bryceltaylor 2017-12-02 03:48
We have ideas
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → Starbage Man
By bryceltaylor and William Macfarlane
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 720 | 3.28 | 47 | |
| Fun | 819 | 3.00 | 49 | |
| Innovation | 339 | 3.44 | 49 | |
| Theme | 553 | 3.46 | 48 | |
| Graphics | 838 | 3.00 | 50 | |
| Audio | 201 | 3.64 | 50 | |
| Humor | 46 | 4.09 | 49 | |
| Mood | 579 | 3.26 | 48 |
We have ideas
Pretty awesome first day of the Jam. Still working on it, but there are several playable sections that are pretty fun to noodle around on.
I think our game is going to be pretty rad. Space garbage!
I enjoyed the dialogue. I found flying and navigating to be too difficult.
Okay, this is by far the best game I've played for this LD so far! Excellent mechanics, interface, graphics (seriously, cutscenes in an LD game?) and even worldbuilding. 5 stars in everything (except audio, which gave 3.5 for voice acting). I want to keep playing, and will likely be back just for fun. Curious, was this in any way inspired by Schlock Mercenaries?
I thought this game was really funny. I'm not sure if all the voice acting was the tutorial section (I didn't skip the tutorial) but it was by far the best part of the experience for me.
I'd almost suggest making it unskippable if you haven't.
The game play itself was pretty standard space fare, it was a little weird running back and forth to the map and the cockpit to fly, I almost found it easier to just fly around until I found stuff by accident since the game area looped on itself.
All in all, the polish here is really really good.
Slow to start, but the idea of you slowly gaining more responsibilities as everyone else dies was not only a funny one, but a good one for gameplay. Regarding the boss' tutorial, I think it would be better if there were subtitles to it, since you can't always have sound enabled. Also, I'd prefer that he not take up the full screen while talking to you, since in many sequences you can still move while he is speaking. Allowing the user to play while being spoken to would quicken the pace of the game significantly. Still, a fun experience. Good job!
Great entry.
I found the navigation difficult. Either in an game HUD or pausing the ship while viewing the map would have helped me. The voice acting was great and story sold it. Clear objectives and mechanics worked well overall.
Thanks for the great feedback, everyone! It's really cool to have so much to think with this soon after the jam. This was our first game jam and I'm finding the experience pretty amazing.
There are a lot of half-finished ideas in the game -- we couldn't decide whether to lock controls when the boss was talking to you or not because we wanted to add a bunch of random superfluous interruptions to get in the way of you doing your job but not quite stop you entirely. Perhaps a smaller boss animation with more of the screen visible so you could more reasonably _try_ to work but still have it in the way.
I think the skeleton of the "frantically running back and forth between controls to manage too many things" mini-game is there, but it's not actually tuned right for gameplay so it perhaps just feels kind of confusing and hard without quite feeling frantic and silly and fun. But I think there's a glimmer of a fun mechanic there that could be unearthed.
We wanted there to be too much garbage, too much to do, and too many interruptions from your boss, and I think we successfully got all 3 of the pieces working-enough to see the skeleton of relationships between those systems.
@micahtron -- I've never heard of Sclock Mercenary, but now I have something new to read. Thanks!
A very funny game with a clever mechanic. I really liked it.
It does feel like the minigame of moving your cargo from hold to hold is never actually important: it's easier and faster to just fly to the black hole and dump the stuff.
Also, I ran into a game-breaking bug: the boss appeared, said "Next time, you should be a little bit more considerate" and then the boss screen never disappeared, rendering the game unplayable.
Despite all that, I still think this is a really good game. Good job!
@grentacular we did a lot of the work for putting in subtitles, but we didn't get them working in time. We also had a bug where the audio wasn't working at all that was related to the file with the subtitles and in the end we ripped it out to get it published in time.
Oh, I hear the voice of the captain! Cool idea, but I would appriciate subtitles too. Also, fullscreen head doesn't allow player to look around and get familiar with surroundings while listening. The general idea of the game is pretty good, just keep improving. =)
Funny game! It's hard to see games with narrative in a game jam. Well done!
A simple sugestion: down arrow to break, instead of going backwards. This way you can easily stop your ship.
That was a really unique idea! Had a little trouble navigating having to change between terminals, but all in all that was quite a bit of fun. I also noticed that the physics don't pause while you're being talked to, so I had a situation where I was slingshot out of a planet's orbit while I was watching the animation, then came back not really sure where I was.
Still, that was really well done. Keep up the great work!
I like the theme, and was entertained by the dialog of our boss dude. The premise was unique, though like a few others I found navigation and whatnot pretty difficult. With some tweaking this will be great!
Very slow start and maybe a little too much dialogue for this type of game. Also kinda hard to play. Neat concept though just needs some tuning, unique graphics too.
Check out my game if you would like https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/virus-detected
I've experienced a lot of issues with steering the player. Everytime voice-acting started - inputs were stick and player walked on it's own, also i couldn't steer starship in 'black hole' view and when i got info that i should press 'space' to shoot pellets - spacebar didn't work for me at all...
I give it a second try with windows version (i figured that maybe it's webgl issue) but this was even worse :(
I had to admit that voice acting was a really good idea and it was really funny ;)
Checkout **Voxel Mob Arena** here and please leave rating!: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/voxel-mob-arena
I really like the idea, but I found myself lost with all these mixed mechanics, with just some cartoonish guy explaining them (which is neat and I love it, but not enough to replace visual feedback). Also controls and/or collisions inside the ship are a bit unresponsive sometimes. I got lost all the time flying around the ship and finally got bored :( As I said, the voice acting, is a great detail, but that caused me some issues too, you should avoid player actions while cutscene is on screen. May be I'm a pretty lame player, I don't know. Is just my subjective opinion. Just take it in count (or not!) for your next game, or for this if you plan to improve it. Anyway, I can see there's work here, son Kudos for that.
Thanks everyone! You're all right, we do need to tune up some of the systems.
@Yngvarr @William-Macfarlane said a lot up above about why we made some of the decisions around the boss. Basically we didn't have time to tune a lot of systems and decided to put effort into turning the game into the tutorial to give a taste of all of the systems.
@bartosz @Chronosv2 @fernandxor It's quite deliberate to make flying the ship hard, namely, not being able to steer and see exactly where you're going at the same time, but I think with more tuning we could get it to feel a little more silly and a little less frustrating. Like how QWOP is hard (but nowhere near that extreme.) Probably making planets be further apart or you move slower would help. We could also have told you that you need to be at the pilot station to launch garbage, but I never went back to record more voiceover.
As for the boss freezing your controls, we did that to solve some problems with the events triggering for this section of the game to get it out on time, but the fact that the ship is still moving does cause some other problems. Ideally both you and the ship would be able to move while talking to the boss and he'd be more inconvenient rather than totally blocking.
@eric-florio Thanks, we might implement that.
@talon You're right. I think stuff is generally too quick to get to so you don't really need to spend time worrying about that in this version. In the future we'd like to make it more pressing. As for your other bug, It's really a feature! and a bug. There is a half-implemented system of planets exploding if you have too much waste, which happens now but we just don't explain it at all. We ran out of time and I don't think I recorded the audio to differentiate that from your ship blowing up.
I like the concept, though flying was a little hard. To me, the spaceflight mechanics were what I wanted to be fleshed out more. Flying around, getting caught in a planet's orbit and jettisoning the garbage without shooting it off into space is where much of the meat of the concept *should* be, I think. Especially for a jam game, you generally need to distill the game to its purest form, and the walking around in the spaceship didn't add much gameplay. I didn't enjoy having to move between the pilot seat and navigation computer. If this game was pilot view only, with on screen indicators for navigation and the voice over coming through a communications monitor on the side, I think you would have had a lot more time to polish the space flight and graphics.
I really enjoyed the narrative take, though. Automatically being assimilated by the corporation and rising through its ranks by not dying were a nice touch that added a lot of character. Fun writing!
Overall I see a lot of potential here, but right now I feel there focus isn't on the *right* parts. That said, maybe I am just more excited about space flight games than I am about walking around a space ship. :smile:
Thanks for playing our game Last Ticket and your game has a cool id.This type game is too hard for me and you are cool!
really fun game. Respect for the mechanics, simple clever :wink:
Man I like the humor of the game. You are the captain... and due budget cuts the complete crew. The mood of the game is great, also that you have different play modes :). But I did not die but accidentally flying in the black hole. Anyway this game is fun :).
This is an awesome little game, lovin the voices and how it ties into the game. I did find however that the movement when controlling the ship was really erratic. It was hard to do those fine movements. I just found it difficult to get into the orbit and most of the time i did, the orbit would just shoot me out in a direction getting me lost. When flying around, i did find myself lost a lot of the times and it got tedious to go back and forth to check the map. My intention was to press 'M' to check the map. If your ever planning to continue on this game, which i really hope you do, consider playing the game from a new player's perspective. Playtest the game, give to family and friends to see how they react with the game. If they react negatively edit the game accordingly. All in all, this is a great entry for the Ludum Dare. Congratulations! :smile:
Cool game, and of course the voice acting is a big plus. The cockpit features is really fun at first, but quickly gets annoying, specifically as we don't have a minimap nor any other navigation indication. And as other player told it, controls are a bit rough : we accelerate really fast...
But there are tons of interresting bits in your work and those mixed activities should be fun. If you wanted to keep developping the game, mixing onboard with space event might really be fun ! Anyway, congratulation for this ambitious submission.
Awesome! I like this style!
I need more!! GJ! You are cool!
Funny game but hard to control.
Good dialogue but the game should be more clear on what the player should do.
The voice acting is great!
The voice acting/tutorial/story is very well done. Almost to a fault - I found that I preferred 'advancing the story' over the gameplay itself. I might have preferred more to do in navigating around the stars - without landmarks or anything else to occupy your attention, navigating was a little less interesting than it could have been. Really liked the nod to asteroids. Well done!
Great and funny voice acting! The controls of the ship felt a bit clunky, the orbiting movement made me a bit dizzy...
Big project!
Love the tutorial. As some already say : hard to navigate. But it's a part of the fun :)
Good job!
The voice work in this is great, liked how it progressed the story and added humour to the game. Was fun to see how your role changed as you played and you moved up the role ladder. Thought that was pretty funny. Did have issues with the flight navigation and with some tweaking it could be a nicer experience but did like that you could go back in to the ship view and look at the galaxy map to see your position. Added a different element to the game.
There is a lot of content given in your game which is awesome. Many manageable positions. The tutorial was very good. Keep up the good work, the game has a lot of potential :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJv721Ieq1E
I love this game, your voice added some real depth!
The only bugs I saw were dialogs causing buttons to stick, and opening the captain console had me immediately turning left, because it was to the left of the user. The second could be fixed by using the same e key to enter a terminal and exit.
Well done.
Great story and VA. The star system navigation is a bit difficult as the zoom, is so close.
The game is probably 2.4 times too fast on a 144Hz monitor. Hint: Multiply the movement with the time delta.