josep93 2023-10-03 17:22
The theme of the game is quite curious. Even with the small drawback of the distance and relief relationships of the stage not being quite right, it looks perfectly good and the animations are considerably fluid.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → The Confines
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 375 | 3.77 | 26 | |
| Fun | 684 | 3.29 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 712 | 3.18 | 26 | |
| Theme | 337 | 3.97 | 26 | |
| Graphics | 678 | 3.41 | 26 | |
| Mood | 140 | 4.06 | 26 |
The theme of the game is quite curious. Even with the small drawback of the distance and relief relationships of the stage not being quite right, it looks perfectly good and the animations are considerably fluid.
@josep93 Are 'distance and relief' terms relating to the '3D' perspective? (sorry if that's a noob question) If so, sadly I am both (a) terrible at anything artistic and (b) extremely new to anything computer graphics related - so honestly I'm surprised my 'programmer art' turned out even passable ahahaha. Thanks for playing! :smile:
I liked the game, its verry interesnting and make you thnik about things.The animations are good, i really enjoy this style.Good luck in your game dev path.!!!
I tried Safari and it would just keep starting over after a few minutes in, then switched to Chrome and was able to complete the game with no issues. The story was very cool! My only criticism would be to: add some sound (typing maybe or speaking if possible) and/or allow the player to increase the speed of the words. Well done!
@dannysimo thanks for playing and your wishes!
@draekdude funny to hear that, I'm glad you got it working though. On sound - definitely agree, sound would have been pretty much at the top of my 'extra features' wishlist - I'm not that experienced with sound effects but I do enjoy composing music, particularly when it's to complement a story or setting. On the speed of the words - I know I should probably add a label, but did you try the slider at the bottom?
Cool implementation of the theme but these types of games aren't really for me. Maybe there could have been some small minigame you play to advance the conversation or something.
@verttixpertti fair enough, I also have types of games that aren't really for me :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:
Honestly using the theme in a prison never crossed my mind, nice idea, it's just does not feel fleshed out enough as a game, More player input would have been nice, like some mini games. But very good story nevertheless.
An unusual concept.
love the style and great idea, really good work considering its your first time doing a lot of things
Wow deep story, I liked the way the two characters got to know eachother. I think this is the perfect art and style for this game. Simple, yet fancy, fluent little animations. Well done! :D
@verdant-jack I agree that it's quite minimal gameplay-wise, as I say I'd have at least liked the dialogue tree to be less linear, even if I were to keep the purely story-based approach. That said, I fully understand where people are coming from in terms of wanting more gameplay, and in the future I doubt any full-sized game project I work on would use this purely text-based approach. Glad you enjoyed the story, and thanks for playing :)
@fatemperor thanks for playing, yes I tried to think out of the box somewhat :smile:
@deaglan-murphy tyvm :D
@wouterk12 Glad you liked it - also for my first time making an animated sprite I think it went pretty well - confining (no pun intended!) myself to a simple silhouette with no colour definitely helped me achieve my goal. Thanks for the comments :)
Interesting idea, I just sat back and read the story. This was a ton of writing for such a limited time.
That was... unusual. I am absolutely fine with text-based games and it gave me some food for thoughts. That's cool. Though I couldn't parse if this is political commentary or not :)
@newvid glad to hear it, and yes it took a fair few hours even for this fairly limited dialogue tree :)
@nicekot haha I see that, no it isn't meant to be political commentary and I didn't intend any allegory to actual political figures (current or historic) - I essentially just started thinking about how I could make a conversation between 'cellmates' interesting, and let my mind wander from there to generate a story. Gradually I guess I wanted it to end up being kind of an encouragement to think about the ways we perceive and respond to crimes - not in any attempt to justify heinous acts or lawbreaking, just to remind the audience that nothing is ever as black-and-white as it's sometimes made out to be and to always think critically.
I enjoyed the story and mood. Great job with the narrative!
I did enjoy the game a lot, to be honest, it all went by in one breath! It wasn't too long, and dialogue was actually interesting and got me invested. I think the writing on this is really good. Also, I liked making choices through pressing numbers, I liked how you added a little animation of them walking, which made it easier to immerse myself in the story and really see it all happening, and I liked how the text was writing itself w/o me clicking for each new phrase - it actually made me feel like I am watching a small movie (text-based movie xD) that I can sometimes interact with :) I liked the dialogue choices and made the ones I would choose myself. In the end, I became friends with that dude and left the cell. I expected a choice there as well - I was going to leave, but was surprised there is no other choice. Also, I was greedily expecting some kind of final screen with the "title" of the ending (like Ending 1: Freedom, or something!), not even necessarily a CG, just a conclusion of sorts. Overall, I think the game is great. It also tackles some heavy topics, and as a russian, I had some personal feelings about Anton (as I see it, there can be some parallels drawn, and I would like for our president to be sent to prison for his crimes against humanity); however, I also tried to understand him as his own character and our MC as well.
@amirrajan good to hear, thanks for playing!
@kanity thanks so much for your comments :) It seems you found the 'good' main ending (there is also a 'not so good' main ending as well as an earlier 'insane' ending). I think you're right, a final choice at the very end might have been an interesting thing as well, but sadly I was really quite time pressed towards the end so it worked out with less choices than I would maybe have liked :sweat_smile: I take your point about the lack of a final screen - but actually I also enjoy the simplicity of a concise (and even possibly ambiguous) ending so I think there's a valid argument for both sides. I tried to make the characters somewhat relatable - definitely there may be some parallels to certain persons, living or dead, but I doubt these real-life people have the same story or motives as my character (it's true I wanted to stimulate a bit of thought on how not everything is black and white, but even while saying that, some people really unequivocally do deserve to be imprisoned!)
@destroyertech yeah I totally understand about time crunch, I feel you ^^' and yeah as I said I tried my best to see this character for himself and not as someone else, and ofc it's not a complete match, and I did feel like my character became kinda friends with that guy :) I agree it's always good to give people benefit of the doubt and try to understand them and their motivation.
Wow I was drawn in to the story, you are certainly a great writer! In all honesty, if you were able to flesh this out into a hour-2 hour experience I'd quite likely pay a modest fee to play this sort of thing.
Sound and music would have been excellent additions but given the time crunch and all, I can certainly understand why you decided to drop those.
I hope you come back to the next Ludum Dare, I eagerly await your new entry then!
good story ! I would have liked to have a little more sound to get into the atmosphere but otherwise overall the game is simple and effective! I like this
I like the story, It was really intresting, story about mistakes of past and the fact that you shouldn't judge people without going through their shoes. Good job!
@balimaarthebassfish High praise indeed... much appreciated - thanks for playing! And I hope to come back as well (other commitments permitting); my 2 LDs so far have been quite stressful but ultimately both definitely worth it - and as I get more experience, it can only get better!
@fannevada @dk-game-labs thanks for your kind comments :)
You're a good writer, dialogue worked and you conveyed the plot and emotion well in such a short time. Honestly, I kinda like your space art too, so no need to be afraid of drawing your own assets in future jams. Also I ship them
Neat story game! I was most impressed by the amount of polish you managed to add: the default typewriter speed felt good to me, I didn't notice any typos and only a few awkwardly built sentences, and the overall graphics were simple yet effective.
It was very interesting to have the conversation -> dialogue options -> internal thoughts. The interplay of these last two really made the story work for me, especially in the end (I got the main 'bad' ending, if you want to call it that). I'll admit, the writing at times felt a bit flat to me, maybe because there was hardly any reference in the story that both characters were opening up a lot in a short time, so there were times where Anton as a character felt more like a backstory container than a person, even if his personality was supposed to be bold and up front. I totally understand the difficulty of writing during the jam, so this is more a point of feedback if you continue the game or make another game like it. Perhaps if you develop this game out to last a couple of hours (as someone suggested above) you'd have space to slow down and move through the story's arc more gradually.
My only other issue was that I didn't see how to play in full screen, if I could at all. I played on my laptop, and that made the text box on the side very small indeed! Maybe I missed it, but if there was a way, maybe you could indicate it on the title screen?
I just read your postmortem (something I don't usually bother with, so that's a good thing!) and I wanted to add that: considering you wrote most of this on the final night, this game was great. That was a big thing I learned from last jam (my first) to this one: if you're going to make a wordy type of game (a narrative or dialogue or whatever), get a handle on the writing early. Even if you have to force the words out of yourself at first, it will allow you to develop the story and characters more fully over the limited time window of the jam, and prevent the issue I mentioned with Anton in the post above.
At least that's what works for me, but I'm still pretty new at this so I definitely don't have it all figured out :sweat_smile:
thank you for all your message!!! I'm currently working on a version with more feedback for the player. Follow the game's itch.io page to stay up to date with developments
That was pretty interesting, and well implemented. I might advertise it as a Visual Novel, so that people have a better expectation of what they're going to get, since I've come to realize a lot of getting good reviews is just meeting people's expectations when they come into the thing. I might have preferred if the maximum text speed was a tad faster, since you went through the effort of making it configurable.
Also, as someone whose also incredibly self conscious about art, I think you did a really good job. Even the screen shot from the beginning of the jam section looked good, because I could tell what I was looking at. I think, especially for game jams, as long as the art communicates what it is the player is looking at, then it is good enough.
@minjutin Thanks, I tried my best :)
@oter Really appreciate the sincere feedback. I absolutely understand what you mean about Anton being a backstory container - actually I think both characters suffered from this problem of spilling juicy info pertinent to the story almost unprompted, and I would have liked to make that feel a lot more realistic if I had had the time. As you mention, getting started on the writing earlier would definitely help with this; as it is I'm just happy I managed to make something coherent and complete-ish.
Also duly noted about the lack of fullscreen - I had more troubles than I'd anticipated while exporting to just get the canvas to behave and not weirdly fill up half the website with a completely wrong aspect ratio, so I completely forgot that fullscreen would be a useful thing particularly on small screens - so definitely something I'll try to do in the future. Thanks for playing and leaving your honest thoughts!
@gary-the-enchanter Thanks for your comments! I take your point about expectations needing to be met - although to be quite honest, I don't think it's fair to call this a 'visual novel' either, not because it completely lacks visuals but because the visuals are so non-varied that the 'visual' half of 'visual novel' just isn't really there. I'm surprised you would have preferred something even faster than the max speed - I'm a relatively fast reader and I can barely keep up with the current max speed :P Also, thanks for the kind comment on art - I guess it's a step above using simple shapes (*cough - my last LD entry*) to represent characters and other objects, although definitely still falls into the class of programmer art!
@fannevada wrong chat?
cool game, keep up the good work
@dan-str ta, thanks for playing
the game is quite interesting, it was fun to play, everything was done well, both the controls and the game design itself