Munin the raven, faithful messenger to Odin, now stands stripped of wings and transformed by Loki into a mortal girl. Flightless and determined, she will stride through the nine worlds of Yggdrasil to reclaim the lost feathers and return to Asgard. Munin bolsters the traditional side-scrolling experience with the use of rotating environments to surpass obstacles and to solve puzzles. By twisting portions of the environment, players will create bridges from pillars, turn walls into floors or open new passages.
Further gameplay elements, like switches, moving environment or items influence by physics add even more depth to the puzzles: by rotating the game’s world, boulders and debris will rumble, roll and fall. Liquids like water or lava will flow accordingly and Norse runes will show the way to the raven’s lost feathers. Munin features nine amazing worlds, 77 exciting levels and roughly 7 hours of enjoyable playtime. I really like the art style of the game, I feel like some of the edges are a bit too rough and don't have a 'Antialiasing' look to them rather jagged. But other than that there are excellent designs and color palettes being used. I think that all of the screenshots of the game could be mistaken for a painting, which is a great thing! Congrats of release and getting a review on Polygon, I myself have recently been working on getting on review sites, any tips that you can offer for other developers?
Thank you for the very kind words. In what regards to getting the attention of the press (and believe me, I'm no real rocket scientist in such subject) I believe it makes a huge difference to have someone who already has a name out there that can grab their attention simply by being who they are (specially when you're an unknown studio like us!) In our case, having Daedalic Entertainment attached to us, helped us reach some places that I'm pretty sure it would be harder to get to on our own. In either case, you should start small and from the ground up, meaning that you target smaller reviewers and try to work your way up the known review sites. Having a great and engaging press release helps too. But then again, this isn't a clear cut deal, sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't.
There's some things you can do to increase that luck (such as trying to have ) but ultimately you'll still be in fate's hands. The important thing is to keep fighting and don't let up.
In our case, we've been seriously hurt by our release date on the day of Sony's press conference at E3 (ouch!) so the first month of sales was a ghost town and we quickly became buried in the Steam Store. After the reviews popped up (about two weeks after release) we saw some increase in traffic and it's been slowly picking up the pace but there's still some hard work ahead for us in order to simply get acknowledged as something that exists, haha. Good luck on your efforts!
Do you have a page for your game? Thanks for the insight. I do have a page for my game Glitch in the System and am working on putting it on IndieDB among other places. I agree that it is a hard thing to do, there is a reason why this can be a full time job in its own right and it really helps you appreciate those that do it so much more. But that's why I think communities like this is a great way to spread the news and connect with other developers. In regards to creating a IndieDB page, do you think that it was worth it creating one?
I think that there are some great opportunities there for people to see your games. What are your thoughts?
Sorry for hijacking your thread a bit, I am just curious about other developers opinions on this subject. Related to your actual game. I would love to buy the game and tell you what I think, but I noticed that there is a Steam version and a Windows Store version that is cheaper (I own a Surface Pro 2). Just wondering if there is a difference between the two versions, like if one has lower quality graphics. Also does it have touch support?
I sometimes find myself without a controller but still want to do some gaming. I might just get the Steam version so I can expand my game library some more though, but I digress. Feel free to ask me anything! This is a community for devs, I'm happy to answer anything I can IndieDB is a great way to showcase your game but you need to be careful with how early you show it because it might drive some potential fans away if they see some rough work. It also operates in a 'recent news give you visibility on the front page' system so it encourages some frequent updates to stay visible tho it might lead to some people being a bit spammy in order to stay on the front page. The tablet version has touch support and has some visual features stripped down (mainly the ones that make it painterly and pretty) in order to improve performance.
We have some segments of the game with fluid simulation and it tended to choke the game up with the higher particle count we use for PC/Mac so that also got reduced a bit for tablets. In general, it's the same game, it's just stripped down of some of the more visual features in the mobile version. I'd personally recommend the Steam version since it's the best (prettiest) version (recently got updated too) and also has Achievements, Trading Cards and all those cool features you'd expect from a Steam game.
I totally forgot to mention this - Our Steam version has a Free Demo for you guys to try out! I finally got a chance to play the game, though I didn't get to finish the game only got through the first two areas. I kinda have some mixed feelings towards the game to be honest. I first must say that the art style of the game is beautiful; I can't stress that enough. It really does look amazing. The presentation of the game is very slick and professional, it is really impressive that you were able to present everything at the same caliber of the art (I really loved how all of the menus transitioned and were crafted). I also really like the concept of the game and I think it can lead to some very interesting puzzles.
In fact some of the puzzles that I played did have some elements of these interesting ideas and clever ways of approaching the game. But that leads me to some of the bigger issues of the game, the biggest being the puzzle design. While there can be some cool ideas presented, the majority of the puzzles seem like they are tedious. What I mean by that is there are instances where you need to get to a certain area in the level and to do so you need to rotate pieces 3 or 4 times to get there, that is fine. But then there is another feather in that same area you just reached but you just need to rotate that piece in a different orientation to get it, so you have to do the same thing you did from before but this time do those last rotations.
This feels really tedious and like the design is fighting against the player having fun figuring out a challenging puzzle as it is as simple as rotating the last piece a bit. (I wish I knew which levels in particular that I am thinking about but I will look again later today when I get the chance). The other issue that I had with the game is that the controls were a bit unresponsive, this led to one of the most frustrating parts of my experience with the game. There was one puzzle in particular that I was struggling with that I shouldn't have been (Again, I will go back to check which one in particular). I figured out what the solution was after looking at the level for a bit, the problem was that I had to execute that action.
I felt that the controls were a little bit off to where I died, had to redo something, or miss-stepped somewhere all too often. This along with the design of the puzzle that had that same design issue I was stuck on this one puzzle for 45mins to an hour; the irritating thing was that I knew the solution. So like I said, I have mixed feeling with the game.
I like the concept and the art is gorgeous, but the puzzle design and the controls were really frustrating. I might be totally off-base with this as I really only had a chance to do the first two areas, but that is what I think.
Sorry for coming down a bit harsh on the game, I just really that this concept is an interesting one and the game has a lot of promise. I will go and figure out the names of the levels I am talking about to help you get a better idea of what I am talking about. Thank you for the honest post, it's stuff like this that I was hoping to hear from fellow devs. I'm aware that the game can get a bit frustrating due to the harsh penalty you get from dying, our level designer even went wilder with the latter puzzles so it's definately a very though challenge for puzzle lovers.
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What worlds did you try? The puzzles tend to get more elaborate and creative as we introduce new mechanics to go with the main rotation theme. I keep hearing about the controls problem but it always looked and felt fine in my and my fellow dev's machines during development.
We recently put out a patch on Steam that improved it a bit but it seems there's still some issues. I feel that the controls end up being the main problem here since this higher difficulty could be highly rewarding if you didn't felt 'cheated' out of a win when the controls fail you. The game isn't designed to have high reflex requirements, generally you can go through most puzzles without precise jumping but yeah, it gets annoying when you miss that last feather or mistime a jump after a while. As such, we want to improve the controls as much as we can. Would you be so kind to answer a couple of questions for me? I'll also take the time to invite any other readers of this thread to try the game and give their thoughts. Would you describe the controls as having a 'latency' issue?
IE you press a key and the girl doesn't respond immediately, causing some mistimed jumps and deaths? Or is it the general lack of speed?. How's the framerate?. Do you play with VSync on or off?. Do you use a Controller or Keyboard and Mouse? PS: Thanks for the feedback on the Art, it's my area and I tried to push the painterly look as best as I could within the constraints and needs of the 2D game. It obviously could be even better but for our first game I feel proud of the results.
Yeah, it can feel like a pretty harsh penalty when you are just about to complete the level. I only got a chance to do Midgardr and Jotunheimr.
I sadly can't go back to check which levels specifically I mention earlier. I think I have some sort of an idea on why the controls seem a bit imprecise, it may have to do with the fact that there is a tad bit of momentum build up that is a bit too slow. I say this because it looks like I am having an issue with the 'floaty' nature of the game. I don't think that 'floaty' gameplay is inherently bad (I am an avid LittleBigPlanet creator!) but for some reason it just seems to be a bit off here, not entirely sure why. To answer your questions:. As I stated above, it is 'floaty' so it does come down to a latency issue.
A lack of speed would accurately describe the controls. The frame rate is consistent at 30fps, 1920 x 1080 resolution fullscreen. VSync is on. I used a controller for my first run through (Logitech Wireless Gamepad F710), I tried using the keyboard as well and it still seems to have that same latency issue. I hope that helps you guys out in finding the issue (if there is any, it may just be me). Oh and I completely forgot to mention the music in the game is top notch, very moody and mysterious; nicely done.
And you should be proud of the game as a whole. This is an impressive piece of work, it may have its problems, but all games do (I can attest to that).