itch.io

The game does have a wall run mechanic - if you hold forward as well as the direction of the wall while wall jumping you move along the wall, you can time it to ride the surface, kind of like flappy bird without obstacles. You can do this infinitely without losing height. If you only hold the direction of the wall when wall jumping, but not forward, you bounce off of and away from the wall. This, combined with the dash, is the intended way to cross the gap and reach the final buildings in the first level, wall run, bounce, dash to next building, wall run, bounce, dash to next building. Based on the wording of "discovering" the dash mechanic, I am wondering - did you play the tutorial?

Can you explain what you mean by very broken? Other reviews have mentioned it makes the game fun, I am wondering what bug you encountered with it, or if you mean it is overpowered, so that I can improve it for Sunday's update. Right now it is infinite instead of being only twice in the air, which is to allow jam players to circumvent difficulty to play the game, as a courtesy owing to the limited time we can give each entry as we play them.

If you like the game feel free to follow the game page/devlog, we are bringing out tons of new stuff gradually over the course of the next few weeks in patches, bringing this game to the state of a full prototype for the full fat, full length title we plan to turn it into. That includes multiplayer and a bunch more stuff :)

Thanks for playing!

Hey! Glad you liked it!

We're definitely going to add a skip button in the next update - speaking of: you're going to love the next update if you don't like the revolver - new starter weapon has much tighter handling. I sent a video on the discord but, here's a more up to date clip: New weapon implemented for P0.2: Semi-automatic pistol (1911) - Shadows // The Shroud in: Calm Before the Storm by Winnitude!, Cageramnod, Kyron VideoArts (itch.io)

In the meantime until we patch it, if you ever feel like playing more Shadows and not watching the cutscenes, the Level Select will skip the opening cutscene for that mission. It's not a perfect solution as you can't get out to menu once you end the level and start the next levels' opening cutscene, but I hope that in some way that can help you derive more enjoyment from our project.

If you like the game feel free to follow the devlog, we are bringing out tons of new stuff gradually over the course of the next few weeks in patches, bringing this game to the state of a full prototype for the full fat, full length title we plan to turn it into. That includes multiplayer and a bunch more stuff :)

Thanks for playing & thanks for the feedback!

Feedback well appreciated. 

-How can we improve upon the existing objective marker system to indicate to the player where to go?

-The player begins to heal after 3sec without taking damage, and will be fully healed in about 25. This is actually twice as long as intended due to a bug made in some late night jam marathon coding - the interval on the timer that controls this is hardcoded and does not match the interval used for the math in the function. Good catch! Correcting this for the upcoming P0.2 update. The design intention is 12.5 seconds, which is meant to roughly match the time it would take for the player to, once behind cover, reload both of their weapons, meaning that all of the actions requiring downtime could occur at once. 

-Yeah, the entire revolver is itself a design misstep. But, I hope I can answer your question - the shooting here was designed and written during a very early phase where a slower, stealth based, tactical shooter was the plan. Then, as the movement morphed because the game was more fun as a movement shooter, due to time constraints, the gunplay did not fully get tightened up to match. The result is that these two sides of the game directly conflict. In the upcoming P0.2 update, I've rectified this by making the default starter weapon a 1911-style semi automatic pistol with significantly tighter handling, adding crosshair highlighting to help with timing and hitmarkers that indicate enemy health, and buffing the revolver with zoom and the benefits of a reworked ADS system to turn it into a true hand cannon, punishing both to the enemy if the player is skilled and thoughtful and to the player if they make a mistake, for the kinds of people who love to play deagle in CS, the reload being punishing if you try to "COD load" becomes part of the fun if the revolver is an option for some playstyles but is absolutely not fun for most players when it's the default option.  There's a devlog on our page here if you are interested: New weapon implemented for P0.2: Semi-automatic pistol (1911) - Shadows // The Shroud in: Calm Before the Storm by Winnitude!, Cageramnod, Kyron VideoArts (itch.io) 

I post new updates and progress every couple days, our goal is to reach a state where we have a very fun, polished, playable, multiplatform game with strong multiplayer and singleplayer to match, to then fund and build into something even greater. We are fully committed for the next 2 years. So if you like the core game but want to see it with more polish and time behind it, feel free to follow along :)

-Yeah, levels came last - still proud that we managed to get 4 levels with at least a taste of a parkour section, a stealth section (though it sucked and the map itself was an asset demo), waves modes, and 5 cutscenes in time - but level design is absolutely not the strong suit here and we're reworking the campaign as we progress towards P1.0. Do you have any suggestions?

Hope you enjoyed & hope you consider coming back in the future!

Will give your game a shot in the morning.

Insanely good use of theme. Well done!! 

It's worth it, I swear :)
Can always leave it downloading overnight and remove it after you're finished with it if you have space for it.

If not, understandable! The decision to buff up the graphics and get those levels done as fast as possible with a ton of high-resolution assets at the last minute was, while beneficial to the game itself, one that comes with the consequences of making the game less accessible to people on slower connections and hardware.

Thank you! Yes, I'll give your game a shot tomorrow/today once I've slept. It's been a hell of a week so far but finally getting to play these!

Thank you! Yes, I'll give your game a shot tomorrow/today once I've slept. It's been a hell of a week so far but finally getting to play these!

Yeah Pixel Streaming is pretty cool, my day job is almost entirely writing code for a pixel streaming application. It's like Unreal's built in version of Stadia. You provide your own servers and let it mostly handle the rest, so while it's not sustainable for a huge game, totally doable to let 15-20 people try a jam game remotely at a time. 

This is their solution to not having working web export since 4.27 :P though the community has picked up the slack and made their own webGL plugins, the beauty of the engine being source available is that the community can continue to maintain and port the old WebGL plugin forward.

Ah. yeah that's just a flaw with the tutorial level and has nothing to do with the wall jump mechanic itself. In Unreal we still use old style Constructive Geometry to cut into larger blocks to make levels like it's the 90s and the two blocks are misaligned. The mechanic is not dependent on the geometry of the wall next to it though - you can ride the wall at any height regardless of if you're over the lip, and wall jumping/riding is a necessary mechanic along the flat surfaces of the buildings in the first level, the walls in the second, and the fences etc in the fourth for maintaining speed to avoid getting shot. 

Also, reloading interrupts the counter if you try to shoot mid reload because it's a revolver, most FPS games do this where you can interrupt the reload at any time to continue shooting, but you only have as many bullets as you inserted. I will be keeping this in mind though and giving the player a simpler semi automatic pistol as the starter weapon that is easier to get the hang of at first. This is definitely a design flaw on my part - the revolver is way too cumbersome. This originates from the game being originally planned as a slow paced tactical shooter but morphing into a movement shooter, and not everything about the design changed to keep up - the gunplay/aiming system is also noticeably inappropriate to the movement. 

Will definitely patch this after the rating period, we are totally redoing the tutorial. Thanks for pointing this out!

No, the jam is over. 

It's 100% possible using the built in tools for Pixel Streaming and the server I already have to deliver the full experience to a couple dozen players at a time through the browser so long as they have high speed internet and with zero download time, plus there are older greybox versions of every map that use cubes for everything that I could specify in place of the final maps to make the build a couple hundred MB and then use one of the current community solutions for WebGL. 

Just time constraints unfortunately. Jam's over so no new builds for 2 weeks too.

>  The wall jumping mechanic seems to be done with a slightly bigger cube on the bottom which I found to be a pretty janky way of implementing that. 

I am very confused about what you mean by this. There are no cubes involved in this mechanic to speak of, only one identical trace that is done three times, once at the feet, once at the mid section, and once at the head height, always from the center of the capsule. The distance of this trace is always the same, multiplied by the normalized input vector rotated into the space of the character, which will, of course, always have a length of one. The result is a trace that is, mathematically, always the same length, which is the closest thing I guess to be analogous to the sizes of these "cubes". 

Can you explain what you mean in terms of actual gameplay effect? As what you are describing in terms of implementation to change does not exist in the game in the first place, it is not that helpful, but I'd love to fix whatever gameplay issue you experienced.

As well, if you are having problems dying too quickly, there are difficulty options you can use in the menu. Story mode gives you nearly unlimited health. I've yet to see someone fail to complete the game in under half an hour on medium though in various Discord streams and whatnot except one person who had to change it to easy, but if you do need the option, it's there. I have also never seen someone become overwhelmed by the concept of using the dash since we added the infinite time you can stand on that ledge unnoticed (though it was definitely much more problematic in an earlier incarnation of the level where there was an enemy on the first platform), especially after playing the tutorial, but I will keep this in mind for next time.

My wife and I have launched a new studio and are working on a game. We intend to make the page and share it around this weekend. But, for some reason, even though the page is like a week old, it is still flagged to be reviewed by a moderator and cannot be viewed.

https://kyronvideoarts.itch.io/

Reflecting on this feedback a little, I also think something that hurt this game's controls is that I  initially envisioned it on a gamepad, but realized later on that most players would experience it on a keyboard. So controls that might make sense on a gamepad (hold a button like RB and then press a face button correlating to the attack), didn't make any sense on the keyboard (square to fireball, triangle to fire blast, circle to fire armor, cross to meteor slam turned into left click to fireball, right click to fire blast, E to fire armor, space to meteor slam which was super janky and disjointed, and on top, the layout means adding an extra button to hold would always be awkward). The gun button was Left Trigger, which became Left Control, another really bad mapping - but again, on controllers, this made some sense - left trigger for the gun, tilt finger up to LB too to aim.

I think at that stage is when I should've re-evaluated the control scheme closer and switched to a system of selecting an ability and casting them all with one button, and switched to gun-by-default.

What I was going for was a third-person shooter/beat em up with some mild parkour elements in there to make movement more engaging (then about half way through making levels realized some extra movement track sections would break up the action). Definitely don't want to go down the road of making a parkour game - but they do need to be fleshed out more. X was a stupid key bind for abilities and using Tab to cycle through them is a needed change. Ctrl should be rebound to dodge, and E should be rebound to switch modes between melee and ranged I think rather than removing melee entirely as it's a lot more fun than the shooting IMO.

Thanks for the feedback, it's being taken into account!

Cool idea and visuals, has a bit of a pacing issue. Liked it

 Outer Limits was a great TV show (both times)

I like the soundtrack and the visuals, the only complaint for me I guess is the movement feels a little hard to control, especially when there are tight gaps 

I had to spend some time with it to get used to it, I don't want to repeat what others have said but that movement is pretty rough, IMO directions should be relative to the screen and not the wire especially when the wires don't really have clearly defined directions visually. Nice art and great concept, cool levels, I like it.

Yeah, the lack of those really hurt the project. There's certain things like the tutorial and the settings menu I should've done first, as unfortunately by leaving them for last they got bumped out by other IRL obligations.

 I've added them in for the post-rating-period patch (which also includes rewrites of the enemy AI into C++ so later waves aren't so laggy and a tutorial), hoping to turn this demo into something substantial over time :)

Fun controls, cute visuals, satisfying sounds and mechanics. Not much to complain about here - what it does it pulls off perfectly except maybe that dive mechanic, i didn't feel like it was noticeably faster, have to add some kind of quick impulse and animation to make it satisfying

Will note some weird UI scaling on the game over screen, did not effect the experience or enjoyment so wont impact the score I leave but figured I'd let you know if you hadn't already been made aware

Did you try the time trial level that gives you all the abilities right off the bat to play with? Does take some getting used to, but once each individual mechanic is down the sum total begins to make more sense.

If any one mechanic is giving you trouble feel free to ask about it!

NOTES

1. Please read the full controls before playing! I ran out of time (preoccupied on the last night here unfortunately) to include a tutorial in-game and it's quite a complex game so I recommend doing that to familiarize yourself. The game starts with fireball and fire blast unlocked (X + LMB, X+ RMB respectively), the other abilities are unlocked as it goes on (or from the start in Time Trials only).

2. I fully intend to keep fixing this on my own time until the rating period is over and then replace it will a lean, polished, optimized version and continue building from there into a real full multiplayer game, I will post a Devlog tomorrow with the full plans as the vision is laid out quite comprehensively.  Please follow the game page to stay up to date!

3. Have fun! 

1. voting for a theme has started

2. voting for a game starts on the 27th

3. you are welcome to create and submit an original 3d game for the jam, please do not just re-upload the same game (red cube) that you submit to every jam that passes that you did not make for the jams

Get it looking flashy early on in development then send lots of progress videos in the discord as both marketing and continuous feedback gathering is my usual approach. Basically have to when it's a download-only

Get it looking flashy early on in development then send lots of progress videos in the discord as both marketing and continuous feedback gathering is my usual approach. Basically have to when it's a download-only

Yes, Love is Blind has been used before. There are some more open ended themes that encompass old themes too - Strength In Numbers (Stronger Together), Sands of Time (will end up being the same as Rewind in most cases). I hope we don't get Love is Blind, as the more variety of games generated by this event, the better.

I picked Sands of Time because out of all of them the best idea unfolded in my mind the moment I read that one.

mmmmmmm dog

Thank you!

hey, can you edit your comment to remove the use of the term "r*pe"? Thanks!

The soundtrack is admittedly not everyone's cup of tea.

Hey! I agree that the first level is far too dark. This was something I wanted to fix, but couldn't find a balance between atmosphere and visibility personally. It's unfortunate, but at least the 2nd level and further are lit brightly.

enemy telegraphing - Enemies have a blue indicator over their heads just before they attack. Unfortunately their animations don't have enough wind-up. The mech has no indicator, but the mechanic is that he always attacks predictably (whenever you are in range he instantly attacks), so I felt he did not need much telegraphing. Good to hear the feedback though! If I release a post jam enhanced edition, I'll include better attack telegraphing for enemies.

Thanks! Will play it soon, at work rn :)

It's not really very chaotic or anything, but it works decently as a Papers Please! clone. However, it's missing a lot of the things that made that game good at what it did (the emotional weight of the story, the constant reminders of the protagonist's life, shocks, etc), so it's like you took the basic premise of papers please and never expanded on it. The stuff with kicking out illegal passengers is a good expansion though but it just doesn't do enough and the interaction doesn't add any fun.

It does the job, the visuals are quite pretty, but it doesn't really capture the theme (the turmoil isn't chaotic, the multitasking isn't very chaotic when it boils down to just hitting a button when something isn't very obviously wrong) and the gameplay just isn't there.

Game design: 2/5

Fun: 1/5

Innovation: 2/5

Theme: 2/5

Graphics: 3/5

Audio: 3/5

Weird. It's set not to use VR and this didn't happen with either my Vive CV1 nor my Quest 2 when testing. Besides turning on the VR set, how did the gameplay feel?

those damn loafs of bread

I like to give detailed feedback, so give a read:
SUMMARY
Gave this one a play because I was excited after seeing it in the discord. Music is a little too loud although that's not really an issue, just turned the audio down. I think it's a little disappointing that all the levels are the same, and the poor animations/lack of sounds on the hammer make it extremely unsatisfying to use (also, the fact that the hammer is attached to the player when thrown makes it trivially too easy to wipe out anything and survive infinitely). 

The AI is simplistic and seems to just run directly at the player and have no other behaviors, and the combat isn't fun because there's no combat besides clicking when something gets close. The final boss is a cool idea, but meh in execution. Still, I commend it for adding some good, solid difficulty to the game, and it took me a few tries to do. I really do enjoy games where I have to master their systems to get better at them, and there was a little hint of that.

GAME DESIGN: 2/5

The gameplay is present but it's very simple, and not very fun. You just click a button when something gets close and use your movement keys to train them in a circle, in essence. You don't need to really be mentally present. 

Also, you forgot to normalize your movement input vector, so you can just move diagonally to run at double the speed and basically cheat the entire game.

GRAPHICS: 2/5

Nice art style, but the animations for things truly take what is a 4/5 in models alone and downgrades it hard. The style of certain animations makes the game less satisfying than it would have been without them (or with 2 keyframe poses), which is unfortunate.

There could be more stuff like particles etc too, to give more of a chaotic flare.

INNOVATION: 1/5

This game doesn't do anything new. There are no innovative mechanics to speak of; even if innovation is seen as things that might be new or ambitious for a jam, or new ideas, or however it is interpreted, this game does not have them.

THEME: 2/5

It's not actually all that chaotic. There's destruction (in a sense) but it never really maximizes its potential on that front; trees just kinda fall over and go away when hit, which doesn't really add anything mid combat. IMO to bring this to the next level it needs actually chaotic gameplay with a lot of things going on to manage, and visuals that supplement that (not necessarily high quality, just having particles and other visual effects that drive the point home).

AUDIO: 3/5

There's music

FUN: 3/5

Despite how scathing my criticism has been so far, it's only to help you see where things can change and could maybe be better. Overall it still has its fun moments regardless of its flaws.

Hey, I do recommend turning the volume down when you play this game.  As for the difficulty, yeah, you have to practice abit  in that first level for sure but the game is designed to be incredibly easy, for example dodging makes you completely invulnerable so you can just dodge when enemies show their lasers or the big neon blue indicators on their heads.

Can you describe in detail what happens so I can reproduce it, or send me a video clip on Discord (Alex!#3319)? Looking to patch this, planning on releasing a big patch with some fixes and new levels in a couple weeks.