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A jam submission

The Big HouseView game page

A Reality Gameshow with unique randomness for replayability.
Submitted by Crucible Gaming — 4 days, 4 hours before the deadline
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The Big House's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Fan Favorite#263.8003.800

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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Comments

(+1)

Great use of FinalBossBlue's tilesets and characters! An interesting, fun, and unique concept. It was a lot of fun although I never figured out how to gain influence, and only got 2nd place. It's something I would enjoy seeing elaborated on.

Suggestion: Definitely elaborate on the different aspects of the game so they can actually lead to some interesting tactics to try and win. Also, fix the timing on that ‘Simon says’ mad lab one. I dunno if it was intentional, but all lights seemed to go off at once at the end and it’s impossible to figure out which to hit in what order.

Jam Host(+1)

Please see Teal's play-through video, as well as her review of the game in the video description:

(+1)

It's creative and fun to play,i look foward to see where it goes since the idea made me curious.

(+1)

It doesn't go exactly as I want, like getting kicked out of the game at the first round, but that's not something bad.

Submitted

Interesting idea.

The door doesn't give you a choice after prompting you about skipping, it just does so.

Could have used visuals for the selection menu. The second choice of who to eliminate is messed up and shows horizontally.

The computer terminal should definitely not have you input right away.

The cow collection was a bit annoying because you don't just touch the cows, you have to interact with them. This isn't clear from the dialogue.

The game basically tells me to spread my relationships evenly while focusing on whoever is eliminated that week because they'll vote on the winner, but I found that it might be better to just focus on 2-3 of them. The important part is getting the power to eliminate (and power to rescue if possible). First week, get rid of your lowest relationships. This is your throwaway. The top 3 relationships, you want to work on them. Second week, work on your top 2 (or top 3) relationships and eliminate them. If one of them gets the power to rescue, switch to the third choice (or, do a second throwaway and take the risk of that throwaway being picked). You want them to be around the 60-70 range. Third week is fairly easy. Bump up the top two and ignore the third unless one of your choices gets the power to rescue. If that happens, use your influence to do the stronger relationship boost. You want your allies to be in the 60-80 range. Last week, keep the person with the lowest relationship and focus boosting the other. Since you'll be getting the last power to eliminate, if there is a tie, you win.

If you cancel the relationship menu, it picks the relationship loss option instead of just cancelling. I think I almost failed because of this and another issue. (I still got 1st place, but only because I got the power of elimination every week).

Why does it look like you can eliminate yourself? (I didn't dare test it though).

I wish the game was a bit clearer about the fact that whoever you pick at the end is not the one that is auto eliminated. It says it, but it isn't clear at first because of how the game works until that point. Also, add confirmation dialogues please. I almost failed because of this.

Influence is honestly fairly useless here because you need to sacrifice relationship to gain influence. I didn't try to see if I could go negative though.

You can cheese a lot of the minigames. Wasn't a big fan of the spike traps area though.

Not a huge fan of the memory puzzle. You can record it, but some of the icons flash almost at the same time.

It felt like one of cannons misfired at some point.

I wasn't ever able to get the power to rescue. The minigames for that one...

Developer

Thanks for your feedback!  All of it was very valid. As for the cows one, I don't think that's true :/  In every playtest I've ever done you only have to touch the cows!


Thanks for playing my game.

Submitted

Could just be some issue due to the high movement speed combined with the fact that I'm running the game at 165 fps (RPGM does some weird things past 60 fps, iirc). Weird that action button worked then.

Interesting idea of entering a reality TV show for a game. It's not bad, but it's unusual and maybe you should provide one instructional show text when you enter the big house. Something like "Use your time and influence to gain relationship points with the other contestants, but choose wisely because you're limited on both!"

I ran into a bug when you walk into the left door. The player is prompted with a show text that asks, would you like to skip the next part and go straight to bed, but then it doesn't give a show choice, it just jumps ahead. 

On the shed map you forgot to add collisions, you can walk all over everything, even the walls, Ray. There are some simple mapping or region restriction errors here. Not a big deal, but check them out and get them fixed for the next version update.

On the computer terminal please prompt a show choice BEFORE the input number. People are going to naturally feel inclined to inspect everything when they enter a room. So you may be asking the player for an answer before you've given them the right information.

Most of these puzzle are very short and require very little effort, but then you have a spike dungeon trap puzzle which is quite frustrating. I think they can all work, but maybe polish the difficulty so that it ramps up slowly. The difficulty basically goes like this:  kindergarten work, kindergarten work, college essay. Skipping grade school, middle school and high school entirely. Add some middle ground difficulty puzzles before the dungeon trap. Maybe sequence them instead of randomly selecting them.

When the player gets to decide who to use the pendant of power on, you should increase the relationship and/or influence the player has with that person. You basically just saved their butt in the competition and a person might remember that you just saved them. That would certainly call for a nice Relationship boost with the person you picked to save, but sadly it doesn't in this version. 

The cowboy minigame where you wrangle the cattle was my favorite minigame, it was simple, the music for it was good and I had genuine fun for one minute. :)

I would also like to see your unused time points carry over to the next round. I have ended every round with a single time point and I always start with five. It would be nice to be able to save them to add some different strategy, but I understand why you wouldn't for realistic reasons. Keep in mind though, it's a game and realism should hold less weight than fun gameplay. First make your game fun, and THEN try to make sense of it.

The inclusion of a Guide in the main menu was a great idea as I was unsure of many things about the game until I read through the guide. 

I finished second place, 13 influence(it never really moved) and 962 fans. The biggest tip that should be included is, "Remember that all the contested will come back to vote for the winner when you reach the finals, so don't neglect anyone." It would make sense to spend the first couple rounds just adding relationship points to everyone evenly instead of picking favorites. The person who I had the most relationship points with ended up winning. 

Overall I really liked this entry into the game jam it genuinely brought something different to the table and felt much different from the other entries. There were plenty of things I felt could have done better and a few bugs and map issues, but those could be polished out in the final version. Thanks for participating and congratulations on having a decent project to show on your portfolio! I look forward to seeing what you bring next time.

Developer(+1)

Hey Drifty, thanks for taking time to play my game. The bugs and balancing problems you bring up are very valid. I'll make sure to fix those as soon as the competition ends. 

Thanks for ideas and tweaks on how to make things better. I appreciate the work yall are doing to help us get better at gamedev, which is the goal here. Thanks! 

Submitted

The big house is such an interesting concept. I loved the idea of playing a character as part of a reality game show, and being able to influence others into voting out people. My only grief with this is I was hoping for more dialogue and interactions with the NPCs. And including more puzzle or strategy mini-games would be cool too! But overall I really do like the concept of it all. 

Not sure if this is a bug or not, but for counting the animals on the farm game, the player can easily pause the game, which pauses the time and freezes the animals in place, giving them plenty of time to count. So I pretty much got that done in less than 30 seconds, was almost the star champion the whole time.

(+1)

Hey there! Just finished my first game and I won! It was fun making friends with the NPCs! Good luck!

Submitted

Hi, I just played your game. This is really pretty cool. I ended up being second in the show and I only won two of the minigames, but it was fun.

I did notice some bugs:

  • In the Influence part of the guide, you forgot to capitalize 'However'
  • I had a game, where two of the characters had the exact same sprite (Maximo and Reginald), which ended up being a bit confusing. I would suggest that all contestants have different sprites in the future.
  • Whenever I interact with red door it asks if I want to go to the next phase, but it doesn't actually give you a choice.
  • I could walk on the walls in the following minigames: Farm Frenzy & Mad Scientist.
  • When I'm talking to someone and I use the Cancel button,  I lose 3 AP and gain influence. How? And what is that?
  • Upon nomating the second person, the choice window gets all stretched out.
  • For the credits, I would remove the AP window.

Honestly, this entry is super impressive and the minigames are mostly fun (though I found Farm Frenzy to be a bit hard; I always took about 2x or even 3x times more than the winners of those games). Great job, Crucible!

Developer

Hey, thanks for playing my game and I really appreciate your feedback. As soon as the game jam is over and I have the ability to update, I will! Most of those bugs I was unaware of, and will be fixed asap! 

The characters are randomly generated from a pool of sprites, which is why occasionally there's identical contestants. This was just a time constraint thing. I'll be adding more sprites after the gamejam, and once there's a fair number will add some code that will prevent the identical contestant bug! 


Thanks once again for playing, I appreciate you taking the time to play the game and also leave some good feedback! 

Deleted 2 years ago
Developer

Thanks for your feedback!  We will continue to improve it.  Once we get some more minigames, we'll be able to expand it to include more contestants and more features.