justin-toyo 2017-12-05 03:05
This was a great game. I just wish the window was bigger. This would save me from accidentally clicking out of the game. Otherwise, this was fantastic!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → Desert Express
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 248 | 3.76 | 47 | |
| Fun | 204 | 3.71 | 46 | |
| Innovation | 454 | 3.30 | 45 | |
| Theme | 264 | 3.83 | 46 | |
| Graphics | 296 | 3.95 | 48 | |
| Audio | 173 | 3.70 | 44 | |
| Humor | 567 | 2.91 | 37 | |
| Mood | 274 | 3.64 | 44 |
This was a great game. I just wish the window was bigger. This would save me from accidentally clicking out of the game. Otherwise, this was fantastic!
I love the graphics & animations! I wish there were multiple enemy types or multiple guns. Also repeatedly clicking got tiring, maybe an automatic weapon?
Simple core mechanic, but well done with nice art and sound, a good difficulty curve, and a short play loop. I played through a couple of times and managed to deliver a 15-crate train without losing any.
I definitely had some moments of panic, and I thought it was kind of funny how the calm friendly music juxtaposed with the violent slaughter. Those bandits must be desperate!!
Nice entry.
Great concept and wonderful animations. I also would like a little more variation in weapons, and bandits. Maybe a carriage?
This could be an amazing game with more time. Nice work.
Whereas the style of the game is really nice, the gameplay itself is a bit to simple (for me anyway). The shooting mechanic works well, but it's just that, resulting in spamming the mouse button. However I like the vibe of the game!
That looks really cool! Sadly the one platform that's not available is the one I am on (macOS) :(
Very simple but interesting little game. Hoped more depth than just shooting bandits though...
fun little game. visuals were nice. shooting sound was kind of irretating after a while. songs were a good fit, though. well jammed!
This was fun, I liked to kill those robber. The music is great for your game, it makes me want to shoot all cowboys. Congratulation everyone !
Very fun to play, great music and nice graphics. But was a little confused if the game was over after a run. Turns out if you keep going the game will become harder. also when I hit another run the map turned glitchy: https://i.imgur.com/ZwKmTV5.png
What a cute game! The mouse needs to be locked to the window, I kept clicking outside of it, and the window behind it would cover it. Of course, I could have just made a new desktop to play it on. Love trains and the music is perfect. Thank you for not forcing full screen.
It's a bit weird with the theme since you don't exactly have control over whether you have more of something or not but dayum I'd be lying if I said it wasn't frantic and fun
I had a blast playing this simple but addictive game. It would nice to allow full screen mode to minimize clicking outside the window, because the action gets intense real fast. Excellent work!
Thank you all very much for your wonderful feedback. You've given us plenty of suggestions and ideas for a postjam build.
@dom If you'd like to try the game, [there is now a macOS version](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/desert-express/desert-express-arrives-onto-macos-mostly), though it comes with a caveat that some Homebrew packages need to be installed before running it, since I haven't yet figured out a way to properly package all of the dependencies.
If that's not a problem, check the prerequisites section and do give it a go.
@Luther Thanks for reporting this issue.
As for the difficulty of each subsequent run, it is actually randomized in the jam version: the number of crates is randomly determined for each run, so the game can become easier as well as harder. Obviously, this was just a quick and dirty way to make the theme more apparent by getting the player to play with different number of crates to ensure that indeed the more you have, the worse it is :). In the postjam version we'll of course add some sort of proper progression.
A little too simple for my tastes, but its a great starting place. I'd love to see a score, or different enemies or some sort of "you gotta get X amount to the stop". It's got great potential though!
Cool concept. reminded me of zerg rush. it woulda been cool to see a mechanic to recover stolen boxes. Overall great game!
come check out our game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/virus-detected
When the second level started, the railway starts to "glitch", but that doesn't affect the gameplay whatsoever. Guess it's a unique take on the "the worse it is" part.
@moonlightbomber Yeah, it's a known bug, that I believe we have a fix for, but we can't actually apply it to the game yet, since we're not sure if this qualifies as a "game-breaking" bug or not (probably not?).
Anyway, on the machines we tested the game on, the bug occurred pretty rarely. Does it happen to you every time on the second run?
Very simple, but with a lot of room for more depth :) I honestly enjoyed it, could impagine as a mobile game
@Luther @moonlightbomber Thanks again for reporting this issue. We uploaded a `bugfix` build, where it [appears to be fixed](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/desert-express/train-crashes-are-much-less-likely-now-say-railroad-engineers).
Nice game! I enjoyed the art and music, and the game itself had a fun mechanic and setting. Some notes I had were that the ability to click really fast and basically clear out everything made it a bit too easy - maybe something like shoot, then a reload delay + sound? Then you could adjust the number of bandits down in turn, to make the shooting more deliberate rather than gunning them down en masse. Also, the shooting sound effect felt a bit overly artificial and distorted to me. Really like it overall though, very cohesive and enjoyable!
Nice little time killer and finger muscle trainer ;) Good selection of midi-western tunes. While the idea of different game dynamics according to the amount of boxes is good and keeping things simple definitely is, too, I longed for a little more variation. Maybe some power-ups and different enemy types?
an excellent game), I also thought this way, the theme of the trains is well revealed and very coolly done with boxes) I was impressed to admit) and management is simple, this is plus of course :wink:
@lancejz @justin-toyo @siepiau Thanks for your feedback! We've constrained the mouse cursor to the window in the [postjam version](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/desert-express/$71011) of the game, in order to avoid accidental clicks outside of the window.
Wow, amazing game. Love the artwork! The music is really nice too. Really fun to play, nice job! Honestly don't have any suggestions on how to improve lol.
https://youtu.be/oCMTfqy0KUg
(played and rated the bugfixed jam version)
Props for still using SDL in this day and age!
This was simple but well executed as a concept. Your postjam changes make sense too! As others have pointed out I think some more mechanics around actually shooting down the bandits would make the game more interesting.
Interesting, I really enjoyed the music associated with the game and the background giving the feeling of actual motion with some variance in the landscape, it's a shame the shooting mechanics didn't have a bit more juice to them as that alone would have brought the game along quite a bit!
Quite curious what you'll end up doing with the postjam version though, the progression being entirely random proved a bit anticlimactic as you started on a level with something like 19 crates then suddenly jumped down to 5 something and far less enemies!
Interesting to see you used your own engine (though this meant it didn't run on my Ubuntu 16.04 machine as i've yet to jump to 17.04.. finally tried the game on Windows now!)
Nice work :)
Pretty solid gameplay, the top down shooter genre adapts well to this pretty fun setting. The graphics are pretty quaint as well, and pair with the active but relaxing music. The MIDI guitars though in the music aren't the most pleasing sounds though, are a bit harsh.
I think there definitely needs to be some sort of cooldown/slowdown on the gun, as you can pretty easily just spam click and rarely have any issues even with high amounts of bandits. Also I wish there was a way to just shoot the bandit and not kill the horse :cry:
Very good game, I love it! Good work! Very fun and pretty that you create christmas verion and fix bugs!
Notes from me: - Create screen size in full screen - Maybe add cooldown (but I don't know, maybe with cooldown you must generate less enemies and it's not good) - Add bullet visualisation (raycast seems not so nice for me) - You have many variants how expand your game: new guns, new enemies, new goals, new train and etc
Overall, I enjoyed this game
Ohhh! Nice work on submitting a game with a custom engine! Very cool!
I had quite a bit of fun with it! I actually enjoy being able to spam the mouse button. Using one hand to click and the other to aim help a lot in the tight spots. The progression being random did seem weird like some people have already said. And the rest of my other suggestions seem to have been said too... like a better visuals for the projectile and also a wider range of weapons. Again, nice work!!