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Update: The item system works now! But the TV remote still doesn't have its intended function, although 'tis usable as an item

The item-system works now! And the game has an EXP-bar. Levels also show how far you are from evolving your mon

One thing I forgot to say: The name has to be a reference to "Zombies Ate My Neighbours", right?!

The comment has been adjusted, based on one thing I forgot to mention, and after having read through the other response that you had cited

"To be clear, the AI did not write the lyrics. I did" Well, that explains it. Kudos to you! The lyrics are really catchy

"just to make sure you know that AI isn't that good" As I had suspected, I just wasn't sure

"If you look at my response to @Crevlorne's post about 4 posts down from yours, I went into a lot of detail about my thoughts on AI-generated content and how I share some of your sentiments on it. (I spent like 40 minutes writing that post so I don't want to belabor my point here.)" 'Tis good that you were upfront about it, which is objectively the correct thing to do. It shows your spine. For the sake of us being in a Jam, you're correct, it matters very little what's done for hobby-projects and Jams. They don't carry any greater gravitas than that. But generative AI in general is pure evil, and it is a Pandora's Box that can no longer be closed, once it has been opened up. AI doesn't make things out of nowhere, somebody else's information and data has been used to train what generative AI does. When used for silly, insignificant things, it isn't that deep. The whole concept of AI just icks me, especially since "AI" as we currently know it isn't really even AI at all since it cannot generate anything on its own, and the ramifications of it using other people's work is creatively bankrupt at best and dangerous at worst

I am not here to preach at you. I'm just a preachy feller in general. But I hope you're smart enough to understand all of this already, and still make your own decisions, judgement and call despite all of that, so my preaching is not necessary. You seem to have a good head between your shoulders, even if I'm unable to trust people in general. But I have no reason to believe you're not

"Yes, the assets of my game are premade free assets" If you're a solodev, that is a bit more understandable. And especially since this Jam did provide them and encouraged using them, if those are what you used. I just personally favour unique, handmade assets whenever possible because of how much life they breathe into the creations, and makes them special. I fought with my programmer before the Jam started about whether we should use premade assets or not, considering that we hadn't found a sufficient amount of artists yet

4.5: "But well, you had 5 people working on your game and I had one, and my computer caught on fire during the jam" You are correct. In fact we did have six, the game was originally supposed to have music made specifically for this game. But due to a few altercations with our fifth member (our second programmer, who I had to take in because our original second programmer never contributed anything to the game's code and I only found out on day 7 of the Jam's runtime, and the new second programmer [not Tespy, feel free to draw your own conclusions there ~ I won't name any names. But Tespy was a part of the team ever since day 1, and he programmed most of Hauntlings all by himself. So if we really want to be dogmatic there were only four of us in the end and for the most of the devtime]), our composer left as a result and barred us from using his music. Your PC catching on fire is quite unfortunate and unlucky, and you're a trooper for having been able to pull through despite all of it! I can relate because I was afraid that Hauntlings would never be finished, because it was constantly on fire :'D Well, maybe not as much as your situation but it had little embers lingering around it constantly

"Except for some of the sound effects that I made using sound effect makers" Respectable

"As of this writing, I've played and rated 126 games in the jam. I will say there are a few more stable games out there, especially 1-bit games that were smaller in scope" That's to say more to what catches my fancy and what kind of games and genres intrigue me personally. I'm of course speaking based on my own personal bias, and that comment doesn't necessarily have anything to do with anything ~

"Again, I appreciate your honesty" I'm a professional, and I'm used to critiquing different pieces

"And I'm glad you seemed to have liked the game against your will. :)" The game is so good, and the presentation so well-made, that it made me like it. That is what I wanted to convey

About the Jam's theme (the TV) and how it was supposed to relate to the game: There is an item in the inventory called the TV remote, it just is a toy-item just like the angel statue which is supposed to make your mon happier

When selected, the scene was supposed to transition into a TV room where the mon watches TV, that's literally all :'D We interpreted the theme in the loosest of senses

I will never be good at these types of games because I have that neanderthal-genome in me. But this game is objectively-speaking well made! It works for how simple it is

This game's good looking, very fleshed out and it has a lot to do in it!

Our team has two artists: Mern drew the background-image and the items, and concepted the monsters

Shadow turned the monsters into sprites, animated them, and also made the countdown graphic  and the opening gate (which apparently didn't make its way into the game) in the racing minigame

Update: The gate is in the game now!!

Cool Flappy-Bird clone with a horror-twist that I'm way too shit to play. This is literally a skill-issue which I acknowledge to be the case, this game's not made for me

The only complaint I have is that this game cannot be paused and has to be killed with control F4. But other than that, neat stuff!

This game is pretty wholesome, for something that was mostly made with the assets provided by this Jam. This game has such a cool, interesting concept and mechanics

The movement and the sword-swinging are a bit janky but overall this game is pretty neat!

This game is pretty neat and okay for an arcade-shooter. Brings me back to when I used to play Call of Duty: Infinitite Warfare zombies-mode with friends way back when ~

The only complaints I have are that the 3D movement (aiming and looking around you with your mouse) feel way too wonky/weird, almost like either you or your character would be drunk. Also you getting stuck in corners can lead to some frustration when trying to escape from da zomps

The second thing is the ammo-system and the way it has been implemented. When I read your comment on the game's page, that at least helped somewhat since it let me know that ammo at least exists. But it is still a bit frustrating that once you run out of ammo, you're just supposed to bum-rush through the zombies to find yourself more ammo

"But having the characters themselves talk about various items that might be useful doesn't seem very satisfying." One's own personal feelings should never get in the way of what's good for the game. What we grow accustomed/blind to as developers, for we know our own games the best, others may not know since they could have no possible way of knowing, naturally

"For the ending, I wanted to convey a sense of eternal limbo. But I understand that doing so just makes it seem like the game has stalled or something else is going on. I'll take that into account too!" That's fair, it just genuinely made me wonder if something's not working as intended or what's going on, did the game break or what? Putting in at least some kind of an ending-text would have been a better indicator, no matter how cheesy that would be

"each item was originally supposed to be an element of a more expansive lore that, due to time constraints, we weren't able to implement! So we did our best to include indicators to help you understand what to look for" That is fair, and I have no reason to believe otherwise

"(and originally there were supposed to be 4 of us doing it and not 3, another friend of mine who is actually trying his hand at level design)" I can relate to this with my own project of Hauntlings, that ended up being a revolving-door for programmers. My sympathies and condolences, friend

"also because I've never done Level Design!!" Considering that you've done a servicable job, well done!


This game has a lot of flavour and intrigue, and I could see this easily being able to be turned into a full release with slightly more elbow-grease

As much as I hate AI and I will actively want to punch you in the ballsacks for using it, no matter what I'm about to say next and there's no changing that fact . . . the main theme coming at me out of left field was a pleasant surprise and added more to this game's production-value! (even if something made with AI cannot be counted as production, for obvious reasons). This game's music is good, the title theme as well as the theme(s, mutiple variations apparently which increases the game's quality even more) in-between stages is nice and catchy with coherent lyrics for AI. The game looks nice, even if (if I understood the credits correctly) all of the assets in this game are premade

It really pains me to say this, and it speaks to the quality of everything else I've witnessed in this Jam so far, but this might be the best, most stable experience I've played here so far

This game has such a cool concept, it looks great (presentation, graphics etc.) and switching between video-footage and real life is the most creative mechanic I've seen in any GameJam in a while. But it has several issues . . .

1. A lot of the puzzles/puzzle-elements in this game are pretty random and nonsensical. You're just expected to know things or just figure them out on the fly. What a fool I was for my inability to predict that, without any indication, some of the specific parts of the video drop the item that is needed to progress, except the mom-bed room where you're just expected to bum-rush every corner of the real life room until you come across a drawer with the key inside of it. And what a fool I was for my inability to predict that when the objects around you ask you to bring a "sharp object" near them to cut them, when you finally find a pair of scissors, you're meant to use it on a lock instead of snipping those ropes off . . . or towards the end of the game an eyeball and a piece of knife next to a police officer will magically turn into an axe, and a brick with what looks like a piranha's tooth turn into pliers. Just illogical nonsense with zero explanation, which is not a good thing in a puzzle game

A better way to go about all of this would have been that the video-footage's dialogue should give more indication towards the puzzles themselves, like for example: "Laadi-daadi-daa, oh hey let me use this thing to cut this thing! Oz noe, where is mi knife?" Or something like that, "Hey, let me leave my walking cane here in the corner of the door since I don't need it anymore". It would be clever and it would actually tie the video-footage in into the gameplay as well as explain what is going on with the puzzles better, instead of you just having to guess things blindly without any kind of guidance or a hint

2. I got stuck behind the fridge after trying to open it up, this should be physically impossible

3. After the monster chases you, you end up in this state, without any idea if the game is over or if you can still progress or what's going on 

This is barely a videogame, and way too short. But what it loses in both of those, it wins over with charm, the cool poster (which misled me a bit, admittedly . . .) and the presentation!

I wanted to give my team a week of time to rest, and today we'll get to talk about if we want to continue this project and implement in all of the missing features that were supposed to be there

The inventory was supposed to work, but we weren't able to get it done in time

I feel the same way, thank you so much!

The item/feeding feature did not make it into the game, unfortunately. As you can see the inverntory exists but the buttons do nothing as of yet

I wish that if we ever get to work on this again, we'll add that feature back in!

We definitely should make a petting-feature for our mons if we do ever decide to follow up on this game

There are only two minigames. We were supposed to have a battle minigame as well, Pokémon-style. But it unfortunately had to be cut, but we got it to somewhat of a functional proto-state

The item-system in the game doesn't work, we kinda left that to the very last second and because our programmer (due to his timezone) was sleeping during the seven remaining hours of time to submit the game, I just decided to bite the bullet and submit it as it is

I'd like for us to "fully finish up" this game, to polish it and add in all of the stuff that's missing. But that's up to my team, since I can't program or draw for shit :'D

Don' !

Thank you for the reminder! ^_^

Just because something isn't impossible doesn't mean it should be made. Also you at no point had any point to even begin with

Wrong, the question is absolutely 100% "can I" because this person makes games exclusively in PowerPoint apparently. But the question to both is automatically a "hell fucking nawh"

"why would you want to suffer" because this kid is like seven years old or something, obviously. No duhh

Yeah, I suppose you can make "ice cream" out of cowdung. Only 1. It won't be real, actual ice cream since it won't contain any ice . . . or cream. And 2. It'll literally taste like shit

So there'll be no point ^_^

Fair enough

And how the hell are you "for make the game" with PowerPoint, are you like nine years old or just trolling?! I'm sure you can use that, if you're some kind of a wizard that can make a game using PowerPoint as an 'engine'. I doubt that's explicitly prohibited, not like anyone would do that though ~ Because that is physically impossible :)

For what, pray tell?

"AI is allowed as long as it’s used ethically and legally" This is a bit of a paradox, since AI doesn't really have any ethical, or technically legal, use-cases at all. More on that with my second point

"Don’t use outputs that infringe on copyright or trademarks" This is virtually impossible, because AI doesn't pull its information out of thin air or the ether. ANY and EVERY information or data AI has has been trained off of something/somebody else's works. That's how and why AI is able to mimic different artstyles. Of course what's probably meant more with this guideline is "Hey, don't go around creating Disney or Studio Ghibli -prompts" etc. , but I've got the feeling that that's done here only because that'd be the most egregious, blatant and in-your-face thing, and not for any other reason

Of course, you people are free to run your own Jam however you want. I just find the way these guidelines are phrased funny, because if you really think about it, they are oxymorons