You're in charge of the friendly dungeon's basement, a place where the most troublesome NPCs of the dungeon get thrown out for corrective measures. Your job is to make groups of 3 or more NPC "friends" (either all of the same type or all different) and send them back up to the friendly dungeon above.
<dpad> - move your ghost dude around
<x> - grab and hold characters with your dude's shadow, release and press again to grab more
<z> - once you grab 3 or more characters, press this button while still holding <x> to try and send them back up
This game is based on a famicart by @wyel made for the A Game By Its Cover Jam 2018 at itch.io.
This is probably one of my most experimental games to date so you might find the gameplay a bit strange. Hopefully you'll still give it a chance and tell me what you think. Cheers Pico-8 Fellows!
Update: Forgot to add my usual credit + year to the title screen. Also added an earlier less crazy alarm when the friendly meter is running out.
Love the polish and the art!
Gameplay is fun, but I'm not terribly great at it. I think it would be easier if each type of character was outlined using a different color maybe..? (instead of changing based on their state)
And maybe the goal could be to either match colors, characters.. or both for a bonus.
Iunno -- looks amazing, though :)
Thanks guys. TBH, this project was a struggle because of its very experimental gameplay. Glad you enjoyed it tho!
So I played this one also, very difficult and mostly fair difficulty too, so I enjoyed it. I'm pretty oldskool in my gaming so I like tough, short games or tough infinite/score chasing games.
So here's my critiques:
1.) It's very difficult to get more than 3 monsters in your circle of friends that are identical while grabbing another one. I think there is room to implement possibilities of mixing friends..such as minimum of 3 identical monsters but if you have 3 of one kind and 3 of another, you can still send them off, but possibly get half points. Sort of like in poker with 2 pair or something.
2.) Considering how difficult it is to coral the monsters, I think it might be worth experimenting the ability to push monsters around to get them to be collectable into the circle quicker, but I'm not sure if that would break the game too much.
3.) The biggest critique I have is that there's only one difficulty and no ramping whatsoever. I would advise that the game start with only 3 or 4 monsters and gradually as the player lasts longer, the monsters start getting more diverse and more difficult to collect into trios. It would feel more polished that way, even if you didn't take into account any other suggestion/critique I had, this alone would boost up the playability quite a lot, imo without changing anything gameplay wise.
4.) I know the pico's color limitations make it difficult, but colorizing the monsters would help visually quite a lot when matching. There's two monsters that look kind of identical, so in a rush it's infuriating to realize you picked up the wrong one! I think even doing something as simple as just coloring the eyes would help while still maintaining the current ghostly aesthetic they already have.
5.) 'mission' based play might be an alternative for that polished feel...i.e. if you've ever played Klax, it's always the same game, match tiles, but levels require specific kinds of matches and a specific number of them, or they're timed or they require you to last through an endurance of a specific kind. In context to this game, you might have, for instance, 'Match 3 monsters 3 times!' and then follow it up with 'Match 3 monsters 4 times" and then 'Match 4 monsters 3 times!" etc. And obviously offer a bonus for remaining time while adjusting time available to meet those requirements so that it's got that sweaty palm level of urgency that makes a good arcade style puzzle game.
I enjoyed this one, it's much different than your other games and i quite like it as is, but I think it's at a place where some gameplay changes/alterations could possibly make it more enjoyable. The concept is great already.
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