Really nice entry, it's very intuitive, without the description (isn't up as I'm writing this) I managed to understand everything. Congratulations! The graphics are effective, and the mood is greatly made.

Thank you!! Added description and images now c:

Yea, this is great. I mean it capture that terror of running out of time perfectly. I tried playing on trackpad at first which was impossible, but once I dug out a mouse it was perfectly playable. The sense of foreboding was immense, even before any of the tasks started. I think that was down to the audio. I had my headphones on and that driving bass was really hitting an anxiety nerve. Only gripe would have been length, but that can be forgiven as it's the bane of all Ludum Dare entries. Graphics were great, and the visual effect added an extra life and ominous vibrancy to them. It all fitted perfectly with the overall ambience of the game.

Great stuff :8ball:

The viney descent into darkness is such an awesome effect. The visual effects overall are really well done. The textures, vignetting, AO, chromatic aberration, and screenshake all come together very nicely to sell a dark atmosphere. Same goes for the sound effects. The interactions are responsive, intuitive, and satisfying. Running out of time isn't super punishing, which could have been very frustrating, but you handle it really well.

I would absolutely love to see more "scenes" if you happen to continue working on this post-jam!

Great job, as always. I hope you're proud of your creation!

The mood is very well made! I tested on the controller at first, and everything worked except the camera movement was too slow, so I switched to controlling the camera and the clicks with the mouse and kept the gamepad stick to navigate.

It took me a few attempts, especially for the last level (I tried to interact from too close to the object). It was a bit tough to restart one level before where I failed, though it fitted the inner thoughts of the character.

Thanks for playing, everyone! Sorry for taking so long to heart your comments, LD messed up my sleep and I needed a week to get my energy back and return to this 😅 Playing your games now!

@ava-skoog Take care of yourself! It's more important than everything, and game jams can be pretty exhausting. :-)

That's a cool concept, with a good atmosphere, and i really like the story telling, gg !!!

Good entry!

I wish it was a bit longer, there's definitely room to add more minigames and build on the story that you're telling.

I especially loved the audio in this one, and visuals effects are really nice too! Great atmosphere.

Nice job!

This was great, and I love the concept. Wario ware, but creepy. It's just a shame that it's so short, but that's expected.

Also, those are some really nice visuals and effects for being your first time with Godot, awesome job!

Thank you all! "Wario Ware, but" is exactly how I described the game myself to someone, glad you picked up on that 😁

I like the atmosphere a lot and the visual effects are cool. The gameplay is simple but good and easy to understand. Great job.

This was INTENSE. I actually started to breathe faster and felt really anxious all the way through. The ending was really beautiful. Man, what an experience. Fantastic.

Hey There!

Loved the audio and the mood it set for the game. Very straight forward game, yet it requires you to be quite observational.

Great job !

This is fantastic, you absolutely nailed the atmosphere and presentation. Even with a short length and simple gameplay, it very well compliments the story and thematic elements. Really a beautiful piece of art that resonated with me a lot.

I liked how well you executed the atmosphere, and the story. My only annoyance was that restarting put you in the room where you had to sit and wait for ten seconds with nothing to do.

Thanks a bunch! I'm glad the themes came through even with the incomplete content 😊 Agree about the restarting, and I think shuffling levels when you had to redo one might've been good too. Appreciate the feedback!

Definitely an interesting experience! But I'd love to see a post mortem or devlog video of you sharing how your first time with Godot was! I mean, what did you think of it? Nice!

@unidaystudio:

Thanks for playing! Not sure how much I have to say about it but I can summarise some of it here 😅

## Before the jam

I already knew Unity well. A week before LD I looked up Godot's basics and then the stuff I need for most jams. Made a Breakout clone with shaders to practice:


Just barely dipped my toes into 3D shaders just to assess.


## During the jam

The rest I figured out here and that's also where much time—that could've gone to making levels in a familiar environment—unfortunately went. Struggled especially to get the different physics body types to play nicely with each other.

### Physics

Hope it's just my lack of Godot experience, but I initially wanted the 🎭 people in the "crowd" level to move but couldn't get it to work like I wanted while keeping them as rigid bodies (not kinematic bodies) like all other interactables in the system I designed and didn't have time to modify. In Unity and Bullet it's easy to just set the velocity of a rigid body and it will slide around fine, but in Godot I just couldn't do it without forces (which, while more physically correct, is often not what I want in more deterministic games). Did use forces for the balloons. 🎈

I really liked the visual raycast node for setting up my interaction sightline! It did seem tricky to do procedural raycasting however?


### Transforms

I'm used to quaternions and Godot's approach tripped me up. It's not bad, but I couldn't get the player movement relative to camera angle to work using identical maths to what works for me in Unity and elsewhere. In the end I just had to copy maths from Godot's FPS tutorial, but to be fair it was less code so I'm glad I learnt the proper Godot way. 🎥

### Editor

Godot's editor is mostly fine. But while I do work this way sometimes outside Unity, the ability to still use the editor in play mode to move things around and quickly test certain things really is a luxury and a time saver that I missed dearly this LD. Hopefully it will be added in the future.

### Graphics

Unity is 100% shader customisable but I have to say I find Godot's default solution probably even slicker. Nice access to many options on "spatial materials" without code, yet with presets in "shader materials" saving boilerplate even when you code. And visual shaders on top of that! 🤩 And multi-pass for outline was so easy!!

However I got really frustrated that there was no way to ask Godot to preload shaders. Even the suggestions online, to prerender something with every material didn't work (there are some cubes behind the UI on the title screen, just can't see them well with the post-effect) and so the game will lag on every new level the first time you turn to look at something with a different shader. In Unity I've never had the issue. For custom stuff I always just preload.

Viewport node for fullscreen render texture was great; trickier in Unity!

### Input

Unity and Godot's current input map systems are very similar. However neither compares to the bliss of the huge input device database that is SDL 2 and unified interface to any normal-ish gamepad. The DB is separately available so please use it, engines! 😭

## After the jam

Or just after the game and moving on to submission…

Export options are another area where I hope Godot can be improved compared to Unity. Needing weird setup to add an icon for Windows was something I just didn't have time to do, so no build got an icon. Unity also seems better optimised for web even with my sloppy layered shaders, and I couldn't get this game running there in an acceptable state so dropped that as well. Icon and web build are things I've been able to do for so many previous jams so I didn't like that. ☹️

## TL;DR

I liked it! Will use again. But some issues. Hope some were my fault and possible to figure out next time. Hope this post was what you wanted 😊

I realise the post was mostly techy but I reached the character limit and dunno how much there's to say about the "creator" experience because besides said editor issue it's so similar to Unity 😅

The audio bus/mixer stuff is identical! The keyframe animator is identical! The viewport is… a viewport. And of course I didn't make the graphics and audio *in* the engine.

I think Godot and Unity are incredibly similar apart from learning the node and asset workflow (which are possibly a bit slicker in Godot). I didn't end up using signals at all so I dunno about those.