itch.io

Reviewed and rated! :D

As much as I loved the intro - great job on that artwork, *and* the artwork in the game in general, btw! - I felt like I must of missed something? Minesweeper, which it feels like this is a cousin to in some ways, gives you far more information on the surrounding cells, but there doesn't seem to be a mechanic like this for each cell here? Just the occasional clue, like "the enemies are not in this row", etc? That's a great idea, but it didn't give me enough clues, so I ended up just randomly clicking around and dying. Maybe some kind of Bomberman-esque light mechanic which reveals all unoccupied tiles in a row might of helped? The production values are great, though.

Genuinely quite fun. The goofy sounds of the enemies and their pre-rendered sprites pitched this at the perfect level of silliness to me - because no matter what anyone says, there will never be any idea as silly as a Christmas action game, lest of all an FPS. So I'm super glad to see someone else realise this and just roll with it! :3

My three main crits are technical ones - firstly, enemies get stuck in doorways often, meaning you can effectively get trapped in rooms, but it's a jam game, so what do you expect? (additionally, this is why I made my entry an enemies free experience - one week just isn't enough to make decent AI, imho). 

Secondly, the weird lurching with the FOV when you move made me feel kind of ill after a while. I understand that kind of thing when running, but just when moving at all is too much. Third - and, this is an issue I've struggled with as well in the past when making my own projects in Godot - the lag spikes when a 3D scene first loads, due to all the shader and material pre-caching, are a pain. I prevented this same issue in my entry by making a scene that displays some quads and particles in front of the camera, and loading all the saved materials and particles in quick succession, one after another, while the HUD is being covered up with a black screen with "Loading..." text in front of it - it seems to solve the issue fairly well, for me at least. ^_^

Your main gameplay mechanic is fun, I love the silly enemy sprites, and the music tracks picked really suit the tone of the whole thing as well. Well done!!

Fun for a minute or two - I liked how picking up presents gave you a wider cone of light. :D

101 BELLS DING DONGED

Yeah, it's a pinball game alright. Kudos for the original song, that made me laugh a little, haha. Could of definitely used some good strong flipper noises for the.... well, the flippers. But otherwise, good job! (It's a shame about WebGL Unity's light limit - I would of used additive sprites instead in your situation but i guess you have your reasons, haha)

Thank you very much! I'm so glad you enjoyed it :D

Hehe, thank you very much! I'm glad that you spotted the camera sensitivity setting - I really should of added a control layout diagram to the game itself, but dammit, it was Christmas eve and I was so burned out by the end! I'd of loved to of made the level bigger and added a few more trees and scenery items, or maybe even a few more levels - but I just didn't have the time. Maybe in a post-jam build I'll add a bunch more levels and some more features. ^_^ Thank you for playing and rating!

Thank you! :D I played and rated your game, btw.

I couldn't get too far, because a pit somewhere after the third child doesn't kill you when you fall into it - you survive and can scroll the screen but you don't die and respawn? I did like how giving the children presents acted as checkpoints, though. One thing I would definitely of done is - after the player dies, removing the lights they've spawned since the last checkpoint and re-add the bells they've collected since that checkpoint to the level. As it is, if you ring the bell somewhere and it's not in an appropriate spot, you... kind of have to restart the entire game again. But, a good effort! :)

Heh. 69.9 points. Noice. :P

This was a very fun simple game! Such upbeat energy, made me think of a kid jumping around on Christmas morning. And I loved the music! Great job :D

Oooh!! A strategy card game!! I've.... gotta admit, Go Fish is the limit of my card game playing abilities, and I always avoid card games because I never have a clue what's going on. But all the little animations were neat, and it had pretty high production values for a week long game! Sadly, I lost the light of Christmas. I think. I had very little idea what was going on. :P

First off - that is a pretty unsettling background image to put in the back of every level! That had me a little unnerved right from the start - so, starting off strong there. Great job on the sound design! - even if I felt that the game was probably in need of a more dramatic death screen... and, it kind of has the Alan Wake issue where enemies get stunned by you looking at them - but, the battery running down on the flashlight, and it needing to be charged by shaking it, thus attracting more enemies, does negate that somewhat. I got as far as level 5, and that took me several retries! 

However, what I would say is that the purchases/upgrades shop? Yeah, I didn't really use it. It doesn't feel like a great fit for this type of game, what would of probably worked better imo is enemies with different attack styles (maybe once they spot you they charge and can't be stunned with the light until they get really close?) or more variety in pathfinding, or more player goals - like  having to find a button to open a door to get to an exit door after finding presents, which would require backtracking or running in a loop of some kind to escape the enemies. I wouldn't say that it *hurts* the game by it being there? (The upgrades shop, I mean) - it just doesn't add anything, imho. Regardless, this was a great, simple jam game - and in my book, you also get extra points for using Godot ;D

Thank you! And HOORAY someone actually used the free look feature! :D I'm so glad, hahaha

HOORAY! The downloadable version worked!!

A great little adventure, I loved how you implemented the jumping mechanic! It felt like the environment kind of fell apart towards the end with missing collision shapes etc, but I loved how it seemed to be made out of oversized things you'd normally find at Christmas - made me feel like I was helping guide either a tiny dog in a regular household or either a regular sized dog in a giants house :P

I loved all the lights as well, even if the art style was quite simple it was endearing and fun. And very good animations on the doggy too :D Well done!!

Played and rated! :)

I did have a play of this one, but couldn't complete it - I got as far as the two benches in the corner of the maze and then it wouldn't open any further when I rang the bell? o.o

Either way, the environment design on this was really nice, it felt the closest that any of these has felt to me to a real place  - and it made me feel very Christmassy as well! Good job ^_^

Played and rated your game ^_^

Played and rated! <3

Played and rated! <3

The ominous christmas music, the uncanny visual style that reminded me of baldis basics... it didn't feel like you were aiming to make an outright horror game? And that made it all the creepier. Some of those elves... they looked dead. new head canon: Santa is keeping corpses of elves in his factory. XD I failed my inspection, but I think I looked pretty hard so I'm not sure where I missed any...

Regardless - I'll certainly remember this game. 

Nice little timewaster, but it needs two things: A try again button and for the main music track to loop! Gets very awkward sitting there, defending your Christmas tree in silence, don'tchaknow? :3

My highest score was 2350 :D

Honestly, the best game I've played for this jam so far. Simplistic but effective art style (I adored the sweet little blackbirds, haha), and a really effective and novel central mechanic that had me playing all the way to the end! Would be highly effective to be used in a horror/dark survival game, actually - gave me very "Don't Starve" vibes. Also, whoop whoop for some Godot rep!! :D Only downside - if you could call it that? - was that the "get back to the light" screen where everything faded red made the entire screen brighter, so sometimes I ended up using that to find nearby lanterns. Not sure if that was intentional. Two thumbs way way up!

Fun for a little play!! I like how you can ring each bell more than once, in theory meaning you can get more than one point from each bell ^_^

The best I managed to get was four presents! While I like the idea of ringing the bell to light up the area having actual consequences of Santa hearing you - in practice, it meant I barely used the light, only navigating by the edges of the map. It could of used some music - but I liked the silly """jumpscare""" from the not-scary santa when you get caught, haha.

Fantastic little 2D platformer, you incorporated the theme AND the special object really well, with a really neat mechanic!! Graphics and sound are rather basic but the writing was great, the humor was really well done and I loved seeing what the little gingerbread folks had to say. Only thing was I couldn't complete it - the timings on those christmas-light platforms were far too tight and when I thought I'd finally made a difficult jump - out goes the light! (Truly the dark souls of Christmas platform games :P ). Overall pretty amazing :D

Thanks for playing! I'm going to play yours as soon as the main part of my Christmas day is over. By the way - Camera sensitivity can be modified at any time using the MINUS and PLUS/EQUALS keys on the keyboard ^_^

Definitely! I'll rate and play yours if you'll do the same for mine (I'm queing a bunch of jam games  to play and review after the main part of my Christmas day is over - so should receive a rating sometime after 5 pm-ish today) ^_^

My entry is Ready, Steady, Glow! -  a 3D Platformer where you have to decorate all four trees around the Snowy Isles before the bell chimes twelve times! For some reason, the pickups don't glow and the level decoration and snow-topped fences don't show up in the web build - so I strongly urge you to play the downloadable version. I've confirmed it's not an issue with my code - something to do with Godot or the plugin I used? (Fixed now!) Hope you enjoy :)

Thank you! <3 I'm going to play yours as soon as the main part of my Christmas day is over ^_^

Thanks a lot! <3 I'm going to play yours as soon as the main part of my Christmas day is over :)

Specifically, what issues did you have with the movement? I ask as I'm gonna tune up the character controller for further projects ^_^

The presentation, tunes, graphics, all fantastic (as I've come to expect from RaptorSoft!) - but I had real issues with the mouse sensitivity and the camera controls. The attack also isn't very intuitive to use - three times now I've made it to the little section where the camera goes overhead, and I die each time because I can't properly target the enemies, so I get my ass kicked every time. I should mention that I'm using keyboard and mouse, not a gamepad because I'm very much controller-impared - but I figured it was worth mentioning all the same. I'd kill for an options menu so I could alter the camera style and the mouse sensitivity, because I really wanna give this game another shot... but as it stands it's just kinda frustrating. :( I do hope you add that stuff in a future release because I'd definitely be interested in trying it out again!

Was this project abandoned? I really hope not because it was great...

Great choice of tension music, the whole thing felt very uneasy even when the spooky ghosts turned up, it didn't put a half to the unease. I wish there had been a button to make it go fullscreen though, as it wouldn't quite fit on my monitor! Good work though :)

Hooray! A Godot project, and it's fun too :)

Great choice of tension music, the whole thing felt very uneasy even when the spooky ghosts turned up, it didn't put a half to the unease. I wish there had been a button to make it go fullscreen though, as it wouldn't quite fit on my monitor! Good work though :)

just posting so I can get notifications of new posts to this :)

Yeah, itch.io said at some point something about "oh we're looking for a new payment provider" but I think they're just quietly hoping that we all forget about it. I still plan to participate in some game jams here but if I ever release anything else substantial, I'm likely to just register a dot com, make a page for the game here with just screenshots and a link to my main site once it's up and running.

As a creator, being told what I can and cannot create isn't exactly great for artistic freedom and also prevents us from telling the kinds of stories that we want to tell and in the ways we want to tell tehm. In addition, as soon as you create a rule that the majority of people broadly agree with - under the banner of "sexual content" for instance - all you then need to do is define a regular part of everyday life - e.g., two gay characters holding hands - as "sexual content", and then bam. It's now illicit to depict a gay couple in your game, and you'll be cut off from funds and a space to share your art if you do. It's not hard to see why this is a bad move (unless you're a devout bible belt bigot).

As a result,  I've been downloading whatever I can from itch.io, GOG and then using SteamRip to pirate games that I previously purchased on Steam to back them up to external drives, because fuck knows when some terrible new regulations will come for them. Itch.io is the best platform that we have, but tbh even it is not particularly appealing nowadays. 

Wow, I can't believe you'd make such sweeping statements like this. What about all the good Nazis?! /s

dot

ughhhh are we going to have to move to using fucking crypto

to buy video games

Can developers themselves upload stuff on DLSite and sell via there? Sorry, just curious, not trying to be aggressive, haha