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A jam submission

A Blind Bat's Bug BuffetView game page

A blind bat must navigate dark caves using their echolocation. Can they?
Submitted by N'Demo — 2 hours, 33 minutes before the deadline
Rated by 15 people so far
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A Blind Bat's Bug Buffet's itch.io page

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Godot Version
4.7.2

Theme Interpretation
Sound is one kind of signal, so the game is based on a bat relying on sound to navigate a cave. The frog wildcard are a bit forced, they had a different role in the original idea we had, but they serve as decent obstacles.

Wildcards Used

Right Wildcard

The third wildcard (description pending)

GWJ Participation Level
1

Team Size
5

Generative AI Disclosure

I confirm that this jam entry does not contain any AI-generated content

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Love the art. Nice job team!

Developer(+1)

Thank you!

Submitted(+1)

Great idea. The levels are not designed for the player that don't care about bug points, it is always a very simple route. More complex "simplest" solution would be nice. Or, maybe, make the bug points matter more.

Developer(+1)

Thank you for your feedback!

I have to admit the "balance" aspect of the game was quite rushed. I'll tell you more, originally we wanted to have procedural levels, but just couldn't fit it into our timetable. Still, we'll give it more attention in case of a future version

Submitted(+1)

Really nice visuals and I like the mechanic in concept, but I ended up finding it too precise for me. Even when I knew the route I'd either slightly misjudge the wall or I just didnt have the hand control to follow through, although that probably feels a lot better if you play on mobile

Developer (1 edit)

If we'll make a 1.1 version for some extra polish, we'll probably make drawing the path more user-friendly. Thank you for your feedback

Submitted(+1)

Super cool art direction and absolutely loved the sound design. The main mechanic of having to memorize the map and plot out your route was really creative, but I found it a little hard to memorize or judge how close I was to a wall/obstacle. Super cool game regardless, would love to see more

Developer(+1)

Thank you! We might look into making a version 1.1 incorporating some of the suggestions we received this week

Submitted(+1)

Really fun game. I liked the concept :D

Developer(+1)

Thank you! I see you are the other dev for Psychic Sidekick which I really enjoyed, good job again!

Submitted

Thanks! Yes, my part was on the characters, the background and part of the game concept ^u^

Submitted(+1)

Wow, that was fantastic! I loved the sounds and the art. The gameplay was something new entirely. Great job, really!

Developer

Thank you <3

Submitted(+1)

So interesting, love the art style and level of polish! The game is a bit slow paced. And it can be hard to remember perfectly what the route of the bat should be, maybe having a little more grace around the wall collisions might be good.

Developer(+1)

Thank you for your feedback! Many jammers had us notice the slow pace. Thankfully we've also received suggestions on tackling it for future projects :D

Submitted(+1)

Great game. Love visual style, sound design is silly in a cute way :D

As others mentioned - a bit too slow, but I think that only applies to echo. Sometimes it takes it’s time to go aaaaaall around entire screen. Flying speed felt fine to me.

Also would be nice to sent echo multiple times before flying (It’s hard to look in multiple directions at same time :D ) and be able to draw flight path while echo is still in progress (that would also fix “slow echo” issue)

Grid hint would also help a lot (maybe a bit too much). I kept drawing lines a bit too close to walls and hitting 3 tiles in a row :D

Anyway, was fun for sure.

(Funny how we both used frog as “ranged obstacle” :D )

Developer

Thank you for your feedback!

Speed has been mentioned as an issue, yes. Thank you for clarifying immediately that you refer to the echo specifically!

About hitting walls multiple times, it's a fair point, happens to me too. And the grid suggestion is a good idea :D

Submitted(+1)

I think this is a wonderful game! I especially love the artwork.

I think it could be even more fun with a slightly faster pace!

Developer

Thank you! Would you like to clarify which parts you felt were a bit slow? We did make the bat's flight a bit faster multiple times during development. Is it the echo-location instead?

Submitted

I didn't really notice it when I cleared it in one or two tries, but after a few failed attempts, the echolocation started to feel a little slow. Maybe having an option to adjust its speed or skip it would make repeated attempts feel a bit smoother.

That said, if the current speed is important to the overall atmosphere of the game, I think it's probably the best choice for the default setting.

Developer

Fair enough, many people had us notice. We'll be sure to consider a speed-up button for future jams

Submitted(+1)

HAHA! I love how comedic the art and SFX are!! I’m very impressed by the echo localization going over every wall!!

As other said in the comments, this was a bit too slow! I think it would have been perfect if it was 5x faster!!

Good job!! And congrats on your first wild jam!! Its a very good one!!

Developer

Hi! Thank you for your feedback. When you talk about speed, are you referring to the bat's movement, or to the echo-location's travel time?

We're glad to see sounds and art have been overall well received!

Submitted(+1)

Both!! A way you could cheese this is to add a button to change the Engine.timescale (or bind that to the mouse click, so it speeds up whenever you are holding the click outside the drawing sequence!)

Developer

Changing the whole engine's timescale definitely sounds re-usable, we'll consider it for the next jams

Submitted(+1)
  • Nice opening, the black and white color scheme with the sound effects does a good job creating a mood
  • Cool effects. The screen transition and the actual "level light up" walkthrough are neat.
  • Definitely a lot of information to try to hold in with the level walkthrough, one-shotting a level is out of the question for me, haha
  • Showing the previous path is great. I do wish I could skip the level pulse on retries though.
  • The things that make noise lighting up intermittently is a neat mechanic
  • It's a bit tricky to see the bat's hitbox

Really really cool take on the theme, and I really like the mechanic of drawing a path through the level. Aesthetic is very good too, and I liked the sound effects (though some background music or ambience could've been a nice touch).

Really cool entry, very compelling. The things I'd give to peek into your "bat yelp/scream" sound effect folder...

Developer

Hi! Thank you for your feedback.
I'm glad you liked the previous path being shown. It's a case of bug turned feature :D
As for the sound effects, it's been mostly us doing our best yelps in front of a microphone followed by some light Audacity :D

Finally, when you refer to missing ambience, did you play the web version? We noticed it has some trouble loading sounds in some browsers. There should be some (very basic and generic) cave ambience, or did you hear it and are specifically talking about music?

Submitted(+1)

I think it may just be the case that the ambience doesn't loop? I hear it on the main menu, and I just went and got through level 1 again, but afterwards there was nothing (outside of the other SFX). Not sure if it's browser specific, but I'm on Firefox.

Developer

Right. It *should* loop. Sadly on some browsers it doesn't. For instance, loops fine on my phone, loops fine on my laptop, won't loop on my desktop, and so on. Hard to tell :/

Submitted(+1)

That was really cute. Love the Groening style bat. My first thought for this jam was to do something with echo location, but this was far better than what I had in mind. Good job!

Developer

Thank you! Would you like to share your original idea? Or do you plan to work on it in the future?

Submitted(+1)

Basically a maze but you’d have to periodically hit the echolocation button from time to time to reveal the surroundings. You’d hunt insects and different types would upgrade different abilities.  Thought about doing something like that in VR when I was working in Unreal Engine but probably won’t ever get around to it.

Developer

Seems interesting. Godot also has at least some VR/XR support
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/xr/setting_up_xr.html
Might be worth considering for the future

Submitted(+1)

this is by far one of my favourites, I really love the idea, and got hooked by the screaming bat sfx lol

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the feedback, the sounds are mostly us making weird sounds :D

Submitted(+1)

That's what I thought, 10/10 voice actors

Submitted(+1)

super cool! love the art style, unique mechanics, and entertaining characters. the sfx are loud for me. gameplay is a tad slow, relies on memorization. overall impressive job, well done

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the feedback! And sorry for the loudness, we tried balancing sounds out but it's an art we are still not adept at.