Play game
Trouble With Tetras: FeralBytes's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Innovation | #419 | 3.364 | 3.364 |
| Audio | #476 | 3.273 | 3.273 |
| Theme | #585 | 3.242 | 3.242 |
| Visuals | #650 | 3.409 | 3.409 |
| Overall | #650 | 3.192 | 3.192 |
| Gameplay | #716 | 3.015 | 3.015 |
| Enjoyment | #992 | 2.848 | 2.848 |
Ranked from 66 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does the game fit the theme?
Nothing Can Go Wrong… as long as you manage to keep everything under control during the remainder of your mission! In this 3D First Person Perspective game, you will need to quickly clean up the abundant replicating Tetras that are loose on your ship, while the computer manages the ship’s systems for you… until they fail one by one. Can you keep the ship on course until the end?
What code and assets did you not make from scratch during the jam (if any)?
I use a framework that I wrote myself over years of using Godot. I call the framework EverGreen. All other code and assets were made from scratch for the game jam.
How many people worked on the game?2
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Once I understood what was happening, it was actually a pretty chill game. Just doing laps vacuuming and readjusting everything, it's actually kinda satisfying haha
You are probably the first to call our game chill, congrats you are next level. I am glad that you enjoyed our game.
I really appreciated how the game communicates what you need to do through a mix of text and environmental cues, which makes the chaos feel manageable despite the rapid pace. However, the game could benefit from a bit more clarity in its instructions. There are also occasional bugs: like freezing during level transitions. Overall, though, it's an ambitious and immersive experience! Great job to the team!
Thank you for playing our game and thank you for the feedback. We will try to improve the clarity of the instructions in the future. I am sorry you encountered some bugs.
Though some is unavoidable, given the decisions that we made. I opted for a Single threaded build of the engine, and as such some pausing of the main thread is required in order to load and unload assets. In the future we may take a different approach and load everything upfront to reduce this during game play.
Its a great idea, but like the others said he certainly needs some polish:
Thank you for playing and thank you for your feedback.
Hey!
I see where this game is going, especially after reading your post. Sadly, I’m not quite in your target audience, but hopefully, I can still give some useful feedback (though I didn’t finish it, haha).
Some thoughts:
Please don’t get me wrong—I really liked the game and appreciate it for what it is. The complexity of the systems you built in just one week is seriously impressive! I had a fun (if stressful) time with it.
Thank you!
Thank you for playing our game and thank you for the feedback, it is helpful and we will take it forward into our next game jam.
I can't imagine how much more challenging/stressful it would be to have to read all the text on the walls in your non-native language. If it was a fully developed game, we would definitely want to make it more linguistically accessible. We did want to have an interactive tutorial, instead of having to rely on the visual/text stuff, but just not enough time. The wonky physics when the inventory is full is because the tetras collide with you instead of being collected, so they will push you against a wall. That part is intentional, though. Thank you so much for giving it a try. :)
Clear design direction on a time rush, resource and task management title!
More tutorials about how things work on your ship should help with the overwhelming information.
Thank you for playing and for your feedback.
Rated -- Cool concept! I really appreciated that you put up the "You are Here" maps, since I'm the type to lose my way all the time :P
Thank you for playing our game. I am glad the maps helped! Our first iteration of the game actually had the player doing circles, and the maps helped us run the bug down.
A little tutorial would be helpful and I don't understand why the game crashes when I try to touch a door. It even closes up the browser tab :-) By the way I play that one on Google Chrome.
So far you are the only person to have encountered this issue. Can you please tell me which OS you are on, How much RAM and VRAM?
Oh I'm using a Windows with Nvidia RTX 4060 with 32 gb of ram. So my pc would probably not the reason for the crash I suppose.
pretty fun but I wandered around lost for a long time, I think a tutorial would have really help me figure out all the different things I'm supposed to do
Please see my post on your game. I am sorry I was unable to play your game. I do agree a better tutorial would have been good. Unfortunately we ran out of time to be able to implement the planned tutorial. Our extra time was used up to fix bugs.
I have to admit I didn't manage to last the entire mission, but I think I did a really good job and I really deserve a bonus. I wish the camera movement was a bit more smooth, maybe it has to do with my mouse settings? Otherwise great job, especially considering the timeframe :)
Thank you so much for playing! When you say the camera motion isn't smooth enough, can you be a little more specific? I want to make sure we are able to address that issue in the future, but we need to be able to understand what that will take.
I mean when I turn around it kinda turned me a bit too far, if you know, what I mean? Maybe it's just an effect of the corridor being a bit disorienting.
I think I understand what you mean. Thank you for clarifying.
Very complex for me at first but I got it when played a little Good game
Thank you for trying it out.
Crashed my ship the first time but tried it again and successfully completed the mission! As others have mentioned, a mini game tutorial would probably help players understand what to do quicker. The vacuum/push mechanics and sound effects are very satisfying! I feel like shortening the timer to something like 5 minutes shouldn't impact the game too much, as it felt repetitive after a while. Overall, I enjoyed this, and I think it's pretty well done! Good luck!
You might be the first here to have completed the mission successfully! Outstanding! We did want to have an interactive tutorial, but that was more complex to work out within the remaining time we had. But we are definitely taking that lesson forward with us. The reason for the length of the timer was to give the player a chance to discover what the next problem is and adjust their priorities before bringing the next problem into the mix. But yes, I think you may be right that it could be condensed, although maybe we would have to reduce the difficulty to make up for that. Thank you very much for playing our game and leaving feedback.
Music was nice and good controls explanation. a bit too long for me with adhd.. also i did not get to play the full game becasue i did not know what to do and the camera made me motionsick due to that it felt like input lag.. im sorry if i sound harsh but that is just how i felt
I'm sorry if the camera made you motion sick. We have tried to keep the camera as smooth as possible, but everyone has a different threshold. In the future, we might try to implement a way for the player to adjust that. It sounds like our game probably doesn't fit your playstyle - and that is okay. Thanks for trying anyway.
Nice to see a 3d godot game. I enjoyed it even as i got overwhelmed. Love some Tetras
We love GODOT. Thank you for trying our game!
Great entry !
I really liked how the sensory overload built up little by little until you have so many things to manage at the end ! My only complaint on the subject was that maybe the first failures could happen a little bit faster.
The tutorial at the beginning was a nice addition : I had no issues figuring basic mechanics thanks to it. I could instead spend my time figuring out instead how the heck to keep that ship on course !
The graphics and sound design was neat, coherent and well fit together. Maybe adding more FX & SFX when everything goes wrong could be nice to stress the player out even more !
A minor complaint is that only QWERTY keyboard is supported, which is a shame since it is quite easy to do in Godot by setting configuring the actions in the Input Map with "Physical Keycode" instead of "Keycode" or "Key label".
I sadly was not able to complete the game since I had a crash that made the game freeze while loading into a sector near the end. It seems to be related to audio as you can see in the log below:
In conclusion a great entry and a fun 15 mins, congrats !
EDIT: one question I have for you however is why so many loading screens ? Is loading the next area in the background with
while in a sector in-between two area not good enough ? That could have made the gameplay even more tense without all the micro-pauses due to loadings.
Wow, thank you for the valuable feedback, especially the comment about only having QWERTY support. It's too easy to have tunnel-vision and forget such an important, but easily overlooked accessibility issue. We will definitely carry that lesson forward with us for future projects and ALSO will include that fix after the jam when we provide an updated version. Accessibility is critical. Thank you for taking time to try our game and I'm glad that you enjoyed what you could.
I definitely will add additional keyboard support in the future thank you for the tip.
Thank you for the debug output. That definitely points to something I was not expecting. But Hopefully it will help me run down the bug.
Per your question. Although I am using threaded loading internally. In reality threaded loading is not possible. This version of Godot is using the Single Threaded Web build of Godot. Though I am pretty sure my Background loading models does print that it is using a thread. In reality the code detects it is a web build and knows it cannot use a thread. I need to modify that print statement as it is misleading. Though, on a desktop version it would use threads. So unfortunately any loading is actually done on the main thread and will cause stuttering. I do think I could have loaded the entirety of the ship in a single scene. But I still need to test that theory and see if it holds for a phone, as I am hoping to also target smart phones. Another thing I would like to try in the near future is to get scenes to be sufficiently chunked by making many sub scenes and then see if I can load the dependencies first at a rate of 1 dependency per frame, as that may let me do some preloading and simulate it being a background thread. Definitely more work to be done in that area.
Oh okay, it does make a lot of sense ! That's quite clever to switch depending on the export type !
Since all part of the ship share most of their textures and shapes, it might work to simply load everything up at the beginning and simply removing unneeded area from the node tree with "remove_child" at runtime an putting them back on the tree as needed, no ? As such, unneeded area don't have any impact on processing time while staying in memory for quick loading. I guess it really depends on how low of a device you want to support.
Why did you chose to stay away from multi-threaded web export ? They seems fine now on Godot 4.3 & 4.4. It also looks like most major hosts now support SharedArray Buffer. Is there an additional issue with multi-threaded web that I do not know about ?
Thanks a lot for all these details !
That is a really good idea about holding scenes via reference but not adding them to the tree until they are needed. That is a smart simple solution. For some reason I did not consider that. This conversation has been very helpful for future optimizations and improvements. I will definitely try the off tree technique for future optimization tricks.
I choose to avoid the multi-threaded export because of our experiences in the past year with them. Safari is definitely still a problem with SharedArray support at least on iOS. Most non-mainline (e.g. things like googles search browser on android, or other embeded browsers, not chrome, which for some reason many people actually use) browsers also do not support Shared Array support. I also saw Firefox break Shared Array support 3 times in the last year.
Oh and now I remember cross-origin isolation. I would like to be able to have the games be-able to call home to our website to check for news updates. I also would like the potential for multiplayer support in the future. I do not know for sure that all of this conflicts with Cross-Origin Isolation, but it seemed to be causing me problems. By not needing to meet cross-origin isolation requirements, I can have the game check for news content on our site and ideally in the future add a server that would allow for dynamic multiplayer akin to No-Man's Sky. At least those are my wild plans...
Thank you for the discussion.
I found another reason for why we went Single Threaded rather than muti-threaded. We have been working to integrate the Terrain 3D addon into our web projects. It now supports the web but currently only supports the single threaded version of Godot in the web. Now hilariously we are not using any Terrain 3D in this project. So I may simple remove and disable that to have a multi-threaded version.
I do not yet have the new build ready yet, but I have been working on my framework for the last week to re-write it to better handle loading and scene swapping. Your discussions with me really helped guide this re-design. I now have it smoothly supporting loading and swapping of scenes both single and multi-threaded. I also implemented your concept of Hot Scenes which I have named Stored Scenes, and now the framework can load multiple scenes into memory, while only assigning 1 as the current scene. It can also swap scenes in a single frame if the scene is a Stored Scene. This should make loading much faster even in a single threaded environment. Also finally I made sure that if an error in scene loading does occur, we now catch the error as best I can to let the user know and take them to an exit screen.
Again I just wanted to say thank you for helping me think through a better way to design our game framework and I hope it will result in better games from us in the future.
I really liked computer screen interaction system, with pressing a button to free the mouse, it was an extremely clever way to get around the normal 'press BUTTON to open', and kept me in the flow of running in circles sucking up tetras as opposing to opening menu after menu. I wish i had thought of something like that for my game, I'm jealous. It did feel like it took a bit to get going, but that did also give me a chance to look at the environment and not need to restart the game due to not knowing how the mechanics worked the first time.
Thank you so much for trying it out. It's tricky to figure out the right balance and timing, but we will continue working on it outside the jam. There's a fine line between too easy and too frustrating, as well as too long and not long enough. Thank you for the feedback.
Thank you for noticing my interfaces. It took me a little while to get it working like I wanted. I used code very similar to the official demo, but slightly more generic. It also took a while to figure how to best make the consoles local to scene while still allowing them to be utilized and updated in multiple locations from a single source scene(actually 2 sources scenes).
https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/127
Thank you for playing our game.
I think the mechanic with taking the items and pushing them away is my favorite!
Thank you.
I love the visuals and audio! The gameplay I had a hard time figuring out, but overall I was a fan :)
Thank you for trying it out! There's definitely a learning curve and it's not meant to be entirely straightforward. The learning only really comes with failure and increasing situational awareness (mostly by paying attention to the display panels for status updates and relying on station visual aides and warnings). In hindsight, it's probably too niche for a game jam.
The visuals are good, and the environment is so immersive. It immediately makes me feel like a part of the game. However, the real threat started only after a couple of minutes into the game. My humble suggestion would be to start the game showing that the ship is almost dying and then compel the player to collect tetras in order to save the ship. All being said, this is such a great result for just 1 week's effort. Best wishes!
Thank you very much for trying it out! I like your suggestion.
It reminds me a lot of games like Viscera Cleanup Detail and Powerwash Simulator in a way. The music's very chill.
My biggest feedback is it isn't entirely clear what I'm supposed to be doing. I know how to control the game, sure, but I don't exactly know what I'm supposed to doing or what my goal is. Besides that, it's a nice game! Good luck!
Thank you for trying our game. It's meant to be a little overwhelming on the first try, but in hindsight, probably not the best approach for a game jam. The style of game we were aiming to create is a bit niche, so I understand why we've had a lot of complaints of unclear objectives.
I just played your game, cool concept.
I can only support what other have already said:
Good job!
Thank you for playing our game.