Mindlapse by Vulture_42

Some people say that the mind is a palace — reality has other ideas.
Battle against the monsters in your mind as they slowly erode your sanity, but watch out — the longer you fight, the more damage your mind takes. Do your best to hold it together or you'll soon find yourself with no mind at all.

Download and play: Here
Source code: Here!
Controls
Use WASD to move.
Use the mouse to aim and the left mouse button to cast a spell.
Hold E to repair or rebuild a room when prompted.
Defeat monsters to regain sanity.
Meet the team
@0xff0000 (Abraham den Hond) — art, animations
@azathothep (Félix Belthoise) — level design, music | other Itch games
@jorge-baptista (Jorge Baptista) — programming | Twitter / Itch.io / GitHub
@vulture-42 (Katherine Franklin) — narrative design, sound effects | Vulture_42

Ratings
| Overall | 401th | 3.564⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 599th | 3.222⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 456th | 3.315⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 420th | 3.713⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 221th | 4.028⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 205th | 3.587⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 310th | 3.443⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 53🗳️ | 39🗨️ |
The overall gameplay is nice, the first time I played I "died" pretty quickly, but after few try it was really cool. The *commentary* by the main character makes it feel more "alive" and that a good point!
The only negative thing I would say it's that the game doesn't feel "polished", like it's missing animations, lack of shadows or some textures feels stretched out, but it's just details and for a game made in 3 days, it's a really good job!
So yeah, congrats again, great game!
@hailburns I'm especially glad you thought the sound effects were cute — I'd never made any before this weekend :grin:
@unbonjusdefruits It's interesting to be compared to *The Dream Machine*! I only played the first level at an event once, but I loved it. I'm glad you thought the mood all fit together. And who knows? Maybe we might polish it up a bit more once voting is over.
I do also like the game-play, for what It can be at-least. I found that it got me in a very good flow after a while: Shoot while moving around, collect bricks, repair, preemptively shoot the ghost before the arrive, repeat. A fun balance for otherwise very simple gameplay.
However, the problem became that I could never lose and the largest issue with the game is a extra feature that should NOT be there: the ability to repair already broken rooms. It makes it so that it gets very hard to lose, and also, sadly, takes AWAY from the theme. And even aside the thematic issue, I just feel like the permanent loss of a room needs to be there to END the game at some point. A important part of "endless-waves"/survival sort games is prioritising and resource management, but if I have endless resources there is really no urgency (I also count rooms as a resource).
All in all awesome work! I hope to see more claymation games. Might actually give it a try myself :)
@hauo Thank you for this very precise feedback ! I wanted to keep the gameplay simple, as long as the player kept saying to himself "I don't have enough space !".
I understand the issue you describe, I added this feature to solve a balance issue : without the ability to repair rooms, players could lose very easily and it would be very frustrating (I didn't want to slow the pace of the game by making rooms take more time to break). However, there is multiple way to solve this issue and as you said it brings other problems I didn't thought about, thanks for pointing it out ! :)
I found the gameplay a bit too slow, but I like nervous and dynamic gameplays usually, so I'm not saying that it's bad, just my personal opinion. It also lacks feedbacks and details, maybe an idle animation, some camera shaking on taking damages or kills, some building particles. I know it take some time to add, and the spirit of jams is to have a short amount of time, but I think you can't ignore details.
Overall this is a very good game ! Had a good moment playing it ! Good job :)
Graphics are good and you quickly understand what you're supposed to do (especially with the rebuild interaction, so congrats for that), SFX are great but a bit too loud. The music suits well the game.
I think you should have worked on adding something more to the game. The character is already trapped and running out of space. Maybe a timer or a way to escape the area would have been great, it would have been able to suit well the theme while giving the player an opportunity to "win the game". I'm pretty sure you worked on something like this but, well, ran out of "time" to implement it.
Overall, it's a pretty solid game, and you made it in no time. Good job !!!
@saering I know what you mean with the game feeling a little slow. I can personally get quite into it for a while, but as someone said above, there's no real urgency or end-game unless you start running out of resources or time a repair badly. We had plans for more mechanics, but sadly not enough time to implement them (we thought we'd stick to the core mechanics). Thank you for the feedback!
@anthony-dunlap and @uncannyvalley Apologies for the loud spell-casting sound — I hadn't used Unity in years and didn't know how to adjust the volume in the editor (I probably should have readjusted them in Audacity)! (Definitely something I'll look up if I ever end up making sound effects again!)
@wrenpirate Standing in a collapsing room does kill you, but only if you haven't begun repairing it. I probably could have made that a little bit clearer with some more explicit dialogue the first time it happened.
@demn Thank you! I'm glad you liked the little dialogue bubbles :grin: There were a few ideas for more mechanics and/or a win condition floating around, but yes, we did run out of time to implement them — or really to hone those 'extra' ideas much.
Like Demn says, the little dialogue box is very clever !
That kind of game is very hard to balance but it was playbale and quite enjoyable so well done !
The music is really unsettling and it really adds to the mood though the gameplay gets a little boring after a while frankly. There isn't really any sense of urgency to keep me engaged.
Overall really great, and really innovative either way you did the art I've never seen anything like it.
@swordfish — @0xff0000 made everything by hand — the bricks, character, monster, walls, floor etc. I think he has some 'making of' posts he might be able to share.
Pros :
- Unique, beautifully crafted graphics
- Great background music make the mood even better
- Easy-to-get-in gameplay loop, with an intuitive control scheme
Cons :
- Difficulty curve a little too flat (maybe kill the player when he has no brick and gets hit)
- Hitboxes are not always consistent
All in all, great job !
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/mindlapse/mindlapse-claymation
But other that this - a pretty solid and balanced game.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/299088812?t=02h53m57s
@local-minimum Thank you! I think the visual feedback on the rooms about to collapse (when the floor turns completely red) might have been made a bit more confusing by the fact that the room can't collapse if you're repairing it at the same time. The floor does flash a little while, then it goes completely red — when it does that, you don't want to be standing in it. We had intended to add animations where the room would crack a few times, then disintegrate, but we didn't get round to it.
@carlos-giraldo The clay art is really cool — @0xff0000 did a great job :smile: . To repair a room you need to be standing in it. The notice to repair a room might be a little vague because you have to be quite close to it and the text appears off to the side. Which did you think could have done with a clearer range? (I think maybe we could have highlighted the notice or something when you get close enough and that might have worked.)
@tigerj Thank you for featuring us in your stream! I noticed the comment about the reticule — it was quite large because it indicated the explosion radius. Anything within the reticule takes damage, including yourself, which is why you kept taking damage (you only got hit by the monsters a couple of times, I think). Great feedback about binding the reticule to the mouse cursor, by the way!
:bomb: