Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → Intergalactic Gold Rush
By omiya-games, Apostrophe and Patrick
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 47 | 4.05 | 40 | |
| Fun | 111 | 3.76 | 40 | |
| Innovation | 97 | 3.79 | 41 | |
| Theme | 89 | 4.00 | 41 | |
| Graphics | 2 | |||
| Audio | 2 | |||
| Humor | 243 | 3.00 | 33 | |
| Mood | 136 | 3.77 | 37 |
The jam builds of the game kept softlocking on me and the game was pretty hard to survive in. That said the game absolutely has potential and based on your post jam builds the game is freaking fantastic! While I unfortunately cant judge your game on the post jam build I will say that was one of the most fun games I have played all jam! Fantastic idea! Wish the jam version was as good as your post jam version!
Good music, good vibes, good use of theme. I could never get used to the player acceleration though. That felt a little off to me. Overall, a very solid entry!
Great game! Love the gameplay - said the rest on my channel!
I have just come back to give my ratings for the game! I really hope you do well. I am sorry about the bugs that were present when I played it and I hope they don't hurt your score too much as this game is brilliant and shows a lot of polish!
Amazing game! Awesome music and plays well, glad to see postjam versions on kong/ng - good luck.
Very cool visually appealing game. I really enjoyed spawning in the new swaths of lands and collecting things. The random generation adds a lot of variety and puts you in interesting situations. There is a lot to build on here. I feel like if you wanted to take this game further, you could add a lot of variety through powerups, enemies, and rogue-like elements. The music was pretty good, and the the art worked really well with everything else. The only thing I didn't like was the fact you could walk off the edge of the world, because sometimes I mistakenly thought I could spawn new land and kept moving towards the edge as if I could. Otherwise really fun and well balanced.
Brilliant entry! I've only played the jam version so far and it already looks superpolished.
Graphics are beautiful, and the game mechanic is really fun. It balances the tension of having the world crumble at your feet and the urge to keep exploring very nicely.
I could very easily see this expanded further with some goals beyond surviving (which is already more than enough to keep you invested and replaying to improve your score).
Wonderful job, congrats!
This is a very, very solid little game. It feels hectic, especially when you realize the blue coins speed up your magic regen which lets you go really fast looking for more gold. It only gets a little sluggish when you run out of mana, but I see you have updated the game since with some tweaked mana regen and with coins giving a little mana boost, so you probably have that covered. I would suggest you simplify the mana regen thing, and not have different regen speeds on different tiles, I feel thats an unecessary bit of complexity thats not obvious enough. I'd recommend trying some more obvious stuff instead: either more obvious special tiles that boost mana regen speed (like, big glowing runes or something), or maybe have mana regen faster if you don't move, and slower if you are in mid-air? That way you could end up playing chicken with some incoming monsters if you are hungry for mana and at a dead-end. That might be fun. Although, it might also slow the game down, since that would reward players for moving less... but with the game collapsing around you, I'm not sure that would be an issue! Anyway, again, this is really good! Played it on my stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/139473859 (at 1:59:10)
Really great art and a solid entry. The gameplay is frantic with hex tiles about to fall away at your feet and angry horned pac people coming at me. The time high score is easy to exploit by sitting on a water tile and just casting your magic. But by doing, that the gameplay slows down and you can approach exploring with a little more caution and ease. (That is, until those damned pacholes spawn en masse.) :grin: Nice work!
I really enjoyed this game! The gameplay is straightforward, frantic, and tons of fun! It was great to be running away from 10s of enemies at a time, frantically searching for mountains to hide behind and water to regenerate.
The menu screens add a ton of polish and professionalism to the game. The controls are very smooth too (in the downloaded version, the web version is a bit laggy in Chrome).
I think you already addressed all of my concerns from the jam version in the post-jam version (balancing issues, mostly). Thanks for the game, I've added it to my collection on itch!
Great game with really fun mechanics. I wish the mechanics shined through in your game a little more clearly, but over all, this is a game I see myself playing over and over! Thanks so much for sharing it! Consider multiplayer in the post jam? <3
I wouldn't have guessed that water made magic regenerate faster without reading that it does. Interesting mechanic and the controls/movement felt tight. Lots of nice polish. The camera angle gets a bit wonky if you keep moving off in a single direction. The music is fun. Nice entry :)
I love this game. I thought that the main mechanic was original and really well thought out, and all the other mechanics surrounding it really complemented it perfectly. Some great game design decisions were made, for example, forcing the player to risk getting eaten by the monsters in order to regain magic faster in water. My main complaint would be the delay when using magic, it feels like the main cause of death (for me at least) was running off the edge about a second after pressing spacebar - maybe make the ones next to the player spawn instantly?
Hi! Thanks for posting the game to my livestream!
It has nice graphics and animations - it is clearly readable what the state of the game is about.
There may be tutorial right in the game to show me what to do.
I didn't feel very motivated to play it more and try to make better score.
Nice jam entry anyways :)
You can watch me playing the game here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5x4fRX8yrw
Hello, nice jam game! My highest score so far was 6240. I like the generative terrains, though was a bit confused with the rings and the gold until I read they multiply my score. One game I had a bunch of monsters chasing me and it felt pretty good was I was able to get the invincibility and clear them out. The fx is really nice though personally it feels a bit too blown out for me (might just been the bloom or blur or something). The controls feel a bit slow making it pretty easy for me to walk off the edge - might just be a bit slow running on the browser for me. The lava was pretty interesting as an unpassable terrain - I assume getting invincibility would allow me to get through (though I didn't have it that game), could be cool if there's something special pass the lava or something like that that rewards the player for risky exploration. Nice job!
@aeveis Er, were you judging the WebGL version? As the warning says, that's actually the post-jam build, and shouldn't be used for judging purposes. There isn't a Jam version for WebGL due to the original project relying on threads, which WebGL did not support. It's a drastically different (and rougher) game, so it's only fair to judge that instead.
In regards to lava, there are dark platforms you can jump on, that almost always generates rewards. The intent for that biome is that it turns the game into a platformer as a "now for something different" gameplay change. Also, the Jam build doesn't have lava, which makes it a feature that shouldn't be judged for this game jam :P.
Edit: whoops, I forgot to mention that invincibility ability does let you walk on lava just fine! So that's another way of getting easy money.
So, as I remember @omiya-games playing my game last time, and I played yours ... I was kind of wondering whether you participated or not, and as I see - you did.
I'm kind of surprised, I played both - jam and post-jam version and it is suprising, action and fun. I successfully died multiple times in both versions!
What I didn't like - probably the jumping, it was way too easy to fall off (although yes, I am kind of noob!), apart from that the power-up mechanisms work, the critters and funny and yet terrifying :D, and falling into oblivion (e.g. dying) was never that much fun.
Thanks for creating it and congratulations, I had fun playing it - and that counts I guess :).
Hey, @stanov! One of the two programmer of Intergalactic Gold Rush here. Thanks for live-streaming your playthrough. Just finished watching the Youtube video!
In regards to ratings, I can take most criticisms, so feel free to be as harsh as you want. In fact, I encourage it, even in livestreams! Ludum Dare's rating system is all about growth, and I really think we all learn the quickest from our own mistakes. So go for that 3 star or even 1 star rating: it's a learning experience for me. I will always prefer honesty over being nice when it comes to feedback. Besides, I often rate other games with 3s and 2s (though like how I rate 5s, I leave 1s for truly exceptional cases), so it would be hypocritical for me to say otherwise.
I'm actually quite glad to see another dev seeing the game past its graphics, and asking the question, "did I find this game's experience compelling?" As you can tell, I'm pretty darn good at making things shiny (that said, art section is removed because it uses pre-made assets so it's not representative of our artistic abilities), but I'm actually more interested in improving my game design skills. If you didn't find it compelling, great! It seems a combination of factors, such as the lack of tutorial and how easy it is to walk off the edge, probably hindered your experience; a fault I 100% admit is an oversight on our part. I wouldn't have learned that with the comment you've posted alone; but the video really helped summarize the problems. Again, thanks a lot for the feedback!
P.S. If you have the time, please let us know what you think about post-jam's game. I admit, there's still no tutorial and it's very easy to fall of the edge. Still, it does attempt to fix a few other problems, such as providing a compelling reason to travel farther from your starting point.
Hi Taro!
I'm glad you found my feedback useful :) It's new for me to say my subjective opinions, so I was quite unsure saying things that may hurt somebody.
See you next time with new games! :)
Good game! very funny and addictive!
Good concept, but really chaotic gameplay. especially after that relaxing intro music :D
Really good one, I got a hang out it and had a few good streaks!
Fun game! Loved the art and music. I feel like the cooldown on magic might be a little slow, because standing around waiting for it to recharge is just not that fun. Maybe add some more enemies to bump up the difficulty too? But I really enjoyed it. Good job!
Really original concept. One of my favorite entries entries so far.
Awesome visuals! I love the way the hexagons shake and drop. The choice of music really makes the game come to life. It was challenging and fun to play.
Some things could have been communicated better. I didn't get why you had two types of magic that did the same thing, but no life bar, until I found out the squares were supposed to be hearts. It didn't help that clicking the squares also activated your magic. Speaking about communication: I would assume that many players will find it a bit tedious to read a wall of text to understand the game, especially when a bullet list would have transported the same information. There are so many games to take in every LD that this carries an additional weight.
As for pacing, I really like how you will die within seconds if you don't react, so the game starts immediately as you hit Start. On the other end of the spectrum, I didn't really feel that the game became harder over time, although it probably does. Maybe a steeper difficulty curve may keep the skilled players interested for longer.
All in all it's a very polished, beautifully looking and sounding game, great job!
Great graphics. Tiles, particles, animations look very good. Interesting and fun gameplay. Nice work!
Nice game, guys!
@omiya-games Ah, thanks for that catch!
Super rad game! The music was fantastic, though after watching the credits, I guess you didn't make any of it. My best score was 405, which I'm going to pretend is very good. I encountered a bug when using magic right as the pieces were falling, which resulted in some empty hexagons in the newly generated area.
****What I Liked:****
* Oh my, this is fun. It's kind of addicting, and stressful, and just overall amazing. Fantastic job with this. * The graphic intensity increasing was really cool. I loved that. * The music was a good fit for this, even though it seems like you didn't make it yourself. * The terrain types were really good, and added an extra level of strategy. * Having two scoring systems was a nice touch. * The physics felt good, and it was really really fun to grab everything. * I got a score of 6040. I think I got pretty good at the game, but I still didn't beat you, @aeveis!
****Minor Nitpicks:****
* Falling off of the stage always felt like a really cheap way to die. I understood it when everything fell around you, but "gliding" towards the end of the map and falling just felt kind of sad.
****Great job and thanks!****
Very fun game! 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=jKyqjTvBURc
The gold rush is awful! It is scary to imagine that once people died because of gold. But I can understand their feelings because I recently became interested in investing in precious metals. Every day I read a ton of useful information about gold, silver, and other metals on this site. You can [check their blog](https://www.pacificpreciousmetals.com/blog) too and learn a little more about the right investment. I think it will be useful for any person.