Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → Sim Sperm
By nbilyk
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 307 | 3.22 | 24 | |
| Fun | 299 | 3.09 | 24 | |
| Innovation | 319 | 3.00 | 24 | |
| Theme | 215 | 3.54 | 24 | |
| Graphics | 325 | 3.04 | 24 | |
| Audio | 44 | 3.81 | 24 | |
| Humor | 111 | 3.25 | 22 | |
| Mood | 158 | 3.42 | 23 |
Not bad! Saw your post about this game during the jam and I went out of my way to look it up cause I was curious as hell xD. Gameplay was a little laggy and for whatever reason I couldn't run it in chrome but the experience was not bad!
Good idea, quite fitting for the theme. The music gives your game a pretty poetic ambiance, nice job on your piano improvisation. Rated !
Yay, I got her pregnant! Wait, what? Cool game, great music. I was a tad disoriented at first but I quickly found my way once I stayed with the swarm.
Ridiculous. Ran well on the website for me. I liked the piano, added to the impregnating ambiance. Wasn't sure if clicking the mouse was adding much speed or not. Some of your assets were getting a bit grainy once they were too big. Overall a nice compo entry.
Would love feedback if you get a chance on my game:
**https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/sling-ship-search-for-a-small-world**
Cheers!
@Quoclon Thanks! Yeah, as a compo entry I didn't really have time for much other than "render everything every frame", which meant that I needed to keep the number of draw calls down, which meant the wall pngs were a bit too small in order to fit in the sprite sheet. In the future I may add things to my framework that lets me keep the static scenery as a single static mesh.
Wow, such a maze in there:)
This was such a good take on the theme :) I got really confused with where I should be going at first, but I got it eventually. The music was really nice!
We've all been there
I found it difficult to win since I had no idea where to go, so I was just following other sperm and you all go at the same speed. An old trick they use in racing games is to make the cars at the back go faster than the car at the front, until it's no longer at the front anyway.
Yeah, tap/click makes you thrust, I probably should have shown that somewhere. 48 hours! :)
Really enjoyed this game. I found it very engaging and was racing right until the very end. Very satisfying to make it just in time. I thought the dificulty was perfect, It was challenging without being impossible. The controls were simple and well executed. The music was really nice and I felt it helped highlight the broader themes of life and birth etc. Great Job!
also enjoyed this game but I did'nt expected there are many curved corridors in female organ
The graphics and music were the highlights for me on this one. I am not sure I would necessarily call this a game though... The movement and such worked pretty well, but there didn't really seem to be a goal. One thing is that if you go directly downwards, you can go forever with nothing showing up, should probably make it so you can't do that.. I had to refresh the page to get things back.
haha cool game with a very good choice of music that fits very well together with the whole game! It gives a really good atmosphere to that little race! Really enjoyed it to navigate the little dude around. I only had my problems by passing the green enemies. They catched me everytime. Great game with an awesome pino track!!
A goofy spin on racing games, and a sperm implementation thats not too crass, nicely softened by the gentle sound/art. Very on theme for the jam, I love the personification of cells. Very nice piano music. I am also a Spine user, and it worked to nice effect with the flagellum. There is a bit of a motivation conflict when you get punished for being too far ahead, i.e. the gauntlet of the green guys. Felt like I was told to hurry up then wait. I understand the dilemma after winning, as seeing all the other sperm right behind you is definitely more gratifying, maybe make their speed proportionally increased based on how far ahead you are, like driving games. They also just warp them ahead to behind camera when it suits them, could also work. I did like the steerings ability to avoid the enemies, nice loose attraction steering on the green and fine control on player allowed me to give them the slip (in isolated 1-2 enemy cases).
Fun stuff. Thanks for sharing!
Only a handful of votes away myself, good luck to you! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/tiny-dentist
I am become Life; Destroyer of credit ratings. You'll understand after your third grandchild.
Silly and meaningful. You picked an very interesting idea and did it justice. This would have been too easy to nosedive into parody or crude humor. I appreciate the route you took artistically. Kudos!
Map design could use a little work. There was no point in the lower portion. Worse, there is a gap down there I could leave through and just cruise around outside.
There were some very interesting learning moments. First, the follow the pack mentality works well to guide players through. Secondly, I liked learning that the guys in the lead aren't going to make it. There's an interesting strategy to winning this game that I appreciated.
I'm sure it goes without saying that the music is great. Since you've got some audio chops there, it would've been nice if you could have fit in some light 'tinks' to 'wumps' when an agent hits a wall or dies or something, just to round out the soundscape.
EDIT: Oh, you could've done better on the name. I'm looking at the link title "The Best Game Ever Conceived" and my mind is racing with punny possibilities. Little sorry you played it save with "Sim Sperm".
This is a hard game. Playing it caused me to constantly shout the f-word (and given subject matter I find this to be appropriate behaviour).
One thing this game does really right is that it lacks any "replay cooldown". Failing and trying again is never a process of painful waiting.
I think I may have managed to swim outside fallopian tube at some point. Not sure if this is a bug or a short cut.
I would say that I did a poor job leading the player towards discovering the 'tricks' to beating it. If I had more time I would have done a lot of things differently. For one, the green immune system cells were added way too late, and therefore didn't get much playtest time. I like the idea of getting those enemies to target your brethren, but the implementation was poor. I like the idea of safety in numbers, don't try to be the leader, but I don't think I let the player discover that strategy in a good way. It would have been better if the green cells chased you back to the herd, and let you ditch them in the masses. They also should have moved a lot slower, making it possible to evade them.
Here's sort of how I wanted the game to be:
- Start off getting shot into the vagina, kind of this chaotic beginning where all the sperm is struggling to get going in the right direction. - The cervix is like this bottleneck that lets in a cluster at a time with every contraction. So the fun here would be trying to time yourself to the contraction. Then you get carried away for a bit like a water slide. Around here there should be a bunch of acid clouds that you can't hang around for too long. (I think that's realistic, I did my research =-p) - Within the womb there are immune cells, that behave as I described earlier. - The Fallopian tubes then would be more like an obstacle course. No enemies, just tricky navigation and competition. - The egg part was the only part I think that I did the way I envisioned. You have a struggle to get into an opening, and you have to time your thrusts to get to the center first. To those that didn't make it to the egg, I think that's the highlight of the game for me ;)
Known bugs:
- Starting the player going South at the beginning was a bug, I accidentally introduced that at the 11th hour.
- The gaps in the walls were unintentional. I didn't have a visual editor, so it was kind of a gross process of getting the reproductive system to look right. Maybe in time for next Ludum Dare I'll have some sort of visual editor for creating abstract levels.
- The victory cadence was clipped. I'm not much of an audio pig and didn't record it right.
- Slow and choppy in IE or mobile. (iPad works ok)
Hi,
After 27 attempt, I finally reach the end! (How did I succeed in only one try in real life, I'm asking...) Great music and good game! =)
Interesting 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=r1o2f-9mGRU