World Keep-Away

rabbittortoise 2017-05-01 17:30

The idea was nice. It was more fun and challenging than I thought. Also first game that I have rated and that had self-made music :) It got a little repetitive after some time but hey, there was some! The jumping felt surprisingly good.

The turrets sometimes felt a little weird because when they shoot an astronaut it spawns again ahead of you and then its harder to dodge his shots.

Few bugs I encountered: Sometimes an astronaut spawned inside a wall. You can do these "super jumps" when you are close to a wall (intended or not?). I never finished the game because in the 3rd level (I think it was the third, maybe final level?) I got outside the map or something and the game crashed.

raincole 2017-05-02 13:27

The control is kinda clumsy and makes the game unnecessarily challenging. But I like the concept that the player activates turrets to defend himself.

stending 2017-05-02 14:55

The plot was pretty funny! I didn't really understand why the background was static and the platforms were the only thing moving.

But the game is fun, and the turrets defending yourself is a really nice touch. Congratulations on this entry =)

shubham-gupta 2017-05-02 15:12

Controls and levels are bit confusing and sometimes levels are very challenging. Concept of game is great. Graphics could have been bit better but overall game is fun

liquidbrain 2017-05-02 16:19

I laughed a lot while playing this game, even though there was a lot of bugs I had a great experience. Not because of the gameplay, but because of the music.

Concerning the music, I got a picture in my head of you trying to clean a piano and recording it by accident. Later finding the piano-cleaning-song and thinking to yourself “That will do”

I had a hard time getting to the tutorial-screen due to the buttons being a bit offset, when I got to the tutorial i was kind of confused. I think there was some lack of information, bigger and brighter text might do. By the time went by I learnt how to play. And it was fun! Overall the game was kind of challenging but on the same time pretty balanced.

I’ll give you some extra credit for developing this game in java! Have an awesome day, and hope to see you in the next jam!

// Isak (one half of [LiquidBrain](https://ldjam.com/users/liquidbrain/))

avavt 2017-05-02 16:59

The concept is pretty solid and humorous. And the turret mechanic is very interesting!

The control is a bit clumsy, and the physics doesn't feel realistic - though I've never been to the moon, what do I know?

I'm a bit irritated by the um, background music though. I'm giving a 1 stars for audio and 5 stars for mood because the bad music *did* make me feel the panic & stress equivalent to someone running with the fate of the world in his hands.

pkenney 2017-05-03 03:09

This was really simple, but I just kept playing! I think you might have some objects you aren't cleaning up, because after I played for long enough the game bogged wayyyyyy down to like 1fps.

The slow fall was fun to play with. I found a secret tactic to abuse: the jumps can be stacked. You can stand touching a 1-high block, and jump but hold the jump key down. You will do your normal jump from the ground, but then as your feet pass the height of the 1-block, you get a second impulse applied, and you rocket upward. Kind of cool, I definitely used this.

If I could change something here it would be the bullets. They are very small and when they touch you there's not a real big effect, so they kind of feel wimpy. I wish they were bigger and nastier.

cheesymoo 2017-05-03 04:30

Wow! Very fun!

The music is gr8.

:clap: :clap:

tweedle 2017-05-03 04:34

The story at the beginning set the mood very well, then suddenly a piano and... some birds started chirping and quacking and I'm running for my life haha! A flood of emotions! Getting the player movement physics more floaty (like I'm in space & lovin' it) then maybe some death animations on the baddies, guys are poppin' in and out and I'm not sure if my turrets are helping or not. Those are the first couple things that I think would help out a lot here. Also, wow, this is in Java next game minecraft 2?! I believe in you!

fueelin 2017-05-03 05:20

Charming game! Enjoyed playing it and was sad when I died. Some of the jumping behavior is a bit... interesting :)

bunnery 2017-05-03 09:56

This made me laugh too - loved what sounded like your budgie in the background! I took a while to get used to how it worked - but after a bit I had fun with it. I do like the colourful art style and the humour. Very cool opening explanation ;-) Nice work!

bwalter 2017-05-03 21:14

hilarious concept, but could use some refining. jumps are a little violent, for one thing. opening was 10/10. id like to see what this evolves into if you keep at it :D

obidubi 2017-05-05 00:25

This was great! It was hilarious with the opening scene and I definitely laughed when the music came in (In the best way possible. Great piano playing! :P). The jumping was a little off since the player would immediately jump up and then slowly fall back down at a constant rate instead of accelerating, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Overall, great job and keep at it. :)

louspirit 2017-05-05 23:21

Very nice cinematics (and scenario)! You shoud focus on that for your next games. The jump is not usual but we are in space, aren't we :) ? Great job to have the time to code IA of ennemies + turrets and make cinematics in a game jam. The runner / plateformer is a perfect combo. The piano was funny, maybe you can think about taking lessons ;)

jasperarmstrong 2017-05-06 03:43

Cool idea! The jump definitely needs work, but it was otherwise a lot of fun.

fiery-squirrel 2017-05-06 03:47

I really laughed about the world football thing xD. Nice game!. I'm not sure but I found the jump a little bit strange, maybe you have to move the whole background to achieve a more natural effect, don't know. The graphics are cool and the soundtrack was nice too. Good job!

starspell 2017-05-07 02:45

I like the idea here and the opening cutscene was really fun. However I had a lot of problems with the rest of the game. I wasn't able to click on the menu entry for the tutorial, I think it just sent me into the game. The game itself is ok, there are a lot of bugs in the jumping logic, sometimes I would be hit and sent a few screens into the air. The music is not really easy to listen to over time, nor does it fit with the game that much. A bit of polish and this could have been a nice tight prototype.

cal 2017-05-07 03:35

Nice to see another java dev here! Good job, its really difficult to make a game in this time without an engine like unity. Loved the funny cutscenes

ratking 2017-05-07 17:18

Awesome story ;) I liked the intro scene.

The jump/run part was a bit clumsy, but overall I'd like to see a concept with turrets as defense mechanism in a platformer expanded.

athomicus 2017-05-10 10:05

the concept is solid nice job

officialcodenmore 2017-05-10 22:02

I agree with the others about the controls, but I must say that the overall mechanic worked well!

nightshadow0 2017-05-13 16:26

This was a very bizarre experience, enemies spawn out of mid-air at any time so there's really not much point to the turrets, you just have to keep moving forward while soaking up damage. The music was pretty annoying, to be perfectly honest. I did however love the premise and the intro cutscene, that was pretty great.

local-minimum 2017-05-14 10:19

The game was really huge! I ran for quite some time and passed two or three green things and it almost seemed never ending? I think it would have made more sense to limit the size of the world and author the obstacles with more care. A while I thought I had landed on the surface of the moon and that I was outside the game world, walking right. Then the blocks appeared again.

I liked the premise of getting people to stop doing sports with things you care for and have to run away from them and I didn't really mind the glitches in the controls that terribly where sometimes I got some mega-jumps that shot me far up. Neither that the jump felt rough. It was fine that the sporters just kept spawning around even if there was no real reason withing the game world why they were allowed to do that and kind of fun when they got stuck in blocks. It was a bit unfair when so much time was falling and enemies spawning that it was really hard to not be shot by them, but on the other hand life was really plenty.

However, to really make the game stand out, I think these issues would need attention. One thing that could be cool would be to give the player a sprint (with cool-down) followed by shorter slower than normal speed.

Good work.

philomory 2017-05-18 18:48

The art style is really cute, and I love that you recorded real, actual music with a physical piano for this (even if it eventually gets repetitive; so does a _lot_ of LD game music, my own included). That said, there are some gameplay design issues here:

* It's not clear to the player what the goal is (the tutorial doesn't actually have a green 'goal' area, so even the player makes use of the tutorial, they still won't know what they're trying to do) * Even once you've beat one level and have seen a goal, it's really hard to know _where_ the goal is * I played for a fair while and _never_ figured out why I could sometimes jump really high, but most of the time couldn't. * The enemies are crazy unpredictable. * The turrets don't seem to help at all, as far as I can tell; they shoot the enemies, but that never seems to actually matter. * The health meter is actually not super obvious; Besides being somewhat hard to read, the fact that it's in the lower corner and has a decimal point made me assume for a long time that it was an FPS counter. Now, of course, in a sense that's my fault for making unwarranted assumptions, but that's how it is with UI design. * The levels are _reaaaaaally_ big! Really, really, really big! Too big! Like I suspect many others did, I ended up falling for long periods of time in level 3, assuming I was falling down a bottomless pit waiting for the game to realize so I could die and restart the level. But eventually, I hit some blocks. Later, I fell again, for at least 20 seconds, and then still hit more blocks. This happened often enough that eventually I was trained to just assume there would be more blocks. That was the point I was finally wrong, and died. Good level design generally means that the player can tell what's a hazard and what's not (in most cases, there are exceptions but I don't think this is one of them). * When I died, I was returned to the main menu, instead of starting the level over. With levels as long as this, actually, even starting the level over wouldn't be that great, you'd need a checkpoint system.

All that said, I do think this game has promise, and the premise is super cute. It's gonna take some time, though, if you want to polish it.

kurekurecicz 2017-05-18 19:11

Sometimes... just sometimes... i missjudge (is that the word?) the actual level with background, but otherwise its really great. And the big levels are amazing ;)

harry-alissavakis 2017-05-20 00:38

Fun little game! It had some pretty interesting elements, like the turrets and the whole run for your life style, which can be expanded in a very intriguing manner. The game lacked some polish and the jumping was kind of weird, but other than that it's a solid game jam entry. Good job! :D