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A jam submission

Inner LifeView game page

Discover the rich inner life of cows.
Submitted by Don Collins — 2 days, 4 hours before the deadline
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Play 7DRL

Inner Life's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Completeness#14.0004.000
Roguelikeness#14.0004.000
Innovation#14.0004.000
Overall#13.7223.722
Scope#43.3333.333
Aesthetics#83.6673.667
Fun#113.3333.333

Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • Wow this is a wacky cool innovation on hunger and combat. 

  • IMO, one of the best games this year!

    PSA to anyone who plays: If an enemy enters you, you haven't eaten them, theyre raiding your food! I think you generally don't want to have enemies enter you. EDIT: Also, you can kill an enemy by stealing all their food.

    • Completeness: 4. Very complete! Several terrain types, lots of polish (there are even chairs and a table in your inner self) and several enemies, even one that moves twice as fast.
    • Aesthetics: 4. Beautiful sprites and animations.
    • Fun: 3. It was fun! It also felt like something was missing, perhaps combat. At times I felt like enemies would just keep coming at me relentlessly and I had no way to repel them except for repeated bashes. EDIT: Heard that I could kill enemies by raiding their food. Tried it out and it worked!
    • Innovation: 4. Having the enemies be dungeons is a wonderful twist!
    • Scope: 4, it's a very large game, with several abilities, tilesets, and enemies. i was particularly impressed on the bash ability's chain reactions through the environment.
    • Roguelike: 4, it just doesn't feel like a roguelike to me without combat and items. EDIT: Now that I know how to fight enemies, bumping from 3 to 4.
  • Completeness - Everything polished, the features work, I did have a stack size error crash at one out of ten games, but we can overlook an occasional rare bug.

    Aesthetics - Simple but functional, gets the job done and doesn't get in the way. Lots of info and extra flavor in the mouseovers.

    Fun - This is definitely lots of fun once you figure out the mechanics. Thumbs up!

    Innovation - One of the most unique mechanics I've seen in a roguelike.

    Scope - This is the perfect scope for a 7DRL, not too small but not overambitious either.

    Roguelikeness - Turn based, grid based, permadeath, good enough for me.

Successful or Incomplete?

Success

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Comments

Submitted

I really like this game as well, but unfortunately are too unlucky or too stupid to win. The tomato of victory is a nice idea, and I definitely noticed the length of snakes' interior!

Developer

If you've seen the tomato of victory, I think you're pretty darn good at the game. Thanks for playing!

Jam JudgeSubmitted

Beautiful game! After playing for a while, I knew I was missing something, so I went on the discord and someone told me the piece I was missing: you can defeat enemies by stealing their food! Knowing that made the game way more fun, so I actually went back to update the score, hah! So, PSA to all: Don't let enemies get inside you because they'll steal your food, and if it happens, you can steal it back!

You did a really good job with this! This is definitely one of the best games this year.

Developer

Hey, thank you so much for the kind words! Yeah, the fact that enemies die when you take all their food is an easy thing to overlook, since it turns out not to be all that necessary for the gameplay sometimes.

I greatly enjoyed this game.

The worlds-within-worlds mechanic is masterfully applied to every aspect of game play: Your inventory is your world; Creatures attack you by entering your world; You can recover stolen food by entering their world after they get bored of yours and leave; You can even kill creatures by stealing all of their food.  The opening quote aptly sets the theme.

The command interface (key + direction) gives the game a traditional rogue-like feel, though thankfully without as much of a learning curve.  I miss the ability to idle, though it's usually possible to 'b'ash or 'e'ject something to similar effect.  The absence of (direct) inventory management is also a bit of a challenge, though curiously fitting given the inability to enter your own world.

Beyond that, the game has a surprising attention to detail: Different terrains pertaining to each type of creature; Creatures with different food preferences; Rams bash!; Elephants trample!; Spiders cast webs!; Slime molds eat everything!

Developer

Hey, I can't tell you how thrilled I am to read your comment! Thank you so much for the kind words. There's a lot of stuff in the game that I thought might go unnoticed, so I'm really glad to hear you mention some of the things you did.

I absolutely agree about it being strangely light on inventory management for a game that's all about inventory. I grappled with a few different possibilities for letting the player control their own contents a little bit more, like going inside yourself somehow, controlling two characters so each can go inside the other, having more defensive animals (like the dogs that did make it in), etc., but ultimately didn't have time for more than what you see in the current game.

Thanks again for playing! 

Jam JudgeSubmitted

I thought I was prepared to explore the rich inner life of cows.  But it was so much more than anticipated.