Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Escape Ghoul Prison is fun to play, technically well executed and well scoped. While behavior trees would be an overkill for this project if the primary purpose was to make a great game with these mechanics, it demonstrates technical expertise well as a portfolio project. The game builds creatively on the starter project with a sensible scope for the submission timeline. The participant delivered a quality result both in the game as well as in the documentation. The main feature I was missing was a tutorial and controls explanation in game. Overall a well thought through and polished submission.
• I tried to play it without reading the game page (as I do with other games) and struggled to understand what was going on outside turning the key and unlocking. After reading the game page and grokking how all the elements are related to each other, it became much more interesting to play with the tension between swapping views and making progress with the lock as soon as possible. However, once I realised there was no real time limit, the tension was gone since there was no incentive to progress through the lock as quickly as possible. Having some sort of timer, scoring system and/or some in-theme narrative (e.g. all the other inmates are taken away one by one) would balance that. I’m not sure how the battery level applies to the game as it went down but wasn’t sure ‘why’. I ended up quickly tapping between D, Space and W to get through the lock stages rapidly. Not sure how the game would scale though for replayability or difficulty. Maybe different puzzle locks, different guard behaviours, etc. The UI/UX had good cohesiveness on the theme, it looked like it all tied together and the two tone aesthetic worked well. A couple of areas of polish would be: - making the three lock stages part of the lock instead of a separate UI so it’s immediately clear - showing the torch in some fashion to show where it’s being used that drains the battery - some hint in control that pressing space changes view with clear indication which one is your cell - maybe some indication of state changes with the guard (Metal Gear Solid style) The AI behaviour system looks like it is the focus of the coding as mentioned in your writeup and it’s great to see that you are using new C++ features with it. I would be interested to hear how you found debugging the system compared to a state machine as well as a comparison between working with the two.
• Clean release ZIP Good minimalist art aesthetic Controls work well Took a while but was able to escape successfully Great player documentation Good job on design/development documentation
• Interesting, I can see the potential there!
• This is a neat game, with a nice set up of the two different screens. Holding space to see what the guard is doing is a nice mechanic, but you should disable input for the lockpick when doing this, otherwise you can just hold space and continue to blindly fumble with the lock. The timer could be brought down a lot to make the game more difficult. And some audio would elevate this game quite a lot. It's quite basic graphically, and that's ok for the style. But some music would really add to the tension that the game is trying to create.
• This is super fun, I got so frustrated when I got caught and kept retrying! This is a great example of using the base mechanics in a creative way and building on the areas which you are passionate about - that's the best way to learn! I'm very impressed with your development of the AI. Also, the UI and controls are intuitive and make it an easy to figure out how to play. Great stuff!