itch.io

Ok review, 9 months later.

Short and simple, but I wish it had a retry button.

Well considering you attempted this 4 hours before the deadline I'd say you gave it your best shot. Particles are nice, I had a friend who also tried this "close but not too close" idea before as well so I'm always a big fan of that...

But I think a certain comment summarized the problem quite eloquently: "I seem to do better when I don't do anything". The initial configuration, no matter how artistic, leads to this awkward situation where if you stay in the center you'll be able to survive for a very long time.

Nice idea, but please give yourself more time to work next time. Cheers!

Well this was a fun arcade game. 

The shadows were very awkward, I assume you were trying to go for something like a 3D effect which feels a bit incomplete. 

Something else which kind of bugged me was that the "momentum" was always at the bottom of the screen, which was a questionable design choice for a game where you always have to keep looking up.

Still these didn't detract too much from my enjoyment, well done!

This game really is a lot.

I tried playing in browser but the motion blur felt too much, the map was to big and the game suffered from performance. I don't want to say you included too much in your game but it could have been better optimized to load the current parts of the given scene, although I'm sure the windows download performs better as you say.

But besides that the environment was nice, the many weapons were all nice touches and I really like the ring health around the bots.

Nice work!

This was clearly a team effort and it shows.

Really colorful, really nice sound... The tipping mechanic was a bit confusing but besides that I'd say this was very nicely done!

The trailer looks amazing but we were sadly unable to play it in our browser because it was too resource heavy. Cool idea anyway, impressive you managed to make a multiplayer game at all :~>

Couldn't run the game, 'cuz I'm on a Mac but 10/10 on that Speedwagon GIF

Short and sweet and with a great intro to boot :D

The controls are very smooth, but collisions could use a little work (I was able to clip out by running up against a wall when it was rotating I think?). You might also consider having a warning, such as an exclamation mark pop-up before the negative thoughts appear, so the player will have a chance to dodge.

The ending was a bit of a let down, as no matter what I did I could only achieve world peace, but I assume you ran out of time when thinking of different endings. Still, it's nice to see you spent that extra time on giving us all a cool intro.

Nicely done!

Thank you for your kind comments. We actually had to patch the quotes and doctors falling in after the submission of the jam, but I'm at least glad you were able to enjoy them :D

This was a fun arcade game. If I had one complaint, it was that some ingredients would just not show up enough times before the time ran out (especially if you lost time from collecting too many wrong ingredients). Other than that pretty fun :D

Easy concept, tricky game. I didn't quite get you were supposed to leave the cat alone at first but besides that everything else was fairly obvious, nice job.

This was an original idea. 

Guess no one else asked so I'll go ahead: 

What happened to the title screen? Why is the text so small?

But besides the unwelcoming intro, the game itself was quite welcoming and easy to figure out. Nice job!

SOOO MUCH DESTRUCTION! 

Wish the destruction percentage actually did something though.

This was an experience. A simple game with a simple message, but throwing that song in was really going the extra mile. Here's hoping you'll expand on this even further after this jam!

Glad you finally fixed this, it's one of the first games I'd seen but only now have I been able to get around to playing it. 

A bit buggy, but I think this is probably one of the "longest" games from the jam I've rated so far. While having some length is good, sometimes it felt like levels were very big and disorganized, a wider camera or map could have made the game a lot more enjoyable. The invincibility power-up was a nice addition, although unreliable as sometimes germs would cover an entire platform and you might not get any vaccines.

The game-balance could use reworking but otherwise I think it was fun, nice job!

Fun game, great humor, 10/14, would become a renowned ornithologist who will be remembered for ever again.

I liked that you had 14 whole birds and the ambient music, but some of those birds just move around too quickly. It wasn't impossibly difficult though so I think you could improve it greatly if you could just slow down the birds a bit.

Nice job for an early submission!

The graphics and audio might have been a bit bare-bones, but the overall game was quite enjoyable. It took me a while to figure out that the circles released triangle bullets when destroyed and that the guns could also do damage on contact. A few things could be a bit more obvious but other than that, it's pretty enjoyable. Nice job!

I was able to get up to 10100!

This was the most unique? Please, Madtronics was clearly the avant-garde entry this jam :P

I think the yellow ants give you more time, purple ants "disable" the holes; and your final score depends on how many ants you can drop in.

The red ants are carnivores and need to be clicked on to shew away.

That's a lot of notifications! I've always wanted to make a game like this, wonder if I'll ever get around to it. But anyway, I'd say the game's strongest suit was the humor. I love how I need to like "Literally the President" and "My Father's cringy memes".

Game balance-wise, the sheep game didn't increase health as quickly as it should have; I kept running out of health. 

The background becoming clearer to signify your needs being low was a nice touch, albeit not super obvious.

But all in all it was enjoyable enough for a few minutes. Nicely done!

I'm going to have to a detailed review for this one (cracks knuckles):

Theme: Yes, that was definitely a lot of sorrow, although it felt more like a lot of hunger, seeing how easy it was to get hungry. The real sorrow was seeing the character just collapse when you thought you had things under control.

Mood: Welp, I might not have a job yet or regularly see a psychiatrist, but I can clearly tell that the people who made this game did an excellent job at reflecting the mindset of a programmer, especially one participating in a game jam such as this.  You really nailed it,  from "feeling too overjoyed to bother to eat anything" to the jarringness of having to walk very long distances after having spent the past few hours in-place on a computer. I could almost call it hyper-realism, I'm not sure if a game should ever be this tedious, but mood wise it really helps the game get its message across.

Audio: The music was okayish for my tastes, it was nice that you managed to include a unique sound effect for almost every action. But maybe that was the point? As you play longer and longer, the music almost gets nauseating, not to say it's bad or anything, but that it can really wear down the listener. Similarly the sound effects begin to sound annoying, not ugly, but as if every pill is slightly harder to swallow than the last one. Whether intentional or not, it got to the point where I began to dread certain sounds, especially the aforementioned pills as the psychiatrist would keep prescribing higher and higher dosages.

Graphics: Again pretty simplistic designs, but considering the scale of the world stretching from your house to the psychiatrist, I'd say quantity to quality works here. But just because it adds the visual elements necessary to keep the player pre-occupied at all times, instead of having them stuck in a very well designed house all day.

Game Design: Tedium. Everything is tedious, everything is difficult, you have to make difficult choices while being punished for not paying attention. On paper this is a horrible idea for a game, but as you can tell from my words above, I think the theme let's you get away with this horrendous gameplay.

That being said it could use a lot of improvements. I would rather watch an unskippable cutscene when going to the psychiatrist than walk there with my horrendously slow speed. I don't like not being able to rest when I get tired, I mean there was the sofa but it was unreasonably far from the  character's room. If we're going for realism here, I would have rather been able to fling myself on the bed for a short rest or nap. 

The tutorials were a mess, moving the flashlight around was  very clunky, I couldn't quite figure out why the light was sometimes talking to me... Not to mention how confusing it was that the hunger and health bars work in reverse (100 for max. hunger, 100 for max. health; but one goes up while the other goes down). But I imagine these were just issues you were unable to resolve during the course of the jam and might have had a better chance to look into if you had more time.

Overall: Definitely very experimental. Feels a lot like a point and click game, reminds me a bit of "sim" games considering how many status bars you have to balance. A full release would definitely need a lot of reworking, but as is it's definitely one of the most unique games for this jam. It's a good kind of unique, where gameplay and artistic choices really complement one another. Is it a fun game? Maybe not. I'd say it's more appropriate to look at it like avant-garde art. It's definitely not for everyone, I can't see myself playing this for prolonged amounts of time, but again maybe that is the point. 

All in all I'm just astounded you were able to finish this within the time constraints of the jam at all. Great job there!

> The masked dudes fall down very fast, but for some reason the gravity works differently on the hero.

This was a deliberate design choice, I decided to make the enemies falling a touch more "humorous" I suppose by giving them a ridiculous falling speed. It was done for emphasis, which clearly pays off but at the cost of realism.

Other than that thanks for your kind comments, we're looking into fixing those hit-boxes (and possibly making death feel less "abrupt")

Well it's a very broad topic but it's probably best to start with "runner" tutorials 

the next stage of this (even advanced for us) is to build "dungeon" or large structures.

Yeah I did the music actually, I was more in favor of doing SFX but the gambit of going for a ambient track instead seems to have payed off. We might add some basic sounds (footsteps, jumping and yes death screams).

As for the hitboxes, I think the size is fair, but certain angles can be too sharp. We could try skewing the hitbox so it's a bit more leaning to the right.

Thank you for your kind comments.
We've actually updated a few times, for the "12 hours" experience help yourself to the 1.0 version (*_*)

Note: Our other team members weren't able to run the game, so they assigned me, the harshest critic of them all, to play it.

First of all, it is a good game, and I don't mean it in the "hey man, I need some ratings, great game though!" way, I really mean it. I see that this is your second jam game, and you did a great job!

Now, after that is out of the way, I must say that I am no game-critic and I know that there are human beings like me at the other side of the screen, putting effort and time and sweat to doing something, great.

But I didn't enjoy it.

I know, I just said that you did a great job, didn't I? Yes, you did. But the game is something like... a captcha. There is no fun, there is just frustration in failing to pass it. In a short span of time it turns from something funny into a program that actively designed to make you fail and you just get more and more frustrated along the way.

But again, I am no game-critic, and I find this game better than all of our games, combined. You made a game, an actual game, in a short amount of time, using a unique mechanic. And managed to do it, by coordination! That is the thing that amazes me the most.

Tips:

You can try to lower the difficulty, or give player higher stamina. You can buff the stick by making its "stamina bar" separate. You can also change the colors of the animals to make it easier to differentiate them.

Wow, just wow, I'm stunned. This is honestly amazing and I'm not just saying that because I like over-complicated games. A 9/10 on Game Design to be sure, with that one point missing due to how easy it is to trigger an overheat and have to start all over.

On the contrary to previous comments, yes make this a full game. But again, make sure to rework that overheating thing. I also love how the instructions were always randomized, which forces the player to learn what the instructions mean instead of relying on muscle memory to solve all of their problems. That's really something missing in games nowadays so I would be all for supporting this kind of a design choice.

Just maybe consider having a tutorial in a full release instead of a super-long level 1 and introducing different mechanics as the game goes on, but given jam constraints I don't think the game has any serious issues. It could use some audio work, but the visuals get the job done.

All in all great job, hope you pursue it further in the future. Nice job !

Yeah it is 64bit, any other ideas?

Nope, not really. One of the team members is learning French this year so he suggested we come up with a French name, (see https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GratuitousFrench). It actually means "The Scapegoat" in English or "Il Capro Espiatorio" in Italian.

Hardcore Gamer mode FTW!

Although you mostly used pre-existing assets, your choices in fine taste still warrant some appraisal. 

The game is pretty straightforward but the addition of the "overheating" mechanic adds in an extra bit of challenge. 

Now if you excuse me I've got exploded and it's now time for REVENGE. 

Pros: 

• It's playable in browser or on a phone
• Matches the theme pretty well

Cons:

• Jumping seems to mess some things up. The world begins to shake, my keyboard will start to influence the direction objects fall and worst of all you can't even do it on mobile.

As a bit of constructive criticism I'd suggest you to try and improve your art skills or maybe compete as a team next time, it never hurts to get some help (^_^)

Not really a game, but it has enough interactivity to entertain for a few minutes. And that entertainment is phenomenal.  I can see this being used as a meditation app you really did a great job in the short time you had.

I personally think your biggest accomplishment was making it mobile-browser friendly, even if right-click won't work, which is quite a success!

Everything is a 10 here, simply brilliant!

Yet another browser game here folks! We just updated it in fact so go check it out

https://itch.io/jam/quarantinejam/rate/588554

We've finally updated the game to increase enemy difficulty, how about trying it now (^_^)

Version 1.2 out now! 

https://efegiller.itch.io/le-bouc-emissaire/devlog/131177/version-12

Thank you for your kind comments.

We're actually updating the enemy spawn rate and difficulty right now, as well as the glitchy parallax; we had noticed these but thanks to you as well bringing it up. :D

I am heavy weapons guy... and this... is my weapon.