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(+1)

Wow, you've a nice collection of one line comments. I'm sorry to break the trend. 

I think the music was surprisingly good for what my first impression was. 

About the game, I wanna say that while it is nice and simple like this, where there is very little you can do, it is also to the point where a hypothetically perfect player would practically play the same way as a beginner, except that they have better memory. It's possible I'm wrong of course, if the strategy with which you guys play has actually changed over time. But I believe not so because everything you can do, you have to always do, there are no optional things.

For some game genres it's fine if more experienced players play in a simply more strict way rather than with high IQ plays. Think animal crossing or geometry dash. The former buys into it by being calm and relaxing, which your game is not, and the latter by making execution more difficult, which your game is, in my opinion, also not.

In believe arcade games usually get their draw from: "I know I can do better next time if do this and this", where in your game I won't go further than: "In move in cleaner lines" or "I need to react better to when the fire stops" or even "I need to get more lucky with where the fire spawns". Because these are all execution things I feel your game would most benefit from going into a strategic direction, which to be honest, increasing the FOV would already mostly accomplish. Why don't you try it, triple the zoom of the camera outwards and see how that feels. I believe you'll start to be able to move around more with more intention, and strategy will matter more.

Please don't take my feedback as me trying to say "You stupid, is bad game" because it isn't. The simple mechanics work well with the aesthetics and sound, and I think they work well for when you're tired and don't wanna think too much. 

(+2)

I appreciate the fully flushed out review, I would say you are correct on all points. This is the first game we have made for a jam where we scoped in ad narrow as we could to polish each element we do have as best as we can. We have had a few game where the unpolished bits ruined the rest of the game. 

If we did continue this game, things like upgrades and fire spread would have been added. Maybe even a wider viewport being one of the upgrades. Thank you for playing, and giving a really good review that we can use to be better in future game jams. 


(+1)

I see what you did there...

(+1)

On my first read through your comment, I thought what you're saying is uninteresting.

On my second read through your comment however, I think what you're saying is interesting.

About the fact that you wanted to narrow your scope, I think you guys did that effectively enough, but could maybe have been better, which I'll come back to.

The fire spread makes sense, however I wonder how much harder it would have been to implement in place of the current system, but I trust you had your reasons for omitting it. I do question whether it would add anything to the game. To make it balanced you'd have to drastically decrease the random placement of the fire, which would just mean you stay at the same place longer, which is less fun.

About the upgrades, you're right that it would massively increase the scope. But it would also greatly influence the identity of the game. Suddenly it's no longer an arcade game. The scoring system would break, seeing as a perfect score and a meh score are pretty close together point-wise, this could of course be fixed by making the scoring exponential. On the other hand, the way you can currently 'turn your brain off and just do the thing' lends itself well to the average 'play, buy upgrades, repeat' gameplay. 

In fact, following that last conclusion, it could very well be that that's what's so jarring about the original version. You're selling it as an arcade style game, but it's missing the high skill ceiling those usually have. Instead the game is an idle-esque mindless progression loop style game, without the progression. 

So if you guys were like: "We're gonna make this game with upgrades in an infinite progression loop" but then said: "You know what, let's lower our scope and not make upgrades" I think you guys missed the plank a bit. Instead you could've simplified the gameplay a bit further or done a bit less polishing, so you could add minimal upgrades, something like a speed boost, costing points, which are now permanent. Or you could've changed the genre, and add a bit more skill expression somewhere in the game.

Well to be fair this game was made for a 72 hour game jam. With that in mind I'm going to choose polish over expansion, especially the closer to the end of the time limit we get.

Most of your rational seems to be based off having the time to fully plan the scope and game all at once and have everything settled before making it. While for a game jam (especially such a short one) our initial build plan is to just make minimum viable. Then if you have the time, expand.

The main downside to this is that any major system that is added after a minimum viable build has to be built on top of already implemented code. Due to that even a small scope expansion can take many hours of re-writing code to get the new system to work on top of the old. The upside is that if something doesn't work or you run out of time you have the ability to backpedal to a working system. 

The examples I gave for add-ons to the game are just possibilities, which would greatly change the game and thusly also change how we would describe it. Right now it is arcade-like, because that is the closest way we want to describe the game. If we made it so you would buy upgrades after each loss, we would then probably describe it as roguelike.

If we were to expand the game sometime in the future, we would probably change many, many things about it. There is a good possibility that we would start a brand new build that can be built with a much more defined idea in mind. That way all the systems can work together well, we would also have the time to test out additions and see how they feel before making them final. Then at the end finding what's best to describe the game.


Again, thank you for taking the time to give feedback on the game. What you have said and gone over will useful for future games we make, especially when deciding on an initial scope.

I see, and I mostly agree. When creating your initial scope it's indeed important to make sure you have time to polish and stuff. But it's also vital to have at least one mechanic you know is fun in there. For an arcade game it's improving your skill and getting higher scores, and for an idle-esque/permanent upgrade style game it's seeing progression in possesion. When starting out your game it's important to constantly keep in mind one of those goals immediately to avoid having to hack it into your game later. If you then think of adding some optional feature before having the basis of what makes your genre fun, you can put it on a list for later or ignore it completely.

With 72 hours it's indeed easy to overlook certain things that in hindsight you would have thought about earlier in development. And I think the stuff that you did make was cooherent and executed really well.