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Blackout Warden's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #3 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Graphics | #6 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
| Overall | #7 | 3.100 | 3.100 |
| Gameplay | #11 | 2.400 | 2.400 |
| Historical Accuracy | #11 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Thematic Relevance | #11 | 4.100 | 4.100 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Historical Accuracy
The game is situation in the heat of the UK bombings in 1940. You play as a volunteer of the ARP and need to enforce the war blackout.
Thematic Relevance
In WWII there were many jobs that saved lives without awarding hero medals. In Blackout Warden you play in one of those roles.
Disclaimers
The sound in my game I got from various assets I had from HumbleBundle. The font is a free pixel art font from the Unity Asset Store. Other than that, everything was made during the jam.
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Comments
I had a nice time walking around the patrol, the tension was there where I had to anticipate things that may happen at any point. However, I couldn’t really get into the gameplay. I saw the light in the house, and my first impulse was to knock, and being able to do that, and not really knowing what to do, left me a bit confused. Regardless, really immersive, and I’m sure I just needed a bit more guidance to know what to do. Great job and thanks for the entry!
Are you saying that nothing happened then you knocked? Sadly, the game seems to have all sorts of bugs, but usually you can walk back a bit and then try pressing E again.
Unfortunately there's so sound feedback for the knocking, but if you check out the playthrough files I've shared into the server, you'll see I tried every distance, and for quite some time! Thanks for letting me know that's it's really just a bug though - will you be working more on this?
But there is sound for the knocking! Please try the game again and press E on the doors. It is working for me at least.
This game is absolute gaming, the graphics, sounds, gameplay, dialogues. I was really surprised that you did this on your own, with no ones help. Huge applause from me.
Thanks a lot =). It's my first game jam and... the first game I make that is actually playable and not following a tutorial.
This game had a charming narrative and while the gameplay was relatively simple and a little dull at times, that is the point. It's not supposed to be interesting, slowly surveilling an empty country community at night to make sure all the lights are out but the game tries to make up for that with the relationships the warden can foster with their community, even if some of them called you draconic lol. I found myself wishing for more options of expression, but honestly this is great content you managed to fit in a 9-day jam.
There were a few bugs I ran into with gameplay. I was able to repeat picking breaking into Eleanor's home to pick her off the ground and the Millers' lights stayed on at day 3 and afterwards... talking to them would just repeat the same greeting dialogue without the option to tell them to turn off the lights. I also found the movement to be clunky, being locked to 4 directions and the weird input order issue that jam_bone mentioned.
The level design also had some interesting storytelling, with the richest house having control of the bunker and closest access to the park while the lowest income family is the farthest from the bunker and out of town, to the point where I missed their house for the first 2 days. It was interesting asking me to go out of my way to care for the lower class, especially when the alarms went off... While in the meantime protecting the middle and upper class is the closest and most-convenient. I'm not sure how intentional the placement was but I thought it was a really cool touch!
I really enjoyed this one... Nice job!
Thank you for such through review.
Regarding the movement. Initially I made a simpler input system where the diagonal movement was normalized, but because I had only animations for four directions, it looked awkward. I decided to just limit the directions and because the map was very vertical, I made the horizontal movement dominant. So the player will most likely always hold up or down and then adjust the movement with left or right. It seems people don't like it XD..
About the design, I did position the houses intentionally, but I hadn't thought much about the starting position relative to that. It was a happy little accident.
Oh and yeah, I'm happy the game was playable at all. I was connecting everything until the last minute. I might go back and fix the bugs, as well as optimize the game. It now creates a gameobject for each step sound and then destroys it. Makes it quite laggy on the web I think.
Ha ha. When this game up in the Submissions, my wife went "look - someone did my idea!". She suggested that I have a light on on my front screen (I did a Battle of Britain game too) and and Air Raid Warden shouting to "Turn that bloody light off!".
Great idea and good representation of walking around at night. It needs expanding though - the first house I called on didn't give any choices in the dialogue and after that there were just two.
I think in reality nobody was exempt from the blackout regardless of their part in the war effort - so I intended to shut every light down regardless of their 'excuse'.
Thank you for the review!
Yeah, I wish I had had time for more content, but this is my first jam and I everything else took so much time. Right now, the game has 15 "events" with choices distributed in 6 nights, and 2 bombing events. And it took me until the last second before the submission was due to hook everything up with the consequences of your choices into a beautiful tangled mess of spaghetti code XD... cheers!
The dark music and dark grey atmosphere reminds me of the early fallout games from the 90s, or 2020s northern England. That walking animation was great. I did have an issue with the movement where if i was moving up or down i could easily go left or right. But if I was going left or right I had to stop pressing those buttons to move up or down. But it's just one issue, nice game overall. Congrats on finishing.
graphics look good, I liked the little sfx in the dialogues
I would have loved to walk faster and be able to skip the dialogue animations without jumping to the next dialogue. Great writing and atmosphere kept me going though!
I really liked the graphics and the overall atmosphere! However, I didn't quite understand what I was supposed to do 😅 (I walked around and talked to a few NPCs).