aleal-dev 2017-08-01 02:47
Nice game guys! I managed to save all the crew and to repair the ship! Yuhuuu! :D
Good work!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD39 → Planet Salzex
By dragojt
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 334 | 3.48 | 45 | |
| Fun | 503 | 3.00 | 45 | |
| Innovation | 578 | 2.79 | 45 | |
| Theme | 315 | 3.65 | 45 | |
| Graphics | 324 | 3.77 | 47 | |
| Audio | 255 | 3.39 | 45 | |
| Humor | 259 | 2.82 | 42 | |
| Mood | 334 | 3.38 | 44 |
Nice game guys! I managed to save all the crew and to repair the ship! Yuhuuu! :D
Good work!
I was unable to play the game. Something with the avast antivirus. I write the comment to let you know. I'll leave you a graphics score, because I love the art. Sorry guys and good luck!
Oh, what a problem! We don't know why exporting with game maker can cause problems with antivirus. With windows defender you're able to execute it. Thank you for playing trying, man!
Same here, I wasn't able to play the game unfortunately :(
First I got a Windows Defender warning, and selected "Start anyway".
Then I don't know if it's related to the issue you mentioned, but after a few seconds in game (during the first dialog) the game exited (I'm not sure if it's a crash or something else forcing the game to quit).
Let me know if there's something I can check for you!
I was able to play, no problem with anti-virus firewalls. Pretty good game, I wish you luck for this jam. Me gustan las almendras.
Try to test now if the antivirus allows you to open it, I tried to export it in a different way :)
I like the graphics sound and music. But unfortunately, I found a lot of things that could use improvements. I like your game over all and I think this is not some piece of that but there are some design failures. I will give you a list:
- the exposition dump at the start
You tell the player way too many things in way too short time. New name every 2 sentences. Player will ignore those after the second one. Whole start intro is just giving you names and says little about what is going on. 30% of that intro actually said something useful. They are near a planet, a guy is doing some magic trick and they ran out of power. I can only imagine that either none of them were paying attention to the power or the magic guy screw something up.
- enemies feel inconsistent
The jumping monster just acts weird. You play it one time, it jumps 2ft in the air, next time you play it is 7ft, next time he doesn't even notice you before you shoot him.
- unbalanced second level
The second level in the darkness is just unfair. There is just no other way to put it. Enemies are silent you only see them when it is too late and it takes the extra shoot to kill. The only way to actually fight them is to know that they are there and shoot them blindly. That is not a good use of the flashlight. Maybe making a cone of light in front of you would make it fair so you can see eye monster going for you or make flashlight radius bigger at least 2x I would say.
- 3rd eye monster
That is just a fail in level design. You put a silent tough enemy in a place where a player cannot see it and damages you without any chance for a reaction. And knowing that he is there does not prevent it either. You need to remember that you want to the player have fun while playing your game. Give him the challenge to prove his skills. Do not try to beat him. Making the game frustrating is OK only in frustration simulator. Never do that.
- battery drops are inconsistent
I can see that they are made randomly after each kill but a problem is you don't have enough enemies in the game for it to balance it self. If you kill 100 of them yes it is consistent enough but I don't kill 100 of them in one run sometimes I get a lot of them and sometimes I would really need one to even be able to continue. Placing something that reset players energy to an amount he needs for beating the next level would be a great feature.
- I did not found the end of the level
I got to the end of the darkness level, ran out of power and there was no end. What am I supposed to do now? I see nothing and there is no way of getting out other than ending the game. Make it either beatable without a flashlight or make the player lose if they run out of power. Like an enemy that attacks you if you don't have your flashlight on.
I hope you can correct these mistakes in the future and make this a great game. It looks great, nice audio and the mood is pretty good too. This game has potential good luck.
@david-broz Thanks for this complete review haha! If this game likes in final ratings we'll continue developing this project and polish every single part of it. I want to answer some of your points that you said:
For the prologue, we wanted to create atleast 5 characters with names of users that followed and commented the stream that we made all the weekend, so it's only a reference. Thought that the most important name was captain but it's true that it can be confusing five names more in a short period of time.
The jumper enemy that jumps with a spring, jumps randomly in a range we programmed, just to add more difficulty, **It's a survival horror hehe**
In the second level we wanted to increase a lot the hardness of the game, to make the player want to repeat it until he beats the game, but also it's true that it can be frustating. Oh, and the hidden eye we put it there just to troll xP (also to be removed :) )
The fact of the battery drops have one reason, the player must optimize the battery(Theme of this jam) and just recharge it if he's lucky when an enemy drops it. It has to be balanced again.
Well, talking about the end of the level: when you have collected all the pieces you must return where you start to fix the ship, as it say in the instructions text :)
I think I didn't miss any point, so here is my answer. You are correct in a lot of this points but because of time limit we couldn't do more improvements.
Thanks again! :)
@david-broz WOW! First of all, I would like to thank you for taking your time doing this list.
@dragojt and I were conscoius about some of the problems you mentioned like the random height or the random amount of batteries that drops the jumping enemy. We though it will fit well in our game making it less monotonous.
The 3rd eye enemy position was... well, a little "prank" trying to scare the player, but you are right, it can be so unfair... :c
The problem at the start with the names is true, there are a lot of characters without any importance in the game and we could have made an "unnamed crew", but the detail of putting names to each one was a "gift" for the Twitch followers during the development of the game, just for fun :)
Finally, the unbalanced second level is true, we hadn't enough time to test the level many times and yes, it is a bit difficult if you don't know what you will encounter there.
Try to complete the first level without the flashlight or running and the second one must be easier, you can ignore the enemies and come back to kill them and get battery if it's necessary.
To complete the game, all you have to do is, once you get all the pieces of the ship and you have rescued all of your mates (or killed them >:D), go back to the first room and the ship will be there repaired and ready to escape!
We will keep all of this advices in mind for the next game, thank you so much! :D
Link to my playtest of your game: https://youtu.be/QaFjqMSQLks?t=9m32s
Cool game, but it's very dark even with the flashlight on. I also managed to fall off the world by going left at the start of the game. Cool intro, and a overall a very enjoyable game! Good job!
@gurbx the fail you said is fixed already, It was fixed when we upload the game first, but I had to recover a part of the project so the collision was lost. Thanks for enjoying it :)
Nice work, I love it :) But It is really hard to hit the target :disappointed:
I like the game, you made a grat job, keep doing games, Good Luck
Nice artwork, tho while looking at screenshots I was hoping it'll have a bit more story or dialogue. Due to way shooting works, creatures are very challenging if you don't get to kill them with first shot, I swear I'll have nightmares about that jumpy thing chasing me around, most horrific monster in video games ever.
Really enjoyable game! My only complaint is that stuff in the foreground obstructed my view a little bit too much :) Cheers!
Couldn't finish the game. The visibility is ridiculous, even with the flashlight on. And WHAT THE HELL with those control buttons? Why are the 4 buttons all around the keyboard? Every thing else was really well made though! The musics, the graphics (except the graphics in-game which we don't get to see), the intro. Good job!
Really cool game loved the art.
Nice game, I liked the visual and the little story. The shooting was a bit too hard for me, and I didn't really knew why it was sometimes rewarded with new batteries and sometimes not. I tried several tactics, like slowly killing everything, or running to the next screen but I couldn't finish the game. I had fun playing anyway, so keep up the good work!
Cool! Nice vibe, good graphics & music, although the music is a bit upbeat for a survival horror game :) I managed to beat the game seemingly without getting the last piece of the ship (engine?) so that was a little weird. The shooting was pretty difficult since it's so delayed, plus the fact that batteries are so rare made it so I really had to conserve my shots. Did the eye enemies not drop batteries? Those enemies really could've used an audio cue as well. Another small note - I thought "space to skip" meant skip the whole intro, which I didn't want to do, so I sat at that screen assuming something would happen for a minute or two :P The intro should probably auto-progress slowly if there isn't any input. Nice experience overall though, good work!
Neat game, quite a lot of scope for a game jam, which is quite impressive.
My main gripe is the foreground elements getting in the way. I also accidentally killed quite a few of my crew members, so maybe give them a tad more health.
It was certainly entertaining enough to make me want to play through the whole thing. I really liked all the graphics and sound. There's a lot of polish here, especially for a game jam. That being said, while the foreground objects looked neat, they were really infuriating during gameplay. Also, the walk back after getting the final ship piece was kind of boring. Just a little more gameplay testing/polish would make this that much better. One of the most polished games I've seen this jam.
Thanks all of you for the feedback :)
Cool game! I liked the graphics and the music a lot. Key bindings were a bit weird for me.
Thank you for making this game I enjoyed playing it!
Nice entry, I really enjoyed the intro though pressing space while a text is appearing should just skip the text's animation, and not jump to the next line of dialogue. The gameplay is smooth but could be smoother, and at some points the use of the flashlight was useless, maybe it's a problem from my computer's screen but in some areas (when the eyes-monsters appear for the first time) the light wasn't powerful enough, or maybe it's just an effect of loosing power and the light's power is going down? Anyway, i had a good tmie playing it, nice job :)
Shout-outs to the dad!
Man what a cool game! I really like the graphics and the story is cool as well. Great entry, nice job!
Couldn't play because the antivirus, but looking at the screenshots I can say the art is pretty good.
Visuals are really good, and i liked the intro and the music too. There is a good mood here. :D My only complaint is all about the button used... Z,X,F,E are not so accessible to everyone. For instance in some keyboards "Z" and "X" are not so close like in a standard QUERTY. Use "X" and "C" instead. :) BTW cool game guys, keep up the good work!
@hav24 True, we didn't think about it, sorry :)
I liked the graphics! that being said... the resolution somehow is screwed up? I'm on 1650x1050 and it seems that it just cuts of half of the bottom panel. I could still figure it out but was pretty annoying.
Liked tha parallex, added a bit difficulty.
The gameplay itself was fine, but what I REALLY liked was the Game Over comments! aweeeesomme stuff! It adds so much replay value! I was like - alright I think I get the hang of this game.. and then I decided to actually read what it says below the "Game Over".
It read "What if I shoot at my crew?". I was like... "No way!!" and replayed immediately =]! Also it had tips when I tried to run the thing too much to save the battery etc..
Overall nice game, but I really appreciate that feature it's such a cool tiny detail that actually makes the game entirely different!