sputnik 2015-12-15 03:13
Nice simple game. Love the music.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD34 → All Ways Down
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Theme | 94 | 4.20 | ||
| Innovation | 199 | 3.59 | ||
| Fun | 295 | 3.44 | ||
| Overall | 358 | 3.49 | ||
| Mood | 535 | 3.19 | ||
| Graphics | 820 | 2.80 | ||
| Humor | 844 | 1.69 | ||
| Coolness | 1391 | 49 |
Nice simple game. Love the music.
Really well made, with some genius ides. It's oddly fun too.
Simple but fun, nice job!
I Like how it performs the idea of using just 2 buttoons together with the puzzle. And I just can see one simple thing that I would change maybe the ball could move some faster.
Congrats for this game.
Very nice concept! It really works out, you made some interesting puzzles with this mechanics.
The music fits the movement of the ball, it's very smooth and gentle.
Great job!
Neat concept!!
Nice concept but the player and the pick up are too small
This is great. Simple, but effective!
fun and chalenging as hell, good work
It's solid.
This wins it for innovation for me great puzzle idea and great use of game dynamic to create challenges. With the music a nice mellow experience. Well done for sticking strictly to two buttons!
Very good game. The graphics were lovely and the game's mood was very pleasant. It was also cool to see how you combined the two themes in your game.
Great. Simple, but effective!
Overall, this is a good project. Well done ++
Really clever design, and elegant use of the two button rule (and I just realised it had the growth theme too). I have to agree with some of the other commenters that a little more speed, and larger pickups would make the game more fun.
Spinning to try and get the ball through at the last moment was really fun, so I feel focusing your game towards being more dynamic could help make the most of that!
Solid entry. This gave me an inspiration of a game with a similar control scheme where you need the ball to grow larger to break thicker and thicker walls.
But there is one big problem here. One that I'm surprised not to see in the comments already.
You are simply transforming the local coordinates of the *room*. It does not change the relative movement vectors for the *ball* in its local coordinates. There's no need to have this smoothed out trajectory business when turning.
Consider a short scenario without collisions. If a ball goes up at t=0, and there's a rotation at t=t_r, then it'd damn well keep going up (from the camera's perspective) at t>t_r. The direction of the gravity in the ball's coordinates doesn't change either! Which means the ball doesn't start swerving right/left or doing those bonkers loop-de-loops visually, even if one did keep spinning the room around. The way you're doing it now is as if the ball is collecting extra momentum from the rotation itself, but there's no interaction to cause that, which fucks with the player's brain.
This is a big deal because it causes the result of your input to be less intuitive and harder to predict than it needs to be. Also there are some additional concerns with the floatiness (common to Unity games because of default physics I guess?) and the lack of elasticity of the ball.
Thanks everyone for all the awesome comments, it’s always great to get positive feedback :-)
@RedBricksStudio
@RockhopperGames
The ball being slow was partially a design choice, as I wanted the ball to start by feeling light and for the player to really feel the increase in weight when the ball grows, but not be too heavy at the larger sizes. However, based on feedback I do feel this could be tuned to make the ball go a little faster at smaller sizes, and to be slightly less floaty.
I’m also planning on increasing the size of pickups for the post jam version.
@Jwatt
The local co-ordinates of the room don’t actually change, in fact the level never actually moves :-p
In this instance, the effect is created by rotating the camera, and updating the direction of gravity so that it is always in the downward direction relative to the camera. The rest of the work( i.e the way the ball moves) is then left to the Unity physics engine, which applies the required forces based on the new direction of gravity to all objects. This is why the ball behaves the way it does, and does bonkers loop-de-loops :-D
The reason I chose this method was because of its simple implementation and because I liked the effect of the end result.
@noddingTortoise: thanks for the response, cool to know about the inner workings of the game. Quite an interesting way to approach the rotation mechanic. Perhaps it's an example of an engineering mindset, while I'm a physicist by education. (All this talk is giving me flashbacks to spacetime coordinate transforms in relativity and string theory... they're quite a whopper)
But if you've deemed your method to be functional gameplay-wise, then I guess I won't object to it any further. Glad to hear about post-jam updates as well!
It's crazy! nice!
Great game. easy to come back to. Great concept.
Really nice idea. Somehow simultaneously soothing and frustrating!
I like it! It's fun to see how someone approached the same basic idea that I took a crack at. Very solid, well done!
Nice game! Music is good too
I think this game would be really fun to play on a mobile, where you have to actually rotate the device!
Good entry, nice puzzles.
Great and fun game... I really liked it, but it got slow at some points... Maybe a speed up time button would have helped
The most frustrating part is that I can see my death coming a mile away, but I can't do anything about it because I'm too stupid to use the controls properly :P Nice game, great level design too.
Cool Game Mechanics! Liked the music!
Really well done! Would also work great on a phone/tablet :)
Great job! I love the "simple to learn, hard to master" type of games. The graphics are a good fit for the game too.