YOUR GAMES | Game Design Feedback

I played your Indie Games to give you some game design feedback you sent me hundreds of games and prototypes I chose three more amazing games and I'll do my very best to give some constructive feedback my name is Jonas I'm a full-time indie game developer i co-develop games such as eyers will you snail and now thrown fall the game starts us out with a floating text tutorial it's a very efficient way to implement your tutorial fantastic choice for game gems for finished steam releases I would probably rather do something like this it looks more polished and finished and First Impressions do obviously matter the game gives us the first collectible for free which is awesome cuz it teaches us that there are Collectibles and that we should try to find them we learn how to perform a slidey slide which is always very fun and then we get an introduction to the cryptic story of the game the game continues its clever textless tutorial by putting the key right next to the lock and then visually showing us what exactly the key does while some games need a cut scene just to show how the door opens this game doesn't need that at all it's just so plain and obvious very well executed so we make

our way over there find another collectible and that's the first level complete I did a bit of an oopsie I accidentally picked very very good games that means I'll have to point out more positives and I'll also be a bit more nitpicky than usual I think it's going to be a lot of fun let's have a look at how the rest of the game looks like I already like the visual variety lots of different looking corridors and rooms you can feel that the game was probably designed with speed running in mind the level layouts are very linear there's not really any way to get lost you just try to make it to the end but some of the Collectibles are hidden away in places that are a bit more difficult to reach in the last episode we already talked about how your game can look a bit syy if you use the same lighting everywhere check out how effective that is in this game we just have different lighting and different wall textures for every Corridor and they look completely different we have this red slide that transitions nicely into this purple Corridor there's a lot of contrast in the level design we crawl through a narrow space just to get into a wide and open space right afterwards there are darker spaces where you can't see anything there are brighter spaces

where you can see there's tons and tons of contrast and visual Variety in the level design and you can tell it's quite intentional not only does that make the game more fun and memorable when you play but it also helps with marketing and especially with your store page if all of your screenshots look different that signals to the player that this game has a lot of content and that it's interesting and Vary at the same time you want your level design process to be fast and efficient enough so that you can actually finish your game and look at that all of the shapes are super simple this is super fast to create and to model and yet it looks interesting and varied this is perf perfect for an indie game the demo of the game that I got to play has three levels so far I made it all the way to the end multiple times and the good news is I think I do have quite a couple of things to say that I think will really help the developers first of all let's finish the level design topic I give you the level design 9 out of 10 the only thing I would want more of is a little more nonlinearity as far as I can tell this game takes place in Hell or in the Underworld and I think feeling lost is something you would definitely feel in those places also the feeling of being in a place you're not supposed to be you're creating such an interesting and

compelling World here that I really feel the urge to explore and unfortunately at the moment there is nothing to explore cuz it it's just very much a tunnel like level design currently the levels look roughly like this with the purple areas being optional Secrets One thing that's completely missing so far that I think would be very nice as some alternative routs so you have a little bit of choice for where to go it doesn't even have to be much I think even just a little would help a ton here already and then I would also just add some more secrets and optional spots the point of those is of course to reward exploration and once again I don't think we need a lot of them just a few more would already be great whoever does the level design in your team definitely knows what they're doing from the use of landmarks to foreshadowing areas you'll encounter later on I'm happy with that but let's talk about something slightly more problematic the movement I think the main issue is that the skill ceiling is too low the skill ceiling is how experts play the skill floor is how beginners play and I think they are too close to each other at the moment there are three actions the player can perform move jump and Slide the only way to go faster than normal is when sliding and that only

works with ramps and ramps are actually very rare you also don't get to keep that momentum for very long so you're basically always stuck running at the same speed for a game that is all about movement and has no combat the movement options definitely feel a bit limited one solution could be to add another movement option however I think that's kind of the lazy solution I'd much prefer if you have a look at the options that are available now and try to make them more interesting for example the movement could be more interesting by just allowing you to build more momentum so basically having a lower acceler ceration but a higher maximum speed the jump could give you some additional speed and maybe be higher if you perform it while sliding and the slide should also just have some advantages without any ramps cuz there are not that many ramps at the moment it should probably just help you to maintain more speed but at the cost of making yourself more difficult to control so that way if we watch an expert play the section they should be absolutely zooming across the level it makes it more rewarding to get good at the game and also it's more fun to watch imagine watching an expert play and it looks almost like watching a beginner play that's not very fun you want to see some exciting stuffff here

on a different note I experienced a little bit of wonkiness when performing jumps from a standing position sometimes you get quite a significant forward speed boost and sometimes you don't which feels inconsistent I'm pretty sure the problem is being caused by the difference between this and this if you didn't catch the difference let's play it a bit slower for you one time we have the forwards button first and then the jump button and then on a different occasion we have it the other way around and this all happens in milliseconds now imagine the player has a lot of grip and acceleration on the ground but not in the air then what you press first really matters cuz if you're standing and you start moving forwards you get a lot of speed and then if you jump you have a lot more speed than if you jump first and then you start moving forwards I'm not sure if that's exactly what's Happening Here what you do want is if you perform roughly the same inputs you want roughly the same output or result from it so if you programmed your movement script well then performing a jump like this and like this should do almost the same thing the trick is to avoid hard cut off points like this where the grip instantly goes from 100 to zero when the player loses contact to the ground what you can do is you can fade the grip rip out and that way small

differences and timing won't matter as much anymore for a movement Focus game like yours I think working some more on the movement is where you can get by far the most bang for your buck at the moment highly recommend it I also believe you do have some optimization potential for the audio of the game [Music] what was a bit of a mood killer for me was that you can hear Zar blades everywhere even when you're not anywhere near them because you can hear them through walls I think you should treat sound much like lighting where you can have different areas that are lit differently so you have a lot of visual variety you should also have a lot of acoustic Variety in the same way here's some clips where replace the environment sounds obviously the sound effects are missing but I think it gets the point across

[Music] same principles apply you want a lot of contrast you want some loud places you want some quiet places and the quiet places in particular is where this game can do a lot better like it never goes entirely quiet you can always always here traps going off I would really say we need some quiet places in this game cuz nothing is creepier than suddenly all of the sounds being gone and you just realize you're completely on your own I will make a similar point for the footsteps the footstep sound effects

currently sound the same everywhere as you do a lot of walking in the game I think it would be very refreshing to have a couple of different ones for different surfaces [Music] we already talked about the visuals they are very very good just one more idea I had there are some neat effects going on with the lava here already but I really think it could use some Bloom for that you first have to separate the brightest surfaces then you blur them and then you add them back to the original image but also game engines like Unity have these as buil-in effects so you don't have to build them yourself I think it looks very very nice on the lava this is the original this is the version with Bloom and here I added a little bit of Fu in the distance to make it look a bit more three-dimensional not that it's like a massive difference I really just get to

be a bit nitpicky this time is this game something people would buy that is a very interesting question I tried to make a little trailer mini mock up [Music] [Music] [Music] unfortunately the trailer is often times an afterthought but I think it can give you some very good insights on what's awesome about your game for example I think what looks best in your trailer so far is fast movement and memorable big landmarks those are really the two things that stand out to me so I think moving forwards you should try to focus on that and try to build on those strengths so that hopefully by the time you make your final release trailer you have some really cool and awesome

footage to show there really nice flowy movements and really epic memorable places that really wow people cuz that's what you have to do you have to wow people it's moving in a good direction but I want to see some more I want to see those two strengths built on a little further obviously I wish you the very best thanks for sending in the game keep at it [Music] let's address the elephant in the room right away I can tell this developer loves writing Cool Tech cuz there are thousands of enemies on screen and the game runs smooth as butter I think I've think I've never seen a game with so many units on screen that run so smoothly I was really mind blown like I I didn't drop a single frame throughout my entire playthrough it was crazy holy [ __ ]

man not even dropping a frame then we have a bunch of other crazy Tech going on like the enemies dropping fluids on the ground mining through rocks terraforming like this developer really enjoys writing Cool Tech and that's a massive Advantage cuz there are not a lot of developers like this out there most of us are just like scrambling a game together in what whichever way we can this means you automatically have less competition there are of course some other swarm games out there but not that many hey dad wake up no need to shed kill I'm awake I've been tracking a group of local Vermin heading your direction just like all of the games I picked this time the onboarding is very very good first of all we learn how to move turrets we get to see it in action we learn that we have some Hero characters and how to send those around we get to see some more Buck being shredded and that's already the end of mission one what I also like is that almost every level has something new for example the second level gives us a shotgun turret shotgun turret great for these Nar passengers what I find very interesting is that units are essentially less mobile than turrets cuz

turrets you can basically teleport you can just pick them up and drop them off wherever you want and they instantly teleport there while your units don't teleport and they have a little bit of travel time when you send them somewhere other than that they are pretty much the same they just shoot on stuff that's nearby between missions you get to buy some upgrades in your Hub and the next mission we learn that we have some active abilities for example we can fire a machine gun from orbit or we can place a Minefield and blow up an entire chunk of enemies good fine Roo more drilling means more the economy is not quite what I expected you can drill resources and the more resources you drill the more orbs drop from the sky you can then open those orbs like loot boxes and choose one out of three random rewards the economy system in general is very minimal you basically place your drill once and then you just receive passive rewards for the rest of the match and this seems to be the case for all of the maps that are available right now the objective is usually to survive for x amount of time we do that we win we move on to the next mission this is the first mission that does not feel like a tutorial Mission anymore there's quite a sizable amount of enemies from different

directions and I actually lost this Mission the first time around mainly because I did not see one of the spots where I could have built on additional drill my second attempt I just built that drill right away and then placed all of my turrets next to it and that was the correct solution we start the next mission with this mining vehicle which can drill through mountains to gain resources while this sounds interesting and unique on paper it's actually not the different from what we've seen before you just place all of your turrets around it and win the final mission of the demo surprised me cuz we're suddenly in control of this Mex Place more like vampire survivors where we can purchase upgrades for our Mech such as speed upgrades or fire rate upgrades we go around the map to gather resources and to collect or once we're done with that we hide in a corner and Camp it out for the rest of the match as you can see the game's really good it really good there's only one thing I'm slightly worried about it's not graphics it's not onboarding it's not the tutorial it's not the sound everything's really really nice the only thing I'm slightly worried about is strategic depth and not even gamepl in general I

think the game play itself as a whole feels fine we only have access to a few levels so we don't know how the game continues from here but some cracks are starting to show you're usually just protecting one spot on the map whether that's a stationary drill or a moving drill the turrets are clearly strongest when you Clump them all up so you just Clump all of your turrets up next to whatever you're trying to protect whenever your drill moves on to the next spot you just take all of your turrets with you and Clump them up again cuz remember you can just pick up your turrets and place them wherever you want you can basically teleport them across the entire map there's zero travel time you can do whatever you want with them there's no punishment for misplacing your turrets you just pick them up and put them somewhere else so what I'm saying is it does not feel very strategic you're just micromanaging a bunch of turrets and moving them around if they get into trouble every time I tried to put a turret somewhere else it was a horrible idea it immediately got overrun I'm not saying that it's impossible to pull off I'm just saying that it's the far far far far easiest strategy to just put everything next to your main objective and just leave it there I think strategic depth means that the player has interesting decisions to

make an interesting decision means that the correct answer cannot be obvious at the moment the answer for where to place your turrets is very very obvious you got to place them next to the objectives so in the best case it should be more situational sometimes it should be best to place your turrets next to the objective sometimes it should be best to place your turrets uh somewhere else on the map and there should be a lot of viable options not all of them should always be equally good but figuring out which is the best one should actually be a challenge if these are your objectives then your best strategy is to place all of your turrets like this that way the turrets all protect each other as well as the objective from the onslaught of enemies there a very strong incentive to clamp your turrets up like this that means we need a counter incentive to spread them out one obvious solution might be to just spread out the objectives a little more that would encourage you to use some of the available choke points to protect multiple objectives at once but you can see the layout still looks a little too formulaic I don't think this is the final solution let's go back to the drawing board with just one objective in the middle and now one very useful

design approach is to think about how would we want an optimized turret layout to look like and I think the answer would be something like this we want the turret spread out in an interesting way over a larger area we want to use the terrain features we want to use the natural walls in the level we want some clusters of turrets but we also want some turrets that can stand somewhere on their own if we would run this strategy at the moment then the turrets would be completely over run by enemies or at the very least some of them cuz you can't perfectly balance your defenses everywhere at once once again we can reverse engineer this and ask how does the enemy flow have to look like to allow for this kind of turret placement I think the answer is fairly obvious enemies should just not care about destroying turrets so much they should flock a lot more towards the objective I'm not saying they shouldn't attack turrets at all I'm just saying less less so if I place a turret somewhere on the outside not every single enemy in that area should suddenly flock there and just by changing that one thing about enemy Behavior you suddenly have so many more options for how to place your turrets in defense games enemy designs how you force the player to switch up

their play style nothing speaks against having one kind of enemy that does like chasing after turrets and another enemy type that does not like chasing after turrets this is in fact another complaint I want to make the enemies feel extremely zamy they look different but they feel exactly the same the job of different enemies is to make the player mix up their play style they don't do this at the moment it's not like I can strategize and be like ah I guess against this enemy I need this weapon and against this enemy I need to place my turrets this way no no matter which enemies they are you can always do the same thing at least for the demo I've played so far this is a huge missed opportunity and I hope we see more actual enemy variety later in the game maybe we can get some flying enemies maybe we can get some enemies whose bodily fluids actually do something in terms of gameplay I would love to see some soft counters so certain turrets are better against certain types of enemies obviously we don't know how the rest of the game looks like I was only allowed to play the demo for the demo and for the onboarding in particular I don't think any of what I've just said is that big of a problem when you start learning a new game you don't want to worry about enemy counters right out of the gate you just want to enjoy the spectacle and the game does that

beautifully well the only thing I'm flagging here is that in the long run later in the game players will want that strategic depth and that from what I've seen in the demo I'm a little bit worried if it's going to be there or not I think if the developer plays it well from here this could become a new classic in the genre I really see a lot of potential in this I wonder if the economy system could be a bit of a turnoff for some traditional strategy fans this is something I would recommend you conduct some careful market research on this certainly makes it more casual but I'm not sure if you're targeting a cas ual audience it limits your strategic options a little bit for example if I just want to build shotgun turrets only why not just let me do that you're relying on random drops to get what you want and at the same time it feels like it's interrupting the flow of the game a little bit but it also comes with some advantages definitely definitely make a careful and informed decision about this the next game did not make things easy

for me the premise is basically if Space Invaders was a Rog like card game which is a great premise you use your cards to move and to kill enemies and after every turn the enemies keep coming closer you have your draw pile you have your discard pile and you have your Mana typical card game stuff in this case it's called heat enemies that come too close to the bottom produce Doom at the end of the turn which is basically your health I would say it's very standard to the point that you feel right at home you instantly know how it works but at the same time it's different enough that it's still interesting and original for example you can always play cards that are too expensive but the disadvantage is that it burns the card burn cards are unusable for the rest of the battle but it's not that big of a deal battles aren't that long this opens up a lot of interesting strategies there's a lot of depth to the system already and all of this is built into a fairly standard Rog like system you can pick your battles there's a shop you can add and remove cards from your deck there are biomes there are boss fights there are items there are different classes you can play with it's a very standard deck building Rog like game but with enough uniqueness sprinkled in to make it feel fresh and

interesting the game makes you feel smart it looks fire it sounds very good it has personality and just in general it makes it very very hard for me to complain about anything maybe one design decision I find a little strange is just how tiny the game board is in the beginning of the game the actual gameplay area is maybe taking up 15% of the screen feels very tiny and then the cards the other important gameplay element are equally tiny so this entire thing feels like it would fit perfectly well on a mobile phone but to be honest I wouldn't change a thing the board gets a lot bigger the further you go so later on it's not really an issue anymore the generous spacing looks good it's visually pleasing everything has enough room to breathe it's just that first moment when you first open up the game and are like wait that's that's it that's that tiny square is the game a bit of an oddity but not a super big issue the only thing I would say is that I think it makes marketing a bit more difficult as well like imagine you're the one tasked to make the trailer for this game it's very static like there's not a lot of movement and the game is

Tiny like from a trailer making perspective but even here I have to say in their steam trailer they made the best of it they show a lot of quotes they have some text slides they show some of their cool art like whoever made this trailer is a giga professional I'm actually very impressed with what they managed to get out of this playing the game is more exciting than it looks and that makes it a bit of an uphill battle for marketing for sure I think the main question to think about here is what are you going to use to catch players attention bur we had the flowy movement and we had the Epic memorable landmarks Iden had a ton of Cool Tech and really massive enemy SWS and for your game Star Vaders I'm currently thinking what could possibly fill that Ro what could you use for that attraction factor to attract players arguably probably the game mechanics cuz I think anybody you explain the game to will probably like it the problem is it's not that easy to show like for example you're not going to be able to explain your overcharge mechanic in the trailer easily it's just not going to happen What You ideally want is something that's easier to show in screenshots and in short clips and in

your trailer so maybe one potential candidate for this could be very cool card combos chain reactions that are happening on the board it needs to be something that people can understand very very quickly from just a couple of seconds of gameplay and from a couple of screenshots CU if you know anything about how people browse store Pages they basically watch a couple of seconds of of the trailer and click on a couple of screenshots they don't read anything they don't have a look at anything else so that's really what matters that's where you have to draw people in you only have a couple of seconds and whatever you decide for make sure you make that feature of your game a bit more pronounced like this is not just a marketing question this is also potentially adjusting your game a little bit to help your marketing for example if you're like okay we want to showcase cool Combos and cool chain reactions then maybe add some more stuff into that game that you can use to show that for example enemies that themselves explode and damage enemies around all of the unique selling points you have at the moment are difficult to show cuz they're mostly

hidden in the gameplay your fantastic art cell is a strong selling point you definitely got that going for yourself so the only nitpicky feedback I can come up with is have a selling point that you can more easily show in your trailers and in your marketing material figure out how you can wow people to get them through the door and then your awesome gameplay is going to do the rest H so I could either keep nitpicking to stretch out the video or I could just admit that it's a very good game and that I have nothing more to say H I think I'm going to do the letter that was really really awesome very positive episode please support the developers I put all of the links in the description I'm very sorry to all of the awesome games like there were so many games that would have really deserved to get some feedback I'm very very sorry that I didn't get to all of them but we'll definitely do this again thank you very much and I'll see you then