Post by ComfyMitten Samuel in 9 Dayz jam comments

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This was a nice experience! Although I will say that I ran into some visual bugs the first time I tried playing it - the menus and my character dot would disappear and only appear briefly when hovering over other interactible items. I was playing using the itch.io sandboxed app, in case that helps at all.

Most of my feedback mirrors what Jakub & Jay already posted, but I have a few other things to mention:

I found it a bit difficult to select specific cards that were sorted on the right side of the pile, and it also felt pretty claustrophobic with all the cards visible at once, at least at the size they currently are. Have you considered adjusting the card layout so only one is maximized at once, with the rest shrunk down or pushed out of the way a bit? I think getting that UX just right will help a lot especially with the very packed areas of the game. You might even be able to do something completely different, like having miniaturized cards hovering above the objects they represent instead of all stacked in a pile.
I'm not a huge fan of having a real time counter that ticks down while also having turn-based mechanics that eat up time from the same pool - I would prefer only going with one system or the other. I could see the gameplay becoming more strategic if it's all turn-based, or possibly more hectic/manic if it's all in real time. If you do narrow it down to just one system, I think you should really lean into it!
A nice to have feature would be dynamic aspect ratio scaling; I played on an ultrawide monitor, and it would be really great to see more of the map or at least some simple decorations on the sides rather than darkness.
I think it would be nice to have the option to run away from a battle (probably at a cost), or have some basic 'struggle' attack that kicks in when you're out of weapons, like in Pokemon. Early on, I didn't know what I was doing and died after only doing a bit of damage to a zombie, so I had to wait quite a while for my character to die while standing around doing nothing.
Minor spelling error: I noticed on the game page that there is a section titled "Scounting, Rest & Sleep", but I assume it should be "Scouting".

Great job on this game!

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Humane Tiger303 days ago

Hello Samuel! Another great feedback giver - oh man, my hopes and expectations for people playing my game and giving me feedback in this Jam have so fully come true thanks to folks like you -Tiger haz some great times here!

I will check the disappearing images. It happended during your first playthrough, right? I built a rudimentary image preloading system, but it only preloads the images it knows about - the latest ones I forgot to add.

"I found it a bit difficult to select specific cards" -- Card interactions in these dense places also annoy me, to be honest. Who was doing this %&$ ?! Oh, wait - it's me :-D haha Yeah, the whole thing has to be more dynamic, I am afraid. Your idea of "pushing the other cards aside" is pointing into a good direction - I will try harder here and think about the math needed for that, do some experiments etc..
"I'm not a huge fan of having a real time counter that ticks down while also having turn-based mechanics that eat up time from the same pool" -- This is an interesting point I also heard before. Interesting because there isn't really anything else than the time counter ticking down. When an actions says "30 min" the character just will keep doing this action for a little longer - roughly until this amount of time has gone by. I am speeding up time during sleep (maybe also when resting?) but just to prevent longer waiting times. And when the turn based battle starts, I hope(!) I am stopping the time - have to check that. Can you please help me to understand better your point? It is an interesting one, but I can't really grasp it.
The nice-to-have pattern is totally understandable - will take car of that.
"I think it would be nice to have [...] some basic 'struggle' attack that kicks in when you're out of weapons, like in Pokemon." -- Sounds interesting. Do you maybe have a link that shows this kind of attack? I was searching for another Pokemon feature before (someone said, it has a nice in-game tutorial for learning how to fight), but couldn't find that on either. Never played that game.
Will take care of the spelling error - thanks for finding it. Should rename myself to Typo Tiger or something... it happens so often...

Thank you so much!

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ComfyMitten Samuel301 days ago

Sorry about some of the ambiguity and confusion in my last feedback!

So I noticed the image flickering issue was the worst the first time I loaded the game up, but when I refreshed the page it was totally fixed. However, when I went to relaunch the game today, it was back, but only the menus were affected. I then tried relaunching multiple times and couldn't replicate the issue again.
Regarding the time mechanics, I think I was partially confused when I played the game initially, because I was treating it only as a turn-based game with my decision making. In those kinds of games, you would expect to be able to take your time and make more strategic choices with a lot of thought put into them, and the card-based action system that you have lends itself well to that kind of gameplay IMO. With (I believe) minor adjustments, you could make your game work that way entirely.
Right now you have the real-time countdown, but I think there needs to be more to it for it to be a valuable feature. As you said, it just ticks down the time - it doesn't tie into the gameplay loop beyond that (unless I missed something). If you decide you want to keep it, I think it would make sense for your hunger, thirst, and energy stats to go down over time, zombies might wander around automatically, and other world events should happen automatically too, wherever it would make sense. Your cards could still have an indication of how much time an action would take, but with it being real-time, you might have the option to cancel certain actions midway through. Longer actions like sleeping could still be greatly sped up to avoid too much idle time. I would also consider making the timer update in increments of 1 minute instead of 10 so you get more immediate feedback and thus feel more pressure to make quick choices.
Here's a video that shows the Pokemon struggle mechanic I'm referring to:
Normally each of your Pokemon has up to 4 moves, each with a certain number of 'Power Points' that determine how many times that move can be used in battle. When every single move has no points left but you still choose to attack, your Pokemon uses the move 'struggle' and deals a small amount of damage.

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Humane Tiger301 days ago

This took MUCH longer than I anticipated (thought this will be a quick win, but nope...). Anyway, at the end it is looking pretty good, and game is benefiting from it. Will take care of your other points step-by-step.

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ComfyMitten Samuel301 days ago

Nice, the borders look great! if you can find out a way to scale the whole window down when the width shrinks below the 16:9 ratio, it should also work well for older style monitors (e.g. 4:3) or tall browser windows too!

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Humane Tiger301 days ago

You are showing no mercy with the scaling ;-) But tbh, me not either - prepared the border already in a way, that it can also be applied to the portrait scaling. Being just a little scared to start on this one. The expected responsive behavior is pretty obvious, but under the hood a lot of bolts and nuts have to fit perfectly to scale and position everything into the right place.

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ComfyMitten Samuel301 days ago(+1)

Totally understand! I saw on your website that you were using a (custom?) non-canvas web stack for this project, and being experienced with professional web dev myself I get how that could be a real challenge. I'm using the Godot engine for my projects which thankfully has many built-in options for handling window scaling, so it's something I occasionally take for granted.

(Btw I can highly recommend Godot as a general purpose game engine, it has some pretty good platform export options, although Godot 4's default web export has a WebGL 2.0 dependency which can cause issues with some browsers, mainly on Macs. It's free & open source, has a great, growing community, and there are a lot of great learning resources available! Maybe something to check out for future projects if that is of interest to you.)

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