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Temple of Unstable God's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #1 | 4.767 | 4.767 |
| Audio | #4 | 4.100 | 4.100 |
| Controls | #4 | 3.900 | 3.900 |
| Overall | #8 | 3.719 | 3.719 |
| Fun | #10 | 3.700 | 3.700 |
| Originality | #18 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| Accessibility | #26 | 2.867 | 2.867 |
| Theme | #39 | 3.100 | 3.100 |
Ranked from 30 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
The pixelart is so nice, good job on the audio as well, all of it makes up a really good atmosphere
The art is fantastic, and getting around the level was interesting. It felt a bit more like a sandbox than a game, which is great for game jams, but I imagine taking this engine and making a Metroidvania or a game with level progressions (maybe like Yoshi Story where to progress you have to collect a certain number of fruit in each level) could be a logically next step? Very nice stuff :D
Yeah we were playing with the idea of making a puzzle metroid-vania at one point but we had to seriously scale back the scope to even finish within the extended timeframe haha
Great job! As others have said, the art absolutely stunning, and the audio matches it well. The controls are really well polished. The purpose of the game was rather confusing, and the expanding effect and my score showing up took me by surprise, although it was fun to explore the mechanics of the game.
Great job!
Awesome! Good Job! What a great experience!
This is one of the standout games for me. The art (as many have mentioned) is great, as is the audio.
The minimal UI & lack of tutorial are both great - it's fun to explore and learn the mechanics as you go. My best time is 4m20s, which looking at the comments it's a pretty decent score I think. Is there actually a win condition for the game, just wondering if I should keep trying or not!
My only criticism is that void consumed the temple as the offering animation was playing. I feel like God could have been a little more patient in that moment! The fruit was right there, you unstable so-and-so!
Thanks a lot!
We spent unreasonable amounts of time on the game, I basically coded all my waking time for two weeks straight even though I’m not a workaholic. Our artist is a workaholic :) So we’re all glad the game stands out after that maddening effort.
It’s awesome the minimal UI & intentional lack of tutorial worked for you, I guess you’re the intended audience - explorer :) Comments here show that many users prefer a more controlled introduction, I’m still not decided on how much of that to include in future games - generally I like as little as possible.
There is no winning condition (like in real life, heh), but you can make history by beating 5:20 which is the highest recorded time (by me and our sound engineer). I think one or two more sacrifices could be done if you try hard and get a good RNG :) Be sure to drop a screenshot of the score screen here if you do that.
And I completely agree, obliteration during sacrifice is brutal, unfair, inhumane. I’m sorry for that, the timer should probably stop during the sacrifice 🙈
Smashed it, mate! :)
Well Played, this is a current record 🥳
Man i love the art in this game! great job!
Thanks for visiting the Temple!
Wow, this game is really made with soul! And there are a lot of comments here :) Awesome graphics, great controls, nice sounds, FRUITS, FRUITS, MORE FRUITS FOR THE GOD OF FRUITS! The secret mushrooms were cool, hehe. Despite the monotony, it's just a pleasure to play, damn it. Amazing work, I'm impressed!
Thanks for your kind words!
I’m happy you enjoyed the game and even found the secret shrooms as they have a cool effect :) I know your game is filled with secrets, so this comes as no surprise :D But I wonder what percentage of players found the shrooms and noticed they make you shoot faster AND shoot weird projectiles 🤔
The core game loop sure is monotonous, I’m glad our plethora of distractions from that fact seems to work.
Finally, here is a OC meme as a reward for your WH40k reference (intentional or not):
Well... My reference was random, but the meme is cool)
The art in this game is super good and the platforming feels really good. I kind of wish the reticle just followed my mouse because i kept looking at the reticle and loosing track of my mouse and clicking outside the game window.
Thanks!
I actually managed to change the mouse cursor to targeting reticule on windows, but it didn’t work in browsers so I reverted to this original aimer which was designed to work for controller too, but I didn’t have enough time to implement controller properly in the end or make the aimer follow the cursor as you suggest - it would certainly be better.
I just want to say the aesthetics are just gorgeous, and the evolving music was a cool touch to the doomsday counter (admittedly I had to check out other comments to realize that the thing at the corner was the timer itself). It was fun navigating through the temple and hunting for resources, plus it's satisfying to just chuck them apples like crazy. Others have already commented on the timer and the collectibles, but I just noticed that the character reacts to coconuts falling on their head and that's great attention to detail.
It may be just me but it feels clunky to use the walljump to gain horizontal distance. It works fine when you wait for a bit and when the gap is small enough that you can just time pressing jump. Given that this game has a doomsday clock I instinctively try to walljump as early as possible, and sometimes even when pressing both jump and the opposite direction, it only registers the jump part and completely negates the horizontal momentum. There aren't many wall gaps like that though, so it's a relatively minor thing compared to the rest.
Really solid entry here, and I think my best was a 4:43 so not too shabby on my part.
Thanks for a detailed review!
I’m really glad you noticed and enjoyed the details, including but not limited to crowd’s favorite coconut bonk 🥥 :D If you enjoyed throwing fruits, try collecting a secret shroom and then throw fruits real fast including secret new projectiles. I assure you it’s worth the effort ;)
I fully agree the wall-jump is way too non-standard, people are expecting it to work differently. You can actually mash jump between vertical walls to quickly ascend, you just must not input left/right away from the wall. The angle is chosen automatically when sliding wall.
The rationale behind this was to eliminate the annoying left/right alternation when wall-jumping up, and it works fairly well when you get used to it, but I think people don’t really play the game long enough for that, and honestly it’s not a good design for things to work differently than people expect.
4:43 is a decent time, well played 👌🏽
Everything about the look and feel of this game is perfect! I see so many attempts at "pixel" art games that focus on being "retro" but without being good to play. This was really cool and the art and sound served the game well.
I'm still wandering around wondering if I'm missing something though. Would agree with those who say some kind of hints or tutorials are needed. I normally try to teach through gameplay and have very very simple starting levels...
This is only a minor complaint though, this game is a great entry and inspires me to do better on my own entries in future!
maybe I need to team up...
Thanks!
My favorite Steam Curator Shitlisting Service is harshly calling these failed attempts you mentioned “redundant pixelsh1t kusoge” - I’m proud we ascended beyond that point in your eyes :)
While the hopefully smooth controls/gameplay/logic are a result of my furious coding, I would never be able to create such a good game as a whole on my own without my dear jam crew members, who are each excellent in their realm (art, music, sound) while also being fun and good at cooperating.
Human cooperation is generally hard to establish and hard to maintain, but I managed to get a full crew I really enjoy working within a year’s time of active searching. If you wanna give it a try, I suggest looking at
#team-upchannels before jam start and picking frens you like :)Finally, while I’m stubborn with my unorthodox/cryptic designs, I must relent in the topic of missing tutorial. This is a #1 complaint about the game, so I’ll try to include more directions in future games.
I don't usually play pixel art games, but when i do i play games that look like this haha! Seriously though this game looks amazing. From the color palette to the animations, everything just fits together perfectly. Very well done!
Thanks!
The art as well as most of level design is the work of our new artist we found on this jam, and as you can see he’s ridiculously good. Honestly, I didn’t expect this high quality myself, and I’m spoiled by Steam :)
We worked ultra hard to get this done, but in the end the result was worth it - I’m glad you enjoyed the Temple as well!
Thank you for the high praise! It's a rare treat for me to make a majority of the art assets in a project so I went all out this time ;D
"You won't be remembered." haha, harsh but accurate about my abilities! The art and music is really charming, works well together. I'm not sure if it's just my eyed but a lot of the time I didn't even notice some buttons which were causing walls to move - eventually I knew to look for them. I also struggled to see the items I was supposed to pick up. Probably just my own issue, but maybe it would help to highlight those things more? The shader transition at the finish was a nice surprise too. :)
Thanks!
The end game texts are chosen at random :D
You’re not the only one struggling with identifying collectable objects, maybe they should be highlighted a little… but I’m glad you figured it out in the end :)
Really nice job! I really enjoyed the art and music. I liked collecting all the offerings and brining it back to the shrine. I really struggled with the wall jump though. Managed to make it 3 minutes. Pretty challenging game. Great entry!
Thanks!
The wall jump is a bit controversial, as you must not input left/right when sliding wall, just jump and the direction away from the wall is automatic.
So once you wall slide, you can get up parallel vertical walls just by pressing jump repeatedly without alternating left/right.
I can hardly believe this was done in just two weeks. The art direction and quality is just mind blowing. The controls generally felt quite good and I didn't encounter any bugs or issues. I also found it pretty intuitive to understand what to do,though other than the music cue it wasn't really clear to me how I was doing or how close I was to losing.
The connection with the theme also seems a bit tenuous but otherwise absolutely no complaints! Nice, simple fun with a really fancy coat of paint. :D
Side note: My best time was 4m 38s
Thanks for your kind words!
We definitely wouldn’t be able to finish our overly ambitious game in the original jam timeframe, this was only possible due to the random week extension :)
I’m glad you didn’t mind the cryptic nature of the game and the lack of tutorial!
There is a binary doom 🍎 timer in the lower right, but so far not a single person noticed it, so it’s obviously not visible enough.
I think 4m 38s is the average time to make without try-harding :)
Thank you for the high praise!
Yeah we definitely ended up straying from the theme as we designed the game, our team has pretty much universally agreed to tighten up our scope for next time, and hopefully that will help us stick to our theme a bit better ;)
Very good art style, i really like the mechanics, the game is good, good entry
Thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed your brief time spent in the Temple :)
For your reference, developer’s score. Getting over 5 minutes ain’t easy.
Oh no, a typo >:(
Very cute art style. I think it could benefit with some kind of tutorial, for instance I only figured out that you can double jump after quite a bit. Also the game over came quite unexpected, I think there is a timer? Would be good to show that as a TextureProgress somewhere in the UI.
Thanks for feedback!
The tutorial is probably the most requested feature, and yet… The game is cryptic by design including its objective and controls. Those are expected to be explored by the player providing a sense of achievement when figuring things out as opposed to tutorial spoiling half the fun :) You did figure out the double jump in the end. You figured out where to find which fruits and where to put them as well… well done, you figured out something without explicit instructions :)
The “game over” is expected to be unexpected as well. If you look carefully, you can see a binary doom 🍎 timer in the lower right. That one is probably too easy to miss, I should have made it bigger, I guess.
This game is really charming, The art is filled with details and I love the small touches, like when you get hit by a coconut!
My only feedback is that I wished the collectables had a little more contrast against the background, on my first playtrough I had a hard time finding them because I couldn’t identify them. Maybe having different colors or some kind of animation could help.
Congrats, loved this entry :).
Hey, thanks for your kind words!
I think we can all agree the coconut bonk is the best feature of this game 🥥
You’re right with the collectibles being fairly hard to identify, sorry about that :)
BTW I personally also loved your entry, it’s probably the most original one in this jam, a true display of working minimalism and yet charming as well! I think you made more with less by using wits as opposed to our over-ambitious zeal - a valuable lesson.
Cheers!
Great job!
Only had a couple of issues. You should tell me what I'm supposed to do in the game so that I don't have to read the instructions to know. (I did figure it out after the first time I died and saw I had done 0 sacrifices) The graphic for the... I think coconut... I was running all over looking for the little brown thing, and then I picked up a little green thing and it counted. maybe there's a way to make that clear. Also, some sort of timer, so that I know how long I have left before the temple is consumed by the void would be good.
Overall amazing job!
Hey, thanks a lot for your constructive review!
I hear your call for tutorial and you’re not the only one, but you did figure it out after one annihilation after seeing 0 sacrifices - that’s actually intended design and deliberate decision. I’m not saying this is Dark Souls of foraging platformers (:D) but Dark Sould/Elden Ring provide no tutorial, and yet millions of players did figure things out. I for one enjoy figuring things out on my own and I wanted to provide the same experience to players. Do you think it’s too harsh of an approach? 🤔
The green coconuts received a lot of hate, I should have removed those, sorry :)
And finally, there is a doom timer! Check out the apples in the lower right 🍎 It’s cryptic binary doom timer. Probably too hard to notice and fairly hard to decrypt as well… But it’s there ;)
Amazing entry ; the game is gorgeous, the music fits perfectly, and controls are satisfying.
One little thing I had trouble with is identifying which fruit is which, had to randomly run into trees once, only to get the one I was looking for in a tree that was supposed to deliver peers ; but it may be me the problem here, I'm honestly not sure.
Congrats, the result of your work is very impressive !
Thank you very much for your kind words, I’m really glad you like it because we seriously overdid this, it would be impossible to finish within the original jam timeframe 🙈
The game sure is kinda cryptic, but I hope it’s more charm than harm - you did figure out it’s pears in the end, so yay! :) Wasn’t it kinda fun to discover the fruits by experiment? Maybe not, I can’t really imagine not knowing the fruits now :D