Heya it's Chris!
It's wild that you guys were able to incorporate so many features in such a short time. I grew up with the PS1/2/3/4, so the art style, the driving, the atmosphere is very nostalgic. I do feel like you guys have something worthwhile here, yet there are some friction and bottlenecks I felt when I played that prevented the relaxing adventure from shining through:
-The controls are.. a lot. It's probably warranted for a bigger scale game, but for the purpose of a short game, I felt like maybe half of them were not necessary. For example, I personally thought having AWD or not didn't impact gameplay much, and perhaps might have made it more relaxing if it wasn't there. All this resulted me pressing Q every 30 seconds and it gave me a bit of ludo-narrative dissonance.
-The dialogue was a bit eerie (i.e., opposite of relaxing). For example, at some point the Fisherfrog blurted out something like, "Come to me anytime as a surrogate dad.. but I'm a total stranger btw" (I'm paraphrasing). In the context of the conversation, it was more like a psycho because I don't know their established relationships.
-Level design. I know you guys spent painstaking effort to sculpt the hilly region, but for me at least, there are 2 big issues: readability and constant roadblocks. Together, they make my experience more or less this: 1) Where's the navigational path, it's so hard to see; 2) Oh gosh I'm stuck for the nth time bumping into a small stump that I missed because I was trying to vibe in the driver's seat view; 3) Oh gosh I forgot all the buttons I have to press, time to Q and read. Maybe later parts of the region can be taxing, but would you consider the onboarding zone to be more accessible?
-Van physics. I won't mention what other comments said, but I feel it's a bit too bouncy. With this theme, my personal preference is chill driving through the woods. I love the outdoors and often rent a van to drive around national parks in the U.S., and I get that sometimes you have to pay attention to where you're going, but honestly, for the most part, the experience IRL is super chill, since all the roads are well kept unless you're offroading. Again, I know there's F4 -- but maybe because I see the potential of your vision, I'm a bit more invested than usual!
Great effort for the jam!
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I’m not really satisfied with the physics of the van either. They currently utilize Godots builtin vehicle physics for the sake of completing the submission in time, but if we continue development I would prefer to make something custom instead. And as for AWD, it makes a huge difference but we’ve noticed that a big number of players can’t really experience it due to having difficulty controlling the van in the first place. Which ties in with what you’ve said about level design, and I completely agree. We’ll need to find more playtesters for next time to help strike a better balance between the number of features and their quality :D
Thanks for all the feedback, really appreciate it.