Afterlife Assistance Agency by FishMasterino

Just another day on the job
These colorful characters have lived a long, fruitful life, but they've had it too good for too long!
You've been contracted to harvest the souls of those designated to meet their maker
Controls
Left click on a character to pick them up
Drop them in the coffin to peacefully terminate their existence
Get as many as you can before time runs out!
Credits
Coding - Christian Hamelain - https://twitter.com/guriid0
Coding - Antoine Cointe - https://twitter.com/Grotfang_
Art - Axel Signargout - https://twitter.com/fishmasterino
Sound - Zakku https://twitter.com/NamedZak
| Link | https://fishmasterino.itch.io/afterlife-assistance-agency |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/afterlife-assistance-agency |
Ratings
| Overall | 116th | 3.939⭐ | 108🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 74th | 3.991⭐ | 108🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 259th | 3.528⭐ | 108🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 215th | 4.014⭐ | 108🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 75th | 4.373⭐ | 108🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 38th | 4.137⭐ | 104🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 85th | 3.799⭐ | 104🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 176th | 3.827⭐ | 103🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 65🗳️ | 94🗨️ |
My first couple runs I was just trying to grab as many as I could but I kept failing and I wasn't sure why. Then I realized that some people matched the face on the right and I understood.
Great job!
- Difficulty now resets when trying again
- All hats and hair are now properly rendered in the contract
- You can no longer drop a character outside of the frame to never see them again
- Cursor is now scaled to screen size
- Characters spend less time out of frame
- You can now hear the clock tick when time is running out
Thanks for playing and rating our game !
Music is spoopy, very fitting
Good graphics, I like the variety in characters. Music reminds me of old Sierra games.
I could harvest 11 souls, I will try again later for sure!
LOVE the pixel art!
my best is 10 souls and 0 mistake

I got a max of 17 souls with 1 mishaps :D 
At the start I was planning on commenting, that the people were too easy to distinguishe, but after the 10th soul I don't think that anymore :D
Good game, simple to understand (yes, the first soul is easy) because of the increasing difficulty.
The hand manipulation is smooth, along with the animation.
Good job!
It would be perfect to have it on smartphone to play in spare time, when you're waiting for something, haha.
I loved it, the art, music, and overall polish were outstanding. Felt like a final release.
I definitely killed a couple of innocents before realising I was looking for the person pictured, oops! 😅
Funny game - I had one person that was off screen for 10 seconds! was mildly panicking that I could not see them and the casually walked down.
Cute graphics, amazing music, fun and entertaining concept. The difficulty scales well.
Well done!
Thinking back to god sims like Black and White etc, the disembodied hand could interact more, maybe pushing other people out the way or banging the ground to make them flee etc..
Keep it up!
I ran into an annoying issue a few times where targets leave the screen without ever returning, sort of soft-locking you into losing. Something as simple as adding a button for a new contract could easily solve that, but I understand if the lore doesn't allow skipping :)
Great job, all of you! Here's a well earned round of applause from me! :clap: :clap: :clap:
- Nice graphics.
- Enjoyable feedback from actions.
- Controls could be better (colliders for people are too small – you can only grab them for head for some reason)
- Objective people always go over the edge of a camera, and it's pretty frustrating, especially when you can grab him by the foot, but you can't because of too small collider.
- Music and sounds are good.
- Game lack some big goal / objective. No meta upgrades, no story, no milestones – no reason to replay the game.
I had two fairly good runs in a row, but I felt like I could get even faster -- a sign of a good game. Oddly, during the first run, I maybe clicked outside of the frame, and the entire frame tinted red for the last half of the game. Not sure how that would happen, but it made it extra challenging XD

After the tinting:

The faces were fantastic and you made good use of a face generating system to make it relatively hard to pick out the correct face, especially in later levels when there's a lot of people running around.
There seemed to be quite a bit of variability. The first time I played I could only get 6. I often had to wait several seconds until the guy popped into frame. Only upon coming back here and seeing posts did I realize that was a very low score. I tried again and got 14, with a lot of contract-characters being on screen already. Judging by your comments, the 1st case should've been rare so I'm not sure what happened.
Either way, I did enjoy the game very much. This is a genre I always want to see more of but there doesn't seem to be a lot for it. The later levels were awesomely hard and really challenged me. Great stuff!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnWqmLOzSps
My only feedback is that characters spend too much time off screen because of the looping around the screen nature and that caused me to lose because I lost time waiting for them to come back on screen.
Other then that - all 5's IMO - Great Game!
The game does seem rather dependent on luck. In particular, my best run, with 12 souls harvested, had a bunch of characters show up right next to the coffin, making it very easy to score them quickly.
On the other hand, sometimes a person will wander under the character info card, or off screen, and then you just kind of have to wait.
This is somewhat fair, as if you're seeing them walk off screen, technically it is your own failure if you don't manage to grab them before they walk all the way off. But it is rather difficult to grab somebody right on the edge of the screen, particularly because it is somewhat awkward to click near the border of a game running in the browser. Adding some extra padding around that could be helpful.
I did have to test the unfortunate mishap mechanic separately, as I didn't have any in any of my other runs; perhaps my strategy is just rather cautious. But anyways, this was kind of funny, because the first two times I tried to just grab a random person and throw them in a coffin, I actually had gotten the right person by accident. So I had, by luck, just started a run with 2 free souls, that had taken like less than a second each.
Anyways, I do think that a sound effect for unfortunate mishaps would be a good addition, and I almost didn't notice that the timer had gone down, so maybe a little visual effect there could help...?
The one other mechanic that seems a little difficult to appreciate is the info card for each human. That is, there's really not time to read it while you're scanning for them on screen. Maybe you could read each card after the game is over...? (Although, that might have a rather sinister feeling to it... :sweat_smile: )
The variety in the human characters is super fun, and provides for some nice gameplay. In particular, sometimes in the early game you can very quickly identify somebody by just one feature, which is cool. And, it makes the later game interesting as you have to kind of scan for features that you think you can recognize at a glance, and then filter down the people with those obvious features to see if they are an exact match.
So, the difficulty curve is also a great feature. It definitely feels fair and fun, the way that the number of people on screen increases over time.
Overall, great job!
no I was just bad at it 🙈
very polished game! I especially liked that you get to see the souls by the end of the game 👻👻👻👻
:3
