Sunken

j-nat 2017-04-24 08:05

I've been told that sometimes the spacebar doesn't work on certain systems. I could not reproduce this bug on every computer. It seems that reloading the page can fix this. I'll investigate some more once I get some sleep and I'll provide a post jam update.

historymaker118 2017-04-28 22:51

Unfortunately I couldn't seem to pick up the treasure (I'm assuming you have to press spacebar when the symbol shows up) so I wasn't able to play much of this. It's a shame because it seems like there's probably much more content than what I experienced.

The art style is cute, and the game has a nice sense of humour, and I'm super thankful I'm not seeing yet another space/planet game for this theme, well done for thinking beyond the obvious. I like how the screen wraps around, makes a nice change from simply having colliders on the edges.

Downside, the controls feel very floaty, I'm not sure if that's what you were trying to do what with it being underwater and all, but I kept accidentally sliding past the activation points for the fish conversation, and missing half of what he was saying. Also it would be nice to jump. Not that jumping necessarily has an impact on gameplay, but it would make the game feel perhaps a little more responsive.

For a single person dev-team in under 48 hours this is a good effort, and I hope that you continue in developing games and learn from the experience of making this one.

j-nat 2017-05-02 09:51

Hey @historymaker118 ! Thanks for the feedback !

The floating behavior is "as designed" just to make you feel the floaty environment.

You mentioned problems that I did not have time to address during the 48 hours period of time. However, most of the problems are corrected in the post jam version (http://www.jnat.fr/LD38/PostJam)

You'll notice that the hero character stops when a speech is shown on screen. You can now pick the treasure and give it to the fish and he lets you move off the breathing tube that holds you in a small area of the level. For the jump I decided to skip it to save some time, even if it's peanuts to implement. Also, yeah, no title screen, no music, game content : not so much. I did not manage to hold my horses on design versus implementation.

In fact, as a postmortem, I just lost too much time implementing a dialog system which handles flags and keys to handle the narration/puzzle system. I had a hard time working on it because I went out of my comfort zone by choosing to develop a game in javascript (I am more versed in the c++ / UE4 combo myself). I'll never make another content based game for a ludum dare in the future since it takes me too much time to get the "empty shell" working and doesn't leave me time to actually fill it with something.

For the "art part" I just when with it as I could. It was very relaxing but it's so time consuming. Kudos to the artists out there making awesome graphs for their games in so little time ^^

I am learning everytime I do theses jams, this is a lot of fun.

Thanks a lot!

Jnat

jorjordandan 2017-05-02 17:21

I didn't see the note about the puzzle solution not being finished, so I spent a while trying to interact with things :) Dialog was good, I was wondering what was going to happen! Good job for going out of your comfort zone!

j-nat 2017-05-02 19:15

Thanks for the message ! The original version is not finished in any way. I am glad you enjoyed the few there is to be played here ;)

xenosns 2017-05-04 01:11

Love the look of the game. Sadly the spacebar issue is happening for me (Chrome on Win 7)

frodewin 2017-05-11 23:43

Interesting setup, the graphics are cute! I was not sure how to interact with the treasure and the coconut, I got a sign on the game screen that looked like a squeezed latter U, what does that mean?