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Parvescence's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| AUDIO | #2 | 4.004 | 4.182 |
| MOOD | #7 | 3.743 | 3.909 |
| INNOVATION | #12 | 3.569 | 3.727 |
| ENJOYMENT | #14 | 3.395 | 3.545 |
| OVERALL | #17 | 3.569 | 3.727 |
| GRAPHICS | #21 | 3.830 | 4.000 |
| THEME | #41 | 3.307 | 3.455 |
| HUMOR | #113 | 1.741 | 1.818 |
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
Interesting game concept, pleasant music and sounds, and relaxing gameplay. I would like to see a volume setting.
We've played over half the games in the jam by this point, and I have to say, this may be my personal favorite of all of them so far.
The ambient mood, the unique gameplay mechanics, the strategy aspect, the simple but satisfying graphics, the helpful and charming tutorial, I thought it was all incredibly done, especially for a jam.
The vibes and concept are very reminiscent of the intro to spore, but with a much different gameplay loop. It feels like a game I could play for a long time and just feel relaxed and immersed in.
I would love to see this game with more interesting additions to the gameplay, more strategy, and some sort of further progression system! I could play this for hours and hours if there was more content going on.
Amazing work, your game deserves more love and attention. :)
-D
That is quite the substantial compliment thank you!
There was a moment in the development process where a realization set in that I best mimic the Spore cell phase. This moment was followed by spending way too long for a jam trying to get blurred-out "colossals" to function in 2d unity to add depth to act as background elements.
Unfortunately, you hit the nail on the head for my biggest foible with my game, being the lack of overall content. I had hopes to do a similar zoom-out effect to Spore once reaching certain thresholds of progression, but alas a lot of the atmospheric elements would have needed to be reworked or at least heavily modified. The hope was that once zooming out enough you could see the edges of the petri dish with branching out and escaping being the win condition.
Cool mechanic, I dont know if its possible to die, I played it for like 5 minutes unitl I quit, the current chaning mechanic is prety nice, it forces you to change up your strcuture often. It is a bit unclear if the nodes cost you food or if you can spread them only x many times on one branch. I think I could spread the same distance if I was think or fat, which was a bit werd. It was fun dou :3
Thank you for playing and I'm glad you have a fun time :)
To answer questions directly: you can create unlimited branches, though the passive decay of each branch increases depending on how far removed it is from the center, measured by the number of connections. For balancing reasons, nodes cost some food borrowed from the node it is coming from but spawn in with more food than was paid. This imbalance will quickly be redistributed back: kind of peculiar, even unintuitive, but the best "game feel" that I could find messing with stuff.
I spent quite a while visiting and revisiting the balancing of the game though never quite got it to a happy state. I eventually settled on making the game easier and leaning into the sandbox elements as a past jam I've done yielded a way too hard bullet hell--checked all the gameplay boxes but was brutal and required more than the typical 5-10 minutes peeps allot per game. It is near impossible in Parvescence to die after the, say, 45 second mark as food will likely reach the middle and sustain you for another 14 or so seconds if you have no non-core nodes; during this limbo you will also eventually get a second chance by increasingly likely luck to branch out and continue play.
Nice relaxing experience with an interesting concept behind it! It was a short enjoyable game. The music was very fitting!
Woow, I have never played something like that. It becomes very meditative after a while with the music.
This is extremely well-made, nicely done! The core mechanic of the game is quite cool and I find it very satisfying to build different structures to collect as much nutrients as possible. While I was kind of bad at completing that simple task, I do wish that the game escalated in difficulty somehow or otherwise had some other looming threat. That aside though, this is a very solid entry. Good luck! :)
A very nice audiovisual experience
Great game! I truly feel like an amoeba now.