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Mesolithic's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #29 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Gameplay | #30 | 2.846 | 2.846 |
| Visuals | #33 | 3.231 | 3.231 |
| Fun | #35 | 2.692 | 2.692 |
| Audio | #39 | 2.615 | 2.615 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How have you used the theme "Strength Lies in Differences" in your game?
The player will learn positive traits and skills from the animals around them to progress. (Tip: Level expands in both directions)
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1
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Comments
So much love for and in this game. Although simple this is a demonstration of why simple done well always trumps complicated. A thing of beauty and worthy of taking it further. Congrats
Some of the best games are "simple, done well". Other platformers like "Thomas Was Alone" and "Ibb & Obb" are games that inspire me. They don't really provide any new mechanics to the genre. Rather, they were crafted with such attention to detail that they are memorable and feel new/unique to the player. With this game, I spent 2 hours making sure the fire light wiggled just right and the colors changed appropriately. Was it necessary at all to even have a light source on the fire? No. Was it necessary to make a script to make the normal light source go through a day/night cycle? Definitely not. But when I see that campfire, the way the shadows combine on the ground, and the vibrancy that it adds to the dim nighttime it makes me proud of what I have done.
I felt the love that went into making this. Very creative approach to pretty much every aspect of the game, the theme, the music, the visuals all feel unique.
I got stuck at the bear too, although I might be missing something based on your reply to someone else below, cause I don't know how to attack. If I get close, it injures me, but nothing else happens.
I get your intentions about keeping it vague (the ability to observe and understand was key for humanity to get from there to where we are now, after all), but it's a fine line between enjoying something challenging or becoming frustrated by failure. Having to figure out pretty much all the game mechanics as part of the puzzle might be stretching it a bit too far, especially if it takes multiple seconds before an action is registered, and there's no feedback that what I'm doing is actually the right thing, I just gotta do it longer.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, I'm super-impressed with your game, it's easily the most memorable one I've seen so far.
Special thanks for your long "post-mortem" on the game page, it was a really interesting read.
Thanks for the thorough comment. As for the thing you are missing, it might be that you can also go left from the start location (after learning to Sneak, there is something you need just to the left of the campfire). I tried to indicate this with background art, but in retrospect I should have swapped started the player in the center with the fire and bunny on each side to give more of an indication that you can go both ways. Maybe also an arrow shaped bg art asset. I do also that my design as is can create frustration, and if given nore time would have found some way to keep the UI minimal, but indicate taht you are performing the correct action (perhaps with a particle effect creating a growing “glow” around the target. But the is the difference between game jams... sometimes you just dont realize if something is going to work or not until you are in the middle of the project and you don’t always have the time to fix it and still meet your scope.
...and thanks for reading the post mortem. I felt like I would need it to remember my feelings on this project in the future. I’m glad someone else enjoyed it.
You nailed it, having played a million games that only play from left to right (and having made one myself a few years back) it never occurred to me that I could go the other way too. I played your game again and got to the end this time. I'm still impressed. :)
I also understand what you're saying about game jams. Believe it or not, this was my first ever game jam, which is quite the "achievement" considering that I'm 43 and I actually made my first game 35 years ago - on a system that had a 2.5 MHz CPU and 16K RAM... The final entry I submitted is barely a shadow of what my original idea was; life got in the way and I lost 3 days, leaving me with a whole bunch of half-baked features. I basically spent all of Sunday cutting stuff from the game, just so that I actually have something to submit that more or less works.
For your first jam, getting anything accomplished is a feat, even if you have been making games for a while (my first was in QBasic on a Pentium 90MHz, and didn't start jamming until about 5.5 years ago). In the end if you can make something that compiles and is more or less playable, that is good. My first jam team had 6 people. Me, another programmer who merged changes that broke all my code half an hour before the deadline, a person who literally did nothing, a 3d artist who made 3 different small models of asteroids, a 2d artist who made a single 2 frame animation for a 16x16 pixel character, and a writer whose content never made it into the game. So yeah... having anything is good.
Haha, that was both reassuring and discouraging at the same time when it comes to my own performance and to joining a team, respectively. But I hear you, I certainly should try and appreciate it more that I did in fact submit a more or less working game.
Team's aren't usually that challenging. That particular game jam was my first and everyone on the team's first. None of us knew the tools (that was all of our first time using Unity and no one had experience with any other engine.) All of my teams since then (6ish years) have been mostly good, and part of that is experience on how to lead a team when they need direction. I love to work with new people and teams as much as possible and usually try to work with someone that is their first game jam. I see a lot of developers in my local area that work with the same teams every time, and that works for them. I like to work in the community to give new people a chance and invite them in and try to see that they have a positive and enjoyable experience. The number one thing is communication, with trying never to be negative about ideas and thoughts. This often means being a bit fluid with the design to accommodate whatever comes up. Next just make sure that if someone makes an asset, try to get in in the game somewhere. If nothing else, flatten it out, put a cube behind it, remove the colliders and call it a poster on a wall. So... I am rambling... but what i am trying to say is teams are very valuable and important to me.
I'm really impressed that you took this on alone, I can tell you've done a lot of work to get to this. I like the setting and theme used and you tutorialise, which is something we didn't manage to get in.
Admittedly I couldn't get past the rabbit - I know in earlier comments you said to bow, but I've hit almost every key on my keyboard and in different combinations and I couldn't work it out, haha. So perhaps you need to explain to the player what the controls are somewhere (like on the submission or game page) so they can figure out whether they're doing something wrong gameplay wise, control wise or if it's just a bug. :)
I will definitely give it another go if someone can enlighten me on the rabbit puzzle!
I've just worked it out! I wasn't staying by the fire long enough, I would just leave after a few seconds, then find the rabbit and the tutorial would then tell me I needed to befriend it. However I wouldn't have the bow ability yet so it would essentially mean I needed to restart. :)
Great job mate, I really enjoyed this - I got stuck on the bear puzzle and frustrated that I couldn't work it out, but the audio and visuals were nice and simple and that matched your stone age "dawn of man" setting quite nicely. You should be proud of this, it's simple but effective - well done!
Hint: When the game starts it tells you how to move, by starting “Warm yourself by the campfire.” The rest of the controls get explained as you unlock them (and are disabled until you unlock them). In a “real” version of this game I would have liked to put in an overlay when you pause the game to display the controls you have unlocked along with a log of important text for each of the events.
Great visual, but I took a while to figure out what to do for each animal in the game.
Figuring it out was the point of the game. I'm glad the puzzles took you a bit of time. Thanks for playing!
I beat it! Loved the aesthetic of the game and the variation of controls/interactions. I don't think I fully understood the stamina system but it didn't really feel like I needed to. Your use of different animals to gain different abilities was super unique and I really enjoyed it.
The stamina system was purposely vague. Different actions take different stamina, which slowly refills when you are standing still or bowing.
I really like the design and it plays as a complete game. Can't beat the bear!
I specifically added the bear auto-killing the player if you attack it more than necessary. You attack once, and learn Mercy... any more violence beyond that is just asking for trouble.
Completed it, a nice little experience :) I really like what you did ^^
Unfortunately I couldnt get past the rabbit, wasnt too sure what to do! But I really loved the aesthetic of the game looks really nice. I also really liked the guitar soundtrack!:)
Thanks! It was actually a Koto midi instrument. I wanted to make the sounds as close as possible to the earliest of music instruments, as if it were something from 20k years ago. Hint (Solution to Rabbit: Bow when close to it for 4ish seconds,)