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@averagewater thanks for the kind words!


Wishlisting the game isn't intended to unlock anything... but once you grab the full game (planning to be released in August) that will unlock EVERYTHING :o

;D~~~~

Thanks!

I had a good time with this. Smart decision to have very simple art and spend the time on physics and gameplay mechanics.  The sound adds a ton to the atmosphere. 

I wasn't able to reach the final island... my bote just kept tipping over. Even when I moved all the way to the opposite side, at slow speed... it still tipped! That felt unfair. 

I feel like there are 3 main ideas explored with this: navigating, balancing and steering. Navigating and balancing are ramped up as you advance through the islands.  Steering remains pretty constant (except for dodging the pre-pyramid obstacles).

I didn't care much for the balancing mechanic. I really liked seeing my bote react to my weight as I moved around ... but I didn't like getting tipped over. It felt too opaque as a challenge.

Personally I loved the  navigating and steering. There's a real sense of magic when having a new destination and working out how to navigate there. If you kept ramping that up I would have loved to keep playing. Even with very basic art I could feel that sense of exploration evoking something in me. The steering was fun too, I would have enjoyed some dangerous obstacles along the way. 

Thanks for the kind words. Great observation on the "peeing forces you to move close to obstacles", that was defn the intention. 

Nice suggestion. I kept wondering about snuffle's and owners collisions, in the end I decided that it added a bit more challenge, so I kept it in there. However, based on your feedback I think it would have been even better to have "snuffles can bounce away the owner" as an upgrade path. That could lead to a fun way to push the owner away from obstacles and if it's locked behind an upgrade you'll feel it's earned. 

Again, thanks for the feedback.

"bladder infected truffle hunter" :D

Thanks

Oh dear, that sucks. There must be some bug with unity's textmeshpro components on Web + Firefox + macOS. I'll try uploading a macOS build when I've got a moment later this week.

Thanks for the screenshot. Encouraging to see you managed to make some progress despise the terrible UI (or lack thereof)!

Really enjoyed the visual style in this <3

Great feedback.

This covers my 2 main feelings while playing this too, that I kept missing beats even thought it seemed like I was hitting them and that I would have loved to have more chances to just watch the dancer groove out. Maybe some solo/freestyle sections?

This is like a living Spencer Tunick photograph. 

Good suggestion, I also would have enjoyed protecting a destructible structure of some kind.

Glorious cut scene!

Nice entry.

I like the other-worldly nature of destroying UFOs as a snail. 

I found it quite difficult to destroy those UFOs accurately because of the wobbles in the movement after releasing myself. I felt like I was able to aim quite accurately but then launching would quite different from my aimed direction and I would miss my targets.

Cool concept, nice execution. 

I was having a good time and would have enjoyed playing even more levels as you kept exploring the mechanics.

Wow, there's sooo much content in this for a jam! Amazing work. 

One thing that almost stole the experience from me, and I hope other players don't have the same problem... After entering my name and being asked if I was happy with my hat, I said no. Then the button to accept name had disappeared and I wasn't able to continue. I had to fully remove the name and then type it in again. 

Also when I eventually entered my name as "bob" that didn't work. I had to use "Bob" (case-sensitive). I was a bit confused initially and almost gave up, thinking that it might have been the joke that the whole-game is in the character creation... and there was no other content.

I'm not saying this to criticise, just so that other folks don't get stuck at the same points and give up early, missing the rest of this experience. 

The voice narration added so much for me, gave this sense of gravity to the whole setting. 

Did you have the whole loop in-mind early on or were you just riffing on stuff during the jam?

Thanks <3

Hey, thanks LiZZarD_Ros!

The art is a mashup of a bunch of stuff. I'll share more details because I'm always curious about others' process:

• Snuffle's the dog is a model from the unity asset store. I added massive eyes so that it works better from a top-down view. Also added a tongue.
• The owner is just a bunch of unity capsules.
• The ground texture I generated with an AI, something like "grass texture, gentle, soft, cute, seamless"
• Rocks and trees are from a unity asset.
• The upgrade machines are just a bunch of rounded cubed bashed together.

Snuffle's is actually kinda terrifying when you look up close:

Hey Mandy!!

Thx for the notes. Glad you liked the sound design. Honestly, I had very little time for this jam and I was on the verge of submitting without any audio. Thanks goodness someone convinced me to add audio because I think it elevated the whole experience.  You're totally invited to our next audio recording session :)

Nice to hear you felt the upgrades were balanced. My big question with this jam was "what's the min number of meta upgrades required to feel a progression loop?" There are 6 types of upgrades with 3 levels each in this, I think that's enough to get that progression feeling. Maybe just 4 types would have been enough. I also think having more visual changes with each upgrade would go a long way. For example one health upgrade idea was "helmet"... so the owner would get a construction helmet and that would take 1 hit and fall off before the owner starts taking damage. That's effectively the same as adding an extra hit of HP worth in an upgrade, but visually it changes things up. 

"edge of the forest/property had a fence or something" - totally agreed! I was going to add a water body around there but just guided myself to spend the time on meta-related stuff instead. 

oh no typo! If you can recall where you saw it, I can go fix it :)

You asked about "making a larger game"... I think that's such a good question and I try to ask it of every jam. I feel this is a good candidate for a game "going surreal". I imagine Snuffle's could randomly stumble upon all these super-weird-yet-powerful technologies (slowing time, gravity fields, deadly lasers, portals, etc)  and it's funny to imagine the pooch using them to just amass more truffles while society is clearly collapsing around it. 

Thanks again for playing and writing up notes.

Love the art in this!

:'D

Soooo elegant. Chef's kiss!

I managed to fix the error by renaming "GDKO Game Jam Project_Data" folder to "BatLotAI_Data".

Cool idea for a character :D

Love the character design :)

Haha, this is a wicked cool idea for a location & world. I felt myself wishing I could get to my room and see what life is like here.

I like where you're going with the art style too. Like Michell pointed out below, there's some small tweaks that could help it be easier to read ... but I think ultimately this style could be quite endearing in a larger experience.

Oh yeah, like others I really enjoyed the animations in this. Even more than the player character's animations I really liked the projectiles swirling in the orbs once they're activated. 

Thanks! Really digging the title of your jam :D

No worries, thanks for following up and checking it out :)

Hey, thanks.

Did you click and hold the left mouse button for longer than 1 sec? I'm wondering if there's something else that may be wrong. Do you have your mouse buttons inverted in Windows? 

Hehe, that's a great idea!

I've been thinking about way's to return to this boaty / floaty mechanic in a multiplayer way...

I'm really enthralled with this, although I couldn't get past level 2.

The curvy mechanic and that super-juicy gif got me interested immediately.  

I gave this 3 tries, the first one without any context and the latter 2 after reading the tips and hints on this page. All 3 times I just couldn't get past level 2 (the darker level).

Totally agree with Eltucke that the sound design adds so much to this. Every shot feels impactful. 

Control-wise movement felt great (I played with an xbone controller). I've never felt that type of control before in a FPS and being able to control crouch height is such a neat idea. Hopping from spot-to-spot also felt intuitive.

My big struggle was with curving bullets intentionally. The "fire on release" tip helped a bunch, I was able to start curving stuff regularly ... but was never able to properly control my curves. I found that relying on the spring / bounce was too hard to time and so most of the time I just played with holding down right click (to keep the dot locked) and using left click releases to try attain curves I wanted.

I kept wanting to try an alternative control scheme:
1) no swing / bobbing, so no need for right click AND
2) firing on left-click down (using mouse motion up until that point for curving)     

I wonder if that would have helped?

:'D

Thanks, this is great feedback.  

Totally agree with you on level and enemy design being best areas to work on, that's where my head is too.

Thanks. I think that track is an absolute banger, so I'm happy to promote Nana's stuff: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR8WNU7NJOQYJMfQgBAUSqg

Ah ye, that's diegetic UI alright. I wish I had time to make the health and stamina bars a part of the in-world bow :)

Thanks. The difficulty curve feeling good is really encouraging feedback for me.

Thanks!

Edit: Just checked out your Dog Walk prototype, so cool!

Hey Mandy! Thanks for such great feedback.

It sounds like overall you had good difficulty progression with this, so I'm thrilled about that. I've definitely had stuff way too difficult in the past, which has led to folks giving up early and not getting to enjoy fuller experiences. Your comments made me feel like I'm making progress in this regard and it's really validating. 

On restarts and area progression: Great points. These are things that didn't occur to me while testing and now that you've mentioned them, it would really benefit from improvements.

You mentioned improvements to the HUD, I agree. I'm curious to know if there is something specific you had in mind or something particularly that stood out as irritating / visually gnawing to you?

OMG my spelling game continues to be terrible. Good catch on "Cick" :) 

I actually had arrow key players in mind after your input on previous jams! I didn't know what would make a comfortable jump button though? Right shift? Right control?

Good catch on music not looping.

On the starting area: I personally like that you're able to use it defensively and that you as a player found ways to take advantage of that. My concern, like Ben, is that right now it's too easy to just hang out there forever and never move into the arena. I'm thinking this can be addressed with upgrades and level design. Ideally there would be upgrades that help you out defensively and some arena level designs that have natural advantages for defensive builds (breakable cover, a period of invulnerability when first entering the area, deployable cover, etc). Basically right now you can hide out at the start forever, that's a low-effort, high-time way to make progress... I'd like to find solutions that are higher-effort but higher-reward :) As you pointed out, that would be the challenge in designing this.

Again, thanks so much for your kind words, time and thoughts writing this.

Hey Ben! Thanks for such thoughtful feedback, appreciated. 

On the mono-modal interactions... that's partly lazyness and time pressure :P Once I'd got bow physics working it was easier to just make physics buttons and interaction than building out a whole UI and switching to pointer input. Generally I prefer immersive interactions though, so I'm thrilled that came across. Sorry about the accidental upgrade removals ;( 

On bow-vs-gun, I generally don't enjoy violent stuff so lent away from gun. You also technically don't kill the drones with arrows, just knock them... they only die to impacts with the environment. I don't think this is very clear in the current build but I'd want to make that clearer and more meaningful. I also like the sprint vs fire trade-off... and I also don't feel like it's balanced right. I wanted the stamina to be quite limiting initially to make stamina-affecting upgrades more tempting but I'm not sure that worked? I'd be curious to know if you have any thoughts on how to improve balance / feel there?

Oh yea, you're so right on the entrance door! I was pretty concerned that all the challenge would disappear because of it, I didn't get time to address that concern. I considered having bombs spawn after X seconds near the entrance to push the player out ... but your idea of a breakable entrance is great. It makes me think there should be MORE breakable cover in arenas and increasing it's health, size, etc should be an upgrade tree!

On autobattlers I've barely played any, but I tried SNKRX earlier this year and had a great time with that. Immediately felt like that shop & upgrade system was an exciting space to explore. I read an insightful post by the snkrx dev, which I assume you've seen because you're always so on this stuff, one thing that stuck with me is that the "auto" part of the formula is actually a detractor, because it's largely waiting or low interactivity which by definition is less engaging. That felt very true to me and so with this I tried to keep both the "play" and "shop" parts highly interactive. It's a really powerful system and it's so rewarding to see players stop and spend time considering their options in the shop. Two things I'd love to explore more here are:
1) teaching the shop (it's tricky by nature and takes people a while to figure out ... but once they do it's magic!)
2) testing class synergies (during the jam I just kept quickly playing through and seeing how things felt, but I imagine there are smarter ways to explore combinations quickly at higher levels)
Which autobattlers are you enjoying most?

Another good insight on the enemies, I would have loved to get to more type and challenge levels + larger area sizes. 

Again, thanks for taking the time to play and share your thoughts.