I would suggest stepping players through how to play one step at a time rather than having a controls panel that shows once (I know, I'm guilty of this too) since a lot of the time they're just going to skip it and become clueless on how to play
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Be Kind's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Graphics | #226 | 3.875 | 3.875 |
Fun | #283 | 3.518 | 3.518 |
Game Design | #317 | 3.554 | 3.554 |
Overall | #364 | 3.438 | 3.438 |
Theme | #494 | 3.429 | 3.429 |
Audio | #495 | 3.161 | 3.161 |
Innovation | #598 | 3.089 | 3.089 |
Ranked from 56 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
In what way does your game fit the theme?
You need to rewind tapes in this video store management game
Did you write most of the code yourself and made all the assets from scratch?
Yes
Comments
Nice Game, I like the graphics and the concept. I couldn't understand how to rewind the tapes..
I was pressing E and I make a shop mess.
if you wanna try my game is https://misterm.itch.io/mixtape-match , Thanks
Really enjoyed the cute graphics and how light hearted it is. Easy controls and a good use of the theme. The icons for each movie to show which category was a really great touch. Great work!
I really enjoyed playing your game, I got sucked in really fast and played for a good 15min to half an hour. I think you did a great job in exploring the theme and the music helped a lot on creating this busy atmosphere. I also liked your art a lot and the lots of different genres to sort the tapes into. On thing I would add is a goal to work to, because a this point of time you just want to stay at a 5-star rating and that's it. So maybe add a shop or a goal for how long to stay on 5 stars until reaching the next goal like a better shop with more cassettes or something. Of course this would maybe make the scope for this game jam too big, but consider it, if you ever should make a post jam version, I would definitely be the first one to check it out (; . So overall, I think you did a great job and I can see your game ranking high in the jam or even winning. Good luck and keep up the good work!
You're right there was some definite similarity there! I loved how you had to organize the videos by genre and how you could see what they were when you picked them up so that you could keep throwing them back until you found something you needed! Nicely done :)
I really enjoyed spamming the unlimited box of tapes. Great job!
Loved the art and aesthetics in this one!
Could you please play and rate my game as well?
Really cool game! Nice and well thought take on the theme and complemented with a nice art and sounds. Good job!
Great concept and art style, I do really think that either I'm understanding it wrong or it really needs to be harder because you can easily get 5 stars on the hardest difficulty just by standing still and pressing e a few times. Other than that, great job!
A very solid game, with potential for long game sessions.
I liked the gameplay and the art. Less so the music (good but too repetitive)
The critique I'll make is regarding user feedback (if you can call it that way). For the first ten clients or so, I was sure I had to go to give the cassette to them. It led to me frantically pressing E and F around them until the bubble went blue (which of course wasn't my doing but I had no idea...). A sound effect or a graphical feedback letting me know that pressing the buttons didn't do anything would have helped me :)
Good job on your entry!
The art for this is really nice, as is the sound design. The gameplay loop is simple but polished. As other people have said the tutorial could use an extra line or two but other than that the concept feels rather complete. Well done for including a difficulty slider as well, options like that are always appreciated.
Excellent job!
Thanks for the input! I'm glad you enjoyed the game. It's tough writing a tutorial for something you have playtested a thousand times. It's hard not to assume the player will naturally understand a concept. It sounds like that's what our mistake was here with the tutorial.
Thank you for enjoying our game!
This is actually quite entertaining, a few things I would want to point out:
1) The tutorial is a bit iffy, it's very well designed UI-wise but it doesn't really teach the player what to do so I had to pick up on the fly. Which was fine for me but can be problematic for slower learners. I think you need to be more specific in the teaching the player the objectives of the game.
2) Your art and sound is on point, sounds very good as a whole game. If anything, you could always add more polish by having more sound effects when filling shelves, pretty sure there were no sound effects when filling shelves.
3) The RNG nature of the tapes box lends itself a more casual-approach of this game, which fits the game jam nature and I think you did it justice. By also omitting, whether intentional or not, the actual number count of tapes left on the shelves too, you remove a lot of the strategic aspect of the game (having to plan what shelves to fill etc.) which I think also fits the casual nature.
With that said, I've only played on the default difficulty so it mileage might vary.
4) Simple game loop with simple mechanics. I think you've nailed it by having only a few things to worry about and allowing yourself more time for art, music and polish in the entire game. It looks and feels good to play.
However, I am unsure as to how to take this game further. Your current game design feels like it fits some other games that focus on managing chaos (like Diner Dash, first thing to mind) which is something I have not explored much so I won't comment on. Consequently, I feel like the rewind tape mechanic is supposed to fit that but I'm also not sure how much it contributes.
On one hand, its a neat feature but on the other, I'm unsure how much it contributes to the gameplay as a whole.
Regardless though - this is a fun little nifty piece! If you give it some more love, more time and more fine-tuning, you could definitely port this on mobile just to see how it goes. Cheerios man!
Thank you for the in depth comment! I really enjoy these, especially with this being my first publicly available game and first game jam.
We tried to naturally communicate a lot of what would have been tutorials and UI elements in this game. When you talk about the casual approach removing the number of tapes; there are counters for the shelves, it's just communicated through the actual sprites how many tapes there are. Based on the comments we have received, we gave too much credit to our players to figure out how this game works by looking at the things in the store.
Our inspirations for this game was Diner Dash and Overcooked. We tried to take a spin on that formula. The rewind feature could definitely be worked on whether that be done by reducing the tapes that need to be rewound further or something else.
Thanks for enjoying the game
Writing comments as I play:
- The tutorial is not very helpful. It tells me the controls but I have no clue how the gameplay works.
- I'm just thrown in, but I can learn pretty quickly anyway. It only took me a few minutes which is great.
- I love this art! The covers for the tapes are super fun to look at.
- The gameplay is fun! I love it. I wish the difficulty ramped up a little faster, though.
- What's the point of throwing tapes? I can't seem to throw them into shelves
- Also, I just want to say that this game is awesome, but the cover art and main menu do not look like the game at all. It's cool, but the cover and main menu sell a horror feel with the darkness and the one light screen, plus it's 3D while the game is 2D. This disconnect just might confuse players who are looking for a different type of game.
All in all, solid entry! The gameplay was fun and addicting, and the art was great. Good work!
Thanks for playing! The art had a lot of love and care put into it. Scaling the difficulty was one of the difficult things for us. Our initial difficulty got insane real fast, so we died it down and I think we overdid it a bit for the default difficulty. Throwing tapes was supposed to be a way you could manage more tapes than the ones in your inventory by pitching them aside and rewound ones behind you, however, it was added at the end of the jam and we didn't get to improve on it more.
Thanks for the input!
This is the most fun entry I've played so far!
Kept me very engaged with the chaotic mess of keeping up with everything. I'd love to have a short sprint as in the Overcooked series, just as a cherry on top.
Great work overall, lovely project.
Very nice graphics visually, but there was too much going on with them to be really clear, I had to get used to it, to see things clearly gameplay-wise. Nice feedback of the actions, although it was also confusing at first so I had to get a grasp on rewinding, and how it worked exactly. Gameplay while pretty simple it was very well done. It felt like doing a lot of busy work to be honest, but I guess it's the way the game is supposed to play out. My bigest problem with the game, that it was confusing at first, the lack of some sort of tutorial was probbably the reason. Overall the game is enjoyable so don't get me wrong, I'm just more used to pointing out the negatives ;P
One thing I would like to see added would be a some kind of sprint button. Maybe also the customers could summon me with some kind of bell before they rage quit and throw the movie on the floor.
Also there was one time that a customer wanted to pay while standing between romance and action shelves, and they just rage quit after a while, but well, I guess it represents real life customers pretty accurate, so... "it's not a bug, it's a feature".
But... The game is quite fun, very well made and present a very nice spin on the jam theme.
Keep up the good work.
Thank you for the input! I'm glad you took the time to tell us your thoughts on the game! The tutorial was definitely the hardest thing to get to fit nicely into the game. I didn't want to do a whole wall of text to explain the game, so we tried to have what we could communicated through the environment or through the various popup tutorials we had. Thank you for playing the game!
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