itch.io

Thanks so much for playing!

I will say, when I first opened up this game, I was not expecting a turn based tactical RPG with resource management elements - but I'm so glad that it was! The gameplay was very fresh, and mechanically very intuitive for me - very straightforward to play and understand.

The art is just beautiful, and the audio choices were great too.

This may have been mentioned before, but I did get a runtime exception when one of my bugs died. But overall this is a strong entry with a lot of good going for it. 

Finally, moths are just the most adorable little critters - love that you chose one for the protagonist.

Thanks so much for playing! We tried really hard to nail that oldschool RPG look, and I'm pretty proud of what we managed to end up with. 

I'm so glad you enjoyed the game. It makes me happy when people notice those small intentional details. Meta_Crystal did a fantastic job on audio / music. 

Mechanically, we had planned for much more variety,  but in the end we had to focus instead on just getting something playable out the door. I'm so glad you enjoyed it despite its simplicity - we're looking forward to expanding on this project a bit and realizing some of those original ideas we had going in. 

Lovely game - I enjoyed it thoroughly. The artwork is charming, the music was intense, and this game fits the theme in a way that's very literal, which is awesome!

Great entry. Keep up the good work!

Thanks so much for playing! I've always loved 8-directional character sprites, and I loved working on the little guy - it was actually the very first thing I did on this project. 

We've got some pretty cool plans to expand on the pot throwing - can't wait to get them finished!

We would too! We're really excited to expand this to a more complete game, rather than just a demo. So glad you enjoyed it - look forward to more updates post jam for certain. 

This game is a VIBE. Very spooky, intuitive gameplay, and a fun an mysterious premise. 

Loved it. Great work!

That's a great idea! Initially this game was designed with simple controls in mind, but I don't see any reason why we couldn't explore this style of controlling the game. Maybe as an setting or something under the options, or as a decision during the tutorial or something. Thanks so much for playing! 

This was absolute chaos, and I loved it. QTE and simple choose your own adventure style gameplay never gets old in my book. 

Great work! 

Yeah, starting with such a massive island really kinda bit us in that respect. I had considered setting up borders to keep people on the narrow path to the actual content, but I simply ran out of time sadly. 

The final game world will hopefully have a bunch of _actual_ exploration to do, rather than mindless non-exploration of a nearly empty island. So apologies for that sour experience. 

I love auto battlers, and this one certainly manages to deliver on that front. Lovely art, gameplay is nice and intuitive. 

Fine work!

I'm so glad you liked it! The game was a bit short, and has some big holes (like the massive island with not much to explore yet).  But I'm proud of what we managed given our limited time and resources. 

This was an absolute treat to play. I love the art, the music is nice and relaxing, the gameplay is very intuitive and straightforward. 

The only thing that got me a bit flustered was I accidentally called all my pets to a single spot, and then the ones that were hungry, I couldn't position myself in a way that made sure they got fed. But other than that, I really loved this entry - Fantastic work!

Thanks so much for playing! I'm glad you didn't find the controls or mechanics too klunky - there's some parts that do need polish still, but overall I'm really happy with how they turned out. 

I struggled a bit with the controls of the game, but I love the look and feel! Great work. 

I'm glad you liked it! I tried to keep it pretty true to the oldschool feel of mechanics in games like the original A Link to the Past, to varying degrees of success. Thanks so much for playing!

I loved this. Took me a bit of getting used to the controls, but it all made good sense to me in the end. Great work!

We had planned to add two more dungeons and a final boss - all of which we still plan to add, but it just sadly is going to take longer than we had for the jam. So glad you enjoyed it!

Loved this! Easy to make sense of, and fun gameplay loop. And the art and assets of the game have such a lovely charm about them. Awesome job making this!

Loved the audio! super satisfying - and the gameplay is intuitive and fun!

Great work.

I agree - the game really does feel a bit empty. Planning on expanding (and reducing) some aspects of the game to make it feel a bit more focused. Thanks so much for playing!

Glad I got around to playing this! Lovely game - fun, simple, and innovative. Keep up the great work!

Hey, thanks for playing - and thanks for the feedback! Glad you enjoyed it. I had big plans for this island, but unfortunately had to cut a lot in the end. I'll keep this feedback in mind for the post-jam patch.

I'm still reeling honestly.

Now that reviews and feedback on stuff has mostly settled, I shifted focus away from the jam to do some refactoring on a different project -  so I was beyond surprised to see my entry was highlighted. 

Having participated in a couple jams now, my expectations were very, very low. But by golly, this jam especially has just been a real treat. ❤️

Loved this. Wonderful, tense atmosphere - perfect for any psychological horror game. So glad I played! Keep up the great work.

Thank you so much for the feedback, and for giving it a try! 

With the exception of some CC0 audio from freesound, I made every asset in my game from scratch.

https://hey-tack.itch.io/a-short-walk-in-the-snow

I made the music for the game using LMMS. I made some manual tweaks to the sound with Audacity. Any video / gifs for the game were edited using Shotcut.

I was the most proud of my 3D assets, despite their simplicity. Especially the blendshapes for the face - didn't get as much in-game highlighting as I had planned, but still proud of how easy they were to use in engine. 

It's been a long time since I messed about with Blender / 3D modeling in general, and animating in blender. I had also never done animation blending in Godot before, so that was a fun challenge, trying to stitch all the animations together in a way that didn't look awful. 

Baby helped me find the secret area

This is a great looking game! Visually, very pleasing to look at, and a very uniform style and feel to it. The falling particles are subtle, but add to the very dark atmosphere. Loved the choice of audio and sound! The growling roars of the eyes was genuinely spooky.

The controls are super tight and easy to use. The platforming feels good and is easy to reason about. And the tutorial at the beginning of the game was straightforward, and easy to understand, and you quickly introduced challenges which involve using them - great design choices there!

This is a very strong foundation of a game - there's so much potential here to work with. Would be cool to see you build upon this game in the future. 

All in all, lovely game!

Hey! Glad you enjoyed your playthrough.

Regarding performance / loadtime, I'm sorry to say that this game is essentially totally unoptimized. So I'm guessing that's why your browser froze when trying to play. Apologies for that. There is a Windows build available on the repo, which perhaps may have better performance. I do have some small post-jam patches planned, but any performance improvements will likely take a while  for me to hammer out. 

Regarding the mouse lock, not sure on that one. Itch will generally release the mouse if you hit the escape key, or the Windows button. I could just be misunderstanding the issue though. 

I generally try to review anyone who's taken the time to comment on my game, so I'll definitely do that right now. 

I initially struggled to think of something thematically that could be considered unexpected, and ultimately unwelcome - especially when considering the sort of technical challenges I wanted to explore. Thankfully, I feel like I ended up with something that does fit, but I do worry about the subtlety of it still. 

Regarding your guesswork - you're exactly right. The approach I took to deforming the snow mesh depends on a static piece of geometry to modify vertices of. I couldn't use a higher resolution mesh because my computer was chugging loading it as it was. I couldn't come up with a sensible strategy for dynamically dealing with the snow deformation for procedural terrain. And ultimately, I ran out of time to try alternatives. So, in the end, I just boxed it in to keep players from falling off the mesh. 

So glad you enjoyed this little game. And thanks for the feedback! 

Visually stunning game - simple, and fun! Great work. 

Beautiful game, lovely story, and polished mechanics. Great work! Very much enjoyed my playthrough.  

Oh, and good luck on midterms ;)  

I'm really happy with how the particle turbulence turned out - it makes me happy to hear you enjoyed it too!

I actually hadn't read any of Jack London's work before you pointing out this comparison. I'm glad you did! That was a lovely read. Tragic, but lovely. 

Thanks for the feedback, and thanks for playing!

Absolutely incredible work. I was instantly reminded of games like Burger Time and the original Mario Brothers arcade cabinets. And my jaw dropped when I... well. I'd like to preserve any surprises for others. I'll just say that this game did an incredible job of setting up expectations, and very quickly subverting those expectations in ways I absolutely did not anticipate. 

The attention to detail in this game is honestly staggering. It really feels like you're playing a NES classic - that in itself is a difficult feat. But to put together a game that both feels fresh and unique, while also highlighting a lot of what makes old classic console games nostalgic? That's very hard to pull off, in my experience. All this to say, this achieves that here - beyond a reasonable doubt. 

I'm so glad I played this. And I can't wait to see what you get up to next!

It's an honor to have been the subject of such an in depth, and thoughtful review! You managed to pick out a lot of intentional detail that I thought might have been lost due to the short nature of the game. 

You're right that the trees stand out of when compared to the rest of the scenery - that unsurprisingly wasn't totally intentional. It was the result of me trying to build a shader that puts snow "on top" of stuff, if that makes sense. In short, it checks upwards facing normals and adds a noisy white texture to those faces depending on exactly how "up" they're facing, to simulate snow laying on those surfaces. It had the unintended effect of giving the trees a lot of depth and texture, and less like they were covered in snow - but I liked it, so I left it in. 

Regarding the music I made - all of the game assets (including the music and sfx) are in the repo (https://github.com/hey-tack/a-short-walk-in-the-snow). I left the repo unlicensed, so technically I haven't given express permission to rip audio from the game - but because it's public, I couldn't necessarily stop you, if you catch my drift. 

If it's easier, I went ahead and uploaded the music on SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/hey-tack/a-short-walk-in-the-snow). You can download it from there if you like. The music felt very empty without the windy ambiance, so I composited that into the track. If you're interested in a totally raw version of the music (which is in the repo), let me know and I can upload that too. 

Thanks again for the glowing review - It really makes me happy to hear it resonated with you! 

Hey! Thanks for playing - glad you enjoyed it :)