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[Nanni]

Hello!

In this game, you play as a squeegee guy  and you need to clean the dirty cars when the stoplight goes red.

For now, it is called Stoplight Watch!



To play, use WASD to move, the mouse cursor to set the direction of the "attack" and left mouse button to use your squeegee.

I started this two weeks ago and it's my first game project, with an idea that was rolling in my head for some time. I'm doing it on GameMaker, so I'm not sure what do you need to play it besides Windows.

It's still early in development and I have 3 pages of things to add/fix/remove/decide that I can share with you, but first I'm looking for every fresh feedback you can give, even about the placeholder stuff (like sound, menu, name and graphic).

Please tell me what feels weird, if the collisions are breaking the game (I don't like'em, but don't understand collisions yet), if there's something fun, what isn't working, sugestions...
If you want it, you can contact me by e-mail: [email protected]

I'm a little perfeccionist, of the worst kind: the kind that paralyzes me and makes me stop everything at the first problem. So this game is special for me, because it's my first and it's helping me fight perfeccionism and just do stuff, even if it's broken or ugly.

To download it, just access this link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e68wkn8mkt9nxgl/Stoplight%20Watch.zip?v=0mcn

Images:




* In the last image, it is written "I'm sorry", in portuguese

* I accept name suggestions, Stoplight Watch is temporary

Thanks, everyone!

[diegzumillo]

It was entertaining for a while, but the mechanics is so simple that quickly one devises a working strategy of cleaning the leftmost cars only and waiting for the next wave. Add some more parameters there, to complicate things, like a time constraint. A time constraint would prevent the player to simply play it safe (and hence get bored quickly with the game). I can't think of a context to add this constraint though... it could simply be the day's length, and you have to meet a quota.

A structure that never fails to entertain and hook players: upgrades and days. Each day you take what you earned and buy upgrades. After 30 days the game ends and you show him how well/bad he did.

Anyway, just some ideas A propósito, eu caia na risada sempre que o "foi mal" aparecia na tela hahahah

[Nanni]

It was entertaining for a while, but the mechanics is so simple that quickly one devises a working strategy of cleaning the leftmost cars only and waiting for the next wave. Add some more parameters there, to complicate things, like a time constraint. A time constraint would prevent the player to simply play it safe (and hence get bored quickly with the game). I can't think of a context to add this constraint though... it could simply be the day's length, and you have to meet a quota.

A structure that never fails to entertain and hook players: upgrades and days. Each day you take what you earned and buy upgrades. After 30 days the game ends and you show him how well/bad he did.

Anyway, just some ideas A propósito, eu caia na risada sempre que o "foi mal" aparecia na tela hahahah

Thanks for your opinion and sugestions! I agree with you, the game needs something to make the player want to go to the street and to diversify the gameplay a little more. I liked the idea of 'days' and use them to upgrade your character. But it needs what you said - context. I'll try to implement this later on and see how it feels  

I also thought about a 'hunger meter', that decays over time, and a kiosk, where you can use the change you get from the cars to buy food and don't die of starvation.
A friend of mine suggested a bonus multiplier for getting 'near-misses' from the cars when the light is green, because he enjoyed trying to stay alive and it might be a good idea to encourage that.

What do you think? I'm afraid of putting too much and lose the simplistic feel.

I'm glad you enjoyed the 'Foi mal!' What expression do you think would be best to achieve this feeling, but in english? 'My bad!','I'm sorry!', or another one?

Thanks again!

[diegzumillo]

"My bad", definitely. It has that casual dismissive tone of 'foi mal', like "oops, did I just smash your legs on the concrete? that's a shame". Funny.

Near miss multiplier is a good idea. Maybe make the cars come a little slower and not on perfect lines, this way the player can have some room to maneuver while not having fixed safe lanes in the middle of the road.

I think you're right about being careful with keeping it simple. It's easy to ruin a minimalistic game with unnecessary features. But so far the game suffers from the opposite, so I wouldn't worry yet.

[Nanni]

Ok, thanks again!

I'm going through all my notes and updating them. I won't be able to work on the game at the rate I wanted because I need to study, but your contribution was really valuable.

And I loved how you described the "foi mal" tone, it's exactly what I wanted but you detailed it perfectly