olenikimid 2022-04-05 11:07
This was quite difficult! The art and music+SFX work well together. The shadow tracer effect is a nice detail :)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Against the Dying of the Light
By celtican and Gardenovena
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 143 | 4.00 | 25 | |
| Fun | 346 | 3.69 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 568 | 3.43 | 25 | |
| Theme | 105 | 4.23 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 261 | 4.17 | 25 | |
| Audio | 92 | 4.10 | 25 | |
| Humor | 965 | 2.47 | 23 | |
| Mood | 12 | 4.56 | 25 |
This was quite difficult! The art and music+SFX work well together. The shadow tracer effect is a nice detail :)
@olenikimid Thank you! The ghost image effect I came up with pretty early on, but we weren't really sure if we liked it. The intention was to hint at lethargy, but unfortunately that effect can also be associated with super speed. Hopefully more people like it!
I tend to give preference to playing the WebGL entries since I don't have to download anything, but the art sold me on this game and I downloaded it. I'm glad I did. Very well done! Excellent art, music, and sounds. Quite an accomplishment to get dialogue and quests in there, too. It really nails the theme.
@tony-li I would have loved to make a WebGL build. Unfortunately the game was lagging a bit in the editor (no thanks to the several thousand bits of grass that I could only optimize so fast), so I figured it was best to not make a WebGL build so that the chances of someone having frame drops remains minimal (especially with a game so geared around immersion).
Thanks for giving it a chance! We definitely impressed ourselves with the art.
Wow! This is one of the best LD games i've played so far I was really expecting to pick up twigs on a small map until there were none left but I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was progress and an ending. A super polished and complete experience great work.
Absolutely love the game. All the graphics and sounds gives the needed atmosphere and feel. One thing that I am a bit nitpicky about is that all the controls use one hand. Enabling movement with arrow keys or changing the interact button to mouse will be a great improvement IMO.
Awesome work! I destroyed an entire forest to save my son. I really loved the exploration aspect to the game. The fact that I had to find an axe to chop down a tree in order to build a bridge to find a radio was pretty cool. There was a good amount of tension as well. Great work on the audio and art. Extra points for writing dialogue and letting the player choose the name of the father and son :)
It would've been cool to see the rangers show up in person before cutting to the dialogue, but that is a minor detail.
I like the art on this, fits the feeling to your game. Well done!
@boykala I was really afraid of giving that impression to be honest. But! The game is a bit more than that. If not just a little bit. Thanks for playing and enjoying :slight_smile:
@wainini Oops, I forgot to add arrow key support! That's a minus on my part. And I have to agree with you on the "one handed gameplay" part. At some point I experimented with having a light source that looked in the direction of a mouse like a flashlight. Unfortunately the player was already drawn with a lantern so it didn't really make sense to have a flashlight-like light source with a lantern. I probably could have made left click an alias for interact. I think it crossed my mind, but I was busy with other stuff.
Point is: I'm also mad at myself for only using WASDE haha
@rschoellgen Naming the kid (and parent to a lesser degree) was a great way to make the player feel connected with the game. I'm really glad I thought of that. In the original idea for the game, your brother/whoever else was with you camping went out to find help and would return, but we opted to have the player and their kid be alone for the tension. And yeah, I would have loved to have the rangers appear, but I'm not actually sure how I would have implemented it. Thanks for playing!
@cover-club-media I like the art, too :slight_smile: @gardenovena did a great job. Way better than our other two entries.
Hidden onions in this game. I enjoyed it a lot - a well polished game, plus art and music on point to create the mood. 11/10 would murder a whole-ass forest again to save my kid.
Really nice experience, Art and sound awesome! Really like the overall experience!! :D
@saryah Onions? I didn't put onions in the game. They must be *really* hidden. I made the map! ... Oh, also thanks for playing and murdering that forest :slight_smile: (you have a cool game, too)
@gabriel-corbani Experience is what we were aiming for! I think a little more dialogue would have improved the experience a good boot, for instance, no implemented dialogue mentions the bridge. I could have also written plain better dialogue, although I'm not much of a writer. On the other side of the coin, silence can be good in a moody game, so it wasn't completely a loss. Our first jam game, [Palette's Bottomless Backpack](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/palettes-bottomless-backpack), had so much dialogue that you could potentially not have a single moment of silence the entire game if you were fast enough. But that was a humorous game, not a moody game, so that also worked out! ... Anywho. Thank you for playing and you have a nice cat!
Lovely experience. Kind of relaxing despite the impending doom (or at least I eventually failed -- not sure if there is an end game hahaha.) I like the slow progression mechanic mixed in with the relaxing pace.
@mrevilguy Thank you! It is quite relaxing. There were moments in development where I turned on the game just to have the ambience and visuals in the background while I worked on dialogue.
There is an ending as well :slight_smile: As a hint, you have to find an axe to collect wood and eventually find a bridge to repair. On the other side of the bridge is a win condition, more or less. It starts a timer.
Unless you already reached that ending. Yes, the "you won" ending is quite ambiguous... Anywho, thank you for playing ad enjoying!
@celtican Ohhh haha I fixed the bridge started to go across but went back to tend to the fire and died haha
@mrevilguy Gotcha. Unfortunately the game did turn out a little more difficult than I was aiming for. I also tried hinting at the ending with the quest prompts and whatnot, but! There's only so much you can do in a jam!
What a great experience! This is an all around awesome package of beautiful art, interesting graphics (like the snow and the shadow tracer), ambient music, and heart. Your opening dialogue set the scene well without being too much to read. The only thing I can think of that it needed was maybe more clarity that you use the axe just like how you gather twigs. It took me a little bit to realize I could chop down trees just by pressing E. Although, that's just me nitpicking. Great job! :)
Well done. A nice, emotional experience. Enjoyed playing this on stream!
What a fantastic entry! Masterful storytelling, pacing, artistry, and audio. This game is deeply engaging and heart wrenching on every level, and supported by every facet of it's polish - the gentle particle effects as the storm worsens, the tight cuddled face of our child rendered lovingly in uncharastically vibrant colors, the winter wind and gentle songwork twinkling in tandem - all create a powerful and efficient atmosphere that is inductive of a very skillful dev team.
Plus there were some very clever gameplay elements on display - the key items being lit by forgotten lanterns, the metroidvainia sighting of the impassable log, and the path that lays beyond, the frantic twig searching in the beautiful waving grass, and the natural comfort of the screen brightening near the stoked fire - contrasted with the dark dread of running back to camp as only embers struggle.
Gotta say, the theme + the ending has me awful nervous, and all I can do is hope against hope that the rangers got here in time.
Truly amazing work, you should all be very proud!
(I typed out this whole comment and then I lost it by navigating to another page, fun fun fun)
@pixelydian Thanks! I quite liked the opening dialogue. It set the stage and mood very effectively, and also gave an opportunity for naming the player and kid. And! It doesn't take too many assets to make. The only assets in the dialogue screens are the font, navy background, soft yellow light, and snow particles. All of those are used elsewhere, it was an easy copy-paste. I think more jam games should use an opening dialogue, especially moody games that really need to set their theme quick. I also have to agree with you on the axe note, there is not much indication that you can do it besides (un?)common sense and a tiny graphical indicator. I originally planned to add a few extra tutorial quests, particularly "Chop trees with E" and "Pick up logs with E," but, y'know, time crunch and all that (although it would not have been hard). I also should have made the third gif include logs, it only shows twigs, which makes it seem rather boring. It was my first time making gifs though, so I can't be too mad. Thank you for nitpicking (I love nitpicking)! In return, I've given you a rant. Fair trade, no?
@jitspoe Thanks for playing! I'll be honest, I don't think this game is the best for streaming, since streams (at least in my experience) tend to drift more towards being entertaining with humor and good times. But our game is not about humor and good times, it's about dying children and very very bad times. I'm not a streamer myself, though, so perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe viewers do enjoy dying children and very very bad times. Anywho! Thanks for checking it out!
@ugly-robot I wouldn't quite say I'm a master at game design or anything (the only three games I finished were these last three LD jams), but thank you for the kind words! Admittingly, there were a lot of things we wanted to add but missed. Notable examples include: a flint mechanic to relight a dead fire (removed for realism), an axe chop animation (I tried adding this in the last 10 minutes, needless to say it caused a screaming headache), an interact animation/sound effect, more dialogue (I think this game has a fine amount of dialogue actually, Silence does well here), multiple layers of blizzard that get worse over time, a child shivering animation (this was not added because of a small miscommunication between artist and programmer sadly), swaying twigs/trees, and... uh, a fishing minigame or something. Every RPG needs a fishing minigame. We did quite well considering the circumstances and our relative inexperience, so I'm pleased. [We did really well on our first jam game, too.](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/palettes-bottomless-backpack) (shameless plug, sorry) I should probably play more games so we can actually get scored. Anyways! Thank you for the wonderful words!
I'd love to play a full version of this game later on, the atmosphere reminded me a lot of This War of Mine!
This was gonna be my last play for the day until you hit us with the 10/10 mood. I need a pick-me-up! The atmosphere and setting are really fitting for the theme. Really well done. I enjoyed the gameplay, and I don't think that it was entirely unfair. I was able to grab the radio and the fire died in the blizzard just before I got back to camp. I don't know if it's possible to "win," but I was satisfied with how it ended (apart from like, my child perishing).
The art style was great too, and there were some fx you used that added a lot of character. e.g. the character's ghosting and the sprite flip.
@mickxe Thank you! I personally don't think this particular game has enough going for it to play for more than 15 minutes, but maybe with some hefty modifications.
@drumgadget-433 Perfect. That's what I was hoping for. With the way the gameplay ended up, it's unfair enough that you'll probably die your first try just as you learn how to ration resources and manage time, but I've seen that people usually beat the game on their second attempt. I think I like that, as it does emphasize that this is a dire situation, it really shouldn't be easy. When we were first designing the game, we thought that it made sense for the game to be *really* hard. It would take multiple playthroughs to beat, and you would have had to harvest nearly the entire forest to win. We decided against that in the end though, simply because you guys are expecting to play these LD games for just a few minutes, and frankly it would be a waste if you didn't see the ending. So, we made it much easier than we originally hoped to (perhaps by accident). Oh, there is an ending by the way :slight_smile:
Really good entry! I have nothing to complain about :) Quite challenging!
Cool game nice graphics
Nice challenge. Took me two tries to beat. Didn't find the bridge the first time, and on the second attempt was nearly out of fuel by the end. Good job on the the presentation and setting the right atmosphere.
@d0monation Thank you! I have nothing to commentate about. I'm running out of commentary :slight_smile:
@pashaloban I agree! Two things I didn't implement that I wish I did was a flicking fireplace light and a shivering child. I didn't have the script ready for the child—although I did plan out how it would function—but I did have the script for the flickering fireplace (copy-pasted from a previous prototype of mine), I just forgot to implement it in time. Thanks for playing!
@unpronounceable Two seems to be the golden number. I don't know if anyone managed to complete it in their first try (someone @ me if you did), but it doesn't seem to take much more than two. It can't be too easy, after all! Thank you for giving it a shot!