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Will of the Wisp
Will of the Wisp
By johnfn, miyolophone, lunacyecho, fawnblue and garlagan
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 334 | 3.90 | 28 | |
| Fun | 785 | 3.53 | 29 | |
| Innovation | 1457 | 3.16 | 29 | |
| Theme | 1688 | 3.44 | 27 | |
| Graphics | 315 | 4.26 | 30 | |
| Audio | 9 | 4.50 | 30 | |
| Humor | 547 | 3.45 | 26 | |
| Mood | 265 | 3.98 | 28 | |
Comments
How does this not have more ratings! It's great! The music was epic! Did you compose it all in 3 days cos that is impressive as heck. (What did you use for the music? Software/vst wise?) Also the visuals are beautiful, has a real Gris feel even the animation of the dress/cloak. The foreground of the level was pretty block-y I think you coulda gone for a more drawn/painted look and then made the colliders blocks underneath - that would have kept the style more consistent. For me the text was a bit hard to read - it was a bit glitchy and squashed. +1 for toss a coin reference damn u
@peterfiftyfour It is because there is no link to a easily usable game. punks like me are too lazy to compile the game to play. Could you guys host your build somewhere? you can host on Itch.io for free! I hear it is very good ;P
Codewise, very interesting to see a React game. I think this wins the music side. I am curious for the music creation process, with the same questions as @peterfiftyfour :)
By the way, if you don't add a build to the game, i.e. in Itch.io, you will probably get little to no gameplays, because I think just a few people will try to run the game from the code.
johnfn
2020-04-22 08:53
The LD website is being a little flakey with displaying the URL. Here it is: http://138.197.213.214/
Thanks for the comments :)
liam
2020-04-22 09:24
Enjoyed playing this a lot but sadly it crashed for me right at the end when I was trying to get to the top!
the speedrun record at the moment is 5:06:44 from the ending of the opening cinematic to the final button press that ends the game! CAN ANYONE GO SUB FIVE
In chrome it won't seem to play (the controls appear at the top of the screen): 2020-04-22.png In edge it works slightly better, but it seems many UI elements are broken: 2020-04-22 (1).png 2020-04-22 (2).png
I would really love to play this game, so please let me know if there's a better browser I can use.
adamv
2020-04-23 03:05
Wow, the graphics and music were amazing! The gameplay felt kind of rough around the edges. The camera felt a bit off, especially when jumping you could sometimes end up briefly out of frame. I also had some frame rate issues at one point and the text felt very slow which may be related. I think you have a really solid foundation though! Great work!
sablen
2020-04-23 08:54
The art and music are incredible and added so much to the environment of the game. Had a few pauses in the game where transitions or text were a bit slow, but didn't detract from the game too much. Dialogue is also pretty well written, plenty of meta jokes in it. I got a bit of an Undertale vibe in the writing, which I think is great. Got a run done in 2:53 from pressing enter at the start to the final dialogue (the PS bit). If anyone wants to go for sub 2:50, I think it's definitely possible.
Update: the record is now 2:44.2! wtf people found optimizations FAST
g12345
2020-04-24 14:59
Hi! I just played this game on chrome, but it was very sluggish and when i got my first extra storage, the game ended. Also the fonts were barely visible.
Is that intentional or is that just a bug on the browser side?
Did I mention that despite all this, it looks and sounds great?
johnfn
2020-04-27 00:59
Sorry about the performance issues, guys! We should have just made some improvements that make the game playable on more computers. :)
akuirako
2020-05-10 13:05
looks and sound amazing. i'm fond of the animations, there's gorgeous !
arden
2020-05-10 14:08
As others are saying, the art and music are great. I especially enjoyed the way things bloom around your character. Really nice touch.
I thought the story was a little wordy for my taste, and the collisions seemed a bit crude in general. I enjoyed the level design, and thought climbing the tree at the end was really cool. Glad I made it to the end. Nicely done!
Wow, this game really looks and sounds impressive. Unfortunately, after a while the wines stopped working for me so I couldn't get anywhere :cry:
I like the game, I just think the player speed and movement could be faster
honey
2020-05-10 15:16
Uff, it runs incredibly slow on my notebook, gotta play it again on desktop PC. Wouldn't do that if it wasn't for the music and art that is so good that I want to experience it properly!
honey
2020-05-10 21:22
WotW.png
I got stuck here, have no idea what am I missing, even side quest didn't push me any further :) EDIT: I am not lost, you achieved to make the areas sort of memorable. I just can't find where to go next.
It feels amazing, the music and the graphics. It is a shame though that you didn't make it work well enough even on normal computer.
I also encountered some minor bugs - when you step on ungrowed mushroom and press interact, the shroom will grow up, but the character starts twitching weirdly. Also sometimes when you jump close to mushroom, u got the additional push, but don't get it once again when you fall back on the shroom. Also annoying part is when shroom (or anything other) is close to fountain, so the fountain text window pops up when you try to grow a shroom. Maybe you can have dedicated grow button when you're not bound to X and Y only button controller nowadays (also pain of a binding on qwertz keyboards) :)
Still I played much longer than I intended to, it was very soothing, the music is really great. After the jam, I probably give it another go so I can finish it. Now I need to play some other games so I can't spend more time looking for where to go or what to do next. Great job! Thanks for this game, really enjoyed it! :)
thanks for playing and for the feedback, @honey !
without spoiling exactly how to get past that part, i wanna point out that the height you get from bouncing on the shroom depends on how high you jump onto it from. basically, if you fall farther, you jump higher! hope that helps :)
honey
2020-05-10 22:43
@lunacyecho Oh, well, totally missed that! Thanks!
sinci1
2020-05-10 23:48
Wow wow wow, this game is amazing, I don't know where to begin, first of all it's amazing that you all managed to finish this for a game jam! like this is a game I would expect took like 6 months of work, not 3 days! but even apart from the fact that it's a game jam, everything is so well done and polished! I love the animations & the art, I love the music, the SFX design, the dialouge, the humor [it's great] the gameplay, and that before-ending [unfortunatley i did not expirience the ending because after the withers went away my game froze], I won't spoil it but that was unexpected. Overall I really love this game, the only problem is that there are serious lag spikes for some reason that made the game very hard to play, I'm not sure what's causing them, but even with them this game was a great expirience! Well done to all of you, well done!
Awesome visuals and decent music, as well as some good navigation puzzles. Great work!
its great job ! fuentes.jpg
duke
2020-05-11 11:14
First of all, you should really include a loading indicator when having so many assets :) the screen was gray for a long time before the game started.
Second of all: Wow! Congratulations. This was awesome. I was already blown away when entering the main menu and the great music greeted me. With vocals! You did all of this in the time of the jam? It didn't even end there. There were at least 3 other musical pieces in the game. What an effort. By far the best soundtrack I've heard so far in any game I've played this jam. Now I can wholeheartedly give a 5/5 for music :) The art was also very sophisticated. Great amount of detail and animation frames. The visual quality was top notch all way through. The platforming was good, but had some issues regarding ledges and the mushrooms. When standing on top of them and growing them, the player got stuck a little. Also, Screen transitions were a bit off, when the player was jumping while the transition happened and a wall was on the other side. But that's just minor complaints (we had our share of problems with the platforming engine as well). It was also good to see, that we weren't the only team to tackle some kind of non violent metroidvania style 2d platformer. The writing was funny and I liked the forth-wall-breaking and self referential stuff. It's always good to have a lighthearted mood when playing jam games. Keeps the player invested more easily :) The ui and controls were pretty much self explanatory and everything worked as I expected. The level design was simple but effective. You even managed to include some platforming puzzles, which is awesome. We didn't have time to add those. The end was a nice twist and paired with the music change, it was really fun to rush for the end.
All in all, a very competently made game. Really good game design and absolutely amazing music and art. The love and care put into this really shows.
this game was absolotely amazing
This was such a brilliant game. I'm not much for platformers, but this was beautiful and very well done for a game jam. I'm super disappointed I didn't get to see the end. The game froze, I assume when trying to load the final scene? Stuck.png I let it go for a very long time to see if it would eventually load. But it wouldn't.
As for what I got to play, the only part that bugged me was the fact that I couldn't bounce from mushroom to mushroom when going back up sections after I fell. Would have been very satisfying to bounce from shroom to shroom rather than have to land beside it and jump again.
Outside of that, the game was beautiful, and very satisfying to play. The music is the best I've heard this jam. I loved the way the plants would spring up around you as you walked.
Great work, love it.
Well, I guess I figured why this game doesn't have more ratings. I wanted to play it and rate it, but am totally unable. It refuses to run (Firefox). It asks for my name but after I type anything it just hangs, the music stops, I get a flash of what I should probably be seeing and go to black screen with ellipsis, where I just stay forever.
Screenshot_8.jpg
fawnblue
2020-05-11 18:20
Hey @fabula-rasa ! Did you try pressing X instead of Space? A few users have reported the same issue, which stemmed from our slightly strange control mappings... We realize they're not the most obvious, something we're hoping to fix in future versions.
fawnblue
2020-05-11 18:25
@archimagus Thank you so much for the comment! :blush: We actually felt the same way about the mushrooms, and implemented chain-bouncing a couple days later.. Unfortunately it didn't make it into the jam. If you're interested in playing that version, though, you can do that here: http://138.197.213.214:3000/
@fawnblue And I was pressing enter, space and clicking! Didn't think of pressing the interact button at all (especially that just earlier I was pressing Enter on the title screen) ! That did the trick, and I am playing the game now. Thank you!
mykola
2020-05-11 18:36
Tried Chrome, Edge and Firefox but the furtherst I could is the black screen with three white dots, after I enter my name. It's really sad after all the positive comments I've read here. Please let me know if there is any other way to play your game.
fawnblue
2020-05-11 18:40
Hey @mykola, have you tried pressing X? The controls are a little unintuitive (see my above comment), sorry about that!
Beautiful game! It's amazing to see how much you could do in just a weekend. Great art and heartwatming story. The mood was on point. Great job!
Awesome! I loved how you worked with music, starting with this melancholy piano and evolving and changing it as the story went on. Armless graphics is great :wink: and I really liked how my character affected the world around her - making flowers/vines bloom as she walked. It really made the wold feel alive and reactive. All this together creates great mood.
I laughed at "toss a coin to your Withers" and enjoyed the villain's monologue overall. Although, in my opinion, it didn't really fit the tone of the rest of the game. However, I do love some good forth wall breaking - so I can forgive a little tone incongruencies.
The only thing that I didn't really like was the mushrooms. Would be nicer if you could bounce up on them every second bounce or so, not only on the first bounce.
Dialogue would often catch me mid-jump (what can I say, I lie jumping around) and I was having conversations while hanging in the air - looked quite funny. The game also completely hanged on me once, near the end. It just stopped being responsive. It was here:
Screenshot_10.jpg
mykola
2020-05-11 19:53
@fawnblue good point and thank you so much. Silly me.
It's one of the best games I've played in this jam. Definitely the best when it comes to audio and music. I'm really impressed that you managed to create so many legendary soundtracks in just 72 hours. I love the instrumentals. Is there any way I can listen to the whole soundtrack of the game?
Art is great, I loved the details like different flower animations as you walk by. The story-telling was great, very immersive plot, very funny dialogues at times and fourth-wall-breaking and reference phrases were on point. Whoever did the writing - huge respect and well done. All in all, amazing audio, great art and beautiful story create a perfect mood.
When it comes to the gameplay and programming, it did the job as the game was playable and felt complete. There is still some polishing to be done though. It was probably mentioned already, but I'll just recap: 1) for a milisec I could see the previous dialogue message when switching to the next one; 2) the last frame of the vines animation was stuck after it was over; 3) when activating the shroom while standing on top of it, the character animation glitches; 4) The first level soundtrack did loop smoothly as far as I remember. Overall, it didn't bug me much and the game was still really enjoyable. But it might be something to address if you decide to move on with the further development.
Overall, you've done an amazing job putting it all together. Top mark.
EDIT: I see you addressed all the issues in the post-ld version. Well done, feel much better now! I found just two issues: 1. a collider is missing from the left part of the very first ground obstacle. 2. I can't perform the mushroom jump in the crossroads screen, right after I teleport there after getting the fifth soul.
@mykola you can listen to the OST (and download it for free, if you're into that) at https://miyolophone.newgrounds.com/audio/ !!
thank you everyone for your feedback and kind words! especially those who complimented the music. you have won my personal favor.
Super cute! Lovely graphics and very good music! Relaxed mood ON! Nice entry!
mykola
2020-05-12 19:38
@miyolophone thank you so much for sharing! I love your style. Will definitely keep it on repeat for a while. Really inspiring!