pathfinding is hard...

Cool mechanic of getting the key to the door! There should be a tutorial somewhere tho, like in the description

:(


I like the art!

I won in a couple minutes :)

I enjoyed the art, some of those pixel animations are pretty smooth!

I can't @ you anon :( but that's an error with the new embed system on LD, either play it in FireFox or on the itch.io link

@infecsean Thanks! Right now this is the bare minimum of the bare minimum of the game (bare minimum squared, if you will), tutorial is a goal for when it's fleshed out better.

@cheesecube @jacob-diaz I also like @shreemp's art! The zombie is my favorite! :)

Thanks for playing this early draft of our game!!

As others have said, the art is great. I think it's a little quiet, though -- have you thought about
putting in some placeholder music? I find it really helpful at the early stages, and you can always swap it out for something you make specifically for the game later on.

I had the same issue getting my Godot game to embed correctly, but with a little bit of hacking I was able to get it to work. Details here: https://twitter.com/johnpennycook/status/1576756004061995009

Haha nice! I don't know what was happening but I loved the little sprite peeps falling over. Eventually, the one with the key opened the door and I guess I won! Yeah, loved this game :)

Not a bad start. Graphics style is nice!

The art looks nice, but it was hard for me to understand whats going on or what i had to do. Anyways this game is on the right track, keep going guys <3

Cool Work in Progress! we also had to deal with pathfinding for a bunch of our game. I like the animations and the music was pretty cool too. Keep up the good work!

art looks good! Even though it was hard for me to understand what was going on, but it is a good work in progress!

I was not expecting the key to just be delivered directly to me

@pennycook Haha, we rushed this build out to try and "finish" by the jam deadline. Just a sort of closure thing to show off the fruits of 72 hours (although I joined the team last night so less for me) and so we can rate&play. Music for sure is a top priority when we've recovered from the crunch burnout :) Thanks for the link by the way! I'll see about hacking the export later if the LD embeds are still wacky when we have a better build available.

@coda-highland Thanks!

@martina-angelico Thanks! It'll be clearer in later builds, this is like the most rushed min viable product haha.

@riphitter Haha, hope your pathfinding has less NPC left-right dancing issues than ours!

@conchrastw Thanks!! Hopefully it'll be clearer in our future builds :)

@piscythe haha, it's cooperative with the npcs! Mostly...

Thanks everyone!

I'm digging the art. I'm not sure if I did it "right", but I found the guy with the key and pushed him up to the door.
Was I supposed to do something with the drawers? I opened them all, but they seemed empty.

Not sure if it was the point but I pushed the guy with the key into the door and it opened :-)

I like the art / vibes a lot, it reminds me of the "of the Killer" games, if you've seen those.

@mikesalyh @vgel That's basically doing it right in the current build. It's a cooperative effort to escape the room, the NPCs can find the key too. Everyone can leave after someone unlocks the door. The drawers can also have traps, which kill the NPCs (which is why the zombies are there).

Also I haven't personally seen the 'of the Killer'/'Strange Town' games, no, but I looked it up and I can see what you mean! It really does have similar vibes :)

Love the character design. It's simple yet memorable. The animation of the guy being possessed and dying is really good. There's not much to the game yet but I'm very intrigued by the premise and mood. Looking forward to further development to see what this becomes. Good job.

Hmm.. I only had empty drawers and the person who found the key. I pushed him and got out. If you make a new build, then please tag me. I want to check it out!
Thank you for an interesting experience ^^

I am highly intrigued and want to follow this game to see where it's going...that said, i couldn't figure out how to play at ALL (neither mouse nor keyboard seemed to do anything), but I *loved* watching the lil guys run around on screen and live their lives. (I'm a sucker for zero player games)

@paul-avallone Thanks for playing! I agree, the death animation is so cool! Really glad to be working with @shreemp, his art and music are so fantastic! :)

@sofignedova Thanks for playing! Nothing mechanically changed, but we just put out a music/atmosphere build.

@jadedresearcher I'm glad you enjoyed the little ant farm! It's arrow keys to play (more control support will be in a future build, right now it's just default Godot settings) and enter/space to interact. Also, thanks for the follow on itch.io!! I hope our game keeps your interest as it grows! :smile_cat:

is music update time~~~~

enemies still don't do anything except look cute so there's still no threat yet...

Love the graphic style, no idea how to play but great experience

I get the "Failed to read the 'serviceWorker' property" error in the Ludum Dare embeddings, but the itch one works perfectly.

This is an interesting prototype, I'd like to see where future development takes it. Nice work!

@misfire-dev Glad you had a nice time! Thanks for playing!

@matt-ravenhall Yeah, seems to be an issue with Godot HTML5 builds but only in the LD embedding. Someone else in these comments posted a link on how to fix it, I just haven't gotten around to it, but I'll go ahead and work on that for this version of the build. Thanks for playing!

This is a huge trip. I had no idea what's going on and loved it!

I Like the art and I think it works well. I think some sort of tutorials would be nice as its hard to tell what you need to do.

Really quite fun love how the room vibe changes.

@ritz1231 That's what we're going for! Although it should be clearer in future updates :smile_cat:

@zyger Tutorials/instructions will be coming in the future! Right now we're working on the basic mechanics, it's a lot of complex systems interacting so the instructions would be incomplete.

@chrisdedev It's a lot of fun to fine tune the vibes!

haha, pretty cool, though not sure exactly what i did to win. i liked the mood changing every 10 seconds.

Loved the music and the changing mood, even though I didn't have to do anything to win X)

I'll be honest i have no idea what happened, but I, apparently, won, and that's good.

The music and artwork are working well together. A great start! Looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Graphics are nice, I like the core mechanic, now it just needs more puzzles ;)

I really liked the mood and art/animations! I think the main gameplay loop needs a little bit more to keep me replaying!

hehe thanks and it's true there's not much rn but we're working on the overscope hell to get something reaaaally playable before ratings are over rn papabirb is refactoring all my uncooked spaghetti code lmao so that stalled productivity by a few days lmao :point_right: :point_left:

Hello everyone who's ever commented on our game,

I wanted to say thank you for playing the earlier versions of our little extra project. Your early feedback was the push we needed to stay focused, and while it took all of the Extra period to get something close to a full prototype (still missing things, somehow! The over-scope was real!), I'm happy with where we're at.

I'm tagging all of you because I remember some of you expressed interest in being notified of updates - this is the final one that will be hosted here on LD, so I wanted all of you to have a chance to re-play our entry and let us know your thoughts if you were still interested, while the play&rate is still going for a few more hours. Either way, I wish you all the best of luck with your ratings when the results are announced!

Good luck and have fun with the rest of your rating periods, everyone!

@infecsean @cheesecube @jacob-diaz @pennycook @jjbug @coda-highland @martina-angelico @riphitter @conchrastw @piscythe @mikesalyh @vgel @paul-avallone @sofignedova @jadedresearcher @misfire-dev @matt-ravenhall @ritz1231 @zyger @chrisdedev @seansmeedcomposer @rinkuji @actuallythemoon @mediflect @ironfred @diego-teran

@papabirb Major improvement over the original version I played. I would make the E key also interact like the Space key. Really neat seeing all the different mini games. It's pretty easy to never take damage so you might want to do something to make it a little more challenging. Some of the mini games were hard to tell what I was suppose to do or what the final goal is. I love all the environment changes and the new art and effects added. The school girl one is very funny. Great job!

This game is rather interesting thematically. I am a bit confused by the gameplay loop though, I found the items but nothing seemed to happen when I used them as they needed to be used.

**Semi-on-the-fly remarks**

1. Wow, this is way too hectic to comprehend at a first glance! :o XD
2. As said on the game page: controls are layout-independent, great (I have an AZERTY keyboard). :) AND arrow keys are enabled. Apparently, the controls for the mystery/second phase (dark forest) is through clicking? It was not obvious to me at first sight. (Actually, BOTH keyboard + mouse, for all three phases!)
3. How does health work? I notice the other characters have hearts, but it is not obvious knowing if they are enemies or allies, or neutral.
4. Not sure what the ‘idol’ is supposed to look like.
5. Haha, the spoof of anime with the schoolgirl uniforms is great, and I love the bubbly music! Especially the contrast of having it right after the gloomy forest. XD
6. Weird: brought a key (which I had in my hands thanks to having the anime panel before; the transformations are useful! XD) to the upper door in the ‘survival’ phase, but pressing Space, it got thrown, and everything massively slowed down! And then, the other two phases are fine, but the survival phase is always slow. Relaunching the game.
7. Since the page says that new builds are on the itch.io page, and the latter says it was updated 5 days ago, taking a look at this one!
8. Again the slow-down in the first phase! And then: I still cannot manage to use to key for the door. ._.
9. I now understand that the zombies from the forest phase are those that died in the survival phase. XD Oh, and maybe the heartbroken anime ones too?
10. Died (against three simultaneous zombies!).
11. 10 seconds really is too short to get through the dialogue in the anime phase! :o I had less of this impression in the game *You vs. the clock featuring the narrator*, and I think this is because this latter game solely focuses on this aspect. Here, you have to go through all the other two phases, and then walk to talk to someone (even possibly grabbing an object first).

**Takeaway:** the idea looks original and comical, but I think there needs to be some way to convey more clarity to the player, and also some pause, despite the 10-second constraint! There must be a clever way, such as having several 10-second ‘inner’ cycles inside each phase. Still, I love how everything changes, including in surprising although logical ways (dead -> zombie). Not too sure I understood the whole gameplay (third phase: apart from bringing a present/object, does talking through a complete sequence achieve the talking objective? Ah, maybe you give a heart back!), but I am sure you could manage to get all of this clearer.

Thanks for the hecticness!

PS: I have played just a bit more because I tend not to like not finishing games. :p And I better understood some things: the survival phase is the one that is dangerous to companions (and I cannot validate keys, but they can, weirdly), the zombie phase is the one dangerous to you but where you can score points (and what I thought were brown branches are idols, and you paint the floor by throwing the bucket), and the anime phase is the one where you heal others by offering presents, possibly the prom/panel proposition, and talking rightly to them. I reached 4/10, and wonder what happens when you win (which is hard, since the circular saws just keep on killing the others! XD); pretty please? :3 Glad I understood the game better!

@mossieur-patate Wow, what a surprise getting such a detailed comment a week after LD51! I really enjoyed your semi-on-the-fly remarks about the game. It was a great insight into the mind of someone playing the game as intended - as the main programmer I was prone to waiting through 2 of the phases until it got to whichever one I was testing at the time.

Your comments overall rang true with what we ourselves have thought about the game - mainly, that if we continue development with it, then it needs a serious redesign. I like your idea about multiple 1--second inner-cycles - I'm not sure how we'd go about putting that into our design, but it is an excellent idea as 10 seconds per phase really is too cramped to get much done. You'll notice the anime phase had everyone moving very quickly - I did this to help mitigate the time issues by making sure everyone had designated spots.

You're correct that those who die in the 'Escape Room' mode are the zombies/heartbroken in the other modes. (The sawblades are also a danger to you, by the way!) I apologize that the door wasn't taking your keys - it was being pretty buggy in development, but was working when I built it. Definitely I'd want to rebuild the code from the ground up after a redesign, there were a lot of cursed bugs that had no reason not to work...

Overall, I'd say your understanding of the mechanics is pretty spot on: In 'Escape Mode', you and your companions need to take 10 keys to the door, at which point it will unlock and you can all leave; in 'Horror Mode', you have to throw the key item on the ground (since it will now be a paint bucket) to draw the pentagram, which is where you take the 10 idols to; in 'Dating Sim Mode', you can: 1. Use presents to heal 'dead' characters; 2. pick the right conversation options to heal them in general, and 3. invite them to prom if they have full health (as the health is also affection points in that mode). Leaving through an unlocked door, sacrificing all ten idols, or getting a date to prom are the win conditions.

Unfortunately we didn't have time to put in much of an ending, but if you win any of the 3 genres you get taken to a screen that says "you win" and offers a restart button, so you weren't missing much. We were considering having separate endings depending on which genre you completed, though!

Merci beaucoup pour les commentaires détaillés! :smile_cat: