PyWeek - Himalia - feedback

The way guards you can't see suddenly turn around and kill you is rather frustrating.

A nice game, reminds me of Metal Gear :)

Irritatingly difficult even on easy.

Enjoyed playing the game. Found it hard to find where the king was at first but got there in the end. Many thanks!

This could have been fun, but there were a few problems, probably due to lack of time. The two main ones are that they turn unpredictably and I can't hide behind buildings. In fact, it seems buildings and rocks and trees have absolutely no effect in the game at all. They make even the easiest level quite hard, which is too bad, because this game definitely looked fun. It's frustrating for a player to think you're doing ok and suddenly lose because someone turned too fast and without notice. Graphics are very good but they feel inconsistent with each other. Music feels a bit out of place for this game. The concept is good, I would have liked it if you had time to solve these problems.

This game seemed to be either easy or hard with no middle ground on difficulty. There was some odd lack of alpha blending.

Cute concept. Game play a little frustrating (I couldn't quite tell when turning guards could be expected to see me).

Even the easy level is extremely difficult. It is impossible to tell when an observer is about to turn around, so success depends on random chance rather than skill.

Easy didn't seem so easy. The guards that instantly change direction gives you no wiggle room, and in fact most of the time I die without even having a clue as to who saw me or what I did wrong. Nice gfx though. Just a few tweaks and it could be pretty fun. Good effort!

Funny game and nice music, it fits the game.

The idea had promise, but needs more work on game balance and more variery in terms of board layouts and options like using cover.

Tricky, quite cool.

+ Good, solid interpretation of the theme - Only one level - Instantaneous game over - Sprites
have non-transparent background - Sprites flicker - 10fps (could be Linux) I guess you ran out
of time, though the amount and quality of assets is pretty high for a one-man effort. I see a fun
concept in all this, but it's just too short.

What spoils the fun is that the guards turn instantaneously, giving you no opportunity to avoid their gaze. This is the most serious issue, but I think it would also be a good idea to give the player other means of dispatching the guards and to place the guards deterministically — the random placement can lead to quite impossible situations and prevents the player from learning the patrol routes of the guards.

Even without these problems I'm afraid it would be a bland game. I hope you learned a lot and make a more imaginative game next time!

Good job with the menu transition effects! ;-) Sadly, the game itself crawles along at only 7-10 FPS with stuttering music (didn't have that problem with other pyglet entries). I played through easy mode, anyway. Slow fun.

A reasonable game idea, with a single fatal flaw. The first few times I played, I couldn't understand why I kept suddenly dying. Eventually I realised it was the guards turning around and looking my way. Given the density of the nasties, the apparent randomness of their patrol paths, and the length of their vision regions, it makes every game a roll of the dice instead of a test of skill.

Giving some kind of indication of when a guard is about to turn would make the game much more enjoyable.

Fun concept, though I felt frustrated a bit by the mechanics. It might have felt better to even have a moment of visibility before dying, since when the guards field of view changes there's no warning that you've been killed. Feels a bit like a random punishment at a visceral level.

Hey. Your game is fabulous, but I had to give it a low rating for 'fun', just because it ran very slowly (about 2fps) on my old laptop (2005-era Thinkpad T60.) This made it really hard to play - often I could not get near enough to the king for him to start following me.

Minor quible: you didn't normalize your sad trombone sound.

This was a bit disappointing, I was expecting something where some skill would be involved, but because of how the patrol patterns worked, it was all luck.

Not much fun, really. There seems to be no strategy other than waiting around for a favourable configuration of enemies, which is rather boring.

I think your idea was sound, but the execution could use some improvement. There wasn't much
strategy to it. It seemed to be mostly luck whether the level was winnable or not. I died 3 times
on the medium setting, but then finished the hard setting on my first try no problem. The
sprites had black boxes around them, and despite all the detail poured into the terrain, none
of it mattered - you could walk anywhere. In your in-game help, some of the characters showed up
as boxes for me. If you use characters like + and * in the controls, make sure your help font can
display them! Also, it would have been great if you'd packaged cocos along with the game.

I'm really mixed on how to evaluate production on this one. The menus are all animated, there has been a good selection of fonts and imagery. There are plenty of graphical issues, though, like missing characters in the font and visible background color in moving sprites. Also, you get to walk through everything.

The game's gameplay is easy to understand, but it gets old in the second run into the game already.