Well done - I didn't get very far with the puzzles but it seems a pretty solid little game.

Were some graphical glitches but still very cool. Might've been the emulator.

Love the art and the whole gameboy aesthetic. Loved the idea as well!

Really nice game, I love the music. The puzzles are really difficult though.

Good job!The game is good and the old style fits very well.

Good job!The game is good and the old style fits very well.

@victorcrafty @paragonraptors it's not just an old style, it's an actual old game!
You can download the gameboy rom and play in your emulator (or flashcard in a true gameboy)
Thanks for the kind words :)
@jole Yep, probably due to the html5 + js emulator, if you load the rom into no$gba it works like a charm.

This game made me come back 25 years back ! I love game boy style, and your idea to use a cat as character !A good game boy adventure game with a good story typical of game boy game ! Greeaattt job ! (Ps: i need a cartridge for my original game boy !)

This game is offensive to cats.

Clever idea with cats lives! And love GB looks ^_^

First of all I want to say that even hearing the music and seeing the graphics just gave me nostalgia goosebumps. Really hit that mark of gameboy graphics and music. Second of all, the puzzle was really nice, though I could see how a lot of people that don't have to deal with RGB values on a daily basis would struggle understanding the first clue.
All and all that was a really fun game to play!

Being the ever-wandering cat, I roamed throughout the city, interacting with anything I can. Trees, flowers, rocks, tables, chairs, mean humans. Most of them didn't talk, except the mean human. But it's ok, my friend was around to keep me accompanied. We wandered to the Witchwood to satisfy our inner adventurer. My friend ate a mushroom that looked really bad and smelt even worse. My friend fell asleep, and I felt like I had lost a bit of me. Time froze, until my friend woke up and rushed to home to take rest. I wandered around some more, interacting with more trees, flowers and rocks with no mean humans in sight. Rocks were happy to be different. Really Great Boulders! I started missing my friend so I went back to home. He was still asleep. Asleep for what what felt like an eternity, until he suddenly woke up from a noise outside. Curious little me and my friend went to investigate. The cave guard, the mean human, was missing. My friend went inside the cave to explore, but I took to the cave guard's home to make sure he is well. Humans can be mean, but they are still amazing. I couldn't find the cave guard, but I found a shiny thing that looked like it belonged somewhere else. I took it, and place it where it belonged. The chest gifted me with another shiny thing. The shiny thing was really mesmerizing and beautiful. It reminded me of my friend, so I went back to join him in the cave. A mean boulder was blocking me from going to my friend, but she had her own reasoning. As much as I adored the shiny thing I had, it was not worth more than seeing my friend, so I quickly bribed the boulder to make way. I could see my friend from afar, sleeping yet again. Time froze again. I lied there beside him. Hoping that my friend will soon wake up and take me to another adventure. He didn't, time stood frozen till I slept.

Welp, didn't mean to write this, but I just felt like it when coming here to give feedback :) (and I apologize to anyone that went through my wall of text with broken English).

Really fun little experience. The puzzles did feel out of place, but given the time constraints I think that is still fine. Roaming around as a cat was a great experience, and I feel like it captured what cats go through in their daily lives. Humans doing stupid things :P

I think the game translated that feeling really well to the players. "Your Life is a currency" hit home when I first selected "no" when asked to save the "children"(It should have said "child" btw, RIP my immersion).

Awesome little game, I liked the story.... but what was up with that kid, just went hog-wild running off and dying everywhere.

@gcttirth thanks for your long writing experience, it feels awesome when someone plays your work at this level.

Excuse me for the "children", I inserted some text in the last couple of hours late at night so maybe I got confused and dizzy.

Also it was pretty hard to find the path to the next place (the one thats in the top right).

this was so sweet and cute <3 i really dig how straight forward it was, and the writing made me smile a lot haha :)

So this could work on a real Gameboy? Sweet!

This is so well done, amazing how hou managed to put it together in 48 hours!

I love the graphics, feels very solid!

A very nice little game. I really enjoyed it. Graphics look good. The gameplay and puzzels are a bit simple but the story is very cute, a very nice interpretation of the theme. And the fact that it can be played on a real gameboy is just amazing! Nice work!

Great job in getting a fully working gameboy game done for the jam! The puzzles were clever and I like the sprite art. It did lock up in the cave on the HTML5 version, the text box moves up, and when a button is pressed it moves down and jitters at the bottom, not sure if that means the end of the game or not.

The idea of the cats 9 lives made me think "why I didn't think of it too ?" haha
It was nice to play, I felt some Undertale vibes, the puzzle were great and not too hard, except the one about the RGB palette. I thought of it but I did not think that could be the solution haha. The character felt like sliding a bit too. Great entry!

@gamepopper that's probably a bug due to javascript emulation, just wait without touching buttons and he'll show the ending screen with the last dialogs :)

Beautiful game, i enjoyed it well done

Great game! I LOVE the Pokemon inspired art and music! Probably my favorite from LD44 so far :)

@fat-cat RPG style like pokemon red/blue was my main inspiration with graphics, I actually studied a lot the pixelart in that games and used as reference to make mine.
I love them too, because Pokemon Red was the first videogame I played in my life :)
Thanks for the kind words!

Great use of the theme and it is very fun to play games with a retro feel like this one. Good attention to detail, I would have liked if you had some different dialog on the objects for further hints if you get stuck. I didn't realize I had to go to the cave gaurds house.

Good job on this one.

Great Game!

I like the gameboy-ish look and was really interesting to dive into it although I got stuck quite eraly on.

@joemanaco there is a link to the solution to all riddles into this game page, look at it!

I'll paste it right there:

### Solution to riddles
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hbYQ6XzqH2sUtJYAmIiUrRI1WvsO3iilr7DQv-NPvXo/edit?usp=sharing

This is awesome and great use of theme. Really feels like a gameboy game would fit right in next to Pokémon red on the shelf :)

Great game, really liked the feeling, graphics, story... It was perfect. You have my 5 stars

Lovely concept!

Wow, this looks great! When I get home I'm going to load it onto one of my GB clones for an authentic experience :)

@jjjjason awesome! Take some pic if you can, and share them here! I'll really be happy :DD

It's ending too soon! I was in the game and wanted to have more story to have!
Great work :)

Great idea with the cat. :smirk_cat:

Nice aesthetic.

@memel06 Here ya go! https://imgur.com/zywhcfo

edit: WELL DONE OLLO!

Wow man, this is really great. The puzzles were fun to figure out and all the lil people have great personality. Kudos!

Great game! Very fun!

First thing I did was say "no" to giving my life for kid, rip Ollo.

On restarting, played through. The old Gameboy aesthetic is nice, and paying in lives was a fun story element. Also, I have no idea how that child survived this long in the first place.

Nice job for compo!

so retro, much cool :)

The art is wonderfull and fully recreates a gameboy.

Interesting little game, throws me right back to early pokemon games =)

wonderful theme usage. congrats with the idea

Nice feel, I like the pokemon-like graphics. The collisions are a bit awkward, go stuck in the trees a lot of times.

Clever puzzles and nice use of cats 9 lives.

Impressive!

Yaa! That was really cool! The art style is really cool and the music is really cool in it's own way. Kinda threw me back to some old school pixel art games and music. The story thing is also very nice. Had a good time with ollo the cat! There was also some small bugs like getting stuck somewhere or things like that, but they didn't make my experience any worse. Congrats!

Was it made in GB Studio? I always wanted to try that one myself! Really cool you used it for Ludum Dare - and in such a great way!

I loved the game! The amount of polish was stunning, and you nailed the old gameboy vibe. The puzzles were also simple but nonetheless quite fun to solve. Plot was great, fantastic job!


NO, DONT YOU DARE, DONT YOU F--KING DARE.

The game looks really nice and has a ​charming old atmosphere!

Sometimes there was some problem​ with sound and game suddenly​ stopped​ when I pressed Z after interactive dialog at the end in the cave and nothing happened.

@orrchy it's a known bug due to emulation, just wait the dialog go up and disappear and you'll see the ending screen with the good end :) thanks for the kind words!

Incredibly well made and totally took me back to my childhood playing the original Pokemon games! Great characters, really enjoyed playing ollo.

Can't think of any criticism, really well made! Thanks!

Really enjoyed this game. The only criticism i can think of is that it would have liked to play more :)

how many cats does this guy need in a weak xD

Really loved the graphics, felt like a real GameBoy game really impressive that this can actually be played on GameBoy - way to go above an beyond!

Good take on the theme, very nice! :thumbsup:
Kept waiting for a wild Zubat to attack me in the cave :laughing:

I wish I had a Gameboy to run this on it, this is so cool! WebGL will do.
It's amazing that you made this in 48 hours! Beautiful pixel art, music and story.
And Ollo is such a lovely little kitty! :)

Loved the puzzles. I initially tried making all the rocks the same color, then it dawned on me that it was RGB. Loved the graphics and the music, really felt like a Gameboy game.

Hey @memel06 I loved you game! Keep updating it! Its awesome

Really polished game! The only critic I can have is how repetitive the music is for the length of the game, but it still is such a good game!

Definitely liked the game and bazillion super bonus points for the fact that it's a real GameBoy game.

The way it's an actual gameboy game is super impressive, and the sprite work is good too. I can't say I enjoyed the gameplay that much but this is still really cool to see

I like the idea to play with cat lives.

This game was so delightful! I was very impressed by the amount of content, and the use of the game as a storytelling medium. I'll remember you Ollo!

Where are the parents ? rofl

Nice game, and congratz for the Compo! As others have said puzzles seemed a bit out of place, and the controls were a bit iffy and not always responsive (but I understand the limitations).

Graphics and music were great as well, and the story was cute.

Also the lifes weren't really treated like a currency but I mean, the theme wasn't that great so who cares :P

@memel06 I was stuck after talking to the first guy on the HTML PC version but the smartphone version is Awesome !!! And there's also a .gb file ? Dude how did you do that ?

PS : Also, not only did we both went cats for this one, but I also made some GB games to play on smartphones for Ludum Dare a while ago, but it was fake GB.
If you're curious this one is still availiable : https://5you.itch.io/brains-of-racing

PPS : It's not self-promotion if it's an old game jam ;)

What a cute and clever game! Good job, had fun with this one

I love it ! Sweet graphism and great idea

Clever game. Really good art and sounds. Good job !

Loved this game! Thanks for making an iOS version, made things easy for me to play it where I am. Loved the Gameboy style graphics too.

Excellent work! It's a great game that above all other's I've played pulled me into the narrative and made me really take in the dialogue. I enjoyed the puzzles and made it to the end (I think), although it did bug out when I pressed Z when the text box lifted up (after you trade the last lives). No harm done, well done!

Cool game, brings me back to when I used to play Pokemon so extra points for that :)

I really enjoyed playing the game, its got very nice music.
I really like the concept of transferring lives from the cat to save people, however I would have liked to have seen this used as a puzzle to create large branching pathways of a story.

Hey! I Remember your game from the last ludum dare! This one has an awesome aesthethic! It made me really pokemon nostalgic, totally fitted the theme!

Wow, this is brilliant!! I really love it, so impressive for 48 hours! My only feedback would be that the dead trees seem to have a blank box around them, so they don't blend in with the rest of the game. Other than that, excellent work!

All in all a great game. Loved the premise and the gameplay is solid and fun

Extra points for ACTUALLY making a Gameboy game FOR the gameboy!

Thank you for giving us the option to -not- save that stupid a**hole child by the way, it's like he tried to die in the most ways possible in the shortest possible time frame. Go live your life Ollo, who is to say that d-bag wont chow down on some bleach the second he gets the chance when you're gone!

Nice solid game, though its pretty short. Very cool for making it for GB.

Well, daym, I'm impressed.

Game Boy Color modding is a hobby of mine, and I had a flash cart, as well as a USB flasher lying around ...


(Yes, this GBC is modded. The LD comment won't let me get the image upright for some reason.)

And it works ! Perfectly even ! I completed the game and enjoyed every second of it.

I'll admit that I am extremely curious as to what you used to make this. I doubt that you wrote it in assembly, that would take too much time. Even in C ... I'm not sure.

Again, I am honestly humbled. Well done !

Great style. I grew up playing gameboy in the back seat of my parents car using a flashlight to see at night. I love the feel. Nice game.

super cute game, I love the use of a cat's 9 lives, great use of the theme!

Really cute and fun game, puzzles are very challenging but not so much that you can't eventually figure them out with some thinking. Also that cat is so frickin cute <3

I really enjoyed _Ollo's Life_! The pixel art, concept, and execution were fantastic. However, I didn't manage to figure out the puzzle. I'll give it another try in the future!

@fluffy-kaeloky I'm also curious on what was used to make _Ollo's Life_. I've been wanting to try making Game Boy games for a while, but I'm not sure how to get started - Unity is all I'm used to.

Wow I'm amazed by how much content there is. Also the presentation is really nice. I'm happy to see that there is so much support for multiple platforms too!

I would really enjoy watching a time lapse of the making of this game! Well done! :)

I always find games developed for actual retro platforms cool. The intro could have introduced Ollo's human friend a bit better so we could know why Ollo cares about saving them :)

That was a really charming game with a bittersweet ending :) Loved the presentation, the gameboy aesthetic worked really well.

I didn't give the kid my lives. He didn't deserve them.

@mertios @fluffy-kaeloky

Take a look at this high-level framework, built in around gbdk.js

https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio

It's basically and Electron wrapper over lots of functions, that masks C-like code over blocks and have nice memory management and event system.

It surely have some bugs that you can get around of by juggling with the code itself, but it's great :)

You can also play with the Ollo's life project, I attached it as source code.

Maybe you can figure out some tricks that I do to get around of several limitations of the platform :cat:

nice graphics bit buggy but good job mate

I'm a huge gameboy nerd since it was one of my first consoles, so I'm a bit biased, but I really love the concept! The rock puzzle was a bit obscure, I have to say, since using colors for puzzles doesn't work well with the gameboy aesthetic. It might have been a good idea to use something that could have been represented graphically.

I actually just yesterday found two pieces of GameBoy Dev software: GBStudio and GBDK, so it was quite a cool coincidence to find a game like this right after ^^

In regards to the music: I can recommend the Super Audio Boy, which is a free VST by Impact Sound Works. It's from my experience cleaner than many other GameBoy VSTs and has a lesser amount of "ear-rapey" fragments that many 8bit VSTs tend to have.

VVIIIBBEEESSSS :D I love it :)

It's cool to see a GBStudio game made for this jam, as GBStudio is rather new. Good work! I played it with a GB emulator to give it the nearly-real feel :)

@memel06 Awesome ! Thanks for the link ! I'll take a look, it looks pretty fun to play with, and a good starting point for eventually making a game from scratch in C for the GBC.

Short but very beautiful interactive novel. In web version the sound was bit too loud, you might consider lowering it a bit

Very heartwarming <3

Not gonna lie, I got super stumped on the color puzzle. I think having to imagine the rock turning a different color while it remained the green color palette was a bit too much of a disconnect for me. Having the rock be dark or light and the sprite reflect that (This would require a different puzzle) would be a bit easier to grasp. Overall though, great presentation, and I really appreciated seeing what GBStudio can do. Will be giving it a go myself!

I loved this game!

Very nice retro styled, creates interesting mood.

It was a bit of thinking to solve those puzzles. The interactions were a bit slow, but I guess it's my impatience :sweat_smile:

I also felt for this kitten that he has so dumb master and he had to sacrifice itself :slight_smile:

Nicely done. Music, graphics and gameplay come together great here. Reminds me of my old gameboy games. Great entry.

Cool concept, but I never owned any nintendo products so I can't really feel the nostalgia. I couldn't even get past the first puzzle even though I got that it should be RGB, maybe it was a bug idk. I just think the format restricted the gameplay from being fun. Maybe if the stones would have actually glowed the color instead of a slow interaction telling you the color. If you're going to have a puzzle about color maybe add color? Or is it supposed to be ironic? To me it just feels stupid, maybe I'm too young to see the beauty of this game. Sorry for being honest.

whats your twitter account if we wanted to follow and see what you do in the future? :)

@peppsen hi! Thanks for your thoughts.
Actually, Gameboy doesn't have colors You can only use 4 shades of green, that's it. I choosed the RGB riddle because I felt that the LD community was ok with this kind of knowledge, also I thought was cool to talk about colors in a colorless game, because that was a witched place were things are magic and strange :)

Solid puzzles, great nostalgia factor and GBA fidelity, I just didn't really like the audio (specifically the soundtrack) a bit. It sounded like too many similar instruments were playing sometimes.
Besides that, excellent experience!

Oh, I've just played a Gameboy once a long time ago and that was an Advance, so it had color. I would have enjoyed it more with color. Modern technology has ruined my imagination, quite sad.

Wow this is incredible! Love the retro color tilesets/pixel art and music is spot on. Can't believe it actually plays on GB too. Is there a specific game engine/software you use to get it to work on Gameboy? Fantastic work either way

I didn't get a chance to finish it but it is nice to see another GB Studio game on the list. I really enjoyed the bit I did play and also nice job on getting some music in. I wasn't able to get a good song into mine.

I knew this game would make me sad ;) I don't have the original hardware, so thank you for providing an HTML5 port! This game is an outstanding technical achievement, and a touching bit of storytelling. Thank you for making this!

Just to be fair I think credit should be given where it's due, this game uses GB Studio. Many people (including me) in the comments above were fooled by that, the technical achivement is not the same at all. Also, I think it violates some of the Compo rules.

The game is still fine.

This is vanilla GB Stuio when you open it, with it's sample game pre-built : 

The code, some assets like the trees are already there... This should be a Jam entry, not a Compo.


http://ludumdare.com/compo/rules/

@5you Hi! thanks for your comment

I personally remade all the assets used by creating custom tilemaps, only using base assets as a reference on sizes (that's quite a mess when you talk about single pixels. Grass is still quite similar because that's just a reversed V made of pixels, I don't think this is a problem because I wanted to make that like this, I'm not creating a copy of a char or a landscape. Also derivative works are also well explained in the compo rules that you attached)

Please, do your comparison based on base art of GBstudio and mine, source is attached and you can check by yourself. Also, trees, rocks, Ollo, houses and rock tiles are all custom built, and I can demostrate that because I still have tilesets file :)

Also code was totally made by scratch, with tweaks to the GBstudio system to permit some of the logic part of the riddle.



Nice job.

The game is well executed and the theme is cleverly presented in the story.

Props for making an ACTUAL homebrew gameboy-game (and not just one that borrows the aestethics)! One can easily see where you draw your inspiration from. I myself enjoyed the Zelda & Pokemon -games of the GB/GBC -era back in the day, so this takes me back.

If there would've been one or two more music themes, and perhaps a "cut-scene" (= detailed art of the characters) the overall product would have felt more fleshed out.

But considering the time constraints the end result is a a very enjoyable playing experience.

*****

Btw: Apparently someone else did a jam-entry with a similiar cat-theme using the same tools as you.

You can find it here if interested:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/nine-lives-3

Cheers!

I really traveled back in my childhood! Good game! Itresting,not too easy.

Good job for finding a way to finish the story efficiently!

Having a look at GB Studio, I see better which parts you've worked on and which parts were already in the template. I was about to say the UI was a bit slow due to the dialog box moving in and out of the screen for every new text, but it seems this is not customisable in the editor. So I ranked you on the original content. Well, there doesn't seem to be a UI or Control/Game Feel category anyway, I guess that enters Fun and Innovation.

For simple games like this, I think the more direct the experience, the better. I was a bit confused by the coloured rocks, I think a bug showed the "Touch/Leave" question twice. And since the natural order was to touch from centre to outside, I wasn't sure if there wasn't something else I missed out. I guess a change of sprite shapes would have helped, since we cannot see colours anyway.

About the story/pacing, I thought the fever was related to the mushroom at first, making me feel I lost a life for nothing. But considering the whole sequence of events, now I think they were unrelated.

That boy though! What a pain! haha thoroughly enjoyed being the life giving Ollo! A nice little GB game, thanks for entering,

Love the game but it makes me not want to have children. Nice work :D

I don't have the nostalgia that most people rating this do, so I'll probably have a bit more of critical feedback, but that's the point of LD anyway. To be honest, I didn't enjoy it. The GB controls were unpleasant for me personally, and puzzles were overly difficult in my opinion. The music got repetitive quickly, and the lack of music in houses when there were multiple tracks in the rest of the game. I'm sure if I had other experience with GB games I would enjoy this more, but as it stands I don't really like it all that much.

The retro feel of the game was delightful. The game itself was tedious and the retro like wore off quickly. I still can't believe this is a fully operating game boy game. That's cool in and of itself. And that's the part i liked. :-)

This kid keeps getting himself into the worst situations, and Ollo ends up having to sacrifice himself over and over. It honestly sounds like a nightmare situation, and Ollo should have peaced out a long time ago.
I really love the commitment to the retro style of this game. The music and art really brought me back to being a kid and playing my gameboy for hours on end. The music did get a little repetitive, but I found it really impressive that you had multiple songs playing throughout the game.
Great game!

Super good game, my favourite so far in the jam! I loved how the little human got himself killed all the time 😂. Cool that you had multiple separate music pieces!

I couldn't even solve the first puzzle with rocks, so I looked up the solution. It's very hard to solve a puzzle if you don't know that you are suppose to interact with the rocks and that the rocks need to be a specific colour. Because of the art style, it is not possible to see to which colour you have set the rocks. I would recommend showing the player that they can interact with rocks. Perhaps change the puzzle so that you need to move the rocks (since the colour think doesn't work with art).

Ollo was never forgot :cry:

Really great entry! You nailed the Gameboy aesthetic, and made a very cohesive experience. I notice some people complaining about puzzle difficulty, but I thought they were a bit on the easy side. Easy is good for accessibility purposes, but I would have liked a couple more difficult puzzles.

Overall I have few complaints though! I enjoyed my time playing, and would have kept going if there was more :smile:

This game is very nice and cute, i liked the story.
but the music is kinda repetitive, it tires you very quickly

Wow man, the ending was truly emotional for me. Like you, I have had animals in my life that were so important to me, I will never forget them. Thank you for this! You really did move me with your game.

At first I of course thought: "What's wrong with this kid?" but it is actually a realistic portrait of a little child, doing whatever comes to their mind :-)

Also I did not even try to NOT trade my lives, I actually like the child and think the child-cat relationship is really cute. As I said, I have had dogs and cats as a child as well.

Story-wise this is the best game I have played so far. The talking rocks, the "witch wood", you really created a little world of its own here.

The graphics play a big part in this as well. Having grown up with the Gameboy I can instantly relate to what I see. You really hit the nostalgia nail as well. The graphics are very well made, reminding me of the Pokemon games. Thumbs up also for the occasional screen shake! I did not know you could even create that in a Gameboy game :-)

The music and sound are great little 8 bit tunes, I like how you created a unique atmosphere not only with graphics but with audio as well for each part of the world.

Overall a great entry! Keep up the great work, I am really looking forward to your next LDs as well!

Great nostalgia hit. It was particularly good on my android device. Something about holding it in my hands was especially satisfying. Good job

A nice little entry, short but quite complete (except the few places where there is no music… I would suggest leaving the main theme playing rather than silence; right now it feels a bit odd)

I left the spoiled kid to die and vowed to never forget Ollo. I’m sure he had a great life after that.

Great game! Really enjoyed the story , it's very cute. I am impressed that you managed to make a nintendo game in such a short time, really appreciate the effort! Overall the theme was met which was very rare in the games I played so far. Very nice!

really cute game!!!! Ollo is just 10/10!!!!! the graphics are awesome and it kept me smiling all the time :) great job!!!

It's just a little piece of retro-goodness :) Amazing achievement to complete an actual GB game (and not simply 'GB-styled' one). Good job!

that rocks :)

Loved the Gameboy style! Sadly, I couldn't move on from the rock puzzle.

Good work, but very sad ending.

Gave me so much nostalgia. I appreciated that it wasn't just got to point A, talk, and then go to point B. There were puzzles and a story and a world that broke up the going from here to there. It was nice and cute. Took the theme to a different place. Good job.

Sidenote: LOVE that you can actually play it on a Gameboy. Sending to a friend to try now. :)