The In Between by Adam Gallina
All of these games about summoning, but nobody stops to think about how objects are summoned from one spot to another... Take up work within the In Between and make sure everyone's summons appear where they expect in a relaxed strategy game. New summoning portals will spawn over time, and it's up to you to guide the summoned objects to their targets with a variety of items
I wanted to make a public leaderboard system, but couldn't get it to work when played in browser - if you want to save your score, you can still download and run the windows build below
ldjam.com still doesn't support godot browser builds, but you can play on the itch.io page at the link below!
Multiple game modes!
- Challenge: Connect summoning portals together as they slowly ramp up in requirements (the intended way to play)
- Zen: Removes the loss conditions, so you can play as long as you want and see how big of a map you can cover
Controls
- Left click: Select and place objects to route summoned objects to their correct portals
- Scroll wheel/Q/E: Rotate held object
- Right click/W: Mirror held object
- Space: Pause gameplay
- Tab: Toggle game speed
Tiles
edit: It looks like godot tooltips don't work correctly in web builds, so here's a reference for what everything does -
Reroutes items in the direction of the arrow
Alternates items in two directions
Bounces an item in the direction of the arrow over any adjacent tiles and items
Hold back items for one tile
Destroys any items that pass over it
Transports items from the blue portal to the orange portal (the orange portal will spawn after the blue is placed)
Tips
- There is a colorblind mode available in the options menu, I'm not colorblind so I'm not sure how helpful it'll be, but feel free to let me know if I can improve it in any way :slight_smile:
- Launch tiles can combine multiple paths into a single direction
- Destroy tiles are really useful for cleaning up the board, especially late game
Tools & Attributions
- Made in Godot 4.2
- Sprites created in Krita
- Sound effects created using BFXR
- Background music from Uppbeat (Milky Way, by Mountaineer)
- Fonts and symbols from Google
| Github Repo | https://github.com/Adam-Gallina/ldj-55-summoning |
| Itch Page | https://gallinagames.itch.io/the-in-between |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-in-between |
Ratings
| Overall | 266th | 3.857⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 275th | 3.796⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 162th | 3.888⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 182th | 4.184⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 676th | 3.6⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 428th | 3.735⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 48🗳️ | 87🗨️ |
Either way, this is a polished-looking game with great soundtrack that scratches the same itch as Factorio! I do love getting everything flinging precisely where it's supposed to go
The gameplay itself was a little confusing at first, I read the tutorial but it was hard to wrap my head around without any graphic examples. I had to go back to the tutorial to find the rotate keys because I am used to R or right click being able to rotate lol.
@dinoraz Thanks for letting me know, I can't seem to replicate it, so hopefully it's not too common - was it in zen or challenge mode? The only thing I can think of is you lost the game, but the ui didn't update for some reason. For the portals, I thought about limiting them, or making items moving through portals not score at all, but I found that they only made the early game easier, and later held me back more than using all the items
@waterspirit glad you liked the story :) I definitely wanted to spend some more time on the tutorial but ran out
@jason-shapiro Thanks! The items are a little jank sometimes, definitely not intended, just a little too inconsistent to troubleshoot during the jam
@breadstick The portals have a max capacity, so the extras passed over it, glad you still had fun tho!
Cool game. The teleporting pair seem a bit OP. Ended up running it on the faster speed and just pausing every time a new input-output pair spawned. It got quite hard to track where the new portals were appearing once it zooms out a bit, and the indicators of how quickly the inputs were triggering and how often the outputs needed items were too small to see.
@nathmate I personally wasn't able to get the tp portals be that op and didn't think it was a problem...but that score completely proves that wrong lol, if I end up continuing development I'll definitely balance that somehow
@poboy glad you liked it! The shake helps a bit, but it definitely needs to be more obvious when the map scrolls out
The only problem I had was the game got so zoomed out the arrows stopped rendering for the pipelines
(I used portals very little for extra fun) and couldn't tell what started going wrong as new portals appeared.
So - Scaling could see an improvement? and perhaps better way to tell where things are going wrong.
Very happy with the experience, thank you.
The subtle and constant zoom out is great. You don't notice it until way later and you're like "where did this empty space come from?"
I think the portals might be a bit overpowered though because I can just put any portal right from the entrance to the exit. Maybe some restrictions like making them only go in a straight line, or making it so you only get a certain number would make it more balanced, because I found myself just using those 95% of the time.
Also could go with some visual indication where I'm about to die, because I heard the sound of the exit portal and I could just not find it until I died and I'm like "oh there it is". Items colliding and destroying each other could use a visual indicator too, it was hard to find where my things were colliding. My final high score was 1363
Troubles I had:
- Some connections would at first work and receive the item and then would suddenly stop working later. This happened to me using portal connectors.
- When a portal is about to expire, I hear the sound, but it takes time to find which portal is sending the distress signal when the screen is full of portals. A visual indicator of which portals are sending distress signals would be useful.
There is an animation for the portals that are about to expire, but it's really subtle and hard to notice zoomed out, I definitely need to scale it up with the zoom level
Visual feedback of expiring portal could be more "in your face", currently it's rather shy. Graphics are a bit inconsistent - you have perfectly symmetrical, straight-lined arrow (clearly drawn with shapes) next to a more sketchy, hand-drawn pipes. They are not bad by all means, just could use more consistency of design :smile:
It's an impressive entry (a one-man job!). Keep up the good work :smile:
@emaigualmc2-art 'striking' is being generous lol...I am by no means an artist, but glad you liked it! It was a bit quick-and-dirty spritework, but I was relatively pleased with the result
@fabula-rasa agreed on the sketchy pipes, I redid the arrow sprite towards the end and wanted to redo the pipes in a similar fashion, but couldn't come up with a design I liked, so shelved that for the sake of time
@salanyel Thanks! Mini Motorways was a huge inspiration for this, so glad to hear it :)
@zindarm In theory there were tooltips available, but I don't think they work on the web build unfortunately, it seems like godot is drawing them offscreen
The gameplay was really nice, controls a bit clunky for my part (having this one tile you have to rotate or mirror with keys, it was taking me a lot of time to have it in the right orientation each time) but it reminded me the same kind of "Mini-metro" gameplay (which is a great reference) where after a while you have to managed some spaghettis designs.
Congratulation for your entry!
The instructions at the beginning were a bit obtrusive, and despite their presence the gameplay still felt a bit confusing (although that could be a skill issue on my part). A proper tutorial where the different elements would be taught to the player in a more intuitive manner would have gone a long way, but considering that all of this was made by a single person within 72 h I can see that there probably would not have been time for that. Great entry overall!