minimurgle 2017-12-04 04:24
I think this game would have felt a lot better with the option to control the ship with the mouse.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → MAGNETOGRABBER 2000
By kroltan
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 507 | 3.05 | 31 | |
| Fun | 596 | 2.66 | 32 | |
| Innovation | 576 | 2.60 | 32 | |
| Theme | 520 | 2.98 | 32 | |
| Graphics | 389 | 3.18 | 32 | |
| Audio | 402 | 2.70 | 31 | |
| Humor | 496 | 2.05 | 30 | |
| Mood | 436 | 2.89 | 30 |
I think this game would have felt a lot better with the option to control the ship with the mouse.
The visual effects are kind of interesting, but the low-acceleration makes it tedious to control the ship. I figured out that the wrench repairs me. I don't know what the golden circle object does. I assume that there is no win condition (just get a high score) but I didn't play for very long.
Like the graphics, maybe the bottom bar could shine a littles less, but that's my opinion. Controls are a bit clunky and take a lot of time to get somehow used to. Other than that its a good distraction for a while :]
@almost The golden circle object is a clock, it gives you extra time. By default you start with 5 minutes to collect as much stuff as you can, but you can extend that by grabbing clocks.
Cool idea, but the movement is sluggish and annoying.
Nice game, I thing that it would be useful to have an arrow showing the current direction and magnitude of the velocity, it would help with controlling the ship.
The controls feel very slow, and im not quite sure how it plays into the theme, but I can see with more tuning of the controls it can be a fun game.
5 minutes for the first level also feels quite long, could do with more staggered level times to build up control. Maybe routes to travel through?
@wevel Funny you should mention that. A more implicit mechanic already exists. The faster you go, the bigger the field of view becomes, and the camera pans to show further ahead of you, putting the ship off-center.
(unrelated, there is also a slight golden gradient in the background that indicates the direction to the center of the map, where the collector is located)
@jons-games Good idea! Albeit that could be challenging to do, since all maps are randomly generated. The time limit is the same on any map size, actually.
Thanks everyone so far for all the feedback! I read every comment!
Cool idea, fun game. Not sure how it fits into the theme though. Also, kind of hard, and slow paced.
Hey Krol, I finally finished helping set up our game, I got a good opportunity to play yours. Congratulations on finishing up your entry!
Anyhow, and bear with me for a second. My first impression was that, for a simple premise, 5 minutes were a bit too much, specially with things that extended gameplay.
But soon, I found out 5 minutes were not nearly enough, and I had a rollercoaster of emotions when ~~crashing into rocks and mindlessly drifting like a clumsy walrus into the depths of space~~ piloting the ship. While I didn't really understand the game at a first glance, I quickly caught up with the mechanics, and had a blast.
True to the theme, the more ores, the harder the game was. And it was hard enough without them, but in a fun way. While the controllers were a bit finicky, they were not really unfair, and I managed to do some cool maneuvering every now and then. Getting the ores to their stashing zone felt _so good_. At points, I was just roaming around just trying to see how many I could have with me at any given time. It was madness. _Madness!_ The glowing and effects did wonders to the atmosphere.
Great submission, pal, and keep up the good work! :whale:
I agree with everyone else that said the controls were too slow/sluggish. I managed to get three rocks/ores/whatever the colorful balls are into the goal, and then dreaded the idea of slowly bumping into asteroids to go collect more...
The magnetism mechanic was interesting, and I think you could do some really cool stuff by experimenting with different shapes for the ship if you want to continue developing this. I can imagine some combat scenarios too that involve throwing rocks at enemies :P
Graphics and audio worked together nicely.
Hey Krol, nice game! I enjoyed the play I just had
Loved the magnet feature and it's cooldown, it was satisfying sucking in the meteor chunks and adding them onto my spaceship for transportation.
The asteroids were in fair positions as well not being too overwhelming
One suggestion for making this game more fun would be to have upgrades at the drop off station, maybe this would give special abilities like boost, lasers to fire at the asteroids in the way or even side boosters. These could be got depending on what ores you have collected e.g (2 blue + 2 green = lasers)
Kind of hard, but it wasn't too punishing - My kind of challenge
Cheers :smile:
Nice game. I love the graphics. The gameplay is good, nice addition with powerups. But I think the spaceship is too slow. Other than that, great entry!
For some reason he controls feel a bit off. Otherwise, well done.
I like the concept even though it is a familiar one, and I though the game was well executed and offers some replay value due to the different difficulty modes, and the core game mechanic. Graphics were also well done, esp liked the particle FX and glow FX.
The effects looks super nice against the black background, art as a whole is pretty good actually, it's a nice style It would have been a good idea to include background music to help liven the game up a bit and the controls are quite difficult to use but other than that I enjoyed it :blush:
Thanks everyone! I'll try to improve the handling in future games.
@ponchoguy That store idea is really nice, definitely would have done it if not for the Compo time constraints. I don't really plan on making a post-LD version, though.
@rainbowjam Believe me, I've tried! I actually finished the game in about 32h, and the rest was spent _trying_ to make a BGM that fitted the game's mood and pace. But the combination of my disastrous composition skills with the fact that the only software available to me (Bosca Ceoil) made very "lo-fi" / "retro" sounds mostly did not align very well with the existing SFX. (Which by the way were all performed with mouth air sounds and filtered with Audacity. So, very soft sounds) So, after spending hours unproductively, I left the game soundtrackless.
I'll reiterate what many people have said. Graphics are great. The hit effect especially really sells the impact. It's also easy to tell what I'm supposed to be doing and how I'm supposed to be doing it. Outside of that, it doesn't feel very good to control. Allowing for the direction to be controlled by the mouse would go a long way, but there's just too much momentum to really feel like I really have any control of the ship.
Video review here at 0:00 https://youtu.be/4xvWzFL3Kp8
Personally I love the controls. There's something very satisfying about the physics. You just get better the more you play, to the point where I was gently steering and bouncing/flinging them into the goal after a while. Really cool game!
I like the idea, it's sort of like asteroids but you have to get stuff instead of destroying stuff. It would have been nice to have some spacey/mysterious background music. And overall the physics and controls are quite reminiscent of Asteroids. gg wp
Good game overall! But controls are a bit... uncontrollable :) And that makes game slower, than intended.
Neat little game - I don't think I've got anything to say that hasn't already been said - the movement does feel sluggish but the idea is pretty neat and the other mechanics play well into it. Well done.
Nice game! I enjoyed the idea and thought the rotational momentum was a neat factor to include in a spaceship game.
The biggest drawback was the audio. The audio that was there was awesome, it was what was missing that was critical. In short, you had three sounds that were really missing: Spaceship damage, magnetograbber, and music. I do realize this is a jam game and not everyone wants to spend their precious time doing audio, but I think in your case you were really close to getting there.
First sound is the easiest, damage is pretty easy. Especially when you have a destruction sound. If you were feeling short for time, I would've taken your explosion sound, cut off the first chunk of it (0.1-0.3 sec), made it fade out, and then maybe add a short-tight reverb to smooth it out. The issue there would possibly be a repetitious sound that becomes tiring to bumbling players. A good jam-technique for that issue is to play each iteration of the sound with a slightly random pitch and volume. In my code I frequently have these two lines: ``` sound.setPitch(math.random() * 0.05 + 1) sound.setVolume(math.random()*0.1 + basevolume). ```
This helps add enough variety to remove a ot of the annoyance factor.
The other sounds are a bit harder. Magnetograbber wouldn't be super hard. It is up to you of course, but I'd experiment with some sort of humming sound, take a mic to your AC unit, or even your throat when you hum.
Music/ambiance is a bit harder, but in this case I think it is pretty critical. It would really help the mood. Space games tend to be a bit easier because all you need is some sort of thin pad doing ambience, and then some sort of basic interest factor, high pitched tinkle sound maybe, or sporadically placed bloops. Again, this is up to your skill level and interest, but I think it would really enhance the mood and bring in the player more.
The other aspect of your game that I felt needed a little more attention was the controls. The relation of your game to the theme really hinged on your controls. I think you had a great start. But I think maybe you should've made it easier and more responsive at the start, and then much less responsive when picking up point things. Maybe even have it to the point where it starts easier, and then once you get ~3 pick ups it is to the point where it is now.
Anyways, I think your graphics worked well. I could tell it was jam graphics, quickly done and done with the intent of getting something decent looking into the game. But I think it worked really well like that. The simplistic feel really works well for me and the look you came up with was really easy to read.
Gameplay wise I think you nailed the scope for a jam game. The controls and idea behind the game was simplistic and easy to follow. But yet it filled out a complete game. Frequently LD games have the idea but not the execution, or everything is there but it is just hard to follow. You nailed all of that.
All in all, good job! Sorry if I talked too much about audio, its just part of gamedev that I really enjoy.
Wow this game was hard, I feel miserable for having failed so much :S Anyway, despite my inability to complete the first level, I find this an excellent accomplishment for a 48 hours effort: I found no bugs and I didn't see any performance issues. Also, the controls are challenging, but fair. I see some "predictable" math in there, which is making it hard and challenging, but *fair*. Good effort! :)
@wetdesertrock Wow, thanks for the in-depth feedback!
I indeed ran out of time, but not to record the sounds, but to implement them into the game. The pitch-and-volume idea is actually great, thanks for the tip!
You give an interesting suggestion of scaling the maneuverability. I tried to make the difficulty completely self-inflicted, but my idea was putting as little constraint or artificial "fudge factors" into the game as possible, to allow a higher skill ceiling. As often is with this kind of design, I forgot about the first impressions completely!
@asilva4000 I'm glad you enjoyed! The predictability is something I really tried making sure worked fine (as well as a non-biased map generator). As for the levels, don't worry! The larger levels are actually _easier_ (*don't tell anybody!*) since the time limit is the same and there are more rocks about. (and more asteroids, so watch out!)