star-garden 2019-04-30 16:01
Wow I absolutely love the way this game looks. Nice work!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → Sinking Town
By detectivelosos, Annie Owl, morel-8 and Natashus
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 298 | 3.68 | 53 | |
| Fun | 631 | 3.19 | 53 | |
| Innovation | 337 | 3.36 | 53 | |
| Theme | 428 | 3.50 | 53 | |
| Graphics | 102 | 4.31 | 53 | |
| Audio | 325 | 3.41 | 51 | |
| Humor | 348 | 3.16 | 50 | |
| Mood | 142 | 3.85 | 52 |
Wow I absolutely love the way this game looks. Nice work!
Would love to play this since it looks really cool, but all I get when i start it is a dark screen with some UI on it... :/ screenshot.png
@josia-roncancio Really strange… We will try to figure out what is up with that. Thanks for the feedback.
I have the same problem as @Josia Roncancio.
I didn't have much time to try it, but your game looks pretty, runs well, and the robots are cute! I love the 3D + sprites mix. Mind that I played the Jam version, which had little bugs like dialogs showing through models etc, but that's okay. Good job!
@arc0re Post-jam version only fixes spelling errors. We haven't got time to fix other problems yet :smile:
~~I'm having the same problem. Please @ me if you manage to fix it, I'm really loving the art style from the screenshots! :)~~
The original JAM version doesn't have the blank screen problem so I played that. Really digging the art style. I got stuck trying to find the lens for the factory door, but overall a really neat game and interesting take on the theme.
@josia-roncancio @minemes We have fixed the problem. Errors with post-processing. Thanks again for your feedback.
@neverautomatic Thanks alot for the info, you saved us a lot of time!
Really really love how this game looks. I found that running around swapping bodyparts became a little annoying over time and figuring out some puzzles ended up being 'try everything on everything' because the dialogue doesn't change at any point to reflect that there's perhaps more you can do with items, etc... Although I still found the game very engaging and fun. ( I take it that the ending was a little rushed ;) )
I played for quite a long time because I was intrigued by the story and the game felt polished. Unfortunately I got stuck trying to get into the factory (couldn't find the new crystal lens anywhere). If you post a hint I'd love to finish it. Overall good game!
The game looks great! I unfortunately got stuck in the ground and couldn't get out. The music was nice and not too intrusive, and despite not much dialog, I loved the characters.
Well done!
Great game. It looks really awesome. The textures are fitting and the things you can interact with clearly stand out. However I was kinda stuck getting a way into the factory. Also the textbox sometimes wasn't visible because it vanished inside an object. Otherwise, awesome game!
Such a great entry! Graphics look extremely polished apart from a few very minor clipping issues, I love the artstyle. Music, story, everything is just outstanding! Great job you guys!
The aesthetics are great - nicely done! And the story is neat. Mixing body parts was fun, I only wish there were more things you could do with each one!
@annie-owl Thanks for fixing the post-processing. It works perfectly now! :)
I really enjoyed the level design and overall aesthetics of this game! The town feels very believable and is a lot of fun to explore. And the characters are very charming as well. Good job!
@boxedmeatrevolution Yeah, that last puzzle came out a little bit convoluted and unclear. I've tried to fix it in post-jam version, but maybe it's still not clear enough. The solutions are a little bit different in JAM and POSTJAM versions.
In JAM version, you need to grab some more coal from the factory roof, then go to drowning robot, exchange your nuclear engine with him, and give him coal to make the diamond.
In POSTJAM version, you have some coal left in your inventory after fueling up drowning robot, so you can just exchange your engine with him and make a diamond out of coal leftovers.
You can then use this diamond as a new lens crystal.
But you haven't missed much actually, because we had no time for a "Big ending" we planned at first. You will just get a "Thank You Screen" if you manage to bring the turbine to the factory.
@raphiell Thank you for your feedback! :slight_smile: Did you get stuck in some out of town geometry? Because we were putting it all together at the last moment and had not much time to play-test. it :smile:
Absolutely adore the art style, please flesh this out into a bigger game :)
@daspanjo Thank you! Sorry for the convoluted puzzle at the end, but you haven't missed much, because the ending was really rushed and it's just "Thank you" screen.
@sempiternal Thanks! We glad you liked it :slight_smile:
@mharring Yeah, we wanted to make way more interactions, but our working process was a mess this time around, and we have managed to make very little of what was planned at the start. Maybe we should set less ambitious goals next time :smile:
@josia-roncancio Thank you! Sorry for the inconveniences, we were so tired that we haven't even checked the "fixed" version when uploaded it.
@jofersgames Thank you! We have plans for fleshing out our jam projects every time around, but unfortunately rarely do that, because of different life problems and stuff.
I loved the mix of 2D and 3D! I was also impressed by the shader work to show the character when they are covered by a roof. In the end I couldn't find a replacement lens for the factory door by I was able to jump onto the roof using the fence.
@mr-field Thank you! Yeah, we actually wanted the town to actually start floating above water, but... As usual not everything that was planned from the start gets into the final product.
I love the billboard-type graphics of the characters and the overall art style is great. Such an interesting concept as well and very well executed. The story is also really good and I would really like to see this expanded on in the future along with the body part switching mechanics because there is probably so much that can be done with it! Great work!
I like the game! It was interesting and the mechanic of swapping body parts is really cool. The only problem I ran into was not knowing the coal-turns-into-diamonds part, because I didn't get the "legends" dialog part when I first interacted with it.
Otherwise, fantastic entry!
@annie-owl It was actually in the middle of town that I got stuck. I was using the booster legs and jumped from the tower.
@scott-steffes I've spent about a half of the first day writing and tweaking this see-through effect, because we planned for quite a lot more interior gameplay. We ended up with just two buildings you can enter and it probably would be easier and faster to just hide the tops in a C# script. Yeah, that factory door thing is very unclear. Pretty much nobody gives you hints that you can go take another lump of coal and compress it into a diamond. We added some dialogs to make it more clear in the post-jam version and we also made it so the coal is not removed from your inventory when you refuel the sinking robot. So people would more likely just stumble upon the right solution by combining everything with everything. Thank you very much for playing!
@khamekaze We are very glad that you enjoyed our game. As far as expanding it into a bigger project, we have this idea pretty much after every jam, but life, study and dayjobs are always getting in a way. So we'll probably just call it a day and move on to creating more small game prototypes.
@darylsteak Thank you for playing our game! Yeah, this coal-diamond part is unclear, with it we are breaking the rules of the adventure-game-logic making you return and take an already used and forgotten item and use it once again for something else. In the post-jam version however we fixed this issue by adding more dialog hints and by not removing coal from your inventory after the first use.
@raphiell Strange. We will look into it.
Снимок.JPG I am stuck.
@max-torn Heh. Thanks for the screenshot, we will fix the geometry a little bit later.
Liked the overall atmosphere, music and tricky quests. Although the quests where a little bit complicated for me, they made me stay and explore more that usual. Nice results achieved in just 3 days!
Heh, even with all the help from you guys in the comment section it was still very hard and somewhat confusing to fit all the pieces together. Good job though. It is a fun and interesting entry, with some quite unique visuals.
I absolutely love how this game looks. I also really like how you can interact with things in different ways by choosing your body parts, makes total sense, you being a robot and all — a nice twist on the classic adventure game convention.
I also like how the game encourages you to walk around and explore and talk to the other robots to figure out what's going on and what needs doing.
I think a nice addition would be a color change to the dialogue boxes, so you can easily tell who's speaking :)
Very nice work, very polished and well-made for such a short span of time. Congrats!
Very nice submission! The visuals are simply awesome, and so is the music. The gameplay is original, but a bit slow for my taste. I was a bit of a hassle to swap bodyparts, and the puzzles are pretty hard. Because navigation is not very fluid it was a bit hard to get around town.
Overall a very impressive game, very complete and awesome looking. Well done!
Congrats on finishing the game. I liked the asthetics of your game, it's kinda unique, with its blend of pixelart and 3D graphics.
@stockyspark Thank you! Glad you liked it.
@drauthius Thanks! Yeah, the quest came out "a little bit" confusing and unclear.
@tiagorrech Thank you! Yes, i was actually thinking about coloring NPC dialog boxes, but ran out of time.
@drtizzle Thank you! Yes, unfortunately, we had no time to playtest the level, so stairs came out a little bit too narrow. I hope we find some time in the near future to fix this.
@j-c-one-bit-studio Thank you!
Wow! This is one of the most unique looking game I have encountered in a while. I really think that you should develop an entire game with this graphic style because it is so amazing. These were my favorite parts of the game:
- I enjoyed the Dialog a lot, great to see games with a bit more script! - The graphics, like I already mention, are just top tier. - Innovative camera system, I liked how it cuts into houses.
This is one of those entries that makes me go "Oh I would love to make something similar" :smiley:
@simon-rahnasto Thank you! We had a separate person for the graphics this time around, so this helped a lot. I actually felt that the final dialogues were a little bit low cluster, but I'm glad you liked it! And the "cut into houses" shader took half of the first working day from our main programmer, so I guess it was worth it :smile:
Really nice visuals and aesthetics! ...and the gameplay is quite intriguing too. Unfortunately, after a bunch of trading I still wasn't sure what my goal was, or what I was supposed to do. Perhaps the cool graphics hid some important story information from me, like they hid the textboxes of some of the conversations. I really liked how talking to different people changed with different devices and after different trades. The story was slowly unfolding, but at some point I got stuck, and couldn't figure out how to proceed. This is when the amazing art style kinda became a detriment, since jumping and navigating around was quite difficult. I am kinda torn, because of this.
@szabe Thank you for your feedback! Yes, I kinda made quests too convoluted and unnecessarily difficult. And as was said earlier most of the level geometry was not properly tested and can get you stuck. Hopefully, we would have time to work on that soon enough.
The graphics/style of this game are great. Nice job.
I'd love to know how you did the show effect for the sprites, I'm trying to do a similar effect in my own game outside of LD. I love this aesthetic.
@knightshousegames Glad you liked our visuals :) Can you elaborate a bit more on what do you mean by "show effect for the sprites"? I'm happy to tell how we did it, but I just don't get what exactly you are asking about.
Good idea, and I like how you combined 3D and sprites. But the camera is quite clunky
The art is gorgeous! I love the visual mood, and the hazy lighting is really nice. I like the voxel-like approach to the floors, and the blue-gray color palette. I felt a little lost while playing, but the post jam version was definitely more clear!
I like the random beeps and bops. Music fits the theme and mood well. For me on the graphics side the player resolution was a bit too low compared to rest of the scene. Game is filled with content and lots of places and nooks to find and explore. Loved the camera slicing the building when indoors. Great game!
I love the world, the art and the music. I miss a bit of feedback to make me really feel like this is a game, maybe it would have helped to scale down the scope slightly so you could've added some UI to guide players through the game and quests. Overal, very nice entry and I'd love to play something like this as a full devved game!
@detectivelosos Sorry, that was a typo, I meant the shadow effect, like how you got your sprites to cast a realtime shadow
Nice game! Lovely art :) Some more hints on how to progress the quest would be nice ;)
Really wonderful art, cute story and music that fit very well. I enjoyed this world a whole lot. The one gripe I had is that sometimes that dialogue got obstructed by the surroundings and since you had the fancy shader effect for being indoors, it might have been nice to make sure the player could always read the text.
Really nice style and entry. great job
@knightshousegames Sorry for a bit of a late responce. [Here](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1CK9Itk2WpB5glrspJj6WNG87amXGgUSo) is my shader and lib file. Just drop them in your Unity project directory. Then you have to create new material and assign DashingAshes -> Sprite_ZWrite_NoBatch to it. Like so.
Help.png
Then create a new sprite, assign the material you've created, set the sprite of your choosing. Now the important step. Switch to "Debug" mode like so.
Help2.png
And select "Cast Shadow" option.
Help3.png
And that's pretty much it. Feel free to ask if anything goes wrong.
@mrtnldm Glad you liked our game! Fun fact is that pixel density on all the 3d environment objects is two times less than on characters. Which means that technically characters are twice as detailed comparing to the environment :) We first made everything with the same pixel density of 16 pixels per Unity unit, but we found out that it looks pretty bad and distracting to have a lot of high frequency details in the environment, so we just scaled up two times all the 3d props.
@twan-mul Thank you very much for playing! You are so correct. We aimed way off with our scope right from the beginning and had to cut a lot of corners in the end to even publish the game in time. Wish we didn't spend that much time creating all the assets and spend more of it building the level, playtesting and making an actual game ending.
@local-minimum Yeah, we had that dialog clipping problem for the entire last day and never got to solving it. The problem with such minor-and-easy-to-fix-bugs-that-in-reality-have-a-huge-impact-on-gameplay is that it's so tempting to put them off especially during the last day. And it's also so tempting to do more interesting stuff like see-through indoors effect instead. So yeah, we should probably do a better job prioritizing tasks next time.
Glad you still enjoyed our game despite this issue! And thank you very much for playing.
I had fun with this! The art is excellent (I'm surprised by the number of different assets!), the universe is original and left me wanting more. For some reason, it reminds me of Beyond Good & Evil! Here's the points that might need improving:
- The camera should probably be a bit closer to (and higher than) the player by default; I thought for a second the game was in first person and I was looking at an NPC! It's cool that we can change the angle, though. - The dialogue box sometimes gets hidden by geometry. It might be better to always make it appear on top. - It is well hinted at but I guess it's a bit odd that simply talking to someone requires selecting your head first? I tried a few times to talk to the track legs salesman while having another body part selected. - The way to obtain the diamond at the end isn't intuitive. I had to look it up. The rest of the quests made a lot more sense so it's mostly this one that needs tweaking! Maybe it should be made more obvious that Gears can turn coal into diamonds?
@detectivelosos Oh hey, that debug menu thing was all I really needed, my shader I was already using seems to work fine! Thanks so much! Good luck if you intend to take this project further, or anything else you might do
@kyrio Thank you! I'm glad you've enjoyed the game despite its problems :smiley:
I agree with you about the camera. We even thought of preventing the player from tilting the camera so low.
Dialogue boxes clipping is just a bug, that we had no time to fix. I hope we will have a little bit of free time in the future to make a proper postjam version without bugs like this.
The fact that you need to select your head to start talking is actually just the result of the way I've programmed our dialogue system. It wasn't planned like this from the very beginning. So I guess it's a "bug" that became a feature :smile:
Yeah, we had the whole debate about that diamond quest. My colleagues were arguing that it was too hard to figure out, and I was thinking that it would be too easy if I start adding more hints. I guess they were right all along.
Took me while to figure out that you could actually rotate the camera. It was bit frustrating to play without that. Maybe add that to the list of controls?
I really enjoyed your game. Graphics are for most part really great. That text box in the world, clipping into things, was bit annoying. Music is minimal and fitting for a robot world. Puzzles were on mostly nicely balanced (post-jam version). Only thing that I really disliked was moving through the world which felt really buggy and messy at times, I would get stuck on stuff, go behind certain elements and so on.
Overall I enjoyed playing, great job!
@tuomo Thanks for playing our game and for great suggestion! I've totally forgotten to add camera movement info into controls.
Awesome entry, it's good to see that kinda of mix between 3D art and pixel art, at first i tought you used spritile : https://chemikhazi.itch.io/sprytile or crocotile : http://www.crocotile3d.com/ ...
The music is a bit boring and repetitive, you could add some ambience, it's a goos scenario for that, like some choking water, some metal squeaking and creaking, wind blowing from the sea, seaguls, and maybe some fog would also add depth to that bluish city so close of the sea...
There's also a lack of sfx to increase the presence of the characters... like some idle sound from their engines, some footsteps made out of metal slams, sppining gears and pressure releasing from their joints...
Really love the art and music. The robots are really distinctive and well designed. I enjoyed the gameplay, the concept of robots gleefully trading their body parts is a lot of fun, and made for some good puzzling. My main criticism is that certain things seem to be unachievable once you swap your arms out, and I had to restart twice because I did things in the wrong order. I still had a lot of fun though, this game has a lot of personality.