The atmosphere, art and music was suberb! Very scary, especially with how the enemies can be half insisde of walls and how they don't make much sound when approaching. The story was also really cool, and the voice acting at the start was amazing! As for playability, unfortunately, it lagged a lot for me, though that may just be my pc being old. This made it pretty awful since you needed to hit each enemy four times to kill it. To get around this, (this goes especially for level three) I would just snipe the enemies from a distance with during the animation when they activate. Maybe make them invurnerable during the animation? Also, communicate the sprint button to the player, I found it by accident and it helped a ton. Nice touch with the crosshair changing color, that helped a lot as before I noticed that it felt a bit frustrating since I didn't know if I hit or not. I think this game would benefit from two things: making enemies easier to kill (fewer shots, with the horror element it doesn't need to be super difficult) and making you respawn at the very start with a skip-cutscene button when you die. It kind of breaks the story when you respawn at the beginning of the floor you died on, with the stakes being so supposedly high. Overall, this was a great experience!
Super atmospheric and surreal! It always startled me when the monsters showed up and the music changed. Interesting story. Overall, a great game given the time you had to make it!
Loved the story and the atmosphere! Great use of sound to create tension and scares. Keeping track of the codes found on the screen was a well appreciated touch as well. I found there to be very little ammo though, and it was hard for me to tell where I was going to shoot. Both of these combined made combat a bit frustrating. If you were trying to steer the player away from combat that'd be fine, but I couldn't find a way to get past enemies without having to shoot them 5 times. There was also a lot of texture jankiness that I thought was a little distracting. Despite all this, I want to stress that you still managed to create a unique, tense atmosphere, which is one of the most important things for a horror game. Great job!
Hi Cyrus! I'm glad you enjoyed the atmosphere and story! I really appreciate the feedback and wanted to address it with how I hope to implement it in the future and some of my thoughts that went into the decisions that may not have worked as I had hoped :)
I'm sorry you found some aspects frustrating, the very limited ammo was intended just to add more tension and create those moments where you have to run away to find more (and possibly run into more enemies for a good scare). When testing it I thought I had left enough ammo throughout the second level to clear, the third level wasn't intended for a full clear though (my fault, I think I could have designed that encounter better, originally we wanted to have a boss in that swimming pool but we knew there wouldn't be enough time to add this on top of everything we had already made so we went with a horde that would overwhelm the player for a "you find the answer but you won't live to tell the tale" ending, which looking back on I could have communicated better). I'm intending to redesign the levels in the future so I will take this onboard when planning encounters to give the player more opportunities to get away or avoid encounters, and the swimming pool area will be getting it's originally planned boss fight that we had to substitute!
For not being sure where you were going to shoot, I'd be happy to hear a bit more as to where we missed the spot on that one? (Pun somewhat intended) I thought my teammate did a good job with the crosshair and communicating when you hit an enemy by having it turn red, I also hoped the bullet trails would do a good job at showing where the bullets went so I'm sorry to hear this was a point of frustration as I thought we nailed this, what would you like to see for us to make this clearer for the player?
With the texture jankiness, I think I know what you mean if it's the weird clipping on the floors of level 2 and around the swimming pool in level 3, this was my first time doing 3D modelling (a lot of firsts tbh) for a game and mistakes were definitely made in the process that would have required time we didn't have to fix (I joined everything in the levels together in blender thinking it'd make things easier in Unity, it did the opposite, I am planning to fix it when I remodel the environments)
Again, thank you for playing, for your kind words and for giving feedback! It's greatly helpful and I do intend to take it all on board while working on a "fully polished" version of this game :D
Thanks for getting back to me! I'd be more than happy to elaborate on some of the things I mentioned. There isn't a crosshair in the windows build of the game, and when I shoot, it seems to land towards the right instead of the center. The bullet trail is helpful though. There's also no indication that an enemy has been hit, they don't change color (that I noticed) or make a sound effect. A sound effect might be more helpful than the color change since most of this game is in darker areas. I found that collecting ammo was also pretty unclear, I didn't know you had to step on it at first and kept trying to interact with it.
As for the textures, there's quite a bit more that I noticed than just Z fighting (that weird flickering/clipping). The gun is partially transparent; it looks like its normals are flipped or the wrong faces are being culled. Same goes for a lot of the roots/branches in the second area. Not all of the textures are oriented the same way, sometimes the bricks start going vertically. There's also a few areas where the walls seem like they have stripes running up and down them, though this might be more the UVs than the textures. The UVs do seem off in some places where the texture starts warping (ex. floor of the swimming pool area). Most of the textures on the walls are pretty low res, but they're used on such big objects that the jpeg artifacts are visible. This is a fairly easy fix though, just tile the texture of the wall materials a bit. If anything I mentioned here isn't clear, you can always reach out to me on discord (kazamis) and I can send you screenshots of what I mean. This is still pretty impressive for a first time 3D modeling, you made quite a bit in such a short time! I'm glad to hear you're continuing on this project and I wish you the best of luck!
Comments
The atmosphere, art and music was suberb! Very scary, especially with how the enemies can be half insisde of walls and how they don't make much sound when approaching. The story was also really cool, and the voice acting at the start was amazing! As for playability, unfortunately, it lagged a lot for me, though that may just be my pc being old. This made it pretty awful since you needed to hit each enemy four times to kill it. To get around this, (this goes especially for level three) I would just snipe the enemies from a distance with during the animation when they activate. Maybe make them invurnerable during the animation? Also, communicate the sprint button to the player, I found it by accident and it helped a ton. Nice touch with the crosshair changing color, that helped a lot as before I noticed that it felt a bit frustrating since I didn't know if I hit or not. I think this game would benefit from two things: making enemies easier to kill (fewer shots, with the horror element it doesn't need to be super difficult) and making you respawn at the very start with a skip-cutscene button when you die. It kind of breaks the story when you respawn at the beginning of the floor you died on, with the stakes being so supposedly high. Overall, this was a great experience!
Im glad you enjoyed it! We will take your suggestion into consideration!
The atmosphere and specially the music makes this a good horror game
Thank you very much!!
Super atmospheric and surreal! It always startled me when the monsters showed up and the music changed. Interesting story. Overall, a great game given the time you had to make it!
I'm glad you enjoyed it! We apprecitate it!
Loved the story and the atmosphere! Great use of sound to create tension and scares. Keeping track of the codes found on the screen was a well appreciated touch as well. I found there to be very little ammo though, and it was hard for me to tell where I was going to shoot. Both of these combined made combat a bit frustrating. If you were trying to steer the player away from combat that'd be fine, but I couldn't find a way to get past enemies without having to shoot them 5 times. There was also a lot of texture jankiness that I thought was a little distracting. Despite all this, I want to stress that you still managed to create a unique, tense atmosphere, which is one of the most important things for a horror game. Great job!
Hi Cyrus! I'm glad you enjoyed the atmosphere and story! I really appreciate the feedback and wanted to address it with how I hope to implement it in the future and some of my thoughts that went into the decisions that may not have worked as I had hoped :)
I'm sorry you found some aspects frustrating, the very limited ammo was intended just to add more tension and create those moments where you have to run away to find more (and possibly run into more enemies for a good scare). When testing it I thought I had left enough ammo throughout the second level to clear, the third level wasn't intended for a full clear though (my fault, I think I could have designed that encounter better, originally we wanted to have a boss in that swimming pool but we knew there wouldn't be enough time to add this on top of everything we had already made so we went with a horde that would overwhelm the player for a "you find the answer but you won't live to tell the tale" ending, which looking back on I could have communicated better). I'm intending to redesign the levels in the future so I will take this onboard when planning encounters to give the player more opportunities to get away or avoid encounters, and the swimming pool area will be getting it's originally planned boss fight that we had to substitute!
For not being sure where you were going to shoot, I'd be happy to hear a bit more as to where we missed the spot on that one? (Pun somewhat intended) I thought my teammate did a good job with the crosshair and communicating when you hit an enemy by having it turn red, I also hoped the bullet trails would do a good job at showing where the bullets went so I'm sorry to hear this was a point of frustration as I thought we nailed this, what would you like to see for us to make this clearer for the player?
With the texture jankiness, I think I know what you mean if it's the weird clipping on the floors of level 2 and around the swimming pool in level 3, this was my first time doing 3D modelling (a lot of firsts tbh) for a game and mistakes were definitely made in the process that would have required time we didn't have to fix (I joined everything in the levels together in blender thinking it'd make things easier in Unity, it did the opposite, I am planning to fix it when I remodel the environments)
Again, thank you for playing, for your kind words and for giving feedback! It's greatly helpful and I do intend to take it all on board while working on a "fully polished" version of this game :D
Thanks for getting back to me! I'd be more than happy to elaborate on some of the things I mentioned. There isn't a crosshair in the windows build of the game, and when I shoot, it seems to land towards the right instead of the center. The bullet trail is helpful though. There's also no indication that an enemy has been hit, they don't change color (that I noticed) or make a sound effect. A sound effect might be more helpful than the color change since most of this game is in darker areas. I found that collecting ammo was also pretty unclear, I didn't know you had to step on it at first and kept trying to interact with it.
As for the textures, there's quite a bit more that I noticed than just Z fighting (that weird flickering/clipping). The gun is partially transparent; it looks like its normals are flipped or the wrong faces are being culled. Same goes for a lot of the roots/branches in the second area. Not all of the textures are oriented the same way, sometimes the bricks start going vertically. There's also a few areas where the walls seem like they have stripes running up and down them, though this might be more the UVs than the textures. The UVs do seem off in some places where the texture starts warping (ex. floor of the swimming pool area). Most of the textures on the walls are pretty low res, but they're used on such big objects that the jpeg artifacts are visible. This is a fairly easy fix though, just tile the texture of the wall materials a bit. If anything I mentioned here isn't clear, you can always reach out to me on discord (kazamis) and I can send you screenshots of what I mean. This is still pretty impressive for a first time 3D modeling, you made quite a bit in such a short time! I'm glad to hear you're continuing on this project and I wish you the best of luck!
Good work on the story, super complex game for such a short game jam, congrats :) !
Thank you so much! A lot of time and effort went into it!