Post by Marsoupial in The Great Scaler jam comments

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This was fun! I like the audio a lot. The art is cool, it would’ve been nice have more for the other characters. The gameplay has that sim-y, utilitarian feel found in games like Potion Craft, which I enjoy. I liked having a limited selection of weights, it made each customer feel more like a puzzle.

I found myself wishing the weights were physics objects that could fall over and sit on top of each other. The little bit of controlled chaos physics objects bring adds to the tactile feel of playing a game like this. I like that I needed to click kinda carefully to pick up the weights, it wasn’t really challenging per se but it did require more attention and made the experience feel more methodical.

Sometimes when skipping dialog I would accidentally choose yes or no, I’d appreciate some kind of short lockout.

I’d love to see more of this, especially if the narrative aspect is more developed and you find a way to vary the gameplay some.

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Envilon Script1 year ago

Thank you for the thorough feedback! I’m glad you didn’t mind the rest of the missing audio that’s not in the game :D. The “sim-y”, methodical feel was actually intentional and I wanted the tasks to have some puzzle elements but this takes a lot of time to balance so the difficulty scales smoothly over the playthrough, therefore now it’s not that polished and well designed if I’d say so myself.

I was experimenting with the physics of the weights during the development. I wanted them to tip over when dropped on the edge of the pan or thrown out of the hand and then when picked up, they would naturally rotate into an upright position due to gravity. However, this felt utterly awful when I tried to do this purely physics-based, so I scratched that, and the rotation of the weights is currently locked. I would need to implement something custom for the game that feels right, but that was not in my scope for the jam.

The dialogue UI is a real problem, thanks for reporting that. Someone else mentioned that they made an accidental choice in their playthrough but I did not connect the dots up until now. To be honest, the UI buttons were just a “quick win” for me because I had to narrow the scope of the game. The original plan was, that answering questions (tasks from customers) would be done by nodding the Scaler’s head with the mouse. This will, however, require some good animations so it fits the game and it would be a huge risk to undertake with my minimal skills in this domain during a jam.

And lastly to finish with your last comment. At the beginning of the jam, I was actually thinking about finishing this game later on. I would like to finish a project fully and go through the release and publishing process to gain some experience in this regard. And this game seemed like a nice fit scope-wise (like, it could potentially be finished in a few months). So maybe I will do that. :) Unfortunately, as the jam deadline approached, coding standards and organization went out the window, so there is a lot of refactoring and reworking needed.

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