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Gizard's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #189 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Innovation | #371 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
| Feel | #410 | 2.250 | 2.250 |
| Overall | #452 | 2.250 | 2.250 |
| Aesthetics | #463 | 2.000 | 2.000 |
Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your submission match the theme?
The player has a gun which acts as a means of propelling movement and attack.
The player also has a bouncy object which is triggered for a short amount of time, which bounces any enemy (and player) that comes into contact with it, destroys enemy projectiles and damages enemies.
Third-party resources
Unity with Tiled.
Contributors
PrownieBrownieSoft (Hamza Salih) - Programming, Art, Playtesting, Designing and sound effects.
BUNN1E5 - Playtesting and Programming assistance.
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Comments
The art is really quite lacking, there's no real theme, and the SFX are sub par.
The gun didn't point in the direction of my cursor which made the gun kind of hard to control.
Shoot to move means when I try to shoot enemies I just fly away from them and can't see them, then they shoot me from off screen which isn't too fun. The only reasonable strategy was to just sit in a corner and shot enemies that come near.
The enemies were just complete bullet sponges, you shoot them a tonne and they just never die, and there's no interesting mechanic to make them better, just point the gun at the enemy and hope it dies before it slowly walks towards you.
you put screen shake on the gun, but it still lacks juice because the sound effect is really not good and there are no good visual effects to go with it.
My score also never went down after I died, which doesn't really make sense.
The player seems to have an invincibility timer after being hit, but there's no indication of when they can or cannot be hit, the player should flash or something when they are invincible.
Keep at it! this will be a good learning experience, and you can improve for next time!
i'd like to know how the art is lacking though, does it need detail? more animations? i did encounter a lot of problems with the mouse aiming.
the biggest problem i had with development was the fact that i had 2 days to make the game, so i had to rush some things (including not having the theme, bullet sound effect and giving the game some juicy stuff)
i didn't even playtest much of the levels so i can see why the game gets a bit boring (due to the reason above)
still thanks for being heavily critical of my game
hopefully i shall resolve the problems with the remake of this game.
It's definitely lacking animations.
But it's also lacking an overarching theme, and artistic style. The pieces just don't seem to fit together and make a cohesive whole.
The sprites feel like sprites in a game, they don't feel like creatures that fit into a world.
i would like to ask you, how could i make the sprites feel like creatures that give the game life and atmosphere or give the game a sense of art direction? should the characters have animations? should the characters colour schemes have a similar feel (i.e. dark tones)?
i'm not saying i'm a bad artist but i could do with a little help.
it's only through other's perspectives where i can better myself.
Its a pretty complicated topic and not something that can be learning by itself, it's more a combination of many things. It's generally just using similar artistic techniques and styles for everything, as well as everything kind of fitting a theme. And yes, a shared palette among things you wish to associate is one of those techniques for more cohesion.
There should be similar geometry among parts that want to be cohesive, similar palette, similar sizes, similar level of detail, etc.
In games, generally the first enemies will be introduced in an easy environment for the player to learn about them. Then every enemy henceforth is introduced in reference to that first. If a new enemy looks similar to something you saw before then it's assumed it will behave similar. If a new enemy is stronger maybe in terms of maybe health and attack, then it will usually be bigger, if an enemy is showing new geometry or color, then it is probably going to have new mechanics. If you see a new enemy like the ones previous, except this one has a really big spear, then the player will inherently think that this enemy is the same as the previous one in every way, except that it will use this spear.
You can break conventions, but you have to be really good at introducing these new conventions to players. Because there is a thing called game literacy, and subverting that will more often than not just unecessarily annoy players. Like if you make the left analog stick control the camera, or make up arrow on a controller equal to jump. These things break convention for no good reason and make a player relearn mechanics that they could've already know. And the same goes for art and sign posting.
For my game, I originally had more detailed sprites for the enemies, but the rest of the game was minimalist, so while I personally liked the sprites I made, they just didn't fit the game, and I ended up just making the enemies squares
This is the kind of thing I've had to fit to, this minimalist style and also the pallette I chose. The enemies are grey because they couldn't be the same color as the player, they couldn't be allowed to blend into the background, and adding too much more color to the scene would've made it muddier, so they became grey.
But then also, the little indicators on my enemies don't fit the pallette that much, because I purposely want them to stand out as they are an important game mechanic, not just art.
Think the game could be balanced a bit more, now once you see enemies with bullets its pretty hard to dodge, and with the timer mechanic it means hide in a corner and shoot at enemies until timer is up which isn't very exciting gameplay.
thanks for giving constructive criticism and pointing out the problems with my game. i too have found this a massive problem. there wasn't much playtesting gone into the levels due to time constraints.
these are issues i would like to fix with perhaps future games of mine