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APPLICANT's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #58 | 2.510 | 3.438 |
| Visuals | #60 | 2.876 | 3.938 |
| Overall | #69 | 2.271 | 3.109 |
| Mood | #78 | 2.100 | 2.875 |
| Gameplay | #93 | 1.598 | 2.188 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Engine
Unity
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Comments
Looks really cool, sucks you guys didnt get to finish but thats how jams can get and its easy to happen. The visuals and audio look amazing. I tried it out for a little bit on my livestream tonight if you wanted to see feedback and reactions I had you can check it out here
Much appreciated, I’ll give your stream a look tonight!
Nice looking level and I really like that you considered the audio to be part of the game design - I love the tracks and noises despite it can still use some polish :) The UI scaling was strange for me, I was not able to use the tablet properly, but that is due to my sort of weird 21:9 aspect ratio. Overall I liked your submission, I hope you keep working on it!
The UI scaling is definitely a bit funny in places, mostly due to the fact that a lot of quality passes that might have happened never took place in the rush to get certain key mechanics working. Part of this has to do with my own experimentation with making the monitors take place in the game world as opposed to taking over the screen; this was cool when it worked but proved to be fairly unreliable and desperately needed some polish that never arrived. This project is how I developed a few tricks that I use in all projects going forward to get consistent 16:9 centered scaling that will function at any resolution.
As for the tablet… its functionality was planned from day one, but implementation UI wise was on the second or final day. Things got hectic while we taped together a shippable game, and due to ambition and a number of hurdles along the way we had a whole laundry list of urgent priorities to take on.
The audio itself [meaning the tracks themselves] was my work, but the actual transition sequence wouldn’t have worked nearly as well without VitaSoftware’s work on the Room Manager. Had we actually been able to ship the story, it would have been impossible to pull off the kind of quality I wanted to shoot for without those tools.
I learned a lot working on this game and depending on the interest/availability of those involved, I would probably be willing to work on the game some more. It all depends on opportunity really. I appreciate the feedback and the kind words!
Very nice map design. Looks like it could be an awesome game, hopefully you do carry on with it.
Glad you submitted what you had, despite the issues! I hope you do get a chance to continue on with this because it looks great!
It's weird. I'm running the Linux build and something within it seems to reset while the message is scrolling through and before all of it was even shown (never mind having time to read all of it, notwithstanding it's scrolling through rather quickly) it goes back to the beginning. The last thing I can just make up is some bit in green (it appears to be some sort of quote) between two <hr> tags (that are verbatim, not horizontal lines as they should be).
And clicking on either of the three buttons has no effect... I have to Alt-Tab to the terminal window and stop it with Ctrl-C.
Trying out the source, opening the project in Unity 2021.1.10 (which gives of course a warning that it's updating the project from 2021.1.7). Loads of errors because it wants to run Blender which I don't have installed (yet, will fix this in a moment). Lot's of warnings about assets that have not their corresponding meta files with them.
One warning about Dialogue.cs line 85 which has an assignment in an if() expression which is likely a typo meant to be a comparison ('==' instead of '=').
So maybe it's running off the end of the intro message and therefore throwing an exception and resetting to the beginning of the message? Will check this out...
No more missing prefabs, but my build has no sound and the error remains :(
(Running that scene in the editor seems not to hiccup, but doesn't react to any input as well...)
Hey there! Sorry about all the troubles. I actually run Linux myself and while I knew that the scrolling wasn’t perfect on Linux (it was about ten minutes before the jam), I didn’t think it would be that much of a mess. This sounds pretty urgent since you weren’t even able to get through the first menu… yikes.
My source code got a little messed up when trying to package the game due to some sleep-deprived carelessness, but since I have a 100% up to date backup I expect that I should have no problems finding whatever went wrong. Dialogue.cs is (if memory serves correctly) entirely useless as dialogues were removed from the game before launch. I wonder if I somehow forgot deltaTime for that scroll box, but I’ll just replace it with a scroll view to be sure.
Many of the bugs came from the last day of development where I felt pressured for time and started diving into certain mechanics with plenty of enthusiasm but not so much focus or sleep. While I’ve been a little busy with my main project over the last few days, I plan to take another look soon to get the art test cleaned up then another post-GDTV to get dialogue and my unpublished character sprites into the game, as soon as some people I wanted to talk to about voice acting are ready and able to give the idea another go.
As for the buttons, they do have working scripts under normal circumstances. I’m wondering if that’s related to some scripts breaking.
EDIT: Never mind, this one’s obvious. 0.11 is the build you downloaded. 0.111 is the hotfix that addressed a weird bug with the scrolling box, which I only ever put up for Windows. Give me an hour or so and I’ll have it up here… I must have just completely forgotten to upload. My bad!
While it runs on the Windows laptoy, given the bad performance is not showing well what you managed to complete.
The download for the Linux version is still the broken version, unfortunately...
Yeah I got a little sidetracked sadly. Sorry for the lack of transparency. Performance wise the game benefits a lot from reducing shadow quality and texture quality to about half the default, unfortunately they weren’t brought to that level by default.
Linux will get brought back up to speed as soon as GMTK Jam ends, I definitely understand your frustration as a fellow Linux user and if not for the damaged backup I would have aimed to have it up already.
I owe you the mother of all apologies for all the delays and last minute changes in plan. I finally had a chance to sort out my source code issue and make a Linux build, and the uploaded build is now up to 0.111.
While more substantial changes to restore the game might not come for some time, I appreciate your patience and hope that this can at least give you a chance to see how these environments were actually meant to look.
The updated version runs fine as far as I can tell, any issues are likely just caused by it being unfinished, so really nothing to complain about. (For example I couldn't get back from the archives screen message, and there was a wall at the end of a corridor that in the right spot gave me a message about a locked door and I could sort of manage to squeeze around it into a room with another door at the opposite side, only that by my "squeezing" I managed to get stuck in the spot. :) (And there were a few places one could manage to wiggle the camera position to clip through a wall, but that would all be a matter of thorough testing in a later state, when the "meat" if the game would be there...)
The artwork is fantastic and I liked the room/area names showing up when one approached.
I'd love to see the finished version of it!
Wow, you actually got past the “wall?”
So, a little context for that… it was supposed to get a texture that looked like an ending for the wall, but the keypad would pull it up into the ceiling with a special sound. The “locked” message there was intentional and supposed to get you thinking about that spot early on so that you would guess that it could be unlocked later. It was done in place of a crawlspace to the final room so that we didn’t have to program crouching or sliding through a tight place. As with the keypad system, implementation is unfinished as you can definitely tell. ._.
The ground mask bug is definitely a problem and can probably be fixed with better collision.
Again, thank you so much for your patience with the upload.
I think you could have had something interesting here, you don't need me to tell you it is broken.
Great visuals, good mood/feel. I actually had high hopes.
Give it some more love when you have the time and I think you could have a good game!
Well done on submitting it despite the issues!!
Thank you for your feedback! It’s really unfortunate that some aspects of the game fell apart in development. I’ll take full responsibility for the state of the game as a mix of time pressure and other obligations started to crash down on me– things got a bit messy towards the end and a lot of the mechanics that didn’t get attention until late in development ended up sinking the ship. There were a lot of valuable lessons that I learned and as my first collaboration I’m still very happy with the final outcome, since we were able to come together and make something that at least looked cool.
Looking forward to checking out your game!
Yes, very interesting level design, sad that developers didn't have time to finish. I think this was going to be some sci-fi mystery/puzzle type game? Huge fan of the genre. Keep working on it. As mentioned, several bugs are there around the interactions stuff and mesh collisions etc. But I'm sure they can get worked around. This could be a good game project, so keep at it!
Thanks for the feedback! VitaSoftware did an amazing job putting together the framework for the game, and all the pieces were definitely there to finish– unfortunately, one of my last changes broke the computer interaction system with not enough time to put it back together, and we got around to a lot of the requirements for a MVP way later than necessary due to the sheer scope. The two day late start didn’t help that one bit as we joined and got started a few days in, and despite it all we got pretty close to reaching the finish line. The idea behind this game was fundamentally a near-impossible challenge for one or two people with limited time, and I am incredibly fortunate to have a codeveloper that was not only willing to hear it out but got awfully close to making it a reality in time. All in all, it was a lot of fun working on this game and writing the mystery, and I hope that some day we can properly present that story.
I’m personally hoping to give some of the unfinished materials a look post jam, once some of the personal projects that have been keeping me occupied are cleared up.
It's good that you uploaded what you had :) It looks interesting, so keep working!
Love the art. There were some meshes overlapping in one room and every time I entered the corridor it said the door was locked. Good atmosphere!
Bah, I must have missed a spot. :|
I think I know what’s going on with the UI, unfortunately it’s a bug that got fixed several times then got overwritten in commits. It has to do with the UI masks used to create the wipe effect being too large and accidentally revealing other masked UI elements. Should be a fairly straightforward fix.
Tried to play it but it wouldn't execute. Gave me permission warnings and I attempted to change security properties but alas I was not able to play. I recommend trying a WebGL build and embedding the game here in the browser.
Hey there @experial83,
So if I understand correctly you’re playing the Windows version? The SmartScreen window unfortunately tries to hide the button to Run anyway, it’ll be a small bit of underlined text as opposed to a button that reveals the Run Anyway option if memory serves correctly.
As for a WebGL port, I opted not to focus on WebGL due to my previous experiences with the platform. Apologies for the inconvenience!
Hey! Yes, windows and it wasn't the Run Anyway option that I'm talking about. It was a windows permission error that simply prevented me from opening it. Haven't had this issue with any other project so hopefully that was just a one-off thing!
That’s very bizarre. I’ll try to figure out what’s going on here, sorry for the trouble!
I love the quality of the visuals! Thats something I can't quite get my head around yet! Nice work :D
Thank you! I just wish some of the finished Archives visuals made it in, in the source code you can actually see an Archives test scene where there were working mechanical arms on an assembly line that just needed to be dropped into the right place and hooked into our systems. Unfortunately the aesthetic took a lot of hits towards the end when I started cutting down post processing left and right to try to get past some visual issues on interactibles.
There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors making it happen, but the long story short is lighting means everything. If you want good dynamic lighting, it means you have to use your pixel lights sparingly. There’s a neat trick Phildor put together that manages room lighting behind the scenes to stop most of the artifacting that would ruin the effect; the transitions are in doorways, which is why there’s a huge stutter/framerate drop when you go into the Catalyst chamber for the first time on some systems. Other than that, haha color light go brrrrrrr
Eh...putting only a linux version a really limiting setup.
@quantM-Labs Apologies, the Windows version took a little longer to upload due to a last minute bugfix.
Will check out later.
No worries! Unfortunately this game didn’t quite get finished, and it’s a real shame as there was a pretty neat story we were going for. This entry serves as more of an Art Test since the gameplay elements didn’t quite work out.