In the dead of night, a Mastermind is awaked to a challenge against a rival foe, and now has seven days to recover and retrain their army before the duel of a lifetime!
Hereās my teamās entry to the 2022 Gain Jam! We hope you enjoy what weāve prepared over the weeks. This an adventure game with hints of RPG elements and you train minions to go out on adventures for risk and reward! Encounter a variety of events with branching paths depending on choices (or mistakes) made. Can you build an army capable enough in a week to defeat your insatiable rival? Play and find out! (Pretty please!)
Your artwork is always amazing and brings a lot style to the project, was able to do one run but lost in the end, need to learn more what path does what
Well, Iāll say this much for the game: The artwork is indeed good. Probably the best part of the game, really. Unfortunately, the experience of actually playing the game is rather trying, mainly due to a lack of clarity.
When you send your minions on a mission, youāre supposed to pick one based on which stats are needed. However, most of the missions arenāt labeled with what you need to succeed at them. Thus you have to resort to trial and error to figure out how to succeed at each mission.
Youāre limited to 3 training sessions per day, regardless of how much your minions actually get out of the sessions. The game does not mention this when going over the basic loop of feeding and training. I donāt hate the idea of having to set up the training sessions by maxing out weight first, but I would have appreciated a heads-up about it.
Speaking of training sessions, trying to figure out how much you can actually pump up a minionās stats is unnecessarily difficult, partly because of the increasing amounts of weight needed per level and partly because you canāt easily see the exact weight number. You have to start a training or feeding session to see the number, and that means using up a training session or, at the very least, a bit of food. Eyeballing their sprites is imprecise, and sometimes itās not even accurateāthe sprites may suddenly update to a different size when you start a session. Iām not sure what causes this.
The minigames throw you into the action without giving you a chance to test out your controls first. Combined with the fact that all of them except the food-catching one end after a single mistake, it results in very short, not-very-informative first attempts.
The Big Dayā¦ Honestly, I still donāt really know whatās going on here. The game tells me to mash the button to make my minions eat, but then they just get full and stop, long before the other team finishes. Is there anything more to it, or is it just a glorified stat check?
Besides the clarity issues, I also have a grievance against the menu when preparing for a mission. For some reason, the game automatically tries to select your first minion for any mission; if you want to send someone else, you have to hit the cancel button to de-select that minion and then select the minion you actually want. This led to me sending the wrong minion on more than one occasion.
Oh, another thing: in the āWhisper in the Forestā event, after catching the ghost once, I tried to strong-arm her. My minion succeededā¦ and then the game crashed. Whoops.
And finally, Iād like to add that the 7-day time limit seems rather short. It took me several runs just to figure out what on earth I was doing, and so far, I still havenāt been able to actually beat the game. A lot of the events just arenāt that rewarding, even if you succeed, and it ends up feeling like you donāt have much control over whether or not your minions will be strong enough when the Big Day rolls around.
All in all, I do like the presentation of the game (well, aside from the typosā¦ ābrdigeā and ādangeriouslyā are eyesores). I really would like to see the clarity and UI issues improved on, because I feel like there might yet be an enjoyable concept here.
Thanks for the honest review! We just updated to fix some errors in events like the one you just mentioned.
We are aware of the UI/balance issues you mention, and wish we had time to adjust those before launch, but our goal was to have a proof of concept of a basic game loop first and foremost, even if rough around the edges.
The idea of marking events for their apporpriate stat checks initially is something we want to implement by a color code system before setting out, while still keeping some mystery of what else may be involved with certain choices.
Initially we wanted the idea of ānew game +ā to be the meta knowledge you gained through an initial run and being able to loop again and make more inforned decisions the next time, hence the āshortā week, but we did not have enough time to implement and balance proper, which is what is leading to the issues you see here.
But again, thank you for your kind and honest words, and we hope to have a more polished concept of this idea in the future, thanks!
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event0
for object pbj_scene:
Push :: Execution Error - Variable Index [5] out of range [5] - -1.scene(100517,5)
at gml_Object_pbj_scene_Step_0
############################################################################################
gml_Object_pbj_scene_Step_0 (line -1)
The graphic seems fixed but Iām still getting this crash with the latest version if I chose to attack the deer in the A Whisper in the Forest event
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event0
for object pbj_scene:
Unable to find instance for object index 66
at gml_Script_actor_gain_food
############################################################################################
gml_Script_actor_gain_food (line -1)
gml_Object_pbj_scene_Step_0
Also just want to say I really like the style and the concept of this game even tho itās very rough around the edges
The basic game loop is definitely working for me as Iām having fun figuring out every event and finding ways to maximize stats gain
In the Whisper in the Woods event, offering one of your greevils as tribute doesnāt seem to do anything. In fact, itās possible to offer all of your greevils to the doe spirit and essentually softlock the game. :V
Also, selecting her harp as a reward doesnāt seem to anything either. If I select it, I can just restart that scene in particular and select a different reward.
That might be by design. I think the game is incentivising you to think like a greedy greevil. No noble adventurer are we! Weāre greevils! We take what we want!
Itās a tough cookie no lie. I barely squeaked a win because I managed to luck into doing jump rope for like 4 days and getting approx 100 food that way. You have to be on your A-game for sure to win.
Itās a shame that to get what I assumed to be the best ending from āA Whisper in the Forestā I found that the days sunk into it meant it was tricky to capitalise on the prize as you lacked for food during the interim to train. A clean racing line (Whisper, get food, Whisper, Whisper, Whisper - get prize) still only leaves you with two dedicated days, aka only six training opportunities, to work with. I still lost even when optimising training with all that food.
Is it possible to win whilst doing the Whisper event? In the newest version, yes as a lucky Balance Board netted me 85 food and I breezed the game* with the Whisper prize as well. In a way it felt a little unexciting to win just by doing the far more profitable minigames than by exploring the more interesting events - and even then the victory was down to the wire.
*Although funny thing, knowing that You repeat the final eating contest after a further seven days it seems my greedy greevils, already pretty statted out and stuffed from the finale, were unable to shed enough weight for it! Talk about being victims of your own success!
It was a challenge but a compelling one that Iām happy to have played (fatal bugs aside, natch).
Speaking of bugs, found a new one in the latest version when attempting the Fishing for Trouble event - it locks on this screen:
So first of all, art direction steals the show. A lot of people are saying this and I also agree. Everything about the art works, sound effects and music really help too. I adore every part of that UI too. Got that really good Sega Genesis feel. Gameplay is ambitious and I respect that a lot, a nice little monster trainer to go do monstery things. But I think thatās really as far as I can take the praise.
As itās mentioned already, navigating the game is obtuse as there isnāt really a ābackā button, trying to go back a page and do things with another Greevil means youāre just starting over. And if you want to check the training of a Greevil or your feeding of it, better have it written down somewhere or remembered cuz pressing the action button just feeds/trains meaning wasting your limited resources on things you didnāt mean to do. Most of my time playing the game was spent just learning and failing in kind of unenjoyable ways. It especially hurt to discover that if you donāt let the whole feeding animation play out, then the food is lost and uneaten - which is bad enough when food isnāt a prevalent resource! Though looking at things other people have gotten hundreds of food?? Geez. I spent most the game barely using my already limited training sessions because I couldnāt actually feed my Greevils. Some sort of passive income even if you fail would have been nice. Though apparently that didnāt matter as I managed to win the final challenge anyways. Somehow? I was expecting a blowout so I guess Iāll take it??
Anyways the presentation feels motivating enough to give the game another spin so I might go a bit further to see some of these other scenes other people are seeing. Mad respect for all the hard work you guys did all the same.
this game art is Very good making feel like I am playing this on my Game boy ADV but it is hard as Events are random and winning is random too if there where more time before the big day event or have free win event mixed in it may make it a bit less hard.
Itād be nice if I could skip the intro so restarting when you fail the first wagon challenge- I mean, beginning another run will go quicker. Also, having you still lose if you MATCH the target number of a dice roll really sucks. It just feels bad.
And apparently when youāre feeding the greevils, the food can MISS? Like it just falls past them and doesnāt add to their weight. It happens when you cancel out of the feeding early, and sometimes it justā¦ happens for no reason.
Also, I donāt know why, but the balance beam minigameās controls are SO confusing. Theyāre like, the opposite of what they should be. When I press left, the left side tilts UP, which does NOT make sense to my brain at all because if I were holding something and then leaned to the left, the left side would go DOWN. Also, thereās no indication of when itās tilting too far, so you just suddenly fail without realizing you were even close.
The jump rope makes me want to kill something. Itās impossible to tell when to actually jump. There needs to be a better indication than just guessing if the mode seven sprites are in the right place/right size/whatever.
It honestly seems like the only way to win is to get one of the minigames on the first day, and do incredibly well on them despite them being the most frustrating things in the game.
I agree with all of these criticisms, but the balance board in particular was what prompted my complaint about not being able to test out the minigame controls. I would input a direction, it would do the opposite of what I expected, and bamāimmediate failure. Happened to me more than once, in fact.
Thanks for the full feedback! Weāre aware of those issues you point out, and it comes from a shift in development halfway through the project that left some ideas half-finished, but we still wanted to present them as proof of concept, in particular with the minigames.
The food āmissingā issue comes from the tally only activating once the food hit the greevil, so backing out early can lead to missed food unfortunately.
I really want to clean up this project post-jam and turn into something more focused on its strengths, and I hope I can deliver on that promise in the future.
I honestly thought that my first loss was a forced one and the bulk of the game would be working my way back up to regain the title because I didnāt get any minigames the first time around I played. The rewards you get from non-minigames are just too low to really make any progress with. I think there was just a massive overabundance of rng. Hope you get missions that you know the right stats for, and then for non-minigames get a dice roll after that. Even for some of the minigames like the balancing one and the catching burgers rng could play a huge role (food only dropping on the edge of one side of the seesaw and the towards the middle on the other side to the point where you canāt keep the side up and food spawning on opposites sides of the screen back to back respectively).
I feel like not only giving players a hint of what skill is needed for all challenges, but also a vague range of how high you have to get for the dice rolling challenges would help make it more of a risk-reward challenge for the player than a replay the game a couple times to learn whatās actually possible challenge. Especially with the opening being unskippable.
I also got a glitch a couple times where backing out of selecting someone to go out from the wagon would make it so the first guy would get selected no matter who I chose the next time.
Love the art direction though, it was definitely the highlight of the game.
