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A jam submission

Domenick's revengeView game page

Submitted by ReadyGo
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Domenick's revenge's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Visuals#413.3054.143
Gameplay#432.7353.429
Use of Audio#512.6213.286
Overall#662.5073.143
Innovation#682.1652.714

Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Number in team
1

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

It's a big shame man. The intro cinematic got me really excited for the game, but once I hopped in (and died pretty fast) The retry button didn't work. Although the intro is lovely, it drags on a bit if you're replaying the game which is a bit offputting. I'd say you went a bit too ambitious for a solo project. Having jump start when you let go of the spacebar instead of when you start pressing it made dodging anything really challanging, especially since I needed to do a slam to gain the much-needed ammo. On the bright side Oh. My. Goodness. The graphics are incredible! Not sure how much if it is yours, but the city looks just amazing!

Developer (3 edits)

Thanks for giving my game a try, really appreciate your feedback!

Absolutely bit off a little more than I could chew. I think I could do this again in half the time though having learnt what I learnt, and then I'd have plenty time for polish and bug fixing. So I probably won't drop my scope in the next week-long project, so let's see how that turns out xD

I think my biggest take-away from this project was that I need to allocate more time for bug fixing and play-throughs. It's my least favourite part of a project but certainly very important! I think I gave myself about 20 minutes for that, haha, silly, maybe 5 hours next time xD

Really sad I didn't get those retry + skip intro buttons working properly, sorry :'(

That city is all credit to Synty studios' city asset pack but I agree it looks pretty sweet!

The spacebar thing - what I found in testing was that putting jump on down-press made it feel too much like a toy, I just found myself bouncing everywhere, so it felt like I wasn't working with something heavy like a mech, but something bouncy like a mario man. I then added a jump-charge so that you could hold it down for up to a second or two, the longer the hold the bigger the jump. This felt too unresponsive and delayed though and made things even harder, so I didn't like that. The jump on release was a compromise between the 2 states. Would be curious to hear if a lot of people felt as you do though.

Submitted(+1)

Awesome story and reminds me of Virtual On! Great work!

Developer

Glad you you liked it thanks so much for the feedback! 

Submitted(+1)

Sorry for your source loss. Maybe you can recover it from submission link which you should provide?

Also i was wondering what exactly you did for the project because now it seems like a lot of different areas covered and in really quality way. I really like 3d intro scenes, smooth movement and shooting for a robot (it feels so good), enviroment and effects. But it looks like a lot of work for one week especially for one man. I saw a lot of bought stuff on unity (just curious you used it only for jam or not?) so my guess that you did intro and glued other stuff together. Which is a good job too, dont get me wrong, i just interested what one man can do)

Developer (4 edits) (+1)

Hi Nazandr, thanks for your feedback!

Happy to hear you enjoyed the feel of the shooting, this was something I was particularly proud about because it was the first time I had written firing like this and I loved how well it worked(I am always going to push myself to do new things in jams). It uses a combination of raycasting, illusionary particle effects and object pooling for those particles to get the fire rate up high and the fps stable(The particles you see travelling to target are a total of 5 objects being recycled). I could've pushed the fire rate to the moon with this but the problem was the sound, I would've needed to do the sound effects for the shots in a different way because it becomes too much for the ears. I was happy with how it came together though, maybe I'll do a youtube tutorial for this kind of firing system some time! It was still missing screen shake, muzzle flash and mech barrel animations though but there were more worrying things to address.

So let me dive into the beef of your comment - what did I do.

The assault mech (protagonist). The model and walking animation I took from the store, however none of it is linked to behaviour, the code you get with it is written for the purposes of the demo scene that shows it off. This model was actually not so great to work with because the rotations do not align correctly with Unity's coordinate system. So when I used Quaternion.lookrotation and slerping to rotate to the aim target, it was all wonky. This is where I learnt that you can "Add" quaternions together by multiplying them together, but it is not commutative, so the order matters, that was an annoying little lesson! So I was able to offset the spastic model direction and that got it right.

The model textures were also quite realistic, really nice for a high quality project but out of place in the low poly world I was putting together. I created a new material from the flat cell kit shader to "cartoonify" it up. 

It also didn't come as pieces. So in order to create the intro scene where Dom is working on it all broken up, I had to get it into blender, but it was some kind of "ASCII" FBX file, so I had to use an autodesk converter to do so. Even then it shows up in blender as one piece, no hierarchy. So I had to tear it up into the pieces I wanted and then patch it up and reimport it.

The walking animations for the model while great, did not come with any kind of logic I could borrow from. So I created an animator, took the animations I wanted (just walk+run+run_jump) and plugged it into my control system. The animations weren't blending together well at all though, this is where I had to learn what a blend tree was, very cool! They were also read-only so I had to learn how to get around that as well. 

Before I even went to this mech I spent a lot of time in Blender making and animating my own mech, and it was about there but the animations were really difficult to get right and I am still brand new to rigging and animating in blender, at some point in the process I decided to drop it and go with a store bought model, purely to be able to get walk animations.

Next the jumping/jetpack - the trickiest thing to get right was the jetpack power, to have it strong enough to accelerate the player up when already falling to the ground, but not so strong that the player could jump, immediately use the jets and fly to the moon. I ended up using a raycast to the ground to help mitigate both sides of the equation but ultimately I don't like where it ended up. I think I would program the behaviour differently if I had to do it again.

The biggest "steal" from the assets I used was the map itself. I spent about 3 hours writing a random map generator using the synty city buildings as prefabs and while it worked pretty well to place buildings of the same size, it was really difficult to get it right with buildings of all various sizes, while still looking aesthetically pleasing. So I decided to drop the custom map generation and instead cut a corner piece out of the synty city demo scene, patched it up a bit and then wrote+applied the necessary destructible scripts and layering to the map objects.

In terms of modelling - the only thing I did myself was the rocket car. This was modelled from scratch in blender. I also animated the tires for driving but never had the time to actually implement movement on enemies.

It took me 4 days to get the player controller/mech playing and feeling right with flying/jumping/shooting/slamming. A day and a half to do the intro and learn timeline. The last day and a half to sort out the map/enemy logic/enemy spawning(incl. that flying drop-in aircraft logic - I enjoyed that a lot)/boss logic/death+victory cinematics/game state+scene management/bug fixing/balancing.

Anyway, I hope you can see that although I did borrow a lot from store assets, I did a lot more than just "glue stuff together".  Thanks so much for your feedback and I hope this gives you and others with the same concerns a better understanding of the work done.

Submitted (3 edits) (+1)

Hi, thank you for so big answer)

"I did a lot more than just "glue stuff together"" didnt mean to be an offense or like indicator of low effort. On the contrary i think this is a good skill to have because you can use (and i don't count it as stealing if you credit accordingly) result of others work which can save you time and bring better quality. I think this is even more important skill than doing everything from scratch because imho it how it works in real job. So i actually appreciate your job especially because you did much more that i was initially thought about. Looks like you have a lot of experience already, isn't? If not a secret can you share short review on that? :)

My only concern is paid stuff. It's not accessible for everyone especially in jam so it's like "pay to win" in games. Other than that good job!

P.s. Could you tell can i skip intro? I'd like to play again but don't want to sit through this again. I saw hidden button on the left bottom but it does nothing with it unfortunately

Developer(+1)

No worries, no offense taken!

I would argue that there is enough free assets out there to showcase your skills just as well as there are paid assets. Paid assets generally come in better looking but if people are being honest about what they pulled in and what they made themselves, then the judges have all the info they need to judge accordingly, so you shouldn't feel worried about "losing" based on this. Further to this point though, jams aren't really about winning or losing are they? It's more about practicing your craft, getting feedback and building your portfolio, they're all about your own progression, so you really shouldn't be concerned about what others are paying for or not.

I have a few years experience as a hobbyist, most of it was focused toward a small mobile game I shelved shortly after launching, but that project gave me a strong base of knowledge to work from. By trade I am a developer, not a game developer sadly but coding is one of my stronger points so I can crank stuff out pretty quick usually :)

Sorry I really wish I spent a few more minutes on that secret 'skip' button you mentioned, I don't think I ever remembered to wire that button up, my apologies :'(

Submitted(+1)

I'm not sure about free assets but i have not that much experience with it. I know that when i was trying to find simple (non-fantasy, non-shooter) 2D character i've failed. But on the other hand when i have tried to find it now in paid stuff it's not there either (at least in about 2-3 pages)... So mb you are right here

About "losing" - i'm not that hopeful for winning, i don't know if we even have prizes here :) But if i will have good results it can help at job interviews as style points :) I meant that there is like unfair competition this way if judges will not consider this ofc and there are a lot of work for them even without it so they can accidentaly miss this. And there are different participating goals for different people including having prizes so it can be important for someone. Anyway i'm not into arguing about this, so if you want to have last words on this topic i'm ok with it)

Really cool job for this amount of experience) I have similar experience but including a bit of gamedev job. Thanks for sharing! Wish you the best

It's ok

Submitted

Haha, I recognize that level (or at least the assets) from the mobile game Holes.io! I like how you made use of static scenes with a moving camera for the storytelling. It's a good way to make competent cutscenes without sinking too much time into them. Your player controller is pretty nice. I like the jump boosting and being able to rotate the torso to aim and shoot. Overall, it doesn't feel complete and lacks polish. I think the ammo is too limited, and there doesn't seem to be any in the level to pick up. It's tough to replay the game when you can't skip the opening cut scene and the menu at the end to restart/quit doesn't work. Honestly though, not bad for 1 week of work and 1 person working on it. Good effort and continue to develop this and polish it up! 

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Heya OhmZ, thanks so much for the feedback!

Your criticism is right on point, I over extended myself a bit and couldn't get it nearly as solid or as bug free as I wanted.  Unfortunately my HDD crashed the very next day after submission so there will not be opportunity for me to polish this up as I would've liked :'( In fact I would've liked to do a lot more than just a bit of polish, damn!

Regarding the ammo problem you had - yes there is no ammo on the level, ammo is regained by jumping/flying above enemies and then holding shift to slam down onto them - when you kill an enemy in this manner you regain ammo. Not sure if you were aware of this already or if you struggled regardless of understanding this mechanic. Just in case . There is red warning text above your ammo counter that explains this when your ammo runs out. Playing the game a bit myself though, I realize the difficulty and lack of space for the player to breathe makes it very difficult to read a bit of text in the corner of the screen. Even in spite of knowing this though I do agree there is not enough ammo, especially with how hard it is to shoot down the damn glowing balls...

When I play tested, it was entirely through the editor game window. In the game window you can see your mouse cursor, in the game itself you cannot. This makes a massive difference to the difficulty level, because shooting the red missiles down with a mouse cursor is quite easy, doing so without it is damn hard.

Lots of lessons learnt this jam, but thanks I really appreciate your feedback!

Submitted

Hey, you accidentally only submitted a .rar file? So I used extract.me to make it into a zip to then extract and play. After that it works!

The opening cutscene was really good! So is the level design and all of the stuff like... this looks impossible to make in one week! Great job!

Only issue I found was that after I died the retry and exit buttons didn't work >< so I have to close and restart it to play again. Other than that it looks amazing and I'm really impressed!

Developer(+1)

Heya, sorry I didn't realize .rars would cause problems  but I appreciate you making the effort to work around it! Unfortunately I can't fix it until rating period is over..

I do understand there are a couple of bugs related to scene changes... I definitely could've used an extra day for bug crushing... In fact there is a much more severe bug which spawns the boss outside the play area and unless you really try to find him out in the back from a high building - it is not possible to win, which I'm so bummed about because there's a victory cinematic I was hoping some people would see as well :'(

Anyway thanks, I really appreciate your feedback!