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Ata Deniz Oktay1 year ago(+1)

I adored the game. It is simple, polished, and feels good to play. It even has a terrifying nature due to its dark atmosphere and sound design. I enjoyed every bit of the game, and I honestly think it is one of the best games in this jam.

I wish the levels were designed by hand rather than created procedurally though, I believe it would multiply the fun.

Finally, after some point, the game stopped working for me. I don't know the exact reason, but it was pretty late in the game after I pressed the space bar over a hundred times.

Awesome game, well done!

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SecretPocketCat1 year ago(+1)

Thank you 🙂

I'm not sure hand-crafted levels would be the same. Restarting a level would rob the player of the  initial discovery unless you mean creating a pool of levels which might be hard for a jam game.  Either that or stitching it from hand-made chunks/rooms could work.

Sorry the game crashed. Was that maybe after entering a portal? I think I encountered that a few times but didn't have time to fix it unfortunately.

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Ata Deniz Oktay1 year ago (1 edit) (+1)

Procedurally generated levels have the disadvantage of being able to provide worse-than-adequate levels. Since games should supply the players with an appropriate difficulty curve and well-designed-placed thrills, procedurally generated content is not preferred when it is not just a tool to provide a chaotic environment such as in survival/sandbox games.

Of course, providing the player with hundreds of hand-crafted levels is not so possible for a game jam game. But, I'd prefer playing 5 unique hand-crafted experiences rather than trying to find my way in more procedurally generated mazes that probably won't provide any thrills. For example, that enemy you have implemented in the game can be utilized in certain levels in the game to create thrilling moments, but since the levels are procedurally generated, that is most of the time is not the case.

As I remember, the game crashed after I entered a new level and pressed the space button several times. I couldn't reproduce that though, sorry!

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tasgon1 year ago (3 edits) (+1)

For example, that enemy you have implemented in the game can be utilized in certain levels in the game to create thrilling moments, but since the levels are procedurally generated, that is most of is not the case.

I agree with some of this, but I also think one reason it doesn’t come off as thrilling very often is because enemies get stuck on geometry in weird ways, thus giving the player safety in situations where they shouldn’t have it. For example, if you go through a corridor blind and you ping a chaser, you should likely lose, but right now there’s a good chance you’ll be fine. With those bugs fixed and with better mechanics to ensure that enemies get to their destination, I’d imagine the threat factor would increase quite significantly.

Some levels could potentially have served the game well, especially having a couple introductory ones as a tutorial system, but I think another big limiter was the lack of enemy variety (and the aforementioned bugs). For example, we didn’t even experiment with enemies that could actively ping.

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Ata Deniz Oktay1 year ago

Yes, you are right. If the enemies wouldn't get stuck in the walls repeatedly, the game might offer a much greater experience, maybe even eliminating the need for hand-made levels other than tutorial sections. I hope you guys iterate over this idea!

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SecretPocketCat1 year ago(+1)

Loads of this comes down to balancing or lack there of. Sure, premade lvls would come out nicer, but the procgen lvls could be also much closer if they were tweaked properly.

Thank you for trying to repro the issue btw.

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