Hey everyone!

I am looking forward to continuing Hermit To Gold post-Jam and would like some comments on it. I will be writing a full Post-jam-mortem later this week but until then, I would very much like a bit more feedback on the current state of the game and where I should focus first.

Thanks a lot to everyone who sends me feedback. (Anonymous feedback is on if you need.)

This is a rather long post(WITH PICTURES), so please click "expand." :P

Alchemic Archer is a game about shooting blobs with potion tipped arrows(but there is a portion of one of the levels where you gotta run as fast as u can).

I was very heavily inspired by Roguelight(one of Daniel Linssen's games), although my game is still very much different.

About The Development

The main issue I ran into with the development of the game was that I pretty much made a game engine during the JAM since I hadn't finished my "engine" scripts earlier. I say "engine" because it isn't exactly a module with its various scripts and classes that work together. It's more like a bunch of random scripts that aren't bundled together. They pretty much do everything I need at this point. Making this "engine" soaked up about half of my time, which resulted in not enough time for making large open levels. These smaller levels that I ended up making due to lack of time ended up being the second biggest source of criticism. Although, for those players who spent some time to get used to the mechanics, the smaller level design didn't bother them as much as they were able to maneuver around the enemies while shooting. This game ended up being more like an early test for my engine since I didn't have too much time for dev.

The Feedback

Most of my comments are between the two extremes of: "The game is too hard since there isn't enough space to move around and it's really laggy." and the people who think the game is great.

Just a side note, the person in the first comment there was saying that the controls were "bad" because I used the Arrow Keys/ZXC layout. I got premission from @Wan later on to add the WASD/JKL layout as an option. He/she also may actually be experiencing technical difficulties unlike most people who say it's lagging. Also, it seems like(I'm not sure yet) when he/she said "physics lag" he/she was talking about how your input gets delayed if the game is running at 10FPS. I checked and he/she definitely has a way better computer than I do. I intentionally do dev on a lower end computer since that means that if it runs for me, it should run for most people. At this point, I'm pretty sure the 10FPS issue is actually on his/her end(nobody else has actually had lag like this). I'm still waiting to hear back about it though.

A lot of people ended up complaining about what they thought was lag, when it was just the camera moving at speeds less than 1 pixel a frame(which looks pretty clunky since the game is 240x160 scaled 3x). The player and everything else would move normally though, so I'm not too sure why so many people thought they were lagging. Fortunately for me, I accidentally left an option to see the current FPS if you press Q, so now people don't complain about it as much. :P

The Art

On both ends, they normally say the art was great even if they didn't like everything else. I've been working on that for 4 years, and it seems to finally be paying off. This is what art looked like year by year:

2013(I had to pull out a 10 year old computer and search for this file on it since any images of this game completely disappeared from the internet):

I didn't draw the characters for this, there were originally some really ugly characters(an alien and a robot). Unfortunately, I was unable to find those images.
Even though I couldn't find any images of the old characters, I managed to draw something like what I think it looked like:

Keep in mind, it was worse than that.
EDIT:
I FOUND IT IN OLD EMAILS!!! :D

2014:

The date on this one is a bit sketchy, because the files for it date back to the very end of 2014, but i hadn't posted about it until about 2015.
The "WUT" text and the lines were added on. It was the only pic I could find.

2015:

2016:

2017:

I know that it would've really encouraged me to see how someone's art got better over time like this, so I hope it helps someone else. :D

What I Did Wrong

As previously mentioned, I made the mistake of letting the camera move at speeds less than 1 pixel a frame, which made people think it was lagging when it would go at speeds of 0.1 pixels a second. The easy fix for this is to not let the camera speed go lower than 0.5 pixels a frame.

I should've set up the "engine" a bit more before the jam so I'd actually have more time for dev. That would've saved me from all the "the levels are too confined" comments.

I had designed the difficulty curve very poorly, which resulted in only the people who were willing to invest some time into the game fully enjoying it.

The music was somewhat questionable. I put 10-20 minutes toward it which was probably a mistake.

There was yet another issue related to level design that I made. The levels themselves didn't introduce potions properly(eg: putting the items on the ground and an enemy farther away so a player could figure out what the first potion does), so players didn't really know how they worked. This resulted in players attempting to just run through the level.

So the main issue here was that I didn't save enough time for level design, which is extremely important in a game like this.

Conclusion

This jam turned out to be more of an expirement with my "engine," so I hope to work with it in the future to make some better games. Every jam I learn a bit more about how to design games to get the players engaged and how to get them to get used to the game's mechanics even when they're complicated. Obviously, I completely failed to get the level design to train people to maneuver around enemies while shooting them. The main thing that really excited me about how this game turned out was the art. I personally think it's a pretty big step up from even my last game jam's(LD 39) art.

This is probably the right spot to put my "full playthrough" video:

I really appreciate everyone who gave me feedbacks or just played my game. I hope you had fun. In these days I've got many suggestions or improved thoughts from you or my friends outside Alakajam. Some of them are quite brilliant and inspring. So I just started to make a post-jam version, polishing the game more and hopfully it will go public one day.

Some improvements that will be included:
1) The re-designed levels, DEFINITELY.
2) A less complex compounding system, where each ingredient/element has its own purpose, and contributes to the outcome respectively.
3) An indicator for what will show up at the viewport's edge in next seconds, giving player more time to prepare.
4) Repaint for more pleasing experience, and for being able to differentiate elements and enemies visually in an easy way.

If you're interest in my game, please follow me on twitter @WizcasChen. Any advice or critisim would be very helpful. Cheers!

Well, I'm still lack of one vote for ranking… It would be great if anyone can help me out []~(￣▽￣)~

for some reason gold in my game has number 100

and i think i finally found way to put images in posts(if not here is a link http://savepic.net/9989781.png)

I just want to thank all guys who have played my game 'Alchemic'. I know that it has a lot of stuff that need to be changed, but i already have some ideas for game. I will add some stuff after the jam ends(i want to do that now, but rules just don't allow me to do that). BTW, i already fix most of bugs and if you played it on the first day of voting, i reccomend to download a new version without bugs.
Thanks all of you guys i really impressed.

As some of you good jammers known, I made my game too hard. So I wondered how many times it will take to clear the only level. I gave it a try, and recorded my playings in video at https://youtu.be/xbtgiIxMxgg

I would love to get your feedbacks on my game WuXing Rush. I'll make a post-jam version and any advice would be super helpful. Any idea on difficulty adjustment, mechanics design, art style, level improvement, or even pure complains are welcomed. Thank you guys in advance!

And you can play it here: https://alakajam.com/1st-alakajam/71/wuxing-rush

Hello Guys
Just updated my game (https://alakajam.com/1st-alakajam/77/potion-shop-ultra-hd-super-xl/)
for bugfixing and it put me back to the solo division. We're a team in fact…

Is there something we can do?

Cheers

Seems I made the only interactive short story in the whole jam! It is nice being the president of my own little exclusive club.
Managed to put in all the required pieces, yet many nice to have things were cut. I'll keep working on a post-jam version.

Try it here

Here's my entry: https://alakajam.com/1st-alakajam/94/god-save-the-queen/

Honestly this has been the most productive weekend + monday I've ever had. I'm super happy with what I got done, I'm super happy with what the game can still become and I'm looking forward to developing it further. (It's very unfinished as a game)

I've been wanting to join another game jam for a couple of years now, I joined this one because I saw it advertised on the Ludum Dare page when I went to see when the next LD was and this fell at comfortable time for me. I'd love to say I'll be back in February, I really hope I will be. I learnt a lot in such a small time today by deciding to use technologies I wasn't familiar with and I know there's so much more for me to learn still.

Thank you for hosting it, it's been great. I'll be sure to give some time these next two weeks to check out some of the other entries!

Good luck to those of you with ranked entries, and to everyone else I hope you had fun!

Good god damn it..

It is done : https://alakajam.com/1st-alakajam/86/with-cold-feet/

Here's the pitch : Decypher the riddles before time eats through them, and through yourself. Find out the missing elements at the mixing table and enter the right combinations in the assembling table.

I am going to sleep forever now.

I hope you'll enjoy the creature and not encounter any bugs, my brain is too hot for debugging..

Although before I got I'll say I am very happy deep inside, as this is the first complete game I have ever done in my life.

Thanks a lot to the Alakajam Team.

Cheers