Ah, yeah. That did the trick. I had no idea that you were supposed to hold the button. Also I had no idea that the left/right arms didn't do anything until you upgrade them, and you only have laser eyes to start out.
rameynoodles
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So, I liked the music a lot, and the credits were quite funny. The atmosphere was cool and I liked the lighting effects.
What I didn't like was the level design. It started out ok, but once you get into the MASSIVE EMPTY HALLWAYS.. it's just is really boring.
Also, I think not allowing the player to move and shoot at the same time takes the fun out of the combat. I also think the combat would be more fun if, in addition to move/shoot at the same time, the enemy bullets were much faster but less of them. Also, the pistol and shotgun seem pretty useless after you get the machine gun.
And on the art, if you use a pixel art style, you need to make everything a consistent pixel size. It looks like everything has been scaled to a different size, so you have small pixels on the character, but giant pixels on the shockwave effect and the UI elements.
I hope you learned a lot and I hope your next game will be great!
OH! I can't access your Game Design Document. Might wanna fix that.
So, the graphics, UI, and sounds are very good.
Problem is, I just don't like the gameplay at all. I was hoping for a survival game, but really it's just a guessing game. I hope this doesn't come across as mean, because I'm not trying to be, but criticism must be accurate if it is to be useful.
Basically, you need to guess which combos of "insights" are the correct choices to unlock the "correct" outcome. For some reason, the insights are arbitrarily locked with "survival points", and you can't tell if the unlocked "outcome" is correct until you choose it. Since you can't know which outcome is correct, then why not skip the insights and just have a list of "outcomes" (which are really "plans of action" btw) and just choose the one that makes the most sense?
For instance, in the first scenario, I thought that what I might do is to check out the cave, but I couldn't find the right combo of "insights" to even make that a possible "outcome". The "insights" were arbitrarily limiting my strategic thinking.
And there's a timer? Why is there a timer? Maybe this comes into play in later scenarios, but I didn't even have the patience to finish the first one.
To sum it up: art direction is excellent, sound design is good, but the mechanics don't make logical sense and can be frustrating. Also the timer seems pointless.
Also, not really sure I agree that this fits the theme of "you are the weapon". I think that choices being interpreted as a weapon is a pretty big stretch. Choices have consequences, but is everything that makes choices a weapon? Are choices weaponized? Choices may hurt some and help others. But weapons only hurt the one they are used on.
I really liked the style and ambiance of the game. The art is very good. And the plot and mystery of the game keeps you wanting to explore, which I love.
I have to say, I did not like how the floating girl form sloooowwwlyy floats down. It's not a big issue because you can just transform back to the sword or press "down", but I feel that it should just fall quickly by default. I think you meant it to be an "ability" for certain puzzles, but I didn't really see it utilized, so maybe if you utilized it I would feel differently.
I also don't particularly like that the sword can just fly around freely. It feels too powerful and doesn't make much sense for a sword. Maybe the characters should swap abilities in a sense. Make the sword able to "jump" small distances, and make the floating girl able to fly.
I also feel that maybe you should not allow transforming anywhere, but instead require something to transform. Maybe shrines could allow you to transform? Then you could add these to your exploration puzzle to increase the depth of the mechanics.
When you get to the big room with the statue of the king missing his sword, I feel like you are supposed to be the sword for the statue, and something would happen, but instead you just need to fly upwards. I didn't see the upwards pathway either, as it blended into the background too well. I only discovered it by flying around.
Good entry though, I really liked it. I assume I beat it. When I got to the woman in the tower and she says "You awoke. He's not back yet. etc" it just sent me to an empty brick screen and it seemed to freeze.
Thanks for the feedback! We've since modified the game quite a bit, but this is all we could get done in time for the jam deadline. I ended up making the rocket slow down instead of speed up while just flying, so that you HAVE to use the booster walls to maintain speed and stay alive. It also makes it a lot easier to control because the speed doesn't get out of hand. I think the controls could be a lot better done, but those controls took a while to get as good as they are.
Good art, good style, good audio, but to be perfectly honest, I kinda found it boring. But I'm not much for story driven games with simple choices that ultimately take you to the same place. I also realized that I couldn't exit the game till I died somehow and got back to the main menu, or just use Alt-F4, so I gave you a low rating for controls and accessibility because of that.
Was actually quite fun. Best strategy is sit in the middle and don't miss. The enemy spawn rate seems to not get much faster as the levels get higher, so if you don't miss you can fire as fast as they spawn. I think the levels should start out a bit harder though, was really too easy at first. I think that you should make Zeus have hitpoints instead of being insta-dead.
Hey, thanks for your more than deservingly kind words. I have had trouble with people not liking the controls, and im not realky sure what to do about them. The previous version had controls where you didnt slide at all, and I just added the sliding because I thought it might feel better and help a little in the corners, but idk...
Im especially glad you liked my incredibly laughable placeholder programner art, haha! I also would like more, and better, music. I just havent really worked on that much.
Cone back sometime and maybe ill have a more updated version with much more content.
Also, one question: Did you make it to the end, or did you get bored/frustrated part way through?
Haha, we really weren't trying to make a horror game, I promise! I do really wish we had taken a few minutes to try and make it so that you didn't have to restart the whole game upon death, but we were just way too far behind and decided that other things needed more work, like adding more levels. Looks like that was all for nothing though since nobody bothered to play long enough to get to them. Thanks for playing!
Yes, the AI was half-baked lol. But at least it worked well enough for the jam deadline. I've been working on the game some more, and the AI has seen a massive improvement, plus got rid of those diagonal circuits that nobody liked :D BTW, my parter will appreciate the kind words on the music and sounds, because that was all his.
So, I absolutely loved this game, except for one very large issue, which I'll get to. I loved the original Myst which I only just played for the first time about a year ago. I wish this game was longer, but it's only a 9 day jam. You should make another but actually make it a full game. The graphics were awesome, the sound was great (maybe add some footstep sounds and some light background music). Controls were fine for me, it was just slightly non-intuitive on some screens because it's limited to screen edges and the center, but I think it would be better if you had areas in the screen that if you click on them it would take you towards that thing. Also, making the mouse cursor change depending on what you hover over would be great polish and good for feedback to the player.
Ok.. but the big issue... I can't beat the game. There is seemingly no correct answer. I watched Vikfro's stream (that's what's playing in the background) on twitch to make sure I had the correct answer, but it doesn't work. This seems to be a game breaking bug.
So, to be honest... I really didn't like the gameplay at all. It just made me rage-quit because when the "malfunctions" happen, it just takes complete control away from you. It's like playing chess, but there's a toddler that keeps knocking the pieces over and moving stuff around. Not trying to be mean, but it's just not very fun when the malfunctions happen. Other than that though, it's a good tetris clone. Decent graphics, good music, perfectly fine controls. The lowest ratings I gave were for Fun and Originality (originality because it's literally just a tetris clone with bugs done on purpose).
Thanks for making it though, and congrats on making a working game! Easily more polished than mine.
Thanks for the feedback! I too did not like the movement along the wire, but I had to fix the drone AI so I ran out of time. I also agree that it feels like your are almost doomed when you trigger the alarm. Originally, it was planned to only release 1 at a time when you trigger a trap, but again, out of time. I tried to make a later level where there are far more directions to go to hide from the anti-virus. Also, the anti-virus have a radius where they can see you, but if you get out of that radius they can't see you and just move randomly. There were also supposed to be far more enemy types and more puzzle elements like switches to rotate parts of the circuit... but alas..