eerongal 2014-04-29 02:12
The game is really tiny on my monitor. Hard to tell whats going on. Seemed pretty fun, though. Nice work!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD29 → Elder Sub
By indiekylo
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coolness | 3 | 70 | ||
| Theme | 138 | 3.64 | ||
| Graphics | 149 | 3.98 | ||
| Overall | 174 | 3.52 | ||
| Mood | 196 | 3.46 | ||
| Humor | 244 | 2.89 | ||
| Audio | 259 | 3.32 | ||
| Innovation | 311 | 3.15 | ||
| Fun | 328 | 3.07 |
The game is really tiny on my monitor. Hard to tell whats going on. Seemed pretty fun, though. Nice work!
Not sure if here was more to do than just patch up the holes, but it never got more fun or interesting.
such a good idea! i want moar
Besides the fact the game was too tiny, it was fun and the graphics looked really good! you should really develop this more and I'd definitely play this more if it was 2x bigger! :D
Graphics were cool but I wasn't really sure what I was mean to be doing?
Nice take on FTL. Good fit with the theme. The monsters didn't seem to do much after a while. They'd just pop in, multiply a little, and just stand there. Somehow my guys would lose life and eventually die. I can appreciate the simpler arcade-y style to it, but it does need a little break every now and then. Maybe some ship upgrades or something?
Nice graphics, great attention to detail in them and good unit control. I wish gameplay would've been more flushed out. Not a lot of things to do right now :(
Wanted to do a full blown game like FTL but that turned out to be a bit too ambitious for the jam.
@tomhunt: They are either drowning due to a flooded room or are being killed by the monsters. Also, the monsters were going to have more behavior but there just wasn't enough time to implement it.
I like the animations, they remind me kind of of Lemmings.
The take on RTS controls is different and interesting. Nice pathfinding. I like the particles in the water and the tentacle, it hints at a giant monster and leaves a lot to the imagination.
I wasn't sure what the end game was going to be... seems like if I moved all my guys to where the enemies boarded I was going to stay in good shape.
As stated, resolution is a bit too low. The HP/oxygen bars in particular should be bigger. Game looks clean in full screen, but unfortunately the HUD doesn't scale and ends up in a small corner.
FTL, huh. Game does has an overall feel on an undending onslaught of Mantis-Lanius hybrids with drones added to the mix. Curious to see what the full picture would have looked like.
Anyway, good work.
I stopped after getting 8000 :D Would love to have more threats / more units / more stuff. Like TomCooper3D eloquently said "such good idea, wow, want moar"
@LemmingSurvivor: Definitely would have fixed the resolution stuff if we had a bit more time, same with properly supporting full screen.
graphics are great, wish they could be scaled 2x tho
really good start, i'd like to see more!
Amazing detail on the sub! Very entertaining little game, great work!
I enjoyed squinting at the sub to some extent but really this should be rendered at 2x :). The animations of the characters seemed pretty great. I'd love for there to be more to do in this, but it had some outstanding atmosphere.
very solid basic entry. I love the pixel art and the unit movement is really well streamlined
Can't play windows games, any chance we could get a web version?
@jomomomo: I would love to do a web version but that isn't something I could do within the time of LD. Should interest be high enough or if I were to continue development anyway afterward, I would definitely support more platforms.
The sprites looked great, really wish you could zoom into to see them better.
I liked it but the resolution was way too low and it made it difficult to see my guys health bars. Also I couldn't figure out what would cause the water levels to go down. Sometimes it would go down without people in the room and other times I needed to send my guys there.
By popular request I've added an up-scaled version!
@BenW: Once all breaches in a room are fixed, the water level should go down regardless of if there are still guys in it.
I would be all about a more developed version of this. The fight animations were awesome. so full of life and character. The game felt a little empty, but I can see so much potential for this. Good concept.
Very pretty game, but it felt too easy and lacking in gameplay. Lots of potential!
Might have been nice to have a game over circumstance.
if there was more to this it would have been pretty fun - the controls were very good - nice job
I enjoyed discovering the game. I like how you let the player learn what the game is as he plays it. My first playthrough was completely different from the last one. This, to me, makes it a great game and experience.
Great music, sfx, mood. Pretty cool you got multiple selection/pathfinding/rts elements working smoothly in this short amount of time.
There is real potential in making an action based micro game.. like needing to swap guys in and out of the med bay paying careful attention to everyone's health. It just needs game balance and as everyone else has been saying - more stuff.
Really cool game, loved the take on FTL (though it also reminded me of the board game Red November, about a bunch of drunkard gnomes in a sub getting attacked by a kraken and having to do basically this -- inspiration perhaps?) I loved the pixel art (at 2X) and can see a lot of potential here, keep with it! More micromanagement! Oh, and because nobody else has mentioned it -- bonus points for the crew member on the toilet. Love those tiny quirks :D
@2HitAdam: I'd actually never heard of Red November until now. That resemblance is a bit uncanny, really. If we had had more time to build our game it would have strayed from that more.
A wonderful game that could be made more wonderful if expanded. The music was good, the graphics were unique and nice to look at, and the gameplay was fun until around 24k when I couldn't handle the monotony any more. The sailor text is nice, but sometimes got in the way of the action! Can't wait to $end you money for an updated ver$ion!
Nice job, my one suggestion would be to really figure out how to push the contrast between interactables, things that need to be interacted with, and the decorative background. Right now things can get a little lost. I can definitely see how this will ramp up in difficulty with future iterations. Well done!
This game has a very good concept, but it does feel it was held back a bit. Most notably, even though it looks like there's a lot going on in this game, it's actually very hard to lose, since the only game-over condition is when all your units die. The units are also a tad too strong against the enemies and have way too much oxygen when underwater (rendering the drowning hazard harmless), so the fact that I always felt well-equipped to deal with whatever the game threw at me was probably a bad thing.
With that said, there's a lot to like about this game. Even without instructions, the game does a good job of explaining its mechanics by having your units act automatically in certain situations; for instance, I learned about repairing broken walls when units moved in front of one of whatever room I sent them to (some visual progress on repair would have been nice, but the tone made when fixing a wall did the job well enough). Also, the red + in the med bay made it easy to recognize it as a heal room, despite how small it was. In regards to gameplay, managing between combat, survival, and upkeep among several units & locations is a great idea and a lot of fun, and the RTS-style point & click controls did a great job of keeping all this action manageable.
All in all, this game is a great proof-of-concept. I know you're already aware of its shortcomings & working on a post-jam version, so I'm eager to see what will come of it!
Elder Sub looks and feels fantastic. I can't wait to see how development goes!