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Behind the Hydra's Eyes - ClimateJam2024 Production's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Use of Themes - how effectively or uniquely does it engage in the jam's themes? | #7 | 4.167 | 4.167 |
Likely to Release | #12 | 3.833 | 3.833 |
Overall | #14 | 3.567 | 3.567 |
Smooth, Polished & Bug Free | #14 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
Interesting Gameplay / Fun | #24 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Aesthetic (Art, Audio) | #27 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Very cool! Love the pixel art, it feels reminiscent of old point and click games, which I love. You also have a very cool style and intriguing poster that makes me very interested in how the story is going to go. My favorite part is the manual typing of the emails! There's something very fun and tactile about it.
I'm not really one for text games but I do really like the style and feel of this game already. This game already seems very polished visually and all I could ask for is more content that keeps people entertained, keep up the good work!
Thanks for taking the time to play! That's some incredibly kind feedback, and I'm so happy you found it enjoyable and polished (we were bug-fixing right before submitting!). This version is just Q1, with our initial plan containing Q1-4 - we've had to cut one of these out to meet the final deadline, but will work on adding it in after the deadline. That is to say, hopefully you'll find that you've got what you wanted in the next submission!
Also, to return kind words in kind, I really like the look of Carbonbusters! The elements in your powerpoint look really promising; mechanics sounds interesting, I like the theme, car animation looks fun, the background music fits the vibe really well. Good luck in the final submission! 😊
looks like the games mechanics are already done and it plays smooth without issue. would like to have a controls menu or a button popup when you can interact with something.
Thanks for taking the time to play, and for the feedback! I agree, a controls menu (and simplifying the controls slightly) and a button prompt would be important features both from a polish perspective and an accessibility one. We've fallen a bit behind on implementing certain features like this because our development team is two people, only one of whom is a competent coder, but we'll keep tinkering with it post-jam.
Really cool game about green washing. I just wish I had a clear idea what to do. Hope you can add more explanations of what is going on in the background and how the economy of the company works.
Thanks for taking the time to play it! I agree that it'd benefit from cleaner interfaces and a few explanations about how things work - we're trying to add a bit more of the protagonists inner monologue to accomplish this.
In terms of the companies economy, we've tried to do a bit of a bait and switch, where the protagonist expects to have an empowering role keeping a green project economically viable, but instead has to confront the reality of what the project is doing (and, hopefully, understand the processes that make that harm inevitable) while the project spins out of their control. Fundamentally, we don't want managing the finances to be a big part of the game mechanics because we don't want the player coming away thinking it could/should be possible to save the project. In the final game, we want player choices to be centred around feeling helpless within the company machinery while grappling with the info trickling in from on the ground, rather than from actually being empowered to manage the company. To create an arc where the player can "right" the course of the project, either balancing finances to turn a profit or pivoting spending to address the social wrongs of the company, would, in my view, be serving only to legitimise a false view of reality that excuses immense harm. Companies like this will never be concerned with climate justice, and are currently involved in land theft, neo-colonialism, and ethnic cleansing all around the world (our game is based on the real life example of Oaxaca, but we could easily have picked countless other examples), all while successfully laundering their reputations in the west by pretending to care about the environment. That is the realisation that I want our pixel protagonist to undergo.
Sorry if that comes across as a rather polemic answer to your quick comment! My intention is just to answer earnestly why we're developing in the direction we are, and I thought that was an interesting idea to expand on 😊