Anyone else care to rate my game? its nice to hear feedback, even if negative.
I've posted feedback on your game.
Very in depth feedback. All negative. But, all very useful. Most of it I am aware of, but even then it is very useful to hear people confirm the exact things I thought were wrong. You went well beyond what I could have thought of, which is even better. But you did not like a single thing?
Here is what I liked:
- I made a HUD for the first time, and the hearts and blue bullet icon look ok
- I got the jetpack working by accident, and it handles ok (it was supposed to be a rocket launcher)
- there are some sort of pickups
- there are some variety to enemies
- you can die
- you can kill dinos
- dinos can damage you
- I made a grass tile that tiles across the edge properly
- the barrel looks sweet. better than anything else I have done so far. My previous pixel art experience can fit on the spritesheet I used for the game.
These are things I have never done before... I have never even made a guy do damage to my character before. So I guess all the things I thought I got right, are things that most people take for granted.
The things I did not like:
- gun ended up being a stupid water gun. I wanted that one to be a shotgun, and then I wanted a rocket launcher and a machine gun. at least.
- powerups were made in last hour and did not have time to make textures for them (one is just a dino skin on a cube)
- powerups have no indication of what they do, and their effect is too small to be noticeable
- jetpack is barely working, and only worked by accident due to unity physics lifting my character up when I spawn objects under him. I would like more predictable and systematic control over it
- feedback of what is happening is non-existent. can't even tell when you died. can't even tell when you get a gameover.
- score system is an afterthought (finished in last 10 minutes)
- HUD lacks many feedback messages or they are too small. I would like to have created sprites with the text in these in very large stylized characters.
- There is no way to actually win the game
- The single worst part is the dino logic. Which is no logic. I would like them to be moving more systematically. The idea I had in my mind was that they would think about where you are and then try to move towards you for a few blocks, and then if they came within range, they would pounce. Instead I just have them moving towards me at all times, and they behave a lot more like orbiting planets than creatures. I was having a lot of trouble getting Unity to behave, especially with the mass and drag of objects. I would normally have moved the guys by Lerping their position manually between their current position and their target position, but this time I was trying to do it how Unity wants you to do it (I think?). Which is to use AddForce, but I spent almost an entire day just trying to get the damn dinosaurs to stop flying around everywhere or to stop moving like snails. This is the part that makes me want to scrap the entire thing and restart, if I were ever to try to remake the game again. Which I won't because it was just a reason to learn a bunch of stuff in 3 days.
- The game progression is basically just a number increasing every 10 waves, which increases all the stats of the dinos. This is very crude and would completely be replaced if I had time.
- The perspective was confusing to too many people. I was basically just re-purposing what I already had. I would have got even less done otherwise. But, now I realize either it completely does not work for anything, or at least it definitely does not work for a fast paced action game.
- The game is too dark. There is a very good color theory based reason for this, but I won't go into it. Ultimately if its too dark, its too dark. I will have to try to figure out how to solve this without sacrificing
- The sound effects would almost have been better if they had not been there. They are way too loud and ear piercing at times. I know exactly how to fix this, but didn't have time. Really, I would use something other than BFXR next time, I don't have enough time to be doctoring the sound files the generator makes.
- I wanted to do more tiles. Although, even the barrel shouldn't have been done, because doing the gameplay would have been a much better use of my time.
- Maps did not change. Originally the plan was to make the levels change between waves of dinos. I even had the thing loading maps from Tiled Map Editor xml files. Making a map only took a few minutes, but I did not have the time to code the actual part that changes maps into the game. I even wanted to include an in game map editor.
- the dinos spawn in just by dropping in from above. Even that was not working properly, because they were not supposed to float down. They were supposed to drop really fast. I could not get mass/drag to work properly, even by the end. I wanted to have them jump in from the sides, or spawn at little cave entrances which would be placeable using the map editor.
- and many many more things
The thing that I will be taking away from LD, is that I need to work on my time management, and that there is still a lot that I need to figure out before I can make a full game. Also, that I will never do another LD until I have mastered these things. I thought it would be OK to just see what I can get done, despite lacking the experience. I never expected that some asshole would hurl insults at me for doing this.