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A jam submission

Shadow CrittersView game page

It is your duty to cure them! Find and cure the shadow creatures
Submitted by homhom โ€” 15 hours, 28 minutes before the deadline
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Play critter

Shadow Critters's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Cleverness#2274.5004.500
Theme#2334.0004.000
Artistic Style#4014.0004.000
Playability#7193.5003.500

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 and shown in a random order.

  • I love the idea of this game! It has great foundational ideas. It's a very cool interpretation of the theme and is very well executed for the time frame. Love the tutorial, it was exactly what is needed. Constructive criticism: Add more upgrades Add more recipes that are used to make items that go into the antidote Make it so you cant buy a pen if you are standing where it spawns or you get trapped and cant get out
  • I enjoyed playing the game. Having to spot the animals with the flashlight was an interesting mechanic, especially coupled with listening to the audio cues to find the right animal. It really made me start looking for specific animals instead of capturing everything I found. I'm not quite sure what happened, but either the animal escaped or there was an issue registering it in the pen. I was gathering a lot of gold and parts, but the juice was not producing despite putting the animal in the pen. I had to go find more and put those in a separate pen. I was unsure if that was intentional or not. Overall, this was a cute and fun game.

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!
Jump into a fun world of shadow only creatures.
Collect them and create an antidote from them to cure them from their invisible, shadow only curse!

Extra Notes
I really like my game even if it might be somewhat vague I hope you do too :)

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Comments

Viewing comments 21 to 2 of 21 ยท Next page ยท Last page
Submitted

Chill game, the music was great, enjoyed playing-some notes/suggestions:

1. wasn't clear to me how you produce was made initially, you may want to do a brief tutorial on capturing critters and placing them in pens

2.  If you want to expand this, I'd make more upgrades, and maybe make the cure only work for creatures you've already captured, this was you have a sold gameplay loop

3.Don't juice raccoons, make them them produce phosphorus

4. Maybe add geese and have them produce gold

Congrats on finishing and great job with the game! It reminds me of a friendlier version of factorio where you have to gather resources peacefully/without exploitation.

Here's some feedback on your GDD and game since you filled out my request form:

GDD

  • Generally speaking with making any type of document it's helpful if the formatting of the document was clean. In the case of your GDD that means font sizes for headers are cascading in size and more bullet points. Regardless of how good your document might be, if it looks a little messy people are less likely to read it/may bounce immediately.
  • It would be useful to put in your target audience. Think of one specific person who would LOVE your game and describe them.
  • I wasn't familiar with the games listed as references. It may be helpful to include more information and an image.
  • I'm not entirely sure why the theme was listed in the introduction section but I don't think it added too much because of theme interpretation later in the document. I think you could remove it.
  • I think the game summary could be improved by including information about what type of game it is. Since there was resource/crafting involved this could be highlighted.
  • You could also mention more of the game loop in the game summary: gathering creatures to harvest their resources to upgrade your tools and develop a cure.
  • Selling produce was included in the game but was unmentioned in the document. The document also failed to include information that animals could escape the pens. It's important to keep the two in sync.
  • More information on the mechanic and how it relates to the design would be nice. For example I thought the first mechanic's description about the light was good.
  • You may have benefited from including a diagram with the crafting upgrade/unlock tree in the appendix at the bottom. It can also help point out problems with the upgrades.
  • The art section was very light on details and it's difficult to understand what you mean by "simplistic" and "detailed". Even if you mean something like "pixel art" or "low poly" there are different degrees of both (ex. 1bit, 8bit, 16bit, etc.). More images may be helpful, especially for explaining something like albedo.
  • You would benefit from including information about why the art style was chosen and how it reinforces the game theme.
  • Audio details are light as well. Here you should also include information about why certain music styles were chosen. "Fitting mood for a forest" isn't particularly helpful - is it a peaceful forest? A scary forest? etc.
  • I found the audio cues relating to the animals to be important for the game play as it made it easier to find the animal you needed. It may be worth it to highlight this more as a reason to use animal SFX.
  • Given that P for Pause is a little unconventional the explanation was nice and helpful.

Game

  • Good job for including the tutorial! Try adding an interactive tutorial in the future instead of a text dump.
  • I found it a little hard to read the dialogue at the start of the game. Try to make the dialogue advance based on user input instead of automatic. It also helps for accessibility reasons.
  • Being able to see the creatures at the end with the cutscene was really nice. I really enjoyed that.
  • The audio cues were helpful for finding the creatures.
  • I didn't really understand why I could not pick up the pig or capybara - I thought it was a bug. Some sort of feedback would be helpful to direct the player to needing the upgrade. 
  • I wasn't sure why we needed the shops to sell resources - I didn't use them and getting gold was easy.
  • The tech tree was well formatted - upgrades were in order and let you get more resources to get more upgrades.
Submitted

Was actually a lot better than I thought, gave in to the spamming of the hedgehogs in chat :D 
Pretty charming game 

Submitted

A really fun game! I made the mistake to tab out of the game after a few minutes, making the game unplayable by losing mouse capture, but it had me hooked and I didn't mind starting over again :D This also gave me the chance to read the intro again, as I missed parts of it because it goes too fast for me. Would have liked a "press to continue" for the text more.
Cool mechanics with exploring and seeking invisible animals with their audio cues and making them work for me!

And also... of course pigs produce fuel, everybody knows that!

Submitted

THOSE ARE THE FATTEST RACCOONS IN EXISTENCE, I LOVE THEM <3

But fr, cute game ^-^ I liked how you had to rely on sound to get the approximate location then swoop in for the capture using the light.

Submitted

I love your game! I actually liked that the shadows were a little harder to spot and you had to use sound a lot of the time to guide you towards animals. Half-way through my run i started recognizing the sounds that the animals i needed made and started hunting them down - As a sound person, I love the use of sound here and would like to see that expanded in the future.

The only complaint that i have is that my animals (specially raccoons, those freakin' raccoons) started stacking on top of each other and escaping their pens. I thought i was hallucinating for a few minutes but then i just pointed my flashlight at them for a bit and saw them committing their great escape.

The upgrade system is great, specially the flashlight upgrade that helps with catching animals.

Submitted

Really cute game! Everything works well. Even works on a super ultrawide with no issues. Good job!

Submitted

I like the unusual idea and gameplay! I really enjoyed the game! <3 cute hedgehog^^

Submitted

This was such a cute and really fun game. It was incredibly satisfying to finish.

My only minor complaint is that the animal shadows were kinda hard to see sometimes and they hide at the very edges of the map. Maybe having them be a little darker would be helpful. It wasn't a big deal but it would be a nice quality of life change in my opinion.

The game was a lot of fun to play, it was kinda like a really casual real-time Pokemon game but with real animals. I liked having to get animals to produce items to get further upgrades to get bigger animals. It's a very well practiced system that you implemented really well.

The audio on the animals was great, it was easy to pinpoint their locations really well thanks to it. I found it super helpful. The music was fine but it would have been nice to have a little more or a larger variety of sounds, it just sounded like the same few notes being repeated over and over.

The graphics were very basic and low-poly but they communicated their intent well and everything made sense. I especially liked the rocket launch and the reveal at the end that actually let you see all the animals. It was a nice reveal of "Oh wow, they were all fully textured animals the entire time" it was a really nice ending to the game.

It would be cool to see the concept expanded. I'm a sucker for these types of resource management/progressive upgrade type systems. I had a lot of fun and the game was really charming and cute :)

Submitted

I saved him!

Really enjoyable small little game, well done!

Submitted

Very creative and that hedgehog is so dang cute!!

So a few thing to note that are missing from making the experience better in Webgl which include a bigger sized viewport which I found by my extensive uploads of Webgl games that 1280/720 is the ideal view port and yes you have a Fullscreen option however a game shouldn't be so small that you need to press a Fullscreen button. Your missing the main part of a Webgl game and that's optimization for the UI and scaler that all Webgl games need. If you go up to the outside walls the game's frames dropped a bit which could be due to your use of the multiple instances of a rock with all casting shadows which isn't needed if its only meant to block a player from leaving the game world. 
The sound is a bit crackling in my headset and speakers and will need to be fixed in the future to enjoy a good sound experience in the browser. 

I understand if you don't like my feedback but its subjective to the user and everyone seems to give "positive" reviews and feedback which doesn't help you do better for your next one and I would prefer critical and somewhat harsh feedback so next time something is made its taken as "Ok I will try to do this next time" practice makes perfect and that's how feedback works.

I like the visuals and the meme's but so great job with that. 

Submitted (1 edit)

This is a creative concept! I had fun playing it, but i do have a couple points of feedback.

The critters were really fast, so when the are moving around me, they would get out of the flashlight radius really quickly, and i felt a bit frustrated trying to track them. Maybe more constant audio feedback would help.

One time I tried to press pause, and it released my cursor from being captured. The problem is that it would never re-grab the cursor, so trying to turn back around my mouse would go off the screen, I had to restart after this happened.

Overall very cute, and very creative concept. That is a mean Dr doing that to the critters.

EDIT: P to pause then Resume re-captures cursor :D

Submitted (1 edit)

Lovely game ! I like the cozy experience and music. The only major problem I had was that the hedgehogs and racoons look a lot bigger than the bunnies that I thought  I couldn't catch them without the upgrade. I spent quite a while being confused on what to catch to get strong materials and juice. Still, it's a great game, keep it up !

Submitted

very fun game! i love the cozy experience and the resource management. 

Developer

Submitted(+1)

Absolutely fantastic game, loved walking around with the light trying to find all the animals, super cozy and the ending made me smile! 

Submitted(+1)

This was very fun! The whole experience was very cozy, and the quirky story is charming. I think the sounds were a great match for the game too, everything really melds together well! 

I didn't find additional gold, maybe I missed an animal? Still got the rocket off though!

Developer(+1)

Thank you :)

There is an animal that gives you gold directly yea, but you can also sell your other stuff for gold :)

Doesn't really matter tho you've fulfilled your duty :)

Submitted(+1)

This was cute, I enjoyed seeing a shadow capybara and immediately recognising it lol.

I think I got quite unlucky because I found lots of bunnies and not much else, I had already bought all of the pens before I got my first juice, though that could just be me being bad at the game haha

Overall nice game, cool that you made all the assets yourself :)

Developer

Thanks :)

capy :D

Might be, bunnies do spawn more often than others. (not sure why I did that lol)

(+1)

Incredible, even saw a hedgehog.

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