Captus Studio

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A member registered Sep 15, 2023 · View creator page →

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Liminal Space

A Dark Dive into the Astral Abyss.

Captus Studio

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Gatt & Glitch jam comments · Posted in Gatt & Glitch jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

This is a cool little platformer! The gimmick is nice and the controls felt good for a game of this genre. I do have a few suggestions, though:

1. Instead of the dialogue playing at a set speed, you could make it a "press A to progress" sort of thing. This may not have been a problem for everyone but I tend to be a fast reader, so the dialogue did interrupt the flow of the game a little.

2. There were a few issues with the camera - it would freeze in place at certain spots until I messed with an object as Glitch, after which the camera would follow Gatt again as normal. If this was fixed, the game would play much more smoothly.

Overall, though, I liked it! I do appreciate the twist you put on the theme here, with the "space" being the out-of-bounds space of the game world instead of space in the conventional sense.

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Moonstruck jam comments · Posted in Moonstruck jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

Fun game! I really liked the orbital mechanics, and the ending was a nice touch as well.

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Walter. jam comments · Replied to King_Dreadz in Walter. jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

You're welcome, I'm happy to offer helpful feedback where I can! I wish you and your team well as you continue your game development journey.

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Nebula_7 jam comments · Replied to Hosein_SunFlower in Nebula_7 jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

Ah, gotcha! That makes sense, although I feel it interrupted the otherwise fast pace of the game sometimes. It's not a bad mechanic, but tuning it down a little bit would probably help there.

Either way, good job!

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Space Shooter jam comments · Replied to TSE0523 in Space Shooter jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

No worries, life happens! I think my not noticing the effect of the ice bullets might've just been a me problem lol, but that does make a lot of sense.

I hope I didn't sound dismissive of your work in my review - what you have here is good so far, and given the GameJam constraints and life stuff going on I'd say you should be happy with what you've achieved here!

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Walter. jam comments · Posted in Walter. jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

I like the art of the game, and the option to change color palettes is fantastic. The music/SFX are also well-made. Everything about these elements feels very GameBoy-ish, which I think is great!

The foundation for good platformer gameplay is here as well, but unfortunately it is held back by a pretty major bug - the player character is "sticky" and won't move left or right at all unless in the air, meaning you have to spam the jump button to make any forward progress. The game is still completable because you can be next to a wall without being on the ground to initiate a jump, but the process of finishing the game basically boils down to spamming jump while holding D.

If this was an intentional gameplay design decision, I do apologize for mistaking it as a bug. This gameplay element wasn't advertised on the game page, so I just assumed it was a bug.

I hope this doesn't sound harsh, as I do respect the effort you have put into the game and think it's a nice project, but I hope the criticism is helpful as you continue to develop your game-making skills. We're right there with you - our game certainly ended up with a few problems too, lol

For a first-time GameJam project, this is good! I hope it has been a great learning experience for you and your team.

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Liminal Space jam comments · Replied to TSE0523 in Liminal Space jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

Thank you, we're glad you had a good experience playing the game! I can definitely see where you're coming from with that, so we'll be sure to keep that in mind when working on future projects. Thank you for the feedback!

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Liminal Space jam comments · Replied to Link3605 in Liminal Space jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

Thank you so much for the kind words! We are definitely in agreement with you on how easy it can be to get lost in the game, lol. The feedback in this regard has been very insightful and we hope to learn from it moving forward.

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Liminal Space jam comments · Replied to NepherTheLess in Liminal Space jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

We're glad you enjoyed the atmosphere and general gameplay! In hindsight, there are definitely a number of things we would've added to make the user experience less disorienting (room name shown at bottom of screen, etc). Thank you for your feedback though, it is valuable!

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Last Breath jam comments · Replied to BL1TTZ in Last Breath jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

You're welcome, and no problem! My friend and I also noticed a number of user experience issues in our own game so you're far from the only one having those issues, lol

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System Flight Explorer jam comments · Posted in System Flight Explorer jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

This is a really cool project! The environment is incredible and the flight mechanics feel good. My only issues with the flight were:

1. It's a bit difficult to stop the ship, as it seems to like drifting around a bit when the throttle is set to zero.

2. When the Close! warning appears when hitting a planet's collision box, the ship seems to become "sticky" and requires a decent amount of thrust in a straight upward direction to go anywhere.

I don't mean to level these criticisms as a way to downplay the quality of the work you've done, as making a 3D flight simulator in the GameBoy style is already very impressive under the time constraints of this GameJam! That being said, I feel these things would make the experience a bit smoother if addressed.

Another thing is the lack of audio. With the game being so atmospheric and sandbox-y, I feel the lack of any ambience/music or audio feedback had a negative impact on the experience.

I'm very impressed with this project overall, and you should feel proud about having something like this playable and reasonably polished in such a short time! Excellent work.

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DRIFTING STATION jam comments · Posted in DRIFTING STATION jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

I really like the concept of this game, but there was a number of graphical bugs, odd collision boxes, and a loading error that locked the game up during a level transition in the rooms with the rounded glass walls. Because of this, I wasn't able to make it very far into it. The audio/SFX were nice, but they were quite loud (I turned down my PC volume to adjust) and another bug caused a rapidly looping high-pitched collision sound when standing in certain places.

The parts of the game that did work seemed good, though! The loading screen in particular looks awesome, and the graphics in general (outside of the bugs making some things invisible) were well made. The platforming felt awkward on the small platforms, and the bugs unfortunately did not help here, but with some sensitivity adjustments and polishing I'm sure it could be made much better.

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ShipBuilder jam comments · Posted in ShipBuilder jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

This is really cool! I'm having a hard time figuring out what each of the parts do, and the controls took some getting used to (particularly in regards to flying the ship that was built), but I enjoyed trying it out. Being unable to save designs is a bit sad, but given the time constraints of the GameJam I completely understand why a saving system like this wasn't implemented.

Good job on this one!

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Nebula_7 jam comments · Posted in Nebula_7 jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

Very fun race-and-shoot gameplay! The motion of the ship feels very fluid, and shooting/ramming enemies is satisfying. The recoil from shooting the gun is a nice touch. The addition of a brief tutorial screen is greatly appreciated, as knowing the keybinds helped me jump into the action quickly. The music is great as well!

I did notice that I was sometimes unable to shoot. Is this tied to the energy bar at the bottom left? My apologies if I missed something, but I'm not really sure what the energy bar does (other than that it seemed to go up as you fly faster) and don't think there was any mention of it in the controls screen.

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Last Breath jam comments · Posted in Last Breath jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

Excellent little survival game you've got here! The only issue I had was with learning how to play the game - my Xbox controller didn't seem to work for it, so I was just pressing buttons on my keyboard for the first few attempts until I figured out the interaction buttons. That being said, it has a very nice gameloop of managing your O2/energy, hopping into the mechsuit to defend the base, and breaking rocks as fuel to escape.

My favorite part was, of course, the mech. The little map indicator made it very clear where I was aiming and what asteroids I had to prioritize shooting first to protect the dome. The graphics in general (but particularly in the mech) are great, and the music is very nice! The tilting of the pixel graphics on the asteroids makes it a bit less gameboy-ish in my opinion (diagonal pixels), but I do love the motion of the asteroids in their animation and the tilted asteroids do fit the graphical style of the game very well.

Overall, though, great work!

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Space Shooter jam comments · Posted in Space Shooter jam comments

Captus Studio1 year ago

I really like the direction you're going with this game - it's a good foundation for a bullet hell roguelite with some chill music and fun player/enemy designs. The game as a whole is alright - it functions reasonably well especially given the constraints of a GameJam, but none of the art/music/gameplay elements stood out to me either.

As for gameplay, it felt like +Fire and one or two +Pierces makes the game extremely easy - there's no reason to go with +Atk because the enemies all died in 1-2 hits even with Atk penalties stacked up. Also, because the enemies just move directly towards you at a set speed that you can outrun (except for the shooting ones, whose projectiles made things a little more interesting), they didn't offer much of a challenge. There were also a few oddities I ran into while playing:

1. If you fly around without shooting enemies, it keeps spawning them in and eventually causes the game to stutter a lot and jolt the player/surroundings out of frame repeatedly. If you had a limited count of enemies per wave, or just a maximum enemy spawn cap, this issue could be avoided.

2. I didn't notice any changes to my attacks when getting the Ice Bullet upgrade. What was the intended effect here?

3. The game seems to reset itself to the starting wave after beating wave 14. I'm not sure if this was intended or not, but the immediate game reset was a bit odd. If beating wave 14 gave you a "you win" screen or something similar, that would've probably made this a better transition.

4. When I tried to use my Xbox controller to play this, the A button wasn't mapped. Pressing the D-Pad allowed for movement as normal, and pressing B paused the game, but I was unable to shoot until going back to using my keyboard.

5. When the waves hit double digits, the numbers become misaligned on the screen.

All in all, this was a fun little shooter. I hope this criticism helps as you continue developing your gamemaking skills!

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Captus Studio

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