Overall I think this game is a really great minigame type game. Great work and a creative design overall!
Viewing post in Snooze or Lose jam comments
Also apologies for this late reply I just wanted to give some suggestions and critiques because I have given it to every other game and this is one of the few that I hadn't. So here they are.
Suggestions/critiques:
- I found that some of the "enemies" would spawn almost on top of the character and I had a bit of confusion figuring out what I needed to do with them. After looking at the instructions and understanding that down on the d-pad would slap things closer to the body I understood the instructions a little more. I still feel that having enemies spawn in or on top of the body should be avoided.
- I really like the almost clock looking text that you put in the game however for readability I felt that it was a little bit small for on hardware. This is especially noticeable in the credits where to me it almost looks like just a jumble of symbols. It may just have to do with how fat the text is and how small it is as well.
- I think that the control scheme for the game is pretty good especially since you're making it so that the player doesn't need to press the A and B button. However I think that the A & B buttons could be used in this game to switch arms. I think it could be nice to have B be the left arm and A be the right arm. Oftentimes I felt confused trying to switch between the two arms because of everything that was on screen and the fast-paced nature of the game.
- it would be nice to have a tutorial for this game but I also understand that it could take a lot of work that may not even be necessary. I think it would be nice to have the player go through the motions of moving the left and the right arm and slapping towards the body and away from the body.
- I think that it would be nice for the hands to have its own force field in a way where it would automatically slap away items that hit the hand without needing to stretch or slap towards the body.
- as with any arcade game I think having a high scoreboard would be really nice.
- I wonder if this game would have a possibility of a level system or this game really is only suited for an arcade type game. Maybe some possible levels could include different characters like a kid having to get up for school and the mom trying to wake the kid up. Or even an adult who needs to get ready to go to work but also doesn't want to get up. Maybe even a fireman who has to get up when the fire Bell rings for the firehouse. Maybe there could even be strategy to get up at a specific time.
One question I did have is if there is an ending to this game or not. As I was not able to get too far into the night yet.
Overall this is a great game and this is one of the few that I'm going to keep downloaded on my device because of how fun of an arcade game it is. Thank you for all the work that you put into it.
Thanks for the feedback!
- I wanted to fix enemies spawning on your chest but didn't have time :(
- We also wanted font scaling, not just for the score display in the corner but also to display the score bigger in the game over screen.
- We had A and B for arm switching originally, but it made it difficult to hold the console, and your fingers had to move a lot between those buttons and the D-pad.
- No time for a tutorial, but there is a "How to play" menu! We also wanted to tune the beginning to be slow so you have time to figure out the inputs, but it's a bit too fast still. But by 3 tries, we found that most people got the hang of it.
- We used to have the hand slap anything it touches without additional input, but we found the game was cheesable as you could just spam the crank and the arm switching and you'd never die. The active slap forces you to actually aim and manage your time spent on enemies. The cat as a mechanic also wouldn't work if we didn't have a distinction between a slapping and a not slapping state, since now you can pet the cat, and can get penalized for slapping the cat.
- We also thought of adding a local leaderboard, but that's a big feature, you need a keyboard to enter your name and figure out how to read and write to the console's storage system, it's a game jam of its own.
- A level system could be interesting if there were more mechanics and enemy types, so you wouldn't always have to start "from the tutorial" and wait for it to ramp up, yeah.
There is no ending, the game stops ramping up after a minute or so. If you practice, you can definitely get good enough to play infinitely. The score counter will cap out at 9999, but it would probably take like 30 minutes to get there, and I don't think you should do that to yourself! :D
I'm really glad you like the game so much, thanks a lot! We learned a lot and we're proud of the result, I think! :D
Thanks for replying!
- makes sense why you chose not to use A and
- Makes sense for no tutorial as well.
- It's interesting that having the hand slap everything would be such an issue of balance. It's cool to understand why that didn't work.
- Understandable that you didn't add a leaderboard to the Jam. I still think it would be a nice feature to have in a future iteration!
Thank you again for responding and I'm happy to have learned more about this game! :)