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Chicken Chomp's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Does the game have only 16 colours or less? | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Fun-ness! | #2 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| Overall | #2 | 4.300 | 4.300 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Fun, simple, retro...oh and it is challenging.
Does it really works ?? I'm on AZERTY keyboard, normally the Z key is the W key on my keyboard, but does not seem to work. Is there any animation when the Z key is pressed ?
I'm sorry you're having trouble getting it to work! I'm reading that the Z key is mapped to W on your keyboard, as you suggest. There is not really an animation for eating in the game, but you should hear a peck sound effect (if you're on top of a patch of worms), and you'd also see your hunger bar dropping. I hope you were able to figure it out! Thanks for trying!
I'll keep trying to make your game work for me before rating it. Thanks for the answer. OK i found it, for me (with an AZERTY keyboard), the action key is C. Nice concept, maybe the chickens are a bit to fast !
This is actually surprisingly quite a fun! It's really not as simple as it seems and takes a bit of skill to do really well.
The art and sound really could use a bit more polish but I honestly love the gameplay, really, really good for a first game. Great job, keep making more!
Definitely recommend you give it a try if you haven't already.
PS ;)
Woooooooooow, I'm impressed! I've never seen anybody get 10k! I really appreciate the feedback as well - yes, the art and sound aren't very good. Since I did the art for this I've been studying up more on pixel art - watching tutorials, trying to spend more time looking at what other folks are doing, etc. - so I think my next game will have much better art. Hopefully.
Thanks so much for playing!
TL;DR: The menus are slick and well presented, but the game itself isn't fun or pretty to look at.
The good:
-Menus are slick, intuitive, and responsive
-Chicken pixel art looks good
-You can into a game really fast fast
The meh:
-Unclear what the differences between chickens are until you test each one
The bad:
-Movement feels awful because chickens accelerate way too fast
-Since worms aren't autocollected, the optimal strategy is to always be mashing the eat button
-High scores are unreliable because of how random worm placement is.
-The playfield is ugly, and it seems like there's only one a level
-Most of the play area feels like it's wasted space, especially since there are only ever two objects on it.
-Music loop is too short, and gets annoying quickly
How to fix these issues:
It feels like this game has two games it wants to be, but instead of doing one well, it does both badly.
Either:
make movement slower and more precise and slow down the hunger bar
This means that the peck to eat mechanic rewards skillful play more, and makes game mastery satisfying. Have new levels at the edge of a new player's average skill level (in the current game, that's between 1500 and 2000). If they don't get to see it, tease the level in the game over screen
or
make worms autocollect, and turn the careening chickens into a feature
Add more worms to the play area, so that missing one is less of a big deal. Then, add absurd elements, power-ups, or the like, so that a casual player can get good and have fun as fast as possible
Then
-Make the background more colorful, and change it fairly often
-Make the main music loop longer, and add better audio cues
-Add visual cues for eating a worm
-Spawn multiple worms, some closer to the player and some farther away. The farther ones are worth more points, might grant power ups, etc
Hi chaoticnuketral - Thanks for playing my game and giving your honest and thorough feedback. I appreciate the positive and negative criticism, truly. I absolutely agree that the playfield is ugly and the music is annoyingly repetitive - this being my very first game I wasn't quite sure how to make background tiles and a soundtrack that were interesting in such a short amount of time, and I'm still very early in my pixel art attempts.
I did want to point out, simply to state my intent, that the careening chickens, random worm spawning, and extreme game mechanic simplicity were all totally intentional. It is meant to be a game played in around 60 seconds, with only a direction pad and 1 button. I didn't want to add all kinds of power-ups, etc. as I just wanted people seeing if they could beat their high score. Or, if it's too boring, maybe they're just mildy amused by the theme. Of course this was all simply my intent as the designer, so I absolutely understand that every player will take something different from it. That said, I personally feel there is some real strategy to the game, and while I know I have played it many, many times more than anybody else, I have been able to achieve a high score of 9,600, which I point out solely as an attempt to prove that there is more to it than meets the eye!
Again, I truly appreciate the feedback, and will likely take some of your comments into account when planning a next game. I hope you're having fun testing games out! I hope you'll try my next one, whenever I finish.
It's a really good first game, and I'm exited to see what you do next.
I've actually been playing it a lot too, and I'm starting to see the appeal a little bit more. The movement takes a good amount of getting used to, but I've beaten 2k, so that's pretty cool.
The simple mechanics are great, and the core of the game is excellent, I'd just like to see a little more apple on top if it.
I haven't played with PICO-8 at all, but if you could drop me the source files, I'd love to fork this game. (I also kind of want to beat your high score. I'll let you know if I do :)
Trying games out has been a lot of fun. There's a lot of great PICO-8 games, so thanks for introducing me to the platform.
Hi again! Thanks, again, for the continued feedback. For my next game I'll be thinking "find that apple". :)
As for the source code, it's already available here as a free download - that .p8 file is all you need. You'll end up needing to buy Pico-8 (which is toooooootally worth the money) to really be able to edit sprites and sounds, but you can also just open that .p8 file in your text editor and can edit the Lua script without owning Pico-8. Also, if you buy Pico-8, you can find the game in "splore" mode and do whatever you want with it from there as well. The version playable from the Pico-8 "console" is identical except that it tracks your high score for you. Let me know if you end up messing with it! I'd love to see what you do.
Yeah, you do get a LOT for those $15. Does that mean all PICO-8 games are basically open-source?
I'll definitely buy it ASAP, it seems like a fun and powerful tool.
Yes, all Pico-8 games are open-source. There's also a specific channel you can post your games in for collaboration, so if you need inspiration or are just trying to get started it's a cool place to look. Have fun!
That's amazing, thanks for telling me !!
Hey! I hope all is going well for you. I just wanted to point out that there's a Fantasy Console Game Jam just about to start. I thought maybe you'd be interested in trying your hand at Pico-8, or some other similar platform! I plan on giving it a shot again. Maybe I can make something slightly better this time. :) https://itch.io/jam/fantasy-console-game-jam-2
Oh, thanks for the heads up!