Oddly satisfying! For not having much "game" yet, it felt like a really polished tech demo or something of that sort. I could watch the little bug consume the entire forest of shrooms quite happily. Id love to see this one fleshed out and more added to it to make it a full game, with more levels ect. I only experienced one bug, and one possibly unintended behavior. While trying to make my swarm climb a large tall shroom the stem started to turn inside out and there was a bunch of mesh related bugs and stretching going on, once they hopped back off it was fine again but it seemed it couldn't handle the swarm climbing its stem. I also noticed when rotating the camera, the sickness reducing vignette would only appear if I held the button down, but generally it felt more intuitive to tap the button to turn the camera rather than hold it since its snap turn, which resulted in it not appearing unless I accidentally held the button a bit longer then I intended, which made the experience a bit confusing, at first I didnt know why it kept appearing. Personally I never liked that feature in games so being able to avoid it by just tapping quicker was nice, but it would be nicer if it could just be disabled. The locomotion was fine if not my favorite form of locomotion I have no complaints it worked great as intended. I will say I didn't really find any reason to select the larva, instead just always using the select all option. it felt redundant. Maybe later levels could give reason like needing to press buttons or something portal style to open doors to get more shrooms. But at the current state it just felt pointless when it was far more simple to just send all the swarm toppling over the forest of shrooms.
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Writhe & Dine (VR)'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #1 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Use of Theme | #1 | 4.600 | 4.600 |
| Presentation | #1 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
| Overall | #1 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
I'm glad the Vive wand support worked well! I have a soft spot in my heart for Vive wands - they're so much more beginner friendly than the other controllers, are ambidextrous, and the touchpad is a blank canvas of usage options for developers.
As for cuteness value, I think even adding the legs might have been a mistake, but I wanted to honor the "bugs" theme and not go too "worm". I kept trying to decide between cute and creepy, but creepy became too creepy and made my skin crawl. Imagine the larva moving 4 times as fast, and being a lot more squirmy and chaotic, and with longer centipede style legs splayed out to the side - it was too triggering.
Also, I found that slower movement helped physics performance on the Meta Quest 3, which is pretty much limited to a mobile device CPU/GPU and much more limited than a desktop PC.
https://bsky.app/profile/in-otter-news.bsky.social/post/3lqktenhsuk2q
this made me wonder what if they had to push a rolly polly ball to a location?
Old-school HTC Vive wands are now supported in the post-jam Windows OpenXR and Windows OpenXR Ultra Sandbox builds!
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