Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Witches Brew
By delauraen
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 862 | 3.31 | 21 | |
| Fun | 1085 | 2.84 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 1112 | 2.65 | 21 | |
| Theme | 335 | 3.97 | 21 | |
| Humor | 97 | 4.05 | 21 | |
| Mood | 161 | 4.05 | 21 |
Enjoyed the mood in this one! To be honest, the one thing that I was wishing was the ability to jump and/or sprint, I feel like that would've broken up the monotony of walking from place to place getting the ingredients. The ending was witty and funny, overall a decent mood!
Well done, it looks nice.
You maybe should put invisible ramps around the carrots, a got stuck on them many times.
I really enjoyed reading all of the dialogue you wrote -- witty and entertaining. :D Main thing I wish it had was more depth of gameplay to add to the great vibe you created.
Amazing artstyle and funny idea!
Great art and level design, I love the "water" material. I'll try something like this for the next jam, thanks for the inspiration.
An absolutely riveting experience. My only issue with the game is that its very hostile towards speed runners. I tried a number of creative routes to get to the ingredients but I kept getting blocked by the giant tree colliders and little props that i couldnt jump over. Other than that, it was phenomenal.
Fun little game, always enjoy when someone goes the extra mile to tell a funny story. The ending definitely caught me by surprise. Great job!
Well well well... if it isn't a fellow game with canoes in it... Really cool game though! Love the art style and just game all around!
looks very good
The atmosphere was really nice tbh. The are for some reason felt like the plaguelands from WoW which is one my favorite areas! Good job! ^^
great vibes in this game. not much to it and the music loop could have more going on but i had fun walking around all the same!
So. This is the first time my PC has had to work hard with a Jam title. Good job with the game. The environment is pretty and you thought about invisible walls at the edge of the map (very positive). In the future I would like to see more variety in the gameplay and music. But it was a fun experience to summon a giant frog xD
Thanks all for playing! I definitely had more fun designing the level/world this time around than anything.
I had plans to implement some type of puzzle at each 'collectible' but simply ran out of time.
In the next few weeks I will be putting some time in to put in a little more polish and make it a more playable experience so keep an eye out 😊
Not bad environment, atmosphere is felt) Relaxing game!
The visuals are **really** pretty. Makes me want to take screenshot and use as my background on laptop. It looks magical, and colourful, and maybe a bit nostalgic (remembering old Harry Potter games xD tho this looks better tbh) This is the kind of 3D game/environment that I **do** enjoy (I am more of 2D person x)).
There are even butterflies flying around! Cute!
I have trash sense of direction (part of why it's harder for me to play 3D games) so I appreciated the hints a lot: hint.jpg
For some reason I was expecting I shouldn't be able to walk on water, but then it turned out to be completely legal x) It made exploration easier, but I am not sure if it's supposed to be like that?
The end made me chuckle x)
**Overall**: I feel like with this vast and pretty place you have an option to make a bigger game, filling up the space with points of interest, things to interact with (to learn more of the lore, or take more quests, etc), more story/stories, like our journey of trying out different spells and getting silly results x) There are a lot of things you could do with this!
*Nitpicks*: * It would be nice if text disappeared when you click a mouse or a button, because when game loaded, I had about 1 second to read first batch of text and then it was gone and I was like 3_3 * The sensitivity in-game is a bit too high, the mouse moves too fast (I have 500 dpi set on my mouse for context) * To be honest, main background music felt a bit too distorted for me and didn't fit the visual atmosphere :( I don't want to insult the composer but this just doesn't work for what I am seeing in game, I would expect this music in uhm... Did you play "Digger" game? I actually loved it a loooot as a kid (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digger) Well, I think this music would fit in *there*, but not in *here* >_<
Edit: I noticed you opted out of graphics, are these assets from someone else? I see three people listed in description, but only one person in LD list 3_3
I liked the level design, but I think scaling some of the pine trees up and down as filler and making smaller ones not collide with the player could fill out the map a bit. The controls were decent, but the mouse sensitivity default was a bit high.
At the end I was hoping for something else to happen, like the frog attacking, exploding, or letting you know that this whole experience was just a dream or anything more than just a win state. Then again, these game jam time limits are crazy! :)
@kanity - wow thanks for all the specific feedback! This is all super helpful :v: I was definitely getting some visual inspiration from the first spyro games, I love that low poly fantasy look of the artisan home world levels.
- I had it so you could walk thru the water but it felt weird, I added collision but then realized I should have made the height higher so you can't just walk across it xD - I agree, I didn't really know how to do a proper dialogue system so I just went with trigger events and should have figured out a way to dismiss/skip text. I believe the first ones must be based on load time so I overlooked it completely. Since then I found that there's an open source plugin I could have used (version 2.0 probably!) - Mouse sensitivity I didn't really think about, I think this is just default but maybe it's related to some of the way unreal implements the firstPersonPlayer (since it plays similar to a shooter in the tutorial) I'll check this out in a future session sometime - We were going for a more eerie/creepy vibe with midi. Initially I had asked @catharticmeat to procure some sfx but then he came up with a few of his own tunes that I liked. It might have worked better if we had a few different tracks so it wasn't constantly looping? I haven't heard of digger but I'll have to check it out!
As for assets I did use a marketplace pack since I was focused on greyboxing everything first (I'll add some pics for the devlog!) so the art wasn't created by me but I created all the landscaping and used some megascans for foliage and whatnot. I put together the POI's and @catharticmeat helped detail it by building out the cauldron/hut/cave/swamp areas.
I credited some friends who I asked for some specific jobs (writing the dialogue and helping with audio and some level design) unfortunately they don't have accounts or have really entered gamejams before which is why they aren't tagged but I'm pretty sure I locked them in for next time around as they had a lot of fun seeing the process evolve!
@trevor-lentz you are 100% right about the trees, I have already added this as a task in the next iteration but I'm finishing up with another project atm! It was annoying while playtesting and I should have considered just replacing that 'realistic' collision with a much less chunky one.
Hahaha who knows maybe there will be another ending soonTM 😁
I have to say, so far this is the most visually impressive game I've tried out in the jam. The level design is simple but works very well, and the mood of the dark forest feels great, with a good amount of small details to keep it visually interesting. I had fun with the dialogue as well!
I didn't have any issues with controls or collision, so the search for the ingredients went by very quickly and smoothly.
I only there was more of a challenge aspect to it! Even without tricky puzzles or riddles to solve. Like having to go through a small maze for one of the ingredients, or finding an obstacle like a boulder and going back to find a tool or magic scroll to get rid of it. Could be an option to expand on the game in the future!
First postjam update (its been a busy few weeks) - I added a lot of little things people requested along side a few new things. I'm currently working on some better puzzles, but in the mean time I hope the world is a bit more explorable and bonus points to whoever can find the easter egg!