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I figure this is a good time to post a retrospective on Dance Magic since the judging is in but I've yet to see any reactions: I wasn't clear on exactly how much additional work we could do on our game after submission, so I stopped making changes after releasing the Oculus Rift build. But, if I ever release an updated build, I'll likely incorporate a number of the lessons we learned: -Nobody likes reading a How-To screen. Make a playable tutorial. We just didn't have the time, but if I did it all over again there would be a tutorial teaching you the four spells and main mechanics. -Make an options menu the player can always access, and for god's sake put mouse sensitivity in there. Also support Xbox controllers. We didn't start getting feedback on the mouse sensitivity until literally the last day. While I was able to improve what we had, watching others play and watching the streams it's pretty clear some players are less comfortable with the medium-high sensitivity we went with. This also explains to me why every game I play starts with low sensitivity and I always end up jacking it way higher. -Rainbow Blast should have been a machinegun. Rainbow Blast consumed a bit more Dance Magic in earlier builds, and we ended up re-balancing the game in the last two days. This resulted in players casting Rainbow Blast more often, which is fun but people don't like spamming mouse clicks. With the changes to game balance, we should have made it so holding down the button would cast Rainbow Blast repeatedly, and stopped players from manually casting faster. -Put the UI at the center of attention. Putting it in the top-left follows conventions, but players either can't concentrate on how much Dance Magic they currently have, or don't know when they have enough magic to cast a spell. The buttons should be bigger, placed in the bottom-center of the screen. -Hint Mode should trigger automatically if a player dies too many times to a boss, in addition to having it as an option when you boot the game up. Players find hints most useful after they've failed at the boss, rather than before trying. -Jeremy should start behind his dancers. Too often I saw players not realizing there was a line of dancers behind them, and then get confused when the game ended. Jeremy starting directly in-front of a dancer is a bad idea too, since players would try to back up and be blocked by what they assumed was a wall behind them. Again, tutorial would help with this. -Dancers should fall down immediately when dead, rather than wait to be hit by something. Standing dancers with empty healthbars was confusing, but not something we noticed until after release. -The first boss should have a move that requires shooting it with Rainbow Blast. All other bosses have stuff like this, but it's not clear to the player. The how-to screen talks about it, but nobody likes reading a how-to screen. This could have also been handled in the tutorial. -The last boss should have had a healthbar, at least for phase one. We liked the idea of Satan being a puzzle you have to figure out in stages, but the game teaches you to Soul Hole as often as possible and it doesn't do much against Satan until the very end. He actually has very little health (150) but you rely on Rainbow Blast for that damage and many players didn't 'get' that. I still like having Satan rely on you using each spell in turn (Rainbow Blast, Sparkle Wall, and finally Soul Hole) but the only real visual feedback I give the players that they're doing damage is the boss flashing. Most players didn't notice he stopped flashing in phase 2, indicating you had to figure out a different way to damage him. Atoramos fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 21:42
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I've got a Linux build put together, can be downloaded from the Play section: http://www.ironpencil.com/yescallmengame/ Or directly here: http://www.ironpencil.com/yescallmen/standalone/YesCallMen_Linux.tar.gz
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Aug 18, 2014 23:15
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GOONS ARE MEAN
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Tube posted:Also, the averaged scores table in the spreadsheet is all cocked up. ... and I need to go through and make sure this is right (other judges maybe look at the spreadsheet and make sure there aren't any obvious mistakes), but pretty sure these are the final results: Moving On To Gamer's Choice: #YesCallMen 88 Sink 86 Public Access TV: Superstar 80 You Have To Do Everything 80 Kooking With Krugg 79 Take Two Treehouse 79 Hypnovision 78 .2:22 AM 76 Public Axes 76 Jeremy's Dance Magic 75 Spiritual Seth 75 Games Whose Story Ends Here: The Rage of Painting 73 (poemdexter's Gamer's Choice override nomination) Probing Nature 72 TV Tycoon 70 Spook Manor 70 Monday Afternoon Quizzlers 68 Wizard Broadcast Special 65 (Tube's Gamer's Choice override nomination) Public Access News 61 Public Access Wars 60 Night Vision TV 57 (Polo-Rican's Gamer's Choice override nomination) The Angry Atheist Gamer 54 Let's Be Heroes 53 Dog Time 53 Turtle Derby 53 Grublands 52 Bob Ross's Puzzle Painter 51 CulTV: Fhtagn with Mr. Cthulhu 51 SWAT: Freedom of Breach 50 Dinosaur P.I. 49 The Contract 48 The Game Knight 47 Breakfast with Agatha 46 555-Skeleton 43 Public Assets 43 Ham Strife 37 Anime Club Text Quest 32 Lovely Day for a Parade 25 I Don't Care Anymore 18 Tubulargame 9 Assault on PA13 0 ... so it would appear that #YesCallMen is our winner so far  . The top 11 will go on to Gamer's Choice, with a wrinkle! Judges: You can nominate one game to go onto Gamer's Choice regardless of its final score. Everyone gets one, and if two judges overlap their votes, one can choose a different one / I'd like the final Gamer's Choice tally to be 15-17 games.
Shalinor fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 23:54
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Tied for third,  . That's a lot better than last year, and for once I can say I did all the code myself without having to use someone else's engine. 
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Aug 18, 2014 23:59
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7th place? Not too shabby.
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Aug 19, 2014 00:07
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Oh, and here's all the feedback, stripped of the judge that left it. If you don't understand the feedback, just ask in here, since I'm sure a lot of the judges would have Words for you regardless. EDIT: and if I can just say, I never in a million years thought "game about throwing things at stuff in a basement pool" would be that good, let alone come in second. #YesCallMen, sure, if you had described that to me, I'd have said "sure, that could totally win". Public Access TV: Superstar? Sure, it's a well-worn gameplay type. But... Sink? Woah. Well done, dude(s). EDIT2: Oh, and Assault On PA13, as far as I can tell, NO ONE got that to work. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 00:09
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Shalinor posted:Anime Club Text Quest 32  Good enough for me. I made a game in the last few days, avoided the Wall of Shame, fulfilled my Toxx, and didn't even get last place!At the very least, I've learned a lesson on time management. This score leaves me a lot of room for improvement, and so long as I don't get horribly derailed again, I should be fine next year. e: And also probably stick closer to the theme next year, but this is what I wanted to do so whatever. e2: Also thank you to everybody that left feedback, even though my game didn't appear to be your guys' thing. Takanago fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 00:13
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As a judge, I want Rage of Painting in the running. It was way too fun drawing emoticons and Jeb.
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Aug 19, 2014 00:23
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RIP Turtle Derby, and thanks to the judges for the feedback on it.
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Aug 19, 2014 00:32
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Okey dokey let me check the feedback.. quote:i did not like this game Success! I did better than I expected which is a surprise to me. I should check this with my score last year. Congrats to #YesCallMen. Well deserved.
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Aug 19, 2014 00:37
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The winner of Best Twine game appears to be Breakfast with Agatha. Congrats Rianeva! The winner of Best First Game is You Have to Do Everything! If I'm wrong, let me know. Winners can PM me or email me at lockemurph at the google's mail website. Rianeva, name 11 games from the list, they are yours. That leaves the remainder to be picked over by Dodgeball, Protocol7, and thehoax Ulta fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 00:44
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Afal posted:Okey dokey let me check the feedback.. 
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Aug 19, 2014 00:48
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Y'all make me so happy reading the mostly positive feedback for Take Two Treehouse. 
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Aug 19, 2014 01:00
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The feedback on my game is all spot on. The music game was supposed to be a Simon says type of thing and we had about twice as many minigames and cut-scenes planned but we ran out of time.
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Aug 19, 2014 01:04
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Figured I was backloading the theme too much. C'est la vie, more wisdom for next year.
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Aug 19, 2014 01:04
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My override choice: Wizard Broadcast Special. The concept grew on me over time, and feels more memorable than some of the other games I liked. Incidentally, my notes were pretty sparse at times for various entries. I take strange notes as I play, and it doesn't always translate well into comments. One example: "turtle rocket? WHY? where am i supposed to be? = worst part" Accordingly, if any entrants want specific, somewhat more detailed feedback on your game, just let me know and I'll provide it.
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Aug 19, 2014 01:04
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In retrospect making the game three handed, kind of annoying, and a bit tedious and difficult to play to fit the theme was a very bad idea. But hey, I learned a bunch of poo poo so I'd say it's a success.
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Aug 19, 2014 01:07
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Some Judge posted:Doesn't run, crashes my browser, probably sucks anyway. 1 point given in visuals for the banner on the games list.  Wow. That's kinda rude, in fact that entire column was filled with rude comments for every game that judge bothered to comment on!I mean you're totally right about the game, but you don't need to be such a dick in comments. But the crash was due to you running a weird browser / having plugin issues, I didn't even get a crash report on my end so the game didn't even boot into web-player. Anyways, so I guess I'll mention that my lovely game was made with the tools I built before my team bailed so I had a lot of weird backend stuff (like a GB emulator) but I ALSO had analytics gathering for nearly everthing for fun. So I guess I'll reveal the results of that. Most popular game: Sailor Moon Most time spent per session in a Gameboy game: Garfield by a HUGE margin, 5 minutes on average per session.  Average "Garfield Score" per unique user: B+ [Average Garfield fan] Hidden value based on a few different things Average Session length: 150.6 seconds (Wow, did someone just leave it idle for an hour to skew the results? There's like 30 seconds worth of game here) and finally... TWO unique users who previously played Sewer Solvers. Too bad the special surprise didn't work on webplayer.
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Aug 19, 2014 01:11
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Jon93 posted:
I was one of the Sewer Solvers players. 
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Aug 19, 2014 01:18
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Well that's crazy. You judges are crazy. Crazy nice. Thanks for the kind words and the feedback. By the deadline I was very much aware of my game's weaknesses but I'm still disproportionately proud of what I came up with. This was a ton of fun, even if I was pretty anxious/frustrated at times. Congrats #YesCallMen on your win!
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Aug 19, 2014 01:36
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Jon93 posted:and finally... TWO unique users who previously played Sewer Solvers. Too bad the special surprise didn't work on webplayer. And I was the other one!
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Aug 19, 2014 01:55
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There is no  big enough. I am just really glad people liked the game. Thanks to everyone who helped me out in IRC, game wouldn't have been half of what it is without your input and assets. Great effort everyone, even if you scored poorly. My first game last year scored poorly and I actually felt really discouraged after the challenge, and look at this year! So stick with it, learn from this experience, and above all, have fun with it.With that said, I have some $25 cash prizes to give out, so here we go: I Can Make It On My Own (best judged game made solo) - 2:22am by RoboCicero. Great job, man! Lost in Translation (low theme adherance) - Grublands by a medical mystery. Apparently the theme was present towards the end, but I didn't make it that far yet, so my loss is your gain! Kid's Gonna Be a Star (novice game dev with promise) - Jeremy's Dance Magic by Atoromos. Great game with a lot of polish that could've been even better with a little more time and tweaking. Judge Dread (game I think should have higher score) - Night Vision TV by Blastron. Not a bash on the judges, there were issues with the implementation that made this not a great game for the format, but still this game has such great promise and is an incredibly cool idea, not to mention how amazing the overall presentation is. You better do something with this! Diamond in the Rough (game I liked but little polish) - Turtle Derby by Mo Steel. I can't help it, that turtle has the heart of a champion. Polished Turd (game I didn't like lots of polish) - Kooking With Krugg by ApproachingInfinity. WAIT DON'T FREAK OUT. This prize was really hard because I liked all the games that were well-polished. So I decided to award this to a game with the highest ratio of "gameplay I didn't particularly care for" to polish. The surgeon simulator-type gameplay is funny for a bit but not something that really captures me, but this game looked incredible, so you win. I understand you have about 173 people on your team based on the wiki, so I guess buy a few pizzas with the money and have a party! If the above people would please contact me either through PMs, through email (jim@ironpencil.com), or on IRC in #SAGameDev on synirc.net, you can collect your $25 prize. I can do Paypal or Google Wallet, if you can't do those then we'll have to figure out something else. sighnoceros fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 01:55
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quote:How the hell did you do this in a month? Ridiculous! I wish I could give extra points in some sort of "tech" category to make up for the points off I took, because the tech more than makes up for it in the overall experience Ahhh! I'm glad killing myself making Wizard Broadcast was appreciated!! And a nomination for gamer's choice, too. Thanks Tube!
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Aug 19, 2014 02:20
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Shalinor posted:You Have To Do Everything 80 Holy crap!  That's amazing, I never thought our game could score that high, and it even got tied for third! Thanks for playing and judging our little game, it's nice to see that someone had at least some fun with it I completely agree with judge "Column D"'s criticisms, in retrospect we should have paced the gameplay a little bit differently, and it could be much more fun to play. We just went with our first idea and polished it as much as we could to get a good consistent look and feel. But it was a cool learning experience, we have some ambitious plans for the next challenge so, if you enjoyed YHTDE, look forward to it! Ulta posted:The winner of Best First Game is Take 2 Treehouse But... YHTDE was my first game  But then again, I already have most of the games you offered, so it's okay also, congrats to #YesCallMen, a well deserved victory!
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Aug 19, 2014 02:34
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sighnoceros posted:Diamond in the Rough (game I liked but little polish) - Turtle Derby by Mo Steel. I can't help it, that turtle has the heart of a champion. Got my reward, much appreciated.
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Aug 19, 2014 02:53
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Could we get a score breakdown? I'd actually like to see how TEAM PUNCH FIGHT wound up scoring.
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Aug 19, 2014 03:29
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blastron posted:Could we get a score breakdown? I'd actually like to see how TEAM PUNCH FIGHT wound up scoring. What game was yours?
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Aug 19, 2014 03:31
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Ulta posted:The winner of Best Twine game appears to be Breakfast with Agatha. Congrats Rianeva! Ooops! I'm a terrible person! Updated results!
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Aug 19, 2014 03:49
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Monday Afternoon Quizzlers Post-MortemJudge #1 posted:Not as funny as it thinks it is. Not by half. Thanks for the feedback! I know some people have different tastes in humor, but I tried my best!  Judge #2 posted:Really interesting take on a typing game! Very funny premise. I wish there were more feedback about what I was doing right and wrong though - I felt like I was typing in the dark. Judge #3 posted:This could actually be a great game if the dialogue was cut down as much as possible, there was an option to speed up the dialogue scroll, and if it showed how it graded your result somehow (word count? number of mispelled words? I’m actually curious to know how this works!). Since the competition is over, I shall reveal the secret to the scoring mechanics. Each judge has its own main criterion it judges on: time of completion, length of response, and structure, respectively. The first two are pretty obvious: the first judge scores you higher the sooner you complete your response, and the second judge scores you higher the longer your response is. The third judge is a bit trickier. It goes down like this: First, the game gives you a 120% score for word structure from the get-go. Cool! Next, the game takes all the letters in your response and records it in a histogram structure. For example, if your response was “banana”, the histogram structure would have a value of 1/6 for “b”, 3/6 for “a”, 2/6 for “n” and 0 for everything else. Finally, this data histogram is compared to another existing histogram that contains a rough value for what distribution of letters you’d expect from an average piece of text. For example, a common letter like “e” would have a value closer to 10% while a letter like “z” or “q” would have a value near 0%. Each letter value of the histogram generated from your speech is compared to that of the existing histogram and the difference is subtracted from your score of 120%. This process is also done again, but instead of letters, it is done based on the number of letters in the words of your response. Whatever is left after that is your final score for word structure. That is to say, there is still one more operation that is done before the final scores are set for each judge. This piece of code represents the gist of it: code:In conclusion half a judge’s score depends on how coherent and complete your response is and the other half depends on how coherent and complete AND how fast/long/well structured your response is. Judge #3 posted:The biggest problem is how little gameplay there actually is and how slowly the dialogue moves. The game lasts around 20 minutes but you actually only play for maybe 2 of those? Judge #4 posted:I thought this was a very solid game albeit a bit wordy. By the time I got to the action, I just realized it was a typing game where I could put whatever I want. Although weak in gameplay, the writing was very well done. I admit that the idea behind this game was to have it more like an interactive movie. The vast majority of production involved creating the character sprites and inventing quirky animations and personalities for each of them. In retrospect, it probably would’ve been easier to use a pre-existing engine, but I was tempted into using javascript since it could be played in browser and it would be easy to upload new script files if I wanted to ever make new episodes. Also, I also partly implemented judging code that would have it so it would consider if the actual content of your response was related to its respective prompt, but I was running low in time so I dummied it out. Technically, you can achieve the same score if you put in the same response in the same amount of time on different prompts. Judge #2 posted:Also, awesome visual style, reminds me of old lucasarts games. Judge #3 posted:The visuals and music were pretty great, although the single song starts to grate on you after a while. The character design was probably the strongest aspect of this game - I got a Lucasarts vibe from some of them (Day of the Tentacle specifically). Judge #4 posted:Visuals were great as well. Good job! Thanks! I’ve never actually played a LucasArts game before, though I think I might have been inspired by the visuals. I originally got the idea for the character animations by making a webpage where a static portrait of a person would blink at you at 3 o’clock in the morning, and then things took off from there. Overall, I would say I’m kind of disappointed about how my game scored. I was using this competition to gauge on how I should proceed with this idea, but at this point I think I’m just going to shelve it. I MAY refine it later on by refactoring the judging component, adding more music tracks, updating the art, and etc., but I’ll need to reevaluate things to see if this is the right time to do this in my life. Regardless, it was a fun and challenging contest. Thanks to everyone who participated!
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Aug 19, 2014 04:27
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Shalinor posted:Public Access Wars 60 Thanks to the judges for their feedback. A bit disappointed that at least two of the judges who left comments didn't actually play the game though. Out of interest, whoever left "couldnt get it to work" - what was the issue you were having? Heisenberg1276 fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 04:47
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Heisenberg1276 posted:A bit disappointed that at least two of the judges who left comments didn't actually play the game though. Jon93 posted:
(I agree it was dickish, but, that IS part of releasing games, so I'm torn on whether I approve or disapprove) Shalinor fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 05:17
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Ok, I'm gathering there was a snaffu getting some of the judges to play Public Access Wars that could be solved by you guys setting up a play time and helping eachother out. So here's what we're going to do: I don't have time to do Gamer's Choice until after PAX anyways (sorry guys, I'm dead busy for the next 2 weeks), so I would really appreciate it if the judges in question would show some goony spirit, work together with the other judges and players, and figure out a way to get some real scores in those slots. We're talking about the difference between 20th place and 2nd place here. (thank you SharpenedSpoonV2 for pointing all this out) No, players in Gamer's Choice won't be that forgiving, but that's why we have judging. To try and judge games on their merits / give them a fair shake. If that DOESN'T work, and you guys can't make a time work (please try)... then what I'm going to do is retroactively score that game for those judges based on whatever the average of all the other judge's scores for that game would be. I'm fine with broken games getting all zero's, but if it's a matter of "can't find anyone to play with", that's very different. EDIT: Other devs, this just means a single game might rocket up the charts. If it does, and a game gets bumped out of the top Gamer's Choice set, that game will become SharpenedSpoonV2's pick / this won't change who gets to go into Gamer's Choice. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 05:24
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I cannot rightly understand how Tubulargame scored higher than any other functioning piece of computer programming, but hey, thanks judges. It's not even, it's not even a game 
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Aug 19, 2014 05:35
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Congrats to #YesCallMen, when I played it I kinda had trouble stopping. Good job
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Aug 19, 2014 05:44
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Horray not last place for once. Small steps. At least not on the wall of shame this time. Also congrats to #YesCAllMen.
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Aug 19, 2014 05:46
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Jon93 posted:
It's me, I'm the dick. Since it seems to bother you quite a bit, please allow me to explain. For some reason, I expected the comments to be placed near the (frequently good) scores I handed out, and thought that would provide context. I don't know why I expected that, since it's never been done that way, but there we are. I have quite a lot more to say about most of the games; a fair bit of it is rude, because I'm just an rear end in a top hat like that, but even more is positive. There was a great selection of games this time around. If I'd played your game, I'd use this opportunity to give you a thorough review. Sorry, but I couldn't get it to load on either of the two computers I tested it on, even using different browsers. It seemed broken, and you'd already said you put no effort into it, so my comment was only meant to reflect the fact that I was blowing your game off as a lost cause. It definitely wasn't personal. As stated, I did bump you up by a point for the banner on the wiki, which wasn't technically part of the game, but which was roughly the sum total of my playing experience. Also, this isn't an apology, just an explanation. I'm still a dick.
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Aug 19, 2014 05:50
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poemdexter posted:What game was yours? Night Vision TV.
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Aug 19, 2014 05:50
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blastron posted:Night Vision TV. (I'll let the judges share their numbers, though, since that's up to them / should come with some context anyways)
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Aug 19, 2014 05:52
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I'll take my 49 for Dino PI. No real surprises in the comments either; it was the first time I'd had to actually finish a game, to a deadline no less, so a lot of the problems and complete lack of polish or features were down to a lack of time, or having any real idea how to approach a project, or even having any idea how to translate the theme in a good way. It's been a good learning experience, so I should produce something better next time!
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Aug 19, 2014 08:03
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Shalinor posted:I don't want to say you peaked early, but you've never quite matched that year where you did the ball-based adventure game set in Hell. That thing was beautiful haha.. about that... I think there will be some news on that soon enough (maybe) (as soon as I can get walking working fine on a tablet that is https://vine.co/v/M0w5vYv02UJ) (also I was on a full team back then. I don't think that can be compared to "I know nothing about music or drawing or writing but I'm gonna spend my few minutes after work working on something terrifying (depending if I'm not burned out from work)")
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Aug 19, 2014 08:46
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