Very impressed with the AI, I felt completely in control even though I was controlling the camera. Loved the idea, and would be keen to see how this could be expanded on if you revisited it.
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[Out of Frame, Out of Game]'s itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Creativity | #87 | 4.356 | 4.356 |
Overall | #128 | 4.174 | 4.174 |
Presentation | #297 | 4.288 | 4.288 |
Enjoyment | #317 | 3.877 | 3.877 |
Ranked from 73 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
The computer plays the game. You are the game camera.
Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?
We created the vast majority of the art during the game jam
Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?
We used pre-existing audio
Comments
Really cool idea, really well executed! I appreciate that the character AI seemed to know what I was expecting and acted that way. Super cute art too!
Amazing! The last level was put together so well, I enjoyed trying to figure that one out. I hope you continue with this!
Best game I’ve played this jam <3 5/5/5
Wonderfully clever introductions of new mechanics. It just really worked for me, many “Heh?? … Ah!” moments
Got stuck on the level with the clouds where you can pan pretty much arbitrarily left and right. Maybe there was something to be found but I didn’t get it.
Really cool idea.
Though I got stuck on level 5.
I couldn't zoom, and I could go as vertical as I liked without the player counting as out of frame.
This one was really good! Cute graphics, nice music, neat mechanic. The spider level was a clever puzzle which I managed to figure out before executing my plan, but the last level I just sort of accidentally completed before I really understood what was going on.
I like the cursor thing but it does mean that I can't decide how long until I retry (or maybe I'm just too impatient).
This is an incredibly smart concept, and remarkably polished too.
I feel that the level which introduces the spiders should have had something on the left that shows that the character can jump farther when running from them. And I also wish that the character's AI was a tad better (which is rich coming from me, the bots in my game could not be dumber). It seems she's programmed to move towards the level's ending, which is fine for the most part, but I feel like when the end goal isn't visible her priority should switch to exploring in the direction of the window edge she's furthest from that's not in the direction she came from. In my opinion this would allow the player to better mimic the cameras in actual 2D platformers (for example, think of how easy to navigate Celeste is despite how oddly shaped a room may be simply because of the camera's position, or the camera position in the original Super Mario Bros which I'm sure you've heard about a million times already).
Overall this is a great game and a really strong contender for top 100!
Also, the menu gimmick was funny.
Ooooh, this was really clever. I'd love to see a post jam version of this.
(SPOILERS BELOW HERE in case someone is scrolling through the comments before playing)
I think a few more levels with the spider mechanic before the parallax trick would have been great - as it stands, both the spiders and the parallax come off as curveballs instead of puzzle elements. Letting the player warm up to the mechanics by introducing them in isolation before mixing them is generally best, but the last few levels kinda felt like they were trying to rush through their ideas as fast as possible. Really, just more expanding on the ideas here and playing with them would be great. Parallax spiders you can manipulate in the background? Zooming in and out to hide pits, or only keep very specific pathways visible?
Also, a few new mechanics for a post jam version would be cool. Toggleable HUD layouts that block varying portions of the screen? Splitscreen?
My only real complaint other than 'more content pls' is that an explicit explanation of the rules the player follows would be nice. The WASD popup at the beginning was clever, but I think building on that style of second-person exposition to introduce new mechanics and ideas would be great. In particular, the first level requiring keeping the camera low required a lot of trial and error due to having to work out the specific rules of how the player moves.
Overall, amazing work - especially for 48 hours!
Thank you for the feedback and great suggestions! The last levels came out rushed because we ran out of time to design more levels. We would like to explore more combinations of the mechanics for the post-jame version and also experiment with new ones. From our initial list: camera rotation to maybe affect gravity, playing with depth of field to blur objects in and out of existence, split screen where you control 2 cameras that can have different zoom levels, top-down and 3D levels, asking the actual player to simulate screen shake, etc. We really like your idea regarding obscuring the view with HUD!!! Regarding explicit explanation of the rules, there was supposed to be voice acting from the "player". Something like "the camera is not following me" and "this wall is too high for me to jump, I need to find another way". We will include them in the post-jam version.
It was pretty standard for the first few levels. But the last level really caught me off-guard, I would love to try out levels with that parallax mechanic!
Other than that, the game looks really nice. Loved it.
Wow, this was fantastic! At first, I encountered what I thought was a bug, but then I realized I wasn't playing the game correctly. What a thrill! Well done!
Now, that's interesting concept! Didn't saw anything like it before, great job!
Very fun game and a great Idea, would love to see this with more mechanics and more levels because it is very creative.
Great Idea!
My player sadly got stuck in the hole and didn't finish LV3
Great idea and game! Was going to give some suggestions, but swilliamsio already gave the suggestions I had.
This videogame has beautiful aesthetics and it's original, I liked it!!
I really like this. I like the idea of subtly controlling the player's actions by only showing them what you want them to, it's very clever. It would be good if it was a little bit more clearer what the player was thinking at every time - it seems like most levels have a predefined path that is hard coded? Would be interesting if you could make it more camera-directed, like giving the player a bias towards heading for the exit if possible, or heading to the centre of the camera if otherwise? Just spitballing. Great job on the game.
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