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Click-o-Calypse's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity / Innovation | #4 | 4.207 | 4.207 |
| Audio | #6 | 3.793 | 3.793 |
| Visuals | #15 | 3.966 | 3.966 |
| Overall (Fun and Playability) | #26 | 3.172 | 3.172 |
Ranked from 29 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How was the theme(s) implemented?
The setting is retro-futuristic, there are also dragons of sorts and late in the game comes a bit of cleaning up after the hero
Where did the assets come from?
Homemade graphics
Most Graphics were created by the team during the jam
Home-brew audio
Most Audio was created by the team during the jam
External graphics
Some graphics assets were downloaded or made prior to the jam
External audio
Some audio assets were downloaded or made prior to the jam
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Comments
Wow this was incredible. Clicker games in a way are like a distillation of RPG mechanics, so it was really cool seeing them brought back into an RPG context. It probably took me around 10 minutes or so to figure out exactly how all the mechanics worked. The boredom mechanic and having the battles play on auto is another great way the clicker game theme is brought into the fold.
The Break Free easter egg blew me away as well. That could have been an entire jam entry on its own. It was very tense, and the (narrator?) creature was super creepy. Was the implication that I was one of those creatures all along as well? Did the clicker games turn me into that?? It's amazing how that whole sequence is optional, and it has some sinister implications for rest of the game world. I found myself having flashbacks when I went back to finish the main ending haha.
This has probably some of the best and most responsive crawling controls in the whole jam. The input queue might have been a bit overkill for my tastes though.
The narration is great and funny but sometimes it was hard to tell what element the narrator was commenting on, as they would get interrupted by different actions I would take.
Also, for the second half of the robot world, I got stuck with one of the v3 enemies with me for almost the rest of the game. It was blocking almost all of my attacks and I was blocking all of its, so it sort of was stuck with me for a while. That sort of made it easier to walk around without worrying about boredom for a while, I feel like that probably wasn't supposed to happen?
Thank you very much for your extensive feedback!
We totally agree that the on-boarding early in the game needs a lot of work and is something we’ll try and fix after the jam as well as balancing the difficulty so that it’s not that unforgiving early on and easy during later stages. And at least ensure fights will always end. You might have been able to spend the time upgrading your equipped weapon to max and then get somewhere with dealing damage, but I agree it shouldn’t be like that.
Very glad the creature was scary to you and honestly we sort of ran out of time and what we in pure panic made as an ending does have that implication yeah.
NIce little game. I was surprised when it switched to a completely different vibe!
The art and audio were nice, I just got a bit confused at the beginning about what I was doing, how did the boredom progressed (even thugh I kinda had an idea). And then the feeling away from the monster part was fun. I got lost a bit in the labyrinthe but... that's the goal of the labyrinthe.
Nice job
Yeah that beginning is on the top of our todo list! Glad you liked it.
Superb entry! A few tweaks to the audio balance / subtitles would be helpful for me but, it didn’t detract much from the experience.
Sorry I couldn’t help but go to the right! :P
Thanks for making this entry!
You can watch my playthrough here: https://youtu.be/SQmFh5TorxI
Thanks for the video coverage of the game!
I think at some point you must have pressed the
Mkey which mutes the music - that’s why it dropped out suddenly.That was fun! The narrator was fantastic. I laughed out loud at "It was quite obvious to everyone besides Jet".
At first, I thought the combat exclamation marks were nice for knowing where I've been - then noticed they came back when I healed, and that seemed fine, except, then it seemed they came back even when I hadn't used a healing station, which confused me, and then I went back to being lost.
The names of items were great, I'll not trade my soiled cardboard hat for anything! I tried going for a dodge build instead of defense on a couple of my lives, but it didn't seem to work, I just got torn up :D. I went back to just choosing increase to defense and it was good. It seemed the green/red plus/minus on DPS didn't show right (often said it was a minus to DPS but actually was much higher than what I was wielding).
I liked the incremental game integration with ambient combat, felt rather fresh. I really appreciated the auto-clicker.
Later half of the game didn't come as much of a surprise to me, but I loved the visuals, especially the environment. Unfortunately I did not know these halls as well as some of my colleagues professed to, so I spent quite a while wandering about, but eventually found all 4 dragons, for the third time, and won.
Really enjoyed it, nice job!
Yeah the exclamation marks are on a steps-timer until they return. It was our fast solution for not soft-locking players in the clicker act if they were unlucky and ran out of easy enemies and still needed some.
The DPS calculation in the UI is based on rolling the outcome a few number of times, because I don’t know the math to actually calculate the expected average of this system. Way to complex. So the estimation error is unfortunately quite large in this build. We’ve fixed that already for our next version so that the error is much smaller.
Somehow, I managed to finish the game and I’m glad I did. I really liked the visual style of the first location and the overall texture work. The bookshelves, in particular, look incredibly volumetric. Is that all done on a flat surface with just normal and mask maps? If so, that’s seriously impressive.
The lighting is vibrant and juicy, with pleasant background animations throughout. The main menu is beautiful. I loved the futuristic font and the rocket landing animation. The sound design is solid, and the voice lines were fun, giving me strong The Stanley Parable vibes. The first part of the game felt comedic and playful, which I really enjoyed.
I wasn’t entirely sure how my progress in the first part affects the second part of the game. Is there a point in doing certain things before the stealth key mission? And are there multiple endings? The one I got felt quite bleak, so now I’m wondering if there are alternative outcomes. I also didn’t fully understand what was happening in the world or why things were the way they were.
One thing I didn’t enjoy was the enemy “attack” animations in the darker part of the game. They felt quite disturbing and unpleasant, but more importantly, they were hard to read. It wasn’t clear when my character actually took damage at first, it seemed like enemies just walked past or stepped over me without hurting me, which made me less cautious than I should have been. Only after seeing the “you died” screen I realized those animations were actually attacks, and I adjusted my behavior afterward.
The idea of awarding suitable amount of XP to yourself as you play is new for me and pretty engaging
It was an interesting experience. Thanks for your submission!
Thank you for such detailed feedback. Really appreciate the time you've taken to play and share your experience.
The bookshelf is indeed a flat surface, however it has both a baked normal and height map, which is a parallax effect (rather than tesselation created geometry). Below is a screenshot of the material channel for that asset if you're interested:
I'm really pleased to hear that it had the intended effect for you, it took quite alot of effort to put some of these together and it's nice to hear it paid off.
There is no real tie in between the two phases - other than being able to explore the world in relative safety (and with more light!) which should in theory make navigation easier when you go down. The player can choose to break through at any time and it has no impact on how the second phase plays out. There is just the one ending, it was a very late addition on the last day. We hadn't really worked out the lore in truth either, and this entire project was hugely overscoped. The broad idea is that the first phase is a simulation to keep the player placated. The player then breaks out into the 'real' world, but then we thought it might be interesting if you were the monster all along!? Honestly, we didn't get much further in the plot than that, so you have my apologies.
I completely understand regarding the enemy attack animations. He was quite experimental and uses an inverse kinematic rig rather than a conventional keyed animation. As such we had to animate him exclusively by moving targets for his various bones to point at. As such some of the animations are quite thrown together.
Thank you again for taking the time to write such detailed feedback, and thank you for playing :).
Thanks for sharing the maps, that's cool! I also quite liked the bookshelves and the padded cell that felt so much like home =)
What an experience! I went in without reading the game page at all and was able to fully enjoy this bizarre world without any context, which was an absolute delight. The environments are varied, surreal, and the 3D background is gorgeous. I loved the Stanley-Parable narration style, and the retro robot enemies are really cool.
I enjoyed the fact that combat doesn't prevent you from moving and that you can chain them, especially near the end when you're overpowered. The game was a bit on the easy side, but I enjoy that kind of chill dungeon-crawling a lot. I didn't understand why I was destroying Apple ][ computers, though.
It's a splendid game, great work to you all!
Glad you liked the clicker/stanley parable-esque act of the game. It sounds as you played that to its end, which is actually a false end. There’s a way to progress to act II through interacting “correctly” with the clicker part that then hopefully also explains why you are destroying those computers.
This flew over my head. I did not understand at all, what to do. I read some of the comments and this is supposed to play itself? I tried it a couple of times and always just died, after a small number of encounters with those robots (?). The narration is a cool idea and I had too think of Bennet Fodys stuff. Movement is smooth and the graphic well done.
Could it be that you didn’t click on the XP button and buy/click on the various abilities as they unlocked. Maybe also didn’t find the health-stations? The battles play themselves out, this is true, but your job is gaining XP by clicking and improving your abilities. And also managing health.
I will try this again later. But I clicked like a maniac on the XP button, which seemed not do do anything after a while. Maybe the cool voice overs distraced me too much from the rest. There are no subtiles, right? As being not a native speaker, I have to use more of my brain power to listen to the voice ;)
You're not the first person to mention the overload right at the start, we were actually working on a subtitle system today as it happens. But it's all a bit late.
I would say this game a case of, you have to go slow to go fast. If I may offer a couple of small pieces of advice:
You want to take battles slowly at the start, and focus on getting upgrades (on the right of the screen) as well as finding healing stations. As you get some gear and click the upgrades for gear, weapons and maschochism on the right hand side, everything gets alot easier and you'll have more comfort in exploring. The '!' markers are different colours depending on danger, blue is safest, then yellow, then red.
There is one healing station to the room on the right when you start, and two are in the open room directly infront of you from when you start (towards the rocket). Then they start to reset and you can use them over and over.
After this, it all becomes much easier and it'll be pretty much impossible for you to die, it's just the first couple of fights that can be a bit scary to start.
Hope you get on a bit better this time, I would hate for you to have such a horrible time and not get to see anything.
EDIT: I've drawn a small map - just incase it helps to you get you up and running.
I enjoyed the view a few too many times, but I did enjoy the view! What a strange and wonderful place you’ve built, the visuals, voiceover and music really build a fantastic and unique mood!
A little bit of audio-visual feedback as to combat progress and your current health level would have helped the fights feel as interesting as exploring the world, and at it took me an embarassingly long time to stop worrying about the boredom mechanic and treating it as time pressure…
It was a trippy, 4th wall breaking experience. Totally loved the art style. The first half of the game has this red-white color palette which reminded me of Mirror's Edge. Second part is like the dark version of the first level. I was collecting the dragons on the first level then suddenly i saw the connection lost text on the screen and we are teleported to the second level. I'm not sure what happened there. There's probably a story explanation of it but i couldn't beat the game to learn about it. Second level is scary and tense with the monster following you around but i found myself infinitely running in circles and get killed by the stalking monster while looking for the last key, eventually had to drop out at some point.
I love the voiceovers. I think the narrator's voice is Local Minimum. I heard his voice in his streams before :) I really appreciate the voice acting but there's maybee a little too many of those in the game. I'm not a fan of autobattles but they didn't bother me. Choosing loot and inventory is cool, it makes the game feel more like a RPG. I like the visual language of the game for example showing encounters with exclamanation mark, stronger enemies are red exc. mark while the weaker ones are white. So you know what to expect. But those enemies keep respawning after you kill them once and they're gapblocking enemies, i didn't like it so much. Also we keep getting xp and upgrade our skills with those. I randomly clicked on the skills, not knowing what exactly they do. Also what happpens when boredom meter goes entirely full. Is that what triggers the second level?
It's a very cool, original game with nice stylish graphics. I enjoyed experiencing it and i think your game adds great flavor and quallity to the jam. Congrats for your excellent work!
Glad you liked it and almost got to the end. The thing that triggered you progressing to act II was buying one of the skills (with a bit delay). And I think, as with any clicker, it is a valid strategy to just buy buy stuff as they become available.
The boredom doesn’t have a special event, it scales the amount of xp each click gives. So if you got 2xp per click at 0% boredom, then you get 1xp per click at 50% and always 0xp per click at 100% boredom.
I think the problem with the voice-lines is that you’re thrown into the game and need to know everything at once from start. And we are planning on restructuring that a bit, which should ease up on the pace of them.
I don't understand the combat. Is it an auto battler? Should I only care about load out? Or should I actually do something? I get whacked by the first encounter in the game. :(
Sorry to hear you're having trouble!
Yes it's an autobattler so you don't need to do anything for combat. At the start, just stay in that little section you're in and take one fight at a time, there is one fight directly to the left of you and there's a healing lamp to the front-right.
As you get a little bit of gear, the fights get alot easier, if you're willing to have another go or two, I promise it gets much much easier. Additionally the clicker mechanic gives you upgrades that makes you stronger in the autobattler portion.
I hope things get easier for you if you're willing to give it another go.
Thanks! I'm gonna give it another go :D
This is an audio-visual delicacy, and inarguably one of the most creative entries I seen so far. The implementation of the ideas and communicating the key aspects of the game towards the player was a difficult task, and even though the narrator and the poiting arrows helped a lot, I agree with the other commenters that there is still plenty of room for improvement. Actually, without the comments, I would end up giving up way too early.
Anyway, bold ideas and a willingness to innovate is always admirable, especially if it's done in a visually appealing way, so, well done.
glad you read the comments then! We’ve got some plans based on those and own ideas to hopefully make the experience a bit smoother.
I like the narration mocking me as I kept failing at doing stuff and I was punishing my mouse button trying to get more xp and then it went crazy town! I could only find four of the keys though and I'm still not sure where to use them. I'll keep working on it!
oh after finding four keys you need to find the exit, but yeah we could, if we had time added some guidance towards it.
That was ONE.WILD.RIDE.
I totally did not expect going from chill, comedy infused clicker (I love idle/clicker games, so this was right up my alley) to FRIGGIN FIRST PERSON HORROR. Loved it. Was confused at first as to what I was doing in the second part, then was running while going oshitoshitoshit! then I figured out what I'm looking for and it became even more engaging.
A very unique, interesting experience.
Oh thanks! That made my day! Sounds like you experienced the game more or less exactly like it was intended!
Nice game!
I had a hard time understanding anything in the beginning, I just kept dying over and over. The itemstats for weapon and apparel seems strange as well. It almost always felt like you were trading down when picking something up. like there were always negative stats. Though +0 in change shouldn't be shown as red/loss I guess.
The movement was swift, but the game stores to many inputs so even though it responds to several inputs in a row, the delay makes it feel unresponsive. I did make the same mistake in my 2022 game, since I thought the best thing was to respect the player inputs.
The game is hard in the beginning, very hard until you learn the mechanics, and then it becomes very easy after a while. So some tuning of this might be good to do for an eventual post jam release.
Narration works fairly well, but if you move around fast the narrative kinda lags a bit since the sounds seems to queue up before they are played.
The second part was a bit hard to figure out what was needed and how many. Also if you were to cuddle or not, apparently not. Nice with the brightness settings in this section, would have been hard without it. I also kinda expected the exit to be in some other spot than the place where I a few moments earlier got punished for going.
Overall a good gaming experience with a fair amount of polish.
Good job!
Yeah the item stats are confusing and unfortunately not at all exact due to the complexity of the battle system. We should actually maybe give less info and just say brass > cardboard and such.
And I, well I finally understand: I don’t tap play at all, I hold down as preferred mode and the controls aren’t at all made for tappers first lol.
The early fights should probably have been much easier too. Good thing I actually doubled the starting health during the last day of the jam. pew.
and yeah i agree with pretty much all of your critique. we had some thought on how to adress some of it during the jam, but we very much ran out of time.
Fun game! The narration was well done. Loved the visuals, and it's a great take on retrofuturism. Would have liked the fighting to be manual instead of being an auto-battler, but I understand the vision and that's more of a me thing :). Great submission!
This game has a very solid aesthetic for a game that applies the retro-futuristic theme. The narration voice was well done though every time something was happening in the game. However, I'm confused as to what I was supposed to do whenever I reached the exclamation mark points.
I'm glad that I gain new items after defeating an enemy by randomization but I didn't know if they were meant for me (as the first person character or the character that is fighting the enemy by themselves). I had to restart from the beginning as I had no health and I didn't know how to regenerate it.
I noticed that there was a boredom system. That's a nice way of preventing users from being AFK for too long or not reaching the battle points for a long time.
the game uses an auto-battler, so fights play out by themselves and the exclamation marks are enemy locations. So your job is balancing your health and running around being in battle collecting wise amounts of enemies at the same time to get better loot and still survive. And run to health stations when needed. The battle time is also a great time to get more XP since you cannot get bored while being in battle. That, i think is the core mechanics of act one of the game.
very interesting mechanics, quite confusing but enjoyable once you get used to it. The stanley parable meta voicing doesnt really work here i feel like, it felt very disconnected from the actual game. But still, it's pretty polished and fun to play.
i’m sorry that it was a bit confusing and that the inner voice felt disconnected, but in part that was by design and sort of explains itself in act 2 of the game.
clicker and Dungeon crawler mix that actually worked i think! Art and music are cool, but i think that you should actually fight the enemies and not just watch(or i am stupid and it works differently)
It is an auto-battler because we imagine you’d be busy exploring and doing the clicker things and it’d be much to busy also doing the manual fighting.
Okay
The graphics look fantastic! Alas I wasn't able to get this running on poor my old Linux box. It rendered one frame every 2-3 secs, then crashed at body type selection. The Windows version actually did better (using WINE) achieving 1 frame per sec, then crashing at the same place. Not your fault, just my underpowered tech!
Oh that's not good. Do you mind me asking what your system specs are? This should run on a GTX 9 series or above very comfortably. So anything within the last decade or so should be fine.
So this might be a more sinister driver issue that we'd like to get to the bottom of if at all possible!
Don't worry, I'm sure it's just my machine: it's a basic office-type PC with integrated CPU/GPU!!! :-) I run Linux and mainly play 80s/90s games, so it's fine for all that. Hope you guys do well in the jam!
Ahh right yeah, it sadly won't run on integrated graphics. We did put a decent amount of work into optimisation for lower end systems but sadly it still needs a GPU or APU.
Thank you for trying nonetheless, and I think in future I should make sure to state the requirements on the jam page. Take care :)
Very interesting entry, I loved the gameplay of the first part and atmosphere of the second part. As always I’ve enjoyed poetry and narration (I haven’t pointed it out in the video), it feels very personal this way, an author’s project.
I felt like input buffering with slowness of movement animation was a hassle for me, but that might be my setup? I ended up overshooting quite a lot from time to time. The visuals in the first part felt a bit flat, while in the second part you did a great job of producing a nice visual atmosphere by combining lighting, fog and particles (I think). Music gave a lot of nice vibes and wasn’t in the way of the gameplay, so it felt like a nice soundtrack.
One thing I noticed after the play-through is that in the first part you were rushed by boredom a lot which gave you little time to look at the upgrades and their description (it was nice when you received items after the fight, as you can stop and think a little bit). I guess having some kind of pause-not-pause in the first part to look at what is happening and what you’re upgrading would be nice.
But as always I’ve enjoyed playing your game and this is a solid entry with a nice twist and a personal touch. Thanks for making it!
Here’s my play-through:
I’ll try and pick your brain about the input over on discord because that sound like something that would be useful to understand.
We wanted the two acts to be as distinct as possible and using plain versus detailed was one such distinction, but disregarding the vista that slippers worked really hard on, we didn’t really have the time to iron out the aesthetics of the first act as much as the second tbh.
I hadn’t thought about the boredom in that way! And I agree that’s a bit unfortunate and not intentional effect of you getting more and more auto-clickers. And trying not to spoil here, but being stress about boredom while exploring the first act very much doesn’t work as a contrast to the second act. So maybe a dedicated keybinding to toggle gaining xp:s at all by auto-clickers while exploring would have been good. The boredom going up isn’t actually that problematic though, if you start moving about or take a fight, even when maxed out, it drops quite quickly. But it is hard for the player to know that.
Thank you very much for playing and recording <3 I’ll be sipping my tea and taking notes