Pajuu - Always With You by Samurai Spark
The game is a short story driven side scroller, about a small fox named Pajuu and his mother.
Controls
Hold SHIFT - to Warm Up
Press SPACE - to Jump
WASD - to Move
The scarf is your resource like health, while you hold "Shift" it slowly fades away. Using it is indicated by sound and a white glow on the scarf. When the scarf is gone you aren't able to heat up anymore.
Note
Hey guys, this is our second participation at the Ludum Dare.
This time we wanted to create something more emotional. It was a really though weekend, but we are pretty happy with the result. We hope you have the same fun to play as we had while we created the game!
We'd love to hear some feedback from you. :grin:
For the Theme: The basic idea was "the more the player uses his mechanic, the worse his situation gets" The mechanic being the warm mechanic and the situation in this case is the snow storm and your danger to freeze to death. So the more you use your scarf to warm up, the more it fades away, increasing your exposure to the cold.
Ludum Dare tip of the day:
Don't do cutscenes in a game jam. :sweat_smile:
| HTML5 (web) | https://samurai-spark.itch.io/pajuu |
| Other (document) | https://twitter.com/SamuraiSpark |
| Other (web) | team@samurai-spark.com |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/pajuu-always-with-you |
Ratings
| Overall | 127th | 3.918⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 557th | 3.333⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 832th | 2.873⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 950th | 2.873⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 27th | 4.627⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 3th | 4.556⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 20🗨️ |
Unfortunately, I didn't manage to finish as I kept failing at a jump later on, and there aren't any checkpoints, so I was forced to start from the beginning again.
I think you've done a fantastic job otherwise, though!
PD: I missed a little tutorial that explain the objetive and the controls of the game.
Great job
the only issue i'd say was the warmup mecanic that's a bit unclear at first, maybe add a few notes about the controls on your game's page to help understand them better.
other than that it's really well made, so good job guys :)
Amazing job, for 72 hours? Damn.. one thing though, I felt like the fox wasn't reacting fast enough when I pressed space to jump. Of course that led to the need of checkpoints. Overall, absolutely beautiful game!
Linda arte.
We are very happy that you enjoyed our entry.
@Tad, @Angelonias, @donut_daria
We to took your advice and made the game now beatable at all. During the jam we focused too much on the visual side of the game that we didn't had
time to make play tests. To be fair to all other participants, the original version can still be found on our itch.io
page.
Thank you for your feedback! At first we had alot of struggle to come up with a unique idea to the theme. After a lot of thinking we decided to go for something like "the more the player uses his mechanic, the worse his situation gets".
The mechanic being the warm mechanic and the situation in this case is the snow storm and your danger to freeze to death.So the more you use your scarf, the more it fades away, increasing your exposure to the cold.But we think that this might not come through as well as we had it planned out in our minds.
Mechanically it's a very minimalistic but polished sidescroller, and without your post I would've indeed struggled to make the connection to this LD's theme, but the art and mood are really great. I guess it's reached its emotional climax already, but I'd love to see this continued.
Don't let it go under just because of your smart balance!
thank you guys for the nice input!
We are very happy that you enjoyed the game and the experience.
@OldPeculier
Yeah because of the cutscenes and visuals we didn't had the time to polish the gameplay completely.
And to answer the "What’s up with the scarf and warming?" part:
**!!!Spoiler alert!!!**
*The scarf represents the mother. Her will and love guides her child trough the relentless cold and warms him on his path to the better place where she wanted him to bring. *
**!!!Spoiler alert!!!**
I really liked what you did with the scarf
Unfortunately, I didn't get the relation to the theme before reading how the mechanics affect the storm.
All in all a good and polished entry. Congrats!
Absolutely love the look, feel, atmosphere, and such. I was thrown off by the controls, which felt a bit loose, especially since flipping was centered on the face of the character. Use of theme was pretty subtle, and I wouldn't have understood how it was incorporated if I didn't read the description.
I hope I don't sound like I'm complaining. These were minor things that didn't bother me that much. The art and feel more than make up for the controls. Fantastic job!
Other than that, **cute** and **impressive** in many ways.
*TLDR: I'm picky about platformers having played so many...*
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/rush-hour
Now I should mention that at first, I didn't realize the scarf was shrinking, so it surprised me when it disappeared. I also noticed at one of the last few precise platform jumps, the camera would shift back towards the right, almost in mid-air, making the jump a bit easy to miss and fall. I suggest to re-arrange that moment... but other than those minor troubles, it was super high quality, good job!
The one problem i had with it is that the main mechanic, to warm up, was a little confusing too use and i still don't understand what its for... sometimes it works, sometimes not, and all in all in the end i just ignored it.
I'd like to contribute from a user testing perspective. Platforms are much more difficult than freeze mechanic. In fact, I've never failed because of using scarf too much (if it wasn't in the description I wouldn't notice), but I've failed lots of times on platforms. Also, a pretty annoying bug that I think should be fixed is what @aviland points out:
The fox's flipping point at the head causes that behaviour when I hit A. But hey, it's only a tiny bug, the overall experience is fantastic!!
@Aviland and @Naca
yeah you're right the flipping point is the center of his head not the body. That's because of the scarf. The problem was when we moved his local position it began to totally freak out and stretcht about the whole world. During the short time of the jam we needed a quick solution, so that's why he flips at his head. Hope we could bring more clarity. We definitely fix this in the future!
11/10 game, seriously. Good shit, guys! Thanks for the experience.
I have just experienced occasional frame-drops, which caused me to fall down a few times. Also changing direction while standing on the edge of the platform is deadly (probably wrong pivot point). Overall the game is well polished and enjoyable.
Please do more cutscenes in the next game jam :sweat_smile: