I PLAYED YOUR GAMES! | Game Design Feedback

for this video i asked you to send me your indie games again my name is jonas i make indie games as well and last time you sent me so many great games that we actually have enough to make another one of these these are the five games we're gonna look at today and by the way i don't think that my opinion is more valuable than yours so feel free to leave your opinion in the comments down below i'm always happy to read what you think let's dive right in so this is hoverblade by alex hetherington there are still many bugs and missing features that is good to know because one problem i often have when giving feedback is i am that i don't really know in what state the a certain game is in right i don't know is this an early build is this almost finished if you activate your wrist rockets without the hoverblade turn on yeah yeah just let me play not sure how i feel about this upfront tutorial but maybe i'll let it pass because it's an early build i'm just saying maybe for the finished game find a way to get me a little more involved like let me move around a little bit let me move the camera and then explain more to start your wrist rockets press left mouse to come to a stop press left mouse again okay the speed up turns smoothly to slow down turn sharply like was i talking to somebody or maybe i was talking to that robot up there i didn't get that this game looks relatively nice but the ui doesn't keep up that's just a reoccurring theme with all of these games especially i guess it's fine for for early games just gotta remember to upgrade the ui before releasing the game oh and actually i cannot move with the arrow keys at all i can only move with my rockets and that feels odd but i'll i'll give it some time and see if i get used to it if i want to speed up i'll turn smoothly i like the wind sound to give me some sort of idea of how fast i am and i think i can see my speed at the bottom there right it's 8 14 my speed yeah that seems to be my speed i think it would be cool if you have some basic way of walking around just with sdw just just some very slow walking when you're not using the rocket i think that will feel nice jump press right mouse got it okay so i can jump very nice one thing i want to say about the look of the level is i do like that there's some vegetation i think this would look very bland and dry and sad without the vegetation so i appreciate that there are some trees and some green stuff that helps a lot i almost wish that there was a lot more green add more green the green looks looks very good all right right right right i need to jump wait my jump is not very high though [Music] oh and i can wall run like that as well i think you should work on the rocket sounds a little bit tutorial race okay let's start the race time limit 26 okay and i have to get there i need to gather more speed [Music] why did i lose all of my speed there some feedback for that would be nice like some sound when i crash into a wall for example that would be really good and when a game is early in development you always have to listen to the most obvious things being pointed out okay i did it okay so now what did it i'm so proud of you that's all i've got to teach you for now goodbye [Music] oh wow [Music] okay finish the trailer there [Music] oh that's yeah that's kind of cool i want to finish i wasn't able to do that trail i guess the visuals work in game like a lot of screen space in your game is covered by these walls and the wall texture looks a little dirty and muddy and i'm not sure it looks that great on screenshots there's a little bit of fog i like that and as mentioned i already also think the the vegetation helps a lot helps a lot can i change the field of view because i would kind of like to see a little more as well in some cases that would be very useful no make that an option i want my field of view i want it bigger bigger i kind of like the exploration part of it the most but i'm just so bad at getting to places maybe you should encourage the exploration part a little bit as well because i think especially for for beginners like me that is a very fun part of the game just looking around seeing where everything is maybe you can hide some collectibles make it a little bit of a yeah a little bit of a collect-a-thon man i'm really stuck here i can't go anywhere i'm too bad i can't go anywhere what i'm stuck oh no at first i thought i was joking but now now it turns out it's actually the case [Music] let me out let me out ah you know what i want to do i want to take a screenshot from this game and i want to put it in photoshop and see if we can make this look a little more inviting yeah that's a good looking screenshot um still let me let me play around with this a little bit first of all maybe a little more ambient occlusion i'm not sure if there's any ambient occlusion in there already but you know ambient occlusion makes everything looks better i'm just trying to simulate like what the the standard unity ambient occlusion would do i don't think there's any ambient occlusion no there isn't uh i would i'm not sure how to get that in there and unity should be relatively simple it depends on the shaders you're using sometimes it's not simple but i think it would make yeah a lot would probably look good so i would say hell yeah maybe i overdid the vignette a little bit like this is um what i meant this just looks a little it looks good but it doesn't look inviting and this yeah this okay i did the saturation over the saturation a little bit but you know this will look better on a screenshot i would rather spend time in some in like an area that looks like this maybe the ground should have a little different color as well i like i could keep going here forever but we i just want to demonstrate the point right it has a little bit of warmer colors i want to spend more time here i don't want to spend as much time here as i want to spend here maybe you have a different opinion this is my opinion good game very nice the chord of wanderers i'm excited for this one because i do like me some good puzzle games yay [Music] what happened to the ui though okay i guess it's better than some of the other games but what is this wanderer jonas [Music] bonus ah i got scammed this game looked a little cooler on the screenshots let me show you how it looked on the screenshots but it worked so look at that this is how the screenshot looked and i was like oh yes i want to play that so if you make it look like that this looks like a hit game to me i'm not sure what you think but this looks like a hit game make it look like that please but i'm assuming it is still a very interesting mechanic and indeed it is i already saw that on the gif so it rotates whenever i step on it by 180 degree okay i like that mechanic that's such a cool mechanic please replace the ui before you launch the game it's okay for now i guess you can rotate the camera with j and k why not with e and q then i don't have to i can use the same hand but i guess i don't need the mouse but i and i want to keep the mouse uh the hand on the mouse anyway okay that was not the correcting thing to do here it's probably good that it's only rotating by 180 degree and not by 90 degree otherwise would be too difficult there we go love it let's see i do like the puzzles i do like that you don't need a lot of buttons i do like the way the tutorial works i do like that the camera automatically wrote it in the correct direction here there's a lot this game is already doing right and i love it and if you make it look the way it looked in the screenshots i will buy this on steam without hesitation this is like this is my jam yeah an odd cube pleasant to the pleasant to touch but strangely heavy so now i have a cuboid what what's the point of that maybe a puzzle once solved should just you know freeze so you can't break it anymore i wish i could rotate the camera sideways a little bit because in in a vertical level like this i can't really see how many blocks are there on top of each other or maybe if you can't rotate the camera then i have some lines here so i can see how many blocks are there it's this just one block is this just two blocks like it's not completely clear press space to reactivate switches so i can i don't have to step on it every time okay that makes sense but i still don't know what to do though you know the game hasn't taught me that i can jump down somewhere okay i can jump down there so what i would do is um teach me that i can jump down cliffs before you present this puzzle to me otherwise this feels a little unfair and you don't have to teach that with text like oh you can jump down there just force me to jump down somewhere before i'm letting me into that puzzle zoom in or out oh also i have to use the mouse then well then i would say definitely put rooting the rotating the camera to q and e because now you're really forcing me to switch with my hand between mouse and keyboard that's not cool okay some switches only rotate by 90 degree and this one here rotates by [Music] okay i have two cubes ah and then i can put the cube in here maybe have a little bit of a more explanatory animation or something that makes this a little more clear that the cube is what made this appear i can decide which puzzle i wanna solve with of sir first that's always a nice thing what am i trying to do i'm trying to get these next to each other right like this yeah yeah oh i got it [Music] like oh what oh this is not in the square it doesn't move no i no i keep making it worse huh easy this is my kind of game fairly nice sound effects maybe there could be a little more variety in the sound effects because you hear the same sound effects very very often so if you hear a sound effect very often it can be nice to have a little bit of variety in there well i honestly am amazed by the fact that this is so difficult even though there are literally just two buttons on the ground let me restart this like um good puzzle design is when you can see the entire puzzle at once right when there are not a lot of complicated things on the screen with when it's a very simple looking puzzle that that is easy to understand and grasp but it's still difficult to solve and that is what you managed to pull off here so concretes for that that is what i call good puzzle design we can argue about the difficulty curve but like the puzzle designs very nice so maybe thinking does help after all oh no didn't mean to do that oh oh using your brain does help in a puzzle game who would have thought juicy juicy juicy i like it i i really like this one and i'm i'm really looking forward to playing this when when it looks like this man oh yeah oh yeah there's yet another game we need to have a look at real quick and that is my game will you snail yeah here's some gameplay i guess am i doing this right bloodspur it's a game about a snail that dies a lot because you suck at platforming and there's also an evil ai that talks a lot yeah hit the wishlist button on steam thank you okay so this is raw shire by perpetual reality studios inc we'll just click on new game so far it looks nice it sounds nice [Music] [Music] okay i saw a creepy dragon now let me play so like from attention story telling perspective i would say that is that is not bad because that lets me know that later on in the game there will be big cool dragons as well so from from a storytelling perspective and from i guess although from a game design perspective showing me what's up later in the game just you know make it a little shorter make it juice it up a little bit um this is at the very least this is a nicely formatted wall of text but it's still a wall of text and i don't i don't like it movement okay this is obviously good to know and this is not too much information so i can definitely process that that feels good i don't know if it's necessary to pause the gameplay for that or if you could just you know leave the game running and fade that in somewhere at the sides that way it would feel a little bit less like an interruption and i would still probably be able to read it just fine and i very much like the the main character it looks very cute and friendly and that i have to say is one of the things that con confuses me a little bit about the game or i guess the look of the game let me show you what i mean on steam because what you can see here is that the main character looks super cute and friendly but then the entire rest of the game is just very dark and grim i wonder if that's a i guess that's a combination that can work you know it's one of those cases where i'm kind of wondering is this something where you'll get both of these audiences the people who like dark games and the people who like cute games or will you get neither i would um lean more towards saying probably getting both by having a cute character in a dark grim environment and the walk cycle is so cute as well oh my god i want one objectives yeah yeah yeah we've seen objective markers a million times in games there's no need to explain that tap q in the to initiate fight mode or glide prospects jump oh it's so cute i can glide down there bro my my wings are tiny what is this they're like baby chicken wings okay now here we have different collectibles brown silver gold these are three precious metals and can be found all over raw shire yeah i guess you can show that as a pop-up screen i would still honestly no i that looks that is this is so obviously a collectible oh wait a sec what's going on with the ouch i just realized what's going on with the controls it controls like a remote controlled car like if i press forward now actually moves away from the camera okay so i'm a remote controlled car um and i'm kind of slow i hope there's a way to go faster later but yeah stuff does look nice reached level one well does does that mean i can do anything cool now or why am i deliterating now i dig the environmental storytelling here that is very cool i like it i like it there's already some variety in the step sounds on the snow maybe there could be a little more just to make the constant step sounds a little less annoying or maybe maybe they could also be a little more silent i'm not sure how you play shapes your skills evil good okay press e or the action button to save dragon x and now down there we have two texts on top of each other press space to continue press e or action button to save dragon x through raw shire or break during x out of complete frustrations so this is a little hard to understand i feel like okay that pop-up is warranted we can do that like this but it's a little hard to understand so maybe on the one side for evil you can write break dragon x on on on the other side for good you can say lay dragon x or something like that safe dragon x but let's save no i didn't mean to destroy it i wanted to say to save it with e go faster little dragon go faster maybe it should also make some cute dragon zones just to make it even cuter go faster please oh my windows open a minus ah that's good okay okay okay obviously i didn't know that this area would end the level but that's fine like for you'll learn that when you enter it for the first time please don't add another pop-up to explain to me that this is the exit i'll figure that out the ui here it doesn't look bad but like let's just say compared to the rest of the game compared to the like your your in-game graphics they look really really good like this ui does not keep up with with the standards you've set in game i'll just say that are there some enemies do my little eyes spot some enemies there once again the intro sequence is too long i enjoyed it for a little bit but then i was like nah just let me play so i'm sure there will be a pop-up explaining to me how i can fight this guy in just a sec yeah yeah there we go that is obviously yeah that that's reasonable because i don't wanna i don't wanna read that while i'm already getting attacked or something so i appreciate that the game freezes here and i can have a look at this um at my own pace that's good i have fireball and flamethrower and melee attack and i can sprint no i cannot sprint what are you talking about i can literally see no difference when i'm sprinting am i doing it wrong oh yeah so obviously the solution by the way for the controls i would really suggest that when you press to the right it should just move to the right depending on where the camera is right so if i press right here it should move to the right but if i press to the right this is what happens how can i aim though where are you shooting what what wait it's shooting where the head looks i can't control where the head looks though right pretty nice detail that the bushes start burning not bad well maybe he auto aims no he doesn't alter him i'm not sure how i'm supposed to aim oh and i already forgot what the melee attack button is oh yeah okay f is the melee obviously lacking a sound effect like maybe a crosshair or something would be nice so you can aim because at the moment feels a little random where the fireball goes although i have this attack as well ah get up there ah i do not want to destroy it i want to save it [Music] okay let's try to get on that [Music] ah i was supposed to use that to get up there well i didn't do that just got there by glitching my way up so the more i think about it the more i feel like the the theme of the cute little dragon in this dark and grim well it works really well for me i think it will that like the theme the team will work for a lot of people really well ah oh no i don't want to be a remote control no can i skip the cut oh yeah so so what i think the good thing about this game is it it doesn't require a lot of big changes to become really good just require some small change and basically the rest can all stay the same and it needs some changes to the movement first and foremost and maybe a little bit to the tutorial and then i think this this will already be way way way way better other than that it's really good honestly oh you're cute little you you oh my god so cute yes i can pet it yes oh my god this is the best thing okay i call it here it's you're not i think you're on a very good path there are just a couple of things that feel like it's interesting there are a couple of things that feel really well done they really feel right like the atmosphere etc etc and then there are a couple of things that really feel like nah but they should be they should be possible to sort out so good luck um thank you very much for sending the game okay i just had to play this game this one is called sky tale and i think it might have taken some inspiration from a certain other game i'm not sure about the gameplay but look at the ui like listen to the minimalistic music oh look at the look how that looks oh i see some similarities there okay okay okay okay texas in german sorry about that i'll let you know if there's anything important in there oh man bro like even the tutorial text boxes i'll take that as a compliment i'll take that as a compliment so i can um pick buildings here with uh my number keys and i'm supposed to place one oh wait can i maybe i'll check in the settings if i can change the language yo you forgot to copy the camera smoothing gotta copy that as well that makes it feel a little better what am i supposed to do though am i just supposed to close this so i need to collect enough coins to unlock a card and that that's a little weirdly translated i'm not sure that's been done with a google translate or something like that so i'm very curious to see the gameplay now is this literally just grid based islanders or does this have something else in terms of gameplay i'm intrigued okay i build a house now what what does the house do i cannot do anything with these okay so gameplay seems to be a little different um i'm not entirely sure what i can do with these because the house i was able to place ah okay no no okay i can place these at the border here maybe i would do it then in a way then that only like these borders here only appear when you select one of these cards that you need to place at the border okay i got new cards if we all always have three cards in my hand or how does that work english here we go now you can read as well query and a house those look very similar in my opinion they look a little too similar like i can't really you know if i look look at from the fire i can't really see what's what um so where am i supposed to place that here curry how do i get coins though first maybe let's place that here so i'll just date right this game is clearly inspired by islanders which i think is completely fine i'm i'm more than humbled if people take islanders um as inspiration for their games and then like i think that is a very important thing that happens in the games industry the developers inspire each other to make certain games and then you take inspiration from games i'm completely fine with that part especially because gameplay seems to be different enough i would say that maybe you could have gone for a little bit of a different ui cell not because i'm mad that you copied it but just because people who know islanders will notice and it just looks a little weird you know it looks a little unprofessional to copy something that closely i wanna state i'm personally i don't care i'm completely fine with that so no hate for me i'm just pointing that out place some forests here rocks there okay and now we we get to choose just like an islanders okay but it's a little different it's islanders but a little different so do i get to pick an entire site basically right choose your card pack these cards will be shuffled into your deck one thing i have to say is i don't understand why and how i got coins now like there are no tooltips for what everything does i'm not sure how this circle down there filled up circle as well how am i supposed to know what to pick if i don't even know what what stuff does you lose if your deck runs out of cards collect coins to shuffle new cards into your deck yeah sure whenever i fill up the circle i i get to choose some new cards i guess right so basically um islanders basically does this under the hood as well you have basically a deck of buildings and islanders as well honestly i kind of think this game maybe even improved on that system a little bit because it's a little more transparent about that deck mechanic so i actually kind of like that oh wait we have two tips right here gather three two scrap one get one if house around sure so we'll just have to place this next to house and okay so the way you get coins is also a little different you don't get um coins when you place something you just wait that was not a house oh no that was a lumberjack oh houses look too similar make them i would make them look a little more different from one another and then of course the fact that you can expand the island so you don't run out of space that is that is pretty big brain as well i guess so basically what i think you you correctly identified a couple of things that were a little sub optimal about islanders and try to improve on on those which i think is a good way to make games thing with terrain placement at the moment is the terrain placement doesn't feel very meaningful at the moment okay now i have two tips here as well interesting get four if query earned coins does the query have to be in range of the brick factory or how does that work i think another thing you try to improve on is to make the tooltips a little shorter right i think that is definitely a good thing because an islanders tool tips are often like this massive which is a little silly so i like that the tooltips are shorter maybe they need to be a little longer just to be a little more specific if you know what i mean so there aren't any misunderstandings for about what i need to do to get points sure i'll put the brick factory here because there's a lot of brick that's probably good oh no i put the wrong building there because it had some rocks in front um yeah i think that it would be good if the the look of the building still an even better job of telling me what the building does it's a little subtle at the moment i mean i can see that this does something with bricks but other than that it looks completely like the other houses i wonder if there's a way to make like these terrain placements a little more interesting because at the moment they really just feel like they're there for me so i don't run out of space but there's nothing like inherently interesting about them yet except for maybe if i have a lumberjack at the border i can place new trees around it but that seems like a very relatively rare scenario is that rock yeah that's rock as well okay i guess i'll put that here then with another house here water water placing water that's a very nice addition i like that so basically i get to pick a couple of um basically terrain cards and i also get to pick a couple of buildings okay i think a little bit of fog could make this game look nice because just you know just so you have a little bit of more how's it called feeling of three dimensionality and see that like this area up here's a little further back there's a little closer to the camera also we have a lot of unutilized space here especially if you call the game something like i think it's called sky tail if all of this is like in the sky then maybe it would look cool to have a cloud background or something here because this fills a lot of screen space and it's currently it's just a solid color i think as your tooltips are so short it might be cool to have the tooltips when hovering over this as well because in islanders we don't have tool tips when hovering over buildings that are already placed on the map but that's because buildings don't do anything once they're already placed so we we don't have to worry about that but in your case buildings keep doing stuff when they're already placed which is why i would say put the tooltips on the map as well when you hover over it okay my camera died there i'm back haha okay so it seems like i'm running out of tiles anyways which is which is good i'm kind of kind of want to run out of chats but i'm getting new ones now now i got 18 new cards again okay so i'm not running out of cards but what what i just said before the camera died is that i do think it's okay to copy other games it's fine like that's the way this industry moves forward is by copying like and and i like that about the games industry that is a good thing that is a it's a good thing like we have the freedom to copy this kind of stuff without being afraid of violating any patents or stuff like that that is a good thing yeah so i think i'm about ready to quality quits there [Music] oh i lost anyway perfect okay so that was some tile-based islanders i enjoyed it very much and i think it has a lot of potential so keep up the good work and not for our sake but for your own sake change the ui a little bit to make it a little less obvious um where it's coming from maybe yeah i very much i like it i like it great job okay there's a groovy speedrunning game immortals temples by kudo let's give it a shot oh interesting menu you want english please there we go english ah no i didn't want to go to these settings because there are no audio settings anyway right oh yeah there are all your settings that's kinda cool yeah cool menu okay i like the music i'm just gonna turn it down for editing there you go now let's play a little many of these uh in between menu screens and so on to the point where i'm not even really sure what is game play and what is um menu so maybe you should try could try to do a little better job of visually differentiating the two so maybe if i'm in a menu like the background has a different color and if i'm in in game play it looks a little just looks a little different so i can tell it apart let's go for the second level so it's a speed running game if you're not fast enough you lose and i'm already a little spoiled here so i probably already know the solution to this level this game was made in wowie gem 2021 so this year where the topic was failure's progress um so i think if i touch the red dot i lose and respawn at the beginning and thereby am faster at the exit and that's exactly the solution there and probably similar solution here so gold is 60 what you can beat this in 460 you're killing me ah of course yeah of course now we got gold okay okay but there's a faster way of doing things obviously there's a faster way i can do it faster there we go it's actually pretty fun i like it because it has a little bit of strategy and levels like this where you have to think about what is the best path what is the guess best route what is the best way to get to the goal but then it also has this execution part and i actually like both parts and the levels are short they're juicy so in terms of gameplay i very much like this i'm not sure what's going on with the screen now this seems to be some sort of thing that happens when you're idle for too long um it's cool idea maybe go for a little bit of a different effect i don't think it's too pleasant to look at hey wait it doesn't go away what do you mean oh no it just stays like this why oh no it's gone okay thank god i'll just give this a go say obviously you can do this a lot faster and i'll also try to do this a lot faster oh yeah i got gold now perfect it's not that easy if you to see if you got gold or something maybe you should make that a little easier to see i'm not entirely sure sometimes if i got it or not you know have some sort of rewarding when you when you beat the gold time just have some more feedback for when you manage to do that that would be great so obviously here i need to go in between right you want to get a really good time this will take a while yikes okay this level is hard well i actually got gold oh i really like the pathfinding aspect of this as well why did the color change was the color changing oh did it always do that or did that just start now oh i'm not sure if i like that oh i think the colors were fine why would you do that or is that just random stuff that happens sometimes similar to the flicker effect earlier i'm not sure what the purpose of that is yeah that that's the trick i guess you see yeah okay maybe the correct time to go somewhere near when i press restart i hope so because i don't really don't want to wait too long yeah okay that is the case very interesting it doesn't really get boring to be honest why does it turn black and white i don't like it some are pretty tricky i'll call it squid quits here it's very good it's very good and i think you can wish listed on steam already let me check oh you cannot only wish list that you can also buy it on steam already so if you if that looked fun to you go check it out it's pretty good i like it a lot it's simplicity at its best i would say i like it [Music]

Channel: Jonas Tyroller

Views: 104,340

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: dS8TuTRJZ2A

Length: 39min 27sec (2367 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021