Day of the Hamster
Day of the Hamster is a sidequel to Day of the Sandwich. This game was made live on twitch over the course of a couple of months.
Day of the Hamster is a tiny point and click adventure game about escaping from a locked basement vault.
| About Day of the Hamster |
Lucas is just about ready to embark on an epic adventure with his friends. Unfortunately fate has other plans. Trusty sidekick Cryo the Hamster is being attacked by a murderous cat. Due to a terrible mishap, Lucas is locked in the basement before he can react. Help Lucas find a way to solve the many issues and finally exit the vault in Day of the Hamster. A game by @FractalMindMike Classic pixel art graphics and real Roland MT-32 music recordings are used to lend an authentic retro vibe to the game. Stay tuned for the next exciting entry in this mini adventure series! |
Day of the Hamster is heavily inspired by the visuals of Lucas Arts classics like Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max: Hit the Road. The making of the game was recorded in almost all it's detail as the process was live streamed. With 40+ episodes filled with of hours of game development content. From technical decision making and programming to full art processes and production pipelines. The entire process of "how to make a game" is covered right up until the publication here on Itch.
All these hours of content will be freely available on Twitch and YouTube and the game is provided free. If you feel that these many hours of resources and this little game are worthwhile, I'd love it if you'd consider donating for this project.
YouTube playlist coming soon!
Twitch: twitch.tv/fractalminddev VODs
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I would like to thank all the people who joined me along the journey of creation of Day of the Hamster on my dev channel! I truly can't thank you enough for all the support and motivation in my continued pursuit creating these games.
Of course I have to thank the Lucas Arts creators of DotT and Sam & Max: Hit the Road for all the inspiration and excellent games.
Huge thank you to PaiLorZan for the unending and hugely impactful help with maintaining the vod archive and being there to talk to when I needed it.
oldskooljay (porta2note) thank you so much for stepping in and creating such a wonderful sound track for this little game.
Huge thanks also goes out to those who helped with testing the game.
- refractionpcsx2
- toni68k
- Disthron
- AdrianBauer
- stalk4wooder
Thanks to toni68k for making the Mac build available.
Of course, thanks to my kids and wife who have been surprisingly encouraging with these projects.
Finally thanks to the AGS community and devs for the obvious support of AGS.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Day of the Hamster Launch Party24 days ago
Comments
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Firstly, this is my review posted on the AGS Games page:
"This is one of the best short games made with AGS that I've ever played. Everything is at least good - the graphics and music are very nice, the humour often hits the mark, but the real joy is in the puzzles - they are absolutely excellent. I especially loved the hamster maze puzzle, that was really clever.
Thoroughly recommended - even more so if you liked Maniac Mansion / DotT".
Congratulations on a superb game that shows amazing development of your skills since Day of the Sandwich (which I also enjoyed).
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Just a couple of little bugs - in the lab (right-most room) the walkable areas need trimming, as you can walk partway up the walls.
Also a couple of the hints don't trigger properly (or the issue may be the code that decides when to display the tick) - from memory I think "fill bucket with water" and "power on computer" were affected by this.
On a personal level, I found having to keep reselecting the inventory slightly annoying, but that maybe just me :-)
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Just want to end this comment by saying a massive WELL DONE - you've created a really memorable game here.
Wow, thanks for the glowing review and thoughtful comments!
I'm really happy with the improvements over the Sandwich game - that was my first time using AGS, and had a very tight (self imposed) deadline. So going into this game I really did want to focus on improvements across the board.
The bugs you mentioned - I'll look into trimming the walkable areas in the lab. The journal check-marking system is definitely not triggering for the bucket, I think the powering one was working, but I'll check if I missed a trigger.
I'll patch those soon.
I understand the frustrations with the inventory. I was trying to find a balance of usability with it. I really don't like the "move the mouse to the top, auto opening" inventory style. So I wanted an intentional click, but I wanted to maintain the "it goes away when you move your mouse away" because it's pretty typical to select an item and then want to interact with the world. But yeah - I think I could adapt it so that it only goes away in specific situations that make sense. For example, only auto-closing when there is an inventory item selected and the mouse moves away. I also thought it'd be a good idea to leave it open during the blueprint sections... I really should have done that. Maybe I'll patch it in, if I can find the time to look into it as well.
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For each game I set some goals to focus on. The first was "learning AGS, and developing a production pipeline."
The Hamster game was a broad set of goals, but focused on "improving art, dialog and actual puzzle designs" to boil it down to a single sentence.
For the current game, I'm focusing on character interactions, animations and dialog sequences as well as maintaining interesting puzzle mechanics. But I'm not aiming to include such diversity in the mechanics (more traditional inventory and dialog based puzzles for the most part).
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Once I've completed the current game, I think I'll be able to focus on a larger project, having gathered all the tools necessary to produce a fleshed out well rounded adventure game that presents fun and challenge with humour.
Well - I guess that remains to be seen, but I'm pretty excited about moving onto the bigger project - the goal is to meet the scale of games like Sam & Max Hit the Road, DotT, Thimbleweed park, and that kind of thing.
Thanks again for the wonderful notes and feedback. I'm really glad to hear you liked the game. I'm excited for the future :D
silly
Thanks! I hope u liked it :D I worked really hard on it and it's nice to see people appreciate it <3
Absolutely love this game. The puzzles are creative and engaging, and really made me think. The whole game kept me on my toes. Just as I'd solve one problem another popped up. I appreciated the checklist that showed me what I still needed to solve, and the hints. I'm looking forward to the next installment.
Thanks! What a nice review. Heheh
I liked it. Things to consider: inventory arrows are difficult to use in top right corner in the browser version, since the storage options and the itch.io options tend to be in the way.
Thanks! Yeah I realised yesterday that the solution would be to simply make the inventory a few pixels less wide. I'll put that change in for the web version as soon as I can find time today.
I'm glad to hear you liked the game 😁
Thanks for playing and commenting.
I am done with the game! I do like the reference to Delphine from The Day of the Sandwich. I will definitely recommend this game to my friends. I do encourage you the make more games like this.
Bro where is the handle-like thing in this game for the metal detector?
There are four items that can work. The real handle is missing and you need to substitute another item.
Hope that helps. Think of things with long handles.
What are some things? for handles?
Well, you can use a mop, a hockey stick, a shovel, or even a broom.
Thanks for the help! Also, I'm a big fan of your games.
btw how to combine all the objects to make the metal detector?
I'm really glad you're enjoying the games :D
the hamster part is so hard i gave up and i will do it tomorrow T-T
If you have not gone into the bio lab yet, focus on getting in there before completing the maze, as it needs some extra stuff before you solve it.
This was another wonderful quick adventure game! I was kinda kidding about some of my random ideas as I pointed and clicked around and felt incredibly smart when my half brained ideas actually worked! Can't wait to see how the next one turns out :)
I really liked the Hamster puzzle. Reminded me of the Professor layton hamster puzzle but more advanced. Overall really great!
Minor issue, the scroll arrows for the inventory overlap the gear button making it difficult to click the right button.
Hey thanks for the excellent feedback! I don't remember the Prof Layton hamster puzzle - I'll have to go take a look at it. My goal with that puzzle was to see if I could make maze solving and movement programming a little more palatable. Glad to hear that you enjoyed it :D
Yeah, the web layout has been a bit frustrating to solve - the scroll buttons was the least evil position to obscure I could figure out. But I'll keep looking into it. I have a few patches I want to make, so I'll be looking at that gear icon again as well.
Thanks so much for playing :D I'm excited to begin working on the next one.
Just played through it - good fun, puzzles a bit more involved, loved the easter eggs - especially when using different frequencies on the wall.
Only possible bug, I seemed to collect one of the zinc bars when on the concrete near the door instead of on the field.
I'm glad you enjoyed it and that you took the time to look through the different walls :D I wanted to do more there, but kind of ran out of time. The zinc bars being out of bounds is baffling. I need to re-examine that part. I've seen it happen a lot.
I'm happy you played it and enjoyed it, though! Thanks for the feedback <3
Loved it! Played completely blind, there's so much packed into these few locations. Excellent extra mechanics to break out the usual point and clicking. Fantastic job, congrats!
Awww thanks! So glad you enjoyed it!
It was a lot of fun putting it all together.
Congrats Mike! I just finished DOTH and it's great. I wasn't able to follow along with much of the dev streams for this one but can see all the effort you put into it improving on from DOTS. Those blueprints giving me major FotAQ. I did come across 2 non game-breaking bugs: the checklist item for the bucket not being ticked, and the closest raisin causing Cryo to stop during a carrot command, but they don't stop after collecting the carrot during a carrot command. Can't wait for Dot<R>!
hey! The rasin will stop Cryo :) the carrot goes until a wall or a new command!
great game, congrats! my only criticism is move the settings wheel somewhere else. it interferes with navigation quite often
Yeah, quite frustrating where it was! I've moved it to a new location. Thanks for the feedback! <3
Thanks Scloh1! I really appreciate the feedback. I'll need to have a look at the bucket checkmark - that was surprising t see (I thought I took care of all those issues haha). The hamster is following the instructions it gets. I had planned to make the maze a few degrees more difficult with more "interrupting" food items on the paths, but I decided to keep it simple with only the ones you see. When it runs over the raisin, that will stop the carrot instruction and execute the raisin instruction.
Congrats, Mike! Nice one!
Thanks Presto <3 I really appreciate it. :D
Awesome to see another legendary FMM adventure! You got a lot of great talent that shows in these games, the effort you put in these games is astonishing, and I hope all your hard work pays off when you get to the main game eventually. Congrats again!
Thank you Toni! You've been such an awesome person with helping out and talking with along the way!
i was searching for a multiplayer game to play and i didn't see the single-player tag, is it possible ? . if not its okay, we can switch turns. thx
Oh no I can only fit 10 tags on the game. It's technically single player, but if you have friends sitting with you, you can try and solve puzzles together :D
Congratulations on the launch! You've put a whole lot of effort in to this and it paid off, great game, great fun!
Thank you ref! You're a legend - thanks for all your help and support <3
Congrats on the launch, Mike
You legend! Thanks Roo! <3 I really appreciate all the support. Hope you enjoy the game :D