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Pollem Panic's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Artistry | #7 | 4.059 | 4.059 |
| Overall | #11 | 3.388 | 3.388 |
| Game Completeness | #13 | 3.765 | 3.765 |
| Best Most Like the Original | #13 | 3.059 | 3.059 |
| Sound Design | #18 | 3.118 | 3.118 |
| Best Creative Twist on the Original | #22 | 2.941 | 2.941 |
Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Love this game! Love the art and music. Really creative twist.
verry nice art style and music!
I think this looks and feels cool. I enjoyed the day and night cycle for the enemies. I think it needed proper grid based movement as I kept getting snagged on corridors.
This is my review of Pollen Panic
Overall
Stylish graphics in a very faithful arcade shell. Gameplay is too basic unfortunately and sounds are too loud! Deep lack of game feel/juice, particles, shakes.
Graphics
Excellent and coherent graphics, there’s a huge effort here and it pays a lot. Proper UI with a bit of mixed font styles, I would have use one or max two font styles. I see the same problem I had in my submission: maze is too small in the viewport which made me add camera movement (like it or not). There’s not a definite solution to this, maybe I would have made the viewport more square.
Sound
Music is appropriate even if a bit repetitive. Sound is too loud, I have reduced the volume to 50% and it sounds almost right.
Gameplay
Unfortunately, this is the weakest aspect of this submission. There’s not many challenges, game loop is repetitive, even it looks faithful to the OG.
Buggy character movement, the player doesn’t stay in the grid. The corridor width looks and feels bigger than the player hotbox. Sometimes you cannot turn at crossroads because of this. First level = tutorial, finally some proper arcade onboarding!
Great presentation, though I found the walking sound a bit harsh. It was a little easy to get stuck on corners. Would have been nice if there was a "cornering" feature like in pac-man. I'm not sure I understood the twist, it seemed like a pacman clone with random powerups and levels.
Thanks for the comment, you understood perfectly, that was the idea! a Pac-Man clone with random power-ups hahah
Like the bee/pollen theme, nice twist on the original with cute graphics and sound. Great game.
To echo 60k41p's comment, definitely a solid, polished game but there is an occasional movement glitch where the player character stops part way between tiles, and it takes a few key presses to get going again. Not a big issue though.
Understood! Thank you!
Solid game that I had fun playing. Very likeable graphics, and sounds were cute too.
I did feel the input handling sometimes didn't quite work right before some corners and caused my character to abruptly stop before cornering the turn, and the footstep sound (especially when you bump into an NPC) was a bit loud to the point of being distracting.
Still, easily one of my favourites!
Thank you very much for your analysis of the game, I am now aware of the problems and will work to resolve them!
What a cute game! The day/night system was such a cool feature to include in each level. I love that you can collect extra flowers to complete them. Overall, a really creative way to build the theme!
thank you very much
I hate bees even more than I already did, thanks ;)
First off, excellent twist. A day/night cycle is something I tossed around doing for my entry, but I'm glad I didn't because you pulled it off much better than I would've. The snails in particular were inspired. I also think the Mario-Kart-style power ups work very well in this style of games.
The visuals were perfect and felt well-polished. I like that each level has its own theme.
The music worked for me, but the movement sound didn't. I ended up muting the SFX (thanks for letting me do that!)
My two (somewhat minor) complaints are 1) the movement isn't locked to a grid and 2) the difficulty within the levels.
For the movement: The way the movement is implemented led me to getting caught on corners occasionally which is frustrating. For a "pac-man-like", I expect a bit more forgiveness in the timing of turning corners. The speed and responsiveness felt good, though.
For the difficulty: The game overall has a pretty good difficulty curve. The last few levels felt appropriately frustrating. But I kind of wish the levels themselves started easier and ramped up (like by starting with fewer enemies and spawning them in over time). Instead, we stay at the same difficulty the whole time. Moving the flowers around is cool, and I liked it at first, but after awhile I felt like most of the levels overstayed their welcome. I would have preferred shorter levels, or, ideally, for the levels to change more over time.
These things didn't stop me from enjoying the game, though.
Next is more of "unfulfilled potential" than a complaint: I wish that there was a bigger difference between the day/night behavior of the enemies. My favorites were the snails, because they behave totally differently at night. But I think you could push it further. What if during the day, you could pass through the snails, and they only blocked you at night? What if, too, they also blocked other bugs? A thought I had, was that the "day reset" powerup felt just a little useless. But if the snail worked this way, you could make the day reset a "cycle swap" powerup that swaps to day or night instantly. Then, you have a situation where you could pass through a snail, then use the powerup to immediately block off a bee chasing you. Just a thought I had while playing.
Sorry if my feedback is too rambly. I enjoyed your entry, and I hope some of this is helpful for the future!
I'm very happy you liked the mechanics :)
1 - Yes, the movements aren't as polished as I'd like; I discovered a bug very late and had to redo some things.
2 - Good analysis of the difficulty. Since I played several times and knew what I should do, I ended up finding it easy, hahaha, but with these observations I can improve, thank you :)
Regarding the enemies and power-ups: I had ideas for others and for improving those already implemented that weren't done in time. I liked the idea of the snail and the power-up; it really makes more sense. Those were definitely very useful tips!
Spoiler: There would be fireflies, and during the night in some scenarios, they would undergo changes between day and night.
Glad it was helpful! I know difficulty is so hard to balance. You know your own game so well it's hard to know what's obvious and not; I'm constantly struggling with the same thing. Fireflies sound super cool and interesting. I'll be interested if you ever update the game!
Superb game, nice polish and art. The only thing I disliked was the sound of the main character when it’s moving and the fact that sometimes you get stuck. For me it was rather short, we need more levels!
Thank you so much for the feedback!
The graphics were great, and it felt just like playing Pac-Man.
I'm glad you liked it, thank you!
Great work! I liked the visual style.
Thank you for your comment!