BridghamGray 2024-05-07 13:21:04

this is actually rlly cool!! i love constructive critique videos

Kolumbo 2024-05-07 13:37:24

thank you for the play & the review!! was very fun watching someone suffer nyan cat ear torture

Fiddleling 2024-05-07 13:47:17

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!!

Emrox 2024-05-07 17:45:09

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!)

sizescape 2024-05-07 20:29:24

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. :)

pabten 2024-05-07 20:32:33

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!

Jin 2024-05-07 22:53:50

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.

Deaen 2024-05-08 03:22:25

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

pabten 2024-05-28 01:25:26

@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 ?