damnscout 2017-04-24 00:51
Awesome man! I especially love the artwork!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → Super Small-io World!
By micahcowan
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 423 | 2.93 | 35 | |
| Fun | 274 | 3.15 | 35 | |
| Innovation | 373 | 2.84 | 35 | |
| Theme | 151 | 3.72 | 35 | |
| Graphics | 525 | 1.97 | 35 | |
| Audio | 283 | 2.83 | 32 | |
| Humor | 352 | 2.20 | 27 | |
| Mood | 464 | 2.48 | 31 |
Awesome man! I especially love the artwork!
I love the circular gravity angle, it came out well! I was not brave enough to attempt anything with complicated physics...
Unfortunately the sound is ony mono for me, which got extremely annoying
Good job! It works really well, I seemed to go through the coins a few times while jumping, not sure why. I gave up with trying to get all the coins fast enough... but hey it kept me playing a bit longer.
Sorry about that, @joyfired, I'll try to be careful of that for next time!
Do note that the music can be toggled with the "M" key (though the other sounds will still play)
Reminded me of Gravity's Ghost. It plays really nice and the stick art for once looks charming!!
The core mechanic is well implemented and actually pretty fun to play with. The main problems that this game has is a) limited implementation as there are only three planets to jump around on things get stale fast and b) enemies move crazy fast and, while this may just be me cracking under pressure, that one that just swoops all over the place is really annoying to predict and avoid. The music was pretty okay defiantly better then nothing (so it's doing its job).
over all you've made a pretty strong demonstration of the core mechanics which is an accomplishment given the short amount of time you had to do so.
Heh, @tiny-planet-studios - you can probably tell I spent like 95% or more of my available time on developing the core mechanics. Everything else definitely took a backseat (especially the art, obviously).
The wavy-line-following enemy was intended to be a _touch_ aggravating. But it _is_ predictable, following a path that's just a combination of sine waves that have a whole ratio (so it cycles predictably). But yeah, it trains you to pause for a moment for it to reach you and return, when all the rest of the game is "go go go! you're going to miss the time!"
BTW, I hadn't actually beat the game at the time I published it, so wasn't 100% sure it was possible in such a strict time limit. :D I was gratified to learn, after a few more practice runs, that it is indeed possible - even easy, once you've learned the right pattern of moves ;)
@nilanjan Thanks very much! I'm glad you think the stick art is "charming" - both of the sprites in the game are prototype art of the "what can I bang out in GIMP just as fast as humanly possible?" variety! ;) The enemy in particular is very obviously me just scribbling something out and hitting "Save" ^_^
Im not so sure about the coins re spawning when you are too slow, it just seems a little mean. The mechanics were well implemented, it just felt a little inconsistent at times, and I would pass through enemies or coins.
@kleinzach, perhaps it is a bit too mean. I'd definitely leave the respawn mechanic in - otherwise there's almost no game (I didn't have time to make bigger levels and such, spent all my time on the mechanics!). But I could make it a lot less aggressive of a time limit.
It'd probably also help if you don't hit a coin automatically when you fall at the start. That starts the timer the moment you've fired up, before you've had a chance to think/move.
Sounds from a few peoples' comments that the collision could use some adjustments. I think they're all radius-based, so probably just need to expand it a few times. I think I did purposefully ease up the enemies' collision a bit so it wasn't _too_ ridiculously tough.
Wow, nice that you made this in your own engine!
The music is interesting and the art is simplistic. The controls are intuitive and so is the objective although I had a hard time figuring out what the enemy. Maybe a short story line would help tie the game mechanics and graphics together. Great job overall, +1 for custom engine.
Nice and fitting music! The enemies are quite hard to avoid :P
I managed to reach the win state after a bit of practice. The enemies are certainly tricky, but they're manageable once you figure out how to deal with them. I was worried about the respawning coins, but they weren't really an issue for me. My gameplay issue was getting smashed between the rotating clouds on the big planet, often because my character didn't jump when I felt like it should have been able to. Props for the engine and the gravity mechanics. The music did its job well.
EDIT: Yeah, I kinda figured that it had something to do with the bouncing. Not that big of a deal once I got used to it.
I like this game. The movement felt very good. The enemies were a bit more unpredictable than I would've liked though.
Thanks to those congratulating me on making my own engine! To be clear, the engine was _not_ part of the 24 hours, but was mostly developed beforehand (just in case), so that's the "preexisting codebase".
@piscythe, thanks for the feedback!
Usually when you can't jump when you feel like you ought to, you're in the midst of a bounce from having landed in a previous jump (or from a bouncepad, especially). Ideally you should be able to jump when you bounce, too, but I guess I didn't get that quite right. ;)
To those having difficulty predicting enemy movements: They're all simple repeating paths. The floating-in-space enemy has a more complex path, but it's predictable if you watch it. The two enemies traversing the larger world in opposite directions are moving at slightly different speeds, so they don't keep meeting up at the same place each revolution - that may be part of the difficulty in predicting them (and is intended, of course).
Nice little game. The controls felt smooth and worked very well. Graphics were simple, but cute.
Struggled a bit with the third planet for a couple of tries, but then focused on just jumping at the right time and running around it until I collected all the coins.
Good work!
The physics in this game worked really well, graphics could be improved though.
There wasn't a reaction when I died which ended up being really jarring when it happened the first time. Enemies ended up being hard to dodge (one of the early bounce pads could sometimes send you straight into one?).
Overall I liked the idea.
Nice art :P !
Without joking, the game is too hard but it is really fun !
Rated
Nice game! Hard, especially if you try and get anything on the big planet but overall a really fun and challenging experience. Simple art style, but that totally fits the game, and once you get the hang of the jumping/timing this was an overall good experience! Well done :smiley:
Great! I think you should give to othe player a second chance when an enemy hit him, add a Lifebar, or a chance to trade some coins by a new life... But I've liked the concept, and spent some time having fun trying to avoid the enemies and catch all the coins!
Good job! :D
I liked it a lot, though I wasn't able to finish it after several attempts. I didn't find the wavy enemy problematic at all, it was the two enemies on the largest world that were the problem.
This game would be *substantially* improved, I feel, by the addition of levels with a ramping difficulty. Each level would still have the "get all the coins before they leap out of your pocket" mechanic, but the the level the game ended up with should be one of the later ones.
@philomory, oh yes, definitely! But I'm probably not going to do further work on this game idea - or, if I do, it'll probably end up being very drastically different.
I had wanted to make something more Mario-ish, but with 5-ish hours left to go all I'd done was the mechanics and the music, and probably the bounce pad sounds. So I just whipped up the gameplay you see here, which I'm pretty happy with, but yeah, it's definitely on the higher end of difficulty.
Ideally I'd have larger levels, with more worlds, and more to do on them, and various types of enemies. But if I did that, I'd probably scrap the disappearing coins - they can only work if you can very quickly get back to where you started to reclaim them, and wouldn't be good at all for larger worlds.
All in all, the coins were a "clever" device to keep folks playing, instead of the game being done in all of 10 seconds. ^_^
This was fun to play. Good job with that game engine
Pretty fun. The fastest enemy was a little frustrating when it would come from off screen and instantly kill me. It might've been better to have more enemies that were a bit easier more carefully placed. I still found the game enjoyable though!
Super fun and challenging. My highest score was 60 (so close :cry:) The music worked for me on firefox.
Overall great. The zooming camera could make it difficult to see incoming squiggle danger thingies. Very fun and innovative gameplay.
Nice little game! It took me a few times to get it but I finally did! I could have cried when I was about to pick up my last two coins and I could hear some respawning on another planet! It's too bad there's only one level. If you have more time, make a "post-compo" version with more! (but make them easier than this with a difficulty rampup)
Feedback: Sometimes I'd land on a planet or jump on a pad and try to move one way only to go the other, which was frustrating and lost me just enough time to not be able to beat the level. I don't know that there's an easy way to solve this problem - typically you'd keep your camera aligned with your character's orientation but I'm guessing you can't do that in your 2D engine. Another point is that it was hard to see the cloud going around the planets. I eventually learned its movement but if you made more levels this isn't the kind of thing you should have to memorize every time. You could fix this pretty easily by adding a little trail behind your clouds (plus this would make your game look better!).
While the art very much came off as placeholder, and the enemies were very difficult to avoid, the controls and physics were very nicely pulled off and I liked the sound as well. Solid entry overall!
@frenchie, thanks for the feedback!
It actually would be a piece of cake to make the camera orient on the user. But I wasn't convinced I really wanted to do that, and left it out. I think I was concerned that it would move the world around the player too much and could be a bit dizzying. I don't know if "lagging" the camera a bit behind the player's alignment might help or hurt with that.
There's been a few other games with a similar control scheme to mine; on one of them, a user suggested orienting A/D to "left/right", but with the same key meaning the same clockwise/counter-clockwise direction until it's released. That could possibly work to help alleviate confusion with the controls... but I imagine a quick reversal after the "meaning" of D had changed might then be surprising. That is, if you were underneath the world, and used "D" for right (counter-clockwise), and then, once you looped around to the top of the world, you quickly released and then pressed "A" for the reverse direction, you'd actually wind up going in the same direction you were, even though it's a different keypress.
I imagine you could fudge that away with some sort of release timer or something, but anyway it's an intriguing idea. Of course, the camera alignment method is much more reliable at ensuring the player isn't confused about the controls.
Another way to improve visibility of the world-gliding enemies would be to have the camera zoom out a bit more, either by default, or when the player is near the prime jump spot to that world.
Enemy avoidance would probably be much better if I improved the ability to jump when you bounce from the big landings. Maybe I could find a way to fudge that so it "feels" better.
I don't currently plan to do a post-compo version of this game; or if I do, it'll probably be very substantially different (and later).
The concept is really nice, it'd be cool to see this expanded. As it is, I thought it was very difficult (maybe add a few levels that ramp up the difficulty?). I found that finding the balance between carefully avoiding enemies, and hurrying to get all the coins made it more trail and error than skill.
(also I think it's really awesome that you've rolled out your own game engine, great stuff I'm going to take a look)
This game is really fun, but it's a little difficult. It might be cool if there was a health meter or something so you didn't have to start over after getting hit once. Overall, great game!
Fun little title you have here, I did find myself getting a tad frustrated with the coin respawn time. Unless you get a perfect scenario it is quite difficult to gather up all the coins, I tried a couple times and I think the closest I got was about 2-3 coins away. I really enjoy the Mario galaxy style galaxy, and was quite sad to find the game was only 4 bodies, I think this could have been a lot more fun with some more places to go. Thanks for the game.
i really like the concept! was fun and keep my playing longer than most of the games! i can't get all the coins :cry: enemy speed was a little higher for me, sometimes was impossible to avoid contact! Nice Entry
@blaster391, I find that there are patterns that you can discover through practice that make it mainly a matter of skill. However, today I'm realizing that because the "elapsed game time" counter doesn't reset when you die, those patterns can actually shift and clobber you without much warning, bringing the game into that trial-and-error territory.
I think I've been avoiding it mainly because when I was practice getting my runs fast enough to beat it, I'd just spam refresh when I knew I was taking too long - so I always got the same pattern to practice on.
@gamerjenn, I know the single-hit kill can be frustrating, but I liked the challenge of it, so I'd like to keep it. But I _would_ like to diminish the sheer frustration of it, particularly when the death isn't really your fault. I'm thinking that fixing the above-mentioned timing issue, increasing the visibility of the jump to the large world, and maybe being more forgiving with the "can't jump when bouncing" thing?
@izunah, yeah, more bodies would be nice. But then I'd need more mechanisms and obstacles to keep it interesting, and there wasn't any time left for that... and with the coin reappearing mechanic, you don't want to get too far away from the starting position!
**NOTE**: A [new, mildly-tweaked version](http://micah.cowan.name/smallio/latest/) has now been uploaded, to make things just a little bit more fair during gameplay. It's still fairly punishing, but not quite so unfairly so. See the description at the top for details.
This was a pretty cool idea! Getting that whole gravity system to work had to be quite a challenge. The graphics were amusing, the music was silly but worked well. There were times when it felt like there was little I could do against the enemies, but overall I liked the game a lot.
Keep up the great work!
Simple but good! I included it in my Ludum Dare 38 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQvFJMpbZ5A