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(+2)

I thought the music was really nice, the graphics were well done, and the game definitely had a solid atmosphere.

Those bats, though, were a frustration for me! Part of it, to be honest, was that it took me a very long time to equate the green particle effect to “buried” chests. I read the description, before playing, about the “smelly” chests and that you needed to dig them up, but, in game itself, it just did click. As such, for the longest time, I thought all I had were 5 bombs and 20 torches… and those bats were ridiculously relentless! Even after figuring out the chest situation, the bats were still a huge source of wanting to give up. It’s not that having enemies is a bad idea, but…

  1. It takes TWO bombs, on average (at least for me) to kill a bat and that’s when I get them close! When multiple bats are on me, a number of times the bats are spread out, so I can’t always get both with a bomb or two. I often need to lose them all!

  2. The bats home in on the player, and fast! I feel it’d be a little more fair if, when the bats charge at you, they do it in a strait line! This would give the player a chance to dodge when they’re out of bombs. As it stands, those bats are like glue, so if the play isn’t able to get rid of them with bombs, I feel they’re shiz out of luck.

  3. The bats are active during the DIG and OPEN CHEST mini game! This is horrible! As the player, once I start digging, or opening a chest, I’ve lost control of anything else (to be fair, I don’t recall if I tried escaping from the mini-game), then the bats chase me down and attack me while I’m helpless to do anything about it.

Honestly, this is a really cool game! But, at least for me, those bats really were flying up my craw!

For your interest, here’s a link to me playing the game on stream recently.

(+2)

Hi Obsidian, thanks a lot for playing and especially for streaming our game. It was both exhilarating and teaching to witness your experience. I wanna get into both the things you write as well as what you mentioned in stream.

You're dead on with a lot of your critique, the smell component to the game loop is a bit hard to decipher. We wanted to make a dirt mound as you suggested with a tiny chest appear as you get closer to the scent, but ran out of time. 


As for the bats; Currently there is one spawning every 20 seconds in a circle around you, and they do know where you are initially, but you can loose them if they're in the darkness. Which in hindsight is not enough, because it's very difficult to do since the player needs the light themselves. Conflicting design choices on our end. The bats die in two hits, there might be a bug that causes double collision. Also the vector math for throwing is not entirely accurate which definitely adds to the frustration if you're not used to it.

I really liked your intuitive idea of hiding in the shadows, which would've been an amazing element to implement to let the player trade some health for a bit of peace from the bats.

The bats not stopping during the dig and mini game was a conscious design choice, we wanted the player to be scared and have a sense of urgency while solving the minigame, however at this moment you can not exit the minigames, and if you don't open them, there is also no real alternative to dying (like hiding in the shadows). For the journals however, we didn't want the player to be punished for taking the time to read our story which is why we paused the game.

As you're developing, the game naturally becomes extremely easy to you. Now in post, we get some critique saying the game is way too easy, and others saying the bats are merciless or the chests are impossible to find (which is why we added the youtube video, a bandaid for lack of polish if you will). We definitely wanted the bats to be scary and provoke a reaction, but it shouldn't be frustrating.

Bottom line, this was the first project we did together, we did a lot of work and it's not perfect and definitely needed some more polish. We'll definitely work together again in another jam and hopefully craft an even better honed and rounded experience. Thanks for your feedback :)

(+1)

Thanks for the feedback obsidian, coming from when I played your game it's good to get that opinion, and it's good in context of your abilities. We're definitely taking all this feedback on board for our next jam. Cheers mate