I need criticism of my game(ukz art games)

[ukz530]

Hi! As you know, I am ukz530.

I wrote this thread because I wanted to get some general criticism or feedback on my game series.
I read the notice once more. I hope I didn't violate the rules.

(Content)

(Contact)

(Gigant)



I made four games. The games are 'Fall', 'Contact', 'Content' and 'Giant'.
I was helped by many people in the process of making it. It's been improving little by little.

But my game is a style that very few fans love, and I've always wondered if I can keep this style. I still don't know if this is right.

I would like fans who like point-and-click adventures to do as much as possible, but I am saying that it is impossible in my own style.

This is a low level of art, story, and level design in my game. Or maybe it's a problem because it's low overall.
Or they just don't like qte. They may not like monsters coming out.

It's easier to understand if my game is "overwhelming negative" on SteamPage and so on.But it's not like that either.

It's a dilemma that I always do, but I can't answer it well.

So, if anyone has played my game, I'm curious about your opinion.

[Snarky]

Hey ukz530! I'm glad you're asking this on the forum, since I think constructive criticism can be really helpful to improve. When I helped out with the translation of Gigant I had some thoughts about aspects of the game that didn't quite work, in my opinion, but since you said that the game was more or less done, while fixing the points that stood out to me would have taken significant rework, I mostly didn't bring them up.

I should start by saying that your games have achieved a pretty decent level of success here. Both Contact and Content were nominated for Best Short Game in the most recent AGS Awards, and you've built an audience of fans who like what you do, including several game designers and developers. I think you are in a good position to build on that success, improve your skills further, and expand your audience. Take me, for example: I tried your games because of the AGS Award nominations, and liked them!

Of course, we are a small community, and your games are a bit "niche" for the genre, so that may not translate to a large number of players in the short term. I think I understand you to mean that you want to get more people to play your games, and make them enjoyable to a broader audience? And also just make your games better? (BTW, I would be interested to understand your longer-term ambitions. Are you hoping to go professional as a commercial game maker? Or are you more concerned with the quality of your games for their own sake? Do you want to branch out from your "signature style" into more diverse games, or focus on getting better at what you already do?)

So, these are my thoughts about where you might want to focus your efforts and perhaps change your approach a little:

Not your typical adventure
I think the greatest strengths of your games are the atmosphere and distinctive style. Your games are unlike any other adventure games. The stories and settings are surreal, dreamlike, and the design mixes point-and-click elements with other genres in unusual ways. Even small things, like how when you pick something up you get a dialog box on the screen describing what it is: that's not how adventure games typically do it. And of course the QTEs.

I think you should maintain this approach, and even look for ways to develop it further. Are there other elements of gameplay, design or presentation you can introduce to set your games apart from typical point-and-clicks? For example, maybe there is a different way to do conversations. Or maybe you could introduce something like the "Objectives List" seen in more open-world titles. (Those are just two ideas off the top of my head; you should think of what you want to do, and what elements of other genres and styles you like.)

Of course, this won't be for everybody. Some people don't like monster stories or gory death scenes. Some don't like fantasy or surrealism. Some don't like QTEs. Some don't like games that aren't set in America or with American characters. (And a game about the generational conflicts in Korean society is probably a hard sell in general.) But I think it's better to make something that really appeals to some people, than to water it down in an attempt to be acceptable to everybody. You could think about making some things optional: for example, if you had a setting to turn off (auto-win) the QTEs, or to censor/omit the gore, that might open it up to some players who would enjoy it if only not for those particular things.

Puzzles and gameplay
In Gigant, I think the greatest weakness is the puzzle design and gameplay. The puzzles are not very well integrated into the story: Often, the link between your objective and the sequence of steps needed to get there is very unclear. It feels arbitrary that this is how you solve the problem, so as a player, you have to "guess the designer's mind." Sometimes, the objective itself is unclear: you can be stuck with no idea of what your next step should be. (For example, the attempt to scare the people out of the truck by faking a Gigant attack. I have no idea why that's something I would want to do.)

This was also to some extent a problem with your earlier games, but since Gigant is so much bigger, it makes it worse. It was hard to get stuck in Fall because there were only so many rooms, hotspots and inventory items, so you could always brute-force a puzzle if it didn't make sense. Here, it is easy to get lost. In some cases, you have to go back many screens to some place you last visited a long time ago in order to pick up something you now need (and a couple of times, there are changes in faraway locations without any indication that you should revisit them).

Also, the tone of the puzzles doesn't quite fit the tone of the story. The story is pretty dark and serious without much humor, but the puzzles are very Monkey Island-y, with absurd item combinations that would never work "in reality," ignoring physics and common sense. It reminds me of two puzzles in serious games that have become infamous for being silly and breaking the tone of the games: the "rubber duck" puzzle in The Longest Journey and the "cat hair mustache" puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3. Even though the setting in Gigant is a bit surreal, the whimsical tone of the puzzles is a poor fit for the moody and gruesome story.

So while the strength of your games is that they are so distinctive in other aspects, that they're something only ukz530 could make, the puzzles feel like imitations of "typical" adventure game puzzles. If you are going to rely on standard puzzles I think they need to be better, but personally I would prefer fewer of these puzzles and more unique/alternative/hybrid forms of gameplay. For example, both Content and Gigant revolve around earning money, so actually making this a gameplay element, with an in-game economy where you have to pay expenses while making money off various missions, whether that's collecting monster eggs or editing YouTube videos and attracting sponsors, would be an interesting approach. (Again, that's just the first idea that comes into my head.)

Graphics, sound and polish
Your graphics and animations are great for freeware games, but I'm not sure they quite meet the expectations for a commercial game. They are a little bit "rough" and uneven in ways that make you come across as a talented amateur rather than a professional. (For example, towards the end of Gigant I had a hard time understanding what I was looking at on the screen with the Gigant eggs and the broken walkbridge, and I couldn't tell that those were human remains in the villain's lair.) If I were you, I would stick with short freeware games for now, or maybe pay-what-you-like releases on itch.io and places like that, rather than try to "go pro" with full-length titles just yet.

That's just my personal intuition, though, and I might be completely wrong. I don't really know anything about the best way to build a career as a game designer.

I do think you still need to improve the "polish" of your games. Things like making sure the UI always works as intended, that hotspots only light up if they are things you can interact with, that room exits are easy to find, that there are responses to every possible click, etc. Laura pointed out a bunch of issues like this during the testing of Gigant, and beta-testing is probably key here, as well as improving your AGS coding skills. You've already done a good job to fix some of the most glaring issues (for example editing/proofreading the English translation), and setting up good processes for testing, but there's still some way to go. One thing I would recommend is to get feedback and fix problems with basic things earlier in the design process, before it's too late to fix them.

Another aspect where I think your games would benefit from more polish is in music and sound design. I feel this part is still very crudely done, for example with music cutting off abruptly in the middle of a cut-scene, and a general lack of music and sound effects, as well as lack of consistency. Good sound design, and making sure for example that music doesn't simply cut off, but fades out or cross-fades to some other soundscape, would really help lift the quality of your games.

I hope this answers your question and is helpful to you. The criticism is not meant to discourage you! You're already creating really interesting and enjoyable games. If you continue to improve I believe you will do great.

[ukz530]

@Snarky

Thank you so much Snarky!

Thank you so much for your sincere feedback. Although I was in a pessimistic state. I never get discouraged by this feedback.
I wanted exactly this criticism.Most of the players who played my game didn't seem to tell me the truth. So I wanted this feedback.

These were really helpful, as Laura had previously criticized Fall, Content, and Gigant.
I read everything you wrote one by one and it was really helpful!
Maybe the details (hotspot handling, music handling, UI, etc.) I think I'll have to retouch it.

But I don't want to try to get away from point-and-click adventures much.
So, I used a qte that can use action elements in the best way.And I'm thinking a lot about whether I should get rid of QTE.

I'm also very motivated to develop the direction of authentic classic point and click with a good story.
But now my game fans feel that QTE is unique, so I'm going to think a lot about it.
And I don't have much commercial greed. I want to be recognized and developed for gameability as a point and click adventure. Even if it's a game that doesn't sell well.

At least I don't want to be a laughing stock.
To be honest, recently, my game has been mocked by many people on real-time streaming broadcasts

So I wanted to hear honest criticism about the current direction of game development.
And your answer was excellent. Once again, thank you very much!

[AndreasBlack]

I don't know what to say, Snarky summed it up so beautifully  But i'm gonna try and be helpful as well as paraphrase one thing he said, that is absolutely true about your games! I'll put this in a spoiler just in case someone clicks on this thread and haven't played any of your games before.

Spoiler

The spidersweb, if i remember correctly. It was a while ago i played (my bad) and wasn't there a big shark or some kind of monster in an aquarium too? I've never seen such "monstrosities" in a point & click game before and it was really cool, liked it a lot.

[close]

So keep doing those type of themes in your games, if that's what you want to do! Your games and Billy Masters are the ones on the forum i've enjoyed most of the "none commercially released games", tbh.  As for your style i consider myself an overall artist (pixelart, music, game creation) and i resonate with your described feelings about your projects. People tell me "you need to change the lyrics you can't sing that". "If you sing something more normal, i think it could be a hit". . There will always be opinions, and those totally miss the point of my art! It's supposed to be funny and weird cause i like it that way!

Spoiler

https://www.instagram.com/p/CYtXsKIoy6Q/

[close]

But i'll try to give some humble suggestions anyways. Perhaps hire a coverart artist, ask for one here on the forum. Cause that's at least one thing that draws people into the steam page/IG/Twitter feed or whatever social media platform you're using, "cool art" that is. I remember as a kid i could see a coverart of a band, and just bought the record cause the cover was cool, right! You get the idea. This is a niche just like Snarky says, and if you keep doing what you'll love it will grow over time, but you have to fake patience, i know it's hard! I've seen this firsthand with two friends, and heard her frustration when she told me "Their art is ugly compared too mine! I get so frustrated. I post and post and nobody likes it almost" and all i did as a friend was confirm her bias.

Yes, indeed her art is way better to both her and my eyes! I have a friend posting guitar videos aswell on Instagram from scratch, zero subs. He's got over 400 000 subs now. 2-3 years ago he was a nobody on Instagram! But he was consistent, that is key, but unfortunaly can be really hard to keep up with. Perhaps set a timer in your phone that rings 30minutes or an hour before a certain time when you should post something on your social media platforms!

Both posted two videos/pictures per week or something like that. IG and Twitter are good platforms for indie game stuff and you have to be a little active over there, if you're not it's a missed opportunity! I wish i could listen to my own advice some, i really need to update, perhaps typing it out helps me out aswell What's funny is he isn't even playing in a commercially successful band! He took my amateur business-sense advice about selling small guitar (ironically enough PDF lessons) on Patreon. If you hear my song "Famous & Smarter" you'll get it... (Before anybody else was doing it, now everybody does it..Go figure!) and he's living on playing the guitar now and supporting a whole family! 

I sense your inner frustration, cause all "starving" artists are very alike, i believe. The selfdoubt if it's good enough, or if the stuff that i'm doing will sell more then two copies (One Snarky might buy and ukz530).  Jokes aside. But you need to try and stay calm and hold your head up high, believe in what you do and the audience will come. Cause your games are great and what's mostly important is neither of em' frustrated me playingwise, and that's a really good thing! My own first game got some people frustrated, so i've probably learnt from those lessons, not to make it too difficult!

I've been frustrated for years about my life situation, the music was always my main dream, play my music/songs, but i started to enjoy gamedesign more and more and almost gave the music dream up! But then something funny happened. I wrote to a an artist i like on IG. Now days he's an award winning grammy artist, he replied and complimented my playing and started following my IG out of 85 followers! Yet, i can't even get a frickin' songwriters contract in Sweden!  . He gave me a stamp of approval, now all you other experts that don't like my music (amateurs) can *beep* off, pretty much.  . Please link your IG and i will be the first to follow it!

Here's my IG: https://www.instagram.com/maxfury_official/ and here's my Youtube for the full songs and perhaps game creation videos in the future. https://www.youtube.com/user/Reaper1984 edit: Oh and my Twitter that i never use, but i have to start using more  https://twitter.com/AndreasJBlack1

Wishing you the best of luck, now i'm gonna attempt to script my own bigger game, and if you don't want to follow my accounts. No hurt feelings, i have a grammy award winner follower that says it all really

[ukz530]

@AndreasBlack

Thank you very much! Snarky definitely gave me a great critique, but your story and experience that you told me really helped me a lot.

As you say, sometimes I feel a lot of inner frustration.

Every time I do that, I need my criticism and I tend to appease the frustration with the growth.

But the story of art you told me gave me a lot of hope. Thank you so much!

And I'm doing Twitter but not Instagram. Instagram may be a great help in terms of marketing. When I look at SNS myself, I tend to compare too much with other people's lives, and because Korean people actually use IG a lot.

I didn't start IG because of my personal problem of not trying to compare myself to others as much as possible.

But if you have Twitter, please follow me!

https://twitter.com/UKZarts

And thank you so much again for telling me your story!

[KyriakosCH]

I hope to find the time to play this soon, I like all your games.

[ukz530]

@KyriakosCH

Thank you! 

I hope you play it and tell me how to improve it

[Snarky]

At least I don't want to be a laughing stock.
To be honest, recently, my game has been mocked by many people on real-time streaming broadcasts

I'm sorry to hear that. That can't be fun, and you don't deserve it.
Without knowing the streams you're talking about, I would guess they're the kind that habitually makes fun of the games they play, so you probably shouldn't take it too personally.

But I don't want to try to get away from point-and-click adventures much.

Ah, good to know. Some of my suggestions are probably less relevant, then. Of course, adventure game puzzles don't have to be inventory item puzzles, but if that's what you want to make, then go ahead.

So, I used a qte that can use action elements in the best way.And I'm thinking a lot about whether I should get rid of QTE.

I'm also very motivated to develop the direction of authentic classic point and click with a good story.
But now my game fans feel that QTE is unique, so I'm going to think a lot about it.

Given the horror/monster theme of your stories, I think some element of danger is very appropriate. QTEs work well for that, but I don't mean to say that they're a must or to discourage you from trying something different.

You could also experiment with other gameplay variations, like a sneak/move-only-when-its-head-is-turned-away mechanic (for example, in Gigant that could have been suitable when you pick up all the inventory items around the Gigant under the bridge: net, scooter, etc.â€"it feels a bit odd that you just walk around it completely unconcerned), or timed puzzles (like in the store, where you might have to burn the Gigant within, say, a minute or it would attack you). And you already have a couple of Sierra-like deaths when you do something stupid (like mess with the Gigant eggs); perhaps you could expand on that. Maybe you have other ideas.

And as I mentioned, QTEs and other twitch-gameplay mechanics probably turn off some players (including for accessibility/disability reasons), so even if you decide to keep them you might want to have a setting to skip/auto-win them, or to have them just stay on screen until clicked on. That way, players who don't want any action/arcade elements can still play your games.

[heltenjon]

At least I don't want to be a laughing stock.
To be honest, recently, my game has been mocked by many people on real-time streaming broadcasts

I'm sorry to hear that. That can't be fun, and you don't deserve it.
Without knowing the streams you're talking about, I would guess they're the kind that habitually makes fun of the games they play, so you probably shouldn't take it too personally.

I second that. Focus on us who like your games, not those who miss the point. Of course, if I had your talents, I would probably make a short animation of streamers making fun of Gigant, followed by the monster appearing and taking their heads off. Then the likes explode upwards, or maybe the thumbs up sign is replaced by a lobstrosity claw. 

In regard to what you are asking about your games, I see Snarky's points, but don't personally agree. For me, the selling points are indeed the contraption puzzles and the Korean setting, along with the monsters and QTE. Horror is often combined with humour in movies, but it may be wise to make up one's mind if the horror is going to be tongue-in-cheek or not. Snarky may well have a point about how to reach a wider audience, but I genuinely like the way you construct puzzles. (Perhaps the best were in Contact.) They may break immersion, though. In real life, noone would make a code for a door and leave deliberate clues close by as to what the code could be. (Despite all Escape Rooms in existence being made like that...)

But perhaps you could do both? Try your hand at some shorts more in the direction of traditional point and click if that's what you desire, and only do the QTE when you do monster games? Ultimately, you're the one deciding what you want to make.

Getting feedback early on is probably a good idea, if not always possible. My own betatesting for Gigant was mostly limited to finding bugs, pointing out logical flaws, misspellings, lacking or misleading text when interacting with something. Anything to do with puzzle construction or storytelling would probably have to come earlier.

Story: One could argue that the characters are too one-dimensional, all good or all evil. You could go for more depth here. However, I also feel this is a sort of trope in the South Korean movies or series I've seen, and also many Japanese ones, where the characters are stylized like larger-than-life or exaggerated in their behaviour. Squid Game comes to mind. So there is a tradition for telling stories and painting characters that way. (The same could be said about some western genres, like war movies or westerns.)

QTE: I like these. As an experiment for variation, is it possible to code it with multiple clickable areas at the same time? Then it could be used for choosing different actions, not simply to duck in time. Perhaps like a combat system. Having the possibility for turning the QTEs off or adjusting their speed is a good idea for including more players.

[ukz530]

@Snarky

Yes, I made this game especially for point and click adventure fans or people who like my game. But I tend to be overly conscious of others.
Especially in Korea, there are not many users with point and click memories, so the genre will not be preferred.

I sometimes forget this particularity. fans or people who like my game.
I tend to be overly conscious of others.

And to attract general point-and-click adventure fans, I have to consider the 'QTE off' option.
Thank you for your opinion!

@heltenjon

At first, I wanted to make a point-and-click adventure game with the movie 'JAWS','The mist', and 'ALIEN'. However, these movies had a lot of action sequences.
I liked the basics of Point and Click Adventure, and I liked the fact that it relied heavily on the story.


In addition, Point-and-Click Adventures do not have the burden of developing new game mechanisms for continuous development.
Therefore, I thought that the only genre that makes me feel like a game while continuously writing stories was point and click.

This is the intention of maintaining point-and-click adventures without putting in excessive action mechanisms and making actionable with QTE.
But I had doubts that existing Point and Click Adventure fans wouldn't like the QTE element much. It may actually be so.

For this, as suggested by Snarky, add the QTE off function. If you want, you can proceed with the QTE, and if you don't want to, you can prevent the QTE from appearing.
And as a development of QTE, it's a good attempt to generate the QTE options you've presented (like Detroit Beacom Human).

But I feel the tremendous cost of Creature Animation. If you do this, the cost will increase several times. I think I need to consider this.

As for the story. I agree that the main character is too much of a Streo type.
This would be something I would have to come across more works and explore the story.

This feedback was really helpful.
It will have a good influence on the next game.

Thanks a lot!

[Stupot]

Hi ukz530,

I helped out with some testing for your Gigant, but it was mostly for smaller bugs and crashes. The game was already in a pretty final state, so I was focusing on things that needed fixing quickly, rather than any big-picture stuff. Snarky mentioned the inconsistency between the puzzles and the tone of the rest of the game. I noticed that too, but in a way I felt that added to the charm in some way. Perhaps I was wrong there, and people want more serious believable puzzles.

My only real issue with the puzzles, was that there were a few cases, which I mentioned in my notes, where you can pretty much "solve" a puzzle that you haven't even encountered yet. It is better if you can let the player find the puzzle before the solution, that way they can feel clever for solving it.

Other than that, I really liked the game and I am really rooting for it to do well. It's interesting that a few people on Steam seem to have given it a positive score even while they have made some rather negative comments.

For your next game, I recommend you try recruiting testers much earlier in the process. I would love to help. That way, bigger gameplay and puzzle elements can be talked about so that they might be changed or implemented without having to spend time redrawing assets.

[ukz530]

@Stupot

Thank you so musch!

I tend to rush the game production too much. it was because it was a commercial challenge this time.  Next time, I will make a long amount of free games.

I think I will be able to work on enough play tests, level design composition, and art.

This time, I'm going to take a long feedback and produce it.

Thank you so much for your help!

[Snarky]

I'm glad that others enjoy the aspects of the game I found dissatisfying (speaking only of Gigant). I'm just one person with one opinion, and I wish the game success.

I have nothing against whimsical puzzles, or contrasting silly puzzles with drama and horror. Though I do think that it would have worked better here if there was a little more humor in the story too, so that the puzzles felt more at home. (Or maybe parts of the story were meant to be funny and I missed it?)

But for me it was mainly that I got the feeling that the puzzles were more like imitations of other adventure game puzzles than an essential part of this game. I thought perhaps the puzzles were "silly" simply because many adventure games have silly puzzles, and this game copied those rather than considering what kind of puzzles would help tell this particular story.

I guess what I ideally want from a puzzle is a sense that this puzzle had to be here (and the solution had to be what it is), that it could only be in this game, and that it's just a little bit different from any puzzle I've seen before. And since ukz art games are so distinctive in other ways, I'm disappointed when the puzzles are, IMO, relatively uninspired.

I know that puzzle design and coming up with novel ones is fucking hard, though! I'm no good at it myself. And apparently others enjoyed these, so maybe I'm just an outlier. The part of the gameplay that worked best for me was the environmental storytelling: how you discover certain elements of the story in the course of exploring the environment.

[heltenjon]

I guess what I ideally want from a puzzle is a sense that this puzzle had to be here (and the solution had to be what it is), that it could only be in this game, and that it's just a little bit different from any puzzle I've seen before. And since ukz art games are so distinctive in other ways, I'm disappointed when the puzzles are, IMO, relatively uninspired.

I get your point. If the problem or the solution is organic with the context, setting and/or the character, this may be achieved. I agree totally. But then again, one puzzle which you disliked, I think qualifies to these terms. It could only be in this game. I'm thinking of

Spoiler

simulating a fake giant attack on the container.

[close]

Perhaps it would feel better if the hero could hear them say something like

Spoiler

"we're safe in here. Nothing short of a Giant attack can break these walls.

[close]