Great game! But still wondering why that woman on floor 2 wanted to go to floor 2... nvm
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Smooth Elevator's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #182 | 4.278 | 4.278 |
| Overall | #230 | 4.063 | 4.063 |
| Design | #260 | 3.944 | 3.944 |
| Adherence to the Theme | #662 | 3.967 | 3.967 |
Ranked from 90 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
There's a lot of great things going on here! The elevator-takers' sprites are delightful and varied, the sounds flow really well, and letting the elevator take a long ride to the bottom is satisfying in a bizarre way. This was a genuinely fun and complete jam game; feels like no amount of more development time would have improved on this lovely design. Our only complaint is that it's easy to forget what someone's floor is, or for their bubble to be covered by another person's, and there's no way to re-query. Perhaps you should be able to ask again?
Playing it has also given us a small insight; definitely want a shareable grade, or discussion hook, in our future jam games. We got a 77/100 on our first run, 86/100 on the second!
Submitted
All I Need Is ExplosionNice management game, I think once you get used to the controls they work remarkably well.
Suggestion: instead of highscore, implement a >time spent crankin'<, where you start with ~60s on the clock and each passenger correctly delivered grants an additional second, I think this would make the game more engaging, because then people don't chase (only) the highscore, but they chase "playing more of your game"
I was away from the PC for a little while and was looking for a mobile friendly browser game. I was not disappointed. You've gone and made one of those easy to learn difficult to master games. Love it.
Submitted
Head Ache (GMTK 2019)Very unique take on the theme and amazing realization in terms of sound and artstyle. :) The obvious strategy of course is going up and down, stopping at every floor. However you will realize quickly, that in order to maximize your score you have to mentally keep track of where each passenger wants to go. Love it! Only weak spot are the somewhat wonky controls: would have thrown away the one button idea entirely and used one button to go a bit up, a different button to go a bit down, so pressing none of the top stops the elevator where it is. This would keep the feeling of the liftboy cranking like crazy to go up and down, but make stopping the lift more intuitive, thus give the player more cognitive capacity to remember where every passenger wants to go. And it would transfer to mobile as well: press the upper half of the screen to go up and the lower half of the screen to go down. Just my two cents...
My game: https://njamster.itch.io/wonkey (playable in browser)
Submitted
WonkeyI love going all the way up -then releasing the mouse button and letting jesus take the crank as the elevator careens down to the bottom floor.
Submitted
SURVIVE: 001 SOL CYCLENice idea, was a little hard keeping track of everyone's floor but that's just part of the fun~
Took a little time to stop at a floor though, but there's only so much you an do with one input after all.
Good work~
Submitted
Palette FighterReally cool idea that makes the game really enjoyable but the controls may need some polish.
Submitted
Only One Toweri got 68! sometimes it's a bit hard to land on the level you want, but it's a pretty cool concept nevertheless, and i liked the bouncy physics
Submitted
Only Juan in Spacei've tried it on mobile too, and you're right, it's better. i got 73 this time. i'm using an strategy that feels like cheating, i just go from level 10 to 1 stopping on each level when i forget where a passenger wants to go, but when it gets too crowded it doesn't work as well ;) i think the elevator should decelerate faster, and the passengers could maybe remind you after a certain time which level they'd like to go
by the way, i'm sorry it has to be this way but my team and i are a bit short on ratings, would you mind giving a look at our game? https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462969
Elevator control postmortem:
We agree that the elevator controls turned out to be a bit messy. That was the first thing we implemented and when we actually got around to do our play testing after hours of work on the game we were too much used to it so we didn't see the problems until very late. At least we were able to polish it to be playable in time.
Main problem with the controls is that most users instinctively try to land on a floor "flappy bird" style (slowing down manually by managing click frequency) but currently the game requires the button to be held down in order to land on the floor.
If we had the time we could make controls differently. Hold down control is the biggest problem here I think. We could have made it so that if the elevator is very slow and it is very close to a floor it sticks automatically. Then elevator could leave the floor by clicking again. (single click goes down, multiple click goes up and there is a cooldown to land again on the same floor)
We really would really like to hear it if you gave your own solutions on how to make the elevator controls feel natural.
Looks nice, elevator controls were strange at first but fairly intuitive. Overall, I really liked this game!
Submitted
The Tragedy of the Watch MakerVery nice game. For me it quickly devolved into just stopping at every floor instead of coming up with a unique strategy. I think the game would benefit from some incentive for fewest stops. Also if the passengers kept their numbers displayed I think there would be more opportunity for strategy. Good job!
Personally I like games that offers multiple types of challenges to the player and to take mental notes of the destinations is an extra layer of challenge. When you start to sort the order of the destinations mentally you also start to decrease the amount of stops you need to make.
I realize that stopping at every floor is one of the first things any one would do in this game (my wife also did that on our play testing sessions). I believe that's because it is the starting point of the short learning curve this game offers. Play a few more runs and try to increase your highscore and you will change your strategy entirely.
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