fabian

The first version had a cool atmosphere, excited where you take it this time

+1 for candy factory!

That looks very cute already. The animations are

That's an interesting concept and the illustration already looks cool! The scope sounds reasonable, too

This looks fantastic! I Imagine a little gamer-dot-gobbler sitting in that chair....

Well, you were reeeeally close to beating this level when you reached this point here: Thanks for playing and streaming!

The game is now released! You can find it here: https://fabiandenter.itch.io/wish-upon-a-star Hope you enjoy and have fun! ------------------------------------------------------- Original Post: ------------------------------------------------------- Hi, thanks for checking out my devlog! What I want to do: For this jam, I‘m trying to do a puzzle game with a few simple mechanics. It will mainly be „getting from point A to point B while overcoming an obstacle“, though I hope it will turn out more interesting than this description sounds! I’ve already got a few mechanics in my head, most of them are moving blocks around in order to create a way for the player character. For this to work, I‘ll need to look up Unity‘s navmesh, but folks in the slack already told me it‘s easy to work with, so I‘m optimistic. It definitely needs to be somewhat dynamic in that it regenerates itself after each action, I hope this is possible. This also means the movement will be point and click, which is something I wanted to do for a long time now. The levels themselves will be quite short and isolated and while I type this I‘m just realizing that I‘m describing Monument Valley without the perspective stuff. So that‘s my new theme prompt now 😄 Goals: - have a dynamic navmesh with point & click movement for the player - have multiple simple mechanics that allow the player to alter the path that needs to be taken to overcome an obstacle - have at least 10 small, isolated levels that contain one puzzle each - code everything gameplay-related myself/ without third-party assets/ of course with the help of Google and other people - make a simple character with an interesting shape - do gameplay first, add bells & whistles later All goals might be slightly adjusted depending on how everything goes. 😄 Good luck everyone!

@SharedControl @eRonin @Nappi @brendonsmall @pdotjpg Thank you for playing and giving feedback! A lot of good thoughts there, and none of it too critical! Looking back I agree that some levels could be much smaller / focussed on specific things. They became quite big pretty soon because it's tempting to use all your mechanics at once I guess. I tried to introduce each one separately but one thing I really didn't expect was that people find the game too hard. During the jam, I constantly was afraid of everything being too simple, so I added and added and added stuff to the levels to make them harder or more complicated - and probably overdid it sometimes. I forgot that as a game creator you are automatically an expert at your game and everybody else isn't, at least at launch. It is also correct that it is rather click-heavy. I wanted to add "hold to raise/lower", but an early implementation of that broke other stuff so I decided to use what's already working and finish the game. I might come back to this later because when it worked it felt so much better than clicking each time you want to move something. I also want to go over each level and fix some cases where blocks are really hard to reach or where they can disappear behind others, forcing you into a reload. Fortunately, everything is set up so that this is pretty easy to do, it's just tedious and time-consuming. Regarding the perspective, I think it's preference. I like the isometric view and I'm not really bothered by being tricked into thinking a path exists when it doesn't. It's probably like you said, you have to leave that Monument Valley mindset behind, though I see how that's quite hard, given how influential MV is (also to this game, obviously!). @brendonsmall thanks for pointing that out. As this is the only level with these blown out highlights and the other views reveal the arrows, I think it's ok as it is. Also, I spent a good amount of time during development hovering on the main menu buttons, you can actually make simple melodies! @pdotjpg Yeah, I made the music. A few posts earlier I posted some of the loops as a Soundcloud playlist. Glad you like it! Thanks again for playing! Getting awesome feedback like this is really encouraging!

Thank you! Also, thanks for the bug report, will fix asap! I expect there to be more things like this in the game, so if anyone finds more please report here or on itch

The art (visuals and audio) is extremely good! I also like the movement of the drone, but I'm horribly bad at games like this so I didn't get the rules of the game until I watched your gameplay videos. I think more variation between the rooms could help to make each one feel more different from each other (ok ok, I just want to see more rooms with more art ). Are you going to continue this?

I don't know what I made, but I sure as hell enjoyed the process of creating it! I

I agree with everyone who said this is good. I like especially small details like this: I haven't processed all häxes yet, so I will likely return to it soon!

Just played it, nice atmosphere, but could use some scary swamp sounds maybe Are you going to continue working on this?

One should probably have watched Frasier at least once in their life to get it, right? Since I have never seen an episode, this was quite weird - maybe I should go watch Frasier now?

What @infamous space turtle says

Enjoyed this as well and I agree with @FartSatchel about the music and a Life is Strange vibe, very nice! Good that you have controller support, because the mouse kept going off the game view when I looked around, which is kind of annoying when you have multiple monitors. I think you'd need to lock and hide the cursor during normal gameplay to fix this. But controller worked just fine and for me it is a better way to play a relaxing experience like this anyway! I didn't expect that ending but Good work!

Only one day left but then both of my free rebels got arrested Very cool and unique idea. Also very hard game. Sometimes I wished I could see the effect that e.g. swapping letters would have before I made the move. I think that would make the game easier... but maybe also too easy? Anyway, I had a lot of fun, well done!

Just played it and it‘s really lovely! I like the beginning a lot with the music and voice actors and then you are just there in space. The atmosphere is really good, I think, especially when you meet another ship. Well done! I assumed pressing the escape key would pause the game and not quit to the main menu, so I think I lost my progress. But I managed to find a ship, mine a few asteroids and explore the map a bit. I wonder what lies beyond that asteroid field! On thing I noticed is that a few dialog lines triggered twice for me. Will probably come back to this later!

That was fun, I also think there's a game worth to be made here! I like that the levels are so short, though I wish there would've been more of them. I guess when you continue working on this you will discover infinite situations with these and more mechanics that could be interesting to play through I agree with the criticism about the tool selection via 3 different keys. I think this could be done simpler (I don't know, maybe a radial menu would work?). Good work! Looking forward to seeing more of this!

Happy to announce that the game is now released on itch! https://fabiandenter.itch.io/wish-upon-a-star Hope you enjoy!

Oh man, the jam is over, but I still find some game-breaking bugs and generally things that I need to fix/add. Unfortunately, I am now back at my work and also work on another project will continue so I try to squeeze in a few fixes here and there. I hope to have something up on itch by the end of this week. The game is sort of playable right now so I'm optimistic this will happen! In the meantime, here is some of the simple looping music I made for the game: Looking forward to playing everyone's games!

I've gotten a lot done in the past two days, but there is still so much more I want to be in the game until Sunday. (There is no music currently and many sounds are placeholder. Also, I still need to implement a few characters and I'm glad I found a workflow that is quite stable and quick) But! I built all levels that I wanted to build! I have yet to test them for errors and mistakes, but they are all in the game, which is cool. I also found a nice way to have "dialogue" without words. I spent a few hours today and created a bunch of small images, which will be implemented via speech bubbles, like in the screenshot below. So far I have a system that shows an image randomly chosen from a list, but I also want a few scripted "dialogues" at certain points in the game, so I guess that's what I'll do tomorrow!

Congrats! Looking forward to playing!

I'm using Unity's own post-processing stack (version 1 from the asset store). The effects I use are Anti-Aliasing, Ambient Occlusion, Bloom, Color Grading, and Vignette. ----- Building levels/puzzles is taking me longer than I initially thought. They can become quite complex, but I somehow still feel they are too easy to solve. I also don't really want players to stay in a level for more than one or two minutes. Not sure how it is for people who haven't played the game and aren't familiar with its rules. I've got 6 levels so far, but the first few are more or less tutorials and very simple so there is a lot to do in not so much time left

No problem, these are not dumb questions! I don't actually do fancy tricks or something in terms of rendering or shading. I mainly use the Unity Standard shader for everything, most of the time even without textures (except for the top of the platforms and the character). One thing I did is I turned smoothness all the way down to zero. In terms of lighting, it is indeed just a main directional light with shadows enabled and in addition to that, a few point lights in different colors with low to medium intensities, no shadows enabled and a rather large radius. Having an isometric perspective and a scene that mostly consists of cubic shapes helps getting the impression that each face facing a different direction has a different color - that's because I light them more or less independently with the point lights. The main directional light is there for a general light direction, the point lights are there to brighten and colorize the parts of the level that otherwise would lie in the directional light's shadow. I also add ambient light with a single color to the mix. Here is a screenshot of the light setup of the level from the last gif: The sun icon is the directional light and you can see the direction it is facing. The other lights are the point lights spread throughout the scene with their radius represented by the yellow circles. Another big part of getting the look is of course post-processing and a colored gradient overlay. I made two screenshots, the first one without the gradient and post-processing, the other one with both enabled. The gradient is just a sprite with a gradient from white to transparent that I colorize in Unity and put on top of everything except UI. Hope this helps!