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Innerworld's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Cleverness | #93 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Theme | #104 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Artistic Style | #109 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Playability | #487 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 1 rating. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- Pretty good! It's not immediately obvious what you have to do, as is common in puzzle games. I love Zelda-esque games so I may be a bit biased.
Did you include your Game Design Document in your downloadable files?
Yes
Tell us about your game!
Innerworld is a 2D, Zeldalike Adventure-RPG. It utilizes a unique parallel-world mechanic where your actions in the “Innerworld” give you more and more agency over your actions (keybindings) in the “Outerworld”. This is implemented through puzzle mechanics, and in the future, 2D top-down combat. The story is told through the environment, with no dialogue (written or spoken).
The Innerworld keys are set, while the Outerworld controls are dynamic based on the Innerworld player’s actions.
Mouse/Keyboard
Outerworld
World Switch - Spacebar
Move - ???
Interact - ???
Attack - ???
Innerworld
World Switch - Spacebar
Move - WASD
Interact - E
Attack - LeftClick (when the time comes)
Did you remember to include your Game Design Document?
Yes
Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes
Extra Notes
KNOWN BUG: Double-clicking the "New Game" button will break the game in the submission - this has been fixed in the web build
This game is essentially a demo to what we want the full game to look like. In the future, we plan to implement combat systems, companion mechanics and a much larger story.
We had a blast making this game. Thank you so much for this opportunity, and good luck to everyone else who participated!
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Comments
Absolutely beautiful game. This one is a standout to me because it achieves something, at least in the Outerworld, that few others did: the scene decorations feel very intentional and make the space feel like a real environment. Everyone can add generic trees, rocks, etc when creating a forest scene - or cars, fire hydrants and buildings when creating a city scene - but there is a lot of life poured into the details in the Outerworld that really caught my interest. Someone said what set Hayao Miyazaki movies apart from others is the insane amount of time spent on “arbitrary details” (animating the rain drops falling on a rock before the rock is fully wet). I feel like the Outerworld really captured this.
Example: The tree in the Outerworld says “Never” carved into it? Amazing and compelling.
Since I am supposed to give criticism, the best I can come up with is: The Innerworld is not as detailed as the Outerworld, but I imagine this is because you made this in two weeks. If each level looked as thought out as the Outerworld this game would go viral IMO.
Other critiques, and this is digging deep and can be taken with a grain of salt: I do not know anything about music theory or music beyond how it makes me feel, so bear with me: The music was beautiful and well crafted. However, it was a little too consistent in rhythm (pretty quick paced) and a little too..driving?…powerful?…always peaking?…As you can see I do not know how to music-speak but I think if you were to vary the level of intensity of the music by adding more pauses, slowing it down a little bit, and adding variety in the volume it would really elevate it. Though, it is already objectively very, very good.
To be even more vague in an attempt to be more clear: the vibe my soul wanted while playing this game was more like drops of water echoing in a cave and the music came on strong and stayed strong.
Feel free to totally ignore me, as others have said the music stands out to them as being a perfect match, and it is objectively and subjectively very well done.
This is really excellent and I’m very curious to know what influenced the creation of the Outerworld and why you created the assets you did. It really caught me and pulled me in!
Thank you so much for playing, and for your thoughtful and constructive feedback! We’re super proud of the amazing job our environment artist Perry did as well.
You’re right about the Outerworld detail vs. the Innerworld - we have a ton more planned to fill in the Innerworld; for example, the central tree was originally supposed to glow, and activating the orbs would “spread” more light to the tree through the roots (and thereby activating her brain functions on a more obvious visual scale). I wasn’t able to implement this in the timeframe, but alas, we press on!
And you’re also spot on about the music - currently it loops the main theme for the main section part (which is a banger by Sean, our composer). We definitely want to add some extra tracks to follow the emotional progression of the character and add to the ambience for this intro section (something slower, more ethereal that shifts when she wakes up, etc. hitting those objectives).
My idea for the story involves very little (if any) dialogue - I absolutely love media that offers compelling stories without talking or substantial reading (Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, Mr. Robot S4 E5 to name a few). And so, a lot of the weight of that falls on details in the art and sound design, and I’m so happy to be working with some awesome people to pull it together!
With that, we’re extremely excited to keep pursuing this project. Thank you again for playing!
This was awesome! I really enjoyed the world switching mechanic, I've always liked this concept in video games but it can be a lot of work to make 2 different worlds xD I made a few mistakes, and it took me a while to figure out that you could rotate the control but it was a really cool idea! Sorta like, if you unlock powers in the "dream" world then you can use them in the other world too. Music was fantastic. Incredible job for 2 weeks!
Thanks so much for your feedback! We're glad you liked it! There's a lot more we want to do with the interactions between the Inner/Outer worlds. A lot of people had trouble figuring out the rotator - we're definitely gonna add some visual stuff to make it easier to identify.
Very polished experience for the 2 weeks worth of work!
Beautiful music, very intriguing game mechanics, would love to see more of this!
We’re so glad you liked it! We’re super excited to keep expanding on the concept and move forward with it.
Hey, thanks so much for checking out the game! I actually checked out your VOD playing our game and we're glad that you were able to figure out the mechanics without them being too frustrating. We're definitely planning on making some changes to make things more clear.
I also wanted to answer your question at the end about our development team's experience prior to the game jam.
1. Do any of us sleep? Our coder and writer, Deccadome, basically did not. I think he worked more than a normal full-time job's worth of hours on this game. He definitely had the hardest job of all of us. The other 3, as in me, the environment artist, and the music composer all definitely got a lot more sleep.
2. Our experience before the game jam? Deccadome hadn't really worked on game design before, but was pretty well equipped to figure out Unity and troubleshooting his code. It was pretty much all from scratch, though, as far as he's explained to me. I've been doing art for pretty much my whole life, but had never tried pixel art or animation so the past two weeks was definitely a crash course on learning how it all worked. Perry, our environmental artist, had experience doing pixel art, which you can definitely tell from the quality of his work, but only had a week since we invited him onto the team relatively late. Our composer, Sean, is actually a musician and vocalist, so he was very familiar with writing music, which I think you can also tell by just listening to what he wrote for our game.
Again, thank you for checking out our game. Your playthrough was super helpful for us!
Awesome, I wish you guys the best of luck with the project! I'd love to see how it evolves!
Beautiful piano soundtrack and charming mood in this game. Gameplay can be confusing at time as to what you're supposed to do but I figured it out with a bit of perseverance and random key smashing.
Thank you for playing, and for your input! We were expecting some confusion for sure - we're looking into how we can reduce that in the future while maintaining that "aha!" sense of accomplishment when you figure out what's going on.
Just completed the demo, i have to say that i love Art direction of the game. and soundtrack is lovely. to me the Gameplay seems that it has a lot of potential, i loved the mechanics of the game so far. but i can see three things that need to be tweaked first: some animations felt too slow in my opinion it either needs to be a bit faster or you need to add more frames to it to feel smoother but that's just my opinion on this matter. second: the character is always facing down when you release the input key; be it pointing up,left or right. if that's
intentional it's fine but to me it didn't feel right. third: when i first booted the game i didn't know what I'm suppose to do it took trail and error on my part to figure things out. but all n all its a very enjoyable experience and I hope to see more in the future.
good luck with the Jam.
We appreciate your feedback! These are all things we're looking at in moving forward with it from a quality-of-life perspective - for starters, polishing up animations (adding directional idle animations for sure) and some tooltips for getting the player started (the initial spacebar switch likely needs one).