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A Sad Sad Christmas's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Grandma's Favorite Game | #7 | 3.231 | 3.231 |
| Most Festive | #9 | 3.308 | 3.308 |
| Game most likely to give someone a drinking problem | #14 | 2.000 | 2.000 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Interesting. I included it in my compilation video of all of the Awful Holiday 2018 games!
thanks!!
(x/post) Net a bunch of spirits using the mouse and provide the sad people with festivity. Well, I can honestly say it's better than any game I made when I was 14. Or... anything when I was 14, now that I think about it. It's rough and raw, but it's also kinda cute. Work on the UI, add a cleaner bounding box, iterate, iterate, iterate, and who knows what'll happen! If I was the creator I'd love to find an old digital time capsule and dig this game up years later. Keep it up!
This game has a serious memory leak issue that quickly compounds and can cause systems to choke.
It's a simple concept for a game that mostly plays out as expected but I feel what'd really help this game is better overall feedback for your actions. It's hard to tell if I've successfully given people christmas cheer or not (how many spirits does it take? It felt like it took anywhere between 1-3?).
Attempting to cheer someone up without spirits should give some kind of feedback, some kinf of negative sound + a little message maybe?
There needs to be some kind of mini-map or indicator to let you know where people and spirits are, as the map is pretty huge and I'd often find myself wandering aimlessly in a white void.
But yeah as said, well done for finishing something in a week. it's not easy.
Pros:
Cons:
If I had to guess, I'd say that the particle effect for the fountain or something similar is causing the game to run pretty slowly by the end of the timer. The gameplay is simple enough to understand easily, but the game itself doesn't explain that you need to be standing on top of the sad people to gift them a spirit while pressing e. In hindsight the "e" makes sense, but because of the delay with the transformation into not-sad people I had convinced myself it was a number key for my first attempt. After I looked it up though it was a pretty smooth little game. Nicely done.
thanks for the review!!!
With the performance issues it was probably because of the footsteps actually. I realised afterwards that the footsteps just fade out and don't get deleted, so they just build up. And up. I also was told by a friend that the controlles weren't clear enough so I added them on the itch page. Thanks!
Nice work making those sad right-side up frowns upside-down frowns!
thanks!
A weird little collect-a-thon arcade game where you need to collect spirits and give them to people in order to increase your score.
You start the game as a tiny elf thing with a big net that you can use your mouse to move around to collect blue little spirit things in your vicinity. I found the mouse movement for the net to be mostly unnecessary since you can pretty much get the same effect by simply moving toward the spirits with the keyboard keys.
Speaking of the spirits, it seemed like most of the spirits I ended up capturing were clumped together near the beginning of the game. Then as I progressed, I'd eventually find them in sparser amount for the remainder of the time.
However, in order to actually score points, the spirits you collect must be "fed" to the random sad wretches walking about the area, transforming them into happy elven things. These guys have a nice "[e]" symbol above their heads, so you know exactly what key you need to press to feed them, which I thought was pretty accommodating
A simple, yet maybe gameplay-breaking quirk I found was that the game makes it seem like you need to feed a single spirit to a single sad person in order to score, but even if a person has already been fed and made happy, it is still possible to keep feeding that same person spirits to keep increasing your score. In fact, after a while, I found a single 'e' click on a person would result in them being fed multiple spirits at a time. Because of this, I found the optimum way to score was to simply focus on collecting spirits for 99% of the time, and then the last 1% was to just find any single person to deposit all your spirits.
At the end of it all, you get your score and are encouraged to play again for a better score. It's a simple game, but with a fun little premise that'll keep you playing maybe 2 or 3 more times.
Also, what the heck is up with that loud noise when you start?
Thx!! Means a lot to me that you thought that it was fun. I found out about the glitch with the being able to feed them spirits multiple times when I was polishing the game and promptly forgot to fix it, sorry. The loud noise confused me as well because it only occured after I had uploaded the game.. didn't have time to re-upload. Thanks again!!
This is great! Glad to see you're doing game jams, the hardest thing to do when making a game is actually finishing it, and game jams are a great way to build that habit.
thanks!! Game jams are the best way to figure out scope and getting you to finish on time with a polished product, and I've learnt a lot from doing them. Thx!!