5:11 and 35 deaths! I like the platforming, the cell division mechanic and moving platforms wasn't very innovative or did much for the theme, but they were well executed and I had a good time playing through this game. The hitbox of the spikes was a little unfair, especially coming from below, and could need some leniency since your player has a slight momentum to its movement.
The Rayman style knight was a really cool design, kudos!
"Your pet is now kind."
This is such a well executed take on the theme, using the same concept as so many other games in the jam only better in every area.
I didn't feel like I had to optimize my pet towards a goal or style, I felt free to pick whatever I imagined my pet to be like, especially with the brilliant personality/action questions. This really felt like evolution, gradual adaptation over time, compared to many other games where it's just a linear power progression with unlocks (like practically every game ever).
So when, after making a bunch of choices and focusing on eating carrots and apples, I get the confirmation: "Your pet is now kind." My heart got all warm. Such a great experience.
Did you make the art yourself? The level of quality is ridiculous for such a short period of time, so for your sake I really hope you didn't work that hard over the last 10 days :D
If I'm to suggest anything for a full release, it's to really focus on the "home" area. Make the pet move around and do stuff, and have the different actions you can do be implemented in the scenery instead of "popup panels". Implement more of the "tamagochi" things, I guess, so the player can stop what they're doing and enjoy watching their pet.
Cute main character and a good puzzle on the third level. It was very short, and the mechanic of adding more keys was barely more than a tutorial, which I think you could have played with a lot more. It doesn't really do much to address the theme except introducing the keybindings to the player.
Still, it's a smooth experience with good visuals, great work on such a strict deadline! And again: the keyboard is so darn cute.
What a weird and interesting character. I really like the look and feel of it, and how the fall/jump animation transition so fluidly (like when you glide off an edge). I did get softlocked at one point because I skipped a pickup so was lacking the dash, and had to start over.
You make some nice art and show a lot of technical depth for a first jam. Those rolling stones are really difficult to pull off in a platformer where everything has to be tight, and their rolling animation is on par with the ones in Yoshi's Island <3
If Jade is streaming your game, they're going to scream "coyote time" over and over again, just so you know. Those jumps are so hard to time :D
Hi bapple! Heard you liked cozy games, I do so as well and there are some really good ones in this jam. I totally second "Our Family Quilt", you're going to love it I'm sure.
Here's some other games I found so far that is super wholesome and relaxing and cute, in case you don't get a full schedule:
Butterfly Evolution (zen and colors and caterpillars and butterflies)
https://norodix.itch.io/butterfly-evolution
Becoming Terrestrial (cute art and chill gameplay)
https://jul2040.itch.io/becoming-terrestrial
re:EvOlution (heartwarming story)
https://teamsimona.itch.io/reevolution
I'm only going to comment on the visuals, because they are beyond gorgeous. Your writing is engaging, I think you can tell a good story, and craft a world to hold it.
But really, the visuals.. Man, I've always been a fan of that type of geometry and texturing, some of my all time favorites have used that to great success, it's timeless and super effective. The way you introduced modern PBR techniques into it without reducing the "retro" aesthetic a single bit, you just managed to make it that much better.
No exaggerated shadows and light/dark points on normal maps like you so often see in high contrast flashlight games like this. Everything is just tasteful and an easy 5/5 on the artistic score.
I'd love for you to maybe introduce proper physics into it as another modern addition, with the right tweaking on rigid bodies nowadays (and the simple geometry) you can do stuff in your level design they could only dream of back when this style was necessary.
Not that much gameplay, but a really solid base. I'm a big fan of the main character (especially in the intro), and the combination of art in general.
The way the player is designed makes it look as it's not supposed to shoot the machines. Maybe have them throw stuff like chairs and books, things you have in your house as the AI turns on them. Like "oh shit my computer is trying to kill me" so you're frantically throwing all the stuff you can find on it, while the machines use fancy lasers and stuff.
I don't know, I think that dude would look extremely cute throwing things over his head in panic.
I love the creative use of the voronoi shader, and the little lerping of your face in the direction you're going. It takes some decent technical knowledge to be able to do so much with so little, and the tiny thing about the face gave it 1000% more personality. When they're that cute, can you blame all the cells in the area for wanting to inseminate it?
This is a brilliant and simple idea, you created an amazing ambiance with a lot of love put into it. The music and nature sounds are such a good choice.
What this game needs is just more. More variety, more detail, more of the art, more of the same vibe, more environments, more complexity, more than what is achievable in a jam. I think a lot of people is going to appreciate the tone and feelings you've created here, and you should just give them more to do and see so they can stay for longer.
Another thing that would be an important addition is an interactive tutorial. You don't even need to use words, you can show the controls and actions gradually to the player to set the mood and tempo of the game. Show two butterflies mating and the resulting color in some way, show the caterpillar eating and hanging from a branch, stuff like that. Just make the first tutorial experience a player gets in your game have the same vibe the rest of your game has, and explaining it visually instead of literally will make it feel even more organic and relaxing.
Great work, hope to be seeing more from you!
If you get complaints about the difficulty, that doesn't mean there's something wrong with your design. This is top grade level understanding of platforming and level design and all that's needed IMO are small tweaks and tricks to make it a little less frustrating to spawn back at the beginning. Because you should keep spawning at the beginning, that was actually a great choice.
The only thing wrong with the difficulty is the curve, it's just a short game condensed in a short time so how can you avoid that? The world did an amazing job at teaching the mechanics and there is thought to every aspect of the character movement. This is proven in the level design, as there's a puzzle for everything in your skillset. You don't always need to be "nice" to the player, some of the best games ever made thrived on the sense of achievement after a lot of work, they thrived on being "tough but fair".
What many may not notice is all the small things you did to make it easier for the player, the very lenient hitboxes, the super-predictable jump length and height, the order in which things were introduced. Saving moving platform for late in the game, which is such a common and spent mechanic, was also smart. Those were one of the most difficult things to deal with in the game, they threw off your rhythm and forced you to react and improvise, and would only be in the way early on when the player was learning the skills.
There's some butthole-tightening hard areas to get through, but for some reason I rarely died in this game. The controls were airtight, it was 100% down to your own skill and no jank. I have no idea how I managed to get through that "hell" part, but after that I had to walk away from it for a bit.
I love how your own jump becomes the "skip" mechanic, the further you're into the game the faster it is to get back to were you were, even though it's further away and full of dangers. Learning the map was an engaging part of the game, it could have needed some slight variations to the visuals to distinguish the areas (for memory), but nothing too crazy. I don't think you should add checkpoints, but try finding other creative ways of letting the player skip with their skills, , at least only do so if you increase the scale of the game.
I'm going to say that the theme works as well. It's not so much the character that's evolving, but the world and how you traverse it. While nothing has physically changed, it's a completely different place when you're zipping through it on a streak of blue light.
Can't tell you enough of how impressed I was by your design decisions, and I'm tempted to tell you to ignore some of the comments you might get about your choices in pacing/difficulty/design and go with your guts. They seem to be working.
40 over par and still didn't manage to finish the last hole. The physics made sense and all, I really enjoyed it, it's just that there were some bugs with the camera and targeting, leading it to be up to 180 degrees wrong or only being able to aim down. No rotation or direction changes could fix it.
It can be so hard to do targeting in 3D, but if you manage to get that right (along with the camera) you have a really cool and satisfying+frustrating rigidbody golf game, kind of similar in vibe to Human Fall Flat. There's so much you can do with those chimps!
Having that "ape scream build up" when the banana was in the air was a great decision, it just works so well.
I'd focus on changing how the player controls the chimp, make it less "tank simulator" and more "surgeon simulator", if you catch my drift. Go all in with the wonky physics, it's an ape game after all. That, and try incorporating a dynamic camera with reactive effects like shake or zooms, it's going to feel great!
Great work, even if you had a working keyboard! There's so much work that goes into making a game that people don't know about, just having menus and transition screens can take a lot of time, so you should be very proud of what you've made here.
I hope you win a course, you will do great things with it I'm sure!
*Mwaaah*, you're getting a huge kiss for that one. When it changed to modernity (didn't see the screenshots first) I got so excited, and it didn't take long for me to go from not liking the first levels to loving them, due to the role they play in the story.
Life was so much simpler back then. There were dangers, sure, but for some reason it was still way more serene. Those tasks you did back as a fish and a legfish that seemed so banal and overly easy to be stimulating, those just pales in comparison to data entry. You're basically worse than a prehistoric fish sitting in that cubicle.
The elevator scene was a good one. That simple interaction ("...") told me so much about the character, apart from the excellent body language in the animations.
I want this to be a grander, longer game, maybe 45-90 minutes or something, with maybe non-linear time (going back and forth) and use both the arcade platformer style as a intermission/moodsetter until you're back to the more social/storytelling part. Anyway, excellent work!
Games to maybe take inspiration from:
What a enjoyable experience, the polish and beautiful presentation was an important factor in making this idea work. And it works really well! I have some nitpicks and suggestions, but that's in the context of this already being a good game made by someone obviously skilled and not criticism on something you did "wrong":
Another suggestion I forgot to mention is "hapticity". Instead of clicking and selecting, make it "physical". Make connections between neurons something you "draw", something you "drag" between them that gets more resistant the longer the distance is. Make creating helpers a physical act of pulling the neuron out of the pattern and releasing it.
That's what's so great about the idea! You don't really need more mechanics than this either, the "body shutdown" and helper neurons is more than enough to build on.
The game doesn't need to be balanced or paced either. It can be "gradually build and maintain a large and beautiful geometric construct" and the reward the player gets is taking a few steps back and watching what they've made. That's also why you need to have screenshots in mind. Not as a functionality, but practically; think about how the game is framed and how it will look statically on a screenshot, as that's where much the strength of this design lies. After playing for 15 minutes seeing the structure from inside to then flying away and look back felt satisfying to me and took a photo. Not only because the structure was so beautiful (it looked like a sitting fox), but because it's also ephemeral. It changes, it doesn't last, which gives it even more value and beauty.
This is also why I suggested to scale back on things, that might sound counter-productive and non-intuitive with how "simple" the game is but I really believe the lines and dots can speak for themselves with some clever design decisions. Focus on the experience and emotions and not the balance and math of it.
Hmmm areas to improve... I can think of things it could be smart to avoid or to strive for, based on what's done right here.
I'm trying to be restrained and honest in my praise and give ideas for improvement, but for this I'm just going to tell you to keep going. Really, really great fucking work.
There's no point in pointing out the "faults" here, because there's always a million of them in a jam game, and here they don't stem from bad design decisions but a lack of time. What I mean by that is things like visual feedback, pacing, balancing, etc. and those are areas you obviously are going to succeed at judging by what you managed to pull together here, so again I'm not going to comment on that.
What I am going to comment on is the combat, character and enemy design, because wow. So much thought put into them, way above any of the jam games I've tried so far. The way they're combined to counter your instincts as a player without being random works so well, I was giggling to myself out of joy as I was playing.
Example: the room where you enter and there's the spawner mobs along the top wall. If you go in defensively, and retreat when all the other mobs surprises you, you put yourself at a disadvantage. The mechanics encourage you to be aggressive (Souls-like), the back cannon is a genius early addition to help with that, so to get the upper hand and to kill enemies fast enough (spawners put a time pressure on the situation) you need to get the most out of both guns, so that means towards the center of the room. That means dodging bullets from all angles.
Even if you do manage to kite them along the wall, or shoot from a narrow hallway, the way the different enemy types act means they will quickly overpower you. At no point did I feel like I could outsmart them with my "gamer brain", I had to outperform them. I had to take risks, and got rewarded for it.
And this is where the take on the theme works so well. You've incorporated ideas I've seen in many other games here already, but here it just clicks. I'm genuinely interested in seeing how changes to the cell is going to affect the flow of combat, how it's going to change your priorities.
There's a bunch more here to be impressed by, on so many fronts, but I'm out of keyboard juice. Good luck continuing on this title!
You managed to get a lot done, and the character has a kick ass attack animation. The jump is what needs the most amount of work, I think, considering that fine movement controls seems important to the goal of the game. That's why you should also don't lerp the speed that much when stopping, it just feels floaty and like you have less control.
The right jump can take forever to perfect, but luckily there's entire talks and papers dedicated to a good jump, and to making and adjusting the perfect curve without having to do trial and error. I recommend you go read up on it, for example how the Super Mario Bros. jump was written, it's really interesting.
Ooooh you build some beautiful geometry as you evolve the neural pattern. I thoroughly enjoyed this idea and want to see more of it.
If you haven't, check out "NaissanceE" on Steam (it's free). Your neurons is just like the guiding light in that game, and gave me the same vibe.
I would ditch all the colors and text, and communicate their function in another way visually. The game could start with a pitch black world and two single orbs, that you need to connect in order to imitate gameplay, and from there the player has all the information needed to discover the mechanics themselves as long as you make it apparent enough. Try practicing delivering information using only a monochrome gradient and no language.
Another thing that can help motivate the player to progress is having abstract geometry surrounding the area, that is only gradually and slightly revealed as the number of neurons (and consequently, lights) go up.
Oh, and this would be a perfect project to try out SDFGI with the emission on the neurons. Volumetric fog would also be amazing with the visuals of this game.
For me, interpretation of theme was where this game scored the highest. Evolution is a long story of figuring out how to deal with energy, and I think you can make something out of that.
Consider giving the player a few different directions to evolve in, to suit how they want to play. Perhaps make pacifism as much a valid strategy as fighting is, and introduce the same trade-offs you find in nature. If you want more armor or physical strength you're going to have to give up other key traits, as thermodynamics won't let you have them all! For a pacifist/social strategy you could even introduce mechanics that allow you to interact with the other squids, that they protect you or share their energy with you.
Thank you for the wonderful praise, it means a lot, truly.
I'm so glad you noticed the poles, that's where the "illusion" breaks down: it's not 3D movement, you're not controlling the ship but you're rotating pivot points located in the center of the planet. The "player" character is about the size of the sun and the ship is just a model stuck on top off it. I had to sacrifice full 3D movement from the beginning, as that quaternion math and smooth rotation on a sphere would have taken up all the time and it would have just ended up as a "fancy" tech demo. What you're seeing on the poles is the game slowing you down to avoid you ever reaching the pole at all, to avoid a gimbal lock.
"Save it for the remake" was my mantra to help me live with all the dirty hacks, and the hope that someone would notice it. So thank you again!
The game "broke" for me on every try after a while with the melee soldiers stopping to attack, so I wasn't able to see if there was any bigger changes to the core mechanic as time progressed.
In an economics style game like this it's easy to keep the player wanting to go on, you just need to provide a metric for them to measure their progress by and have them feel like their decision shapes the outcome in more ways than one.
For that I recommend two more ingredients for you to build upon:
1. Rock-paper-scissor balancing.
With a shorter time from spawning to engagement and an additional unit type (fast cavalry?), you can give the player strategic choices to make about which units to spawn and to react to the battle as it goes on. Every unit is strong against one type, and weak against another, just like in "rock paper scissors".
2. Planning intermission
Between eras or battles you can give the player access to a tech tree or unit upgrades, where they can choose the direction they want to improve in, or even plan what units to send into battle next round. This acts as a breather for the player, a save point for progress, and motivations to do another battle to unlock more stuff.
These rats needs a game to go with them! They're so cute.
I never managed to get to the "Pope Rat", because the exponential scaling was a bit much to take. This is a type of scaling that almost never works, in any game, except if you really delve into it and explore different sense of scales (Universal Paperclip, Cookieclicker) or use it as the sole mechanic (2048).
Without any deviation to that "doubling", you leave no room for player expectation. If the player knows that the next 2 minutes is going to be exactly like the last 2 minutes, just with even more clicks, it's hard to keep them motivated. They need something to optimize or some agency in the direction the game takes, instead of feeling like they're only making the frames go by.
Examples of what you could have done to achieve this is variation to the "tech tree" of rats, like having to combine varying number of certain kinds of rat. Think "Little Alchemist", simple and addictive to find combinations.
Since you also had the ability to pick up and relocate rats, a Lemmings style mechanic would be right at home. You could have the rats walk around and getting into places they shouldn't, like in the combinator when you're trying to combine two other rats, so you need to drag them away. A hamster wheel with limited space to place them in, for example. The player would have to need to balance how many rats / how productive / how fast they want to progress against how many rats they can keep track of.
I'm in love with the shooting animation in unison with the music. Shooting and dashing in rhythm with the music is incredibly satisfying. I want to see this take inspiration from titles like "Crypt of the Necrodancer", "Beat Hazard" and "Patapon" where your performance is directly linked to how you respond to the rhythm and music. This could be further accentuated by having the BPM of the music be linked to particle/light/shader effects, and enemies animations trigger "on the beat".
Not sure if it broke for me, but I had to go look for enemies stuck around the edges and didn't lose a single hp, collected all the dust from around the map and went over it twice to make sure it was completely empty. Nothing happened, no new spawns or anything, both times.
I'm not sure if it's broken, but on restart the game stops working (no spawning points, locks player movement with nothing happening). I need to reload the page to retry.
I like the idea of conserving energy and only doing the movements you need to. When you pick a direction you got to stick to it, kind of like how Super Hexagon works. I'm not sure if I managed to see all of it as it was hard to tell if the game had broken or not, there were sections of 5-10 seconds of nothing happening but you still get your vertical/horizontal movement locked without a text on screen saying so.
You're right, I think it was the death/fail screen that confused me a bit on the story; "succumbed to the demon's mockery".
Using "motivation" as health is a good choice, it makes total sense, and that was the only reason I reacted to the "koin" part as that works as the players motivation and in dissonance with the rest of the game. Not so much criticism as an observation.
I like the idea of like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill, maintaining your motivation despite constant pushbacks and regressions, and doing so by improving your perception of yourself (adjectives or properties like "self-worth", "pride", "humility", "introspection", "empathy" etc.)
I like this idea, it's cute. Especially how it's a 3D object, you can go even further with that and make the buttons a physical object you need to push, have "beeping" sounds coming from an AudioStreamPlayer3D from a little speaker on it, having you need to open the back to replace the battery occasionally, stuff like that. A real Tamagochi simulator! Also, as it's 2022 there's so much you can do with logic and programming that simply wasn't feasible in those tiny computers, beyond just picking up poop and feeding them.
Heck, you could even throw in evolutionary algorithms in there with genes and all, could be an interesting title. It just needs to be in a format where it's easily available, like a home screen widget for the phone or a webapp, so people can check in on it occasionally instead of dedicating their entire focus to the game.
Love the visuals and restrained celshading, it ran really well in the browser for me. It has an addictive loop of dying/upgrading7dying that keeps the player going.
I gotta say, the philosophy of this game bothers me a bit. This is a Koi that tries to avoid ridicule, by trying to perform better than everyone else, and in order to pull that off it needs to keep up its motivation. And what is their main purpose of facing those challenges? To get money. To grind enough money to enable you to grind even more money. They say they want to avoid the "shame demon", so they go out every day to get money so they can buy an advantage over everyone else and get a little further the next time, but to no real end. Grinding wealth in order to reach your goal becomes your goal, you work to earn money so you can keep working to earn even more money so you can work even more.
It's kind of fucked up.
For this to work you need to download both the .exe (for Windows) or the .x86_64 (for Linux), and the .pck file (listed as the linux download), put them in the same folder and run it. I.e. both the 35MB file and the 209MB file.
I think you might have been a bit too ambitious here. There's a lot of ideas at play and a lot of complex mechanics/systems attempted, but none of them really works in isolation and don't make sense together either. There's a lot of technical skill here, you've been very productive! I just think you should limit the scope a lot, find one or two core mechanics and focus on them! This game didn't know if it wanted to be an fantasy brawler, a shooter, a platformer or a puzzle game, so it tried to be all at once, and that's impossible to pull off for a small/solo team even if you had months to develop it.
Thanks, this means so much to me <3
Fun story, I got an inflammation in the optic nerve right before the jam started and lost vision in my left eye. All bright/white areas was inverted so they went grey/dark, I could only see detail in darker areas. As the jam went on my vision gradually improved, and the game just became darker and darker for me, but since I didn't trust my eyes anymore I decided that it was just my perception that was off. Good to have it confirmed that it's too dark for someone else as well, that it's not just my eyes failing! Hope you managed to finish the "story" despite not seeing anything, the inner layers were particularly hard to see for me, even in direct sunlight.
