Very cool atmosphere, really pulled me into the story making me feel like I was there, which is hard for a low resolution game like this. Fun overall, though the music gets a bit annoying.
A big issue is that you can't tell how much time you have left at any time other than when you're traveling. Like how much travel time verses how much time left before you fail. Kinda important for knowing what to spend your time on at any site.
Choose gun and lamp. Always fix the bridge unless you don't have the time.
Bible doesn't seem to do anything. Don't take gamblers bet.
If you find broken door house ignore it unless you got party needs to take care of. If you got lamp and gun you can look in, see the bear and kill it with gun. Though minor stuff can happen this way your party doesn't freeze or whatever since after killing the bear you can eat/rest etc.
Always light a fire before sleeping 6 hours if you got a sleeping bag. Though there are a few times you can get that option even if you didn't select sleeping bag and exhaustion isn't much of a thing to worry about in game
Don't investigate stuff, just bodies, bones and trauma. I don't get the doppleganger event, doesn't seem to do anything.
Eat when your party is starving and rest by the fire when your party is cold. Hot meals also help mood.
If you mind your parties conditions and remember time left from when you were traveling it is easy to to win/stop the outbreak. I only lose party members when they randomly catch and die from dysentery. Not sure what effect being bruised or stress does to you even.
You will always have two members fall in love and there is no reason to say no, it just makes them upset at you, which granted doesn't seem to do anything.
I deliberately tried to keep the game output more narratively focused rather than directly explaining mechanics to the player, relying on "common sense" for decision-making. But I might as well clarify some things here for those like you who are more mechanically-focused.
Negative status effects like bruised, stressed, agitated, etc. do contribute to the overall risk of dying. Some are worse than others, but it's impossible to die exclusively of dysentery (for example). The death message attributes the death to the "worst" affliction available currently, but maintaining general health is important. So waiting to eat/sleep/warm up until you're starving/exhausted/hypothermic makes you vulnerable to dying if you then also get dysentery or a broken leg, which wouldn't happen if you were otherwise healthy.
But you're right that the bible and doppelganger event are mostly just for flavour, and it's not well balanced for variety over multiple playthroughs because I never really expected it to be played more than, like, twice.
Something I really like about this game is how you keep going even if you will run out of time. It feels so helpless in the best way possible. 10/10 good game
This was SUCH a cool *badum tsh* game! It reminded me of Don't Escape due to the time limits and the choices you have to make to survive.
The music was a fantastic selection and melded well with the gameplay and it was super intriguing to go through the world you crafted that was contained within the snowy clutches of this game.
The mysteries were well handles, and the danger and time pressure really felt real and creeping up to you more and more as the game progressed! Loved the art and you just did a fantastic job taking simple mechanics and melding it into one whole great game. Loved it and can't wait to see more if you ever make more games! (Also editing the Restricted Archive and that was amazing as well!!)
Love these types of game, and theres not a lot of them around. Got the good ending on my first try, but also ignored everything that wasnt 100% related to survival. It would be nice to have a restart bottom at the end, or a section that showed the final endings you've got.
Took me a while to get a good ending! I was worried that no one would survive on what became my final win! I love that characters can fall in love, I love the misc places you can visit. So fun! I'd love to see a longer experience with more prompts and art, but as-is, this was a fun and pleasantly paced experience. <3
No one dead, yayy! (Hopefully) Gunner and Leonhard in love and serum delivered! They were all kinda shaken by the end but i had a couple hours to spare!
I did it! I only had two people die of dysentery, which is an Oregon Trail staple! I really think that there is a LOT of potential with this game. There's admittedly not a ton of crazy stuff that happened in my run (which is my personal favorite thing to experience when playing games like this), but the fundamentals are there and they are good.
Great little game. Well done. I barely managed to make it to the end, but it was a fairly harrowing trip.
If I had a suggestion, it would be that it would be nice to have a pixel-art progress map showing the journey in addition to the hours estimate. That would really drive home a sense of how far you've gone and how far you have left to go, building nicely on what you've already got here. I'd especially like to see little icons for things you encounter or accomplish along the way - might be something people would want to screenshot and share.
Anyway, great job. Hope to see more cool games from you in the future!
Fun, but short and a bit unbalanced. Can't imagine the usefulness of taking much other than the gun and the lamp, as they both thoroughly saved my run and I even had an hour to spare, the worst of it being that we were all a little cold from not being able to warm up before the final stretch. I think, in keeping with the inspiration of Oregon Trail, the journey should be made a bit longer overall so that the challenges have time to build upon each other
Fun little game. If it was expanded to be a bit longer & have more of an overarching goal connected by smaller ones around the same size of the current game, I could see it being more popular. (Especially with expanded balance & roguelike elements.)
Hope you decide to continue this project a bit more in the future, just to make it more replayable. I finished my first little 'run' in about 2 minutes, nobody died, nothing eventful really happened (except for me seeing a spooky polar bear in a cabin and deciding to leave), and the ending was quite... anti-climactic.
If by "original game" you mean the version made in 48 hours for Ludum Dare, just download "serum_run_COMPO.exe" from the downloads page. Sorry, I guess the meaning of "compo" is not clear for people not familiar with Ludum Dare.
Publishing on Steam would cost me $100, and so far I have made precisely zero dollars from this game, so there is no plan to publish on steam at this point.
I'd like to clarify that the party members are supposed to be human and are separate from the dogs. No dogs are harmed in this game! I thought the new graphics would make this clearer, but apparently not :(
first of all, how the heck are two of your people in love? second of all, your lucky, i made it out with gunnar dead from a polar bear, leonhard dead of a broken leg, and wild bill dead from dysentery. and jack was hypothermic, stressed, bruised, and guilty.
i got 1 hour left til the pandemic thing at the location, wild bill died bcs he had practically every single disease in the book, i jokingly renamed him to special edd
Beautiful! The artstyle, the music, the gameplay — everything is awesomely composed. The game's vibe kept me focused, and I tried to make every choice as rational as possible. At the end I thought the wild nature of the Arctic was about to capture me and my party forever. Fortunately I've got the good ending on the first try
My jaw dropped when I didn't make it in time. Hardy died in vain. It really makes you think more about your choices. Those "good night sleeps" weren't worth it. I was so close. Yet I pushed myself back. I wonder what could've been. Wonderful game, I would play again but I'm trying to end this night in good spirits. Keep making stuff!
Lo siento, no hablo español y no planeo traducir el juego. El código está disponible en github, y estoy abierto a que otras personas lo traduzcan si lo desean.
I was thinking this was a lil too easy but as the game went on it got worse and worse and then I barely ran out of time... Which means this was really well balanced! I loved how tense it was and how it really felt like every choice mattered. You did a great job with the art and the text, it set the scene so well!
I loved seeing the aurora borealis, and then whatever that red sky was! And I'm still so curious about what some of the events were, but my people sure didn't enjoy seeing them as there was so much awfulness out there that they kept freaking out 🤣
All of that to say that I loved this, and it's one of my fav LD53 entries! Well done! 🧡
Did my comment on Ludum Dare already, but for an itch-specific one: you enabled fullscreen in the embedded web version, which allows me to see more status lines (so I can see the full inventory), but otherwise the rest if the game doesn’t seem to support it: the viewport and font is not scaled so we can see a lot of empty space on the left and right, and even some void since the looping background is not made to cover such a big screen (maybe 1080p but not 1440p). So it may be better to disable? That said, if it doesn’t look too bad at 1080p then you can keep it for such users. Would be nice to have a way to go “partial fullscreen” where you scale the game to a certain limit and fill the rest with black bars, but I don’t think Godot has this out of the box.
At this point I'm thinking the post-jam version will just have a fixed aspect ratio, and I'll post a dynamically scaling version somewhere else for mobile purposes (if I get around to it). The only reason I didn't have a fixed aspect ratio from the beginning was because I was hoping to support mobile, but it currently doesn't work on iPhone anyways so that was kinda a bad decision.
OK, I think you mean window size rather than aspect ratio? (which is also good to support, but the relatively small world + small text issue appears when stretching window, even at same aspect ratio). So supporting different sizes should be worth for Android anyway. In this case it’s more important to have bigger text (which also acts as button), this was my main issue when playing text adventure / visual novels on Android. I know you can play with stretching modes in Godot to decide whether to scale text or not with world, so you could try that; or just manually set the size when using a dynamic font.
I meant aspect ratio, in the sense that the reason why I couldn't get good scaling behaviour in the first place is because none of the scaling options in Godot seemed to work satisfactorily when stretching the window into both a widescreen-y shape and a more mobile-y portrait shape. But deciding not to try so hard to support mobile, and instead having a fixed aspect ratio, would free me up to use more sensible scaling options.
Might need to make a separate export for mobile with different settings. I dunno, I'm bad at dynamic UI layout.
I also noticed the Ludum Dare link (the one in the top-right under Rate this game, and the temporary big one at the top that shows during the event) are not active, you have to open More info to see them. Is some meta info missing?
EDIT: wait, it’s the same for my game. Did itch remove the links too early? There are still 2 days to rate. And normally the top-right link to jam should stay forever…
EDIT 2: oops, I forgot Ludum Dare is not a jam hosted by itch.io so there has never been any top-right link. That said, the top banner should probably still stay until the end of event…
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Very cool atmosphere, really pulled me into the story making me feel like I was there, which is hard for a low resolution game like this. Fun overall, though the music gets a bit annoying.
"hailstones as big as large hailstones" XD
neat game, good flavor, you did a good job making it feel harrowing.
what does the choice between the two npc`s do, is there an evil npc or is it just for fun, i played a couple of times but i dont seem to get an event.
A fair amount just doesn't seem to do anything.
A big issue is that you can't tell how much time you have left at any time other than when you're traveling. Like how much travel time verses how much time left before you fail. Kinda important for knowing what to spend your time on at any site.
Choose gun and lamp.
Always fix the bridge unless you don't have the time.
Bible doesn't seem to do anything. Don't take gamblers bet.
If you find broken door house ignore it unless you got party needs to take care of. If you got lamp and gun you can look in, see the bear and kill it with gun. Though minor stuff can happen this way your party doesn't freeze or whatever since after killing the bear you can eat/rest etc.
Always light a fire before sleeping 6 hours if you got a sleeping bag. Though there are a few times you can get that option even if you didn't select sleeping bag and exhaustion isn't much of a thing to worry about in game
Don't investigate stuff, just bodies, bones and trauma. I don't get the doppleganger event, doesn't seem to do anything.
Eat when your party is starving and rest by the fire when your party is cold. Hot meals also help mood.
If you mind your parties conditions and remember time left from when you were traveling it is easy to to win/stop the outbreak. I only lose party members when they randomly catch and die from dysentery. Not sure what effect being bruised or stress does to you even.
You will always have two members fall in love and there is no reason to say no, it just makes them upset at you, which granted doesn't seem to do anything.
I deliberately tried to keep the game output more narratively focused rather than directly explaining mechanics to the player, relying on "common sense" for decision-making. But I might as well clarify some things here for those like you who are more mechanically-focused.
Negative status effects like bruised, stressed, agitated, etc. do contribute to the overall risk of dying. Some are worse than others, but it's impossible to die exclusively of dysentery (for example). The death message attributes the death to the "worst" affliction available currently, but maintaining general health is important. So waiting to eat/sleep/warm up until you're starving/exhausted/hypothermic makes you vulnerable to dying if you then also get dysentery or a broken leg, which wouldn't happen if you were otherwise healthy.
But you're right that the bible and doppelganger event are mostly just for flavour, and it's not well balanced for variety over multiple playthroughs because I never really expected it to be played more than, like, twice.
I'd put the time remaining in the status tab.
I appreciated the uncertainty, it added a lot to the atmosphere.
Made a video
usually i can't get into text only based games. but this was nice.
Something I really like about this game is how you keep going even if you will run out of time. It feels so helpless in the best way possible. 10/10 good game
This was pretty fun, thanks for sharing this project. I'll pass it around!
The music was a fantastic selection and melded well with the gameplay and it was super intriguing to go through the world you crafted that was contained within the snowy clutches of this game.
The mysteries were well handles, and the danger and time pressure really felt real and creeping up to you more and more as the game progressed! Loved the art and you just did a fantastic job taking simple mechanics and melding it into one whole great game. Loved it and can't wait to see more if you ever make more games! (Also editing the Restricted Archive and that was amazing as well!!)
Love these types of game, and theres not a lot of them around. Got the good ending on my first try, but also ignored everything that wasnt 100% related to survival. It would be nice to have a restart bottom at the end, or a section that showed the final endings you've got.
Congratulations on your game, it is great!
managed to survive with everyone on my first go. everyone is in some level of feeling like shit though.
Took me a while to get a good ending! I was worried that no one would survive on what became my final win! I love that characters can fall in love, I love the misc places you can visit. So fun! I'd love to see a longer experience with more prompts and art, but as-is, this was a fun and pleasantly paced experience. <3
No one dead, yayy! (Hopefully) Gunner and Leonhard in love and serum delivered! They were all kinda shaken by the end but i had a couple hours to spare!
damn foster is ok but costers dead poster is bruised loster is ???
Does the bible actually do anything?
Not that I know of, just there for flavor.
both the lovers are gone but alas they will be together in the afterlife
very good
Love the way you changed the scene to reflect the weather, kept the experience super immersive. Shout out romance.
I made it there with literally no extra time, two guys in love, one dead, and one just unhappy
I did it! I only had two people die of dysentery, which is an Oregon Trail staple! I really think that there is a LOT of potential with this game. There's admittedly not a ton of crazy stuff that happened in my run (which is my personal favorite thing to experience when playing games like this), but the fundamentals are there and they are good.
Great little game. Well done. I barely managed to make it to the end, but it was a fairly harrowing trip.
If I had a suggestion, it would be that it would be nice to have a pixel-art progress map showing the journey in addition to the hours estimate. That would really drive home a sense of how far you've gone and how far you have left to go, building nicely on what you've already got here. I'd especially like to see little icons for things you encounter or accomplish along the way - might be something people would want to screenshot and share.
Anyway, great job. Hope to see more cool games from you in the future!
Fun, but short and a bit unbalanced. Can't imagine the usefulness of taking much other than the gun and the lamp, as they both thoroughly saved my run and I even had an hour to spare, the worst of it being that we were all a little cold from not being able to warm up before the final stretch. I think, in keeping with the inspiration of Oregon Trail, the journey should be made a bit longer overall so that the challenges have time to build upon each other
I agree and it should have more things to balance to keep in line with the Oregan trail (such as dog's health, not being able to find food, etc.)
Fun little game. If it was expanded to be a bit longer & have more of an overarching goal connected by smaller ones around the same size of the current game, I could see it being more popular. (Especially with expanded balance & roguelike elements.)
Hope you decide to continue this project a bit more in the future, just to make it more replayable. I finished my first little 'run' in about 2 minutes, nobody died, nothing eventful really happened (except for me seeing a spooky polar bear in a cabin and deciding to leave), and the ending was quite... anti-climactic.
This played great on mobile, just a wonderful little game!
How to download original game, link? Also pls put on steam and add gamepad support
If by "original game" you mean the version made in 48 hours for Ludum Dare, just download "serum_run_COMPO.exe" from the downloads page. Sorry, I guess the meaning of "compo" is not clear for people not familiar with Ludum Dare.
Publishing on Steam would cost me $100, and so far I have made precisely zero dollars from this game, so there is no plan to publish on steam at this point.
Barely made it with two of my dogs left… They’ll name their kin after the fallen
I'd like to clarify that the party members are supposed to be human and are separate from the dogs. No dogs are harmed in this game! I thought the new graphics would make this clearer, but apparently not :(
first of all, how the heck are two of your people in love? second of all, your lucky, i made it out with gunnar dead from a polar bear, leonhard dead of a broken leg, and wild bill dead from dysentery. and jack was hypothermic, stressed, bruised, and guilty.
just gotta kno when to give two luvbirds privacy!
i really liked it
Really cool game, at first I didn,t noticce I had to get there on time untill the last few hours lol, but thats on me, goodjob!
Wild Bill contracted dysentery on my literal first turn. The man clearly craves death.
my wild bill got literally everything
i got 1 hour left til the pandemic thing at the location, wild bill died bcs he had practically every single disease in the book, i jokingly renamed him to special edd
i got 3 hours left til pandemic thing at location
And i torchered leonhaurd but all with stress
no ice broke 3/3 stable
Beautiful! The artstyle, the music, the gameplay — everything is awesomely composed. The game's vibe kept me focused, and I tried to make every choice as rational as possible. At the end I thought the wild nature of the Arctic was about to capture me and my party forever. Fortunately I've got the good ending on the first try
My jaw dropped when I didn't make it in time. Hardy died in vain. It really makes you think more about your choices. Those "good night sleeps" weren't worth it. I was so close. Yet I pushed myself back. I wonder what could've been. Wonderful game, I would play again but I'm trying to end this night in good spirits. Keep making stuff!
very cool! the music really added to the tension, enjoyed this a lot
Hay o abra versión en español?
Lo siento, no hablo español y no planeo traducir el juego. El código está disponible en github, y estoy abierto a que otras personas lo traduzcan si lo desean.
a ok XD
I was thinking this was a lil too easy but as the game went on it got worse and worse and then I barely ran out of time... Which means this was really well balanced! I loved how tense it was and how it really felt like every choice mattered. You did a great job with the art and the text, it set the scene so well!
I loved seeing the aurora borealis, and then whatever that red sky was! And I'm still so curious about what some of the events were, but my people sure didn't enjoy seeing them as there was so much awfulness out there that they kept freaking out 🤣
All of that to say that I loved this, and it's one of my fav LD53 entries! Well done! 🧡
- ✨Beth
Did my comment on Ludum Dare already, but for an itch-specific one: you enabled fullscreen in the embedded web version, which allows me to see more status lines (so I can see the full inventory), but otherwise the rest if the game doesn’t seem to support it: the viewport and font is not scaled so we can see a lot of empty space on the left and right, and even some void since the looping background is not made to cover such a big screen (maybe 1080p but not 1440p). So it may be better to disable? That said, if it doesn’t look too bad at 1080p then you can keep it for such users. Would be nice to have a way to go “partial fullscreen” where you scale the game to a certain limit and fill the rest with black bars, but I don’t think Godot has this out of the box.
At this point I'm thinking the post-jam version will just have a fixed aspect ratio, and I'll post a dynamically scaling version somewhere else for mobile purposes (if I get around to it). The only reason I didn't have a fixed aspect ratio from the beginning was because I was hoping to support mobile, but it currently doesn't work on iPhone anyways so that was kinda a bad decision.
OK, I think you mean window size rather than aspect ratio? (which is also good to support, but the relatively small world + small text issue appears when stretching window, even at same aspect ratio). So supporting different sizes should be worth for Android anyway. In this case it’s more important to have bigger text (which also acts as button), this was my main issue when playing text adventure / visual novels on Android. I know you can play with stretching modes in Godot to decide whether to scale text or not with world, so you could try that; or just manually set the size when using a dynamic font.
I meant aspect ratio, in the sense that the reason why I couldn't get good scaling behaviour in the first place is because none of the scaling options in Godot seemed to work satisfactorily when stretching the window into both a widescreen-y shape and a more mobile-y portrait shape. But deciding not to try so hard to support mobile, and instead having a fixed aspect ratio, would free me up to use more sensible scaling options.
Might need to make a separate export for mobile with different settings. I dunno, I'm bad at dynamic UI layout.
I also noticed the Ludum Dare link (the one in the top-right under Rate this game, and the temporary big one at the top that shows during the event) are not active, you have to open More info to see them. Is some meta info missing?
EDIT: wait, it’s the same for my game. Did itch remove the links too early? There are still 2 days to rate. And normally the top-right link to jam should stay forever…
EDIT 2: oops, I forgot Ludum Dare is not a jam hosted by itch.io so there has never been any top-right link. That said, the top banner should probably still stay until the end of event…
Reported: https://itch.io/t/2861327/ludum-dare-banner-disappeared-before-end-of-rating-ludum-dare-53-may-2023