Medieval Package Delivery Company

ahistyap 2023-05-09 14:51

I played the jam version, I'm not really a big fan of a game where the goal is to walk from point A to B, then to C, and so on. I know there is combat in it, but I don't know if I'm playing it wrong but I'm struggling to hit the enemies and just kept on dying. Also, at the point where I need to enter a castle or some kind, I couldn't enter the place, which prevented me from progressing. Some suggestions I have for improvement include adding collision around the island and reworking the level of detail for the trees. The graphics are beautiful though, very nice work Alphabean!

I noticed that there is a v1.1, but could you give a quick summary of the additional content added to this version?

Overall, pretty awesome work!

tanner-shelton 2023-05-09 16:21

@ahistyap thank you for your feedback! As for V1.1, we actually addressed all of the suggestions you had. You can now beat the game, collusion for combat is better, there are a lot more enemies, tree LOD distance is way better, you can’t walk across the water, and a few other QOL improvements. Let us know if you are able to check out the V 1.1!

selkieharbour 2023-05-09 17:01

I tried the v1.1 and I could not play this as the graphics quality is too high and it runs at 5fps, I have 32gb ram, gtx970 & Ryzen 5 2600, so I suppose many people won't be able to play either :/

tanner-shelton 2023-05-09 17:20

@selkieharbour thank you for the feedback! I’ll take a look and see what may be causing that and either fix it or maybe add it to some sort of quality preset.

selkieharbour 2023-05-10 09:35

As you're using unreal maybe I can help, an easy fix that doesn't need much work I can think of is calling these two methods somewhere when the game starts (could even be the beginplay of any level as long as it's only called once, as they'll take some time to process):

`UGameUserSettings::RunHardwareBenchmark`

`UGameUserSettings::ApplyHardwareBenchmarkResults`

This doesn't give any user control at all and it may look bad on some low end pcs but... at least in the worst case I think people will be able to play with the auto settings.

Anyways if you end up fixing it tag me please so we can give it a go, your entry looks very nice

link270 2023-05-10 14:47

@selkieharbour Thanks for the feedback! I am planning to add that possibly as a “detect auto settings” button or something on the start screen, along with a few other customizable options I think, if I can find the time lol. I’m sure that will help make the game much more playable for a lot of people!

link270 2023-05-12 06:05

@selkieharbour I finally got around to adding a button to enable those auto settings, and we also made a few additional simple optimizations. Hopefully you'll be able to actually run the game now!

ethernalstudio 2023-05-12 09:42

The game is not optimised at all, but the graphics are incradible...

veralos 2023-05-12 12:06

I played both 1.0 and 1.2. I'm going to rate it based on the content from the jam version (which seems to be unbeatable - I couldn't get past the castle after the goblins), but will focus feedback on 1.2 so it's hopefully more useful.

First off: This is a very impressive game! The graphics look great, both the world itself and the characters. The world is very impressive in scale, and there's a lot of different buildings and terrain spread across it. I like how there's several different biomes and races of characters. The use of different weather/lighting effects (at least in 1.2) is well done and makes the different areas feel distinct. The amount of dialogue and characters in the game is also quite impressive. I like all sound effects and music, though it is a bit strange how the music seems to come from a specific direction.

Unfortunately, the gameplay doesn't live up to the stellar presentation. It mostly involves walking long distances between NPCs without much interesting to do on the way. The combat doesn't feel great either. There's a lack of feedback, making it hard to tell who's hitting who, and in general it's not very satisfying. There also doesn't seem to be much in the way of strategy - I tried dashing around a bit at first, but ended up having the most success by just standing still in front of each enemy and mashing attack until they died.

tanner-shelton 2023-05-12 13:45

@ethernalstudio thank you for the feedback! Which version of the game did you play? Was it the newest version 1.2? Or an older version like 1? Let me know as we did quite a few optimizations for 1.2 so I was curious to see if that version was better for you.

weirdbitgames 2023-05-12 19:45

The visuals for this game are really excellent, incredibly polished! It's absolutely on theme for the jam too, amazing work! You've made an awesome little world to explore (and I love exploring!)

link270 2023-05-12 21:09

@veralos Thats for the great feedback! I forgot that the game isn’t beatable in v1.0… we rushed to blanket add building colliders and forgot that we actually needed to be able to go through the castle doors. Haha we didn’t realize this until later and when we made the fix I forgot to make a v1.0 with that bug fixed and it just made it into v1.1.. I’ll make a note of that on the main page.

Art is all @tanner-shelton realm and he did a way good job! The music coming from a direction was partially intentional, but the effect is way too strong so I agree it’s a bit off putting. I’ll have to tweak that a bit for later versions.

Thanks for the notes on the gameplay as well. It does need a bit of a rework to become more engaging. The attack itself it directly tied to the animation, and since the animation is pretty small it doesn’t read super well. I’d love to have a bit more extravagant animations for attacks, and different attacks for each race. Then improving the feedback and everything would be a really important thing to improve I agree. If the combat was a bit more engaging I bet the walking around portions wouldn’t feel as dull. Our initial idea when coming up with this game was help up a lot by humor. We were able to add a little of that into the game, but what we really wanted was a fun little “fetch quest” style side quest that makes fun of itself and is fun and funny to explore and see what everyone has to say. Since we weren’t able to fully capture that vision, the end result of the more simple gameplay doesn’t really hold up quite as well on its own.

I’m just rambling here, but I think an issue we had was focusing too much on smaller less important things too quickly. I put too much time into the lock on mechanic early on when I should have been refining the dialogue delivery and even just the base combat haha

Thanks again for the feed back! Glad you got to play it!

link270 2023-05-12 21:10

@weirdbitgames thank you for the feedback! I’m glad you were able to explore our little world! It was really fun to make and we’re pretty proud of that part of it for sure!

python-b5 2023-05-13 07:30

I played version 1.2.

I enjoyed this quite a bit! The island was large and fun to wander around. I think the combat could definitely be improved, but spamming dash while running makes you move faster than the goblins anyway so I was able to avoid actually having to fight for the most part. I also think it might be nice to remove the waypoint arrow from above your head; the characters could then give slightly more detailed instructions on where to go and the player would have to actually explore a bit more.

island-jam-2-group-3 2023-05-15 21:44

Missed something else apart from going from A to B but loved the graphics / sound atmosphere ;-)

josh-bothun 2023-05-18 05:58

Love the look of this game! It looks like a much better version of the aesthetic i was trying to go for on mine, i love the grass especially!

gardenovena 2023-05-18 17:46

This looks really nice! You guys definitely took on a big project for this jam, I am impressed that there are just three people on this team. You all seem to have talent/skill, it seems time was the biggest hurdle. My teammate and I have definitely learned the hard way (multiple times 😳) how important it is to start with a very narrow scope for jams. I look forward to seeing your future games!

link270 2023-05-18 19:30

@gardenovena haha yeah we have a bad habit of going over scope haha we promised ourselves we wouldn’t do that this time, but here we are. Haha thanks for playing!

studio-endeva 2023-05-19 05:50

Beautiful game. Only issue with graphics was LOD pop in but otherwise a very clean presentation. Exploration was nice as well. I haven't played the non-jam version but I'm going to download it to see what improvements you were able to make :)

link270 2023-05-19 14:05

@studio-endeva thanks for playing!! I’m pretty sure we fixed some of the pop in issues and other things in the post jam versions, so I’m glad you’ll be able to check it out!