serval-games 2017-12-06 17:03
Great music and overall much fun!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → Sugar Crash
By conrad123, aphid98 and incredibill
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 776 | 3.21 | 25 | |
| Fun | 603 | 3.28 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 396 | 3.37 | 25 | |
| Theme | 871 | 3.02 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 819 | 3.04 | 25 | |
| Audio | 376 | 3.34 | 25 | |
| Humor | 469 | 3.13 | 24 | |
| Mood | 705 | 3.11 | 24 |
Great music and overall much fun!
Hello there top-down car steering game-dev! :-) Loved the game and the fun music. The changing controls freaked me out though. :) Some more stuff to grab would make a bit more gamy I believe. Good work!
Woah, this is a lot more difficult than I expected.Good going. I don't like the title screen that much though and that's the only bad thing I have to say about your game XD
Oh boy that was difficult! The swapping controls made that a lot harder than I thought, especially coupled with the car health to consider. I think with smaller but slightly more frequent obstacles like say driving through a field with a tree or two would give more room to struggle horribly with the controls :P Otherwise great job!
Great job, this game deserves way more attention then it is receiving.
This turns really crazy really fast! Maybe the controls display could be changed to make it easier to read - I stopped trying to read it really quickly, and just pressed keys until I found the reverse gear or a turning key.
Really fun but man is it hard! Love the soundtrack and the graphics look pretty nice too! Funny idea and the keys changing makes for a nice learning curve! :)
Hi there! Really nice game. I like the graphics and gameplay. It's really hard, but I like that. It could be a lot of fun if there occasionally would spawn circles (ports) that you had to drive to in order to get more points or stay alive (maybe to get fuel). Hitting a small circle on a timer could be quite the challenge! Or there could be ramp, where you need a certain speed in order to actually fly far enough to reach whatever, so you couldn't just use the breaks - you would have to steer. Oh and the menu needs a bit of polish. But overall very cool and well done! :)
A funny fast pace game with high reaction demand. I like the gameplay. When you change the fluid to candy it would fit more for younger players too. Would like to see this polished up in the future.
* Music is to loud compared to SFX * Some music on the menu screen would have been nice. * UI fails being very usable.. perhapse have the keys floating around the car so that you don't have to keep looking back and forth. - even use the whole keyboard and just have the keys floating around the car might work better.. * Took multiple plays to figure out you had 3 'acidents' to game over from crashing - this should be in the instructions. * Graphics are consitent and of a resonable quality for the game. * Not quite sure how 'the more you have, the worse it gets' just that each time you get more time, your * inputs get shuffled. Maybe have the shuffling start happening more often as you get more sugar or have the sugar crash bar go down faster. * Why does the car explode when you sugar crash?
I'm playing this after I saw your request for more detailed feedback, so I'll do my best to provide that. I played this through the ich.io app.
The title screen is quite ugly, specifically the text for "SUGAR", it doesn't mesh very well with the font used for "CRASH" or the buttons. I'd suggest reducing the number of colours used on the title screen overall. It's great that you included a guide on how to play. I would maybe try to explain it in fewer words, or at least break the text up into paragraphs. The "QUIT" button doesn't work for me.
The game (at least for me) only had a short playtime, which meant a lot of retries - so it was annoying to have to return to the main menu each time to begin again; a quick retry option would help.
The graphics are OK, they have a cute quality to them; they remind me of those play mats you would drive toy cars around on as a kid. There isn't a lot of variety in the buildings. There isn't much in the way of animation either, so the game feels very static. I think you could really commit to the cute art style and populate the town with people and buildings to match. You could also just go with it being all about sugar and fill the place with candy and that sort of thing. As is, the "POP" on the soda bottles is hard to read. Some kind of visual feedback when you get some soda would be nice, maybe a bit of screen shake when you crash too.
The UI is fine but I think the "time until crash" bar is a little small and you really have to take your eye off the action to check it. Some kind of visual indicator closer to the car would help, I think. Maybe the screen could lose colours and slowly shift to greyscale as you run lower on sugar (or just the car could become grey/transparent). I didn't use the controls display much, easier just to figure it out as it changed; I can see you need to include something like this though.
I liked the music, I thought it fit the game and its style well. The sound effects are very simple and there are no sound effects for the car.
The main mechanic, the changing controls, is good. I like games that use the controls in interesting ways. However, it is difficult and not everyone is going to like it, as there is also an element of frustration to it. The main incentive for replaying is to better your score, so a scoreboard would be nice. However, if it were a bigger game, then some kind of objective would add to the replay value (e.g. reach this place in X seconds, Kasper's suggestions too).
I see how it used the theme but it become "worse" to the same degree each time, so I don't think it nailed it 100%. If there were other disadvantages as you consumed more and more soda, I think it would use the theme better. Maybe the screen could start to jitter, a rapid heartbeat sound effect or other effects people associate with sugar highs/crashes.
I tried to go as far as I could in different directions and I never hit an invisible wall. Also, the roads varied so that I couldn't just go straight forever without hitting a building, so good work with the level wrapping and design.
The controls when reversing don't work like they usually would, specifically the left & right are swapped to what they should be.
Sometimes a soda would spawn directly where the car was, meaning you unexpectedly swapped controls. So you may want to check that there is no collision with the car when spawning a soda.
The download seems quite large for the size of the game; I'm not familiar enough with Unity to know how to reduce it though.
Thanks @kasper-dissing-bargsteen @satyre @jason-kennedy @kodiqi for giving these awesome reviews. I'm assuming you saw my post on the main page. @kodiqi The quit button is meant for when you are playing the downloaded button on a screen that isn't windowed; it's the equivalent of ESC. But thanks for the awesome review; that's exactly what I wanted. I'll return the favor.
@Conrad123 asked for more critical feedback focused on areas for improvement, so I'm going to try to make that my focus. Don't take that focus to overstate negatives though, please. Because there are positives! The game is an interesting idea, has tight responsive controls, decent art sound and music, and most of all it achieves that sense of wild panic I think it sets out for.
OK here's the critical stuff. I played the windows download version.
You have a hard game with quick deaths, so you must take great care with your retry loop. That is ULTRA-important. You make two mistakes in your retry loop. Mistake 1 is sending me back two whole screens. It should be zero. Mistake two is that the gameplay input is on the keyboard but the retry loop input is on the mouse. I want to press a single key from the hiscore display to instantly be playing again in this game, ideally a key that is not used during play so I don't hit it as a "spillover" input and cancel through my score review by accident.
It's such an all-in decision to have deliberately frustrating inputs.
Most games bend over backwards to smoothly translate the player's intention into in-game action. Examples include the "ghost jump" where platformers will still accept your jump input even 50ms after you walked off the edge of the platform, or how colliders will often be rounded so you don't get corners stuck. A game is just automatically more fun by having fluid inputs that translate thought into action easily.
You have gone the total opposite way and deliberately made it hard to make my thoughts into action. It's a design decision you successfully executed on, and your vision for the game. I don't want to suggest you shouldn't experiment. But that's like advanced game design where you're poking me in the eye and saying "isn't that fun?"
Be aware that this design decision creates an initial barrier between the player and your fun.
Given that you set out to make it frustrating, I would have appreciated some other affordances.
For example you could have laid out the up/left/down/right controls with UI elements that were actually up, left, down, and right in their display. Instead they are just a line of text which I have to read.
Here's how it felt: The only strategy that I found that could work was to read just ONE input, down, so that I could stop the car by pulsing this input while I looked at the others. I would be pulsing backward, let's say S. Then I would back up into a bottle. The inputs would change. I would look at the new inputs and read the down input. It says W. Which one is W again? In my brain it that key is "UP" not "W". I am dead now.
A) read the text labels to find "down", B) read the character "W" and C) translate that character to the actual key to press. Maybe it would have been easier for me to play with the arrow keys?
Here is a mockup of what the lower-left boxes indicator might look like if it used no text and the game were using arrow keys: https://imgur.com/tbpD4Z9
Imagine how much faster I could absorb the "what key is down" information, since this cuts out two of the three steps from the current thought process.
OK back to the fair and balanced review. My top score was 100. This was an interesting experience, something different. The art, sound, and music were all nice. I appreciated the snappy response on the car when I did know the keys, and the decals of the breaking car were nice. I clearly knew when I had hit the house and taken damage. I think you achieved your goal of creating a feeling of panic in me, and that's definitely something! I critiqued how maybe that feeling wasn't the right one to go for, but I give you props for achieving it because it's not necessarily easy.
You also had me with a one-more-try feeling because I thought "shit it's just a simple translation of keys, I'll nail it next time."
So a nice entry, but since you asked for the tough love I tried to dig in more to the splinters.
The game is overall both weird and really interesting. Especially the control idea is interesting, but it is also super frustrating, and for me it was not fun for long. The music and graphics is overall fine for a LD game, and it all fits the game idea well. I would have liked a small intro story, and perhaps a end goal for the game. And some camera shake when the car is driving into buildings, could also have been fun. But overall a fine LD game. Well done.
Overall nice idea, I wished the Keyhints were more in the middle of the screen
https://youtu.be/w42MwHaX9XE