itch.io

Hi, I would really like to play this game but neither the web build nor the windows build are working for me.

Web build error:

Windows build error:

I ran into the same issue with other WebGL builds on here. Apparently the fix is to disable compression in the player settings.

Great concept and execution! I liked the presentation, the humor, the varied playlist, etc, and the theme complements the mechanics really well. I enjoyed the game loop of being given vague information about oncoming troops and having to dial up my worker allocation accordingly. I would love to see this concept expanded to a point where the player is forced to make difficult tradeoffs.

Does this game have a win state? I played it for a few days while trying to maximize defense, but I never reached any sort of ending.

EDIT: Nvm, I reached the ending!

Hi, I would really like to try this game out, but I can’t get it to run on my browser (Firefox Developer Edition). The following errors are shown on the console:

WEBGL_debug_renderer_info is deprecated in Firefox and will be removed. Please use RENDERER.
Uncaught DOMException: The operation is insecure.
    createUnityInstance https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9138082/Critter Comforts/Build/Critter Comforts.loader.js:1
    onload https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9138082/Critter Comforts/index.html:106
    EventHandlerNonNull* https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9138082/Critter Comforts/index.html:105

Hopefully it’s just an issue with the build settings? I was able to play other WebGL games in this jam.

This is one of the most polished jam games I’ve come across. It feels like a very complete experience as it is. Pro soundtrack, lots of variety in the art assets, all the tactical combat gameplay you would expect in an FPS. The way the game keeps your interest through the varied environment, and the pumpking constantly moving and switching up attacks, is a lesson on maximizing replay value out a limited amount of game elements. Really good graphic design as well – another rarity in jams.

I would love a devlog or a “behind the scenes” post on what went into designing and making this game.

Thanks for adding mouse support. I thought I would never be able to play this game because my controller only has one stick!

I got absolutely smoked the first few times I tried the game. But once I learned to strafe, it went from unplayable to just very challenging. That being said, I’m old and was never very good at videogames, so I can definitely see others having more success.

The shield upgrade didn’t help much, as I would only be able to reflect one projectile before the ghost got to me. The bullet speed upgrade just made me aggro more ghosts than I could take on.

That being said, congrats on having an upgrade system in the first place. I don’t often see progression in jam games. That, plus the map generation options, and the arena shooter gameplay potentially add a lot of replay value to this game.

Issues found:

• I can’t close the game window during a run
• After I unplugged my controller, mouse look no longer worked

Ohh it never occurred to me to try to freeze the water with the ice spell. That’s clever

The graphics are very eye catching and suitably spooky, but I couldn’t master the gameplay, so I can’t provide a rating.

At first I tried to use the shield action to defend against enemies but it didn’t help. I tried pressing “up” while in front of the bench thinking it would allow me to go up the path, but instead, it kept teleporting me back to the beginning. I didn’t notice that I was getting bones thrown at me since the projectiles were small and low contrast. I could have used a more detailed explanation of the mechanics on the game description.

I did eventually make it to the platforms on top of the bog twice. The first time I died because I didn’t realize the ground in this area was deadly. The second time, I switched characters on a whim and that’s when a platform showed up. I was able to get on it and jumped towards the second platform, but my jump was too short and I ended up clinging to the side. I wasn’t able to get up the platform.

Nice attempt though, it does look like there was a lot more to explore and I’m sorry I didn’t get to see it.

Awesome graphics and sound. The Tim Burton homages were spot on. I loved the crooked crypt entrance, the twisted trees, fences, etc. Same for the chilling sounds of howling and creaking gates and all that.

My main issue with the game was its performance. I had to play it in short bursts because my laptop kept getting unbearably hot (and this was on low settings). I blame Unreal Engine for this more than the game itself, as I’ve had the same experience with other Unreal games. I tried making the window really small so that my GPU would have less pixels to render, but this didn’t help.

Though the beginning of the game was a little disorienting, once I got to the church area I quickly got a pretty good sense of where everything was. The landmarks visible from afar (the church, the windmill, the stacked cube houses) really helped with navigation and backtracking.

I was never able to go into the church. I kept getting chased by a zombie and/or a werewolf and wasn’t able to lose them. I’ll update my comment if I make it past them.

Cool game, very spooky setting and ending. I especially liked the strange names of the cities.

Yeah, that part was clear to me. Every time I encountered a new enemy I would run into them to see what ability I would get. I ended up beating the game by skipping to the topmost platform with flight.

I was really confused the first time I got flight though. Because the cursor was off-center, activating flight caused me to spin rapidly in the air. Maybe constraining the flight angle to a specific range would help.

Omg the graphics in this game! The bitmap font, the scrolling noise textures, the lowpoly curtains, the chandelier made up of two crossed quads, the vertex-painted characters, the linear animations, the fog! Everything in this game was clearly designed with maximum N64-ness in mind and I love it.

I struggled a lot with the camera, but it was ok since the attacks appear to auto-target enemies. While the movement was slow, the combat was satisfying.

While working on our game, we didn’t have time to implement a full combat system where things could hit and damage other things at certain times in sync with the animation, so props for getting that working as well as it does.

Were keys implemented? I wandered around quite a bit but never found any of the keys for the locked doors.

Highlights: 1) Roundhouse kicking 2 skeletons at the same time. 2) Lightning effects, both outdoors and indoors.

Neat game concept. Great sense of speed. And voice acting!

It was hard to decide on a rating for the visuals. While the low resolution and lowpoly environments felt N64, the shading is an odd mix, with old 16-bit era dithering, on top of modern pixel-shaded specular point lights. But while it’s not N64, the more I look at it, the more I like it. It feels crisp and grungy and that’s cool.

Nice try! Efficient use of 2.5 days of work, with the dual pumpkin mages and the simple gameplay. I did have a very hard time getting the hang of dodging the EPM’s attacks though. I assume the GPM’s movements mirror or hint at the EPM’s attacks but I was unable to figure out the pattern.

Either way, the pumpkin mage’s staff animations and design are really mesmerizing.

This has nice potential. The graphics are very cohesive, and I like all the different combat/stealth situations you created with the various enemy paths and patterns. And I cannot understate how much death/respawn checkpoints helped. Overall it feels that a big chunk of the development time was spent on the mechanics, and it paid off.

My biggest issue was that the mouse cursor wasn’t centered and didn’t wrap around, like it normally does with mouse-look controls. But I was able to get around that.

Highlights: 1) the graphics as a whole. 2) the stealth section with the two pumpkins patrolling on a loop.

There was a body of water that I couldn’t cross because of a big block that kept pushing me aside. Is there a way to get past it in the current prototype? I think I need a high jump or a double jump spell for that but I never found it.

A chill, slightly surreal experience that gave me about twenty minutes of playtime. I understand you didn’t have a lot of time to work on the game so I appreciate what’s there.

I managed to find about 5 bibles, a guitar, and a sign before my computer got too hot and I gave up. I kept getting lost; it would have been helpful to have more landmarks, like the ring of pumpkins in the starting area. Like say, a giant pumpkin statue or a circle of houses. That being said, the green lights really helped.

The highlights of my experience were 1) the moment the ghost shows up (legit scary); 2) the cemetery; and 3) the time I was exploring the temple courtyard, spotted a green light on an inside wall, and was able to follow it around to the outside wall to where the object was.

Bugs/issues found:

• controller support is limited to strafing
• pressing E when a message is shown reloads the current message instead of advancing

Thanks for trying out the game! I really enjoyed your playthrough and your channel in general.

Sorry about some of the bugs you encountered, such as the kindling not disappearing, or the enemies not moving. We’ve been fixing these issues as we find them.

I found this by accident but it’s really cool! It’s true to the outrun mechanics and feels like a classic phone game.

Great tool for creating alien languages!

I really like this! Where does it save the skyboxes?

No distractions ever popped up for me. I was also unable to save in Firefox due to this error:

Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: window.showSaveFilePicker is not a function

But maybe it’s just me. Other people certainly seem to be having fun with it. But distractions aside, the text editing works great.

I love all of these textures and images! This really looks like opening up my binder of stickers and laying them all out.

UI-wise I think this could use a few big changes:

1. divide the UI into two areas that can scroll independently of each other: the main collage, and a “gallery” of things you can drag and drop into it.
2. add touch support! this is an ideal app for tablets

Somehow I keep failing my mission to take my sleeping pill.

Because of this, I can’t rate this tool, but I like the concept.

I love the UI and the concept. The editing experience is great, it works like a text editor should. The keyboard shortcuts could be more intuitive (Ctrl+S instead of Alt+S?) but at least I like that they’re always shown on the UI so I don’t have to remember them.

Things that could be improved:

1. mark it as an executable so that users don’t have to chmod +x jern themselves
2. prev/next keys/buttons to navigate through entries in chronological order. very useful for remembering what you wrote yesterday or last week, and referencing it in a newer entry
3. add support for other unlocking mechanisms, such as a passphrase, an OTP device, or a path to a key file stored in a removable medium.
4. as far as I can tell, the program did not generate a .k file for me. Or at least I don’t know where it is.

I can actually see myself using this as a pure journaling program (ignoring the encryption) to keep track of progress on projects. Consider posting it on hacker news or reddit when it’s more complete.

I tried this in Firefox and the buttons didn’t seem to be working. Upon inspecting the page with the developer console, I noticed this error:

Uncaught (in promise) DOMException: WebMIDI requires a site permission add-on to activate

I have webMIDI enabled in my about:config so I don’t know what could be the issue. Maybe it’s my ad blocker.

Anyway it would be cool if the web app could catch this error and give the user instructions on how to work around it (e.g. change their browser settings, switch to a supported browser, etc). Judging from the screenshots, the tool looks really cool and I wish I could use it.

I liked it!

I was unable to draw with my stylus so I wasn’t able to try out the tool properly. But it looks like it has a lot of different features and brushes and I appreciate the effort that must have gone into this.

I love theme 3. The idea of a simple, themable graph maker is a fun concept and a good fit for this jam.

I did run into a lot of issues with the text fields and the UI in general. I imagine a lot of these must be a result of using Unity’s UI system.

1. I have caps lock mapped to Backspace but that didn’t work in this tool.
2. I appreciate that the fields were tabbable, but when tabbing in reverse, there’s a bug where it gets stuck between the max value and the first bar name.
3. the text inside the input boxes is very small
4. when you click on an empty text box, there is no indication that this text box is now focused
5. The +/-/download buttons are not tabbable

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get the hang of this tool. I tried a couple of images, some of which were already seamless textures, but the result did not look like a seamless texture.

The texture size selectors didn’t seem to be working. And I noticed that they only go up to 1000, which seems arbitrary. Why not 1024px? Or better yet, no limit at all?

Let me know when you’ve worked out these issues and I’d be happy to try it out again and update my score accordingly.

I’m not much of a musician but I like the idea and I hope it motivates people to try out new things musically!

I like the colorful UI and buttons. There was clearly an attempt made to make everything follow certain design rules (e.g. “clear” = orange).

The key/value pairs here could use more work. For example you could split them into lines or bullet points, and make the labels bold or otherwise different.

See https://design.mindsphere.io/patterns/key-value.html

Edit: I just realized the “export strict” feature doesn’t generate valid JSON:

name=PLAIN=NONE%
tags=OBJECT=COMMA%

I can’t run this because it requires libjpeg.so.8, which is deprecated in Debian 11. But it looks pretty cool.

As an ASCII artist myself I would find it helpful to provide my own “palette” of characters. My go-to filler characters from lightest to darkest are:

# $ 8 I : `

Ncurses! It lets you draw/print characters at any position in the terminal window. It’s what most C/C++ roguelikes use to render dungeons and stuff.

Fun, addictive, deep. You could totally polish this up and release it on mobile.

This is where I died:

I love all the graphical tricks used in this game. The scrolling UVs in the main menu’s background, the billboarded animated coins, the blurry lowres cave textures stretched to humongous proportions. It’s all so representative of the era. I can’t tell if the game is also vertex lit but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

This is so… out of left field. I was at various times confused as to how much of it was real, or what time frame the game took place in. But I happen to love confusing media.

Nice Goldeneye look on the character model. The fog was spot on and so was the sound. The collision physics could use some work. Cool entry

Woah these levels are HUGE! Strong Mario 64 / Banjo Kazooie vibes with this one, with the large levels and the many, many different traversal mechanics. Jumping, lunging, swimming, trampolines, mine carts, platforms, there’s a lot of mechanical depth in here.

I wasn’t sure what to do after the first minecart stopped in front of a “Safe” sign. The other minecart seemed out of reach. After a failed attempt, I was able to land on the edge of the next minecart rail and just walk up the rail to my next destination.

Combat also took a few retries. I’m sure there’s a way to kick the soccer ball but I was only able to make it roll forwards very slowly.

I was not able to beat the doctor at tennis and it took me back to the start of the area, which was frustrating. But just the fact that the boss fight is a tennis minigame is great. I love the genre combo you picked and the way it’s used.

A lot of games in this jam made me go “this is so N64!”. In this game, it was the moment you first see Urchin’s pointy polygonal face and mitten hands. These graphics are cool not in spite of the N64 limitations, but because they use these limitations so well. Those handcrafted per-vertex shadows accomplish more with a handful of quads than modern games do with thousands.

Nice writing too. The delayed messages, nicknames, the personalities, it was great. Really engaging and enjoyable little VN.

Thanks for the feedback and for reporting these bugs. The menu bug was fixed in an older version, but I’m still able to reproduce the issue where the game breaks if you win.

Thanks for the detailed feedback on the gameplay, presentation, and performance. I can’t speak for the combat design but I apologize for freezing or glitching your OS. There’s definitely a memory leak or some effect not despawning as it should. I wasn’t able to find it but I fixed the B button conflict.