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A Hue Steps Away's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Presentation | #166 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Creativity | #169 | 3.824 | 3.824 |
| Overall | #321 | 3.471 | 3.471 |
| Fun | #617 | 2.588 | 2.588 |
Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Newbie?
Experienced
Nope - I've completed at least one game jam before.
How does your game fit the theme?
It's a story anyone who's been trapped in a "self-improvement mindset" loop will understand. The protagonist is someone who is very stuck in life. He has a lot of ideas for projects and ways to be better, but struggles to "just get started" because he's in an endless cycle of shame. This story is about realizing that shame, overcoming it, and leaning on your friends.
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Comments
the message is very strong, the situation the MC is in is very relatable (been there) and the way it is presented gets the point across very clearly. Only thing I can nitpick is the text speed is a bit slow , I know it does add to the experience but a fill current sentence or fast forward button would be a nice addition. Besides that, I have nothing to add. Fantastic job.
Loved the emotional baggage the protagonist had, especially when he feels lifted from it as the colors return to his world, really good presentation! Hope to see more of your games in the future :D
Liked the color palette and art! and idea
Thanks!
The low resolution 3d realism style with the gray color really gives a nice touch to the ambience of the game , giving a depressed , dark vibe. The narrative of this game is very nice. The font are a little small if i dont have my glasses , i can barely see the text.
Thank you! Yeah seems the text size was the biggest issue. Now I know ha. Thanks for playing!
Im a sucker for interactive visual novel, but it would be nice to have sound effects tho. The cel shading here is pretty good and having his perspective tie to color was really cool! Love the execution for that. Also gotta love the bromance with brad, wish i could see them hangout and talk more. Nice game tho!
The font definitely needs to be bigger. Even full screen I had a problem. Also the inconsistent text speed control was frustrating. I would come up with a universal control where while text is playing if you hold the mousebutton down it speeds up. Then once you get to the end of the text you have to release and then click to proceed to the next text. It is a balance between clickthrough and forced reading. If you are going to have a text only game more control of the text is necessary.
I would add more interactions beyond just find the question marks. Some sort of branching story or minigames would be a great addition.
Theme wise this game is excellent. It doesn't wallow as many depression themed games tend to. The use of the gray and the flashes of color are very relateable to my experience.
And of course, good job on the 3d modeling. It is a great presentation, and the occasional flickers of color do a great job of highlighting the breakthroughs.
For sure, really appreciate the feedback. A lot of those things I would have to add, but ran out of time. This was my first time working on a game of this type, and I'm going to build more so I appreciate your tips.
Nice little story, I wish there was more to do and interact with. The character sliding when walking is because your walk speed is different then your animations' walk cycle, so you do have to be careful of that. Also, the movement of the character flipping is caused by taking the input and not the velocity to flip the character. The animations were nice, though. I struggle with 3D animating, but yours was really good, well done.
Good feedback, thanks!
You told the story very well, it's well paced and relatable and also really liked the symbolism of the use of colour here as well. as another comment says the text is a little bit small and I also think having some background music could add to the experience, like during the coloured sections. I also noticed there's a little bit of lag walking around the house, when you need to interact with things compared to when he's cleaned up, and I wasn't able to walk in the corner right of the window, even when the boxes were removed, but it didn't take away from the experience for me, I liked this one.
Thanks for pointing those out! Glad you enjoyed it.
For the background music, I actually originally added some then removed it. I felt it was more reflective of the player living a "colorless" life. Although maybe there's a track that would fit that.
I think in the black and white sections, there could be atmospheric sound instead of music? To represent the same kinda theme through sound?
Ffor how short it is there is a lot of emotion and story into it, felt wayyy too at home lmfaooo. I really really love the story, i think its really accurate to the self improvement mindset being pit against depression (or atleast, how i interpreted it). Obviously, if it could be longer, I think the story and feelings alongside would be pushed even further (i think having more emphasis on shame could be interesting)
my only complaint is not being able to pet the cat lolol
Thanks for playing! Yes I will make sure to add cat petting <3
Too relatable! good work putting this together, other than what people have already said I'll just just say the phong shading makes everything looks like plastic.
Thanks! I really wanted to add a toon shader, but perhaps I went overkill with it. Some games like Persona used a mixture of toon shading and other styles. What would you recommend?
Well I'm not that familiar with how this is implemented, normally there's a way to control the roughness of each part with a roughness map
Really creative. Visuals and story are great. Like others mentioned, a few more choices or interactions would go a long way. This is a really good start to a strong story based game though!
This is very impressive..the visuals especially.. although texts were a bit too small
Thanks! Yeah I should have made the text just a degree or two bigger, but hey now I know. Thanks for playing!
Post your game here https://itch.io/jam/shovel-jam-2025/topic/5113637/play-and-rate-each-others-game... for others to notice
I think the combination of the story and the color-changing visuals really suited the game! And your dialogue box was simple but effective.
Seems pretty story-centric, and I think the game format might actually be holding it back. This might work pretty well as a short film. As it's very story centered, the gameplay doesn't really exist. "The real gameplay is the friends we made along the way"
Good feedback! Yeah my dream is to build a really story centric, emotional game with rich characters. It was kinda hard to do both in the gamejam, but I haven't done any story stuff yet so that's what I focused on.
good, you tried out a new thing!
I like the approach but I didn't feel like I had many options, not even dialogue options but I don't usually play this kind of games and maybe I' m just not used to
Yeah, it's kinda supposed to be like that. It's more of just a story you play through and observe, which was the goal. I could have added options but I wanted the character to be a certain way.
Then I think you did it great