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Game Engine / Tools
godot
How does your game fit the theme?
You take on the task of sending people to heaven or hell, needing the points of view of good and evil
Self-made & used stuff
Graphics / Art (e.g. models or textures)
Audio (e.g. music or sound effects)
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Comments
I love the idea of this game!!! A full game of this would be really fun to play!
Love the idea of Papers Please but in the afterlife! creative use of the color palette! I would have liked for the stamps to be more legible and maybe for them to have matched which side they were on, angel or devil. The font was a little hard to read but otherwise, hell yeah, no pun intended.
Thanks for your feedback.
As for the stamps thanks for the advice, and i think they are the only thing i did not later redo in a smaller size to match the rest of the pixels, maybe that would have helped. But the fact that they were on the other side was a thought out choice. mostly to trick people dragging the wrong stamp because of how our brains work. Also doing wrong things gave some more fun(i hope) comments from the angel and devil so i tried to play into that
I had a great time following this game's progress on Discord and the art great, though the actual implementation of the game could use some polishing. As I know others have said, music and sound effects for when the people are sucked to the great beyond would make it a lot more fun and immersive.
I ran into a bug in the third shift where I could not put the document in the envelop, so I can only assess the plot and logic up to that point, so please forgive me anything later in the game negates some of my critique.
For assessing the people, the initial cross system was okay, but adding in documentation got really confusing, especially since everyone has basically the exact same super long list of auto generated great and terrible things. It basically sounded like they all did superficial things to look good, like support their church and volunteer at homeless shelters, but behind closed doors they were using violence to assert dominance, spreading malicious gossip, taking advantage of vulnerable people, etc. If the lists were a little shorter and had a less even split between "good" and "bad" actions, it would have felt like I was actually able to assess just how much bad vs good they did and pick accordingly, as opposed to just sending everyone to Hell.
Anyway, I do think this is a still a neat concept and I'm glad to see you were able to complete your game for the jam :)
Thanks for your extensive feedback. Unfortunately you had a bug but i will be honest it did not change the gameplay as after the third shift i could not add any more mechanics.
I am curious though did you had more than 5 items in the list? Because it should have 5 but it might feel as longer because the sentences where not short.
Its always a challenge between making it challenging but not to. While i could have done the same with 2 items as you can still get a "good good", "good bad" and "bad bad" outcome. But also randomization is a b*ch, i actually worked with 2 lists 1 evenly split between good neutral and evil and one list of just good that had a 66% of triggering, which should have mostly added good people.
The lists all had at least 2 dozen items and you had to scroll way down to see them all. Maybe it glitched and used your whole list. I'll see if I can get a screen shot.
Well, I loaded the game from continue, which restarted shift 3 and the list is working properly now with about 5 or 6 items appearing so I can't show you a screen shot of the list being super long, but it definitely appeared to be using more or less your whole database earlier. There was a scroll bar for the list and you had to go down three times to read it all. I hope this ends up an easy bug to fix or at worst a freak incident.
Thanks for trying. Because of your answer i was checking as well, and indeed i see that sometimes the web build has some strange bugs i never had on my dev build. The curse of gamejams i guess. But it explains why people say think there are to many items to read trough (because there are)
You're welcome. Glad I my comments made it stand out something was up with the list. I was just reminded you were the one who noticed my note about pressing Shift to skip dialog got cut, so glad I could reciprocate.
Cool concept, kinda reminds me of Papers Please! The art is great as well. One suggestion I'd make is for the text to be a bit easier to read, maybe by making it larger or using another font. Great job!
Thanks for your feedback, Yeah i have heard it a few times the text was to small. i thought it would be big enough on full screen, but its something i need to find a solution to. Probably less long, larger text.
Great usage of the theme and the art style is quite catchy.
I played the game for a while, but at some point it gets repetitive and there was no real sense of progression. I am not sure if the game has any form of ending, but if does there should be something that lets you know how you are progressing and how close you are to the end. For example, after every 10 souls it would be nice to have some form of statistic of how you are doing overall, and the game progressing to adding some form of variety. By the end of 3 or 4 stages the game would end and let you know how you did.
thanks for your feedback, the game should show a counter near the demon. But I did not explain that very well. If the counter is full you go to heaven if it's empty to hell. But to be honest both endings are just a text plus thanking you for playing (counter goes from -50 to 50. But a more visual periodically feedback of your progress sounds like a good idea
Cool game! I love the sprites and im honestly impressed how good they look with the limited colors we had available. The concept is also unique and fun :).
thank you very much for your feedback. I am glad you enjoyed the game
Very good use of the theme! It's pretty fun and interesting for a while, but it gets a bit monotonous over time. I think adding more variation could make this a great game.
Thanks for your feedback, and i totally agree. But time is the enemy of a game jam :)
I had some extra features in mind like connecting photos to actions, spotting infiltrating demons. giving free passes to Catholics but only if the confessed. Checking date of death for old souls trying to trick getting in to heaven and some things like that. But i was happy finish the minimum game play.
This is a really unique take on the jam! Making us humans decide because we, the player, are neutral and lack bias, is something I find ironic because humans are the last species to lack bias imo lmao. Jokes aside, This delivered to me more as a task/message than as a game. I feel it leaned in a little too much on being realistic- maybe if the character notes had more whimsical life descriptions, it would be easier to become immersed. That being said, this is one of the more radical takes in the jam, and I like creators that venture far off from the standard genres of game creation. frisbee halo / 10
Thanks for your feedback,
I agree they should be more whimsical, and continue more in the semi tongue in cheek conversation between the devil and angel. The decision of good or bad was intended to be more extensive with other matches to make. But for a jam this had to suffice, And im happy you enjoy my take on the theme. I always try to challenge myself of doing something different, its the whole reason i did not continue with my first idea of a platformer where you switch views
A game resembling Papers, Please but with a split between Heaven and Hell's perspectives? Sign me up! Unique take on the theme for sure, and the color palette in question lent itself well to the characters. I especially appreciate that there were neutral characters who could go to either side. Maybe they could have been sent to purgatory instead though? I understand that's probably a lot of hard work.
My main gripe with the game, aside from the lack of music as you mentioned, is that it's almost impossible to read. Doubling the font size and expanding the speech bubbles would work wonders. I'm also a bit iffy about the note system and think it could use a total rework, but I get you were pressed for time.
The voice clips are cute, by the by.
Thanks for your extensive feedback. I had indeed also thought about a purgatory, however i felt like i would adhere more to the theme.
As for the note system it was indeed the bare minimum i wanted, the plan was to be more investigative and make connections between documents, photos and opinions of the angel and devil. But time is the great enemy in a gamejam
Understandable. Writing is tough.
Great concept, and the art is good. The resolution is quite small, making it difficult to read the text, so I had to zoom in on my browser.
Thanks for the feedback,
I believe itch.io should offer you a fullscreen button, was it still to small then ? (also you could turn on full screen in the settings which should make the game full screen)
You're right, I never noticed the fullscreen button. I just tested with both the button provided by itch.io and the one in the display settings in your game, the resolution is fine with fullscreen enabled and the text is large enough to read. Well done for providing multiple sound and display settings in your game, good features to include even though I skipped them the first time I played it.
Cool idea! I think the first two levels felt kind of pointless, I would've liked starting with having to make the choice. I also thought the document on what the people did in their lives was too long, I didn't want to tally a hundred things to figure out if the were good. I liked the character designs, it reminds me of Papers Please
The first 2 levels were literally pointless as you cant get any points :D but no gamewise and story wise i think they werent. They were much shorter than the real levels and introduced gameplay that would come back in later levels. Of course i had no time to maker more levels because its a jam but to add all right away in the first level felt like an overload of things to do to me.
About the document, did you get more than 5 items ? (or 6 the very first time) because it should have been capped to 5
Chute little game but messiness are hard to read and get cut off. I think you can enable full screen when playing in the browser. I like that I can move objects.
Thanks for your feedback. You should be able to use fullscreen in the browser yes by clicking a button or using the settings.
Probably the messages get cut off because last minute i decided to change fonts as the first ones were stylistic nice but a bit harder to read
This game reminds me a lot of 'Papers Please'. I like the whole main mechanic of having to seal the envelope, that was a nice touch. I wish there was some music in the background or some more sound effects. Overall looks like you have a good concept here.
Thanks for the comment, yeah i did had no time anymore for music. I could have used a premade one but since all was made by myself it felt not right to do that.
It did not start out based on papers please, but once i started making the "customers" i also started seeing similarities. Probably unconsciously influenced by it