itch.io

Ok after some fiddling around I got it to work. The game has to be played in exclusive full-screen for the camera controls to work. Anyways, with that fixed it was a decent game. sensitivity felt a bit low even at the highest setting but apart from that the controls felt good, dashing felt quite nice with the FOV change. However I’ve noticed a few things that bugged me a bit:

• the enemies can shoot over fences and through trees so you cant really take cover from them
• having (even fast) projectiles to dodge would feel a bit more forgiving and sell the fantasy of this fast zombie creature dodging and weaving between gunshots even more. as of now I just tried to time my dodge with the audio-cue you gave the enemies which works but isn’t that great IMO, since enemies that are far away exert the same amount of pressure, if not more since they can turn “faster” to face you, but their audio cue was harder to hear.
• charging up a melee felt kinda pointless since it doesn’t one-shot and takes a long time, in which you could’ve just tapped the enemies head instead. and since there is no cover it also doesn’t help that you can charge before you move in, since you’re always engaged with the enemy.
• hitting the head for the one-shot feels a bit finicky to aim and I think its already hard enough if a hit on any part of the body results in an instant kill, since you are playing with a melee weapon against all ranged enemies.
• when an enemy dies they still have collision while their body is collapsing, which can make it hard to dash from enemy to enemy in a quick succession. I think I’d prefer it for their collision to turn off as soon as they are dead.
• sometimes the dash loses a lot of momentum when colliding with a barricade and doesn’t manage to break the one behind it and sometimes it doesn’t and breaks the second one without problems. Also starting a dash too close to a barricade doesn’t allow me to break it. I don’t think this is intended because the dash instantly accelerates so it should be able to break the wood from point blank, but if it’s intended to work the way it does right now, I’d like the acceleration to somehow reflect that (e.g. make the dash start slower and build up the speed over time, but then it wouldn’t feel as responsive in the combat anymore)
• some kind of red tint on the screen to indicate low health would also be nice, as you don’t really have time to look at the character portrait to take not of your health in the middle of combat.

Sorry if this came across as overly negative, I tend to spend way more time focusing on what can be improved and don’t point out whats already working, but understand that for me to spend this time trying to figure out what could be improved your game must have already hooked me in enough to want me see it be improved, if that makes sense.

Anyways, good job on the game, ultimately I did have fun beating it and don’t let my criticisms fool you into thinking I didn’t.

Damn, looked really promising but I get my camera stuck looking at the sky. I start looking parallel to the ground but as soon as I move my mouse in ANY direction the camera tilts upwards. Even for completely lateral movement. (don’t have any other input devices connected and playing on firefox)

Glad you noticed the effort we put into polishing, so it wasn’t completely wasted :D I spent waaay too much time getting the camera movement smooth which could’ve been better spent on something to do with the surplus body parts. Anyways thanks for the nice comment, I’ll make sure to check out your game when I have some time!

Glad you liked it, and yeah, there really was some Isaac inspiration. It wasn’t really a conscious choice tho, it just kinda happened because TBOI just fit the general vibe we were going for.

Thanks for the kind words and good luck with your leaderboard grind ;D

Hey, thanks for the detailed feedback and sorry for the crash. I tried to keep everything performant and clean up unused objects but apparently that wasn’t good enough for a web build. Either that or I must have missed some objects leaking. Maybe its the body parts just piling up and we did think about allowing the player to sacrifice them for upgrades like you also suggested but well, the deadline said otherwise :D

Anyways, glad you liked our game and congrats on the high score!

I was worried that someone would call us out on this D: next time I’ll take a strong magnet to the disk drive and flip each bit myself!

Yeah we are also a bit sad that we did not have time to implement more ‘unique’ upgrades like the explosive bullets. We were struggling against time a bit since we fell behind our development schedule early on by a day or two and I think this game would heavily benefit from more (silly) variation in the upgrade department. Glad you liked the visuals tho :)

Hi, first of all thanks for trying out our game! I’d love to shed some light onto the unified control decision. First of all we did not have enough time for playtesting in our development as we fell behind our original schedule by a day or two. I think if we had done playtesting earlier into the jam we would’ve caught this sooner and done the twinstick movement in the original upload as well. Now as to why we even chose the unified controls in the first place: We think that unifying the movement direction and the shooting direction has a couple of upsides:

• it plays into the theme as it increases the likelihood of one of your bullets ricocheting towards you. In just the “Twinstick” version, not the “Rebalanced” version where the map is significantly shrunk down, this is less likely to happen, as the obstacles are quite far apart and you can always just aim away from your target and the bullets will despawn before they ever come near you again.
• It simplifies the control scheme so it works on mobile devices without any additional dev time, which is sometimes nice to have to show people quickly.

That said I think the downsides far outweigh the positives. Due to the unified control scheme the skill floor for just picking up the game is increased a lot, since you not only have to move away from enemies and shoot at them, but you have to time those two actions based on the firerate to not get caught while also dealing damage. While this can be fun in a more rythm-focused game, we just did not put any work into fleshing this out so to the player this is not a fun mechanic to learn and engage with but just an annoyance to overcome to get to interact with the actual game. Ultimately I think that our genre choice of a survivorlike where the enjoyment comes from getting stronger over time clashes with our interpretation of the theme, being that the game gets a lot harder as time goes on.

so yeah tl;dr: We sadly didn’t have time for playtesting early enough or we probably would have arrived at something similar to the “Rebalanced” version before the deadline and I think we tried to force the theme a bit too much, sacrificing fun and good design to strengthen our interpretation of the theme.

Hope this shed some light onto our thought process :)

Hey, you might want to check out the “Rebalanced” version if you enjoyed the presentation but didn’t vibe with the gameplay. We’ve tried to give it a more pleasurable early-game experience and I’d love to hear if your opinion on the gameplay changes with that version.

Hi! Thanks for checking out our game. We’ve gotten that feedback you’ve given for the unified movement/shooting direction quite a bit so we’ve decided to add a version that addresses that, as well as a re-balance of the early game and some of the upgrades. You can check it out in the Linux/Windows downloads section if you’d like!

Hey! thanks for the feedback. we are still setting up the page right now and hope to explain a couple of the core mechanics better. Have you managed to pick up an Upgrade yet?

Nice rendering on the fur!

Thanks for the feedback, you’ve raised some really good points. I sadly didn’t have time to test the web-version as much as I’d have liked to, so I didn’t even notice that the escape menu would kick you out of full-screen mode! As for the slime-permeable platforms I was kind of aware that they might be a bit harder to spot but I wanted to keep the color palette small, and told myself I could get away with it. In hindsight I think that my judgement of their visibility was kinda biased because since I placed them, I already knew where they are and so they stood out to me more. So next time when I have to decide between a more concise color palette and visual clarity I’ll go with the latter.

Thank you for hosting the jam! It was a really nice opportunity to finally learn some Godot. I was a bit worried that players wouldn’t notice the changing jump-height and thus struggle in level 6, but I am glad to hear that you noticed :D

Neat entry, built around a simple and intuitive concept. Not a big fan of the arrow key controls and I didn’t even notice that you can use WASD and Space instead, until writing this. I had some difficulty determining the exact size of some fishes at times, so it was hard to plan ahead how many smaller fish I had to eat before I could consume a specific larger fish. I think this issue came from the fact that you reused some sprites for different sized fish. If you had more time/want to continue this I’d suggest

• a different sprite for each fish size
• some type of Diegetic UI that lets the player tell the exact size

Overall a solid entry tho, keep it up!

Glad to hear you liked it! I was actually worried that the puzzles would be too easy, but I guess that’s normal when you already know the solution while designing them xD

Played really smooth. There is a minor bug that trivializes some puzzles, where you can ‘double jump’ by spamming jump really fast but apart from that I couldn’t find anything game-breaking. The graphics were neat and the eye-count showing you how often you can split is a nice diegetic UI design. I personally would’ve preferred if the jump action was bound to spacebar and split used another key but I could get used to it after a couple of accidents.

And lastly I have a tiny critique that is completely negligible, considering its a game jam entry and not a steam release but I think its still worth pointing out: It felt a bit cumbersome to switch to a specific slime when you could divide into 4 and that problem would grow worse if you were to push this game further and allow for more splitting to happen.

I hope this didn’t come across too negative, I think this was a great entry, my mind just tends to focus on the critique side of things more than the praise, ESPECIALLY when I see potential in a game.

Thanks for the nice words! The slimes use harmonic springs and raycasts from the center of the slime to determine the shape. I basically have simulated springs that drive the desired radius of the slime and then I raycast from the center to that point to prevent any overlap with the environment. The source code is available on my github if you wanna have a look https://github.com/Umbrason/GodotJam-SizeMatters/blob/main/Shared/Slime/Rendering/SlimeRenderer2D.gd

Did you throw your slime into the water? xD You can restart the current level from the pause menu (ESC)

thanks <3

thank you <3

Oh that’s sad to hear D: Sounds like some kind of a memory leak, but I have no clue where that could come from. Did you play the web or desktop version?

right now? sadly not much. You can create ‘Item-Graphs’ using the editor and then import them into the ‘game’. That’s all we had time for, since we had to recreate asset (de)serialization and the node graph UI for runtime.

https://umbrason.itch.io/vampire-hunter-wip

Yeah I totally get that, we too had bigger plans that what was possible during the jam time. I hope the feedback didn’t sound rude or anything, it was a nice game for a jam :D

It lacked some variation in the level/puzzle design but the core mechanic is interesting to explore. It just needs some more supporting mechanics like things your dream version is too weak to do or a barrier it cannot pass to prevent you from solving the level in your dream and then just walking through it afterwards.

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll try to fit your game in with my exams :P

Glad you liked it, it took way too much development time to get it working xD

You should be able to turn your camera by holding the middle mouse button down and moving the mouse at the same time. As for the spade, have you found something to blind the tree with yet? (like a flashlight, hint, hint)

Hi, sorry for your troubles, you just need to extract the files from the Windows Build archive and run the executable file named “Dreams are not real.exe”

I’m sorry but I don’t plan on developing this game or rather prototype any further (I’ve also updated the description to reflect that). You’re not missing out on much anyway. The stuff you see is pretty much everything this “game” contains so far. It was just a quick concept for a Game Jam about converting an existing mechanic into a different dimension (hence the bridge construction in 3D).

I agree with all the comments pointing out that an in-game tutorial would’ve been better, but I will try my best to explain it here. The core mechanic is the time manipulation (UI Slider on the top screen edge). Just drag that slider around to move through time. Then, at any point in (valid/not red) time, you can add a force to any physics-based object by just dragging. When you are done creating a force hit the play button (bottom left) to re-simulate the new timeline. If everyone survived you can move on to the next scene.

My bad I updated the description ;)

Yeah, I totally agree that sounds would improve the game feel tenfold. Sadly I didn’t know how to approach SFX in a game where you can move through time pretty much until the last day. I have had this idea to record them in a similar way to the dynamic objects motion and velocity and to play them back when the time slider gets moved but sadly it was too much to add as I’d have to create my own sound file data.

Instructions, on the other hand, I didn’t even think about apart from the description on the Itch page so thanks for pointing that out to me. I think when I playtest a game I forget that I’ve been through the entire process of its creation and therefore already know what to expect and how each mechanic works down to the source code.

Yeah the messed that pick up mechanic up a bit because I used the mouse position for the raycast instead of the center of the screen and it turned out that in the web build the mouse doen't get moved to the center when its locked. It should work on desktop

I like the idea and I dont know if its intended or not but the fact that the werewolf doesn't know that he can jump fits with its simple mind and bloodlust that overshadows any rational thought like jumping to reach enemies. On that note he also doesn't seem to understand that pit = bad. Cute little puppy has a lot to learn ;) Only real downside is that its looking kinda washed out and not crisp and sharp as pixelart should and the occasional gap between tiles but overall a solid concept. Could be interesting with more transformations with different goals and immunities each like a mervolk that can swim, vampire that can fly but not in sunlight etc.

That is true, as you probably have noticed this is not a finished game but only a prototype for a gamejam.

thank you! A lot of effort went into making it :)

First of all your game has a very great gamefeel (the meat feels "meaty ", the graphics are very clean and the clones are easily distinguishable).
Your game has a nice learning curve its not too difficult to get into and gradually builds up like it should. Ofcause the 'difficulty ceiling' is very low because its a jam game made in 48hrs and theirfor doesn't have as much content as other puzzle games, but that doesnt hurt the experience.
The soundtrack is a little boring but blended in with the overall feel and theme when I didn't actively pay attention. 
I have noticed some minor bugs like being able to role the meat back up a block when it didn't fall long enough or a door pushing the meat upwards when closed while moving onto it but nothing gamebreaking. You could consider waiting untill the meat has fallen / the door is closed before you let the player make an input again or make the fall/closing faster so the player doesn't have the time to move again.
All in all a solid entry!