The Last Word by stasm
The Last Word puts you on a quest for Words. These Words have power: they can change the rules of the world around you and help you brave the harsh elements on your path. But beware: changing those rules might benefits your enemies! You'll have to use the right Words, at the right time, to reach the end of your journey.
How to play
The Last Word is an infinite runner (with levels): you do not control the avatar that you see on the screen. Whatever you do, she will run. She might encounter obstacles, though, and that's where you come in. Use your keyboard to change the rules of the world around her. Each rule has a key attached to it, displayed to its left in the UI: that is the key you need to press. As long as a key is pressed, the rule is changed. Once you release the key, the rule comes back to normal.
Goal of the game
You play an entity who has an interest in this little girl finding more Words. What is that entity looking for? Well, you'll have to play to the end to find out…
Team
This game was made in 72 hours by Adrian Gaudebert (dev), Manon Halvadjian (3D artist), Staś Małolepszy (dev) and Caroline Vic (2D artist).
Tools
The game was made with Godot. Sources of the game are hosted on github here: https://github.com/adngdb/the-last-word
External resources
Because of reasons, we've had to use a few assets that were not made by us. That includes all of the audio assets, as we did not have any sound designers for this Jam. Here are the credits to all (I hope?) external assets we used. Thanks to their creators for sharing them!
Graphics
- Keyboard key by TRBRY - https://opengameart.org/content/keyboard-keys
- Vampire by irmirx - https://opengameart.org/content/vampire-animations
- Skeleton by irmirx - https://opengameart.org/content/skeleton-animations
Audio
- Ghoulish Fun by Eric Matyas - https://opengameart.org/content/ghoulish-fun
- Soliloquy by Matthew Pablo - https://opengameart.org/content/soliloquy
- Achievement effect by Little Robot Sound Factory - https://opengameart.org/content/fantasy-sound-effects-library
- Fire effect by artisticdude - https://opengameart.org/content/fire-evil-spell
- Water effect by rubberduck - https://opengameart.org/content/40-cc0-water-splash-slime-sfx
- Spikes effect by Jute - https://opengameart.org/content/items-door-fire-weapon-hits
- Plant effect by Independent.nu - https://opengameart.org/content/5-break-crunch-impacts
- Success effect by wobbleboxx - https://opengameart.org/content/level-up-power-up-coin-get-13-sounds
- Orchestra level up effect by bart - https://opengameart.org/content/level-up-sound-effects
- Enemy death sounds by rubberduck - https://opengameart.org/content/80-cc0-rpg-sfx
- Girl scream by Partners in Rhyme - https://www.freesoundeffects.com/free-track/nmh-scream1-466424/
Changelog
Version 1.0
This is the original build submitted in the 72nd hour of the jam.
Version 1.1
In this version we reordered the buttons to better match their actual positions on physical keyboard. Thanks to everyone who played the game and gave us feedback!
Known Issues
- In the HTML build, the sounds glitches when changing scenes. Please play the native builds, if possible.
Thanks for playing our game!
Ratings
| Overall | 229th | 3.797⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 157th | 3.797⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 108th | 3.922⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 418th | 3.5⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 357th | 3.828⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 594th | 2.633⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 385th | 3.548⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 23🗨️ |
I have to say that the sound design is really too loud and agressive though. But otherwise I enjoyed the game.
Still really cool, I loved the idea of mixing different hazards
loved the themes, the arts, the funny creepy sounds! good job
Awesome work done here. :3
@reblys Yeah we didn't have anyone working on sound, so I did all that myself on the last day and haven't been very good at it. But at least there's sound! :smile:
@citsua That's very good feedback, thank you! The keys would indeed be better off in the actual order they appear on our keyboards.
only the cute girls scream is to much for my ears^^
The art style was also pretty neat.
The hit boxes on the grabbing vines was a bit weird though, seemed like you had to walk into them a bit in one level, to be able to kill of the vampire.
Overall a pretty good game.
I pressed all the keys at once and felt like a hacker finishing the game easily :D
The WebGL version definitely seems a bit buggy with the sound, but even though it's buggy and from an external source, I think it definitely helps the vibe a lot! Great work adding it in at the end :smiley:
For future games (or this one if you take it further!), I would recommend spending a bit more time on providing feedback to the user. It took me awhile to figure out how the vampires/skeletons work since there's no specific key for them, but that was the only really confusing part. You already have some steps in the right direction with tinting the buttons and de-illuminating harmless objects, so I would just play them up more. The lighting effect in particular was really subtle, and I often found myself glancing to make sure I was pressing the right buttons. One way to go about it would be animating the objects, then turn off that object's animation when the correct power is activated. Another quick and dirty option is to drop the saturation when an item is rendered harmless (e.g. red/yellow jackolantern and flames to a b&w version) but be careful with color-only indicators since color-blindness might make that less noticeable.
Overall a super nice game! I made it all the way to the end!
Other than that nice work :thumbsup:
Well done!
Good stuff :8ball: