Winding Woods by tetrapteryx
This jam did not go smoothly, but it is done! I ran out of time, so here's a brief tutorial in text form: * Play cards on woods tiles to keep the critter from dying in the darkness * The critter picks a random direction among any “safe” adjacent tiles. If there aren’t any safe ones, it picks a random woods tile, or an already visited one as a last resort if there are no better options * Your hand resets every 10 seconds * Visited tiles are full of ghosts and will kill the critter, but a whirlwind card will clear it * Move the camera around with WASD * Reset camera with spacebar * Keep the critter alive as long as you can!
Tools:
- Engine: Godot
- Art: Aseprite
- Sound: jsfxr
- Music: Beepbox
- Color palette: Rosy 42 by PineTreePizza
| Link | https://tetrapteryx.itch.io/winding-woods |
| Link | https://github.com/baconsaur/ludum-dare-51 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/winding-woods |
Ratings
| Overall | 516th | 3.583⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 551th | 3.417⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 161th | 3.854⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 412th | 3.833⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 251th | 4.104⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 207th | 3.792⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 207th | 3.875⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 30🗨️ |
A couple of things I noticed; sometimes the placement square didn't seem to go up a full square? It's like it got stuck halfway to the next square and just snapped there. I wasn't sure as well how the critter decided to which direction to go. Generally it would walk in the direction I expected from the arrow cards or placing the grass. Sometimes it would just turn around though and walk back the other direction? Not sure if that's intended or not, but it did lead to some unwanted deaths.
Good work though.
- The game is beautiful, art is super cohesive
- The music and sounds fit well
Feedback:
- It was a bit too hard imo, not because it required a lot of skill, but because of sheer randomness. As you have no indication of the critter's next direction, no way of redrawing or changing cards, and waaaay too many ghosts everywhere, sometimes you just die without being able to do anything - especially with the fact that you get so many tornado cards later on (justified by the number of ghosts), which means if the critter decides to go straight to the dark part, you get to just watch him die :(
- It took me some time to understand what the different cards would do. I got confused by the cards you could play on visible tiles or not, and the movement ones (at first I thought it would change the critter direction when played ahah)
I really liked the mood, thought :)
The game might rely too much on randomness, that and there is not point in living x). You keep moving where you can, some tiles other than wood could provide an objective for the player to try to go in a way or another.
Good game overall. Well done!
The rules are: as soon as the critter reaches the center of a tile, it chooses its next move and marks it with a cursor on the next tile. If the tile it's currently on has an arrow, it chooses that direction no matter what. Otherwise, it chooses a "safe" adjacent tile, ie. not woods or ghosts. If there's only one safe tile, it's guaranteed to go there. If there are two or more, it picks one at random. If there aren’t any safe tiles, it picks a woods tile at random. Until it reaches the center of a woods tile, you can place a new tile in that space to avoid death. If there are no safe tiles or woods adjacent to it, that's the only time it will go towards ghosts (aside from when there's an arrow pointing to the ghosts).
Personally I would probably add a short waiting period before the movement or indicate a short path instead of only the next move. There is simply not enough time to understand all rules instantly and repeating failures add up to a feeling of inconsistency when you do not understand why you failed. Conveying knowledge simply with the given circumstances is difficult. You already do a good job. It just feels a bit random due to the short time span you have to aquire all the required knowledge/ rules. Hope that helps!