Daunting Disorientation by Ronin748_
The game is sort of an amalgamation of An Unconventional Weapon and Companion. Cats and dogs are companions to us humans, but why not use them as weapons?
The game was written in C++ using SDL2. Music by Kevin MacLeod. Sounds made with sfxr.
You are lost in the woods and the night is falling. You have to find your way back to your cabin, but you can't recall where you came from. It's as if the forest around you is changing... There are monsters that roam the vast wilderness and you don't seem to have any weapons on your person...
There are 2 commands: attack (E) and defend (Q). These will alter your companion's behaviour. In attack mode your companion will attack everything and might wander off if the leash is not attached. In defense mode your companion will stay close to you and attack only aggressive animals. Attaching the leash by pressing R will cause your companion to follow you (even in attack mode). When it gets dark, you must defend yourself from the darkness by turning on your lantern (press F).
Each day the cabin will be further away and more monsters will spawn. Sleeping in your cabin restores health, oil and you gain xp. You can also upgrade your companion's stats (attack, defense, speed).
Controls:
WASD move
E attack mode
Q defend mode
F lantern
R leash
Space activate
Esc quit
IMPORTANT NOTE: changing out of the window will mess up texture alpha values (screen goes completely black), restart to fix
My personal best is day 12 and level 8, see if you can beat me!
TIPS:
- Spending the first nights in your cabin is essential as this is your only source of oil (around day 5 you can get oil from drops)
- Farm xp by killing animals to level up
The game was written in C++ using SDL2. Music by Kevin MacLeod. Sounds made with sfxr.
You are lost in the woods and the night is falling. You have to find your way back to your cabin, but you can't recall where you came from. It's as if the forest around you is changing... There are monsters that roam the vast wilderness and you don't seem to have any weapons on your person...
There are 2 commands: attack (E) and defend (Q). These will alter your companion's behaviour. In attack mode your companion will attack everything and might wander off if the leash is not attached. In defense mode your companion will stay close to you and attack only aggressive animals. Attaching the leash by pressing R will cause your companion to follow you (even in attack mode). When it gets dark, you must defend yourself from the darkness by turning on your lantern (press F).
Each day the cabin will be further away and more monsters will spawn. Sleeping in your cabin restores health, oil and you gain xp. You can also upgrade your companion's stats (attack, defense, speed).
Controls:
WASD move
E attack mode
Q defend mode
F lantern
R leash
Space activate
Esc quit
IMPORTANT NOTE: changing out of the window will mess up texture alpha values (screen goes completely black), restart to fix
My personal best is day 12 and level 8, see if you can beat me!
TIPS:
- Spending the first nights in your cabin is essential as this is your only source of oil (around day 5 you can get oil from drops)
- Farm xp by killing animals to level up
Ratings
| Coolness | 100% | 1 |
| Overall(Jam) | 3.67 | 160 |
| Audio(Jam) | 3.20 | 317 |
| Fun(Jam) | 3.37 | 277 |
| Graphics(Jam) | 3.94 | 198 |
| Humor(Jam) | 2.21 | 825 |
| Innovation(Jam) | 3.67 | 164 |
| Mood(Jam) | 3.78 | 99 |
| Theme(Jam) | 3.75 | 239 |
<continues playing> Well, I finally found the cabin. But got frustrated by how easily this dude keeps getting lost every single day. :-) Being lost without any clear idea of a strategy I could employ to resolve my problem was not particularly fun, unfortunately.
Great graphics btw!
Overall, I really liked the concept and execution.
That made it fairly difficult to pick up and understand at first since you had essentially 30 seconds to learn how to play the game before you essentially die. I played it about 3-4 times before going back and reading the description to understand how to do stuff (regarding the lantern and dog controls). I then probably continued to play another handful of times with this new-found knowledge only to still consistently fail at finding more than one cabin per run.
I mean, but at its heart I really liked the core stuff you do with the game. It's got a really nice general ambiance to it and the art and mood is fantastic for the timeframe. I just wish it let me enjoy and admire some of that a bit while introducing the survival aspect. There was always this nagging pressure to constantly keep moving and looking for the next cabin. This also put a damper on all of the interesting dog mechanics because I almost always needed to spend my time looking for the cabin.
Some things that would have improved this for me would be:
- adding in control prompts for the lantern and dog leash. The lantern specifically could have just had an "F" under the oil bar and I could have figured it out without having to refer to the description.
- Better balance for the pacing of the day night cycle with learning the mechanics for the game. Slower days, shorter nights or less oil consumption per night, would have tremendously helped ease into understanding the game before ramping up the difficulty later on. Right now I felt like it was constantly punishing.
- Something needs to be done about the cabin random gen I think. If the cabin wasn't around the local area it felt impossible to find. Two main ways I could think of would be to allow the dog to lead you to the cabin when you take his leash off (a bit too direct imo), or to have some sort of landmarks to spawn near the cabin so you know when you're getting close. I know the game is supposed to give you the feeling of being lost, but with the additional pressure of time added it just makes it a bit more frustrating and easy to blame the game for revolving around luck.
You've got some really nice atmosphere here and it's a great start to something that can be tweaked and rebalanced to allow for a better learning experience. In its current state though it felt too punishing to me.
Feel free to contact me if you upload a post-jam version that you've tweaked or just want to discuss any criticisms I had.