itch.io

You're welcome! I'm glad you liked it :)

I recorded and commented while I played your game. Here's the video for you :)

https://youtu.be/SUSAgqTBWRI (it's still processing at the moment)

My story:

That's it! You are completely lost. One moment you were camping with your friends, the next one a thunderstorm drives you deeper into the woods than you have ever been. When the rain finally stopped you had no idea where you were.
You look around from some clues to find your way out of these woods. Eventually you stumble upon a pathway that you have never been on. You walk along it, any direction seems fine right now.
After a while you reach a crossing. The right path leads down into an even darker part of the forrest, on the left path you can see a small cabin in the distance.
You Go into the woods.
The longer you walk, the darker it seems to get, until you can barely see. You keep on walking until you suddenly suble out into a clearing. In the center of which there is a huge circle of stones, looking like an ancient ritual location.
You can see the path continuing on the other side of the stone circle. Something seems eerie about the huge stones. How did they get here? And how has nobody noticed them before. You certainly never heard about them.
You Go through the circle.
The moment you step into the circle it feels like your are moving through a web of invisible veils. Your vision goes blurry for a second, but then you blink and you can't believe your own eyes. From inside the circle you the stones look like gateways.
There are four gateways, even though the one you just stepped through seems to have closed. Since there is no going back you take a look at the other three. The stones are marked with symbols of the four elements. You came from the earth gateway.
You Go through air gateway.
You step out on the other side of the gateway. Actually you are more falling than stepping, because suddenly you are high up in the air. And you can not believe what you see as you break through a layer of clouds.
You are high above your home town. You can even see the campsite you and your friends went to from here. But before you can enjoy the view you realize that you are getting closer and closer to the ground. You close your eyes and await the inevidable.
It was a calm night when you parents heard the big impact on the roof. It was giant mess. Some huge bird must have crashed right into their home, some local biologists were astonished by the size of the remains, but were unable to identify the species.

Loved it! Great level design. I recorded while I played and gave feedback. Here's the video for you :)

https://youtu.be/aLeGra65jxs (still processing at the moment)

Thank you! I think so too. Probably the best future this game could have would be as a mobile game where you can challenge your friends and chat in between sessions. And I think I would then change it so that you have maybe 1 minute per article, and you get 1 point for each word you find plus extra points if you find a word within the first 10 seconds, one that's maximum 4 characters long, if you get a word on your first attempt, and so on.

You're welcome! Thanks for the fun game :)

I'm glad you liked it :)

I agree - it's what I've been thinking every time I've joined a non-LD jam!

Spot on! I recorded while I played and commented, here's the video for you :)

https://youtu.be/XX4DVDTTsr8 (it's still processing)

Hey! Recorded while I played your game and gave you my comments there. Well done!

https://youtu.be/V1PaWdJIjTw (still processing at the moment)

Oh crap, I just realized that when I plugged in my PS4 controller, it switched my audio output to that, so I didn't play with sound :(

Super clever! I recorded when I played and gave my comments there. Here's the video for you :)

https://youtu.be/yX86U2DYhAU (it's still processing at the moment)

Hey! I really like what you've done here with being able to pick up the bullets coming at you. I think you could have won a lot by picking just the one or two best bosses and only working on them, so that you could have implemented some more feedback and stuff to make it more clear what's going on. But overall I like it! Well done :)

Hey! I really like what you've done here with being able to pick up the bullets coming at you. I think you could have won a lot by picking just the one or two best bosses and only working on them, so that you could have implemented some more feedback and stuff to make it more clear what's going on. But overall I like it! Well done :)

I feel it's hard to rate a game without playing through it. It's really hard to tune difficulty, so I find in game jams a lot of the mechanics and content can be locked behind a really difficult early level, so it's a shame to rate it only because of that. And I agree, it's really important, and that's why I'm happy to do it :) Glad you liked it!

Thank you! I was recently playing a real world game with some friends where we had to pick numbers of increasing size in magazines we were reading, trying to one up each other as closely as possible, which is not a great game in and of itself, but we had fun with it. I wanted to make a similar concept for a video game, but have it more measurable somehow, so then I came up with this :) I also love taking something and completely changing the way you look at it - like how in this case an informative article becomes a treasure hunt.

With regards to the bug, I picked only 15 articles (that were the featured articles on Wikipedia that day) to make sure you don't get some crap one, and that was already the end of my 10 hours, so even though I had many more plans of letting you play a couple of rounds and stuff, I just added a reset button and shipped it!

About the decimals, I made it in Firefox which doesn't have the decimals :) I agree they shouldn't be there! I just used the built-in browser preformance measuring tool. Turns out it's not consistent between browsers (inconsistencies between browsers on the web!? Who would have thought!?)

Thank you for the feedback and the questions!

Happy to hear you enjoy it!

Ok, for the technical bit, let's define some terms. A word is any word, reused or not. "word hello word" has 3 words. A unique word would be any word featured in the article one or more times. "word hello word" has 2 unique words ("word" and "hello"). A solo word is a word that exist only once. "word hello word" has 1 solo word ("hello").

After I had published the game (I could only work on Sunday, so I was crazy rushed), I added a debug feature to my game to get some statistics. I opened maybe 10 random articles, and more or less no matter the length of the article, roughly 2/3 of the unique words were solo words. However, only about 15% of all the words were solo words. That means that about 85% of the text is comprised of 1/3 of the unique words. Fascinating! Anyway, the fact that it was as consistent as it was surprised me. After having played around a lot just guessing in my browser with ctrl+f (my prototype!), I felt quite confident that I could pick any article and it would work, but that a longer article would be more fun. I then just went to the page where Wikipedia puts featured articles and put them all in the game, so those are the 15 articles of which you will receive one at random. I actually had only tried one of them when I uploaded the game, which made me slightly nervous :D The reason I wanted to get some statistics afterwards was that I got lucky a few times when trying it out and felt it was too easy. Then it turned out that all the articles I checked had hundreds of solo words each! That became even more discouraging when I compared it to the number of unique words to find that 2/3 unique words were solo words. But then when I realized I had to compare to total words and found about 15% I was satisfied at last. But there are about 6 million articles on Wikipedia, so there might still be one or two without solo words, although I think humans also actively try to vary their language, which helps if you're a solo word hunter.

On the more computer technical side there's especially one technical thing I found surprising. Overall the game is very simple - the tricky bit was mostly to make it really feel like you're browsing Wikipedia while being able to check if the word is actually a solo word, because browsers have a LOT of security against reading any type of data from any domain other than the one you're currently on, so as soon as I show something from Wikipedia, I can't access it at all from the code if it even loads in the first place. I still didn't want to just download and republish copies of the articles though, because it just felt wrong and would probably be illegal and difficult to pull off well either way. In the end I had to use the official Wikipedia API with some special cross-browser settings on both ends, extract the data from there and use the extracted data to compare against the words you enter. At the same time I load an iframe with the same article so you can scroll around and read. In other words, the article is actually downloaded twice in different ways, and what you see from Wikipedia and what goes on underneath the hood are completely separate from each other (which is also why you can't guess a word by double clicking it).

This became a bit long, but that's what you get for asking fun questions :) I'll gladly tell you more if you're interested.

Hahaa! You're just too clever :D I love hearing about these tricks that people come up with. That goes on the bug list.

Thank you! It would be pretty cool to make a heat or something, where you all get the same article at the same time! I could make and upload a version for you where you can at least select the article manually to make sure you have the same if you're serious about playing with your friends :)

Thank you! I agree completely. I could only work on this on the Sunday, but I was planning online high scores for different categories (shortest word, fastest time, fewest attempts, best "overall", something along those lines). I also think you should be given a few articles and have an overall timer and get some statistics afterwards :)

Thank you! I'm happy to hear that you found it challenging - that was my original thought as well when I just went to wikipedia to try it out ("prototyping" was the fastest I've ever done! Went to Wikipedia, pressed "random article", ctrl+f, match whole words, and I could play my game :D). But then as I was working on it, quite a few times I just by chance entered a random word from the article and got a right answer on the first try, which really wasn't very much fun at all (which is why I think the game should have you complete a few articles in a row, so that even if you get your first one on your first try you still get to experience the challenge as you go). Thank you for playing and commenting, I'll make sure to play yours too :)

Oh I didn't realize you commented here! I'm so happy to hear you had fun with it, and that it felt original, which was my main goal this time around. I'll make sure to give yours a proper play through!

Finally done! Here you go! :)

Love it! SPOILER WARNING: The last level had me standing in the middle trying to figure out how to get them to pass each other up top (I had a plan I think would have worked) until I just decided to play with letting mirror images spawn mirror images until I was like "Hey, wait a minute! That's a solution to the level!" :D

The puzzles are quite fun, and the design does make you feel alone, just playing with your own mirror image. Great work!

Thank you :)

Hey, it only took me half an hour to finish the last level! I gave my feedback while playing and recorded the whole thing. I'm currently uploading to YouTube and will post the video soon!

Thanks! :D

Haha! Thanks a lot :D What do you mean making it work like this? In the end it turned out to be really quite simple :) I'll check out your game as soon as I have time to sit down and start playing.

I've been a professional developer for more than a decade. Reading the documentation, googling stuff and checking tutorials is a big part of where I spend my time, and some days it's the only thing I do. If you're not sure how to do something or what your options are, why not ask someone with experience? That's what tutorials are to me.

Hello friend! I see that you've been active in many competitions. Super cool game, love the style of it, and I think the puzzle mechanics can work. It's pretty cool also that there's no map of the planet, so you'll have to navigate using memory and land marks. AND the game is beautiful - I played it on my 43" screen and it was amazing. Love the design of the sun. Well done! :)

I agree, and I'm also planning how to add controller support in a good way. Currently I'm considering one joystick being for movement and the second one to move the camera slightly farther to either side. With the WASD controls they'd really just an alternative to the mouse, since you could use either. For now the plan is to make a list of different control schemes and an easy way to switch between them in-game, so I can quickly bring new ideas to life.

PS: Hair dryers are great. :D

Haha awesome that you took notes! Makes me feel important. :)

I think (but I might be wrong) that parallax effects are usually done either using a perspective camera and putting things at different distances for away (so you get a natural parallax effect), or by making multiple orthographic cameras. Or an additional perspective camera that only renders a background layer, or something to that effect. Hope it helps! I'll be waiting excitedly for the new version.

I'm gud! And you know, never underestimate the power of serendipity. The key is to make the most of it.

I'll have to check out the new version as soon as I get the opportunity!

Nice of you to make such a thorough reply, it made me happy to read it :)

Thanks for the feedback! That's a really good point - I didn't really have in mind that the audience here is totally in-and-out (I also tend to go a bit too much in depth when I check out other people's games, which might have had me biased even if I had considered it). I also feel when I start the game up that it's way to slow for what you expect when you open a jam game (although I do love the animation). For my post jam version I'm reconsidering the entire control scheme. It's a bit of a rabbit hole, because it will get down all the way to what the core of the game is - is it that the thrusters do multiple things, or is it the rage meter or is it both? Perhaps you'll control the player mainly through WASD/Arrow keys, with an additional mouse crosshair that instantly flips the player around to fire that way when you click? I'll have to try a bunch of different control schemes... :D Aaaanyway, thanks a lot for your encouraging words and nice feedback! I don't think I'll have time to check out any more games now as we have a new week starting tomorrow, but I'd love to check out what you've done at some point!

I made a video review which is available here: https://youtu.be/ItIP4pU81xA
It's uploading now, but should be online in about 10 minutes or so. Thanks a lot, and well done!

Oh wow, what a review! Thank you so much for putting all of that effort in! I'll be sure to try your game tomorrow and give it a really proper review too.

For the aesthetics, I actually started out making a couple of different generations of sprites and it just looked like the worst thing you can imagine. After trying to rework it a bunch of times I experimented a little bit with making honeycomb patterns, which just gave me the idea of using actual 3D cubes in Unity to make my them come alive, which also meant I didn't need to try using Blender again (there not many programs I just don't get, but that's one of them), and it became this kind of pixel-art style but using 3D cubes, which I agree just worked so well, so that was a lucky one! I had already spent way too much time on it, and it was millimeters away from ending up just a green mess because I had to move on and make the actual game. And the HUD placement actually came out of the controls, because I tried to make it control with the absolute position of the mouse at first, but then changed it to relative, so the cursor just had to follow player around, and I also think it totally worked - it would have felt very strange do something else, but I might have if I didn't start with the cursor.

I'm happy you also notice the rage mechanics, because I was worried they wouldn't really come across at all. I wish I would have had more time to put into the level design, and also that I was much better it to really give you the opportunities to do all the cool moves that should be possible. But I think the reason you didn't really get a feel for it is completely my fault. I've been thinking more about the controls, and I think what would probably make the most sense would be to use the thumbstick on a controller to control the player (and maybe the second thumbstick to control the camera). And, since I went a bit all-in on the effects, I even get the occasional lag spikes on my i7 6770k, GTX 1080 rig...! There just wasn't time to do anything about it. The explosions shouldn't be able to send you back into a previous section though, since the doors are already closed (unless you had used the reset button (space bar) - that one also resets the doors!). In future versions I'll make sure that won't happen for any reason though. If the game is not fun then it's my fault and I want to fix it! :)

You know, I figured an intro is more fun than a menu, and it takes like 45 minutes to implement it with a simple animation (you can make so many quick and dirty things like that using the animation tool in Unity, it's great! Just copy the world, remove all components from the player and other stuff you want to animate, and the just drag stuff around with recording on).

Thank you so much for this huge effort you put into both trying and analyzing my game, and also for taking the time to communicate it all to me. Expect one in return tomorrow!

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, on the game page it mentions that it's very much intended to be played with a physical mouse, a touch pad becomes severely crippling. If you'd get a chance to have a look at it with another mouse I'd love it if you could compare your experiences :)

Try mine, I'm really happy with how it came out: Destroyer of Destroyers ☺

I'm happy you liked it! I wasn't planning on playing for so long, but what could I do? You made a good game! :D Cool that I discovered something new :)

I think it's good that you can't shoot backwards. That's a limitation that sparks your creativity, even though it can also be frustrating.

I think if the bullets bar was more like a list than a bar it would be much more intuitive, because I thought it was the shield (since the shield is also white) at first. If it looked like the bullets I would have probably understood it sooner.

Super cool game! The lighting effect looks great! I'd love to know how you made it. The whole game plays very well, and it feels fast and responsive.  As you've noted yourselves, the difficulty curve is quite tough, but that also creates the nice moment of panic when you see a tiny monster going for your gem. The whole game is very clear, and makes total sense. The only possible exception to for me was the shop - both that you have to stand under it for it to open (I spent a while next to it trying to figure out why the menu sometimes suddenly opened and closed again) and that it changes the view in a way that changes the aim of the player, so if you're chased by a monster and pass under the shop, you will shoot all over for a moment. But again, super cool entry! Well done!

OH MY GOD IT'S A GIANT SPACE LIZARD! :D

I didn't experience your game as sluggish actually. You could try lowering the cooldown (but then also the damage?) of the main cannon to make it feel more responsive. What I miss mostly is a challenge that's more than a timer. If for example instead you would get 1 point every second (so still the timer element), but also 1 point for each asteroid you kill, and double (or triple!) the points if you do a trick shot kill. Then I would have something to make me want to keep going more. Still I liked it - cool that we both had the damage = change AND shooting = moving + deflecting combo :)