Not much to mention that others haven't. I love the concept, but yeah the execution could use some work. The writing is spot on though, so I hope this project continues to evolve.
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HoloReco: Elysium's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| References / Humor | #62 | 2.679 | 2.947 |
| Innovation | #87 | 2.105 | 2.316 |
| Theme | #87 | 2.248 | 2.474 |
| Overall | #96 | 2.076 | 2.284 |
| Ambience | #101 | 1.818 | 2.000 |
| Gameplay | #103 | 1.531 | 1.684 |
Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
I like the voxel style look and the character movement! Very minecraft like!
Nice ENReco references and Mint cameo.
I exhausted all dialogues with Calli, Ina, IRyS, Raora, Liz, CC, Kronii, Kiara and Mint. I spent arond 30 minutes walking around the map and couldn't find anyone else to try to continue quests so I just went back to Liz and spammed the chat until time ran out to see what happens.
Bruh, I should've just done that at the start and saved myself 30 minutes of clicking around. XD
Some improvement suggestions:
- Old text in the side bar should be a little darker, to differentiate it more with the new text.
- Try making the quests more obvious to the player. Hiding them in the "log" wasn't very intuitive for me. I prefer them showing on a corner of the screen at all times.
- It also wasn't clear to me what CC needed for her quest and I spent a while looking for IRyS' brother but couldn't find her. I feel these kind of quests need better markers for the player to have a better idea of what to do or where to go, especially with a large map.
- The game could use some sound to improve the ambience.
- Movement is a bit weird if you click again before the character has finished moving to the previous spot. It's especially bothersome with such a big map. Maybe consider WASD as alternative movement option?
I like the recreation of the minecraft for this and the overall design of the skill system. As others have already commented, the movement for this game is very awkward but I think that's due to the size of the map. If the area was more contained, I think the mouse movement would feel a little better, but due to it being so expansive, it takes a lot of mouse clicks just to move from one end of the map to the other. This makes traversing the map a bit of a pain to try to get to people to talk to, especially if you try to double click to run which resets the movement. You have the spirit of Disco Elysium in it, it just needs some adjustments with the map size and the movement.
I did find a softlock in the upper left where Mint is. I think you left a transition tile where it shouldn't be as it'll take you to another map and at that point, you're stuck as you can no longer move.
I want to start with saying that this is not generally my type of game. I liked the idea, the graphics and the UI, but the movement system felt very cumbersome to use. If you spamclick you actually go slower because your move resets, but looking at the character just walk around after a click removes that little gameplay from you too. I felt lost but its probably a skill issue, i will not blame it on the game. Overall it's a great start but could use a lot more work (I have read the description about the time limitations). Some music is needed even if its an official holo track to keep the player engaged because the soundless walking really pulled me out of the experience.
Sometimes feedback from people who don't play the genre is valuable. I actually hadn't thought about the possibility of the player clicking repeatedly, and that's something I really should have thought about. There's likely a decent overlap between players who play crpgs and players who want/need to have their hands constantly doing something for whichever of the various reasons that can be the case. I think I know how to make repeated clicks not slow anything down as well (just allow the path finding code to delete a couple nodes and build on the existing path). Thanks for trying the game.
This is a super solid start!
I only managed to get Bae's quest done before I ran out of time, since I had talked to everyone before realizing the quest log existed.
Seconding some of the comments on the movement system - the map is large enough that I feel like running should be the default movement options, especially since it seems like you can't just hold down click and drag around to move, which means you can't accidentally run past your objective and therefore walking just feels a little obsolete and slow.
Along with that, I see you have a highlight implemented on the characters you can interact with, and applying something similar to the tiles you can move to would be helpful, I found myself trying to move to places that were out of bounds, but couldn't tell since there's no indicator, and would just have to randomly click around until I found a valid position to move to.
Lastly, maybe some indicator of time going down, or at least getting low (maybe just turn the time display red to keep it simple) - I didn't realize I was super low on time until I had gone around and talked to everyone and needed to rush to complete one quest before time ran out.
I like that you have multiple quests implemented, and I'm sure you could optimize routing to get all of them done, or at least 2, and the skill system is already in, which I feel like would have been the most difficult part to implement within the jam time frame, so that's a lot of heavy lifting already done. I also like how you chose to make the UI like a chat overlay. Small touch, and likely something that most people would consider, but still wanted to give it credit.
Would be cool to see you come back and add more content after the jam! I haven't played DE, but I've kept up with all of ENReco and I feel like it's a great setting to capture the story telling and mechanics that I hear make the source inspiration very popular. Good work!
It was a good effort. Unfortunately, I didn't follow EnReco and only recognised Tam Gander and Roa.
Still quarantined, but it's safe to run.
A fun game, the story is really interesting. Great job capturing the personalities of everyone from EnReco, and it's a really interesting concept seeing them after everything happened. The traversal is a bit slow and clunky, but not too bad. And the skill system is impressive for the time frame. Fantastic work!
Quarantined for me as well.
The minecraft theme was pretty interesting. I did like the layout of the game. Movement felt a little awkward at times, though.
I got two quests but both weren't implemented. The game also got frozen on the pause/menu page and I couldn't get out.
I am not sure if I am missing something but I just wandered around and talked to NPCs. I don't understood the goal and I am very lost.
I cant download your game bcs its flagged by itchio! I hope that gets fixed soon!
I sent an email to support. Thank you for informing me about this. Apparently this is a thing that can happen, and the game creator is never notified about it. My best guess is that it happened because I didn't fill in the game page before making it public (because I wanted to take care of the submission process early). I'm aware of at least one other game this happened to (Cecilia's Rescue Mission), so now that I know I'm going to go let them know to. If you're feeling trusting, it is still possible to download by clicking the "I understand the risks" part, but I would actually recommend against it since you don't know me.


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