itch.io

I've smoothed off some of the rough edges of the core gameplay loop, and added a character selection screen. It still needs a victory condition, meta-progression, and an in-game tutorial. 

Please give it a try, and let me know what caused you to stop playing. Thank you!

https://warpzone.itch.io/public-game-002

Honestly? This is a lot faster than manually updating the webpage. Great job, itch. I used butler some years ago, but I remember it being complicated and fiddly. Maybe even a bit fragile. The itch app has none of these problems. And while I feel like the workflow could be a little more straightforward, visually? The self-enforcing nature of the Compare step means I almost literally can't mess it up, even as a noob to the app. Well done! 👍

Is there a way to know if our game is indexed or not?

Honestly, I have a hard time getting anyone to play anything that's not HTML5 on this platform. Even then, you generally need to go out and find playtesters and direct them to your page, unless your game is something really special. (And the discoverability problem gets worse every year.)

Good luck.

Well, keep in mind, I'm not giving you "the right answer," here. There is no right answer. I'm giving you my opinion. My first impressions, really. And I'm only the first person who's replied to this thread. 

In general, you should think for a bit about what you want the story to be, and what you want it to be about, before you write it. That way you can avoid saying anything you didn't intend.

Here's a youtube video about writing VNs. It stresses the importance of writing an Outline before you sink a lot of time into writing sections that might need to be rewritten later, when you discover a fundamental underlying problem: 

Concept

Well, it's an interesting concept for a VN.  I wouldn't bet anything on it finding an audience that you can't afford to lose. Video game genres are the way they are because of market forces beyond our control. Sometimes, an indie can create something new and get lucky, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Especially as a first project.

Visuals/Presentation

I liked the character designs. I hope that if it ever makes enough money that you can afford it, you'll consider hiring an artist to replace the AI art. It's fine for prototyping, I guess. And probably for the first release, too, considering how big a risk you're taking, bucking market trends.

Mechanics

I didn't notice anything obviously broken on the homepage, or in the game. (I assume that if you didn't modify Renpy's internals, the menus and such should function normally. I didn't test every possible button and save/load state, obviously.)

Tone

This ended up being a personal hang-up for me. I only played it as far as the guy in the suit introducing the teams. All the talk about religion and ethnicity started making me a little anxious. It made me feel like, "Uh-oh... This sounds like one of those TV shows that are only popular with people who already agree with the creator's politics." I realize that you're probably just copying the social cliques you see or imagine in your own school, but when you combine that with the lackadaisical, comedic tone, it starts to feel like dangerous territory.

My advice is to tread very carefully, if you're deliberately going for satire.

And if you're not going for satire, then maybe it would be a good idea to base the cliques on things that are the characters' choice, like what school club they're in, rather than on things like race, religion, or politics. Especially in these fraught political times!

Of course, all art is political, and your political views (whatever they are) are bound to end up in there somewhere. If you try to strip it all out, you'll end up with something bland. The trick is to embed concepts and principles, not details, from the real world. Less "Imperial Japan during World War II," more "The Fire Nation," to borrow an example from Avatar: the Last Airbender. 

Make your characters interesting because of who they are as individuals-- what they do and what they believe-- not so much because of "what" they are, or where they came from.

Story

The bit that I played was an efficient way of introducing the player to the high-level concept, but it wasn't very engaging to read. (Other than my aforementioned visceral reaction to the creeping awareness that it might be teeing up a political rant, of course.) It felt very much like an elevator pitch. But since you're only asking about the concept, I suppose it did what it needed to do. Actually, I was a little fuzzy on this... is it about a VR video game, or a Death Game with real weapons? Right now the text supports either interpretation, unless I missed something.

General advice on improving

By far, your biggest help, going forward, is probably going to come from tutorials and videos about writing. I say that not because the writing I experienced was bad, but because writing is the fundamental core building block of any good VN. Focus on resources specifically for writers; the internet is full of them.

Making the concept 'cooler'

Start by replacing real-world factions (foreign students, religious groups, etc) with factions from your fictional setting. If it were me, I'd consider pivoting to something more fantastical, like a magic school, superhero school, something like that, so it's relatively quick and easy to explain the fictional cliques to a new reader. (Though that would necessitate a lot of new character designs-- definitely don't go to that much trouble if I was mistaken about the AI before, or if, gods help you, you're spending tokens on this.) 

But if you want to keep it grounded in a near-future real-world, make it a University, and group the students by their majors or their intended career paths after graduation. 

Engaging the reader's empathy

I get the feeling that, because it seems like you're setting up the weakest group as the protagonists, this is either going to be either some sort of underdog story, or else you're teeing up a subversion later on? And that's probably a load-bearing part of your plan, so I won't mess with it. Hopefully, you'll take a more character-oriented approach when writing the start of the actual game, of course. this high-level, almost 4th-wall-breaking overview is fine to get feedback on the game's concept, but if the reader doesn't empathize with the characters, you don't have a story, no matter how cool the high-level concept is.

Final Thoughts

Writing is incredibly subjective. I hope some of this was helpful to you. Good luck.

Right now, the jumping doesn't feel very good. Here's some ideas:

• Make the ascent faster
• Make the descent 2x as fast as the ascent (Mario falls faster than he jumps! This makes it easier to land precisely where you want to.)
• Give the player more jump height and distance than they need to solve the game's problems (so there's room for error)
• When walking, the player should start and stop instantly, not slide like they're on ice.
• Look into Coyote Time. I couldn't tell if you were using it, because the game has you going up stairs the whole time, but it's an important technique to learn in 2D platformers

I noticed you're using the godot game engine, so here's a video on jumps in godot:

Ah.

My apologies. I thought since the animals looked final, the player was meant to be final, too.

So I'm not a ray of light, or a targeting reticle of a gun? I'm a person? A shepherd or hunter or villager or something?

If the goal is to kill the goat, shouldn't I just avoid the wolves and let them eat the goat? 🤔

Right now, the game has an abstract reasoning puzzle (figure out how to kill the goat) with important information poorly communicated to the player (you are a human, the goat is a decoy.)

Or, it's possible that I could be confused, in saying that. I might still be not understanding the premise of the game entirely.

Whatever explanation you're about to type to me, that text needs to be on the screen in the game.

Or if the premise is testing the player's abstract reasoning, to teach them to sacrifice the goat without telling them to do so, then the player needs to at least look like something that could take damage from a wolf. Maybe try one of these free villager assets from itch: https://itch.io/search?type=games&classification=assets&q=villager

Important: if the player can't attack, then don't use a sprite holding a tool or weapon. If the player CAN attack, teach them how to attack in the game in a safe place (maybe they have to attack a box or something to break it open) before there's a life-or-death situation that requires them to attack.

Good luck!

What am I and why do I have a health bar?

Hi there, Maram. Personally, I think the game is too difficult. But the reasons why have nothing to do with the level design, and everything to do with the player sheep's basic movement:

• The sheep's hurtbox is so big, it almost always collides with the enemies' hitboxes, even if the graphics don't look like they overlap.
• The movement is too 'slippery. The sheep starts and stops gradually, as if they're walking on ice.
• Any time I tried to jump onto a one-block platform, I'd slide right off the other side, even after taking my finger off the key.
• I'm pretty sure you didn't implement Coyote Time.

I notice the page says you used Unity to make the game.  Consider increasing the friction in your Physics2D Materials, until the sheep can stop instantly. (You may need to also increase the sheep's move speed after increasing the friction. maybe by quite a lot.  Try multiplying by 10 if the sheep is too slow, divide by 10 if the sheep is too fast, until you find something close to right, then make smaller adjustments until it feels good to play, even with high friction.)

Movement is the most important part of a platformer, so be sure and get this right!

First of all, I love the sprites, music and sound. That's some good use of Gdevelop!

Longer-term, what are your plans for the game? If you're trying to sell it some day, what platforms would it run on? 🤔 I ask this because the extremely tall and narrow screen shape you have right now doesn't seem like it would fit on anything but a web browser.

I agree that it feels too difficult, especially for the start of a longer game. The default enemy appears to be armored whenever it's not shooting, requires all the player's actions to engage with (jet, move, and shoot simultaneously,) fires fast enough (in both directions!) to cover the entire platform in less 0.2 seconds, which is about the average human reaction time.

I suspect what happened here is you played the game hundreds of times while developing it, got really skilled with your own mechanics, and set the difficulty on what you personally considered hard, but fair.

This is a classic rookie mistake. (Take it from me, I usually make the opposite mistake and make my difficulty curve too flat!) But you usually want your game to be easy at the start, so easy it's almost impossible to mess up, so that new players who don't understand the controls can still shoot the first enemy. (That's how they learn to shoot other enemies!)

I recommend first enemy, just walks back and forth, doesn't shoot.

After about 5 platforms of different types with these walkers patrolling in different ways, introduce the player to an enemy that doesn't move, just shoots in a way you can avoid by jetpacking. Let the player stand on the ground for at least 2 seconds between shots. this gives the new player plenty of time to think about shooting back, jumping over shots, or just jetpacking past it. (But include a little zigzag armored ceiling so they HAVE to jetpack over the enemy, they can't just shoot straight up past it without noticing the shots.)

Then do a little obstacle course that mixes patrollers and shooters.

Finally, add an enemy like the Mets in mega man. (Those little yellow hard hat guys.) It's armored and doesn't move, by default. It shoots one bullet towards you when you get on the same level as it. And only after enough time for the player to react to the bullet, does it start moving horizontally.

Oh, and when the enemy is in its armored state, make sure there's some very visible juice when the armor deflects the shots, that's very different from the juice when they take damage (again, like the Metools in mega man, where the shots would make a ping noise and bounce off diagonally.)

An enemy like this that can do everything at once, and moves so fast you need to dodge, should be deep into the game, after the player has mastered moving, shooting, and reacting to bullets, separately and in combination with each other.

It's not a boss, though. A boss should move slowly, have lots of health, and switch up its attack patterns (but also telegraph its attacks so they're easy to dodge.) At least until the later levels.

Hope this helps! You've got some fantastic aesthetics going on, here.

I don't know what engine you used, but if at all possible, you should try to make a web version. Even itch itself is telling people not to download exes unless we're 100% sure we already know the creator is on the level.

That said, I'll run it in a sandbox if I can scrounge up the disk space to do so-- I do love me a good megaman game! :)

Good luck!

Interesting concept. 

Here's how my play-through went, as a new player:

• Where is the goat? Where is the wolf? What do I so?
• Oh, I can move a light with the arrow keys.
• Where are the animals?
• There's an orange dot. Looks like a bullet. I should stay away.
• Or... should I collect the bullet?
• Ugh. The game reset! Why?
• Maybe this is easier in fullscreen?
• Oh, I enlarged it, and now I can actually see the world. The bullets are in a circle, and there's a timer!
• Ah, I see, I need to collect all the bullets.
• I failed? I must need to collect the bullets faster!
• I got all the bullets! Oh, hello Mr. Goat! Hello Mr. Wolf! And you brought a friend!
• "Something" needs to die? What was it again? Oh, right. The goat!
• Apparently bite attacks come from the light if I put it on the goat. Is the light a wolf? Am I a wolf or a hunter with a gun?
• I guess I won? Now to minimize the screen...
• The victory text doesn't fit in the screen.

I guess it took me ~3-5 minutes?

I only beat the game once. It was very difficult. The gameplay was too confusing. 

As for the question in the title, ("Do I continue development or start new one? (read first line pls)")  :

I think the graphics are good, but I don't think there is an audience for a game this confusing. 

Have you considered just letting the player control a wolf? you could move with the arrow keys and press Z to bite. Or you could move with W-A-S-D keys and bite by clicking the mouse button.

Standard controls became the standard for a reason: they work, and everybody already understands them.

Thank you for sharing your game! Whether you decide to continue or not, I wish you the best of luck in your game dev journey. 💖

That was a fun little romp! It needs music like Ana needs to pick up her toys. 😆

I love the cozy aesthetic and the original concept! I had toruble with the controls at first. I kept needing to scroll down so that I could see them all. After the jam, consider putting the gameplay instructions (controls, what to do when the puzzle is solved) into the game itself. 🌟

Glad you enjoyed it! The beam is a deliberate trade-off between power and range. It actually does damage much faster than the regular guns. But you have to really get up into the enemy's face in order to take full advantage of it. It leads to a very different style of play.

Glad you liked it! The arrow visibility has proven tricky to get right. Every time we make it bigger and flashier, there's always a new player who didn't notice it. But the fact that you eventually did see it makes me think this might be the optimal size. Not so flashy that it's annoying, just flashy enough that you notice it before you're done playing. (Which means when you do notice it, you feel like you learned something about how to play the game better!)

Glad you liked it!

This is a very intriguing possibility!  The initial pitch for this game was something vaguely like an open world game (though, of course, scoped much smaller!) So the question becomes, do you want an open world with one-time Quests, like Arkham City, or an open world with perpetually replayable Events, more like Prototype?

Of course, even Prototype made its story Campaign Events one-time use, so the player had a critical path and could actually finish the game!  (Otherwise, every time you're ready to face-off against the boss, you start losing stations, therefore losing progress.)

🤔So it turns out, by exploring this simple real-world consequence of the implications of a "connect" mechanic, what you're actually asking for is either:

• a separate type of mission objective that it's okay for the player to fail/ignore, or else stations would only be able to be under attack a limited number of times, perhaps once per station, (after which it gets its own guns or whatever and becomes immune to the event)
• or else there would have to be a way for the player to upgrade the space stations, either one at a time through some sort of resource collection and building, (basically the above but with more player interaction)
• or maybe by discovering some sort of alien artifact that lets each station build its own shield, or whatever (some sort of story-based Macguffin that permanently resolves the question of being able to lose a station.)

It's a classic example of Scope Creep, where a simple, intuitive idea can lead to problems that need more systems. And the most satisfying solution (probably the resource collection and building one) also requires the most new systems to be designed, programmed, and made pretty by the artists.

Definitely not the sort of thing it's easy to do for a game jam. But if the project grows into something bigger, who knows? 

Thanks for the suggestion! 🌟

I love the concept. It's not exactly giving 'cozy game' in theme or aesthetics, but it's definitely cozy-adjacent. One UI change I'd like to see would be for trees to somehow be highlighted when you're in berry-picking range, or maybe even just auto-pick them when you get close enough. My guy was zooming around like crazy by day 2... are... are you sure this is alcohol? 🍻😆🍻

You got very lucky. Most godot webplayer games hitch when loading textures or sounds, which by default, happens when the object is first about to be displayed on-screen, or the first time a sound needs to play. The technique to avoid this is called Asset Preloading. you also might want to pre-warm particles if your game uses those. Google the terms for more.

Good luck! 👍

I loved the sound effects (especially those birds in the background) and the controls of the walkabout mode. Unfortunately, I couldn't understand the minigame. I know it's Pipe Dream. I know how to play Pipe Dream. What I don't understand is how to experiment with it and figure out what the controls are without the minigame suddenly ending. Did I win? Did I lose? Is it a bug? No way of knowing.

(Come to think of it, that beautiful main menu was tough to figure out, too. I clicked everywhere with the mouse, then instinctively tried WASD, before figuring out it was the arrow keys. Maybe this game just needs non-diagetic elements to supplement the UI?)

Web optimization felt a little weak. Have you tried reducing the physics update rate in the Options and turning on Physics Interpolation? Pre-caching the sounds would have been nice, but since it's not an action game, the hitches at the start that only happen once aren't a deal-breaker, just an annoyance.

I loved the gimmick of using the chameleon's tongue as a grappling hook, but even more, I loved the level design. First, it teaches you to go up, then it teaches you to hang from a branch, then it teaches you how slope affects your tongue firing arc, all without saying a word. 

Two tongues up! 🦎🦎

Maybe little ⤴️⤵️ buttons in the corners of the tile?

What a delightful little one-screen collect-a-thon. My only complaint is the collision detection when you release a connection feels a bit smaller than it is. Several times, I would drag a wire, let go, and it would vanish when I thought it should probably connect. With only 4 sockets in the whole TV, it ought to be trivial to make the collision radius for connections a little bigger than the graphics, though i could see this falling apart in a more advanced or procedural version of the game where the TVs in every level each have a different, tightly-integrated system of components for you to hook up. Overall, a fun, cozy collect'em up. And I loved the occasional creaking floorboards!

I love these tiny factorio-style games. It's a shame you couldn't fit more content in before the deadline. Once I figured out how to build a fully-functional mine, there was no reason to build anything else. Oh well. Someday, you'll make a great game out of this. It just needs that "unfolding" aspect that makes incremental games so compelling. And more builds, resources, upgrades, etc. A promising start! 

I love the concept here, and the music is soothing. But I feel like crippling the player character by default was the wrong way to go. You could have just given the player normal 2D movement and a very limited jump, started them in an area with some support balls, and made  all the obstacles require a ball of the right color to pass. However many types of collectible ball there is, the player can connect to that number minus one. The puzzles may not have been as fancy, but at least newbies could do them without getting stuck on the ceiling above the text that tells you how to drop balls, or button-mashing to teach themselves a climb mechanic that is the wrong way to play the game, or just plain not understanding how to make the ball move.

Once I got the hang of attaching and detaching balls, I was able to start to appreciate the level design more. Good job with the wind fields. There were usually enough balls available to go the direction I wanted to go, but when I got stuck, it never really felt like it was my fault. I'm not sure how to fix that, but it kept me from learning, which kept it from feeling fun.

I do love me some Crazy Taxi nostalgia. But the controls here felt very difficult. It felt like I was constantly stopping when I didn't want to, and unable to stop when I wanted to. My advice if you want to expand this game further: ignore all physics-based movement implementations, just stick the car model on a CharacterController, and use CharacterController.Move. Tweak it so you can stop on a dime, and I can't remember if CharacterController does friction during collisions or not, but if it does, turn that down to zero. You want to slide along walls like an ice cube, only to brake to a dead stop the instant you take your finger off the key. 

(Later, add juice during a polish pass, like sparks flying off the walls during a scrape and the car bobbing in place while a tires screech plays, so it feels like there's physics, even though there is not. 90% of video games is knowing what to simulate and what to fake-- and on some level, it's all fake!)

I liked the game, but I couldn't figure out how to play it "correctly," which means I couldn't change my choices in order to get better at the game. The slot-machine mechanic really isn't a gambling mechanic so much as an RNG mechanic for choosing which adjacent tiles to activate? I think? I couldn't figure out how much wheat I had, or how to collect stars without running out of trees, or what the river was for. I want to say there's potential here, because it feels like some of the resources are under-utilized, but I can't quite figure out what the game is trying to be, so I can't really imagine how to make it be that thing better. 🤔

A genuinely unique twist on Asteroids, that feels more like the Cell stage of Spore crossed with some *.io game. I was delighted to discover that I bounce off of the asteroids harmlessly, then horrified to discover that my bullets bounce off of the enemies harmlessly. But it didn't matter much, since the actual goal is just to sort of gently brush against the collectibles on the way past. There's potential for expansion here, but it comes down to how many ideas the dev had but didn't have time to include.

I guess that's one way to explore the theme. I couldn't really figure out what I was doing. Even after scrolling down to find the tutorial text (It's always just off-screen, somehow, with these games,) it was still unclear if we were supposed to be dodging or collecting things.  After dying numerous times, I realized that we were meant to be collecting the things that look like video game bullets, and dodging the things that look like insect food. But the icing on the cake was when I let the game run on its own, and the weight of the leaves pulled my fireflies together just right to dodge and collect stuff, and I ended up getting more points by accident than I could ever by pressing the button intentionally. (One point. I got one point that run.) 

Why not just have WASD controlling the left firefly and Arrow Keys controlling the right one?

I really, really wanted to like this game. It's got a novel mechanic, it looks and sounds cool, the theme is dark but not too full of itself, it does everything right... except that there's a lot of powerups on the screen that I feel like I'm supposed to get? And the game just won't let me. Drawing a line more than 150% the left-to-right length of the screen in tiles makes you die for no clear reason. And it doesn't matter how fast I draw. It's length-based. Why would you put text on the screen at the start of the game that it's literally impossible to follow? 🤔

I like the concept, and this was good use of the theme, but the execution had me perplexed. It's like playing dodge-the-thing and warioware at the same time. It was hard for me to tell what the goal of the game was at any given moment. I figured out that typing random keys was entering the wifi password, but how do I "bang the modem?" Knowing where to look on-screen for the instructions, actually reading the pixelated font, all added friction to a process that newbies have to be able to do in like 3 seconds while their action game is interrupted. Dying in order to develop skill is one thing. Dying in order to learn the controls is just plain frustrating.

Edit: I just played it again, forgot that WASD was to move, and discovered that arrow keys shoot. How was I supposed to know that!? But then the player's movement gets slower when you successfully shoot stuff, so apparently that's not the goal either. I give up. 

You should probably also look into optimizing the game for web, since the webplayer version is going to be peoples' main point of entry into the game. Here's the process I use:

1. In Dashboard, upload the new zip file, set it as the one to be played in the browser, set old file to "hide this file and prevent people from downloading it."
2. Scroll down, click Save, click View Page
3. Wait while the "game loads for the first time"-- Note that this is ONLY time you'll see the game the way new players see it, unless you repeat step 1 or clear your browser's cache for itch.io. (which would also delete any saved game files, so maybe stick to the first method!)
4. Now you'll notice random hitches, the first time something happens or spawns. Sound effect? That's a sudden 2 second freeze. Bumpmapped textured enemy spawns for the first time? 7 second freeze. (The numbers will vary based on your machine. But in an action game, these hitches are always noticeable.)
5. To fix, make sure these files get loaded into memory ahead of time, some time when the player is not trying to stay alive. (Menus, level transitions, the title screen, etc.) This is also known as "prewarming" your assets. Google it for more information and some approaches that other people have programmed, or use the ResourceLoader nodes already built into Godot.
6. The simplest solution, if all else fails, is a 2-pronged approach that's easy to implement and hard to mess up:
   1. Program your game so that enemies NEVER spawn or attack before the player walks a few steps.
   2. Put "dumb" versions (Process > Mode set to disabled in the inspector) of each textured object, especially enemies and projectiles, someplace visible at the start of the level. (Delete these after 5 frames)
   3. Put audiosource nodes near the start of the level that play all of the sound effects in that level, but at a very low volume so the player can barely hear them.

Note that 6 and 5 can conflict, but in those scenarios 6 usually wins, until a scene transition unloads everything.

Good luck!

You might wanna label all of these "DLC gun for the game Carlrun: Overdrive" in the description and link back to the main game. Just sayin'. I saw all of these in New Games and didn't know what I was looking at. 

Hi there! I programmed the arrow. It should always be pointing at the nearest unconnected station, or at the boss if all stations are connected. And it should update 10 times per second, so you wouldn't really be able to see any delay. If one of those things was not happening, then I'd love to know more information about how. Because that's a bug! 

• Does it happen in any specific situation? 
• Or at a specific location in the map?  
• Can you reproduce it at will?

Anything else you can tell me about this behavior be greatly appreciated. 💖

Protip: In playtesting, we beat the boss in that mode by flying backwards. :D

An impressive, ambitious, and surprisingly creative survivor-like that utilizes the theme to its utmost. I'm going to come back to this later to get sunk into the metaprogression, but the fact that you did all of this is one week is nothing short of incredible!
The web version currently hitches the first time it plays a sound. Thankfully, there are only two sounds that occur during combat, so it's less annoying than it could have been. Look into pre-caching sounds and textures for your next godot game jam!

HoloCure did it by rubber-banding the enemy's health to player damage, and enemy speed to player speed. But, crucially, both were capped so they wouldn't outscale the player, just gradually trend back towards the original difficulty curve over time after a wave change. (New enemy graphic.) And even with that soft auto-balancing, even with meta-progression upgrades normalized for Timed Mode, it was expected that broken builds would be possible when a lucky run goes off the rails.

But how could this be done within the constraints of a Jam? 🤔I suppose the most important thing is to end the game via Time Limit, like Vampire Survivors and HoloCure did, not by increasing the difficulty until the player gets overwhelmed. Then again, maybe that's a fix that would only be useful after there's more content in the game, long after the Jam is over.

Either way, good job doing so much within a short time period. 👍