Post by ecaroh.games in Gobblins jam comments

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Only good goblins get cake! Took me a while to figure out some of the tricky levels but they were really satisfying when I finally got it!! I love the complexity in some of the levels from such a simple premise!

Also really love the UI design. Everything felt really responsive and had great control with just the NES button layout. Great work on that! It was super polished. Also it was very really authentic to the NES with art and sound design.

I really don't have much critique except maybe it could use a few more tutorial levels with text to introduce the concept of killing some goblins in order to pass. Another thing was not quite understanding the win condition. Was the goal to get 5 happy goblins to the end, or was it to get a certain percentage of them? One last very minor note is wishing the level number displayed in the game too, so I could easily tell you which levels were my favorites by number! There were a couple levels I really enjoyed solving.

My least favorite level was the one with the portal maze. While I did like the portal levels in general, this one was kind of just a guessing game to figure out where each portal connected... and that just took a few rounds of trial and error to figure out but didn't require as much strategy and puzzle solving. I REALLY liked the cloning mechanic though and the "aha" moment from figuring out those levels was the highlight of my play session.

Really well done, I thoroughly enjoyed my play :)

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Radsi Jay202 days ago(+1)

Really glad to hear you enjoyed the game!! Spent a lot of time working on the polish so I'm glad it paid off!
And yep, you're definitely right that the win conditions aren't explained very well in the game. If we keep working on it I'm sure we'll add some more details in.

Every happy goblin that goes through the exit increases the hidden background score by 1, and every angry goblin decreases it by 1. After we designed a puzzle, we would check what the maximum and minimum possible scores are for a level, and those would be used as the thresholds for 0 and 5 stars. This is why on some levels you actually start with more than 0 stars, since it's possible to lower your score in the level. I was also tempted to try design a semi-hidden secondary objective where you can try to get the lowest score in each level, which is why you may have seen an "Ultra Fail" endscreen if you finished a level with 0 stars. Didn't quite finish implementing that though, especially since it's pretty easy to get a low score on some levels. Though in others it's actually harder to get a low score than a high one!

I was a little bit uncertain about adding the portal maze into the game for the exact reason you mentioned, isn't really a puzzle as much as it is a guessing game. Ended up leaving it in after one of my girlfriends said she enjoyed it though.

The cloning mechanic was something I wasn't even sure I was going to have time to add in, but after seeing the positive response all of the cloning levels have received, I'm very glad I managed to get it done! It does open up a remarkable amount of possible puzzle design.

Thanks for the long comment, I really appreciate it a lot, I'm sure the others in my team will too!

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ecaroh.games202 days ago

Yeah the cloning mechanic was really well done, and also really impressive all the systems interact flawlessly without any bugs at all. Really good stuff.

And for the record, when I say it was my least favorite, it's like a 7/10 and i still liked it, just a little less. I enjoyed pretty much every level to some degree :)

To me the portal maze felt like a little break, , since it was pretty easy and a bit different than the more traditional puzzle levels. It might work really well if it was a recurring bonus level where you can get a little reward for good luck, if there were any ideas for powerups or special items.

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