Play game
DNA's itch.io pageLink to gameplay video
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QZcQkhK2p5K0yuyK_ol_IyXLrYTNPvKe/view?usp=sharing
Team
Miro Aurela: Producer, Game Design, Programming
Kim Kayeong: Game Design, Level Design
Hyojoon lee: Programming
Leonidas Karavanas: Sound Design & Music
Steve Grigorow: VFX
Tools and Resources
Unity
Blender
Affinity Designer
LMMS
Vital Synth
Estimated work hours
70
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Comments
I played this yesterday and I have to say that I'm really impressed. The visual style, with the transparent sides on the DNA string when they are rotating, GUI,+ sound / music, the science vibes and how the gameplay feels like you are looking at the DNA string and trying to piece it together. I also like the arcadey feeling with the timer and how the difficulty escalates.Tbh it feels like a natural concept, so it feels like there should be more games like this :)
My main critique of the game is that the 3D on the DNA pieces makes it really hard to see how they would fit together. One fix for this could be to show them in 2D when they are separate, so you clearly can see the length and color of each rNA staple. Like a stretched out version of it. It’s also a little confusing how strings flip when they are combined. One way to fix that would be to have two rows of pieces, top and bottom, and not allow the player to combine pieces on the same row. I think these things would help and let the player focus on recognizing patterns quicker.
One other thing is that the game can give some kind of visual feedback when you lose or win a round. I noticed that there’s sound effects for that, but it’s always good to be extra clear. And it can be a way to add extra juicy effects. Also when the player is wrong, maybe highlight the area that they did wrong, if that is possible.
Other than that I feel like this game has a very solid theme / concept and it feels like it has a lot of potential.
I figured my notes from reviewing the games might come in handy, so here's what I wrote about your game as I was playing:
Excellent work on sound, music and graphics. UI Feels nice and tight. The one drawback is that it's so hard! I feel more like I’m working rather than playing a game.
Thanks for the feedback! It is certainly useful. Sad to hear that the game was not fun to play but I do agree with you that it can be quite difficult. For now I don't have any ideas on how to make it easier without removing some core parts. Do you think you would enjoy the game more if it had more or unlimited amount of time? Or does the difficulty come more from the fact that it requires concentration and perception to play?
For me, I think the puzzles had a bit too many parts early on. There's the assembly of parts, the time limit and visually parsing the DNA "lines", it all became a bit overwhelming. It's possible a bit more time to get acquainted with each thing might help? I'm not at all sure what the fix is (if anything!), you'll know that much better than me!
Maybe there could be a tutorial without a timer to help onboarding. And the difficulty level could also rise a bit slower maybe. But the main difficulty probably comes from understanding the 3D shape of the DNA which can be really difficult on it's own. Also, I don't think that could be very easily removed without completely changing the game to something else.
Well, in any case, I won't probably be editing the game a lot afterwards. It was nice project but luckily only for the jam. As the difficulty is now this probably would not success very well as a real game even with all the possible bug fixes and polishing. But I'm happy with it being this kind of mini game. Not every game needs to be perfect.
Thanks again for your comments and feedback! It is always interesting to hear how others perceive games that I have been part of creating.
Nice job guys! Great artwork and animation, the music fit the vibe well, and a creative and on-point interpretation of the theme. It was also designed nicely so that there were no apparent cheap ways around the task. I played it a bunch and made it as far as 5 groupings, which was my ceiling. It felt quite hard at first but I developed a strategy for making it further along, which is good.
One of the challenges of the game as you make it into later rounds was the limited "workbench" space on the bottom. The ability to clasp the strands together was visually nice, but I personally didn't end up using that as a way to solve it, and the clasping ended up only happening by accident when I was trying to space the strands out. The ability to "gray out" the strands or drop them into an "outbox" might be something you consider in further development?
Great work!!
Thanks for trying the game and for the feedback! It's good to hear that the game was interesting enough to try some times to learn. And congratulation on getting so far! I also think it is starting to be quite difficult at that point.
In the second paragraph you have some very interesting points . We didn't think about the player wanting to "discard" DNA strands. We should have just playtested the game early but I was thinking it to be unplayable without some features that I now hear that you for example did not use at all. The more projects I have done the more I've started to realize why everyone is constantly talking about playtesting and prototyping.