Hi community, we are new to game creation and in this context we have created our first game Thimble Mania with godot in order to familiarize ourselves with the tool. The game can be found here Thimble Mania by RA game studio. Any advice or criticism for this game is strongly desired in order to improve us.
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Congrats on creating your first game!
It’s a simple concept and you’ve done it well, so I don’t have much critique on the gameplay/rules/systems. I would prefer it though if there was some number of wins I had to reach before running out of lives. Endless mode could still exist, but I think it would be more satisfying to be aiming for eg. 10 wins with 3 lives. Maybe this is what you are doing with the levels you say are coming on the site? Or maybe there is a set goal already, but I stopped before reaching it because I didn’t know about it and assumed it just continued to infinity.
There are lots of options you can set, which is nice. I like that you’ve included multiple ways to scale the difficulty (cups, speed, tours and balls). It would be cool if you could set a range for the options to allow variety in a run (ie. you set balls to 1-3 instead of just 1, and each round has a random or progressively increasing speed). More importantly, it would be helpful if the Arcade mode had some text to explain what it is. I’m guessing it ramps up in difficulty over time and maybe has a set number of rounds, but I don’t know.
I like that you’ve included two different environments and that they have a different vibe. It would be nice if they had some flavour text (just a sentance or two) when you’re choosing between them on the menu to give a little more character, charm or humour to the game. The city one says “bad balls” and seemed to change the ruleset in some way but I’m not sure exactly how. I played that stage with an extra ball and it seemed that choosing one of the balls made me lose, and the other made me win. But there was no difference I could see between the balls. Perhaps for “bad balls” the balls should be different colours (and shades and patterns, for colour blindness) and the player isn’t told which ball they need to track until after the cups are shuffled. Though I think this would be best implemented as another difficulty scaling option or level progression feature - it requires a new skill, tracking and remembering the positions of multiple objects.
The UI worked well, though the font for buttons could be more exciting and the logo needs a bit of anti-aliasing. The pink logo text over the purple thimbals didn’t look quite right - if you look at the logo in greyscale you’ll see why, the thimbal and the logo text are almost exactly the same shade, so they merge together. The UI is an easy win for “juicyness” - giving buttons a tiny bit of bounce and a sound on mouse in/mouse out would make it feel snappier and more alive. You could do the same thing with the cups in the game.
All of the following would be huuuge scope creep, so I hope you’ll recognize it as such. That said, if I were to expand on the game I would try to add a bit more character, possibly by adding characters. They could be 3D or could be as simple as 2d cutout animations with just a couple of facial expressions, or even just JRPG npc style static faces on a text box. Their hands could whip around over the cups as if they are moving them, and they could have very short quips and lines to taunt the player when the player loses, try to psych the player out when the mouse hovers over the cups, and to congratulate the player, cry foul or cry when the player wins. If you were tying it into a story mode (you say on the site that you are adding levels), they could each have different difficulty levels and some could have gimmicks. For example, one character could appear to be done moving cups, then talk for ages, move two cups, and carry on talking. It would annoying if all characters did it, but for a charlatan character it would be a fun gimmick. You could even add gameplay to the characterisations, giving the player opportunities to throw off their opponent by saying certain things to make the game easier. This too could be one character’s gimmick. I can see a simple absurdist story about a tournament everyone cares way too much about working well as a way to frame the game. Street Fighter or Pokémon levels of obsession, but with balls and cups and gazillion dollar prizes at the highest echelons of play.
I think that’s about as comprehensive a review as I can manage, but I hope you find something helpful there.
Congratulations again on making your game a reality!
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thanks a lot for your commentary. We will consider this for our future updates.
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You’re very welcome. Good luck!