Spooky Jam Feedback

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Started by ATT_Turan 28 posts Page 1 of 2 View original ↗
  1. ATT_Turan
    #1 Source
    With the conclusion of the Spooky Jam, I've taken the time to play through (mostly) all of the submissions. I thought I'd offer some feedback on each entry here.

    A few notes:
    - I have all respect and appreciation for everyone's work to create a complete work of whatever length under a time limit. Any critical comments I make are to offer what areas that dev might be able to improve on in their future work or ongoing project.

    - I know some people don't want to read anything that isn't "Good job!" So, I give everybody who participated a "Good job for producing a contribution!" and all of your more specific and critical comments are in spoilers - if you don't want to see it, don't click it :smile:

    I will say, outside of the spoilers, that the most common complaint I have is games lacking the correct credit for RPG Maker's developer. If you read your Maker's EULA (or the most recent update which combines all versions into one), there is a specifically-worded attribution that's supposed to be in the credits of any game you distribute. Six of the games (and perhaps a couple of more that I didn't complete to see the credits) were lacking this, and thus were technically distributed illegally :wink:

    And so:

    @Starmage
    Whispers in the Bitter Frost
    I thought this was a decent play. The map sprites looked good and some effort was put into all the eventing.
    • Lacking GGG copyright information
    • Tutorial window staying open for the entire first map is annoying
    • Random unpassable tile near the first building
    • Some text cut off by message window
    • When it changes to you controlling Avelina it randomly has dash always enabled
    • Storywise, the people don’t make a lot of sense. They're completely accepting their random hallucinations and memory loss, and there are awkward and uncalled for internal monologues about lusting for each other.
    • Grammatically, there's some stilted phrasing and incorrect placement of apostrophes, commas, and capital letters. It's not the worst I've seen, but it was frequently distracting.
    • There were some more significant wrong words that I already mentioned in the game's thread before deciding to make this one
    • When you seem to be spending effort to make most of the dialogue have an older or medieval feel to the language, characters randomly spitting "whatever," "bad vibes," and "screw you" stick out in a silly way
    • Many graphical flaws in the text from the VS Message Core. There's a fix in this in a number of posts that requires updating your NW.js - apparently VisuStella is ignoring bug reports about it?
    • It looks weird for the characters to walk horizontally straight across diagonal stairs on the map
    • Most of the mapping is good, but the courtyard map is bland and confusing. Using the same tile for the ground and elevated levels with the tint just makes it hard to understand what it's supposed to look like
    • I'm not a fan of the barely changed references to Judeo-Christian mythology. If you want to use an established religion, do it; if you want to make up your own, make up your own. "Sintanel" and especially "YAWEH" (ooh, changed one letter! :stickytongue: ) come across as silly
    • I don't know if something is bugged or if it just isn't made in a way that correctly reflects what you want to happen: the combat instructions say "timing is key," but it isn't. There’s no penalty to pressing it at the wrong time, so just standing there and jamming the button as fast as possible is the way to win
    • Using a potion weirdly closes out the menu
    • I don't know how well I think this relates to the theme of a haunted building. It takes place inside of one, but the whole story is about this cult and they could be doing their stuff anywhere; nothing really seems to be building-specific.

    @TheAM-Dol
    Psyche
    The graphic and sound design is well done and interesting. The style and colors of everything created a nice aesthetic, and knowing you did it all in one event is a cool technical aspect.
    • The executable name is unintuitive. "Game" or the title of the name would be easy to find; only someone who's technically familiar with NW.js would think to look for or try running a file named nw.
    • The font is really hard to read at times. Some of it is the way the bottom isn't level but bobs up and down, and some specific letters (like lower case "T") just don't look like what they're supposed to
    • I think referring to the person’s mind as their “home” for the purposes of a haunted building theme is a big stretch, personally :stickytongue:
    • The very beginning seems to have a bit of a bug in the eventing. Selecting a door with Enter makes the cursor disappear but doesn’t activate the choice. Nothing works until pressing the arrow key again to make the cursor reappear
    • I appreciate the time you spent studying the style, but the imitation medieval English and abstract topics meant I really didn’t know what anything was talking about, and I didn’t understand the significance or meaning of most of my choices. So I just chose stuff randomly
    • I apparently achieved an ending because after one of the poems it stopped saying things and showed me a credits screen

    @ISC
    Trick or Treat
    I thought this game displayed the most creativity and technical prowess with the interface - I would not have been playing this and guessed it was made in RPG Maker (aside from the default cursor sounds).
    • Flash screen misspelled “presents”
    • Lacks the GGG copyright in credits required by EULA
    • I was initially offput by it saying it only accepted mouse input. It turned out more things responded to keys than the instructions said they would, but I still didn't love that
    • Some unusual phrasing in the language makes it clear that it’s translated, but there were no other egregious spelling or grammatical errors
    • The mood icon on the cards is unintuitive, it has nothing to do with any visual on the screen. At least put it next to the mood track
    • The constantly ticking clock sound is pretty annoying, especially since the gameplay isn’t actually real-time
    • Speaking of the clock, it doesn’t seem to work properly – I bought candies approximately a million times and the time didn’t advance past 5 minutes. I finished the round by getting all the candy with full mood and still at 11:00.
    • Not sure what the point is of having the cards upside down in your hand then clicking them to see them – they don’t cover any other UI elements when held facing you. It made having to put my cards down just to buy candies then click back into the cards a bit annoying.
    • The limited choices in the hand size and number of repeated cards didn’t make it feel like there was a lot of strategic choice...I just played whatever I had the most resources to afford. With no way to discard cards I couldn’t use, I spent most of the match with my hand jammed up by two cards with no effect but to improve the human’s mood while it was already maxed
    • The cards in my hand stayed up even after I had completed the round
    • Due to the lack of challenge and low choice, I didn’t really want to play additional rounds after the first one
    • I don’t see how the game relates to the theme of a haunted building. You’re playing as a girl trick-or-treating to other people’s houses

    @Rubescen
    Midnight Central
    I thought the premise of being stuck in a supernatural train station beyond the edge of the real world was a neat one, and the art overall worked well. However...
    • Game window is offputtingly small – why would you make an MZ game smaller than default?
    • The girl's sprite does this weird crab-walking sideways instead of actually turning left and right
    • I don’t really see the point of the fog-of-war-ish light radius around the player. There’s nothing on her that would cause her to be actually shedding light, and there's no gameplay effect for the stuff you can't see outside of that radius
    • Language-wise, there were some typos, but the dialogue is generally good. The girl and the various NPCs had character
    • I wasn’t able to complete the game. I went to the four maps I was able to access (main hall, east, south, and boiler room) twice to make sure I talked to everyone I could and inspected every item I could see, but couldn’t find any way to get any Soul Coins and advance the story. So I quit.

    @werzaque
    The Symmetry of Remorse and Penance
    I liked the sci-fi setting - I think it has a lot of potential that's under-utilized for horror - and your sprite work is really good. Some of the portraits I thought were a bit awkward in the face/neck posing, but they still look quite good.

    I wasn't sure if you were intentionally trying to go for a slightly cheesy Original Series Star Trek kind of vibe - that would explain some of the techno-babble and the "20 hyperboles away" in the opening. If that's the case, I think you did yourself a bit of a disservice as it detracted from the spookiness of the game.
    • There are some minor misspelling and awkward wordings, language is overall decent. Some of the techno-babble crosses to the cheesy side
    • A few more significant misspellings like Parsly, Lietenant, and Hanger I already discussed with you
    • Second hit of Crossslash puts him standing in the middle of the target sprite
    • Enemies are very spongy, fights are rather long. The first fight took so long that it put me off the battle system a bit, and my resources were so depleted that as soon as I got into a second fight I was steamrolled in the first round. There might be some combinations to take advantage of in the skills, but with no introduction to them outside of combat, I really didn't feel like I had time to just experiment with abilities because of how quickly the enemies were starting to kill me
    • I'd personally greatly prefer battlebacks to the blurred map in battles
    • Unfortunately, I died on the third map of the enemy ship because I thought the spirits walking about might've been crewmembers who would give me the passcode for the railgun, but they were an even bigger group of enemies. I hadn't thought to save my game after the opening sequence and first fight, so I really didn't want to play through that again to see more of the game. I plan to revisit it later

    @LunarSpire_
    Mystery Job
    I really wasn't sure what to make of this. I guess it's interesting that you found a way to incorporate 3D models into your RPG Maker game, but I don't think it improved the experience any.
    • 3D graphics are very different, but I found them visually unappealing
    • The controls tutorial is wrong, says D moves both right and backwards
    • There's no explanation of the setting or what’s going on at all. The situation is explained in an abstract sci-fi/quantum physics sort of way, it’s not clear how it relates to the theme of a haunted building
    • There's not a ton of text, it was mostly okay but had some blatant errors (“It smells putrid meat”)
    • I didn't see/retain any explanation of the Power bar or Points
    • I was walking around picking up meat when some creature randomly appeared, ran up to me, screamed, and the game ended. The Power bar wasn’t empty and the Stench bar wasn’t full. So I don't know why, but that was it
    • The experience seemed kind of pointless, so I wasn't really interested in trying it again to explore further

    @alice_gristle
    Nelly Come Back
    I thought this was a good play. Short, sweet, solidly done.
    • The color palette and sprites are appropriate for the retro gameplay
    • The second screen took me an unseemly number of tries to complete, but not badly crafted. There were a few times where it seemed like the spirits were catching me from just standing next to them rather than them going through me, but that might just be a visual trick because they don't really have a facing change
    • On the last screen, one of the pink old men actually caught me but just walked through me, I presumed that would be a death
    • The ending was a smidge predictable given the...memories? sounds? you came across, but I thought it was still good
    • All the English was good

    @r66r
    The Dentist
    I thought this was decent. It suffered a bit from under-explanation in a few ways.
    • Why have a language choice screen with one choice?
    • The title font is not great, the “S” is petty illegible
    • Most of the text is pretty good, the dialogue has some oddities that aren't how English speakers talk (“It’s a joke?”)
    • How old is this kid? He still says “mommy” but also says “what the hell”?
    • The premise is...a little specious. Why or how would a kid damage his teeth walking through a mall to his dentist appointment? (and why is a dentist inside/on top of the mall?)
      • I see later that the teeth get damaged by clowns...like...hitting them? But there's no reason a kid would assume something like that could happen
    • There’s no gameplay reason presented to try to get candy. It seems to only be a bad thing that you’re forced to eat to get through some paths
    • Getting caught once by a clown appears to be a damage loop; as soon as I clicked out of the last message, he would immediately trigger his attack again.
    • It would be nice to have a controls tutorial letting us know that we can dash and that diagonal walking is available. Both of those are really valuable to maneuvering around the clowns
    • Speaking of which, dashing seems to break some of the enemies. Several times I hit up against and walked through them without triggering an attack
    • I died while just running around. Apparently getting all of your teeth darkened by candy makes you lose, but I didn’t know that. Wasn't sufficiently interested in trying again to get farther
    • Good use of sound/music. Character sprite looks good

    @BobbyLily
    Tuckamore Eve
    This was a decent play. Because it's almost entirely dialogue-driven, it makes the stray typos a bit more jarring than they would be in a game that had other mechanics going on.
    • Artwork is not to my tastes, but is good for its style. I thought it was aesthetically consistent
    • Dialogue is pretty good, has some typos (“now we’re suck in the middle,” “I’d explain the horrid smell”)
    • Text placement is inconsistent. Some lines are cut very short of the side of the window, presumably not to overlap the character art; but then when the art is on the left, the text draws over the top of it. Maybe use a word wrap plugin instead of trying to manually add line breaks
    • The girl seems to be the most grounded and taking charge, then decides the route to finding gas for the car is...to walk into a spooky house? Literally who in the world keeps gas in their house?
    • How is light coming in the south, west, and east windows of the house to shine onto the floor?
    • “noisome aura of cadaverine” is a pretty excellent turn of phrase
    • I wish the doors didn’t have to be activated to walk through
    • The funny book titles were singularly not funny to my tastes, I thought they detracted from the air of the story, which I'd thought of mostly serious with quipping teenagers, á la Buffy
    • You have to activate the basement door twice to use the key then open the freaking door
    • The sequence with the basement monster had the weakest writing, there were a lot of incorrect partial sentences to put up with for a climactic moment
    • I endings 0 and 2, wasn't really interested in replaying it more to figure out the other 2

    @karusomine
    NectaReal
    I thought the premise of this was pretty good, right up the alley of the jam'e theme. Unfortunately, it kind of went downhill as I went on.
    • Lacks the GGG copyright notice required by EULA
    • Loud. Turn down that music/sound, or check out my Master Dev Volume plugin
    • The writing started off pretty good. There's some dialogue at the beginning that reads quite stilted because Alden is omitting contractions. Twice in a row during the opening scene he says “go there” instead of “goes there”
      • As the game went on, there were more and more wrong words and words missing from phrases that make this come across like it's been translated from another language. Your profile says English is your first language, but this reads increasingly like a translated Japanese app game or something
    • It’s in a bunch of places, so please – “never mind” is two words :wink:
    • The first map of the neighborhood I thought looked good. But then, the map of the house’s yard is quite large and generally empty. The house could simply be right on the other side of the gate instead of just taking time to walk over bare grass. Then when you get to the house itself, instead of being an impressive reveal, or looking scary, it's quite featureless, just continuous wall with a door
    • The conversations with the cat-boy(?) and the doll I thought were particularly weak. They read like a bad anime, with all the "I just met this person but I'm going to pet them or tell them they're beautiful"
    • I gave up at the Spider King. It seems like his attack hits a three-tile radius from where he lands, but there’s no indication of when he’s going to jump, so there was no way for me to time my movement – just dashing continuously resulted in him landing on me each time. I was able to consistently dodge his first attack by waiting for a second after the instruction window went away, but getting to the kitchen made me stop dashing and he killed me every time
    • Speaking of which – the controls instructions at the beginning don’t say you can dash, and I’m pretty sure the Spider King is impossible without it

    @Prescott
    Ghost Puncher
    I thought the mapping in this was competently done. I also appreciate the parody play on Ghostbuster with, like, an action-comedy movie or anime or something, although it's not to my tastes.
    • For me, the voice acting didn’t add anything to the game, even in comedic value. I skipped through the messages as quickly as I could read them. An option to disable it would’ve been welcome
    • Having to activate the doors inside the house and getting a fade in and out just to walk through the doorway was weird. I don't know why you didn't just let us walk through the doorways
    • The gameplay is focused around the combat system, but there's no nuance to it. There's no reason to not just spam the most powerful attack - I don't know why you even made the other skills
    • The currency reward message is wrong (at least in the USA) – dollar sign comes before the number
    • It would be nice if the item descriptions told you how many HP or...PP...they restored. Having to go in and out of the shop and my inventory to heal up without wasting my money was annoying
    • You can walk down through the top of the bed
    • The Strong Ghost is randomly unbeatable. If he happens to waste some turns on Ectoplasm, you can win, but the first time I fought him he did Deadlift almost every turn and that kills you before you kill him (and your milk heals less than one Deadlift hit)
    • I couldn’t finish the game. Unless you just happen to have bought extra cookies and milk, and you just happen to sit in the house healing up after the third ghost (even though your character says it’s done), you go into the house fight at a huge deficit and will lose in a few turns. Since I couldn’t save after the last ghost fight, I was uninterested in going through the work to stock up on items, do the third fight again, hope the random choices allowed me to win, just so I could heal up and take on the house

    @Jokokit123
    SPOOOOKYYYY
    Well.
    • Obviously no game here to evaluate
    • The RTP wasn’t packaged with the game and I wasn’t going to track it down and install it just to read the story outline, so...sorry, but I didn’t read it
    • You also didn't even say which RTP it needed

    @Izzy_MS
    The Abby House
    I thought this was pretty good for a short adventure game. It was appropriate for the theme of haunted building.
    • The dialogue is pretty well-written. Some errors – “a crack on the wall,” repeatedly getting “its” and “it’s” backwards, other typos
    • The Kitchen Key and Moldy Letter seem to be set to be consumable with no effect (I didn't continue to test the others). If you simply change Consumable to No in the item entry, the player shouldn't be able to activate the item and get to targeting a party member just for an error buzzer
    • Is the bedroom diary supposed to still be in Spanish? That seemed a little randomly pointless to have pages of message text I couldn't understand
    • Why is there a prompt to save after the end of the game?

    @patedod266
    President Evil
    I see this is your first game, which is pretty cool! It definitely had some flaws, some of which are newbie mistakes, but I thought you made everything work well - there weren't any gamebreaking bugs.
    • Any time you're distributing something that's multiple files, you should put it into a zip or other archive. Google Drive can zip it for us, if we know to select download from the arrow next to the folder name, but that takes longer that it takes you on your computer
    • The game was not distributed with the RTP. It doesn’t even tell us which version of RPG Maker was used so we can download the correct RTP. Just include the extra 22 MB and distribute it as a standalone game
    • The opening info screen is way too short to read all of
    • The dialogue is okay, but there are a fair number of typos that basic English/proofreading should catch (enimies, litterally, ya’know)
    • The fights on the first screen seem pointless, my attacks do no damage to the ghosts but they also don’t attack me
    • It took me a long time to progress past the first screen – just having a square of rug is not a sufficient visual indicator that there’s supposed to be a door in the wall there. It would be a bit better if the rug went to the wall via shift-click mapping, instead of stopping in front of it, but doing something with the wall or ceiling there to indicate a doorway would be better.
    • It would be better to choose a currency symbol like “Dollars” or “USD” because seeing it formatted as “0$” is incorrect
    • It’s a bit unintuitive that you can select the weapon attacks after you’re out of ammo and it still spends your turn and plays the gun sound effect...for 0 damage.
    • It’s also somewhat unintuitive that your melee attacks do as much as shooting does. I'm not sure if there was supposed to be a strategic choice where the different kinds of attacks were more or less effective against the different enemies, but everything died in a round or two of spamming regular attacks

    @slimmmeiske2
    Pumpkin Decorating
    I thought this was a cute little game with some really nice art, good mapping, and some clever eventing to do all the decorations.
    • GGG is listed for a few items in the credit, but the EULA-required copyright notice is lacking
    • Cute title screen, the windowskin is very entertaining. It’s right on the verge of being too much, but is vibrant and fun.
    • Playing as the pumpkin is adorable. When I got the option for the costumes I was really tickled because I thought I'd be a pumpkin in a gothic lolita dress, but instead I changed entirely into the doll sprite. I changed back :stickytongue:
    • When decorating the walls, one of the options is spiderwebs – I didn’t realize the spiderweb in the attic was a decoration to take, so I got “I don’t have one” when I selected it. Since you’re using plugins, not having the choice show up if you don’t have the item would be better
    • Language is good. Dialogue is fun and, aside from a few missing commas, all is good with the world

    @Wifi
    Slice of Dead
    I conceptually appreciate the idea of a parody of a haunted house run as a business by the monsters. However, your writing really drags the game down, so I wasn't able to really enjoy reading that story or get into liking the characters at all.
    • The project doesn’t contain the RTP and doesn't say which RTP you need
    • Something in the project was never correctly named, the installer and the folder it creates are just called "Halloween"
    • The name on the title screen also appears to be incorrect – if you’re making a play on the phrase “slice of life,” the correct analog would be “slice of death,” not “dead”
    • The opening info scene is all trailing ellipses, no sentences. That's really amateurish to read
    • In the rest of the game, there are numerous misspellings, and a really unacceptable lack of periods, lack of capitalization, and use of ellipses
      • I recognize English is not your first language, but Italian uses capitalization and periods, too. And knowing you're not proficient with the language should just mean you know ahead of time you should type everything into Word or a Google Doc or some other spelling/grammar checker
    • The vampire calls the dog a god...c'mon :stickytongue:
    • When you get control after ten minutes, it says “you can check on your bag” what to do, but there’s no bag and nothing in the menu to check. I had no idea what to do, so I eventually wandered down into the dungeon
    • Some battle messages (particularly on states) still have Italian in them, other messages are formatted incorrectly
    • There are apparently extra spaces at the end of Wolfgang’s name in the Actors tab
    • Some jarring music starts in Winta’s room and doesn’t stop when you go back out until you go all the way downstairs
    • There's only one troop in the dungeon. Thankfully the spiders died in one hit and Flee was guaranteed to succeed...combat seemed pointless
    • The Einstein joke misspelled his name as Albret
    • It's lacking the GGG copyright credit as required by the EULA
  2. Wifi
    #2 Source
    ATT_Turan said:
    With the conclusion of the Spooky Jam, I've taken the time to play through (mostly) all of the submissions. I thought I'd offer some feedback on each entry here.

    A few notes:
    - I have all respect and appreciation for everyone's work to create a complete work of whatever length under a time limit. Any critical comments I make are to offer what areas that dev might be able to improve on in their future work or ongoing project.

    - I know some people don't want to read anything that isn't "Good job!" So, I give everybody who participated a "Good job for producing a contribution!" and all of your more specific and critical comments are in spoilers - if you don't want to see it, don't click it :smile:

    I will say, outside of the spoilers, that the most common complaint I have is games lacking the correct credit for RPG Maker's developer. If you read your Maker's EULA (or the most recent update which combines all versions into one), there is a specifically-worded attribution that's supposed to be in the credits of any game you distribute. Six of the games (and perhaps a couple of more that I didn't complete to see the credits) were lacking this, and thus were technically distributed illegally :wink:

    And so:

    @Starmage
    Whispers in the Bitter Frost
    I thought this was a decent play. The map sprites looked good and some effort was put into all the eventing.
    • Lacking GGG copyright information
    • Tutorial window staying open for the entire first map is annoying
    • Random unpassable tile near the first building
    • Some text cut off by message window
    • When it changes to you controlling Avelina it randomly has dash always enabled
    • Storywise, the people don’t make a lot of sense. They're completely accepting their random hallucinations and memory loss, and there are awkward and uncalled for internal monologues about lusting for each other.
    • Grammatically, there's some stilted phrasing and incorrect placement of apostrophes, commas, and capital letters. It's not the worst I've seen, but it was frequently distracting.
    • There were some more significant wrong words that I already mentioned in the game's thread before deciding to make this one
    • When you seem to be spending effort to make most of the dialogue have an older or medieval feel to the language, characters randomly spitting "whatever," "bad vibes," and "screw you" stick out in a silly way
    • Many graphical flaws in the text from the VS Message Core. There's a fix in this in a number of posts that requires updating your NW.js - apparently VisuStella is ignoring bug reports about it?
    • It looks weird for the characters to walk horizontally straight across diagonal stairs on the map
    • Most of the mapping is good, but the courtyard map is bland and confusing. Using the same tile for the ground and elevated levels with the tint just makes it hard to understand what it's supposed to look like
    • I'm not a fan of the barely changed references to Judeo-Christian mythology. If you want to use an established religion, do it; if you want to make up your own, make up your own. "Sintanel" and especially "YAWEH" (ooh, changed one letter! :stickytongue: ) come across as silly
    • I don't know if something is bugged or if it just isn't made in a way that correctly reflects what you want to happen: the combat instructions say "timing is key," but it isn't. There’s no penalty to pressing it at the wrong time, so just standing there and jamming the button as fast as possible is the way to win
    • Using a potion weirdly closes out the menu
    • I don't know how well I think this relates to the theme of a haunted building. It takes place inside of one, but the whole story is about this cult and they could be doing their stuff anywhere; nothing really seems to be building-specific.

    @TheAM-Dol
    Psyche
    The graphic and sound design is well done and interesting. The style and colors of everything created a nice aesthetic, and knowing you did it all in one event is a cool technical aspect.
    • The executable name is unintuitive. "Game" or the title of the name would be easy to find; only someone who's technically familiar with NW.js would think to look for or try running a file named nw.
    • The font is really hard to read at times. Some of it is the way the bottom isn't level but bobs up and down, and some specific letters (like lower case "T") just don't look like what they're supposed to
    • I think referring to the person’s mind as their “home” for the purposes of a haunted building theme is a big stretch, personally :stickytongue:
    • The very beginning seems to have a bit of a bug in the eventing. Selecting a door with Enter makes the cursor disappear but doesn’t activate the choice. Nothing works until pressing the arrow key again to make the cursor reappear
    • I appreciate the time you spent studying the style, but the imitation medieval English and abstract topics meant I really didn’t know what anything was talking about, and I didn’t understand the significance or meaning of most of my choices. So I just chose stuff randomly
    • I apparently achieved an ending because after one of the poems it stopped saying things and showed me a credits screen

    @ISC
    Trick or Treat
    I thought this game displayed the most creativity and technical prowess with the interface - I would not have been playing this and guessed it was made in RPG Maker (aside from the default cursor sounds).
    • Flash screen misspelled “presents”
    • Lacks the GGG copyright in credits required by EULA
    • I was initially offput by it saying it only accepted mouse input. It turned out more things responded to keys than the instructions said they would, but I still didn't love that
    • Some unusual phrasing in the language makes it clear that it’s translated, but there were no other egregious spelling or grammatical errors
    • The mood icon on the cards is unintuitive, it has nothing to do with any visual on the screen. At least put it next to the mood track
    • The constantly ticking clock sound is pretty annoying, especially since the gameplay isn’t actually real-time
    • Speaking of the clock, it doesn’t seem to work properly – I bought candies approximately a million times and the time didn’t advance past 5 minutes. I finished the round by getting all the candy with full mood and still at 11:00.
    • Not sure what the point is of having the cards upside down in your hand then clicking them to see them – they don’t cover any other UI elements when held facing you. It made having to put my cards down just to buy candies then click back into the cards a bit annoying.
    • The limited choices in the hand size and number of repeated cards didn’t make it feel like there was a lot of strategic choice...I just played whatever I had the most resources to afford. With no way to discard cards I couldn’t use, I spent most of the match with my hand jammed up by two cards with no effect but to improve the human’s mood while it was already maxed
    • The cards in my hand stayed up even after I had completed the round
    • Due to the lack of challenge and low choice, I didn’t really want to play additional rounds after the first one
    • I don’t see how the game relates to the theme of a haunted building. You’re playing as a girl trick-or-treating to other people’s houses

    @Rubescen
    Midnight Central
    I thought the premise of being stuck in a supernatural train station beyond the edge of the real world was a neat one, and the art overall worked well. However...
    • Game window is offputtingly small – why would you make an MZ game smaller than default?
    • The girl's sprite does this weird crab-walking sideways instead of actually turning left and right
    • I don’t really see the point of the fog-of-war-ish light radius around the player. There’s nothing on her that would cause her to be actually shedding light, and there's no gameplay effect for the stuff you can't see outside of that radius
    • Language-wise, there were some typos, but the dialogue is generally good. The girl and the various NPCs had character
    • I wasn’t able to complete the game. I went to the four maps I was able to access (main hall, east, south, and boiler room) twice to make sure I talked to everyone I could and inspected every item I could see, but couldn’t find any way to get any Soul Coins and advance the story. So I quit.

    @werzaque
    The Symmetry of Remorse and Penance
    I liked the sci-fi setting - I think it has a lot of potential that's under-utilized for horror - and your sprite work is really good. Some of the portraits I thought were a bit awkward in the face/neck posing, but they still look quite good.

    I wasn't sure if you were intentionally trying to go for a slightly cheesy Original Series Star Trek kind of vibe - that would explain some of the techno-babble and the "20 hyperboles away" in the opening. If that's the case, I think you did yourself a bit of a disservice as it detracted from the spookiness of the game.
    • There are some minor misspelling and awkward wordings, language is overall decent. Some of the techno-babble crosses to the cheesy side
    • A few more significant misspellings like Parsly, Lietenant, and Hanger I already discussed with you
    • Second hit of Crossslash puts him standing in the middle of the target sprite
    • Enemies are very spongy, fights are rather long. The first fight took so long that it put me off the battle system a bit, and my resources were so depleted that as soon as I got into a second fight I was steamrolled in the first round. There might be some combinations to take advantage of in the skills, but with no introduction to them outside of combat, I really didn't feel like I had time to just experiment with abilities because of how quickly the enemies were starting to kill me
    • I'd personally greatly prefer battlebacks to the blurred map in battles
    • Unfortunately, I died on the third map of the enemy ship because I thought the spirits walking about might've been crewmembers who would give me the passcode for the railgun, but they were an even bigger group of enemies. I hadn't thought to save my game after the opening sequence and first fight, so I really didn't want to play through that again to see more of the game. I plan to revisit it later

    @LunarSpire_
    Mystery Job
    I really wasn't sure what to make of this. I guess it's interesting that you found a way to incorporate 3D models into your RPG Maker game, but I don't think it improved the experience any.
    • 3D graphics are very different, but I found them visually unappealing
    • The controls tutorial is wrong, says D moves both right and backwards
    • There's no explanation of the setting or what’s going on at all. The situation is explained in an abstract sci-fi/quantum physics sort of way, it’s not clear how it relates to the theme of a haunted building
    • There's not a ton of text, it was mostly okay but had some blatant errors (“It smells putrid meat”)
    • I didn't see/retain any explanation of the Power bar or Points
    • I was walking around picking up meat when some creature randomly appeared, ran up to me, screamed, and the game ended. The Power bar wasn’t empty and the Stench bar wasn’t full. So I don't know why, but that was it
    • The experience seemed kind of pointless, so I wasn't really interested in trying it again to explore further

    @alice_gristle
    Nelly Come Back
    I thought this was a good play. Short, sweet, solidly done.
    • The color palette and sprites are appropriate for the retro gameplay
    • The second screen took me an unseemly number of tries to complete, but not badly crafted. There were a few times where it seemed like the spirits were catching me from just standing next to them rather than them going through me, but that might just be a visual trick because they don't really have a facing change
    • On the last screen, one of the pink old men actually caught me but just walked through me, I presumed that would be a death
    • The ending was a smidge predictable given the...memories? sounds? you came across, but I thought it was still good
    • All the English was good

    @r66r
    The Dentist
    I thought this was decent. It suffered a bit from under-explanation in a few ways.
    • Why have a language choice screen with one choice?
    • The title font is not great, the “S” is petty illegible
    • Most of the text is pretty good, the dialogue has some oddities that aren't how English speakers talk (“It’s a joke?”)
    • How old is this kid? He still says “mommy” but also says “what the hell”?
    • The premise is...a little specious. Why or how would a kid damage his teeth walking through a mall to his dentist appointment? (and why is a dentist inside/on top of the mall?)
      • I see later that the teeth get damaged by clowns...like...hitting them? But there's no reason a kid would assume something like that could happen
    • There’s no gameplay reason presented to try to get candy. It seems to only be a bad thing that you’re forced to eat to get through some paths
    • Getting caught once by a clown appears to be a damage loop; as soon as I clicked out of the last message, he would immediately trigger his attack again.
    • It would be nice to have a controls tutorial letting us know that we can dash and that diagonal walking is available. Both of those are really valuable to maneuvering around the clowns
    • Speaking of which, dashing seems to break some of the enemies. Several times I hit up against and walked through them without triggering an attack
    • I died while just running around. Apparently getting all of your teeth darkened by candy makes you lose, but I didn’t know that. Wasn't sufficiently interested in trying again to get farther
    • Good use of sound/music. Character sprite looks good

    @BobbyLily
    Tuckamore Eve
    This was a decent play. Because it's almost entirely dialogue-driven, it makes the stray typos a bit more jarring than they would be in a game that had other mechanics going on.
    • Artwork is not to my tastes, but is good for its style. I thought it was aesthetically consistent
    • Dialogue is pretty good, has some typos (“now we’re suck in the middle,” “I’d explain the horrid smell”)
    • Text placement is inconsistent. Some lines are cut very short of the side of the window, presumably not to overlap the character art; but then when the art is on the left, the text draws over the top of it. Maybe use a word wrap plugin instead of trying to manually add line breaks
    • The girl seems to be the most grounded and taking charge, then decides the route to finding gas for the car is...to walk into a spooky house? Literally who in the world keeps gas in their house?
    • How is light coming in the south, west, and east windows of the house to shine onto the floor?
    • “noisome aura of cadaverine” is a pretty excellent turn of phrase
    • I wish the doors didn’t have to be activated to walk through
    • The funny book titles were singularly not funny to my tastes, I thought they detracted from the air of the story, which I'd thought of mostly serious with quipping teenagers, á la Buffy
    • You have to activate the basement door twice to use the key then open the freaking door
    • The sequence with the basement monster had the weakest writing, there were a lot of incorrect partial sentences to put up with for a climactic moment
    • I endings 0 and 2, wasn't really interested in replaying it more to figure out the other 2

    @karusomine
    NectaReal
    I thought the premise of this was pretty good, right up the alley of the jam'e theme. Unfortunately, it kind of went downhill as I went on.
    • Lacks the GGG copyright notice required by EULA
    • Loud. Turn down that music/sound, or check out my Master Dev Volume plugin
    • The writing started off pretty good. There's some dialogue at the beginning that reads quite stilted because Alden is omitting contractions. Twice in a row during the opening scene he says “go there” instead of “goes there”
      • As the game went on, there were more and more wrong words and words missing from phrases that make this come across like it's been translated from another language. Your profile says English is your first language, but this reads increasingly like a translated Japanese app game or something
    • It’s in a bunch of places, so please – “never mind” is two words :wink:
    • The first map of the neighborhood I thought looked good. But then, the map of the house’s yard is quite large and generally empty. The house could simply be right on the other side of the gate instead of just taking time to walk over bare grass. Then when you get to the house itself, instead of being an impressive reveal, or looking scary, it's quite featureless, just continuous wall with a door
    • The conversations with the cat-boy(?) and the doll I thought were particularly weak. They read like a bad anime, with all the "I just met this person but I'm going to pet them or tell them they're beautiful"
    • I gave up at the Spider King. It seems like his attack hits a three-tile radius from where he lands, but there’s no indication of when he’s going to jump, so there was no way for me to time my movement – just dashing continuously resulted in him landing on me each time. I was able to consistently dodge his first attack by waiting for a second after the instruction window went away, but getting to the kitchen made me stop dashing and he killed me every time
    • Speaking of which – the controls instructions at the beginning don’t say you can dash, and I’m pretty sure the Spider King is impossible without it

    @Prescott
    Ghost Puncher
    I thought the mapping in this was competently done. I also appreciate the parody play on Ghostbuster with, like, an action-comedy movie or anime or something, although it's not to my tastes.
    • For me, the voice acting didn’t add anything to the game, even in comedic value. I skipped through the messages as quickly as I could read them. An option to disable it would’ve been welcome
    • Having to activate the doors inside the house and getting a fade in and out just to walk through the doorway was weird. I don't know why you didn't just let us walk through the doorways
    • The gameplay is focused around the combat system, but there's no nuance to it. There's no reason to not just spam the most powerful attack - I don't know why you even made the other skills
    • The currency reward message is wrong (at least in the USA) – dollar sign comes before the number
    • It would be nice if the item descriptions told you how many HP or...PP...they restored. Having to go in and out of the shop and my inventory to heal up without wasting my money was annoying
    • You can walk down through the top of the bed
    • The Strong Ghost is randomly unbeatable. If he happens to waste some turns on Ectoplasm, you can win, but the first time I fought him he did Deadlift almost every turn and that kills you before you kill him (and your milk heals less than one Deadlift hit)
    • I couldn’t finish the game. Unless you just happen to have bought extra cookies and milk, and you just happen to sit in the house healing up after the third ghost (even though your character says it’s done), you go into the house fight at a huge deficit and will lose in a few turns. Since I couldn’t save after the last ghost fight, I was uninterested in going through the work to stock up on items, do the third fight again, hope the random choices allowed me to win, just so I could heal up and take on the house

    @Jokokit123
    SPOOOOKYYYY
    Well.
    • Obviously no game here to evaluate
    • The RTP wasn’t packaged with the game and I wasn’t going to track it down and install it just to read the story outline, so...sorry, but I didn’t read it
    • You also didn't even say which RTP it needed

    @Izzy_MS
    The Abby House
    I thought this was pretty good for a short adventure game. It was appropriate for the theme of haunted building.
    • The dialogue is pretty well-written. Some errors – “a crack on the wall,” repeatedly getting “its” and “it’s” backwards, other typos
    • The Kitchen Key and Moldy Letter seem to be set to be consumable with no effect (I didn't continue to test the others). If you simply change Consumable to No in the item entry, the player shouldn't be able to activate the item and get to targeting a party member just for an error buzzer
    • Is the bedroom diary supposed to still be in Spanish? That seemed a little randomly pointless to have pages of message text I couldn't understand
    • Why is there a prompt to save after the end of the game?

    @patedod266
    President Evil
    I see this is your first game, which is pretty cool! It definitely had some flaws, some of which are newbie mistakes, but I thought you made everything work well - there weren't any gamebreaking bugs.
    • Any time you're distributing something that's multiple files, you should put it into a zip or other archive. Google Drive can zip it for us, if we know to select download from the arrow next to the folder name, but that takes longer that it takes you on your computer
    • The game was not distributed with the RTP. It doesn’t even tell us which version of RPG Maker was used so we can download the correct RTP. Just include the extra 22 MB and distribute it as a standalone game
    • The opening info screen is way too short to read all of
    • The dialogue is okay, but there are a fair number of typos that basic English/proofreading should catch (enimies, litterally, ya’know)
    • The fights on the first screen seem pointless, my attacks do no damage to the ghosts but they also don’t attack me
    • It took me a long time to progress past the first screen – just having a square of rug is not a sufficient visual indicator that there’s supposed to be a door in the wall there. It would be a bit better if the rug went to the wall via shift-click mapping, instead of stopping in front of it, but doing something with the wall or ceiling there to indicate a doorway would be better.
    • It would be better to choose a currency symbol like “Dollars” or “USD” because seeing it formatted as “0$” is incorrect
    • It’s a bit unintuitive that you can select the weapon attacks after you’re out of ammo and it still spends your turn and plays the gun sound effect...for 0 damage.
    • It’s also somewhat unintuitive that your melee attacks do as much as shooting does. I'm not sure if there was supposed to be a strategic choice where the different kinds of attacks were more or less effective against the different enemies, but everything died in a round or two of spamming regular attacks

    @slimmmeiske2
    Pumpkin Decorating
    I thought this was a cute little game with some really nice art, good mapping, and some clever eventing to do all the decorations.
    • GGG is listed for a few items in the credit, but the EULA-required copyright notice is lacking
    • Cute title screen, the windowskin is very entertaining. It’s right on the verge of being too much, but is vibrant and fun.
    • Playing as the pumpkin is adorable. When I got the option for the costumes I was really tickled because I thought I'd be a pumpkin in a gothic lolita dress, but instead I changed entirely into the doll sprite. I changed back :stickytongue:
    • When decorating the walls, one of the options is spiderwebs – I didn’t realize the spiderweb in the attic was a decoration to take, so I got “I don’t have one” when I selected it. Since you’re using plugins, not having the choice show up if you don’t have the item would be better
    • Language is good. Dialogue is fun and, aside from a few missing commas, all is good with the world

    @Wifi
    Slice of Dead
    I conceptually appreciate the idea of a parody of a haunted house run as a business by the monsters. However, your writing really drags the game down, so I wasn't able to really enjoy reading that story or get into liking the characters at all.
    • The project doesn’t contain the RTP and doesn't say which RTP you need
    • Something in the project was never correctly named, the installer and the folder it creates are just called "Halloween"
    • The name on the title screen also appears to be incorrect – if you’re making a play on the phrase “slice of life,” the correct analog would be “slice of death,” not “dead”
    • The opening info scene is all trailing ellipses, no sentences. That's really amateurish to read
    • In the rest of the game, there are numerous misspellings, and a really unacceptable lack of periods, lack of capitalization, and use of ellipses
      • I recognize English is not your first language, but Italian uses capitalization and periods, too. And knowing you're not proficient with the language should just mean you know ahead of time you should type everything into Word or a Google Doc or some other spelling/grammar checker
    • The vampire calls the dog a god...c'mon :stickytongue:
    • When you get control after ten minutes, it says “you can check on your bag” what to do, but there’s no bag and nothing in the menu to check. I had no idea what to do, so I eventually wandered down into the dungeon
    • Some battle messages (particularly on states) still have Italian in them, other messages are formatted incorrectly
    • There are apparently extra spaces at the end of Wolfgang’s name in the Actors tab
    • Some jarring music starts in Winta’s room and doesn’t stop when you go back out until you go all the way downstairs
    • There's only one troop in the dungeon. Thankfully the spiders died in one hit and Flee was guaranteed to succeed...combat seemed pointless
    • The Einstein joke misspelled his name as Albret
    • It's lacking the GGG copyright credit as required by the EULA
    I didn't know about the credit things, sorry for the issue, I thought older engine's were not supported anymore so I never read the new updates.
    Also thanks for the critiques, I really should try and use the program more and write more instead of focusing on just the pixel art for my games.

    If I'll ever make a new version of this game this info will come useful.
  3. Sword_of_Dusk
    #3 Source
    Impressive effort, Turan. How long did playing these games and making this thread take?
  4. ATT_Turan
    #4 Source
    Sword_of_Dusk said:
    Impressive effort, Turan. How long did playing these games and making this thread take?
    I...didn't actually time it, although I should've thought to. I'd guesstimate half an hour per game - some of them took less time than that, but some a bit more and there was added time for me to switch windows and write notes down while playing.

    Then I spent a couple of hours cleaning the notes up into actual sentences and formatting the post and stuff.

    I just wanted to make sure everyone got some kind of acknowledgement out of their contribution.
  5. Wifi
    #5 Source
    ATT_Turan said:
    With the conclusion of the Spooky Jam, I've taken the time to play through (mostly) all of the submissions. I thought I'd offer some feedback on each entry here.

    A few notes:
    - I have all respect and appreciation for everyone's work to create a complete work of whatever length under a time limit. Any critical comments I make are to offer what areas that dev might be able to improve on in their future work or ongoing project.

    - I know some people don't want to read anything that isn't "Good job!" So, I give everybody who participated a "Good job for producing a contribution!" and all of your more specific and critical comments are in spoilers - if you don't want to see it, don't click it :smile:

    I will say, outside of the spoilers, that the most common complaint I have is games lacking the correct credit for RPG Maker's developer. If you read your Maker's EULA (or the most recent update which combines all versions into one), there is a specifically-worded attribution that's supposed to be in the credits of any game you distribute. Six of the games (and perhaps a couple of more that I didn't complete to see the credits) were lacking this, and thus were technically distributed illegally :wink:

    And so:

    @Starmage
    Whispers in the Bitter Frost
    I thought this was a decent play. The map sprites looked good and some effort was put into all the eventing.
    • Lacking GGG copyright information
    • Tutorial window staying open for the entire first map is annoying
    • Random unpassable tile near the first building
    • Some text cut off by message window
    • When it changes to you controlling Avelina it randomly has dash always enabled
    • Storywise, the people don’t make a lot of sense. They're completely accepting their random hallucinations and memory loss, and there are awkward and uncalled for internal monologues about lusting for each other.
    • Grammatically, there's some stilted phrasing and incorrect placement of apostrophes, commas, and capital letters. It's not the worst I've seen, but it was frequently distracting.
    • There were some more significant wrong words that I already mentioned in the game's thread before deciding to make this one
    • When you seem to be spending effort to make most of the dialogue have an older or medieval feel to the language, characters randomly spitting "whatever," "bad vibes," and "screw you" stick out in a silly way
    • Many graphical flaws in the text from the VS Message Core. There's a fix in this in a number of posts that requires updating your NW.js - apparently VisuStella is ignoring bug reports about it?
    • It looks weird for the characters to walk horizontally straight across diagonal stairs on the map
    • Most of the mapping is good, but the courtyard map is bland and confusing. Using the same tile for the ground and elevated levels with the tint just makes it hard to understand what it's supposed to look like
    • I'm not a fan of the barely changed references to Judeo-Christian mythology. If you want to use an established religion, do it; if you want to make up your own, make up your own. "Sintanel" and especially "YAWEH" (ooh, changed one letter! :stickytongue: ) come across as silly
    • I don't know if something is bugged or if it just isn't made in a way that correctly reflects what you want to happen: the combat instructions say "timing is key," but it isn't. There’s no penalty to pressing it at the wrong time, so just standing there and jamming the button as fast as possible is the way to win
    • Using a potion weirdly closes out the menu
    • I don't know how well I think this relates to the theme of a haunted building. It takes place inside of one, but the whole story is about this cult and they could be doing their stuff anywhere; nothing really seems to be building-specific.

    @TheAM-Dol
    Psyche
    The graphic and sound design is well done and interesting. The style and colors of everything created a nice aesthetic, and knowing you did it all in one event is a cool technical aspect.
    • The executable name is unintuitive. "Game" or the title of the name would be easy to find; only someone who's technically familiar with NW.js would think to look for or try running a file named nw.
    • The font is really hard to read at times. Some of it is the way the bottom isn't level but bobs up and down, and some specific letters (like lower case "T") just don't look like what they're supposed to
    • I think referring to the person’s mind as their “home” for the purposes of a haunted building theme is a big stretch, personally :stickytongue:
    • The very beginning seems to have a bit of a bug in the eventing. Selecting a door with Enter makes the cursor disappear but doesn’t activate the choice. Nothing works until pressing the arrow key again to make the cursor reappear
    • I appreciate the time you spent studying the style, but the imitation medieval English and abstract topics meant I really didn’t know what anything was talking about, and I didn’t understand the significance or meaning of most of my choices. So I just chose stuff randomly
    • I apparently achieved an ending because after one of the poems it stopped saying things and showed me a credits screen

    @ISC
    Trick or Treat
    I thought this game displayed the most creativity and technical prowess with the interface - I would not have been playing this and guessed it was made in RPG Maker (aside from the default cursor sounds).
    • Flash screen misspelled “presents”
    • Lacks the GGG copyright in credits required by EULA
    • I was initially offput by it saying it only accepted mouse input. It turned out more things responded to keys than the instructions said they would, but I still didn't love that
    • Some unusual phrasing in the language makes it clear that it’s translated, but there were no other egregious spelling or grammatical errors
    • The mood icon on the cards is unintuitive, it has nothing to do with any visual on the screen. At least put it next to the mood track
    • The constantly ticking clock sound is pretty annoying, especially since the gameplay isn’t actually real-time
    • Speaking of the clock, it doesn’t seem to work properly – I bought candies approximately a million times and the time didn’t advance past 5 minutes. I finished the round by getting all the candy with full mood and still at 11:00.
    • Not sure what the point is of having the cards upside down in your hand then clicking them to see them – they don’t cover any other UI elements when held facing you. It made having to put my cards down just to buy candies then click back into the cards a bit annoying.
    • The limited choices in the hand size and number of repeated cards didn’t make it feel like there was a lot of strategic choice...I just played whatever I had the most resources to afford. With no way to discard cards I couldn’t use, I spent most of the match with my hand jammed up by two cards with no effect but to improve the human’s mood while it was already maxed
    • The cards in my hand stayed up even after I had completed the round
    • Due to the lack of challenge and low choice, I didn’t really want to play additional rounds after the first one
    • I don’t see how the game relates to the theme of a haunted building. You’re playing as a girl trick-or-treating to other people’s houses

    @Rubescen
    Midnight Central
    I thought the premise of being stuck in a supernatural train station beyond the edge of the real world was a neat one, and the art overall worked well. However...
    • Game window is offputtingly small – why would you make an MZ game smaller than default?
    • The girl's sprite does this weird crab-walking sideways instead of actually turning left and right
    • I don’t really see the point of the fog-of-war-ish light radius around the player. There’s nothing on her that would cause her to be actually shedding light, and there's no gameplay effect for the stuff you can't see outside of that radius
    • Language-wise, there were some typos, but the dialogue is generally good. The girl and the various NPCs had character
    • I wasn’t able to complete the game. I went to the four maps I was able to access (main hall, east, south, and boiler room) twice to make sure I talked to everyone I could and inspected every item I could see, but couldn’t find any way to get any Soul Coins and advance the story. So I quit.

    @werzaque
    The Symmetry of Remorse and Penance
    I liked the sci-fi setting - I think it has a lot of potential that's under-utilized for horror - and your sprite work is really good. Some of the portraits I thought were a bit awkward in the face/neck posing, but they still look quite good.

    I wasn't sure if you were intentionally trying to go for a slightly cheesy Original Series Star Trek kind of vibe - that would explain some of the techno-babble and the "20 hyperboles away" in the opening. If that's the case, I think you did yourself a bit of a disservice as it detracted from the spookiness of the game.
    • There are some minor misspelling and awkward wordings, language is overall decent. Some of the techno-babble crosses to the cheesy side
    • A few more significant misspellings like Parsly, Lietenant, and Hanger I already discussed with you
    • Second hit of Crossslash puts him standing in the middle of the target sprite
    • Enemies are very spongy, fights are rather long. The first fight took so long that it put me off the battle system a bit, and my resources were so depleted that as soon as I got into a second fight I was steamrolled in the first round. There might be some combinations to take advantage of in the skills, but with no introduction to them outside of combat, I really didn't feel like I had time to just experiment with abilities because of how quickly the enemies were starting to kill me
    • I'd personally greatly prefer battlebacks to the blurred map in battles
    • Unfortunately, I died on the third map of the enemy ship because I thought the spirits walking about might've been crewmembers who would give me the passcode for the railgun, but they were an even bigger group of enemies. I hadn't thought to save my game after the opening sequence and first fight, so I really didn't want to play through that again to see more of the game. I plan to revisit it later

    @LunarSpire_
    Mystery Job
    I really wasn't sure what to make of this. I guess it's interesting that you found a way to incorporate 3D models into your RPG Maker game, but I don't think it improved the experience any.
    • 3D graphics are very different, but I found them visually unappealing
    • The controls tutorial is wrong, says D moves both right and backwards
    • There's no explanation of the setting or what’s going on at all. The situation is explained in an abstract sci-fi/quantum physics sort of way, it’s not clear how it relates to the theme of a haunted building
    • There's not a ton of text, it was mostly okay but had some blatant errors (“It smells putrid meat”)
    • I didn't see/retain any explanation of the Power bar or Points
    • I was walking around picking up meat when some creature randomly appeared, ran up to me, screamed, and the game ended. The Power bar wasn’t empty and the Stench bar wasn’t full. So I don't know why, but that was it
    • The experience seemed kind of pointless, so I wasn't really interested in trying it again to explore further

    @alice_gristle
    Nelly Come Back
    I thought this was a good play. Short, sweet, solidly done.
    • The color palette and sprites are appropriate for the retro gameplay
    • The second screen took me an unseemly number of tries to complete, but not badly crafted. There were a few times where it seemed like the spirits were catching me from just standing next to them rather than them going through me, but that might just be a visual trick because they don't really have a facing change
    • On the last screen, one of the pink old men actually caught me but just walked through me, I presumed that would be a death
    • The ending was a smidge predictable given the...memories? sounds? you came across, but I thought it was still good
    • All the English was good

    @r66r
    The Dentist
    I thought this was decent. It suffered a bit from under-explanation in a few ways.
    • Why have a language choice screen with one choice?
    • The title font is not great, the “S” is petty illegible
    • Most of the text is pretty good, the dialogue has some oddities that aren't how English speakers talk (“It’s a joke?”)
    • How old is this kid? He still says “mommy” but also says “what the hell”?
    • The premise is...a little specious. Why or how would a kid damage his teeth walking through a mall to his dentist appointment? (and why is a dentist inside/on top of the mall?)
      • I see later that the teeth get damaged by clowns...like...hitting them? But there's no reason a kid would assume something like that could happen
    • There’s no gameplay reason presented to try to get candy. It seems to only be a bad thing that you’re forced to eat to get through some paths
    • Getting caught once by a clown appears to be a damage loop; as soon as I clicked out of the last message, he would immediately trigger his attack again.
    • It would be nice to have a controls tutorial letting us know that we can dash and that diagonal walking is available. Both of those are really valuable to maneuvering around the clowns
    • Speaking of which, dashing seems to break some of the enemies. Several times I hit up against and walked through them without triggering an attack
    • I died while just running around. Apparently getting all of your teeth darkened by candy makes you lose, but I didn’t know that. Wasn't sufficiently interested in trying again to get farther
    • Good use of sound/music. Character sprite looks good

    @BobbyLily
    Tuckamore Eve
    This was a decent play. Because it's almost entirely dialogue-driven, it makes the stray typos a bit more jarring than they would be in a game that had other mechanics going on.
    • Artwork is not to my tastes, but is good for its style. I thought it was aesthetically consistent
    • Dialogue is pretty good, has some typos (“now we’re suck in the middle,” “I’d explain the horrid smell”)
    • Text placement is inconsistent. Some lines are cut very short of the side of the window, presumably not to overlap the character art; but then when the art is on the left, the text draws over the top of it. Maybe use a word wrap plugin instead of trying to manually add line breaks
    • The girl seems to be the most grounded and taking charge, then decides the route to finding gas for the car is...to walk into a spooky house? Literally who in the world keeps gas in their house?
    • How is light coming in the south, west, and east windows of the house to shine onto the floor?
    • “noisome aura of cadaverine” is a pretty excellent turn of phrase
    • I wish the doors didn’t have to be activated to walk through
    • The funny book titles were singularly not funny to my tastes, I thought they detracted from the air of the story, which I'd thought of mostly serious with quipping teenagers, á la Buffy
    • You have to activate the basement door twice to use the key then open the freaking door
    • The sequence with the basement monster had the weakest writing, there were a lot of incorrect partial sentences to put up with for a climactic moment
    • I endings 0 and 2, wasn't really interested in replaying it more to figure out the other 2

    @karusomine
    NectaReal
    I thought the premise of this was pretty good, right up the alley of the jam'e theme. Unfortunately, it kind of went downhill as I went on.
    • Lacks the GGG copyright notice required by EULA
    • Loud. Turn down that music/sound, or check out my Master Dev Volume plugin
    • The writing started off pretty good. There's some dialogue at the beginning that reads quite stilted because Alden is omitting contractions. Twice in a row during the opening scene he says “go there” instead of “goes there”
      • As the game went on, there were more and more wrong words and words missing from phrases that make this come across like it's been translated from another language. Your profile says English is your first language, but this reads increasingly like a translated Japanese app game or something
    • It’s in a bunch of places, so please – “never mind” is two words :wink:
    • The first map of the neighborhood I thought looked good. But then, the map of the house’s yard is quite large and generally empty. The house could simply be right on the other side of the gate instead of just taking time to walk over bare grass. Then when you get to the house itself, instead of being an impressive reveal, or looking scary, it's quite featureless, just continuous wall with a door
    • The conversations with the cat-boy(?) and the doll I thought were particularly weak. They read like a bad anime, with all the "I just met this person but I'm going to pet them or tell them they're beautiful"
    • I gave up at the Spider King. It seems like his attack hits a three-tile radius from where he lands, but there’s no indication of when he’s going to jump, so there was no way for me to time my movement – just dashing continuously resulted in him landing on me each time. I was able to consistently dodge his first attack by waiting for a second after the instruction window went away, but getting to the kitchen made me stop dashing and he killed me every time
    • Speaking of which – the controls instructions at the beginning don’t say you can dash, and I’m pretty sure the Spider King is impossible without it

    @Prescott
    Ghost Puncher
    I thought the mapping in this was competently done. I also appreciate the parody play on Ghostbuster with, like, an action-comedy movie or anime or something, although it's not to my tastes.
    • For me, the voice acting didn’t add anything to the game, even in comedic value. I skipped through the messages as quickly as I could read them. An option to disable it would’ve been welcome
    • Having to activate the doors inside the house and getting a fade in and out just to walk through the doorway was weird. I don't know why you didn't just let us walk through the doorways
    • The gameplay is focused around the combat system, but there's no nuance to it. There's no reason to not just spam the most powerful attack - I don't know why you even made the other skills
    • The currency reward message is wrong (at least in the USA) – dollar sign comes before the number
    • It would be nice if the item descriptions told you how many HP or...PP...they restored. Having to go in and out of the shop and my inventory to heal up without wasting my money was annoying
    • You can walk down through the top of the bed
    • The Strong Ghost is randomly unbeatable. If he happens to waste some turns on Ectoplasm, you can win, but the first time I fought him he did Deadlift almost every turn and that kills you before you kill him (and your milk heals less than one Deadlift hit)
    • I couldn’t finish the game. Unless you just happen to have bought extra cookies and milk, and you just happen to sit in the house healing up after the third ghost (even though your character says it’s done), you go into the house fight at a huge deficit and will lose in a few turns. Since I couldn’t save after the last ghost fight, I was uninterested in going through the work to stock up on items, do the third fight again, hope the random choices allowed me to win, just so I could heal up and take on the house

    @Jokokit123
    SPOOOOKYYYY
    Well.
    • Obviously no game here to evaluate
    • The RTP wasn’t packaged with the game and I wasn’t going to track it down and install it just to read the story outline, so...sorry, but I didn’t read it
    • You also didn't even say which RTP it needed

    @Izzy_MS
    The Abby House
    I thought this was pretty good for a short adventure game. It was appropriate for the theme of haunted building.
    • The dialogue is pretty well-written. Some errors – “a crack on the wall,” repeatedly getting “its” and “it’s” backwards, other typos
    • The Kitchen Key and Moldy Letter seem to be set to be consumable with no effect (I didn't continue to test the others). If you simply change Consumable to No in the item entry, the player shouldn't be able to activate the item and get to targeting a party member just for an error buzzer
    • Is the bedroom diary supposed to still be in Spanish? That seemed a little randomly pointless to have pages of message text I couldn't understand
    • Why is there a prompt to save after the end of the game?

    @patedod266
    President Evil
    I see this is your first game, which is pretty cool! It definitely had some flaws, some of which are newbie mistakes, but I thought you made everything work well - there weren't any gamebreaking bugs.
    • Any time you're distributing something that's multiple files, you should put it into a zip or other archive. Google Drive can zip it for us, if we know to select download from the arrow next to the folder name, but that takes longer that it takes you on your computer
    • The game was not distributed with the RTP. It doesn’t even tell us which version of RPG Maker was used so we can download the correct RTP. Just include the extra 22 MB and distribute it as a standalone game
    • The opening info screen is way too short to read all of
    • The dialogue is okay, but there are a fair number of typos that basic English/proofreading should catch (enimies, litterally, ya’know)
    • The fights on the first screen seem pointless, my attacks do no damage to the ghosts but they also don’t attack me
    • It took me a long time to progress past the first screen – just having a square of rug is not a sufficient visual indicator that there’s supposed to be a door in the wall there. It would be a bit better if the rug went to the wall via shift-click mapping, instead of stopping in front of it, but doing something with the wall or ceiling there to indicate a doorway would be better.
    • It would be better to choose a currency symbol like “Dollars” or “USD” because seeing it formatted as “0$” is incorrect
    • It’s a bit unintuitive that you can select the weapon attacks after you’re out of ammo and it still spends your turn and plays the gun sound effect...for 0 damage.
    • It’s also somewhat unintuitive that your melee attacks do as much as shooting does. I'm not sure if there was supposed to be a strategic choice where the different kinds of attacks were more or less effective against the different enemies, but everything died in a round or two of spamming regular attacks

    @slimmmeiske2
    Pumpkin Decorating
    I thought this was a cute little game with some really nice art, good mapping, and some clever eventing to do all the decorations.
    • GGG is listed for a few items in the credit, but the EULA-required copyright notice is lacking
    • Cute title screen, the windowskin is very entertaining. It’s right on the verge of being too much, but is vibrant and fun.
    • Playing as the pumpkin is adorable. When I got the option for the costumes I was really tickled because I thought I'd be a pumpkin in a gothic lolita dress, but instead I changed entirely into the doll sprite. I changed back :stickytongue:
    • When decorating the walls, one of the options is spiderwebs – I didn’t realize the spiderweb in the attic was a decoration to take, so I got “I don’t have one” when I selected it. Since you’re using plugins, not having the choice show up if you don’t have the item would be better
    • Language is good. Dialogue is fun and, aside from a few missing commas, all is good with the world

    @Wifi
    Slice of Dead
    I conceptually appreciate the idea of a parody of a haunted house run as a business by the monsters. However, your writing really drags the game down, so I wasn't able to really enjoy reading that story or get into liking the characters at all.
    • The project doesn’t contain the RTP and doesn't say which RTP you need
    • Something in the project was never correctly named, the installer and the folder it creates are just called "Halloween"
    • The name on the title screen also appears to be incorrect – if you’re making a play on the phrase “slice of life,” the correct analog would be “slice of death,” not “dead”
    • The opening info scene is all trailing ellipses, no sentences. That's really amateurish to read
    • In the rest of the game, there are numerous misspellings, and a really unacceptable lack of periods, lack of capitalization, and use of ellipses
      • I recognize English is not your first language, but Italian uses capitalization and periods, too. And knowing you're not proficient with the language should just mean you know ahead of time you should type everything into Word or a Google Doc or some other spelling/grammar checker
    • The vampire calls the dog a god...c'mon :stickytongue:
    • When you get control after ten minutes, it says “you can check on your bag” what to do, but there’s no bag and nothing in the menu to check. I had no idea what to do, so I eventually wandered down into the dungeon
    • Some battle messages (particularly on states) still have Italian in them, other messages are formatted incorrectly
    • There are apparently extra spaces at the end of Wolfgang’s name in the Actors tab
    • Some jarring music starts in Winta’s room and doesn’t stop when you go back out until you go all the way downstairs
    • There's only one troop in the dungeon. Thankfully the spiders died in one hit and Flee was guaranteed to succeed...combat seemed pointless
    • The Einstein joke misspelled his name as Albret
    • It's lacking the GGG copyright credit as required by the EULA
    Also about the name thing, ye it's annoying, I wanted to change it at the end, but I didn't have much time, couldn't correct all the typos either, the reason of the name difference though is cause I had 3 projects in mind actually, I started out with the first 2 Horrore and Halloween, but time was very limited so I scrapped horrore for the third project which was Slice of dead, and used Halloween as a base, as for Slice of dead, it's not an error there, the dead meant the victim, and the slices were the victim, but again I scrapped the slices or pieces of the body of the victim in the end, in favor of just common items to avoid making sprites for it, but yeah it is confusing that it's named slice of dead instead of death with how I changed the story at the end.

    As for the soundtrack, ye those were actually placeholders, wanted to get some music from a colleague, but didn't have time so sorry it's bad, also thanks for mentioning that bug.

    The combat is supposed to be pointless, mostly because of a certain easter egg I put if you actually manage to lose, but I did forget to make fleeing a 50% chance so I should've done that first, also the game is not meant to be an actual combat focused game but a visual novel, so sorry if you found the fighting poitless, but I never really planned to do much with it anyways, except for ulterior cutscenes, I did plan on more enemies though on other maps.
  6. r66r
    #6 Source
    Thank you for taking the time to play my game and for your feedback.

    I particularly agree that there is a lack of explanation of the gameplay. I had planned to include a mini-tutorial at the beginning of the game, but due to lack of time I summarized it more or less in the description on itch.io.

    For the language selection at startup (select left or right to switch from English to French), as for the player detection by clowns or zombie punks, the 8 directions movement, and the custom character sprites, I used this jam to experiment with some of my plugins under development... a good experience in the end that will enable me to improve them further.

    Otherwise, about this "old spoken" English, unfortunately that's how I learned it at school... 30 years ago! :LZSwink:(note: English is not my native language)

    In conclusion, I'm glad I was able to finish this game in time and that it's playable to the end... and above all that I got feedback that will be very useful for the next ones.
  7. TRIDIUM
    #7 Source
    Dang, that was fast. I haven't even really started yet. I did download pretty much all of them, except maybe one or two that triggered windows defender.

    Thank you! Even though I didn't submit, I appreciate you taking the time to provide some feedback to people.
  8. BobbyLily
    #8 Source
    Thanks for the feedback!
    All I really have to say is that where I grew up it's normal to have a few cans of gas lying around for use in lawnmowers and stuff.
  9. Canned_Dinosaur
    #9 Source
    Thanks for playing Turan! And yes the combat can seem unforgiving with no tutorial available but that is kind of why…
    ATT_Turan said:
    I hadn't thought to save my game after the opening sequence and first fight…
    …it has auto save… Will have to look into making that more obvious. It’s a standard feature of MZ and I failed to realize it wasn’t standard at all in preceding makers, my bad.

    Hope you give it another (full) go some day ‘cause I appreciated the feed back!
  10. Izzy_MS
    #10 Source
    First off, thanks so much for playing the game and taking the time to write feedback!
    ATT_Turan said:
    The Kitchen Key and Moldy Letter seem to be set to be consumable with no effect
    That’s very weird… I’m sure I set them to not-consumable… I’ll have to check…
    ATT_Turan said:
    Is the bedroom diary supposed to still be in Spanish? That seemed a little randomly pointless to have pages of message text I couldn't understand
    Yes, it gives you a direct clue as to where the bedroom key is, so to make it less obvious I decided to leave it in Spanish. It’s like a second option if you don’t get the riddle.
    ATT_Turan said:
    Why is there a prompt to save after the end of the game?
    I do that on every game, not really sure why. I guess it’s so you can mark the save file as done.
  11. slimmmeiske2
    #11 Source
    Aww thanks for the feedback, Turan! Happy you enjoyed it for what it was :wub
    ATT_Turan said:
    When decorating the walls, one of the options is spiderwebs – I didn’t realize the spiderweb in the attic was a decoration to take, so I got “I don’t have one” when I selected it. Since you’re using plugins, not having the choice show up if you don’t have the item would be better
    I'm actually not using a single plugin in this one. Originally I had evented it that the choices would only show up if you had the item, but that became way too complicated unfortunately. I tried searching for a plugin to simplify, but I couldn't immediately find the right one and I was running out of time, so this was my rudimentary solution.
    ATT_Turan said:
    Playing as the pumpkin is adorable. When I got the option for the costumes I was really tickled because I thought I'd be a pumpkin in a gothic lolita dress, but instead I changed entirely into the doll sprite. I changed back :stickytongue:
    Spoiler
    Yeah, the game doesn't make it very clear, as I ran out of time, but Pumpkin is not actually a pumpkin, but a ghost possessing a pumpkin. Hence why they can change into other inanimate objects.
  12. karusomine
    #12 Source
    Thank you for the feedback! I really appreciate it.

    I completely agree with all the points you you mentioned. The biggest offenders being "too loud", "missing credits", "inconsistent writing", and "lack of mention of dashing".

    long comment
    I assumed people are familiar enough with RPG Maker games at this point (or any PC game, really), so they would go to the Options at the Main Menu to adjust the volume if the game sound is too loud for them.

    And they would turn the "Always Dash" on because the default movement speed are quite slow. But I admit this one is 100% my fault for failing to mention the "Shift" key and the "Always Dash" option. If you always dash, the Spider King would be much more manageable.

    Typos and awkward writing are inevitable. I'm not good at writing proper sentences, in which I question myself why would I make a visual novel in the first place. But I like reading stories, and wanted to write one myself. And this game jam was a good opportunity.

    For the story itself, you will get more hints as you progress, and have everything explained at the end of it. Even though I admit, it still extremely rushed and awkward.

    All in all, this game jam was a good learning experience, and I'm glad I joined it!
  13. TheAM-Dol
    #13 Source
    That sounds like a 3/5 for my game.
    I'll take it!
  14. ATT_Turan
    #14 Source
    BobbyLily said:
    All I really have to say is that where I grew up it's normal to have a few cans of gas lying around for use in lawnmowers and stuff.
    I have cans of gas for my appliances, too, but never in the house :guffaw: That's how homes burn down...'tis what garages are for.

    slimmmeiske2 said:
    I'm actually not using a single plugin in this one.
    I was just assuming that you were using a tile-changing plugin for the wall decorations, and I'm not even sure why...plastering them with events that have different pages is much easier. :stickytongue:

    r66r said:
    For the language selection at startup (select left or right to switch from English to French)
    Ah! That's really unintuitive. Since all the other menus in RPG Maker show you your options and you scroll the cursor to select them, it would never occur to me to try pressing buttons to select something invisible.

    At the very least, I'd strongly suggest you put arrows pointing left and right on either side of the window. That's a standard UI element indicating "there's more stuff in this direction".

    r66r said:
    Otherwise, about this "old spoken" English, unfortunately that's how I learned it at school...
    To clarify, there was nothing wrong with your English. My comment is that those two lines of dialogue seemed contradictory for the boy. Someone who is young enough to be calling a parent "mommy" would not be old enough to say "what the hell" :wink:

    Once kids start actually speaking in sentences, they usually stop saying "mommy" and "daddy" and go to "mom" and "dad." And I would usually avoid having a kid curse at all unless they're an older teenager or you're trying to portray them as having bad behavior.

    karusomine said:
    I assumed people are familiar enough with RPG Maker games at this point (or any PC game, really), so they would go to the Options at the Main Menu to adjust the volume if the game sound is too loud for them.
    We should design our games so that they start at an acceptable level for a normal system volume. It's well known that MV and MZ's default levels are very loud, so it's something devs need to account for. I've never loaded a professional video game that blasted my ears out when I first started it up - I use the audio options if I need to adjust the balance between music and voice, etc.

    karusomine said:
    And they would turn the "Always Dash" on because the default movement speed are quite slow.
    Again - if there's something you think everyone will do, make it that way in your game.

    karusomine said:
    If you always dash, the Spider King would be much more manageable.
    I did always dash and could not pass him. As soon as I get to the edge of the kitchen something turns my dash off and his second tackle hits me.

    I'm glad this was useful to y'all - congrats again on making entries!
  15. LunarSpire_
    #15 Source
    ATT_Turan said:
    @LunarSpire_
    Mystery Job
    I really wasn't sure what to make of this. I guess it's interesting that you found a way to incorporate 3D models into your RPG Maker game, but I don't think it improved the experience any.
    • 3D graphics are very different, but I found them visually unappealing
    • The controls tutorial is wrong, says D moves both right and backwards
    • There's no explanation of the setting or what’s going on at all. The situation is explained in an abstract sci-fi/quantum physics sort of way, it’s not clear how it relates to the theme of a haunted building
    • There's not a ton of text, it was mostly okay but had some blatant errors (“It smells putrid meat”)
    • I didn't see/retain any explanation of the Power bar or Points
    • I was walking around picking up meat when some creature randomly appeared, ran up to me, screamed, and the game ended. The Power bar wasn’t empty and the Stench bar wasn’t full. So I don't know why, but that was it
    • The experience seemed kind of pointless, so I wasn't really interested in trying it again to explore further
    Thanks for the feedback! I do agree that this wasn't the best experience and could've done with a bit more time in the oven. A lot of it came down to me rushing as I started the jam pretty late (Started around 1 week before submissions). As for the error in the controls and grammar, I'm admittedly a little disappointed I let those slide. :kaocry:

    But overall, thanks for taking the time play!
  16. karusomine
    #16 Source
    ATT_Turan said:
    I did always dash and could not pass him. As soon as I get to the edge of the kitchen something turns my dash off and his second tackle hits me.
    The "slow down" effect is there to emulate spider webs. It's only temporary, and the key is to keep moving and avoid stepping in the other spider webs. I want to create a suspenseful scene, but I can see that it's too challenging because it needs a lot of precision and a lot of luck. I'll make sure to balance it properly next time.
  17. Starmage
    #17 Source
    Thank you for the additional notes and feedback on things that can possible be improved in the game! Also, the religion in-game is actually from my mainline BlueSkies series, so that's why it has some "Christian" likeliness to it. xD
  18. Jokokit123
    #18 Source
    woah :0 thanks for all the effort in playing everything!! i am just a tiny bit confused though-
    ATT_Turan said:
    • The RTP wasn’t packaged with the game and I wasn’t going to track it down and install it just to read the story outline, so...sorry, but I didn’t read it
    • You also didn't even say which RTP it needed
    im pretty sure it does have the RTP packaged with it (the last one is it right?), and i put this exact file zipped in the drive.. uhh am i missing something? (i definentally missed something)
    1730259312342.png
  19. Canned_Dinosaur
    #19 Source
    karusomine said:
    The "slow down" effect is there to emulate spider webs. It's only temporary, and the key is to keep moving and avoid stepping in the other spider webs. I want to create a suspenseful scene, but I can see that it's too challenging because it needs a lot of precision and a lot of luck. I'll make sure to balance it properly next time.
    I threw my controller at this point... tried 10 times, even reached the kitchen, was told that "this isn't it", and I gave up. It's a shame because up until that point I kind of enjoyed the experience.
  20. ATT_Turan
    #20 Source
    Jokokit123 said:
    im pretty sure it does have the RTP packaged with it (the last one is it right?), and i put this exact file zipped in the drive.. uhh am i missing something? (i definentally missed something)
    I couldn't tell you how to tell by looking at the game directory, that would need to come from someone who's used XP.

    If it's like VX Ace, there's not really any "pretty sure" because it's a checkbox you choose to hit when compressing the project.

    I think I ended up installing it to play one of the other games, so if you want me to try again and give you feedback on your story, I will.

    Wifi said:
    The combat is supposed to be pointless...also the game is not meant to be an actual combat focused game but a visual novel, so sorry if you found the fighting poitless, but I never really planned to do much with it anyways
    I would suggest that if you put something in your game, it should be entertaining. No one said you have to have combat in there just because it's made with RPG Maker - if you want it to be a visual novel, make it that way.

    I don't know why you would include anything that's "supposed to be pointless" - isn't that wasting your players' time? :stickytongue:

    Anyway, I didn't post anything here to get people to explain themselves to me or apologize, I'm just making sure everyone gets some feedback on what a player thought was good and what needed improvement.