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OBAKE's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creative use of art assets | #21 | 4.177 | 4.177 |
| Overall | #99 | 3.679 | 3.679 |
| Overall polish | #101 | 3.709 | 3.709 |
| Engagement | #277 | 3.152 | 3.152 |
Ranked from 79 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
A little unforgiving, but I really like the visual style you've got going on!
Thank you for playing! Yeah, the difficulty spikes can be a bit RNG dependent at times. If i was to expand this project further, I would have a much more gradual curve. :)
Very nice experience, the sound design is just awesome and the glow effect is gorgeous.
Thank you for playing! :)
I loved the creepy vibe and creative use of the assets. The sound design in this is the best part. It took me a little bit to figure out what to do, but it was easy to get the hang of things. I’d love to see an entire game with this theme/atmosphere.
Thank you for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Creepy!
Very creative in many aspects: The game mechanics, sound effects and the use of the art to create spirits (was it a car used as a face?)
I loved the mechanics, kept me playing for long time until I managed to make it. It was hard to pull it off.
If you completed it, I am contractually required to call you edupo-senpai until the rating time is done. :D Yep, the faces of the little spirits are cars and it wasn't even intentional. I just grabbed the first sprite that looked kinda like a mask to me, and didn't realize until a friend pointed it out. XD
That was a very creepy but enjoyable experience! The glowy look gives the game a dreamy, spiritual feel which is perfectly suited for what the theme. And the sounds!! they gave me chills and were effective in elevating the atmosphere. great job :)
Thank you! Your comment really put a SMILE on my FACE. Your game put a SMILE on my SOUL. Now we all SMILE. Everyone should SMILE....SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE SMILE
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I liked the atmosphere, wasn't sure what to do at first but slowly got the hang of it. The sound design is very spooky honestly, had me at the edge of my seat most of the time. I loved the anxiety you gave when I'm cleansing a shrine, looking around and seeing all the work I had to do set up for some interesting anxiety inducers. I'd love to see what else you could make out of this!
Really cool use of the assets, the challenge picked up quite well, great design overall and it felt quite polished. Quite cross with the spirits, though. Annoying fellows
Thank you for playing!
Pretty cool how you used the assets. The mechanics weren't too difficult to pick up, but maybe it would have made more sense if the three small monsters turn into the large monster. That way the game is a little less unforgiving as well.
Thank you for playing! Fine tuning the difficulty was one of the more challenging aspects of making this, and it could definitely have used some more time. I'll probably dig back into the code after ratings are done. Thanks again! :D
Great atmosphere, Super interesting use of the assets, and nice game play variety once things get going great job!
Ok, this is by far the cooleste use of the assets I've seen so far. Commenting now before I forget while playing again and again. xD
Was this your voice?
The game feels super polished, the cube-ghost-monster actually scared me the first time I've seen it ingame. I wish there was a way to restart once you died because I'm bad at games xD
Very glad you commented on my entry or I might've missed this one! Super fun, very good job!
Thank you! The oni were my voice (heavily modified). The chanting is from freesound.org, but also heavily modified using Audacity.
Great use of sprites and really liked the sound effects!
thank you for playing!
Very creepy atmosphere, although it does take a while to get going and I thought I was doing something wrong
Yeah, it has a bit of a slow start. I had other approaches to this game... a single well but having to chant to fill the gong, gathering incense to appease spirits at the lake, or doing something to appease the forest spirit to prevent them from spawning. None of it felt like something I could balance and have feel "right" with the time I had remaining though. I think the game is running it's best around 4am when you have the pressure and frantic feelings of "do i try to stop this level 3 well, or do i say screw it and go for the gong?". Thank you so much for playing!
Very creative with forming the monsters using the sprites, has nice effects and a very good atmosphere! Showing the LMB sprite when close enough to the well and the little giggles after purifying is complete is excellent player feedback which enables me to look at my surroundings without worrying about the one I’m purifying. I didn’t even have to look to know that I’ve finished purifying the well, which is great! For criticism, doing this one thing over and over again is not very engaging, even if there are monsters to try and disrupt me. Pardon me for this analogy, but the gameplay is akin to attending a boiling kettle while some kids try to annoy you in different ways (an all too familiar setting in real life); which meant that for me, my engagement of the game relied solely on the theme and atmosphere. Therefore, I feel that the mechanics need to be improved in some way to be more satisfying to the player. Perhaps you can include things that require decision-making, maybe each shrine is of a different god and would give different effects. Maybe allow enough time for the player to go to the river and catch a fish or prepare some sake as a shinsen offering to the gods - relaxing times like this can act as a “calm before the storm”, and you can play with the pacing of tension. Lastly, dying at 5am was basically down to whether I was unlucky enough to not be able to get back my rosary in time, or be moved by the girl spirit at an inconvenient time. Being forced to restart because of something completely out of the player’s control can feel unfair, so perhaps you can mitigate this by having multiple ways to get out of a problem. All in all, I had some fun, loved the setting and was excited to see such a unique aesthetic. Great job!
The idea of an indicator when in range of a well was proposed by a good friend of mine (I let him know of your praise for it :D), and I'm really glad I took his advice! The well sounds were something I wanted from the beginning, but were actually implemented towards the very end. I really felt it pulled things together. Looking at the other wells while chanting is definitely an important strategy to beating the game. The wells all have the same behavior, but all have modified random numbers to determine when they escalate to a new haunt level. I'm really happy you enjoyed and noticed those last minute improvements!
Yeah, I can definitely agree with you that the game needed more things to do besides tending the wells, it's one of the reasons why I kept the game intentionally very short. It's no longer than 6 minutes to beat, but I think it feels longer due to the repetition and having to maintain focus constantly. I had other ideas such as: lighting and delivering incense, chanting at the gong to reduce it's cool down, and performing a mini game if the ghost girl grabbed you, temporarily disabling you until you completed the mini game. I had a completely different map for a while, with a single well and a place to gather incense, but I just didn't have the time to experiment with those features due to the constraints of the jam and being incredibly new to this style of game. The boiling kettle analogy is perfect, it's also pretty much applies to all the "FNAF" type games...which I sometimes refer to as "Horror Management". You have to keep doing Y to "win", but X and Z are doing their best to stop you. I probably over simplified due to my fear of over scoping and doubting my abilities to get anything more complicated out in a playable state within the time limit.
RNG is definitely a factor in this game at times. I spent a very good chunk of time trying to balance it out so you could pretty consistently get to 5am, but that last hour is definitely a nightmare! The gong was so incredibly overpowered at first, that the game was too easy, and being such a short game I wanted to bank on repeated attempts. I feel that sometimes, you're just going to have a bad run. I have a few solutions to this that I was tweaking, but finding that perfect balance is tricky!
Thinking about the sprites creatively: I will admit that a lot of that mentality came from watching all of the "jam off the same art kit" videos Miz posted. I've watched all of them, it's how I discovered his YT channel and this jam! Making all of the spirits was really enjoyable, and I'm thrilled that people liked the visual style of my game!
Anywho, sorry for the novella there. You provided some really excellent feedback, so I figured I would share a bit more about the development process! The "calm before the storm" idea is great, and something to distract the player before engaging them is a great technique I need to learn to implement for future projects. Thank you again for playing and commenting! It's greatly appreciated!
Top tier style, probably the most visually original and gorgeous game I've played in this jam. Sadly the gameplay takes a while to get itself going and is, at least in the initial part, very easy. Still, I would never have managed to even imagine something like this with this asset pack. Great job!
Thank you so much for playing! I had a lot of fun designing this, and I agree that the beginning can be a little slow. I appreciate you sticking with it to see the crazier parts of the game in the later hours! Thanks again!
The atmosphere is nice and the sound effects are fitting, I especially like that you used different ones when the well demons get chased away. I encountered two bugs though. I was able to walk through the gong and then was stuck behind it, and after the amulet got taken away I couldn't find the spirit that took it, died to an oni and restarted the game without the amulet. But all in all a solid entry
Wow! That is the first time i've heard of that happening at all. The forest spirit has 5 designated spots he can run to after grabbing your beads. One is very lucky for the player , one is very unlucky for the player, and the rest are only "kinda" bad. I'll have to pop back into unity after rankings and do more bug testing. Maybe I have a bad box collider somewhere. Thank you so much for playing and pointing that out! It's greatly appreciated!
This was weird as fuck but I loved it. Super unique and original and the teleporting ghost scared the shit out of me. I tried a few times but could only make it to 4am! I love how you used the sprites to build the ghosts and monkey spirits. The sound effects were also really unique too, well done there.
Overall the style of this game was great and it's a top contender for this jam in my opinion.
Thank you! I'm really glad you enjoyed it! It can be hard, sometimes you just get horrendously bad RNG timing with the spirits. I've managed to beat the game a handful of times, along with some of my friends who playtested...but there is some luck involved sometimes.
A few tips for survival:
Effectively Chanting at a well, even for a brief moment, will reset the timer of the current level. Sometimes it is advantageous to hit the most escalated well, even if you can't completely purify it, just to buy a little extra time before a Yurei spooks you or a forest spirit is about to grab your beads.
The forest spirit always comes from the same place on the map. You can almost consider the moment he makes his sound to when he reaches you as a pseudo timer....though his movement speed increases as the night gets later, as does his escape speed! Since he is a forest spirit, he naturally lives in the forest...he isn't afraid of the gong, so that might be a clue as to approximately where he comes from.
The Yurei drag you to the lake...it's almost like they are lonely and want you to join them... :( They are hard to see, but unlike the stealthy forest spirit, they are visible! Unfortunately there isn't much you can about them, though it might be advantageous to make the first move!
Oni start quite slow actually, but as the night draws on, they get faster and faster. If you have a bad beginning of the night, dont hesitate to kite them around for a bit (carefully of course), until you feel you need to use the gong.
Don't forget that you can look around as you are chanting at wells! Plan which one to run to next!
The priest is kinda slow, he's no spring chicken anymore. However, he's a fan of old school FPS games, so you might want to try moving diagonally if you want a little more pep in your proverbial step! This can be helpful for outrunning and kiting ONI if things get over-well-ming.
Thanks for the tips! I'll definitely come back and try it out again.
That was a really unique and immersive world! Seriously, top marks for pulling me in. The whole style of the art (the bright colors and glow of the sprites) was pretty effective there, too, along with the sound effects. I mean, how dare you put a child's giggle into a spooky game XD
The game mechanic was pretty neat, and the imp-infested wells gave me some Zelda vibes. I will say that the game loop got a little repetitive once I got into a rhythm. The spirit that came to steal my rosary was a great way to upset that monotony, but as soon as I got it back, then there wasn't much different. Maybe if the time moved a little faster, I might be encouraged to see visible progress?
Still, I didn't mind the loop as much because the garden was such a pleasant space to take in. I just can't get over how well you established the style and stuck with it!
Thank you! The major changes in the game come at 1AM and 3AM. The total game only takes 6 minutes to complete (each hour is a minute), but I think the game keeps people on edge and makes it feel like time is moving slowly. Around 5AM things start getting kinda of impossible to manage at times, and that's when you need to try and have the gong off cooldown! I really appreciate your feedback and thank you so much for playing!
Thank you for the headsup on the timing! Knowing how long I'm actually waiting, I was a little more patient XD I made it till 5am this time. Those mischievous spirits were really getting me haha!
This is an interesting lesson; as a player, it's easy to understand the dev's intents. I think you scoped this really well for a jam, and I hope I didn't sound too critical or obtuse! This game gets more fun the more I play!
Didn't sound critical at all! Besides, any criticism is just going to help me learn and improve! :D I'm glad you enjoy the game and gave it a little extra time! :)
Really cool game, I did not expect to see a horror game, sure had fun playing it! the only problem was that I had a lot of sensibility
Thank you for playing! :D
I get swarmed by Oni's after my amulet is taken away(I do take it back but wells go to sh** by then), not sure how I'm suppose to eliminate them.
It's a very fun game tho.
The gong is your "OH CRAP IM SURROUNDED" option! It does have a lengthy cooldown however, so you have to try and use it as a last resort. You can grab your amulet back from the forest spirit, just chase that little bugger down and snatch it back! *oops, i just noticed you knew that already, sorry!* *He's a jerk and it's perfectly ok to hate his smug little butt*.
I like the Japanese theme of the game and how the mechanics emphasize that like with the purification of the wells. Interesting gameplay, atmosphere and good immersion! Maybe a little bit of story to add context would have been interesting :)
Thank you! I would have loved to add maybe some flavor text or a short introduction, but time was short and I had a hard time balancing things. Maybe post jam i'll flesh things out a bit :)