I PLAYED YOUR GAMES! | Game Design Feedback

hey this is jonas i'm an indie game developer and today i'm gonna play your indie games to hopefully give you some valuable feedback i've been talking about my own game will you snail way too much lately play will you snail it's out on steam now go play it go play it it's available on steam and on consoles as well by the way you sent me almost 300 games that's way more than i can play so my girlfriend helped me to pick 10. quality was not the deciding factor for what made it into the video we're just picking things that we think makes for a fun video so unfortunately there are a lot of really high quality games you sent me that i'm not gonna be able to cover just because you sent me too much stuff let's get into the business i don't know what the transition was but i'm sure shelfman will do something cool with it was that cool okay this is biba and boba letter which seems to be a game jam game because we see the gmtk game jam in the background there just for the sake of giving feedback i always have to assume that you're still working on the game and you're trying to turn this into like a full product for people to enjoy otherwise giving feedbacks kind of pointless all right let's try it out um you control these two dudes here so usually this is a two-player game but you can also play this alone concept is very simple you can understand very quickly what it's about yeah you just hey didn't even touch the ground there come on the art style is pretty great and we're trying to get the letter up here okay maybe some hey come on touch anything okay the balloon apparently was the checkpoint that's great because starting from scratch every time i slightly touch the ground would have been a bit annoying [Music] we got the checkpoint now what maybe you can walk over these corners here now you cannot walk on corners left shift to zoom out okay so this way we can see the leveller head and you cannot walk diagonally is that true don't tell me any bees i can go there there's no other way i don't think it's possible i'm already stuck i like that there's a little warning sign above their head when they get too close to the to falling oh no here we go okay this is progress [Music] oh yeah x i really don't want to fall okay that's actually pretty impressive [Music] very careful oh don't fall yeah i can see this being quite fun in multiplayer oh balloon yeah give me a balloon please there we go yeah we made it yeah i think i played through the entire game already now thank you for playing press any button to restart okay that's it already oh cool let me think about my feedback real quick i feel like what's absolutely great about this game is that it's a super simple and easy to understand concept it's not only easy to understand when you play it it's also easy to understand when you see somebody played which is a great advantage i like the ui progress bar on the right very cool so in my opinion this you should definitely keep working on this this is like a fantastic start to a puzzle game there are a couple of obvious things missing like sound effects and animations i'm not going to talk about that because it's very obvious and the main thing this game needs in my opinion is more content and i even have like a suggestion for how you can keep the simplicity of the game and i have a suggestion for a very simple mechanic that i feel like would add a ton what if you're able to drop the letter and then if you find a different letter maybe with a different length you can pick that up so just the ability that is my suggestion the ability to drop letters and to pick up letters i feel like that would add so many level design opportunities that it would take you a really long time to run out of levels you can possibly make with this but that's just an idea maybe you have different ideas cool very nice game i hope you keep working on it looks cool thanks for submitting okay unknown escape let's try it out new game this looks pretty polished and finished already i'm curious to see what this is and if there's any useful feedback i can possibly give on it let's try it out so apparently we awake in a strange facility wait am i being dragged floor what's happening here unknown escape yeah i think something's dragging me a bit portal-like okay wait the button prompt for inventory messages is missing a little portal like cool would you kindly would you kindly pick up the receiver that feels like an insider joke would you kindly or not an insider how do you call that a reference to a different game a message receiver left by an unknown person allows receiving remote messages okay maybe we don't need to read this let's see how far we get without reading oh no we don't get very far without reading because we need to enter a key code the code to the security checkpoint is 0451 cool i got away without reading i'm happy i can grab the table why would i want to do that interesting the lighting in this game looks relatively nice i can see that there's some special lighting going on with the ceiling lamp wait is nah nah nah there's just a point light below the lamp i can see that in the reflection on the ceiling okay weird looking ropes i like the environmental storytelling a lot more than reading a bunch of text can i pick that up oh and go into the locker i hope that doesn't mean it's going to be like a horror game kind of thing because usually if you can go into the locker that's not a good sign oh now my head is stuck in like this in the locker thingy oh oh oh no i already broke it oh no oh that was fast okay um damn it i guess my first feedback would be make it so you can't get stuck in the docker i'm going to restart the game now don't get anywhere close to the locker the locker is dangerous it's a very interesting facility and it's relatively immersive the only thing that so far makes a little less immersive is like it's missing a couple of details like ventilation how is this place ventilated and like these small details make it feel like it's not really a real building but a video game level that's pretty good other than that's pretty good the labs code changes every day i don't have access to the database so you'll have to find it yourself lab a benches slides trees grass beds benches lights trees grass beds oh do i have to count how many there are uh the lounge in the lounge okay one two be four five lights i mean does this giant light in the back here count i guess so five three or five two threes we have three so five three three two [Music] okay the the light on the wall didn't count actually i mean if you give a tip like that i would say make it very very obvious how many lights there are like this is too ambiguous because this looks like a light to me got another key card a keycard granting you access to the containment floor now you have this huge security card you can use the main elevator to access the containment i'll contact you once that you're there okay so basically this game is a bunch of locked doors and you need to figure out how to get through the locked doors i get it okay fair enough that's like not not the worst gameplay loop what is this like this looks like an interesting thing but i can't interact with it that's frustrating i want to interact with the interesting thing what is it i at least want to be able to pick it up or something like the fact that it's just lying there i can't do anything with it it's triggering me a select floor containment i feel i can go there now right game secretly loading different area or i assume that oh no there's the loading okay i always love when there's like wet vegetation mixed with technical looking stuff that always looks so cool and like the end i really dig the environmental storytelling that there's like a little area here where usually you would have would be greeted by somebody i'm just from an immersion perspective i'm not entirely sold that anybody would will build a place that looks like this like as mentioned without any elevation and with like the same lord tiles everywhere and so but i understand that if you make a game alone you have to cut some corners somewhere [Music] electrical see that's what i mean i feel like this place is all in all surprisingly believable because it has all of these different sectors like it has an electrical sector with like cables going into the roof and like fuse boxes and stuff that's pretty cool but then it's lacking a couple of details to make it truly believable i mean i really like okay addressed my biggest criticism the ventilation shafts there's like two ventilation shafts in like this entire area down here is that really enough with any kind of people here would get really quite smelly quite fast i'm go i'm have to stop complaining about that maybe i'm just doing that because i don't have any valid criticism other than what is this room is this like the workshop or yeah maintenance this is like the workshop room and they're like there's a ventilation shaft i do like the vent and the ventilation shaft you just like maintenance or whatever this is really just have four light bulbs that don't even match like the lights that are like all over this facility like they should have had some neon lights in this shape here not like these light bulbs because these light bulbs i haven't seen any light bulbs like this in this place can do put in some small teeny tiny extra effort to like to sell me on this fantasy of this being a real place so i guess i'll have to take the elevator up again elevator see you later elevator two three one two three four why are there five things i can go to but there are only four buttons on the elevator another small detail i'm not too sure about but yeah we can see past that containment uh should we just check every floor and see if we can even go there and we can go to the atrium let's try that now here we have a different kind of door or force field which is a cool idea just so to help me like navigate a bit more now here we have the dried out leaves autumn leaves which from a storytelling environmental storytelling perspective i very much appreciate but but then especially here there should have been some like leaves dropped to the ground because if this is dried out or something leaves should fall off alrighty [Music] oh pretty pretty pretty looks awesome i can't wait to get out of here again me too this r trim is great but it's just not the same as the real park okay so apparently these people are kind of locked in here or something how long till your contract's up two months you actually not bound by any fixed term contract i have to stay here until butterfly steam just finished butterfly scene okay that seems to be like a used code name for secret project yeah something chemical because we see chemical symbols here nice and we have a different floor for once like very nice normal maps it seems this looks great oh this looks awesome and see that's exactly what i'm talking about like having these little thingies here where water is pumped out and in to like keep fish alive that's what i want to see yeah that makes the place believable that's really cool filtration control oh i've heard about these oh i'm on a timer as well there need to be three triangles in each row or something in each column and row or something like that was the rule three three three yay we did it and now it turned on some of these things that's awesome that's really cool i think i don't have to think about my feedback for this game for very long i feel like everything's great like just to make it clear i really love this it's a simple concept you get to explore on mysterious facility the story seems very interesting from what i've seen so far like the places seem interesting it's fun to explore they're like different areas you get to see different things it's fun fun to look around and to explore the story is fun to explore and look around really the only little criticism i would have and i want to be clear for like a solo project for like a small indie game this is not a major criticism at all and it's kind of in that uncanny valley of a believable place right if you have like rooms that look very gamey or something this wouldn't be critical criticism at all but you clearly tried to make a somewhat realistic looking place that feels believable and so if you try to make a realistic looking place that feels believable and then there are a couple of these really odd unbelievable details that makes fields thing feels things quite off for me like having one meter thick walls having barely any ventilation having chairs face the wall instead of the park that sort of stuff kind of breaks my my personal immersion a little bit maybe somebody else has a different opinion on that was which is completely fine please don't give me too much hate in the youtube comments this is a great game well done very enjoyable thanks for submitting okay let's play intergalactic taxi by rocky donkey games or something like that they have a cool logo let's press what do i need to press to start or press arrow key to the right to start that's oddly specific um seems like the game doesn't have any sound and only has like very ugly unity text which i guess is probably fine i'm this so far this looks like a game jam game or something the ice planet has two passengers that want to travel to the lava planet click the ice planet to pick them up then click on the lava plane to drop them off that's very cool how you have like a an interactive tutorial that you can click through like that that is extremely cool okay let's pick them up oh taxi is moving quickly i like it stella the white blocks at the back of your ship are your fuel okay they have three fuel the lines connecting planes show how much fuel the route will use make sure you plan your trip so that you have enough fuel to get everywhere where they want to go [Music] no problem wait no no i ran out of view uh this costs you fuel so it's better to fly this way okay got it some plants will allow you to fully refuel when you visit them but only once okay bring you here and then i can bring you here stella what if i have various green planets do they not care which planet i bring them to then i'm gonna go to the yellow planet refill gas here out of this world yeah i like it it's very simple concept feels a little bit like it could be inspired by like something like mini metro or um how's the other one called mini motorways like it has that simplicity to it the simplicity vibe which is great a lot of people like these simplistic games it's easy to understand it's good concept it's fun to play so gameplay 10 out of 10. i guess the most obvious route would be oh no now i can't make it back to this planet okay let's try that again but i think it was almost correct good i think it would probably be nice if the planets were even easier to identify i have some you know you can if you look closely you can identify which planet is meant but you have to look a little closely sometimes one thing that could really help is i guess if planets had a bit more of a unique silhouette and that silhouette was also shown on these icons the words are very useful for identifying stuff you know doesn't have to be super realistic not every plant has to be completely round i guess your taxi's fuel capacity has been increased to five okay and now there we go now this will obviously make it more difficult one do the five things i still run out of fuel yeah i made it hmm okay things getting more and more difficult here but there are not any guests i have to pick up so that's should make planning quite a bit easier this planet here has to be the last one i go to because i cannot return from that yeah not too difficult i guess there we go okay i'll skip ahead level 11 see what the last level is oh here's a new mechanic click on a portal to enter it and you'll exit through the other portal of the same color warm holes or something i see and things getting quite complicated here there's you can get gas on every planet and this is getting to the point where i'm getting a bit of information overload but not necessarily because there's too much information on the screen but i think it's more once again how these planets are portrayed in these little speech bubbles it's a little tricky for me to see what needs to go where exactly you can probably clarify that a bit more by improving colors and silhouettes of these so but where do we go i guess we go to this planet to the green planet thing ah then we don't have enough gas to get to the that one oh that's a shame okay but the the puzzles are cool they're getting more difficult they're challenging i like it oh and now we get a new mechanic i love that i can just skip ahead and just check out all of the content that's honestly great the mechanical planet only accepts passengers when it's lights are green the lights will change each time you leave the planet uh okay so you have to visit it twice be able to drop off passengers that's like i feel like this game idea has so much potential just the simple concept of planning your route and picking up and dropping off passengers that alone is already so cool i feel like the most important thing you honestly need to do is fixing the visuals a bit because in terms of gameplay it's great i can tell you have tons of great ideas you're not anywhere close to running out of ideas probably i feel like if you want to sell this game and make sure a lot of people download it or buy it or whatever you really got to fix up the visuals and in particular the the ui design let me see if i can show you in photoshop just a little bit what i mean that's probably my favorite thing in these videos just playing around in photoshop who doesn't love it and the ugly ui is gone and there are a bunch of other things i honestly want to remove as well i spent a bit more time than i should have probably uh long story short this is what i came up with so all in all i just try to make the important things bigger like give important ui stuff some outlines you can always see them here i made sure the gas station feels a little more attached to the planet which i think makes it easier to read there are obviously some more improvements you could probably do to this but this i feel already helps and of course i made the planet icons like a lot bigger here you can see they were pretty tiny before absolutely no reason for that i just made them bigger and then for these connection lines here i made sure they feel a little more continuous uh to hopefully make it a little easier to read when seeing the full picture what what's connected what's not because this with all of the lines looks a little messy in my opinion so now you can see a little more how what's connected how it's connected i even added a slight subtle level counter in the corner here but that was just basic unity text which it ruins the look of games so much i assume this is like a game jam game and obviously my own game jam games don't look any better and i'm just trying to tell you if you want to turn this into like a full commercial product maybe this is sort of those are a couple of things to think about i'm not a professional artist or anything i'm sure you can probably do even better just try to reduce the clutter but make it easy to read make it nice to look at concepts great simple nice fun cool fantasy i like it anyway let's move on curriculum let's check it out this looked interesting [Music] miguel he's a construction drill okay he likes silver screws okay and he hopes nobody steals the silver screw so somebody's gonna steal his silver screws now okay i see so we need to find get the silver screws back oh yeah yeah they dropped some screws what always triggers me in pixel art games is when the pixels have different resolutions right when the pixels are not equally sized and not not too sure about the font looks a little weird not sure if it fits the art style yeah this is what i mean with the with the pixel size right in the background we have like these really big pixels in the foreground we have these really small pixels i prefer everything having the same pixel size oh yeah right you can't jump in this game apparently oh [Music] haven't we seen that mechanic in like a jonas bonus no wait in a i house my own game gym called i feel like we've seen this in a wowie gem before by the way a new huawei gem probably coming up roughly this mechanic i think we've seen in in hawaii gem but what i do like about this is it it's quite nice and it actually feels like drilling in terms of speed and so on and i think it's a very cool mechanic zone i do not mind multiple games doing this at all what i don't understand is how me bouncing up and down there is gonna give me so much speed because i'm not digging deeper i'm just magically getting faster by doing it again ah i forgot that i can't jump that would be cool to obviously see where you dug already that would fit the theme if that you would leave kind of a little trace although i'm completely ignoring the text in the background there i feel like the little shadow thingy you put there that shows how you're supposed to move that's already more than enough for me to understand what i'm supposed to do i think we can just remove that text i don't think it's necessary really i'll also like the little arrow thingies to show the player where you're supposed to go so like from a tutorial perspective and teaching me how to play this is pretty cool yeah uh ui looks nice i just don't like the font too much i feel like yeah the font on the buttons is cool but the this font right here is you can do better in terms of art i appreciate those little details like having some wooden bars here to hold up the terrain i like that the diggable terrain is clearly distinguishable from like these metal blocks that you can't dig through and you have a nice green background i feel like that's pretty cool um that being said the background feels a bit busy and it's a little hard to see i guess you could kind of try to create a little more contrast between foreground and background maybe just by reducing the saturation of the background a bit or something another thing that would be cool is if i could see on the character if i'm currently pressing the drill even if i'm not touching terrain at the moment you can see if i'm digging through terrain the drill has like a spinning animation i would also like to have that spinning animation when i'm pressing the drill button mid-air if you like that that would make sense i like the character the character feels quite unique and memorable yeah but considering that drilling is the main mechanic in your game oh you can look up and down i see considering that drilling is the main mechanic you could like polish that mechanic a bit more in terms of how it looks and feels some visual polish for the movement would be great as well as mentioned like a digging track in the ground or something or i guess something i find interesting about the digging mechanic as well is uh why does sticking not destroy terrain there should at least be some terrain that can be destroyed by digging right that would fit like the theme really well the earth is my trampoline there we go cool the fact that you can cancel your upward momentum by pressing the dick button right before leaving the ground that feels super weird i would kind of put in a hack to get rid of that because then if you have a lot of momentum here and then just press the button and your momentum gets completely cancelled it feels a little unsatisfying okay okay okay but i don't think i'm gonna i've repeated myself enough now i guess i don't think i'll have too much more to say about this okay very cool yeah let's move on great game thanks for the submission okay swing it let's give it a go play nice level selection wait i can still hear the music i turned the music off what but you can't turn the music entirely off that's i will be my first point of criticism secondly like the the fonts seem a bit mix max yikes here and there like the background is so beautiful and then the use of fonts is seems a bit weird at times if you know what i mean like this go almost touches the side of the screen here characters overlapping each other weird spacing like the typography i don't know it doesn't really check out for me other than that looks cool play okay let's play this at first oh there are even multiple levels in each area okay that's so cool no tutorial nothing you're just thrown into it cam oh it's a one button game all you can do is um grapple to the nearest thing or release it what why does it not grapple to the other thing oh oh it's not a one button game you you grapples to the thing you click on i see okay you can see here i wish those dots were a little more visible and i also wish my mouse was a little more visible because the background looks great but i it's very hard for me to see both where my mouse is as well as where these grapple points are very simple but effective i like that the ball has a bit of a trail not sure why it has three colors but i guess why not now what i'm curious about is how do you manage to keep the level design interesting for this definitely seems like one of those things that's easy to learn and difficult to master so that's great but how do you keep it interesting for a while breaking those boxes is quite rewarding new background pretty background yet another background somehow it really feels like something's oddly costing me momentum sometimes we um like it's very easy to lose your momentum maybe you should make it a little easier to keep your momentum see see there how easily the momentum is gone okay that is a lot of momentum but i have no clue how i did that [Music] like the only way to get lots of momentum is to pull yourself to to a grapple hook that is like really far away that way you can get a lot of momentum oh yeah but that doesn't feel quite right i wouldn't be i i don't want to get so much momentum from grappling hooks that are so far away i just want to be able to get a bit more momentum from from just using the grappling hooks i'm close to also seems like the grappling hooks are pulling you towards us very specific distance that's interesting now i moved image here the backgrounds are so pretty in this game but like every you know the real the reason i'm not trying to break all of these boxes because i'm already kind of bored of this mechanic i'm kind of hoping there to see something new there soon obviously more sound effects like for the main mechanics for grappling would be nice whenever i grapple to something or like a spring sound when you are pulled closer or something to me like this almost starts feeling a bit like um how do i say this politely uh an asset flip somebody just made like a cool game and or like a very simple game and put cool backgrounds from the internet in the background which you know this if anything this is like a good proof that it's not a bad strategy having nice looking backgrounds really makes the game pop and it looks so great in the email that i tried it out uh the gameplay yeah it needs it needs more variety needs more things you can do and it needs a little more fine tuning for like the ball movement i feel like yeah i don't think there's gonna be any more in this game so i'm gonna stop playing here as mentioned i really do like the background i feel like the gameplay needs a bit more work a bit more polishing and more variety that's it thanks for your submission cool game okay now we're playing please fix the route which is coming to steam this year add it to your wishlist uh let's give it a go oh okay tutorial clickyclicky [Music] i don't understand what's happening it's a bit too handholdly so much so that i don't understand what the buttons even do see that tutorial just made me click some buttons but i don't i still don't understand what to do now like what is the goal what how do i switch to a different tool down here i didn't also i couldn't remember all of the button the hotkeys there were just too many i just much prefer the the buttons down here to be clickable and then when you click them show me like a hotkey that i can use okay now i have actually absolutely no clue what to do or how this works after playing the tutorials i'm just gonna restart the game and try again okay i restarted the game but the tutorial didn't restart it just started here again but it's fine i think i've finally figured out how it works basically if you look in the bottom left corner here all of these things basically just happen in order right so first of all i need to delete something for example this and then i did the next thing happens i can delete three and everything just needs to reach its goal so the boat needs to reach a goal and so on i don't really need to delete anything else do i or is this bridge too small now i get another one okay now i get to duplicate four things or what one duplication two duplications okay i think i don't know what to do now but quite rough for a first level how do i fix the height oh this is very rough for our first level i have one more duplication i don't know let's duplicate the water so the ship can go there didn't manage to fix the height though i need to try a little harder i definitely need to keep that downwards ramp put a bridge here and a bridge here copy the road copy the ramp copy the ramp again copy the water [Music] okay [Music] lovely okay that was a pretty cool transition to the next level wow what the hell was that okay very cool i like the idea with having certain tools in a certain order i bet that allows you to do quite a ton of varied and interesting level design i think the polish and the visual art style are 10 out of 10 like this looks absolutely fantastic very nice post-processing effects looks really colorful and juicy i love it the only small thing i would criticize so far is the tutorial because i i'm sorry but the tutorial didn't help me at all i feel like i would have been better off without the tutorial almost so in this level i just have four rotation tasks of can rotate four times okay that's interesting [Music] what next what now it feels so satisfying how all of the tiles move it's really really well polished let's see if i can do anything here [Music] nah not really i feel like it almost makes more sense to start the game with a level like this where you only have one tool for the entire level and then you know you can introduce new tools in every level i feel like that's a more fun way to go about it anyway where in every level you see a new tool or two for the first couple of levels yeah so tutorial and difficulty curve is are my main complaints i can't solve it okay what happens if i start the puzzle backwards [Music] oh [Music] okay maybe that was a good strategy cool [Music] holy crap dude what wow those seamless transitions what the hell so good man holy holy moly so these vehicles all want to go up to the parking lot what does the hand do okay this allows me to grab a tile and move it around but which tile would i possibly want to move [Music] uh i mean can delete three tiles here maybe i need to move something like this out of the way get rid of that i can delete another one why why would i want to do that okay i got it yeah okay i need to save like one curve for later this curve goes here and this curve goes here oh man this is so satisfying i can't wait to see the next level transition holy hell this is so good oh my oh my god did you see that what the hell i'm so mind blown wow wild colors as well holy hell oh and this time i make a path for an animal wow it's so creative i love it i love it i love everything about this except for the tutorial and the fact that the first level was kind of surprisingly difficult yeah this is more like one of the first levels i just only have like three things i should i need to do what i get to move an entire row wow there are so many options for variety and for various possibilities this is so cool i got it this is i think this doesn't matter where i place this oh it does matter [Music] i'm gonna place this here and then move this here haha give me the next transition oh my god wow so much interesting stuff i feel like the game should start out easier other than that i love the simplicity okay this is getting too difficult now i can't figure this out but it's absolutely uh fantastic i mean there's really not much more to say about this game it's just really really good stuff i don't have any complaints i'm probably gonna keep playing this when it's out wish listed very cool great stuff i'm impressed thank you very much for sending me so many games i have more than enough games to make another video like this very soon i hope you enjoyed play willy snail and i'll see you next time play with you snail bye i will snail

Channel: Jonas Tyroller

Views: 167,928

Keywords: game development, game dev, indie games, indie dev, game developer, game design, indie game, gamedev, game design discussion, game design analysis, video games, let's play, game design talk

Id: WrVF4d5PDcM

Length: 37min 40sec (2260 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022