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The Gourd, The Bad, and The Ugly's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme / Rules | #5 | 4.143 | 4.143 |
| Graphisms | #12 | 3.714 | 3.714 |
| Musics / Sounds | #13 | 3.214 | 3.214 |
| Gameplay | #17 | 2.786 | 2.786 |
| Overall | #17 | 3.071 | 3.071 |
Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
To me in it's current state it would be most fun to treat it as just a little Halloween themed art doodling kind of game. To that end I'd love to not have a timer rushing me along. Maybe just as a "creative mode" option. Cause I realize you were going for the jam theme. Then it'd just be a cool creative game. Having to hurry to carve something limited my creativity a good bit (and I am an artist used to drawing with a mouse!). Further to be able to take a screenshot more easily I had to leave a few seconds at the end. The spinning effect at the end is neat but makes it harder to take a picture of the art you made.
I'll be honest, I circled the entire pumpkin at the end and it froze for a few seconds before becoming a lemon LOL. I just wanted to see what would happen. But it handled that well enough!
I saw someone else say their browser didn't have music--mine however plays the music just fine in Chrome on Windows.
Thanks for the fun, and best of luck to your future games!
Thanks for playing and your feedback!
What kicked my butt was getting the carving mechanic to work, and as you probably saw it still had a good number of issues. I had a base idea of how I was going to do the task when I started, but the more I implemented the more I realized there were so many edge cased that the method I had in mind did not cover and as a result I basically spent the first 4 days of the jam working through reading a bunch of research paper and implementing various algorithms for handling the cutting and re-tessellation. I eventually hit a wall and realized I need to flush out the rest of the game or im just going to have a pumpkin sitting on a white box with a half broken carving mechanic. On my last day I was weighing the decision of working out my scoring system (which also was untested and needed to be implemented from scratch) or leave it more of a doodling game and flush out the polish in the environment. In my case I opted to flush out the environment more which I personally believe made a huge difference on the end feel of the game, especially considering the main mechanic was technically a bit broken. Lesson learned here is be careful when trying out new things that dont have a lot of existing examples and tutorials in the wild, especially in the context of a game jam. I learned a lot but it came at the expense of the gameplay itself.
In terms of having a creative mode, I did have an endless mode in the options panel where there were no timers and you could just carve to your own content. I suppose making that more visible (aka probably on the title screen) probably would have been the better way to go. Good point on the end screen, I could definitely have a toggle so you can turn off the auto-spin and allow the player to orient it for pictures.
Best luck on your future games as well!
I'm not really sure what the goal is, but the mechanic is quite interesting. Maybe playing with your carved pumpkin in later levels could be something fun!
Thanks for playing!
One of my stretch goals if I had time was to make a silly FPS where you had to fight off waves of the pumpkins you carved. Sadly I did not make it that far.
I've never made anything like this nor would I know how to.
As you noted on your game page, it's a little rough around some edges, but the concept and the execution for carving that you were able to achieve is very cool. Clearly you have some model deformation...not just sprite decals (or something).
The concept is very nice. I like the details you've included like endless mode and showcasing all the pumpkins on the table when complete. It would have been nice to have more variation in the shape & size of the base pumpkin each time you hit 'next'
I also liked how you could zoom-in...it was the first thing I wanted to do...and you could! Maybe starting more zoomed in would make sense.
As an aside, I had to play it in browser that had no music. I saw your game page notes about the issues with the browser version, so it's understandable. I see lots of positive comments about music below. I did try to download the Windows version, however, I got the 'thanks for downloading' window, but no download. My browser and AV have not been blocking downloads for other games.
Nice submission.
Thank you for playing and your feedback! Im excited to try to use the model deformation technics in future games after I finish working out the edge case quirks that still plague my algorithm.
You are 100% right on having different variations in the pumpkin size&shape on the carving table. They look nice in different sizes on the display and it was just a detail I missed when hooking up the next button.
I struggled a bit to figure out what the best starting zoom was. I wanted to make sure to give a feel for the scene, but I think that could have been accomplished by making it start zoomed out and then zoom in to the real starting point.
That is odd that you didn't have music on the browser. In the few systems I was able to test it on the music worked fine... I wonder how many other people had the same issue? Lesson learned on not web testing earlier in my development with a new engine. Its also weird that your download wouldn't start. In my dashboard I see that lots of people have downloaded it and this is the first issue I have been made aware of on that front. If anyone sees this comment and has the same issue I would appreciate some feedback so I could prevent that issue in the future. Only thing that comes to mind is some AVs may not like it because it was made using the Godot4 beta which is fairly new, but that is just my current theory.
Thank you again for playing!
I think there's a lot of potential to the carving mechanic.
You mentioned that you ran out of time for a scoring system, which is understandable under a time crunch, but I would have loved to see a little more of a game around the carving.
100% agreed. I got a bit overzealous with trying to get the mesh carving mechanic to work that the game itself suffered. Thank you for the feedback and for playing!
Liked the music for it and the way that you create the carvings, an improvement could be to add SFX once you've carved to just add to the player experience
Thank you for playing and the feedback. You are right the SFX after the cut would definitely help the game's juice.
A bit underwhelming for a game jam which lasted almost a week but interesting nonetheless.
Entirely fair. I definitely shot myself in the foot by trying to dynamically retopologize the 3d mesh with cuts. Godot really didnt have much in the way of tools to handle this so I basically had to homebrew a solution. After spending approximately 90% of my available time trying to solve that problem I only ended up with a partial solution and had to quickly prop up the rest of the game around it. End result was a fairly bland game, but I feel good coming out of it having learned a lot and I think I am near a point where I could reuse that type of system in future games with fewer headaches. Thank you for playing and thank you for the feedback!
Wow. Godot 4 for a game jam. That is daring.
Your music composition was pretty good, as were your models. Time was cleraly spent on these. The graphics were very decent, especially considering that you used Godot 3D. (I haven't tried out the Godot 4 beta much. Last time I tried, I got so frustrated that the features were different and had little documentation that I gave up and switched to Godot 3.5. Perhaps I shall try again sometime). Anyway, back to your game. I liked the carving concept. It was actually really well executed. It would be nice to have a specific "comparison face" that you had to imitate, as well as have different sized pumpkins, but it is still good.
Again, I applaud you for trying out Godot 4 beta! Great game!
Thank you for playing and the feedback!
I may have been a bit overambitious going with Godot4, but I figured a game jam was a good place to force me to learn. My biggest beef was fighting with lack of documentation, looking up stuff was also very difficult because anytime I searched for a problem I would find solutions for Godot 3 and then would have to resort to either looking at the source code or Github issue list. All in all though I feel like to Godot team is going in the right direction. I actually appreciate a lot of the changes they made once I found them, but I wouldn't quite recommend jumping into Godot 4 just yet due to lack of documentation.
This was my first music composition so I am glad it came out well.
My OG plans were to have random faces generated (different pairs of eyes, nose, and mouth) that you had to match with your cutting and then get scored on by how close you were to the requested face, but as game jams go, once I hit the end crunch I had to scrap some of those features :'(
Again thanks for playing!
Loved you music good job, it gave a great ambiance and although sounds often add in your case just music was fine.
Your props and setting looked and felt great, shame about the skybox.
Cutting was fun and engaging although no perfect brave and experimental and effective.
good job.
Thank you for playing! This was my first time making music so I am glad it was liked.
Godot4 definitely gave me some surprises when I exported to web. Lesson learned to test web builds sooner rather than later.
I liked the 3D carving a lot, it was relaxing. Maybe you can add different pumpkin sizes and shapes.
Thanks for playing! That was in my original plans, but you know the game jam crunch goes >.<
Good concept!
Thank you for playing!
Chill and relaxing, Play as detail oriented as you'd like. Perhaps more interactions for tools or like precise cuts could be added to improve but overall great concept and entry
Thank you for playing! I like the idea of having different tools to use