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Feed the Machine's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #2605 | 3.257 | 3.257 |
| Enjoyment | #2826 | 2.914 | 2.914 |
| Overall | #3279 | 2.952 | 2.952 |
| Style | #4111 | 2.686 | 2.686 |
Ranked from 70 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
The main gimmick of the game is using drills to scale down other islands to scale up your own.
Development Time
96 hours
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Kenney.nl (gun model, some sounds)
Sonity (Sound manager)
Pixel Crushers (Dialogue System)
Unity (First Person Controller)
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Comments
I really liked speeding around with the glider - pretty unique and not something I've seen in a first-person game before. I like how it was kind of like tower defense with interesting movement! Really nice!
I cant play it cuz of the mouse
You can double tap tab to pause and unpause, fixing that; if you'd like to give it another shot.
Ohhhhh! Yes i would like to give it another shot
My island collapse but it was pretty fun! Only issue is that pretty much every drill had a enemy stuck inside it eventually and I couldn't shoot them in that state.
Thanks for playing, we didn't have enough time to fix that bug. Turrets can still shoot them when they're in the drills, though.
I enjoyed this game! Runs well and feels to have a nice level of polish as well! Well done!
I really liked the gliding mechanic, and the game in general was quite fun! The music was pretty nice too! I also like the message, but I doubt anyone wouldn't
Thank you!
This was a fun little game, managed to win by efficiently placing 1 drill + 4 turrets on each island.
CANNOT OVERSTATE how cool the glide mechanic felt to use, that worked super duper well + had just the right amount of inertia and control.
Shooting enemies yourself feels mostly worthless, there's also a bug where enemies will path to the inside of your drill and then can no longer be hit by your shots (as your shots will collide with the drill), for some reason turrets did not have this limitation.
Penalties on shop purchases felt kind of "too directly tied" to the bonuses to the point where they mostly seemed to cancel out and invalidate using the shop at all (aside from when "your health" was the punishment, because using the flight meant you couldn't really be hit at all, and you recover health pretty quickly even without that)
Overall really nice presentation though, and fun writing!
Thank you for your feedback!
Unfortunately the enemies bug was caused by fixing another even worse bug.
We wanted to balance more and create a challenge that would require truly utilizing the games mechanics but felt it would be best to make it easier and more accessible for the jam. We also thought of and experimented with multiple methods for traversing the islands and eventually went with a glider, which was honestly the best of them.
The presentation was meant to reflect the slightly dystopian themes of the game, I'm glad you enjoyed it! And you complimented my writing too, thanks!
Really fun stuff, great work! Love how the islands shrink as your drilling them
cool fps shooter!
very satisfying to play! Would love to see the upgrade system expanded and balanced a bit
Good game, nice music, nice sound designe, the concept is cool!
Literally dope, I love Vampire survivor-like games. Turrets are a bit weak as I can't prevent it from getting destroyed by enemies. There are cases where enemies are trapped behind the turret and my shots deal no damage to it.
Also, remember to hide the cursor lol
thanks! We couldn’t fix the cursor bug in time so you have to pause and in pause with tab to fix it.
I had the hide cursor script enable on Start() but idk why they did not work in the tutorial scene. It was a bug we were not able to fix before submission. After submission I realized that it may have been because of the 3rd party dialogue system we used for the tutorial (I had never used it before).
I generally like these type of management/tower defense games and this is certainly a cool take on it. However I was bombarded with features at first took me too long to realize what I was supposed to do. Because of how fast islands scale down it is better to just glide around the islands than stay in one and guard your drill so the repair feature or shooting is mostly useless. It also felt like I wasn't making any amount of progress. The upgrades negate other effects so much that it always feels like you are in one place and it's not worth upgrading. Whenever I die my progress resets back to 900smth and I just can't get the bar up. I understand that some of the things I mentioned are the way they are because of the tight deadline of a jam but they made the game frustrating to me.
Thank you for your feedback. We had multiple different versions of the game; earlier versions had fewer islands, they would shrink much slower, and/or there would be increasing cost of buying drills and/or turrets, which would incentivize players to spend time at each island and disincentivize hopping from one to another without giving each much thought. Most of the other versions were much more difficult and demanding, and during the last day much of our time was spent balancing, creating a tutorial level and making the game easier and more accessible. We also had a scaling system that we had to remove last minute because of a major bug. The final version of the game does not fully flesh out the mechanics or balance them in the best way but it's much easier for players to grasp and complete and it's less frustrating.
Balancing the game and effectively teaching all the mechanics to players was arguably the biggest challenge of its development.
Yeah I understand. It must have been really hard to balance a game of this scope in such a short amount of time.
Fun gameplay, cool mechanics and systems, lots of good ideas explored. Great work!
Thank you!
fun and quirky
I am dumb was a bit complex for me
Don't think it was intended but if you glide and hold shift you can fly everywhere. It was quite fun but I was pretty confused what I was doing lmao.
There's an issue where the enemies will get too close to the turrets and I can't shoot them. Still, I really like what it's going for.
Thank you for your feedback. There was an AI navigation glitch we had to fix last minute, the side effect being that enemies could get stuck in the drills and could not be shot with the gun; however, the turrets can still shoot them.
It's a fun game, however I noticed that I had more fun when engaging with all the systems (combat, trading, ect.), but did much better when I just ignored all that and dropped drills everywhere before the enemies could react.
There's a lot going on in this game, and while each individual system is pretty fun by itself, I feel like the cohesion between these systems could be improved. Of all the problems to have though, this is arguably a good one.
Thank you for your feedback. We had a scaling system implemented but had to remove it last minute because the values were static and would keep infinitely scaling, not resetting on restart; it was meant to deter the tactic of just dropping drills and force players to engage with the other systems. Balancing this game was a challenge; one of the biggest lessons this team learned for future jams is to narrow the scope of the mechanics and devote more time to balancing and playtesting.
I discovered the turrets and excavator can go below 0 Health when buying the cards and finished the game with +9999% extraction rate, turret rate of fire and damage but they were paper thin and would explode if touched by frogs 11/10
I sold the world