A downloadable game for Windows and Linux

Mort's been playing in the forest all day and lost track of time. Help him get home before nightfall! Be careful, though. Despite his spooky demeanor, even the most harmless forest critters could be a headache.

Homeward features three levels, a spooky secret, and basic player stat tracking.

Homeward was developed by Pilone Consulting in three days for GBJAM5. While it's 99% feature complete, several assets may receive a bit more polish before the jam is over.

Download

Download
Homeward for Linux 24 MB
Download
Homeward.zip 13 MB

Install instructions

The .x86 file is for Linux, the attached .zip is a ready-to-play Windows version. Like any Unity game, keep the .exe and the _Data folder in the same place when you run it.

Comments

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The background graphics have a wonderful spooky feel to it; I love the details of the trees. I agree with Rey in that the 160 x 144 screen is way too small. Scaling is allowed, so long as the right aspect ratio is retained, if you didn't already know.

The gameplay itself is more on the confusing side for me. There aren't any instructions present, so I'm not sure if I'm missing out on a certain control, but I got partway to a ledge that is slightly higher than my tallest jump, and found myself unable to get on top of it. I notice that I can stick to the sides of ledges, so I'm not sure if there is something present to get on top of there that I'm not aware of, or if it is a bug. For clarification, I've got a screenshot here.

Critters causing a headache is right! The music gives off a great spooky atmosphere, but the sound effects of the jumping enemies get annoying pretty fast. They're a bit on the loud side.

I did enjoy the narration over the game as the player progresses, however. It adds an engaging element to what is mostly linear gameplay (as far as I've gotten, anyhow).

So if there's anything that needs the most polish, it's: adding clarification on how to play the game, ie. the controls (which could just as easily be put in the game's description page here), and scaling the game to a bigger, more visible size. And if the controls are just limited to the WASD keys, perhaps you'd want to look into the ledge that I took a screenshot of, as I can't figure out how to get up there at the moment.

Just a warning: I've downloaded it for windows and it doesn't run. You might want to look into it. Error code:

"Unable to load mono library from "C:/Users/user/Desktop/gbjam5/homeward/Homeward_Data/Mono/mono.dll" (error = 126)."

(1 edit)

Thanks for the heads up! Not sure what happened in our build. Removing the Windows option for the time being until we can sort that out.


Edit: New Windows build is uploaded and tested, should be all good now!