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Unarmed's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #3 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
| Hardware | #5 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Overall | #5 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Gameplay | #5 | 3.750 | 3.750 |
| Sound | #7 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Graphics | #9 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
- Nice to see a multiplayer game creation. I was limited on playing with other multiple people, but give this game props for the attempt.
- First of all, thank you for your participation. Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by the game and its main theme. There’s even a story and everything. Graphically, even if it’s a bit light for the Super NES, it’s still enjoyable. The concept is good, the physics are well handled, there are shots, and especially the brilliant idea of making it multiplayer. So honestly, with richer gameplay, better graphics and all, there’s real potential for a great game. Anyway, well done.
- A kind of Tower Fall for up to 4 players. A custom tile mode (fun). Quite minimalist but effective for a 4-player game on SNES. Too bad they're fixed screens with no effects or parallaxes.
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Comments
I couldn't really experience this one properly as I didn't have anyone to test it with. I struggled with the shooting controls a bit, but I think because I was just testing it solo I didn't really have the opportunity to get into the gameplay loop and have it all "click".
I'll be sure to give it a proper go when I have people around to help me test it properly!
First of all, thank you for your participation. Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by the game and its main theme. There’s even a story and everything. Graphically, even if it’s a bit light for the Super NES, it’s still enjoyable. The concept is good, the physics are well handled, there are shots, and especially the brilliant idea of making it multiplayer. So honestly, with richer gameplay, better graphics and all, there’s real potential for a great game. Anyway, well done.
Loving the concept, multiplayer games are great, can't have enough of them! Hope to be able to try this soon with 3 friends. The map editor feature is great! Regarding the shooting delay: Instead of delaying the bullet, you could fire it instantly and subsequently change its trajectory if an additional shot direction button is triggered within n frames. No idea if that would feel weird, but maybe worth a try. Great submission, overall!
Actually, pretty cool—I feel like there’s a lot of potential here. That said, I remember there being a slight delay between pressing any of the buttons and firing, so making it more instant, a la Smash TV, could be nice. I also wasn’t entirely comfortable using the shoulder button to shoot, though I guess that’s just a matter of getting used to it. Maybe adding a mapping option so it could be assigned to simply “up” would be interesting—I’m not sure if it would feel better, but I’d like to try it. Overall, a really nice game.
Thanks for the feedback!!
And ah, I love the topic of input delay, so excuse me for going on a bit of a rant:
Super Smash TV was actually the primary game I looked at to see how 4-way shooting could be implemented.
One issue I had with Smash TV was that when you shoot diagonally, so pressing say both X and A, the first bullet will either go straight up or to the right instead of going diagonal, since your thumb won’t press both buttons at exactly the same time. With Smash TV that’s ok because you can just rain lots of bullets one after the other.
For a versus game like Unarmed, I found out that doesn’t work so well, because if you saturate the level with bullets, players can’t react anymore, and the game won’t be fun.
So I figured I needed to limit the amount of bullets by rate limiting. But if you do that, you want every bullet to go the way the player intended to. For this I implemented a slight delay between the first time a press is registered and actually firing the bullet so that the other button can catch up before we decide on in what direction to shoot. I set this variable to 2 frames, but after looking at the code again, it turns out this mechanism adds 3 frames of lag. So 50 miliseconds. I just checked this in the debugger, which can step through individual frames, and I can confirm that it is indeed exactly 3 frames.
For comparison 50ms is generally within the accepted range of online lag for an FPS or fighting game. I can try to experiment with less, or even make it a configurable option. I’m probably less prone to notice the lag as my reaction times aren’t great to begin with. But I can believe that 3 frames might be noticeable.
Another reason for the lag could just be that you’re using an emulator. This bit me a couple of times, while developing the game, where it turned out my OS was introducing quite a bit of lag, or worse when my bluetooth headset was introducing a loooot of lag between game and game sound. Testing on HW made that go away. But I’m guessing you noticed that the lag wasn’t there when jumping for example.
As for button layout, I guess you mean ‘shoulder button to jump’ instead of ‘shoulder button to shoot’: yea I already abstracted the code to allow for different input methods. But there was just so much to improve and I had so little time to come up with an interface. I did do some play testing with some people, and I was a bit surprised myself that they didn’t seem to bothered by the mapping of jump to R. Even after I prodded them on it. So that also meant that the feature tumbled down a bit on the list of priorities. Although I wouldn’t have time regardless I think.
But your feedback has put it back on the map :) And yea, mapping to up might be a good solution.