Metal Goat Sacrifice by adrisj7
This is a stealth game.
The plot is simple:
You must sacrifice goats. The farmers who own the goats would rather you not. Don't let them catch you.
https://youtu.be/Ms6-9ilieRk
Controls:
| Key | Action | | --------------- | ---------------------- | | WASD/Arrow keys | Movement | | Space near a Goat | Subdue/Knock Out Goat | | Space near object | Pick up object | | Space with object | Drop object | | Space with brick | Throw brick |
Screenshots
Gameplay Tips
- When subduing a goat, you must rapidly press the Space bar.
- Throw bricks. They distract guards and knock out living things.
- If a goat sees you subduing another goat, it will give away your location to all nearby guards.
- Play to the end.
Here's to another awesome LD
Ratings
| Given | 0🗳️ | 0🗨️ |
(Takes deep breath)
- The Opening text is too small and the kerning is a bit off, like in the case of 'T' next to 'for' vs. 'for' and 'a' (kerning, google it.)
- Main menu is bland. Too bland. Give me some spice, get me hyped for what I'm about to play! A nice image, some animation, even some buttons to press if I don't want to use T and space. This may not seem important, but ultimately, it is.
- When fullscreened, the main menu text is off-centred and it hurts the OCD.
- The sound effects seem a bit clunky, goats on the edge of the screen make just as much sound as you do. Try fading sounds by distance or using 3D soundspace to create more interesting sounds.
- The pick-up multiple goats system is a bit glitchy, often drops the held goat instead of picking up another.
- The aiming system feels too unresponsive. The moment I change facing direction, this should update, but currently it takes a bit of movement before it faces the direction I want.
- The player's light lights up the top of trees, which doesn't logically make sense. From the player's point of view, they would be closer to the stump of the tree rather than the top, and the base should be more lit than the top.
- Holding down space over a knocked out goat will spam pick it up then drop it.
- Getting caught sometimes causes the music to glitch around. Also the AI got into a position where it was not catching me, despite being on top of me.
- The guard's fields of view are very deceptive. In a standard game, the lit area is the field of view. It's okay to go against the norm, but your tutorial doesn't explore this element, and instead leaves me dead in a real game scenario.
- You have similar kerning issues in the shrine text, wherein the 'w' of 'power' is merged with the 'e', whilst the 'f' and 'o' of for are very separated.
- The trees seem to prevent you from going out of bounds, but you can slip through with relative ease.
- Need an opportunity to play around with the guards in the tutorial, so as to learn the knock out mechanic.
- The guards notice you from way too far away (in my opinion) at any angle (even if not looking at you).
- Goats sometimes spasm left to right.
- The guard AI can't move past bricks and other items, to them it is unpassable.
- You are powerless against the guards. The bricks knock them down for such a short time and due to the (sloppy :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:) level design, 3 out of 8 goats REQUIRE that you pass by a guard.
- Is something supposed to happen at the end when all goats are delivered? Because it seem to set up for something big with all the whirring, lights and camera shake. It felt like I was summoning cthulhu, but really nothing was happening. You (on this very page) set up for a legendary ending that you must play to the end, but the payoff is unexciting. There could have been so much potential, but ultimately this ending fails to reward the players that have played it for the longest.
- Could use some form of UI upon completing the game, rather than the soft lock of whirring on a pedestal. Some simple buttons such as retry and main menu would do.
- The hay is a bit O.P. and undermines the difficulty of the game. 5 out of the eight goats can easily be snagged without any challenge using hay, which is freely obtained from one of the houses, unguarded. Ultimately this boils down to severe level design flaws, as one part is way too easy and the other is quite challenging. This denies the player of any mid-ground, which can be an important learning experience in progressing to higher difficulties.
- The progression is a bit too linear, despite appearing to be an 'open world' based idea. Even though you can start on any one goat, there is only ONE way to get that goat. A more flexible approach would be to create many different methods of achieving the same goal. For example, with the bottom three goats, there could be multiple paths with differing risks and opportunities.
I'm now running out of available characters, so I'll see you in the next post.
Overall great game, sorely under appreciated. :thumbsup:
I agree that the level design was sloppy: I ended up using the level that I made for testing purposes and it kinda shows. Would loved to have either had more levels, or made the level more flexible with different ways to achieve the objective (_Game Maker's Toolkit vibes anyone?_)
Definitely struck a chord with me when you critiqued the tutorial and mentioned giving the player a "mid-ground" to learn from. I'll focus on getting better at that for the next jam, since It's definitely one of my weak spots.
And of course, the game is definitely buggy. I'll try to release a post-jam bug fix version with improvements (fixing pickups, making brick throwing more intuitive, making the guards more reasonable, maybe even making a better tutorial and designing a good level, who knows!)
And about the ending (This next paragraph is kind of a **SPOILER** to anyone who hasn't played the game yet)
At the ending, it is revealed that the Main Character was a goat all along. They get powers that let them kill all of the human guards in the game. At the ending you can still move and you can kill guards (If you want to experience that without beating the game again, there's a cheat code, Ctrl+A+F1. _shh_) but that's about it. So yeah, I agree, the ending was a bit lackluster and I really wanted to make the player's "Final Form" more freaky and Lovecraftian, but if I did I probably wouldn't have submitted this in time :).
Once again, you gave me a crazy thorough comment and I love it to death. Many many thanks, once I start looking at games yours will be on the top of my list and I'll try to give it a thorough critique!
Cheers and enjoy the rest of the submissions, there's some real goldies out there!
I don't have that many complains (-:
Sure knocking enemies is kind of a waste (good luck getting that brick back!) but distracting works well. I had to run around in the north-west woods a few times to get rid of a chasing guard which wasn't the most fun but it worked (-:
The thing I had most issue with was picking up multiple goats. I ended up dropping them most of the time and it only randomly worked for me.
Great game over all, can't praise the AI and path finding enough. Also dynamic music, wow!
Quick question, what is the gray human shaped thing at the top-left of the map?
The human on the top-left is kind of an easter egg. When making the game, the first thing I did was make a "bouncer" object that would bounce from left to right (the player, goat, and guards inherit this bouncer object). The human shaped thing was the first sprite I made as a placeholder to test it, and I left it in the corner for the hell of it.
Will definitely check out your stuff in a week or so (sadly not now, got finals :cry:).
Cheers to you!
Only 2 ratings at this time for a top quality game !! you have to rate other games, i pretty sure you can win a medal with this entry. Impressive work for a compo.
Congrats !