Beautiful game, it made me sad

@julia-nistel Thank you, I guess that's a good thing? :sweat_smile: I wanted to do something more moody and atmospheric than my normal arcadey games, glad the tone came through!

kind hard to learn but I loved the mood and the overall idea! :D

The mood is so...Great produced

Nice idea and story, i came for a game and left with a strange mood, kinda happy with that different experience

@roberto-romao @leoatopos @dramonsa Thank you! I'm really glad people are liking the mood, I tried something different this time and I'm happy it's paying off

Interesting concept, gave me a creepy existential dread feeling

Very somber and dark and I love that! I felt bad taking the good traits away from the souls that had excess/dumping negative ones onto them and that is a really cool thing in a game

playing as god and plant soul, that's dope! the arts, sounds, musics fit so nicely to build up the mood.

Cool game brought nicely together by the atmosphere led by the art and music. Perhaps even a bit philosophical with the passing souls and their burdens. Game play could have been a bit more challenging. Good job!

Hopefully you can get the HTML5 export working because 10-100x more players will play your game. Last night our own game had 150 web plays on itch.io and only a single download. Web play is an easy way to get WAY more engagement because it's so convenient for players. We're all trying to play as many games as possible so making it easy helps.

People like myself are afraid of downloading games because of the possibility of viruses so I hope you can get the web view working soon, your game looks interesting. I can't download games at all on my work laptop because of configurations the IT people have made to prevent viruses, so web players make it easier for me to check out games during breaks.

What was godot doing wrong for the web build? Here are some of my settings I've used in Godot 3.5.1 to get it to work properly:


**Don't use the Ludum Dare web player, it's garbage!** Use itch.io's web player!

Export Window Settings for HTML5 export:

* Export Type: GDNative (this is important, my web builds don't work without it, don't know why it's not default)
* Canvas Resize Policy: Adaptive
* Focus Canvas on Start: On
* Export filename: `index.html` (this is important for itch.io and others, they expect your root file to be index.html)

Here's what I configure in my project settings so that it looks good in browsers:

* Display: Window: High DPI Support enabled (not enabling this results in ugly pixel resizing, this setting makes it smooth as butter and even nicer on high res 4k screens, ipads, etc)
* display: Window: Mode: 2D
* Display: Window: Aspect: Keep

On itch.io I enable the following settings:

* Shared Array Buffer Support. Seems to work well with my godot projects
* Run on page load. It says it doesn't work for unity games but I haven't run into issues for godot games with the above settings
* Add full screen button. I like this, it adds a full screen button to the game. Sometimes the game has to go full screen to work properly and lots of people doing the jams know this when rating games.

@sean-esopenko thanks for the feedback! I'm aware web is absolutely the platform to use for game jams, but I've been having issues with the web export on Godot 4. In hindsight, should have just used 3.5 for this, but it's too late to remake it all. To my knowledge, Godot 4 export is just broken at the moment. I'll poke at it some more but I'm not holding my breath.

That said, if you do end up downloading the game, lmk what you think!

Oh you're using Godot 4, ok. Yeah I would have liked to use all the new features of Godot 4 but we're waiting for the official release before using it in a jam. What were some of the new features you liked from Godot 4?

@sean-esopenko Mostly, I just wanted to start getting used to the new scripting syntax, and ended up leaving it as my default Godot installation and sort of forgetting about it. The game also used the new await syntax a TON so it helped a bit, but I definitely *could* have used 3.5

Really cool concept! Executed fairly well, though my first attempt I was given three seeds that produced three souls that were either broken or had negative traits, and it all ended as soon as it began haha. But on the second attempt I had more success. Very interesting idea to have to manage good vs bad traits within your own "inventory" and the spirits. The mood and aesthetic were fantastic.

@paetramon Thank you! The game chooses vessels randomly, which can put you in situations like that - if I had more time I might have tried to make it pick vessels with more care. Glad you liked it, regardless!

This game have a too long tutorial and a too short gameplay :( But overall, it's perfect. Especially the audio. Wow.

Interesting game, with well written narrative. I don't know if I missed some strategy, but I didn't feel like I was given much chance to optimize the ability to make as many people as possible to move on. But I did get 4 of them at least after the intro bit. I don't particularly mind though, it felt quite fitting to the game that it was short and that there really wasn't much to do to get more than a few seeds. (Or I was unlucky)

Nice narrative. i'd like to have kind of skip button to proceed to the main gameplay on the game over.

Anyway. Cool entry!

Oh man, this was one of my personal favorites in this jam. It's so simple, yet, I feel real empathy for the souls. The writing while short, was brilliantly done, and the music really adds to the somber atmosphere. The simple aesthetics acts to really contrast with the narrative and the weight of my limited actions.
Beautiful, beautiful game!

I'm really frustrated now. This game has by far the best atmosphere of any I played so far. But I just don't get it. It says I need at least as many positive as negative thoughts for a soul to pass on. But even when I have MORE positive than negative, it still says the spirit can't move on. I can't seem to progress any further after the 3 seeds you get after the tutorial. This is really irritating me BECAUSE this is exactly the type of game I like the most in a game jam.

@local-minimum Thank you! Unfortunately I prioritized atmosphere and presentation a lot so the gameplay itself ended up relying too much on RNG, so past the tutorial it's a little less balanced. I'm glad you still enjoyed it, though!

@asfdfdfd @pazzi Thank you! I'm considering adding a 'replay/skip tutorial' button for a post jam build.

@maartene Just to clarify, do you mean *you* have more positive than negative, or the vessel does? What you're holding onto doesn't matter, it's what they've got. If that wasn't the case, that's a very weird bug, I'm sorry it's not quite working for you. I'm happy to hear you like the mood, though!

The atmosphere and sound track is great! The gameplay is pretty interesting too, however I got really bad RNG and died in like 2 minutes. Great game overall tho!

This was really good. As a lot of other people have said the atmosphere and mood is amazing. The music and art style and premise all comes together to really evoke that feeling of sadness and regret. The only criticism I have is it was a little difficult, I kept failing early on by taking on too many negative feelings and the spirits not having enough positive. But maybe that is a commentary on depression and mental illness more generally. But regardless a really great and emotional entry.

@lastorange @roitchie Thank you both! The RNG/lack of balance is definitely the weakest point, though I'm glad one of you was able to take a kind of message from it.

Damn, what a game ! I had never played or even felt anything like this before ! Definitely a stunner in terms of atmosphere

Wow stunning installment. I did feel like the negative feelings were predominant too and so my turns were very short but as an experience it's definitely quite something. I think that with a bit of balancing this would be fantastic in its genre!