itch.io

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 :) 

Beautiful, deeply relaxing game. 

Simple in terms of gameplay, but for me that adds to the relaxing experience. 

Awesome choices on audio. I loved listening to the chirping of birds, the gentle gusts of winds, and even the whispers of the enemies was rather soothing. 

I spotted lots of lovely, polished visual details. The shadows as you approach objects, the particle effects, the gently swaying foliage - all very carefully crafted, and adds a lot of great atmosphere. The 8 bit look of the game is also very cohesive and solid.

I had a wonderful time playing this entry. Thanks for making this! Excited to see where you take this. 

Lovely visuals! Couldn't progress past the first level though. Tried hitting 'E' on everything, no dice. 

Got stuck on main menu :( sad day. 

Sorry to see this can't be played - I love topdown shooters! 

Looking forward to giving this a try post-jam. 

I find it baffling that this game does not have more reviews. 

First of all, fun, and thoughtfully designed puzzles. 

Secondly, the game looks fantastic - very clean style and atmosphere. 

Thirdly, something that initially scared the heck out of me, then turned out to be a core gameplay element! 

This is a polished, clean, and very well designed game. From the mechanics, to the visuals, to the audio. This is one of the best entries I've tried, and I'm so glad I did!

Please keep making games, because I need more of this in my life. 

I very much enjoyed this little game. Simple, and fun!

Downloaded it from github, and thoroughly enjoyed it! Great little spooky game. 

I enjoyed this game.  But it also makes me sad, in a way. 

The reason being, it reminds me of some specific interactions I had with friends who have since passed from Alzheimer's disease. 

It's inevitable, but there's nothing that can prepare you for that moment where you come to realize that they're either beginning to forget who you are, or they've already completely forgotten you. 

It's a very, very unsettling feeling. 

This is a good looking game! The tonal whiplash between the two worlds is honestly incredible - it made me laugh, but at the same time, the horror world is genuinely terrifying. 

I love games that play with the concept of insanity and perception, and this fits the bill really well for me. 

I would almost call this an "anti-stealth" game, because you actually need to draw attention in order to progress - and I honestly found that to be a really cool, and unique game mechanic. 

Very fun experience! 

I'm so glad you enjoyed it ❤️

You can find a desktop release on the repo. Let me know if you have any issues getting to it. https://github.com/hey-tack/a-short-walk-in-the-snow/releases/tag/v1.0.0.0-acero...

O M G - I LOVE this. 

The music, the art, the atmosphere - the style! it gives me chills.

Absolutely incredible piece of work. And MULTIPLE ENDINGS? I'm blown away. I wish I had more time to explore this game - I'm definitely coming back to this post-jam, because there is clearly a ton of love and effort behind this project. 

Thank you so much for playing! 

I initially intended to add more gameplay elements, but had to cut a lot of it due to time constraints. It's reassuring to hear that you found it to be a worthwhile experience, despite being rather barebones compared to my initial concept of what it could have been. 

I LOVED this. I love dungeon crawlers, and I love RPGs.  I especially loved the experimental nature of trying out each rune and figuring out what it does. And the game's look and feel are right up my alley. 

Awesome game!

It was one of my favorite parts to work on! So glad you liked it. 

Absolutely beautiful game. So glad I played!

Lovely, good looking space combat sim. Controls are comprehensive. The missle lock-on didn't want to behave for me, but aside from that, solid game. 

Love the noir style, gameplay elements are solid - just took me a bit of time to figure out that I actually had to accuse someone by pressing E on them. Nice job!

Fun little waiting game! 

Lovely dice rolling game! Simple, easy to play, and visually very pleasing. 

Would be nice to see some ways for the player to intentionally tip the scales in their own favor, make risky decisions, just a bit of something to add a small, but meaningful strategic element to the game. 

This feels a bit like a zero player game - like you're not so much playing, as you are progressing the state of the game by allowing the dice to be rolled. Not that there's anything wrong with that - just makes it a little harder to feel personally invested in the outcome. 

I like this! Lot of potential - curious to see where you take it. 

Okay first of all, gameplay wise, I think this is fine. I can get behind a good maze game as much as anyone. However, I do have some personal reservations about not giving the player any real way to detect invisible walls -  outside of doing what effectively becomes wall surfing to find all hidden paths. 

As a mechanic? I think invisible walls are totally fine, and can work really well - I just don't really want to wall crawl the entire game to make sure I don't miss something. A hint like a subtle crack, or a glyph, or even a soft directional noise que can go a long way in helping the player out while still keeping it interesting. 

As far as presentation, the game is quite pretty. Lots of nice techniques used here to give the game a polished look. And the voice over? Is that proper voiceover from someone? You love to see it. 

I will say, I have a relatively mid end graphics card, so I wasn't expecting a perfect 60fps, but believe me when I say that this game suffers some pretty substantial performance issues - particularly when you look directly at the center of the map - which is where I think most of the particle effects are concentrated. 

Good game! I enjoyed it - even though I failed to find all the crystals. 

Lovely looking game, and the premise is cool too - confused the heck outta me though. Maybe I'm just dumb?

Visually speaking, this game is very unique. The field of view and massive walls do a good job of making the player feel very small. I like games that make me feel small. 

There's a lot of gameplay ideas here that I can see - using your hands, sprinting, sliding, jumping. The tutorial had me prepared to do some platforming, but I recall mostly walking. You do have to use some of them to complete the game, so there's that. 

This game left me with a feeling that I can't quite describe. Glad I played it though. Good work. 

Couldn't install sadly. But based on images alone, love the look! 

Looking forward to post jam, so I can take this bad boy for a spin :)