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A member registered Aug 23, 2021 · View creator page →

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OK. I'm unable to complete the first level. I must be missing something. I can't jump high enough to get over the last wall.

OMG. Those starting platforms are too hard to navigate I got to the end one but then couldn't jump into the next room. Nicely presented though.

We'd be up for another one in the New Year

Very good entry to the jam. The graphics were low poly, but consistent and well presented with volumetric fog and particle effects adding to the atmosphere.

The game started well with a nice title and options screen. The entry voice over was extremely good, so good that I thought AI voiceovers had come along massively with perfect pausing and intonation that wasn't present in the text displayed on screen but when delivered as audio added depth and character that I've never heard before in AI. We then had to see what you'd used and found it was a real voice actor, and a great one at that, so AI still isn't quite there. Good choice here.

The in-game user interface was very nicely presented with the inventory (and background image), compass and special item slots for weapons, hat, etc. We only found one of each during our play but that did give us the anticipation that we would find a hat or helmet and we were satisfied when we could put the fancy hat in its slot. All this looked great, although you might want to remove the background embossed version of the slot item when its filled as it looked strange to see the actual dagger and ghost outline of a sword behind it at a different angle. On one of our machines we got a constant flicker from from the UI when the inventory panel was up. It might have been tooltips being shown for a frame and then hidden again, but it was a bit off-putting.

We loved the gun cartridge and reload animations, again making it really satisfying to reload while also giving you all the information needed to know how many bullets you had left and how many were chambered. You also seemed to have a map on load/save/restart (we think). It appeared but we didn't know what we were looking at and couldn't find key to bring it up in-game. 

Combat worked OK. We noticed that once you were in combat you couldn't seem to retreat, which avoids the two-step to evade enemies. The health bars were good, but when we did 3/4 damage we weren't sure what the scale was to understand what that meant in relation to how much they had left. It's interesting to be able to see your weapons on front of you. We liked that but a lot of the more classic games and copies don't show any weapons and might only show a slash graphic when you use them. It was good to see you go the other way. Enemy animations were nice to see and you'd put in enough audio and visual feedback on hits to make them have a satisfying feel.

The font choice seemed nice and appropriate but there were times where there might have been up to four different fonts on the screen at once, all from different font families, which made the UI seem less cohesive and more glued together. For example there were different fonts for:

  • The damage/log text on the top left
  • The "Young Man..." dialog box
  • The compass directions NSEW
  • Inventory titles "Derek" and "Paranormal Detective" (maybe these were just SmallCaps/Narrow versions?)

Movement and turning were good for the most part. Free-look would have been nice so you could appreciate your surroundings more, such as the asset for the house, which looked great, with lots of "clutter"/"set dressing". This also added to the feeling of depth and atmosphere in the game. Things like the message in blood on the walls and doors, and the odd cobweb or broken window, were nice touches. The portraits with the dark highlights on the low poly characters looked amazing.

However, parts of the house didn't seem well aligned with the dungeon crawler movement grid, so often you would be a long way away from a wall, but not be able to move as close as you expected to be able to. Or there were doors you couldn't reach, or doors, that you (or enemies) went through, that were off center on the screen which looked a bit janky at times. You did well to try to fit an existing asset into this genre though, all things considered. The fact that the house was different on your return was a great touch too. At first we thought, "nice, the mirror is now broken", and then we realized it was essentially a new level with lots of changes. This worked very well.

The music and sound effects were good and added to the polish of the game a lot. As we've mentioned, we loved the voiceover!

We enjoyed playing Derek Deagle very much. Possibly a few more puzzle type elements, some UI fixes and level layouts,  and this would have been a near perfect entry in our opinion. Great job.

We've never seen RPG in a Box before so that was really interesting to experience a game in it. We're guessing the UI issues were related to the game engine?

The graphics were nice and self-consistent. The voxel approach worked well here. Even the ambient occlusion added something unexpected to what were basically extruded sprites. The variety of the items you could interact with was great. The level design was excellent. You really felt like you were on a spaceship or on different planets. You'd incorporated all the themes in a way that wasn't a stretch, even the Infinite bit where the game restarted at the end (and we groaned). Picking up things from cupboards was very satisfying. 

A/D to rotate. Q/E to strafe. NOOOOOOOOOOOO...!!!!!! This almost made the game unplayable for us, especially on the lava planet maze where we were constantly strafing when we meant to turn and then ended up in the lava taking damage. 

The user interface was a bit frustrating. Sometimes you were blocked from moving and sometimes you weren't. It was neat that you could move windows around but sometimes they lingered when you moved away from the place they were supposed to be. We had the Neutride Engine slots visible while we were on the planets. We thought putting the crystals in the slots at that point would cause a bug so we didn't but it was a bit messy. The Inventory was also on the screen when were were in the space view navigating to planets. The window configurations seemed to change randomly and it ultimately detracted a bit from the fun of the game. The madness bar made us mad, because we couldn't tell whether it was full or empty. It should probably have had the same background color as the health bar, even if the foreground color was different. 

The combat worked well, even though it didn't kick in until we were 30 mins into the game. It was simple, and you only had one weapon (that we found) but we could feel the potential for more in there. The enemies had health bars that were nice, so you could see if you were close to killing them, even the boss at the end. The enemies even had animations to them in their voxel form which was a nice touch.

The narrative text was at the right level. Most of the time you didn't show more than one or two lines of text so it wasn't overwhelming to read. It would have been better if you didn't have to click out of it to continue moving, it stalled the gameplay when it didn't need to. Perhaps this was an RPG in a box issue?

The sounds helped with the immersion and you got audible feedback on things you did in game which was nice. 

We finished the game after 56 minutes of play time and we enjoyed it a lot. Good consistent graphics and sound, atmospheric with good narration. Nearly perfect for a jam, had it not been for the UI and controls. Well done!

The graphics seemed nice, even though the wall textures were limited and overall it lacked a bit of variety. The monsters were self-consistent in themselves but graphically being 2D black and red sprites, they weren't in keeping with the rest of the game which was nicely 3D and had some color differences. Font was OK - Did you create it yourself.

Movement and camera angles were good, although no freelook. Controls were .... infuriating. Pretty much every game on the planet uses A/D to strafe and Q/E to rotate. Why go against everyone's muscle memory? Is there a reason why you went with this, like it's default in some classic Dungeon Crawler that we haven't played?

User Interface was nice and clean, and self-consistent. The 10 inventory slots that you could use with the number keys were easy to use and understand. The tooltips showing the item's stats were great. The idea that you could only use something a certain number of times with the Durability (or even the key) was a nice way to do it.

Chests looked great and opened nicely and presented you the item for your inventory. Until you could only chose 1 of 3? If we've opened a chest, we want the whole loot. It's not Trick Or Treat and we're saving something for the next visitor! It's interesting in some ways because it is a choice and a decision the player can make, and possibly on replays you might chose a different path, but it wasn't what we were expecting when we opened it.

It wasn't clear what our max health was (we think 100), you just knew what your current health was. For the enemies you had no idea how much health they had so you couldn't make an informed decision about whether they were about to die and you could get away with a sword hit, or if they needed a mega-wallop from the hammer, reducing it's durability. You could see damage being done and received and the feedback was good there but without enemy health numbers there was no context to understand what effect the numbers were having.

Enemies seemed to spawn (and re-spawn) at random, which discourages you from exploring as you may randomly be attack at all times, even after you think you've cleared an area. We forgot/missed the 'F' to parry so we don't know how good that might of been. We partly forgot we think because 'F' was also used to interact with chests. You could have made the left mouse button be the attack and the right mouse button be parry, especially since there was no freelook. There was no chance to retreat and you couldn't see them coming so it was hard to prepare for combat.

The destructible walls, using the hammer (at the expense of its durability), was a great addition. It was clear where it was breakable and it was satisfying to break it. It kind of felt like you should have to hit it twice though as the hole wasn't big enough to walk though , but you could walk through it anyway, which was slightly immersion breaking.  The graphics for before and after for the break in the wall were very good and completely consistent with the surrounding textures and artwork.

We only played for about 10-15 minutes in the end because the random combat encounters were so brutal we just died before we felt we had a chance to get any further, even using up all our hammer hits. If this had been easier, or you respawned close to where you died, and not at the beginning again, we may have played for longer. 

Really nice game overall. Simple but effective graphics and bug free. Not too many puzzle mechanics (maybe there were later on) but those that were there were well done. It's just a shame the combat was too difficult for us to play and didn't make us want to replay. Well done with your jam entry!

Sorry about the double post, we didn't notice we'd done that. Please show a play through video, we'd love to see all the content of the game, even if it doesn't change our rating and review.

Arlorean's wife is called Jil(l) so we felt OK saying this and we're always ready for the earful!

That had a lot of potential. It was great to see classic dungeon crawler elements like fireball emitters (very nicely done), hidden walls (brutal from the first room though), secret door with secret buttons, teleporters (aggrrr), random rotations (very disorienting). You were only missing push/pull blocks, pressure plates and pit traps for the full monty.

The opening screen was nice, if you made it by hand especially. The logo could perhaps have been more solid, rather than as soft as it was. It didn't stand out enough from the background art style. Font was just the Unity default, it would be nice to have seen a font choice made to match the art style in some way.

The first voiceover had us impressed, it sounded good (for AI we assume). But then there was too much of it, and too much narrative text that didn't add enough to the start of the game when you just wanted to start playing. One paragraph, start the game and then maybe reveal some of those lines as you progress through the game. When you added narrative in game you blocked the player until they pressed Next which affected the flow of the game negatively. It didn't add enough to the "fun" or "playability" of the game to warrant forcing you to take notice of it before continuing.

Movement was OK, but it was very fast and snappy, not very smooth and the movement between tiles was very linear and didn't suggest you were walking. Tile size and camera angle seemed on point. There was no free look, which would have been nice in the larger rooms.

Combat was OK, although it wasn't very satisfying when you did damage, or eliminated an enemy. They just disappeared with no sound effects or graphical effects to indicate you'd won. We actually looked around to see if the enemy had run away. We only found two attacks you could do, close up melee or a ranged attack. Some enemies fired diagonally at you, which was a surprise, and not in classic grid crawlers. It also meant you could easily two step and range attack on the other square after it shoots. We died almost instantly, after 35 mins of player when we encountered a brutal guy with demonic symbol behind him. With them all being sprites there was no rotation element to their movement which might let you get a side attack in before they could launch an attack. This may have been deliberate but then it's attacks perhaps shouldn't be so devastating.

The lighting and shadows were a bit confusing in places. Sometimes they cast through walls from other rooms when they shouldn't have, making it disorienting and immersion breaking. The textures were OK but they didn't seem to fit with the lighting and shadow styles somehow. In some cases, like the brickwork, the textures didn't tile correctly so it was visually jarring to see. The lighting seemed to be blown out in places too (possibly a Unity URP issue). The textures were all just diffuse, possibly with a specular component to some parts, but no normal maps, ambient occlusion, etc. They might have enhanced the atmosphere a bit more, and disguised some of the texture tiling problems as well.

Sound effects were OK with the ambient background noise and doors opening. We didn't hear any music at the start or during the game, which might have added to the combat a bit.

Overall, a good entry with lots of interesting aspects, but perhaps it didn't come together quite as cohesively as your NeuroNexus entry last year. We had some fun in places, but we had more fun with your previous entry.

Thanks for you feedback and for playing our game. Sorry about the bugs with the rat and combat in general. We will try to do an update with a fix post jam and we'll let you know when we think it's worth having another try, if you're up for it. Glad you liked the graphics, puzzles and atmosphere. 

We look forward to playing your game soon. 

Thanks very much for playing our game. Sorry about the bugs in the combat. We just ran out of time to finish it and test it properly. You did well to persevere after a restart, so we appreciate that. Hopefully we'll have fixes for all this post jam if you fancy a replay.

We look forward to playing your game soon.

Brilliant game. That checked every box for us for what a dungeon crawler should be. Multiple characters with inventories, pickups, equip-able items, skills, different attack types, health and mana. You have multiple puzzles, different biomes, verticality, steps (half height - is that legal @Zooperdan? - we don't care, we loved them), secret walls, pressure plates (activated by your character or items), wall buttons, keys, etc. Just excellent!!!

A-D Rotate, Q-E Strafe. OMG, why oh why did you do this? We nearly stopped playing straight away because of this, which would have been a travesty. Please, please, please use the same keys as every other game ever written (apart from this one).

The sound was good, perfect for pickups, combat music, ambient sound, enemy grunts. Very complete and served its purpose well. Feedback from these sounds for all actions was great to have.

The user interface was very good. Nice to have inventories for characters. We weren't sure how the Strength/Dexterity/Body/Mind stats affected things. We also didn't work out what AP stood for. If it's action points, what are they and how do they work? We kept trying to put pickups in the skills slots for some reason (well Dan did). It was nice to be able to see equipped items as green and save you having to create a separate UI for body slots, which was reasonable.

Combat ability slots weren't visible while you were in combat, or maybe if they stayed visible until you clicked a close button. It was off the screen so you couldn't tell what attack you were doing with which character while you were spamming the left click button. The weapons and skills clearly had some effect on combat but there wasn't enough time to make an informed decision about which weapon to use in each situation. Was there an ordering to our team members in terms of who got hit first? It was nice to have multiple enemy and be able to target them individually. The two step was still there though as you danced around doing an attack and then stepping back to avoid being hit and then attacking again. It wasn't clear how many hit points each enemy had in total, or remaining, so you couldn't make a tactical decision to one or the other. Health bars/numbers might have made combat more informed and engaging.

Although the graphics were clearly pixel based, they were very nicely done and self-consistent. The font was simple and used consistently throughout. It would be nice to see a devlog showing what artwork you created with AI and how you did it.

We played for 46 minutes but didn't finish it. We didn't want to stop, we really wanted to finish it but we ran out of time and had to move onto another game. This was a great sign though as had it not been a jam, we would have played it to the end. We did feel a bit lost at the end though so a map may have been good. although with the verticality it may have been hard to present and interpret. Level design overall was very, very good and interesting and engaging. We wanted to explore.

Well done for producing such a great jam game. We absolutely loved it.

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Jil was really annoying.

On the surface this game looks amazing and gives the impression it's very complete with character inventories, level and skill advancement, etc. However, when we played it felt like the graphics were really not part of the game, they were just set pieces outside of a very linear path. The starting town for example. It looked great, but you couldn't interact with anything or even go onto the grass, just follow the brick road. 

Jil was really annoying.

The combat wasn't as exciting as we were hoping it was going to be. We were doing damage but had no idea what the damage numbers meant since we couldn't see an enemy health bar to judge how much health they had in total or remaining. The enemies teleported between tiles in a way that was a bit jarring since the attack animations were so good (Courtesy of Protofactor - good choice!). DamageNumbersPro added a bit to the enjoyment as numbers appeared and disappeared with nice animations. Perhaps use a different font next time though so it isn't so obviously a dropped in asset. 

Movement, turns and camera angles looked good, although the lack of free look felt like a missed opportunity, given how nice the visuals were.

We think we were caught out by the teleporter bug because we ended up in an area underground that we couldn't get out of. This was after 30 minutes of play time.

Jil was really annoying.

It would have been nice to have clicked on doors to interact with them to open them, rather than using the keyboard, although you did mention this on your submission page.

Almost as annoying as Jil, were the constant 1XP messages that appeared every time you moved one tile. It seemed unnecessary, although the Jake and Jil Level Up was nice. Allocating the points after levelling up was above and beyond most jam entries and a nice touch, although we seemed to have to randomly jab around the plus symbol to get them to increase. Were some of them locked? We didn't see a reason if they couldn't be increased beyond that number and there was no visual or audible feedback that you'd hit a limit. On the stats "Interlect" should probably be spelt "Intellect" but if English isn't your first language (or even if it is Dan), spelling is hard.

We picked up a key from a chest but never saw where it went or whether it was in our inventory. Or maybe it got used and we didn't realize? 

The was a graphical glitch when the double doors slid open and the door was partially visible in the wall.


Very well presented game that looked like it could be really fun to play, but at the end of the day seemed to lack content in terms of puzzles and things to explore and find. Maybe we hit the bug too soon. We'd like to see a full play through video of this so we can experience what the whole game was like. Great job. The toolkit looks very promising, best of luck with it.

We found Jil slightly annoying, in case you couldn't tell.

Amazingly well presented, great user interface. It oozed potential with the backpack, item descriptions, stats modifiers and character traits and abilities. The "What have you learned", etc. journal/quests page was a great touch. This really felt like a classic RPG of old. Great job. Font was a great choice as well BTW!

As you've probably noticed, we're not huge fans of the retro 8 bit style graphics ourselves but it was all self-consistent. The instant movement and lack of free look made it feel a bit clunky and disorienting when moving around. The textures for walls were almost identical in many places, like the dark cave in the forest, so sometimes I wasn't even sure if I'd moved forwards or not.

Verticality was a nice touch and worked pretty well in the library.

We spotted some typos in the narrative text. On the "New Books Table" the "Well" at the end should probably be "Will".  The "Cursed Book" "draw" should probably be "drawn". It's OK. Dan (our artist) can't spell either.

Combat was nicely done. Turn based like the original rogue type combat mechanic. You move and then they move at the same time. Don't move and nothing happens. It's more tactical, which can be good and less sweaty. You avoided the two step by locking into combat when an enemy was next to you. Multiple enemies could attack at once as well and you saw an arrow indicating when they were there but offscreen. The special abilities like Frenzy and Defend which showed an active icon and the number of turns remaining for that effect was excellent. We weren't sure what the scale of health was for any of the enemies so when we did 5 damage, we couldn't understand what that meant. The enemy health light did change color but it was a very coarse way of describing enemy health. It didn't make for meaningful combat decisions.

Lots of really nice narrative touches were in there like walking up to the walls with number lines etches into them and it mentioning counting the days. This enhanced the theme of solitude. Having a conversation with someone and not killing them and them telling you about a key was something rarely done in the dungeon crawler jam and we did like that. Intro was nice, we were worried it was going to be too wordy but actually you hit the sweet spot on that.

We played for 47 minutes but couldn't get out of the forest so we quit the game. At one point a Hint came up that suggested we might have hit a bug as it said we could interact with the books of the walls, but all we saw were trees.


Sound was good with nice UI and combat sound effects.

Very small point, and we're only mentioning it because everything was so polished and well done. The light direction on your buttons seemed off on the start menu. The title "Library of Endless Souls" has the light from the top left, but the buttons/panel edges suggest it's coming from the top right. Also, when your backpack needed a scrollbar, the mouse scroll wheel didn't seem to be calibrated properly so you couldn't move more than a few pixels at a time. Thankfully you could drag to scroll. Again, small point but you might want to fix it in your toolkit.

Overall that is one of the best entries we've seen in a game jam. It felt very complete and so much thought had gone into everything, from the UI to the narrative and then the combat system. Great job. We're inspired by your entry to try to do more things like yours in our next game.

Absolutely with everything you said there about combat. When you click it picks a random combat animation but you can pick specific ones by pressing the numbers keys (1-6 depending on what weapons are being carried). Hopefully we'll add GUI buttons to make this more obvious in a post jam update. The mobs also have their own animation set and we play to show you which ones are available and which one is currently being used, possibly which one is about to be used. Defensive moves are in there when you get the shield but yes more would be good. Unlocking them as you advance as well is also in our minds.

More coins. Better physics. Noted. Thanks again for your feedback.

Thanks for playing our game. We ran out of time to implement the save/load (more specifically the load part). We also didn't get chance to add a New Game option, so yes, you do have to restart the game if you fall into a pit. Sorry about this.

You weren't doing anything wrong with the jars. That was another bug to do with physics and them being dynamic instead of kinematic, causing them to wander around on their own!

The combat was where we were really trying to innovate and bring something new to the table. Unfortunately it was more ambitious than we realized and so we ran out of time to finish it, and as a result didn't test everything either. Hopefully our post jam update will show the  combat in a better light.

Thanks again. We look forward to playing your game soon.

Very polished and self consistent. The graphics were all hand drawn but they worked very well when put together. The lighting was good, you even had ambient occlusion in there. The small animations of the bubbles, worms, etc. in the scenery was a really nice touch that added to the atmosphere.

The narrative was very good and kept you on task. From the start animation, to the text prompts/messages, you always knew why you were there and what you were trying to do. Simple but effective.

Radio Beacon was an excellent idea to give you rough directions, but not a complete map so you sometimes hit dead ends and had to backtrack.

There weren't many puzzles in the game. There wasn't much to pick up, therefore no inventory, other than the health stims. We think we picked up weapons but we weren't sure. The only difference seemed to be we did more damage in combat, but we don't know why.

Combat was well done, although we often found just repeating the Defend action seemed to give the best outcome until the end of the combat where you might deal the final blow with the attack icon, since the enemy didn't get a counter attack and you did more damage. Better than Rock-Paper-Scissors, but not by very much. The idea of trying to escape was good, although the monster just disappeared and you stayed in the same place. You avoided the traditional two-step by not allowing enemy or player movement during combat. 

The random spawning of the enemies was a bit annoying in the end and it dissuaded you from exploring since a visiting the same spot could respawn a new enemy again. You couldn't clear an area and then look around for stuff!

It's a shame there was no free look because you had high ceilings that looked interesting but you couldn't look up to appreciate them.

There was no jeopardy when walking next to a drop off the side since you couldn't walk off the edge to your death. Perhaps not necessary but it could have added something. to the gameplay.

The ending was very well done, with nice cut scenes travelling back up through the levels to get to the ship. 

Overall that was a fun experience and a great game jam game. We really enjoyed it. Well done!

You made it to the portal!!!!! That is impressive. You finished the game with all the Zooperdan trophies and nearly all the coins (there were 70). In the Unity Editor it displayed "Game Completed" on screen when you go into the portal. However there must have been some kind of timing issue because the game stopped but the message didn't appear in the final build. Sorry about that.

The combat system was our attempt to try to do something different, along the lines of the old Lost Worlds, or Ace of Aces, two player combat books. But instead of being simultaneous actions, the actions can be triggered by the player and enemy at any time they want. The hope was that the emergent combat gameplay from the differently timed animations would be very interesting and exciting. We still think it would be, but we didn't demonstrate that in any way for the jam build. 

The wandering jars was another bug that we didn't see in testing because the game needed to be running for some time for them to jitter around into places they shouldn't have been thanks to the physics engine. They should have been kinematic the whole time.

The push block into the pit trap would indeed lock the game and prevent you from completing it. Another bug we didn't get around to fixing before we had to submit our entry. It might  just have occurred in debug mode where you could open doors out of order.

You're right about the physics not being robust enough on the wall bevels at the bottom, so items like the bone club would sometimes fall through when they shouldn't. More bugs to fix.

Thanks for the feedback on the commentary. People don't usually notice or mention it, so we're glad it wasn't completely in vain. 

We do plan an update post jam that should fix all these bugs and hopefully give you a better taste of what we were trying to achieve with the combat system.

We look forward to playing your game soon!

Wow. Thanks for the great feedback, and for playing our game. We used Unity URP so we could target WebGL, believe it or not, so we're not using any HDRP features. Unfortunately the build was too big for itch so we had to quickly upload a PC only version instead. Glad you liked the movement and puzzles.

The combat was way too ambitious for us to complete in the jam week unfortunately. We will post an update after the jam finishes, hopefully with a play through video, so you can see what we were trying to create, but failed! It's a shame as the rest of the game seemed solid and we were very happy with it.

Thanks again for your review and we look forward to playing your game soon.

Thanks for that. We really appreciate you playing our game, even though it was full of bugs. The combat system was more ambitious than we should have attempted in the jam week TBH and it didn't leave us any time for proper testing. Looking forward to playing your game soon.

Thanks for playing our game, oh mighty Zooperdan! 

We're delighted you liked the graphics, controls, camera angles and dungeon layout. We put a lot of effort into these.

"The sound effects and overall sound design are superb" - something no one has ever said about one of our games before. THANK YOU!

Sorry about the combat bug with the rat. We were overly ambitious with the whole combat system and because it took so much time, and still wasn't right, everything else suffered. We completely ran out of time to test properly at the end so we didn't catch these bugs.

You were right about the weapons. We had actually ordered them incorrectly so one of the more powerful ones could be gained from the Skeleton at the start. We ran out of time to balance these.

We loved the fireball trap too, combined with nice new shiny pressure plates that glimmer in the torchlight...

We'll polish the combat for the end of the jam update, to the point where you can see what we were trying to achieve and hopefully that will show the idea in its best light. It was flawed in many ways in the current implementation. We wanted the vases to be a way of practicing combat before it became life or death with a real enemy. Unfortunately they had a mind of their own and didn't like being smashed so wandered off. We'll look into making that experience smoother, but still as satisfying as when you kick or punch one and it shatters.

We're glad you like the new 3D Zooperdan head. Of course we've now set the bar very high so we're not sure how we're going to top it next year!

Thanks again for playing (persevering) with our game.

Thanks for playing our game, we really appreciate it and it's great to get your feedback. We're glad you like the world, assets and movement. We spent a long time trying to get the controls to feel smooth. The only model assets that were third party were the Rat, Skeleton and Zombie (PROTOFACTOR) and the two Mayan Macuahuitl weapons (Sketchfab). Everything else was created by Dan (the artist of the pair of us), including the push/pull crates, buttons,  switches, chests, pressure plates, doors, tables, shelves, columns, altar, fireball emitter, spikes, even the StarGate at the end (although the whirlpool effect was from an asset pack). He even produced the final Zooperdan trophy based on a ropey charmed.ai 2D->3D model generator. Dan also designed all the levels and puzzles. Mazeworks was our level building system, which made the beveled wall creation easier (by Adam/Arlorean).

Sorry about the bug with the rat. We were overly ambitious with our combat system, because we wanted to try to  avoid the classic two-step movement and whack-a-mole weapons style of combat. We then ran out of time to properly test everything which was a real shame. We had some Unity Physics bugs where things were dynamic when they should have been kinematic so they wandered around the scene randomly on their own!

Hopefully we'll upload a version which fixes all of this so you can see what we were aiming for after the jam has finished. 

Thanks again for playing. We look forward to playing your game soon.

This looks amazing and sounds great. It's extremely well presented, from the menus at the start to the user interface and graphics in-game. Great job.

The movement is smooth, although it felt very sluggish. Then there's the tile size. It felt way too small for a classic dungeon crawler. It was very apparent when the prawns died and there wasn't enough room for them to die on the floor so they disappeared through the wall.

The transitions between the rooms via doors, or the TV teleporter, were very disorienting. You thought you could see through the door to the next room but when you went through the door you were somewhere completely different. Most of the scenery looked nice but was completely static and didn't really add anything to the gameplay. Why were we in a gym with lots of toilets? It felt a bit disconnected.

The inventory looked great and it was nice to be able to pickup in free look. When you picked items up the icons had no transparency to them which felt like an oversight, given how polished everything else was.

We picked up everything we found but didn't use anything except for the baton, the sledgehammer and the keys. We didn't get hit once throughout the entire game, even for the boss at the end. Were the red and blue bars health and something else, because they just seemed to be static for us. It was too easy to two-step around all the enemy. The small tiles made it very hard to know whether you were next to an enemy or a square away, especially with the end boss. Thankfully he was so slow that you just moved up to him until you couldn't move any further and then back away as he was turning.

There weren't any puzzles that we noticed and we didn't find any secret rooms. Did we miss some things?

Overall we were very impressed with the graphics and controls, but the gameplay and combat were lacking and in the end it wasn't as fun as it could have been given the foundations you put in. We didn't encounter any bugs that we noticed though, which is quite an achievement, much better than we did!

The presentation from the start is really well done here. Lovely menus and interactions with them. The font choice is nice too. The graphics were very self-consistent in-game with the skeletons, bombs and scenery blocks. Animations on the Skeletons were nice. 

The visual and audio feedback on actions like breaking the walls and setting off bombs was excellent, and very satisfying. The gameplay and strategy of when and where to place the bombs was engaging and made it fun to play.

The feedback on combat wasn't there the same way. It wasn't clear when we'd hit something or when they'd hit us. The health bar was very granular with just a number of hearts/lives and each hit removed one. This made the combat overly simplistic and not as satisfying.

We destroyed a lot of blocks and picked up a lot of elements but didn't see an inventory, other than the collected pieces at the top. Was there a reason we were collecting sand/etc.? We didn't really know what we were doing until we found one of the keystones and it took us a long time to find the first one so we weren't sure we actually playing the game properly for a long time.

Nice touch with the Zooperdans and Dungeon Crawler posters in the first room! The voiceovers seemed to work quite well too and is unusual for a jam entry in our experience. These rounded out the game experience for us. Well done on an excellent entry!

Thanks for playing our game, we really appreciate it. We spent a lot of time trying to make it look good and control well. Gold is always good.

We look forward to playing your game soon, but we might have to clear some disk space first! We'd be intrigued to know what assets you've used in your game. Some of them look familiar but you've put them together in a really cohesive way.

Thanks for playing our game, we really appreciate it. We spent a lot of time on the theme and graphics. Also on the movement controller, which we were happy with, even when the verticality of ladders comes into play. We're glad you noted that.

You're spot on with crates. To pull them you click on the ring and to push you click anywhere else. It made sense at the time but sometimes a literal interpretation of how stuff works isn't as fun or intuitive as a more abstract where the top half is push and the bottom half is pull. We'll fix that!

The combat was our most ambitious innovation for this game. We didn't quite pull it off in this version, as we ran out of time, but we're hopeful it has some potential. The unarmed combat animations weren't good enough to land hits properly so they were only really useful for the Clay Pot destruction. We didn't make it clear that we meant the Pause/Break key on the keyboard, when it comes it enabling debug mode to defeat the rat. More apologies...

We look forward to playing your game soon.

Thanks for playing our game, we really appreciate it. We spent a lot of time on the look and feel and deliberately made it start like Dungeon Diver in the same type of caves but then go onto the ancient ruins. There was third biome which went sci-fi for the cosmic horror when you went through the stargate but we didn't manage to finish it. Maybe next time.

Sorry about the Urns, Unity Physics (PhysX/Novadex) has a mind of its own. The combat system consumed most of our time and energy and was overly ambitious for a jam. We wanted something that was a bit more than just Whack-a-Mole or Rock-Paper-Scissors (no offense to Neon Nose, which is the best version of this we've ever seen BTW). We put the save checkpoints in there, and the game saved, we ran out time to do the re-load part.

We put @Zooperdan's portrait in as a trophy for Dungeon Diver so we knew we had to carry on the theme but up our game as well. When we saw the Theme Reveal on Twitch and he was wearing the IKEA hat we knew we had to put it in there.

We really look forward to playing your game soon. We loved Aegir Rising, which was part of our inspiration for Dungeon Diver. We also loved Neon Nose. You have a knack of making games than are fun to play for sure.

Thanks for you comments, we really appreciate you playing our game. We spent a lot of time trying to get the "look" right. We'll do a break down of the layers in a blog soon. We're glad you enjoyed the mechanics. As usual we had more plans than we could implement in the time but we got the core ideas in there.

The weapons had limited balancing done to them and, as you spotted, the torpedo launcher was designed to be an area of effect weapon, like an RPG, but we ran out of time again so it was more a hinderance than anything. We should have reduced the AP to 2 for the final build, spot on.

We did think about making the AI avoid the mines, but where's the fun in that! So we left it so that you could guide them into the mines with strategic positioning of your units. An emergent benefit of not so good AI!

Getting the camera controls and voxel cell cursor to work in a useful and intuitive way was most of the problem we had during the jam. We spent a lot of time with prototypes trying to see what worked best, and cursing ourselves that we'd decided to go with elevation in a turn based strategy game! We're fairly happy with how it turned out though.

We will definitely add Q/E to rotate the scene. We were mentally trying to go for a single button to drive the whole game, thinking ahead to a possible iPad version where you just have 1 finger. Also we had Mac users previously who only had one button mice and could barely use the keyboard! For a PC game though, additional keyboard controls should be an option and we'll make it happen.

Thanks again for all your kind words and for creating a great game yourselves. Best of luck with future jams and we'll see you in the next Turn-Based Tactics Jam.

You're right about chess having a timer, although you tend to get 2 hours for 40 turns (3 minutes per turn), unless it's speed chess, which isn't the same kind of pressure as completing the whole game in 25s! However, this is what game jams are all about, trying out new things to see how to do them and what people think of them. We had 2 stacked timers in our last game jam, a flare for light which ran out in 5 minutes and an oxygen tank when swimming underwater which lasted another 5 minutes. Some people liked the jeopardy of them, but others did not. We had one of the original team who worked on Command & Conquer and Eye of the Beholder games review our entry, and he had some strong opinions on timers that we took on board.

We learn so much every time we do a game jam. It really is valuable, and the time pressure sparks the creative process in a way that you just don't get outside of a jam. Knowing that you have an audience for your game at the end of a jam, and that you're going to get feedback, makes all the difference. Well done again for completing your game and best of luck with your next one. Each one gets better in our experience.

Thanks for the great feedback. We were really pleased with how much we managed to do and how it turned out. We spent a bit of time creating the floating up death animation in Blender to get that effect and we were really pleased with it. It's great to see them float all the way to the top and off camera. 

We really wanted to be able to make an informed decision about who you could shoot and what the chances of hitting them were before you moved to a cell and took the shot. We also wanted to add the chance to "be hit" from units that could see you from a target cell as well, but didn't get that in there before the deadline. The line of sight indicator is solid if it's 100% chance to hit (and 100% means you will hit, looking at you XCOM) and dashed if it's less than 100%. Targets you can't hit have no lines drawn. If you press F1 you can also see the 100 ray casts we send out from the character to a capsule to determine the %age visibility. Red lines would hit something else, green would hit the target.

The mouse sensitivity was a real pain. Because we wanted to be able to mouse wheel to change the height of the cursor but stay on the same vertical column, we had to warp the pointer to the center of the cell above. It turns out it's very hard to warp the system cursor on most platforms (especially WebGL), so we had to create our own software cursor that we tracked internally, but at that point we didn't have access to any of the system mouse configurations (Windows/Mac/etc.) for pointer speed/acceleration so we just matched it to our local mouse settings, which are probably way too fast for most people. We'll try to get the system mouse information next time (Unity Input.mouseDelta is in a unknown unit, it for sure isn't pixels).

When we do game jams we spend all the jam time on the game, taking time off work (and family) to get it done to the best of our ability. So in effect we had most of 14-15 days with two of us working on it (graphics artist/game designer and programmer). This is how we managed to get so much done. We did use a few off the shelf Unity asset store assets too which we'll list in an upcoming blog post.

Thanks again for organizing the jam. Sign us up for the next one!

Well done everyone. We had fun playing all your games. We'll be up for joining the next Turn Based Tactics Jam. Thanks @the_syncr0 for hosting the jam, and extending it to allow more entries and extra features/bug fixes on the first round of submissions.

We totally agree, the complexity is not obvious until you start trying to implement all the mechanics and suddenly your 10 days has gone and you have no sound effects in there! Are you creating your own WebGL backend for the fun of doing it? Just wonder if you'd thought of Unity or even Three.js?

Ping us when you have a new version. We can't guarantee we'll get to play it but we'll do our best. Good luck.

Thanks for that. Hammerhead Squad and Under Water Tactics were both good games that could easily have taken first place. It was a good, albeit small, competition, and we enjoyed it immensely. We actually started the jam with a mental plan to create a top down, no-elevation single floor turn based scifi tactics game, similar to Rebelstar on the ZX Spectrum. We even had some walls prepared in Blender. Then the theme "Underwater" was revealed and we had to throw that all out of the water(!). For underwater, where you can swim up and down, we felt there had to be elevation involved. But the problem there is that if you can't see the whole map then you could be shot from offscreen, so we decided to have the whole map visible all the time. Controls in 3D are tricky, as you probably saw, but we think we did our best, given the time we had and the theme "curveball".

We actually rolled our eyes slightly when we saw "Underwater" because, as you saw, in our last jam we chose to make the underwater game "Dungeon Diver" under the "Duality" theme (water and air) and then thought we were done with that genre. Still it was a lot of fun putting another aquatic game together for this jam.

Best of luck with your next game and hopefully see you here next year for the Turn-based Tactics Jam 2025.

On the plus side, your game was on theme. The units were all underwater units and a variety of them. We managed to move around but when we moved onto the worm nothing seemed to happen. Were weren't sure why we had so many turns or what we were supposed to do with them.

The game seemed to hang frequently for seemingly indeterminate amounts of time, asking us to wait after a mouse button press. We didn't understand what it could be doing in the time it took to return to the play screen.

Our game, Scuba Squad, was actually a 2 player game as well, up until 3pm of the submission day! We threw together a simple AI in 5 hours. Give it a go, you can do it!

It looks like this might be your first game (on itch at least) so well done for completing it and submitting it before the deadline (8 minutes was close). We look forward to seeing more games from you in future jams.

For us, turn-based-tactics allow you to take your time making a tactical decision by weighing up all the possible moves and coming to a decision that matches your strategy best. Like chess. Having a 25s timer on your actions, so they have to be played out like a real-time-strategy game is the opposite of a turn-based-tactics game. This could just be our opinion but turn limits on levels are OK but (real)time limits are not. The games starts off putting you under stress and never lets up.

You start the game with no clue what you're doing and what the controls are and just a timer counting down to your demise. Even once you've learnt the controls having the movement grid isometric and not aligned with the keypresses. It might have worked better as a top down board view so the movement matched up with the view. Alternatively using mouse to control the cursor could have alleviated this slightly.

We can see that running out of oxygen via the timer is in keeping with the theme, just not the turn-based-tactics style of game play.

You had no idea of the amount of damage you would do to an enemy unit when you attacked so you couldn't make an informed decision about who to attack first. You did get a health bar but the scale was unknown in relation to the damage that you could do with each unit. You did provide feedback on how far a unit could move, which made that an informed decision.

The graphics were simple but they worked for the type of game you made, like Into The Breach meets Countdown (TV show with a 30s timer!). The music did get a bit much after a while and had us reaching for the mute site button in the browser.

This all sounds very negative so can we just say well done for finishing and submitting your game, and with 4 days to spare! You could have added some more features in those 4 days! The game does play from start to finish and runs smoothly in a browser without any issues. Congratulations on submitting to the jam. We look forward to seeing more games from you in the future.

Well done, really good job, especially for a single person team. We felt that your game was the most "tactical" of all the submissions to the jam.

The graphics were probably the best of the jam, even the clutter decals like blood splats and newspapers added a lot to the ambience. The video screens, some partly off the walls, were good too. 

The sound was good, but also restrained, so it was in the 3D space, but you could pan away from it to lower the volume. Sound effects for gun shots, explosions and footsteps were all nice additions.

The AI, for the most part, was competent. It was nice to see enemies moving into cover when they didn't have enough action points to keep firing. We did see the AI seem to get stuck in a corner at one point though, seemingly trying to move to a unit that wasn't there.

The camera angles were good, and the controls worked well, although a bit of mouse interaction for camera movement/rotation would have been nice. Sometimes the scenery got in the way of camera angles, for example when you moved the camera into an unexplored area the camera went black. Having the fog of war was nice though so you didn't have any idea what was through the next door until you opened it. The third person shooting sequence was a nice touch too. It was slightly frustrating only being able to see 1 AP of potential movement at a time, meaning you couldn't assess whether you could reach an enemy, and fire a pistol for the last AP, without committing to the move to find out you would fall short.

On the weapons, the grenades felt like they were underpowered, compared to the rifle, although they both seemed to take the same AP. Is this because they were unlimited? We had no idea what the area of effect of the grenade was and which units it would impact before we threw it, making it a random decision. There was no feedback on the damage, chance to hit or action points needed to fire, for weapons which made any decision you made arbitrary and uninformed. We missed shots with a rifle when we were on the adjacent tile to the enemy and had no idea why, or if choosing a different weapon or place to fire from would have made a difference. What was nice, and made an informed decision, was when you showed whether enemies were in range or not when a weapon was selected.

The health bar was just a bar with no scale on it so you had no idea whether you could be killed by a unit with a particular weapon or not, making it hard to know whether to run for cover or whether to run into the fight. The damage from weapons was unknown on the health bar scale and also, it wasn't clear if the damage varied with each shot, or whether it was fixed. All these things help you make an informed tactical decision, like choosing whether to attack with a knight or a bishop in chess.

There seemed to be cover provided by some parts of the scenery, but it wasn't obvious which places were more in cover than others. This meant you couldn't make an informed decision about the safest route to move, while not being shot at the end. An explicit cover mechanic would have made this valid to reason about.

 The environment "Interactables" were a nice touch with the doors and health pickups. Also having to destroy crates with a grenade as a puzzle to progress was a great addition to the level. This might also explain why grenades are unlimited because if you'd run out it would be game over. Perhaps you should be able to shoot the crates with a rifle or pistol as well?

Character animations were nice, with what looked like rag-doll deaths, and the enemy were clearly aquatic which was on point for the theme, although you weren't actually engaging in combat underwater. The theme was overall only paid lip service, with no specific under water related mechanics that we saw in the 44 minutes we played the game on the first level. If it was after this then we'd suggest putting jam theme content earlier in the play through as many people won't spend more than 10 minutes playing before moving on to the next game.

We did find the game very hard. We steadily lost units and felt as though they were stacked against us. With this level of enemy opposition, you might want to have some single use superpowers, or the Bravado mechanic from Hard West 2, to redress the balance.

Congratulations on completing your submission, and best of luck with developing it in the future. You might well have a real game on your hands here.

We've just added a WebGL build that should run on all modern platforms and browsers. If you get chance to play it before the votes end that would be great, otherwise please feel free to feedback to us after the voting period, we're still really keen to get people's opinions on Scuba Squad.

https://rebello.itch.io/scuba-squad

The only real changes were to do with making the fonts larger and bolder so you could read the text when the game runs at the default itch.io WebGL page resolution of 960x540 (1/16th of the 4K resolution we designed it for). We did bug fix the Demo Mode not working as well. Lastly, the level meshes were being generated using compute shaders at runtime so we had to export those to static meshes and bundle them with the build to get it working on WebGL.

Normally we would do a WebGL build of our game (this time Scuba Squad) for a jam but it takes so long in Unity that we ran out of time to submit one (Our Windows one was submitted 4 seconds before the deadline!). It sometimes doesn’t work, or doesn’t fully work, in Unity WebGL as well so we’d have probably taken a good few hours or more to get the build out.

We’d rather you played our game than not though so we’ll try to submit a WebGL version, if the-syncr0 is ok with that, and let you know when it’s ready.

We could do a Mac one but they don’t install by default on modern OSX versions and complain a lot about being an invalid download, which just gets us more grief, but if that would work for you it might be doable too. 

Firstly, we were really impressed with your entry. It has all the elements that we would expect from a turn-based strategy, with nice orders, movement and overall controls. Graphics were nice and consistent and nothing broke that we saw. Good choice of existing asset packs like Synty and URP Water. Great job. We want to give you some honest feedback though, which will hopefully help you to make your game better.

For us turn based strategies are all about making meaningful, informed, decisions. We're going to mention that quite a few times.

Team selection and backstories was a nice touch, although you just added them all to the team. There was no meaningful decision to be made here.

Health bars were nice to see but you didn't have any idea what the scale was, also the enemies didn't have any health bars, so you were completely in the dark with them. How many health points did you have? How much damage would an enemy weapon do? How much damage would your weapon do to an enemy? You couldn't make any meaningful decision about who to attack, and which unit to attack with, and all the health/damage/chance to hit information was hidden. You just ended up randomly clicking on a unit to attack with and a unit to attack and then just sat back and waited.

In theory you could move into cover but, with the AI as it is, you didn't need to. You could just move behind them, and they didn't know you were there. You could then just shoot them from behind without needing to be in cover at all. We just went to the end of the map (thinking it would end the game) and then worked backwards like a firing squad. They seemed to have fixed positions or firing directions or to move to known positions to fire, sometimes running past us to where look the opposite direction to us, or ran up to us, ignored us and ran away again.

This brings us to the fact that we didn't know what the mission objective was. We seemed to be following the flags but at the end nothing happened. Presumably we had to kill all the enemies (while repairing the leaks that any of their grenades created) but we didn't really know for sure. We played for over an hour and didn't manage to complete the first level, so we didn't see if there were more levels or a meta game between levels. Probably you might want to have an intro level that you can finish quickly, that teaches you the basics, and gives you the sense of accomplishing something. We didn't get that buzz of finishing anything, just that the level dragged on.

Chance to hit was completely unknowable. In classic XCOM style you could be on an adjacent square to an enemy and miss them 3 times in a row. Again, there was no meaningful decision to be made here about whether you were more likely to hit with a given unit/weapon or from a given position.

Weapon damage was similarly unknowable. The shotgun seemed to be deadly, but the damage was random and the lower or upper values of damage you could do was unknown. It wasn't clear if the range affected damage either, although you could at least see the range of your weapon on the tiles, which did make that an informed decision, nice! Time to kill an enemy unit seemed to be very large, and without any health feedback on the enemies you had no idea whether they were close to death or not.

Movement range was clearly indicated too with the line changing color when it was beyond range. This was very good. Cover indicators were good, although full/half cover wasn't clear. Sometimes we felt we were in full cover, but the unit still crouched as if it was half cover. Great work on those animations, they really added a lot to the feel of the game and were well done overall. You could move through scenery like red barrels though!

Graphically there were only a few notes. The health bars weren't horizontal on the screen. You were billboarding them to the camera position, not camera direction. Something like this in you HealthBar (Late)Update method should fix it: 

        transform.LookAt(transform.position - Camera.main.transform.forward, Vector3.up);

Health bars partially were clipped by the water, perhaps move them to a separate UI overlay camera so they're always in front. When in third person over the shoulder firing mode, sometimes the enemy and your shots were obscured by scenery. It's very hard to get this right but it was nice to see you have this change of any close-up for the shots.

For the UI, you had no idea what weapon you had on your character, or what stats it might have, until you saw the "missed" message (sometimes a hit one, but not often). You didn't know when your team had run out of action points to know whether to end the turn or not without going to each unit. This is partly because of the large action point economy of 100 points. It's one reason why a lot of games use a smaller number of action points. It does mean you can step out of cover though and then step back into cover without needing to have automatic "step out and back in again to shoot" logic that a smaller number of AP would require.

SOUND VOLUME WAS A BIT LOUD AND WE COULDN'T FIND A VOLUME CONTROL. We had to use the Windows game bar to lower it to 2/100. The non-so-in-the-background music got a bit annoying after a while, but maybe it was more about the volume. Nice shooting sound effects.

Overall though, well done guys. That was a great entry to the jam and thanks for making it!

Thanks for playing Dungeon Diver. We really enjoyed doing it and look forward to participating again this year. It would be great to see you in the jam this year too if you can make it. When the theme for the TBT24 jam came up as "Underwater" we couldn't believe it. We actually groaned and said "not again", but it worked out quite well for us in the end. We never really started off trying to make underwater games, it's just happened to us!

Thanks for running the jam. It was great to see the extra submissions . We'll review them over the weekend. We're really looking forward to feedback on Scuba Squad too. Please don't hold back, be brutally honest, it helps us to hone our craft.

As for cadence of the jam, our preference is annual. It makes it more of an event when it happens. We really liked the format of having two full weekends as part of the jam, so 10 days was good, but we did manage to get more done when it was extended to 14 days. We'd probably like to do a full two week jam next year if possible.

We also do the annual Dungeon Crawler Jam and Zooperdan (the organizer) told us it was a strange feeling creating a Discord server and being the only one on it! However, 4 years later it's a buzzing community with nearly 1600 users, many of which post daily. It really adds to the jam experience before, during and after. People are always happy to discuss the features of different games, and what makes a good dungeon crawler, and it would be great to have a similar forum for turn based tactics games. For the last jam they even managed to get some of the original developers of popular dungeon crawler games (like Legend of Grimrock) to select a judges' top ten, separate to the jam votes. Having your game played by the creator of Eye of The Beholder and having him rip you a new one was a humbling, but rewarding, experience! Imagine if you could get Julian Gollop to judge some games next year (or maybe the year after once submission numbers have increased).

the_syncr0, what made you create this jam and what were you looking to get out of it?