itch.io

Hey! I just finished Cryptis. The pixel art is really good and so is the general mood of the game. I really feel the DOOM vibe but it’s also kinda mystical too. I really like it. However I did find quite a few issues that I thought would be nice to report so here I am.

• The purple arrows are a little hard to see when they are heading towards you. Maybe you could make them glow harder or add a particle effect or something around them to make them more visible.
• Since the game is fast paced, in my first playthroughs I didn’t really take my eyes off the center of the screen. I died quite a few times without even noticing my health was low. I quickly took the habit of checking the left down corner of the screen but it’s a bit distracting. Plus, even though i like the health bar’s look, it’s not really readable. It might be better to have a regular health bar at the center of the x axis of the screen. Then, the player’s eyes would have to travel a much shorter distance to see how much health they’ve got left. A simple health bar is also easier to read than text or a cross shaped one. Lastly on that matter, if I didn’t always notice that my health was low, it might be because the “player hurt” sfx and vfx are too subtle. I didn’t even notice the screen turned grey before the second level.
• Even though the sound design is quite good, it is sorely lacking in bass. I don’t really feel the music and the sfx. It’s like I’m hearing it from quite far away. I WANNA FEEL IT TREMBLE MUAHAHAHAHA😈
• I got stuck against to a wall like 5 times in my 2 hours of gameplay because I was surrounded by enemies and I couldn’t pass until I had killed all of them. I had the same problem in my own game for a pretty long time and the solution that worked for me was activating physics on enemies’ character movement and making the player about 3 to 5 times heavier than them so he could push them around by simply walking on past them.
• Sometimes, you die without knowing why. It would really make the game seem more fair if you made a customized death screen for every way the player could die. It seems pretty time consuming said like that but you could do that pretty simply by replacing the “game over” by some custom phrases that you choose from an enum depending on the way the player died. Or maybe you could color the “game over” with the color of enemy that killed the player, like in Zelda BOTW when you die by elemental dammge. But I’m not really sure if it would fit, I’m just spitting out some ideas… it’s worth trying though. Just don’t make Cryptis feel like a battle royale please😂
• Also, the easter eggs are really cool, it would be even better if they were destructible with some particle effect an stuff.
• There are also some camera clipping issues, you should double check that the rocks’ meshes are entirely inside their collision shapes.
• In the arena with square platforms, after dying the first time there, the music stopped. I tried do kill myself to make it play again but it didn’t until the final boss.
• The boss is more frustrating than challenging. He just follows you around like a dog and strikes you in the back. The only way to deal him damage is to shoot at him while walking backwords. Sure you can also bunny hop to get far from him but you risk just falling off a cliff. The last strategy I came up with was just getting on the opposite side of a hole and shoot him while trying to stay on the opposite side of that hole. Only problem, it’s not fun. It’s clearly not a fair fight. You should make him go slower and stop attacking when the player isn’t looking and is already dealing with other enemies. It’s not important if the combat is fair or not. The important is FEEL like it’s fair. And right now it just seems unmanageable as soon as he calls the other enemies. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t even kill half of them. And when I tried easy mode, I defeated first try. Didn’t feel rewarding at all. It feels like you put a souls boss in a doom-like. I know I am pretty harsh about this boss fight but it did ruin an otherwise very good experience. You have to fix it.

Again, Cryptis is a really cool game. Sorry if I’m being a bit too direct with my feedback but I really want to help you make it better.

Have a nice journey of game development :)

It is a really cool project the aestetic is very original and I really liked the sequence when the gravity stopped. I'm pretty surprised that the project isn't more popular on itch, I had a great time playing Solar Sails👍

It DOES look a lot better! I can't play it right now but I added it to my steam library so I'll try it out pretty soon :)
Thanks for sharing this for free🔥

Great game! It's really impressive that you have made all of this in a single week. I have been working on my own movement fps for 4 months and it's still not as good. Still learning i guess🤷‍♂️

Anyway, I had a great time playing the descent, thanks!

Why do i like this game so much even though it's making me feel so dumb?

I had a ton of fun with this game, thanks a lot!🔥

Hey! Sorry for responding so late, it's been a while since I opened my laptop. It's great but are you sure about the chest stuff? I mean, almost all the fun in your game comes from going really fast and killing enemies. I'm not sure that having 2 different ways of upgrading your player is really going to make the game better. The simpler, the better. Having just an upgrade system where you choose between 3 randomly selected upgrades in a pop up menu seems to be a better fit. I mean, it doesn't break the flow of the game and it seems easier to implement.

Again, I'm really no game designer and I might be giving you terrible advice, so trust your gut if you don't like the idea.

Have a great day :)

You deserve an Oscar for the voice acting😂 No but seriously it was pretty fun👍

Still can't beat it today😂 I guess it's gonna be a little more difficult than I expected. Anyway, I just saw that you were going to publish on Steam. It's great bro, keep it up🔥

Great game, I can really feel the Dishonored vibes😎

Thanks so much for putting such quality work out there for free, I didn't have a whole day to dedicate to making this myself so I'm really greatful for this🙏

Hey, great demo! First of all, the movement is extremely smooth and easy to pick up: in 2 minutes of gameplay, I had already mastered it. And I can see that you've put a lot of effort into making the menus look good :) So yeah, it looks really promising. I'm sure that if you keep working on it, this demo could become a really great game.

Of course, this is only my personal opinion, but a lot of things still feel a bit off:

• The game is way too easy: I am completely overpowered even though I never switch weapons and I don’t take the time to buy any upgrades.
• The forced break that the player has to take between waves really breaks the immersion:
Right now, every time a wave ends, I have to go to the center of the arena to start a new wave, and before starting it, I have to check a new weapon manually (and 90% of the time it is worse than the one I currently own). And there is a shop, but I just stopped going there; it doesn’t seem to be useful since I’m already overpowered. So yeah, you should probably simplify the upgrade system a lot. I won’t tell you how to do it because it all depends on what direction you want to head in with your game, but right now, it breaks the immersion.

• And finally, I would love to see a little more enemy variety. The game is getting boring very fast. If you don’t know how, you can take inspiration from the first DOOM game. Mark Brown has made a great video about this on his channel Game Maker’s Toolkit.

Sorry if I seem rude in this comment; I really just want you to succeed, and I’m convinced that just telling you to “keep going” won’t help you as much as a real critique of the game’s design.

Anyway, I hope that you’ll have a great day and that my advice has been at least somewhat useful.

Hi, thanks a lot! Here's a link to the game: https://victor-dayet.itch.io/flap-in-3d

Thanks so much for this tool, I made all the UI of my game using it :)

Hi, really appreciated the overall experience,

Problems:

- The mouses keep attacking the player after the game stops

- The game would benefit from some variety in sound design (random pitch and volume in range for sfx)

- Game needs a little work on the movement, there's a great free "game" from Mark Brown that could help you balance your 3Cs https://gmtk.itch.io/platformer-toolkit - This last advice is probably not that good but I think it would be great to add some silly stuff in the game like laser eyes for the cat or something…

Guess who just beated the world record?

This is a great game! Love the art, the music, the game feel... Keep it up! (it is just missing a score system)

I'm glad you enjoyed the game :)

I laughed when I first saw the name of the game but it is actually really deep and meaningfull
Didn't expect this, I'm pleasantly surprised

Yesterday, I went home at 6 p.m. and left at 7 a.m. this morning to hit the road. A normal person would have slept, but I couldn't. I had received so much feedback (not that much, but enough to make the game significantly better) that I couldn't do anything but work on my game.

I didn't sleep at all, but I think it actually paid off, and I'm really happy with how the game turned out. Here is the list of the improvements and bug fixing I did yesterday:

• Added A&D inputs to change columns.
• MADE THE GAME WAYYYY EASIER by scaling the bird down so we can see the pipes better.
• Added background music.
• Made the pipes of the other columns disappear when you pass one so you don't die because you changed columns too quickly.
• Added a pause-options menu with sound settings (music and sfx volume bars) and an option for windowed mode.
• Added credits menu.
• Fixed the bug that made you jump when you pressed the left key and were already on the left (same for the right side).
• Fixed the bug that awarded you a point every 50 meters for no reason and made you lose your perfects.

Without all of your comments, I wouldn't have been able to make the game so good, so thanks so much again!

I still didn't have the time to do everything I wanted, so here is a list of things I plan on adding to the game:

• Adding an online leaderboard.
• Adding some variety in environments (meadow, city, volcano, desert...).
• Finding a better fit for the menu music; right now, it feels like it's a fishing game until you press play.
• Adding a menu that explains the controls.
• Remaking the branding and a trailer for itch.io.
• Making an Android version since it is a short game, and the controls are already implemented for this platform (swipe and jump with touch input).
• Optimizing the shader, which requires too much computing power for mobile.

Anyway, please check out the game (even if you already did); the game really feels 10 times better :)

Great work! I would love to see a full release :)

I had a great time playing the game!

Right now, the chef looks like the left one (kinda) but it doesn't really fits the rest of the art (kitchen aso..) I thought maybe smoothing the chef like in the center would help but if it was intended, maybe using ico spheres instead of UV spheres (right chef) would fix the problem since the tomato is made from an ico sphere too

Hi, it was very nice to play your game. It looks and sounds really good and it's evident that there's great potential in it.

One tiny suggestion would be to incorporate movement with the AD keys but otherwise I'm struggling to come up with any other improvements for the game as it is so polished.

Looking forward to seeing more content exciting content in the future!

Great game! I had a lot of fun playing it!

- The art style is clean (I love the menus)

- The music really fits the game

- The tomato is very fun to control

- The text bubbles add a lot to the game

- Although you can grab them, I find it really fun to just push chefs and make them roll to the put.

You should just try to smooth your models in blender (right-click, shade smooth)

I know... I didn't really think about playtest before the jam, just made 5 people test it and called it a day😂
I'll make the game easier as soon as I get back :)

Hi, thanks for playing! I'll work on that as soon as possible

Thanks for the bug reporting, I didn't really know about this issue before. It will be a quick fix.

And I'll try to disable collisions of the other pipes for half a sec like you said

I'm glad you liked the game :)

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

• I’ll try to change the speed of the bird when falling, I just don’t want him to feel floaty. Maybe wing animations could reduce this feeling

• There’s a phrase that I didn’t really understand as I don’t speak english so well. I tried to translate it with google but it doesn’t really make sense. “Other rows of pillars distract from the main goal, I would suggest to use them more intensively from the start to "sell" the 3D aspect of the game better.”

• About repetitiveness, maybe a day/night cycle or selecting a random biome at every game could fix the issue? (meadow, city, volcano, desert...) It would take a really long time to do this so I'm not sure if I will. But if I get feedback from other people who think it would be worth the effort, I would definitely work on that!

I’m glad to see you enjoyed the game, an update should come within about 3 weeks so don’t forget to check out :)

Hi, thanks a lot for playing the game! I'm glad to hear that you made it that far :) Most of the people I asked to test it didn't reach 20. Now, about your feedback:

• As the game was meant to be played in really short sessions, I didn't really think about implementing a pause menu, but now that you mention it, it seems pretty obvious that the game would benefit from it.
• For the options and controls, I guess everything should fit in the pause menu without making it too overwhelming. I'm just a bit worried that changing the ratio of the window might completely break the UI, so I'm not sure if it will be something doable. But I will try.
• About the lack of music, I felt like something was missing, I just couldn't tell what! I guess that's it haha. Anyway, I just found the perfect track, so it won't be a problem real soon.

Thanks again for your feedback. I'm not home right now, but I will update the game as soon as I get back :)

Thanks for checking the game, I'll add to AD keys and try things to fix the bad readability. I won't be back home before 2 weeks but I'll try to update the game as soon as possible

Loved the game, (i did 7200pts)
I have nothing negative to say, I just love it

Can't wait to see that! (but don't crunch too much, it's not healthy)

We had the same idea for the hat!😂

That was so much fun to play! I love puzzle games and making art so it just felt like it was made for me.

There is a lot of potential, you should totally do a full release!

Anyway that's how it ended up looking for me, don't worry about his hat, its just a tampon... for paper...

Here is my list of possible improvements for your game:

• I didn't really understand the cutscenes until I read the story. Maybe some audio could have helped.
• It is hard to understand why you die. You should definitly add a health bar
• The game is a little too punitive. Sometimes you manage to get to a green surface before dying and you die on it without understanding why.
  If there is some kind of health system in the game, when the player gets on a platform, you should give back enough of his health so he doesn't die. Then you slowly fill the health bar as he stays on the platform.
• Finally, when you finally manage to move fast enough, you get to the end in 10secs. You should try to make the game way simpler at start and you get to the current  difficulty at the end of the game.

Sorry if I was too direct, I like when people are frank with me so I tend to be that way with others. I hope it will at least help you get better at game dev :) Keep it up!

Just the best game I'v ever played

I love the player movement, it is really responsive and I started to get speed at my second game although i don't usually play platformers so you did a very good job at making it intuitive.
If you could improve your game on one thing it is by changing the dotted texture. It is not shocking but it doesn't really fit with the rest of the art style in my opinion.
Anyway really cool game👍

Hey there! The game looks really good but the tutorial is 1/12th of the screen on the web version and I can't read it. Right now without the tutorial I don't understand a lot but tell me if you fix the issue, i would love to understand your game a little more :)

Hey! Really cool game! I would just add a bit of screenshake when the player does a perfect. It always makes a game more satisfying