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Cosmic Reclaimer's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Style | #2604 | 3.213 | 3.213 |
| Overall | #3185 | 2.978 | 2.978 |
| Enjoyment | #3430 | 2.738 | 2.738 |
| Creativity | #3506 | 2.984 | 2.984 |
Ranked from 61 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?
3D Puzzle Game (Sokoban/Lolo inspired) You can scale boxes, and walls to solve puzzles! Bug in the WebGL version, check description!
Development Time
96 hours
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Comments
The controls for this game felt... strange. I would frequently have to hold both F and WASD at the same time, which felt weird sense the same finger is usually used for both of those. It would've been nicer if that was bound to something like Shift instead. Vault and Climb felt like you wanted to include interesting movement, but didn't think about anything beyond 'we should include this'. The level design frequently includes parts that look like you should be able to vault/climb, but you can't (for example, any two-block-high wall with a box pushed against it). Not to mention that anything a vault/climb can do, a basic jump would've been able to do too, while feeling much more intuitive and a lot less janky.
The camera also felt strange. All of the puzzle-solving elements take place on a 2D grid, but the camera (and therefore the directional controls) are offset 45 degrees away from that grid. Also I frequently rotated the camera in the opposite direction that I wanted to. I think making Q+E rotate the direction that the camera is looking would've been more intuitive than rotation the direction of the position of the camera. Also why no mouse-based camera controls? That would've been by far the most intuitive.
The puzzles were also not ideal. For the most part, the difficult part of the puzzle was 'find where the goal is', and the easy part was 'get this box to the goal' when it should've been the other way around. Every single puzzle in this game more complicated than a tutorial seemed to have one of two solutions: either use a box to make a bridge, or use a box to block lasers. I would've liked to see a bit more depth/complexity there.
One thing that took me a while to learn about gamedev is that you should playtest early and playtest often. The sooner you playtest things, so sooner you find out what is and isn't working, and you can focus your attention on those issues.
Art is great, music is groovy, and gameplay is fun! I personally was okay with the camera, but I think being able to rotate it more freely with Q and E instead of set angles would make navigation a bit more smooth :)
Thanks for playing!
Very nice concept. I love the visuals and the music. I'm not so sure about the camera and unfortunately I encountered a bug where "x" wasn't responding when I tried to go up the stairs in the first big room. Then I restarted the game and tried again, got up there, although I'm not sur if my method was the intended way. Managed to get a bit further, then died. On my third try it wasn't responding to "x" in the same place.
Yep, that is the bug we mentioned in the description! Sorry about that, but thanks for playing!
I wasn't sure about the whole 3D thing at first, but you used it for the puzzles quite nicely. Impressive game!
Thank you!
Great puzzle game! There were already a bunch of comments that have said what I was going to say in a much more eloquent fashion (level size, camera lock, controls, etc), so I'll just settle with saying that despite that, I honestly still enjoyed it! Good job! Aside from that, we'd appreciate if you guys also took a looksy at our game < 3
Will do, thanks for playing!
Seriously! in the name of visuals it is a masterpiece that describes the beauty of open-world 3D games. The controls could've been made more better but i think the good artwork has taken all over it and covered its vulnerabilities.
Best of luck.
I will have pleasure if you play and rate my game as well.
Thank you! Will check your game out as well!
Love the art style! The control keys are a bit weird, I think.
When I got off the first climb in the tutorial, I couldn’t climb back.
Thanks for submitting this to the stream! I enjoyed finding all of your 'easter eggs' >:)
lol, thanks for playing.
Hey, wanted to give this a proper review since I know you've been contributing to lots of other games today.
Firstly, love the theme and the music. If those assets weren't premade they're really well executed.
Lots of people have mentioned the controls and level size so I won't hammer those home - I would think about what keys games usually use for vault & climb and try stick to those.
I have a few things to say about the level design that might be worth considering in the future.
Colours would have helped, matching the colour of the box / gate / switch to each other means the player knows what to expect when flicking a switch/moving a box.
Alternatively a wire or track that goes from the switch to a gate is often used and would have helped here.
All in all I think this is a great entry and fits the theme well. If you ever need a play tester to guide feedback feel free to reach out.
Aegis 🛡
p.s I was promised that I could pet a dog... I did not find a dog :(
The most important thing first, the dog: One of the glitches we left in the game lets you pull a box backwards into a wall and appear on the other side of it when you let go. If you do that at the very start, and walk directly away from where you pop out at, you'll run into the pup. He does have a bark animation but his controller breaks after that and he will freeze forever, lol.
Thank you for the rest of your feedback! I definitely agree with everything you had to say, and I wish I had left myself time to execute on that level and playtest more to find the things that may not have been quite as obvious. Unfortunately, we were really ambitious and ended up scrapping half of our plans about 12 hours before submission, so that level was haphazardly cobbled together in a few hours just to showcase what mechanics we managed to get into the game. I will probably try to do a post-jam update myself, even if my partner isn't up to it, to fix the glaring issues, many of which you mentioned.
We had originally planned everything with four folks, brainstormed, picked potential genres, themes, experimented with toolkits, assets, universal mechanics, etc. Then we lost two of our team members right before the jam and didn't bother to adjust our ideas to accommodate, so we ended up way over-scoped. I swear I say this every jam, but next time, I am going to set scope requirements and MVP much more reasonably to make sure this doesn't happen again, lol.
Ah sorry to hear you lost 2 team members, that must have made things much trickier. All things considered, it's a great game and has loads of potential. Hope you get round to doing the update.
Aegis 🛡
LMAO i kinda brike the game by pooling multiple boxes on my character !! Also the idea of rotating the camera is cool but might have been more free (like not clamping the rotation) this way you could always watch with right angle. Apart from that, it's a nice puzzle game and it's quite polished, good job !
Thank you for playing! Considering changes to the camera post-jam, have had a lot of mixed feedback about it!
Also, yes, there are way too many ways to break it right now, lol.
ahah i'm quite curious of all the others bugs, i might try again post jam to find them!
Really cool idea! Controls were really hard to get used to tho... I read in a previous comment that vault and climb had to be separate keys so that's understandable but it's still tricky to use... I also personally didn't like the way the camera moves. Pressing Q/E to rotate it doesn't come natural to me... It did help that they have a default position and rotate automatically so that was great! Other than controls, the games was really fun!
Design is definitely the best part of the game ! camera is also really cool and smooth, so is the music, As mentionned by others rooms look too big and empty, however that's fine that doesn't make the game less amusing ! Keep up the good work :)
Thank you!
Cool puzzle game but definitely needs some more polish.
Rooms feel empty but I know that level design is hard and for 4 days the only thing you are thinking about is to make them functional, not pretty ;P
Character model and texturing is amazing! (Itch cover render <3) As a 3D modeler I admire people who can do such an amazing job for a jam. Tho run animation felt a little stiff. But man! Vaulting animation!? Really well made.
A good base for a game that can be easily expanded.
Also I really enjoyed vaulting over small boxes :P
Note from my gf:
"When you gonna rate them tell them that the music is awesome!"
So here you are :P
lol, thank you.
Nice game ! I love the retro vibe of the music and also maybe just me ( and maybe weird feedback lol ) but I like how the camera rotate
Thanks for playing! It's not just you either; folks have been very divided on the camera, either they love it or hate it, and it seems to be split right down the middle, very polarizing. We didn't expect it to be such a popular topic.
Absolutely love the style and feel of the game.
Definitely could of used a bit more polish (as do most games in 2-4 day jams), but the main thing that came to mind was just how big and empty the rooms were. It got a bit sluggish moving mutliple boxes over a big area.
But I can easily see a further refined version of this being a popular puzzle game!
Yep, have heard that a lot about the level, and I agree. It was very cobbled together last-minute and not tested nearly enough. I'm not particularly proud of the level design.
The original idea was to have 5-10 small and tight levels that had a steady puzzle difficulty ramp. Time and tech constraints led to what we have though. If I were to continue it, I would probably want to look into how we could build our puzzle mechanics into procedural generation for a unique experience every time you play. More or less add replayability and rogue-lite mechanics if it was going to commercial release.
Cool retro future graphics + music.
Fun puzzle game! :)
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I would have probably made the jault & climb button the same.(I see your reply about the issue on other comments just now)
Edit: I basically had the same comments as butterskotch. :)
Thank you for taking the time to play!
Great start! I see the idea and the with some extra polish it could be a great full game. It works very well as a tech demo, great job!
Thank you!
A fun little puzzle game, but it could use a bit more polish.
On my playthrough attempts, I ran into a few bugs - a couple times where the climb button stopped working without any apparent reason, and 1 time where after scaling a box, it attempted to ascend unto the heavens thanks to physics glitching (and the puzzle reset button didn't work for getting it back).
Going to echo 1 or 2 other commenters; I'm not sure what the point of vault and climb being different buttons were. Climb also felt somewhat inconsistent, even when it didn't break - not sure how it's internally coded, but it could use a second look.
Having tutorial text over the interactable cubes after (what I presume was) the tutorial felt weird. Might be that I just didn't make it all the way through the tutorial, but after the first couple cubes, you should already know which button is used for grabbing.
The music was really good and fit the game's aesthetics very well. My one audio complaint is that the enemy lasers' firing sound didn't change with distance - they were always exactly the same volume. Putting a bit of volume falloff on those with distance would make the game more immersive (and let players enjoy the music more!)
Those are all good points! I was trying to get spatial audio working right before submission but didn't quite make it. The Unity physics/rigid body Kraken is also hard to wrestle down in such a short period of time, so we had to accept that shortfall.
I have had trouble explaining the situation with having separate bindings for vault and climb, it is necessary right now because we use them as interactions on the same objects sometimes. We built these interactors so we could stick them on anything. With the response people have given that, though, I am thinking of just setting aside the ability to Climb and Vault a single object and just let it be either, but not both, and binding it to one key.
Cool idea and solid execution. I think vault and climb didn't really need to be different buttons. The levels also felt like they had a lot of empty space so I think condensing the experience/environments could have been done.
But like I said, this was a solid entry overall!
Thanks! I agree with you for sure, we were over-scoped (like always) and the level is one of the areas that suffered. As a professional UX Researcher/Designer it definitely cuts deep that we had to leave it so unfinished in that regard. I appreciate you playing though!
I love the style of your game! The music and models really match and gives it a sci-fi spy-ish vibe. I love the scaling boxes to solve puzzles (I had the same idea!!) and I like the use of turrets to create a need to block as they shoot. I think that in general the game would feel a lot more fluid if the camera was like a directed camera that automatically move to fit where it needs to be to best see the puzzles at each point, it seemed like most of the puzzles were best viewed from one angle to get the best idea of what's going on/ what you're doing. I would also recommend making some of the walls higher or putting something on top of them to make it more clear that you can't just climb over them, I kept trying to stack boxes so I could climb over the walls and it wasn't working. I was a little confused with the wandering robots, I wasn't sure if I was supposed to block them with the boxes too or just evade them, and it was a little frustrating when I got ran over by one and the game ended instantly, maybe setting you back to the start of the area would be less frustrating? Regardless, good job!
Thank you! I appreciate the detailed feedback!
I think the walls and camera were the same issue. We considered some other potential implementations, but they were all too technically complex for us to implement with the time we had. That's why we ended up sticking with the low walls, so they didn't get in the way. We also found that the locked camera angles that could be toggled were more effective than a freely rotating camera. I 100% agree that part could use more exploration, though.
I hear you on the full reset part, I'm not sure I would create "Little Nightmares 2" style checkpoints that trivialize death. However, I would have liked to introduce mechanics to the players in advance so they know the consequences, I fell short there! My proper IPM setups actually ended after the first key block, time again, lol.