really cool concept! i liked how cohesive it is. some clever bits of game design too - like that turret directly after the third (i think?) which teaches you that turrets are telefraggable in a pretty spectacular manner (though it was a bit of a jump scare for me lol)
i do agree with everything acgaudette said about exploration and checkpointing - there are a couple of punishing moments (especially with that turret in the long corridor) which i only could figure out by trial and error. would be nice to have some contextual hints as to what to expect. like the "final puzzle" - i liked that! it gives you just enough to figure out where to "blindly" teleport, and when you do nail it it feels rewarding
overall, this is a really interesting concept and imo you did a great job implementing it. again, seconding acgaudette on the whole "half life 2 mod but full game" vibe - somehow it reminded me of The Stanley Parable (though it's not really similar at all lol)
neat concept! I like the puzzly, slow pacing take you gave this mechanic--I think it really works, and I enjoyed it. somehow this really feels like it could be one of those 'hl2 mod but we released it' games. must be the tone, and the turrets.
I do think the pacing contrasts a bit painfully with the lack of checkpoints though. normally I welcome difficulty, but punishing the player so harshly for exploration (which seems to be quite central to how this game plays) seems a bit unintentional. nevertheless, this is a minor point.
the first turret death is communicated well. or at least it makes sense in retrospect--the first time it happened to me I had no idea what was going on.
the invisible zones are neat, and the "don't clear the backbuffer" effect is very cool, but it makes traveling through doors impossible. when you noclip straight through a door (the first action I took as a player) it very much looks as though nothing is happening. took me awhile to realize that wasn't a literal bug.
I really like the orientation lerping. I can see how this might trigger a certain kind of person, but it doesn't affect gameplay and I enjoy the way it feels.
overall, great work! seems like something that would fit well as a bite-sized narrative puzzle experience, i.e. it would seem to depend heavily on content. curious if you have similar thoughts.
a few minor, unimportant polish points:
I often released RMB and tapped LMB at the same time to teleport, which appeared to trigger RMB first (which was annoying). probably not what you want to happen?
if you mark your zip as a windows target on itch, the desktop client will be able to auto-install and play it (as opposed to the webgl build, which installs and bugs out by default on the desktop client)
You guessed it, but checkpoints were dropped due to time constraints, as well as options (mouse sens, input settings, volume controls) and some general gameplay changes for clarity (looking at what shot you during death cam, having a fragment shader zero out the uninitialized back buffer pixels a little more aggressively, that sort of thing). I wanted to focus on (what little) content I could get done, but if I were to put a team on this it would definitely be content heavy; imagining a facility with rooms densely packed and such that full exploration would be viable, and where out of bounds death would be less of an occurrence.
As to your points: I probably could have just had it so letting go of RMB would just teleport you, RMB -> LMB was more a hold over from some ideas I had about how the game might work before it became a stealth game... I was thinking maybe the player would want to no-clip somewhere to gather some information but not teleport to that location, or like a player would want to teleport but only at a specific time so feathering on the RMB would be an option.
I'll look into the itch build suggestion! I want to have the WebGL available to players to play to make it more accessible to players, but I didn't know it affected the desktop app in that way... wondering if there's a way to have it default to WebGL for web users, and PC for desktop app users...?
I liked the atmosphere and interesting astral projection mechanic. Also: kudos for your desk, monitor, keyboard, chair, and office plant!!!! It gave me a sense of comradery to see those in your game. Also punishingly difficult, but interesting to find a sort of 'leap of faith' mechanic to bypass the death turrets.
This was cool! I'll start by sharing some feedback, then I'll tell you what I thought about the game.
Feedback: - I almost missed your game! There are no screenshots and the thumbnail is not very attention-grabbing. You may want to invest more time into making your game look appealing so more people see it. You can always make changes to your itch page after the submission deadline. - It took me a while to figure out that the other rooms were invisible until you entered them. This had me flying around randomly for a while until I figure it out by accident. - The mouse movement felt slow and the mouse acceleration felt a little weird. I was picking up my mouse a lot to look around. It wasn't a big deal though.
My thoughts: - Once I figure out the basic mechanics, the game became quite interesting! When I read the description, I thought it would be an action-shooter game. But it turned out to be a puzzle game. It reminded me a lot of Portal (one of my favorite games). - The noclip mechanic was interesting in a puzzle environment. Because you had to teleport into rooms blindly, I died a lot! I had to memorize the room layouts to not die. If this is what you were going for, then it worked well. I had more fun once I figured out that I needed to memorize things. - I really enjoyed finding the hint for that secret room. That was a really cool moment. I love puzzles like that. - I had a good time playing this and I'm glad you decided to explore this noclip mechanic!
I almost made a game that was very similar to this for 7dfps. It was going to be in a puzzle game in an indoor facility. We were going to use maps to give clues, and other hints just like your game. We decided to make it outdoors. If you want to check it out, you might like it! It's called Traversal. If you want to play it, I'd love your opinion it, since our game seems similar to yours.
Hey JadonTheDev, thanks for the feedback! 7+ days ended up being a little too ambitious for me so things like the itch page and mouse sens ended up being secondary to getting the game done. I've already updated the page with some screenshots as per your advice though!
As for the rooms, I tried to give a rough idea of room layout using locked doors but yeah flying around would ideally be a viable way to explore; I wish I could have had a densely packed facility so you could conceivably just teleport around in any direction and land in a room, but as I mentioned before I didn't get enough time to do this (I have to learn to scope better 😅).
Again thanks for your feedback, and I'm glad you liked it! I'll have to take a look at Traversal (once I've recovered a bit haha).
Comments
really cool concept! i liked how cohesive it is. some clever bits of game design too - like that turret directly after the third (i think?) which teaches you that turrets are telefraggable in a pretty spectacular manner (though it was a bit of a jump scare for me lol)
i do agree with everything acgaudette said about exploration and checkpointing - there are a couple of punishing moments (especially with that turret in the long corridor) which i only could figure out by trial and error. would be nice to have some contextual hints as to what to expect. like the "final puzzle" - i liked that! it gives you just enough to figure out where to "blindly" teleport, and when you do nail it it feels rewarding
overall, this is a really interesting concept and imo you did a great job implementing it. again, seconding acgaudette on the whole "half life 2 mod but full game" vibe - somehow it reminded me of The Stanley Parable (though it's not really similar at all lol)
neat concept! I like the puzzly, slow pacing take you gave this mechanic--I think it really works, and I enjoyed it. somehow this really feels like it could be one of those 'hl2 mod but we released it' games. must be the tone, and the turrets.
I do think the pacing contrasts a bit painfully with the lack of checkpoints though. normally I welcome difficulty, but punishing the player so harshly for exploration (which seems to be quite central to how this game plays) seems a bit unintentional. nevertheless, this is a minor point.
the first turret death is communicated well. or at least it makes sense in retrospect--the first time it happened to me I had no idea what was going on.
the invisible zones are neat, and the "don't clear the backbuffer" effect is very cool, but it makes traveling through doors impossible. when you noclip straight through a door (the first action I took as a player) it very much looks as though nothing is happening. took me awhile to realize that wasn't a literal bug.
I really like the orientation lerping. I can see how this might trigger a certain kind of person, but it doesn't affect gameplay and I enjoy the way it feels.
overall, great work! seems like something that would fit well as a bite-sized narrative puzzle experience, i.e. it would seem to depend heavily on content. curious if you have similar thoughts.
a few minor, unimportant polish points:
I often released RMB and tapped LMB at the same time to teleport, which appeared to trigger RMB first (which was annoying). probably not what you want to happen?
if you mark your zip as a windows target on itch, the desktop client will be able to auto-install and play it (as opposed to the webgl build, which installs and bugs out by default on the desktop client)
also hey, very cool logo--don't think anyone has mentioned this yet and it's worth pointing out.
Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
You guessed it, but checkpoints were dropped due to time constraints, as well as options (mouse sens, input settings, volume controls) and some general gameplay changes for clarity (looking at what shot you during death cam, having a fragment shader zero out the uninitialized back buffer pixels a little more aggressively, that sort of thing). I wanted to focus on (what little) content I could get done, but if I were to put a team on this it would definitely be content heavy; imagining a facility with rooms densely packed and such that full exploration would be viable, and where out of bounds death would be less of an occurrence.
As to your points: I probably could have just had it so letting go of RMB would just teleport you, RMB -> LMB was more a hold over from some ideas I had about how the game might work before it became a stealth game... I was thinking maybe the player would want to no-clip somewhere to gather some information but not teleport to that location, or like a player would want to teleport but only at a specific time so feathering on the RMB would be an option.
I'll look into the itch build suggestion! I want to have the WebGL available to players to play to make it more accessible to players, but I didn't know it affected the desktop app in that way... wondering if there's a way to have it default to WebGL for web users, and PC for desktop app users...?
I liked the atmosphere and interesting astral projection mechanic. Also: kudos for your desk, monitor, keyboard, chair, and office plant!!!! It gave me a sense of comradery to see those in your game. Also punishingly difficult, but interesting to find a sort of 'leap of faith' mechanic to bypass the death turrets.
This was cool! I'll start by sharing some feedback, then I'll tell you what I thought about the game.
Feedback:
- I almost missed your game! There are no screenshots and the thumbnail is not very attention-grabbing. You may want to invest more time into making your game look appealing so more people see it. You can always make changes to your itch page after the submission deadline.
- It took me a while to figure out that the other rooms were invisible until you entered them. This had me flying around randomly for a while until I figure it out by accident.
- The mouse movement felt slow and the mouse acceleration felt a little weird. I was picking up my mouse a lot to look around. It wasn't a big deal though.
My thoughts:
- Once I figure out the basic mechanics, the game became quite interesting! When I read the description, I thought it would be an action-shooter game. But it turned out to be a puzzle game. It reminded me a lot of Portal (one of my favorite games).
- The noclip mechanic was interesting in a puzzle environment. Because you had to teleport into rooms blindly, I died a lot! I had to memorize the room layouts to not die. If this is what you were going for, then it worked well. I had more fun once I figured out that I needed to memorize things.
- I really enjoyed finding the hint for that secret room. That was a really cool moment. I love puzzles like that.
- I had a good time playing this and I'm glad you decided to explore this noclip mechanic!
I almost made a game that was very similar to this for 7dfps. It was going to be in a puzzle game in an indoor facility. We were going to use maps to give clues, and other hints just like your game. We decided to make it outdoors. If you want to check it out, you might like it! It's called Traversal. If you want to play it, I'd love your opinion it, since our game seems similar to yours.
Hey JadonTheDev, thanks for the feedback! 7+ days ended up being a little too ambitious for me so things like the itch page and mouse sens ended up being secondary to getting the game done. I've already updated the page with some screenshots as per your advice though!
As for the rooms, I tried to give a rough idea of room layout using locked doors but yeah flying around would ideally be a viable way to explore; I wish I could have had a densely packed facility so you could conceivably just teleport around in any direction and land in a room, but as I mentioned before I didn't get enough time to do this (I have to learn to scope better 😅).
Again thanks for your feedback, and I'm glad you liked it! I'll have to take a look at Traversal (once I've recovered a bit haha).