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The Umbral Hollow's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Cleverness | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Playability | #214 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
| Artistic Style | #328 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
Ranked from 2 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- There was a long load time and the game felt jittery a bit, but that might be because it's in the browser. Then again, your game is a lot more intensive than most of the other games in this jam. Good 3D environment, I found the gameplay fun, and I want to play more (and will do when the judging period ends). Animations were excellent. I loved the visual feedback on the hold to skip. That's been well implemented here. Your GDD had excellent detail and signs of very good pre-planning. It looks like you probably wrote most (or all) of it before you built the game? Which is the intention and what we hope you'll do. Good luck in the game jam!
Did you include your Game Design Document as a Google Drive link?
Yes
Seriously... did you include your Game Design Document?
Yes
Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes
Tell us about your game!
A puzzle game were you use the power of light and darkness to progress through a dungeon. Everything that's cover in shadows stops existing.
Navigate through short levels with limited resources to find the exit.
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Comments
I see the concept and overall main mechanic of revealing the path with potions was executed perfectly!
Very well implemented!
Really nice touch that you managed to add a story element and introduction to the world, music and sfx were also pretty good.
Few issues I had:
- Alchemist table - every new level / reset I had to touch the table to reset (double reset per try) and it made it very tedious, what if every restart you just spawned next to it with all potions already equipped?
- Player movement - felt very slippery
- Aim camera - this was so confusing and desorienting at first, maybe instead rotating the camera to face character direction you should rotate player to face cameras direction
- Level 3rd (I think it was 3rd) level with projectiles - you want player to go with projectiles but projectiles kill the player that is very contradicting (I got the intention but it felt bad), maybe adding some more space for the player would help? (projectile has bigger light range)
- I didn't manage to beat the game - for me it was frustrating at times, its not that the levels were hard, I could not see a clear goal of the level and often felt lost
For example 3rd level was awesome in terms of what you want the player to do.
The idea is there but requires a lot of polish.
Still very good game for a jam.
Nice entry! The narrative bit at the beginning was great and the mechanics of your game are really cool.
I got stuck on level 8 and ended up skipping it until getting stuck again at level 12. After that I didn't really try to beat any levels after that. Just checked them out to have a peek.
One thing I'd suggest is making it so after the player gets the potions the first time for the level, that resets after that point wold automatically start the player with the potions. (Or maybe a toggle in options to make this the case?) I feel like difficult puzzles are going to frustrate players to an extent by design, so doing anything to avoid unnecessary frustration would be good in my book.
I feel your puzzles had a really good flow in introducing mechanics and then iterating on them until introducing even more mechanics. Some of them seemed really clever! Well done. I feel like this game would be worth continuing after the jam no matter the results of the jam itself. Some more mechanics/potion types, some optional challenges of higher difficulty, and some more narrative bits interspersed throughout and I feel you'd have a winner for making some side cash on Steam. Heck, maybe even get a talented artist onboard and do a lot of playtesting and you could have a top seller on hand. Good luck!
Thanks a lot for the feedback! And thanks a lot for the nice review, it is really motivating to continue working on the game!
Cute start to the game, I enjoy the writing (and the character dialogue sound effect lol)
My biggest criticism might be the controls / turning the character is too floaty
Bruh I just realize I didn't take into account the friction when calculating the character speed :/ no wonder the character feels super slippery lmao.
It'll be fixed after the jam is over, thanks for the feedback and thanks for playing!
A very interesting concept! I got to level 5 before I got too frustrated :p
The way the camera goes wherever it wants when you try to aim feels pretty bad. I think visual indicators could also help a lot to make the puzzles more enjoyable. But that's all polish, I can see the vision here and this could be a really cool game! And the intro scene was a nice touch, really helped you get into the story!
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, that's the first thing I plan to fix once the jam is over
Very interesting idea. The game ran very poorly for me though with constant freezes but i'd imagine it's because these types of games are usually cpu intensive. The intro cutscene was pretty buggy with text switching back and forth. The movement feels like you're on ice and i think the inclusion of precision platforming in some of the levels only exaggerates the issues with it. I do see the potential for some very creative puzzles and mechanics though.
Welp you just made me find a bug in the main menu, just click the new game button once or it screws up.
The game is more gpu intensive I would say. but I've seen it run smoothly in pretty slow pcs. Do you have hardware acceleration on? The game does stutter a bit whenever a new shader is loaded, but that is more of a Godot issue that can't pre compile shaders
Love the idea!
I can see some more fun puzzles coming out using this mechanics.
The narrative is very well set and it gives the game it's character.
I would love to see where the potion hits the ground though, it is generally hard to aim and guess at the same time.
Other than that, it's a solid mechanic and pretty well made loop that player can get into quickly!
Keep it up! :3
I love this concept! I could get sucked in to a full version of this.
My only feedback I could say to improve it is when I aim, occasionally my camera just decides to go wherever it wants when the right mouse button is initially clicked. It led to a couple of frustrating throws when I'm trying to throw quick, but I'm suddenly not facing the direction I was when I aimed.
I highly enjoyed this overall! Great job!
Thank you! Yeah the camera changes to where the character is facing, I was planning on fixing it but ran out of time
This game is so creative, I’m really impressed. The puzzles are all really unique and interesting, and I found myself wondering what the twist was with each level as I loaded in, really well done. There’s a few small glitches, such as getting stuck in the floor on some jumps, and touching the fireballs killing you seems a bit harsh in my opinion as there’s not much room to move (same thing as someone below). The cutscene is awesome, really well animated especially considering the short timeframe, and the music fits really well, although it gets a little repetitive; silence could work well in a game like this, maybe only playing the music once you’ve thrown a light? Overall I thought this game was great, definitely one of the best I’ve played so far :)
Thanks! I really appreciate it!
Me parecio exelente el diseño de niveles, y la dificultad es lo suficientemente dificil para engancharlo y no aburrilo, me gusto mucho la tematica de las pociones, creo que podria jugarlo varias veces despues de completarlo, porque aunque aprendi como completarlo, la mecanica es sigue siendo un poco dificil, es de esos juegos que si no juegas un tiempo, tendras que volver a pasarlo para recordar la mecanica que realizaste 10/10
Cool idea! The difficulty picked up pretty fast, camera was annoyingly jerky. I made it past the room where I had to run with the fireballs after 20 tries but got stuck after. Enjoyed the atmosphere and the cutscenes a lot!
Thanks! Appreciate the feedback!
Yeah, I showed the levels to some friends and different levels were really difficult to different people. If you'd like you can try other levels through the level select in the main menu