I think it's a fair criticism that our level design holds us back in some ways. A lot of our levels are more geared towards introducing concepts than exploring them in interesting ways. Maybe we should have focused on fewer concepts and explored each of them more thoroughly.
I agree with you on the spike visibility issue, especially in level 4. I am glad that you only had occasional bugs, but sorry about that.
I am glad that you liked the game and I hope it didn't take you too long with the difficult parts you mentioned. I will let our composer know that you liked the music. It sounds like you made it pretty far into the game and I am glad you were motivated enough to stick with it despite the difficulty and any bugs.
I think we unintentionally made it way toooo challenging :). Our intention was to make something that required a level of skill and mastery, but keeping in mind that its a game jam and people may only play your game for a bit. So I think we need to retune the difficulty a bit, after the jam is over. I apologize for the bugs you mentioned. We are working on delivering bugfixes also after the jam is over. The last bug you mentioned is a surprise to me, but we will look into it. Let us know if there is anything else you would like to see patched.
Glad that you liked the game. Thanks for taking the time to play, comment and rate. I think playing with volume on would have added to the impact of the player's actions, but no big deal. I think it's a fair criticism that the swinging points can reduce your momentum. The grappling has a certain speed, and the swinging has a certain speed, and swinging is harder to manuever, so we kept speed lower, but I think that's an oversight on our part that it does detract from the feeling of inertia and momentum. I think I know the bug you are talking about - we have tried to reproduce it but we can only reproduce it once in a while. Hopefully it didn't happen too often for you, but will try to fix it in an update after the jam. I think we need to add a brightness slider, because each monitor has a different color configuration and that might make it harder to see the blue swing points. Please also let us know if there is anything else you would like to see changed or improved.
It was refreshing to play a game about exploration, there was very few games I have seen in the jam focused on that. While you had exploration, it wasn't mindless exploration either, you had an objective and a companion to guide you, and that helped a lot.
I think having things like the jump button and being able to stay on sides of mountains was super helpful, because it made traversal a lot easier and less punishing that it could have been. It sacrifices some realism, but I think the tradeoff for gameplay vs realism is worth it.
I would have liked there to be some more visible tangible projectiles coming out of your gun whenever you shot it.
I ran into a bug whilst climbing the fourth mountain / tower where the action music started playing, so I expected to see enemies, but didn't see any, then the game said connection lost and started me over. Other than this, I didn't have any bugs. I enjoyed my time with the game.
I think you could also benefit from some screen shake when enemies explode, to go along with the kaboom particle effect and sound effect. This is how I do screenshake in Unity: https://imgur.com/a/rWEMD0U
I liked the idea of combining slimes to grow stronger, and I really liked the idea of being near a start point to heal. I do wish the tuning was more in the players favor - enemies attack very often and do a pretty significant amount of damage. The healing is slower than the enemy attacking, so once an enemy is on you, it feels almost impossible to escape. Even if you get back to the healing station, you are taking more damage than you can heal. That's how it seemed in my playthroughs, maybe I missed something.
I really enjoyed the choice of music and art. I think the music kept an actiony rhythm and vibe, and the art had a cute, lighthearted vibe.
I think you could benefit from camera shakes, hit stop, and particle effects. I don't know if you're engine already has a particle system. If it does, adding some particles will make a big difference. I am not sure how camera shake would be coded in your engine, but this is how I do it in unity: https://imgur.com/a/rWEMD0U
As for hit stop, this is how I do it in unity
IEnumerator hitStop(float hitStopTimeScale, float duration)
{
Time.timeScale = hitStopTimeScale;
yield return new WaitForSecondsRealtime(duration);
Time.timeScale = 1f;
}Please don't take my suggestions as me not liking the game. I liked the game in many aspects, I just think it could be even more fun and easier to pickup for players.
The thing that stands out to me in a good way is the visual style. I am glad to see a space game. Both of us made space games, so maybe we can give each other more relevant feedback.
I also really like the music, although it did get a little repetitive after looping 4 times. I appreciated the gradual fading out and reverb of the music. I wish that you let the game be quiet for longer, or just had some kind of white / brown noise in the background, to let that quiet lonely atmosphere of space sink in even more. I also do wish the asteroid destroy sound was a bit quieter. Nonetheless, I was pretty happy with the audio overall.
I like that you can connect to stars and create planets orbiting the stars. I got into a situation where I moved one star right next to the other. I wish you could create a binary star system, where two stars orbit each other simultaneously. I totally get how this would be too ambitious for a game jam, but it would be cool to see in an updated build.
My only real issue with this game is I wish that it were level based, so I felt like I had more of a prescribed goal on what to do and how to proceed. In this case, I found a couple stars, made some solar systems, destroyed some asteroids, and then stopped playing. Take what I saw with a grain of salt, because I have the same issue with minecraft - it doesn't have a prescribed goal, and yet minecraft is overly successful. But yeah, I would have liked maybe to have two modes - an endless mode like this and a level mode with more structured and focused gameplay. I don't think this is a huge issue either, just affects me as a player.
I was very happy to see camera shake and particle effects used here. I keep recommending people with action-esque games to use camera shake, particle effects, and hit stop. I think you could also benefit from hit stop whenever you destroy an asteroid. Hit stop can be achieved in a coroutine like so:
IEnumerator hitStop(float hitStopTimeScale, float duration)
{
Time.timeScale = hitStopTimeScale;
yield return new WaitForSecondsRealtime(duration);
Time.timeScale = 1f;
}
and call it with (below) where x = 0f and y = 0.2f
StartCoroutine(hitStop(x, y));
Cool concept, as others have said it does feel a bit short - that's a good thing though - it means that I was engaged enough to want to play more. I think you could take this farther. You had some basic mechanics but you could add more, more obstacles, more kinds of walls, more complicated level design, enemies, etc. The idea has a lot of potential.
I do appreciate that this is a unique take on this kind of game. I have seen other games like this in the jam where you control two characters with one input system, but none where the character wrap around the screen. I would keep trying to add distinguishing elements like that.
Hey, I'm glad you enjoyed and didn't face too many issues. I apologize for the buttons, not sure what happened, maybe you are right - I needed to test on a widescreen monitor to be sure. The other bug you mentioned is unfortunate but luckily not common, I will try to reproduce it on my end. Thanks for playing and all the feedback.
Wow! Thank you for taking the time to play, rate, and leave all this feedback!
I totally agree with you on the idea of introducing the new pull and throw mechanic in the last (12th) level. We were planning on having 3 more levels, but ran out of time. I'd say I'm still happy with 12 levels for a game jam, but if we knew it was going to be 12, then we would have (and should have) planned to introduce the pull and throw earlier, I totally agree with you on that. As for the level before that introduces enemies but not the pull and throw, we wanted to ease the player in a little bit. We thought that introducing both the pull and throw and the enemies in the same level might be too much. But we will consider in in our fixes to the game, thanks for that feedback.
Thank you for pointing out this bug of only activating the "buttons" if you click on the bottom portion. I want to help clarify what you mean, when you say buttons do you mean the small blue circles that allow you to swing? Internally we call those swing points, but I think buttons is a good name too. We will look into this bug. Can you give me any other details? - are you running at a 60hz monitor, 120 hz, 144 hz, etc? Did you face any lag?
In the rest of the game, did you run into any other issues or bugs? Did you get stuck on any level? Did you have any concerns about controls or pacing? I appreciate you playing all the way to the end if you did encounter any hiccups. We appreciate any feedback you can give us as we try to polish the game after the jam.
I will be happy to play, rate, and give feedback on your game as well!
Yeah, I am not definitely not a tower defence player typically, so you will know better. These are just the suggestions I give to most action games if they don't have those elements. I think the particle effects could help you without getting too noisy, if you just keep the particles to a minimum. For the camera shake and hit stop, I totally see what you are saying. One way to do it is to reduce the fire rate but make each bullet be worth more, and then at least the camera shake might work. The hitstop maybe you do only for when an enemy dies or when player takes severe damage. If you take a look at the twin stick shooter roguelike enter the gungeon, you will notice that they have a subtle screenshake each time you fire a bullet, and the bullets fire pretty fast, and in that game it doesn't get repetitive, though they only shake when the bullet fires, not when it hits. It still may not work, but I feel its worth a shot to reduce fire rate and add screen shake for the bullet fire, and then minor hit stop in those two situational cases.
For the removing towers, let me correct myself, what I mean is that - in order to remove a tower you select it with LMB and then remove it with RMB, then if you want to place that tower elsewhere, you have to again select it from the shop, and then place it in the new spot. If there is a net cost associated with buying a tower and selling it (I apologize I didn't pay attention to that part as much), then I understand the game design and I agree with your decision on making the purchasing and placement of towers important. In that case, yeah the slow motion does make more sense as an option for you.
I would be happy to playtest a future build if you make one. Feel free to reach out to me, at any time, even now. I'm @rsaamar on the Lost Relic Games Discord Server. It's good to have fellow indie game devs to chat with on topics and for feedback.
I think it makes a lot of sense to make a tower defense game about connecting to towers / to a base. I liked the different elemental effects - I thought that added some flair that a game like really benefits from. I was initially a little confused about the controls, even after reading the "How To Play", but the video tutorial helped a lot to get me started.
I think the controls were good, but they could be even more intuitive. It would be nice to be able to drag a tower from spot to spot (by holding down LMB, like a chess piece) rather than pressing LMB to remove the tower and selecting the tower again and then adding it to a new place. I would also like the game to save the tower I last clicked or last removed, and next time I click a spot, I would like the tower that I most recently selected or removed to be placed there. I think just these two changes would make the game a lot easier to pickup for new players.
I would have liked the towers to reprioritize to aim at the targets closest to the battery (if in range) rather than just the targets closest to the tower itself. Another approach is to keep the tower aiming / targeting the same, but introduce a slo mo mechanic where the game slows down whenever you are choosing your tower placement, which allows you to slow down and respond to incoming enemies and have just enough time to make a decision to switch the position of a tower without getting a disadvantage in battle. Of course I am biased, I made a slow mo game, and I love slo mo in games, but I genuinely think it could take this gameplay to the next level.
I wish there was more to do with the actual mechanic of connecting to towers. It doesn't have to be, but it would be cool for their to be some strategy around that, more than just which towers to activate and not to activate. I think it's still a very solid job for a game jam, but I could see it being expanded. Maybe you can connect two towers (can you? I missed that) and then the connection between the towers becomes a laser, so a long laser is good, but the longer the laser, the slower the tower each fire bullets? You are more the expert than me at tower defense, you will have better ideas.
I think you did a decent job with the art, sound and music. I think since this is an action game, you could really benefit from adding particle effects, hitstop, and camera shake. Unity has a great particle system, and if you are not familiar with it, there are plenty of tutorials online. You can also look for free or cheap assets that have particle effects for hitting things / enemies.
Hit stop is when the game stops briefly whenever an action happens. You can code hitstop using a coroutine like this:
IEnumerator hitStopRoutine(float hitStopTimeScale, float duration)
{
Time.timeScale = hitStopTimeScale;
Time.fixedDeltaTime = (Time.timeScale / (1f * Screen.currentResolution.refreshRate));
yield return new WaitForSecondsRealtime(duration);
Time.timeScale = 1f;
Time.fixedDeltaTime = (Time.timeScale / (1f * Screen.currentResolution.refreshRate));
}
And you can call this coroutine like so:
StartCoroutine(hitStop(x, y));
And you can do camera shake like so: https://imgur.com/a/rWEMD0U
Sorry for the long message and please don't take my feedback and suggestions as harsh criticism, I genuinely enjoyed playing this game and I think things like this, from me or other players and commenters, could help take this game to the next level.
Hey, I think I may have fixed the game breaking bugs that you encountered. Since you can only rate me on the existing build, I will upload the new build once the jam is over. If you would like to check it out, then please reach out to me at any point on the discord. I am @rsaamar. And then I will inform you when the new builds are up after the jam is over.
Wow, thanks for capturing footage and commentary. It was nice to see realtime reactions and gameplay. I don't know whether or not you are being sarcastic about the "well executed" after seeing the video, which I am not proud of. I'll take it as sarcasm, but correct me. At this point we are definitely aware that level 4's onboarding is not great. The purpose of level 4 is to teach you to use the slow motion mechanic, because later levels and mechanics will become much easier if you use the slow motion. The blue-purple bar under the player is your slow motion meter, and you can hold down the slow motion button (space) for up to 3 seconds at a time, and it recharges twice as fast.
Our strategy for the onboarding was to be hands off, only give the player button prompts, and let the player experiment and figure out how things work themselves, to handhold as little as possible. But I totally see how level 4 was just too soon. We needed one or two levels before level 4 that introduced the slow motion mechanic more gradually.
I was glad to see you eventually give into using the slow motion mechanic, because that was the entire purpose of level 4. You almost made it to the end, all you had to do was use slow motion more frequently. You can grapple at extreme angles to your destination and avoid spikes, if you just have the time to do so, by using the slow motion.
You are right, you don't need to hold down the button. We were okay with people not holding down the button if they figured out they didn't need to. But what we realized is that encouraging holding down the button for the normal grapple conditions people to hold it down in general, and so when they get to the blue "swing points" they would typically automatically hold it down there as well, which is needed.
There are also some situations in later levels or even in level 4 where you may want to let go of the button halfway to the wall, turn on slow motion, and regrapple somewhere else. And so keeping the grapple enabled only while you hold down the button gives us some versatility in the mechanic which is more explored later on. I would compare it to how you can adjust the height and duration of your jump in platformers by holding down or letting go of jump.
Three things that really puzzled me in your playthrough, which I apologize for. We also have not gotten feedback from other players about these, as far as I know:
I am glad you took out the time to play, and we can never blame a player, but for a dev it is disheartening to see a player give up on level 4, only 1/3rd of the way through the game. Things gets easier from there - levels are simpler, but you get to see plenty of new ideas / mechanics / enemies / obstacles. You even get to grapple an enemy's bullet and throw it back at them, like telekinesis. You can see a lot of these new ideas and mechanics in the trailer:
Hey, nice to see a game of this style. My team made a similar kind of game for the GMTK game jam 2021 where the theme was "joined together". Please check it out if you are interested, its a short game with similar mechanics to yours: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2021/rate/1086486
We have a lot of similar mechanics, but you have some unique twists on it. In my game I would have players take damage if they stepped on the wrong color platform, and you instead make that platform immune to the opposite color player - I think that's a good way of restricting their movement without punishing the player.
I also thought that vertical walls and clinging onto the sides of walls was an interesting twist on the idea. I do wish that I could jump off of those walls without swinging though, may make them a little bit easier to move around.
I see that you used a music asset and gave credit for it, that's perfectly fine, there's no music section in the ratings anyway, so it doesn't hurt you at all. I appreciated the variety of music.
As others have said, the only criticism with this game is that the characters can be difficult to manuever on the chain. That may be a matter of tweaking numbers on the characters. I'm not sure if you used the unity 2d physics system or built your own, but it might help to just make the characters lighter or make them heavier but apply more velocity / force when a key is pressed than you do now, to give them more momentum. Linear drag / damping should probably be minimal is my guess. These are just my thoughts off the top of my head, could be way off.
I would also make the colliders one way. You can use a platform effector for this, so that the bottom of a platform can be passed through, while the top of a platform cannot be passed through. Also try making colliders a bit smaller than their art, especially near corners and edges. With all three changes - tweaking numbers on physics + platform effectors + smaller colliders, your game will feel like butter. I think that's the only thing holding it back.
I think you also have to make a design decision about what kind of game you want to make. Do you want to make a puzzle platformer or precision platformer? Puzzle platformers are more about what to do, and less about the execution of it in realtime; puzzle platformers shouldn't require precise control or skillful manuvering, but they should require some thought about how to make the next step. Precision platformers just in my opinion should have much simpler level design which requires minimal thought, but more skill, timing and precision when it comes to execution of the movement. It seems like you are going for more of a puzzle platformer, but that's totally up to you. Whatever you decide, remove anything that inhibits the player from engaging with specifically that - whether it is puzzles or precision.
Sorry if the message is long. I think the game has potential and I would love to playtest a new build if you make one. I am rsaamar on the discord, feel free to contact me there if you make a new build. I would also really appreciate it if you checked out my game jam submission, because we also have some chain / grapple mechanics.
Glad to see another grappling game, I think we can give each other valuable feedback since we both made games with similar mechanics.
I was immediately impressed by the scope of the levels and the number of different mechanics you managed to put into the game. I really enjoyed the visual themes you went with of the dinosaur-like 'technocow' enemies and the cowboy. I was super surprised by the boss at the end. I really enjoyed the movement and grappling mechanics, most notably when I had to grapple from under a point and swing horizontally. I found grappling to points on the sides of walls to be a bit more cumbersome, but it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the game, just not the same level of wild fun movement.
I do wish the grappling were a little faster at times. I think the normal grappling along a horizontal path under a point above you is fast enough. But grappling to a point on the side of a wall (moving upwards) or bringing yourself down or up from a grapple using the arrow keys felt like it could be a bit more smooth. I can understand the design choice though to make it more gradual to allow for easier control of your positioning.
I think it made a lot of sense to include attack (left click) and defensive options (shift), although I wish that these were actually part of the grapple or jump somehow, so that the movement mechanics could be the absolute focus of the game. This is just my personal opinion, but it might have been cool to kill enemies by landing on them via grapple or jump (like Mario) or somehow using your grapple to move to and slice through an enemy very quickly (think like a katana but using a grapple to lunge forward). I also think that the jump could have just been you letting go of the grapple button and launching off of the tangent of your path, rather than having a separate jump button.
These changes would also allow you to cut down on the number of buttons the player has to use for the game to just left mouse button + WASD. I can see how each of these changes would have their own design and development challenges, but I think you could take this grappling hook foundation and push it a lot further. I think your level design indicated that the grapple was supposed to be the star of the show, but I feel that the other mechanics like the jump, attack, and especially dash distract from that.
The boss at the end was awesome in visual design and mechanics, but the health system confused me. At that point, I kept playing because I had gotten so far and I felt motivated to keep going, but the health bar seemed to keep going white. I wasn't sure if this was a glitch, or a design decision of the boss going invincible temporarily. I had noticed the same thing with enemies, but I had been able to bypass them by grappling away. In the case of the boss, I kept trying to grapple and attack. Eventually my game crashed with the bug below:
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event0
for object obj_camera:
Variable obj_camera.camera_v(100135, -2147483648) not set before reading it.
at gml_Object_obj_camera_Step_0
############################################################################################
gml_Object_obj_camera_Step_0 (line -1)
I think that you could benefit from adding hit stop and camera shake to your game, for when the player gets hurt and for when enemies get hurt, to really empasize the impact of the hits. Camera shake can be achieved like so in Unity, I'm not sure how it would be in the engine you used: https://imgur.com/a/rWEMD0U
And hitstop can be achieved like so:
- set Time.timeScale = 0f; or 0.2f or some value close to 0, below 1.
- wait 0.2 seconds or so, unscaled time
- set Time.timeScale back to 1f (normal time progression)
I would be happy to playtest the game if you get an updated build. I would also really appreciate it if you could check out my game and give me feedback as well, since we both made grappling games.
I liked the overall approach to a mometum-based grappling game. I really liked the art style and I appreciated the chill music playing in the background. I also really found the in-level arrows to be a big help, otherwise I would get stuck sometimes. Overall I enjoyed my experience.
I think this game has a high skill ceiling and a high skill floor, which means its a lot of fun if you are skilled, and its even more fun if you are very skilled, but if you are a novice, its not as fun as it could be. Nothing wrong with that, just makes it a more niche game in my opinion.
I think the game could have been much more engaging even to a novice by making everything move faster, with more gravity, higher initial speeds, and all jumps and movement be less floaty.
I think you could expand on this by making the swinging feel more stylish and adding some kind of points / score / style meter - like in skateboarding games - for different kinds of movement, swings, flips, jumps, combos etc.
My team also made a grappling hook game, so I would appreciate it if you could check us out and give any feedback. Your feedback will be very valuable since you also made a grappler.
Super unique kind of game. I see you went with the theme application of connecting to the goal through the journey. It was really neat how the game was setup as taking the role of a mars rover operator with the full equipment and everything.
I did run into a bug where the text box covered my character so I had no idea where it was until I tried moving around multiple times. I also got kind of confused when I was only able to use one 'execute' per round as I got deeper into the game, and then I realized that need to be doing multiple adds and one execute, which I think is a little confusing at first but clever, because it adds tension to the gameplay.
I would suggest adding more elements to mix it up, like enemies that shoot projectiles that move one square each time that you move one square, or portals that transport you from one location to another.
I worked on this game for the global game jam that was also about a mars rover, in case you are interested: https://globalgamejam.org/2022/games/superpositioned-4. It has the portal mechanic I am talking about as well.
Wow, that's some high praise there. I don't even know if I believe our game should win overall :), but hopefully do somewhat well. I am glad that we entertained you with our game.
Is there anything specific you would like us to change or improve? We are open to feedback from players, anything.
Also, what bugs did you encounter, specifically? Thanks in advance.
Thank you for taking the time to play, rate and comment on our game.
I appreciate the feedback - what specifically do you think made level 2 difficult? How many levels did you complete? Were there are any other levels you found too difficult or suddenly hard?
Yeah, there is an infrequent bug with the grapple, unforunately we didn't have enough time to fix it, but I appreciate you sticking with the game despite it. Hopefully it didn't bother you too often.
Oh I see, that's super cool. I still do wish that there was more a mechanical or gameplay connection, but I think that's super impressive that you base it on how the chess pieces move.
I think it's totally fair to make your game more accessible, its more important to avoid making a hard game, so I get it. I'm interested to see where you take the difficulty and challenge going forward. I'm rsaamar on the discord, feel free to shoot me a message if you have another playtest build.
Thank you for taking the time to play, rate, and comment! I appreciate your kind words. I am glad you got to the very end, so that you could see the combat part of the game too, I know it can be difficult to get through all the levels.
Do you have any specific feedback for the team? Do you have any concerns regarding difficulty or pacing?
I enjoyed your game as well, and hopefully my feedback was helpful.
"The Matrix meets Interstellar" Speedrunning, time-manipulation, momentum-based, space-traversal game (too many words, sorry lol):
https://itch.io/jam/lost-relic-games-1/rate/1580912#post-6072787
"The Matrix meets Interstellar" Speedrunning, time-manipulation, momentum-based, space-traversal game (too many words, sorry lol):
https://itch.io/jam/lost-relic-games-1/rate/1580912#post-6072787
Thank you for checking out the game and leaving feedback!
Sorry about your experience with level 4. I was telling myself that I always have issues with difficulty spikes in game jams, and I did again lol.
The purpose of level 4 was to teach you the slow motion mechanic, and using the slow motion mechanic correctly should make the level a lot easier, but I completely agree that it was out of place. There should have been another level or two leading up to it, where we introduced the slow motion more gradually, and perhaps I should have framed level 4 as a boss fight of sorts, to allow the difficulty to make sense.
I had a great time with your game too, and I hope my feedback was helpful there. Is there any other feedback you would like to communicate to the team about Grapple Blast?
Outstanding game! I keep suggesting people to use things like camera shake, hitstop, crunchy sfx and crunchy particles to juice up their game. Finally, I find a game that meets that expectation!
Its a very minor thing - but it might have been cool to see even more variation in the magnitude and duration of camera shakes, although there already was a decent amount.
I can understand why you did not implement hitstop in your game - just too much going on to want to pause the game, but I think if you used it sparingly, mainly in key moments of the fights, then it would add some extra pizzazz.
It was difficult at first for me to understand where the mental engagement for the game was. I thought, okay this is just an auto / looping type of game, that's all. But I began to realize that how much you spent and whether or not a weapon was enabled or disbled mattered to some extent.
However, I also saw that I often didn't pay the full bill, and so my rates went up (love that) but I still survived until day 14, even after many consecutive days of my missing part of the my payments. I'm guessing there are some calculations behind the scenes to determine at what point the player is really severely punished for missing too many payments, but I wish those were made more obvious to the player, so it could inform my decision making.
Similarly, I didn't understand how much life I had left, and so it was impossible for me to gauge how careful and careless I should be about protecting my plant. It was not obvious to me when I was taking damage or how much damage I took. So in that sense, though the game does aspire to be a thinking mans game (or it seems that way) I think the UI and communication of player state is lacking, and makes the game feel a bit more braindead then it actually may be or was intended to be.
I still had a lot of fun, because the point of the game was to turn me into a killing machine, and you executed that very well. I also really enjoyed the resource management aspect of it, up to the point I realized that I didn't feel noticeably punished for missing payments and didn't know when I was near death.
I would be happy to playtest an updated build if you keep improving this, because I think this genuinely has a ton of potential as a browser, mobile or even steam PC game. Sorry for the long message.
I would also really appreciate it if you can give me some feedback on my submission as well.
Visually striking game. As others have said, it was a bit hard to get into at first and the screen does get a bit noisy at times.
I think you could benefit from adding hit stop and camera shake. I am commenting this on many of the games I play, because for whatever reason, no one uses hit stop and camera shake! :)
Camera shake can be achieved by using a coroutine like so: https://imgur.com/a/rWEMD0U
And called using StartCoroutine(cameraShake(x, y, z, ..));
And hit stop like so:
IEnumerator hitStop(float hitStopTimeScale, float duration) {
Time.timeScale = hitStopTimeScale;
yield return new WaitForSecondsRealtime(duration);
Time.timeScale = 0f;
}
I would be happy to playtest an updated build if you make changes. I would also appreciate it if you checked out our game and any feedback you have.
I would also add that its sometimes hard to tell that you got hurt. I would perhaps add a screen shake and hit stop whenever you get hurt. Screenshake can be achieved like so: https://imgur.com/a/rWEMD0U
and hitstop you can make a coroutine like this:
IEnumerator hitStop(float hitStopTimeScale, float duration) {
Time.timeScale = hitStopTimeScale;
yield return new WaitForSecondsRealtime(duration);
Time.timeScale = 0f;
}
and you can call it with StartCoroutine(hitStop(x, y));
I suggest x = 0.2f and y = 0.3f each time you get hit. Or if you want to emphasize at lower levels of health, you can scale it up each time, 0.2, then 0.35, then 0.5f or something like that.
I don't think this necessarily the most unique game (I have seen others along the same lines) but this is outstandingly well executed. It seems like a small thing, but I think adding a short story portion at the start makes the game feel much more special. I understand that you didn't make all the music yourself, and you credited the producers which is nice, but I liked how the music paired with the tone of the story and game. I think the strongest aspect of this game is the level design. As I kept playing, I started to notice how the stages mirrored each other and so the solutions to the puzzles became more readily clear over time. I do wish there was another mechanic or two to spice this up, but I think its awesome that a solo developer was able to put together such a complete, polished product.
If I had to suggest some new mechanics, I would suggest things like intermediate portals that take you from one place in the level to another, to spice up levels. I worked on a top down game for the 2022 Global Game Jam with a similar theme and ideas that had the portal mechanics I am talking about: https://globalgamejam.org/2022/games/superpositioned-4
I am happy to playtest any new builds if you continue developing this game at all.
I would also really appreciate it if you could give me feedback on my game jam submission as well.
Ryan, thank you so much for checking it out, commenting and rating. Definitely level 4 is a bit of a hike in difficulty, although the point of that level is to teach you to use slow motion, which should make it easier, but I agree with you that it should be adjusted or moved later in the game. I would love to know if there is anything you think we should change or improve going forward?
In unity for a camera shake, I would make a coroutine like the so: https://imgur.com/a/rWEMD0U
and again you can call it using StartCoroutine(cameraShake(...));
You can make your own functions for decideDuration() and decideStartingMagnitude() and magnitudeOverTime() and inside those functions return whatever numbers you would like for each type of camera shake. You most likely want to do a small camera shake each time that the player fires a bullet - if its a bullet the player charged up, then do a bigger camera shake. You also may want a camera shake each time a bullet hits an enemy or object, and whenever the player gets hurt. And lastly a big camera shake anytime anything explodes.
Again, sorry if this is too much info, and please don't take this as me not liking the game - I liked the game a lot and would like to see it get even better. I'd be happy to playtest if you make a new build.
Here are a couple more minor pieces of feedback. I think adding hit stop, camera shake, more pronounced particle effects and sound effects could go a long way to make combat feel more visceral. I'm assuming you are making this in Unity? (Sorry if this is too much info or you already know all this stuff, just trying to help)
In unity for hit stop effect, make a coroutine like so:
And you can call this with StartCoroutine(hitStop(x, y));
I would call this whenever a player bullet hits any object or enemy, I would make x = 0f, and y = 0.05f. Similarly, I would call this whenever the player gets hit by anything, with x = 0.2f and y = 0.2f.
Whenever an enemy dies, I would call it for longer: x = 0f, y = 0.3f to really emphasize it.