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A jam submission

GRAVView game page

A short platformer in which you have control of gravity. Avoid the heating plates!
Submitted by therealsemechki — 52 seconds before the deadline
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GRAV's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Aesthetics#34.1674.167
Gameplay#33.6673.667
Fun#53.3333.333
Best Use of Theme#71.8331.833
Story#71.6671.667
Overall#72.9332.933

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • I think this was a fine entry, but very difficult to play. I did feel a great sense of accomplishment making it to the end. Aesthetically, the game looks good, but sometimes feels a little jarring when you switch directions--I had to turn the motion blur off. Notwithstanding, it is difficult to make a 3D game and I applaud how polished this entry feels!
  • I really appreciated the the concept of the gameplay for your game. While slightly disorienting I could imagine this being truly wild in VR. The graphics and sound were great and player movement was innovative. I look forward to seeing where you take this!
  • Those unity global illumination graphics look amazing, and the concept is very cool! This feels like it could evolve into a Mirror's Edge style next-level parkour game. But the difficulty curve feels way off--the tutorial is trivial, then Level 1 is super hard. I gave up on level 2. The WIP level 3 seems promising: I especially liked having the sky be visible, and working your way around to the opposite side of previous geometry seems like it could make some very interesting level designs. I never really got used to the viewpoint switches; a few frames of quaternion lerp direction smoothing would help, as would retaining some sensible camera direction (like the view direction, or motion direction) on rotation. You might consider just aligning the camera Y axis with the (changing) gravity vector, leaving camera Z fixed forward. Inertia feels "weird" when direction switches--does the player's inertia remain fixed in camera space after the rotation? It feels like it should be world space (if I run and leap at a wall, I feel I should get smashed *onto* the wall, even if gravity is rotating around me, rather than sliding forward after the view switch). Holding lshift and lcontrol at the same time doesn't seem to be physically possible in normal WASD plus mouse hand configuration.

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Comments

Submitted

Hey! This has got some real potential. 

So one thing I would suggest is adding some sort of ability to "stick" to a wall, kind of like how you hold down the lctrl to not transfer surfaces. I think that would help alleviate some frustration with the platforming. That and some control tweaks.

I'd recommend checking out Aliens VS Predator 2 and the Aliens VS Predator reboot. They both have Alien campaigns which primarily focus on shifting from surface to surface by sticking to them. They let you climb on walls, ceilings, etc. Might help with the design of this game. 

It'll be cool to see what you do with this. 

Developer

Hey, thanks for your feedback!

You're definitely right about the controls. I think the issue is that, as the developer, I knew exactly how all the movement systems worked and so it was very easy for me to use. But, after seeing my brother try playing the game, I realized that it wasn't nearly as easy for someone who didn't have such thorough knowledge of the movement.

I checked out Aliens vs Predator, and it definitely has some interesting movement mechanics. Not quite what I'm going for, but I'll definitely have to experiment with smooth camera rotation from one surface to another, since that's a very disorienting part of my game. Maybe once I really figure out how quaternions work.  :P

I'm glad to hear you think it has potential! It's my first time developing a game and not just little bits like, I dunno, procedural generation or third-person movement, so it makes me very happy to hear it wasn't a complete failure. Maybe I'll continue development on the game one of these days, although probably not soon.

Thank you again for your input! It's good to hear ideas and genuine reasons as to why some function is bad, rather than someone only telling me they don't like it.

Developer (2 edits)

Apologies, everyone! I only uploaded a build of the game for Windows. I'll be uploading a copy of the build for Mac OS and Linux shortly. You can view and download them on the game's main page. (Not this submission page, the one for the game itself)
Edit: It seems they've appeared on the game jam page as well. Apologies for the inconvenience! Please let me know if the Linux build has issues, since I don't know anyone with Linux and don't feel like installing a Linux VM to test it.  :/