Well, sort of. The web version only saves your progress for the life of the tab, so playing on mobile isn’t ideal even if the controls are there. And making a bigger, more involved mobile version with a more touch-oriented control scheme sounds like a great idea, i’m 100% on board!
Pineberry Fox
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now that i’m actually seeing how to play, i think this would make for a neat puzzle game. like, if you in the background generated a layout and got some output, you could show the houses wanting that output and then the player could have to figure out an arrangement that would produce (at least) that. i’d play a lot of that
Cute game! It should not be tagged “Windows” or “Android” though, as there is now download available for those platforms. (HTML5/web is its own, separate platform that has nothing to do with those!)
On the gameplay itself: There’s no risk vs reward here. Because the changes are random and there is no transition period, players can’t react to anything. So the only reasonable way to play is to walk a foot or two, and then sleep through the rest of the day and the night. Opening up a short transition period and forbidding day-sleep would make people need to react, but that would come at the cost of entirely changing the feel of the game :c
For context, I reached “128 foots” without even looking at the game while scrolling through twitter on my phone, just paying attention to the changes in brightness in the corner of my perception. Didn’t lose, just closed the tab.
Consider using scancodes (keys-by-position) instead of keycodes (keys-by-name) so that your game doesn’t rely on people having qwerty keyboards [I don’t have qwerty]. Thankfully most Unity games support gamepad by default, so I was able to move with my controller, while holding my little finger on the E key, and maneuvering my trackpad with the other hand. Not a comfortable control experience, but it worked! Didn’t get to experience the SMITE, but I did get to experience the crash in the boss room!
I can’t play your game (it’s Windows-only) but having submitted to 23 of the 24 jams I’ve joined, I feel like I can comment on actually finishing things.
In general, you want to know what the “core” of your game is. What is the thing you want the player to be doing most of the time? Start with that, with no real assets. Personally I’m often making movement-focused games, so I’ll start by making just the physics in empty rooms with boxes for characters.
At that point, you’ll either have something that’s already fun, or you have nothing. Make a snapshot. (You are using version control right?) From there, you can add features, but always make sure you have a playable game. Snapshot frequently, basically whenever you get the next playable thing. If you have a list of “NEED THIS” and “NICE TO HAVE”, focusing on the needs first, you’ll be fine.
When time runs out, submit that latest playable version, that’s your game!
All that is on planning. Estimating timeframes is always going to be significantly harder. That’s the kind of thing you can only get with experience, and even then the typical recommendation is to double or triple everything you imagine. For instance, in my submission I have an achievement system, and I was sure that I’d be able to fill out a list of 48 achievements in a few hours. But the reality was significantly beyond that, and as a result some things just didn’t happen. This is fine. 72 hours is not a lot.
On Firefox I’m getting the “Error: The following features required to run Godot projects on the Web are missing: Cross Origin Isolation - Check web server configuration (send correct headers) SharedArrayBuffer - Check web server configuration (send correct headers)” message — should just need to enable SharedArrayBuffer in the upload’s settings here? I’m running the LTS version of Firefox if that makes a difference. Still not sure what was happening with Safari on my M2 air.
As for the updated version: the rule here is that updates are allowed as long as the original version remains available. Whether you want to make use of that or not is up to you, but even if you’re waiting for post-jam I very much look forward to playing through this again!
You tagged this as a downloadable executable for Windows, Linux, and macOS, but it is not any of these things. Change the game type from “Downloadable” to “HTML” and select the box that says “This file will be played in the browser.” (Also, it’s brotli compressed. That causes problems, so might as well go into the player settings in Unity and set that to Gzip or Disabled instead)
EDIT: fixed, thanks! Now that the game is playable, I am confused as to what the goal is.
The control scheme was a bit uncomfortable — had to put my right hand over top of my left hand in order to move and attack at the same time! Why not attack on space? (Or, better, rebindable controls and controller support.) That aside, there doesn’t seem to be much challenge here. Never was sure how much HP i had since that doesn’t seem to be shown anywhere, and the attack cooldown could be made clearer, but it was quick and easy to get through to the end.
This game doesn’t work in firefox when embedded, and tends to get force-refreshed by safari due to excessive memory usage after a death sure what’s up with that. But, after playing all the way through, I can confidently say that I like this game a lot. The art is good, especially the boss, and the controls feel exactly how you’d want them to. The little “plick” when you’re grazed is a nice touch.
I have only two complaints: The high score is never saved and gets reset to zero every time you start, so it’s impossible to compare runs. And the first mini-boss will sometimes spit out impossible patterns where the last lightbar goes directly off the side of the screen.
Related to that last bit: I think some of the randomized directions could use tuning: the barrels liked to be unreachable, just going directly sideways.
Looks like you’ve got a good start on things here. I don’t like the automatic fullscreening though: the game doesn’t need to be played at 4.5K! If you can disable that it would be cool. I appreciate that you gave multiple control options (arrows and wasd) since w/a/s/d are nowhere near each other for me, thank you! If you’re able to use scancodes instead of keycodes, then you can talk about keys by position instead of by label, which is better for movement controls.
Is this an endless game? I reached room 201, and there’s been no challenge at all so far. Am I building up to some kind of boss room at 1000?
It looks nice tho, and the music is a bop!
Concrete design analysis: I think the rooms here are far too small in comparison to the shield and dash abilities you have. You can reach the end in a split second while being completely invulnerable at all times in every room layout I’ve encountered
I jumped too high and left the screen entirely! Then enemies kept pouring in, and soon the page refreshed because it was “using too much memory” (probably from the flood of enemies).
I appreciate that you added controller support, that makes it much easier to play comfortably!
The running animations feel really off at slow speeds. I know it’s a jam and time is tight, but if you want to expand on this then you should definitely have per-speed animations
This is a nice game with some good art. Crashed during the (first?) boss fight tho, so that’s as far as I got. What controller-button is the dash mapped to btw? I was able to move and jump and shoot with my controller, but couldn’t dash. Not that it was needed during the part of the game that I was able to see.
Is the wall-cling intentional? If so, i’d like to see an animation for it. If not, your collisions might need work.
In terms of level-design, there’s a lot of blind falls. Might want to consider something like what Sonic has where you can hold up/down to move the camera?
the game has looked like this, with nothing visibly changing, for the past half hour. i suppose i should consider this a win-state
i’m not sure what the cell towers (?) do, and it feels like there’s more terrain cut off by my screen? (the last upgrade didn’t visibly change anything) but stuff feels pretty alright.
there is a bit of easy cheese tho: you can harvest honey from the hives while the game is paused!