itch.io

Hello! I’ve just made public a free puzzle game: https://gmso.itch.io/dusk-or-dawn

It’s a simple and relaxing tile-based puzzle. It started as a learning project but I think it’s become a nice game on it’s own. Simple but fun, at least in my opinion.

If you have any feedback, comments, or would like to leave a rating, feel free to do so as well. I’d love to hear what other people think about this game.

I’ve also added some release notes as an entry of the game’s devlog, in case you’re interested: https://gmso.itch.io/dusk-or-dawn/devlog/1337649/v020

Cheers!

Thanks for playing and leaving a comment! Yep that’s unfortunate about some audio not being in the correct audio bus, after the jam is over I’ll release a new version with this and other fixes. Oh I don’t remember that visual glitch happenning, do you remember over which objects you seemed to be on top of? Maybe some tiles’ collisions were not configured properly, but I’d like to know to fix that too if I can.

I’m glad you liked the vibe and that it was a fun game to play, that’s always nice to hear :D

That was a lot of fun! I finished it and got a few funny achievements doing so. Kudos for making a whole set of missions in such a short period of time, and for making them fun and original. Thanks for submitting, it’s a great game!

A fun take on a classic! Very original idea thinking to repurpose the apples as projectiles.

I did have a hard time sometimes trying to align the snake towards the crocodiles, but still do it far away to have enough time to shoot 2 or 3 apples. If the apples were faster, or you could shoot in other directions, it might be easier and add another element of strategy to the game. Or maybe there’s a better strategy that I’m missing hehe.

Overall a fun game, a fun idea and a good execution, nice entry!

Thanks for playing and for the feedback!

Oh I didn’t know that about the foot steps, probably we missed putting those in the SFX audio bus… The oxygen could’ve used some re-balancing for sure. It should’ve probably dropped faster, and we maybe could’ve added more refills around the maps (or make them respawn). I did think about pausing the oxygen consumption while reading, but unfortunately ran out of time to implement that.

I’m glad you liked the atmosphere! The automatic light mode was the first version we had of the flashlight, and we implemented the manual mode later. I wasn’t completely sure which one would be more useful or interesting for players, so we kept both. I personally found myself using the automatic mode when I wasn’t trying to run away from the monster, but I can see why that’s not the case for everyone.

Thanks, looking forward to future jams myself as well! :D

I see, that’s very interesting knowing that the game was initially harder. If you’re trying to balance one difficulty for everybody, it seems sensible to me to err on the side of making the game easier. Mainly because you don’t know what type of players you’ll have, but probably many will be tower defense novices (such as myself). From my perspective I’d rather play a game a bit easy than too hard, which becomes frustrating. Especially for jam games where you want to have time to try as many games as you can.

That option of novice/expert you mention would already go a long way in making balancing easier, as well as potentially extending the play time of the game. I haven’t tried to implement those systems myself yet, but I’d imagine they’re not trivial to implement so in only 9 days it’d be hard to find a lot of time to invest in that!

Ohh that would explain why sometimes (I think it only happened with the first tower of each type?) I’d buy the tower but would not be able to place it somewhere else, and it would end up on the bottom of the map, above the bar where you purchase/build towers. I thought it was me fat-fingering the screen and not dragging the tower properly haha, but it’s good to know it wasn’t just me. Still, it was a minor thing and with the generous resources you get I was still able to build plenty of towers where I wanted them.

All in all the mobile support felt like it was very intentional (even if less tested as you mention) and felt as a great way to experience the game.

I loved the concept, it was so easy to pick up the game and start playing. It didn’t even need any explanations because the objective of the game was so clear with the visual clues. Great entry!

Oh one thing I forgot to mention is kudos for giving the game touchscreen support. I was looking to play jam games while away from the computer and was pleasantly surprised that this game supported touch controls so I could just play it from my phone. The game even gave clear instructions at the beginning on how to use the touch controls. Awesome job there making the game more accessible!

Wow I can’t believe you managed to build such a complete game in such short time! The amount of towers, upgrades, currencies, types of enemies, … Really amazing! Not only that, the game was a lot of fun and I liked the pacing of getting more and more towers and upgrades each round. It kept me engaged until the last wave.

I see what you’re saying in the description about the difficulty. I’m not particularly skilled in tower defense games yet I managed to easily beat the waves by stacking a lot of towers close to the entry of the enemies. At some point they almost weren’t even visible and were being defeated before being seen. Those cannon towers are OP lol. But I feel like balance is such a hard middle point to find, especially with only 9 days to develop and test. Maybe some difficulty settings could’ve helped players find their own difficulty, but that’s probably really hard to achieve in this short period of time.

Great entry, thanks!

Thanks so much for the detailed feedback! I’m glad you liked the story. Like you say it’s a bit vague in some details, partially for the mistery and partially because we didn’t have time to introduce much more lore hehe. I’ve personally always liked the way some games build their world organically through in-game books, songs, gossip, etc. Some examples are Fallout, the Elder Scrolls, or BioShock. This small game is far from those massive games, but I’m hoping we went a bit in that direction.

Yeah unfortunately the enemy could’ve used some rebalancing, as you and other players have confirmed. I think with different speed settings, making it easier to discover, or even giving you a couple of seconds head start to start running away would’ve made a significant difference. The pathfinding could’ve used some improvements as well, and the obstacles in the maps themselves probably needed more testing to make sure the monster would not get caught or stay in a weird position where you are basically doomed to sacrifice your character. There is actually a way to distract the enemy but it’s not explained clearly so I assume most players don’t discover that (or they do so by accident). If you run close enough to the monster, unless you’re in its line of sight, it will “hear” you and to to investigate that position. I think there’s a sound cue when that happens. You can use that to lure it into a specific spot or area. But it’s never explained and now I wish I would’ve added that at least to one of the terminals for the player to figure out lol.

Oh that’s interesting that you depleted your oxygen and nothing happened. That’s a bug I had not encountered before. We did try to add a system to respawn in case you’d get stuck (which we did saw happen in play testing but apparently we didn’t find all the spots hehe) but we ran out of time so we had to ship the game without that.

That’s great that the atmosphere worked, that was important to make the experience fun.

Thanks again for leaving a comment and for playing our game!

Thank you so much! It’s good to hear that the atmosphere worked and you felt the tension of not knowing when the monster would jump on you. I’m also glad you liked the story, kudos especially to one of our artists @caerion for coming up with a lot the world building, setting, and dialogues!

Lol that’s great, I’m glad you experienced that because one of the goals or that level was to introduce the enemy in a scary way, where you see them, they see you, but since they can’t reach you they leave. Which leaves you wondering “where did that thing go?” Is it coming after me? At least that was the intent :D

I’m glad you liked the flashlight movement (I used that more than the manual pointing) and also the dialog. It’s true that the dialog is more for “world building” than to give very clear guidance into what to do. We wondered how we could balance that and that was what we came up with. With a bit more time it might’ve helped to add a quest system or at least an objective that’s more explicit, like “find the key card to go to the next level” or “find the exit” or something like that.

I agree the enemy fights could feel unfair in some instances. In hindsight we could have balanced that better, by making the enemy slower, “dumber”, easier to locate, … I think that with more time to play test and tweak those things we could’ve gotten a more solid experience in the enemy encounters.

I’m happy to hear you enjoyed the game, thanks so much for playing!

Thanks! I’m glad you liked the atmosphere :)

That’s a good point about knowing which upgrades you already have. The flashlight does turn into a lighter blue when it can stun in the last level, but it’s not too obvious. We probably should’ve been a bit more explicit there.

Also a great point about the enemy. It is supposed to be hard to see so that there’s more tension about not being caught by surprise, but we could have balanced that better. I think that tweaking the enemy’s speed, the visibility, and maybe use more visual and audio cues when it’s investigating, we could’ve made the enemy encounters more fun.

I appreciate the feedback, and thanks for playing!

That’s the good part of getting others to play your game, you get different perspectives. Our game also has polishing to be made, partially due to lack of time, but also because it’s harder to see certain things as you’re working on them.

Nice! I’ll look forward to replaying it once you get around to updating it in the future :)

I liked a lot the aesthetic and how easy it is to pick up the game and start playing it. The base building aspect was fun, I just kept adding turrets everywhere to fend off those pesky space-evil-bunnies lol. I spent a long time playing this game, great submission!

Loved the theme, the music, and helping th little rat figure out how to sort the trash without getting overwhelmed. It reminded me of a communist version of Overcooked. This would also be fun as a co-op game. Great submission!

Very interesting concept that made me want to defeat all the robots! I agree with some of the other comments here that some quality-of-life improvements, like making the robots move faster in their turn (or all at the same time maybe), might have helped in making the game feel more fluid or easier to understand. But we only had 9 days to do this so you can only get so much polish in that time ^_^

Great submission, and thanks for sharing the source code as well!

Thanks for playing and for your kind words! I’m happy to hear that you felt the tension and enjoyed the experience even if it’s not your favorite genre. To be honest I also have other genres I prefer before horror, but in this case it was fun to step outside of the confort zone for a bit :)

Thank you very much!

I’m glad to hear you liked the game and that we got the vibe right! That was definitely something we were going for, even if at times it felt challenging to experience the “horror” ourselves (since the maker already knows what’s going to happen lol). But it’s great to know that it resonates with players that way :D

I got the golden leaf! It was a fun experience, both from moving around with Fiora as well as seeing the world change around you. Also the achievements are a nice addition, it made want to play more to get more of them. I never understood how to get rid of the birds though, but maybe there’s no way do that lol

Thanks so much, I’m glad you enjoyed it! We also got some jump scares while doing it so it was a fun process too :)

The art is definitely one of the most important parts of getting the vibe right, our artists did a great job at that I must say!

Thank you! I’m glad that you were able to feel the tension and get a couple of (I hope not too bad) jump scares :D

Tackling this as a horror-lite we knew that getting that vibe right was going to be important to make the experience enjoyable. Props to our music and SFX guys for helping create that atmosphere!

Ohh I totally missed that, thanks for pointing that out! I’ll have to try the game again without the timer, and see if I can help the inventor this time :D

Easy to pick up and fun! The audio effects (like “splash” or “nice”) really cracked me up!

Very cool idea, totally fits the theme too! I wish I would’ve had a bit more time on each puzzle, poor inventor never got what he asked for lol

It’s a fun mechanic, I like how individual bricks turn ON or OFF depending on the light you’re using. It was fun!

An idea that seems simple (if you’ve played 2048 before) but given fun spins with hero classes, monsters combining, heal items, level improvements, … Plus, really well executed, with charming music and art, as well as engaging gameplay. This is really fun, great job!