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 to feedback. 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. Every game has some redeeming quality.
Focus on the design, not the designer.
Be specific and constructive. Don’t like something? Explain why.
OK, I’ll go (since there’s nothing sadder than a Feedback Friday with no submissions). I’ve been working on something that’s not a game, exactly, though playing with it feels like a (sandbox) game to me. It’s a neo-retro virtual home computer called Mini Micro. Currently when you launch it, you get a screen like this:
And there you are. At a command prompt, with a random tip (“Use parentheses…” in my example above) and a one-line instruction about how to get help. Of course it’s on a web page that has a link to much better help if you scroll down, but many people don’t bother to scroll, and anyway I’d like it to be discoverable on its own as much as possible.
So this is what I’d like feedback on: is this a good initial experience, or should I instead have Mini Micro boot into some sort of menu interface, with options to list/run the built-in demos, browse help, manage files, and exit to the shell.
I’m strongly considering just such a menu system, since I think many yoots today have little clue what to do with a command line. On the other hand the whole purpose of Mini Micro is to get people comfortable with using a REPL and working with MiniScript, so the faster we get them to the command line, the better.
So, if you’re willing to give it a try, please see if you’re able to locate and run the demos. And with your feedback, while I wouldn’t dare to ask your age, perhaps you could say whether you used a home computer like this in the 80s… as I suspect that colors your perception (and certainly colors mine).
My formative game experiences were in the early DOS days. This is a nice throwback!
It does feel like a game of discovery. It’s more fun than booting into a menu interface. The colors are nice, too. Keep throwing them into the text interface like this and let them have fun discovering.
Miscellaneous thoughts:
When there is no such topic, help “topic” prints no output. Maybe add something?
Can you add scrollback?
It’s unusual to type cd "/usr" instead of cd /usr. Any way to make it more standard?
Similarly, since it looks like a POSIX-style file system, can you make ls an alias for dir?
cd /usr also throws an obscure Compiler Error that might throw people.
Edit mode: Is there a way to save or cancel using only the keyboard?
What kind of input is available? Mini Micro reminds me a bit of PICO-8. It would be neat to be able to make an interactive game with it.
BTW, I really like the ability to generate new sounds! It’s super old school. I can imagine people playing around with that a lot.
Thanks for the feedback! I’m absorbing it all, but I’ll just reply here to specific questions:
That’s a tough one, because it’s not really a stream-oriented display (like a terminal); it’s a cell-oriented display (like home computers of yore). So once text scrolls off the top, it’s gone. But as I type this, I begin to see ways we could offer scrollback anyway… and I certainly do see how that would be useful…
This one is a conscious choice. Unlike home computers of yore, or even Unix/Linux machines of today, the shell language is not different from the programming language — it’s all MiniScript. I’m aiming this (in part) at people who have never done any programming before, so I don’t want them to have to learn a different syntax when doing things on the command line than they do when writing code. So that means, in this case, cd is just a MiniScript function, and its argument is just a string — and like any string literal, it needs quotes.
I know that’s a hiccup for people used to bash or DOS or similar; it even trips me up now and then. But on the flip side, it’s nice that you can use all those same commands directly in your programs, or use variables for your arguments on the command line without special syntax.
I certainly could, but probably won’t, because in general I adhere to the principle of having “one best way” of doing things, rather than multiple equivalent ways. But you (the user) could certainly do that, just by doing:
ls = @dir
You could even put that in /usr/startup.ms (once I add that feature) to make it a permanent addition to your environment.
It supports the equivalent of Unity’s Input.GetButton, GetKey, and GetAxis. So you can certainly make games (many of the demos are simple games already), and even local multiplayer games.
To your other suggestions, assume no specific reply means “good idea, I’ll look into that,” with my thanks.
To keep this thread rolling, I’ll put up something for discussion. I’ve been thinking about an ultra-casual idea with one game mechanic:
Send heroes (from a limited roster) to handle events that span multiple turns. Heroes’ stats determine their chances of success. It’s a turn-based resource management game. If all of your heroes are assigned to events, no one’s available to protect the ship or handle upcoming events.
To assign a hero (crew member) to an event, click on the event and then drag one or more heroes onto it:
I don’t know where I’ll go with this. (It’s a casual project that I pretty much only touch during downtime, such as while assets are building and running unit tests.)
What I’m Looking For Feedback On:
Core gameplay loop: Is it fun?
What I’m Not Looking For Feedback On:
UI (the current is just functional for the concept prototype)
Writing of characters & events (the current are just stand-ins)
Thanks in advance!
And if anyone else wants to put up something for feedback, there’s still plenty of time until this thread closes on Monday!
Interesting! I think the fun of this will depend entirely on the writing.
Mechanically, it seems a little thin. But maybe not. Your heroes should have stats that are increased through experience. And presumably some sort of energy that is depleted, such that you need to give them some time off too. And, on rare occasions, I would guess somebody is lost when an event goes south.
How then do you replace them? Maybe you have more junior officers, with weak stats, whom you can nurture with easy events or by having them go along with your stronger heroes? Successfully doing that would lead to a natural sense of accomplishment (thus fun).
I would guess that a major part of the game is figuring out how much strength you need to spend to successfully conclude each event. When I’ve played games like that in the past, it can often be very hard to guess. You might want to consider calculating and displaying the odds of success in the mission assignment screen. That way, players can decide how much they want to gamble based on hard numbers, rather than trying to read the mission-writer’s mind.
@JoeStrout - Give it a play when you get a chance. Heroes gain a level with every 3 successes. Some events will also increase stats if successful. Many events are life-or-death: on failure, the hero(es) are lost. On success, some events add new heroes to the crew. The requirements of success are shown in each event, and the odds of success are shown for each hero and for the combined heroes assigned to the event.
It’s an experiment to find a minimalist mechanic that’s fun. Kind of like how Canabalt is fun with just one ability (tap to jump), but a strategy version of that.
EDIT: In case you missed the link to play: Click To Play
I did miss the play link — thanks for pointing it out! However I couldn’t see that the odds of success were changing, even when I assigned multiple crew to the event.
Also, I’m sure this is on your to-do list, but the ability to drag a crew member back out of the assignment bar would be very welcome.
But I can see what you’re after here, and it is indeed pretty interesting for such a minimal mechanic. It might make a great casual game to play on your phone while waiting in line or whatever.
I quite like it as a sort of idle, atmospheric game. The most basic things about it, getting new missions and assigning crew, is definitely fun. I would suggest also making it more of a story progression rather than random missions, so it’s almost as if you’re reading a story where the way to turn the page is to assign crew to missions.
A couple of things I noticed.
You can assign multiple crew to some missions. Whats to prevent just stacking the entire crew all the time? Would it be a guarantee of success? I mean, if the entire crew can’t do a mission, then any subset of the crew won’t be able to either.
I still don’t really understand what the slider in the middle is for. It seems to progress left - right as you take on more missions in a single turn, but what does it mean? Why can I drag it and what does that do?
Also, I think the ability to un-assign and reassign crew from a mission would be a good idea, unless I’m missing something that’s not possible yet.
I can also imagine having side quests specifically related to each crew member, like in Mass Effect 2.
Overall I think it’s very cool and a great way to provide just enough interaction with a story to make it feel interactive. It would be possible to interact with a quite complex branching story this way, simply by sending specific crew along different branches.
The red-green bars indicate odds of success. In the second screenshot above, each character has a red-green bar indicating its odds alone. If you add characters to an event, the event will also show a red-green bar. It could be made clearer, but I’m not focused on the UI right now. Same for the ability to drag a crew member out of the assignment bar. I agree it would be important in a final UI.
That’s what I was thinking. The idea actually came out of a local paper prototyping game jam a few weeks ago. The prototype was a fantasy-themed card game where you’d have a hand of hero cards that you could play to attack region cards and/or handle whatever event card was drawn each turn:
It used a gazillion beads to keep track of how many turns were left on each event or region attack. So it was an obvious candidate for automating the bead-counting electronically.
That would take the entire crew out of commission for however many turns the event takes. A new event appears each turn. If you leave an event unhandled (e.g., because you don’t have any crew available to handle it), it automatically fails. Most of the time this will result in your ship taking damage. Which leads to…
It counts the turns elapsed in the current star system. (You have to complete 3 star systems to catch up to the final enemy.) The slider handle is your ship. It starts with 6 health bars. If you lose all 6 health bars (by allowing your ship to take damage), the game ends.
Oops. It shouldn’t be draggable. It’s a UI issue, so I won’t worry about it for now.
Good ideas. Thanks!
I don’t envision this as something with save game functionality that you’d save and resume over multiple play sessions. Instead, it would be a casual diversion that you’d pull up on your mobile device and try to beat in a single session.
I intended it to be randomized so you’d have a different playthrough each session. But I think some progressive story events could be thrown in there, too.
Ah ok, I think the currently-in-progress vs incoming mission division could be made clearer, I just focused on the ‘next’ one.
That makes sense. Also, having something happen e.g. ‘You warped out of the star system!’ when the bar reaches the end would make things clearer.
I would suggest at least tying the missions together with a backstory of some kind. It would bring a greater sense of anticipation and immersion as you play through.
The way I imagine playing this game is on the bus or the plane, not so much a short play session (2 minutes) but more like a medium one (10 minutes to an hour). That way it’s casual in the sense you’re not invested cognitively much at any point, but there’s also a bit of immersion. That ties in with it being story-based. But maybe I’m seeing something different to what you’re aiming for!
Now that’s exactly the kind of feedback I’m interested in.
Initially, I didn’t show upcoming events. Since you couldn’t see further than the current event, the optimal strategy was to simply assign the best-fitting crew to the current event.
I added upcoming events so you’d be able to plan ahead. For example, say the current event is a low-stakes, easy diplomatic mission. An upcoming event is a high-stakes, difficult diplomatic mission. If you only knew about the current event, you’d send your best diplomat to it. But since you know that a tougher diplomatic mission is coming up, you might choose to send a weaker character to the current event to save your best diplomat for the upcoming event.
This doesn’t appear to come through in playtesting, though. What would make this decision-making more interesting?
That definitely sounds like a good idea! Adds significant depth with very little new mechanics.
I think really it’s just as simple as making it clear what it means for missions to be on the left and right. At the beginning, it looks like “here’s your mission on the left, and just in case you’re interested here’s some coming on the right”. Maybe a grid system or some kind of ‘holder’ images on the left would make it clearer that they can stack up for several turns, along with a label of some kind like “Current missions” in the plural.
Also when you assign a crew member, maybe say “Tauz will be occupied for 3 turns” or whatever. Or maybe that’s just my lack of experience with turn based games, and it’s obvious to most people.
I think it’s really quite a cool concept, and can go far with very few explicit mechanics.
