brimz 2017-12-05 02:30
This is a really cool idea. The first thing that jumped out at me was the art. All the art looks fantastic and a really cool change from the more common art in games.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → RE-SANTA
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 79 | 4.00 | 78 | |
| Fun | 467 | 3.42 | 78 | |
| Innovation | 28 | 4.11 | 78 | |
| Theme | 95 | 4.12 | 78 | |
| Graphics | 26 | 4.65 | 78 | |
| Humor | 97 | 3.90 | 77 | |
| Mood | 69 | 4.02 | 77 |
This is a really cool idea. The first thing that jumped out at me was the art. All the art looks fantastic and a really cool change from the more common art in games.
Fantastic! What a great idea for an art direction!
The art on this game really stands out! And the gameplay itself is great too! My fave game so far.
"My new year's resolution is 300x300"
Ohh man the graphics are amazing !! I love you concept and the art is so good with Christmas theme ! The storytelling is so nice too and even if I don't like to re-give my gift in real life, i can do it in your game for a long time ^^ Also i love the jokes in every yer resolution, it make me continue playing :P
One of my favorite game so far !! I love it
And Merry Christmas !!
Really love the artstyle. There is an end game?
The game ends if you have 12 or more friends and make them **all** happy. (it's really hard, I'm considering changing it so you just need to make 12 people happy total, no matter how large your party is).
The game also ends if you make everyone angry. Just give your first two friends their own gifts back and see :D
Strategy spoilers: ------------------ - it helps to take notes about people. the phone is only a marginal planning aid.
- take some time to tidy up your gift pile before you hand out the last gift
- the sweaters and names show you what colors they like
- if their hair is in a gift color, they will give that color 80% of the time
- if their hair is a natural color, they'll give random gifts
- some people give shitty gifts every now and then. we can't all be perfect...
- first you need to get more friends by making as few people angry as possible
- shape your group into a circle of friends that's varied enough so that your gift stash stays varied enough, too
- you can make friends unhappy a few times, as long as nobody is angry, you will slowly get more friends
- that means you can dump shitty or wrong gifts on good friends a few times
- it's often necessary to get rid of people who don't fit your friend circle
- that means it's a good idea give shitty gifts straight back to the person who gave them, because they keep giving shitty gifts every now and then if you allow them to come to your parties
- the only reason not to give back a shitty gift is if your party needs more friends or everyone could be happy that year
Lovely art-style, an intriguing way to put into action this LD's theme, I really liked it.
I wish there was a way to keep notes in-game, was fun nonetheless. Great job!
Ok, so the game's :
-Graphically really interesting, it works a lot and is readable. -Dialogues are funny, the new year's phrases are much cool -Have an interesting concept, needing memory and good gestion : Maybe a little repetitive, but it's the concept, and honestly that was covered by the funny reactions I had when I did shit
Overall, a really nice performance, the best of the jam's Christmas-themed games I played for the moment. Full points on art, a real good idea !
I'm in love with the artstyle on this.
As the others said, the graphics really catches your attention and it gets better with the smooth transitions. The sounds add a great atmosphere too. Overall great job!
Don't want to be repetitive here cause I thing everyone just said the same thing but ... The Art is amazing.
Still trying to figure out how you do this on Unity (being a Unity person myself).
Gameplay is simple and easy to understand without any need for tips and tutorials. Also very fun to play as well. Good Job!
It's a post-processing effect. The camera renders into a low-res texture, and then a fragment shader splits that into little half-chevrons at a higher resolution (matching the little thread patterns). It's kind of a horizontal 2D displacement mapping done in code (in hindsight, it would have been better, faster, and more precise to build that with a simple displacement lookup).
The final color values that are blended with a sweater texture as color map.
Sadly, part of my math is wrong so in some resolutions, the pattern slides a little, and it jitters in the fireworks scene, fortunately that's the only moment when the camera Y position is > 0.
Loved this game, the christmas sweater style is so nice! It's a very addictive game, the only trouble i had was occasionally having a hard time picking up a gift, great entry!!
The concept is very cool !
I love the wool Ambiance. You made a great Job
Excellent Game, really nice art and gameplay. Great job !
Great mechanics! I wish I could see easier the goal of the game, but the art and the sounds are fantastic :) I love how the transitions between screens work also. Great job!
Whaaaa? Stitch-based pixel graphics! How awesome is that?! I absolutely love this! The transitions! The sound effects and music! The new-year lines! The smartphone oveerlay!
The gameplay is the only thing which didn't really capture my interest, it gets repetitive quickly, and I didn't really feel the consequences of bad decisions.
Wow! What a polished, beautiful game. What a unique and effective approach for the art. The music fits the christmas theme very well and I loved giving back shitty gifts to the people who gave them to me. lol
A great game that fits well with the theme with one-of-a-kind graphics.
Very well done!
Outstanding graphics, I was not expecting to see something like this, gameplay is really cool too.
Love it! <3
I ABSOLUTLY enjoye the graphics, so charming! The sound where beautifuly made and really made me feel ba when i gave the wrong colour to someone. Maybe it would be more interesting if the phone was always on screen and you could lose in some way.
Thanks for the great feedback :)
You CAN lose by making everyone angry. The game unfortunately has a strong equilibrium thanks to the new influx of friends. We originally had three "lives" but since the game can take a long time (there's even an easter egg regarding time...), we decided that as long as you have friends, you're ok. Just as in real life!
Great idea about the phone, it was the original plan but it didn't fit on the screen. I should just have put a mouse-over or button somewhere that would slide it in.
I might build a greeting card version of the game to send to friends for christmas ^^
Funny, original, charming and festive.
I love the sweet graphics. And I think the greeting card version is a great idea!
This is amazing. You did so well in so many areas. But why did you opt out of audio ratings?
@tvance - We opted out of the category out of fairness. :) Because we didn't CREATE the sound effects during the jam, they are from an audio library (zapsplat, I have a gold account there). The music was "created" using Jukedeck, which is a very easy to use music generator. It only took a few attempts to get something light hearted and mildly festive.
I think at least something like SFXR and GarageBand need to be used to fairly expect to qualify for sound/music voting. Jukedeck is just too easy.
Fair enough. I used GB's smart drummer or whatever it's called for my game but recorded the synth and bell tracks. Anyway, I enjoyed Re-Santa and appreciated your feedback on MGMD.
Godamnit the graphics are so cool !
Those graphics are amazing for the games theme! on point! The game itself is easy to learn but i think everybody once had a situation where a person was not happy with its gift. To me that part was not really clear. How does it have a negative impact? So my suggestions would be: * Add a Highscore of some sort * Give points for happy friends * Take points for unhappy friends Everything else is nicely done!
Thanks for playing!
You win when you have 12 friends and make them all happy.
When someone is angry (eyes x'ed out), they won't be your friend anymore.
You lose when you have no more friends. (it rarely happens but it can happen)
Great advice on the scoring :)
Sounds like a cool idea, I'd like to try it... the graphics look really cute.
I use Linux, so I tried the web version - but I can't play it there because parts of the game are cut off on my (rather small) screen size, and even though it has scrollbars, scrolling only shows half of the cut off parts :/
love it! the art style is awesome and the game itself is simple yet fun!
@flauschzelle - you can try to zoom out in the browser, e.g. CTRL-minus on many browsers.
@thygrrr - that was the first thing I tried when I saw that it was cut off. Didn't work :/
First of all I had unityplayer.dll error so I got from other games. Npc sounds reminded me Pixel Piracy .In few round nobody give red gift that give me stress :D. The game match with theme.matching of sweatear and gift is nice idea also being not jealous of your shader is impossible.
Thanks for the error report. I did have a stray unityplayer.dll laying around, need to check if that belongs with the game now.
Edit: @cenullum - I owe you one, I didn't realize with the new Unity that the engine is in a separate DLL. And there I was surprised that the game was far below 20 MB. Updated the downloadable zip archive to include that file. Sheesh. The one time I have a chaotic desktop, and I overlook something like that.
Holy crap. Such a neat idea! Fun and I love the art. I had to show all of the people in the room after I saw the characters pop in for the first time. haha Great job!
Gee, thanks :D
Cool concept :) The graphics are fantastic - give the game a unique festive feel
We rocked the christmas theme as well! Clever graphics and the smooth camera panning was very nice. Well done! :santa: :beers:
Cool game! Great work with theme and love the graphics. Friend cap a bit too high though.
Wonderful! I can't find any flaws on first inspection!
Interesting puzzle, but it went for too long without me winning and just had to stop at some point. The knitted graphics are the best for this christmas themed game, I love them!
I loved the knitted graphics and the screen transitions.
The game wouldn't quite go full screen for me or fit on my screen in another way, so I had trouble reading the instructions.
Great game and idea!
The art is really fantastic. The base idea of gift you don't want to buy is really fun and that could help to do that in real life :smile:. Good mood, and some fun text. Loved playing it. Only one little bad thing to not say only goods: the game become a little boring after some times and it is hard to win. But well I think I still played it more than others ld games.
Great entry! Love the visual style, and is pretty original. Congrats!
The concept of this game is great! Also I like the art a lot (long live shader magic)! The music works with the game extremely well! What can I say, this game is just VERY GOOD. You could definitely make some more female friends tho mate 😂. Good job!
Beautiful, funny, fun. I didn't quite get the goal until like 2020. You are supposed to look at the schedule and try to plan how you will distribute gifts so that you can maximize happiness. So a bit of foresight is required, and that is really cool. Maybe that needs to be communicated to the player a little better though?
Wonderful work, and I am very curious how the thread-look was acheived.
The knitted pixellation :D TOP TOP TOP :D
MIND BLOWING shader style. Looks super realistic even on a close inspection. Works very well with animated characters too. Gameplay was fun for a bit but I never really got into the strategy of it, I was just passing out gifts that seemed okay. I can see how there is a deeper strategy involved with winning with 12 people, but the game got too slow and repetitive to make me want to explore deeper.
Super cute! I love the knitted Christmas sweater look. I'm definitely gonna take a closer look at it. ;) The gameplay is a bit rote but I can see where the player could come up with different strategies to reach the goal. I think my favorite part is all the flavor text.
Really pretty game with a very interesting mechanics.
I was watching a movie or something a few days ago and I saw some knit-styled screen that I thought would be a great fit for a game. And voilà ! Great coincidence!
I really liked the entry. It was funny (with some of the new year sentences being straight hilarious), fit the theme perfectly and the graphic style matched the game. The characters looked funny, too.
My only nit-pick would be that after a while it could end up being a bit repetitive. I'm not sure if introducing other kind of restrictions (shape, size,...??) could help this.
Anyway, congrats on an amazing entry!
This was brilliantly done. I enjoyed making those who gave me substandard gifts angry by re-gifting it back to them immediately. Beautiful to look at, the music fit the theme, and even though it perfectly encapsulated Christmas's frustration for me, I still wanted to play on.
Terrible art! :D I love it, and the gameplay it's pretty original and funny. I like it very much. Now i'm going to some money on lotery tickets. CONGRATS!
This was insanely awesome. The sweater graphics were just so spot-on, and along with the gameplay and audio made for an excellent experience. Finding this made me really happy. Such a good job! The gameplay does get tedious and monotonous after a long play session, but that's to be expected when you're trying to con 50 friends with re-gifts!
Super awesome game. The art, the mood, the storytelling and the music are all well made to fit together. This is the most enjoyable game I 've played so far. Anw great entry. Check out our game in my profile. Happy Christmas mate.
Wow, this game is much more in depth than i originally thought haha. I can't win though, been stuck with 8 friends for awhile now. The graphics are really unique.
At first glance, i loved it. After playing for awhile on full screen, it made me a bit dizzy though. I think it'll be nice if there are multiple layers involved here. So for example, the characters are a layer above the background and thus make texture is a bit different.
Other than that, nice concept and game :grinning:
I like this game. It took me a while before realizing gift preference depends of the color and not just the owner over years.
And I don't know if it's wanted but the date loops back to 1971? I went to 1978 and just gave up. I didn't know you could actually win the game.
@crazyrems YOU WIN THE LONG-PLAY AWARD XD ==========
You found the E3 - the Epoch Easter Egg. It is a play at the fact that Unix timestamps overflow in 2038.
Thanks for playing so long... The game is quite hard to win and also almost impossible to lose. I didn't want to change this post jam because it would be adding more features. Though I could just have simplified the victory condition.
Very nice graphics! I included it in my Ludum Dare 40 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBdKV67omDA
Wow! You took the 'ugly Christmas sweater' asthetic and turned it into a game.
@Chipper35 Uhhhh... wrong jam, dude. ^^