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A jam submission

Robot Fighting MechanicView game page

Repair your robot and win the fight!
Submitted by byazzle (@byazzle), LetterAfterZ — 5 hours, 31 minutes before the deadline
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Robot Fighting Mechanic's itch.io page

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Comments

Submitted

I found this game too frustrating to enjoy.  Here's why.  

  1. Even after I read the instructions all the way through, it wasn't until the fourth play and reading the instructions a second time that I understood how to play.  
  2. It wasn't until the second play through that I figured out how to grab parts.  
  3. Even once I knew how to play, the repair round timer seemed arbitrary.  It wasn't uncommon for my robot to need five or six parts in a single round, even though I barely had time to deliver two, even when I was already holding one.  
  4. There seem to be invisible barriers everywhere.  I have to be standing six feet upstage of the conveyor belt to walk behind it, and debris seems to have magical invisible boxes extending in unpredictable directions.  Speaking of which, trying to clean up debris first requires me to play hide and seek with the particular pixel I have to walk into in order to get the SPACE prompt.  

It seems like most of what didn't work for me was just a failure to communicate.  Here's what you can do to help, if you're interested.  

  1. Make a tutorial level.  As a suggested outline: Have the robot request one part, stop time and explain to the player that they need to go to the shelf, then wait for the boxes and drop it in.  Let them do that without a clock.  Then have a piece of debris fly off.  Once again, stop time and explain to the player how to clean it up.  Don't let the game progress until they succeed.  Then have the robot need two items at once.  After that (untimed) repair round, turn the player loose.  
  2. Think about where your player's focus is.  When I tried to grab parts from the shelves, I didn't realize that I had succeeded and kept trying.  That's because the only indication that I've grabbed a part is on the other side of the screen, and it's not readily apparent that that's my inventory, and not, say, a reminder of which part is needed.  Have the part appear at the shelf, and have the character carry it.  If you don't want to animate that, have the part appear at the shelf and then fly up into your inventory.  
  3. Think about game language.  In most games, an empty box or shelf with a sign above it showing an item means "When you find this item, you should place it here."  I spent the first play through trying to grab items from the boxes so that I could bring them to the shelves.  
  4. Try to match collision boxes to the visuals.  When using a 3/4 overhead perspective, I've found putting the bounding box where I imagine each element touches the floor to be a helpful method.  
Developer

Thanks for the indepth feedback Jabberwockist. All spot on - as our first game, we def suffered from overscoping and getting overwhelmed with other commitments, and did not leave ourselves enough time to get the game where we had wanted it at all. We learned a lot from this experience, very much on those three points you highlighted.

In our subsequent jam game, we left a whole day for polishing, adding instructions to play, and thinking about where a user's attention is. And probably more importantly spending the time to develop our game fully on paper before touching the code!

I really appreciate your time to provide this indepth feedback, it's very helpful.

If you're interested in seeing the lessons in action - we made this one off the back of the lessons here for Ludem Dare 47: 

https://letterafterz.itch.io/merry-go-madness

Would love your take on that one, if you're happy to take a look.

Thanks again

Submitted(+1)

this was really well done! keeping an eye on which parts and boxes to remember, and then actually remembering them while keeping your floor clean is a great brain exercise :)

It is true though that I could not figure it out without reading the instructions on the page; which is a turn off for people playing through several games from a game jam. But you live and learn. Anyway the game is still in a good state, and brought me a little bit of joy :)

Developer

Thanks for the kind words and great feedback. I’ll definitely be scoping in game tutorials / controls in my future game jams as a must have!