itch.io

Hi MeralFoxDioxymore, thank you so much for playing our game and the huge amount of feedback you've given us. We really appreciate the time and effort you put into this.

> I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because I had a black screen after loading on Firefox. Did you use WebGPU?

Doh! We only tested Chrome on Windows unfortunately and we did add in WebGPU (it seemed like a good idea at the time!) but as a fallback option with WebGL 2 being the preferred choice. The console on Firefox says R16_UNorm is not supported on this platform. Probably a request from one of the Post Processing steps in Unity URP.  Thanks for trying that out and sorry it didn't work for you in Firefox.

> Very cool game! The atmosphere, with the graphics and sound design, is absolutely amazing. 

Wow. Thank you so much for that. We really spent a lot of time trying to get things to look and sound the way we wanted. We deliberately went for a background ambience track instead of music for the atmosphere as you noted.

> You did a multiplayer game in a jam, that's extra points for you. 

This was a stretch goal for the jam and we focused on the single player experience just in case we had to pull the multiplayer at the last minute. Rebello is normally a two person team (Programmer+Audio Designer and Artist+Level Designer) but this time we joined up with another member who is working on his own networked multiplayer game. It seemed like a good fit to try to work through all the problems with networking and release something with the deadline of the jam but knowing it wasn't key to shipping or not.

His experience is with FishNet for Unity so that's what we went with. Because we wanted to have WebGL clients (you tend to get more visibility in a game jam that way) we couldn't go with Peer to Peer so we had to have a server in the mix. We went with PlayFlow who will host a Linux Server build of your Unity game, almost as a one touch upload from within the Unity Editor (almost!). Part of the reason we went with PlayFlow was because they offered free hosting, or so it appeared. It turns out that they stop your server after 1 hour of uptime and you have to manually login to restart it. We found this out a few days into the jam but it was too late to change tack so we punted up the $20/month fee for it and got on with the game (while grumbling about bait and switch tactics).

PlayFlow has support for multiple lobbies and for leaderboards, both of which we implemented. Unfortunately they were implemented in a separate branch and just before the deadline our networking guy was, by no fault of his own, unable to get online to merge the fixes into the build. So we have a single lobby for everyone in the world currently! If the game hangs when you press single player it means someone else is playing in the one and only Room!!! Ah well, at least we gave it a shot.

> The level design is pretty good

Thanks for that. We did spend a lot of time trying to get the right balance of mechanics and upping the "risks" for the biscuits as the level progressed. We would have liked to have had some form of enemies and combat but in the end there was no time and we decided to stick with puzzles only. We also timed it so there was probably no more than 20-30 minutes of game play, so it was possible to finish the game during the jam but let you then play some other jam submissions as well.

> ...something like a cable going from the button to what it does would have been convenient.

That's an interesting idea and something we should definitely consider adding. Thanks.

> The controls are... Really weird ^^'. I'm really not a fan of the grid snapping, so it made the game feel quite clunky to me. Not unbearable, I'm used to it now, but still clunky ^^'.

We completely get it and it's a very valid point. We have a history of doing the annual Dungeon Crawler Game jam so our experience is with Legend of Grimrock (originally Dungeon Master on the Atari ST) style games. We didn't want to deviate too much from what we know for the jam but free movement would have been nice to have. We might experiment with it post jam and maybe have "old-school grid-based movement" as an option you can enable.

> ... the theme is absolutely not respected. In fact, that game looks like... Well, all the other games you made, just with a different skin.

We did spend a great deal of time planning out how the levels could have two alternate paths, the "risky" path (biscuits are to be found) and the "non-risky" path (no biscuits). But as we got into actually play testing this idea we realized that we always took the risky path. By then we were so far into the jam, the "non-risky" path was dropped in favour of setting up the level so you didn't necessarily collect all 7 biscuits unless you took a risk with a retractable bridge, some laser traps or other potential risks. Add to that the fact that Player 2 had access to lots of the mechanics and could trigger them on you if you tried to take the biscuit from the vault, like turning stairs into slides and making you fall back into a laser beam. The Sci-Fi settings was part of the lore of the game but also allowed us to use lasers without them feeling out of place. Rotatable mirrors for those lasers were a puzzle mechanic we had to drop in the end due to lack of time.

Unfortunately, the game hangs at the end so you never get to see your death/respawn count or how many biscuits you collected and how many times Player 2 activated mechanisms. So the risks were there and you could skip them and not pick up the biscuit, but it might not have been obvious that that was how the level was planned out. However if you finish without all 7 biscuits you may not have taken enough risks!

We'll do a DevLog soon but you'll be able to see that all the 3D models for the game were created from scratch during the jam week, apart from the Player Avatar (Synty Studios) and the final Stargate (Created by Dan but a couple of years ago and we needed an ending!). Here is a rendering of all the artwork Dan made in those 7 days in Blender:

We stuck with the game genre we knew, and added the extra dimension of multiplayer, and did try very hard to fit with theme, but it sounds like we might have missed the mark for you. Sorry about that, but we're still glad you enjoyed the game.

> So, for me, this is not a good "Brackeys Game Jam 2025.2: risk it for the biscuit" entry, but it's a great game, and you can be proud of what you did in only 7 days. Congratulations!

Thanks again for playing our game and taking the time to give us honest feedback. We really, really appreciate it. We look forward to playing your game soon and wish you the best of luck in the jam!