Thank you for giving it a play Juddleys. I tried to make the experience and controls accessible and I'm so glad you were able to enjoy it. I used a rigid body to give the vehicle momentum and I agree that swooping through a new mission feels great. I look forward to playing your game. Thank you for the feedback.
Enjoyment: I enjoyed the novel concept of moving the ground rather than moving the avatar. That was very interesting
Concept: The concept of a circular track was a good way to design the levels
Presentation: I thought the characters where very cute and fit in with the fantasy theme. I also enjoyed the animated character in the background.
Use of Theme: The game has you delivering gems to the princess. This was good motivation to keep going.
Overall, once I figured out how to move the ground, I was able to move forward and enjoyed the challenge.
Technical Notes:
• The controls could be described in the game. I had to read the instructions in order to figure them out.
• I think it would be nice to have a sound when the gems were collected.
Thank you for playing my game!
Thank you for the review shashKing. Your suggestions are dead on. This is my first VR project and onboarding/accessibility is something I need more practice with. My next project will be more intuitive now that I have more experience. Out of curiosity, did you feel you were positioned on the hover-bike correctly? I added an update that auto-positions the player and I'm curious if it was effective.
Thank you again for the feedback.
I see what you mean about pointing the vehicle down when diving. That makes a lot of sense because it defiantly gets in the way when trying to see where you are going. Thanks for the suggestion. I really liked your game by the way. Great especially finding the ringing phone with sound. That was the first time I've ever seen sound used like that.
Amazing game. Incredible use of hand tracking and in-game interfaces. It took me three tries but I eventually got the pizza with 2:22 left. My favorite parts were finding the phone using sound and finding the second half of the pin number on the corner of the painting. Very well thought through and polished for a seven day jam. 5 stars!
Thank you so much for giving it a play BBIT. I agree that the controls are a challenge. I had to figure out how to map up/down left/right forwards/back and left turn/right turn to two joysticks. I'm still not sure on the best way.
With regard to your suggestion about turning the plane the controls actually do allow you to turn left and right with the right thumb-stick or joystick, but I know I didn't explain that very well with the instruction graphics.
With regard to your suggestion about positioning the player, I totally agree. I actually just posted a new build that auto-places the player at the right position at the beginning of the round. I hope it makes the game more accessible.
Thank you again for giving it a play and leaving me my first comment. This is my first VR game jam!
I'm going to give yours a play now.
I was going to compliment your game. Then I looked at the gameplay clips and realized that I have only played the intro scene. I'm going to jump back in and figure out how to play the levels.
Update: I got to the first level, but it was too hard. I think this mechanic is fantastic though, so five stars!
I tried out the game. Thought the music was great as well as the throwing mechanic. I kept falling from the helicopter but eventually got the hang of it. Great work on the intro.
I always thought a game about throwing spears into large monsters would be fun. Your game inspired me to explore that further.
Hey fateful. Just wanted to give you an update. I started to do some updates to the game, but I hadn't designed the game very well on the first pass so making the updates was hard. I've learned a lot about how to make programs that are easy to fix and modify recently, so I'm in the process of re-writing the internals of the game so that changes in the future are easy and fast. This will allow me to quickly fix bugs and add new features like new game-modes very easily. I'm going to add the modifications we talked about as soon as I rewrite the internals. It's sort of hard for me to estimate the timeline on that. This is the biggest program I've ever written and now it's the biggest program I've ever re-written, so I'm sort of in new waters here. I'll keep you updated on the progress. Hope you're doing well.
Hey Fateful. Metal Slug is the most iconic side-scrolling shooter in my opinion. It defiantly was a precursor to Madness Interactive which was a big inspiration for this game. My design goal was to put a side-scrolling top-down shooter on a table-top. I also downloaded RV tournament. I'm playing my first round now.
I've decided to break the update into two or three parts so I can get your fixes to you quicker. The next update will have blue-tooth support and the improved instructions. I will probably have the new surfaces support also, but that might come in the second update. I took some short-cuts to get the game out faster and because I want to continue developing it I need to go back and re-write some of the poorly architected parts.
If you're available to answer some questions about your experience, that would really help me understand how players interact with the game. Just answer whatever you want, skip anything that's not interesting.
What kind of gamer are you? When did you start? How often do you play? Which platforms? What are your favorite genres and titles? Previous AR experience?
How did you find the game? When did you make the decision to download? What made you decide to download?
How approachable was the game for you? How was the AR set-up process? Did you get stuck or feel confused at any point? How did you learn the controls? Were the controls approachable or were they difficult to understand?
How do you play the game? Where do you play it? How does it fit into your life? Do you play it during short work breaks? When you have free time? Is the game still novel or interesting to you? How long before you got tired of the game? (No need to exaggerate. I don't play the game myself because it's not very compelling to me. Probably because I did so much testing during development. Most people probably just give it a single play. I'm just interested in how you interact with the game.)
Have you beaten the challenge mode? (I tried to designed it so that an average player could win with only a little practice. I wanted people to be able to easily experience all the content.)
I think you said you're on a 6S. Have you had any performance problems? (Like stuttering frame rate, Performance changes with low battery conditions, or excessive heating, poor battery life. The game freezes for me on about 1 out of 6 games and requires a restart. Does that ever happen do you? This is a very difficult bug to diagnose. The game kills the battery on my device. Sometimes just 10 minutes will take me from 50% to 10%. I tried to make it so a player could play though the whole challenge mode on an older device without noticeable performance problems - I couldn't really avoid battery problems though)
I included a short-cut where you can do a 2 finger tap on the left side to open/close the editor. Sometimes I activate this by mistake. Do you ever activate this by mistake? I'm probably going to remove that feature in the update.
Do you play in landscape or portrait orientation?
Have you used the time-slider to alter the speed of time? If so when? Have you ever paused the game and looked at the scene?
Was anything about the game unclear, confusing, or frustrating to you at any point?
How do you interact with the various scale options? Did you understand the scaling options from the beginning? What did you size it to? What surface do you usually play it on, table or floor?
What stands out to you? What's the first thing that comes to your memory when you think about the game?
Feel free to answer any of the questions that seem interesting to you. To give you context, I'm a very amateur developer. I've only published 2 amateur games. My goal is to keep practicing until I can make really compelling games with viral appeal. I want to make games that are totally novel and break away from prior convention. There's also amazing technology coming out that's accessible to people like me. Tech like this AR stuff as well as tech that can allow for thousands of animated characters on screen and 1,000 - 10,000 players in a shared universe.
I really like seeing things fly through the air and the smoke trails do a great job emphasizing the movement. The rifles have projectiles that travel at 200 m/s (when in life size mode) but it's really cool because the smoke lets you visualize a 200 m/s projectile that would otherwise be a blur. 1800's muskets had about that muzzle velocity. I would actually browse the internet looking for cool gun models to relax after a hard day's development. It reminded me of a fashionista shoe-shopping online. It was hilarious because I eventually had 60 gun models (essentially every gun I ever though was cool or saw in a movie/game, western and eastern block, almost all the NATO rifles) and this incurred a huge overhead because I had to design the properties for 60 weapons (sort of like having too many shoes in your closet). The majority of the guns were actually made by amateur artists who post their work online for free. I sometimes changed the colors or form a little so there was a coherent aesthetic. You can check out creative-commons modes I used here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U1QNcLbOzmagvtLWFlD_qdd4dkFQf_JQtzA8Vva3...
These are some of my favorites
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/apsmg-4549b93ce4704e79aefb7fbd4c9dc481
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/triple-barrel-shotgun-54c82c65b15d47a3a3a43c46d17f679b
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/supershorty-4207137c47c74c5e92904ea37121a0c0
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/magpul-fmg-9-vang-choi-loa-b30c1940f8904460987e47b46f33efea
This update also includes a better explanation of the controls which I hope will help new players get oriented without help. The best way I've found to introduce someone to the game is playing it in front of them, then demo-ing the controls while explaining, then putting it in their hand. I actually sometimes sit on main street just doing demos while enjoying the weather.
Here you are in the credits:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1T-5LHkIv000s3avR9rheZvdYMmXQOH-lGZj4sCNWEUU/edit#gid=0
I hope it's okay if I reach out to you again for feedback. You're actually the first organic fan of the game I've made contact with. Understanding your experience and perceptions is going to be very valuable to me.
Thanks for noticing the mannequin responses. I worked really hard getting those to look smooth and realistic because of how cool I think it is when the animations are life-like. A big inspiration was Call of Duty: Black Ops, Zombie Minigame. I really like the idea of knocking an enemy back with bullets. Your suggestion about the ceiling is great. I had already thought a little about ceiling based games (mostly because they promote good neck posture relative to ground games) but I never considered inverting a ground based game and putting it on the ceiling. The beautiful thing is, that would probably be really easy to implement. It might only take one new line of code that flips the game when it's placed on a roof plane rather than a floor. Now I'm wondering if you could play it on a wall. (Edit: Dude, I'm totally doing to do this. There's no reason not to. I'm going to detect wall and ceiling planes and orient the game to those planes as well. Mannequin Madness on ALL SURFACES NOW! Once I publish this update, you'll be an official game designer. What name would you like associated with you in the credits?) Also, it can be played from 2nd or 3rd story balconies in life-size mode. That's pretty fun too. If you make it max small and set the game on a desk, it can be played in portrait while resting your wrist on the table. Also, 5x damage for headshots. I'm going to implement multi-player eventually. The technology to do that is recently available. I also want to add giant enemies that are like 3x taller than you because I think that would look awesome in life-size. It'd be like a 20ft giant coming at you!
Thanks for the bug report. I did your test and identified the problem. This issue emerges from a bug with Unity games on iOS using bluetooth. You can read about the issue here: https://forum.unity.com/threads/audio-not-playing-through-bluetooth-headphones-on-ios.546154/. The fix looks pretty simple and I have some air-pods myself so I will confirm bluetooth support in the next update. I'll send you another message when the update is out. Please let me know if you find anything else that needs to be fixed.
