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Ai Usage
AI Assisted
Genre
Action
Shooter | Platformer | Slasher | Beat em Up | Base Defense | Survival | Racing
Puzzle
Mystery | Advenure
Rating
For 13+
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Comments
I intentionally limited my session to around five to ten minutes so I could cover more jam entries and give more developers feedback. That first window still matters, especially for judging the hook, onboarding, presentation, controls, and whether I want to continue.
First of all, this made me say “what the fuck” out loud, in a good way. I understood the nesting-doll theme from the screenshots, but I somehow did not expect to literally enter another character’s head and discover a world inside. That reveal is crazy, immediately understandable once it happens, and genuinely great game design. I am not normally big on platformers, but this idea got my attention anyway.
The folk-art direction, characters, ornate platforms, wallpaper, and old recording all fit the concept really well. The art could still use another cohesiveness and polish pass, and the unusual mechanics need slightly more guided onboarding because moving, entering heads, hanging characters, and wearing their skills is a lot to understand quickly. Still, this has an actual identity and a hook I will remember. I wishlisted it on Steam, good luck with the release and keep pushing forward.
By the way, I agree with ace24713. I’m not a platformer gamer, but the level design could use some work.
If you have two minutes, climb inside the extremely normal spinning-mech world of BEAT BAES and trade me some feedback.
Open the battle-mech nesting doll · Leave notes inside its head
thank you for useful feedback and kind words :) and you were right about onboarding: after your and ace's notes i rebuilt the first five minutes as a small tutorial that uses the game's own rules, one thing at a time. i still don't like it much, but will fix it day by day. it's live now
on the art: i'm not an artist at all :) trying to learn as i go
i'll climb into BEAT BAES within two days and leave notes inside its head. thanks for the wishlist!
Good to hear and don’t worry lol I’m working on my game’s tutorial now and it sucks!
The surreal atmosphere and the hand-painted art give Lilith a really memorable identity. Every area feels like a piece of someone's inner world, which makes exploration meaningful rather than just solving puzzles. I'd love to see this grow into a full game.🪆🌹
"Every area feels like a piece of someone's inner world" -> i really like this one, thank you very much.
I will try Recipe Frenzy within two days and let you know
As a Turk, I will continue to support you :)
Okay so this is intriguing. I played for about 20 minutes, but it's just totally overwhelming and I gave up. The level design is a disaster, you're exposing me to way too much information way too quickly, I can't process it! Within the first 5 seconds of gameplay there's a doll you can fall into, a random floating cat, some jumping dolls you can rope onto, something holding scissors, you can press Q to look into yourself... gah it's too much, I don't know what to even start with, I haven't even been given a goal or direction, so it's impossible to know if I'm making progress.
I would implore you to just start over on the level design, make an entirely new set of levels built with the express purpose of teaching the game, make it linear so there's always one obvious way to go. You don't have to "make a tutorial" you can use minimal words like you have, just dial in on one mechanic that you want the player to learn at a time. Riff off of Nintendo's 4 step level design method if you can: introduce an idea > develop it > twist on it > test the player (see the excellent GMTK video on the subject)
Many puzzle games I've played can take hours of teaching and reinforcing before even presenting the player with something they could conceivably get stuck on. Puzzle games are hard to design for this reason, because we as designers can't see our games from the perspective of a new player anymore. Try to swing the pendulum in the other direction, make it over-designed and then cut sections that prove unnecessary from playtesting. It's a lot better than people getting flustered and frustrated in the first 5 minutes.
I'm opening to revisiting the game if you make changes. Good luck!
P.S. I record my playtests, if you're interested I have the raw footage available unlisted on YouTube. Keep in mind I'm just a dev, I don't have a lot of practice giving live commentary, I do better at organizing my thoughts in text afterwards.
Edit: I just read your devlog where you said you redesigned the beginning room recently. I feel kinda bad now because I'm pretty sure I'm played the new version, and I still got quite lost. I think I kinda see the vision though? I was supposed to fall into the big doll which immediately presents the first challenge to escape. It didn't work out that way at all for me... but at least now I see what was supposed to happen.
hey, thank you, this is exactly the kind of feedback i can't get from friends. don't feel bad at all :)), you played the new version and still got lost, that's the most useful thing anyone told me this month lol. i'm a dev too but not a game dev xd, so the "you can't see it as a new player anymore" part hits, i literally can't.
i'll watch it and read it in my free time and rethink the beginning from scratch. thank youu!
update: i took your advice and started over. the game now opens inside a small linear tutorial built from its own mechanics, one idea at a time: take-in, hang, jump, then scissors. about two minutes. it's a first pass and i'm not sure about it yet tbh, so if you feel like a second look, i'd rather hear where it breaks than where it works
I checked it out, I'm not really a "new" player anymore so my input on it won't be as valuable unfortunately. But the new stuff is definitely an improvement, it explains the basic mechanics pretty succinctly which is a big help when getting to the next areas, since you aren't fumbling around trying to figure out how to interact with the game while also trying to find the way to progress. I will say I still don't understand the scissors very much, they seem a bit under-utilized? Like there's lots of things you can cut, but I didn't notice it ever really helping after the tutorial. And the first transition where the cat carries you up happens really quickly, I can't tell what's going on it happens so fast, you're exiting one doll then you're exiting another, then the cat is floating away without you, and I barely have enough time to read the text, let alone process what's on my screen.
Beyond that, seems things stayed the same so far, but I have some more observations. Beyond the tutorial, it'd be helpful to isolate some of the mechanics more, give each one space so that the player is only asked to learn one thing at a time before you start asking them to combine stuff. For example, I like the puzzle where it seems you have to combine sing and song-fly, but it's awkward to deduce because this is my first time encountering singing (I don't know what the purpose of the singing doll is), floating (I didn't even know it was a mechanic until I equipped the doll), and songfly. I'm being asked to make a lot of assumptions before I can even think about a solution. You could break this down into like 3 puzzles: first a puzzle where you need to learn how to float in order to progress. Then a puzzle where you need to learn how floating interacts with singing in order to progress. And finally the current puzzle where you have to deduce to combine the two and achieve flight.
Also more broadly, I'm noticing there's a troubling pattern with the game design that will make it difficult to make good puzzles in the future. The way you've built it, the complexity compounds together, because at any point you can carry things inside yourself from one area to the next, you can always go backwards and fetch an earlier doll. Every time a new shell is discovered it just adds more interaction space and there's no point I can mentally shelf something I encountered earlier. For example, if you've played Portal, that game separates puzzles with "material emancipation grills" that prevent you from bringing items from an earlier area into the next puzzle. So I don't have to remember that there was an extra box in chamber 4, because I know if I tried to carry it into chamber 5 it would be destroyed. For a more relevant example, the game COCOON is a puzzle game about entering worlds inside of worlds similar to this game. It is very carefully designed to make it impossible to carry extra puzzle elements forwards in the same way to prevent complexity runaway, and when you can carry an entire world forward with you, they segment that world with one way gates to prevent you from straying off the critical path.
I don't know how I would address that for LILITH, but it's probably worth thinking about. Improving that would make the task of designing puzzles easier too. You can just design in isolation, and if you want to rework a puzzle or reorder something later you wouldn't have to worry that it'd break something else.
I did try this game on stream, but unfortunately I just could not get past the beginning. I could recognise that it was structured in a way to guide you towards the initial dolls, but unfortunately your own abilities and the extent of them were just not explained in a way I could appreciate, much less how it interacts with the other dolls.
There is definitely an idea here, but there aren't enough clues that I could notice to help you figure out how things work. Link to vod below if you like but I really didn't last long until I gave up.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2864192089
thanks a lot for the vod, it was gold -> i cannot see the game the way you do anymore, because basically i'm the only playtester and i got way too used to it lol. I watched it frame by frame and changed the opening because of it: the game now starts on the platform instead of the zoom out. I added more on-screen hints. If you ever feel like a second look, same link