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A jam submission

The Land Beneath Our DreamsView game page

There's something below this town.
Submitted by NoloriGames — 1 hour, 7 minutes before the deadline
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The Land Beneath Our Dreams's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Story#653.5334.429
Music#1133.5334.429
Sound#3632.6213.286
Overall#4362.7353.429
Fun#4852.3933.000
Aesthetics#4922.6213.286
Mechanics#5422.2792.857
Theme#5572.3933.000

Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How many people worked on this game in total?
3

Did you use any existing assets? If so, list them below.
We created our assets using free textures from polyhaven.com as well as free audio samples from freesound.org. We also reused certain audio files and lines of code from our previous project, Spawn Escape.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Hey. I just checked back on you to see where you landed on the rankings. #65 for story is a really good spot, but if you look at your raw score for it, you're tied for the #3 place! I think you guys deserve it. The story telling in your game was so good.

Developer

Thank you, that's really good to hear. There's still a few loose ends holding the story back from truly being good, like what precisely became of the character's wife and children, and where the sun orb thing came from,  but maybe in a future version we can clean those up. Room for interpretation is great but I think we left a little too much in the current version because of time constraints.

Submitted(+1)

Surprisingly good game for how low it is ranked on the list. As Color Optimist said, it could use with a little love in the map/maze length area. I played all the way through to the end. I was not able the read the last text as I slid in to the final zone, so that was a little sad.

I'd say the combat was a weak point in this game. It was not very engaging and only one room felt challenging. I understand with such a small time limit that it is very difficult to get so many systems working. It is just something I think needs looking at in your touched-up version you mentioned working on.

Atmosphere and the story telling were very Diablo 1 and I loved it. The poems through out the levels read very much like the tomes in Diablo. The music was perfect to set the atmosphere. I enjoyed the swapping between story-mode and combat-mode navigations and the trickling in of the story.

I do think the spinning blade traps were a bit annoying. The level that ends with them ended up getting me right at the end several times because I couldn't tell where they were. It would also be nice if diagonal movement was parallel to the diagonals of the floor.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game a lot and I look forward to seeing your enhanced version. 

Developer

Yeah, if we have time it might be best to just completely redesign the maze and combat sections, since those sections were rushed and I'm not sure if a single person enjoyed the process of making or playing them. Definitely the weak point of this project.

Submitted(+1)

First thing I have to say, is you should consider making the intro text pause at the end and or certain points in the text to give people the time to read it. I kept up the pace up until the last few lines... then it faded before I could finish it. Given it has an appearance like cursive writing... I would image if you did not learn cursive writing, it would be much harder to read at that pace if at all. But also it would have been nice to take a moment to really ponder on that text and really take it in... as it felt as much as a poem as it was a story intro.

I also did not realize I was controlling a character at first until I panned to the left because I had seen red flashing at the bottom of the screen only to realize after I had panned back left, it was text. The a short moment after that, I realized it was a character being controlled. Dropping into the scene after reading the intro text left me feeling like I was scrolling a camera and the story would continue with my view focused on the camera and not on the tiny character. It can be easy to lose sight of the character after scene transitions. 

The playstation style isometric style graphics were nicely done. I really had Diablo vibes from this. The music is so **Peak**. The music really puts you into the atmosphere, along with the use of scale really emphasizing this feeling of darkness and despair. This further accentuates with the moments you are reading the texts.

I was not too fond of the enemies running in to you when you have the text overlapping on the screen and either have to battle through the text or read it as you take damage.  

The combat was fair. I didn't find it really engaging though because of the scale of the character and enemies, which made the combat feel off putting. Spamming arrows across the scene and cheesing enemies in between screens was useful to level up for the sake of being able to get your shot rate increased. I would look forward to experiencing visual feedbacks added to the combat~ it would make the experience feel more impactful.   

To be honest, I actually abandoned playing the game because I could not stand getting to dead ends and then spending minutes at a time to back track to find another space where nothing was going on, essentially spending dozens of minutes navigating with no direction. This absolutely killed it for me. This was where I was like... a mini map would be so helpful right now, then at least i could have a better understanding of where I could back track to and continue exploring something I may have missed. Also there is a normalize direction issue with the movement inputs so I took advantage of this by moving in diagonal patterns the whole time, hoping it would spare me time of travelling the endless empty corridors. There is a bit of graphic collision artifacts that allow the character to appear as if they could be walking along the side of the geometry instead of on top of it.

I found this experience started off amazing and I was very impressed but then after I descended into the crypts, the feeling faded into irritation as I wandered around hoping to find the next great text or event that would hook me back to a similar feeling that the first 5-10 minutes had given me. 

This was an extremely entertaining experience, and I am disappointed that I abandoned it, but I also was not going to go to another dead end and get lost possibly running back into the same dead end I may have already been in. I really hope this project continues to progress. This has so much amazing potential! It really does a lot of great things in unique ways and invokes such great emotion and the need to invest the time in the things I feel it does great.

Developer(+1)

Thank you for giving such detailed advice! We are planning to try and release an improved version at some point and we may be able to fix some of the things you mentioned. To be honest there is a little bit of artificial difficulty/length in a few of the bigger mazes so it's quite understandable that not everybody would have time to deal with that.

Submitted(+1)

that must've been some crazy azz dream XD As a vivid dreamer, my own self... I have to say, making a game based on things you dream about, is a great inspiration to create a project with!! Regardless of the genre in which that dream had taken form   :3

Submitted(+1)

I liked the athmosphere of the game. I came to a map where I didn't see where I could go anymore ("Enough of this. I came here to..." (no spoilers)), so I stopped, not sure if there is an ending. The camera could have been a little closer to the character. Nice game

Developer

Sorry about that, the route in that level is a little confusing. Basically you're supposed to trace a backwards m shape, starting at the lower right and ending at the lower left. Here is how the collision looks:

Submitted

ok... but at the ramps I slided downwards so I couldn't get across the slopes? 🤔

Developer

Gravity is supposed to pull you towards the lower left slope which leads to the next level. If gravity is pulling you right, it sounds like there might be a design flaw or a glitch. What browser are you using?

Submitted (1 edit)

I tried edge, as you wrote firefox is a problem. Right below the last (right) slope I couldn't move further right?

Developer

I'm trying to understand exactly is causing the issue, you should be able to walk left and get to the end of the level in the bottom left. If that's not working it might help if you post a screenshot.

Submitted(+1)

The atmosphere is great, i like were you're going with this! But I wasn't quit sure what i was supposed to do, I was just roaming around. The spiders gave me the ick, which is good!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the input. The setting of the game was based on a nightmare I once had, and we worked really hard to replicate that atmosphere, so it's great to hear that we succeeded to some extent.

When you get stuck, the first thing to do is look for levers to pull which unlock doors, and the second thing is to look for glowing areas that indicate the exits which might otherwise be hard to find. The levers are rather small and dull looking, so they can be easy to miss if you don't already know their locations. Once you've pulled both levers, all the doors become unlocked, and the rest of the game is essentially linear with certain optional detours.


There are also some visual issues where your character becomes invisible or covered in too much shadow. If you encounter these issues it can make certain segments much more confusing than they were supposed to be. We hope to someday be able to upload a new version which fixes these glitches and makes the game easier to navigate.

Submitted(+1)

I liked this. Easy to play and visually great in my opinion, nice story.  First time I thought the game stuck on the pyramid, because I couldn't find the player on the screen. The screen probably was bugged, because I had a smaller darker screen in middle of the the game window, which showed current health ( in Firefox browser).

Developer

Thank you for the feedback. We have had a lot of graphical/UI issues in this project, particularly on Firefox. You may have better results using another browser.