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Animal Fodder's itch.io pageJudge 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
The game’s art gives me the feel of Animal Crossing mixed with Paper Mario. The music and sound effects were really nice as well.
I liked the different characters and dialogues, and also the fact that the NPCs can actually die.
I don’t really understand the point of using X to tell the NPCs where to go, as the cannons seem pretty random and there no indication as to where they are gonna land.
I found myself stockpiling upwards of 20 animals on the bridge to the cannon, so I can shoot all of them at once and enjoy the view. It also kinda helped that moving diagonally makes your character move way faster. All the animals seem to do the same amount of damage, so I don’t really see a difference between the animals types, as I expected the capybara to do way more damage than the seal due to the size of the sprite. I’m also not too sure what food heals, as I’ve tried eating things from rocks, to the capybara.
The Middle mouse button for rotating the camera seems a little odd, as I’d rather the rotation be on RMB and dropping be something like Q.
The random drops other than animals seem a little useless, as apart from the very start of the game, I just found myself picking up anything random to just eat, before searching for animals to launch. The healing is also a little much, and with the NPCs being able to regen so much, it seems like the game won’t finish until you AFK and let yourself die.
I liked the NPC portraits popping up from time to time, but initially I thought it was a bug as they kept appearing without any dialogue. Trying to interact with any NPC when they had a sort of chat icon above them also showed a similar portrait without any text, so I was a little confused.
I tried playing until around wave 12 all while waiting for a ship to actually appear to rescue us, but was a little disappointed that there wasn’t an ending in sight.
A good and fun little game jam, though would need more weak to polish up the game. Great job nonetheless!
First thing I noticed was the lovely artstyle. It's adorable and has so much charm! It also reminds me a bit of Okami and Parappa, too. The way the camera moves reminds me of some old multiplayer games that played in a similar way. The character portraits are an awesome addition, even having different expressions, too!
The sound effects are very fitting and the music tracks are awesome, helping to create the lighthearted feeling of the game!
The characters and dialogue are really well written, too! Just from this small exposure to them, I could already tell some traits of each character. They each felt unique! I also like how the story progresses as you go through the waves!
I enjoyed the attention to detail with the characters. Their portraits showing up when they get hit or do something cool. It just makes them feel a bit more alive and gives them a similar importance to that of the player.
The idea of using animals as cannon fodder is honestly really funny, and it's even funnier that they're the ones to go up to the task.
I did notice that on the 12th wave, the animals stopped spawning. I eventually figured out that it might have to do with the amount of items that were already dropped on the floor that I hadn't picked up. After I started picking a bunch of them up and consuming them all like crazed starving lunatic, animals started showing up again, so I was able to continue playing.
I did run into this odd glitch where I'd lose control of the game and the character would walk around and do things on their own, so I couldn't play after wave 14.
However, I had a very pleasant experience with this game and I really liked the story and the characters. Pretty crazy that you guys actually put this prototype together in 5 days after having to pivot. It's a game with a lot of charm. Well done!
Thank you for playing! I'm glad you noticed the camera movement was similar to old multiplayer games, that's where I got my inspiration from. I'll let my artist know that you enjoyed the character portraits and expressions 😁 in total, there were like 70 expressions. I told them to make whatever and I'd somehow fit them into the game lol I'm glad you found the game funny, cos that's the feeling I was aiming for. I'll make note of what happened at wave 14! Thank you for discovering that glitch. Yeah, this game almost never happened but fortunately we pivoted and most importantly didn't give up. I appreciate everything you wrote, thank you again!!
Cute short little game! Liked the gradual build up with the animals to the big ol capybara. The art and sound was nice and there was nice hecticness when the game really got going. It would be nice if there was some indication of where cannonball shots were going to land as well some indicator of which item you were about to pick up. As well the game seems to let you move at double speed if you're moving at a diagonal. Really enjoyed my time with it!
Love this game I can people be competitive with friends and trying to beat each other's high scores and leader boards. The art is adorable af and I feel guilty for sending those poor animals through a cannon though not guilty enough since I made it to wave 10! I have no real criticisms besides possibly making the pirate ships the same 2d style as the animals if possible? Also maybe if the animals can pass through each other instead of pushing the main character around if we are both on the bridge. Also possibly making a box or circle indication of where we can drop off the canon fodder so we know how close or far we can drop the items from the cat. No big deal though. I love the animals little emotions/reactions as the game went on. Overall a really smooth feeling and fun game! Great work!
The game looks really pretty. I like the mixing of 3d and 2d. But I couldn't figure out how to shoot the cannon.
Thank you for trying! You can shoot the cannon by dropping any item by the cat (right mouse button) - you will hear a sound effect and the item will shrink into the ground when it is happening. Thank you for the compliments
Very creative and unique entry to the jam! I really enjoy the premise and execution of the game, but I don't think I can recover from what I did to those seals.
Love the art style !
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.
Really cute artstyle and the music is also very catchy! ♥
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!
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:
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.
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 😁
Overall very good, but gameplay is a bit repetitive, only thing I do is grab items go to cannon throw items, repeat 100 times.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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!
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>
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!
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