Thanks, appreciate the time playing it, do you know how or where you died for it not to respawn you?
Jestersheepy
Creator of
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Wow, we really do appreciate this much breakdown of our game and we do totally see that perspective.
We were Art heavy for sure and Art does sell games (in both vision, quality and marketing). Art doesn't make it a good game and isn't essential to have a fun game.
I have seen comments like this and we have had similar thoughts but I do think you have to keep in mind the complete package.
There is a start and ending cutscene in our game, there is design through steering the player through the environment with hand placed orbs, there is a difficulty curve and the movement did have quite a lot of dev time to ensure it felt as good as it could. There is tutorial onboarding, designed gates to prevent you from progressing too fast, enemy patrol routes that had to be thought through. There are also elements that aren't obvious such as a semi complicated FOV shifting system based on velocity and a ton of stabilisation/bug fixing around using physics with the jetpack. Main menu/pause system, death, collision blocking volumes over the entire game and a sneaking mechanic. During development we had items to unlock such as a jetpack and a Spiderman like swing rope but the progression didn't fit with the game. Our average completion time is 40 minutes, level design is one of our weaker areas.
My point here isn't to disagree with you but to put a different perspective on the game which is difficult for players to see.
From our perspective we don't feel undeserving of the conclusion that Epic came to as we did work our butts off and managed to achieve a lot. But our design was lacking behind other entries and we didn't have any innovative creative designs that a lot of people strive for. We played it safe, made a cool character with a story objective for the game and tried to make it feel fun, good and interesting to play.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this, if it's changed the way you see the game or if you stand by you original post, we are very interested!
Thanks for your time!
The Theme for the gamejam was 'Down to earth' which kicked off the thought of being tiny in a big world. We naturally looked at Alice and Wonderland for inspiration and started to model big mushrooms, leaves and the vine forest.
The plant in the astronaut helmet came about when thinking of a reason why you are on this journey, it came from story generation; You arrive in orbit, you go 'Down to Earth' and you have an objective, a plant in an astronaut suit made a lot of sense (In reflection, that sounds weird).
Filling in between the lines was just letting our creativity take over while we developed (Such as the interior/ruins area and the final sequence).
All of the team watched your run through, very entertaining and frustrating at times, surprised you stuck it through but glad you did. Awesome.
Really appreciate the coverage and video, it helps us make improvements and we do plan to have a streamlined build that fixes and addresses a lot of the issues you found!
Thanks!
Appreciate it! Yeah the Mushroom dudes were a quick attempt at adding more difficulty to the game, but ended up adding to that unfair feeling which isn't great.
We only used megascans for the mushroom dudes head, all other meshes were made during the Jam :)
There are a lot of great entries but we had a ton of fun seeing how high quality we could get and how much content we could churn out.
Thanks again for the kind words and really appreciate the feedback.
Really appreciate the kind words man. Totally agree with you in regards to the level design and progression. The forest area is one that we wish we spent more time play testing and iterating on as it's a location that definitely feels like 'Can I be done yet?'.
Thanks for playing, finding it hard to find time to play all these cool entries, will give yours a go!