- Two-round voting system. In the first round every forum user can rate a small subset of the games that is preselected for him. Then the highest rated games are voted by everyone in the second round.

This seems like a good system. We had talked about a similar theoretical two round system but yours is much better because we didn't consider only allowing a subset of games to each user in the first round. This means only a manageable amount of games is presented to each voter at any one time.

I guess while we're throwing ideas around, someone suggested breaking the games into categories, somehow. But this is not as elegant as your proposed two round system because the number of games in each category could be lopsided.

I think multiplayer did make the games harder to try simply because the overlap of any two people's free time is inherently less than either one individually.

We got together one Sunday to try all the games in one sitting. This turned out to be a little bit of a mistake. There were just too many to try in one day. We started using any excuse to move to the next game. "We have to install something? We'll come back to it. There's an ad? Let's skip it."

Like mcc, we put our focus on the kinds of games that there were the most of. Since most of the games required us to be in the same room with one computer, that's how we approached it. We tried our best to give as many games as we could a fair shake. Despite this, there were still a few we didn't get to.

It's party my fault for poor time management. We didn't start trying any of the games until the voting started. I think there were at least 2 weeks between the submission deadline and when voting started that I could have recruited some people to start trying games. (Although, I did feel like I needed a little bit of a break at that point.)


Generally, though, I found trying other people's games was just as valuable, from an educational standpoint, as working on my own game. It was interesting to observe just how quickly the people I played with were to dismiss a game and move on. It was a great way to observe what worked and what didn't and try to understand why.

Also, indecently, it was interesting to observe my group tended to prefer:
-cute over retro
-simple over strategy
-original over homage
-the fewer buttons the better

Obviously, we were partial to the kinds of games that lent themselves to the kind of environment we played them in. Essentially: simple, easy and clear casual games.

 

Overall, I feel like we're at the end of a challenging dungeon I went into ill prepared and under experienced. If life were like a game, with a system of rewards perfectly timed to coincide with overcoming groups of challenges, I feel like this would be the perfect time for a level up.

Hello this is Pencerkoff

The combined votes for the three games I voted for came to 14.  Future note: if Pencerkoff enjoys your game, IT'S ONLY MEDIOCRE.

-PENCERKOFF

Interesting analysis. My combined total only comes to 10. XD I wonder if that says something about my taste in games...

Very well deserved winners though!

Thanks everyone, it's been a great experience.

Hey, thanks for the thoughtful comment. I didn't realize earlier that the game doesn't actually reward players for shocking each other. That makes things interesting! Even though we played this for one of the shortest amounts of time, it turned out to be one of the more thought provoking for me.

Another thought I had, the game could collect statistics on player behavior and send them to some kind of central server. So everyone who plays is actually also part of a statistical experiment!

Pretty good advice!
What about the rotating fire object? The main thing I am trying to do with these items is force players off the "ideal", short ways through the rooms. I thought at least the rotating fire would be a big enough obstacle...

I like the way you think! When we played, though, we just walked through the fire. Partly we didn't know how important health was. Idea: if the rotating object was solid, players would be physically unable to go that route. (Although leaving it fire does give players an option and creates an interesting trade off: spend life, and therefore speed, to take a shortcut and gain ground).

Did you guys notice that you get slower the less health you have? Did that play a role at all?

We didn't notice this. We noticed players moving different speeds but couldn't figure out why. This certainly makes health more important. Of course my approach is to just remove as much as possible so if I could find a way to do without health, I probably would. But variable speed could be important in a game of tag. And tying it to health isn't a bad way to get variable speed in the game.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the connection between health and speed is not immediately intuitive. Maybe if the character sprite looked physically hurt and started limping, it would tie these things together more.

Here's some other item ideas I am implementing by the way:
- a fake item pickup at the same spot that is actually a trapdoor to the other players
- a spreading puddle of glue
- a very experimental idea that makes the screen's contents the actual level layout for a little bit
- an item that reverses the other player's controls for a bit

how do these sound?

I like your ideas! I actually wanted to do a "reverse controls" trap in my own game, but ran out of time. (So I really like that idea, I'm biased). The trapdoor sounds a little similar to the teleport trap? But maybe I misunderstand how these work.

I'm not sure if how the item system works now is the most effective. The combination of items being random and immediate makes them of questionable usefulness, I think. Essentially, if you aren't in trouble, they won't make a significant difference. If you are in trouble, you have to just hope you get something that will immediately help.

Also, the ball is very bad because it covers so little space I think. I'll try how it feels if it is aimed at the nearest (other) player when spawning. Would it be more interesting if it also knocked people away (so it is not just damage but a choice between evading or the gap becoming bigger)

That's a good idea, and if you keep health, you'll want some damage items. But you're right, the ball was ineffective.

How does a (rather quick) pan of the camera to the new place (so you see what way it is moving) after a short delay with a TELEPORTING animation sound?

That should work fine. You might even get away without the camera pan. You could also think about spawning a little cloud of smoke before and after so people know why someone just disappeared or appeared in front of them.

Ooh man finally someone tried my game, you don't know how much happy you made me  ! Thanks for playing it!  Anyway...

Really my pleasure

Mmm the attack felt right to me...like you said the attack animation is probably too fast! 
It didn't register a hit? Are you sure the other doll wasn't crouching? Because I specifically designed the crouch (down button) to dodge attacks.
Anyway I'll make some fixing like you said and see what happens!

Definitely go with what feels right to you but this is what I was referring to.



It seemed to me that when the "swing" effect touches the other doll sprite it should be a hit. But that's just my feeling, it's not right or wrong one way or another. It's a subjective thing!

I'm planning to make a single player story, look forward to it! 

I'll look forward to it! Show us whatcha got.

Do you remember where the player was in the level when stunned indefinitely? I think there might be something with the "on-the-ground" hit detection that is happening to prevent the stun from resetting.

Yes, this would make sense because I remember falling right after or before getting hit. After I landed, it never reset. I could have been hit midair, or (perhaps) knocked off the side of a ledge. I'm not sure where I was when hit, but I remember falling afterwards. Hope that helps. XD

Stay tuned for exotic locales, like, "CRYSTAL OFFICE!" and "SAD VOID!"

Sounds great! :D

Hey, glad to hear you're still working on this! The game has turned out great so far, I am excited to see where it will go.

Sorry for all the confusing stream-of-consciousness feedback  . I still have a lot to learn about constructing feedback! Looks like I went a little overboard with the brainstorming. Oh well, better too many ideas than not enough!

I really like the idea of combining chassis and turrets. It could make for some really cool interplay. The whole thing with having less cars and less slots was to help make things a little easier to learn. But a well-made tutorial could address all that so don't worry about too many combinations. It could turn out really cool!

Sounds like you've got some great plans. Best of luck!

It's animated in pieces, so I guess that counts as procedural?  Or maybe skeletal, kinda.

Ah, very cool! I'd love to hear more. Is this a typical kind of animation that you could point me in the direction of some tutorials or other examples? I'd like to learn more about it. I appreciate any time you can spare.

Also, I like Pencerkoff's alternate battle mode idea. 

Ok, we tried this the other day. At first we thought it was just a kind of neat most-efficient-path wins game. But it's actually more interesting, because you have to balance an efficient path with maneuvering to bury your opponent and not get buried.

Some thoughts:

We didn't know gravity was going to effect free standing dirt and it took us a little while to figure out why we were getting crushed.

Love the music. Reminds me of In the Hall of the Mountain King.

I think the people I was with were a little turned off by the degree of similarity in the visuals to Spelunky. Which is too bad. The art is really well done! It all fits together well. It just comes off as a Spelunky clone. The message it sent us was, "Like a cheap knockoff of your favorite name brand, I am inferior in every way to the original you know and love. My gameplay is going to be just as unoriginal." Which couldn't be further from truth. You've got some really interesting and unique gameplay! You just need graphics to match it. And I know you can do it because the pixel art is really good!

Well, that was our impression anyway. Thanks for making the game!

Hello Pencerkoff,

I'm a big fan. I like your style because it's always clear who is talking and there is never any ambiguity about who everyone is.

When we tried this game, we couldn't figure out the ship building interface (we are a little slow). And the options overwhelmed us. It looks like a really cool game! But it didn't really lend itself to the group we played with. Can't really fault the game for anything in that regard.

The person driving the mouse spent at least a full 60 seconds on the main menu dancing with the mouse cursor and spelling words out with the trails.

That gives me an idea for an asymmetric cooperative game. One person spells letters with the mouse and the other has to guess what they are. It would probably have to be online. Alternatively, it could be a group of people competing on keyboards and the first person to type the letter wins. Like charades with a mouse.

Well, thanks for the inspiration!

-FLUFF

It looks like this could be a cool tower defense game. We tried it out the other day. We figured things out pretty quickly (for us). But some of the players were a little concerned about the amount of player interaction. One person said, "we could just open the a single player tower defense game on two computers to get the same experience." So we didn't end up playing very long. Sorry! Just thought I'd share our experience.

Recently we hooked a desktop to a TV and played through all the games. We didn't spend long on this but I thought it worth relaying our experience.

Your menu made a good impression. Very cool effects. When we started the game, though, the owner of the computer seemed distraught. He said, and I quote, "What? I don't want a bunch of junk text files all over my computer!" It was his computer, so we didn't get to play. Too bad! I thought it was a neat idea.

It seems like the kind of game that would be played in a computer lab somewhere, during an unsupervised computer science class perhaps, or after school. I see two people on separate computers and a referee giving them tasks. Maybe with a few curious onlookers hanging about, chiming in from time to time to resolve close calls.

It's a cool concept! Thanks for sharing!

My sister thought this one was really cute.

Ok, we were going through all the games a few days ago and played this one a little. I'll try to relate the experience we had.

Everyone liked the instruction screen. We all agreed: it was clear, informative, and the most creative we had seen. When we started the game, though, a sort of hush fell over the room. There was kind of an uncomfortable pause as people digested what they saw. One person said meekly to themselves, "So I press this and then this..." There were some hums and grunts as we started playing. And then one person declared, "This is kind of creepy." And that seemed to be the consensus of the room. We played a few times anyway, about four rounds I think, and then moved on to the next game. Too bad! I thought it looked great and not creepy in the least.

As you said in the first post, the gameplay is pretty much button mashing. From the visuals, it seems like it should be more about psychology or, perhaps, experimentation. What if the game was about the choice: do I shock the other player or not? If the players had some incentive to not press the button, it might make things more interesting.

The question is: how do you give the players incentive to both press and not press the button but also make the outcome unclear so they have to think: "Should I shock the other player or not?" The source of (at least some of) the uncertainty should be the other player. So that what they are really thinking is: "Is the other player going to shock me?"

I think the best way to do this might be to give both players a prompt -- some piece of information -- for them to think "will the other person shock me based on this information?" That way, it's not just a pure rock-paper-scissors guess.

See, We know there isn't a lot of gamplay here. The game is pretty much done, but We'd love to listen to your suggestions on how to expand the concept or make It more interesting.

Careful what you wish for! I've been running through ideas that might be more interesting than button mashing.


Idea 1.

The first idea had "timed rounds." If neither player shocks the other at the end of the round, they both get a large reward. If someone does shocks the other, the person who does the shocking get a small reward.

This could be made more interesting by making the rewards random or unknown or both. And by varying the rewards based on subject behavior. So, for example, if they are both always waiting for the time to run out, the reward for shocking someone could be increased.

But the problem with idea is is: if both players get the same amount of reward (no matter how large), it's really no reward at all. The only real metric is the difference in player score, which wouldn't change. (Maybe this large reward should be given to a random player -- with a "probability meter" that shows the probability of either player getting the large reward?)

I couldn't quite get this idea to work. It certainly could work, but it needs much more tweaking.


Idea 2.

This evolved out of idea 1. I think it's a little closer to the mark.

Suppose the game was broken into rounds.
Players alternate roles. Let's call them subject A and subject B.
Subject A can shock themself or the other person.
Subject B can choose to redirect the shock or not.

If subject B does not redirect, then whoever subject A selected gets shocked.
If subject B redirects, then the person subject A did not select gets shocked.

It kind of sounds like the poisoned drinking game in The Princess Bride, actually.

Anyway, to make it more interesting the intensity of the shock could vary and be partially unknown to the players.

Suppose a lab technician holds up two white cards (think figure skating judges' cards). They both have a random number on them but we can only see the number on one. (Kind of like blackjack, I guess).

After both subjects select an option (double-blind), the hidden card is revealed and the sum of the two cards is the intensity of the shock. That is how much "life" or whatever is subtracted from the person who gets shocked. First person to run out of this pool of "life" loses.


Ok, I should stop there! This turned into a mountain of text that's probably not clear at all. Sorry guys, that escalated quickly. It's a neat concept, I could go all night... Thanks for the opportunity for a brainstorming session! Always fun.

The title screen got a big reaction. "Ok. This one is my favorite," someone said when the title came up. However, we ran into some bugs and overall the gameplay left us disappointed.

We only played once and quickly found ourselves in an unwinnable situation. One of the players got stuck by evenly spaced rocks across the whole screen, and they couldn't proceed.

We also ran into similar problems as Hempuli:
Dirt turning into stone.
Stone turning into dirt.
Dirt appearing where there was nothing.
Dirt being indestructible.

A few things we found odd or against expectation:
You couldn't fit into a one-square wide slot.
You could dig out 3+ blocks at a time.
You could dig non-adjacent blocks.

Some minor animation issues you're probably aware of:
If you walk into a wall, the character starts twitching.
Walking animation and walking speed aren't synced, leading to the subtle "foot sliding" problem.

Other thoughts:
Monsters did not present a challenge. We just ran past monsters without trouble. Maybe the gun is unnecessary? Without the gun, I think UP becomes unused and could be converted to JUMP. That would reduce the controls to just movement+1. (I'm always trying to reduce the number of inputs for some reason ).

Respawning at the top of the screen after dying felt unsatisfying. "You mean I have fall through all the holes I just dug?" I'm trying to think of alternatives, but I can't come up with anything.

The background could be used as an indicator for how deep you are. Things could gradually get more dark and scary.

Unfortunately we didn't play long enough to get a feel for what the gameplay was supposed to be like, but I hope to see some more from you guys!

We tried a few rounds of this game the other day. It was a lot of fun but we lost interest before long. At first we were confused about some things but we figured most of them out.

Some thoughts:

We had no idea how to play! Since some of the people in our group liked the visuals enough, we spent the effort to come to this thread to learn how to play. (We only did this for 2 or 3 of the games. In other words this was one of the few games without instructions that made a good enough impression for us to lookup how to play.)

It was a lot of fun to go attack your opponent's "vacant" dolls at their base.

Overall, the whole switching doll thing was a lot of fun, but difficult to switch to the exact doll you wanted. Maybe try a Lost Vikings style of switching? Hold the switch button and press a direction to switch to the character in that direction on the HUD.

Really liked the doll sprites and backgrounds.

Liked the horizontal split screen.

Couldn't figure out what to do at first (especially before we looked up the controls and objective).

Couldn't figure out what we had to do at the window, or how that whole part of the game worked.

One person had trouble figuring out what was a platform and what wasn't.

Attacking could use some tweaking. Firstly, you can stand next to a doll and swing right through them and not register a hit. Try increasing the distance that you can do damage. Also, the attack animation doesn't feel quite right. I'm not sure why. Maybe have the "swing"/"wave" effect stay on the screen a little longer, or appear earlier?

Do you maybe want the title to be Doll Master instead of Dolls Master? "Dolls Master" is a little awkward.

A neat game, it went over well in our group.

Looking through the thread it looks like you have some good ideas! That concept art is adorable! Great stuff. Hope you continue to work on the game. Thanks!

Our group really liked this game. Cute, simple and one of the more creative games in the compo. However, couldn't figure out how to win or end the game!

We figured out the basics pretty quickly (for us). But it never hurts to have some basic instructions in-game, no matter how intuitive the controls and goals are.

At one point, it seemed like one player got stuck in the "stunned" state and couldn't eat anything or do anything to get out of it. We concluded it must be a bug.

We didn't realize you also had to get your opponent into your cake to win! Since we ran into that little bug earlier, we thought the victory condition was also bugged because we completed both cakes and couldn't figure why the game wasn't ending.

We thought the SZXC controls were counter-intuitive. WASD would be more in-line with other games, I think.

Earlier, right after the compo deadline, I was going through collecting links to all the online games. At one point I had all the games open in separate tabs, and I went through to copy the link from each. I didn't intend to play any at that time, but for whatever reason this one caught my eye and I tried it. I think this probably had something to do with the music and the clean, simple page the game is on.

Fun music. Cute, cohesive visuals. The aesthetics come together really well, I think. Thanks for making it!

Ok we tried this with two people on keyboards the other day. We all liked the movement, controls and interaction with walls -- all very intuitive and smooth. It's fun just running around, spamming cards randomly. But, ultimately, the card system left us confused and unsatisfied.

We didn't know:
How many cards are there?
What card produces what effect?
What is the purpose of this effect?

We weren't able to make effective use of any of the cards, despite there being some with cool effects.

Maybe it was the perspective, or the fact they both share finely-tuned movement controls, but we really just felt like attacking each other directly Smash Bros style and knocking each other around.

This led to a brief discussion: Do you keep trying to make the card system work or switch to a less original, but more proven style of gameplay? How the cards work now, a simple fighting mechanic would probably be more satisfying. But then does the game lose some of it's novelty? Does it lose some of the reason to play it in the first place? We couldn't decide what was better.

Thanks, and good luck!

We played this for a while but had some trouble figuring out what was going on. Eventually we concluded that the wizard types words and tries to shoot the girl with them while she tries to avoid the letters. But we weren't sure what the girl's goal was, exactly. Except just to stay alive, I guess, long as she could.

Our thoughts:

Nonsense words were really hard to type!

Actually, all the words seemed a little long.

Maybe give the wizard a pool of words to choose from when typing so if he wanted something fast he could type a short word but if he wanted something large with a lot of spread he could type that, too.

Ok, after reviewing the instructions here, I realized we had this wrong. The girl is not supposed to dodge letters but collect them. We thought the wizard was trying to shoot letters at the girl, which is why we thought shorter words and a word pool made sense.

No idea what the other pickups did, or what the HUD elements meant.

Overall, kind of an odd, surreal experience -- but fun! Kind of like the vague recollection of a 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. -type nightmare induced from a week of intensive and strict typing classes.

Thanks for making it!