Empathy by Quasar47

[raw]
made by Quasar47 for LD 44 (JAM)

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

illus 1.png illus 2.png

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.

Ratings

Given 19🗳️ 16🗨️

Feedback

victorcrafty
30. Apr 2019 · 11:34 UTC
Wow. Very emotional , and the music creates a very sad mood.Also the graphics are nice.Good work!
junt74
30. Apr 2019 · 13:08 UTC
very sad and beautiful. congrats!
🎤 Quasar47
02. May 2019 · 17:03 UTC
@victorcrafty @junt74 Thanks guys !
KAI
02. May 2019 · 18:11 UTC
So it's a walking simulator where you wait until you can press E.

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.
noahw
02. May 2019 · 18:14 UTC
Beautiful game. I didn't cry at all, I swear.

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.
A_ColtZz
02. May 2019 · 18:18 UTC
Really good man I don't know what to say as for the concept. Gameplay I have a few tips:
- 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:
🎤 Quasar47
02. May 2019 · 18:19 UTC
@kai Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, what you said is entirely true. As I said, it was clearly a walking simulator. I couldn't find many idead for the jam given the theme (only 2) so I had to make a choice (the second idea is more for a personal game).

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 ;)
🎤 Quasar47
02. May 2019 · 18:22 UTC
@noahw Thanks for the feedback ! Sorry about the Mac version, I really couldn't test it to fix any potential bugs. And yes, I know the pacing is really slow at times and fast when it shouldn't, but I mainly made this game to test my pixel art skills, and didn't really bother with the rest. Glad you liked it though, I'll do better next time :)
🎤 Quasar47
02. May 2019 · 18:24 UTC
@a-coltzz Thanks for the feedback ! Yeah, I know the pacing is really slow at times, but I mainly made this game to test my pixel art skills, and didn’t really bother with the rest. I don't know where your full-screen issue comes from though, I tested it on Windows and it worked just fine on windowed mode. Thanks again, I'll be sure to check your game :)
multiplexor
02. May 2019 · 19:08 UTC
Oof, right in the feels ‧.·´¯`(>▂<)´¯`·. I like the overall athmosphere and the graphics, playstyle and music all tie together nicely!

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
🎤 Quasar47
02. May 2019 · 19:33 UTC
@multiplexor Thank you for your feedback ! Yeah, some people already pointed out that mistake, but thank you anyway ;) Looking forward to test your game!
Borys
02. May 2019 · 21:02 UTC
So sad and emotional game. Really unique look on the theme and I didn't see ideas similar to this in the jam. Narration is good, but I think that graphics needs a little bit of improvement. I don't mean the art is bad, just you have to stay with conciseness of the sprites' size (e.g. child has littler pixels than adults) and try to not rotate pixel-art sprites. Rest of the game is good. Great job!
digitaldude555
02. May 2019 · 21:17 UTC
Art and music fit in well to set the mood. I must have missed the press e prompt, got a suicide ending. one critique is I feel he is constantly saying the same thing but with different words.
junjunlowpoly
04. May 2019 · 22:24 UTC
There are some glitches as other comments have pointed out. But the mood was conveyed well. I think it is perfectly ok for a game to be not fun or not even a "game":)
With some resolutions, part of some text is out of the screen and not visible.
I like it overall.
Webox
05. May 2019 · 03:29 UTC
Super sad! :( . I like the mood of the game, it get real deep.. I played til the end, kind of a happy ending.. Good job!
OddSocks
06. May 2019 · 08:08 UTC
An emotional game for sure. Some of the dialogue was a little fast, but maybe I’m just a slow reader! Really loved the pixel art graphics. The style and colour palette fitted perfectly. Congrats on an awesome entry 🙌