I particularly enjoyed the initial creepiness of the bugs when they start moving around, and then the humorous lines of the queen. Quirky in a good way.
tinne26
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I liked that the moods were a bit over the place in the right way. First it might look a bit like crude comedy, and then it gets kinda creepy and scary afterwards, it was a fun mix. Also, minor and fairly subjective, but I found the title screen to be particularly catching. Very minimalistic but oddly satisfying.
The game design is excellent in this one, and I'm not going to say much more because it kinda is self-explanatory when you play through it. I really liked that you participated alone this time, as we get to see your individual strengths more clearly... and we get *more* games to play, lol. It also was the right level of challenging to me personally, so I really enjoyed it.
I didn't realize you could "skip" the "plot twist" with the visuals until I saw one of the screenshots you added. Clever not giving it up, it's super cool when it happens, it caught me totally off guard.
The polish on the map visuals is really something else, all the effects you added really enhance the graphics and the mood. Overall, it's an excellent game entry as always.
The results for the latest Ebitengine game jam just came out and this situation messed up the first place. Average ratings per game: 11.8. median: 13.0. First place got 13 ratings and an overall score of 4.323, while second place got a normalized score of 4.179 with 12 ratings (above the average!), which is 4.350 raw, which would have left them in first place. Both are awesome games, but this really feels bad. 17 entries, very high average ratings and median and very well balanced ratings across the board, yet the normalization can't be avoided. And there were two participants for that entry, so if both voted, then... are they effectively forcing themselves to have their ratings normalized by inflating the otherwise extremely tight range of ratings for the other games?
Doesn't look like itch.io offers any mechanism to make things more fair in these contexts. I'd personally love to see a combination of judge and participant ratings, so whenever an entry has fewer ratings, the judge rates can be used to compensate. But the current situation makes jams not fun for small communities.
I see what happened, yeah, that's my fault... I had the game downloaded too and ran this within the game folder itself. That explains why it was ok for me. So silly. I basically downloaded, played, then went like, hmmm, can't I do this easier with just "go run"? Tested, worked, shared without realizing I was already in a unique context myself.
I was only trying to be helpful, it's not like I'm the person responsible for this game. But I have to admit that this is somewhat surprising to me. The game is using this:
ebitenutil.NewImageFromFile("assets/images/space_background.png")
If this code won't work on macOS, I think the biggest opportunity for improvement would lie on ebitenutil itself.
EDIT: (could it be related to missing the _ "image/png" import instead..? hmmm, most likely not, ebitenutil already makes that import)
Ok, I've added that in case you need it, but what I don't like about this option is that then F won't work to exit fullscreen. I use Firefox myself and F works fine. Sometimes you have to click on the game first to put it in focus, and changing from fullscreen to windowed makes it lose focus so you have to click on the game again, but it should be obvious enough, because if it's not in focus you can't move the player either. Maybe some extension or some keyboard layout or configuration difference? I can't see why would this cause any trouble.
[...] you are an extra [...] Which could be a bit unfair
That's the part I like most about the game; I find some solace in playing under those situations and just dying. Like, "you are not special", "you are just another alien". That's very refreshing for games, and it makes me wonder how the concept could be explored further.
Actually, I missed moof! Thanks for pointing it out, nice detail, haha.
One of the things I like most from this being a relatively small community is that we get to see something beyond other people's games; we get to learn about their identity when it comes to game design, their subjective preferences, the ideas that they gravitate around and get them excited and drive them to create. You can expect heartfelt fables from Daigo, otherworldly spaces and mind-bending experiences from Zyko, equation-solving-like challenges from Quasylite, resource management and upgrade focused games from Elamre, Loïg's minimalism and his gift to create deep puzzle-like mechanics from small and elegant rulesets.
And I say all this for two reasons: first, highlight the beauty of it; second, to bring the point home that expecting complete games from me on a game jam is... misguided? I like creating worlds. Typically moody, somewhat ethereal worlds, something that will capture my own imagination. Worlds that make you ask yourself what's beyond what's presented in the game, where the game story is only a small series of events within a broader universe. In Retromancer, for example, you also managed to create a small, cohesive and unique world, but gameplay and content are always at the center, with other parts acting as a supporting elements. You make a world to add color to the game and anchor it to a theme. Being very ambitious and never neglecting any of those elements that can help make a game more colorful or fun may be an important part of your identity as game designers, but you always keep gameplay and content that you can interact with at the center, as the first focus, trying to create a complete experience around it. And it totally works.
All these styles are absolutely fine, and it's great that we all do different things, but I feel like my approach is among the most incompatible with game jams, and creating a complete experience will almost never be my main goal. At the same time, when compared to most other jam participants, all this might make me more prone to keep working on a project even after the jam ends. I've worked on ideas and content for 10 miles of the project, even if I only ended up showing 1, because creating foundations that I'm pleased about takes a disproportionate amount of time for my style. And that's why I'm great at text walls and tutorials, because I always go much further than what may be considered healthy in terms of pondering, trying to examine things from multiple perspectives, being impractically contemplative. But that's my way of doing things.
(That was a very long way to tell you to adjust your expectations, hahaha.)
I like the general art direction, I have about twice the amount of art of what's shown in the game already done, I have the narrative and I have almost all mechanics (unless I decide to implement fights), so rationally speaking... I should do it. I would need to do some significant cleanup, but after that it should be fairly straight-forward content creation.
(SPOILERS AHEAD) The winged creature becomes able to transform into a horned creature (which can dash instead of double jump) after the sword thingie. The core of the gameplay is about combining the two abilities (jump and dash), sometimes swapping mid-jump. The main char also has some unique power related to reversing, and it's used on other contraptions, small puzzles that combine with the platforming and so on. About the world and the power of the char, more becomes revealed slowly through a few NPCs that are placed in more "secret" or hard to reach locations, which are not essential to beat the game, but act as secondary rewards for more thorough exploration. And you keep finding a few more of those big swords... and then... well, I'm not going to spoil the end of the game here.
Maybe the main problem here is that you get so close to regular 3D that we just have to complain about the typical things we care about in 3D, like the camera, while we ignore the player animation, the star field, the editor (yeah I "played that" because I was curious), the lighting and semispherical effects for the taser and win, etc. In a way, it does feel like that, like you got too close to general 3D, and for the average player that doesn't understand what's going on under the hood... it may not translate so much into a visually unique result as other of the games you made? Some of the fancy details got drowned by the scale of the chase, in a sense.
I wonder if you have any plans to develop this style further, e.g., a "paper mario"-like framework to work with more generally (paper3D vs tetra3D war incoming?), or if it hasn't inspired anything in particular that you would want to bother working on. As a proof of concept is very interesting, but unlike your knowledge on animating characters with shaders, it doesn't seem so easy to reuse situationally?
Nice little game, I enjoyed the theme with the animals.
Once I understood the rules I saw that the game wasn't actually too difficult, but I felt some things could've been better explained in the game description, like the board wrapping, the active effect affecting the movement direction (mentioned but unclear in the description), the enemy player also being able to reverse (but only once?) after knowing what you did in your turn, etc.
The main mechanics are actually fairly pleasant, and there are some interesting ideas around them; but some parts of the design, when I imagine how one would go about turning the game into a real board game, could have been polished a bit more.
Ok, it took me a while but I have finally figured out what's going on with the slow initialization of your game. Two things: first, you should decode the sound effects into raw byte slices, but not the whole BGM. Loading the whole BGM at once is overkill. Second, the ogg file's sample rate is 44100kHz, as most music distributed in the universe right now. You have 44000 in the project instead, which leads to having to resample all the audio you load. For the long BGM this is a massive pain.
When you see such a slow initial load you should definitely suspect that something is off, there's no reason why a game like this should struggle so much or even have an initial load screen.
For your style of games where you tend to put the focus on upgrading and managing resources, this idea definitely has a lot of potential. There are big questions surrounding how to manage so many units and how to group them, decide the order they come out, etc, but it could really be a killer concept.
I also didn't manage to complete my game, so I feel your pain, but if you decide to keep going and develop the concept further, I'd definitely look forward to that!
Yeah, only web version has music, see the notes on the main game page (Linux version should have at least the sound effects, though). Just in case, I've also tagged the jam version on github, so it can be played from the terminal with:
go run github.com/tinne26/transition@v0.0.1-jam
Hmmm, checking again, the general volume may be too low. I tested with headphones only and it was fine for me, but it may still be too low for many setups. Anyway, I only put 4 chords together in 8 minutes or so, you aren't missing much.
Very polished game, really solid experience. I will admit it took me a very long time to realize that you could only use shapes on the top lines, which is obvious in hindsight and it's fair to expect better from jam participants, but... yeah, I'm that dense, haha.
One thing I've noticed is that you can place a shape even when there's a gap left below and there's nothing that would actually support the piece. Is this a bug in the reverse-time matrix?
Continuing with the existential questions, I bet the more tetris-versed attendants will also start debating whether positions like these should be valid and accepted, as they could be "reversed" in many tetris versions. Maybe more modes and options!
The animations for the pieces and in the game in general are also really nice, the details on the main menu are super cool, the sounds are very well chosen. All around, a really tight package.
Nice concept! The puzzles were entertaining, and the difficulty felt very reasonable to me. Oh, and thanks for the special thanks!
Being the text nerd in the room, one thing I'd have loved to see explored in this game would have been animations when you press enter. For example, quickly lower the opacity of all glyphs around the start point, then start raising the opacity of the glyphs that are adjacently "traversable" and show the path being traversed, replacing the glyphs in the path with asterisks, or "eating" glyphs and making them disappear or something similar. I think having the result animated and shown explicitly would make beating the levels more rewarding. Or to visualize failures, too.
Ok, sorry for the tangent, couldn't help myself, haha. Nice to see you participating again, keep it up!
EDIT: ignore the first part of this comment, you do indeed have to download the game to run it. The given command only works if you are inside the game folder itself.
For anyone trying to play, I think running this from the terminal is probably the fastest way to go (no executables bundled in the zip, or if you are on linux):
go run github.com/matthewsedlacek/reverse_gravity@68ce9a0
There's one funny part of the game that I don't want to spoil...
We had similar small games in the previous jam, and again, it's nice to have these as an example of how to write a little game in less than 300 lines and, pretty much, a single code file. I checked the repo and saw there were extra graphical assets and removed audio files among that, so extra points for trying, even if you didn't manage to get it all in in the end.
As a small comment, notice that ebiten/v2/text can be used instead of having to roll your own text width computations. Or you may also consider tinne26/etxt.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed making this game and are encouraged to try bigger projects in the future!
Yooou dieeee daaamned liiich \ò_ó/
Not much to say, honestly. Everything is at least great... but then audio and content in general are exceptional. And on top of that, the co-op, GPT integration, multiple endings, japanese translation, gamepad support, quality of life features and details like hats, muting sfx and audio, interaction highlight hints, going back on menus, etc. Just awesome.
Don't want to sound like everything isn't also awesome, but the music is really something else. Congrats to liqMix, really good understanding of not just how to make great music, but how to make the music serve the context.
Hey, I'm a member of the Ebitengine game engine community. We noticed it was listed as a recommended engine for Go as "Ebiten" (thanks for that!), but it was recently renamed from "Ebiten" to "Ebitengine" for trademark reasons. It would be great if that could be fixed (Ebiten -> Ebitengine, and https://ebiten.org/ -> https://ebitengine.org/)!
If anyone is considering using it and would like to know more, we did also hold a game-jam earlier this year -> https://itch.io/jam/ebiten-game-jam/entries. The code is open source for all the games, so it may serve as a good collection of examples or to see what kind of stuff is people doing with it, libraries and all that.
Whatever you end up using, good luck to everyone!
Hey, cool to see this here! If you want smooth expansion of the text on the initial screen instead of the current pixel-by-pixel size increase, you can disable quantization completely on the renderer and use fractional pixels to set the size. You can convert from floats to fixed.Int26_6 easily, for example with etxt/efixed.FromFloatRoundAwayZero. It may put quite a bit of pressure on the system though, as that would generate multiple new glyphs very often, so you would have to test and see.
You may also want to add an epilepsy warning for that title screen!
Looking forward to more projects now that you've got gopher rotation under control ;-)
Hey, I've re-added the WASM version so you can play. If you still have problems, as a last resource you can always try with:
go run github.com/tinne26/bindless@v0.0.1
I tried to cross-compile for macOS, but sadly it didn't work out (cgo incompatibilities). I'll figure it out eventually. Edit: ok, I think I did, feel free to try out the macOS binary.
You have always been able to skip text by pressing ESC. Sadly, that collided with exiting fullscreen in most browsers (I didn't really plan for WASM or test it). I've since added TAB as an alternative to ESC in case that's helpful.
I'll be completely honest, I originally didn't intend to participate. I'm always very reluctant to join something, as when I do, I have to make something I'm satisfied with (which is really, really hard, and I always end up pushing myself too much). There are still many things in the game that are clearly not good enough (tutorial, some level designs, magnetic simulation being slightly broken... and then a dozen smaller things more). I did definitely push myself too much and went a bit crazy at times in order to get enough of what I wanted done. I also always feel really uncomfortable writing code avoiding obstacles in order to move fast instead of properly solving the issues. The world as a whole always tends to move too fast and without enough care for what they step on.
But I did learn quite a few things, and I truly believe we ended up making something great of this jam all together. Every submission has been an important one and has made this jam more unique and memorable. I'm content to have been part of this.
Sorry to barge in again. To disagree with Zyko, I think the character controls were almost perfect as they were. I liked wall-jump timing. And while speed could be changed, I think it's more accurate to say that the issue is the relationship between movement capacity vs movement needs. For example, speed could have been kept the same, but add zip lines or magnetic rails to jump on and move quickly through some areas. Or other skills or devices. Or design levels to be more vertical and take advantage of wall-jump and magnetism. Or make levels more linear (e.g: room by room, and then can't go back). Or put robot eggs to respawn from them when you want. For the metroidvania genre, it's true that if you want to make an explorable world you want it to be pleasant to traverse, and maybe higher speed would be nice, but I don't think speed was necessarily a problem here. Part of an unbalanced equation yes, but there are many other variables that could be adjusted. I was now thinking about Team Cherry saying they made Silksong as a separate game because Hornet wasn't the right size for Hallownest.