We're very proud to present you our first game, first LD, first Jam!
It's called Hatty & Tom, the theme was "Sacrifices must be made", and we decided to make a short story-driven 3D Sidescroller in which you start at the final boss, and have to make sacrifices along the way to get back to your hometown. You're Tom, seeking adventures and glory with your living-hat-bunny friend, Hatty, who guides you through the Voxel-style world you're part of. The game has been made to be played with a controller but you can still play it with a keyboard, the binds are listed at the end of this text.
This is the first time we're making a game and we're honestly very proud of it, it makes us happy considering the fact that we were a team of 3 which was very unexperienced in the game development domain. Our team consisted of Dumbeldor (programmer), Emeffe (programmer), and Pokang (beginner artist)! We all learnt how to use Unreal Engine on the run and we learnt a whole lot during this jam, working in a restricted environment really brings up the best out of a learning experience. We didn't sleep a lot and we worked super hard to bring a decent game for you guys and for ourselves, and we're very satisfied with what we made, we hope you will enjoy it! Everything happened super fast and we weren't seeing time passing by!
Now that I've shortly introduced our game and team I will enter in the more technical details for those interested.
To make this game, we've used these resources :
-Unreal Engine 4 -MagicaVoxel (thank you ephtracy ily so much?) -Mixamo -Photoshop -Audacity -LMMS -GitHub
About the assets, every voxel asset has been made by Pokang on MagicaVoxel and he's super thankful for ephtracy who made such an intuitive and beautiful software to use. We've chosen to use Mixamo for rigging and animations because it makes decent, fast and cool animations, that can be a little goofy sometimes, which we enjoy! We've used Photoshop for a few UI assets, and all the sound effects have been recorded by Pokang and his scuffed mic with various objects around his apartment. The super short music loop has been made by Pokang on LMMS, he's never really made music before so the track is very simple, we didn't want to have a near to silent world and we didn't want to use other's people assets! All the rest has been made by our super cool programmers who have made an crazy job at learning UE4 along their path to enlightment and who learnt a whole lot of cool things during the development of the game. We're impressed at how many things we've come to acheive during the 72 hours of the jam and these things include :
-A cool main menu -A lot of animations for characters -A fighting system -An equipment system with items you can drop when needed -A dialog system which brings a story we entirely wrote and imagined from scratch -Crouching, jumping, movement features -A platformer part -A healing system -A very short cinematic -A checkpoint system -Very mean enemies that attack you just for the sake of it -Credits! -An excessive theine consumption by the team
Now to give a little background about where this all started, Dumbeldor and Emeffe are both students and friends in the same class, and Dumbeldor met Pokang during another project which is called Skyrim Together, a Skyrim mod that has the objective of bringing multiplayer and coop to Skyrim.
Feel free to tell us your honest opinion about our game, we'd love to hear it even if it's not positive!
We're looking forward to playing all of your awesome submissions guys, I've personally noted some of them that I REALLY want to play.
Thank you Ludum Dare to give us this wonderful opportunity to train ourselves and create cool stuff, we enjoyed this event so much as a team.
Loved the art, but the hit detection for attacks needs work. I found myself having a lot of trouble actually hitting anything. Fun idea too. Trying for some clearer sounds would help a lot too! Otherwise a great first step!
@literal-filth Thank you so much for your feedback ! We're aware that the hitboxes are kind of wonky and we'll make better ones next time ! About the sound, well, yeah... I know hahaha I recorded them on my scuffed mic, I would've done better if I had better hardware, but that's no excuse! Thank you for playing♥
Short and sweet! I liked the voxel-style art and the use of lights. Visually, it reminded me of Bit.Trip Runner. Nice use of the theme. For those playing with a keyboard, I recommend having the controls up in another tab. By the way @pokang the "Interact" controls on the itch.io page are wrong! It says 'A' with a keyboard but it's really 'Q'. Took me a while to figure out. Otherwise, great entry!
@danman9914 Thank you so much for your feedback, it's really an honor to receive comments from someone that made the almighty Pony Island. Thank you for your bindings feedback, I'll update that, I got QWERTY and AZERTY mixed up! Thanks♥
Well this is really good! The voxel graphics looks neat and the sound is pretty good too. The sheep enemies were a bit tough at the beginnging but I got them all down after a few tries :D Well done!
@Smeax Thank you but the sound is really not that great... :D Enemies are kind of harsh to deal with because of our hitbox system but we're glad you succeeded!
Great first game, but the combat and the dropping of weapons and armor could be improved. Great looking game. I hope you continue to make some more games! Best of luck!
@PlagueOfMinds Thank you very much for playing! We're aware that we can do better on these points and we will improve it next time we do something, thank you for your wishes!
Graphics were amazing! I thought it was ironic that I became a better fighter at the end of the game from sheer experience, despite losing the armor. The take on the theme was well done. If you fleshed out the combat / platforming, I could see this as a legit game. Good job!
Amazing first entry! It looks beautiful, the animations are super smooth, and it's a great take on the theme! Like other people said, the combat feeling could be a bit improved, but that's not a big deal, the game's overall feeling is awesome.
That's also nice to see you enjoyed your first jam experience, really hope to see you at the next LD!
@bingdom That's a pretty good idea! We didn't think of that. We didn't do it while the dialog because we wanted the player to "feel" that he was making a sacrifice. Thank you for the kind words. :)
@mrleeperry Thank you! We know the kbm controls aren't very cool to use, we developed the game with the focus of making it a controller game, thank you for playing it and giving feedback!
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Thank you for your interest!
About the sound, well, yeah... I know hahaha I recorded them on my scuffed mic, I would've done better if I had better hardware, but that's no excuse!
Thank you for playing♥
Thank you for your bindings feedback, I'll update that, I got QWERTY and AZERTY mixed up!
Thanks♥
Thanks @johnnyginard ! we are glad you liked our game ^^
Enemies are kind of harsh to deal with because of our hitbox system but we're glad you succeeded!
5/5.
This is a solid first game attempt! Well done.
It looks beautiful, the animations are super smooth, and it's a great take on the theme!
Like other people said, the combat feeling could be a bit improved, but that's not a big deal, the game's overall feeling is awesome.
That's also nice to see you enjoyed your first jam experience, really hope to see you at the next LD!
@pellanor I'm sorry you felt that way, we've had a few comments about the hitboxes but it's the first time someone doesn't get past the frog :(
@vlad-ilisan Thank you very much!
@bingdom That's a pretty good idea! We didn't think of that. We didn't do it while the dialog because we wanted the player to "feel" that he was making a sacrifice. Thank you for the kind words. :)
@mrleeperry Thank you! We know the kbm controls aren't very cool to use, we developed the game with the focus of making it a controller game, thank you for playing it and giving feedback!