Dream Catcher by Mykola
Story
Have you ever had a dream where you're falling deeper and deeper scared and excited of what is down below? Experience the same feeling navigating your personal raccoon through his trippy dreams. Do you have what it takes to handle dreamy physics and uncover their true nature?
Controls
- A/left arrow and D/right arrow to rotate
- W/up arrow and S/down arrow to move forward and backward
- Space to air dash
- Backspace to wake up and start over
- P to pause and unpause
- Escape to quit
More details in the in-game tutorial.
Make sure to hit Backspace at the end of tutorial to proceed to the actual game!
Credits
All the contents apart from the font were developed from scratch during the game jam by Mykola Herasymovych (game design, coding, sound, art) and Halyna Oros (game design, art, voice acting, playtesting).
The soundtrack was composed by Mykola Herasymovych during the jam. Check more tracks at https://soundcloud.com/mykola-herasymovych.
The font Cartoon Fun Font was developed by Darrell Flood at https://www.fontspace.com/cartoon-fun-font-f51921 and used under the free license.
Tools used:
- Unity3D
- Krita
- FL Studio
- Audacity
Notes
If you get stuck or for some other reason can't finish the game yourself, you can watch @eric-smith nailing it in his stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1003785681?t=2h32m32s.
Windows built messes up the initial menu screen position on load but it gets fixed after the first waking up. We recommend playing the browser version for a smoother experience.
Bug fixes:
- Adjusted sprite import settings to remove dithering on the edges.
- Adjusted the last tutorial message to explicitly ask players to hit Backspace. Deactivated all other inputs at that point to make sure that players complete the tutorial and get to the main game.
- Added "Skip tutorial" toggle to the menu screen for those whose game crashes when they hit Backpace so that they could still proceed to the main game.
- Adjusted sound effect triggers to be less regular and annoying.
- Adjusted the difficulty a bit to make the game easier to win and discover the ending.
Many thanks to those who reported these bugs and let me improve the game experience.
Enjoy the game and thank you for playing!
| Link | https://kolebas.itch.io/dream-catcher |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/dream-catcher |
Ratings
| Overall | 715th | 3.628⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 792th | 3.43⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1069th | 3.093⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 568th | 3.895⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 778th | 3.791⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 188th | 3.988⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 146th | 3.89⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 516th | 3.798⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 52🗳️ | 71🗨️ |
But it seemed fun to play in the beginning! If I really like skill based games so it was a nice mechanic! :slight_smile:
I think it would be easier to control for those who are used to traditional game controls, if the movement keys were rebound to A/D and Q/E. This might just be my opinion, though. Well done!
What you should do is to hit backspace when it introduces it in the tutorial and then you'll be able to start the real game. Please try it out, as it's quite skill-based and challenging indeed, and there is an unexpected twist if you manage to beat the game. :)
I loved the graphics and the animation on the main character. The cute raccoon is extremely cute and the environment is a pleasure to look at. There are some aliasing issues, but that's really a minor complaint for a jam game.
Movement feels nice, responsive and natural.
I met a bug when I ran the game for the first time. It just hanged on the second tutorial line, I could do nothing to "unhang" it. But I restarted and all went well the second time. That was on downloadable version.
It's a very cool simple game. Very solid entry!
Addition: I found an odd bug. On one of my runs I was at about 200/300 depth and then no more obstacles spawn. I closed the game at 1200 depth.
@peculiarcarrot, @landosilva, @totteriludum, @fabula-rasa, @waltsontanaka, @hoeleboele, @mighty-mufflon-games, @minefreak thank you so much for the detailed feedback and suggestions, they are invaluable. I carefully went through them and tried to cover most of the show-stopper issues in a post-game version of the game with bug fixes. You are more than welcome to try it out!
@waltsontanaka regarding the cuteness and swearing we fully agree with you and plan to make a child-friendly version of the game. For the jam version, we thought that it might be too cute, so decided to balance it out with some black humor. You might want to try getting to the ending of the game to discover what's behind this controversy. :wink:
@minefreak regarding the procedurally generated obstacles, they actually are there in the main game. I'm afraid that you've encountered a bug in the tutorial phase and didn't get transitioned to the main game. Sorry about that! You can check it out in the updated version with bug fixes now. :slight_smile:
@eric-smith we really appreciate it that you took your time to play our game on your stream and give us some really good feedback. Fixing the sprite import setting made them look much better! Would you mind if I add the link to your stream to the game description? This way, those who get stuck or can't play the full game for some reasons, can still see the full content of the game.
Какой милый маленький енот! Он так сладко спит! Только... Почему он ругается матом? Плохой, плохой енот!
Увлекательное приключение вместе с маленьким недовольным енотом ^_^
Are you plaing with your ass?
@pnkvrt thank you very much for playing and the feedback! Yes, we started with standard controls where it moves in the direction you press but it was too easy and not consistent with the falling / dreaming concept. So we changed them to be harder to manage and more affected by the physics of falling and floating. This way, it felt more like navigating through a dream and trying to move while falling. So the iffiness is kind of on purpose. You can also do some cool and funny flip and parkour tricks with these controls. :slight_smile:
incredibly cute game! I loved the physics-interactions especially (for example when hitting one of those cottonball-thingies!)
Some remark: sometimes tutorial texts are behind the raccoon and hard to read. Expectation: texts are shifted to be fully visible.
Great entry!