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Joakim Sjöberg - Hazelight Games4 years ago(+5)

An absolute treat. There's some great things at play here, and the simplicity of the gameplay itself really allows the visual and aural features to shine. 

What I think really sticks with me is how I feel like you nailed the pacing. I feel like you landed in a really good spot regarding how and when the game ramps up in difficulty and you start ushering the player into thinking in new dimensions. From simply staying out of cones, to going around tables and behind objects to intentionally putting yourself at risk to kite enemies away from their patrol - it just feels right. 

Initially it took me a moment to understand what was going on with the cones visually appearing and moving around my character, but once I understood it was my own line of sight everything fell into it's place. Maybe I just missed this feature in an explanation somewhere, but consider making this feature even clearer, possibly in the first room you start in?

Furthermore, i'm so glad that you decided to not have a system in which the player would eventually run out of lives and be met with a game over. The fact that I could just keep playing and try again immediately when I got caught was a huge reason that I stuck with it for as long as I did and that I was always engaged and having fun. While it might feel tempting to go hardcore and really punish players In a game like this you went the other way - very smart move!

The ability to hide in the barrel I didn't really understand. I feel like I got caught even though I got in it if I was already in an enemies sights, but if I used it prematurely I really just lost my bearings due to not seeing what happened around me, so I never felt like I had a reason to opt for it over just playing smart with my movement. While the idea of an ability besides movement is cool, maybe re-iterate on what you want to accomplish with this?

A-grade pixel art. Audio and music is f*cking smashing, and that's coming from a technical sound designer. Just wish tunes would change as I got to new roomes, but that's just me being greedy.

Congratulations to a fantastic achievement!

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David Naußed4 years ago(+2)

Thanks a lot for playing and thanks for this very informative feedback! 
I am speechless and do not know what to say. It's simply very good and constructive feedback.

I'm happy that the experience of our game is actually almost exactly as we intended it to be, except sometimes a small bug occurs, but that's negotiable, haha. 

About the hiding in a barrel mechanic: I feature creeped our game the last day and just added it because everybody said "please add it", but since the levels were already done and a very fast hiding mechanic would break most of the puzzles, 

I applied a enter time window in which the player can get seen. Basically if you jump into your barrel and an enemy sees you, the enemy will remember you. That was part A to avoid breaking all the puzzles with a new mechanic. 

Part B was an attempt to give the player some incentive of using it: You can't get seen as long as you do not stand in the way of your enemy. If the enemy walks against you regardless if you have been detected or not, you get caught. Either way, I added a small "act of patience" to the barrel mechanic. You get vision for a second every 2.5 seconds. The balancing of this mechanic was not very good, but I really wanted to implement all the animations of the duck, so everybody can enjoy the pixel art in its fullest. 

We will definitely rework the hiding in a barrel mechanic  to make it feel good and give it more meaning! :) 
And of course, more variety to the player in terms of music and maybe even different kind of puzzles and environmental mechanics.

The ideas for this game are pretty open and I think we can go a little nuts with it.

Thanks again and thank you very much for playing our game :)

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