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The Great Scaler's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme interpretation | #4 | 4.423 | 4.423 |
| Overall | #59 | 3.692 | 3.692 |
| Gameplay | #78 | 3.538 | 3.538 |
| Innovation | #102 | 3.385 | 3.385 |
| Audio | #111 | 3.346 | 3.346 |
| Graphics | #134 | 3.538 | 3.538 |
Ranked from 26 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
GitHub repository URL
https://github.com/EnviloN/game-off-2023
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Comments
Congrats on you first solo game jam ;) The game is fun and you quickly understand what to do. Voices are fun too ! Great job !
Thank you! I’m glad you tried it and that you enjoyed it. :)
Good job! As a solo game dev this is really impressive, the setting and dialogues are very nice, and I would have liked if it had lasted longer. I'm glad I played this game.
No, I’m glad you played this game! And I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it. :)
Hopefully, it will be longer some day.
this is a really fun game! the voices remind me a lot of Reigns which is really cool
my only notes are that it was a bit tricky to pick up the weights before i got the hang of it, and the first time i played, i missed the . in front of the .25 and .5 weights (and has them both on one side so i didn't notice one was half the other) and then was really confused until i got my 1 unit weight and then restarted haha. labeling the weights instead 0.5 and 0.25 could easily solve this problem
Thank you for playing and for the feedback! :)
You are right that Reigns had similar voices. I didn’t even realize. To was initially inspired by the voices in Cult of the Lamb.
Thanks for pointing out the confusion with the weights. I’ll try to polish the grabbing mechanic more to make it more natural. But I’ll have to think about the weight labels a bit more. I feel like 0.25 is a bit too many characters for the label. I think there are several ways to handle this, I’ll just need to find the right combination of those. :)
Nice game that is fun to play and looks good. Nice voice acting too!
Thanks! Glad you had fun. :)
Really good graphics & gameplay.
I am the royal scaler! Simple game that made me do math with a great theme interpretation. Voice acting made me smile and I am a big fan of introducing false weights as a game mechanic. If you do plan to implement more than one or give the player non-conventional weights I would suggest adding a journal or way for the player to keep track of their recorded weight values. I can't decide if background music or audio would add or take away from the game. Great work!
Congrats on getting the positive ending in the game and thank you for playing! I don’t yet know about the background music, it will be hard to compose something that fits the scene, but SFX would definitely add to the experience. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage my time ideally, so I didn’t finish the sound design. Thanks for the feedback. :)
Really curious game, I really loved the graphics, and the gameplay I played it for good 30 minutes. And I really liked it. Good work :D
I’m really glad you enjoyed the game for such a long time! :) Thanks for the positive feedback. Might continue working on the game after the jam because of it. :)
I loved playing this one! It is a simple concept, but it is executed really well. The overall gameplay is fun and satisfying, plus I am a huge fan of how the game tells its story. On my first run I did accidentally click yes on one of the dialogues without weighing the given object, so I think maybe you could do some sort of an automatic transition to the scales when the choice dialogue comes up. But other than that, this game is polished and has a really good scope. Great work!
I’m happy you enjoyed the game. I’m sorry for the UI buttons, they are indeed pretty janky. Nevertheless, those are just a temporary solution as I was running out of time and they were just easy to add. :)
Yes, I could have transitioned to the scales automatically. Originally, this design was intentional, as I wanted to include some small secrets and “achievements” in the game. One of them was supposed to be for answering a customer without taking a look at the item at all, and they would comment on that. Unfortunately, that didn’t fit the scope at the end. :(
This was very fun to play! I can see this easily being expanded into a longer game with more complicated puzzles and a longer narrative. And nice touch about having that one unreliable weight! The artstyle is very cute, as is the voice acting. Great work for your first Gamejam! 11 seconds, cutting it real close there haha.
Thank you for the positive comment! I’m glad you had fun with the game and I hope you’ll give it another go someday if I end up extending it. :)
It was actually my second game jam. I did the first one with a friend, but this was my first solo jam.
I love games like this and think this is a great foundation! Had some trouble picking up weights at first and did accidentally click ok on a dialog I didn't mean to, but everything else worked smoothly. Fun voice acting! Would love to see it expanded on.
Nice work on getting all this done with multiple endings and submitting so close to deadline!
Thank you for playing and for the feedback! :) I’m considering doing some more work on the game after the game jam as well. My submission was definitely closer to the deadline than I would like. :D
This was fun! I like the audio a lot. The art is cool, it would’ve been nice have more for the other characters. The gameplay has that sim-y, utilitarian feel found in games like Potion Craft, which I enjoy. I liked having a limited selection of weights, it made each customer feel more like a puzzle.
I found myself wishing the weights were physics objects that could fall over and sit on top of each other. The little bit of controlled chaos physics objects bring adds to the tactile feel of playing a game like this. I like that I needed to click kinda carefully to pick up the weights, it wasn’t really challenging per se but it did require more attention and made the experience feel more methodical.
Sometimes when skipping dialog I would accidentally choose yes or no, I’d appreciate some kind of short lockout.
I’d love to see more of this, especially if the narrative aspect is more developed and you find a way to vary the gameplay some.
Thank you for the thorough feedback! I’m glad you didn’t mind the rest of the missing audio that’s not in the game :D. The “sim-y”, methodical feel was actually intentional and I wanted the tasks to have some puzzle elements but this takes a lot of time to balance so the difficulty scales smoothly over the playthrough, therefore now it’s not that polished and well designed if I’d say so myself.
I was experimenting with the physics of the weights during the development. I wanted them to tip over when dropped on the edge of the pan or thrown out of the hand and then when picked up, they would naturally rotate into an upright position due to gravity. However, this felt utterly awful when I tried to do this purely physics-based, so I scratched that, and the rotation of the weights is currently locked. I would need to implement something custom for the game that feels right, but that was not in my scope for the jam.
The dialogue UI is a real problem, thanks for reporting that. Someone else mentioned that they made an accidental choice in their playthrough but I did not connect the dots up until now. To be honest, the UI buttons were just a “quick win” for me because I had to narrow the scope of the game. The original plan was, that answering questions (tasks from customers) would be done by nodding the Scaler’s head with the mouse. This will, however, require some good animations so it fits the game and it would be a huge risk to undertake with my minimal skills in this domain during a jam.
And lastly to finish with your last comment. At the beginning of the jam, I was actually thinking about finishing this game later on. I would like to finish a project fully and go through the release and publishing process to gain some experience in this regard. And this game seemed like a nice fit scope-wise (like, it could potentially be finished in a few months). So maybe I will do that. :) Unfortunately, as the jam deadline approached, coding standards and organization went out the window, so there is a lot of refactoring and reworking needed.
I just realized how much text I wrote, sorry. :D
It’s cool, I enjoy hearing about it! I hope you keep working on the game
Had fun with this, I played two different endings (once accidentally clicking through a decision when cycling dialogs) and I think that you managed to create just enough gameplay and puzzle to show off how much opportunities this concept could have without making it overly complex, hitting the sweet-spot for a game jam format. Nice
Thank! I’m really happy that you think that. I was kind of disappointed with how much I managed to add to the game so it’s nice to hear this. :) Glad you gave it a go and enjoyed it.
Oh, I think the best game which I played on this game jam. I really liked art and voice acting!!!
Will be glad to see you playing my game <3
Wow, thanks for the kind comment! Glad you enjoyed it.
I’ll definitely play your game. :)
Excellent take on the theme! I really enjoyed the dialogue and voice acting. Some parts were rough around the edges like having difficulty picking up the weights and some of the UI, but overall, I really liked this game!
Thank you for playing the game :) I’m glad you liked it!
The voice acting is an 11/10
Thank you! I was inspired by Cult of the Lamb as I played it recently and tried to do something similar. :)
I am glad somebody did this game. A similar game like this was our second idea. The game was a little short and I did not get any ending other than some guy saying he is envy of my scale.
Thank you for playing the game! You’ve got the neutral ending (where nothing happens, unfortunately), so you’ve been robbed of some more encounters I think. There are currently three more endings which include a ‘special’ customer at the end. But still, there is a lot of customers and story missing, so the ending is very abrupt and anticlimactic.
I will try to get other endings.
Like the main theme, and the story through dialogue. The scaling is kind of satisfying but it lacks depth a little. It is still a very impressive jam game, I think it would benefit a lot from more defined background art, and some sfx or bg music when you have to do the scaling. Good job!
Thank you for playing! You are right - especially the sound design is one thing I did not manage to get done. I also wanted to animate the Scaler and add more customers to it.
As for the depth of the scaling, it is very shallow and could use some more mechanics. For example, I was planning to include the ability to obtain some empty containers (e.g. potion flasks), so you could weigh them against their full counterparts to weigh their contents accurately.
Which ending did you get, if you finished the game? :)
I guess a neutral one? They just said that they will tell the king that I gave one wrong answer, but after that I did everything right, so it made sense to be neutral :D
Ah, I see. That’s a pity, the neutral one is the most boring. :D If you were to get everything correct, or you’d make more “mistakes”, there would be other endings.
A great interpretation of the theme. I like the story telling method this game. Although it is not very polished right now, but I see great potienal in it. More story and more gameplay machanism could be add. I don't know if you know Paper Please by Lucas Popes, I think you can learn at lot from this game.
If you are interested, please take some time and play my game, thank you.
Thank you for the feedback! The story and sound design are indeed lacking. You are correct, the story progression and how interconnected the customers are is inspired by Papers Please. And the voices of the customers are inspired by Cult of the Lamb.
I’ll take a look at your game once I have time to play Game Jam games. :)
Can't get more theme acurate that this :)
Feels like I don't know have old school scale work cos I was left confued about some many answers.
Other than that really high quiality in this one.
Thank You for playing the game! :)
I later realized that the difficulty between the first customer and the second one arose a bit too quickly. If there were a bit more story and a better tutorial it would probably not be so harsh.