Play abstract 2d junk
Nights With Junk's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #2 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
| Graphics | #3 | 3.867 | 3.867 |
| Controls | #4 | 3.467 | 3.467 |
| Audio | #6 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
| Overall | #7 | 3.467 | 3.467 |
| Fun | #11 | 2.667 | 2.667 |
| Theme | #16 | 2.800 | 2.800 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
3.2.dev.custom_build.6b19da583
Source
already, it is on https://notabug.org/Houkime/nights_with_junk
Game Description
playing with junk on a conventionally floating island of junk
Participation Level
0
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Comments
Controls and motion felt very good. Also there seems to be some crazy backstory to discover, which is fun. The puzzle mechanic is definitely creative and I can see there is a lot to explore there, if only the mechanics were introduced in a more accessible way.
Like the others I already found enough challenge in the second level - took me like 10 tries -- seems I am human number 2 ;-) And then I got even more stuck on the third level and did not really want to try anymore, which is a pity, really...
Maybe also using something different than flashing pink squares to show the target shape would have been welcome because I think the current approach will give me a headache if I play it for much longer. Similarly for the flashing text with instructions.
btw: I first download the win version because web-versions of Godot are annoying (especially the music) but it got stuck starting up so used the web version in the end.
I don't really have a Windows machine so i basically tested it only in Wine, which worked. Sorry about that :-(
Wowie, this was a trip and a half! This was really weird in a good way. There is some weird english, but it kinda adds to the charm. One complaint; it was really hard to understand that the section on you doesn't fall. Otherwise, solid game!
I mentioned this both in controls section of description and in game, but probably this should be addressed by making a better first level so that you actually see it for yourself multiple times and learn by doing.
Now the first level is made in a way that you start with one block over your head and it purposefully triggers this situation, but if the roof were bigger or sth so that you should deal with multple columns and maneuver around that would be more useful.
This nuance btw is not just a quirk but a sort of mathematical necessity - otherwise there can be an edge situation when you essentially kill yourself in a very weird way.
I really liked the visuals and how the dialog boxes changed shapes to indicate who was talking. Found the puzzle mechanics to be a bit confusing.
Tested on browser
I'm not a big fan of story-driven philosophical puzzle games like Thomas was alone (that somehow this game reminded me of), but I must say that the general mood, stylistic and musical decisions are on the top, and I'll be as objective as possible.
Sound effects are great, which is not so obvious since sometimes the "sound" part of a game jam is the most avoided by developers, and if a developer is not familiar with music and sound manipulator tools things are necessarily going to be messed up.
Also visual effects are really cool, which I think is what makes the general minimalist graphics stand out, and I appreciate the notes and opinions you left in your game page.. it is something that developers should do during jams (I should too!).
Dialogues seemed really intriguing and , even though the dialogue system itself is a little bit off and tricky: I accidentally skipped some parts of text since the Enter button is both used to progress the text and skip the dialogue, but the dialogue is skipped before it is completely shown, so it is a little bit frustrating. ( i had to restart the game a couple times and skip all the levels to read the dialogues)
Maybe using just two cases (if the text is progressing and hit Enter the whole text is displayed with a little arrow on the bottom, the next Enter will change dialogue) or making the text progression faster would make dialogues more appreciable.
Now, I sincerely admit I'm not one of the smartest guy around here, but I feel I've got to point two things since I really enojoyed your game and ideas:
1. The second level was a little bit hard to solve, and had to skip it. I think that the level design was not the best, since the gap between the first level and the second level is tricky. Too much actions differences and mechanics progression between the levels, maybe 1-2 more levels between them could smooth the level design. But again, maybe it is just me.
2. Playing it outside the jam I probably wouldn't understand that the main theme is "floating island". Only thanks to the last dialogues and reading the controls I figured out it was an island of "junk", but at first glance it is not immediate the visual representation of the floating island, mostily if you have to phisically destroy it or remove parts of it as a mechanic of the game iteslf.
Anyway, I really like your style and also tried some of your other games!
I maybe need to add proper input locks for ENTER (so that you can't accidentially press it too quickly, it is used throughout the whole game but not for dialogues) and have a proper "skip" button for dialogue.
1. No, it is not just you. I was too busy playing with concepts for puzzles and core mechanics. I thought about it for several days straight mostly on paper and in sandbox-y mode, so when the time came to actually load those levels into the game and weave into/around story i was wastly behind the schedule so i made a deliberate choice to include "cool stuff" sacrificing much needed in-between levels of difficulty curve.
It is quite absurd in retrospective - the game even contains a level i can't solve myself (as a bonus), but not the basic stuff :(((
2. Yep, i should have made junk more obvious through first dialogues.
At the same time, it is kinda in line with the fact that it could be really anything instead of junk because it is people who are creative and see things and make them "fun" and not things themselves.
I think that the main problem is that you've got tons and tons of original ideas and a lot of creativity, but sometimes we gotta accept that if we are not in a team and have a little time we can't realize everything that is in our mind, and maybe the coolest things we fulfill in won't be appreciated or understood like simple features that just work for a jam.
Anyway, I really like your work and this game expresses your own personal style, which is not so common in jams. I think that this is what really touched me the most
I have not yet found cool people to team up with in such a way that makes resulting collaboration cooler from my perspective than solo work.
People call me in to join projects from time to time, but mostly it ends up being quite dull and not motivating enough and i quit soon.
How one around finding the right people to work with?
Do you have some experience with it?
I guess my games and other work might attract some community eventually and i can collaborate with community people in a typical opensource fashion, but that seems a bit distant. ^_^
I also can try and actively search for creators i personally consider cool and who do FOSS.
I think that nowadays finding people on the internet is the easiet thing on the planet. What's truly hard is finding the right people you can really trust and have fun together.
Sometimes a message on Reddit, on a Forum or simply on Discord could attract the right people, and this is something I personally experienced since I'm one of the Godot Engine Italy Community's curator, and a couple of nice teams came up together for jams and projects.
But it depends a lot on your character, attitude in teamwork and what you are looking for.
If you didn't find the idea of a team project yet, you simply don't need it!
I have so far only one single human who solved the second puzzle on his own (a programmer from the ForgeFed federated git project)
This game was really fun to almost understand what I was doing, lol. I couldn't understand how to solve once the pink blocks were introduced, but I kept playing for a bit anyway.
I added basic HOW TO PLAY section in description, but probably the problem here is that i just made the complexity curve WAY TOO STEEP.
I thought that if i couldn't realistically add needed number of levels in time i should just choose the most interesting ones and put them in the order of increasing number of available operations to not pour too much mechanics on the player too quickly.
Obviously that was a mistake ^______________________^
Ironically a friend of mine when he first saw the drafts (on the first day of the jam) said sth like:
- The main problem with your games are long dialogues and no tutorial. Like i go into a game and have a real hard time figuring what's going on. Make a good tutorial and if you make long dialogues at least voice act them to make them more fun or sth.
I should have listened.
I guess i will have not only have TIME as a factor limiting size and depth of my games, but also my ability to make tutorials for them.
Like, if one can't realistically make a needed shallow tutorial, then reduce the scope even if you can go for cooler things.
I kind of wish for some cool tutorial tech which can introduce mathematically simple but counterintuitive things easily and not as a separate tutorial but like fused with the game itself.
At the same time concepts i usually tackle (even if simple in nature) prevent me from assuming that an average Joe will easily come along without a longish journey. That would make me a mega-accomplished pedagogue if i could do that.
And when you limit yourself to things you can reliably tell and transmit to others, that's a bit different from when you just play yourself with stuff you consider fun (even when it is not really important and can be considered junk).
In other words, i currently have a "wrong" goal for my games - incorporate some cool (for me) stuff and be interesting first of all for me while letting others to play with it as well as a side-effect, instead of considering a game as a communication tool with a "purpose" of communication, i.e. sth _useless_ if not communicating properly.
Or maybe i just need to have two separate types of games, like internal and external APIs - games i want to play myself and games i made to communicate with others.
I don't think you need to split up your games, though you can totally do that if you want. I just think this one needed more time for tutorial. There seems to be enough polish and mechanic here for a full game, tbh.
WARNING: DOWNLOADABLES (i.e not web version) WERE ADDED AFTER (~halfday,) THE JAM SUBMISSION TO BE MORE COMPLIANT WITH RULES.
(they are still using unchanged source files that you can fetch yourself from git at https://notabug.org/Houkime/nights_with_junk)
Linux export may not work on Linuxes using old libc.
OSX is NOT SUPPORTED. This is because to compile for OSX (at least in official godot way) i would need proprietary XCode which goes against my principles.
If you're on OSX, go get the sources and play them directly.
This seems definitely very polished with what I have seen now. The text is kinda confusing though hahah.
^_^ I knew that given my story-lust i can spend countless hours writing the story, so i intentionally shifted it to the end of production so that one can actually have a game to play and not just hours of dialogues (like it happened to my other game NeonHead https://houkime.itch.io/neonhead)
Yeah definitely a lot of story. Btw the sound effects were cool too.
I can't really use synths yet, so for previous NeonHead i went for a mix of simple synth + body sounds, and this one i made entirely with body sounds (except for music) because of how bloody simple they are to make. ^_^
yeah I heard, still sounds good though. Did you applied effects to it?
Not really. Sometimes fadeins and fadeouts in audacity to avoid clicks at start and the end, a bit of in-godot pitch randomising and a major pitch downshift for level erasure sound for it to match animation length.
But generally i have a good enough wearable mic (around 30$ worth) so that major interventions are not necessary.
A good thing that you can just make a sound repeatedly in one recording go in Audacity a ton of times and then just cut out a good enough sample.
Sorry guys, i initially forgot to write a shortcut R (to reset a level) in the description.
If you were frustrated, my deepest apologies.