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Stowaway's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Atmosphere | #3 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
| Lasting Impression | #6 | 3.708 | 3.708 |
| Overall | #6 | 3.592 | 3.592 |
| Characterization | #6 | 3.750 | 3.750 |
| Emotional Engagement | #7 | 3.250 | 3.250 |
| Mental Engagement | #11 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 24 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
One of the best games I've played so far - I love sci-fi settings - this one is great - and I've also loved your art style (AND voice acting)
Marco thanks for playing it and giving feedback. Much appreciated. Glad you liked the art. First time I’ve ever done that my pixel art and it was trial by fire. And Travis is The Man when it comes to voice. He’s narrated a couple hundred audio books now.
Congrats! You got tonnes of atmosphere into the game (pun intended). Great setting, and the art is really nice to look at and sets a great tone. Travis was really excellent. I really like the gameplay too, just fun interactions that flow you through the game at a nice pace, and do the job of getting you looking around and engaging, without being too in-your-face puzzley. I'm very happy playing games like this.
Your writing is really good too. I'd maybe have an alternate pose for the character when he's thinking to himself if you do more in the style. But I think you're really good at establishing character through the dialog even in something so short. I'm hoping you do more, get some banter between more characters going because I think you'd have a lot of fun with that!
Dave, thanks! My interest in PnC games was honestly rekindled after I played Peridium a few years ago. I’d not thought about PnC games in years until that point.
I was initially a little down on the lack of real puzzles in this but chalked it up to time and inability to tweak much. I’m glad to hear people just like just moving through the game as an experience. Mood and voice goes a long way.
Thanks for the writing comment. It was hard to pull together. I’d spent the first week on art and hooking up rooms. I had a day to get Travis a script. I’d never done one before for a game like this, so I had to export it, clean it up and have the game “done” so I could write to the situations…all in a day. A long day. I got lucky and covered all the voice and situations and a couple I missed I was able to double up lines etc. It was a good learning experiment.
I also added any ‘character’ in that day as I was writing. Things like making him a little southern or writing semi thoughtful lines as he interacted with corpses. And Floyd. I did have the ending in mind from the start and the ending credits music, etc.
Good note on the talking pose. Art/animation was just such a struggle for me I stopped at ‘good enough’ so I could focus on implementing. I look forward to leveling up there with more practice and speed.
Been knee deep in working on the aspect ratio fix we were talking about and near done, but I’ve been dying to play Telwynium and it’s up very soon!
Yeah, in terms of puzzles, it's been interesting with Telwynium trying things much less linear than I'm used to. A lot more puzzles for the sake of puzzles, and characters that are like "I need these 3 things" ha ha. It's less modern feeling for sure. I tend to avoid doing that for the drifter, but it works for a deliberately "retro" one like telwynium. One thing that's nice when you think of more puzzles is that you get more bang-for-buck for the rooms you've done, people can play longer, since it feels like it's a lot of work for 20 mins of play time otherwise! But people don't have as much time to play stuff these days, so I like a condensed experience. Peridium was very similar, just a serious of obvious things to use. But yeah, I like that personally. Just like the flow of "ooh I got the thing, I know what I need to do now". There's a very vocal minority that HATE easy puzzles though :P
My experience writing for these things is similar to yours too, mostly I look back and I can't remember writing most of it at all, such a blur. But one thing I love about these is that you start with nothing and end up with a character you kind of feel like you know somehow.
I love adventure games in space and that was fantastic! This is one of the most complete and polished games I have played so far in this Adventure Jam 2022. Very impressive in 2 weeks. Bravo Monsieur Broussard!
Thank you for playing it! I will return the favor and rating.
What an awesome little adventure game! I guess I was only halfway surprised to find that your game would involve shooting aliens with a laser gun :)
In any case, here's a more in depth review:
- First the game felt really polished. There was 0 bug, everything felt really well finished and complete, even if content wise it took me about 10 minutes to beat. The animations, dialogs, cutscenes just felt really well orchestrated. I'm assuming that somehow within the 2 weeks timeframe you were able to buffer in some time for polish. That made a huge difference. Also some nice quality of life bonuses like pathfinding around the ship made it almost feel like you had too much time :)
- The graphics were actually quite detailed, there was a lot of attention in the small details (foreground, color palette, pixel art shadows etc) and everything felt really comprehensive overall and contributed to building a sense of fear towards the creature you can only hear scream, which in retrospect, created more tension than when it became visible.
- The puzzles felt fairly basic, but this may be due to having played a lot of point and click games. I never had to think about what to do next. In hindsight, that may be a good thing for players who are just looking for a good storytelling. One thing that felt a bit backwards is that the character ends up collecting the shielding before seeing that there is a breach - aka finding the solution before finding the problem.
- Story/character wise, I really enjoyed Travis and was able to relate to his way of interacting with the world. Floyd was a great touch of humor and provided a great balance between the gory setting and a more lightweight gameplay.
- The sfx and voice acting were top notch and really added to the gameplay. I'm actually quite curious from the technical side about how you introduced all those dialog lines into your game (did you have separate wav/ogg files/events for each dialog line? how did you load them into the game? if not, how were you able to sync the mouth action to the length of each audio queue? that's an area I struggled with in the jam)
You mentioned in your readme that you had built an engine in unity for P&C adventure games. I'm curious how much you had to bend your game in order to fit the technical limitations of your engine vs enhancing the engine to adapt for the game you wanted to create.
Overall, a really fun and memorable little game! (I'll definitely remember to bring that welder next time I personally travel in space!)
Cheers
Thanks for the play, feedback and rating! I put a lot of effort into polish, and even though it was a small game it took a lot of effort. I realized a week in (I did art the first week) that the design was pretty linear and easy. I couldn’t do much about it by then so just stuck with the design from day one. Worst, case, people don’t get stuck.
You are 100% right on the shielding and being the solution before the obstacle. I feel like the design suffered under the weight of just trying to make and implement the game. Next time!
re: voice lines. There are like 129 lines. Most are 1-2 lines long and they were recorded as a “line”. Something the player would say, then pause. Coule be 1 line, 2, 3, 4, whatever. I just imported them into a voice[] array in Unity. I used the index as the id for the file (and it coincided with the script, so I just played line 29, for example). Lip sync was nothing special. Just had a 6-7 frame “talk” animation with the head separate and several frames of mouth position. When I played a voice line I just played that animation for the length of the voice ogg file so at least the player stopped talking when the voice did. Cheap and easy and good enough.
re: my engine. It largely held up well for the things I’d tested before the jam. But I ran into a lot of instances where “uh oh, I have no way to lock a door/exit”, and things like that. But mostly it held up. I probably lost 2 days to coding new things, or having bugs or whatever. Couple hours here and there. Some things were 15m fixes and easy and some caused me grief. I did the jam as a reason to stress test the engine and see if I could make something more ‘real’ with it.
I’m pleased overall.
I always downplay the amount of effort that polish takes, and end up at the deadline with a game that is very rough around the edges, which unfortunately considerably brings down the experience for the player when the deadline hits! I guess it all starts with having a small scope under control that you can deliver in half the jam's duration or so...
Very cool to hear about how you leveraged your game engine. Are you thinking about open-sourcing it or showcasing it at some point? I think I saw a few other games made by people who built their own scumm-like engine in unity.
re: polish, yes, it’s all about scope, pretty much. Less to do, more to polish. And insane time put in. I probably put in about 150hours on the game in 2 weeks. Pretty insane schedule.
re: engine, no. It’s ok for me, but nowhere near something other ppl could use or would want to. Something like PowerQuest (my recommendation if you have some programming / Unity experiecne), Adventure Creator (Unity), or AGS / Visionaire etc are much better choices. I was just working on it and at some point I was like “I have enough to get close to making an old Scumm game?”
What about you? What did you use for your game?
I ended up using unity and building everything from scratch, partly because I was naive thinking that this type of game would be easy to make. After all, what's there but a few animations and a couple of dialog trees... Oh boy was I wrong!! :)
What saved me though is that I ended up finding really outstanding artists / musicians / vocal actors - all randomly through reddit / discord, meaning it could have gone in a very different direction -- but they ended up taking on all the artistic work from A to Z. On top of being super talented, they were all super accommodating with their craft to speed up the development process as well. It still came down to the wire, and I still wish we had had a few more days of polish, but overall it's only been made possible by the fact that I was surrounded well (see our game credits).
A lesson for work/life perhaps... :)
(just played your game) Impressive that you coded all that in a week and did all the other things. You’re right in that these games, while easy to code, have a ton of nuances and details and edge cases.
Well the code didn't just take a week, more like 13 days, 23 hours and 49 minutes :D
Thanks so much for playing it all the way through!