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Merci jouxjoux, content si ça t'a plu !

Hi Matthew, thanks a lot for your detailed comment! You're right, Boklin's lowpoly art, and the genre of the game itself (adventure/puzzle), clearly don't make it a promotional game /or a game that can compete with other commercial games such as Cyan's! Apologies if the original message posted made you think that. Boklin is a free game and will remain such, and there is no objective of making it a big project. The message posted on the devlog was a call for comments and feedback regarding the current game (and our games in general) because we have had a lot of visitors on the page, but no new comment were posted. It's always interesting to read players feedback, and that's what we want to see more! We wish you the best of luck with your own games and projects. We know very well the difficulties of making a living for small indies, we are in the same situation. Regards, Simon

Merci Yaz ! Content que tu aies aimé :)

I'm not familiar with Android devices. I'll try to make a webgl version at least. Thanks for asking!

Version 1.3 - Finally I received serious feedback on the whole game, which helped me to improve a few things and fix the remaining bugs. This version should be close to perfect, hopefully? (at least regarding what I had in mind). I have added a dialogue with the character Door that gives an important clue to solving the riddle of the Iron Giant after giving him the philo book item.

Version 1.2.1 - I have fixed a few more bugs (the chest minigame was a game breaking bug if Phil won). A French translation has been included thanks to @Yazorius

Well it depends. I created 1st person adventure games for 10 years, and giving a correct playtime is always a challenge for me :D I played your game quite slowly because I needed time to find the solutions to the puzzles. I'm not a beginner with puzzles, yet I got stuck here and there in your game, so I would say it is not on the easy side (not super hard either). That would make sense to increase the playtime, but I also see that you have uploaded a playthrough video. If the playthrough is a kind of walkthrough that gives all the answers, then it means that some people will not do the effort of finding all the answers on their own, and so they can end the game very quickly, in 20 minutes or less. It is probably better to write an average time. 30 minutes sound fine to me. In fact it doesn't really matter, only enjoying the game is important, and I did!

This game is really fun, it made me think of The Stanley Parable. The graphics are simple but the content is quite rich. Also the events are surprising, I didn't expect to fall in the basement! Then the serious things begin and it's quite challenging. The dev announces 20-30 minutes to complete, but it can take really more depending on how good you are with that kind of puzzles. I stayed stuck several times and had to think out of the box. The puzzles are interesting though, but the answer is not obvious. I liked the developer humor and the ending dialogue! Very nice game!

Thanks! Congrats for escaping the cell, it's not the easiest part!
Yes unless there is an unknown bug, it should be possible to continue after you escaped the jail.
Where are you stuck exactly? 1/ After going through the tunnel behind the metal plate, or 2/ did you open the door and could go back to the dump?
- In the first case, you should be able to walk to a deadend and find a key item. Use it with another item (spoiler: the spoon), then use the resulting item in the cell again.
- In the second case, talk to the agent who asks 3 things to let you pass. You need to buy plenty of things at the vending machine. If you don't have enough Coins, talk to Sonny who gives you a tip for a new minigame (with Phil again). Talk to Kikinou too who gives you Coins. Use the new items to repair the toy and to make a hat (wear it). Give a certain item to the Iron Giant and play with him. Give a certain item to Pim. When you have gathered 4 items that you can't use anywhere, put them to the recycle bin and obtain a complete access card.
Hope that helps! Please let me know if you're still stuck!

Version 1.2 is now available and should fix most issues! I have finally been able to find the time to go through the whole game and fix all I could. Now the game is fully playable from beginning to end. If you get stuck somewhere, please let me know as it could be an unknown bug.

Also the wacatac trojan mentionned before is a false positive that happens with many itchio games (and most programs that are not Microsoft approved). Please ignore it, there is no risk.

This episode of Francium is quite long, so don't forget to save from time to time. The menu finally works :) Soon I'll try to add French localization. Have fun with the game!

I love the character design! Everything is interesting and creative, and the story is well developed and nice to follow. The atmosphere, colors and art are mastered, and while playing I ended up forgetting the pixel art and was like watching a super cool cartoon/animation. I haven't finished playing, I'm stuck and want to take my time, but the setting and ideas are the best.

Very interesting and a unique style! I love how you managed to mix your drawings with some geek/programmer things in a way that makes sense. Oh I miss Lan Parties! The best one and last I did was in 2000 with my best friends from college. Anyway great game!

Everyone, sorry there was a game breaking bug in my initial Jam release (if you downloaded just after the end of the Jam and got the very first version). Someone also mentionned a possible trojan (wacatac) so please be careful, even if I don't see why there would be a virus in my game because my pc is clean and the content of the Zip is just the Unity built, no other files added.
I had many issues accessing the itchio website on Sunday and spent a lot of time with many errors (429 Too Many Requests), and had a hard time creating the game's page and uploading the game. Because of that, I couldn't play through the whole game as usual on the last day of the Jam, so I was sure there would be plenty of unknown bugs in it, unfortunately.
I have posted yesterday an update that fixes the game breaking bug. It is now possible to continue after the Jail and finally open the metal plate, which should make it possible to go through all the following events. I have tested several parts of the game and they work well: I could see the ending scene etc, so hopefully the game is fully playable finally. However I still couldn't find the time to go through it from the beginning to the end in one single play, and there are still various issues such as the menu not showing with escape! (which means you cannot save, sigh). I'll work on a new update asap, but I have to find free time, as I moved back to other projects now. Thanks for playing anyway, and I hope you find the game interesting despite the issues!

I really liked your game! The use of a 3d engine adds a lot to it (it doesn't seem to be Unity, there is not the logo on game launch). It's very funny with interesting characters, and the pixel art is really cool! I had a virus warning when I copied your files, I don't know why (you're not the only game in that case). Someone else told me that there was a virus notification with my game too (trojan, wacatac), which has never happened before. I mean, I made a Unity build with no additional file, and my antivirus doesn't find anything on my computer. Could it be that viruses were added after the files were uploaded to itchio? It seemed like itch was under attack all the weekend. I don't know... Anyway cool game, great job in 2 weeks! Congrats!

Oh I wish it wasn't just a demo, there's such a strong LucasArts vibe! I wish I could play more, I really liked it. Classical point and click is all we love as adventure fans! That made me think of Crocodile Dundee lol, because of one of the characters with a hat. 

Great game, I could play it yesterday evening. The art is very nice, neat pixel art, nice colors, plenty of details. The gameplay is cool with some interesting puzzles. I liked the music and atmosphere and the story was interesting too. Well done!

Thanks Ben! If you played the Jam release, unfortunately there was an issue and one of the hotspots wasn't working. I have fixed it yesterday in the new release. Hope it works! There might still be other issues like that, I just don't know. I couldn't test the game properly because I lost my time with itchio which wasn't working well on Sunday. I need to find a moment this week to play through the whole game and fix the last issues!

Thanks a lot! :) Plenty of small references here and there ^^

When I first played this game, I thought "what is that?". It looked so strange (and it is! in a good way). The gameplay is very simple: move and jump. And then you go where you want and write your own dream -or nightmare. Indeed in my first attempt I stayed in the bedroom to jump on the bed, like a nasty kid who doesn't want to sleep. But I didn't imagine that an horrible monster would come from nowhere to catch me! On my next plays I moved, didn't want to see that monster again, and went to explore the basement with a tv, went deeper underground and found a mysterious place with a lot of terrible faces in the dark. Yikes! Looks like I always end up in the most nightmarish situations! Happily I went back to the bedroom (I don't know by which miracle) and I explored differently again. This time I went undersea and could enjoy a very interesting world, after which I "fell in the sky" where a rain of food was waiting for me, and I rolled over a spherical burger (or what looked like it). It seemed like a happy end to the dream, so I decided to stop here. I'm sure there's much more to explore, and I might give it another try later. It's fun and well done, with plenty of excellent idea. I just thought that it lacked of story/narration, even if it might be best for the dream and the experience without it. The art is simple but works well, if you like pixel art and funny shaders, you'll love it! 

This game has been quite a big surprise to me. I had never seen before such a visual novel made with video, and it works great. I can imagine the amount of work needed to create the videos and images (even if it's AI, because you had to obtain footage that was making sense all together, including the characters that had to look quite similar), and then to make/script the game itself, with all the writing. There's a unique atmopshere. I love the black and white parts particularly, and I would have enjoyed it even more if the whole game had been like that. I think the recipe would work greatly for a film noir. Excellent ideas!

I remembered this game from the past, but it was a funny /good idea to put it in this year's Yaz Jam! It's still a good game with interesting ideas and an original design. Of course it is short and limited, it's more of an experience than a game, but it's still fun, with different possible interactions, and I really like the world in which it takes place. It's just so weird! Those hands out of the walls are like a nightmare, while the giant white tree on the contrary looks like a beautiful dream. We're totally in the theme! Very good job.

I really liked it! The visuals are interesting, with all the grey and the few color touches, the strong aliasing/low resolution, etc. It has a unique style! The gameplay is very good too. I like how the world is built, so strange, losing the player in a kind of maze. The theme of the Jam and the diversifiers have been used properly and overall I think it's a very good creation for something that has "no big ambition, just a practiced game jam"! Well done!

Thanks Nigec! I think the maths are easy even if you don't really like that, I didn't want to include anything difficult - it's more a matter of logic. Have you tried using the tips in the "mini guide" that I provided?

Thanks Nigec! :)

Oh thanks a lot! I'm glad you liked the game so much and the narrative part! Being compared to Little Big Adventure is an honor ^^
I agree about the hammer minigame, it breaks the "rythm" of the game and makes it a little painful to go to the inventory 3 times... I'll try to improve in a future version!

Thank you Hex! I replied with more details to your other comment (on the page of the game), but I'm really happy that you liked the setting and the use of the painting :)

Thanks Hexenwerk for your kind words! I hope too that what comes next will be interesting (it's difficult to renew ideas and stay "fresh and unpredictable" over the years ^_^), but at least I am quite happy with what I did here on Boklin, even if it's not perfect.

If you "cracked" the generator puzzle instead of solving the puzzle normally, that's fine for me. There can be several ways of solving a puzzle, and the most important is to find a solution to progress in the adventure!

The colors and numbers puzzle is not very difficult in fact (it is the last puzzle in the game), you just have to be sure that you gathered all the clues found previously - Spoiler: The plan of the temple, the columns with their colors, the code on the portal at the center of the island, and the color code on the paper with the 0 to 9 digits). Just make the link between the colors, their position with the roman numbers, and the value in digits, and you should get a code to enter in the temple.

I'm glad you liked my interpretation of the painting! It was fun to recreate my own version of it for the game. All credits for using this specific and inspiring painting go to @BlurredGames (Juanjo).

Hi! Thanks for playing! The game is not easy. I hope this helps: https://the-icehouse.itch.io/boklin/devlog/823127/mini-guide

Like all of my other reviews, I'll try to be objective and balance the pros and cons on this project. It is not intended to be negative in any way, I'm just trying to be honest and help the creator to improve the game and their own skills. 

So the Mighty Sloth takes you in a funny spaceship in which the situation is critical, because the rest of the crew has been killed by an alien, the terrible Polymorph, and you're the last survivor. Of course the Polymorph will try to kill you too, and your only chance of survival is to... err, what is it? :D I'm not sure you really stand a chance against it in fact, because you're just supposed to stop thinking! Isn't that synonymous of being dead? ^^

In this funny context, we awaken in a stasis pod. Immediately the player has to press one of the 2 buttons. I like to try the less obvious solutions so I immediately pressed the red button. I've been asked 3 times to confirm my choice and it ended up in horrible screams and the death of my character in the worst sufferings! I don't think I was prepared for it and I don't want to live this experience again! So next time I was asked, I immediately pressed the green button and could finally walk freely in the first room. Phew! 

The art in The Mightly Sloth is nice with a cartoon style, which might not be my first choice for an alien scifi game, but still is ok, particularly because there's humor and second degree in the different situations. Technically, the textures are quite detailed and there's a surrounding inking around the modeling made with some kind of cell-shading tool. There aren't a lot of objects in the rooms and they are quite lowpoly, and the 3d render parameters (lighting, shaders, global illumination, ambiant occlusion etc) are very basic, probably to save rendering time, and I have absolutely no issue with that, knowing very well the complexity of that kind of technique. Overall the game looks like a solid game from the 1990s, with the addition of high resolution, and the graphics do their job. I find the art mainly lacks of post-process (visual effects) to add a more modern touch, but we can say this is mainly a question of personal tastes. Once you start playing you don't even care about the art, the renders are neat and do their job, and overall the game looks fine.

The main interest of The Mighty Sloth resides in the setting and ambiance. We are mainly between horror/scary spaceship on the one side, and humour/cartoon on the other side. That works very well, and despite the fear that the Polymorph can induce, every situation is just fun and absurd, which is accentuated by different jokes in the texts. The game never bored me, I wanted to see the end of it, and the challenge wasn't unfair. I was only stuck once or twice, because I couldn't find a hotspot (yes I'm talking to you stupid chest next to the "work bench"!) but the game is fair and never too hard or too easy. You progress in the story in a very usual way, and it's interesting if you like the genre. 

Technically the game is not perfect. I've talked above of the art, which is subjective, but there are a couple of other issues here and there that can bother you if you're a perfectionnist:
- I went through a few bugs that I listed to the dev, so there might be a new version available to download than the one I've played.
- Sometimes when an object appears on screen (such as the blender) you see that it's a cropped picture that was placed over the background, but it causes a shift of a few pixels, which makes it obvious that the blender doesn't have transparency around it. Anyway I might be one of the only players who notice it, so it doesn't matter.
- Along the other issues I found, I think some of the sound design and music is not always at the same level, and for example when the main character dies and screams, the sound is very loud (even more shocking!).
- I finally noticed a few typos here and there. 

Globally, as a conclusion, I would say that The Mighty Sloth might not be the most polished and the most impressive game ever, it is quite classical in its form and might not impress young players, but what it does, it does it well. I really enjoyed the experience, I laughed a few times, was caught by the story, and the Polymorph idea is interesting. The dev of this game (and another person I think) said that this project finds its inspiration in an old UK tv show called the Red Dwarf. I don't know it, so I can't compare, but if you saw it and are a fan of it, then just go ahead and play The Mighty Sloth without hesitation: it's really a good game, quite long for a Jam, and with plenty of good ideas! I liked it!

Thanks Yaz! You're too kind :D
Regarding the size of the file, I do agree with you, it's incredible (I'm surprised myself). Unity is great for optimization (even if not perfect, real programmers still complain). I think it's been thought on purpose because of the compatibility of the engine with smartphones: these games have to be small and optimized.
Also, Boklin is small because there is no texture, no image, no video, on the contrary of some of my other games. Textures and images are what increase the size of the game most. You can see it with Catyph, 2GB of size! Here there's only polygons, colors, text and data. 

When you work with images, you need to optimize them a lot "for the web" (the photoshop feature is good for that). When you save a standard JPG, even with a low quality setting, it will still be bigger than a JPG "saved for web", in which everything is optimized (color palette, level of detail, etc). You have to use all the techniques that exist in order to optimize your games. Using PNG is usually not recommended if you want to lower the size of the game, unless you absolutely need transparency (which can also be avoided with some techniques: I saw it in the Mighty Slot game, he did like me in ASA using no transparency on some buttons/interactive objects that appear of disappear in a cropped area).
If your engine supports it, you can also use "newer" compressions such as webp for pictures and webm or ogg for video and audio, etc. It's always a sacrifice to do and a balance to find between the size of the project and the result in game... And it is way easier with full 3d and no texture than with prerenderend games!

Of course Josh people enjoy it, I'm sure you have already seen in during the stream of TigerJ and in the comments on our Discord :) Be proud!

Roger, I hope you didn't see my review as negative, I just tried to be honest and list the good and bad points. Overall your game ("game" or experience) is balanced and has many interesting ideas, and think you have been doing great with the tools at your disposal and your knowledge. I hope you are not discouraged and will want to keep learning and try to make new "games" in the future, that I will be more than happy to play!

This game is terrible, it's a pity that there is such a character such as Gerard. The robot is useless and doesn't even know how to make a pizza, typical of an AI. One of the worst creations in this Jam!

I wanted to play this game twice before I write my review. In addition I have also watched it on the stream of TigerJ. I wished I could play the 2nd version that is in prepare, but on the other hand I prefer to focus on writing about the actual Jam experience. As usual this review is very personal. I tried to write it (like the others) detached from the friendship I can have with the different creators, in order to comment as objectively as possible the game for what it is.

The Traveler is a unique project. Not only it's the first and maybe last game of Josh (who knows?) which makes it even more unique, but it is also a game that has been developed over 20 years, and in addition it was made with Adventure Maker, a game engine that makes me very nostalgic because I created my own first game (ASA) with it. So all in all, The Traveler has everything to seduce me. Let's see how it goes when clicking New Game. 

You awaken in a mysterious empty room with blue walls. The 3d is neat, visually refined, with little details but still it's clean and goes to the essential. The art is quite old-school, clearly made with techniques/softwares from the late 1990s, with prerendered 3d, simple modeling and texturing, etc. And this feeling is accentuated by the use of the adventure engine and the low resolution. But it works like a charm and in fact I like it a lot: that kind of graphic style speaks to me and I don't need more in a game if the content is rich enough. I still feel today that games have become too complex and focus too much on showing spectacular visuals and action, but they might lack of a more serious and quiet setting. I like it that there are still games with more simple graphics (simple but good), and that they focus on doing things differently in the gameplay and storytelling. However The Traveler remains VERY simple in its construction, and the addition of a few videos to make transitions would have been great.

So you're in your blue room and don't know why, and you come up with very few possibilites: looking at a shelf with drawers and a flower on it, going through a door, or enjoying a painting that is just in front of you, hanging on the main wall. Of course you quickly guess that you'll have to travel through the painting, as it has been the fad of many artists to invite the viewer to immerse themselves in their work and escape into a delirious world. Personally I haven't been surprised that we can go into the painting, as it is something I also did in past works, but I still think the concept is interesting and can let some players completely mind blown. I love it when art becomes a door to another world.

So after a few adventures with the lighting in the room, you're finally taken into your journey. You are alone, you don't know why you're undergo the current situation, and you find a few scrolls left to your attention, but they don't leave you with a lot of answers. So you have no choice but to continue to progress, and damn what a varied and mysterious world! You'll travel from a peaceful island to a world of ice, then different environments with luxury plants, and even to some kind of alien planet and their moon where you end up in prison. You'll definitely go through many places and feel taken in a real adventure. 

The gameplay itself is very basic: you read comments, interact with the world and try to use the few items that are available here and there. There is nothing very difficult, yet it's enjoyable because interesting situations/places are unlocked when you find what to do, thus the player is regularly reward with the possibility to progress further in the journey (hence the title, The Traveler). However I feel that despite the many different places, there is still very little to do. The number of possible interactions is limited, every scene in the game goes strictly to the essential, thus you never get lost and never have to think much out of the box, which makes the experience quite easy. I mean, it's cool, I have no problem with that and it makes of it a game that everyone can play, yet I feel it could have been a little more intricate, each world could have been detailed a little more (through text?) and a few more events could have happened (more challenge?). It's not a complain, just a note, to say that one shouldn't expect something as rich as the Myst series for example, despite obvious similarities here and there, and knowing that the creator of The Traveler is a fan. I would personally have enjoyed it if there had been a real puzzle to solve, with some buttons to press or I don't know what else, and a global puzzle in the end that would require to use the different informations you have collected during the journey (particularly because you can visit all of the places again and again).

Quickly you have visited all of the different worlds that the painting had to offer. The traveller reaches the end of the journey and comes back to the first room, to realise that he's stuck in a loop. How to break the loop? You have 2 different ways to do so, and the choice is up to you. I found it nice that there are 2 possible endings. 

Well, to conclude, 20 years is such a long time to create a game that I can't know what the dev went through during all that time. I can imagine how the game was ignited with a lot of joy, then abandoned for some time, then restarted, stopped again, etc. With plenty of life events that are not told in the game, and that were good reasons for the project to not be released earlier. I'm glad it finally happened and that we could play it, and see all the efforts and ideas put into this world. The game has been made with love and it's the most important. It could be more polished, more rich, more this or that, but it's definitely a work of dedication and passion (like all the games created during this jam actually), and that in itself is more than enough to conclude on a positive note!

As usual in my comments, I will try to detail my very own experience and to review the game with my lacking English vocabulary, and my own perception of video games, so the below is very personal. It is also, like all of my reviews, written in order to help the creator to (maybe) see qualities and flaws in their creation, but definitely not with the goal to be negative. Let's go:

Trip does hold its name so well! This game is 100% about the meanings (plural!) of a trip, both for us players and for the developer. I would suspect that even the AI that created the art was powered with LSD lol! I feel that this project was born from a concept, which is that a trip is a kind of dream, and the word trip can have several different meanings depending on the context, and I love the idea. If you don't know at least five different meanings of the word Trip, play this and wait for the ending scene!

The pictures are beautiful and detailed, particularly the environments (I liked the characters a little less - well they're just pictures of realistic people), and give a real feeling of evasion. The ones with plenty of colors and exotic places are definitely great to look at and convey all the emotions of this game imo. When you start playing Trip, what you want to see is these beautiful paintings that invite you to continue the journey up, or down, or left, or right.

I liked the AI art and how everything has been put together with Renpy. The transitions effects are interesting and well done! There are a few issues however in the game imho, but they are not very troublesome. The first issue I would notice is that some texts are going too fast and you don't have time to read them (final video), but I'm not a native English speaker and so I don't read English fast (yet I think it's important to take this profile of players into account). The second issue is more a matter of tastes, so I can't really say if it's an issue or not, but I find that the font used in the video (and to write the word TRIP) is beautiful but doesn't fit with the rest of the art. As you can see those issues are not a big deal and are very personal. Maybe the biggest issue is that quickly the game gets stuck into a loop until you unlock the final scene?

The gameplay itself is minimalist. It's not a bad thing, yet it's not a good thing either as it can become a little boring after a few clicks. Yet that was enough for me to continue to play and see where it was going, and I had a good time. I just wouldn't play like that for hours to a game, but in the current case that was a pleasant experience. As said above, you just choose in what direction you want to "trip": up, down, left, right, with a few variations. It's just like you're in a dream (or under drugs maybe but I've never experimented), you don't control anything at all in the different situations, but you can still decide a little bit in what direction you want the dream to continue on. In that aspect, Trip is a real success: you are a spectator, you see mysterious things happening before your astonished eyes and you have absolutely no control on them, and you just trip. 

Trip might have needed a bit more of a context, or a narration. I don't know. On the one hand I like it like that: the main character is clearly sleeping and tripping, but once the trip has started for the player, I feel like giving him more context could have improved the experience. Or maybe not a context, but an objective to reach? I don't know. I found it interesting for example that there is the "5" to see, but it's quite easy to find it in the game. Maybe it could have been something more difficult to unlock, after travelling in all directions for example. In addition this 5 is important and it's not immediately clear what it means. I liked it that way, but I feel like using the exact same picture for the 5 we see in game, and the 5 in the ending video, is a bit of a shame. I would have wished to see something different and unique in the final video. Nevertheless, even if the picture of the 5 is similar in the game and in the ending scene, there is still extra content in the ending scene, thanks to the additional text that give the different meanings of Trip, so I can't complain :) 

A word of conclusion. There would be more to say about Trip, about the music, the finition, etc, but I feel that the most important in my case was said above. The rest of the game is just what makes of it a game or an experience. It is short, strange, psychedelic somehow, and comes with a very unique idea of the theme of the Jam. Well done TreeDancer, and thanks a lot for creating this game and sharing it with all of us! I really hope you learned, had fun, and will continue to evolve and share your ideas with all of us at The Icehouse and on itchio.

I think we all have this mixed feeling ^^ WOW the art is gorgeous, this game is incredible! ... and... oh is it already finished? Isn't there a little more exploration? :D 

Nevertheless I really find big qualities in this game! Watching it streamed by TigerJ showed me new things I didn't do (such as walking outside the main path). That was interesting!

This game is awesome! 5 stars!

Thanks Juanjo, you know that this game would have never come to life without you <3