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A jam submission

Rockblaze PlaytestView game page

Rockblaze is a 2.5D physics-based puzzle platformer.
Submitted by made_all_the_hats — 6 days, 20 hours before the deadline
Rated by 3 people so far
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Rockblaze Playtest's itch.io page

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Ai Usage

Human made

Genre

Action

Shooter | Platformer | Slasher | Beat em Up | Base Defense | Survival | Racing

Puzzle

Mystery | Advenure

Rating

Family Friendly

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Comments

This was really fun! Very simple, but also still alot to chew on as a player. It was great zooming around and navigating the puzzles.  Some general comments:

  1. The language cube, is a little weird.  Nothing bad with it, just felt odd to use.
  2. Moving the sliders for the volume feels odd
  3. It would be great if a small sound effect played while adjusting the Sound Effect slider so that the player knows what they're setting the slider to.
  4. The blue blocks being safe to land on should be tutorialized.  Also, be careful as there is red blue colorblindness (though rare), and also total colorblindness.
  5. The recoil on the mouse's blast is cool, and offers alot of skill expression
  6. Manually activating the checkpoint isn't immediately clear.  Unless there are puzzles that rely on that mechanic, it might be good for those just activate by proximity.
  7. it may feel obvious that the player should shoot the aggressive blocks, but it still would be nice to have a tutorial icon / hint for it
  8. The slingload / magnet grab feature is going to be a pain point for alot of players.  It's not necessarily a bad thing, but handing payloads of similar mass to your own craft is a pretty advanced skill
  9. The moving panels in the bossfight don't have any apparent collision.

The VOD for the review is linked below and will be available for 60 from the day of broadcast:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2861952488?t=1h3m48s

Developer

Thank you very much! Your comment will really help me make the game better.

Jam Host

Hello and welcome to Feedback Quest 9! My name is Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts for this lovely event! I'm also one of the streamers, so both the game and this feedback are being done live! If you want to see the see the VOD, let me know and I'll link you to it when it's uploaded to YouTube!

I need to start this by making a confession: I generally don't like these types of games. I refer to them as "momentum" games, where the objective is you have to navigate around using controls that not responsive and where if you overdo things you'll likely just screw it up. They also tend to use what I call "tank" controls, where you use A and D to turn the character and use W to move forward, which I'm also generally not a fan of. Despite all of this, I wanted to play it and give it a chance because I HAVE seen some of these games that I do like. It's all about the game's design and how it treats it.

For the first couple of levels, I didn't feel there were any real problems. Then I got to the first level where you have a wall of floating spikes in the way, where you need to use an ability to push them out of the way. Now up front, I like the concept of this idea. Having a tool to let you force certain types of obstacles out of your way can be fun. What I wasn't as big of a fan of was how using the tool didn't just push the spikes: it also pushed ME in the opposite direction with quite a bit of force, making it that I then had to overcome that force to regain the careful momentum I had been using. Now maybe if this power could be used for other things - like, say, for pushing blocks quickly or for pushing buttons without need to get too close - I could see this as being okay. Sadly, it doesn't seem to impart a lot of force on blocks (moving them about the same or just a little less than how much it would move me if both myself and the block were sitting on the ground), meaning I was better off just using my body to do so, and it had no impact on buttons.

One thing I DID like, however, was how blocks I had to move would retain the progress I had made on them. Thus if I had gotten a block where I needed it to open a path, that path would stay open. I like this. You also had checkpoints, which made this even better! Nothing annoys me more in these games than getting so far through a level only to die right near the end and having to redo everything. These two things made this not the case and I do appreciate it.

But then I came to the part that... Look, I'll be honest; it just turned me off to this and I quit part way into the second level with them: enemies. There are blocks that, if you come within a certain range of them, will come at you and instantly destroy you. Not push you around, not block your path. They just outright destroy you. More than once, I ended up having these things attack me on a spawn point where I just repeatedly died until the enemy would self destruct (as a consequence of this, it would make it that I could no longer sit straight up on the spawn point and had to now navigate back into play at an angle that was disadvantageous to me).

There are honestly several problems with these enemies. For starters, between the size of the player character, the size of the enemies and the general amount of space you usually have for navigating around, these enemies have attack ranges that are just too big. There's just no way around them. Another problem is how quickly they can move. Where players have to work with the momentum gameplay and can have a hard time navigating around if they're going really fast, these things can go from 0 to 100 about as fast as Sonic the Hedgehog. It's outright impossible to get away from them without absolutely max speed, and even then I don't know. I never got the opportunity to try because they were ALWAYS perfectly in my way to prevent me from attempting. Essentially, this means that unless an enemy is far off your normal path, the only choice you have is to keep beating your head against these machines until they blow themselves up and clear the way.

Maybe these enemies could work if that tool that can push spikes away could also push them away or even destroy them, but this doesn't seem to be the case either.

Overall, right now this is a frustrating experience unless you're REALLY good at tank controls and know perfectly how to play these games to maximize speed. It's just not fun to play. You have some cool ideas here, but there would need to be some major changes before I even think about considering to try this again.

Developer

Hello! Thank you very much for such a detailed review of my game. Of course, the mechanic of eliminating enemies using the left mouse button works. I would be happy to watch your video of the playthrough on YouTube and draw the appropriate conclusions. In any case, you’ve done a lot for my future development with your feedback.

Jam HostSubmitted

Hi, we will re-categorize your game to AI-assisted due to people's doubts on the cover art by end of submission period if you have not replied me or edit it by then. Just giving you a heads up. Get back to us whenever you can. thanks. 

Developer

Hi! I just don’t understand what I need to do to prove that the cover was created by a person — namely, by me.

Developer

Jam HostSubmitted (3 edits)

ok thanks for clarifying, as an artist myself I will just take your word as it is and won't ask for further proof. I needed to investigate for the people who have questions. sorry about the uneasiness.  I will just tell them you made it. 

Developer(+1)

Thank you, otherwise I’d already started redrawing it so it wouldn’t look like it was generated by a neural network. But that would have taken several days. Anyway, thank you for the comment. I’ve never been told before that it looks like it was generated by a neural network. I’ll try to finish reworking it so it doesn’t look like that.

Jam HostSubmitted

its an unfortunate problem bec AI copies humans, so now any human art that resembles their copy get looped in. :( This chaos will continue until all AI content are properly labeled but I don't know when that will be the case. 

Jam HostSubmitted

Hi, some members are questioning if your cover is human made or AI made, to remain in the all human category please clarify that, attribute the artist, change the cover to human made, even a screenshot is fine, or change your category, thank you.