I couldn't pass through the first gate, the lever won't work. Otherwise graphics are great, and the mechanics to interact with the goat are fun.

All issues are fixed! Sorry about the lever problem, we've got a working build up now

dat song tho

Just finished the fixed version and I loved it!! Graphics, Audio and Puzzles are all amazing! Just a heads up tho, during the underground "puzzle" with two keys the goat pushed me into a wall and I got stuck :/ Everything else is on point!

Lovely! Graphics and sound are great and really polished. Love the goat carrying animation, it looks so annoyed :P.

Popping in after seeing your game on Twitch! Nice graphics, but it really did a number on my computer even at the lowest quality setting. But pushing through I really enjoyed the puzzle elements, and it's got a ton of personality and charm. The song is genius of course, but even just the Zelda-style "in the beginning" animation, only with sacrificing goats instead of Triforce lore? Really sweet.

I enjoyed this, I am going to play it again when I am not dead tired. You can checkout my carrot picking here https://www.twitch.tv/videos/345748006?t=00h41m40s

very nice game but i think i the gameplay is very long.PD runs below 30 fps

Awesome, got all the way to the end. Got a real Fable vibe, LOVE the sung theme tune! Amazing. I love that there are redundant keys so you don't get stalled if you are stuck.

Wow, this game was beautiful. By far the best Ludum Dare game, I ever played. That song in the beginning gave me shivers, it immediately reminded me of Disney songs, just amazing. The whole atmosphere of the game is just perfect. The music, the graphics and the sound effects just play so well together. The puzzles are very nice, easy but challenging enough.

Somehow I managed to pass to the altar without Snowball, but he respawned there. I tried to put him on the altar, but sadly, he bugged below the world and so the game was broken and I couldn't see the end yet. But now I can play the game again, tomorrow. So that's good, I think. :smile:

Thank you very much for this experience.

@skosnowich funny you should mention Disney. The person who did our sound/music has a girlfriend who sings professionally at Disneyland. We were fortunate that she wanted to help out with the intro :D

@skosnowich I suppose we just never got around to baking the navmesh for the top of the altar - we kind of assumed that you'd walk into the trigger volume around the altar holding the goat, not place him there. But goes to show that you can't anticipate how people will play your game differently!

Thanks for the feedback - we wish we could have done more level design. Considering how we only had a very brief amount of time to actually build the area, we ended up scrapping a lot of our design ideas and just made something quick and doable to showcase the technology.

Really nice game, guys! Loved the puzzles, the ambience and the intro <3 So much work in such a little time is something to be proud of! Congrats

Awesome work! Loved carrying the wee goat around and as others have mentioned the song at the start was a nice touch. Surprising amount of content for a jam too! Looking forward to seeing your next entry :)

Wonderfull game. The music is perfect. And the intro is so goooood!

What a beautiful and polished entry! I did not get to the sacrificing part so the experience was really peaceful and heartwarming for me. The graphics is excellent, the physics and the mechanics are solid, the music is chilling. The effects like underwater, falling leaves, shiny crystals were a nice addition. You can be proud of yourselves, thank you guys :) Cheers

The audio and graphics are great, but I didn't find the gameplay as enjoyable. At the first puzzle with 2 buttons the goat only bothered to stop for the carrot about 10% of the time. I got stuck after opening the first gate, because when I took the path back to the goat and stood on the button to open the gate, another gate closed behind me and I couldn't find any way to open it again, leaving me no way to bring the goat up. No other commenters seem to have a problem with it, so it's quite possible that I simply suck at this game and missed an obvious solution. I played the original version, so perhaps it's also easier with the fixed version.

So, amazing production values but sadly not fun enough for me to keep trying to get through it.

@bificommander yeah, there's a lot of issues with the LD version. The post-LD version fixes a lot of that. Originally, the two pressure plate puzzle had a requirement where both pressure plates had to be held down to keep the door open, and the carrots on the trees didn't grow back due to a bug in our code. So you could get horribly stuck very early on. We ran out of time pretty hard so the level was basically untested =/

@linear PS: Thinking about it after a night's sleep, I think I see what I should've done at the part where I got stuck (the elevator to the bridge goes all the way down, I can probably toss the goat on it). So that part was just me being tired and sucking, not an error in the level.

The game has a very nice mood set to it thanks to the graphics and music. Picking up the goat actually made me sad from the sound effects. I did play the original version rather than the post, so there was issues progressing through the puzzles. The goat wasn't very cooperative, but can't really blame him.... Still, an awesome entry overall. Would love to see more of your group's games in the future.

It doesnt look like you made it in 3 days...awesome!

Simple but hard puzzles and the graphics are awesome for 3 days. It is almost like some part of a finished game

Very impressive entry. The art-style and atmosphere remind me of 2000's rpgs. The audio and sfx are great, but as great as it is, the background music can get on your nerves after a while.

Not sure why it was necessary to completely disable backtracking in some segments of the game. After I had reached the first gate and understood that I would not be able to get all the keys in the current area, I had to restart the game to be able to complete the game. It might also be a good idea to mention in the instructions that you need to press spacebar in order to dive.

The only bug-like thing I noticed was that the goat could be glued to the underside of a moving platform.

Carrot trees ftw!

P.S. Sorry if any of my gripes repeat the other comments, didn't check them all out :D

Very impressive entry. The art-style and atmosphere remind me of 2000's rpgs. The audio and sfx are great, but as great as it is, the background music can get on your nerves after a while.

Not sure why it was necessary to completely disable backtracking in some segments of the game. After I had reached the first gate and understood that I would not be able to get all the keys in the current area, I had to restart the game to be able to complete the game. It might also be a good idea to mention in the instructions that you need to press spacebar in order to dive.

The only bug-like thing I noticed was that the goat could be glued to the underside of a moving platform.

Carrot trees ftw!

P.S. Sorry if any of my gripes repeat the other comments, didn't check them all out :D

@aurel This was frustrating at times, but very fun to play! I love my little goat friend. Something about taking a friend along with you, creates some kind of bond with the story/gameplay(i.e. like a comfort cube) Anyway...

Unfortunately, I noticed while editing that all actual in-game footage was not captured by OBS. This saddens me, that people will not see your game, but I still enjoy the atmospheric audio and my commentary lol So, hoping that people might see it and want to play!

Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MZ_QoEaCr0

@simanis yeah that's fair. The falling boulders were initially supposed to be areas where we loaded a different scene. But level loading turned into a nightmare, so instead of removing the falling boulder effect, we said "nah, let's keep it, it looks cool". Originally we weren't planning to do keys. Keys and doors were actually introduced at the last second, and we didn't really account for the fact that the boulders (or even the vertical drops, for that matter) would leave you unable to go back to retrieve a previous key.

That's actually why in the post-LD version we've added a lot of extra keys. It was a band-aid fix but it seemed to work. We also noticed that a lot of the streamers were having issues with the pressure-plate puzzles in the beginning. Funny thing is, we're all used to playing first person games like Overwatch and Unreal Tournament, so when we were playtesting, the puzzles seemed easy. But when others played them, they found it difficult to time the dropping of the goat to keep two pressure-plates weighed down at the same time, etc.

And yeah that's a good point about the dive. I guess we forgot to include a mention of the dive controls because it wasn't actually a game mechanic. It was just an 'accident' that you could jump out of the water and re-enter the water, causing you to dive for a moment. And then I decided to use that feature to hide a key underwater but didn't tell the person making the intro screens... yeah, there was just a lot of chaos in the last few hours

Atmosphere and music are incredible. Fantastic work for three days. Puzzles were a good use of the theme, in addition to the overall goal/story.

Graphics are stunning, although it's a little unclear what was done during the jam. I'm assuming most of the textures/models were premade? Or did you make any of them during the 72 hours?

Great work!

@jeremy-ryan Most of the base textures came from textures.com, although everything was recombined with a lot of perlin noise maps and combined into materials (i.e., most materials used multiple diffuse maps combined together in some way, not just a single texture straight from textures.com). The goat was handpainted by Angie. All 3D models were made during the 72 hour jam. Goat was rigged and animated during the jam as well. Basically everything except for the base textures was authored during jam.

For prior jams we used to start with me driving around taking pictures of things and processing them into textures in Photoshop, but the trouble is that Ludum Dare starts at 9pm EST when it's dark out, so we have to wait a full 12 hours before we can start on artwork, and that always put us way behind. So this time we decided to create composite materials from 3rd-party base textures. We figure it's transformative enough to be within the rules.

As for tools though, we've greatly accelerated our development by using level-building tools we worked on ahead of time, in addition to bits of code we reused such as the player controller, a system for managing game and camera state, etc. We have custom plugins that integrate with Modo (the 3D modeling application we use) that allow it to load materials from Unity if their names start with an arrow such as "->Grass1" and a custom AssetPostProcessor that automatically links the material when the FBX is imported, just so we don't have to relink materials inside of Unity. Basically we have a whole suite of things that speed up everything we do to maximize on time.

By the time the jam starts we usually have a ton of base code ready to go for things like a first-person controller, a skeleton Unity project properly configured with a git repository, a Trello board for task tracking, etc. In fact, for the final round of theme selection, we actually create a shared Word document detailing what kind of game we'd make if any of the final 10 candidate themes was chosen, so that when the theme is announced we know exactly what we're making instead of sitting around brainstorming.

That's amazing! Great work to the whole team.

Loved the concept and the original idea. The art seems fantastic but my laptop couldn't even make it. Great job!

Great game, I especially loved that you had an intro cut scene! I had trouble getting the first key, but besides that it was amazing!

This was a really quite polished game. It looked fantastic, especially for a 3d Jam game, and the fact you have audio and singing blew my mind. I had to actually check it was an original song because I was so shocked. The gameplay itself is really quite fun and unique. I enjoyed having my goat around and trying to figure out all the puzzles. In the end, I actually didn't get to complete the game for one main reason that kind of annoyed me. Due to the lack of back tracking, and no indication that you needed to get all the keys, I just got stuck and I was so far through I didn't want to start all over again. It was a small thing but it was frustrating. If I'm honest, however, I'm somewhat glad I didn't finish as I got slightly too attached to my goat. The good thing about this game however is despite this, I might come back to it just to see if I can finish it. It was really well done and congratulations to the team. I'm not sure how much was made in the Jam, but it's still good seeing everything come together in such a short time to create a really fantastic looking and interesting game

Also carrot trees??

That was really impressive. 3D, with nice and smooth controls, intuitive puzzles, atmospheric music and singing, it really blew my mind.

The intro scene was something beyond anything i saw in this jam. Outstanding work. As for the game, it is nice as well. The controls respond nicely, the graphics are neat and the level design is interesting, not crazy complicated puzzles but they arent dumb.

For the negative part, i tried but became stuck in the elevator bridge part right before the gate with four keys. When i grab Snowball in the platform and put it in the bridge it phases through the bridge and reappears in the ground below. I though the damn goat walk off the bridge, but trying a couple of times i had the the same effect. Is this a bug or there is another way to put the damn goat in the bridge in order to proceed?

Also, tired of Snowball shenanigans.

@derek-volker hmm... yeah that's probably a bug. There are two known ways to get the goat to the bridge:

Crank the elevator-with-goat up to the top of the bridge, then stand on the bridge, crouch, and grab the goat from the lift while standing on the bridge.

Or, walk past the gate that requires 4 keys, and there's a path on your left that loops back down to the bridge room, with a pressure plate that opens the bottom portcullis. Afterwards, you can just grab the goat and walk back the way you came. This only works in the post-LD version though, I believe, as we changed how the portcullis works there to make it easier to get the goat where you need.

the graphics is really something... and that is why gameplay is lacking... though really good work....

Best sounding game I've played in LD43, and one of the best looking. Brilliant work with music especially! I'm not great at puzzle games so I didn't make it too far, but I think this is a really nice effort. Congratulations!

Hey MiranaMiranaMiranaMirana! Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my livestream!

If you'd like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/346059114?t=03h03m33s

Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D

💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady

https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin

Cool game idea! enjoyed the playthrough on our stream! I really loved the intro btw! And tha game itself is quite satisfying

@andrazg For sure dude. It's a never-ending battle of "what do I have time to do?" each Ludum Dare :)

@elysiagriffin Elysia, thanks for playing our game!

@firesplash-entertainment Thanks for playing our game! It was enjoyable watching you play it on stream! Sorry that I couldn't be online on Wednesday (was busy with work!)!

We had a major bug when it came to going back to the main menu on the Game Over Screen and we didn't have time to make a proper game-over screen before we ran out of time for LD. In fact, we cut out about two entire areas a few hours before LD ended and scrambled to tweak our level design to make it work. Sorry that the ending situation was so abrupt!

That said, it was interesting watching you play and seeing areas where we could improve things. Visibility of certain objects, ways to show what certain levers are doing (there was one lever that you never figured out what it did).

You also missed about 4 keys that we had had hidden, and it makes us wonder how we can draw more attention to the things that are in the game but not immediately obvious.

Either way, thanks for playing! I think somebody asked in your stream about the art. It was all drawn by @angiekatneko, as well as the texturing for the goat and character reference sheet for the goat.

The first thing that stuck out to me was the polish of this entry. The graphics and audio are pretty amazing for the time restraints. I was really surprised to hear a sung intro made just for this game. The gameplay is also really clever. I liked the idea, and the level design makes it more interesting than I was anticipating.

High level of polish, anyone can see that you put a lot of work into this. But I give 1/5 stars because poor goat :( (just kidding)

Oh, man, this gameplay is so frustrating for me. Obviously I cannot play it, even if the preparation of assets is from the top shelf.

Wow! There's a lot of game to play, and all of it has very nice graphics, music and sounds, very nice! I think I skipped one puzzle (near the end, in a cave with some crystals you could get in with an elevator) since I didn't manage to bring the goat with me to the last area, but thankfully the goat respawned behind me near the altar. Otherwise I had no problems. Really good entry!

Pretty good job considered the short amount of time! But I see you've taken profit of the month to polish your work and I admire that :) You've put a lot efforts into the graphics and the sound design, that's usually something you rarely see on a Jam. I'm also glad to see you've chosen to keep the puzzles simplistic, I'm not really fond of scratching my head for hours in front of an enigma. What would have been great would have been to see the future landing point of the carrot before throwing it, but I know by experience that it takes a bit of time to implement, so I let it slip through. Good job!

@quasar47 Yeah - the carrot throwing mechanic was just done with rigidbodies - originally I wanted to dislay a little arc but I ended up cutting it out because there was no way to make it accurate enough and have it properly collide with walls in the time constraints that we had.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean, by "taking the month to polish it" but we haven't touched this since the jam - we fixed a few major bugs, and then after watching some streamers play it, added a few keys and simplified a puzzle because people kept getting in situations where the game was unbeatable by skipping essential keys.

We clearly wanted to do a lot more; our original plan was to have three different distinct levels and scenes with different environments, but we ended up consolidating it all in one scene as we only started the level a few hours before the submission deadline and so the puzzles are necessarily simplified a bit. We had wanted to make some optional challenging puzzles, but well, prototyping and testing takes a while, and we took some ideas from our test scenes and just used them in the final scene.

@neon - thanks for the comments. Yeah, we kind of realized that there might be situations where you can't backtrack, so we have a goat teleport script that brings it to you because we realized that people might not be able to finish the game otherwise. Thanks for playing! We hope you enjoyed it!

@ryjcio - Can you tell us what you mean? What do you mean that you weren't able to play it? If you lower the resolution it runs fine even on my very slow tablet.