Jawbreaker by arya-s
Jawbreaker is a pico-8 game made for LD48/48 compo. It is my first completed game.
The game is about a kid's descend into crime. Getting deeper and deeper in the mafia world of the 1960s.
Known bugs: - game over death screen doesn't reset the game properly
| itch | https://arya-s.itch.io/jawbreaker |
| Github | https://github.com/arya-s/jawbreaker/blob/main/jawbreaker.p8 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/jawbreaker |
Ratings
| Overall | 301th | 3.629⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 496th | 3.258⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 345th | 3.403⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 236th | 3.903⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 351th | 3.581⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 411th | 3.21⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 114th | 3.519⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 184th | 3.7⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 38🗨️ |
I think I had a little bug when the game locked me on "as you grow old, you grow impatient [...]", unable to pick a choice.
Finally, I killed someone, reached an end, got to relax with my favorite jawbreaker, but it says "game over", did I win?
Overall, the story is nice and immersive, but I found it hard to know what I was doing. I couldn't really "choose" which path to follow, as some of them lead to instant death. Maybe clear textual choices instead of icons would have helped? I don't know =) It would also have been nice to know when and why we got something added to our inventory, I often opened it and was like "ooh, when did I looted that?". It would have allowed us to better learn what's the best path for future plays =D
Thanks. I ran out of time sadly, a bunch of the art isn't completed. Thank you for playing!
>Nice game! I enjoyed it!
>I think I had a little bug when the game locked me on “as you grow old, you grow impatient […]”, unable to pick a choice. Finally, I killed someone, reached an end, got to relax with my favorite jawbreaker, but it says “game over”, did I win?
>Overall, the story is nice and immersive, but I found it hard to know what I was doing. I couldn’t really “choose” which path to follow, as some of them lead to instant death. Maybe clear textual choices instead of icons would have helped? I don’t know =) It would also have been nice to know when and why we got something added to our inventory, I often opened it and was like “ooh, when did I looted that?”. It would have allowed us to better learn what’s the best path for future plays =D
Thank you for playing and the feedback! I noticed some bugs right around the end of the submission time. The item menu also bugs out sometimes and you can't consume the items properly.
Ideally I would've had text for when you receive an item, but I ended up settling for a quick sound.
The ending says game over but it's the win state, confusing indeed. Did you hear the shot at the end?
I did, yes! I found it to be an awesome twist/loop on the story =D
Graphics are good, tought I did not understood what were some of the icons, especially when facing the kid at the very beginning. At first I was like "what the hell why did he beat the kid" because I was thinking it would give him the jawbreaker sweet (notice that I did not read the description under the game, so I was not aware it would be about crimes).
I like a lot the little references to mafia movies. Is Joe a reference to Joe Pesci ?
Great experience.
Yes Joe is a reference to Joe Pesci and Tony is Tony Soprano hah.
Glad you liked it!
Like others said, I didn't understand the meaning of some icons at first, but it was quite easy to try it out and come back to the same point, so no big trouble.
It's so cool that you had time to come up with a story and a bunch of situations/encounters.
Nice entry !
There could be more options on how to deal with situations and the final fight came a bit suddenly story-wise. Still very very likable and well-executed for a Jam game. Thanks for sharing, Arya!
thanks so much for playing and leaving kind words and feedback!
I think it would have helped to force the player to select a story branch rather than giving a default one, since I got to the "as the years go by" three-way branch without realizing I was even making any choices.
Congratulations shipping your first complete game!
love the take on the theme! and always happy to see pico-8 games :)
also: I can see you watched the porklike series ;)
@pancelor thanks! Yeah porklike helped me a lot :)