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A jam submission

The Guardian AngleView game page

Get The Chance To Live Again, With A Twist
Submitted by nsubordin81 — 1 hour, 45 minutes before the deadline
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The Guardian Angle's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Story#3022.5562.556
Music#3752.7782.778
Theme#4002.8892.889
Mechanics#5272.4442.444
Fun#5372.4442.444
Aesthetics#5662.5562.556
Sound#5981.6671.667

Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How many people worked on this game total?
Just Me

Did you use any existing assets? If so, list them below.
Tiny RPG Forest Pack from Unity Asset Store

Link to your source?
https://github.com/nsubordin81/the-guardian-angle

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Congrats on finishing your second jam!

I like the core idea of guiding a different version of yourself through a maze, but the controls really suffered here for me. It was tedious to get the characters going in the right direction, and despite you being a ghost, it was easy to get pinned in or trapped by yourself. I thought I was getting the hang of it until the character walked off the right side of the screen and never came back. 

It's rough, but the idea here works. Just needs more polish and playtesting for the next one!

Good job and keep making games :)

Developer(+1)

Thanks! I'm so glad I participated. 

Yes thank you for letting me know about that experience, I definitely see that on my own playtests and feedback I've received from others so I've got some good foundations on what parts to cut out (or just redesign on top of the core concept) and what parts to build upon, every little bit helps! The character getting through one of the colliders is a new one, I can totally see it happening though, caught a few seams myself in the last few days of the jam.

Thank you for playing my game and taking the time for the review!

Submitted(+1)

really incredible game. At first I didn't quite understand what was going on. but when I understood, I couldn't quit the game. nice job. it was fun to play. congrats for submission

Developer

That's great to hear, thank you for playing and letting me know how it was for you!

Submitted(+1)

Eyyy John Candy :) I miss Uncle Buck.

Nice job, though wow, the idea you came up with for controlling 'Not Link' is pretty out there. I figured it out fairly quickly though, thought I got stuck in that twisty bit of the maze, but a bit of pew pew and I had our Elven friend back where I wanted him.

Good job and with a bit of refinement (maybe wider passages, not-link not blocking you, some enemies...) I think you could have something here.

Developer (1 edit)

Haha me too. Thank you, So glad I know the controls are a bit wonky I'm really glad you were able to tame them enough to get through to the finish. Your suggestions are right in line with my backlog, that you came to them as a player is very reinforcing. TY!! PS looking forward to giving your game a playthrough tomorrow, love shooters in that vein and the clips look gorgeous. 

Submitted(+1)

Like this idea, guiding the player to success. 
Made for a fun challenge to figure out how to turn the player just right.
Great job :)

Developer

Thank you! Thanks for playing : )

Submitted(+1)

Even though that control needs some adjustments, your idea is clearly demonstrated. Guiding the character instead of directly controlling is interesting, and I can see great potential to make puzzles based on this mechanic. Unfortunately, I think in the current state, the game can be quite difficult to play. The difficulty comes not from the level design, but from the controls.

Regardless, I think this is a very good attempt, especially considering that you are doing this solo! Good job!

Developer (1 edit)

Thank you! I appreciate and totally agree with the feedback. Others have mentioned the controls as well, I think there are updates to be made there. I'm glad to hear that you see potential in the puzzle aspect of moving another character around, I agree the controls are the primary issue, one of the main problems I've faced is how to properly represent influencing the NPC character from a safe distance in a way that is entertaining. I tried a few things like having the player be able to walk through the NPC and there were drawbacks I found with that so I added this bubble around the NPC and maybe introduced more drawbacks. The size of the projectiles and the way you shoot them, maybe too many degrees of freedom for rotation for you as the player, could be better with tiles. Thank you this opens up some definite lines of thought for me for future tuning!

Submitted(+1)

It is a bit buggy but i understand what you  are attempting and i think if done right will work quite well so keep it up. Will be quite cool i think.

Developer

Thanks! yeah it is certainly rough, it is great you see some potential this was def one of those ideas where I questioned whether it would work more after creating a prototype than before, but your words give me encouragement to pursue it further, much gratitude : )

Developer(+1)

I watched your stream! thank you I got a lot out of that because it showed me specific areas I can improve on. In addition to the bugs that were more obvious to me there were ones I had blind spots about lacking player perspective so watching you go through it was very helpful.

I don't know if you recall the details of my game because seems like you've played a bunch of these by now, but one big issue that I knew about at submission time was that the NPC could trap your character. That was itself an overcorrection to a bug I discovered. I'd noticed the player and NPC were both rigid bodies with the same mass, and since the goal was to get the NPC to walk over the white squares there was a loophole where the player could just push them around like a cart instead of shooting at them. 

To counter for this I made the NPC mass 10 and had player mass at 1, so you end up getting trapped by them and have to keep shooting them until they walk in a different direction and let you go free. This was definitely more of a bug than a feature, as was having to move in a direction before the projectile would have motion in that direction, I just had trouble getting the top down world orientation of the player entity and keyed off of their movement controls instead. More my lack of experience than intent, but watching you play I also got to see that the instructions were too wordy (totally agree, this is a problem I have, this post is a prime example) and the display ratio for the webGL build I also kind of stumbled into rather than picking one that would work more generally for screen size. 

Very helpful, I learned a lot thank you very much.

Submitted(+1)

I really liked the interesting take you had on the theme! My living self was pretty dumb, but I got my soul to get me though (almost) the first level.  Enjoyed!  Please rate our game if you would like :)  https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2022/rate/1554224#post-5960926

Developer

Awesome! Thankyou for taking the time to play throught and rate. I got to check out La Calaca and I thought you and collaborator nailed it on that. I'm humbled that you gave my game a look, thanks again.

Submitted(+1)

I downloaded the exe file, but my PC warned me so aggressively about it that I decided to use the github instead and just open it in Unity. I recommend adding some screenshots to your game page to make it seem less suspicious :D

The game itself is okay, I struggled with the control system but once I figured it out it was a very interesting concept. Nice work!

Developer (2 edits) (+1)

Thanks! yeah I agree with 'okay' evaluation, playtesting unfortunately was down to the wire and limitless projectiles that simply turn the player in such a narrow maze like level doesn't give the puzzle or fun aspects I was hoping it just organically would. I'm thinking a few things that might help are to separate your avatar from the 'living you' npc with barriers and making the influence projectiles more bouncy, maybe have the npc ai be a bit smarter and alternate between more random search modes and pathfinding modes that you can influence with pickups or something, possibly opening up the level design and not having it be pac-man style all on one small screen. 

It may also just be less intrinsically fun to have the main objective be to control a pawn of another character that doesn't have any intelligence programmed into it, so will give it a few more updates and evaluate whether it is worth developing further. I appreciate your playthrough and feedback, especially given the Windows security warnings! Will try to find a way for the self extracting archive strategy not to get flagged like that, also considering just doing a WebGL build for my submission page.