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Robin Six
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Hi :) thanks for the feedback and the nice comment overall!
About some of your suggestions:
"continously clicking the mouse button to shoot can be annoying" -> true, however I do not believe that auto fire would be the best solution. The game has only two inputs, aiming and shooting, so if auto fire is implemented, there will only be one input left, aiming, which could make the game a bit boring to play. So what I could do is implement different weapons, as you also suggested, which would make the game less boring and the shooting pace less repetitive, with possibly lasers that do not require any input, or semi automatic that have some auto fire, maybe.
"perhaps another way to get around the level and breaking boxes other than shooting (maybe headbutting?)" -> this one was suggested by one of my colleagues who tested the game before the jam deadline. I didn't do it for the jam because I wanted the crates to be an obstacle challenging the player shooting direction, since he has to face the crates to shoot them, pushing him the other way where he does not want to go, so he would need to stuck himself in some corner or something, while adding the ability of destroying crates would have make it easier in my opinion. This is still a great idea, especially for an infinite mode, else as a powerup, or just for juiciness purpose and speedrunning :)
"this type of game fits perfectly with a procedural level generation" -> could work, but it definitely depends on many other design choices (typically, different weapons, breaking the crates by colliding, etc.). I thought of implementing random generation for the jam and make it an infinite runner, but I prefered creating a rather small adventure the player could play in a few minutes, which I felt more confident with. That's also why I added coins to collect, to add some replay values in case some people would like the game enough to want to replay it, though it is not procedurally generated! Also added the timer display for an upcoming version of the game with some improvements and bug fixing, which could also give another reason the play again (timer was already displayed at the end, but seeing it during a run adds something I believe)
Otherwise, thanks a lot for taking the time to give your feedback ! I don't think I'll work on a game after posting a slightly improved version, to be honest I'm proud of the game as a jam entry, but I don't feel like taking it further. But if I do, I'll make sure to consider your suggestions !
That was really nice ! I enjoyed every second of it :D
Some thoughts :
- I really I could have played with a controller. The game page mentions you could not build a web version, but I really care about here is controller mapping. Seeing what you achieved, it seems clear to me that it would have been fairly easy for you to add it and the game would have been much more enjoyable to play ! Not that it was bad, but this kind of game clearly require it in my humble opinion.
- Got so scared by the sound of the character jumping out of the water xD it made me laugh, and maybe it was on purpose, but just so know it scared so that if it was not your goal, maybe reduce the volume a little bit :')
- Gameplay is great, it works fine, and it has a nicely made pacing so it was truly enjoyable. I had some trouble getting used to my range at first but it came pretty fast. About the blood mechanic forcing you to fight not to die, I think it lacks some explanation. The UI is the only element that seems pretty obvious to me, but since it looks like a classic health bar I did not realize it was reducing, and the blood coming at you when you kill an enemy is too discrete for such an important mechanic. The thing that had me die once because of blood is that I wanted to explore a little bit, just out of curiosity, and well my character just died while walking :D and I thought : if you need to fight without stopping, maybe the map has no reason to be large ? Don't get me wrong, it's far from huge, and I also understand the waves get bigger so you need more room, but maybe it could grow on size with wave index or something. Also, I perfectly understand that it's a jam and thus there's no tutorial, which if you had the time would have avoid me to die like an idiot haha. And about the health bar, just wanted to say that I'm in love with the blood animation!
- A mechanic that I did not use at all is the dodge roll. I didn't feel I needed it since my character was moving fast enough, at least relative to the enemy attacks, even ranged one or the dashing enemies. I took some damage from those attacks, but I was not used to the roll since I never used it, so most of the time where it would have been useful, I didn't have the reflex to use it, compared to a game like Enter the Gungeon (I might be wrong but seeing your roll animation, I would say you got inspired by it :p) where you roll almost all the time since the very beginning because you're forced to (which is great for a game made by a studio called DodgeRoll...).
- I'm sad I could not destroy the crates :( there are only few elements in the environment, so I was expecting the crates to have some interaction. Also because ground and walls are both grey, so seeing an element with another color, really standing out, made me think it was here for a purpose other than decorating or collision.
- About the artstyle, I think the game looks charming and everything has been polished. What I would just say is that I found the ground too clean and smooth for a dungeon ground, and the point lights did not help because they made it shine too much. I also think the game could have been a little bit more saturated and way more contrasted : I found it more beautiful looking when the player is low on health (at least for the contrast, obviously the post processing coming with it would not fit anytime, but - hopefully - you get my point). I also think your main menu doesn't not credit the game. The start button seems placed randomly, same goes for the title, and the inputs are taking all the bottom of the screen, which makes it look like you did it in a few minutes at the end. Not a real issue, but since it's the first thing you see, you should polish it a little bit :)
Other that all of that, it was great ! And to be perfectly honest it's making me want to work on a game with a same art direction haha, I really love it and I think you nailed this 3D pixel art style. Again, gameplay is great and I did not say anything about juiciness because here again it seems clear to me that you spent lot of time on it, it's really well made, feels great slicing enemies and killing them while not being too much, great job for that.
Hope my explanations were clear, feel free to ask if some were not due to poor english :D
Hi !
The game is pretty cool, the concept is simple but rather well executed. The main issue is, in my opinion, the huge lack of feedback on the dash mechanic. Whether I was spamming my mouse or keeping it pressed, moving or not, I could not figure out clearly when I was dashing or not. Sometimes I managed to push the pillars really fast, which felt good, sometimes on the contrary it just did not want to and since I could not understand how to perfectly dash, this was a bit punishing.
Also, the mouse button to dash seems strange to me. You can keep it, but since your game has almost no input, you could have add at least the space bar. It also seems than the strength put on pillars is not related on movement speed, which I would have expected since you have a dash mechanic.
About the scoring system, first the score does not reset through runs, which is a small issue, but I'm not sure about such a design. Make a pillar recoil is not something I'm doing for scoring, I'm doing it to survive and play a little bit longer, so I believe a timer would've been a better idea. Or, if you're going for a score, then it could be interesting to make the game a bit more arcade, with some combo system allowing to push many pillars at once, or something cool like that giving a real meaning to the score value :)
Also not a fan of the game over system. This feedback is just my personal opinion, it's not bad but I did not feel "stuck" when two pillars were touching. I'd have feel stuck if I got stuck between two pillars that had collided and could then not be moved, which would mean my death will eventually come since I got nowhere to run, and then the game is over when you get crushed (or just when you get collided by the two opposite sides of the same pillar, I don't want the cute character to get crushed :D).
Other that those feedback, this was nice to play :) the game is cute, self explanatory and with some more juice, it would have a nice replay value ! It also lacks sound design, score UI should not be centered left, etc. they are a few minor things to improve, but overall it is good and you should definitely work on it a little bit more and publish a polished version ! I'll play it if you do so :D
Hi! Thanks for the game :) Here are my thoughts about it
Overall, as it has been stated, controls are a real issue. You asked what to do, I'd suggest implementing controller mapping first because it would fit really well, or check racing game to see what mapping they use. Always use references !
So yeah controls felt pretty terrible, and they were not helped by the camera and level design. It's hard to see where you're going since the camera is always focused on the car and the road is tight, at least for a beginning map, so you have to really improvise when turning left or right, and most of the time it will just not work. The arrows next to the road are, in my opinion, pretty much useless as in racing game, they're either shown in first person view because it's obviously harder to see the road, either to warn the player about a huge bend, which is more the case here, but they're definitely not shown with enough size or particles to put the emphasis on them. So I most of the time ended up colliding the arrows, which made me being soooooooo slow for long seconds, before getting back on the road. Or I ended up in the water and I was excepting it to make me respawn on the road just where I was, but no, I was teleported to the beginning, which felt frustrating.
The game also felt a bit boring because the AI just run away at the start, and at the first misplay, you just completely lose them and you end up being alone on the road. It's okay in a racing game to do mistakes, but what is fun is that you're playing against other car, colliding them, etc. being alone in such a game is very boring. And that's a shame because colliding other cars and speeding up is well made and fun ! So I wish the game helped me doing it a bit more :)
So maybe work on smaller maps, with AI cars being of different speeds, and what you can also do is slow them while they are far from the player, to help him reach them and feel like he can still do it. AI in games do not have to be realistic, they have to SEEM realistic, and you can tweak them in such ways to help the player.
About the art style, I'm not a huge fan of bloom for pixel art games, and it does not fit the day map in my opinion. Looks better during night but still, not really accurate I think. Otherwise this is good looking, everything's clear and the menu looks good though the texts are tilted a bit too much :p
And I think that's it ! I'd play again if you work on some improvements, and also keep in mind that racing games are not the games I play the most so maybe some of my feedback are not so valuable :p but those are my thoughts ! Still, congrats for making a working and polished game during this week !
You can actually be proud :) the game is far from perfect as I said, but hey, it's a game made alone in 8 days and it's already great. Solo jams are hard. Otherwise, glad to read that you thought of UI particles, adding more juice and stuff, and you're definitely right about the fact that it should not reduce the clarity of the game, so knowing that, I'm sure you can work on something great without making it a complete visual mess :D About the UI particles, indeed it's a bit annoying to do. I've already used this package that works really well, just needs to learn it a little bit, it comes with a demo scene so it's fairly easy : mob-sakai/ParticleEffectForUGUI: Render particle effect in UnityUI(uGUI). Maskable, sortable, and no extra Camera/RenderTexture/Canvas. (github.com)
The SFX did not bother me, I was mostly focused on the music to be perfectly honest, but if I did not pay any attention to them, this may not be a bad point.
And you're welcome :) Feel free to ask me if you need any help!
Thank you very much :)
Not sure about the auto fire since my game already has very few inputs so it might get a bit boring. However you're totally right about it being tiring, so there are definitely things I could have done about it ! Like adding lasers or stopping the lava while on checkpoints, already done this one for a small patch even though it's not the biggest improvement about the issue :p
Hey :) Thanks for the game, here are some thoughts. Overall, I must say I found it pretty boring for different reasons :
- The gameplay is not in sync with the music, and actually nothing is. Seeing what you've done, there are definitely some improvements that you would have been able to do about it. I suggest you look at these videos : Audio Visualization - Unity/C# Tutorial [Part 0 - Result] - YouTube that talk about audio visualization in Unity, and explain things that are actually simple and can be used in games such as yours :)
- It lacks soooo much colors and feedback ! When I destroy a cube, I want to see it being obliterated, I suppose you know about Beat Saber :p so you know the cubes are cut and thrown away which feels great, here there are just a few particles and the cubes disappears. So if it's just for scoring, I have no real interest in destroying the cubes. The UI is white, I wish it was more flashy or with some neons, that the combo text bursts a lot of colors when getting a bigger combo, etc. this is would have make the game a whole lot fun, because this kind of game is just here for visual and audio pleasure, so you have to put everything on it.
- About audio, as already mentioned, the music not in sync is the main issue. But I also think the musics do not really fit, they're not fast paced enough, there are not loud enough drums so that I can bang my head while bursting cubes, and that's a shame. You can start with a slow music for the tutorial, but you need to quickly rise up the pace. Also, when losing combo or missing a cube, you can play with audio mixer effects like low pass to add lot of juice in your game audio.
- About the tutorial, it was good though I would have prefered the tutorial to make me destroy a cube, and do it again until I do it correctly. It would have probably been a bit harder/longer to do, but definitely better !
- I wish there was a liiiiittle bit more than just cubes coming one by one. Maybe some long cubes that requires to keep the key pressed, or cubes coming in pair. Not random pairs, that could be hard and frustrating, but sometimes a left/right or up/down pair, just so that the player feels he's doing something hard and getting better.
Other than that, let's not forget the fact that you made this game alone, despite using some already existing assets but that's perfectly fine, and it's really good ! You have polished menu animations and an animated tutorials, a fully working gameplay loop, and even if I said lots of negative things, you just have to tweak a lot the speed of the game and add more feedback, which should be technically fairly easy to do though it can take some it, and it would be really great to play ! And I would play it again with pleasure if you do so :)
Hope my feedback will be of any help !
This was a beautiful game, however I wish it was as fast paced and juicy and it is good looking. Not that it was bad, but I was just wandering around, sometimes attacking, not really understanding how much damage I was dealing, or I was taking damage, but it seemed to be the thing to do so I did it.
At some point, a popup shows, telling you to select an upgrade, in which I could choose between projectile speed and melee range, and I learnt that I had a range attack which I didn't know, maybe it was written somewhere but I did not see it. Also, you have a 3D game with emphasis on lighting, so the popup being very very poor graphically was a bit disturbing. I guess a simple 2D texture and a custom font would have been good without being too long to implement ! Same goes for health bar and the pixel art icon that has no reason to be pixel art.
Otherwise the melee attack feels pretty nice, you seem to have put most of the work here, and it was worth it imho. I simply wish you polished everything else a little bit more, and this would have been a great entry ! You should work on it a little bit more, it does not need much more to be wayyy better :)
Also, I tried running far away from the bonfire, and when coming back my game crashed. I tried checking the logs but there was no exception or error. Maybe an infinite loop ?
I love this concept. However I think there are a few things here that make it not work very well.
The "help" command is a joke, which is pretty fun at first, but then when you're really in need for help, it's simply frustrating because you don't know what to do at all or what command will work.
The command parsing is a bit unfair. For example you can type "clear" and "Clear", but not "clear " with a space at the end. This might seem a small issue, but then you need to type "bowl.create()", as "bowl.create ()" won't work, although I believe it is a perfectly fine syntax (though I don't add whitespace before my methods parenthesis, but that's another topic haha).
Then, you need to add egg. And to do so, you have to specify the amount, which means you cannot write "bowl.add(egg)", although here too if seems like an intuitive instruction, which simply means I want to add only one egg. And as I was thinking "okay, technically, it is possible to write a method that indeed takes two arguments and no less", but then I saw that the "remove" command only takes one and you cannot specify the amount, which felt a bit strange to me.
Also, a thing that I would have find amazing would be the ability to add as much eggs as I want. I tried to add 100 but only one seemed to appear in the bowl. I tried to add "-1" and the interpreter did not tell me "cannot add a negative value".
What I mean, is that this kind of games works really well if your code interpreter feels like a real one. Here, you immediatly understand how the real code behind it works, and it's a bit frustrating because it would have been SO funny to just let the player do whatever he wants ! Create 50 bowls ? Alright. Add 5000 eggs ? Okay maybe just clamp to 100, but sure.
However, I absolutely understand that this is easy to say, but so so so, sooo hard to make. It's already nice that you achieved to do this prototype during this short amount of time ! And despite all the feedback I've written, please note that I found the game fun and that I believe the idea should be extended and improved a little bit, because it's really nice. And I'd be happy to play it again if you decide to work on it a little bit more :D
Congrats and thanks for making this game !
Hey ! Thanks for the game :)
It is great, and obviously polished and well done, but I must say I had too much trouble with input mapping to enjoy it :c I first tried playing with a controller because I thing this kind of game is perfect for such an input system, and I realized the jump key with Y (I'm using an Xbox One controller), which really surprised me and was too counterintuitive to get used to, but what annoyed me at most was that no trigger or buttons on top of the controller was used, while a trigger would have fit sooooo well for the vacuum action. Then you just jump with A, shoot with X, and you're good to go. So I then tried to play with keyboard, it was clearly better and designed for it, but I'm bad on platformers with a keyboard haha (cannot blame you for this though :p)
Otherwise - and obviously considering the fact that I had trouble with inputs - I think the level is too punishing too soon, one missed jump and you're almost guaranteed to get caught by the fire, as you then have to vacuum and then try jumping again. That's a cool mechanic that would be really fun for experienced players, but it was a bit frustrating in my opinion. Jumping and double jumping is hard in your game and there already are long jumps to perform at the beginning. I LOVE difficulty in games, but in my humble opinion, it was unfair here.
Last negative feedback, the menu navigation using a controller was pretty annoying, as switching from an option to another using a joystick would also change the value of the newly selected option (guess the dead zone is set to a low value), and you cannot switch from last value to first one, don't know how to explain it clearly in english, but like, if you have 3 values A-B-C, you cannot go from C to A, you must do C-B-A. Same goes for the options themselves, and there were apparently no back shortcut so you have to go to the back button which is at the bottom, without the possibility to just go from the first option to it by going up. Sorry if it is not clear, feel free to tell me and I'll try to explain it better :D
So that was it for the negative feedback, but there are obviously really nice things to say about the game ! First, about the options, I'm glad that you put a toggle to disable the scanlines. I personally like them, but it's always good to see developers adding options like this for people to customize a bit their own game, since it does not change anything about the design and can only be positive.
The lava in the tutorial that never touches you and the facts that it waits before starting a level is also nice. Makes in way less frustrating as it would have been if you had to start jumping fast when beginning a level. Wall jumping is nice, I would have make the character slower when on a wall, but I had absolutely no trouble dealing with it, which is nice because wall jumping can really feel horrible and frustrating when not perfectly working.
And I liked the visual style of the game :) simple but veeeery effective with nice color choices, beautiful interfaces, some discrete but nicely fitting environment details. The only asset I'm not a fan of is the static lava that's here for you to reload, but that's actually the only one.
Overall a good entry ! Hope my feedback is not to harsh, and I'll be happy to play the game again if you change the controller input mapping ! :)
About game design itself, being a programmer and not a game designer myself, I actually don't really know what advice I could give you haha. I suppose that game designers should play lots of different games, but this is also the case for others game profressions since it's a very generic advice.
Otherwise it seems you're already working on some games and doing game jams, which is great and you should definitely keep it going, personal projects are really what will make you get better and it's also a proof of motivation :)
Thanks a lot !
Spamming the same key is indeed boring and there are things I could have done for that. Many people already mentioned it so I should try to do something if I'm working a bit more on the game, like more just than debugging it.
Glad you like the little accessibility option ! For some reason this one was not this quick to implement (mostly because the code was not initialy planned for the player to go down, so at some point you could just disable the lava, go down, reenable it, and you were below the lava without dying haha), but I deeply believe it was worth it :)
Thank you ! Space on screen has been a problem during development, as I wanted the player to the see far above him, while he also needed to see the lava below. A thing I could have tried is moving a bit the camera depending on where you aim, which would probably help, mostly when using the mouse indeed.
About the music bug, I realized it too late, and got a little frustrated that I had no time to fix it, but it will be done :D