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Try not to Make a Mess's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Polish | #3 | 3.130 | 3.500 |
| Narrative/Mood | #3 | 3.667 | 4.100 |
| Art | #4 | 3.309 | 3.700 |
| Overall | #5 | 3.130 | 3.500 |
| Game Design | #5 | 3.220 | 3.600 |
| Audio | #6 | 2.952 | 3.300 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Monkeybrain
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Comments
A nice game within the scope of the jam (especially seeing you went at it solo)!
I really like the cutscene and the setup line!
I like most did not understand there was a button for "hitting" stuff nor that the crate could be destroyed to get a weapon. (I did wonder why there was a single crate randomly placed in the room though).
I think this is a problem of visual communication (and lack of sound cues) when you click. Since we are viewing top-down, a headbutt isn't really something that is easily seen. Same with you have the axe, it is just a small vertical hit. These does not really change the siluette of the character. It would be much more clear to do a horizontal swipe, both with the arm and with the axe.
I also would think that the way to build upon this would be to have someone chase you, and you being able to get in extra messes by throwing stuff at the things you pass but are unable to walk into. And ofc something special that you can throw back at your pursuer to make them pause for a bit.
I think compulsive mode seems like a fun idea, but I myself don't have any good suggestions currently as for how to make it work. Not that it would be the same thing, but maybe it would be easier to make that about trying to stop Bernie as another character...Nah. Not really the gameplay of compulsive then.
Yeah, all very good points. The animations are pretty poor right now. I didn't even get around to hooking up a jump animation. And I agree that the hit animation should be more noticeable.
As you mention picking up the weapon isn't a big advantage right now, so it's not like people are missing out on much. Eventually I think it'd be good to make the crate "glow" or highlight it in some way to get across that it can be interacted with.
Thanks a lot for playing the game and the great feedback!
Dang, it didn't work on my Parallels running on my Mac. I watched the stream from Zack and the game looked pretty fun! Only feedback I would have would be to grade the player based on the score, the higher the points the more agitated the guy who leaves would be. And of course a leaderboard might be fun.
We thought about doing something like that in the bulldozing game. Basically instead of trying to clear the mess, you would drive into a grocery story and just trash the place.
Anyway, great job!
Draekdude
Leaderboard is definitely something I wanted to add, but didn't get around to. And yeah, I have a few ideas on how to add variety to the intro/outro that I had to leave out to get it done in time for the submission.
I'm also interested in providing Mac builds, just haven't figured out a good way to do so since I don't own any Apple devices.
Thanks for the feedback and ideas!
I watched the host play this game, and was instantly intrigued. The art style and characters was immediately immersive for me.
During the lore, I had a hard time reading the purple text from the characters standing in front of the door.
Once in the game, it was really fun to watch him hop around and smash stuff. You’d think with the title of the game you wouldn’t want to make a mess, so having the point of the game to actually make a mess was a hilarious twist.
This game has serious potential. Maybe there could be other patrons in the bar that get upset with you for trashing their meal/beverage and could go after you.
Great work, I think you’re onto something here!
Thank you very much for the feedback. I've been busy jotting down notes on everyone's feedback, and I've got plenty of stuff to improve. I agree that having some sort of goal or obstacle would be good to give the player a bit more direction, something to work towards.
Another thing I had considered was to implement some sort of leaderboard and have people try to beat each other's scores (currently the room is procedurally generated every time you start a new game, but it could be easily modified so that players can provide a specific seed if one turns out to be particularly challenging or interesting).
Now I just need to find the time to implement all of these ideas. =)
Cool game. I saw in comments you said you want to go back and tweak compulsive mode later on. I definitely think it would be worth it, I think its a cool idea and am glad you left it in. With some tweaking I think it would be my favorite of the two modes. Maybe something that forces Bernie to run directly towards objects so you have to time jumps?
Played these with my 15 year old son, he said levels of increasing difficulty or some kind of obstacles or antagonist other than the clock would go a long way.
I appreciated the "And Bernie..." setup line in dialogue.
Very true, the compulsive mode currently has a high probability of the character just getting stuck in a corner or to walls, so that's something that definitely needs to be improved. There's also a partial mechanic in the game that allows the player to pick up a weapon to do more damage (there's a single crate in the level that nobody seems to have realized that they can destroy), so that would probably also be interesting in compulsive mode. Making it such that the character has a more specific goal and also knows how to jump, rather than just randomly changing direction would likely make it more challenging.
And yes, adding a bit of actual level design would probably be fun and add variety. I also liked Zack's suggestion of adding specific goals/quests. Of course that all blows up the scope significantly and I wonder if adding all that complexity might actually make things worse. Won't really know until I try, so I guess that's what I'll do.
Thanks a lot for the feedback!
Can you make a WebGL build? As a general rule I don't play itch games unless it's in browser, even from players I trust.
Unreal Engine doesn't support web builds anymore, so I don't think this is possible. I share your scepticism when it comes to playing random games off the Internet, but I think itch.io's desktop app is a nice tool to help alleviate some of those concerns. It creates a sort of sandbox and runs as a separate user to prevent most issues that would be problematic. There's some information here if you're interested:
https://itch.io/docs/itch/using/sandbox.html
Alternatively if you're on Windows Pro you can use the OS's built-in sandbox feature. Other operating system have similar features. These are all slightly inconvenient, so I fully understand if you don't want to invest the extra time.
Very nice! It took me a while to understand the "compulsive" mode, but what a great idea. Also I was delighted to see the main menu, intro, and level all be part of the same scene. Very clever!
Thanks for the kind words. The compulsive mode didn't quite end up being what I had in mind, I somehow couldn't get it to feel good, but I wanted to leave it in because I thought it was an interesting twist. I'll likely go back and try to improve it at some point.
Really loved the game!
its simple but very effective.
I would love to have even more chaos that you can throw things for example!
Good game tho! :)
There's a single crate that spawns in the level, which drops a weapon when destroyed (you can hit it using the attack key/button). You can technically hit stuff with it and it should have a physics force applied to it, but I don't think it works quite well. One of the things I would like to go back and tweak to see if I can make it better. It could be over the top powerful for some extra fun maybe.
you should its an amazing concept!
Sorry boss, I was compulsed to make a mess.
Buffs:
Polish:
Thanks for the feedback. It's much appreciated. I should stress that I'm not an artist and all of these were assets that I found online, so I can't take credit for that. There's "premium" versions of these assets that I've since bought to both support the artist and add more stuff to the game in the future.
I love the idea of having the boss chase you around, I'll definitely have a go at that. I also want to go back and tweak the character movement to make it a bit snappier.
I had played around with destruction a bit, but couldn't get it to work properly. I had to disable physics after a little while for these items because otherwise there'd be weird (albeit sometimes hilarious) glitches. Definitely something worth going back and tweak at some point, though.