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A jam submission

Nell's WindowView game page

An escape room-style game where the player must break out a siren from captivity.
Submitted by Chimera Digital, Corinne Kaulia Kimball, KatRuss, I_Cat_I, Diavent, demonbatcat, AzulisBlue — 5 hours, 54 minutes before the deadline
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Nell's Window's itch.io page

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

  • Thanks for joining our jam! I thought it was a fun puzzle game. The visuals were amazing, I loved the art style, the environment, the storytelling in both the environment itself and the dialogue. The music and sound choices were also great, and the UI was mostly non-intrusive and easy to look at, although the area for clicking on the computer to type in the passcode was not where I expected it to be, and the UI for that did not match the rest of the game, both visually and the way it popped up. There were only two main parts that I had a problem with, which were that there was no way to change mouse sensitivity. It was extremely sensitive, to the point it almost gave me motion sickness initially. And this is probably more of a reflection on myself, but I found the hook puzzles a bit confusing and I was not exactly sure what I was supposed to be looking for. I solved it by just randomly clicking around between the boxes and the hooks, but I'm not sure what the actual way to solve it was. Overall this was a fun little prototype!

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Comments

Submitted(+2)

I'm really diggin the vibes of this game. Whoever did the set dressing, really good job! The note on the fridge got a laugh out of me, it makes the world feel lived in. I also really liked the character interactions. The puzzles were a bit confusing but really only because I immediately went into puzzle solve mode and missed the sticky note on the computer monitor lol. You have to input that code first, which is a bit weird that you can't just input any code from the get go.  I would appreciate some feedback from the game when a puzzle is completed or an object is picked up as I had trouble knowing if my input actually went through or not and found myself opening and closing the inventory screen alot. Overall I think this game came out really great!

Developer

Thanks so much for the feedback!! The puzzles could 100% be improved upon (I say this as one of the main puzzle designers), I did feel like i let the ball down, and the interactions in between each puzzle weren't as clear, but I'm just glad it was able to be solved! This game jam thought me alot, mainly to not plan complex puzzles that need to be cut afterwwards lmao!! But most of all I'm glad you were able to enjoy our game!

Submitted(+2)

This is really good! To anyone else reading this, I'm going to spoil the game a bit so stop here.

I'm going to start with a few things that I think could be improved. First the level design (not asset design, that was incredible) could be improved a bit. There were a few times where the game was a bit too form over function and I would get stuck on something because I was distracted by something else in the background. Part of that is just me being dumb, but some of it is definitely a side effect of the design. For example, I spent way too long looking for the code to the computer (I thought it had something to do with the hooks, then the cabinets) before realizing that it was on a sticky note on the monitor, and the pixel shader was just making it difficult to read. The second main thing was that I couldn't really tell when I had successfully interacted with something or not. The player should get a different reaction from the game when successfully completing a task (like pushing a button or taking fish from the cabinet) versus mashing the E key near an intractable item that can't be used yet. It led to a few situations where I solved a puzzle, but thought I hadn't because I got the same amount of feedback as I did when I failed to do something.

I really hope that's useful for future projects.

The good parts of the game are just about everything else. This has insane visual quality and individuality just in general, let alone for a game made in a week. The story was surprisingly captivating given how short is was, and I've been left genuinely wondering what we were doing there, what the experiments were about, and what happened to the scientist. I really like the asset design, I'm jealous of the pixel shader (I've been trying to make something similar in Godot for a bit and just haven't cracked it yet), the hand drawn textures were incredible, and every angle of the game just screamed care and quality.

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Hiya. I'm one of the devs for Nell's Window. Glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the feedback! :D 

I made the pixel shader. Though for annoying URP-to-Web build reasons it wasn't on half the time during testing, hense why some things are difficult to read. As it was tested on builds without the shader.

Regardless, I'm happy to show you the shader graph I made, if it helps you out. (un)Fortunately Unity has a built in dither node which I'm not sure Godot has (I assume it's just a form of Ordered Dithering)? Which probably makes this look a little "step 2. Draw the rest of the owl":

There was also a feature to have a gradient colour mapping if we wanted to go full Return of the Obra Dinn on the art style. Though we never used it.

(I've been meaning to remake it in Godot as well lol)

Hope it helps!

Developer(+1)

Even though Kat already replied, I just wanted to jump in here and genuinely thank you for the well thought out feedback! It means a lot! I laughed at the "mashing the E key" because I was doing the same thing before we even had the interaction label show up. lol An additional reaction through sound and visual is a great idea!

Submitted(+1)

Nice music and seems pretty well-polished.

I like the pixelated effect everything has. Is that a shader?

Developer(+1)

Thank you! Yes, one of our Programmers did an awesome job on the dithering shader. Hope you liked the game!