zeichnn 2024-10-07 22:37
A big task to want to achieve in such little time!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD56 → Strange New Tides
By wdelvi, TheSeller, pauls134, Jamie Whitmarsh, nine0wands, sylvic, essillore, Abram, dankacles, Squadle123, kristirose88, Nivarian, venera-program, rbakh, questionmarc, SleepyScribbles, DougT, ideomancer-luis, Veeraptor, Quain Holtey, Annie Okuhara, Maria Shurupova, sabrinap, hayley_durham, SamWam, Suica, Superpose Press, skylarkblue1, aivyeri, OverkillLabs, infiltratingmom, leikaiser08, Abhyu, Hiram, indie-game-academy and Lauree
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 826 | 3.25 | 46 | |
| Fun | 925 | 2.87 | 46 | |
| Innovation | 818 | 2.94 | 46 | |
| Theme | 850 | 3.21 | 46 | |
| Graphics | 748 | 3.30 | 46 | |
| Audio | 212 | 3.75 | 46 | |
| Humor | 345 | 3.39 | 46 | |
| Mood | 638 | 3.42 | 46 |
A big task to want to achieve in such little time!
Really adorable game, I especially loved the unique composition of the different art styles. And of course the little sound bytes when interacting with the different characters. I enjoyed the different dialogues, and the story felt well rounded (I choose to stay). One thing: both walking and fishing felt just a bit tedious. It felt, like the reaction time was just a bit delayed, as if I am walking through quicksand and even when I got good at the fishing (I definitely tried that multiple times) it just had a bit of delay, that kept being a bit irritating. But that definitely feels like a minor quality of life thing, that happens during a game jam.
Also I wasn't exactly sure what the day-night circle was for, but I didn't mind that either.
Overall a great experience, and I am very happy I found this game, and will come back to see what happens when I leave :)
For a game made by ~40 "industry veterans", I was expecting a lot more... There is a lot of flavor text, props to the narrative team, but the game elements were underwhelming. The world isn't even an open world, its a collection of several smaller screens. The game consisted mostly of minigames, and there were several bugs despite the team of QA people who worked on this. The music was really solid and good, but the visuals were not cohesive at all, and there was pixelization on the main protagonist's art, as well was on the arrows between screens. Just all around it felt like a mismash of too many chefs in the kitchen. The fishing game lagged when you hit the button, and seemed to jump to 'trash' from the entire opposite end of the menu, and I never was able to figure out how to upgrade or buy a home.
@Vikapa I challenge you to do better!
@ninai Thank you for the kind words. The team worked really hard on it, and plan more in the future <3
I hate to add to the criticism, but @vipaka is right: it really does feel like too many cooks in the kitchen here. The 2d pixel art on a 3d background is pretty glaring, but what was worse for me was the simple lack of polish on everything. If you have 40 people working on the game, surely 1 of them could've taken 15 minutes to find a font, but we end up with default font on a sqaure white or black background in far too many places. Similar thing with the audio cutting out, or the lack of sfx when you do stuff (e.g fishing, mining geodes), or Munch clipping through objects, or the fact you have to click a small bit of text to continue through dialogue instead of anywhere on the screen... the list goes on.
This feels to me like a classic quantity-over-quality problem, where you set out to do something too ambitious and lost track of how you were going to integrate it all and make it feel good to play.
I never expected to see so many people collaborating on a game at the Jam. The scale and polish of the game are incredible for something completed in just a few days. Iโm sure everyone involved must be longtime partnersโitโs truly impressive!
@ember44 The team is mostly beginners! And our first and foremost reason to do this is to give everyone AA sized teamworking experience. We'll also be doing a free Steam release, so keep your eye out for that ;)
@yayagame yes indeed! It was a crazy experience! Many of the leads knew each other but most of the team did not. We did it to all learn together <3
Very impressive work for a team with so many members! ๐ฎ I loved the mix of different art styles and the sound effects when interacting with the characters ๐. The story was engaging and the choice to stay really added depth. I wish the controls were a little more responsive, but that's a minor thing for a jam game. Overall, the project turned out great, can't wait for the Steam release! ๐ฎ๐
This is such an amazing game and it is really commendable how much you got done in such a short amount of time, I love the little voices and one of my friends is nicknames Crabigail so that totally got a chuckle out of me. The entire game is so well polished and the amount of love in the details is noticeable <3
๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ฅ Great job ya'll!!! ๐๐๐
Great entry. I appreciate the keyboards controllers weren't literally WASD makes playing on a French keyboard easier. Well done!
I liked the audio and mood.. soothing. However I was unable to figure the game out ( the mentioned upgrades?). But must have something to do with the fact that I fast read most of the dialog :sweat_smile:
There's a surprising amount of content here, each character has a ton of dialogue and there's clearly a lot of love put into it. I wish there was a bit more variation to the fishing, or that the house upgrades were more relevant. There's a solid base here that would become something amazing with some more time and polish.
Cute game! I like the character designs and the interactions the characters have with one another. The little noises they make are cute too!
If I'm being honest however, I wish there was more interactive games beyond fishing. I get that there are other methods of gaining sea glass but the fishing mini game seems like the most interactive one out of all of them. Had there been more besides that it would've made earning the sea glass more engaging in my opinion.
Also, nitpick, but the arrows could've been made clearer. I thought they were hands to a clock at first (although that could very well just be me haha).
Overall though, the game has a lot of charm. I can see people playing it as a way to relax and to see what they can do with their castle. That and being in charge of a team of 40, with only 72 hours to make something, is definitely ambitious. That should be appreciated.
Overall while I think there could be some improvements, I think the team did good. So nice job!
I am getting serious old school early 3d point and click adventure vibes (like Monkey Island 4). How you manage to have 40 people working alongside each other, I don't know. It's an achievement, for sure!
WOW, an interesting visual idea, quite creative! The gameplay is also very simple and fun! You did well
There's definitely a lot of content here, and there was a good amount of story telling between the various characters. I wish there was more benefit to the house upgrades though, and earning the currency to upgrade felt like a total slog that took away from the rest of it. The fastest way seemed to be the card machine strangely enough, but that was beyond boring just pressing two buttons, waiting a few seconds, and going again, so I mostly did it through fishing, which felt like it had some horrible input lag if I'm being honest. So the actual "gameplay" needs some work, but there's a lot of content going on otherwise.
A really cool little game! I can't believe y'all somehow coordinated that many people, must have been difficult! The result is great though! I had one bug when I first built the castle where the shop never went away and it took me to the beach. Minor though was able to close it when I went back to the shop. The music is just... the best I loved it, gave me final fantasy vibes. The ending was awesome, poor little (or big? xD) Cthulhu :cry:
I had so much fun with this game.
What a funny game! The opening music is relaxing, I love it! The arrows on the ground are greatly appreciated; often when I play games of this type, Iโm unsure of where to go. Although the arrows don't blend seamlessly with the environment, they definitely help the player. The dialogues are well-written, and the music consistently complements the gameplay. Fishing is challenging, but I managed to earn the gold :-).
The only thing is that, personally and in my humble opinion, I don't connect with the main character for some reason. However, that's a personal feeling and obviously doesn't affect my rating. I'm also impressed by the number of people who participated; managing and organizing a game with so many contributors is a tremendous achievement!
Overall, it's a very complete game. Great job!
Interesting world you created! The gameplay could perhaps have had a bit more depth, with the house upgrades having more of a purpose beyond just the final one. But the mood of the game and the music are quite nice
@ember44 Thank you so much for taking the time to give thoughtful critique. We're planning to polish the game up post jam, so it's super helpful to get these things pointed out. Just to give some context: one of the core goals of our megajams is to give early career devs something akin to AA experience. We try to do so while honoring their creative and professional autonomy, which means we had leads getting a crack at running teams for the first time, people participating in LJ for the first time, people in roles up and down the hierarchy for the first time all while trying to empower them to set strategy, learn and somehow pull a beautiful project together. Since that's part of our secret "design prompt", the too many cooks of it all is totally fair and yet the solve has to be something that brings these folks together. We're getting a little better at it each time and having done this the first time myself (Lead Producer speaking), it's honestly so cool and such a total geekout to be learning together. Shared fully because I'm hyped about this metaproject and not to be defensive. I think everything you said is on point.
@yayagame Thank you for checking it out! Every comment like this is so exciting and such an honor.
@sviborg Totes agreed on the controls. We're looking forward to polishing this up once the jam is over. Thank you for giving us your time and writing such beautiful comments. They really warm the team's heart.
@weefairyfabi So happy there's another Crabigail in this world! We fell in love with ours so we know how lovable they are. Also, thank you for playing the game and sending us this love <3
@desibragg Thanks for checking it out! :champagne:
@paroxysmal A seemingly small but never trivial concern! We have some non-Americans participating thankfully, which probably helped drive that decision. Your appreciation was passed on! Thanks for checking the game out!!
@xparker not just you at all! We'll def try and get some of the player experience tested for stuff like this as we polish it post-jam. Thanks so much for checking it out. Passed your comments along to the audio team!!
@mdsalomon Thanks so much! The narrative team did beyond incredible and you should've seen them pivot and learn to implement dialogue in engine on the fly when we realized we had an implementation bottleneck. Amazing. What you're diagnosing is a legit problem that echoed a production choice: we knew AC had so many complicated interlinked systems and had to pick only one or two to give depth to. In this case, we chose to emphasize the friendship system and deepen the relationships. We're def going to keep adding and polishing all the other systems for final release! Ty so much for playing.
@demiclod My answer to MDSalomon above will def also inform you (if you were curious), but fundamentally you're dead on and we're gonna keep building them out for a release post-jam. Thanks for such a thoughtful write up and for giving solid crit we can use!!
@langotriel Omg... geeked by this reference. We have a couple Monkey Island megafans on the team and one of them may or may not be responding to you right now. The answer to how you organize that many people is... make sure you work with people who are incredibly kind! Jk kinda of course it takes a lot but we have such an impassioned and kind team so when you run into a million inevitable tangles... the shared love and excitement gets us through.
@kseniya Thanks so much for playing!! Your kind words have been passed along to the art team.
@wraithind You're totally right. See my answer to mdsalomon in the comment above for context if curious, but we had deeper systems intended for all of the games you mention and they simply fell out of scope. We absolutely want to follow through on your thoughts as we build out/polish the game post jam!
@glaikunt Thanks so much for pointing out that bug! I passed along your comment on the ending to the narrative team.
@bacalear Thanks for playing!
@milq thanks for such a lovely and attentive comment!! It's really beautiful to have someone think through all the various parts of the game like this. Honored truly. If you'd like, would you offer some more thoughts on the disconnect with the main character? Maybe Munch will never be for you, but maybe it could help the narrative team as we're planning to finish and polish the game post-jam!
@zathnic thanks for playing!! I address the need for depth in our systems in some of my comments above, but suffice to say you're right on the money and we really appreciate your comment!
@indie-game-academy, in my opinion, the reason I didn't fully connect with Munch, and to some extent with other characters, comes down to a more technical perspective. I noticed a lack of animations or facial expressions accompanying the dialogue, which I believe is key to building that connection.
I've often heard the intent to do something similar to Zelda. However, in the Zelda games, Link doesn't speak or show emotions because the idea is for the player to feel as though they *are* Link. In fact, you can even give him your own name. That's why Nintendo avoids giving him any distinct personality. But in this case, Munch does speak, and we hear a range of tones in his voice. However, when Munch talks, I don't see any corresponding expressions on his face, it remains static.
There are several ways this could be improved. For instance, you could animate the character when they speak, or you could simply display a portrait with different expressions alongside the dialogue. For example, when Munch emphasizes something, he could have one expression, and when he's serious, angry, or happy, he could have others. In my view, a system like yours would benefit from showing these changing expressions next to the text. It doesn't need to be a huge number of images! The same artist who created the scenes could spend a bit of time drawing these facial expressions to go with the dialogue. I think this would help me - personally, and this is just my humble opinion - connect more with Munch and the other characters overall.
That said, I still think this is a very well-rounded game and a huge achievement considering the size of the team. I hope this feedback comes across as constructive and isn't taken the wrong way.
@milq Awesome! Thanks for the feedback. I'll pass it along. I definitely see the art team working on adding and polishing a lot of those things in weeks post-Jam!
Nice game,very interesting plot!!!!Nice job!!!!
Damn, dudes, how did you manage to make it such a small team :)
But seriously, it's cool that you were able to connect 40 people to one project in just three days. I'm not kidding, I think that's quite an achievement, it's hard for me to even divide responsibilities with a few people sometimes.
This game is pretty alright. Big props to the narrative team - a bunch of Amaretta's lines made me chuckle. The sound team also deserves praise for the background theme and FX. And I will also highlight that this game implements multiple mechanics and relatively complex UIs very successfully, considering the time limit.
That said, while I appreciate the intention of getting a bunch of beginners AA-sized team experience, I think it would have been really useful to include some more general industry practices here as well. I am specifically talking about the strong need for a style guide for this project. The combination of low-poly 3D models, seemingly unintentionally low-res character sprites, and polished, high-res UI elements just does not work. I obviously can't know about your development practices but it feels like some additional planning on the specifics of how the game would look would have been useful.
Additionally, I wish there was a little more in the game indicating a larger story. I actually didn't realize there was more narrative content on my first attempt, and got tired of the minigames pretty fast. It feels a little like the player is expected to be familiar with games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, which is bad for the beginner player.
But overall, I really really love the concept - and I do think this is an impressive feat given the time limit and the level of coordination that would have been required here. Thanks for letting me play it :)
Guys, I dunno how it was the division of work for all 36 members of this project. But, having such a number of people working on this project, I think that the final work could have been better. Thats said, I don't think that it was bad... the opposite, actually. Well done. I'm just saying that it could have been better. I will just complain about the movement control, the character movimentation is odd. Graphics 9/10, Sound 8/10 ... (I am not saying it was bad... I'm saying that you had room to improve it). Don't take it personally, my game is also on the LD, you can go there an see it, and make a fair judgement aswell, ok!? Overal rate in my oppinion: 7/10.
Nice game! I didn't have the heart to grind it all, but I did get a level 3 lighthouse, it should count for something right? I think it could've used some more sound to get more feel when fishing for example.