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Optimization Protocol's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun | #45 | 4.083 | 4.083 |
| Overall | #267 | 3.583 | 3.583 |
| Presentation | #328 | 3.583 | 3.583 |
| Creativity | #537 | 3.083 | 3.083 |
Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Preferred Name
JoyousLlama
Newbie?
Newbie
Yes - I'm new to game jams!
How does your game fit the theme?
Firstly, I downloaded UE5 five days before the jam... this was definitely an adventure in "just get started" for me personally, haha.
I did try to narratively tie the theme in a little bit - you are thrown in with no explanation and expected to adapt / evolve to succeed.
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Comments
For a first game and making it in 5 days, this is very impressive and comes together quite well. I overall had an enjoyable experience, all in all. The main thing I'd say is the music doesn't loop at times, and I do desire for there to be more audio/visual feedback present in the game. But beyond that, pretty incredible first project, and this is a fantastic foundation that you can build upon if you choose to do so. Great stuff, and I hope to see more of your projects to come
After some wrestling with my GPU drivers I was finally able to play it.
I had a lot of fun! My strategy was just moving in circles and shooting constantly, but it got me pretty far.
There is sometimes a bug when you reboot where the "Failure" screen doesn't dissapear that was a bit frustrating because it blocked my view.
Apart from that I loved the game. Great job!
Sorry about the GPU Drivers issue, I think I mentioned in another thread but that wasn't even on my radar hah - out of curiosity, is your GPU AMD?
Thank you, yeah ideally I wanted to implement some kind of mechanism that would encourage the player to actually look FORWARD most of the time but ultimately I wasn't able to do that (except some enemy spawning logic that is barely noticeable haha), definitely a good thing to keep in mind, maybe I will try and update it a bit sometime.
Thanks very much for your feedback & kind words!
Yes I have an AMD GPU, I updated the drivers because the earlier version wasn't working, so it wasn't that much of a hassle :) I also had to install C++ for some reason, and launch the .exe as -d3d11 (But I think this was very specific for my machine).
Hey great first ever game jam submission!
And if you really just started picking up UE5, I am really curious what you would be able to pull off next year!
Like TaHie mentioned - I also would like to have some feedback when the play was hit (a sound or screen overlay in red) because the first runs I tried to figure out, what was killing me (time, hits or shooting not enough enemys were some of the ideas).
But overall you did great and I hope you still enjoyed the process and continue making games!
Yeah I definitely should have prioritized feedback better, it is great to keep in mind going forward haha.
Thank you for your kind words and encouragement, this was a great experience for me in the end. At the start of the rating phase I was hoping nobody would see my game since I am a perfectionist and was embarrassed by it, but ultimately this community has been really encouraging so far and I'm very grateful for that. I definitely do think I will continue
This game is great. I worked on a project that had a wall running made in UE not to long ago. It's very interesting thing to figure out. The cross hairs didn't feel like they pointed at where I was shooting, though I had to slightly adjust my aim to compensate usually. The game is fun, well done.
Thank you! Yeah the wall running was interesting, I had never even thought about what all goes into a wall run before but suddenly there is a lot of vectors and dot products and "oh the player is running forward but I need to redefine what 'forward' is" lol.
Thank you for playing, and thanks for your feedback!
gameplay is soo good and the feedback is also w
nice for the 1st jam
Thank you! I really appreciate your kind words and encouragement :D
Gameplay feels really solid, and I love having meta progression in endless-type games, it makes each run feel more rewarding and pushes me to aim for a higher score. That said, some hit feedback for both the player and enemies would really enhance the experience. A simple red tint on the player when taking damage would help indicate hits, and having enemies flash red or play a hurt sound effect would make it clear that my attacks are landing. Overall, this is a great foundation to build on, just needs a few tweaks here and there. Congrats on your first jam entry!
Thank you for playing, & thanks for your feedback! Better feedback makes total sense, there is definitely some good improvement opportunities. I am really glad you liked the foundations though, thank you :D
Great first steps for an FPS roguelike. I feel like you could easily build upon this by adding in other cool upgrades, like powers and/or weapons. One quality of life feature I would recommend is a way to register that you have hit an enemy as well as some visual queue when you get hit.
Thanks! Yeah a feedback system makes total sense, it was too far down my TODO unfortunately. I learned a lot about prioritization this jam, haha
I do feel like there is some potential there too for a fleshed out FPS Roguelike, that sounds fun to make. Although I would certainly remake it from scratch because right now there is a LOT of spaghetti and jank shoved up in there. Especially from the last 2-3 days when I was tired of grinding and just trying to crank stuff out. I remember at the very end I had to touch on the system I made first, and I laughed at how nice & tidy it was lol
Thank you for playing & for your feedback!
Super ambitions to make first-person shooter in five days for your first game jam haha! I would have appreciated a little clearer definition of the success criteria, I'm still not sure what I did to win the game. But it was fun to upgrade my character and each upgrade really made me feel stronger. Oh another thing that would have been super helpful is a mouse sensitivity slider, idk how hard that is to do, I have never made a 3d game, but I play a lot of shooters and it would have been really nice to adjust my sensitivity haha. Loved the theming, the messages as if they were directed toward an AI was a really nice touch. Lots to be proud of here, great job!
Thanks for your feedback and kind words, I appreciate it!
Yeah once you hit ~30 seconds, there is supposed to be some big permanent text in the center of the floor that says "Kill 50 to free yourself" or something, I'm not sure if I ended up getting that working or not. Truthfully the whole narrative and text bits got added less than 1 hour before the deadline, I was just pleasantly surprised they were kind of working haha, didn't do a ton of testing there...
Adjusting the sensitivity is a great idea, I remember thinking of it and throwing it on the TODO list and I think I just forgot tbh, oops. Thank you for the reminder. And thanks again for playing & your helpful feedback :)
You making your first game in UE5 blows my mind 🤯
The fast-pace FPS feels really good to move around with, but sometimes there were moments where I would get stuck, quite confused sometimes, difficulty is also a tad bit high at the beginning, I'd suggest maybe lower damage or adjust the AI a bit.
Overall quite a neat a game, especially from a fellow newbie, I am very impress you pulled this off, good job!
Thank you! This is helpful feedback and I appreciate your kind words. I do think a bit better level design and an easier difficulty curve would help a lot... if you could believe it, less than 15 minutes before the deadline I tweaked the difficulty and made it much easier (e.g., tripled the starting player health) lol... definitely should have taken a more proactive and playtest-driven approach there (and not left "difficulty curve adjustments" on the backburner of my TODO for so long...), lesson learned for sure hah
This is actually really cool, the sound design is awesome, and I really liked getting a bit further after every upgrade. Well done, this game is great!
Thank you! I appreciate your kind words
I spent a long time learning about sounds/music and how to get it all working together in Unreal, honestly after like 3 hours I was kicking myself for not focusing on higher-priority TODO items. So I am really glad you mentioned the sound was a plus, lol
I have no idea how much of this is already provided by Unreal Engine, but either way It's really impressive how much you managed to managed to accomplish as a newbie and in only half of the allowed time.
Making a fast paced 3D platformer FPS game is quite the commitment that you don't usually see in this game jam.
There are of course things that could be improved. The thing that stuck out to me the most is that the terrain felt somehow haphazardly placed. I could go somewhere and do a big jump or a wallrun but I couldn't smoothly chain these movements from one section to another.
Throughout the game it wasn't apparent to me how much energy I had or for what reason I died. I don't know if there was an HP or energy bar but nothing stuck out to me.
Congrats on your first game jam submission!
Thank you! I think the UE5 template provided both a surprisingly high and surprisingly low amount of content, in a weird way. There was a lot of stuff that came built-in which I still had to spend hours fixing up, tweaking, or outright rebuilding from scratch - I didn't expect to get caught up on some of that stuff haha. On the other hand, it had a lot of stuff I didn't expect that worked great out of the box (or with minimal tweaking)
Thank you for your actionable feedback. Revamping the level design was certainly my strongest TODO item that ended up getting cut, I agree with you that if the environment and the player controller were fixed up a bit then it would add a lot! I might spend a bit more time on it sometime soon as a learning experience too
Regarding the energy, yeah I did some initial testing having the energy bar near the center but it was pretty distracting visually (probably due in part to the super basic art style), I ended up putting it at the top near the current round's kills/score, but I definitely should have prioritized some kind of low energy/health warning system. I think I gave up early on art since I'm not talented in that area, that definitely led to some poor UI/UX decisions
Thanks again for your kind words & good feedback, and thanks for playing :D
I loved this experience. If you kill the difficulty of the AI a bit until the game starts to progress more this could be a great introduction to shooters. The running along the walls, jump pads, and glowing mannequins were miraculous and smooth. Would love to see this game in full scope. Good work!
Thank you! I appreciate your kind words. That is really encouraging, maybe I will remake it with a lot less jank/spaghetti and build it out sometime haha
This was really fun. I think if the controller was a little more physics based and you were able to gain speed over time while running that would've been cool.
one thing is The bullets are too slow but other than that that was really fun.
Thank you, these are all helpful suggestions. The bullet speed and fixing up player controller a bit were on my TODO, but gaining speed over time is a cool idea that I didn't even consider! Thanks for playing