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SpaMail's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #1 | 4.125 | 4.125 |
| Theme | #2 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
| Overall | #2 | 3.875 | 3.875 |
| Fun | #3 | 3.750 | 3.750 |
| Humor | #5 | 3.438 | 3.438 |
| Mood | #7 | 3.438 | 3.438 |
| Graphics | #9 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Source code
https://github.com/xphere/spamail-openjam-2018
Tools used
Godot
Gimp
Audacitiyand rFXGen
OpenSourced assets
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Comments
Very nice idea! I included it in my Open Jam 2018 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :)
Thanks Jupiter! I'm a big fan of your videos, they help me a lot to know what's cooking in the jam world. Glad you liked it!
Nice idea, although the F1 does not work on my computer so it made it more complicated than it should have been :)
This may have been fixed with other combinations like "push tab for next category" or something like that.
I need to find better control schemas for future jams.
Thanks for playing!
Congratulations you earned 5 Open Source Karma Stars!
I wish my FN keys were positioned easier so I could get in the zone and spam some keys.
I like the stance it took- spamming keys to protect! (could have been spamming to infiltrate)
Glad you liked it! Kind of the point of the game is to make you feel overwhelmed by the amount of spam, I think the FN keys help to that, but maybe it was too hard... Thanks for posting
Really amazing rework of typing games. It gets impossibly hard at some time but its really fun anyway. 5 for music
Glad you liked it! I admit that we had no time to create our own music, so we used two free tracks that fit the theme well enough.
Thanks for playing and posting a comment!
One of the ideas my collaborator and I didn't go for this jam with was kind of the opposite of this, where you play as a fallen Nigerian prince and have to send as much spam as possible to restore your kingdom. This is well developed, great soundtrack too. Godot, represent! Our games have something in common huh, utilizing the whole keyboard?
Damn this gets confusing though. Like @Capital Ex, I also have to press FN + f# key to switch boxes, which I think makes it too hard for me. That moment when the difficulty spikes and more come in quick = game over for me every time. I want it to go on for longer before I lose, but that might just be my laptop keyboard setup at fault. IMO, arrow keys would definitely be better. It should also more clearly indicate which inbox you have currently selected, I didn't notice the color bar until my fifth time through. Many of the characters are really tough to read at a glance as they pop out of the spinning envelopes. 0 vs. O for example. l vs I vs 1 vs 7. M vs. W. B vs. 8. 9 vs 6. These could either be cut entirely or made very distinct; although I see that's where part of the challenge come from, I didn't personally find that enjoyable. I think if there was little "shiiiick" sound effect that played while the mail slid over to its appropriate category, that would add something to the responsiveness feel and positive feedback.
This is a unique and original entry, which is my favorite kind to see. Well done for taking a bright idea and running with it as far as you could in the time allotted.
More or less the same idea of yours, but also two well differentiated approaches. Who would have thought this could happen with that theme?
At first, the idea was that each envelope would have its own bar moving and you can only press that key on certain areas of the bar. This spammed the screen with rotating bars all around and made it crazy hard to play, so we went with categories. Much easier, just focus on classify as many envelopes as possible from the same category at once and then change to another one.
Confusion between look-alike characters was also intended, a pun to how spam tries to confound us with subjects and mail names. What may be more annoying is the constant open/close animation of the letters, this could be fixed in a following iteration.
I think I might add difficulty settings at start or make the curve smoother (this curve controls how much time elapsed between envelopes).
Sounds also play on a successful classification, but only when the envelope reaches destination. Now that I think of it it was not the best decision, will think something different.
Thanks for the detailed review!
P.S. Godot for the win!!
Glad you like it!
Spam needs to be classified faster because it's time based, but the rest of messages fill the screen also and when this happens (all 26+10 messages are on screen) your inbox will start feeling the punishment of spam until you free some space.
Thanks for playing and commenting!
Really fun game. It gets quite hectic. However, the function keys might be hard to hit depending on keyboard design. For example, I use a small 60% keyboard so I have to press a special FN key + a Number Row key.
Yes, it was a hard decision, since all the other keys are needed. Another option would've been to use the arrow keys to go up and down the list of categories.
Anyway, thanks for playing and commenting!
Fun quick game, but hard as hell. Fkeys and characters was really hard for me, I think even without the categories it would have been a challange. I'm also not exactly sure how the categories work, I think the mails also vanished if not the correct category was chosen.
I think exporting to web would give you much more players, currently most games without many reviews are downloadable binaries whereas nearly all games with a high amount of reviews are directly playable. Also it should be very easy with godot.
(first posted this comment directly on your game page, but I think here it's more appropriate. Sorry for the spam!)
Glad you had fun spamming the spam mails.
I know that not having a browser version means less players, unfortunately I didn't have the necessary template for Godot 3.1 alpha to export at the time given.
Thanks for playing and commenting!
Is the template available now? I'm sure uploading the same version already there just as html is fine. It would be sad if people missed the game just because no web version is online.
Thanks to your suggestions I exported it to HTML, now you can kill all the spam within your browser! :D
It made my antivirus go crazy. But i still gave it a try. And i was pleaced to see that it was worth it.
The game feels great and fun, you executed the game really well and made a fun game out of it. Congrats!
Also, this is incredibly hard too, i was kind of raging while playing it, that danm spam mail.
I'm glad you liked it!
I just posted in the forum about the antivirus... The file's clean, and I hope this won't be a problem, but thanks for letting me know!
Also thank you for playing and reviewing!