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Lab Mayhem's itch.io pageJudge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- This is a beautifully polished and enjoyable proof of concept. The style of pixel art combined with the music makes for a beautiful presentation with smooth, responsive controls. My main criticism with the game is that it's too difficult to intuit the path of the laser, and successfully clearing a stage feels more like a product of trial and error than a result of effective strategy. I feel that the game's UI would benefit massively from a dynamic path indicator (if memory serves a lot of similar games use one that provides the path from one bounce), especially given the target audience of more casual gamers as per the GDD. Additionally, I feel like using left click to charge the laser instead of spacebar (or both!) may have been a better choice as the player is already using the mouse for the majority of the controls and forcing them to use the keyboard as well seems unnecessary. I adored the musical score for this game and am very impressed by the sense of style evidenced throughout, as well as how smooth the experience was overall. Fantastic work!
Link to your Game Design Doc on Google Drive.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sXaWQnb7Zox_KW7XztmPxivKy1kb6ECnRG9knV5m9KI/edit?usp=sharing
Have you checked that your GDD is publicly accessible ?
Yes
Is your game set to public on itch.io so we can see it?
Yes
Summarise your game!
An arcade-like game where you play as a hacker that infiltrates a high-tech lab and manipulates the Lab's machinery.
It's a top-down puzzle-like game where you shoot pellets that bounce off of walls but the twist is that the pellets can do as much good as they do bad.
Please explain how your game fits the theme:
For the theme interpretation we wanted to limit the player’s actions and deprive them of common actions like moving freely and having full control of an attack. A weapon is also indiscriminate, so the same mediums the player has to reach your goal are the same mediums that can make them fail.
Is there anything you'd like the judges to pay particular attention to?
Music and Interactive music instances.
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Comments
Very cool idea! I feel game is very hard though. I'm hoping enemy randomly run into bullet, most of the time.
We want the game to be fairly difficult and make the player look into multiple factors other than just aiming direction and laser power. With that said, the difficulty curve feels too steep right now and we hope to ease the players into more difficult stages by having more introductory stages without huge difficulty spikes. Thanks for the feedback, it's greatly appreciated!
I don't think the shooting of the laser is intuitive enough, i tried holding the spacebar and tried clicking it, but i could not really get it to do what I want. Did a good job with the visual presentation tho. Good job!
We will look into the game's tutorial and explaining the game's basic mechanics. Thank you for the feedback!
First thought - that button animation is absolutely beautiful lol holy crap.
I appreciate the inverted aiming, it's a clever way to prevent you from using your cursor trivializing aiming.
I think the camera controls might be a little unnecessary and add unneeded complexity. I think it'd be ideal if the room just fit on one fixed screen.
Controlling the drone shots feels a touch beyond comprehension. I agree with Rakudajin that it probably needs something to assist with understanding where your shots will end up. It could be a limited aimline, or maybe it's reducing the possible angles for a drone shot. If the turrets clicked into place into, say, 16 possible angles instead of being totally free form, it could give the player a starting point for making adjustments each attempt. It becomes hard to iterate when the slightest change in shot angle results in a widely different outcomes.
Overall, well done! I think this is a really cool game. I also really like the music, it really fits the game.
Thank you for the detailed feedback! We'll certainly look into the game's difficulty. While we do want the game to be fairly difficult. there seems to be a couple areas that add another layer of complexity we do not want, like the aiming guide for example and a limited guideline might just be what we want. Enemy movement and stage layouts are another aspect we want to improve to ensure the game is still difficult without feeling unfair at times.
Once again, thank you for playing our game and taking your time to leave a review
Very interesting game idea! Kind action-puzzle. But I found it a bit too hard, given that both energy limitations and enemies move around - I think it would be better to have some implications, like having a bouncing line to aim. It took me too many tries to finish just the second level.
One minor suggestion for text in the beginning - it would be cool if the first click didn't click the message but displayed it whole, like in many other games. I ended up skipping some text not because I wanted to skip but because it was too slow, and I wanted to see the whole text at once. Also I think it is a bad idea to make all the lines move up when another line is added - it is a bit painful to the eyes.
And cudos for Godot :)
Thank you for playing the game! The game is meant to be somewhtat difficult to reward trial and error but yeah, an aiming line might be useful. And I completely agree with your take on the menu/dialogue navigation, thank you so much for the feedback!