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Goobler's Magic Shop: a game by Shovel's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall polish | #42 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Overall | #65 | 3.797 | 3.797 |
| Engagement | #99 | 3.739 | 3.739 |
| Creative use of art assets | #111 | 3.652 | 3.652 |
Ranked from 46 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Very cool game. I watched the devlog which was also very high quality. Talented developer!
I’m surprised somebody else had the idea to make a shop game! I really like how you implemented things here. It super super fun trying to manage all your gooblers when things got hectic.
What a nice game! I am very impressed how much stuff you managed to get done in such an amount of time.
The only few suggestions for improvement that I have are these:
1) Indicate it to the player in some clearer way when they get a new employee in the shop
First time I played I suddenly realized I got 6 of those when I was still playing with only 3.
2) Maybe change the cell size from 16x16 to 14x14, that would make things snap better.
3) Do something with the topazes, in the menu it's yellow on top of yellow, literally invisible.
So big game with creative concept! Good job!
Wow... the level of polish is astonishing... especially for first time using this engine. And I gotta say, music choice was perfect haha. My only issue was the game was very very small on my screen. made it tricky to see/play. I tried downloading it and playing in browser and both were small. I have 4k monitor so maybe that was it? I am not sure. Besides that though (and a little pathing weirdness) it was great!
I really like the setting and the gameplay is really smooth, I found it a little stressful trying to figure out what my gooblers were up to though aha
The game was fun though I wasn't very good at managing the gooblers. Maybe it would have been easier if the status of each goobler were shown and if the game could be played in full screen (or maybe zoom in on a goobler when it's selected). Nevertheless, it was good!
You have a very cool concept, that works really well. The touch of humour is very nice and gives your entry more personality. I can really see this as a fully fledged project.
My only problem was that I played in my browser, not full screen, and it made things kinda hard to see. Something like thought bubbles on the little gooblers might help for the player to notice when one of them starts daydreaming.
But once again, amazing job!
Wow this is really good and fun. For a first time Godot entry this seems very advanced and amazing. Very cool concept and super UI heavy which works out great!
I'd love to have an action queue for the little character because I'm impatient .. but just now thinking of that I think if there was an action queue, the player would probably have some downtime every now and then when everything is scheduled..
The Sims-style thoughts of the Goobler were fun and the variety in items and characters works well.
Super cool idea, very polished, super awesome use of the asset, really liked it!
I love the concept and it was executed very well! Game looks really polished and this felt very unique and refreshing! Only thing is I wish the difficulty curve went a little slower as there were so many orders right when i started understanding everything haha great game!
Thank you for your feedback! And thanks for playing my game! I'm glad you enjoyed it! :)
Holy polish! I loved the concept and the variety of items. I wish there was a way to make it fullscreen in the browser as I had to strain my eyes to see what was going on. Definitely has a dwarf fortress feel to it. Your design of the shop has a very comfy feel to it. Good job and thanks for making it!
Thank you for playing the game and for the feedback! I really appreciate it!
And yeah, I think the biggest mistake I made this jam was making the screen too small, haha.
really nice game, lovely done, great work
Thank you so much for playing my game and for the feedback, I appreciate it
This is such a nice concept. I could tell from the font that I was going to enjoy it! It had such a cartoony and fun feel.
The whole vibe of the environment was pretty cheery, with the music and sound effects, even when it got hectic trying to service all the customers.
I would say the biggest barrier was the AI routing. I was impressed that you had that implemented! It was a little buggy, though, which started to feel frustrating when customer satisfaction was on the line. I know that's a huge challenge, especially for a jam, so kudos for getting it even slightly working.
Overall, this felt like it could be a complete game. It had nearly everything, just needs some minor tweaks and polishing of the AI.
The AI routing is actually imperfect completely by choice - haha! It's just a simple depth first search across some pathfinding nodes - but instead of generating a map of pathfinding to be referenced when necessary (or just doing a complete traversal with distances/breadth first search for node count), each of the little guys have their own "pathfinding_iq" which dictates how many paths they're able to generate before picking which one they think is the "best".
I started with "perfect" pathfinding, but I wanted to have some semblance of "goofing off" that they would do, and I didn't have time to implement a more complete feature, so I decided that making them struggle to get where they're going would be a good stand-in! I think I might have made their IQs a little /too/ low though, which makes the game really hard as the difficulty ramps up. I think if I were to continue, I would make them get smarter as they complete tasks, so that once the store is really, really busy, they can actually make their way around the store. Something to limit the frustration but keep that "what are these goofballs even doing" kind of feeling!
Huge thanks for playing my game, and for the detailed feedback! I really appreciate it! :)
That's interesting to hear how you intentionally designed it! I remember having those kinds of thoughts, like, "Are you dumb? Why did you just turn around?" Or, "I told you to deliver that already ... right?" So that's funny to hear you explain the intent.
*ugh* maybe it's too realistic of a manager simulator XD
Oh! One other observation that I wanted to offer was the learning curve on the inventory for the shop. It was pretty overwhelming initially to figure out what items were when a customer asked, as I had to search each list for the non-obvious ones. Especially as I quickly had 5 customers waiting!
If you are interested in easing the player into it, you might start with only one of each category, and then slowly add new stock. The progression would serve as not only a way to simplify the early game, but also reward progress and maintain interest.
Nice game and I loved the tutorial/ cut scenes (really helped make the game accessible). Keep up the good work.
Thank you so much for playing my game, and for the feedback!
This is an impressive game, principally considering being your first game in the engine. ?? It even has cutscenes. And the idea is pretty good too. This have a strong vibe of an old sim game.
Thank you so much for your feedback and for playing my game!
Yeah, Godot seems quite easy to learn, but also very powerful, I'd definitely recommend it for others trying to make their first game jam games as well, haha!
I thought this felt like an incredibly polished game. Making a shop management game seems like a huge task and it’s amazing that you did it in such a short time but also with a new engine. Incredible!
Wow, thank you so much for the kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed my game! :)
Pretty cool and creative game! The pathfinding seems kind of wonky but other than that it's a very polished and well made game!
Thank you for the feedback! I appreciate it a lot! :)
Fun game with lots of micromanagement! Got some Shoppe Keep vibes with the sims. Bonus points music and sounds (where spot on), and had fun reading the idle text (customers can wait).
Two things I would add would be a bar that shows your employees current actions (through I suspect it might have been intentional) and sense of progressing, since the game gets sorta repetitive after a while (understandable for a jam game).
Awesome game overall.
On the side note, how was your experience with Godot? Since it's the engine I use the most, I am curious about a newcomer point of view.
Not the dev, but I have been using Godot off-and-on for about 4 months. I was learning Unity at the same time, too. I have been trying to use gdscript, as there are a lot more tutorials for it, but I miss C# when I do that. I feel like I don't really understand how Godot's file inheritance works--constantly getting circular dependencies, or errors that think one exists (even though I can still play the game). I have a hard time knowing how to get a type visible or included in my class. Eventually, I'm sure I'll develop the intuition I have with Unity's game object and SerializeField paradigm.
All in all, though, I find the UI in Godot incredibly easy to use, and the Canvas element is a breeze compared with Unity. Still, I did this jam in Unity because I knew I would be able to do what I wanted in code much more quickly in C# (since I'm pretty used to C-style programming).
Thank you so much for your feedback, very detailed! I appreciate that a lot!
Having a bar along the bottom for quick reference to the current actions does seem like it would make managing the gooblers a lot more accessible, rather than needing to switch between them to figure out what is going on!
And yeah, some progression would definitely be nice - rather than a "play until you lose" system like I have, haha!
So, I've used Game Maker, Unity, and Slipspace (I'm a game dev at 343 industries on Halo) before, for context. I can't touch on Slipspace since it's proprietary or whatever, but I will say that Godot has some really nice features. GDScript seems good to use, I didn't have to do too much profiling, but it seems like that's pretty well handled. Also, Godot's tree structure really forces good design practices, so I didn't have to spend much time thinking about the overall game architecture, it was easy to add features simply by adding nodes in the logical places. I /hated/ the control nodes for UI when I first started using them, but after playing with them enough, I got the hang of it and it wasn't as frustrating to use. I've never much liked Game Maker, always thought Unity was far superior as an engine. I think in a comparison between Godot and Unity, I'd have to give Godot the edge based on my experience thus far. It's a really powerful tool for making games, and I think it's easy to learn for newbies, and powerful enough for more advanced systems as well!
Thanks for your time, both of you (I am the one who actually wrote the comment, but I asked Mota to post it since he submitted our game and can rate other entries). To be honest, I pretty much only used Godot (and a little bit of Love2D), so I am curios how it compares to the other engines. I think I will try unity when I have the time.
I never had much trouble with cyclic dependencies, but I am not used to C-Style. On the side note, It seems to be possible to use C#, C and C++ in Godot (although I never tried), in case it helps.
About the control nodes, yeah, they are something. I get flashbacks from positioning divs in css. About Godot and Unity, while I haven't used the latter, most people I talk about normally say Unity simply has more marketing.
Again, thanks for the feedback!
Atmosphere is really nice, gameplay unique and engaging.
One thing I had issue with is size of the screen. I did not see `fullscreen` button and the font is a bit small and hard to read.
Good luck with your adventures with Godot, it's an awesome tool.
Cheers!
Thank you for the feedback, and thanks for playing my game! I'm glad you enjoyed it! :)