Aaw damn. Sorry for the bad experience. The performance in the hypno scene is garbage. And low fps breaks the hit detection, noticed that too late into the jam so didn’t even try to fix it. It shouldn’t desynch that often though… Maybe I forgot to make something fps independent, wouldn’t be the first time. I’ll see if I can improve on the performance or completely remake the hypno part. Thanks for giving it a shot and commenting. I’m surprised that more people haven’t mentioned the bad performance tbh.
I run an old pc so maybe it's a potato issue, not many games are made optimized enough for it to play smoothly. It plays lots of games...on the lowest settings...barely.
An 'easy' fix is to just widen the margin for error that recognizes a fit. Also remove the variable speed that accelerates and decelerates as frame drops will break it. A real doozy when one of the icons just keeps flying around superspeed with no input.
Also would be nice QoL to have some indicator of how well you did. I'd imagine there's some math involved for determining what gets enhancements and by how much, so you can just stick that on the the little monitor next to the door. You could also just stick the current value instead of the score and players can do the math themself. I couldn't figure out the gameplay loop because...there was no changes visually, and I'd randomly get told by the alien that we're onto the next phase after a dozen or so attempts. I didn't even know there was a shrink mechanic until they said it was shrinking something and eventually the player model started getting shy shortly before the became a ken doll.
I really would like to experience the game as intended. Though...the headless thing is a bit creepy, you could put a helmet on them if you don't want to deal with faces and whatnot. A cute helmet would do wonders. Doesn't even need to be intricate/animated, just stick a box with googly/sticker eyes on it. Could even become the mascot of the game. Good luck with the developing~! Seems like a great jam submission overall, regardless of my personal experience!
Something this simple really should run on even older hardware. The way the scene is now is just super inefficient, dumb scripting or too many objects or maybe the shaders suck, haven’t really investigated yet.
Apparently the spin isn’t framerate independent. Thought it was after eyeballing between 60fps and 10 and didn’t notice a difference, but going down to 2 fps the spin slowed down significantly. So yeah forgot to multiply with dt somewhere again. No wonder people have problems with the gameplay.
Yeah some kind of indicators has been proposed. I’ll consider them, but the hypno game really isn’t supposed to be very hard, if it just worked correctly. You were supposed to see the effects pretty fast in the mirror.
The headless thing is part laziness part deliberate. Tried to go for maximum immersion, and personally I find that if you can’t customize your character’s face the next best thing is no face at all. Also I absolutely hate the human faces I draw. Original plan was to show the players face after full transformation. The busty alien gal in the cover image is supposed to be the player. Might try a faceless head or something, but I kinda stand behind my original idea, shame it didn’t resonate.
Thanks for the feedback, wouldn’t have noticed the framerate dependent acceleration otherwise.
The faceless shtick only works for semi-serious rp, anyone more serious about it can rp as anyone they want regardless of the differences in physique or whatever. Those not into rp, really only appreciate the idea that whatever feature being hidden is done so because it'd be more time consuming, and although a low effort placeholder could go distances it can also rub people the wrong way when there's an obvious dip in quality(annoyingly all I see are complaints of an 'unfinnished game...even if it was a demo or alpha).
I was thinking along the lines of those tv head characters, just a box with all expressions being emoticons/ascii. Though...for a game like this you can get away with a singular 'hypnotized' look that's been taped/stickered on haha!
The point isn't the realism or whatever, but that it shows you thought of it for a bit yet wasn't where your heart lay so you put something whimsical that further nails home the intent. Not super polished AAA game; just an indie/hobbyist project never meant to shake the world or anything, just an idea was born and thus it was carried out and then created in a form that we can also experience should we want to.
Wishing you luck in whatever patch you came up with works out as intended. I'll check again...hopefully. I'm quite forgetful, I didn't even remember half the stuff I commented. I will say what little I got to experience was great, it's not often I can find any sort of 3d rendering to work without stutters or wonky controls(1 fps slide show turned slip and slide). As a baseline, my pc can play on some gmod lobbies on the lowest settings, and if I'm feeling fancy a step up...when alone on said server haha. A full server is a nightmare. Once tried vrchat...it was 1 fpm(generous estimate) and the audio delayed by dozens of seconds haha.