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Hey everyone! and welcome to September's voting thread. We had a bit of a mix up with the theme vote this month (Nutter can't count apparently) and ended up with a particularly morbid theme, luckily you all managed to come up with some truly unique games based on our deadly theme. So without further ado let's get voting.
# How to Vote:
**Reminder: The theme was "Death"**
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.
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Example Voting Post:
First Place: Game A - Dev A
Second Place Game B - Dev B
Most Creative Game: Game D - Dev D
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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 September 30th
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# Entries
* Death Bus (by 0rava) [Click to Play This Game on Itch.IO](https://dashrava.itch.io/deathbus)
* Everyone has to Die (by Say892) [Click to Play This Game on Kongregate](https://www.kongregate.com/games/say892/everyone-has-to-die)
* Return from the Mountain (by CyberSpirit) [Click to Play This Game on Kongregate](https://www.kongregate.com/games/Cyberspirit/return-from-the-mountain)
As always, the bonus points will be added to your tally after voting is complete.
Good luck to all entrants, get voting everyone!
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### Showcase + Jam Writeup
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# **DEATHBUS**
*Death has replaced its scythe with a bus,
and tasked it with harvesting a dead town.*
[](https://dashrava.itch.io/deathbus)
# Play! https://dashrava.itch.io/deathbus
(Unity WebGL 2.0, requires somewhat modern hardware. Keyboard only. Estimated time to beat: 6:06 min.)
#### Watch! [Playthrough Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I28Hr_mPBQQ)
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# Post-Jam Musings
I like how the game turned out a lot both stylistically and gameplay-wise. As simple as it is in the end, the casual arcade wroom wroom action is pretty sweet in my opinion.
Fun facts:
* The billboards are images of my GiTD entries, including DEATHBUS itself for a tiny bit of meta.
* The town was originally very tiny, and only made of the smaller buildings, but then wall-driving happened and I had to expand it to add a bunch of highrises.
* The highrises are actually just normal apartment buildings stacked on top of each other.

* Had some issues with the WebGL build, so lighting isn't working in the intro scene (but I kind of like it like that, with just the headlights.) It's supposed to look like this, but with a bit of movement:

* The pigeons are MASSIVE, because they weren't visible at all otherwise.

* The game combines Unity's rigidbody physics with entirely arbitrarily forces, and somehow that worked out pretty well for wall-driving.
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First Place: Death Bus - 0rava
Second Place: Everyone has to Die - Say892
Most Creative Game: Death Bus - 0rava
0rava a nice feature for your game would be the ability to change perspective to see from different sides
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^ I had a shader that shows the bus through the walls but unfortunately it doesn't work in WebGL and I didn't have time to rework the camera.

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### Feedback
**Everyone has to Die** (by Say892)
Cute robots, especially the falling sprite 
Hoped for the robot numbers to ramp up quite a bit more lemmings style, as the small amount of robots combined makes the difficulty pretty non-existent.
Showing [X] in the UI from the get-go despite having to green things to toggle can be a bit confusing since it just doesn't do anything.
I know you wanted to have more levels, and it shows a bit. They're quite tutorialish in difficulty (3 completes itself if you just toggle the laser on, and 7 doesn't really need the green control at all.)
Room for expansion. I'd like to see hordes of tiny robots in more elaborate deathtraps.
**Return from the Mountain** (by CyberSpirit)
I liked it a lot, actually required taking notes to make it through or you get completely lost in the maze.
Got lost in the midway, but [mapped](https://i.imgur.com/hzSoQRo.png) (spoilers) my way through eventually and everything is going to be OK.
Maybe it was just my note taking, but I seem to have found a couple spots where it was supposed to intersect itself but didn't, e.g.

Typesetting leaves quite a bit of wasted space (easily half the screen is just pure white constantly)
Pressing [A] in the intro says "They seem unconscious"
Some typos ("stires", "coresponding")
NESW isn't the most intuitive because keyboard layout and all. Using NESW for most of the game and then switching to arrows for the battle minigame is a bit weird.
# Votes
### #1 - **Return from the Mountain** (by CyberSpirit)
### #2 - **Everyone has to Die** (by Say892)
### Most Creative - **Return from the Mountain** (by CyberSpirit)
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Yeah I wondered about people having trouble with being overly lost. Here is a general layout that gives some perspective without actually showing giving the path itself:
If you get frustrated use this image (spoilers): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chris-hjelmfelt/ReturnMountain/master/partial_map.jpg
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0rava thanks for the good feedback :)
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First Place: Death Bus - 0rava
Second Place: Everyone has to Die - Say892
Most Creative Game: Everyone has to Die - Say892
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Good job to the other 2! As 0rava said, I wanted to have more levels and the levels that are there are pretty simple. But basically, I just wasn't feeling good with the game itself, and I sort of just gave up making levels after those first 8. Granted, it was still nice to read a few comments and see some people enjoyed it, as well as watching the play count go up. Thanks Kong Kommunity. :D
Quick Feedback:
**
Death Bus**
Pretty cool idea, and straight the point/theme. Was hoping it would turn more into Katamari Damacy/Fishy with more things to take down as you went on, and then it DID. I think turning this into a full game with different environments would be cool to see.
**Return From The Mountain**
A nice little text-based RPG. I'm not usually a big fan of these, but it was still a good experience, with the little side quests/games thrown in. Only gripe would be traditionally you can look back at the history of your commands, so you can keep track of what you've done. This would have helped in the maze, since sometimes the prompts don't change after a press, and frankly I just got lost and didn't keep good enough track of where I went. :)
First: Death Bus
Second: Return From The Mountain
MCG: Death Bus
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^ Yeah I'm really glad I pulled that off. I wasn't even planning on making *everything* destructible, but then it just kind of happened at the last minute (maybe second to last night?) when I made a house break as a test and it felt real nice to barrel through them.
Also additional fun fact, I did test fracturing building models, and it was really cool, but unfortunately I didn't have time to fracture all the building models so the game just spawns generic random bits.

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Kongratulations to all 3 of our entrants but it's time to announce the winners.
**First Place:** Death Bus by 0rava
**Second Place:** Everyone Has to Die by Say892
**Most Creative Use of Theme:** Death Bus by 0rava
PS: The battle for second place was incredibly close, it was the "Progress Updates" bonus point which provided the tiebreaking point between the two games.
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