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A jam submission

Getting Around It with Pheasant BirdyView game page

A platformer prototype by Hell Labs for GBA Jam 2024
Submitted by Hell Labs, Skirmisher, lifning, opalescenteel (@opalescenteel), viviridian — 1 hour, 41 minutes before the deadline
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Getting Around It with Pheasant Birdy's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Technical#15.0005.000
Audio#24.0004.000
Overall#34.3334.333
Polish#54.1674.167
Graphics#64.0004.000
Originality#104.0004.000

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • A technical masterpiece! I always wanted to see something like this for the GBA and thanks to you my dream is now a reality, I really hope you take it further! The multi-layered wordplay in the title almost deserves an award of its own. :P
  • Amazing prototype! One of my faves of the jam, I hope you can make a full game with the engine. Some notes: - It's great how you've managed to pull off the Fez thing with the GBA hardware. I thought there was going to be some missing sprite scanlines and such during the game, but it worked great on the GBA Micro :) - Sprites are cute and the music selection is nice too. - You've even added a playable tutorial! So much polish for a prototype :) - It would have been cool to have some collectibles and such. Make a full game with the engine, dammit! xD
  • Super cool concept! The game is too short to appreciate it completely, but it is really promising!
  • While only a prototype, it is among the most polished and technically impressive entries this year. I'd be interested to see what direction you go with this project. It would be interesting to see what gameplay elements you could build around the world rotation concept. Even if you don't do anything further, I'm glad this exists on the GBA, well done! If you choose to continue working on it, I'm looking forward to seeing your future work on this project! I'd be interested to see if you go more in the direction of an exploration game, like Fez, or if you decide to build puzzle elements around the rotation feature.
  • To accurately recreate a smooth GBA port of Fez's world shifting mechanic AND effectively design an interesting level around it is nothing short of impressive. I also loved the collection of soundtracks that accompanied my playthroughs.

Jam ROM submission

Ok - understood! I attached the GBA ROM file as "MYGAMENAME_jam.gba".

Type of submission

Game

Existing assets
https://github.com/rust-console/gba - platform
https://github.com/lifning/gba-flac-demo - audio codec
https://kenney.nl/assets - scenery base
https://evertpot.com/neko/ - player sprite base

Tags

Puzzle
Platform

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

This is really cool! At first I assumed it was some straight-forward platformer demo but when the core mechanic kicked in I was really taken by surprise :) Definitely an impressive showcase and an enjoyable game.

Developer

thanks! i believe the blog series you referenced for Sleep Paradox was also part of the inspiration i used for this :)

Submitted

This game felt really polished! Good job :D
Camera movement was really nice. Rotating the world looks super good!

The only negative aspect I can think of is that once you learn how to play (e.g try to progress until you are stuck, then rotate the world until you see a reachable platform), the level design felt somewhat repetitive. But that could easily be solved with puzzles, additional game mechanics and backtracking.

Overall, a great entry!

Do you plan to make a full game out of it or do you consider it finished?

Developer (1 edit)

thank you! 

and yeah, so... the vast majority of the level design in this demo may have been done on the last day before submissions, after all the other pieces finally slid into place... 😅 we do hope to make something more substantial out of it!  this was pretty much just a proof-of-concept tech demo i started making at the end of july, which proceeded to get a little out of hand once someone told me that the jam was still going and i decided to try to turn it into something playable.  i've already started helping the codebase recover from its deadline-crunch hangover, after which i've got some technical improvements in mind that should allow us to make much more sophisticated level layouts (if you pause the game, free-rotate a bit, and look at the lower-right, you can see that in scenes with more than a few pieces of geometry, we're already pushing the amount of cpu in a vblank period pretty hard with the current approach - hence the levels being as sparse as they are)

Submitted(+1)

I'm impressed you managed to deliver so much under pressure. I went into procrastination mode and did 0 progress the final month x)

Submitted(+1)

My first reaction: wow, this is possible? The 3d rotating is simply the best part. How did you make that? Are that two planes scaled horizontally to create that 3d effect? Really nice puzzely jump and run. The desert fox is very cute and lovingly animated. Also the tree climbing mechanic is a great element. Just awesome. Even the music is great. One thing, jumping off a platform could use some Cojote time.

Developer

yep! just a couple affine scale matrices and a dream :)  thank you very much, glad you enjoyed it!

Very Cute Game with great gameplay mechanics! I love it 👍

Developer(+1)

thank you very much!

really cool!

Developer

thank you!

Submitted(+1)

Really fun and cute game, I especially liked the little puzzle with the arrows pointing you where to go. For a game jam there's a lot of clever ideas and, if expanded, I'd love to see more of those spatial puzzles. Also the fox is unbelievably cute!

Developer

thanks so much! we certainly wanna do some more with the project, yeah. (fun fact, everything after the cave was designed on the saturday evening before the submission deadline... and the tutorial/cave not *that* much sooner 😅 so i think given some more time, we could make a fair bit more out of this)

Submitted

Talk about a close call! Well, good luck with any future stuff :)

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

That game is so amazing! When I first turned the camera I was mind blown and happy like a little child lol. Love everything about it, the awesome idea, the cute sprites, the crunchy music, the length of the game and the difficulty. 10/10 Game, nothing I can complain about.

Developer (3 edits)

thank you very much! was really hoping some folks would be excited like that at the end of the tutorial, i'm glad you enjoyed it so much :D

Submitted

Lovely. Amazing. The small amount of times I was stuck I was enjoying it.

Developer

thank you, so glad you enjoyed it!

Submitted(+1)

This is super impressive, amazing work! I particularly appreciate the detail of the character silhouette when you're behind stuff.

Developer(+1)

thanks! funny trick for that using both blend registers simultaneously:

Submitted
t 

This part has inconsistent visuals that feel like bugs. I've already finished the game, so I know what the correct path is, but I thought this would be worth pointing out.

Other than that, I get the Fez influence, but I'm not sure where the Bennet Foddy influence is, beside the pun-based title.

Developer (1 edit)

yeah, the false platform-looking spots there are unfortunate, we did manage to cover a few up, but iirc there was a rendering issue that we didn't have time to fix when we added more overhang there to hide the snow-topped tiles. (here's what's going on there: editor, pause screen)

it's mostly the pun -- but also, the object of the game is to climb to the top! (and it's just you and the environment, no other fluff in there apart from the tutorial bird.)  at one point i was considering letting you fall all the way down without respawning, but ultimately decided against it.

thanks for playing and for the feedback!