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Metastatic Infection's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Relevance to the theme | #1 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
| Overall | #4 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Metroidvania | #4 | 4.100 | 4.100 |
| Execution | #9 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
| Sensory | #12 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
| Enjoyment | #13 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme interpretation and application
Absurd Size was our theme. This is reflected in the story and setting of the game as you are a shrunk down medical soldier who enters the human body where everything becomes absurdly large relative to your size. The player has to defend the body against a deadly virus.
Team/Developer
Jack Willis, Andrew Droujinine, and Ayden Nazaroff
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Comments
Really awesome work! Super thankful you had gamepad and sensitivity, I had dial it down to 35 to aim reasonably well. Also super thankful for the walkthrough; since there’s no map I misremembered where a grapple section was (I didn’t know what it was at the time, but guessed due to the spikes) and probably spent 15min wandering around the wrong section. Unfortunately I had to give up during the lungs, it was maybe 15 tries to make it up the switchback platforms, I couldn’t do it on gamepad so switch to kbm. Then, the portion where you have to trigger a platform, then immediately trigger the next two then make a grapple, it was maybe 20 times before I made it to the second platform, I just can’t move jump and aim that precisely. I think the platform retracting would almost always sap my forward speed so maybe if it rose up instead, it wouldn’t have been so brutal.
Having a different effect when shooting too far away would have been good. I didn’t like the flying guys but it wasn’t always clear when I was actually damaging them (same for the smaller guys but they are easier to deal with). Possibly related, the damage boost on the gun didn’t feel different. Maybe it was, but I might have been too far a lot of time.
The whole production is great, I really like the pixel poly aesthetic. I’m always kinda nervous with grappling hooks but it worked well so no complaints. I think the levels were well designed and interesting. I recommend putting a few lights/decorations/etc around doors would have been nice to help the stand out a little more, it was easy to miss some of the openings. It was funny watching the walkthrough when I was stuck, it was around 9:30 where I saw the room I couldn’t find but I probably played for an hour at that point. Again, great work!
If its not playable in a browser people will pass it over. Sad but true.
Yeah we kinda realized that halfway through which sucks because we put a ton of effort into it, ig id just recommend watching the playthrough for those people who don't want to download, Can be found at the bottom of this thread and in our games page. I'll post it again here so its at the top
Wow, this is insanely impressive. I don't know how you all pulled this off but the graphics and overall vibe are increadible. Super cool to see something like this here
Thankyou so much this warms my heart to hear as I created all the visuals by myself this month while working another job. My programmer and I put everything we had into this game as our first game jam and although its not perfect, we are quite happy with this for our first time and comments like this really mean alot.
Incredible production, visuals, atmoshpere and game and it's really good that you can save games between sessions
The enemies felt a bit bullet spongy and sometimes it felt like the jumping sections require a bit too much precision, but otherwise it's an excellent job!
Can I ask how you did the maps? External editor or in-engine editor?
Also, the water texture looks really neat along with the other visuals :D
For the maps we used Unreal 5's cube grid editor as a (super rough) base, I created every other asset you see in Zbrush, maya, substance painter, and photoshop and placed them by hand to give the environments more of an organic feel. Thankyou for playing and leaving a nice comment we worked really hard on this and its our first game.
Absolutely sick game. Loved what I could play of it. I unfortunately couldn't finish it as it was burning up my PC. Shoot me a DM when you guys start working on it again I wouldn't mind testing it to help get the CPU and GPU usage down massively.
Thankyou for playing, and yes we haven't done anything to optimize the game lol. I could list you a million things we could do to make this game run smoother but since it ran very well on our computers (90-120 fps) we didn't really worry about it to make time to add more content as there is about 3 hours of content to a new player in the game. This was our first game jam and I think in the future we will focus on optimizing as we go a bit more lol.
really great game! you executed the theme in a really clever way, honestly this could be a concept of an actual released game. Funny you put testicles everywhere on the ceiling also to shoot. works smooth, no bugs, the movement is liiitle bit clunky, but ok. I love the design of the world and the enemies
This is a really cool game that I will definitely be finishing later. The visuals are very unique and interesting from what I've seen so far. The sound effects and light atmospheric music are quite nice cand all mesh together really well. combat a movement feel pretty responsive and reliable. Fighting flying enemies is a little hard, but then, that's kinda always been the case in a lot of first person type games from my experience, so I'm not gonna linger on that too long. Areas are small and easy to navigate leading to it not taking too long to back track around an explore areas with the new power-ups you get which is great for a metroidvania I'd say. Once I got what I assumed to be a scalpel, I was happy to be rewarded with a power-up to my health for remembering a breakable wall from back at the start that I could now access. It's always nice when one's curiosity and attentiveness to their surroundings is rewarded in these types of games.
With all that said though, there is one major flaw I experienced with this game, and it's to do with the jump. The jump seems to be frame-dependent. Initially, when the game loaded, it was in fullscreen and admittedly running a little slower, but I didn't think much of it cause the laptop I'm on isn't the best, so it was expected. It was still running acceptably for my anyways, so I didn't mind. However, once I reached the point of the double jump power-up, I couldn't get out of the room at first. No matter how hard I tried or whatever timing I did, I just couldn't make it. It almost kept me from playing the game until I remembered something I learned years ago about jumping in games and the difference between frame jumps and delta jumps. With one last attempt, I put the game in windowed mode, managed to gain some frames back, and suddenly I could make the jump without any issue and was able to play more of the game. But, had I not known about that possibility, that could've kept me stuck down in that room with no way out. If the jump is based on your framerate, you'd ideally want it running through delta time instead to be more consistent across the board regardless of hardware.
Outside of that though, I really did enjoy my time with this and was eager to play more once I managed to fix the problem I was having with it. It seems well put together and fun to explore around in and I'm looking forward to finishing it later after once I've gotten through as many other games as I can. Great work!
Thanks for the feedback, im glad you liked it. Also great to know about the issue of it being harder to use the jumps when the game is running slower. Theres a lot we could do to optimize more but since we didn't have much time we kinda just had to hope ppl could run it at over 100 frames, never got around to testing on lower end pc :( so thanks for that feedback.
One more thing I forgot, if you hold the jump button you get a tiiiiny bit higher and longer of a jump, that might help a bit.
Extremely cool and unique concept and a first-person Metroidvania was something I did not expect. The progression is straightforward, and the level design points you into the right direction.
Visuals are cool, too. The PS1 graphics work.
One thing that would be a nice-to-have would be more juice during shooting. It isn't really clear when and how much damage you're doing to the enemies, but other than that it's a great project.
Well done!
I really appreciate that, thankyou for the feedback. We are super happy you enjoyed it.
Really cool concept and game! Unfortunately i got stuck on the upper level.
Thanks for playing. If you are stuck I have a walkthrough posted in this comments section and on our page. I highly suggest giving that a watch or trying again since we have a ton of content in our game and there is a lot to explore/unlock you should be able to just hit resume game and the walkthrough will help. We wish we had time to implement a 3D map but with just 2 people for a game this large we didn't have time.
I saw the tutorial, i didn't understand that the vain was en elevator, ill surely continue it
This is such a cool concept even outside of the jam's limitations, making levels out of the insides of living things is just so sick. The only thing I found lacking was the audio, the game could really use some music and additional sound effects
Thankyou so much for the kind words, unfortunetly none of us are audio based artists so we had to source.
I just reread this, did you actually not hear the music? Our game does have music for every level? or was the music just not good? Just wondering if maybe there is a bug where music isnt playing.
It might just have been too quiet for me but I don't remember any music, I may be wrong and will check again.
If you cant figure a puzzle out or get stuck somewhere, trust me, there's always a way to make your life easier in our game. Check out this playthrough if you are struggling :).