Making your own engine is an absolute stud move! I love it. Link gives 404 tho so i cannot see it. Must be interesting to see how the sausage is made.
Steam is doing some really weird things with their ui, haha. Good that you could download it. Oh, nice, I still feel like I want to give the camera a slight push in. But I might wait until I have implemented Remote Config so I can do some AB testing and see if it affects peoples gameplay experience.
You rolled your own engine?!?!? Wow! Massive props to you guys. That's really impressive. Please tell me more about your engine, I'm really intrigued. I'm a Unity simp and wouldn't even know where to begin with my own engine.
Thank you so much for these kind words. Actually had Princess Mononoke as reference for the plague.
I agree completely with your feedback on the light levels, in the latest build on the demo page, I have a brightness slider implemented that pulls up the gamma and exposure levels and gives you the traditional "should be able to see the rightmost object faintly" type UX.
I had to make a hard choice with the camera view size, I noticed that any closer made it hard to navigate because you didn't have enough reference points on screen to orient properly, mainly a problem in the town center. So I decided to pull the camera back to fix this, until I have had enough time to make more art that will make orientation more distinct, the houses all kind of look the same atm. Hard choice to make about 7 hours before submission.
It's weird that the demo download is bugging, I contacted steam support to check that it worked, I set up a fresh steam account that is not part of my org and then the demo download worked. I wonder if they are flipping out about the whole 2 week grace period that they make you wait after page goes live before you can properly release anything.
Thank you so much for taking the time to make this write up, It's truly highly appreciated!
I can only judge from the trailer, but I'm happy to download the game if it ends up on steam. (Taking Thor's advice with the whole FunShooter.exe thing)
The graphics style brings me back to the PS2 era and that is a really good thing. I love games that pay homage to the golden age while offering modern mechanics and game feel. The characters are funny.
The music is cool, and the gameplay looks entertaining.
I my main criticism is the UI. This looks like the UI could have benefited from triggering on certain events, like when a Plumwood is healed, it reads out how many more are infected instead of having it on screen the whole time. Having it up in the corner looks more like a debug UI. The grey box at the bottom seems unnecessary, I prefer to keep UI hidden as much as possible unless it is showing something really important or interesting.
Of course just my subjective opinion and there is no right/wrong. Just opinions. I really like the look of your game.
I added a Brightness adjustment menu to my game since it's very dependent on darkness for it's ambiance, so I want people to have a a good experience regardless of their screen settings.
Damn man, did you do it here on itch? Thor spoke about it on stream, I think it means disqualification, because you're not allowed to update your submission and there is no way to recover the previous state.
I agree that something might need to be done to make the important items stand out.
There will definitely be more levels no matter is we get the Game Jam nod. I ad so much fin developing this and seeing my friends play and scream in terror.
Steam is still reviewing the submission, but this link to Dark Plague Demo should be live within 1-2 days if you wanna follow and wishlist it and get the updates I have made since the submissions closed.
I went deep, put my other project on pause and spent on average 16hrs per day as the lead developer and designer of the game. The rest of the team was not able to do what I did, but I guess it's because they are sensible people :D
We made it that the monster is at the same speed as the player, but the monster cannot pass in as tight spaces as the player, so you have to outsmart him and make him take a longer route than you to be able to break his line of sight and lose you. Of course we are listening to peoples feedback and considering balancing.
What I have noticed (watching friends play) is that as soon as you learn how to evade the monster and and where to best lose him, you kinda know how to beat the game without losing a single villager.
But don't worry about you gaming skills, we consciously made it hard to instill a feeling of dread and vulnerability, and we would consider it a failure on our part if a player beats the game in their first run. Every time I lost and got the instinct to rebalance to make it easier, I had to remind myself that this might have just been a failure of me as a player and not necessarily as a designer 🙃
Map and orientation
This is a hard one, I am very much open to suggestions. Part of me thinks that it's a part of the game to get familiar with the village by just walking around and discovering the areas. Another part of me is pulling towards making it accessible and less likely to frustrate players.
I can at least rule out the following:
Minimap - This is an absolute immersion killer and players would be looking at the minimap instead of the game world
On screen map that you can open that pauses the world - this feels like an unnecessary element to include in the gameplay that would take away from the experience of being chased.
Maybe what we'll end up doing is adding a map in the starting house that you can view similar to the notes that are scattered around the map.
On the Story
Wow, thank you. I stayed up until 6am on submission day finishing the last note, saying to myself: nobody will read this, but on the off-chance that someone does, I really want there to be a little bit of world building that explains some of the gameplay. Why would the villagers have their only gun separated into parts scattered around the village.
When the game will get it's updates I will bake the story some more to fill in some of the blanks, and this comment lit a fire in me to keep writing. This is my first ever time doing game writing, so I'm willing to stumble and fail in my pursuit of telling an interesting story.
The game is currently under review by Steam, as soon as it passes I will link to it on the Itch page so you can get my latest updates if you want to stay in touch and keep playing throughout my journey of turning this into a fully fledged game with multiple areas and rich storytelling.
Again! Thank you for your gracious feedback, and I promise to always listen to anyone who has taken the time to play.
awesome feedback! Thank you for taking the time to play.
Everything you are suggesting will be added. I our steam page will be up in the next couple of days with our entry as a free demo. I'll link it here so you can get updates while the jam judging is still ongoing.
EDIT: deliberating on the map though... Might make one that acts like a note. Still wanna have minimal ui on the screen.
Very good suggestion, this was definitely something I wanted to implement, I just had to prioritize other things. But I'm gonna put it on steam no matter what and there will be an adjustment slider for brightness. Thank you for playing <3
