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A jam submission

Animal FodderView game page

animals enjoying their time on an island with pirate ships
Submitted by Mewt (@Mewtelier), maria mochi (@mochinuuuu) — 39 minutes, 6 seconds before the deadline
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Animal Fodder's itch.io page

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

  • GDD One of the most detailed GDDs I came across. Everything was clear, and it was an easy read. The only thing I would add is a timeline at the end to let us have an idea of the development process. Great job. Gameplay The gameplay is novel; using small animals as cannonballs ended up being more satisfying than it should be. Don't try this at home. Please. The variety of stuff that can be thrown at the pirates and the fact that the other animals are running around in a panic and need to be healed is pretty funny. Later, it would be good to add variety to each ammo effect; currently, everything is just one-shot kills. I understand that's probably because of the time constraint. There's a lot of room for expansion later. Art What a marvelous mix of 2D and 3D. The animal designs are adorable, and the color palettes match well. I love me some pastel animals. Sound design The BGM is very enjoyable, a chirpy, happy tune to be played while we are being bombarded by pirates. Lovely. The SFX is well-crafted, has good sync, and is very responsive. Last thoughts I love cozy games. A pastel island, my animal friends, a lot of trees and flowers, bloodthirsty pirates, a massive cannon for decoration, relentless raids, picnics, and tea time. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Ignore the explosions; they are not related. Great job.

Link to your Game Design Doc on Google Drive.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRAg2XzOOcGLXorDH6HtvVb8mKX5-HgMG4rwWSAVg_4fgwmWGaUwd25KSdPF7rpJaMDI60Zy1ysNyhz/pub

Have you checked that your GDD is publicly accessible ?
Yes

Is your game set to public on itch.io so we can see it?
Yes

Summarise your game!
Collect items and drop them by your cannon. And also survive the waves of pirate ships. Move around with WASD, space bar to collect stuff, RMB to drop items, 12345 to select item. LMB to eat food to heal yourself. X to tell NPCs where to go.

Please explain how your game fits the theme:
The party doesn't have cannonballs so they use animals on the island instead. Imagine being a cute little seal, but nope you are the weapon - and they also do a lot of damage.

Is there anything you'd like the judges to pay particular attention to?
Enjoy the game! We had fun making it in two weeks. Just read the controls on the game's page if you need a bit of help.

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Comments

Viewing comments 20 to 1 of 26 · Previous page · First page
Submitted(+1)

Love the art style ! 

Submitted(+1)

I really liked it. The art and music were great. The controls are a bit weird though. It’s a bit unexpected to use the middle mouse button to change the camera angle, but I got used to it. The switching between item slots becomes a bit intense in later waves.

Like others have said, it’s a bit repetitive, so it becomes kind of a mindless chore to pick up the animals. A variety of tasks would definitely improve the experience.

The other NPCs in the map don’t seem to be doing that much. Could you find a better use for them?

Anyway, great work.

Submitted(+1)

Really cute artstyle and the music is also very catchy! ♥

Submitted(+2)

Ah yes, it's time. I'm gonna be mean sorry 😭

First impressions: 
Very cute main menu!
Small UI issue here tho: most people don't know what "BGM" stands for,  just use "Music" instead. In the grand scheme of things it's a very minor thing but yeah.

So the whole thing is very cute and stuff, I like the small storyline you made, graphically and audio-wise it's pretty good...

BUT THE GAMEPLAY?
Hell nah we have a lot to talk about here.

Firstly the controls.
This is the most outrageous set of controls I've ever seen; it barely follows the common control schemes of all other games!

  • WASD: for movement ✅
  • Inventory: 1/2/3/4/5 ✅ (would like scrolling as well but oh well)
  • Rotate camera: middle mouse button??? ❌❌❌ 
    • Terrible! It's really hard to press down constantly and you're required to look around for the majority of the game. Would recommend just unbinding this and making the camera move around freely all the time!
  • Interact/Loot: Space Bar 🟨 (I'll give it a pass but I'd like to see [E] or [F] a lot more)
  • Consume Item - LMB 🟨(I'll give it a pass once again, but if you're picking up items using the keyboard, you should use them with a keyboard keybind as well! For me it feels weird to switch between input devices for the same item here)
  • Drop Item: RMB or backspace ❌
    • If you don't make camera movement constant, you should at least bind it to right click which is really common for third person games. RMB should not be a secondary action for this kind of a game!
    • Would recommend using Minecraft's [Q] instead since it's already close to WASD.
  • Call to location ❓❓❓
    • What does this do? It's never explained at any point of the tutorial and when I tried it ingame one of the guys just came to my location and did nothing...

Ok I'm done with rambling on controls... Let's talk about the gameplay.

The gameplay is well... repetetive. But I think enough people have said that by now. I have multiple issues with the game design of this:

  1. Non-animal "ammunition" is practically worthless as ammo. This makes the game 100% about trying to find the closest animal and removes all strategy from the game since the animals just one shot everything.
  2. There's no real danger in the game. Since all non-animal items are edible and regenerate health, you're basically unkillable because there are so many items everywhere, you just won't ever run out of them, and the cannonballs hit you so rarely anyway that there's almost no tension.
  3. The level design is ALMOST good, but it needs a few things IMO: 
    1. The first thing being a second cannon. Splitting the map into two points of interest would basically double the amount of strategy in the game.
    2. A shortcut from the cannon to the lower island would drastically speed up the game and would add an aditional fun moment to the game (because who doesn't like jumping off a cliff?)
    3. More spawning spaces with different routes to make collecting animals more interesting.
    4. You already added those extra islands to the map, why can't we access them? You could add special items to each one of those islands and reward the player for taking that extra journey! Would once again add more strategy to the game.
  4. Add more interesting attacks to the enemy pirates. One of the cooler ideas I have right now is if the pirates would shoot a literal skeleton on your island which starts running towards you and dies after about 10-15 seconds. This would once again spice up the current "running around collecting stuff" gameplay by introducing extra obstacles!

That's about it for gameplay. Overall this is a very cozy and graphically well designed game, however the gameplay and controls need a lot more work for the game to continue being fun after the first 5 waves. I don't know if there's an end to this but I went until the 12th wave, where the animals stopped spawning for some reason so I just gave up.

Developer(+1)

I wanted some honest feedback cos that's one way to improve as a developer - will take a lot of your input into consideration. I appreciate this a lot, so no need to be sorry. Thank you for your insightful review! I'll definitely put it to use 😁

Submitted(+1)

Overall very good, but gameplay is a bit repetitive, only thing I do is grab items go to cannon throw items, repeat 100 times.

Submitted(+1)

It took some time to understand what I needed to do, but very soon i got running around fetching things and feeding them to the cannon... 


Very fun! And the idea of a 3D world with 2D sprites is pretty clever for a jam.

Submitted(+1)

Game is very cute! I loved the art style of this one! I loved the cute dialog and really liked the character portraits! I think maybe the animals having different traits could be a cool direction to take them in the future! I also felt like sometimes I would try to pick up an animal and hover a different "unimportant" item. Maybe giving priority to that type of pickup would alleviate that!

Cute entry. Nice job!

(+1)

came for the artstyle,
stayed for the addicting gameplay and boppin music.
Really rewarding scoring system and i like how endlessly playable it is.
Reached 335 until the game sadly froze probably because i has it on pause for too long.
One potential exploit i found was that diagonal move speed isn't clamped, but i relied on it a lot to dodge everything.
Overall a great entry and one of my favs.

Submitted(+1)

Certainly a different take on the theme than what Ive seen in other submissions! Its an easy to understand game with clean visuals, though does suffer a bit in gameplay from having the same collection loop. Ill suggest adding other enemy types that lead their shots, or even cause an area to give damage over time - something to stop the player from beelining it to the animals and rarely taking damage. Adding a bit of progression for each animal type increasing damage or having different effects will also help, since 9999 damages every time makes the animals all feel the same. Dialogues are very nice, and feel natural [except for animals agreeing to be fired out a cannon, but hey, its a game after all]. Overall, a cute and silly game that needs some work 

Submitted(+1)

So I went till wave 15. One problem I encountered was the entity limit. I didn't take damage, so I didn't heal, and so the healing items took up the entire entity limit and no more animals spawned, so then I ran around eating everything as fast as possible to resolve the issue. You could create a separate entity limit for food and animals to resolve this. The gameplay is fun and cute, but it does get repetitive. I was hoping there was an end to the story and it wasn't just endless wave defense (pardon me if there was an end). I'd like to see a zipline to get from the cannon to the bottom of the island faster, cause walking all the way there and back is not super engaging. I'd also like to see different animals have different attributes or something. All in all a very fun game, and you should be proud.

Submitted(+1)

ok, imma be honest - at first I thought the game loop was a bit uninteresting. but very fast I got immersed in the loop of running and catching stuff to fodder lol and quickly was having a blast. the sprites are REALLY cute, the music is good and SFX is compatible. As the other comment said, I am sad that there is no ending, because this game deserves one. Please make one after the jam is over if you have time!


some suggestions:

- I would prefer if I didnt need to hold middle mouse to rotate, just have my cursor stuck like usual FPS unity games do

- I think the spawn of fruits should be limited per number of fruits

- I have no idea what telling NPCs to go do to help me haha


overall, a very enjoyable experience. Congrats on doing this game!

Submitted(+1)

Alright. I don't know if the game had an ending, but I got as far as wave 16 before calling it quits. The game is fun and hectic, plus the art is really cute. One thing I notice though is that the quantity of animals that spawn in the island reduce significantly the farther I got into the waves, but I managed to figure out that it directly correlates with the number of other items that were spawned already (I'm guessing you put a limit in how many item assets can be loaded into the scene in order to not crash the game), but I had to do a bit of grinding before figuring it out. I also feel like the game drags on too long (again, I was ready for the game to wrap up by level 11, but I kept going because I thought I could reach the ending, but by wave 16 I had enough). The controls are nice and I actually came close to dying a couple of times, so de balance is good. And I got pretty far, so I'm posting my score>

Submitted

The art is super cute, the concept is fun, there's a big cast of characters, and I'm always impressed with anyone who can manage a 3d (mostly) game during a jam. That takes a lot of talent and creativity. Good job!

Submitted(+1)

The art style was very charming, and all of the sound fx and characters were very cute :D I also really enjoyed the fact that movement was faster ont he diagonals, it added some fun tech to moving faster.

I think the cannon could be more centralized on the map, I felt like I didnt want to get too far from the cannon to minimize the time walking back and forth, but I also would have liked to explore more of the map. Eventually it becomes basically impossible to survive up by the cannon when you are dropping off the pets.

Very cute and fun, great submission :D

Submitted(+1)

Very interesting take on the theme, I loved it. The character dialogs & drawings were awesome. Don't know how but this works. It was fun running around and getting "cannon balls". Loved 2.5D idea. At first it was strange but once got used it became very enjoyable. After some time it become boring tho as nothing happens but you already have a great foundation for expansion. The core game loop works & is fun. More content will make it even better. Great job on the game, you made a really interesting game.

Submitted(+1)

The game has a very charming and cute aesthetic! I’d love to see more grass variety in the level design to make the environment feel even more lush and immersive, rather than just scattered sprites. The game play was enjoyable, though the controls felt a bit counter-intuitive at first. However, once I got used to them, everything flowed smoothly. I especially loved the character portraits and the music—both added so much personality to the experience!

Submitted(+1)

What a delightful game!  The art style drew me in immediately, and the gameplay and sound effects are a nice mix of fun / cute and chaotic! Nice work :) My only note is that some of the controls aren't very intuitive compared to the controls on a lot of other games (I'd personally prefer if spacebar and LMC were switched), but that's a very minor note! ^_^

Submitted(+1)

I was deceived! No way you could stuff a capybara into a canon!

Jokes aside I quite like the game, to be honest, it doesn't take itself seriously,  also a bit silly and chaotic. It's a shame that the gameplay gets repetitive quite quickly, and progressing in level doesn't feel like things are different at all. Also a minor nitpick is that using the scroll button to rotate the camera is a very bad idea in web (I've made the exact same mistake), that it would trigger an auto-scroll and we can do nothing about it.

But hey I am having a good time. Good job!

Submitted(+1)

This is how I far I got.



Liked presence of dialogue and silly premise, very cute.
The gameplay itself - not so much - found out that as long as you move - you won't get hit.

Good job, nevertheless!
Submitted(+1)

The art is cool and I love the characters. There is some nice tension while gathering creatures. Good job!

Viewing comments 20 to 1 of 26 · Previous page · First page