This is a very cute game with a great story. Liked the music and the idea of echolocation to "light up" the world. The ice (?) felt like I could slide on it sometimes and other times, I would just stop. Definitely some difficult platforming in there, but it was fun nevertheless. Would love to see more!
Cheers,
Daragard
I really enjoyed this game! It had a great aesthetic, music, pacing... like kryione said in an earlier comment, the only thing that I wish was that I could see a bit more of the words as I was typing. I'm not quite sure how you would do this and keep the amazing aesthetic you have, but maybe if the words scrolled vertically it may help? I'm really not sure on this one but I genuinely loved your game. Saved and coming back to play again later! Good luck in the game jam!
Cheers,
Daragard
Hi Tom:
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, the game did take a bit of inspiration from games like Celeste and Super Meat Boy, but I was going for more of a speedrunning feeling overall. About the visual signifier for the wall jump... maybe an quick animation that shows the player facing away from the wall? I don't really want the player to be holding onto the wall because that would slow down the pace of the level. In regards to making it more original, I think that considering more level mechanics and unique abilities of the player would be a cool to add in the future. I like the idea!
Hey Conor, thanks for the review!
Fun fact: the "speed boost" when jumping off of the ramps is actually a bug in the character controller script that I thought has cool mechanic implications. In level 0-4, I tried to teach the player organically that you need speed when going on the ramps. I struggled teaching that mechanic through the entire lifecycle of the game. Any ideas if ways to make that more clear? As for coyote time and jump buffering, there is actually both of those mechanics in the game. I'll take a look at if I need to re-adjust the timings of those after the voting period ends.
Thanks again for taking the time to write a thoughtful review.
Cheers,
Daragard
Hi all!
My game, Maximum Velocity is all about going as fast as you can on the levels. Be wery though, the levels do gave some timing parts that can be tricky! I want to see some of the best times that you get. Just put the level code and the time you got in the reply to this post. Let's create our own leaderboards right here!
I am also open to all feedback. If you drop a comment on my game, I will make sure to try and play and rate yours. I run Linux but should be able to run most Windows games through Wine.
Cheers,
Daragard
Current Leaderboard Positions:
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Hey lostwords:
After reading your reply, i think your ideas were spot on - maybe just a bit more in game explaining to show what each thing was for. I like your idea for taking out the power ups for the first couple of levels of they are confusing. Maybe just remove the icons all together and then add them back when you want to introduce the mechanic so the player isn't confused about what they don't do. I actually do think the high tide idea is pretty funny and i think it is a great mechanic for Scrabble. An idea could be a short popup / cutscene that shows a text box that says "High Tide" with the waves going very large across the screen - then after that cutscene finishes, drop the waves all the way down to the bottom of the screen so you can still see them but they arent blocking anything. I'm kinda thinking like 5-10% of the screen size.
Just some ideas...
Cheers,
Daragard
I think that this game has showed me that I am not supposed to be a Pull Request approver lol. This was a very creative interpretation of the theme and fit very well with the fact that Github is the one that has hosted this game jam. Unfortunately, I don't even think that I made it past the first day but I had fun getting fired! Very polished experience with all of the animations and sound effects. Great job and good luck on the rest of the game jam!
I ended up liking the concept of this game a lot and the mechanic of always moving had me switching directions to go back a tiny bit before actually making the jump. Good implementation of that mechanic. It was also very rewarding when I finally beat the game and was a bit disappointed that there was only one level because I was quite enjoying myself.
A bit more constructive feedback on different aspects of the game:
Great job on making your game and good luck in the game jam!
One thing that I absolutely loved and should focus on more in my games is all of the particles that you used in yours. I loved the stars flying past you, the ship's boost, and the explosion when I killed an enemy. To me, this game has a lot of potential with where it could go. It seems like you got the core mechanics down, but I think the pacing was a bit slow. One thing that I think you could change about the first level is maybe having the enemy ships have a swooping motion. One not so slow that the player doesn't have a threat but not so fast that it feels unfair to a new player. Just an idea to give the first 10 waves a bit more spice. For the boss, I would have loved to have been shooting that guy for a good 10-15 seconds before he blows up. Just long enough where I feel like I earned my victory a bit more.
Great start to the game and I look forward to seeing where this game goes in the future!
Hi Game36:
Thank you for the suggestion and because of this, I have implemented it into my version of the build of the game. Unfortunately, I cannot update the game until after the game jam has finished, but you have made a good point with this. I assumed that most people would play the game with WASD because that is almost always how I play games. However, using the arrow keys could be more intuitive for a 2D platformer that doesn't require use of the mouse.
Thank you for the suggestion and good luck in the game jam!
I liked the idea of scrabble combined with the theme of waves. I also really liked the wave based power ups that you had (although I think that for the game jam, the game should have those enabled by default).
A bit of feedback on the UI/UX of the game:
Loved this game! Very simple and very intuitive! The art was very aesthetically pleasing and went with the music very well. I think that a bit more tolerance when it comes to if the cursor is on the wave or not would be very helpful. I was able to keep it on the correct part for the most part but that also made it hard to look between all the different color requests and think about which color I should do next so that the crowd didn't get angry at me.
Great job on a great game and keep up the good work!
I really liked the idea that you were shooting for (ha) here and the mood that you have set. The implementation of the flashlight helped a lot with this.
Despite running around the map a couple of times, I could not figure out how to find a gun or other weapon. I did find a beer bottle or a knife or something in a small building with black walls but could not figure out how to use that to my advantage. When I start the game, I think it would've helped me a lot to be spawned in a building (so that you can force the player to experience specific things in an organic way) with a gun in one of the rooms. That way, I am able to get to the core mechanic of the game (killing zombies) as fast as possible.
About the controls: I would say that while pressing W and S to go forward and backward relative to the player's rotation works well in a 3D FPS game, it was a bit jarring to have those controls in a top down. Personally, I think I would have preferred the ability to walk up, down, left, right, and then spin around freely without it messing up the direction I was going.
Loved the art style of this game and I thought that the gameplay was fairly engaging throughout. I liked the idea of getting new weapons and when I unlocked the lightning guitar, that was a really cool moment. You also had a very polished presentation of the game and the UI was very intuitive. Something that I would love to see more of is the types of weapons. I loved the creativity of using instruments as weapons but it may be cool if the weapons had different effects - like if the drum was particularly good at clearing out all the obstacles in the room. I also felt like the enemy AI was very easy to avoid by running in circles around the room. An idea that I just had about potentially fixing this issue without too much extra coding (because I know how hard coding AIs can be) is a stationary laser tower that fires beams at you. I think this may provide the added challenge because even if you use a simple look_at() function to shoot the beam and then have a quick timer before firing, the beam would naturally be more accurate when the player is closer to the tower than when further away. Just some quick ideas though.
Cheers and good luck in the game jam!
Hi darnOK:
Thank you so much for taking the time to write so much feedback! I'm glad that you liked the level design. That is what i really tried to focus on this time around. Right before I submitted the game, I thought about pushing the harder levels of world 1 back into a later section of the game. I probably should've done this. However, I was going for a bit of theming to the worlds where the first world was simple platforming and introduced the ropes gradually and then world 2 introduced the RADIALS as the core mechanic for that world. However, like you said, 1-5 and 1-6 (which is even harder imo) probably shouldve been bonus levels at the end.
About your solution to the ropes, I'm a bit confused what you mean by making a bounce or a jump that you can miss. Were you talking about adding an extra floor to the level or changing the programming for the mechanic?
Again thank you for the feedback!
Daragard
Your idea for combat was very interesting and something that I have not seen tried before. I think something that you could do to possibly improve the combat is increase the tolerance on how much of the line you have to cross in order for it to count as a pass. Also, centering the camera on the player when in the over world could have the potential to let the player see the fish and have more time to react to them before they accidentally run into them. Overall, great concept for a game and keep up the hard work!
This is a really interesting concept for a game. Love the music and the art direction for this game. Also, the sliding animations you had between scenes really makes this game feel polished. I am still a bit confused at how to use the wave machine on the left side of the screen. I think a very simple tutorial where the ghost is in a static space and then you can move around freely so that you can see how your wave sensors react to the distance and direction of the ghost would be massively helpful here. Great game and the work that you did to polish the game feels great! Keep up the good work!
The art for the game pulled me in and I think that you have a strong idea for a minigame. You had a good implementation of a bit of leeway when it comes to pressing the space bar but I could not figure out the buttons when they said "Hold". I tried holding the spacebar but that would just result in me missing the next input. I'm not sure if you have played Splatoon 2 on the switch but there is a minigame on there that your game reminds me of. This is a link of some gameplay that you may be able to use as reference for your own game.
I loved how bazaar this game was to play. The fun music and characters bouncing around. A simple change that you could do to make the game a bit more intuitive is to 1) make the UI a bit more readable by placing solid backgrounds behind text and 2) use the sprites of the things that the characters were holding instead of the emojis. I couldn't really tell which people fit into which category because the emoji's didn't really match any group of people the way that I expected. I thought that your entry was a very creative take on the theme of WAVES. Keep up the good work!
I really liked the art style that you were going for in this game. I also thought that the music fit very well with the fast paced action that you had for gameplay. However, I was a bit confused on how to create combos as well as use the overload mode. I could be wrong about this, but I think that your idea for the combat was to get as many of the same colored balls as close to you as possible and then kill them all at once. I might add an attracting force to the player character to pull the balls of the same color to you, then when you touch them, it kills them. Then the only balls that would do damage are the ones of a different color. This feels a bit more intuitive to me but I could very easily be missing something. Keep up the good work! I like the vision for the game and lmk if I'm missing something about the combo-ing thing.
I liked the concept of the game that you came up with. The shark was really cool to see come onscreen because I tried catching it for food! (I died). The controls were a bit confusing for me. I don't understand why there is a separate mode for using the fishing rod when that is the entire purpose of the game. I also couldn't figure out how to reliably reel in my hook when I didn't have something on it. I like the concept for the game but I felt like I didn't understand the controls very well. An idea to make the controls more intuitive would be to exclusively use the mouse for everything fishing related. I would make casting left click and reeling in right click. Then, if my fishing rod was already out and I tried to cast again, the bobber would instantly teleport back to the player (dropping whatever it was attached to) and allow me to cast wherever I wanted again. Just an idea but I think that you have a really solid foundation for a good raft survival game.
Before even clicking on the game. Love the art style and color palette you chose. Especially the text boxes (I know it seems like a small thing but my text boxes always seem to be a default rectangle with rounded corners.
After playing the game: Still love the art style and the music (especially the bells and vocalizations) really sets the vibe for the game which is perfect. Operating a machine for the patients is something that I have not done in a video game before and I thought it was very creative. The micro games were fun but became somewhat repetitive after a couple of patients. One feature I would love to be added is for the power button to reset the micro game. There was one time where I was trying to reverse the direction of the waves and clicked left so many times that the frequency of the wave literally became a blob. Small feature, but I think it would be a bit of a QOL improvement.
Overall, I really enjoyed playing through your game. With a bit more variety in the micro game department, I could see this game being even more fun to play!
I like your intention for this game which is sort of like space invaders in the way that you have enemies coming toward you and if they get too close to you you die. When I first played the game, I would try and aim my shots directly to the guys climbing up the wall. However, when my shot would miss, I realized that I could shoot multiple shots with no downside. Some tweaks to your game that I would recommend are different levels. At some point the enemies should run out and you could be taken to a shop (just an idea). There you could buy weapon upgrades like an ability to shoot faster, shoot multiple shots, freeze enemies while you continue to shoot them (this would mean having enemies with more than 1 hit point). Just some quick ideas I had but I am sure that you could work something even better out! Keep up the good work and don't give up!
Unfortunately, I was unable to play this game. I got stuck on the screen below and didn't know how to get off of it. Maybe there is a button underneath of the screen that got cut off when building to WebGL? If there is a patch or way around this, let me know by responding to this comment. I will see the notification and be able to come back to this game to rate it.
I thought that the concept of attacking that you came up with was very innovative. Moving things around the scene to reflect waves back at the enemies, duplicating waves. Figuring out the best way to generate the most amount of waves to deal the most amount of damage. Something that I would love to see in a future update or even future game is to see damage markers on the enemy when the wave hits them. I couldn't tell which waves were doing more damage or if the waves were even hitting at all until after the attack had finished. Just a little more feedback for the player is all. Loved the art that you had for your game - especially the thumbnail and the decorations for the itch page. Great job and keep up the good work!
Loved the interpretation of the waves theme. Also loved how innovative the game design was. I actually really enjoyed playing as the bull fighter and trying to figure out when to hold up the flag to charge the bulls meter and when to try and run away. The little animations that you guys added to just about everything in the game also gives it so much charm. Great little project! The only thing that I can think of to say as constructive criticism is maybe make the text on the buttons contrast a little bit more. Some of the buttons I didn't know if they were disabled or not. That's really the only negative (if you would even call it that) thing. Great job! Love to see what you guys do in the future!
This was a super fun game that kept me immerse the entire time. Didn't realize that you could change the type of tower until the very last level so I just played with the Gatling the entire time. Keeping in mind that you made this entire thing in Pico 8, would it be possible to put an explanation of the different types of guns or even better - make some sort of projectile or laser that showed how the guns worked? I was initially confused because Gatling seemed to be shooting enemies that weren't in it's lane (because it was). Only after I made the assumption that the Gatling was able to shoot in three lanes at once did I realize that it said that in the description of the game. Again, I have never programmed in Pico 8 but I do know that there are severe limitations on what you can do.
Other than the little problems that I have with an inability to read the description of the game lol - I absolutely loved this game. I was really enjoying the music and even noticed my head bobbing along to it at certain points. Great game even under the constraints provided by Pico 8! I'm gonna save this one and come back to it later!
I really liked the story and animation that you had going on. My favorite part was when there was the outline of the main character and then a couple of dialog lines later, the full character actually came into view. Great method for showing the character approaching the scene. Something that I would love is if you added was the last line of dialog before giving me the dialog options because I couldn't remember what the original prompt was after reading all the options. Great start to a visual novel type game. Keep it up!
I really liked your interpretation of the theme of waves. The gameplay was fun and I can see how you plan on expanding on it in the future. I had a couple of bugs (like software bugs not in game bugs lol) like clicking the start button after it had already started and one of the bugs getting caught in a corner and being unable to move at the very end of the level. Also when I died halfway through the level, it seemed like I could spawn the bugs anywhere but when I clicked, it took my energy but didn't spawn any bugs.
Despite these couple of bugs, I did have fun watching my troups blast through the enemy soldiers. I can see real potential in this game - especially with the art direction. You used the art assets well. I didn't see an indication that you used them from somewhere else so if you made them, they had a lot of charm to them. Even if you didn't make them, I loved the way that you put them together to make the level with variable heights instead of just a flat plane. Keep up the good work!
I like the scope that you had for your game. You had a simple art style and mechanics which show that you scoped your game well for the time that you had. A suggestion I might make is to reduce the rate of fire for the player. I ended up spinning in circles and leaving my gun on all the time to prevent any asteroids from hitting me.
First of all, let me say that I love the theming of your page. Second, I like that you used your first game as a branch off of a well made tutorial. I am familiar with the Brackey's tutorial that you used and because of that, I can see the things that you changed and how you were able to adopt some of the tutorial to make it work for some of your own systems. Good start to your game dev journey. Keep up the good work!
I'm not going to lie, when I saw that you said that it was your first game ever, I was a bit scared to play it. However, your charming art style was the first sign that this was going to be different than I expected. Loved the mechanic of clicking to drop waves to move the ball. Lots of fun to control. Love to see the games you make in the future because as your first game ever, you are getting 5 stars all the way down!
I really like the concept that you were going for in this game. The art was very pleasant I also liked the sounds. One thing that I have a problem with is how little time I had between the wave appearing and pressing the button. I felt like the wave spawned and instantly pushed me back. Then there was another wave directly after that and it didn't allow me to collect my thoughts. I think that if you were to give the player more time to react to the waves, it would be even more fun than it is! Keep up the good work and good luck with the jam!
Genuinely loved this game! Played till the very end to see what would happen. I loved how the boat controlled and responded so quickly to the mouse movements. It forced me to steer back and forth trying to get my boat to go in a straight line while the waves smashed me against the rocks. Cutscene at the start: Great world building. Cutscene in the middle: fantastic to highlight the change of pace that was about to happen. Loved the black and white aesthetic. My favorite part of the game was the waves that physically affected the height of the boat and seemed move the boat about in other directions too.
In general, I loved the game. However, I had a couple of issues. At the bottom of the first loop, the isometric view just made it so that I could not tell where the boat was in relation to the rocks. Whenever I went behind one of the rocks, I ended up spinning in circles, loosing a couple of souls each time. This was the same at the end with the white pillar of light. This could have a possible remedy if you stuck an arrow in one of the corners of the screen which showed the direction the boat was facing. That, or make a shader for the boat which allows the player to see an outline of the boat through the rocks. There also seemed to be a bit of a problem with how the mouse functioned because at some points, it felt like it was getting caught on something and the steering didn't turn as I was moving my mouse. This may have to do with how you captured the mouse input. Honestly, it felt like you made the mouse invisible and let it hit the corners of the screen to provide the natural minimum and maximum rotation for the steering wheel (I don't know boat terms lol).
All in all, loved the game. I think I might save this one and come back to play it again later!
I like the creativity you had for the concept of this game. I didn't realize until right before I died that the enemies floating "randomly" through the air were actually riding on the waves in the background. Great touch to show which wave you had to switch to in order to get to the correct wave. Some thoughts that I would like to share is that the gun as the weapon was a little off-putting. It was very hard to shoot the enemies while the wave was bouncing unpredictably up and down. My first thought as to a fix to this would be to have some sort of sword. Maybe even the Synthblade? Great concept for a game. Keep up the good work!
The art style on the thumbnail and screenshots is what initially drove me to look at this game. I didn't read the description of the game before playing so I was very glad that you had controls of the game built into the game. Also the moment I realized that you could transform from a photon to a wave was really cool. Great interpretation of the theme. The second level (or whatever the one with the lasers) got me stuck though because I could not figure out how to do that part without running out of energy. The sun beams also randomly disappeared which I think is an intentional part of the gameplay but I don't understand how they worked. Great art style, CRT shader, and music. Thought those fit very well with each other. Keep up the good work!
