"You clicked on this video to learn something new, not because you actually care about the game I made" this guy gets it! I'm happy to hear about your game too, but I want to learn something interesting.
I noticed this on myself when watching devlog type content. Most of the time I click on a video about a game I never heard about or care about, just to potentially learn something new, and this trend showed itself in some of my other videos as well.
You could have made it so that for one reason or another in every room your health slowly decreases with safe zones spotted between, and the only way to stay safe or regenerate health you would have to buy something using the items. For rebalancing, you could have made the box enemies spawn slower (more like 5-20 seconds with random time between) witch would also help with lag. On cheese room, you could have the cheese occasionally switch even if the player looks at it or not. Just take it as a learning experience, and get better learning from your mistakes. ALSO TO REBALANCE COFFEE ROOM ADD TEA ROOM. WHAT DOES TEA ROOM DO? MAKES YOU BRITSH. HOW DOES IT MAKE YOU BRITISH? IT JUST DOES.
"Hazard" almost does that! (except the safe spots on the surface of the map; I wanted to add those during the jam but I ran out of time). Doing that for the whole game would be really weird tho as it would be another element to keep in mind, while you already have to: 1. not die to enemies 2. complete the objective 3. collect items (will turn into scanning items in an update). Adding an extra thing would overwhelm the player for no reason. If I would decrease the box spawning, the level wouldn't be as cool as it is right now. With less boxes, they don't create the stupid waves and they would look less threatening. It doesn't really matter tho, as I'm going to rework the boxes anyway. There is a global cheese timer which does switch the cheese, but that's getting an overhaul as well. The coffee room had an idea where the player could die from caffeine overdose with 50% chance after drinking 3 cups, however I didn't end up making it for some reason. The room is getting removed anyway so whatever... Also I'm Hungarian and tea >> coffee
could give the player an equipment back pack that allows them to hold multiple items. and make all items found in the doors be to big to fit in the inventory
"You clicked on this video to learn something new, not because you actually care about the game I made" Lol, I actually clicked on to check out the actual game and get inspired, not to learn something new.
If you really did want to keep a shop feature and have room-specific items, could you have a shop in each room, and it only sells general items and the items specific to that room? With the scan feature (instead of having to pick up items) it might be neat in some rooms to sort of do drive-by shop runs at critical moments... at least, on paper. This would also remove the need to know what the next room is, but I think maybe it could get overpowered quickly if players can stockpile money in easier/less time-limited rooms to save for the harder ones. Anyways, great video!! I enjoyed learning about some of the key problems you identified with your game's gameplay loop. Sometimes as a player I think I know a game could be improved or that some things aren't fun, but I can't identify the specifics (or think about cascading problems that may come from a simple-on-paper fix), so it was interesting to hear from the perspective of the game dev.
The box room sounds like a really cool idea. I figure you probably won't revisit it, but it might be worth looking into flocking algorithms, which could be used to make masses of enemies move together without nearly as many physics interactions. This may reduce lag. I'm working on a flocking system for my game and I feel like it will be really interesting given that most games just don't tend to have a lot of enemies on screen at a time.
I actually tought of a solution not too long ago, where there's a "leader" box that has the box AI, and then a bunch of "secondary" boxes that are just regular rigidbodies and they get pulled towards the leader box with a bit of randomness like a black hole or something. This way there would only be one box that uses the navmesh, which should fix most of the lag (?) and also make the enemy even more wacky as they could "shoot" all the boxes towards the player which could be hillarious :D
Game jams seem so hard! For the useless shop issue, could you have an item that tells you what room is next, or gives you a choice of two rooms, and let the player pick one? you could also give the player an inventory - nothing with too much room, but maybe a single slot backpack?
We actually thought of an item that would guarantee the next room, but there wasn't really enough time for that unfortunately. I wanted to make the game slightly less like Lethal Company, which is why I decided on the 1 item in hand limit. Something I could have done is to add an inventory for smaller items, and have the bigger items (like the microwave) take up your hands, but that would have been really outside the scope of the jam. Thanks for your comment!
@@kristoffred I know it might not be the best idea, but what about having items that have "weight" to them and your belt/backpack has a weight limit that wont let you carry any items above the weight limit. Obviously the items you need for each room wont fit in the backpack
I know this all has to be done within a certain timeframe, and im not much of a games developer, but hell ive played my fare share of games over the years, just some thoughts: Yeah i think even if the box room didnt lag it still wouldnt be fun, its just a speed check, theres doesnt seem to be an obvious strategy like the pipe one has Asside from the bugs, the cheese room looks fun, gives a like doctor who weeping angels vibe, maybe rather than just moving towards the player, if the player looks away for x time they move a set distance per x seconds, that way if you spin quickly it insta kills you, and it essentially becomes a puzzle of using your allocated turns to complete the objective Why couldnt the shop have been something you can view at any time ? That way level specific things could have been bought to help the player with certain things, maybe add more verticality to the rooms and have some sort of jump boost to help with certain parkour type things ? Hazzard just doesnt seem fun, just get to the end asap ? remove the damage effect and maybe add some boards or something you can pick up to bridge across to the islands, make it more interactive and puzzley, just running quickly doesnt spark much joy from the game personally All in all i think the games cool and unique, has a neat premis to it and with some nicer designed levels, hell id play it for sure :)
Have multiple exits, but ones that aren't part of the 'loop' cost credits to exit, you have to encounter them while having an available balance, if you fail to go through these, you more or less loop through the same familiar rooms, and perhaps the rooms get harder the more times you loop, so it's wasted effort/extra challenge not to collect credits. The starting 'loop' pool could be randomized, then there could be 'branches' each branch is unique per run, and there could be several of these off-shooting branches, a few rooms deep, then back to the main loop. Unsure if the door should always have a cost, maybe so if the player needs to start branching because the main loop is getting too hostile? Some ideas!
cheese room
okay but the fact that you can cheese the cheese is so funny
"You clicked on this video to learn something new, not because you actually care about the game I made"
this guy gets it! I'm happy to hear about your game too, but I want to learn something interesting.
I noticed this on myself when watching devlog type content. Most of the time I click on a video about a game I never heard about or care about, just to potentially learn something new, and this trend showed itself in some of my other videos as well.
Lethal company from temu (jk dont kill me)
so true
You could have made it so that for one reason or another in every room your health slowly decreases with safe zones spotted between, and the only way to stay safe or regenerate health you would have to buy something using the items. For rebalancing, you could have made the box enemies spawn slower (more like 5-20 seconds with random time between) witch would also help with lag. On cheese room, you could have the cheese occasionally switch even if the player looks at it or not. Just take it as a learning experience, and get better learning from your mistakes.
ALSO TO REBALANCE COFFEE ROOM ADD TEA ROOM. WHAT DOES TEA ROOM DO? MAKES YOU BRITSH. HOW DOES IT MAKE YOU BRITISH? IT JUST DOES.
"Hazard" almost does that! (except the safe spots on the surface of the map; I wanted to add those during the jam but I ran out of time). Doing that for the whole game would be really weird tho as it would be another element to keep in mind, while you already have to: 1. not die to enemies 2. complete the objective 3. collect items (will turn into scanning items in an update). Adding an extra thing would overwhelm the player for no reason.
If I would decrease the box spawning, the level wouldn't be as cool as it is right now. With less boxes, they don't create the stupid waves and they would look less threatening. It doesn't really matter tho, as I'm going to rework the boxes anyway.
There is a global cheese timer which does switch the cheese, but that's getting an overhaul as well.
The coffee room had an idea where the player could die from caffeine overdose with 50% chance after drinking 3 cups, however I didn't end up making it for some reason. The room is getting removed anyway so whatever... Also I'm Hungarian and tea >> coffee
could give the player an equipment back pack that allows them to hold multiple items. and make all items found in the doors be to big to fit in the inventory
backpack isn't a bad idea, I'll keep it in mind
"You clicked on this video to learn something new, not because you actually care about the game I made"
Lol, I actually clicked on to check out the actual game and get inspired, not to learn something new.
If you really did want to keep a shop feature and have room-specific items, could you have a shop in each room, and it only sells general items and the items specific to that room? With the scan feature (instead of having to pick up items) it might be neat in some rooms to sort of do drive-by shop runs at critical moments... at least, on paper. This would also remove the need to know what the next room is, but I think maybe it could get overpowered quickly if players can stockpile money in easier/less time-limited rooms to save for the harder ones.
Anyways, great video!! I enjoyed learning about some of the key problems you identified with your game's gameplay loop. Sometimes as a player I think I know a game could be improved or that some things aren't fun, but I can't identify the specifics (or think about cascading problems that may come from a simple-on-paper fix), so it was interesting to hear from the perspective of the game dev.
The box room sounds like a really cool idea. I figure you probably won't revisit it, but it might be worth looking into flocking algorithms, which could be used to make masses of enemies move together without nearly as many physics interactions. This may reduce lag. I'm working on a flocking system for my game and I feel like it will be really interesting given that most games just don't tend to have a lot of enemies on screen at a time.
I actually tought of a solution not too long ago, where there's a "leader" box that has the box AI, and then a bunch of "secondary" boxes that are just regular rigidbodies and they get pulled towards the leader box with a bit of randomness like a black hole or something. This way there would only be one box that uses the navmesh, which should fix most of the lag (?) and also make the enemy even more wacky as they could "shoot" all the boxes towards the player which could be hillarious :D
Game jams seem so hard! For the useless shop issue, could you have an item that tells you what room is next, or gives you a choice of two rooms, and let the player pick one? you could also give the player an inventory - nothing with too much room, but maybe a single slot backpack?
We actually thought of an item that would guarantee the next room, but there wasn't really enough time for that unfortunately. I wanted to make the game slightly less like Lethal Company, which is why I decided on the 1 item in hand limit. Something I could have done is to add an inventory for smaller items, and have the bigger items (like the microwave) take up your hands, but that would have been really outside the scope of the jam.
Thanks for your comment!
@@kristoffred I know it might not be the best idea, but what about having items that have "weight" to them and your belt/backpack has a weight limit that wont let you carry any items above the weight limit. Obviously the items you need for each room wont fit in the backpack
@@pikachu.01 The items actually have weight that slow down the player, but I'll probably experiement with that
I know this all has to be done within a certain timeframe, and im not much of a games developer, but hell ive played my fare share of games over the years, just some thoughts:
Yeah i think even if the box room didnt lag it still wouldnt be fun, its just a speed check, theres doesnt seem to be an obvious strategy like the pipe one has
Asside from the bugs, the cheese room looks fun, gives a like doctor who weeping angels vibe, maybe rather than just moving towards the player, if the player looks away for x time they move a set distance per x seconds, that way if you spin quickly it insta kills you, and it essentially becomes a puzzle of using your allocated turns to complete the objective
Why couldnt the shop have been something you can view at any time ? That way level specific things could have been bought to help the player with certain things, maybe add more verticality to the rooms and have some sort of jump boost to help with certain parkour type things ?
Hazzard just doesnt seem fun, just get to the end asap ? remove the damage effect and maybe add some boards or something you can pick up to bridge across to the islands, make it more interactive and puzzley, just running quickly doesnt spark much joy from the game personally
All in all i think the games cool and unique, has a neat premis to it and with some nicer designed levels, hell id play it for sure :)
Thanks for the feedback! I'll keep these in mind for a future update (if I end up doing that)
Great vid! Hajrá a jövőben főnök.
Have multiple exits, but ones that aren't part of the 'loop' cost credits to exit, you have to encounter them while having an available balance, if you fail to go through these, you more or less loop through the same familiar rooms, and perhaps the rooms get harder the more times you loop, so it's wasted effort/extra challenge not to collect credits. The starting 'loop' pool could be randomized, then there could be 'branches' each branch is unique per run, and there could be several of these off-shooting branches, a few rooms deep, then back to the main loop. Unsure if the door should always have a cost, maybe so if the player needs to start branching because the main loop is getting too hostile? Some ideas!
That's actually a really good idea damn
Good Video 👍🏼
🐔
FIRST PLZ PIN