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Athero's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Innovation | #90 | 3.796 | 3.796 |
| Overall | #92 | 3.770 | 3.770 |
| Gameplay | #104 | 3.650 | 3.650 |
| Audio | #117 | 3.680 | 3.680 |
| Enjoyment | #146 | 3.748 | 3.748 |
| Theme | #172 | 3.845 | 3.845 |
| Visuals | #252 | 3.903 | 3.903 |
Ranked from 103 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does the game fit the theme?
A racing game in the bloodstream should definitely qualify as a strange place! But also, the main theme of the game, Athero(sclerosis), is the build-up of fat and plaques, cholesterol, etc. in veins. That's a strange place for the body to put these things!
What code and assets did you not make from scratch during the jam (if any)?
We did not make the font, the blur shader (yay godotshaders), some of the sound samples are from zapsplat and freesound.org (they're all edited), everything else is handmade
How many people worked on the game?4
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Comments
haha really unique idea! fun game!
Congrats on hitting 100 rating! .Luckily for me, I was the person who happened to reach this number today. I hope you can check out my game and give it a rating. Best of luck with your project!
Thanks for submitting your game to the stream! If you wanted to look at the playthrough again in the future here's the VOD timestamped to your game
Thanks for streaming it! We had a great time watching you play! Daniel said he stayed up all night watching your stream. The rest of us all watched your VOD the following day. It was super useful seeing how fast you picked things up. You're a real gamer! And your game was cool too! Good luck in your future endeavours!
Wow, your game is really creative! Especially the boosts you get from those yellow blockages :D And the heartbeat that changes the direction! I don't know how you guys thought of this, but you nailed it for the game theme! Reminds me of all the cartoons when somebody had to shrink and go in somebody else's body to fight some sort of deadly bacteria or [insert medical term here], so the game hit me nostalgically :D. One thing that was kinda confusing for me is that if you do along the borders of the vein it looks like you are hurting it. I didn't see if that slows the player down. If not - it could be a cool feature - to be able to "dig" out of the vein and using the mini map to find your way back :) I played for some time, but didn't complete all the maps, so, sorry if I am saying things that are already in the game.
Hey thanks for the comment! Great to hear you enjoyed it :) The medical condition that you are clearing the blockages from is actually a plaster along the wall of the artery in real-life. So our original goal was for the player to grind it away from the edges and get a speedup from that. Later on we changed that during our playtests, but we kept the grinding since it was just really fun to grind along :) So currently you get increased max-speed and increased impulse from the heartbeat the longer you grind.
We should probably make this all way more clear in a next version. We had a lot of feedback that it wasn't really clear if grinding was good or bad since it looks like damaging.
Really good racing game, feels very polished, had lots of fun with it! Setting a racing game inside blood vessels is surely interesting, indeed a strange place! Liked the gameplay a lot, without reading anything I was a bit confused on the mechanics but quickly figured them all out and got comfortable with the controls (I also like that movement keys are clearly explained at the start, it is not granted one will know what to press). I just found a bit difficoult to clear the plaque as you often already go so fast you can't even notice it, and you end up missing it ot clearing it without realizing, but that's not a big problem.
I liked the velocity depending on the heartbeat, and just as a little nitpick I'll say I would've liked if the indicator was a bit bigger rather than small on the side of the screen, but I quickly got around it following the rythm.
I liked a lot the mechanic of your previous matches being recorded and replayed on the next play, thus creating a sense of competition with yourself rather than a simple want to get a higher score. Genuinely one of the features that would keep me playing the longest.
And I liked a lot the general skill ceiling of the gameplay!
Visuals and sound are very good and clear, very polished!
I just wished there was a bit of extra variation on each track, a good example being the one with the big line of plaque, that needs you to catch it and keep that side to gain max velocity, but that I know it's too much as time was what it was.
Great job! Very fun game!
Thank you for the kind words! I would have liked to give the tracks a little something extra too. I tried to give them some personality, but I'm not sure I fully succeeded in that regard. I tried to have a mix between short and long tracks, I made Pulmonary Speedway narrower (not sure this was fun or even noticeable), I made Aorta a wide level (not sure this was fun), and Vena Cava had the spiral boost crazy ending you talked about. I feel I could have done more interesting design with the little plaque boosts, but all in all, I'm reasonably happy with the ~4 hours I got to work on all the levels!
If I could re-do the week, I would have probably asked a teammate to take over a few of the levels, and work with them a little bit more to figure some more interesting design ideas.
It's a little bit silly to me that I wasn't able to devote more time to the levels, since it's such a huge part of the fun of the gameplay experience. But that's the game jam life sometimes, I guess.