Agoraphobia by Kodiqi
A game about the small world of agoraphobia.
Now playable in HTML5 via https://kodiqi.itch.io/agoraphobia PC download also available.
Music and fonts not original. The background music is from https://soundcloud.com/abstraction - who made 10 free tracks for use in LD38, please check them out.
Feel free to get in touch -> https://twitter.com/kodiqi

| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/agoraphobia |
Ratings
| Overall | 381th | 3.385⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 615th | 2.692⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 253th | 3.385⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 65th | 4.077⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 154th | 3.731⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 37🗨️ |
It became a little bit repetitive after a while, so it would be cool to see some other gameplay elements.
Very well done!!
@la-mecanique-du-plastique @drtizzle @andrey-voznuyk @shamps @geeitsomelaldy @smbe19 @furazin
1- double the amount your house grows when you take a powerup, so you might consider grabbing a second one to shorten the distance of your walk back to the house,
2- grabbing a powerup has a chance of immediately spawning a second one, a little bit further away, to tease the player into going further out.
Played it on stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/139989925 (at 34:22)
It took me a while to realize that your house stays grown larger even after you "die". Since it had started getting a little repetitive, I just started staying out longer and collecting all of the upgrades I could before passing out, and there was no real penalty to this. Eventually I had collected so many that the house didn't get any bigger, and I thought it was a glitch. Turns out you're just supposed to go off the map, which is unintuitive.
But I had conquered my fears! Thanks for the game.
This is a very interesting idea, and for the most part it's VERY well executed. It really gives you a sense of what it's like to experience Agoraphobia, and there's legitimate tension whenever you decide to leave the house. The art style is simple, but suitable for the concept. Anything flashier feels like it would be unnecessary.
I did sometimes think that the message of the game was kind of undermined whenever a health pack or "house-up" would spawn inside the safe zone though. It might be worth it to take extra care that that doesn't happen (unless that was intentional, and the meaning flew over my head...)
Also, I think you could stand to improve the pacing a bit. Because the gameplay doesn't change throughout the course of the game, it might be best to maybe shrink the overall field to ensure that more players reach to the end and get a chance to really consider what your game is trying to say. Otherwise, the frustration of making minuscule progress for minutes at a time might overshadow any sort of introspection you might want to evoke in the player.
Otherwise, I felt this was an awesome entry. It's rare that game jam game try to make you think on an introspective level. Thank you for making this!
Really good take on the theme, it reminded me a lot of my own anxiety about the outside world. I had some thoughts on improvements that could make the game slightly more approachable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGAiipylkqo