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A jam submission

GravShooterView game page

Fast paced Multiplayer Shooter that lets you decide what "down" means. Because the fastest way around is falling
Submitted by trud — 3 days, 4 hours before the deadline
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GravShooter's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Engagement#3223.0003.000
Overall polish#3292.8572.857
Creative use of art assets#3392.9522.952
Overall#3422.9372.937

Ranked from 21 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

A great idea, and very ambitious. I mucked around for a bit but unfortunately wasn't able to play against anyone. The gravity mechanic is very cool but I admit it is a bit disorientating - I would not make a good space marine. I like the amount of weapons you included.

I did find the platforming a little bit off, I think a bit of ramp up of X velocity would be a bit better than instant full speed. Otherwise though, a solid little multiplayer shooter.

Submitted

It takes a lot of courage to make a multiplayer game in a game jam! Nice dedication, cool mechanics, it was fun, I had a lot of lag, so it was hard to play.

Developer(+1)

I noticed. No idea if it was on your end or mine. Usually, there's a lot less lag. And thanks for playing and the feedback :)

Submitted(+1)

Great work!  Making anything online is challenging (I spent a few weeks messing about with Photon Unity Networking myself), so doing it for a jam is particularly impressive.  I tested the connection with myself by generating two instances in browser, and things felt just fine.

Submitted (1 edit)

Very impressive! I’m glad I got to try it out with the developer around. trud made a server that said “shoot to alert”, which means he’s sitting there afk until someone comes by, that’s some dedication. It’s a great concept for a shooter to switch gravity, and there are many weapons to choose from, all of which work well in the multiplayer. There’s an indicator to tell which direction your gravity has been set to in the bottom-right which is great. There’s a scoreboard to keep track of kills and deaths too. I liked shooting the developer, and dodging shots was fun. I tried doing all sorts of stupid things but the game is really solid, and the bullet collisions all work well despite moving at high speeds. As for criticism, the movement feels too slippery, the transition after landing a grav change is too sudden, there is a lack of feedback when player performs a grav change, and perhaps the level design can be improved. I can see this being a ton of fun with a full server. Very well done!

Developer

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it :). You caught me just back from vacation. Wasn't able to jump in all week but I'll try to as much as I can for the rest of the rating.

You caught a new bug though ;) Shouldn't be able to reload spam but I already found it :)

Submitted

Pretty cool idea, but I don't think the online system works well for game jams. I also noticed that the movement was quite slippery, making it hard to do precise movement.

Developer

We might have different ideas of working well ;) I agree it's pretty bad at getting many meaningful ratings because it's hard to rate without bringing friends or getting lucky with a random other player. But the again I learned how to do multiplayer with real world project, tried out some other ideas and got a better understanding of the engine all while having fun doing it and getting a lot of feedback. 

Might not work to get a good ranking or the most plays but it worked well enough for me ;)

Submitted

Pretty cool game! I wish I had some more friends to play, the weapons and movement feel great, I love the gravity feature, the only problem was that the camera rotation was a little bit disorienting

Submitted

Impressed how instant the multiplayer is ... I had it opened in two browsers - just to check it out. Really felt responsive, well done!

The platforming was a bit hard to get used to ... very floaty and the horizontal movement was too quick imho.

But overall nice game for the jam!

Developer

Thanks, most of the network performance is godot's work though in spite of my code ;)

The platforming had to take a back seat during the jam sadly. Ran out of time because I spent the day I had planned for polish on getting the multiplayer to run outside of LAN and in browser. But it's definitely being fixed after :)

Submitted

Hey fun game!

Wish it had a small bots to enhance the experience, but whatever managed to play with peeps^^.

There's alot of depth in the game, starting with the gravity mechanic to the weapon system.

During the game we both had garbage internet so players kept telephoning everywhere ahah,

Umm usually games do movement prediction where the players moves in the predicted direction.
This can solve greatly the teleportation issue.

Buy yeah making an online game was bery bold of you. Props for that.

Good work!

Developer

Thanks and very glad you had fun :)

The multiplayer decision was mainly driven to avoid building a bot AI for the game.

I'll have to look into handling connection problems. There should be some movement prediction, but my guess is it collapses quickly if the connection hiccups badly enough.

 The whole network code is going to need a clean up though. I'm pretty sure it's sending a lot of unnecessary stuff back and forth. Didn't have time to optimize and a lot of things could be handled better.  A few nights of sleep really help with digesting concepts ;)

Submitted(+1)

Cool project. It would certainly benefit from a bit more friction to make precise platforming easier, but it's still impressive what you managed to do with this.

Developer

Thanks, quite happy I got it working. Movement is number one on the "didn't manage to fix, will fix later" list. Feels quite wonky when jumping

Submitted(+1)

Wow, a multiplayer game during a jam .. I'm impressed!

I could only walk around alone and it seems like the particles (for firing a bullet) obey their own gravity. I can'r really rate on a gameplay base but it's a very creative use of the assets, a super cool idea and again - a multiplayer game during a jam .. nice!

Developer(+1)

Thanks, quite enjoyed it overall, but it has some drawbacks as you noticed.

Everything except the players stays in global gravity. It's something that quickly becomes working knowledge once you see your rocket fall up and away from an enemy instead of raining down on him like you planned ;)

Submitted

Welp since I got no friends I only could judge this game by running around on my own...
That being said, well done on making a multiplayer game on a gamejam, I am already impressed just by that.

Two things I'd suggest to improve

1 - the physics, it is good how fast-paced it makes the game, but it also made precise jumps impossible. F.e. try going into bottom-left corner on the map and try jumping onto that 2x2 square next to you. I fail to do it 8 times out of 10. It would be much better if slight tap on a jump button / one of arrow keys would change your speed only slightly, and not fling you all over the place.

2 - the way the main feature of this game is implemented. When I touch the ground the entire scene rotates to make your local gravity point downwards, completely disorienting players. What's even worse, after you lend, the keys you would use to switch the gravity field do not rotate accordingly, making it really confusing and forcing the player to manually keep track of the gravity at all times.

Developer

Thanks, for the feedback :) Would have jumped in myself but I'm nowhere near a mouse till Saturday...

They are both on the list but got pushed back by other stuff that was more broken ;) I had to submit a little early so there's almost 20 hours left on the jam clock that didn't get used. Quite a hectic jam...

For the gravity I'll need to do some experiments though. I wanted the switch to be a little disorienting, with the switch being on landing you can somewhat choose your time and place by switching gravity during flight. But I'm pretty sure I've overdone that by now.

For orienting there is an icon in the bottom right that keeps track of gravity. I found it made orientation easyish with some practice but still kept it something you had to think about. So during the limited playtesting with other people it made for some nice, planned moves and some tense, recoverable screwups when things got stressful. I'll definitely try relative controls for gravity though.

Like multiplayer the gravity switching was an idea that was nice and simple as a short bullet point ;)

Submitted

Wow congrats on making a multiplayer game in such a short time ^^'

I could only test it with myself, but it's a pretty nice concept! I'd argue the controls were a lot too slippery for me, and also the fact that your input to switch gravity is based on the "normal" gravity makes it hard to do a quick and intuitive change mid-action, at least for me! (Also maybe it's because I was playing with myself, I didn't see the health bar of the "other" player go down as shooting them.)

Must be fun with a lot of player going around in all directions!

Developer(+1)

Thanks, nothing I'm going to try again with such a time limit. Polish suffered a lot because of it. But a fun experiment during which I learned a lot :)

Movement and the switching will definitely get an overhaul after the jam. They were in and working technically so I didn't find the time to touch them again during the jam...

Submitted(+1)

Fun little shooter game! Challenging to make a multiplayer game for a game jam, but you pulled it off technically! I like the gravity flipping mechanic, so with some more polish it could be really satisfying to play

Developer(+1)

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it :). Polish suffered a little due to the technical aspects of multiplayer. But on the bright side: I remembered to keep my window closed most of the time so the kids in the neighborhood only learned a minimal number of creative curses ;)

Submitted

haha, good for the kids ;)

Submitted(+1)

The problem with multiplayer games in jams is that there probably won't be any players, and so happened in my case.
Though I couldn't try the combat, it's an interesting concept and I think it has potential.
It definitely needs some improvement on controls, make the movement overall slower and slow down the player in mid air when he stops pressing the movement button (or it feels like you're being thrown around).
The gravity shifting in my opinion would be better if it was relative to the player's current gravity (so if I'm upside down and shift to left, I expect to go to the world's right) and rotate it before the fall, or smoothly during it.
That said, I hope you'll keep working on it after the jam, I'm interested to see how it will be. Good job :)

Developer

Thanks, I'll definitely keep working on it. Multiplayer wasn't the best idea indeed. Took me about half the time I had for the jam to get it working properly (through NAT and in browser, the stuff in game was surprisingly easy) plus the player part now. I would try and join as many games as possible myself but I only have access to a tablet with keyboard at the moment...

The camera on gravity will need some more experimenting. I tried rotating immediately but then you lost aim so it was a stupid move during combat. Now you can shift as often as you want during the fall but have to watch where you land.

I try the other movement suggestions for sure

Submitted(+1)

Interesting game and adding multiplayer is definitely a nice feature. But the switch feels really weird right now. It disorientated me so much I didn't even know where I was anymore. Nevertheless nice concept and well done especially for the 48 hours time restriction.

Developer

Thanks :) Multiplayer wasn't that hard to implement in hindsight, just pretty annoying to figure out. Godot does it really well and with 3.2 and WebRTC support it has built in NAT traversal and works in the browser. Only thing missing is good documentation and examples...

The camera during switching will definitely get some work after the jam. Had to finish before my 48 hours were up to go on vacation ;) The experience from the limited amount of testing I got in with some people is that it's disorienting but one can get used to it after a few tries. Would have preferred it though if I had managed to implement it as a slow rotation during falling.

Submitted(+1)

I like the concept, an online multiplayer game is very ambitious for a game jam. I could see this being very fun if more people were playing it. I could only figure out how to switch my gravity between up and down but it seems like you can do all 4 directions in the clip so maybe I was missing a control. The camera swap was very jarring and I thought I was being teleported at first, so I feel like it would probably best to keep the camera consistent and just have the character change direction. Really cool concept tho

Developer

Thanks, I'm glad you like it :) and yes, I really regretted trying multiplayer during the middle part of the jam. 

All directions should work by holding the right mouse button and pressing the corresponding W,A,S,D key.

The jarring was intentional but it definitely needs some more tweaking. My thinking was that it has to be somewhat disorienting so you have to be more strategic about it's use and so you have to keep track of which direction you're pointed to at the moment when switching again. During testing there was some flying by just rotating quickly and steering by varying the timing. So there are ways to avoid being disoriented till you can afford it ;)

Player count is also something i thought about too late during the jam...