itch.io

hello! i am a programmer that can implement UI and HUD and beginner translator (EN, JP) and would like to gain practical experience by either:

1) programming your ui
2) translating your game from English to Japanese.

if you are interested please contact me on discord. my username is yuyaric.

hello! i am a beginner and would like to gain practical experience by translating your game from English to Japanese. if you are interested please contact me on discord. my username is yuyaric.

hello! i am a beginner and would like to gain practical experience by translating your game from English to Japanese. if you are interested please contact me on discord. my username is yuyaric.

You're welcome. If you ever have the time again, I think it would be a good idea to keep working on your combat system. It is the strongest thing I have noticed with your project, but gets scuffed because of the UI. I hope you had a good time working on your game, best of luck for your future games.

Start screen ui is not the best, since you block the player sprite a lot. Fix for readable font and more simpler UI.

Biggest Issue

I see you have the instructions in the page, but most of this should be in your game. The main issue with this is that people should not have to read somewhere else to play your game because it 1) makes people confused due to the lack of information and 2) wastes time which decreases player experience. You want people to play your game, not read how to play it.

UI

Overall, not good. Clearly indicate the HP and Level in the game. Clearly indicate the description for the items in the game. Add in UI for showing the player they levelled up and won the battle.

Indicate [Area1, Area2] for different areas. It can be a small animation on the top right corner to indicate the player is progressing. 

Indicate the description and base damage of Slash and Fire Sword and Call Army in the UI box.

Magic Sword does not decrease magic.

Indicate when the player receives a new item. I did not realize I had a new one until I checked my items. 

SFX

Battle: There arent any sound effects for battle music, attacking, pressing an input, or going back in the battle menu.

World: There isnt any music for each area and walking. It could be nice to have the enemies have a cry or some sound they make when you are nearby. You can show progression for each area by making it more tense, or whatever feeling you would like to convey in your game.

Art

UI and background art is very basic. Character art and basic enemies are okay. Boss should not have the same colored sprite as the player. Walking animation would be good.

Battling

Army mechanic is not clear in the game and it should be.  I think vfx for the moves could be a nice addition. Most of the battling issues stem from a poor UI design where things need to be obvious and not hidden.

Narrative
Difficult to tell why the player starts off battling. There is a spare mechanic not mentioned in the game, so it would be useful to outline these things in the game. You can use the first battle to mention how to play properly.

Overall the game experience is not too good because of the issues I've mentioned above. I think you should look into game design and playtesting to improve. You need to let players think about what they are doing for turn based combat. It needs to generally be fun and fresh when you battle with the exception of grinding. There is not a clear direction of what the player is fighting for necessarily, and adding a story can help with that. The army mechanic is interesting, but I am not entirely sure if the damage scales based on how many people were spared since there is no description of how it works in-game. The army mechanic is creative but needs to be worked on. However, the game is poor in UI, art, SFX/music and narrative.

In game Issues
Default Settings

There is not any text when answering the question the game asks for the "do you believe ... makes human keep on living". There are some grammatical errors throughout the game. Upon selecting the first input, I am met with a white screen. Upon selecting the second input, the screen is frozen at the same page.

After seeing the comments, it's a bug and it should be in fullscreen. It needs to be optimized at its default settings. People are inclined to leave if the game is not working. Players should not have to look around trying to see how to make your game work. It is a bit disappointing after playing in fullscreen because of the issue above, because of how great the artwork is. Please try to get it fixed soon! You can scale down the art if possible and look into  making the game playable for different screen sizes.

Changing Text

There are some grammatical errors in the narration. I would also change the text to: Do you believe that hopes and dreams gives people a reason to live? ex. '58% bachelor degree holders express difficulty in finding work'

Music/SFX

SFX for the news and home would be good. As for the music ehh. I think stock sounds might be better to indicate they are on their phone: ex. audio from a youtube video, watching the news, notification from social media sfx.

UI

Dialogue in room would look better if it was stylized as a comic bubble with a black background and white textnear the player. Or at the bottom like classic VN games.

Posters are a nice touch but they do not look coherent with the art style. I would keep the hideo kojima poster, or have the artist create posters with their style to keep things in line.

Instead of using E, I would suggest space bar to skip dialogue. I ended up pressing space and was prompted to start over, but it is confusing why I had to. The placement for it is not good, and I would outline the goal of the game and change it to E for interaction (common).

After a second run it seems to not work anymore when it gets the the unemployed rates high. If the purpose is to simply restart the game to battle the laziness, the game is unfortunately unplayable at this time.

Overall, the narrative is okay and the artwork is good. But, it is a game first and foremost and it must be optimized and playable. The audio can be much better. Ultimately as far as enjoyment goes, it is not good at worst and meh at best. The player experience is not very good because of the default settings issue and it being unplayable when you have to restart. The UI can be changed with player experience in mind.

Instead of having to restart, I would find a different way to implement a game mechanic where you have to resist being lazy. It could be through a series of minigames, interactions with other people in the game, etc. It is not practical to restart every time to make progress. 

You should make the font more readable on your itch.io page. because you have the most important part of your game on the pageand not inside your game, players will need to read your page more often and the font is not accessible.

It's nice to have a stylized font, but you have a lot of content on it and it is best if it's easier to read.

Game ui

On the left you have what seems to be a control panel / keybinds. It's not clear why the collectible echo is there for and should be removed as it does not have anything to do with the controls.

Instead of having 'press these to open', use a mouse icon that has the right click down. 

instead of having 'to pull' just put pull. It is easier to describe actions if you have no way to show it graphically. Also this is something that should be on a separate window. Have a button that says controls and put it there.

In-game

It feels a bit empty without music. The jumping height is not very good. Would be good to have a tutorial to play, not necessarily to explain the controls, but moreso explaining what the echo mechanic is since it is the most important part of your gameplay.

I can see that this platformer relies on using the echoes to get further into the game, but it seems like it was designed intuitively and not with player experience in mind. You need to explain especially what you mean by input based. I think the second area needs the echo to have more time to get across.

The player is hidden on the game screen when it goes too far left. You should be adding a collision or boundary there. I think it takes too long to finish areas and not in a fun challenging way.  Overall, the game mechanic as a concept for echos is very interesting, but not utilized well in your game. Player experience can be increased by the changes above. I think the most useful feedback you can get is from new people playing this and sharing their opinion on your mechanic.

Upon first playing it is confusing on how to increase your score and hard to understand why the velocity hitting the core of another planet ends up making you die. You should make this apparent (the goal of the game and the rules). You can add a how to play menu and also indicate how to play on your itch.io page.

It is more clearer that it's supposed to arc around the star after playing through a couple times. I would simplify the velocity instructions and have an indication that you will lose if it his the core. 

I think this is a creative game that has potential, but because of how the velocity works I think it having a bigger screen size would be more effective so that players can have space to create more planets.

This game would be more enjoyable if it did not have a confusing player experience, highlighted the rules/mechanics of the game and a better on-screen indicator of the entire arc the velocity will go in before moving. Right now it is linear with a slight curve and you can only predict when it will start changing. Instead I think it being a circle would be better so you can decide if it will end up hitting the core of another planet.

Game design suggestions -> I think it would be interesting if there was a speed aspect to how fast it orbits around a planet. Could even play around with the colors of the velocity matching the planet for increasing the score.

Artwork and audio are pretty basic, but okay sfx. 

What I did like about this game is the sfx for marble rolling and win screen music. The warping mechanic is interesting, but I think it needs to be utilized better. Most of the focus is on ensuring you can build a track to the endpoint. Because of the level of randomness in the game, i do not think many people will be using this warp mechanic, unless they are panicking to get extra time. And that is only if they are able to warp given the randomness of the pieces in their current run of the level.

The instructions need to be simplified.

problem: confusing because it mentions one marble, then says all marbles. after playing you see that it is only relevant to each level since it increases. it's not necessary to put in the instructions, put it in the game itself.

problem: fast forwarding is not entirely relevant to the instructions, it can be explained within the game or simply added in the ui "fast forward" above.

problem: irrelvant information at the end. don't get me wrong, it is a nice touch but not necessary. people only need to know what is necessary to play.

suggestion for revamped instructions: Build a track for the marble to reach the end by clicking on the board.

For things in the game

needs a better indicator of when to start. the colors are fine, but not really good enough as an indicator imo. do this by saying specifically where it starts and ends

there should be a hud indicator of how much time you have left to place a track. race against time should have the time displayed..

suggestion: instead of a mouse pointer cursor, it should be the current track.

problem: game itself is rng pretty much, and because of that most people will not win and will get frustrated. when it comes to challenging games people try to devise effective strategies so that they can win, but it is lacking in effective strategies to make due to the rng of it and fast paced style which is prone to spamming.

good: the warping mechanic is good for giving the player extra time from what i have noticed. but it does not have strong decision making to decide if it is worth it and may be used as a tool to not panic.

Is the game fun to play? does it have a good player experience? Not really. I do think there are things that get away in player experience with feelings of frustration. It's not necessarily because the game is 'challenging'. I do not think there is much of a challenge to it, it is just how fast can you build these tracks based on randomness. It's moreso that this is a puzzle game, but there is not an interesting and strong level of decision making needed to play this. For example with other puzzle games like tetris, orienting the way of incoming blocks is imperative to playing and makes you think about what you are doing. This game kind of feels like spam until you get the right pieces, not really actually thinking about more efficient ways to win with the given mechanics.

I would ultimately change the game design to add mechanics that make adding the tracks meaningful in some way and improve player experience. Maybe there could be a small randomized set of tracks a player can choose from to build the tracks. It gives them a better way to think of what they are actually doing and consider using the warp mechanic if they think it is a good idea too. There could be different indicators on the board that take up a square and if the player builds on them (not directly but there must be an adjacent track) it can help them in-game like selecting a track they need right at that moment. It does not have to be these, but you know make it enjoyable. Game design is an iterative process and takes a while to find out what is fun. I would ask people to playtest while you work on games or playtest among the group and be honest with yourselves on what can be added, changed or removed. 

The most important part of this is that you guys were able to finish something and you should be very proud for doing so. I wish you luck in your future games.