small game but the emotion is big ! I like the palette and the minimalist music

Beautiful small game with a very coherent minimalistic art style, both in music, graphics and presentation, good job!

WELL THAT WAS AN EMOTIONAL JOURNEY

I love the art style, when I'm playing I try to avoid the death num, but at last I figure out is inevitable

The art style is simple but effective. The story about the dog's life is pretty emotional. The symbolism of the rainbow bridge is great as well. The game is simple, but achieves what it set out to do.

Simple and delicate. I loved the music and the choice of colors. One doubt, does picking up the bad objects make the game end sooner? Well, at least in my gameplay the game ended normally.

Very nice game with simple mechanics. I liked the transitions between scenes

So simple but at the same time very thoughtful. The Art style fits so well with the theme too.

Makes me miss my pup, great job creating an experience that made me feel. I liked the color and use of dithering. I only wish there was either more story or more mechanics. But the gameplay just felt like a way to get to the next dialog. I'd honestly have been fine just watching the dog walk.

Very simple but very pretty !
Loved the art and the palette choice

Art style is delightful!

Really fantastic art. Simple game. I liked it a lot :)

Good choice of colour palette and art style, and a simple yet bittersweet story. Nice work.

Very nice submission. It's bittersweet in the perfect way. I loved the colors and the choices made in dithering that added an interesting effect.

I'm not crying, you're crying :'( Very well done! Love the dog animation

The music got me

Short and sweet. nice!

Maybe it's the sleep deprivation from the jam, but this game hit me in just the right spot. Thanks for uploading.

The words were a little small and hard to read on my screen, but I love the art style!

Very nice art and simple clean music, it's short but to the point.

I think the game is more about the sad story than the game play, which is cool, but the game play was just a little too slow for me.

Otherwise the art and music were really nice!

This was really touching! Thank you for sharing the game. :)

Simple but it looks polished and I like the simple music :D Love the chill vibe of it and your art style is great!

Thank you everyone for the feedback!

@very-bad-bunny-studio The number of bad objects picked up does not affect the ending. Because it's all inevitable, eh? ;)

I really liked the polish on this - I think the gameplay could use some work. It felt a bit... slow, unknown of what I'm supposed to do with the objects, and the game could have controlled better. Still, I love the story you put in, the writing, the simple color palette, and the art. Well done!

Nice game! Interesting story actually.

Wow, so much feeling packed into a small game. Great job. I've never even owned a dog and it pulled at my heartstrings. Awesome job.

Graphics are very nice! Nice little game for dog people!

Amazing game with a deep meaning. Never forget, all dogs go to heaven. :)

Oh, this is wonderful. I definitely cried. Love it being written from the perspective and interpretation of the pup <3 The minimalist palette and audio works really well. It's a bit difficult to tell where the interactable element for moving to the next dialogue window is and whether you'd clicked it (an onclick sound probably would help) and I had to restart once because I double clicked and missed some dialogue. It was worth restarting though: I wanted to read all of it.

Better story than most AAA games. The little pupper almost made me cry. It could be interesting to have different endings depending on what you collected (Maybe good if you collected more hearts than skulls, bad if you collected more skulls than hearts and perfect if you only collected hearts?) The graphics are rlly nice and polished. Moral of the story: don't give dogs cheese.

@dindotjs But they love the cheese! Those sneaky pills that the human hides inside, on the other hand...

Heylo! Congrats on your first LD jam! :D

Love that you prioritized making a good small experience instead of a long one. Giving you honest feedback because I want to help you do better next jam!

**Feedback:**

---

🎨 Graphics 🎨
- I don't really have anything to say on the graphics, I liked the colour palette, the animations worked well, the "level" transitions were cool. The only piece of feedback for the graphics is that the dialogue prompt looks out of place. Same with the box in the top right. I think it's because the actual box isn't pixelated like everything else in the game.
- The animation seemed to be the dog running, but the camera pans at a walking pace -> I feel a slower walking animation would have worked better

🎮 Gameplay 🎮
- Was hard to tell what I was supposed to pick up and what I wasn't supposed to
- Not sure if there is a consequence for picking up the wrong objects -> is it just a number going up? I only played it once so if it makes an alternative ending or something, that's cool. If not, I feel like adding a reason to pick them up if they are there.
- Happened in a few places where there were 3 items, 1 on each lane. I'm guessing they are randomly generated, but having a way to prevent that would be nice.
- With all that said, I think the gameplay still worked well with the game because it was much more story focused.

📜 Story 📜
- Sad story, but it was good. I liked the fact it was from the dog's perspective.

🎺 Audio 🎺
- Sound effects were nice
- Music worked well as well

🧼 Polish 🧼
- Instead of having a button in the dialogue, I think it would have worked better to just let the player click anywhere.

🐞 Bugs 🐞
- The dialogue button doesn't always seem to work, sometimes need to press it a few times, then it skips through some dialogue.

---

Hope this was helpful! Good luck with your next jam!

i love the little running dog so much! music was good too. i like reading a lot in games so i enjoyed the dialogue but i think there might be a little bug with it

That's a neat little game! The game mechanic itself is simple, but the narration is great and heartfelt, good job! :v:

PS: I love the dithered transition between two scenes!

Really loved the art style - a lot of personality in the run animation!

I personally look for fun mechanics and gameplay in jam games, so this wasn't exactly my cup of tea. That being said, I would still like to give feedback on other non gameplay aspects of the game.

The dialogue box was a bit funny as I didn't immediately realize I had to press the paw button and was spamming on my keyboard to go further in the dialogue without any success. It would def be cool if you also went along in the dialogue with random keyboard inputs as well.

The gameplay wasn't that exciting, but some things that really struck me in it were the collectable objects spawning in each other. It felt like I had to collect some of them and avoid others, but couldn't do that since they occupied the same space.

Take all this with a grain of salt since, as I already said, I'm not the biggest fan of story based games in GameJams. Still, great work!

Nice game with beautiful art style. I really like the story.

Excellent art and a moving story, what more can you ask for? On the part where you have to avoid bas stuff, it was sometimes impossible to pass without touching any. Other than that, perfect :ok_hand:

I see dog, I play game. But for real, This was a super fun little game for something so simple. The graphics were amazing also!

And there are still people believing that games are unable to tell stories. Show this to them.

Sobbing/10

uuhhhhhmmmm
wtf
10/10

pls rate my game:)

Holy crap, I had friends over while playing this and most of us ended up crying. Steller story telling, and hitting emotional cords. Beautiful piece of art.

Bawling my eyes out now, thanks. Wasn't ready to be emotionally battered by a gamejam, but here we are. Loved it, though.

Surprised how a simple game can be so emotional. Great game!

Right in the feels, really makes you value the story a game tells over having the best gameplay possible. Congrats!

wow that sad... (but in a good way :D), really simple and cute game. Great job!

cute and i like it. as simple as it is.

Nice entry - so wholesome :) The limited colour palette for the art looked great. Only issue I had was with the dialog box - it wasn't immediately obvious to me that the paw button progressed the text.

Well done! That was a great story driven game. The art and vibe created was very good. Great work.

Your game made me feel a certain type of way :cry:

The story was so cute. The blurb about the cheese tasting bad was exactly how a dog would think.

I have to say, I didn't really enjoy the gameplay particularly. But I don't really care, because you created a story about something I was very invested in. I played all the way until the end and maybe a little tear rolled down my cheek when he ran across the rainbow out of screen at the end :cry:

Great job invoking emotions from your players in only 48 hours!

Very simple, very quick-it lasts less than a minute-and that's why it works well. The game gets in with a sweet, little story, and leaves before it becomes too intrusive or overstays it's welcome (not that it was much of a risk.). The graphics are nice. The music is a little too simple for me, but it works for the game, and the sound effects are effective.

Nice game-didn't expect a nice story in such a short timeframe.

Very good little game, well made. Although, i think it doesn´t follow the theme. I mean, the owner of the dog kind of tries to delay the inevitable, but i don´t think the theme manifest in the gameplay.
Really good game, and the ending hurted my hearth really deeply.

You came in and made exactly everything the game needed and didn't add any fluff. Very sweet story that hits hard even though it's very short. The music was okay but it didn't need to be fancy for this game to work. All around great job!

Very sweet little game. Graphics and sound work great together. Just a slight hitch which seems almost petty to mention, but it was hard to tell what was a heart item to grab and what was a skull item (in game of course, I can see you listed them above). I mean my dog loves bugs, heh. Anyway, quite touching

Very beautiful game, being a fellow pixel artist I can really appreciate the low bit style this game has. I really wish this game was longer. Great story and emotion though, I still think about my bulldog that we had to put down because of her health problems. This game really felt like a labor of love.

This one gets me goose bumbs. I wish it would be longer.

This game is a mood! A very simple game but I love the theming of it along with the art style and music! I would definitely play more of this game.

Cool little game, as someone who has a dog I enjoyed this very much.

Well damn, brb going to play with my dog.

I see you're hitting on the emotional side :P Pretty graphics and I enjoyed the small game. Replayed it couple of times so that the doggy has no skull items picked up!


So emotional :______) nice work!

Well-crafted art, clean music, simple and direct gameplay. I love the dog, I'd have liked more mechanics or one more surprise. Good game tough!

Congrats on your first Ludum Dare and welcome to the community :)
The game hits right in the feels (damn ninjas cutting onions...).

It is more of a story game with a simple loop to pass a message across. But maybe elaborating a bit more on the gameplay would have been good. A little detail that would have been cool to see is the sprite for the dog changing: starting with a puppy, then a grown dog and then maybe change the animation to look more tired for the last part.

It is a good emotional game nonetheless. Good job!

This was so beautiful. As someone who would die for my loving dog, I felt this game hard. It was a simple gameplay, but a huge emotional journey. Thank you :)

Cute game with simple mechanics, although I didn't quite understand how the different objects impacted the dog :( good job

The graphics are great and we can really feel the mood, but the speed is really slow and we can move with no cooldown so it's possible to just catch everything on the three lanes if we want to.

Didn't expect to find a game that hits that hard - but here we are 🐶

Really enjoyed the pixel art. Super minimalistic and clean, and extremely pretty.

This game made me cry since my cat went missing on last sunday and was found dead hit by a train on friday before the jam started... Thank you for this cute game. :heart: :heart: My first thought was to make something in honor of him, but it would have end me.

ooooofffff, right in the feels man....

Nice game, a little small, but still good!

Good work! Really cute and I enjoyed the art and color pallette!

Not my taste. I pay more attention to mechanics in games on the Jam. The story is cute, and the graphics are very nice, but the gameplay is just ok. It's good and it's working, but nothing besides that. Why are we even collecting the items?

Good job!

Great game!!

Cute game but what did the cheese mean?
Does it have a specific meaning I don't get?

Thanks for this nice story. Very soothing music and I like the color palette. Good job for your first entry!

I wasn't expecting that, definitely hits the mood category

Started out as super adorable and then well... Good job!

Good simple game. Story, graphics are nice, audio simple but goes well with the music. I had a problem with dialog button, after few clicks it seemed to accept.

I love the aesthetic of this and how you wanted to tell a story. Great job. LOVELY (My only complain is that I can't pet the doggy).

Aesthetically strong GJ!

Don't worry-all dogs go to heaven. See you later, my friend.

Super cute game, simple but effective; nice job!

@finn-pickart I (and probably other dog owners as well, although I don't have any sources or anything lol) will wrap pills that dogs need into cheese slices. They hate pills but love cheese so they gobble it down!

Lovely, touching game. Nice work!

Very emotional game. It seemed like you were drawing on your own experiences! very deep! Really nice job!

Didn't expect to to have emotions from a game jam but you did it. Really neat little game. Well done.

There's not much of a gameplay but it's really cute and touching!

Oh my heart can't take it!

Great simple and short story driven game. I didn't understand that the second section had bad items until after I collected them.

I really liked the atmosphere. Subverted my expectations. Nice job!

Short and sweet experience, I liked it very much!
(Check out our game as well!)

As someone who lost their dog a few years ago, the story definitely resonates with me.
Loss is such a powerful emotion, capturing it in a good way is difficult.

The ending was a bit abrupt, and left me wanting more.
But then again, the same could be said about losing your pet.

Simple and lovely game! Loved it!

Didn't expect tears

:'( Well, that's sad.

It didn't really seem like there was actually much purpose to the gameplay. But, the overall presentation was excellent! Great little story. Nice animation. Beautiful pixels. Good music!

So simple and so beautiful. This game really makes me miss my dog but also very happy that I can think back fondly on the time spent. Lovely game, thanks for making it! <3

sweet game ,very touching, the ending is so rush makes me feel have no ideas

well now I need to go pet my dog.. anyways great submission!

So cute, great art style. Well done!

Wow very nicely written. You really set the mood with the writing, art, and music. Loved it!

Neat idea.

Sweet game. I really like the mood of the story and game itself.

Little bit of short thought, and the gameplay may need more polishing.

Well done!

lovely and touching :cry:

short and touching game, nice job!

I wasn't sure if the runner mechanic would work well with the story, but since it's short and it switches from collecting to avoiding, it makes a nice point. I'm not sure if what is collected changes the story in anyway though?

Wow. beautifully crafted. I really like how the collectibles matched the emotion of the story at the moment.

beautiful game, plenty of tears on my end

Very good and deep narrative for compo game. As well as overall mixture of visuals, sound and gameplay.

Nice little game! I tried both the web and the windows version, as I felt the first was a bit slow, but the second was waaaay too fast: once I pressed space I almost instantly arrived at the next text phase, making the game last for like 2 seconds. But despite that, still a very good work from you, gg!

awww, the end makes me sad, even though i knew what was coming. Thank you for making this beautiful little game. I liked the pixel art much and it was so satisfying to pick up all the good things. :-) <3

Such a beautiful game, amazing pixel art, simple and pretty.

Right into the damn feelings.. cute game.

Great looking game, a bit short on gameplay but it makes it up with the story!

Really evocative... made me think of my dog several years ago. Thank you, so much :)

Brief but intense, great work

Pretty game, very emotional for such a short experience.

Thank you for sharing!

All I can say is that it's more touching and pretty than Titanic. Cute <3

Simple but sweet. The mood is quite strong.

Cute and charming!

Small experience but cute bois

cute art, but the dificult of the second level is to high

Cute, little game or rather experience :). The narrative is nice. I have approached it without reading the description first and haven't really understood which items are 'good' and which are 'bad'. Also they sometimes are generated on top of each other which makes them difficult to pick up/avoid. Neverless good job and congratulations on being the most rated game! That is a huge achievement :)

Short but really sweet :) Don't take it the wrong way, but maybe you should opt out of the "fun" rating ? It feels weird to rate it on that criteria (I decided not to) since I really don't believe that's what you're aiming at

Dem feels... Really enjoyed the game and its atmosphere - great achievement for a compo game! Kudos for the text and the background art - that's great dithering work and color choice!

Strengths:
- Very well written
- The toned down palette and melancholic music make for a great, nostalgic mood
- Immediate gameplay

Possible improvements:
- The effect of the different objects was a bit confusing during my first playthrough

Great job!

Simple but effective, the art style is very good and the story is well written. Good job!

A short but great experience. Loved the art style and found it to be touching. Well done!

Nice small game with aesthetic graphics.

This made me sad, I love my good boi! Awesome game!

Simple and touching. Yet I am little bit confused with how each items work and the purpose of me collecting those and avoiding others.

Not an ambitious game, but still made me tear up in the span of two minutes.

As many have said before - this hit me right in the feels. Needs a bit of polish here and there but a great emotional ride. Great job!

Nice game, I almost cried

This got me in my feels, especially towards the end with all the treats and running toward the the rainbow bridge. I love the beautiful simplicity of it and how the story is told from the doggo's perspective. Great work!

Very cute game and, well, what an emotional journey!

Omg, you're going to make me cry. :cry: I love how the story is told from the dog's perspective. The color palette, the dithered gradients, and the somber music all contribute to a great sense of mood. I only wished it was longer, or that the gameplay had more impact on the narrative / gave you different endings. Nice game

Lovely art, I don't have a dog but it's the same with my cat! (':

Nice and cute little game. I can see the emotional journey and I have to say a very good entry for not only your first LD but a Compo at that. It could be more fun, as I was engaged more by the story rather than the gameplay. I see lots of potential, and I do like the minimalist pixel art. Well done.

Good job!

Very cute, emotional game. I really love the graphics, music and the well-written story. My only feedback is I would have liked to see more in terms of interactivity and actually be able to delay the inevitable, as I think it would make the experience all the more emotional. It's a sweet little game nonetheless. Congrats on your first ludum dare!!

Love the colors and the art style - simple, yet lovely. Really hits the "inevitable" theme - no matter how many sticks you collect and how much you play, in the end, it doesn't even matter. Good take on explaining death of an animal honestly.

Very cute and simple. I liked it! Good job!

Omg what a beautiful game. The presentation is amazing, already from the menu. Love the color scheme and the art. And the story!! You managed to fit so much meaning in such a simple and short game. Brilliant work.

Nice little game. I really appreciated the mood and the story. The art is really nice, too.

Lovely palette, simple yet efficient gameplay and a subject matter everyone who ever lost a pet can emphasize with. Well done!

Nice little game. Writing is excellent and the art is very nice too. The limited color palette + dithering helped match the theme really well. Only suggestion is that I do wish the dog moved a bit faster.

Loved the story and art. Great work <3

Nice little game, very minimalistic :)

Cute game. Sometimes clicking the dialogue, or pressing space for it seemed to take multiple presses to get it to transition for some reason.

There was an issue where the first click for the button didn't register - and it seemed consistent.. at least to me. The vibe of the game is great but - as others have stated maybe a little to the slow side. And again the impact of picking up and not picking up "items" wasn't too clear.
Great job over all - very stylized :thumbsup_tone1:

This game was interesting. The gameplay (what there is) was really basic, with no real way to fail, you could beat the entire thing by just pressing space, trying to collect the good things and dodge the bad things is really basic, but because it's random, it is sometimes impossible to avoid all bad things; and speaking of good and bad things, the graphics aren't incredibly clear on what is "good" and what is "bad." The graphics were good, the dog's walk cycle is a little janky but it does it's job. A lot of people (including myself) have issue with the dialogue boxes not registering inputs, but bugs are expected to be in game jam games. Now for some more positive aspects, the story was really sweet and emotional, and pretty much objectively the best part of this game. Either way, this game is very cute, with a sweet story, but some lacking gameplay. Sorry if my criticisms seem harsh, but I'm just trying to be fully honest with my opinions.

Great game, even more impressive this is your first solo jam. Concise yet touching journey that you were able to deliver, simplicity is well used to really bring out what the game is about. Love the art direction of the game as well, great job!

Very good game about very good boys and girls. I love that the ending section is filled with sticks and naps and bones, I read that as giving plenty of treats and love to your pet right before sending them off. Overall the game did a really good job of immediately evoking emotion - impressive for a game jam game!

I like the minimalist pixel art style. It is an interesting emotional game

I used to be a cat person but then I played this game.
Excellent writing, it would be nice to have more of a game mechanic - currently it doesn't even seem to matter how many hearts and skulls you get.

Nice little game here. The color pallette and running animation are super well done.

Simple gameplay but very touching story. The art and music add to the mood.

Cute <3

Never owned a pet before, but still very sad yet wholesome, well done!

Art is great, the small palette works really well. But at least for me the size of the embed makes the pixel size vary between the pixels. It's really annoying for me. I zoomed the page a bit which fixed it. Gameplay worked great. Would have loved to see a bit more of it though :)

Wow, that hit me hard. Think I might need to play with my puppy for the rest of the day now.

But great job, really. You did a lot with very little time, the writing was great, so were the graphics/audio. Everything was very polished too. One of the best I've played as part of the jam.

the game is interesting but it just lacks depth. great art and music

nice art and music