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Prime Time Punishment's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Judges Choice | #20 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Theme Implementation | #26 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Playability | #37 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Cleverness | #59 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Artistic Style | #107 | 2.000 | 2.000 |
Ranked from 1 rating. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Link to your Game Design Doc on Google Drive.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSR22ZJT24mIcIknJSdDWJ2j0a1YgHELjXVKfJpCoJDWw-h7YV71LCdG_Xqpp6-F5O__-ulz4ZA21fV/pub
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
Summarize your game!
Prime Time Punishment is a mix between a card game, a reverse tower defense and a puzzle game, with some arcade elements.
Story:
You are a newly hired director for a new reality show. The premise is simple: the audience wants violence, and we provide that. But the audience is never satisfied, and they always want more.
Mechanics:
You place cards randomly draw from a poll (currently only SPIKE and BANDAGE, that respectively damage or heal) onto tiles, and a " runner" is either hurt or healed by them. The audience desires violence, so you are rewarded by hurting the runner with increased viewership (your objective), and punished by helping the runner with less viewers. Your goal is to keep high ratings, but keep the runner alive until the end of the episode, so don't hurt him to mush. Everything is done with mouse click and drag.
Each level is an episode, with new audience targets and higher stakes.
Please explain how your game fits the theme.
The jam theme "The World is Watching" is interpreted as a sadistic, fickle audience demanding entertainment. The entire game revolves around performing for an unseen mob - represented by a live viewer count, reactive chat feed, and procedural social media posts.
You're not watched by allies or supporters; you're watched by " thousands" who want violence but will abandon you if the show becomes boring or predictable. Every decision is a performance under scrutiny - hurt them too much and they die (show ends), hurt them too little and viewers leave (ratings drop, show cancelled).
The player must constantly balance the audience's bloodlust with keeping the "star" alive, creating moral tension where cruelty becomes profit and compassion becomes risk.
Did you use Generative AI to make any assets in your game?
No
Is there anything you'd like the judges to pay particular attention to?
This was unfortunately a rushed job. I had in total just the last 3 days of the gamejam to work on it, so art and sound had to take a backseat. This is the result of a madman trying to get somethign done in about 14 hours.
I would love feedback on the game feeling and balance. The famous " is it fun" question. I know that it needs an extra layer of polish to really tie everything together, but it has been hard for me without playtesters to know if the gameplay loop is boring, unfair or just weird. Also, some feedback on the UI direction would be good, since I am very bad at that kind of thing,
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Comments
Interesting idea. Might consider that, when not playing a card on a turn, the player redraws one or more cards. Cool entry!
Playability:
Easy to play and understand. Didn't realize the spike/bandage cards were draggable at first. You can hardlock yourself if you're on low HP and get double Spike though. Would be nice to be able to place traps multiple steps in advance.
Theme:
Fits the theme well enough as audience sentiment is the main goal. Could tie this into gameplay more but that comes later.
Cleverness:
Interesting design idea here. Would be nice to have more options for traps/benefits.
Artistic Style:
Simple and consistent. Good work on the scanline shader options. The highest tier is legit unreadable though.
Ah, yeah this is a great baseline for sure, like Maoaii said.
The main issue I see with this game is balancing. Run it through a couple more times with friends, and see where they fall short. For me, my contestant died because I kept being given the choice of Spikes or... Spikes. I didn't feel a lot of agency. There are also some notes on the value of certain actions. Like dragging the card onto the slot – there's nowhere else to drag the card to, so maybe it could just be a click? Or maybe you want to increase player agency and create more slots that can be dragged to? Like maybe the contestant hits a crossroads, and you're not sure which direction they'll go. So you try to setup a trap by predicting which path they'll take. Could also be interesting to lay traps in advance, down the pipe. So you're not just putting them in the very next slot, but maybe 4 slots down.
Oh man, this game would be fun with multiplayer. One friend is the contestant, the other(s) are laying traps. Or Twitch chat could lay the traps, too. That's a cool concept.
Anyway, great contender, awesome start, and if you build on this again in the future, tag me and I'll give it another play!
Thanks for playing the game!
I agree balancing is an issue. I had very little time to test the interactions. That said, I agree that randomness has been a point many brought that is does not feel that good in this kind of game. Multiple paths and placing on other tiles than the next one is a very interesting idea that I'll try to implement. I initially cut the placing to only the next tile due to time constraints, but I agree it does feel a bit bad.
I found interesting that you brought up multiplayer, did not think about it. I'll add to the idea list.
Thanks again for the feedback, hope you had fun.
It's an interesting concept and may be a good baseline to make a game!
The biggest issue I came across is the randomness of the choices and there only being a binary choice. I had to retry the first level multiple times just because I got dealt only "SPIKE" or only "BANDAGE" multiple turns in a row, which meant that there was no way I would win. Having more factors that influence the outcome could make this more interesting, like external factors, more choices, more cards, more effects, so on and so forth.
Regarding the rest of the game, you already have some polish in terms of animations, and even style coherence (even though it's greyboxed), but like Brocktho mentioned, these types of games where you have limited control or choices bank on the fact that they have a lot of juice in interactions (think Reigns cards interactions) and either deep mechanics and/or a deep story in which the player's actions have consequences (think Reigns or Sort the Court). So spending some time on that could make the experience more cohesive, have real weight on choices, and less "min-max -y", let's say.
It's a cool idea!
First of all, thanks for playing the game!
The randomness seem to be hit or miss, I'll do some experimentation on using a control panel instead and add randomness as some sort of event system. The plan is to have more options besides bandage and spikes, but I can see how randomness can be very harsh on this kind of game. The famous " sounds like a good idea but not that much in reality".
Thanks for taking time to play the game and give feedback.
I think the idea could definitely have a lot of iteration here, more unique rooms, more levers to pull. It's got a decent puzzle game core, but ultimately a game like this lives and dies on the "juice" factor and the feeling of the controls. In its current state it's not fun because it's a binary option and you pretty much just always pick a bandage when you see it and a spike when you don't.
The controls are also too weighty for what you end up having a choice of. Since we aren't building a full dungeon layout from the start we have no reason to drag and drop things. It's possible this was left in for a future aspiration, but I'd recommend a single click action in this simplified state, and even in a future full game you could keep single click by having the user "focus" a square and then left click add the select tile.
knowing this is only about 3 days of work, it definitely makes sense for the current state, but highly recommend for a future jam, ADD SOUND! jsfxr is a really great really simple tool online you can use to at least generate something to quickly get it in there. Sound really elevates things to a large degree and can make something feel a lot more complete.
First of all, thanks for playing.
I agree that the juice is very needed here. I also agree that the binary option is not that great for strategic thinking in this case.
Thanks for the feedback on the controls. I am thorn between have a dungeon building or go with a control panel and remove the randomness. I guess some experimentation is in order.
Thanks again for the feedback and taking time to play the game.