Empathy by Quasar47
Welcome to Empathy, a game where you play the role of a depressed man trying to find redemption.

The game is very short, only a few minutes long, and it has 3 different endings depending on your actions (or lack thereof).
WARNING : I haven't tested the Mac and Linux versions, so sorry if they don't work, I don't have the tools necessary to do it.
ABOUT THE GAME : Personnaly, I have mixed feelings about this project. On one hand, I learnt a lot while making it, but on the other... It's not a fun game. Or a "game" at all for that matter. If you wanted to have fun, you're on the wrong page x)
But, it doesn't really matter. I had fun while making it, and it was a challenge on some points. I trained my programming and my drawing skills, so that's still a plus in my book.
| Source code | https://github.com/ClemGG/LD-44---Empathy |
| Windows | https://quasar47.itch.io/lundum-dare-44-empathy |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/empathy |
Ratings
| Given | 19🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
The dialogue seems to only be in short sentences you need to wait for or entire paragraphs that are hard to read before they fade off the screen. Also, children don't use massive words. That first kid was hilarious and immediately sucked me out of the games miserable tone.
The character animation is... weird. For some reason the protagonists left eye winks every other frame of the two frame idle and their shirt/sweater clips up and down.
The buttons in the menu don't fit the words so mousing over the word and clicking wont select the option.
The dialogue at the end is insanely long with the protagonist repeating the same couple of ideas over and over. "You're dead and I'm sad" paraphrased in as many ways as possible.
As for the music, it's the same 20 second clip of grainy noise over a really sharp piano that becomes very annoying after about 3 minutes.
Oh, and the protagonist is on the layer above the blonde child in the graveyard, so their foot is in front of the childs head. The "soul" is also on the top layer, so it shows over the trees. Those are very easy things to fix but I can understand them not getting done when the walking speed for the "soul giving" path is so painfully slow.
It's just a series of missed targets that come together to form the kind of forced "Look at how deep I am" kind of game I'd expect from a high school poetry student.
To be constructive, half the characters being dead and the other half being sad doesn't make something deep. It makes it miserable and boring. Pressing E isn't a satisfying resolution to those conflicts.
The positive, however, is that the enviroments all looked nice and with a few exceptions it was well put together. If the piano track had been extended by about a minute (and had been equalized) it would have been much easier to listen to.
It was a good effort.
Couple notes, though: it's sometimes a bit unclear which character is speaking, and some of the pacing of the conversations feels a bit odd (the kid in the graveyard said something too long to read before it faded).
Also, there's a permissions issue with the OS X build. If you're on OS X, open a terminal and run "chmod +x <path to download>/Empathy-Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/Empath-Mac" in order to run the game.
- Consider doing some kind of popup above the talking person
- Let the player skip to the next dialogue because sometimes it took too long or it was too fast couldn't read
- at the end because it wasn't full-screen I couldn't read halve of the dialogue
The rest movement and interaction, music and graphics they were great. Good job so 4.5/5
If you have time check out my game :v:
About the sprites, there was a glitch at the import that I couldn't figure out how to fix. They definitely didn't look like that when I made them, so of course, I understand why it was confusing.
I'm also dissapointed with my performance of this month, but meh. It's a jam, I made this game mostly to test my pixel art skills, since coding this game didn't really interest me. I still had a lot of fun making it, nonetheless.
But hey, it just means I'll do better next time ;)
I did feel that the texts were too fast and I missed some of the conversations tho, which is a pity. Also, in the end I got a bit lost regarding the story, nontheless, good job, it was a really nice experience :)
Keep up the hard work :D
With some resolutions, part of some text is out of the screen and not visible.
I like it overall.