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HOMECOMING's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Community's Voice | #77 | 3.250 | 3.250 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Creative Vision / Rationale / How Did You Incorporate the Theme
CREATIVE VISION: The native folktale of the jumping mouse was a driving force in our ideation. We wanted our Mouse character to reflect the character traits in the original story, but with our own twist to it. We loved the idea to tell a story taking place at the end of one's journey, and being able to tell the whole journey in retrospect as the Mouse visits previously encountered areas in his now-completed quest.
RATIONALE: During our initial discussions, our team discussed which abilities would be included in the game. We eventually decided to include abilities that players often make take for granted in other games, such as dashing, double jumping, and field of vision (FOV).
THEME INCORPORATION: Players are given the choice to help characters in the game by giving away abilities, and these characters appear later in the game to help you in return. However, we wanted to avoid our game from being self-sacrificing in nature. Now having completed his journey, the Mouse no longer has an active use for the abilities gained along his adventure, so we wanted to explore this idea of giving based on the Mouse's mentality of "You need it more than I do". We wanted the ending of this game to reflect how acts of generosity can come back around in unexpected ways, and thus deftly steering the Mouse away from self-sacrificing tendencies.
Because of a bug, the game is unable to be completed in full. However, we are actively working on a stable and more completed version of the game that will be uploaded after the jam officially ends. Additionally, as of now, the mac build for this game is not working.
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Comments
Incredibly charming, love that you tackled the idea of generosity coming back around and preventing the mouse from generosity burnout/giving too much!
This is such a heartfelt and polished game. I absolutely love the charm in the characters and the writing. The tortoise boosting across the screen once you give the boots was hilarious and really made me feel the impact of gesture. The generosity is felt and seen in such a simple and distinctive way, that it makes you look forward to meeting the next character and helping in any way you can. Giving away abilities and getting back the abilities through the story is such a brilliant idea, and you tied that very well with a narrative and atmosphere that feels warm and full of life. I also thought that it was smart to not make the mouse run or move too fast, so that you can really take in the world you've created. And can we talk about the music? Absolutely superb. Well done!
Thank you for the kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed our game!
I really like the environment art! The way the plants pop out of the ground. So preetty. Controls were a little confusnig at first for me but got the gist of it. Fun!
Very nice art style and character design! It reminds me of children's books like Winnie-the-Pooh and Peter Rabbit. It was also a unique choice to make certain props pop in and out as you approach, like a pop up book. The music was also nice, and I liked the interpretation of the theme and over all story of the return journey after a quest.
Beautifully crafted game - I am sorry that you have this ending bug :(
Your art is very nice and the narrative very wholesome. I found the forest level kinda hard to read, what are walkable surfaces what is deco?
The controls don't feel great. Especially the cave level gets very frustrating without your abilities which is not fun. Is there a reason behind the slow movement speed and weird "charge-up-makes-you-stand-still-jump" ^^
Love the concept, theme implementation and art style. |
Giving away my dash shoes to the turtle at the beginning dint change much of the gameplay for me which was good, I thought that I would miss out on things now but that’s not the case.
I like all the characters and the way story is progressed. Really well done!!
Eventually, there's certain character / event interactions in locations depending on which items you give away :D Thank you for playing our game!
I guess, I might wanna play it again fully then xD
hey Chris here!
Glad I experienced Homecoming and that you were able to submit your hard work. Honestly, this game made me feel something. There were rough around the edges (all of which were already mentioned in other comments), but I was emotionally invested, and as such, I easily overlooked all of them.. except the very last part (if you know what I mean!!!). My fiancee and I sunk hundred hours into Hollow Knight, and I thought the reverse-Metroidvania was an extremely novel idea: instead of gaining power ups, you are to lose them, but in losing them, you are gaining something greater. It's all beautiful. Great, great effort guys!
Hi Chris! Thank you for playing our game. I'm glad that you've summarized the narrative / message of the game perfectly! I'm glad that it could come across in the story despite of all its bugs and unfinished goodness.
I really like the art style and the music. I wish the gameplay felt better: the jump windup is too dramatic and navigating through the caves felt rough as I'd constantly hit my head on something. Cute game though I always like mouse protagonists
One of the first things we're addressing is revising and removing the crouch before and after the jump so that the player gets immediate feedback. We're working hard to optimize the player control and platforming as well!
This game is very adorable, I really like the look of each scene, and the mouse protagonist is a fun concept. Also really liked the use of dynamic lighting! I think there should have been an explanation for the dash mechanic in the game itself, but I was able to figure it out myself from the sound cues. Can't wait to see the completed game after the jam is over, great work!
Thank you! One of our highest priorities is adding UI guides and to optimize visuals for the polished release post jam. I've been fiending to play your game based off of the silhouette based visuals - I'm making time soon hopefully to get to playing it!
Very cute characters! I like the idea of someone that has retired giving away what they don't need anymore, which may make things difficult but not impossible.
Our Mouse has seen the horrors and has been in the trenches...for sure...
Also I really like how cute your mouse is omg. I couldn't figure out the dash mechanic before within the game so your itch page really helped, once I figured that out, OMG I LOVE THE DASH MECHANIC SO MUCH!
That said, art wise, while it's superrr cute, UX wise it can be better because I could not differentiate what is background and what is interactable (like the trees), but still super cute artwork and the textures on it is also very niceeuu. ALSO the narrative, very very interactive and immersive!
Great that you mentioned the contrast issue between the ground and background. In layout, it was really clear differentiating between the layers, but we must have missed that when translating that into the final assets. Will make note of this! Some of the things are so clunky, but I'm glad you still got a great experience from our little game :D
This game is a little bit slow for platformer and lacks of tutorial at the beginning, you should've added controls binding to the menu. Your artist made a great job. Art style is good, reminded me of Ernest and Celestine or redwall. Also dynamic light blowed my mind.
I do love great UI / UX design, we definitely should have prioritized UI more. One of the biggest priorities we have right now is having UI indicators and help in that first level of the game (the tutorial level), and we'll be tweaking the player controller to get a more natural feel to it. This was our artist's first time working on a game, and I'm glad you noticed the Ernest et Celestine inspo! Our goal for art was to go for a storybook aesthetic, which will be touched up on for the full release! Thank you for your feedback ^^
While playing, I noticed a few areas on the map that seemed like they could be explored, but when I reached them, there wasn’t actually anything there. That left me feeling a bit disappointed. Anyway, I completely agree with the idea that generosity isn't about self-sacrifice, and I really appreciate how the game conveys this theme. Nice job!
P.S. The little mouse’s walking animation seems a bit off — it walk with the same hands and feet (I don't know how to excatly describe this in English, I mean the mouse use left hand and left leg at the same time while walking)
Ahhh yeah!! There were definitely dialogue bits to those areas where you could traverse to, but we ran out of time to implement those! It'll be in the full version after the jam! Also forwarded what you said abt the anim to our animator!
The art style of this game is so cute! I really love the concept and even though it doesn't fully work, what you have is really cute and compelling!
Thank you for playing! We tried to convey as much as we could about the game's concept even with the broken state of the game itself.
Two things about this game really impressed me. One is that in the first section, you had dynamic light and shadow despite being in a 2D environment. The other was the section after that where the mouse first goes outside and background objects pop up and back down again, like you were in a pop-up book. It was a great way to get the player invested in the environment.
I wasn't really sold on the dash mechanic. In the first area, I'm guessing the intent was to use the dash mechanic to get across the spike pit. However, I couldn't have known that since there wasn't anything indicating that the player had to hold down Shift to cross a large gap. Especially since there's another spike pit immediately after when the player drops down to the lower level. Another thing is that if you choose to give away your shoes and scarf, that doesn't reflect on the mouse character since he's still wearing those things after the fact. It could be a scope thing, but I still found that slightly odd.
I found a bug where if you click somewhere else on the screen when you first talk to the Kiwi, the arrow goes away, and you can't select either dialogue option.
I look forward to seeing the future build and finding out how the story ends.
We really wanted to make a stretch goal to add UI indicators to accompany some of the abilities, but due to time we weren't able to get that done before the end of the jam. Same with the different mouse anims, which would have needed to be redrawn for all actions. We definitely could have made our lives easier by starting with a blank mouse anim and then adding individual accessories based on how many he had, but I fear we didn't catch that soon enough.
Thanks for the really good feedback, and for catching that bug as well! I noticed that bug appears sometimes through playthroughs (I'm still not sure what causes it to glitch), but we'll add that to the known issues section of the page.