LD40 Compo: The Greed Run

mikuzune 2017-12-04 00:20

Hiya, this was a nice fun little platformer to play for me. I like the balance between the gods punishing you and you spending the gold they give you to more stats.

The only problem I've found is that after trying for too long to get 800 coins together to buy the "WTF don't buy me bracelet" (it was too tempting). The gods have punished me so hard I move backwards/on the spot. pic.PNG

I had a really great time playing this though and enjoyed the satisfying sound of picking up all those lovely coins. (Just to sate my curiosity could you tell me what the wtf bracelet does?)

If you'd like to check out my game here's a link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/toy-hero You play a robot toy who must protect all the other toys from the mum of the house by hiding them away in different places.

vkmicro 2017-12-04 01:47

@miKuZune thanks for playing :D don't forget to come back and rate when the ratings are up :P

the WTF bracelet actually kills you :D hahah so, be happy you didn't buy it haha. I'll check out your game for your.

iak 2017-12-04 10:37

Huh. good going on the theme there. The floor grabbing you wasn't actually intended though, was it. =P

vkmicro 2017-12-04 22:15

@iak nope... it's a collision detection bug I couldn't fix... platformer physics and collision are hard I tell ya.

flaterectomy 2017-12-05 21:18

This was a cute little platformer. Nice use of varying movement options with the different items you can buy. Hell is pretty capitalist. :laughing: It took me a while, but after some time I found the end. The sticky floor thing was a little annoying, but I jumped my way out of it.

What we learned at LD39 where we also made a platformer named Artax is that we should have added a small grace period after you leave the edge of the platform where you can still jump. It's a commonly used technique in platformers, and it avoids a lot of frustration. :wink:

The art is very basic. My first suggestion would be to not use that much grey in your palette. The music started getting on my nerves pretty quickly.

All in all, it looks like a first platformer, and plays better than one!

mors 2017-12-05 23:20

I like the idea quite a bit and I think there's a potential for a really unique and fun game here, but the execution has a lot of problems imo. Like the controls aren't very good, there are a lot of collision issues, and the graphics look pretty bland overall. I actually had a fun time despite these issues, but unfortunately they are too big to overlook.

arch 2017-12-06 03:11

Good job, I like the punishment mechanic, but I definitely got greedy and tried to go straight to the WTF bracelet. Judging from your earlier comment, I'm glad I didn't keep going after that. Jumping felt good, coin *DING* was satisfying, and you made good use of those 15 hours!

versatile-box 2017-12-06 03:52

A commonly used solution to the Theme, really cool way to do it!

dijaguy 2017-12-06 03:56

All of these coins and things to buy! Pretty fun game, and I really liked the swirly-animations on the hour glass / items. The countdown of stats was also pretty slick!

rik-thunder 2017-12-06 09:45

i like the protagonist sprite :D very spartian. I liked to collectthe coins...disliked the grabbing floor xD i felt like incomplete Spiderman. the audio was a good pick but it does seem to get old for A LEVEL OF THIS MAGNITUDE :/ over all not bad.

somnium 2017-12-06 18:29

A fun little platformer!

The level design was large, and interesting to explore, as it contained a lot of interesting passages, coin formations and obstacles patterns. I especially liked the vertical openness, which made the jump-boots a very fun mechanic. The game would have felt more vibrant with a bit more variety in the blocks layout and the color scheme.

As you mentioned, the game was a bit buggy (although framing the stuck-to-floor as part of the godly punishment was a nice touch ;) ). My game session ended up freezing completely, with the music running, but the game otherwise being unresponsive (I couldn't even close it without ending the process). The effect of having a grace period after leaving a platform which @flaterectomy mentioned above, would also have improved the feel of the controls.

The music was simple, but it kinda grew on me. The noise effects for the coins was nice and satisfying, now it just needs some sound effect feedback for other effects (like buying items, jumping and landing) :)

The concept of having the physics variables decrease over time, and buying items from the world to temporarily increase them, was a very interesting mechanic. And it worked especially well with the reset-upon-death mechanic, which meant that you were careful to avoid death right after buying items, but after a while started to actively seeking out deadly obstacles, in order to regain lost speed. That duality in the mechanics worked really well I think!

All in all, the game had interesting mechanic-twists, and was a quite good first try in the platformer genre, especially since it was made in only 15 hours! :)

>Indulging in greed. >Endure godly punishments. >DON'T BUY THE BRACELET!!!

rob-white 2017-12-06 19:51

I liked the depth of the game. I had a breadth of content that you could spend a good while exploring - trying to find everything. The jumping and movement was a tad floaty but it was still relatively easy to get around. I also liked the knights idle animation, flexing away.

serpentworks-games 2017-12-08 08:44

I really like the concept and ideas behind this! I've not encountered a platformer where the gravity and speed change before, and even though jumps are a little 'floaty' it still feels super cool to be able to jump and fly across like half the level at once. There's a lot of stuff to try to find and find coins for, and it really prompts for exploration.

Things are a little buggy yes, but I like that you added an 'if you're stuck on the floor, jump!' indicator and just tied it into the story. A nice little touch for a bug, that is now a feature!

This is really impressive and fun for only 15 hrs of work~ Great job!

arputikos 2017-12-08 08:58

Nice game. Sound of coins is very satisfying ;). I saw some glitches but it's not as bad as you claim. Interesting concept!

cliff-lee-cl 2017-12-08 09:08

Great concept for the theme, I like it!

The level design is good, but I will discover I get stuck in some places because I was too greedy lol.

Nice work for less than 24 hrs!

norrimo 2017-12-08 11:09

Your game concept of bying things which give you speed and juming height to avoid the negative effects of your world is interesting. At some points it was a bit annyiong because I stucked on the ground. But for your first plattformer it wasn't bad, especially that you created this all in 15 hours. :O I like the level design that you have so much things to discover but I never get it to point where I can buy the WTF bracelet. After I reading what it does it sounds not so useful. xD

I had some similar problems like you in my last LD the 39th with my game GREED. Yeahr, the name is quite similar with yours. It was my first platformer too. :D I think if you create a game where you will punished for only beeing in the world or waste too much time, there has to be a higher reward if you overcome it. And I think it would be more gracious if you don't loose the item bonus when you die. Because you collect so much coins than you lost them and you have no option to get the same coins back.

Maybe this is now a bad example but in dark souls you can collect souls from enemies and they die, but if you die you lost all your souls but the eneemies respawns. So you have ever the chance to get the same amount of souls back. It's often a balancing thing and maybe it is something what you can use in your post jam if you intended to create one. :) I would play it!

hugimugi7 2017-12-08 13:06

It's so simple yet addicting and fun! :grinning: The bugs actually make the game more funny and enjoyable and the music is repetitive yet it fits the game nicely.

vkmicro 2017-12-09 01:40

Whoa :D the feedback is so much more positive than I expected... Thank you all very much for the feedback and the changes you suggest which you think would make the game better. I truly appreciate it, means a lot. I note down all the comments / suggestions as well as all the feedback and at the end of the voting period I compare my overall score to my previous scored and such to reflect on all of that. Again, I truly appreciate all the feedback, especially happy about people who say the game was fun / addicting and who wanted to play the post-jam version. Unfortunately, while that is a highly likely thing to happen, it won't happen soon as over my winter break I'm planning a fairly large game project which won't be related to my jams but will utilize things I've learned from jams. But I do intend to finish this game up so thanks for all the feedback.

p.s. I'll play ALL of your games after my final exams are over, which will be in a week. My apologies for taking so long but voting period is still quite long.

Thanks again.

saramartins 2017-12-09 07:19

This was a fun game even though you didn't have much time to spend making it. I went in it already expecting crashing and collision bugs, so I must say it did crash and sometimes the little guy-thing got stuck on the floor. Jumping around fixed that. Not the crashing though lol. It was cool the exploration part, speacially for me being a collector, I had to have all the coins so I could have all the goodies. The jumping felt cool, however the movement was way to fast, making me fall of the platforms many times. The music and sound effects complemented the game nicely. Overall a cute game, congratulations :)

samusoidal 2017-12-10 15:00

Certainly confusing. The controls seemed glitchy, and the items seemed to make it impossible to win (like reducing the jump height with the fast boots while I'm on the lowest platforms). After 3 minutes I stopped playing because I had collected all the coins and had died, making it impossible to collect any more items. It's definitely a good concept game and I would be interested in a post-jam version.

sovogirl 2017-12-11 10:14

Weeeeeeeeem coins!!! Just for enjoyment to become richer for no apparent reason - love it