very good.

Cool ambiance very minimalist. Would have been great to have a great objective, but otherwise very stylish and fun

Cool mood

really liked the ambience.
The controls are a bit complicated to get used to.
With a bit more fine tune, and probably more detail in the levels, this game could have a bright future... =)

@stencilchris I was hoping to have a better goal done in time, but I had a ton of school work. I probably only had like 6-7 hours to get this done.

@seththefirst Yes, I am not that happy with the movement script, I really should have spent more time on it.

Besides the controllers I liked your idea. Somehow relaxing too. Congrats :)

The controls feel a bit awkward, there is not enough friction. Sometimes I gain too much velocity and find myself disoriented on the other side of the level.

Lovely gameplay. The concept is simple and intuitive. It would be nice for your touch are to get larger as your become larger, not sure if the gameplay would be too intense though. Overall, thumbs up!

Really interesting game. Good visual design and very fitting ambient music. As already mentioned, the controls are a bit too sensitive, but I was able to adapt to them pretty well. Nice work ^^

@raed That is an interesting idea. I was planning to go back and figure out what exactly I did wrong in my movement scripts this coming weekend, but that concept is something I will not be able to resist playing around with!

solid mood, fun idea, controls are pretty hard to use

I loved it! A game that
1. I could actually play
2. Made me mash my fingers into the arrow keys, due to the tension of the situation
3. The walls close in on you.

Fantastic work, even enjoyed the music!

Relaxing vibes!

A good game! The graphics and mood were great, and I liked the gameplay. However, it seems the collision doesn't change if you amass lots of light. Overall, reasonably fun!

@hillexed I was using lighting to accomplish the glowing effects and from what I know about Unity, it would be extremely difficult to implement that. I am creating a list of stuff to look at trying for the weekend, so I probably will pull up the old manual and try to find a way to accomplish that.

Nice and calm game with a great moody atmosphere. My first instinct was to collect all the light in the level, even thought I knew it was bad for me! That music was beautiful, did you compose it?

I wish the ideal way to play this game was not just siting around waiting for it to go dim until you pick up another light ball. The most engaging way to play was to be moving around, so I would have loved to see a mechanic that rewards players for that too.

Great job on completing your first ludum dare with this solid entry!

Very cool! I liked how the level shrinks in on you like that.

Surprisingly tense and atmospheric, despite the extreme minimalism. The music and lighting effects really sell this simple concept as a complete, satisfying package. Good work!

What a great game! The blending of light and dark along with the wonderful music was very engaging. One of my favorites so far. My only two notes it that the text in the tutorial is difficult to read because of the bloom, and i wished the game floor had some texture so I could get a sense of how fast I was going in what direction when there weren't any other visual clues. Very fun and beautiful!

Nice. I like the simplicity and aesthetic. The music was very helpful in setting the tone. Normally I'd complain about the floating movement but I think it lended well to this game.


A game that made me feel claustrophobic at the end. I'd definitely see some additional content like a light devourer (Some monsters following you to eat your light in case you don't move that much). It would give an horror atmosphere to the game and something stressing. Really good concept.

@misterstripey and @sherwood I love that idea. Gosh dang it, don't put these ideas in my head or I will not be able to resist staying up all night and putting them it :D!

@misterstripey Unfortunately, I did not compose the music for the game which is why I am in Jam not Compo. I will be ready next time though, I am working on neutral network to compose music for me!

@cercle I am really upset about the way the text came out too! TextMeshPro, the plugin I use for text broke right after I had the UI looking as good as the game and I was forced to use this hard to read mess as a last resort :( The texture for the game floor to tell how fast you are moving is a good idea, but I feel that would hurt the art style. However, that is a good point to bring up, I am think something along the lines of a minimap?

Thanks for including your build as a web build. I often prefer that as its easier to test.

Nice experience. I first tried the game without reading the rules. I found it took me about 30 seconds to learn the rules (excluding the walls, which I didn't understand until it was too late. After having read the rules, I found the game to not have quite enough going on or driving me to action. If you add more stuff encouraging playing I think the game will be more enjoyable, but overall I found it fun.

@forrest If only I had you with me when I was coding . . . I have been playing a lot of games today and mine is definitely lacking in the actual gameplay department. Someone had a great idea to add a monster that hunts you down and sucks your light, which I am totally going to work on over the weekend!

The controls were hard to deal with, but I found that fun after a while.

This was a good amount of fun once I figured out what was going on, but the more I played I realized that I didn't feel a strong need to play to the objective and found that I could sit in the corner for long periods of time before I had to move. However, the concept was fun and I appreciated the music as it set the tone of the game for me.

I really liked the vibe of the game, really smart concept. Great first jam, congrats :smiley:

I almost made it to 13 light before I died... I enjoyed your game. It was simple and minimalist but worked :-D Good job!

I liked the tension the music introduced to the game. I would improve the tutorial with some image or animated gif to better clarify the core mechanics of the game. Simple but interesting idea. Keep up the good work!

Not bad! Interesting theme interpretation!

Wow, very interesting concept right there, i really liked the game, very well executed. I really liked the background music, it was quite grim (kinda scary sound) but it was very plesant. Great game sir.

Not the best score, but hey, i tried XD: https://i.gyazo.com/2d017381d9d834eaff3b31a76c641624.png

The light gets really really bright at around 11, so I kinda didn't see the map anymore haha.
Very simplistic game, but I like the implementation of the theme here!

I survived for 92 seconds and had 7 lightmasses at the end :)

Full marks for mood! Loved the soundtrack and the minimalist graphics, the light effect was really nice and kind of soothing. I didn't necessarily understand how I was losing light or what made the walls come in when they did, but with some tweaking that would be easily resolved. Nice.

@videojames I really do need to be clearer in the directions. You lose light to the black squares (-1 light per black square shrunk to nothing), and the walls close in faster, the greater your light. Less than 1 light and they begin to retract at a proportional rate, the lesser the light, the faster the retraction. The black squares have a radius in which they subtract light from the player and the glowing orbs.

@turbulentwinds Ohhh gotcha, so it's more about maintaining a balance for as long as you can than collecting as much light as possible?

@videojames Yep, pretty much, remember, the more you have, the worse it is! :D

Mood, nailed that category. Everything in the game just kind of fit together really well. While not really replayable it was an enjoyable experience. Good job!

@pinneh Thank you! I really screwed up the replayablity side of things, but hopefully I can get a black circle that follows you throughout the game sucking down light quickly to add to the tenseness and the gameplay factor done on the weekend. Sigh, and to think I had 7 hours left in the Jam and I did nothing :(

I was going for something like "The Plan," check it out on Steam, it's something you will always remember.

Great atmosphere. A nice combination of simple elements. Great shader work.

Really great concept that compliments the theme well. Both the music and the light/dark dichotomy set a strong mood, which is a very well executed aspect of this game. Nice work, and I'm looking forward to playing your future LD titles!

Nice idea of the contrast between light and darkness, and also good environment.

Nice concept and well execution on the concept too!! I think it would have a very good rate on the part of innovation at least. I rate it 4.5 Also the light effects looks very nice too!
Here is my score of playing

Pretty cool idea. The music was nice, I like the minimalist design quite a lot. I found the controls somewhat challenging and the lack of a defined goal is unfortunate. It was unclear how you would "sacrifice some light" as mentioned in the description, doesn't seem to be a way to shed it any faster than it wears off, and after a certain point I couldn't see any more appearing in the room, the room just suddenly started getting smaller. Due to these things, I found the actual gameplay to be kind of confusing, and frustrating. But I like the overall idea, with a little refinement you could easily market it as a nice little time-waster game for mobile.

Really cool atmosphere. I love the high def/black & white/artsy games coming out nowadays (like limbo) and your use of light effects really helps the atmosphere. It would probably screw up the no-ui vibe... but I would have really liked a UI that let me know my score was going up. The first time I played, I wasn't sure if there was any data being tracked.

@colossal-gnome I am going to be updating the instruction in the description soonish as it has been a bit confusing for a lot of people. The lack of a defined goal really is a big issue with this, I agree.

I think you have potential in your game. I like the mood you are creating. There are always more features you planned to put in. It's a jam after all. So, good work, see you next time! :)

The game have super cool atmosphere, and both the music and graphics is great. The gameplay idea is good, but it is a bit difficult to understand what the goal is in the game. But overall a very well made game.

Interesting concept, though I found it difficult to navigate.

Very nice game. I managed to hit 382 seconds. While at first I found it hard to gauge my movement against the flat grey background, I got the hang of it eventually. And the bleak aesthetics really sells the feel of the inevitable extinguishing of your frail spark. Although (and this is my nitpickiest suggestion yet) my avatar being a big fat square felt a bit... too massive, too solid to fit with the rest of the vibe I was getting. A narrow diamond shape (like the card-suite) would've felt more like a spark to me.

But hey, if that's the most substantial criticism I can make, you're probably doing something right.

Interesting idea but I had one major issue with implementation: when there is no objects around there is no indication of your movement at all. So it's pretty hard to navigate and understand where you are.

Kudos for thinking wide in game idea and nice atmosphere. I had trouble understanding what my goal is and the mechanics. That can be both a negative and a positive thing. It adds to the mystery that I have no help on what the controls are or what the game is about along with the atmosphere. But I don't know if I replay the game, on what objective should I try to beat myself and how/why do I stay alive longer other than not using the AWSD-keys at all which seems like a boring tactic?

tnx 4 web build)
this is so simple, but fun! GL!

Nice, simple game with simple graphics which described the environment you were going for perfectly. I enjoyed playing it even though I am not sure what the end goal is (survive the longest or survive the shortest?) anyway, even though it is very simple, it is a great concept and it is well executed and I think the only way to make it better would be adding some story to it, which is not very hard with what you have prepared :)

This is a really cool concept, and overall a very beautiful game. I ended up lasting about 2 minutes before I stopped finding enough black boxes to drain the light, and went splat.

Nice little game. Beautiful, I loved the mood.

Very strong ambiance. The lighting effect was well done too. I dig the take on the theme and the game play. Honestly, I could see this working well with some text that pops up telling a narrative as you progress. It gives off one of those deep and artistic type of game feels.

Thank you guys so much for your feedback, it is helping immensely with my "I wish I had thought of this" post-jam build :D

I thought I had found some nice rythm, allowing me to remain under 1 light most of the time for 5 minutes straight, almost feeling at home is this small ecosystem, then everything started going downhill and all I could do was writhe in despair as a newborn blinding ball of light was inexorably being crushed by the walls. Nice work building a world that really draws you in out of such simple assets.

Very nice! I like the mood of the game.

In fact i like the graphics!

Mood is very good, but it's getting boring very quickly, as in fact you just move around with cube with light attached :D

Text get's blurred or out of focus with some light settings - you may want to check that as it is hard to read through 'tutorial' part

Nice entry though!

Try our **Voxel Mob Arena** here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/voxel-mob-arena

light 18.09, time 104.11

Not sure why, a combination of scaling, music and visuals really sucked me in this. Great fun!

Lovely game. :) Had fun playing it! Congratulations!

The thing you put on itch as a Linux download is actually just the Windows .exe!

@blubberquark It is a cross-platform standalone or at least that's what Unity told me. But you should be able to use Wine.

Fun little game. The noise is just making it that much more intense!

Nice entry! Feels very polished. Loved the mood. good job!

I can also play the WebGL thing, no worries, but it did not work in the itch app.

I liked this game a lot grafics and music matches prefectly and controls felt nice i just thought it was kinda pointless to get light but besides that really cool game

It was a bit confusing at first but pretty fun when I got the hang of it. I wish the camera view was bigger and the mage would be harder

I survived for five minutes before I got bored, then I ate all the light and got to brightness 28.

Very nice game!

I was surprised by the mood of the game ! The BGM is really nice.

Btw there's no "Exit" button D:

Light 19.51

Time survived : 977.45

https://imgur.com/a/G4mca

@sugiuro I like to use the default exit button -> Alt + F4

:P

@turbulentwinds But when there's no light, I can see my Alt F4 keys :(

@sugiuro That made my day :D

Great Job 5 stars

Come check out our game!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/virus-detected

Great Job 5 stars

Come check out our game!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/virus-detected

nice take on the theme!

Really nice BGM, I think the movement could've been simpler, though.

Also, is there a way to know where are new light particles to pick up? And from when to when do they spawn?

Real smooth graphics. A nice ambiance overall, good job.

This is a nice looking, minimalist game! Here are my two cents of things that I think can be improved:

- The background is a flat color, so it's difficult to know where are you, or how fast are you moving. Some kind of texture or decoration in the background would help a lot with this.
- When you are under 1 light, things get too random. If a black square suddenly appears close to you, you are dead, as you won't have time to react. That makes it difficult to create a strategy for maximizing your time.
- I think that zooming the camera out at some moments can increase the strategic value of the game, as you may plan routes to shink-grow yourself.
- Sometimes, the game gets slow. You wait for a while, pick a light to stay close to 1 size, and wait again.

That's it! I think that with some work and tweaking, the game can be polished and turned into something quite cool!

@racso

Zooming the camera is a great idea! I am currently working on a version with all the feedback and that definitely is going into it!

How do you feel about a minimap to solve the positioning problem?

I get what you are saying with the randomness aspect. I'll update the spawning code to have an area around the player where nothing spawns (in the post-jam build of course).

The slowness aspect of the game should be fixed by the addition of a "hunter" a black sprite that follows you, draining light (if you are in range) throughout the entire game.

Thank you for your wonderful feedback!

Really good mood and music. The visuals are simple but very good, I like it a lot. Congratulations on your first LD :)

Very Nice game.

A great game all around. Two minor things: the tutorial text was hard to read and it seemed like one could almost play indefinitely by skirting around the outside.

The concept is great and the implementation (graphics, sounds, etc.) are just what the game needed. Good job!

Effects are nice.

Nice atmosphere and effects, going well with the music as well. The game got a bit annoying when the light was really bright, but I guess that's the point of the theme.

nice ambiance,nice try for your first ld, in fact the i've no idea what do you wish to express through the interaction such as acceleration movement, light expanded in sudden, and dead by clamping by the surrounded black wall.

This has a great atmosphere, and I really enjoy the simplicity of it. I was a little lost at first as to what I was shooting for goal wise - was I looking for a way past the walls, or simply collecting balls of light? It does get rather bright at the higher light levels, but it impresses the 'brightness' aspect of the game.

Movement is decent, though I had a hard time finding where I was in relation to other objects at first. You blend a little too well into the backdrop. I did sort of expect the walls themselves to steal light from you, but they do not seem to? I think it would be interesting to see the walls leach light as well.

I really like your idea about a 'light hunter' square, as well! I think it'll add a good level of tension to the game.

All in all, a really good job for your first LD!

@turbulentwinds Those ideas sound good. The minimap sounds useful, too; I guess you'll know how it goes after doing some testing with it :)

I also think you may make the game more dynamic by simply tweaking what you already have. For example: what would happen if you made the walls faster, and increased the threshold for changing the walls direction (currently 1) to, let's say 3? You wouldn't die so fast when under the threshold, but you would need to move a lot more. I don't know, I guess you would need to test :P

Good luck with the game!

@serpentworks-games I actually tried out having the walls leach light, but the flowy movement makes it very difficult and frustrating not to be killed by them. After I do some work on movement, I will definitely give that idea another go!

@racso Changing the threshold sounds pretty cool! I'll definatly try that out!

Simple game that respond perfectly to the theme, big downside would be that the controls aren't smooth, making it hard to maneuver between those light balls, thus hard managing your light level. But else, good lighting, spooky mood, that's an interesting entry overall.

Cool idea and I really enjoyed the atmosphere. My only complaint was that it felt a bit hollow, in that it felt like something was missing. It would have been nice to have some other kind of challenges/goals that you have to complete during the game, or in a specific level. Overall though, I really liked the concept and had fun playing.

Unfortunately, the controls aren't very polished. The character moved too fast. Also, the gameplay wasn't very entertaining. It would have been nice if there were objectives or levels in the game. However, though the game wasn't really fun, I did like the spooky audio and graphics. They provided a sort of surreal creepy mood.

Simple and enjoyable, well done.

The game has a great mood and looks nice, given it's minimalistic style. However the movement was too floaty, which maybe was a design decision, but it was easy to get disoriented. The fact that the game had no goal doesn't bother me that much, as it is a chill game and i didn't feel like it needed one.
Good job overall :)

really cool style, but i felt like the light meter text removed some of the immersion

I enjoyed playing through it. It would have been really nice if the music reacted to what I was doing in game (getting drained) or bumped up by white orb. It took a while in the beginning before I recognized the way you were supposed to handle the flight. Then also another thing. The glow effect on the text in the instructions made it almost impossible to read. And that was a bit unfortunate.

So I have mixed feelings about this game! I loved the minimalistic art and the mood in general. The floatiness of the player and the way the dark spots consumed you was very well executed.

However I felt some objective was missing, for me simply surviving was just sitting in a corner and eventually grab one light when I was getting below 0.6. So this killed the fun of it!

So congrats on the great work artwise and with the mechanics, but you need to give the design a spin to make it more of a game.

Interesting mechanic, where more light kills you. I didn't notice that at first, and just got as much as possible --- the graphics start to mess up around 10 light or so. Overall, game is pretty polished. The graphic style is nice. The force-based movement is a little weird, but it adds a little more depth to the experience because you have less fine control over your movement. Well done.

Going supernova once, adding white to the whole screen, was fun if ultimately fatal. Tough to strike that right balance between being sub 1 to grow the screen while also maintaining enough light to avoid surprises. Fun game.

Interesting game concept. Graphics are simple but the music fits the theme of the game. Well done!

If you are interested, please check out my LD40 game [Escape Infection!](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/escape-infection)

@turbulentwinds This is a pretty cool game! The music fits the theme really well, howcome you didn't sign up for the Audio? I'm assuming that you made the bright circles have trigger and regular colliders?

You could have just set trigger colliders on these objects and it would have felt smoother. You can also set them in groups and make it so that you only collide with certain class of objects.

Also, if you have the time - check out my game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/dont-get-hangry

@snipera

I did not sign up for music because I just found some fitting free to use music online. Right now I am working on using Magenta to create a AI that writes game music for me so I can do that category next time. I can't wait to get it working, its gonna be sooooo cool!

The bright circles have normal colliders only. That is an amazing idea to just have triggers for them (might have to rework somethings though)! I'm gonna have that in my PostLD build!

I definitely will check it out!

Such atmospheric, much ambient soundtrack, very mood, 5 mood, wow.

Amazing visual effects and terrific arts. It did quite well about darkness and light. The feedback of orbs and cubes are cool. I need to keep balance of my light so I can wander around or just stay still but there's not things that keep me to do anything. But it's a bit negative. Considering the death status I think the game is encouraging me to die at the most value of light. I thinks the value of light dose not reflect players' skills because when you die you must have had much light absorbed yet most of time you don't want these light, and you are absorbing them by mistakes.

Atmospheric and ambient, it builds up the mood.

The problems I had were the controls, it was controlled somewhat 'non-smooth' and 'laggy'. It was running smoothly, but the input lag was there. Making the game quite hard to control.

The idea is quite new and it misses some kind of high score.

Keep up the good work!

This is a very interesting idea. Well done :-)

Nice and simple, love the mood and look of it. Clean slick enjoyable.

I love the idea! i think at some point the light was a little too bright but maybe that's my monitor lol. I love the music. Thanks for shearing, great job!

Nice game with a great mood. The letters in the tutorial were a bit hard to read. It was fun to play, I just tried to survive as long as possible. :)

Very very very beautiful music. I love it. Interesting application of the theme too.

The only thing i would suggest is visual differentiation between the black squares and the walls. At first I wasn't sure if being close to the walls had the same effect as the black squares... Not a big deal obviously. Anyway, nice work!

I like the concept of the game. However, i find the gameplay objective to be a bit confusing. Part of it is probably because you show the time survived and light at death on the end. Maybe combine those into some kind of score?
Other than that, great game :)

Stunning take on the theme as it is made in a simple but quiet effective way. Love the vibes of the game, and also the part where you can't see anything on the screen when beeing too greedy about collection bulbs. Great game!

I became a supernova, only to realize that it meant that I lost :( . Nice mechanics. Nice art and audio, it set up the mood quite well.

Anyone who is still following this thread, I would absolutely love it if you could check this out for me: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/a-spark-of-light/$71462

This is my first 5/5 in mood on this LD. I'm really digging the soft ambient aesthetics.

My only concern it that fullscreen looks a tad off (Firefox + macOS).
This is a bit bummer for such an emergent oriented experience.
(edit: This is already fixed in the post-jam version)

Any ways: Really nice stuff! GG.

@jordgubben Oops, I must have screwed up the upload on the original. Unfortunately, I did not keep a save of the source for the Jam version so I am unable to fix that issue by rebuilding.

The atmosphere is good. Like a lonely one.

I found the game a bit boring to be honest. At the beginning the world is large enough that I couldn't even tell if it was shrinking or not, but the instructions said to wait until you're dim to capture the next white blob, so I tried to do that. But my brightness stayed constant when I was near the white blobs, so I felt like I could easily stay "balanced" by just staying there and doing nothing. So I quickly got bored and tried instead to capture all the white blobs and kill all the black squares, that was more fun but of course I quickly got crushed. While crushing the player for picking up too much light certainly fits the theme, if picking up light is required to make the game fun, then the game disincentivises having fun, which is counter-productive for a game. Maybe if the goal was to destroy a certain number of black squares without getting crushed, so that the obvious approach of becoming over-powered by picking up all the white blobs would not work?


> Right now I am working on using Magenta to create a AI that writes game music for me so I can do that category next time.

@turbulentwinds Nice, kind of like bfxr but for music then? If it works out, do you plan to make it publicly available?

@gelisam

I completely agree with your comments. Thank you so much for your honest and constructive feedback! I will definitely be checking out your game! On the topic of music generation, I guess it will be kinda like bfxr. I just want to make something I can give samples and let it run without worrying. If I pull it off, I will make it publicly available.

I addressed the problems you talked about in my post jam version which I hope you will check out:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/a-spark-of-light/$71462

@turbulentwinds Ah, adding the chaser makes all the difference! Now I feel like I need to clear up the black squares (even if they don't add to the score) while carefully avoiding both getting too bright and too dim, and I must do so quickly before the chaser catches up, excellent. Amazing how adding a single enemy can put all the other mechanics in a whole new light!

Nice concept!