Jason Bakker

Post Your Game for Playtesting and Feedback!

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This is a thread where we can post finished (or unfinished!) games and get some sweet, sweet feedback.

 

I made a game-in-a-week last week called SUCKER. It's available for Windows on itch.io here: http://jasonbakker.itch.io/sucker . It's an experimental attempt at an expressive game, but I didn't really get to have people playtest it, so I have a feeling a lot of the expressive elements fall flat due to annoying controls or obtuse player feedback.

 

I got around to watching the GDC Microtalks today (which are available for free online), and while you don't have to do this, if you watch Lana Polansky and Elizabeth Sampat's talks before playing the game I think they frame it better than I ever could. It doesn't necessarily make it good, but it might help make sense out of why I chose to spend basically all my waking hours last week creating it.

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I look forward to playing it when I get home. I'll video-capture it and try to be vocal so you can see my initial impressions good and bad.

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So after playing it for about 10 minutes, here are my initial impressions:

  • Octopi! Octopuses?! Octopuses. 
  • Whats this glowing light on top of my head?
  • Just keep swimming.
  • Hey, a octoparty. 
  • Looks like we're showing off our colors.
  • Hey, why is my light blinking red?
  • Double hey, why are their lights white?
  • Why doesn't anybody love me?
  • Seems like this party is dying off, everyone is headed to the afterparty.
  • Woah, a lot of octopuses in this place.
  • Not really my scene, I'ma go chill over in the corner. 
  • Hey you guy also chilling in the corner, why are you running away from me.
  • Come baaaaaack. 
  • It seems my journey has come to an end. 

 

So I take it that this about trying to find compatibility? I wasn't able to find someone who made my light turn white. I'm not sure if this is even an option for the player, which might make sense if this was made with a pessimistic outlook. I did find the controls a bit difficult at times, but it wasn't anything that ruined the experience. I think the game could use a "snap camera back to default" button. Maybe click in the stick? 
Just went back to it, and now seeing the "Network" on the control screen. Are we exchanging business cards? Octopus business cards?

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Initial feedback: You may want to put a brief about what people are downloading on your site. I know you explained it in this post, but seeing a stark black and white lettering saying SUCKER and expecting me to download a zip makes me wary I'm being duped into a virus.

 

Maybe that's just me, but I could't help but raise an eye brow.

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I love this idea, and will post my game too here in a bit. But I wanted to give you feedback on yours first!

 

First of all, inverted y AND x axis?? What are you some kind of monster?? :P (But seriously an option to change those would be nice.)

 

Beyond that, I think the most basic feedback I can give is that I simply didn't know what was going on. Now, if your ultimate goal is creating a game where the mechanics themselves are a mystery you have to solve, I really like that idea. But the two main things that hindered my enjoyment of that discovery was 1) the movement speed. My octopus was too slow for any actions to happen with any kind of frequency. E.g. I might be curious what will happen if I interact with two other octopuses at once, but if they're far enough away my motivation to float all the way over there is pretty low. So my discovery of the mechanics is diminished because of that.

 

The second thing is, I suspect you might not actually have many mechanics in place anyway? Which is completely understandable, but it's a piece of feedback I can give anyway. At this stage, I didn't have much motivation to continue.

 

That might all sound pretty negative BUT I'm legitimately interested to see where you go with this. You've shown me just enough to pique my interest, and your enthusiasm for the concept is evident. So I'd love to see where you're planning to go with this!

P.s. Is this a networked game? Or are the octopuses AI? Cause if you got that many people to playtest your game simultaneously after only working on it a week, huge kudos.

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I haven't watched those micro-talks and I hadn't read the other impressions posted in here before I recorded this. I know that's going to be hard to believe, given that my experiences felt very similar. My eyebrow didn't raise like Murdoc's, but I got nervous like when someone on the street asks me for money, due to what Murdoc explicated.

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This is incredible, thanks so much for playing it!

 

All of this makes me feel heaps better about the game; the thoughts and reactions (even the more mixed/negative ones) are along the lines of what I hoped to get; way more so than I expected.

 

Murdoc: Totally agree. Have added some text to the bottom of the page that should hopefully clarify things a little bit.

 

singing_pigs:

Were you playing keyboard+mouse or with a controller? (My guess is controller?) I have this weird thing where my brain really quickly forgets or gets confused about what it's used to, so I just went with whatever felt okay. I want to go back and add options at some point, but I want to figure out a way to do so that doesn't introduce any HUD elements on to the screen. (I guess if you hit start/enter, that could probably just bring up a quick options screen.)

 

SUCKER is single-player only unfortunately. It would be awesome if it secretly connected everyone across the world, but I think in that case I probably would have had to put in AI anyway, just in case only one person ever played it at once.

 

Thanks a heap for the moment-by-moment impressions and the video as well; it's super cool to get a window into the player's mind as they're playing. A few of the moments in both clyde and rexor's playthroughs are almost scary in how they match up to what I hoped the player to feel at those times.

 

If you're curious, one thing that doesn't seem to work at all communication-wise is the light on the back of the head. What it was meant to indicate is the octopodean creature's energy:

- when it's bright, the creature has a bunch of energy.

- when it's bright and pulsing, the energy is being drained.

- when it's red and flashing intermittently, the creature is out of energy.

 

I've got some other ideas for how to communicate that without resorting to HUD elements.

 

Look forward to trying out some of your games and hopefully giving feedback that's as useful as all this!

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Check it on out! This is a game my team has been working on for a little while. It's a local multiplayer game so it works best if you have a couple friends (or more) with 360 controllers, but you can test it out for bugs and stuff if you've only got yourself. (If you don't have a controller you can use a keyboard but be warned, it suuuuucks. It's only there for rudimentary testing. Hit 'g' at the character select screen, then turn on keyboard support in the pause menu.)

 

Let me know what you think!

 

Coffee Break

 

 

@Jason Bakker: I was playing with a controller yeah. I figured with only working on it for a week there wasn't much time to add that sort of option, so it's all good!

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If anyone has a few minutes and another person, I would love to get a little feedback on a small project! These are a couple little arcade game-y prototypes I made after playing through Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons that use a similar control scheme.

 

http://www.maximum-extreme.com/bros/bros.html

 

I'd like to pursue one of the ideas and make it into a more full fledged game, but no one I've asked can agree on which concept is strongest and I'm not sure either. And honestly the control scheme is so confusing, it might not even be worth pursuing! You can get a sense for the controls with one person, but you need two players to actually play. The controls are mostly explained on the page and in-game but if you have any questions please feel free to ask me here or on IRC/ Steam/Twitter.

 

I'm also trying to figure out what I can do to make controlling it more...sensible. One thought I've had is that I need better visual feedback about which ball you're controlling, like having a thumb-like shape on each ball so it's more clear which hand it is. So any suggestions along those lines would be appreciated too!

 

Also...I wonder if it would be better to have this thread in the general video gaming forum? I imagine a lot of people don't come into the game dev subforum who would be interested in doing some playtesting.

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@singing_pigs
I just played it single player, but it crashed on me when I was trying to collect coffee mugs. I had already collected one and was trying to collect a second. 

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Also...I wonder if it would be better to have this thread in the general video gaming forum? I imagine a lot of people don't come into the game dev subforum who would be interested in doing some playtesting.

 

I'm up for that idea, the more people the better.

 

 

I just played it single player, but it crashed on me when I was trying to collect coffee mugs. I had already collected one and was trying to collect a second. 

 

Sweet!! (I dunno why, I get really excited at bugs. I'm crazy.) What specifically were you doing when it crashed? Picking up a mug, dropping it, just carrying it and not doing anything special?

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My initial impressions of the Bros prototype.

 

Thanks for playing! I agree that the fun of the dual joystick thing is trying to keep them close together and move them in tandem...it kinda just feels good when you're able to control them both simultaneously, but it's also challenging to do consistently (especially when you're playing against someone). Based on watching you move around, I probably need to tweak the numbers so you want to stay even closer.

 

To get to the other game modes you should be able to hit back/select and pick a mode with the left stick or d-pad. It gets a little weird though because they're also clickable with the mouse, and you need to click in the window to get its focus so you can use the controller. Guess I probably ought to just take the mouse clicking out.

 

Also you're right, it totally does need sound effects. Maybe I'll use these mp3s that somehow appeared on my hard drive.

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Now I'm frantically trying to learn how to use OpenMPT so that I can get you some proper samples. 

I was thinking about your game again and I feel weird throwing ideas at you, but I'm going to do it anyway. I think that if you made it so the two points lerped back towards each other when the controller sticks are at rest, it would give the player-controlled object a lot more tactility.

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Now I'm frantically trying to learn how to use OpenMPT so that I can get you some proper samples. 

I was thinking about your game again and I feel weird throwing ideas at you, but I'm going to do it anyway. I think that if you made it so the two points lerped back towards each other when the controller sticks are at rest, it would give the player-controlled object a lot more tactility.

 

I've been struggling to figure out what I'm doing with these prototypes so I'm definitely open to trying things out and seeing how they feel. So don't feel bad/weird about suggesting things!

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As with everything else, I'm finding out how much is required in order to have a really cool dynamic, sawing sound. Creating a noise sample is easy enough in OpenMPT. At first I was thinking that the change in the sound would happen in the actual clip, but no. In order to get a real sense that your lazer is biting into the target, it seems that there would be a constant, looping high-pitched drone (probably at a low volume) that has a sudden increase in volume and a sudden decrease in pitch at OnTriggerEnter(). Then the pitch would lower further, as the lazer is getting closer to the center of the sphere.The pitch and volume would return to normal OnTriggerExit().

 

Here is a buzz sound if it's useful to you. For some reason, Explorer won't open it, but Unity uses it just fine. You won't be able to hear what it sounds like unless you loop it.

 

Of course, the samples you uploaded are way better though.

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Hey guys, I created a 2-4 player competitive sports game similar to Windjammers and FIFA.  It's called GHARGE! and it's currently being developed by myself only haha.  It originated as a school project at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT, for my "Building Games" course where we are attempting to learn Unity and some game development strategies.  

 

Anyways, the game!  It requires 2-4 Xbox 360 controllers to be hooked up BEFORE loading the game.  Unity games have a problem with the way it recognizes controllers, and I'm not really sure why.  You use the left stick to control movement and the A button for everything else.  When you press A without holding the disc you dive a set distance.  When holding the disc and a direction with the left stick you throw the disc in that direction.  In all game modes you can traverse past the middle line to shoot the disc or to attempt to steal the disc from your opponent(s).  When you shoot the disc and score from your half of the court you score 3 points, and from your opponent's court you score 1 point.

 

I'm still working on it but I would like to see what some other people think, apart from my colleagues and classmates.

 

Here's a dropbox link for the zip containing an exe.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rh5sjdnigyc6sjz/GHARGE%21%20DEMO%201.2.zip

 

I hope you guys like it, and thanks for trying GHARGE!

 

EDIT: Just realized I double posted.  Anyways this is the updated link.

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@Ravage484:

 

Might be my computer but there seemed to be a bug where the Ready and Quite buttons overlapped the player selection, so it was a little confusing. Also wasn't super apparent that everyone needs to select a character before hitting Ready to start the game.

 

1. This could be because of the controller support issue, I think Gang Beasts has the same problem, but I think the buttons get all messed up when the game starts. Setting it up on the launch window is a bit tough to do every time for 4 people. so having the ability to do it while in the game would be amazing.

 

2. Not sure if having the ability to rotate 360 degrees was the best design decision, it does change it up compared to windjammers, but scoring on myself isn't particularly fun. Maybe if the field was design in a way where I could turn back and chuck the disk against an angled wall back there to throw off my opponent would be cool.

 

3.Are the players supposed to cross the center line? That might be your Fifa influence, but it didn't seem to benefit a 2 player game, maybe with 4 it makes more sense.

 

4. Oh and this is a super polishy thing to maybe add later, but when a game is controller supported it'd be nice to see the support in the menus :)

 

Due to button mapping not sure if I got into any of the nuances of throwing, but I like where it's going. After Giant Bombs marathon of Windjammers, it's cool to see people working on an homage of sorts.

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Hi all,

 

My first game, (PC/Mac) Deadstone, is nearing completion after several thousand hours staring at a screen and pressing buttons. It's a 2D shooter with elements of tower defense, resource management, backed by a fairly hefty character development system (4 stats, 11 derived stats, over 40 perks). Also, the full 50 mission campaign is playable in local co-op. I haven't got a playable demo yet (maybe around 2 weeks), but if anyone is interested, I'll put up a link when it's ready. There are two trailers though, if you'd like to have a look.

 

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I made minimal improvements to my sequencer. It's not complete or anything, but I'm starting to wonder if it ever will be. I wanted to put a newer build up because the basics are there though it has problems like that the numbers in the menu don't refresh as they should. It mostly works though and I enjoy it so much that I wanted to make sure that the other people like me can play with it now. I especially enjoy making very large grids and massive amounts of notes between octaves. Then I kind of wander around on it which changes the music because the audio has a fixed range. 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/92741283/Sequencer/sequencer%205-26-14/Menu%20improved%20with%20numbers.html

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Here's version 0.1 of my Space Cowboy Game Jam entry. I'm planning on doing some more visual stuff and adding a few more sound assets (like music!). Give me some feedback on the play, tell me your high score.

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4536789/SixShotsWebBuild_0_1/SixShotsWebBuild_0_1.html

Here is the type of thing I was thinking of for the soundtrack

http://free-loops.com/4557-bonanza-theme-song.html

Turns out it is rather hard to find electronica remixes of Oklahoma! or Aaron Copland.

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Wow Clyde! A whole seven minutes of feedback is super valuable. The"pause for ray trace" is intended to be a nice little hit pause for you to check out your shot. After I posted I added some more stuff to try and make the hit a little more crunchy. Shooting hats and speech bubbles are great ideas. Thanks again.

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Here's version 0.1 of my Space Cowboy Game Jam entry. I'm planning on doing some more visual stuff and adding a few more sound assets (like music!). Give me some feedback on the play, tell me your high score.

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4536789/SixShotsWebBuild_0_1/SixShotsWebBuild_0_1.html

 

I think some kind of cursor/reticle would be useful, or you should lock the cursor to the unity window, because I twice clicked outside the window and died. The latter probably makes more sense, so that players still have to aim using the line coming off the gun.

 

I like the look overall and think the parallax background works well, but a little bit more differentiation between the different layers of the planet surface would make it a little more visually interesting.

 

Doubt you'll have time to do it for tomorrow, but something that I think might work is an active reload to add a little challenge and make players try to shoot enemies earlier (rather than waiting for them to bounce into their sights). At some point once enemies just start flooding onto the screen, there's not much you can do to shoot them down fast enough, so I think keeping the number of enemies down but increasing the difficulty of shooting them (whether via active reload or maybe more complicated movement patterns) might feel more fair. For reference I wasn't able to get past around ~35 enemies before I wasn't reloading fast enough.

 

How did you get that sweet kinda fiery-blue effect on the "wheels"? Particles with collisions? I like that a lot.

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