Play game
The Sacred Flame's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Visuals | #1 | 4.422 | 4.625 |
| Overall (Fun and Playability) | #8 | 3.944 | 4.125 |
| Creativity / Innovation | #26 | 3.347 | 3.500 |
| Audio | #34 | 2.809 | 2.938 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How was the theme(s) implemented?
Cleaning up the hero's mess is the primary plot driving point. Retrofuturism and elemental RPS were both incorporated as well. There is a detailed in-game description with spoilers.
Where did the assets come from?
Homemade graphics
Most Graphics were 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
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
I think this was a great entry that was bogged down by the numbers. After reading Jimbly's review just below me, I realize I had the same experience (dark, left the first island before I could get anything, didn't turn in my trickster brother quest).
Overall, a very nice entry but I ended up using the dude as a damage sponge, doing Block 90% of the time since he was absolutely useless at anything else. And the lady was absolutely fantastic at everything and just solo'd everything. I did notice the fact that you could injure fire creatures after hitting them with water, but the dude was still just better off tanking hits than trying to hit anything.
It wasn't very clear when you could hit the fire serpents (something in the dialogue made me think I could damage them after getting the wind spell for some reason) and entering combat with them just to realize they're immune and having to wait until they killed you was kind of a slog.
So yes, great entry, fantastic graphics and look'n'feel but the numbers really need looking at.
Thanks for the feedback! I agree it could use more time balancing. I'm not sure what else to say about that which hasn't already been said, but yes it could use improvement. As for the fire serpents and the fire boss - they become vulnerable to all attacks once you hit them with water once. It was meant as a puzzle, some people figured it out and other people felt it was broken or mysterious. It's good getting feedback like this, I can further tune future games to be more aligned with expectations.
Thanks for linking the palette, I was curious if it was a specific one. I guess it was specific but very obscure =). At times the game was awfully dark, was the 3D view/map additionally darkened beyond the palette colors? Once I turned down my lights and closed my curtains I could play better :D.
I had to replay the first area as I was kicked off without getting any loot or killing any wolves the first time. Second time I ensured the genocide of the wolves, as is expected of me. I got some new armor, and my AC went up... and I wasn't completely sure if that was good or bad =) (pretty clear it was good, I just wasn't sure which way it was going to go...).
I couldn't figure out why Jora could hurt the fire serpents with her Hand Axe, but Hargir couldn't (didn't matter much, as blasting them with magic was more effective, just confused me), I think later I deduced they needed to be injured with magic first, but often the magic one-shotted them, so took me a while to get that.
At the end, there was a guy who offered a reward if I killed the trickster's brother, which I did, however I was immediately whisked away since I then had the 3 songs so didn't get to go back to him - was there something I missed there? (Obviously not anything important to progress since that was the end of the game...)
Very solid game! Felt nice to be whizing through menus with hotkeys - most of the time, except when I accidentally pressed E to turn but I was in a dialog and E selected something else :D. Power growth felt nice, combats were hard, especially as you're figuring out what to do, which was nice. I absolutely loved the visuals, really looked great!
Thank you for taking the time to create a large writeup. I noticed the game plays really dark on PCs ... usually. I'm genuinely unsure why. Somebody mentioned it has to do with the fullscreen mode but I haven't looked into it yet. Basically the colors are exactly what the LoSpec DELETE palette wanted but rendered in a "increase contrast dials to the max" way for some reason. This is a new one to me.
The first area does kick people off of it a bit too early I think. Lots of people leave without grabbing the loot or XP. The game does up you to level 2 invisibly if you don't kill the wolves and drops very good loot near the beginning of the cave but that's the less exciting route for sure. The true expectation is a complete map covered with empty chests and corpses of course! I love that you're still thinking in terms of "low AC may be good" lol.
You're correct about the fire serpents - once they have been injured with water magic (same for Trickster's brother) they are vulnerable to all attacks. The Trickster's brother's flames disappear if you hit him with a water spell but it's so subtle I don't know if anybody saw it.
The reward is a lightning trident that makes it easier for Hargir to harm the water snake but the thing was underpowered and Lightning Strike was really meant to prevent the players from being underpowered late game so I guess you don't need it. As for missing content - I'm fine with that under some circumstances but I don't think this game really nailed it.
Too bad about hitting 'E' and missing a screen - LocalMinimum had the same thing happen to him and he missed the conversation where he got exiled. He was walking through the forest and BAM he's on a boat starving to death. So, I think in the future I'll prevent WASD/QE from ever being the keys that accept/dismiss a conversation.
I'm really glad you liked the combat and the visuals. Those are the things I'm the most proud of. Cheers.
I did like this quite a lot! I’m not one one to be very nostalgia driven so the control scheme and menu systems mostly adds friction for me without any clear benefit. But I also understand why you go for that stuff lol.
So my main issue is probably the chance to hit balancing. It didn’t feel at all right to me to have the boy miss the overwhelming majority of time. OR if that was gonna be the situation, I would have wanted an auto-block on him. Similarly, each fight, which can last quite a few rounds, I found myself repeating 1.5 intricate patterns for the sister (C3A or similar or C[heal]1) and I think I’d found the experience so much more rewarding if there was a “Repeat last” type action (for both of them). Some modernization / quality of life. Similarly, though I’m very happy there was resting, why did we need to do that ourselves? I saw no cost of resting.
I’m not sure exactly why, maybe because the map was so good, or something in the very rectangular shape of the tiles in the view-port or how the walls were painted to break up the grid-lines, made it so much more easier to navigate via the ever-present map so that I did quite a bit of map-walking. And I think that is a pity when you’ve put so much effort into the “3D” art.
I found that the firestorm spell was bugged out (but it was funny to get -800 mana/energy). It could ofc be an effect of running a windows executable through wine/proton inside a vm.
I did like the structure of the story / maps. And they were reasonably structured with some variation.
So overall, I think it was a very good entry!
Play-through:
Thank you for the kind words, thoughtful feedback and full play through! I learned a lot about my game watching you play it. To answer some questions from the play through:
I agree the hit balancing is off - my idea was to have each creature be a bit of a simple strategic puzzle - bats are supposed to be very high AC but they were a huge part of the game and Hargir just kept missing them. Other things often had an AC too high so he just misses a lot in most fights. Very unsatisfying.
I completely agree it would be nice to see what the spells do. I built the game on top of a "Might and Magic 2.5" engine I had created. The very bizarre UI is an artifact of that. So it may have nostalgia value for some people but now that I've used it, played with it, and seen people respond to it I think I'd prefer something more modern in the future. Having to hit C3A etc over and over is authentic, but the UI isn't the part of 90s games we generally want to bring back.
I enjoyed seeing you figure out that you're not ready for certain fights and then going back to them. That means the balance somewhat worked which is good. As for the map being much more clear than the levels, you are right about that for sure. It seems to be how our genre works.
Thank you so much for all the effort in your video and write-up.
EDIT - on more thing - I noticed the "move sideways" button 'A' was also "(A)ccept" during the conversation at the end of act 1 where you are kicked off the island. So you moved into a guy and immediately missed the conversation and arrived at a cutscene on a boat. That must have been pretty unsatisfying to see. Basically the event was you got yelled at buy a guy and then exiled from the island for stealing the figurine.
Yeah it was a pity that I only got to see that cut-scene for a single frame :)
And I did totally feel that each enemy was at puzzle, it was just the boy’s role in the puzzle and the streamlining of the whole thing that needed work. The actual puzzle of them felt quite intuitive and nice.
Looks great! I do wish there was a bit of variety in your movement sound (just because I love to spam move real fast haha)
You know, I have to say I completely agree. Also thank you!
Everything there is to say has already been said.
I really like it!
Well worth porting to a real 8-bit system :-)
Oh, if I were only that cool! :)
Thank you
As usual your entry is really good!
Visuals are really great, the retro look, animations, palette choice, all speaks the game of that age. Controls and keyboard-only approach fortifies it. By the end of the game I’ve built the muscle memory for most of the things I need to do.
I loved treasure chests hidden behind encounters, so you get a reward after taking some risk and get stronger as a result. I also like the approach I usually call “puzzle RPG”, which basically means that you need to find encounters you’re comfortable with, finish them, level up, find the next challenge, rinse and repeat.
The RNG when your character miss all the time is a bit annoying, but if you play strategically it’s not a big deal, it just makes each encounter a bit repetitive and a bit too long. A, C-2-1, rinse and repeat, sometimes it felt like I’m playing a piano and when my characters improve and get more powerful I start to play a different melody :D
Speaking of melody, just any basic ambient sound would help the atmosphere, however that wasn’t a big issue, as I was getting involved in the story and fights.
Ah, and one last thing - I think if you skip the selection, if you only have one valid target will help the game a little bit. For example when you’re casting a spell or shooting, you still have to press 1 or A, while they’re the only valid targets.
Here’s my play-through:
Thank you so much! Great write-up and play through video, I really appreciate both of them.
I really think you got this game. I intended it as a "puzzle RPG" and although the hit rate was too low (absolutely agree) it seemed like you went through it basically exactly as I hoped most people would. I know what you mean about playing the piano, I have muscle memory for everything including the gear given at the provisions lodge! This was my attempt to play with a M&M 2.5 engine I built that copies M&M 2 UI, but it's not exactly peak UI. I think I'll figure out something more streamlined in the future. Especially adding things like "don't pick a target if there is only 1 target" which is on my TODO list and never got done.
I loved your comment about how the longsword is typically a 2-handed weapon but in RPGs it's only 1 handed - you are so right! Believe it or not I had it as a 2-handed weapon for a while but 2-h weapons were bugged so I changed it at the last minute. I figured "if D&D has 1-handed longswords then I guess I can too".
Sounds absolutely would help. I really think the game would feel much more atmospheric with those, my time management was bad related to that sadly.
I found your play through very entertaining to watch and I really appreciate all I learn about the game watching you play it. Also glad it works on Linux!
I second the cleverness how the theme is incorporated. The graphics of this game are amazing and there are even animations. How did you do all this in such a short time? I guess the game wants to simulate how the classics played, but having to type so many different keys gets old quick. Why can´t I for example target enemies with a sling with the number keys? Why does it have to be a, b, c? The movement was super satisfying and snappy. Maybe a couple of more sound effects and a bit of ambience noises would be nice. My main problem was, that the game is super difficult, Hargir missed almost with every attack. If I could not cast bolt I would loose almost ever battle. And you should use a fullscreen window not fullscreen mode, as AMD cards seem to often have problems with fullscreen these days. When I started the game for the first time, everything was super dark and I had to switch to window and fullscreen back and forth to fix the colors. Hm…oh yes, the map was totally broken, never showed the correct spot.
Thank you! I appreciate the thoughtful writeup. I absolutely agree with you that the UI is a bit clunky and it really could have used more ambient sound. The sound part I ran out of time on, and the UI was meant to be a near clone of Might & Magic 2 which I thought was interesting to play with. As for difficulty balancing you seem to share that opinion with most players. I really wanted another day to just balance it but it was so much work drawing everything and creating everything I ran out of time for that as well. I'm surprised the map was broken, I never saw that bug.
As to how I got this done in as short time it was a combination of having a M&M 2 engine ready that was pretty efficient to create content for and having way too much time spent developing the skillset of making these games and their content quickly. For example for the wolves I took a wolf asset I had then did a really, really fast scribble paint-over of it with very few colors and called that good enough. For the druids I took 3 photos of "google image search creepy older woman" and I just bit crushed them, erased half of them, and drew over them / used fill tools to make them 3 or 4 colors. Lots of stuff like that. Fullscreen illustrations took about 1-2 hours each. Each component of the game was very small and fast to do but only because I had a combination of techniques and tools to make it so. The UI was text because that's the fastest way I know to build a UI, the background of the cave and the lodges were solid black because I didn't waste time drawing backgrounds, the cave sky is black for the same reason, I re-use the water in 7 or 8 place, etc.
I absolutely agree with the screen resolution stuff. I really dropped the ball on that one. I'm glad it's able to work though.
I really appreciate the write-up, thank you for taking the time to write it.
I hope, I wasn´t sounding to negative here. I really appreciate the game. I never was big on M&M (I actually rented the Genesis version as a kid and hated it g), but it is so refreshing seeing a game made in this way today. I believe, that we should deviate more often from the standards, especially the controls. Crimson Desert came out a while ago and while the game has problems, there was so much hate for the controls, which just did not conform to Dark Souls controls. And I don´t see, why this is inherently bad. If we don´t try something, we will always play the same way and that is soooo boring.
Oh no, not negative at all. Very good feedback. When you spend the time writing a long and thoughtful reply I try and do the same answering your questions and sharing whatever I think might be useful. :)
Wow what a ride! I totally loved this game. First off, as everybody else i have to compliment the graphics. This can be one of the games i played in recent years which has the most genuine early 90's VGA DOS game look. I mean you could easily sell this game as "The lost dungeon crawler game from 1992" to anybody. The keyboard only controls and UI has the authentic DOS game feel as well.
One thing i found jarring about the UI is that , instead of having borderlines between windows, you just left space and Unity's default background color is visible in spaces between windows. I can tell that bcs i use Unity too.Another thing about UI i found jarring is that, there are attack and fight buttons which do the same thing. I was missing a flee button in the battle command panel too but i think you didn't add that bcs your main inspration for this game is M&M series. Fleeing from battle is not a thing in M&M AFAIK.I usually dont like static gapblocker enemies but in this game it didn't bother me that much. Combat feels somewhat tactical. In most jam games, combat is just button mashing, this has some well designed combat. But in the second area all physical attacks miss %90 of the time on all enemies. That's where i figured out you can cast spells bcs you can only kill the monsters in the elemental cave with spells unlike the island map. My strategy was blocking with the fighter and cast spells with mage until i beat the game. That made physical attacks somewhat useless on second act of the game.
The incorporation of the theme" cleaning up heroe's mess" is very clever. I never thought about cleaning our own mess but cleaning up other's mess for some reason. It is a pretty long game for a jam game. There is no saving but reviving on the last tile you die is good thinking to mitigate that. Difficulty is very well balanced. When you feel underpowered for an enemy,kill weaker enemies get xp and level up. The loop works very well and feels engaging.
Absolutely a gorgeous and fun to play game. Congrats for the great work!
Awesome! Thank you for such a long and thoughtful writeup. It feels so good to hear you say you loved the game!
The VGA DOS look was something I tried forever to accomplish with 3D texture maps and I never found a reasonable way to pull it off. So I went "actual 2D" but it's really hard. Drawing things at different distances and the such is a gigantic amount of work but I have some tools to help with it. I'm very happy with the aesthetic myself but by the end of this project my finger hurt like hell (where my drawing stylus rested on it) and I was so very over drawing pictures of trees and stuff. Also fire, I may never ever draw any fire again. The room full of candles broke me. Why the hell did I do that? No idea!
I totally hear you about the missing flee button - running away during the fight was bugged so I removed it but I figured if the game auto-loads right after the fight ends badly then the consequence of failure isn't that bad. M&M2 options before the fight are "attack, bribe, hide, run" but I wasn't going to implement all of those. As for fight and attack - one of them lets you choose the target and the other targets monster #1, this is taken straight from M&M 2. It's not particularly intuitive I know, I think later M&M games have a much better system of selecting a "target" monster and having everything just target that guy unless you change the target but I figured I'd go with the M&M2 system just for fun. I don't like it, having both "attack" and "fight" is really not intuitive at all. I plan to change it in the future, "attack" + "fight" is a bad system. The feedback about Unity's default background is interesting. I intentionally placed a blue border between the windows, that's just the color choice I went with. M&M2 uses a solid maroon red border but I thought that didn't look good with my color palette so I changed it. I intended to change the color to red when a combat started but I ran out of time. I configured the Unity solid skybox color to be black and I show that when you're looking at the character sheet.
Static gap blockers enemies are not my favorite either, I'm on the same page as you with that. Since I wanted heavy M&M2 inspiration (which is also static enemies) I went with it and I found it easier to design strategic levels this way, but I really do prefer games where the monsters chase you. I think I'll go back to that in the future. As for monster AC being too high for Hargir I hear you on that. It's probably my #1 piece of feedback at this point. I want one more day to play balance so stuff like this doesn't happen but alas I didn't have another day. Oh well.
I really appreciate the kind words and the effort you put into your feedback. Thank you.
Ok my bad, i checked it again. I saw that black background outlining the window borders when i look at it more carefully. It is more apparent on character screen as you said.
It was a nice little adventure. I like that you get "revived" at the point just before a failed encounter. This makes you dare to try them out without to much fair of losing progress.
Also nice little story, even though I had some hard time following what was happening.
Good length of the game too.
Great job,
I quit to DOS now.
Thank you! Last year my game was very "if you screw up you restart the whole game, and you'll screw up a lot on high difficulty" and I didn't want that this time around. The story evolved a lot during development. Early draft of it had the heroes spending a 1000 years on a magic island where you don't age leveling up boat building and druid magic. That ... didn't work for reasons. The whole of it was a bit contrived but really I just wanted an excuse to explore cool areas and kill stuff.
Once again you’ve created a visually stunning game. I loved every minute of it… minus the 60 minutes trying to get the resolution to work. BUT, every other minute I loved!
Only thing this was lacking was a nice ambient sound track.
Thanks for making this wonderful game.
You can watch my playthrough here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=gVDCcukcqOrym3Yn&t=3900&v=rAQHqcPamXY&feature=youtu.be
Haha thank you for all the effort you put into getting it to work on a stream and for figuring out what the PowerToys issue was. I really appreciate it when people like yourself say such nice things about my games, it really motivates me to continue to make them.
As for the soundtrack I 100% agree. I was listening to perfect soundtrack music the whole time I was developing but I didn't have rights to any of that, and finding ambient audio got left to the last minute sadly. Oh well, next time maybe. I should get you to help me set up some 16-bit Sandblaster era music with your tracker, that would be pretty sweet.
That was fantastic. The visuals were stunning and the overall feeling of the game was spot on. About the only feedback I'd offer is to raise the accuracy of the player characters in combat or add an accuracy bonus to some weapons. Overall, the game felt great, but it did feel like I was lacking control over many of the battles.
Thank you for the compliment and for playing! I really wanted another day to tweak play balance - that combined
Graphics look amazing! Very effective used of limited colour palette. Alas I can't rate it yet as I'm on Linux and this one doesn't run for me in WINE. I'll keep my eyes out for a playthough video, though.
One of these days I'll figure out how to make my games WINE-compatible. You're not the only one playing the games on Linux and that's something I genuinely would like to support. As for the compliment, thank you! I went on to Lospec and grabbed the palette of the day a few days before the jam and did an art test with it (the test was to take a M&M2 screenshot, change it to the new palette, and watch it get a million times better) so I figured that palette would work. It's called "DELETE". Very nice to work with.
Thanks for the reply. I suspect it's a lottery as to whether a Windows game runs on WINE or not. I've played some jam games that run fine on WINE, and I'm sure it wasn't because of anything the developer did intentionally. All the best and good luck with the jam!
Just checked out CaptainCoder's playthrough, and wow, you've created a whole RPG with a genuinely engaging narrative! The spiritual/mystical elements add real depth to the story, and the Druids are especially creepy (like the witches in Macbeth). Innovative idea to use of songs as a parallel form of magic.
The artwork is great, as well as the limited palette I like the use of black outline to tie everything together. The combat system is involving but not too complex, and the UI seems no-nonsense and really effective. Kind of you to allow restart from current position on death.
Nothing negative to add, really. I know a combat bug occured during the playthrough, but that can happen to any of us.
Great submission, and thanks for helping to organise the jam!
Thank you for the kind words! I hadn't thought of the witches of MacBeth but you're totally right. I see that now.
Yes, black outline and limited lighting made my life so much easier. The feel don't look good? Just erase them. Don't want to waste time on a background? How about solid black. As for the UI it's the same idea. So much easier to create a "button" by just writing the word "Rest" on the screen with a green 'R'.
Sounds like my (non-existent) fashion sense: if they've got it in black, just buy it in black ;-)
I normally avoid downloads during gamejams, but this one is well worth the exception! Beautifully put together.
Yeah, Hargir dies a bit quickly tho :(
Thank you for making an exception to play my game! I'm glad you liked it.
Yeah as eefano said before holy hell it's a pain with Hargir missing everything almost xD My only other complaint would be you need some dungeon music! Or at least some ambience... Just a bit too quiet... Really good work though :)
Yeah, music would have helped a lot. I wanted strong ambience and music can really help with that. Just ran out of time. Thank you for playing.
The was a lot of fun. I love the aesthetic of the whole experience.
Thank you so much!
Why Hargir MISSES EVERYTHING? The RNG imbalance is the only frustrating thing in this wonderful game
Thank you for playing and calling the game wonderful.
It’s a bummer because the missing rate of the non-magical attacks makes the game pratically unwinnable, even with high XP: the water attack on the trickster’s brother is too low on damage. Once the mana is depleted, everything else misses. Hargir is practically the bullet sponge of the party, I make him always block, his attacks are almost never successful. Bug: the firestorm spell can be endlessly cast in the same turn, decimating affecting opponents, and the mana goes in negative numbers on unaffecting ones.
EDIT: against all odds, when the mana depleted, Jora killed it with ranged attacks, so I managed to see the ending! Nicee
Sweet! I'm glad you got to the end. I would love another day to play balance it. I don't have good systems in place to play balance quickly or easily. Maybe I'll solve that later.
The orphans got back to their homeland.
I greatly enjoyed your game per usual, these graphics and animations are as atmospheric as it can get and get you absorbed by the story which is told, the cutscenes as much as the tiles as much as the monsters as much as the insides of the buildings all look great, I love the druids' portait.
Thanks for sharing!
Wow that was fast. Thanks for playing! Space Prisoners was one of my favorite games of the 2025 jam so I'm really excited to play yours. Especially since you also went with "DOS-era text with green for highlights :) "
I played the game as soon as I received a notification that you released it ;) .