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Blocknauts!
Blocknauts!
By endlessplumber
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 414 | 3.32 | 39 | |
| Fun | 457 | 3.02 | 39 | |
| Innovation | 519 | 2.86 | 39 | |
| Theme | 459 | 3.28 | 40 | |
| Graphics | 413 | 3.43 | 39 | |
| Audio | 373 | 2.89 | 39 | |
| Humor | 501 | 2.26 | 36 | |
| Mood | 394 | 3.22 | 38 | |
Comments
Flying around the place is enjoyable and everything looks nice even if the graphical style is somewhat unfocused (the voxel stuff is a bit out of place). The way the tethered parts jitter around is also rather funny. I couldn't find the last two hull pieces, some kind of radar/locator tool would have been nice, but this is not the biggest issue by any means.
The biggest issue looming over everything that is good and just is --** \*drum roll\* **-- the camera controls! They function unlike anything I've played before. A standard 3rd person camera rotates around the player, it never rotates around its own axis. In other words, moving the mouse forward always moves the camera up, around the player. Here if the camera is looking at the player from the side, moving the mouse forward instead rotates the camera around its local forward axis. This is most unusual behavior.
Other than the camera, you've put together an enjoyable exploration and gathering experience. Some challenge would make it into a game proper, but you can't have everything on a tight deadline. Good work, have a :rocket:
Hey! So weird, spotted your vid on the front page, opened a tab to download it, went to check on my own game and you'd commented! Freaky!
Love the game though, feel a brotherhood with the voxel graphics :) Was getting definite Grow Up/Grow Home vibes from the spaceship collecting!
siryakko
2017-04-28 08:18
Ok so you basically took one of my first idea for this jam :D, the difference is that you manage to do something that works really fine from it. Love the arts and the fun out of it. Like said a bit before, the camera has to be rebuild, but i've had the same issue last time i've made a 3D game with Unity. Keep up the good work, love to see more from that idea/concept.
jk5000
2017-04-28 08:56
The idea for the game is simple and fun. The music and graphics is super great for a LD game. The flying from planted to to plated is sadly super difficult with the jetpack. But overall well done.
@huvaakoodia, @lacemattley, @siryakko, @jk5000, thanks so much for the feedback!
I knew the camera and motion controls were going to be pretty rough, and it's good to see I wasn't wrong. On Sunday I had my young daughter play the game, and had to coach her through how to jet from one planet to another. I knew then I had to improve the controls, but I didn't have enough time to work up something good enough to replace what I had.
I'm planning on growing this idea a bit post-jam, and camera and controls are definitely first on the list. Thank you all for taking the time to look at my entry!
holgk
2017-04-28 16:26
Nice entry. Only the controlls were a little counter intuitive. In fly mode i would have liked to steer with the mouse or if w and s were switched. but other than that a nice game.
jushiip
2017-04-29 08:58
Overall nice entry! Who doesn't like collecting space ship parts? Only downsides, like others have already mentioned, are the controls and camera. It's especially difficult to steer in space. :D I liked that you actually "physically" had to bring the parts using the ropes.
part.png
Where is it? :cry:
firewill
2017-04-29 09:00
I dig the idea, exploring different planets is really cool, I wont go to great lengths about camera or controls since most comments already adressed that, camera can feel fine once you know where to position it, Im going to put this in Z up since you use unreal, your up down feel fine rotating in X, but left right should rotate in Z not Y imo, it'd make it much more controllable.
You implemented some stuff which was fun like the ropes, and the first survey was quite fun, descending and looking at the stuff, I think this kind of game thrives when you have cool stuff to check out, so it was a tough entry for a jam.
I got everything but 2 blocks, which Im assuming are the same ones @Huvaakoodia mentioned, I flew around for a while but couldnt see anything, so I'd say they needed to be better highlighted or theres a planet I missed, because 2 blocks couldnt have been in the asteroids I think.
Graphics were very good, you nailed the lighting, and planet textures are great, I'd add a pinch of ambient light, because the dark side of the galaxy can become a bit too disorienting.
Overall I think its a great entry, if you do a post jam versionI'd focus on as everyone said camera/controls, and adding interesting stuff to discover while exploring.
@holgk, @jushiip, @firewill, thanks for the great feedback! Because of everyone's feedback, I've put an 'After LD' build out on itch.io that I think greatly improves the camera controls and space navigation. I'll also put together a short finder's guide for those pesky parts I hid a bit too well. I'm leaving the original submission download on my itch.io page, so make sure to use it if your judging to keep things fair to others.
I'm really enjoying working on this entry, so I'll probably keep building on it post-jam. If you care to follow along, I'll probably blog and tweet my progress starting next week (details in my user page).
Fun game with great controls (especially the camera controls).
LOVE the small robot :smile: It took me a while in order to cope with the jetpack and leave the start planet. Looking around on every planet for the missing parts is really fun. But how do you made the wire frame model of the rocket? Looks amazing! To be honest I was getting a bit ill from the camera controls after about 10 minutes (weak stomach xD).
Although overall it's a great entry :grin:
aviland
2017-04-30 19:14
Well, while playing as astronaut Jesus... or Ralphie's younger brother all bundled up. I scoured the asteroid belt and tiny planets of varying climates for the wreckage of my once proud ship. Piece by piece I reassembled what was lost. When finally the last puzzle piece had been recovered from under the table. I blast full throttle home, contemplating what to say to the madman who designed my controls. Just barely holding in my lunch I arrive back at my ship. I gingerly step forward sliding the last part into place. To my horror I seemed to have only created a glorified music box in the shape of a spaceship. Doomed to spend the rest of my days alone, drifting in space. I make the hard choice that must be made, I reach for my space suits console. A sharp pained breath, a pause of momentary hesitation. I press the dreaded key stroke alt-F4 ending my life.
@aviland, great feedback, thanks! Which build did you play, the original or my AfterLD build? I made some pretty significant improvements to the controls in the AfterLD version. If you played that build and the controls were still bad, I'd love to hear your thoughts so I can further improve them. Thanks!
I'm currently 50 seconds into an end-game cutscene, so you get more than a merry little tune when you complete the game. It won't help those Blocknauts already abandoned, alone with a completed spaceship in far reaches of space, but perhaps it will bring some hope for all the others out there. For people who have already played the game, I'll post it at the end of the game page or in a comment so you can see it without having to replay it all.
This was pretty fun! I quite liked flying around picking up parts. Watching the rope tether drag the parts around was pretty impressive too.
Only complaint, like everyone else has mentioned, was the camera. (I played the LD version.)
Keep up the great work! I'll check out the Post-LD version sometime soon.
spaceman
2017-05-01 06:02
Great game! I played the Jam version and the camera controls were pretty problematic for me, especially when changing between space and a planet's surface. It seems like you've already fixed that in the post-Jam version though. I really enjoyed building up the rocket.
Played it on a gamepad - had to control camera with a mouse.
Graphics are very fresh, but I think it would be prettier with less black shadows (I know it's space, but it's hard to see a surface sometimes).
The tune was very pleasant.
Thank you for such a nice game!
Played it on a gamepad - had to control camera with a mouse.
Graphics are very fresh, but I think it would be prettier with less black shadows (I know it's space, but it's hard to see a surface sometimes).
The tune was very pleasant.
Thank you for such a nice game!
I really enjoyed the game. The visuals and the sound really brought the world together. It was fun flying around and picking up pieces of your ship. As already mentioned by other people, the camera controls are pretty weird. It is hard to rotate around a local axis. Flying in space would be even more fun when I could controll the direction and not just taking a weird turn and then heading somewhere near the target. Besides that I did not really find something I could complain about. It was a fun little experience.
jk5000
2017-05-01 08:41
I have now also rated your game.
hadik
2017-05-01 13:10
Game overall is great, expect controls and camera, it's horror. But I like it universe which you created.
jushiip
2017-05-01 13:41
Peek-a-boo! :cat: Came back to leave ratings!
Looks cool man! No chance of an OS X build?
@neontropics I wish, but sadly, no. I work in a Linux/Windows environment, and Unreal Engine 4 can't cross-compile from those OS to OSX because of Apple's restrictive API policies. I would need to shell out for a Mac to package games for OSX :cry:
Camera controls have been addressed by others so I'll just leave it at that.
I really like the planets and the atmosphere shader is gorgeous. Collecting items with the ragdoll physic tubes felt fun. I really liked collecting as much as I could so I could see them flail all over the place.
Finding the last part was almost impossible, because the light around the parts is really hard to see.
The camera has been mentioned previously, pretty impressive for a jam. The motion blur really didn't agree with me :( Music was great!
listonos
2017-05-01 22:35
+1 for strange camera controls. Personally, I did not find it that much fun or enjoyable but it looks cool, little bit more lights would be nice.
Hello, for some reason the game is showing this error "out of memory trying to allocate a rendering resource". This computer is not that old, has anybody else had this error when running the game?blocknautserror.jpg
freyby
2017-05-02 21:31
This game looks amazing but camera was kinda confusing and I had hard time trying navigate between this many planets, btw I guess improving moving speed while not using jetpack would make it so much easier to navigate through planets. In overall it's a beatiful looking game, well done!
I can't play the game, I get an error saying ``` Failed to open descriptor file '../../.../BlocknautsDemo/BlocknautsDemo.uproject' ``` From the screenshots it looks good though! EDIT: On Windows 10
@fiery-squirrel, I haven't been able to reproduce your issue :cry:.
I can successfully run Blocknauts on my development machine, w/ a Geforce 970 with 4GB VRAM, our older gaming computer, w/ a Geforce 660 with 2GB VRAM, and a bargain bin laptop with a 2.2GHz Dual-Core AMD A8-7050 with integrated R5 graphics and 4GB shared memory for the whole system. That last one runs with a very low FPS, but it does successfully load and I can fly around between planets and such. Looking at some profiling information, it looks like I use less than 2GB of VRAM total: videomemoryusage.png
What graphics card are you running in your setup? How much VRAM does it have?
@samusoidal, I am able to reproduce your issue on multiple machines when I try to run the executable file located at /BlocknautsDemo/Binaries//*.exe directly without extracting the zip file first. If this is how you tried to run it, I was able to fix the issue by extracting the zip file contents into their own folder and running BlocknautsDemo.exe from the extracted folder.
Hope this helps you guys get up and running!
My basic opinion of this game is that the goal is rather boring, but flying through space is kind of fun, so it doesn't necessarily matter that the goal is so mundane. I have some other feedback though, namely: - I don't understand the combination of voxel models and non-voxel models - perhaps it's simply a graphical style I dislike; not really sure - Gravity does not appear to actually be gravity - from what I could tell, the character is just linearly pulled to a planet, but gravity is meant to be a force, which makes this game feel rather wonky. For me, this problem seriously detracts from the fun of the aforementioned flying through space, and is probably one of the reasons I didn't enjoy this game as much as I could have. - The rope is a bit glitchy; I know other people have mentioned this but it just makes the game feel less complete/professional/something - The controls. Other people have mentioned this as well, but the controls also cause serious problems with how much I enjoy this game - sometimes I couldn't get off of a planet because the character would not aim the right direction. Perhaps simple third-person camera controls would be better...? - This is an insignificant issue, but it is possible to fly through the sphere surrounding the game world. The fact that the sky is a sphere also means that the stars don't necessarily move how you would expect - they basically shouldn't move at all with regards to the player's position, only their direction.
As it were, while I was playing, I also developed this (highly subjective) opinion: I believe this game could be incredibly effective as a puzzle / horror (?) game - basically, confronting the player with being truly lost in space - disconnected from the rest of all humankind. This would mean changing the music and graphical style to be much less cheerful - this thought, in fact, is probably one of the reasons I disliked the voxel graphics. But flying through space and staring at the stars off in the distance did create this sort of feeling of isolation, and I think if the game was specifically constructed to do that, it would be a really cool experience.
Of course, that would be completely changing your game from what it is; just something to think about. In its current state, it's not at all bad; there's just a few small things holding it back from being truly enjoyable. I think the most important changes would be fixing the controls / mechanics (including gravity) and giving it a slightly less trudging goal; perhaps just a bit more open-world-ness would be good.
@themonsterfromthedeep, thanks for the excellent feedback!
You're totally right about the gravity - I integrate it as a velocity instead of an acceleration. I mainly did this for simplicity's sake early on. I had planned to implement acceleration with inertia, but I was afraid it would make made it even harder to navigate between planets with the state of the controls at the time, so I left it as-is in favor of improving other parts of the game. I'm actually about to revisit the physics so I can loosely model orbital trajectories, so there should be an AfterLD build with more realistic gravity soon.
I like your thought on a puzzle/horror game. I've already been sketching out some plans for turning this into a physics puzzler/exploration game already. The rocket collection bit was just a short-term stand-in to help my world creation masquerade as a game :grin:. I really like how the dead planet turned out, it's perhaps my favorite so far, and I've been considering what it would mean to emphasize the ancient civilization motif a bit more strongly. I don't think I'll go full horror with the game, but building up a slightly more atmospheric dread in parts of it may be appropriate.
Fun stuff to think about!
linus
2017-05-03 20:00
This game looks really cool and I wish I could play it but it doesn't run on Linux even with wine. Perhaps there is a way for you to provide a build for Linux?
This is a really gorgeous game. A shame I can't punch the trees, though. :p
@Linus, I'm not surprised wine coughed on it, I'm using Unreal Engine 4 as a base and it's a bit particular with it binaries. However, just for you (and everyone else who likes Linux :grin:), I'm currently rebuilding Unreal Engine from source so I can cross-compile a Linux redistributable version of Blocknauts.
I'm running Arch linux here at home, and don't have any other flavors around with GPUs to test with, so I can't guarantee it will run on everything, but we'll see how it goes :wink:
Keep in mind you'll probably want a discrete graphics card with 2GB of VRAM or more for a good play experience. It will run on less (it performs, albiet very poorly, on an $85 laptop with AMD integrated graphics), but I'm not sure how low you can go and still run fine.
Assuming compilation goes well, I'll shoot have a Linux download on the itch.io site tomorrow. I'll add a note to the top of the Blocknauts game page either way to let everyone know.
linus
2017-05-04 08:25
@endlessplumber that's awesome, I am running Arch as well and if it doesn't work on my laptop I'll try on my other computer which has a RX 470 amd graphics card. Thanks for thinking about Linux users :D
This game is barfalicious(if you play it too enthusiastically, which is hard not to cause its quite pretty ). its assets are nice and the idea is very good. ill try the afterld version latter if possible. commendations and keep on jamming.
I finally was able to play your game!! it was my stupid graphics card that was not working properly. So, I really like the idea, the game is very nice, the graphics and music are very cool too. I have few comments on how to improve it from my perspective. You could add a "run" button when you are exploring planets, I get that the whole space feeling maybe makes it important to have low speed but doing a repetitive task slowly is not fun sometimes, so I think that could help a lot. Others have pointed out some camera issues so I won't comment about it. The idea is simple and fun. You could also include a race mode to compete with people if you extend or develop the full game, it would be cool.
The graphics are well done, and it is really good use of the theme. I thought I got all of the parts, but nothing seemed to happen, not even the musical effect others have alluded to - there was no visible wireframe left on the ship so I'm not sure what I could have missed. Overall this was a solid entry.
Really nice little game! It's got a fun little atmosphere, it looks really nice, and it definitely fits the theme really well. As other people have mentioned before, the controls are a little wonky, but otherwise it's a really good game. Keep up the good work!
dejvo
2017-05-11 09:31
The controls man! I am so sorry, but I've never seen worst controls. There is just no way I could bare picking up the whole spaceship. And people tell me, that I have bad controls on my game. The graphics and the idea is nice, but you've got to change the control system. I am so sorry
After initial problems with the controls (inverted look when flying, gravity turning you around), this turned out to be a worthwile experience with nice graphics. The lack of animation felt a little stiff, but once you get the hang of jetpack controls, you don’t even bother anymore. Some feedback on the current progress (UI elements) would have been a great addition and in the end we had no idea if the game was actually finished or not. (The rocket wasn’t obviously missing any more parts, but the game just went on).
Check out our review of the game over here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iWSzicsia8
@gurkenlabs, thanks for the video review :heart:! Love the feedback, watching someone else play is really helpful!
I've been working on the controls, and my After-LD builds have gotten better, but they're still not quite right. I've found it's difficult coming up with an intuitive, yet flexible scheme for navigating in 3D with a completely arbitrary 'up' direction. The planet to space transition is pretty harsh :grin:. I'm currently looking at Mario Galaxy as a study in good camera controls in a game like this.
Thanks once again for everyone's feedback, positive or negative - it's really helping me to improve as a developer!
I played the version of the game produced during LD38.
- I liked the positioning of the intro text, but it was a tiny bit small and reading it involved some gymnastics.
- LOVED THE VIEW! Jetting from planet to planet and then looking "up" made the game.
- At first I wanted to be able to run on the planets, but then I got used to the speed. It reminds me of watching moonwalks.
- Walking from day to night on the tree planet was a neat experience. You really captured the beauty of it. This was my favorite moment: blocknauts-favorite.png
- I also liked how the character was re-positioned during landing. I struggled with the camera alignment while jetting around, so I'd feel like I was constantly mid-crash, but then my character would finish the move gracefully.
- BUG-REPORT: Immolation didn't work as expected. blocknauts-immolation.png
Oh rude Am I ! I didn't write a feedback of your game D: First of all I don't have that much knowledge in 3D so according to what I am able to do, your game is awesome ! I'm just a bit disappointed because I didn't find the last part of the ship... I wanted to see what could happened at the end of the game, but I couldn't :'( Maybe it could be great to have access to a radar when we only have few pieces remaining ? Anyway, it was fun to travel around the solar system and finding part of the ship. The most difficult part was to bring them back to the ship planet (I don't know how many times I got blocked by the trees xD).
I would enjoy to play the post-jam version !