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machina's itch.io pageJudge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- Style is fun, the movement can be really fun but for people with ease of motion sickness a none wiggly mode would be nice. That or make it just a big larger for the smaller screen size. The idea itself is fun, and makes you really have to think about possibilities. I hope to see more skills and abilities as the development goes or would have went on the GDD would be a good place to show further planned ideas out. Good use of free things to create something that appears very unique in style. Now for the GDD, it's pretty small, this is a great place to write day to day work done and for you to look back and reflect on. Having a layout of sprites used and explaining their uses. GDD not only allow us as judges to read up on your game but to see your thought processes and choices you make. Some people even do dairy like section to explain day to day and what they've learned!
Link to your Game Design Doc on Google Drive.
http://shared-verse-4f0.notion.site/Machina-Design-Doc-239944396b2f47b09f77b53798afeaf3
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!
Clear through the 9 stages and upgrade your character along the way. Defeat multiple enemies in one turn to gain more gold.
Please explain how your game fits the theme:
Most of the abilites the player has damages the player. So you need to manage your health correctly.
Is there anything you'd like the judges to pay particular attention to?
Presentation
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Comments
Wow, nicely done! Really enjoyed playing the game, nice music too! At the beginning the mechanics were a bit strange but afterwards I got it and I had fun playing it :) Good job
Thanks. Happy you enjoyed the music :)
Fun tactical game, I like the vibe of it! :-)
The first boss (3rd floor) destroyed me multiple times! 😅
I had a bug where the cost for health regeneration wouldn't reset after losing the game. So I had to close the game for each retry.
Yeah this is known, unfortunately can't fix it at this point but it's for sure a valuable lesson!
I put the whole game state within globals, so whenever the player is defeated I have to manually reset these values. This must have been one that slipped through the cracks :D
Either way, glad you liked it, sorry about the difficulty curve!
Love the visuals and concept, they really work well together. I did have to read the comments to understand why enemies were moving while I was modifying the queue, but that's nothing a tutorial couldn't fix. Awesome job!
Thanks for your comment, so annoyed at myself for ignoring one of the playtesters feedback which were saying exactly what half the comments on the game are saying!
I reallllly wanted to add a tutorial to clarify the mechanics, but unfortunately the last 3-4 hours of dev time were spent fixing bugs D:
Nice idea! I like the programming aspect of the game, but enemies moving while you program is a bit confusing. It kinda makes sense since you can't cancel your tasks, but also, is it really programming then, or more like delayed action?
Also, nice use of Balatro assets and blender, but it kinda takes away from the originality of your game for me - since it kinda has its own flavour, which is very different from Balatro. Although using shops adds a bit of similarity, I guess?
Thanks for your feedback! The game loop is pretty similar to balatro in a lot of ways. Such as the normal -> normal -> boss progression loop. With a shop inbetween each stage and no urgency when it comes to the fights. It was definetely a large inspiration for this project so it's okay if my game has less of an identity because of that. :)
I found that without the enemies moving when you add to the queue, the game became *way* too easy. But since people seemed to be struggling anyway I probably should have not added that.
This game is probably the best use of the “programming” game genre I’ve seen, combining it with the Balatro game loop is inspired. My main gripe is with the enemies moving as you queue actions. Maybe I’m missing something, but it’s not exactly clear to me when adding another action is gonna make the enemies move, and to me it kind of ruins the strategic flow it feels like the game is going for when my whole plan is ruined by enemies moving around while I set up.
The idea is absolutely there, though, and I love it. I hope you take this idea further!
Appreciate your comment! If you hover over some abilities you'll see a lightning symbol. This means they don't give enemies time to react when adding them to the queue. Most abilities however do.
It's totally not your fault, the game needed to be a lot clearer that this is how it worked!
I like the balatro inspired visuals, the game looks very nicely polished. I didn't quite understand why sometimes they enemies moved before i executed, and i often got confused between the turn left and turn right. Really nice job tho, looks ilke a lot of work went into it!
This one has some really nice bones! Just me or could this be great fun with controller support and same screen co-op
Hey, appreciate it! Do you have any ideas how co-op would work? I had an idea for a versus mode but that would be different to having two players working together.
Visually very cool and I liked queuing actions, I was bad at queueing them fast enough to survive the second level but still had a lot of fun, good job
Hey there, thanks for your feedback :)
Just so you know there is no urgency to queing actions, the enemies move only when you modify the queue or execute ;D
Really liked it! clever design and I like how the modifiers you can buy build on what youre able to do in later rounds.
Thanks! I wanted to expand the modifiers a lot more, and add more artifacts that change the way you play. But unfortunately there are only two which heavily limit strategy. Glad you like it anyway :)
really polished and awesome presentation, would love to see what strats develop from further content! sadly we got hard filtered by firestarter first boss...
Yeah, he's a tough boss for sure. If you play it again, I will say that you can queue the "backwards" and "turn" moves without giving him a chance to react, so you can easily dodge his fire if you have some charges remaining and a bit of paitence ;D
Thanks for your feedback.
The game was pretty addicting, I even finished it. That first boss is a large difficulty spike though and really feels like a filter. I did run into a bug where the shop didn't reset the price for buying health after restarting the game. Overall the presentation was great and mechanics solid! Great game!
Thanks for the feedback. Impressive you managed to beat it! Do you have any additional feedback on the artifacts, upgrades or skills in the shop?
The worst part, is the health cost at the shop is meant to reset after each floor. Just broke my logic a bit towards the end!
from what I remember, I think the “gain 1 health after killing an enemy” artifact kind of broke the game. I don’t think it took into account the max amount of health and over healed me. Ended up with like 30/10 health and it really trivialized the game toward the end.
The game is super cool ! I love the idea. Only thing I would say is that it lacks some feedback on when you will get attacked and when you queue actions to turn. It quickly becomes hard to tell where you will end up and when you will lose health. I think that enemies action takes turn when you select the first action, but you can cancel it and retrigger an action from the enemy.
Very good game, I had a great time and might come back to it later to go further.
Thanks for your comment. I'm glad you had a good time with it :)
Unfortunately the exact implementation of the queue, is not quite what I had in mind at the start. Ideally it would work in a more obvious way.