wongkongphooey 2019-04-29 17:35
A nice experience and change of pace from the other jam games. The graphics look great and I particularly like how the text drops into place as it displays. Well done!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → A Moment To Reflect
By aeveis
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 365 | 3.11 | 69 | |
| Fun | 495 | 2.14 | 67 | |
| Innovation | 293 | 2.95 | 69 | |
| Theme | 453 | 2.56 | 66 | |
| Graphics | 34 | 4.19 | 68 | |
| Audio | 159 | 3.28 | 66 | |
| Humor | 336 | 2.23 | 60 | |
| Mood | 60 | 3.74 | 67 |
A nice experience and change of pace from the other jam games. The graphics look great and I particularly like how the text drops into place as it displays. Well done!
Really adorable graphics!
Not a lot to the gameplay, but there are some nice sentiments and the art is really nice. I love that crying bird and the way he hops around.
An experience more than a game. But a wholesome and visually pretty experience
Ah so pretty! I loved it. Thanks for the experience. :)
Pleasant. A very thoughtful interpretation of the theme.
Did you design the underlying system in a way that you can easily iterate upon in the future? Or did you imagine this more of a PoC whose idea you'll continue on?
Super cute. It's a nice break from all the things trying to kill you. Would love to see more.
I really liked how short and approachable your game was. You created something great even though the scope was small, that's not something I see done well often :)
The graphics are really well done. I hope that you get more time to work on this post jam.
The text was a little hard to read, but the pico8 type games doesn't give you much options.
What are your future plans for the project?
Short (by design I guess) but enjoyable, adorable art/music
I love the crow. Graphics and audio are really cool :)
Art is cute, can we get a longer game with the birb? :smile: I spent more time just hopping around than I'd like to admit
This is a cute experience but I don't see the theme of the gamejam.
This is a very interesting entry. If I had to guess the theme is interpeted as this: Your life is your own, and you choose how to SPEND it. I might be absolutely wrong, maybe the theme isn't interpeted as a whole, or not at all and i'm just overthinking this :sweat_smile: Nontheless I like entries that go beyond the usual stabby-stab kill the bad theme.
Interesting little interaction
Original concept :) Had trouble to see the link with the theme, but passed that, mood and graphics are pretty neat!
Peaceful games are the best <3 and look at this cut little bird Also I didn't understand how the theme was interpreted in your game, but I don't care :D I hope you will continue to make more game like this
Really relaxing ! Everything fits well together and the concept of playing such a short time is interesting !
Thanks for the comments everyone!
@jjjjason There's sort of an underlying system in the works, I had to jam out things to just make it work this time around. Eventually though I'd hope I can use the system for dialogue type stuff whenever I need it for games. Thematically as a proof of concept I really don't know how people will react to the writing, so I guess there's that.
@saoi-games The game is done in Haxeflixel, but the text was originally made to be as small as possible, which I would like to do differently eventually. For a pixel art game, I'm thinking it'll be nice if the text was 2x or 4x the game pixel density so things are more readable, but still pixel art. I haven't done anything about that yet though, and localization and other languages also makes things complicated. I don't currently have any plans for this project, though I think thematically I'll probably be leaning on some more things like this (ie. also like my LD 43 game).
@tammukka I think there's something about controlling a character platformer-style that is just fun. :)
@harksa @ekilibr @linheha Thanks! The point is you are given a choice to how you want to live your life. Living itself costs your life, so this was an attempt to make that more intentional while also being encouraging.
@fenderbate Yeah, basically. I tried to dial in on some more specifics of how that can be done- and the hope is for the player to commit to the choice they've made in living out their life. I think this can be hard though if players don't make the connection from their game-self to real-self, or if they don't take the choices they make seriously. Also it can be a lot of a short game to ask for how someone will want to live out their life.
Very small but good looking game. Good work!
Nice art and concept
It's cute :heart:. i love the crow art.
Didn't get why everyone was crying :( but the parrot is cute. Nice interpretation ^^
i like this!! the concept works really well for a short little narrative and it's a really nice, different use of the theme; some of the writing is really sweet and i love the graphics and the audio - especially the little crow!
Cool art and sfx! GG
Graphics are absolutely beautiful, and I get it is a narrative experience, so it doesn't need to be a larger game (it is more like a interactive experience, I guess?). The way the text is show is really polished, but maybe a more readable font would be better. I'm not really sure how this fits the theme, but I'm probably not getting it and that's my fault, haha.
Good job!
Very relaxing and differently paced entry. I enjoyed the atmosphere the game proved, but I didn't really get it. It felt like I was reading a bunch of fortune cookies, but I enjoyed feeling like that. Nice work!
I wish I have your sense of color, your pieces are always so innocently colorful.
The experience was simple and nice as always!
I like the sprites very much and though short, what is here is a nice start to a nice little story-based game.
What an odd but interesting game. It's very phisolophical and religious, very cool!
Really liked the bird sprite, very cute. Also very nice to have the instructions in the game.
Beautiful art and interesting experience ❤
I loved the art and sound design. Super cute little experience! :two_hearts:
Really nice presentation that creates more questions than it answers, in a good way
Sometimes less is more. Loving everything about it!
Thanks for the comments, really appreciate it!
Some specific responses:
@jvolonte The crow is crying because life is difficult and the lamb is crying out of sympathy because it knows the various hardships the player must face in life and of what is to come. There's still hope though!
@daniel-moreno It's an experiment that ideally puts the player's own life into question by asking them how they will live out the rest of their life. Since the rest of someone's life is used for something, the experience tries to call that out.
@kukareru-sekai I would say the fortune cookie nature of it is probably it's biggest weakness - there's not really necessarily enough time in the experience to make the choices you make feel meaningful. Glad you got something out of it though!
@avavt Thanks! The colors here were chosen so that they all stood out from each other enough while being different hues. Usually in past LDs I've been able to get around that by using a black outline. I think I sort of happened upon an even mix of saturated (the grass, flowers) and neutral colors (bird, lamb, wood).
@mateusboga if religion is supposively an explanation for life, shouldn't it have repercussions philosophically? It should take into account not only how we live our life, but how we treat others. Thanks!
@foolmoron thanks! That's what I was hoping.
Once again, cute characters making difficult decisions. You've really got this self-reflective micro-narrative thing down to a science.
The graphical and audio elements do well to set the mood. A bit more buildup to the flower decision might have been good. Life is full of people who will try to sell you on the "right" way to live, it may have been a good opportunity to add more characters and dialogue to the game. I don't know that the experience needs to be any longer, but adding a bit more biased dialogue might help provoke more thought and add weight to the player's decision.
As it is, I'd say it works just fine in achieving that state of mind. It's more that I've been playing primarily action games for the jam in rapid succession, so this experience came as a bit of a sudden change of mood. I suppose that's not a bad thing.
Short, but with great impact.
Good job!
> ...I’m on vacation so this was scoped pretty minimally.
Oh, yeah, been there, done that.
Given how short the game was, I didn't feel like committing to a specific flower was...particularly meaningful. I mean, the game resets in a super-short time, so I could just replay the game again; that kind of makes the decision-making process trivial. I just went with farthest flower first, then gradually chose closer ones to see all the dialog ('cause I'm weird like that). There just wasn't much consequences in choosing one choice over another.
It did feel like the game was not for me. Which, to be clear, is fine.
Random bugs I found: tutorial kind of shows up out-of-order, especially if you figure out how to move and approach the sheep early in the game. I also noticed that by tapping the X button over and over again while on top of the flower, it resets the fade-out animation, making it easy to just not commit to a decision. Maybe that last one was on purpose :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: ?
@omiya-games Yep, I thought about having the player only be able to choose one thing, but in the interest of time and perhaps curiosity of the player I just had it so you can replay easily and choose something different.
I was okay with there not being any consequences in the game because the game itself is just a question about how you want to live out your life - and someone's choices and decisions in how they will live out their life will certainly have consequences. If someone is expecting more of the game then makes sense it won't really be that meaningful. Thanks for your critique, always good to hear.
If I had the actual weekend, I'm not sure what the game would've looked like instead. The idea for the short experience only came about because I knew I had a very limited amount of time, but it's interesting to see how people have been responding to it.
Thanks for catching bugs! The tutorial just plays in the space the players spawns, so you can go in and out to retrigger it. The fadeout bug is a good catch, probably not locking input after a choice is made haha.