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Spark's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Community's Voice | #25 | 3.760 | 3.760 |
Ranked from 25 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
I immediately recognized that the theme image was inspired by Michelangelo’s fresco The Creation of Adam, so the idea of reaching out and sparking life came to mind. At first I struggled with how to theme the game because my thoughts went to biblical and renaissance imagery, but I realized the provided theme image showed disembodied arms that could belong to anyone. They also felt ghostly, which led me to think about death and reaching across the veil between life and death. That was where the idea for Spark came from.
You play as a necromancer who is astral projecting into a series of Sokoban-style dungeon rooms where fallen explorers lie. You are too far away to directly control the dead, so all you can do is spark life into them. Once awakened, each skeleton follows the shortest path it can find back toward you. The goal is to recover every soul and build the largest possible skeleton army for an impending war, meaning you cannot leave a single skeleton behind.
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Comments
Hey! I just finished the game and really liked it. I was surprised by how intuitive the controls are, yet how tricky it can be to decide which skeleton to wake up first. I didn't find any bugs, the visuals are great, and the music loop, while simple, really sets the mood.
Here are some small nitpicks for further polish:
As I said, these are just minor suggestions. Overall, the gameplay is great and I had a lot of fun! :)
Thanks for playing I'm glad you enjoyed it! I don't think those are nitpicky at all, they are very valid and useful feedback :)
Quite easy at first but strategic after!Nice mechanism and creativity!
Thanks for taking the time to play it!
What a game. Can't express enough how cute these wiggly skeletons are. The puzzles are just the right balance of rewarding and challenging for a game jam. Hope to see more development coming down the road!
Thanks for giving it a play! I appreciate the kinds words :)
A nicely made game you have here, your introduction to each puzzle is well done, from easy to more difficult ones, and introducing a new mechanic to the puzzle is well done, I like the pixel art you made for this. I could see more puzzles with other puzzle mechanics for this game in future updates.
Thanks for playing! I really appreciate the feedback :)
Exquisite game. The art, audio, and gameplay mechanics complement each other perfectly. 14 levels flew by—I'm definitely craving more!
Thank you for the kind words! Hopefully what they say about "leaving them wanting more" is a good thing haha
This is a really neat puzzle game with a surprising amount of complexity to say you only have one mechanic. This is the perfect length game for a jam game, if you where to add more, maybe having different types of puzzles and biomes would be cool. Congrats on your entry.
Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it :) I certainly might expand on this concept in the future but my current goal as a dev is to do a bunch of jams this year and not pick a larger project until I have some more experience. Thanks again for your kind words!
sounds like a good plan, best of luck 🤙
Fun little puzzle game with an innovative mechanic! I wish there were complex puzzles and more twists to the machanic, but for a jam project it is amazing and a great innovation nonetheless!
Your praise is very kind :) I really appreciate you playing the game!
The little skeleton is really fun! I also think Level 13 is the best, and Level 14 is quite good as well. The earlier levels are a bit too simple, but the player guidance is really well done.
Thanks for playing! Balancing level difficulty was definitely a big challenge for puzzles like these. Thanks for the feedback :)
Such a cute little skeleton! I didn’t expect this kind of gameplay at all—I even thought it was a bug at first! The level design is really fun too. You can already tell that later stages will test timing control even more. If this is a solo project, that’s honestly amazing!
Thank you so much :) I'm really happy with how my simple little skeleton guy turned out! It is a solo project. I ended up having almost the entire jam off from work due to the holidays and didn't have much else going on so I really put my all into this!
Loved it, very neat mechanics. The learning curve was perfect, well implemented learn-while-you-play. Music was cute, and so was the art. Did you make both yourself?
That's great to hear you enjoyed it :) thanks for playing! I did make both the art and music myself and am really happy with how they turned out. I tried to keep both super simple which ended up working really well! They both went though a good bit of iteration to actually get them to this simpler state. For instance at one point while making the music in FL Studio it had 4 or 5 different instruments but I simplified it down the 2 and it was so much better haha
Ok this is super cool! At first I was confused because the first 5 levels I just clicked each skeleton immediately with no fails so I wasn't sure what was going on. Then I had an AHA moment in level 6 where I got stuck for the first time and it all clicked. This is really fun and the level design and minimalist style are really great!
Thanks for playing! That’s great to hear, because that was sort of the plan. Teach the player the flow of the game with minimal risk of them failing early, and then ramp the difficulty up slowly as they progress.
好棒的创意，希望能出更多关卡、更多小骷髅 Great idea, I hope to come up with more levels and more little skeletons
Thank you :) It definitely is possible that I expand this after the jam...
Nice idea and level design!
Thanks so much for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it :)
I really enjoyed this take on Sokoban! There are some really compelling order-of-operations puzzles in here. I especially like level 13. Maybe it's showing that I am not great with game AI, but the pathfinding finding the shortest path while taking into account pushable blocks seems very impressive.
Hey thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it :) I've gotten feed back from others saying level 13 was their favorite, so I should probably think about why that level in particular works so well. Thanks for the feedback!