SpaceManiac
A wonderful game, great sounds and graphics.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD13 → Only Forwards
By mrpiglet
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fun | 1 | 4.05 | 22 | |
| Overall | 4 | 4.18 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 17 | 3.43 | 21 | |
| Theme | 17 | 4.00 | 22 | |
| Polish | 2 | 4.59 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 5 | 4.09 | 22 | |
| Audio | 15 | 3.39 | 18 | |
| Humor | 16 | 2.88 | 8 | |
| Journal | 1 | 4.75 | 16 | |
| Food | 2 | 4.33 | 18 | |
| Technical | 9 | 3.35 | 17 | |
| Towlr | 16 | 3.25 | 8 |
A wonderful game, great sounds and graphics.
You clearly put a lot of effort into this game, and it definitely shows both graphically and in the content. Good job, man. I also think it was a nice variation of pacman-ish gameplay, even though I never liked pacman.
However, i did notice one small bug where the game sometimes didnt seem to want to recognize my keystrokes, making me run into bad stuff :(
(also, great to see a lot of journal/food entries! Yours were especially good at showing the entire process of making the game, imo)
Oh that's rather addictive. :) Nice style and plenty of polish too, really impressive for a 48 hour compo.
great game... felt like I could have been playing in the arcade.
The sounds are awesome, and it does indeed feel like a real arcade game! It's kind of an annoying game, though, especially when the big slow guy just sits there circling the exit like a shark. It's hard to make turns sometimes, since unlike Pac-Man, you can't back up a bit and try again.
Nice game. The controls are a bit frustrating though, sometimes it seem it won't move the way you want it.
Lack of music was conspicuous. Sound effects were good. Graphics were quite good. Controls were infuriating (even just stopping at a junction to let you choose, while not allowing you to move backwards, would be good). Also, possibly for me, the 'die and you move back to your starting position' mechanic was a bit annoying (Because I died so often). That said, I wasn't playing in survival mode mostly, which is probably more authentic in this way.
The graphics and the retro sound effects are absolutely amazing. I love them.
The gameplay is pretty great, except for one major problem: The unforgiving control schemes. You should *really* allow the player to indicate which direction he wants to go by pressing before the actual turn. As it is, I keep turning the wrong way because I can't handle the controls, which is a big issue in games like this (you should war against the enemy, not against your keyboard).
Great stuff!
I find games frustrating when the challenge is caused by the difficulty in controlling the character. In your game this is balanced out by not having to completely restart the level every time you encounter an enemy. Trying to strategize around the behaviors of the enemies is also made things a bit more interesting.
The men you have saved flying to the top of the screen was a really nice touch. Lots of polish made this a good game overall.
Fun times! Definitely one of the best I have seen so far. Keep up the good work!
This was a thoroughly enjoyable game! I played all 10 levels and survival mode. I really just loved so many aspects of this one. Anticipating the strategies of the various creatures and learning how to lure them away from the target zone or you was great. I loved the 'only forward' always on the go method as well as low penalty for death. I think if there were 'lives' I wouldn't have found this very enjoyable at all. The "death" noise was my favorite, so nice and bassy. This is the most polished and all around balanced entry I have played this compo so far. Having only done 2 LDs now I am starting to realize what a feat that is so congrats on really pulling off something fairly complete in the time period. Your journal and food photos are great and show so many progressions along the way that one could feel they are right there with you. ;)
Rock!
reducing pac-man from "collect every last thing" to a flicky-style "collect this handful of things, and hold on to them til you get home" makes the game a lot faster-moving, and i like that stages are measured by how much time i take to complete them and getting caught just makes me take more time.
what frustrated me, and this might just be the game, is not reacting fast enough to pick a direction before i hit a junction, and having the game pick for me (usually poorly). i like the concept of always moving forward, though. maybe the player could always move in a consistent direction - "always clockwise," for example - by default. maybe that's how the game already is? if so, i didn't notice it.
Really enjoyed playing this one. It's fun and very nicely polished.
The time frame for pressing a key could be little bit longer, so that the character responds snappier.
Good little game, impressive stuff - like others have said, the control scheme could be a little more forgiving, and the game would be better for it - it's mainly when you have to make several turns in succession that it gets annoying - considering you can't go backwards, a slightly more forgiving system might make the game better.
Still, nice little real time puzzler, very good :)
Really fun, great mechanics, love the pacman inspiration. Gets really hard at the end! Would have preferred if you spawned in a random location -- sometimes a bunch of enemies would cluster nearish to the beginning on one of the main roads that you have to go down, and I'd die over and over again.
It almost felt like a music game in later stages. The tones arranged themselves nicely. I've always wanted to do something like that and you pulled it off very well. All of the other aspects were great. Nice job.