New Horizons by Noctuaris12

New Horizons is a 2D platformer with a 3D environment that follows the journey of Mr. Anderson, whose psychiatrist advises him to go on a vacation to change his mind after the passing of his wife.

On the Island, Mr. Anderson will spend time swimming, diving, and exploring the area to try and change his mind, and try to carry on with his life. Surely he'll be able to make peace with his situation, right? And maybe, by exploring the depth of the island, he'll be able to through these tragic events. Or will this vacation that was supposed to help him process the death of his wife uncover something hidden deep within him?
Controls
You can play either with a controller or a keyboard, simply chose which one you prefer in the options menu.
Keyboard
Use A/D to move left/right and SPACE to jump
Controller
Use the LEFT JOYSTICK to move and press A/X to jump (ps5 controller support is hazardous at best with unity it seems, but it mostly seems to work, although controls are mapped differently, use the LEFT JOYSTICK to move around and press L2 to jump)
Tools
We used Unity to make the game, and pixilart to create most of the pixel art you can see in the game.
The music was 100% found on youtube and is royaltee free.
| Link | https://noctuaris12.itch.io/new-horizons-ldjam-48 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/new-horizons |
Ratings
| Overall | 1714th | 2.904⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1833th | 2.404⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1063th | 3.096⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1404th | 3.231⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1136th | 3.481⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 892th | 2.696⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 969th | 3.46⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 29🗨️ |
I believe you could read some articles from Thomas Grip (Frictional Games). They can be interesting for you.
Also Tom N, I see what you did there ;)
https://youtu.be/DHfy_7ZtjHk
The narrative sequence are too long in my taste, the text speed is very slow with no way of accelerating it and some dialogues don't really feel useful (they just summarize what something was said before). I think if there were more of those sequence but they were shorter it would be better for the global rythm of the game.
I feel like you maybe wanted to do something bigger and you didn't have the time to?
I quite liked the artstyle, the pixel art is really nice and the animations have a lot of personnality. The 3D shaders and post process are good work too, the amount of work that went into this art direction is actually quite impressive.
The controls were really fast I'm not sure if that was intended (maybe they aren't framerate independant?) but otherwise they work nicely, the transition from walking to swimming is smooth and that's not easy to do right.
Regarding audio, I would have liked the background music to stay during the gameplay sequence, it felt a bit less polished with no audio or sfx whatsoever. I also quite liked the talking sounds you made with the text appearing it had some nice nintendo vibes.
The story was deep. I liked how you made fun of the theme with it. The twist was a nice touch and even tough the story is quite dark, the humor was there nonetheless.
To sum it up, it was a nice entry, and a lot of work clearly went to this. Congratulation to the team and keep it up, I had a good time playing it :)
I would say, while I liked the story, you really need to either speed up the typewriting or add a button to auto play it, because the length of the opening almost made me stop - I'm glad I didn't though because the rest was really wonderful!
Congrats on submitting!
Sounds like a cool story with a rather cool surprise ;)
Game jam makes games with story very complicated to achieved in time
I like the idea to go deeper in mind and deeper in an environnement these are beautiful images in my opinion.
I really love your image shader for the swim part