itch.io

The rules say we must make "...intimate and personal video games based on real lived-in experiences." How closely do our games need to follow our personal experiences? Could we also base it off of the personal experiences of someone close to us (with their permission of course). How far into fiction can our game's story go?

If you are ever interested in coming back to this game and improving on it, I found the following bugs:
I also ran into a visual glitch where my game screen flickered from the gameplay to a black screen very quickly. It started at the word jumble game. In another playthrough, this occurred when I selected the book in the top left multiple times. My guess is that it is a problem with switching between menus or screens.

The continue button on the main menu is a bit broken. Pressing it lets you spawn in with all of the medals and knowledge you've learned, along with all the rooms you have unlocked,  but the game forces you to go through all of the introductory dialogue and tutorial prompts, and it respawns every clickable item in every room.

I like your games and your commitment to education, so I would love to see this game in an improved state! :)

It's a cool game that teaches about sound, but from what I played, I didn't see any connection to rare diseases. Also, considering I have seen this same game on multiple other game jams, and it has been disqualified on others, I am inclined to believe that this game wasn't made for this game jam or for rare diseases. It is a well-made game though! The UI is clean, and the minigames are well suited for younger children. I did run into a bug where I got stuck in a dialogue loop: every time I pressed the button to go to the next dialogue, it repeated the same dialogue. Besides that, good game, just not very relevant to this game jam.

It's a neat game, but it looks like it does not fit the jam requirements

Did your game have anything to do with rare diseases? I'm not a judge, but looking at your submission, I don't think it had much to do with rare diseases or the other theme

The collisions are pretty buggy, but it's a cool game

Just confirming, is our pitch allowed to have video editing? ie cuts, gameplay footage, etc

If we are accepted as top 8 for the first deadline, when will we film with the judges, and when will we know if we are top 4 (and get the 1k for development). In asking bc the 1k will greatly affect my development pipeline, but only if I know I have it earlier on

Yume Nikki was actually one of my inspirations :)

I think you make the video and submit that through the submissions

The controls say you have to press 'enter' to submit a word. Hope that helps!

I'll try to find the time to play it again. It's cool that you have this extended content!

If you were to ever revisit making the game, I'd suggest putting information about Hair Cell Leukemia earlier in the game, or at least mentioning that it is involved. I thought I was just fighting a 'rare disease,' but the fact that you have taken initiative and inserted a specific disease is something that should be specified sooner. You could maybe mention Hairy Cell Leukemia in the itchio description so that judges know

I thought I left a comment here, but ig I forgot to post it.

The game's really good! The AI is fun to talk to (the AI was the highlight imo; my favorite chatbot in the whole gamejam. It is very funny), and the minigames are pretty good. I got softlocked on 'leap of faith' tho and was not able to exit the minigame. I had fun tho!

I had left more specific feedback in my original comment but I forget the feedback since I played so many games. Oops!

Thanks for making such a great game! I hope you do well in the game jam. I just finished playing all of the real submissions, and your game along with one or two others stuck out to me, so I think you have good chances.
Out of all the games, yours was definitely the one I spent the most time playing lol. It's a lot of fun. 

GL!

I think the games are required to be in English, but I may be wrong.

The video kept freezing, and I'm fairly sure it's from a TV show or something. If so, you need to credit it in the credits at the very least. Otherwise, it's a breach of copyright.

The way you were able to 3D map a room was cool though!

Sam is stretchy

Really good game! Despite being short, the gameplay loop was actually enjoyable and the right balance between challenging and possible. I also liked the music, and how the game itself taught you abt the disease. Not much to critique! Good job!

The game was really cool! The talking with AI was fun (I may or may not have gaslighted them), though I had some trouble diagnosing the patient. The doctor also moves too slow imo, but the artstyle is nice and concise.

Like GM637, I also had to turn up my volume a lot to hear the sfx. The process of diagnosing was good gameplay loop.

Overall, good job! GL!

This is an incredible game, but gameplay is impossible for English speakers. While some text translates to English, the conversation, the part that actually gives the information you need for gameplay, is not translated from Chinese, so it can only be played by Chinese speakers. It looks gorgeous and incredible though.

It's a cool game, but there's not much rare disease awareness.

This is a really cool game, and the art style is very beautiful.  I don't see how it covers the themes of rare disease awareness and AI, though.

I would also recommend having a way to clear your drunkenness. I thought the mechanic was really cool, but then I could not figure out what I was saying and kept choosing answers that insulted people or lowered confidence on accident.

Is it called DiseaseLand or DiseaseLab? You have both written in different places.

Overall, it was fun! I did not encounter any bugs, and I was able to get through all of the minigames. However, the archery game was very finicky and tedious. These games also felt a bit disconnected from the theme of diseases, but they were fun nonetheless

It looks cool, but it is too much reading and not enough incentive for me to figure out how the game works. If I had more time I might have delved deeper into the game, but putting a steep learning curve at the beginning is a huge deterrent for new players.

It does look cool though! I enjoy games with manual-style mechanics, like 'Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes'

This is a cool game with a cool story, but I have some critiques:

- The movement is painfully slow since you can only move one square at a time. Combine that with slow dialogue, and the game feels extremely tedious

- Using pixel art is great, but different assets have different pixel sizes and look incoherent

- Never expect your player to remember something on their own. When the old man gave those instructions, I remembered everything up to playing the piano notes, but then I forgot where the gate was. And I did not want to search for the gate since movement was so slow.

Besides those critiques though, it's cool!

I got a score of 342.

The movement felt fun to skirt around in, but you could build up too much momentum and go off camera. 

The mechanic for eating is also a little clunky imo. The virus bits would seem to grow and shrink randomly, and sometimes I would press the eat button and it would not eat. This made getting a good score basically impossible.

Besides that though, good game!

342

Cool game! Having a leaderboard for competition is also a great way to keep people invested.
My only big critique is that the level generation was not balanced. I would have levels where I could walk straight to the exit, while other levels would require building three bridges to get the pickaxe and then sprinting to the opposite edge of the map to open the exit. Also, a tree would sometimes overlap with a boulder, making me think I could reach the exit when I could not.

The retro art style is really nice, but the screen can feel cluttered, and it's weird that the pickaxe is not revealed at the very start of a level.

Other than these things, this is a pretty cool game! GL!

It's a cool game with lovely atmosphere, but I don't think it's about rare diseases, and I don't see any inclusion of AI

It's a cool concept, and I was able to get a score of 90. I think the sound system is bugged though. I kept getting error sounds and the music was cutting in and out.

As it should be, the artwork is very beautiful. I know you told me that shaders are doing all the heavy lifting, but to the player, it doesn't matter why the art is beautiful, just that it is. You outdid yourself with the art.

As you already mentioned, there's some glitches and bugs, so I'm not going to point those out unless you want me to. My only other critique is that I do not know what the objective is. The counter makes me think I need to collect data, but I do not know how.

Besides that and the bugs, awesome game!

As GM637 already said, after a while, my framerate wants to crawl into a corner and die. It's a cool game though! It wasn't clear what rare disease it was raising awareness for, though

Really cool concept! I like how you made the rare disease a main mechanic, while also adequately describing it and its treatments. A little feedback:

- The continue button after you beat level 2 takes you back to level 2 instead of to level 3. I thought you were reusing levels until I realized the button was broken.

- The puzzles are cool, but the use of enemies that move on their make it too hard to be enjoyed. It would be better if the enemies moved when the player moved, much like 'baba is you' or something like that. By doing this, the player has more control and does not feel like the game is screwing them over.

- The difficulty curve is pretty high. The first two levels mostly require focusing one one orb while making sure the others are not softlocked, then moving on to the next. After that, things got very complex, and with only two eyes yet four screens, it became overwhelming. I'd recommend starting with maybe just 2 'personalities,' then slowly scaling up to four so that the player does not get overwhelmed.

- The music is very quiet. I thought there was no noise at all until I read the description.

Besides these errors, it's a great game! The system has a lot of potential for more puzzles if you ever return to it.

It's a very relaxing game with nice sound design. The robots are cute.

I would recommend putting a note in the description encouraging people to play in fullscreen mode. I was not playing in fullscreen mode, and the edges of the screen were cut off, and I did not realize that fullscreen would fix this until the second-to-last level.

Overall, very good! I liked it <3

It's a neat game with cool pixel art, but I am not really sure what to do. After the first area with the vending machine and the first lesson, I went through the door and my lessons counter reset to 0. I continued through the maze of doorways but I could not find anything else to interact with. I did find some things like desks, computers, and someone in a blue outfit, but I could not interact with them. idk if I accidentally sequence broke the game or if I found a bug, but I was at a loss for what to do and closed the game. Which is a shame, bc I liked what I was seeing so far before the problems occurred.

It's a cool endless runner game! The inclusion of a tutorial is nice. It took a lot of trial and error to figure out that you have to click on the items you bring into a run with your mouse to activate.

The symbolism section of your description feels a little shallow, and I feel like your game would be fine without that part of the description. This may not be the case, but that section makes it feel like you are grasping at straws to make sure that rare disease awareness is in your game, so you wrote that up. 

There's a mistake in the code that will sometimes spawn two overhead obstacles at such a distance between each other that it is impossible to initiate a second slide before hitting the second one.

Overall, cool game! It's well polished. I just wished I learned more about rare diseases

Cool game! The mechanics are really neat, and it reminds me of some old mobile games I used to play, so extra nostalgia points lol.

There's not much to say in terms of critiques. The difficulty spike at day 4 prevented me from passing, and the music can get repetitive, but other than that, it's a pretty good game. I just wish I actually learned something about rare diseases. I don't feel like I gained any awareness about a disease, but it's a fun game!

Cool game! I'm always a fan of vaporwave aesthetics, and it was cool the way you incorporated the diseases into the game. Here's some feedback:

- Driving the car is very difficult. It drifts at high speeds even though the space bar is supposed be drift, and I'd find myself crashing or turning on accident frequently

- I wish there was a checkpoint system so that you did not have to go all the way back to the start when you died. The lack of checkpoints is what made me quit.

- The diseases have really cool visual effects, but it would be even cooler if some of them affected gameplay.

- The world should freeze when the player opens the status window. There would be multiple times I would open the window to read abt the disease and either drive off the edge, crash, or lose the speed required to clear a jump.

Overall though, it was fun, the way you implemented the diseases was really cool

This was a fun game. The intro cinematic kept me engaged and was easy to read, and the art style is very nice (I am a personal fan of low poly). The gameplay is also nice and simple. My only gripe is that I feel like I learned more about service dogs than rare diseases, but other than that, I enjoyed it :)

It's a cool game with a cool concept. I like the art too! It's simple but pretty. However, I did get stuck on lvl 3, as I couldn't position the character correctly to get the jump onto the high platform. I also have trouble speaking clearly, so it took multiple tries to get the AI to understand my input when I spoke, which is a shame, considering how cool the movement-by-speaking system is. It just wasn't able to understand me well, I guess. :/

Fun! I'm not good at racing games, but I enjoyed this. The cars were fun to drive around, and the racing was pretty difficult. Here's some critiques:

- The vision reduction did not change gameplay much since it only dimmed the brightness of the screen, if you wanted the vision reduction to affect racing, you could have a vignette effect where the edges of the screen get dark and black until you can only see a small portion of the screen. This would make the need to get vision back greater.

- I am not very good at racing, so I was coming in 4th or 3rd when I tried to race normally. However, the blue barriers leave gaps in the race track, allowing for easy shortcuts and easy victory.

The artstyle is really nice as well. Good job!