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kelsito

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A member registered Jul 23, 2019 · View creator page →

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This was a really fun game - and I'm a sucker for puns, so I liked the liar/lyre setup.  ;)  Very impressed you managed to build this in just a week!

Some comments from as I was playing through, in roughly chronological order:

I like the audio - the music on the title screen immediately set the mood/tone for the game very well, and goes very well with the game overall (it's not distracting during gameplay, while also being quite pleasant to listen to).  The sound effects are also decent - I liked the falling noise when you miss a platform and drop off the screen (which, to be honest, I heard a lot - platformers aren't my strong suit!)

In terms of what I'd suggest changing: not a lot!  The lyre music effect did get a little repetitive, mainly because I kept spamming it as often as I could - maybe having a couple of little randomised snippets to vary it up a little bit would be a nice touch there.  Also, on my first playthrough I found it difficult to see that the fake spikes were flashing when the lyre music hit them (i.e. they are fakes), because the spike animation partly hides the flash (unless you're really looking hard for it).  But that just adds additional challenge, so definitely not a showstopper!  ;)

Overall, very enjoyable game, really liked the concept and the execution, would definitely recommend to others!  Well done!

Thank you very much, I'm glad you enjoyed it!  Interesting re: the potential bug, I'll have to investigate that one...it would definitely be difficult (maybe impossible!) to finish the game without being able to buy multiple levels of those upgrades - so thank you for flagging it!  :)

Thank you very much, I really appreciate the feedback!

You're right - I think that if I make one single improvement to this game in the future, it'll be to try and adjust that gameplay loop of finding/returning the dead bodies, and easing the punishment of dying.  Particularly if you get pretty far along, suddenly dying and losing all your progress is extremely harsh, and becomes more likely to happen the further you go (which makes it a nasty mechanic where the pain scales upwards with the progress, which isn't ideal at all!)

I'm making notes of all the various feedback points people provide and storing them on my potential improvements list for the future, so thanks once again!  :)

I very much enjoyed playing Liar's Map - I'm very impressed that you managed to get this much done in only a week!  Some general comments (in no particular order, just as the thoughts cropped up during play) below:

1) I loved the concept of the 'one truth and two lies' maps - definitely an interesting mechanic, and the ability to investigate/eliminate/cross-check them during play (e.g. by putting ticks and crosses next to them on the Clues window) made it a good part of the gameplay too.  It led to some interesting emergent strategies as well (e.g. do I sacrifice one of my weaker soldiers to investigate whether there really IS an enemy camp in this quadrant, allowing me to eliminate the other two clues).

2) Minor point: it wasn't always clear (on the main map or on the overworld map) what some of the objects there were - e.g. the blue star(?).  Possibly just because I never stumbled across the thing they might represent.  Not a major issue at all, as you can pretty much use whichever image for whichever concept you like during play (you're marking up your own overmap, after all!)

3) I still have no idea what the gateway-type objects are/do.  I think I destroyed one?  But another one ate one of my men?  Don't know.  Does that vary depending on playthrough?  The danger of hidden-information games is that the player might not pick up on/be able to fully appreciate some of the intricacies of what you've built - if the gateway does something different on each map, for example (though I'm assuming it doesn't and is simply another hazard!)

4) We liked the soundtrack - it fitted well, and was pleasant enough to listen to without being intrusive/distracting.  Again, impressed you managed a soundtrack as well in the time!

I'd definitely recommend Liar's Map to some of my friends - it's a nice mix of careful, slow, thoughtful planning, and frantic "oh no I've just run headlong into a camp of enemies because I missed an obvious logical inference" action, which works really well!  Thank you for building it - very much enjoyed!  :)

(You also appear to have made a game that my girlfriend enjoyed watching/correcting me on, which is a rare thing - congratulations?)

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, it's hugely appreciated - and is all really constructive, too!

I fully take on board all your points about the tension between the story-play, as it were ("returning bodies leads to bad things happening") and the gameplay ("return bodies to progress"), as well as the frustration of potentially losing all progress at any given moment.  I actually experienced some of that myself while doing my final playtesting, and you're absolutely right that it's infuriating!

I'll consider all your excellent points in further detail, and may well rework/rebalance some of the game aspects to make it less punishing (or at least less frustrating).  And yes the camera is...uh...interesting at the moment!  ;)  There's a lot of very clunky code going on in the background, and I think it potentially needs a full rewrite.  Version 2.0, perhaps!

Huge thanks once again - I'll definitely play and review Liar's Map, it looks very interesting!  :)

Finally, done.  This has been educational - I've had to cut scope drastically (as I expected), but it's reached a point where it's at least playable, if rather kludgy and janky!  Given that this is my first ever completed game, and first ever game jam, I'm happy with where I got to in this week!  :)  I even had to learn tilemaps from scratch, having never used them before (which probably shows!)

A couple of screenshots attached.  Sorry for the extremely bad programmer-pixel-art!




Thanks! Yes, health packs (or similar) were something I considered, but time worked against me for that one. Also under consideration was another shop upgrade element to upgrade your health, or your resistance to damage (there are actually five different damage types, but only two of them are actually used in this current prototype - 'spike' from coral, and 'drowning' from...well, drowning!) Possibly something for me to tackle in some future version!

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Spent all morning debugging complicated script problems I'd made for myself.  It has been an educational - if not entirely productive - morning.  Trying to power on through by submission time tomorrow!

Ah, the joys of trying to throw together sufficient mechanics to allow for decent storytelling (to support the jam theme) in just five days.  I've tried to weave together a dialogue system and a shop system in my jam attempt.  It's currently hanging together so loosely and with such instability that I'm genuinely scared I'm going to bring the whole edifice crashing down with one bad script edit.

And yet, somehow, yes, it's still fun!

Similarly, first ever game jam and very early days in terms of learning game design and development - this will be a learning experience for me, not a winning experience (and that's all good!) :)