Feedback Friday #125 - August 7-10

It's Feedback Friday time!

Want free design feedback for your work in progress project?

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. 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 #124 is here.

 

Thanks, Tony! I haven't participated a lot lately, because I've been busy with... well, a lot of things. But one of them is Mini Micro, which is getting oh so close to a version 1.0 release! So this is the time to ask my friends here for any design feedback they might have, even though it's not exactly a game. At least, not a traditional game. Maybe it's a sandbox game?

Mini Micro is a neo-retro virtual home computer. Anyone over the age of 40 will immediately know what to do with it. For the yoots out there, you will need a keyboard, and you will have to type. Poke around and stick with it, and I bet you'll quickly figure it out! However everyone should probably keep the Mini Micro Cheat Sheet handy.

You can play Mini Micro in WebGL, or you can download it for Mac, Windows, or Linux, from here:

https://joestrout.itch.io/mini-micro​

or here:

https://miniscript.org/MiniMicro/​

I would like feedback on the new user experience. Did you get stuck, and if so, on what? Was anything about the experience frustrating? Did the demos work for you, and did they seem to cover a reasonable range of features? If you were going to get into this to create your own games and programs, did you notice anything lacking that would make that easier?

Thanks very much!
- Joe

 

Hi Joe,

I notice a lot of nice polishing touches since the last time.

I still think cd /sys/demo should work without quotes even if it's not a "pure." OSes need to be practical. Being able to press Tab to autocomplete would be great, too.

Is gfx.clear() the proper way to clear the screen? When I broke out of the 2dVis demo, it didn't clear the help text:



The side-scrolling platformer was pretty impressive! Kind of reminds me of how MMG made Celeste Classic in Pico-8.

 

Actually you want to use just

clear

to clear all 8 displays.

gfx.clear

clears only the gfx display. (And note that parentheses are not needed in either case.)

And yeah, I hear you about the quotes. It's an issue I thought about a long time, and I'm going to stick to my convictions, but I appreciate your feedback all the same.

 

Hi Joe,

I've played around with it a bit and I have to say that the amount of work put into this is very impressive.

While I'm not the target audience for this type of game, perhaps my feedback on it could help you in some ways so here are my thoughts:
- In the 'help' menu, I think the quotation marks in the line "Remember to use quotation marks!" should be more highlighted either via quotation marks or via color. This is because I felt throughout my playthrough, I quite often forgot to use it.
- If it would be possible, I think the API or MiniScript-Manual should be accessible in the game. This is mainly because I like when I don't have to look things up on the internet to figure out what to do. Perhaps it allready exists, but I couldn't find it.
- help "color" doesn't exist or It's not intuitive how to get the color.toList (which I haven't figured out how it works yet). Though maybe this is more tied into the API-point that I mentioned above.
- sp.rot doesn't work. When I used it, the sprite never rotated.
- Would be neat if there was a sp.move xDir,yDir,speed or something similar
- While in edit-mode, the create for-loop button or create while-loop button doesn't work on line 0001. subsequently once you've pressed the button, the Code button can't be pressed again until you select the line in the code again.
- I got sort of confused when I wanted to create things. On one hand all the commands are ready to be used straight in the command prompt, they are also used the same in the edit-mode. I think the confusion mainly stems from the fact that the edit-mode looks so different from the command prompt.
- Another thing that I didn't quite figure out was: How do I create sprite images? I understand that I can load already existing sprites, but when using the help menu, I could figure out how to access the sprite editor.
- In the help "graphics", it mentions the gfx.clear. However, it doesn't say that it only clears the display that the gfx is tied to. This might seem a bit obvious in retrospective, but when I first started using it, I thought it would clear sprites as well. It was only until later that I realised that it would require disp.clear for that. My feedback would be to maybe specify either what it clears, or what the difference is between graphics and sprites.

Regarding your questions about the demos:
- I tried the balloons demo, which worked and I felt it displayed a reasonable range of features. I'm sure there are many other demos that have more features, but I didn't have time to go into all of them.

I realise that I've only scratched the surface and while I'm not the targeted audience, I'm sure there are many out there that are. I'm impressed by the amount of detail that you've put into it and I wish you good luck with the project.

 

@Lime_x - There's a place for constrained environments like Mini Micro and Pico-8. Constraints spur creativity. That's one of the reasons why game jams have themes instead of just saying, "do anything."

@JoeStrout - Somehow I got into a state where "clear" wasn't recognized as a valid command. But I can't reproduce it now.

It would be handy if the "cd" command validated the new path:

 

@TonyLi - Yes, you're right. While my initial comment meant no ill, it had no place in this discussion, so I removed it. My apologies for any inconvenience it may have caused.

 

Great feedback, guys! I could answer your questions but I suspect you don't really want answers, you just wanted to let me know where you were confused (which I greatly appreciate). And that failure of the create for-loop button on line 1 sounds like a real bug I wasn't aware of. Thanks very much!

 

@JoeStrout I like the interface aesthetic and I think it's a cool concept, even though I'm probably not the target audience here.

I think it would be good to quickly introduce some more engaging and fun examples of things to do at the start for people who perhaps aren't already familiar with miniscript and that sort of stuff. I typed in a few commands but after a while wasn't really sure what to do to keep myself engaged.

Another thing, perhaps try to add more things like humorous responses, glitches, weird/interesting OS behaviour to make it feel more like a game and a bit less like a command prompt.

Of course, run everything through your target audience filter first! Might be a good time to start a Discord community.

 

Good feedback! Thank you. Of course keep in mind that it's really not a game in any traditional sense, though it can be used to make games.

Good idea... In fact we have one, and if you're interested at all, we'd love to have you there![/user]

 

That's it for this Feedback Friday. Join us on Friday for the next one!