Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Sasha V
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | 👥 | One Dark Day | jam | 263 | 3.89 | 3.77 | 3.44 | 3.67 | 4.01 | 4.15 | 4.11 |
Love the unusual format :) What a flashback to the fun times on Tumblr the past 1.5 years as the sourdough-baking equivalent for Tumblr was wacky tests with increasing degrees of randomness... Got a chuckle out of me for sure
Oh this was really good - great graphics, all too real humour. Control mechanics were fun too although they went from too slow to too complicated very fast!
These graphics in 3 days, howwwwwwwwwwwww. Amazing visuals and mood. That said, I'm afraid I didn't love some of the mechanics - the keyboard controls were very difficult in places (you did warn it's better with a controller, but I don't have one I'm afraid...) and that combined with the fact that I wasn't seeing where I was going made the progress a bit too annoying. (By not seeing where I was going I don't just mean the dark, but rather some specific places in the dark in the rear of the room where I just couldn't see there was a gap between the walk and the wall and kept falling in) But I guess it's just a part of the challenge of the game! Also one small thing - there was a room where burning stuff made it impossible to progress, but the candle could jump to safety; would it make more sense to throw the candle into the last save spot regardless of whether it survived or not? Anyways, the visuals are just absolutely out of this world for LD, well done!
Hi! I really liked this! I love Van Gogh and you found a good interactive way to show some things out of his life and art - I particularly liked the bits where you had "paintings within paintings", showing the ones with details of landscapes and interiors - really drives home the point that the artist was in that environment for a while and drew it at different scales. Music matched very well too.
Some bits of constructive feedback: scrolling was way too fast for me with the touchpad, the text just flew to the end; I had to scroll by holding the bar on the right. Also, I wasn't quite sure about the ending - either there wasn't a real sense of conclusion of the game, or maybe I didn't find a way to progress?
In any case I enjoyed this a lot :)
I really liked this! Especially the style, it was very on-point with graphics and sounds. Very cool concept.
As for constructive feedback, one thing I found rather annoying was how loud and jarring enemy sounds were compared to the background music - I had to turn it way down, which is a shame since the music is so nice!
This was fun and a great concept! The wrong options were soooooo tempting, they made so much more sense than the "correct" stuff. "Life is like a box of chocolate" lol. Made me wonder what all those people would think if they really heard all that.
As for constructive feedback - I think I've seen this problem in pretty much all LD games with this type of text interface - the typing is annoyingly slow and I'd love to have a way to speed it up; also some audio track would be lovely!
Also, nice to see a narrative-based game on LD - we made one as well, not too many of those around :)
Hi! Really liked this!
In terms of constructive feedback, would agree with some commenters above that the ending felt maybe a little inconclusive, I kinda expected something else to happen - completely understandable given the tight time though. And would also agree that the "unstable" topic could have been stronger.
Loved the graphics, the mood and the controls. The monster thingy was genuinely very creepy :)
Hey! I absolutely loved this! The minimalistic graphics worked super well, and the overall mood came through very strongly. Cool topic too, I think the part of scientific history that you mention is very interesting. Have you read or watched the play by Michael Frayn called "Copenhagen"? The vibe and topic kind of reminded me of that a bit.
Just to give some very minor constructive comments: - Like some commenters above, I found typing too slow and set the text speed to its highest, but it made the text typing sound rather annoying and a bit too loud relative to the music - Often it felt like the text is a bit too low on the screen as the continue button and choices were at the very bottom and the top was empty most of the time, although this might depend on the screen/computer? - Since I as the player am the "therapist" - as I'm answering those questions - I'd probably feel it's more logical to press continue before "my" lines appear, and then the AI just responding on itself - The final screen was a teeny bit confusing, I spent some time clicking around wondering if it's the end or I can't see how to progress. I liked the quiet pause at the end but would maybe prefer something to appear on screen after some time to indicate it's over
There are all super minor comemnts though and didn't get in the way of me enjoying the game!
Also it's very nice to see a narrative game on LD! We made one as well, seems like very few teams chose to do this :)
Hi! Sorry, are you sure this is the right link? It seems to be giving me an error!
@not-as-artistic oh yeah it works fine now! I think itch tried to give me an editing link for some reason?.. anyway all good now!
I enjoyed the game - the mood and the audio/visual ambiance was on point as well. As for constructive comments, would agree with some commenters aove that the story was a bit on the short side (although completely understandable given the time limit) and that it would be lovely to have the option to speed up the text.
Also lovely to see a narrative game! We did one as well, seems like there are very few of these on LD :)
@baknik thank you! We used Twine :)
@crispypin thank you for the feedback! there were five endings, one of which was kinda maybe the winning one, although that really depends on your point of view :D
@crispypin haha yes that is "winning" insofar as the main character sees it! Some of the "losing" endings sound pretty good to me though...
Thank you for including us @jupiter-hadley !
Hi @danae, thank you for the interest! I have just tested the game both in Chrome and Opera, looks like all is working; I googled the error and it looks like it's connected to cookie settings in your browser! Twine needs cookies to store the game info, so if your browser blocks cookies it's impossible unfortunately. To enable cookies only for itch.io, go to Chrome settings -> privacy -> cookies and there's a list of websites that are allowed to use cookies, and add itch.io there. Although if that's too much of a faff or if you'd just prefer to not change those settings - no worries, completely understandable :)
I really liked this! Cool theme, lovely graphics, overall very strong mood.
As for some constructive feedback, I think for this to really be some sort of emotional intellect game/check, I'd prefer the "bad answer" options to be a bit more subtle? Most of the time it was a choice between "Aw I believe in you" and "You suck" and that felt a little too unrealistic? Although I still appreciate what the game had to say :)
Also I lived the idea of the music loop changing! But I felt like the changes were much more prominent when I tried negative options, while I didn't notice much of a change during an entirely positive run? Still amazing idea though and I'm very impressed with implementation.
Oh wow this was unexpectedly brutal haha! I liked it, absolutely loved the graphics and visuals in general, like the fact that you had color themes for each branch - lots of visual style.
As for constructive feedback, I was a bit confused by the fighting system - like how different are different attacks? (kinda hard to tell with health going up and down every second) and what's the condition for winning? (percentages were different every time I won/lose, is it about the difference or some more complicated condition?) Also Ctrl/Shift/Alt controls didn't feel great but maybe it depends on keyboard layout :)
@ericfreeman that's a pretty thought-through fight system, I'm sorry I didn't appreciate all of it during the play-through :) As for the controls on a PC, I think the traditional thing is right hand for arrows, left hand for action? (Good buttons for action are Z X C V in the left keyboard corner, I believe most of the games I've played use that)
Congrats on finishing your first game jam, that's an achievent in itself! I hope you liked the experience and will do more in the future :) I really liked how much mechanich you managed to put into this in such a short amount of time, and it looked really compelling. Would agree with many commenters above thought that the UI is pretty complicated - I actually didn't manage to figure some of it out - so it would be amazing to add some sort of tutorial in the beginning, or some sort of help section. I liked the graphics, simple but do the job!
Really liked this! The art was amazing and the style overall was very strong, and the story was funny as well. (Especially loved the tiny running ghost animation, so cute.) My one bit of feedback is that I'd love to have more dialogue/story in between the minigames because all that freakin jumping took me so long that I'd prefer longer breaks/more of a story reward in between :) really well done!
Very cool! I love the idea, for such a simple game it actually does a fantastic job discussing emotional balance. Pretty complicated too (I kept falling off the edge by accident lol and balancing wasn't easy) but not too complicated, just the good level to be engaging but not too exasperating. Cool art style too!
Hi! I liked this - really loved the art, and it's a cool topic to discuss via a narrative game. Definitely some food for thought.
With regard to constructive comments, for most of the questions I was not too sure why they influenced the outcome, as in using everyday tastes to say something about gender identity seemed to kinda play into gender presentation stereotypes, which seems to be the opposite of the game's aim? Or maybe I misunderstood completely and the answers didn't directly influence the outcome and that's the whole point? (In which case that's really cool actually but I'd love to see a hint about that in-game?) Hope this makes sense haha!
Another bit of feedback I had was about the dialogue - the characters seemed to have pretty similar voices, speaking in full complicated sentences etc, while in an online chat I'd expect at least some people to speak shorter, and just from the narrative standpoint would be nice for them to have distinctive voices - although I appreciate it's not relevant to the plot :)
Overall, really like the idea of a choose-your-answer game to make you question your biases, perfect format for that! And by the way great to see another narrative game - we made one as well, seems like very few teams went for this format :)
@kitcate thank you for taking the time to respond in such detail! It's really interesting to see your logic behind this, and yeah I totally see where you're coming from. Thanks for this game and good luck with future projects :)