Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Familiar Quest
By frank-gevaerts, balimaarthebassfish and Bizzybee
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 867 | 3.31 | 26 | |
| Fun | 997 | 3.00 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 1192 | 2.32 | 25 | |
| Theme | 441 | 3.84 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 4.42 | 15 | ||
| Audio | 454 | 3.43 | 25 | |
| Humor | 448 | 3.27 | 24 | |
| Mood | 857 | 3.28 | 23 |
Amazing graphics, nice writing and great humor (Moo), I really loved it :smiley: 'Agree to "Help"' :laughing: A Puur-fect game :wink: How many branches are there? And endings? :fish: :cat: :dragon_face: :unicorn: Great job :thumbsup:
Thanks for playing, @incd021! There's a total of 13 endings. Branches, well, not *as* many :)
@incd021 thank you! glad my D&D writing skills came to be of some good use!
Also: you monster! Did you also do the gassy twist with the poor thing?
FARTIUS MAXIMUS! Awesome writing, played it through a few times, thanks for the experience. However it was a bit clunky that 70% of the time I had the repeat the same generic texts just to see different outcomes. But I guess there is no real solution to this in these kind of games :smiley: Nice entry, cheers!
Thanks for playing multiple times, @tudvari ! Yes, that's the one feature we didn't manage to get in. The plugin we used for the story handling should have support for handling that in some way, but I didn't get it working in the short time I had left at that point... (also, @balimaarthebassfish takes full responsibility for *those* jokes :) )
Very enjoyable experience. The art is super cool and atmospheric. The writing is great, a pure pleasure to read. The game is nicely quirky and amusing. The whole thing seems polished, I encountered no bugs and don't even have any improvement suggestions. It's a tiny jam gem :smile:
Sooooo... I summoned a ghost whale :whale:
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Thanks for playing, @fabula-rasa ! I hear a ghost whale is better than a rubber ducky! :)
Thank you, @tudvari , for taking the time to play our game! We truly appreciate your support and feedback. We apologize for the lack of a 'skip seen dialogue' option; as fellow coder fgeva mentioned, the plugin we used does have that feature, but implementing it proved to be a headache before the deadline.
We're glad to hear that you enjoyed the writing—I was responsible for that, so your praise means a lot! And about those fart jokes... well, let's just say I'll take about 80% responsibility for those. They could have been deleted or overwritten at any time, but hey, where's the fun in that?
Thanks again for playing, and we hope you had a blast! (badumtss)
@fabula-rasa Big thanks to you for diving into our game and sharing feedback! We're thrilled to read such kind words, especially the blushing-inducing comment about our game being a 'tiny jam gem.'
We might need to borrow some of that blush for our next character sprite!
Thanks again for playing and for the glowing review—it's comments like yours that make all the hard work, the mental exhaustion and mild panic at discovering new bugs, worth it!
Lovely game! The art, music, and writing all came together very well, making it worth playing again to see alternate endings. I got a ghost whale my first time, but then I got fire elemental twice in a row! Chaotic choices have the same ends sometimes I suppose. I see lots of pun-tential for a bigger game with different scenarios, choices, and summoned familiars, maybe even continuing the quest after you get your first familiar (?!).
@kirsybuu, thank you for your kind words about our game! We're glad you enjoyed exploring the myriad of possibilities—we must admit, keeping track of all those variable combinations felt a bit like herding cats!
And speaking of unexpected surprises, if you managed to stumble upon a path through the game that even we didn't anticipate, don't worry, I had a catch-all implemented. It just so happened to involve the house catching fire.
Who knew wizardry could be so... fiery? Thanks again for playing, and remember, always keep a fire extinguisher handy in your magical toolkit!
Lovely game, your team has done a great job with bringing the art, storytelling and graphics together to create a cohesive mood and deliver the theme !
Impressive art and witty writing, a very pleasant experience
I love this game, it's simple and enjoyable and has incredible art. The first time I summoned a cat. Good job!
You have my respects for this production grade art direction. Nice entry!
Overall a nice little game. The sound effects were very on point and added a lot to the atmosphere. The art was insanely well done for a jam! What program was used to make the art?
One of the best visual styles I've seen. Very cool!
You know, guys, I'm as pro-AI as they come: I understand it's a great tool, I understand its value for inspiration, search and brainstorming, concept generation, etc. Seeing as LD rules apparently allow the use of **any** tools to create assets (I think?) I'd also be ok with just using AI-generated assets directly in some cases, sure.
But using AI to generate *every* piece of art in the game, being completely quiet about it, silently accepting praise for art quality, mentioning art creation in the description ("our talented artist" and "when it came to creating art"), and not opting out from the Graphics voting category is just deceitful. Straight up disqualification material right here.
Not cool.
@13x666 going around and randomly accusing people of using AI art is not cool **at all**. I have no idea what makes you say these things, but the fact that you go around calling for disqualification for no other reason than that you **imagine** that undeclared AI art is involved makes me not really want to know anything more about you...
@frank-gevaerts You did choose to go the "this is not AI and you're imagining it" route then. Well, that's a shame, but I don't really care nor do I need to prove anything.
I brought up disqualification, but I'm not "*calling*" for it, not about to flag your game or anything. We're all here to have fun and gain experience and play games. If you're ok accepting praise for something you didn't create, you do you, have fun. :)
@13x666 I have *no* reason whatsoever to believe that our artist would have chosen to lie about this to the team, based only on an accusations from a random stranger who didn't even give any arguments. What route do you expect me to take?
@frank-gevaerts Let's put it this way: a pixel artist sees and closely analyzes dozens of pixel art pieces every day, pixel for pixel. People in this line of work know what things look like. We also know what it looks like when good pixel art is created in a "quick and dirty" way when there's a time constraint or just a style choice like that.
And a lot of us have been playing around with AI to see what it's capable of. I, for one, have seen and generated tons of AI pixel art just for the fun of it, and there's a lot, and I mean *a lot* of telltale signs in the result each and every time. Things that a human would never ever do just because of the nature of the process — no matter if it's fast or slow and what style is being used. There are flags in colors, pixel sizes, subject matter and specific recognizable details, they are *abundant*.
I would hate to have even a 1% chance of accusing someone wrongly. But I'm terribly sorry, there's absolutely zero chance of that here. I have no desire to devalue your work, and a jam game is still a jam game — you made an entry and that's awesome.
But this is AI art.
@13x666 tl;dr "Trust me on this! I'll repeat my accusation without mentioning *any* of those many telltale signs I claim exist".
@frank-gevaerts Do you want me to go in-depth with this? Like, a full-blown investigation here in the comments, with examples, close-ups, diagrams? Come on.
When I wrote the first comment, I honestly just expected you guys to say something like "well, the rules don't forbid it".
You can always just ask your artist about it. Or ask for the opinion of other artists, for example. Or go to any image generator of your choice (Ideogram or Bing Image Creator for example) and try generating something like "Wizard's study, pixel art", there are a lot of ways to investigate it if you're interested. Saying "it's not AI because you're no one" is inconsequential :)
Also, I don't want this much drama about it. Nothing personal, I don't think anyone is a bad person for doing this or anything. It's just a bit weird to me is all.
@violetdreams I'm so happy to hear you like the SFX! Thank you for your kind words. :)
@fabula-rasa , @kirsybuu, @ansible, @edoardo-talamini, @baluj, @asfdfdfd, @violetdreams and @anifan-gelati, thanks for playing and the nice comments!
@violetdreams I asked our artist @jaquillyn and they told me "It was a combination of 3D paint, pixlr and gimp and then in (almost) every piece I cleaned up the pixelation effect with a free tool called Pixelify by Yomu Labs. It still required a lot of cleaning after, so it was a backwards and forwards process. And then the recolouring was done in Pixlr" I know there's a bit more to it as the ghost effect was done by @bizzybee (we're in different timezones so some of this was shift work!) and I don't know what tools they used, but they're reading here so I don't need to pass messages :)
I wish I could delete accidentally sent posts :)
@13x666 I'm generally Pro-AI art and personally would feel no shame in openly using and saying we used AI art. That being said, we had an artist, she delivered the assets, I personally edited a couple of them. Our artist is sharing her process and one of the others has posted it in response to another comment. From your comments I thought you were a troll honestly, but I see you do have some LD work so I'm just baffled you would insist there's no possibility that you're wrong. That's a bold and arrogant stance to take, especially on a game made for fun, for a game jam. Whole lot of social clout we're earning here, I'm sure! But you're free to think whatever you think, and everybody can choose who they believe.
@frank-gevaerts "a combination of 3D paint, pixlr and gimp" or similar handwavy descriptions are a common way to try and claim AI art, but it's pretty funny to anyone who does art. No, no combination of available non-ai tools and techniques produces this result. Yes, even Pixelify, not by a longshot (although "dirty pixels" it produces might lead people to believe that's the answer). Naming 23 tools in the hopes that their accumulated artefacts will somehow make it plausible doesn't work, tools are not magic.
@bizzybee I'm very curious to see the process. As I said before, yes, we're having fun here, your game is cool, before leaving the first comment I played it and rated it and the rating was not even affected by this (except I left Graphics unrated). But I'm in turn baffled by this amount of resistance to something so simple. It's a bit sad, really.
I might be able to help with this, as the artist. Due to time constraints I did use a graphics filter called pixelate to create the pixel effects on this art. As far as I'm aware this is allowed. I would be happy to share the link with you as it is a free program, but you'll have to remind me in a week as I'm visiting family interstate.
Hey, it is I the slightly still waking up project lead here!
I understand your concerns, but I believe it's highly unlikely that Jaquillyn used AI to generate the art for our game. Making such an accusation without concrete evidence seems unfair and unwarranted. As the saying goes, "source: trust me bro" isn't sufficient proof.
I've known Jaquillyn for a long time, and I have full confidence in her abilities as an artist. Without proper evidence of the use of AI tools like Midjourney and Dalle, I'm inclined to trust my friend's integrity. The burden of proof should always lie with the accuser, and until there's concrete evidence to suggest otherwise, I stand by Jaquillyn and her work.
Again, I firmly believe our game's art is a result of Jaquillyn's talent and hard work, not AI-generated assets. It would be deceitful to claim otherwise, and I assure you, that was never our intention. We're proud of Jaquillyn's contributions to our project, and I'll continue to defend her integrity whenever necessary.
@13x666 Of course there's going to be resistance when you accuse people of lying. You presented us as knowingly deceiving and taking credit. People tend to want to defend themselves against such accusations. That being said and your methods of engagement aside, the base art was entirely the product of Quill, I'm going to leave any further defense up to her. Unlike Bal, I don't know her well, and I only added some light edits to the finished assets she provided. I will say she represented the art as her own to me and the rest of the team, and that's all we have to go off of. I hope she'll show some proof once she's back from her trip, but I can't claim to know what she'll do or the sincerity of her work until such comes to pass.
What I DO know for sure is that I put a whole lot of work into this, and I don't want that to be overshadowed by this debacle. I appreciate that you still rated us in the other categories, and for anybody reading, I understand if some prefer to leave a category unrated for similar reasons.
[edit] None of what I said in this comment before deleting it actually matters. Wrapping up here. Good luck, guys.
I appreciate your diligence in seeking clarity, but I must respectfully disagree with your overall assessment. While I understand your concerns, it's important to approach such matters with tact and consideration. Accusations without substantial evidence can be damaging and unfair, and it's essential to handle them with care.
Offering proof that was little more than "trust me bro" is hardly proof at all.
Rest assured, I have full confidence in Jaquillyn's integrity and abilities as an artist. When she returns, we will address this matter together and provide any necessary clarification.
If it does turn out that our artist used AI art I'll apologise publicly, contact the admins and see what we can do.
If it turns out that, as I expect, you are mistaken - I expect no less from you.
This is the last I, or any member of the team will be responding to the question of AI art until our artist has returned home and has presented her case.
@balimaarthebassfish Do tag me if there's proof of my mistake, I'll apologise of course.
Of course, I've summoned an unicorn! What else can it be? :)
Frank, Congrats on making a step out of your comfort zone of Inform 7! I bet you had a lot of fun making it, although it is technically a text game. But with a lot of added mood. Music, audio, and of course visuals made it a completely different experience. You all did a great job, guys. Don't mind people who don't appreciate your hard work, there are not many of those. I believe you put a lot of effort into it and had a lot of fun making it and that's what matters, don't let anyone spoil it for you. You should be proud of what you have done.
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Such a beautiful game! It's a shame that the art got bitten by compression so much, but pixel art is a bit tricky in Godot. And congrats to @frank-gevaerts for getting outside of the comfort zone! :)
Also, I loved all the puns! Thank you!
Thanks for playing, @jiri-hysek and @yngvarr! Yes, switching to godot and a team has been an interesting experience, so much so that *someone else* wrote the puns! :)
@jiri-hysek Thank you so much for your kind words. The whole debate yesterday did have me in a bit of a downer. I was riding such a high, legitimately proud of what we had managed to create only for one person to ruin it.
@yngvarr I must take responsibility for the puns and the fart jokes
We would like to extend our sincerest apologies. After conducting a thorough investigation in collaboration with some independent outside experts, we have encountered sufficient doubt regarding the human origin of the art assets used in our game.
In light of this, we have made the decision to opt out of the graphics category for our submission. We understand the importance of upholding the integrity of the competition and want to ensure fairness for all participants.
We would like to express our gratitude to members of the community who provided valuable insights and assistance during this process. Your support and understanding are greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely, Balimaar Project Lead
Neat game. I usaually do not enjoy text games, but this was good. Art, sound and mood are great. It goes into nitpicking, but I would have prefered a bigger text size.
Great entry!
@13x666 I know the tone of my replies probably came across as overly aggressive earlier, but I really don't know much about art and especially AI art (there's a reason I used to do text-only games), and given that I didn't have **any** concrete evidence I felt I had to stand by my teammate.
Despite what I now know and believe, I still think "team first" was the correct attitude at that point, but I should have been more diplomatic in my replies, and I apologise for that.
@rentem thanks for playing! I think we probably spent too much time working and testing in the default windows size. In hindsight I agree that in full screen it's too small. Lessons for next time!
Thanks for your hard work on the game, and I understand you had the added stress with discovering that your artist used AI after already posting in defense. Game jams teach us a lot of things in a short time, and sometimes they also teach us about PR and public statements, which is a great lesson to learn (and better to get it on a jam project than on a full release!). Hope the team is doing good.
But back to the game! I got the ghost whale ending. I also immediately noticed the AI source of your art - thanks for opting out of the category! Honestly, I think it's what distracted me the most from just enjoying the flowery writing and branches resulting in different endings - it's genuinely better to have simpler, handmade art, even made by a programmer with no prior art experience, than having very clashing, generated styles who fight for player's attention with too much detail added and no art direction. If the city or the room doesn't pay a big role in your game, there's no reason to give it the detail worthy of hidden object game or a highly interactive point and click screen - but AI of course doesn't know that, so you always get things you didn't ask for :) Huge kudos to the person responsible for music/SFX, it carried the atmosphere where the art tried to interfere.
Writing was fun with a little bit of humor - it would be great if all the joke-y "achievements" were actually displayed somehow in the menu, like medals :)
@frank-gevaerts All good! Yes, team-first is the right approach to have, completely understandable.
@outstar Composer/SFX artist here, thank you so so much! :) I had a lot of fun challenging myself to write an orchestral piece, which I chopped into sections for different parts of the game. If you're interested, you can find the full track here! https://on.soundcloud.com/ze6VZS5BL4uyqE899
Yeah, the whole debacle was stressful, but we're not letting it devalue the work we did put into the game, and we'll (Me, Bal, and Frank) still be participating in the future jams.
That would have been a great thing to implement given more time, certainly. :D Though, I'd probably get distracted pitching more endings, haha. Really appreciate your thorough feedback, hope you're having a wonderful day. <3
@outstar Thanks for playing our game! The drama has been particularly painful for myself since the artist is a personal friend. It's not fun to doubt a friend, you want to believe them, you clutch at oily straws defending them... then the evidence starts to pile up and its not just from one source like it was initially.
This was fun ^^ Got the egg To be honest I just enjoyed skimming through to see all the different familiars you can get. The art is so nice and I love all their designs sm
Very nice! For some reason it gave me some vibes of the final fantasy tactics game for the game boy advance :D Although the art is partially done using AI it is still an accomplishment to get a coherent look out of it which I think you managed to do :) The story elements are very cool and created the base for an interesting fantasy world :)
Fun little game, gorgeous artwork and interesting outcomes. Well done!
@verti Thanks so much for playing our game, glad you enjoyed your time :) @xoreaxeax I might not have minded so much if I hadnt stated to the team that while I have no objection to AI placeholders, I was not going to have any AI left in the release version. Ah well. It is what it is. Thank you for the kind words about the story! I'll be honest I probably would like to flesh out this fantasy world... @digital-bacon Thank you! It was a lot of hard work by the entire squad, we hope you had as much fun playing as we had making it!
**Visuals** As I understand from comments, there was AI usage for art, and I see you opted out of this category, (main room with the cauldron looks pretty, tho it looks strangely blurry, so it's a shame it was AI) so I will talk about something else: text. The game has a lot of text, but it's not very comfortable to read - maybe you could play around with that a little. Try different font, bigger text box, maybe bigger font, maybe bit bolder, maybe play around with colours as well. I felt like letters were blurring before my eyes ;_;
However, I zoomed out the screen to 50% in my browser and game looked more coherent: art less blurry, text bit bigger. So maybe browser just doesn't show the game in resolution it's supposed to be in.
Some bug here in text, maybe? With 20 14.
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**Quests** It seems we had a collection of short stories, with 3 clear choices for "good" "evil" and "mixed". Events themselves felt a bit simplistic, maybe due to their shortness, maybe due to writing (though I appreciate the game not being too long). I think this could be further worked on, maybe expanding the stories a little, or trying a different approach to writing them.
I quite liked that you have different endings! First time I went the "good" route as I usually do but it seems it wasn't a very positive ending xD
* Summoned a cutie.
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Choosing evil options actually gave me a better ending (well, for my MC, not her master...) which is kinda funny xD
**Overall**
The idea is nice, and I love story games. I think it could be polished a bit more, with presentation and writing ^^
It was an wholesome visual novel. The music was quite solid and the art was amazing if I had to put it into words especially the animals/creatures. It felt a bit like one of thouse personality tests just in game format with summoning which was a bit unique. Put in my collection on itchio, wanna share with a friend. Oh well time to do it out of character to get the rest of the dialogue and see the other creatures XD GG
@kanity thanks for playing! I agree about the text, I'll admit I didn't give it a lot of thought, it looked right for me in the specific environment where I was testing (default godot window size on my monitor), but that's just not good enough... Lessons learned for next time!
That character rendering issue, hmm, not sure. It looks like it's only in the web build (as in, I don't see it in the linux build), which is a bit odd. It looks like it's the font not having the long dash character, which again I should have caught, but the web build was a bit of last minute thing so it didn't get the testing it should have had.
I'll let @balimaarthebassfish respond to the story comments, that's mostly his work :)
Thanks for playing, @n0va. Make sure you get all the endings! :) I hadn't thought of it, but yes, that personality test comparison is quite apt!
@kanity Hey, thanks for the awesome feedback and detailed review! Gotta admit, I kinda lost track of time on day 1 of LD55. I was hunting around for some code examples when I stumbled upon Dialogic, and man, did it save the day! Not only did it solve my problem, but it also promised to make the rest of the game a breeze. So, I went ahead and installed the plugin, but had to spend some time getting the hang of it. It all worked out in the end, but I really wish I'd found it before the event kicked off.
As for the writing style in the game, I deliberately kept it simple for the LD submission. I wanted to make sure it was easy to follow while still being engaging. Almost ran out of time, though—I was rewriting all the endings with just 2 hours to spare! That said, I think the stories would've been way more fleshed out if I'd gotten the hang of Dialogic earlier. Live and learn, right?
@balimaarthebassfish I totally understand you, I was finishing my game until last minutes myself! And I read in another comment there are 13 endings, while I thought at first there must be around three - so, that's impressive! And yeah, I learn with every jam too. Curious to see what you'll make next time ^^
@kanity There are technically 14 but only 13 true endings. The 14th ending is a catch all ending should the player find a combination that we didnt take into account. We had a great time making the game. Looking forward to October!