(Spoilers) Detailed list of problems, devs please read!

[/Impulse 101]

I'm going to start from the beginning and work my way to the end. There are a lot, and at first I was going to list them in the order I encountered them, but instead I decide it best to do them in order of importance, and separate them into 3 different kind of problems: Game design, visuals, and sound. Most of these problems really come down to a noticeable lack of polish.

It feels to me like Armikrog needed more testing, and perhaps just going around and making sure everything looked presentable and made sense. I believe all of these problems can be fixed with some minor patches. I will remain constructive for this entire post.

The first category of problems I want to call attention to are Game design related. Problems with puzzle logic not making sense, or things that make the player feel like the game is broken for example.

1. This one is both game design and visual, but if done properly, it could fix a lot the game design problems. The mouse cursor is a static windows default cursor.

At the very least, this should be some sort of animated clay pointer. I’m imaging maybe it looks like the Neverhood cursor but it’s striped with Tommynauts colors. Ideally the cursor would be dynamic and change shape or animate like in the Neverhood based on what it was hovering over, but at the very least it should look like clay.

At best it would change dynamically based on what it was hovering over, like if it was hovering over a button, or something you could speak with/ interact with, or even if you are clicking on an area that would move you into a new room like in the Neverhood.


2. This one is a puzzle design problem, and one of the few times I couldn’t figure out what to do. Early in the game, a precedent is set that when you control Beaky and you are seeing in black and white, anything that you can interact with or pick up or is important glows, or has a black swirl around it. This makes sense, because it is difficult for the player to make out objects in the swirling black and white “beakyvision”. However, there is no clue or anything to indicate the Beaky is somehow able to talk to the Squids.

When you are seeing in black and white “beakyvision”, the Squids don’t look special or like they can interacted with. They just look like another black and white piece of the set. For what reason would someone have to click on the Squids as Beaky, when they probably already clicked on them as Tommy, and when they are viewed through beakyvision, they don’t glow or have black swirls around them?

I see a few solutions to this. If the cursor was dynamic and animated, the pointer could change to beaky’s mouth moving if you hovered over the squid. Another simpler option would be to put a black swirl around the squid, like is around the other items beaky can pick up or use in beakyvision. Another option would be to have the squid start making its gurgling noises, or move its tentacles around, or really do literally anything at all to make it seem like its important if it is alone in a room with beaky. Otherwise it just blends into the black and white and doesn’t seem important because we already clicked on it as Tommy and nothing happened.

3. The red buttons with the lightening-power symbols above them don’t make any sense. First of all why can’t Tommy press them if they don’t have power? He should be able to press the button, even if doesn’t do anything. He could press it, and it could make a buzzing noise or a sputtering motor noise, something, anything, if it doesn’t have power. Just let the player interact with it somehow, even if it won’t solve the puzzle.

Not letting the player interact with a button that is clearly meant to do something makes people think the game is buggy and broken, when it is actually just really unpolished. Second, why can only Beaky press some of these buttons with his tail, and Tommy can only press some of them with his finger? It doesn’t make any sense at all, it’s very inconsistent, and also pointless. I’ve only seen one button in the game that made sense that only Beaky could press it, and that is because it’s in an area Tommy cannot go.

The solution to this is simple, just let Tommy or Beaky press all the buttons, even if the buttons don’t function. I cannot stress enough how broken it makes the game look if there is a button, and you click it, and the game acts like you didn’t.

4. This next one is another time I was stumped, and again it involves something that should look interactable, but in fact just looks like a wall with a symbol on it.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528168202

Surprisingly, to attempt to solve the puzzle in this room, you actually have to click on the still symbol on the wall, and NOT the blue button. If you click on the blue button, absolutely nothing happens. I’m going to restate the importance of the buttons doing something when you click them.

Clicking these buttons, and having no response from the game at all, not a sound or an animation or anything, feels like the game doesn’t recognize the players input. It feels broken. If you click on the symbol, you are taken to a screen where there are icons of creatures and a cannon in front of the symbol.

There are a lot of things that feel “off” about this entire process of starting the puzzle. My best recommendation would be to have the blue button start the puzzle. If I remember correctly I think you had to turn the puzzle on in another room, so just make it so if you press the blue button before the power is on, a buzzer sound or something similar to let the player know this button doesn’t work yet.

The symbol on the wall doesn’t actually look like it’s a puzzle until you click it, zoom up into it and see creature icons, and I’m not sure if anything can really be done about this. I was legitimately surprised when I clicked this plain looking symbol carved on the wall (after having tried to press the blue button just to the right of it many times and the game ignoring me), and then have the game zoom into the previously empty wall, only for it to now be filled with icons of monsters. The puzzle itself is fine, if not a little easy, but at least it makes decent sense and it functions.

5. The puzzle I am currently stuck at is when Beaky crawls through a tunnel and ends up in a room with a squid and a very “un-interactable” dial on the left wall. I don’t know how to enter the solution to this puzzle because unlike the rest of the puzzles, there isn’t a button to press when finished or anything.

I don’t know if my guess is right or wrong or anything really, so a player may assume the puzzle doesn’t work and is bugged. I’ll try it some more, but this one feels like something is missing.

UPDATE 10/2 5:30 EST

For some reason this puzzle now works properly and makes sense. For whatever buggy reason, the symbols I was dialing into the puzzle had no effect on the game world. It seems to be working now, but it definitely was not working before. This puzzle is fine when it works as intended.

6. This console in this screenshot doesn’t do anything when you click it.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=527417139

I’m assuming it needs power to function, but it feels broken or bugged because the player cannot interact with it all. If there were some sound effects like an empty clicking noise, the player would at least know this is something that is responding to their mouse clicks and isn’t bugged.

Even if the puzzle cannot be solved at that point, there needs to be some indication that this is actually at some point going to be a puzzle, and isn’t just a bugged screen that will not respond to the player’s inputs.

7. I’m not sure if this has been fixed yet, but in this screen, if you control Beaky and click on the door near the dead center of the screen, Beaky will walk through the wall and end up in a tunnel.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528471473

Exiting the tunnel to the right will take you back to the room you entered from, but Beaky would appear at the top near the door, Tommy would be missing, and the kickstarter credit song would start playing. Saving at this point would make that save file unable to finish the game, because Beaky would be stuck up at the top of screen and can never come down no matter what.

8. If you press escape to go into the options menu during the baby mobile music puzzle, everything just gets weird and unresponsive. My best guess is that when you press escape to bring up the menu during this puzzle, the menu comes up but is invisible, but it still responds to the user’s mouse click, and therefore this invisible menu is blocking the player from using the mouse to interact with the baby mobile puzzle.

Next up is graphical problems. A lot of these are not obvious, but they are noticeable if you have played a lot of video games and know what to look for.

1. This one is a minor visual issue, but since there are so many I will comment on as many as I can remember, as they come up. In the 2nd room, after solving the puzzle and having the squid tentacles fall from the roof, you can still interact with the lever on the left and close the door in the right, even with the block creature in the door frame. This is what it looks like:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528147755

The door is completely closed in this screenshot, with the block creature in the way of the door. In the actual game this only happens in a fraction of a second, but it is easily reproducible. It doesn’t make any sense and could easily be fixed by just disabling the lever.

2. Another minor visual issue. If you exit a room, and the entrance is the background of another room, and then you immediately reenter that room from the background, Tommynauts graphic will shrink as if he was walking into the background, but he won’t face the door. He just gets smaller and stands still as the screen fades.

The first screenshot is Tommys normal size, the 2nd one is if you exit and reenter a room in the background very quickly. It looks much worse if you actually see it in motion. The 2nd picture is darker because the screen is fading out to the room in the background.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528147771

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528147763

3. The black strings on the baby music mobile puzzle on the far right (the orange box creature) and far left (red squid) toys don’t look like they connect to the mobile properly.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528147796

I’m not sure if this is intentional, because I don’t think those parts of the segmented circle light up and play music, (which I am also not sure is intentional), but I felt it was worth pointing out. Every other string looks like it connects to the center of each of the segments on the music hoop, but these look like they connect to the black border between the segments. A solution would be to just move those lines and toys slightly in the correct direction.

4. Graphical error are normally not something I give too much thought to, but when you have a game that’s primary appeal is the artwork, problems really stand out. When you are pushing this block creature around in the room with the sunlight shining through the roof, there is something wrong with the way Tommy looks.

I’m guessing the parts of him that are supposed to be hidden behind the block creature are becoming exposed, and are super imposed onto the orange bock creature, making the parts of Tommy that are supposed to be hidden by perspective actually appear orange.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528168214

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528168218

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528168223

5. Minor graphical, Tommy’s foot going through various things that looks bad.

This one it’s a dog bowl.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528168242

This is one it looks like Beaky and Tommy are standing in the empty hole below the squid.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528147818


6. Minor graphical, some of these levers look like they aren’t set into the right position in the level holder. The first one is particularly noticeable, its not even anywhere near the vertical slot on the side. It looks like someone glued it to the wrong spot.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528147733

This one looks much too high, like the inner part of the lever is set at the top of the device.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528168257


Lastly I will bring up sound problems.

1. Before the game even starts, the opening movie is problematic. You can barely hear the lyrics to the song explaining the background story, because the music and sound effects are much louder then the almost whispering singer. I restarted and turned the subtitles on so I could even understand what was happening. Solution is obvious; just make the lyrics louder or the music quieter. If I would have to pinpoint the sounds that are really overpowering, it would be the loud thumping bass.

2. I felt like I only heard maybe 2 or 3 songs so far, the rest of the noise was just atmospheric ambience. Is the music selection generated randomly every room? Is this intentional? Are there more tracks? What is going on with the music and why is there so little of it? Is it a bug? I don’t even know what questions to ask about this, but it’s a problem. Maybe the rooms are so small that the music doesn’t get a chance to play, and when you leave the room the music starts over.

3. At one point I stopped hearing the footsteps of Tommy and Beaky and it never came back. I actually think every sound effect just stopped, or maybe the sound effects weren’t even there to begin with.



UPDATE 10/2 6:35 EST

I finished the game, and I honestly think Armikrog would be considered a good game, if not kind of short, if these problems I mentioned were addressed. It's up to the devs at this point.


The following are some final issues I have after beating the game.

If you go into the screen that tells you the third icon needed to solve the antlincon puzzle after Beaky is dead, you still hear Beaky make a noise when you enter.

UPDATE 10/3

One unanswered question remains from me.

In this screenshot, there is a "interaction circle", or to be more clear, a spot where if you drive the "rail wall car" to it, something usually changes or happens. The one nearest to the center of the screen is unreachable as far as I can tell. Does it do anything, and if not, why is it there?

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528600506

UPDATE 10/4

One of my unanswered questions was revealed to be a legitamate, unbugged secret, so I removed it.

Any edits I make in this post have been to fix typos, spelling, and grammar, unless otherwise noted with a date.

[Slainmonkey]

4. The sound volume of cut scenes are much louder then they are while playing in game.

[Reginald Kincaid]

Great write up! I hope we get a response about some of this stuff soon...

[ko]

I bet you spent more time on that then the devs did on the game.

[norian]

abaut green room, i can walk there thrue closed doors, Normal the dog guy sholuld be on button to open the door.

[/Impulse 101]

I would like to know if someone from the dev team has seen this thread, I think it would help fix the games many problems.

[Reginald Kincaid]

Originally posted by Xandier:

I would like to know if someone from the dev team has seen this thread, I think it would help fix the games many problems.

I second that. Has anyone from the dev team posted anything since release day? The silence is making me kind of nervous...

Hopefully it's just a weekend break and we'll know more about the plans to fix things up on Monday.

[ShadowNate]

Great list Xandier!. This is probably what a feedback from their beta testers should look like.

I've got most of the bugs you wrote about and I absolutely agree about the tweaks needed for the button interactions and the missing indication that Beak Beak can interact with octopus creatures in trippy mode.

My 6 additional bugs in order of importance. They are already mentioned elsewhere but let's have them here too:
1. You can finish the game after getting the last octopus to give you the last artifact (used to activate the console in emerald room), without rescuing the baby or encountering the bad guy. I returned to the first station using the trams, and had beak beak with me, got into the emerald room with his help, solved the final puzzle. And then I got a cutscene which I assume is the only ending in the game, where stuff had happened that really did not for me (beak beak was dead, the baby was back with Tommy, and the mother said I beat the bad guy and was worthy of everlasting power energy). [gameplay bug][consistency bug]

2. In the second tower, if you leave beak beak on a button in the one room where this is possible, and return to the tram platform, you can pull the level and get sucked in the pipe, but then nothing happens. Tommy gets stuck in there because the game expects beak-beak to be with him too. You can't get unstuck there. You need to restart [gameplay bug]

3. After solving the final puzzle - putting the combination in the emerald room panel, the sound will play but if you then click out of the panel to return to the main room screen, the glass is not raised. It's still there, when it should not. I think the solution to this is to wait until the sound finished playing entirely. [gameplay bug]

4. The panel that beak beak uses to set the tram lines in the fourth tower resets itself to its original tile combination when you revisit it, although that does not necessarily reflect the state of the tram lines. In order to set the tram lines to the horizontal state I had to mess the tiles and then return that to the original combination (this is a bug, because it makes no sense).[gameplay bug]

5. In the first tunnel that Beak Beak uses, if you exit to the first room of the game, Beak beak's vision stops being trippy. This is inconstistent with the rest of the game. [visual glitch]

6. Also in that tunnel with Beak Beak, if you exit to the first room and Tommy has blocked the door from the other side, Beak beak will still see the door as closed.[game world glitch]

And a suggestion:
- The "wall of lore" is really easy to miss (no indication of interaction) and also sections of it are easy to miss (no indication that there are multiple sections), and pretty soon in the game, you solve a puzzle and you get completely locked out of it. I missed it the first time and only randomly found it after reloading and trying to figure out the logic in the astroanuts puzzle (which I solved seemingly randomly). Anyway, ideally there should be an indication that you can interact with it and its various sections. Unless this is supposed to be just an easter egg maybe (?)

Originally posted by Xandier:

Two unanswered question remain from me.

1. In this screenshot, I never managed to find a way to rotate this circle on the wall. Is it possible?

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528600483

About this, it is an easter egg. You need to use the pipe in one of the rooms of the second tower. This pipe looks like the ones near the trams, and kinda seems out of place in that room. I got this neat the end and I am not sure if there is a specific sequence to unlock it. I was with Beak Beak and I stood with Tommynaut under it and it now worked. It sucked Tommy in and spat him out in a platform where a... special tram car was parked.

2. In this screenshot, there are a "interaction circle", or to be more clear, a spot where if you drive the "rail wall car" to it, something usually changes or happens. The one nearest to the center of the screen is unreachable as far as I can tell. Does it do anything, and if not, why is it there?

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=528600506

As far as I can tell you can't interact with or reach that.

[Fooch]

Devs won't respond they are too busy swimming in the money

[/Impulse 101]

I was actually supposed to be a beta tester because of kickstarter, but the only beta test version that was released on steam for me to play was only the first 3 rooms of the game. I posted if this was intended, and was informed that it was. A link to the post:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/334120/discussions/0/530649887207868797/

This means that only the first 3 rooms of the game were beta tested. If I was allowed to test the full game and give feedback during the beta, these problems may have not been in the full release.

[/Impulse 101]

Still havent heard anything about these issues.

[HighLanderPony]

Great list!

One thing to add, the effin' lever in the green 50/50 room, where you find P. The first time you go in, you can't see ANYTHING on the floor that's like a lever. Nothing. Then the cut scene plays. Of course, you won't pay much attention to the room that had nothing in it after an important cut scene played. So you leave the room. I was stuck after this for hours, because I didn't go back to look for a lever. And even when I did, it was hard to notice.

That and the blue whirly puzzle on the wall drove me nuts.

Forgot to say, plus points for the Wario Thwomp-thing avatar.

[davetrowe]

I think most people missed the green room lever for those reasons. With the cutscene, the room feels "accomplished" immediately. This could potentially be solved by removing the clutter, or moving the lever to the other side of the room, but even then that's not a great solution. Maybe if the cutscene triggered by picking up the lever, but that leaves the problem of players clicking the bearskin rug and getting no feedback for what is obviously an important object in the room.

The blue whirly puzzle absolutely needed the blue button to be part of the hotspot to trigger the puzzle, and the puzzle itself is pretty obtuse in its mechanics.

It's all small problems like that that make the game a design mess for me. Just small things like people not realizing they could continue upwards in the first ant room, or the well documented beak-beak clicking the button or talking to the squid. Those aren't puzzles in the game, just bad UX stuff. It boggles my mind how they spent so much time on the art, but just overlooked such obvious fundamentals. If I had to guess, I'm guessing they weren't in close touch with their programmers. I've been on projects where the programming was outsourced and eventually I just learned how to program due to my frustrations with those projects.

[HighLanderPony]

Originally posted by davetrowe:

I think most people missed the green room lever for those reasons. With the cutscene, the room feels "accomplished" immediately. This could potentially be solved by removing the clutter, or moving the lever to the other side of the room, but even then that's not a great solution. Maybe if the cutscene triggered by picking up the lever, but that leaves the problem of players clicking the bearskin rug and getting no feedback for what is obviously an important object in the room.

The blue whirly puzzle absolutely needed the blue button to be part of the hotspot to trigger the puzzle, and the puzzle itself is pretty obtuse in its mechanics.

It's all small problems like that that make the game a design mess for me. Just small things like people not realizing they could continue upwards in the first ant room, or the well documented beak-beak clicking the button or talking to the squid. Those aren't puzzles in the game, just bad UX stuff. It boggles my mind how they spent so much time on the art, but just overlooked such obvious fundamentals.

Well explained. These are things they should've thought about.

Another thing is when you pick up a brown lever, and it turns into a silver level (for the cart) in Tommy's hand. If you miss that you get confused, looking around where to put it. This also could've easily been solved by not reusing the same lever appearances within one puzzle section.

[davetrowe]

That too. I've read people getting stuck because they've picked up a lever, but it wasn't the correct one for the current puzzle they needed to solve so they had no idea what was wrong, and it felt like just another bug.

My big cardinal sin is the room near the end with the necessary hint that the player soon after cannot ever revisit. This isn't due to a bug, this is by design. This should never, ever happen in an adventure game.

This has been the game I've been harshest on in years, and it's because I wanted to love it, and it's such a disappointment for reasons that could have easily been avoided with a little thought. Plus, even if it wasn't "modern" in its sensibilities, it doesn't even match up to their previous work in terms of design. I can only conclude something went very wrong in development.

It's turned from a game I was looking forward to into a case study I will be using to demonstrate bad game design and terrible development prioritization to my interns and such, which is tragic.

[Juz]

Adding my 2 cents (hoping that I'm not repeating any known problem).

I'm playing under Linux (Xubuntu), with a 4:3 screen, in 1280:1024.

Here are the problems I found:

1) During the opening cutscene (not other ones) subitles do appear when activated, but are not removed when they should be, so that they all stack and are impossible to read.

2) While normal room screens are correctly adjusted to my screen ratio (adding black bands over and under the scene), puzzle screens (like the panel in the emerald room and the lullaby puzzle) are not, so that what's left and right is cut out.
This is potentially a game breaking bug for me: the button to trigger the lullaby is still barely reachable, but if I look at the panel in the emerald room I have no way to get out of it, except killing the game process. I assume there are sensitive areas to exit it on the left or right and I can't see nor click them.

Thanks for any future fix!