pcmxms 2017-12-03 22:46
Strange game. The controls are a bit too stiff.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → Stand your ground
By gistnoesis
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 653 | 2.54 | 47 | |
| Fun | 649 | 2.36 | 46 | |
| Innovation | 518 | 2.77 | 46 | |
| Theme | 602 | 2.71 | 46 | |
| Graphics | 641 | 2.14 | 45 | |
| Audio | 415 | 2.65 | 41 | |
| Humor | 543 | 1.75 | 37 | |
| Mood | 618 | 2.08 | 42 |
Strange game. The controls are a bit too stiff.
Interesting take on the theme. The controls are a bit stiff but they are precise. You can even shoot towards the camera!
Good job!
A little help with aiming would go a long way, I kept missing. However, I enjoyed the experience. With polish this can become a cool game.
Very interesting, I am curious to know how the idea came to you ^^.
@grostonton I have my real life tower defense : (check my "Linn photobooth" tracking video) :) . But more to the point, I use Ludum Dare as an exploratory week-end to try ideas I can't test during work. So this was the opportunity to use Three.js. And currently I'm experiencing a paradigm shift towards "system's thinking" with emerging behaviour resulting from simple interactions. So I tried to add this bit (did you notice you can get fire to propagate across grass balls :) ? ). The theme was quite uninspiring to me so it forced me to reflect upon it, and after a few iterations I chose this game philosophy : "You throw some balls some hit, some don't but they come back, you set your own pace but you'll have to manage". Add a little too much Tetris when I was kid, and you get this game.
The control could be more fluent and the pace is a little bit too high for me. But +1 for an HTML Game and +1 for the sound!
A fun game that definitely ramps into a challenge. I really liked how well it runs online. At least for me, it loaded fast and the gameplay was responsive. And you want to sing to yourself the song "I won't back down" as you play. As some other people had stated the aiming is a little hard. Overall I really liked it though.
Took me a while to understand all the concepts, but once I got it, it was fun! The only thing I still don't get is how you lose (I was expecting some kind of feedback on the game)
@thetophatnoob : Glad you got the Johnny Cash reference :)
@almost-panda-studio : Thanks for the feedback. The rule is you lose when one enemy (Big sphere touch your half-space (i.e. y < 0 ). But you are right that I should have repositioned the camera to better show the player where the line was crossed.
An odd take on the theme. Aiming could be a bit difficult, and if there's a lot of spheres coming at you it's nearly impossible to fend them all off. I do like the concept though, with some polish this could make for an excellent, say, mobile game!
I think you should use 4 elements instead of 5 for better user understanding of rock, scissor, paper system. Also it is a problem with with aim but i think the main issue is not the control itself but the camera perspective, i just can't predict where sphere come from. In general solid game, especyaly if you did audio solo. Good job.
This could benefit a lot from a better system for aiming. The mouse would probably work a lot better. The arrow keys just don't really work for this kind of thing. I really liked the music, you know your way around piano keys!
@dumivid thanks for the feedback. Yes I should probably have add an easy mode without the air element. The ball are constantly accelerating towards you (it's meant to add some pressure like they are coming to get you), which makes them harder to feel where they are going because these are not trajectories we as humans are used to. But with a little practice you can get used to it.
@georgebgreen The controls were meant to feel like a 3d version of "Tetris", the aiming is quite natural once you get used to it but I concede that it feels unusual at first (see above). Glad you like my music. The controls are meant to induce fast repetitive key-presses in rhythm with the fast paced music.
This is an interesting one :D Aiming is difficult because of the perspective, but you get the hang of it after a while. The most fun I had, tho, was in the sandbox mode, trying to break the game with hundreds of spheres! :D
interesting concept, (maybe for a puzzle bubble ?) the game is a bit hard for me so i played in "I" mode, (also played your LD39 game, it was very fun ! )
Lol. Got fun from this =)
Nice game. As someone mentioned in the comment, you should put a assistance to guide the player's aiming (an arrow or [a 3D dashed path](https://threejs.org/examples/webgl_lines_dashed.html)). Static perspective cameras are not the best to appreciate distances and directions. It was fun nonetheless. Congratulation on your submission.
fun but very very hard to many bulets for too many target in the start time
The gameplay is too hectic, especially the way you need to target in 3D without the usual finesse of mouse aiming. And the fact that the canon is not aligned with the camera makes things even harder.
I like the idea how elements are interacting, but for example green elements need to be hit twice - first by fire and then by water to destroy. And without a fast way to switch elements between those two. All the games end up being short. Really short.
Interesting concept, but the controls were too frustrating. Holding down keys to aim the cannon has a delay, and it's very hard to get the vertical component correct.
For these reasons it wasn't too much fun in the normal mode, but I did enjoy messing around in the immortal mode for a bit.
@dimesto52 There is a mechanism in place to make people tilt : If they restart the game immediately without taking a few seconds to breathe, they will have extra balls at the start (allowing them to grow their score back faster). Also the pace of the game is mainly determined by how many bullets you shoot.
@hilvon thanks for the feedback.
@alottabit The controls are intended Tetris like, sorry you didn't like them but you're not the only one :) I'll do my best to make the controls more user friendly in my next Ludum Dare.
Nice little game! I think it would have been a better experience if the aiming arrow extended indefinitely as it is a bit hard to aim the way it works now. The music was cool! All in all a job well done :)
Like others said, using the keyboard to control the aim seems clunky. Also, the perspective makes it harder to tell where you actually are aiming on the y axis. I'd say either restrict things to a two-dimensional plane or maybe aim from a first-person perspective. I did like the interaction between the elemental orbs, though. Nice work overall!
The game would really benefit from an easy mode with two or three elements. If you wanted to keep the aiming mechanism I would add a line (laser pointer) so it is easier to see where you are aiming.
Obviously the controls aren't any suitable, but forget about. I only came here to say one thing - this is the first game in ~40 played during this LD that receives 5 stars for the Music. It's just perfect. Can I get it somehow?
@Pixelome laser pointer wouldn't do it because of gravity but @eptwalabha suggested 3d dashed lines to me.
@zinkler glad you enjoyed the music. Look at the source search for "mp3", and grab the file you liked (There are 2 distinct audio clips of unequal quality which I randomly AB test :) ).
@gistnoesis - are you sure that you didn't forget to provide the source code? Both links seem to have the same address, and I can't find the way to get the source code from that page.
@zinkler This is a single self-contained html page. You open it in your browser and then you do a "view source" (depending on your browser it may be inside the "developer tools" menu). Or you can use your text editor and open the URL.
My score was 777! Controls were super hard Also it was really hard to see what height the balls were coming from so aiming was really hard
Sometimes it was difficult to set the shooting direction to hit the enemy. I got score 7375.
The game could be more polished (fonts, more complex object models, terrain/background, ...) but it't definitely not bad for a Compo entry made in "raw" JavaScript without any game-making-optimized libraries!
(You might want to look at triplanar texture mapping to help you with texturing spheres.)
@m-1 thanks. I didn't know about triplanar texture mapping.