I had fun playing the web version for 20 minutes or so and I think that's the best compliment I can give :) I think I saw all available content (full party, bought everything in store) or are there any hidden/unlockable player updates etc?

I also found a few bugs:
- the guild screen says "the party is already full" but still shows two empty slots at the same time (if you haven't bought the updates from the store yet)
- the Quit button crashes the game in HTML5 version
- showing spell costs and how much each spell heals is useless as long as I don't see how many HP a party member is missing and how much mana I have available
- Guardian Angel is always disabled, even with full mana
- the encounter with 3 mages is impossible to beat (at least with a cleric/mage/tank/goon party) - is that on purpose?

Fun mini-rpg! great work.

Nice, complete game! I really enjoyed playing for a while. I stopped because the combat was dragging on, maybe if it were faster paced (e.g. dangerous monsters appear faster) would help? Overall a good effort and I *really* liked the art style.

Really enjoyed this, would be nice if combat paused when you clicked "run away" and also if there was some indicator of exactly how much mana/hp you have, but otherwise this is actually a pretty fun game.

It's really impressive that you were able to put this together in two days. I also noticed the bug with the guild screen showing additional empty slots, which was probably due to lack of time. Overall the game just needs some polish but other than that I had fun

I really enjoyed the game! The ramp up works well and you did a good job balancing things. I am curious if you used any particular method for deciding spell cost, heal amount, mana regen. incoming damage, etc. It seems to be all in harmony.

I agree with @chriiis88 on most points. I also played a similar length and unlocked everything. The summary he gave matched my experience. I could never cast Guardian Angel (which btw is the name of my Compo entry). I also thought having health amounts would help but I can see that is a choice.

The graphics and sound were passable. The theme was a stretch for me but I am struggling with what aligns to this theme and what does not.

I really like this one. Great job making a game in 48 hours!

Close call but managed to pull it off (with the whole party alive too)!


Can really relate to this as always a healer class player in MMOs. 😆

At first it seemed like it'd be mega grindy. But of course it wasn't as there wasn't really much more to do besides get more party members and repeat the same stuff until you beat it.

So my first party member pick was the tank. Tanks are the healers best friends, right? How could I have been that wrong, they're worthless! So I just stood there in the dungeon with him doing jack shit but hey, at least I was learning what the UI elements actually mean (needlessly confusing btw, more on that later) and how to do stuff.

So my next line of logic, tanks don't work so lets go full DPS and get a mage friend. And that was indeed the correct route. Few trip down the dungeon and I had cleaned the shop, now time to go for the clearing goal. I did try the tank again and gave the goon a chance too but they didn't really seem to be any better than going triple mage. Tank just stands there, sure soaking a lot of damage but so does an empty space. Goon was like a worse mage, dies just as easily but doesn't do that much damage.

So yeah, me and my 🧙‍♀️🧙‍♀️🧙‍♀️ friends managed to beat the dungeon by the skin of our teeth (or just two of them actually).

It did have some spark of interestingness kick in near the end when the rotation of your three spells actually mattered. Could be still made more intriguing though with more spells and more choices. Oh and that one (expensive) spell even being completely uncastable wasn't cool. 🤬

Kinda funny how it was the exact opposite on how healing works in FFXIV. There you mainly heal with your cheap spells and bigger ones are more like the panic one and comboing one. And here it was so that the biggest was the most hp per mana spent but due to long cd, you couldn't only rely on that. Neat! But yeah, it would really have needed some deeper mechanics like the tank actually holding aggro etc or maybe some actual control on the party members even to fully shine.

But it was very boring at start and when it started showing some signs of difficulty and actual needing to do something else besides masking a single button, it was over. So it really should ramp up more smoothly from mashing single button to complex rotations in the end (could be a bit more complex as it was now) more smoothly where the monotonous starting bit would be over sooner too.

So the UI was confusing and way too complex. Only the top bit with the actual characters was needed. The player/selected panels were just making it more confusing than it needed to be. Would have also helped if the enemy sprite on the first level was something completely different looking than the player or hires to more easily make it clear who is who and what is what when getting started.

But yeah, very fun game. Sadly it ended up being a lot more thin that at what it first seemed and left me wanting for more in the end (which is a good sign). Good job! :thumbsup:

@chriiis88 There is an actual end when you beat all 8 encounters. Join the dark side and get your own three mages! Tanks and goons are worthless... 😎

Really fun game! Took me a moment to figure out how to heal my party members, but after that the game play was smooth

@antti-haavikko Good tip, with three mages its almost easy :thumbsup:

Thank you all for your feedback and for playing the game. I think this is the best reception I've had on a LDJam game so far, so thank you again for that. I've also had a couple of friends try it and some of the feedback were the same so I'm going to fix those shortly and make a additional Post-jam version if you are interested.

The things I will mostly target :
- The Guardian angel (Max mana < Mana cost -_-')
- Fix the guild "empty slot" when you don't have these slot yet
- Display the bars values (HP and Mana)
- Disable the quit button in WebGL
- Show the dungeon progression, some people didn't get that there was an end to the game.

Now for some personalize responses :

@david-york : Thank you for the comment about the art style, I'm really not an artits, so this is *really* huge for me. I tried a new technique I haven't tried before for the locations backgrounds. I'm quite happy with the result and the time it takes to make them. For anyone interested in how I did this, hit me up.

@tylerstraub : At first I thought pausing the game while running away would be wrong because, while you run your party is still getting demolished. But after reading your comment I figure it could just double as a pause button. Thank you for the idea.

@spadekhemoglobiny : Truth be told I attempted another game idea before this one, so I started on this about 19 hours in. But I can't believe the amount of stuff I got done. I'm still trying to figure out what went right so that every jam can be like that from now on.

@blockerz : I haven't used any particular method, just tweeked the values around until it felt right. And for items prices I just picked prices exponentially because the amount of rewards you get as you get more powerful are exponential. And thats why I made the rewards in the dungeon grow linearly. I added a Theme section in the description above for you, if you're curious.

and finally @antti-haavikko : DUUUUUDE You finished it !!! Now I know it can be done :) I can't thank you enough for your comment and story of your experience, it mad me tear up :') . You probably know my game balance more than me.
About aggro : I acutally started with it. Each character has an aggro stat that determine which would get targeted by the opposing team. Your party actually still uses that stat to choose which enemy to focus. But what happened is that your tank would be the only one taking damage, thus you never needed to change target, which made it really boring. Now one thing I was thinking about doing is add a spell to the tank that would pull aggro for a certain duration, but didn't have time for that.

Again thank you all for playing, I'm on my way to try all your games now ! See you in a bit.

Yeah balancing is hard! The aggro thing is actually quite difficult for this kind of scenario as the other party members are not controlled (by anyone really). So they will either "play perfectly" (ie. tank will always have aggro etc, DPS will not over DPS to pull aggro etc) or they will be dumb and might as well be random. And in such perfect scenarios in these kind of party structure MMOs the healer only needs to focus on the tank occasionally topping others off from missed AoE damage etc. And of course other buffs too (which don't exist in this game, they could make it more interesting). You could for example actually show the intent of the enemies that they're casting X on Y and the player might then be able to react to it by using a single hit shielding spell on the paper thin mage to protect them from an incoming hit. And by mentioning paper thin mage, I think the classes would need to be defined further. Maybe if the tank did hold the aggro (at least the majority of it) but mages would do AoE damage but be fragile as hell. And so on.

Just uploaded a new version with the most important fixes mentionned before :
- Guardian angel can now be cast !
- Guild party emty slot only appear with party size
- Quit button disabled in WebGL
- Show Heal and Mana values
- Changed fonts from TMP defaults
- Show dungeon progression
- Dead character can no longer be targetted
- Running away now pauses battle

Great job, it was intriguing and fun.

started playing for the ui, kept playing for the gameplay :v:

it reminded me of the many web games I used to play about 10 years or so, a simple ui yet lots of fun.

your take on the theme is good too, its kind of sad that after getting attached to your party members for them to die :smile_cat:

from a programming perspective, this is exactly the kind of genre I like to play and learn from.

it was really nostalgic I think I will be playing it again

Obviously I'm going to fill my party with goons. Is there even another way to play?

Very happy to see a game with game-like gameplay that I sent (Especially to COMPO), congratulations!

I know how difficult it is to balance an RPG during development, and I won't comment on that.

I really liked the battle system, but I was kind of lost on how the dungeons worked, after playing for a while (I played around 40 minutes) I managed to find out how it works and it was smooth.

Right at the beginning of the game, it shows that my party has 4 slots, but if I take a class, the game already says that it is full, I was a little confused by that too.

The art fit the genre perfectly, and the interface was very friendly.

Congratulations!

Super cool concept! Loved your sprite work! Keep up the good work!

I recorded myself playing, message me on the Jam’s discord @ Dark Peace and I’ll send it to you. It was pretty enjoyable until I died randomly with half health at fight 5 I think.

I had a good time with this. Very ambitious for LD with the complex battle system. nice work!

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1451440143?t=06h36m51s

First of all that's a lot of gameplay systems and content for a `COMPO` game, well done getting this far. I had fun playing the `COMPO` version and then seeing how post-jam version modified the gameplay a bit.

Though I have to agree with some previous comments:
* I was mildly disappointed, that having a `Tank` in the party was a deadweight. Neither did it do any real damage neither did it soak up damage from other character. (Or if it did happen I didn't see any indication of happening)
* I missed some attack foreshadowing mechanism, especially at the later stages, where several enemies hit like truck on my poor team of frail mages. The only real strategy is to all in my party at full life. It would be nice, if enemy attack would consist at least three steps, that have some timing between them:
* *`Target`* - visually indicate which of our party member is going to be attacked; give some time to the player to try to heal it, or just ignore it.
* *`Attack`* - actually deal the damage, short time slow here.
* *`Cooldown`* - prepare for the next attack, giving time to the player again, to heal again.
* If we have targeting then it would be nice, to have some indication on how hard the hit is going to be. e.g. is the character targeted by a mage for massive fireball damage, or just lowly goon?
* Both targeting and damage scale could be something of an upgrade to be bought in the shop. So it would be an optional thing to get.
* Both thing would add more strategic depth into choosing what to heal and then, rather than just trying to keep them as much at max life as possible.
* As currently there is no price difference between `Goon` and other two characters, it gives little incentive to hire them. Maybe the `Goon`s could be a character that scales very well, but is hard to keep alive a lower levels. So for example in first two encounters `Goon` would hard to keep alive, but with every dungeon level their attack speed could be increasing; Or they would start more reliably hitting mages only. Just an idea.

Great entry, nice to see it updated post-jam at least once. I understand that most of my feedback is hard to fit into `JAM` or even `COMPO` time, but still leaving it here for future.

@bloodycoin Thanks for your feedback, you gave me the push I needed to finally publish the last update to the game. Most of your feedback won't be in there of course but the tank class got reworked completely. Hope you can give it another try.

@Kepsert @tigerj @dobryn @antti-haavikko @chriiis88 @very-bad-bunny-studio
If you guys are interested in trying out the new version, classes got reworked so balance is probably really different. Thought you might like to know. Some of you asked me to give a shout out if anything new was added. Hope you like it !

Nice, I like where this is going. No longer (or at least it's very hard) with all mage party. The tank is actually tanking, soaking up the damage, which now nicely stacks with invulnerability. The assassin is a nice twist ability-vise, and because now it's harder to get the perfect party you want - makes it worthwhile trying out more combinations. Even one more class added this would make it challenging to gather good party. Maybe even add mages to be unlocked in the shop, as they are still biggest damage dealers.

Glad you could make the update; the font fits well.