The cats is more productive than iam haha, an it's kinda sad when i became iron hand cookies maker that use free labour of cats to make the cookies! Love the game pretty much, IMO the UI button mix with the background because the same color palette, this made the button is quite hard to see. Great game!
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Makin' Biscuits's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Visuals | #20 | 4.670 | 4.670 |
| Audio | #74 | 3.903 | 3.903 |
| Overall | #145 | 3.756 | 3.756 |
| Enjoyment | #185 | 3.864 | 3.864 |
| Gameplay | #293 | 3.524 | 3.524 |
| Innovation | #409 | 3.330 | 3.330 |
| Theme | #703 | 3.243 | 3.243 |
Ranked from 103 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does the game fit the theme?
The owner of the bakery took out a big loan; she is risking bankruptcy to make biscuits!
What code and assets did you not make from scratch during the jam (if any)?
Aside from music, all assets were created from scratch.
How many people worked on the game?2
Comments
1 year ago(+1)
I totally agree with all of those points and they are all things I was thinking about during the jam ahahaha
Thanks for the feedback, I think giving the player better feedback will be on my list for the next jam
1 year ago (+1)
Thank you for the kind words! (TL;DR this became a bit of a rant but I think it's a good read so I've left it all here ahaha)
yeah the calm relaxing games aren't for everyone.
There are lots of reasons that we didnt make the game like that and actually it had nothing to do with time.
If there was some consequence to one of the bars falling all the way down, what would that be? (Nothing good for the cat) and we specificially didn't want to make the cat suffer in any way. That was one of our fundamentals.
Our other fundamental goal was to not stress the player out. Timers and targets and things just add unnecessary stress to artificially 'engage' the player with subpar mechanics.
A great game (in our opinion) can hold the attention of the player because the player wants to win. Not becasue the player is scared to lose.
(see how you got all the stations because you wanted to see the cute animations, thats what I mean)
Anyway none of that makes your points any less valid. We needed to make the game more engaging and I know we have learnt a lot from the jam.
I think making the game to low paced has always been something I want to improve on. Without overwhelming the player
Oh when I mean quality of life stuff that I would’ve enjoyed more, I mean like assigning a cat to go from oven to window seems like it should cover other ovens when standing around waiting for its own to finish, or any other deliver this thing to that place assignment. I can see the argument for that being an intentional design decision, but there’s no easy way that I could tell to find out which of multiple identical stations a cat was assigned to which would’ve helped alleviate that. Being able to pull trays off a maxed out oven might be nice too, even if it meant dumping them.
I agree you made the right call on not requiring the player to micromanage and from some of the points you’re making (all of which I agree with) it seems like you may have gotten the opposite meaning from what I was trying to say. It felt confusing because the game seemed to be communicating that that it was going to require micromanagement from me, which I didn’t want and was relieved to see wasn’t the case. Tip #1 even shows sending a cat to get food as an example of the kind of job you would want to assign to them. Since there were stations for two of the three bars that I could assign the cat to and no obvious way to get the cat to recover fun, it caused the stress of “how do I meet this need?” instead of knowing the cat would magically pull some yarn out of nowhere. If you had instead removed the ability to micromanage the cats at all outside of kitchen work, then that would have clearly communicated that it’s not expected behavior. Incidentally I think being able to manually pull out some string and play with the cats by dragging it around with your mouse might’ve been a great way to give the player something to do while waiting, make their fun recover faster and they purr and get a speed boost to work, or whatever.
I think the incentive structure of a jam makes slower, more methodical games discouraged because the typical voter is trying to play through as many as they can and that’s a tough challenge to overcome. I definitely wish the game had ran while not focused on the window, I would’ve left it up while playing through others!
1 year ago(+1)
thanks for clarifying! I thought that might have been the case; that I misunderstood ahaha.
All really great ideas, being able to manually play with the cats would be amazing
You make a solid point about the beds and food, initially I made them interactable just so people wouldnt be like 'why can't i click on the bed', because you actually can't 'assign' the bed or food, when the cat is done eating/sleeping/playing it will go back to whatever task you assigned it.
It would also be really nice if the cats could work out to go from multiple ovens to the window for sure. I guess I did get a little caught up thinking of each cat as a sort of conveyer belt so each one was a different pipeline.
Its so great to be able to talk about games like this that we threw together in such a short time 😁 i really appreciate the feedback 🙏
1 year ago(+1)
you're too kind 😅
Your game looks incredible btw, i'm putting it at the top of my list right now!
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