FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD40 → Heavy Hearts

Heavy Hearts

By badlydrawnrod

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall4403.1767
Fun3803.1868
Innovation5092.7867
Theme2823.5667
Graphics4263.0667
Audio3312.9267
Humor2013.1565
Mood4922.7364

Comments

falk-bruskeland 2017-12-04 10:44

Fun little game! The baby is so cute xD

sbarrio 2017-12-04 10:52

Nice entry!, the voices are quite... surprising!

damoy 2017-12-04 10:53

Very fun, congratz for your entry :)

matthias-schedel 2017-12-04 11:01

Nice, concept - I like the soundtrack :)

scriptorum 2017-12-04 14:16

Cool idea. Instead of popping enemy balloons, I'd love it if you could steal the balloon for more buoyancy. :)

BTW, I get an undefined assertion in Safari.

```exception thrown: abort("Assertion failed: undefined") at jsStackTrace@https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/680530/heavy_hearts.js:1:18008```

badly-drawn-rod 2017-12-04 14:30

Stealing balloons is a great idea. Thanks.

wibblymat 2017-12-04 15:03

"Who's the daddy" is surprisingly creepy :)

omnipotentindie 2017-12-04 15:21

Great idea, the theme didn't work much into the level design much tough, kind of made it a chore Implemented well, nice job

acsid 2017-12-04 17:49

remind me balloon fight on the nes. good idea.

misterstripey 2017-12-04 18:40

Hey, nice game! Were the sound effects from an actual child or did you pitch shift your voice? One comment that I have is that it is almost impossible to get to home on the later levels. Maybe it was because I only had one balloon, but I really felt like I was about to break my keyboard spamming space and ctrl.

Thanks for sharing this game!

badly-drawn-rod 2017-12-04 19:55

@misterstripey well, I was a child a long, long time ago, and when my wife saw what was causing the baby to move up then she declared that I was clearly still a child.

krasse 2017-12-04 20:43

I will never get tired of that song! Well, I did now ;)

Very solid mechanics. Enjoyed the voice SFXs :)

bocodillo 2017-12-04 20:46

Those voices were brilliant! Enjoyed the gameplay, game fits the theme well with your flying capability getting worse as you collect pickups. The music's alright but the graphics are great!

eerongal 2017-12-05 02:11

Reminds me a lot of balloon fight! not a bad thing! Fun game!

stencilchris 2017-12-05 04:14

Very similar to balloon fight! Weird voices. Good compo entry :)

tvance 2017-12-05 16:43

Reminds me of joust, one of my favs. Nice work!

acoto87 2017-12-06 05:35

Nice work putting this together in 48h. Sad there is only one level, but good job anyway.

srabatata 2017-12-06 05:40

I think it was really clever to make it harder when one of your balloons is popped! Nice work!

gastricsparrow 2017-12-06 13:18

A fellow Godot user always gets a thumbs-up from me... except I've broken my thumb carrying 6 hearts on one balloon.

shrapx 2017-12-06 20:14

nice compo entry, funny audio, absolutely hammering my space bar haha

mrnyarlathotep 2017-12-07 00:50

I liked this a lot, but must admit totally-not-mary-had-a-little-lamb had me turning the volume down after awhile...

flaterectomy 2017-12-07 10:58

A simple and cute concept! The only thing for me is that it lacked a challenge, as it was pretty simple to avoid enemies and pop their balloons. A difficulty ramp-up would also have helped as the choice to take just a few or more hearts didn't really matter much.

The art is cute, maybe the colours are a little too saturated across the board. The home sprite at the top clearly needed some more love. :wink: The music eventually got on my nerves a bit, and the voice sound effects gave me a chuckle. Obviously, a fart noise was needed for flying. :stuck_out_tongue:

All in all, a nice cute entry!

automatonvx 2017-12-07 19:44

Nice, solid enough gameplay, i just found it a bit lacking in challenge, but could be easily fixed with a bit faster ramping up of difficulty, maybe some kind of time limit or increase in enemy spawn to encourage you to carry as much as possible in one go or something. art was pretty good, personally would prefer with sfx instead of voiceover, I find it gets a bit annoying quite quickly, also a bit disturbing. Anyway had fun for a while good job.

ruthiepee 2017-12-08 17:10

Very funny game. At first it reminded me of Balloon Fight with the floating controls and horizontal screen wrapping, but the gameplay is pretty unique. And of course the sound effects are totally hilarious and goofy. Music is pretty grating after a few minutes though. I think I broke my space bar.

ladybenko 2017-12-08 23:26

Solid mechanic, it reminds me of good old arcade games like Bomb Jack. The music felt a bit repetitive after a while, but the SFX are fun. Good job!

tschery 2017-12-08 23:32

wow, super hard to play =D Decent mechanic and nice execute. Audio is weirding me out a bit tho

loveapplegames 2017-12-08 23:56

Graphics are very charming, but the gameplay could be improved. It mostly involves spamming the space bar, as the enemies are quite easy to avoid, and it doesn't seem to get harder. I suggest having a limit on the frequency of flaps (as in Joust), and adding more enemies each level.

fluidvolt 2017-12-09 00:08

That music is stuck in my brain! I wish it was longer, though it's an ... interesting take on Mary Had A Little Lamb! I like the gameplay, obviously inspired by Balloon Fight but the weight mechanic gives it some freshness. The sounds are cute too. I enjoyed playing :)

Also, what you said: "There’s only one level, because there are only 48 hours in the compo." -- I've never agreed more!

jegus9 2017-12-09 00:16

I found good things here (as always, you used Godot -> extra points from me), but I'll give my suggestions on things that could improve right away.

First, that mary had a little lamb made me tired eventually. It's a compo game I know, and composing an original song can be a lot of work and in 48h it can really turn your schedule into hell, but something else besides that leitmotiv would make the game more... "listenable".

Second, playing the same level over and over again doesn't really add up, so what I would do about this is a random level generator here, to spawn the platform nodes randomly but nicely along the screen. It can be tricky to do that if you didn't think about anything in advance, but it can also save some work if you do (I don't know if you tried that, in fact I can't figure out much about your game by just looking at your code since your workflow with Godot in general is pretty different from mine).

Third, trying to climb up the level with only one balloon made my arm hurt. And I'm one to talk, I've been single until my 19 years LOL, so definitely take this into account.

badly-drawn-rod 2017-12-09 15:49

@Jegus9 good point on the random level generation. It's easy enough to do. However, I had originally planned to create at least 3 levels by hand but just ran out of time ... the mechanisms are in place to do it.But the first thing I would do if I had another 30 minutes would be to add the ability to disable the music!

mess110 2017-12-09 16:14

Cool sounds, all I can say is that merry had a little lamb and she was 8bit rock as hell! Fun game, however once I lost a life it was insanely hard to reach home.

zirrrus 2017-12-09 17:42

You nailed that old-school aesthetic, well done! I had fun...my keyboard not so much. RIP, spacebar.

sgadrat 2017-12-09 18:23

Cool concept, balancing how many earts to take allows for balancing difficulty versus speed-run. The game could use better level design, to make some parts really hard with more than one heart, et a scrolling background. Anyway nice 48h entry ;)

sammyb 2017-12-09 20:27

Really good for 48 hours. Really the only thing I would have wanted more was a bit more content (i.e. different levels/enemies) which is primarily I'm sure due to the short period of time we all had :-)

jasperarmstrong 2017-12-09 21:39

Pretty fun, well-executed idea. Someone above commented that they'd like to see stealing balloons to increase buoyancy, I definitely agree with that. I really liked the voice, it was funny. Overall you did a good job!

svr-audio 2017-12-09 22:05

Lovely cute game, the art is very good, the audio is really impressive for a 48h compo game, great job, the game is simple but is really cool, congratulations on doing this game, really good entry !

local-minimum 2017-12-09 22:35

Simple well executed game. Grabbing more than two hearts at a time made it a bit spammy to get upwards. But it was perfectly fine going up and down several times. It took be a while to realize I could pop the enemies' balloons. And that made it much easier. It would have been nice with some progression. If only adding more and more enemies each iteration you live through.

x1212 2017-12-10 07:38

Well done! The art style is very consistent, the audio fits the game perfectly and the mechanics work fine as well. So far the first game I found that I feel is a little too easy but I guess if there were a few more levels and enemies, it would be pretty challenging.

stratoskakalis 2017-12-10 18:37

The theme and gameplay were very nice as for the audio... xD no comments simply lovely! I found myself spamming the space bar and making a whole lot of noice without realizing it was annoying other people :P. Very nice submission!

madbeagle 2017-12-11 19:18

Nice retro-style arcade game. Would have been nice to have procedurally generated levels to give a lot more variety without having to design them.

drtizzle 2017-12-12 13:41

Cool idea! I really like the art, it really fits the style of game. It would have been nice if you didn't have to spam spacebar, but maybe a rhythm-game that gets harder the more hearts you pick up ? But I get get you can only do so much in 48h ;)

Overall a very solid entry, which would make a cool webgame with some more time.

Well done!

seannoonan 2017-12-12 21:01

Quite a simple twist on Balloon Fight/Joust formula.

As others have mentioned, it's a shame that there weren't procedural levels. As far as I could tell the same levels were repeated?

As a technical side point, I really liked that you could show on both halves of the screen when passing between edges - never worked out how to do that myself.

The enemy respawns seemed to happen once the currently spawned set are killed - this made it quite easy to exploit by keeping one at the start.

If I picked up all of the hearts at once I couldn't hit my space bar fast enough to even move... might have been nice to have a drop heart button if you're on the ground.

Nice try though!

badly-drawn-rod 2017-12-12 21:26

@seannoonan to show on both halves of the screen, I just doubled-up the sprites and their collision geometry. I found an inelegant technique that worked well enough for the compo and ran with it. There were also a couple of hacks in there, such as hidden off-screen blocks.

There are better ways of doing it that don't need the hacks, but they didn't occur to me at the time.

dodormeur 2017-12-13 22:23

The gameplay is nice, but would love to have a bit more variation in the gameplay for each levels :)

lereveur 2017-12-19 20:03

Simple and fun, even if a little repetitive. :)

m-1 2017-12-21 21:19

There should be more benefit of popping enemies' balloons. (Maybe getting lighter or "stealing" the balloons as others suggested?)

There might be a time limit (or time "counter" with leaderboard) to force the players to find and use a good heart-collecting strategy.

More diverse enemy trajectories would make it more challenging. I would also appreciate more levels, but I understand the Compo time constraints...

Anyway it's a nice and simple game, which fits the LD theme perfectly.

(btw. I couldnt't get it to work on Firefox Quantum on macOS, but Edge on Windows 10 worked surprisingly well.)

noble-robot 2017-12-25 13:54

Our team does a weekly indie gamedev podcast called Nice Games Club, and we just did a Let's Play episode where we played thirty-six (!!) Ludum Dare 40 games, including yours (which we thought had good controls and was super cute)!

[Check it out here!](http://nicegames.club/2017/12/nice-plays-ludum-dare-40-games-2017/)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BGt66ZnLME