Restless

geckoo1337 2017-04-26 22:34

A solid entry which was really good. I liked to play this project... until it bugs. After a jump, my character has been blocked between two colliders and he twirled without end (take a look at the picture below). I guess that I had found 6 creatures. The gameplay is basic, but it seems to me that I played something new with a strong desire to continue my travel. There is a good aesthetic (I recommend you to add blur or gloom FX in order to give more volume - or something else). I would like to hear a nice background music which could be quiet so as to improve atmosphere. Sometimes the camera isn't really smooth, but I assume that you could improve it. Animations are good enough, especially when the player grabs a new tentacle. The sounds are just bad - sorry. Overall this is a very good starter kit to create a solid game. It remind me BoxLife. Well done ++

http://hpics.li/7ff64cf

elzach 2017-04-30 07:41

I feel like this was an super ambitious project. The lowpoly artstyle and the futuristic design is super cool to look at. Actually I followed you since the first time I saw a blogpost with screenshots. The world also seems to be big and diverse even.

However the game fell flat for me on several different aspects. First off the sound design isn't anything to write home about. While the foot-steps feel and sound weighty, repeatingly listening to mechanic CLUNK CLUNK CLUNKs is stressing over time, especially combined with the obnoxious jumpnoise.

First thing I did in the game was to reverse the horizontal camera-axis, so thanks for having that as an option. Would've been great to have that ingame and not soley on the titlescreen. Although there was more trouble with the camera. Having it follow the player direction isn't a bad idea per say, but the way it was implemented felt very twitchy and often made me lose direction/focus. Although I appreciate the work which was put into the camera-controls, because I noticed some of the fancy camera works like the over-the-shoulder angle, while rotating.

The Jumping however was what stopped the game for me. I see that it's THE gamemechanic of the game, however it wasn't very fun. The jump is short and fast, there's hardly room to maneuver. Combine that with a level design where you have to do pinpoint jumps from the get-go and it gets frustrating very fast.

The games strongest points to me are the visual direction and the animation and holy moly, kudos to whoever made the animations. Doing 3D-animation is time consuming and hard, producing them for a gamejam is sth. I tip my hat to. Also the wiggly snake like additions to the character look neat!

I felt like you/your team lacks a little experience in the time-management/priority-setting department. As the game would've benefited from doing level design and mechanics design first and later polishing the visuals.

Cheers~

matoux42 2017-05-06 21:05

I liked play this game, but I think that too much things are missing : ambience is missing because of too simple graphics and the music absence, a piece of story is missing to give sense to this game, and a lots of little things make game frustrating (camera, difficulty to estimate distances during jump, stopped jump when your too close with a wall, etc).

However, I'm impressed by the workload you done during the jam, and I think that it's a good base for a futur game.

citsua 2017-05-10 14:46

I have no idea what this game was about, but I liked it. The graphics are very simple but the lighting makes them look extremely pretty. The sound was plain annoying though, I would have liked it way more if there was an ambient music instead of this. I liked the design of the tentacle men and their animation, and I absolutely didn't expect them to just, uh, become part of me. The mood was a bit unsettling and I liked that. Even though there was no text it was quite obvious what the player needed to do, so that's some good level design I guess.

I think you should have added a blob shadow to the character though; right now it's hard to see where he's going to land. I also think you shouldn't have smoothed the camera rotation this much, as it is pretty but really way too slow.

Solid entry overall!

quoclon 2017-05-12 02:09

Art was decent. I liked the lighting. I wished the character had a shadow. Some kind of tutorial would have been helpful. I enjoyed the moment when I first saw an enemy. the sound effect was awesome, and the character looked cool. I was confused when he attacked me and I sort of absorbed him... oh wow, haha, I just looked up at the review above mine as I'm typing this and seeing that he noticed some similar stuff. I also wish I could have pressed esc to exit. I think the base mechanics and ambiance are there. With a few small tweaks this would be rad.

If you get the opportunity please feel free to check out my game, Sling Ship: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/sling-ship-search-for-a-small-world