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(3 edits) (+1)

What a fascinating experience. It really felt like a dream. I think you really took advantage of the inherent limitations of a game jam and turned them into a positive, and I mean that in a few ways.

I'm not sure if the lack of a title screen was a time-related choice or an artistic one, but I think it paid off not having one. The lack of... pomp and circumstance, I suppose, really set the tone.

Minimalist visuals are kind of a natural way of turning the time limit into a positive. Especially with this jam's theme since minimalist art often feels "dream-like." It's not an uncommon way of interpreting dreams in art and media. It's natural because it works so well.

The learning curve is well done. The fact that what you have to do is wordlessly communicated adds to the "dream-like" feeling. You will, most likely, eventually figure out that you have to circle the lights with fireflies because the purple bits keep spawning around them . And once I realized that, I eventually naturally thought "what if I circled the enemies?" It would've been easy to explain what you were supposed to do at the beginning with text. A lot of people would've done that, and it would've taken away from the dream-like feeling.

The last instance of this that I want to bring up is the fact the ending is just white text on black. I think it actually works well. To me it evoked the feeling that I had just woken up from a dream. Like I'm half asleep listening to someone. To use the same term from before, no pomp and circumstance.

The one thing I would change is that I think having the player speed up when they collect an egg kind of contrasts with the rest of the experience in a strange way. Kind of took my out of the flow.

You not only turned the lack of a thing(s) into a positive, but made it contribute to the theme. I don't know how much of what I've mentioned is artistic choices or just time constraints. Judging by the fact that this was submitted less than 30 minutes before the deadline, I'm gonna guess that at least some of it was the latter lol. ('m genuinely curious.) Either way, I think it really it came together in a beautiful way. I like the word "magical" that was used in another comment to describe this. Great job!

The real reason there is no title screen is because I am in the middle of changing how I make menus XD. But I am a fan of when games effectively blend the title and the game together.

The fully scoped idea for this game has a lot more mechanics, and they also kind of lean on the environment itself nudging the player toward what needs to be done. The eggs making you go faster is actually a pretty important part to me - that opportunity to just stop worrying and zoooom. The planned idea was for flaming rings to appear when you pick up an egg, and moving through those would progress hatching as well as speed you up. (You could also opt to throw the egg through the flaming rings to heat it up, lol.)

Basically, the full idea was a bit of a playground, with a lot of implicit interactions between things, and a fair bit of strange. But it would have taken me at least a week to finish a minimal version of that.

Also, the full scope had an incident in which Doremy Sweet herself was trapped sleeping in a dream world, and some evil baku was using her powers to trap other people the same way, to feed off of their figments, wishes, and fears. So like, you would have to wake up four others first in a strange sort of boss fights in four stages, then challenge the evil baku and sleeping Doremy in the end. The ending would have been very different. The dialog would have been focused on contemplating the sleeping characters' wishes and fears.

But honestly, I like the simple and down-to-earth Mystia-Wriggle interaction here too. :)