My review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgxU6Tyns-Y&t=305s
Overall, cool game, and thanks a lot for reviewing everyone’s games, including mine
Viewing post in LOOP PROTOCOL jam comments
Amazing video! Thank you for going so in depth! First off, with Loop Protocol- I 100 percent agree with your thoughts on third person, I definitely lived through all of the pain you described lol from camera collision to animations, and controlling, it was a source of a lot of my work in the game. I think the controller feels that way because I went with a velocity based root motion controller (hindsight 20/20) and I tried to balance the way the animations looked vs. player feel, but honestly after watching your video, I should've prioritized the player feel more and sacrificed the "look" of the movement animations. You did run into bugs (we were face palming watching your playthrough) the dino was indeed an anomaly, it SHOULD'VE scanned, and scanned during our play testing, so idk what happened there. I think we could've been clearer on the loop punishment system. If you miss an anomaly, you don't actually get reset to 0, you are just attacked by the crawler (Loop Entity). It was 11 loops, you were right there about to beat it! Anomalies were random, I think it was coincidence that you got blood rain and the body bag in the same order, weirdly. Another source of pain was making sure anomalies did not repeat, something you mentioned in your hotel game section of the video. This worked mostly, but we did notice a small anomaly you didn't catch (a sign said 666 on it) did get chosen twice. So overall, very grateful to see your playthrough, shows all the cracks which hurts when you put a lot of time into it, but necessary to see to improve!
Secondly, you showing the transition and behind-the-scenes of Hotel Game was absolutely amazing! I tried a few times to implement the teleport system with the player, but I think since I was using Unity's measurements and not blender, that was the reason it didn't work out! Also generating the hallway with the anomaly was extremely smart. We only generated the anomalies themselves in the same hallway, but your method really helped create that seamless look. Overall, THANK YOU again for that video, very informative and educational for us!
Also, yes the renders were done by my wife lol all of the framed pictures were hers. We died laughing when you noticed the blender guru donut tutorial render 🤣
No problem, and also one thing I forgot to mention was the reflections bleeding through from the cat place into the outside hallway, to fix that you’d set all your level geometry to static and bake a reflection probe (and a lightmap). This might make the game darker as well, but to fix that you’d increase the exposure via post processing (maybe need to tweak the contrast as well if it doesn’t look so good). Also, turn on ambient occlusion in your lightmap settings, and turn on cast shadows for the spotlight flashlight the player has, this will make it so things look more “correct” / make things look less “flat” (if that makes sense)
Yeah it definitely makes sense, that was something that we didn't know how to fix as well. We just approached baking the lighting to save performance, but it makes sense to change the settings of the surfaces that it affects as well. Great tips! The whole point of this jam was for us to grow as devs and you are helping in that process for sure