thank you for the play & the review!! was very fun watching someone suffer nyan cat ear torture
Still working at it, bit-by-bit.
Lucas Gonzalez-Fernandez
@FutureCopLGF
Age 36, Male
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UMD
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Comments
Cheers! And boy, was that a hell of a jumpscare (and nostalgia trip)!
Thank you so much for taking the time to play another one of my titles! I am watching the video and absolutely loving the comments. Stay tuned for the 3-Bit Explorer, which is already in development! Cheers!!
Cheers! You've knocked it outta the park once again: can't believe how deep and complex these games get, while simultaneously also being very bite-size and not overwhelmingly long! Slowly making my way through it with my tiny brain and looking forward to the sequel!
Thank you so much for continuing to do these! (And hey, thanks for #6!) Some thoughts about your playthrough and feedback, if you're interested:
First off - apologies for the bugs (glitches)! In your 15 minutes with the game, there were two I had never seen before (perhaps some logic I changed toward the end of development? emulation bug?) and both made you lose progress ferrying the bugs (insects)! Some context - I had been tinkering on the game sort of half-heartedly since January, making the gravity stuff and a bunch of weird enemy mechanics, and then in the last 10 days or so I realized the game wasn't going to come together unless I really crunched on it, so I made all the art, designed four levels, implemented sound, added a zillion features on the to-do list, fixed a zillion bugs, tested (sorta), playtested (barely) in ten days. I even asked my boss if I could blow off work for a few days and he said "sure." It was fun and hard and stressful and thoroughly exhausting, and the final product ended up a very competent-looking piece that is secretly made of duct tape and elmers glue and pipe cleaners, but is also actually pretty cool if you can stay with it long enough to look past the weird roughness of it.
I guess this is to say, if you choose to give it another go - I can confirm there is a lot of really cool stuff in the game, and I will also verify that you are not in fact smooth-brained - you were actually more competent picking up the game than most playtesters. My original intention was to make something like Zelda 1 where it just sorta drops you into this world and you have to figure out everything for yourself - but as I learned perhaps too late, wacky gravity and platform managing and shepherding bugs to alligators is way too much to throw at a player all at once. I'm not sure how to fix that, other than better level design (I still prefer, aesthetically, not to over-tutorialize, though obviously more people could play the game if I had gone that route.) Pretty much every first-timer thinks you're supposed to hit the bugs to the correct planet, by the way - unfortunately the game is about the platforms! The thing where the red bug doesn't get effected by hitting it was added specifically to correct this, and judging by your playtest it worked! But I can't help but wonder - how many more people would have stuck with the game if you couldn't hit the bugs at all? Unfortunately, bug hitting is a cool feature that comes in handy later on. Maybe I should change it so just the ones in the intro area don't do that. Hmmm...
So... I feel kind of bad about that, but I also came around on liking the game after the initial wave of post-rushed-release depression - and so I'm encouraging people to stick with it as best I can! Unfortunately, I've had a lot of weird problems with saving and medals in different browsers/players, and those have taken my attention away from doing some much needed design polish and tuning, so the game is far from being the best version of itself. By the way, the game doesn't get any easier. (But if you can get used to it, it's a real treat, I promise!)
So that's why the game is the way it is! You set out to make something weird, and end up making something that is definitely weird but also really hostile. Unhygienic, even. If you remember my game KISSING from last year - you had a very similar reaction to it. But last time it was confusing on purpose (it was for the three star jam), and this time I only wanted to be a *little* confusing!
(Note - I always mention Zelda 1 because everyone knows that one, but anyone who's played Starseed Pilgrim knows where I really stole my ideas from!)
Cheers, and thanks very much for the deep insight! I definitely agree with a lot of what you were going for: I love games that don't hand-hold you and are very challenging and mysterious because it's that friction that can create sparks, but it's definitely a tight rope to walk in terms of player retention! All things considered I think you did pretty well, and I enjoyed the journey. Very amusing to find out that the game feels so polished but is barely holding itself together: if it helps, I think that is a very common tale in game development, including my own games, haha!
Thanks for the review! Like you guessed, I'm a beginner game dev, and Cascade Cascade is supposed to be a pretty straight forward arcade game. Glad you enjoyed it. :)
Cheers! I thought that might be the case: always tricky since I want to give the good critique but hopefully I wasn't too harsh as it was, while very standard, competently made! I'd give it a good grade if I was the teacher for your programming 101 class, haha! Hope to see more games from you as you grow!
HI! Thank you for triying gem frenzy, we fixed the loading screen, like you said the audio wasn't compressed
This was our first gamejam as a team so we are still learning some things
The feedback was really useful specially your video reaction, we'll have it in mind for our future projects or even a gem frenzy's update, but surely we'll make a better main menu
We are glad you enjoyed our little game and thank you for taking your time!
PD: We did read your review but some points weren't very clear, this video helps a lot!
Cheers! And oh wow, I'm surprised I guessed about the audio compression: I got that from an old tale about Titanfall, but I guess it is rather common! Definitely a cute game with a nice twist on the typical shop mechanics: I'm a sucker for job sims and would love to see a sequel in future! And yep, glad to see that the intended purpose of the video allowing more insight into feedback is working!
The video review is very helpful because written feedback usually don't describe the pain points in enough detail to help me figure out what exactly I have to change, since player frustration could sometimes be solved by changing something completely unrelated.
Thanks.
Cheers! Like you say, that's the intended purpose of the video reviews for me and I'm glad to see that it provided some insight. After recording when I was giving the game another go, I was really surprised with how the game evolved: some solid and interesting RPG mechanics you got there!
im sorry you expected more from awesome calculator it's just a silly project i made in an afternoon trying to learn how to code i genuinely have no idea why it's nominated lmao
These crazy kids will nominate anything nowadays! But yeah, while very simple, I did find it very amusing and memorable: that music transition is great!
@FutureCopLGF Thank you again!
We updated gem frenzy changing a few things you said to us it helped a lot if you can let us know your opinion about it would be awesome!
We learned a lot from your video ?
BridghamGray
this is actually rlly cool!! i love constructive critique videos