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Left Behind

By jimjam

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Theme763.56
Innovation1453.06
Mood1842.86
Graphics2023.06
Coolness26246
Overall3772.63
Community4042.33
Fun4482.13
Humor4521.56
Audio5941.00

Comments

deza 2011-12-19 09:05

Very innovation idea, however controlling the bird was troublesome, if you fix this and add some sounds it would be great.

sanojian 2011-12-20 20:09

Nice animation on birds. Funny surprise in depths. Some sounds would add a lot. Nice game :)

frankiesmileshow 2011-12-21 05:14

Nice game. Yeah, sounds would definetely be a plus! Also sometimes there just wasnt any fish it seems. Im not sure what triggered the angler fish to show up and eat you, was it to go deep under the sea or running out of stamina?

jimjam 2011-12-21 20:50

Hi guys, thanks for your feedback. The controls are definitely in need of a tweak... at this point, I'm not even sure why the bird gets stuck in the water, but I was also very, very tired on day 1 when I did most of the controls/physics code. By day 2, I was too terrified of it to try and rebuild it.

As before, I had the same old problems with getting sound in the game, which is a great pity.

FrankieSmileShow, the angler fish/Cloverfield monster ripoff (TM) turns up if you go too deep, but you also lose if you run out of O2 (the blue bar). Running out of stamina doesn't do anything except slow you down, which prevents you from reaching your flock, which in turn will cause you to lose. I probably should've mentioned that.

mes 2011-12-22 06:32

not bad. i like the concept. the controls felt a little odd and i was able to win pretty easily by flying underwater surfacing just frequently enough to breathe. great touch with the thing in the depths.

jimjam 2011-12-22 08:37

Thanks mes! I'm glad you were able to beat it easily - I spent about 15 minutes yesterday trying to beat my own game and getting nailed by the red birds :) I guess I made that route a little hard, and others a bit easy, so I'd need to adjust difficulty too.

Ta for the comment!

lanoiadimuu 2012-01-04 01:15

Bad controls and no sound. The idea is good and i like the graphics.

oggologgo 2012-01-05 19:57

Please add W as a control for ascend. It would be more intuitive for me. Also adding arrow keys, would be good.

pierrec 2012-01-07 15:55

Nice idea but the controls aren't fluid enough. It makes the game very hard and not that fun to play...

evan-greenwood 2012-01-08 14:38

I really liked the Cloverfield monster touch. I have much greater respect for seagulls as a result :)

It'd be great if you could fix up the controls and maybe add some other mechanics... like wind currents that carry you or obstacles or something... and maybe fishes that you can munch on (thus triggering the angler fish revenge cycle.)

evan-greenwood 2012-01-08 14:42

Doh! My bad, you can already munch on the fishes. *Preempted face-palm*

jimjam 2012-01-09 07:09

Hi guys, thanks a mil for your feedback! I see that controls have definitely been a weak point in this one.

I've had this idea for flight mechanics for a while now, being more or less based on an ooooold game called Ugh! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugh!) in which there was a sort of hover/glide mechanic for controlling a prehistoric taxi. Give it a play - it has a fairly uncommon feel to the gliding/flying. What I wanted with the bird was to have the player have to balance falling and flapping up to kind of create a glide (not sure if that makes sense), but somewhere along the line it just became straightforward 2d movement marred by the wrong kind of controls.

Also, in a game like Ugh! there are all kinds of reference points in the view to tell you where your flying craft is - in fact, if I remember, there was no camera panning. In my game, even with the addition of the clouds and mountains in the BG, it still feels a little disorientating, and difficult to tell exactly how fast the bird is moving.

@Black Ships: The air current thing was actually a planned feature initally, but I knew quite early on I wouldn't get to it sadly. I also appreciate that my interpretation of seagulls has raised the bar, but I don't think it's quite as important a contribution as the knowledge that even a small quantity of fresh seagull blood has enough cooling power to cool a spaceship entering Earth's atmosphere.

kellythomas 2012-01-10 01:53

brutal!