ianburnette 2015-04-20 20:50
That music. That's awesome!
Nice job. I like the bears especially!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD32 → Loquacious Lepus
By lacaranian
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audio | 75 | 3.86 | ||
| Humor | 380 | 3.15 | ||
| Mood | 460 | 3.15 | ||
| Innovation | 658 | 2.86 | ||
| Theme | 671 | 3.14 | ||
| Overall | 697 | 3.00 | ||
| Graphics | 740 | 2.82 | ||
| Fun | 882 | 2.50 | ||
| Coolness | 1901 | 33 |
That music. That's awesome!
Nice job. I like the bears especially!
Funny, nice audio and graphics. I din't have any powerup yet but I'll try :D
I'm not sure what I just played.
Please run a filter to cut out the white noise, unless that's the point... not sure.
Excellent work on the music and the mood accomplished!
Took me a little to realize how to play, but even not knowing, wandering in the nature was enjoyable haha.
This game has SEVERE issues.
First of all, there really need to be how to play instructions and the player needs to get more feedback to understand what's going on. At first I didn't even know how to get out of the blacksmith's house, then I didn't know how to get letters, it was not obvious that you just had to string random letters together (the game tells you to make words), but most of all, there is no instruction or feedback whatsoever about the fact that some letters are more powerful than others. There's really tons of missing feedback to cause this confusion - damage dealt is unclear, enemy HP is unclear, which enemies drop which letters is unclear, and even at the blacksmith you can't see how powerful each letter is. All of this combined make it really hard to discover that letters vary in power, which is an essential part of the gameplay.
The gameplay is interesting in concept, but it's very poorly executed. You constantly have to make return trips to the blacksmith (or kill yourself) to upgrade your word, and if you die you lose your word, generally causing a huge setback in game progress. Furthermore, the game doesn't work right. The most pressing issue is that the greek letters and nuclear symbol do not have any power; this makes fighting snakes near impossible and the dragon completely impossible. This issue is made worse by the horrible spawning mechanics; the game keeps spawning enemies with no regard to the amount of enemies on the screen or the player's position (you can be fighting an entire swarm of snakes and have one suddenly spawn on top of you). With the late-game letters not functioning properly, the enemies spawn faster than you can kill them.
The controls feel inconvenient. This is an action game where my input is directly converted to actions, not a strategy game in which I can queue commands - why do I need to click the destination position to move, and why can't I hold a button to keep moving or something like that? The unrestricted 'one shot per click' makes hammering the mouse the optimal way to play the game, but button mashing rarely makes a game more fun.
The interpretation of the theme is obvious and overdone, and in this game it isn't executed very well. With how you're just stringing letters together, it could thematically have used just about anything else than letters and 'words'.
However, I did really like the graphics and I loved the music.
Ow. Great music.
@VDZ You expect a lot from Ludum Dare games ;)
Your comments are, regardless, spot on.
I'm of the school of thought that exploration and learning are more important than fun in games (though I like both), so I make the admittedly costly trade-off of letting the player find out how to play for themselves. It is possible to kill the dragon, though maybe not by brute force. This is not meant to be obvious - I'm also of the school of thought that likes difficult games, and makes them accordingly. This game isn't for everyone.
The greek letters and the nuclear symbol do have power, but of a different sort than the letters that precede them, and there is little indication that this change has taken place, since you can't see the properties and effect your words have until you try to use them. The only hint that things have changed is that the alphabet in use has changed.
An aspect of the game which is not patently obvious is that the more clicking you as a player do, the more enemies spawn. Animals in the wild are merciless, especially to those they see as a threat. The controls are they way they are to make gauging the level of frenzied bloodthirstiness the player exhibits simpler for the code, so this is part of the design, if a bit lazy.
For a post-jam version, I might show the player some visual gauge of word strength in the smithy before they create a new word, though maybe not with an indication of any special powers those words possess (this could allow the effect of the greek letters/nuclear symbol to be clearer). I could allow players to select any of the words they had previously crafted, which I thought about but didn't implement (that was a bit a shortcoming in the code effort). Finally, tweaking the spawning mechanics to prevent spawns on top of the player would be a quick change, though I'd like to keep the amount of spawning high for click-happy players.
The graphics were the work of my partner in crime - I'll pass on the compliment! I did the music, but thought I rushed it too much. Thankfully the accidents in the audio contribute to the overall silliness of the game, so people seem to like it more than I thought they would.
Thanks, fellow essay writer!
You guys have a good sense of audience, and after I figured out how to play the game got a lot better. The mood of the game feels intentional and well executed. I thought it was pretty funny, but it could have used some more dialogue. The audio itself was pretty catchy, but some mixing could keep it silly while sounding a bit cleaner. The graphics themselves do their job, but otherwise weren't anything I'd write home about. It kept with the theme of the jam pretty well, though. I didn't fun it that fun, but I did enjoy spelling words.
My advice would be to separate the tree sprites into two separate entities. The bottom could be what you collide with, and the top half could be walked through.
Took me a while to work how out to actually kill the enemies but the idea itself was pretty interesting plus I liked the acapella music.
This is wonderful! Great art style, and the word-slinging is fun.