Welp, I feel like with a popper upgrade enough to pop all the bubbles and keep full momentum for the next wave while at 104*2.04 with exactly 241$ I have properly beat NPFL-241 and can let the game rest. 😁
IrisNebula
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I usually get free games that sit and collect dust without ever playing them, but this looked pretty and short so it won me over. 😊 I’ve played until I reached the Sky City (circle 9), feedback so far:
The drawings are all very beautiful and the animations are cute, visually it’s really really nice, that’s what drew me in in the first place! Good job! 🤩
Some assets (other characters) stand out as lower res than the girl or the backgrounds, which looks a little strange on a 27” 4K monitor, but totally fine on a 6” mobile screen. If you have higher resolutions of those to export into the game, it would be a good idea to do so, otherwise it’s nothing major, just distracts from the beautiful world.
Sounds effects are ok, so is music. I always play games with their music on, but an option to turn it off is always a plus as some people don’t want it, while still keeping the sounds.
Puzzles and story: I will be coming back to this when I’m done, so far I like it, it’s cute, the puzzles are hard enough to stumble for a minute and easy enough to know how to solve them after a bit of thought, without brute-forcing anything.
And now the bad: Controls suck. I played this both on PC with a mouse and on my phone with Steam Link.
It feels like it was made with mobile/touch in mind, but didn’t make it to mobile?
- The icons that appear ABOVE the intended action are ok for touch, but cumbersome for mouse, it would be better if they appeared right on top of the action item, not above. It’s confusing and slowing you down. At least maybe move them lower?
- Clicking the icons (mouse) is usually fine, tapping the icons (mobile) is irritating because their shape doesn’t match their hitbox and as fingers don’t always hit exactly in the middle, it is very easy to miss them although you hit them perfectly fine, just not in the bullseye. Please fix the hit area for the action circles.
- Movement: I’m dying inside every time I click and nothing happens while I know Yuki can move there. I end up rapidly clicking 10 times while moving the mouse around in small circles until I actually hit the correct spot. The movement area is ok, but you need to accept input even outside of it and just move the character towards it, just stop on the edge. This is even more important for touch input as it’s even more difficult to hit the right spot. Movement is my biggest gripe with it.
Now that we are at controls, although Alt+F4 is pretty much common knowledge, PC games ALWAYS need an exit button. I don’t understand how developers keep missing this, you’re not alone 😜. You already have a pause menu and a title screen, so adding a back to title screen button in pause screen and an Exit button in title should be trivial and allow for always easily getting to the Exit button. And a music mute button in the pause menu too maybe, that would be great as I said before.
Why is there no Linux version? It’s a Unity project, you should be able to export it to Linux just as you do for Win/Mac, unless I’m missing something. If you just don’t have an easy way to test it, I’d be willing to do it, contact me.
So, publishing on Steam? Well, Steam reviews can be harsh, so I think fixing the controls before publishing it there might make the difference between an otherwise perfectly fine game being review stormed or ignored, and actually succeeding. Of course it’s quite short so price should probably be pretty low, gamers are harsh with that too (although a lot of times I enjoy short games more than longer ones, so I don’t understand this one).
And lastly, you might want to publish to mobile too as a lot of gamers in your target audience enjoy shorter games on the go. If you fix the control issues, it might do well there!
I hope you wanted the criticism, gonna go finish my game now 😊
EDITS:
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Oh, controls additions: There are some places where clicking to move invokes a text bubble instead of moving, they tend to jump the dialogs after the first time clicked because it responds to both mouse down and mouse up events, maybe keep mouse-up only. Noticed this at least on the hot air balloon bridge and the temperature pool.
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Circle icons position: I realized that when moving up or down, they actually make sense to be where they are! Only when interacting with items they are weird and would be much better positioned on top of said item.
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Ah, the wallet puzzle. I hate you a bit (kidding, it was good 😂❤)
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Finished. Awww, sad but cute, loved it! Under an hour total, would have been a lovely experience if not for the weird control issues. I wish you luck, tell me if you want clarifications on anything.
I did like the puzzle ideas, I’d play more of this! Implementation wise (except for the obvious lack of exit mechanic, which you shouldn’t omit even in demos, not everyone knows about Alt+Tab/F4/Enter and your game defaults to fullscreen), I have 2 pieces of feedback:
One is simple, when forward and turn are pressed at the same time, turn should take precedence whenever there is a traversible tile at that direction and not only when forward is blocked. Even turn always preceding forward, which is even simpler to do, would be better than the current mechanic if properly timed by the user.
The other might not be very straightforward. The fast turning of the cubeworld feels very satisfying at first but is also super disturbing after a while, it can induce dizziness or stomach turning. Maybe solved by slowing down the animation, but that could be frustrating, or zooming the whole level out? Don’t know, but you should definitely test to find something that works.
That’s all. Again, concept is nice!
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