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A jam submission

Lights OutView game page

You're a security guard at a condemned building. Can you get the generator running?
Submitted by lordnarwhal — 20 minutes, 8 seconds before the deadline
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Lights Out's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Presentation#4502.7113.833
Theme#4962.5933.667
Fun#5372.2393.167
Originality#6242.2393.167

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game represent "Power"?
The power goes out and it's up to you to get the back-up generator running.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Very cool game! Knowing it was made under an extreme time crush makes it very impressive! Reminds me of one of those old RPG maker horror games.

Developer

Thank you! Yes, my biggest inspiration is easily Ao Oni so I appreciate the comparison :D

Submitted(+1)

Immersive atmosphere, beautiful game, thank you for making it! Lots of text at the start though, could it be spaced out a bit, attached to objects and triggered when player interact with them?

Developer(+1)

That's a great thought. I tend to go heavy on exposition because it's just my style, but I think it'd drive me insane if I was playing someone else's game and was confronted with a novel at the beginning lol.

I originally intended for this to be more of a horror game, with some actual scares / monsters, which of course ended up falling apart due to my shrunken timeline. But my thesis for horror games is that they need to be paced well to be effective, and one way to pace them is to have upfront exposition, and slow roll the scares. Otherwise they feel cheap and cheesy.

Broadly speaking though I do agree with you -- elements of the story probably didn't need to be directly stated, and if they did, it could definitely make sense to attach them to environment interaction.

Thank you for your comment and for playing, I appreciate the feedback!

Submitted

Nice! Will you continue working on the game after the jam?

Developer

Probably not this exact story, though I might revisit it eventually. The mechanics though I'm absolutely planning on leveraging for a much larger game. Was going for some proof of concept here for that one.

Submitted(+1)

Cool little game! I am sorry to hear that you had an even harsher time constraint on working on it, sure you could have cooked up something cool, definitely nice work for what little time you had!

Developer(+1)

Thank you! It was seriously 16 hours straight of me coding as quickly as possible while trying to think of puzzles in the background lol. Hopefully in the future I can have another opportunity to make something I'm proud of.

Thanks so much for checking my game out!

The writing on this game is really good! With that being said, the fact that the light from the lighter is always away from the player is pretty annoying. Still, good job!

Developer(+1)

That sounds like unexpected behavior. It should be centered on the player. Mind letting me know what system you're running?

Developer(+1)

And if you have any screenshots or anything you would be willing to provide so I can see, that'd be helpful. Also, if you have some setting that scales apps on your computer, that could be related.

I'm glad you enjoyed the writing at least :D

(1 edit)

There, the light from the lighter isn't centered on the player

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the screenshot! Does the lighter just never follow the player or what? That's completely game breaking lol. I haven't had anyone else report this issue, so I'm a little unsure how to reproduce it myself... I appreciate the info though, I'll try to dig into what's going on.

At least for me the lighter is off-center 99% of the time. It does follow the player, but it does so poorly.

Developer(+1)

That's really really weird, and no one else has reported that behavior. It should stay perfectly centered on the player at all times. Does the position fix if you toggle the lighter on and off? I'm guessing it's something different about your GPU -- any idea what your hardware is? 

If you're willing to go the extra mile, I could send you a copy of the game with some debug logging added to help me understand the issue. If you're not willing to do that then I 100% understand. Thank you so much for your patience so far in helping me figure out what's going on. I intend to use this lighting system in other games so I definitely wanna get it fixed for you.

I'll try to record a video to show what's happening exactly. Maybe that'll give you a better idea of what's going on.

Also my laptop is an Acer nitro 5.

Developer(+1)

A video would be awesome, thank you!!

In the process of filming the video I found out that it only happens because I had the game on full screen. Once it's in a window it works properly.

I'm using windows 10, will send a screenshot in a moment

Submitted

Fun little game! I enjoyed playing, I don't play  lot's of puzzle games so it took me kinda long to figure some stuff out but it was really cool and the audio/text/dialogue systems seemed really polished! Very impressed you got all that in there given you only worked on the game jam for a day!!

Developer

Thank you! It was a hectic 18 hour day haha, haven't worked that long or hard since college. I'm glad you were able to beat it -- there's really only two puzzles but I was worried they'd be a little too cryptic