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A Trail of Ink and Rain's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #1 | 4.774 | 4.774 |
| Accessibility | #5 | 3.548 | 3.548 |
| Overall | #8 | 3.687 | 3.687 |
| Originality | #11 | 3.742 | 3.742 |
| Theme | #13 | 3.968 | 3.968 |
| Controls | #17 | 3.226 | 3.226 |
| Audio | #18 | 3.323 | 3.323 |
| Fun | #18 | 3.226 | 3.226 |
Ranked from 31 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
4.0.3
Wildcards Used
Textless, Windy
Game Description
You are a bird that fell from its nest. Now you must survive through the rainy river. Endless run: play as long as you can survive! Graphics and code are made by us within the Game Jam period.
How does your game tie into the theme?
Everything you'll experience in this game is caused by rain--from your fall from your cozy nest to the raindrops that may sway your route and so forth. We also tried to think about what art style could fit with the rain theme, and we opted for a water-based color graphics, in which the road is drawn as you go, and disappears behind you.
Source(s)
N/A
Discord Username(s)
cat.astro, thoozee
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
0 except this one
My game has an export for Linux, Windows, & Mac and/or is playable through HTML5
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Comments
Lovely watercolor art!
Thanks a lot TYAB, we're happy that you liked it :D
Beautiful artstyle and its kinda hard! I like it that it isnt that easy. Its challenging after some time
Thank you, turunaela! The difficulty was not entirely planned, but still... We're happy that it worked for you! :D
Such a beautiful art style! I'm amazed how the procedural generation makes it looks seamless. Everything in the game looks really nice, and the animations, while simple, fits really well. I wish there were more visual and audio feed-back though.
The game controls well, I like the minimalist interaction. It's kinda tricky to maneuver, but fun to learn. At some point though it seems that we suddenly gain a lot of speed, and it kinda becomes unmanageable. But since there's no end, I guess that's okay. That poor bird is doomed to take a swim! ^^' I had a nice time playing it overall. :)
Thanks a lot for your comment, Itooh! *-*
We're really glad that you had fun with this, despite the tricky controls ^^' We needed a way to increase difficulty as the game went on, and the speed growing was the immediate solution. Probably, other choices would have been better and would have avoided the perceived chaos at the end. Learned lesson: the next time we'll make something with a clear end, or a character which the user is happy to see
deadwet :PRegarding the procedural generation, the river is composed and re-assembled as needed with the available pieces. The seamless chain is obtained with a special piece (that we humbly called The Universal Joint - it sounds so stupid now) that's placed between every two sections and graphically covers the minor faults in linking. It's not perfect and sometimes it fails, but we're happy that it worked at least with you!
Again, thanks a lot for your precious feedback and for playing the game, we really appreciated it! :D
Note for next time: we should’ve probably capped the maximum speed of the player 🫨
More implementation details below:
The river is implemented as a tree. This allowed us to manage all the bifurcations and check which parts could be safely reused without much effort. Scene-side, we used Node2Ds to mark the entrance and the exits of a river section so that we knew where we could link the parts.
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thanks for the feedback and for playing the game. I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed it. It’s really rewarding to see that our effort brought something people can have fun with. :3
Art is amazing and the audio of the wind fits perfectly. The river felt like it was a continuous drawing very impressive. There was a some strange white backgrounds that gave away the auto generation so that would need to be fixed.
I was surprised how challenging it was but with out something to compare my performance against not sure I would play this again. I understand the textless could be lead you to not use numbers but an animation showing a zooming out track and your completed distance could accomplish this.
Great entry though, thanks for submitting.
Thanks, Anonymyst! You spot some aspects that worried us, so we really appreciated your comment!
Regarding the white backgrounds, we're aware of the annoying bug :( Even if it happens only few times - right after the river splitting, because one path interferes with the other - we weren't able to fix it within the jam's period, therefore some runs may randomly be blocked. That's not good, but we hope to upload the fixed version after the voting session!
The water texture is a sort of tileable background that follows the player, but instead of moving pixel by pixel like the player does, it "jumps" in steps equal to its tile-size. On top of that, the texture itself is composed by five layers independently animated. This way, we were able to reach the continuous drawing effect with controllable animations :)
And finally, as you already said, it misses a scoring system, which we didn't put because the obvious solution (a number score) was against the Textless wildcard. We thought about a progress bar, but having an endless run it should have been... endless itself ^^' Maybe something like you suggested could fit, the zooming-out track is a neat idea!
Hoping that this answer doesn't seem like a long excuse, but more like a brainstorming / ideas-exchange. It was just because we really appreciated your feedback, so thanks for taking the time to write us! :)
overflowing emoji barrrrrr 😔
Wow, I really like the art. Cool idea on using the mouse to determine the wind direction.
Thanks a lot! We're happy that you liked it! :D
Gorgeous watercolors! And a great intro scene. Poor little bob, bobbing along in the wind and rain….
Fun game, nice entry!
Thank you for trying our game and taking some time to give us some feedback!
yeah poor Bob :°c
Nice entry!
The watercolor painting visual style looks really good, giving the game a neat hand-crafted feel. I liked how the textless wildcard was implemented, the icons and the little videos explained everything you need to know well. I also really like that you've made the custom menu icons in that same watercolor style.
I liked the simplicity of the controls, they were easy to use, even if the scenarios you use them in can get rather challenging.
Thanks a lot, Ferevran! We're really happy that you liked it :D
We feared that the visual icons wouldn't be enough to explain the basic mechanics, but your comment gives us hope :') Of course, there's still room for improvement, also in the direction of balancing the whole experience and making easier scenarios!
Very beautiful game. The visuals went pretty well and I also like the story. I wish the game would have had a cute ending with some more beautiful slides!
Thank you for playing our game! I'm glad you enjoyed it! :)
Thanks Xandruher! :D
We thought about the "ending" many times, and we opted for an endless run, but you're not the first that says that would have liked a proper finale. Maybe we could create an alternative mode in the future!
Thanks again for your comment, we're happy that you liked our game :))
Beautifully presented game! The artstyle is so nice and feels really unique. I adore that how the level are laid out. Very cute intro cutscene and UI for the menus.
I failed to read the entire description before playing so I didn't know it was an endless runner. I think the gameplay would be clearer if there was an indicator for how far you've travelled (that'd be pretty challenging to implement without numbers!).
The wind power was nicely implemented for what it is, but I think it would be enough to just let you use it without restriction since the game already drops your health if you're going too fast. That way it could also be a time-trial kinda thing!
Other than that, the only thing it needs for me is more sound effects and some music. Really well done!
Wow, thanks a lot for your detailed feedback, we really really appreciate it! :D
Regarding the endless-run score, your're perfectly right! Endless-run games work when you can see how much you did, and in the moment when we were about to implement the score number, we realised that... it was text ^^" We thought about giving up the "Textless" wildcard - but what an effort loss! - or implementing a graphical milestone system. That last would have worked, but only if it was "endless" too, and we had no time to design it. Anyway, we're glad that someone had our same perception, we hope to update the game in a nearby future!
Other than that, your hint about the time-trial is really intriguing, thanks a lot for the suggestion and -again- thank you so much for your comment :)
I voted for the thumbs-up emoji, but my proposal was rejected. We could've spammed so many emojis... Overflowing the emoji bar! Talking about lost chances... :,)
cute art style! i think the gameplay could be slowed down a bit to match the atmosphere, felt pretty uncontrollable at times. otherwise great work!
Thanks a lot, melon! :D
You're right, the balancing of the forces and the speed was maybe the hardest part... But we counted on comments like yours :P We hope to load a new version after the voting period, and maybe try to reduce the overall velocity and pacing, or try some mechanics that could "brake" the player. Thanks again for playing, we appreciate it :))
Very good visuals but I think it could definitely be improved with visual/audio feedback for user input. Hope that helps (:
Thanks for the feedback! Initially we wanted to make some sound effects, but time is always so little and passes so fast :,,)
We'll try to take some more time for that next time, though!
Really cool! Sometimes it was a bit hard to react as you were going so fast. But really cute artstyle :O
I'm glad you liked our game! Thanks for the feedback about the gameplay experience. It really helps. We were uncertain on the fine tuning of the game parameters because we didn't want to ruin the experience by making it too easy, but unfortunately it seems that we fell on the other side of the spectrum... <.<
Really loved the game, and great watercolor art! Like others mentioned, the controls got too hard in the later part of the game but it had a good ambience throughout the game. So pretty good work on the game :)
Thank you!! :) I'm sorry to hear about the controls. This is certainly something we'll have to keep in mind for our next projects. :)
A very pretty game with neat watercolor art! The sound effects and art create a very soothing atmosphere. I found the controls difficult and wasn't able to save the bird :(
Thanks a lot for your feedback!
We're sorry for the controls: we were uncertain about how difficult the final game will turn out, so we tested it several times. However, developers are always biased on their game, and we might have underestimated the challenge. But -hey- that's what Game Jams (and comments like yours) are for! We'll definitely try to tune the difficulty of the game, at the end of the voting session. Thanks again for your advice :D
Regarding the bird rescue, well... Let's say that it's not implemented, yet ^^"
amazing <3
Hey, thank you! :D
We're glad you enjoyed our game ^^
Beautiful Game! You've got a really great style here! :) The UI fits very good as well :) The mechanic is a cool idea, although I must admit I found it really difficult to control in the end. Still an awesome entry :)
Thank you!! We’re really glad you liked our game!
Truthfully, we were uncertain about the final difficulty of the game and we kinda hoped for the best ^.^’,,, maybe there’s still something to tune.
Thanks for your precious feedback and for taking some time to play c:
I really LOVE the watercolour art style! It's very very cute. Simple gameplay as well. I like how I can bounce with the bird while navigating down the river. Wish it has a happy ending at the end as it was so sad to see the bird died :( Really love the UI interface! It being textless. Overall, very good game! I also love the cinematic clip where you time the thunder sound effects.
Thank you for your kind feedback! We're glad you enjoyed our game. :)
I'm really sorry for the bird too :(
but sacrifices had to be made.Beautiful game. I absolutely love the art style. The watercolors were beautiful and the bird was super cute. You fit the theme perfectly. The textless UI and tutorialization were excellent, and the wind mechanic was really cool. Great job and congrats on your first GWJ entry! :)
Wow, thanks a lot for your kind comment and for your time! We're really happy that you appreciated our game :D
Thank you! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ It's really rewarding to hear that!
I quite liked the style of artwork, its pretty fun, although a little challenging for me, good job!
Hi, thanks a lot, we're happy that you enjoyed it!
You're right, it may be that it turned out a bit too hard... We planned to create a difficulty selection system, but the time is always too short to do everything :) Fortunately, game jams are the perfect pool for precious feedbacks, so thanks again for taking the time to try our game!
I’ve got to make a watercolor styled game now, this looks amazing! Fun game!
Wow, thanks a lot!
...But do you want the truth? We'll never make a watercolor game again ^^" It was quite exhausting, and a huge part of the time had to be dedicated to drawing graphics. This is NOT to discourage you, but just to make sure you're aware of what you're getting into :P
Fortunately, comments like yours reward all the efforts :')