king-kujito 2017-04-28 16:18
This is a very funny game and it has something more LD games need: the option to make text appear faster. Good job to you and your team. :-)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD38 → No Minor Task: Party of a Lifetime
By xavier-indie-gamedev, Tye Hastings, Travis W. Hendrix, PeteyG, Dkrefft and hoozle8
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 467 | 3.24 | 68 | |
| Fun | 426 | 3.07 | 68 | |
| Innovation | 515 | 2.87 | 68 | |
| Theme | 704 | 2.51 | 68 | |
| Graphics | 553 | 2.95 | 68 | |
| Audio | 199 | 3.44 | 60 | |
| Humor | 75 | 3.72 | 67 | |
| Mood | 355 | 3.27 | 63 |
This is a very funny game and it has something more LD games need: the option to make text appear faster. Good job to you and your team. :-)
Thanks @king-kujito for playing:)
Hey I liked the presentation and the art style and I like the fact that there is a story; gave me a few chuckles (although, with respect, the fourth wall breaking could be a bit more subtle, but that's just me). I thought the gameplay was fun and interesting also, but it took me a few plays to make any progress. I found it quite difficult; I don't know how others got on with it.
I was thinking maybe what might help would be if adults had some sort of vision cone so you can see where they are looking/what they can see. When there are lots of characters on screen it isn't always easy to tell; I failed quite a lot as a result of people I couldn't see too clearly.
Great game though and I can see you and your team put a lot of time into it. Hope you enjoyed yourselves! See you next year?
A very funny and intriguing game. The cutscene's story made me laugh :rofl: It amazing that you even wrote a background for every enemy appearing in the level. And very very very challenging as well. I gave like 8 attemps but never met the goal...
I do hope it can be more obvious for enemy's line of sight, since i'm not sure where are the safe zones. And the golf buggy...Arghhh I hate those women :joy:
Anyway, great work guys!
This was a fun game and the dialog was well thought out and amusing. I also really enjoyed the art and music.
I would agree with limejuice123 it took a couple of tries before I got the hang of avoiding the adults.
You're welcome :-)
Thanks for all the feedback guys:) Funny story: this is actually the 'easier' version :P The original version required you to collect 250 kids, and the enemies caught you a lot quicker (no one beat it except me).
**Pro Tip:** chain together the collecting (which itself recovers your stamina) and make heavy use of sprinting as you run between bushes (which hide you from the adults) ;)
And yup, with more time I would have divided up the levels to be smaller and less chaotic, with progressive difficulty!
Pretty amusing, and I did beat it after 3 tries, but I have to agree with the other commenters (and the author) about the scale of the level and the difficulty. My second try, I managed to collect 200 classmates and then got caught trying to figure out where my house actually was. So that was irritating. But otherwise, yes, this was quite good.
Very funny, with a fantastic soundtrack and great cut-scenes! The gameplay has a great concept, although I have no idea when I'm in the line of sight which makes things a bit tricky, but got there in the end! Well done, really nice game :) Nice to see fellow Redditors doing something other than browsing Reddit too :P
Nice game, really liked the art and music, also found it pretty tough sometimes seemed to hit game over when it was not obvious which adults i was being spotted by. Personally found the intro scene a bit on the long before getting to the action. Nice to have the backstory and added atmosphere but maybe not so much right at the start.
Hahaha, I had a good time playing this. The music was fantastic, kept wanting to play just to listen to it. The intro scene was nice, maybe a bit too long and with too many random characters, but it had some good humor. Gameplay was nice, got overwhelmed with sound effects from being spotted too much at some point though hehe. Nice job!
The introduction for this game took way too long for my short attention span to handle (thanks for the tip on how to fastforward it). Once I got into the game however it was actually pretty fun! It was pure chaos (in a good way) Everything was everywhere and I had to run away from almost all of it! Good game!
Thanks for playing it live @drazil100! I look forward to trying your game too:)
Swung in to try it out, going to agree with @gumboot and say that the intro ran on a bit long. Also I would have appreciated some means to turn down the volume (or mute) while the music was fine it was super loud on my computer and forced me to mute everything.
As for the game itself, it seemed to work fine, my only beef was that enemies would sometimes be behind say, a tree, but still be able to detect me, so I would have no good way of seeing it coming... maybe there's an audio cue I was missing since I muted but I got hit by it twice.
@ilseroth Thanks for playing, hopefully you enjoyed it anyway (and all scenes are skippable with ESC)!
Settings for volume etc. are definitely a good idea, and definitely would've been included with a bit more time :)
And yes, there are audio cues for when you're being detected!
So I played it a few times but never could figure out where my home was. I would invite 200 people and then it just told me to go home -- was never able to finish it.
Edit: Thanks for the tip! Figured it out this time
Intro was a bit slow, actual game was fairly well done. Could have had more variety (maybe with power ups, etc?) but overall nice and the cut scenes were pretty polished for a weekend of work. Well done!
@kosmo - your home is in the top right corner! If you want to skip it and see the outro, just press ESC until you get to the gameplay, and P to skip the level!
@jeremy-ryan definitely would have added more levels (smaller and more strategic too) if we had the time (and if our 2nd programmer didn't drop out haha). thanks for playing!
Really decent game! Enjoyed it despite a slow start, love the story, the humor is also on point, great entry!
The intro was a bit slow as others have said. I know that you can speed it up, but then it is way too fast to read. Also, it is difficult at time to tell the adults from the kids until you realize that all of the kids look the same. At first, I was running into some of the adults because I thought they were kids. Enjoyable soundtrack, though!
Solid game :D I was glad dialogue could be sped up. The humor was pretty finely tuned (not trying too hard), which is awesome! I thought it was clever. Huge fan of the music, it fits well and set the moods of each scene. Great job!
Awesome game, I cracked my ribs today and it was painful to laugh!
Error: cannot see characters or anything just dialogues. At the start it is all black with the dialogues only. So ill just rate it based on the gif.
Capture.PNG
@doppelgunner that's a really strange error! Are you playing on Linux by chance? If so, try playing on Mac or PC, on Firefox.
@ everyone else: thanks so much for playing and for the feedback! Glad you all like the music and humour:)
Im sorry the game doesn't load on my browser maybe I will try again later
@kristian-david try firefox on a Mac or PC!
This game is pretty hilarious, definitely 5 stars for humour. Maybe I was too dumb to learn the enemy movement patterns but I figured out you just have to keep sprinting when you hear the warning sound, and not get stuck on environment objects lol. Pretty simple but fun game, great sense of humour, nice music too. Good work!
The story was very funny but it did introduced the characters. However there are multiple of those characters for some reason :p I'm also surprised the homeless man walks so fast...
The gameplay itself is quite fun but there maybe too many adults so it is hard to do any meaningful stealth, I ended up just sprint around to lower suspicions. I feel like the game will be benefit from having a more static map and fewer enemies so that stealth is actually doable.
However, the graphics and the background music was nice. Well done!
Hi! The initial cutscene was great - I lost it at "unfaints" :) I think the game is way too hard; I couldn't finish it, there's too many characters and sometimes you get stuck in a group of them and there's nothing you can do. I managed to get 200 kids but then I couldn't find the house so they got me. Anyway, I think the idea is very cool - i've seen a lot of games in the jam about small planets, so it's good to see some original concepts.
A fun intro, quite a difficult game! I like it!
Rated! Great game, such replayability!
Agree with some of the other commenters that the intro was rather long and perhaps it could have been better broken up in parts so you don't invite everyone in a single long level either, but rather back and forth between play and story. Some parts were rather humorous but the game part was a bit too difficult. I could probably have managed if I had tried one or two times more. And I might even have tried that if the game quickly dropped me back into the start of inviting right after game over. I can see the retro references in how the game level is built, but it sort of didn't make any sense to me why the cars were so haphazardly placed. A pity, because running around under the radar of the adults to invite to super secret mega party could have been a really great concept. But don't take my concerns too gravely, perhaps its just been too many years since I faced the same problem.
@local-minimum Thanks for playing! All those things were planned from the beginning (shorter, more strategic level design, introducing characters one by one with shorter cutscenes between 5 levels of progressing difficulty - Monday to Friday), but I simply ran out of time (especially because our 2nd programmer didn't turn up). Nonetheless, hopefully you still had fun! :smile:
The cutscene was a little bit to long and in my opinion the game it's a way too hard. I get 200 kids but then i couldn't find the house to go home like @jaimuepe. And lost again and get frustrated. I like the idea and the implementation.
@rahtainka Ahhh I guess no one is seeing the parts in bold I put above at the top of the game description haha :P The house is in the top-right corner! If you wanna see the ending scene, just skip to the gameplay by pressing ESC, and skip the level by pressing 'P'.
Thanks for taking the time to play! :)
Loved this humor in the Intro Cinematic Story for this game. It definitely hits the nail on the head for a funny and a little bit goofy visual novel. Everything from the Lord of the Rings references and the breaking of the Fourth wall from the random hobo was fantastic.
That said I felt a bit let down by the gameplay. I feel like you should continue with the humor and theme of that intro sequence and add some puzzles and different minigames. Grabbing 200 kids and sneaking them to your house is funny enough for a moment or two, but its pretty easy to just spam your sprint randomly and game the system. But it works and its not glitch or killing my computers framerate, so that at least was very good. Some games you play in the jam will murder even some of the best gaming computers.
Overall I love the concept, the humor is extra on point. Just needs a bit of tweaking for the Overall gameplay and I think you've got quite the game in the making. Combine that with a unique coherent art style and I think you could very easily refine this in the future. especially if you wanted to make a visual novel style game, which are always super popular on steam (I Mean lets be honest, if you can make a game about dating birds, you can make anything).
Otherwise nice work. The game was featured in my third episode of my Ludum Dare 38 showcase series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qy_8ccUyhs
Is it a visual novel, or a "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" homage? Either way. Really interesting, and great work for 72 hours.
It's super-cool that your team all met online to make this happen!
Cool game. Funny dialog and nice work on getting everything integrated together. Had a nice full feeling to it to have everything form the dialog and controls for fast and normal speed to getting the game play going. Nice graphics and collecting. A little confusing. Liked that I also didn't have to go through the dialog again once I 'died'.
Amazing entry right here! I really really loved the cutscenes, storytelling is so fun! Greath humor and interpretation of the theme! Maybe the difficulty was too hard, at least for me! I would add more feedbacks for the player and a margin of error: maybe a "Bust O' Meter", that fills up each time an enemy is red, and goes down when you are stealthed. Anyway, great job! :)
Hahaha had a laugh playing your game. The beginning dialogue was great. Controls made sense and seemed to run very smoothly. I wasn't able to collect 200 but got close. Great job on the game!
i enjoyed playing this game. The narrative was very amusing and the game concept is cool the only problem i found was that it wasn't clear enough when you was in or out of their line of sight. Well done though really fun game and i did manage to beat it after a few tries.
Tried the game out! :D
Enjoyed it as well. Simple to play. I did find it weird why he would "collect people". Everything was enjoyable overall!
I wasn't able to actually invite 200 people after two tries! But if there's anything I did learn from playing the game was that being specific with the number of points you have to achieve isn't exactly a bad thing. I got 160 on my first try before I died- and I was really pushed to try 200 on my second. :D
Definitely learned something here. Though- not sure if it were just my machine- but it lagged on the browser slightly.
Finally- The music felt nice as well.
I do have quick question. How did you guys decide to have "200" people as the target goal? :o Was this after some playtesting? haha
@theclinthennesy Thanks for playing! :) Regarding any lag, I *think* it might just be your browser, because the game is quite small in size and I've never experienced any slowdown (that being said, I wasn't exactly trying to optimize my code for efficiency haha).
Actually 250 was the initial target, but everyone found it too hard (i.e. only I could beat it), so a teammate suggested we reduce it to 200 and that stuck :P (I also reduced the difficulty in other parts, but people are still finding it hard :laughing:)
The original vision for it didn't even involve the collecting part - it was gonna be smaller more puzzle/stealth-based levels with enemy types introduced one-by-one over 5 levels (Monday to Friday). We were running out of time so I reworked to be one big level with a bigger (but still achievable) objective, and added in the player collectables ('invitables' :wink:)
@xavier-indie-gamedev Hahahah! That's incredibly funny how you guys had to change the entire mechanic after running out of time. But pretty smart how you guys still were able to ship this thing on time! :D
That's definitely an interesting way to re-scope an entire game. :P Kudos to that.
Funny game, but graphics is too simple I think :)
I usually not enjoy too much text or intro sequences in games but this one is hilarious! unfaints?!?! LOL! I almost always enjoy breaking the fourth wall, which you did just enough to not be all about that.
The game thing I think could have been a bit easier, because when the game is about the story you just really wanna progress. Good work nonetheless!
A funny game. I am not too much text-games but I like this background.
As for @theclinthennesy, it lagged on the browser a bit.
fun game ! The humor was great, the *unfaints* really hit the nail x) I loved the work you put on sound design, it really serves the mood of the game! The overall difficulty was a bit too hard though, I didn't manage to reach the end, as I had sometime troubles understanding why I lost. Maybe a more clear feedback when the adults are highly suspecting you could do the thing? Anyway, great entry !
Although the intro went on a bit long, but it was funny and I liked it. :slight_smile: I enjoyed the cutscenes and the little story you put together. Also the 4th wall breaks with the characters that weren't really important to the plot :laughing: but the gameplay wasn't all that great. A bit too many enemies which made the level more annoying than just challenging. Especially when I got all 200 kids and then a bunch of police officers and golf cart moms were blocking the way (I realized police officers have their movement set to follow you slowly but when there's that huge wall it's kinda impossible). Glad you fixed this with the skip level option though! When I remembered there was one, I was able to just go to the next cutscene and enjoy it. I can see a lot of effort was put into this, good job! :smiley:
Fun game, maybe sometimes too chaotic with the number of things on the screen, but overall very decent. Loved the humor, although maybe a bit corny at times. The graphics were okay, they served the purpose, but nothing too great in audio-visual department. Very nice indeed.
I really like your intro even if it is not as interactive as you planned it to be. While it is quite long that didn't really bother me. Sadly I wasn't able to collect all 200 people even in this easier version. Would be interesting to see what you had planned with different levels.
A fun game, the intro seemed about the right length to give some story especially with the sped-up text and witty humor. The actual game could use more mechanics, maybe I am just not very good at it, but I would liked to have seen powerups, traps that you could set for adults, and more things to move around to block their line of sight.
Haha, very hilarious game! Great story, very good gameplay. You got full 5 points in every category from me!
Although I didn't manage to finish it. It is very hard.
A really fun game. I didn't mind the long intro. I tried it a few times, but even with the pro tips and a lot of patience I couldn't beat the first level. I found the house but I wasn't able to collect 200 people. Seems like I'm just not meant to be the coolest kid in school. xD But I would probably play it again.
Played your game and while I liked the music, sadly, I was not having that much fun. The whole dialog scene was funny in the beginning but a little too drawn out and trying a little too hard to be funny. The game itself was solid, although I got caught a couple of times and didn't really understand why, as I was not near to a red flashing person. In my best run I managed to invite 120 or so people, so thanks for letting me also skip that part :) A little balancing and better collisions should go a long way, however. And I am saying this knowing fairly well that the game I participated in this time is having similar issues ;)
- very unique game that i played so far in this jam - Gameplay is awesome , very well designed - music is very well suited for this game - overall i enjoyed this game - by the way i score 179 :P on my 10th attemp
This was really cool, but I wish there was a downloadable version. It didn't run very well in browser for me, so I had to skip the level and just watch the cutscenes (which were great, by the way.) The story was unique and the art/music worked. It's pretty impressive to me that you managed to pull together a team from Reddit and come out with a cohesive entry. Good work.
I have to wonder if you went to my high school LoL, a 200 person underage house party... sounds familiar haha. Neat game. Though, by the description I was expecting it to be more text based because of the "visual-novel" description. Still it was pretty fun. The music was nice. Some of the humor was a little over the top for me, but that's opinion I suppose.
Hey - thanks for dropping by. Yes this was interesting and fun. Like the dialog elements but think it's all condensed into the first section would have been nice if it was split up between gameplay and maybe using it as a reward narrative. All and all a good solid game!
Nice game. Although, I didn't care about the story and I did not exactly understand how were the adults getting suspicious sometimes, but overall, pretty nice
Fun idea, and i like your take on the theme (small world as in school/teen world). Intro sequence is funny (sometimes extremely cliché funny, but I assume that's intentional ;) ).
- **visual feedback - player health** I have no actual idea if there's health involved, or first collision with enemy sends you to game over screen.
- **visual feedback - enemies** After a few plays I still don't know why / in what exact situation enemies change colour to red / green - I assume that means they've spotted you
- **performance** - about 50% of the time there was a considerable slideshow (< 10 FPS) which makes playthrough unnecessarily tough
- **text speed switch** - while between scenes it works only when you actually keep enter/space pressed, the permanent switch in the scenes with another key to cancel the fast forward doesn't work well. I'd opt for 'fast forward only while pressed' - just like in visual novels for example, and option for tab to be a permanent switch if someone prefers that.
- **consistency** - that's a tough one, I'm aware of that, especially since you met through Reddit and probably don't know each other well enough to always know what to expect :) But to make the game more polished, both art style and music should adhere more to general design - at this point it often feels like they were taken from completely different projects. I don't mean to discredit the variety - just try to make it feel like it actually all belongs together.
I don't mean to overly criticize your project - it's fun, holds strong and considerable work went into its development. I'm just trying to leave some hints how to make it even better.
Leaving my rating, cheers and stay awesome!
I really like the style and some of the humour was pretty funny. I found the controls and bit clunky in the arcade section and the enemies sometimes hard to spot, it was all a bit chaotic but has the potential to be a lot of fun with tighter controls. I loved how your text appears, especially during the intro. I'd definitely pursue something bigger in this style with more minigames in between story beats.
The best aspect was the music, went from c64, to jazz, to megadrive/arcade. Loved it. Great work to the composer, bass was sexy during the cutscenes!
@takusan Thank you for that comprehensive feedback:) Definitely some good points there. RE: performance, honestly not sure what could be causing that, might be partially an itch.io thing, or maybe your computer (because only a couple people had this issue), because the game is only 20MB and we allocated like 256MB of memory to it with WebGL. But if you or anyone else has any ideas regarding why such a small game could be having these problems, definitely let me know! Was this a slowdown in loading the game, or just in the gameplay section?
@poffle Our sound guys will be very happy to hear that :P The bass was recorded live because one of our guys is a jazz musician hahah.
Long overdue, but thank you so much to everyone above who spent the time to play through our game, and leave a rating and thoughtful feedback! It will definitely be taken into account if we continue further with this game.
Our team is very happy with what we achieved in 72 hours, and we're glad that most people are enjoying it :smile:
Longest (and funniest) intro ever! I love the music - both the title screen chip-tune and the intro jazz. You have scored full marks for humour AND audio I can tell you that!
When I finally got to the game I must admit to being a little disappointed because I had built it up so much based on everything that came before. However, this is an accomplished game and I congratulate you all...(but especially your "sound guys")! :grinning:
Apologies - double post, not intentional!
I´ve never controlled such a suspicious main character :rofl:
A crazy storyline to a nice done game. Everything is very polished and detailed to be a jam. As they said before, sometimes it confuses me as the adults can detect me. Good job.
Fun in a way but also very chaotic! Wasn't able to finish the first level... I might try again later :)
That was fun hiding from the adults, I liked the idea but had a hard time collecting 200 students. It was frantic but I think that is what you were going for. Good job.
Interesting, but it was very difficult for me to get even half-way to the goal, as some enemies were extremely fast, many were too numerous to avoid without serious patience, and a general lack of indication as to how large their line-of-sight was generally made things nigh-impossible for me to overcome. Another thing I'd like to see is less linear of a level, as sometimes you genuinely *cannot* make it around the enemy given their positions, so having an alternate route would be lifesaving.
However, the story was a fun read, and being able to speed up dialogue was excellent (though I'd personally rather the skip button just make the text appear instantly) and I enjoyed the story. Altogether a nice entry!
Even on fast forward, the cut scene takes forever! Don't get me wrong, that cutscene is super funny, but, you know, only the first time around. The game itself wasn't as good as the cut scene, I gave up after two attempts and didn't feel like it would be worthwhile to improve my skills. I think it's because it wasn't clear enough which was the character who caught me, so there isn't a tight enough cycle of improvement to make it fun.
Thanks for the feedback everyone!
Total Ratings
Votes on your game so far
Overall: 60
Fun: 60
Innovation: 60
Theme: 60
Graphics: 60
Audio: 54 (I'm guessing 6 people only watched a video haha..)
Humor: 60
Mood: 56
I'm gonna do one more promotion push before the deadline!
Here's a postmortem blog post I made of our game :smile:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/no-minor-task-party-of-a-lifetime/no-minor-task-postmortem-of-my-first-game-jam-ld38
Really loved the humor behind the game and both the story and gameplay mechanic was really fun! I completed the run on my 2nd try and i think the challenge was well designed too! I just think you should put some indicator to where his house really is, i had to guess it was on the othes side of the level (but it was kind of a obvious guess too), other than that, the game is great, good job!
The graphics are amazing for pixel art, but the beginning story part was *way* too long, at least it was funny though. The chill music is a very nice touch.
Once you got to the actual game it was okay and held my attention for a while, but I didn't complete it because I didn't have a large incentive and at that point I was too bored of the game. Good job.
I really enjoyed the intro! Looks very cool! Super cool pixel art! I can see you've put some time in that!
Good work!!
Challenging, funny 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=nf9jH1KZdXw