itch.io

Sadly the upload for this submission failed and it uploaded an empty zip files somehow. This is a link in case anyone wants to see the game.

https://gmchris.itch.io/witch-harvest-reupload

Beautiful and simple to understand puzzle game. It does so many things right, right down to giving the ability to speed up time after you’re confident in your solution. One thing that irked me is that some levels require you to react immediately, which means you’ll probably not be able to beat them the first time around. Perhaps a pause button is in order, since this feels more like a puzzle game rather than a reaction game.

My more important feedback is announcing what will be out of control in a better way. The icons barely grey out and I barely look at them anyway. Perhaps a progress wheel showing the time left till the next swap and what will be unavailable in an icon will make a tremendous improvement to this game.

Great concept, and not a half-bad execution. I think the sound design, and overall presentation are great, however there’s a few things that feel a bit off when playing.

There’s a certain sense of non-responsiveness to the actions and the fact you can very freely fill the bar with the same action puts this game into a bit of an uncomfortable situation, where players may be inclined to stop after every challenge and fill up the whole track with “pick-up” item action which won’t affect their movement.

Speaking of movement, it feels floaty and slidy. With a game where your controls are already under arrest, they should be a lot tighter. So here are some suggestions (I know some of them clash with the current design):

1. A button to reset your current track. While this fights with your idea of the player gradually making life harder for themselves it prevents players from doing a similar thing by just being more cautious and slow (thus designing fun out of their playthrough)
2. When you input a control it will only trigger whenever the next beat happens (I’m sure you’re aware of this), this makes controls feel not too great so I suggest focusing on preparedness by making actions only trigger on the next run of the track.
3. Don’t use the mouse for controls. There’s really no reason for the mouse, other than to further abstract the control scheme. There’s no precise aiming and this everything can be on a keyboard/controller.

Despite not controlling the game directly the controls actually feel really good. Predictable jump and forgiving wall-jumps make it natural to solve the game’s puzzle. With this in mind a few notes:

1. Overlay some sort of tutorial on the first level, because I didn’t know I’m supposed to place actions on the level itself
2. Don’t make full levels out of very simple things, they’re a bit tedious and it goes into something Mark said “It shouldn’t take the player longer to implement the solution than to actually solve a puzzle”. I’m talking about the first few levels where we learn to walk left, then walk left THEN right, then jump. These are very common actions and can be summarized in a level or two.
3. Avoid trial and error levels like the one where you need to go over a walking enemy, because otherwise he’d run into you. There’s no way for me to predict how much the enemy would have walked by then so I either have to guess there’s a reason for the bridge above him or fail the level then do it again.
4. If you’re going to make the game a bit trial and error for sure give players a way to accelarate the process. Maybe a fast more or something.

The control concept is actually brilliant, and while I don’t know if I’d call it out of control, the potential for a great puzzle game is easy to see. The problem is it’s mostly potential at this point, with a single not too mechanically complex level.

I’d love to play a version of this game with more complex level design and wacky mechanics.

First of all, I’m quite impressed with the art in this game, the characters look great and the audio design makes the mechanics feel good.

I do have a few points of feedback:

1. The regain control mechanic seems to either just waste some time if you’re away from enemies or is a death sentence if you’re near them. Furthermore binding it to ‘J’ (instead of space which was already used earlier in the game for the menu) makes for some akward hand placement.

2. At first I figured being spotted means game over, so I was very careful, but when I saw how slow the guards actually were I was able to pretty much run past them quite often.

What I think you have going for you with this concept is the distractability of the protagonist as well as the barking with specific objects, I think you should focus on making those mechanics much more important, for example guards are faster, but it takes them a while to actually notice you, so being distracted near them wouldnt be a death sentence, but you also wouldn’t be able to run past them.

Cool execution of a literal out of control concept. If I could change something about it, it would probably be having the cat’s interruptions play into the level design more by being scripted instead of being random. And respawn enemies when you die (I THINK that doesn’t happen right now)

Confronting the monsters will usually end in death. Use the environment to hide and try to move behind them.

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/463187

Currently at 17 ratings.

A nice game version of a classic riddle. It starts off simple enough, but through its four levels more mechanics and introduced. I think a few QoL changed could improve the experience:

- Why not reset the level as soon as something dies? Or at least prompt the user to restart it by overlaying a "Game over". As far as I can tell you can't win whenever something is eaten.

- An undo button would be great, since this riddle benefits from some experimentation, although I can see how the game could just become a lot of trial and error then.

- Maybe some way to differentiate the "win" side of the river so people know that's the goal. Perhaps some type of farmhouse or even a flag.

- Being able to drag an animal on top of the animal that's already on the boat should swap them in my opinion.

- Some sort of counter for the "Kill in 2 turns" mechanic. Hard to keep track by yourself.

I'm going on a rating spree in about an hour too. Would love a comment more than anything :)

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/463187

This certainly has a potential. I have a couple of negatives:

1 - I think it could have done with a few more levels at least. You introduce new mechanics but never explore them much (enemies, keys, walljumps).

2 - The running seems to be this way intentionally, but I don't get the point since you can just cheese it just by alternating left/right and build up momentum. I'd go for a simpler but still tight horizontal movement.

Creative, but please dial down the acceleration