Hello, and welcome to sup3r’s design station! This is an “experimental” feedback form for games that you wish to recieve feedback on.
HOWEVER
Instead of doing what most forms do and say “your game is too hard/easy, art needs improvement” etc etc, this form will be dedicated to generating ideas for your games.
What does that mean?
Here’s a few examples: Boring platformer? Try adding moving platforms in multiple areas with floating obstacles right above them. Boring asteroids game? Try adding a scoring, score saving and ranking system. Boring dungeon crawler? Add traps on the ground to make it trickier.
Basically, the point of this form will be to spice up your games rather than linearly improving them. I will only tell you to improve your art or the player’s movement if it’s a glaring flaw. For most games this won’t be the case, and remember, the first step of being good at anything is sucking at it.
If you want to submit a game of yours here, please state if you would like your game to be more fun or more challenging. You can ask for either, neither, or both. How you request will adjust the kind of ideas I give to you. Of course the more detail the better.
I look forward to (hopefully) improving your game!
Really like the idea of this, I try to add some things that I think would make a game better in my reviews, but I think a topic solely dedicated to this will be really helpful for some people
This is a cool idea! If you would like, do you want to give it a test go? There’s this little game I work on from time to time called “Shattering Steel,” I’m curious how you would analyze it using this system? I want to make it both more fun and more challenging!
(Btw design isn’t trivial, so I wish you luck with this. Also, it is very easy to burn out in this kind of feedback thing unless you’re super passionate, so be sure to take it at your own pace and have fun )
wow lol, shattering steel is probably one of the hardest games to review with this format since it’s so feature packed. There’s upgrades, playstyles, modes, an entire saving system (HOW), pretty much everything that makes a great game here.
However one thing I wish more games had and I think this game could do well with is a Bestiary, which is a library of enemies the player can read about. At first the page would be full of the enemy’s sprites blacked out (or replaced with an image), but after killing them they show up and you can see their health, movement speed, a description etc.
If you wanna go the extra mile, you can do what terraria did and track how many times the enemy has been killed. At first you can display the name and sprite, then after a few more kills the health and speed, and then finally a text description. This incentivizes people to play the game and get lots of kills so they can get a full bestiary and read about all the enemies.
This is such a cool idea! This will definitely be a great feature to add once I have more enemies. I already know exactly how I want to execute this too, I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before, thank you!
I would like to know how to make this game more fun. By the way, I just want to say that this topic of yours is very innovative. The next step forward in Flowlab game reviewing.
This is an interesting game; very content packed, but oddly balanced.
My idea for this game would be to Reduce weapon variety and instead make 2-3 weapons more versatile and fun to use. It’s a little frusturating reading a tutorial per pretty much every new level lol, I think making it simpler and making the weapons more fun/easy to use will make the game easier to run through.
You might also wanna explore redesigning the menu by adding more clarity to buttons and “categorizing” them. The current main menu is kind of a text jumble but you already have the code to change that fairly easily.
This is a neat game you’ve got here! I’m a fan of the minimal color palette, the classes, etc. It is really hard getting a hang of the controls at first, but with enough practice it gets easier.
I would reccomend adding random buff drops like faster fire rate, more max health, repair health, faster rotation/movement etc to bosses when you kill them. This will make the game more replayable and there’ll be more incentive to get further.
Another thing I would reccomend is adding a progress bar/results screen to visually show what wave the player got to. Here’s a good example from steredenn of what I mean. These make for screenshots, and players love to send results screen screenshots to each other to flex.
Hey, I played this when reviewing the flowjam games - this is a really impressive game, especially for a free account! well done!
I would add a short dialogue system where a farmer/policemen/someone else yells orders as the waves get more advanced. Basically, you can have a farmer saying “we need backup!” when tractors start spawning, or the same farmer saying “I’m calling 911!!” when police show up. Basically a kind of antagonist dialogue system. This’ll make the game feel more alive and will give a more urgent feeling to when humans start to get difficult.
This is an interesting platformer, my only gripe is that the “wall climbing” mechanic relies on a flowlab bug and should probably be replaced with something else.
Aside from that, I think your game could be improved with backgrounds that parallax. When you ask the camera to parallax, different objects in the background layer will have different amounts of parallax. Your game worlds can feel a lot more alive with some proper background layering.
ok, my game is called Penguin penthouse, I can’t give link because flowlab is blocked for me but can you check it out? I know its going to glitch everything out but all you gotta do is press “edit” before anything loads and go to the glow sprite and delete the attach-glow in the glow sprite
I’m not sure if my lighting has been updated tho, so if everything looks too bright just go to the black sprite and put display order-5
This is a neat take on platforming that I don’t see a lot in flowlab. Good job adding lighting and other atmospheric effects!
Honestly I think balancing and tweaking the abilities would be best here. The projectiles emitted by the player at the start can collide with the player which shouldnt happen. Instead you can have “is solid” off for those and keep collisions enabled. Also on the second level, the different abilities can use a rebalance as some are far “safer” than others due to the attack being ranged.
(sidenote, flowlab is used by classrooms and supervisors are gonna see games so definitely change “stripper penguin” to a different name and ability (you could do EMP penguin for example which freezes enemies))
It’s cool seeing a swarm survival game like this, nice job! It’s pretty hard in some cases but still a fun game.
I definitely feel like adding waves will make this game more fun - at the moment each run lasts 10-40 seconds, and you get no grace period to build and collect loot. It feels like a frenzy that you have no control over. Adding waves instead of a constant enemy stream helps keep the game enjoyable and more fair.
do you have anything to say about my minigames? (tiny metroid isn’t finished but still could use ideas)
i’m especially looking to have a fun element in Arena because right now it’s mostly spam lol
This is a neat idea! The current games are simple and pretty fun. They all could do with some polish, but otherwise are pretty interesting.
For this game I would strongly reccomend an unlock system where, once the player has played a minigame enough, another unlocks. This way it gives incentive to play and unlock them all. You can even have a universal points system thats accumulated by playing all the games, and achievements to go with.
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