First Day: Chicken Duty by ParadoxCrusader5
It's your first day at your new job at the farm, and you're on chicken duty. This is a speed-run/time trial style game in which you have to complete a series of levels in order to keep a chicken from dying. There are multiple difficulty levels, and as the player, your job is to beat the three difficulty levels as fast as you can.
| Youtube | https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ne5s9e2io7a8s6c/AABGPm10DjJbKATlndw1Zj6Ea?dl=0 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/first-day-chicken-duty |
Ratings
| Overall | 2363th | 2.821⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 2348th | 2.596⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 2179th | 2.732⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1995th | 3.232⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 1386th | 2.778⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 806th | 3.204⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 2088th | 2.804⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 33🗳️ | 28🗨️ |
That said, I'm going to give you some criticism. It's going to be pretty harsh, so don't take it personally.
There was a significant lack of general polish. I understand that it's hard to fix bugs and polish gameplay during a jam with all the other things you have to do. However, there are FAR too many bugs, and it makes the entire game feel as if there was very little effort put into it, even if it had a cool concept and good art. These issues are really the only thing holding this game back from being a pretty good game. Here's the laundry list of issues I ran across just in the first two sections after like 10-15 minutes of banging my head against the wall, but I'm sure I could have found three times as many if I had been able to complete it.
- Walking up the stairs only worked half the time, because the other half, the player would either slam his head against the roof or his feet against a step on the stairs (can't tell which), which for some reason stopped all of his momentum and prevented him from moving. You had to jump halfway up or it would act as if there was a roof over your head
- The fading transition happens every time you press e (and not just when you grab the gun)
- The chicken spawns in weird places, has bad AI, and keeps its health between scenes, so if it spawns next to a fox it can run towards it and instantly end the run or make it effectively over because it doesn't have health for later.
- The lighting was unbuilt, which meant an annoying red text was in the top-left corner at all times
-* During the chase scene the side the object was on was randomized AND the object was invisible, so you had to blindly guess which side to choose every time. It's probably a rendering bug, but I only have a basic understanding of the Unreal engine. Oh, and if this was intentional, just... don't. This is what made me stop trying to play the game. Don't do that.
- The player was unanimated when holding the gun. I can tell you just posed him so he grabs the gun because you couldn't find/didn't have animations for him walking and shooting, but it looks strange in comparison to all the other fully animated characters and scenes.
- The gun detected shooting from the gun barrel, not the camera. It made it hard to hit the foxes because you weren't shooting at your cursor. Also, the foxes' hitboxes were tiny, so they were already hard to hit.
- The difficulty reset every time you respawned.
Lucky for you, there's some hope. The jam rules say that you are allowed to fix minor issues after the jam, so you might be able to fix the biggest issue (which I've starred) and reupload the game. I would complete the game if you fix that issue (and the issue is one the rules allow you to fix) and @ me. But for now, it's impossible to do.
But most importantly, don't sweat it too much. This is already much better than my first jam game, so keep at it! The only way to improve is to keep at it.
All the best,
The President
P.S. 5.7Gb. WOW
++ the character models and animations were awesome. Not sure if you got them from somewhere, but they looked great
++ solid concept. Felt like it could be a mini-game within a larger game
++ the voices were really funny!
-- I ran into some odd issues a few times. Game locking, not knowing where to go, etc. Could use some polish, but it is a gamejam.
-- the controls felt a little wonky. I almost feel that this would be better as a FPS? Ether that, or some more work should go into making the controls feel tighter.
Some notes about my experience:
1. Size was surprising for Ludum Dare, not much surprising for UE4.
2. Game is random and challenging. Felt like dice game at the beginning. Skill matters a little but matters.
3. Chicken near the house made me think it is the only chicken to be protected. At first I thought that game would never start.
4. "game" and "lvl" timers are in different formats.
5. Music is epic :)
6. Light looks too bright.
7. It was not enough time to read messages before levels. 2 times longer would be great.
8. Gun on the ground near house never gives more ammo and breaks ammo counter.
9. Shadow from gun on the second floor is visible on the first floor.
10. Sometimes gun doesn't shoot when you press left mouse button.
11. I've accidentally pressed "Quit" button after some retries.
12. You can walk on the top of supermarket.
13. Sometimes timer never stops on "Foxes" level when you kill all the foxes.
14. Sometimes chicken is stuck on that level and second level never starts.
15. You can go out of map wandering around.
16. You can skip levels 2 - 4 going over the mountain and complete game after "Butcher" level jumping near final doorway in the supermarket. Don't know if this skip speedrun tactics was intended.
17. Sometimes second level starts twice and camera goes under ground.
Uma vez ajudei em um projeto na Unreal e estávamos gerando com dezenas de assets que nem usávamos (que vinham por padrão).
PS: Favor ignorar se tiver domínio da ferramenta e não for o caso.
I once helped with a project at Unreal and we were generating with dozens of assets that we didn't even use (which came by default).
PS: Please ignore if you have mastery of the tool and it is not the case.