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Where in the World is Harold Asinego's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Music | #3 | 3.545 | 3.545 |
| Graphics | #4 | 3.909 | 3.909 |
| Gameplay | #4 | 2.909 | 2.909 |
| Story | #5 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Comedy | #6 | 2.545 | 2.545 |
| Overall | #8 | 3.091 | 3.091 |
Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Overall: 3- A solid little adventure that really makes you put on your thinking cap.
Gameplay: 3- Really loved solving all the puzzles and how every time period parallels and interacts with each other. For example, realizing the shiny tile from 5025 could work in 300 Ka Ma was really satisfying. The time travel sequence was cool but could definitely be abridged after the first time.
Story: 2- The exposition felt a little abrupt and I was a little lost as to what was happening at first. The character writing works its 9-5 and goes home, but it could have definitely used a lot more character to really stand out. Otherwise it works.
Music: 3- Tunes fit well, although I don't think the two-songs-playing-at-once effect in the fairground worked as well as it sounded in theory. I appreciate you including a music player and crediting all the composers! Nice to see KV putting his musical chops to work in this one, even if just for 5025.
Graphics: 3- Elevated RTP with some great custom graphics that break up the grid. Some looked a little scaled-up though. Really nice looking parallax mapping too. I wish it were easier to see through the trees like in 5025 to make navigation easier, but that didn't bug me as much as the rest.
Comedy: 3- A few sensible chuckles here and there. I'd give this a 2.5 since it kinda treads the line, but that does round up to 3.
Overall: 3- A solid little adventure that really makes you put on your thinking cap.
Gameplay: 3- Really loved solving all the puzzles and how every time period parallels and interacts with each other. For example, realizing the shiny tile from 5025 could work in 300 Ka Ma was really satisfying. The time travel sequence was cool but could definitely be abridged after the first time.
Story: 2- The exposition felt a little abrupt and I was a little lost as to what was happening at first. The character writing works its 9-5 and goes home, but it could have definitely used a lot more character to really stand out.
Music: 3- Tunes fit well, although I don't think the two-songs-playing-at-once effect in the fairground worked as well as it sounded in theory. I appreciate you including a music player and crediting all the composers! Nice to see KV putting his musical chops to work in this one, even if just for 5025.
Graphics: 3- Elevated RTP with some great custom graphics that break up the grid. Some looked a little scaled-up though. Really nice looking parallax mapping too. I wish it were easier to see through the trees like in 5025 to make navigation easier, but that didn't bug me as much as the rest.
Comedy: 3- A few sensible chuckles here and there. I'd give this a 2.5 since it kinda treads the line, but that does round up to 3.
Three things I liked about this game:
Three things I did not like:
Another thing that isn't important for a jam game, but something you could consider improving in the future: improve the characters' individual voices. Most NPCs were either flat "welcome to our town" characters or very wordy people. Some different quirks, like clueless, obsessed with something, or one-word talkers can help differentiate your characters so they don't suffer from the dialog equivalent of "same face syndrome."
It still was a beautiful game. Good job!
Graphics: 3 - The menu is clean and easy to use. Generally the game is presentable and the tiles themselves are very nice. I do have to dock some credit for how frustrating it is to actually navigate the maps; the greenery is very large and distracting - I found the way they were used disorienting.
Sound: 3 - Good music that fit each area's theme well. No complaints!
Story: 2 - An episode of Dr. Who and/or Chrono Trigger distilled into a fetch quest. The premise is that Harold got lost by being stupid and trading items up till you get the key one to find him. It's a barebones story with very limited meaningful dialogue. NPCs repeat the same lines; it'd have been more enjoyable to just have smaller maps with less NPCs, I think. The concept is fun I just wish there was a more narrative to go along with it!
Comedy: 2 - Okay, I snickered at the outhouse. Other than that though, there's not much in the way of humor.
Gameplay: 2 - Very basic fetch quest gameplay with lots of back-tracking. The animation for traveling between time periods is very long and some maps are frustrating to navigate. You can also get stuck if you accidentally skip a certain line of dialogue that contains a password, which isn't too unlikely because you might be prone to rapid clicking as a lot of characters say the same or similar stuff(This did happen to me, so I restarted). All in all, I found the various issues I had compounded and I ended up not having a lot of fun.
Overall: 2 - I liked the audiovisuals! I just found the moment to moment gameplay tough to appreciate, and the lack of the story didn't create a lot of drive for me either.
Alright this was making me smile the whole time. It gave me BIG Chrono Trigger vibes. You make really pretty maps and the music with them was really will done. Over all I give this game a 3 over all and enjoyable. If I had to say were a little work would be in the gameplay, I kind of got lost a little, but to be fair I got lost in Chrono Trigger back in the day too lol.
Solid little adventure!
If there's anything I'd complain about is that the environments look pretty, but are hard to move around in.
I love the premise of a dr who outhouse travelling between time periods. A simple trade-quest type of adventure - the password is sure easy to miss if you don't write it down right after you see it. The use of the tileset is very good! Everything fits well and blended in together. Some of the maps are a bit hard to navigate as some paths are obscured by trees. Nice work!
Thank you! I've fondly referred to the outhouse as the "Turdis," and it still gives me a bit of a chuckle to think of it in application. I wanted to do more with the notebook idea, and may very well revamp this later down the road. Noted about the terrain being a bit obscure, I wanted to be overlapping but do not want it to be off-putting, so that is something I must reevaluate for future endeavors. Mapping is one of my prides so I am glad you enjoyed them!
Thank you for the feedback, and cheers!
Heya! I'm going through all of the entries so far and giving my preliminary ratings!
I really liked this entry! It has a lot of rough edges though, so it's a bit of a mixed bag, but I'll give some proper feedback with my personal scores for it!
Overall: 3 - Overall, I really like this! It didn't do anything groundbreaking for me, and there are a lot of frustrating bits (the maps are enormous, and the time travel animation takes an unnecessarily long time), but I thought the basic gameplay loop of exploring, finding key items, and using them to unlock other key items was enjoyable! I think the maps looked really cool and unique, with a lot of cool details, and the music choices, while clearly stock, were all effective! Great work!
Gameplay: 2 - Unfortunately, while I found the core loop to be interesting, a lot of the mechanics and execution made the basic gameplay less enjoyable. While there is a note-taking feature, there's only one instance where taking a note is really required (the password) and unfortunately with no other way to check what that password is, players who don't write that down could be stuck. The big maps are interesting to look at, but at times the massive trees block my view and make it hard to tell where I'm going, and the very slow time travel animation makes going between time periods unpleasant. That said, I think the basic premise is fun and it wasn't a thoroughly unpleasant experience! Figuring out what items the NPCs want and how to get them was pretty cool! This actually reminded me a lot of Chrono Trigger, although I went in expected more of a Carmen Sandiego experience.
Story: 2 - There was a pretty barebones story here, and it was cute, but ultimately the writing was barely passable. A lot of the dialogue was repeated between NPCs, especially in the first chapter but present throughout, and the story ultimately just comes down to "Harold went to a bunch of places and then we found him". It wasn't the worst thing ever or anything, but it didn't do anything that I found especially interesting.
Graphics: 3 - The graphics are all premade, but a lot of effort went into the presentation with the custom menu screen, bust graphics for dialogue, and mapping. The way the trees cover the foreground was really cool, and I love how each time period feels unique while still having the same basic layout in the geography. I found 3025 to be especially interesting with the holographic trees and hexagonal synthetic grass.
Music: 3 - The music is also premade, but its choices are all well executed and interesting! I found the 3025 theme especially fun to listen to, but the time machine theme was also a great choice. The music never got grating and always felt like an appropriate fit.
Comedy: 2 - While there was some humour here, the only joke that I especially enjoyed was the basic premise of an outhouse being used as a Tardis. While that's funny, it didn't hold up the entry on its own! Still, the rest of the game was enjoyable even without much humour, so that's fine!
Final playtime: About 20 minutes
This was a pretty solid entry! I do feel it could have been made more brief, but it fell well within the time limit and ultimately provided a unique experience! I'll be surprised if any other jam entry feels like this. Good work!
Thank you for taking the time to play! (even though I know you kinda have to lol)
Anyway, I admit, yes, the dialog was NOT a focus this game jam , honestly. I wanted to focus more on my eventing and switches/variables, which is really a place I have allowed myself to atrophy in. I also used this as a tester to see how annoying it would be to have to constantly change eras to advance, since in my own personal project, I have a sort of similar puzzle for players to navigate. It was a way I could test it on a player base without deploying the whole project at this time. The music may be stock, but I did try to pick music from a variety of places so as not to sound cookie cutter... and I wonder why you like the Future Era's music so much?! lol Thank you, KV_Kingdom, for adding a personal touch to that for me.
The terrain was meant to be a little challenging, but I will, in the future, take into account the foliage overshadowing the character sprites. I had noticed this in my own project, and so I need to figure out how to manipulate the terrain so that it will fade in and out if a player is behind relevant areas that need to be transparent. I do think it will be as simple as using a region event, possibly. If there is a suggestion, I'm open to it!! XD
The use of the notebook... yeah, that was a ball I dropped. I intended for the puzzles to be more intricate. And I may expand on this whole thing as I intended to in the beginning. My anxiety in having ... anything... to enter got the better of me, and I rushed through what I really wanted.
So, if anything, this jam has inspired me to make this a more fleshed-out game as a whole, with the goal of eventually replacing bust graphics with my own art and adding in busts for all characters you interact with. Maybe I can even find some better animations for the "Turdis".
Thank you for playing, and cheers!