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Patrick W. Crawford3 years ago(+1)

Fantastically done! Love the story and Portal-like Cave Johnson voiceovers, as well as the BB8-like main character. The carboard feel was nicely present throughout with good warm colors. Really solid (more than cardboard!) 3D entry. I also appreciate exposing all of the filter options to disable to get it running smooth as we need/prefer. I was able to get to the end and unlock one of the secret areas.

So, basically the game is great, consider the below just the fine tune polish commentary, but not such that they really detract from my experience at all!

I feel like the ball should have a little more inertia, rolls to a stop so quickly which is super helpful and makes the game easier, but seems like judging a little bit more of a stopping speed could be fair too. Also checkpoints I feel like they should just be auto triggered instead of having to press e, but personal opinion perhaps.

Most difficult part was the floating blue portals/fans, feels like there should be some additional force helping you keep a little centered in them (though I realize that’s part of the challenge).

Minor UI bug: pressing esc to escape the Map would be nice, and also if you press esc on the map (bring up options) and press esc again, you end up still in the map but your mouse is controlling the view, so you can’t move your mouse over to click the x (if you remember to press m though, you’re good).

Final verry nitty nit pick: under UI settings, you have one slider for mouse smoothness. You have nice popups and text explaining how a lower number is higher smoothness… I’d just invert the logic, do a (1-value) or something, saves the text and makes it more intuitive.

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Lentsius3 years ago

Glad you enjoyed the experience, I very well remember your submission, what a lovely take on the theme you had! Yeah I really wanted to expose enough settings so that

a) I wouldn’t lose too much time setting it all up and

b) people got enough customizability out of it to set the game up for their needs.

Inertia! Believe it or not, the initial version was a lot more “physics” based, I then ran playtesting and as a result went for a lot more arcadey feel as the more physics based one, which although more accurate, irritated the players more than it helped the game feel. It’d be worth experimenting with an inbetween solution for the future though and seeing how it fares in relation to the previous.

Esc to exit the map is a fantastic catch, that is easily fixed and makes total UX sense.

I was working on that! On stream! Haha, but then I experienced a good ol’ brain fart and the inversion logic mad no sense to me, so I decided to take the easy way out and put an info note there. However for a more polished post-jam version this is a must to have in there, ideally ranging from 0 - 2, where 0 is none, 1 is default and 2 is double of the default. Should be easy enough.

In terms of checkpoints, that was a design decision. I wanted to give the player the agency as in some levels there are multiple options for checkpoints and the one you want to activate is the one that’ll most help you current strategy. Otherwise part of the gameplay would turn out having to find a way around the checkpoint which you don’t want to remain active as after having died you wish to return to the currently active one.

Thank you for the long and detailed post and again, for playing the game!

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Patrick W. Crawford3 years ago(+1)

On inertia: I totally believe that a fully physics based on would be irritating! (Also kudos for getting playtesting and then making design changes as a result). So if there was a scale from 0 (current) to full physics based (1), I’d shoot for like 0.1, so probably more like an extension of your current implementation of movement vs trying to introduce something new. Something that just makes the roll to a stop slightly slower.

On checkpoint: yup I totally get that rationale. Hm trying to remember, do you prompt the command + key to set the checkpoint when you are underneath it? I’d make sure at least that is done.

On the user prefs, I recall thinking “what do these numbers mean??” for a couple of the settings. So if you have that idea of making 2 = double smoothness, maybe you have a label off to the right which updated based on which “region” of the slider you are in to help reinforce the current position? Eg 1.5 to 2 makes the label say “extra smooth”. Either that or map everything from a 0-1 value, and have a small vertical tick to remind users where the default is?

Final thing… I forgot to mention in my first post, also really loved your little post-it notes and messages, great detail :) nice work again!

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