Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Hi Federico, my name is Clemens, I am a programmer and I hope I can provide some useful feedback about your game BURST. Before I get into details, I just want to say: Your game is fun and I enjoyed playing it. I am glad to read that you learned something. Bitwise operations, physics, and profiling are things that you will need throughout your whole career. Instead of removing the shadows to gain performance, you could have baked them instead. However, from a design perspective, your decision is understandable. And to be honest, it is quite common to delete features to improve performance. I liked your documentation. It is not written in a usual way, though, but sharing your experiences through this document makes it useful for others and this is great. Your game design is simple but solid and fun. The slow-motion, as well as the mini-map feature, are very essential in my eyes. It is great you implemented them. The controls are easy and fast to learn. The UI is very simple but fulfills the basic needs. I understand, that you did not want to make a third bar below the player to show the health status, but the way it is now, it is not in the player's focus, and therefore, a player might not see quickly, how much life he or she has left. My tip is, to use other styles for communication, e.g., a ring-UI around the player, or changing the player's color from green to red, just to name two examples. That you did not have time to add sound is a pity. Sound (in your case some ambient music and a shooting, explosion, and boost sound effect) is so essential for games and it is not much work to create a basic setup. I am sure you have heard about the 80/20 rule, where 80% of your game is developed in 20% of the time. The last 20% of game details however take 80% of your time to make it perfect. Of course, during a game jam like this, you will always only go for the 80% mark, but a basic audio setup is part of this. However, you wrote that you had a stressful time due to other deadlines and I am glad that you were able to upload a working game. I found a little bug, but don’t worry, it is very minor. The life status is not always reset when starting level. I think it has to do with saving the health status when collecting the “health plus”. You are aware that using debug features in a shipped game is a no-go, but in the context of a tight time-budged game jam like this, the decision to use it to have the direction feature was a good one. All in all, you did a great job! You worked with the given code-base and learned lots of things about Unreal Engine and programming in general on your journey. Apart from audio, you were able to implement your game as planned in the given time. And most importantly, you submitted a fun game. Best regards, Clemens Scharfen
• This was good and you should be proud of what you were able to achieve with your time. Next time, I think it would be useful for you if after seeing the brief, you take some time to think about it and plan the game you're going to make, and the features you're going to add. Be honest with yourself about the amount of time you'll be able to spend on the project and aim to complete something in that period. It can be better to create a small but polished slice of your final game, instead of trying to make something with loads of features. Then once you've done that, you can look at what features can be applied on top. Like: Local High Score; Difficulty select (which can just change some levers in your game - opponent damage and speed, player damage, etc.) All in all, you should be happy with what you were able to accomplish.