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BALANCE's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Judge's Ranking | #1 | n/a | n/a |
| Art | #5 | 4.550 | 4.550 |
| Fun Factor | #35 | 3.700 | 3.700 |
| Gameplay | #44 | 3.575 | 3.575 |
| Sound Design | #45 | 3.525 | 3.525 |
| Overall | #52 | 3.496 | 3.496 |
| Innovation | #52 | 3.525 | 3.525 |
| Theme Integration | #299 | 2.100 | 2.100 |
Ranked from 40 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game bring our theme, The Error is the Feature, to life?
In my game, the error is the mechanic. The scale is fickle and cares more about piece count than weight, so mis-drops, ugly bounces, “light” bills, and overshooting dumbbells become tools. As the pans grow, chaos ramps up and you improvise; when it all blows up, a reset/bomb turns the stumble into momentum.
Did you include a fake publisher splash screen at the start of your game?
No
Did you use the Audius API in your game?
No
If AI was used in your game, let us know how you used it.
AI not used, all assets have been drawn by me <3
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Comments
very cool game, the art looks amazing. the idea is very interesting!
love the artstyle, and simple to understand gameplay. Also runs great on mobile!
As some others have mentioned, it is pretty easy to find a winning strategy and then it's just doing the same thing on repeat, so for now it does get a bit boring after a bit. It would be cool to play a version of this game which is a bit more balanced (pun intended) towards progressively scaling difficulty, perhaps with a bigger variety of pickups, frequency of the bombs going down, more unpredicatble objects, etc.
Lots of ways you could expand this. But this would really make a great casual mobile game you can pull out and fumble with!
Great job, loved it!
Definitely, after all the positive feedback I’ve been receiving, it’s made me want to prepare a more complete version of Balance, with everything you’ve mentioned. It’s true that the game is really easy to expand on given its foundation, and I would have a lot of fun doing it. <3 Nice score, by the way! I find it amazing that even though it’s such a simple game with fairly limited content, you’ve still been motivated to achieve such high records. Thank you so much for playing, and especially for your comment :)
As an artist, I’ll praise the art first, incredibly how simple it looks but it’s very beautiful, how are you not watching this game? Very good work.
Very original game with cool art. Loved the story behind your youg self drawing things you actually use later, that's very cool! Quite enjoyed the moment of pure discovery, thanks for that and well done!
Really cool arts! Although I think the CRT post-processing curvature is too pronounced and a bit distracting. The birdnessman popping up every few seconds is also a bit clunky. Other than that though, it's a fun game to play! But I'm not very good at it, I don't know how there's a player that can get to 1 million scores lol.
Overall I think this was a pretty nice entry, considering the time frame allowed. Good job!
i think i won...
BRO WHAT THE HECK?!? HAHAHAH <3
Fantastic art style. I really loved it.
The art style is fantastic and it has a really addictive gameplay too! Great submission!
This is really cool, though I feel like there should be more punishment for failure. A high score seems more like a function of time rather than skill.
Otherwise, great art, concept, and execution!
Yes, in theory the points should reset whenever any of the plates touch the table, but it seems like the game only works when it feels like it ;( Thanks for playing <3
Really fresh concept, and I think it was very well executed. As some other developers have pointed out, I think once you find the strategy of alternating between the multipliers and the bombs, it feels like you can just keep wracking up a higher and higher score without any real consideration. That being said, I thought this was an incredible entry with tons of style anchored in a refreshing concept.
Really love the art and sounds. Good job
Deceptively simple but very addictive gameplay. The presentation is fantastic, too, especially with the retro styling, the sound fx and the physics-based feedback. Great job!
I love the art! Simple yet very addictive gameplay
Really good looking game. Well done mate!
Great look and feel. Simple and addicting.
BALANCE
This game really gets points for being the original creation of a solo developer. This game is so awesome and amazing that it would be a perfect portfolio piece to show for an aspiring game developer in the industry. I would hire you as an artist and designer off of this project alone.
MENU: There’s no real menu except for a little startup animation showing the name of the game on a CRT TV screen, which helps to set the tone for the game as an almost “wacky game show” minigame.
ART: The art is completely original and super addicting, with a style that reminds me of colorful assorted cartoon gummy candies in pack. This is where the game really shines in its animations, camera work, and art.
AUDIO: The game has fun beeps and boops and sounds for audio confirmation that points are counted and pieces landed as they should. It creates a very responsive feeling game.
GAMEPLAY LOOP: Quite fun but quickly loses its appeal after a few minutes. There’s very little strategy needed to play items as they seem to kind of stick wherever they land, and once you get a system going of bombs and multipliers, the game loses its scaling pretty quickly.
Written Review
The player turns on their CRT TV to see a fun interactive game show being displayed, hosted by BIRDNESSMAN. The player then tries to balance items on a scale for points and see how many points they can accrue, but watch out! If items drop, your points will continue to decrease until you have nothing left! Every so many items, the BIRDNESSMAN will offer a gamebreaking option for the player’s experience.
The art for this game alone made it a fun treat to play, but the actual gameplay loop loses its appeal rather quickly when it becomes apparent that the points can’t be used for anything and the upgrades make it easy to “cheese the system”. This would make for a perfect meta-game element of using points in an in-game shop for upgrades or other changes, or to add to a collection of minigames apart of a larger game.
Ways To Improve Game
Rather than losing points if you miss a scale, points should only be gained for items on the scale and lost if they happen to fall off the scale. Add more motivation for accruing points, like meta-game elements or a “game winning” scenario or a “competing enemy” you have to beat to win the game.
Cool art direction, I love how chaotic the game is.
Ordered chaos is our real world. All moves, nothing keep quiet.
I got up to 200k! And I could have kept going. Really fun and neat concept. At one point, I was able to find a pattern that just allowed me to keep going infinitely. The simplicity of this game made it very addictive for me. Like I said, I could have kept going. I was locked in! Loved it. Great job!
Not gonna lie, I was really looking forward to seeing a screenshot of someone’s high score. You don’t know how happy it makes me that you enjoyed it and got so hooked. Thanks for playing and for your comment <3
In my opinion, the game has a lot of potential. It would make for a fun mobile game to quickly pass the time as it is quite addictive (my highscore is 26380 and I think I've spent about 10 or 15 minutes playing it without even realizing lol). The art is very nice, sounds fit the game very well too. The only issue I have is that after some time, the game became... too easy? It might've been because I kept choosing +0.2x multiplier whenever I saw it, but it got to a point where the Birdnessman (cool name btw) kept appearing each time I've added something to the scale. Overall, it's a very fun game and I might even come back to it every now and then.
I’m really glad you liked the game and its art, and especially that it got you hooked hahah. About the difficulty, you’re absolutely right — I was adding content until the very last minute of the jam, and due to lack of time there are things I would’ve liked to polish, like the long-term gameplay.
Most likely, making it so that each time Birdnessman requires more points to appear, or that simply redeeming upgrades costs you a certain amount of points, would make it more interesting.
Thank you so much for your comment and for playing my game, rest assured I’ll take it into account for a future update <3