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Apocalypse Meep's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #8 | 4.308 | 4.308 |
| Audio | #15 | 3.731 | 3.731 |
| Fun | #25 | 3.577 | 3.577 |
| Accessibility | #25 | 3.231 | 3.231 |
| Overall | #41 | 3.462 | 3.462 |
| Controls | #61 | 3.038 | 3.038 |
| Graphics | #64 | 3.462 | 3.462 |
| Theme | #98 | 2.885 | 2.885 |
Ranked from 26 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
4.7
Theme Interpretation
A player must lead their meeps away from an ever present wall of death that is closing in on them and destroying the world
Wildcards Used
Left Wildcard
Go Spinny - Use the mouse wheel in your game
Right Wildcard
Tag Along - The player character has a companion
Discord Username(s)
McMuffinator212 and ASleepyGiraffe
GWJ Participation Level
1
Team Size
2
Generative AI Disclosure
I confirm that this jam entry does not contain any AI-generated content
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Comments
Love the concept, art, and sound! No feedback that hasn't already been stated. Great job with this submission :)
Ngl, I was horrified when they died. Distraught. My little meeps. (Fun game! Good job)
Thanks Dotoclock!
Cute concept! I loved the little meeps and the music. I guess I had them climb too fast and they launched too high and died coming back down? That was a little weird. And they kept getting out of sync, so some of them were moving in a different direction than others and I couldn't get them to follow.
But I had fun and it was interesting, which are the most important parts. Good job :D
Hi BrokenVial, thankyou for the feedback and kind words! Glad to hear you had fun and liked the design choices :D
Thanks for mentioning the bugs you encountered, it really helps prioritise which ones are causing the most immediate issues for players.
There’s a lot of balancing and bug fixing left to do, and certain aspects of the Meeps behaviour either needs to be less chaotic, or better communicated to the player regarding, when, why and how certain chaos ensues.
Both are on our list of fixes, and we flag each time an issue crops up in feedback, so hopefully in the next update they should be improved.
The climbing one may be as simple as limiting their ascent speed and is a priority for us because we don’t want any Meep deaths to feel unfair and I’ve definitely encountered that in my own playtests. The herding behaviour is a bit trickier, because it’s layered into a design mechanic and fixes another issue in the code, but we’ll have a think and tinker with it and see what works.
Thanks again!
Tim
it was pretty fun, only issue was controls were very hard to use lol
mostly the right click menu and the fact I didn't know how to move the creatures!
Glad you found it fun!
We’ll look at the controls/sorting the tutorial to make things clearer and maybe allow the inputs to be remappable to be more accessible.
Thanks for the feedback!
It really does help us figure out what the common issues are and control confusion seems to understandably be a major one so we’ll make it a priority.
thanks for replying! you did a fantastic job with everything else tho so its no biggie
Awesome lemming-style game. Some things could be more clearly communicated and since you can turn their speed negative, I dont see the need for a turn-signal?
But visuals and sound design are top notch and the idea is super cool.
Keep up the good work!
Hi Xerxes, thanks for the encouragement and kind words!
Definitely agree about the communication being an issue. We’ll make that a lot clearer around controls.
Turn signs are one of those that if we keep them in, have to be given a reason for being there. Atm, we rushed the tutorial, so that isn’t really addressed. Turn commands were a quick way to allow the meeps to still move fast in either direction if you need to course correct any misbehaving strays.
The meeps are limited speed wise going backwards because when they weren’t limited, it was causing a lot of havoc and general game breaking chaos, but we’re going to look at it and add it to the ever growing list of things may need a good old fashioned tweak to get right or see if there are better ways of doing things.
Thanks for taking the time to give us constructive feedback, all really useful data and it helps!
Tim
IDK what I’m doing wrong, but WASD doesn’t move anything for me–or if it does, the camera doesn’t follow the movement.
Hi Hatmix, thanks for checking the game out.
Sorry to hear it isn’t working for you.
We messed up a lot on explaining controls, in theory, A should move player left, and D should move to the right.
Do the other controls work? If you move scroll wheel do the meeps move forwards and back at all? Or if you right click can you see the command menu pop up? Just wondering if it’s a bug that is stopping all control input or if just the player control is borking out.
Haven’t come across the player not moving yet so any extra info would be really helpful to understand what may be going on.
Thanks
Tim
Ah, reloading the page solved it–I’m too tired. Now I just need to figure out the rest after a nap! :D
I had fun!
To be constructive, the controls aren't communicated very well and it took me quite a while to figure them out. After that, I got the idea.
Also, I kind of suspected that I was supposed to climb out as of the sudden wall underground; but a lot of people wouldn't. Some kind of a tell, like god rays, might be helpful there.
Thanks for contributing this!
Hi Michael,
Glad to hear you had fun!
We’ll definitely sort out the control communication and make things clearer in game.
We have some plans already to look into more visual indicators for the player and make the experience a lot more streamlined, so hopefully the next version should resolve a lot of the common issues people are understandably experiencing.
Thanks for taking the time to give some constructive feedback! All helps us make the game better.
Tim
I had so so so much fun playing this - I felt like a mother hen. Got stuck at the first tent though, said not all meeps r safe but I was unable to place a climb sign to go all the way back on myself to find if I'd left a meep behind- or do I have to make sure to not let any die? I sadly lost one even tho I was very careful
Thanks for playing! I’m really glad you enjoy it. Sorry you got stuck, we were rushing when it came to implementing the tutorial so we didn’t make it too clear. You as the player can climb any wall by pressing E and You should be able to get past the gate if a meep has died, as it’s supposed to adjust to the total you have, but may have been a bug we left in so apologies for that. We are considering developing the game further and fixing a lot of the issues, as there is actually quite a lot more to the game after the first gate and more we wanted to add in general. But still glad you had fun despite the current issues :)
fresh gameplay idea! nice work guys!
Thanks Simigdalius!
I like the game, it was very cute. I think maybe a bit more of a visual tutorial would have been nice as it took me a little to while to figure out what I was doing
Thanks for checking it out NotGeorge! Glad you liked it.
It’s very much a work in progress, and we plan to fix a lot of the bugs after the jam to make it more user friendly and get core game loop actually playable to the games end.
As well as having a more cohesive/properly timed visual tutorial at the start of the game, with clearer UI and just a lot more polish.
Thanks for taking the time to give feedback, it helps!
Tim
I like your game a lot, well done !
The characters are cute, the playlist is nice, sfx good, visuals good.
I would have added more character animation (but the screen effect is nice and the player's jump animation is fun). Overall great concept, I felt like playing a mix between a platformer and Pikmin :D (and I love cute games)
You asked for bugs and such so here is my list (don't take it as criticism, that's meant to help, I love your game !):
- The narrator's instructions are displayed no a very short time, for non-native English speakers it's too short so I couldn't read them all.
- At one of the first long-climbing, one of the meeps fell and died and I didn't understand why, there was no obvious reason for that ?
- At the meep's gate, the player is shown behind the tent when we walk on the same position ; I'm not sure this was intended, it gave me an awkward feeling so I think the player should be displayed in front of the tent.
- At the meep's gate, I could see two buttons. One was marked "Option 1", the other had no text, I didn't know what these two options were so I picked one at random. I lost 3 meeps, walked a bit and then suddenly got 100 meeps after a dialogue. Then the game became a lot faster and more difficult and in a very short time they all died. This part felt like unfair punishment / too quick and difficult to understand rise in difficulty, very frustrating. Is this the end of an in-game tutorial and shift to main game with more threat of imminent doom ?
Hi SystemK, thanks so much for the compliments and for taking the time to provide a detailed list of bugs!
We know there are a lot of janky gremlins to iron out and this really helps us build a clearer picture of the most common issues across systems and playthroughs.
Not taken as criticism at all! It’s our responsibility to make sure the game works and is accessible, and this really does help us tackle those issues.
We’ll definitely look at expanding animation in future, just as soon as I can summon the willpower to face the horror of accidentally spending twenty minutes animating on the wrong layer again by mistake :D
Really appreciate all of your feedback. As for the bugs specifically.
Narrator timing, and missing dialogue is hopefully a quick fix. We just ran out of time to playtest thanks to lovely github merging issues.
The climbing one, where Meeps spontaneously decide to plunge to their doom, or explode is something that remains a mystery but we’ll dive into the code and try and figure out what’s going on.
Player going behind buildings - we can definitely try moving them in front of the building. Also helps make sure no dialogue gets missed.
Meepgate Option text not appearing/clear response - This one we simply ran out of time on. We’d like to have it be something not tied to interaction that just triggers when the player is safe/meeps and dialogue has passed, so maybe on a timer? We’ll experiment with it and see what flows.
The difficulty scale - Absolutely broken yes, sorry about that! We have 3 levels before the ending, but as it stands even I can only get through most of level 2. The timing of the doom is a bit broken, and the jump/transition to the player controlling 100 meeps is a steep/sharp shift. We intended a gentle build across the levels, but our scope was a bit too ambitious for the wild jam timeframe and it meant we couldn’t get in camera animations showing the doom, having the text/cinematics in place for the narrative, to seperate out the levels, and balance the gameplay. But we’ll definitely expand this out in future and make it work much smoother.
Hope I haven’t missed anything, but thanks again, truly!
The Meeps appreciate it, so they have a better chance of surviving! :)
Tim
Hi Tim ! (Fun fact: my name is Kim :p)
Thanks a lot for your detailed reply. Mine will be shorter as I'm a bit tired !
Github merge issues are horrible, I'm sorry you had to deal with this. They're part of why I prefer to do jams alone (so far).
I also totally understand that given you game's scope, custom art, and small team some things aren't perfect. It's a jam, not a Steam game sold for 20 bucks !
If you update your game and/or published a paid version at some point, feel free to contact me. I'd be very happy to play it again / buy a more complete and debugged version of it :) To me with your narrative and artistic skills, you're able to develop original and appealing games. I found your game original and for me it's one of the 3 games that stand out of the games I've tried so far. I also play games every week (almost every day) and being tired of all the combat and/or incremental games, I am looking for cute games with more diverse gameplays relying on simple mechanics like platforms, puzzles, exploration and such. I don't know if there are a lot of other players looking for that kind of game, but in my case your game has all the things I'm looking for in a casual/short game these days ;)
Have a nice day !
Kim
ps: Sorry if my English is a bit awkward sometimes, I'm French !
Hi Kim,
Thank you so much for such an encouraging message and for following us. It genuinely made both our days when we read it!
We definitely plan to polish the game up.
We haven’t quite decided yet on how much extra development time we intend to give it beyond that, but we do have many ideas and are excited to possibly keep developing it into the future, even if just occasionally.
It’s really helpful to know you’d buy a paid version. So many comments have been really encouraging and informative and we know we can squash the bugs given time, and sort out pacing and game mechanic gremlins/responsiveness and accessibility issues.
We’ll see how we feel after we’ve taken a break from the Jam, but at a minimum, we both definitely want to upload a free, fixed and solid linear narrative version here on itch.
If we do decide to release a paid version in the future, we’ll definitely do an announcement on our page or socials.
Thanks again and have a nice day too,
P.s. Your English is infinitely better than our French, so need to apologize!
Tim
I enjoyed this! Took me a bit to figure out how it all worked but was fun after that. Not sure if this was intentional but that ominous game over screen you enter after being in the happy meep world was very funny
Hey, thanks for playing! I’m really glad you enjoyed it. It was intentional, the big scary end screen thing does also follow you in game after the tutorial, but I don’t think we made it clear enough how to progress at the end, but that’s on us. We wanted to try and find a way to blend the cutesy and the mildly terrifying haha.
So much charm! I've been longing for a Lemmings-like game, and this game scratched an itch for sure. Such cute companions, those meeps :D
The music is a perfect fit, and I enjoyed the little side conversations the player has with the narrator too.
It took me a while trying to perform actions with a trackpad, but I eventually found an external mouse and the controls worked well. Wasn't sure if the tent part was the end based on the text changing next to it ("Now we are ready"). If you have any tips to get further, I'd definitely try again!
Had a lot of fun, and loved reading the write-up on the game page, too :)
Hi, thanks so much for playing and the feedback it really means a lot. I’m glad you enjoyed it! Sorry It’s not hugely clear in game, but when you get to the tent at the end of the level and all of your meeps are in the tent, you can press enter on the sign next to the tent to progress further into the game. There are 4 levels total including the tutorial :)
Cute game, it's fun how u control meeps lol
It was bit tricky at first figuring out the controls but it's easy when u figure it out
Also, is this the end of the game? Or was there some timer I didn't pay attention to? (After this climb and after big climb game ended there for me)
Anyways congrats on ur first entry
Hi, thanks for playing! No that isn’t the end of the game, if you reach the tents with the fire, when all your meeps are in the tent if you press enter on the sign it’ll open the path for you to continue. Apologies, we didn’t make it very clear in game. -Tom
Hello Tom, I'll try the game again now with this info
What an adorable game! The art and music are fantastic. I can tell you took the time to really polish out the level and environment.
Like others I definitely did not know that scrolling changed their speed, and it was also pretty easy to lose track of them (when I jumped down the platform, I think I accidentally scrolled my meeples away and to my knowledge had no way of getting back to them or figuring out where they went). But it was a really cute game and great idea! Great work!
Hey, thanks so much for playing and for the feedback! We really appreciate it. We unfortunately did over scope a bit so the explanation for the players in game is lacking, but we will take feedback for our future games and learn from the mistakes on this one :)
what a charming game ! very refreshing, I Love the meeps, artstyle in general and music. I do wish the meeps were a little faster (writing this review while waiting for them to go to next instruction lol) but honestly it's a fun cosy game based on a great idea, congratulations !
Oh and it took some time to understand that the climb command had to be placed directly against the wall, and most of the meeps failed the second "climb" instruction which is sad because a lot of them died by falling :(
Edit : I just realised scrollwheel makes them go faster, sorry about that
Thank’s for commenting Bill, really lovely to hear the creative design side of things is appreciated and the cozy vibes come across!
We do definitely need to sort out the narration in the tutorial though, and make sure the games controls are much clearer, and that nothing gets in the way of the core gameplay, so no apologies necessary! All the feedback is much appreciated, whether good or bad. It’s our second Jam, so lots still to learn.
We’ll get as much as we can fixed up in the next patch so the bugs don’t get in the way of hopefully having fun.
Glad to hear you managed to get them going faster!
Tim
Hey, thanks for the game. I love the jump animation. You should include the instructions how to move the meeps in game as well, didn't realize how to do that before i read the description. For some reason I could not make them jump or climb with the commands. The art style is cute!
Thanks for playing Sovium! And for the feedback :)
I accidentally deleted our dialogue node that explained the mouse wheel right before upload as I was editing the narration text and didn't notice so that is 100% my bad haha. We plan to make sure to fix everything after the voting period is ended and we can upload a new build.
Really nice to hear you liked the jump animation and art! Makes all the animation time/lovely suffering in Asperite totally worth it.
Sorry to hear the commands didn't work, was the wheel coming up after you click on the specific actions, or did the commands just not trigger anything in game?
Tim
Hey LemonHatGames, yeah the wheel came up but I wasn't sure if there should be some kind of visual mark or something where you placed the command but whatever I clicked on the wheel they did nothing.
Oh, okay. How weird. Thanks for letting us know! We've added it to the bug list.
Very cute, took me a while to understand how to make them move. Fun and interesting mechanics.
Thanks Oakie! Glad you found it fun and that the mechanics were interesting! We'll definitely fix the narration /movement tutorial and the balancing/gremlins for the next build after voting because we really enjoyed working on it.
Tim