Beardadette and the Eternal Hiccup by Honest Dan
Beardadette and the Eternal Hiccup
Controls
A - D to move left and right
Spacebar to jump
E to pick up and drop objects
E in water to drink and delay your hiccups
R to restart the level
Introduction
Play as Beardadette, a bearded dragon who cannot alleviate her hiccups. Unwilling to accept her fate of incurable hiccups, she sets out to find a cure.
She must find a sand shaman… though the ancient sand shamans of The Rept Isles haven’t been seen for years. Their numbers have been in decline for decades, but the last few never returned after their last pilgrimage, deep into the desert.
Beardadette’s journey will be challenging, moreso because of her hiccups. The intensity of her hiccups interferes with the simplest of tasks, such as running, jumping, and carrying things. Though Beardadette’s always been an optimist. If there’s a way to turn a negative into a positive - she’ll find it.
The Sand Shamans
The last remaining Sand Shamans still live! They dwell deep in the desert, defying a natural death - but at what cost?
They have cursed many innocent lizardfolk with incurable hiccups. The shamans harness the energy from each cursed hiccup to fuel the beat of their ageing hearts.
v1.1 Changelog + Fixed a bug with the second hoarder navmesh messing up so you could get stuck there. + Fixed wasps killing you again when you're already dead and you get stuck. + Fixed a bug where you get stuck in the water
| Link | https://honestdan.itch.io/beardadette |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/beardadette-and-the-eternal-hiccup |
Ratings
| Overall | 56th | 4.167⭐ | 77🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 156th | 3.933⭐ | 77🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 190th | 3.807⭐ | 77🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 151th | 4.153⭐ | 77🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 19th | 4.627⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 48th | 4.205⭐ | 75🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 64th | 4.1⭐ | 72🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 63th | 4.218⭐ | 73🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 35🗳️ | 73🗨️ |
Overall very well done.
@karen-shum thank you! I always say I want a title screen where you can trial the controls, but every other jam I run out of time and just throw up a static image for the title screen instead! Glad you liked it.
@guitarbro we were really worried the 10 second would be too long. We had most puzzles initially require a hiccup, to jump further or throw your item further - but in the end we simplified each puzzle to make it not essential since waiting around 10 seconds if you mess up can feel terrible. Hiccups ended up being a way to speed through bits, which worked as a nice compromise. Thanks for the feedback!
@mavvy Brainoid did great with the music, feels very cohesive from level to level! He also made it so you hiccup on the beat to try help with the timing, which was about as much as we could manage in the time! spacey makes lovely assets too, so its a pleasure trying to make them look good in editor!
@inksun thanks a lot! we often get carried by the art haha! It is every 10 seconds you hiccup - you can delay it by drinking water for certain puzzles though.
@creepyounguy cheers, means a lot!
@pianoman373 great to hear about the sounds! what's funny is most sounds I had to double the pitch of, but the hiccups spacey recorded were high pitched enough so left them as they were!! Yeah there are some tricky puzzles in there (SPOILERS INCOMING: you are right about timing your hiccup, you need to reset your hiccup with the pool of water so that your hiccup happens between the two others - like on the first 3 hiccupers you walked past).
@thebooksnail thanks for the feedback! yeah, we really hoped to get some play testing from people before we submitted, but time didn't allow. It may run a bit different on various PCs, which could impact the load times and cause situations like you described :( Let us know if you give it a second go.. you can defeat those pesky wasps! (SPOILER: Remember, they don't like fans and they also lose interest quite easily if you're quick).
The timing the hiccup puzzle to raise the platform took me a little while to figure out.
Well done team !
@chybby yeah the final puzzle was crammed by brainoid in the final hour or so, so its a little janky and not exactly the most obvious - but glad you still got it!
@merijn-schaap glad you mastered the hicjump! We wanted to make more puzzles reliant on it, but decided to have it work more as a "optional short cut" sorta mechanism, so people didn't get stuck!
The art and sound is so cute. I wish you had an HTML5 version of your game so it's easier for us to ask friends to play your game!
We too look forward to when Unreal Engine web builds are a reliable and accessible thing!
Also I wanted to take the turtle to the end but it's now in the depths of that fall, sorry friend.
my game bugged out right at the end so I didn't get to finish, but it was really fun and polished! incredible job, as usual from this group :)
Great work!!
Some minor bug: sometimes items or characters got rotated 90 degrees on the Z-axis, so they looked like vertical lines.
I love the hickup idea, its the perfect fit for the theme and u build a really cool game around that idea!
Loved it!
The art style and character design are excellent. Beardadette is a beautiful and graceful protagonist, and all of the miscellaneous creatures have tons of character. I loved the little angry rocks and the sick lizards (reminded me a little of [Grubbs](https://oddworld.fandom.com/wiki/Grubb)). The art style of 2.5D worked great with the gameplay and mood, but you still put lots of extra graphics flair in like the section where you walk through walls, the 3D liquids, and the points where you move closer/farther from the camera.
The gameplay itself is solid. I liked the visual indicator for the upcoming hiccup, but I think it could have been even more precise (like an animation or meter refilling) to take out some of the guesswork.
I will say that the fun part of the game was the puzzles and the hiccup mechanic, but sometimes I felt like I was fighting with the physics of the game a little bit. Things like trying to throw a rock onto a ledge and having it roll back off. The windmills were also a little bit finnicky --- at one point one knocked out my rock, stranding me on the wrong side. It might be an improvement to make some of the objects less slippery and more likely to stay put, but this is a pretty minor thing. But for the purposes of a game jam it's still way above standard haha.
The music and audio were great, especially the hiccup noises. Would have been nice to have sound effects for some of the extra things like the knife-wielding bees!
I drew Beardadette and added her to the fan art collage on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
Great job and look forward to continuing to play your team's games in future events. :smile:
As for the test though there were some definitely interesting uses of the limited mechanics. The picking up, putting down and hiccupping. Though, a little limited on the hiccupping I guess I'd say, at least till the end. Which to be fair lets you get used to other mechanics first which is nice.
The different enemies were also interesting and it does seem like there's some different strategies to deal with them which would be cool to look back at, which I may have to do. Maybe try and *not* murder all the, I think they're called hoarders? Though I dunno it was pretty fun to murder them.
Overall though a really fun setup and a interesting game to play through. Definitely a nice set of mechanics setup for sure.
@jag thanks very much, spacey makes lovely 2d art and we are glad you liked it!
@fedir we did have a carry animation, but ran out of time to implement it sadly :( Was spacey's first time doing 2d animation for our games, she did good!
@daivyishere thanks for the kind words <3
@yellowkamel thanks for playing on stream, glad you liked the character! hic!
@eroaxe thanks a lot for the good feedback. yeah we agree, the puzzles don't always suit a jam. A vague puzzle in a game like inside you don't mind spending 10 minutes on figuring out... but in a jam I don't think the audience is the same or as patient. Murder of hoarders was sadly a valid strategy... they just love the shiny :(
@jeremy-ryan lovely fan art, Beardadette is honoured! We agree about the hiccup timing. The music beat and the screen effect does help, but the screen effect coming on 1 second before isn't as helpful as it could be. The intention was for it to start to fade in more intensely, but we never got the chance to refine it properly. I think maybe something subtle like 3 dots above the character that would come on like a 1 - 2 - 3 - HIC count down would have helped.
@jvdwijk thanks for kind words. We would have liked another half a day to polish all, but we were happy with the core aesthetic at least!
@stvup thanks for the feedback! brainoid designed some good puzzles - they had the risk of getting people stuck, but we're pleased you enjoyed solving them!
@zubspace thanks - our first time doing this style in Unreal in a jam, we think it came together well! 2d stuff in unreal has a bad reputation as there are issues - but was fun to explore it!
@thoastbot appreciate it! yeah we felt the theme was going to produce a bunch of games of the same type - so we wanted to find something that was relatable to all yet not something conventional in a game. Due to 10 seconds being quite long, we had to make sure not all the game puzzles / platforming relied on the hiccup, but glad it still felt a core part of the experience.
@michaelaranda thanks for your solid feedback when playing it on stream!
@rincs Beardadette is flattered by your praise. She's actually blushing! :D We are glad you enjoyed our game - one of the biggest parts of the jam for us is hoping people enjoy and react positively to our games!
@mika314 yes, there's a bug with orientation that happens if you press R to restart when you're already in the process of restarting! Fixes itself after another restart though so we didn't rush to fix it! As for the cog puzzle, its a tricky one - the intended way was to stop fan with rock, run cog into the lift, then run back and remove the stone - then the hoarder would get killed by fan when running back to his home with the cog! However, occasionally it bugs out and the hoarder doesn't get killed by the fan, so it can be a bit finickity.
@bobfish thanks a lot - its a highlight of our jam to watch other people on stream play and react to our games. Appreciated your time.
@tyrannas yeah - we wish we could have made the UI / visuals easier for people to know when the hiccup was coming. We had a timer on screen when debugging, which tricked us into thinking it'd be okay - but def was something people took time to learn.
@badcop it was great to watch you play - thanks for streaming the games, don't worry about the vod! we were there LIVE! <3
I think that there were some issues with how the colliders worked, and the hiccup mechanic may be the culprit around it. Speaking of, I found the hiccup mechanic quite smart and fun to think up! The enemies that got in the way were really annoying, and that added to its charm.
Props for making this, I enjoyed playing it!
Here's a VOD of my gameplay https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1625333439
(The performance was flawless on my end, it's the recording that is low quality, sorry about that)
The art and sound design are gorgeous.
The hiccup mechanic is funny, but quite hard to use properly when you need it for big jumps.
I'm not sure I understood the last puzzles but I got to the end anyway haha.
Great job and thanks for the game, I had fun ✨
Thanks for submitting your game to stream!
Bummed we couldn't coordinate a time to have y'all in chat, but glad we were able to play it at least!
I think this game takes the cake as "most adorable" one y'all have made. :blush: I think my favorite aspect though was weirdly the diegetic title screen y'all did that went right into the gameplay. Integrated tutorials like that make my designer heart swell. :heart:
Oh, also! I forgot about the whole drinking water thing until the end. This was actually a cool and original feature which could have been integrated more into the puzzles.