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Ink Well's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #1 | 4.667 | 4.667 |
| Controls | #24 | 3.606 | 3.606 |
| Overall | #26 | 3.680 | 3.680 |
| Graphics | #34 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Theme | #36 | 3.879 | 3.879 |
| Audio | #42 | 3.545 | 3.545 |
| Accessibility | #43 | 3.152 | 3.152 |
| Fun | #85 | 2.909 | 2.909 |
Ranked from 33 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
4.2.2
Wildcards Used
Memory Lane
Game Description
Black out poems to reveal coded messages, transform the world, and advance to the next level- or freestyle to create your own unique blackout poems!
How does your game tie into the theme?
This game focuses on removing, or voiding, words from a poem to create new phrases. Each level also focuses on a different interpretation of void, including an abandoned city, the depths of the ocean, and outer space.
Source(s)
https://github.com/NesaraThottethodi/Ink-Well
Discord Username(s)
asterythm, cloudy_days, t-rex-thriving
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
0
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Comments
Very original, and I loved all the art and music. Despite the instructions, knowing what the right thing to do is a bit of an impossible guessing game. I think the answers need to be more concrete, or there needs to be more feedback when you're headed in the right direction. But the idea is really solid and I hope you all keep working on this. <3
I almost didn't make it past the start menu cos I'm a Millennial so I don't read instructions. But I eventually got there, and I'm glad I did! What a thoughtful, original game and I also loved the quirky graphics.
this was so original and interesting, keep being awesome!
Crazy unique and also crazy difficult! Excellent work!
This is really something different :)
Really nice and also really tricky :P
I like the concept its very original, I got until the crab without looking the sheet it said 3 words but there are 4 in the answer, its a bit hard for me maybe because english is not my first language. The presentation is pretty good and the illustrations and music fit nicely.
Thank you so much for playing!! The crab is definitely a dev oopsie on our end- I think other comments have mentioned the mistake as well and we’re gonna fix it in a post jam patch :,) Thank you again for playing and we hope you enjoyed!!
Amazing game! I had thought that there would be "redacted" interpretations to the theme, but I could not envision this level of execution. Everything is on point. The visuals, the control mechanics, the gameplay concept. I hesitate to write this as a nitpick, because I feel like the difficulty in solving is part of the charm, but I could not get past the stages without referring to the walkthrough.
I did try my hardest to depend only on the Help sheet, but the small scale and some kinks makes it hard to make out the clues. E.g. on the underwater level, the bottle message did not reflect the target state of the message being lost.
That said, this is really a very strong entry! Amazing work!
And also, love the meta-gaming on the itch page design. Had to "view-source" to see what magic was going on there!
thanks so much!! it definitely is very hard to get through without looking at the walkthrough (i helped make it and still had to lol) but we're hoping to get some more hint mechanics going post-jam. as the artist who did the note bottle sprite, i just entirely forgot to remove the note while working on it at like 2 am lmao so that will definitely also get fixed. ty for the support and kind comment!!
Very cool concept, great art, great music! I couldn't make it past the first level after the tutorial, but I can see what you were going for(I could just be dumb)! Definitely do more as a team.
thank you so much!! it's definitely very difficult so we're hoping to add more clues later. ty for the kind comment!
Thanks forsubmitting your game to the stream. If you wanted to look at it again in the future heres the vod timestamped to your game
It was SO MUCH FUN watching you play and we’ll definitely be rewatching to find the points to improve in a future patch!! Thank you for playing and for your feedback :DDD
Music is really cool, but i couldn't go past the first level, stars word blacked out but nothing :/ Do you mind help me ?
Of course! We'll have to make that instruction clearer in the post-jam patch, I think. You're actually looking to black out every word EXCEPT for the ones with stars. So only leave the stars showing!
ok thanks, i will try again, feel also free to play my game, i've just pushed a bug fix !
Did I miss out something ? i did but nothing is happpening
This one is very cerative and one of the more unique entries in my opinion. Coming up with this concept is an achievement and the execution was pretty nice. I really think you should continue working together on more games because this one is a great start.
Thank you so much!! Definitely, we had a wonderful time working on this and are just as hopeful there'll be plenty more coming from this team in the future <3
this is a great mood! I especially enjoyed the music as I kept experimenting with the poems — and I mean experimenting literally, not trying to solve the puzzles. I did not find the puzzle aspect very interesting, as it felt like pure guesswork, so I resorted to the walkthrough to progress.
that said, there’s real beauty to this concept. I really enjoyed it when I stopped trying to guess which words the game wanted me to click — instead, I just played around with the words, seeing what I could come up with. that’s real art, held back by widespread ideas of “what a game should be”. (I have some gripes with the mechanical implementation of things, but I’ll spare you the nitpicking details for now.)
also, I love the meta-level itch page stuff, that’s ██████!
Hey -- wow, thank you so much for this thoughtful comment!
I know my reply here turned out to be suuuper wordy, but even if it feels like nbd to you this legitimately marks twice now you've saved us on this game and I just want to express my gratitude:
Throughout the course of the jam so far we've gotten a lot of feedback reaffirming what we suspected on submission -- that the puzzles are, sadly, kind of unsolvable at the moment without a better/more responsive way to guide the player to the goal. But at least for me, reading you talk about how you had the most fun when you could just relax and create something your own rather than trying to find a pie-in-the-sky solution suddenly made a major light go off.
I've been trying to figure out how to fit a subjective peg into an objective hole, but the joy of this game concept and about blackout poetry in general was never about finding a set solution, but about turning something set and static into something unique and unexpected. I got so much more excited seeing you post your own creative take than I have at any point watching someone stumble blindly into the arbitrary correct solution after trying a bunch of other beautiful combinations that totally should have worked. This is how the game was meant to be played, and this is what was exciting about it before it was distilled with the perceived need to make it "gamier". We don't need to set up guardrails shepherding the player along an arbitrary path; we need to move the goalposts entirely. What exactly that'll entail, I'm still not sure, but it's a really important distinction that I really hope we can find a way to follow through on now that it's been clarified.
Anyway, suffice it to say: love your poem so much. If you're willing to share, I'd also be very interested in hearing your mechanical nitpicks, just in case we do find it in us to keep polishing this game until we can get it to that full-potential dreamstate. ███ ███!
sure!
holding down the mouse button and dragging over multiple words didn’t work as I expected it to. let’s take “a █ c” as an example: dragging from a to c should result in “█ █ █”, not “█ b █”. what I mean is that when dragging to toggle multiple words, the state of a word should only be toggled if it matches the state of the first pressed word.
it’d be nice if hovering the mouse cursor over ████ would make the underlying word visible, like white text over the black ████.
punctuation is a bit weird to work with. I found myself thinking it should be separate from the word when inking, because I felt like it restricted how I could use the words — but maybe that’s an interesting restriction? limitations like that are not necessarily bad. I’m really not sure about this one tbh.
some parts of the poems don’t seem to be “designed” in a way that’s meant to be experimented with. this is hard to convey, but as an example there’s this part “survive and live endure and greet” where I wanted to use “live” and “endure”, but there’s no “and” or comma to support this. I encountered this situation a lot, where I was just missing a little word or some punctuation to make a nice phrase. I think this could be improved by putting more thought into how the poems are arranged, and considering how they could be remixed instead of just setting up puzzles.
the options should be accessible while playing.
the music shouldn’t restart when I press “options” or “start game” from the main menu.
something went wrong with the encoding for the apostrophe in “heart’s”:
All noted!! This is super helpful, you rock.
Actually, it's nice to see that (as you can probably guess, which is presumably why they were left out of your original comment to begin with!) almost all of these were points we'd considered but ran out of time to properly implement/fix -- that tells me at least our instincts had us on the right track, which is always a boon.
Unrelated... I keep psyching myself up to play I, The Void next and then you go and leave such thoughtful comments that I'm like, how can any feedback I offer on yours live up?! Lmao. Don't worry, I won't let that totally scare me off from playing: It'll definitely happen (promise)... and I'll try to keep it from being novel-length when it does (buuuut no promises there)!
it’s a silly little Asteroids-clone, I’m really not expecting anything in terms of feedback lol
Thank you for your INCREDIBLE feedback you are continuously saving our newbie butts :,) I know there’s a more lengthy response I am beyond eager to analyze and jot down notes for, but for now I just want to say I am SO obsessed over the original blackout poem you created!! (I was the writer for that level and am definitely still learning how to balance the hats of puzzle designer and poet at the same time :,) ) I was really hoping to get to see people creating their own stuff in addition to the puzzles and am so so so thrilled you did!! Thank you so much for playing and helping us during our export ordeal !!!!
Very creative puzzle game) I love the UI and all the game vibe)
Aww, thank you so much! (And I'm sorry - totally unrelated - but who's the cute kitty in the profile pic?!)
Hehehe that's my cat - his name is Bread) and he is cutie for sure)))
BREAD!!! everyone else in the comments can go home this ratings page is a bread fanpage now :'00
I AM DEFINITELY A BREAD FAN HIIIII <3
I really love the idea behind this, the ui and the cute art style with the interpretation of the hints to match the image, i do believe the hints or the walkthrough is a bit confusing but fun game overall
Thanks so much!! We had a blast watching your team member stream their playthrough, it gave us a lot of great ideas on what parts of the tutorial and gameplay needed clarity and how to possibly go about improving that -- not to mention just generally being a ton of fun, hehe.
yesss i was in the stream too (i was suscow lmao)!! it was really fun and you were sweet too <333!
OH FRIEND HI!! i was looking for you after the stream omg :'))!!! thanks so much for stopping by, it was so nice to hang out with you and im so so glad to get to put a name to a face (er, username to a username)!!
AWWWW !!!! new friendship is formed lesgooo, im happy we found each other here too <3333
This is a really creative idea! I was somehow stuck for way too long on the first stanza alone, though, and had to give up and see the solution. I definitely wasn't expecting it to start with "was" without an "I", so that kinda fooled me. I tried the next ones for a bit but I think this type of puzzle is just generally very difficult to me, there are many possibilities that feel like they fit but it ends up just being a guessing game sometimes. (by the way, the hint for the first stanza of the second screen says the solution has 3 words but it actually has 4, I assume it was just overlooked).
Overall though, it's a very charming game!
Thank you!! And hey, no shame in using the walkthroughs -- they're there for a reason, we totally agree that the game in its current state is still very much lacking a good feedback loop so otherwise it ends up being a bit of an obtuse guessing game for sure. Good eye re: first stanza of second screen! That'll be the first thing we fix in the post-jam patch.
Very clever idea, and I like the sound design too. i will return to this in the morning, it is 2 am here and my brain can't English at this hour.
Thank you so much!! Hope you got some good rest, hehe. I still mean to give it a proper rating later today once I get a chance to play for myself, but I watched Littlest Wanderer played on stream last night and was legitimately blown away by your game's sound design and general atmosphere, so this is high praise!
This is possibly the most unique entry. But a very difficult concept, because we describe, feel things differently. I feel like this could be a cool community game, sort of an artsy multiplayer. because (I guess) there are no good or bad ways to express emotions. I think you shouldn't let go of this idea, but think more about how this concept would fit in the game.
It would be interesting to see
The art is lovely, the poetry is evocative, and this is a really interesting concept overall. I do think as a game, it might be too difficult though - the number of plausible, poetic word combinations for each stanza is so open-ended, that even with the hints, it can be hard to get the exact right phrase (I had to check the solutions multiple times). Maybe there could be a way to give more progressive hints - like if you had one line correct with the blackouts, something would start to change about the corresponding image, instead of needing all words correct at the same time to get visual feedback? Or maybe just having several options for each stanza that would be "correct" for progression purposes.
Great job for a first jam!
Thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback! Honestly, we're right there with you about the difficulty -- we spent a while trying to figure out a good balance between too-sparse hints and just outright giving the solution, and even on submission were thinking it was probably still not super solvable (hence the walkthrough inclusion lol).
Beyond appreciate the alternative ideas you've pitched here, both would make for a much more forgiveable solving curve. Done right, multiple solutions would probably lean far more into that aspect of player-driven creativity, actually. Just updated the jam page to actively invite other suggestions on improving the hint system; turns out fresh playtester perspectives like yours are exactly what the jam doctor ordered :)
Thanks again!
Quick comment for anyone coming from the GWJ submissions page: We're aware that the build currently on itch is, unfortunately, non-functional, and are waiting right now to upload our fixed builds pending approval from the jam organizers! Turns out we missed the .txt files needed for the game to run while exporting... whoops.
Thanks for checking the game page out; we'll post a devlog when the builds are fixed!
This looked like it was going to be good but unfortunately the HTML version wouldn’t load (says it couldn’t find index.html) and the Windows version didn’t seem to work either. The start game button worked but when it started the game there was no text in the page and also no text in the help window. The game window also seemed to be too big so part was hidden behind the taskbar, which I think is where the back button for the settings menu was, so I couldn’t get out of that. I liked the music though and will definitely play it once it is fixed as it seems really interesting!
Seconding this, couldn't get it to play unfortunately in browser or in Windows.
Hey!! Thanks so much for taking interest in our game. I just posted a quick comment and devlog explaining the situation -- basically, we're a bunch of newbies and didn't realize the game wouldn't ship with the txt files, which ended up breaking everything haha -- but we've got the fixed builds ready to go as soon as we get approval from the jam hosts to update our files, at which point we'll post another devlog to say it's ready to go. Super appreciate you taking the time to check it out, though; hopefully it lives up to the wait!
Aaand we're up and running! Thanks again for taking the time to share your interest with us while we waited. Hope you enjoy!
Worth the wait! Really enjoyed it, and it felt quite relaxing also. It’s a very creative idea! One issue I noticed was that I think the hint for the crab said 3 words but it’s actually 4, but it doesn’t really matter I just thought I’d let you know.
Eek!! That's a good catch, appreciate the heads up. And thanks again for playing & the feedback!