Gecko's Chronicles: The Miserable Men by RAFFE
Dive into the surreal world of Gecko's Chronicles: The Miserable Men.
In Gecko's Chronicles: The Miserable Men you find a game with a unique story and artstyle. Experience its world by going through stories from four different people: The Miserable Men. Make your way through the unstability of mental health through different stories and surroundings unlike anywhere. The game also has hilarious humour implemented to balance things out and to keep things from becoming too dark. :smiley_cat:
Still, Gecko's Chronicles is almost impossible to describe without you playing it. We like to call it an experience, and hope you feel the same way after playing. :dizzy: Please play with headphones on :headphones:

Credits:
@JustMars with all the programming + UI
@jokku with sick 3d models and shader work + a little assistance in programming
@raffe with 2d artwork
@eleeve with help in programming and 3d modeling
@happytomato with the mindblowing soundtrack
the world and people were 3D scanned by @JustMars & @raffe
voice acting done by @raffe & @happytomato
Version 1.0.1: - Fixed slower movement speed when not looking straight ahead.
Ratings
| Overall | 576th | 3.643⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1049th | 3.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 125th | 3.977⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 767th | 3.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 288th | 4.136⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 223th | 3.841⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1078th | 2.381⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 168th | 4.023⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 7🗨️ |
Ok, my time was horrible, but i finished the game!
I never saw graphics like this, and it's really interesting that you took the theme not only for the scenario that keeps on getting more and more unstable, but as well for the stories of the misarable men.
I found the experience really different from all other games i tried in this jam, and i think that this is one of the most fun part of the event, the diversity of games that are produced and the oportunity to experience them all.
Trippy game, it looks like you scanned your area in? Very clever, I would like to see more games like this!
Cheers! [-LB](https://ldjam.com/users/the-lame-brain/)
Subtitles along the voicelines would have been nice, because gameplay distracts quite a bit from the stories and as non-native english speaker, I missed a few parts.
Definately something different than everything else and a brave entry. ^^
PS: please can you share here a link about the technology which you used and application? Maybe you made a post-mortem with some explanation? Thank you.
About the tech, we used an app called Polycam to capture the environments as 3D models. For a larger scan the depth data was quite rough tho. We (me & @raffe) started out with long capture sessions, like 20 minutes for a single room walking around and scanning every nook and cranny. But after scanning we realized that the app wasn't able handle that much data (the results were somehow worse than the minute or two long test scans we did at first) so we decided to keep the scans short (10 minutes or so) with more coordinated routes to avoid overlapping scanning as much as possible. After exporting the captures as .obj files our 3D model expert @jokku then tweaked the meshes a bit in Blender, but to make them actually look good would have taken way too much time so we left them in the kind of "unstable" state.
The consumer grade 3D scanning technology is evolving quickly, but right now it's still very much in its infancy. Even with a phone that has depth sensors (e.g. LiDAR on iPhone 12 Pro and forwards) the precision isn't too great so it's up to the software how presentable the output will be. There are probably more advanced apps than the one that we used (and we don't have much experience on the scanning itself so our results were definitely less than optimal), but to achieve a usable result for a commercial game would most likely require to stitch the textures and depth data manually & do edit in post. But overall, we are satisfied enough on how the models turned out. At least they fit the theme well xd.
All in all, this was a fun out-there title. For better or worse the game appears to be entirely shaped by the environment photoscanning method your team employed, and despite some annoyances here and there the final game is something that easily stands out from the rest. Well done to your team.
The music on the main menu feels a bit more upbeat than the mood set by the rest of the game.
Finally, I felt like the lines saying "oh look how *unstable* things are becoming!" were a bit on-the-nose, but that could just be personal preference for subtlety.

Controls are little clumsy, especially for "speedrun"-oriented game.
Anyway, game is breath of freash air, I had a lot of fun
Good luck!
Good controls and gameplay but the game need CHECKPOINTS!!
One wrong jump and back to the beginning is a big NO NO!
Nice work!
Great work overall!