This game was cute, and felt pretty good to play too. Good sense of humour and didn't outstay its welcome - great entry all around! ^^
-Joe
I had this exact idea when we were coming up with plans for what to do, but this is executed so much better than what I had in mind! So much polish!
I think the game would really benefit from two quality of life improvements. First, a way to make the dice move faster - it's pretty frustrating to have to wait for the dice to move, especially in big levels.
Second, a way to undo a move if you make a mistake. Sometimes I'd feel like I got so close, but then had to do the whole level again because I messed up one move at the end.
Other than that, really solid entry all around!
(-Joe)
With spending money to earn passive money, this kinda feels like an idle game (I love idle games so no issue here :D ). I love the idea behind this, seals fighting off sharks tower-defence style.
I wish there were more types of seal to unlock, and also that the enemies would scale up a bit. I put a couple of attack seals at the beginning and they could handle pretty much anything, leaving me free to fill up the rest of the map with money makers.
Solid foundation here, played for quite a while just enjoying watching the numbers go up, great job!
(-Joe)
So much love for Snakebird! (That game was inspiration for me to make two mobile games)
The later levels were put in very late on, and so there was an intended solution, and then it turned out it could be done with less players and we didn't have time to adjust. I agree that having red herring puzzle elements just for the sake of it is mostly just frustrating to the player.
Implying a wrong solution? Fair game.
Putting in elements that actually don't need to be used? Less great.
As for the input recording? I thought we'd need a really clever solution due to memory constraints, but it turned out to not be an issue. Basically we're just recording the joystick vector and the state of the action button every single frame, and storing it in an array that is as long as the time you have for the level. (10 seconds = 600 frames = new FrameInput[600])
Then, each frame we increment the frame number by one. If the player is being controlled, that input data is stored to the array. If the player is not being controlled, the data is read from the array and used as the input for that frame instead. We used an integer for button state so we could tell the difference between button down, and button hold.
If we really needed it to be memory efficient, we could have instead stored the four directional buttons as bitflags, and then stored all five buttons in a single byte. 600 frames of data would then be 600 bytes. But premature optimisation is the root of all evil and all that, turns out we didn't run into any problems for this gamejam doing it like this.
Hope that made sense! If there's anything else you'd like to know just ask! ^_^
(-Joe)
Hello! I hope you've enjoyed Mini Jam 48 as much as we have! I've played and rated your game, and I hope you don't mind me giving you come constructive criticism and feedback about it
Great job on developing this YOURSELF within 72 hours! You done a fabulous job and I could totally see this being expanded into a full game, good job on the sprite art and the music and the mechanics. It's very unique in my opinion!
One thing I would say though, is make either the interact key or the reset key different, I kept accidentally pressing reset!
Hope you have a nice day :D
-Amy
Hello! I hope you've enjoyed Mini Jam 48 as much as we have! I've played and rated your game, and I hope you don't mind me giving you come constructive criticism and feedback about it.
I felt like I got stuck at the exact area which @Vainer got stuck at, the red square got stuck in the corner :(Was struggling to run this, but got it to work eventually, (although it ran pretty slow on my laptop because I don't have a graphics card)
I agree with the other comment, with a 3D platformer you absolutely need the shadow below the player to be able to line up jumps. In the latest Mario game, I'm pretty sure they have a separate light source just for Mario's shadow, so they can have nice lighting (not needing to be pointed downwards) and still have the shadow in the right place.
Also, was it intentional that you can just spam the jump button and fly to the top? (I feel like I cheated)
(-Joe)
I've played and rated your game, and I hope you don't mind me giving you come constructive criticism and feedback about it.
You've done a great job on the platform sprite art and the character sprite art, and you had some great mechanics in there! You could have something like a dotted line showing the player where the cannon ball was going to hit (but I guess that defeats the purpose of firing this cannon if you know where it's going to end up!)
I felt like the jumping needed more work, I often found myself falling down on the last level because my jump wasn't registering, and every time I complete it, the music duplicates! This can be prevented by using singletons, this might help you out
Great job on completing this for the jam! You and your cat done a great job ;)
-Amy
Nice job with this puzzle platformer! I found it a little difficult to play in a few places, and wondering if these are areas you agree with?
I couldn't see the end door, it was too dark. For the first few levels, I just went all the way to the right, but then one level I couldn't, and I had to really closely examine the level to find the door. Even after I knew that, each new level I had to find the door all over again because I couldn't see it without focusing. The goal should probably be easily identifiable, otherwise players aren't going to know what to do.
The spikes seemed a little unforgiving, as just touching them would kill you, even if it was from the side. This combined with jumps that you can *only just* make was a frustrating combination. I stopped playing after getting a game over (the level with the green and red boxes) and had no desire to go through that all again just to get to that point. Also, learning what the green/red boxes do by dying meant that cost me one of my lives, which wasn't a great way to learn that since I had limited lives.
For a GameJam game, you probably benefit the most if people can get to the end of your game, because then they can see all the content you made. Perhaps consider counting up the number of deaths, instead of counting down the number of lives? That way, no matter how many times people die, they don't have to start again, but you still have a way of players rating how well they did based on deaths.
I like the core of the game, I think it just needs a few tweaks to make it more enjoyable to play.
(-Joe)
Super cute! Really great job for your second Unity game, there were a few issues with clipping through walls but I think that wouldn't be too hard to fix. I have a couple of suggestions that I think would make the game more user friendly.
Have the controls on screen, or at least the two buttons that you use (E and R). They won't take up much space, and will be a reminder to the player that they have the option to interact with things, and swap.
Also if you have some sort of indicator as to which character you're currently controlling. Maybe make one a bit lighter, or have an arrow above them? Just something to make it easier to keep track of in the players head.
Perhaps something like this, what do you think?
Great job, keep it up! ^_^
(-Joe)
I've played and rated your game, and I hope you don't mind me giving you come constructive criticism and feedback about it.
I really like the character pixel art and the pixel art for the characters! Really great job on that, you've given them cartoony features which makes the game feel so much more exaggerated and cute.
The gameplay was good, but I feel like you could've done so many more levels! You could make some really complicated levels with the mechanics you have.
The music is really catchy, great job on that!
I feel like you could've added more polish to the game, make the background have some clouds or something.
Other than that, great game, I would love to see more added to this, I hope you enjoyed the jam as much as we have!
(-Amy)
Without any explanation, I'm not exactly sure what the aim of this game is? I got the red guys to shoot each other, and some of them died, but eventually there were two left over that wouldn't kill each other. If you could put a description on this game explaining how to play, that'd be really useful and I think then more people would be able to play!
(-Joe)
I've played and rated your game, and I hope you don't mind me giving you come constructive criticism and feedback about it.
The game is very basic, but great job on making it you two!
I found when I got hit by a rock, some of my collectible values would go past 0 into the minus values.
Was the art work made by yourself or was it an asset?
I also think some groovy space music would've been awesome for this, I would totally play this again if you added more stuff :D
Hope you guys had a great time at this gamejam!
(-Amy)
I've played and rated your game, and I hope you don't mind me giving you come constructive criticism and feedback about it.
I love this game a ton, like the other comments have stated, this game is super polished for being a 72 hour game jam, I'd have expected you guys to have stayed up the entire 72 hours with how amazingly polished this game is.
I love how the game gives some awesome impact when you drop blocks, it's really great!
I'm rubbish at Tetris myself, BUT it's such a challenging and fun game! I could totally see this being a release on the Switch or something.
I have nothing negative to say about this!
AMAZING JOB ALL OF YOU! You've all done awesome :D Give yourselves a round of applause
(-Amy)
So this game was difficult to play for two reasons.
First of all, Chrome considered it a virus, and then Window Defender considered it a virus, and then Windows Smartscreen considered it a virus. Either you need to find a way to make your games considered safe to execute, or I'm an idiot who just installed a virus on their computer ;-)
The second reason was that I didn't really understand the rules? You said that the tank can take a hit, but it died as soon as it did. I buffed up the tank so it had a bit more health, but there were no points for getting hit so it seemed pointless to do? It seems like the goal is to collect the green dots, but I wasn't sure, all I knew is that my score was dropping RAPIDLY into negative numbers, and I couldn't tell why.
I like the idea of two characters with different abilities who can revive each other, but I just didn't understand how to play. It needs better explaining, and needs to be safe to download too!
(-Joe)
I've played and rated your game, and I hope you don't mind me giving you come constructive criticism and feedback about it.
I like how you're mixing traditional art with games, you don't see that too much anymore, I feel like you could have done a better job with erasing the white on the back of the drawings (Try and use something like a lasso tool or a magic wand next time)
I also like how you used water and fire and bullets, this game definitely fits the theme of the jam, great job!
The music seems to duplicate each time you die, but other than that, you picked some nice music :D
Hope you had as much fun in this jam as we did!
-Amy
This is awesome! I managed to beat it, but I felt like I exploited it. I used up the arrows I didn't want making characters walk into walls, so they didn't move at all. That meant I could just use whichever arrow I wanted and made it a lot easier.
I loved the little voices, reminded me of Worms! Very unique idea, and well made, too great job!
(-Joe)
This reminds me of those old choose your own adventure games! Looks like you've written a bunch of dialogue for this, which is really impressive. It took me multiple attempts but I finally got through to the end.
Some of the dialogue I think I missed because a popup appeared over it too fast? There was a room with poison in it, but I didn't get told that, all I got told is that I didn't cure the poison and that I died. It'd be nice to have seen that room first without it skipping to telling me I died.
Overall, great job! I liked this a lot! ^_^
(-Joe)