Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → The last way
By Parado10, arficord and li_toh
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1117 | 2.90 | 27 | |
| Fun | 1195 | 2.38 | 27 | |
| Innovation | 929 | 2.94 | 27 | |
| Theme | 1126 | 3.02 | 27 | |
| Graphics | 333 | 4.06 | 26 | |
| Audio | 329 | 3.63 | 25 | |
| Humor | 1035 | 2.00 | 23 | |
| Mood | 102 | 4.18 | 27 |
Wish I could've gone full screen to enjoy the nice models, did you make the models yourself? Evident you guys put so much work for the visuals, but found it a little difficult to understand what to do / the goal. Water creatures chasing you were cool. Good submission!
Very good looking game, music was nice too. Figuring out what to do took a bit of time, but I did reach the boat and moved around. A few technical issues I would like to see fixed is audio feedback for hitting enemies and getting hit. I was killed by the fire land ghosts, though they were still tracking me at the house. I tried to listen to the pretty long ghost stories on the boat, but after only one gave positive karma I yeeted them as soon as I could to see what was next. After a point the wind led me to nothing, so I have to guess I saw everything. It would have been good to have something say a message based on whatever karma based system this game had, but the visuals were pretty to look at. The supposed speed the rowboat moves is pretty funny too. Good work!
@osh-studio Thanks for the review. Models, animations (mesh swap based) and overall look was made by @parado10 and @li-toh themselves. Unfortunately, gameplay is a bit confusing, but the main goal is to collect souls in the sea, judge them by listening to their stories and let them rebirth or sink in the sea.
To enter full screen you can either scroll down in the game window (some ldjam visual bug), play on itch.io, download windows build.
@toppervideogames Thanks for the review. We had some hard time with adding the tutorial and giving information about what to do in the game. Karma changes when you make the choice (right or not) to sink a soul in the sea or rebirth it in the well at the lighthouse. At the positive karma enemies spawn frequency drops down in negative rises (percent based).
So I hop in, try to walk upstairs, probably because of the lighting. Didn't work. Then went down the path, some mysterious texts about enemies and I'm asking myself if I will get ammo for the gun on my back. But I have melee so, I keep walking and discovered - walking diagonally is much faster. Doing this a while I discovered some enemy. They are slow. Just like the player. So I can wait until they glitch in my body before pressing SPACE to kill them, or just ignore them while walking away from them at twice their speed, diagonally. I decided to kill them because I felt like the game might need them to be dead. I keep walking and walking, taking the path up to the wall of text cave. Something about historical things I guess. Lore. And again, walking and walking, the path downwards. And there is just some broken wood that seems to lead to collision bugs, so I left it alone. And again, walking and walking. And then the next text-guy. I walked into it's trigger area, then turned around to kill some enemies and 'poof' he was gone. So I stepped into the boat, randomly moving across the map, again, diagonally to be faster. And didn't find anything. So I thought that this guy might be important. I restarted the game. Walking and walking and walking and walking. Finally getting to the guy. The guy says: "Follow the wind."
Doing what he said, I find some ghosts. Game tells me "press E to 'progress'", I press "E", negative response (karma goes down). I pick the next one. Now knowing better. So I get all the way back, first by boat, then by feet. The longest journey of my life, occassionally smashing spacebar to get rid of black things that trigger a Quicktime-Event that will reset my position (and my karma?). Ok, all they way back. Paddling, paddling, paddling (against invisible walls), walking, walking, walking - I press "E" at the start location. Again - negative response (karma goes down).
I understood - I should decide which to "get rid of" and which to "resurrect", and whenever I want to resurrect, I have to walk this insanely long and boring way, all the way to my house and back to the boat to pick the next one.
4 Devs, 3 Days. What went wrong? I could guess that artists tried to put in their stuff, neglecting the actual gameplay, bad communication or simply lack of experience. BUT - this is LD and LD is a place to learn.
The game design is somewhat flawed because just paddling around the (mostly empty) ocean as main gameplay doesn't work. It needs secondary mechanics. Killing enemies as second mechanic doesn't work with the mood of the game. One doesn't read while fighting. Collecting things that guide you back might have worked.
The level design with all the invisible walls doesn't fit what's happening in the game either. Invisible walls should only be supportive and placed precisely at obstacles, not gigantic boxes. The level itself should already restrict player movement. You have fences, rocks, steep hills and cliffs. If you want to block the players movement, you have to use those. And all the long paths - they should be way shorter and ultimately lead to the beginning, where a new path opens down to the boat. So the distance between boat landing stage and tower is as short as possible.
Improvements in coding should be clear. Make enemies not glitch into the player by using collision. Avoid diagonal speed boost by normalizing the value if greater than 1, use Quaternion.Slerp or MoveTowards to rotate the boat smoothly, use Dot-Product to slow the boat down when not facing move direction and so on.
But I guess you all learned a lot by attending this jam, so keep going, keep improving and deliver something cool in 6 months (next jam).
I threw a ghost into the water :)
Pretty interesting game, wasnt sure what i was doing most of the time but it was interesting!
The visuals of this game are really nice. I jut wished there was some more light. As you get out it is really dark and I had to crank my screen to full brightness to understand what was around me.
I am not entirely sure what the goal of the game is as I was mainly going around hitting stuff, though :smile:
Great visuals! I wasn't sure what to do when getting to the boat though, I got lost trying to follow the wind.
The game looks great, the music is awesome, really fits the mood. I didn't totally get what to do at sea until I read the comment about judging the souls. Overall a good time.
Love the graphics. I fall below the map while trying to chase the wind lol. The combat encounters can use some sound effects to improve the overall game feel. Solid entry overall.
Stunning art style, very atmospheric! The movement felt far more fluid than it has any right to be. The combat felt a little one-tone, and could use some audio and visual feedback, but awesome entry, great job!
Really awesome atmosphere. The art and music really worked well with the story to set the tone for the game.
Really nice looking game but i had no idea what to do with the souls :(
Loved the mood and the world building. I was supposed to choose what to do with the souls but the only option I had was to throw it away. And then the option disapeared and I couldn't do anything exept fight the never ending flow of undead attacking my ship. Really awesome potential for the atmosphere, not so much with the gameplay (unless I missed something or there is a bug). Great and unique entry overall!
The visuals are great, audio is great and it's the best of these types of games.
@jonathan-lorenz thanks for the review. Souls can be reborn at lighthouse and you can't throw souls near the island.
@arficord Thanks for the reply, I will give it another try!
So I was walking on the path to the dock and I saw the water shader you mentioned, and I thought I should go take a closer look. I like shaders after all. So I go for a walk by the sea and :) WALK.png
I feel like you were too worried about collisions. Really liked your navigation system, beautifully done!
Maybe it's my love for comtemplative game speaking, but I almost wish there was no combat in this game! It's incredibly pretty for such a short jam and I can see you put your whole heart into it, the bad guys actually kept me from enjoying the atmosphere and story of the ghost as much as I wanted to, but still, I'm extremely impressed by it ♥ The main character animation work so well, your choice of making them so low framed was a very smart move. Kudos to the sound designer especially, you did amazing!
I got lost at sea. Could not find my way back to land.
Overall I loved the aesthetic but the combat could have used a little extra work to feel satisfying. The giant skeleton hand coming out of the water behind the house is incredible btw.
Thanks @blank-3d, glad you like it)
Thanks @mercilesscult, we really hard work to give it a life. Glad you enjoyed the game)
@drazil100 thanks for the review. Unfortunately many mechanics were added at last minute and we didn't have much time to polish them. You can also enter the toilet under the lighthouse btw)
This was something special! I first went wtf about the animations, but realized it was cool. Not sure I've seen these type of discrete animations in 3d before. I did not understand the fighting with the oar in the beginning. No indication of if I killed them or if they hit me. I guess I won, because I made it to the boat. Very cool water, is it a vertex shader of some sort? It looked like lots of polygons with smooth shading somehow, very nice to see new ways of making water! I'm not a big button masher fan, and after rowing around for a while I had like 10 dudes swimming after me, so I got to mash some serious buttons before I could continue. I think the game could have been more interesting without the fighting actually, because the setting is strong, good mood. I would have liked to go around in peace looking for lost souls. I did not figure out where to go with my ghosts though... Very interesting game, very impressive!
@wighz Thanks for the review, nice to hear that you like it. Btw we used shader (link in the description) and custom created normal maps
Nice environment! I loved the level design. Lovely atmosphere.
@xk-the-name thanks, I will tell this to our artists)