Very interesting idea for a game, love the art style!

I've reached the naked truth, and here it is - your game is gorgeous to look (I was surprised on noticing that you have added screenshot button - "why?" I wondered before diving in), hear and play. It actually felt like a meditation, and you have reminded me, that I've been skipping my yoga practise recently.

@daniel-whittaker
Thanks and I'm glad to hear that as my goal with this gamejam was to get better at animation and presentation. Ran out of time though so the title screen is a bit bare bones and some extra graphics that would be shown at the end had to be cut.

@kszaku
The screenshot button was just an already existing feature of my engine, but now that you mention it, it's a perfect fit for this. Thanks for the feedback!

Game doesn't appear to start for me. I installed the redists, didn't get any kind of debug output running it via command line either. Win10 v1809 build 17763.1879

Game looks interesting though!

I love the Japanese retro PC aesthetic, as well as the theme, but unfortunately found the game way too difficult. The floaty player controls feel nice, but make it basically impossible to avoid all the fast-moving projectiles. I'd get bombarded with both positive and negative thoughts within the first few seconds of each attempt and then be forced to restart. If you'd tone down the projectile quantity and speed, this could be a lot of fun.

@kp-cftsz I've done some research and I think it might be because DX9 isn't included with some versions of Windows 10? Are you willing to test installing it and report back? The DX9 redist can be downloaded from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109

If it still doesn't work I can consider porting it to FNA which should be more compatible with newer versions of Windows out of the box. The reason I use XNA instead of FNA or MonoGame is because I want to support Windows versions as old as Windows XP. I should probably offer both XNA and FNA/MonoGame versions of my games in the future.

@pdotjpg Thanks, definitely the style I was going for.

I play a lot of arcade style games so my perspective on the difficulty might be a bit slanted. The first iteration was way too easy from my point of view so I ramped up the difficulty a bit because it wasn't fun for me. The thought form projectiles have slower deceleration than acceleration so if you change to the opposite direction or move in circle patterns they have a harder time keeping up. The spawn positions of all the thought forms get randomized each round, so I guess it's also possible to have very unlucky starts where you're completely surrounded from the get go. I should probably increase the minimum spawn distance to the player.

When I make a post jam version update I'll definitely add different difficulty modes to match different kinds of players and might even add a "casual" mode where there's no negative thoughts and you only enjoy receiving positive thoughts. Thanks for the feedback!

@lalaki7 , I made like 5 attempts and didn't get to grips with the mechanics at all, got slaughtered every time. The thing to keep in mind is that your players aren't gonna be half as good as you are at your game. I made the same mistake with my game – tuning it to where it felt fun for me. The result is players with high scores that I consider absolutely trivial, and a lot of players missing content I made that only triggers when you've reached a certain score.

It's a good idea to tune jam games easier rather than harder, imo, since most players just wanna check it out for 5 minutes and then move on.

It's cool that you're planning on making a post-jam version, though! Eager to check it out.

The game doesn't seem to launch on windows 10

Not much for gameplay.

Interesting idea, and like the ui font and pc ascetic

I really like your idea and the pixel art is great! Most of all visual and atmospheric game for me. Nice.

A very innovative concept! Very zen mood, great game!

The art is really a bright spot of this experience, but sadly the character had far too much inertia for me to manage to build more than three chakras.

mango is the best fruit. interesting game concept, but it felt really hard to intentionally have any effect on the outcome of the game. targets were too far away to be seen, and in order to avoid the red thoughts required maintaining such a high velocity that it became almost purely chance if i hit a blue thought. overall though, nice submission!

No matter what I try, installed redists, run as admin, run as different windows modes, game refuses to boot at all - no processes even start.
Looks like your engine might not be fully compatible with Windows 10? Unsure. Sad I didn't get to try this out.

Unlike a bunch of the folks above, I was able to launch it without issue. Unfortunately it runs *way* too fast to play—within a fraction of a second after starting the game, my character gets swarmed with text and starts fading out. Is it… not limiting the frame rate, or something?

@magnanix Sorry to hear that. Will investigate it more when I get access to a Windows 10 system with the same problem or when I find someone online that can help me track it down.

@mahalis The engine is locked to 60 FPS, you can check it by changing IsFpsCounterOn to true in config.ini, but it's probably because I'm into high speed action games and didn't account for that as not everyone else is. Will do a post jam update after the rating period is over, that will add different difficulty modes that'll drastically slow down the gameplay, lower the homing range of negative thoughts, increase the minimum thought spawn distance between the player, tweak the time to lose focus (fading out) and also fix two minor audiovisual bugs I discovered.

If anyone that didn't get to fully experience *The Naked Truth* is still interested, they can retry it then (sometime after the 18th).

Mango best fruit confirmed! I'n contrast to other people here I didn't feel that it was too hard, my best time being 21 seconds :D Some progression would be nice though, as I didn't see much reason to keep on playing

@nitero Indeed! My high score is 20 seconds though. :smirk:

I planned to add some extra graphics at the end if you finished within a certain time limit (21 seconds actually) but ran out of time. Although since there's a total of 96 different DEEP thoughts, you usually don't get to see all of them in one run, so by playing more than once you can get to see more different ones. Anyhow, thanks for playing!

most aesthetic game I' ve seen so far It's great job

Looks interesting, sadly I'm on Linux and don't have Windows. :'(

Another meditation theme! Awesome! But unfortunately the game was lagging and everything felt very slow. I love the pixel art in your game!