FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD34 → Kubble

Kubble

By memoryleek

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness1100
Innovation4153.28
Audio4573.13
Theme5283.66
Overall5483.29
Graphics5663.35
Fun5873.07
Mood6143.10
Humor6722.35

Comments

bubsypoochies 2015-12-15 17:54

This is a very interesting game! It feels like a strategic version of locoroco, not platforming oriented but more puzzle solving. The mechanics have a lot of potential to create very complex puzzle based levels, would love to see more of this in the future. The only downside is the difficulty curve: it can be a bit too hard to understand in the beginning (lots of different platform types introduced at once), took us a while to get through the first puzzle. Nevertheless, it's a pretty awesome and very original game. Congratulations!!!

chubb1337 2015-12-15 18:33

I can't get past the first puzzle, I get some sort of time bomb and a clone. The one with the bomb explodes, the other one unfreezes, but then the game crashes. (Windows 8.1, 64x)

memoryleek 2015-12-15 18:39

@Chubb1337: Thank you for the report. Are you able to reproduce the crash?

jofra 2015-12-15 19:00

Very cool puzzle mechanics

dinnerinthedark 2015-12-15 19:39

Im getting crashes all the time on windows 8 64-bit. Memory leak?

big-cow 2015-12-15 19:50

Hey hey! Fun little game simple but challenging. I also couldn't solve the first puzzle!

memoryleek 2015-12-15 19:56

@DinnerInTheDark: Thank you for the report. There is one memory leak that I know of, and that is proceeding to the next level, which won't free resources from the previous one. But it's a matter of 13MB per level and shouldn't be a source of the crashes. We will investigate it.

bradur 2015-12-15 20:20

The game is a little hard to understand at first, but it's a solid puzzle game once you get the hang of it. The graphics are crisp and the shadows are a nice touch. The sound & music are pleasant. Good work!

pcmaster 2015-12-15 20:44

I, too, could not figure out how to go past the first level. Furthermore, after restarting a level, I always missed the background (Win7 x64). On each application restart it's OK again. I'll give it one more try (and think hard!), I like the graphics, nicely done, congratz :)

memoryleek 2015-12-15 20:47

We were finally able to reproduce the crash and we've patched it and uploaded new binaries. So you who have experienced crashes, please download the new version and try it again. Thanks.

utgarda 2015-12-15 20:47

Screenshots look real nice, I totally want to play it. Unfortunately, crashes on start every time.

[[email protected] kubble]$ uname -a
Linux Jotunheim 3.18.24-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Nov 3 21:34:29 UTC 2015 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[[email protected] kubble]$ pacman -Q sfml
sfml 2.3.2-2

[[email protected] kubble]$ ./kubble
*** Error in `./kubble': free(): invalid pointer: 0x00000000013a6fb8 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/usr/lib/libc.so.6(+0x72055)[0x7fb94c33e055]
/usr/lib/libc.so.6(+0x779a6)[0x7fb94c3439a6]
/usr/lib/libc.so.6(+0x7818e)[0x7fb94c34418e]
./kubble[0x4269d5]
./kubble[0x4069ea]
/usr/lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xf0)[0x7fb94c2ec610]
./kubble[0x406be9]

urbanhelsing 2015-12-15 21:02

Pretty decent little puzzle game. Last level was really tricky but I beat it at last. Thought it was a bit annoying having to wait everytime the snakes fell down.

memoryleek 2015-12-15 21:12

@utgarda: Thank you for your interest! Your problem might be due to the new GCC 5 ABI, I am not sure if that is synced to Manjaro yet. We will try to create a static build on Debian stable as hopefully that will allow more people to play the game :)

cyranh 2015-12-15 21:15

Great game! Good concept. Interesting and hard to solve puzzle. And overal fun gameplay. And I like the way those snake thingies look.

utgarda 2015-12-16 13:59

Nice audio and nice minimalistic graphics, but goals are really obscure, in the first puzzle the flag isn't seen from the beginning. Needs more tutorial levels with gradual complexity increasing.

memoryleek 2015-12-16 14:32

@utgarda: Very fair criticism. This is a common problem in most of our games, they are too hard and not easily accessible. We will work on improving this for our next games.

deathbysnail 2015-12-16 19:35

Interesting concept, however my puny brain is not up to the task of solving the first stage! :)

darkflint 2015-12-16 22:20

Nice idea, interesting. But somehow i couldnt restart the game after exiting it once?

memoryleek 2015-12-17 06:24

@Darkflint: That's a new one. We don't save any kind of state, so I don't see any reason why it would not start again.

tantumgames 2015-12-17 16:12

Cool platformer with a good idea, I liked it

oberynmartell 2015-12-18 03:33

I liked the mechanics of this game. But I could not figure out what todo. =/

jeff 2015-12-18 10:41

An amazing game! It could be cool to add a tutorial just to understand the basics and the goal of the game.

memoryleek 2015-12-18 11:50

@Switchiers: This will surely be added to a post LD version of the game. Thank you for your feedback! :)

razveck 2015-12-18 15:47

Very interesting mechanics, the levels were varied and fun. Lots of room to improve and explore new concepts and level design within these mechanics.

brandondyer64 2015-12-18 21:39

e$ ./kubble
./kubble: error while loading shared libraries: libsfml-audio.so.2.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

memoryleek 2015-12-18 21:45

@Brandondyer64: As the description states, the Linux build requires SFML 2.3 to be installed :)

mukult 2015-12-18 22:02

Geez...no OSX or a web build...cant play it!! :|

memoryleek 2015-12-18 22:13

@mukult: Sorry for that. The game is created in C++ with SFML, so making a web version of it is not very straightfoward. The game will build on OSX, but we don't have access to any OSX machine to build on.

trizek35 2015-12-18 22:20

Controls are a bit clumsy (sometimes not rolling when I press the keys). But the puzzle ideas are great (especially the one growing your cube making it invincible etc). Maybe you introduced to many mechanics in the first level, which made some people lost. Btw, amazing work starting from scratch with SFML/C++, you even wrote shaders !

memoryleek 2015-12-18 22:24

@Trizek35: Thank you for the kind words!
I believe your problem with the "clumsy controls" is due to the round not being over. The hourglass at the top of the screen will be showing when a round is still in progress, and you have to wait for it to disappear before you can make your next move :)

hotboxgames 2015-12-18 22:47

Interesting and challenging game! The music wasn't fun to listen to though, it hurt my ears after a few minutes.

themonsterfromthedeep 2015-12-19 00:26

The game kept breaking: http://cubeupload.com/im/2Npy9c.png

This made some of the levels really sad - I beat the third level without ever knowing what it really looked like.

The first level took a long time to beat. I think the second one was actually easier. I beat the third one, as I said, without knowing what the heck I was doing.

The graphics (when they work) and the music are really cool. The gameplay is also pretty cool - I like freeze-time platformers. This one is also unique because you can have multiple guys at once.

memoryleek 2015-12-19 00:30

@TheMonsterFromTheDeep: That's very interesting, you are the first to report that problem. I have no idea what could be causing it, unfortunately.
And yeah, in hindsight we should've reordered the levels.

arcturusdeluxe 2015-12-19 19:04

Cool idea! I don't think I've ever seen a turn-based puzzle platformer. You've crammed a lot of mechanics for a game with only two buttons, by using the environment to give different abilities, which is interesting to me. Cute graphics and a nice soundtrack too.

eric777 2015-12-19 23:00

I could not solve first puzzle. BUT - wow, the game looked brilliant, really stands out with it's clean look. Concept is great. Audio was also really good.

I understood the mechanic, and was able to get through blowing up worms on the platform above the goal, but I could not ever figure out how to successfully drop from the left side of that platform to the flag. Probably me not being super great at puzzle games.

Absolutely well done!

elliotfiske 2015-12-19 23:08

Great puzzle game! It'd definitely be better to not have the first one require you to make that leap of faith, but after that all the puzzles were well-designed and interesting.

Also would be good to have a win screen instead of looping you back to the same level :P

mattlevonian 2015-12-19 23:24

Great game, the only nitpick I have is that waiting for all the actions to resolve during a turn took a little longer than it should have, so waiting after each key press got a little annoying.

bobm 2015-12-20 00:02

very cool game, simple and elegant, a bit hard to understand well

hyperscope 2015-12-20 01:44

It would be nice if the turns remaining for the abilities was shown on screen. Also there were times when not all cubes were visible on screen. Very elegant visuals, lighting elements added a another level of polish to the game. Background music fit very nicely with the overall theme of the game. I also appreciate that the music more or less didn't get annoyingly repetitive. Although puzzle games are typical not my genre of choice I didn't mind playing.

rjhelms 2015-12-21 04:05

This is really cool! A good challenge, but I had a lot of fun with it.

I agree with hyperscope that showing a countdown for timed abilities would be really helpful - especially on the last level, I found myself having to keep count in my head in order to manage the solution.

Good entry!

memoryleek 2015-12-21 05:58

@hyperscope @rjhelms: Agreed, a countdown would've been helpful :) This is one of the things I hope to add in a post LD version of the game.

piper82 2015-12-21 17:09

looks very nice but unfortunately for me it would not run. nothing happens when started.

memoryleek 2015-12-21 18:28

@piper82: What OS are you using?

piper82 2015-12-22 13:17

W7 x64 SP1

memoryleek 2015-12-22 13:32

@piper82: Okay, and nothing happens? No error messages? The window does not even appear?

finn 2015-12-24 22:49

Really nice game. I like the use of environmental mechanics, leading to a two button game that does not feel clunky.

A couple of suggestions for minor improvements, similar to what others have already said:
- The difficulty curve could do with some work
- The camera should probably take all of the cubes into account, as there were a couple of times that I couldn't see some of my cubes (such as at the end of level 3).
- I feel like the freeze icon should disappear a turn earlier (right after your last frozen turn) so you know the cube is about to move. Currently it seems to show whether your cube was frozen in the previous turn, whereas I think showing if it will be frozen for the next turn is more useful (might be fixed by the addition of countdowns).
- Perhaps an indication of the range of the bomb would be useful.