Post a link to a playable game, preferably WebGL. If you don’t have a playable game, post something substantial, not just text.
How To Ask For Feedback
Be concise.
Specify what you want feedback on and what you don’t.
Resist the urge to write an immediate defense. Take the time to understand their points. Remember that your friends here are taking time out of their busy schedules to help you for free.
How To Give Feedback
Be positive. There’s something of value in every game.
For those of you who are interested, the Game Maker’s Toolkit (GMTK) has a game jam this weekend. So if you would like to have feedback on your games from that jam, you could post it here as well.
For a description of the game please look at the steam store page (I’m linking that instead of re-explaining it here since that’s what most people browsing the game for the first time are going to first see about it)
Does the description of the game give you a good idea of what the game involves without needing more explained?
I’m mainly concerned with whether the descriptions on the page are good. I know the art assets need improvement and it needs a trailer, both of those are next on my to-do list now that the games come a bit further along since i first set up the page with just screenshots.
Its a limited demo with 3 levels introducing the 1st couple of block types, then a 4th level with every block type unlocked so you can play around with them all. There’s also a level editor.
I’m interested mainly in
a) how intuitive the controls are. How easy was it to figure out what to do without needing to be explicitly tutorialised/told what to do.
b) The menu interfaces - The first time opening the game, how easy was it to find your way into the campaign and start the first level. Was the process for selecting a level, creating a solution then entering the game too confusing for the first time doing it.
OK, your descriptions could use a bit of work. Instead of being short and snappy, sentences are often wordy and focused on information rather than emotions. Emotions are what you need to convey to the player.
For example:
Way too much information, lost me on the third or fourth noun. Also, what is the point of ‘solving challenges’? What’s exciting about that?
I would write something like
“Design, build and run your own little factory to take simple blocks and turn them into masterpieces, solving puzzles and challenges to progress to Factory Master!”
or something like that. Notice how I focus on the words that describe what the player will do - ‘design’, ‘build’, ‘run’ etc. These are words that make you imagine the actions you’ll take and emotions you will get. And wrap it up with a sense of achievement for progressing through the game.
I like how you focused in the next sentence on the player’s agency, that’s always a good move.
In the ‘About This Game’ section, think about using more exciting, action oriented words and avoiding bland sentences such as:
“you will find no end to the amount of time you can waste coming up with new ways to move a block.”
“Refine your solutions to improve your position on the histogram”
“so play the game the way you want to.”
and replace them with sentences such as:
“You’ll spend hours thinking up new ways to turn boring blocks into masterpieces”
“Optimize your creations and compete with other players to find the best solution.”
“Use your imagination and creativity to find new ways to solve puzzles.”
I’ll have some time a bit later on to test the game, looks like it’ll be fun!
@zombiegorilla & @Kiwasi : since you two know the game I’m thinking of, you’d make perfect test candidates to confirm my assumptions. What game does this make you think of:
Now look at the steam page before reading the rest of my post:
Now you can read the reast. I’d be interested to hear whether you share my impressions.
+1, excellent talk.
I have to disagree, based on how people shop on steam. That short description makes me go “Oh, so it’s a zachlike. Cool, I like those.”. It’s dropping all the right keywords for that to happen without using any words that would be questionable under trademark law aspects.
I played Infinifactory, so I have a very good idea what to expect. It also hints at a possible twist on the mechanics from that game, that would require your assembled part to fullfill some kind of requirements along the way as it’s moved towards the goal. I’m thinking that because of the part “moving masterpieces to solve the challenges”. If it’s not in the game as a mechanic, I’d consider adding it.
Then I look over to the screenshots to verify my assumptions, and this is where all the good will you’ve build so far turns sour, because it looks like literally Infinifactory. It looks like you are almost verbatim cloning assets and mechanics from a game that I already have and like. I think that’s a very bad idea and will not resonate well with your audience. Cloning a game is often perceived like an attack on something that the fans of that game love. What you should go for imho, is “homage” with your own twist on it. Something that makes people describe it as “Infinifactory, but with ________”. If your twist is the one I thought the text hints at, it needs to be more obvious and you need to get further away from the Infinifactory aesthetic imho.
I think the capsule artwork (is that what they’re called, the one I pasted up top?) that you chose is pretty bad. At this point, your game’s name isn’t a brand, it’s what people care the least about, but you made it the biggest in the picture. You need to have it in there somewhere to build your brand, sure, but the important part is that you communicate the right expectations with the artwork. And right now you’re neither communicating game mechanics, nor a feeling the game creates, nor suggesting trust in the quality of your game by having a super polished high-end artwork there. Not sure I’d use 3D letters, they’re harder to read in downscaled versions and I don’t see a real benefit they way they’re used right now.
I think it’s possible to achieve that effect while improving the words that are chosen. I totally agree with using the keywords that an audience is familiar with for a specific type of game, but that doesn’t mean you can’t add some more exciting adjectives.
Stating the right information about a product is only the beginning.
Overall, I think the images and videos are 10x more important than the description. According to that video people hardly paid attention to it. Might as well do it as best you can though.
True. I haven’t even read the long description on the storepage.
What are “exciting” adjectives though? To me words like “thrilling, exciting, tense, addictive, blood pumping, amazing, etc.” all get ignored as meaningless marketing fluff. “Addictive” is maybe the worst offender, instantly makes me think “The game is probably shit too if your marketing already is this cookie cutter bullshit.”.
We’re talking about a puzzle game for clever people here. Applying casual-game marketing slang 101 to them seems insulting to me. Something on pure information level that conveys the actual USP to me - like from the store page: “All I’m giving you is a challenge and some tools, the solution is up to you.” -
is just about the most excited you could get me with a descriptive text. Relatively few games follow that “solve problems instead of puzzles” paradigm and it has become one of the most common attributes among games that I like. So this is a great thing to put in there imho.
Sure you can polish the wording some more or weave in some adjectives like: “Face a tough challenge with your tools, the brilliant solution is up to you!”
That’s 2 more adjectives without increasing text length, but I don’t know if it’s really any stronger. My gut feeling is it feels less genuine and less like “written by a real person” and more like something from a marketing guy, but maybe not yet in the “do you think I’m stupid???”-zone of marketing drivel that is indistinguishable from parodies of itself.
For comparison, this is the text on the page for the game that inspired this one:
“Infinifactory is a sandbox puzzle game by Zachtronics, the creators of SpaceChem and Infiniminer. Build factories that assemble products for your alien overlords, and try not to die in the process.”
That’s 0 “exciting” fluff adjectives, still gets the target audience excited. Imho it’s pretty spot on. It front-loads the genre, references prior successes that people might know, introduces the theme, and hints at some stakes and drama.
Theming actually is a good point, now that I think about it. It’s missing completely in the short description of Block Motion. The narrative themes in Zachtronics games always were a big plus for me, they tie the puzzles in with a narrative and it feels like it infuses the abstract gameplay challenges with meaning and context.
I agree with a lot of this. I don’t just mean fluffy adjectives but also interesting ones, and verbs. Talking about a game is telling the story of how the player will experience it. Words like ‘design’, ‘build’, ‘optimize’, ‘compete’, ‘find out’, ‘test yourself’, etc. Not incredibly exciting but evoke the player experience and their self-image.
In the example you mentioned, ‘try not to die’ is much more interesting than ‘solve challenges’, for example.
Hey guys, thanks for having a look at that. I’m already planning to re-do the art for the store page so I’ll keep in mind everything you said about those. I remembe watching that video when it was posted it’s great, i’ll have to rewatch it again when i’ve got more time. The 3d text was mostly used as a shortcut to get the basic art required for the page done because i have no experience using image editing tool, but now that I’m re-doing it I’m going to have to sit for a few days and learn to do proper ones for those capsule images. In hindsight with art being more important to steam users than the long description i probably should have spent a bit more time on the current placeholders when i was first setting it up.
For the short description the impression i was trying to create was that (A) you assemble functional pieces in order to create things and (B) that its about designing your own solutions to problems instead of discovering pre-made puzzle solutions. From martin’s comments it sounds like it might have been a little misleading in one part, so I’ll have a look at how i can improve those when i re-do it.
When I started out I was planning on having a greater emphasis on laser based logic circuitry and that was going to be one of the main things that differentiated it from infinifactory. But it was quickly apparent that the logic circuitry part of the game and the moving blocks part of the game didn’t complement each other well at all and didn’t really make the game better so i ended up scrapping it.
I have it in the back of my head that I’m going to use that for my next game. One that’s based purely around making big logic circuits out of blocks that process inputs/outputs to do things like run a set of traffic lights. I.E: You’d place sensors that indicate the presence of a car, process that and send the right inputs to the lights to keep traffic moving with no collisions. But that’s a very different game and i want to finish the first game rather than give up on it and skip to something else.
Unfortunately that means that in the end it is more similar to infinifactory than I’d intended it to be when i started. It has differences that change the designs you will make but it’s kind of a list of mechanical differences in the way things work and not really a big prominent “It’s like infinifactory but …” feature like you mentioned. I do think there’s enough in block motion for it to be worth something to someone who’s played infinifactory and wants more of that type of game, but i understand that I’m certain to see more comparisons to infinifactory in the future and I’m certainly open to ideas to differentiate it better.
When i re-do the screenshots on the store page and make the trailer, i’ll keep in mind to make sure they emphasize blocks being used in ways that differ from how you’re able to use them in infinifactory. Hopefully that will help a little with first impressions from people that have played infinifactory.
I’ve had a think about it and had an idea. I think adding a feature on top of it so its “like infinifactory but it also has _” is the wrong direction to make it feel different to infinifactory. At its core the game is about moving blocks around and connecting/altering them to get them into the goal configuration. I think the better approach is to keep it focused on that core concept and instead change the way that’s done, the way blocks are manipulated.
I just had the thought that maybe i could completely eliminate some of the basic movement blocks (like the conveyer belt and the fan) and replace them with a different system for basic movement. That way the designs you make for a given objective would be completely different to the ones you would make in a conveyer-based movement system with different problems in how to achieve the results. I think that would go a long way towards making it feel less like “a copy of infinifactory” and more like “a game of the same genre as infinifactory”.
My first idea for a new movement system is what i’m temporarily calling the “car” block. A conveyer is a stationary block that moves things that touch its top surface. The car would instead move itself in its forward direction, pushing along any block in front of it. There could then be direction blocks. When the car block touches a direction block it changes to that direction, so you can turn cars, loop them around, reverse them, etc to shift blocks wherever you need. Conveyers and fans would be removed while some other common blocks like the welders would stay.
As someone who’s played infinifactory as well, do you think that would start to feel like more of a difference in how the two games work?
I had a play of the game. Bear in mind I’ve never played a game like this before, so maybe I’m missing some obvious things.
Things to improve
First of all, getting the game started was not intuitive in the main menu. The button that actually starts the game, which is labelled ‘Create’ looks it’s going to add a new save slot or something like that.
Getting started with gameplay was confusing. I played around with left and right click but couldn’t figure out how to start putting stuff down. Finally I realized spinning the mouse wheel would bring up a conveyor block that I could drop. This was not intuitive for me.
I suggest adding more prompts/highlights when you put the cursor somewhere on the level that signals to you what blocks you can put down (like some kind of hologram of a block).
The main issue I found was rotating the blocks. I highly recommend rotating the block around the world axis and not the local axis when you press the controls. The way it currently is, as soon as you rotate once or twice the entire frame of reference of the rotation changes.
The block should eventually return to the start rotation if you keep hitting the same control, which it currently does not (or maybe does at some random future point).
Another thing which could be improved is laying down lots of block by swiping the cursor across the screen. This is good in principle, since players that are skilled need to be able to do things very fast. But I think that it should be possible to cancel all the blocks in one go, for example by right-clicking while the left button is still down. It’s tedious to clean up lots of blocks that you accidentally lay down because you were looking around while left clicking.
Finally, I wasn’t entirely sure what the goal was. I assumed that I had to lift up blocks and slot them into the spaces (the hovering block that showed ‘10’ when you put the cursor on it was confusing). However I couldn’t figure out how to transition from ‘up’ to ‘forward’.
Things I Liked
The menu is very nice, with the stuff going on in the out-of-focus background and some cool sound effects (though maybe a bit too many nature sounds for the setting?)
The graphics look good too, with a simple aesthetic that doesn’t look unfinished. It’s very pleasant to look at.
The controls generally work well. The walking around and double-jump to go into ‘fly mode’ is cool and fun. Block selection and general interaction with the level worked flawlessly, and I never had trouble with the game not knowing what block or space I was wanting to interact with.
I think if you work on making the controls more intuitive and the goals clearer, you’ll really bring out the fun factor a lot more. Congrats on what you’ve done so far and for posting on FF!
It started off great but once I got to the point of ‘I’ll find him in Venice’ the paper went empty and nothing on the map was clickable, so not really sure what to do at that point
I like the map and aesthetic, and the writing was good too. I suggest having the map panning in a window that doesn’t include the paper though - the right side of the map was obscured.
Yikes, that’s the very beginning. It’s sort of a hidden object game. The intro text flashes the location of Venice. But then you’re expected to mouse over it to reveal the name and click it. Other city names don’t flash; you need to find them and click on them. Some of them that are a little more obscure have bigger mouseable areas. I made sure the text window wouldn’t obscure any city points.
Another player remarked that they didn’t figure out they could click-drag to pan until later in the game. Any suggestions on a way to teach that to the player without outright saying “Click-drag to pan”?
Ah! The problem is that when the text is scrolling I’m focused on that, and it’s impossible to see the flashing. Even after you tell me I missed virtually every one until Timbuktu, and only found them by waving the mouse around. The interactable area is also extremely small, and I think a marker or highlight is very necessary.
The writing is quite good, there was one repetition about ‘skin burned as red as his hair’ or something like that.
I think something that’s missing is a compelling intro to each place. Travelling from one side of the map to the other should feel like a long journey and mark a distinct transition in the writing, which would drive a sense of novelty. The intros could more directly reference the journey itself and how the character feels after it.
I also felt as if the dialogue was a bit too similar at each place. The way that people say things and their type of character might use a bit more variation imo.
Here are my suggestions:
Permanently mark new areas on the map that the player can travel to.
Pan the map to have the current destination at the center when travelling.
Place a marker on each place that you’ve travelled, as well as perhaps a marked route (which could be traced out over several seconds when travelling between places).
Lots of sound effects for ports, sailing, storms, moods, etc
Have ‘side quests’ that grab the player’s curiosity and add more time at each place.
As far as the map panning, I think a different cursor when you mouse over it, or even just having explicit instructions or a hint would be fine.
FWIW: I presumed I had to find Venice and click on it when the text said “I’ll find him in Venice”. And when I hovered over Italy, it appeared. So that part was clear to me, and part of the hidden object fun.
I found the scrolling text a little hard to follow because of the way the text jumps up as it types on. Had to wait for it to stop and then read the whole thing in one go. Paragraph spaces would have helped me too. Or maybe text color variation for dialogue.
Thanks for the feedback, both of you! Paragraph breaks and smoother scrolling would have been perfect low-hanging fruit to fix, and they’ll be the first things I address if I take the time to work on it further. This was for a jam, and I only ended up with ~5 hours to work on it, so I was just crossing my fingers that I didn’t have too many typos (I didn’t save time to spell check) and that the writing wasn’t culturally insensitive anywhere.
I really like the idea of a marker at places you’ve already visited. Port sounds, too.
I’ll also use a different text color for the player’s lines.
Would navigation buttons in the lower left be helpful for panning? Perhaps with click-drag as an alternate way to pan?
A couple people suggested that this might be a nice, short little tablet game. Any thoughts on making it for mobile? I’d probably expand and refine the writing but keep the gameplay streamlined with not much in the way of side quests.
I’d have the text box centre screen and bigger while reading, and then move it out of the way when exploring. You could change the background per location, or add character illustrations.
I like @Billy4184 's idea of the classic route marking when you move between locations to give you sense of travelling the world.
You could have to fetch items from different locations to give to the people you need information from. Or some visual way to keep track of the information you know about Edmund to piece together his location.
