The fact that you created such a rich environment and story with such a simple approach is amazing. I really enjoyed this story and I think you did a fantastic job on this submission!
OH! I saw the food crate, but I TOTALLY missed that it was for the pigeon. For some reason I thought it was for Pete. That makes sense now. Thanks for explaining!
Really fun game. I played all the way to the end, which is rare for me in a 20 level game jam game. The difficulty progression on this was on point and it had just the right amount of training. Even though there was a bunch of text at the beginning, but you made it fun to read - especially the final point "You. Are. Not. Alone". The animations were a great way to keep the intro interesting. Good luck in the jam!
I had no clue there was a poop-o-meter until I ran out of poops and I had to press that second button. I agree with BakerDev's comment on this. I loved the little pigeon and the happy Pete character. Jumping around with them was good fun. I just wish I knew how to refill the poop. :) Great submission!
Creative concept! Took me a little bit to figure out they couldn't jump the same distance and how to use the controls. It got quite difficult and I got very stuck at the first switch - I got the red in, but once the switch was on, I wasn't sure how to get out. I'd recommend adding a slower progression to the difficulty to ease the player into learning their new skills.
Congrats on this being your first game you completed! That's a huge accomplishment and I hope we see an entry from you at the next game jam!
Very cool art style and I like the creative spin on the theme. I found it incredibly difficult to win despite multiple attempts on easy. Maybe it's because I'm less used to using the SAWD keys? I'm probably just bad at hiding. Either way, awesome submission!
I liked the switch between bright and happy to dark and scary. You pulled it off well. I had to do three playthroughs because I kept getting stuck when the boxes didn't fall the right way. But once I learned where I had to hit them, I finally escaped! Would have loved a health meter, a way to attack, and some kind of message/direction at the beginning to let me know my objective was to get to some kind of destination. The platform jumping was a little tricky, but overall felt good. Good effort on this one!
Fun game! I had no clue what to expect and this did not disappoint. The explosion sound was very well done. The ways the little smiley guy and tanks mess up your gameplay is very creative - and they do it just when I was getting confident. Really enjoyed this!
This game is FUN! Love the controls and the music had me jamming out. Design was fun and effective. The gameplay felt great. I wish there was a way to push people away from rocks/obstacles (like blowing a gust of wind from the cloud?) so that the wouldn't automatically drown if I picked them up next to a rock. All in all, really great submission.
Thanks, Doughet! I'm also a fan of the office dynamic - I think it has a lot of potential for silly situations. :) If we had more time, we would have loved to deepen the story line of the trainee a bit and add variety to the mini games. So much to do, so little time. Thank you for playing!
Thanks so much for the great feedback! I agree, there was potential with the mini games, and we initially had 4 different ones in mind, but ran out of time. Oh well!
Really fun platformer - the jumping felt really great and and I enjoyed how the gun/mushrooms could bounce around before killing enemies. I got stuck once in the bottom right of the map and don't think I was able to get out. After a few tries I found what I think was the cave I was trying to get to, but it said 0/7, even though I had 3 mushrooms. I guess I wasn't totally sure where I was supposed to be going. Despite that, it was really fun to wander around and shoot things. Great art, SFX, and music!
I have mixed feelings on this one. The graphics, music and SFX are wonderful and really create a spooky/exciting vibe for the game. Great job on that!
However, I find using the commands instead of just the arrow keys to be really tedious. Where I think this could have been improved was being able to chain commands together like LRDDDULR and pressing enter to have them executed at once. Otherwise, without the chaining ability, you're just using two keystrokes for something that normally takes one, and it's less intuitive. Even though it's really creative and fun to type the commands at first, it gets tedious quickly.
Super creative idea, though, and polished execution!
So bittersweet! Really creative entry and I enjoyed the gameplay. Potentially the leaves could speed up when the memory bar gets into a red zone and be slower the rest of the time. I think starting out slower with the leaf drops would have allowed them to contribute more to the atmosphere as well as being part of the objective.
I was also hoping he would stumble in the narrative based on how low his memory meter was. Saying something like "oh.... hmm.. I seem to be forgetting how that went..." and then maybe pick the original narrative back up once the meter was brought back up. I think there is such potential for how the narrative could branch out based on his level of memory.
Overall fantastic entry and enjoyable game to play.
I agree with some of the other commenters that it was a really tough game. However, I really enjoyed the music, sound effects, and models. It came together really well, great work! You achieved that Autumn aethetic.
To make this game more fun, I'd recommend making the bad guys less difficult to kill and introducing waves of baddies that have increasing difficulty. You could also allow the character to have unlimited leaves and only require them to suck up health restores, leaf "power ups", or leaf "bombs". I found it difficult to avoid the leaf bags while shooting at them AND trying to refill my leaf blower.
Anyways, creative concept and nice execution. Just needed a little tweaking on the gameplay. Great work!
Great aesthetic on this one - the art, sound effects, and animations came together beautifully to create that tense/creepy/Autumn vibe you said you were going for. Short game, but I would have loved to see more. I really like how you tackled the character animation. His style of movement definitely added interest to the game.
Of course, I had to use my imagination on the intense chase scene. :) Sorry you ran out of time, but it was a fun entry!
Super cute graphics on this one, and it looks like there's a large amount of content for a 20 day jam. Great work!
I had some trouble exiting the buy/sell screens once I was in them, but didn't buy or sell anything. Had to restart the game in those situations because it wouldn't let me go back a screen. I think the shops and buildings are quite lovely. The level layout overall could probably be improved to match the richness and quality of the buildings themselves. Also, I was a little sad I couldn't clean up one leaf pile at a time. I tend to enjoy tedious clean-up tasks because they give the player a sense of accomplishment when it's done. Cleaning them all up instantly with one click seemed too easy.
Interesting idea - kind of like mad libs for game development. As a game, I didn't find this very fun, but as a work tool, I thought it was really cool. I see that you allow the player to rotate to the underside of the environment. Perhaps that's an opportunity for a different type of idea forest?
Took me a minute to figure out the controls and the music didn't work for me (Chrome browser), but it had a really cool vibe and I liked how you set up the environment. Minimal, but quite effective.
Basic game, but I see a lot of potential for this one. I'd be curious to see how it would play from a top-down perspective where you can see the neighborhood laid out similar to a maze or mini-map style. It wouldn't require more advanced graphics, but would make the gameplay more complex because the player must decide if they should go up/down/left/right instead of just left/right.
It'd also be interesting if there was a probability that you got more or less candy from some houses. It could add an extra sense of reward and break up the repetitiveness of going to each house.
I love the time limit and I think it added some excitement to it all. In the future you could tie in the time limit to a story element. Like get as much candy as you can grab before the nightfall, or before the moon rises, or before Halloween ends. You can still have the same countdown timer, but changing the wording of what it's counting down to may add more depth to the game.
I'm sorry to say, I haven't played Resident Evil, so I had to look up what you were referring to. If you're talking about a fixed camera position transitioning to another fixed camera position (like I saw here in old style RE), then I'd say what you've got now is more engaging. There's got to be a sweet spot somewhere in there. Maybe pivoting the camera slower, or even pivoting it a little off-center so the player doesn't feel like their head is moving. I'm really not good at this part of game design, but I did enjoy how dynamic your camera reposition was. :) (end rant)
Cool idea and the art was nice. Because the time in game passed at the same speed as normal time, I didn't see any of the other evolutions. It seemed that the time limitation made gameplay really limited unless I was willing to put in 8+ hours to get to the next feeding/care cycle. That's unfortunate, because the later evolutions looked pretty neat.
Queenie is ADORABLE. :) For a first game, this is great start. The environment was inviting and I liked the design of your level. My only complain is that I kept getting stuck on ceilings/walls in the middle of jumps. I think FallingWallGames provided a suggestion to solve this.
Enjoyed the aesthetic of this game - between the sound effects, music, design, and mechanics it all came together very cohesively. Great work!
I think the thing that tripped me up the most was the mushroom bouncing + spikey vines. I kept getting stuck on the edge of the mushrooms or spikes. Also, I realized after much failure that a bounce alone is not enough to propel you over that second jump. It seems you need a bounce + jump. I'm not sure if there is any better way to differentiate between the bounce or the bounce-jump.
I also really liked that the camera moved around the level and gave you different perspectives of things. It made the game more interesting to play (as others have also said). I'd probably limit the use of it a little more - it got disorienting at times. But overall, it's definitely a cool mechanic to include.
Great suggestion on the shot reset button. Yes, when you know you're going to miss that far target it does take a little while to finish it's landing.
Tutmo can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the red targets are worth different amounts. The back one is the only one that has a different amount and was added to provide another layer of challenge. I think we spent a majority of the time trying to implement the first layer of challenges for the player (just chucking the pumpkin) that we didn't have time to think about how add progression and additional challenges to our targets. It's been a big takeaway for us this jam.
I really enjoyed the transition from one interactive piece to the next. It was very creative way to progress through the story line while keeping the player engaged. Beautiful story. Great work!
Thanks for your feedback, Mag! Glad you liked those explosive pumpkins! If we used our time better, we were thinking of adding firework pumpkins and pumpkins that exploded into other tiny pumpkins. The sky is the limit. Maybe for a post-jam update?
Happy to hear the Autumn vibe came through. In previous jams, we were really lacking in environment, so we pushed ourselves to really embrace all things leafy and Autumn. In hindsight, we may have been able to take a less polygon-intensive approach to the environment, but we're learning!
Thanks for this feedback, Manbo! Yeah... on paper, Chuck was intended to be a wholesome pumpkin farmer. In execution, though, he ended up a little "smiley" and way too still. :) I'm impressed you were able to hit the far target. I still haven't been able to get it either. Well done!
I really enjoyed this game. Those spike tunnels are such a challenge!!! I really had to BE the leaf... no room for panic. It totally reminded me of that Firefly/Serenity reference, "I am a leaf on the wind". Unfortunately for me, I'm not a very good leaf.
The music is such a contrast to the floaty, graceful leaf and I felt like it was antagonizing me, letting me know how futile the effort was. If you were going for melodic chaos, you nailed it. Honestly, it amps up the angst, so when you have so much floaty, open space, maybe that's not a bad thing if you're trying to create tension for the player.
The art style was simple, but it accomplished the goal. I'd recommend setting up your colliding mechanism (or whatever triggers a hit) closer to the actual spike image. I felt like level 4? with the big spike tunnel was causing a collision when I was about 1 pixel away from the spikes. It led to a lot of frustration and frantically smashing arrow keys. I'd also recommend making sure the baddies contrast with the background in future games. I didn't realize that the spikey balls had spikes at first. Going with the theme, it may also have been cool to switch up the look of obstacles so that they related more to the plight of a leaf... like drops of water instead of spikey balls.
My favorite part was the text in the pit and the "hidden" reference to zelda in your first level. I'm a huge fan of hidden areas.
Like others have said, the art in this game is excellent. The style is cohesive and it all really works together to build a whimsical autumn mood.
Regarding the writing, I feel like you were able to capture what you trying to go for. Magical, cozy, autumn, mostly cheery and maybe a little solemn at times. The only suggestion I have is to make the overall conflict of the story more clear. I could tell that I was going from one task to the next (and the writing and art made it enjoyable), but I couldn't tell at any point where I was trying to get to. Maybe somehow tying in the "last day together" part at the beginning and then during the day you can enjoy the little moments at the market and the cafe that much more. I appreciate the depth you went into character building on the witch. I would have preferred for it to be a "he/his" or "she/her" pronoun instead of "they/their", only because I couldn't tell at first if the story was 1st person or 3rd person.
Really liked the ability to do Auto play. I'm unfamiliar with this genre, so maybe that's a standard feature? Anyways I found it helpful.
Looks like you added lots of settings too. I didn't try out all the configurations, but the interface was clean and appealing. Great work on the UI!
Cute game! I like the music and the variety of baddies. The animated trees on each level were pretty cool, too. Nice work on that!
A few suggestions I'll make that could greatly impact player experience:
- refine player movement (make the player more responsive/faster/less floaty)
- add feedback info to the player on how much ammo they have. It took me a minute to realize that the trees refilled the ammo
- refine the colliders on the platforms. It wasn't always predictable what I could jump through and land on. Sometimes I'd land in the middle of a block. I would have liked to be able to jump through the platforms and then land on top of them.
I'm happy to say, though, that I found Rosette and everything turned out ok :)
Thanks for this feedback, Incanta Games! I wanted to do a little more with the depth of the story that we presented, but had to keep it really high level with the stickers - we didn't want to make the player sit through a long intro and didn't have a ton of room in the dialog box. I'm glad you still found it useful in progressing the story line.
Regarding the wall jumps, yes, that was a learning experience for us. The more I played it, the more I'm thinking maybe the walls needed a little more friction feel to them? Either way, really appreciate this feedback - it'll help us improve for next time!
Thanks for this feedback! Glad you liked the stickers! I think the jumping issues were likely a mix of mechanics and mesh issues we had. Definitely something to work on for the next game.
