If you’ve ever played the arcade game Tapper, then you know what this is about. The twist is that you can drink your own brew! You get two minutes to drink all you can while keeping up with your customers. It’s a bit of a challenge.
I’ve been working on this every day since the jam was announced, since I won’t be here for all of next week. My art still sucks, but I’m pretty happy with the game itself. Tell me if you have any problems downloading or playing it. Also, I’m not totally sure if this fits into the rules about original game design, since it’s so close to an existing game, but for what it’s worth, I did implement it and create all the assets within the time allotted.
Downloaded fine for me, but when I ran the .exe I got a console and a title page, but nothing I clicked or pressed would start the game itself. Running Windows 10.
I have some thoughts on the game but I will let others play it before I start running away talking Great job on making a game in such a short time though!
Hey, so I really liked the game, though the controls are a bit unusual. You press right to drink the beer and left to give the beer to a customer, but it took me quite a while to learn that. There’s also the fact that walking up from the uppermost counter makes you go down, and while that might save time for some, I’ve found out it’s more trouble than it’s worth and it ended up making me lose quite a bit of games because I accidentally pressed up and then a bottle a customer threw would smash into the ground before I could react. But otherwise the game is pretty nice! It’s quite a bit of a challenge indeed as you mentioned.
I think the game is a bit to hard, as you have to give multiple drinks to each customer to send them back, and I can barely keep with them, let alone drink on the side.
Ah, I knew I had missed something in the README. Thanks for clearing that up about the space bar. I also forgot to make it a GUI-only application, apparently, so that’s why you’ll see a console window.
This needs an explanation of the controls in the game itself, and what will or won’t make you instantly lose the game.
It also takes forever for the game to respond to the space bar when you want to start/restart the game.
Do the redheads just never go away? Because it feels like it, and that’s so frustrating when six of them end up in the bar at once. It’s impossible to keep up with all of this when a single mistake ends the game for you. Having to catch the returning glasses and losing if you send a glass down without anyone catching it make it unenjoyable. The time limit is completely unnecessary too, it just blindsides you with a game over because you’re too busy with everything else to remember there’s a time limit.
Also, it freezes at random times, and crashed in the middle of the game while I was trying to serve drinks. Not sure why.
I really like this game! It does seem to have a bit of a learning curve, but once I got it down I did find it really fun. I never really found the timer a problem but I sometimes I feel like my key presses are not being registered, but this could just be my keyboard rather then the game.
Cute! It’s a simple enough concept and I think the controls are actually pretty simple (after I read the README, anyway). I agree with others that it’s very difficult to keep up, but I imagine that can be tweaked pretty easily. Maybe only some customers would slide the glass back, or it could travel back more slowly? Or perhaps missing a glass would have a penalty instead of a game over?
The juggling between wanting to drink as much as possible whilst also not getting stuck in a position where you cannot serve the customers, all the while trying to race against the clock, was pretty well done!
But like others have said, it may be a little too hard. So like happytpr said I think the best way to tune the difficulty would be on the customers, as tuning the other parts might mess with the nice balance between the clock, positioning and drinking game.
This game is pretty good,
seems like everyone has already said what i was going to say although, the difficulty wasn’t too bad but the timer should maybe be extended to get the higher weights.
Other than that it’s really fun. Nice job!
Now that a few more people have had the chance to play it, I will leave my thoughts as I suggested I would earlier The game is a great effort in such a short time and was genuinely fun to play. As others have said the main point of contention is the difficulty. I would personally say it’s not so bad that the game is hard, but the game feels too brutal; one mistake results in a game over and restart its just a little frustrating. I would suggest a lives system, you could even potentially only have 1 - 2 lives, playtesting would find a good balance as to exactly how many are appropriate. The only other thing would be a small graphic of the keys on the title screen. They don’t necessarily need to be labeled but having the graphic of what keys are active within the game itself is a good idea. Like I said before, well done for making your submission and good luck in the competition as a whole!
After some practise I got the challenge down but, as others have pointed out, it doesn’t leave much time for the fun WG aspect. Since the player needs to worry about this as well as the challenging gameplay loop itself, I’d be a touch more forgiving to the player and have either a live system or a score/time penalty for broken glasses. Gaining weight, on the flip side, could net the player a bonus either in lives or time.
An accomplished remake of Tapper - although perhaps a bit too faithful in recreating its challenge, lol.
On the plus side, there’s scope for adding juice alongside balancing. Music should be a no-brainer!
I’m going to go a different route from most people here and suggest that instead of changing the difficulty in any significant way, simply add sound effects, perhaps some little jingle every time a new diner enters and a different one whenever a diner returns for seconds. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost a run thanks to having my eyes too focused on multiple tables or hordes of customers and accidentally sending one too many mugs in one row. It’s simply too much visual information for the brain to process at some points, audio would lessen the sensory overload.
Either that or extend the timer a bit, currently the game requires almost perfect gameplay and aggressive drinking to win. Oftentimes you have to get drunk at the risk of getting overwhelmed by a sudden onslaught of red-hairs because playing defensively is far too slow to reach max weight. The result is a game uncomfortably reliant on RNG. Being allowed to build at least somewhat of a defensive buffer would make things less hectic.
no longer consumes excessive CPU on title/game over screens
README now contains additional controls and strategy tips
None of this is likely to affect my score, but I thought it would be best to throw in the things I had missed before the judges get to it. Don’t take this as a rejection of your suggestions; I’m just short on time right now. Additional changes may be added after the jam ends. However, I encourage anyone who was having trouble to check out the strategy tips.
Great job on making a game in such a short time though!