itch.io

That's a very extensive cave system for something made in two weekends, which I think made scope grow way too much, especially since it seems you also did your own music. Cutting the size in half and spending more time on rounding out the experience would likely be more satisfying both for you and the players - even at the price of having to put a "This is a dead end, couldn't make more" sign after a few rooms (like I did :p).

You got a lot done in a tiny amount of time, kudos for that :).

Thank you so much for the kind words, I'm glad you had a good time :).

Continous digging was planned as an upgrade, but I had to cut it last minute, as the jam was ending :D.

Really well done with a bunch of functional mechanics. Cool use of the facerigged model.

Jumping on the dough to knead it, and then being told to not do anything weird with it right after floored me :P.

This is a solid entry - a complete story with a bunch of mechanics and environments. I liked the writing - it dealt with heavy subject matter without being corny. Well done! 

(I had a minor gripe with choppy camera movement, especially visible when strafing - I imagine your character controller's running on a fixed tick?)

Thumbs up for original hand-drawn art!

Hey, thanks for playing!

There's no real consequence for staying in the dark - I didn't think killing the player and forcing a replay was going to be fun in this short of a game, after all how many times can you dig through the same pile of mud?

The rock lifts the gate in that room :). It's initially closed, might've missed it in the dark. 

There are two upgrades - one for speed and one for digging radius. They both aren't on the main path, but aren't very hidden either. A red glow gives them away.

Thank you!

I might, but even if that doesn't happen, I'll keep using the digging system for other stuff :).

Thanks for playing! 

Very reminiscent of Dishonored 2's "A crack in the slab", which I loved as a level. I really wanted there to be more!

I really liked the aesthetic, it's straight from the late 90s.

I'm glad you... dig... the game.

Thanks for giving it a try :).

Thank you! It was my fouth attempt at making a digging system, the previous three were complete failures :D. 

I appreciate the very subtle incorporation of the theme ;).

Very enjoyable. I've spent an inordinate amount of time playing Uplink 25 years ago, so perhaps I have a soft spot ;).

Boy, I'm gonna sound like an old rambling man, but here goes:

The font choices are questionable. I can barely make out what any of the text says. 

The fading lights are not done in a way that maintains tension - there's no immediate or indirect danger, but the player has his sight taken away every few seconds, and that makes traversal frustrating rather than tense.

The game doesn't make it very clear what it wants from the player. To gather resources? To just go forward? There's a crafting station early, but there's seemingly no use for it. Do I stay and look for more resources that are hidden? I feel like that works to the detriment of a gamejam game, where people only give it a few minutes unless they're really hooked.

I did laugh at the pizza slice, though.

Very good - visually coherent with good audio and doesn't overstay its welcome.

I have to admit I got stuck right away and couldn't figure it out. Walked all over the map, but couldn't find the items needed to proceed. Hoped I could at least row the lake boat with a plank, but that wasn't it.

I liked the artstyle, the controls, the nicely done UI, and the rope shortcuts :).

I have no idea what I'm supposed to achieve - I've made scratches and died instantly a few times, another time I've scratched away all the surface and moved the hand in circles for about 30 seconds before dying again, without anything else happening. 

I did like the use of IK here, you don't see that too often in jams :).

Thank you for the kind words :).

The player doesn't currently die - I've decided to only keep the player uncomfortable through the whispers instead of forcing to replay the game after death. If the game was longer, I'd probably make the darkness lethal and make some sort of checkpointing system.

Thank you for playing and the kind words! 

There are two additional Sporkmanship stones placed in the game world that upgrade both your digging speed (dig as fast as you click!) and radius - they glow red :).

Thank you for playing! I did have to cut some of the story, didn't have enough of the level to cram all the voicelines in without them feeling overbearing. There's the motif of the soul of the guardian slowly being eroded by the monster he's containing.

Also - you're eroding mounds of dirt with a spork, that's it ;).

Firefox doesn't seem to like the web build very much - try Edge if you encounter problems!

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 :).