No Minor Task: Party of a Lifetime by XAVIER_INDIE_GAMEDEV
Half retro visual-novel / half chaotic action-stealth game with an 8-bit / jazz mixed soundtrack.
Can you invite 200 classmates and make it home to host the party of a lifetime?
Also this should go without saying, but..
PLEASE DON'T RATE THE GAME WITHOUT ACTUALLY PLAYING IT :smile:
KEY CONTROLS: - SHIFT to speed up cutscenes - ESC to skip any scene - SHIFT to sprint - P to skip level if you can't beat it and wanna see the outro - Key tips: always use sprint, house in top-right corner, hide in bushes, listen to audio cues for danger - More gameplay tips on itch.io page
Link to game (playable in Firefox browser on Mac or PC):
https://xavier-indie-gamedev.itch.io/no-minor-task
'Wow, what are you doing here??? What a small world!'
STORY:
You are a schoolkid, promising to host an epic party on Friday night, granting you eternal coolness.
There's just one problem: you aren't old enough to buy alcohol.
You put on a convincing disguise and buy lots of alcoholic beverages from the local liquor store. But the ADULTS see through your clever Groucho Marx disguise and all hell breaks loose.
The neighbourhood POLICE FORCE are on the hunt for an underage purchaser; meanwhile the presence of police officers has forced THE HOMELESS to find a new street to live on, and they blame you! PARENTS are on the lookout, wanting to protect their kids from your bad influence. GOLF BUGGY DRIVERS from the local golf course are also on high alert. Not to mention, you still have to send out the invites...
THEME:
The theme for the 38th Ludum Dare Game Jam was 'A Small World'. We wanted to pursue a creative interpretation, and thus decided our 'small world' would be where you bump into someone by coincidence in a situation you wouldn't expect, and you say 'Wow, what are you doing here??? What a small world!'. In our game, our kid uses a fake ID to buy some alcohol for a party the following night, but must avoid the suspicion of adults encountered the night before whilst travelling home from school. This 'small world phenomenon' can thus be seen as the 'enemy' of our game's protagonist.
*POSTMORTEM: *
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/no-minor-task-party-of-a-lifetime/no-minor-task-postmortem-of-my-first-game-jam-ld38
*VIDEO: *
https://youtu.be/nf9jH1KZdXw?t=19m29s
CREDITS:
Art: Hyungbin Kang, Peter Gietl
Code / Game Design / Writing: Xavier Ekkel (my first game jam! Follow me on Twitter)
Music / SFX: Dustin Krefft, Travis Hendrix, Tye Hastings
Game Engine: Unity
Our team was formed through Reddit and the entire game was completed remotely in <72 hours!
Ratings
| Overall | 467th | 3.242⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 426th | 3.076⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 515th | 2.879⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 704th | 2.515⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 553th | 2.955⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 199th | 3.448⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 75th | 3.723⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 355th | 3.279⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 134🗳️ | 83🗨️ |
I was thinking maybe what might help would be if adults had some sort of vision cone so you can see where they are looking/what they can see. When there are lots of characters on screen it isn't always easy to tell; I failed quite a lot as a result of people I couldn't see too clearly.
Great game though and I can see you and your team put a lot of time into it. Hope you enjoyed yourselves! See you next year?
I do hope it can be more obvious for enemy's line of sight, since i'm not sure where are the safe zones. And the golf buggy...Arghhh I hate those women :joy:
Anyway, great work guys!
I would agree with limejuice123 it took a couple of tries before I got the hang of avoiding the adults.
The original version required you to collect 250 kids, and the enemies caught you a lot quicker (no one beat it except me).
**Pro Tip:** chain together the collecting (which itself recovers your stamina) and make heavy use of sprinting as you run between bushes (which hide you from the adults) ;)
And yup, with more time I would have divided up the levels to be smaller and less chaotic, with progressive difficulty!
As for the game itself, it seemed to work fine, my only beef was that enemies would sometimes be behind say, a tree, but still be able to detect me, so I would have no good way of seeing it coming... maybe there's an audio cue I was missing since I muted but I got hit by it twice.
Settings for volume etc. are definitely a good idea, and definitely would've been included with a bit more time :)
And yes, there are audio cues for when you're being detected!
Edit: Thanks for the tip! Figured it out this time
@jeremy-ryan definitely would have added more levels (smaller and more strategic too) if we had the time (and if our 2nd programmer didn't drop out haha). thanks for playing!
If so, try playing on Mac or PC, on Firefox.
The gameplay itself is quite fun but there maybe too many adults so it is hard to do any meaningful stealth, I ended up just sprint around to lower suspicions. I feel like the game will be benefit from having a more static map and fewer enemies so that stealth is actually doable.
However, the graphics and the background music was nice. Well done!
Thanks for taking the time to play! :)
That said I felt a bit let down by the gameplay. I feel like you should continue with the humor and theme of that intro sequence and add some puzzles and different minigames. Grabbing 200 kids and sneaking them to your house is funny enough for a moment or two, but its pretty easy to just spam your sprint randomly and game the system. But it works and its not glitch or killing my computers framerate, so that at least was very good. Some games you play in the jam will murder even some of the best gaming computers.
Overall I love the concept, the humor is extra on point. Just needs a bit of tweaking for the Overall gameplay and I think you've got quite the game in the making. Combine that with a unique coherent art style and I think you could very easily refine this in the future. especially if you wanted to make a visual novel style game, which are always super popular on steam (I Mean lets be honest, if you can make a game about dating birds, you can make anything).
Otherwise nice work. The game was featured in my third episode of my Ludum Dare 38 showcase series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qy_8ccUyhs
It's super-cool that your team all met online to make this happen!
Enjoyed it as well. Simple to play. I did find it weird why he would "collect people".
Everything was enjoyable overall!
I wasn't able to actually invite 200 people after two tries! But if there's anything I did learn from playing the game was that being specific with the number of points you have to achieve isn't exactly a bad thing. I got 160 on my first try before I died- and I was really pushed to try 200 on my second. :D
Definitely learned something here. Though- not sure if it were just my machine- but it lagged on the browser slightly.
Finally- The music felt nice as well.
I do have quick question. How did you guys decide to have "200" people as the target goal? :o Was this after some playtesting? haha
Actually 250 was the initial target, but everyone found it too hard (i.e. only I could beat it), so a teammate suggested we reduce it to 200 and that stuck :P (I also reduced the difficulty in other parts, but people are still finding it hard :laughing:)
The original vision for it didn't even involve the collecting part - it was gonna be smaller more puzzle/stealth-based levels with enemy types introduced one-by-one over 5 levels (Monday to Friday). We were running out of time so I reworked to be one big level with a bigger (but still achievable) objective, and added in the player collectables ('invitables' :wink:)
Hahahah! That's incredibly funny how you guys had to change the entire mechanic after running out of time. But pretty smart how you guys still were able to ship this thing on time! :D
That's definitely an interesting way to re-scope an entire game. :P Kudos to that.
The game thing I think could have been a bit easier, because when the game is about the story you just really wanna progress. Good work nonetheless!
As for @theclinthennesy, it lagged on the browser a bit.
I loved the work you put on sound design, it really serves the mood of the game!
The overall difficulty was a bit too hard though, I didn't manage to reach the end, as I had sometime troubles understanding why I lost. Maybe a more clear feedback when the adults are highly suspecting you could do the thing?
Anyway, great entry !
Although I didn't manage to finish it. It is very hard.
But I would probably play it again.
- Gameplay is awesome , very well designed
- music is very well suited for this game
- overall i enjoyed this game
- by the way i score 179 :P on my 10th attemp
Neat game. Though, by the description I was expecting it to be more text based because of the "visual-novel" description. Still it was pretty fun. The music was nice. Some of the humor was a little over the top for me, but that's opinion I suppose.
Intro sequence is funny (sometimes extremely cliché funny, but I assume that's intentional ;) ).
### What could be improved in future updates
- **visual feedback - player health** I have no actual idea if there's health involved, or first collision with enemy sends you to game over screen.
- **visual feedback - enemies** After a few plays I still don't know why / in what exact situation enemies change colour to red / green - I assume that means they've spotted you
- **performance** - about 50% of the time there was a considerable slideshow (< 10 FPS) which makes playthrough unnecessarily tough
- **text speed switch** - while between scenes it works only when you actually keep enter/space pressed, the permanent switch in the scenes with another key to cancel the fast forward doesn't work well. I'd opt for 'fast forward only while pressed' - just like in visual novels for example, and option for tab to be a permanent switch if someone prefers that.
- **consistency** - that's a tough one, I'm aware of that, especially since you met through Reddit and probably don't know each other well enough to always know what to expect :) But to make the game more polished, both art style and music should adhere more to general design - at this point it often feels like they were taken from completely different projects. I don't mean to discredit the variety - just try to make it feel like it actually all belongs together.
I don't mean to overly criticize your project - it's fun, holds strong and considerable work went into its development. I'm just trying to leave some hints how to make it even better.
Leaving my rating, cheers and stay awesome!
The best aspect was the music, went from c64, to jazz, to megadrive/arcade. Loved it. Great work to the composer, bass was sexy during the cutscenes!
@poffle Our sound guys will be very happy to hear that :P The bass was recorded live because one of our guys is a jazz musician hahah.
Our team is very happy with what we achieved in 72 hours, and we're glad that most people are enjoying it :smile:
When I finally got to the game I must admit to being a little disappointed because I had built it up so much based on everything that came before. However, this is an accomplished game and I congratulate you all...(but especially your "sound guys")! :grinning:
A crazy storyline to a nice done game. Everything is very polished and detailed to be a jam. As they said before, sometimes it confuses me as the adults can detect me. Good job.
However, the story was a fun read, and being able to speed up dialogue was excellent (though I'd personally rather the skip button just make the text appear instantly) and I enjoyed the story. Altogether a nice entry!
Total Ratings
Votes on your game so far
Overall: 60
Fun: 60
Innovation: 60
Theme: 60
Graphics: 60
Audio: 54 (I'm guessing 6 people only watched a video haha..)
Humor: 60
Mood: 56
I'm gonna do one more promotion push before the deadline!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/no-minor-task-party-of-a-lifetime/no-minor-task-postmortem-of-my-first-game-jam-ld38
I just think you should put some indicator to where his house really is, i had to guess it was on the othes side of the level (but it was kind of a obvious guess too), other than that, the game is great, good job!
Once you got to the actual game it was okay and held my attention for a while, but I didn't complete it because I didn't have a large incentive and at that point I was too bored of the game. Good job.
Super cool pixel art! I can see you've put some time in that!
Good work!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf9jH1KZdXw