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Courier 1865's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment - How much you enjoyed playing this game. | #38 | 2.944 | 2.944 |
| Overall | #38 | 3.069 | 3.069 |
| Presentation - How well executed the game is. | #39 | 3.278 | 3.278 |
| Concept - How interesting or unique the game is. | #42 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Use of Theme - How well the game incorporated the given theme. | #51 | 3.056 | 3.056 |
Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
What assets did you use in this project?
Boxophobic Skybox, Polygon Western and Western Frontier from Synty, and VR tutorials from Valem.
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Comments
Gotta say that I'm jealous of your visuals. Next game jam that I do, I wish to be able to pull of this kind of polish in looks, audio design and overall presentation. The reload mechanic is impressive and I do like wearing cool hats. As far as improvements, I found that the enemies scale/size to be a bit big. Outside of that, I loved the whole thing.
Haha yes good eye the enemies are like twice the size of the players. I do think it kind of helps to actually hit the targets though a little bit. If they were smaller it might be even harder to hit them as they run away. I really wanted to add a huge enemy boss you could really let loose with fanning on because fanning against anything else doesn't work that well. Maybe I could have added aim assist for fanning or something using eye tracking.
Anyway thanks for playing. Admittedly the visuals were mostly attributable to Synty's excellent assets. I usually shy away from using them since a lot of people do but game jams are a good time to use them I think since it would take a long time to really put all that together, but our art team were able to take it and kind of make some of it our own, the hats and characters. We avoided using the Synty characters because that would really feel Synty assety. The guns, train, and a lot of the other objects were Synty. We do normally try to make more of our own assets for games but our lead 3d artist was having a baby shower for part of the jam so he was a little busy.
So glad we have someone focused on audio and general polish as well, custom music and some combining of other sound effects/foley work goes a long way to making it sound good. The default particle systems for guns for instance were just terribly large, you really couldn't see past them so it was fantastic to have someone make the guns even usable past the smoke screen.
Thanks for playing and I'm pretty sure I used one of your youtube videos as inspiration for how I set up my body socket system so thank you for that as well.
That's great to hear! I'm glad the body socket video helped out. Now I just need to take some inspiration from you and learn how to bring an entire games aesthetics together. Thanks again for the review and watching my videos! Best of luck in the jam!!!
Thanks again and full credit to my team for that. I am not the aesthetics guy, that's Parker, but it feels like everyone else does more for the aesthetic than I do haha. Every little thing adds to it, font color choices, font choices, post processing (I've managed to keep them reeled in on this one), audio, effects, etc. I personally focus entirely on programming and tools programming, usually when there's a question of does this look good I'm like uhhhh yeah it looks the same as before or both look equally good so I'm glad to have people to work with that have a good eye for that. Thanks Parker, Rokugin, and LunaticLucas!
Dang, this was a really solid jam game! You definitely have a solid base line to build off of if you want to try and take this further and turn it into a full game!
Definitely some areas that need some polishing up, most of which looks like it's already been pointed out in the other comments. I personally couldn't really figure out what I was doing right or wrong in the game. I saw lots of hats on still on the train when the round would end, but then it would tell me I only delivered one package. So maybe a little more description in the How to Play section would have helped?
I also noticed that ammo didn't refresh itself between rounds, which meant I kept starting the next round with empty guns. If that was the intended experience that's totally fine, but it was something that just felt odd to me, and took me a while to actively start reloading my gun when the round was over.
Overall though, fantastic game! Something that feels silly complementing, but that I really liked, was your main menu! You had everything nicely laid out, and the controller diagram helped greatly! Definitely something I should have implemented in my game!
Awesome job!
Thanks for playing.
We have definitely already started doing some polish on it but we're going to wait until the judging is over to upload them, got things like particle effects and animations on enemy death and so on that have been listed but anything you got we want to hear.
The starting each round with empty guns was not even a thing I considered, I usually reload them myself after I am done shooting but that's a good suggestion. I think the way I think about them is sort of realistic, if they had no ammo in them the last time you holstered them why would it magically change in the next round, they continue to exist as they have but it is a game and that would be kind of nice. Something that wasn't mentioned is there's two reload methods, mashing the reload button and just holding it down. personally I like the tactility of mashing the button per round reloaded but for those who can't or don't want to do that you can always hold it down.
The menu definitely helps pull a game together, it's hard enough getting a fully working game but getting one with a menu with actually meaningful options is a whole other story haha. It definitely took some work on that.
Is really amazing that with this little time you put also a multiplayer mode working well! Took me a little bit of time to get used to the controls but i really enjoied it!
Yeah as I may have mentioned in another comment to someone else, I am definitely all about playing with my friends and if I am making something I can't play with my friends it's not as fun.
Thanks for playing!
Visuals were really great! It all felt smooth and really polished.
I'm impressed you got multiplayer with it in one week.
The reloading was cool but it sometimes did stuff I didn't mean to, like reclosing the chamber before I finished reloading. It would be nice if there were some sound effects or indicators when the enemies spawned as I couldn't see them.
Overall, great game!
We thought about putting a yeehaw in here or there for where they were spawning from but ended up not doing that. That's a great idea though.
Unfortunately we can't take full credit for the visuals as a lot of it was asset based from Synty however our artist was having a baby shower and was a little busy for some of the jam. He was able to put together some stuff and wants to go back and redo some of the visuals after the jam to make it more ours.
As for the reloading not sure I can say much there other than practice, practice, practice!
Thanks for the review.
Fun game in a great setting. Real feel this western mood.
Also great work with the main menu and (WTF) customizable characters!
Couldn't try it yet, but that you even added multiplayer to it in one week is really impressive.
About the gameplay there was unfortunately one problem, that let to few different other issues: My virtual body is a bit "too far" in front of me (tried to reset position of my device, but always was at the same position). Because of that, i could not really look downward. So i could not really see the hats, which i wanted to grab and also did not see the revolvers. So just stood around and saw these people riding towards me, but was not sure what to do (just tried wearing some hats to at least look cool^^).
As i watched your trailer then, i saw that I'm actually supposed to have guns already and thought, it's maybe a bug in this round. So started the next round, but still had no guns. So started somehow "blindly" to grab everywhere around (because like mentioned before, couldn't see anything under my head). And luckily after some time grabbed a revolver. For my taste it's a bit too high, but that's fine.
After found that, the real fun started. Also really liked these way of reloading, it's a nice implementation of doing it one-handed (and enables the possibility to do it on both sides in parallel).
Only little problem was, that some hats were so to say "under" my physical ground, so was hard to grab them. But no worries, guess they anyhow have not really an influence about the actual gameplay?
Sorry to hear your virtual body was so in the way, not sure what happened there as we didn't really run into that issue during testing.
We had originally placed the revolvers in your vision, but found them to be a bit in the way when shooting down at enemies, so we moved them to your hips. During testing, we found that if you weren't a skinny person then it was nearly impossible to get the guns, so we had to move them out a bit. Unfortunately, our trailer doesn't showcase that you have to grab the guns off your hips but that's where they always return to when you drop them.
As for the hats, you can shoot them and they'll come sailing towards you. And you can shoot them while they're above you to juggle them, it's a lot of fun to mess around with.
Thanks for playing, hopefully we can address these issues for the future.
Everything my brother said and we'll be doing a polish pass and updating the game after the jam ends so you can look forward to that. I am hoping to add some customizability to the locations of your holsters and body as well as your gun holding angle so that you can adjust it to whatever your situation.
That is correct the hats don't have any real effect other than making you feel like a cowboy or cowgirl. Haha. Should have mentioned somewhere you can shoot them to make them fly to you. I didn't want to go for a traditional kind of ray grab that you see in a lot of games, this is more akin to like half life alyx I guess but the interaction is you shoot it to make it fly to you.
Anyway I hope you had fun and when we update it maybe you'll give it another go and it will be smoother. Regardless we'll be trying to take this stuff into consideration going forward into other games and game jams.
Thanks
Yes, i indeed did not get, that i could also just shoot the hats, but sounds fun :-D
Yeah, i think it's actually a very simple fix, just move the body a few cm backwards, and then probably all problems i had, would be gone^^ But no worries, i rated it, as if the body would have been at the "correct" position. Definitely looking forward to a polished version of this game in future :-)
I've taken your feedback into account on our post game jam polish pass and I made it so you can put the holsters wherever you want, shoulders, chest, floating in front of you. I forgot to add the ability to adjust where the body is, but I'll go ahead and move it back a little bit so when you look down you aren't looking right at it. I'll try to get it to follow your virtual neck more so that it is out of the way. And maybe I'll add in a body adjustment just to be sure.
Technically the body was directly under the head which means when you look down it doesn't move back like it would if it were attached to your neck. So that's what I hope to fix with that change.
Hope you'll try it again after the jam.
Really cool y'all added a multiplayer option. Well done on the reload mechanic!
Multiplayer games are what we do basically, I want to make games I can play with my friends so that's pretty much all I end up making, for better or for worse haha. Thanks for playing.
Yeah, the biggest reason I got into VR dev is to create multiplayer for me and my friends. Still learning how to do it well though. 😅
Thanks for the game! Shooting games are always fun in VR. I liked the reload mechanic but had some issues with the shooting timing where a gun wouldn't let me continue to shoot while I still had some shots left. After a few seconds it would let me again, but it wasn't the smooth rate of fire that I think was intended.
Also, the location of the guns felt high to me, like they were in my armpits, but maybe I'm just short? lol
I'd love a little more action to the game...just standing and shooting is a little mundane, perhaps obstacles like bridges the player has to duck under every so often? A more varied landscape would help as well.
Great job!
The reason for that is that it works like a real revolver. If there are empty shells in between shots and you pull the trigger on an empty shell it won't fire.
Yeah we originally had the guns a little closer to the player and lower but we wanted to make sure everyone would be able to reach them. It would be better if they were configurable or something perhaps.
And yep about the standing and shooting, we talked about adding in obstacles to duck under like you see in some movies and other games but we did kind of want it to be playable sitting down.
Thanks for playing!
Thanks for all your feedback! As for the shooting timing, we've discussed this amongst our team and believe it's an issue of the trigger and release thresholds being too marginal, so for all intents and purposes, you need to fully release the trigger before pulling again for it to recognize it's a new shot. We'll adjust the sensitivity if we end up going back to debug after the jam. Thanks again!
Really loved this, it's a simple and enjoyable game. Love the tutorial as well straight to the point.
Thanks for the feedback, I'll be sure to try out your game.
Customizable characters, fully fletched out menu, HATS! and that smoooooth reload.
Definitely had fun with this one and I would love to see more of this game, keep me posted!
It would mean a lot to me if you'd try my game Protocol PAR-C3L as well :)
Thanks for the kind words. We were throwing around the idea of putting in a quick draw VS mode for the heck of it but with like 3 hours left it felt like maybe something for later so maybe.
We generally tend to go back into our jam games and clean them up with feedback we got during the jam to just really make them more presentable.
I will definitely check your game out. Thanks.
That pistol reloading is amazing! I hit the menu button wayyy to often though. This is multiplayer?! I need to make some friends and try it again. I'll hold off on my rating till then, but it was very cool and I really liked the ability to put on my hat! I didn't like that the thieves just disappeared from my view I couldn't really tell how far away they were before they were going to disappear. Maybe adding a little hill or something that they need to come riding over or riding away over so you could "fake" the enemies getting out of view. Other than that, super polished and very cool!
A hill is a great idea and we did think about putting the menu on a virtual button but wanted to be sure it would be easy to access. I was thinking of adding carriages but bluffs/hills would have been a great choice there. I also wish we had some animation for getting them vs them leaving as when they get far out enough it's hard to tell if you got them last second. Spinning in a circle and throwing their hands up before disappearing would have been easy and good enough. Thanks for playing.
Also about the pistol, I definitely wanted to add more weapons like a break action shotgun and a lever action rifle but I spent most of my time on that pistol action. Very satisfying though.
The pistol reloading is really well done! Also, I love the addition of the hats.
Gotta have the hats! My favorite part is how you pick them up. I'd didn't want to do the standard line interactor to grab stuff and figured if you shot it to you that would be cool and it is incredibly satisfying.
I also wanted to add a little shop in the town where you could unlock the various hats, but we didn't get around to it in the time we had.