seven-from-seventoad 2017-12-04 12:53
The movement is very smooth. Nice work!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → Tail
By conk
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 123 | 3.76 | 25 | |
| Fun | 188 | 3.58 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 189 | 3.47 | 24 | |
| Theme | 243 | 3.63 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 39 | 4.19 | 25 | |
| Audio | 49 | 3.84 | 24 | |
| Humor | 473 | 2.17 | 19 | |
| Mood | 38 | 3.84 | 25 |
The movement is very smooth. Nice work!
I love the controls, it feels really nice to play. The art looks very pretty too!
I see what you're saying about not being sure if its the game you set out to make, i feel like there's was a more snake kinda intention with a shooter and the tail as health bar.
There's potential but i can't quite put my finger on what it needs to really get me hooked, i think it might be that the movement doesn't fit the gameplay. The constrained map and shooter mechanics needs something more precise. The current movement is cool and kinda "flow-ey", but doesn't really fit.
I should say it felt like a more complete win condition than most LD games.
Also you're the current leader in my "Longest Load Time" Championship.
@halouverite Haha, thanks for the feedback! After giving it another play you're totally right about it missing something and the tight spaces, certainly worth a revisit when I get a moment! The load time is a problem, glad it's got recognition for something!
Really great job, I found it oddly peaceful hahahah. Reminded me of "flOw". I'm not sure if it's a bug or not but after about 5 - 10 mins I went downward and there was no islands, I kept going, still no islands. Perhaps a world border would help.
Other than that small gripe, it was a really enjoyable experience, and you seem like a very talented dev. Is there somewhere I can follow your work?
@joel-rochon Thanks! Admittedly the level was thrown together at the end in a somewhat rushed fashion :S Still learning to prioritise I guess. I have an itch page https://cojowe.itch.io/ but it only has the LD games I'm somewhat proud of.
Nice job on the artwork.This game kicked my ass because I wasn't used to the control,but it's still pretty fun.
You've got a wonderful feel and atmosphere here. Movement felt really nice, but I would've liked to use the mouse for aiming instead of the arrow keys. Ah well.
I found the trickiest thing was learning to conserve shots, to move carefully, and to consider confrontations before rushing in. I soon learned both that you can shoot away the walls, and that sometimes shooting walls would create what I called "wall babies", those little tiny blocks that would turn into tiny, hard-to-hit enemies. So you couldn't just run in, guns blazing, because every missed shot had the potential to make more enemies. I had to learn discretion in moving and confronting enemies, and once I understood that it became quite nice to play.
Well done!
@logan You're totally right about the 'wall babies' (Funnily enough I had no name for them :grinning:), they dissuade the act of cutting through every bit of terrain while also punishing missed shots. Shame the main enemies are fairly broken, I'm looking into currently working on better AI and more diverse enemies in a post-jam version.
Thanks for your feedback!
I love how the game allows you to "cheat" by breaking through walls, but punishes you by spawning a ton of little things. This was great. Best LD entry I have seen so far. Also, what was up with the red countdown clock on the top left?
P.S. Opt-out of Humor next time, for you own sake, as some people will count the 1 star in humor against your overall.
@dragonzlay Thanks for playing! And that's actually a pretty decent idea for next time, I always leave it open as an experiment to see how high I can get in a category even though I didn't actually try. The idea of it affecting my overall though is worrying. Thanks!
Whoa, this is a really great control scheme, which I will probably steal sometime :P The simple graphics look beautiful! The game's balancing seems fair, and I had a great time with it! Will show this around! :>
Great art and atmosphere! I liked the environment and the variation across the map. The concept fits the theme, and I think if you increased the number of enemies it would help to emphasize the disadvantage of being longer. Some routes on the map are very narrow, and as a result of the bounce on impact I sometimes lost a lot of health by bouncing between two close walls.
I feel kinda bad because I didn't play that long...
The audio and visuals were definitely great and set a mood. Like a... calm, flow-y... mood. Look, I'm not good at describing things.
I thought the movement was nice but also frustrating. The momentum of your character didn't seem quite right (at least to me). I'm not sure how to explain it, sorry. I think it might be that you don't have like a real turning radius? Like, if you try to move from up to right to down, if you move too fast, you will just kinda... slow down... while you turn around... instead of naturally curving to down and maintaining speed.
Also, the way you rebound off of walls was rather annoying. If you hit a wall head on, it makes sense to completely turn around, but 99% of the time I ran into a wall, I was going almost parallel, but then it flips me 180 degrees! And then I probably run into another wall or two because of how the turning works and I'm not expecting to be suddenly going the opposite direction. Also related is that I think the hitbox for colliding with walls is a little too big; it doesn't really feel like you were actually touching the wall when you bounce off it sometimes.
I think the movement style is also at odds with the shooting, at least currently. Maybe if there was a bit of autoaim, or you just had a bigger bullet, or if you could aim with the mouse instead of having a pretend-second joystick with the arrow keys, it would work better.
The Movement feels really nice. The gameplay is very intuitive. The music and art worked very well together. I think that aim with this controls is too hard (specially because of that small enemy). But the game is nice even without shooting.
Well done!
I loved the movement, playing with a controller i felt like I had full control of the snake even in the tiny corridors. However...
First I was going to talk about how it was hard to only being able to shoot in the direction in which you're moving. But then I played it again and realized that I was playing it the *wrong way*. Really I think it's a game about moving, keeping up the flow so that you can quickly get away from the enemy's aim. I ended up **circling "around" the enemies** and only shoot when I briefly face them every revolution.
So, with that in mind I think that the current movement promotes a game where you shouldn't stay in one place but keep moving. If the game should instead be about occasionally stopping to kill enemies I think that it should be easier to move in these circle patterns. Also, if you like the current keep moving-feel, I think that it would be really helpful if the game view zoomed out when you move at higher speeds.
Hope that you can make any sense of that :stuck_out_tongue: Great looking game and nice controls anyways!
Hey! Nice entry! I started by playing with keyboard and it was really hard to do anything in the game. I'm glad I have controller close by at all times, when I switched to controller the game became waaaayy easier. I got all the gems an made it to the exit with no problem at all. :D
so here's some thoughs:
- The gameplay is really smooth and core loop is simple enough to understad without a tutorial. That's good. You can just get into the game without even thinking about that you need to do next. just go with the flow. this might be because of "gamer logic" though. To a non gamer this might be confusing.
- The controls were good... **IF you play with a controller**. playing with keyboard is SUPER hard because you only got 4 directional keys. It's really hard to aim and maneuver in tight spaces. Making the creature follow mouse cursor for example would be more intuitive or just making so that you move mouse left or right and the creature turns left or right respectively. or making it so that pressing forward makes the creature accelerate and pressing left & right makes it turn.
- I found that killing enemies was not very important... I only killed the enemies that literally got into my way. otherwise I just mostly ignored them.
- The art stye is simplistic and really well thought out and the audio is fitting.
I love game art and atmosphere. Very simple, but holistic.
But it very hard to shoot with keyboard, so I just roamed around enemies without attempt to shoot them. Also I agree with @sadcolor, almost half of my deaths was becouse of walls rebound, even if I have many HP, I just smash between the nearest walls to death.
Hey everyone, thanks for leaving great feedback!
@rosik & @sadcolour The rebounding was a little lazy on my part and was something I'd hoped to get back to and do properly, certainly something I'll take on for the post jam version.
@willisika You're correct abut the keyboard not being great, admittedly I did all testing with gamepad and never got around to fine tuning the keyboard controls, a mouse would've been the better route to have gone.
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 were very bad at, but loved the art)!
[Check it out here!](http://nicegames.club/2017/12/nice-plays-ludum-dare-40-games-2017/)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BGt66ZnLME
I played on mouse and keyboard. The movement was good for swimming around exploring, if you like taking your time as I do. But once enemies showed up, it was hard to hit them. It required a lot of firing, and missing, which created even more enemies. But I did enjoy sometimes blasting thru a wall, knowing an enemy might be there, and I was already facing them- that felt like the right amount of challenge. Sometimes the game would restart in a mob of enemies. This game has a unique mood that I enjoy a lot- a combination of the murky turquoise colors, the mix of melancholy and upbeat music, the dead/skeleton fish (which was really cute when it looked around independent of its tail). It's like a cute fish afterlife.