confidentgames 2017-08-01 01:59
Pretty good. A little confusing, but overall good graphics and sounds.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD39 → Zzap
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 124 | 3.85 | 62 | |
| Fun | 128 | 3.71 | 61 | |
| Innovation | 95 | 3.74 | 61 | |
| Theme | 73 | 4.10 | 61 | |
| Graphics | 263 | 3.93 | 61 | |
| Audio | 54 | 4.00 | 61 | |
| Humor | 378 | 2.48 | 47 | |
| Mood | 198 | 3.64 | 58 |
Pretty good. A little confusing, but overall good graphics and sounds.
It seems that the levels are random, isn't it? That makes the difficulty a bit confusing, mixing very simple and more complicated (not hard) levels, that was a bit confusing. Good game though. And a very good sound.
Nice game man, great graphics and sounds. the music was cool. Hard to figure out the game at first but once you know what to do it is pretty great. Hope you enjoyed the LD :)
It can be very random its true, a solver method checks that a level is physically completeable but does not guarantee you have enough power to do so! It's the best we could do in 72hrs :) Certainly a lot of refinement to be done in the level generator now the time constraints have gone and I've had some sleep at last!
I forgot to include the readme.txt in the zip - i've added it in now and also pasted part of it to the game description on this page :)
Excellent little game, love the music, love the sound, feels just great to click and play. I think my only complaint is the timer might have been too lenient? I never really felt under pressure. The game is really fun to play but also very easy.
Love it.
Amazing game with interesting and unique gameplay mechanics. The game seems to be very polished(animations are incredible). Also, the graphics and visual effects are nice. The only thing that could be a little bit better is sound, but it is not a big problem. Overall a really nice game, definitelly one of the best I played so far.
Very clean graphics style and tight controls. The difficulty is a bit all over the place though. Playing it is still a blast, though.
That was a lot of fun! Very smooth gameplay. There were a few times, though, when I felt like the game forced me to give up. I was going pretty fast! Feels like there's a lot of potential for different level styles too. Would love to play this on my phone.
Some of the levels didn't work with the different camera angles; I think it may be better if it always stayed top-down or nearly-top-down. Overall, though, great game! I enjoyed it.
Great game, the overall presentation is very well done and I loved the art and audio. The corruption tiles were a bit harsh, especially when they spawned close to the goal.
(Ignore this, my comment posted twice)
Nice game, a bit confusing at the beginning, but i like it, great job!
No kidding, it definitely does get harder from level 10 on wards. Music and sound were the stand outs in this entry. Theme is also used well. Graphics - models and particles effects - are good for an LD. Main critique is probably the spike in difficult. Overall, good entry.
Hi there, just played your game. The neon visuals were really cool, and did match the sounds quite nicely. The game was simple to play, but I couldn't understand what was the incentive for me to keep going instead of just pressing the node power to exit. Also it could be good to have a way to check the time left for the purple squares to spread. All in all was interesting and a different gameplay from the usual.
Great!
At first I was a little confused, so a few training levels whould have been nice, but as soon as I "got" it I had a LOT of fun playing it.
Also, the music and FX really gets you playing, nice work!
@flukeshot: look out for future (non-LD) releases if interested in the game, we are definitely refining the difficulty spikes and level generation! To meet the LD time constraints we had to cut corners, for example I created a level solver based on a flood fill that simply checks "is there a physical path between entrance and exit" but our current build now uses a A* based solver that not only tells us if a path exists but how expensive it is and how expensive is it to get all the items etc so we can really control that difficulty curve :)
@saramartins: truthfully the only incentive is if you care about your score! you get more points for collecting everything :) This was again due to the time constraints of LD. Future releases will have online leaderboards making your score more valuable but also we are testing a few points-to-xp based upgrade systems that would add way more value to the score.
Thank you all for the feedback so far, keep it coming! :)
Great game, with nice graphics and audio.
A good jam entry with a good balanced difficulty.
Very nice puzzle game, I like how you worked on the theme. It also feels very good just to hover the map with the mouse, the transitions and animations and the UI in general are great.
This is fun and feels very polished, but seemed a bit simple! Most of the time I didn't really need to think about my actions to get to the end of a level, or even to get the energy. I think the levels are procgen though, it might be interesting to think about how to change the generation rules to result in trickier decision-making. For the time being though, this was still pretty fun to play through!
The graphics and sfx are very good. Though I don't quite get the gameplay, it feels just clicking through to the exit;
Good game, rather an easy one, for which I won't complain ;). Nice graphics and good sfx & music for a game that feels quit polished.
nice one, really enjoyed this one, pretty slick looking and sounding :)
@tmpxyz Difficulty was something we had a hard time balancing.
Essentially, if you are quite good at quickly finding an optimal path through a series of obstacles, you are going to blast through the twenty levels.
The purpose of the gameplay is to plan a route through each level in as efficient a manner, and as quickly as possible. The corrupted tiles are supposed to add a sense of urgency, as waiting for too long will give the tiles time to spread, and crossing them is expensive. The levels are designed to take less than a minute to solve, in my youtube play-through I managed almost 40 levels (I failed on my first attempt) in about six minutes.
The reason for the short play-through (although we never really discussed it as Dave and I seemed to be on the same page about most things, correct me if I'm wrong @hs-Dave ;) was to let players see the end of the game without spending too long playing - there are after-all, many games for everyone to try! The knock-on effect of this however, is that the difficulty can seem a little random. Some players may face a greater challenge than others to a certain degree. As @frankiesmileshow noted the levels have a degree of random generation to them, although I should add that a) they are guaranteed to have a non-blocking path through them, and b) there is a difficulty scale that affects the spawn chance of the different tiles, the cost of movement, points awarded, player health etc.
We're continuing to work on the game; in fact, I'm in the process of adding an "Endless" mode now after having added proper campaign and scaling difficulty support. Feedback about the game's difficulty is greatly appreciated, I think moving ahead that's going to be a big factor in whether or not the game has replay value especially in its endless mode.
Thanks for all of the feedback everyone, we're glad you found the game enjoyable!
Awesome game. On my final playthrough I was saved by a pylon right next to the start after resetting the stage. I love how the corruption adds just the right amount of pressure to be quick. The only improvement I think is required here is the consistency of the difficulty. Maybe make the number of items and the distance of items to the player a little less random and more controlled by the level counter.
Awesome game! One of the best entries I've played so far.
I liked your game a lot! The corruption tiles are a nice idea, they got me the first time. :D
Gorgeous game! Looks really polished, sounds awesome, plays great.
Criticisms: - for what seems like a slow, thoughtful puzzle game, having an element that requires you to speed through it didn't feel right (the purple corruption blocks). It just seemed to mix action and puzzle in a way that I didn't think meshed particularly well. - I thought the level design was a bit all over the place. Once I'd understood what each tile did, I blasted through the rest of the 15 levels in about 3 minutes. I had a good time, since the game felt so nice, but I didn't find myself stopping to think at all - something you're actually penalised for doing due to the time-limits imposed. I don't think this sort of game works well at all with randomly generated levels and would have much preferred a set 20 levels that actually pose a challenge. In a similar vein, 'restarting' would completely annul the existence of purple tiles since you could think, figure out the route then restart and instantly complete it. - I thought the 'obstacle' tiles could have been presented more clearly. I'm not super familiar with electrical nodes but it looked to me like I could hook them up - I'm not sure what fantasy world the grid is set in, but it might be worth having objects that are completely non-electrical related so they can be read a little more clearly (a toy wooden block, a knocked over bottle, even a non-tile much like the borders). - Costing points to restart also feels very punishing too, though this ties in to my previous issues with randomisation and time-based puzzle games.
I'm only being so critical since I think it was great! :) Do what you will with the feedback. Good job!
I miss a tutorial, I spent some time trying to know what I was doing, good audio and good graphics
This is awesome. A fast-paced puzzle game. Although it certainly seems possible that sometimes it gives you an impossible level - I'm pretty sure this happened on my second playthrough but I can't say for sure.
In any case my main complaint is with the graphics - they're mostly pretty nice but they don't all exactly go together. That is, some of them look more.. realistic (?) than the others. In any case, it doesn't really hurt the gameplay - just something to think about.
Aside from that, my only criticism is that points are not really a huge motivation given that attempting to get them could very well cost a player the game, so perhaps there should be some alternative motivation for collecting points (such as, perhaps, holding back corruption for longer? Could allow players to build up points in the early levels so that they could have longer to think in the later levels)
Fun game! The timed bad tiles led me to stop thinking about tiles and instantly make a decision about where to go - which I really liked. I was confused about the numbers displaying tile cost, since it displays positive numbers for things that cost power and negative numbers for things that give power, maybe it would be more sensible in reverse? A lot of times I was worried the recharge tiles would cost me power (especially when they were on bad tiles). I didn't like the camera tilt when the stage got bigger. It made it difficult to tell which tiles the floating points belonged to. I enjoyed this game though and hope to see more of it down the road. :)
I feel it was very well put together and provided a fresh puzzle game idea. A good tie in to the theme is the concept of carrying over your remaining power to the next level, so I needed to conserve power and not go for all the points sometimes. The purple tiles didn't seem to fit with the flow of the game quite so well, especially since it was random whether there even were any. I think the large penalty from them and their inconsistency led to this. They might benefit from being redesigned from a different angle, since it looks like you wanted to apply a time pressure to make the player think fast. All in all a good game, I had lots of fun and played through a few times.
I really enjoyed! At first, I was kinda lost and reading the instructions was a little bit difficult, but then I got the hang of it and it was pretty fun. I have mixed feelings about the random "bad blocks" appearing. Maybe it needs just a little more balancing. Very beautiful entry and great presentation. The music and sfx were spot on too. Great work!
@maybelaterx It's actually meant to be a fast paced game, but getting the time pressure to feel right and build up was a challenge. With that said, since the latest build supports campaigns with varying difficulty curves and tile spawn chances, it would be reasonable to add a "classic" mode that emphasizes careful planning over quick reactions. @hs-dave has written a path finding algorithm which provides us with a difficulty weighting for a particular level, so we can more easily ratchet up the complexity of each level without making it impossible to complete.
In general, we've been looking at difficulty scaling a lot, and right now the level builder doesn't have enough control over where it places corrupted tiles. For example, we've added the concept of different zones to the game that can be reached by taking an alternate exit. The exit should naturally be harder to reach if the zone you are moving to has a higher difficulty rating. However with the present implementation of difficulty, the chance of spawning hard tiles is uniform across the entire level, not just near the alternate exit.
Thanks again for your feedback folks, it really helps to give us an idea of what parts of the game need extra attention.
I liked the way some hints about the elements of the game were presented in the title screen!
The game itself has an interesting concept, but because the level design and progression it doesn't quite work. Making the levels random took away the "experience design" part of the game, a lost opportunity to teach and engage the player with the mechanics. Throwing the player into an arbitrary part of the game needs a great deal of design to work, but here it just happens, so I don't think the decision was justified. Maybe time constrains?
Level design definitely was the part most in need of attention, since it's a puzzle game. I firmly believe it would have benefited immensely from having fewer levels, but more thought out, cohesive and challenging.
Loved this. The power carrying over was a great idea
Excellent game. The way to resolve the puzzles is simple of understand and the puzzles are very challenging. I really liked this game, good job.
Very nice game, however, I think it needs a tutorial to make it even better!
Graphically, it was nice as well. However, what would make it nicer, would be some variation on the patterns of the grid cells. :)
Really loved it! Was a nice game to play.
@pavel-kouril There's just five basic layouts at the moment, but we plan to add plenty more. It's also possible to add geometry specific to the levels themselves, like perhaps something for the tiles to be anchored to, which will make things look more interesting.
Interesting mechanics, cool style, great game! I really liked music and design of this game. It would be great if you added more types of obstacles and the possibility of buying some useful things for passing the level for points. And of course I wish there was endless generation of levels!
@enot487 We're adding a skill tree to the game which is unlocked using points. There's also an endless mode added, and different areas that can be accessed via optional exits.
I liked too much the game, it is funny and challenging, I can lose some time playing this haha. The music, the graphics, the mechanics... all really good, congratulations. The only thing I didn't like is this is a little bit confuse at beggining
This was a fun little game with some killer production! Reminded me a lot of some old PS1/2 games back in the day. The only thing I found was that some level setups made it ridiculously easy to complete. But props for your first LD jam and props for making a pretty robust random level generator!
Is a fun game. I could see myself playing this on my phone or tablet while traveling, queuing, or using public transit. Great for killing a little bit of time. A leaderboard could get quite competitive, especially with an unlimited mode.
It would have been nice if either a collapsible hud were available stating what each of the items do or a tutorial (that could be skipped) were available for one's first playthrough.
@talouin @hs-dave has experience with leader-boards, so definitely maybe!
Presenting information is a continuous challenge. Imade that dinky little rotating hud display at the start, but it's nothing compared to a decent tutorial. Allowing the player to pause the game mid-play on "easy mode" (whatever that turns out to be) and presenting contextual hints might be the way to go.
An endless mode has been implemented, and we are currently working on skills, and level generation ahead of releasing the game.
absolutely perfect the way it is, add a leader board and market this bad boy!
Absolutly amazing art and music for the game created during jam!
The balance of the game seems to be dishonest sometimes. For example, you successfully finish a several levels and then get to level that gets away most of your power even in the best possible solution. This situation devalues the power gained previously.
Thank you for this game, good job!
Great game with a good mood. Congratulations!
@dekhey Thanks :) We have a working skill system and XP now!
Great puzzle game, with a nice mood!
The graphics, sound and music worked really well together, the game felt very polished!
As others have mentioned, the randomness of the levels made the difficulty vary quite during the game, but I actually think that it worked pretty well. There was a certain satisfaction in surveying the game map, trying to locate an ideal route at a glance, and then sometimes getting a map with an easy solution. But I guess it depends on whether you play it from an "incremental difficulty" vs. an "get through a lot of levels" perspective.
Nice game!
>Moving like the wind, >Find the path, avoid the slow. >Unlock the Exit!
@somnium there will always be an aspect of random generation with the levels. We are shooting for a "get through many levels" approach as you said, where managing you health, and assessing the risk of collecting points vs exiting the level are integral to game play. Our latest build now features an xp system, a skill tree, and a world map that connects different zones. The idea is for the player to spot and prepare for incoming risks. For example, the world map shows zones up to five levels ahead of the player, so they can see a fork into a more difficult area approaching them.