Hello everyone!
I’ve been working on this mobile game called ‘JumpJet’ and I realized that it might be the case that I’m making something nobody wants in a way that nobody cares about. I figured I’d post some wip previews of my project to get feedback. Critique, opinions, suggestions, questions are all welcome.
There is also a 15-ish seconds of gameplay gif over here
The premise is that you’re a space guy equipped with a jetpack. You’re investigating a bunch of spaceship debris looking for something important. What is it? You’ll have to find out yourself.
The mechanics of the game are quite simple so far - the screen scrolls and you can move about the screen and pew-pew things that come at you. I’m also considering doing static screens that the player can travel across for the ship-interior parts of gameplay, but it may be scrapped due to lack of fun. There’s going to be some alternative storytelling in this game, but that’s only for those that care to pay attention to it.
Thank you for your time, let me know what you think.
It’s difficult to estimate the time spent because it’s a thing I do as a hobby in my free time, but I started doing this exactly a month ago. It may not look like much right now, but there’s a bunch of levels, scripted events and enemies behind the scenes that I can’t show yet because they are too raw at the moment. I will be revealing more in the future.
The main reason why I’m making this game is because I want to have a project under my belt. Many employers look for published products when they hire developers. However, I recognize the slippery slope that this kind of mindset can lead to, and I don’t want a make a shovelware game enjoyed by no one just so I can tick a box in my portfolio. I gave this situation a thought and figured that if I’ve already mentally committed X amount of my future time to this project, I might as well make sure this time is spent doing something meaningful. I have a plan for what I’m going to do with this game, but a different perspective may be helpful.
The constant shooting is a little odd, but I understand why you choose to do that.
IMO - everything onscreen at this point is all very linear, static and basic. I could see this looking/playing more fun if the camera had some shake on it to represent the space thrust of the onscreen character. And it might be interesting to make the camera do some unexpected/different stuff like counter scroll based on the direction of the character. Or maybe some stronger screen shake when he hits a target.
Additional ‘juice’ would help the game ‘look’ more appealing even if the core gameplay stays the same.
Particles, animated - everything (not just linear movement) rotation and erratic motion always adds a bit of visual appeal and change to the game.
If the goal is to have a portfolio piece it should be appealing, a piece you are proud to display - even if nobody plays it due to limited marketing ability.
It’s been a week more or less, and I’m back. I’ve gotten a couple of people to play my game on their devices and the feedback caused me to rethink some things.
People have pointed out that in order to justify the player constantly shooting there should always be something to shoot at, and that the game didn’t feel as dynamic as they expected. I got thinking why people didn’t find the amount of enemies sufficient and a whole bunch of design problems came up.
The first thing I had to address was that the player occupied around 20% of screen height. I felt like I couldn’t throw too much on the screen without making the game unfair. Because the number of hazards couldn’t be large, players didn’t feel like they were in any danger. I had to shrink down most objects while keeping their movement speed. This allowed me to offer more things for the player to deal with, and have things coming from all directions. There’s also a perception trick that smaller things appear faster even though I didn’t increase the speed at all.
The second change came to me through observing the way people played my test levels. I’ve noticed that in sticky situations players tried spinning around in a fast circular fashion to spread their fire around, but it wasn’t an effective move because the fire rate wasn’t high enough. After looking at a bunch of other games of similar genre I’ve noticed that in all of them the player fires very rapid streams of bullets, presumably for a good reason, so I’ve decided to bump up the fire rate in my game. I’m not sure what the sweet spot for bullets per second is, so I might experiment with some ridiculous values. Based on the limited feedback I’ve gotten so far I seem to be onto something.
I figured out how to post gifs on this forum so here is some new footage:
As usual, feedback is appreciated.
Thank you for your time.
EDIT: Nevermind, I did not figure out how to post gifs If anyone knows what I’m doing wrong please tell me. Meanwhile, back to twitter I guess x.com
Alright, it’s been two weeks and I’m back with updates.
First of all - thanks to theANMATOR2b for posting the video. It opened my eyes to the vast world of visual improvement. I’ve made a huge note about this further down the development line, however I am slightly ashamed to admit that I haven’t done anything of that sort just yet. Too many things aren’t set in stone for how the game looks and plays, and I fear that diving into ‘the juice’ at this stage would be premature. I will definitely do it as soon as I feel confident with the mechanics.
I’ve realized that players don’t feel incentivized to kill stuff. The game quickly devolves into dodging rather than shooting. I gave the player a reason to shoot stuff by introducing an exp bar. When filled up it provides a permanent bonus like faster fire rate or multiple projectiles per shot:
Not only is it gratifying to get progressively stronger, but also closer to the end of a level the player becomes a real death-machine, so I can justify throwing a more serious challenge at them.
Space minefield
Introducing a new enemy type - a space mine. Admittedly not a very creative enemy, but there’s going to be a boss battle that will, hopefully, justify this design decision.
An animated demonstration can be seen here x.com
Along with the mines comes a change in the scenery, but that’s neither here nor there.
Making clever(not really) use of boxes as cover to pester the player while staying relatively safe, this enemy doesn’t pose a big threat on it’s own, but combined with other enemies it introduces more chaos that the player needs to deal with.
As usual, feedback is appreciated.
Thank you for your time.
If anyone knows what I’m doing wrong please tell me. Meanwhile, back to twitter I guess 
