itch.io

I didn’t mean to insinuate that you weren’t playing well. Just that the game is very easy. As soon as you upgrade to an SMG or two, there’s no challenge. It just becomes a rather tedious slog as you said, with no buildup, no goals apart from that next upgrade. But that trudge is incidental, not intentional.

The game does feel too long, but that’s because we didn’t get around to implementing planned features that would have (hopefully) made gameplay more interesting. “The best-laid schemes of mice and men” et cetera. We slapped together what we had on the last day and tested just enough to make sure it doesn’t explode, but that’s all you get.

Your criticism is entirely fair. I don’t enjoy playing this one either. In fact, I’ve never been interested in the genre, and my only contact with it is seeing Samsai play a couple of these games on his streams. I get why people get hooked on them, but they’re not my drinking vessel of hot beverage. I also enjoy our previous jam games a lot more.

That said, this jam was another success for me personally: I got to write some bad code I won’t have to maintain and solve interesting problems I’ll never encounter in my day job. I didn’t get to write any silly prose or doodle more than a few tiny sprites this time, but that’s okay.

By the way, making the game “get to the point faster” would actually be the opposite of what we had planned. The idea, at least in my mind, was that you’d need to actually get good at it to ever reach the disappointing but inevitable conclusion. If you played well, you’d reach the expected power trip phase before things start to fall apart. Ideally you’d come in feeling like a proper hero and go away knowing that you achieved nothing of value. That it just wasn’t worth it, at all. You know, like war in general. Apologies for any hurt feelings, war enthusiasts!

We never had time for proper balancing and a lot of our plans had to be scrapped due to time constraints. But that’s casual jamming for you I suppose. As it is, there’s not enough build-up for the (anti)climax to make an impact, and getting there is tedious at best. But seems like some people actually had fun with the game so I guess it could be worse. :)

Fun start for a nice puzzle adventure. The graphics are simple but effective, and the mechanics are tried and tested first person 3D adventure fare. Nothing too unexpected in what we saw of the story either, but that's absolutely fine by me. I was definitely left eager for more!

I managed to grab two batteries from my own capsule as well. I wasn't about to kill anyone unless maybe it was absolutely necessary to save the rest, especially without investigating if there was a way to simply wake someone up first. Might not have finished at all if I had to resort to murder just to get a door open, or even just to save my own life.

The game over screen “sass” is basically just something we threw in to amuse ourselves, but I’m glad you enjoyed it as well. ;)

The sound issue is not with the sound effects, but with the code adding too much latency. There’s also a noticeable delay between the game visually reacting to something in the music and the corresponding sound actually playing, for the exact same reason. But that’s something that’ll improve if Ysblokje finds the time for the audio rewrite he’s been planning.

Paddle speed is a matter of difficulty and balancing, which we didn’t really have time for. A jam is a jam. We have plans for some gameplay mechanics that would affect the issue as well, so we’ll be tweaking things anyway. (I’ve managed to juggle several balls for a while multiple times as is by the way, but it’s not supposed to be easy.)

I’ll check out your game as soon as I can find the time, but as I wasn’t the one who actually submitted this one, I don’t get to give out ratings. That’s just how these jams work. Stranded does look like something that’s up my alley though, so I’ll be sure to give it a go.

The paddle isn’t rounded, but it has friction! Try moving your paddle towards the direction you want the ball to go. Some of that horizontal momentum will be passed on to the ball.

We actually tested a couple of mechanisms, including the one you suggested, and this felt more natural to us.

Oh and thanks for the compliments!

I'm glad you like the effect. The music is in an old-school tracker module format (made by our friend Gurnu on MilkyTracker during the jam) and we're simply lighting up rows of blocks when there's a note on a corresponding channel of the module. I wanted the blocks to look a bit like the lamps/leds on a horizontally mirrored digital VU meter, but obviously we're not monitoring volume levels, and the block patterns can make it all a bit hard to see anyway.

Did you notice that the ball launch counter follows the bass drum and the lights on the paddle are activated by the snare? :)

My specs: Ryzen 7 3700X / Radeon RX 5700 XT / 16GiB. The OS is Linux Mint 20.3, which--as far as games are concerned--is basically Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I run the latest stable Mesa (opengl/vulkan drivers) and latest stable Linux kernel (5.16).

It's not on your end. It just locks up on a black screen after the photosensitivity splash screen fades out, hogging up some 85% of my CPU (Ryzen 3700x) until I kill the process.  I did leave it running for a couple of minutes in case it was just precompiling some complex shaders or something, but no luck. Couldn't get any useful debug output out of it either. I guess I'm giving up for now.

Lovely little preview of a game that will make you smile. It looks good, it sounds good and it'll give you a laugh or three. The beta/preview is quite short and a tad rough around the edges, but I heartily recommend giving it a go if you enjoy platforming and are not allergic to a bit of silly humour.

After you've played the demo, why not go ahead and back the game on Kickstarter? I just did. Or donate here on itch, why not? I think it'll be well worth a few units of currency.

I tested today with a Dell laptop from around 2011, sporting an Ivy Bridge i7 with Intel HD Graphics 3000. The demo ran perfectly. Same thing on a Haswell i7 desktop system with its integrated HD 4600 GPU. On the Haswell I even tried with an Ubuntu system straight from the live install image to make sure, and the demo ran just fine.

If your hardware is very old and doesn't support OpenGL 4.5, you might want to try navigating to the game installation directory in a terminal and running "./ENCODYA_DemoV1.x86_64 -force-glcore42" (without the double quotes of course). Or if you've got very recent hardware, try the same with "-force-vulkan", because why not. :)

I found a workaround for the Linux "black fog" bug: Switch to Unity's Vulkan backend by adding "-force-vulkan" to the command line. Seems like it might make sense to switch the game over to Vulkan by default, at least on Linux.

The same problem on my gaming box with AMD graphics, errors and all.

Tested it quickly on my work machine. An intel iGPU, so test was run in a 1280x720 window at a horrendous framerate, but seems like the bug is still there. Screenie below.

PS: First launch showed me a black screen for minutes after the unity logo, compiling shaders no doubt. Started quickly the second time.

EDIT: Errors in Unity's Player.log, maybe due to the iGPU?

The referenced script on this Behaviour (Game Object 'Light') is missing!
(Filename: ./Runtime/Mono/ManagedMonoBehaviourRef.cpp Line: 333)

and

OpenGL Error: Invalid texture unit!

(Filename: /home/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/GfxDevice/opengles/DeviceStateGLES.cpp Line: 72)

Any progress?

The package for 1.5 includes a "hardcore" version of the ncurses executable without SDL features. Have fun!

Yeah keyboard controls aren't great. We're just relying on getch() for those, and key release events aren't available. But grab your SDL2-supported gamepad if you've got one and you'll have a much better experience.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Could you possibly elaborate a bit to help us fix this? Did the game not launch? Did you try launching from the Itch app or did you download and run locally? Did you try both the ncurses launcher and the pdcurses launcher? Which Linux distro are you on?

Due to the tight deadline of the jam we didn't have time to test very thoroughly, but we do expect it to run on Ubuntu >= 18.04 and derivatives like Mint 19, as well as Arch.

Can you try again? (version 3)

Version 2 worked fine on Arch when we tested it, but apparently only when launched from the itch app.

EDIT: I didn't make any changes to the game beyond adding a couple more deps into the libs folder.

EDIT2: Keyboard controls are really weird, that's why we added SDL2 gamepad support with more natural controls at the last minute. SDL won't return keyboard events for a non-SDL window though, so grab your gamepad if you've got one.

Fixed in git. Jam rules probably (and understandably) prevent us from updating the content until judging is done, but Samsai might possibly push a minimal fix at some point if that's allowed.

EDIT: Samsai updated the release on itch earlier today.

Me too.

Because that's exactly what we did... :P

The love2d wiki suggests AppImage bundles.