FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD25 → Escape From Prison Planet

Escape From Prison Planet

By gamexcore

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness1100
Graphics1143.72
Audio1223.19
Mood2313.04
Overall2373.23
Fun3042.96
Humor5242.07
Innovation6032.35
Theme6212.53

Comments

patricklorio 2012-12-17 11:02

It looks awesome! To bad I'm on a mac, is a port on the way?

starspell 2012-12-17 11:02

Unfortunately when I try to run this game, either through setup or the application it crashes and says that it has stopped working. No error messages I'm afraid.

gamexcore 2012-12-17 11:05

Damn starspell, thats a bit rubs one of the problems with 48 hours I guess is a lack of being able to test on a bunch of platforms and "it works on my PC" runs rampant. I'll double check a bunch of things and see if I can root out the issue, my apologies.

Sorry as well patrick, XNA - Windows only, or at least I wouldn't have the foggyest on how to port to mac, thanks for the comment though.

xeke_death 2012-12-17 11:08

Found a spinning goat and was like "What the hell!?!" and died at 415.77 LY...

gamexcore 2012-12-17 11:11

415.77 isn't too bad, my best during dev was 650, the goat means your doing well :p

Starspell, I did a local test, I uninstalled the XNA redistributable from my PC and got the same issue, I then downloaded and ran the installer and it worked fine, installing this dependancy is supposed to be taken care of by the clickonce portion of the installer, I guess that failed.

arch-jslin 2012-12-17 11:52

The art style is pretty novel to me, interestingly an all white background for the universe still pretty fits. (to me) :P I only wish it doesn't need installation. But I guess if you used XNA to publish it's pretty hard to do that?

vidar 2012-12-17 11:55

I love the amount of polish you've managed to put into this.
It feels like a really solid game and I had fun playing it.
Great job!

gamexcore 2012-12-17 12:31

arch, I could provide the .exe and resources etc however it would require that the user has the xna dependencies installed which they likely will not have, so its bit of a toss up - I don't like installers either!

I'm currently looking into SilverSprite to see if porting it to silverlight is a quick job, if so I'll try do that and get it hosted online.

Thanks Vidarn.

gamexcore 2012-12-17 12:38

I just added a new download:

Windows (No Install - Requires .net 4 & XNA)

For anyone that already has the required dependancy's installed or wants to install them themselves!

robashton 2012-12-17 13:25

I ran the installer and got the various dependencies, couldn't run the game, then tried standalone version as I now have the dependencies but that won't work either :(

No error, no nothing :(

aare 2012-12-17 13:28

Overall really nice game. My only problem is with the background - despite I like the effect of fading space station and spinning galaxies it doesn't give any feedback about your ship speed/direction. As a result my first 4 games ended up after 10s by continously hitting the top/bottom asteroids

clavus 2012-12-17 13:46

The theme is more of a backdrop here, but the game itself is pretty solid.

goerp 2012-12-17 14:10

This looks nice. The black-white thing works for me.
A lot of stuff going on and it also looks expandable (I mean could be expanded)
The game is pretty hard (for me) though, al lot of different buttons to push (hmm, just like my own game:)

fonserbc 2012-12-17 14:17

Looks great!
The only thing is maybe that the game is kind a hard at the beggining, having to recharge the guns etc.

The gun shots are small and barely visible sometimes :/

Other than that it's really polished!

mutuware 2012-12-17 14:18

Audio/music is kinda strange! But liked the stylized graphics.

lucasncv 2012-12-17 16:24

Nice controls, really polished! Great mood too. As someone above me said, it starts too hard. You should introduce the player to your game one bit at a time.

Could you give my game one more try? It comes with the DLLs now! Please? :D

gamexcore 2012-12-17 17:48

I did think that starting with a wall of asteroids was maybe bad, however I also wanted to start with a bang, so that there was instantly something to do.

Of course I will,added to my play queue now.

Thanks for all the comments!

mava 2012-12-17 21:44

Very nice! Definately agree with having bigger bullets but other than that I enjoyed it very much :)

filtoid 2012-12-17 21:48

Good game - i enjoyed. Used the non-installer version and worked fine (on Win 8) Nice graphical style.

gamexcore 2012-12-17 21:50

Thanks, originally the bullets were all going to black, to keep colors almost exclusively for explosions... that was a BAD idea!

therestlesstaxidermists 2012-12-17 23:24

"Found a spinning goat and was like "What the hell!?!" and died at 415.77 LY..."
Same here. In fact, I went totally distracted, till I realised it was just for fun :D

Really loved the graphics, this is a nice touch. The only little thing that was quite annoying (for me), was the beginning. I didn't understand what happenned, with this planet going farther from my ship. Something went weird with the perspective/and or the parralax, I didn't get I was already playing the ship and could move it.

But I just may be dumb.

winterblood 2012-12-17 23:31

Great visual style, Scott! Could use some vertical parallax on the background so you know when you're about to hit the top or bottom of the play area, and maybe a little less inertia on the ship. I have yet to catch a single power up :) Very polished.

dalbinblue 2012-12-18 02:04

Beautifully styled game. Really hard to control on a tablet computer without a proper mouse, but I will not hold that against you at all. I will need to get an external mouse and try it again later. Good show!

saisaith 2012-12-18 09:25

This was pretty fun!

gungnir 2012-12-18 09:31

Solid work :)

pacifistgames 2012-12-18 12:18

I made it to about 385 by just going as fast as possible, shooting missiles occasionally. I have no idea how you made something this complex in 48 hours! I wish the control scheme was a little simpler, it's hard to maneuver on a laptop.

gamexcore 2012-12-18 13:39

Was you using the trackpad or a mouse pacifist? I actually did the whole thing on a laptop on my sofa! 48 hours at the end felt like quite a lot, I just didn't worry about pretty code or any nonsense like that, each feature was put in one at a time, whichever way it went in fastest... that and my day job usually involves the same frantic pace of programming!

lorancou 2012-12-18 14:35

Good work! Just a little downside: it's hard to distinguish the different elements, especially the power ups. I discovered their existence only on my 2nd or 3rd run!

shaneshanekavanagh 2012-12-18 19:17

Very pretty.

awppy 2012-12-18 20:56

707, augh! I find it best to save the missiles for large clumps of enemies. It increases your chance for cargo drops when you can take 3 of them out with a single missile.

Great game, and hard to believe it was done in 48 hours! You must not be new to it.

With the dependencies installed, the game crashed immediately when I opened it in "Sandbox mode" (avast is very nervous about EXE files, even ones that I've created myself). Opening it normally, it runs fine, so anyone WITH the dependencies getting it to crash, check file/folder/user permissions is my best guess.

This game is awesome.

amoaeba-junior 2012-12-18 21:00

I love the art on this game, the background and the ships look fantastic, the only thing that annoyed was the ship movement, other than that it's a very solid game, especially for one that is made in 48 hours. Gratz man

moomoo112 2012-12-18 21:46

made it a lot farther when I realized I had missiles

gamexcore 2012-12-18 22:21

Thanks all.

@awppy, this is my first LD, and in fact first game jam/comp, I've been making games for a while now though.

@lorancou, thanks and fair point, I think I weant a little overboard on the whole "Black and white" and should have used that more to my advantage by using colour to make game-play elements really jump out.

@moomoo112, yup, those missiles will help :p knowing that the best bet is to make something intuitive, or teach the player as they play I wanted to add some in-game hints to teach the game-play as you went along, the main reason I didn't, rather embarrassingly, is I couldn't work out how best to put them on the screen without them being detracting or distracting.

markengley 2012-12-18 22:50

Good work. You managed to get an insane amount done here. The graphics look great, and the music is nice, and appropriately spacey.

Thought the difficulty was pretty reasonable once I rationed my missiles a bit.

Also you get bonus kudos for the flying goat.

dtg 2012-12-19 11:28

I love the aesthetic, clean and a great feel.
Gameplay was fun whilst being nice and challenging.
I think I would have made the top and bottom just push the player back, and also having things that look like powerups hurt you is a bit harsh.
Had fun though.

killmonday 2012-12-19 12:19

Loved the art, the sound, the spacy atmosphere and the pewpew factor. Great job!

deathbysnail 2012-12-19 15:06

Liked it.

maple 2012-12-19 21:31

I loved the story set up, actually. It made me really want the game to be set on the planet! But I'm not here to talk about the game you didn't make, so without further ado: The gameplay felt a little slow, while the asteroid (when moving vertically) always seemed to travel too fast. It's a fairly solid game. The music and sounds were nice, etc. Probably the biggest thing for me though, is the complicated controls. It would have been much nicer to have those repair keys around WASD instead of all over the keyboard. A nice entry, nonetheless.

(Also, thanks for the constructive feedback you gave us on our game. It helps!)

gamexcore 2012-12-19 21:46

@maple did you put the right comment to the right game here? First bit makes sense, but unless there is a secret repair mechanic I forgot I added I;m confused :p

faust 2012-12-20 08:37

Nice graphic. But I think the bullet and the powerups can be more standout from the background.

delahee 2012-12-20 18:10

Really nice, lacks a tiny bit of progression and narrative. :)

gfm 2012-12-22 13:13

Nice game!
It's really polished! Also, nice graphics!

ilo 2012-12-23 00:42

Really nice presentation, but I think more colour would help the player to breakdown the visual elements more easily.

A more defined difficulty curve would also help, but the gameplay was solid.

jaj 2012-12-23 16:58

This has a very interesting style. I would have gotten a better sense of speed if the background had multiple layers. As it is now I didn't even notice A and D did anything for the first minute. Other than that this is very polished and plays well.

endesga 2012-12-23 23:38

nice!

spe 2012-12-25 14:34

The bright graphics lessen the space feeling and for my taste a bit too easy, but the overall game experience is really good. Nice work.

ayce 2012-12-27 23:07

Once I figured out how the game works, it was quite funny - until my shields ran out. Really good game! :)