not-the-real-mark-zhang 2017-04-23 22:46
10 dogs out of 10. Love the art style and the music! I also like how the theme wasn't too obviously placed in :) Haha just kidding, but it was fun.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → D4RK and the Small Worlds
By abhimonk
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 134 | 3.67 | 45 | |
| Fun | 169 | 3.44 | 45 | |
| Innovation | 437 | 2.60 | 45 | |
| Theme | 281 | 3.36 | 46 | |
| Graphics | 355 | 2.97 | 45 | |
| Audio | 60 | 3.74 | 45 | |
| Humor | 72 | 3.48 | 45 | |
| Mood | 172 | 3.37 | 42 |
10 dogs out of 10. Love the art style and the music! I also like how the theme wasn't too obviously placed in :) Haha just kidding, but it was fun.
We played the game all the way till the end, it's really nice! you should take care of the joypad implementation that is not working, since the game deserves it! Also It would be more fair if the player once got hit becomes invincible for a moment just to avoid lethal combo hits in the end. And yeah the theme is obviously placed as a joke, but it's funny!:grin:
I sucked SOOOOOOOOOO bad at this. I think it's a game that just really desperately needs a controller to properly appreciate it. My attempts with a keyboard were quite sad. I liked what I saw and I hope to see more of you work in the future.
Alright so, overall platformers like this are hard for me to judge, I tend to set high expectations due to the fact they are pretty easy to get working. That being said there are a few nitpicks that I have to throw your way. For one, you have the standard unity platformer bug, which is that you can just hold left/right to pin yourself to the wall. If you add a 0 friction physics model onto walls this will prevent you from gripping with them.
Next is the wall jump, generally it's good to give some "push off" velocity when someone wall jumps, especially when your intention is that they jump off the wall opposite to gain height. Without that the game feel kinda suffers unless it was explicitly your intent.
As for the implementation of the theme... well honestly last LD I ended up not submitting anything because I wasn't happy with the theme, so I know how bad it can suck when you can't think of a good game around the theme, but at the same time I'd rather you just ignore the theme entirely and do a game you care about then kinda just shove it in there.
Thanks for the game <3
Wow this was amazing. Music and graphics were simple but perfect. It was also quiet funny but I didn't manage to make it to the end, I lost too many times on the elevator part :/ The platforming was really good, with the exception of wall jump being a little bit clunky. Overall really good job and really fun to play with it. Good luck !!!
(BTW on XB1 controller, the dash was the only problem being on the Select button LoL)
I liked the game, but I felt like the crescent moon dudes were too difficult to fight. It was always worth it to just dash away from them. I may come back to see if I can get farther with a controller. Nice game!
@ilseroth Thanks for playing. I actually intentionally made the friction at the walls a little over 0, mainly because I thought sliding directly off them didn't feel good. Your other concerns regarding the wall jumping are totally valid. Thanks again for going through it :) I hope you were able to make it to the end despite its faults!
I was able to hang until the elevator... Couldn't find all of the button mappings on the 360 controller so had to use the keyboard. Overall, though, good job.
@eddynardo Thanks for giving it a go! Sometimes I think I made the elevator section a little too hard haha. About the controller issue: Man that's so lame that L2 on ps4 maps to Select on XBOX. I hope that didn't take away from the experience too much! I definitely agree that the wall jumping came out very clunky. Thanks again though for playing!
Man that was super enjoyable but I like a good platforming challenge. Boss fight especially was great! Writing made me laugh too and although some might think the theme is kinda forced, once I got to the end I think this is a complete legit use of the theme. One of my favorite entries definitely!
Edit: Forgot to mention the excellent music!
This is... My favorite LD game. I love it. The art style is minimal but evocative, the writing is funny and plays with a lot of game tropes. The controls are easy to learn but hard to master. My only complaint is that it's rigged when Plut- I mean Saturn shoots 3 shots at you in a row. That last boss was cavestory levels of difficult but fair. Basically, This is a game I wish I'd made. Much love.
@silkworm-sweatshop Wow thanks for playing to the end! You have no idea how much that means to me! I really appreciate it. Haha the theme implementation was definitely a joke, but I'm glad you enjoyed it.
@smiling-cat-entertainment Thanks for playing! Sorry about the controls. I wish I had tested it with an XBOX controller when I released it. The elevator is really tough, I agree. I'm glad you made it to there anyway. Thanks again!
This is a great game. Respect for you made it in 48 hours, alone, you are a good game developer.
jajajajajjaa i die like a trillion times !, im not a fan of Up arrow to Jump but was not bad, i dont know why but the wall jump some tiemes didnt work...
@abhimonk, nice platformer! Couldnt get quite to the end sorry, the elevator kept messing me up. Hate a bunch of fun though, very quirky sense of humour. The player animations are very cool as well. Great job!
This was good. The dreaded elevator is what ended it for me. It's too bad, though... I wanted to know what happened to Pluto.
I like this but the difficulty is just too ridiculous, I eventually gave up which is a shame because I did enjoy the game as far as I played. I think you need to make it less punishing. But the sense of humour is A++ and I like the simple monochrome visuals, the audio is nice too!
I had a hard time getting used to the controls, but it was still really fun. The art is fitting, even tho it's minimalistic and also the music creates a good mood. All in all a good entry! :)
I have to agree with @AntaresValdemar, the difficulty is a bit too much, at least with a keyboard. Maybe with a controller it would have been better. I think I got killed by Saturn maybe... 20 times, before i gave up? My main problem there was the big bullets Saturn spawns, which (obviously) are the same color as Saturn (because the game is monochrome) and spawn in the same _place_ as Saturn, so you can't see them, and run into them when jumping to attack.
Also, there's no reason not restore health when passing a checkpoint (since you restore health when you die), but that's a minor complaint.
The music, was really really nice. SFX were pretty good too.
That was really cool. The dialogue in this game is gold. Some it it seemed way too hard though (I couldn't get past the elevator thing).
It doesn't feel like a jam game. That game has a lot for himself : Perfect music and fx, funny lines, and a challenging boss fight! (A boss fight game where you fight all the planets would have been crazy good)
With a keyboard, the game is really hard, but it's the platformer style that want that. The moons are also easier to avoid than to fight, that is maybe a problem.
Very impressive for a compo game! Good job!
This was a lot of fun! The elevator part was really difficult and took me like 8 tries, but it was very satisfying when I did finish. Similarly, the final boss was very well-designed, in that it took me a few tries but I felt a big sense of accomplishment when I finally won. To be honest, the first parts of the game were kind of unmemorable since there really wasn't any challenge or ramp-up, so I'm really happy I played through to the end!
To be a little more specific, it seemed like you were aiming for a platforming game when you introduced both dashing and walljumping at the beginning, but those mechanics (especially walljumping) weren't really used that much in the part before the elevator/boss, as I made it through mostly just by walking and normally jumping. I would have enjoyed it even more if you put in gradually more challenging platforming sections so there's not as much of a difficulty leap, or if the whole game was just bosses.
The story was pretty silly, especially with the repeated emphasis of "SMALL WORLD", but I did laugh at points, especially the confrontation at the very end.
A few nitpicks: using up to jump felt a little weird, and I would have liked some audio feedback for walljumping and for passing through a checkpoint (also as the above comment says, I didn't see any reason to not restore your health at checkpoints).
The sound/music is really really good. Where can I download the soundtrack? ;)
Overall, really impressive job!
Nice game. Good music. I had some trouble with the wall jump :) Loved the hints.
This was a nice little platformer. Minimalistic art style worked, and the music was good.
Did have some issues with the control scheme (playing with keyboard). The wall jumping, in particular, seemed to be a hit and miss a lot of the time. I also had a slight freeze every now and then while playing... don't know why that was.
Keep up the good work.
@philomory Thanks for playing! I had some similar feedback about saturn's bullets. I probably should have outlined them in white or made them glow in retrospect, since it's definitely hard to tell when they spawn. Also, the checkpoint health-restore thing is something I'm still kicking myself for, because it's so obvious now that I think about it. Thanks again for the feedback and for playing!
@qzqxq Wow thanks for finishing! Also the platforming feedback is really valuable to me. I definitely agree about it seeming like a platformer initially but then diverging. I wish I had committed to one specific thing (i.e either melee combat focused, or platform focused) in retrospect. I also wish I could have fit in one intermediary boss in the middle, to break up the monotony of the intro. Thanks again for all the feedback! As for the soundtrack, my soundcloud is https://soundcloud.com/abhisundu . I'm not sure if you can download off of soundcloud, but if you're interested in the music, check it out! Thanks again.
Quite difficult, specially these moon enemies. But I like it difficult, so great for me xD The animations of the main character were really good! Also the music is super sweet and the enemies are really different from each other. Just a small idea, I would try to align the tiles via vertex-clipping. Atm the world feels kind of "icky" for me, because the tiles/pieces are very random placed. I hope you get what I mean :D Great job anyways! Cool game :)
Good job. The animations were really nice. Some parts were really hard. The music was really good. The wall grabbing was kind of clunky feeling. Good job with the theme.
The game was really fun, but I honestly got too frustrated with it during the Saturn battle. Everything about that was just downright mean for the player. The planet's hit box seemed to be much smaller than its graphic. I generally like hard games, but I never even got it down to half HP, so I gave up.
Other than that, I loved the game. The music was fantastic, the graphics were excellent and the humor came through really well. Your take on the theme was quite funny.
@krylos Thanks for playing! I've gotten a bunch of comments concerning the difficulty of the Saturn battle. I think I definitely should have tuned it down a little. I think part of the problem with Saturn's hitbox is that he's roughly 1 jump above you, so if you attack anywhere below the top of your jump, when your attack hitbox comes out, the player often falls below of Saturn's hitbox by the time the attack completes. I think I should have just made the hitbox bigger/made Saturn a little lower to compensate for this effect. Thanks for making it that far though! I know a lot of people got stuck on the elevator, so it means a lot that you were able to reach the boss!
@obvious-san Thanks for your feedback! I definitely agree that the world block placement is very imprecise. To be honest, I did all the level design at the very end, after creating all the content pieces first, so the block placement came out super rushed and ugly (a bunch of the edges do not align and whatnot). That said, glad you enjoyed the rest of the game! Thanks again for playing.
I Played this on Livestream Today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_6NTcovuI0
I got pretty frustrated with it as I was playing, the difficulty might be a bit too hard for me to get into (Which is saying something, I genuinely like hard games). The block placement is super imprecise, I might recommend you look at a tileset solution (Or maybe ProGrids if you're in Unity, which I don't remember if you are or not. I have a migraine from another game I played).
@occultone Thanks for playing! Sorry if it was frustrating. I definitely think I made the game too difficult, especially judging from how consistently people get stuck on the elevator section. If it ramped up more gradually it would have probably been better. The block placement was also indeed very imprecise. That was mostly due to running a little low on time, but sorry anyway about that. Thanks so much for playing the game on video! It's incredibly valuable for me to actually WATCH someone playing my game, because I learn a lot about how players approach things, and what I can do better to make those experiences and approaches more enjoyable. Thanks again for playing !
Wow!! It was an amazing time playing your game. Music so good (especially for the boss), it's fun, and the control are great too! Maybe should you down the sound when you've been hurt (or maybe I need to play better and not beeing hit ^^). Very very good entry! (The graphics are not the best but the game are very great). Good job!!!
Ok, this game is **REALLY GOOD**. I see you focused 100% on mechanics and coding, but that has some drawbacks I'm listing below. (And I think I'll make a post about this game)
+ Wall Jump + Meelee Attack + Dashing mechanics (<~ this adds a lot to your game) + Slightly funny plot + Fast-paced + Skill based + Good animations (sometimes - e.g.: laser beams)
+ Some hitbox (glitches usually the floor) + Kinda glitchy wall jump mechanics + Requires too much precise frame timing. Maybe add a small tolerance to still wall jump after leaving wall, like 5 frames or something like that? + Art communication critical issues + Could maybe have a double jump? Idk, this is more like a suggestion.
Please notice I am a hardcore old school gamer, that means I don't think your game is too hard, but by the feedback in my game I bet people here are complaining about difficulty too. I won't do that. I had to die some times to kill Saturn and to pass the elevator, but **that is expected, that is part of game**. What cannot happen though is that I died due to **game flaws**, which I detail next.
Given that, your game suffers (as almost Jam game do, specially Compo games) from some serious problem with art, please read this until the end. When I say the art is bad, I am not talking about photorealism skills, I am talking about **COMUNICATION SKILLS**, your art must **BE CLEAR**, must inform **without a single sign of doubt** what is going on, and that is not the case. Your design choice is that everything in game is black, that means either the silhouette **is perfect clear water** or you need to add some **value changes**. See examples below: + Saturn missiles are hidden by Saturn himself + Moon wave attacks are hidden by the moons + Important attacks (Saturn and Moons) have no anticipation (but the laser beams do). + Enemy attacks require anticipation so the player can react. It doesn't need to be a lot of time, but some visual clue must be given. The more powerful the attack is, the bigger the anticipation is, as the attack is "building energy on cast" and the attack is stronger and the punishment is higher (yes, art relates to game balance). See this short video about **Anticipation from Disney's 12 principles of animation**: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8OtE60T8yU
###### One more thing: add "Hey, listen" to Earth, lel ******
I want to add more details to this comment about *Anticipation*.
Please notice the reference above is for **FILM** industry, and this is the **GAME** industry. So adaptations must be stated.
In film industry you just watch and chill passively the final product. Well, for games you don't. Games build tension and release it constantly, create strong feelings and addictive focus. Too much anticipation is ok in films, but that doesn't hold for games as anticipation make games **EASIER**. Therefore, the principle of Anticipation must work together with principle of **Timing**: + Two much anticipation will make your game **easy**, **boring** and **childish** (like "Kirby's Epic Yarn") + Lack of it (what you did) will make your game really hard like "I wanna be the guy" and will attract only niche public that want to test their abilities **TO THE LIMIT**.
Also player attack anticipation is not always required, because anticipated attacks are **WEAKER**, casting time is a **NERF**. So usually players don't like to have **their** skills anticipated, but like to have **enemy** skills anticipated, as non-anticipated skills are more **responsive**. A good anticipation time for simple skills could be 1~2 frames for instance. A mega strong boss attack anticipation could be between 2~4 frames. These values must be tweeked and could also be defined in time units within code instead of being defined by the artist through addition of similar animation frames.
Nice game, mechanics are really good :)
So much works for a compo game, good job !
Pretty neat game! I like the little sword swing animations.
Pretty difficult but solid mechanics.
@meronsoda Wow thank you so much for all the feedback. The problems you listed, specifically those involving attacks being hidden by enemies are definitely on my list of things to improve upon.
I totally understand what you mean about the art being "bad" in the sense that it doesn't clearly communicate to the player what is about to happen. A game could be made in MS paint but it could still have really well-communicated art if everything is telegraphed and teaches the player how to react. I definitely need to improve in that respect.
The Saturn bullets being hidden by the boss is the biggest offender of this. Outlining the attacks with white, or even just using different shade (maybe a lighter grey) would have made this much clearer. I think the moon's attacks being obscured wasn't AS big of an issue, just because of how predictably the moons behave (attack, dash to side of player, delay, attack), but it's still pretty inexcusable for an attack to be hidden by the enemy like that. The impreciseness of the wall jumping is something pretty much everyone (myself included) noticed. To be honest I wish I had just removed it, since it came out very clunky and it was only really required twice in the entire game. I wish I had focused less on the platforming and more on combat overall.
Thanks for the video link too, although I've seen it before, I definitely should have implemented anticipation for the more impactful attacks. I believe the moons are a bigger offender in this specific category, since the missiles come out really quickly and don't really have a delay or animation on spawn.
Out of curiosity, did you kill Saturn before it used its sword attack? A lot of players who get past Saturn do so before he even uses his Sword attacks. I'm curious about what you thought of that specific attack, since it has a pretty huge windup but also takes up the entire floor of the stage, so I'm not 100% sure if it's as balanced as I wanted it to be. Great feedback, thanks for taking such an interest. I really appreciate everything you said.
Beat it-I ended up killing Saturn before the sword mode, as that mode owned me like five times at least. One of the rare games I will keep on my computer, and I hope you take this and keep developing it!
The game is quite nice. I have tested and finished it with my XBox360-Controller and, as you allready suspected, the keymap is kind of glitchy. Attacking is on the lower key (A), jumping on the right (B). The big problem comes with the dash. It is triggered by the select/back-button (back) and is almost unusable due to the fact, that your left thumb is allready occupied by the left analog-stick. the shoulder-buttons and triggers are not working.
All in all a nice platformer with good animations. I really like the fact, that you have included some music and sound. Only problem I had is, that I think those moons have annoyingly much health. They should have died after three hit allready. It kind of angered me, that I had to back off after the first three hits, to dodge their attacks before finishing them off.
Anyway, a nice game that you made.
I really enjoyed this game, especially the final boss battle! I managed to defeat it in the end, but it was rather challenging and I like battles where you have to learn when to attack and when to dodge etc.
I did try to use my Xbox controller to see if it made it any easier, but dash is the back button which was very awkward so I went back to using keyboard.
This was a very fun game overall.
SPOILER WARNING: I am never trusting Pluto again!
really nice game, i loved how simple the graphics were, and the humor in it, it is a really nice try. the movement was so smooth which worked great for the game. the hardest part about it, is probably the wall climibing, that thing is just really hard at least i did find it hard.also nice job with the save check points without them, i don't think i would have progressed at all in the game. great work. and, what a cute little earth we got over there :)
@abhimonk Yes, I've killed Saturn before that attack, I didn't even know it existed actually. In that case I'll try it later as I am really curious about this apocalyptic attack. I actually wasn't expecting time-based pattern, instead I thought it was life-based.
And the desperation to kill it before you get some **"SURPRISE, M@$#%*& TOUHOU PROJECT MISSILE-BEAM COMBOS!"** is real, LEL :rofl:
Oh, and by the way I am adding more details to my previous comment.
Wow, awesome game! I love chiptune music and yours is perfect, especially that boss theme. Did you use Fasttracker or something similar?
I found the graphics a bit inconsistent between awesome pixel art on the one hand and sketchy mixed resolutions on the other hand. The fact that the terrain sometimes was a single pixel off (not game resolution but screen resolution), is a huge no-go for me. That being said, I found the animations to be outstanding! The attack and dash animations were awesome, especially for a low-res two color game like yours.
The earth trailing you, rotating beautifully was another cool idea, although I wish there would have been more of a chemistry between the two characters with some snide remarks and quibbling. While I really enjoyed the unique and fresh backstory with its plot twist at the end, I didn't much care for the humor, which was a bit repetitive, except the very cool joke in the end which actually made me laugh out loud.
Control-wise my experience is that an arcady game like yours should never assign up to jump. If you didn't want attack, jump and dash tied to the left hand, I think down for dash would have been more acceptable than up for jump. Also down for continuing the text didn't work for me. Attack would have felt much more natural for that.
The difficulty ramp-up was very good, with some more challenges towards the end, like the elevator and the really tough and rewarding boss fight. I think the game could have done without perma-death enemies on continue, which took the challenge out too much. For the boss, I think it would have been a bit fairer if the bombs didn't sometimes appear behind it (black on black), which sometimes caused you to jump right into them when you attacked the boss. After learning the patterns it was a manageable fight that rewarded observation and perseverance. Did I say I loved the boss's soundtrack?
So all in all I found it to be an awesome experience with some minor flaws and overall one of the best games of all 45 games I have rated so far.
The wall jump mechanic feels slightly off. I found it far too difficult at times to jump accurately. However, the world itself was quite intriguing. I Enjoyed the minimal art style of the graphics, and the jokes sprinkled throughout the game made me laugh.
@cerno-b Thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree on the boss bombs being obscured. There's a bunch of "clarity" related things I'd like to fix in a post-LD version later. I actually was working on a speech-bubble thing with earth and the main character. It was going to be triggered as you went through the levels. It was supposed to add some banter between the two of them, but I couldn't get it working in time, so I scrapped it. That would definitely be a nice addition later on.
Glad you liked the attack and dash animations! The dash is actually just spawning copies of the player's sprite that decrease in alpha over time and then destroy themselves, so I didn't have to do any animating for that!
As for pixel-inconsistencies in the level design, my bad! I rushed a lot of the level making, since I spent most of the time on the base-system (animations, and mechanics coding).
I made the music using LMMS. I've never used Fasttracker before, but from what I've seen, it looks kind of similar to LMMS.
Thanks for playing and thanks for the helpful feedback! I really love when people are interested enough to give such detailed feedback.
The game was very fun, although the enemies were a little hard to fight. I usually had better luck avoiding them.
This was pretty cool. the crescent moons were pretty hard to fight. I thought I could just dash my way out, but then when they were a lot in a row there'd be just too many projectiles incoming to dash out of hahah. Liked the writing too, good stuff!
I'm disappointed I couldn't beat it... the elevator was too restricting in movement. The laser things were interesting and looked good. The crescent enemies felt odd because it seemed like it didn't matter where they were facing. The projectiles looked similar to the enemies themselves. I thought the dialogue was alright but it just didn't seem like the characters were authentic; all the jokes felt slightly out of place. The mechanics were really nice but a bit buggy, I got caught on the walls a few times. Cool game anyways, good work!