A lot of games for Minetest, even the relatively well-made ones, feel samey, too derivative. Nothing is ever wholly unique anymore, but Shadow Forest is not the usual fare that I expect out of Minetest. It is truly an game. It's also the first time I've thought "maybe ContentDB needs a souls-like tag", even if that's not the most accurate way to describe Shadow Forest.
You'll be running around at breakneck pace in this game, looking for the collectibles and dodging the baddies. The RPG elements, like Dark Souls, are gained at a campfire and are mostly there to help to help improve your stats if you are struggling. If you're good at the game, or speedrunning, then they're completely optional. You may want some damage upgrades though as the final boss can be a bit of a bullet sponge.
The game is visually and aurally appealing. It has a proper aesthetic going. It has a moral to the story. It has nice and themed level design. The 1.0 Game Jam version had issues with being swamped with infinitely-spawning mobs, and a lot of high frequencies in the staff noises. The 1.1 release leaves the game hard in spots but not unbeatable, and the staff sounds are much better.
Wuzzy is an expert with Minetest and it shows. Shadow Forest makes use of a recent feature that controls the fog distance independent of your settings. It also doesn't let you choose options like creative mode, enable health, and other things that can be left checked the wrong way for playing a Jam Game. One problem I had though was the dialogue didn't word wrap and ran off the right edge of the screen. This is at 1080p resolution fullscreen on my desktop monitor.
There is a workaround for your dialog text bug: If you reduce the window width by just 1 pixel less than 1920 pixels (which is exactly your resolution. Ouch!), the font will become smaller. I actually worked to fix the problem at the last day of the development time, but it seems I have chosen the wrong cutoff point. :-(
So, thanks for the review. Now that the game jam results are finally in, here's a longer reply:
Actually, this game was never meant as a "soulslike", as in "absurdly difficult". The large amount of mobs was not intended. The problem is that I've put too few restraints on mob spawning in so that mobs just keep spawning and spawning and killing them doesn't help to stop the spawning. Mob spawning is kinda broken and in fact, this is the last item on my TODO list before I ran out of time. :-/
There actually ARE limits to mob spawning, but obviously these restraints are just unbalanced and way too "permissive", i.e. allowing too many mobs to spawn. I think the biggest problem was that killing mobs doesn't stop or even slow down the infinite stream of mobs. So the current winning strategy is to run, which wasn't really intended lol.
Are you sure it's the projectile HIT sound that has a high frequency problem? I would say if any sound is a problem, it'll be the SHOOT sound since it's much higher pitchde than the hit sound. But anyway, I'll add that to the TODO list. This is actually one of the very few problems in the game I was NOT aware of before submission.
PS: I'm also planning to write a making-of and post it in the forum thread soon(ish). Stay tuned for that (and the post-jam update :P).
Are you sure it's the projectile HIT sound that has a high frequency problem? I would say if any sound is a problem, it'll be the SHOOT sound since it's much higher pitchde than the hit sound.
I fired the game up again to check. I'm sure it's the hit sound. It makes a clinking/bell noise that has something nasty up in the like 16-24 kHz range, whereas the shoot sound does have some volume in that circa 12-14 kHz range. I'm guessing these numbers not looking at a spectrograph, but anyway, I think a high pass or heavy downward EQ could help a lot.
The very upper end of the spectrum can be hard to hear depending on your age, past noise exposure and level of tinnitus - I'm not presuming anything about your hearing, but that's one reason people can miss these things. What I will say is with my own hearing, I've gotten a bit more tinnitus and lost a bit of the top frequencies over time, but at the same time when something is audible in that range tinnitus seems to make it worse because there's always a whine in my ears up at that range as well.
Version 1.1.0 has been released and hopefully all your reported bugs are fixed here, including the sound. See forum thread for changelog. You can also check out the new sound directly here: https://codeberg.org/Wuzzy/Shadow_Forest/issues/10
Please tell me if it's OK or if it still needs fixing.
A lot of games for Minetest, even the relatively well-made ones, feel samey, too derivative. Nothing is ever wholly unique anymore, but Shadow Forest is not the usual fare that I expect out of Minetest. It is truly an game. It's also the first time I've thought "maybe ContentDB needs a souls-like tag", even if that's not the most accurate way to describe Shadow Forest.
You'll be running around at breakneck pace in this game, looking for the collectibles and dodging the baddies. The RPG elements, like Dark Souls, are gained at a campfire and are mostly there to help to help improve your stats if you are struggling. If you're good at the game, or speedrunning, then they're completely optional. You may want some damage upgrades though as the final boss can be a bit of a bullet sponge.
The game is visually and aurally appealing. It has a proper aesthetic going. It has a moral to the story. It has nice and themed level design. The 1.0 Game Jam version had issues with being swamped with infinitely-spawning mobs, and a lot of high frequencies in the staff noises. The 1.1 release leaves the game hard in spots but not unbeatable, and the staff sounds are much better.
Wuzzy is an expert with Minetest and it shows. Shadow Forest makes use of a recent feature that controls the fog distance independent of your settings. It also doesn't let you choose options like creative mode, enable health, and other things that can be left checked the wrong way for playing a Jam Game. One problem I had though was the dialogue didn't word wrap and ran off the right edge of the screen. This is at 1080p resolution fullscreen on my desktop monitor.
Good game, I give it a 5/7.
There is a workaround for your dialog text bug: If you reduce the window width by just 1 pixel less than 1920 pixels (which is exactly your resolution. Ouch!), the font will become smaller. I actually worked to fix the problem at the last day of the development time, but it seems I have chosen the wrong cutoff point. :-(
I'll push a bugfix post-jam.
So, thanks for the review. Now that the game jam results are finally in, here's a longer reply:
Actually, this game was never meant as a "soulslike", as in "absurdly difficult". The large amount of mobs was not intended. The problem is that I've put too few restraints on mob spawning in so that mobs just keep spawning and spawning and killing them doesn't help to stop the spawning. Mob spawning is kinda broken and in fact, this is the last item on my TODO list before I ran out of time. :-/
There actually ARE limits to mob spawning, but obviously these restraints are just unbalanced and way too "permissive", i.e. allowing too many mobs to spawn. I think the biggest problem was that killing mobs doesn't stop or even slow down the infinite stream of mobs. So the current winning strategy is to run, which wasn't really intended lol.
Are you sure it's the projectile HIT sound that has a high frequency problem? I would say if any sound is a problem, it'll be the SHOOT sound since it's much higher pitchde than the hit sound. But anyway, I'll add that to the TODO list. This is actually one of the very few problems in the game I was NOT aware of before submission.
PS: I'm also planning to write a making-of and post it in the forum thread soon(ish). Stay tuned for that (and the post-jam update :P).
I fired the game up again to check. I'm sure it's the hit sound. It makes a clinking/bell noise that has something nasty up in the like 16-24 kHz range, whereas the shoot sound does have some volume in that circa 12-14 kHz range. I'm guessing these numbers not looking at a spectrograph, but anyway, I think a high pass or heavy downward EQ could help a lot.
The very upper end of the spectrum can be hard to hear depending on your age, past noise exposure and level of tinnitus - I'm not presuming anything about your hearing, but that's one reason people can miss these things. What I will say is with my own hearing, I've gotten a bit more tinnitus and lost a bit of the top frequencies over time, but at the same time when something is audible in that range tinnitus seems to make it worse because there's always a whine in my ears up at that range as well.
And thanks again for the great game :D
Version 1.1.0 has been released and hopefully all your reported bugs are fixed here, including the sound. See forum thread for changelog. You can also check out the new sound directly here: https://codeberg.org/Wuzzy/Shadow_Forest/issues/10
Please tell me if it's OK or if it still needs fixing.