Post by StrodoGames in Rating your games

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I'd love to get some early feedback if you have time.

The game itself has a pretty basic main loop as I was aiming for small and complete without bugs, I won't have time to implement any other mechanics I had ideas for so now the game is 95% finished.

Link is: https://strodogames.itch.io/lackluster

To do/things I'm already aware of:

Settings menu needs to be implemented

Game over screen needs to give restart/main menu option rather than just automatically starting a new game.

Polish and juice it up a little if I come up with some ideas that fit the overall feel of the game

Nitai994 years ago(+1)

I'll try to get to your game today, but it is 3 am, so I might do it in the morning. Do you mind giving me feedback for my game too? I'm in desperate need of some feedback.

StrodoGames4 years ago

Will do, its 2am here so it'll have to be morning for me as well.

Wanted to get a playable build out before crashing out for the night.

Nitai994 years ago (1 edit)

Wow, the game is really hard! And weirdly really really fun (didn't think that a game where you just walk and rewind tapes would be so fun)! For some reason though I couldn't hear sounds (though I saw you added some from the credits (:.) and I think they would have made it much better. Anyways, the main thing I think you should do is explain a bit more - I didn't understand at first that you could switch between a rewound tape and a non-rewound tape in the rewinding machine to save time. But even with that trick, it was really really hard. Maybe you could make a normal mode where there aren't customers with 3 tapes, and a hard mode with those customers. But it just seems impossible to survive for long with the 3 tape customers. I don't know, think about it.

Another small thing is telegraphing whether the tape will be ready soon. That will allow for more strategising.

I think you should try to add more depth. Maybe increase the amount of customers and add another rewind machine. It will make the game a lot more frantic and will add to the strategising you can get by telegraphing the end of the rewinding. That's just an idea that I don't think will take a lot of time to implement but will add so much more to the game, but it might be a bad idea. The main thing is - I think you should focus on adding some more depth and planning to the game, and if you can also make it quicker. Maybe make the top speed a bit higher?

StrodoGames4 years ago

I'm not sure why the sound wasn't working for you as I tried it over two devices and I can hear it on both, what OS are you using?

I was actually considering adding cash per tape and allowing up to 2 more VCRs to be purchased in the 2 spots below with a simple click.

In regards to the swapping a rewound for unwound tape, I did consider whether to provide that information straight away or leave it to be discovered, so you'd prefer to know that off the bat rather than an 'easter egg' of sorts?

With the telegraphing when a tape is finished, do you mean some kind of countdown bar etc? at the moment its set to rewind over 5 seconds and has sound attached so you can hear when its done when out of view but that isn't helpful to you if sound isn't working haha

Nitai994 years ago

I am using macOS.

About the swapping of tapes, I admit that it was really fun to discover it and maybe I would have lost on that if you would have just explained it at the start, but I think that since it's so important to do it to even barely survive, some players might see the game, try a couple times and see that it is extremely hard and lose motivation to play because they didn't discover that. So I don't know, I think it's a risk but it might be a risk worth taking.

And about the telegraphing, you can for example lerp the sound down slowly, starting a second or 2 before the end, instead of just stopping when it's done. Or maybe also changing the ants on top of the machine. Or you could just do a small countdown like you said or a small bar.

And I repeat again something that I think is really important - make is quicker. I think you should make the player move more quickly, the tapes rewind more quickly, the customers come more quickly. If what you do in this game is walk around and rewinding tapes, why not do it a lot more?

StrodoGames4 years ago

I played your game as well:

Sound

The sound is really loud even when turned down to the lowest settings so definitely needs changes made to get that sound score up, the alarm almost blew my eardrums with the headphones around my neck at 30% haha.

The sounds themselves are good though and fit the game well so keep what you have but just let people adjust it more as there was very little difference between 10% and 90% and 0% music doesn't mute the music which may make some raters unhappy.

Difficulty

I noticed on level 5 and 8, its was quite hard to make informed decisions on when to use rewind and the direction to choose because I'm having to plan for pathing up to 7 moves ahead across more than one enemy as well as my own redirection. For me that turned it into more of a guessing game than a strategy game as my overworked brain was fried trying to virtually map it in my head.

Level 8 was the killer for me, I really couldn't figure it out at all and didn't manage with brute force, is that level definitely clearable? It was made worse by the fact that the same square can send me both directions depending on whether I used U before the guard moved or after meaning there were twice as many combinations I have to try.

Clarity

Do the numbers on the ground have a deeper meaning beyond signalling which direction the player will move? I'm not sure if that's a big piece of the logic puzzle and I just didn't understand such as some sort of 'calculation' I could make around enemy pathing.

For me I think I just need more information so I can feel like I'm in control and making conscious strategic decisions rather than brute force guessing, on the other hand I might just be too stupid to make sense of the game.

Art

The art is pretty basic but that's because the game is focusing on the actual mechanics over environment so no issues there for me.

Controls

Control instructions were clear and easy to remember, maybe change the U button to something closer to WASD as its the only control that involves having to move your left hand

Improvements

Outside of what I've mentioned above, these are just the thoughts I had while playing:

At the moment the game focuses a lot on forward playing a lot of moves ahead, what about designing some levels that use the environment such as a 2 square wide level where you have to use U when by a box in order to hide behind it, something like this then gives you a real reason to build on the mechanic over time by allowing 2 rewinds rather than 1 etc.

Add a menu while in game, I wanted to skip level 8 and check out level 9 but when I pressed esc it just exited the game so I had to reload and re-adjust the sound settings which isn't ideal.

I hope this feedback is useful, it was hard to make feedback because I struggled with the core concept.

Nitai994 years ago

OK, thank you so much for the in depth feedback!

I'll fix the sound, thank you! I use a really low volume on my laptop so I might have not noticed... About the options not really changing the volume, I am not sure if there is anything I can do about that. The library I was using for sound turned out to not work when exporting to windows, so I am forced to use another library which is a bit clunky with volume change.

About the difficulty, I completely agree. I tried to lower it but turns out it didn't really work... level 8 does have a solution but it is really tricky. Maybe I should add a hint after you die a couple times.

About the numbers, yeah they don't have a lot of meaning actually other than knowing the next move, since the numbers change as the guards change. But they are supposed to give you some sense of control over it (and most of the players I asked do say that it helped), and allow you to understand the problem with the AI - that it makes move in isolation and without planning ahead. So you need to plan ahead and fix that. I am not really sure what I could add to make it clearer though. Do you think a better explanation of the AI would help?

And thank you so much for reminding me to make a pause menu!

I will think about the two rewinds, I am just not sure if I want to do that. The tenth level originally had 2 rewinds but then I thought about it a little and found a way to do it with 1 so I removed the second rewind. I think that right now I didn't fully explore 1 rewind, so before I add another 1 I should focus on that.

And once again, thanks a lot for the feedback, it helps so much!

StrodoGames4 years ago

I would only add a second rewind if it were gonna be used in some context like I said below, getting behind cover to avoid a guard then to get back out from the cover and continue on the path. Otherwise you're adding it for the sake of adding it rather than to add an extra level of gameplay.

You're not using the built in unity audio like Audiosource, Audio Mixer etc?

As for the numbers, I'm really not sure, I may be the problem as I've never been a big puzzle guy.

Nitai994 years ago

Sorry for the late reply.

Umm, yeah, I will think about adding more rewinds. Right now I want to mistly polish the levels I have, but I will try to add more if I have time.

I don't use Unity, I used processing, a java library.

And about the numbers, its not you, they really aren't that informative, but I think they do help people feel in control.