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A jam submission

Understudy EarthView game page

A falling block game about making land
Submitted by BoredSkeleton (@garrett_hobson) — 9 minutes, 1 second before the deadline
Rated by 0 people so far
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Understudy Earth's itch.io page

Link to your Game Design Doc on Google Drive.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qmt93IcnQvWWFIFKS3elbzIokE81oK62Twrp2eQld6E/edit?usp=sharing

Have you checked that your GDD is publicly accessible ?
Yes

Is your game set to public on itch.io so we can see it?
Yes

Summarize your game!
Understudy Earth is a falling block game about creating terrain so you can take over as the new planet earth.

Please explain how your game fits the theme.
The world itself is watching you play, grading your performance.

Did you use Generative AI to make any assets in your game?
No

Is there anything you'd like the judges to pay particular attention to?
Please play in fullscreen

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Comments

Submitted

At first, I was confused about what to do, how to score points, and what the tiles were while playing. But after reading the GDD, I think I understand the original intention.

It seems the core loop was meant to be a matching game where you build terrain tiles by stacking blocks and place them strategically to score points.

While that design intention didn’t come through clearly in the gameplay yet, I still want to applaud the team for implementing those core systems within just two weeks — that’s genuinely impressive!

(This comment was written using a translation tool.)

Developer

Thanks for playing! Yeah the game is very opaque and unfinished because I essentially only had 2 weekends and one all nighter to work on it. The core systems took up so much time that in the end I didn't really get to package it into a game that can be parsed just by playing it. Hoping to go back and bring it up to the originally intended spec in the future, but I just did 2 jams back to back so I'm a little burnt out at the moment. I'm glad you were able to see the vision using the GDD!

Submitted

Interesting little game! Overall it was surprisingly crunchy and felt great to play. I noticed a few things:

  • It was not immediately apparent that you can press space to shift perspective. I ended up nearly filling the right side of the board with tiles before switching over and doing anything with them.
  • Once I started placing them around, I didn't really understand the nuance of what each tile means, or how to generate specific ones. I'm guessing that's kind of the point, that it's an exploration and memory game, but the explanation of what I'm there to do felt a little undercooked to me.
  • I wasn't able to actually fail at the falling blocks side of the game, so it didn't feel like it had stakes. I didn't necessarily feel that fantasy of being a god taking over earth, which feels like what you might have been going for, and I wonder if you amped up the stakes a bit, if it would help with that power fantasy.

If you decide to continue the game, I could this working really well on mobile! You've got a really solid game idea here, it just needs to go through the car wash a few more times and get loads of external playtesting!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing! The entire game is undercooked and not where I wanted it to be. I intended to include proper tutorialization, an actual readout during scoring of how the tiles were interacting and what you were getting bonus points for, and a fail state on the falling block side, but alas this is was I was able to turn out over 2 weekends and change.

Submitted

Well very nicely done for only two weekends of work! I spent essentially 4 hours a day throughout the week and 10 hours / day on weekends for Don't Read Chat!