Forums » Games » Nirvana - Access Denied (GGJ2012 entry)

Just thought I'd share this thing a couple of friends of mine and I cooked up during Global Game Jam 2012 with Impact. There are some bugs, and the game didn't turn out to be "fun" but we think it did become pretty funny.

The game's premise is that you are a poor guy trying to kill himself, but Death keeps sending you back to the land of the living. Enjoy!

http://www.krisjet.com/Nirvana/

If you like it we would appreciate it if you dropped us a vote here: http://globalgamejam.org/2012/nirvana-access-denied

Internet traffic's a bitch tonight. Accessing your game took forever. How large are your media assets?

Anyway, the game itself kept me going for about 4 minutes, or about 6 deaths worth. I wouldn't have lasted as long had it not been for a few (well placed?) cognitive dissonance traps: just when I thought water (and sharks and lack of oxygen) killed, I suddenly found myself able to stay in it for extended periods. Intrigued I played on. A nice moment when the dead shark is spotted at last.

Eventually though, I got bored. Hinting at further milestones and adding more surprises would have kept me in longer.

Overall not a bad entry actually, IMO.

The mechanics are also interesting though I found myself wishing for ways to grab the side of nearby vertical terrain when in parachute mode.

Hope this helps.
Alex

I quit because I got tired of doing the same part over and over again. Every time I died (basically any time you make some progress) it would send me back to the beginning. When it killed me and gave me a shield and sent me back to the beginning, i just quit.

Interesting premise, interesting game.

Reason for the chunky download seems to be predominantly the music though I'd wager there's a fair number of graphical assets in player costumes (though there are only so many variations to contend with)

The cognitive dissonance comment was interesting; if anything by the time I'd gotten to the water and caught by the shark, I'd already fallen too hard and also managed to get spiked, so the notion of being thwarted from dying at each opportunity didn't actually set in that behaviour in my mind. If anything, it made me more curious to see what other things there were to kill me and what would happen about it.

I agree with the comment about being sent back to the start; while I don't think much different could have been done from a logistical/story perspective, I don't think dropping the player back at the start was necessarily the ideal - what I might have done personally is to reinstate all the entities except the player, and reset the player back at a specific point relative to the hazard - the platform just before the shark, for example, if you get killed by the shark.

Gotta say, after I was rewound to the start each time and had to progress back through the level to see what came next, I did notice some bugs, up to you whether you fix them or not, but the ones I noticed were:

* leaving the water does not always reset the player's state; more than once I had the bubbles around me, even in the air, and no parachute, because it thought I was underwater.

* in the area near the start that you can reach by gliding off the upper platform by the start (where you can first encounter spiked floors), above the water, there's a corner with an overhang - the player can get almost trapped if they end up moving into that corner.

* the shark's behaviour on dying was quite interesting: typically if it killed me, it would retain its x velocity and once it came from underneath me to kill me and ended up flying out of the water in its death throes. Odd, but strangely amusing.


Other thoughts... the intermission intrigued me, I wasn't sure what purpose that was supposed to play in the game, other than to perhaps indicate how long that vertical tunnel is, and I found the ending oddly amusing. There is something poignant about the way that gravestone sits on the end screen.

tl:dr; nice game, some interesting ideas, nice if a little fragile execution in places and I think the mechanic using Death is a good one, but it's perhaps not used the best way it might be.

I really like the idea behind the game. It's one of the more original things I've seen recently. Good work!

I would have to say though, that re-doing the level over and over did get tiresome after a while. Perhaps resurrecting at the point where you died ( or closer to it ) would help? Or checkpoints?

The source code on Gamejam is minified. Can you provide the non-baked version?

17 MB of sound files, that's why it takes forever to load...

I played until the end. Agree that gameplay is ultimately not fun, but it's a fun idea and a great effort. Lots of cool things going on and from what I look at in the unbaked code, it looks really well done.

Thanks for the comments guys!

We have both .ogg and .mp3 versions of all files, and we MIGHT have included more than we ultimately ended up using, sorry about that :P

We were already (painfully) aware of some of the problems you pointed out while we were still developing the game, but seeing as we only had 48 hours we decided to go for tedious respawning and rather focus on implementing all the planned deaths and resultant abilities. Early on we wanted the player to gain abilities that helped him progress through the level (iron boots on traps throw you into the air, so you can reach higher places for example), but we ended up with the game you see here.

After some thinking I think we can "fix" the game design by respawning the player where he died and only letting the player retain two abilities at the same time. This could make for a nice puzzle mechanic, where you have to find appropriate places to die to get the right ability at the right time.

As for source code, I think you overestimate us, stahlmanDesign :D We didn't so much "code" as we hacked this game together, and toward the end I was so exhausted I used something like 2-3 hours just implementing the explosion at the end where the screen fades to white and then to black :P

We had a lot of fun playing around with it during the Global Game Jam, and I highly recommend anyone who didn't go to join next year!

I think your ideas about respawning at the point of death are good, where you respawn with the new ability that would prevent the type of death you just faced.

The key to making it a game would be that these abilities would fade after a few minutes, and the point of the game would be to get into a situation where you have all them in a short enough amount of time that Death finally gives in and lets you die.

The quest is to go to areas that allow you to die in different ways so you can gain those preventative abilities. There would increasingly be a race against the clock as your inventory of preventative abilities expires with time.

You'd have to figure out a way to have aquired all the abilities in a quick time frame, thus frustrating death and forcing him to finally give in. But there may be strategies too, such as having to let the parachute expire on purpose at some point to acquire the other abilites, and only THEN can you jump off a cliff.

It would be reverse of most games, where you're trying to die, but death prevents you until you ultimately are so determined that he gives in.

Seems complex and original. Challenging to design to make it fun to play.

i couldn't load the game, getting a lot of .ogg errors. probably your server exceeded its bandwidth quota