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A jam submission

The Ghost of Christmas PresentView game page

Please read the how to play
Submitted by McKayCraft — 8 hours, 17 minutes before the deadline
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The Ghost of Christmas Present's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Most Festive#103.1333.273
Game most likely to give someone a drinking problem#112.9593.091
Grandma's Favorite Game#151.8281.909

Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

(+1)

Pros:

  • Nice puzzle-y elements

Cons:

  • Quite fidgety and harsh

On the one hand there are nice little moments like gathering the bones for the dog to get at the present in its house, and then on the other there's a maze where the vision of the player is so reduced it's practically blind. The solution for the kitchen is also a bit of a twist given that there's no indication that the stove is interactable or requires a button press (I think I activated it with the spacebar but it could also just have been by touch). Overall it's a solid if short game, but I became pretty frustrated with it when I was discovered while no one's bars were full and forced a reset, or attempting to poke at the present in the kitchen to figure out the solution also caused an instant failure. Polish in stealth games is pretty crucial because the genre is so focused on expectations of the player that when anything unexpected happens it feels like the game is cheating. All that whining aside, this is a nice and solid first entry to jams, so all that other stuff will come in time. Keep it up!

(1 edit) (+1)

Fun game! I included it in my compilation video of all of the Awful Holiday 2018 games!

(+1)

(x/post) Stealth game, collect the presents while dodging people.  Okay, dev's first game, cool.  Feedback needs a bit of work of course (line of sight, sound, detection, stuff like that.  There's also not a lot of emphasis to point where you can go or what you can do).  I think the biggest problem is it relying on a pitch-black labyrinth for most of the game.  It just doesn't feel good mechanically (it's a stealth game but it's not using it, not that I think applying it there would work) and thematically.  Still, I've definitely played worse "dev's first game that was also a stealth game" so that's a point in its favor.  Keep it up!

Developer(+2)

Thanks for your feedback ha ha. Yea we made the mistake of getting stuck on the mechanics so when we finally had the rooms and map planned out we didn't have enough time for balancing, but that was just bad planning on our part.

Submitted(+1)

Pretty ambitious objective-based stealth game. For a week, there;s a good amount of things to do but unfortunately a lot of design issues bog it down in my opinion.

I appreciate the feedback you get from enemies when they've spotted you, however it's kind of hard to anticipate when you're going to be spotted. It feels inconsistent, like sometimes I can be directly in front of someone and they don't see me. Some kind of vision-cone system might help alleviate this issue.

The artwork is a little simplistic which makes aspects of gameplay more difficult than they need to be, for example it can be hard to tell that some rooms are connected but more importantly for a stealth game it can be hard to tell which direction your enemies are facing. 

Punishment for being spotted feels too severe; you're instantly thrown right back to the start of the game

The labyrinth in the basement wasn't much fun..

But yeah, super ambitious for a week and congratulations on getting a project complete, relatively bug-free (as far as I could tell) and submitted.  

thank you for your feedback we will keep this in mind for future game jams

the people who made this game must have been really gay for each other