WELL OK THIS WAS OVER SCOPED SO IT'S MISSING A LOT OF STUFF AND POLISH BUT OH WELL it's a learning experience :D

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Can Thumper escape from The Forest?


Thumper is a little friendly bunny. He earned his Training Wings about 3 months ago and was so happy. Unfortunately things have gone down hill since then ... he got addicted to carrots and bouncing (too high). For punishment he was sent to The Forest. Now you can help him escape! (Feedback is appreciated, good or bad!)



GENERAL STUFF

This game is a bullet hell sort of thing but not exactly. It's also got puzzle elements - to win you must destroy the 4 obelisks. These are hidden around the map. Map sections are locked off by gates. These are opened by activating totems. Totems are activated by having enough essence. Essence is farmed from ... things.

Oh and every 'so long' The Forest will chuck some magic at you sending you back in time and somewhere else. Sounds fun ey? There is a plus side to the looping - it replenishes your ammo - because you've gone back in time, handy!

Things that might be of interest (spoilers sort of): As you destroy obelisks The Forests power gets weaker giving you more time between ... attacks. The dash gives you 15 frames of invincibility which is quite lenient. Ammo boxes, dead bodies, gates, totems - they're all persistent through all time, it's a weird quirk of The Forest.

Best of luck. Go save Thumper.



CONTROLS

WASD or Arrow keys to move. SHIFT to dash. Left Click to shoot.



Thanks for playing the game! Hopefully you enjoyed it. If you got any bugs or crashes .. sorry, I didn't have any time to actually playtest any of it! So you guys are literally going in blind :D



The art was drawn by Auro (will stick twitter link here)

The background track was made by Mcwequiesk

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  • WangleLine 🌸
    Patron

    The way you handle those monologue progression bars is LOVELY. I'm genuinely baffled I haven't seen this anywhere else in games!

    Also, the lighting in this game is pretty neat, definitely a plus for immersion and art!

    Night Fuss
    Submitted

    Night Fuss

    • havik
      Patron
      havik Developer of Thumper and the Freaky Forest

      4yrs ago

      I am so happy you mentioned those progression bars haha. I was sitting there thinking of a way to display progress during that (since often there is no way to tell how long you have left) and settled on that. I was quite proud of it, glad you appreciated it :D

      Quite happy with the lighting too - only issue really is that sometimes monsters don't actually appear quick enough from the fog so you feel like you're being jumped unfairly lol. The spider was meant to be a hit and run monster anyway so, that just made it worse! (maybe in a good way? If you like jump scares :D)

      Thanks!

  • Mcwequiesk
    Lv. 10

    This is pretty fun actually. I like the spookiness, especially of the monsters, and moving and shooting was fun and smooth. I wish the monsters had some sounds, that would definitely beef up the spookiness even more!

    I do wish that there was some way to heal and get ammo without going back in time, or more pickups around the forest that can help. I like the idea of being sent back in time and looping again, but it (randomly?) happening to the player was frustrating sometimes. Good game, I enjoyed it.

    Lysis
    Submitted

    Lysis

    • havik
      Patron
      havik Developer of Thumper and the Freaky Forest

      4yrs ago

      Thank you! Sound is one of those things we always forget to plan for - and we didn't even have a background track until the last hour of the jam! Got very lucky with someone stepping in and making us one quickly :)

      There are ammo boxes all around the map! We decided to leave health finite to give a fail condition. Originally it was restored on loop but then you could basically survive forever so, had to change that quickly. As such, it wasn't balanced too well since we weren't able to playtest it!

      The looping is on a set timer, starting at (I think) 30 seconds. Each Obelisk you destroy extends that timer by another 50 seconds (weakening The Forests magic). We had thought about adding a visible timer but it felt it removed some of the mystery a bit, so settled on some little tooltip messages hinting at the loop about to happen.

      Thanks again!

  • Kylazaur
    Lv. 5

    Little dungeony type game, I like, randomly warping and reappearing, i don't like. it's a nice little game but it's a little confusing and unclear

    • havik
      Patron
      havik Developer of Thumper and the Freaky Forest

      4yrs ago

      I think we needed to add a bit more instruction really (we had plans for a more indepth intro)! Just to make it clearer on what will happen and how to stop it etc. But we ran out of time so ... learning experience! Glad you liked the dungeony bit though :D

  • Panda-K
    Lv. 17

    I like that the looping takes your essence and makes you have to plan out when to get the shrines, but it didn't do much other than that? (I guess enemies respawn and you get ammo back...)

    I had a fun time with it nonetheless :)

    • havik
      Patron
      havik Developer of Thumper and the Freaky Forest

      4yrs ago

      Looping is just supposed to disorientate you really (and remove essence, replenish ammo). The game is focused on mentally mapping out The Forest and trying to work your way through it - we didn't want to add too much to the loop since it would have made it even harder than it already is!

      We had plans for some land marks around the map and biomes etc to make it easier to map - if we'd had time to add those then we would have fleshed out the loop with more stuff too but, as it was .... ran out of time :P Glad you had fun!

  • Yosi
    Lv. 46

    Very interesting game! I'm a bit confused though; I activated a few of the obelisks but I never got looped back in time? Is there a certain condition before the loop takes place?

    Edit: Yeah, I did get it once I replayed :)

    • havik
      Patron
      havik Developer of Thumper and the Freaky Forest

      4yrs ago

      I'm hoping that it worked ok the second time around? Since yeah, it happens every 25 seconds to begin with! So you can't miss it!