Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines

Olanti

102
Posts
13
Followers
6
Following
A member registered Jan 01, 2024 · View creator page →

Creator of

Recent community posts

Thanks for feedback!

There is no hard ending. You can unlock some doors and gates with consoles (the idea was that you'd be contacted by security over radio, and they'd advise you on how to progress), and eventually arrive at the hangar where a boss fight was supposed to take place (and an ending cutscene), but right now it's just an empty room with glowing text that explains how the ending was supposed to play out.

Thanks, glad to be an inspiration!

You mentioned controls, maybe it comes down to past experiences? What you describe sound like controls for a tank or a car, where W means forward from vehicle's perspective, meanwhile I've mainly played top-down shooters where W means up from player's perspective *shrug*

(2 edits)

Thank you for your kind words! I had more content planned in my mind (enemy types, character abilities, radio chatter) so it should've been more variable, but those didn't make it in. Actually, level length is not something I thought about at all when designing it, but now that you mentioned it I'll have to remember it, thanks.

The smoothness comes in many parts thanks to 2D physics interpolation. You have to explicitly enable it in project settings, and take care of what goes into `_process` vs `_physics_process`, and cancel smoothing on case-by-case basis when spawning/teleporting entities. It takes some non-zero effort to keep it bug-free, but the visual payoff is great, especially on high-frequency displays.

(3 edits)

[Edit: not relevant anymore]

Hello, nice to meet you!

I'm Olanti, a software dev with a year of Godot experience and some gamedev experience beyond that. I can make fairly robust code and make it fast, as well as debug tricky issues. No experience with either Wwise or FMOD, but I'm up to learning one of those for the occasion.

There's a bunch of games on my itch.io creator page that you can check out. I just love making games; crafting worlds and experiences out of nothing, especially as a team, feels very enjoyable :)

No team with me yet, just looking to form one. No concrete project plan too, but I've got a few ideas for gameplay and story setting that I can share. Leaning towards steampunk or sci-fi, but other ideas are welcome too. You can DM me on discord (olanti_p) if you're interested, or would like to team up.

I checked out Mystery From North - oh yeah, #10 for audio is def deserved, congrats!

Update: we now have a team of 4: programmer, narrative designer/project manager, game designer and a 2D artist. Still looking for sound design and music ;)

Update 2: We found a musician/sound designer, so this is no longer relevant, sorry for bothering you. Still looking for a pixel artist with jam/gamedev experience though.

Good game, nice use of minigames here! I really liked the art style, it felt very polished for how short the jam was, and the idea behind the game was great. Music and sound design were superb too!

I had some issues with controls: Esc key for closing dialogue conflicts with "exit fullscreen" in browser, and I kept getting trapped inside anvil collision in this place (moving up from trashcan) and had to restart:


Thanks! I'm happy how it turned out myself, the lighting gives a lot of "pop" to the otherwise mediocre pixel art, lol.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, the balance could use some work. Infected pose little to no threat as they are, and personally I found turrets trivial to deal with too once you find a corner or a crate to hind behind. You can also outrange them since bullets travel for a long distance, but turret vision is limited to 1-2 screens. In the end, I just thought making the game easy would be preferable for the jam format.

Thanks!

I agree on the enemy damage feedback, I wanted to make a visual effect for when enemies get damaged by the shots, but ran out of time.

Pretty chill atmosphere, great choice of music!

I think the overall style was very nice, both art and UI theming, as well as the idea behind the game setting and gameplay loop. 

Feedback on bugs and UI issues:

- I didn't find out until later that you can scroll the list on the right, the wheel direction is reversed so it doesnn't scroll on first try

- A scroolbar would've been nice, or faster scrolling speed, or items being sorted by name/category. The list is fairly long (4 pages), and with no sorting and slow scroll it takes a while to navigate and find things.

- 'a's in front of item names feel distracting

- No way to increase/descrease price fast, you have to click 20 times if you want it up/down by 100$. ALso, when buying items, price step is 5$, but when selling things, its 10$.

- There is a bunch of specific potions, but also a generic 'a potion' item?

- Pricing %% does not reset to 100% when you try to sell an item to a new customer

- Supplier complains when you offer 0$ for items, but is completely fine with selling anything at 5$ a piece

- Sometimes customers dismiss themselves after a second or so (customer respawn script gets triggered twice?)

- When selling items, your money counter is not updated, only when buying them

Hope that helps in your future projects!

Nice game! I think it had a solid gameplay loop and pretty good atmosphere.

The art style and gameplay reminded of the ancient DOS game Heretic.

I quite liked the art and animations, though wish the game overall would've get more polish.

Feedback on issues encountered:

- Music resets when you switch between menu entries (look into autoloads/globals, with them you can loop music between scenes)

- "Back" button in level select doesn't work (missed connecting signal?), same as "main menu" button on death screen

- "How do I start the game?" problem mentioned by others

- On game start, if instead of pressing Enter you press A and then press Enter, the game stops responding

- I didn't understand what the 2nd weapon does. It makes a swing, but seemingly does no damage (enemies don't die) (on second thought, are there actually 2 types of enemies, immune to different types of weapon?)

- Sometimes I would get snagged on ramps and stop moving, which allowed enemies to catch and kill me (misaligned collisions?)

- If a group of enemies catches you, they can very quickly block your movement and/or insta-kill you (maybe make an invulnerability timer after getting hit, and/or make enemies pushable)

- Some enemies got stuck in the roof in one of the side rooms (I assume spawnpoints are misaligned?)

- Camera felt too sensitive, had to crank down mouse sensitivity to the minimum to make it playable; wish there was a setting for it

- When you die, you can't click the restart button with mouse (game keeps mouse cursor hidden and/or grabbed)

Hope that helps for your future projects.

Interesting concept, congrats on submitting a game!

Cute little entry! The art was nice and clean, and overall the game had a carefree and enjoyable atmosphere.

Had a bit of trouble figuring out how to get rid of the cat, the hint for dropping the cone didn't pop up at first.

Hi! Sent you a DM on discord

Saw the OST release on Mittsies channel, immediately put on top of my to-play list. Fantastic game! How do you even describe this genre, bullet-hell rhythm puzzle?

It felt very hard, even on normal. You can't tell half the time what's even going on on the screen, you kinda have to tune out all distractions and focus on dodging green & running patterns between machines... But the story made it all worth it, lol.

Also, the vibes. You don't even have to start the game, it just oozes with style from the main menu alone. Excellent animations, banging soundtrack (but then again, it's Mittsies, what else would you expect?), tons of self-referencing artistic themes. And the girls, yeah. though it's a bit disappointing they don't feel as memorable as the ones in Helltaker.

I think I had a weird issue with dashing? Like, if you spam spacebar, sometimes the girl dashes once, pauses for a few frames, then dashes again, and other times the girl dashes twice without pausing.

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, the background ended up not great. I spent way too much time figuring out the spraycan tool in aseprite, so by the time I've imported it into the game and realized the contrast issue there wasn't much time left to fix it. It was either redoing it from scratch (not enough time), dimming it down (which looked ugly), keeping a pure black background (boring) or leaving it as is.

Thank you!

Nice entry!

I quite liked the aesthetic and the premise, feel like there's a lot of opportunity to expand it further.

The hidden tunnel effect was very cool. The graphics overall were fairly crisp, good use of lighting and particles! Only downside to me was that it was unclear what exactly the decorative objects were - they have names in code like "icedFountain", "controlPanel", "deadHeater", "engineHolder" and the like, but they didn't associate with anything for me (maybe due to perspective). Nice touch with the parallax effect on arches.

The sound design was great, it perhaps contributed the most towards building the atmosphere!

I felt the game could use more variety or challenge. Once you figure out what each item does, and what combinations can be crafted (both don't take long), the game boils down to slowly wandering the halls, applying correct item to the obstacle, or backtracking if you don't have the needed item. Maybe it would've helped if the game had enemies, or more crafting combinations, or more memorable locations (all tunnels look kinda same), don't know.

There's a broken .lnk file in your game archive that points to a file that only exists on your PC, might want to remove it for future releases.

This is a very nice game!

I think my favorite detail about it was the autumn leaves particles, it's a small thing but does a lot to bring out the atmosphere.

Great choice of music & art, it looked and felt very consistent and in tune with the game story and message.

The difficulty was ok, it didn't take more than 10 tries to complete any of the rooms, so I never felt stuck.

In some cases it was very hard to see the spikes, as they blend into the background or the decorations, and you notice them only after you die on them once or twice. Same issue with hearts in some rooms (example pic attached, heart blends with cloud and spikes blend with fence). Perhaps it would've helped if the spikes had more visually distinct features, or the decorations were not as saturated as the foreground elements. Also a minor thing, in school levels the paintings have very high contrast against background, which is similar to floor platforms, and at the same time the lockers obscure the white/brown floor lines, so it becomes somewhat hard to see at a glance where you're supposed to land, you kinda have to stop and think for a moment. There was also the issue of not being able to see where to land due to camera positioning, but that's been mentioned by other reviewers.

Overall a pretty good entry!

Okay, that's certainly an interesting concept. Nice idea with the dimension switch too! Platforming mechanics aside, I feel it could've worked better if there was more interaction between the storyline and the gameplay. Like, maybe the dialogue going on in the background as you collect the cards, or advance through the level? Or maybe the level responding to the dialogue? It feels like the two exist apart from each other.

Kinda disappointed the art is AI-generated. It looks appealing and clickable, yet the levels are made from plain white boxes, and the character uses isometric perspective instead of side perspective so their feet don't line up with ground. Ends up looking like a bunch of 3rd party assets thrown together... I'd suggest you look for an actual artist, or at least take more care to keep it consistent.

(2 edits)

Pretty good entry! The visuals were very nice, the art was quite detailed and readable, loved the style of it.  Sound design was great, it did a lot to convey the atmosphere!

It was confusing that you have to double-press E in order to interact with some objects, and it was also confusing that some objects will only reveal surface-level information after you've triggered a corresponding script step. Like how the safe can be seen only when you're supposed to find it, while the game sets up an expectation that it is a regular closet, and you need to find a prybar or something to move it or crack it open with.

Damn, great vibes! The art is really disturbing, crazy high attention to detail. Storyline shows much promise, I would've loved to see where it goes next.

I had some frustration figuring out the layout of the game map (there are 2 floors... but going right teleports you to the 2nd floor, and yet there is also a window from 1st floor to the 2nd floor - how does that work?) and the rules by which the demon behaves (he can spot me from the first floor when I'm on the second floor... does he do that through the window when he stands next to it?), and died a lot because I couldn't find the 2 hiding spots on the map for a while (thanks for the cutscene skip function btw). But I think it was worth it in the end.

Voiceover was awesome. It was also surprising to see multiple languages and voiceovers (что редко встречается в джемных играх), and of the high quality too!

I thought the game bugged out because it returned to the main menu after the mirror scene, yet the description & narrative mentioned multiple demons, had to source dive to double check it's just Beelzebub. I'd suggest putting an "end of demo version" screen, or making it more visible in game description.

Overall, I think you did an outstanding job here, team, this is certainly a unique entry!

Glad you enjoyed it! I'll definitely need to do something about the wall jumps, I've been getting a lot of complaints about them, and controller support is something I didn't think about, but should definitely look into. Thank you for suggestions!

Thank you for the comment, appreciate it!

Yeah, controls are apparently a common complaint, and I may have overdone the difficulty... Perhaps expecting players to put much effort into playing the game in context of a game jam wasn't very smart, lol.

Thanks!

> I just want to take a second to appreciate the main menu, everything was so detailed and seeing even the points where the bullets fired from were animated was a great detail.


Thanks! TBH it didn't take much effort to animate the main menu at all... Because the main menu is "fake", it's actually a fully simulated level that you have to play through at some point in order to win the game :)

(1 edit)

Interesting idea! Wish it got some more polish.

The mechanics were confusing, even with explanation. Probably because there wasn't any visual feedback between the bird and the passcode (or I missed it), so I couldn't tell that the two mechanics are related. I completely missed the moment when I unlocked the first two colors in passcode, and why it happened. Coincidentally, the first 3-color combo I got was red-red-red, so I thought that the resulting change was what's supposed to happen once you collect any full 3-color set.

I think the art was pretty good, you definitely had a consistent style going on with the characters, but their explicitly vector style looked weird against explicitly pixelated terrain.

The game should probably disable fall damage while the cheatcode is active and just limit vertical movement, you get teleported upwards and off-screen and don't fall down, so it looks like the character disappears.

I... didn't like the music choice, it was just a short loop with no variation that got grating after a while.

Anyway, hope my feedback does not discourage you in your future projects, good luck!

> I am wondering if I should remove the down arrow, to keep players on the surface longer.

Ha, don't know about that. First thing I did when I spawned in is jump into the hole in order to check for a secret :)

(1 edit)

Pretty cool game, nice concept! Very good color choice, and I liked the relaxing music.

Took me a bit to understand how to spot the "invisible" platforms, but once I did, it was pretty straightforward finding the way. I think I managed to complete some levels in an unintended way by jumping high enough off the platforms below the door, instead of going through bottom edge or platforming.

I ran into a strange bug where sometimes, pressing Space doesn't make the character jump but instead only plays the jump sound, that was distracting. Coyote jumps would've been nice too.

(1 edit)

Great submission! The art was clean and pleasing to the eye, reminded me of World Of Goo, and the use of light motes greatly added to the atmosphere. Very good sound design too!

It was pretty clear where to go or what to do, and the platforming wasn't very hard. Copious amount of checkpoints was good, didn't let it get tedious. There were 2 confusing moments for me: in first room, the spikes look like visual effect of echo instead of danger, so it took a few deaths to understand what's going on, and in the long jump tutorial room, there is a mote of light hanging in the center of the screen that doesn't move and hence looks like an unreachable collectable.

Only major downside is that I experienced an input bug where the game would "stick" to the last direction key pressed (e.g. I die while holding D, then release it before respawning -> the character will endlessly run right on respawn instead of standing still; I do a walljump while holding D, then release it -> the character will fly right after ending the walljump), that was very annoying. Also, defeating wizard doesn't count as defeating an enemy, sadge.

Nice game! I wish there was some hint on how to use the cheatcodes - I only discovered that by accident while trying to be cheeky and poking the web game with browser tricks (because I thought the cheatcodes bugged out and didn't work).

The sound design was okay. Wish there was some background music, the game was very quiet. The art was fairly good (I dig the minimalist aesthetic), though the colors felt a bit harsh. Character walk animation felt too slow with relation to how fast they were moving.

Not sure how I felt about the underground tunnels, they were sometimes long and winding with nothing exciting going on (character speed hack could've helped?), but it was surprising how much hidden stuff there was on the surface.

Good work!

Very cool entry. The art was great, I quite enjoyed picking up on small UI details like the shadow from the window, or the control consoles. Good background music and sfx too, I think you nailed the sci-fi feel with these!

I felt the difficulty curve started out very steep. I played the tutorial, and the first rule was something along the lines of "No House Grumio Fragites"... "There are ships coming from all directions, but I haven't even found where the tutorial text is! How do I tell apart a frigate and a shuttle by picture? Their features look way off from how they look in the 'book'! Also, how do I tell which faction it belongs to?" Yeah, it was a bit overwhelming. I think a more slow-paced tutorial would be good here, or maybe additional in-game explanation. I didn't figure out until much later that shuttle and frigate have different engine shapes, or that the big blip with inverted crosshair is for frigates (it was similar in size to cruisers), or that there's a window on the left with information on ship size & faction (which is also apparently can be falsified). It was also a bit awkward having to dart the eyes between cargo manifest and scan results - those are in opposite sides of the screen, yet you have to check cargo fast and often (later because of that and scanner speed I just ignored the scan feature and sent away every ship with suspiciously low cargo weight).

Then the difficulty curve normalized, I even managed to buy an upgrade... But by the time there were 8 or so rules it started to get impossible to track all the rules, and I just couldn't earn enough to combat the monthly upkeep. Made it to 15 rules, I think it was, before blowing up.

Anyway, this kinda looks like a wall of negative feedback, but I actually enjoyed the game very much. Great work, team!

I tried playing the game (Windows version), but unfortunately it just crashes for me whenever I press the Start button (blank error window with "Fatal error", no additional info).

Is it just me or not? May be related to an outdated video driver (Adrenalin 21.30.24.05 vs Adrenalin 24.3.1+ that UE recommends), but that's not something I can change at the moment.

Nice short game! Great choice of art & music, ended up very atmospheric. The puzzles were very simple, but I guess in this case it just gives you a sense of solving puzzles without having to think hard about it, so the game ended up quite relaxing. I quite enjoyed it.

I had a little trouble figuring out how to enter numbers, before realizing those squares are input boxes that are supposed to be clicked.

Alright, that's a pretty simple game, but surprisingly addictive! Great job on sound+visuals, the game just oozes with style. The difficulty curve was good, and despite how the bosses don't have much complex behavior behind them, I found myself developing little strategies on how to best increase damage output and take less damage.

I had a lot of technical issues trying to play it though (game not fitting on a 1920x1080 monitor, fullscreen not adjusting resolution/not centering, couldn't find how to escape laser selection menu, game not closing from Alt+F4, resize ability did not appear to work).

Unfortunately I couldn't progress past the wall jump where there were spikes on top of a wall, it just kept killing the character whenever they attached to the wall. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but in the end it wasn't fun having to walk for half a minute from the spawn point to try again. Overall the wall jump mechanic feels extremely unpolished with how vital it is for progression, with seeming random attachment/detachment and acceleration.

Fairly good atmosphere though, and great choice of the name!

Thank you for feedback!

> I didn't find the debug option, unfortunately.

That's... unfortunate, perhaps I didn't make it intuitive enough to discover. It's in the final room of Frozen North location. The game ending with the pedestal is just a red herring; there is a graphical "glitch" in a corner of the prize room that you're supposed to enter and unlock the second half of the game.

> the movement felt a bit difficult

Yeah, it can take some time to get used to. I tried experimenting with a zoomed-out fast-moving feel inspired by Super Meat Boy, and use a split-room camera instead of the usual follow camera. It worked out great in some situations, but maybe not so in cases where precision is needed.

> The music was good as well.

Thank you, it was my first foray into soundtrack design, was tons of fun!

Good entry! I really liked the paper aesthetic, animations and backgrounds were very well done.

(1 edit)

Had to push a post-jam update to fix a critical bug that breaks sequence progression and makes the game unplayable... Which is ironic, because [spoilers].

Also, turns out web build acquired some minor issues (text misaligned, music looping from wrong position). Nothing critical, but I'd advise playing native Windows build instead.

Edit: Please ignore "Press G for dash" text in tutorial area, you don't receive dash until later in the game.

Thank you for your kind words!

The recipe book is a good idea, I think we should consider it if we keep working on the game.

The dialogue popups from plaques are a common annoyance, yeah, wish we could fix that before submitting.

Glad you enjoyed it!


It's a last-minute workaround we had to put in due to an issue discovered way too close to submission deadline... Though I must ask, why does it upset you so much? Being fullscreen does not stop it from being a browser game, nor does it cause technical issues on a well-maintained machine. I don't understand why such a triviality would stop anyone from playing, when this game jam is all about creative expression over technicall correctness.