Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD13 → ‘0xF0’
By bluescrn
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 2 | 4.45 | 20 | |
| Fun | 8 | 3.85 | 20 | |
| Theme | 19 | 3.90 | 20 | |
| Innovation | 39 | 2.70 | 20 | |
| Polish | 1 | 4.70 | 20 | |
| Graphics | 1 | 4.52 | 21 | |
| Audio | 14 | 3.40 | 20 | |
| Humor | 24 | 2.67 | 12 | |
| Technical | 1 | 4.50 | 20 | |
| Journal | 10 | 3.82 | 17 | |
| Towlr | 38 | 2.50 | 8 | |
| Food | 1 |
High quality and polish. This is really a great piece of work. I love how you can just go nuts with the speed, fly off the tracks, and still get yourself back before failing :)
It would be cool if the game automatically switched track after finishing one.
Ok, since nobody else will, I'll whip out as much negative critique as I can come up with. Bear in mind that I voted 5 on fun and tech, so I do like it. This nitpicking will just drop polish to 4. Also I think I still hold the 1-1 track record after some 70+ attempts - record in both perseverance and time perhaps.
Minor annoyance: Sound effects. The countdown is ok, but the fall sound (whistle) is excessive and pretty random as you basically hear it all the time. Menu sounds could be lighter with less bass (this is almost always true).
Thrust sound is weird since it seems to be a longish one-shot sample rather than a continuous noise, which makes you think that the thrust is also one-shot (so you could repeatedly tap it to go faster for instance). Sound should mirror functionality to aid the player rather than confuse them.
Fall sound is my personal nemesis. I hate it. I always try to hit space as soon as I sense the race is lost, but if I'm a split second too late it'll trigger the sample and it'll go on and on for an hour before it finally shuts up some time in the next run. "Hour" is subjective here. It gets on my nerves though, should be muted when you restart the race.
Onwards to the actual simulation. A cosmetic issue is that, at least on my system, the frame-to-frame jitter is pretty bad. The ship is shaking back and forth along the movement vector, as if the timing is messed up and some variable time delta suffers as a result. It's often better (sometimes worse!) when I disable the glow and framerate goes up to 60 fps, but there's always occasional hickups which are sort of jarring. Maybe you could have capped the delta measurement or smoothed it over time, to prevent a temporary timer hickup from noticably affecting the animation.
As for the actual gameplay, I don't quite like how the ship turns like an asteroids vessel, with almost on/off angular delta. I suppose it's mainly due to the camera being fixed in the same direction as the ship though, making it feel rigid. If the camera had lagged behind a bit you'd get a better sense of what it's doing in terms of movement and direction (like a typical 3rd person racing view).
Speaking of camera lag, the vertical lag is pretty extreme in some cases, leaving you temporarily above the ship looking straight down, having no view of the track ahead.
Stability-wise, it's been mostly good to me except one time when it crashed out with an unhandled exception as I was sitting on the starting line. It triggered the fall sound right before crashing (even though I was sitting still on the track).
The level system is a little bit harsh in that you can't skip a single track if you want to see the next batch. It isn't terrible, just not optimal for lazy players :P
I've completed the first 11 tracks, but I probably won't play further anytime soon. If I had a warp option I'd try a few of the really late levels, just for kicks.
Anything not mentioned (bitched about) here is probably great, like the graphics and ghost replay.
I've played worse commercial games than this. Several, actually. In two days? I almost don't believe it.
Brilliant. If you don't win this thing, I'll eat my hat.
Yeah, this is pretty cool / amazing. Good graphics etc.
Reminds be of old starfox games. Impressive graphics, felt like I was playing a commercial game. Amazing! Agree with eric.. on negatives
Really nicely done. I think the large number of levels works against you here. I don't want to have to finish all the early levels before I can try the later more complex stuff.
Also, it would have be cool to have an option to race against developer ghosts!
Amazing. Again :).
I love the "FAAAAAIL" sound effect. Really nice touch.
Excellent work. My only complaint is: 100 tracks?! It seems a bit much, considering the similarity of the tracks within each level that have to be played through to move up a level. But that aside, this is a very polished and very enjoyable game. I especially like the best time ghost - that's a nice touch :D
Very cool racing game. It's got some pretty odd physics to how the car works (like the air steering!), but not unpleasant, and quite learnable. Like everybody else, I find the unlocking quite excessive, but it sure makes it feel even more like a real game!
I don't need ghost racers, but some sort of goal to shoot for would be nice. As is, you could just pass every track by driving as slow as possible (not that it would be very fun). Some time goals maybe, something.
Technically completely awesome, and the gameplay isn't exactly weak either!
The control style does however take some getting used to, and, as is too often the case the procedural generated content feels well, okay. I can't help feeling that a smaller handful of hand crafted tracks would have actually been significantly more fun. Hey though, I'm just nitpicking, and I know how hard doing content *and* code in the timescale is. Still majorly impressed!
"The application has failed to start because d3dx9_35.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem."
Too bad, this looks really cool too!
found the controls a little difficult but i'm not great at racing games anyway. very polished and well rounded entry in general. sound effects quite humorous. like the look and feel of the track in that it reminds me of some racing game I used to play a long time ago but I can't quite remember what it was called. something that ran on a 286 though so that was the era. very impressive to see this much game pulled off in 48hrs. lost interest after the first 10 tracks as they all were very similar and i kept flying off the track when i tried to go really fast... ;)
You know, I think you'll win. :)
Positive:
- Gameplay is excellent. From the ones I've tried so far, this game has been the most fun.
- The presentation (menu system and in-game both) is absolutely stunning.
- All the maps! In a sense, this reminds me of F-zero X (in particular), which had pretty cool random maps. Procedural generation is my friend :)
- I love the sound effects!
Negative:
- If I alt-tab out of the game in full-screen, and back again, game crashes.
- It should automatically move you to the next level in the menu once you finish a certain level for the first time. After that, it's fine if it doesn't go to the next one.
- I'd really like a way to leave the current map and go back to the menu, without having to finish the track or restart the game.
- I kinda agree that there's a bit too much unlocking going on. Perhaps letting some half of the maps be playable straight away?
Same here: "The application has failed to start because d3dx9_35.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem."
This is really very impressive in terms of polish, playability, and everything else in a 48 hour competition...
very well done, very nice... 5/5
Very polished and awesome entry. Ghost and enemy-less racing games are pretty easy to make, since you only have to worry about the player and the track, but this game builds on that simplicity and makes something really amazing. A great accomplishment for a 48 hour game.
Outstanding, super high quality. The issue of playing all 10 tracks to get to next levels was tedious. Wanted to just go on to harder stuff. Small fix. For 48 hrs, amazing job.