itch.io

Interesting article. EngineSim is good to know about. Clipping the audio when it is == 0 is also a good insight. I usually do the [sample][sample but backwards] trick to make it 'seamless' but that is only because clipping at 0 didnt occur to me lol.

I'd be interested in knowing you you did the skidding sounds. For my  car game I had to search 'electric car drifting' or thereabouts, and grab a portion of the audio from that. Did something similar for engine noise as well. Not ideal as you don't have much control over the output and probably not licenceable in a paid game

This sounds similar to a problem that I had in a similar project. I didn't think to increase the supsension strength, although my suspension code was pretty bad/unstable - setting the strength too high meant that my car wouldn't be able to stand still without randomly bouncing into infinity. I might try revisiting it and using that approach whenever I get back around to it.

The way I 'fixed' it in my game was by adding a secondary somewhat thin box collider underneath my real collider which had a different ice-like physics material that has slip set to 1 (max) and bounce set to 0. Should my suspension give out completely, the car->road contact then has 0 consequences

Epic game. Could we get a flappy paddle gearbox, i.e a button shifts up and another button shifts down? 

Very cool

I looked at your itch.io page and your gamejolt page and I couldn't find any download links. Typically I want to play a game before I make any comments, even if it is something unfinished and demo-y. The game looks interesting enough from the youtube videos though, although the player moves a bit slow imo (but I would need to play the game to be sure)

Also maybe try to put the 10,000,000 on a single line? right now the last 0 is wrapping over

Looks good. Maybe needs 1 pixel of padding on the left? (like how it is on the right)

Very challenging game. The red level is very RNG. And the first 0 scratch level is very simple looking but it is very challenging. The dog (?) makes it hard, but I doubt I would last 20 seconds on an empty screen tbh. I need to get better at video games ...

The game was not a waste of time. I found it interesting how I was able to memorize the icons I was more familiar with better than icons I was not familiar with, despite all other variables being the same.

I believe you will receive better and more accurate/unbiased feedback if you reword "This is such a bad game." to something more neutral like "Feedback on memory game plz" and you remove "if not sorry for wasting your time.", as these will significantly lower a person's expectations. Perhaps I would have given harsher but more useful criticisms if you had omitted these (I already know there is a 80% chance my time will be wasted, and it is not a big deal imo)

I have noticed that the game is actually very laggy, especially in the higher particle counts (my highest XP was ~73000. the lag actually helped me by giving me slow mo hacks lul). However, some comments regarding performance:

- Circle x circle collision detection is very similar performance to square x square collision. The circle x circle collision code would be like ( if (circle1.pos - circle2.pos).sqrMagnitude < (circle1.radius + circle2.radius) ^2 ). (Notice how we are using sqrMagnitude of the vector and the radius to avoid using the square root function). A square x square collision would be like ( if !(r2.left > r1.right ||    r2.right < r1.left ||   r2.top > r1.bottom ||   r2.bottom < r1.top) (I just stole that one from stackoverflow as I couldn't think to write it myself at the moment). It is only a little bit faster.

- I am not sure about how you have implemented the game, but if you implemented each object as an individual script, this will be very slow and you are better off making all the entities into structs and then putting into an array, so that they are all allocated next to each other in memory and it is faster to iterate them. I.E use a "BulletManager" script that has a Bullet[] array and manually iterates and updates them from it's one Update rather than having each bullet as it's own script with it's own Update. More info about this kind of optimization here:  

(I have linked to 5 minutes into the video, but I remember the whole thing being a pretty good watch)

- also do object pooling. Where instead of Destroying and Instantiating each object manually, you have a list of the objects, and you just hide them when they are 'dead', and then unhide them when they are no longer dead: https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/introduction-to-object-pooling#

If you don't use unity engine then probably a lot of that specific terminology like 'instantiate' didn't make sense, but the concepts apply to game dev in general

good luck with your game

I have noticed that a lot of the circular enemies (like the blue things) actually have square hitboxes for player damage. Is this intentional? It makes it a bit hard to weave through the enemies when there are a lot of them, so it may be preferable to have circle collisions

I have found that I can move the mouse around very quickly, and go back through the hoop I just went through. I can do this repeatedly to continually increase my score. (But then it increases the risk of forgetting which ring to go through and losing, so I guess you can keep that bug in if you want)

Feature Ideas:

- Fly through a city, or have some sort of 3D objects that you are flying around. Needs more scenery

- I would like some particle effects for the jet stream, and the trails on the wings, something to feel like I am flying a plane. To add to this, the mouse should not simply rotate the plane like an FPS game, it should set the 'wanted rotation' instantly, and then plane should rotate towards that wanted rotation at some linear rate. This will make it feel more like you are controlling a plane. To add to the 'physics', you should also make flying downwards faster than flying upwards, due to gravity. (just examples, you can add more)

Simply by making the plane feel more plane-like and adding more scenery, this simple game can become very good. But after a while, simply flying through the hoops becomes boring. Could add some type of progression, or some end goal/win state. I am not sure what that will look like though, it is up to you really

Very cool game. I got very far in the game, with a very high level character with near maxed out firing speed, and bombs, it was very OP. but then the game went black and I saw this in the dev console:

gmlmessage: "Unable to find any instance for object index '84' name 'Core_Spawn'", gmllongMessage: "Unable to find any instance for object index '84' name 'Core_Spawn'", gmlstacktrace: (100) […], gmlscript: "", gmlline: -1, __yyIsGMLObject: true

maybe it is related?

Some feedback:

• The thing that made me lose interest in the game was the 'double-up' feature. At first, I thought it was pretty cool, cause it reminded me of that 2048 game. But then it dawned on me, that this game is endless. I will have to be managing these resources till eternity, because I can infinitely double-up something. 
  • The goal of the game is not very clear imo. Is it just to have as many foxes as possible? After getting around 6 foxes, I think that getting 2 more will require just as much effort as it did to get the previous 6. I was stuck at 6 foxes for quite a while. But this could easily be because I didn't move my mouse over some button somewhere that explained how much of what I needed to get to unlock the next thing (it seems like this is most of the gameplay)
• A lot of the gameplay seems to be clicking on menus. Is there a way for me to control or instruct the foxes, or to smite the enemies that threaten the meat farm, like how I can gather meat by pressing that button? (that button should have just started an auto-gather imo, so that people don't tire their fingers clicking it or use bots to spam mouse-click on it.,,). I think there should be a way to talk to the foxes or interact/manually trigger the dialog with them in some way. I am a sucker for the dialogue. Or just more variety in the gameplay in general, aside from waiting for menus to appear and clicking the right buttons
• It may be worth having some enemies at the start, and then giving the player time to build up their base. Because I regretted building things all the way to the edge of the board when enemies were introduced, and it was a pain to drag each of my structures to 1 pixel within the boundary so I could place a fence.
  
  • Could be solved by an infinitely large playfield, or giving the player the ability to expand the playfield by 1-2 squares when the enemies start appearing, or by incentivizing players to build near the center...
• It seems like there are a lot of menus that I just forget to mouse-over, and they are sitting there waiting to be clicked until a fox tells me to look at the research tab or something. May be worth making the UI highlight new revelations/unlocks as well?
• There is a bug when dragging - the tooltip will appear while you are dragging and it will cancel out the drag, which is a bit annoying

With a more tangible purpose, and more variety in the gameplay, I might play this game for tens of hours. The music was very nice though

Thanks for the feedback. I will see what I can do about 1,2,3,4.

Will definitely add a volume setting in the next update. Right now, you can press 'M', and it will switch the game volume between 10% and 100%, but it was meant to be temporary, so I have not mentioned this anywhere in the game.

I do not know how to make music at the moment, but I do plan on learning this and adding it in eventually. (the priority of this is very low though, because right now I just listen to music in another program while I play this, and I think this is a better experience anyway)

This demo of a demo seems quite well executed. I would not be surprised if it actually get recognized by people and gained a cult following some time from now. Most character designs and music/sfx are good. There are a lot of easter eggs, and paths that you can go down, some of which are fun to stumble into (using the lower damage attach after the higher damage one was very cool), but some of which are a bit random (Why can't they just perform the song again? Most performers can perform the same song multiple times so this is a plot hole imo. Why does fullscreening/unfullscreening during the performance ruin their performance? Sure there was a notice at the start, but I did not understand why the change in fullscreen/windowed would effect the performance any way. Probably because I changed the window state, but then they waited till the end of the entire passage to complain about it, so the 'feedback' wasn't localised in time to the behaviour. Maybe fullscreening/unfullscreening should have some visible effect on their universe. Otherwise the gag feels a bit random. Maybe I am overthinking it? I am definitely overthinking it. just forget about everything in these brackets okay?)

I imagine this will be constantly compared to Undertale. The terms "Mercy" and "Pacifist" and endless fourth wall breaks come directly from or feel like references or responses to that game.

Main complaints:

• In some screens you use this one calibri looking font. It looks pretty bad imo, because it is inconsistent with every other font. It is possibly the only graphic 'mistake'

• I would have liked to be able to navigate the menus with the mouse. I am already clicking on the knives, so I was expecting to be able to click on the "fight"/"check" options with the mouse as well. 

The game is too short and well executed for me to find a lot to complain about, so apologies. It looks very promising

The yellow block is a lot simpler than I thought :0

Am a bit surprised I didn't see that

Too many things happening on the screen imo. I think there is a bug where the old menu will still appear over the game, so I was not able to play. (I think I triggered it by accidentally opening some sort of speedrun menu?)

I wanted to post a screenshot of this, but itch.io is telling me "post: body: expected text between 1 and 20480 characters". so rest assured, having bugs is a very normal part of programming

That shouldn't be too hard actually. Can do it with coroutines, I am pretty sure:

IEnumerator RenderLeaderboardEnumerator() { 
   // enable the loading spinner
    while (leaderboard_hasn't_loaded) {
        // update the loading spinner() * Time.deltaTime or something idk;
        yield return new WaitForEndOfFrame();
    }
    // disable the loading spinner
    RenderLeaderboard() ;;; 
}
...

    // in your OnEnable or wherever you are fetching:
    StartCoroutine(RenderLeaderboardEnumerator());

Something like that, I imagine. You will have to fill in a lot of the blanks though

Very cool game actually. Really makes you think. I can't believe someone finished it in just 3 minutes though :0 damn

It says "Leaderboard service currently not available" when I click on it immediately for the first time after reloading the game. But if I reload the game, and wait for a little while and then click it, it works fine. I am guessing there is some async call when you get to the main menu that fetches the leaderboard, and the leaderboard code just checks if the leaderboard is present or not and doesn't check if we are currently fetching the leaderboard? Just a guess though, as I was not able to find the sourcecode on the page

Your game reminds me a lot of TrackMania 'hold-forward' tracks, where a player can just hold forwards  + left or something, and the car will complete a very elaborate series of stunts through the track. This is only possible because of the game's 100% deterministic physics engine (for example:This video ). I imagine creating one of those levels is basically the same as solving these puzzles.

I believe there are some possibilities for ball movement that are only possible by letting the ball bounce somewhere, and then moving the blocks around mid-game and 'brute-forcing' a solution. However, I think that this results in a large number of 'resets', which is probably bad (I am not actually quite sure what counts as a reset though, because I couldn't see it anywhere. It could also be an interesting gameplay mechanic to solve one of the later levels though, so maybe this is done on purpose.

There are edge cases where if you have several blocks close together, the GUI indicator for translating/rotating that appears when the mouse is close to a block starts activating for every single cube, going haywire.

On the level 1 act with 4 dividing walls, I was able to move the boxes through the tiny gaps at the center, because it seems the divider only blocks the very center of a cube. Is this on purpose?

Sound and visuals:

Sounds and music are good, nothing seems out of place, although a bit monotonous after a while (or I could just be taking too long on these puzzles). 

The musical notes should not be random. They should be a deterministic property of the physics. This way, pro players can come up with creative solutions that also sound like the meme songs.

The game looks very pretty. It is very minimalistic - is this going to be released on mobile?

Difficulty

I will never say that a puzzle was too hard for me, as that might make me look like an idiot. It was all your crappy level design's fault (Just kidding). But really, I think the puzzles seem balanced. I think that it should be a bit more obvious that we want to light up all the cubes. A fractional counter somewhere saying {{number_lit}} / {{number of cubes}} or even some sort of visual progress bar that moves based on that fractional amount or some visualization of that progress would give feedback of this I think. (Also it may look nice).

I still don't understand what the yellow blocks do. I can kind of intuit them, but I would never be able to explain it to you. It pushes the ball away, but it also flips the gravity in the opposite direction? It makes the ball travel in some parabolic path? Sometimes I felt as if moving the white blocks without moving any yellow blocks when the yellow blocks were active would affect the 'area of influence' of the yellow blocks as well, because the ball would move differently for seemingly no other reason. This really threw me off, and I still haven't quite figured it out. Because of my lack of understanding, solving some of the puzzles then became just brute forcing rather than actually piecing together a solution based on a solid understanding of how the blocks behave. Maybe we need some puzzles where you can't progress until you come up with a very precise configuration that can only be arrived at by understanding the blocks? 

I believe there should be a way to pause and rewind time, while placing blocks, rather than everything just resetting. This would make the problem solving much easier, more productive, more fun, more calming, and easier to experiment and understand the mechanics. But it would also give you much more scope and creativity with your level designs. You can now make your solutions much more tricky elaborate, because of how much easier it has become to explore the solution space.

I was not able to finish act 3 because I got bored/frustrated, but could just be me

Thanks for the feedback! The lack of clear direction on some levels does make sense, so I will keep that in mind. When you say the drifting being sensitive, is this because the car is rotating too fast, making it hard to control it's direction? Most of the levels are designed with drifting in mind, so if people aren't doing it, they become unplayable. I will do some thinking on this

yeah true. It is very easy to fall into the trap of endlessly refining your game and never releasing it. I have done this many times myself, so it's good that you got it out there

The player moves very slowly. This makes each level agonizingly boring. I honestly thing this is the only major issue, gameplay-wise. The slow movement prevents the gameplay from 'flowing', like it would if you were playing something like Pac-Man (The diamond in your game is very similar to that big pill that allows you to eat the ghosts, so I was reminded of Pac man). 

Music is on point though

Hi, I found your game through your feedback thread, so I thought I would give some feedback:

Negatives

• I didn't know what to do when I clicked play. Like, not sure what keys to press and what is happening. Am I supposed to just go as high as possible? Took me a while to realize oh, I'm meant to let these massive bricks fall on me (not very obvious imo) ...
  • Idea: a tutorial room where the way you escape is by jumping up into the bottom of a brick, and you see the score incerase and stuff. That way the core mechanic is very obvious, and you dont need to write any dialog/exposition
• Walking into the side or top of the thwomp kills me, and I wish it didn't. Only getting crushed by it when it is falling should kill me (that is what my common sense tells me, and also how the mario games work as well, I think. Or at least the 3d ones work like this. the 2D ones should as well.)
  • A common scenario is where there is a thwomp, but because the player is so slow, it is a pain to move and jump over it to get past it, so I just wait for it to disappear. Something you could try is to just not have anything disappear? Will force me to interact with these things, and may make for more emergent/interesting gameplay that arises through the random way the bricks fall and the structures they make
• There was no feedback for death, I just dissapear which is not very satisfying
• Main menu loop and game-over loop is really jarring, you can tell when it loops. Probably a simple fix in Audacity or something, just need to get that perfect loop timing right
• falling black bullet is impossible to react to, and is a stupid/frustrating way to die. Make them easier to react to somehow (slow them down, or telegraph them somehow, etc). When I have 4 thwomps and octopus chasing me, I can't put all my focus into dodging the bullets.
• The green coin does way too much for how significant it looks (people would say that it is 'too OP'), but it's main problem is that it makes the game not fun for the next 10 or so seconds. Collecting coins is the most boring mechanic in the game. 
• The game needs more platformer elements. Each level feels basically the same. And the purple things are way too hard to run away from, and adding more platforms / things to jump on and move around on will alleviate this problem as well
• I want to restart immediately, not after 10 seconds
  • I didn't realize how much additional content this game had when I started writing this feedback. But it is too frustrating to play all the way through to the end. I was only able to make it to the room with ~5 octopuses. Could you add one of those "Continue" options for the noobs like me? (where you get to start from that level again but with the 3 lives, and your overall score gets halved ? I think the touhou games had something like this. You can continue around 5 times in total I think)
• it is basically game over if the purple octopus get too close. They are way too OP. Make the player faster. I.e the time to reach the peak of the jump and then land again should be halved, and horizontal movement speed should be buffed a little as well

Nitpicks

• yellow pipe that appears at the start shouldn't just disappear. Always avoid making things dissapear, as this is always jarring. Make them slowly move off screen/fade out/tell a funny joke and walk out / leave a puff of smoke / anything else
• jumping is not very satisfying. Like, it feels like I dont have a lot of control. In the mario games for example, the duration you held the space bar is much more closely linked to the height of the jump than in this game (though it looks like you kind of have something like this but not quite). I.e when I lightly tap the spacebar for 0.01 seconds, I should just jump up a tiny bit rather than 3 body heights

Positives

• The subtle downwards 'bounce' when you jump into a brick from the bottom is perfectly executed and feels very satisfying. Need more like this.
  • To lean into this mechanic, add this rule: If a player allows a brick to fall on them, they just get crushed. But only if they jump up into the brick, the brick breaks and they get score.
    • More justification: There are some levels where you can win by just standing there doing nothing. In the grey levels, I was better off standing in one corner doing almost nothing. Adding this rule also fixes this, should engage the player more
• After the first 3 levels, there is some sort of horizontal coin run minigame. These are always cool, more of this please (doesnt have to be the same horizontal run, can be other random stuff you think of)
• Very cool how the enemies interact with each other and the other level elements and not just the player
• The you died screen music sounds like it was inspired by the ambulance sirens, very cool :0

Could I get feedback on this game I am working on? https://el-tejaso.itch.io/powerslide

The level editor is quite unpolished, as is the majority of the UI, so I am mainly interested in feedback about the gameplay, and the other things. How easy/hard Is the car to drive? How approachable is the level editor? etc

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects...

It looks like toSorted only has "preview" browser support for firefox, whatever that means. I've opened this up again in chrome and it seems to run fine

When I interact with blue thing at the start, I get Uncaught TypeError: prompt.options.toSorted is not a function error in the dev console and the game freezes :(

looks interesting tho