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The Frontiersmen's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Visuals(Graphics) | #12 | 3.024 | 4.000 |
| Sound/Audio | #16 | 2.268 | 3.000 |
| Overall | #20 | 2.646 | 3.500 |
| Fun | #24 | 1.890 | 2.500 |
| User Interface (UI/UX) | #25 | 1.512 | 2.000 |
Ranked from 2 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
DevLog Link
https://game-smith.itch.io/the-frontiersmen/devlog/675407/adding-a-bit-of-life-to-the-game
Developer Feedback Questions
What area of the gameplay/design do you feel needs the most improvement and why?
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Comments
I was playing the Win install. In your screenshots I can see animals, but in my game there was no animal (maybe they are hiding?). Here is what I did:
I like how you shaped the environment. Feels pretty natural to me - like a small area at the end of a valley. Also watching out for and collecting mushrooms along the way is a sweet idea. Of cause I was trying to also collect the cat tails ;-) These little details like the skeleton and the small "water walker" (this is how we call them over here) made me smile.
A suggestion: I am a huge fan of The Long Dark. I think there is a good chance for you to draw some inspiration from that game. It is also 1st person, set up in the wilderness and amoungst many other things you can can place (and re-place) traps for catching rabbits. Some things you might want to check and compare:
You created a good base here for a promising game. Keep it up!
Hello and thank you for the feedback!
The animals should appear at either end of the level, with a bunny near your camp and a fox near the skeleton log. There is a chance that they saw you and ran away before you noticed them, but the fox is a little oversized in this build, so he should be harder to miss. :)
Did the version you played not have an image of the needed keyboard key/controller button to press when you looked at the ground or other objects?
Yes, currently going to sleep triggers the end game screen. In a future version I hope to add a day/night cycle to simulate the passage of time. That way it is up to the player how much do they want to push their luck and stay out in the wild.
We call them “water skimmers”, and I’m glad you like them. I hope to make them move around the stream in a future Sprint. I’m a sucker for the small details in games. And I agree the cat tails should be pickable at some point, I will probably wait until I get a hunger/thirst system implemented. They would make a good test item for foraging for wild food.
I enjoy The Long Dark as well. :) I hope to get more styles of traps and snares in the game. That way you have to use the right type for the kind of animal that you want to trap. On the player walking, is it the lack of a headbob animation on the camera or something else that makes it feel “floaty”? I admit, I had not thought about the audio/visual feedback UI, I had been so focused on getting the new systems in I think I had a case of developer tunnel vision, but you right The Long Dark, Red Dead Redemption 2, and other games that I have been drawing inspiration from all have some kind of visual and audio cues for the player. I will definitely add that to make Backlog as a new item to work on soon.
Thank you again for the thoughtful and detailed feedback!
I played both the previous version and the improved version. Having the animals as a hint where to place the traps is a good thing. Without them it was rather random where to place traps. Maybe this could even be improved: Adding more complex behaviour to the animals so that it is necessary to observe them for some time to find there preferred spots. Also it would be nice if you could pick up traps to place them somewhere else. In my first game I placed some of them accidentally and was not able to correct it. Another thing I notices was that the spacial audio is kind of extreme: I played with headphones on and when I turned sideways to the waterfall the sound was only on one ear. That is rather unnatural as in reality you will always have some reflected or diffracted sound.
My suggestions for improvement in order of importance:
Overall the game is well done! Nice graphics, good controls, runs fluent, no bugs, but some lack of depth...
Thank you for the feedback!
I agree the animals need a lot more polish for the next version. I will check into the spatial audio issue, I had been testing the build with a mono-piece call center style headset, so I thought the cutoff was just coming from the lack of a left ear piece. :) I should have tried it on my computer with the normal speakers, but I just didn’t think of it. Fixing the traps to be able to pick them up is probably my most requested feature, I just ran out of time to make it work with the new item system since they are interactable after dropping them.