Jim Doesn't Care About Space by Finn Truman 2017-05-02T17:38:16Z
Updated. Thanks
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Finn Truman
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | 👥 | Kamishibai | jam | 2.77 | 2.50 | 1.77 | 1.61 | 3.66 | 3.38 | 3.05 | 3.00 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Recursion | jam | 946 | 3.60 | 3.44 | 2.88 | 3.34 | 3.84 | 3.78 | 3.76 | 3.66 |
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | 👥 | Greenback | jam | 280 | 3.70 | 3.83 | 3.21 | 3.42 | 3.43 | 3.54 | 4.07 | 3.42 |
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | 👥 | The Forgotten Four | jam | 544 | 3.40 | 3.35 | 2.58 | 3.11 | 3.17 | 3.48 | ||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Bullet Pause | jam | ||||||||||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Jim Doesn't Care About Space | jam |
Updated. Thanks
Absolutely astounding.
Shame about the warren bug.
I will tell you why I love this: I want to like Magic the Gathering, but can't. I cannot stand that in MtG your mana (a resource that you NEED in order to play the game at all) is tied to random chance whether you draw it or not. Here, I adore that every card you play is theoretically a resource to use to summon more cards. Fucking genius!
Where I can see it going wrong though is in the random chance of drawing many cards that do 0 attack, that could get annoying quickly. But you seem to have included enough type of each card in the deck that that doesn't happen, and I commend you for that.
It's a functional game, but there's not much feedback for what you're supposed to do. I think different drugs combined with other drugs produce different levels of effectiveness, but I can't figure out makes something temporary and something else permament.
Also, rate some games dude! The more games you rate, the more people will see yours!
This is the best game I've played this LD so far. It deserves nothing less than a 5 star Fun rating from me. I know this, because I physically said out loud "this is fun" with a smile on my face while I was playing it, rather than needing to think about it when I got to the ratings.
It works so goddamn well, it invokes that "just one more go" feeling that I think will take this far.
I have not a list of issues, but a list of improvement suggestions, for there are no real issues with this game: When you are holding a mob, I think it should draw an arc to show the path it will take when thrown. I think you should be able to catch mobs when you are falling/jumping. If you can already, I couldn't get it to happen, so I think the grab range should be increased only when in the air. Catching a mob mid-air as it's about to fall into the pit would have a real cathartic fun vibe to it, much the same way as seeing somebody's head explode meatily when you get a headshot is cathartic.
I'm not a fan of games where it's not clear what you're meant to do. On top of not knowing what to do, I have to do it really slowly. I'm a fan of a slow buildup, but there's too much walking in empty rooms. I'm not even saying you should walk faster, I'm saying the rooms should be a little smaller.
But I do like the idea of trying to find all the sins. The background art is also very nice. As is the model of the nun. But I don't think they look nice together. It's a bit too obvious one is 3D and the other is 2D
*clicks channel*
*percentage skyrockets*
They built that fuckin' doom portal real quick. None of that waiting for the stars to align bullshit! Here we go lads, doomsday's upon us!
I liked it, but I can see how others would not.
It's a little un-intuitive, but after playing through it a few times, I figured it out. Playing a card with an element on it will move that element out of the way and leave the other one open for another, so you can play a different card later to hopefully complete the circle. Even though that's not well portrayed, you can figure it out and that's very cool.
But, that strategy goes out the window with the AI also being a factor. He messes up your plan so any setup you could make is up to a coin flip if he destroys it, so it's a lot of luck.
@jac-b Omg thank you so much. There has been an overhanging feeling of anxiety from day 1 that this was too much with too little time, but to hear someone say they liked it has made me so incredibly happy
@luka-roli We were torn between making the intro text last longer or shorter.
The brown filter is to make it look like it has a sepia tone so it looks like an old photograph, emphasising the fact its an old tale being retold. But I do acknowledge the characters kind of blend into the background.
The abilities have some descriptive text if you mouse over them.
These status effects don't appear in Darkest Dungeon, we made them. We couldn't make a tutorial because we ran out of time, so to compromise we made a txt file of game terms included with the file. Thank you for your criticism!
@amigopadilha @jdh @kloscunha @sempiternal @thedarkmagi Thank you guys for playing our game! We're thrilled to hear you enjoyed what you managed to play of it :stuck_out_tongue: I'm so sorry that the game is as buggy as it is. We tried so hard to fix it but it's a stealth bug; we couldn't intentionally trigger it, so we couldn't find out what under what conditions it operates :frowning2:
@amigopadilha @jdh @kloscunha @sempiternal @thedarkmagi @stellaryyan2 I have fixed some bugs and uploaded a new version. Besides the bug fixes, no other changes have been made. I do not expect you to play the game a second time (I know we've all got a lot of games to get through!), but if you did want to try again, the option is there!
@bonelazy Thank you for your feedback! I think we definitely took on too much with this project, we were still "making" it right up until the last day, there wasn't much time for polish. So the bottom panel does look a bit naff.
The game is certainly much longer than we were expecting. It felt faster for us because in the dev build we could just right click on people to kill them to skip fights so we could test later ones. That and we know the best synergies. So we never found out just how long it was XD
The designer wanted even more mechanics, if you can believe that. There was going to be an "imbue" mechanic where when a character dies their spirit could bless a living character and they would gain an ability that that spirit had when they were alive. That had to be scrapped.
We also wanted some exploration to break up the fights in between. The fights do overstay their welcome and some exploration would have helped, but of course, there was no time for that.
The presentation is absolutely amazing. But I feel the game falls short in the actual gameplay. There isn't much player feedback and it's very un-intuitive. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. The exclamation marks pop up to tell me... what exactly? I then look at my resources in the top left and I have... too much of a resource? I wanted to like it because you've clearly put a lot of effort into the presentation. Like, the graphics are gorgeous!
This is rather enjoyable, though I think it's a bit too frustrating to play for too long. It's not clear if a limb is still enough to not to damage to you when you try to pick it up. Maybe limbs should turn orange when they're pick-up-able?
This was a solid little game, I enjoyed my time with it.
One thing I would change though: I think you die a little bit too early when the light circle is closing in. I think it would be cool if you died maybe a third of a second after you were in complete darkness, so if you manage to make it back to the altar in that tiny window of time, you will be even more relieved because you know how close to death you were.
He who feeds monsters should look to it that he himself does not become fed
I see somebody has played Papers, Please!
This was a lot of fun. I failed on the first level 3 times in a row because I was trying to figure out what the meta pattern was. Once I beat it, I then didn't fail at all except once. I was kind of disappointed there wasn't one super final level where you had to get 50 of every stat, plus 3 of every gender, plus 3 of every profession.
The attention to detail was brilliant. The little people (though there seems to be a graphical glitch where it looks like there are 2 people left when the level ends), the bios, the vault doors, the gorgeous icons for the stats and the professions. All really good!
One complaint: I would have it so that two clipboards will NOT take away from the same stat. If I'm struggling for one stat and I get two clipboards come through that both subtract from it and I've only got a few more people to go, I'm screwed. There's nothing I can do about it because the RNG wasn't kind to me.
For the record: I beat the game.
The game was a functional and nice looking platformer. I was having fun up until the last two levels. The jumping feels a little unresponsive, and that really made the penultimate level hard and in a frustrating way, because of the twitch movements and sudden jumps you need to make. The final level was too RNG. A boss fight in a platformer is cool, but the tentacles were too random. The level is tricky enough with the pre-placed obstacles. Throwing in RNG obstacles literally means you can't be sure if a level can be won without a good seed. But goddamn, is it pretty!
I'm also not rating audio as highly as I would like because I know the knife sound effect is from somewhere else. I've heard it in Poacher.
I played and rated the original version first.
The updated version is certainly a lot better. There's more feedback, movement is much better both for the blimp and the character on it, and the slowing down music when you near death is much better.
But even the updated version has problems. The later game (around the 95% onwards point) has the screen so full of eyeballs, it's impossible not to get hit. This is made extra frustrating by the fact that enemies can collide with the blimp body to hurt the dragon, which I don't like. The game is giving me feedback that the *dragon* is being hurt, so it doesn't seem right when the dragon takes damage even though nothing's touched him.
I think the game should *either* have fewer of eyeballs in the late game OR have a smaller collision box on the blimp, not both.
Moving between stations is really slow. There's a lot of twitch gameplay in effect here, since you want to quickly swap between feeding the dragon because he's taken damage, then poking him because you're falling, and now you need to grab that person for food later, but oh no we're nearing the bottom the dragon needs to be poked, oh dear he's thin because of damage so run over and feed him and now we need to attack this eyeball!
There's a LOT going on in a short space of time, so for the character to have such a slow movement between the stations makes me feel cheated when I couldn't do something in time, because I had all the intention to do the thing, but I couldn't because the character is too slow!
I like the use of the theme. We were thinking of something similar for ours, originally. However, a lot of the sacrifices boil down to "lose 1 heart". And if you sacrifice speed, you're screwed when the projectiles come in. But the loss of sight was a really cool one. More like that would be awesome.
I'm a little bit disappointed with the combat. The AI's strategy is just to approach you. If you can get them all on one side, wait for them to come to you and spam click, they'll walk into your sword and die. Arrows don't do enough damage, and they're more of a hindrance against the projectile enemies because of how far back they push them.
I love the Flash art style. It reminds me of classic Binding of Isaac.
I like this and had fun with it, but wow, it's hard! I couldn't make it past the first level!
I think it would be better if holding space added force to the balloon and something Ctrl took force away from it. I think that would make the "weight" mechanic very daunting, as it would get to a point where the balloon can't rise even if you hold space, and pressing Ctrl would be a risk vs reward thing as you might sink too quickly.
I like the use of the theme. Having to make a quick decision because you misjudged the physics and thinking "oh god, I need to get rid of something quick! Argh! What do I get rid of?!" but because of that I thought it was more tense than relaxing!
Potential employer: So what are some games you've worked on in the past?
I wish I got more feedback than a generic "this didn't work message". If I try to murder the pathetic person who has nothing and I get "this isn't what they wanted" I'm left confused. The impression I got was that murder was a "wild card win any encounter". And I swear I tried everything on that couple and didn't get anything.
I feel as though the game could've benefitted from some random generation (if the deck were also larger). I don't think it works when seeded, but if it were to work with randomness you would also need more encounter cards so the same businessman doesn't appear three times in one playthrough.
I do like the idea of the game. Choosing which resource to sacrifice in every encounter certainly has some intrigue to it. But I'm just not a fan with how simple it gets once you've memorised the sequence. Because as it stands, once I die, there's nothing to stop me from getting back to where I died save for a couple of minutes of time and a few clicks because I know what to do already.
I had fun with this! It's biggest strength is that you "get" it in about two minutes. There's very little figuring out. One quick trip around the village and you know how everything works.
I think there are some balancing issues though. Mills and mines should produce more than just +10% of their resource. I think they should either give +5 or +25%. And the god shouldn't ask for a sacrifice you can't possibly provide. "Give me a woman". "But there are no women in the village!". "Well, I guess you're screwed, then!"
But maybe that's just part of the humour of the god. If that was the intention, then it is funny, but from a balancing perspective, it's not quite right.
I got 15,000 points by spamming left click. The game looks nice, the music is good and it's well made made, but the game isn't very well designed
The game is cool until you realise there is next to no skill involved. I lost the game because my last relic room was destroyed even though I had a 97% chance to save it. Kinda tilted.
I like that the base chance for saving a room goes up the more people are already in the room, but I think the increase in chance should itself increase the more people you put towards the crisis.
What I mean by that is the first person you choose to sacrifice adds 10%, the second person adds a further 11%, the third person adds a further 12%, etc. etc.
I'll be honest: I didn't finish the game. I couldn't make it very far. I'm not a fan of these kinds of puzzles where the "logic" is a bit open-ended.
But I liked the art. You said you wanted to be inspired from older games and I think you nailed it. I got some "Real Myst" vibes from it.
The music, while nice, loops so often that it becomes annoying. And the click detection on the key is a little broken. I thought I had to do something to cut it out of the page (the grass drawing makes it look like it is sewn into the book).
I do really like the idea of a series of puzzles being solves in a book. That's really nice.
The presentation is absolutely stellar, I think more effort was put into the main menu than was necesarry :stuck_out_tongue:
The screen goes black when I click on a song to play, except for the score. The music keeps playing and nothing else seems to be happening.
This is certainly one of the best games I've played this LD. You had a style and stuck with it, and little things like the fish eye effect really bring that out. It's cathartic to see things explode, and I'm filled with little schoolgirl-like titters of glee when I see a golden barrel of health or a room with upgrades in it.
I was very close to turning it off straight away however, because I got to the next level without upgrades because I didn't know there were any or what the teleporter was before I touched it. Once you've got the skills down and got plenty of upgrades, about all the game has up its sleeve is "open door, enemy straight away in your face, free hit". it needs something like a boss battle to really top it all off.
Despite all that, I was playing for ages, so I must've really liked it! I gave you 4.5 Overall stars :smile:
This is quite impressive, tech wise. I liked the opening cutscene, and I like premise, the gameplay is just a bit frustrating. Your hitbox is way too narrow, and wrestling with the movement physics makes the game feel more like a loosing battle. The game was hard enough with all that, so throwing in enemies on top of that makes it a bit too frustrating to be very fun.
I turned the game off because I was fed up wrestling with the controls, and because I was annoyed with the short, repeating music, but I'm going to rate you favourably!
This is a very good idea. A very good idea that relies on communication of information. And that's where it falters.
The sliders mean diddly squat, for two reasons: is higher better or worse (Which direction even is higher?)? The sliders tell you that citizen's value for that stat relative to the other citizens, but it doesn't tell you what their true value is. I had a lot of citizens that seemed to be murdering other citizens even though their law-abidding stat was all the way to the right; I suspect this is because even though they were the most law-abidding, their true value was still very low.
What does the productivity stat even do?
How does fertility work? It makes citizens produce offspring more often, but what does that actually mean? 10% more often? 100% more often?
Law-abidding is just annoying. A random chance for a citizen to murder another. Randomness is good for the stat generation, but not good if you need to actually rely on it. I need to rely on my best citizens not getting killed just because I rolled a 1 on a dice.
It's difficult to tell how close a citizen is to death. I know they fade out to black, but if you're min-maxing, it would be nice to see exactly how close they are.
I certainly enjoyed this! Card games are hard to make, so you've pulled this off quite well! The choice of font is a bit questionable, there are some spelling mistakes, and it's not very clear what suspicion does, but I liked it enough to complete it and I had fun!
It's a little unintuitive that the organs drop to the bottom layer if there is nothing beneath them, or that you can't pick up bottom layer organs (I thought that was a bug at first), but the art style is beautiful! Very old timey!
The idea is a really good one. Sacrificing specific organs, and a different effect happens depending on which organ you sacrificed, is a really cool idea. But it's executed poorly. Sacrificing nerves makes you invisible? Unplayable.
The sound design is also very annoying.
I completed the second level and stopped playing because nothing was changing. Nor was it challenging. The flamethrower rofl stomps the enemies. There's no reason to buy upgrades. And with no sense of direction you're just walking around to find an enemy you haven't killed yet.
@refraction Oh it's procedural? That's actually kind of impressive! Procedural generation is hard! That explains why I got two upgrade stations next to each other.
I'll be a little kinder with my rating now that I know this was a technical experiment. Typically one shouldn't choose procedural content when a well crafted linear experience can be just as good, but jams are also for experimenting one's programming skills!
As cool as an idea as this is, it suffers from lack of intuitiveness. What's the point in job proximity if lack of transportation makes you late anyway? When does payment come in? How much does overtime affect your health? How much does overtime increase income? Wtf just killed me, I was healthy!
@miltonnh25 I will absolutely admit fault with the transportation thing. I did play multiple playthroughs on different jobs, but for some reason I registered transport always costing the same across all of them. I went back to double check and saw I was wrong. I'm sorry for that.
@itsjustjord Hey, Jord! Thanks for playing it, I'm glad you enjoyed it! I'll be sure to return the gesture later today when I'm home, scratch my back and all that! :smile:
@refraction Thanks for the feedback!
But, 3 guys shooting at you? You mean the pit of prefects at the start of the game? I hope you made it past that or you've only seen a quarter of the game! You wouldn't have fought the first boss either!
@refraction Duuuuude! Just jump over and dash past them! You neeeeed to see the first boss at least! The bosses are where the effort went!
@boxedmeatrevolution You played through to the end?! That's awesome! We don't know of anyone else here that's done that! Thanks dude!
@cozmic @stanislau @valid @petsanah @zesix Thank you for playing the game! These were fun comments to start the morning with!
@peppsen I really appreciate you taking the time to leave just honest feedback! Comments like this one are the best!
I definitely agree with you that enemies are dull, and we knew this when we submitted it. But most of the effort went towards the bosses themselves, and we think this was for the better. Though I am a fan of the alley level because of how it looks and how it twists on itself.
I'm sorry you didn't like the dialogue. We were honestly very pleased with it. The tutorial is lacking, but it was a last minute effort, and I forgot to mention how dialogue worked. I was also meant to allow you to skip dialogue by holding Ctrl, but forgot that too.
The last boss is difficult on purpose. We think he's tough, but fair.
@mamoniem Glad you enjoyed it! Yep, all music and sounds are original!
@miltonnh25 Thanks for playing the game, glad you enjoyed it! Yes, I agree that the bullets are a little hard to see at times, but our focus was mostly on the boss fights, so that slipped the polishing stage.
The game severely suffers from lack of intuitiveness, and more than once I said "what just happened?". It's unclear what the shapes are meant to be, it's unclear that the shop takes away health maximum (at least, i think that's what it does), it's unclear when an enemy is near you (particularly the brown ones, because they blend in with the background and you can't see them in the dark), and even when I got to the room that said "Complete!" I wandered further into the room and was then hit by an enemy and killed. Why? I thought the game was complete?
Some more play testing was necesarry too. The first few doors to the next room don't take health away, even though they say they do, and I had a white enemy hit me through a wall.
It's certainly well put together and looks very nice, but the grid is a bit of a mess. Tbh I don't think it even needs a grid at all. It's also pretty annoying not being able to tell the ents where to go. You can have some free ents on the other side of the island not reacting to enemies on the other, so you have to waste a few trees to build new ents. But I kept playing until the end because I liked it enough! I lasted 13 winters.
It's biggest strength is its own weakness. It is a wonderful case of showing without telling, but because of that, there is a sense of "wait, what am I supposed to do now?".
Unplayable. Controlling hands independantly with keys is a terrible idea. Can't even pick things up.
It looks gorgeous! Ultimately though, I stopped playing out of frustration. Movement feels slidey, awkward and unresponsive and I had an enemy who didn't die even though he was on no health. It seems a bit easy since you can get back more health than you're paying between sacrifice stations, and once you've got the ranged abilities, what's to stop you from carpet bombing the enemies from afar?
I may not have finished it, but I did like it because of the technical marvel of it. It looks impressive considering the time frame, it just ultimately falls flat from lack of polish.
I think you spent way too much time on art considering you only had 48 hours to make it. There's no incentive to leave the front of the door so a lot of the off-screen stuff is wasted. Some of that time could have gone to polishing the mechanics (I sometimes get stuck on nothing from left-to-right and vice versa). It was certainly a humorous setup, but there's not much else to it.
It looks alright, but it's a bit flawed in design. It's literally impossible to get all the heretics to the altar because they operate on flock logic, and the paths are narrower than the group, so of course heretics are going to fall in. And there's no point to branching paths to try and lead me on a goose chase when I can move the camera independantly to the flock to find the altar. I also got stuck on a level because my last two heretics disappeared, but didn't count as dying so I still had some left being counted, but there weren't any.
But, like I said, it looks nice! It's quite colourful considering it's in Hell!
The use of the theme is very uninspired. Instead of losing HP, you lose money, but it functions exactly the same way. It's just a health display with a dollar sign on the end. Enemies spawn on top of you with no warning, there's no incentive to keep as much money as possible, and I beat level 1-2 and no other levels became available in the next room.
The character looks nice, I like how his blinking is independant from his movements. I also like how colourful it is and how it's got a sort of Prison Architect style going on, but there just isn't anything to the gameplay.
It's got some of the best presentation I've seen from LD, but balance wise, it is completely broken. Since upgrading a building to max will probably net you a health max increase, there's no reason not to do it since the upgrade will probably give you back the health you spent on it! You recover HP faster than enemies can take it away unless there's lots of them, I found myself never using the tree ability and mostly the sweep, rare the stomp. And there's a bug where if you die, go to the menu and start again, it keeps your progress.
But I absolutely love the art! It's sooooooo colourful and the sound is also nice!
Will it certainly looks pretty, gameplay wise it controls a bit clunky. Your melee range is far too short, while it seems like you take contact damage from enemies when they are nowehere near you.
It's truly gorgeous and well put together, but I ultimately got fed up because the random enemy generation is very unfair. It's not uncommon for the first enemy to be a dinky rat that for some reason deals six damage, and you can find enemies with 20-something stupid health before you've seen your first shop. It's almost as if the enemies use the same RNG stat rules throughout the whole game with no scaling.
I also don't like how if you miss a key, you take damage. The very nature of this mechanic encourages fast key pressing and key misses are bound to happen. And missing a key already carries the punishment of not dealing damage (since every damage point is essential), and letting the enemy get that little bit closer to dealing damage to you anyway.
Despite that, I played it through a few times because I enjoyed it, but ultimately turned if off because of these issues.
It's a little boring since you're stuck in a loop of doing the same thing. Get up, water plants, plant some more if you have time, sleep, repeat. The plants grow slowly, which makes sense if the game was released comercially, but this is a game jam: I have the attention span of a gnat.
I just don't think a farming game is a good choice for an LD. It needs extra things around the core mechanic so it's not the only thing you're doing. Stardew Valley lets you visit the town, talk to people, find goodies elsewhere, all so you have something to do while you wait for plants to grow.
The game is enticing, but very very poorly balanced. Extra saplings barely ever drop from trees, random lightning strikes happen way too frequently and are just an arbitrary "you lose that tree because RNG", and considering how slowly wood is being produced, rent is way too high, and to top it off you have the mafia sucking away more pennies. I also had issues with the clicking, as it targetted a tree I blatantly wasn't cliking on, destroying that tree's progress.
While unoriginal, it's a nice idea for a farming game. I like how fast paced it is, which it should be for a jam, but the balancing is not good.
I would liek to play the game but the browser version is too laggy for me and I can't find a download link on the itch page. Am I missing it?
Thanks for updating the link!
I'm not sure what kind of difficulty you're going for, but I managed to beat it on my first try, not really knowing what I was doing, and without finding the hatchet. I really like the concept (I'm an absolute sucker for games where coziness, warmth, and comfort are key themes. I even liked the programmer art because it lends a certain cuteness to it!), but I feel as though it's been held back by slow pacing.
Everything takes just a little too long. The level is too empty for how zoomed in the camera is, so when you're walking from one key point to the next, you don't have anything to keep you entertained along the way, which wouldn't be a problem if you moved a little faster. Rope climbing is also far too slow. And I don't think the warmth drains fast enough.
There's never a reason to leave the fish somewhere. You always have to be taking the fish forwards towards progress, and there isn't really anywhere to go that isn't forwards (there kind of is at the start fo the game, but after the first rope climb it's pretty much all straight) so leaving the fish anywhere is pointless because you have to come back for it. So because leaving the fish on the floor isn't worth it, campfires are also not worth feeding.
The meta strategy is to mount the fish to your back, never take it off, and carry a piece of fire in your spare hand (This also makes soup pointless because the fire will keep both of you warm), and abandon the fire whenever you need to climb rope. You never need to worry too much about a lack of fire in your hand because your warmth drains slow enough that you will likely find a piece of firewood next to an empty campfire.
In order to fix this, I would do the following: * Make the hatchet essential. Remove random pieces of firewood. Put the hatchet near the starting campfire, because a player's first instinct is to move forwards, especially if they see the fish is already on a timer. * The fish's warmth both drains faster and restores slower than yours does. Thos means sprints between campfires are more of a risk. * To counteract the above point, make campfires last longer so you can be confident you can leave the fish behind. If the player is too worried the fire dies quickly, they won't want to leave the fish. Each piece of wood you put on fire exponentially increases the time a fire lasts, encouraging the player to gets lots of wood (so each piece of wood increases the fire duration for 5 times rather than 2 times. This number would require some experimentation). * With all that, the player is much more free to explore. This is important because the critical path is blocked, either from a cliff face that doesn't have a rope (and the player has to find the rope which is hiding somewhere nearby), or a wooden barricade or fallen tree is in the way (which produces lots of wood as a reward).
That's what I would do. And I would do all of that because I do like the game even as it is and I want to see it get even better!
I see you had the idea to something that was almost like a stealth game: avoid contact with enemies and make it through a house. You had a good idea to make it unique - with the fact that the player cannot see in the dark with a side on view, and the ability to see anywhere in the house with a click - but it'd not fully realised.
First of all, there's no incentive to click anywhere that isn't near the player, because it's not beneficial to see anywhere in the house other than right next to you. Moving up a floor isn't dangerous because you can see silhouettes in the window, so you just need to keep spamming click around you to make sure you aren't being jumped, and watch the window for a silhouette to know when its safe. I woud've given the player a permanent - but short - light source that is always on top of them so you're never sure what you're walking into. And without a "mana" bar or equivalent, there's no reason the psychic button couldn't have been held rather than clicked, because you can spam with no consequence.
The width of the house is also either irrelevant, or unfair. if the key is on the left half of the house, you can grab it without ever needing to walk past a zombie, because stairs are everywhere, If the key is on the right side of the house, its unfair because you *have* to walk through a zombie to get to that half; they don't stagger their patrols enough for there to be a gap.
I also found a bug where you can repeatedly press Space to spawn the key in a new location. It resets your score, yes, but on the first run this isn't a concern because you don't teleport back to the beginning.
Interesting concept, but unfortunately not realised because of the design.
The game dumps a lot of information on you, some of which I think could've been removed from the game without sacrificing anything (like Hull and Armour being two different stats). I think the console should colour code certain keywords so it's easier to pick out what happened. Like, ammunition is orange, food is green, morale is purple, etc. So when you glance at the console you can tell what happened without shifting through the dump of information. I also couldn't figure out how to fix Hull, so I only travelled 100 distance. Some more information on what the actions are supposed to do would be nice. But I did like it overall, it just tried to do too much without polishing what it had. Sometimes, less is more.
I have to admire the large brass balls it takes to decide to make a VR game for a game jam alone, props to you. Unfortunatrly, I couldn't complete one delivery without getting frustrated because of the jankiness of everything. I don't think the truck needed to be on spring joints to its wheels, or at least, the springiness needs to be turned *way* down. The way the truck rocks from side to side is really weird.
The long range grab mechanic also interfered with trying to pick up the thing you pulled towards you. You can't catch things mid air because it causes them to hop into the air. On the vive wands, grip is not a good button to map to gripping things (ironically), because its not comfortable to hold. Trigger is much better, or it should be toggle, not held.
The hand also freaks out when you try to interact with physics objects, like the van door. It seems like its trying to figure out its position every frame, but once you've grabbed something like that, you should hard set its position.
Ie.: when you've grabbed the handle, the hand should not try to figure out whats its position and orientation should be each tick. Instead, it should recognise it is gripping and set its value to the handle's position, but allow the handle to be pushed/pulled by the controller inputs.
There is no challenge, there is nothing trying to stop me from achieving my goal. What even is my goal?
I got to the second level after the tutorial stage and stopped. It's not the difficulty I have a problem with, it's the lack of room for error. The lasers flash way too quickly, so you have time it perfectly. The fish has only 2 seconds to love, so you have to act quickly without any pause for thinking. I wasn't finding it fun, I was finding it frustrating. But the respawn time is really good. There's no faffing about. Death leads straight into another attempt.
@mykola Thank you for your very kind words! For some reason I had it in my head that adding a thumbnail adds the image to the text as well, and I never thought to check. Thanks for bringing up the screenshot thing.
I agree that instructions were lacking. That is one of the aspects we wanted to improve (my personal pet hate is the lack of instruction on the wide gap. How is the player supposed to know there is a platform beyond the screen?), but it was a case of time. I'm the only programmer and I had to go to work on the Monday. This is also why we haven't reviewed as many games as we would like, we unfortunately have other things to do, but we're scraping by.
The jump height is not increased by holding the button. I think what you're experiencing is the increased jump height when you pick up the computer chip in the basement (again, lack of instruction).
Again, thank you for leaving such elaborate feedback!
@icxon Thanks for playing! You should absolutely go back! This is one of the issues with the game: the lack of instruction. Pressing the red button is only one third of the game! That opens the black and yellow door.
@iamscissors Thank you for playign the game! I'm glad you liked it!
@charles-fernandez You're absolutely right about the sound. I knew it was an issue whilst making it but I didn't have time to fix it. I tried turning up the volume in the code, but it didn't seem like it wanted to go louder than 100%, and there wasn't time to re-render the audio with a higher volume.
Thank you for playing the game! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
@plutonium-powered Thank you very much! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
It looks nice (although the attack animation is lacking), and the audio is serviceable because its cute. The gameplay isn't completely thought out, though. The block not being a held button action is very frustrating, because it's a block, not a parry: I should be able to hold the button to block an attack. It's frustrating to get caught out by the attack I knew was coming because the character decided to put the shield down. There's a strategy that makes the gameplay trivial, and therefore boring: a) Run as far as you can b) When in a combat wave, comfort your friend to reduce his stress income as much as possible c) When an enemy approaches, block the first attack, then attack. Repeat block->attack until dead d) If friend's stress is 30-40%, comfort for as long as possible until combat wave e) Repeat
It's all rather one note. There's nothing that makes combat dynamic or organic, it's two people standing opposite each other taking it in turns to do an animation of set length like an MMORPG. Knockback, short attack animations, and attacks that do less damage but hit more targets - like a ground pound (which would in turn give a reason to jump), or a long-range thrust attack - would give the player more options. But when its this rigid, you encounter easy to abuse patterns like I found.
The main focus of the game was the pipes, as opposed to the thing you're supposed to keep alive. The puzzles were certainly an innovative idea, but trying to maintain a map in your head and juggle the light level is not fun. The light does not pose a threat when you can walk back to the lamp for no cost, so it just becomes busy work and something that repeatedly interrupts you when you're trying to do the puzzle. And I do not like that the diagrams can straight up be wrong. You had a puzzle idea, and it's good on its own. Making a puzzle that deliberately gives me incorrect information, especially when I have only so much time to be near the puzzle, is not good design. But the mood was nice, and the tutorial was welcome (though needs spellchecking).
I liked the game. It works, it's got a good idea that you managed to realise, and it looks nice. I have two major concerns:
1) It's too easy. There's no incentive to venture far from the bonfire and risk danger, because you can wait near the bonfire for logs to respawn. And there's no reason to take fire from the bonfire when you can just wait for those two logs a mere jump away to respawn.
2) This is more an opinion about the whole idea: I think you did yourself a disservice making it a platformer. The ability to take and give fire makes it more innovative, but when I saw the title screen, I was expecting a Gods Will Be Watching sort of game. If you're inexperienced in making games, then that's okay, you've got to learn by making the easy genres. But in the future, don't be afraid to try making something out of your comfort zone. If this had been a cozy, warming, atmospheric experience, I would've given it 5 stars on Mood.
It certainly looks nice and manages to establish a tone and mood without words, which is impressive. But there isn't much substance to the actual "game". It's unfortunately nothing beyond a maze, and there isn't a mystery to discover. And the lamp needs some more feedback on what purpose it serves. I got it in my head that it loses power when you bark. "The amount of time the light stays on" as an indicator for the correct path doesn't work too well because we have no comparison for a normal rate of dimming, so you wouldn't notice if it was getting darker faster.
There's no motivation to do anything, and causing 400 instances of fire to appear in the world lags the game. But the fire chaining between flammable objects is cathartic, and it made me chuckle at first, but there's nothing to it after that.
This was a pretty cheery and enjoyable game! My biggest concerns are: * It's sometimes a little tricky to tell which tile you're on * It'd be nice if you could turn on the spot (considering how important direction is and how it has to be timed) * There needs to be some instructions for the core mechanics (I got stuck on the first few levels because I didn't know what sitting was) * The colour of the ropes clashes with the colour of the ground, and sometimes lines up with the edges of tiles, so it's difficult to make rope out against the graphics
But I did enjoy this, and I've giving it a good upvote!
It looks nice but it seems like a lot of the assets weren't even yours (like the background, the main thing you look at). The main issue is that the game does not give your room to breathe. The next incident happens mere seconds after the previous, sometimes the same incident at the same place. It's impossible to look at the bars to judge your resources when you've got one fight after another screaming at you, and two people throwing up on the floor. Because those have sounds, they become the immediate concern in your mind, and the other resources get forgotten about. If you can even do them in time, whilst you're trying to break up the next fight.
I adore the visuals, it looks like something out of a Nick Jr. cartoon. It's unfortunately let down by a lack of polish. The animations are a little broken, how high the cat goes when you hit it feels inconsistent (I'm sure there is a system behind the scenes, but it *feels* inconsistent where one swing might make it hop, and another swing will send it soaring for miles), and I never saw a reason to use the underhand swing (S is also an awkward button to put the underhand swing when I need my finger free to press W to jump at a moment's notice).
It's not going to set the world on fire, but it was nicely put together and did what it wanted. Although figuring out how long a plant can go without water was a little obtuse, which isn't good when you need to rely on keeping them alive until the end to be able to earn the information you need to keep them alive, which seems a bit backwards. And it's a bit too unforgiving. I can water a plant as soon as I see its dehydrated, and its dead the next day. Not good when you're trying to figure out the timings. Nice introductory cutscene though. It was fun to watch.
The idea of juggling tasks in the buildings a good one for the theme, but a severe lack of player feedback and clearance of objective made it pretty much unplayable for me. I don't know what the 20 seconds is trying to tell me. 20 seconds to do what? I walk up to the phone to "save 120 seconds" and nothing happens. About the only thing I figured out to do was walk into the wash room to reduce my radiation. Also, you're not Yahtzee Croshaw. The How To Play screen really needs some punctuation. Also, is my build broken? Because I can't hear any audio, but you submitted it as a category.
I liked the look and idea of this, but there are two things that hold it back: very slow movement, which makes getting anywhere a chore; and world aligned movement controls that mean when the camera is at an angle, it's difficult to guess where you're going to walk. But its looks wonderful, and the toon shader is really nice! Did you really make the shsader yourself?
I enjoyed this! It's nothing amazing, but you've made something technically impressive and you've made something rather unique out of the theme (I really dislike the theme for this LD). It's a bit easy to abuse, though. There is a loop (around the middle, off to the left, it's got four trees in the middle of it) where you can get yourself and lock off all the tracks and they can never get to you.
This is pretty fun, which is all one can ask for with jam games, really! But I did encounter some frustrations, particularly bugs. Sometimes the mouse double clicks when I click once, causing me to choose an option before I had time to read the event (I imagine because the same click event is active when the new buttons appear) and sometimes when dragging resources, the click event will stop stop registering and the resource will disappear from my mouse. Something I like about the games you make is that you work a lot with the art skills you have. The ship isn't the prettiest, yet the pixel icons look nice, and the streaking parallax stars in the background are so simple yet so effective. And I like the use of colour, which I find tends to be lacking in games set in space. Something I think the design is lacking is an end goal. Yes, the theme is Stuck In a Loop (a theme I don't particularly like for this very reason), but even once you've settled on a planet, the score is inconsequential and forgotten about as you start the next timeline.
This is pretty fun, which is all one can ask for with jam games, really! But I did encounter some frustrations, particularly bugs. Sometimes the mouse double clicks when I click once, causing me to choose an option before I had time to read the event (I imagine because the same click event is active when the new buttons appear) and sometimes when dragging resources, the click event will stop stop registering and the resource will disappear from my mouse. Something I like about the games you make is that you work a lot with the art skills you have. The ship isn't the prettiest, yet the pixel icons look nice, and the streaking parallax stars in the background are so simple yet so effective. And I like the use of colour, which I find tends to be lacking in games set in space. Something I think the design is lacking is an end goal. Yes, the theme is Stuck In a Loop (a theme I don't particularly like for this very reason), but even once you've settled on a planet, the score is inconsequential and forgotten about as you start the next timeline.
EDIT: Lol I have no idea why the comment was posted twice, but I also wanted to say I think mesetatron did a fantastic job on the music!
@bakemonomori @kotovnav @bokonon @lintfordpickle @etrealjunior @bredera
Thank you all for taking the time to play it! We're glad you enjoyed it and we hope to see you again when we finish it!
There's a lot to unpack here.
I personally did not get anything out of the tone. If anything, I found it to be more dark humorous than depressing, because the timing of the suicide scenes, the way they come and go quickly, and the weird effect on the "You have been useless today" are all hitting the right beats to be a comedy game. Especially when my man Joey somehow crucifies both arms like a chad (I know it's a dream, but still).
You cannot have a dark game about suicide automatically win points for tone and capture the heart of its audience just by being a game that has heavy elements in it. Likewise the game's blurb cannot be "This is a serious game". Context is important; I know nothing about Phoebe and Joey and so their personal struggles carry no weight to me. That's more a writing thing than a game development thing, but it's important nontheless.
A game that wants a tone like this would benefit from being longer (which is obviously not within the scope of a game jam, which is why I don't think this is a good idea for a game jam game), where we get to experience Joey and Phoebe in a positive context, and grow to like them and care about them. If we're just thrust immediately into the deep end, there's no substance. And the way it ruins its own tone with jokey tips, the Kurt Kobain gag, and stuff like that makes its intentions wobble about all over the place. Is this a serious game or not?
Which is why I *do* think this is a good idea in general. The idea of learning who Joey is and trying to figure out what he is thinking based on what he has said, what he has done, and what he has left around the house is actually a great idea. It provides a lot of opportunity for subtext, and requires the player to pay attention to dialogue in the game. But as it stands, the game is too arcadey and fast paced.
The game's scale is also all over the place. Sinks are too tall, rooms are too big with too much empty space, the car is *huge*, there's no reason for there to be a stamina mechanic, and the default mouse sensitivity is way too high.
That said, I am still impressed by what you managed to achieve in Unity in such a short time. I think Unity is horrible for quick projects because of all the bells and whistles, so whenever someone is able to make a game-jam game that's more than just a single room with a single mechanic, I think you've done a good job technically-speaking. The programmer(s) should be pleased.
There's a good idea for a game in here somewhere, the execution just hasn't been great.
This is really damn nice. It looks awesome, ad the movement feels awesome too. It's lacking some intuitiveness though. The path you need to take isn't clear. I think the camera would have benefited from being pulled back a little more so we can see more balloons.