Very impressive visuals for just 14 days. I really like how the player moves in and out of the shadows. Very well done, and very polished as well. Look forward to seeing more of this.
Silversong Studios
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I didn't expect to see a card game in the game jam, so props to you for doing something different. It took me a while to know what to do, but I liked that I could see what the enemy was going to do. I think some tool tips and just assistance to make things easier to understand would go along way if you were to revisit. :)
It took me three tries to get 2 of my piggy brethren out. My only regret is I couldn't save them all. Anyway its a cool game and I like the concept. Something else that was good to stood out was the sound. The splattering sound was really good. One thought I had while playing though, was the level is quite long, which is fine, but is made a little tedious by the fact it is an auto scroller. It might be more fun if you could move ahead, but you could still be being chased by something requiring you to still act fast but allowing you to move ahead if you wanted to. Just a thought, I did enjoy it :)
I like the concept a lot, and I managed to last five minutes (not sure if that's good or bad). It's an interesting idea and something that could be expanded upon. It would be nice if when a tower was destroyed you got some of the strength back, otherwise at the end all my towers were just as weak as they could be and I ended up spamming, which I get the feeling you didn't want me to do.
Obviously very short at the moment (Assuming I'm not really bad and didn't know where to go after the train), but it's very striking. The art is very good, and the lighting gives it a very polished feel. The music also goes well IMO. One thing I did notice though was that it was sometimes hard to tell what was in the background, and thus you couldn't land on, and what was in the foreground that you could land on, it might be helpful for players to make that clearer.
I'm going to be honest I'm not sure how we decided on the topic or the genre. It was sort of us discussing ideas and we settled on SeaHorse puzzle game. I think we went with the obvious idea of freeing something and thought that could work as a puzzle game, and then I shared a screenshot with a seahorse for some reason.
Game: Free the Ocean
https://silversong-studios.itch.io/free-the-ocean
You play as The Seahorse and have to traverse the seafloor to free other ocean dwellers from falsely discarded trash. It's a short but fun puzzle game. Suitable for all ages.
Hey, it's a cool little game, and the skeleton is very stylistic, I'm sure if this was intended or not, but because the level is so closed off I seem to mostly be hitting my head on a block or ceiling, which felt frustrating more than anything. You have to be very precise on some of the jumps, again not sure if that was what you were going for. It did become easier once I realized you could double jump :)
Game: Free the Ocean
Pitch: You play as The Seahorse and have to traverse the seafloor to free other ocean dwellers from falsely discarded trash. It's a short but fun puzzle game.
I'd like feedback on Anything, but specifically I am unsure of how well the puzzles actually work, its very had to judge how tough they are when you made them.
Day 14
Ben:
So obviously we forget to keep up to date with this devlog, fortunately we did keep up to date with out project, and we have something that I think both Ally and I are very proud of. I think we have both learnt a great deal, and I can't speak for Ally but I think I have enjoyed the process quite a lot. It has forced me to actually finish the project, something I am notorious for not doing, and has given me more confidence in my abilities. Over the past 14 days I feel I have improved as a coder and I think I have a better appreciation of how to work with other people. As you can see from the attached screenshots the project has become a lot better looking, so hopefully if you are reading this you'll go give it a play, and give some feedback.
Day 2 - Let's start with Ally today:
"I'm working a little bit out of order and more in a ' I do what interests me most within the list of things I have to do' kind of way today and researched some if the sea creatures we want to use and made a turtle after finishing the sandy background. Well finished for now I'm sure I will go back and polish it up.
I'm still new to pixel art and while I think that my art is looking very good for the limited experience I have in this specific genre, I do feel my limitations very differently to other artworks I make. I do learn a lot thought and that's always fun"
Ben:
Today, I played with colliders on unity. Lots of colliders. I draw some very temporary coral and seaweed to start with and put them into the scene. Using colliders I made it so that when the seahorse is moving through the seaweed it takes 2 moves instead of just one, this was relatively easy once I realized that my seahorse needs a Rigid body. I wanted the coral to be intractable from any adjacent square, which means I needed a collider that was in the shape of a plus, which unity unfortunately dose not provide. I had inconsistent results with the edge collider, and the polygon collider was a mess due to the weird shape of my spirit. My way around this was making a empty game object as the parent of the spirit and giving that a polygon collider, which was a hexagon. It was then a simple task of reshaping the hexagon to the size I want. Once in range you can press space bar to clean it up, but for some reason this only works half the time. I'll press the space bar five times and nothing will happen, but the sixth time will do it and I am unsure why this is. Something to fix tomorrow.
I also added some of the art that Ally had been working on into the project, just so it's nicer for me to look at and she can have an idea of how the scene works with her elements and if she has anything to change.
We are a team of two friends who decided they should work together to make computer games. We both discuss and come up with the ideas and mechanics together. My friend (Ally) then makes beautiful art and drawings to represent these ideas while I (Ben) try and get unity to do what I want it to do. With lots of help from google I sometimes manage to succeed. We have limited game making experience and are both constantly learning. Before this jam we were working on a project together where you play a dog who is a doctor.
Day 1:
Ben:
I was busy Saturday so we started Sunday, though we started pretty late as I was recovering from a heavy night before. We discussed what to do it on and were a little stumped, the obvious idea was a game where you had to free something. I did suggest we make a trading game, where everything is free but we had no idea how that was even a game. My partner suggested we make a game where you free cats or turtles, and we then got stuck on an underwater theme, where you FREE aquatic animals from disposable, FREE plastic objects (such as plastic straws and plastic bags) that us humans throw in the ocean. The obvious hero for such a noble adventure would obviously be a Seahorse.
We also decided to make it a puzzle game, where you would have a limited number of actions and you had to solve the level. We would have hazards that would slow you down and obstacles that would move you, this could either help or hinder you. We would also have the animals you have to rescue move in set directions so you would have to take that into account when planning your tactics for each level.
Once we had the idea sorted we got to work. I started by setting up unity and creating a simple 10 x 6 grid to use as the temporary game space. I also found a PNG of a seahorse to use as a temporary place holder (apparently good art assets take time, who knew). After more messing around than I would like to admit I managed to get the grid to align with the unity place space, so when the seahorse was at 0.5,0.5 he was in the center of the bottom left square. From there it was simple to make code to move the seahorse one unit in the appropriate direction when the w,a,s or d keys were pressed. Next I created a game controller and used that to keep count of how many moves the seahorse had taken, and by that time it was 1am and I needed sleep (serves me right for starting late). See below for my progress after one day.
Ally:
I spent my time today learning how to do sand and researched other things as well, like water, vegetation and rocks for our project, as I am the artist doing all the graphics. Our main style is Pixelart for now, though I would love to eventually also illustrate something in styles like GRIS, Oxenfree and other games like these.
After feeling confident with my initial research I started to look for colour palettes for beaches and the ocean, settling on a few combinations that I liked and started to make the basic seafloor tile. Initially the wavy pattern was a bit too large for my taste, so I settled on something smaller and worked on that until I went to sleep