I really liked the music and the graphics were really nice!
The controls felt pretty nice, maybe a bit too much gravity, great job!

This game have the best music so far i think and a really good atmosphere. I like the end where you can see what other player decided to do. The only problem that i can see is that when you fly and press the down arrow, it smash you on the ground really quickly , so it is better to use the gravity instead of the down arrow.

Mate, this game is impressive! Like you desirve n1 for mood and audio. I say it's almost like ori and the blind forest, just playing with your feelings!

This is a graphic, audio and mood beast. The game play could be more challanging.

Really cool game, loved the ending. The sound was beautiful and the notes when collecting the flying orbs really added to the mood. Nice relaxing game.

Great job ! Music and sound design are awesome, graphics are nice too. The different endings add some replayability and the gameplay is OK.

**First of all:** This game is beautiful! both graphics and sound wise.

**Overall game impression:** This game is very beautiful in all the ways possible, it's beautiful graphically, an eye candy, simple yet very mesmerizing, it's full of beautiful sounds, the story is also beautiful and sad at the same time (at least the choices I made) it was incredible and surprisingly deep. The deepest meaning and story in a game out of all the LD entires i've ever seen. Absolutely beautiful and incredible. 5 in all categories that's for sure. Bravo! Just Bravo!

I really liked the statistics at the end, very cool little touch! My favorite game of LD39 so far and I highly doubt anything could change my opinion on this.

**Suggestions and comments on improvement:** none...this is too beautiful to be in need of changing anything!


p.s. check out my game as well please.
edited: Thanks for checking out my game! I'm honored!

One of those games you play and love, but can't quite explain why. The mechanics are simple and discovered by exploration (I must admit - I sat on the first room after unlocking the second, quite happily playing little tunes by grabbing orbs, rather than realizing what I was to do next). The sound design is amazing.

Beautiful game! My favorite so far. Amazing!
The only thing that didn't worked for me is that it took me some time to realize that I had to go right after collecting the first 10 orbs. Maybe you should make that a little bit more obvious.
Great work!

This game is incredible. The click sound should be replaced, but it's a sweet little journey. But i'm confused, do i have rescued the sister? xD.... Last part is a bit strange to me too. I'm myself and have to choose between me and myself? Do i have in this case rescued a live o suicide/given up myself?
I realy enjoyed the game.

Sorry for my english

Wow.

I enjoyed the style and mechanics. Making something like this in less than 48 hours seems insane (multiple endings and all).

The stats at the end of the game really make you feel immersed and I think it is a beautiful neat little thingy to have

Amazing job

Wow for me to good visuals but i loved the music and the notes the stars? played when you hit them verry good atmospheric game loved it.

That was beautiful man. Such an awesome atmospheric game with a story to tell. I do feel like there could have been more of a challenge though. The game was pretty easy, I guess making some tough decisions where the challenges. Well done.

This looks super professional, the sounds were so good that I cannot but complain about the one bit I did not like: the bit used when displaying texts was very jarring when contrasted with the excellent music. Also are you aware of the digital card game Solforge? just curious, loved your game!

This game was great. Visuals were simple, but it was easy to tell what was what, and the music was really nice. I like how you can choose what you do, and the controls are really solid. Definitely my favorite game so far in this Ludum Dare.

Love this game! Very polished and thought out, nothing but praise for you! Love how the notes fit in with the music. Also very good looking and coherent visually.

I went for the "bad karma" choices, and the story was really sad. Combined with the music that really hit me, which is a big compliment.

Well done!

Thanks for giving me Existential angst lol. A really a beautiful game with interesting concepts.

Very well made game wish awesome music and it's very relaxing. Loved it!

Great experience! You have achieved very nice effect, with this simple game. Simple, but good story, and mystic mood :)

I was wondering before, how to save and load stats to server. Now I can learn from your game :D

I liked the movement. almost like sin-wave...

Awesome! So creative and beautiful. I especially liked the nice art style and the calm music. The little notes that were played when collecting those "flying things" sounded awesome.

I found the idea very interesting to give the orbs kind of a personality. But I found that there was very little context to answer the questions so I didn't think much when choosing whether to save someone. The stats at the end were really cool.

At the beginning I flew around for a few minutes until I noticed that you can go to the right. I guess because I tried it at the beginning and couldn't go there I thought there had to be something else. Felt like Frog Fractions once I found out...

Very interesting, loved the overall mood. I didn't understand the bar at the bottom, it would light up and then go dark seemingly at random, it wasn't tied to the orbs, I think, and seemed vaguely tied to my movement? I thought it was a timer when it start draining to black, but then it never actually emptied.

Thank you for all the great feedback. I'll answer a few of your questions.

@vodzik Just take a look at statistics.php and WWWManager.cs in the _Scripts folder. It's all in there.

@filippy The click sound sucks, I know. It was the first thing I made and I didn't come around to changing it before the deadline. I know how to compose music, but I don't know much about sound design unfortunately.


Regarding the final choice and its meaning: The thing is - I didn't think of a specific interpretation about anything in this game. It's about your choices and how you perceive the things you experience. The final choice is intentionally ambiguous.

Incredible experience, lovely music, stunning visuals, engaging story and I really appreciated the ending.

The gameplay was a bit simplistic but that definitely didn't detract from the experience.

Great job!

A very good experience. The visuals and music are stunning and the mood of the game is great. It's not necessarily a fun game, but it is still a great game. I liked the different choices one can make along the way, but I didn't really understand the ending. I really liked the stats at the end to show how similar you are to other players. Great Job!

Got shivers. Music huge part of this game!

I'd love to play this on a tablet. Very relaxing.

** First Impression **: That looks impressive :)

** Sound **: I really enjoyed soundtrack of your game, great job again (same as last time with colorfly) :)

** Graphics **: Really well done, they really fit the mood of your game :)

** Gameplay **: In terms of gameplay the concept if fun, but i see this game more as a visual experience :) which is a really great change of pace :) something you could do tho is maybe to change it so that the player always has to gather orbs of the right color? to make the steps in between more interesting :)

** Overall **: Like your last game, really great result :) i am sure this one will be high up again in terms of mood and sound :)

@loktor I was wondering what someone said that played both games. Thank you for the feedback.

I actually have a lot of ideas for more interesting gameplay, but it would've cost a lot of time. That's the unfortunate thing with spending so much on music and graphics - it doesn't leave much for coding the gameplay. So I chose to keep it extremely simple again and focus on the presentation.

@zelos :)

ah that's great i would love to see where you take this game if you keep working on it :)
that's totally understandable :) but i think your game really shines again in those key areas where you put your focus on :)

Nice moody game. I could see this being polished and released as a "real" game, which is just about the best thing a Ludum Dare entry can be. I'd maybe make the movement a little more responsive, that way it's fun to just move around. But overall great work!

Relaxing music, and clever use of visuals to create a immersive atmosphere ; very good job!

The flying-thingy collecting part seems a little bit artificial, though, compared to the rest of the game ; which lacks some gameplay and seems rather like a collective psychological experiment for a research lab (to whom would you give something that required work) and the fact that you're displaying overall player statistics reinforces this idea :-)

Anyway, I'm glad that I played this one, which really stands out from the others!

Wow you manage to tell the stories very well. I really loved the music, the tone and mood was just right to bring out the emotions. Great job

Amazing.

Wow. It's great game!!!

Nice relaxing game, loved the sound. Maybe a bit less gravity though.

Very beautiful game. The graphics and music were spot on. The click to continue sound was a bit jarring in contrast, but it didn't detract much from the overall experience. I enjoyed the journey your game took me on. Nice work.

Very nice music - probably the best that I've heard so far. The text in the game had a bit of a melancholic feel to it, but at the same time the sounds and the visuals made the game quite relaxing to play.

Another polished little 'art game'. Kudos, Zelos!

I was rather frustrated with this one in the beginning. I wasn't expecting the gravity on the player avatar and it took a while to notice. This led to me fighting the controls. It also took a while before I noticed that I could proceed to the next screen. The barrier removal is very subtle and the moving starfield led me to believe that I might already be moving forward. Things were smooth sailing after that point, however.

I feel the real star of the show is the aggregate player choices at the end. Sure, the decisions are a little hokey and the gimmick is very Telltale Games (A gimmick that they themselves have pretty thoroughly beaten to death), but it was a welcome surprise in a LD game.

Compared to ColorFly, I feel this one is a step down. Gradient provides a very linear experience where the only freedom comes from dialog box where as ColorFly offered a more varied experience and real exploration leading to some true "Ah-Ha!" moments of realization. I'll score this game as its own thing, of course, I just wanted to offer the input for your consideration as an artist.

Amazing, I loved the stats at the end and the gameplay was incredible. Nice job

I really liked the overall atmosphere but didn't get a lot out of the actual gameplay? I think it could definitely be improved to be more challenge or interesting in terms of how the orbs are obtained. The story was good though

Unfortunately I cannot run this Windows 64 bit exe on my 32 bit machine, could you add another build?

This is one of my favourite games so far. It's really relaxing to play, I found myself collecting the orbs way more than I actually needed to haha. There's not a lot going on, but I really liked it, and the music and art style really went well together and made the game something enjoyable :)

It took me a while to figure out that you could even go to the next screen, but after several screens I noticed the counter in the top left corner :P

The music is awsome.

Had also played colorfly in LD 38, you can see some similarites (one improvement to the sucesssor for sure is, that at collecting an orb is a single note and doesn´t interfere with the rest of the game).

I´m a fan of the telltale games, so it´s great to get some choices on the way (and to see what other people have selected).

What I am missing is, that it is very loosely on the theme and some challenge.

Despite of that: Smooth game, story cool, graphics and mood great, sound excellent.

Good entry!

At first, playing this, I thought: What is this? Is this even a game? It seemed pointless. But that was perhaps because of how most games give instant gratification. No, with this game you get it at the end, and then some!

It's a really beatiful game and not only visually, though it's that too mind you.
It makes you think about choice and sacrifice.
At the very least it makes you think about what constitutes a game? It must be interactive, which it certainly is. I think it's almost like art even. In the same veign as Journey and other such games.

Music is also top! You played that yourself?

On more thing: Aren't the big stars killing the little starts to help themselves live? What does that say about the big stars? You got me thinking man...

Nice idea and interpretation of the theme. The click was a little imersion breaking, but I still considered it a 5/5 sound because all in all the sound was incredible and is what made the game in my opinion.
I liked the controls and the statistics at the end was a nice touch.
I don't think the orb counter in the inferior left corner was necessary.

I am happy to be one of the numbers in the total players of this game, nice job.

Nice game but controls were awkward. I can see this working on a phone or tablet much better.

While it wasn't very challenging, it was a great experience nonetheless. Possibly the best audio of any game I have played so far. Had a nice look and a fantastic mood. Great work!

Very good mood in this game!

Very nice game. Great job!

Once again a wonderful game / experience, I really liked Colorfly and this was an improvement on it in several ways. Great soothing music and feel, kind of the opposite of what I went with. Excellent.

Really nice mood in this game, fun and simple gameplay, with amazing story. I really enjoyed the colorfulness of the game, especially the trails of objects. Great Job!.

The sound is beatiful and fits really good to the story. Good job!

an easy and relaxing game. very nice

A VERY beautiful game! I loved it! The music set the mood perfectly. Well done!

Good game which has fantastic music.

The orbs alone being key'd to the music was fantastic. The story also really enhanced what would just be a straightforward game. Thank you for offering a version with just the endings on it.

The scale the orbs play on pickup fitting the scale of the composition was key here. but that doesn't mean you should have stopped there. I would have loved to be able to lose somehow or get hit. Enemies or health or something to avoid... Something for replay value. collecting pick ups over and over from and endless stream is not interesting after 60 seconds. even if they are colorful and graphically well done. Also there was no instruction to move to the next screen and I thought your game was broken at first. The narrative was loose at best. it seemed like you tacked it on so the theme could be tied in. I was bored right away and the only thing that kept me "playing" was that it was not challenging. I was hoping for some type of challenge but it never came. The coolest part besides the graphics and sound was the stats at the end which might be interesting, but really don't do anything for the game. It felt like I was involved in a poorly done social experiment. If there was some spiky thing to avoid that took away orbs then you would have a game. this is a interactive story with very loose writing in my honest opinion. The interactions really did not effect story that much either. mostly your just going down a very pretty path. Great job completing it on your own. It is very visually appealing and sounded very nice!

I really enjoyed this game, it was fun, it was relaxing, it had cool graphics, it had great audio. I had a lot of fun playing this and it was really calm and relaxing. I like the interactive story you added as well. Overall this is absolutely a great game and had beautiful graphics. You should be really proud. Good job :)

Very good entry! The graphics were simple, but colorful and I enjoyed them probably because I have a soft spot for games that convey human emotion and drama through very abstract things such as geometric shapes and the like. The music was fantastic - very relaxed and emotional and I was particularly impressed with how picking up orbs played a musical note which fit majority of the time. Obviously this isn't the trickiest effect in the book - just make the notes within the scale and hope the player picks them up in accordance to the tempo. That said, even if it's simple, it still impressed me and added a lot of charm and made the soundtrack feel organic. The encounters were pretty well done and added to the desolate atmosphere of the game as running into all these orbs that have run out of power and are dealing with emotional situations really set a grim and fitting mood. I will say that the gameplay was definitely the weakest aspect, even though I didn't hate it. It was refreshing to play an easy and chilled out entry in the sea of very hard old school ones. That said, adding more challenge would give the choices more weight as the player would have to take into consideration whether or not it's worth saving someone only to have to go through more orb collecting. As it stands it's more of a minor annoyance than really a challenge you have to take into consideration. Some more impact for the individual choices would be nice as well, because as it stands it doesn't really matter who you decide is worth saving but it's rather an all or nothing situation which eliminates the value of the individual choices and drama of these characters. All in all, however, I really enjoyed this one. Great work!

I think I would describe this project not necessarily as a game, but more as an experience, in the same way that "Journey" was an experience. And boy was it a good one. The mood in this game is incredible, with the amazing piano score (Yes I am a sucker for pianos) and very minimalistic yet pretty graphics. I think the story (and especially the conclusion) was very interesting as well. Although I might have come out more confused than when I started the game. Good job!

Beautiful game! A little repetitive as the particles you have to catch always move the same way. Really nice touch to add a link the the endings. I think movement should be a little faster for the walking levels. Congratulations! One of the best games i've played so far.

I saw 'developer of Colorfly', I saw the screenshots, and I knew exactly what to expect: an aesthetically soothing, dreamy experience - it didn't disappoint. Atmosphere and graphics wise, I feel it trumps Colorfly. It's like you polished the already good parts of Colorfly and took it up a notch.

I liked that you added a story with choices, and even recorded statistics from all players at the end of the game. It's a very rare thing to see in an LD entry. I think the "You win" ending might be too comical/whimsical for some players, although I was OK with it.

Gameplay was a weaker point though, but that's perfectly fine, since that's probably not the main focus anyway.

Good job, and I hope to play your entry in the next LD!

this game is a very charming music experiment. great :smile:

The music and the atmosphere of this game are impressively well crafted. The gameplay felt a little bit too simple and repetitive after some time. All in all, this is more of a visual experience than a mecanic-intensive one, an impressive one that is. Kudos!

How... Wha... Wow. I mean, i'm impressed. It isn't only a 48h game, but it feels polished, it is powerful, it is atmospheric, it is... great. I wasn't expecting this at all, but it felt great. Not only it brings you into this weird light world, but you managed to build characters and story in a few minutes. **clap, clap**
Congrats to you. Seriously.

The only thing that annoyed me were the invisible walls that there were sometimes, and realising when you had to drop instead of carrying onwards was confusing sometimes... but, this doesn't really compare to all the things this game does well.

Also, the statistics make it feel even more meaningful.

Soo... overall, great work! Keep it up!

well done :) beautiful little game, one I think you should take further.
just nice and relaxing to play, with the pickups adding to the music and a nice storyline along the way.

nice one, spot on loved playing it !

Nice use of Unity tail renderers. I like how the musical notes changed as you collect the mini-orbs. I wish the characters were a little more interesting than just glowing balls. The gameplay got stale rather quickly too. Collect the mini-orbs, lower the wall, talk to the next guy and answer a question, then repeat. I'm really not sure what this has to do with the running out of power theme. The choices I made really didn't seem to impact the outcome in any meaningful way.

Absolutely beautiful, the mood, the music, the visuals, the lulling undulating movements. I loved the exploration-based controls and gameplay!! I loved the experience which was more than the sum of its parts, all of the parts being excellent. Thank you for making this, I can see why it's recommended <3

Very nice experience, mood and sounds are greats and the there are some contents.
Well done :thumbsup:

This is a strange and quite abstract game that has a lot of atmosphere. Even so, the world does feel a bit sparse, but 48 hours is not much time to spruce things up. I like the way you tell a story and the music was lovely. I made it to one of the endings and it was quite interesting. I really like the player stats you give at the end. Very cool stuff.

Quite charming and atmospheric! The "eyes" part was definitely (suitably) creepy. With the last question, though, I wasn't even sure what I was being asked to decide... does "save yourself" mean rescuing the "I'm you" orb or "saving myself" as in selfishly fleeing? Perhaps that could be better phrased, unless the ambiguity is deliberately confusing.

When I intercepted light trails, I felt interested! The moment when I would continue to play is after collecting several light trails and seeing the progress bar at the bottom increase to three pips and reading 12/12 change to 10/10. I didn't figure out how I could change those pips or ratios. I wasn't entirely sure that intercepting light trails was a tactic for changing those metrics.

Wow. The music of this game. Amazing, mood is perfect. Polished, fun, atmosphere is nice. Beautiful. Thank you for this game.

I need more than 5 points to rate this beauty of the music in here. I didn't understand a thing from the ending nor why the game is named gradient descent (may be the player is moving to the local minimum or something), and I don't think that I'll ever understand but I don't care, the mood i felt in this game made me too relaxed to ever care. The art is really good too. I stayed for may be 5 minutes in the first area collecting orbs till I understood that I can go right. Overall, it was a great experience and I loved it. by the way, why did it say that 85 other players played the game while there are more than 90 ratings... did some of the others play it on desktop or without a net connection?

I'm very excited to have won the audio category, so thank you for all the votes and your great feedback!

@Yetman
Pretty sure that many of the voters just didn't complete the game. The data is only sent when you reach the actual results screen.