Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

• It sucks for everyone when a game is bad, but think about who gets it the worst: the main character. Forever tied to a bad experience and tainted in the eyes of players, ya couldn't blame 'em if they wanted revenge.  In Katana 2 team anotherthingnamedcolbert shows us the natural result of a character scorned by bad game design, and their desperate rampage against Famous Video Game Creator Joe Romano.

  Right off the bat I wanna say the visuals are super appropriate for the source material of Daikatana and team anotherthingnamedcolbert nailed the aesthetic especially well within the cut scenes, which are amazing.  They injected a great bit of humor and were spectacularly animated haha.  Though I do think integrating a bit more of that tone and feel, say with enemy barks + animations or with the player character Hero remarking on the environment as the level progresses, would help make the moment to moment gameplay more engaging.  Excellent work on the music, these are solid jams which help set the tone and coupled with the visuals create a cohesive package. I do wish there were more sound effect cues, the big one being player hurt grunts since it's easy to not realize your health is being decimated by enemies.

  I really digged the usage of da jam theme here. Katana 2's narrative sells it well with the main character seeking revenge for being in a game by... being in its own sequel?? And pursuing the game creator, it's a neat meta take that carries through till the end.

  Weapon variety is nice (ie having any at all within a jam submission), but man does the pistol outclass every other weapon!  I can understand the katana purposefully being unwieldy, but with the limited movement and ranged enemies it's pretty unusable.  Even if a weapon is meant to be bad, figuring out a few moments where it can surprisingly shine helps make it feel worthwhile including.  Setting up a 'serious' melee enemy encounter where after a cutscene ya both sort of nerf bat each other for way too long could be a fun exclamation point to the gag. Ya definitely want the final weapon players picking up to feel satisfying and impressive, and sadly the rail gun just didn't hit those marks and couldn't compete with the pistol.

  More enemy variety would have been greatly appreciated, again some melee'rs or enemies that are weak to the railgun would encourage weapon switching and general combat variety.  The few enemies here don't have the greatest AI to begin with, and I had a lot of trouble knowing when the sentries were thoroughly dead.  For things that light up 'red for bad', it's really nice to make 'em shift to gray when they're deactivated.

  Level design is interesting, with it possible to go different directions as ya explore for keys, but it gets a little too close to 'mazelike' with keycards tucked away into areas making them easily missed.  A bit more info display and marking would go a long way in making things less confusing.  In any case I thought the three levels ya included were a nice amount of variety for me to Pistol da Heck Outta Things.

  A bug that bit me badly in the judging build was non-ideal checkpointing.  Because the game checkpoints right before a button press that changes level geometry (but isn't required to continue forward), if you restart from there it's easy to think it's already pressed and then get totally stuck.  It sounded like this was a last minute issue that got fixed in the public build, but it's a good reminder to be thoughtful about checkpoints, objectives, and the ability to backtrack in general to reduce player confusion or risk of soft locks.

  Issues aside, I think ya ended up with an impressive FPS jam entry with a nice amount of content and narrative interwoven. I'd love to see ya do a bit of bug fixing and general polish, since what's here is already one of the better FPS packages I've seen in our jams!