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A jam submission

Bird BunchView game page

My entry to Indirect Control Jam
Submitted by DarkBloodbane — 6 hours, 26 minutes before the deadline
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Bird Bunch's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Graphics/Animation#52.7773.000
Music/Sound#72.3152.500
Theme/Limitation#82.4692.667
Overall#82.2632.444
Technical Implementation#92.1602.333
X Factor (overall enjoyment)#102.0062.167
Fun/Design#101.8522.000

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Did you credit all assets in-game (including your own) as required by the rules?

Yes

Team Size

Solo (1)

Will you continue work on the game after the jam?

Yes - fun side project

What tools did your team use to construct the game? (optional)
OpenBoR

Which art and audio did you / your team NOT create? (optional)
All SFXs and music were not made by me

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Complaints:

1) The gameplay didn't feel all the great if I'm going to be completely honest. First off, the bird's movement speed was really slow (I'm mainly talking about the blue one). So slow, that often times I couldn't get it to my cursor in time to hit an enemy, and especially since it's the only bird that attacks for a while, it didn't feel great to play. Another thing is that when I order the birds to attack, heal, or slash, it was really delayed. Especially in a game like this, where timing is important, delaying attacks just doesn't feel fun at all. If you are going to continue working on this like you said, I would highly recommend making the general gameplay much more responsive and quick.

2) I didn't really understand what I was doing. I knew I was exploring some area that was infested with enemies, and I knew that controls, but that was about it. Especially since this game really feels like there's supposed to be a story behind it, there should be some sort of explanation, or some other way to set the scene a little bit. Even games like Hollow Knight, which basically throw the player in completely blind, have the intro cutscene and Elderbug to provide a little exposition. Granted, it is a jam game, but even one screen with a little bit of text explaining some sort of situation would've made it a little more engaging in my opinion. (I think RockyMullet also touched on this a little bit).

3) The healing ability especially NEEDS a cooldown. It was way to easy to spam heal, and that combined with the gameplay being very slow and frustrating just did not make me want to continue playing.

4) This one seems a little nitpicky compared to the others, but the dirt road thing could've used some detail in my opinion. Especially when it's surrounded by excellent pixel art, it sticks out like a sore thumb a little bit. Again, not a big complaint, but definitely something to do it you want to continue this project.

Compliments:

1) Other than the aforementioned dirt road, the pixel art was really impressive. Especially the birds and enemies, so really good job on that.

2) The music and sound design was also really good. Not much else to say here.

I know I might come off harsh with there being so many complaints compared to compliments, but I really did put a lot more effort into finding things I didn't like, because in my opinion, complaints are a lot more helpful than compliments for improving a game, and especially since I saw that you were planning to continue working on this, I wanted to give feedback on what I thought could be improved. This really is an excellent base to continue working with, since with just a couple tweaks to the gameplay here and there, you've already got yourself a fun and engaging experience. It's just up to you to add what you want. So please don't take this feedback negatively, I don't mean it that way :).

Developer

Thanks for playing :)

The late response for each bird is deliberate to make it feel hard to give order to the birds. To compensate this, the healing is OP so if you fail dearly while trying to order birds to attack, you can fix it with healing.

Still, I'm going to do something about difficulty in hitting something :).

Missing story was there cause I didn't plan to have one in the first place :|. The idea is to bring birds to end of the forest while collecting branches and fighting enemies. So the story is just that.

Submitted

As far as balancing goes, I think it would be better to add a cooldown to the healing and make the actual attacking easier by making it more responsive. And as for the story thing I just kind of felt like there should have been one, maybe because of the exploration part of the game, I’m not sure.

Submitted

I like the idea, it was quiet unique to have a pet that follows you around without you having direct control over it's actions. I struggled to figure out what to do in the beginning for a while, so some kind of simple tutorial would have been very helpful. Good Job overall!

Submitted(+1)

Interesting concept. I like the art, the birds were cool. I'm not sure I udnerstood the end, there was like something throwing spiky things at my birds and then at some point I won XD
I kind of wish I could've played with the mouse, moving a cursor with only 3 inputs, seems like it would've worked perfectly with the mouse.

Cool game!

Developer

Thanks for playing!

If you've chosen that path, you'll only be bombed before you could reach the end. If you chose other path, you might meet the one responsible for the spike tossing ;).

Submitted(+1)

It's a little hard to know where to position the birds to attack properly, but overall this is a pretty good game.