listonos 2020-04-21 01:38
Not really sure how to bring the fish up after discovering the lake but great atmosphere and not shabby looking either.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Until We Freeze
By icxon
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 524 | 3.79 | 44 | |
| Fun | 848 | 3.50 | 43 | |
| Innovation | 877 | 3.45 | 43 | |
| Theme | 88 | 4.29 | 43 | |
| Graphics | 851 | 3.87 | 43 | |
| Audio | 750 | 3.46 | 42 | |
| Humor | 1381 | 2.70 | 37 | |
| Mood | 84 | 4.25 | 43 |
Not really sure how to bring the fish up after discovering the lake but great atmosphere and not shabby looking either.
Really enjoyed the aesthetic
Really great atmosphere, but somehow the fish disapeared when I tried to climb the rope... Yet awesome game (:
Has a very cool feel to it. I enjoyed chopping down trees and exploring. Had a sense of place for sure! Felt the controls were odd with relation to the direction of movement and the rotation using the mouse and I thought climbing felt wrong - but nice control system on the hands and the interactions, felt very natural quickly.
Nice game. Very beautiful.
I had to find the axe to realize I could carry the fish on my back! Really complete game for how simple it is. Desperately needs a character!
The rope climbing is a bit too slow and I couldnt figure out how to cut down trees so i kinda just ran with my fish till the end, but otherwise you nailed the mood!
woah love the graphics and the overall game mood. It was a little bit hard to figure out what to do after I found the fish but the world building is neat!
I enjoyed your game. It had a similar idea as mine, i.e. keep the fire alive and don't freeze, but yours was a lot more mellow and interactive approach. Nice job!
I freed my fish! Now I am alone.
This is a lovely game. I never found the axe but there was enough wood to get me to the end.
Really liked what you did here with the atmosphere - and while using only standard assets too! This game feels and plays as a finished piece. Great job.
I liked what you could do with the Unity graphics. The game play was a little too straightforward for me, I thought there was some good time to do a Chicken, Fox and Grain Riddle type puzzle, but everything was just putting the fish on your back and going from fire to fire, I am not sure the soup was even needed. That being said I liked the idea, graphics, and atmosphere!
Wow, it is so sadly and joyfully at same time. The most kindly game our team ever made.
I like thost small details like cold breath, fish animations, a bit different phrases on repeating cases. I would like to have a bit more things to do, not just putting woods into fire. Or, I'm sure, it could be a very beautiful "walking" game, with strange and mysterious nature around (we are in dream, right?) where it is nice to just walk around and see.
Wow, that truly was an amazing experience. I really liked Once Upon a Plague last year and I'm happy to see that each member of your team is still making good games!
I think the best about your game is its mood with this desperate music. The level design is also clever, well done!
I like the vibe in this game c:
Great aesthetic and atmosphere.
It would have been nice if the "health indicator" was a bit easier to see like if it had harder edges to make it easier to see as it appeared. Also the lack of fall damage and barriers around cliffs lets the player jump off cliffs instead of going down rope. Otherwise great game, the atmosphere is genuinely awesome
Loved the vibe you created.
This is cool game. Freezing even.
"I love you my fish <3" :)) It almost make me cry ;)
Did I just put my fish, doesn't like the cold, into a snowy mountain lake?
Anyway, well done. Any future version would need to tweak the difficulty a bit, but overall a very nice game.
Fun game with a nice story. I stayed until the last bit :P
I'm not sure if this was intended, but I managed to get to the end without making a second camp. Nice graphics!
Actually the proxi grafics are good and stylish, maybe except for the main character. Your game is good in mood - you couldn't belive how a ton of rocks fell from my chest, as I figured out how to get the small golden one up the cliffs. There are more "keep the fire alive" games out there, but I would say you (mainly) keep your character and his fish alive, so it fits the theme multiple times. The random mechanics can make a run quite exciting, also a bit frustrating, though replaying was fun ... and a bit sad sometimes.
It's lovely! Really cute. Love the aesthetic and the ambient, just two items makes the game a simple but effective puzzle.
Really like the cold effect that goes on, I think it might have been better to make the screen darker than just blue and for the effect to come in a little later, it seems to come in a little early and stays there. I also think that when you start getting colder, the countdown should get progressively faster which will be harder to recover back to warmth (seems a bit too static). I think the game has really good intent but is let down at the end when you realise you only have to survive to put the fish in the river at the top of the mountains. A few bits of wood and you're sorted and you could likely survive in one go. Sadly this makes the survival tactic a bit pointless considering how easy it is to finish the game.
Nontheless it's still an interesting concept and I like being able to only carry two things. It can feel a little limiting but when trying to light a fire or use the soup you then have to organise your slot. You can easily keep the fish on your back though.
If there was more time it would be intesting to find more content around the map rather than just trees, I ended up blindly walking everywhere to see where to go or if there was more gameplay.
Cool game with great atmosphere! Graphics and music go really good together and I like little clouds of warmth when the character breaths. The end scene is cute and the fish looks really nice there but it's a bit sad for our character who will now probably freeze to death :(
Cute! The minimalist music and wind sounds really set the mood well. I felt happy for the fish at the end, but sad for the mountaineer, who I immediately suspected will die. That just adds to the mood, though. Wish the freezing timer was a bit quicker, though, as the game feels way too easy.
I would liek to play the game but the browser version is too laggy for me and I can't find a download link on the itch page. Am I missing it?
Really great atmsphere. i love the simplicity of the main character : he is just a capsule but he is very meaningfull
Nice job on your game , played very smooth. Couldn't climb the rope to get wood after I got too cold liked the fact it looped back and you could pick up where you left off.
@finn-truman, thank you for letting me know about that issue. I attached win-build to the [game page](https://graal.itch.io/until-we-freeze), see **"ld46_until_we_freeze_win.zip"** under downloads section.
Music was very simple but set the mood for the game perfectly! I felt immediately attached to my friend fish. I carried her (i would like to think it's her!) everywhere and felt bad for leaving her. That is until i learned i can use TAB to switch items. I didn't read instructions before starting game and in actual game the instruction came pretty late for me (i firstly climbed up, then i went back and backtraced to find chicken noodle soup, then i finally learned TAB it may be useful to put it closer to starting point maybe ^^). It was simple, but very beautiful. Very good experience! I greatly liked it!
Thanks for updating the link!
I'm not sure what kind of difficulty you're going for, but I managed to beat it on my first try, not really knowing what I was doing, and without finding the hatchet. I really like the concept (I'm an absolute sucker for games where coziness, warmth, and comfort are key themes. I even liked the programmer art because it lends a certain cuteness to it!), but I feel as though it's been held back by slow pacing.
Everything takes just a little too long. The level is too empty for how zoomed in the camera is, so when you're walking from one key point to the next, you don't have anything to keep you entertained along the way, which wouldn't be a problem if you moved a little faster. Rope climbing is also far too slow. And I don't think the warmth drains fast enough.
There's never a reason to leave the fish somewhere. You always have to be taking the fish forwards towards progress, and there isn't really anywhere to go that isn't forwards (there kind of is at the start fo the game, but after the first rope climb it's pretty much all straight) so leaving the fish anywhere is pointless because you have to come back for it. So because leaving the fish on the floor isn't worth it, campfires are also not worth feeding.
The meta strategy is to mount the fish to your back, never take it off, and carry a piece of fire in your spare hand (This also makes soup pointless because the fire will keep both of you warm), and abandon the fire whenever you need to climb rope. You never need to worry too much about a lack of fire in your hand because your warmth drains slow enough that you will likely find a piece of firewood next to an empty campfire.
In order to fix this, I would do the following: * Make the hatchet essential. Remove random pieces of firewood. Put the hatchet near the starting campfire, because a player's first instinct is to move forwards, especially if they see the fish is already on a timer. * The fish's warmth both drains faster and restores slower than yours does. Thos means sprints between campfires are more of a risk. * To counteract the above point, make campfires last longer so you can be confident you can leave the fish behind. If the player is too worried the fire dies quickly, they won't want to leave the fish. Each piece of wood you put on fire exponentially increases the time a fire lasts, encouraging the player to gets lots of wood (so each piece of wood increases the fire duration for 5 times rather than 2 times. This number would require some experimentation). * With all that, the player is much more free to explore. This is important because the critical path is blocked, either from a cliff face that doesn't have a rope (and the player has to find the rope which is hiding somewhere nearby), or a wooden barricade or fallen tree is in the way (which produces lots of wood as a reward).
That's what I would do. And I would do all of that because I do like the game even as it is and I want to see it get even better!
It's kind of cool you used only the default unity meshes. It makes the keeper very capsule like. The survival aspect definitely could have been made a bit more important. I never even noticed that you could cut down trees to get fire wood. The game has a nice peaceful feeling and I enjoyed it.
@finn-truman made some great points about the game, and I agree with them. I beat it on my first try as well by just walking around with my fish and finished the game in about 5 minutes. The atmosphere is good and the subtle music makes is all the better. Overall a nice experience!
Really great entry, its a really good use of the standard unity assets. A little more polish and this would have been super fun to play.
As people have stated before, it needed to be a little more challenging. I always love day/night cycles in games like this maybe something like that could have added depth.
Great work and keep up the unity development :D
Very nice! I was not able to stop playing until I finished it. Our fish is on the top of the mountain. Pretty balanced entry. Respect.
Simple but cute game with a lot of small details that create a winter atmosphere.
I wanted a little more activity and challenging. You don't need to store resources and using an axe, you can just run forward and complete game.
very cute! And those trees are so simple and good looking.