Among the trees by LooksLikeSomething

[raw]
made by LooksLikeSomething for LD 40 (JAM)

Play as ... well... something, in Among the trees!

You are in a woodland, running/flying among the trees. You have to avoid collisions with them to be sure to travel safely.

During your run, you may find some little "something" just like you, they will follow you, and help you make the biggest score possible. But it seems like there is a problem with having a lot of those... aren't you getting heavier?

The farther you go, the fastest you are, and the more trees you'll meet.

This is an endless game... how far will you go?

HeavyBirdyv4 2017-12-04 16-39-58-43.jpg

Controllers are supported

Ratings

Overall 1089th 2.688⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Fun 869th 2.938⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 1088th 2.354⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Theme 896th 2.958⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 1004th 2.5⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Humor 872th 2.237⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Mood 784th 3⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Given 34🗳️ 7🗨️

Feedback

MarioBarone
05. Dec 2017 · 10:22 UTC
Concept is pretty straight forward and music is cool, definitely could have used a bit of a polish in controls feel
tthe
05. Dec 2017 · 10:26 UTC
Dear developer, you forgot to include UnityPlayer.dll in you uploaded game. I could play the WebGL version though. Those spheres in my opinion consist of way too much vertices, and the game ran with like 20 fps on my laptop.

Now, critics aside I like the concept. With a little bit of polish in the controls, and optimization, it could be a really good game, but I'd rather play it on my phone with gyro controls.
WilloXs
05. Dec 2017 · 10:35 UTC
At higher speeds you sometimes slip right through trees and those "power ups (?)". But i like the calm music and the pragmatic theme.

tthe is right gyro would be cool.
🎤 LooksLikeSomething
05. Dec 2017 · 14:48 UTC
@tthe woops, sorry about that. I re-zipped the game with the unityplayer, should works now
Netherlab
08. Dec 2017 · 01:28 UTC
![highscore.jpg](///raw/5e1/e/z/e3f4.jpg)

Weeeeee! I don't know if this is good. I enjoyed it, easy to grasp can fun. Good job!
The Triumvirate
09. Dec 2017 · 18:37 UTC
The music is really awesome and the concept is good but definitely not the most creative. The only really strange thing - besides the little "something" - is the way the trees are spawning out of nowhere :fearful:.
🎤 LooksLikeSomething
09. Dec 2017 · 20:03 UTC
@the-triumvirate I probably should have set the line of sight farther, I admit it haha.
I will add this to my redo-to-do-list. Thank you for pointing this out :)
conrad123
12. Dec 2017 · 17:37 UTC
Really nice music. I like the idea of using a dodge game for the theme, as it fits well. The tree graphics were very good, but I didn't feel like I was "in" the forest. The character was too simple, and the back-and-forth movement that gradually sped up had no real premise. What if you were a bird, flying away from predators? Or what if you were a person running away from an ever-increasing horde of zombies behind you? A premise like this would really get me into the action. I don't really know what the blue dots do for you; I was always going too fast to pick them up. Again, they don't really add to the premise either. I think that if you improvised on the idea here, and added some reason to be running, and to move forwards, then the user would really be enveloped in what could be a really solid game.

Two other tips:
1. If you spawn the trees on a curved surface, like how the earth is curved, you won't have the weird spawning out of the shadows that you do now.
2. The itch link says windows but there is a web player too. Let people know that you have a web game because some people won't play games they have to download for some reason. Just so you can get more plays.

Nice work! You could make a really cool app out of this if you stuck with it.
Raphael
12. Dec 2017 · 17:51 UTC
The game was enjoyable, but there were some issues.

One being that the the performance on the WebGL client suffered dramatically once you were somewhat fast.
And also the draw distance is kind of short.

I know that if you increase the draw distance the performance will be even worse but it is unusual for the amount of vertices on screen for it to start dipping in fps this fast. Maybe you should look into enabling instancing on the materials used in the trees.


Another idea would be to use object pooling so you don't always instantiate new objects.
I don't know how you set up your game but if you just create new gameobjects and destroy the unneeded ones once they are out of the screen this will greatly impact performance.
By reusing your objects in form of pooling you can mitigate this loss in frames per second.


EDIT: I think I found out another major problem. If your trees are constructed out of individual Unity primitives and not a singular mesh you will also run into issues.

If you did it that way you should look into modelling your trees in an external program like Blender and export the model and use that instead of a bunch of primitives parented to each other.
Shivur
13. Dec 2017 · 20:33 UTC
I liked the music.
zirconcode
14. Dec 2017 · 17:09 UTC
We really liked it, we reached 5450 in score! It was quite nostalgic.
notpresident35
15. Dec 2017 · 23:00 UTC
Gotta go FAST! Anyway, this game is pretty well done. The gameplay was pretty fun, and it fit the theme. I think that it's pretty nice that you're learning 3d modelling too, a very useful skill. Now, improvement tips. Firstly, look up fog. It would look a lot better than plain camera clipping does. Second, maybe use the default trees, or improve the art. It could use some work, although it does look fine when you are just rushing by it at a billion miles per hour. The big ones are stretched, and I'm not sure if that looks good. Finally, the game mechanics need a little improvement. One, you feel VERY slow at he beginning, and it's really boring. Maybe either increase the speed or trees as you go, not both? Also, the trees don't spawn far enough to your left and right, so it feels empty, and you can just hold down in one direction and survive forever.
Gris
16. Dec 2017 · 10:17 UTC
Good music and straightforward mechanic. I would make it go quicker sooner since the beginning might be too slow. Congrats!
Sylver_Kovy
18. Dec 2017 · 19:12 UTC
The concept behind the game is rather simplistic, but I have to admit this is the game I had the most fun playing today good job.
hunttis
23. Dec 2017 · 05:42 UTC
Music was good, gameplay was simple enough and naturally, easy to get a graps of immediatelly. I actually liked the tree graphics too, even if it was just primitive shapes, they conveyed very well what they were. Maybe started a bit slow, but it got interesting when the speed increased enough.
Geckoo1337
27. Dec 2017 · 12:18 UTC
Music is really good. The main gameplay is simple, but good enough. Maybe you could increase speed at start so as to improve gameplay. A great entry ++