I nabbed all my sounds off of free sound sites, which is why I could throw all that together in so little time xD I respect doing everything all properly though, kudos for that! I’d prefer doing that too but never been in a jam that had a week available for me to just make music since I’m not too good at it to do in that amound of time (or maybe too picky hahah).
I didn’t figure out how the level two input was supposed to work.
For what I did get through though I’ll give some feedback! First off, since I’m a bit of a polish nerd, there was too much screen shake and some of the sounds didn’t feel quite right. They sounded like a bad thing was happening even though you did it correctly. For future reference, check that the sounds actually sound like what you’re trying to convey. For screen shake, tone that down by like 80% maybe. It’s supposed to support the feeling you’re getting of the impact, not disorient the player. It’s easy to overdo but elevates stuff when done in moderation. For the cinematic sequence of blowing up the planet it’s fine to have a bit more, since it’s just vibes and doesn’t interfere with any gameplay.
For a simon says clone i really like the packaging of it but I would have liked a bit more focus on clear communication of what you are supposed to do when. From a game design perspective, I think level 1 overstayed its welcome a little bit. Maybe 5-10 button presses fewer in total but ramp up faster. The challenge comes when you have to remember a sequence, it’s not hard to remember which light just flashed even if it’s a fraction of a second xD
Allow skipping the intro sequence too, I missed part of it and had to rewatch the whole thing hehehe
I am on linux (Arch). I could run fullscreen (chromium based browser). Also yes, you should be able to run windows .exe standalones if you got Wine installed. I’m also pretty sure you can somehow through Steam Proton compatability.
I won’t be rating it cuz I won’t be able to play it with a mouse before the jam ends, but from what I am able to see you’ve hit it out of the park with this one!
You even got a full tutorial (didn’t play much further because it didn’t feel good with a touch pad lol)!
I think my only critique from what I experienced was that the music does get a bit monotone…
I’m impressed by how much you managed to fit into this game!
The puzzle pacing could have used some work, I feel like there were a few redundant puzzles that didn’t add much to the experience since you already knew what the solution would be because you knew the mechanics. I stopped playing a bit after the second layer was introduced but that’s just because I’ve played with my share of LEGO gears already xD
Amazing entry overall though, you can be proud:D
If you’re interested in puzzle design, I highly recommend this lecture series:
Clearly you know what you are doing but just didn’t have time for more. The visuals are definetely strong, there’s good contrast, good separation of gameplay space and non-gameplay space, etc. I think you could have spent 10 minutes on some nicer UI though :b
Ooh, well done having so many things on screen without lag:D
Decently polished as well. I think my most major critique would be mismatching pixel art and some things that are perfectly sized single pixels and others which are nearest neighbours scaled sprites that aren’t 2x2 like the buttons (which is fine!) but like some of the text or menu selection things don’t look as nice as the little guys.
The sound design could use some love and there were no interesting decisions to make. (which is where the depth of idle/clicker games comes from). You simply max out your coin gain and then your era gain because it goes so slow there is no other strategy and it just becomes a chore. I would keep this in mind for these kind of games.
And a godot specific thing: Be aware of focus on buttons, it usually is best to just disable focus entirely, otherwise it just highlights something that doesn’t function as a selection.
The art did not feel super coherent and there are some sprite/scaling issues but besides that I enjoyed it for a bit. I agree that there are difficulty issues and maybe there should be some better guidance in game. Having the whole map rotate as well was a fun discovery:D
I could not get past the second jump, and I tried for roughly five minutes. So I’m just going to give some advice instead of commenting much on the actual game.
My best advice is to play the good platformers out there as well as the good rage games. They always make it so you feel like it’s your fault you messed up, not the game’s fault.
That means generally:
Be generous with hit-boxes (favor the player). This makes the player feel like they messed up, not blaming the game.
Do no hide mechanics required for progress.
Ease the player in. Make difficulty progress throughout.
As for other feedback: The cat was cute and the ground sprite was decent. The rest could use some work, and your game page should use a different and larger font. It’s difficult to read. Getting stuck on the walls was not something I enjoyed, not was the slippery player controller in a precision jumping game. The main menu looked good and I enjoyed the aspect ratio not being 16:9. It fits the pixel art style.
I like thinking of games as the same as good user interface design, you want to reduce the mental friction as much as possible anywhere it’s not an intended part of the design (in 99% of cases you want less friction).
The theme was loosely integrated into the main mechanic.
The game was definetely fun. The choice of main mechanic was good and skill based with good audiovisual feedback.
The art was all over the place but in a consistent way. It kind of reminded me of Nubby’s Number Factory. Could still use some polish to be more uniformly weird. Just some general pixel art do’s and don’t would benefit. Like a consistent (or smaller) colour palette to give it that cohesion.
I did not really feel like there was currently a good reason for the overworld/map existing. I think it would have been a tighter experience if you could simply choose a difficulty to fight.
The cheering sound did not do it for me. But the sound design for the combo gameplay was solid. Perhaps an accelerating tune that follows the acceleration of the ball would make it even better.
Check for typos. You had one in the tutorial. I also think there was no need for a tutorial beyond maybe a flashing space-bar in the first fight since it’s quite self-explanatory.
I think the main gameplay could use a supporting mechanic or some other thing to make it a bit more engaging. Maybe it would already become more fun if you didn’t snap to the location instantly, but the tongue was elastic and could get tangled up in the meteorites, something like that perhaps would give it more replayability because just messing around with the main mechanic is fun.
I had like 15 seconds at one point where I was just floating in space with no meterorites flying by in the direction I needed to go, which was a bit frustrating I guess.
For art I think the background could have benefit from being more muted in some way as it is higher contrast and more busy than the elements in the foreground.
I enjoyed the choice of music though, it was quite fitting to the experience like a relaxed space-walk!
Mine is a potato too. I don’t know why it decided to lag out in the web build. Something about whenever something appears on screen for the first time there’s a lag spike I think…
I would definitely have rebalanced the game around them. The current difficulty was mathed for what kind of obstacles currently exist hahaha. Adding on top would have made it way harder, I agree!
The year is a timer, but 1683 is a decent time to complete it in! I tried to make around 1500 a normal time for me when play testing since I believe that’s roughly when heliocentrism got accepted.
My lack of subject matter research is quite bad I have to admit, but I think people won’t take it as an educational resource anyway xD
Thanks! Yeah that was initial idea I build the game on. Morphing from geocentrism to heliocentrism:D
To be honest, that was a lazy moment on my part. I could definitely have added a tiny tutorial button for the spacebar but it would have taken like 30 minutes so I went to bed instead… lol
Thanks for the kind words!! (despite my lackluster spacebar tutorial)
I realized that the top and such was distracting, so I added the lighting to guide the focus towards the bottom. I maybe should have added in some lulls in the action so people could appreciate what is going on though. Good reminder to break up the action and pacing!
Like everyoen else I think a good tweak would be choosing weapons that lend themselves better to a rock paper scissor matchup visually and intuitively.
And then despite seeing how the theme is incorporated I also think it gets a bit lost because there is no real gameplaly difference between “you, the knight” switching weapons and you handing him a different weapon.
Awesome job for a first completed project, I really dig the stylistic choices. I think you could have leaned even harder into the cardboard-y thing and it would probably be even better as a small puppet play kind of thing which is the vibe i got
I mean luckily it kinda was humerous to have the bed and stuff in the game. It was not originally meant like that, those are actually just our internal communications we didn’t have time to remove lmao. Just an artifact of it being a jam game.
I did not have time to investigate why the fairy room was laggy, though I suspect it has to do with each wisp/fairy thingy being light source since something weird is going on there and they also turn on and off for some reason. Or it could be something to do with poor instancing on my end and I ended up duplicating assets a bunch … It didn’t break the game on my own potato laptop so it stayed xD
Oh if you fell through the floor of one of the bookshelf that was intentional but probably poorly communicated. The idea is that you get pushed off the shelf by the book that is going out. The bottom floor does a check and will never push out a book where the cat is to prevent falling out of the map ^^
Oh please don’t think of it as super harsh, definitely one of the games I enjoyed the most reviewing yesterday! Maybe I should have put a positive note at the beginning, I guess I was kinda in a complaining mood…
But yeah level design is tricky for sure, we also messed that up on our game lmao (I did most of it 😅). I just wanted to give you a list of everything I would like to have seen improved!
As for the final level I was not sure what the goal was, maybe I just needed to press the other red switch? I just did things that were possible, not really with intent if that makes sense.
After I accidentally closed a door I had unlocked on myself I stopped playing since I felt like I had experienced what the gameplay was like and it would be more of the same
You can click to advance the text at the beginning. It was a last minute change I upped the duration because you could not read it in time and I did not know it would affect every sentence change lmao since I did not implement it. Oops xD
I think the level design could be tightened up a bit, maybe it is not nessecary to use the whole screen for the levels? Also it was not clear what to do in the final level and it did not feel that fun to move the character around with the cloud. Maybe change the controls so that the cloud stays forever but you cannot move with it while solid and add a cooldown to transforming. That makes it less of a “skill” game and more of a puzzle game.
Other notes are that the cloud should probably not be able to collide with player guy from the top, use one-way platforms for that to make it only be able to lift him up.
The combat felt tacked-on. I would have preffered a no-health bar situation game I think. Either you have the guy shocked or not.
It looks like I did not figure out the gameplay here since it appears other people have “figured it out” but I didn’t.
For a jam game this is fun, but I don’t think this selection mechanism would actually make a great game people would play for a long time because it is just too unwieldy and bakes frustration into the core loop of the game
I think resetting the level each time you die would make for more consistent gameplay. Lean more into the puzzle aspect of the game. The first level was not set up in a way to teach you the main mechanic of how it works that the hero has to be picking up the gold. I think making it grid-movement based would benefit the game greatly (Baba is you style movement where things move a tile when you move). Having to eat the right chests in the right order to make the hero path-find correctly so that you can eat him is fun.
I would play this as a whole game if you fixed the gameplay. I think it would be a fun little puzzle game.
Oh what nice Post-Processing, this looks really cool and polished. Then, I was staring at the starting door for like a minute because tapping keys on the keyboard or mouse did not do anything, after which I spent 3 minutes attempting to get out of the first room. Then it worked fine for a minute. I picked up a red ball and dropped it, there was a horse cart. I go to horse cart. I get on horse cart. Horse cart seems to work, alright let’s ride down this path. I look off to the side because I assume the mouse will steer me, no okay gotta use keyboard, i spam left, some dialogue pops up, huh why did it pop up. Let me read, something about a hero going somewhere… In the meantime the horse cart drifted off over a mountain of some sort… got stuck in a hole for 3 minutes trying to dismount the horse which has gotten glitched and is now sideways and I can’t seem to accelerate anymore. Let’s go to this large windmill I am at. Hmm, nothing here, looks like I’m on a path though which I got from the dialogue I was supposed to follow so let’s try to stick to that. I wander through some terrain until I get to a large tree with no collision and decide I must have ended up out of bound so I close out of the game. 10/10 horse drifting.
Basically I would like to see a lot more playtesting of the game, it seems like the map was enormous but if it’s not fun to traverse because everything is slightly broken or wonky or not playtested enough you end up with an experience like I described above. It looked amazing though, I thoroughly enjoyed the graphics
Writing was definetely the best part of this entry. I enjoyed reading the text but the full screen reading made it a bit of a hassle because you had to scan your whole screen with your eyes. Maybe halve the text size of the large text.
I would say the whole gameplay part of this entry needs some work, there was not a lot of game to the game, which it seemed to imply there would be. Why train your stats when they are not used for anything?
I do like the collection of minigames angle though, nothing wrong with that.
It is uncanny how much it sounds like you were part of the team and our planning phase before it all went off the rails, everything you mention was either discussed, originally planned, scrapped from scope, problems we noticed but didn’t have time to fix or other hahaha. I agree though, we really, really would have benefitted from a level designer on the team—The only section in the game that was not thrown together nilly willy in some capacity was the huge bookcase which had some setpiece planning around it for level design. And the execution on that one still has … room for improvement if we wanna put it generously (it was me who put that in, I can say that about my own work xD)
The original concept was something closer to “you, the wizard’s cat, are trapped in the fight between the heroes and the wizard. The game acts as if the wizard is the important guy and achievements are given for things the wizard does. The cat just happens to be there, and you play by doing cat things and interacting with random magic junk the wizard has lying around in his tower, not really caring for the fight going on around you. Also there’s a rat to catch, much more important than whatever those humans are doing.”
However the action and whimsical magical interaction things were at odds with one another so we went less down the action route, banking on having a lot of art to put to use and make unique small fun interactions (like the bubble room)… Then yeah stuff happened and here we are lol. I did put in some assets from the action playtest in though if you try to touch the cauldron you’ll see what that is.
Oh and very interesting feedback on the small jump. I advocated for adding that because I felt like using the pounce for everything was clunky (I was getting sick of having to charge a pounce over every little thing in playtesting) and didn’t really sell the feeling of being a nimble cat. We couldn’t find a combination that combined both purposes of the charged jump and a simple one button directionless jump into a single button.
What we really would do if we had another few days was to get the sound part of the game in properly, we have a lot of unused sounds that we didn’t get to implement due to time pressure. I honestly think this is the most bare bones sound thing we could get away with. I feel sorry for Joe who spent the time putting those together, but at least we got four out five of his songs into the game hahaha
Thanks for the feedback (and the love for my tail simulation!) <3
Adding to this, it’s the best we could do. This kinda became our forced interpretation of the theme because we haven’t heard from our then main artist for around two weeks now so we had to make do with the assets we had at the time. We had a much clearer version of this story in mind but it required wizard and hero models as well as full screen illustrations.
So uh, it’s up the the player to exercise their imagination in this version. lol.
(Also the reason for the mishmash of art quality and styles present in the game)
