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(1 edit) (+1)

A note about my judging: My rating scale starts at a baseline 3/5, anything good done raises a score, things that are less good can lower a score. Genre is rated generously. As a game-developer I know that when giving feedback, while I can give suggestions, it's up to you as the developer to determine what accords with your vision.


I don't know what's happening here.

Enjoyment 2/5: I found it enjoyable for about 2 minutes and charming overall!

Execution 2/5: Please do a much more thorough job of explaining what's up to the player. In the screenshot above one would normally expect a tetris-like game with a gun to be in a lose state by all known Tetris-y conventions, yet I've left the game running while reviewing it (with no input) and I'm on level four. I can't stress enough how little I understand what I'm doing here.

Sensory 3/5: The music is neat. The colors are less so, but they don't actively hurt my eyes.

Metroidvania 1/5: This is not on-genre for this jam in any sense I can meaningfully score above a 1 for. It's really just a classic puzzle game but with a gun, as far as I can tell.

Overall this has potential to be a quirky and charming (if janky) game. I recommend dropping all semblance of having more than one camera angle (focused on the player, or maybe even holding still) and focusing in on ways you can make the mechanics and scoring much more obvious to players. The quirk and charm are there but they're being overrun by confusion and possible jank.
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Thank you for your review and trying the game. It was our understanding based on the game jam instructions: 
"3. Incomplete games are accepted, so don't be anxious making a complete game! But your submission should be playable. If you're not quite satisfied with your game, or you missed the deadline, or you simply want to continue working on your entry, check out Super MVM!"

That it was ok to submit an incomplete game. As far as what is happening I'm surprised people have not understood the game as we felt it was straightforward enough it would be ok to not put text instructions on the screen.  Left click fires a projectile that hits wherever your mouse is pointing, if you hit a falling shape it will move to the right.  Right Click cracks a whip to wherever your mouse is pointing if your mouse is over a block it will move it left. The progress bars on the top left shows percentage of full/goal you have completed in each of the three clearly defined sections (The packaged game did show the bottom section of the bottom box that is actually under the map, so the shapes look like they are floating, but they are on the floor plane, so I can see where that adds some confusion as well visually. It did not look like that in the editor.)  When the volume goal percentage reached is >=100 then all the blocks in that section delete and you get points.  When you score 1000 points you get a better gun and the level clears. (If you overflow well we didn't add endgame logic or menus because it is a concept demo.)


The game is by far not finished, this is a playable concept and now we have learned we should have explained the game in a menu since the two reviews we have gotten say they don't know what is going on.  I would ask a simple question when evaluating the game, how would you go about calculating volume occupied of an area?  Which was the primary challenge we had given ourselves to solve, and we solved that challenge. Of course since we made the game we understood exactly what the goal was and what we were trying to accomplish, so with a simple left click right click game mechanic that we thought was rather intuitive we neglected explaining in more detail.  But, I think if you were to try it again after knowing how the scoring works you may find it less disappointing, again it is just a demo of a concept.

I do have to argue the point of not themed.  The character, is a metroid (literally i used metroid character as reference in blender). He uses a chain whip to grab boxes and move them left. The whip is modeled after the castlevania whip.  It is 2d (Well technically 3d but locked to 2d perspective.) I would think at least a 3 is warranted for theme, in my opinion. If we were to finish the game, we would progress through levels in platform fashion (i.e. explosions game boxes sink through ground you platform right until you come to the next puzzle board), but our main goal was accomplished which was learning how to calculate the filled/empty volume of an area in 3d space.  

Again thank you for your review.