It's really interesting and I like how how you meet the characters along the way. It took me a bit to understand that the other characters were linked with my controls, but once I did it was a mind=blown kind of thing.
I was initially thinking "dang I'm hella weak", but then I saw the potential. It's there, but it needs to me tweaked (e.g. other characters bullets can hit the player and just not work at all).
Interesting concept that needs a big brain. I found it difficult to play given the smaller screen sizes. They key to solving these puzzles is knowing the layout of the map. The smaller screen spaces deny that information, or at least makes it tedious. I don't think there's any way around it, but maybe some more hints or guidance would help.
The game feels kind of sparse, like it's missing something? It could just be the result of the sluggish performance on my end. I found it really hard to group enemies together to use my life efficiently to attack. It felt tedious, and once I did get them together, killing them felt "meh". Interesting concept turning an action game to a puzzler.
Simple art with a lot of working systems. Level design is well thought out as well. I like how the instruments in the music change as you pair the monsters together. Great work!
I had a problem where I would get stuck on those gates. They would overlap with the monsters or me and I would be forced to restart the level.
I thought this game would be more detective work, but I ended up just waiting until the wolves spawn and either walling them until the timer runs out or walling up a single sheep and using bait to stall out the wolves from destroying the walls. The only "out of control" feel I had was having no grid placement for blocks. When I need to wall up a wolf, you could see the struggle as my blocks are placed sporadically. Other than that, I felt that I was in control for a majority of the game.
Also, please turn up the volume of the sound effects, and perhaps add some more. It will definitely need more polish if development continues.
No, I think I understand what you mean. Unlike other straight-forward one-button games, this one requires a bit more thinking and planning as you play. When I plaaytest my game to get a high score I have this general strategy that I follow. Essentially we want to move as much as we can while being as safe as possible. So I'm always pressing the button whenever the opportunity arises I also need to pay close attention for when I'm in a pinch and spam to get out of the way. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't, I know I can always try again quickly to try to achieve the dream run.
Having two random buttons sound nice, but also difficult to implement with the chaos. The spaceship faces the direction it's going to go, so if it instead has two direction that it can go, it's not possible to clearly indicate that based on ship rotation alone. If I include an alternative hinting, like an arrow on the top right of the space ship that is the same color as the alt-button, it could work. But I think it'll be more confusing for new players. Worth a shot though.
Thank you for your feedback Marxy! Glad you liked it :D
I never thought about something like that. What I had in mind when expanding the game is that you could have a few slots where you could save moves. You could never go over those slots, but you could always save a move if you had one empty.
Say you had a right but you don't need it right now. That's fine, save it for later in 1 of our 3 extra slots. Oh, I need a right? Cool, I saved one earlier so I'll click on that saved move so I can move right. I don't have a left? I'll throw what I have into my save slots to quickly try to get a left.
The idea of having a preview of the future rolls... pondering on the idea, it would give the player a lot less agency over the idea above. However, because of that, the player does definitely feel more out of control. And even if they could see 3 moves ahead, if it rolls wrong you're still screwed e.g. left, right, up, down... asteroid incoming right; the moment you see it, it would take too long to get up or down to move out of the way unless we balanced specifically for that interaction. That doesn't even take into account the other spawns of particles.
Needless to say, thank you for the suggestion! And thank you for testing :D
Now that I'm typing normally, I'm moving my hand as if I'm playing. This game will make me unlearn how to type.
Super clever game. Absolutely obscure, but in a good way. The only thing i can think of is to make the ball actually move rather than have it teleport to the next grid. Please check out my game too, we met in iaknihs's stream.
I see loli, I click.
Jokes aside, I think it was a fun game. I definitely would have liked to have seen more tight puzzles. I played the game more like a platformer, and worrying about my action life bars became an afterthought. This is more of a balancing/level design issue. As such, there were times when I was throwing my grapple off screen to hit something, off screen.
I also felt that the grapple mechanic was a nice touch, but could've been executed better. For example, when you reel in it feels very abrupt, and has no audio feedback that you hit something.
Music sounded very good and fit with the overall art direction, but it most definitely is repetitive. It also doesn't help that it doesn't loop seamlessly, so it got stale after about 4 minutes of gameplay, probably less.
Overall, OK game. Needs rebalancing of action health bars and better level design to compliment it.
Bloom is a bit too harsh. I also felt that the sun is a bit too fast. After hitting about 3 asteroids and having them slow my progress to stop, the sun was able to catch up to me. This happened around the 80km mark. Also, the black holes are so deadly! When trying to outrun the sun it's nearly impossible to avoid them since you need to go so fast. One hit and i was at like 20% health, and hitting another asteroid would have immediately been a game over.
I would have liked to see some shaking/extra particles when you hit a asteroid. Also, when you start going fast, I would have liked to see the camera "trying to catch up to the ship." This could be done by having the camera slightly further behind the ship, or to really sell it, add a small bit of motion blur. There isn't a good sense of "going fast", which I definitely would have liked to see (e.g. streaks of speed).
Overall, a solid game.
Definitely tight on the deadline. There isn't enough hinting at what stats do, because they most definitely do something. I also suggest having the note much closer to the player so they have something to guide them at the start, since if they play blind, which they are, they will have absolutely no idea what to do.
For example, following the schedule would give the player an idea of what each stat is. Knowing they didn't take a shower early in the morning, they would've noticed the low hygiene and follow that it could have an effect on other interactions. Overall, it just needs better hinting.
A lot of my gameplay is purely on previous game logic, and for those who haven't played game like this, I think they would be absolutely lost.
There's also one problem where I got a call even though I was already in a call, get that fixed unless it was intentional, and if it was then it just adds to the chaos (good :c ).
When it got dark I thought it was night time. When it was night time I thought I couldn't work, so I was at a lost at what I was supposed to do. After two-ish rounds I had learned that there was a power thingy to make it normal again. I don't know if it's regular lights or something, but just know that I was confused.
Update: After talking to dev, supposedly the power goes out and you lose half of your work. So your sanity takes a dip and you have to turn on the power again. Please add some kind of indicator that this happened :c
Some music or ambiance of cars outside would have been nice. More sound effects on events would also benefit greatly (e.g. power goes out, sounds of a clicking noise with electricity noise thingy).
Also the hunger stat is confusing. The rest of the stats, you do a positive action it goes up, but when eating it goes down. It makes sense but is inconsistent with the rest of the stats. I would have walked hungry for a long time had I not been told from dev that hunger is "this is how hungry you are".
The sink I'm assuming is limited by a cooldown? When you use it, you can immediately walk away and you get the benefits right away. But the progress bar for it fills up. It should deplete assuming it's actually a cooldown, which from what I've played it's a cooldown, not a job.
Great balancing on what matters the most though, which is the deadline. Also indicate what's considered good reputation ;-;
To me, a good Getting Over It requires three elements, 1.) simple controls but difficult movement, 2.) interesting visual design, 3.) a motivator. This game has (1), a little bit of (2), and nothing on (3).
The motivator (3) could be anything, text appearing on the screen, a voice over, some gentle "flow" music. I only played the game for 7ish minutes before falling down hard. With nothing to motivate me to try again, I think it's normal to give up after a few falls. Use a motivator to make it difficult to give up.
Onto (2). I like the variety of terrain physics. That with the movement mechanics allows for a more organic feel to progression. This is probably due to good level design; it's quite good. It introduces a new terrain while you are safe, then adds the risk of falling after you mess with it. I did, however, fall with my first interaction with the bouncy guacamole. I bounced over the safety platform and into the other guacamole platform and kept on bouncing until I fell through. I was a sad :c
(1) I thought the moving arrow mechanic was going to be all the mechanics on this game, but when I interacted with the terrain it definitely made the mechanic more dynamic. Great design on them, and again, great level design.
Thanks for checking out the game WrathTitan. We did have this idea in mind as we were brainstorming, but had decided to have it change per button press. We didn't really think about why at the time since we had been brainstorming for a while, but thinking about it now, it would feel terrible if it chose right and you were locked with it for X seconds while a projectile came directly towards you from that direction. Having it as it is now would allow the player a chance to move once to try to get a direction perpendicular with the small time they have.
You should make it so you can't move towards a wall you're already touching. This prevents players from accidentally wasting a move when they don't move at all.
Difficulty is also very high. This is mainly because there's a lot on the screen, and many blocks are misleading. But that's the point, I'm assuming, that you'd need to figure out what isn't useful and what is useful. Took me an hour to finish the game at 90%ish completion. It's also a bit difficult preparing for moves that are very far away. There was one case where I thought one solution was viable, but I was 1 block off. Took me a good 15 minutes to realize it wasn't going to work.
When acquiring the red block, it trivializes the rest of the game. It's also tedious to time your stops precisely, and the camera and the block also jitters a bit if you stop outside of a snapped grid. I think you should have it so that red blocks are collected like the regular blocks and your stops become limited by how many reds you collect. Doing this means difficulty spikes to (limited moves * limited stops).
Overall, very fun and also very hard. Could be too hard though, if I were to give it a difficulty rating 0-10, 0 being easy as breathing, 10 being no one should even try to touch it, it would be a 6.
I got all the stones, made my way to the pillars to put the stones down and died on the way. Had to get all the stones all over again. There should be a checkpoints when you put down a stone and when you acquire a stone. I stopped there since I just kept dying over and over again.
Enemy cats need better signaling when they launch their attacks, especially their fireball. Would be nice if projectiles hit the walls, makes them feel more grounded and adds more strategy against the dark mage enemies.. Attacks on the dark mage are super fast, and again, have little to no signaling.
The cat as the player definitely takes a while to get used to. Even after 15 minutes of playing it's still quite hard to control, but I have a better idea of how to direct my attacks. Though that only happens maybe 1 out of every 5 attempts. If I kept playing and it stayed like this, I would just run around like a chicken without its head waiting to transform back to human, especially with the large checkpoints and non-regenerating life. I'd be more worried about surviving than actually fighting with the cat.
Also, if you get hit while the timer for attacking goes off, you don't attack at all. At times I just stand next to enemies waiting for my attack to go off but it never goes off, it's because you're in the hit animation, so it doesn't go off. If this is intentional it I'd like to know why, because it feels frustrating to play.
I also feel like enemies should pause when you transform. I often found myself stuck in the corner when I start to transform since enemies just surround me.
Very good game with good pacing. Definitely needs more of what I noted above.
It's great that you had moments where you felt strategic by barely escaping, but at the same time that introduces moments where you were really close, and you think you should've been fine but you weren't. To make this happen we made hitboxes lenient. We'll look into making it more lenient so long as gameplay doesn't feel too wack and out of tune. Thanks for the feedback on that!
I like the story and the interactivity parts, as little as there may be (the interactivity). This feels more like a webnovel than a visual novel. It's missing music and sound effects to sell the "gamified" story, so it just feels like I'm just reading a regular story from the internet. If I were to just judge the story by itself, it was okay. Things kind of just happened. There's two types of writing, writing of the characters and there's writing of the plot. This one appears mainly to be writing of the plot, and for me I typically don't like them, so I'm bias on that. But if I were to judge it based on previous plot-driven short stories, it's OK. I the story suffers from not setting up the scene enough. The reader is thrown in this scenario before ever knowing why they should care about these characters, this train, and the world. Pacing is too fast.
I like how you used the fonts and colors to highlight speakers and important details. The font really adds to the complexity and depth of the character in how they conduct themselves, or how they should, anyways.
I would love to hear a clap or snare on the off beat. You always want to be doing an action on the offbeat, and if you don't you literally move out of control. Without a sound on the off beat it's difficult to time and get in the flow. It's a great design that for the theme and would like to see more of it.
This game screams aesthetics. There's little to no story in exploration, and the little that I did find said something about a home (play it and you'll see it c: ). All of the other notes were just messages from the developers, I'm curious how this even got in the game.
I have problems in climbing hills that looks like they should be climb-able. At the start I actually wandered off into the ocean, but then realizing I probably shouldn't be here I tried to walk back. But since the hill I came from was "steep," I couldn't go back and I ended up wandering into the ocean.
Overall, I wish they had done more story. There's nothing to do! Or so that's how it seems like on the surface. It just doesn't seem like there's story implemented at all aside from that one text.
I find the buildings you see towards the end to be very interesting. Their structure is man-made (or so it seems), so there must have been something going on here. But I wasn't able to find anything else about it bedsides more asset developer notes.
Music is very repetitive.
I find the controls of this game to be frustrating, which yeah is out of your control, but there should be ways to minimize that frustration. I can't pick up characters when they are stacked on top of each other, meaning that if the delivery point has two of them stacked up, you need the spinner to hit the guy on top, otherwise you're soft-locked. If a block is on top of an inactive character and the spinner selects that character, you're also stuck. You can't pick up blocks while they're in the air (e.g. falling from a platform lv. 2). I'm just frustrated at the control scheme. Maybe it's me misunderstanding, but I am frustrated. Also missing music/ambiance.
Aside from the rant, visually it looks great. Perhaps the screen can shake when you throw it and it lands? That would put good weight to the boxes!
Very fun micromanagement. I would like to have seen some more visual feedback when you get hit by the spitting fish, but aside from that presentation is top notch. I definitely get a out of control feel from this at the start, though as you progress and get better, I feel like less of that, as if I have learned the game already and now I'm "in control." If I could change anything I would change the start of the level. It's slow enough for beginners, but as people play over and over again they have to wait and wait until they need to do stuff. Not too sure what a solution would be, but that's how I feel.
Were we only supposed to get one ball into the goal? Because that's how it functions on my end. I was originally under the impression that I needed to get all balls to the goal, so I spent a lot of time trying to solve for that until just one cleared the level. I really like the intro to the game, very clever! Check out my game too, and please look into UI in Unity :c
Thanks for the feedback! Glad to see that you appreciated the jank. This was more or less intentional, as we wanted to rely on the RNG of spawns to stress the player out. There will be times where you absolutely can't survive and you will be hit, but with instant retries, you can try again until you get the dream run for high score.
I will take note of your hold down button. In the future, if this ever continues, I was thinking about adding an upgrade system with the ship. So pressing down and holding to move, and then re-rolling the direction could be one of those upgrades.
Visual presentation is great, everything else though, no quite so. It feels 80% done, with the other 20% requiring polish in control scheme. It uses arrow keys, with space bar to activate a firefighter. You also use the number keys to select actions. I have a hard time trying to figure out how I'm suppose to play. Like, I get how to interact, but how I approach the game I'm unsure of. I beat a few levels though! Overall, it's okay.
Also, please turn up your audio levels to -6 dbs please. I can't hear anything unless I blast my speakers :c
A simple mechanic requires heavy level design to make it shine. Very similar feel to Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, but with more control and less frustration. This is probably because of the lack of vertical in level design, but as this is just a showcase, and I think there's enough to have players wanting for more to explore. Simple, fun, and chill.
