Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• What works: -This is a good start for a level -I'm getting some Firewatch game vibes -Fun choice on the style What could be improved: - I don't mind games where things aren't overexplained to me, but a little bit would go a far way on this one -It's a bit hard to know what the goal of the game is at the moment. Anything would help "Find your dog!" "Eat as many red orbs as you can before you get caught" "Run to the next tower" -A simple overlay or note at the beginning of that station where you start, explaining controls and purpose could work nicely -There's 3 bars on screen. An icon of someone sprinting, food item, etc, over each one would help the players immediately understand what the bars are be for, without text - A beginning splash screen would help - An exit game button would be nice - Would be great to name the Files of the game with the Game name. At the moment it defaults to a folder named Windows
• Since this game is a lot more visually sophisticated, I will call out more things on the 3D side. I also am a biome artist, so this might get a little technical. The bark on the trees are very nice, but the textures on the ground and pine needles lack tha same visual style. When painting on the branches, I reccomend painting the pines in larger clumps instead of small leaves. Take this sketchfab model as reference (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/stylized-pine-trees-0e40fee2ef674f46b718262853b52719) As for the landscape, there is obvious seam lines running through large hills that seem to have a dent in the normals. I want to assume this is an actual seam in the material/texture itself and not on the landscape. If you made this texture by hand, I reccomend running it through substance designer, importing the textures, and attatching the 'make it tile' node to fix those seams. (documentation: https://helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-designer/substance-compositing-graphs/nodes-reference-for-substance-compositing-graphs/node-library/filters/tiling/make-it-tile-photo.html) As for the trees as a whole when set dressing, if you are using the foliage tool in ue5 there is a way to change the height and scale at random so all the trees are not copy and paste. My main issue with the forest is that the canopy is the exact same height, and theres no variation amongst the trees. It makes the trees feel planted intentionally all at the same time so they all grow the same, much like a tree farm. (documentation: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/foliage-mode-in-unreal-engine) Another thing with filling up forests is that there should be color variation amongst the trees. Although very slight, there will always be a bit of a mixture. One quick way of fixing this is using the SpeedTreeColorVariation node in ue5 in your material. There is other more advanced set ups for color variation, but for something quick like a game jam this node should do thr trick. (quick setup tutorial: https://www.cbgamedev.com/blog/quick-dev-tip-76-ue4-ue5-speed-tree-colour-variation-node) Also, this may not be true, but the texture of the pine tree and the landscape look the same. I reccomend tiling the landscape material more so its less uncanny and the normals aren't as obnoxous. As for design, because there is no start tutorial, I genuinely had no idea where I was going, what I was doing, who I was, where I was, what the obective was, or the end goal. I reccomend some sort of UI in the beginning, perhaps a short paragraph just explaining the situation you are in. I began button spamming to see if I could interact or open a menu and there was none, but I do think I accidentally discovered a debug mode using one of the number keys. I was able to run around the edges of the map, walk easily through water, and manage to circle the whole map without finding something to interact with or get any idea of what I was doing. What are those glowing stones on the ground? Are those security gaurds walking around? No idea, but I'm just cruising along the map having fun looking at everything. A very good game jam, you guys created a big map in a short amount of time. I reccomend fleshing out the design more, having more UI thats labelled (no idea what those bars do), maybe some sound design, and a menu that lets you quit or pause the game.
• I had to get someone else to play this for me because only the executable for windows was uploaded instead of the entire zip. It's really unclear how to play the game, and it just involves a lot of standing around. I liked the art a lot!
• By far, this submission required the most amount of effort to try and get it to work, and, for example, an average SteamDeck user who would simply use "Add non-steam game to Steam" and "run using compatibility tool" would've simply stopped there when it failed, and had no idea how to continue debugging or trying to get it to work. For that, I initially gave this a "ProtonDB Rating: Borked" But, I sunk quite a bit of time trying to make it work, and ran into many different issues. Initially, I couldn't run the windows files, and I don't have a macOS machine. After the build was updated, there continued to be issues: 1. It seems like the Microsoft Redistributable required to run the game wasn't included, and many other submissions had no issues with this. Not sure what happened with the build, but this effectively made it unplayable. ( I did eventually figure out that it needed the `vcredist2022` installed (after trying `vcredist2015` first), and was able to do the following command: ``` WINEPREFIX=./.wine UMU_LOG=debug GAMEID=umu-dis-connected umu-run winetricks vcrun2022 ``` It took quite a bit of debugging/diagnosing/finagling to get to the point where I could figure out that was the core issue, and while this is possibly an issue unique to Linux, any other non-technical windows user _may_ not have that redistributable installed either, especially given a new windows install. 2. Steam API's While this could've been a red herring, trying to launch this via Steam failed, and the only log that a novice Steamdeck user might've come across is this: ``` Feb 28 20:03:01 <hostname> steam[8560]: [S_API FAIL] SteamAPI_Init() failed; no appID found. Feb 28 20:03:01 <hostname> steam[8560]: Either launch the game from Steam, or put the file steam_appid.txt containing the correct appID in your game folder. ``` Initially, my assumption was that: because some Steam API's are used, when trying to launch the game via Proton through Steam, Steam refuses to launch the game due to not being officially downloaded through Steam, and having a real appid. I did try adding fake appid's, both `00000` and `480`(spacewar), the made up ID for the added game. This did not help. I almost concluded that because the Steamworks API was used in the build, that Steam was simply refusing to run the game and that I was not going to be able to get it to run, and I do think it's a reasonable conclusion for less experienced/new Linux(i.e., SteamDeck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, SteamOS, Bazzite, etc etc) users, given the limited information in the logs, I think this probably comes down to the same issue as #1, which is that by not having the redist installer included, Steam could not start the game because it didn't have the proper redist included. From what I can tell online, it seems like Unreal Engine disables the config setting that specifies that a build should include redistributables, when configured for Steam/with Steamworks plugins. So relying on Steam configurations/libraries may have bit y'all in an unexpected way when releasing on a platform like itch(/gog/etc). --- For my Linux compatibility rating, Technically this meets a `Gold` rating, because it required a few tweaks/extra work to make it run, but it was very close to `Borked` if I didn't have enough time to try and figure out why it was failing. ProtonDB Rating: Gold --- Other notes: I did not like the TAA/motion blur. I wish I could've disabled it.
• I couln't play the game myself, but I watch a friend of mine play it, unfortunately the frame rate was too low to be playable.