itch.io

Thank you for the kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed our game!

Eventually, there's certain character / event interactions in locations depending on which items you give away :D Thank you for playing our game!

Hi Chris! Thank you for playing our game. I'm glad that you've summarized the narrative / message of the game perfectly! I'm glad that it could come across in the story despite of all its bugs and unfinished goodness.

A visually stunning game. I love that this game's art style is similar to those of ancient Greek black figure pottery. Some of the player movement, to me, wasn't very intuitive and a bit clunky at times, but I can see a lot of inspiration from games such as Spiritfarer and TGC's own Sky: COTL.  The worldbuilding is very interesting!

Visually strong, very clear style and direction. My thoughts reflect others who've commented on this page in that there would be many parts that I explored but didn't trigger any dialogue. More elements to the exploration would have been nice - or to limit the traversal areas and guide the player down more through the world.

Audio-wise, for an open world game, it would have been nice to delve into some spatial audio to place different types of ambience throughout the level. It was especially tiring to listen to a wash / white noise for most of the beginning area of the game. Great work nonetheless!

Yes!! This game was so fun and so whimsical. Very strong art direction here, and it's overall very cohesive. Thanks for breaking down this process! The character design definitely shines through with their personalities and nuances.

The general vibe of the game is great! The jumping, as some other users have said, is definitely clunky, but I know that player movement is difficult to optimize. In general, I wish you could modify the camera sensitivity - I definitely got a bit motion sick from how sensitive the camera was with the mouse.

Hi guys! I'm an audio designer and composer who wants to see the breakdown of some of everyone's proudest work in this game jam. I've especially got way too invested in creating a music system for our game that symbolically represents the player's interactions with the critters you meet. This jam was especially nice since I could take a break from audio design work and delve more into music in my time outside of work. Our team also was leaning into the storybook aesthetic, so media like Peter Rabbit, Wolfwalkers, My Father's Dragon, and other children's tales were a main source of our inspiration in both audio and visuals.

If you have any easter eggs or fun things you've included in your games, please share them! I love seeing people's workflows and thought processes from initial ideation to final. 

One of the first things we're addressing is revising and removing the crouch before and after the jump so that the player gets immediate feedback. We're working hard to optimize the player control and platforming as well!

Our Mouse has seen the horrors and has been in the trenches...for sure...

Great that you mentioned the contrast issue between the ground and background. In layout, it was really clear differentiating between the layers, but we must have missed that when translating that into the final assets. Will make note of this! Some of the things are so clunky, but I'm glad you still got a great experience from our little game :D

Thank you! One of our highest priorities is adding UI guides and to optimize visuals for the polished release post jam. I've been fiending to play your game based off of the silhouette based visuals - I'm making time soon hopefully to get to playing it!

I do love great UI / UX design, we definitely should have prioritized UI more. One of the biggest priorities we have right now is having UI indicators and help in that first level of the game (the tutorial level), and we'll be tweaking the player controller to get a more natural feel to it. This was our artist's first time working on a game, and I'm glad you noticed the Ernest et Celestine inspo! Our goal for art was to go for a storybook aesthetic, which will be touched up on for the full release! Thank you for your feedback ^^

Thank you for playing! We tried to convey as much as we could about the game's concept even with the broken state of the game itself.

Ahhh yeah!! There were definitely dialogue bits to those areas where you could traverse to, but we ran out of time to implement those! It'll be in the full version after the jam! Also forwarded what you said abt the anim to our animator!

Visually unique. Definitely minimalist and solid gameplay loop. I do agree with the sentiment that it took a second for me to become familiar with the mechanics, but I really enjoyed the overall experience. Only teeny tiny nitpick is that some of the text is hard to read (the pink one against light background), but other than that, amazing!! I'm coming back every so often to see this garden (amazing replayability).

Forgot to actually post my team's game here. I composed the majority of the music three days before the jam ended, so sorry if it sounds a bit rushed! I think it was a total of seven (???) tracks for this game in the end. I wanted to included additive layers for different scenarios (music is different based on which animals you helped in our game, especially noticeable in later levels). I'm mostly a sound designer for work, but I avoided doing sound design for this one in order to avoid legal complications with management LOL. 

Most of my work in this game was figuring out what workflows work best for me in Wwise and interactive music, and it was nice taking a break from the actor mixer hierarchy for once. A lot of the music thematically also shares elements throughout the game, and each critter symbolically represents a different instrument (Tortoise = bassoon, Bat = marimba, Kiwi = flute, Mouse - harp). We on the dev team joked about it being a "my singing monsters" type music system, and it's really the best way to describe it. Our programmer, Dan, was also the sound designer for this project and was the one putting in audio tags into the engine itself, and saved us a bunch of time. We wanted to work outside our comfort zones for this jam especially for audio, and hopefully it's conveyed well in our game!


https://itch.io/jam/tgcxcoreblazer/rate/3629125

Loved your team's game so so much !!! Such a creative take on the theme with the core mechanic and it's visually stunning as well! 

Feedback on ours would be great - we didn't have time to finish a couple important story beats and including certain interactions, but we'll add them in a polished version after this jam is concluded!

https://itch.io/jam/tgcxcoreblazer/rate/3629125

God, I love that you guys delved into utilizing audio into the core game mechanic. I feel like with a lot of games whilst in the game design process, much of audio doesn't get as much attention as much as other disciplines, so this was a breath of fresh air for me! I love how you incorporated the microphone into the core mechanic of the game. Visually and audibly cohesive, this might be my favorite one so far that I've seen. (I'm biased, I'm an audio person) Very very creative interpretation of the theme and amazing execution! Minor nitpicks are just visual contrast overall could be upped for accessibility (or even having it as a toggleable option).

A heartfelt short story and creative interpretation on generosity. This game is visually stunning and I love the art style and how polished the game looks. I only wish that the music and sound design could have been pushed more to be more interactive and that you dug deeper into exploring "generosity burnout" further with gameplay mechanics.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to be able to open the mac build on my M1 Mac, but I'm going to get my teammates to play this one! This looks super cute!

I loved that this game was a snapshot into the lives of this family that we as the player are introduced to. There are so many interesting details on the immigrant experience, going home, etc all the whilst being in the perspective of a child who's blissfully ignorant to the "adult issues" being discussed. The gameplay felt very fitting for the context, and is a realistic and nostalgic portrayal of day-to-day life. I wish elements of generosity were more deeply meshed into this snapshot conversation, but I love the narrative and the game's simplicity so much. Wonderfully done!

Our game tried to incorporate story as a key feature in its gameplay. You play as the Mouse, a hero coming home after his quest is concluded. You walk through his journey in retrospect and learn more about his endeavors as you go. We wanted to avoid our story from becoming self-sacrificing, which hopefully we conveyed in this short game. A lot of the story is going to be fully implemented in our polished version after the game jam's conclusion, but we're pretty proud of how much we did with this (...in one week... our mistake...haha)

My part in this specifically was story, level/game design, and music, where music plays a huge role in characterizing these critters (it changes based on who you help and who you don't help).

https://itch.io/jam/tgcxcoreblazer/rate/3629125

I completely understand how hard it is to make isometric movement feel less awkward! To answer your question on contrast, you could utilize complementary colors or play with saturation to have the text stand out and be more readable to the player while in gameplay. For the menu/movement instructions, you could up the contrast here have a dark multiply/overlay layer over gameplay, thus ensuring that the buttons can pop in comparison to the rest of the screen. Hopefully this clarifies a bit on my thoughts!

Yeah! I'm glad this helps - it's so easy to overlook some of these things when it comes to game jamming. I think even for my own game I didn't double check my entry/exit cues for a couple loops and messed them up. I believe it was the Wwise 2023.1.17. something update (some point.. I'm not sure) they added the feature where you don't have to have the tail baked into the audio file. Nowadays I just export the audio with the tail and dump it into Wwise and let it due its thing with the entry/exit cues. It makes sense that your team used the loop then tailless loop for the music, and I think it works pretty well! I haven't looked too deeply into audio programming directly into Unity, but there's quite a bit of documentation on building your own audio system in Unity. I suggest you look into them, they're really good reads if you want to nerd out a bit with systems (and breaking your game even more before successfully implementing it).

We really wanted to make a stretch goal to add UI indicators to accompany some of the abilities, but due to time we weren't able to get that done before the end of the jam. Same with the different mouse anims, which would have needed to be redrawn for all actions. We definitely could have made our lives easier by starting with a blank mouse anim and then adding individual accessories based on how many he had, but I fear we didn't catch that soon enough. 

Thanks for the really good feedback, and for catching that bug as well! I noticed that bug appears sometimes through playthroughs (I'm still not sure what causes it to glitch), but we'll add that to the known issues section of the page.

This sounds great! I'm not 100% sure how many tracks are supposed to be in this, but I've got some technical notes (since subjective notes often are up to preference)!

Make sure the music loops seamlessly (I assume that it's supposed to loop). I might be wrong guessing on this, but it might be a file issue as well if the music files are mp3. (in case this helps other ppl) Mp3 files often have a tiny gap at the start of the file, which is why wav is more commonly used. Using audio middleware and such would alleviate some of those issues as well! Composition wise, some more variation in the chord progression and motifs would have been nice to see! Overall, the music accomplishes its purpose throughout the gameplay and elevates the vibes.

Loved the flappy bird-like controls! The low-poly style of the game fit the theming and overall vibes of the art style. The theming kind of felt more self-sacrificing than generosity at its core. Overall, I love the gameplay loop! Amazing job!

Great art and amazing character anims! UX-wise, there's some work to do, but I read below that you're planning on developing this into a full game. The interface and controls are not very intuitive, like somebody else had said. My issues with UI can be simply fixed with some contrast between the buttons and the main gameplay. I wish you and your team the best of luck developing this in the future! Super stoked to see where this goes :D

The ecosystem encapsulates the theme very well! I liked the multiplayer aspect of the game. I do wish there was a bit more to the story and gameplay loop that could lean a bit more into the theme. I love how you've done the UI and art! The loop itself, because it's puzzle-based and repetitive, you can really get in the zone and keep building. Excellent job!! This is so exciting!

We were distraught when we were a couple minutes late in submitting our game, but TGC was really generous and understanding of our situation. It's up now!

But yes, we're also aware that the area where you got softlocked is blocked, but we're working on making a more completed and (hopefully bugless) version of the game after this jam's concluded!

Hello! Wasn't able to get ours submitted to the jam in time but still wanted to share ours !

https://dryya.itch.io/homecoming