Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD36 → No Mario's Sky
By eigenbom
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|---|
I enjoy the art and concept is actually really interesting were you to go for a full release/ dev cycle but your physics make it very hard to jump on things precisely, it essentially made the game feel like everything was an ice level, over all good though!
Hi, nice game and congratulations ! We're realizing a video with several games of the Ludum Dare #36. We made the same thing at the previous jam.
Can you add your game on indiexpo.net ? (it's free)
So we can include also your game in the video ;)
p.s. write #LDJAM in the game's description.
Isaac - cheers! We pushed a minor bugfix and tweaked the motion a little.
Steph - thanks! Unfortunately we won't have time to do that but you're more than welcome to take footage of the game and use it in a video.
this is genius :)
Very cool idea, I wonder where the inspiration came from? Overall it's a pretty neat game. The controls feel a little off though. I must ask, is there something at the centre of your universe?
The jump controls are terrible for a Mario game ^^
Otherwise, this is a fun and amazing entry!
I agree with the criticisms for the jump control and feel. The spaceship also feels a little to twitchy to steer.
However, the art and procedural generation is fantastic. The best No Mans Sky version I've played yet.
Pretty game art. Although the theme isn't ancient technology I like the idea of the game - and of course the twist of mario and no man's sky. Great job!
WONDERFUL game, but I really find myself hating the inertia when I want to hop up on a 1-block platform. I'll run too far 9/10 times. It's a great concept. A crazy good game for 3 days work in spite of having little to do with the theme. Great job!
Cool concept, I really liked the procedurally generated mario game in diverse planets, and the multiplayer
...
Jokes aside, the theme isn't ancient technology at all, nice game but I'll leave to that
Cool idea and execution, but the game fails in the same way as No Man's sky, too repetitive xDD.
(Not a fair comparation in development time, though )
Great stuff! :D As stated before movement is a bit weird I find jumping hard to control, but getting in and out from and into the ship feels really great. The hyperspeed camera movement is very well done.
Really fantastic what the team do! Congratulations
I really loved the concept of procedurally generated planets filled with Mario levels... but I gotta say the controls pretty much ruined the experience to me :P - The visuals are very cool!
Hilarious! Great graphics and concept. The collisions are not very polished, sometimes Mario gets stuck. Good work!
=== Graphics and animation ===
Loved it, specially the ship.
=== Gameplay ===
Ambitious design and cool implementation. The level design was not that fun
=== Sound ===
Good
=== Controls ===
It gets buggy now and then. It's to understand how the ship works
Where did you get the inspiration? I think I would never guess it lol.
By the way, mixing these two concepts was a great idea. I hope Nintendo and Hello Games approve it!
The art is really great! The changing music and enemies are amazing! The controls were a bit weird for me this' and some times I got stuck. This was awesome
well it was a very creative way to do a parody, maybe you can break the NMS curse and do some real gameplay for it :D
Wow, impressive variety of worlds for a game jam! I wish the moving and jumping felt a bit better. It's surprisingly difficult to land on an enemy at first, and it's odd how Mario seems to lose momentum when he lands. Maybe the circular worlds caused some complications with that though? I have no idea how you managed to make all of that.
The ship felt really solid. Awesome stuff, loved the concept. :)
No source? Let down.
Hahaha wow, this is great. I agree the controlls are a bit clunky, but the idea is amazing! Would love to see more!
This is a fantastic concept and getting to the stage of having working procgen in a Ludum game is very much respect. As others have mentioned the controls would be great if they were tweaked. I think would be splendid to build upon this concept and make a proper game out of it. Enjoyable as is too, but please make it grand ^^
The controls are not very precise while on land, but the art is really nice.
There is only a thing that deeply annoys me - what does this have to do with the theme? There are plenty of simple games who put at least a bit of effort into trying to fit with the theme - this game seemingly doesn't even try. It feels like a game idea that was had without consideration for the theme, and as it was a cool theme-less idea, but a cool idea anyway, so you decided to put it here to get a "free audience" for it.
Don't want to be rude, i'm just trying to figure out what went on. I don't doubt there is a valid explanation.
That was quite fun and above all funny. The graphical style was awesome too. The controls were quite floaty but that might have even been the point.
However I see a much bigger problem in all the unfulfilled promises. Where is my epic quest to find the center of the universe? Where is the complex trading system with fully procedually generated alien races? Where is the base building? Where is the cooperative and competitive multiplayer? This game could have been really big if you would have just gone through with all of that and you could have probably implemented it all in like 2 hours.
Anyone able to find where the game writes it's saves/config? I've run Directory Monitor and I've even checked the Registry. No dice. I've also confirmed that it's not written to the exe.
Squished Trump goomba. 10/10 would tramp and Trump again.
Jokes aside, really well done. The movement needs slight tweaking and sometimes the character gets stuck in walls but other than that, it's all good. Not really following the theme but you've made a great game and that's all that really matters.
Aweome idea. Running on OSX I seemed to have some bugginess, especially when flying the spaceship, but a little post-LD clean up and this can be an amazing experience.
Quadrillions of worlds to discover....
If you fixed up the physics and removed the Mario art, this could be on Steam. Work more on the generation and maybe some cool stuff in space, and it could be exactly what people wanted in No Man's Sky. ;)
Awesome idea! Great job on the art; love that you kind of have your own style for a familiar character. Controls bothered me, but I mean, this was 72 hours so whatever haha.
Incredibly well done. Took the concept and blew it out of the water. Only real complaint is the controls not mapping well with Mario platforming controls, specifically how he would hitch after landing.
Great job, love the idea and some of the generated goombas are hilarious! Took me like 10 minutes of flying through space to think, "You know what this game could really use? a Star Wars style Hyper Speed mode!" Well, turns out I just neglected to press the Z button those then minutes. Derp. Very fun game. Also, because its made in unity, there are the usual animation glitches (often in the running animation when jumping if you like fall off a cliff as you jump/locked into the jumping animation when on the ground, idk why). I do agree with the other criticism that the in-air movement is a little wonky too. Definitely kind of floaty and weird in the air. Especially one time when I thought I could make a jump but ended up falling into it three times in a row. Cool game though, played it for ages (for a LD game) before getting bored!
*those TEN minutes
To get the obvious out of the way, this game it visually fantastic and technically impressive, particularly for 72 hours. Heck, the art in this game is better than a lot of the art in games on steam (although that bar certainly has gone down as of late). I also really like the concept of exploring planets with random Mario levels on them. I definitely had a fun time with this one just going around collecting coins and lives and seeing how many goombas I could stomp before I gameovered. The one thing really holding this game back is its controls. There is sort of an expectation for good controls with Mario games since those games are all about their controls, and I certainly wasn't expecting this game to get the controls that perfect, but I was legitimately having a hard time stomping on goombas without dying. Something about the lack of momentum and not having a sprint function really doesn't gel will with Mario gameplay. If this game ever does get expanded upon, I hope that this is something that gets fixed. I could definitely see this game getting expanded with more unique enemies, hazards, and level designs to explore, as well as maybe something to do with all of those coins. But, for what it is, this game is pretty great.
loved the idea, controls are a little bit hard, great game, what makes it ancient technology?, is cause it is based on an old mario game?
It's fantastic that you guys made this game in only 3 days! Superb work! Congratulations!
Very good! the art is smooth and the somewhat distorted mario music is spot on.
Id really like to see how you achieved that in code, are you going to share your source code for us to take a peek?
Great idea, great graphics and music! I get that the floaty controls are meant to mimic the original super mario bros, but the minimum jump height was too high, the controls felt slippery, goomba hitboxes seemed at times both too large and too small, like you had different hitboxes for stomping and biting. I frequently got stuck in the level geometry.
An extremely clever idea :) It's a shame it's mario because otherwise you have a releasable game idea here! 2D NMS is solid :)
Leaving the planet feels great, really hits home how restricted you normally are :)
More please!
Great! Just the controls on land are not that good, as its hard to jump and run. I always end in an enemy.
I'm definitely impressed. As others have said the jumping controls are a bit wonky but quite a good execution otherwise.
The character controller is a bit off, but I absolutely love the concept, and the variations in the planets, goombas and music. And gravity! Low gravity mario may be my favourite thing ever :3
Controls can be weird sometimes but overall is awesome. Congratulations
It is awesome. If this were rated you would get 5/5 , except for theme obviously. Physics need to be tweaked a bit though.
I played it for a while and I must say that it is very cool! I've seen some NMS style games here, this one is very nice.. PLUS it has Mario!
Amazing game! I didn't get how it fitted into the theme, but maybe you weren't aiming for that category. I love the ability of flying to different planets. Because I was awful with the controls, I just activated the spaceship and flew over gaps I didn't want to risk jumping over XD Great job on the fantastic entry!
Had to play this before the lawyers take it down :) Controls are slightly spongy, but the concept is so cool it didn't bother me. Definitely used the ship to jump over things. If there were ratings, I'm pretty you guys would have crushed it! Excellent entry!!
Interesting idea, but a little boring. Nice game anyway.
With better control and with better collision detection the game would be perfect.
But like this, it's already amazing! I would like to see this game in a few month, with more improvement.
Doing that in 72 hours just seems incredible!
Congratulations! And I hope you will release a upgrade of this game later!
The controls feel a little bit off and i don't see how it fits into the theme if you don't consider Mario ancient :)). Otherwise really fun too play :). Great job !
Pretty cool idea. Nice artwork!
Jump controls were terrible though and there is no multiplayer!? I want my money back! xD
Good job! I had fun thank you!
The spaceship and different planets were really nice. :D
Controls feel a bit unresponsive. Graphics are awesome!
Good job! :D
Great entry! The concept and graphics are rock-solid, and the remixed soundtrack and different goomba "species" were really nice touches.
The actual platforming element felt a bit rough. It was surprisingly difficult to jump on goombas and hit bricks, and the collision was wonky enough that I found occasionally myself getting stuck in walls and falling through bricks. Those are fairly minor issues though, with more time I'm sure they'd be fixable.
A lot of people seem to be commenting that it doesn't fit the theme, but I disagree: Mario's pretty ancient by video game standards!
Awesome, awesome jam entry. The art is absolutely amazing, and the procedural music was a genius touch.
Out of curiosity, do the Goombas have procedural parts as well, or are they just selected randomly from a set of a bunch of different goombas?
Others have mentioned, but the mechanics around running and jumping need a bit of tuning. Feels quite different from the original mario, especially with how slowly you can change direction in midair.
If you decide to keep working on this, it would be super cool to have procedurally generated enemies that are more than just goombas. Wonder if there's a way to mix and match stuff like wings, shells, arms, etc that would still feel mario-y.
Again, amazing entry overall. Definitely one of the best this LD.
Hilarious! I'd also like to mention that the controls feel annoying. I especially enjoyed the soundtrack! Most things have been said. I'm not really a fan of trademark infringement :/ And I found a Trump planet o_O Well done!
I had to give this a try after seeing some screenshots of it, and I'm glad I did. It was really interesting seeing different goombas and the ways that the planets turned out - just when I thought I had a handle on all the different ways they could vary, something entirely new showed up.
What you've put together is really impressive for 72 hours, but the scope is ambitious enough that it doesn't feel quite complete - for everything that's impressive about this, the gameplay gets a bit samey-samey after a few planets.
Still a better value than No Man's Sky, though. Great job!
I felt obligated to play this as a Ludum Dare participant, and I'm glad I did. The generation was very impressive and the art is amazing. My only complaint is the controls.
Thanks everyone for all the feedback and comments! We've been overwhelmed by all the attention -- the game has now been downloaded over 80,000 times.
We've continued to patch it all this week, mainly fixing the control issues and making the generation more interesting, and over the new few weeks we'll continue adding features until we think it's finished.
The original Ludum Dare version will also remain available on itch.io.
Feels like I'm just going to repeat what everybody says and what you already know :D
So yes, the concept is hilarious, the art is wonderful and the game itself is unbelievable. Sadly for a "mario" game we all except perfect platform-type controls, which I understand is extremely hard to achieve, mostly in such a short time. You went full berzerk on everything else, and for that you have my respect. Congratulations !
The art looks great for a 3 days game!
Also, the end of world 1-1 is fun.
Absolutely blown away that something like this can be made in such a short time!
It's amazing what people can accomplish in only 72 hours.
This is a well polished game for being made in 72 hours. The game doesn't really seem to have a goal and it gets pretty repetitive but, it has nice graphics. Good job!
I am blown away by the quality and design of this entry. I love to read that you are patching and adding features. Very interested to see where you go with this in the future.
See you on steam? Q1 2017? :D jk
Congratulations on having your game get such a big response!
You guys really went for something technically challenging, and clearly put a lot of work into it.
If you had more time the controls could use another pass, probably polishing up each aspect one at a time. The air control was very slippery (I believe real Mario has that problem as well), but with the modern platformers we've been playing and nostalgia goggles on, I think the air movement needs a bit more control. Also the space ship jerks a lot as it goes slower and faster, some acceleration would really make the movement seem more dramatic.
The art, sound, and ambition of this was really excellent. Thank's for putting it together!
PS. I'm looking forward to Moonman!
Unfortunately we received a DMCA takedown notice and have had to take the game down. Thanks everyone for all the great comments! You can play an alternative version here: https://asmb.itch.io/dmcas-sky.
Any chance for original, but uploaded to something that isn't itch/gamejolt?
...lack of edit hurts.
Because new version lacks mac/linux build.
@Boberro I have it if you want it
Cool game. Topical and funny, with cool procedurally generated Mario levels. I'm not sure how it ties into the theme beyond Mario being an old video game. One small quip I have is that the controls feel very difficult and I find myself dying a lot more often than I feel would happen in an actual Mario game. Also, I wasn't sure if there was an end to the game, but then again, I suppose you could say the same about No Man's Sky.
Had to rate via the DMCA's Sky rerelease (bloody hell, Nintendo, did you REALLY have to lawyergram a LUDUM DARE ENTRY?!), but seeings as how it's just a re-sprite, I don't think it'd be that big a difference.
Love the idea, not enough games with planets to explore out there, and Mario Galaxy style microplanets are really fun.
I'm cautiously optimistic that maybe Nintendo will find their over-zealous use of the DMCA hammer will eventually backfire, but in the meantime, keep doing DMCA's Sky. Satire games are funny when done right, and you seem to be doing it right.
This idea is brilliant!
A great entry for 72-hour jam.
Played this before it was taken down and have also played the new version. Liked the mashup of both games and how you implemented the ship and planet mechanic into the platforming. Cleverly done and can't even imagine the coding effort that went into that, congrats.
Its always a good sign when hear about an LD game from kotaku before discovering it, and this game did not disappoint. I love that you didn't restrict the use of the spaceship, so if I don't feel like trying my luck over a gap I can just hop into my ship and fly over it. This is a great game and I do not know how you did this in such a short time, but I'm gonna play this for more than 3 days.
Neat idea, very impressive for 72 hours work.
Really fun concept... needed a lot more incorporation of mario enemies and objects to be great, but for a 72hr proof of concept, it does the job. Too bad about the DMCA takedown... it would have been fun to see this fleshed out into a full mario tribute title.
Wow pretty amazing for 72 hours!
Also - must feel awesome to have Nintendo senpai noticing you when you're "stealing" their franchise.