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A jam submission

Whispers of FateView game page

Inspired by classic dungeon crawlers from the 90s, but with a modern engine
Submitted by Maddie — 10 minutes, 27 seconds before the deadline
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Whispers of Fate's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall#24.2384.238
Completeness - Is it an unfinished tech-demo, prototype or a complete game?#24.4624.462
Gameplay - How fun is it to play?#34.1154.115
Audio - Does the game have nice sfx and music?#64.2314.231
Graphics - Is the game aesthetically pleasing?#84.4234.423
Theme - How well does it incorporate the theme?#163.9623.962

Ranked from 26 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Viewing comments 22 to 3 of 22 · Next page · Last page
Submitted

I’m quite late to play but I was curious to come back and check out the judges’ top pick eventually!

Very robust Dungeon Crawler gameplay fundamentals. A bit on the easy side, and equipment quality ramps up unexpectedly fast, but that was appreciated for packing a full experience into a short jam game. Your endgame twist was very cool – I didn’t expect all that extra content in the last couple minutes, including the outdoor map. It made me a lot more invested in your story/world, too.

I found a coin item that said it raised my strength by 5, but I never did figure out how to use it. It wouldn’t equip to any slots and when I passed it between characters, their stats didn’t change. I wonder what that was about…?

Congratulations and best of luck with your next game.

Developer

Thank you for playing my game and giving feedback! I am glad you liked it. :) Don't worry about the coin, or the items in general. Its pretty random, haha. The coin is not of a class which can be used into one of the slots. ;)

Submitted

This is a truly fantastic entry, from all points of view. You did everything well in this, from the atmosphere to the old-school gameplay and inspiration, to the theme implementation (I was wondering where the duality comes in right before I approached the altar haha). 

Really enjoyed this one quite a lot, it's one of the strongest entries in the jam.

Developer

Thank you very much! I am glad you liked it. :)

Yeah unfortunately the theme twist comes in a bit late, but I hope its worth it, haha.

Submitted

Man, I almost got a hitless run if it wasn't for those fireballs.

Really solid entry. I find it a little annoying when I tried to use left-click to attack by clicking the icon.

Developer

Hehe evil traps are evil. Yeah figuring the controls out at the start is a bit tricky. But still thanks for playing my game! :D

Submitted

Excellent game!

It has everything for a great RPG, it's beautiful, it plays well, exploration is rewarding, there are stats. I definitely enjoyed it a lot!

The only things that are missing are some information about the stats and their purpose, and also little information on how to fight (I died like a noob at the first wraith because I had no idea how to attack before trying all keys and mouse buttons and then finding out)

Though if it was the price to pay to have such a complete game in a week, I definitely would tell it worthed the sacrifice of the tutorial! haha

Excellent job!

Developer( 1)

Thanks, I am glad you liked it. :)

Yeah the beginning can be a bit hard, when the player has to figure out the controls. The game kinda throws you right in against real enemies, not just some rats below a tavern, haha. :D

Submitted

Really nice!  Took me a little over a half hour to get through to the end.  All of the graphics and visuals come together very nicely, and there's a surprising amount of variety in environments, especially at the end!  My only complaints is that I wish it paused while I was in the menu, the first time I got into a fight I was trying to save before the fight and almost died while re-reading the intro text after re-loading =).

Developer

Thank you for playing my game and giving feedback. :)

Ah, an half hour is what I estimated for this game too, thanks for stopping the time and letting me know. Pausing is a bit tricky in Unreal because it can break some UI things, but its all on the long list. Same with the cutscene playing again, after loading. :D

Submitted

Very nicely done, graphics are of a very high quality, whole story is laid out and game feels almost complete in terms of features. I was surprised by the endinge section of a game in terms of how good it looks.

I wish there were better hit reactions and more feedback from enemies' attacks to make combat feel a bit more responsive, and movement be less constrained in terms of queueing, but overall game is really solid.

Developer

Thanks for playing my game. :)

You are right with these points, I too want to make enemies attack more visible to the player. So they can more "feel" getting ripped apart by some dark shadows. I put it on the big list. :D

Submitted

Hey, I finally played your game :)

  • felt that before even starting, mainly from the screenshots, that this is a top-notch work, at least in graphical and atmosphere department.
  • great title screen, very atmospheric and with a nice background music
  • I really appreciate the time putting such an "Options" screen, not many people did that, including myself :) And you put many settings in there, that's a commercial-level options page :)
  • I love that you started the adventure in the most traditional and efficient way ever, in a loud tavern.. Great vibes. Pretty nice that you multicolored the text, I like the technique myself, loved it :)
  • I really like good D&D-like PC games and this one is really oozing this kind of inspiration.. Loved the whole text, the screenshots and lore being explained before even starting. Presentation was outstanding!
  • unfortunately, the game seems to be built for high-end PCs and couldn't managed to play a lot. I am left with a crappy laptop these days, I will check it again when my new monster of a machine arrives :)
  • It also crashed twice on me when I entered on that dungeon; definitely need to be checked on lower-end machines. Lovely graphics by the way
  • regardless, I loved the movement and field-of-view, such a classical implementation, I loved it :)
  • you seem to put a lot of work there, content, puzzles, graphics polish, for such a small time-window, along with lots of lore around :)
  • I need a week myself to fully appreciate this game and you made it in a week, ha!

Overall, although I didn't it played much due to hardware constraints, I loved every second of that. Will definitely bookmark it for later :) Please, continue on it!

Developer( 1)

Thank you for checking out my game! My goal was to create to a complete experience with a nice little story and I am really glad you liked it. :)

Yes, unfortunately Unreal is a bit hardware-demanding, so I am sorry performance was not that great for you. There are ways to improve that, but Unreal performance optimization is an art for itself and that was a bit out-of-scope for the jam, haha. Still, I am happy could check it out as it is. I will certainly continue with this code-base and with what I learned during the jam. :D

Submitted

Wow, insane how this game had a full story with optional lore and twists! Loved the sense of power growth it had too with the items and stats. I think you could have made it so there was only one inventory since splitting it up felt a little pointless, and the health potions weren't super useful since the health regen usually fixed the damage I got. Felt a little bad that I killed all the guards but I'm glad you could still kill them, it gave me a good laugh! Really cool game either way, super impressive what you were able to do in just a week!

Developer( 1)

Thank you for your feedback! It was really fun and also educational for me watching you playing it. :)

Also you are a bloodthirsty monster! :P

Submitted

Stunning! Great visuals, great atmosphere.

Though a bit long in the beginning, dialogues and story are well written. Love the dynamic between the 2 characters.

There are some bugs, sure, but for something like this built in only a week that's totally acceptable.

Some issues I encountered:

* Items disappearing when accidentally dropped. I knew this could happen so I saved before and after picking stuff up.

* I could kill all the guards in the guard room. And could still talk to them. It gave a lot of xp, after that my characters were very OP.

* In some places there is light visible from the other side of walls.

Developer (1 edit)

I am glad you liked it! Thank you for playing. :)

Indeed, items are a bit wonky, fixing this would have required some major work for which unfortunately was no time.

You are not the first person who kills the peaceful guards. Why is everyone so bloodthirsty? You monsters. :P I guess if something can be killed, players will try to kill it. :D

Submitted

I really liked this entry but 

- All of my items fell through the floor (i know you mentioned this but i'm just dumb and accidentally threw boots on the floor - found another later and accidentally threw it again lol) 

- Didn't know i can use other spells than the one you already have equiped until it was almost too late 

- The outdoor area looked fantastic but my framerate kinda died there

-The duality part was fun but it felt kinda forced and i didnt know why i was there and it just did not matched the story i don't know if it was intentional but i was unkillable in the duality corrupted part 


Overally if we ignore those small thing the game was brilliant and i really enjoyed it! Really strong entry i'd say

Developer

Thanks for playing and giving feedback. :) I am glad you liked it. Yes, items are indeed a bit scuffed. I had no time to make any major work with them so there are quite some issues. Performance in the forest does indeed drop. But the area is fortunately not very large. Unreal performance optimization is an art for itself, though with more time its fixable. The duality-switch off part is code-wise a bit of a mess, but I think it turned out generally well, so take it as intentional, haha. :)

Submitted

we accept "life and death" as the duality.

A nice looking game.

I enjoyed doing some voice acting for the various characters.

I think that the old dude in the tavern was Graham.

(that wont make sense to most people, but I don't care!)

Good job.

All the stars.

Developer

Thanks for playing! It was fun watching you making your best voice-over expression, haha. :D

Submitted (1 edit)

Excellent work on this one! You managed to cram a full story in here that was rather cool, especially for a one week jam! Over all, I don’t have anything major to criticize with this entry, but there are a few thoughts…

  • I love that there was usable inventory items and I was definitely in “horde all the items” mode, but the potions seemed… unneeded. Health and mana regenerated automatically, so the potions seemed to have little meaning.
  • Equipped items and spells, I think, shouldn’t be changeable unless the inventory is open. There were a few times in the game where I was fighting a wraith and sometimes I left-clicked instead of right clicked and nearly lost a spell or weapon. If I’m only allowed to change these when the inventory is open, there’s be less of a risk of me loosing a spell/item… or, at the very least, loosing the fight while I try to wrestle the spell/item back in place to use it.
  • Once the twist is revealed, I think it would have been better to automatically equip the characters abilities. I didn’t realize they weren’t equipped until the worst possible moment and that could have sucked!
  • Near the end, the outdoor area was setup in a way that, while gorgeous looking, made it difficult for me to know where the grid was where I could walk. There was a path that I thought was a wall (foliage seemed to block the way) but it wasn’t and confused me for a moment.

Over all, very nice game! Excellent entry into the jam! Well done!

Here’s a link to me playing your game during my stream!

Developer (3 edits) ( 1)

Thank you very much for playing my game! It was really fun and also very interesting watching you playing it. Seeing someone else playing your game gives a lot of useful information to the dev. :)

Your points are all valid. I couldn't really "balance" the game because time was running out, so I was stashing tons of health potions everywhere. I rather make to game too easy instead of players getting frustrated because they can't finish the game. Better safe than sorry.  :) The item system needs a bit of a rework and the bugs have to be fixed, indeed. I also actually wanted to give the new abilities after the twist to the player, but since the "switch-off" happens in a really hacky way code-wise, I couldn't do that in time for the jam (not as easy as it looks, haha).

Submitted

Beautiful to look at, great to listen to, smooth movement, fun to play. It checked every box for us. Absolutely brilliant. The AI generated art really added a lot to the story and atmosphere and is something we'll look to do ourselves in the future. We played the game to completion in about 30 minutes.

It's hard to find fault in what you've done here for a game jam but in  the spirit of providing some constructive feedback, this is what we'd do to improve things:

  • Less wordy introduction maybe? Get into the game quicker.
  • The cursor pivot point was off on your inventory icons so you had to drop them off where your cursor wasn't.
  • Some items fell through the floor when you dropped them. (You did mention this in your write up)
  • The icons weren't always self-consistent, for example the apple filled the whole inventory slot box where some other icons fit nicely inside with a small margin around them. The Scribbled Note too overflowed the inventory box slightly.
  • The duality at the end felt a bit forced. We weren't sure what our motivation was or what the point was from then on.
  • Not always clear what is and isn't a pickup.
  • Wardrobes feel like they should be openable but didn't.
  • The default armour we were wearing was a low poly seemingly untextured asset when we dropped it, which was different to the other assets. It was like you grey-boxed it and forgot to switch this one out. Had we not dropped it we wouldn't have noticed though.
  • Barrels weren't breakable - we wanted to smash them apart!

It would be great to see a write-up of what you created during the jam, what you did before the jam and what was part of the Unreal Dungeon Crawler Toolkit asset. 

Great job. You're sure to do really well in the final ratings and so you should.

Developer( 1)

Thank you for playing and giving such great feedback! Its very helpful to have a detailed list with things to improve on, I will look into everything mentioned. :)

Yes lots of things are like that because of the limited time of the jam. For example I didn't really put much time into the items, thats why they have no or bad collision and may fall through walls and also have placeholder models at times. But I am glad you still liked it. I will also write a bit of a devlog, though I don't think anybody reads this. :D

Submitted

We made a devlog for our game Dungeon Diver. It would be great to see one for your game too. We've had nearly 200 views of it so far and our game Robots and Zombies from last year has had nearly 1200 views:

https://rebello.itch.io/dungeon-diver/devlog/514563/how-we-made-dungeon-diver

Developer (2 edits) ( 1)

Your devlog is very big and informative. Its a really nice read. I also read the devlogs to your past games. It grants some interesting insights. As I promised I wrote some paragraphs too, (links in the description of the game at the bottom), though its not as large as your blog. I am not some kind of seasoned dev who does this as professionally as you. ;)

Submitted

Wow, great job! Lots of content, an enjoyable battle system, loot, and a complete story! I appreciated that it let me lure enemies into traps to do damage to them; it showed a good attention to detail.

Developer

Thanks for playing! Yeah its always fun defeating foes with their own deadly traps, haha. I am glad you like it. :)

Submitted

very cool! One of my favorites so far!

Developer

Thank you! I appreciate it. :D

Submitted

Hehe, I thought just using two characters was a lazy take on the theme, then I advanced through the game and well, there's definitely more than that but you already know this.

The game feels quite polished with very good movement and control feelings. Also a button is almost already enough for me to like it, I started by bumping onto the walls (even a bit further away) then went OK it must be a button then. A dungeon without dungeon mechanics feels a bit pointless to me so I'm always happy when people put some in their game.

That was cool, thanks for sharing.

Just ignore the question if it's inappropriate, but did you comment on my game just a bit earlier? I think I got an alert then saw a message then it vanished (I might totally have deleted it by mistake).

Developer

Thank you for playing and giving feedback! :)

Yeah its my big fear that a lot of people won't play far enough and never even find my implementation of the theme (making the switch cost me a lot of work, haha). I am glad you like the dungeon crawler mechanics. I wanted to do a bit more, but time is limited. :D

Well I did indeed comment on your game. But maybe I deleted it accidently. I posted it again. :)

Submitted

OMG, what a game! I forgot I was playing a jam game, and when it ended, I was, “what? where’s the rest of the game?!”

Amazing graphics, solid sound design, and great combat mechanics. It had me engaged every time.

The only thing I would consider would be that if the player initiates combat, it would be good to know what the enemy will pick as they’re at a disadvantage, but perhaps that’s part of the balancing.

Amazing game, amazing execution. Excellently done!

Developer (1 edit)

I am glad you like it, however - I may be wrong - but judging from your comment I get the slight feeling you wanted to comment on a different game. :P

Submitted

Wow… Don’t I feel dumb. I’ll give you real feedback today.

Submitted

Wow! That was a big download for a jam game! But, it was totally worth it!

I love a good puzzle game and really enjoyed the graphics and sounds effects. Overall, looks and feels very polished!

A great entry here!

Developer

Thank you! I am glad you liked it. :)

Submitted

A very complete package, very well done. 

Not to sound nitpicky but the explorer in me missed a bit of exploration, I mean puzzles and pressure plates and traps are there but you really can go only one way and the chances of getting lost are close to zero, or I am missing something? I bumped head a lot, did not find anything other then the stuff that was in plain sight. 

After all we only had seven days and you cant do everything.

Overall a very enjoy full experience. Graphics & sound are top notch so this is as close as you can get to an sell able product in 7 days I guess.

Developer (2 edits) ( 1)

Thank you for playing and giving feedback! :)

Yes, its a bit linear, especially after the first level. I tried to give the player some exploration options on level 1, but time is just too limited in a 7 day jam to really make a huge maze. So I focused on polishing what I have and concentrate on the story and general completeness. There are no invisible walls (wanted to do that, but the time...), but there is one 1 hidden secret switch-door though. :D

Host

I know there asset packs in use here and quite a bit of re-used code but this is a really nice crawler and with more content and polish I'd pay to crawl it. Great job!

The art is amazing. I know it's AI generated but I don't care. I love it!

The dungeon graphics is great too and you nailed the movement and perspective view 100%

Wow at the inventory system and character abilities.

Combat is traditional real time dance routine but I don't mind. It works as advertised.

LOL at credits screen: "This Game has been made by a person".. Well except for the AI generated art ;)

1 for arrow keys and numpad controls

Developer

Thank you for your kind words! Yeah I am mostly playing to my strenghts and thats putting things together for a nice complete experience, haha. I also did quite a bit of testing to get the dungeon crawler "feel" and controls right, so I am glad you liked it. :)

Viewing comments 22 to 3 of 22 · Next page · Last page