The mechanic is unique enough for me. My only problem is that there does not seem to be an overarching story that ties everything together.
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The Junkyard's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun (Overall enjoyment) | #1 | 4.211 | 4.211 |
| Balance (Speed of the game) | #1 | 3.725 | 3.725 |
| Uniqueness (Originality of the game) | #1 | 4.349 | 4.349 |
| Overall | #1 | 4.021 | 4.021 |
| Theme (How well the game follows the jams theme) | #2 | 3.798 | 3.798 |
Ranked from 109 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
I suppose it's fine enough usage of the theme, but it wasn't in anyway an enjoyable experience. It's just watching progress bars go up ad infinitum, without rhyme nor reason. I can't see how that could be fun to anyone. Maybe there could've been some puzzle element to the crafts part, but the pieces you're working with are so arcane that I could never come close to predicting how anything would up being used
Pretty fun experience overall. One thing that really bugged me tho is how arbitrary that "1" is. You can have 2 items using exact same skills but one fills up in 5 seconds and another takes a minute. Feel kinda cheated with progress bars
Submitted
Point of originDefinitely my favourite contender, though flawed. I enjoyed it, but it was very idle, which isn't a bad thing. The uniqueness was an interesting factor of the game, and I actually enjoyed slowly finding random parts and building weird machines. I think a concept like this, but expanded on and maybe balanced a bit better would be super interesting. Some of the wait times for the items were a little exaggerated, and could have been sped up just to not waste the time of the players, especially near the end once you had discovered everything it just became a waiting game. I also wished you kept the bonuses even when merging the items, so that some items didn't become pointless or slow down progression. Otherwise, probably my personal favourite for this game jam.
I really wanted to like it after seeing peoples' comments but if I'm being honest, it does feel a bit like watching progress bars with interaction. Maybe the game just isn't my style of playing, so don't really take this too harshly, many other people enjoyed it. Regardless here's a bit of feedback I'd like to give:
- Search is oddly manual before auto-search and I would have preferred if it were continuous as other people have pointed out, however I do recognise that this makes autosearch much less useful.
- Some of the items have way too long waiting times and you kind of just do nothing, but this also makes the game somewhat idle-able so it has its own benefits.
- The sense of unfolding seems lacking and all I really felt like I was doing was watching progress bars. Progression-wise, this is a game jam game so it could probably be attributable to lack of time. However another thing in my opinion is the lack of indication of progress. You never know when searching matters or it doesn't or when you unlock new items or recipes until they simply randomly show up in your face which is disorienting. I do get this is probably more representative of what would happen in the real world, but even a small "Area searched: x / 1123330" or something would be nice.
- UI is somewhat odd on both collapsed and fullscreen: Obvious reasons for collapsed, but for fullscreen I feel like things are also a bit too spaced out which makes things hard to see.
- The ability to dismantle crafted items if needed, and show what boosts those constituent items provide. Often crafting things is almost a downgrade which I feel is counterintuitive, this could make for a nicer way to plan things.
Theme-wise, it feels like not much was really done and this could be easily applicable to any other game without having been inspired by the theme, maybe some sort of limit to what items you could carry with you to help you with tasks would be interesting?
Submitted
Antimatter MonomensionsThanks for the considered reply!
I find that a lot of incrementals are about waiting for numbers to reach an arbitrary point and then being disoriented by a bunch of upgrades before being forced to "prestige" which is really a downgrade. So I switch it up with progress bars, "crafts", and other more concrete or lifelike situations, and fit them into the incremental model.
I like a lot of your concrete suggestions. I can always use interface suggestions. I'm seeing from comments that this could be a good long-form game, and adding features like dismantling would make it a lot easier on me, preventing the need to analyze skill unlocks to avoid soft-locking the game.
For the theme, I really wish I'd added the text "Capped at 1" on every item. People didn't associate "unique" with "1". The game was designed around the theme entirely, I didn't even have an idea for a game before the theme came out. I didn't want to play with some math to make the skills appear as if they were capped at 1 without it affecting the mechanics. I did it with the progress bars, and now you can't tell how long something will take. Every button caps at one to the detriment knowledge, but that isn't enough to count for the mechanics-based theme? As a long-form game, you better believe there would be 10k screws and 5k metal plates to craft a "chamber" or whatever. I just have to remember to spell out themes for people, my interpretations are too unusual.
Ok, sorry for that bit of rant. I do appreciate the feedback and I'll look for someone to look over the interface before I post my next game.
Thanks for the support! You can retry for a better time now that you know what all the junk does, but yeah, random search doesn't actually add much replayability. Please check out my other games on itchio, or from the links in discord channels for the older ones. I'll try to make more eventually, but I'm not a professional game dev (yet :) ).
It's funny, when i did click to progress, people wanted auto-click. When it was a pain to hold the mouse there, I went with a single click to auto-progress. Now that's not enough either and I guess I need auto-play?
But seriously, there's only one button in the game that stays where it starts, and that's "Search". There are early bonuses to speed, and later in the game there is auto-search so you don't even need to click it. So progress is there. I'll continue to work on balancing this sort of thing in later games. Thanks for the feedback.
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