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A jam submission

Build to ScaleView game page

Submitted by error13660 — 16 hours, 51 minutes before the deadline
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Build to Scale's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Style#25533.2333.233
Creativity#34093.0003.000
Overall#38732.7672.767
Enjoyment#55122.0672.067

Ranked from 30 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the theme?
You use whatever you can find to build climbable scaffoldings to scale your way to the top of a mountain.

Development Time

96 hours

(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
see description for full credits

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Comments

Submitted

This game is super polished, it was simple to understand but quite hard in practice, also i don't know why my camera kept rotating it was soooo annoying !!

Developer(+1)

When you raise up a pole, the camera rotates to look at the end of it. The bad decision on my part was rotating it back when you let go.

Submitted

Yup i agree but apart from that small issue the game is still very very good !!

Submitted

Awesome  atmosphere, visuals style and music  is fitting the game perfectly ! Awesome tale on the theme! Well done!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

should be renamed to moaning with sticks simulator 5/5.

On a serious note though, Ive gotta say although the building mechanics were rough to say the least I was definitely surprised by the level of polish the game had in general which was up to a very high standard, it was quite impressive! I think it was just the small details which were a knack to many people. It may have been perfectly usable on your end but unfortunately many people play differently than others to put it lightly.  I think its not very helpful to just say 'the controls were bad/janky' though so I will go through every single 'knack' I came across in my playthrough. (in order) Just so you know exactly what was going through the average playtesters mind when they are playing your game, which you might find super useful, hopefully!

(wall of text sorry) (edit - I shortened this down a bit)

This is my account of how I played your game as a playtester, in order:

  1. I expected you to just be able to scale the ladder by pressing W near it and going upwards, I would need more feedback that you have to press E to scale things beforehand. I think you should've put the rock ledges first, so there is only one thing whilst you learn controls. 
  2. I also didnt expect the way you would climb the ladder would be to press E on each individual rung - I only came across this on accident when moving my mouse over the ladder after a minute or so
  3. Without knowledge of #2, the first thing I did was to try and move the ladder by dragging it around. I got confused with how the controls worked whilst doing this so, maybe stacking logs for the first puzzle would be more intuitive, or building a bridge like you do a bit later. 
  4. LMB seemed to do absolutely nothing to the ladder. It only starts moving like 2 metres out at which point you either gave up because you just assume your hands cant reach so far or can't go any further as you are on the edge of the platform. I would experiment with turning the power up or turning down the friction of the wood when moving it to fix this.
  5. RMB did nothing but make the ladder clip into the wall a little more. It would work only sometimes, and most of the time it would just clip into the ground. I had no idea that lifting object was based on 4 separate variables - the position you are standing at, the point where you place the mouse cursor, which side is facing away from you and the length of the object. This is simply too many variables for me to grasp.
  6. when RMB did work, I struggled with the inverted controls - I know some people like them but for this scenario it was disorienting. I kept stuffing the ladder more and more into the ground and not understanding why because logically to me moving the mouse 'up' would move the end point of the ladder higher above the ground. 
  7. Also, its quite disorienting switching between normal and inverted controls all the time.
  8. Finally, I realise you can climb onto the individual ladder rungs by the climb icon showing up for a single frame, and I press 'space' to jump onto the platform above. Although jumps are tiny in this game so it more or less makes you fall off the ladder instead. It was not displayed anywhere that you had to press LMB while looking at a ledge to climb up automatically - this is another thing I had to learn by noticing the icon pop up for a single frame when moving your camera over it. 
  9. tbh 'jump' should be renamed to 'let go of ladder' and the LMB thing is done automatically in some way.
  10. The tips were actually really helpful and useful - I found this intuitive so good job on that.
  11. The second puzzle took quite a while to figure out because of said lack of controls but I did eventually get the hang of it once I got a better knowledge on how to play. So well done on that.
  12. I felt jumping was puny, For a game about jumping on props I would expect this to be much higher, you can't even jump onto the small logs.
  13. When picking up logs, you can't see yourself actually hold them at least on my screen until you place them down again so you have no clue where you are putting them.
  14. I think I eventually quit at the section where you have to use the logs and the big plank, because failing that once meant you had to do the previous section again and it just got kinda tedious. But honestly i couldve played for longer with a non-broken attention span

Honestly, If i would make this game myself I wouldnt have any rotation or ladders and you would just move crates and planks around like in gmod. But that wouldnt be unique, and honestly despite all this something about the way you are so feeble and the unique way of carrying stuff is something really creative. Honestly, this could make a really good rage game like getting over it with a few tweaks. You did a really good job. Thanks for reading my wall of text.

Developer(+1)

Although a bit nitpicky for a game jam, i found your insights valuable, but i would like to raise a few counterpoints. Not to prove, that what you are saying is wron in any way, but to give a reason to why things are done the way they are. So i will go in order:
(1-2) The current scaling system was developed purely because it gives the most opportunities for puzzles without significantly raising the complexity of the movement system. And i fully aggree with you on that it's notwhere intuitive enough without a good in-game tutorial or explaination, but with a limited time available, i had tu cut corners wherever i could and tutorials are quite time consuming to create and take time away from developing the main gameplay.
(3) Rock climbing and the first ladder section should absolutely have been flipped. This was a bad call on my part. I just wanted to introduce the main mechanic before the section after the wall climbing, which is still too hard.
(4-9)  These are the sort of issues that play-testing is there to prevent. But with a 96 hour hard limit on development while working alone, I unfortuanately couldn't get basically any playtesting done with real players (aka not me).  

So unfortunately it's true that a lack of good controls and intuitiveness had a real impact on this game, but I still think, that it was a worthy tradeoff this time and this situationm is preferrable to having a polished game with great controls and an intuitive tutorial, but basically no content at all.

And btw it was my first time moaning alone in a room in front of a microphone, especially with sticks, so i think it was a good attempt at that.

Submitted(+1)

Thank you for the explanation, and yes sorry for being a bit of a nit-pick. It is a game jam after all you're right. Not in any way was this some sort of gamer rage rant on your game or anything,  but more or less keep as a good piece of information to keep in mind for whatever game you make next. For a game jam this is definitely very impressive, I only am commenting because I have seen a lot of comments about jankiness but nobody has gone into detail on what exactly people got stuck on, so i thought it would be useful if I described what I got stuck on in more detail.

Again, hope you didnt take offence this was more or less just a description of my playthrough as a playtester. And again I want to just say that although I got stuck on many things the level of polish was definitely apparent  I couldnt help but be impressed by the consistency of the art style and gameplay despite some parts being frustrating. So really good job!

Developer(+1)

No offense taken what so ever. I am here to take feedback, the point of this is learning after all.

Submitted

Thank you!  d=====( ̄▽ ̄*)b

Submitted(+1)

Really cool climbing game ! Especially for a 4 day jam, handling movements with transition and physics can quickly become complicated !

Loved the feel of the game, had some troubles with the poles like some people mensionned before, if you ever work again on this game (please do it, it deserve it, it's a really cool idea !) I will gladly try it back :)

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

This is a really unique climbing game. I really like the mechanics, art, and the music. However, like others, the primary problem for me is the controls. Aside from collision detection and the dragging and rotation of the poles, i think the jump should be a bit higher and responsive. The player should be able to jump to the next platform when they are on the top of a climbing pole instead of falling downwards when jumping. Enabling vaulting after a jump could also be a nice addition. 

I also want to give a few possible solutions for the collision problems. Are you by any chance using mesh colliders for all the platforms ? I think it would be better if you used the primitive shape colliders since most of the platforms fit into them. Also, have you turned on continuous collision detection ? It should help with the poles and player clipping through objects.

If you plan on updating this project, i'll be looking forward to playing it again with the improved controls. Like i said before, this is really unique and even with the control problems, it is still fun to play. Good job overall !

Developer(+1)

The reason for the anemic jumps is that they make puzzle desing much easier. Previously i had a stronger jump and it allowed you to cheese a lot of puzzles. 

I rarely use mesh colliders in the game because of their performane implact. Only a few objects have it. And the movement and collision detection are entirely custom and doesn't use rigidbodies. A rigidbody based movement introduces lots of problems with camera jitter and world interaction when it shouldn't happen. And also i use a system where certain objects can override the player's amovement in unique ways and it would be much harder to do with rigidbodies.  As for the collision detection problems: I have no idea yet what causes them, it's an investigation in progress. It must be some edge case with the capsulecast function.

Submitted

I really like the concept and vibe of the game. I thin you should really explore this idea further. Unfortunately controls are a bit unpredictable which smoetimes makes it hard to play.

Submitted(+1)

I also had some problems with the pulling and dragging, but still managed to get through it, and really enjoyed it! Being able to look up to where you want to climb to and also looking down into the abyss really adds to the intrigue of the climbing. And the texturing also just looks great, nice work!

Submitted(+1)

I spend time playing this game about 1-2 hours.

The game has collision problems, the objects do not spawn correctly sometimes, some objects clip through the floor and go to the void, and the icon said I can drag things, but I can't. Despite all that, I managed to go to the top. (I saw the comment that have the same dragging problem with a laptop but I use a PC and a regular mouse)

I like the aesthetics of the game and the music reminds me to be chilled. I think if there is more time to polish this game it will be good and chill for real. Keep going like I keep climbing.

Developer

Valid. Thank you for your feedback and the extreme time commitment. 

Submitted(+1)

The atmosphere, visuals and music are all top toch. The gameplay also seems interesting, but a bit finicky sadly. Still, really nice game!

Submitted(+1)

I really like the concept here, but I can't get the poles to drag and raise how they should. Sometimes they won't rotate or move at all or seem to be trying to rotate into the floor. It's also a bit tricky to aim at the correct things to get the action you want to do. I would love to try this again with fixed controls as it looks interesting with these kind of climbing mechanics. I also like the atmosphere and the art style, especially those hand painted textures. Good job regardless!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for your feedback! The main problem is with the collision detection and the rotation of the poles.  I haven't figured out yet how i would improve the collision detection, but for the rotation i have some ideas.

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Cool concept and atmosphere.I think the large environment fits the theme really well. I did have some issues with the controls for climbing and raising stuff (sometimes the camera would reset to point at the sky/floor or poles wouldn't raise past a certain point depending on their start position on the floor), but the checkpoint system helped. Nice work!

Submitted

The game has a nice art style with slow cozy music and insteresting twist on the theme. However the controls are bit clunky, mostly when raising poles.

Submitted(+1)

Good direction with the careful, thoughtful pace! The music really sets the tone and does not allow to get frustrated with the controls, which are actually good but could use some improvements like a forced screen-overlay to guide the first couple of ledges (since the mechanics are relatively deep, it's hard to expect the player to intuitively grasp all the nuances, also the grabbing seems to not be playable with a laptop mousepad, so re-enforcing the idea of mouse-only would help). The looming heights do call to be climbed up on!

Developer

Thanks for the feedback! Good ideas, i will try to implement something like that in my next projrcts.

Submitted

I really like this cozy, kinda sleepy mood, but the grunt wouldn't feel out of place in a severe bowel movement scenario. Stylish yet sometimes almost impossible to play. ♥

Developer(+1)

Yeah, imagine how i felt while recording and editing those. I still have to learn my way with grunts and squeeks. And yeah the controls could have used another hour or two of work. Thanks for the feedback.

Submitted(+1)

Anyway, you did a really good job!

Submitted(+1)

Very interesting concept! A roguelike climbing game is a great idea to develop on. Loved the music also. Congrats!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback, i will let the musician in the team know. (Also, it's not a roguelike :D)

Submitted(+1)

I like the artistic direction and the concept but the game handling is quite hard to master, sometimes some lags but it's great !