Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → A Mote in the Dark
By kirenio
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 549 | 3.09 | 34 | |
| Fun | 664 | 2.54 | 33 | |
| Innovation | 383 | 3.12 | 33 | |
| Theme | 555 | 3.06 | 33 | |
| Graphics | 467 | 3.29 | 33 | |
| Mood | 392 | 3.22 | 33 |
A game to crash your mouse ! It remebers me (in a way) clicker heroe but your concept is way more interesting than just clicking things. You have to "manage" and to choose what to click and when.
The only thing I could have loved (maybe I didn't saw it ?) is some kind of timer to see which "Light" is going to collapse in order to really manage the things I am going to click.
Good work ! It can be really interesting on mobile or tablet !
@gozz Thank you for reply and glad you liked it!
By default with UI enabled there's a circle around every mote that represents energy left in it. Maybe you hid the UI by accident?
I love breaking my mouse every once in a while and this game definitely manages to do that. The management part of it is really interesting and makes this game more interesting.
Interesting mechanic, was very time consuming but fun. Couldn't find any big issues
Firstly - you have forced me to learn a new word! I had never heard of a "mote" before (so I Googled it). That's edutainment for you!
Secondly - I think I need a little more explanation. I was able to feed the first mote and keep it alive, I then triggered 4 other motes but eventually they all died and soon enough there were no more white discs to click on and it was game over. Can you explain the strategy I should be using?
@richard-michael-smith Thank you for your feedback! I've made a detailed explanation on how the game works. I should have done that earlier.
P.S. I hope **formatting** I've used is not too **obnoxious**!
I have read the explanation and played it about 5 times (getting 87k in the last run) and still don't really know what is going on. Some ingame tutorial showing the game mechanics would be nice (especially when the mechanics are so complex).
Intresting idea, pretty fun to play, but it gets a bit tiring when you have more motes. I really like the graphics, simple and clean.
@boltkey @azargaz Sadly I didn't have time to include a proper visual in-game explanation other than the text you see right before the game starts. And I'm afraid my overcomplicated explanation here might have only made it worse. The only thing player has to do is to stay alive as long as she/he can while maintaining as many nodes at the same time as she/he can or desires to.
**What I wanted** was to provide a bite sized but complete experience. I've ended up achieving that with artificially limiting the duration of each playthrough by gradually increasing the difficulty. I decided to do so that potential player can experience a cohesive game with beginning and an end, while not getting bored out and quitting it. **While doing so** also providing player a control over difficulty of the game by giving an ability to increase the amount of active nodes player has to manage.
**What I failed** to do was to provide a good risk-reward mechanic by undertuning the amount of points player scores from having multiple motes active. I believe that would be way too major change in how the game will flow to fix after the deadline. Oh well, live and learn.
**What I hope** is that players will have maybe 2 or 3 runs and 3 to 6 minutes of fun yet as challenging as they want it to be experience. Personally I would consider that a victory.
I feel like you're on to something cool here, and you have a well thought-out idea, but the implementation goes over the player's head.
Expecting a player to read (and understand!) that description of the game mechanics is a bit of a stretch. 90% of people will just scan it and dive in (like I did) and then be confused.
With that said, graphics and sound add a great feel to the game, and everything felt nice and polished. I'm sure it could be something special with a slick, intuitive tutorial. Well done!
I liked the atmosphere of the game. A bit hard to notice which exact black hole caused losing of energy and actual status of small black holes. Maybe some UI feedback could help there.
@japes Thank you very much for the feedback! The in depth explanation of in-game mechanics are there due to a request, I don't expect people to 120% understand internal workings of the game. Though I agree that rushed "wall of text" explanation given before the game starts is not good at doing it's job.
@korvyashka Thank you very much for the feedback too! I glad you've enjoyed the atmosphere of the game! And I totally agree that lack of any indication on status of the orbs was a huge mistake on my side.
I played this on Livestream Today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr-ZBj_dJa4
I couldn't really figure it out, I think the sheer amount of text thrown at me at the beginning was too much. Maybe having the text unfold over the course of the beginning of the game would have been easier on us new players. Great art style.
Interesting game - I really like the monochromatic art style, the mood/music and the 'linking' mechanic. You can see the work you put into the mechanics - but none of your big description really translates into gameplay? Ultimately, it boils down to 'click on stuff as fast as possible' with the main strategy being timing about when you click on the other orbs.
Overall a really interesting idea. Well done, thanks for sharing!
Very creative and interesting. I like that dark tone and the music really fits.
A competently made entry. The graphics are fine and together with audio contribute to a strong mood.
Unfortunately I do have a massive problem with the design, you see I'm allergic to *clicking*. The less *clicking* I need to endure the better. So how could you reduce the amount of *clicking*?
For instance, the motes could attack and collect the orbs automatically at a speed relative to their energy level. The player's job then would be to manage the energy flow between the motes, diverting the flow when the situation calls for it. Just an idea.
Ok job in all, but not for me!
Interesting take on the clicker genre. I'd echo what a lot of the others have said - the complexity was a bit difficult to overcome. After a couple playthroughs I was able to make some level of progress, but I still felt pretty hazy about what I was doing other than clicking everything as fast as possible. I'm primarily unsure of what needed to happen with the dark orbs other than clicking on them.
The overall design and UI was great. Current power levels were communicated really well in an unobtrusive, readable way. I think with refinement to the gameplay (clarity of purpose, giving some level of automating clicking) this could be a really interesting strategic clicker game.