itch.io

Good luck with your game!

Ya'll had a great push at the end for getting ratings. I was watching the number of ratings on games the whole jam and I was WAY in the lead until the last two days. (And yes I did play and rate yours.) Nicely done.

I never had time to come back and try your game after the bug fixes. Sorry. I ended up playing and rating 128 games during the jam. It's too bad you didn't get more reviews. What I did this jam was start playing and reviewing games early and often. I had something like 40 reviews in the first couple days. By the end I had 70, and I usually get about 12 in a jam.

I'm someone who got into the games industry when I was young, and was burnt out by it. I went and had a career in computers and raised a family. For me I'm doing this game jam to teach myself how to get a game out the door. I want to make money at it without stupid marketing people telling me what makes a video game sell. Because I want to make games that are fun and will hopefully make some money.

You're right about push-button crap and AI slop. So the only thing I can do is try to make bespoke games that are good enough that people will shell out some money to play them. And hopefully someday I will have enough money to pay a musician to create the game music I want.

As for my results, yes I got 12th in overall and music. But TBH, based on the comments I received I think my AI music hurt my scores in other areas. That, and not perfecting the gameplay a bit more. I'm currently halfway through writing a post jam article, and I think I my be copying large parts of my former reply into it.

Thanks. Glad you enjoyed most of it. :) If you read a few comments down I had a lot more to say on the AI music. I completely understand your feelings on it.

Glad you enjoyed it. :)

I got the ending level success theme from OpenGameArt.org but I forgot to save a link directly to the file.

That was a very immersive experience. The control support was excellent. It was nice to be able to use my gamepad.

I tried selecting the None options just to see if something else would happen but it didn't.

Definitely a creepy vibe. It's a good basis for creating a larger game experience.

That was a cute little game! Really nice art. The evil cackle was hilarious when you lost a heart. I love seeing Godot games!

The level change was a bit abrupt when you go the 10th candy. Starting on the left also meant you sometimes missed a candy on the right on a new level.

Solid little game!

I wanted the chorus of lyrics to sound like a nursery rhyme, like something that could be sung in sing-song voices during a double-dutch jump rope competition. "How many pieces did he steal? One! Two! Three! ... etc. That's why in the version where he sings to himself the main parts he remembers is the chorus.

That was an interesting experience. You told a story just through the TV. Well done. I survived the week!

There wasn't a lot of gameplay. I felt like I was just stuck on the floor waiting to see what happened. So it felt more like interactive fiction.

You made a full game loop and a win condition. Congrats!

Congratulations on your first finished game! I love seeing other Godot games in jams! I love tower defense games! I enjoyed the soundtrack you picked. Your aesthetics were good too. Felt like an old school CRT game.

I happened to pick my pumpkin up right before I got an upgrade, and when I selected the upgrade, the pumpkin was deleted. When I lost, the game just quit which was abrupt. It would have been nice if the towers prioritized static monsters closer to the bed or at least closer to them. I never got to experience the merge mechanic.

Nice job for your first finished game!

I downloaded and extracted the game folder in Windows. I ran TheRoad.exe and nothing happened. I also tried running it from the command line. I have python 3.13.3 installed on my system and you're using 3.13.9. Not sure if that was an issue. I didn't leave you a rating since I couldn't get your game running.

I appreciate your honesty, and the follow.

To be clear, the AI did not write the lyrics. I did. And in fact the main theme is the 8th version of the song that Suno created after much tweaking of the prompts until I got the song I wanted. I spent even more time on the one where Skele-Tom is humming to himself even though it's a cover of the original. That's not to refute any of your points, just to make sure you know that AI isn't that good. If you look at my response to @Crevlorne's post about 4 posts down from yours, I went into a lot of detail about my thoughts on AI-generated content and how I share some of your sentiments on it. (I spent like 40 minutes writing that post so I don't want to belabor my point here.)

Yes, the assets of my game are premade free assets. Except for some of the sound effects that I made using sound effect makers. But well, you had 5 people working on your game and I had one, and my computer caught on fire during the jam. (Which I talked about in the Skele-Tom Post Mortem DevLog.)

As of this writing, I've played and rated 126 games in the jam. I will say there are a few more stable games out there, especially 1-bit games that were smaller in scope. To your main point though, I think my ethical admission of using AI to create music is going to damage me in the overall results.

Again, I appreciate your honesty And I'm glad you seemed to have liked the game against your will. :)

Thank you! The Free Godot Engine Logo Redesigns were by StayAtHomeDev. I forgot to list that on my entry because I've been using them so long. I'm glad you enjoyed the intro and the "trick" mechanic I added and the game itself!

So I've been playing with the cape, and when Skelet-Tom jumps, it flaps through his head. The capsule on the CharacterBody3D doesn't affect it I think because most of the cape starts inside it. I tried parenting it to a smaller capsule on a different collision layer and that kind worked, but not totally. How did you deal with clipping?

This was an interesting game. The use of the TV as a positive helper in the game was cool. Definitely had a creepy vibe overall.

I could not figure out how to accuse/kill any one. I didn't know what the energy drinks were for. So everyone died even though I knew who it was. Could have used a better tutorial.

Well done aesthetics. The game has a lot of potential.

This was an interesting idea for a retro style cookie clicker. I thought your theme interpretation was interesting too.

It would have been nice if the font was larger. Even maximized, the upgrades were hard to read (in the web version at least). It ran a bit slow for me to want to finish the game.

This would make a good phone game.

This was an intense experience. The art and atmosphere were fantastic. It was like a combination of an old-school RPG and the experience of playing Half-Life or The Last of Us. I know the controls were meant to be hard, and so I persevered.

One of the problems I had was I couldn't re-read the notes. There was too much contained on that first note to digest and it took me a while to realize the buttons were also in the upper right-hand corner. The other issue was that I just got stuck and didn't know where to go. I got to the T in the corridor, turned left and nothing in that room. Turned right and dead end there. That's where I gave up. I also couldn't get the med kit to activate.

I would've loved to see a controller option, perhaps each stick is used to operate each wheel? Often when I was moving the mouse and I was going  horizontally I found myself trying to move the mouse in the direction of travel instead of straight ahead.

Overall really polished but I would've liked to experience more gameplay. Very fascinating world you've created.

Very well-done game. It reminded me a lot of Half-Life and that terror that engendered at times. I got two of the endings, cause the creature caught me before I made it to the top. Dark ending when you get up there. Really expansive world considering the entire game is on a ladder.

It would have been nice to have controller support.

The story was really good and it was an impressive vignette.

The concept was great. The sky looks amazing. Good choice of sound effects. Really nice use of the KayKit Space Base assets. It played like flappy bird on Mars with thrusters.

The animation at the beginning felt a little slow because the screen just sat there and I thought it was hung. The connecting screen was terminally long between levels and while atmospheric was REALLY painful considering how fast and how often I died. I could avoid anything but those damn large flying wind generators. I could not seem to avoid them. I don't think I ever got past 10%. It may be that I just flappy bird just isn't my game.

The game was really good looking for the part of it I saw.

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

The mouse offset issue was listed in the Known Issues on the game page. It has to do with projecting 2D Control nodes through a SubViewport into a 3D world. I talked about it in the Skele-Tom Post Mortem. I appreciate you mentioning it though.

I got a Cathorn! Definitely had a Pokemon/Tmagotchi feel.

The game could do with a tutorial. It would also help to have an XP bar to know how the min-games are affecting evolution. The inventory items did not seem to do anything.

This game has potential.

This was a fun game. My high score was 2,117. The music and SFX were good. Fun visuals. Cool player model.

The VFX for the bomb made it impossible to see inside. It would have been nice to have some idea what was going on as carpet bombing was the only way to stay alive. Would've been nice if there was a health mechanic.

Overall, fun experience.

Really nice art. Intense feel. The music was good and helped with the immediacy. I did manage to get to the end of the game. The killer TV was a creative interpretation of the jam theme.

The wall jump was difficult. Might've been easier with a controller. It would've been helpful if the wall jump pushed you away from the wall a bit. I also had to slow down often for the big TV to catch up so I could see the little TVs coming and have enough time to clear them.

Overall a pretty solid platformer.

The vibe was very dark and creepy. Good atmosphere. I got all the way through the android keycard area to the explosion.

I spent a lot of time turning around to use the lights on my back to illuminate what was up ahead because it was so dark. Maybe that was intentional?  A lot of walking to solve these puzzles. I think they could have been closer together. I'm not sure if falling through the floor forever after the explosion was intended to be the ending, but it was my ending. The game soft-locked, and I wasn't going to spend a bunch more time walking through the whole game again to see if there was another ending.

The game has a lot of potential.

Love seeing Godot games. This game was very artistic. The music choice, the color palette, and the choice to make the enemies sparkly fog. It even had dialogue choices which was cool. Along with the gameplay, it felt like an abstract deconstructionist art piece.

I got stuck in the trees for a while. I would not be able to move and then could somehow wiggle my way through. Then I got the reaper of souls but the black fog meant I fell to my death. Then I fought souls in the graveyard. It felt like in the game you were meant to die a lot? I beat them and fell off the edge of the world trying to move forward. Was it intentional that you had to die a lot to proceed?

It was a an interesting entry.

I love seeing other Godot games! The mechanic was neat and the sound was a really big help in anticipating jumps. The aesthetic was really nice.

The controls were rough. The W key for jumping is straining on my wrist. Also, while WASD is common and should be supported for jams, Godot makes it really easy to add the arrow keys as an option, and use of a gamepad. You could have up and spacebar, and the bottom action button on a gamepad all as jump options. And it'll take you only a minute or two to add that. The switches felt a bit slow in coming. I spent more of the time waiting for night to fall than I did jumping.

Well done for a first game jam!

I'm glad you enjoyed the game.

I appreciate your thoughtful response about the music and sharing your feelings. I knew being upfront about it could potentially tank my ratings. The indie game community is pretty anti generative-AI and I know this. In fact I used to be rabidly so. Then I ran into a cute little game with really good music in a Jam. In fact, it was the GameDev.tv Tiny World jam. So I decided to try it. I speak about this in my Eternal Echoes Pots Mortem DevLog. In there, I also talk about my mixed feelings. I've also had some very long discussions about it in the Godot forums. Including this week, an off-topic reply about generative-AI that sparked interesting discussion.

I don't want to put artists out of work. In this game jam, no musician lost out on money because I couldn't spend money on them to make music. Could I have found a music producer to do this for free in a week and make the song I envisioned, as well as two chiptune versions of the same track and a fourth version of the track with Skele-Tom humming it to himself? Maybe. My brother is a DJ and music producer, and we didn't have the time to do it together. And the fact of the matter is while the generative AI didn't perfectly recreate my vision, it was close enough for a game jam.

Sure, the generative-AI did a lot of work in literally seconds. But it wasn't like I took the first version it spit out. I wrote the lyrics to have a particular feel. I asked for a particular type of song, and it took a number of tries of me tweaking the lyrics and prompts to get what I wanted. I believe it was the 8th version I picked. I do not think I could have done that without my own (limited) musical training. I definitely know it wouldn't have been a banger if I'd chosen the first version. I literally tweaked the number of syllables in the verses and chorus to make it flow perfectly.

I've read discussions on music forums about generative-AI in general and Suno (the tool I used) in particular. One example was a songwriter who uploaded him singing and playing guitar to a song he was working on, and then using Suno to add a backing band to him so he could see what it sounded like. does that take away from other musicians? Maybe. But I wonder if there's a world between AI-slop and "pure" music where these tools can be used as creative tools instead of creativity replacements. One of the (amusing to me) things I've seen on Suno is people copyrighting their lyrics in song descriptions. Which misses the point of how generative-AI steals from musicians to work.

It's an ethical question that I have been pondering. I thought the courts were going to shut it down with the MidJourney AI lawsuit. When they didn't, I realized it was here to stay. So I'm wondering is there way to use it ethically. There are for example, ethical implications to using LLM AIs to help out in school. But students don't seem to care based on what I read. So do I become an old person who just won't change on principle? I honestly still haven't decided.

However one feels about it - I couldn't have made this game without the music. It would not have been nearly as good. I listened to it all week, over and over as I was testing levels, and I never got tired of it. I could have probably found a banger chiptune track for free, but I couldn't have put the story of Skele-Tom into it and gotten the feel I wanted for the game. And yes, it is in one way upsetting that it's so good. In another, as someone who always wanted to write songs but had the poetry but not the musical knowledge (not for lack of attempting to learn), it's been really fun to write songs just for me as a way to process and express my own feelings. And I see a lot of people on Suno doing the same thing. Processing heartbreak, loss, hurt, frustration, and celebrating love, happiness, excitement.

I do have opinions, but they're not fully formed. And I appreciate thoughtful dialogue with people on both sides of issues like this.

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!

I talk about it in my Skele-Tom Post Mortem DevLog. basically, my brother had a better video card sitting around and had been offering it to me for like a month. The first Saturday of the jam, we both had time and it should have been a quick upgrade. Instead, the card caught fire. It was like a candle flame size. The card, motherboard and power supply were ruined. We had to rebuild my whole computer from scratch with new parts.

The game had a good art style and I liked the puzzle aspect. Reminded me of a phone game you could spend a lot of time on.

I could not figure out the green arrow jump pads. They didn't seem to work. There was also no sound. Wasn't sure if there was a goal for the game.

The game has potential.

Cute game. I really liked how the UI showed each pumpkin outline and then filled it in as you collected each one. That looked really good.

There wasn't much to this game. I'm guessing it was just for the jump scare at the end?

Overall solid game.

I love seeing Godot games. This a was very creative cozy interpretation of the theme. I really liked the main menu music - nice and chill. Very creative to have three whole games inside your game.

The joystick was obscuring the health in the space game. I could not get past the first flower in buzzy bee, but I've never played flappy bird so maybe that was just me?

Very meta game.

Nice little bullet hell game. I was especially impressed with the screen turning off the way it did when you died. That was fire!

The intro of the channel switching was a bit too long. I had started to search the page below the game to see if I was hitting the wrong button to move it along. Would've been fun to get some upgrades too. That's one of the fun things I think about that style of game.

Solid game with a good game loop and nice presentation.

Old school art style. The monster was still creepy. Very interesting soundscape. And the instructions were delivered in a cool way. The art definitely took me back.

I do wish I could have clicked to advance the chat in the beginning. It went SUUUUPEEEEERRRR SLOOOOWWWW. Also, I thought he said you could throw the TVs with 'E' and I couldn't. So that sucked. I couldn't figure out what the goal of the game was either. Maybe I missed it in the dialogue?

You definitely created a creepy vibe. Well done.

That was a very surrealist experience. When the snake slid by the window, I was like, "Woah!" I liked that you were playing the game on an old TV in the game. But like you were also in the game.

I didn't quite get the scary thing showing up and almost catching me. And I wasn't sure if the game was over when I got out.

Still very impressive way to make a simple game much more interesting.

No worries. I do in fact think you deserved the rating I gave you. Trust me, I do not have a problem giving people 1-star ratings.

I find jams to be supportive, and I was just trying to make sure I came across as supportive. I work in software development for a living and have been reviewing code for years. I tend to be clinical and harsh in code reviews because it's not about feelings - just about getting work done. But in that situation the people I'm reviewing code for know me personally and know I'm not an asshole, and that I'm trying to improve their code and create what is needed for the final product.

The thing about game development that keeps me going is knowing that as long as it's fun for me - that's what matters. I usually score low in game jams. The best I've ever done was 20th place and that was for a game I spent a month on. But even though I wish I'd done better, I was really proud of what I had made. In my last game jam my game hardly worked and I didn't even get enough ratings to rank. In this one people have pointing out the same three things to me, and they were all things I knew about when I submitted the game. However despite the shortcomings, I'm really proud of what I managed in this jam.

And yes, that questioning has happened to me. I have learned that when I am upset to look at myself and why I'm upset. Usually it's either because they're pointing out something that I also think is true but don't want it to be true, or I am afraid of losing their good opinion. That's me anyway.

As to the wrong audience, this is really the first game where I made the gameplay central to my work. It was often non-existant or tacked on after making cool cutscenes, intros, or graphics. If you look at my Post Mortem for Prisoner 42 I spent way too much time applying pretty shaders to models the player never even gets to encounter because I forgot to put lights in tyhe dungeon and I had never done a shooter and my bullets didn't work. I like the intro though. and the first level isn't bad. After every game jam I'm in, I play the top like 20 to 30 games. And what I've learned is that gameplay matters more than anything else to voters in a jam. That's why I picked a platformer for this jam. I prefer RPGs with good story personally.

Thank you! That was a mechanic that developed during the jam as I realized I could use that to implement a "trick" mechanic.

Thanks for the comments. I'm glad you liked my "trick" mechanic.

Ok, so the car mechanic is in fact very hard as you have to nail it on the one frame, and this was my first platformer and I didn't really have time to figure out the jump buffer. I appreciate the advice. I will look into it. What I did do was place the cars in the first two levels so that if you jump at their rear bumper, your jump will be perfectly timed every time. In level 1 it's the fastest way to collect the candy. In level 2 it times the jump onto the trash cans perfectly. In level 3 and 4, you are then supposed to be primed to jump at the same time - which if you are at the bumper of the cars you will be flung up into the air to collect all the candy. This will also fix the camera issue you are having on level 1:4, because the candy to fix the camera is at the height of the second propelled jump. I have found that my psychological trick was not enough, and I need to spell it out. Or even better, fix it with a jump buffer like you said. Props for timing it though. That is HARD.

If you feel like trying the levels again, using the rear car bumpers to fling you into the air always gives me a lot of pleasure. Also, there's a mushroom on the ground for level 1:5 to help you time the jump so you can stay in the air. And warning, 2:1 ramps the level difficulty WAY up throughout the level.

I'm glad to hear you liked the music. Yes, it was created using AI, but I did put effort into creating something that I thought was a banger of a soundtrack and helped tell the story of the game through music. (On level 1:5 the soundtrack is Skele-Tom humming and singing his own theme song to  himself while he steals candy.)

Thank you so much for the kind words! I'm glad you found the song funny. I had a lot of fun making it very like fun Halloween-y.