Familiar Quest by BalimaarTheBassFish
Welcome to Familiar Quest!
Embark on a whimsical journey as an apprentice wizard tasked with summoning their first familiar in our charming game, 'Familiar Quest'! Collect mystical ingredients, complete quirky tasks, and navigate humorous encounters to uncover the perfect familiar. But beware - your choices may lead to unexpected outcomes! Will you master the art of summoning, or find yourself in a magical mishap? Play now and let the chaos ensue!
Come and see why fellow LD member fabula_rasa called this effort of my team's a "tiny jam gem!"
There are 13 different options - we swear this is not an ominous sign, would a game developer lie? Let us know in the comments below which familiar you brought forth!
We have now added a web build on itch.io (the LD embedding did not work for us). This is less tested though, we highly recommend downloading one of the builds linked below for your OS. We have builds for Windows, Linux and Mac. Mac users may have issues with GateKeeper but you guys know how to deal with that!
We're opting out of the graphics category as they were partially created using AI tools.
Controls
A very simple control scheme this time around. No endlessly spinning space ships or trying to aim at seagulls with seashells against the background this time around! See my previous entries for explanations!
For Familiar Quest, all you need is your left mouse button.
We do have a super fancy settings menu that you can access even during the game by pressing ESC. You'll be able to fine-tune your audio experience to your comfort!
Words from the Team
Balimaar
Well this was my 3rd Ludum Dare completion and second as part of a team. I am so very lucky to have some very talented friends with the art and music scenes! I mean see my artwork in Asteroid Miner for why I say that! It was definitely an experience working in a team of 4. We each had our own skills that we all brought to the game and I think we have made something we can be very proud of. As one of the coders, I put in the main ideas and inevitably brought some bugs in that my coder buddy would smash them for me! That arrangement worked very well. It also was my first experience using GitHub to colloborate on a project. Thankfully it worked more or less perfectly. All in all I loved my LD experience this time around and I look forward to October!
Frank Gevaerts
I've made twelve solo Ludum Dare entries with Inform 7 text games, and I was getting a bit burned out on the genre, so I finally bit the bullet and followed some Godot tutorials and joined forces with Balimaar and friends. No more story games! Hang on... you tricked me! Joking aside, this has been a lot of fun and I hope we'll work together again next time.
BizzyBee
I'm so tired I can barely think straight. I'm proud of the full orchestral piece I composed, and I think this is certainly an improvement on our last LD. I'm excited to see what people think of the game! And thanks to my team for putting up with my endless stream of "change this, fix this, we should do this". 😛 I appreciate our talented artist and our "witty" coders. Everybody has put a lot of hard work into this and it shows. ❤️ Here's a link to the orchestral piece on my SoundCloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/ze6VZS5BL4uyqE899
JaQUILLyn
Participating in my first Ludum Dare was a rollercoaster of emotions! The pressure was real, especially when it came to creating art - it felt so personal, and I was constantly worried about letting down the team. But amidst the stress, there was also an incredible sense of fun and excitement. The challenges we faced pushed us to our limits, but branching out and trying new things was incredibly rewarding.
Ratings
| Overall | 867th | 3.313⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 997th | 3⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1192th | 2.326⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 441th | 3.848⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 454th | 3.435⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 448th | 3.273⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 857th | 3.286⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 48🗨️ |
'Agree to "Help"' :laughing: A Puur-fect game :wink: How many branches are there? And endings? :fish: :cat: :dragon_face: :unicorn:
Great job :thumbsup:
Also: you monster! Did you also do the gassy twist with the poor thing?
Sooooo... I summoned a ghost whale :whale:
We're glad to hear that you enjoyed the writing—I was responsible for that, so your praise means a lot! And about those fart jokes... well, let's just say I'll take about 80% responsibility for those. They could have been deleted or overwritten at any time, but hey, where's the fun in that?
Thanks again for playing, and we hope you had a blast! (badumtss)
We might need to borrow some of that blush for our next character sprite!
Thanks again for playing and for the glowing review—it's comments like yours that make all the hard work, the mental exhaustion and mild panic at discovering new bugs, worth it!
And speaking of unexpected surprises, if you managed to stumble upon a path through the game that even we didn't anticipate, don't worry, I had a catch-all implemented. It just so happened to involve the house catching fire.
Who knew wizardry could be so... fiery? Thanks again for playing, and remember, always keep a fire extinguisher handy in your magical toolkit!
But using AI to generate *every* piece of art in the game, being completely quiet about it, silently accepting praise for art quality, mentioning art creation in the description ("our talented artist" and "when it came to creating art"), and not opting out from the Graphics voting category is just deceitful. Straight up disqualification material right here.
Not cool.
I brought up disqualification, but I'm not "*calling*" for it, not about to flag your game or anything. We're all here to have fun and gain experience and play games. If you're ok accepting praise for something you didn't create, you do you, have fun. :)
And a lot of us have been playing around with AI to see what it's capable of. I, for one, have seen and generated tons of AI pixel art just for the fun of it, and there's a lot, and I mean *a lot* of telltale signs in the result each and every time. Things that a human would never ever do just because of the nature of the process — no matter if it's fast or slow and what style is being used. There are flags in colors, pixel sizes, subject matter and specific recognizable details, they are *abundant*.
I would hate to have even a 1% chance of accusing someone wrongly. But I'm terribly sorry, there's absolutely zero chance of that here. I have no desire to devalue your work, and a jam game is still a jam game — you made an entry and that's awesome.
But this is AI art.
When I wrote the first comment, I honestly just expected you guys to say something like "well, the rules don't forbid it".
You can always just ask your artist about it. Or ask for the opinion of other artists, for example. Or go to any image generator of your choice (Ideogram or Bing Image Creator for example) and try generating something like "Wizard's study, pixel art", there are a lot of ways to investigate it if you're interested. Saying "it's not AI because you're no one" is inconsequential :)
Also, I don't want this much drama about it. Nothing personal, I don't think anyone is a bad person for doing this or anything. It's just a bit weird to me is all.
@violetdreams I asked our artist @jaquillyn and they told me "It was a combination of 3D paint, pixlr and gimp and then in (almost) every piece I cleaned up the pixelation effect with a free tool called Pixelify by Yomu Labs. It still required a lot of cleaning after, so it was a backwards and forwards process. And then the recolouring was done in Pixlr" I know there's a bit more to it as the ghost effect was done by @bizzybee (we're in different timezones so some of this was shift work!) and I don't know what tools they used, but they're reading here so I don't need to pass messages :)
@bizzybee I'm very curious to see the process. As I said before, yes, we're having fun here, your game is cool, before leaving the first comment I played it and rated it and the rating was not even affected by this (except I left Graphics unrated). But I'm in turn baffled by this amount of resistance to something so simple. It's a bit sad, really.
I understand your concerns, but I believe it's highly unlikely that Jaquillyn used AI to generate the art for our game. Making such an accusation without concrete evidence seems unfair and unwarranted. As the saying goes, "source: trust me bro" isn't sufficient proof.
I've known Jaquillyn for a long time, and I have full confidence in her abilities as an artist. Without proper evidence of the use of AI tools like Midjourney and Dalle, I'm inclined to trust my friend's integrity. The burden of proof should always lie with the accuser, and until there's concrete evidence to suggest otherwise, I stand by Jaquillyn and her work.
Again, I firmly believe our game's art is a result of Jaquillyn's talent and hard work, not AI-generated assets. It would be deceitful to claim otherwise, and I assure you, that was never our intention. We're proud of Jaquillyn's contributions to our project, and I'll continue to defend her integrity whenever necessary.
What I DO know for sure is that I put a whole lot of work into this, and I don't want that to be overshadowed by this debacle. I appreciate that you still rated us in the other categories, and for anybody reading, I understand if some prefer to leave a category unrated for similar reasons.
Offering proof that was little more than "trust me bro" is hardly proof at all.
Rest assured, I have full confidence in Jaquillyn's integrity and abilities as an artist. When she returns, we will address this matter together and provide any necessary clarification.
If it does turn out that our artist used AI art I'll apologise publicly, contact the admins and see what we can do.
If it turns out that, as I expect, you are mistaken - I expect no less from you.
This is the last I, or any member of the team will be responding to the question of AI art until our artist has returned home and has presented her case.
Frank, Congrats on making a step out of your comfort zone of Inform 7! I bet you had a lot of fun making it, although it is technically a text game. But with a lot of added mood. Music, audio, and of course visuals made it a completely different experience. You all did a great job, guys. Don't mind people who don't appreciate your hard work, there are not many of those. I believe you put a lot of effort into it and had a lot of fun making it and that's what matters, don't let anyone spoil it for you. You should be proud of what you have done.
Also, I loved all the puns! Thank you!
@yngvarr I must take responsibility for the puns and the fart jokes
In light of this, we have made the decision to opt out of the graphics category for our submission. We understand the importance of upholding the integrity of the competition and want to ensure fairness for all participants.
We would like to express our gratitude to members of the community who provided valuable insights and assistance during this process. Your support and understanding are greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,
Balimaar
Project Lead
Art, sound and mood are great. It goes into nitpicking, but I would have prefered a bigger text size.
Great entry!
Despite what I now know and believe, I still think "team first" was the correct attitude at that point, but I should have been more diplomatic in my replies, and I apologise for that.
But back to the game! I got the ghost whale ending. I also immediately noticed the AI source of your art - thanks for opting out of the category! Honestly, I think it's what distracted me the most from just enjoying the flowery writing and branches resulting in different endings - it's genuinely better to have simpler, handmade art, even made by a programmer with no prior art experience, than having very clashing, generated styles who fight for player's attention with too much detail added and no art direction. If the city or the room doesn't pay a big role in your game, there's no reason to give it the detail worthy of hidden object game or a highly interactive point and click screen - but AI of course doesn't know that, so you always get things you didn't ask for :) Huge kudos to the person responsible for music/SFX, it carried the atmosphere where the art tried to interfere.
Writing was fun with a little bit of humor - it would be great if all the joke-y "achievements" were actually displayed somehow in the menu, like medals :)
Yeah, the whole debacle was stressful, but we're not letting it devalue the work we did put into the game, and we'll (Me, Bal, and Frank) still be participating in the future jams.
That would have been a great thing to implement given more time, certainly. :D Though, I'd probably get distracted pitching more endings, haha. Really appreciate your thorough feedback, hope you're having a wonderful day. <3
To be honest I just enjoyed skimming through to see all the different familiars you can get. The art is so nice and I love all their designs sm
Although the art is partially done using AI it is still an accomplishment to get a coherent look out of it which I think you managed to do :)
The story elements are very cool and created the base for an interesting fantasy world :)
@xoreaxeax I might not have minded so much if I hadnt stated to the team that while I have no objection to AI placeholders, I was not going to have any AI left in the release version. Ah well. It is what it is. Thank you for the kind words about the story! I'll be honest I probably would like to flesh out this fantasy world...
@digital-bacon Thank you! It was a lot of hard work by the entire squad, we hope you had as much fun playing as we had making it!
As I understand from comments, there was AI usage for art, and I see you opted out of this category, (main room with the cauldron looks pretty, tho it looks strangely blurry, so it's a shame it was AI) so I will talk about something else: text. The game has a lot of text, but it's not very comfortable to read - maybe you could play around with that a little. Try different font, bigger text box, maybe bigger font, maybe bit bolder, maybe play around with colours as well. I felt like letters were blurring before my eyes ;_;
However, I zoomed out the screen to 50% in my browser and game looked more coherent: art less blurry, text bit bigger. So maybe browser just doesn't show the game in resolution it's supposed to be in.
Some bug here in text, maybe? With 20 14.
**Quests**
It seems we had a collection of short stories, with 3 clear choices for "good" "evil" and "mixed". Events themselves felt a bit simplistic, maybe due to their shortness, maybe due to writing (though I appreciate the game not being too long). I think this could be further worked on, maybe expanding the stories a little, or trying a different approach to writing them.
I quite liked that you have different endings! First time I went the "good" route as I usually do but it seems it wasn't a very positive ending xD
* Summoned a cutie.
Choosing evil options actually gave me a better ending (well, for my MC, not her master...) which is kinda funny xD
**Overall**
The idea is nice, and I love story games. I think it could be polished a bit more, with presentation and writing ^^
That character rendering issue, hmm, not sure. It looks like it's only in the web build (as in, I don't see it in the linux build), which is a bit odd. It looks like it's the font not having the long dash character, which again I should have caught, but the web build was a bit of last minute thing so it didn't get the testing it should have had.
I'll let @balimaarthebassfish respond to the story comments, that's mostly his work :)
As for the writing style in the game, I deliberately kept it simple for the LD submission. I wanted to make sure it was easy to follow while still being engaging. Almost ran out of time, though—I was rewriting all the endings with just 2 hours to spare! That said, I think the stories would've been way more fleshed out if I'd gotten the hang of Dialogic earlier. Live and learn, right?