PyWeek - Universe Factory 26 - feedback

Goldfish navigates a slightly-3D maze of pipes and junctions with yucky flowing sewer water. Art and rendering is all in 3D, though there is a 2D minimap to help you not getting lost. Game looks good. However: it's a maze of twisty little passages that all look alike. And the gameplay involves navigating, and occasionally opening drains and jumping up a level. I think playing the game properly would require lots of notes and graph paper to plot out where you are, which simply isn't my kind of game.

Excellent game! First off, top notch in production. The story and voice overs were great and the boss fight was fun (I was hoping that we would get to see it drown). I did get confused about the mechanics at first. The water pressure bar made me think it was an important part of the mechanics and that I had to learn it somehow (especially when you get to the part that says you can get stuck), but it turned out not to be too relevant. The maze-like levels were very disorienting, but the top-down section was a lot nicer. I wonder if the entire game would be better off top-down. The whirlpool part was frustrating, especially because I didn't realize that you could get the fish food by swimming closer instead of trying to jump above the hole. Overall, this was a pretty cool adventure, and I had fun. Thanks for the game!

Nice game. One section was weird because I could more outside of the tube.

Excellent 3D maze with a cool character to navigate it. Spooky voices.
There was once my fish slipped out of the maze and wandered the ether until I quit.
Thanks for the cheat codes. I often need them.

Very pretty game - graphics and sound are great, and the map is huge.

Wasn't really sure what I was supposed to be doing at points, and it wasn't clear where I was or where I was going from the overhead map.

My first impressions:
Oh no! This game looks better then my! And it has a minimap!
Oh yes! This is a team entry!
Oh no! It is a bit buggy. And there is not much to do there.
Boss fight was interesting. But all other is not.
I only finished the game because I need to judge and I used cheats.

I couldn't figure out the octopus, but enjoyed the experience a lot till then.

A great looking game. Love the voice acting! :-)

Can see you've put a lot of work into this!
Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to get past the first level, so I had to make liberal use of the cheat codes to see everything. Amazing what you've managed to create.

I think maybe making the first level a bit easier would help, just to ease players into it.

Really awesome game overall. Consistent style, varying mechanics (drains, rapids, pressure, map) and epic voice acting as a segue.

Kudos for the 3D, varying texture animations, challenging and interesting map layout, food and energy ideas and the narrative (with dramatic ending!)

UV scrolling was good but had some issues in places (sideways scrolling).

Some issues in performance (unplayable on the fastest rapids section) and intermittent lag when showing 2 sections at once. Personally would prefer a shadeless aesthetic compared with low-poly and solid shading.

Really good game, quite well polished for a one week project.

Improvements could be dialogue boxes (subtitles) and perhaps more creatures (enemy/friendly) in the sewers. Really liked the camera movement when moving between sections, but on rapids a bit distracting so might be better with a more static camera so you can clearly see obstacles and the directions to avoid.

Well done!

What I WANT to do is take off one billion points for the pipe that doesn't connect to anything at the end. What I'm going to do instead is say "good job"

That freakin pipe, though, man.

Quite an ambitious, albeit buggy game. Cute theme and story, although it's a bit hard to follow the way it's presented. The controls are unfortunately quite buggy, sometimes not being able to enter pipes that are nonetheless marked green, the controls sometimes seeming to steer in the opposite direction, and having been pushed outside of the bounds more than once. It's also possible to get stuck with no obvious way to reset. Opening up the map makes instruction text overlap, making it hard to read.

Unfortunately the game is very stuttery even on my GeForce 1070, and the camera is rather dizzying. It's quite impressive what you managed to do with just OpenGL in PyWeek, and I think with more work it could be quite a fun game, but it has serious playability issues that I have to factor into my scoring for Production and Fun.

It's really cool that you used OpenSCAD, though.

This was a good game. I am always impressed by well done 3D games, it seems like a lot of work. I'll have to try it one of these weeks.

The controls are flaky. When swimming against current it's kind of random what direction key you must use, pair that with getting lost all the time and you have a recipe for frustration. The map-cheat menu helped. Helped a lot. There are sounds, music, voice, graphics, animations, plot.. all of it, and all of it good, so maxed production value from me. Reminds me a bit of that fish level in MDK2... I hated that level.

Its pretty nice just as a goldfish simulator. I felt the game was solving too many of the puzzles for me though. The flow difference cuts down on my options so much.

Well, except that puzzle level. I failed the first time and went back to do it right later on. I think you needed something that could be done and undone to make it more puzzly, if you wanted to make it more of a puzzle, that is. Maybe a water transistor?

Other than the fish simulator, I liked the story voicing and pretty cool idea in the first place.

Flawless production overall as well.

this is a very good game

This game is an impressive technical achievement for a PyWeek. The flow of water through the pipes makes it really clear where you can go and where you cannot, and the camera following you through the pipes feels very dynamic.

I think "pressure" system didn't actually contribute to the game. I just followed the green/yellow indicators and pressed space when told to, and the game just solved itself. At the boss level I avoided the tentacle thing but I didn't see it attack me or anything so it was not challenging.