Your right about the inventory for sure, because this is a game jam game I was afraid of people not bringing the keys with them or something so I the whole game's difficulty is a bit different from how I'd rather make it, but I also didn't think into it too much with my lack of player testers. I was VERY lazy with the tutorial; the last game I made actually did have a controls journal thing in which the player would collect more notes for it that explained more controls. I'm not the biggest fan of making games in flowlab as it takes a lot of effort to get creatures and things working so I stopped four days early. OH, and THANK YOU! for talking about my game, I really love it when someone plays a game I made and is the type of person the game is made for. Make me really happy to know all my effort wasn't in vain. If you want to talk more, I'd honestly like to read what you write I value feedback a lot! don't feel like you have to limit your messages! feedback is like XP for my dev stat. I'm... I'm just so glad someone liked the movement speed... so glad... although I doubt its perfect.
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About the movement speed, it's fine during every other part of the game, but it can make backtracking feel sluggish. I didn't mention it before, mainly because it's a tricky problem that's difficult to address in a lot of games. I think it's just something you'll have to coexist with, since it's easy to add too much to an only slightly tedious problem and turn it into a frustrating or annoying mechanic for players. There are things you can do to mitigate it. I'd look at horror games; they usually like to add spooky stuff to help fill in the dead time without actually affecting the player, also smaller/denser rooms could help. Personally, don't think it's a big enough deal to worry about; it's good enough to just avoid making the problem worse, like with large rooms or hallways.
I'm also not an expert game dev or anything, so take that with a grain of salt or something. ;-;
Also, while I really liked the ending and the "oh s***" moment when it didn't take damage, it didn't seem to be much of a threat once you get farther away from it. Even getting hit, it's easy to figure out the attack pattern on the spot, and getting shot at from off-screen wasn't as interesting when compared to the other enemies. Again, horror games are really good at this; they'll adjust the speed of the "chaser" depending on the distance from the player so that it's always just behind you. Might not work well with a projectile-based enemy, it can sometimes feel like trying to juke an aim-bot, but giving the final enemy more presence would have been nice, although I get the time constraints and difficulty of making it more complex. Still a great chase sequence, making the exit a really loud and memorable door-like thing made it the first place in my mind that could have been the exit (although that might change depending on the player, so playtesting would better tell you if it was obvious enough or not). I also appreciated that all you needed to do was run, sometimes horror games will add puzzles or other things into a chase, but that slows it down and makes it feel a bit cheap.
There were some little effects that I really enjoyed, the way the final room's walls rotated made it feel like a large moving machine. Small effect, but really effective. Really, the atmosphere of the game was nice, it changed when it needed to, and had good transitions or turning points that made the changes make sense. Especially during game jams, some sequences in games can feel rushed or come out of nowhere, so things like [hearing the goose honk off-screen -> becoming alert, -> and then seeing the enemy], [scanning big power core -> shooting it enough time to make me worried about ammo -> final enemy], or [normal floor -> entrance to dark unknown room -> seeing snake enemies go invisible] were great at setting the tone using audio cues, buildup, or enviornmental changes without just thrusting you into things with a hard cut transition or a cheap attack.
Art wise, things felt fairly consistent, although the UI felt a tad inconsistent with the rest of the game. Consistency is mainly what makes things look good, even without super detailed or complex sprites. Things like line thickness, outlines, and clear silhouettes are what I'd look out for. The UI just needs to have clearer shapes; you have a bunch of different modules that make up the UI, but the shapes kinda blend together, and some things look a bit wobbly. Also, texture-wise, some wall and floor textures were a little rough, for the same reasons as before, I'd recommend taking a look at minecraft's textures or any resource packs since they're really good about that kinda stuff. Sorry if this is a bit abstract; it was the only thing that really stood out as less consistent, but otherwise, it didn't affect gameplay by being hard to look at, which is the most important thing, so great work.
One last note about enemies, I noticed that some died a lot faster than others, not sure why. I suppose it probably had to do with hitting a weak point or something, but some of them would just drop dead without much of a fight. Could have been a bug or maybe a hidden bleeding mechanic, not sure, but if it is intended, it'd be nice to have an audio or visual cue of the enemy being critically wounded. It's a small and insignificant detail, just something that felt a bit odd ever once in a while, but was never a bad thing.
Lastly, showing the hp and oxygen but not showing the bullet count was a good idea. Not knowing your hp and just relying on screen effects or some other ambiguous cue gives it less presence, which would have made deciding between taking healing items or not a much more guided decision. Seeing your hp drop, or oxygen quickly reaching zero, helps add pressure by letting you know when you're going to die, and can activate the clutch gene in players, which leads to more exciting gameplay and avoids making deaths feel unexpected or unfair. This may be kinda obvious, but I wanted to mention it since you could have chosen to hide this info as you did with ammo, but it would have had the opposite effect, since you can be prepared to run out of ammo and have extra in hand, thus making it feel more fair when it does happen while also adding to the pressure and just a tiny bit of complexity to spice up combat. It might not work in other games, but it had a great effect here.
All in all, these were mainly small nitpicks I had, and considering this was a game jam, I'm surprised there were so few of them. Hopefully, some of my rambling was interesting. Anyway, good job on the game, I had a great time playing it! :D
thanks a bunch dude. Funny enough almost all of your nitpicks were things I’ve thought about. With the gun killing things faster sometimes, it has a one in ten chance to do like ten times more damage, some different audio would have been nice for that tho. Sadly I’m not the best artist, even more so when it comes to things like UI and tiles, I’m probably a better 3d artist but who knows. I did think a lot about movement speed and how other games like resident evil do it but all I ended up doing was shorting the hallways and stuff down, which still helped a lot. The chaser enemy at end was originally ment to be more of a persistent enemy that you could lost once you’d gotten far enough away but than it would reappear to slow you down, so I ended up changing a lot of that by increasing a few speeds while keeping the old code so that’s probably why they feel that way, but it was also a difficultly thing, If the player died there than they would have to do everything all over again. Thanks for all your feedback back. Did you know that everything is scannable? Even the all the enemies doors, items, small bugs, the wall lump and more? Even the chaser enemy was scannable although because of its weird color effect it doesn’t seem scannable when you try to scan it.
I did scan as many things as I could, although I don't remember ever scanning the powered door, and I don't know why. Ignore what I said about the exit lmao.
I also did try to scan the dead body of one of the enemies, but I remember it not doing anything, although I could have just been dumb again. It's a cool easter egg, but I doubt you would ever see that during normal gameplay. Random mechanics that aren't super tied into gameplay have a chance to be forgotten. There are a lot of ways you could remind the player, but a journal with a" #/# pages collected" could encourage more people to scan things because of completionism and curiosity. It gives them the idea of scanning as many things as possible, assuming the journal was something they were looking at often. Well, that's what would be intended, not sure if it would actually work. ( ._.)
Don't worry too much about art; you kept things readable and consistent, which is all you really need to do. Rot n Grind was a little hard to look at with all the noise in the textures and the poor contrast between things, so it's clear you've gotten a lot better in terms of visual design. btw, using a reference by just looking up random games or keywords like "UI for game dev" is what let me learn, so always give that a try.
The high damage might make sense if there were clear weak spots, like a hard to shoot segment on the snake or smthn, but it did feel slightly anticlimactic when, after killing one goose after 30 bullets, the next one goes down in like 3. An unexpected thing, though, was that it made fights against multiple geese feel a lot better(?). It made fights harder when taking on multiple enemies, but not overwhelmingly difficult. It's rng based so I don't want to give it too much credit, but it was something that was interesting. Enemy and combat design are topics waaay to big for me to even try to talk like I know anything about them, so take this with an atom of soduim.
Oooo, scanning the corpses of enemies would have been a good idea. I had it so they could only be scanned while alive. There were kinda weak spots, you'd do less damage the further down the segment of the snakes body you shot so you'd get normal damage for shooting their head. The turkey's had an equal amount of damage no matter where you shot. I could have done one of those journal things were in the top right it says "journal updated" once the player had scanned enough things so that the character would know what's going on, maybe with a small list of objectives. The turkey's whole health system had gotten really weird, but I couldn't figure out what I did wrong, so I balanced around it a bit which is why some bullets look like they drop kick the turkey while others look like they graze them, so it's not what I wanted but it wasn't bad so I wasn't bothered to try and fix it, was only a short game anyway. One time I was doing some testing and gave myself two guns and spawn 20 turkeys, man that was fun, I almost wanted to add a way to do that into the game but thought would be a bit much and wouldn't fit anywhere. The game was pretty optimized for all the creatures, even turning them into cubes that stored some basic data and respawning them when the player was within range from off screen, but I think it was just the tiles that too up a lot of the frames which is annoying.