I absolutely love the artstyle and presentation of your game, it's really top-notch. Jumping into the water feels satisfying. The water itself looks really good too. I like that you can see the colors of the sky and the moon reflecting on it. It makes the game feel atmospheric.
The only bug I found was being able to swim through the island and ship and some sprites popping up on the edges.
It wasn't clear at first what was the effect of turning on and off the lamp (or if it was doing anything at all), maybe you could add a sound effect for walls disappearing and appearing again. If it wasn't for the object being unique and the popup I wouldn't have guessed I had to place the branches on the table. Other than the lack of clarity the puzzle was too easy. Maybe you could a element that would require the player to think a little?
Did you make this all by yourself or are you in a team? Anyway, great work!
-Congratulations, you're the first dumb dev encountered this DD: ***.zip the folder with the game files, not the game files themselves*** -1k fps and no option to cap it? I guess fuck me and my GPU too then -let me go back in the menu by either right-clicking or pressing Esc -don't use that 5 second fade anim between menus, make it no longer than 0.3s altogether -don't let me click buttons by releasing the mouse on a button, without first pressing it -don't show "create new file" if there's no other option -where's my it/itter pronouns? bigot -give the colors names, it's a basic dictionary, c'mon now -change UI options onPress, not onRelease -- alternatively, show that the button is being pressed -if I just created the first save, why would I not want to immediately enter it? -either make sprinting the default or remove walking entirely, why would I ever walk if I can sprint -press Q whille holding the Axe to get this:
-inventory sound effect is garbage -missed one tutorial message, can't get back to it, don't sequence them, have area triggers -I don't know how to equip something from it being in the inventory
Managed to cut down some trees and open one cube, but was too frustrated with the crashing and UI to continue. How do you put so much effort into nice atmospheric fireflies but then decide to fuck the player over with the garbage UI. I love atmospheric games with more mechanics that just walking, but you are trying your best to make the UI as unusable as possible. Judging from the sound effects and themes I'd probably enjoy the game if not for the repulsive interface.
One thing to note is that the FPS counter in the corner isn't necessarily how often it's rendering frames; Gamemaker's weird and has "fps" and "fps_real"; the former shows the FPS it's running at, and the latter is how many CPU steps per second it's iterating. I use fps_real to see how close to under 60 I'm getting during testing, but I didn't actually convey that to anyone. Whoops!
The menu fade is noted! I thought it was fast enough, but I'll consider an option to disable/speed up UI animations, or just speed it up altogether. Also, those tutorial messages were just kinda last minute, so making them only show once is def. a screw up on my part.
(I fixed the menu buttons triggering on press as well as that crash with pressing Q, as well.)
Overall, thanks for the feedback! It'll be a good reference for what I need to polish next.
Hey! Played your game on stream, just wanted to recap some of my feedback -
Incredibly well polished. Everything felt really solid, and the artstyle is just fantastic.
I'm pretty dense so I got stuck on most of the puzzles, but I didn't give a whole lot of time to each one either.
I eventually got stuck when I left the uh... place in the north with all the bubbles (gel-covered something or other) and my boat was just stuck in the island. Not sure what happened there.
Also the water effects are really, really cool, but you might consider clamping how far the player can plunge when they jump off a high ledge into the water. The amount of time it takes to surface makes sense but is just a bit unnecessary, in my opinion.
Thanks for trying the demo out! Glad you enjoyed it too :D
I KNEW i forgot something. You can actually get out of being stuck in islands with the boat if you just go forward long enough (you slooowly push through them), but I'll have to move the spawnpoint for that one out of that.
Comments
I absolutely love the artstyle and presentation of your game, it's really top-notch. Jumping into the water feels satisfying. The water itself looks really good too. I like that you can see the colors of the sky and the moon reflecting on it. It makes the game feel atmospheric.
The only bug I found was being able to swim through the island and ship and some sprites popping up on the edges.
It wasn't clear at first what was the effect of turning on and off the lamp (or if it was doing anything at all), maybe you could add a sound effect for walls disappearing and appearing again. If it wasn't for the object being unique and the popup I wouldn't have guessed I had to place the branches on the table. Other than the lack of clarity the puzzle was too easy. Maybe you could a element that would require the player to think a little?
Did you make this all by yourself or are you in a team? Anyway, great work!
_
-Congratulations, you're the first dumb dev encountered this DD:
***.zip the folder with the game files, not the game files themselves***
-1k fps and no option to cap it? I guess fuck me and my GPU too then
-let me go back in the menu by either right-clicking or pressing Esc
-don't use that 5 second fade anim between menus, make it no longer than 0.3s altogether
-don't let me click buttons by releasing the mouse on a button, without first pressing it
-don't show "create new file" if there's no other option
-where's my it/itter pronouns? bigot
-give the colors names, it's a basic dictionary, c'mon now
-change UI options onPress, not onRelease -- alternatively, show that the button is being pressed
-if I just created the first save, why would I not want to immediately enter it?
-either make sprinting the default or remove walking entirely, why would I ever walk if I can sprint
-press Q whille holding the Axe to get this:
-inventory sound effect is garbage
-missed one tutorial message, can't get back to it, don't sequence them, have area triggers
-I don't know how to equip something from it being in the inventory
Managed to cut down some trees and open one cube, but was too frustrated with the crashing and UI to continue. How do you put so much effort into nice atmospheric fireflies but then decide to fuck the player over with the garbage UI. I love atmospheric games with more mechanics that just walking, but you are trying your best to make the UI as unusable as possible. Judging from the sound effects and themes I'd probably enjoy the game if not for the repulsive interface.
Hell yeah, criticism! This'll be useful.
One thing to note is that the FPS counter in the corner isn't necessarily how often it's rendering frames; Gamemaker's weird and has "fps" and "fps_real"; the former shows the FPS it's running at, and the latter is how many CPU steps per second it's iterating. I use fps_real to see how close to under 60 I'm getting during testing, but I didn't actually convey that to anyone. Whoops!
The menu fade is noted! I thought it was fast enough, but I'll consider an option to disable/speed up UI animations, or just speed it up altogether. Also, those tutorial messages were just kinda last minute, so making them only show once is def. a screw up on my part.
(I fixed the menu buttons triggering on press as well as that crash with pressing Q, as well.)
Overall, thanks for the feedback! It'll be a good reference for what I need to polish next.
Hey! Played your game on stream, just wanted to recap some of my feedback -
Incredibly well polished. Everything felt really solid, and the artstyle is just fantastic.
I'm pretty dense so I got stuck on most of the puzzles, but I didn't give a whole lot of time to each one either.
I eventually got stuck when I left the uh... place in the north with all the bubbles (gel-covered something or other) and my boat was just stuck in the island. Not sure what happened there.
Also the water effects are really, really cool, but you might consider clamping how far the player can plunge when they jump off a high ledge into the water. The amount of time it takes to surface makes sense but is just a bit unnecessary, in my opinion.
Overall just an awesome demo though.
Thanks for trying the demo out! Glad you enjoyed it too :D
I KNEW i forgot something. You can actually get out of being stuck in islands with the boat if you just go forward long enough (you slooowly push through them), but I'll have to move the spawnpoint for that one out of that.