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Whal-E's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Use Of Theme | #1 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
| Community Spirit | #3 | 4.200 | 4.200 |
| Fun | #5 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| Originality | #5 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Team or Solo?
Team of 2, with ruixin__
This is our first game jam together.
Credit:
We designed and programmed all the visual assets ourselves, using Adobe PS, Inkscape, and Unity. BGM was composed using Bandlab, and mixed with some sounds from Epidemic Sound. For fonts, we used Poppins https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Poppins.
How/where did you put the theme in your game ? (in short)
There are foreign objects in the player's world which the player has to avoid in order to survive. More details in the game description!
Did you (you or your team) do the graphisms yourself?
Yes
Did you (you or your team) do the musics and sounds yourself?
Yes, with some assets from Epidemic Sound.
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Comments
I really like the game, also a nice educational one with a bit of fun. The graphics were super cute and fun to control, had a little hard time with the boats felt like I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. But I like the whale wearing glasses. Keep it up I could see this being a mobile game even a nice educational one too. Nice job on the sfx and story.
A really cute game with a serious background (pollution of the seas) that offers an interesting interpretation of the theme, good job !
Charming game with fitting artstyle. Really fitting for the Jam Theme!
I like the idea, but I do find the gameplay a bit basic for my liking. I also found it a bit hard to notice what is trash and food (while swimming in the rough in the middle). I also found the challenge balance to be a bit weird (If I swim low it becomes easy, if I swim hight it becomes difficult + the fact you do not have any "checkpoints" in case you die)
With a little bit work on the player feedback (What is what and how does it affect me as the player with the use of visual and audible cues) and fleshing out the gameplay this could become a good mobile game!
Good work!
Thank you for playing our game! Your feedback was very constructive; we will definitely be making some adjustments to the difficulty and pacing of the game. We did include instructions on what to avoid in the help page in the menu, but we will think about how we can remind the player of the different objects at the start of each scene. Lastly, I'm glad you liked the art as we tried our best to design everything on our own!
I think this is a cute game --- if I had a little kid, I'd prob give it to them on an iPad to play. It's adorable. Nice work!
Aww thank you for playing our game, and glad you enjoy it! Do let us know if we can improve on anything
Cool game. I love that you found a way to frame the theme around a real world issue so props for that.
There were a couple areas to improve I picked up on.
I wasn't entirely sure why I was collecting the goal objects (rattle/microphone?, Phone, and sunglasses). Maybe to woo the whale we see in the end panel? It would've been cool if the goal object maybe helped to resolve the core conflict of your game in some way, being the plastic in the ocean.
Also in terms of gameplay I found the optimal strat was basically just to stay as low as possible and spam space bar, once I found that out the game felt a lot less challenging and so less fun.
Finally, it seemed that you played as three different whales on each level based on the colour change but your health never resets as a new whale which seemed odd.
But yeah great application of the theme and good work! Save the whales!
Thank you for playing our game and giving so detailed comments! I'm glad you picked up on the theme. Narrative-wise, we would have loved to spend more time developing our story. The idea we had was to have the player experience different stages of the whale's life - so it was meant to be the same whale, and injuries from its past would be carried onto its older forms, but the whale can gain back health by eating food from the second stage and older.
I like your suggestion for the items, our design was directed towards items that would represent each stage of the whale's life. It definitely could have been incorporated in a more cohesive way into the story/theme.
In future iterations of the game we would want to think of ways to age up the whale while keeping the unique aesthetic of each level, as well as developing the narrative. I would also love to learn to programme more complex abilities for the player, or design more level features, so that the gameplay will be more challenging and stimulating. (I'm still quite new to programming so still learning!) For now, we just hope that people can enjoy the vibes in a low-stress context, just as an introduction to the world and the theme.