natrem 2023-05-01 01:45
I liked it!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → Parcel Panic
By pdotjpg
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 112 | 3.79 | 33 | |
| Fun | 143 | 3.59 | 33 | |
| Innovation | 127 | 3.58 | 33 | |
| Theme | 61 | 4.24 | 33 | |
| Graphics | 15 | 4.51 | 33 | |
| Audio | 109 | 3.61 | 33 | |
| Humor | 267 | 2.51 | 28 | |
| Mood | 109 | 3.64 | 33 |
I liked it!
fun game! interesting concept. the packages started coming so fast i got overwhelmed xD
I really liked the graphics. My biggest difficulty was that the largest packages were a little cumbersome to fit inside of the customs box. Cool polished game, well done! :smile:
So easy to fall behind, but I really enjoy the process of inspecting the parcels. Definitely has a similar vibe to papers please. cool game!
Really fun game. I like the art style. I feel like the parcels arrive a bit too fast. Or maybe i'm too slow.
Very nice game, loved the graphics. As said by others the packages arrived very fast, was a little stressful because of it, but maybe that's by design. Can get a little messy when too many packages fall onto the weighting scale. Also the sinister music gave me the impression that there was some way in the game to rebel and play against the rules maybe? Like making mistakes on purpose to escape this mundane job?
Fun game! Really polished. I think it would have been better to slow down the early packages, I found myself completely swamped immediately with no way to get ahead of the timer. Cool game though!
I love the amount of letter at the end :D Congratz!
I liked the Paper Please vibe, the gameplay felt great and I really felt like a postman ! Great entry
Your game is my favorite so far.
Firstly, I love games where you work towards something. The music is very atmospheric and adds to the mood. I loved the hand-drawn textures - simple details like borders on packages makes all the difference on graphics to stand out. The ASMR-like sound effects at the right volume matched perfectly with the gameplay. Overall, the feeling is like playing with a 3D toy. Congratulations!
Thanks everyone! Glad people are having fun with it.
@tumblingpuffin @kgurniak91 @nick-baggett I definitely agree that it's probably a bit too punishing and throws you into the deep end immediately. Was thinking of having the spawn times get quicker as the game goes on (starting slower) but didn't have time to implement it. I did want to tune it quite difficult as it's pretty content-light. I'd rather the player lose too quick and maybe try again than get bored because there's no risk of losing (common problem with highscore LD games). That said, it could still be tuned a bit easier and more beginner friendly.
@ltyrosine That's incredibly kind of you to say, thanks so much! I'm glad you appreciated the little details in the presentation - I got really into that aspect while working on this. Happy to read that the gamefeel clicked for you. I love that it gave you the 3D toy feeling. I really like games that feel tactile so it's cool that you got that out of this.
I got 80 points! Not sure if this is high or low. But there was a lot of messages to sort sitting in the inbox, had to keep throwing them back into the pile as they kept falling on the scale. Caused me to panic a bit when the timer finally got the end. I feel like some benny hill sax music would make this more chaotic.
Fun and chill, love this kind of games! I wish you made a more interactive tutorial, letting me go through each step instead of explaining everything at the beginning. I always have trouble with games that do this because I tend to forget everything I just read. Would love to see something more in depth with more things to check and do with the packages. Great job!
@tinykidtoo my friends who tried it got like 100 points on their initial attempts, so 80 is pretty normal, I think. The ones who got into it did like 200 points. My PB is 470. So, you know, some room to grow. The Benny Hill comment brings up an interesting point - I wasn't 100% sure how to handle the tone for this. Definitely could have gone a super goofy route but that'd require a totally different graphical direction, and I'd have to be careful not to make it annoying. Anyway, just thinking out loud. Thanks for playing and for the feedback.
@jackaljk I'm with you, would have loved to do something like that. The tutorial messages were coming in at 2 AM, in the last hours of the jam. Didn't have time for anything more advanced.
Nice idea, I'm glad I could use my keyboard numpad. I think you nailed what you were going for. Well done!
Cool Papers Please-like with solid graphics and sound - I especially enjoyed the chunky keypad. I think it's possible to put packages places they're not meant to go (like behind the customs area) but it was never unrecoverable.
Really cool game and so polished! The visual and vibe is oppressive but in a good way. Like others I had hard time to stay ahead of the time because of the early packages, reducing it a bit would help a lot! Great entry with an amazing style. Good job :thumbsup:
Cool game! I knew I would be overwhelmed from the start, so I took my best "whatever" work attitude and still had fun.
However I was stuck once, I finished examining a package and it disappeared from view entirely, and clicking on other packages didn't do anything (but I could still interact with the lever). Also, I never succeeded at sending a package to the customs, this lever didn't do anything / the customs box never emptied :P
This is really well done. I appreciate that you managed to fit a tutorial in and the clicky keypad is so satisfying. Processing the parcels feels quite fun and relaxing, even if the atmosphere seems a little omnious!
@machinescreen I didn't realize items could end up behind the customs area, thanks for letting me know! Glad you dug it otherwise.
@cagibi Hmm, sounds like the physics glitched and the package flew off-screen while you were stuck in the 'holding' state. Sorry about that! Seems like the game's more fragile than I thought, didn't have such problems while developing/testing. Not a huge surprise when dealing with physics, of course. As for customs, the box isn't supposed to empty! The idea is that you put a parcel in there, it gets "scanned", and then you can forward it like a normal package. I should have explained that in the tutorial better. Thanks for letting me know! And thank you for the kind words despite the problems you encountered.
@machinescreen @ani I was pretty happy with the keypad sounds myself, glad to see other people enjoy them too :)
Nice game! Make the spawn time a bit longer and I would have played longer. I had troubles reading the zip codes, then I played on fullscreen and could finally read them :D also I had troubles to rotate the packages to see the zip codes. Good entry as a compo!
Really nice game (the in game tutorial is appreciated!) art is really neat and the vibe is great !! I love the "work" kind of games and I liked the feeling of yours ahah. Well done !
Really fun. Liked the art a lot. Wish the packages didn't spin around when inspecting, It makes it kind of hard to read the zip number. My high score was 70 pts. Very well done!
Really well done for a compo game! Even outside of compo time limitations it would be pretty impressive, especially the presentation side of the game. The packages come so fast I'd expect equally fast music to accompany it, but the slow & tense worked really well. It did evoke a bit of the same mood "Papers, Please" did, but it also gave me a bit more cyberpunk-ish vibe, something closer to the likes of Uplink or Deus Ex.
The controls can be a bit wonky, as expected with a physics-heavy game - quite often I was fighting to rotate the parcel properly to find the zip code, and when I did, I dropped the package off the screen. :( Though it made me think this could work pretty well as a VR game, where you could use two hands to manipulate the objects more easily. So far my record is 110 points, but I'm going to try and get at least 150. :P
Impressive on all fronts! Clean art, really fun and well implemented concept (of course fits the theme well). Papers Please kind of vibe. Some kinks to iron out is all I could find, mouse disappeared when I replayed and the customs didn't always work as I expected.
Really nice compo, congrats!
Thanks everyone!
@helen You couldn't read the zipcodes even when in the zoomed-in/rotation mode? I'm sorry to hear that, thought the text was large enough. Noted for future games!
@lcstark haha, the music was coming in last minute, so synthy drone is all I had time for. Cyberpunk vibe is def in there somewhere - my main inspiration for the graphics was Metal Gear Solid 1. Glad the vibe works for you! I agree about the physics - no time to tweak it in the compo, obviously. VR definitely crossed my mind, but that's completely foreign to me. Thanks for the feedback!
so polished, wow! looks very nice for a compo. Aside from the fun gameplay (even for me, who looks 3 times to enter 5-digit code), I'm surprised by the interesting usage of physics. This mountain of parcels pressed me the whole game, but on the other hand, it gives me more motivation to hurry up)
@pdotjpg First I played the game on the ludum dare page. I couldn't read the zip codes and was like 'how do I know the codes?' Then I expanded to fullscreen and I could read them and play the game as expected.
Great, love the mechanics and the visuals. Well done! Sometimes packages just vanished and seemed to maybe be bouncing around off-screen? Not sure. But who cares, mail is piling up too quickly anyway...
Really great little game, simple rules, but very polished all around. The graphics look nice, and the controls are very natural. Great entry overall !
Fun and simple and doesn't look half bad in this style. My main complaints I think firstly the dependency on a mouse I felt didn't go well with the numpad option and also the physics at times got in the way with a letter 'stuck' on the cursor without me being able to negotiate it back onto the work surface without dropping it. Otherwise it's cool. Really something you can zen out on.
I'd love to see more variations on this core mechanic, like if there were more rules that got added over time, or even if there was a chance for expectations to be broken. Like each time I saw a letter, I'd deliver without weighing it. What if there was like a 10% chance that actually something was in the letter and it weighed a bunch, so you'd needa weigh more frequently. And with the zip codes I got very used to them starting with 10, what if there was a small chance for it to start with something else? I suppose these things make it more rng oriented than skill-based, but I think rare things, or even a greater variety of common things could help break up the repetition. Still though, the game's got a strong core and I am surprised how much I was able to improve my package management with experience. Here's a link to the stream vod if you wanna rewatch;
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1816190498
@justcamh , thanks again for playing on stream, it was really enlightening. There actually *is* a 10% chance of letters needing to be weighed, and I kinda regret that decision. Without extra feedback about what you did wrong, it feels odd.
Basically I agree that the game needs more variation. This is all I had time for, and it's the reason why I tuned the game very difficult - because it doesn't hold up for a long time as is.
Beyond the customs box being confusing the mechanics were very impressive! I love how the packages pile up until the overflow to the scale :D I really like the graphics too. Pixel art textures on boxy models is always great. Too bad the level feels off being cylindrical. Awesome entry!
Graphics are gorgeous, the concept is fun and interesting. It could definitely be expanded to a bigger game with a story or different levels. It started a little too fast for me.