FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD33 → Whimsical Monster Mind Melting Fun-Time

Whimsical Monster Mind Melting Fun-Time

By tango172

View on Wayback Machine

CategoryRankScoreCount
Innovation2103.44
Fun6132.94
Theme7033.21
Overall9352.72
Mood9922.29
Graphics10061.89
Coolness175236

Comments

vaida 2015-08-25 08:41

The game mechanic is great! However, the game could have been improved considerably audio and graphics-wise. Also, the AI could block your movements in very tight corridors. Still, nice start to LD! :)

pampattitude 2015-08-25 08:42

Simple but funny!

benier 2015-08-25 09:12

Fun game mechanics and plays great!

mramaizng 2015-08-25 09:17

Very cool. I enjoyed it. The ai seems to get bugged at some point on the 4th level where they seem to want to go two directions at once. Taking over the dudes was a lot of fun though. Well done!

peterkirk 2015-08-25 09:26

The guards kept turning around quickly making it impossible to sneak up on.
I found the game challenging and was enjoying it until I realised I could out walk all the guards. Then it became too simple.
The ending was nice.

hoqjed 2015-08-25 10:00

Played it on the web through gamejolt and the controls text was very difficult to read. Luckily it's not hard to pick up and figure out though! I also played the windows version and it worked as expected and of course looked better full screened.

The concept is solid and I like the idea of having a sort of body-snatching stealth mechanic. The execution of the idea felt somewhat rough though. Not bad by any means, I'd say it's definitely a good base to expand on, but it feels like it still needs more work and polish.

The guard patterns and level design were pretty straightforward. It kind of seemed like there was some struggle to try and keep the design interesting and there's some very noticeable repetition in some areas. On the plus side the possession mechanic redeems these flaws somewhat and I enjoyed navigating through areas just killing all the guards along the way. In these kind of stealth based games I tend to not take my chances leaving someone around to catch me ;)

The art wasn't very attractive to me in general. Lots of very small repeating textures and parts that don't necessarily look like they fit visually together. For instance, the floor texture and lighting underneath the player have a smooth look, but the walls look very flat and harsh in comparison. It reminds me of an early pc game look and retro in a "hasn't aged well" way.

The sound is also pretty basic. Again, like the art the sounds have a very old feel. There aren't many of them either so they can get somewhat repetitive (especially the possess/unpossess sounds). A looping ambient 8-bit track might have helped make the game feel a little less empty audio-wise.

I did a random search for ambient moody 8-bit stuff and found this as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T2oBTbilyM

Also, there seemed to be a bug where if you pressed x to leave a body prematurely the transition from body to player would play again when the timer WOULD have run out. It's not game breaking, but it was fairly noticeable since I pressed x pretty often to leave guards early.

- Dylan

pantoufle 2015-08-25 16:06

I enjoyed the game. The mechanics are simple but they work well. The difficulty is challenging and the level design is interesting.
There's still a bug with AI getting crazy sometimes. They glitch very quickly and look in every direction at once, making them impossible to sneak on.
Otherwise that's a cool game. Great job!

hoqjed 2015-08-26 17:09

I left a comment earlier, but returned back here on a whim and noticed some people were complaining about the bug where they guards rapidly look two different directions. I just wanted to mention that my method for taking out those guards was to approach them directly from their sides, rather than trying to get behind them, and it consistently worked.

Also, the bug seems to be an issue where the guards are trying to move to a position but constantly overshoot it. To fix that kind of bug you could probably do something like...

if (x < goalX - guardSpeed) {x+=guardSpeed;}
else if (x > goalX + guardSpeed) {x-=guardSpeed;}

not tested, so I might have made an error, but the idea is to create a zone as the goal rather than a specific number.

bigbuggames 2015-08-26 23:58

Simple but fun game! Good idea!

ghostlyguru 2015-09-01 22:18

Had fun with this. I liked the mechanic and concept.

blobo 2015-09-11 18:46

Great concept! my only complaint is that you can easily outrun the AI, which in some cases makes the entire mechanic rendered useless.