Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD39 → Space Bear Panic
By chris-coe
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 308 | 3.52 | 55 | |
| Fun | 289 | 3.35 | 55 | |
| Innovation | 509 | 2.92 | 55 | |
| Theme | 443 | 3.45 | 55 | |
| Graphics | 519 | 3.26 | 54 | |
| Audio | 280 | 3.32 | 55 | |
| Humor | 351 | 2.56 | 53 | |
| Mood | 462 | 3.15 | 54 |
This game really impressed me! The environment was surprisingly large and complex, and at times my navigational skills were really tested. The music and sound design were both great as well. The Entity was an intimidating force indeed, and I liked the welding mechanic to contain it. I couldn't beat the game, but I think the challenge is still pretty well balanced (if not a tiny bit too difficult). Good job!
I waited a while for it to load, I even left the tab open while I was browsing, the game loads up to the last little chunk and then it stops and sits like that forever. I really want to try this game, and I apologize for the issues and hope you find a quick fix if this is a problem for more people!
EDIT: Picture for clarity load.PNG
I like the ambient and the maze. I finished the game without using "Z" though :P.
Cool game! I had some balance issues though; the entity only spawned on one half of the station, and I won easily by welding three doors shut.
Great stuff, I liked the graphics!
I'm sad to see that the game didn't load for @shamuel. Thanks for the warning though. That's the first time I've been informed of that, and hopefully it's an isolated case.
I'm disappointed about the balance myself. If I had more time before submitting, I would have liked to tweak the difficulty balance a bit more to ensure The Entity was always a threat. At the very least, I'm happy to say that everything seems to function correctly.
Interesting way to destroy the wall/doors. Cool graphics aswell.
This is definitely a cool game! Somewhat unbalanced, but still running smoothly and very enjoyable, with all game features present, to play. Like the soundtrack!
Great graphics - really like the colors
Sweet game! I thought the graphics and level design were really great, and fit the mood of the game well. The 'entity' is a really cool aspect that keeps you on your toes. The game becomes much more strategic when you have to remember where the entity is, and how you can best wall it off. I do think the difficulty could be ramped up a bit more with the entity spreading faster, but that can be a tough thing to balance for a game jam. Great entry!
I like how the first area starts with fuel right next to your ship, so that you can learn how to use it in a safe environment. I also like how slowly The Entity moves: It feels like a threat, but one that you can handle... Until it gets out of hand and you are doomed, haha
For such simple graphics, they look REALLY good (The Entity is super ugly tho).
As for the balance, I don't know how random the game is, but in a few playthroughs (for a new player like me), The Entity was actually pretty intimidating. Especially for Ludum Dare, making games too easy is always better than too hard. At least we can see what we're judging instead of just losing every 5 seconds.
Overall a solid entry, great art, good music, and fun gameplay. Well done.
If I'm nitpicking though, it's not exactly running out of power, more of ran out of power.
@ludumanthony Pretty fair points there! Yeah, the spawns are random for both the items and The Entity. Items have predetermined potential spawn points, and 20 of them get used. Entity can spawn on any white tile (not the shuttle bay). Sometimes they all spawn really far away and you don't even run into them.... sometimes they appear frighteningly close! Not a great balance there, would love to tweak it more.
As far as "running out of power" goes, the shuttle's energy continuously drains until you max out the gauge. However it's really slow, maybe too slow.
Ah ok. I retract my statement about the theme then!
I really like it! Nice and casual, loved the music and the theme. Well done.
Nice simple game, I loved the art and the soundtrack.
I really enjoyed this one, A minor controls gripe is that if you move diagonally into a wall, you move rather slower. This feels a little bad when trying to go tightly around corners. The welding and navigating aspects of the game worked very nicely together.
@bmacintosh I'll have to look into that. I know what you're talking about, and it kinda bugs me too. I think I will try to fix that for future versions.
Cool concept, but for some reason I never even saw the Entity until the very end when I only had one fuel cell left to put in my ship, so that made the game pretty easy. I still enjoyed it though, and liked the pixel graphics!
The main character is a ice bear! I really like ice bears. :D
Cool game, but too easy. I didn't used the door mechanic once and win.
That said, I like the soundtrack and the lava mechanic. If you made it harder, so the player have to use the door mechanic, it would be more challenging and fun.
Yay, I escaped! I really liked the gameplay, did a stupid move and almost got cornered by the entity, which led to a tense moment. Love the graphics, which was very nostalgic to me, since they reminded me of Commander Keen 2's overworld. Good job!
Managed to escape! Nice game, fun to play! Loved the graphics and the sound fit right in. Great Job!
I achieved my main goal! As a good thing I'll say that I love the story and the main character, as well as the music and environment. On the other hand, I'll say that it was not all that challenging as I expected, but that is something easy to fix. Nice work and good luck!
Cool little game! I managed to escape the space station with the entity inches away from my shuttle. Everything in the game works nicely. At first I found it annoying that I could only hold one energy at a time but then I realised that the point was to go back and forth quickly enough before the entity spreads so it made sense. The only real complaint I had was getting stuck at the sides of doorways while trying to go through them. I feel like you could make it more tile based so that you fit through the doors smoothly. But otherwise I enjoyed the game a lot, nice work!
Nice game! Interesting mechanics of blocking doors, but I have gathered energy for the ship too quick and don't need to use fuel at all. Ice bear rocks!!!
I had the same problem as @shamuel described while loading in MS Edge, but it worked fine in Chrome.
The noise when you add power to the shuttle is so shrill that it hurts, but you nail the old school vibe. This is a great entry.
@stephen-meyer Thank you! I'll keep Edge in mind. Maybe I'll learn something from that.
Wow! I'm blown away by your attention to little detail in this game. Everything feels polished and the whole experience is engaging, beginning to end. From the start, I understood what I had to do, and when I first saw the entity, I immediately got creeped out, and wanted to control it. The ship feels expansive, but not too large.
The game felt a little too easy, and in all honesty to win I only needed to block three doors. In the end, the entity wasn't that threatening and I wish it was. One idea would be if you placed instances of the entity behind an already sealed entrance with a fuel cell behind it. That way the player has to break through and destroy the entrance, while in the process release the entity! But that's just one suggestion, and the easiness is a minor nitpick. This game is decidedly a polished gem. Excellent job.
@peter-sheehan One thing I'm toying with in new builds of the game is having a certain percent of the doors randomly closed already. It seems to present some interesting tactical choices: do I break this door down to get what's behind, knowing I can never seal it later? Or do I leave it up and find alternative routes?
I hate that I made the difficulty as easy as it is. I've been tweaking it in the newer versions, but I pretty much gotta leave the Ludum Dare version as it is. Oh well!
I found the search for energy while watching The Entity spread very suspenseful. True, it wasn't much of a threat, but the game was well-built nonetheless.
Wow! That was really good. At first I missed the part about the lava spreading but I found out about it quickly when I tried to get some energy and the lava spread just as I picked it up and killed me! Then I started over and won :smile: I really enjoyed playing this. Yeah it was easy but was still fun. I like the graphics and the bears animations, as it reminded me of the 2 frame walk animations of the NES. Good Job!
Fun game, text at the beginning was hard to read however I enjoyed playing this one
Really nice entry, fun gameplay, game seems to be very polished. The graphics look nice and retro-styled. Great Job! :)
This was a great take on the theme and a good concept in general. It was fun running around welding doors and just being a pixel polar bear :)
Cute game! I liked the graphics and the music! Good Job!
Liked this game. The maze level and the backtracking really fit each other and the race-like gameplay is compelling!
If I have to point something to improve is that the collisions are harder than they should be when trying to enter a door and you have to correct your position most of the time. This kind of things are hard to pull of but believe me they are really worth it!
My wife was disappointed as she first read the title as Space Bear Picnic and had hoped to go down to the woods (that's _not_ a euphemism). The graphic style reminds me a little of [Deadly Rooms of Death](http://games4win.com/up/drod-architects-edition_1.jpg). Some fiendish level design there, but I feel it would have been better balanced if everything got just a little bit faster with time.
@badly-drawn-rod "Space Bear Picnic". Clearly this should be my next game! :D
@atridas I actually did fix those collision issues in my Post-Ludum-Dare build! unfortunately since that was after the deadline, and it's more of a gameplay change rather than a major bug-fix, I didn't think it would be honest of me to upload it to the LD version. You're totally right though, it feels so much better and smoother not getting stuck on corners of doors and not slowing down when pressing against walls.
It was fun. The game was easier than expected still I liked the idea of the spreading evil-thing that I had to block. The graphics and audio aspects were good (although the sounds was a bit of annoying to me, I think this is just me unable to adapt to 8 and 16 bit sounds).
Bad font in the beginning, but the game is cool, a bit simple, but cool. Bear sprite and animation very neat.
@sleepless I agree entirely! The spacing is just wrong, some letters are too hard to read against other letters, and it's overall just ugly. I like the capitals though.
very polished (font and player wall-lock aside) and well thought out! The graphics work well, I liked the job on the tile-set, the entity looked like lava to me, but that's ok, no harm in that. Humor was touched on with the polar bear in space. Mood was nice, little things like the stars in the background helped. Also the fact that there were sfx and music helped mood too. However The sfx were way louder than the bg music. to the point where I turned it down, then couldn't hear the bg music, which I did think fit the game pretty well. i even let the BG music play while writing this! its just the mix of sfx vs bgm was off by just a bit. I had the same problem with my audio this jam. Its just hard to come up with the time to get it just right. would have liked a faster entity, but I really really liked the way it was coded to expand. You can take that mechanic somewhere (perhaps more serious) in the future. I do wish it was a little more challenging, I beat it on the first try, as most probably have. The humor was great for a jam, but the entity and polar bear maybe weren't the very best match. def worked for a jam. no point loss, just feedback for future releases. Really a very good entry. I was not sure what to expect and was pleasantly surprised! Great work completing this all on your own!
I had a good time playing your game but the more I played, the laggier it was getting. I got to a state where I had to quit the game because I was almost stuck because of the lag.
However, the game is well designed, the idea is easy to understand, I wasn't stuck trying to know what to do, I immediately started gathering energy. And this is a really good point. The graphics and music are quite good too!
And I think you already got feedback about the collisions so I won't say much more.
@kiirohanabi I think the energy cell sitting by the shuttle helped with making the player's direction clear. It was initially there for testing purposes, but I realized how helpful it would be for new players.
I'm unhappy about how laggy it got. It was caused by having way too many actors out on the field at once, all performing their own calculations. More recent versions fixed that.
Very good game. The concept is interesting. All the musics are really cool. The graphics are very nice. Easy to pick up. The tutorial is a little long, but effective.
A small bug where, if you die with an energy in your pocket, you keep it when starting over.
Neat game. I included it in my Ludum Dare 39 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtt-Piir6X0
Quite interesting. Much more deep and complex than I thought ! Great concept. The graphics are simple but doing the job and it gave you time to polish the game. Great work !