"Defeat the shadows invading the grove and brew strange potions in this magical mini-metroidvania!"


GDD: Click here!

Shadowleaf Grove is a short 2D platformer-puzzle game with Metroidvania elements. The story is about a witch who discovers that evil shadows have been invading the grove, so she takes it upon herself to save her home!

The game was made in ~10 days for Pirate Jam 15, which happened on July 2024


Controls

Keyboard Controller Description
WASD Control stick Character movement and potion throw direction
L A button Jump: maintain to jump higher!
O B Button Switch equipped potion
I Y Button Heal
K X Button Potion toss
Esc Start Pause menu

Credits


Updated 24 days ago
StatusReleased
PlatformsWindows, HTML5
Rating
Rated 4.6 out of 5 stars
(8 total ratings)
AuthorsAlvesito, Adrián Cortés, Tetraminose
GenrePlatformer, Action, Adventure, Puzzle
Made withGodot
Tags2D, Cute, Fantasy, Metroidvania, Singleplayer
Average sessionAbout a half-hour
LanguagesEnglish

Download

Download
Shadowleaf Grove Windows Desktop.zip 68 MB
Download
Game Design Document 999 kB

Development log

Comments

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

I'm on the itch page for like 20 minutes chilling to the music and watching the screenshots. I bet the game is good too!

Apparently pressing the heal button while changing screens softlocks you waaaaaaa

An absolutely beautiful game that has an insane amount of polish and content for a 2 week dev period. 

So first of all let me get get the bad out of the way. The boss is unnecessarily hard. I didn't finish the game because of it, which up until that point was fantastic.

The reasons why the boss are too hard and irritating are that up until that point there isn't much difficulty in the game at all pretty much every other enemy is easy to deal with then suddenly the boss is insane! The left hand hits me 75% of the time and I can't get out of the way and the right hand sweeps waaaay too high if it starts while your character is jumping. Which are you 90% of the time of the fight to hit the boss. So it's only if you are sitting on the ground waiting on the attack does it actually go low enough for you to safely jump over it. Finally the fact that there's no checkpoint immediately before the boss and you have to do that big climb again from 3 rooms away was just too much for me.

Also the character moves too slow and without a dash or something it really drags things down.

Now that all that is out of the way let me just say that this game is absolutely beautiful, the pixel art, the character design, the tilemaps, the parallax backgrounds. It's all so well designed and crafted that I can't believe this was done in 2 weeks. What an insane level of polish. 

Not to mention the UI and items. The potions were super cool too, although I think the particles need to be turned down a bit as they made it kinda hard to see sometimes, even if they are cool.

The audio is fantastic from start to finish. The character SFX are varied and great as are the rest of the SFX through the game. The music is non-stop bangers.

With the exception of the slow movement speed and lack of dash the gameplay is great. Using the different potions to remove barriers and traverse the environment was great. By the end with the combination of the explosive potion and slime potion I felt like I was back in portal 2 jumping around and bouncing from place to place. I was super confused about the introduction of the explosion potion though cos it comes out of a thing on the ceiling and anyone would dodge that normally as it's an explosion right? Only after feeling stuck did I jump into it and realised it was safe and the intended way forward.

I played on keyboard and it was a bit iffy at times but nothing that stopped me playing or got in the way. I didn't realise for quite some time though I could aim my potions with the directions though so at first I was trying to line up my shots from a distance to throw them. Thankfully I figured it out.

I would have loved to finish the game but with the boss mechanics seeming really unfair and the lack of nearby checkpoint it just wore me down after several attempts.

Overall this game is fantastic is almost all regards with a few light tweaks I could see this being a full game on Steam in the future and It wouldn't surprise me at all.

(+3)

Beautiful game. I really enjoyed the enemies, the artwork and the music. The platforming felt good, and I'm looking forward to the post-release version!

Aww I got stuck at the temple room because I come back lol. Anyways great game I feel so close completing it.

(+1)

This is absolutely a very fun game. Artistry (music and graphics) of this game is amazing. Gameplay is pretty solid, I enjoyed it a lot. I did a gameplay of this game. Enjoy, and again, amazing game!

So polished! The platforming handles smoothly. The enemy AI felt quite organic. I also love the visual effects -- the particle effects on the potions and parralaxing look great!

Very good art, and sounds.

The instructions say J to throw. It's actually K.

Also, I disappeared in a screen transition and am totally locked. Can't move, nothing. Had to quit.

Really liked it! I got to the explosion potion part, but refreshed and lost my progress ;-; The explosion mechanic wasn't clicking with me.

It was really satisfying to collect the potion ingredients. I was always super excited to unlock a new potion and find a new ingredient.

This was a cool metroidvania. I died to the boss and I respawned so far away from it. I wish it was closer. I'm bad at boss fights and I don't think I'll finish this game, but I enjoyed the platforming and the potion powerups. I loved the art and the backgrounds for each level. This game was super polished for being made in 2 weeks.

(1 edit)

I love the pixel art, the music, and I'm a fan of metroidvanias so yeah.
Really polished game for the 14 days!

(1 edit)

Sprite design is excellent. Coyote timer (jump grace period when leaving ground) is appreciated. Volume controls were put to good use. Mechanics are well integrated and introduced. Respawn mechanic is quick and easy and solid enough to be used to reset position when you need to - small exception for entering rooms from the opposite side.

Encountered an issue when walking back out of the entrance of the multiple trap bullet launchers room with the wood. Character appears stuck in the environemt and not visible. Found all potions, did not complete game because of this.


Potion particle effects are plentiful, though I find they sometimes cover up the thing you’re trying to throw them at (IE enemies). I also only found out you could throw upwards by accident. Throwing potions also locks you out of jumping. Firebombs are a touch hard to work with and I thought they were an environmental hazard when I first encountered them and turned back to try find some sort of powerup to get past it.

(2 edits)

Playing this game on my mac, on Chrome, visually I get stuck in the title screen. I can hear that the buttons work and the game has started, but I don't see it. I'll try on my PC later. From the screenshots, it looks amazing.
Edit* Eventually it worked. There were some issues with door not opening when they should have.

Overall, amazing visual, incredible music / sound fx. Ori caliber. <3

Everything about this is so good. The pixelart, the music, the core gameplay loop, the crafting system.

Most of all, I love how it was challenging but you don't reset progress, giving the player the choice of whether to retreat or persevere.

So polished for two weeks of work. Well done.

Really complete for a jam game, i'm impressed. Love the music

game sure could save....

also, when I got the explosion potion, I tried to go back, but from the roo with the many shooter going to the left room, I dont seem to be spawned in at the right place as character isnt in the right spot and camera isnt in the right place...
so had to close. and upon reopening, i am back at he games start -.-

(+1)

Hi, thanks for the feedback! We are aware of these issues and will get to fixing them as soon as the jam's rating period finishes. Saving was a feature that was initially going to be added into this version, but sadly we ran out of time (the entire game was made in ~10 days, after all). Thanks for playing!

The pixel art really hooked me in, neat mechanics of crafting different potions and the way they interact with the world, very neat game ^_^

Nice game. I really liked the art and the music!