Flickerlight by avareii
Every firefly hoards a mote of light within itself. But the light outside is fading, and the world is growing smaller. The universe is dying.
Soon, you will die too.
But until then, you will fight to persist. You will fight to live on. Because while there may not be much left, at least you still have this. Live it out, flickerlight. Don't let your light go out. Fight until the end.
Do it for the others, if you don't want to do it for yourself.
~~~
You play as one of the last fireflies clinging to a dying world. Everything may be dark, and dying, but you have a job to do.
You have to keep the fire running. You have to keep it running by scavenging and burning wood, trees, coal, buildings...anything you can find.
For if the fire goes out...well, you don't want to think about that.
CONTROLS:
- WASD or click to move your firefly to where you have clicked.
- Click to interact with items in the overworld.
- Click and drag items from your inventory to use, move and drop them.
- Mouseover for infotips.
- ESC to pause.
- Ctrl+R to reset the game.
Post-Jam fixes are as follows: - Reduced download size by about 25%. - Fixed Excavator not unlocking. - Fixed Excavator crash on deconstruction. - Fixed Excavator sprite offset. - Fixed Workshop task not unlocking. - Fixed two accidental unlimited resource loops.
Ratings
| Overall | 98th | 4.087⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 600th | 3.457⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 552th | 3.457⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 150th | 4.174⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 423th | 3.978⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 179th | 3.932⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 663th | 2.975⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 85th | 4.217⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 13🗨️ |
Would love the dialogues to move a little faster!
Something to be proud of, great contribution!
The music, sound effects, lightning, NPCs with different dialogues and ways to do stuff, crafting all of that is just amazing. Very nice thing you have done there!
The story is also very very nice with a gentle touch!
Was pretty cool -- I like the take on the theme, and the art was great, especially the conversation-profile art. Would have been cool to have more stuff to build that would affect things since it started to feel a litle samey cutting down trees and recruiting people. I accidentally threw the only piece of coal I found into the fire, and couldn't find a pick, so I couldn't make a coal bin.
Really love your game, spent about 30 minutes and going to spent more.
A little problem with optimisation, when bonfire starts to burn really wide.
Everything about the game was great. Did you make the background music yourself? I was indifferent about it at first but as the 'lore' revealed itself I realized how somber the music is with its distortions and all. After about 10 minutes in I was really tense and couldn't even tell why.
I played the WebGL version and it started lagging after about 20 minutes, so I downloaded the Windows version to try later tonight. GREAT JOB!
This isn't rushed, by any means, and the slow pacing of the dialogue forces that, often frustratingly for me.
Overall though, I like the idea!
@hansj @taaada @otterfaelure that's a fair point about the dialogue - I got so caught up in balancing tension vs. readability that I completely neglected usability. Also, every line is manually timed - which is great for attention to detail, but bad when sleep-deprived people (like me) forget to update timings during dialogue edits and one line ends up hanging around for 5+ seconds.
Next time we do dialogue, we'll put in a 'next line' or 'skip interaction' button. Some of the interactions are kind of verbose, but I think a lot of them could be condensed into a summary paragraph for people who aren't into dialogue.
Certainly we also didn't expect the game to be as long as it ended up being. I thought to myself - 20 minutes, max. Instead, if you use up all your resources as intended, I suspect it could last about an hour plus (edit: I had a good run that went for 43:42; I think 50 minutes might be possible, but I don't think 60 is). Regrettably, we didn't have time to properly test all the interactions between fuel harvest/consumption rates etc. But this means I can play the game myself (semi-) blind later, so ngl I'm pretty stoked about that :)
@vgel the game is designed to scale - once you find tools for things, you can hand them to people to do treecutting/mining jobs - or task them with wandering around and finding these tools themselves, provided they are close enough. Unfortunately, we lacked time to polish this progression so as a result there's a bit of a barrier between early game and late game that requires either luck or concerted wandering around.
@truebach thanks for playing! I'm not the guy to help with optimisation, but I'll boop one of our other devs and he might have suggestions. LOVE can be a bit temperamental and chuggy sometimes depending on how it's run. In the meantime, all I can recommend is to try the Windows version, if that's not what you've been trying already.
@leolferraz that was meeeee <3 I'm glad it had the desired effect! We tried something new this time - the moment we had the theme and mood more or less nailed down, I put the music together Day 1. This allowed us to use it as a guideline for the mood over the rest of the game. You guys are the final judges, but I think it helped.
Given that my usual approach to music is sitting down at 6AM on Tuesday (Australian time) in a panic, this approach was definitely more relaxing (and I could stress about other things instead!).
(I also wrote bgm for when you see the stars, but we didn't have time to put in the triggers for it. I put it up on my soundcloud [here](https://soundcloud.com/shoulderdrake/flickerlight-starry-sky-bgm). The default bgm is there as well.)
@baka hahaha haha haaaaa - no, I kid, this is actually a really good idea. I just wish we'd had enough time to do stuff like this. As it was, we didn't even consider scoping it in :)
Thank you all again for playing! I'll put up a post in the next day or two outlining all the scope creep that got cut last minute :)
It may also please you to hear that we've slowly started poking at a post-jam version of the game :) no ETA or details or anything, because there's still a lot to do, but the work is being done!
@kitkii thanks for playing! As much as a character falling into depression and refusing to talk further fits the mood, I'd love to add more complexity to these guys in future. Maybe they mutter to themselves about something, and open up if you bring them a specific item?
@realtanhen did you know, I threw together a list of 50+ things to polish and add in post-jam, and job animations weren't even on it? Thanks for the reminder XD this would do a lot to help immersion!