Thank you very much for that feedback, I am super glad you enjoyed the game!! :)
I totally agree that it could use some adjustments on how much customers are requesting in total, and how quick the fridge is closing too!
Also I never thought about putting the game into a horror settings, but now that you mention it, I can definitely see the angle!
I'm glad you could still upload the game so that we get to see it! :)
The rat model is and walking animation is super cute tbh <3 However, it wasnt exactly clear to me what my goal actually is, when I started, and what all different kinds of pickups do (it gets a little clearer once you pick them up and see what kinds of stats are changing of course).
I happened to find the goal relatively quickly on my first run - I am not sure how extensive the maze is or if there are paths that theoretically lead you to dead ends, so maybe I was just lucky! The end itself was a little underwhelming where it said that I won, and then a few seconds later I just got the usual "Game Over" screen ^^
I could really well imagine that game to be procedurally generated, where you have certain segments of your sewer as nodes that randomly sprawl off from and connect to each other! (If that is something you could imagine doing in the future!)
The games biggest strength is definitely the charm and personality of the characters! (For example the sprite where Amar puts their fingers together is just SO cute <3)
However because of this much dialogue it you need some stamina to sit through all of it and take it all in, which for me posed a little bit of a problem. Still I really feel like you put a lot of effort into working those conversations and lore bits about humans out, and that's great!
The fighting system itself is very familiar, and most things there are intuitively understandable! It's not something that I am a big fan of, personally, but I think that's really just a matter of taste, and in and of itself there is nothing wrong with it :)
One last nitpick however - some of the dialogue texts were going beyond the dialogue boxes, making parts of it unreadable. Also there seemed to be some text missing at the end of the first transition to the new area.
I don't think I ever played a game like this before! It definitely has a lot of space which really shifts the gameplay feeling in an interesting way. I like the mysterious atmosphere a lot, and I think that the writing is one of games biggest strengths, because it really sucked me in and caught my attention!
I got to two endings in total (one was the standard ending of fixing the pipe normally, another one was where I offered the shadow as a tribute to the statue) - and it feels like there is still much more that I could do, but the fact that I would have to redo everything is kind of disheartening. I could imagine that at each point where you make a decision or get/trade an item, you could make a checkpoint, and once you die, you can scroll back to your checkpoints and continue on from one of them. Just an idea though, to encourage players to get all endings / see all lore!
One incredibly tiny nitpick, and something that bothered me more than it should have - the fact that the diagonal walking does not exactly diagonally walk through a tile square on the ground really drove me crazy at some points! xD
I've never seen an ASCII game done for a game jam, that's really cool - and ontop of that, your interpretation of the themes is very unique and interesting as well :)
I made it to Sector 20, but then ran into a room that had no width, but the exit at the end, so I had no means to get to it.
Other than that, I can agree to the comments below - especially that the lore text is really hard to read when you focus on finding an exit!
(Also one more thing, more on a meta level - I really appreciate you putting that content warning on that page! A lot of people would probably not even think about it, but it's very nice of you that you do! <3)
This is such a delightful little game!! I feel like it does not so much explicitly touch on the subtopics of the Jam as others, but that doesnt take away from the fun at all! The color palette is really making me feel nostalgic <3
Completely agreeing with Huilandos, that the explosions of the bigger enemies are really hard to dodge because they are extremely fast - I think they killed more of my runs than every other enemy type combined!
I could also very well imagine an extra screen in the start menu, where you just explain really quickly what each type of power-up or enemy does - at least I feel like that would have really helped me in particular.
Oh boy, that game is really good with time pressure!! I definitely think that the time pressure is essential to the game - but I also feel like it might be helpful for new players to slow down the first two fights at the beginning a little, giving the player more time to get into how this game is played!
I can see a really fun gameplay loop in this game, especially with more polish! :) It immediately reminded me of Inscryption, one of my favourite games. I also liked the little map that the game generates and that the player can reroll - It has a very good board game aesthetic!
If I am perfectly honest, even after a few fights, I still don't know where I can see my energy-meter and how much energy I have left :x
All I gathered is that there is a set amount of energy each turn that I can spend, but that's about it. I feel like especially under time pressure it's really hard to parse what is going on exactly. (But that might also only be an issue for me!)
Otherwise, all my other points of critique have already been said in the other comments! Especially turning card rewards down after winning a battle - or maybe even selling particular cards from your deck - would be great!
I like the general game concept very much, and I feel that with more polish, this game could be a really fun strategy sim to play! The card concept is also adding an interesting spin to it, that I havent seen before!
My biggest problem with the game however was that I felt kind of lost and wasn't sure what exactly is happening right now. The tutorial in the beginning (though a bit quick) gave a good overlook over the general game mechanics you have, but the actual fighting felt somewhat confusing because I didn't know what exactly was going on and because of the turn time limit I didn't have enough time to parse all that so quickly. I feel like this could already be helped if you just included the fighting screen into your tutorial as well! (After reading the explanation on your itch page it's getting somewhat more clear what is happening though!)
The theme is incorporated very well! :)
I't a fun, little game! :) There does not always need to be a lot of depth to a game to be enjoyable! The actual game screen size could have been a bit bigger, but it also works fine as it is!
The "handmade" aesthetics are working really well for this - I am sure with a few more animations, background sprites, or just a variety of different meteor sprites, in the same look, it would look even more polished!
Thank you very much for that feedback, and for this much Praise as well! <3 Overall, I can only agree with all your criticism!
Reaching day 9 is definitely an achievement on it's own already - and the score is most impressive! (Touching back on your last point, I agree that the difficulty scaling gets really rough past day 6, and the balancing aspect was definitely something that came too short!)
I figured that a programmer would immediately be able to spot what is going on with the queue haha :D It's exactly what you think it is!
The wonky turnarounds from the customers to reach their target position are connected to me using the unity nav mesh for the pathfinding for the first time. Works great for the general purpose, but I still have some kinks to iron out there!
Also you figured correctly - the looking-around feature was implemented at the very start already, because the notebook and the water dispenser were supposed to be on the bottom of the shop, so you had to look down to reach them. I decided to move them up at the end though, so that new players can find them more easily, and reduced the zone where the camera-rotation for the looking around actually triggers so that it doesnt trigger when you move the mouse over to drink some water or to look into your notebook. It was tricky to balance, but I still wanted to keep the effect, because I felt being able to look after the customers leaving or looking around for where they are coming from adds some much needed immersion! I totally agree though, the current state of it really needs improvement!
Again, thank you very much - your feedback was very appreciated!! :)
I can very much see the effort you put into the game - it's unfortunate we can not see the models in a closer look, because I feel like they would really shine, with those cool and spooky designs! :)
I feel like it was a bit hard for me to get into the game, because of how the cars control. I am not sure if that is how cars usually control in top-down perspective games, but W making the car move forward from the cars perspective really confused me, and not from "my" global perspective really confused me at first! (But then again, I feel like that is not easy to implement while also having actual car-like steering)
From a game design point, I feel like the game is a little too fast-paced and chaotic. (Even though that makes it incorporate the "Madness" aspect quite well!) Personally I often felt lost and like I had no overview nor real control over what is happening - with cars bumping into me a lot and pushing each other around. But then again, I find it difficult to suggest anything to fix that without losing the actual spirit of the game idea!
If you want to develop the game further after the jam, I will definitely be excited to see how it progresses! :)
Tha's all perfectly reasonable, the time really was short for such a big game, afterall!
Ah, that is an interesting way to do the pathfinding, and definitely makes sense! I dont think we had the flashlight on, because we just kept it off the whole time at a certain point. I think most of the time that was just by chance then! Thank you for explaining it :)
This game is really, really cute! <3 The story fits very well with the theme too!
I very much like the indie-game aesthetics - especially the cute little animation of the character when walking, sliding and jumping/falling! Also the parallax effect with the graphics in the background is adding a lot of charme to it!
The biggest issue of this game - in my opinion - is that the resolution of the overlays got changed somehow (that might have happened when you were porting it to WebGL, or you didnt set the canvas that it was on to scale automatically with screen size). By that I mean the resolution of the newspaper-menu, and also the green effect of (what I assume to be) the radioactive poisoning. That somewhat hurts the immersion, and also makes the lines in the newspaper hard to read!
The background picture in the main menu also seems a little warped, like it was forced into a different aspect ration. That's just a minor nitpick though!
The reflections on the water seemed to be a little inconsistent. In the first level, I could see myself being reflected in the water, but later in later levels I could not see myself there anymore. In general I would suggest making the reflections smaller too, because they can be somewhat distracting.
The actions of walking and jumping are simple and very intuitive for a platformer! But the sliding actually took me a bit to figure out - it seems a little inconsistent and is also not explained anywhere. It would be cool to have a very simple explanation of the character movement in the start menu.
I feel like the jumps could be adjusted to be just a liiiiittle bit higher, because some jumps from one lower platform on an elevated one (which I assume are supposed to be makable) often require a lot of tries to get them, and the higher platform seems to be just barely out of reach because of that. Some of the jumps really required a lot of precision, but that is okay because the character can be controlled mid-air.
Two other things that I noticed in my playthrough: The radioactive poisoning really catches you by surprise, and it's not explained where it's coming from / which zones actually poison you and which are not (I figured it's the "outside" zones, when you dont have a roof over your head anymore). Also pushing a button feels like an impact is missing, because if you dont see anything move, then you dont know that the button did something at all. My suggestion would be to add a button-pressing sound effect or animation, just so that the player gets a little bit of feedback, that the button was actually pressed!
Sloped surfaces also seemed to be a litle janky, because you can run up slopes while you are on them, but if you are on even ground, you can not run up a slope anymore.
One last thing - though not exactly gameplay related - but I very much liked the backrgound music, and especially the fact that you had a volume slider to adjust it!! :)
That's all the feedback I got, I hope it helps you! You definitely have put together a really cute game, and I enjoyed playing it! <3
I am glad you enjoyed them - all of those sounds are selfmade <3 It was a lot of fun to play around with it!
I totally get what you mean with it being mundane as a main activity, I thought about a more intricate "shopping" system at first, but settled with this more basic concept of it, so I could focus on working on the other tasks you have to do next to the item dispensing.
Thats a good score!! Thank you very much for playing and leaving some feedback :)
What a fitting game for a Game Jam that ends on Halloween! <3
A friend and I took turns playing that game and we both agree it's one of the best polished games here in this game jam! :)
First things first - the entire story, the creature, the aesthetics, and the voice acting are all amazing, especially for the little time you had to put it all together! The game mechanics are simple and intuitive, and totally fitting for a game jam game! The 3D models are also all very good, but since you havent listed any 3D Artists on your game page I figure most of them have been taken from filebase or other sources? (Which is totally fine, of course! But if you and your team actually have modelled some of that yourself, then that's even more impressive!) The fact that you had cutscenes and tracking shots at the start even is also hella awesome - the ship approaching gave me a lot of Dead Space vibes! (But for the circle/sphere with the sun texture,on it at the start, I would replace that with a smoother circle, where you dont see the edges as much so that it looks smoother!)
There are a few things that mildly irritated us when playing the game.
- The biggest thing is that dying feels way too punishing. It can happen very quick and all your progress is reset. (Admittedly, this was also why we did not finish the game, so we could not see what's the reveal/twist at the end - I hope that didnt make us miss out on too much of the games content!) It feels really frustrating having to start all over, so maybe something like checkpoints when you collect the keycards would be great?
- Something that also plays into the frustration of dying is having to listen to all the audio logs over and over. There should be a way to make the audio logs optional - like after collecting a keycard, maybe show a prompt "Press G to listen to audio log". Also regarding the audiologs: It's really hard to focus on the monster and not getting spotted, while you are trying to listen to the audio log too. That could be helped by either different things like placing the cards in some sort of safe zone, where the player can not be spotted / where the monster can not follow, or even by adding subtitles! (Even though I know thats a lot to ask from an indie game, but thats just what jumped to my mind!). Placing the Key Cards in visible safe zones would also help to make them easier to find - but I figure that finding them in the first place is supposed to be part of the challenge of the game!
- Another gamefeel aspect would be that the pathfinding and detection zones of the creature seem to be fuzzy most of the time. Sometimes walking nearby seemed to be just fine, sometimes walking alarms it immediately. It would be nice to have some kind of indicator for when the creature actually notices the player and tries to catch them (maybe a special roaring sound from them and/or animation that the creature is doing when it detects the player, so that you know its chasing you right now - or something like a looping heartbeat sound that starts playing in the backrgound as long as its actively looking for you).
- Regarding the pathfinding of the creature, it would be great to know to where it is actually going to. Sometimes crouching away from where it seems to have detected you works just fine, sometimes it seems to know where you are anyway and just follows you even when you are crouching. (Also on the topic of crouching - it feels almost painfully slow, but I think that is a matter of taste!)
- Adding to the last point about being detected - it also seems unclear where or how to hide effectively when you are being chased. The intro voice log says something about hiding in a locker, but to be honest, we couldn't find any locker whenever we were chased (and neither did we know what to look for exactly). I feel just putting a bunch of lockers at the starting area of the game, and making the player naturally interact with it out of curiosity, would help with that a lot! This way the player immediately knows how the hiding mechanic works, and what to look for when they are chased.
- One last thing is that the flashlight felt like it didnt add a lot of value. My friend kept saying that the areas should be darker, so that you would actually need the flashlight to find your way, but my approach would be to make the flashlight brighter or to give it a longer range instead! As far as we came, we could easily play through the game without having to use the flashlight once to navigate through the rooms. That is not particularly a bad thing (I for one am glad that it wasnt completely dark!) but it feels unintended that the flashlight is only giving so little value!
I know that's a lot of feedback and nitpicking, but it's all in a constructive and well meant spirit and I hope you find it valuable <3 All in all, we really enjoyed your game! :)
I very much do like that the game has a gameplay loop and is indefinitely playable! :)
The most important thing missing in my opinion are explanations for how you can spend your money / showing the keybindings somewhere. I later saw you have an explanation for that on your itch page, but having it in the game itself (either at the start / in a start menu, or as an overlay in the main game) would really help!
The graphics are nice, but the park itself feels a little empty, with nothing but trees in it. I think small things like benches or something, that you could also use for tactical cover / to run around, would really add a lot of extra flair to it!
Also there seems to be little feedback on how much health the zombies, your allies or your turrets still have, which would be helpful as well! I know the screen could get cluttered really quickly when everything has little health bars, but you might also do other visual indicators, like changing the hue of the texture to a more red-ish color, or making them have visibly different walking animations to show that they are hurt!
Last but not least, I didn't see a clear connection to any of the subthemes. It definitely fits the apocalypse theme in general though.
I hope that feedback helped you <3
The art and just the atmosphere in general is just top notch - but being a fan of your art for some time now, I would not have expected anything else from you and your team! <3 (Also big kudos to the voice actors!)
It's just incredibly charming and expressive! I would have liked an explanation of what the different dice types are doing in the dice loadout menu (or, if it was there, I just didnt notice it), but this is really just a nitpick from me. I am amazed to see what you four have put together in just 48 hours! :)
The game looks clean all in all, but I have a few nitpicks and improvement ideas:
- The dice rolling feels a litte bit like an afterthought, because it does not tie in very strongly with the core concept of the game
- I really like the shooting sound itself - but it can get a bit repetetive! Maybe slightly pitched versions or different versions of it alltogether would be nice. Also the sound for when an enemy dies feels kind of out of place. I could imagine more of a "spacey" sound for that too, instead of just a "plop" sound. (I hope that makes sense!) I think a subtle sound for the footsteps of your main character, or a sound for when the dice is rolling (thinking of the dice rolling sound in Mario Party for example) would also be really cool!
- The hitboxes of the enemies felt a little bit small, and sometimes they just felt really hard to hit even though I was aiming right at them - but I think it's a taste question!
I like the idea, its a lot of fun to play around with :)
Being a little nitpicky, I feel like your game would have profited from a stric grid-based system instead of a pseudo grid that uses the unity physics in the background, as it was easy to accidentally derail the dice and bringing it off-center which resulted in having to restart the level completely.
The music was a bit monotonous, but very much fitted the theme and served very well as a background music track! The style was also coherent, clean and simple - I liked it :)
The idea of "not being allowed to rotate to the side opposite of the red side" confused me a bit at first, completely without any explanation, but it was intuitive enough to get it after a few respawns! I imagine some player feedback or indicator would work really well at this point though!
That's a really creative pun you made with the game jams theme! :) (However it seems that in your game, god does indeed play dice! :P)
The graphics all look really nice and hand crafted too!
My main two feedback points would be that the screen can sometimes look very overloaded with all the people running around, and that I always felt like I was lacking fine control over what was happening in the game. One burn from Satan could wipe out the whole population or it felt like the evil dice would do nothing at all to an overfull population - so it felt like there was no inbetween sometimes! (But I mean, I get it, its RNG afterall!)
It's immediately noticable how much love went into this game! <3
First of all, congrats to both of you for making the art and the soundtrack/sfx feel so endearing - it just feels like everything in this game fits so well together and like you really had a consistent style and direction going! :) You even made such a neat little banner and logo for the game - I am genuinely curious and excited for how you will update the game after the jam!
I wish I could give more constructive feedback, but the following things are the only things I noticed that seemed kinda off to me:
- The walking animation of the character could feel a little bit sluggish at times, as the wobbling made it feel like my inputs were not always recognized correctly or immediately. Even though it very much fits the style, it irritated me a little bit at first.
- The combat felt a little bit too easy. There is no punishment for throwing and immediately retrieving again. I could imagine that your little dice buddy could have a little bit of a recovery time period or that you need to be in a particular radius of them to actually retrieve them back. This would make combat a tiny bit more engaging I think!
All in all, it's a charming little game, especially as it's made in only 48 hours - I really love it! <3
Wow, the sound effects and 3D graphics really blew this one out of the water for me - they were amazing! Especially with the swelling music, your game immediately stands out in that way!
A little in-game explanation of what the actual goal was would have been nice, but other than that, I really liked it :)
Oh I like this idea! :)
The background music is actually really really well done - it fits your space theme very well! I also really like how the dice can effortlessly move up and down on the walls. The clean neon-aesthethics in general mix in well with the space background.
I know you probably ran out of time and would have polished it more / given it more levels if you could, but nevertheless here is what I think your game could profit from:
- A cleaner intro / main menu at the start. I think just putting up a dark colored square to let the text stand out would really help a bunch already!
- Some kind of sound system for player feedback (when the player did something right or wrong) would be really neat as well! Maybe a very subtle sound for whenever your dice is turning / when a new side is hitting the ground too. Little things like that can really bring a lot of immersion into a game!
It was a bit hard to figure out what exactly was happening at the start, but I like your twist on the Game Jam theme! :)
My main two feedbacks regarding improvements are
- I got spawned onto or very close to spikes when the level switched sometimes, which instantly reset me. Maybe you could do some kind of safezones? where you spawn players in, instead of an exact position translation between levels.
- Sometimes its hard to figure out which ground is actually walkable and which is not! Maybe give the hostile ground some kind of glow effect (or other effect) or make the texture for it slightly spiky to indicate that it actually kills you.
The evolving soundtrack is an amazing idea, heck! Thank you very much for that suggestion and feedback!
It was the first time any of us had to create a soundtrack for a game, so the background music was just a means to fill the silence - but encorporating it like this to show the tension (besides some simple pitch manipulation that we have thrown in) is such a clever idea!
And I totally agree on your other points as well, thank you! :)
Thank you for the thoughtful feedback! :)
We feared that this prompt might be the hardest to understand, so we tried to explain it as best as we could (with the limited space that we had) in the menu you have to click through at the start - I am glad it made sense after a while!
I really like your suggestion about the "endgame"! We thought about multiple possibilities too, like making the timer shorter and shorter, but we just ran out of time on the Game Jam to implement something that felt satisfying ^^
Hello there!
Thank you that you took your time to make a LetsPlay of our game and to give us much valuable feedback! (Seriously, LetsPlays are some of the best feedback sources because you can actually see first hand which kind of difficulties players are encoutnering when they first play it)
I think one "trick" many people overlook is building bridges and stairs quite early in the game, or at least throwing and moving a lot of stuff off the shelves, so you have lots of things to climb on when you get short. We're glad you liked it :)
Hey, thank you a lot for your Lets Play and for sharing your thoughts and experiences! We didnt really want to make a sexual game but rather a game with solid mechanics and gameplay which can be enjoyed by everyone just as a game if they want to!
Talking about the difficulty - there is an update we will get out soon which will bring lots of improvements and new things, including difficulty settings as well! :)
Hey, thank you a lot for the feedback - we are so glad to hear that you had fun playing it :) Multiple levels could definitely be an option but for now we are thinking about difficulty settings, which includes the amount of ingredients and formulas you need to find and the speed of shrinking.
Its so awesome to watch someone else play our game that we created!
