TIGSource Forums

Hello everyone,

I made this game a few months ago for the BaconGameJam and I thought I could get some feedback here.

You basically must survive in a forest by eating all the food you find, at some point you'll attack monsters with a stick to get more life. The main goal is to survive the longest you can beacause your life runs out pretty fast!

(http://media.tumblr.com/141b1da7a83a82ded0e7748feca5f6a7/tumblr_inline_n2yor5L0hZ1sq5tim.png)

You can download it here: http://gamejolt.com/games/action/starvewood/26026/

Hope you find my game entertaining

-The very first thing I tried to do is put it in fullscreen mode because the brightness around the window ruined the atmosphere.

-The second thing I did was start writing here and realize that the game doesn't automatically pause when the window isn't in focus. Is there a manual pause?

-When I died while typing, I think I lasted 44s or so the first time and 39s the rest of the time. Maybe I'm wrong and just didn't pay enough attention before the number disappeared the first time.

-The enemies seem to blend into the background too much. The first time I saw them, I thought they were arrows (like from a bow) falling from above because their actual bodies didn't show clearly.

-If I jump and press down, it queues up my ducking animation and stops horizontal movement.

-When I started this game, I never expected such non-forest-like foods to be in it. A hamburger in the middle of nowhere? Is that just random or is there a story behind it?

-I could be wrong, but it seemed like health and hunger were using the same bar. Hunger already becomes an issue every 40s or so. Having damage make you get hungry even faster seems excessive to me.

-Personally, I'd like to be able to go a little longer without eating so that I could explore more (Maybe 90s, with food more spread out). As it is, it feels more like a "choose a path of food to follow" game rather than really letting me freely explore the environment.

-I like the bit of exploration that does exist, but I hate that there are dead-ends. I ate everything on the way through a cave only to encounter a dead-end when there was no food left on the way back. I wish the character didn't starve so quickly.

-I'd recommend changing "Better to find some food" to "Better find some food."

-If I walk against something, like the "nest" at the start, my character jitters like crazy rather than just stopping.

-I liked the graphics, but I wish there was more variation in the environment. Exploration isn't as interesting without cool places to find.

-I really like the music.

It's a nice little game, but I feel like the way the starvation mechanic is set up actually works against the rest of the design. I am curious to see what you'll do with this, though, and what other people in the forum will say. Should be interesting.

Hey, I have played your game and commented on GameJolt. :) hope the comment was useful.

In case you don't visit the website anymore here is it below:

Well this game has quite the potential to be honest. However a few things here and there that made it a bit frustrating for me:

1- When you first start you are given a choice between going left or right. If you go left, you fall down off the screen and can't come back up and if the game glitched and you came back up, you are in the middle of the terrain.

2- Since the above happened, I tried to find a way to restart the game or pause and restart... there wasn't such an option to my knowledge so I had to wait till I die.

3- The food locations is unbalanced, there are areas with LOTS of food and I mean LOTS of food (3-5 of them next to each other) and others with barely anything. I'd say you need to spread them around.

4- The exploration part of the game while I believe wasn't emphasized, I liked that the option was there. Though I had to follow the path with the food, otherwise I died. I'd say have multiple paths with multiple food supplies, otherwise you are forcing me down a single path.

5- There are areas where I fell off a cliff (I think it was a cliff) and kept falling for a bout 4-6 seconds. I wasn't sure whether that was a bug or normal, but I felt the falling time was long... you can make the fall a little smaller.

6- The game was fun and I liked the part that you had enemies in the game and that they drop health pack. I'd wanted to see more of them and more varied enemies.

All in all, I really liked the game and I did feel that if given enough time (since it seems it is made for a jam) you could polish it to be something very good. I'd say you have the basics right, you just need some balancing and have more emphasis on exploration perhaps -- specially when you are asking the player to "find" food. :)

Good work and good luck! ^_^

Hey, Thanks for all the feedback, it helped me a lot to notice the flaws of my game that I couldn't see. However, I don't think I'll continue this game because it was meant to be a jam game, It's just a short minigame. I will try to correct all these mistakes for my next game. Thanks again for your support.

Best.

Understandable of course. I am glad you are continuing in developing games. If you made this good game in a short time then I'd like to see what you come up with when you have enough time to work on a game.

Good luck and glad I was of help in anyway :)