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Up in the Air's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #1 | 4.786 | 4.786 |
| Originality | #3 | 4.357 | 4.357 |
| Audio | #5 | 4.143 | 4.143 |
| Visuals | #6 | 4.357 | 4.357 |
| Fun | #8 | 3.571 | 3.571 |
Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Fediverse Post
https://fietkau.social/@julian/113222687555054215
How does your game fit the theme?
I took the theme pretty literally: in this game you fly through the clouds as a feather and pinwheel.
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Comments
If anyone else has trouble playing in Safari, switch to another browser. :)
Loved the music and styling in this game. Also appreciated how the music stopped at the conclusion of the gameplay to signify its ending. It was a good kind of challenging! I played via a tablet mouse and I had the quill flinging all over the screen sometimes. Loved how the words you find are worked into the end of the game. :)
Score: 77 words
Thank you very much! 🙂 I would love to make this work in Safari, and it's almost certainly possible, but I don't have an Apple device to test it on, so I'm flying blind on that front. Maybe some day!
77 sounds like it went very well overall, even if it didn't always feel fully in control.
In a few minutes right after the jam's rating period has ended, I'll push a minor update with a few improvements that people have requested here.
That's okay that it doesn't work in Safari. Apple is really opaque sometimes. =_=;
It was also to let other players know "If it doesn't work, switch your browser!" :)
I was happy with how it played! Nice to know my score wasn't too low
I'll play it again after the update and see what changed!
This game was really pretty! I wasn't able to get all the words because it didn't feel like I quite had control over the feather, but the game would have gotten boring if I did have full control. I really liked being able to choose the color of the father. While inconsequential, being able to put my mark in that way made me feel more involved
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it! There is a balance to strike with the feather controls, I want them to be somewhat challenging but ideally never frustrating. Honestly though I started out tweaking the physics to feel sufficiently feather-like and then mostly stuck with it. You can find a few very early versions (one from before swaying and rotation) on my Mastodon account for comparison.
Since you like the feather colors: there are a number of unlockable feathers! Two can be found through gameplay, the others are unlocked through cheat codes. If you want to try one of those, take a peek at this Twitch VOD while it's still available. 🙂
I find the level of polish on this very impressive and inspiring. Accessibility options, multiple fonts to choose from, the game works, everything is so neat and comfortable and feels consistently thought about and considered. I think you've really successfully captured a really nice feeling with this game.
Thank you so much for the high praise! 😃
Fun reflective game! I agree with what others have said about score, but maybe it would take away some of the vibe? The non-comptetiveness was nice. Great entry!
Thank you very much! The current direction I'm thinking about is having a score counter as an optional element that you can activate after the first playthrough if you want to have it. I definitely want to avoid giving the impression through the UI that you somehow "failed" if you don't collect everything.
Lovely vibes and visuals!
Only thing I think it lacks is showing score.
Thank you! You're the second person requesting a score display, and I've been mulling over some ideas. I think for 1.0 I will put in a collected word counter that unlocks after the first playthrough.
A lovely experience! I enjoyed the atmosphere and especially the music. A couple of things that came to mind when playing: I would have liked to see what the word was that I just collected, maybe it could have been scribbled in the air for a short period of time or something. Also, when nearing the quill with the cursor, I think you could have made the pinwheel spin more rapidly to correlate with the force it applies to the quill and to prove a bit more feedback to the player.
All in all, a very enjoyable little game.
Thank you! I like both of those ideas, it's a good thing I left myself some wiggle room before 1.0.
Was waiting to play it after I saw a video on mastodon.
Got ~62 words on the first try. I like the idea, controlling the feather by creating wind, feels very nice. I only had some problems with moving the feather to the sides, that was a bit difficult.
Music and visual is awesome, as well as overall feeling, everything fits together so well
Thank you very much!
I experimented with anchoring the physics to the camera coordinates instead of world coordinates. It makes the feather a bit easier to control, but doesn't feel right for the overall movement. I think I'll keep the physics as they are. From my experience during testing, you can get much better at controlling the feather in just a few attempts if that's your goal. Of course most players will only do one playthrough, and as long as anyone can get through with >0 words, that's fine too. 🙂
Thanks for the gamepad support, and difficulty settings.
Nice jazz!
i liked the different feather colours., and the color of the clouds.
Some weird thing I encountered:
I tried playing on Vivaldi browser on my linux first, and the game did not load at all. Borrowed a windows computer with mozilla and played with gamepad without a hitch. Went back to my linux to check if it works on mopzilla - it did, but the gamepad support did not work, but mouse control worked. Quite Curious.
Many thanks to you as well! Nina and Randy did wonderful work, and I feel bad for having to render the clouds so brightly tinted for fg/bg contrast reasons. The sprites were even more gorgeous in their original palettes.
I did some testing in Vivaldi (coincidentally on Linux too) and didn't run into any problems there, but I'm intereested in what might cause the game to fail to load. If you can still make that error happen, and assuming you know a bit of web dev, I'd appreciate if you could take a look at the developer console. The game doesn't really surface many errors in the UI, so any information about what went wrong will probably only appear in the console.
As for the gamepad support, I've read that it is wonky in Firefox on Linux. I was able to read the left thumbstick of my Xbox 360 pad, but all the other buttons and the right stick were wildly out of order. It's disappointing if the left stick isn't even reliably working across different gamepads. But yeah, apparently that's better supported on Windows.
I am actually not that savvy haha. The error I get on vivaldi reads:
Uncaught DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document.
at loadSettings (https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/11606410/main.js:1112:22)
at https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/11606410/main.js:1937:1
It might most likely be the fault of some of my privacy addons, but I have the same ones on mozilla too, so not sure what is going on.
Ah yes that helps, thank you! I can put in an error handler for that. All it means is that your privacy settings prevent the game from storing data in the browser, which means your settings don't get saved between runs (and you lose any unlockable content you've gotten when you close the tab). Not a huge deal for this game since it's so short.
I played with the mouse (and skipped right into the game so I initially did not read the instructions). After moving back to the description page I learned about the aim of the game.
Really amazing that you added an accessibility page to the options!
I collected 59 words. Were quite tough using a mouse.
I would have wished there was a progress meter to help me gauge my current state.
I absolutely love how you finished up the level. Great job!
Thank you so much! I'm proud of the customization and accessibility options we're able to offer.
Do you think it would be beneficial to have more direct tutorialization, like a popup saying "try pushing the feather into these"? My hope was that with so few things on screen, it'd become obvious what to do because there isn't much else you can do.
59 seems respectable for the first try! I've thought about an in-game counter as well, but didn't want it for the first playthrough. It could be something you unlock by reaching the end for the first time.
It doesn’t have to be an in-game counter. A progress bar that tells me how far I’m away for the end would be sufficient.
At first I thought about the letters flying around as kind of debris and tried to click the feather with the cursor (the windmill thingy).
If there were some wavy lines to indicate that the feather is controlled by the windmill, it should be easier to grasp.
Regarding the tutorial, while close to the house some words would make it more obvious. Perhaps an „Today I’m writing you…“ catched earlier and moved to a letter before the feather goes on its journey? (Because having a scene inhouse would be too much effort?)
Thanks, these points are worth thinking about more. I'll see what I can do for 1.0. 🙂
This game has a great vibe and I love the soundtrack. Everything fits together so well! I only wish I could have read the words while I was catching them.
Thank you! 🙂 I'll let our musician know. I've gone back and forth on whether it would be better if the words were more readable. It might be fun to know what you're exactly collecting, but I also like revealing them at the end as a little pseudo-twist. You do technically have a chance to read them in-game, especially if you pause it, but between the font and the small size it is very difficult.