Spooky Jam Feedback

ATT_Turan · 2024-10-30T04:35:35+0900

With the conclusion of the Spooky Jam, I've taken the time to play through (mostly) all of the submissions. I thought I'd offer some feedback on each entry here. A few notes: - I have all respect and appreciation for everyone's work to create a complete work of whatever length under a time limit. Any critical comments I make are to offer what areas that dev might be able to improve on in their future work or ongoing project. - I know some people don't want to read anything that isn't "Good job!" So, I give everybody who participated a "Good job for producing a contribution!" and all of your more specific and critical comments are in spoilers - if you don't want to see it, don't click it I will say, outside of the spoilers, that the most common complaint I have is games lacking the correct credit for RPG Maker's developer. If you read your Maker's EULA (or the most recent update which combines all versions into one), there is a specifically-worded attribution that's supposed to be in the credits of any game you distribute. Six of the games (and perhaps a couple of more that I didn't complete to see the credits) were lacking this, and thus were technically distributed illegally And so: @Starmage Spoiler: Whispers in the Bitter Frost I thought this was a decent play. The map sprites looked good and some effort was put into all the eventing. Lacking GGG copyright information Tutorial window staying open for the entire first map is annoying Random unpassable tile near the first building Some text cut off by message window When it changes to you controlling Avelina it randomly has dash always enabled Storywise, the people don’t make a lot of sense. They're completely accepting their random hallucinations and memory loss, and there are awkward and uncalled for internal monologues about lusting for each other. Grammatically, there's some stilted phrasing and incorrect placement of apostrophes, commas, and capital letters. It's not the worst I've seen, but it was frequently distracting. There were some more significant wrong words that I already mentioned in the game's thread before deciding to make this one When you seem to be spending effort to make most of the dialogue have an older or medieval feel to the language, characters randomly spitting "whatever," "bad vibes," and "screw you" stick out in a silly way Many graphical flaws in the text from the VS Message Core. There's a fix in this in a number of posts that requires updating your NW.js - apparently VisuStella is ignoring bug reports about it? It looks weird for the characters to walk horizontally straight across diagonal stairs on the map Most of the mapping is good, but the courtyard map is bland and confusing. Using the same tile for the ground and elevated levels with the tint just makes it hard to understand what it's supposed to look like I'm not a fan of the barely changed references to Judeo-Christian mythology. If you want to use an established religion, do it; if you want to make up your own, make up your own. "Sintanel" and especially "YAWEH" (ooh, changed one letter! ) come across as silly I don't know if something is bugged or if it just isn't made in a way that correctly reflects what you want to happen: the combat instructions say "timing is key," but it isn't. There’s no penalty to pressing it at the wrong time, so just standing there and jamming the button as fast as possible is the way to win Using a potion weirdly closes out the menu I don't know how well I think this relates to the theme of a haunted building. It takes place inside of one, but the whole story is about this cult and they could be doing their stuff anywhere; nothing really seems to be building-specific. @TheAM-Dol Spoiler: Psyche The graphic and sound design is well done and interesting. The style and colors of everything created a nice aesthetic, and knowing you did it all in one event is a cool technical aspect. The executable name is unintuitive. "Game" or the title of the name would be easy to find; only someone who's technically familiar with NW.js would think to look for or try running a file named nw. The font is really hard to read at times. Some of it is the way the bottom isn't level but bobs up and down, and some specific letters (like lower case "T") just don't look like what they're supposed to I think referring to the person’s mind as their “home” for the purposes of a haunted building theme is a big stretch, personally The very beginning seems to have a bit of a bug in the eventing. Selecting a door with Enter makes the cursor disappear but doesn’t activate the choice. Nothing works until pressing the arrow key again to make the cursor reappear I appreciate the time you spent studying the style, but the imitation medieval English and abstract topics meant I really didn’t know what anything was talking about, and I didn’t understand the significance or meaning of most of my choices. So I just chose stuff randomly I apparently achieved an ending because after…

● ARCHIVED · READ-ONLY

Started by ATT_Turan Oct 29, 2024, 07:35 PM 28 posts Page 2 of 2 View original ↗

karusomine

#21 Oct 30, 2024, 04:55 AM Source

Welp, I guess I trolled too hard :kaocry:
For people who want to give my game (NectaReal) a chance--or another chance--the thing you must find is right here:

Spoiler

Just run straight there without stopping and you can clear the whole sequence in 5 seconds.

By the way @werzaque I can't seem to find the passcode in your game. I tried inserting the year, even subtracting 47. The only thing I haven't done is beating the 4 ghosts. They are kinda difficult but I'll try again if that's the only way.
Canned_Dinosaur

#22 Oct 30, 2024, 05:11 AM Source

karusomine said:
By the way @werzaque I can't seem to find the passcode in your game. I tried inserting the year, even subtracting 47. The only thing I haven't done is beating the 4 ghosts. They are kinda difficult but I'll try again if that's the only way.
Hey, thanks for playing!

The code of the railgun, right? Yeah, bad judgement on my part.:kaoeh: Didn't think there would be people overthinking it... just enter

Spoiler
47
in the console to turn off the railgun.

As to the ghasts around the reactor, if you find it's too hard you can also sneak past them to get to the reactor and switch it off :kaohi:
Prescott

#23 Oct 30, 2024, 10:03 AM Source
ATT_Turan said:
I thought the mapping in this was competently done. I also appreciate the parody play on Ghostbuster with, like, an action-comedy movie or anime or something, although it's not to my tastes.

For me, the voice acting didn’t add anything to the game, even in comedic value. I skipped through the messages as quickly as I could read them. An option to disable it would’ve been welcome

Having to activate the doors inside the house and getting a fade in and out just to walk through the doorway was weird. I don't know why you didn't just let us walk through the doorways

The gameplay is focused around the combat system, but there's no nuance to it. There's no reason to not just spam the most powerful attack - I don't know why you even made the other skills

The currency reward message is wrong (at least in the USA) – dollar sign comes before the number

It would be nice if the item descriptions told you how many HP or...PP...they restored. Having to go in and out of the shop and my inventory to heal up without wasting my money was annoying

You can walk down through the top of the bed

The Strong Ghost is randomly unbeatable. If he happens to waste some turns on Ectoplasm, you can win, but the first time I fought him he did Deadlift almost every turn and that kills you before you kill him (and your milk heals less than one Deadlift hit)

I couldn’t finish the game. Unless you just happen to have bought extra cookies and milk, and you just happen to sit in the house healing up after the third ghost (even though your character says it’s done), you go into the house fight at a huge deficit and will lose in a few turns. Since I couldn’t save after the last ghost fight, I was uninterested in going through the work to stock up on items, do the third fight again, hope the random choices allowed me to win, just so I could heal up and take on the house
Thanks for taking the time to go through all of these! I've been thinking about streaming all of them but I'm in the middle of moving right now lol. In fact, that's partially why I didn't have a whole lot of time to work on my entry!

Your criticisms have been noted and as soon as I finish moving and getting settled I'll be able to patch them up (as well as play everyone else's entries)! I knew I wasn't going to have enough time to make something stupendous and I wasn't really aiming to win, just to have a little bit of fun making and finishing something. My original idea would have been a lot cooler in my opinion, but I knew I didn't have enough time to make it.

EDIT: Actually it wasn't that hard to get most of that stuff, managed to do it with a little bit of free time before bed. Here's the link for version 2! Only thing I didn't really change were the available skills, because that would take a bit more of a rework. I was going to have more enemies eventually and the skills would have done some different things with different enemies, but that was sort of out of scope. I'm pretty cool leaving it as-is at this point :)
Rubescen

#24 Oct 30, 2024, 12:16 PM Source
ATT_Turan said:

Midnight Central
I thought the premise of being stuck in a supernatural train station beyond the edge of the real world was a neat one, and the art overall worked well. However...

Game window is offputtingly small – why would you make an MZ game smaller than default?

The girl's sprite does this weird crab-walking sideways instead of actually turning left and right

I don’t really see the point of the fog-of-war-ish light radius around the player. There’s nothing on her that would cause her to be actually shedding light, and there's no gameplay effect for the stuff you can't see outside of that radius

Language-wise, there were some typos, but the dialogue is generally good. The girl and the various NPCs had character

I wasn’t able to complete the game. I went to the four maps I was able to access (main hall, east, south, and boiler room) twice to make sure I talked to everyone I could and inspected every item I could see, but couldn’t find any way to get any Soul Coins and advance the story. So I quit.
Wow! Thanks for taking the time to play through all the games, and give clear, detailed feedback!
Re: your feedback

I don't now why I changed the window size smaller lol, just a whim.

I'm not able to to duplicate the "crab-walking", not sure what is going on there. Should be turning left and right. Weird.

Light radius is just for lighting ambience, but yeah, it has not effect on the game. Could be changed.

I'll double check for typos.

Sounds like you didn't explore up the bathroom hallway, but maybe something else? Sorry you couldn't get farther! But thanks for giving it a go!
This feedback is very helpful for considering revisions, should I return to this at all. Much appreciated.

I'm working on playing through everyone's game myself, already a few gems!
Good work all!
ATT_Turan

#25 Oct 30, 2024, 12:31 PM Source

Rubescen said:
I'm not able to to duplicate the "crab-walking", not sure what is going on there. Should be turning left and right. Weird.
To be clear, I'm not saying there's some kind of glitch - I'm saying I don't think the sprite looks good. The girl's face does turn to look left or right, but her actual body is still just facing down.

Thus, it looks like she's scuttling sideways in a crab-walk.

Rubescen said:
Sounds like you didn't explore up the bathroom hallway, but maybe something else?
I seem to recall a sign or janitor's bucket or something saying the bathroom was closed - I didn't try to explore past something that told me it was inaccessible. Or you mean another doorway that I missed somehow...it's possible, a couple of these games I was playing in the middle of the night :stickytongue:
Rubescen

#26 Oct 30, 2024, 03:54 PM Source

ATT_Turan said:
I'm saying I don't think the sprite looks good.
Haha, got it. I was pretty lazy on that directional sprite.

I seem to recall a sign or janitor's bucket or something saying the bathroom was closed - I didn't try to explore past something that told me it was inaccessible.
Yeah, you can walk to right of the sign that says it's out of order. But I can see now how having that message there is confusing and a deterrent to exploration, especially late at night.
alice_gristle

#27 Oct 30, 2024, 04:00 PM Source

Thank youuuu sweetieeee :wub Too tired to make an actual contribution right now, but my appreciation is still enormous! :kaoluv:
ATT_Turan

#28 Oct 30, 2024, 04:19 PM Source

Rubescen said:
Yeah, you can walk to right of the sign that says it's out of order. But I can see now how having that message there is confusing and a deterrent to exploration, especially late at night.
At least it was to me. Maybe just adding a thought like "Bathroom is out of order. Hmm, I wonder what's going on in there" would've been enough to clue me in when I couldn't progress anyplace else :smile:

alice_gristle said:
Too tired to make an actual contribution right now
Not required to! Your contribution was your game, I just wanted to tell you about it. Good work.