Play game
Crooked Casino: Cheaters Never Learn's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #13 | 3.857 | 3.857 |
| Overall | #18 | 3.619 | 3.619 |
| Presentation | #19 | 3.643 | 3.643 |
| Fun | #23 | 3.357 | 3.357 |
Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Very interesting concept ! Well executed too as the animations, music and gameplay is pretty solid. I like the idea of having multiple actions for the cheaters.
(Really enjoyed the acceleration in the music to build the tension).
Now I feel like there are some improvements that could be made.
It could be nice to have a slower first level to be able to familiarize with the UI. There are many things to read and understand, and I didn't really know what to do when the first day finished. (I still don't really get what is the crimometer :/)
It could have benn nice to be able to click on the suspect portrait and grey them when we think that they are not the cheaters. In the end there are a lot of characters to focus on, and I wasn't sure which one I already followed.
Being able to fast forward the day when all the cheaters got caught would be a nice feature.
Personal opinion for that (so maybe not a good idea ^^), but at first, I thought red machines were low% winning rate, and vive versa for green machines. Maybe it is because I visualize myself more as a client, but for me, it is more natural to see green machines as easy to win money with.
Finally, I don't know if it was only for my playthrough, but I was never able to have positive machine income, even though I got all cheaters. Is it normal, or am I just a very bad owner ? :p
Hey I appreciate the feedback very much as spent a lot of time experimenting with the theme alone!
We actually cut the song length in the tutorial level just because we played it so many times! Thanks for the specific feedback here. Other players mentioned a feature request of a “speed up to day end” function so we have been playing around with that concept to hopefully strike a better balance for those especially not playing for the first time.
The crimometer and the macro level difficulty seems to be something the players are having a hard time to grasp. The games difficulty is tweaked to be initially difficult to try to force you into intentionally making let’s say “less than perfect decisions” to protect your income. I think ultimately we ran out of time to finish some of the player intervention and really flesh out the decision making in between days to properly balance this and make it more clear - For now we’re keeping it closer to the puzzle game protoype we have pivoted into but I’m sure needs some more tweaks to make it work better for this version of the game - but we are currently looking to adjust the difficulty and score screen to be more reflective of current player performance!
In regard to the machine colours, the displays actually came out of one of our test level examples, we wanted to experiment with different levels of difficulty through visibility (and even our original prototype had no display at initial conception). TL:DR I also think it does seem to make more sense in that way (green for win) in retrospect so we may flip these!
(Apologies for the particular delay in my response but we appreciate how much feedback you have given and so I wanted to address your comments in full !)
That's a really cool concept but oh god it goes way to fast someitmes. I don't even have the time to read that the day is already over. Just pause the game so that I can read the new features and cheater. Aside from that the music is a killer for the atmosphere and the art was quite fine! Well done overall!
That's good to know. My uncle as well mentioned it was a bit on the fast side for him.
I can see how that would a bit challenging with the late-game tutorial text. I'll see what I can do.
Thank you! Feedback is always appreciated.
Great game! But I think it has a steep learning curve and the beginning can be quite rough. It took some time until I feeled like knowing what I am doing. Also a fast forward button might be nice, when the player thinks they got all cheaters.
Thank you for the precise and excellent feedback!
This was great!!! Gets really intense when you have a bunch of people you are trying to watch without losing too much money! xD Especially with that music (love the music btw!) Really like the idea for this game -having low% machines was a nice touch!! This would make an awesome commercial game if taken further -like the ability to put your daily profits into building a bigger casino and purchasing machines with different % and payouts would be awesome! Am having a lot of fun playing this one! Excellent work! :D
What amazing feedback, thanks so much! We actually had to pivot into a puzzle game due to time restraints of the jam, but we always had the strategy game in mind where the player had more interaction in between levels, like chosing the placement of machine slots/positions + having some ability/upgrades the micro-level managment part in the game.
For sure! We really liked how the game turned out both during and after the jam, and hey if we keep getting great feedback like this then we'll have no choice but to continue on it :D
Ah that jam scope crunch -familar with that too xD And awesome!!! Good luck!!!
Love the idea and the simple sprite graphics. I had a similar idea like this. I thought of a game where you try to win blackjack or some other game without getting caught. It didn't come to fruiton since i'm very new to game development. But games like this really inspire me
Yeah in jams like these it's tempting to shoot too big too quickly, but you can still get something simple out and be ambitious with the idea, and this is something we wanted to try out (but the cost is at one point we simply had to accept the fact that people may simply just not get or like it when we were finished).
Btw if you liked this, please have a look at Cheater's Inn (SLiV's game see link in comment below). It's amazing game with a very similar concept but (I have to admit) they managed to beat us to much more interesting variety in cheater behaviour within the time constraints. I really hope your game comes into fruition, we would like to check it out some day!
Nicely done! The presentation is superb. I was quite slow with identifying all the symbols and got into debt pretty quickly, but by the end I was able to spot some reliably. Still really tricky though :P
Hey thanks so much, we weren't sure whether we tuned the difficulty curve quite right in the end or if people would catch on originally! We we're thinking of doing some polish soon to fix the bugs and add some more variety to the levels and difficulty, and maybe take it on further but I'm glad you had some fun out of the original submission :)
We had roughly the same idea! I must say I found it quite hard to spot any cheaters except the ones that always win.
No way, actually spotted your entry and was sharing it with my partner earlier - cheaters unite haha! Yeah we quickly realised that it was quite tricky to have both behaviours simulaneously, we're working splitting this out to have 1 or 2 focused levels on this kind of behaviour so hopefully should make this more revealing.
Hey again, we just made some quick change with some fixes and some polish. It's not finished with the full new level and variety but hey maybe check it out and see if you can spot the behaviour this time ;)