Polygonal Animal Stacking is a game where you have to stack as many animals as possible on an island without them falling in the lava below. Everything was created from scratch during the jam, except the font.
Tools used: - Unity for the coding - Colored pencils and paper for the artwork - A scanner to get the artwork in the computer - GIMP to cut the artwork and make it presentable - SFXR for sound effects - Music composed by AIVA - Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist (https://www.aiva.ai)
Really adorable, cohesive art stlye! Stacking was pretty tricky, especially with how slippery the ground is! I liked that I had to pay attention to not knock over my tower with the piece I'm holding. Nice work :)
The graphics are something i remember there were in childhood games; it was faster and cheaper to build up graphics that someone draw by hand i guess. Game play is hard because the next animal spawns onto your cursor, while i have to move the cursor up and down after placing an animal. Rotating would be cool with manually feature. Stacking animals is not very unique, but with in this atmosphere it really does. I like your post and the documentation of your development process.
The art style is really charming and it definitely stand out for the choice of medium. There is definitely a good balance of humour and heartbreak while trying to save all the animals and then everything starts slipping and chaos ensues! Great job :)
A very nice, relaxing game. I love the art style, and the music fits well with the tone. I did find it quite tricky, and one suggestion might be to prevent another animal spawning if your mouse is already touching an existing one. Overall I liked it, and played it through a couple of times to try and beat my score :)
@hiisileiri Thanks. I think those old games used hand drawn art because there weren't many digital artists those days and the image creating software wasn't very advanced. For me it wasn't faster at all, I spent way too much time processing the images on the computer and consequently had less time for polishing the gameplay.
Nice game. The stacking was kind of frustrating because everything kept falling of the super slippery island (but thats part of the fun i guess). I really liked the artstyle. Well done.
Made me smile. I like the graphics. And good physics. And trickier than I thought (you put the right amount of wobble into the physics to make it challenging). Nice music. Made me smile.
P.S.: I could not find the "keyboard" animal in my enzyclopedia. From which continent is it?
Absolutely love the way you did the art - that must've taken you ages. Liked the gameplay - no real criticisms from me apart from wanting a "next piece" UI like Tetris has. Great work!
@sleepystudios Thanks, it did take me a long time to draw that and even more to cut it apart on the computer. Showing the next piece is a great idea, I'll remember it for a possible future expansion of the game.
Always nice to see a mix of traditional art in video games. Wouldn't mind few more animals/shapes. Maybe that could allow creating artificial barriers when well placed.
Love the hand drawn art in this one! Tricky game but fun. I do think the animals you're dropped should not collide with the ones already dropped, I had this happen after dropping a large elephant which messed up the tower :(.
Maybe I should make my next game hand-drawn too, judging from my own reaction and then seeing it reflected in the comments :-) Also the game will not (with the exception of spawning a new animal or ... keyboard?) progress unless you're ready. This, together with the music* gives it a relaxing vibe!
I'm sorry to say that I couldn't really get the hang of the rest of the game though. Since the floor is an ellipse or sphere, and the animals are really slidey, there's only one spot where you can realistically drop them. It's not like this gets better when your tower gets higher, since that's very likely, through no fault of your own to collapse as well before you get into any position that you have an actual choice as where to place the next.
Some smaller remarks: - For the 'animal appearing at the mouse cursor': It's not so bad once you know about it. I'd still have preferred for it not to be 'active' already. (Though I suppose the explosions can be fun when viewed from that angle.) - The big elephants feel very light for some reason? - Little bug?: I'm pretty sure I got something like 'final score 15, max score 16' at my first attempt.
(*: A few LD's back a gave procedural music a go as well for a couple of times --Wolfram Tones in my case-- it never felt really satisfying to have made though -- more like curation that creation. Also this party ('Aiva.AI') keeps the copyright if you're not paying them the highest tier? Yikes!)
@remco Thanks for the very thorough review. The floor is indeed an ellipse, but there's still a pretty large area where things don't slide too much, especially if you don't drop them from a big height. See my highscore below. Besides, the theme for this jam is unstable 😉
As you can see, another good tactic seems to be to drop the big elephants directly into the lava until you run low on lives.
As for the animals appearing at the mouse cursor, I don't think that's a huge problem as you quickly learn to anticipate it and even use it to your advantage - use the current animal to steady the crumbling stack or even carefully push an already placed animal to a better spot. Besides, learning how to play better is part of the fun.
Those elephants are indeed too light, I should have set their weight to 4, and the dog's weight to 0.5 and the cats to 0.8. I'm sure I'll include this if I ever decide to expand this game.
The current score shows the number of animals on screen at the moment, while the highscore shows the highest number of animals anytime during the game, so it can be higher than your score at the end. This way you don't get punished for being brave and trying to stack too many animals and causing a collapse.
(As for Aiva, it's fine for little compo games, but I would never use it for a real game. Even my Jam game soundtracks are usually made by my composer friend, who even got a little freaked out about the AI that produced music that seemed to get more praise than his)
@flying-dog-fish Thanks for taking the time to reply! It seems there's at least a little more to it than I gave it credit for.
> Besides, learning how to play better is part of the fun.
Absolutely! Conversely it's also the job of the designer to make the player feel that there is room to grow 😉 Not that that is _necessarily_ lacking here, mind, or at least part of missing that here was on me. I did try about 4 play-throughs though, so maybe I just had a few bad starts.
Great artstyle! I love hand drawn graphics like these. The game is pretty fun and I like the fact that you can knock other animals with the animal you are holding. Or intervene when some animal is sliding down. Only one complain - when you have too many animals, you hear the hit sounds all the time. Can be solved by playing only every [X]th sound. But that’s really nitpicking.
Fun! I got up to 23! I loved the art style and music, they really gave the game a nice aesthetic. I found myself using new pieces balancing the old ones to stay on the pile! I wish the downward force of dropping the pieces was more predictable but I suppose that added to the unstableness of the pile! :)
Pretty fun game, I really like the chill atmosphere it gives off ! Nice idea for the graphics as well, it's not something we see that often, and it looks very cute ! I also need to thank you because thanks to you I discovered AIVA, which will tremendously help me in future jams ! Great work !
Ok, first of all, props for doing the artwork BY HAND! Im really impressed!
The idea fits nicely within the theme of the jam and the mechanics work well. It's kinda tricky to find the balance to stack up the animals, but that is the fun of the game.
The audio, while individually it's ok, in the whole piece seems a bit odd. While the atmospheric soundtrack is great and the chiptune style sfx are also good, they sound a bit weird together.
Your hand drew graphics has a delicate touch. I liked the animations of it. It would have been cool if the trees and the sky also would have had some animation. Tetris with animals, what a game!
As others have said, the colored pencil art is quite fun.
What's interesting is that the small size of the island effectively places an upper bound on the highscore that is achievable. I wonder if the game would be better if it simply centered on achieving some particular score (and then going beyond if you really wish). Then I think, because the difficulty would be less open-ended, it would be a lot more grounded. Right now it feels strange to try to push for a high score because I know that there is probably an upper bound, even if I don't know what it is.
That said, that feeling of detachment that the game has--where there is no benchmark I can meaningfully relate my own scores to--is a fine thing too. And, is perhaps more thematically related to "unstable" than a grounded, specific goal would be.
Comments44
Music is also nice and relaxing :)
It's pretty hard to stack things, couldn't get more than 22 before it all goes to hell :)
After a while the game got stuck at 0 lives without restart button, must be because I was clicking too fast :D
There is definitely a good balance of humour and heartbreak while trying to save all the animals and then everything starts slipping and chaos ensues!
Great job :)
The stacking was kind of frustrating because everything kept falling of the super slippery island (but thats part of the fun i guess).
I really liked the artstyle. Well done.
I like the graphics.
And good physics.
And trickier than I thought (you put the right amount of wobble into the physics to make it challenging).
Nice music.
Made me smile.
P.S.: I could not find the "keyboard" animal in my enzyclopedia. From which continent is it?
I'm sorry to say that I couldn't really get the hang of the rest of the game though. Since the floor is an ellipse or sphere, and the animals are really slidey, there's only one spot where you can realistically drop them. It's not like this gets better when your tower gets higher, since that's very likely, through no fault of your own to collapse as well before you get into any position that you have an actual choice as where to place the next.
Some smaller remarks:
- For the 'animal appearing at the mouse cursor': It's not so bad once you know about it. I'd still have preferred for it not to be 'active' already. (Though I suppose the explosions can be fun when viewed from that angle.)
- The big elephants feel very light for some reason?
- Little bug?: I'm pretty sure I got something like 'final score 15, max score 16' at my first attempt.
(*: A few LD's back a gave procedural music a go as well for a couple of times --Wolfram Tones in my case-- it never felt really satisfying to have made though -- more like curation that creation. Also this party ('Aiva.AI') keeps the copyright if you're not paying them the highest tier? Yikes!)
The floor is indeed an ellipse, but there's still a pretty large area where things don't slide too much, especially if you don't drop them from a big height. See my highscore below. Besides, the theme for this jam is unstable 😉
As you can see, another good tactic seems to be to drop the big elephants directly into the lava until you run low on lives.
As for the animals appearing at the mouse cursor, I don't think that's a huge problem as you quickly learn to anticipate it and even use it to your advantage - use the current animal to steady the crumbling stack or even carefully push an already placed animal to a better spot. Besides, learning how to play better is part of the fun.
Those elephants are indeed too light, I should have set their weight to 4, and the dog's weight to 0.5 and the cats to 0.8. I'm sure I'll include this if I ever decide to expand this game.
The current score shows the number of animals on screen at the moment, while the highscore shows the highest number of animals anytime during the game, so it can be higher than your score at the end. This way you don't get punished for being brave and trying to stack too many animals and causing a collapse.
(As for Aiva, it's fine for little compo games, but I would never use it for a real game. Even my Jam game soundtracks are usually made by my composer friend, who even got a little freaked out about the AI that produced music that seemed to get more praise than his)
> Besides, learning how to play better is part of the fun.
Absolutely! Conversely it's also the job of the designer to make the player feel that there is room to grow 😉 Not that that is _necessarily_ lacking here, mind, or at least part of missing that here was on me. I did try about 4 play-throughs though, so maybe I just had a few bad starts.
Only one complain - when you have too many animals, you hear the hit sounds all the time. Can be solved by playing only every [X]th sound. But that’s really nitpicking.
I also need to thank you because thanks to you I discovered AIVA, which will tremendously help me in future jams !
Great work !
The idea fits nicely within the theme of the jam and the mechanics work well. It's kinda tricky to find the balance to stack up the animals, but that is the fun of the game.
The audio, while individually it's ok, in the whole piece seems a bit odd. While the atmospheric soundtrack is great and the chiptune style sfx are also good, they sound a bit weird together.
Anyway, excellent job!
I liked the music, but it felt a little too "inspirational" for the game's tone.
What's interesting is that the small size of the island effectively places an upper bound on the highscore that is achievable. I wonder if the game would be better if it simply centered on achieving some particular score (and then going beyond if you really wish). Then I think, because the difficulty would be less open-ended, it would be a lot more grounded. Right now it feels strange to try to push for a high score because I know that there is probably an upper bound, even if I don't know what it is.
That said, that feeling of detachment that the game has--where there is no benchmark I can meaningfully relate my own scores to--is a fine thing too. And, is perhaps more thematically related to "unstable" than a grounded, specific goal would be.
I did end up getting a high score of 25.