Really interesting take on it! I like the action amount range minigame. Interesting to only have one character who can attack. The art is great too and I love the little animations. Though it does take a little long to go through all the turns especially when its mostly Adam doing the work.

Great job on this!

@johnjoemcbob Thanks for the nice feedback! I agree that the turns tend to last long and will try to balance that in the future.

Nice! I enjoyed the first level of that, though I'm not sure what was going on with the second level. If I did half of either of the goblin's hp they would fall down and I'd lose. That didn't seem right. They still had 8 hp left.

I liked the core of this game a lot. It feels like something that could really be built upon into a real game. When I saw that the second level goblin also had a healer I started to feel like there was a good game happening here. I would make the "Character's turn" messages shorter though. I'm too impatient for them haha.

Sound effects could also add a lot to bringing this game to life!

@lambdanaut Well, you could probably see the range in parentheses next to the enemy hp. Your goal is to get goblins health down to that range and by doing that you are immobilizing, but not killing them and that's where the theme is implemented. If you were to damage them below that point, goblins would die. Thanks for playing and hopefully you will try it again now that you know the idea behind it.

dope game, ngl

This was a very cool interpretation of the theme and I liked the art and presentation! One thing that surprised me is that you aren't allowed to damage them below their threshold range and then heal them back up into it to save the goblin, but other than that this made a lot of sense and was enjoyable to play.

@ghast-neoh Thanks for the nice feedback. I wasn't really sure whether or not to allow players to get past the HP range, but eventually I settled down with this approach as it makes the gameplay more challenging.

This was a nice twist on generic rpgs. The animation was good. Most of the gameplay wasn't very innovative, but it was a nice main mechanic and most of it was well made and executed. The music was also great.

Super interesting concept once I picked up on what was going on- I managed to miss how immobilizing worked in your description on my first play! I love the idea of the different breakpoints and pairing those with the QTE input.

Also a bit out of left field but I could actually see this as a great way to teach match to kids!

Really interesting way to get out with that with "inversed" turn base battle. The feel is really great, awesome job.

@silas-the-dev Thanks for playing the game. Glad you liked it.

This game looks really polished, and I think the idea is very innovative. Gameplay feels a bit like a math puzzle: trying to figure out the optimal way to protect/heal/attack the enemies so that they get knocked out.

A few criticisms. The time spent between turns is too long, and I often wanted to "skip" one of my character's turns. Often I knew exactly what I wanted my next few turns to look like, but getting through all the information boxes to actually execute those moves felt like a chore.

Overall, I enjoyed playing! Nice variety of enemies, great looking art, good soundtrack, and a fun+unique core mechanic. Great work :smile:

@xel Thanks for the nice feedback. I also think that it can be a good math teaching tool. :smile:

Cool graphics and really polished! In my opinien the best game so far. I also like the music and the turn based battle is better for my slow reflexes. My reflexes also took me the possibility to make smaller attacs, so I had to find solutions where I was abled to use the green zone. The controls are easy and it's really fun to play. As I said: Great game!

@vollfeiw Thanks for the feedback. Glad you enjoyed it.

@boxedmeatrevolution Thanks for nice words. I wanted to decrease the turn wait in the version 1.1 but forgot to do so :face_palm:. I'll have to write that down this time so I don't forget it. :smile:

@acdia Wow, that's some big words. :blush:

Thank you very much, glad you enjoyed playing the game.

One of the games, I let installed to later play it again.

Wow! That's a perfect idea! Exactly something what I wanted to see considering the theme. The game seems polished. I am amazed! So clever. I have no more words :heart:

@reiqy Thank you so much for such a nice words, means a lot! :slight_smile:

This has a cool concept and a creative interpretation of the theme!The little drawings are very cute, and I like how the bouncing animation makes them dynamic - simple and effective.

There is a small bug where you cannot protect your own guy (defense goes back to 0 in the goblins' turn), though for the levels I played it makes no difference as there were few offensive goblins. Also, I think making the time between turns quicker would help with the slightly slow pacing of the game.

Great job!

@forgeronstudio Thanks for the feedback. I'll have to take a look at that bug and will decrease time stamp between the turns.

Cool game with an adorable graphics and creativity on using the theme by not killing the goblins. could see your hard work through the game, good work:thumbsup_tone2:

Nice idea around the theme! Had a lot of fun doing computations to find the most optimized way to get them to retreat :smile:
As mentioned above, there is a bug where you cannot protect your attacker. Whenever you set its defense to something, because the attacker is the next one in line, whenever he finishes his turn, the defense goes back to 0, so he is always defense-less facing the enemies next turn. :cry:
Really well done :v:

@amazura Thanks for the nice feedback. Appreciate it.

@goutye Thanks for playing the game. Glad you liked it. I saw yesterday that bug and will definitely fix it.

Had an issue on the first battle- I guess LD has me conditioned to be on the lookout- so, I was sure it was a game-breaking bug- I WAS WRONG!


But, I can't see the HP range!!!

I took a moment and realized that the resolution of my monitor might be the problem (on Surface Book 2) I set to 1920 x 1080 and FIXED! Thought you should know.


Then, I started questioning the complexity of the gameplay- but strode forward. It wasn't until the next match that I really started to see the potential of this mechanic.

I wonder if each player had the ability to attack, protect, or heal- how would that change the gameplay loop? It was pretty amazing how you were training me to think ahead. Love the graphics. I feel some variance in the soundtrack could actually benefit this game- Overall, fantastic job. A compo game with this much gameplay and polish is very impressive. Thank you for the game!

edit: After reading through the other comments- I agree with you that this could be a great math teaching tool!!!

@joemid Thank you so much for the detailed feedback. I really enjoyed reading your thought process. I guess I could blame 48h constraint for the scaling issues, but nevertheless I will fix that in the next update! :sweat_smile:

Sorry to bother you, but did you by any case forgot to vote because the site still reports 16 votes?
Once again, thank you for playing and glad you enjoyed the game!

@stefan-jovanovic Hi! Thank you! I thought I did- but just looked and if I did :o - it didn't take. Should be tabbed now! Sorry about that!

Really nice game! It was fun and interesting. Near the end (the level with two healers), however, my attacker died because of a mistake, and since there is no way to restart the level (unless I missed something), I just had to wait a lot of turns for the goblins to slowly kill me. But other than that, it was great!

@frogman Thanks for the feedback! Thank you for pointing out about the restart, I'll implement it in the next update!

WOW. Started this up expecting a mediocre half-assed RPG, but it ended up being challenging puzzle game! I loved the levels and for sure think the last two before the finale was the hardest. It took me over an hour i think, but the time just seemed to fly by. Good job on creating such a long and complicated yet simple game for the compo! I loved every bit of this and hope more people take their time to play this to completion.

It got a bit slow every time my attacker was killed, since it was essentially game over then, and not when the rest of the team died as well. Could also have benefited from a button to skip the text and animations as things felt a bit slow on the later tries and when i was just waiting to be killed.

Loved the UI and the graphics where good. All in all an extremely solid compo game!

@fatsheep Thanks for the in-depth feedback, I really appreciate it. I am planning to speed up the enemy turns as well as to make the lose condition to be when the attacker is killed in the next update. Thanks again for playing and glad you liked it! :smiley:

Very cool concept and playing it is quite enjoyable however there are some weird design choices. For example, defence is lost after the person's turn is over which makes giving defence sometimes pointless. Like @fatsheep said above, it was really annoying that after Adam dies the game still goes on. Otherwise, a really good game

@icegod Thanks for the feedback. As for the defense, it could've gone in one of two ways: First way was to carry over the defense even after taking an action and I think that would be really op and would produce unbalanced situations. The second way was the one that I used and because of the way it is, I tended to save the defender for the last players turn except for one level where that was done intentionally. Regarding the second problem, It was really bad decision of mine not to include the restart command after Adam were to be killed. I will be adding that in the next update. Once again, thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed the game! :smile:

interesting concept, good game!

To be honest I wasn´t expecting this, what a cool take on the theme and the ide on that mechanic! Great job

The idea is really nice, and I love the UI (the character selection arrow looks really cool!). The variety in goblin types also adds a deeper level of strategizing, and it's fun. The red-blue-green bar is a nice touch: more interactivity than just choosing from a menu, but easy enough that it doesn't hinder your strategy.

But sometimes it feels slow: when you've incapacitated (whoops, almost wrote 'killed' here ^^) all but a shield goblin, and you've calculated that you just need to keep hitting him till his health reaches the right range, so basically three fourths of the characters are useless to you and you're just waiting for SwordPerson's turn. Maybe make the descriptive texts's duration shorter, or allow to skip them? Or just have them not pause the flow of the game. Or (if it doesn't go against what you envision for the game) allow StaffPerson and ShieldPerson to attack too, maybe doing less damage?

Also the goblins always attack SwordPerson (maybe because he has less health?). So I just always protect him, and I know for sure the others are safe, which is less fun. Edit: I just noticed: All my turns go: Heal Sword if hurt, Protect Sword, and then choose who to attack (which is the interesting part, because it changes). And if you protect Sword and then Sword attacks, he loses the protection, making Shield completely useless in those levels where Shield plays before Sword.

Well. Back to trying to beat this level :D

PS: After reading others' comments, I remembered I too thought it would be a good math teaching game.

@eduardogacn Thanks for playing the game, glad you liked it.

@jin9310 Thank you very much, means a lot. You pixel art is awesome!

@nolanfa Thank you so much for such a detailed feedback, it really helps me to further improve the game. I agree that the pacing sometimes feels really slow, but during the jam I just couldn't think of the way to improve it. I guess I could've just shorten the text duration as you said. As for the AI, i implented it in the last 5 hours of jam(I should've organized my time better) and made it target the unit with the lowest health. I will probably fix this and make it more random. Also, thank you for wanting to show my game to more people, means a lot. Definitely let me know if you get them to play.

No mac or web versions :(

@ldd I've just added mac and linux builds so feel free to try now. :smiley:

Linux build works fine, although on 21:9 aspect ratio the game cuts the top and bottom of the screen, so I was unable to read what the game text was saying. I suspect, it's like that on all platform builds. It's best to make sure game scales properly across different aspect ratios, but for a jam you can also simply enforce 16:9.

Concept is interesting and could use more meat. I think some random variation would be nice, since they always seem to attack the sword guy. For example, you could add some enrage ability that would highlight the person they would attack next, but also deal double damage the next turn. Maybe they could highlight several characters they would attack (some AoE attack), and player has to choose who to defend. If you implement AoE attack, healer could use a weaker version of healing that heals all player-controlled characters. You can also surprise player with choice slider having different animation dynamics: different speed, tweening with easing in vs easing out vs easing on both ends. Maybe choice zones could be varied slightly for added difficulty.

Also, I think it would be nice to have a story explanation of why player needs them "down" instead of "dead". Maybe, a wizard hired him to get some goblins captive for wicked experiments ;) Could be a simple story text in the beginning, or a small cutscene.

Good job and thank you for different platform builds!

EDIT:
Forgot to mention, that I needed to add executable bit for it to launch on Linux.

I love you! thanks for making web builds. you are cooler than being cool!

Great animation with the pixel art! I already killed the goblin and then realized that it has to be kept alive! :laughing:
Greato Jobu! :smile:

Hey again :)
Local Kids Behaviour Expert (aka: my mom)'s opinion was that my neighbours kids are a tad too young right now to try it and that I should wait a couple years (which is why I edited the previous comment, sorry), but a couple parents were actually interested in testing it. It was indeed much too hard for the 5 y.o. I got to test it (I don't have any older kids around), they didn't understand the goal of the game and tried every time to do max heal/damage/protect (but they really liked the red-blue-green bar's mechanic), but the parents said the graphics were very nice, and the dad at times pretty much took the keyboard from the kid to play himself, so I'm guessing he liked it ^^

Also, a fun fact: my ggj20 game was called don't sink, and you had to manage a pirate ship and keep it from breaking down

@civmaniac Thanks for playing the game and thanks for detailed feedback. I agree with most of the points you made and would like to improve the game in the future. I look at the ludum dare entry more as the proof of concept than the finished game.

@ldd No problem. :smile:

@god-colo Thanks for plating the game, glad you enjoyed it!

@nolanfa I can't thank you enough for your effort. Really means a lot when people share my games with others. I guess I need to make a game more straight-forward in order for all ages to enjoy it. :smile:

Also that's a nice coincidence. Can you send me a link to your ggj game, I would like to try it.

Well, in retrospect, the kid was really young. I don't think they could have enjoyed any other game made during this jam.

My pirate ship game is here: https://fal.itch.io/dont-sink . It's multiplayer (up to four, though you can technically test it alone) and you need a controller.

I really liked the game. It was very fun and unique. Interesting how you were able to include math and strategy into the genre. Thank you for playing and commenting on our game.

@theceases Thanks a lot, glad you enjoyed! :slight_smile:

Really liked the concept and the way the hp ranges mechanic is designed. I loved figuring out how to make the numbers work, it felt like a puzzle disguised as a turn-based combat. Also amazing graphics and sound. Loved it!!

@jdk2209 Thanks a lot for playing the game. Glad you liked it! :slight_smile:

Very cool idea and wonderful execution. Loved the art very much and the little action bar demanded a bit of skill as well, that's a very clever touch. Took me a bit to figure out that the shortest region corresponded to the smaller hit-values but it totally makes sense. Well done! Here's my stream from last week featuring the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUmP-nl1pVw

@philstrahl Thanks a lot. It means a lot when it's coming from the veteran competitor. Been following both your channels for quite a while and had not missed neither this nor yesterdays stream! :smile: