Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Theme

  Surprisingly in-depth for a game that presented itself as a hide and seek game at first. At its core it’s about saving the forest and its inhabitants. Each “forest/island” wants to learn how to hide better from humans and keep their forests save and you’re some kind of expert detecting them and it trains them to hide better.

  Gameplay 

  • Hide and Seek gameplay. The tracking needs to be better in my honest opinion.
  • You gather forest points from petting animals and it helps you expand your forest better.
  • You do trading with fellow gnomes through bartering.

  Presentation

  For the most part it’s consistent it works. It has some collision issues here and there, flickering graphic and needs a bit more polished to find gnomes better or graphics to be better (e.g. the tunnel). The color palette is a bit of a turn off.

  Engagement 

  Definitely an interesting game just need some more polish.

  Total – 61/80

• PRESENTATION
  

  Graphics are all custom and fit together well. Maps are very large with lots of decoration strewn about. This makes sense as you're a gnome and the world is a very large place.

  Writing has a fair amount of grammatical issues, making the dialogue very stilted. Story is simple framing for the gameplay and characterisation is there but falls quite flat due to the grammatical problems.

  Sound is decent - there's no real environmental use for sound (which is a pity as it could have really been an interesting mix and would have fit well) but what was there wasn't jarring and, well, worked.

  Music was the same song over and over. It got boring and repetitive after a while.

  GAMEPLAY
  This game was basically a hide-and-seek simulator. You had to interact with animals and find fellow gnomes hidden on the map. Very simplistic in nature.

  There was a zoom button to view tracks, though it wasn't very useful considering you didn't need it to see what way tracks were pointing and it didn't provide any extra information bar that.

  Passability was strange as some trees you could walk behind but the same trees could also block you, so the inconsistency really stood out.

  ENGAGEMENT
  The game wasn't very fun or engaging. You basically walk around and try to find animals and gnomes hiding behind trees in order to do that again. That's all there was to the game. Add in the annoyance of the passability inconsistencies which forced you to go around areas in order to get to other areas, as well as the invisibility of some tiles being passable (the first map had one area across a lake but you didn't realise you could cross it unless you tried, meaning I lost a fair few times before I realised the last gnome was hiding there). It got very repetitive very fast and the music really hammered that in.

  Also, when the main idea is to use tracking to find your fellow gnomes I expected more than a few footprints to help with that (especially since you didn't need the zoom feature to tell which direction they were facing).  Honestly, though, it just became a game of running around til you found movement or spotted a colour that didn't fit somewhere in the trees.

  THEME
  Explanations were few and far between. I guess the theme was "searching" and it held that up well enough mechanics-wise, though some parts were pretty hard to figure out.

  41/80