Super Mowser Bros by Guilloteam
Disclaimer : Any resemblance to fictional characters is CLEARLY NOT coincidental. We saw this event as an opportunity to have fun, and to pay tribute to the famous Italian plumber. We hope that you'll have fun too!
The game has been patched, to fix bugs that were breaking the main gameplay mechanics : buildings kept producing units even after being destroyed, and units sent in buildings were not added to the fighting list. The browser version is patched, you can download the initial version in the itch.io page.
The unstoppable BARIO strikes again! As always, he's determined to get his princess CHEAP back by kicking your butt.
As usual, HE'll be the hero of the story, and can’t be stopped forever... Hard times for the honest MOWSER that you are!
With your units, build obstacles in BARIO's way to slow him down in his crazy rush.
Build FARMS to produce your units. Improve your farm to produce better units by clicking on it and choosing an evolve!
You can then drag and drop your units in your DUNGEONS to hinder BARIO's progress. More units will waste more time. But be careful! Defeated units are lost!
Turn your DUNGEONS into CASTLES, which can hold more units and take longer to cross!
Every time you build a CASTLE, Princess CHEAP is automatically carried there, to keep her away from BARIO! If he gets to princess CHEAP, you lose!
A game by the GuilloTeam: Julien Revel (dev), Michaël Assing (artist), and Clément Ribeyre-Soret (artist)
Music by xsgianni: https://freesound.org/people/xsgianni/
| Link | https://guilloteam.itch.io/supermowserbros |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/super-mowser-bros |
Ratings
| Given | 50🗳️ | 47🗨️ |
Aside from the accidental downwards difficulty curve, there are a few UI bugs:
- Some nodes can't be selected unless players are zoomed in on another node because the arrow keys block them.
- Some of the hills in the background draw over UI elements and make building more difficult.
- The final garrison slot can't be filled while a castle is being upgraded
- When at certain triple-digit-or-more numbers for the not-goombas, the text bugs out and goes down a line.
These bugs are minor overall though, and don't really impact the gameplay that much, just thought it'd be worth mentioning.
I really like the Bario and Mowser designs, and the overall hand-crafted look of the game is really pretty. The music was good and fitting, albeit quite repetitive, and the UI was overall fairly clean and easy to understand.
Gameplay is fun until resources stop becoming a problem, visuals are great, there's a lot to praise this game about.
Great entry!
(Here's where I was at before I decided to stop.)
Graphics are perfect and brimming with flavor.
Music has good energy but could use a little more variety/length.
Probably the biggest issue is the interface isn't designed for each easy player flow. If it were possible to do things with buttons or hotkeys instead of cumbersome clicking and dragging, I think it would feel less like there is a tension between the strategy aspect and simply mouse dragging capabilities.
Fantastic jam game regardless!
The music is great but it gets repetitive pretty fast.
It took me about 4-5 plays until I understood what I had to do. But I have to admit that I didn't read the tutorial properly. :D
I think the most tedious thing for me was dragging the units into the slots. I wished I could just click on a slot to fill them.
Very good entry. Thank you :)
I think it's a bit easy right now (I stopped playing after 15min and Bario still had 8 castles to cross, full of garrisonned unit.
Is there a difference between green turtles unit and spikes? I tried to alternate between them for the sake of "level design" but wasn't sure if it had a purpose.
It really feels like an idea you can expand infinitly, with "powerup mushroom" you have to put in some structures that will buff Bario, teleporters, and all the classic Mario features twisted from the perspective of Bowser.
Great work!
The game loop still might need some work though. I quickly realized that I could go on forever, without having any resource issue. It is nice to be able to place a castle one level in advance, but this means that it provides enough time to plant farms and tower way beyond Bario, and until he reaches them we have amassed enough money to build a castle even further with more farms and resources… Basically: the more you win, the easier the game becomes! It might need some restrictions, higher prices for some resources, or an increasing difficulty to make sure that the run don't last forever.
But it is still a fun concept. I liked that most interaction work with drag'n drop (even though I didn't got it immediately). Placing pawns on the map like this is playful. Good job for this surprising entry!
I also think I broke the game. Mowser and the princess got stuck in between screens 2 and 3 and Bario happily fought through all (empty) buildings and then ran out of the last screen but I did not lose and the time was still running:
Everything was explained very well in the tutorial. The difficulty of the game could be tweaked a bit though.
the game explains itself really well. i did figure out around the 10 minute mark that the game was pretty easy. i made quite a few castles very spread apart, so i guess i could play it kinda like cookie clicker... i'll check on it tomorrow and see if babio makes it 👨🔧
It might have been nice to only let a player open up a single drag/drop UI, and to simply let clicking the tokens also add the monsters to those spots. Drag and drop always feels a little clunky to me.
Probably the funniest game I've played so far, though. Love the parody idea.
Took me long time before undersand how to build something (the drag and drop) and after that it was way too easy.
The 2D graphics are some of the best i see so far, animations are nice too and the game is well polished, very good work on that, but it lack of fun for me.
Thank you very much for playing!
The game has some bugs but that's fine with me!
It'll be better if there could be more content to play with. Love it!
Really cool concept guys!
I can really understand the challenge of balancing out the game during the time of the jam. My own game also had problems with balancing and lack of time allocated for playtesting haha. Imo it's one of the hardest things on a jam, when you're too focused on finishing assets and features there's never enough time to test and balance it out! :(
Looks very polished, and very approachable. I liked the music and the art style very much!
I think this is one of the best ones I've seen on the jam so far. Well done!
Awesome Job!
I did have a few usability challenges with the game. Click would not register some times. Also the tutorial had really small text / display compared to the game, could be scaled up.
I really love the art. You managed to make it look basically as nice as the newer paper mario - not an easy feat for a game jam.
v high marks from me!
The music is great too.
The game itself was fun to play, but became easy quite early. Still fun but got to ~30m without much issue.
I know the feeling of wanting another 48-72hrs to make it shine, and feel like this could have been even better with some more playtesting and polish.
I did notice a couple of bugs:
- Text wrapping on unit numbers, spreads across 2 lines
- Bario fight UI element got out of whack for me, I assume it's Unity being a pain with how it positions them:
Great effort and would love to see a post jam version.
The interface is pretty confusing at first, I did skip the tutorial because I'm not good at remembering a wall of text before getting into a game. Would have preferred in-context tutorial prompts in the game itslef.
Only complaint is probably that you needed to tie it to the theme of LD50. If this had end points when you'd completed worlds I think that would be a lot more satisfying than the endless death march.
Obviously after playing for a while I got ahead of the economy and could play as long as I wanted but that's to be expected within the limits of a weekend jam.
I do hope you consider working on this more, I think there's something really special in the making here.
For the theme: we planned to have much shorter games (around 5 to 10 minutes games, at the end of which Mario would win anyway, but the longer you delay him the better), but we struggled to balance things right in order to do so. We would have needed 5 to 10 hours at least to make this better haha :smile:
A deeper work on this is in consideration, but we would need to change the sprites and the too obvious references to Nintendo, for legal purposes. We'll try to keep you in touch if we ever take the decision!
Nice mechanics, but I'm just too slow for tower defence games, and thats why I was not able to enjoy your game for 100%, but thats my personal problem, you did just great! Thanks!
Thanks for hanging out on stream and sharing your game! I loved the play off of Mario and the art is super pretty and well done. The concept for the game was really nice as well. The hardest part was knowing what I was supposed to be doing. Even after reading the written tutorial it still was not enough to introduce me to the mechanics of the game. I think the UI maybe could have helped explain this a bit better as well.
Also the arrows moving side to side were in the way of the beginning building circles on each new level. I think maybe a walk through/play along for the tutorial would have been better then a written tutorial or sort of a combo of written and showing what's happening and how its being done. I think this could really clear up the communication to the player.
Overall cool game idea, great art just some communication /user experience would help a lot with giving the player the tools they need to succeed.
In terms of graphics, it is top-notch. Professional artstyle, nice animations and overall great (aside from the default-looking progress bars). In terms of music and sound it was also solid as well, although the music does get a bit annoying after a while since it's so upbeat and repeats on a loop with no variation. The gameplay is a ton of fun as well.
My only issue with it is, as mentioned by many others, the UX is confusing right off the bat and I had no idea what I was doing for the first 5 minutes. I realized far too late the first time around that I had to literally drag the tokens into the slots to build stuff. The management idea is actually really cool, but the UX is so confusing that I had a hard time playing even after I figured out how to.
Despite that, it was a really fantastic, solid and playable entry that even has commercial potential (which is fairly rare to see). Great work!
All of the change suggestions I have have already been said, so I hope you make a postjam version with balancing for a more challenging game and perhaps a few more towers, troops etc to make it more tactical and the different units feel like they are needed to succeed.
Love the aestetics and the clean artwork and the core gameplay. Great work!
Glad you liked it!
Some notes: The gameplay is fun, but it's pretty easy. You can easily get 3 or more screens ahead. I also ran into a bug in the 1.1 version. Bario got to the princess on screen 6 and didn't trigger a Game Over.
With some difficulty tweaks, this could be a really fun game.
This feels like something that would suit touch screens really well and a great little game to try when you have a few mins. Great work with this!!
The concept was very unique and I struggled to understand what to do on first playthrough. Honestly that's not bad though, as the 2nd playthrough went very easily and I was outpacing Bario by 2 or 3 screens without a sweat. Honestly for a jam, even though you got a lot of comments about how easy it is, it's probably better to have that than the other way around so that people can experience all your content, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.
It felt really good to upgrade buildings, especially castles to gain slots. I skimmed the comments but I don't see anything talking about the enemy types - I couldn't tell the difference between the different workers/tokens at all. I ASSUME the evolved ones were better than the mushrooms, but when I stared at them in action, I couldn't actually figure out any differences. Can you explain what the differences were here?
Overall the game was very interesting and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the feeling of building out the world map, which is something we've traversed through many times from the opposite angle. I like how much potential this game has as a post-jam thing as well. Great job!
The graphics were great, music and mood were great.
Assigning builders to the nodes was a bit finicky. My first playthrough I thought I didn't understand the game because the guy didn't stay when I assigned him (only happend on the left 2 slots.) - it was finnicky enough that I started only assigning things on the right side to avoid the frustration.
Really clever addition that you could see Bario's progress in each building type at the bottom, everything was very clear and I always knew what was going on. Pretty difficult to accomplish but you nailed it.
There seemed to be a backwards difficulty curve where it got easier and easier over time. Needed some balance tweaking.
Overall really awesome entry! Well done
Maybe it's just me, but gameplay is a bit confusing and I wish that it was a bit clearer how to play the game. I'm not a huge fan of lengthy tutorials at the beginning of the game, I'd much rather the game show me that stuff via gameplay. But obviously that's harder to do when you're constrained for time in a game jam. Really innovative and interesting concept, however.
For the units, we didn't explain at all, lacked time (just should've put a note on the tutorial, but we forgot): green units build faster, and the red spiky ones are better defenders.
Glad you enjoyed the game! We are working on a first post-jam version which will set the balance right. After that, we are considering making a "true" game based on the mechanics. We'll keep you updated!
Yeah, balance isn't there at all. We originally wanted that a game would last about 5 to 10 minutes, at the end of which Bario would inevitably catch up with the player. We are working on a fixed version which should come out soon, stay tuned!
It isn't only you, the gameplay is quite confusing at the moment. We are working on a post-jam version, and hope to do better in that regard!
Love the idea and the Art Style is also very nice
The presentation is great, the game shines from art and juiciness.
I did struggle at the beginning to understand how places were build, and that you had to drag and drop the creatures to build as well, otherwise the "in progress" actually meant that nothing was being built. Once this was solved, the game gets easy quickly, since you can go arbitrarily far, and Bario doesn't get stronger, so you end up becoming too powerful.
Great game nonetheless, the core part really seems like almost a released game. Congratulations.
Yeah sorry for that inconvenience, many little bugs were left in the jam version, and balance isn't set right. It will be fixed tho, in a post-jam version soon to come! Stay tuned!
I tested the game jam release and I got into it for like 15 mins before I honestly got bored, sorry ! It was too easy for me. You just have to keep building a castle in the last point and put more castle on the way thereafter.
The music is cute but very, very repetitive. The graphics are pretty adorable !
I think there was a bug because it seems like my units didn't do anything against Bario. Did I miss something ?
Otherwise it's a nice game. Good job !
Have you consider downloading the game?
Have you consider downloading the game?
Have you consider downloading the game?
Have you consider downloading the game?
If I had any criticisms it would be that (particularly on trackpad) having to click and drag across the whole screen can be a bit much. But honestly had I plugged in my mouse that probably wouldn't be bad.
Great job.
Hello everyone ! First, thanks a lot for all the feedback you gave us on our game!
There were two main things that could make the game more enjoyable : difficulty, and UX. We decided to work on difficulty first, because it’s what needed the least amount of code rework. But balancing is hard, so please give us as much feedback as you can!
The game is here, **you can select the jam or the post-jam version when you launch the webgl game**. By the way if people want to know how @jrevel did that, we might provide a usable webgl template soon that enable to do multi version easily.
The next patch will fix the horrendous UX that confused so many people, so stay tuned! You can follow us on itch.io to get notified when it is ready!
And tell us how long you survived in this version, the current record is 17:03! Enjoy!
https://guilloteam.itch.io/supermowserbros
One more observation - I found myself almost never having time to actively look at/notice "Bario's" progression. Having audio effects to indicate events, especially if they could somehow indicate how close you are to losing might be really good.
And yes, would definitely like to see the code for your version select for webGL. Cheers.
It might be stupid, but I always laugh at slightly changed copyrighted names, like Bario and princess Cheap, I hope I can play it on my Bintendo Glitch console.
I won't be going into details on the pre-jam version, because it looks like you addressed some of the issues raised in the previous comments.
What I don't like is drag&dropping things, especially when I'm building something on the right side. I would consider having the unit resources be put somewhere universally close, like top or bottom, so when time is pressing I don't have to move from left to right many times when I'm building my castle. From UI, I had also a hard time following Bario progress on previous maps, so I had to click all the time.
I haven't managed to understand things like what strength Bario has vs Goombas or Spiky Turtles, whether he will die or will storm through the obstacles without a sweat. Knowledge like this would help me to plan better, whether to speed up the next Tower building or could I invest in the economy on the next level. Your game has some strategic decision-making, but without crucial information like this, it is difficult to choose the right option.
The theme, in my opinion, is not very visible right now. I don't feel like I'm delaying the inevitable, I'm kind of just playing the game until I lost.
Overall great game :mushroom: :mushroom: :turtle: :japanese_castle: :mushroom: :mushroom:
You are absolutely right with the drag&drop, it felt like a good idea at first, but it is really annoying when all your actions are done with drag&drop. We have plans to remove it totally.
I agree that the tutorial, despite being too long, does not provide crucial information, like units strength. I think we will need to make a proper step by step tutorial, now that we are not in a short schedule. For your information, koopas are strong builders, and spiky shells good at defense. But the outcome of every fight is random, so any unit can both stall bario for a long time or get destroyed at the first encounter. But three spikies still have a lot of chance to kill bario at least once.
Feel free to give us any suggestion that would make the relation to the theme more obvious to you, we need all the feedback we can collect as we want to improve the game in the future !
Oh and if you liked the humor, you might be interested by the games we did for other jams, especially Long Leash that has a similar cardboard esthetic and where you play a happy dog that must do his walk to the park, except there is an old lady on the other side of the leash, and you don't want to hurt her too much in the process... The games are listed in the Guilloteam itch.io page ! https://guilloteam.itch.io/
I got a game over before I could figure out how to garrison units or build units. I tried clicking on the node circles and garrison circles and clicking on the icons of buildings but nothing seemed to work. It turns out that to build a thing I have to select the node, select build, and then drag a goomba from the top-left of the screen to the 4 hammer icons.
I think there should be some UI that doesn't require so much dragging. Building could just always automatically consume 1 goomba and have a "speed up" button which will consume an additional goomba. It could also be that clicking on a hammer icon or clicking on a goomba will automatically assign a goomba. It would also be nice if the units that can be assigned are visually much closer to the place that they can be assigned, such as middle of top of screen, or creating new contextual "assign goomba" buttons.
UI aside, the concept is really original and creative. I like the idea of collecting resources and building defenses to stall bario. Choosing how many of each type of unit to produce and whether to assign them as builders or as defenders is a nice tradeoff, though I think right now you just always have a ton of goombas so you can assign them as reusable builders and make a ton of castles. The art style is also really well done.
A well polished jam entry with a great reversed parodic take on Mario. The graphics are great, the music & sound works well (though the music loop is a bit too short & can get repetitive), the mechanic and core gameplay feel quite complete with just enough complexity.
There were a few bugs (the nodes being out of reach and the "In Progress" destroyed sprite) & a lack of difficulty curve that were fixed in the post-jam version though.
Regarding the post-jam version, the addition of the difficulty curve was welcomed, though it could still be improved imo as right now it feels like there is not much danger in the first 10 minutes as you'd win time while Bario is still slow and then the tension would only pick up in the last minutes.
That aside, the biggest area of improvement left is the UX as a whole. Some info is missing right now (koopas being better builders, turtles better fighters, etc...), the drag'n'drop feels a bit slow and the process of building things could use to be simplified (UI/UX wise). It's also a bit hard to keep track of Bario's progression while he isn't on the same screen as us.
Only drawback - as others stated - the original version is quite easy and practically you can survive for eternity which, unfortunately, conflicts with the theme.
Good LUCK!