I PLAYED YOUR GAMES! | Game Design Feedback

hey this is jonas i'm an indie game developer and in this video i want to play your indie games to hopefully give you some ideas on how you can do even better make a better product that even more people want to play alright cute little character okay tutorial on the wall looks nice very cool that is very nice and self-explanatory very cool style for the tutorial i like it oh you speed up when you're in the air that's unintuitive at first but i like it go near the checkpoint to activate it reset to checkpoint with x okay how do i know if it's activated i don't okay some feedback for activating checkpoints would be great yo okay it's a little crazy how much you speed up when you're in air but it's nice and then you can also grapple around oh and the music is kicking in that's nice but just so it's easier to edit i'll probably uh hold the music volume down that way we can pick our own music oh damn i accidentally left to the menu and wait does it start from the last checkpoint oh it turns green when it's activated that is nice okay there is some feedback for activating checkpoints i just wish

there was more feedback for activating checkpoints uh some feedback when i can't grapple would be nice so for example when i click on this rock up here i can't grapple to that why can i not grapple to that uh maybe it's too far because it's too far away but in that case maybe there could be a little grapple shoot out or something and then i can see that it's not long enough if nothing happens it feels a little wrong you know something should happen and then also i like that there's some fog because that gives it some three dimensionality but i'm not sure exactly on how i like the exact look of both that skybox as well as that fog i feel like this is an opportunity to make a screenshot real quick maybe i'll put that into photoshop in a sec if i have some time having correct foc and skybox can do a ton for for the look of a game i like the water though anything that has really large surfaces is very important so obviously water usually fills a lot of screen so it's important that it looks nice grass usually fills a lot of screen so it's important that it looks nice and the sky

is important because it usually fills a lot of screens so those are really the three most important things that well looks somewhat decent and i would say the grass looks okay especially with these little grass thingies right here water looks great actually and then the sky and the fog are a little yeah you can do better you can do better oh oh okay sometimes i have these moments where the controls feel really great and i have these these moments right here i'm like um is it supposed to be like that if it's not supposed to be like that then so that is definitely the most frustrating part about the controls is that you need to be super precise with your aiming in order for the grapple to work and it also needs to be close enough so when it's not close enough it should tell you by giving you some kind of feedback and if you're not exactly aiming right you should like shoot raycasts in multiple directions as backups if my aim isn't perfect then it

should basically do a little bit of auto aim assist i feel like that would make it feel a lot better okay yeah landing on these platforms is a little wonky at times um i did activate the checkpoint now that is great okay our reset slingshot are there more controls to learn aim verge set up slingshot okay that mechanic feels a little wonky it's a little wonky honestly you're teaching me these movement mechanics too quickly i find it cool that there are a lot of different movement mechanics but i think i need a little more time to get used to them you know you're throwing those at me at a pace that is a little too fast and also i feel like some of these movement mechanics are not as polished as they should be for example slingshot i'm not entirely sure how how to aim it honestly you know there's no sound effect there's no nothing all i have is this little line on the ground there and i'm not entirely sure what i need to do to create it or how how far i will go when

i do that that is really fun though these kind of moves are pretty fun when they work also this little particle trail you make very cool i like it i like the wind sounds that gives you a nice sense of speed oh hold on i think i'm slowly starting to understand the slingshot mechanic so basically i think what's happening when using the slingshot mechanic is you attach two ropes to a specific point and then you can pull yourself towards that point i already like like the slingshot mechanic a lot better i just didn't get that those were actually two ropes attached to something i'm stuck on the section alright last try let's see if i can get up there boom oh yeah that was the way to go it seems maybe less would be more here simpler controls you know the controls are fun so i don't think you necessarily need to make the controls more complex

and you got to figure out what to do when people end up in these situations here because that's really frustrating and it tends to happen quite a lot and i have a boost swing meter down there so yet another condition on when i'm allowed to swing and when not i didn't even realize that and then when i use my swing my boost it uses up more of that energy maybe having some indicator that is closer to the center would actually be very useful for that because i'm not looking at the corner of the screen i'm looking at the center of the screen because i need to aim you could probably be clever about it and put it a little more into the center of the screen actually all right i think we've seen enough of the gameplay only thing i wish for is some of the movement mechanic could be a little more polished in particular the slingshot okay i played around with the look a little bit and i'm not a professional artist but i'm just gonna show you my rough thoughts this is a black and white image and for the perception of depth it's really important that you have somewhat of a gradient in that so for example the

things that are close should be dark and the things that are further away should be brighter and we have that here to a very nice degree but then there are a couple of objects that just doesn't seem to apply to also the fog starts at a weird range a little too far away for example this rocks really looks like it's quite far away but it's still completely pitch black i just tried to fix that a little bit without spending too much time on it just made it a little brighter and yeah then i'd basically just try to recolor it to the best of my ability that is the part that i probably should have spent a bit more time on but i want to move on so i just did a quick recoloring to kind of get the point across basically here this is my finished result and this is how it looked before and so so unchanged a little bit like the original was a bit warmer which i honestly like better i like these warm colors in terms of the depth perception i hope you agree with me that this feels a little nicer that things just blend into the background a bit more i have the urge to keep playing

around with this but there are so many more games i want to place all right cool let's move on so i just played a little more and i must say it feels a lot better than my first playthrough i don't think anything changed since the last played i don't know what exactly is but it plays a lot better than i remember i just came back to make some thumbnails real quick and all of a sudden i'm you you zooming all over the place not really struggling with the controls as much anymore so maybe it was just that i needed some time to get used to it i just wanted to say that really nice very very nice okay now we're playing at jack stone actually this game has over 100 000 downloads and i'm not entirely sure why that is i think it has good search engine optimization because it has the open world fps literally in the title of the app oh the there's some tiny text in the corner there okay i didn't even see that i don't see any take down button oh that little skull in the top right corner was the takedown button and now we have a gun

now what okay now i need to click the hand to shoot okay i have to swipe quite a lot just to rotate sorry i'm looking down so much okay my phone's down there can i walk around somehow okay now interesting now on the one side of the screen i can use to move around and the other side of the screen i can use to look around that's an interesting control scheme i just wish i could increase the look around speed a bit more there's some way to get into the menu not like that activate the tower by placing an object on it oh god i have to do so much swiping maybe this is better on a tablet but i have to swipe so much just to rotate place any object on this tower a barrel can i grab barrel can i grab anything from this table here yeah yeah yeah you're funny huh place any object and then i can't pick up any object obviously my first piece of feedback would be i got stuck in the tutorial activate the tour by placing any object on but i can't pick anything up like i'm pressing all of the

why the hell did i have to press the kill button to pick that up that doesn't make any sense welcome to ajaxtown nice effect there opening the book there's a lot to be said about the graphic i think but as this is a mobile game i'm gonna go go easy on the graphics stuff i'm just in it for the gameplay for this one so let's see what the this has to offer in terms of gameplay uh long cut scenes i can't skip seems to be one of those things click the clickety clickety clickety why are there just two skeletons sitting and i can't do anything hello oh somebody's probably peeing [Music] okay so they beat up the skeleton that peed on the fire or something i'm struggling to keep up and now that skeleton is imprisoned and needs to be saved okay this is just one of those typical stories that's just there so there's a story i don't know maybe some

people will find it funny i find it okay because i like stupid humor this just here so i can click the kill button why is this not making a sound this should be like or something wait why did that hit me i did not hit her that's a bit ugly those mega thin walls without any context what is that level design at least can i maybe build a little castle wall around this or something uh kind of immersion breaking oh camera sensitivity thank god i find it tricky to see stuff like especially on mobile where you have not the brightest screens and like mirroring surfaces and stuff like you see that it's very hard to see anything when it's dark it's this water you know i can't see anything i can't see what is this water here am i not supposed to walk on water what the freak dude i'm getting very disoriented

what you gotta fix the icon situation why can you use the skull to pick things up why do you use the red hand to fire the weapon why do you use the blue hand to freeze stuff you gotta there are better icons for all of these things i promise you just get proper icons this is so confusing at least i know what to do now walk across here yeah okay all right all right and now what am i supposed to do with that door i got nothing in my inventory i can't freeze it i can't shoot it did i forget to pick up the key or something you know what i forgot to press the school button when i was in front of the door yeah the scroll button doesn't do anything either yeah i can't figure it out all right are there no screenshots or something oh yeah they are here it looks a lot more like open world or something maybe i didn't reach didn't even reach the open world yet maybe i was just

playing the pre-story with the peeing skeletons there's even a motorcycle seems like there's a lot of content in this game actually so i think it would very well be worth it to invest even more time into the onboarding because if you manage to make people stick around on the onboarding then they'll see your epic open world and if you know if they get stuck on the in the onboarding process like i did then i won't even get to see the the awesome open world you probably built here so that's a bit of a shame thanks for sending it in awesome this video is sponsored by will you snail will you snail is an epic rpg platformer about artificial intelligence honestly it's just a silly little platformer but it's a cool one and it's unlike anything you've seen before so check out my game will you snail it's available on steam and on consoles check it out that would be very much appreciated you know it's a fair deal i check out your games you check out my game come on come on come on come on come on let's go okay let's play poliwicha which actually a steam game but due to its minimalism it looks a bit like a mobile game

alright let's try it definitely already gives me stardew valley vibes which is not a bad thing maya has been lost inside of her dreams she must find each fragment of her soul in order to wake up will you help her well i do appreciate that you kept it very low on and just you straight up telling me what's going on and i can just start playing right away that's wonderful all right and it tells me what to do here pick this up okay i will pick it up and then i drop it here i think it would be nice if when i'm hovering over a position where i can drop it it would already kind of snap into place so i can get a little bit of a preview of how it will look when i drop it because at the moment i don't get any feedback and in case you can't see it my mouse is exactly over this first hoverable spot here right now oh it snaps into place here but it's a very subtle snapping effect that needs to be a lot stronger i want it to snap into place a lot more

and i can already kind of tell that it's made for mobile because the piece is actually hovering over quite a bit over my mouse not on my mouse you can see here when i pick it up it jumps up which makes a lot of sense for mobile because if your fingers on it you can't see it anymore but obviously for the steam build maybe this should just be different for the steam build i feel like this should just stay on the mouse that's like one of those little changes you can make to really make it feel like this is a native build and not just cheap port or something alright then tap here to go that feels that felt very good and satisfying and that too felt very good and satisfying very juicy i do like it i do not like how the snapping feels on pc it but that seems to be one of those things that can be easily fixed later on now go here and then i'll just flip those around a bit now i can go here i'm expert puzzles over i'm sure i'll rush through this game in no time at all one thing i would maybe want for this level here is i i would want it

to be a bit more zoomed in now i can show you i'm just increasing the size here why does it not have this size that would be totally fine there's still more than enough negative space on the on the sides here this is how it would look like on mobile which is fine there seems good for mobile and then this is just too small for for a steam game you can zoom in more if you put this on steam just zoom in a little more you can do that here let's grab that little thingy [Music] what did that button do all right blow us that spike and there's a little glitch in the animation when you walk over the button in this direction but we can totally look past that we cannot look past that because that was very weird nice come on why is it so unforgiving with the placement very nice i like that there are only six

levels at the beginning that you have to worry about that really makes you curious oh what happens when i finish all six of those levels and it's not something like super unachievable you can do it in a relatively quick amount of time so that's a nice source of motivation okay now here it starts getting a little awkwardly complicated with these three buttons here i do not like that especially that you just have the color coding like at least have an icon on each button and on each spike you know this is already more than can fit into my mind the reason this seems difficult is because it's big and messy and not because there's a difficult problem to solve or anything there we go all right now what happens what happens i'm so excited i'm so excited oh okay those are the demo levels nothing happens nothing happens i think the game looks great i i think the graphics are great i think everything feels great except for the fact that the

placement feels too janky that can definitely feel a lot better and also it shouldn't feel like you're wasting so much screen space you're wasting too much screen space at the moment but other than that hey really great i like it a lot one more thing about puzzle design maybe don't try to make puzzles by making it super complicated i'd be more curious to have smaller puzzles with some kind of trick i need to figure out than having big puzzles that are just difficult because they're big and complicated other than that i feel like you're on a great great path good stuff thanks for sending it in all right there are more things the person who sent me this told me it's their first game so i'm excited and it's hand painted so that's even better and it starts with the wall of text which is usually not the best way to start a game but i will we'll go with it just in editing we might skip ahead a little bit i wasn't done reading yet i'm a slow reader the game just skipped ahead okay

and it's clearly made for mobile as well don't put that in the pc version if you can avoid it because i can also control it with the arrow keys which is nice so just don't have the thumb stick thingy on the on the pc version the look is actually insanely cool like this hand painted look it looks really really nice it's the first time in years that i am so close to the house this is the only way i can find out what what has happened okay so basically to sum up everything i've read before the game decided no you you can't read no more new person moved into the town and ever since strange things started happening so i'm assuming we're at their house now okay this is just something that pops up when you enter trigger zone assume okay now i'm in the house you know there there are some cheap ways to go to a new scene like that for example you can just make the screen fade out and fade back in or at the very least what you can do is you can add a door sound because sound already tells you a lot about stuff that's happening or that has happened so even if you have just a rough transition like that maybe you can just add a little door sound

to emphasize the fact that i just entered the house that is a weird photo who is that supposed to be a guy in a halloween costume i hope oh yeah that photo and by the way the house the art style it looks great it just looks great i wonder why the character does not have the same style because having the character in the same set would probably look pretty great as well but you know it is what it is it definitely looks unique even with the character being like that i do like the environmental storytelling here are some clearly some interactable objects because they have a different resolution they stand out quite a bit they don't really seem like they can fit in so i can probably take them with me or something that's a bit of a shame that they they don't blend in at all also we have a scene transition here which i guess is fine if you're if you go for this painted art style here one thing i kind of wish you would have done is make it look more like this scene transition here because here you have a little line in the room as well where you overlapped two sheets of paper i think that's a really great

opportunity to just go for the same look for these transitions here make it look like you have some overlapping sheets of paper hinton cubes my aunt used them to explain the fourth dimension to me it sure took a lot of time can i take them can i take them can i click them i can't take them and what a weird shape for a mirror it's impossible to see oneself on both sides at once unless you're shaped like a v i guess maybe there's something more interesting you could say with those lines i'm not entirely sure because i haven't done a lot of text heavy games but all i'm saying is text is annoying to read people don't like reading a lot of text usually so you gotta use it carefully and when you use it there has to be a good reason for it and a good reason in my opinion might not be telling me something i can already very clearly see with my eyes you know it looks very witchy yeah i know that and then what i do like is that what am i doing here because that is something i cannot see the the character kind of doubting herself that

is uh something i do like what i don't remember seeing a lift in the house when my aunt lived here having that text here makes sense because i can't i didn't see that this is a lift now i know it's a lift so that's good and it's only getting creepier and creepier here okay standing in the middle of the looks like a satanic circle is officially the stupidest thing i've done today i hope that's okay because that's funny someone did not like the original shape of this armchair wait this v-shape okay i do like that this is pulling some attention once again to something i myself probably wouldn't have noticed this looks very bad i have to turn around and get out of here now that v-shaped bed looks very weird okay let's get out let's get out walking through the satetic circle again sure no problem oh now we're in a different room door here open so i can walk through now it's a bit of a shame that you can't clearly see that when you're standing in front

of it because it's covered by a billion buttons and text should i go upstairs to see what is there or should i just walk out cool that you're presenting me with a decision here i'm obviously taking the stairs the look changed take it out you have chosen a bad time to come she is about to return my name is alice spool and i am the only one here on your side you have to get hinton's cubes okay why am i so tiny oh where am i why am i so tiny i don't even want to think about what place this is now i have to focus on picking up the cubes and getting to the mirror to escape [Music] oh i really do like these wait luckily i've gotten away from there who knows what would have happened if i stayed longer oh that's it already are there alternative endings or something should we try out and see if there are alternative endings this looks so great as well the text boxes so they cover up

so much of the great looking stuff if you know what i mean why do they have to cover so much of the great looking stuff i just want to look at the great looking stuff please yeah maybe those text boxes could be a little smaller or well i don't know slightly transparent okay what happens if i walk out the door curiosity got the oh you cannot escape that's a shame okay there is an alternative ending we saw both now that's great good stuff where like for a first game that's really really strong stuff so well done to you round of applause keep it up okay let's play freeway fiasco which looked like a very very interesting game concept that i definitely wanted to try and oh my god the menu already looks so insanely trippy and nice okay so i think there's no tutorial yet but in the email the creator wrote you can use e and q to speed up time

i ran out of time apparently okay nice i feel like the look of this doesn't look as nice as in the menu maybe you should just copy the look from the menu like the white one that looked a lot cooler so will i have multiple cars oh yeah i think oh when you can zoom in that's great actually i'm not sure there should be rain sound when the time is frozen that doesn't seem correct to me okay so what i think is two and three will be start positions for different cars and they'll all have to go up there all right okay see yeah that's what i meant now we have to find a path for green okay i already think i know which path i need to go oh that's that's not the part okay very interesting really really interesting

and now we gotta do another car oh very nice physics-based car crashes seems like i think we need to redo car one actually one question what if instead of the arrows those fields actually had the the button prompts on them so for example the top one has a w and the one on the left has an a and the bottom one has an s because sometimes with this tilted camera perspective i get a little confused with which button makes me go in which direction if you know what i mean like that would be great very satisfying nice it should still do that little nice sprinkly sound come on you should you should give me that nice sprinkly sound when the cars reach the goal i'm addicted to that i want to hear it three times in a row please all right next level here i cannot zoom

in because it does that automatically or what there are two goals for me like two places i have to reach or how should i imagine that okay next car what's going on i'm not doing anything where's my car where's the green car this doesn't seem right this seems like a bug now the green car needs to appear but it doesn't i can't press r either for restart ah that's a shame i wanted to keep playing no because one thing i wanted to say about the puzzles it does look a bit confusing and once again it relies only on color to communicate which car is which maybe having both a color as well as an icon associated to each car would be better both for color blind people as well as for normal players just so you can visually process it a little more easily i like the rainy look of the game but i feel like even with that rainy look it could be a little brighter you know it's a little hard to see stuff take a screenshot real

quick yeah but all in all really cool really really cool concept i just wish i could play more man okay now the plan is not to get stuck in photoshop for hours and hours again like it happened last time just show you how it would look like if you're a little brighter you can still have the rain and everything but then at least you know it's a little more fun to look at if if it's brighter i feel like yeah look it was very dark before you see that it was really kind of dark before okay maybe you know concrete give the concrete a bit of a color obviously not that strong but we can fix that in a sec yeah tone that down a lot yeah you see something like that add some more bloom for these slides here and there probably also some areas you want to be darker actually maybe the concrete is one of those maybe we just want the gameplay areas to be bright yeah actually i think that might be the way to go so whatever is used for gameplay can just be a bit brighter and everything else can stay dark see looks a lot better looks more fun to look at like we did a good job there i like it i

like it i like it i like it i like the gameplay as well i hope i can keep playing at some point thanks for sending it in beans and chains ah you can change the player colors probably we are red and blue is nice why not red and blue okay okay that looks a little messy mostly because the background is quite busy like the background has a lot of contrast i feel like having a con background with less contrast would make this feel a lot cleaner and nicer all right let's play level one so this is a local multiplayer game but you can also play it alone so i'm i do that friends i'm playing it alone of course ooh nice we have walking sounds um j and l to move the other bean actually the movement feels quite nice a bit floaty but that's nice if you keep the jump button pressed just keeps jumping if you press the jump button slightly before touching the ground it does not jump so i would prefer to have a bit of a jump buffer there that when i press jump slightly before it hits the ground it still jumps it's fine though not the biggest of deals

just a little d10 and also seems like there's no coyote time or anything like that but maybe for a physics based game like this we can forgive that i do like the art style uh the low poly looks works nicely having the tutorial on the shields back there works okay camera feels nice something's not quite right with the shadow quality i'm not sure what's going on there or if i could have improved that in the menu shadow quality seems very low what happened okay the chain actually wraps around things and stuff that's cool and i like that the characters can fall over that's so nice that's something you don't see in a lot of games really adds a lot of very cool wonkiness to the through these characters this is the outside of the tower try to make your way inside but watch out for lava not entirely sure if that shield there is even necessary it's just you know keep playing the level and you'll figure it out more or less all right power ups can help you reach new heights

and does that power up apply to oh it only applies to the player who collects it that's nice i wonder what those buttons do i'm sure we both need to stand on those level complete yeah next level let's move on okay we have a bit of a different color scheme here which is nice some obstacles can be tricky to stand on hold s okay to stabilize yourself i see what you mean i see [Music] no not main menu okay it restarts automatically that is nice it's already afraid there i would have to go to the main menu every time i fail once again we have a lot of contrast in the background i'm not sure that is the smartest things to do usually you want a lot of contrast in the foreground not in the background at the moment your background has the most contrast and of course the lava has a lot of contrast which looks cool feels kind of nice that you can oops save each other like that uh

there are no checkpoints okay so you gotta be good you gotta be good uh and you can speed run it because there's a massive timer at the top of the screen there damn it okay so here's one interesting thing that i think makes a big difference you can see if they pull in opposite directions and turn and turn something slightly odd there but i can't quite put my finger on what exactly it is i think what i just would really like if the characters instantly turn around when you press a button they don't have to instantly start moving in the direction but they should at the very least acknowledge my button press by turning always turning in the direction i press with my fingers i feel like sometimes they don't do that sometimes they just turn in the direction they're moving i want them to turn into the direction i'm pressing on the keyboard so i can see that i'm actually doing something right so for example the blue one when the blue one is being pulled it looks in the direction it's going even though i'm pressing in the other direction that's that doesn't feel right to me beans on chains beans on chains

beans on chains oh damn it i will wait till it's back it'll come back right yeah it comes back yeah yeah [Music] okay it's not that easy to control funny okay that was cool that was actually quite cool nice yeah next level let's go and these levels are starting to get quite dark really i think it's screenshot time all right but i think i've seen enough gameplay is cool like there are some small polishing things you could do to make the controls feel even better that would certainly help a lot i do like how these beans fall over and stuff all in all it's it feels really cool art style yeah especially the ui yeah man okay it's it's fine for game gems but if you keep working on this i think the art is something you'd have to look at again and then honestly

this wall in the background here as mentioned it's too busy that would have been an easy fix easy fix maybe we should rename the series to i photoshopped your games instead of i played your games because i'm clearly having way too much fun with this even though i'm not perfect at this as mentioned before i think i can get my point across and that point being is the background is too busy see i just made the background a little less busy less contrast little darker goes more into the background then at the same time you can try to make the actual stuff that's important pop a bit more in that case that's our characters and our paths those things should pop a bit more so those can have some contrast compared to the background those can also have some internal contrast they can be a little more noticeable because they're important yeah basically try to write the tome a bit more with some more color correction try to keep the original dark look and probably doesn't have to be as dark i just thought it looked cool so before basically once again don't pay any attention to my concrete coloring that's

a little weird and stuff i totally get that but what you can pay attention to is here the main focus is the background and here i try to flip that around and put the focus on the foreground and on the player characters and i can i think you can clearly see that that part of the equation works right now you can see the characters now you can see the paths i i think i prefer this even though maybe it's a little too dark error though you can play around with this a bit more maybe so that's my before and that's my after yeah i think that's what i'm going with more or less cool stop don't click off yet you can actually keep watching on the youtube channel of my editor you sent me so many games i couldn't even play one percent of them probably so i send some more games to my edger and i'll link it here somewhere the video link will be somewhere keep watching there and i'll see you in the next video play will you snail play will you snail