Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• This was good, you should be proud of what you made. Some general notes: - Make sure you have time allocated at the end of a project for Play Testing and Bug Fixing. I know you may fix bugs as you find them, but there are some that only appear when everything is done, so its good to make sure you have time to check/fix them. - Whilst working on a project like this, don't be afraid to stop during development and reevaluate whether you're still on track or whether you need to rescope/cut features. - Look at adding some sort of Map/Fog of War to help people navigate through the maze, it can be very easy to get lost and miss things. - Whilst a randomizing maze can offer endless replayability, you also need something for the player to compete for: a high score/time (which can be difficult to get right with a randomizing maze like this). For a short term project, it could have been better to have 3 prebuilt levels that act as puzzles with optional objectives and best time for each of them, as it doesn't need to have endless replayability, just a slice of what the final game would be. But I like I said, this was good!
• Hi Tim, my name is Clemens, I am a programmer and I hope I can provide some useful feedback about your game Mazeum. First of all: The documentation you wrote is nice and clean. This and your Trello board leads me to the impression that you have very good project management skills. In your documentation, you mentioned ideas about level streaming and actor structuring. In the end, you implemented a static level, but I would like to comment on your idea: The solution you found (working with a data table) is good. It is good practice to avoid child actor components as they might have side effects on different platforms. Also, level streaming is probably an overkill for the size of your level (although it is a good idea in general for bigger areas.) I did not see your game code, only the finished game, so I cannot give you much feedback on this. Just from what I read in your documentation, I highly recommend you to stick to the Unreal coding style when doing an Unreal project. About your game: The tutorial is nice and explains the game well. I liked the feature of switching between 3rd person and 1st person view, especially in the vent maze. All features in your game are well explained and easy to understand. For example, I liked the way, the aim object was “marked” by a spotlight. The game provides a decent challenge. There are some things, I think you could have done better (within a fair amount of time). As you mentioned yourself, you were looking for some audio tracks but did not want to invest too much time in this. I know that looking for the perfect audio takes time and it does take multiple revisions and therefore even more time. However, a basic audio setup can be done fairly quickly. Even if the sound is not perfect, a quick and dirty ambient sound and some action audio effects have a huge effect even with small effort. I am sure that you heard about the 80/20 rule: You can reach 80% of the effect with 20% of the effort. To reach perfection on the other side, the last 20% will cost you 80% of your time. You actually achieved exactly that by using Quixel textures. They are simple to use, the effort was reasonable, but they have a good impact on the visual appearance of your game. The actual fun-factor in your game could have been better in my point of view. However, I am sure that you had lots of ideas and not the time to implement them all. I am glad that you set yourself a reachable and realistic aim and implemented the game as planned in the given time. That there is no generative level system is fair for the amount of time you had and I liked your ideas about it. The characters and UI are rough and functional, but this is fine for a quickly made game like this. Scaling down the character when crouching is funny and creative. If I could write some feature requests, it would have been a visualization for the “view” of the guard to better understand how to avoid them. Also, I would have wished for an improvement of orientation in the vent maze (e.g., you could have added graphical marks like graffiti tags or light zones). Also, it would be nice to actually steal the object. Just taking it is only half the job, isn’t it? For example, you could have changed the laser-doors and camera-search behavior to force the player to take another path out then in. I found some bugs in your game: First, the lasers do not work in the tutorial, you can just pass through them. (They do work in the actual level though.) Second, sometimes, the character was not able to stand up when coming out of the vents. Third, the object of desire was not visible in the tutorial after my second play attempt. However, all of those bugs are not fatal and the game can be played without bigger issues. To sum it up: You managed to find a way through lots of challenges during development and came up with a game that includes a good tutorial. The game is missing audio, the gameplay fun could have been better and there are some minor bugs. You achieved most of the things you have planned, which is great. All in all, I think you did a good job – Well done! Best regards, Clemens Scharfen