Play game
Last Writes's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Artwork | #250 | 4.416 | 4.416 |
| Narrative | #350 | 3.792 | 3.792 |
| Audio | #459 | 3.792 | 3.792 |
| Creativity | #603 | 4.143 | 4.143 |
| Enjoyment | #1088 | 3.675 | 3.675 |
Ranked from 77 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
You draw loops with a magical quill to banish enemies.
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Font: https://fontesk.com/lt-crow-typeface/
All other assets were made by our team during the jam.
(Optional) What would you like to be called if GMTK features your game?
Hauser Games
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
I love how the main menu has parallax, and has camera shake when you looped an insect, shows a lot of effort put into the polishing. The art is pretty good too.
Thank you, glad you liked it!
Cool artsytle and music. Well done!
Thanks!
One of the coolest takes I've seen! Can't believe you even had time add lore and explanation in the beginning. Beautiful art and great gameplay; 10/10 :D
Thank you so much!
Really cool game! Took a bit of getting used to control-wise, but once I did it was a blast! Very satisfying to get a bunch of enemies in a single loop. I wish there was a bit more to it, or perhaps and endless mode, but overall top stuff!
Yeah, the controls definitely have a learning curve. We wanted the mouse and the player movement to both be equally important to influencing the quill motion, and after a bunch of iteration this is what we were happiest with, although some more post-jam iteration might be in our future :)
An endless mode is a definitely something we’d like to add, along with additional levels. We had some other biomes planned, each with a boss at the end, but we ran out of time to implement them.
Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed it!
The art is straight up beautiful, and I enjoyed the narrative a lot. Fantastic work!
Thank you!
Very well made! I really liked the idea and also that you could give the quill a bit more range by clicking, definitely made the gameplay more dynamic. Lots of really nice polish when it comes to the art an UI. And you blended the theme and the narrative really well together as well, awesome work!
Thank you! Yeah, we wanted the mouse and the player movement to both be equally important to influencing the quill motion, so having it follow you but be influenced by the mouse, and then have the ability to fling it was what we liked the most, after lots of iteration.
Great visuals, great audio, great narrative at the beginning! Beautiful game
Thanks!
This game was awesome. I loved the art style and sound design. The fact that you managed to have a story as well within the time limit is just insane to me. Well done!
Thank you so much!
This was awesome. I've played a few other of the loop the targets to capture/beat them, but I really like the use here where the quill is a mix of following the player or can be thrown out. Really a pleasure to play.
Thanks so much! Yeah, we wanted the mouse and the player movement to both be equally important to influencing the quill motion. Glad you enjoyed it!
A treat for the eyes and ears! Visually stunning, and the music is simply beautiful.
The implementation of the drawing ink mechanic—chef’s kiss. It’s clean and satisfying.
Definitely a unique take on the “loop around” mechanic (and I’ve seen quite a few entries this jam 😄). I just wish I had a bit more control over the feather. Sometimes it flies way off, and other times it barely moves from the player. I understand it’s based on how long the button is held, but it also feels like physics or maybe even FPS might be affecting it?
Still, it’s incredibly fun to draw loops around enemies.
Beautiful and very solid entry with a fresh and creative twist on the looping mechanic.
Thank you so much! We are also pleased with how it all came together, so that’s great to hear!
Just to clarify, it’s not how long the button is held. The mechanic is basically that holding down the button reduces/delays the force pulling the quill back to the player. The throw itself is based on a combination of the momentum of the player and the speed of the quill. Try moving the mouse through or around the spell circle and then clicking and holding when you get to the direction you want to throw the quill. The GIFs on the entry page’s gallery demonstrate some of the techniques. It definitely takes some practice and we might try to iterate on the mechanic some more to make it a bit more intuitive after the jam is over.
Loved the art and music, sat with the title music running in the background for longer than I would like to admit! And really enjoyed the little story section with Dad.
Really interesting twist to the drawing loops around things mechanic, having it stick pretty close to the player with the throw really makes you have to think about your movement, nice work!
Thank you for the kind words! Our team members who worked on the music and the story will be thrilled to hear that!
And yes, that was very much the goal! We wanted the mouse and the player movement to both be equally important to influencing the quill motion.
Neat gameplay, and stylish too. Great game, good job!
Thank you!
Very cool concept and cool take on loop theme. I love the artstyle and just the overall vibe of game.
Thanks so much, glad you liked it!
Good job with this game. It is easy to get started, and the difficulty ramps up at the right pace. Bonus points for the art style.
That’s great to hear, we’re so pleased that the difficulty curve felt good, and that you liked the art style!
Really fun and cool concept. Kinda reminds me of pokemon ranger on the nintendo ds hahaha. An improvement I can think of is probably make the dash indicator more obvious, like probably make the hat blue when you cant dash or make the flash bigger. Maybe also a counter on the side showing how many waves are left. Really great game, I loved it
Haha, you are the second person to mention Pokemon Ranger. None of us have played that, but we looked it up and definitely agree that there are similarities. Good call on the dash indicator, some sort of persistent at-a-glance indication that the dash is ready is definitely something we’ll add if we revisit the game after the jam. A wave counter is also an interesting idea that we will certainly consider. Thanks for the feedback!
One of the most splendid submission in regards of the art style! I am totally in love with it and the fact that it’s a mixture of Pokemon Ranger and Okami makes it even more lovely for me. This game got so much potential; I can very well imagine a fully fleshed out commercial version of it with the protagonist wandering through drawn worlds and learning more abilities on its way - please keep up the astonishingly great work! you did a fantastic job there!
Thank you so much for the high praise! We also can’t help but imagine a fully fleshed out version, so hopefully we will find the time and motivation to expand on it after the jam!
I experienced a very satisfying arc over the course of my playthrough - I don't know why but I was very very not good at capturing enemies inside my loop at the start. I understood the mechanic but couldn't put it into practice. But slowly I got the hang of it and then more and more I found different techniques to get numerous enemies at once - and honestly the fact that a unique mechanic like quill loops provided me with that arc is a great sign of a creative mechanic - you should explore it more!! Great great job with the art as well!!
That’s so awesome to hear! We definitely wanted the mechanic to have enough depth to let the player feel themselves improve over time, so hearing your story arc is super validating :)
Very cool concept. I personally don't think you needed that dialogue choosing option at the beginning hehe, didn't add much, probably time better spent on gameplay/balancing. But the concept is very cool - there's another game on a similar concept I've seen in this jam but that one was a "meditative" experience while this is very very frantic! The ink worked great visually as well, and while it took me a while to get used the mouse controls, it worked very well after it hit!
Oh, do you mean the “looks like you’ve been here before, do you want to skip the opening dialogue” option? To be honest, we added that mostly to save our own time during playtesting and reduce friction for players who wanted to play through the game again. It only shows up after you have gone through the opening once, so it’s really just to save time for our most dedicated players :)
Unless you meant the dialogue choices in general, in which case, yeah, it probably wasn’t the highest priority, but we felt like it would be fun to have a little bit of control over your character even during the “cutscene”.
For the similar concept game, are you talking about “The Geometry of the Mind”? That one was definitely neat, but yeah, very different vibes haha
Glad you liked the controls once you figured them out. There’s definitely a learning curve, but we think it feels good once you get it.
Oh, I meant the latter. In general.
And yeah - "Geometry of the Mind" was the game. Same concept, plays very different. Both great stuff!
Really fun concept and a great execution, all art is so nice and the enemies are all well animated, the presentation is super well done and the game is very fun you should all be proud! Great submission!
Thanks so much for all the kind words!
I loved the game, it was quite novel and the art is beautiful, especially the ink shader. I did find the controlling of the ink pen to be a bit unreliable from time to time, but you can group enemies and perform swift kills instead of getting fancy. It would've been great if some sort of upgrade system was implemented between the scenes so the ink would last longer, but that would probably make it less challenging. Great submission in any case!
Thanks so much! Glad you liked all the art and the ink shader, we were very happy with how that turned out. Yeah, the throwing is definitely challenging, and we had some ideas to tweak it further but ran out of time to implement them. We iterated so much on the way that felt, haha.
An upgrade system would definitely be cool, but we spent so long getting the base mechanics working and feeling balanced that we ruled out the idea of doing any upgrades in favor of getting it all polished up. Definitely something to consider for possible future work though!