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Rex Escapade's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Ease of Learning | #7 | 3.857 | 3.857 |
Overall | #8 | 3.369 | 3.369 |
Overall | #9 | 3.286 | 3.286 |
Sound | #10 | 3.357 | 3.357 |
Visuals | #11 | 3.643 | 3.643 |
Engagement | #12 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Spectator Appeal | #12 | 3.071 | 3.071 |
Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Visuals are defo your strongest asset here, the game looks visually great, the game play could just use a bit of tweaking. There are some issues with the hit box sizes and what counts as grazing, also maybe a bit of invincibility time after you get hit to help make the average play time a bit longer. Also shout out for doing an online leaderboard! Very impressive yall should be proud
The aesthetic is awesome, first of all - I love the look of the game. The pixel art is super cute, and the elements are all very easy to read.
I do think the major issue is the hitboxes - they are way bigger than they look, which leads to many instances where I got hit while visually appearing fairly far from the creature that damaged me. Often after dying, visually even the shadows of my dino and the dino that killed me aren't touching, which often feels like I got cheated, especially early on when I was learning the game and where the hitboxes actually were.
You can also farm dodges pretty easily off the flying enemies - it's possible to increase your multiplier by 4 or 5 just off of one of them if you trail behind them as they fly across sideways. This means you can farm your multiplier up pretty quickly pretty early on if you're aware of this strategy, without a lot of risk. This can be exploited for some pretty high scores.
I also think that the difficulty doesn't ramp up very much - it would be nice if the game got a bit faster, or forced your to jump or slide more frequently somehow. In my score where I exploited the above strategy, I managed to hit over 350,000 points and I don't think I ever used the jump or slide at all - they were simply not safe or consistent enough to use compared to just dodging around enemies and obstacles.
I'm also not entirely sure I understand how the health/death works. Sometimes I get the Watch Out! message and my multiplier goes down, but other times I feel like I immediately get double hit and die instantly, and I'm not sure why that is.
Overall, though, it's a good bit of fun! I think the dodge mechanic is a great way to encourage risk-taking for more points, but the game's pace ends up being a little too slow without ramping up enough as time goes on.
Oh, I was also able to get 9 dodges at once instantaneously once? I'm not exactly sure how, but I was able to clip it. You can also see a bit of the strat I mentioned of trailing the flying enemies.
Omg an online leaderboard?!?! VERY cool, also loved how the leaderboard slid down at the end and the "WATCH OUT" text that moved along the bottom, lots of really fun "juice" in the game. It took me a second to figure out how to get the "dodge" multiplier but once I did I thought it was an awesome mechanic that encourages players to take risks. Similarly, I was hoping that I would get a reward for jumping over obstacles for similar reasons, rewarding the difficult approach, if you touch up the game would love something like that. Audio and visuals go hand in hand and I loved that you had to walk through the portal at the beginning, such a seamless way to teach the player the movement mechanics!
This is gonna sound like a crazy comparison, so bear with me here.
Y'know how google sometimes does games for the google doodles? usually around the Olympics or Halloween if you click on the google logo it'll take you to a fun little game you can only play that day. I feel like this is the kinda thing google would make centered around the "no internet" dinosaur. The visuals are surprisingly polished, and there's more depth than meets the eye. I dabble in touhou, so the graze mechanic is super welcome. Its a really fun way to implement risk and reward. Do you play it safe and focus on getting through the obstacles? or do you go for style points and try to hit graze for some insane mult? If you're anything like me, you'll go to graze and bonk your head on the underside of a dinosaur, ending your run. Oops! One thing I would have liked would be some sort of visual indicator of what the graze range/hitbox was, since I found myself constantly thinking "I'll totally slide under here" and ending my run because I couldn't tell exactly where the hitbox began and ended. Touhou, for example, has a "focus" mode where you can see the exact hitbox of any given character, which makes grazing a lot easier since you can see exactly what counts as "just barely hitting you". The perspective of the game makes it a little more easier said than done, but Id bet there's a solution somewhere. But yeah! Lots of cool stuff here. Online leaderboards are a super nice touch, and I think with just a little tightening up, you got something really special here!
my only regret for this tiny game is not making the arcade style name input, ive seen it on one of the submissions and i thought it was the perfect idea to fully get in the "minimal controls" zone :3