sorry for not being a gentleman for expressing my frustration as a player for a level design in a porn game forum and expressing my opinion by saying "a poor level design", what a blasphemy and cuntiness! either your game had been receiving too many shit and you are fed up thus overly sensitive or you have never received any negative feedback for a long time. best of luck on your development journey.
Others Val Karee [v0.5.30] [ValKaree]
- Thread starter valkaree99
- Start date
I want to chime in and say feedback is good but it is hard for developers to listen to feedback in a variety of tones, some of which are rude. My recommendation for any dev is not to turn into another YanDev and get into arguments over feedback because it makes the dev look bad and results in a loss in productivity.
Silence towards criticism goes a long way towards invalidating it. If multiple people keep mentioning the same criticism point then perhaps it is worth looking into. A dev should only reply back to valid criticism after checking out the issue topic and realizing the players were correct to complain. The dev can wait a bit longer to address invalid criticism but this should be done with a longer proper document / interview / podcast episode to justify your position on why a large group of players are wrong about that direction of development for the game. Ultimately however that just means there is a disconnect between devs and players for what the game is now and they have the right to leave out of disinterest.
As for the game, I thought it was nifty for a while, a kind of simple but well-balanced game for a fair distance. The story definitely comes off extremely cheesy so it is good that the dev wants to fix that issue. I stopped playing when I met the super monster alone in the room who ran at turbo speed. The dead woman's letter expressed the need to drink monster sperm to get through but alas, I didn't find a monster nearby or advice hint to steer me to one. Surrendering to the lone super monster did not work to complete the room's objective it nor was in feasibly killable.
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Now I get why you put 2 hints for the same thing xD, I'm sorry for when I said it was unnecessary lol
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HOW is the tree counterintuitive?!?!?!?! It's litterally 2 second after the last hint xD
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The "monster" appear in the room before the gal with the hint....You know, The VERY obvious spiked zombie near the portal..........People.....
Sorry, I wasn't interested enough to try that corpse. The necro logic wasn't intuitive to me, I was expecting a living monster to interact with.
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So you passed a interactable zombie, and completely forgot 2 second after.....oh my, you are going to have a meltdown when you reach the syringe puzzle xD
I really like new level one. Monica playing with beheaded Val is fucking great
I am stuck on finding someone called Raven for commanding officer. It is his 3rd mission. Any walkthrough would be nice to have.
I'm much smarter than that, how do you think I got that far into the game already? My "melt down" is to calmly stop playing this incomplete game. It's fast and painless. The game is simply "okay". Besides, if all of the syringes are in the same room it's definitely something I can't miss.
Edit: The next stage's puzzles were still fetch-quests, but they were more intuitive. I've played enough to comment on helpful features and revisions for the game here.
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Valkaree99 - thanks for sharing your work. Offering some brief feedback on the latest release, in case it is useful.
- The updated zones feel and play much better than the original versions. Things are tied together better, there's more life to the world and characters. Yes, porn logic is in full effect, but that's absolutely OK in a porn game.
- There are still uneven bits in the game that could use another pass, or a different approach in future levels. For example, the puzzle or challenge design.
- The new "get Newt to talk to the player" is an example of a challenge that works well. It requires the player to spend a moment thinking, it requires the player to engage with the game systems and use them in a new way.
- On the flip side, there's the "get the handcuffs for Newt" fetch quest. There's no real challenge here, just tedium. Slowly walking across maps you've already cleared, remembering which portal leads where, etc. is not really engaging. It stretches out the playing time, but does little beyond that.
- All that is to say that I would encourage you to include fewer fetch quests and more creative puzzle elements (like Newt) in future chapters.
This reply is on topic with what I dislike most about the game. The tedium. Oh gosh is the game tedious for a very long way. I want to be engaged playing the game, and playing a walking maze with tons of backtracking combines 2 things gamers complain about most in games: large worlds with little to do for all the distance travelled, and backtracking.
I just finished all of the game version I had (0.4.10), through the stage "Backdoor". The last stage was likely the best stage for content, and oddly easier to complete. It brings to mind what feels wrong about the game from start to finish clearly.
- The moment players notice they pace around rooms relatively slowly, can not jump, and have only one melee attack animation, most action gamers opt out of the game early. This is definitely not a "platformer", though some verticality can help make stage navigation and enemy combat more fun.
- There is little visual variety in level design which makes everything feel too similar. The game is definitely unfinished so I'll forgive that, but the sensation of a lack of progression and interest can lead many to walk away early from a game that feels so barebones.
- A lack of directional combat options makes the game feel particularly simple. Combat requirements like crouching shots and kicks, along with diagonal shots and manually aimed shots will help make the game's combat more varied. Combat with enemies that can be defeated by jumping along with enemies that are exceptionally good at dealing damage to airborne players can bring vertical variety to combat, while enemies that require different posturing and manual aim can bring strategic variety to combat. Which brings to mind the relevant issue that causes many players to get bored early...
- There is only a single monster available for 3 stages of the game: the zombie. It has a single sex animation solo and a single animation on a pair attack. Improvements in this area are to add more enemies that enable gameplay variety in point 3, and more animation variety to let players feel less tired of encountering enemies. It is even harder to compensate for waves of the same exact enemy -- they scale in height but it's all a blob of grey or green whenever enemies do appear.
- A much more difficult issue to fix, it is hard to recommend a solution that feels comfortable without changing much of the game: once the player notices they can flop onto the ground for invulnerability frames to dodge or attack, trap avoidance and combat becomes static. As if game design tries to compensate for this, more enemies spawn and traps become more persistent. In the stage "Backdoor" there is a room with repeatably firing razor blades and densely-spawning goblins that would be prohibitively difficult to dodge without flopping for invulnerability, but once that trick is used the room becomes rote like so many others. Aggressive pseudo-dodge availability leads to aggressively hostile game design. I think both would need a nerf for the game to feel less jank, which is not a problem if complex combat and movement from points 1 and 3 are used.
- The storytelling is abysmal in the earliest stages, and while music was a point of poll topic it's really not so important compared to the overall feel -- players will get a cynical feeling seeing slow gameplay juxtaposed with fast music, the trudging ground-bound tedium wears down the joy of the game well before the player gets to stage "Backdoor". I would recommend music be considered after core gameplay flow and story is cemented to confirm the speed and tone of the music.
In short, the game has way too much walking and backtracking and not enough combat involvement or level design. I might try version 0.4.51, or wait a while longer to revisit the game at a later version.
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How? I was born early in the 90s. My childhood missed Roblox and I had no will to play it.
You're just as wrong about this ad-hominem attack on me as you were about the last one. Maybe instead of attacking users on baseless hypotheticals that reveal how young you are, you can focus on being helpful.
I still have more criticism on the game for the puzzles themselves -- one relevant bit of childhood experience I did have growing up was a puzzle MMORPG with up to 300 vs 300 member battles of player vs player or player vs NPC on one screen. If you figure out which game that is you'll realize I'm kinda old and carry some game experience. The game ValKaree lacks actual puzzles and instead offers fetch quests with descriptions of various obfuscation levels.
It's a simple game so I'll credit it on integrating platforming-like elements in its walking gameplay (dodging traps) and puzzle-like gameplay in its combat (order of operations for actions). What the game distinctly lacks is a more firm form of puzzle. I'll try to elaborate on what I can remember in this brief window.
If a game is anything but main menu UI and a single kind of puzzle, you can treat it as a multi-genre game. It takes effort and further design resources to go from adventure game to puzzle game, so most of the time a game would be at most a 2-genre game, that is your main game and the smaller one. Like Nier Automata's spaceship-shooter style levels, Bioshock's pipe maze completion puzzles, and "enter the password" puzzles. But note that last one isn't a fully self-contained puzzle. When you need a puzzle for few resources, you want the logic to be puzzling without more coding or art. So let me suggest some helpful ideas.
- Try not to rely on fetch quests, but know many things abstracted become fetch quests -- a kill quest that you need to tell an NPC about completing is just a fetch quest where you kill stuff and deliver verification.
- Quizzes are king for puzzling on lack of investment. From SCUMMs to that notable section of Banjo-Kazooie to some combination lock you need a code for, putting clues in your environment is a way to make a puzzle on the fly. The trouble is, if your puzzle is really the kind of thing that is subconsciously answered within 10 seconds and has no wrong answers, it doesn't make for a good puzzle.
In ValKaree some paths are obfuscated by a kind of riddle-hint, but most of them you know the answer to immediately even before you see the room where it becomes relevant so the puzzle is too easy. On the other side, sometimes a hint is given that does not seem very related to what you'll be seeing past, present, or future. It's a stronger puzzle, and it's fine for some players to feel stumped, but if there's only one hint and it feels too removed from the solution discovered players will think it feels cheap and they'll regret the experience. That's normal in a puzzle game, just be careful and put a 2nd hint around somewhere.
- If you're going for a more robust puzzle try to make sure it's within 1 room or 2 neighboring rooms. Walk-Fetch-Backtrack is a loop people get tired of extremely quickly, hence why highly-rated games have a variety of puzzles but they're usually all contained in one room, even if the room has to be giganta-huge with lots of verticality. This is the expectation for puzzles with mandatory progress requirement, especially. You don't want players to need to try too hard for mandatory puzzles -- your player will drop the game if the puzzle is mandatory and the game is not fun enough to justify the effort and time.
If you want to give players optional rewards, the puzzle components can be spread far apart across rooms or even whole continents like Baldur's Gate, Divinity: Original Sin, or any other good CRPG. The more motivation there is for a prize, the more time and effort players will be glad to put in. Although ValKaree currently uses combat as a puzzle so it's currently not a good idea to put weapon upgrades behind optional puzzles they could miss.
- Small puzzles with new mechanics can substitute for any complex task, how much you want them involved is up to you. Anything from combat to healing to movement speed on a set course to how many resources you can gather to more exciting crafting. If you expand the game and tell a story with more elements you can justify new puzzles.
My previous suggestion post focused on the action part which can make the game better even if there were zero or lame puzzles, but for less effort and resources puzzles can be used instead. If the game had very few major battles it would be boring (which it was, there were no boss fights). If the game wants to have varied live-action boss fights then it'd have to majorly change with an outright better combat system, which is difficult and costly. However, if the bosses were puzzle fights then there is less effort involved in art and mechanics. One puzzle that gets faster, more challenging, and more complex over time can cover every boss fight this game could have in a fun way.
I hope one day ValKaree will be more enjoyable. Games are entertainment made of dreams and passion, so I'd gladly throw in my own perspective if it helps the end result.
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You really got mad about this game xD. Anyway, if you remove your head from your ass, you can see that the 2 real puzzles in this game actually follow your points:
1- There is only 1 real fetch quest for now, and it helps moving the game forward, showing you new areas of the level
2- The "locked combination door" trope is among the most BORING type of puzzle made by man, and imo it makes the game extremely skipable (if you just look the combination online). Looking for the key (just like in Valkaree, with the combination) is a better way of making this, But this is just opinions. Also I think a too difficult puzzle actually kills the players that lack investment. Now, weren't you the one stuck in more than a puzzle in Valkaree? " if your puzzle is really the kind of thing that is subconsciously answered within 10 seconds and has no wrong answers, it doesn't make for a good puzzle." cit. you. The part where you say that a puzzle needs wrong answers is true, if you want it to be the focus of the level (read the name of each levels dude).
3- Most of the puzzle in Valkaree are already within 1 or 2 close rooms. The fetch quests aren't many, nor that bad, as you get to explore new parts of the levels, only very rarely you need to backtrack (I think of the nurse part, but that's it)
4- The game is going that way, so don't worry, check back in a few months kid!
Being rude is childish. Act your supposed age please.
- Feels like more than 1 fetch quest, but okay.
- Yes, passwords are the most boring option, and the most lazy. If someone uses a guide for spoilers like passcodes it's fine because it helps people who need help. Quizzes or codes are a kind of unofficial fetch quest in its own way but sometimes feels more fun or faster. "Fun" as in finding and remembering an interesting scene, or "fast" when you can just remember it instead of remember and travel twice. Wrong answers to quizzes can lead to different paths, often an element of visual novels. But yes, without proper puzzles a ton of objectives abstract into fetch jobs.
I admit I was once stuck in a fetch task because I got so bored of the game I didn't care to try. Kind of like doing a really boring task for a couple of hours then being asked to process something not normal for you to think about, like sucking the dick of a dead impaled corpse when there's a need for semen mentioned from a live version of that enemy. I wasn't horny enough nor enjoying myself enough to care about the task so I figured nobody would be rude enough to be hostile on the thread if I asked for a hint towards the task, but then you arrived. Anyone can get stuck on something at any time, it's human nature and people are different. People asking for hints often isn't just a sign that the game is too hard, it is a sign that the game is too boring for them to try. I've won much more difficult games because they were fun.
- Yeah, I gave redundant advice there as a caution to confirm its truth. I'm not really sure how much backtracking is involved but the comment of the game feeling "tedious" appeared in the Reviews section and the main thread at least twice, and I felt the word coming to mind often.
- Maybe I would if I want to try a later version. Although you shouldn't call people on this forum kids, that's the most stereotype insult to come from actual kids online. Combined with your odd hostility when I asked for a hint, your mention of Roblox, and your "xD" emote it's really showing your age. Maybe I'm just super-sensitive to fetch or other general tedium because time passes for me faster and I'm just weak to boredom at this point.
Easier? Explain what's bad about it, I blew through and didn't notice.
What I did notice was a lack of key rebinding and controller support which is worth mentioning. The game runs through WebView2 made out of JS and CSS so it's effectively a browser game. It may need a new subprocess to deal with control config and joypads.
I recommend AntiMicroX or Joy2Key for those who need that help in the meantime.