Skip to main content

On Sale: GamesAssetsToolsTabletopComics
Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines

Festus

103
Posts
1
Topics
19
Followers
11
Following
A member registered Nov 17, 2018 · View creator page →

Creator of

Recent community posts

(1 edit)

One of the better entries when it comes to managing tension.

My only issue is that the controls (the looking around part of them) have some really unintuitive conditional checks, which resulted in me trying to look around in places I should naturally be able to, but the game wasn't letting me. This also makes managing the monster more difficult than it should be.

Hello! Congrats on making a functional product under time pressure :).

Here's an idea for extending gameplay: the player has no real decisions to make, so there's no tension in the gameplay. Introducing limited resources and different tradeoffs to using them will increase the complexity of the game and will make the player experiment, learn and handle dilemmas.

Say there's limited time - the host is defending against you, and you won't live long unless you do something about it. Also, you can only infect three times. In addition, the infected entities will spread the infection when they touch another one. 

Now the player has to observe the trajectories of the entities in order to figure out if they will intersect with another one. More so, now the player needs to decide if he wants to spend time to get into a better position, to spend his infection charge in a more effective manner (on an entity that has a greater potential of infecting more times), or would they rather prioritize time and infect sooner. 

Nothing too hard to implement, but you give the player something to chew on.

Here's a fun read that talks about decisionmaking in games: "Players Making Decisions" by Zack Hiwiller. Good luck in your gamemaking journey :).

This is well done and polished. Definitely one of the strongest entries in this jam!

This is more or less how the game was planned  - to be divided between combat and preparation phases, where you'd talk to the survivors to try and figure out if anyone's infected. This was way over scope and got cut - it was like delivering two separate games.

Thank you for playing, the kind words, and we're glad you enjoyed it!

Great writing for a game form that's very well scoped for a jam. The mood sits somewhere between Cultist Simulator and darker Disco Elysium moments, and I really dig it.

One nitpick - the click-and-click-again UI choice for the brain pin really threw me off and I thought my input wasn't working. Some clearer highlighting would've helped; drag-to-place also would've been okay, since that was my first instinct.

I really like the fading light idea, but we probably wouldn't be able to implement that - Unity's forward renderer caps per-camera visible lights at 8, and we have a lot of lighting going on - the flashlight, muzzle flashes, turned survivor highlights, player highlight... we're probably at the limit. Don't have enough processing power on WebGL to try to remedy that with a clustered forward renderer.

We actually had an entire management layer part of the game, where lighting was a concern, but we scrapped that at the beginning of the second week - not enough time.

Thanks for playing!

Ha! Your game was the first in my queue, and I had a real bad deja vu :P

Thanks for playing! We've had survivors turn very reliably in testing, so you were probably just very (un)lucky. Every time a survivor is downed they get a stack of infection. During combat, every 15 seconds each stack executes a 10% chance to transform the survivor - so the chance compounds fast.

I've left the weapon on semi-auto, because it was way more satisfying to pair the mouse clicks with meaty sounds of impact. I also feel it adds tension to the combat. The game is short enough for this to not be very straining. Had we managed to squeeze some sort of weapon handling/reloading mechanic in, I'd likely go for automatic fire.

Good idea and great execution - one of those rare games that achieve a lot with very little :).

I got permastuck on the 3rd floor - recovered the book and read the journal, yet there was nothing to interact with in the bathroom. Checked the browser console for errors, but there weren't any. Oh well.

The layered music is a nice touch, but it goes out of sync after a few minutes, probably thanks to the web build.

I would've loved some hints about controls, because it cost me a lot of mashing to find the keys for changing and closing open documents.

Good entry, rated highly.

A very complete entry. The character controller is finely tuned, I like how deploying the balloon takes into account existing velocity, instead of immediately yanking the character upward, it adds to the skill ceiling. 

One thing I'd request would be making the death/restart sequence skippable or much shorter, including the screenfade. Sometimes I died a lot at the start of a level, and I was watching the animation about as much as playing. I'd prefer to just immediately respawn.

Fun puzzler - got stuck in the secret room 5, solved the puzzle, then tried to connect the boxes, or do something with the symbols, but nothing got me through.

Feature request: I'd love for the portals that launch you to have some kind of indicator of the direction you're going to be launched, that's visible from far away.

The controls were a bit too floaty, but other than that it's a very solid entry.

Hey! Sorry to hear you had problems. The FOV is reasonably high - 85 deg vertical. I think it's the lens distortion effect that's giving you the most trouble. The default Unity shader for that is rather bad and I've always had trouble adjusting it to not screw with screen edges, but I didn't expect it to cause motion sickness. That's the unfortunate part of doing VR dev daily - you have no idea what causes motion sickness anymore, because you're so immune to it.

The video is private, so I wasn't able to have a look.

Thank you for giving it a try :).

Thanks for playing! The UI is definitely not where I wanted it to be, got the weapon and health indicators something like an hour before deadline.

"The past holds only dust"? So does the future! Damn!

Appealing little experience.

Best of luck - this is a great genre, but not an easy one to work in!

The animations really shine on this one, it's really rare to get hand animated pixel art during jams, well done.

My only gripe is that the gunplay doesn't feel great - it's alright and works, but could really use some particle systems, camera shakes, and a little more "oomph" on the audio side of things.

Made it to the end, but the last puzzle was hard to figure out even with the hint - the train of thought behind it wasn't very obvious. Had fun overall, the puzzles weren't too hard, just enough for a game jam :).

I'll add my two cents: with a music loop that short, it'd be useful to intertwine it with silence or ambient sounds. The distances between boxes and buttons can get really long, and that just makes the player wait while holding a key, perhaps smaller but more complex puzzles would solve that.

The spritework was very pleasing to the eye, and I liked it.

Good looks, servicable sounds and UI, but (for me) it was barely playable. I'll be blunt:

It's *slow*. Takes too long for the character to traverse, takes too long for enemies to complete their turn. I'd like to make meaningful decisions, but there aren't any to make for the first few turns, and I end up staring idly at the screen. This would be hard to swallow for a full production, it's even worse during a game jam, where there's dozens of games to go through, and if a game doesn't give the player something to act on right away, it's going to suffer in ratings.

In my eyes it needs a few breadcrumbs in the beginning, snappier movement, and speeding up turns of invisible enemies.

I do applaud attempting to make a tactical (and functinally complete) turn-based game during a jam. There's a ton of systems to make in a short span of time. Kudos.

Thanks for playing and the kind words :). Where did you get lost, was it the little path to the canyon?

Thanks for playing! I did make the tank faster than planned, just so you could traverse the map faster when trying to find your way.

Thanks for playing and the detailed review! What would you say was weird about the lighting (did you play with low detail, maybe?)?

Glad to hear it, thanks for playing!

Not sure what the aim of the game was. I saw the frog popping back up every few spirits, but the dialogue didn't seem to lead anywhere. Visuals and sounds were nice.

Thanks for playing! My initial idea was to make the gameplay fast, but the target prediction algorithm I wrote was way too effective no matter how much noise I introduce into it :P.  So I just scattered more repair points around :D.

Happy to hear you had a good time, mission accomplished :).

There was a bunch of voiced dialogue that emphasized the isolation part, but didn't make it in before the deadline.

It's surprisingly moody for how short and simple it is!

The game looks very good, unfortunately the very narrow FOV makes it unpleasant to play - had to put it down before I could finish. Sounds are nice, could play with reverbs a little bit for additional effect.

Quite a surprising attempt at fitting several games into one. Unfortunately I wasn't able to progress the second part - I couldn't get any fuel despite hitting the marked point dozens of times. Shame - the game got me curious.

Beautiful spritework! I did not have any sound or music on both Firefox or Edge, though.

Reminds me heavily of Amiga games of the early 90s, both in music and presentation. Could use some more mechanics to keep it interesting. Good effort!

Very well made, I have practically no complaints (and I'm a notorious nitpicker, so that's something). The game is well scoped and everything works nicely in tandem to deliver a quick fun experience.

I appreciate the tooltips explaining what everything does. A quick overlay saying what is expected of the player would be a good addition, too.

I couldn't find an explaination of how and why there are more traps spawning - is it a function of time, or money spent on a particular lane? It made investing money a bit confusing.

The little twist with substituting jumping for climbing is a great twist, and forces the player to think about the playing space in a completely different way, I like it a lot. My only complaint would be that the climbing controls are a bit uncomfortable with the direction switch.