thorneto 2017-07-31 21:18
There was a lot of instructions to take in off the bat but it wasn't too bad to actually figure out. Great environment and the bg song was very catchy. Those poor animals...
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD39 → Airship Engineer
By ryte2byte
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 317 | 3.34 | 28 | |
| Fun | 476 | 2.84 | 28 | |
| Innovation | 363 | 3.00 | 28 | |
| Theme | 204 | 3.73 | 28 | |
| Graphics | 152 | 3.73 | 28 | |
| Audio | 96 | 3.57 | 28 | |
| Humor | 50 | 3.61 | 28 | |
| Mood | 302 | 3.00 | 28 |
There was a lot of instructions to take in off the bat but it wasn't too bad to actually figure out. Great environment and the bg song was very catchy. Those poor animals...
I think this is pretty amusing (aside from the Trump bit which is to depressing to be funny). The sound and graphics are all great, and I don't think I've ever seen an LD with passable 3D walk animations before.
Unfortunately my red/green colourblindness pretty much makes this impossible. I simply can't tell the difference between the yellow and green lights (yes, red/green makes distinguishing yellow/green hard). I did figure out that if I could play it the trick would be to keep picking up animals and dropping them next to their target machine so that they will be nearby when needed.
This is a great entry!
Graphic assets are great, and the audio is a nice mix of fun/relaxing. The opening dialogue is also pretty humorous. My only gripe is that there doesn't seem to be an actual "fail" state - all the machines died on me, but the game continued on it's merry way :)
Other than that though, congrats - this is a well-made LD :)
You messed up the resolution settings. There's no 1920x1080
Found it quite difficult if I'm honest, but I enjoyed it! Those puffer bird noises were great! good job:smiley:
Cool original game. Controls are a bit hard. EEls sometimes dont get into the eel engine. I really liked the mood of the game. Very silly, funny style. I'm not a big fan of read-a-lot tutorials. Try to keep tutorials as short as possible, and ideally unnexistent (teaching by gamedesign instead of text). For example you could have drawn a cat over the cat engine, etc...
But overall its a good game ;)
Thanks for the feedback everyone! This was a very difficult LD for me as I ended up switching games after about the 16 hour mark. Let me cast Feedback Loop on a couple of your comments:
@nintendoeats : I'm delighted you thought my walk cycle was passable! I consider myself a fairly terrible animator. It's nice to know I might have made a little progress over the years.
I am extremely sorry about the color blindness issues. It was not a thought that occurred to me. I shall endeavor to keep this in mind for the future.
@RootPew : There are actually two fail states: A) Not 'beating the star' and B) Blowing up the ship. An engine component can take a 3 damage points (indicated by smoke) before catching fire. Afterwards, it will catch fire and the game will be lost if is not repaired after a (perhaps too gracious) period of time. Sadly, my time crunch didn't allow a ton of balancing and I erred on the side of keeping the game winnable.
@Thorneto and @Peredom : I have a known problem with wordy tutorials :wink:. I keep trying to cut 'em down, but always fail out of fear of leaving things unexplained.
Again, thank you for your time and feedback!
*Duplicate post
Whoops, missed one!
@Justashadow : Make sure 'windowed' mode is unchecked and you should see your full screen resolution. Windowed mode is enabled by default to make life easier for folks with multiple monitors.
Very good looking game!
First the bad things :-)
There is a wall of text right at the start of your game, blocking people like me from seeing the well crafted game itself. On top of that the font type is almost illegible, you could have chosen a better font for it.
I tried skipping the text and playing right away but was not really able to deduct what I had to do so I had to go back and actually read the text, most of which is a cute backstory, kind of obfuscating the actual instructions. Maybe a little comic at the start would have been good instead, this would not need to be too fancy, just still images. This way you could convey your story and controls much better and it would probably not take too much longer compared to writing the text.
Trying the game without instructions was confusing to me because I did not realize that you could grab animals from the boxes on the sides. They look like unimportant filler objects because they are half way out of the screen. You could put them more in the center to focus the player's attention on them instead.
That's it with the complaints.
The graphics are awesome, the cat and chicken are really cute! Very good job on that and on the main character animation. The walk cycle looks very good, impressive for 48 hours!
I also like the sounds the animals make, your voice gives this its game jam feel ;-)
The gameplay is solid, once you figure out what to do it is actually easy to make the guy do what you want, the controls don't get in your way.
Overall a very good job, thanks and keep up the good work!
Very good looking game!
First the bad things :-)
There is a wall of text right at the start of your game, blocking people like me from seeing the well crafted game itself. On top of that the font type is almost illegible, you could have chosen a better font for it.
I tried skipping the text and playing right away but was not really able to deduct what I had to do so I had to go back and actually read the text, most of which is a cute backstory, kind of obfuscating the actual instructions. Maybe a little comic at the start would have been good instead, this would not need to be too fancy, just still images. This way you could convey your story and controls much better and it would probably not take too much longer compared to writing the text.
Trying the game without instructions was confusing to me because I did not realize that you could grab animals from the boxes on the sides. They look like unimportant filler objects because they are half way out of the screen. You could put them more in the center to focus the player's attention on them instead.
That's it with the complaints.
The graphics are awesome, the cat and chicken are really cute! Very good job on that and on the main character animation. The walk cycle looks very good, impressive for 48 hours!
I also like the sounds the animals make, your voice gives this its game jam feel ;-)
The gameplay is solid, once you figure out what to do it is actually easy to make the guy do what you want, the controls don't get in your way.
Overall a very good job, thanks and keep up the good work!
Nice game! Challenging but not impossible, and need some to be focused until the end. The gameplay is interesting and quick-paced. The story is funny and the music fit well the game. The graphics are minimalist but pretty-looking. The only downside I found where the menu, who looks blurry sometimes and the font which is hard to read.
Well done! :) (Glad to be able to play with my gamepad!)
Honestly, the noises are funny ahah Nice game, congrats on the graphics that are great (3D animation is sooo hard according to me). A lot of text in the beginning that maybe could have been sumed up a little bit more. But cool game, really. Enjoyed it :)
Fun game! I thought the whole idea of the game was rather funny, and I liked the audio and graphics. I found it very hard to keep the airship running on time without killing everyone on board!
The instructions were good, but the font was quite hard to read.
This was a funny and enjoyable game. Well done!
I had fun! Like other entries with similar sound effects.. I greatly enjoyed yours. :P I got quite a chuckle out of it the first time I heard the "warning alarm" one. :P
The game is pretty fun! The art is very good and the sounds are just enough to get into the game. The font at the start is a bit hard to read for a description that long, but that's a minor detail.
You put effort into places that are rare for a LD game, and I respect that a lot! Despite the wall of nearly-unreadable text, I actually liked the text itself, and the graphics and audio provided a more polished atmosphere than most games achieve.
I found it too hard to win, but it's a good, well-executed concept.
Lol, it's so funny. The idea is so original, and the art is very cool too. Nice entry!
Graphics are good, audio is good. I'm not entirely sure if difficulty is fair, although I only played once so I can't necessarily make a claim on that. However, I did run in to a bug (so to speak) that I would say is rather important - I managed to push my toolbox off of the screen, where I could no longer access it. This obviously makes winning quite a bit more difficult. If this is indeed a feature rather than a bug there should probably be a warning somewhere.
The idea is quite funny but it seems very difficult to achieve the travel. I think that you could have let the player experiment how to fire the engine, it should be a very amusing (and maybe shocking) experience.
Funny game with a cool idea. Unfortunately, I don't think I could win no matter how many times I tried.
Please, use a more legible font/color combination next time. I wanted to give up when I saw that, but luckily I suffered through it.
The game is really fun and well thought out. Being able to decide to generate more energy at the cost of the engines taking damage is a really awesome idea. And those sound effects are just hilarious. I beat it on my first try, it was really close and intense.
But try to put more information into the world, as somebody else already said: put an icon of a cat on the barrel and over the engine. And just like that, the wall of text will be one screen shorter.
@themonsterfromthedeep Good catch on the bug! Hunted down the cause and added a warning to this entry page.
That was a pretty fun game. I did find the font with the instructions a little hard to read, may have been the background it was on. Though I did think it was a very appropriate font to use as it help with the atmosphere. The graphics were really nice, and the sounds were pretty funny. Overall it was a good entry. Well done!
Very well made! The graphics and audio are really polished, I don't think I've seen a prettier game this LD. The gameplay is simple but it works. It is fun to play a couple of times, but it would be more fun if there were a bit more gameplay elements. The font is stylish but really hard to read, which makes it off-putting for reading a long text.
Overall very well made!
Good job, the font is a little hard to read :D
I concur with the other commenters that it's still rare to see a Compo entry with 3D that is this polished (although the cat-model clipped through the avatar-model once, but this is a very minor issue). Impressive w. 16 hr. less too! What was your first attempt and why didn't it work? :slight_smile:
What I think would help cut-down on the tutorial length (or necessity) is to label both the boxes/crates/etc. and the machines with a picture of the animal resp. produced/needed. (But maybe I shouldn't complain given the state of my own meager help-screen... :sweat_smile:)
Maybe place the grab-hotspots a bit closer while you're at it? Seems fine for 'experienced' players, but you could maybe get some extra mileage for the 'first-timers' if you allow the 'fuels' to be grabbed from the side of the barrels and whatnot (also pickup things I dropped on the ground accidentally from a wider radius).