FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD40 → Deadline

Deadline

By sholf

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall2233.5850
Fun1523.6550
Innovation1463.5950
Theme1573.8449
Graphics4053.1350
Audio1473.4748
Humor1733.2649
Mood2463.2648

Comments

jcmonkey 2017-12-04 03:46

nice game, who doesnt like a good run around and smack things and get loot and power up game nice job

formalcloud 2017-12-04 03:49

Aha, I love the pencil mechanic with the writing. Very clever! Nice work!

arthur-amorim 2017-12-04 04:15

Great work! Game idea is really unexpected and really cool.

xacur 2017-12-04 06:56

Really funny and ingenious game. The characters are really cute, they make you want to beat them with a pencil. I need a version of this for software development, lol.

captaindreamcast 2017-12-04 07:10

The pen really was mightier than the sword after all.

I'm with the other posters, I liked the way you interpreted the theme. The gameplay had a good feel to it as well and you really managed to balance the difficulty quite well!

endesga 2017-12-04 07:46

nice little game you have here!

11tomi12 2017-12-04 09:01

Great game. Just loving it!

stevenjmiller 2017-12-04 09:18

Really fun game and stellar use of the theme. The hats were also a very nice touch. My best score was 39.

dusho 2017-12-04 11:13

Fun game and really nice take on theme. Those boosts were really cool idea there. Some editors came really fast out of nowhere.. and often I boosted my self into them. Had fun playing this.

scott-r-howell 2017-12-04 12:26

I like how the enemies run away instead of just dying, aside from that its an addictive game with a solid game loop

benhumphries 2017-12-04 12:40

That pencil swing is so satisfying! Great job!

mess110 2017-12-04 13:16

Nice game, the first try I didn't know I had to write. Silly me.

falk-bruskeland 2017-12-04 14:05

Nice game. Funny that the enemies try to escape you!

are-sundnes 2017-12-04 14:22

Any chance for a Mac or HTML build? :)

sholf 2017-12-04 14:38

Thanks for the feedbacks everyone! Looks like we passed the 20 ratings mark, wooo!

@are-sundnes Unfortunately no :( The game was made using GMS and I only have the license for windows.

skibisky 2017-12-04 14:56

Great game, but I found that I could keep dashing with little consequence. Was that intended?

sholf 2017-12-04 15:23

@skibisky Your pencil gets shorter every time you dash! It might not be noticeable early on, but once you're past 40-50 pages written you should start to feel it :)

Shorter pencil = shorter swing length & knockback, when you run out you are no longer able to write/dash.

skibisky 2017-12-04 15:45

@Sholf ah, just before I died I tried swiping with a 1 pixel 'long' pencil. I didn't see any 'refills' among the powerups, is that to end the game?

sholf 2017-12-04 15:57

@skibisky Yep, that's the catch of the pencil dash. It's powerful but it ultimately lowers the amount of pages you can write. If you never use the dash you can potentially write 100 pages (which is really hard due to the weight of the papers, my personal best is 59 haha). So you have to balance out between using the dashes and saving up your pencil so you can write more pages.

I wish I could explain more of the features in the game itself (or add more visual indicators) but I was running low on time haha.

call-me-nutty 2017-12-04 17:56

Really cool game. I love the writing mechanic, it really adds another layer of challenge on top of the whole; whack em thing. The game was really nice to play and I had absolutely no issues with the controls (in fact it was kind of satisfying churning out paper after paper) the power-ups were an awesome addition as well and the music added some nice depth. In terms of what to improve, I'd say that a graphics upgrade is needed (the play looks very bland for example). Otherwise a very, very solid and good game that has great potential. Well Done.

sholf 2017-12-04 18:15

@call-me-nutty Thanks for the feedback! Art is definitely my weakest department haha. I was planning to add more background variety but in the end I didn't have the time for that. Glad you enjoyed it!

remco 2017-12-04 18:22

_(Please put the files in a folder before you zip them.)_

I like the music!

A background with streets / building or desks would help a lot to ground the setting. It seems kind of empty now...

It also seems kind of easy (but not _too_ easy), which is good, because I'm pretty tired tight now. :slight_smile:

alexv 2017-12-04 18:26

https://imgur.com/a/RrVAZ i'd play a bit more to smash your highscore, i have a thing for beating people at their own games, but i have school tomorrow so that's it from me.

probably the best game i've played so far

colisan 2017-12-04 20:19

So... I started dashing like a madman and ended with a 1px long pencil XD

Very, very, very clever mecanism, and very well done game. The graphics could be have been a bit more polished, but it's still very fun and a bit addictive. I ended up playing longer than expected =)

mark-kennedy 2017-12-04 20:25

I enjoyed this a bit more than I expected, it was fun frantically writing papers. The graphics we're simple but readable so I see no major fault there.

belowparallel-ian 2017-12-05 00:22

Probably the most fun of all the games I've played so far. This is really great all around. The gameplay is addictive, audio is nice, and the concept is innovative and fits the theme well. The weakest area for this game is probably the graphics, but they aren't even bad. Great work.

josh-ayres 2017-12-05 03:00

I didn't find any enemies in my play through...

sholf 2017-12-05 04:22

@josh-ayres Did you write on the pages? (right-clicking)

The amount of editors (enemies) that go after you depends on how many written pages you have. They're there to collect your manuscript, so if you haven't written any they wont even bother! :)

jeffchen 2017-12-05 07:04

This game is really fun!I like the gameplay,but i donw know what to after my pencil disappeared.And the music is so cool,i like it!

diptoman 2017-12-05 07:29

LOL brilliant idea, and well executed! Put a smile on my face after a playthrough, hahah. Pos'd!

gwolf86 2017-12-05 14:06

Great idea and a really fun game. I like the simple graphics and the gameplay felt well balanced.

oson 2017-12-05 17:26

I like it, the game play has a nice flow and the mechanics work as expected. The music and sound effect go well with the visuals.

niterich 2017-12-05 18:12

A well-made game that was fun and creative, albeit a bit slow. Maybe I was just really bad at it, but I didn't notice the whole "slowdown with more pages" thing. The music, from a compositional standpoint, was really good, but I personally can't stand the main instrument on the title screen.

sholf 2017-12-05 19:24

@niterich Thanks for the feedback!

I definitely agree that the game feels a bit slow at start. I'll try to improve the pacing on future versions. :)

sir-mr-dr-prof-sr-jr-phd 2017-12-05 23:23

Satisfying sounds and music, nice graphics, clever concept, and hats are a nice touch. I put more far more time into this game than any other one so far. Gameplay is fun for the first couple of games.

I enjoy the triple usage of the "The more you have the worse it is" theme. 1. The more papers you have the slower you more, 2. the more written pages you have the more enemies come after you, 3. The more written pages you have/ dashes used the shorter your range is.

I have found that the best strategy is actually pretty boring. I go around the map and collect the amount of papers equal to the score I want (I first write 10-15 pages to speed up this project,) then pick up a writing power-up, then run from enemies and dash whenever they get close to me, never attacking. I managed to get 63 points doing this before running out of pencil from dashing so much https://imgur.com/a/fFtuZ

I found that in the late game I would be overrun and forced to dash instead of fighting back since attacking the horde just slowed down the people in front and it would just give me more papers which would slow me down more which would make me fight more and this cycle would repeat until I mis-timed a swing.

I recommend that you lower the rate at which enemies spawn and lower their health but instead make them faster the more paper you have so that the late game would be more of a challenge of timing rather than endurance.

sholf 2017-12-05 23:38

@sir-mr-dr-prof-sr-jr-phd Thanks for the detailed feedback! That's an impressive score you got, definitely beat my personal best haha. I agree that late-game it's near impossible to avoid the enemies without dashing. I'll definitely rebalance the spawn rate on the post-compo version (your suggestion to increase their speed is also quite good!).

The empty paper stacking up due to the amount of enemies late game is also a problem. I thought of adding a button that lets you drop empty papers but I didn't want to overcomplicate the game. Maybe I can mess around with lowering the magnetic pull when you have more papers and see how it goes. Thanks again for spending a good amount of time on the game haha, I appreciate the feedback!

hystaf 2017-12-06 10:04

I like this game. For me @sir-mr-dr-prof-sr-jr-phd said what I thinks (and more) about your game. Also the start is a little bit slow. But at the End it's a really good experience.

priom 2017-12-06 10:58

Now here's a unique take on the theme and bonus humour points too.

jk5000 2017-12-06 13:17

I have no idea what the goal are in this game. But it looking great and the music is really good. And both the player movement and fighting is pretty well made. Overall well done.

sholf 2017-12-06 15:38

@jk5000 Yeah the goal was not conveyed very well in the game until you get into the lose screen, which is entirely my fault. I assumed that people would understand from reading the game description here or in the itch.io page and didn't consider that some people might've missed that. Should've added some sort of a short sentence at the start of the game like "The editors are coming, write as much as you can!"

Thanks for the feedback!

drtizzle 2017-12-07 10:11

Thanks for your comment, the link is fixed! Unfortunatly I cannot play your game because I don't have a Windows machine.

staircase27 2017-12-07 22:54

Fun little game.

kashif 2017-12-11 03:33

Nicely done.

sean-s-leblanc 2017-12-11 07:02

Fairly simple, but fun little game! The gameplay does start to get boring after a little while though; having powerups definitely helps add to the variety, but it's hard to stay interested after you've written a couple dozen pages.

cayleblucas 2017-12-16 09:18

Really enjoyable game, well executed too :)