Amazing and captivating story! It kept me in tension until the end. The art is fantastic and the narrative is top notch. Is it finished already? What's your plans for the polishing week? Congrats on a solid work!
Play Journey
What Lies Underneath's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Likely to Release | #1 | 4.833 | 4.833 |
| Overall | #3 | 4.167 | 4.167 |
| Aesthetic (Art & Audio) | #4 | 4.167 | 4.167 |
| Bug Free | #6 | 4.167 | 4.167 |
| Interesting Gameplay / Fun | #10 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
The story is essentially finished, but I definitely have some polishing that I’d like to do. During the end sequence, I’d like to add some visuals that show the entity is escaping/leaking through the gate — and I’m working with someone on creating some music to the game to add to the ambiance.
There’s also some small things, like tightening up some of the text and using some hacks so that the avatar changes direction based on where you’re walking and so on.
>What was the most frustrating moment or aspect?
There's alot of dialogue boxes at the start, and I was often frustrated with the number encountered from just following the path while trying to get to the house. It wasn't as bad inside the house as I felt like I had more of a choice in how and when pop-ups were encountered.
>What was your favorite moment or aspect?
I think I said this last time, but I still think it's cool how there's "fog of war" hiding areas. I really like the simple art style.
>Was there anything you wanted to do, but couldn't?
I wanted to move around freely while the messages queued in the bottom window where I could read at my leisure, but as-is the game fits the genre without needing those kinds of changes.
>If you could change, add, or remove any 1 thing, what would it be?
More of an indicator that the game is still running during still scenes. Ellipses, or some other standard indicator. I almost quit twice when I mashed keys and nothing seemed to be happening. The behavior makes more sense now that I've read the comment before mine, but it's still frustrating.Submitted
Water's GoneThank you so much for your feedback — and I’ll try to fix what I can. I’m definitely running up against some limitations in working with Bitsy. I can understand how that would be frustrating… let me ponder that some more.
The number of text boxes at the beginning, though — that’s something that I can definitely work on tightening up.
Short and sweet, a little spooky but not overwhelming, nice story. I like the aesthetic. Seems complete(? ) which is awesome. Some music or sounds would bring the immersion up a lot. The only complaintI had is with the cutscenes - I mostly used spacebar to instant scroll the text, so it was kind of odd needing to press the right arrow to get a text box to show up in a cutscene. Otherwise the game worked great and I had no issues!
Thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed it, and I’m working on getting some music going. Thank you for telling me about the issue with the cutscenes. That’s particularity of designing with Bitsy. It doesn’t just let me put in dialog for the cut scenes, so I have to “hide” the avatar and have it interact with something. I may be stuck with it, but will look into some possible hacks to get around it.
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