Really enjoyed this! Great level layout and puzzle layout, teaching skills well along the way and then reinforcing them. Really enjoyed the graphics and audio too! Can't believe how many levels you made too! Very high quality overall!
moocow17
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A member registered Aug 08, 2020 · View creator page →
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Dodge bullets, Amplify them, Send them back at your opponents with your Rewind ability!
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Avoid bullets, amplify the enemy bullets with your amplifiers, then rewind time to turn the tables on your enemies!
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I'm going to slightly disagree with part of this review.
I was also tempted to say that a puzzle game should be about figuring out the solution, not trying to execute it. I've said the same thing for lots of other people's games, because, well, usually its true. Puzzle games should be: about figuring out the solution (not executing it), they should have one answer (not multiple), should present all the information up front (not revealed as you progress through the puzzle) and in most cases not time-constrained (this sort of comes back into the point on figuring out the solution rather than executing it). This game essentially does none of that :P In general I find the words 'puzzle-platformer' should be treated with suspicion :P
But I feel like this game is a bit different, its not really a puzzle game, therefore those rules don't really apply. It has puzzle elements in terms of figuring out how you're going to get the ball to all the enemies in time and how you will plan out the multiple character's runs, but I think ultimately its a skill based platformer style game, with light puzzle aspects, in the vain of Super Meatboy, rather than a puzzle game.
Like Super Meatboy, it gives you the flexibility to create your own solution rather than presenting a puzzle with a correct answer, it's more freeform than a puzzle game. This is the only entry in the game jam I've played through twice because I wanted to see what other ways I could solve each level; whether I could do them in less throws/less time etc. That's also an indicator it's not a puzzle game, because in a puzzle game once you've beaten a level there is no point in going back, you've done the solution and know how its done.
All that being said, yeah, I agree with most other things you said; the first level of having clones is a bit tight time-wise for an introductory level (i did it on my 5th try with 0.5 seconds left, but that's probably still a bit hard for a level teaching a concept) , and it took me a bit of time to realise that the captured balls was used as a double jump (which was a bit of a eureka!/duh! moment for me :P ). A level system would have been great, it did have a quick retry system though...
Really great! Loved the unique approach, always love to see an innovative idea utilising the theme perfectly.
Things I particularly liked:
>Unique idea
>Audio (obviously): was great! well written, well voiced, very funny in parts! :)
>Perfect use of the theme
>I wonder how much depth it would have in terms of the 'puzzles', but that's not an issue for this jam, was a fairly perfect length for a jam game :)
Things to tweak/improve:
>I guess the clarity of the answer is something that will be hard to get right, i found the dog tape one to be quite hard to figure out (i typed 'katie' in a range of different ways before looking here for clues).
Well done!
Quite a nice simple concept! Would have liked to have seen more levels, but such is the nature of game jams :P
Things I particularly liked:
>The graphics: Nice clean aesthetic.
>The audio: I felt the background music and sound effects worked well for the game
>The concept: I was keen to explore the concept more, but it felt like it finished when it was just starting.
Things to improve upon for next time:
>I find it quite frustrating in puzzle games when you can accidentally put the puzzle in an unsolveable state, I think you should always try to allow a player to undo previous mistakes where possible, rather than forcing them to restart the level (or in this case game haha). On the final level the cube can lower the purple drawbridge, but if they dont rewind at that point before going over the bridge then they will get stuck on the other side of the level and will be unable to complete the puzzle, forcing them to restart. I think since this is still an introductory level (and since the player is unaware that the purple button on the other end of the bridge will raise the drawbridge without any way for them to lower it again) it would have been better to have a button that raises the drawbridge unavoidably right after the one that lowers it, that way the player cannot progress without lowering the bridge and then rewinding their colour first before crossing (as if they still have the colour the bridge will raise again). Sorry, this is a long winded way of saying 'make sure the player can undo their actions, or at least has all the info up front' :P
>The movement is slightly unintuitive since the arrow keys/WASD follow the cardinal directions, but the map is shown in an isometric layout, thus you aren't sure which space the cube will move to when you press UP (will it go Up-left, or Up-right) without experimentation. Obviously the player will get used to this quickly, but I'm not sure they should need to; probably slight realignment of the camera may fix this.
>More levels :) I was just starting to get into it when it ended (this is a good problem to have haha). But I understand this is a game jam and its hard to develop much content in time :) I can foresee some interesting uses of the mechanic already :)
Well done! :)
Things I particularly liked:
>Seals! I love scuba diving, so this was a nice treat for me :) I liked the seal and animations of it and the general feel of the game
>Nice relaxing audio
>The visuals in the first level were quite calming and relaxing I found (maybe you should lean into that further to try and achieve a relaxed flow state rather than adding the stress of avoiding rocks?)
Things that could potentially be tweaked/improved:
>Difficulty was quite low, which isn't a bad thing if going for a relaxed game (and this is a decent theme for a relaxed game i think). Simultaneously, I found it quite hard to guage the distance of the rocks sometimes, so that might have been frustrating if the difficulty was higher. I also felt I didn't use the stamina bar really, or have a need to.
>I found the turning of the seal in the first level to be a bit weird; I think it probably would have been better for the seal not to rotate at all in the first level, or if so clamp the value much lower.
>Theme: I felt the application of the theme to be quite weak tbh. I feel like going into the perspective of the seal behind is not really rewinding (even if the game has rewound slightly).
Overall I quite enjoyed the game! Nice, simple, relaxing! I can imagine the seals frollicking now :)
Thanks for the feedback!
Hmm, that sounds like a bug, there are definitely meant to be enemies! I am aware of the bug which causes the player to respawn at the start of each level, and sometimes that means the player spawns right on an already active bullet :( is it possible that happened? (but even then the enemies should keep spawning after your death, so maybe you found another bug)
Haha making the death sounds was fun haha, glad you enjoyed them haha. I will definitely rate yours too and leave feedback.
Brackeys Jam 2020.2 community · Replied to Lotyss in My First Jam! Happy to rate your games (first time or other), please rate mine if possible :)
and yeah, I know about that bug in my game; unfortunately I introduced it in literally the last hour of the jam while trying to fix another game breaking bug that I somehow introduced a couple of hours before the end of the jam :( very frustrating to have to upload the game with that bug :( essentially the ship just returns to origin at the start of the level and the bullets stay moving (neither of which was intentional) so sometimes you just teleport straight onto a bullet, very annoying :(
Hopefully you were able to enjoy the game briefly despite that (although I understand that by about level 4 or 5 you already have to plan around the fact there are gonna be a bunch of bullets on screen when you finish the level haha)
Brackeys Jam 2020.2 community · Replied to Jayden Kusuma in My First Jam! Happy to rate your games (first time or other), please rate mine if possible :)
Brackeys Jam 2020.2 community · Replied to Lotyss in My First Jam! Happy to rate your games (first time or other), please rate mine if possible :)
Rated and left a review; fantastic work! One of my fav games I've played in the game jam so far. I'd suggest if you are rating other people's games that you leave a review on their submission page so they see it and are tempted to click on your game too, your game deserves more plays!
If anyone else reads this, check out this person's game, it's great!
Brackeys Jam 2020.2 community · Replied to Joaquim_2009 in My First Jam! Happy to rate your games (first time or other), please rate mine if possible :)
I'm perhaps a bit confused when you say 'the rewind function is essential to play the game' I dont think I used any rewind function, have I missed something? I played the two minigames, were there more? (I just want to make sure I didn't miss anything before I put a final rating).
I quite like the idea of the game, going back and helping a game-jammer do better; definitely something I can relate to/wish I could do :P
As others mentioned perhaps a bit more instruction as to what to do for each mini game would be better. Also, who says burgers and soda aren't healthy?! :P (just kidding, i need to work on my diet haha)
Perhaps to make it SLIGHTLY more intuitive you could make it so you can hold down right click to catch the ball rather than having to time the catches. I didn't mind the extra skill element required, but some people may find it hard and prefer to just be able to hold down right click if they know the ball will pass through where they are standing. It took me a couple of goes to realise I couldn't hold it down and that I had to time the catch.
I actually fricken loved this! I think I possibly just found my new fav game of the jam!
I loved that the movement of the character was quick and snappy and the wall jumping was easy enough.
I loved that the mechanic of throwing/catching the ball had multiple implications; it allowed you to kill enemies, allowed you to jump again, allowed you to become a platform for future iterations, and also required you to plan around where it was going for the multiple iterations. Seriously loved it, brilliant game design.
It was super fun! Sure, it was challenging, but I think a game like this needs to have a decent degree of challenge. Perhaps the hit detection could be slightly more forgiving, but maybe not, maybe its great just as it is (at first i thought it might be abit TOO precisse, but mid-sentence i thought "well i did finish it afterall, which I can't say i've done for all the games i've played in this jam").
Graphics and audio were very nicely polished, had good amounts of juice in it for a game jam game.
Usually I go into depth with what could be improved, but I am actually struggling to find faults with this game. Perhaps allowing the player to scan the level before starting may be a nice touch. Perhaps having a couple of visual markings on the level background to help line up a target (e.g. if there were little blemishes on the wall and i threw the ball at one from a particular spot and the ricochet JUST missed the enemy then I would know to aim slightly higher/lower to that blemish next time). These are pretty minor improvements obviously though, which is a credit to how good I think your game is.
The only thing I noticed which would be a bug is that crossing out the sound/music buttons on the menu didn't seem to actually stop the music.
I can't emphasise enough how much I liked your game, I think this has good potential to be a real game with more levels. Now go review more people's games so they are tempted to play yours, because yours deserves more views/reviews than it has.
Yeah fair enough I guess.
I think it was the chromatic aberation (is that what its called) that was a bit much for me tbh; the static maybe would get annoying too but i didn't find it as bad as the chromatic aberation.
You're welcome! I think there was a lot of good in the game (i just tend to focus on the potential areas of improvement in my reviews; hope it didn't seem too negative, sorry if it did).
An interesting take on the theme; I've played another game that had the same concept (The End Is The Beginning), but the problem I have with this approach is that the way a player approaches the levels when 'rewinding' is not the same as how a player plays a level from the 'normal' way (i.e. level 1 forward), as demonstrated when I got to the end and then had to go back through normally (some parts you just fall down rather than have to jump precisely). I dont know if that's really anything you can change or fix tbh, just a comment on how it isnt exactly playing as if you were rewinding a game :P (also it would be a pretty weird game design if the final level i.e. lvl10 was one of the easiest in the game :P ). I did quite like the effect of the bullets rewinding though.
It is interesting how the brain gets in a flow of treating left as right and vice versa, but as soon as you stop for a moment it gets confused on the next jump haha (like i would complete 10 jumps with ease; then have a break on a platform, and the next jump i would be confused hahaha, silly brain).
Only real comments I would say in terms of what to improve are:
>the game would be helped with audio (i didn't hear any, was there any?) to set a mood
>You should let the player know what button is shoot rather than telling them it isn't left mouse click (why wasn't it left mouse click btw? I dont think W is the opposite of left mouse click :P I expected shoot to be S when going the 'normal' way )
>The post processing effects were cool initially, but later on got a bit strainy on the eyes I felt; nothing too major, but I think they could be toned down a bit.
A decent platformer overall though :)
Nice puzzle platformer. I didn't even realise the first time I played it that I was meant to collect the bolts AFTER the key haha; when I read that I went back and did it again haha. I of course died a bunch of times then, and I'm not sure I'm keen enough to go back and try to do a perfect run haha. I'm content with my knowledge that life is meaningless :P (haha it got very existential at the end there which vibed well with me haha).
Overall quite solid! I dont have too much to complain about with the game, everything was fairly decent, but I guess everything could be bumped up slightly too in terms of graphics/sound effects etc. (everything was good but not great I guess is the best explanation I could give; but that's understandable for a game-jam game i think)
Only thing I thought could be improved upon a bit more was the theme; I didn't fully understand why the key 'rewound time', or why rewinding time made certain platforms disappear/appear, or why I was collecting bolts. But perhaps some things are just not meant to be understood (or perhaps I would have understood more if I did that perfect run through?).
Brackeys Jam 2020.2 community · Replied to Ryan McDougall in My First Jam! Happy to rate your games (first time or other), please rate mine if possible :)
Haha I almost had no idea what it had to do with the theme; fortunately I looked up 'youtube rewind' to understand it haha (I'm perhaps showing my age a bit here haha).
I'll agree with some of the other people: the chromatic aberration effect didn't really contribute to the game, so you can probably get rid of it.
Also, to maybe add to the challenge of the game you could have the bad/good position move so the player has to constantly find where to put the good comments.
A minor annoyance I had was that the character would get stuck on the walls (was that intentional as a challenge?) and occasionally wouldn't click up the comments I was looking at.
There were some funny parts in the game though, so that was good.
Brackeys Jam 2020.2 community · Replied to Foxrods in My First Jam! Happy to rate your games (first time or other), please rate mine if possible :)
Oh, another thing to add in the Minor Things area:
>The volume sliders seem to work on decibel scale, or similar; but the decibel scale is a curve (i.e. 2 decibels is 10x louder than 1 decibel and 3 decibels is 100x louder than 1 decibel), which means that from the left point on the meter to the mid-point on the meter is almost all non-existent. This is very minor (i didn't even have a volume meter option...) and I've seen lots of other games making this mistake too, but I think Brackey's audio tutorial explains how to fix this from memory.
Awesome work! I had heaps of fun with this game!
Things I particularly liked:
>The game made me feel like a ninja badass: movement and flow was on point; immediately I felt quite ninja-like, able to move around swiftly and with ease, wall jumping and richocheting my shurikens around felt very cool
>Sound/Audio: I loved the background music, also made me feel badass. Cool sound effects too.
Things that could be improved:
>I think you could have leaned more into the rewind theme: a lot of the time it felt somewhat unnecessary (in the open area at the start the shurikens auto-returned to me it seemed), and when I was using it inside it essentially just was a reload function (albeit where the speed of the reload is affected slightly by how far you threw the shuriken, but that was essentially a non-issue the entire time). Even something simple like having the shurikens deal damage on the return journey too would have made it feel a bit more special.
>Greater enemy variety: This could have been a time thing due to the game jam, but I think having different types of enemies may have mixed up the gameplay a bit. Maybe an enemy with a shield which faces you so you have to ricochet shurikens to kill him; or ones that charge at you and are invincible while charging so you have to jump over them and then shuriken them in the back (just ideas). Otherwise it was mostly effective for me to throw shurikens at range just at the enemy's range.
>Maybe increase the damage of the enemies, and decrease the damage of spikes. I never felt threatened by the enemies really, I still tried to dodge their projectiles, but I probably could have brute forced them. Meanwhile I accidentally bumped the spikes twice which was an instant death each time.
Very minor stuff:
>I missed the first checkpoint the first time round, maybe make it so the player can't miss it (force them to go through a tunnel that its in) so they always activate it and know what it is
>The dash seemed quite weak/unnecessary, maybe beef it up a bit
>When jumping off ramped surfaces it seemed to automatically go into my double jump, meaning i couldnt jump as high.
Overall:
Had heaps of fun! While I would have happily played more, I felt the level size was a good length for a game jam game and it didn't outstay its welcome. Despite the fact the 'Things that could be improved' looks a lot longer in this review that's just because I wanted to be detailed on areas of potential improvement. I still had lots of fun while playing your game and thought you did great work!
Thanks so much for your feedback and time playing it :)
Yeah, was quite frustrating having something pop up last minute that meant I submitted something I wasn't as happy with; but oh well, that's a learning experience in itself: dont be working on core functionality 2 hours before the due date! :) hahaha
Glad to hear you were able to enjoy it despite its bugs :) I'll play through your game shortly :)
Brackeys Jam 2020.2 community · Replied to GiantDwarf in My First Jam! Happy to rate your games (first time or other), please rate mine if possible :)
Quite impressive! (And i'm impressed in myself that I made it all the way to the end too haha)
Things I liked:
>Unique puzzle system; quite creative!
>Good variety of levels! I'm impressed you were able to put so many challenging levels in during a jam, well done
>Humour in the dialogue, I chuckled along while playing which was nice
>The little animation of the character moving along; reminded me of a turtle haha
Things to improve:
>I guess the graphics could look a bit nicer, but they do their job, so hard to complain too much ; maybe some nicer feedback when you complete a level, something to make you feel cool about accomplishing it
>The difficulty curve ramped up quite quickly; as soon as the training was done I was already stumped for quite a while.
>Maybe a bit more audio would be nice
But those things are pretty minor things to improve, well done!
Brackeys Jam 2020.2 community · Replied to RedBladeX in My First Jam! Happy to rate your games (first time or other), please rate mine if possible :)
Brackeys Jam 2020.2 community · Replied to RedBladeX in My First Jam! Happy to rate your games (first time or other), please rate mine if possible :)
Pretty cool!
Nice and simple concept, executed fairly well; some bits were quite punishing though when you came up against an area with a very small gap to go through, was easy to get clipped slightly and then get stuck. Some procedural level generation would have been cool so that I couldn't learn the level.
Overall a nice solid game!
Brackeys Jam 2020.2 community · Replied to TheMosterts in My First Jam! Happy to rate your games (first time or other), please rate mine if possible :)
Needed to check the page to see how to play, but otherwise very cool!
I particularly liked that you utilised the rewind mechanic for multiple things: games are always better when one action has multiple uses, I found it cool you used it as the attack as well as for repositioning the cube.
I finally got to the end, but I found the last bit quite hard, having to get the timing of making a new paused box mid-air was quite hard, I ended up making a ladder of sorts by jumping on a paused cube, jumping, pressing R, spawning a new cube, pausing it and jumping on it. I'm not sure if that's how it was meant to be done, but I found that quite hard tbh haha. Perhaps being able to throw multiple cubes (you could pick up additional cubes along the way which let you throw 2, then 3 cubes at a time for example) and having them all controlled by the same rewind/pause/remove button would make for some interesting puzzle platforming.
Well done! :)
Nice game!
Things I liked:
>Controls: I actually felt you did a really good job, especially with the limited time you had, getting controls that felt like i couldn't just hold forward the whole time.
>Graphics (how did you make the cars?): I quite liked the low poly aesthetic, took me back to Daytona Racing ;)
Things to improve:
>Audio: Some background music would have been great and some revving/tire-screech sounds would be nice too; I did love the starting beep sound effects though haha, they sounded a bit like mini farts haha I got a laugh out of them (even if that wasn't your intention, I think it was better having them than not).
>Theme: I thought 'rewinding through your career' was a bit of a cop-out, so I felt the game adherence to the theme was a bit weak; although I'm also glad that you didn't just add a rewind button to undo crashes, that would have made the game pretty bad in my opinion.
Overall quite an enjoyable and fun game!