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WITHIN [My Latest Game] | Review and Suggest Ideas

A topic by Bishal Kisku created Jul 20, 2020 Views: 304 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 3

I recently released one of my experimental project, name "Within". Since I'm still a beginner to game development, so it might not be good. But your feedback, honest reviews, some improvements and ideas will help me to boost up my motivation.

WITHIN is a horror endless runner game where you only jump to dodge the obstacles. If this sounds interesting to you, then please give it a try and leave some feedback. Thank You in Advance.

Link:  https://bishal-kisku.itch.io/within


Moderator(+1)

Hi Bishal Kisku,

Congrats on the game! I took a look at your game and played a bit. Here’s my feedback:

  • The main menu looks interesting. The title “Within” is a little pixelated though and from what I can tell, it’s not by design (Although I could be wrong). It looks like it’s the same quality as the “Start” text, but scaled to about 10 times the size.

  • I find jumping difficult. Jumping over obstacles feels a lot luck-based, and I have little to no time to react.

  • The fireball is very hard to see. Because there’s so little time to react to each obstacle, I can’t help but think “Whatever black appears, I’ll jump over it”, but the fireballs are always missed for that reason. Not sure if this is by design.

  • The looping of the background is wrong, and there are sometimes gaps in between.

  • The game seems to be quite small. In the first few seconds, the user can see everything the game has to offset. That’s assuming there’s no more levels after the user has survived for a while. Maybe it could have more content? Maybe once the user has survived for X seconds, move to a new area?

  • The game right now is missing a motivation, to convince the player to keep playing. The player collects stars, but they don’t appear as some form of “High Score” at the end, or otherwise influence the game.

  • I like the game’s page! Seems simple, gets the message across, and it definitely looks like it suits the game itself.

Hope this helps. All of these are my opinions, so feel free to only pick the ones you like :)

Thank you for this valuable feedback. This was very helpful and like to implement these in a better version of this game. 

I tried to rectify those things which you mentioned on feedback 1 and 4. But every time it's the same. Seems like I need more learning. Since it was an experimental project, I didn't implement much level.

Once again, Thanks for your suggestion.

(+1)

So I've played the game and I will just go through my thoughts quickly.

First off, the art is very impressive, pretty professional looking infact and I really enjoyed the style. If anything, it could have used a few more effects, but it works very well still, giving a scary but sort of cute look. The music also fits the game quite nicely and is very well made.
As for the gameplay though, it is quite repetitive with no real progression. The obstacles all behave pretty much the same, just with different sprites. I found the collisions to also be relatively counter-intuitive, as a visual touch between them and the player is not actually neccessary to lose lives. Furthermore, everything moves somewhat slowly which makes the jumps harder yet. I believe though that if you were to add varying jump heights depending on how long the space bar is held, or a slide on the ground, for instance, the gameplay would have a lot of potential. I really enjoy this kind of minimalistic gameplay when used to full effect, though in its current state it is still very monotone.
I feel that the same applies for a lot of the game's aspects; the title is not really implemented, though the phrase "Within" carries massive potential for anything horror-related. I think that just expanding on the concepts present could make a really nice game, but in its current state it merely shows some cool visuals and concepts.
Something else I liked though is the site itself, (aside from a grammatical error "Are you courage enough"), as the description is well written, especially with the effective use of bold font and capitalization all the while it is kept short and sweet.
I definetely would love to see the concepts explored further and hope that you found this useful.

Sincerely,
Gefüllte Taubenbrust from Mandelbrot Studios

(2 edits)

Thank you for playing my game. It means a lot. Your's suggestions were great among all the reviews.

I am still a beginner and still learning all the stuff. But sure I will make a remake of this game in future after I become quite experienced. 

I will definitely keep your suggestions in mind and try to implement those in my future games.