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Very nice concept. The game feels super polished, and while you used preexisting assets they all fit well. Gameplay was smooth and the minigame puzzles were quite clever. I had a couple of game design gripes though:


  • Couldn't make sense of what was happening in the shoot the target level. Possibly a bug but IDK. When it kept repeatedly giving me that level it became annoying.

  • And my bigger gripe was with a comment on the main page, where a user was critical of the jump button's size and you replied "that was part of the challenge."


  • Just a quick note regarding making the UI challenging: You are not doing yourself a favor here. That would be like if the Elden Ring technical director said to the UI team: "Huh game is not hard enough, you need to turn every piece of text in the game upside down, so funny haha". It'd make some funny meme videos, but after that nobody would ever want to play the game again.


    The UI in a game is how people interact with it. And making UI a challenge is not part of making the game harder, if you want to do that, do it mechanically, people can grow in that regard, whereas making a bad UI will put people off for good. People with eyesight difficulty might not be able to read the tiny text, it is inherently bad game design to intentionally impact the users ability to experience the game in that way.


  • TLDR: making a game tough isn't a bad thing, but inherently screwing with peoples ability to play a game in this regard; please don't ever do this on a Steam release or people won't be kind.
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  • "Couldn't make sense of what was happening in the shoot the target level. Possibly a bug but IDK. When it kept repeatedly giving me that level it became annoying."
    • Can you give context on this one? The only thing that should be required is shooting the target shown in the target box in the upper right (which will be one of the 5 surrounding the player ship). The challenge of that level is that the stations/stars/meteors all randomly generate around the level to be visual noise, but the actual targets are always the in the same place and the same order. 
    • With the above context in mind, were you running into issues where shooting the matching target of the five didn't register as a success? or was the visual noise from the other objects in the scene too much?
  • "Just a quick note regarding making the UI challenging: You are not doing yourself a favor here. That would be like if the Elden Ring technical director said to the UI team: "Huh game is not hard enough, you need to turn every piece of text in the game upside down, so funny haha". It'd make some funny meme videos, but after that nobody would ever want to play the game again."
    • I can totally see what you mean. To clarify, my comment wasn't to call out that their feedback was wrong, it was to give context on the why it was that way (I actually reduced difficulty on that one, as originally the jump button was randomly placed every time the game loaded). I will add an update to that comment incase it was interpreted differently.

Although your mention of elden ring is an interesting callout, because the director has actually done interviews where they explicitly took out UI elements to make it harder (there was a quest log or some kind of quest visual indicator at one point that they removed). 

Similarly, in the context of Warioware, UI obfuscation is not an uncommon component of many of the microgames over the various sequels they have done, since most of them only have one button/single focus interactions. Many times difficulty is added through UI changes/covering the inputs/etc. 

(+1)

Very well thought out response! Like wow. I'm sorry!


With the target shooting I believe I was aiming at the target box lol. I think the way it was showcased it made it look like that was the objective and I lost it every single time.

And yeah I made a bad point about Elden Ring, honestly am not a huge fan of those FromSoftware games, and I can 100% believe what you said was a thing.

Shows how unfamiliar I am with Warioware related stuff too. I'll tell you something that embarrassed me, when I saw the theme I had to google it. I've been making games for years (game music and gameart for longer too) and I had honestly never looked at a Warioware game.

I'm really sorry if I came across as rude or trying to pick a fault, but the thing I most appreciate is that you responded to my last comment in the best way possible, and you sure as hell know your stuff. I'm just somebody who dislikes reducing accessibility for the sake of difficulty. Not saying games shouldn't be hard, but not be designed specifically to exclude people that a small UX change could include.

(1 edit) (+1)

No worries at all! Definitely nothing rude there, as with the other, my response was to just add detail.

Overall, thanks for the quick reply. And yes, based off how my original comment you were describing could be read, I can totally get what you meant. I went back and edited it, because I think their criticism is totally valid.

What's worse is I just found another pack from Kenney that had larger buttons, just not in the asset store. Doh.


Edit: Also, never feel bad for championing accessibility. While there's always a push and pull between authorial intent (like what From Soft does) and user access, there is NEVER anything wrong with asking for more accessibility.