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Santa Fighting Christmas's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme interpretation | #35 | 3.154 | 3.154 |
| Overall | #44 | 2.859 | 2.859 |
| Fun | #45 | 2.654 | 2.654 |
| Presentation | #51 | 2.769 | 2.769 |
Ranked from 26 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Really cool idea! I love the mood of this, and it’s very easy to start playing :D
I'm not sure how to fix this, but the missiles seemed way too easy to dodge, since you can move about as fast as them, as long as you stay moving you can pretty much avoid them all. But if you speed up the missiles it becomes basically impossible to avoid them...maybe just give them a really wide turning radius? Also the SAM sites seem to all spawn in a row in one area, and since the missiles despawn after a certain amount of time you're 100% safe in most of the map.
I like the idea though. I can't help but feel like this version of Santa isn't delivering presents children want...
Yeah, well, the missile issue was a tweak issue I never fixed and the spawn sites were some sort of super easy math issue about their placement that I never got right. They were supposed to spawn muuuch closer to the villages, but for the love of me I couldn't get the spawn area right. I needed a good night's sleep but there was only ten minutes left...
It feels like if you sit and tweak too early, time just gets away from you... 😉
Thanks for playing!
I really like the idea! Santa definitely has a difficult job :D It would have been nice to have some sounds effects. Fun game!
Thanks a lot for testing it and the nice feedback. Yes, sound is the next thing, haven't done much audio in bevy at all, yet.
Got lost a few times, but all's good. The atmosphere is great, would've been even better with music!
I will try to port my music-generator from LibGDX to Bevy... soonish.
The game is pretty intuitive, easy to get in,
The theme is also interesting.
Although I have a few complaints (At least with the build I was given)
You cannot dodge or outrun missiles AFAIK, which means you are doomed to die...
ZQSD not supported :(
But overall it's okay, not bad but I can't say it's really good neither unfortunately, here's hoping you have more time / luck / ideas next jam :)
Thanks for the feedback! I think I just merged some fixes to the missile speed to main, so if you try again you might... but I never got the maneuverability and steering to be just right this time. I didn't do it using physics, just velocities and rotations and then the missiles just were too good to outsmart / outmaneuver.
Thanks for the feedback!
What's ZQSD btw? Just the keyboard mapping?
I have an azery keyboard :)
Now I get it, I bumped into those when I lived in France, fun fun fun!
I often complain about fps games not having an invert-y setting, this seems as important for accessibility!
Very cool gameplay idea, one feedback is that I think there should be more lights, some corner during my travelling seems a bit dark :D
Btw, Merry Xmas!
Thanks for the feedback.
There was actually supposed to be a day-night cycle where it would get darker and darker and then the sun would start to come up and you would have to finish before sunries... but that crate didn't work (for me) on wasm so...
Has a nice atmosphere. It was sort of fun just riding around in the snow.
That makes me real happy. I would've loved to have had the time to add some jingles, some music and... you know, better gameplace etc...
Using missiles as a way of sending gifts is a bit wicked XD. It would be better if there was a small map to show the target. I got lost several times when the level is up.
Yeah, I didn't quite get the navigation to be intuitive, mini-maps are a good thing.
In my original game (https://lavaeater.itch.io/jam-packed-christmas) Santa simply dropped the gifts when passing over houses, but I never got there... :D
While the gameplay is lacking, I like the missiles. I like how they curve as they fly through the air.
I noticed that the player/Santa was shooting missiles at set intervals, is this a bug or a missing feature?
I don't know if you know the cause, but if you don't I recommend investigating the game for performance issues on web or at low FPS (if you're on a laptop you can often simulate a low end PC by using power saver mode and having the charger disconnected) because this will help improve your next game. When I played the game from my gaming laptop the game froze a few times when starting, there were random lag spikes, and there appeared to be lag spikes whenever I saw a missile explode.
When the missiles explode, I instantiate a bunch of lights and meshes, and after a while there's TONS of lights and meshes, and that seemed to cause some problems. I'm not very experienced with Bevy but I took this as an opportunity to learn a lot. Thanks for the tips, I have around 3-5 laptops of varying performance that I use for development (and my workstation which is quite powerful) so I usually get a good breadth of machines to test on.
I did remove some lights etc to get better performance, but in the end... yeah, it is what it is.
I really loved the snow, fog, and general atmosphere. I feel like some ambient winter sounds would have been really impactful, even without much gameplay to speak of.
I read your post-mortem, and I really agree with the first point. If you don't start with at least a loading screen, menu, game over screen in mind, these can be somewhat problematic to try to implement on top of a bunch of existing code. I experienced a bit of that with my entry as well.
The second point too. So important to figure out the process of releasing the game on itch way way before the deadline. Even if you have no gameplay at all, get it onto itch early.
Thanks a lot for the feedback!
I have published before on itch so I felt confident it wouldn't present any issues... except I was using some crates that wouldn't work on WASM, so that was a wakeup-call. The process of getting it published wasn't an issue in the end, I just felt time got away from me, wasn't able to develop the gameplay further. Everything always needs tweaking, right?
In the end it feels like a proof-of-concept or tech demo (for bad tech), but I think I got the look that I wanted, at least.
Sound... next time!
Environment looks good! Seeing missiles creeping from the dark was very unique. Potential for a nice game!
Yeah, I am real happy with how the missiles worked out. I had to cut down a bit one the amount of lights I was spawning, from the beginning every blob of smoke was a light as well, but I had some weird crashes (once) from it, didn't wanna risk it.
I'm very glad you liked the look of it!
Yea, I think having too many lights in Bevy has issues. I had 4 point lights/room in “Station Chore” and beyond that it would cause larger lags spikes. Probably deferred rendering addresses this issue, but I have yet to try it out.
I would love to come back to this game when it's a little more polished, sound makes a lot of difference
Absolutely. I felt time was getting away from me and I haven't done any audio at all in Bevy yet, so I felt that if I started going down that road, I would simply lose too much time on it.
Thanks a lot for giving it a look!