PyWeek - Team Nerd Paradise - feedback

Wow! Lots of story. Very imaginative. Many thanks!

Really fun and awesome production. I felt like I had dusted of an old SNES rpg.

Very impressive. There must have been a lot of work on this game. The game is huge for a Pyweek. The graphics, sound and music are great. The story is good. However, I had three issues that made me give up on this game. The first is that the world is too open, there's little direction. I got lost a few times and went the wrong way once, which was annoying. That, combined with the fact that there are a lot of rooms that feel like pointless mazes (particularly the southern forest, which I mistakenly thought was the way to the factory - I did get to a factory-looking house, though, but I guess that wasn't it) and you walk too much. The third thing is that the enemies stop getting challenging after you get the gun. If these things were fixed, I would have liked the game much, much more (particularly the walking too much thing). Still, this game is great, it was very fun until the point I stopped. And I'm impressed at the amount of content. Excellent work.

There were some odd render orderings but the game is very impressive for a pyweek entry.There was a bit too much walking around in some places for my liking. Well done.

Smeg, this thing is huge! The Fire Temple area seems unfinished -- lots of gadgets that don't seem to do anything -- and it's easy to mess up the plot by going somewhere too soon, but on the whole a very impressive effort that kept me playing for a long time.

Wow, that's quite the extensive game you've created there!

Really exceptional production! :) The fun I should have been having with this game was hampered by the vast amount of walking across empty screens I had to do to complete it. I think the game needs something to make it a little more distinctive -- something to really remember the game by (besides the walking :).

The graphics and general concept were very nice, but most of the gameplay consisted of walking enormous distances between points of interest. The gameworld could have been compressed to a fraction of its size.

The torch puzzle was frustrating because it appears that brute force was the only way to solve it.

Very cool idea, and I appreciate what you tried to aim for, but I think a shorter more polished game would have been much more effective. The huge overworld screens which go on endlessly full of the same weak enemies (which are even easier after upgrading weapons) and absolutely nothing interesting to look at really dilute the awesome sauce that the game contains, to the point where it leaves a bad taste in my mouth instead of a good one. Really could have been amazing with a little more polish as a smaller game. (drawing sprites in y order for instance, fewer but more interesting areas, more enemy variety etc). I really hope you continue to enhance it, it could be a great zelda clone with some more work.

Wow, you put a lot of work into that. I didn't even get all the way through, and am running out of time to rate all the games, but I will probably go back to yours later.

Oh, one time, I resumed play from last save and was stuck inside a wall. That was kind of funny rather than annoying.

Unfortunately I hadn't enough time to play it, but what a production!

Quite enjoyable, although there are too many parts that just consist of walking through empty
rooms.

Seems like you put a lot of effort into this. Unfortunately I couldn't really enjoy it because of the embarrassing dialog and the generic zelda-like gameplay.

I am completely humbled and blown away at how effective your team is! You've got a lot of talent and a lot of dedication, and I hope that you'll continue to make games, either for Pyweek or otherwise.
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But I'm afraid that I didn't really like Shackled Stones. I found the gameplay to be really formulaic. Most of the items you collect are used only once, so they don't really contribute to the overall gameplay. There are what, three kinds of enemy? And you basically kill them all the same way. The world was huge but it felt so empty. Mostly, I felt like I spent way too long walking from place to place, or wandering around not really sure where I was going. Even the temples mostly seemed to involve lots of walking to the end of an unnecessarily long hallway with no enemies to retrieve a key, then walking back. The one interesting moment I remember was the light temple. That was fairly well done with a cool puzzle.
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I got as far as beating the Life Temple and almost finding my way to the cave maze. At that point I guess I accidentally hit the fullscreen key, because the game crashed saying it was unable to go to 1400x900 resolution (my monitor maxes at 1280x1024). I started it up again to realize that the last save point was over two temples back. At the prospect of having to redo the torch puzzle and make it through the forest maze again twice, I promptly gave up. That forest maze was much too long.
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The dialogue is fine, if not that original, but if you accidentally skip a line, you miss where you're supposed to go next, and there's no way to figure it out.
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So, yeah. Less open space, more and different enemies, better use of different items, clearer short-term objectives, more save points (or just let you save anywhere, why not?) would have improved this game's fun factor. For more innovation, maybe some creative puzzles or unusual items. It definitely seems like you had the idea for the game before the theme was announced, and you said "let's emphasize that the stones are caught by the government" in order to make it fit. That's legal, but I think it tends to avoid innovation. I think you might have come up with something more interesting if you'd gotten your gameplay from the theme, rather than the other way around.

Wow, what a scale of production! You guys are crazy :). Must have been a great learning
experience! The light temple worked best of all I think. If I could pick two things to fix they
would be the collision model (as it is you have to go under a door to enter it) and the fire temple.

Awesome work! The ending is a little weak (seems like you ran out of time) and the increasing
chore of running around, finding the right way gets a bit too tedious after a while (again,
seems like you ran out of time). Nevertheless: This is an awesome pyweek game!

a game with proper story line, cutscenes and awesome graphics.. amazing production value.

That was insanely long, or maybe epicly epic. I'm exhausted. Was it really necessary to go through 3 empty rooms inbetween any A and B?

I really wanted to rate this game higher. It's clear that a lot of effort went into it and it's well beyond the normal scope of a pyweek game. However, there are a few elements that made it far less fun to play than it could have been.

There are a lot of instructions that are delivered in the middle of some dialog (such as "go to the swamps to the northeast") that I can't find a way to refer back to when I load my saved game to next day.

Many of the puzzles are unnecessarily opaque and frustrating. It took me ages to figure out what the light puzzle did, because it affected things several rooms away and required much tedious wandering around before I realised that it actually did anything. The torches in the dark temple were just mean, and I nearly gave up in frustration right there.

Is the maze actually necessary? I finally gave up when I got lost.

Although the game contains an impressive amount of content, it feels like it sort of dies out long before the game ends, long periods of time you just kinda walk around without solving any puzzles or fighting any enemies. The game also kinda needs a faster or maybe a shooting enemy, after you get the fire gun you don't loose any more hp for the rest of the game.

AWESOME! Best game I have played for a long time. Could have a better ending.

The game is not particularly innovative nor exceptionally fun. But it's the best production I've seen so far on Pyweek #11, and I'm nearly done judging the entries.

I enjoyed playing this game, till I got first error after pressing 'W', don't know why... When I wanted to load the game, it was from the begining and also with a bug, stuck in the wall :D So I created new game, clicked through, and when I played, one beast killed me very soon, and I appeared stuck in a wall in the first level again...