I'm thrilled you found it fun, engaging, and funny! I was worried about it being difficult to find the mission but never quite was satisfied that I'd succeeded, so thank you for that feedback. What I tried was:
1. Making the temple the tallest thing in the opening scene, even peaking above the maze.
2. Including plantlife closer to where you "should" be and creating a bit of a trail toward the temple and discoverable behind it, and excluding it where you "shouldn't" be. I was even going to trigger a warning and then a death if the snake wandered too far toward the edge of the map but ran out of time.
3. Several of the pieces of dialogue and the interactibles in the temple make reference to trying to interact with the torches. However, without the interact popup working, it can be hard to even find those to trigger the hints, and there are only a couple torches that do anything.
4. I tried making more light toward the temple exit, and planting a skeleton next to the wrong torch to make it look like they almost made it out. I don't think it communicated what I wanted it to. X-D
I'll need to learn more about proper signposting if I do another exploration game.
Thanks so much! Good find on the spamming - that was not intentional and is a super helpful bug report. I'd triggered it on accident during playtests but couldn't do it twice in a row. :-D
Thank you so much! I'll post the finished product in the Discord chat once I complete it in a few weeks. Not sure what I want to make next or when, but I had fun with this so it might happen!
Ooh, that piece on the radius is super helpful. I had trimmed a lot of them down, but tried to keep a couple slightly bigger to encourage the player to wander. Sounds like I need to calibrate so it's not too much wandering. :-)
Thanks so much for the feedback! I was trying to stretch myself and make something I hadn't played before, and I THINK I got there. If you stick around in the Discord, I do plan to finish the game sometime after the semester. My kids want to be able to beat it! Once I've finished I'll re-share the link.
Thanks for the feedback! Is the "rip headphones" thing consistent and reproducible? I ask because I thought I'd fixed that - lots of the sounds triggered on startup including the ones that are supposed to be very far away.
I totally agree that a smaller scope would have served me well. That's all over my reflection paper. :-) "Left me wanting to do more" is about the best feedback I could have hoped for, thank you!
Thanks for the great feedback! You bring up a good point that the interact button not working kind of forced you to explore. Maybe I could make that configurable for those who want it a little harder. There's a good chance some of the interactions didn't trigger, especially with the no-goodnik in the temple and the final boss. There's also a boulder tunnel that isn't directly interacted with.
I ran into some of the same challenges as the other reviewers re: weird spider spawns killing me, clipping through walls, unexpected spider collisions, and the occasional clip through a maze wall.
I'd definitely recommend adding some sort of 3D sound to the spiders so that the player knows they're nearby. Scared the heck out of me a couple times.
I thought the gun wasn't working at first because there's no feedback except that a spider died roughly directly in front of me. Even if there's no muzzle flash, either just seeing the projectile or having a pew pew would have been very helpful.
I'm not quite sure how I'd have solved for spawning spiders near the player but not in walls, but that seemed to be a common issue.
Overall though, nice job. Building out the maze and a shooter with enemies tracking you isn't easy!
Nice job! I can tell you put a lot of work into this with the triggers, lighting, terrain, and smooth controls! I'd loved to have seen more variety in the quests, but 2 weeks isn't a lot of time. I loved that you had the opening menus and a finish to the game, those were really nice touches.
I will say though that you violated the #1 rule of game design: there was nothing behind the waterfall!
I think there's the kernel of something super neat here, but it just didn't quite seem like the game was there yet. Some of the mechanics were there. It also felt SUPER slow on my machine - maybe I run a weaker graphics card and wasn't pumping out as many frames, but it took about 3-4 minutes to get over 100 pts. This has a lot of potential in a Totally Accurate Battle Simulator or Goat Simulator kind of way. I also kind of wish the other guy either fought back or tried to evade. Once I figured out the "pattern" for left/right extend/bend, the controls were clunky but mostly in a QWOP kind of way, instead of a seemingly random kind of way like it felt at first.
Also like one of the other reviews mentioned, this didn't seem to fit the theme.
Is everyone just running the cave dropper.exe? I can't get anything loaded besides a crashed screen right after the Unity splash, and couldn't load it up as a Unity project.
I really liked the thoughtful level design, great job with that! You knew the limitations of how high and far the character could jump, and built the level around those constraints very well. Stuff was spaced out well to fit perfectly if you committed to your jumps. I didn't mind the pits that tricked you from a "the main game mechanic is learning the stage" perspective, but without checkpoints, it did feel a bit cheap, especially on a run where I had like 28 diamonds already.
Some of the platform elements were a little hard to visually distinguish from the background.
That was so close to being fun! I liked the idea, but the difficulty just spiked much too quickly. I really liked the assets, and I also dug the generous checkpoints and fast reloads. Those last two encouraged me to keep trying and trying and trying, but I still couldn't overcome that third grappling section.
It kind of looked like these were 2D assets used in a 3D plane. Assuming the rotating sprites was unintentional, you should be able fix that by going to the Rigidbody and under Contraints, mark Rotation on probably the Y axis. Actually, maybe all 3 could be appropriate.
I enjoyed this so much I went back to check out Sen and the Master of Puppets. Neat stuff, it feels like part of a DnD campaign.
I was impressed at the dialog system and sprites, I'm not really sure how to do that. I think I accidentally hit up some of the challenges out of order, because I never actually saw Bog's. I also felt a little bad killing frogs (Frobs?) that weren't aggressive, but they wouldn't talk so I guess I had to?
I thought the animating and controls were pretty well done - a little slow to respond, but I don't know how to help with that. I thought climbing was broken for a bit but eventually had a little more luck. The enemies were running at me but not attacking for a while. Eventually I got one to attack me and I got a crash, so maybe it was better that I just mowed them down for a while.
I really liked the menu - it was neat that A and D adjusted the volume slider while playing, and I could just close the menu by clicking. It let me do the whole experience without stopping or taking a break!
Nevermind, turns out you jump higher when you're dashing. It's a whole new game now!
So once I played it more - got up to around 50 coins - I realized that my only real gripe is that it only feels good when I'm holding Shift. But I generally think the physics of jumping and dashing and bouncing feel quite good, provided you're holding Shift. Nice job!
I'm not sure if it's because it's running in a different runtime environment or I'm just bad at games, but my jump seemed awfully low and the lava seemed to rise awfully quickly. I'll try again, but I literally couldn't make it to the first platform.
tl;dr: I might need to git gud, or the physics are broken.
Oh no, I fell through the earth! I also am not sure but think there might have been something funky happening to my Rigidbody when I'd change my momentum, because eventually I started to always drift to the right.
I like the projectile ricochets and the experimenting with the gold material near the end. Neat mood too.
Found the same stuff Meapers did, and I generally agree. Including the broken 4th map. Not sure if something weird triggered or didn't trigger because eventually I was just spamming attacks? It was interesting, I thought the dudes took a TON of hits until I realized my attacks were interrupting their explosions.
Art and tone were neat though. I like the concept.
I clicked through on your link, thanks for sharing that. Sorry to hear about the late submission. :-(
That maze was elaborate! I liked the sense of dread outrunning the minotaur. I think at one point it gave up on chasing me, but then I became my own worst enemy: I think bumping into walls was messing with my rigidbody and I slowly started rotating. X-D
This was a super cool concept. I'd thought about trying to do something similar with like a site investigation, but couldn't come close on programming or on assets. I like how you simplified the interface to its most basic core, then tied it back to real-life civilizations. Very neat!
Also I was able to recreate Meapers' bug. When one game ended and the next began (I think I was starting my 4th runthrough), if I clicked quickly, it froze.
I think that might have been a neat effect. I noticed that too, but when I went back to the left (I couldn't figure out what to do past that platform), I noticed the music got better, and then when I went to the right again it clipped again. I think there may have been some gradual and subtle scripted distortion to the music as you approached the mystery there.
