Order Up! by abayb
Order Up! is a waitress-ing game inspired by Hotline Miami. In this game, you cook food from the fridge and serve it to your customers for money. Be quick though, because your expenses are always being taken out of your account! Stay above 0 and you won't lose!
Game uses WASD and the mouse to control.
Game uses WASD and the mouse to control.
The game desperately needs some instructions. I was able to figure it out after some time, but people playing games for fun only rather than to rate them will give up really quickly as the controls are not easy to figure out. The game concept of cooking food to serve on plates with the fitting icons did feel intuitive, though. (For people unwilling to waste time figuring it out: You grab a plate, grab food to put on the plate, then put it on the stove, then pick it up again; all this is done by moving to the top edge and clicking just above you. The rest is obvious.)
Once you get the hang of it, the game becomes too easy. There's no gradual difficulty increase, meaning that if you play well enough you'll consistently gain more money than you lose over time. There is also no score or other goal to work towards, so it feels like there's not much point to it once you get used to it.
The graphics are functional, but not very pretty. The game fits the theme but does nothing impressive or innovative with it.
The game suffers from some technical issues. If you try to configure the options, the game crashes. It's also possible to get stuck in the top edge of the level, no longer allowing you to move down (only left and right). The controls feel very counterintuitive (why can't we just click the drawers/stoves to interact with them?) and the necessity of quick mouse input in a windowed game results in occasionally clicking outside the screen, which can be annoying.
Overall, the game just isn't very fun. With some modifications (some goal to work towards and some difficulty or other game ender) it could be somewhat fun, though it's too similar to other games to stand out even if it were to be fixed.
If possible, for next jam, have a web version that doesn't need intalling anything : ).
A bit of tutorial text at the beginning of the game would have really gone a long way, I feel.