Great graphics, great mood

GENERAL:

This is a great entry, although a short game, it has almost everything in it. I would recommend this to show to students of Game Design and other types of education/training ... It shows how Media, Gameplay(Programming) and Narrativedesign can work well together.

MEDIA:

The Pixel Art is on-point, showing a good sense of lighting, mindfull color usage, following a consistent style is more important than flashy effects. Maybe there should have been a highlight on the students face, but we are talking about 2 or 3 Pixels ...

There are fitting soundeffects & Characters talk in a mumblespeak so you can recognize who is speaking without being disturbed reading the text.

GAMEPLAY:

Yet again your game hold up a good standard with it's dialog system & point&click typical mechanics of finding and using small items... Having a crafting sequenze is a highlight in the game.

The only weak part of it is how short this game is, but it is a great vertical slize ... that makes one wonder how a fully fledged out or a hour long version (made in an extra at Ludum Dare) would be.

NARRATIVE:

The Setting is a kind a surprise - or better said a well made subversion of my expectation - initially looking like modern day or a couple decades ago - there is some lore that this is not our world.

Homunculus' story is told well paced, with no need of an intro, but in gameplay, starting with a dialoue that leads to a couple of tasks ending with a sequence holding a surprise at the end - as expected ;D

:dvd: :dvd: :dvd: :dvd: :dvd:

@oillen Thank you my friend, you can't even imagine how much I appreciate your reviews, EVERY TIME!

I know the "game is too short" is probably the most used sentence in every single of my Jams. I wish I could make it longer, but time is scarse. I use majority of time doing graphics and programming and game design and length is not so well polished.

Really nice game, pixel art is great and gameplay is pleasant. I like puzzle games and point and clicks so it's all good. I would definitly buy a game like that if it was longer/a bit harder.
Shoutout to the voice acting! ^^

Very impressive! Love the art. The audio is fantastic, and it's great to see the world you've built. Great job!

Great job guys, really impressed how you come up alone with it (appart from the music of course), you deserve to be in the top place 👏 From the story to graphics, it's really on point with a great respect to the theme, well done!

Awesome job guys! ^^ I tried making the other potions for possible alternate endings but I couldn't do it, and Im not googling how to make opium..

@rickylee Haha, thanks my friend. Well, unfortunately there wasn't much time for multiple endings. But my initial idea was to make like three. 1) Creature kills them 2) You kill it 3) You kill professor.

Impressive stuff. Art work is really standout standout. Great job guys!

Very very beautiful game. Art is just gorgeous. Gameplay is quite fun too and atmosphere is spot on. Music and audio is also great. I definitely was expecting that ending :)

Just wow, the game is awesome, graphics is beautiful, sounds of dialogs were a very nice touch. I thought I heared a little bit of Polish accent in there? :)

One drawback for me - fitting it to the "harvest" theme felt sort of forced, but I appreciate out-of-the box thinking

Love a point n click game! I even had a few 'huh! where is the damn correct pixel' moments like in a proper point'n'click. Very impressed at the level of polish here, it's a shame the homunculus wakes up so violently, I wanted to see where this was going.

This looks really great. It's very well done. Short, simple, and to the point. Great job!

Really, really cool game! Congrats! -Mike

Love the art

That art is something else, very impressive to have done all that 72 hours!

@ben-toosey Thank you Ben! Well the trick is to focus on art and make very short game with no gameplay at all hahah.

No seriously, first of all I make Point and click games, which is very easy to make. I also use AGS engine which is also very easy to use. So I save a lot of time on coding which I can invest into making art :)

Cracking job! I laughed so hard at the end when I woke it up. Great pixel art (of course), cool moody music, quality retro point and click vibes and just the right length for a game jam.

Really cool idea, I absolutely love the art style, I could use some lesseons in pixel art! I'm not gonna be original saying it's a bit short, cause I enjoyed it so much that I would love to see some more

@alex-de-la-cour Thanks man, appreciate your feedback. Good luck and have fun playing other games as well!

@kuboxxxxx Thank you for your feedback. I'm really happy you liked the game, and yeah, making short games is my curse I guess. I'm not a good programmer, so it takes me a lot of time to code something so I try to keep it short.

By the way, talking about lessons, I happen to run art/pixel art courses. I teach both kids and adults, beginners and intermediate artists. It you are interested just hit me up on my e-mail brocekdavid@gmail.com and we can discuss this further :)

Very nice graphics, loved the voice bits too

Really beautiful game, and fun to play! RE your pixel art course -- do you have some tuts vids on youtube? :)

@avi Thanks for playing my game :)

No, I have online courses, with realtime conversation and workflow. It's more like an online class. But designed to help your needs. For example, if you want to learn how to make a top down RPG style graphics, we won't waste time by me explaining to you how to set up side scrolling paralax effect for example.

I liked the way it used the theme; it was clever. The visuals were aesthetically pleasing, and it's got me interested in knowing a bit more about the world. The potion-building mechanic was interesting too! The overall mood was on point!

Oh this was so polished and has perfect scope. This is probably my favorite entry so far, and is likely to stay that way. Really nice job on the art and simple story!! The book art was probably my favorite part.

The most polished game I've seen so far. I'm not a connoisseur of adventure games so it might just be me, but I had a bit of trouble clicking on the different objects. Something that might be nice is doing a little highlight around a clickable item when the cursor hovers over it.

Anyways Graphics, Sfx, music are all top notch. Loved it.

@phlip45 Thank you for playing the game and thank you for your feedback!

Instead of highlighted cursor I used the word appearing at the bottom of the screen. So it shows you what you are hovering over. But you are right, for better visual response I should have used highlighted cursor as well.

Not really a fan of point and click but this is good :)

Love the art style and the mood set by the game.

Thanks for the game !

This is cute - great visuals and music but the voice acting was kind of distracting. I would've preferred some more gameplay instead of text but it's still a very good entry. Great job!

Amazing mood wow ! Wanted more of it ! Music, and pixel art was great as well
Maybe not that fan of the voices, but nontheless, amazing work !

Love the art and character voices. The mood is perfect

A beautiful game with a fantastic atmosphere. Interesting experience. Lever was hard to find :sweat_smile: I would love to see it as full game!

The game has an amazing graphics and mood. I have some struggles with finding what is interactable and what is not. But overall nice job.

Mysterious atmosphere and interesting narrative! Good work!

Absolutely outstanding! I burst out laughing when I suggested "A human sperm" and was told I was correct, and then lost it when the professor said "inside every sperm is a tiny human".

Brilliant.

@procrasteroid Haha, yeah it sounds funny, but it is actually what scientists believed back in 18th century. I tried to put it in as a little trivia :) They thought that sperm has already a human being in it, and they just grown in the womb. They didn't know the egg was also required for the baby to grow. Good ol' days eh?

Magnificent art and the gameplay combined brought me back to the heyday of Adventure Game Studio times, nostalgia kicked in instantly. The lore & texts were actually quite interesting and made me check on things on the internet. Which is a great sign as the game motivated me to do something else, rare.

I can easily imagine this being a longer full-blown title, though I I'm not sure what way the narrative could be expanded on.

Splendid work all around!

@iluvatar that's so cool! Honestly you deserve extra points for that level of detail!

Incredible work! Graphics, mood, audio are production quality!

Glad to see that im not the only one looking for different endings ;)

Everything in this jam game is on point, the graphics being the most impressive. I saw your post on the main page during the jam and couldn't wait to see the finished project, you guys did not disappoint!
5/5

The art is gorgeous, dialogue and sound design super cool. I miss a bit of struggle and the game is short but it's perfect for the jam ! Good job !

Nice point 'n click game! I expected the ending to happen when it did (would be very surprised to see such polish otherwise!) but it was still a shame that there wasn't more of a game before: more twists or tasks to solve before the homunculus is woken. I enjoyed the audio, both the ambiance and the "speech", which was a nice touch. Graphically the game was quite pretty and consistent, though I would have liked to see more animations, even if they were not strictly necessary, e.g. for pouring the potions into the vial, or for moving about the room (maybe too cliche but still a staple of point 'n clicks for me!).

In terms of gameplay there wasn't all that much and if my previous games are any indication I get the feeling that you spent a long time setting up the "system" for dialogues, items, etc rather than using it. A possible improvement to make would be to highlight interactible items. There wasn't really a point where I was pixel hunting, but I could see how the "lever" could be easily missed, for example.

One thing I wished I could do was to create the other potions in the alchemy book. The game allowed me to pour the ingredients into the vial, but then I couldn't light the torch -- of course I had to "reset" the potion by adding another incorrect ingredient and only make the correct one.

Good job!

Beautiful game. The potion mixing was fun, and gave a good feeling when I got it correct. Thanks for the game.

Very nice! Short but sweet. Wasn't expecting the characters to agree with some of the more 'out there' dialogue options, lol.

Haha this one is awesome! We made a homunculus game last jam!

@slush So cool guys! I just checked your game it's freaking awesome! It feels like a full release 90's 3D horror game. It's funny how we both got the same Homunculus aesthetic. Both using the concept for horror pusposes haha. Which is kind of the opposite of the original scientific idea. The "real" Homunculus was usually portrayed as a little human, almost like a child or a doll, a cute little thing haha.

But I guess it feels more on point to think that something created by a human is scary. Like Frankenstein's monster for example.

This is a really nice little point and click game. As the others have already mentioned, it's a bit short and easy but the mood is amazing. Great job!

After your suggestion on my post I tried out the game on mobile, didn't quite work I don't think. I got past the dialogue and picked up the matches and gear, but couldn't progress any further than that.

Looks really nice though:)

@bobbo Oh, sorry, I didn't test it properly, because my phone is rather slow, so I didn't know. Thanks anyway for trying, much appreciated!

Gorgeous! Love the color palette and steam punk vibes. In a complete coincidence, I am actually in the middle of a book on the history of biology that's talking about the old homunculus theory! I was delighted that this came up at the same time. Great game, great theme.

The graphics are beautiful and the story drew me in immediately!! I love this type of game, I'd love to play a fully fleshed out version. Unfortunately I got stuck trying to make the potion, I put in the right ingredients, but I couldn't figure out how to light the match.. It seems like I'm the only one who ran into that so maybe it's a me problem!!
Beautiful work!

Well that was great! It probably wasn't broken on phone, it was just hard to click the lever.

I loved the art style and the voices. It's very moody. For some reason the cute and humorous looking art style combined with the very dark themes, music and ending, just made it more unsettling :D

Great job guys

It's a nice little Point'n'click game. I would hope for it to be longer, which is not a critique but the opposite.

Loved it, a perfect bite sized adventure game.

Ok, so I was really exited when I saw the screenshots (especially lab and the book), but when it came to playing I had a lot of problems. I didn't expect it to be a quest with a lot of dialogs. Here's some thoughts:

- Graphics are well done, good job here!
- Game start is too long. I almost dropped the game on the first 15 dialogs. I came here not to read, but to play.
- Thanks for the option to skip dialogs quickly!
- Texts are not very well written, there are some typos and texts are written by not native, probably (which is totally ok for a jam, just an observation)
- I dropped playing right after I stuck on the first screen. I got the book and... that's it. I don't know what the game wants from me, and it's pretty frustrating. This is the problem of old quests, so you may say that the design is old. Some hints would be nice.
- Embedded version on this page doesn't load (it says Downloading all the time for me), so I had to open WebGL version on itch.

### Where I stuck:


---

### Some suggestions:

- Don't make player read a million dialogues in the first minutes of the game. Let us play.
- Show the main mechanics (at least some hint would be nice) – like drag and drop stuff, maybe some hint arrows for the first actions in the game.
- Add let's play on YouTube for those who couldn't complete the game and even advance after room 1, so we could watch the gameplay and content even if we didn't get the controls.
- Add link to itch in Links section (you have only Windows one there)

---



Screenshot 2 and 3 are very well done! Again – graphics are really nice!

A great point and click!
not too long not too short, a certain variety of gameplay, fantastic atmosphere given by the graphics, the music and the writing of the dialogues! Very good work!

Gorgeous and solid entry. Everything worked together so well to provide us with a vertical slice of gameplay that perfectly encapsulates the feel of a classic point-and-click adventure. The pixel art is fantastic, the music and story all help to set the mood.. even the voice effects are a nice touch! I played through again to try to make the other potions, would have been so cool to have multiple endings, but it's already so well done regardless.

Really nice art and music in this, I forgot it was a jam game for a moment. At times though, it was a little hard to click on some things (the lever hitbox, notably).

I thought the chemistry puzzle would have the shape of the flask be part of the solution, but it still did a good job of drawing me into the scene. While it may have just been a limitation due to the time constraint of the jam, it reminded me of how Powerhoof uses "non-puzzles" in their point-n-clicks (certainly beats old-school nigh-impossible to solve puzzles!):

https://youtu.be/mivFQB7DAmI?t=311

Beautiful art, a fun (weird) story, and some great audio - no bugs that I noticed. I liked how it didn't tell me exactly what I was meant to do, but I worked out the potions anyway. A very polished entry.

Very great game and an amazing pixel art. i love it.

Had a hard time with the lever puzzle and I wish there had been another ending depending on what potion you make (there were three in the book, so I thought different ones might result in different endings). Still, pretty incredible in terms of mood and atmosphere. Great pixel art and very good music.

@animatrix1490 Thank you for your feedback! It's greatly appreciated.

I think this is one of those situations when creator intended something else than user expected.

1) First of all I wanted to make three endings, but actually only one of them were supposed to be related to the alchemy puzzle. So still, there would be just one puzzle... because...

2) ...because the three recipes in the book indicate that the book is actually a lexicon of alchemy knowledge, trying to feel more realistic, rather than just a one-recipe-book. So the other recipes were there to basically divide your attention. To look more into the book like "Hey, there are three recipes...A-ha! It must be this one, because it says potent life, and the professor was talking about a life potency elixir."

So it was something like if you are in college and professor tells you "go to the library and find out how to fix this computer." So you go to the library, you go through bunch of books and chapters until you find the correct information. It's not like there is one book with one page saying "THIS IS HOW YOU FIX THE COMPUTER."

So that was my idea behind it. Now I see that more people had a different understanding of what I intended, so that's why I'm happy for this feedback because it makes me realize that I could have done something better.

Really cool game! Really enjoyed the art style, reminded me a bit of the old Sierra adventure games. Story and setting was really cool, would love to see more in this setting :)
I had a few relatively minor issues:
1) Would be nice to get a better "fail" interaction when you do something wrong (even just "I can't use the gear there"). In many cases even if I was holding an object, the interaction just gave the same interaction as clicking on the thing without the object which felt a bit buggy.
2) It was often not clear where the actual mouse pointer position was when I was holding items (since there was nothing pointing towards a specific pixel position), so it felt a bit uncomfortable trying to find the correct place to hold it. Maybe if there was always a small pointer next to the object or something similar? [or maybe if the object itself was highlighted when you were pointing it]
3) The potion book page was super confusing since it has three different arrows (one to go to the next page, one to go back to the table, and one to go back to the room), and I kept clicking the wrong ones.

Anyway, really cool game, thank you for making it!

Great aethetics and atmosphere. Though we've know you were lack of time in jam but still can see a great potential in it! Short but impressive!

Such a great looking entry and fantastic writing! Well done! I run into a peculiar issue where the mouse cursor would start moving on its own :o

As a fan of point and click adventure, I can hardly not love this game! The art and writing are excellent and the alchemy mechanic was fun. The only complaint is that it could have a been a bit longer!

Beautiful entry. The pixel art was excellent, audio helped build the mood and the writing was generally engaging (although unfortunately suffered a from poor grammar and spelling, which broke immersion for me). I enjoyed the puzzles, especially for a game jam the inclusion of the alchemy table was fantastic. My only other gripe is that the hit boxes for picking objects was a little fiddly, and would have benefited immensely from some form of highlighting. Otherwise one of the best entries I have played so far, well done!

The audio kept not playing, so even at the final punchline the game was mostly silent other than music :(

Nice little game here, I really enjoyed the atmosphere and backstory. The way you did the voice audio is really interesting sounding, almost like a different language. I got an ending where the homunculus came out of the tank and presumably attacked the others. I wonder what other endings may be possible...

always good to see a point and click adventure game in any game jam :smile:

This is way better than I would expect anyone to be able to do an adventure game in 3 days, amazing, the art, writing, and audio were all fantastic, I only wish it could have been longer, but really I just don't think it would have been possible to do anymore in 3 days, its just great!

I tried another new game just to test what would happen when I throw another potion than intended one, but I couldn't finish the "cure death" ("beauty" needs tea that I didn't find), because the heater didn't "exist" after I filled the ingredients, you got me ha ha :joy:
I love old fashion p'n'c games, so you started with a solid bonus, but the story - as short as it is - the dialogs, and the little alchemy gameplays make this game very pleasant to me, well done!

Awesome to see an AGS game running as webgl! Didn't know that was possible :D Good on you for going for a point 'n click in LD, it's notoriously hard to pull one off in such a short time frame. You did the right thing aiming for a very short thing that you could have time to polish, since the art and audio stand out, giving a great mood.
I adore your pixel art, really great :D

Personally, I'd have added a few hints of what to try when you click things (like clicking the lever could say you need a gear to fix it, etc) to push people in the right direction (especially for a LD game where a lot of players wouldn't be familiar with the genre). But I got to the end pretty easily. Made more sense after reading that you intended to add more, it felt like there was more I should have done, to continue to do more potions from the book. But it's plenty for a jam game!

Anyway, congrats on the game!

Nicely polished game but very short. I liked the mood and the graphics and the voice over babbling was funny :)
I hoped there would have been more to play, now it was mostly speaking. But I understand that the lot of time for so small of a team went to making music, animations and writing the story.
Ending was still good (or was it bad ending :D)

The athmosphere in this game is thick, the graphics spectacular, and the sound design intricate. Your storytelling and pacing is on spot - congrats for this great entry!

... I have just figured out, that the play button at the beginning of the page here doesn't start a video, it start the game embedded on the website here - O.K. cool!

I love your pixel art style. The voices are cute, the theme is creepy and the music is decent! I'm not a fan of lots of text or point-and-click games but even I can tell a lot of work went into this. Amazing work!

Art style is great, garbly voices are amazing, really intruiging story... its just that... I couldn't figure out where to place the gear or the match box. I will have to revisit this again. Maybe a hint or something would be good. I'm great at combat games but maybe not so good at puzzles! Haha

Art is beautiful, and the story is funny. Good job!

Hi! This was very well made game! Graphics is awesome like usual. The whole mood created by art, music and everything else feels so fitting and well polished. Super cool vertical slice. I had no issues with finishing the game but it wasn't too obvious so I'd say even difficulty balancing for game jam game was good. Great entry!

Only one thing - I thought the game is for windows only so I almost didn't play it :) I'm just not used to LD page embedding yet, I guess.. You could add HTML5 link below the windows link, though! :) I can see now that it's written in description but... ehm.. yeah, it's my fault :) Anyway, I'm glad I have noticed it, I had good time playing the game!