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Sadness and Joy's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Playability | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Artistic Style | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Theme | #104 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Cleverness | #423 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
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.
- This is a fun little game! I enjoyed the puppets and the dancing. Well done!
Did you include your Game Design Document in your downloadable files?
Yes
Tell us about your game!
Help stop The Sadness Monster from spreading sadness by spreading joy! Dance in front of a boombox to charge up your Joy Meter. When your Joy Meter is fully charged activate your Joy Ability by pressing E or Shift. Run past as many villagers as you can to make them happy! You only have 10 seconds before you need to charge your Joy Meter again. Try to make everyone happy before the countdown ends. (Hint: Is there someone else besides the villagers you can make happy?)
Did you remember to include your Game Design Document?
Yes
Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes
Extra Notes
All of the characters in this game are puppets that I built out of fabric, foam, ping pong balls, and lots of sewing! Everything was shot on a greenscreen, and turned into sprites. (A lot like how the original Mortal Kombat was made, but this is with puppets!
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Comments
The puppets are amazing! They stand out and look so good! I like to dance along with Joy when his meter fills. :D
Very cute gameplay and aesthetic. Super simple but is well done! Congrats you made me smile :)
Using puppets is a really good idea!
My biggest note is that I wish dancing in front of the boombox was a more active thing. Maybe if you tap space in time with the music, you fill the joy meter faster?
Thanks for the kind words. I like that idea... make the player responsible for making the character "dance."
<3 the use of puppets for the game. Others have done this before, but it’s rare and it’s always great to see it being done. Looks excellent.
Here's a video of the gameplay:
I love the visual style, such an unique and creative to animate sprites! Amazing work and good luck on the Game Jam!
Beautiful Puppetry
Wow using puppets to animate your characters cool idea...very cool. Points for creativity for sure.
Reminded me of Platypus back in the day, claymation game from A. Flack thought his name was....
Brilliant work.
Thank you, thank you. That's a pretty cool reference, I haven't heard of Platypus before. I'll have to check it out.
You put a lot of work in this, this is excellent, it's almost like pacman, love this!
Love this game! Such a cute art style and idea!
Thanks you! I really worked hard on it, so I'm glad you like it.
I LOVE THE PUPPETS WAAAAAH, such a cool concept it came out v good!!
I've never even thought about combining 2D and 3D elements into a single view in this way! Such an inspiring artistic vision.
The puppets spark joy!! I love it.
Our themes are so similar, down to the colors of the protagonists and even how you deal with the big fella :D Great game I love the muppets. Good luck!
Ha ha! Great minds game dev alike!
The visuals in this are amazing! I love the puppets and the stop-motion animation is a ton of fun! Would love to play a bigger project with visuals like this in the future, great work!
Thanks so much, it was a lot of work, but I'm happy with how it turned out. The "stop motion" look is a happy accident. I shot live action of my puppets at 24fps, but I just couldn't deal with all those frames of animation in the time-frame, so I just put things at 12fps or 10 fps.
Really, really good looking game!
I love the puppets! Really creative way to make characters for your game!
This looks incredible. Amazing work.