itch.io

I am not someone who plays platformers, so not really part of the target audience of this game, but I saw there were no comments and no feedback about the game itself, so I had to change that.

I didn't reach the part where you unlock dissolution, so I can't say anything about that.

To the things I can say about the game:

I liked the small icons you used to indicate the abilities, though I would have liked the floating ability to show directly above the player when it isn't completely filled to make it easier to see how long you can float while doing so.

I'd rather had the floating be bound to "Spacebar" and/or "W" instead of the right mouse button, especially because holding shift (Dash) and pressing the right mouse button would open the standard browser menu for clicking the right mouse button (It may be a Firefox thing, but it didn't help when playing)

The music was a bit short and repetitive, but otherwise the short part that was there sounded good, and it was a perfect loop, no weird interruption.

At the end of the first level, there is this hole in the ground where if you fall down there, you keep falling without respawning. So what I thought to be an Easter-egg ended up being a softlock.

Pressing the right mouse button when you don't have any floating power left still resets your falling speed. You should check if the player has any floating power before setting their velocity to 0.

Sometimes the player gets snapped to the ground before reaching it. It happens so arbitrarily that I'm unsure about the exact cause, but it has something to do with your ground detection. I guess it is that you are doing something with velocity, and are using total velocity instead of Y velocity, as it only seems to happen when moving horizontally while falling.

The minigame felt a bit unnecessary, it would have been a fine game if you just left it at gaining abilities, it kind of just broke the flow of the game.

The later levels got a bit too difficult for me, but that is just a skill issue on my part :)

About the graphics. While it is true that for the game itself, gameplay is more important than graphics (as proven by games like thomas was alone) Graphics still do a lot when it comes to grabbing attention. So perhaps try to do something different next time. Though Graphics is something I still struggle with so who am I to talk.

It's certainly not Game of the Year, but it's not bad either.  It's ok and most importantly, I had some fun playing it.

Thanks

The Idea is good. Immersive sims do benefit of having an open world (even if it resides within a building) instead of small levels, but we both know well enough that a good open world isn't something feasible for a game jam. The levels themselves weren't great. And I would have liked for the player to maybe have a small point light attached, so close objects appear just a little brighter.

The floaty jumps: Instead of using a ray cast, use a sphere cast so you can still jump, when standing right on the edge of an object. Use a stronger Impulse and enforce some delay between jumps so you don't get the current slow acceleration upwards but instead a real jump. To make jumping feel even better, check whether the player releases the jump button midair with velocity upwards and give them a small impulse force downward if they do (this force should be relative to their current upward velocity, so the player doesn't just get thrown to the ground once releasing)

Sound:
Your sound effects lacked attenuation and directionality. If a level had a lot of enemies, the sounds would be a bit overwhelming. I think unity's audio source component is made for exactly that. It would have definitely been helpful to hear where enemies come from and get a sense how far away they are.

The potion throwing may have benefited of an indicator (like the white dots in angry birds) showing an approximation of the arc the potion is thrown in. Though this is more a taste thing, some people like indicators like that and some just find them immersion breaking. I find them helpful for doing more strategic throws that are supposed to hit very specific things.

I'd love to talk more about the potion mechanic itself, but I'm afraid I can't. The current levels didn't really need me to think of any good way to use them. Though, turning your enemies to gold was funny.

Would have been interesting to see how this game would have felt, being set in the right environment.

And even with its shortcomings, I still had fun playing it.

Another bug, if you convert enemy parts into resources for upgrades in the last machine, pressing add twice deletes all enemy parts, leaving you with nothing.

This bug made me loose 86 enemy parts :(

My Experience playing this game:
I started and read a lot of dialog. This pilot really likes to talk a lot. I head out, gather some resources, shoot at enemies and get teleported back, wondering why. Reading the death message, I realize that shooting uses up A LOT OF ENERGY.

A bit later on, I have already gathered some resources, my strategy has shifted from using the gun sometimes to basically relying on using the pickaxe to fight because it's just not worth it. Having repaired the first machine, I'm disappointed because now I just have one more resource which doesn't do anything, OIL.

Going out there a few more times now with the strategy, fell trees, gather stones, die, repeat. Because that seems to be the fastest way to GRIND your way through progression.

Pickaxe hit box is really weird, attacks going mostly above the player and shooting or melee pickaxe being decided by whether the cursor is near or far from the cursor made me shoot multiple times when I didn't want to.

Knowing whether an enemy was hit or not is also relatively unclear, which could have been easily avoided by making them do something when hit (like flashing red).

I finally ended up getting the upgrade station and the thing that turns enemy parts to resources, so I thought, finally some upgrades ...
Turns out getting any upgrades with this would give you radiation killing you over time which made them completely useless.

So I went with no upgrades, walked through the entire map once more. Through the opening on the right, and found some flower. (it can prevent radiation)
But, going to the right actually leads to a new area where you also get radiation, so I only got two flowers before dying again.

Having used up all spiders, which are the only upgrade that would make the gun actually usable meant, all other upgrades didn't really help much at this point.

I made a new Energy cell with the two flowers as the only upgrade and walked right until I got to the second "level" where I was now protected from radiation. I collected more flowers and saw another opening to the right, walked through that and reached the ending. (also in this second level the camera is way too far left from the player, you can barely see anything)

I only played through this game to be able to give an honest review. I didn't really enjoy this game at this point. Please, when adding a mechanic or requirement to the game (like things you need to repair the machines) consider the following:

Is it fun?

I still believe this game could be fun, but it does need a lot of rebalancing to do so. Currently, it just feels like an overly long fetch quest that discourages from using any of the games' mechanics by punishing you for doing so.

The art style and music were fine. The UI looked good.

Please make it so you can hold down one mouse button to use the pickaxe (not requiring to click every time) and use the other mouse button for the gun.

It kind of made me a bit sad, seeing what could be a good game have so many aspects that feel like they are only there to make it longer. I'd much rather play a shorter version of this that encourages getting upgrades and has less grind.
(seriously, why do you need 80 rocks and 80 wood to repair those machines, with the mining speed you have this just takes soooooo looooong)

So either this is just not the game for me, or you need to look into what makes a game fun. I'd suggest looking at Jonas Tyrollers video titled "Can We Make This Button Fun To Press?".

You certainly are capable of making a good and fun game, but this wasn't quite it yet.

The Game:
It is a fun concept, but still lacking in some points. There currently is no risk in the game, you just make drinks and earn money indefinitely, and the money doesn't even do anything. If you need some advice/ideas on what it could do if you were to turn this into a full game:

• Easiest route, make it an arcade like game. Put a time limit on it and make it so you have to get as much money in that time as you can.
• Otherwise, making the ingredients you have limited and adding individual days. At the end of each day, you could then use the money you made to buy more weird ingredients which you have to guess what those may taste like, giving you the chance to be more efficient by requiring fewer ingredients for the same taste combination.
• Third possibility, making upgrades you can buy. (Though this is boring in my opinion)

That said, it is clear to me that you haven't made a lot of games yet. And perhaps you may be best of just turning this into an arcade like game and moving on learning as you make more small games, slowly rising the bar as you go on.

Additionally, it would be nice to have some reaction from the customers when they drink it, as a way of additional feedback for if they liked it or not. Even if the change in gold is already some feedback for the player if they did well or not, having additional feedback is good and makes the game feel more alive.

The Art:
Can still improve, but don't worry about it, as it will do so naturally just by making more, especially this early on.
In Godot in your project settings, at: General > Rendering > Textures > Canvas Textures > Default Texture Filter, use Nearest instead of linear. It will prevent the color bleeding between pixels.
At: General >Display > Window > Stretch > Mode, use viewport to have everything scale up and remain in the viewport as shown in the Godot editor. Right now, resizing the view lets you see outside your scene, which would be fixed by this.

(Small thing I noticed in the GDD, you forgot to replace the part "Gameplay overview" with the gameplay of your game instead of the template)

Don't take this the wrong way, even though I had a lot of critique, this is not a bad game. I had fun playing it and hope you continue trying different concepts and working on more in the future. It's a good start, and I'm excited to see what's to come.

Fun game, The art style is also fine, though I'm wondering whether it would look better to have folded corners on your book as buttons to switch pages instead of the arrows, but the arrows work fine anyway. The music is good, and the concept is interesting.  Having a small button on screen for resetting to allow for the full mouse only experience would be nice, and like st4ng said, navigation with WASD or arrow keys would also be nice to have for those who want to use it.
It took me some time to realize, that the shadow was the indicator of things that could be duplicated, but the mechanic has another small problem which you may not have considered.
In the last stage, you can manipulate stuff with the machines, and none of them change anything about whether an element has a shadow or not. In my head I thought it was impossible to beat, because I expected the resulting gold from the final machine to NOT have a shadow like all ingredients I've put into them. But it did.
All in all, the most problematic thing with this game currently is the shadow mechanic, if you can make that one more clear, then the overall gameplay experience would be much smoother.

That said, the game has a solid foundation with its unique mechanics and charming presentation. With a few tweaks, it could easily go from a fun game to a fantastic one. I look forward to seeing how it evolves!

Nice Game, It's very relaxing and there is so much attention to small details. I like the art style, maybe things like the brick walls could use normal maps to have them feel less flat when in direct sunlight, but that is nitpicking at this point (it's more something to try for late polishing). I noticed the one tree in forest level 3 was cut off, but I guess you'd have fixed it if you had the time left. Besides those minor visual things, I didn't notice anything off. The sounds were great and the music fitting and relaxing. It was fun to play and the puzzles were good introductions to the mechanics. I am interested how difficult the puzzles would get in a final version of this game, as these were still very easy (as they should be for introduction puzzles). It's a very atmospheric game, and I like that.
All in all, it's well-made with interesting concepts, and I'd be interested to see where you'll take this game after the Game jam is over. If the next mechanics are as good and thought out as the ones you have right now, this will be an amazing game.
(I took so long writing this that I reached the end of the ambient bird sounds, perhaps put those ambient sounds on loop, just in case. Also, surrounding yourself with two boxes prevents you from jumping, it's nothing game breaking, but a minor inconvenience. The ladder in the final unfinished level lets you climb through the ground)
Had a lot of fun playing this and wish you a great future in game development

Thanks

Some tips for improvements:
I assume you are using Ray casts for interactions. Instead, you should probably use shape casts or Colliders to determine what the player is trying to collect. At first, I've found myself having trouble to collect anything. Once you have tool animations it may be more obvious where the area is the player is collecting, but without any tools my Instinct led me to stand directly on the thing I wanted to collect, which didn't work. And even after finding out, getting the alignment right was a bit tricky, which is why I'd suggest using more generous methods for detecting interaction.
Movement speed felt a bit too slow, just walking from the house to the forest felt tedious and without anything interesting in the meantime, it's just a bit tedious.
Having some graphics in game to show what buttons actually do anything would also help a lot, while TAB for inventory is seen in quite a few other games, other common keys would be 'E', 'I' or 'B' and even just having a small graphic showing the tab key (and other keys your game uses) would help a lot for new players.
Later on in development, always showing what each button does is also not the best idea, as it would introduce clutter, for then there are many ways to deal with this clutter. An example would be showing "Q" above the player if they look at something collectable.

As there are no sounds or music yet and the art is just placeholder assets from some asset pack, I won't give any feedback on those.

I think this is probably your first or one of your first games you made in unity. And while the Idea is good, it's also ambitious. I'd advise making some smaller games first, improving your skills, learning about the engine, learning about the mechanics you want to implement in this game. Once you've made a few small games, you can come back and use the knowledge you've gained to really make it the game you want it to be.

Even though this game is still lacking in quite a few ways, I'm glad you decided to upload it. The Idea sounds interesting and with more time and experience this has the potential to become a good game. Best of luck with the rest of your development process, I’m excited to see how your game(s) evolve(s).

It may be nostalgia speaking here, but I really enjoyed the Marble drop recreation with alchemy theme. Obviously, graphics and sound design could be better, but it's impressive for the limited time there was for the Game jam.
Thanks for giving me a way to enjoy this wonderful game from my early childhood once more, but with its own mechanics.
(A small thing you could try for the sound effect of the element Marbles dropping in is: import them as mono and use an AudioStreamPlayer2D positioned at the dropping points, so you can hear them dropping in from left to right)
Overall, I didn't notice any bugs (besides the reset button on level 2 which you already know) while playing, and I like that you added a small sound effect playing for reference when changing the SFX slider.