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Goat Journey's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #13 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
| Originality | #16 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Audio | #21 | 3.750 | 3.750 |
| Overall | #26 | 3.614 | 3.614 |
| Fun | #33 | 3.450 | 3.450 |
| Controls | #36 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
| Graphics | #66 | 3.550 | 3.550 |
| Accessibility | #68 | 2.900 | 2.900 |
Ranked from 20 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
4.2.2
Wildcards Used
Transfer Takeover, Actions Have Consequences
Game Description
Join a lineage of pilgrims as they take part in a sacred ritual involving a perilous journey with their goat pal! At the end of each journey, you regale your fellows with the tale of your exploits! A reflection on the nature of folklore, each iteration of the story can change if you choose to embellish the details... But be careful! Changing the story will change the reality of the next journey.
How does your game tie into the theme?
We took an abstract approach and made our game about the nature of folklore. We wanted to explore the way folklore arises over time as a true story gets embellished with extra details as it is passed down through generations.
Source(s)
No
Discord Username(s)
@aardvarkio @Dryer At Night
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
2
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Comments
It was a fun experience, the music tied it all together nicely and huge respect for making the idea work!
Also interesting way in that culture to get their minerals by making a goat lick a rock xD
I really love your interpretacion of the theme, i think the gameplay was pretty fun, but sometimes the interaction with the stone would happen twice.
Other then that, really cool game, pretty fun, really good story.
Overall, love it.
Thanks for playing! Yep that was on of our several bugs... Glad you were still able to enjoy!
I really enjoyed the beginning story and made it up to the mountain and then I could not proceed...
I was able to look around on the top of the mountain and would crouch with 'c' and use 'q' to whistle, but unfortunately could not move, as the WASD keys didn't work. Seems I am the only person with this problem and after reading the comments was really looking forward to playing through again, so I restarted but had the same problem :(
Thanks for submitting, I really wish I didn't have this problem...
We just discovered that bug yesterday and can't figure out what causes it :(
Unless @MrDryerAtNight figured it out
You're only the second person that it has happened to. Sorry you didn't get to play the rest! We appreciate you giving it a shot though!
haha, the premise and story are pretty fun. The way you incorporated the theme is also pretty nice, although I think more options for making the stories more "exciting" would have been nice :)
I loved the whole aesthetic of the game! The graphics were gorgeous and the way folklore tied into the gameplay was a fun mechanic to explore. 10/10 would goat again.
Get a goat to lick a rock. 10/10
Blessings of Sel upon you! Thanks for playing! 🐐
This was really cute and I highly appreciate making the game about folklore as the concept. I was really curious to see how the jokes would affect the following loops, I'd be curious to see what you'd add there if you had time (maybe the goat gets a long beard?). It wasn't until my second loop that I fully understood the whistling mechanics, I got the description from the dialog so I just skipped right through the pillar talking about it, I completely missed the function of the two kinds of whistles! (My first playthrough was extra challenging since I kept spamming the whistle thinking I was helping to keep it on track when really I was telling it to stop and start all the time oops!). And that 'gentle' setting down of the goat cracked me up every time!
Thanks for playing! We were leaning towards more of a "Make it spookier/Make it more epic" choice in the dialogue where the "epic" changes would be stuff like lifting boulders to clear a path and that sort of thing, more like feats of heroism by the player. But yeah, not enough time, so the jokes are really just a placeholder
I really like that interpretation of the theme, and integrating the wildcards into it!
The platforming is quite clunky, especially with the moving platforms, but it was still enjoyable.
The forest is spooky, congratulations on that. Not being able to hear the goat and having to look back every once in a while to make sure it's following you is pretty unnerving.
I also like the music / background ambience a lot in general.
I think giving us more granular choices that can impact the journey differently would be great. But I understand that development time was limited.
One weird thing I noted is that the third run through of the forest was identical to the second, for me.
Wishing you the best on your gamedev journey!
Thanks for the feedback!
As for the granular choices, you are 100% right that it was a time constraint. We had much grander ambitions of having multiple branching paths but couldn't quite get there. Your forest loop was probably identical on loop 3 because you selected a joke during the campfire scene. It keeps the loop the same instead of changing it. The original intention was to have a second option (make the journey spookier/make the journey more epic, something along those lines).
We learned a lot with this one and were able to get more done than in our previous jams, so we are really looking forward to our future projects!
The forest was spooky and enhanced by fitting musik, even in the first playthroug and got better every time.
The movement feels solid and well paced. The textures with crisp pixels are lovely and remindet me of ps1 games. I spend far to much time investigating the trees and bushes at the beginning.
I also liked the goat throwing, but no matter where he landed, he could always come back. Is good design that i could not softlock myself, even when i did try to.
The goat doesn't like if you jump onto hin, he can launch you into the stratosphere if you are note carefull.
goodby cruel world
welcome pleasures of heaven
but after a few minutes i was back, back on the ground an reality?
!!! Wow, that's not something we encountered in testing haha
Glad you had fun though lol
I think the narrative is funny, but it would have been nice to add some new element in each journey of the goat, I felt that it was very repetitive and in the end there is not much to interact with. good job anyway :D
Oh no, there are variations between runs, I'm sorry you didn't get to see any. During the dialogue scene you have to choose to make the story more interesting, currently telling a joke doesn't change the loop. Glad you liked the narrative though, thanks for the feedback
I can't lie: what started out as a relaxing walking sim with oddly out-of-place trees turned into a one-river rage game for me. I never made it across the logs, unfortunately, and I wish I had. This was a surprising entry for me, since I played it one time through, quit, saw the comments, and went back for the branching paths. Quite well done. Other than the platforming being old-school-pc-game hard on the third river, I had a really good time getting as far as I got.
Love the tune in the first area, though as others have said that area could have either been muuuuch shorter (just the info pillars, a quick 10-20 meter walk to teach the player how to make the goat follow, then the forest entrance) or left out entirely. I got my goat eaten once in the forest and remembered what I'd read the second time through it; that was a clever way of telling me what to do.
Overall a good entry, suffering only from the river platforming and pacing at the beginning of each route. Well done, thanks for giving us a game to play!
Thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree that area 1 is still too long. Believe it or not, it was originally twice the length lol. We made it pretty large so we had room for a couple variations we wanted to add, but didn't have time for. In hindsight, we definitely could have made it even shorter, or cut it out entirely.
As for the logs... Yeah keeping them in as-is is probably my biggest regret of the project. They were one of the last things implemented really late on Saturday night, and we discovered that they don't carry either the player or goat character bodies for some reason. I didn't have enough time to figure out how to fix it. Probably should have just been cut out entirely.
Glad you enjoyed the rest of the game though! Looking forward to using all of everyone's feedback for next jam.
Cool theme interpretation, I think it nails the idea of folklore, platforming feels a bit hard with the high air friction but thats preference, good effects on the camera with the head bob and zooms the sound design is also neat specially the scary forest and an artstyle that I like. If theres a negative point for me is having to do the same path multiple times even with variations. Overall very solid game!
Thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree about the repetition. We wanted to add more variation per loop so it's not so samey (especially the first zone) but didn't have time
Fantastic work! Especially on the sounds queues! The goat bleat when I get to a spot I need to pick it up is VERY well implemented, because I totally would have left it behind haha. The writing is excellent - All Hail Sel! The implementation of the theme is similar but still so unique and different to ours. I've really come to appreciate the game jam format for being able to see such AWESOME ideas (this is my first one).
Editing comment to add: You should Selebrate putting together such a big project. I was just salty I didn't think of that pun earlier :)
Lol 10/10 puns, thanks so much for playing! @MrDryerAtNight did all the sound work for the game and it's one of my favorite parts. The goat bleating as it flies through the air is my favorite lol (especially if you are evil and throw him off the mountain)
Just read your games page and it sounds great, I see the similarity! I'm going through every entry in submission order, so I'll get to it as soon as I can, I can't wait!
Cool idea and great execution!
I liked the visuals, consistent, clear but not distracting, great job with the things like FOV change, bounce and animated text!
Thank you! All the text effects are just BBCode tags and the dialogue is all done using the DialogueManager add-on by nathanhoad. If you ever do a project with similar dialogue I highly recommend it, super easy to implement.
This is a big project for something which was done in such a short time!
Thanks! Yeah we put a lot of time in, especially on the last 2 or 3 days. I'm glad the effort paid off!
I made it to year 3 and got stuck on the log part. The fact that neither you nor the goat move with the logs makes it 10x harder. Great job tho! Very fun and spooky.
Yeah the log thing was a bug we discovered at the end of the jam... It was the last obstacle we implemented and I think it was like 3AM so we were like "close enough."
If we had more time it's on my list of things to fix.
Thanks for playing though! Glad you liked it!
:O
Oops lol
Yeah the village floor has no colliders. I thought I made the boundary wall in a way that would block you from escaping, but it doesn't surprise me that I missed a spot haha
Okay, WOW. This was awesome. I loved the fact that the "actions have consequences" tied in with the story - your embellishments to the tales make next year's journey more perilous. The statues give a great lore aspect too - I really felt the situation getting less innocent each playthrough.
I didn't quite make it to the spooky part that you mentioned. Unfortunately, once you lose mouse focus it won't focus again! Not sure if that's a bug on my machine or with the game itself, but it meant that I couldn't get the screen to re-grab the mouse so couldn't look around. I'll try and make it to year 3 next time!
Amazing concept and great work!!
Oh no, I didn't have that issue with the mouse focus, I think I was able to reset it by clicking on the game and hitting escape... I know there is a project setting to fix that, I'll have to take a look and see about getting it fixed.
Thanks so much for the rating, I'm glad you liked it!!