Love Bytes VR Jam

Hosted by Fist Full of Shrimp, Muddy Wolf

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A jam submission

Loves PrisonView game page

For Love Bytes VR Jam 2023.

Submitted by Gourd Stone — 25 minutes, 24 seconds before the deadline

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Loves Prison's itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
Enjoyment - How fun is the game overall?	#6	2.800	2.800
Aesthetics - Does the game look great?	#8	3.200	3.200
Use of Theme - Was the theme incorporated well?	#9	2.200	2.200
Sound Design - Was that bump in the night the perfect SFX?	#10	2.200	2.200
Overall	#10	2.600	2.600

Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Fist Full of ShrimpHost286 days ago(+1)

I'm a sucker for a good starting room and you've started yours off so strong! There was some interesting mechanics added to a traditional maze, which is always nice!

What I loved :

Great aesthetics at the start and even though the maze is simplistic, the rooms all look really clean. The hearts, the enemy hearts... I mean all of it just looks incredibly well put together!
I love the instructions plastered all over the wall at the start.
Cool mechanic for climbing allowing for a more 3D maze.
Really neat inventory mechanics. It felt like I was a rock climber using candy hearts as stakes to put into the wall!

Some Suggestions:

I'm glad you had teleporting, because this game gave me some serious VR sickness. The climbing is fun, but that stuff gets to me after a bit. Having it as one of the main mechanics was a bit rough for me.
The evil hearts seemed to go through the wall, which felt bad gameplay wise. I get that it might need to pop out of the wall and be frustrating as I'm trying to put hearts into the wall, but it just feels like I'm being robbed.
The hearts didn't attach to the wall easily, which could get frustrating. I also think that the platform you're climbing to should be climbable like the hearts are.

It's a cool take on a VR maze! I love that you were able to introduce a vertical element into it (even though I got minor vr sickness lol). I also hope to make games look as clean as yours does. It's a great entry! Thanks for your hard work and getting a great submission in! Cheers!

After-ThoughtSubmitted288 days ago(+1)

Great environment. I had read some of the comments prior to playing so I kind of knew the concept - which is very cool! I still struggled getting the hearts to stick into the wall. I liked the inventory rig structure. It worked really well for me. Really great job - especially for a first time!

Submitted

Gourd StoneDeveloper288 days ago

Thank you all for the great feed back and comments! This is our first time creating something for a game jam and it has taught us SO much!

I see that I didn't make the instructions easy to understand and also a bit wordy. Draw back when you seem to be knowing what you're doing but need to be clearer for others. We did have some trouble trying to get the inventory rig to feel more natural and less cumbersome through out the week. I found that if I tried to toss one of the candy resource hearts I had a habit of it actually catching on an empty slot on my arm in mid air. The climbing took a while to sort out too. My wife was racking her brains trying to get the colliders and the coding to work nice together. We found holding the grip and the trigger button down seemed to allow the heart to register easier and then letting go when it was against a wall finally would replace the model with the hand hold climbing model. Before we did have it working that all you had to do was place the heart on the wall and it would hold,,, but it would read the heart anywhere you were close to the wall. In the inventory slot, when you picked one up out of the resource crates, ( in the biggening the physics were so light with gravity that if you bumped anything trying to pick one up they would all fly across the room and get stuck.)

We also had our son work with us and he came up with the 'conversational heart' sayings and the first time he did play through I thought he was going to have a heart attack due to the spawn rate and troubles he was having trying to climb the walls too. (he's a 7th grader and self professed gamer, so we tried to gauge a bunch of stuff on his 'expert opinion.. :) )

I again we would like to thank you all for the great feed back and hope you enjoyed the game and give it another whirl.

IanLindseySubmitted289 days ago(+1)

Interesting idea using the hearts as anchors to climb on the wall - that's a really nice concept.

The implementation did let it down a bit though... it was hard and fiddly to place the hearts and even though I managed to put them together to form a climbable wall, it wasn't big enough to get to the next level (without teleporting that is...). Also, once the heart was placed, I couldn't see a way of taking it back off the wall to replace it in a different location... so I was stuck with what I had. It also seemed that I could only place hearts within a certain section of the wall, which didn't seem big enough for what I wanted to do.

I think with less fiddly controls, where the game helps you out more, then this game would be even better. Still, good solid entry and I liked the look of it too...

Submitted

Gourd StoneDeveloper288 days ago(+1)

Thanks! We were having a headache trying to get the wall climbing to work the way we intended originally. I wasn't thrilled with the way our item slot rig ended up but had to make a few concessions towards the end of the night Friday. First time jam, LEARNED A LOT!

We had decided to have the hearts become permanent and placed other resource chests around the maze. And also used that when taking to much "emotional damage" from the corrupted hearts returned you to the starting cell. That way climbing hand holds were already in place.

We are taking the comments and will be tightening up the game play for this. It was a really fun exercise and can't wait to try another.

Beard or DieSubmitted290 days ago(+1)

Glad I could teleport, because I could not for the life of me get the heart climbing to work. But since I could teleport, it kind of defeated the purpose of the support hearts except to heal, and it was hard to find two matching hearts, so I didn't feel like doing that very much. I had to hold grip AND trigger to hold the support hearts, which maybe is why I couldn't get them to turn into climbables? idk. First room is cool, with baked lighting and a literal wall of text. lol

Submitted

Tunnel of Love VR

Gourd StoneDeveloper288 days ago

I was hoping that the 'instructions' were looking like they were scrawled on the wall with the candy hearts. And we secretly left the teleport feature in for play testing. We've seen now that the system to place the hearts up on the wall was still a little clunky. Before we were able to have them stick to the wall without any other input except to just place them, but it was so sensitive that if you had one in the inventory sockets and rubbed up against a wall they would automatic stick to the wall.

ToreadorGamesSubmitted290 days ago(+1)

Once I determined the 'piton/platform' function of the Support Hearts, I got into it. A climbing mechanic where you set your next anchors, with more anchors in an inventory system? Neato! I could have used higher walls to climb with this mechanic once I got into it. The only downside to this climbing-centric game was the lack of a jump and/or ability to 'mount' the ledge, so you'd have to overclimb the wall to ascend. With a physics-climbing rig, I'd like to be able to push myself upwards after grabbing any edge. The first time a Negative Heart came after me, I pulled out a Support Heart from my inventory and smashed it! Cool! Simple melee combat, too?

A suggestion: If this was Love's Prison, each new level could have been a little brighter, a little happier, to maintain the metaphor, right? Good stuff!

Submitted

Gourd StoneDeveloper288 days ago(+1)

OH WOW! I love the idea of the higher layers would get brighter and nicer! I think I'm going to add that in on our next build of the game!
The climbing was one of our rough spots to try to get working the way we intended. In other replys I've talked about our first version of the mechanic and how touchy it was. We almost didn't think we were going to be able to pull if off. I see that I may have needed to come up with a more clear version of the instructions on how to use the hearts to create permanent hand holds. And boy I wish we were able to get the grabbing of the ledges to work too. My wife is the coder of our family and I had almost started sounding like a broken parrot asking about that.
Don't know how many times I tried grabbing at the ledges when falling or try to pull my self up.

olkoGPSubmitted290 days ago(+1)

The idea of having to stab hearts to then climb them is pretty cool. I wonder how it would work in a more realistic aesthetic. Unfortunately, I couldn't find my other half, I fell into a small box once where there were no hearts and I had to reset the game, otherwise broken hearts would kill me ;) Overall I had fun playing this one. Very nice design in the initial room, maybe a bit too much text, but overall a solid entry ;)

Submitted

Stages of Love and Breakout

Gourd StoneDeveloper288 days ago

Looking at other comments I feel I could have made the instructions easier to read. We had a large heart in the first room that was ment to be placed in the chest slot or the inventory rig and it was used as the health meter as the player would take 'emotional damage' from the corrupted hearts on the higher floors. Once the soul mate was found it was supposed to be merged with the chest heart and would take you to our credits room that listed our assets and such.
And I see that we had also had a few empty rooms not connected to the main rooms of the maze after the fact as I've fell into two of them too. That was a unnoticed bug on my end of mapping our the design of the maze.

Thanks for the feed back!

endenisSubmitted290 days ago(+1)

The first prison room looks promising but I haven't figured out how to climb the wall or how to combine hearts 🤔

Any tips? 😅

Submitted

Gourd StoneDeveloper288 days ago

No problem! Seeing the comments and suggestions from our game, we seem to have not made it clear enough how to use the hearts.
There is a large heart that can be placed in the chest slot. this is kinda like the health meter. Then there are crates found along the path of the maze that can be used a resources. Merge two of the same saying hearts together by holding one in each hand and bring them together to heal your chest heart after being hit by a corrupted heart. You can carry up to four extra hearts around with you in the other inventory slots on your body. Grabbing a heart and holding the trigger button you can push a heart against the wall. Let go and it becomes a solid climbing hand hold. The resource hearts can also be used to fend off corrupted hearts as they come at you. I hope this helps out!

AmeriponSubmitted291 days ago(+1)

It took a while for me to figure out you had to actually RAM the heart into the wall to make it stick. Once I figured that out though it was quite fun making my own paths to climb! The Inventory was a bit all over the place with slots on my arms and waist and hips so it made juggling all the hearts kind of weird, maybe a single inventory slot that you can fit multiple hearts into would work better. Very cool use of the physics though! I reached true love but I couldn't do anything with it, I tried hitting it with hearts or grabbing it and nothing happened. Really fun entry!

Submitted

Gourd StoneDeveloper288 days ago

We tried so hard to make a single inventory slot to work the way we wanted. Sometimes the rig would shoot across the room and would be about 4 feet away as we walked around. In the early builds just bumping into a wall caused the hearts to 'fix' to the walls and made them useless.
Looking at other comments, I feel I failed to describe how to pick up and place the first big heart found in the starting cell and place it in the chest inventory. That heart acted as the health meter and once the soul mate was found was supposed to be touched against it to take you to the credits/ win room. It's looking like that bit may be is not working as intended.
I can't wait to get back in and take all this great feed back to improve the game!
Thanks!