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Humane Tiger1 year ago(+1)

Awwww - that's a really nice game! Right from the beginning the fantastic 8-bit music was catching me.  And when I saw what you  have created, I instantly put it  into my colleciton of games I want to show my nephew. He loves playing Jam games - and  yours he will like for sure! So there will be two ratings coming. One from me, and one when I played with him (maybe in a week or so).

The general concept is nice - I wasn't joining the GMTK, and when I saw the theme, I knew "I would have NO idea what to do with it". Seing you and  others making so much out of it makes me really happy (and also little jealous tbh, because I  have so hard times with creating such fresh ideas...)

You made a lot of things right already. The laser pointer is a huge help, if it wouldn't have been there, I would have asked for "something" like this, but you already found the perfect visual feedback.

I discovered the reset button hint in one of the comments below, I also didn't get it while playing, so  introducing it in-game would be nice. Some voice-feedback might also be a good improvement - funny statements from teh automaton. Good thing is: It doesn't have to be a natural voice, so  an text-to-speach generated voice would sound just right for this. I am thinking of "Will You Snail" - maybe the face of the automaton can be visible for this  at all times somewhere on screen - making angry face + statement ("Darn, this was so close!" / "Oh no, it fell!") when nothing is catched, and having a  happy "revenge" face when something is on the hook ("Harhar! It is mine again!" "Nice teddy bear! Bring it back to me!").  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68hxBSTILkY

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ComfyMitten Samuel1 year ago

Thanks for trying it out, and for your thoughts!

My friend & brother helped me on this project during the jam, so thanks to them we were able to bounce ideas around and settle on the claw machine concept a couple hours after the jam started; without them, I might have been very lost with the theme as well. But one of the great things about the GMTK Jams's themes is that there is always room for interpretation, so there ends up being a lot of cool variety with the submissions. That's partly why we were so excited for this to be our first jam collab! We knew that there would have to be some opportunity to put a fun twist on more traditional game paradigms, regardless of the theme.

I'm glad you like the laser feature - I hope we can improve it a bit in a future update (especially to work more consistently on the web export version), but I'm happy enough with it as-is. This was actually partially inspired by the classic UFO catcher Mario Party minigame.

We'll definitely try to make the reset functionality more obvious if we do another update! But the main goal would be to make it so the claw can extend all the way to the floor consistently, so players wouldn't need to reset as often, if ever.

We were actually planning on having a lot of voicelines! My brother recorded a fair few during the jam period (both for the machine itself, and npcs), but during the 48 hours I sadly wasn't able to add them in due to the time crunch. After the jam ended and I was able to listen through them more carefully, I realized that there were a few things we could adjust to make them work much better in the game, so I decided not to add them just yet in our minor bugfix update. He's a busy guy, but I'm hoping to make some time to record updated lines and use them in a future update! He can bring a lot of character to the machine, and with the right bitcrush filters it should sound very fitting. This is a sample of one of the lines he recorded that might not need to be adjusted at all.

And I love the idea of having some basic face animations when certain events happen, I'll definitely keep that in mind!

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