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GWJ#63 - Cats - Family Ties's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #27 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Originality | #43 | 3.444 | 3.444 |
| Graphics | #45 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
| Overall | #57 | 3.032 | 3.032 |
| Audio | #59 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Fun | #82 | 2.556 | 2.556 |
| Controls | #86 | 2.556 | 2.556 |
| Accessibility | #99 | 2.333 | 2.333 |
Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
v4.1.3.stable.official [f06b6836a]
Wildcards Used
"To travel is to live" and "Arch-nemesis"
Game Description
Mix of investigation/exploration and endless runner 2D game. /!\ Game in the browser can load slowly (during the black screen transition effect, with a really bad PC it lasts 1 minute). For better experience please download the game. AVOID playing in fullscreen for a better loading speed. After the loading, you can select the fullscreen.
How does your game tie into the theme?
This is a real story depicted about a cat and her kittens.
Source(s)
N/A
Discord Username(s)
Hito
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
3
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Comments
Great art and atmosphere! Really enjoyed exploring the house and the surroundings!
Thank you Jimmy for your kind reply
The game looks intriguing. The art is really good. Also, I like that it’s unclear where the next “platform” you need to jump on is. Thus, the game leaves you more room for exploration. And finding the correct path feels more rewarding. But there were a few problems. First, the font is quite small, while there is plenty of space to make letters big enough for everyone to read. Second, the Ctrl+arrow or space shortcuts are quite inconvenient for Mac users. They overlap with OS shortcuts, and instead of jumping “through” the platform, you have your desktop switched, or the Spotlight appears. Lastly, The story felt quite sad. This is not a bad thing on its own, but I was playing with my child, and it caused some frustration. When we ran out of time, the game still continued, but the timer showed -5 minutes. At the end of the “runner” part, something strange happened. The gray “house” caught up with the cat, moving from the left, filling the entire screen with the gray color, and the cat fell into the abyss. Is this a bug or a metaphor?
You play the demo with your child, that's great. That's exactly what I want to! I am so glad to read your comments! You make my day. Thank you so much.
I am so sorry. I am not a MacOs user so i was not aware of such binding issue. My next prototype will take into account your relevant comment.
Regarding the platforms, I am thrusting the players. In my opinion, there is no need to mark the right path. Where is the pleasure? This is more rewarding to find his path without invasing help. I had some bad comments regarding this aspect of the game. Well, you can't please everybody.
There are 6 different endings including a very positive one. This is based on a true story.
The endless runner part lasts 3 minutes. So you have 7 minutes to talk with the cow and the squirrel. If you ran out of time, finishing the endless runner in such conditions unlocks a sad ending. Understanding that the kittens have been thown into the waterfall, sinking into madness, the desperate cat jumps as well into the river. I didn't want to show too precisely this violent ending. So it is more suggested. It is not intended to cause frustation due to the timer. I introduce this feature to add this dedicated ending.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved your game. It feels like you put a soul into it, and that’s the most exciting part. To be introduced to the author’s inner world. The look and feel is amazing. I especially like that your art is a bit off the mainstream. It’s not pixel art, and it’s not deliberately cartoonish. Instead, you feel like you are exploring a painting set alive by magic. It doesn’t feel like a prototype, actually. It feels like an adventure game that just needs some polishing and tuning. Probably, the biggest problem that I had was timing. I mean, I like exploring things in a slow-paced manner.
Your message goes right to the heart. Thank you so much.
I don't take any message the wrong way. As long as it is not insulting. Every opinion matters. Criticism allows us to improve.
I wonder about the right timing left to the player. May be an option. The player chooses it. I wanted to avoid a classic menu as much as possible (at least at start) because it hurts the immersion.
Well again, your message is the main reason why i retrained to work in this creative industry! Make people feel emotions.
Good art and very cat-like platforming. :D However I fell through some platforms thinking they were solid when they were not.
Thank you for your words.
I know that i should have added more platform areas (i guess you are talking about trees). It is all about limited gamejam time. That's why there is no death penalty when you are falling. Btw you can jump down through platforms by pressing the [Control] key.
The problems I went through have been resolved, meaning that while Accessibility takes a hit, we're still able to play.
The first half of the game has you exploring your house and talking to your housemates, interrogating them to figure out where your cats are. This particular element shares a similar design issue with Sierra games: you don't know if there's more dialogue unless you learn to repeat the Talk Key on them. I ended up guessing after leaving the house to roam the wild, which took 3 attempts.
The second half of the game is a runner. If you don't jump the rocks, you lose one of your 9 lives for each one. Very simple, very straightforward.
While the game feels rather basic to me, the transition actually demonstrates an understanding of game state transitioning.
Be careful when talking to the cow. The tree is your only way back into the main space, and the platforms don't match up to what you're looking at.
The sprint button made the reattempts go by much quicker, which was a relief for me when I was making incorrect guesses.
Overall, I think there's still a little more learning to be done. Try to get your Windows and Mac signatures so you can exclusively export to the 3 desktop platforms for December. I'll be doing the same!
Thank you for your feedback.
If you discuss with at least the cow (the first one) and the squirrel, you know the right direction. So it is not about luck ;)
I am pretty sure this slow loading is due to particle effects and shaders. That's sad that when you want to add graphic enhancements to your game it goes wrong.
Indeed, i didn't implement a message to explain the player that he has to press "F" key to get the next message during a talk.
For the tree, i implemented lot of platforms. For sure, not on every branches. But i was really generous on their dimensions and location to ease the climb. It is not my point that this game was a hardcore platformer.
Running is an important feature which ease the run for sure.
The game is designed to be kid friendly. So, the challenge is not high at all. I could have done a harder challenge with ease. However thanks to your comment, i am thinking that it is a good idea to add an option regarding the difficulty (a kid one like a story mode difficulty and a more challenging one).
I was able to play the game in full screen but it did took a while to load up. There're also multiple black screens during the intro that I'm uncertain if something didn't play properly for me. I appreciate having tips displayed at locations to help me with getting the cat around. I was able to read the dialogs but I wish the text was a little bigger or maybe a different font so it would be easier to read. The game feels a little quiet at times, but overall has a really nice ambience. Art in this game is very clean looking and I thought your sense of scale was nice and your scenery was put together well. I was a little sad that I accidentally walked my cat off a cliff at the end before I had a chance to talk to the farmer, simply because I couldn't see where the cat was due to the snowy ground. The endless running scene was actually quite nice and peaceful to play but kind of long and I didn't want to go though that again just get to the ending a second time. If you happen to work on this game further, maybe consider keeping all controls keyboard so player don't have to switch to a mouse in the middle in order to click on a button to advance the game. Overall I think you hit the cat theme really good and there's definitely a gem here if you can polish it up a bit!
Thank you Sophia,
I am using a fade in transition during the intro. It is on purpose. I can shorten this animation (it lasts 1.5s).
I don't understand why the game is so slow. I am using particles for the snow, the fireplace and the smoke. I am also using shaders for instance the fog. May be, particle effects are not well supported by the browser. Depending on your browser you have to activate the hardware acceleration in the options (for instance opera: in parameters then system paragraph). Please, feel free to download the right version to try it in better conditions.
There are 6 different endings. You found one of them :) When you select continue (condition is to have more than 1 life), you don't have to follow the intro again. If you see again the intro, it is a bug! During my playthrough and tests I didn't get this bug.
Actually choosing the direction is not the final feature. I did'nt had the time to implement the polished one: the cat has to move on the choosen button and jump to select it.
Again, thank you for your kind words. I am sad your try was not smoother. I worked hard on the art and the ambience. So this is an issue that the game is that slow.
I'm glad I read this, and it may be a major contributing factor. I dropped this title name into my team's Discord because we didn't try to use these things in our project, but they're valuable lessons to learn for our future.
The webapp may be less capable of handling shaders and particles, and we need to figure out how those work, and what effect they can bring to our game.
Yes, I think so. Particle effects and may be also shaders are a problem for the web version. That's sad because, I love to use them. That brings a lot to the DA, the ambience of a game.
Something about the game is crashing my browser. Someone playing on Mac will have to try it for themselves to see if it runs properly.
Thank you for the feedback. I am sad to read that. Could you tell me what is your browser ? I have tested the demo succesfully with brave and opera (i am using windows). Reading your post, I guess you are using a mac. If so, i can create an export for the macOS version. Thank you anyhow for taking your time to give it a try. Could you tell me when the demo crashed?
There's a specific point in the intro where it crashes, I think after it fades to black after the first text line.
I am running Opera GX on Windows 10.
Ok, thank you, i will try with this version of opera.
I have tested the game with your browser and the game is working fine.
In opera you can activate an option: press the parameter icon (the small wheel icon), activate the advanced parameters then in the paragraph : system switch on the hardware acceleration. I hope this tip will help you.
Funnily enough, I switched the hardware acceleration to OFF to fix it.
However, while this made the game playable, it was also an FPS nightmare.
So, while your submission is still valid, it would be a disservice for me to rate your game, knowing that my hardware is the problem.
Did you play in fullscreen. Playing in fullscreen extends a lot the loading. With a really bad PC (and hardware acceleration on, not in fullscreen), the loading lasts about 1 minute / 2 minutes. Anyway, thank you a lot for your time. That's really sad you can not play the game. If you have time, you could download it. The file is really small (about 160Mo).
I didn't think about that. Since it is playable as a webapp, the fact that there's no mac version is technically not a problem either, so I can play it that way just fine.
I'll post a proper review in a new comment thread, though.
Yes! I am so happy to read that. Thank you!