itch.io

Hello everyone! Quantum Reindeer, following its launch as part of Madvent 5, is now out as a standalone game! It's a holiday-themed shoot-'em-up with a full cast of voice actors and oodles of challenge.

You play as Santi, newly-qualified sleigh pilot, and leader of her squad of quantum reindeer, as she delivers presents to the nice and coal to the naughty. The game's USP is that you can switch between your four 'deer, each of whom have their own strengths and special abilities. Given my love for Star Fox and Metal Gear Solid, I couldn't resist giving them plenty to talk about, so I brought in a team of voice actors, every single one of whom knocked it out of the park. And as you can see below, the game features some amazing pixel art from D4yz, whom I've had the pleasure to work with many times in the past. 

Frustratingly, it seems like Itch doesn't like animated GIFs at present, which is a shame since the game looks even better in motion.

I actually never intended for it to be this big of a project! I intended to have it done in a month, just to see what it was like to be part of a community game collection like Madvent. But scopes did what scopes so often do, and before I knew it, it had become probably my biggest game to date. I really hope you enjoy it! Thanks for reading.

https://johngabrieluk.itch.io/quantum-reindeer

There's something very, very brilliant about this. The crude dots, the beeps and hums of the machine - it all adds up to a very engrossing, very immersive feeling, as though I really am using this clunky, unwieldy machine to play with the very fabric of nature. Really, really good stuff. (And thank you very much for the reference.)

A wildly original take on the theme, and one that I really enjoyed, despite some jank in the controls and the physics engine. I persevered to the end, but there doesn't seem to be an ending? Just a black room with no objects to suspend.

The art and music here both suit the theme really well - it gives everything a delightful sense of grunge.

Share your findings and the passcodes from your playthroughs in this thread! Xenolith is a game that cannot be played alone - you must begin from where someone else left off.

The starting passcode is ILNIELLL.

I wish the game had saved! I played up until I got the Phase ability, then tried to pause the game to find which button it was (C didn't seem to do anything), whereupon it crashed. It's a pity, because I was enjoying it up to that point.

Thanks for playing! I agree, Ctrl wasn't the best choice. I've just added a keybindings menu for v1.1, which will go up after the jam ends, and I think I'll change the default binding to be Shift while I'm at it.

Clever take on the theme - and I like the grappling mechanic - but it's pretty tough! I wasn't able to get very far, I'm afraid.

Is it impossible to win the Australia race? Not even Wheel-on-deGrass Tyson could do it! (He's the son of Wheel Patrick Harris and Bonnet Tyler).

It took me multiple attempts to finish the first level of a Match-3 game. If you'll excuse me, I'm now going to disappear into the forest, never to be seen again.

I enjoyed that! There are a few nice little touches - I especially liked the rustling of the bushes in the cutscene, and the way the chipmunk tells you how long you took.

I enjoyed the sound design on this one, and it's quite rewarding to chain together a series of only-just-made-it jumps over the slimes! But the tiny font is perhaps not the best choice, given the amount of dialogue the game has.

Thank you! The game does have an Itch page - look for the "View game page" button next to the name at the top of the page.

"The game doesn't explain itself properly" is a bit of a longstanding problem for me. Perhaps I ought to take a leaf out of Breath of the Wild's book and have button prompts on the bottom of the screen unless turned off in the settings.

Admittedly, my claim to have used the wildcards is a bit dubious... originally, the way you smash up those computers was going to be a lot more frantic, filling the Button Smash wildcard, and Rage Room was the inspiration for the scripted sequences like the bridge being destroyed or the capsules shattering.

Thanks! You know what, I probably ought to give that game a go - I've never played it, despite liking one of the tracks enough to commission a remix of it...

9/10, not enough poop.

(My attempts at using the mouth as Bill's pupil seems not to have worked. Oh well.)

I couldn't quite figure this one out, I'm afraid. I had issues where I inexplicably couldn't place walls or turrets, and sometimes the "start round" button wouldn't do anything, leaving me softlocked. The dissolving effect on the bunnies was neat, though!

I had Half-Life in mind when I was making it, so I'm glad it came across! The "something falls and wrecks the path forwards" bit, in particular, is definitely inspired by Black Mesa.

Nice entry - especially the photorealistic environment. Given the time limit, it's a little frustrating for the jump windup to take so long.

Thank you! Honestly, I should just come up with a bit of code I can drag-and-drop into projects to have key rebinding, because it's my least favourite thing to implement. So finicky, especially if you also want controller support! But very much worth doing nonetheless.

It wasn't until after playing that I read the comments and realised you could break the walls! I went back and gave it another try - that's a really neat feature!

That's a good point - I think it would work well to have sections in which each creature has to use its unique ability to make its way to the goal, or else give the player a way to quickly move all three creatures once a checkpoint has been reached.

Stuff I did myself:

• All of the 3D models/animations (which took up most of the development time)
• All of the code
• The glyphs for each creature (I don't actually know how to use any vector image editor, so I did those in Blender too!)

Stuff I got off-the-shelf:

• The music (by Pizza Doggy - used with permission, with the requirement that I leave the tracks out of the public source code repo)
• The sound effects (with the caveat that I edited/combined them in most cases, but still)
• Things like the lens flare and twinkle textures you see when a capsule is overloading (taken from asset packs bought on Itch)
• The keyboard icons (from Kenney - natch)

Thank you - really glad you enjoyed it!

You don't normally see this large of a 3D environment in a jam game - kudos for that! Those little details at the start like the sun rays and the raven are really nice touches. I wish I'd been able to control the camera with the mouse - or at least without having to lift my fingers off the movement keys - though.

Ah, the eternal siren call of "make it into a full game" that so oft leads one to dash one's ship upon the Rocks of Overscoping. I hear it so often, and yet I have lost the no claims bonus on my boat insurance one too many times...

One day. One day. Thanks for playing!

Oh, that tutorial is brilliant! I'll have to ask my doctor if Bug Licker is right for me...

You know what this game is? Fully realised. There's no sense of "I overscoped and had to crunch just to get the underlying gameplay in place" - this one is served with all the trimmings! I love how the tongue is tweened to make the motion really juicy, and I love how the gameplay is in its own subwindow - I would never have thought to do that, but it works!

About the only thing I'd like to see different is the fact that it doesn't really escalate as the rounds go on, which feels like a hallmark of this sort of arcade game. But still - really good! Congrats on your first entry!

Percussive maintenance is the way to go! Ideally I wish the environments had been a bit less flat, but trade-offs must be made. Thanks for playing!

Very Serious Sam-esque!

• I really enjoyed the snarky writing on the tutorial - that's a good way to set the tone.
• The movement is a bit floaty, but then, the last time I fastened a machine gun to the wings of a ladybug, it wasn't all that spry afterwards...
• Could do with having some music to match the energy of the gameplay.
• Was that a Trump reference I saw on one of the signs? How appropriate that it should be on a border...

I was already enjoying that before I discovered that you can use the tongue lash to combo multiple boxes, at which point it became a 10/10 experience. Simple, but oh-so-very-sweet. Great stuff!

Did you... yes, you actually did. You made the creature maker from Spore in nine days. I can't even. Congratulations.

As for the game itself, I'm afraid I didn't quite understand what I was supposed to do, so I just did what I do in real life: amass as much food as possible while keeping drama to a minimum.

The presentation here is fantastic, on both an art and music standpoint - I'm listening to the "place critters on the island" music right now and I genuinely want to buy this album on Bandcamp. Also. from looking at the island model, I suspect someone on the team is well-versed in colour theory - please let me know who it is so I can steal their brains.

This game made me realise just how bad the ghosting on my monitor is. 10/10

Thank you for your kind words! The camera wasn't intentional, per se - it was more of an oversight, and by the time I realised how much of a problem it was, there wasn't enough time to properly fix it. I tried simply adding a raycast that would prevent any geometry from getting between the camera and the player, but the results were pretty janky.

And yes, story - and, indeed, gameplay - were a bit light on this one. That's the result of focusing too much on learning new things in 3D, but nonetheless, I'm really happy to have learned what I did. Thanks for playing!

I gave it a good few tries, but I'm afraid I couldn't finish Level 2 - which is a shame, because this seems like a really unique puzzle game! And definitely the creepiest puzzle game that I've ever played. The pixel art is great, the music is foreboding, and the sound design is surprisingly fully-fledged given the genre.

Thank you! Will add energy drink DLC as soon as the jam is finished. :P

Yeah, that does pad out the game in all the wrong ways. As I said in another comment, some sort of quick-travel system that helps you cover ground more quickly probably wouldn't go amiss. Thanks for playing!

There's some good stuff here! A few thoughts:

• No scaling! And the window is pretty small on a 4K display.
• The character designs and 3D models are really stylish!
• The music does a good job of setting the mood.
• The lockpicking minigame is really neat - especially when done under pressure when the gremlins are just a few seconds away from you.
• I could definitely have done with a "how to play" of some sort, because what I'm supposed to do isn't very clear.

Enjoyed this one! A few thoughts:

• The pixel art is immaculate, but the 3D models are no slouch! I especially like the way everything is shaded to give that feeling of the day coming to an end.
• I really like the detail of how Bipster's body has to catch up with how his head is turned. Is that done with a soft body?
• The fact that there's no delay between the round ending and the upgrade buttons appearing mean that I sometimes bought upgrades without meaning to.
• Needing to use scrap to build the rocket at the end is a brilliant way to spice up the endgame, but I wish I'd known that the game was building up to it! As it happens, I spent about 1000 scrap on upgrades I didn't need just before that point, and ended up losing with just a couple hundred scrap left before the rocket was done.
• In my headcanon, Bipster is voiced by Liam Neeson. I assume no elaboration is necessary.

Thank you! I couldn't resist throwing some tidbits in there - these little guys have been bouncing around in my head since the original Hivemind back in 2019 - but I wanted to avoid putting in half-details that I couldn't properly flesh out. And indeed, I forgot that controls != gameplay, but glad you enjoyed it anyway!

Wow - just an incredibly well-polished entry, this, and one that teems with evidence of smart decision-making during development. I suspect I will be coming back to this to play more later!

Thank you! Yes, some more challenge wouldn't have gone amiss. Something for a post-jam update, perhaps.

That's fair, honestly. When you spend so long getting the basic framework in place, you're left without the time/energy to implement some fun puzzles.

The backtracking is an issue, yes. One idea I had since the deadline was to add vents that you can unblock as you progress, so catching the other creatures up is as simple as finding the nearest vent and quick-travelling to wherever you want to be.

This one impressed me from the first moment - I love the aesthetic of that title screen!

• Playing on my laptop, with integrated graphics, I noticed what looked like Z-fighting glitches in the level geometry. But on the other hand, it runs pretty smoothly, even on limited hardware.
• I like the art style - low-poly + hand-drawn is rare, but I'm here for it!
• The character design and animations are really endearing. Go get'em, little guy!
• Given that I tried playing as the larva for a bit: thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for the sprint key.
• There's a point where I was crossing a bridge between two boxes of Fizzy that I seemed to hit an invisible wall - I tried dropping down to the green platforms below but couldn't jump across them after a couple of tries. Did I reach the end of the game? If not, how much did I miss?

Thank you!