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A jam submission

EarthsongView game page

An interactive story about regenerating both the land and yourself.
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Earthsong's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Best use of the theme#13.6323.632
Audio#13.7893.789
Overall#23.4003.400
Most likely to make an impact#23.2113.211
Graphics#93.4743.474
Gameplay#92.8952.895

Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Please let us know your team's name
Team 10

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Comments

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Really lovely and relaxing little game. Really strong writing and gorgeous music/illustrations. Kia ora for the use of te Ao Māori! Ka pai team.

I hit many of the same issues/bugs as others have mentioned so no point rehashing those. I did hit the bug where I couldn't seem to plant anything no matter what ("you can't plant whauwhaupaku in this this season and you don't have a gift to help you!") 

I tried again from the start but hit it again and unfortunately gave up. Would have loved to have finished it so I'll look out for a fixed build post jam!

Developer

Thanks for the report! You can currently spam the explore option to see all the birds and get to the end, but that's not very fun :P Hopefully I'll have a fixed build up soon!

Submitted(+1)

Yeah doesn't sound like the right way to play. I'll wait it out so I can enjoy it as intended :)

Submitted(+1)

Such a pleasant and relaxing game to play. The audio and story are great!

Developer

Thank you!

(+1)

Beautiful aesthetics which gives a really good vibe. Well done team!

Submitted(+1)

The illustrations are  my favorites in your game, story and music are  great as well.

I like how much content you put into this one,  good job!

Developer

Thank you!

Submitted(+1)

Just wanted to say kia ora on the use of te Ao Māori throughout the story. It's especially heartening from a team with members from outside of Aotearoa/Te-Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa so thank you for the aroha/love you showed <3

Developer

Thanks! We had fun learning phrases to include!

Submitted(+1)

im not really a VN guy, even the sexy ones bore me :D so i'll make some technical commentary

you've got a bunch of times where if you click lokk/listen/etc you get 'undefined' attributes

this ones funny though

 Seeds: none    | Items: feather4 setup.items[_item] - make for loop here

didjeridoos are indigenous australian instruments if you want to keep on them there are a bunch of maori and pacifica wind instruments https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/discover-collections/read-watch-play/maori/maori-musi...

the 'continue' text could probably be a bit more contrasting, i missed it a couple of times, the bold green next to green text on a pale green background  (which is also used for emphasis text in the body) could maybe be a bit more yellow, or something wildly contrasting. That or put it inline with the look/listen/etc

All the maori legends stuff at the start seem a bit heavy handed just to have it in there. The narrator doesn't seem culturally knowledgeable yet they can riff off a bunch of legends. The narrators former companion is set up as the one who knew stuff. It would make more sense narratively is that stuff either came from the bird, or the narrator was looking at books or journals left behind by the companion.

I got to the point where no matter what plant i tried to plant i got 



I tried, but i gave up on the ending when i got to my third line of seeds in the UI

Seeds: coreopsis, whauwhaupaku, whauwhaupaku, oioi, oioi, korokio, whauwhaupaku, flax, coreopsis, oioi, whauwhaupaku, flax, coreopsis, coreopsis, flax, flax, korokio, korokio, whauwhaupaku, coreopsis, flax, korokio, korokio, whauwhaupaku, oioi, coreopsis

--

Overall though I think this is a solid entry, it's different, its on theme particularly for the overall theme of the jam. Having the growing lexicon to click on is great, you could probably have slipped some of the language stuff in there too (and also in the couple places you hyperlink in the text that might have been nicer in the lexicon)

Developer(+1)

> Seeds: none | Items: feather4 setup.items[_item] - make for loop here

Haha yeah some debug/to-do notes slipped through.

>you've got a bunch of times where if you click lokk/listen/etc you get 'undefined' attributes
yeah, not sure why it's not working, thanks for the update, adding to my to-do list!

>didjeridoos are indigenous australian instruments if you want to keep on them there are a bunch of maori and pacifica wind instrument
Awesome tip, thank you! The call sounds so similar to that and I put it as a placeholder word and of course completely forgot about it. That link is perfect!

>the 'continue' text could probably be a bit more contrasting
Yeah, I think i'll change it to buttons. Might restyle all the link text, CSS was kinda slapped on 11th hour

>All the maori legends stuff at the start seem a bit heavy handed just to have it in there. The narrator doesn't seem culturally knowledgeable yet they can riff off a bunch of legends. The narrators former companion is set up as the one who knew stuff. It would make more sense narratively is that stuff either came from the bird, or the narrator was looking at books or journals left behind by the companion.
Great feedback. I might add some more interactive elements early on to tell the story more organically.

>I got to the point where no matter what plant i tried to plant i got 
Yeah, this was bugged and didn't have time to fix. I added a hacky workaround to just spawn any birds you haven't found yet by randomly exploring, versus having to grow the right plant type XD Top priority bug!

>I tried, but i gave up on the ending when i got to my third line of seeds in the UI

lol, I knew I should have added some sort of logic to this list!

>Overall though I think this is a solid entry
Thanks so much for the great feedback and your bug hunting! Very much appreciated!!!

Submitted(+1)

lovely music and so much information on this game it could be a course in a university

Developer (1 edit)

Thank you for the reply! Here is our musician's info:

https://liam-hotter.itch.io/

   https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChvCdyE-puZm-vLB_7r0vAg

They will be releasing the soundtrack on spotify!

Submitted(+1)

Love the music of the game, it really fits the story. I quite like the kakapo in the story, its set like you would portray an old friend. And having story elements is a very clever way to do a tutorial, I don't like how I sometimes have to scroll down the page to read the story though I was quite confused on what to do next until i saw the scrollbar on the side. I also found that the button to rest was often hidden in the story, and it was not obvious as the way to progress some of the time, maybe underline it to make it look more like a link? The text also spills off the box sometimes, the "Yours?" option was quite hard to see against the  thick grey border in the scene where Kerry is talking about magic. The "learn" option is a nice addition, and it is nice to read about the plants i am planting and their uses. But it seems that when I have 2 options of plant, both buttons then plant coreopsis, even if I have another plant in the button, -perhaps a bug with the code filling the buttons with text. Overall I loved the game and how through regenerative gardening you regenerate yourself. The music perfectly fit the narrative. However there were a few errors in the final "scene" to do with closing tags. 

Developer

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback. 

The UI issues are helpful to hear about - I didn't spend much time testing screen size variants, so I'll make sure to work on the layout on my next build. I definitely agree that I should make the rest link more visible. I will turn both it and explore into a button. 

The planting does get buggy once I introduce more plots. I *think* I know what's going on, but I'm going to sit and give that a fix, since it's a pretty big part of the game!

I'm happy to hear that you were able to get to the end of the game! Completely missed that layout issue and added </div> to fix it - great bug catch with an easy fix :D

Thanks again for the helpful feedback! Our musician's info is here: 

https://liam-hotter.itch.io/

   https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChvCdyE-puZm-vLB_7r0vAg

They will be releasing the soundtrack onto spotify!

Submitted(+1)

Loved the music and feel of the game, the storytelling absorbs you and makes you empathize with the protagonist, the way the theme was incorporated was also really natural and fits in the narrative.

Awesome job!

Developer

Thank you for the nice feedback!

Submitted(+1)

I really love the music. Good job on that!

Developer(+1)

Thanks! There will be an OST released on Spotify by our artist @liam-hotter

Here is their YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChvCdyE-puZm-vLB_7r0vAg

Submitted(+2)

Awesome artwork of your bird! It's kind of relaxing game to play when someone feel frustrated!

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Thanks!

Our artist was @serenafisher available at www.serenafisher.com

Submitted (1 edit) (+2)

I love the weaving of the educational elements and the protagonist's emotions and internal journey. The drawings of the birds are amazing.

Developer (1 edit)

Thank you so much for the comment! We had a lot of fun bouncing ideas off each other as a team and we loved being able to add new things we learned into the game.

Our artist was @serenafisher available at www.serenafisher.com

Submitted(+2)

I love everything! I'm a big player of Point & Click and narrative games, you got me! Thanks for this lovely music, this beautiful story and all the informations about New Zealand! Congratulations!!

Developer

Thank you for the nice comment!

Submitted(+2)

Very cozy, loved the music and I'm a sucker for text adventures <3 Unfortunately got soft locked after the intro when the game only registered me as wanting to plant whauwhaupaku seeds no matter which seeds I picked. Couldn't get it to work on firefox, but works on chrome! 

Developer (1 edit)

Sadly there are some bugs I couldn't fix in time so I added a quick workaround through explore - if you spam that you should be able to see all the story.


Interesting about Firefox, I'll definitely look into that - was JavaScript disabled on Firefox?

Submitted(+1)

Ah, I think that was it, disabled adblockers and it worked fine! 

Submitted(+2)

Gentle read, nice music, got distracted so didn't finish but was nice!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the feedback!