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Aluminium Scars's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Music and Audio | #3 | 2.875 | 2.875 |
| Theme | #4 | 2.750 | 2.750 |
| Enjoyability | #5 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
| Cyberpunkness | #6 | 3.125 | 3.125 |
| Art and Visuals | #9 | 2.250 | 2.250 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game follow the theme?
The player, Bloodhound, initially believes the first assignment to be their last... and in a way they do eventually get their wish.
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Comments
Listen to Mentel, he did far better than me in the game. On my testing laptop, everything looked too dark. I was not able to take resources (guns, boxes) and wondered how I should get rid of the guards with only 8 darts. So I ran around, used all darts and was finally found and shot by some guard, every time.
I liked the writing and the voice acting, making the game more professional from the start. The sound generally was good. Seeing the screenshots, I see that I have missed a lot, especially the more cyberpunk-y part.
Unsure what sort of issue could be affecting items. You were interacting with E, and not running into them? (In hindsight I get that their arcadey spinning nature could be a bit misleading).
Glad you liked everything else though!
Alright, I was pretty stoked to play a stealth game, especially since that's what I attempted (and failed a bit in my opinion) during my first run with this jam a bit over a year ago. Anyways, time for some feedback and things I noticed:
- The main gripe I've had with the game is that it's really hard to gauge stuff, one of the main pillars of stealth games is allowing the player to: make a plan, try to execute it, then either fail or succeed based on mistakes or overlooked details. That's all well and good, but it requires the player to have enough information, and this game doesn't give enough of that. What I would suggest is: (yes I know a list inside of a list, I'm that great)
1) Some sort of detection meter or other piece of UI (see Skyrim's eye, Payday's detection circle, Dishonored's lightning bolts) or making the detection system clearer, like in thief where you get spotted almost instantly in broad light, but are safe in the full darkness unless they get really close, and even then thief gave you a gem to see exactly how fucked you are.
2) A better way to check for enemies, this can take a form of a minimap like in old MGS games, leaning around corners, or a crouch which could allow you to step into the line of sight for a short period of time without getting detected, because I found myself just turning a corner and getting caught immediately by a guard I didn't even know patrolled there.
3) Some indicator for headshots, because it was sometimes hard to gauge what I'm aiming at with enemies moving so fast and the darkness in the levels, at some point I even managed to pack a full silenced pistol at a normal guy standing still and to this moment I can't tell if I was hitting some gap in their collider, or if I was hitting some invisible part of a prop.
- The reinforcement system could use a bit of work, because the enemy spawners don't get disabled even when you're standing right next to it, to the point that one time when trying to hide I entered one of these tunnels, had enemies spawning in front of me without spotting me, and afterwards leaving without noticing me despite facing right at me, which felt a bit silly.
- The camera could change during the boss battle, because I didn't even realize what killed him at first, so an animation that would show the actual killing blow could be nice.
- In the end I kind of stopped doing stealth and just started running through the levels, because the slower stealth approach started to result in more deaths than running and gunning.
- But now comes the fun part. The good stuff, and there was a lot of it: the world building, the level art, the voice acting, even when stealth became frustrating I still had fun with the combat system (even if it also was a bit clunky). And I mean, stealth games are naturally just a hard genre to get right, especially during jams and even harder when you don't have a lot of experience with the genre.
Thanks for the feedback. I did try and make up for the lack of enemy visibility by giving them a "suspicious" state - you have about two seconds to dash away from when they initially see you and go "Huh?" without them immediately giving chase. I think for the future I wanna give the player some sort of mechanic to help with checking for enemies like you said (hacking cameras maybe?).
For your point on headshots - there are no headshots. The stealth pistol should instakill the regular guards with the tradeoff obviously being that you can never find ammo for it once spent. Unsure what would be causing any issues with hit detection.
I was pretty spent on time when making the boss battle, so apologies if that was slightly janky.
I'm glad you liked everything else though! These grunts are the most intelligent enemy AI I have ever made (even if that's not saying much in the grand scheme of things lol), so it's good that they are at least fun to fight. The story might even be resolved some day if I ever revisit the genre - I would like to take a crack at improving what I started with this game at some point.
Nah don't worry the boss fight was still fun, at that point I was really grasping at straws with things to point out, but honestly I genuinely mandela effected myself into believing that the pistol only instakills only on headshots. When writing about the detection system I actually returned to the game and that was when I mag dumped a guard while standing next to one of the containers (I was checking if lights affected detection time and distance) and he just refused to drop, but throughout the game I usually had to fire at least two or three darts at most guards, honestly it might just have been a better hitreg on the head that caused me to believe that :P
But again, the game was really fun and the best one out of all the unrated games I've played so far.
Oh also I just remembered another thing, the task text was cut off for me when checking them in the first level.
Thank you!
Oh and by the way, the enemies have a basic sight detection cone which is around 2/3 of their gun's range. No fancy Thief: Dark Project hiding in shadows tech unfortunately. They do hear gunshots and camera alerts though.
Edit: The objective popup had a few weird issues with text indentation. It's supposed to wrap text automatically if it extends past the midpoint of the screen but it doesn't seem to always do that.