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A Cardboard Town's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Presentation | #13 | 4.600 | 4.600 |
| Engagement | #20 | 4.200 | 4.200 |
| Overall | #30 | 3.900 | 3.900 |
| Theme | #57 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
| Gameplay | #59 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
An interesting little game! The visuals are really cute, the music is chill and has an unique story to it. Now I'm inclined to finish it!
thank you!!
This game was really enjoyable! The story is well written and quite intriguing. It hooked me early and forced me to continue until done to know what happens. I absolutely love the graphics! The sprite and animation of the player character especially. And the reflection in the mirrors was so well done. Great music too. Wonderful job!
Wow, thank you so much for your kind words! Just curious, did you end up running into the bug where you get stuck in the room when searching for clues? It's happened to several people already, and I'm wondering how prevalent it is :,)
No I didn't encounter any bugs. At least not ones that I noticed :)
awesome, ty for letting me know!
Hi! I tried Cardboard Town and wanted to offer some feedback. First off, I got stuck in Mikhail’s bedroom so I could not complete the game. I tried interacting w/ the bed and it just didn’t do anything. Saving/reloading didn’t help.
But from what I did play, here’s some feedback.
The art is solid with some exceptions. I think the trees and some of the portraits just don’t fit/work as well as the other assets. There are a few areas w/ layering issues such as Mikhail’s bedroom (the desk).
That said, there are a lot of nice touches here. I enjoyed the design of the car, the walk cycle, and the layout/design of the town. The mirror reflection is a very nice touch, I don’t think I’ve seen that in an RPGM game before. I also enjoyed the one instance I saw of a static manga-style image in the first scene w/ Mikhail’s dad.
The narrative is intriguing and well-written. It’s clear you know how to write dialogue and weave in plot and emotional beats organically. Sometimes I would be wondering when Mikhail would react to certain details or if he even noticed them and usually this paid off because he would (the piano bit is a good example of this), making me feel aligned with the character’s experiences.
The music is really good and fits well. When it kicks up later, as Mikhail’s situation becomes more scary, it really drives you forward to see what happens next.
Gameplay is simple but effective, however I think better indication for interactive elements would be necessary in a game that sometimes requires you to hunt around for the right object/person. The “!” above NPCs does the trick for dialogue, but something similar might help w/ scenes like the bedroom, which broke for me. I liked some of the smaller touches here, as well. For example, I really enjoyed that the game forces me to brush Mikhail’s teeth before bed and in the AM.
Overall, I really enjoyed this and hope to see more from you. If you have other games, I’ll be checking them out. I’ll also come back and finish this if you sort out the bedroom bug (normally I would drop the game over this because time issues, not out of irritation – these things happen – but I want to see what happens next!).
First of all, thank you for the detailed reply! I'm so sorry you ran into that issue T-T I can't fix it at the moment due to the game jam locking the files, but if you are interested in completing the game sometime, I will let you know when it is fixed! The portraits also ended up being completely different than what I had intended due to a time crunch, which is why they might look weird (I literally did them all in one day, the day before submitting :,D) Honestly this game suffered the most from time crunch--the story got cut and changed so much due to running out of time, for example. I couldn't really accomplish what I had originally envisioned.
As for my other games, I'd probably recommend trying Spirit Latte if you want! It's the first game I made, and it's definitely the most polished and with a story and art I'm happy! That one is bug-free as far as I'm aware :,)
Hi! No problem. I am gonna try and leave detailed feedback for every jam entry I try. We all do better when we all do better, right?
I will definitely look to finish when the judging is over and bugs get fixed. Our entry also had a few things that didn’t go as planned. Artistically, we had an advantage in using pre-existing assets but it still took a very long time to do all the mapping and custom stuff. I get how it is.
Is the mirror effect you pulled off a… secret? Hehe.
I'm excited to play your game when I'm finished with my homework! And no XD the mirror effect is not a secret, I used this plugin to achieve the effect :D
Update: There is a browser version for this game now! It's on a separate post so you will have to click on the link in the description :,)
awesome work. my favourite of the jam so far
Aw, thank you so much!
no problem! riggy 3k is playing the game on stream right now btw!
ty for letting me know ab the stream! I watched it and he ran into the bug and replayed the game up to that point :,)
Hi, I enjoyed playing A Cardboard Town. You did a great job with the game art and design. I did stop at Mikhail looking for clues in his room. He couldn't leave the room. Is that the end of the game/demo?
No, you should be able to check the bed and be teleported to another memory. I have gotten feedback that for some reason, it doesn't work for some people? I genuinely have no idea why, because it's worked every time for me and there's nothing I can find wrong in the code. My friend told me that it worked for her after reloading an earlier save. If you could try that and let me know if it works, I would really appreciate that! Edit: I found out there's a glitch where you can't load saves after closing the game T-T If you want to skip through the beginning portion of the game, holding down z will do that!