Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → America 2018
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 123 | 3.76 | 46 | |
| Fun | 176 | 3.61 | 46 | |
| Innovation | 554 | 2.68 | 46 | |
| Theme | 291 | 3.53 | 46 | |
| Graphics | 58 | 4.10 | 46 | |
| Audio | 17 | 4.11 | 46 | |
| Humor | 315 | 2.76 | 40 | |
| Mood | 32 | 3.90 | 45 |
I really love your graphical style! It achieves so much with so little and looks so darn stylish to boot.
The controls felt a little bit weird at times (a little like sliding but not really) but it didn't detract from the experience for me and almost contributed to the atmosphere a bit.
I'm gonna bookmark this so I can give you some good review scores when scoring unlocks :thumbsup:
Thanks! I've noticed the sliding as well but didn't get around into digging into what might be its cause. :)
Such cool visual effects in this. The shooting feels amazing too, kinda feels like a paintball gun which I love! The way the bullets drop is great. :D
Thank you. I've noticed that I tend to steer towards adding juice to my LD games rather than experimenting with fresh gameplay ideas. Maybe I should try it the other way around some time :D
Great game! I would love if you'd add a sensitivity slider next time :)
The gameplay is fun and well made with good feedbacks on the mechanics. Also, the art is nice and the level design is good. Good game!
PS: My socre is 1189
Music suited the mood well. I really liked how the world "constructed" itself at the edge of the fog.
The sound effects are really good.The shooting feels quite satisfying.
AI Path-finding could use a little more work, or it's on purpose left that way? Anyway it has made the game not that hard in a good manner.
I really like the low poly abstract artstyle and the music fits nicely as well. The only slight immersion breaker: (maybe webgl only?) the "invisible" mouse gets stuck at the edges of the screen, preventing me from turning further, which is a little bit problematic if there is a monster coming from that direction ^^
Thanks everyone for the feedback!
@11tomi12 Good call, I somehow managed to completely forget about that. Inverse Y too :)
@tmpxyz It's bad, yeah :). Once a monster sees you for the first time, it'll try to walk directly towards you without any pathfinding.
@likitus Could be browser specific since it doesn't happen to me (Chrome on Windows). A fullscreen button should be available in the corner of thhe webgl player and if all else fails, the standalone Windows build shouldn't have this issue.
Your graphics are really interesting, I like it ;) But you can't rotate 360°? The camera got stuck at about 270° and I had to rotate back. Because of that the monsters got me! ;) (I played the web-version)
I'm seconding tmpxyz, the shooting felt really satisfying, not sure what it was but I liked it! Art and audio fit really well as well
Cool game with good atmosphere. The graphics looked very well done and the shooting is satisfying. The controls we're a little bit wonky at times and for me the fps dropped a few times making it even more wonky (I played the web version that may explain it). I managed to grab quite a few stars before falling of the map, on one of the outside walls there is a gap which you can walk through :stuck_out_tongue:
Yeah, the web version doesn't seem to behave very consistently. I'll add a note of it to the game description. Thanks for the feedback! :)
You did a great job on the mood, the music and SFX are awesome. Every time I heard that breathing sound I was terrified. Love the game.
Amazing gameplay and graphics! loved the mechanic, enemies getting destroyed when you pick stars builds up some strategy! had a nice time playing, my Highscore was 1750. Also, I was single-firing until I realize that I could hold the button, then the game became much easier.
I liked the overall aesthetic, the character/ world design. The sound effect for the gun was great. I would have liked a sensitivity slider for a first person shooter because it was way too sensitive for me. The path-finding was also a bit dodgy (the enemies could get stuck/lost). It was a good bit of fun, I would have liked at least another enemy type.
This game is great! I know some other people mentioned the pathfinding, but I noticed that sometimes the monsters would seem to get stuck in the wall, if they were trying to go through it, and wouldn't turn to me if I came around the corner.
The music and sounds were great, the atmosphere is moody, and the shooting is satisfying. Amazing entry! Thanks for sharing
Holy cow, **I LOVE THAT SYNTH!!!**
Really best music in a game so far. I also think the "sketching into reality" effect of building level elements is really well done, and has great synergies with the art effect.
The shooter mechanics are very simple and the controls are just shy of being snappy and juicy enough to give you that Quake vibe that the music and the pentagrams single handedly do.
But dyamn, that synth. 5 goosebumps out of 5 for audio.
Original graphic style, adapted and pleasant music, classic but effective gameplay. :-D
It could have been interesting to foresee several types of collectable objects bringing more varieties in the effects of monsters' spawning.
Tried the WebGL version, looked good. I know I am overly picky, but I sort of wish the character could jump. The music and style was great, I like how they wen together
Great work on the graphics, sounds and gun feel! Not necessarily the most innovative game around, but I still really enjoyed that. High score was 2700!
Music and atmosphere are amazing. As you said AI for the ennemies is quite dummy but I think it fits the game spirit. Controls are goods and addictive, just the mouse is too sensitive for me.
Great game overall :)
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I really liked this! With a more interesting level design and more advanced AI it could be a great leaderboard-oriented game.
The simple and kind of cheesy graphics work really well in this game! The controls are smooth and though the audio was repetitive, it didn't really get annoying or anything. I noticed that when you collected a star, all of the currently active monsters would disappear. This this was an interesting gameplay mechanic that did kind of change how I played; I knew I could run into closed corridors without worrying about getting caught by the horde of monsters chasing me as long as there was a star at the end. In fact, the corridors were the ideal place to find stars, as there was a smaller chance of a monster spawning an instantly attacking you (which was an annoying occurrence at the higher spawn counts, maybe try to give the player a "bubble" around them where enemies won't spawn?). All said, my issues were minor and I really enjoyed playing this game. Nice work!
The web version was a little laged, but overall i did enjoy it! Nice graphics and very good music. Controls are really responsive and the dark ambient is very well done. Nice!
Very enjoyable game , just did a short initial play video of it which I will upload soon.
I like it, especially the visuals and sound, but the controls were glitching for me, which made it barely playable (that might be due to playing it with HTML5, though). Still fun! :)
Video review and play of game https://youtu.be/-EYXs31kKlM?t=17m
Audiovisually this game is awesome, and the shooting feels great, but the gameplay left me wanting for more. It's kinda bland, like a generic shooter.
That was a lot of fun, I really like the art style! It was just starting to get difficult and I fell out of the map :D The little splashes the bullets made on impact were great too. Nice work!
The ambiance is very spooky, and I always get a heart attack when I get attacked from behind.
I love the art and the lighting you used. The music is great as well
I'm not sure if this is a bug or it was intended, the HTML 5 version has a behavior where the direction you're looking at changes spontaneously into unpredictable areas, making it very misleading to understand where you are looking at.
Also, one last thing, the map is great, it feels like a maze :) but be careful about filling in holes. On my second play through, I was hiding in corners and ended up falling off the map because one of the walls had an opening
Good job! :)
Oo, very pretty. To listen to and to see. I really enjoyed the music and sfx, nice. Good take on the theme as well. Would have liked to see more.. eh, something. Anyhow, very interesting atmosphere. Great job!
What if Minecraft's world fell victim to the Upside Down??
Hiscore of 1998.
Love the juice in this, the music was entrancing and the art was squishy and evil and consistent. I really felt like you made a cohesive world here way above the range a typical compo game can approach. Outstanding!
Of course the concept of the gameplay was not fresh, but that's not what you were after here.
Regarding the nuances of the game feel, most importantly the act of shooting felt satisfying. The randomization of the spray was a really nice touch that gave your excellent visuals some room to breathe. Moving was good when it was nonstop, but there was a bit of weirdness in the deceleration. At first I thought it was simply a matter of decelerating too slowly... but what happens is stranger than that. It seems that the motion glides a bit more past where you let go, then instantly stops. But only once you've already moved for a certain amount of time. I couldn't quite feel out the math.
Also I wished the death of the enemies was a bit different, they seemed to turn away and linger a moment before dying, but it was not instant satisfying feedback when the fatal shot hit them. I was overshooting them a while not realizing quite yet that they had already died.
Lastly on the nitpick list, I fell off the map and had no way to restart better than refreshing the browser.
Coming back to the best part, the art and sound! I can't say how much I like the music, and I especially like that it feels comfortable coming down to nothing, like it wants to be music in a video game, instead of trying to be so "interesting" to take my full attention like album music might.
Loved that the blocks were empty inside, spotted, and rotting/cracked. Later when I pushed the limits of the gameplay, I came to REALLY appreciate the sky-bound sparkles over the stars, and I frantically wove between hordes of enemies.
I really enjoyed this one, and I'm impressed by the look you achieved.
Very good game, you nailed the ambiance.
One issue I noticed while playing your game is that the audio was only on my right side. I then went back and found out that the problem is something with my computer. yay...
Anyways, I'm not finding much to comment on about this game. I think it was a super solid LD entry. With the limited time given you split your attention across all of the important elements and didn't let anything get dropped. Good job!
Hoo boy, that's a LOT of feedback with excellent observations. Thank you very much, everyone!
@thygrrr Thanks! All the synth sounds are made with U-He Hive. It's not the most feature packed of all the VST synths out there but it's easy to get it sounding good.
@drnoir Wow, awesome! Thank you very much for the video! :thumbsup:
@pkenney Very insightful and detailed review. Thanks! :slight_smile:
..And sorry everyone for leaving a gap in the map. Ooops! :smile:
I liked the music and sound quite a lot, that and the level graphics created a cool atmosphere. Super entertaining high pace shooter. I would've wished to be able to lower the sensitivity of the mouse but I understand thats not a priority in a 48h game. Congrats!
Pretty nice game! Sometimes the enemies got stuck in the walls but I guess that's the only problem I saw. Btw, it feels kinda weird the shots coming from the middle of screen, but that's not a problem at all, just... weird :P
Great job!
@jean I agree that it's weird but I grew up with Doom and Quake 1 where the guns were centered so I didn't question it. :smile:
This game has style!
Nice! The art style was great and music fit the game very well. The tension was up 100% of the time when playing this. Would have liked to see (or hear, actually) the monsters make a bit more noise so they couldn't sneak up on you that well. I know they did make some noise but it was kinda drowning in the music and constant shooting. Those pentagram thingies looked kinda broken with all that disappearing but dunno, maybe that was the aesthetic you were going for. That particle effect on them was a cool addition. Made it easier to spot them from a distance while frantically running away from the monsters.
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I felt like the difficulty didn't ramp up properly. It was way too easy to dodge even a large pack of the monsters because you needed to be pretty much standing on the same pixel with them to get hurt. The constant health pickups (which I'm not even sure where they came from) also made it kinda easy and lessened the consequences of actually getting hit. They should get less frequent the further you get.
I also feel like the shooting should have some kind of downside to not allow the player to be shooting all the time. Sure, the shooting sound made it harder to hear the monsters but once you got far enough, couldn't really rely on the sounds anyway.
And as you yourself said, the AI is dumb and gets stuck easily. That would actually benefit the gameplay if they could unstuck themselves when gaining the line of sight to the player. Would get some cool jump scares when going around a corner and suddenly a monster that was stuck there just bounces on you.
Good job!
@antti-haavikko Thanks for the comments! Really good points. Now that I play the game again after a few days break, I definitely agree about the skill level. Each pentagram pick up gave 1 health point but it would probably have been more interesting if healing was a separate resource.
I was considering adding reloading to the gun to make the player be more careful with shooting but then I "forgot" about it once I started running out of steam when working on the game :slight_smile:. The AI getting unstuck once player is seen is a pretty neat idea! It would feel like they were sort of intentionally ambushing the player and would definitely add more flavor than just fixing the original bug of them getting stuck.
The odds are that I won't return to developing this game but the ideas are very interesting regardless. Thanks again! :thumbsup:
@antti-tiihonen Oh yes, I have quite a similar ideology when it goes to jam games. Pretty much always leaving the projects as they were created during the jam and never returning to them. But it's good to know these things you could do differently anyway, you never know when you'll be in the same situation and maybe that time you know how to approach it better.
Anyways, good to see a fellow Antti here. I've done LD three times now and seen at least one every time. There's a lot of us... :dizzy_face:
2076,This game is really fun to play!Shooting the enemies feels so good,i really like the particles,it just make me want to keep shooting.And i love the art,it's very special.Really good work!
I don't remember my highscore, but I remember it hitting 4 digits, so probably ~1000.
:thumbsup: The music and visuals fit together very nicely. I really liked the spark/light beacons that showed you where the stars were, it kept me from wondering aimlessly, but didn't feel out of place like the FPS go to follow the compass needle.
:point_right: The framerate seemed a bit lower than it should have been. If you had had some time to optimize things I think the game (WebGL) would have ran a bit smoother. **Edit:** I think the usage of the theme could have been improved, since it is fairly standard for FPS monsters to get harder as your score increases. ^_^
:bug: I'm not sure if I had to reload or something, but on the WebGL build in chrome, on my laptop with a touchpad, I would occasionally lose the ability to shoot. That was alright though, it just caused me to run around without shotting much, and it was an avoid the guys game.
:star: All in all, great work, this game felt very coherent!
@antti-haavikko Yeah. LD is first and foremost a learning experience for me and knowing what to do differently is a very important part of the idea! And Anttis do get around :slight_smile:
@hitchh1k3r Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, seems like the webGL build isn't as solid as I first thought. At least it's a lot better than a year ago since I last used it. I spent absolutely zero effort in optimizing things so I'm happy that the game even runs in browser. :smile:
Great style! It's super impressive that you got this done in a weekend.