2017-12-05 14:57
We would love to hear your comments and feedback! It was a huge task to make everything in time so we hope you enjoy it. Let us know if you managed to escape the apocalypse :)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → Althea and the Magical Fruit
By nights87
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 778 | 3.21 | 23 | |
| Fun | 959 | 2.78 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 1039 | 2.50 | 23 | |
| Theme | 947 | 2.88 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 686 | 3.29 | 24 | |
| Humor | 593 | 2.86 | 21 | |
| Mood | 568 | 3.28 | 23 |
We would love to hear your comments and feedback! It was a huge task to make everything in time so we hope you enjoy it. Let us know if you managed to escape the apocalypse :)
Hey! Nice game you have, the first impression was like "wow, that's like the old Final Fantasy games", especially that bed trick (when you are standing in bed and it looks like you are actually sleeping).
I love how every citizen of the little town has its own personality.
And the ball! You can move it to peoples home, that was a surprise.
So, I have some feedback ready. First of all, letter sound can be annoying after 15 minutes of play. I suggest you to lower it's volume a little bit. Secondly, I like the overall idea and I think that you can create a full version of that. Plus you know some famous games like Undertale which all have some similar aspects and they did well.
I think you can work on the story to create a few hours adventure.
Graphics are solid, I understand that it's hard to create something polished and for 72-hour work it's more than OK. The good part is that interactive objects easily distinguished from environment sprites.
Good job, hope to see this game polished and ready to Steam.
@interpol Thanks heaps for your feedback! I'm glad to hear you liked it (and escaped? haha). I will definitely take your feedback on board when I polish it (I agree with you about the text sound). Cheers for playing :D
Yeah, and some tips for you: try to play and rate as many games as possible, it will help you to get more feedback and ratings!
@interpol Thanks! Already onto it.
Seems like a good game, however, I couldn't manage to reach the apocalypse :(
I gave peaches to mom, the dog, the sorceress and the family in the village, there's one more home I couldn't entered in and when I'll try to sleep, it says I have more peaches to give.
It takes quite a long time to travel around the map and controls feels laggy so I gave up.
I really wanted to see what will be going on and was very entertained by the idea behind.
The mood in the game is really good, graphics are very nice too but I could not make it (to the most interesting part I suppose).
@masadow Ah shame! It's probably not very clear but you have to give peaches to each of the cats in the cat lady's house. I might make that more obvious. Thanks for your feedback :) I hope you give it another try cos you're right, day 3 is where it all happens ;) And if the controls are laggy I'd recommend downloading the full version, that should fix it.
An ambitious project for sure.
I feel like the category this game excels at is 'Mood', since it's more about the dialog and events, and I think the game had a decent pace.
The graphics were good, but quite inconsistent at times, and a fitting font would've made a big difference in the dialog.
The absense of sound in this game was a bit disappointing, since good sounds could've ramped up the 'Mood' quite a bit. Also the text scroll sound was a bit too loud.
My biggest pet peeve with this game was the distances you had to travel, and the fact that you couldn't speed up the walking speed at all (although why you couldn't came clear to me at the third day).
All in all, I enjoyed the dialog and the story of the game, and even though I wasn't able to finish it (Couldn't get the keys without failing), I still found it enjoyable experience, good job d:
@zantze Thanks for playing it and giving us your thoughts! It's how we learn for next time :) I agree the world is a bit too big. It was our first game so we didn't really have a good idea of scale and there was also a lot of cut content too that would have added more to the days. But glad to hear you enjoyed the story :D
And as a hint for getting the keys: The Thompson family has one notable weakness ;)
Nice small little game :) Really good work on the art! All the characters look neat! Lol but what was up with the flower pot out side the house? Looked like it was made in Paint xD (Last min asset i guess :p). I also liked the interactive things like the football. I also liked how she got out of bed, very smart! It was the down arrow animation frame. All in all, well done! And all the best :)
@steven-pinto You're game was great too :) Thanks for the comment. Haha you're absolutely right - some drawings we added to the game as placeholders until better art could be made, but in the end time ran out and some of the placeholder art got left in!
Nice atmospheric experience! Loved it from start to finish. One thing though: sometimes webgl gets all stuttery and this enables you to clip through collision(and stuck there) Had to replay the game from the beginning(got stuck at the end of the second day, in the Thompson's furniture =D )
Really weird story here. I see a lot of effort in making the game. Unfortunately, I gave up from taking the keys after failing too much... There are lot of room for improvement but good job for your first LD
@ongomato Yeah atmosphere was definitely what we were going for. Thanks ongomato. And we appreciate the feedback. The stuttering is something to do with the web version that I haven't been able to fix yet. If anyone else is having the same issue, I'd recommend downloading the .zip version for a better experience.
@kyoute Yep plenty to work on to improve but can't wait for the one! The keys are tricky but the Thompson's give you a hint on one of the previous days ;) Thanks for your comment
I failed picking the key too :c
It was quite obvious what might happen (after reading your small information below the game), but I missed some introduction to the third day. Something like the mother eating the dog - what ever :P something that tells you - WOAH, I should avoid them now.
For example, one trauma of my early kid days when playing Terranigma there's that zombie town. First everything is okay and so, but after sleeping everything is destroyed and the character says when waking up "It smells like rotten flesh...". This was so terrifying, I still remember this moment so well. Maybe something like this would improve the third day for you too.
Since I'm not the only one failing the key part, maybe you should add some help after failing too often. Also blocking the path to the farm might be good on the third day (I tried and found nothing at the tree :P). Also the reading boxes - make it skippable after the first time read (I accidentally read the farmers notice 4 times in a row >.<).
To sum it up - very nice, I like these kind of games. But keep the stale running parts to a minimum and focus on the action parts!
@fis Those are some good ideas. On the third day we originally we planned for the mother to be standing facing the wall, acting strange, only to become aggressive if you step on any of the furniture! (I don't know if you noticed but on day 1 she yells at you if you step on some of the objects in the house). Your dog was also going to attack you on day 2, and on that day you would have had to step on the furniture in order to be 'safe' from it. Unfortunately all that got cut due to time constraints but you can see remnants of the ideas there.
Sorry you made the trip to the tree on the third day and found nothing. It sounded like a 'fruitless' venture :P We really should block the path on the final day. Thanks for playing!
@nights87 These are nice indicators - I suggest you should try to implement things like that not to be noticed occasionally, but due to the way the story is being told to force the player experience them. Just like you did as constraint to sleep - make the mother ask you to take something from the desk and make her yell when doing so. This would create so "WTF"-moments, making the players think!
Amazing, it has such a great attention to detail to it, when I kicked a soccer ball into the door it opened ^^
There's certainly a lot of intrigue here, but I think the game, on a minute-to-minute basis, is kind of boring. The map, especially the farm and forest, are twice as big as they need to be; the text can't be sped up, skipped, or switched to a shorter version after hearing it once; I think some of the text was too "creepy for the sake of creepiness" to be actually creepy (though I think it's pretty hard to induce real creepiness in such a short time, so maybe it would be better in a full game); there's some collision detection issues that make it a bit difficult to navigate; and it seems I wasn't the only one who forgot about the keys on the final day and went to the tree for a "fruitless" adventure. I know there was some foreshadowing, and reading it after the fact was like "of course!" but my first instinct was to go to the source of the mystery for some closure / super spooky thing to occur. I've read a bit of what you wanted to do, and I think that all sounds pretty cool. It's a shame that didn't make it into the final game.
If I can offer some advice: make some more, smaller changes to throw the player off sooner, like the mushroom circle changing shape / size / numbers. And definitely add music, especially since the text noise is kind of annoying. And I don't know if this was in the original vision, but I thought there were a lot things that were introduced but never expanded upon, like the mushroom circle, abandoned playground, soccer ball, fallen log blocking the alternate path down the forest... Also, play, vote, and comment on other people's games!
Great work accomplishing something this large in scope in such a small window of time. My biggest piece of feedback is that you should give the player the ability to speed up or skip dialogue.
I gave up after searching the whole map multiple times trying to find more people to give peaches to. I gave to "Mam", the dog, the old lady and her three cats, and the flower obsession family. Game keeps saying i need to give out more peaches but i can't find anyone and it takes so long to get around the map, i don't feel like searching it a fourth time... From what i played the humor was the only thing i felt was really good, but then again i got annoyed for not progressing so if I had, i probably wouldve liked the game more.
@invixel if you want to give it another go, you need to feed the chickens as well. And on the third day, you need to grab the key to progress
The graphics were not necessarily bad on their own, but there were so many conflicting art styles and blurring sprites that it really made the game as a whole look bad. Where this game is the best is probably mood.