Congrats on getting the Pearl award thingy! ^w^
Play game
Syrup Express's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Pearl of the Jam | #1 | n/a | n/a |
| Fun | #4 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| Theme | #5 | 4.200 | 4.200 |
| Overall | #8 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
| Creativity | #10 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
| Fetish Factor | #11 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
- Adorable art style and uses the theme fairly well. I enjoy the choice in which games to play to achieve the amount needed. Maybe a few more games to choose from would be ideal but the three that are there are still pretty good! A pleasant experience!
- Reminds me of old school flash games in the best possible way.
- The train concept ties the arcade games together very nicely. I like the syrup creature.
Content Warning
Weight gain fetish
Comments
Hello. Thank you for testing my game. I will now take the time to test yours. Please believe that this review will not be intended to praise your work or to belittle your efforts. My goal is to give you a useful and general opinion. (This part of the text was written before the review.)
Let's begin.
Game Statistics
Play 1
18 min 20 = Forgot to rate at the beginning
Total 68
Weight 4/5
Play 2
22 min 30
Total 59 levels
Weight: 5/5
Like
-Original and pleasant graphic style. A little refinement of your lines would make it extremely cute.
-Nice music. I would especially note that it seems well suited to your game and that your vision seems to have been coherent. Which makes it a wise choice to showcase it. (Watch out for Nintendo. Even more so if it's for a Kink Games game. They have no mercy.)
-Good SFX that doesn't overwhelm while remaining coherent.
-Well-crafted mini-games combining luck, logic, and reflexes.
-The world is pleasant and satisfying.
-The "travel" theme is well-exploited. We're in a time of perpetual transition.
-A logical way to see the character's level with the mirror.
I don't like
-It lacks a little story. Too bad because the world lends itself well to it.
-The money always goes back to 5 coins at each station after buying the syrup. It's a somewhat clumsy attempt to force you to play games that are less profitable in terms of coins (see below).
-Despite the well-crafted music, it's almost out of the game, in my opinion. Of course, I'm not going to blame you for this. But it's borderline. It was created outside of the game, for commercial purposes, for a company that makes lawsuits easier than dying in Dark Souls. You should already think about changing it. It's a shame because it fits really well.
Review, Improvement, Idea:
- Giving the player the choice to tip would be more interesting for them, even if it means adding some sort of multiplier coefficient if they decide to put in more coins. Encouraging them to tip will be less frustrating. It's better to incentivize than to force them.
- The winning balance between the mini-games is uneven. Plinko is almost the best to do to have a chance of progressing to bron'k. Spell has a winning level that's too limited compared to spending.
Plinkomust:
Must do if you don't have all 8 coins. It completely eclipses the utility of Sort'm.
Sortm:
-Interesting gameplay. I'd seen it before but never tried it. It seems to me there's a balancing issue between the speed of the elements to be processed and the speed at which the elements slide across the platforms. This is just an impression because I'm not familiar with this mini-game. In any case, its rewards are limited, and it's common to win back as much as you invested. Maybe review the rewards.
Bronk'r
-The speed of the ball when you restart a game is indexed to the speed of the previous game. So the ball can start quite fast at the beginning before reaching normal speed.
- The angle calculation in the middle of the brick breaker bar is too linear. This allows you to make shots in a completely straight line. It would be interesting to reduce the dead zone in the middle of the bar or increase the reflection zone so as not to allow the player to readjust the difficulty during the game by reducing the angle of attack. Conversely, the angle on the sides is extremely capricious; it creates a balance that works but is extremely slippery.
Bug = Bronk'r
If the ball can exit the screen from above if it bounces too quickly on an obstacle near the ceiling.
Final point of view:
To get the best score, you must mainly do Plinkomust to get the 8 coins and chain the Bronk'r. We quickly find ourselves with a partner to follow for performance. A little balancing would seem appropriate to give all the mini-games a chance to shine. And not just by relieving the player of their money. I know gas stations are expensive, but the taxes really hurt XD. That doesn't stop the game from being very enjoyable with a friendly atmosphere. The art is also very appealing, and the positions in the mirror are original. They stand out from the usual straight-as-a-board character. I keep saying to be careful with the music. The chances of getting you back are very slim, but never zero. Anyway, I had a lot of fun and had a great time in this colorful little world.
Thank you for submitting your work. It was fun and "almost" satisfying (the bronk'r is stressful sometimes). It's a beautiful project you presented to us. I hope the judges' feedback is commensurate with your efforts.
Wishing you continued success, and while you wait, "Good work!" :D
PS: Since English isn't my primary language, I can sometimes have very poorly done turns. I apologize if this is the case.
Submitted
Octo Grams TravelerThe reason why I made it so you always get 5 coins back after buying syrup is so you dont end up with nothing and having to go back to the first car to get more money. Also, the tip system was to give players a sense of a final score while making sure they still played the game instead of holding onto a ton of coins they earned in earlier rounds.
I do agree on the music aspect. I plan on adding some original songs soon. I've also made a patch that fixes the issue with the Bronk'r game.
Thank you for your feedback, having nobody else to give insight on the balance of your game while developing it makes it hard to get right.
-As for the money, it's just one point of view. I saw the 5 silver coins, and I also understand the idea of creating a scoring system. Overall, what you did isn't bad, on the contrary. It just bothered me, in terms of score optimization, to have to go through smaller mini-games and not go straight back to Bronk'r. With better balancing, it would have been less disruptive.
- Of course, I completely understand that without a tester, consistent balancing is very difficult to create. That's why I put all these parts under "To review, improve, idea." I didn't want to burden you with this aspect, but to give you information that I thought was important to help you with this.
I hope my post wasn't unpleasant. That was absolutely not the goal.
Very pleasant game. Characters were definitely more unique than others and the art was good! I would say to change from Nintendo music in a future update, Nintendo is not very nice with their stuff. Only issue I found was when I was using the mirror (I believe at the 3rd size) the darkened background wouldn't go away until my next size-up and it made the whole game darker. Other than that, fun game!
Submitted
I Need More ThymeThis was fun! Nice use of the theme and the presentation is really cute. Other than the "Enter" issue that others have brought up, I think there's a bit of a bug with checking the mirror? After the first two weight stages, the screen remained slightly faded out after showing the character portrait and didn't get bright again until the next stop each time.
But I thought this one was a good time, lovely work!
Submitted
Sweet DreamsThe controls are frustrating. The enter key only seems to SOMETIMES work, and I have to mash to get it to eventually register. And having to click the 'pay money' button instead of just hitting Enter like with everything else is weird. Also feels like unless you perfect whatever game you play, you make barely any money.
Very cute! I really like the design of the main character, big fan. I do agree on the sentiment where I wish you had a reason to play anything else other than Breakout, it's kind of a very "solved" game in that regard and the game ends up becoming a small playthrough of that instead of about a variety of minigames lol. Still, very very nice game!
Submitted
Snack WandererThere’s some good content here, and a lot, given the time frame. There are a few rough edges, notably around the controls. I found hitting enter worked about 10% of the time, which just led to me mashing it repeatedly until it worked.
As far as each game is concerned, they were all functional and worked. I liked the level randomization for the breakout clone. That was nice. I don’t know whether the acceleration on the bread was a good or bad thing. It felt a tad floaty, but it would probably have been hard to control without it.
It’s a bit of a rough edge to have to hit enter to start the game, then switch to the mouse to press the pay button, then exit out and hit enter again to restart, especially with enter not working a good chunk of the time.
Overall, a really nice effort.
Copy/Paste of Judging Rubric:
- Fun: Each game was fun enough though the controls didn’t feel great. I felt myself going through the motions for a lot of the minigames. (-1)
- Creativity: There were certainly a lot of assets created for this. The minigames didn’t feel like departures from established norms to me or add variance to existing themes, but the effort that went in to the number of things in the world feels like it deserves a +1.
- Fetish Factor: The handful of gain events felt disjoint from the rest of the game. On the one hand, having that be a reward makes sense, but it really feels more like the games are a barrier to content than integrated. (+0)
- Theme: As a way of setting how often the player can get juice it makes sense. Might be slightly above average in terms of integration. +1 for this.
Submitted
Drivin' for Dine-inI found one bug
in the third game (arkanoid) the ball just flew out of the screen, maybe because of the high speed and a couple of platforms that were nearby, it happened once
and it takes quite a long time to load...
and I understand that no matter how much we earn in one trip, we will get one bottle and our coins will be equal to 5
it is worth noting that the drawing is good, and the character looks cute, which is also good
Submitted
travel_game3I adore this one! The aesthetics are great, Sorbet is a cute lil goober, and the weight gain(?) is delightful c:
I found a couple bugs though: If you inspect yourself in the mirror and then just, walk away, the "non-UI" parts of the screen darkened until the next time you buy syrup/juice. I think this happened in the second fat stage? So after drinking two syrup/juice things.
Also while playing the Breakout clone, the urchin flew off the top somehow >w> I assume because there were a couple quick collisions up there which prevented it from going down enough to 'free' itself.
Speaking of the Breakout - and I never thought I'd care enough to praise Breakout mechanics?? - I really like how the acceleration/deceleration of the urchin causes things to snowball! Because it only slows down a little bit every time you hit the ball with the center of the bread, it makes the game a lot more hectic than I'm used to. It's good! Same with it slowly accelerating if you hit it towards the edge, but that seems a bit inconsistent due to the much stronger angular effect also on the edge. Works very well anyway though c:
Submitted
Snack Wanderer
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.