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(+1)

I really tried to understand this game, but I dont.

It;s definitely on theme and tries something new and experimental, but there's a few glaring design decisions that would need to be addressed.

1. It's not clear how any of the stats affect anything. Should I only address some of them when they are below zero? Doesn't seem like it, since my population will die way before that(even though food and water is still high).

2. The MEWA MEWA screen puzzle has no purpose. Maybe the feature was suppose to be more complex? As of right now, I just need to scroll down from the page to see the combinations and pick the one I need. Would be easier to just let me pick directly instead of creating these combinations.

3. What do these evolved Blubbs even mean? I can infer some like Ninja=Agility, but why does the third Blubb with bizarelly large hands affect multiple stats? What does the businessman do? Why don't you just write this in the picture tutorial so I can know what I'm doing?

4. Outcome is unrelated to skill/understanding of the game. I tried to understand it, I tried to modify my MEWA MEWA often. I would always lose due to a population crash or some random negative event. In my last game, I went to 'business' blurb in the second generation and just progressed generations until I lost at 70k points. This got me to #4 place. I'm pretty sure if I played enough, I'd luck out with enough positive events at some point to be #1.

I'm not saying it's a bad game, I think I would enjoy playing it if I understood the core mechanics. If you are creating a game in a game jam whose mechanics aren't similar to other popular games, you need to invest more time in creating a tutorial/explaining the mechanics.

(+1)

Thank you for putting so much time into analysis! You are absolutely right; we waited too long to scope down the game with the initial intention that more evolutions would be satisfying for experimentation. Thus we were going to keep the recipes hidden. But given that we didn't have enough evolutions to make experimentation feel worth it and after submission, people were struggling to figure out how to play (and validly so), we posted the recipes in an attempt to give an aiming goal at least while still hiding the stats to invoke experimentation hopefully. There was originally going to be a terrain, and blueprint upgrade system, believe it or not, *cries*. For the next jam, we will focus on one core mechanic and build off of that instead of scrambling to scale down at the last second and meeting balancing issues.


Thank you for your input and playing!