All the parts work really well to present the experience, the sound, the effects, the way the images transition, it was all really well done. Now the most impressive parts were the sound and the mechanics, they worked really well and made the experience fun and accesible, it made me want to play just another round.
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Awaken Ye Elder God's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #514 | 2.858 | 3.500 |
| Gameplay | #546 | 2.449 | 3.000 |
| Overall | #592 | 2.586 | 3.167 |
| Presentation | #657 | 2.449 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
What do you like about your game?
It was easy to find the fun. It showed up in surprising places such as the "Guess Who" style system that governs Mythos Power and locks you into an animal form. Learning the ins and outs of Ren'Py was fun too.
Comments
I liked the vibe, sound, atmosphere and the way you presented it. I know it's not that much important in this jam, but the graphics needs to be improved. Best of luck
Submitted
Aberrant ExodusThanks for playing.
Totally agree about the graphics. I originally had an idea where the monster as presented in each sequence would move from "pencil sketch" to "inked drawing" to "colored drawing" to "actual photograph" as you became more defined as an entity. When I actually scoped out that work, the time budget ballooned out of proportion. Maybe if I were a better artist that would have been worth the time, but my skill set being what it is, I went for Creative Commons photography and photoshop filters so that the visuals would actually exist.
I really enjoyed the writing style in this game! intriguing and entertaining premise kept me hooked as I tried out different options to see how many animals I could end up as!
Submitted
DescensionI'm really glad you liked the writing. (I am not a writer and so I wasn't sure if any of it was landing like it appeared in my mind.) There's 42 different animals you could end up as depending on what you choose and where the RNG decides to send you. I just made a list of sea creatures and then kept adding them through the jam ending up with some real weird ones as a result (for example, you can end up as a sea sponge if you just say no to everything).
You seem to already know this, but it was very easy to have fun with this game :) Possibly the one thing to smooth the process a little more would be reducing the intro dialogue on successive runs, but it's a minor thing that's easy to skip past in less than a second. Ren'Py was also a solid choice that made the presentation pretty smooth, despite the sometimes low res images.
Very well done!
Submitted
Objects In MirrorGood call on the intro. I unfortunately ended up in *just* the right spot where I felt adding a skip choice made the intro take longer since it would prevent just rapid fire clicking through. Had I been able to add more elements to explain or even just used more flowery language, I think I would have definitely taken your suggestion.
Always interesting to see a renpy game pop-up. Concept is fun, at worst its a "what animal are you?"quiz which is cute and at best its an engaging cosmic horror romp against humanity.
The gameplay is a little strange just with how everything is calculated but its playable and is somewhat retraversible even without comprehension. There is no 'load' option, which I personally would hope for in a renpy game to really programatically explore all the branches. (and it seems like you wanted too because you have saves)
It also appppeears that you are hiding some easter egg secrets relating to some other media (your previous games?) in this game ;)
Submitted
Break the NormalOh, I may have failed to remove all of the save features included in the default renpy set up. That was my intent since each play through is only intended to take a few minutes at most. The "what animal are you?" is absolutely something I found while implementing the system. I ended up with 42 animals just to make that part of it interesting (an expansion of that game would absolutely have more animals but also have some sort of counter for which animals you've managed to end up as).
You are absolutely right on the calculation part. That's probably the thing I was least happy with since you don't know how much power a choice will cost before you make it. I went back and forth about adding that and eventually decided against it since I didn't want to explicitly hint at the "right" choice.
Well... since you figured out they exist either by reading my dev blog or looking at the source: "Sharktillary" and "Evil Clown" give you secret options. :)
ah okay, that makes sense - on the first point.
I went back and read the dev blog and was explicitly called out for cheating. I was wondering why a dev was hashing their source code, I just assumed it was dedication; but it makes sense that it was an open-source protection. Fun. I couldn't find these games on your itch page so I wasnt sure where they were being devved
Sharktillary was made a while back (really far back, it was made in Adobe Flash) before life took me in a radically different direction and, with that same group, I never managed to actually ship the game with the evil, killer clowns. Sharktillary was released on Android. It might have compatibility issues now, but it is technically still available. A random YouTube suggestion of someone doing a Let's Play of it is partially the reason I came over to itch.io and started looking up game jams to enter.
Being open sourced, I didn't want to make the solution of the game's main puzzle (the name of the Great Old One) too easy to just look up. That said, you can absolutely recreate it with a little knowledge of Python by finding the script that generates the clues.
I love the vibe! The audio and and visuals are really solid and the the story is captivating!
I'm still figuring out how to limit my mana drops. I look forward to working my through the entire story!
Great job! And nice to see another renpy game. Ciao!
Submitted
Norm's FaceThanks for playing.
The drops in power are a little complex to explain. Basically each time you make a choice that defines your character (such has "has venom" or "does not have teeth"), the sum total of what is known about your character is compared against a list of possible creatures. If you've then eliminated all possibilities for other slots, that information gets set also. Your remaining power is the number of unknown slots.
So, for example, since few creatures have electricity in nature, identifying yourself as having electricity will:
1. Set electricity to true
2. Eliminate all creatures without electricity (a lot of them)
3. Scale down your unknowns based on the creatures that are left (I believe lungs is set to false in this case because no creatures with electricity also have lungs)
You then have to strike a balance between killing investigators and choosing traits that define you. Ultimately, each time you finish a run through you get rewarded with a few characters of the secret name you can enter at the name screen. There are 10 in total. Once you know them all, you'll get a play through with infinite power.
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