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The Dark Plague: Trials of Galwefeld's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Playability | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Cleverness | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Theme | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Artistic Style | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
Ranked from 1 rating. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- Loved every bit of it! Feeling like you nailed the atmosphere on this one with some incredible art and soundscape. Your "lives" being the different villagers gave a nice personable touch to the game!
Did you include your Game Design Document in your downloadable files?
Yes
Tell us about your game!
Twin stick top down input.
You are being hunted by an entity, it's dark so shine you lantern at it to reveal it.
Find all the parts of the flintlock pistol so that you can fight back.
If it touches you, it will claim your body and you will have to fight/avoid an additional entity
Did you remember to include your Game Design Document?
Yes
Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes
Extra Notes
This game is best played with headphones and a twin stick gamepad.
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Comments
had a lot of fun scaring myself. You nail it with all aspects, love the audio and the corn field especially. It might help to highlight the items to be picked up so you can distinguish them from what’s just nice decor in the houses. Would love to see the next levels, more maps, more story :)
Thank you so much for your kind word Krapow2.
I agree that something might need to be done to make the important items stand out.
There will definitely be more levels no matter is we get the Game Jam nod. I ad so much fin developing this and seeing my friends play and scream in terror.
Steam is still reviewing the submission, but this link to Dark Plague Demo should be live within 1-2 days if you wanna follow and wishlist it and get the updates I have made since the submissions closed.
Thank you for playing 🫰
def wishlisting this! Best of luck on the game jam
The monsters only appearing in your light worked out pretty well, made a good deal of tension. I think my biggest issue was that because the monsters felt just a bit faster than me, I needed more things that could get in their way to properly run. The trees only sometimes worked for me (could always be a skill issue on my part, of course, haha). I felt like I needed to already understand the town's layout to have much of a chance, I had no idea where my last character died. So some sort of map you could pull out would help. The story was captivating, the mixture of people who clearly wanted to justify their hatred vs the people who wanted to use scripture for good, it felt like a nice balanced nuance. Good luck!
Hey, thank you for playing! Awesome feedback.
On Monster Difficulty
We made it that the monster is at the same speed as the player, but the monster cannot pass in as tight spaces as the player, so you have to outsmart him and make him take a longer route than you to be able to break his line of sight and lose you. Of course we are listening to peoples feedback and considering balancing.
What I have noticed (watching friends play) is that as soon as you learn how to evade the monster and and where to best lose him, you kinda know how to beat the game without losing a single villager.
But don't worry about you gaming skills, we consciously made it hard to instill a feeling of dread and vulnerability, and we would consider it a failure on our part if a player beats the game in their first run. Every time I lost and got the instinct to rebalance to make it easier, I had to remind myself that this might have just been a failure of me as a player and not necessarily as a designer 🙃
Map and orientation
This is a hard one, I am very much open to suggestions. Part of me thinks that it's a part of the game to get familiar with the village by just walking around and discovering the areas. Another part of me is pulling towards making it accessible and less likely to frustrate players.
I can at least rule out the following:
Maybe what we'll end up doing is adding a map in the starting house that you can view similar to the notes that are scattered around the map.
On the Story
Wow, thank you. I stayed up until 6am on submission day finishing the last note, saying to myself: nobody will read this, but on the off-chance that someone does, I really want there to be a little bit of world building that explains some of the gameplay. Why would the villagers have their only gun separated into parts scattered around the village.
When the game will get it's updates I will bake the story some more to fill in some of the blanks, and this comment lit a fire in me to keep writing. This is my first ever time doing game writing, so I'm willing to stumble and fail in my pursuit of telling an interesting story.
The game is currently under review by Steam, as soon as it passes I will link to it on the Itch page so you can get my latest updates if you want to stay in touch and keep playing throughout my journey of turning this into a fully fledged game with multiple areas and rich storytelling.
Again! Thank you for your gracious feedback, and I promise to always listen to anyone who has taken the time to play.
Very nice art, sound and music. Nailed the atmosphere! Couple of suggestions:
1. Increased brightness/gamma, or option for it: Too hard to see some of the beautiful art you created. :)
2. While the font of the letters/diaries fits the theme very well, it is kinda hard to read (maybe just for me). I'd try something a bit more readable (handwriting style fonts perhaps?).
3. Flashing the interact key near objects. I kept pressing E and F and took me a while to realize that SPACE is the interact key.
4. Map maybe? Just a crude one? I don't know, maybe I just have a terrible sense of direction. :D
Overall, this game is gonna be great, I am really excited to see where you take it from here. Good work!
awesome feedback! Thank you for taking the time to play.
Everything you are suggesting will be added. I our steam page will be up in the next couple of days with our entry as a free demo. I'll link it here so you can get updates while the jam judging is still ongoing.
EDIT: deliberating on the map though... Might make one that acts like a note. Still wanna have minimal ui on the screen.
Very nice atmosphere and music! Though tbh even too dark for my taste - I have monitor set to lower brightness than most people :D Maybe in full game, gamma adjustment might be nice.
Very good suggestion, this was definitely something I wanted to implement, I just had to prioritize other things. But I'm gonna put it on steam no matter what and there will be an adjustment slider for brightness. Thank you for playing <3
Anita Max Wynn
great game, I like the atmosphere
Hey! Thank you, we had a lot of fun playing it and startling ourselves with out creation. Which ending did you manager to get?