I wanted to play your game, but you only have it for Windows only; I’m on Linux. I tried running it in Wine but this seems to have failed. I don’t know enough about UE4 games to know to work around this. This is also something I don’t expect you to do anything about because I’m by far the part of the minority of the addressable gaming market.
Given that, I didn’t leave you a rating, even though I wanted to return the favor.
I liked playing this. It’s a novel idea, and it’s fun in its current state. It needs polish though.
It was not immediately obvious to me what was supposed to happen when I was prompted to select my initial ingredients. I only was able to figure that out through trial and error the first few times that I lost the game early. A small bit of explanation up front somewhere on what to do would be helpful.
I agree with other reviewers that having the inventory counts in the UI reduce as you are playing would be potentially useful for thinking about what is coming down the conveyor.
Is the game always winnable? I got to my 7th omelette in a row with all of the ingredients place on it, and I was around 20 points short of the goal. The difficulty felt OK to me but I am wondering if all starting states are actually winnable. You might want to make sure your roguelike card mechanics adjust for that, if they aren’t already.
Nice work.
I played your game briefly. I liked it while I was playing it. Some general observations:
Your music is way too loud. I noted that you have music settings, but I was not able to change the volume at all. The music also doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the game’s style.
What is the “Run” button for? Does your game really need a “run” button? I never seemed to go perceptibly faster while pressing it. It’s also kind of awkward that I can play the entire game with my left hand comfortably except with the run action that requires my other hand to rest on the K key (I guess I could try the X key with my thumb and it might still work). Would your game still work if the player just ran all the time?
I did like your game visually. It looks like you’re in the middle of transitioning between art styles; I think that’s OK. I can’t say exactly why I like your art style, but I think it has something to do with your use of color.
You should consider updating your itch screenshots; the new protagonist is much better looking than the ones in the original screens.
Overall, a nice little game. Keep at it!
So, if you left click while something “interesting” is lit by the flashlight, the player’s character will make a radio report about it to “Control.”
You can make reports about:
I think you and other people who rated the game so far have made it clear that I need to include more tutorial type material in the game itself. It was kind of OK for the first jam where I made this that everything was in documents, because everyone who participated in that one was kind of expecting it. I think I’m going to do that in my next release (which will probably be sometime in October).
Thank you for the feedback!
Thank you for this feedback. Pretty much everyone who reviewed the game for this jam were similarly confused, so I think I’ll be adding a short tutorial up front in the next release.
I’m going to contemplate your thoughts about “anti-stealth” a bit more. It’s honestly a term I made up, because I imagined it would play as the opposite of something like Metal Gear Solid; e.g. instead of being an intruder sneaking past guards, you’re a guard who is supposed to catch an intruder.
The level itself is very haphazard because I was trying to invent stuff to fit this theme during the jam, and opted for whatever I could bash together out of free assets. It was probably a little bit too ambitious for my first jam game? I already have some thoughts on how to make it more coherent and therefore make more sense, but I think I’ll keep what you said in mind also.
I agree with you about the need for a tutorial. I think I’m going to make that the focus of my next release, whenever I get around to it.
The idea is supposed to be that you’re supposed to catch people who are trying to sneak in. Imagine Metal Gear Solid, but you’re one of the dopey soldiers walking around in circles instead of Solid Snake.
Thank you for the feedback!
Yes, I think you’re quite right about the tutorial. There was a lot more written material for the jam that I originally wrote this for that was part of the evaluation, so I didn’t get a lot of feedback from players about being confused on what to do. In this jam there would be no reason to read it, so I think this revealed a weakness that wasn’t obvious to me.
I think I’m going to add another update where this is explained in the game up front before I try to take it anywhere more ambitious.
Thank you for the feedback!
I downloaded your build from 3 days ago. I played the game for a short time before I got frustrated with it during the jumping puzzle that involves little sliding square platforms. Your game does not appear to be hard, but I find it harder to play than it should be.
I don’t like your control scheme. I grew up playing side scrolling platformers on PCs in the early 90s, and the keys you expect me to press are not the keys I expect to press, to the point where it’s uncomfortable for me to play your game. In particular, the left hand is expected to be in too many places at once; up in the corner to block at the Q key, but also on the spacebar. Meanwhile, my right hand is at the arrow keys on the bottom of the row. It’s a lot of physical effort to jump up, double-jump off of an enemy by attacking twice, jump up again, and then block an arrow on the top.
It would be better if all of the keys to press are level with each other. A typical scheme that was common in games in my youth was to use the arrow keys for movement with the right hand, and have the left hand centered on Left Control and Left Alt. From that position, I can easily reach the Spacebar or the Left Shift key in addition to Ctrl and Alt. I would suggest binding jump to Ctrl, blocking to Alt, and maybe attack to Spacebar. That way, I don’t have to move either of my hands to much to do anything. Ideally, I should be able to play a game like this using no more than three fingers at once.
Similarly, I think it’s awkward that spacebar is the dialogue button and the attack button, and that the Up arrow is a jump button. I don’t think any of your buttons should do double-duty. Do you really need a key for dialogue and saving? Consider making these things just happen as needed (why would I ever say no to having my health refilled?).
All of that said, I like your art style. I also thought your writing was funny, so I want to see more of where this goes. I don’t understand why it’s running on an ancient computer within my computer, but it looks nice that way.
This was a nice little game. I enjoyed it. I thought it was well put together.
I played your Linux build. It worked generally as I expected and I didn’t notice any issues specific to it while playing. Is it supposed to spit out debug output to the terminal while running? Some of the messages were standard Godot stuff, but the rest of it seems like stuff you guys chose to print. I didn’t notice until after I was done playing though.
You already know about the bug with clicks going behind objects to whatever is in the room (the “Why would I go outside” bug).
The only thing that I found uniquely inconvenient is that I think your audio was a little weak. Specifically, the voice over is pretty quiet; it was sometimes hard to hear over the background music. The subtitles helped with that. You might want to try adjusting the default volume levels though (I didn’t mess with the settings).
I’m personally not really big on tower defense. I think your game was enjoyable. You seem to be at the start of nice.
I liked the hexagonal grid. The placement of towers was clear and the radial display of their threat zone made it very easy to decide what to do.
The UI around upgrading towers could use some improvement. There’s no real hint that upgrading towers is how you use the crystals. Instead of having a popup that gets bigger to expand as you level up, I think it would be better if your upgrade UI showed what was possible at various levels. That way the player can think about their investments and decide if they want to really upgrade a tower or place more of them.
The waves of enemies weren’t really challenging for a long time. They started ramping up in difficulty right around when I lost interest in playing further. You might want to consider adding an earlier ramp to the difficulty.
I found that the soundtrack got tiresome after a while. It would be nice to have a way to turn that off, or if it could have more variety.
This is a nice concept. I did enjoy it, but at the same time I also felt frustrated while playing it. I did not go all the way to the end; I gave up when I had the sticky block and two other blocks and had to get past the 6 red spikey things.
Wall jumps were a bit annoying. That is, the practice of pressing alternating direction keys on my keyboard per jump was a bit much; to the point of actually hurting my hand (maybe I have some early onset carpel tunnel? But I doubt it).
Is it intended that pressing against the wall while falling will slow your rate of descent? This looks like an application of Godot’s move_and_slide behavior. It felt a little strange to me, but I thought it was OK.
“Throw the next gecko” is probably the single most depressing game over continuation prompt I’ve ever seen. Especially when you actually click the button or press the spacebar and have to look at that gecko cry.
This is an excellent game, though. It is very well put together and very much realizes the scope that you guys appear to have set for it. You have an excellent art style and all of the animations were fluid. The game itself is fun.
The only bit of feedback I would give that would be somewhat critical, is that the art music style is actually very jarring when considering the game’s backstory is essentially animal abuse. It’s too cheery. But that may also be exactly what you’re going for. I’d leave it up to you to determine whether or not that’s “working” the way you intend.
Good work.
Yeah, I’ve thought on the story mode a bit, and I was actually thinking of a virtual month of missions. Kind of like “Papers Please.” I don’t know the exact duration because I haven’t planned the whole thing; I think I know the ending and the beginning, it’s a question of how much middle to have.
I have never heard of “I’m on Observation Duty” and you’re one of 3 people now to mention it to me, so I think I’m going to have to give that a spin.
This game is pretty clever. I actually thought it was going to be boring when it was described as a tower defense game, but the idea of having the shadows determine where towers actually shoot was really, really cool.
I’d like to see where you go with this further; it’s something I don’t think anyone has really ever thought of before.
I liked the idea of this game. The game itself was pretty good, too.
I think introducing the drunk controls and reversal was probably the single most jarring thing that happened while playing it, because there was no real indication anywhere that could happen before it did. I agree with the other commenter who suggested that should be introduced after some success.
Awesome little game! I like it a lot. Very high quality, very fun to play.
The control scheme was complicated to read about but made a lot of sense once I actually got into playing. It was good to play.
The only bit of constructive criticism I would give is that I found your tooltips occasionally did not display over the ingredients. I spent maybe half a minute trying to figure out what Silver did.
I like your game and I like your concept. The art style reminds me of Roadwarden. I’d like to see what you do with it after the jam.
I did find it confusing to know what to do to treat all of the diseases. The people who haven’t relieved themselves in a while implies that they need water to balance out the “common humors” (if I understand your manual correctly) but there’s no obvious way to do this. It’s also not obvious how many ingredients to use to create effective potions.
Finally, after playing it long enough, I ran into what I assume is a UI bug, where descriptions of NPCs did not update no matter what buttons I clicked.
Still, a good game. I hope you keep going with it.
I’m very impressed that you managed to create something that is actually a functioning game with a pile of DOM nodes managed by Svelte. While I knew such a thing was entirely possible, a more traditional method of creating a web based game would be to use HTML5 Canvas exclusively managed by Javascript (not that you need to do anything differently).
The other advantage of your approach is that your game is probably the only one that has felt truly web-native, in the sense that I did not need to wait 30 seconds for some bloated WASM thing to bring along its garbage collector like everyone who used one of the major engines (including myself).
I think it is also impressive that you chose a manageable scope, implemented all of it before the deadline, and the game itself was actually entertaining.
I would echo the constructive criticism that some sort of background art would be helpful. The game currently feels “floaty” without it.
I like this game. I particularly like the night vision mechanic; your implementation of a flashlight is a lot smoother than my own. It’s also very well put together overall.
The one bit of feedback I would give is that it’s harder to avoid spikes than it needs to be, because the player’s position is floating but the spikes are locked to the tile map. It might be less frustrating if the player’s position was locked to tiles, so that a 1 pixel collision with a spike doesn’t happen.
I enjoyed your game. You guys have a definite art style. I’d like to see the rest of your content if you have a whole plot worked out for the other days; I feel like the whole situation with the dragon probably isn’t a stable working arrangement.
One thing I found confusing is that the mouse cursor was not immediately visible in Investigation Mode; it appeared black-on-black in my browser (Firefox, on Linux). I do not know if that was intended, but I found it confusing. It was the only confusing part of your game.
