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As Dreams Are Made On's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #188 | 3.198 | 3.750 |
| Gameplay | #217 | 2.772 | 3.250 |
| Authenticity (Use of resolution restriction) | #217 | 3.944 | 4.625 |
| Overall | #218 | 3.118 | 3.656 |
| Audio | #246 | 2.558 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you work in a team?
Solo project. Had a blast!
Was the resolution a challenge?
The hardest part was getting icons and text to fit and be readable. I removed one of the stats, to clear up screen space. And every piece of dialog was shortened to a small handful of words.
I think the dialog shortening was very helpful for developing the tone of the game.
As far as technical challenges, this helped me iron out some kinks in how my engine positions triangles and text renders. I now have extremely precise control over exactly where the vertices land, and functions to place them at the borders between pixels.
What did you learn?
I had 2 major lessons:
1. How to finish a game. I have a number of really large/long projects that I've started and never finished. Scoping down and working with time constraints was really helpful practice.
2. How to take a game less seriously. I made a weird, artsy, niche game here. I'm not sure how many people will like it, and that's totally ok. I'm proud of what I made, and that's all that matters. I hope this perspective helps me loosen up a bit with future projects, and give them room to be weird and different.
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Comments
It was … a fascinating experience, I think I just entered into someones dreams and had some troubling adventures, especially when I slowly transformed into a crow, very troubling (in a good way) ! The transitions were impressive, good job !
Yay! Thank you.
A very curious game. I loved the art, and the scene transitions were particularly impressive. The stats were just about legible so good work on fitting them in! Gameplay felt like it was lacking a bit, although the roundabout nature of it did suit the dreamscape going on. It just didn't feel like there was too much skill involved; I progressed through it by trial and error and somewhat random choices. Overall though the atmosphere was fab, and it definitely reminded of the kind of dream you just can't quite grasp properly. You definitely succeeded in creating a weird, artsy niche game :)
Nice. Yeah I erred towards confusing and dreamlike rather than mechanics driven and gamelike. So you are definitely having the intended experience.
Wow! Some crazy cool FX in there! Very dreamlike. I like it :)
Thank you! The transition effect was something that was only possible at such a low resolution. I'm really happy with how it turned out.
I copied the screen buffer from the GPU back to CPU memory. Then grouped pixels by color in the before and after image. Then made particles such that each before and each after pixel was represented by at least one particle. Finally slid the particles across the screen, smearing their color from source to destination.
So yeah, totally possible with 4000 pixels. Impossible with millions of pixels. Also helped by the fact that my color palette has 9 color groups, with 7 shades each. So I could group e.g. all the browns, and have the particles slide through the shades as they travel.
Intriguing game. I'm impressed by how much art and different interactions you managed to make in two weeks. The scene transition effect was especially neat. Certain of the scenes reminded me of dreams that I've had (especially the first one, which reminded me of dreams where I keep trying and trying but can't accomplish some simple task). Good job!
Wow, thank you so much. This is exactly what I was hoping for as a reaction, and I'm mostly expecting people to find it bizarre and difficult to engage with. I'm glad you connected with it.