Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → Blackhole Escape INC
By teekeks
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 427 | 2.92 | 55 | |
| Fun | 467 | 2.56 | 55 | |
| Innovation | 372 | 2.84 | 55 | |
| Theme | 443 | 2.81 | 55 | |
| Graphics | 307 | 3.11 | 55 | |
| Audio | 320 | 2.67 | 51 | |
| Humor | 398 | 2.00 | 49 | |
| Mood | 209 | 3.26 | 54 |
To be honest, I was a bit put off by the user interface. It felt clunky to me. I really think that it needed a more solid tutorial, because I was a bit confused.
However, I liked the atmosphere, the color pallet is in tone with the music and the alone kinda vibe you're going for, and I enjoyed that much!
I remember this game from the IRC as being so laggy that I couldn't play it. Great that you sorted that out - worked flawlessly now.
I have to agree with @xangotrick about the Interface. My eyes wandered over the whole screen a bit too much when trying to craft something, because it's very cluttered and clunky. I also didn't really know what to do and thought that the things I could craft weren't that self-explanatory as they could've been.
Audio is a bit repetitive, but I like how everything fits together graphically and I do like the atmosphere.
Of course you agree with me @zelos. I'm always right! :p
Nice graphic, but the gameplay was wierd. Moving only forward felt out of touch, and frustrating. I didn't get far, becouse I lost all my flares. But atmoshpere and vibe are great, I would love to see this game finished!
Good atmosphere. I like the lighting mood and lowpoly art.
Good atmosphere and stylish art. Really struggled with the controls, just couldn't get my head round them!
Well done! Thanks a lot for sharing!
I was unable to run it on macOS, but I was unable to locate what is wring in the console
Sorry. I downloaded it, and it wouldn't run at all. Not sure why.
Good job on working on your own engine. :)
The controls were a bit confusing to me - I think adding strafe for A and D would make it a bit easier to control the character.
Sadly, it instantly crashes when I try to run it. I am on Windows 10.
Kudos on building you own engine! I agree that adding strafe controls would be nice. Would have liked to have my inventory on a physical button in addition to the on-screen one. Still fiddling around to get a feel for everything, but, man, I really wish scrap collection was faster. Not really feeling that I'm a planet either, lol.
Still, it is quite an achievement to pull off a whole survival/crafting game in 2 days!
Cool game! It's impressive that you were able to do this in your own engine! I think it would've benefited a lot from better controls and a better gui, though. I think you should move in the direction you are pressing, not the direction you are looking (like a twin stick shooter). A dedicated inventory button and a more organized inventory screen would've also helped.
Regarding the UI: yea it is a "bit" clunky since the UI system of my engine is not quite ready for being actually used. The A+D controls where something I was intending to implement but forgot later.
@dennyrocketdev sorry about that. I am pretty sure it is that "nice" Windows10+Java8 bug that strikes quite a few games :/ You could try to confirm that by running it via console. If the crash is about your driver only supporting OpenGL1.1 then it is exactly that bug.
@wolar Since I don't have a macOS I just included the natives for it and hoped for the best. Could you try to run it via console and send me the crashlog?
@ryte2byte again: physical button was planned (and would have been easy to implement, actually easier than that UI Button) but I somehow forgot to add it. There are 21 scrap veins on the map and with a bit of trying you can fit 2 miners per ore field. I figured that would be enough but I guess not ^^
Love the art,Great work!
Very aesthetically pleasing, but as others have already said, controls are a bit rough. In any case, really well done.
Nice atmosphere! Interface feels a bit off though.
I think the look is great and totally fitting for the type of game. The UI on the other hands could need some improvement, making the game more tedious than it needs to be.
Very good mood, loved the lightning. Would have prefered WASD for moving. I had the impression that there was already a game idea and the theme was only put on top of it.
This looks like it could do really well if more time was put into it. I think limiting the movement to forward and backwards is rather annoying, a sideways movement would make it much easier to play.
I love the light effects in the scene, making this world inside a black hole fantastic. Love the idea of the combination with exploring, gathering, crafting and tower-defense. Very extensive.
However I do have some issues: - It would be much better if I can control the character moving left or right. I played for about 20 minutes but still struggled with the movement sometimes - Can the turrents really hit anybody? I built a lot but still had to kill enemies by glowsticks..
Anyway, this game is well done in just 48 hours! I've read your blog during the compo and was looking forward to it since then :smile:
This was a bit of a mixed bag, but I spent by far the most time with it out of the games I've rated during this LD.
The gameplay was fine. It took a bit of figuring out, but it did keep me sucked in for a while and was pretty fun. The game definitely had a survival mood around it. Finding 14 Dark Shards is perhaps a bit of an overkill, especially with how much scrap the miners require.
Unfortunately, I was close to getting 14 shards but accidentally placed a miner inside of myself. This rendered my character immobile and my only chance was for an enemy to come from a direction that would conveniently destroy the miner before myself. Being able to remove existing structures should be on top of the future development priorities.
Other bugs I found involved using an emitter's "place" mode to provide perpetual light whereever I went, as well as being able to place multiple miners on top of each other. That was fun.
The game over screen was great, but I found no way to return to the main menu afterwards.
There could be use for more enemy types as well as improved graphics and audio... However, I understand that these weren't your focus. On the other hand, I have to raise my hat for using your own engine, especially one with what I assume to be Java! The game systems themselves worked fine, and I liked that objects can have a lot of different types of information they can display when clicked.
Overall, a solid experience; despite the flaws, this was one of the most engaging compo games I played so far. Reminds me a bit of games such as Notrium. Good work!
@wizcas the turrets can in theory hit something, yes. but since the glowsticks are gravity following projectiles it was hard to get the math for the trajectory at least somewhat right. I did not had the time left to get this fully tested in the end so they are more of a kind of "maybe one will hit". :)
@mmkalll thanks for the detailed feedback! I knew about the emitter bug but could not fix it in time so I had to let it pass. (Now that I think about it, there is a easy fix for that, why didnt I think of that in time... ahh well). The "return to menu" button is actually there, I just forgot to add the Render Component to it so it is hidden. Yes the Engine is written in Java on top of LWJGL and is still in its child boots. Since the engine is Entity Component based, it was actually quite simple to display all the info for the items, so that worked in my favor here :D
The gameplay certainly can be improved but I had to cut the gameplay down to its bare minimum since this type of game is a bit out of scope for a 48h solo contest.
It's a nice concept, and the graphics and audio work well to create an atmosphere. However, I'm kind of annoyed that I can't break / move things that I've placed. I accidentally placed a wall inside myself once, and I couldn't escape. Also, it would be nice if coal and scrap were visually distinguishable, even if it was as simple as coal being darker and scrap being lighter.
This is a game that would improve greatly with some more time/development. There are a lot of problems like placing things inside yourself, not being able to see the range things have, the start being really slow etc. That said, I spent quite a lot of time playing this because I really liked the gameplay concept and enjoyed it despite its flaws.
@narve they are actually difrent, just not enough I gues.
This is scrap: http://puu.sh/vE6ne/037da8807f.png
This is coal: http://puu.sh/vE6pr/c0306dda81.png
Nice colors. I also like your timelapse video where you show how you create music. Nice job all in all!
I'm really glad you ran it off of your own engine, super cool that you did that! Nice work :)
I really like the concept here, but its a bit poorly communicated (like knowing what resource is what, knowing what I should build). Also control feel a bit clunky due to the lack of strafe. Bonus points for rolling your own engine!
The game has a cool setting, but it is quite complicated to learn and also not clear what really happens there. It seems that there is too much text and too less game-like feedback like appearing items or so. The inventory is also very complicated to control.
This could be a nice game with some rework of the details!
Great game, I found it really addictive to play.
I would've conpleted it too, if it hadn't been for the frustrating movement scheme. You should've just made movement controlled by WASD, because having to use the mouse to determine direction and the keyboard determine velocity splits the act of movement into two separate actions. It's not very intuitive, and it makes it hard to make snap movement decisions. Which is why I often ended up running straight into the enemies when they showed up, which is a pretty frustrating way to die.
The gameplay itself was great though. I might be biased because I have a thing for simple micro-managing and building games, but either way I really enjoyed it. With a better control scheme and maybe some refurbished graphics, I think the game could be even better. Even as it is now though, this game is one of the only entries to make me want to keep playing longer than usual, so good job!
I would say much of what has been said above.
Give more feedback about what you are collecting, what you can do with it...
The character control in the direction from which he is looking, not at a predetermined movement, seemed to have confused my movements in this game.
Here I could not restart the game after losing. I had to close and open it again.
The music is well done, but at least for me it did not fit so well.
Congratulations about your own enigne!!
This is my feedback from each of my attempts.
Attempt 1: The moment I opened my inventory, a monster appeared. I couldn't press esc to close my inventory, I had to click the close inventory button and so I died. The game seems really cool and I'll play again.
Attempt 2: This game is really fun! However, the emitter light is too bright and I can barely see the beasts through it. I died again.
Overall, this game is very fun. It has a few minor problems that make it slightly annoying to play, but overall great job!
The music and graphics style are really cool. What did you use for the music?
@awerick I used FLStudio for the music. The UI system in my engine is at best bare bones at the moment and that shows in the game. Sorry about that :/
I like how the game looks, it is awesome considering it is your own engine. The gameplay is a bit confusing but otherwise its good.
Unfortunately I had some issues running this one.
My specs: * Intel i7-4510U CPU * 8GB Ram * Windows 8.1 x64
I'm on my laptop so maybe that has something to do with it, but I figured you should know. If you manage to fix it or need more info on this error, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at [morrilet](https://twitter.com/morrilet).
JavaException.png
UPDATE: Turns out that this was caused by my outdated version of Java.
Most of the other commenters have put their finger on some of the pain points. I had trouble finding scrap and the darkness was a bit unforgiving when figuring out and exploring the area. At one point I felt I reached some kind of outskirts since it was completely empty. Lighting and own engine gets extra points from me as well :)
I had fun with it, and liked the overall look and feel. The early game definitely needs to be tweaked, as it is painfully slow to accumulate resources. Once the I was getting at least 1 resource/sec, the game became a lot more fun as it was about territory expansion and growth. Keep up the good work, esp with your custom engine!
Still needs some work, but really good game. I got used the controls, but I sometimes got caught in the objects I built which was a problem. I really like this, though.
Took a minute to realize that you can only move forward, but once that was figured out it wasn't long before I was chugging away. I think that the light mechanic could use a little bit of work. There doesn't seem to be any way to heal, unless I'm missing something. I enjoyed the audio and the light shaders, though. It's a pretty game, but I think that the mechanics need a little reworking.
I couldn't get the JAR File to run, could you package a batch file with it or wrap it in an exe? I had this one pop up on my stream and I just don't have time to troubleshoot games on the fly.
@occultone You probably dont have Java 8 installed.
Good graphics and ligtnig which - combined with the music - creates a very gloomy mood, well done! But I didn't get how to collect all the resources except for wood. If you want to check out our space game here is the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/42-mikronikus
Can't run the game on latest MacOS :(
The game looks really nice, props to you for going through all the pain of making a custom engine. It took me a while to figure out how to play it though. Unfortunately I ran into some trouble. For instance, the turrets wouldn't attack the monsters (I figured they were supposed to). I had no sound whatsoever, but I read in the comments that there was supposed to be sound, so there was something off.
It's a pity really that I wasn't able to defend myself properly, as I had the feeling that from the moment I grasped the concept of the game I would have loved to finish it, as I think the general idea of starting with only a little and building/expanding from there was very well executed which motivated me to stick with it. The inventory shows what you need in order to beat the game and it created some anticipation of reaching that goal. The eerie atmosphere contributed to that, pity that I didn't have sound. The crafting system was well-conceived and geared towards base building and exploration.
Now that being said, I see some areas for improvement that I would like to expand on.
First, the game starts with an info dump, which is quite off-putting, especially in a game jam where people are playing a lot of games in a short amount of time. It would probably have been better to chop up the info into smaller bites and present them to the player piece by piece. There, I would suggest handing out the backstory first, to create interest, then explain the controls.
Even better for explaining how the game works would be to create an overlay to show what to do inside the game world with arrows indicating points of interest, something like "place mine here". You can also explain things implicitly using the game mechanics, for instance, by allowing to place a building that needs energy only when there's a generator nearby and giving some information what is missing.
The inventory as major part of the game mechanics should have been explained more clearly, which also goes for how the mines just dump their produce into the inventory. Here I would have preferred to pick up the stuff, as it gives the player an additional activity to keep the game interesting.
I wasn't a big fan of the controls, I think WASD and mouse would have worked better and offered tighter control over the action. Also I think you need some indicator when something was hit, and probably knockback and invincibility frames for the player.
Finally, I found a bug where you could place a building on the player's position which made him get stuck.
Overall a very promising game that I could see myself replaying should you decide to keep working at it.
the controls were a bit fiddly, but overall, I'm impressed what you've managed to do. it could use a bit of polish and better control system and a better explanation, but other than that, good game :slight_smile: