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(1 edit) (+1)

First of all, I wanna commend you for your positivity and your dedication to playing and providing good feedback to every one of the other jam games!

Second, great job on this game! I love jam games and games in general which lean into their silliness, and keyboard-mashing hacking is a fantastic way to do it, and you really nailed to aesthetic on basically all of it. The music is great and drives the player forward in a way that matches the visual aesthetic really well, and the game itself is pretty quick to understand and pick up!

The scoring is maybe a tiny bit opaque, and also heavily biases scoring towards players with better keyboards that have n-key rollover, since you get 1 point per key pressed as far as I can tell. Most keyboards only have 6-key rollover, which (in case you aren't a keyboard nerd) means that the keyboard can only correctly register up to 6 simultaneous separate key presses. On the other hand, some gaming keyboards, especially high-end keyboards, have n-key rollover, which means you can press every single key on the keyboard and it will still register new presses properly. With an n-key rollover keyboard, I can smash my entire hand into my keyboard and instantly get 10+ points, and before even lifting that hand up I can mash my other hand down for another 10+ points, whereas a cheaper keyboard this tactic would only net 6 points total.

I managed to get just over 1,500 thanks to my unyielding trust in my keyboard to take any amount of abuse I can throw at it, alongside a handful of attempts to figure out how to optimize the game a little. I don't think that the mouse sections necessarily take away from the game, but I do think it creates a little bit of conflict within the current design.

The conflict with the mouse ties into another (minor) conflict that the game feels like it has internally, which is the pull between being entirely what it wants to be (a fun, low-stakes game about hacking with microgames sprinkled in) and being a score attack arcade game. The reason that this introduces tension, in my opinion, is that the microgames are not all created equal - some of them take significantly more time (clicking the numbers in particular seems quite slow), while others are extremely quick (clicking the popups can be done very efficiently by mashing click in the center of the screen, arrow keys can be mashed through very rapidly). Since the microgame choice seems to be fully random, it is entirely possible to have significant swings in your score simply by virtue of your microgame luck.

I think that this is the source of some people wanting the mouse games taken out entirely (moving your hand takes longer and loses you score!), since there's some frustration involved in this luck aspect if you're chasing a high score.

If you were to continue development on this, I would love to see it outside of the context of score attack, as a short game with an absurd over-the-top leet hacker story, with some more variety in the microgames. Basically all of my critiques would be instantly solved by this change of context, and I think it would be super fun based on what you've already made.

(+1)

Thank you so much for your time and detailed feedback! The whole 6/n-key rollover thing is something I had absolutely NO clue about till you mentioned it, so big ups for the explanation!  I’ve been toying around with the idea of an updated, more robust EX version with more content, maybe a story mode, ETC. If that’s something I decide to try, I’ll definitely not only take the keyboard issue into account, but I’ll also have a look at the mini game balancing. Great analysis all around! 

Thank you so much again!!!