Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD49 → QA - The Game!
By chartle, Pat Cleaver, Kobalt_23 and YordleGod
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 596 | 3.63 | 54 | |
| Fun | 708 | 3.45 | 54 | |
| Innovation | 323 | 3.70 | 54 | |
| Theme | 639 | 3.64 | 54 | |
| Graphics | 874 | 3.47 | 54 | |
| Audio | 309 | 3.73 | 54 | |
| Humor | 196 | 3.85 | 53 | |
| Mood | 787 | 3.38 | 54 |
Looks like the WebGL build for this isn't working :( The windows version does though thankfully. Pretty interesting take on the theme! The scope for this entry is pretty high, but your team did a good job of tying it all together. Very fun to explore around as well! Congrats on your entry!
@megamasterx Thanks for your comment! Can I ask what platform/browser you tried the WebGL build on?
That's strange, the WebGL build is working for me (Chrome on Linux).
A pretty innovative game over all! Might be worth having some kind of counter or something to let me know if I've already found them all or if there's more. Hard to tell when to stop playing :)
WebGl build is not working, not loading. I had same problem - fixed it by disabling compression in build settings(player settings and in one of the tabs there is a dropdown with compression). Gonna try win build now.
@chartle I'm using Edge Dev on Windows 11; I also tried Chrome as well to the same result.
Enjoyed exploring this one, kept looking for the guy in the cactus suit hoping he would be around. The meta humor was very entertaining as well, good job!
Very good game, I really liked it. Basically it's a find the bug game but very well executed. The audio is flawless. Not just the sounds but the effects as you move closer and further away from them.
Love the office vibe, fun game. The amount of audio work is amazing!
The idea is so interesting!
Fantastic idea! Great voice acting and humor! The game is more challenging than it appears at first. Very close to my experience with real QA teams. If only fixing those bugs were as easy as it's presented in this game. Love it!
I love prop hunt type games!! :D
This is really unique and a great take on the theme. For being a game about QA, it played very well, felt solid and polished. I enjoyed the voice over lines and I had fun playing! Excellent job!
@bentebent it's actually a little easter egg reference to our LD48 game that ALSO took place in an office and had the player sneaking around in a cactus costume ;)
@gabrielgamedev Thanks so much for pointing out the audio spacialisation! I decided it made most sense to only have diegetic sounds for this game, which meant things really feeling like they were in the world mattered to me, and audio localisation is key to finding some of the bugs too (plus I enjoyed stretching my "technical audio designer" muscles on this one.
@chesiq Thanks for the audio shout out! I'm lucky to be able to dedicate almost all my jam time to the audio both in terms of assets and implementation. And I'm also very lucky to have team mates that are willing to make space for sound to be an integral part of the experience!
@burst yeah it's not particularly true to the QA experience :) Thanks for singling out the voice acting, I'm far from a real actor, but these jam games do allow me to experiment a bit in that direction!
Such a good take on the "unstable game" direction and the execution of the idea works so well! Incredible voice acting and writing. I for one can't wait for Meatball Monday.
There is a chair in the office behind glass, that intersects with the table but still isn't considered a bug. Also I don't quite understand what people are considered buggy. Other than that, that's a fun concept, could use a bit more polish.
Really good idea guys. You've done a lot of things in such a short time, very good work.
A strange game, there is an opportunity to lose, but it is not clear how to win, but overall pleasant)
Didnt found every bug but was fun to play :)
Love your take on unstable! Really cute and fun. Loved looking out for potential bugs in the world, great job!
This is clever! It was a fun experience to try to find all of the things bugs that needed fixing. This was some topnotch audio implementation. I really liked all of the subtle details, like the mumbling over the PA. Very cool!
Very well done to all! Had a great time time streaming your game and it was a fantastic take on the theme! GGs all round! :D
Such an original idea! I had good time. Especially love the voice acting. Here's my score: asdzx.png
Who knew QA is actually hard :smile:
Amazing first person experience! Great take on the theme. It reminds me of The Stanley Parable
Well done, I did really poorly, even my second run after having seen the pictures of the problems I could really find very many. I love the guy sitting in the air, I passed him twice thinking "Oh the devs missed that" not realizing he was one of the bugs I should find ^^.
When the game starts out with dialog that is this important to understand the game. You might want to think about what happens if you start the game without sounds or if you are deaf. Some simple subtitles and a text reading "click space after making sure sounds are enabled" goes a long way to make sure the user knows important audio is coming.
Also in terms of the interactivity thing. It makes sense that you want something to show up when you are not able to interact with something. However, lighting up the whole floor to be yellow when you hover over it gets obnoxious very quickly. Also some small objects didn't even light up, so more consistency here would be great.
Also take my feedback with a grain of salt, as i never managed to really get into the game. I just dont understand how to play it or what the objective was.
I really like how you guys used the menu to introducing the game mechanics, without the need of a formal tutorial. I think that it is always good to avoid explicit tutorial. That was very clever! I would add a timer and a fast move to forc the player to strugle against time. How things are purposefully bugged in this game is hilarious! It was very fun to play.
Haha, such a fresh take on the theme. Really nice atmosphere and audio, cool vibe. Gameplay is simple, but an engaging enough vehicle for getting you to explore the game world and pay attention to the funny little details. I could totally see this being the conceit for a bigger walking-sim comedy type of game.
I love the game! I really like the graphics, reminds me of like HL1/HL2 pretty good. A pretty cool take on the theme unstable. Good job!
A very funny little game. I will not say that the game is polished enough, that I really was able to know if something was a bug or not. But it did not really matter, because I still had fun playing it.
Pretty unstable :yum:
Interesting idea and fun too! The graphic are nicely done, controls feels good, voice acting is spot on and sound effects fit the theme. Great job!
A very interesting idea, but there were some issues: Firstly, this thing has been animated incorrectly and it stays at the top of the screen.
Screenshot 2021-10-12 203021.png
Settings and UI were welcome, but text was too big and was overflowing the button and the sliders were using default unity icons. Also at the beginning the buttons fade in, but the text doesn't change. I know that's difficult to manage in unity, but at least you can toggle them on top. (a half baked solution would be to render the camera to a [render texture](https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-RenderTexture.html) and stack it on top and below the buttons. Then instead of fading the buttons you just fade the top layer). Also audio slider shouldn't display values from 0 - 1 and instead display 0-100%. Some advice: don't use floats to calculate that as they like breaking. Instead, use [decimals](https://docs.microsoft.com/pl-pl/dotnet/api/system.decimal?view=net-5.0) or doubles if you really have no other option.
Another thing was that you can press the quit button in webGL. Aka: freeze the game and have it sit there awkwardly as YOU CANNOT EXIT A WEBGL GAME. In most game jams I have a script that disables / enables targeted objects on certain platforms. Now I've integrated it into my tool qASIC, so you can [see how it works here](https://github.com/DockFrankenstein/qASIC/blob/main/Assets/qASIC/SetActiveOnPlatforms.cs).
The game never felt unfair (aka there was a "bug" but it wasn't recognized) which I was surprised about, except one of the co-workers that was clipping through the bench in cafeteria (also he didn't have the fancy highlighting). The gameplay felt a little bit choppy on webGL. You should probably turn down the graphics settings for that. Also, in the summary screen I was once able to spot myself as the infamous capsule. The easiest solution would be to just get rid of it and if you REALLY want to know where the player is you can setup a [gizmo](https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/MonoBehaviour.OnDrawGizmos.html).
The audio was phenomenal. Everything had a sound effect and the voice acting was a nice touch. I think the steps should be played as often though. That time when you fail really makes your hearth drop.
Another thing I can point out is that the elevator is broken for no reason. Having physics objects ride something is difficult in X and Z, but when we're talking Y then it gets stupidly broken. As the elevator is a closed space there is no need to do that. You can just close the elevator, wait for some time while playing sounds and teleport. If you want the environment sounds to fade out, you can just move the audio listener upwards. Not to mention, you are freezing movement in the elevator so you can quite easily make the player teleport in front of the elevator and have the camera follow it like we did in our game, but once again: there is no need to do that. Looking through your source code I saw some disorganization in your project. Speaking from experience: bad code structure and lack of communication create the most amount of bugs.
Anyways, I hope you found this review useful, sorry for probably useless solutions. Thank you for reading this all the way, I am slowly approaching the character limit.
Such a fun idea! It's probably one of the first times I'm happy to go bug hunting! Good job ! :)
@dock-frankenstein Wow, thanks for your massive comment! Most of the things you mention probably stem from me wanting to put in too much stuff too close to the end lol.
Yeah @dock-frankenstein that’s quite the comment! Thanks loads for the constructive and detailed feedback. Our approach is certainly a risky one as we like to make things quite dense and our best intentions to keep things neat go out the window during the last few hours..I’m happy you enjoyed the audio! The volume slider was just a lazy shortcut for mapping to an FMOD parameter that takes a 0-1 float(and can be called back and set by FMOD to avoid resetting the values in between scenes), it’s never failed me yet though. Thanks again for playing and taking the time to write!
Very fun game, the audio is immersive (nice FMOD implementation) Great job team!
PS : love the canteen track!
7 / 16 / F :slight_frown: This is a neat idea. I liked searching for issues, but it was hard to tell what I should report, a cubical on a balcony is strange, but is it an issue? It also might have been nice to do two or tree smaller levels (or more practically variants/versions of the same level), so that the player can learn the novel mechanics from the feedback the game gives at the end of the level (as is it's hard to learn and improve). Well done, on this game!
Pretty good experience! I like your idea! For me it was a little hard but it's not a problem.
I guess I'll do your debugging. I loved it! Sometimes a little confusing with chairs clipping in the desk, not sure if it was a bug or not but it wasnt. Aside from that everything was beautiful and hillarious!
Funny idea and I liked the corporate hell sound messages.
The running sound feels weird, like I am doing 10 steps by second.
I like the way bugs are fixing themself slowly, it felt satisfying.
Really interesting idea! I liked the game for the most part. The environment was really nice, and some of the voice lines were really funny. The main issue I had is I couldn't really tell what I was supposed select. Of course, the upside down water dispenser was an obvious thing to select. But, for example, I didn't understand why I was able to select some of the people, but not all of them. And when I would select one of them, I didn't get a point deducted for it, which didn't really make sense to me since all they were doing was talking. Was it because they were supposed to be doing their jobs instead of talking? If so, why was I not able to select the people talking in the other room? Anyways, other than that, I enjoyed this game.
This is a cool idea. My biggest gripe is that I didn't really know what to select and what not to select. Objects clipping inside other objects - pretty obvious. But, other stuff like the people, or a wall or something like that just didn't make sense to me. So that was pretty challenging. If you could provide some better telegraphing to the player, I think you could have a really unique game that's also super fun to play.