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Grapple Blast!'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Innovation | #15 | 3.868 | 3.868 |
| Fun | #16 | 3.921 | 3.921 |
| Overall | #17 | 3.900 | 3.900 |
| Game Design | #21 | 3.921 | 3.921 |
| Theme | #43 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Art Direction | #67 | 3.789 | 3.789 |
Ranked from 38 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Quite fun. Game is interesting mechanically, based on bouncing around at various angles/speeds. Controls are simple and intuitive but also bring an element of skill, which is excellent. Game mechanics are slowly introduced throughout the included levels making learning intuitive. Level design is the only element that holds the game back; the most interesting maps were those that acted as puzzles, which were mostly towards the middle of the level range. For other complaints, the ability to switch between a character/mouse oriented camera would be greatly appreciated for planning routes, as would allowing the slow time ability to continue through grappling.
Art direction is good. Enemies and danger are obvious, and their styling works reasonably well together. Music also fits the space/high tech theme. The only complaint here is static spikers are not immediately obvious to be on one side of a wall or the other when moving past them quickly.
Overall, the game is fun with the primary limiting factor being only 12 levels available. Secondary limiting factor is the limited size and number of mechanics seen in any particular level.
Bugs: One pulled myself through a wall that wasn't capped off at the end. Once bounced off a wall and was flung off into deep space at mach 15. Given the nature of the levels, I just reset them and lost all of 10 seconds. Overall a minor concern.
I think it's a fair criticism that our level design holds us back in some ways. A lot of our levels are more geared towards introducing concepts than exploring them in interesting ways. Maybe we should have focused on fewer concepts and explored each of them more thoroughly.
I agree with you on the spike visibility issue, especially in level 4. I am glad that you only had occasional bugs, but sorry about that.
The game looks good and is fun. However, there were some bugs that I ran into. One of them was bouncing off some of the blue platforms on some of the levels. The other one was getting past the level even though I did not hit the green circle. The last one was a bug that pretty much froze the game and almost caused it to crash, but it ended up fixing itself in a few minutes.
But, overall, the game was really good. I thought the music was really fitting to the theme. The idea of the game is simple, but the added mechanics makes it unique. I also thought that it was more challenging than I expected it to be.
I am glad that you liked the game and I hope it didn't take you too long with the difficult parts you mentioned. I will let our composer know that you liked the music. It sounds like you made it pretty far into the game and I am glad you were motivated enough to stick with it despite the difficulty and any bugs.
I think we unintentionally made it way toooo challenging :). Our intention was to make something that required a level of skill and mastery, but keeping in mind that its a game jam and people may only play your game for a bit. So I think we need to retune the difficulty a bit, after the jam is over. I apologize for the bugs you mentioned. We are working on delivering bugfixes also after the jam is over. The last bug you mentioned is a surprise to me, but we will look into it. Let us know if there is anything else you would like to see patched.
Very satisfying game to learn and beat.
Controls and directions are simple to execute and hard to master. Played without volume so can't comment on music/sounds. Really enjoyed the velocity, felt like I was only limited by my own abilities and less so by the game's defined bounds. I really enjoyed the bullet re-launch mechanism and it felt good to use in conjunction with the slow-mo, and really fulfilled the "matrix" style game play.
The rotation points were hard to see and I felt like I often lost a lot of momentum using them. The time slow felt hard to use because you couldn't shoot in slow motion and so you ended up having to lead your shot, but that might just a learning curve for the user. There were some minor bugs in hit detection, where the grapple contact would swap to being on a different wall when grappling near a corner.
Other than that, definitely enjoyed the game.
Glad that you liked the game. Thanks for taking the time to play, comment and rate. I think playing with volume on would have added to the impact of the player's actions, but no big deal. I think it's a fair criticism that the swinging points can reduce your momentum. The grappling has a certain speed, and the swinging has a certain speed, and swinging is harder to manuever, so we kept speed lower, but I think that's an oversight on our part that it does detract from the feeling of inertia and momentum. I think I know the bug you are talking about - we have tried to reproduce it but we can only reproduce it once in a while. Hopefully it didn't happen too often for you, but will try to fix it in an update after the jam. I think we need to add a brightness slider, because each monitor has a different color configuration and that might make it harder to see the blue swing points. Please also let us know if there is anything else you would like to see changed or improved.
Really fun, fasted paced game. It was definitely challenging on some puzzles, but it was very satisfying when I completed them. Really liked the bullet re-launch mechanism and the slow time ability really came in clutch in many of the puzzles. Only issue I had was during grappling when I would sometimes bug through the walls. Overall, very cool graphics and rewarding challenges.
Glad that you liked the game. Thanks for taking the time to play, rate, and comment. You are not the first person to point out that bug, but thanks for mentioning it. Is there anything else you would like us to change or improve?
This game is awesome! The art is simple, but distinct, and effective. The music is very fitting of the scene, and it's not too dramatic or anything so it doesn't distract me from the game. I really like the mechanics too. As a player, it makes me feel really cool being able to slow time, grab enemy bullets out of mid-air and use them to destroy the enemy who shot it at me in the first place. Really well done!
A couple of things to note. It's probably because I have an ultrawide monitor, that has a tendency to cause problems with game jam games, but for me, I had to click the bottom portion of each button in order for them to function properly. If I clicked the top half of a button, it would just not register anything. Like I mentioned, probably because I have an ultrawide, but just thought I should mention it. The only other thing I have to say is that the final level of the game feels like a weird place to introduce a new mechanic - that being the bullet-grabbing one. The level before it does have enemies that shoot you, but it's not mentioned that you can do that. Especially because of the fact that the mechanic added a whole new layer of depth, I found myself wishing for more levels where I could utilize it.
Overall, this is an extremely fun game with some great mechanics and great ideas. Absolutely loved it!
Wow! Thank you for taking the time to play, rate, and leave all this feedback!
I totally agree with you on the idea of introducing the new pull and throw mechanic in the last (12th) level. We were planning on having 3 more levels, but ran out of time. I'd say I'm still happy with 12 levels for a game jam, but if we knew it was going to be 12, then we would have (and should have) planned to introduce the pull and throw earlier, I totally agree with you on that. As for the level before that introduces enemies but not the pull and throw, we wanted to ease the player in a little bit. We thought that introducing both the pull and throw and the enemies in the same level might be too much. But we will consider in in our fixes to the game, thanks for that feedback.
Thank you for pointing out this bug of only activating the "buttons" if you click on the bottom portion. I want to help clarify what you mean, when you say buttons do you mean the small blue circles that allow you to swing? Internally we call those swing points, but I think buttons is a good name too. We will look into this bug. Can you give me any other details? - are you running at a 60hz monitor, 120 hz, 144 hz, etc? Did you face any lag?
In the rest of the game, did you run into any other issues or bugs? Did you get stuck on any level? Did you have any concerns about controls or pacing? I appreciate you playing all the way to the end if you did encounter any hiccups. We appreciate any feedback you can give us as we try to polish the game after the jam.
I will be happy to play, rate, and give feedback on your game as well!
Yeah, that's the problem with jams - the time limit doesn't feel that limiting until you're near the end, haha. I totally understand easing the player in - I think that worked out really well.
I should have clarified that further, sorry. I didn't mean any of the actual gameplay mechanics for the buttons having problems, I meant specifically when you have to click the "continue to next level" or "Try again for a better time" buttons. The swing points worked perfectly fine from my experience! My monitor was something kind of weird for monitors - I think it's 200hz.
The only level I got stuck on was the final level, and that's because I'm bad with directions and such. I had a hard time figuring out how to get to the exit portal. I think that's less a fault of the game, and more on me. I didn't really have concerns about controls or pacing, everything made sense to me, personally. It felt like things were introduced and explored for a few levels before new things were added, and it never felt like mechanics were being shoehorned in. It felt like it was becoming a more complete game, which was great!
I will say, I did have one glitch that I couldn't replicate. It was on level 11, the first level with enemies. I don't know how it happened at all, but the grapple line got connected to a swing point pretty far away through a wall. It didn't pull me closer, and it would still let me shoot a grapple line elsewhere, so it was basically just a blue line connected to the player for no reason. Like I mentioned, I couldn't replicate it, I tried a couple of times, but I wasn't paying too much attention to exactly what was going on when it first occurred, to be honest.
Hey, I'm glad you enjoyed and didn't face too many issues. I apologize for the buttons, not sure what happened, maybe you are right - I needed to test on a widescreen monitor to be sure. The other bug you mentioned is unfortunate but luckily not common, I will try to reproduce it on my end. Thanks for playing and all the feedback.
Well executed. Watch me fail here:
I'd only add after further reflection that I don't see a need to hold the grapple line to connect. It could just grab onto what ever the guiding line is pointing at. That might interfere with the "swing around" grapple point, but that could be click to release. Think it would be snappier controls for what requires quite snappy reflexes!
Wow, thanks for capturing footage and commentary. It was nice to see realtime reactions and gameplay. I don't know whether or not you are being sarcastic about the "well executed" after seeing the video, which I am not proud of. I'll take it as sarcasm, but correct me. At this point we are definitely aware that level 4's onboarding is not great. The purpose of level 4 is to teach you to use the slow motion mechanic, because later levels and mechanics will become much easier if you use the slow motion. The blue-purple bar under the player is your slow motion meter, and you can hold down the slow motion button (space) for up to 3 seconds at a time, and it recharges twice as fast.
Our strategy for the onboarding was to be hands off, only give the player button prompts, and let the player experiment and figure out how things work themselves, to handhold as little as possible. But I totally see how level 4 was just too soon. We needed one or two levels before level 4 that introduced the slow motion mechanic more gradually.
I was glad to see you eventually give into using the slow motion mechanic, because that was the entire purpose of level 4. You almost made it to the end, all you had to do was use slow motion more frequently. You can grapple at extreme angles to your destination and avoid spikes, if you just have the time to do so, by using the slow motion.
You are right, you don't need to hold down the button. We were okay with people not holding down the button if they figured out they didn't need to. But what we realized is that encouraging holding down the button for the normal grapple conditions people to hold it down in general, and so when they get to the blue "swing points" they would typically automatically hold it down there as well, which is needed.
There are also some situations in later levels or even in level 4 where you may want to let go of the button halfway to the wall, turn on slow motion, and regrapple somewhere else. And so keeping the grapple enabled only while you hold down the button gives us some versatility in the mechanic which is more explored later on. I would compare it to how you can adjust the height and duration of your jump in platformers by holding down or letting go of jump.
Three things that really puzzled me in your playthrough, which I apologize for. We also have not gotten feedback from other players about these, as far as I know:
I am glad you took out the time to play, and we can never blame a player, but for a dev it is disheartening to see a player give up on level 4, only 1/3rd of the way through the game. Things gets easier from there - levels are simpler, but you get to see plenty of new ideas / mechanics / enemies / obstacles. You even get to grapple an enemy's bullet and throw it back at them, like telekinesis. You can see a lot of these new ideas and mechanics in the trailer:
Hey, I think I may have fixed the game breaking bugs that you encountered. Since you can only rate me on the existing build, I will upload the new build once the jam is over. If you would like to check it out, then please reach out to me at any point on the discord. I am @rsaamar. And then I will inform you when the new builds are up after the jam is over.
Really really nice game.I love the grapple mech.Music and sounds are great too.Very well done!
Thank you for playing, rating, and commenting. Is there anything you would like to see changed, updated, or improved?
Nice work.
Thanks for playing, rating and commenting! I will check out your game as well.
Is there anything you would like to see changed, fixed or improved? The team will really appreciate any feedback you can give us.