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A jam submission

Urskog Vertical Slice 2020View game page

Lose yourself in the woods and uncover the mystical secrets of Urskog... a relaxing first-person puzzle game.
Submitted by Plantus (@Plantus3) — 6 days, 23 hours before the deadline
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Urskog Vertical Slice 2020's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Art Direction#14.3544.354
Audio#43.8543.854
Overall#73.5393.539
Presentation (on itch.io)#73.8233.823
Game Play / Game Feel#93.4173.417
Level Design#93.4583.458
Storytelling#122.9272.927
Innovation / Experimentation#182.9382.938

Ranked from 110 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Year of education

Credits (names and roles of entire team)
Project Manager - Pontus Jakobsson
Level Designer - Marika Ohlsson
Art Direction - Amanda Backlund
2D Artist - Frida Grahn
Technical Artist - Johannes Burström
Lead & Gameplay Programmer - Kaan Baris 'Peace' Bicak
UI Programmer - Emil Gårdh
Composer - Marcus Vallgren
Quality Assurance - Ozberk Alpay

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Comments

(+2)

The art in this game is insane. So incredibly nice! The style of game that you are going for here can really be felt through the audio, visual, and relaxing nature of the whole thing. The meditation was nice to lead me to the next location! Good use of a mechanic that some faster paced people might try to push past. I love the collectable runestones!

Continuing with your work and aiming towards the right audience, you will definitely find some success with this game :) Great work you guys!

Developer(+1)

Thank you SterfMaGerf for you nice feedback and comments :)

(+2)

Sooooft!

(+2)

perfect!

(+2)

G O O D J O B !!

(+2)

Great game, i like it!

(+2)

Awesome Like It!👌🏿

(+2)

Amazingly beautiful with simple yet clever puzzles! 

Easy to get lost in the woods, which was both nice and confusing. A lot of times when I tried to place logs in the correct place I would just throw them in front of me because I was a little too far away. While meditating it was really nice to align the camera to the centerpoint on the ground to get a hypnosis-like sensation. Also while meditating the birdsong is very nice, but the crickets were very loud and intrusive.

Overall amazing game!

Developer

Thank you for playing and for the helpful feedback!

(+2)

Beautiful game - well done!

Developer

Thanks for playing!

(+2)

I feel like games with this pace can be hard to completely immerse players into. However, I think Urskog is well paced through straightforward level design, cute visuals and interesting sound. The puzzles progress appropriately, setting up a good flow. I enjoyed Urskog very much!

Developer

Thank you so much for your kind words!

(+1)

The art is absolutely beautiful and I enjoyed the puzzles a lot. The music was very lovely. I thought the puzzles was at a good level of difficulty. I only have a few notes of constructive criticism. Firstly, I didn't feel very calm during the meditation sequences. I feel like some games accomplish a meditative feeling by just playing them, instead of having the game "pause." Secondly, I lagged through one puzzle and couldn't get back and return the log I needed for the first part of it. As such I had to restart the game to continue it, Thirdly, and I think thats more of a personal issue, but I experiences some first person motion sickness while playing. Normally I never have issues with this. I tried adjusting the video settings to see if it would solve it but it didn't help. Maybe the head was bobbing or something? Once more, absolutely fantastic game otherwise. Good job!

Developer (2 edits)

Thank you so much for the feedback! 

We are happy to hear that you enjoyed the game! We will definitely take advantage of your feedback!

Just to help you next time you play if you do,

There is a head bobbing setting under the "Controls" you can turn on and off.


Thanks again for playing and giving feedback!

Submitted(+1)

it loosk breautiful and the puzzles show a very lovely direction. Based on time we had it is impressive what you all created. Consitent art, a consistent world and a nice direction of some puzzles.
Personally, I would suggest to replace the current meditation mechanic. It does not create any form on immersion. Sometimes, you do not create immersion through what you already have in real life, such as holding a button and waiting, but more often in video games you create immersion through creating something we do not have. 
Consider how immersive the story of avatar the last airbender is and how they created something abstract to real life, even though it is meditation. (I am talking about Aang entering "another realm" when he meditates)

Anyway, it is a very promising game and looks fantastic!

Developer(+1)

Thank you David for playing and for the feedback!

(+2)

While the gameplay has a good feel to it for the most part, in the later parts (after initially arriving to the lighted tree) while still doable due to the rather simple mechanics of the game, the game fails to teach the player the objective clearly. As for the puzzle where you place rocks to make flowers grow, it feels sort of separate from the rest of the game as it only appears once in the middle while placing objects to make a path and the mushroom puzzle repeat. 

You may also wish to consider letting the player skip the cutscenes of the orbs flying to the tree since for some players its frustrating to be forced out of gameplay even for what one might consider a short time.

While the game overall looks lovely, the lighting during the darker parts in the game makes it very difficult to see platforming at times. As another note, the UX elements feel slightly poorer in quality with inconsistencies and  sometimes questionable placements for example having the credits with white font while there is an stone with white runes, making part of the text extremely difficult to read. This is a shame as having a less thought out UX distracts from the beautifully created environment.

Despite these points, you have done a good job in the apparent short developing time and I think the game has a lot of promise if you ever plan to take  it further!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for playing and for your thorougly feedback! We will take this with us and use it for the future development of Urskog.

(+2)

Wonderful game and visuals where nice such a chill game!

(+2)

Played it with my girlfriend on the big screen. Cozy and relaxing <3

(+1)

I followed the snowball to the first river and it looked for all the world as if I was supposed to jump on that blob it formed in the water, but I went straight through it. I managed to scramble out of the river further along and get back to the snowball, then it made me chase it a bit to another part of the river where it left three blobs. I couldn't jump on them either. I had to look at the trailer to find out that the blobs weren't physical and there were some rocks nearby with what I thought were atmospheric particle effects on them but which were actually indications that I was supposed to pick them up and drop them in the blobs. Ironically, because the rest of the tutorial was so good about telling me what to do, I'd assumed that it would have given me a hint. I hadn't assumed that the blob was the hint. Augh!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for playing the game! We hope that you had a good experience overall.

We are sorry to hear you had hard time interacting with the objects in the world.

To help you with them: If you look at the first of each interactable object you are introduced, you get a tutorial text at the bottom of the screen which does not go away until you interact with the object. 

Thank you for testing our game again!

(+3)

this game incredible amazing job

(+3)

what a peacefull game