NAGJam - Thumbper
So this is what I have so far for the nag jam. I was wondering if anyone could give me some feedback.
Some questions :
1) Did you understand the mechanic ?
2) Was this fun ?
Gameplay video :
Build : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8L1lapR2kOGZ0xCdTBSOUZUem8
*Edit* I forgot to credit Jukio Kalio for the music. I will add him somewhere in the game before I submit
Some questions :
1) Did you understand the mechanic ?
2) Was this fun ?
Gameplay video :
Build : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8L1lapR2kOGZ0xCdTBSOUZUem8
*Edit* I forgot to credit Jukio Kalio for the music. I will add him somewhere in the game before I submit
Comments
I also also think it's a really neat gameplay idea, but it also also also turns out that I don't have the ungodly reflexes necessary to survive past the first millisecond of gameplay. Super Hexagon PTSD, man. ;_;
I think that if you explain the rules a bit better and ramp down the initial difficulty, this could be super fun. Good luck with the rest of the jam!
Some feedback:
-Careful with the music, there is no age restriction at rAge, profanity won't be tolerated.
-you could ramp up the difficulty even more by having white/ black blobs, then you can only deflect the color of the blob matching the color of your panel. Use LT for black panel and RT for white panel.
-have a more noticable timing running on the screen ,so at a glance you can tell how you're doing.
The profanity has been removed.
Ive added even more juice.
Balanced the difficulty to remove some spikes.
Over all I am quite pleased with how this turned out. The one mistake I made though is under-scoping, which is probably a gamejam first. I had too much free time, and I spent it on Dota2 and Breaking Bad S4 ;).
Thanks again to everyone who gave feedback.
Really nice concept though (from watching your video it looks sooooo fun), and I loved the music. I'm sure it would be a great hit in the Intel showcase stand ;)
But thanks for the nice words <3
But I didn't enjoy the gameplay because the game is purely reactionary. The game is clearly heavily inspired by Super Hexagon, but doesn't have the thing that makes SH interesting to me. SH is not only about mastery of the controls and reflexes, it's also about pattern recognition. You need to deal with the immediate threats at hand, but also need to recognize and plan for the threats that are coming up next.
Have you considered slowing the enemies down, but adding more of them? I think you can keep the difficulty, but still allow the player to plan ahead slightly, and in the process allow some decision making to occur.
It's quite possible that I'm just don't have the reflexes and therefore am bad at the game (my best score was about 15 seconds), but I doubt I'm any worse than the average gamer. I lost interest (without really having enjoyed myself) because I wasn't improving at all (contrary to what happens when I play SH).
I think there are lots of ways that players can learn mechanics and improve their skills when playing video games, but I think there's a limit to how much people can reduce their raw reaction time.
I would really like to see you work on this more. It feels like it has a unique mechanic that could be really fun, but excludes a lot of people from enjoying it. At the very least, I think it would be worth experimenting with different games modes.
Also, minor piece of feedback: The tutorial screen says trigger, but the control is actually the shoulder button.
Yes ! It is inspired by super hexagon. Its interesting that you say you didn't feel like you were improving. I playtested with a friend and his scores went up pretty consistently. My own skill also went up consistently as a result of me learning the patterns (muscle memory).
I think the problem in this game is that the patterns are there but they aren't EASILY recognizable. At first the enemies were moving so quickly that there was only ever one of them on the screen at any given time. Now its about 3 on screen. So I did slow them down and add more of them but I get what your saying. I should do that even more so that there is about 10 enemies on screen and the player can recognize the pattern very easily.
As for the trigger/shoulder thing : I just ended up making it so that both the trigger and the shoulder button has the same effect because I had people that didn't understand the controller sketch who then tried to use the bumper.
I am happy that the tutorial seems to work. Although most people giving feedback probably watched the video so..
I played this at rAge (finally) and I must say - I think it would have been a much better game if you didn't have to use the trigger to "connect" - that felt superfluous and disrupted the flow that otherwise felt pretty instinctive.
The juice and all that was of course top-notch :)