| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #6 | 3.154 | 3.154 |
| Music | #8 | 3.154 | 3.154 |
| Graphics | #9 | 3.077 | 3.077 |
| Polish | #10 | 2.615 | 2.615 |
| Overall | #13 | 2.654 | 2.654 |
| Gameplay | #15 | 2.308 | 2.308 |
| Sound | #16 | 1.615 | 1.615 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
This game is my favorite, on the "story/narrative" criteria.
The idea of a woman exploring ancient ruins with such a strange "companion" is really great.
The game is a bit hard, though, and I got lost after the fall.
It is unfortunate that the story criteria has been forgotten, but your game is great on many other levels, especially graphics.
Well done :-)
I must admit I never would have figured out the climbing thing if I hadn't read the comments below, so I have to second the critique about tile ambiguity.
That said, I just learned a ton about narrative delivery from this game. Thank you for that. Opening the game to a conversation with a sapient talisman was very intriguing. I also like the passive-dialoge-during-gameplay. It wasn't critical enough that I had to stop and pay attention, but not distracting enough that I wasn't able to both focus on gameplay while reading the conversation. The parallaxing added to the feeling of vastness and melancholic ruins. As did the music!
I love that I was able to understand some of what was going on just by context clues and snippets of the conversation. The fact that the negative effects of the fog were not (immediately) clear (or even tangible!) made it very freaky.
I didn't pay much attention to Godot, but you've showcased some of it's power. That shadowcasting effect: Is that a tool abstracted by godot or did you have to manually code the entirety of that feature?
Thank you so much for the feedback!
Yea, I knew from square one that if I didnt very clearly show what Tithon was straight away it was going to cause confusion for the whole game 😂
The ambiguity of exactly what bad things the Fog does is exactly what I was going for so Im so glad it worked!
The passive dialog, and coversation etc took at least as long as programming the mechanics themselves, and took at least 4x or more lines of code (most of it reads as a "he said, pause, she said, check variable, he said")
This was my first game with Godot and Ive got to say it was an absolute joy to work with. Ive used Unity, UE4, Game Maker, Construct (also good btw, exp for prototyping), Action 001 you name it and this is technically my first released game!
Once you struggle through getting used to it initially (like any engine) its freaking insane.
The paralax is a built in effect that needs no programming at all (but can be) but the lighting was achieved using three different lights, all functions inbuilt into the engine.
One negative light to darken the whole screen, one light with shadow casting enabled (legit tick a box, pick your parameters) and an additional light on top without shadows so you can actually see the blocks you're standing on!
All three were attached to a node, attached to tthe player, that increased or decreased their "energy"/effect based on the player's Y position, so it was completely self contained.
It took a bit to get working the way I wanted (initially used a lighting mask but had mixed results) but in the end I was super pleased with it!
And thank you again for the compliment about narrative delivery :3
Loved the lighting effects and the look of the fog.
I also really liked how the story was told. Was sad when it ended, look forward to the rest of their adventures! :)
Climbing the bricks vertically like a ladder was a little odd. By the dialogue I was expecting a classic wall cling mechanic. But once I figured it out it wasn't too hard. If you ever revisit, maybe go with bricks with vines on them as the tile for this as that's the more universal symbol for 'tiles you can climb' in video-gamese.
Main character moves a bit slowly, jumps feel kind of stiff as a result.
But other than those minor quibbles, I really enjoyed it, great work! :)
This is great feedback!
Im also super thrilled you managed to get to the end of the game! And I love that the narrative seems to have been well received, I would have been a little bummed out if I'd completely failed to carry that out!
Ill try and tighten up the character movement a bit as well, I want to do at least one update now the Jam is over with a few major improvements (one or two little bugs, fix contrast with the BG to indicate what is solid or not better, add sound effects, fix and reimplement godrays etc) but one major change is I forgot one or two lines of dialog that were supposed to tutorialize climbing and direct players in The Abyss a bit better 😅
On the plus side today I thought of a much clearer way to tutorialize all of the game elements better and mostly non-intrusively so thats definitely going in ;)
Also I discovered why the annoying command window appears. I accidentally shipped with debug enabled. *slow clap*
But a final thanks for running the contest, thanks to this I have finally published my first game (this) and strangers have played it!
Hi Spring-Enterprises!
Im thrilled you've had a shot at the game! I was aware that in some parts of the game are... Ambiguous when it comes to the terrain 😅 unfortunately I was a bit restricted in block variety (both from source material and a mistake I made mid development that dropped 3/4ths of the darkest green tiles), and left myself with very little time towards the end to fix that, but Ill have a stab at changing the bits Im pretty sure you found after the Jam ends and upload v1.1!
(Pretty sure we're not to keep developing after submissions end until after judging?)
I'll have to have a go at your submission this evening!
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