Hey everyone! and welcome to August's voting thread. We have a great herd of games to check out this month so join the pack and get voting!. # How to Vote: **Reminder: The theme was "Animals"** Each person may vote for a first place entry and a second place entry as well as the game which game they felt used the theme most creatively. * Each first place vote will earn that game 2 points * Each second place vote will earn that game 1 point. * The Game(s) with the most votes for **Most Creative Use of Theme** will earn an additional 2 points. ------------------------------ Example Voting Post: First Place: Game A - Dev A Second Place Game B - Dev B Most Creative Game: Game D - Dev D ------------------------------ In addition, each entrant who made 3 (or more) progress update posts during the development period will also gain an extra point. * The game with the most points wins. * You may not vote for your own entry, and choosing not to vote in order to increase your chances of winning is frowned upon (and repeat offenders will be punished)! * Please feel free to give feedback about the games as you vote if you wish. # Key Date Voting Period: Now Until August 31st

# Entries * Flisland (by 0rava) [Click to Play This Game on Itch.IO](https://dashrava.itch.io/flisland) * NoSnacks (by Kassjak) [Click to Play This Game on Itcho.IO](https://kassjak.itch.io/nosnacks) * Shiftimals (by Dark Moon Fire) [Click to Play This Game on Kongregate](https://www.kongregate.com/games/Darkmoonfire/shiftimals) * Snek! (by Dragonlance5) [Click to Play This Game on Kongregate](https://www.kongregate.com/games/dragonlance5/snek) As always, the bonus points will be added to your tally after voting is complete. Good luck to all entrants, get voting everyone!

First place: Shiftimals (by Dark Moon Fire) Second Place: Snek! (by Dragonlance5) Most Creative Game: Snek! (by Dragonlance5) The other two (especially Flisland) are very very polished and impressive with sooo much heart put into them, it's just that I didn't figure out how to play them (how to capture animals and how to keep the cats away) but they looked like published games.

**First place: NoSnacks (by Kassjak)** Good gameplay and nice looking graphics **Second place: Shiftimals (by Dark Moon Fire)** Good level design, although this style of shapeshifting puzzle-plataformer has been seen before it plays nice **Most Creative Game: Snek! (by Dragonlance5) ** Really creative idea, but the block placement is a little buggy and ruins gameplay Its sad to left Flisland out as it's the most polished graphics-wise, love the looks but the gameplay isnt really compelling The idea is great however, maybe with some adjustements on the gameplay mechanics it would work really great Really good games this time, hope I can join on the next jam

**Flisland:** The visuals for this game are honestly impressive and the premise is quite unique. I thought the master at the start was hilarious especially since sarcasm is my bread and butter but the mechanics felt lackluster to me. All the spells you get to cast have a relatively minor impact on the islands which made me feel like I was never regaining control from the chaos shown at the start. So after quite some time trying to herd the animals I just gave up on the objective and had much more fun just messing around with stuff in the world. **NoSnacks:** This game is all around solid. I love the music and atmosphere and spent more time than I should have trying to save all the snacks for myself. I thought Left Ctrl being the "throw" key was a bit weird and wish that when you threw an animal away it went back farther (or left the screen entirely) but that could just be me being bad at the game so its not a serious complaint. All in all this was a really well rounded game that I had a lot of fun playing. **Shiftimals:** My two favorite genres on this site are platformer and puzzle so when you combine those two you can rarely go wrong in my eyes. I had too much fun playing this game and wish that there were more than 10 levels but you can rarely make a game with a ton of content in such a short timeframe so I'm not complaining. One thing I will reccomend though is some sort of counter to show how many transformations you have left. I originally thought it was a bug when I could no longer transform and once I realized there was a limit per level the first thing I did when I entered a new stage was count how many transformations I could do and then restart. Otherwise great game, please make more levels for me. **Votes:** First Place - Shiftimals Second Place - NoSnacks Most Creative - Flisland

### Post-Jam Musings Don't worry about criticizing the gameplay of Flisland. I haven't been focused on making very good games, but I sure am learning. I'm spending this year learning Unity inside and out by participating in as many jams as possible and assigning secret personal themes to each of them, and then tack on a game of some kind in the end. So far durign GITDs I've done **3D** with *tiny Shiny Fly* (First time doing a full 3D production) **2D+Physics** with *Override Kill()* (Checking out Destructible2D asset and 2D physics in general.) **Softbody physics** with *Dopamine* (I learned that softbodies are fiddly and that I want to stay away from them.) **Animations+Sfx** with *Starward Ticket* (Everything has to move and make a sound!) **Level Design + Visual Polish** this month with *Flisland*, which seems to have been a success as well based on the comments so far. ---- Visually *Flisland* is potentially my best looking game jam game (so far), and I'm actually incredibly happy how well the floating island look turned out.     ---- ### Fun Facts * The animals of choice are purely because those models happened to have running animations. I also had various other animal models, but some of them only had Idling+Jumping animations (because why would you ever need to move anywhere if you're a sheep?) * The islands were originally Red, Green, and Blue, but I changed them to (more or less) CMYK. And the skybox changes colour to a contrasting colour during the portal animation.  * I originally wanted the game to have an orthographic camera (left), but it messed with the portal/spell shader and I didn't have time to fix it, so the game uses a quite narrow FoV perspective camera (right) instead so as not to distort the island (bottom).  ---- I'll be rating the other games next week.

**1st Place**: NoSnacks **2nd Place** Snek! **Most Creative**: Snek! **Flisland**: This game had great asthetics. The art was polished, and really helped to make the game feel animated and quirky, which the opening narration matched. I was able to beat this game using mostly just the puff, since that was the only one I could figure out how to herd the animals with. It's kind of tedious beating the game that way though. **NoSnacks**: It took me longer than it probably should've to figure out that I needed momentum to throw the animals further. I also had control-left set up as keyboard shortcut for my dashboard for some reason, so that caused me trouble when I first started playing. Once I figured the controls, the game played really nice. I also like the art. **Snek!**: The game felt really original, which surprised me because I wasn't sure what you could do with the snake gameplay that hadn't already been done. I'd like it if the snake moved a bit slower, since I had trouble find the right spot to move to quick enough, or if there was some visual distinction between diffrent rows, so I can see where everything lines up easier.

1st Place: Flisland 2nd Place: Shiftimals Most Creative: Flisland Flisisland: I really liked the concept and enjoyed playing the game. I couldn't see my current score, it would be nice to have more concrete feedback on how I'm doing. Also I found poof to be useful but not the other spells. However the game was fun, well polished, and complex enough without the other spells to still be an obvious first place for me. Shiftimals: I like the concept. I sometimes would have the shifting ability lock up so that I'd have to restart the level to get the number keys to start working again. But I thought it was otherwise a nice idea and well executed. Snek!: Having boops be a different color than the walls would really help. It moved so fast that it was challenging enough without dying and not knowing why. I just ended up frustrated. Nosnacks: Maybe there was more to the game than just throwing animals away from the snacks but I was overwhelmed so quickly that I never got the chance to find out. It was cute though.

### Feedback **NoSnacks** Couldn't play properly because spawning seems to be tied to frame rate so I get very smothered very fast.  Player character could easily be multiple times as fast to make throwing the animals around cartoonishly comedic instead of the current quite ineffective lob. Would've preferred W/Up for throwing instead of Ctrl so I can pet a cat with my other hand while playing. ---- **Shiftimals** Like others have mentioned, the limit on transformations should be visible somewhere, but other than that it's a really solid puzzle game and I didn't encounter any issues. The animals and their animations are cute. The special blocks are a bit too on the nose. Maybe the dig/climb/push icons could be there in a tutorial level just to showcase what they do, and then just turn into the distinctive enough, more natural-looking, base blocks without the icons.  The levels could also use a background layer instead of just clear blue skies making it seem like the animals are running around floating islands (that's my theme!) The goal could be something a bit more appetizing to animals than a fallen star. ---- **Snek** A cool take on a classic, with some nice puzzles, but the lives system is a hindrance due to the puzzly nature of the game. I lost my first game without realizing there was a lives system in the first place, and the following playthroughs were spent squinting the route from start to finish instead of doing any kind of fun experimentation with the levels since the lives were so limited. Would've probably preferred the controls to be "click to place a block" (and following clicks removing that block) so you could plan and anticipate things better. It got a bit too hectic for a puzzle game at times with the cursor being the block. The grid is visually very aggressive and hurts both the gameplay and my poor eyes. ---- ### Votes First Place: **Shiftimals** Second Place: **Snek** Most Creative: **Shiftimals**

**1st Place:** Snek ~ Dragonlance5 **2nd Place:** Shiftimals ~ Dark Moon Fire **Most Creative:** Snek ~ Dragonlance5 Won't be giving out feedback this time since I'm in a hurry, sorry!

1st: Shiftimals 2nd: Snek! Most Creative Use Of Theme: Shiftimals *I didn't get a chance to play the other two, looks like my GPU is no longer supporting some of the shaders you're all using so I can't load the game.

And our winners are: **First Place:** Shiftimals by Darkmoonfire **Second Place:** Snek! by DragonLance5 **Most Creative Use of Theme:** Snek! by DragonLance5 Kongrats to everyone who entered and i'll see you here again soon for this month's theme selection.