Feedback Friday #108 - April 10-13, 2020

G'day folks! Feedback Friday is here again

Getting too much stuff done in lockdown and need to get some playtesting/feedback?

Then you've found the right thread! Feedback Friday runs from Friday to Monday every week.

What To Show

• Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play > everything else
• How To Scope Small (Unity tutorial)
• Post a link to a playable game, preferably WebGL to make it accessible to the most players. If you don't have a playable game, post something substantial, not just text.

How To Ask For Feedback

• Be concise.
• Specify what you want feedback on and what you don't.
• Resist the urge to write an immediate defense. Take the time to understand their points. Remember that your friends here are taking time out of their busy schedules to help you for free.

How To Give Feedback

• Be positive. There's something of value in every game.
• Focus on the design, not the designer.

Feedback Friday #107 is here.

 

Hi all (and @BIGTIMEMASTER ),

I'm making a game named Gravia. The elevator pitch is: You shoot small black holes that pull in nearby object, including yourself. It's an Action/Puzzle game that leans heavily on realistic physics to overcome obstacles, solve puzzles, or just move really fast. People who try it tell me it has a "Portal" vibe, and I don't mind the comparison.

I'm planning on releasing Gravia in Early Access this summer. But for now, I'm running a closed Alpha. There's currently about 6 and 8 hours of gameplay. I'm not expecting anyone here to play through that much, but to incentivize it, I'm offering a free copy of the game, as well as a $20 Amazon gift card to any testers who play through to the end, and records their sessions so I can watch. But if you don't have all day, feedback on a smaller portion of the game is also appreciated. (Hopefully mentioning that I'm offering a financial reward to testers isn't against any policies here.)

You can see a video of some of the gameplay here:

So, in short, I'm looking for play-testers. I'm running the Alpha on Steam. For anyone interested, let me know, and I'll send you a Steam key to install Gravia. And for anyone who tries it out, I'm also happy to spend some time playtesting your own game, if you like.

Some specifics:

• I'm mainly looking for feedback on the gameplay itself. There are still plenty of unfinished elements, mainly related to the story and characters in the game. So, for now, it's mainly how you feel about the gameplay.
• The music is also evolving slowly, and isn't complete yet.
• Other than that, whatever thoughts you have are appreciated.
• For those who are willing to do a longer play through, recording your session(s) is extremely helpful.

So, let me know if you'd like to try it out, and I'll message you with a key.

Thanks.

-Dan

 

Hi! Your game looks really cool. I probably can't commit to the full play through sadly but i would be very happy to give it a try and send some feedback if you could pm me a key please.

 

@dgoyette
Send me a key and I'll play a few hours tonight. I can record as well. I'll leave feedback here so others can benefit also.

 

Thanks, guys. I've sent you both keys. I appreciate it.

 

got it - thanks. will let you know how I get on

 

Looks good! I'd be happy to play it and let you know what I think - can't commit to a full playthrough though.

 

Thanks. I sent you a key.

 

@dgoyette Game looks nice but since I'm not much of a fan of this type of games I won't be able to help you with playtesting. Since your game revolves around black holes I would think a little bit about improving the particle effect of a said black hole because the current one looks mediocre and at least for me does not have this black hole feeling. Maybe it is a placeholder effect and my advice is useless but that is the only thing that bothered me about your video.

I would like to thank everyone who gave feedback about my games metadata last time. I really appreciate it.
Since I'm doing a mobile game the only way to try the beta, for now, is through test flight on ios, here is a link:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/zYO86sWa
Android is only in closed alfa testing, so I can give access to the beta on a per individual basis if someone is interested.
The feedback I'm most interested in right now is:
-Is the tutorial is clear enough?
-How is the difficulty of the game?
- Do turret types feel balanced?
- Any other feedback is appreciated.

 

@dgoyette
I am uploading video to youtube now and will link here. Will take a few hours to upload. I played about two hours.

Bear in mind, this is probably my least favorite genre of games. So I get fed up with them pretty quick. But once I get to what I deem "the fun part" I have more positive things to say. As a metric, I thought portal was mildly interesting and I only finished because of all the hype surrounding it. I am still yet to finish Half Life and I rarely play platformers/puzzlers.

Here's TLDW:

The Good:

• Overall, a nice level of professional polish. UI and menus are clean, quick, sensible.
• Unique concept.
• When the game is fun, it's just good simple fun.

The Bad:

• A long, frustrating difficulty before we get to the fun part.
  
• Difficulty is the bad kind - lots of developer "gotchas"
  
• Most puzzles can only be solved through tedious trial and error
• Inconsistent rules/ rules not clearly demonstrated before punishing player for not understanding them
• Even if it's obvious how to solve the puzzle, sometimes actually doing so requires really tight reflex skills. That will narrow down the amount of people who can finish.

My recommendation:

• Focus on the fun first before the challenge.
  
• Let us learn through experimentation and repetition with low or no consequences before delivering challenge.
  
• Tune reflex-style challenges so that if person understands what to do, actually doing it shouldn't be arduous.
• Reset player to current puzzle on death, not one or two back.
• A puzzle with more than one way to solve it has replay value - a puzzle with only one way to solve isn't fun to do twice.

 

100% agree. I have some prototypes for a much better black hole effect using VFX Graph. Once I migrate the project to 2019.3, I'll be replacing most of the particle effects with improved versions. Thanks.

I'll give your demo a try. I have test-flight installed. Do I need an invite?

 

Thank you very much for the time you spent on this, especially since you said you don't really care for this genre of game. I'll watch through the video when it's uploaded. I'll give some thought to the difficulty. My baseline for the standard game has been having my girlfriend play through. She enjoys puzzles games, but is fairly bad as FPS games. So I try to balance things such that if she can't do it, it's too difficult, and I dial it back a bit. I'll pay attention to the parts you felt were most difficult in the video.

To your comment about it taking a long time until you get to the "fun" part, I understand what you're saying there. I'm currently working on changing the first part of the game, so that you have a fully powered Gravia Glove, and can do a lot of fun stuff, without risk of death or failure. I'll be following the model used by other games where you start off with all your abilities, to give you a sense of the game, then those powered are stripped from you and you have to earn them back again. Hopefully that will make players more motivated to play through the earlier part of the game, though in all likelihood I'll be cutting any parts that don't prove to be enjoyable by enough players. But I think a revised starting experience should be more of a hook than the current experience.

Regarding "resetting to current puzzle on death", that's how it should be working now. I'll see if something went wrong when I watch your video.

To your last recommendation, that one could lead to some interesting discussions. I'm trying to make Gravia as puzzle-based as possible, where the "puzzle" levels have a single, unique solution. But mixed in with those levels are the more platformy/actiony levels, where the goal is more open-ended. I think of good puzzles as having just one solution, while "action" levels can be approached in different ways depending on the player's skill and imagination.

Thanks again for the feedback. I'll leave your key active indefinitely if you care to try it again, or see what comes from it.

 

Hi friends here is link to my open world game which I will work more on with friend next week.

The premise of story is as follows (idea inspired by bigtimer):

Forest Nav 1.0 is going to be an open world forest navigation game set in an apocalyptic era of soviet Russia plagued by nuclear fallout, where you the player are pitted against wild animals (some mutant) hellbent on killing you.


https://unit-dev123.itch.io/forest-nav

Any feedback welcome.

Controls
WASD - movement
Mouse right click drag - Look

Further updates can be found here https://forum.unity.com/threads/wip-open-world-forest-game.865069/

 

@dgoyette using the link I provided should be enough. I'm not sure about your idea of giving player full arsenal and then stripping him of his powers, while it can work in an rpg I'm nor sure this approach would work in a puzzle game. For me, it would feel boring to start with a lot of options and then have to do puzzles with limited possibilities. I haven't played your game but after reading BIGTIMEMASTER reply, maybe you are introducing new powers to slowly(your tutorial is too long)? Also while having only one solution is not inherently bad it limits the replayability potential of the game. I'm not a fan of puzzle games but for me, the best ones are those I can find my own solution to and a game about using black holes to manipulate things sounds like it should be possible to do crazy things to pass a level.

 

@dgoyette as for me, game looks interesting, with some nice physics concepts.
If you drop me a key in PM, I will try organize some time, for play test this weekend. If you decide to do so, please attach link to this thread, or testing requirements in PM.

At the current, I don't have anything to test for me.
Potentially, alpha play tester name in credits could be appreciated. That is, if I will dedicate some time in it.

 

The game looks quite interesting. I'd be happy to give it a try and I could probably record my session as well if you want.

 

I tested your prototype, however, I was only able to move and rotate the camera. The characters didn't change their position. They only had one animation on loop and didn't react to any input that I made.
I assume that it is an early prototype, so perhaps the gameplay will evolve later on. At this stage I find it hard to give proper feedback on the gameplay, since there is so little to go on.
That being said, I think the models looked pretty good.

 

Thanks. I've sent you both Steam keys. Showing up on the Credits page is a guarantee, as well as an IOU for playtesting or some other help I can offer in the future. )

Yeah, I'll have to see how the whole "start off strong" concept will play out. It's not exactly a full arsenal, as in Gravia you really only have one "tool". But we'll see. The main idea will be to show the player something cool, so they know what they're working towards. Hopefully it won't feel like it starts off fun, and then gets boring for a while. If that's what people are finding, I'll definitely work on either improving the initial levels or just getting rid of the levels that are least liked.

Also, I'm downloading your game now. I guess it just took a few tries. I'll try it out and let you know how it goes.

 

It's kind-of crowded in here already, but I'm also wanting to get some early feedback on this game's UI/UX.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wjprk8zb9fhra8n/UmbrellaBuild.zip?dl=0

My project is a 3D adventure game with point-and-click style puzzles.


WASD-move
Mouse-rotate the view
[Space] to jump
E or leftclick to interact/next
[Tab] for inventory menu.

Xbox or Xbox-ish Gamepad also works:
left stick/D-pad to move
right stick-rotate the view
(A) to jump
(X) to interact
(menu) for inventory menu

Also press [esc] to exit.

The object of the first section is to get out of the train station. It's not finished yet, but there should be enough content to get an idea of how the game will work.

Extra: If you press right-alt you can switch between the boy playable character and the girl character. In the real game you would select one at the beginning, but the difference would mostly just be cosmetic.

 

For some reason, it won't let me send you messages directly, so I'll reply here.

I've downloaded and tried the game, but there are a couple of issues preventing me from getting to far.

I'm using an iPhone 6 with the latest iOS. When I opened the game, it pops up a little login error. I don't know if this means anything, but it keeps doing this when I open the game:



I can just close the error, and it doesn't seem to be an issue. But I figured you should know.

From there I tried to start the game. I went into Story mode, and got to this screen for the first level:

However, when I pressed Start, the screen faded to black, and it never came back. I could still hear music and sound effects, and if I touched the screen it would make some UI sounds, so I think it's just the fade overlay blocking the screen? I killed the app and tried again, but it happened again.

I wasn't able to get into Story mode, but I went into Endless mode to see if that worked, and it actually opened fine. I created a few turrets and started. But some weird graphic/shader issue started happening. It seems like it would occur either when a certain kind of enemy was killed, or when it took damage. Anyway, it looks as if all the lighting went out except for emissive lighting. This would last a few seconds, then it would look normal again, but as soon as the enemies got close to the towers, the lights would go out again. Here's what it looked like:


With the lights out, it was pretty impossible to see what was happening. I'm happy to try again if you have a new build or if you have any ideas how to sort this out. Feel free to send me a message in case your new build lands after this thread gets locked.

 

Thanks, we will work on updates over weekend. At the minute it is just placeholder assets so forgive the poor quality, this is our second try in 3D.

Idea is I will do most important work like game design and programming and she will do menial jobs like graphics which she threw together in few hours etc.

The game is going to be set in Soviet Russia during post nuclear apocalypse and you have to get to a set waypoint. The unique idea is nuclear apocalypse has destroyed all known civilisation so it actually appears like you in the 17th - 18th century with rudimentary weapons. During your exploration you begin to find clues that something long in the past has wiped out humanity.

Set in rural countryside the wilderness is out to get you. There will be wolves, stags, and mutant bears on the attack.

To break up the expanse of fields + trees, small huts, rusty vehicles and other landmarks will be scattered around. There will also be different locations, snow, jungle overrun nuclear wasteland. I work on most important MVP over weekend.

I will have to think about how to construct open world and load scenes. We removed enviro sky as struggle to work with hdrp and bit slow, i think nice hdri skybox will work, or maybe script to change sun setting. Will need to get 3rd person working with new character and arsenal, navigation menu, and props. It might be next week before complete as two days is quiet hard to do in time frame.

 

Very cool I will try tomorrow if time...

Here is feedback.

1. Outstanding graphics and background music. Very well execute
2. Control felt OK, turning left or right with WASD felt too fast and rushed, jumping felt floaty, not really understanding why is needed, maybe later?
3. Dialogue excellent, funny and engaging.
4. Text looks bad, could be executed better, maybe with different font. Spelling issues (tobacco is spelt wrong), didn't like the squirly patterns on text block, need to think of a way to immediately cancel so you don't have to go through dialogue again accidently.
5. Couldn't get past the pig, to either release the candy bar from shop owner.
6. Seemed to be issue with clipping near pig scene (see picture.)
7. Issue with 3rd person camera when standing next to wall and seeing through.
8. Animations OK, not great, could be improved.

 

hi @dgoyette!

Firstly, sorry for the delay in feedback, I had a couple of things to do last night.

Firstly let me say I really enjoyed playing, the game kept me coming back for more and that is the most important thing. It is obvious that a lot of time and effort has gone in to get the game this far and I commend you for that!

I played the alpha for approx 1 hour - I recorded my gameplay (I died a lot ha ha!) and will send a download link via PM. I also filled in one feedback form in the alpha so hopefully that went through to you.

My specs are 1070mobile (8GB), 6700HQ, 32GB ram. There were no performance issues at all, even whilst recording via geforce experience.

The obvious game for comparison is as you say Portal. My experience with this genre is I played Portal 2 on xbox 360 until about half way through and enjoyed it.

I played the alpha on mouse and keyboard. The "brace" function defaults to shift and quite often I ended up bracing and moving in little steps. This in turn caused windows "stick keys" flash up. I changed the "brace" function to right mouse which worked a lot better for me.

I found the puzzles interesting but perhaps a little too hard in terms of the movement precision required once the "trick" is found. I used the hint and skip functions a fair amount. I am not sure how you plan to progress the plot aspects of the game but GlaDOS was a very important part of the success of portal I think. A couple of ideas of how you could integrate "hints" into the gameplay:

1) Have the player speak, perhaps after a certain amount of time. "I need to break that glass", "hold that lift! ah maybe i'll get the next one" (see comment below)
2) Have decal messages e.g. oil or blood scrawl on the walls from another character. "Timing is everything". "Take a leap of faith". You could perhaps use the gravity pull to reveal simple messages, e.g. a tiled wall where a certain tiles are stuck down and dont get pulled off.

Visual cues e.g. collapsing gantries, vent with repair button inside etc probably need to be stronger. The collapsing gantries should be a different mesh as well as texture. If technically possible it might be cool if the player hand could grab the rails when pulled into them by a black hole to demonstrate they provide a "safe point" to stop. I realise now in hindsight towards the end of my play probably the closing lift-style doors next to the pit would re-open for me to jump into them but I didn't get that at the time and just repeatedly fired myself into the closed doors. doh!

Broadly I agree with the feedback from others above, except I personally don't have an issue with the puzzles having a single "right way to do them". The black hole effect is obviously going to be used throughout the game so a further investment in this effect would be worth it. I didn't actually get as far as having the gravity glove in 1 hour of play (with hints and skips), so I would consider simplifying or reducing tolerance in some of the puzzles. A few additional checkpoints e.g. after the "avoiding the glass panes" would help.

Good luck with the rest of your development!

 

Thanks very much for playing.

Regarding "bracing", I've had a couple of people also say that Shift was an awkward key, mostly because it's typically the "sprint" key in FPS games. Maybe I should just change the default to "alt" instead of shift. Glad you were able to improve it for yourself by remapping the key.

Too much difficulty early on seems to be the impression so far, and I need to really grip people's attention at the beginning, not punish them with precise timing. I'm going to be reworking (and shortening) the early levels, and making them easier. I do intend the game as a whole to be somewhat difficult, so that you appreciate your skill growth as you improve, but that can wiat until later. Early on, mechanics should probably be introduced in a more "safe" fashion, and should look cool, rather than represent a big challenge right out of the box.

I like your ideas around having more of having messages left behind. That's actually how some of the story will be conveyed in the near future. But that works pretty well for providing a hint some sections.

Yeah, the collapsing walkway pieces are too subtle, and I probably overused. I'll tone that down, and make it more obvious. An interesting thing about visual design is how I'm convinced that certain things will be too obvious, so I make them more subtle, and then people don't notice at all. Time to drive things back in the "more obvious" direction so it doesn't feel cheap.

Thanks again. I really appreciate the feedback. It gives me some directions to take.

 

@dgoyette Thanks for the feedback, It's usefulll to know that the game has trouble running on iphone 6, the lowest model I play tested on was iphone 7. From what I see it has only 1 gb of memory and that might be the reason why story mode wont run. About endless mode, if I had to guess iphone 6 is unable to handle one of the post processing shaders. You could try changing the graphics quality in settings to lowest as it turns off most of the shaders aside from the neon one. The login issue, do you maybe have the gamecenter turned off on your phone?

@kdgalla I checked your build and it is hard to say much because the game seems to be in a really early stages of development. The tings I noticed are here:

• Camera is clunky.
• Adding ability to sprint would be a quality of life change.
• Jumping seems useless and with how controlls are right now I think game would be better without any platforming elements.
• Text typewriter animation needs to be much faster, like at least 2-4 times faster or even more.
• The characters hand position was bothering me very much, especialy when moving.
• The mouse cursor is visible.

Most of the things I mentioned might be because the game is not finished yet. Overall the game style has a charm to it. It is a little strange to have a a point and click game with wsad controls but I guess, it can work. When playing I started to remember simon the sorcerer 3 for some reason.

 

Regarding the login issue, yeah, looks like I had Game Center disabled. After I enabled it, the login error stopped popping up. So, good thinking. Maybe you can programmatically check whether it's enabled or something before trying to log in? No idea.

I lowered the Graphics settings, and it looks like that actually got Story Mode working. I had to lower the graphics to "Low". When I do that, Story Mode runs loads properly. That also seems to correct the weird shader issue when I was playing Endless mode.

So, looks like setting the graphics to Low gets it working properly. I'll try out Story Mode today and let you know how it goes.

 

@unit_dev123 and @EbonDust thanks for playing and responding. Most of your feedback was pretty clear. I had a few things that I wanted to ask about:

Can you be more specific? I want to use a handwriting-style font to match the art style, but is it difficult to read? I realize that if the font is too extreme it can be slow/tiresome to read. Is that the case here?

The text speed is to try and give the impression of pace that character would be talking. I could see that might be tiresome for some people who just want to read it and move on. Currently if you press the continue button before the typewriter finishes, though, it will just skip the rest of the animation and instantly fill-in the rest of the message. Should I include the option to adjust the speed of the type-writer effect, or would it just make more sense to have the option to switch it off entirely?

Not sure what you mean. Do you mean the characters over-all pose, or do you mean the hand placement when interacting with certain objects?



Any way, here are some of my take-aways here:

Camera flaws: I'm going to try incorporating a Cinemachine-based controller that I built for a different project. I think it may address some of the problems raised. Also, I think the mouse and joystick sensitivity needs to be adjustable.

floaty, useless jump: I only included jumping because I thought it would feel strange if you couldn't jump. Maybe it would be better if I left it out. I think it feels floaty because you can't end the jump early by releasing the jump button. I want to fix that, at least.

The mouse cursor should be invisible, except during on-screen menus.

That sounds like a good idea.

 

I downloaded the demo. There's not really any gameplay at the moment, so I'm guessing you are looking for feedback on the art direction? I think the graphics are good. The harsh sunlight and faded colors contribute to the post-apocalyptic atmosphere. The overall look and the sound of the music feels warmer and more pleasant than something like fallout or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. This and also the fact that there's more emphasis on nature (rather then ruins) gives off a much more relaxing and optimistic tone than those other games.

I think that harsh, overly-bright sun could definitely signify a post-apocalyptic environment, and at the same time it's visually distinctive from other games in this genre, which tend to use dreariness to create atmosphere.

 

Thank you for feedback, we are working on next phase for feedback friday #109

See here:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/wip-open-world-forest-game.865069/

As all this is new, I am not sure how far I can get but is useful to hear from more experienced devs for sure.

 

By font I am just not keen on font typeface. Is a personal preference, so you are free to ignore. Thanks

 

@kdgalla I mean the hands placement(that L pose). At least to me it looks unnatural. While I under-stand what you are trying to achive with text speed I feel it would only work with voice over, otherwise everyone is going to use the skip option to read the whole text.

 

WOW, those assets looks phenomenal! Reminds me very much of old red barns rather than some artificial game asset. Great job!

 

A gave a qucik look.

Models are nice.
At current state, colors in the sun light looks pail to me. Like saturated.
Maybe that is the goal. But isn't appealing to me personally.
In shade all looks nice however.

Just a question, are you really want to go Open World route?
I would suggest first, focus on local area, containing ranch, forest, and maybe a village, and see where that will go.
It is really easy to make open world boring you know.

That is still tons of quality asset, to keep player interested.

 

I'm a bit late getting back to everyone on this thread, but I can give you some feedback if you send me a link to an Android build.

Congrats on your work so far! Just going on your screenshot, I would suggest making the track a bit less noisy visually, as it makes it harder to focus on the player and the other vehicles.

 

This looks like a scene with some nice artwork added, but I don't see any gameplay. What exactly would you like feedback on? Feedback is much more useful when you clarify the questions you would like people to answer

I would suggest at this stage that you focus on building a very simple prototype of your game to flesh out the gameplay and core mechanics before you focus too much on artwork.

This is how Guerrilla Games prototype Horizon Zero Dawn:


And here is Mass Effect 2 during 'whitebox phase' when core gameplay mechanics and level design was being created.



This enables you to answer all the questions you need to answer before you spend time making art that you might not end up using.

You should give your artist more credit, judging by your WIP thread screenshots she's doing a lot of great work!

 

Congrats on your work so far! I liked the atmosphere of the game as soon as it started, the music, sound and art style definitely work together. Here's my feedback:

The good:

- Nice artstyle.
- Good start on setting the atmosphere.
- Dialogue has the right tone.
- I like the way NPCs shepherd the player toward the goal in a way that fits the situation and environment.
- Overall the game was engaging from the start.

Improvements:

- Camera panning is glitchy and isn't blocked by some walls.

- Character controller could use some work when going up and down ramps. Are you using a physics-based one? I suggest raycasting/spherecasting down and planting the character every frame.

- I did not like the character turning with A and D, it feels like it should strafe (maybe I'm just used to that).

- Needs clearer interaction UI (was not clear at the shop what E would do).

- The pig needs to remember the conversation and only repeat the main detail if you re-engage.

- Main character doesn't look like a kid, maybe round the cheeks out a bit?

- 'Next' button in conversations could be bigger and more obvious.

Regarding the typewriter speed, I think you have to be careful to get feedback in the correct context. There are many people who are used to skipping dialogue who may not be your target audience.

I thought the dialogue speed was fine, but only because I'm imagining the speed not being constant. I recommend having a look at Subsurface Circular (I played it last week and it's one of my favourites, totally based on dialogue). The replies sometimes have a pause beforehand (which is much better and builds anticipation as opposed to ticking out the characters) and also have pauses here and there in the right places. I think if you get the topology of the dialogue right, the current average speed will feel much more natural.

Finally, regarding level design. I'm not sure if you haven't finished it but I found no way of getting past the pig. I have some cheese (which I only remembered because I came back to the thread to reply and re-read your comment, and realized there was an inventory) which I assumed would attract the mice. However it does nothing when you stand outside the mouse hole.

If the mouse hole is the right place to go with the cheese, I very much recommend not putting it at the start. It feels like backtracking to get there and isn't pleasant. Ideally, you want the player to discover each part of the puzzle more or less in sequence with a feeling of moving forward. Or at least put them in a position where the piece is highlighted in some way.

Anyway, nice work so far and looking forward to seeing more!

 

Oops. Yeah, I probably should have been clearer that the game is unwinnable now, but I mainly just wanted feedback on the basics for now (Things like the camera problems people mentioned and that sort of thing).

Do people find backtracking unacceptable? I was thinking it would be better to not line-up the puzzle elements sequentially because that would be too easy. I don't want my game to be obtuse, but do want there to be some obfuscation. Could it be that traversing the level just takes too long?

I was thinking that either the player would either notice the mouse hole first and then when they found the cheese, it would be like a pay-off. They would think "Ah, I know what to do with this." Otherwise, they wouldn't notice the mouse hole. Eventually, after not finding anything useful to do with it, they would realize that they didn't search the first platform very well and then go back (Once the player has the cheese, A new character will appear outside the mouse hole, so if they didn't notice the mouse hole at the beginning, the new character would be easier to spot).

 

There's probably a fine line between too linear and too chaotic. If it's truly linear, then it doesn't feel like you're solving anything or being clever. The flip side of that are games where none of the interactions are intuitive, and you just try every combination of things, and get annoyed by how non-obvious things are. "How was I supposed to know that if I put an egg on the shelf, a chicken would jump through the window?!"

I think a general formula like this is pretty enjoyable:

• Start off in a new level, explore around to discover all the different gameplay elements before making any progress unlocking/solving them.
• The final goal should pretty clear, even if you don't know how to accomplish it. Maybe there's a chain on the door to the exit. Obviously you need a way to break that chain, but you don't know how to do that yet.
• Spend a bit of time exploring clues until you find something that seems to interact with one of the gameplay elements you've found.
• Go back and complete that interaction. This leads to a new sub-area with maybe one small puzzle/challenge. Completing it yields an object that interacts with one of the initial gameplay elements you saw, and it's obvious what to do. For example, maybe one of the initial elements was a completely dark room. Later you find a flashlight, and now you know you can go back and use it there.
• Keep doing this, and eventually you find the thing that lets you break that chain locking the door.

It's not exactly linear, and maybe in some cases you can solve them in different orders until you have all of the items you need to do the final thing.

 

I think the issue for me is that I had no idea there was anything valuable at the beginning (I only found it by going over every part of the level trying to find something to move the pig). The beginning feels like just the 'landing pad' that you step off and then the real game begins. The obvious first thing to do is go up the stairs.

The way I would put it is that ideally, you would have the player start at a point where the only thing they need to do is step through a door or walk up a stair well and then the game starts. In the first scene there's nothing valuable except setting the mood.

In the next scene (after the stairwell), you have a bunch of unknowns. You have a shopkeeper (and here is where you could give the player the cheese and teach them about the inventory). You have a pig blocking the door. And you have people who need to get through. Each of these is a part of the puzzle.

Here's where I would add the mouse hole. Perhaps at the end of the hallway opposite the shopkeeper. Because then it naturally becomes part of the unitary puzzle that the player has to solve in that scene.

For me, going back down the stairwell feels like going back to that awkward, deserted place in games where you end up when either you've done something terribly wrong, or the game has messed up. It feels like a place I should already have gone past, whereas I don't feel the same way going between the pig and the shopkeeper - because I haven't resolved what they have for me to do.

To put it another way, it feels wrong to have a vital clue at the point where the player is just getting their bearings, and it's the least obvious clue of the lot - it's not a big bright shop or a pig in underwear, it's a small hole in the wall that could be there for any number of reasons.

 

Ok, I think I see what you mean now. It's sort of like the obvious puzzle elements define a certain intuitive space and the first floor doesn't feel like it's inside that space, so it feels like it's outside of the playable area.

 

Exactly.

 

This is my first ever game so everything is really rough around the edges. I wanted to create a game centered around swinging. This is what I manged to spit out in about 3 weeks or so.
https://jacobedie.itch.io/swinging-man

I am looking for feedback on how the game feels to play and how I might improve that.

 

Seems pretty enjoyable. There are, however, a few things preventing me from getting too far into it.

• Y-axis mouse invert. I seem to be in the minority on this, but I pretty much need to flip the y-axis to be able to play any FP game. I was fighting my muscle memory more than your game mechanics.
• It took me a while to realize that moving with WASD was important, and that you can build momentum singing back and forth. Maybe just mention that up front when you start the game?
• The mouse look felt a bit mushy, like I'd stop moving the mouse, but it would keep moving for a while. Not so bad aiming left/right, but I felt like it was pretty tough aiming up/down on the small targets.'
• It was pretty difficult to get a good sense of how fast I was going at times. My theory is that it's because the background is so homogeneous. I felt I wasn't sure how far I'd gone on a particular swing, because I didn't see anything moving past me.

Overall, definitely worth pursuing. I think rope swinging is a pretty satisfying mechanic, though I've seen several games using this mechanic lately, so you'll probably want to think about what will make yours different.

 

Well done on what you've managed so far!

The game was very hard to play because of the mouse sensitivity. Remember that when building for WebGL, the mouse input values you get from the Input Manager will be greatly increased compared to Windows/Mac, so you might want to compensate for that.

Other than that it looks like a great start. The only thing I'd suggest is preventing the rope clipping through the platforms by checking the line-of-sight to the attachment point.

 

Very useful advice will be back next week with update.

 

It's just assets sir, she uses something called krita to paint over.

 

Thank you for advice on graphics, we will tone down, but first following Billy's advice we complete low poly prototype. Still lot to learn. Good thing some assets on store is now sale, but we not intend to spend more than $50 as we young and poor.

 

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement! Seems like I need to add a setting menu to adjust mouse sensitivity and add mouse invert options. Hopefully next time you guys will be able to play more without the mouse controls getting in the way.