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It’s a bit hard to rate this game. Gameplay feels good and responsive, but I have no idea what is going on or why. I hope you don’t take offense to this, but this definitely feels like a messy jumble of random assets and features thrown together with AI, with no clear direction.
No offense taken at all, thanks for the feedback.
Did you read the description before playing and that I am guessing didn't help much?
The platforming gameplay feels good, running around and jumping and collecting the coins, etc, but the goal is very unclear to me. The red outlines on some of the collectibles feels like they might be bad and should be avoided, but they seem to be fine (my feel for red is that it's bad). There is a lot shown, and I can't tell what any of it means. I managed to unplug something, but I don't know what that means.
Getting the key popped up "Secret" as the text, which didn't make it clear that I can now go back and then finish the level, so I kept walking around. There's clearly a lot of work that went into this, but it doesn't feel like it all belongs to the same game, or it hasn't been connected in a way that a player of the game coming in blind can understand and make sense of.
Can I ask one more thing? When you first started, what did you think you were meant to be doing?
From the intro, it made it sound like I had to find the lights that are on and switch them off, but I didn't see any lights to turn off. It's highly likely that I missed things, because the game starts with an overwhelming amount of things to read, with the panel of the actions, a bunch of icons with what they mean, then like 7 npc stories, before any gameplay.
So by the time I could actually play, it felt like I was supposed to have studied the game and just know all of it, even though it was my first intro. The NPC stories also didn't make sense for me. How do they fit into the gameplay? Why are they important? The stories/snippets are shown up front, but I have no idea what the team members I find add to the game I'm playing. Why am I collecting money, what is it spent on? Am I saving to buy boosts, or is there like a savings target I'm supposed to reach?
Got it, appreciate the time taken to lay out these things. Will take them into account as I update the game.
That is a lot of content for a 72h game jam ! good job :) as the others tell, there are a lot of things going on and at first it is hard to understand everything, the lore looks very deep and it is hard to understand everything in 15min of play !
Reading the description page before jumping into the gameplay may help :)
There is a lot going on in this game and it controls well. However, it doesn’t do much to help the player understand how to play it / what is going on. I think you’re off to a great start making games. You should start looking into how to design games and what games do that make them approachable. I think the biggest thing this game is missing is affordances.
In game development, an affordance is a design feature that clearly signals to the player what actions are possible with a game element, making interactions intuitive without explicit instructions.
To play your game, the player has to spend a lot of time reading to figure out how to play and what is going on.
Additionally, you have a ton of content and levels but nothing in them makes me want to stick around. I am just running aimlessly to the right shooting things with tons of text on the screen that I don’t have time to read. Sometimes the lights go off and I don’t know why. I did make it to level 10 before I stopped.
Lots of ambition here which I love. Next, I would focus on learning what makes a game great for your players.
Thank you for playing all the way to lvl 10 and for taking the time to write this up. Its very useful feedback.
While I knew the concept of affordance (from playing video games myself) didn't know the technical term for it before your comment and now that I do and looked it up and understood it better, I can see exactly where the game falls short.
Thanks again for being so generous with your time and for the encouragement. I can't wait to share my next game with you and would love to hear your feedback on it again.
I don't know why, but the vibes from this amazing game reminded me of Club Penguin. The game has a surprising dynamism and polish for such a short time frame. Congrats!
Club Penguin isn't a game I have played but will definitely go give it a try after seeing your comment.
I think a game's mood ends up being whatever the player brings to it as much as what I put in, and finding out what people actually feel when they play it is the best part of sharing something. The short time frame meant I had to pick a few things and push them as far as I could, so it means a lot that the polish came through.
Thanks for playing!
Lot of things going around, hard to keep that all in mind. Don't really get how it connects to the theme.
put it was pretty fun nontheless.
Thanks for playing.
The other side of not saving energy today is a dark tomorrow where there is none left. (That's the message I am going for here)
there is so much going on, its really confusing. But the game looks, sounds and feels really good so i enjoyed it nevertheless!
Hi, Thank you so much, appreciate the feedback. Have added some more context on the description page which hopefully makes things less confusing now :)