itch.io

Greetings, and my apologies for what is about to be a very long and probably rambly bit of feedback/critique. I genuinely don't want to leave you with the wrong impression, but I thought the best way would be to as thorough and descriptive as possible. With that in mind, kudos for all your work thus far and I hope that some of what I wrote here can be of use.

The atmosphere of the game so far does a good job of working in tandem with the little bit of world building you have implemented so far. I can tell that as time goes on, these little things will add up in terms of intrigue and then'll be wrapped up in a quaint little dad-game/cozy game. However you might want to put it. Your devlogs demonstrate a great insight into what you're working on as well as the ambitions you have for the future. I don't think it'll be an easy road for you, but you can absolutely turn this into a 10 hour experience with hard work.

One of what I think is this game's biggest strong suits is what you have in terms of art direction. It's incredibly minimal, and yet you managed to squeeze really eye catching and interesting details into the tank's geometry. I won't try and pretend that everything has that same level of polish, but I think you can get there even while striving for great performance on people's hardware. All of the art direction implemented right now gives me Evangelion vibes due to the poles and rebar littered across the landscape. That or I'm really letting my latest rewatch get to my head. This is all to say, you're doing really well to sell people on the vibes thus far.

Moving on, I've had experiences that I want to put out into words so you might be able to glean something to improve upon. I've already read people's comments asking for controller support, but I don't think you should think about that until the physics is more user friendly. Rather than offer solutions in this department, I think you should just make sure you've played the game with a controller and gotten others to do the same. Really get a feel for how your current systems may impact controller users' experiences. If thus far it's felt jank on mouse and keyboard, it's not a big stretch to think it'll feel really bad on a controller without any tweaking.

The next point I want to make is a double edged sword and it's about the night system. The variety and challenge that a night can bring goes without question. I even think I enjoyed it for the first two nights while I explored the lands around Babel. That feeling started to change when I felt like nights were vastly longer than day. I don't even know that I ever witnessed a sunrise. This really didn't help when I was struggling through the ice section and felt my best course of action was to die or reload a save and then spam the skip to day option to ensure I actually had enough visibility. I'll touch on that more in a second. I think the easiest way to fix this problem is to make the ambient light levels a little brighter. To support this, after I destroyed Babel I had a night time moment that was breathtaking thanks to clear skies and a vast array of stars above my head. I could drive basically wherever I wanted and navigate by the pale glow of stars above. That was fantastic. I know this is a rather subjective gripe, but the contrast between the starry glow and the oily ink of other nights made me yearn for more stars. That said, I don't think it's fair for me to expect a solution when this is such a subjective gripe and the workload to fix this seems like a non-trivial matter. If you ignore anything in this essay, let it be this night time gripe.

My last problem with how the game feels right now is related to the ice biome around the radio outpost. I am all for areas with their own ideas and mechanics that help strengthen a player's journey. As you mentioned in your latest devlog at time of writing, it's what makes Zelda exciting. Yet, the ice biome needs at least a once over to polish out kinks and make sure you're clearly communicating to a player what is and isn't possible. I think the biggest thing, is there needs to be some kind of way to be warned when you're about to be drowned. Too many times did I find the deep end of the pond because I drove a centimeter too far into no no zone. Not only did I not have a clue what was too much and what was barely above the threshold, but I felt like I lost minutes off my life when this kept happening. I'm not sure that this is an easy fix either, but some way to know what depth of water is safe and isn't would be helpful. Maybe a small grace period to reverse when treading through water as well. However, the truly easy solution I think comes in the form of fixing how traversing the ice fields is communicated to the player.

Taking things slow, watching for cracks, and following the wires are the three things communicated to the player. Lets start with the wires. The night issue rears its head here again because as soon as night sets in, you lost that waypoint that Gas outpost tells you is so valuable. I'm not sure if the dynamic weather could allow for the stars to appear one night to glow just enough, but there was no way I was going to go back and forth between settlements while attempting to cross to see if that might happen. That said, the language at time of writing makes it seem like following the wires will be enough to avoid any falling in and dying. That's to say, the game felt like it was teaching me to avoid falling into the water at all costs. So, I was pretty surprised when I got to the leg of the journey between Poles 3, 4, and 5 and found myself repeatedly dying. When you come back through this area with the Ice Scanner, a player can see that this section is largely made up of Red and Orange difficult zones. Going through it the first time, you're not really made aware that there are tiers of danger to the ice or even that you can survive in the water by straddling the line between sinking and swimming your tank along. If you played Death Stranding, similar mechanics in that game may have helped you here, but it won't help everyone and it's not something that needs to be required knowledge. Unfortunately, this also meant for me that the going slow and watching for cracks mechanics that the game had taught me at the start of the section were largely out of the equation as I needed to cross between land bridges via carving shallow paths in the ice. This entire section was a blend of anxiety and frustration as I dreaded falling through the water at just a centimeter too deep and losing my progress. Not a great feeling.

So that's a lot to take in, but I think this also has the easiest solution already ready to go and is diegetically pleasing. There are buoys scattered around the land bridges that are intermixed with the wave breakers. These are actually how I figured out I needed to use the land bridges at all, as opposed to unquestioningly listening to the advice from the Gas outpost. There are a few that are positioned well enough that made me realize that not all of the terrain under the ice was deep enough to drown me. If you use the buoys or some other diegetic detail (think lost tanks in impassable zones) I think this area could avoid being frustrating and a nice world building area. Sprinkle in some details about how a tank drowns in the lead up to the land bridges, and you can guide players along intended paths of varying difficulties for more fun. Again, consider also throwing in a visual cue on the tank for identifying water that's too deep or just give us a grace period to reverse to more stable ground.

So, I just yapped a whole bunch. All in all, I genuinely wanted to offer you advice on where I think you might improve. That said, none of these points are concrete or will be felt the same universally among players. Don't let me dictate how you change the game, but I hope this gave you some ideas for how to improve the fun. If nothing else, playtest.

The last big thing I want to bring up is a bug I think I noticed. I'm not sure what exact circumstances caused it to happen, but it seems like packages can lose their collision and vanish through the floor when too close to the floor and the bottom of the tank. I had this happen with a couple of junk pieces while on elevators as well as with delivery items. I think they only happened on elevators, but I may be misremembering. It's kind of hard to notice what happens to the item once it's glitched, but it seems like it starts falling beneath the map since it seemed like that's what happened when one managed to still have some data tied to my claw on the surface. Most of the time, they just seem to go invisible or are already so far vanished that they don't interact with my claw anymore.

That's all I had to say and I think I really ought to apologize again for the length of my critique, but that's unfortunately just within my nature. I'll look forward to future devlogs and picking this up in the future once more has had time to grow and accumulate. Best of luck coding and have fun making Deep Snow Delivery.

I have a couple different versions of NudeByte downloaded and unpackaged, but I'd like to get rid of the older ones so I don't have them taking up space. My concern is, how is my save file stored? I don't want to go accidentally deleting it.

I want this to be a review/comment with the intention to help you polish this game up. Let me start with the things I like. I enjoy the premise and the work you put in to building the atmosphere. It helps sell the immersion and build an identity for the game. The amount of work you were able to put in is something to be proud of. I think the wall running is a neat idea, with the only issue there being the adhesion to the wall feels a bit weak with the player slipping only a second or two after sticking. It doesn't feel like there's much time to use the wall for distance and pushed me to wall hop and gave me a frenetic pace. The amount of bots in Lvl 2 was challenging, but if I didn't have my complaints, I think they would've been a welcome challenge. The game play loop of collecting data and delivering them is simple and paves the way to have unique platforming challenges.

The one real complaint I have is born from my inability to really understand how to use the Wall Gun. It feels like it's supposed to be a way to make player borne walls to facilitate more fluid wall running, but I never could understand how. The wall spawning in front of my face feels more like an obstacle. If I wanted to position the wall in a more advantageous position, I'd have to be angling my view down or flick my camera to the right to platform jump or extend my wall run respectively. That didn't come naturally and felt like I was more likely to kill my momentum or put a wall above my head. So I tried to pivot my usage and started to attempt to wall plant/bounce between my player created walls, but that only ever resulted in minimal height or incorrect placement and plummeting into the void.  All that said, I want to offer some brain storm ideas for how you might take this wall gun idea and mold it (if you, of course, want to keep working on this project).

I think the best and easiest improvement would be to beef up the Wall Gun training room in the tutorial. Offer a small animation of a character using the wall gun properly, or change up the layout of that specific room in the tutorial. Something like a small gap, a bigger gap, and the biggest gap to the exit door. That style of room does offer immediate reinforcement with the player's mind with the trade off that it may be a sieve between players who understand the Wall Gun and a breaking point for those who don't. The animation may be the simplest and best fix. I'm not going to try and armchair dev you with ideas for how to replace the Wall Gun, but that can always be a last resort.

All my critique and feedback out of the way, I think you really should take away a feeling of pride from doing the game jam. I am amazed that you were able to do so much for this game in a game jam time frame, and even if I had my moments that spawned feedback notes, I was still excited to check this out. If you update this project in the future, I'll put it down on my list to have fun with down the line. Have fun and good luck!

I think this is an incredibly unique idea. I appreciate the aesthetic of everything. You don't often see arm-less skeletons side by side with masked up murder teddy bears. The momentum idea is a really unique idea and I think you have something genuinely unique with that in your game.
That said, I gotta offer up critique that the warped tower feels incredibly difficult to play. The tight platforming is not conducive to a good time when the distance I can jump feels like it fluctuates regularly. It's a good idea, tweak it up with a longer time in-between or an audio cue and I think it'll be easier to tell what's going on. The only other thing I think you should probably improve in future games is the readability of your signs. The plank aesthetic is a good idea, but each plank does not need a shadow. It made it personally hard to focus on the signs and take in the info you wanted me to. Those are the only things that really feel wrong with this game and anything else I could offer feedback on would be personal nitpicks.
Solid idea here and good job for putting hard work into this. Can't wait to see what you cook up next.

Admittedly, this game is not going to set the world on fire but, this might satisfy you if you're bored one afternoon with nothing to do. The game is simple by design but that doesn't hurt the experience much, if at all.

The downsides I could point out are that the environmental design can lead to some confusion late in the game as you try and remember where that one thing was you needed to cross to. The first three guns feel a bit hit or miss in terms of enjoyment but your fourth and fifth weapon do make for fun. Controlling the game is also a bit wonky but muscle memory after a few minutes should resolve that.

The last con I'd say is the replay value is hurt by the only player choice coming at the end of the game which may lead to some choosing not to return in order to not go back through everything.

The rest of the game is a good positive in my book. The graphics are fun and reminiscent of times gone by. Admittedly, the story is simple but it serves its purpose and I think pushes the player to continually progress in search of more details. I didn't pay too close attention to the audio design, music or otherwise, and simply put on my own music and vibed to that as I played. The game wasn't made harder and allowed me really to settle into a comfort zone with the game.

Lastly, is the game worth it's price? I saw one particular review claiming the price is too high for what's here. Citing length and overall substance of the game as the reasons behind that statement. Honestly, I'd say it is worth the price. It's not a diamond in the rough with oodles and poodles and noodles and more content behind it, but rather a solid piece of work from a developer that takes you for a decent and enjoyable time. As I stated above, if you need something to do and looking for some way that isn't going to waste your time, I'd pick up "And All Would Cry Beware".

7/10