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A jam submission

Three to One Odds: The Party KingView game page

Made for the IcoJam 2023
Submitted by JivinJimmy — 4 hours, 26 minutes before the deadline
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Three to One Odds: The Party King's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Music#163.6433.643
Gameplay#273.7863.786
Overall#563.3863.386
Creativity#633.5713.571
Theme#903.1433.143
Art#1352.7862.786

Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

Amazing game, I really enjoyed playing it, also shooting with Raycast was very cool, and the sparkle particle effect when hitting enemies, the environment combined perfectly with the music, very impressive, great work!! :))

Developer (2 edits)

Thanks, appreciate it! Fun fact, that spark effect isn't a particle effect on account of I have no idea how to use Unreal's particle system, so it's actually a group of projectiles that spawn with a random rotator. That's probably not helping the performance much. Looks cool though. Anyways, thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback!

Submitted

Very cool game! I really liked the idea and the gameplay. It was tons of fun to play! Great job! :D

Developer

Thank you very much! Glad you enjoyed!

Submitted

Like someone prior stated, it gives off doom vibes. Loads of fun! Really impressive for a weekend jam for sure! Lots of polish for a game about shooting colored rectangles.

Developer(+1)

Thank you so much! Yeah, I got to a point where I could either add more or stop and try to polish what I had. I'm glad I decided to polish it up. A finished game with colored rectangles is better than an unfinished game with character models would have been, I'm sure.

Submitted

This is pretty good! A intro cutscene and full voice acting! That's a rarity in this jam and I thank you for it, you even gave us special dialogue if you skip the intro which is a nice touch. The gunplay is pretty good and I had no problems with it but thank the lord for the health vials cause I needed almost all of them for the last gun fight which my opinion was a bit on the cheap side due how much damage he can do in a single shot compared to every other gunmen, even his two lackeys but yet it was perfectly on character for a semi retired drug lord villain. The art's basic but I got all the info I needed to tell who's who so good job, the music while a bit short was great and fit the setting wonderfully, if we ever get more content for this game (Also I got a perfect score on my 2nd try, and my god I know how you felt with sleeping during and after the game jam)

Developer(+1)

Thanks! Congrats on your perfect score! Yeah, the final boss' cheapness is totally on me. Here's what's going on under the hood, if you're interested:

The enemies all use the same Gunman AI with variables changed for health, damage, aim variance, stagger chance, et cetera, but they also have a couple that determine how they fight. In combat, they first do a random roll to see if they do a single shot or a burst shot, and then they roll another one to determine if they move after they shoot or just stand still and wait. (These are 2 separate variables but they ended up being set the same for each different enemy.) The standard gunman has a 25% chance to do a 3-round burst fire and a 25% chance to move afterwards. McCobb is basically a powered up guard with a 50% chance to do a 3-round burst fire and a 50% chance to move. Lizaro always does a 5-round burst fire and always moves. Zoroaster always fires a single shot and never moves. But because he never moves, he actually attacks faster than any of the others, and he also has an aim variance of 0.0 so he never misses. As long as he has line of sight, he will hit you for 20-30 damage every half second. And I also forgot to implement an attack delay variable, so he was supposed to only attack every 2 seconds or so. I didn't have too much trouble with him, but that's because I knew what to do. You either have to duck in and out of cover or else drip-feed yourself like 5 health vials if you face him out in the open. He definitely needs some adjusting, maybe just reduce his damage, his accuracy, and maybe his health.

Thanks for the feedback. I don't currently plan on making more levels or anything for this but I do want to fix it up a bit based on everybody's suggestions. Glad you enjoyed!

Submitted

Honestly I did a mix of both, I stood halfway down the stairs and took potshots at his nonexistent knees occasionally getting up to get better accuracy to shoot him, In my mind, he wanted to be cheap with 5 guards and 20+ damage shots 100% accuracy shots? Lets play cheap Lizaro, hit what you can't see >:3. both in character for Lizaro but annoying but seeing what goes on under hood does give me good insight, thank you!

Submitted (3 edits)

nice! felt like a geometrical doom. great voices and cutscenes!great job at making me feel bad for shooting at white cubes and really awesome level design, keep at it!
(maybe the one feedback, some animation or something so you get feedback that the enemies are shooting at you more clearely)

as you can see i tried speedrunning the level so some of the gunmen lived to tell the story

Developer (1 edit)

Thank you so much! The cancelled project that I reused ideas from was inspired by the Dark Forces series, that's the Star Wars Doom clone if you haven't heard of it. Using cubemin as placeholders was also inspired by a Doom mod called The Adventures of Square, but I haven't played that much of it, I just like the aesthetic. I tried to make the player's weapon as close as I could to the E-11 blaster rifle, minus the laser projectiles. Raycasts are quicker and I've had problems with fast moving projectiles going through enemies in the past. I know why, it's a tick thing, I just don't know how to fix it. Attack and damage feedback seems to be one of the areas that needs the most improvement. I think it'll be a lot of little touches to fix that, a lot of little polish things I neglected in my haste to get the game done. I'll see what I can do and I'll have to remember for next time how important that feedback is. 

...Speedrunning, eh? Hmm, maybe I could add a timer that starts when the player gains control after the opening cutscene and ends either when Zoroaster dies or when the screen finishes fading to black ('cause you can still finish off his guards before the screen fades out), and then display that on the results screen. Oh, and nice job with checking the friendly fire! I'm sure the innocent partygoing cubemin appreciate it!

It’s really good! I really enjoyed it! The game has a good concept a rather good story and CUTSCENES AT THE BEGINNING!?!. The only thing I would add is like guns to the enemies to indicate where they are looking instead of making new models or else it would loose its blocky charm and I would change the font but all in all, Well Done!

Developer(+1)

Thanks! Yeah, I think the intro cutscene and the death animation are the 2 things I'm most proud of from this project, maybe more because they're hacked together than despite that. Enemy guns is a good idea, I could have them at their side so it's more obvious they're a threat and then add a short animation for raising the gun before they enter their firing logic for the first time. I'd probably want to make custom guns for the gunmen and the bosses rather than reuse the player's gun. That gun model just stops after it's offscreen. And no worries, if I'm making character models they'll be for my next project. I'm too fond of the cubemin too. Oh, and ah, font's another thing I totally spaced on. Typically using default assets makes a game look a little unfinished, though Roboto's not bad as default fonts go.  

Submitted(+1)

First of all, WOW. Really well done! Its a shame that downloadable games like ours don't get played as much as web builds.

Awesome points:

  • Gunplay was smooth
  • Cutscenes were actually one of the separating factors between Three to One and other FPS games. Nice!
  • 10/10 for the theme! 3 bosses to one dude, geometric shapes, great sound effect choices.
  • Voice acting and level design were great, going into a club felt like a "club"

I think the game was really well executed but I also think you might want some feedback for the next thing you do

Constructive Criticism

  1. I agree with the others that it was hard to tell where the enemies were shooting from, I was getting shot from the back without knowing why I was taking damage
  2. Make the ray cast (is that also how entities see things in Unreal? I'm only used to Godot) longer for item pickups, some of the items on the ground were a little slippery to pick up
  3. Movement bob and footsteps. A small bit of visual/audio feedback to separate movement from idle would be a nice "quality of life" change. I think its a widely overlooked aspect of an FPS game but it really does make a small, positive difference when playing
  4. I guess to prevent cheesing of enemies, maybe make them chase you to the last seen location if you stray too far? this one is kinda hard to do in 3 days though 

My criticisms aren't meant to detract from the fantastic game, but to help you out on the next game you make. It really was an outstanding job and a 5/5 from me :)

Developer (2 edits)

Thank you so much! And thanks for the feedback. Lemme go over your suggestions...

I had planned on adding a damage flash, but the way I had it planned, it would only inform you that you were being hit, not where you were getting hit from. Hmm. I wouldn't want to add that circle in the middle of the screen because I usually find that distracting (and it might be beyond me to get working at my current skill level. I think it would just be to spawn a UI element and set its rotation based on the hit direction, but I'd have to mess around with it and try it out.) Another idea would be to have multiple flashes that would only flash part of the screen to indicate where you're being hit from. I could get the yaw from the look at rotation from the player toward the damage source and then divide it up into 90 degree chunks, so it flashes the whole screen if you get hit from the front (or no damage source in the case of fall damage), the right edge (with a gradient taper to transparent so it looks nice) for the right side, the left edge for the left side, or the bottom edge if you get hit from behind. I'd have to string these together so each flash cancels the other 3, otherwise they might stack in a weird way, or worse, get stuck. I could also add a different colored flash for item pickups, but I'm also a little concerned about photosensitivity, so I'll have to be careful. Messing with these in the past, I've found that having the flash be semi-transparent fixes that.

Yeah, they're raycasts, but they're called line traces in Unreal. You can also use different shapes like box traces, sphere traces, I think capsule traces, and multi-trace variants if you want to hit multiple things. The interaction and player shot raycasts are actually sphere traces so they don't have to be pixel perfect. Changing the length is a quick fix, I'll fiddle with it.

I tried to add movement bob on day 1 right after I added the weapon animations, but I couldn't get it to work quickly so I relegated it to the list of features to add for polish if I had time and then just never got to. (I tried to make it animate faster depending on how fast the player was going, but the velocity I got was divided into an x-y-z vector and I couldn't get the math right for a standard 2D speed. Fun thing from that was that I got the gun to jitter super fast when you run at a diagonal.) Now the right way to do this would be to add animations to a skeletal mesh, but the animations in this game are just hacked together with timelines adjusting the relative rotation and location of the gun's static mesh. What I could do is add a point or an invisible object to the hierarchy, make it the parent of the gun, and animate that so as not to have the walk animation interfere with the gun animations, and then add a nice curve to the object's position, but with the math right this time. And not gonna, lie, totally spaced on footsteps. I could add sound cues to the timeline so when it hits the bottom of the curve it plays.

The enemies actually do chase you, they just do it kinda poorly. If they don't have line of sight, they get a random location within range, and then if that location is closer to the player than their current position, they move there. They also have a random chance to move after firing, but they don't have flanking AI or anything. I'm pretty new at AI and did both the AIs real quick, they could definitely stand to improve.

And one more thing I don't think anyone who's played it has mentioned yet, the enemies are actually not hostile until the music change. The gunmen constantly track the player and only switch to alerted if they have line of sight and if one of 2 flags are set, one for "transgressed" which happens during the music change, and one for "weapon hot" which happens at the end of the raise gun animation and goes away with the lower gun animation (this also sets whether left click fires or raises the gun.) The music change happens when an event called "transgression" calls, which happens when the player fires their gun within radius of an enemy (so they can hear it,) or when they step into one of three trigger volumes a a little ways into the club. What this means is that the player can put their gun away, waltz right in the front door, and scope the place out. I probably should have introduced that feature somehow.

Anyways, thanks so much for playing, glad you enjoyed, and I really appreciate the feedback! Hope you don't mind my ramble. I like explaining things. Talking shop, you know?

Submitted(+1)

I LOVED this kind of story-driven game! I just wanted to play this to the end and find out the ending, but got killed by the boss at the end. But the experience was INCREDIBLE. Maybe if there were some indicators for the enemies when they're shooting or making little models would be nice, but even without them I had lots of fun. Thank you for this experience!

Developer(+2)

I'm so glad you enjoyed! Yeah, what I'm definitely hearing is that the final boss is way too tough compared to the rest of the level. It's not just that he can take off a quarter of your health or more per shot, it's also that he has 100% accuracy, and that there's an unimplemented variable that was supposed to adjust their shot rate that I just forgot to do anything with, so he was supposed to be shooting way more slowly. Likewise, Lizaro is supposed to be shooting faster. I was originally planning on making character models, but I realized on Saturday when I didn't even have the AI done that there was no way in hell I was going to be able to model, skin, rig, and animate multiple character models in addition to making the level, scripting the level logic, and implementing the dialogue, so I just slapped a color-change material onto a placeholder model and called it good. Hmm. Maybe I could make the gunmen jump when they fire? Then I could just reduce their jump height so they only bounce a little bit compared to the civilians, more of a jitter.

Submitted

i can't beat it. Good job!

Developer

Heh. Thanks!

Submitted

Ok, this was pretty great. The voice acting was done well. The level design was good. I had trouble doing a full frontal assault but was able to sneak inside through a ladder and that made it a lot more doable.  A couple of notes would be to have the enemies a different color than the wall cause they blend a bit, maybe a slightly closer pickup radius on items, and a bit more visual feedback when you take damage. (especially on big daddy boss cause he wrecked me so fast lol ). Yeah really fun to figure out how to succeed in this game.  (if you ever want to work with an artist for assets hit me up)

Developer

Thanks! Yeah, I did the colors as the very last thing and used the half dozen or so demo material instances I had already made and just tried to make it work, thus the sidewalk being blue and my comment in the about section about painting the stairs at 2am. I think the easiest way to fix that would be to just make either the red used for the entry doors and dance floor walls more purple or make the guards more purple, or maybe just more washed out for more contrast, and maybe make the yellow in Zoroaster's arena darker and more orange. I was actually originally going to include a quick flash on the HUD for damage, but that ended up being one of the features I axed for time, along with the weapon bobbing when you move. I was hoping the audio feedback would be enough on its own. And yeah, the bounding box for the pickup item baseclass is huge, slightly bigger than the large ammo pickup. I could make that a variable and make it smaller in the child classes, I just overlooked it. The main thing I'd want to fix if I update this is that the civilians on the dance floor all try to go upstairs and the civilians in Lizaro's arena try to go downstairs, so they just block that staircase.

And yeah, I may just take you up on that. I'd also be interested in maybe helping out with your project, if'n you want. I love space flight games.

Submitted

yeah that would be awesome, here is my discord if you want to add me .lethalbacon. 

Developer

Cool. Sent.

Submitted

I wasn't able to beat it. Maybe I'm just bad at this sort of game (lol). But I really liked the premise and the gameplay. And the characters were full of personality, despite being rectangles. Really good job, especially for a game jam game!

Developer

Thanks! Yeah, the final boss is kinda tough. The trick is to hide in the side rooms, behind the pillars, or behind the side bar in the hallway with the drink on it.