itch.io

Thank you for the feedback, and sorry to hear you had a negative experience with the game. I'm a solo dev and found out about this even rather last minute, so I've been struggling to get the game in a state that works well as an open-playtest in time. Worse yet I realized that the web version you played skipped the introduction to the game, which should have eased you better into the game rather than jumping straight into the deep end.

- As for sound, I just haven't had time to source and implement this, but I'm hoping to do so over the next week or two. While sound isn't 'crucial' for the game to function, I do understand that it (and the lack of it) can greatly diminish the experience.

- The walljumping mechanic is something I need to better figure out. The intent was to try to introduce it in a way that players would understand but from most playtests this seems to be a drastic failure. Part of this is an issue with lack of feedback the game gives, but part of it is also just that it works in a particular manner that is somewhere in between the two main types of walljumping behaviors in platformers. In any case I'm going to be iteratively overhauling the mechanic and how it's presented to new players until this problem is addressed.

- There are various issues regarding the web build of the game as you surmised (such as the mouse cursor). The web build was really only made as an ad-hoc way to run the game without the need to do so through steam, which currently is using a closed playtest

Fun little game! I did a live playtest with one of the developers so I'll just describe some aspects that I think weren't as clear as they perhaps could have been upon seeing the game for the first time. I think the best way to describe the game is a chaotic and comedic tower defense. While there is certainly strategy to the game, much of the joy I experienced came from seeing ridiculousness that I didn't even fully comprehend unfold. Hoping to see the game push that aspect even further!

Hi there! I appreciate the candid feedback :)

As for the state of the project, I found out about this jam from a friend fairly last minute, so I struggled in trying to implement everything I was hoping by the 'end' of the jam, particularly because I am a solo developer 😅I'm currently working on trying to get the onboarding section of the game relatively finished, since the state it is in is not really very helpful to new players.

There's also some sort of red slowdown mechanic that seems really cool, but I never figured out what it's purpose is.

The next build should have some better onboarding for this mechanic. It's definitely one of the less obvious but also very important systems, so I do want to make sure players have a pretty good sense of how it works early on.

Anyways, onto to the game itself. A platformer with clones chasing you is an exciting concept, but the controls are what matter in a game like this. It sounds weird, but it felt like I was controlling a bag of pudding. There's a delay to jumping, the movement is somewhat arduous, and when I stop moving the character slides for a little bit. It doesn't feel good right now. I could kind of double jump by launching against a wall, but even that felt kind of hit or miss.

If you would be open to it, I'd love to either do a screenshare or get some footage with you talking over the footage describing what parts of the player controller feel worst or behave unexpectedly. For right now there are a handful of aspects about the player controller that I hope to address soon, but it's good to get a wider variety of feedback since there are aspects that might seem fine to me but frustrating to others. At the very least I'd love to hear what are some platformers that have controls that you jive with, and ones that you don't (apart from Shattered Echoes I mean lol)?

Thanks again for the feedback. If you're interested I can reach out to you a build or two down the line to get a gauge on some of these issues being addressed.

Thank you for the detailed feedback!

Much of the feedback you've given are things that hopefully will be addressed by the next build, such as input prompts during the tutorial or after the player dies.

The win condition is not entirely clear from starting a level, it also is a bit confusing to go from the tutorial that teaches you a about elements that you pick up once to unlock a portal and "escape" to the first level that has respawning elements instead that you have to constantly bring to "goal" areas. It feels like you're taught a different game from the one you go to play.

This is probably one of the weakest parts of the current onboarding- I'm curious if you have any particular suggestions for how I might address this? Unlike the normal stages the tutorial stages have a clear start and end because the purpose is to get the player through each stage to teach them the core mechanisms of the game. The challenge here is that apart from a handful of trial stages that do have a specific goal (like in the tutorial stages, the arenas are high score based. I'm open to suggestions on how I might be able to better onboard this during the tutorial if possible!

I also found the dash on release a bit weird, I think it is thought with the intention of carefully aimed dashes, but because of the fast game pace you're mostly fast-dashing and for that the release doesn't work as well as the press.

Yeah, the dash is one of the player controller aspects that I'm considering adjusting. I think there are some things I could do to make the current implementation feel less bad to new players, but I'm also not 100% sure if I want to keep the system working in the current manner.

If arenas is (presumedly) the main game mode, it should be up and centre. Having the "go back" option at the top is a bit unintuitive as we generally read top to bottom.

Graphics acceleration off entirely murders the game, aside from that it worked pretty well!

Yeah, I suppose this isn't super surprising. I'm doing some fragment shader stuff to handle the coloring in a dynamic way. If it turns out to be an issue I can probably eventually make some setting to disable some of the most performance hungry shaders haha.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Glad to hear my feedback was helpful! As for the snowballing issue, the two main ideas that come to mind of what might be worth doing to address this is:
A. The simple option- just make it so that if you lose a fight that it ends your run, and you just go back to the start. Basically the roguelike approach.
B. You could flip the system on its head somewhat. Essentially you could have a strong negative feedback loop and a much weaker positive feedback loop that eventually becomes stronger than the negative feedback loop. The benefit of this is that you can still have momentary comebacks, while still rewarding/encouraging the player to try to win even when relatively outmatched. One of the primary issues with negative feedback loops that are too strong is that all that really matters is the end (e.g. in mario kart games the early laps aren't that important since it's relatively easy for someone behind to catch up and it's harder for people in the front to maintain being ahead of the pack). A practical example of what combining a positive and negative feedback loop in your game might look like might be something like:
- you keep your units between fights, even if any (or all) of them were killed, and they are fully healed
- You have some sort of 'economy' stat. If all of your units are eliminated you will lose some of your economy, but you will gain something that makes you fairly significantly more powerful.
- The economy stat can effectively be tied into making the player stronger between fights. Whether that's upgrades or more units, etc. The point is that the longer you can keep your economy strong, the more benefit it will provide. The main trick here is how strong or weak this feedback loop is. Ideally you would probably want it to be strong enough to counteract the problem of a too strong negative feedback loop but not so strong that the outcome of the entire game essentially boils down to how well the first one or two fights went.

As a forewarning, the feedback I have is quite harsh. I try not to give overly rough critique like this, but because I can see how much effort went into certain aspects of the game I would feel inauthentic if I didn't give my honest feedback regarding the gameplay portions of this game, and I wouldn't be doing you any favors ignoring the deep problems the gameplay currently suffers from. I'm not sure how close the game is to the intended final product, so I can only hope there is time to address some of this.

- The lack of any tutorial leaves me very confused about certain aspects. For example it seems like you are supposed to be able to purchase units at different quantities and not necessarily just at the maximum amount you can purchase, but if there is a way to do this I never figured it out. Similarly, the turn order is never explained and randomly enemies will take additional turns (or the inverse). Another unexplained mechanic is the... defense number? At least that's my best guess at what it is, except I never could figure it out. For clarification I'm talking about the number that is next to the health of the unit.

- From what little I've seen, the game has a grid but it seems practically pointless. Ranged units appear to be able to strike from literally any range, and melee units just rush towards each other and exchange blows. Sadly there doesn't really seem to be any strategy behind positioning, which I assumed would be important. It's also very strange to me that the ranged units cannot both move and attack at the same time... meaning that there's almost never any reason ever to move them.

- It seems to me that the player has almost no influence over who will win in fights. For instance take a melee unit fighting another melee unit- the only advantage to striking first is that during the entire fight you will get a singular extra attack in. In fights that take several hits before one unit dies, this advantage is almost entirely negated and effectively just comes down to who has higher DPS (and/or luck). If there is more strategy here, it's sadly never shown in what I played. As a consequence of this, if I understand at last the idea behind the defense ability, the player will consistently be actively punished for initiating attacks as opposed to just defending and letting the enemy attack. The only time that wouldn't be true is if the player knows they can kill the enemy in a single hit before the enemy can hit back.

- The animations are frustratingly slow, particularly because I feel like I'm barely even making strategic decisions, so I end up just constantly waiting for turns to play out. I wouldn't mind this nearly as much if there was some way to either speed up or skip this part of the game.

- I think that one of the biggest stumbles this game has- which makes many of the other problems worse- is that it is  both incredibly unfair/unbalanced (which I understand is difficult to get right, and for a playtest I wouldn't expect it to be in a final state) but worse, it seems to suffer from a really awful positive feedback loop. I played the game twice, and from what I can tell the enemy gets stronger from one fight to the next, regardless of whether you won or lost the previous fight. If you lose any single fight you are basically doomed entirely, because you're going to be fighting tougher enemies with way less than you even had against easier opponents.

Impressive work for a jam game! If you plan on expanding the game further, I think the most obvious feedback I can give is probably that the levels should have something more going on that makes them feel distinct. After about 3-4 stages I felt like i was sorta just playing the same level again and again, with very small differences. For a jam game what you have is impressive, but for something more it'd be nice to see some other aspects to the levels themselves which can then be explored when paired in different combinations to make it so that there's more to consider and master.

The other main piece of feedback I have is that it'd be preferable to be able to complete turns faster. After the first half dozen turns, the fact that each turn takes like 10 seconds at a minimum due to the animations started to become somewhat irksome.

Good job with the game!

I did a recorded playtest for the game which I've messaged to one of the creators, but figured I'd post some of my general feedback here as well :)

Goreticulture is a bit of an interesting mix of genres that- for right now- feels like it slightly misses the landing. It's a chill game about cleaning up (what I assume to be) doom-inspired arenas, and utilizing some farming inspired systems to help. While the game has interconnected systems that feel like they could create interesting dynamics, I think the game currently suffers from a case of feeling as though the time and effort to engage with those systems would be less efficient than just ignoring them. I suspect it's too late into development to make this game online co-op, but I feel like that would both suit the type of game this is as well as helping to address some of the problems.

There are a few other minor notes, but I suspect those issues can be ironed out with some smaller tweaks. If you're into games like powerwash simulator I suspect you will find this game enjoyable :)

Thanks again for the feedback :)

A cute and polished demo! I gave some feedback during a playtest with one of the creators on a call, but due to time constraints we had to cut it a bit short so I played through the game again and made some additional notes. It's my understanding this is a slightly old build though so some of these may no longer be that helpful 😅

- Dashing into destructibles should probably deal damage to them or break them (can still halt your dash though)

- A small UX improvement to dashing would be to make it so that so long as the dash input is being held, your player will try to start dashing once they get the chance. There are a few cases (such as running into something which cancels your dash) which requires you to let go of dash and then press it again, but it feels like this would be improved if it automatically buffered the input so long as the player is still holding the button down

- Might recommend making destructibles taking 2 hits before getting broken than 3. 2 hits still allows fun physics movement from them but 3 hits seems slightly tedious (edit: after a while I noticed you can charge up attacks, which somewhat deals with this issue)

- When choosing your movement path in the fights, it's probably best to make them choose the shortest path, rather than a squiggle if the user happens to draw that path. If later on it is important what route the player takes and the player intentionally wants to 'squiggle' then as far as I can tell that is already supported since the player can just string together a movement input with another movement input. The current situation can lead to cases where the player accidentally wastes movement points (at least they are able to undo this if they notice though)

- Rather than clicking on an input action and the menu being replaced with those actions, it might be quicker and more straightforward to make a second menu next to the first that swaps out whenever you hover over the action groups, rather than clicking on them

- If you want to have some more unique weapons but don't want to let the player constantly fall back on using them, you could probably have some sort of system that allows the player to summon/create weapons they have previously found. Depending on how you set it up this could also be done in a manner where all previous weapons are created simultaneously for the same cost, which would encourage the player to use many or all of these rather than just spending some resource to use their single favorite weapon again and again. It's difficult to convey this system succinctly here though so let me know if I should elaborate

- During our chat I got the impression that this issue is addressed in newer builds, but I will say that in the current system I would be likely to avoid using the special abilities which break my weapons, which is a bit unfortunate given the intent of the system. I'm looking forwards to see how the new system addresses this issue though!

- Instead of saying the range on an attack through text, might be better to just include a small image of the grid with the tiles highlighted that it can hit

- Gems from chests/destructibles should maybe be magnetized to the player after a short period of time, in case some fall into annoying to reach spots

There were a few bugs, some of which were noticed during the playtest. Not sure if any of these are even still applicable, but here are a couple more that I noticed during playing:  Neither Hit and run nor Shocked seem to work as far as I can tell.

Good job on the game, and I hope the game progresses smoothly :)

It pains me to be that guy, but the lack of any acknowledgement in the credits or on the itch io page of using AI for art on the titlescreen, endscreen, or title art puts into question what else is AI-generated or is from an asset pack. I don't have an issue with those (particularly using asset packs), but I think it's fair to say that it comes off as scummy to not mention that anywhere, presenting the project in such a manner as though your team developed the art for the game.

Ah yeah, that's very understandable; overall the UX of the abilities could certainly be improved upon.

Want to start by saying that the first 3 or so minutes of playing were great. I couldn't help but smile with how the music and sound effects were intermingled. I think the most concise way to put my critique is that the game unfortunately outstays it's welcome, becoming trivially easy over time. The main thing I would've liked is if the game either ended at some point, or if the difficulty curve was balanced to make losing an inevitability. All that said, this is probably the most polished game from the jam I've seen so far, keep it up!

Thanks!

Thank you, that's always reassuring to hear! Not sure if we'll expand on the game any more, but who knows?

Thank you! Glad to hear you enjoyed playing :)

Thank you! Yeah, hopefully we can get that fixed after voting finishes.

Thank you! Was the issue you are referring to the size of the screen/needing to zoom in or out? Or something else? In any case glad to hear you enjoyed it!

Thank you!

Thank you! Glad to hear you enjoyed playing :)

Thank you! Out of curiosity, could you elaborate a bit on the challenges you had with the power-ups? Unfortunately due to time, the UX (and lack of any tutorialization) of the power-ups was subpar 😅

The difficulty definitely ramps up! Glad to hear you enjoyed it :)

Making a playable game is purely optional! You can even use an existing game project and just use this jam to work on the menu for it, for example. Also not only is there no requirement for the UI/menu to be 2D, but I encourage participants to experiment, so definitely feel free to make a 3D UI if you'd like!

Haha, I'm tempted to make a terrible mr. Freeze ice pun, but I'll resist. Glad you enjoyed the game! 😀

Thanks! Turns out that's just what we are doing 😉

Thanks! We are working on improving the game, and making the game a bit more tactical is definitely something I'd like to see. Hopefully it will turn out well 😀

Thanks! I'd guess it might be due to the color palette, although I'm not entirely sure. Regardless, I'm glad you liked it! 👍

Thank you! 😊

Glad you liked it! 😀

Haha, thank you!

Thanks for the suggestions 👍 We are working on improving the game and will likely update these as well as several other aspects. Cheers!

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Wow, thank you for the detailed critique 👍 I'm not sure why the music (or sound entirely?) did not work for you, but I'm glad you enjoyed it regardless! As for the future of the game, we are currently in the process of ironing out various issues and expanding the game with some ideas that we didn't have time for during the jam. Hopefully it turns out well 😀

Thank you! As you mentioned, the corpses can make it a bit hard to tell where a live enemy is- The exact speed of the fading out was unfortunately one of the many things near the end of the jam that we simply didn't have time to address. As for the dice selection, that is definitely one option. There was another mechanic that we could not implement in time that would have also helped address locking onto the dice that you wanted- not necessarily the closest one to the player.

Could you elaborate on the frustrations you're having? I'm not sure I understand what you meant by matching enemies?

Thank you! As for selecting the dice, there was a mechanic that would have helped with this, but sadly we ran out of time haha. In any case, I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it 😃

Ah alright :) If you plan on continuing this project any, I'd recommend changing the way the obfuscation is themed, as right now it feels frustrating that I would assume the character can see, but I as the player cannot. As I mentioned earlier, having something like a dark room would make it more clear to the player that it is very much an intentional design decision rather than feeling like I'm fighting with the game rather than the challenge it presents, if that makes any sense.

Cool idea with, unfortunately, questionable execution.

I think the biggest things that the game does that shoots itself in the foot is the level design. I'm unsure if it's intentional that many of the stages obfuscate enemies behind walls, but these end up feeling quite awful to play. If this *was* intentional, I think you would be better off changing the affordances to something else like the level being in the dark. There's a pretty significant strategic cost to limit the information the player has by so much, however.

There are also cases where (it at least would seem) that level transitions can instakill you by dropping you in a pit. Or maybe spawning an enemy on you? I'm unsure of what exactly is happening, but I suspect it is one of those two things.

On a minor note, I think that the enemy hurtboxes and/or bullet hitboxes should be bigger? There were multiple cases where the small enemies seemed to phase right through a projectile- at the very least it definitely seemed as though my attack should have hit them.

It'd be nice to see this with some of the most glaring issues cleaned up and maybe with some more strategic variety between the weapons- could be pretty cool! Nice entry, regardless 👍

This one is tough for me to critique- for what it is and the time it was made in, this is pretty good! There are certainly some issues with it, but as you were working solo it's hard for me to really fault you. I don't know if you plan on updating the game, but below I'll mention some suggestions if you were to do so:

As it stands, there is very little telegraphing. Eventually I realized the main premise- that the dice affects the attack pattern being used- but this makes me wonder why the boss isn't itself the dice. I think this would help make it much more obvious that the two are related, and as an added bonus, you wouldn't need the dice UI taking up the corner of the screen.

The general difficulty of the different attacks seems quite unbalanced. Several of them seem to be very unpredictable, while others have very obvious telegraphing that makes them easier to play around (such as the meteors). I suspect that you planned on doing more stuff to help with this but simply ran out of time though- I know all to well what that is like, including in the game I worked on this jam 😂

The graphics are simple but serviceable and feel intentionally minimalistic, which I think works well for what this is. Anyhow, nice entry!

This seems promising, although it's hard to tell since- as others have mentioned- it's quite difficult to play. The jump is so fast, and (at least on browser) there doesn't seem to be any way to even full screen the game. As you use the mouse to aim your dash, I can't help but imagine that it would feel more natural if you used left or right click to activate the dash mechanic.

That said, if you can manage to get the player controller to be more amiable to the platforming/dodging, I think the premise of the level changing as you progress could be cool!