Art: splendid.
UI and audiovisual feedback: +-
Hindered by the small resolution with no scaling. Numbers of this scale are not possible to read while concentrated. Small ball is hard to track at times.
Exploding duplicated balls that are nonessential (and not fatal to lose) feel like false alarms.
Gameplay: Convoluted and unintuitive. There are some dropped things, and balls explode, change color and duplicate, but the meaning of all of this is not conveyed clearly through gameplay even after a few repetitions.
Viewing post in Untergetaucht jam comments
Thanks for your feedback!
I'm surprised you don't like the sound design all that much, but I'm convinced this is a result of poor mixing rather than the sounds themselves being uninteresting.
We apologize for the small resolution, there's a fullscreen button in the bottom right corner that will hopefully fully solve this issue for you. The small ball is not as hard to track in fullscreen, and we kind of couldn't make the ball any larger, it needs to be small for it to pop several bubbles at once with ease. The game would have been much slower and tedious if the ball was larger.
I completely agree with the false alarm critique, we should have definitely tried to find a solution for this, and it's my fault for not communicating it with the team.
The gameplay is heavily inspired by the games Arkanoid and Breakout, which are extremely known arcade games, so we didn't feel the need to tutorialize anything about the power-ups. However, I can see how some aspects of the gameplay can be unintuitive.
Sorry, I was not clear enough. Audio feedback got its - in +- for (loud) false alarms.
Other sounds are ok, keep up.
I played desktop version - it does not have fullscreen button. If i set fullscreen manually via magic of window management it occupies only part of the screen and the mouse coordinates tracking becomes borked.
Now when i think of it, the sfx is sort of what i would expect as a child long time ago downloading a commercial 'match-3' tier of game.
It is standard, it is how i remembered those games. It could feel nostalgic if i actually enjoyed these genres maybe. ^_^ Something that does not aspire to be artsy or avant-garde, something very vanilla, getting the job done. Cozy if you are into it, but otherwise heavily associated with lack of imagination, money-first incentives and user disrespect because of the decades of commercial overexploitation.
But i get into too high talk for my own creative level.
I have made maybe a single game that has managed to receive some praise specifically for audio feedback sfx.
It's interesting you say the sound effects are what you would expect of a commercial match-3 game, because the sound effects were heavily inspired by Bejeweled 3. I find the sound effects of this game to be intense and satisfying, something that I tried to replicate for Untergetaucht. However, I noticed that the in-game audio mixing diminished the impact of those sounds significantly, and maybe they would be more satisfying if we had more time to work on that.