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Dr. Freakshow's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #1 | 4.750 | 4.750 |
| Theme | #4 | 4.107 | 4.107 |
| Fun | #5 | 3.929 | 3.929 |
| Overall | #6 | 3.760 | 3.760 |
| Controls | #13 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Accessibilty | #14 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Originality | #20 | 3.679 | 3.679 |
| Audio | #23 | 3.357 | 3.357 |
Ranked from 28 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
4.3
Wildcards Used
Its broken, Pursuer
Game Description
Short arcade game where you avoid ghosts
How does your game tie into the theme?
Ghosts are haunting the laboratory and it's up to you to stop them
Source(s)
N/A
Discord Username(s)
N/A
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
9
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Comments
I guess I wasn't the only one with a ghosts = Pac-man association. Not much a fan of not being able to turn around - its pretty frustrating to miss a turn by a tenth of a second and being locked into ten seconds of walking in the wrong direction - but I suppose its kind of necessary. Other than that its an impressive showing!
Challenging but fun; I beat all the levels and got the gold medals. This is really good in all aspects! I only wish the master volume went up to 200%, I had to turn up my computer volume just to hear the music.
As for difficulty, I thought it was fine, but an "easy mode" that makes the timer decrease way slower would help make the game more accessible.
Thanks for playing! It's funny- one of my biggest pet peeves in games is when the audio is so incredibly loud that the first thing I do when I boot it up is go into the settings and turn the master volume down by like 80%. I think because of that I end up mixing the games I make to be quieter than maybe I should...
I'm glad to hear that you went back and got gold medals on all the levels, but yeah, I've seen more than one person comment that they got stuck on one or two of them. I think having a setting that let you loosen the time restriction on levels would have been an easy solution that would have let people see more of the content without struggling as much.
That being said- during these game jams I always wonder whether people would actually use any provided difficulty settings over just moving on to the next game. But if it's pretty low effort to implement I don't really think that matters much.
Quite a fun game, love the pixel art style and audio all adding together to give that real retro feeling. Not too difficult only really struggled on the last two stages and half of that was me forgetting I couldn't turn around which never felt like too much of an issue until stage 5. Liked the addition of the scoring really made each level replayable and had a fun time trying to get gold on all the stages but couldn't manage it on the final stage.
I can tell a lot of work and dedication went into this game and it really shows. Great work!
Thanks for playing! I'm glad to hear you went back and got the gold medals on all the stages! To be honest I had a lot of trouble balancing the last level. I wanted there to be some big enemy that sort of broke the rules and moved outside of the grid- but it was always either impossible to avoid or a complete non-factor. I think as it is right now, it's still kind of fucked and requires too much luck to get the gold lol.
Incredible intro and presentation. not my artstyle, but very well executed.
I also like the UI and Menu colors and style.
also very funny that one of our team suggested we should make some sort of pacman with the haunted theme, and you did something in that direction.
I could not get past the second level because of the time restraint, but cool mechanic with the levers.
I think the game is well balanced so far but i might be just too slow or did not use the best routes to pick up all the stuff. cool that you can squish ghosts with the levers/platforms.
Well polished, well made!
Also it seems you did it by yourself, which is even more stunning. great accomplishment!
Thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, everything was done by me- it was a long week lol. I saw "Haunted" and the "Pursuer" wildcard and some kind of version of pacman seemed to make a lot of sense.
I wish I had a bit more time to balance the levels a little better. I think since I was trying to stuff in all the mechanics I made into only a few levels, I ended up with a really weird difficulty curve. Thinking about it now, I wish I had put in a setting that let you loosen the time restraint so that people could see more of the levels if they wanted to.
This really reminds me of pac man. The controls felt a bit janky even though I knew I wasn't able to turn back, it felt like my inputs weren't registering when I wanted to turn sometimes. The graphics look really polished and sfx are great, but I feel it lacks some more musical/ambience elements. A lot of thought went into the level design, and overall, this was a good entry!
Thanks for playing! Yeah, my original idea was "Pac man but you have a gun" and I went from there lol.
I definitely wasn't able to get the controls 100% to where I wanted them. There's a bit of input buffering so that if you try to turn just before an intersection you still turn- but I realize now that I didn't buffer inputs in the other direction. So, if someone is consistently a frame or two late on the turn input- they won't turn- which feels bad.
Music is definitely something I struggle with too. I think what I have right now works well enough for the intro/title screen- but for the actual gameplay leaves a lot to be desired.
I loved the old-school audio and the cutscenes especially. I wish I could turn around, but I appreciated that design choice on later levels. This game was by far the most polished one I've seen for the jam, I can't believe you guys got that level of detail in such a short amount of time. Fantastic job!
Thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, I had a lot of fun writing/drawing the cutscenes lol.
It was a long week- but I'm always trying to push how much I can get done in these jams.
super polished, the audio design in particular i loved. The art is also super nice. The fact that you cannot turn around makes the game deceptibly challenging, really enjoyed my time even if i couldn't finish most levels lol
Thanks for playing! Some of the levels feel a lot more unfair than others- I wish I had more time to balance them but that's how it goes. I also really should have just added a way to loosen the timer restrictions on certain levels if people wanted to- just so that players who were struggling could still see all the levels and the ending...
Regardless, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Very fun and well polished game!! The graphics are really nice and fit with the audio very well. Impressed that it was made by one person.
Thanks for playing! Glad you liked it! One of the perks of working as a software dev professionally is that I can write a whole lot of code in a very short time if it's okay that it's shitty lol
One of my favorites in the jam so far! Really nice pixel art and fun mechanics. Plus the word Ectoplasmigator is amazing.
Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it. I just kept adding letters and the word kept getting longer and longer lol
Oh classic arcade game style, done very well! The “Pump the Breaks” instead of turning around is an mechanic that is challenging to deal with, but makes it stand out.
Fantastic entry! Love the art and sfx! Would have liked gamepad support, I thought it had it but it was just godot's builtin nav and I couldn't fire the laser. My only "complaints" are the text expanding from the center, it always gives me a headache reading it, and I want fast text, not just to "skip the scene", which I enjoyed. Would love to see more levels in the future.
Thanks for playing! I really need to start remembering to go in and clean up all the input mappings before finishing up my submission- especially now when Godot makes stuff like gamepad support so easy now. I'm surprised that all the ui navigation worked but the laser didn't- seeing as that was mapped to "ui_accept". Maybe some control still had focus and was eating the input or something.
Good call on the text too- didn't really think about that. Was just trying to get those cutscenes done as quick as possible Sunday morning lol. Not sure if there's a way to both keep the text centered and have it scroll char by char without the whole set of text moving. Maybe there's a way with RichTextLabels?
But again, thank you for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
The few times I've revealed text, I had it left justified so didn't know either but after poking around, I found that Visible Characters Behavior = `Characters After Shaping` does the trick! And even though it kind seems like I'm really focused on this text, the real takeway is that I wanted to watch the cutscenes so definitely time well spent!
Oh man there's just a property for it lol - yeah that's exactly the behavior I was talking about. Thanks for taking the time to look that up!
To your point though stuff like this is definitely important. If the first thing someone sees when the boot up the game is text that they find physically difficult to read, well that doesn't leave a particularly good impression lol.
Thank you! I was looking for this, too.
Excellent take on Pac Man. I was a little confused that I couldn't turn around after hitting the end of a hallway. Great art style, nice retro aesthetic through the chunky pixels and restricted palette. Great work!
Thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, I guess looking at it now there really isn't anywhere in the game that actually calls out how you can only move forward- I'll put something in the game description lol.