I never played the original. I avoided playing it while making this so that I wouldn't be tempted to copy ideas.
I really like the idea of multiple endings. It's something that's not hard to pull off development-wise but has such a nice way of acknowledging your actions as a player. Sounds like you enjoyed it too if you still remember the endings so clearly :)
I had a good time with this. Smart decision to have very simple art and spend the time on physics and gameplay mechanics. The sound adds a ton to the atmosphere.
I wasn't able to reach the final island... my bote just kept tipping over. Even when I moved all the way to the opposite side, at slow speed... it still tipped! That felt unfair.
I feel like there are 3 main ideas explored with this: navigating, balancing and steering. Navigating and balancing are ramped up as you advance through the islands. Steering remains pretty constant (except for dodging the pre-pyramid obstacles).
I didn't care much for the balancing mechanic. I really liked seeing my bote react to my weight as I moved around ... but I didn't like getting tipped over. It felt too opaque as a challenge.
Personally I loved the navigating and steering. There's a real sense of magic when having a new destination and working out how to navigate there. If you kept ramping that up I would have loved to keep playing. Even with very basic art I could feel that sense of exploration evoking something in me. The steering was fun too, I would have enjoyed some dangerous obstacles along the way.
Thanks for the kind words. Great observation on the "peeing forces you to move close to obstacles", that was defn the intention.
Nice suggestion. I kept wondering about snuffle's and owners collisions, in the end I decided that it added a bit more challenge, so I kept it in there. However, based on your feedback I think it would have been even better to have "snuffles can bounce away the owner" as an upgrade path. That could lead to a fun way to push the owner away from obstacles and if it's locked behind an upgrade you'll feel it's earned.
Oh dear, that sucks. There must be some bug with unity's textmeshpro components on Web + Firefox + macOS. I'll try uploading a macOS build when I've got a moment later this week.
Thanks for the screenshot. Encouraging to see you managed to make some progress despise the terrible UI (or lack thereof)!
This covers my 2 main feelings while playing this too, that I kept missing beats even thought it seemed like I was hitting them and that I would have loved to have more chances to just watch the dancer groove out. Maybe some solo/freestyle sections?
I like the other-worldly nature of destroying UFOs as a snail.
I found it quite difficult to destroy those UFOs accurately because of the wobbles in the movement after releasing myself. I felt like I was able to aim quite accurately but then launching would quite different from my aimed direction and I would miss my targets.
Wow, there's sooo much content in this for a jam! Amazing work.
One thing that almost stole the experience from me, and I hope other players don't have the same problem... After entering my name and being asked if I was happy with my hat, I said no. Then the button to accept name had disappeared and I wasn't able to continue. I had to fully remove the name and then type it in again.
Also when I eventually entered my name as "bob" that didn't work. I had to use "Bob" (case-sensitive). I was a bit confused initially and almost gave up, thinking that it might have been the joke that the whole-game is in the character creation... and there was no other content.
I'm not saying this to criticise, just so that other folks don't get stuck at the same points and give up early, missing the rest of this experience.
The voice narration added so much for me, gave this sense of gravity to the whole setting.
Did you have the whole loop in-mind early on or were you just riffing on stuff during the jam?
Thx for the notes. Glad you liked the sound design. Honestly, I had very little time for this jam and I was on the verge of submitting without any audio. Thanks goodness someone convinced me to add audio because I think it elevated the whole experience. You're totally invited to our next audio recording session :)
Nice to hear you felt the upgrades were balanced. My big question with this jam was "what's the min number of meta upgrades required to feel a progression loop?" There are 6 types of upgrades with 3 levels each in this, I think that's enough to get that progression feeling. Maybe just 4 types would have been enough. I also think having more visual changes with each upgrade would go a long way. For example one health upgrade idea was "helmet"... so the owner would get a construction helmet and that would take 1 hit and fall off before the owner starts taking damage. That's effectively the same as adding an extra hit of HP worth in an upgrade, but visually it changes things up.
"edge of the forest/property had a fence or something" - totally agreed! I was going to add a water body around there but just guided myself to spend the time on meta-related stuff instead.
oh no typo! If you can recall where you saw it, I can go fix it :)
You asked about "making a larger game"... I think that's such a good question and I try to ask it of every jam. I feel this is a good candidate for a game "going surreal". I imagine Snuffle's could randomly stumble upon all these super-weird-yet-powerful technologies (slowing time, gravity fields, deadly lasers, portals, etc) and it's funny to imagine the pooch using them to just amass more truffles while society is clearly collapsing around it.
Haha, this is a wicked cool idea for a location & world. I felt myself wishing I could get to my room and see what life is like here.
I like where you're going with the art style too. Like Michell pointed out below, there's some small tweaks that could help it be easier to read ... but I think ultimately this style could be quite endearing in a larger experience.
Oh yeah, like others I really enjoyed the animations in this. Even more than the player character's animations I really liked the projectiles swirling in the orbs once they're activated.
Did you click and hold the left mouse button for longer than 1 sec? I'm wondering if there's something else that may be wrong. Do you have your mouse buttons inverted in Windows?
I'm really enthralled with this, although I couldn't get past level 2.
The curvy mechanic and that super-juicy gif got me interested immediately.
I gave this 3 tries, the first one without any context and the latter 2 after reading the tips and hints on this page. All 3 times I just couldn't get past level 2 (the darker level).
Totally agree with Eltucke that the sound design adds so much to this. Every shot feels impactful.
Control-wise movement felt great (I played with an xbone controller). I've never felt that type of control before in a FPS and being able to control crouch height is such a neat idea. Hopping from spot-to-spot also felt intuitive.
My big struggle was with curving bullets intentionally. The "fire on release" tip helped a bunch, I was able to start curving stuff regularly ... but was never able to properly control my curves. I found that relying on the spring / bounce was too hard to time and so most of the time I just played with holding down right click (to keep the dot locked) and using left click releases to try attain curves I wanted.
I kept wanting to try an alternative control scheme: 1) no swing / bobbing, so no need for right click AND 2) firing on left-click down (using mouse motion up until that point for curving)
