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IGF was just done and an early build of Kaleidoscope was entered. The judges all left feedback that we then got e-mailed to us. I was sad to see that the audio was mostly overlooked but pretty much all criticism was spot-on and has since been remedied. Here’s what the judges had to say:

Kaleidoscope scored best in:  Visual Art

And scored worst in:  Game Design

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A very cute, endearing experience — I really love the fact that jumping on enemies colors, rather than kills them — but the actual gameplay feels generic at best, and awkward at worst. The special powers afforded to the player are seldom all that necessary, or even very interesting: the game, as a result, just feels like an average platformer with an above-average coat of paint.

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This seems like a pretty neat concept. Unfortunately, since there is only one level and it’s all just basic stuff, the game is never really given a chance to shine.

I like that the music and color come to the level as I progress. I also really like the idle animation. Might I suggest that you time it such that the character’s knees bend to the beat of the music?

I was using the Xbox 360 controller, and there appears to be some sort of bug where sometimes I can’t double jump, which is a real problem in a platformer.

Also, I’d suggest not exiting the level as soon as I unlock a new level, since I may want to get more of the color thingies in that level.

Also, I feel guilty killing the golems… They seem so peaceful!

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At this stage it is just a physics platformer with some nice art.  I like the one to one mapping to the x-box button colors.  Forcing people to play the same level 3 times is ok for a game with only one level, but I hope that replays will be either more optional or more varied in the final version!

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Hi there.  I tend to take notes during my first playthrough in chronological order, so you’re seeing my impressions/reactions in the order I had them.  Then I usually go back through and flesh out/clarify them, and maybe add some final thoughts at the end.  Obligatory caveat: you’re going to get real, unalloyed feedback from me because that’s what you paid for.  I hope you find it to be useful and constructive.

First of all, I found your game to be pleasurable to learn and play.  Not many of the games I’m judging are over that basic “more fun than frustrating” line, and yours was over that line with room to spare.  Well done!  Here are my notes:

I love the look of the story intro at first blush.

“Desaturation” is a strange word to use here – most non-artists have no idea what that word means.  Even something crazy like “monochromium” would probably make more sense to more people.  Most games that do the “bring color back to the land” gag don’t even give the problem a proper name.  They just say that someone/thing has stolen all the color from the land, and it’s up to you to restore it.

The cycling colors of the main menu button-text could get confusing, but more importantly the yellow color is extremely hard to read on the sky background.

X’s on locked levels are too perspective-correct and regular in comparison to the fun hand-drawn look of the rest of the map screen.  Circles for levels and steps between levels suffer from a similar too-perfect-ness.  Rough ‘em up!

I like the look of the world map: fonts, colors, textures and linework are all quite nice.

The edge of terrain (or maybe the character?) has a weird soft collision corner to it, so that I can step almost all the way off a ledge, turn around and run the opposite direction, and not move back onto the ledge but not fall either.  I just run in place right on that little corner.

Jump + yellow is extremely hard to pull off with your thumb.  I switched to fighting-game mode (i.e. using my index/middle/ring fingers for the A/X/Y buttons respectively) almost immediately.  This is probably too much to ask of an average player, and a warning sign that you have too many buttons.

Death by falling into the underground was unexpected and frustrating.
- …ahh, I didn’t die from falling at all, it was actually spikes.  Hidden deep in the grass.  So they looked almost exactly like normal grass…
- …this semi-secret underground section is harder than I think it should be, but even if you decide you want your secrets to be extra-challenging like this, the hidden spikes are a bad call.  Not being able to see the difference between grass and spikes isn’t challenging, it’s just unfair and annoying.  Your challenge should never rely on obfuscating the danger from the player until it’s too late.  I was playing carefully, not recklessly, and there was no way for me to predict that outcome.  Which brings me to my next point…

…not being able to look far enough ahead to predict jumps is frustrating.  I’d suggest either 1) authoring the camera more carefully in those areas to account for those cases, or 2) put some yank-the-camera-around functionality on the second stick.  1) is a much better choice, in my opinion.

The overall look of the game is very pretty and fun.  However, the art doesn’t have *nearly* enough stylistic unity.  You’ve got cut-paper trees, airbrushy grass and golems, flat graphic apples, mushy dirt tiles filled with toon-shaded rocks, a silhouetted main character, glossy web-app-lookin pigment meters, painterly clouds, and a wood-cutty world map.  Almost all of these elements are carried off very successfully in isolation, but when they’re all put together it really makes the game look like a prototype.  Which maybe it is!  But just in case this look is intentional, my strong suggestion is that you zero in on a particular look from that list and propogate it across the whole game.  If you do so, users’ perception of the game’s professionalism is going to skyrocket, and you clearly have the core art skills you need to pull it off.

Victory dance!  Woo hoo!  Love it.

End-of-level crystals don’t read as such intuitively… I know the sign that explains them shows up later, but putting it there (and upside-down) makes it seem less important.  You might want to show them as a goal to the player earlier on, perhaps right at the beginning.  Or make them bigger/more exciting-looking (particles and whatnot) so the player knows they’re super-desirable and important.  As it stands, I was always surprised when grabbing one completed the level.

Also, the icons of the end-of-level crystals at the map screen (the ones under the level name) don’t differentiate enough between which you have collected and which you haven’t.  I know, I know, they spin and have more detail and contrast but it needs to be MORE.  Make big changes to their scale, contrast, saturation, maybe add some kind of border treatment, etc. Those changes will all help punch it up and disambiguate its meaning for the user.

I want the color-in-the-world mechanic to matter.  Right now, it just feels like something that triggers arbitrarily on certain pickups, and it resets each time I play the level.  There’s no real lasting sense of progression as a result, which makes it feel like whimsical window-dressing as opposed to gameplay.  It *is* pretty, and feels good when you set off the effect, but if you’re going to describe the game in the intro as being about bringing color back to the land, I feel like it needs to be closer to the game’s heart.

Also, my pigments replenish without the pickups (further reducing their relevance to the game).  When I do grab a pickup, a little “x1″ or “x2″ appears (seems to depend on how many I grab) which doesn’t seem to correlate to anything relevant in-game.  When I USE a pigment, the rate of depletion is irregular (it jumps down, then stops, then starts again), which makes it hard to understand and wield effectively. [NOTE: I have gone back and read your explanation of the replenishment-rate-increasing mechanic since writing this feedback.  However, my feedback stands: it doesn't make sense unless you read it elsewhere, and it doesn't have enough effect for me to stop being annoyed by standing around waiting for it to replenish].

The extra-high yellow double-jump is crazy-hard, because it requires the momentary release of the yellow button AND the jump button mid-jump.  Not sure if it’s an intentional feature or a bug, but it could be fun and cool if it was a bit easier.
I’d love to see some sort of “here’s what you achieved” end-of-level tally.  I assume you have this planned.

The early tutorial signs are totally successful (though I suspect an iconographic version of the “roll the ball into the golem” sign, with no text, is within your grasp).  Might break that stuff out into a separate level, if only because the first level is going to be played through several times?  I dunno, I could go either way on that.

If you’re going to walk in the shadow of Mario, you need to really, really nail the feel of the controls.  Your game will be in a state of constant comparison with the grand-daddy of ‘em all, and that’s a lot to live up to.
- Create a slowing-down run animation for when he’s sliding to a stop, so it looks less slidey.  Mario gets away with not doing this because his legs are like 2 pixels long.  With the long spindly legs of Tint, it just doesn’t sell.
- When facing left, Tint pops several pixels to the left when he jumps, then pops back when he lands.  Doesn’t seem to do this when facing right.
- Every once in a long while, jumping on a little furry guy will catapult me WAY up into the air, like 4 times as high as I can jump by any other means (usually if I bop him on the way up instead of the way down).  If I could do this consistently and intentionally, I would.  As it is, I suspect it’s a physics bug.  Anyway, the hold-jump-while-bopping-to-jump-extra-high feature of Mario is sorely missed in general.

I crashed (at line 15, position 12 in some xml file apparently) after beating the level for like the 7th time.
Now it crashes whenever I try to resume game.
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Overall, my feeling about the 3 color abilities is this: the yellow button (float) is by FAR the most useful of the three.  Blue (run) doesn’t have enough of an effect on my speed (to the point where my brother couldn’t tell what it actually did), and Red (shield) doesn’t protect me from spikes.  My first instinct is to cut blue and red entirely, as they don’t seem to promise much gameplay possibility.  Even if you plan to do a level with lots of projectiles coming at you or whatever, the experience of blocking one didn’t really feel like much fun to me.  Since running isn’t very different from walking, I rarely want to use it and don’t mind its presence, but if you slowed down the default move speed to create an incentive for running more, I suspect I’d resent it being a limited resource.  When my pigment is depleted, I mostly just stand around waiting for it to recharge because there’s not enough little pigment drops around to speed up the process, and wish I was playing instead of standing around.

In short, I think this is a feature that needs a lot more prototyping before you find a truly successful core.  I see the beautiful symmetry of the abilities’ colors and the colors of the buttons on the controllers, and the way they’re the primary colors vs. the secondaries of the end-of-level crystals, but at the end of the day I think you’ve allowed this to over-constrain your design.  I won’t pretend to know exactly what would make it more successful, but here’s a random pile of suggestions that might help:

- Stop costing the color abilities entirely.  The costs feel somewhat arbitrary and don’t appear to enhance the fun of the game.  Mostly, they just force you to wait around and resent the developer. ^_^  I know this would require you to either re-think or cut the shield ability.  As it stands, I wouldn’t miss it.
- If you desperately want to keep the costs, give me more/better ways to replenish my abilities quickly.  Even if it was raining pigment pickups (like the little pollen particles), or they respawned from little holes in the ground, or whatever, I think I’d like it more than standing around.
- Make the shield more interesting: maybe it kicks things like rocks and apples really hard when you turn it on while flush against those objects?  Maybe it makes you bounce really high when you turn it on mid-air and hit the ground while it’s active?  It needs to be more interesting and broadly useful than it is right now.
- Make the speed and float the SAME button, and maybe even the same resource.  I don’t see the run having much use in the air, or the float having much use on the ground.  Yes, I know this blows the colored-abilities-match-their-buttons gag, but your controls being easy to visually understand or even learn (which they are) doesn’t matter if they aren’t usable after learning them.
- Make the color abilities actually “resaturate” particular sections of the world when you just hold a button (or combinations of buttons) in certain designated spots.  Jet Set Radio did this with its graffiti feature, where the spots for painting were pre-determined, and you had to get to them (often challenging) and then play the painting mini-game quickly and successfully while enemies closed in on you from all directions.  Something like this would make the bring-back-the-color idea feel much, much more integrated and relevant, and make the limited pigments feel more justified as well.  If I had to go replenish my paints somewhere else and come back to finish coloring-in a large area, that would make the pigment limits feel meaningful.

So those are my best ideas after playing the game for an hour or two.  To be clear, I think you guys are well on your way to making something really excellent.  My only other main suggestion is to do good, frequent playtesting (force yourself not to explain the game to testers before or during their first several playthroughs), ask the right questions of your testers afterwards (i.e. try to prise out their motivations for their feedback, and the expectations they had that the game didn’t meet, as opposed to their ideas of how to fix stuff), and make careful decisions about what you change with each iteration.  If you keep an open mind and are disciplined about that process, I’m confident you can make this game great.  Good luck!

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Summary

Charming art design and world aesthetic. Platforming interaction and

Positives

Wonderful art style, especially the character design and animations. Music and audio design was also enjoyable.

Rooms for Improvements

Overall, while I enjoyed the interactions between my basic moves and coloring the world around me I didn’t feel much pay-off for restoring the world around me.

Movement and jumping felt flighty and slow. Physics on some of the swinging platforms were a bit unpredictable and I spent a good amount of my time trying to compensate though it.

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As a self-proclaimed platformer snob, I found this game very plain. It doesn’t do anything that hasn’t already been done many times before (and better) and the second to second gameplay flow is just generally bland. Nothing about it was bad! But nothing about it was remarkable enough to make want to play it for an extended period of time.

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