Lonely Year by Shanzhai

A small game about staying (and maybe keeping) things alive.
Made completely from scratch in close to 72 hours.
Powered by Godot, DefleMask and Pyxel Edit.
| Youtube | https://github.com/herrnett/Lonely-Year |
| Youtube | https://shanzhai.itch.io/lonely-year |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/lonely-year |
Ratings
| Overall | 2180th | 3⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 2363th | 2.569⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 2139th | 2.768⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 2169th | 3.052⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1285th | 3.586⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 866th | 3.379⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1939th | 2.043⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1761th | 3.058⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
I would say that maybe some instructions in the beginning maaaay be nice? I found myself fumbling with buttons a bit before figuring out what did what. Overall, awesome stuff!
Then I slept for days and days until uncle was back, then the same but I buried an apple so there was a big tree when uncle came back.
Is there a good ending? It feels like sleeping simulator, haha.
Other than that, I like the simplistic graphics and music, I can see it working if it had some more depth.
Really liked how surroundings were changing with time, and little things like clothes and stuff. And how the well ran out of water so u had to drink this from this poisonous waterfall that at times turned to be okay, but mostly you'd just get sick and not drink for a few days not to die. Didn't manage to plant the tree though, couldn't figure it out.
Naturally I flung myself off the cliff on the first game, and seeing the death screen early on helped me figure out what I was meant to do -- I assume by the temptation of the cave that this was intentional.
It took a little while for me to believe that sleeping was progressing anything -- I'm not sure if this is intentional, I guess the feeling of sleeping and hoping for something better is very appropriate for the game title.
The apple was delicious.
My only feedback would be to either have some sort of display when the game is waiting on the player to press space to continue, or mention it in the description somewhere, as I had thought my web browser just wasn't running the game correctly at first.
Strenghts :
- Consistent retro aesthetic
- Lots of interactions
Possible improvements :
- Provide a bit more guidance at the starts
Good job !
@joe-bustamante
This might be good to know for you guys as well: A Mac-using friend just told me the game fails to load on Safari with a “call_indirect to a null table entry […]”-error. The Problem seems to be on itch.ios side, since the exact same files run on github pages without any problems.
After a few experiments (and a few bad endings) I think I understood my goal. I personally like that not a lot of guidance was given at the beginning - I like that I was allowed to make mistakes - and I was rewarded (in a way) with learning that each time I had found a unique way to fail - complete with its own title and everything!
After that, it did begin to feel like each day I had to repeat the same tasks over and over again in order to proceed. I may have not experimented enough to understand that there were other things I could do, however. How many possible endings are there?
The visual style of the game was just lovely. It's such a neat and effective treatment to use two or three pixels alone to represent the characters - it lets the imagination fill in the rest. A very nostalgic experience.
Thanks for sharing!
yeah i just watched it and was amazed by how long you actually kept playing given the repetiveness of the task. watching you playing actually helped me a lot, since it gave me quite some ideas on how to make this better and more comprehensible aside from the often noted control-thingy. when i made it i just felt it fits the theme of not knowing what to do and the controls (left, right, space) would be easy enough to figure out. to un-boring the whole thing, i guess skipping the intro after the first death or even starting from the beginning of the season the player died in would've been a great way to get the player to a/the good end faster and then just let them explore all the ways to fail if they so wish.
all in all theres i think 8 ways to die: all diffenrent combinations of being sick/hungry/thirsty plus getting lost or jumping off the cliff. the last ones were intended to early on hint the player what the game is about which... yeah, kinda worked, it seems. some other things however didnt work: the water actually isnt poisonous in sommer which the palette change was intended to hint to - but seeing how you thought it was just a palette change because everything looked way brighter in summer, that didnt really work out after all. also i didn't notice the music is too quiet, just matched the volume to that of the speaking-sfx and didn't check how loud everything is in comparison to lets say a song or something. i'll remember to do this next time.
so all in all it was a great watch, i learned a lot for the next game, so: thank you very much for playing it and providing more feedback than i could ever have imagined. next time i definitely will sit down next to my test player(s) and watch them play instead of just letting them play by themself and provide feedback, theres so much to learn by just watching.
a final note on the endings: aside from the 8 bad endings, there are 1,5 good ones: on the first day of spring your uncle (i intended to work a zelda:alttp-joke in but didnt end up having the time left, so it just ended up being an obscure reference) will come back and say a few things on how everything is fine again and he is happy to see you well. fadeout, final scores. however, if the player manages to nail everything perfectly (healthy, no thirst, no hunger, tree level max) he'll also say how he is proud of you. a minor detail that doesn't even get it's own named ending, both are just "the end". theres a few more minor things going on there, but those are the major mechanics.
again: really happy to have been able to see you play the game, thanks a bunch!