Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
A jam submission

Billy Pancakes - and his quest for affordable eye surgeryView game page

Poor Billy Pancakes lost his eye sight during a tragic scrapbooking accident. Help him on his quest for surgery.
Submitted by bastisbastis — 23 hours, 12 minutes before the deadline
Add to collection

Play game

Billy Pancakes - and his quest for affordable eye surgery's itch.io page

Are you part of the Game Dev Field Guide Community?
Yes I am!

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

Comments

(1 edit) (+1)

Wow. Amazing job with this. I think this is my favorite game jam game I've played. Bunch of thoughts:

What I Liked:

Very impressive all you were able to build given the short amount of time.

The main menu was great - the background both provides something visually interesting AND serves as a tutorial.

The music was solid and sound effects effectively juiced the right points. Other little bits of juice that I noticed and thought were effective was having the item icons shake in the top left when introducing new types.

I think the tutorial was really well done. Demo'ing the placement of items with just a bit of overlaying text (that you don't even really need) and then immediately putting the player in a situation to try it out. Also, introducing each new item with a fitting level was done very well.

Overall, I thought the level design was great. Admittedly, I haven't gotten through the whole game (yet) but I think there was a nice challenge curve.

I also think in general, the concept is very clever. At the surface, it seems very simplistic, but as I went through the levels, I started to realize the possibilities, choices the players can make, and interesting situations you can create (and could easily expand on with more items).

But I think my favorite part of the game is the humor - found myself actually laughing out loud from the commentary.

Critical Feedback:

The game might possibly too challenging. I would be interested to hear how others feel, but I got kinda stuck around level 5 or so (not quite certain which level).

I'm wondering if having Easy, Medium, Hard modes that simply adjust Billy's speed might be a nice way to address this? Then you can cater to a variety of audiences easily.

Also, a level selector would be nice. I know you might not want to open up later levels until the player beats them for the challenge, but I don't want to have to beat all the early levels again to get back to where I was stuck haha. Maybe having  "level passwords" for each level that you get after beating it would be a way to get around this? (I'm imagining how old games used to do this, like Megaman X https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Mega_Man_X/Passwords)

Nit: I tried pressing the icon in the top left at first to place the springs (because it looked like that was how you did it from the tutorial and I wasn't super clear from the text). Didn't take long to figure out, but I think just making the text say "Tap WHERE you want to place an item..." (and really cool to show a tap, with a little bubble icon or something)

Questions:

Ahhh a Phaser developer! I used it too a few years ago (I think it was Phaser 2 then), how do you like it?

game is made entirely on a phone

^ So you actually wrote the code, GarageBand, and Assembly using your phone?


Really enjoyed playing this game and I feel like I learned some game development tips by just playing it. Well done!

Developer(+1)

Thank you so much for the kind words!

I like the concept of having a demo a a title screen background, and in this case all I had to do was build a suitable level and launch the game scene.


I spent quite some time on the juicing and really enjoyed it. I learnt alot about juicing from listening to the podcast and it was my First project really focusing on that part.

The level design really took some thought, and I find it difficult to balance the difficulty but I did suspect that it would be a bit too hard. I run through the game in like 3 mins, but I know the levels quite well. I think I know which level You're talking about. I struggled coming up with a design that required using both the red and the blue jumpers but still gave the players a chance to react.


In hindsight I think You're right, two of the levels are probably too difficult for a game jam game. 

The coded for levels is a good idea. Even though it brings nostalgic memories I think I would prefer to save the progress in the browser localStorage for a level selection feature.


I like Phaser, and I learnt alot about programming concepts from using it.

Yeah, all the coding and resources are made on a phone. I do not recommend using a phone as your main tool to anyone, but it is doable.

I must admit though that I did do a couple of short play testing sessions on a computer though to see how it worked there.


Again: thank you for your comments and for playing Billy Pancakes!

Getting level difficulty right is probably the hardest thing in a game jam - I think that's really what the players of the game jam are for haha (to give feedback and help you tweak the difficulty)

Haha yeah I imagine doing it all on your phone would be challenging. But a cool experiment!

You're very welcome and looking forward to playing more of your games!