Play game
LifeHeart's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Presentation | #5128 | 1.565 | 2.100 |
| Originality | #5313 | 1.565 | 2.100 |
| Overall | #5355 | 1.466 | 1.967 |
| Fun | #5439 | 1.267 | 1.700 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
The health and mana are joined together into one mechanic, and the goal of the game is to find your friend
Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?
Yes
We created the vast majority of the art during the game jam
Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?
No
We used pre-existing audio
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Let me just put this out there: it seems like this is a first project created by middle/high schoolers. If that's the case, congratulations on getting something finished, that's more than most people manage, but you've run into a lot of classic problems that come with inexperience.
I'm not going to lie to you and tell you this is a masterpiece, but I am going to try and be constructive so that you can use this to better your skills going forward.
Art:
The art style gives me very strong MS-Paint vibes. In all honesty, it kind of hurts my eyes to look at. I'm terrible at drawing so I can't really give you a lot of tips in that regard, but one thing I would recommend would be to use a pixel-art style if you're struggling with adding detail. I know it's kind of cliche at this point, but it's cliche for a reason. Another recommendation could be to draw in a program that supports anti-aliasing, so that your lines don't look so odd and sharp.
Story:
The story breaks pretty much the two most fundamental rules of storytelling in the first five seconds. Show don't tell, and don't bombard your audience with proper names without giving them time to adjust. I read the pre-game text screen but my guess is 90% of people won't even do that. If you want your audience to read, you should keep it short and interesting. You don't need to present all of the background world-building to your audience upfront. The fact that your character's full name is "Lalaisa" but she goes by "Laisa" is not something we need to know as the first piece of information we're given. If you were telling a more in-depth story you could present that detail naturally by having one of her friends call her "Laisa". Why do we need to know all of the details of who is part angel and what relationship they have with each other? More specifically, why do we need to know these details upfront? You should limit the story that's directly told to the player through the voice of the author to information that's absolutely critical to understand. Having the character be part angel is cool and all, but do we really need to know that? What if we rewrote the opening scene like this:
[Opening text screen]
There are very few celestial beings who reside in the mortal world, and those who do tend to stick together. Lalaisa and Yngar exemplify this, both being half-angels and lifelong friends. As a mage and a monster hunter, they've been known to lend a hand to one another in their hour of need.
Recently though, tragedy struck. Yngar's fiance sadly passed away.
Three weeks later, Yngar rides out to find the nest of the beasts that have been attacking the local village...
[show scene of them talking]
Lalaisa: Promise me you'll be careful on your hunt.
Yngar: Sure, Laisa, whatever. I gotta get going.
Lalaisa: Are you sure you don't want me to come with you? With my magic and your skills we do make a pretty good team!
Yngar: No! Look, every time a half angel does magic it drains their life force. I don't want you throwing away your life because of me. And... I really don't think I could take losing someone else.
Lalaisa: Yngar...
Yngar: Besides, I could use some alone-time to clear my head. I'll see you when I get back.
Lalaisa: Come home safely...
[Yngar rides off]
["A few weeks later" appears on screen]
Lalaisa: Where is he? He should be back by now! [one of the monsters walks on screen] Huh? This is the same kind of monster Yngar was hunting! Maybe I can follow this beast back to its nest!
Just as an example, I think at least that this would be much more compelling. It would take more work to create, but not much more since you could basically just implement it like a slideshow and have it display a series of images.
Gameplay:
Most of the gameplay problems come down to technical issues and game feel. I don't feel I can accurately provide any insightful feedback since most of that is either stuff that comes with experience or problems that you probably knew about but didn't have time to fix. One piece of advice I can give is this: if you're going to use a game engine like Unity you should take advantage of the tools that it gives you. It feels like you're setting the characters' velocities/positions manually when it has a prebuilt physics engine that you could use. It just takes a little bit of reading up on the tools you're using to understand how to apply that to your own projects.
Thanks for your comment. I can tell the criticism is trying to be constructive but it comes off as condescending, especially when you incorrectly assume our ages, straight up insult the artwork ("it looks like it was drawn in ms-paint" and "it hurts my eyes" are definitely not constructive comments to make), make suggestions for fixing the story that simply wasn't feasible for us to accomplish with our workflow as a two person team in the allotted time, and assert that we aren't using Unity's physics when we are (Edit just to make it more clear: Literally all of the movement is physics based). Honestly, I can't tell if you're a game dev or not but your comment comes across as someone who hasn't participated in a game jam holding us to a higher standard than necessary.
Edit: I might keep adding edits because I keep finding things to respond to in your comment, but I also wanted to add that you didn't even take the 2 seconds of effort to check my page to see if this was our first project or not before just assuming it was, which is another thing that makes your comment come off as ignorant and condescending.
Sorry, I was trying to be charitable by assuming that this was a first project, I didn't want to be condescending but I assumed that if I was correct about this being a first project I wanted to explain at as low a level as possible.
I did assume a lot of things as a result of that, and as you mention it seems a lot of those assumptions weren't true. However, if this isn't a first project made by young creatives... well sorry but that kinda makes it worse.
I was commenting that the art was drawn in MS-paint, partially to communicate that if it was drawn in MS-paint to maybe consider using another program. The artstyle actually reminds me of 3kliksphilip's old flash games, I should mention that I didn't like that artstyle but the games were reasonably popular so maybe I'm in the minority.
I don't think that implementing the story changes would take much more work. Compose some images in powerpoint or photoshop, save them out as pngs (or bmps if that's easier to draw), and given that you already have a way to implement drawing images over the whole screen until the user clicks (as seen in the story screen) you could just flip through them.
I'm not trying to hold you to a high standard, I'm comparing your games to the other projects in this jam. I know that can be problematic in of itself, I don't know what additional constraints you were working within, and maybe you had to change direction midway through, and on top of all of that life happens and sometimes things just don't work out the way we want them to, but whatever the reason this game was simply not produced to the standard many other games were, even games that were made by a single person. I know that isn't nice to hear, and I know that's not especially constructive, but I want you to understand where I'm coming from and, if this really was close to your intended vision and you're really happy with the way the game turned out, you can ignore all of this. I'm assuming you're in the position of "my game is flawed, now what could I do differently next time?" If instead, you think "this game is exactly what I'd hoped it would be" and I just don't get it, then take my criticisms with a grain of salt. We don't all have to like the same things, and if I'm the outlier then conforming to my suggestions might take enjoyment away from the people who do like it. Again, I'm just trying to provide what I would like to see in the game.
For the record, I am a hobbyist game dev, but I'm primarily a programmer and I know I suck at art. This is why I said I can't really help you too much on that front and why my principal recommendation comes down to "do the thing that everyone else does". Speaking of which, that's why I assumed that the movement wasn't physics based. It seemed like the movement was really stilted and that's the most common explanation for why it feels like that. If that isn't the problem than the problem is principally one of game feel, which is much harder to meaningfully critique in words (especially for me since that's another weak spot for me, I don't know how to achieve it I just know when it's missing).
Look, I do feel for you, I know it hurts to have someone tear you work apart and I could have been more sensitive in how I worded some of my comments. Ultimately though I hope you understand that I really am trying to be helpful. I do also appreciate your constructive criticism on the constructiveness of my criticism, since I know I still have room to grow in that field.
The game is nowhere near what I wanted the final product to be and I honestly wasn't fine with it until I read other comments in the thread. If you read my responses to the other comments in the thread you can easily see my own thoughts on the game and how I feel I could improve it, and how I plan to improve on it once the rating period is over. It's not the fact that you're critiquing the game. It's the way your choosing to go about it and the quality of your criticism. Yes, this game is below the standards of other games in this jam, and it's also above the standards of some other games in this jam. The goal was to make a game that achieved a rating of ~3 stars or so, as that would be outperforming our submission from last year. If we get that and manage to improve the game later then I'm fine with it. The problem with your criticism is that it isn't helpful to say things like "the art hurts my eyes" and to complain about how the story is bad when the story wasn't even the main focus during development and to complain about us not using the tools we have when we literally were.
Honestly that's not what I expected to hear about the story. If it wasn't a focus why did you include so many unnecessary details? I assumed that was a relic of stripping down the story so details that used to be relevant aren't anymore, that you had become invested in the world and that's why you were hesitant to cut details. As is I have absolutely no idea how you ended with this story. If you didn't care too much about the story, it would be better to keep it to a bare minimum, if anything at all. Honestly you could have replaced the story screen with a tutorial screen and significantly improved the opening experience.
The comment about the art hurting my eyes was somewhat of a throwaway comment, but it's not a useless piece of criticism. What kind of art hurts people's eyes? Either intrusive over-the-top colors or high amounts of contrast where it doesn't belong. Well, your colors aren't over the top, if anything they're mostly gray and brown, so what does that say? The message is that the style is too noisy, it has too much contrast all over the screen in places it doesn't need to be.
Again, assuming you weren't using the tools available was kind of the generous interpretation. If you were using the tools available to you I have no idea how you were spending your time since it clearly wasn't on the story, the art, the sound, the gameplay, or the programming. I'd like to tell you what I think you should have done differently, but that doesn't work when I have no idea what you did. Maybe this was a casual project done in a few hours, but as a 48 hour project done by 2 people? I don't know how old you are or how much experience you have, but I made a 2D platformer from scratch in java in about that much time just after my freshman year of college, it was garbage, but the vast majority of the time was spent getting basic physics and collisions working, and most of the rest of the time was getting stuff to draw correctly.
I'm trying to be polite but that's very difficult here. This game is the worst one I've seen out of any of the gmtk submissions I played, aside from a few that were just completely nonfunctional. You ended up with a game that would be forgettable if it came out in 2008 as a flash game, working with tools that are so far beyond what anyone had back then. I know a lot of times these comment sections get filled up with hollow praise, and who knows maybe that's good for motivation, but honestly I think you could do much better. I mean, the "health as mana" thing isn't a bad idea, it's just not remotely original. Maybe it would have been more creative if you could use it a different way, how about "health is tied to screen position"? Every step you take rightward you need to offset with additional health potions. How about instead of "spells cost health" you had several bars, a health bar a magic bar an energy bar, and if any of them ran out you'd die, so it became more of a game about juggling multiple bars.
I apologize if my criticisms aren't constructive, but honestly I think they are. I tried to pair every criticism I gave with a suggestion on what could have been done differently. Now, maybe that suggestion is garbage, I don't know, and you can disagree with my assessment, but I am truly trying to help. Normally I would try and include as much as possible that I thought you did right, but honestly I can't think of anything that I could say. I know that sounds cruel but I can't think of any other way to say it. I saw another comment say this game was very "ambitious", but I don't even think is accurate considering it's really just trying to be a side-scrolling platformer. All I saw in the comments before I posted was unhelpful faint nonspecific praise, so while I apologize for being harsh, I think it's necessary. I may have done poorly though, since it seems like you've gotten fixated on a few specific criticisms that were worded particularly harshly and didn't see the suggestions that were meant to be more important.
The story was ripped from one of our DnD campaigns, which is why there's so much detail despite it not being a priority. If your problem with the art is that it's too noisy, then the nice, polite, and constructive way to say that is to say it's too noisy. We are not game devs by trade, so our workflow perhaps isn't as streamlined as it should be. Plus we got a late start do to work and personal factors (we didn't actually start on the game until about mid-day on Saturday). I'm done replying here. I'm well aware the game isn't "good", and I plan to make improvements (including to the main mechanic, which yes I agree wasn't done that well).
I enjoyed pushing all the mole rat enemies to the wall
Yeah, in hindsight if I was gonna make them just stand still I should have set them to static lol
With a plot and a boss fight, I would say that this game was quite ambitious. It's interesting that you developed a mythos of sorts and that it gets reflected by the use of life to attack in order to defeat enemies.
While the game is lacking in aspects such as polish, I'd still say it's a good submission for the jam's purposes. A short, difficult game, but sometimes, that's all that one needs. Good job! 👍
Thanks for your feedback! I agree with you about the lack of polish. Unfortunately we bit off a little bit more than we could chew and that led to some pretty significant compromises in what we submitted, the biggest of which in my opinion was level design. This resulted in the straight line path with enemies just spam-clicked in seen in the final product. I'm glad you enjoyed, and you can probably look forward to improvements once the rating period ends!
Good job on the game, very difficult to play well, since no attacks are telegraphed.
I like the art, some animations would be cool.
The blood magic is a nice twist on the theme.
Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately we didn't really get enough time to animate the enemies to add proper telegraphs. I tried to add a particle effect to telegraph the attacks but I'm not sure how effective that was, especially since I completely forgot to limit their range so they shoot at you from off-screen.
Neat concept, despite being simple. I like the story direction, and I can tell you put a lot of thought into it! The art is unique. The controls are functional, but shooting magic felt slow, so it was difficult to avoid the monsters' attacks. Good job!
Thanks for your feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed the story! That was the work of my artist/girlfriend and I feel like she did a great job with it. I kind of intended for shooting the magic to feel slow and stop your movement to add some difficulty to it, but I think some more work needed to be done on the monsters to make that approach viable.
Game bugged out on death > start for me. Couldn't move or anything else.
Otherwise, very simple game but quite functional. (no falling through the floor or anything of that sorts)
Very neat art I've to admit. With some more animations could've looked quite great honestly.
Love the pre-story before the game starts, I always like it when games include some lore.
Not going to lie, couldn't figure out how to get past the godzilla looking guy
Sorry you encountered that bug! We had very limited time for testing and didn't catch it. We also didn't have quite enough time to animate the enemies, although I agree it would have added a lot. The final boss is supposed to have a random chance of dropping a health potion in front of you every time you hit him, but this may make it difficult to fight him if you didn't have that much health to begin with when you got there. Again, we had limited time for testing. I think I only played through the submitted project once, and even then I think I got to the boss by just jumping over all the other enemies.