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A jam submission

ranosView game page

Exploration in the dark
Submitted by SecretPocketCat (@SecretPocketCat), tasgon — 13 minutes, 18 seconds before the deadline
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ranos's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Presentation#34.4444.444
Fun#63.8223.822
Overall#83.6893.689
Theme Interpretation#302.8002.800

Ranked from 45 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Category
y

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Comments

Submitted

really enjoyed this one! Had a great feel to it! Very polished, I died once, and then I had to reload the page to play again, but that felt just like a small oversight. Well done!

Developer

Thanks. It sometimes panics unfortunately - sorry about that. Not an oversight exactly - just didn't have time to fix it and it happened very rarely after dying, so it was fairly low prio.

Submitted

Great game. Very cool mechanics. I would expect that I could get punished by making the sound much more.

Developer

That's a fair point. Part of this I wanted it to make it more uneasy than hard but it's also due to the janky enemies.

Submitted

Very cool, loved the tension it created! Audio, sound, mechanics all felt very cohesive into a unique experience

Submitted

Great audio/visual design, had a lot of fun playing this!

Submitted(+1)

Is the side-effect that the triangle enemies move when you use the sonar?

Developer(+2)

Yes. Rather, the act of learning about your surroundings comes with the side effect of your surroundings learning about you.

Submitted

Wow, this is amazing. The main mechanic is so fun and leads to such an interesting gameplay, and the game itself is so polished! Such a fun time playing this :D

Submitted(+1)

This is so cool! The visuals and main mechanic are great, really gave me a strong Duskers vibe. Nice job :)

Developer

THX 🙂

I've never played Duskers. It looks super interesting though.

Submitted(+1)

I adored the game. It is simple, polished, and feels good to play. It even has a terrifying nature due to its dark atmosphere and sound design. I enjoyed every bit of the game, and I honestly think it is one of the best games in this jam.

I wish the levels were designed by hand rather than created procedurally though, I believe it would multiply the fun.

Finally, after some point, the game stopped working for me. I don't know the exact reason, but it was pretty late in the game after I pressed the space bar over a hundred times.

Awesome game, well done!

Developer(+1)

Thank you 🙂

I'm not sure hand-crafted levels would be the same. Restarting a level would rob the player of the  initial discovery unless you mean creating a pool of levels which might be hard for a jam game.  Either that or stitching it from hand-made chunks/rooms could work.

Sorry the game crashed. Was that maybe after entering a portal? I think I encountered that a few times but didn't have time to fix it unfortunately.

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Procedurally generated levels have the disadvantage of being able to provide worse-than-adequate levels. Since games should supply the players with an appropriate difficulty curve and well-designed-placed thrills, procedurally generated content is not preferred when it is not just a tool to provide a chaotic environment such as in survival/sandbox games.

Of course, providing the player with hundreds of hand-crafted levels is not so possible for a game jam game. But, I'd prefer playing 5 unique hand-crafted experiences rather than trying to find my way in more procedurally generated mazes that probably won't provide any thrills. For example, that enemy you have implemented in the game can be utilized in certain levels in the game to create thrilling moments, but since the levels are procedurally generated, that is most of the time is not the case.

As I remember, the game crashed after I entered a new level and pressed the space button several times. I couldn't reproduce that though, sorry!

Developer (3 edits) (+1)

For example, that enemy you have implemented in the game can be utilized in certain levels in the game to create thrilling moments, but since the levels are procedurally generated, that is most of is not the case.

I agree with some of this, but I also think one reason it doesn’t come off as thrilling very often is because enemies get stuck on geometry in weird ways, thus giving the player safety in situations where they shouldn’t have it. For example, if you go through a corridor blind and you ping a chaser, you should likely lose, but right now there’s a good chance you’ll be fine. With those bugs fixed and with better mechanics to ensure that enemies get to their destination, I’d imagine the threat factor would increase quite significantly.

Some levels could potentially have served the game well, especially having a couple introductory ones as a tutorial system, but I think another big limiter was the lack of enemy variety (and the aforementioned bugs). For example, we didn’t even experiment with enemies that could actively ping.

Submitted

Yes, you are right. If the enemies wouldn't get stuck in the walls repeatedly, the game might offer a much greater experience, maybe even eliminating the need for hand-made levels other than tutorial sections. I hope you guys iterate over this idea!

Developer(+1)

Loads of this comes down to balancing or lack there of. Sure, premade lvls would come out nicer, but the procgen lvls could be also much closer if they were tweaked properly.

Thank you for trying to repro the issue btw.

Submitted

I like the game, but i think it would be more exciting to play with actually designed levels instead of procgen, but its nice anyway

Developer

Thx for playing. For lvl design pls see reply above.

Submitted

I enjoyed it! Loved the look and sound

Submitted(+1)

This is a really cool game, from the idea to the implementation of the game itself! Fun from the beginning and really nothing bad to say about it at all! Nicely done, fun and nice looking :) Love the sound design too.