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Deadbolt's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| FUN! | #3 | 2.304 | 2.375 |
| How does the game fit the theme(s) ? | #3 | 2.789 | 2.875 |
| Overall | #3 | 2.547 | 2.625 |
| Design | #3 | 2.547 | 2.625 |
| Mechanics | #4 | 2.547 | 2.625 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Description of the game please take the time to do this
Deadbolt is a top down Fast paced Action Space Shooter where you play as a Resistance fighter trying to overthrow your Machine Overlords. In the Game you can make use of your Ship's CPU to trigger abilities like Healing or viruses like the Enemy Weapon Hack. But as you play the enemy is also trying to hack your ship and you must decide if you will spend CPU to reduce their progress or if you will try to live with the negative effects of successful enemy hacks.
Engine
Unity
Were you in a team for this jam?
I wasn't just in the team, I was the Team! Oh Snap!
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Comments
Its a pretty nice shoot em up. The balance of the game seems okay but its very hard. After repeated attempts I never could get past a score of 500. I like how its too hard to just shoot them and that using the shield and hack is essentially required. I also like how there's pressure to kill more enemies as quickly as possible to keep your cpu up; however, it's here where the game's balance is thrown off. Once you run out of cpu you're essentially screwed. Its too hard to fight the enemies head on to recharge since their bullets move too fast thus there's no way to build up enough cpu to get the cycle going again.
One other issue is with the hack and shield abilities: there's no indicator or warning of when the effect will wear off leaving the player vulnerable to an attack as soon as it runs out.
Lastly there is little feeling of progression, sure there is rank ups, but means nothing if nothing additional is gained from it. Giving out the abilities bit by bit might have solved this, but that's just a overall design dilemma.
Anywho, the graphics were nice, good special effects and nice music to go with the action.
Oh yes, the theme! I was going to give you a lower score since I thought you were only going for the "Machine" route with the bad guys supposedly being robots or something which would have been a pretty weak way of meeting the them alone. But! I now realize that the main mechanics of the game is organizing and managing between the different abilities by cycling through them in to gain an advantage. So props on taking on that theme as well!
First I would like to start off by saying thank you for you feedback and criticisms.
As far as the design and balance of the game go, you bring up a lot of very valid points that I had hoped to fix. Unfortunately I ran out of time in the Jam before I could get to really tackling the game's difficulty curve and progression. (I submitted it early due to my sleeping schedule being poorly coordinated with the Jam such that the last 10 hours I would be either to tired to work or actively sleeping. Thus I wanted to get it in early to avoid missing the deadline). I will defiantly continue to work on the game to get in some of the features I missed, optimize the code, and balance it out so it really is possible to achieve the highest rank in the game.
As for the theme... yes... that is entirely what I was going for and don't let anyone tell you any differently!
But in all honesty I hadn't even thought of that, in truth as I was developing I realized I wasn't doing enough to really sell the idea that you were fighting machines which is what led me to implementing the hacking mechanic. (Though even with it the Hacking mechanic if anything pushed the game closer to a hacking themed shoot em up in space than a war against machines.) I also tried to to really sell the idea in the lore through the In-game manual, but ultimately, I think my delivery on the theme was very weak and you are basically only fighting machines on "paper" because the lore text said so.