I've been walking around for 30 minutes throwing tonic into a hole and ppl disappearing. Now I don't know what to do or if there's even anything left to do. Awesome graphics and creepy ambiance but really bad at giving you directions.
oxysofts
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Awesome little game, I've always been a fan of these marble type games as a kid but haven't really played any in recent years. Unfortunately, I think it would have worked better with just a preconstructed list of levels. It would have allowed for more interesting level design. Still, good on you for attempting the idea. It's the kind of thing you don't know if it'll work until you actually put it in practice and try it
Solid game but I have to say, the level design is confusing. Without a world map to track your progress, these kind of open world-ish game really suffer. Also shurikens falling in spikes is a big issue because you cannot recover them essentially.They should just warp back to you imo. Cute graphics as always, coming from you. I like how your art style in game jam is never inconsistent, always the same cute little aesthetic.
Very well polished game. It has issues but it's very beautiful at first sight. The sound design isn't overdone, it's feels just right. Physics can be a bit weird sometimes but perfecting physics in this type of game in under one week is no easy task to be sure. Visually, this game is a gem. One thing however I have to mention is that visibility is a bit weak at times. The vignette effect could be a bit weaker and the FOV could be cranked up but I believe it would hurt readability because of the low resolution, things on the sides of the screen would be very distorted. (Devil Daggers for example has a low resolution that is still far more than 160x144 and it has big issues above 90)
Solid entry, all in all
AlienVania Review
This was a fun little game. The shooting was satisfying and I liked how the particle effects were done. The ending was pretty funny, I was fooled and didn't think there was going to be a boss but there was! Also I read everything after that, if you care to know. The music was really nice, it wasn't banging or interesting enough that I'd want to actively listen to it on repeat but it was nice for background music and gave the game a cute ambiance.The art as a whole was very nice although I think the default palette should have been the 5th one I believe it was? One of the available palettes towards the end that has nice contrasts, definitely better than the default!
I noticed in the options menu a little oversight, it checks for inputs down every frame rather than checking if a key was just pressed down or released, which means it cycles through the options very quickly when you press left or right. There were some issues with the climbing mechanic as you remarked at the end but it wasn't overly annoying.
I think the biggest issue in this game is a big combination of weak proportions and controls. First off, your character is very tall compared to the monsters, and the speed at which they and bullets move compared to the space you take, makes the game harder than it should be. However that is not the only problem, because this issue could have been avoided if you could crouch and aim up as well as diagonally. On the other hand, it wasn't that bad because you had a lot of health to offset it, but still was kind of dull.
The level design was nice but not always, there were some level design choices at certain places but nothing major. Also, it was hard to discern where you could walk and what was the scenery sometimes.
Finally, one nitpick I could add on weapons is that the muzzle flash should render over the gun, not behind.
All in all, it was a good entry. Some issues for sure but it was fun and all of the weapons were very satisfying to use.
I can see that you did not even bother to try it because it was toned down a lot my friend, all of the potentially offending ideas were scraped. The problem with my old ideas was that it was all negative stereotypes except for the canadian, and a lot of it was just cheap shots at races or nationalities that are trying to move away from these negative stereotypes. I made sure that none of the stereotypes are negative this time, like the canadian ones, and that it's all in good spirit!
How wouldn't that be fair? If anything, I'm getting the short end of the stick. I worked on my game for the duration of time I was allowed, no more no less. If the itch.io platform doesn't allow to reopen submissions, then it's just a cheap platform. It makes no sense to block submissions as soon as the jam ends, it's the dumbest thing.
I thought I would have a bit of time to submit my game after the jam, like Ludum Dare. Can we reopen them?
edit:
This is what it says for me. I hope it can be resolved because this is an extremely major issue. Many people work on their game until the very last minute and submit afterwards, just seems like poor thinking to me. Why would you close submissions right at the end? Doesn't make any sense. I'm going to bed as it is late so I won't be able to answer to any update on this until tomorrow.
I've only just now realized on the last day that the rules state that you must make all of the assets during the jam whereas I used some royalty free assets like music from Kevin Macleod, some free models, sampled and remixed free sound effects, etc.I was always under the impression that this jam was more like the Ludum Dare jam where it's more chill and relaxed and you can use third party assets.
Can I still submit my game or am I fucked?
I use this http://www.toneboosters.com/tb-timemachine/ it works well and has lots of options you can play around with. It is an audacity plugin
Well VR wouldn't really push any rule since you'd just be looking at the same game through your visor. You could take any entry really and throw VR at it, although it could be cool with a 3D game like I'm doing. I'm too cheap to have any vr accessory anyway :)
Anyway, I was talking more about pushing the 4 colors limitation to its limit. Since it's 4 colors at any given time and not 4 colors max for the whole game, you can expect copious amounts of palette swapping. Like literally swapping the palette every frame to crossfade between different palettes, change brightness, fade in/fade out, oscillating, taking certain colors and flickering them with another color every other frame so the brain fills in the gap and creates the illusion of more than 4 colors, etc. A bunch of crazy stuff like that. I've already got some of that implemented too and it's awesome.
It's almost poetic really, developers back in the day tried to push the limitations imposed by their hardware, and now we're pushing artificial limitations imposed for fun.
Yeah the names are old and need to be updated, RetroPixelMax is the one that lets you define a fixed palette. Also make sure you put the effects in this order:
- Dither
- RetroSize
- RetroPixelMax
The only reason I'm actually interested to participate in this GBjam for once is that I wrote some retro shaders for Unity a couple months back, and one in particular lets me define a palette of colors and it will map the screen's colors to this palette. I figured this could be of interest to other participants as well so I decided to share them!
This repository has 3 image effects:
- Fixed palette
- Graded palette (may not be ideal for this competition but it lets you define gradients)
- Dithering (With any arbitrary dither pattern image)
- Resolution downsampling (I made it default to the GB screen resolution, so you don't have to mess with the parameters once you add it to your camera!)
- Color quantization (posterization, may not be too helpful for this jam)
Example you can obtain with this
You can open the prepackaged scene in unity to see how it was done. Also, I suggest creating an aspect ratio like this so that it always display the true downsampled resolution
took a look at it for a bit, I can see why now. The user interface and GUI stuff is a disaster, but the fact that it has emulation for a variety of sound chip is very cool. Doesn't seem like there are any settings you can play around with either, which kind of sucks. Being able to pick any monospaced font would be nice as well