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Goo Surge's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Playability | #100 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Cleverness | #423 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Theme | #426 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Artistic Style | #469 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 1 rating. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- Fun little game! Well done!
Did you include your Game Design Document in your downloadable files?
Yes
Tell us about your game!
Brought to you by the Goo Council.
You are a goo wizard, an agent of the goo council. You have been sent to free the goo from the clutches of the scientists, steal the schematics of their so-called 'facility,' and then burn it to the ground... hopefully while also making good on your escape!
Goo Surge is a top-down, 2D heist-action game. All the controls are provided in the game so make sure you read them.
Some handy tips!
- Your spells only work on the goo. You must release it first, and use it to change the environment
- Flaming hot goo destroys stuff it is touching, including the lighter coloured walls. Your heat spell is good for that!
- The timer doesn't start until you release the goo. Take that time to scope out the level, and plan your attack!
- To release the goo, collide with the chamber, and it'll pour out
- Casting heat spells while you're standing on the goo can be dangerous! Try casting a cold spell first, and swiftly moving away from your heat, or not standing on the goo at all
Did you remember to include your Game Design Document?
Yes
Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes
Extra Notes
We had a bunch of fun making this project, as a set of programmers hoping to get into the industry it feels great to have something we have actually completed and can put on our portfolios. This came at a perfect time so thank you for putting this on and we hope you enjoy!
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Comments
Love the concept of drawing to cast spells. Was a little confused with the initial mazes and pressing space before the goo is released makes your player loses health (at least visually). Music was fun, art and particles were simple yet effective, and the scoring incentivizes destruction.
I agree that the level design is quite confusing, with some extra time we would have liked to try make each area of the level visually distinct so there was less chance of getting lost (we still get lost ourselves).
+1 for spell scribbles, of all the mechanics that snuck into the game jam, its my favorite
I'm no big brain dev, but I felt like the goo was calling to me in the comments, so here I am!
I have to say, the game's soundtrack has some BANGERS (shoutout to the credits music)! I also really liked the animation of switching between the menus in the title screen (turning the pages), it's a cool idea!
A tiiiiny nitpick would be that I think it'd be interesting to have a visual indicator/feedback of the invisible wall present around the green doors in the start of the level. When I started the game, I was slightly confused on why I couldn't walk to my left until I realized I wasn't meant to go around the door area yet. But again, just a nitpick more than anything.
It's a nice touch that you change the pitch of the sound when you Right Click, helps to make the sound less repetitive!
I have to say, the mechanic is quite interesting. Using the spells to affect the goo's speed and destructive abilities, and with actually having to draw the runes for the spells made for an interesting experience. There were definitely times in which I was drawing the Ice spell in a hurry (and failing miserably) because the HOT GOO was approaching. It was fun to see the fire spreading throughout long sections of walls really quickly. I don't even think I need to go on about how well this game fits into the theme!
At first, I was quite confused with the "Destroy" objective. I found the server room, which looked quite different from all the other rooms and thought "oh maybe this is what I'm meant to destroy", but later I understood that it was more as just a "you can destroy everything now" (which I did, I expect great pay from the Goo Council btw).
There's so many different directions this game can take, going from how different environments could get affected by spells together with the goo, to having completely new spells that affect the goo in different ways. Whatever the case, I think the idea was super cool and I feel like it has potential to be expanded in multiple ways. I enjoyed my time working for the Goo Council! Really cool game!
Thanks for playing, and for the in-depth comment, glad you enjoyed your employment under the council (your payment will be in the mail).
We're definitely going to look to expand the game in a few different ways, with the ones you listed definitely being on the cards as well as potential other systems, also glad you're a fan of the music, funnily enough the credits track was originally going to be the menu music but we thought it was too high energy, so HeavyMetalGameDev made the current menu music. We didn't want to get rid of the other track though because it was really good so we put it in the credits instead.
This game is hard and I love it. I have yet to escape the building but I'm going to definitely keep trying. Having to draw the runes to cast the spell as a mechanic is a really cool concept and add a layer of difficulty that makes me want to keep trying. Sound and music are well done as well as the pixel art. I can easily see myself playing this game for hours trying to get the optimal score on different levels or other people trying to speed run it. Ya'll keep up the good work!
Glad you enjoyed, and thanks for the kind words!
Good luck in getting out of there, I know you can do it, and this definitely gives us motivation to keep going with this post-jam to hopefully add new levels and make it as good as it can be!
Really cool concept! The gesture spells really took me back to being a kid playing Black & White. Enjoyed it being a score attack game - gave me incentive to try more rounds than I intended to haha! I didn't understand the health bar at first - it dropped when I pressed space, so I thought that was doing something. Music was really fun!
Great job!
Yeah, the damage feedback is definitely lacking, I would have liked to add some sort of screen burning effect to let the player know when they're being burned. Glad you enjoyed it anyway!
Love the funky 8bit music, the chunky graphics, the disproportionately huge environment/floorplans, and the goo mechanic. I had two complete fails at getting started with this game, probably due to not looking at the instructions! If you could possibly display the drawing mechanic on a few images right at the start, it would alleviate that... I assumed I just didn't have any spells yet because the page was blank XD
I didn't really understand what the meter at the bottom was. At first I thought it might be health, or maybe mana... finally I came to understand it was probably time remaining? Looks a bit too much like a health bar, maybe an hourglass would be the universally understood symbol!
Awesome submission folks, you should be proud of your work.
Glad you enjoyed playing, and thanks for the kind words!
First of all, yeah we know we needed to add a tutorial, complete oversight on our end, though we did have the drawings in the bottom left of the screen on a bit of paper, though that's definitely not clear as to what that is.
And the bottom bar is actually a health bar! The timer is at the top but the health bar goes down when you step in hot goo, we really should have added some damage indication for that but we ran out of time to add that in, another thing for post-development.
Thanks for playing! Really means a lot
Oh, I was right the first time! Heh. Oh well, I'll know to turn it into ice next time.
There is a lot to love about this game, but I agree with some of the comments that it could feel hard to know what to do next or how to progress. Also, the goo felt too unforgiving, so maybe having it shrink when coold could add a bit more strategy and leeway.
I also found that because the direction of the spell got locked before you could draw, I would find myself firing in random directions quite often, which felt a bit frutrating
The game was actually supposed to have a visual to indicate which direction the spell was cast in, but it seems we accidentally did it such that it only shows in the Unity editor (silly, I know). And yes, the goo is definitely too unforgiving, we actually found a bug with the way it damages you right before we were about so submit so had to scramble to fix it, and I think that has caused a couple issues.
Thanks a lot for playing the game anyway!
This game is a lot of fun! I did find it difficult, which isn't a bad thing. I did run into issues casting the fire spell and wouldn't always cast it when I wanted it to. Might be my bad mouse control :)
I love games where you draw spells. It's always so much fun. I enjoyed the pressure of trying to cast them fast, which is probably why I failed at casting fire so much.
Thanks for playing, glad you found it fun!
Honestly with the drawing system it's not quite where I wanted it to be by the end. The way it works is it figures out what lines you've drawn and from that figures out the rune you've drawn, and sometimes it'll see a line that should by all rights be vertical and say "that's diagonal, definitely". I really want to work on it post-jam to make it feel better, just would have spent the whole time fine-tuning it if I could but I had to devote time to music.
So, tl;dr, there's a good chance your drawing was not actually bad and just the rune system being slightly clunky haha
Movement was smooth, I had a lot of trouble finding the goo chamber, maybe an arrow that gives a general direction of where to go next would be good. I also seemed to have soft locked myself in with the goo and was unable to open the door an escape. I think some playtesting with members outside of the dev team would make it easier to identify where people get stuck because the mechanics are interesting and unique, just needed a little more coaching on how to play!
We totally agree on those points, an arrow pointing to the objective was also an idea that I wanted to add but ran out of time to do. Thanks for playing anyway!
Definitely agreed, if we hadn't finished getting the whole thing together 2 hours before the deadline we would have gotten some playtesting done, but that's on us for not prioritising our time correctly on that front haha
Thanks for playing though, and hope ya had fun!
The movement and animations feel really, really nice. I like the spell cast mechanic its different. However it seems harder to cast fire than frost.
I did get stuck and didn't know what to do, and I feel like I soft locked myself in with the goo.
It wasn't clear in game what the spell casts purpose was, but it did look pretty :)
Music starts out loud and would have like a volume slider.
The sound effects are nice and fit with everything.
Reading the other comments helped and I'll try the game again to see if I can get farther :)
Over all good job !
thank you, thank you, thank you, for making nice feeling controls!!
Its usually so over looked, but so important.
Glad you tried it out! We definitely know things aren't clear, big thing to fix post-jam!
Volume slider is DEFINITELY something we should have added, I thought about it last day then realised adding that with 5 hours to go and still quite a bit of polish in other areas required and figuring out how to do it would have been probably a fool's errand, but I definitely want to get that working.
Also happy you liked the controls, passing that along to the guy who did them (Junky), he's an absolute wizard when it comes to this stuff and I need him to teach me honestly hahaha
The game was really good. The visuals and everything. The music was really fitting and entertaining. The animations were really nice as well.
The controls are really good and the SFX in the drawing things screen was also really good.
The main sort of trouble I had with this game was that very frequently I would get lost and couldn't complete the objective. I think adding a minimap would be a really good solution to this with the objectives highlighted (for example, the blue keycard at the start could be highlighted with a light in the minimap)
The second thing I had some trouble with was that the objectives while written on the top, there isn't as much info on what to do. I was confused in the second stage as I touched the boxes of goo, they got charged, The objective was to "Destroy" but I could neither do anything with the goo or leave the room.
Maybe a more detailed explanation would help get the player do what they are supposed to do?
Overall, the game is really good, has good visions and great ideas however, there seems to be a lack of guidance to the player. Maybe a tutorial section would really help.
Also, I think I discovered a bug. When casting the ice spell, I am guessing that the game checks that if 3 straight lines are drawn and they intersect at one point in the middle, to cast the ice spell? but drawing a K shape like this also seems to cast the ice spell. (I have also placed the strokes and the order it seems to be working most easily but 1-3-2 also works)
A tutorial would have 100% improved it, I agree. As a team of programmers, I think we focused too much on making the mechanics cool instead of easy to understand.
I also agree that finding things in the level is very hard and not clear enough, given the time I would have liked to add helper arrows that point to the next objective.
In fact, the "Destroy" objective isn't really an objective, just something you are being told to do! I think that was poorly communicated.
To interact with the goo, you have to cast spells on it by opening the canvas with right click and drawing the spell you want on it. Heating it up makes it spread faster and destroy things, cooling it down makes it slow and makes it more safe. The main idea of the game is to destroy the level until you find the schematics, then to leave the level.
I can't comment too much on the rune drawing mechanics as that was Nijelous who did that, but we wanted to try and make it quite lenient with the shapes since we only have two spells anyway.
Thanks for playing!
Thanks for the kind words! Means a lot to us that you took the time to play.
On the rune drawing point, yeah you got it spot on with what it checks for. I have it checking for 1 vertical line and two diagonal line, then run some logic to see whether the diagonal lines a) are in between the top and bottom of the vertical line at some point and b) cross in two different directions (upwards diagonal and downwards diagonal). It should also check to see if the lines are either side of the vertical, something definitely to check for development moving forwards!
I played the game but I was unable to get very far. Also space seems to do something interesting that is not in the controls menu, but i really really like the spell casting. It has proven to me that I do not know how to draw a straight line with my mouse, but really inventive cool idea.
I think it would be awesome if you could somehow combine spells by drawing multiple on the page at once... that would take it to the next level (steam from ice and fire?)
Love the game , but would appreciate some pointers on what to do, i tried burning everything and freezing everything and no luck...
Yeah haha, the space thing was a debug that we forgot to remove :)
i think the spell cast mechanic is just fantastic
please continue and make something nice, i think this is such a cool idea.
Thanks, it took us a while to get it all working and I think because of that how "fun" the game was suffered, but there is totally a lot of room to make some cool stuff building on what we have so far!
Thanks for playing first of all, sorry you weren't able to get particularly far and yeah drawing is hard, though admittedly I still need to fine-tune the system it was not exactly where I wanted it to be in terms of intuitiveness, but that required outside testing we did not have time for in the end, lessons for next jam.
I REALLY wanted to add combining spells at some point, or even more runes you can cast, and I still do, and that was one of the ways I thought to implement it so yeah definitely gonna look into doing that.
Also in terms of what to do, heat the goo as much as you can to make it burn everything, but the goo also burns you so you need to cool it down to walk on it. You also need to complete the side mission of getting the schematics (a folder somewhere in the level). Once you have that you can leave via the fire exit. Hope this helps if you decide to replay!
i love it my friend...
with your advice I am definitely going to try the game again!
I LOVE the spell drawing mechanics!!!!
This is really ambitious and well put together. Control is really well put together, and I like the drawing spell mechanics. However I got stuck after I let the goo loose and couldn't figure out what it meant by destroy. I think some Valve style playtesting might help out, as I can tell there's a lot of effort put in here and it's also possible that maybe I'm just oblivious. All in all I liked seeing all the ambition and creativity poured into this, and am interested in seeing where this thing is supposed to go.
The game definitely needed more playtesting, but we didn't find the time to do any unfortunately. The task list in the corner was quite a last minute thing, so I think that is certainly one of the biggest causes for confusion in the game. There isn't actually any way to check off the "Destroy" task, instead the goal is to find the schematics in the level (which unlocks the exit back at the player spawn) and to then reach the exit again.
Really appreciate the comment and we apologise for it being so unclear 😅
I liked the animations! (especially the bubbling vats of goo. The drawing mechanic was also neat.
Unfortunately i have a really really wide monitor which doesn't support full screened games very well.
I was a bit lost on what to do (i think some of the UI wasn't showing up due to my monitor). The concept is neat though. I'd love to try a web gl build if you get one up!
Ah that's a shame, none of us have ultrawide monitors so we wouldn't have been able to test that.
Unfortunately, I don't think we'll be able to get a WebGL build as we are using Compute Shaders for the goo mechanic, and WebGL does not support them (which is something we just decided to accept and to focus on making a playable, downloadable version).
Thanks for the comment!
After the jam, if you decided to update the game, you can go into the project settings and enabled "resize window". This will allow users to force the game into a window from full screen and then resize it to fit their monitor. This can cause weird issues with the UI however if it isn't designed to scale well (which typically is a bit of a problem with Unity I feel). Just a little tip I figured out while play testing my games in the past. I love my ultrawide for work, but it definitely causes issues with gaming at times (i run most of my games in a window lol).
We'll probably do that, thanks for the tip!
No problem! I ended up forcing my game to 850 x 850 because i wanted it to be square and feel more "constrictive"...like you are looking at everything in a petri dish under a microscope. (though you can force full screen the game and then it kinda breaks lol).
awesome music, the intro text cracked me up. when the music changed as i released the goo I got so stressed LOL nice work there. i was 100% sure how to cast a spell, i'm not sure there was clear instructions on that. i like the protagonist and the creepy vibe of the game. nice work!
I think one of the main flaws is how confusing the game is, it seems like a lot of people are having that issue 😅 The downsides of not having any playtesting.
To cast spells, you hold right click, then draw the symbol for the rune you want to cast on the page that appears, and release right click to cast it! (The confusion may have been caused by the UI not scaling properly and parts of it missing, again our fault haha)
Thanks for playing! We've gotten a lot of feedback on things not being clear, definitely adding a tutorial first thing post-jam.
Nice game! I liked the graphics, they have this old windows games style. The spells having to be drawn is a neat idea, but I keep finding myself struggling to get the fire one. Like, don't ask me to make straight lines haha. Also, it took me a while to get the blue card.
I kept getting game overs with enough time left, and I'm still not sure why. Maybe I was too enthralled watching things burn, very satisfying. I wasn't the council favorite person, though.
Overall is a nice idea with an endearing look. I liked it!
Glad to hear you enjoyed, the drawing system definitely needs some fine tuning (I was in charge of that one, at some point I'm gonna figure out how to get it working). I imagine the game overs came from you dying to the burning goo since you take damage from it if it wasn't you timing out, something we didn't exactly make clear and a tutorial level of sorts would have been a good thing for us to think of haha.
Thank you for playing!
Very cool!! I love the creativity in using the fire and ice spells to make your grand gooey heist! It took me a moment to understand exactly what I was supposed to do, but once I figured it out it was fun and challenging!
I may recommend being a bit more clear on your objectives as well as possibly displaying all of the objectives before you release the goo, as I was caught off guard and had no idea where everything was until it was too late. haha.
I think another good addition would be to have a sort of 'tutorial' wherein you learn how to harness the goo's powers along with your fire and ice spells before the great heist. Maybe like having a brief area before the main gameplay where you need to use the goo in a smaller setting to reach only a few objectives before entering the giant room.
Overall awesome job! Its a really neat, quirky, and goofy game! Keep it up!! :)
Thanks for the nice comment! The issues you mentioned with not knowing what to do was one of the ones we were worried about to be honest! We would have liked to have a tutorial level and multiple levels after that (instead of just one) but we decided to limit it to just the one for the jam. Thanks for trying it out!
Thanks for the kind words! Really means a lot that you ended up having fun and that you played the game.
We didn't leave much time for playtesting at the end, and we definitely would have caught the fact it's a bit unclear what you're meant to do in-game. I definitely agree a short tutorial level would have been a fantastic addition, as well as maybe an arrow to point you towards relevant objectives, but that's stuff for post-jam should we have the time to work on it.
Very "goo"d game hahahaha
the mechanics are very unique and interesting and the premise is very good.
Quirky little game! I rate it very highly
I'm glad you had a "goo'd" time hahaha.
Thank you for playing!!!
I love this! The bouncy animations, the draw-to-cast spell mechanic, running around like a madman setting fire to things. Also the juxtapositon of a magical wizard raiding a scientific laboratory was very fun. The artwork was great as well! Excellent work!
Glad to hear you enjoyed! The Goo Council is very pleased with this review