Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → Vermin
By hertz14
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 53 | 4.07 | 23 | |
| Fun | 108 | 3.90 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 100 | 3.88 | 23 | |
| Theme | 87 | 4.14 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 76 | 4.45 | 23 | |
| Audio | 57 | 4.04 | 23 | |
| Humor | 170 | 3.71 | 23 | |
| Mood | 149 | 3.85 | 23 |
This game looks amazing! I like the graphics and upbeat music, cute rat king too. But I don't fully understand how exactly do I control rat horde, they seem to move at random?
Edit: Nevermind I get it. Very nice game. Difinitely 5 starts.
@goplite Thanks for the kind feedback! The horde takes some getting used to, but the basic behaviour is that if the king is moving faster (further right), the horde will form a narrow line behind you. Slower movement causes them to spread out into a wider shape where they will try to align with you vertically.
A really nice game :smile:. I especially like the music
I laughed out loud at this game, whether it was the people running away or the rats plowing into the sides of buildings and dying, it was all really well presented.
Took me a couple of games to figure out how to control the herd? pack? group? Whatever rats are called in a group.
Fun!
Very nice and polished game. Peasant sprites are hilarious, and general theme and atmosphere is great. Honestly, not a single complaint about this game - just fun.
Amazing game! Its very polish and pretty. Im a pixel art lover, so for me the graphics are 5/5 haha, good job in that one!
That was a good load of fun; It did take some minutes to figure out how the followers move, but once I got the hang of it, I was invincible!.... Until I hit a house, that is.
Overall really cool piece of game, great graphics and sound design.
Never quite being able to control your followers to the extent that you might like made this game unique. It's hinting at some pretty deep underlying truths. Fun game with cool assets :D
It took me a few tries to really get a grasp of what was happening, but once I did the game is really a lot of fun! It's cool to have your swarm of rats massacre all the food in a plot of land, and feels awesome to guide a big swarm through the buildings. Not to mention the graphics and sound work well too! A super solid entry, well done!!
Man I don't know how your game has so little comments... This game is AMAZING!
Great artstyle, Great Sounds, Fitting music, Gameplay rocks! (Even though sometimes the generated terrain screws you over at the very beginning)
I rate it very high! Thank you for making this
Looks amazing and the idea is great. But I feel like I'm not really in control at times. But still really great entry! :)
WoW Solid and Completed game! Well done! That's going to be really fun to play it on mobile!
Good and polished game! Yeah for mobile, it would be nice to release it i think
Great entry! I played long enough that I think my followers stopped wanting to listen to what I was doing - or maybe they saw so much death that they rebelled - so feeding them became a problem. That aside, I really enjoyed this game. It's solid, with some great music, and the runaway sprites for the humans is hilarious. I like that the different food types give different types of power ups.
My only concern is that the tutorial text doesn't pause the movement so you can read it. Makes it hard to catch what's written there.
Other than that, great job!
It felt like a complete experience. The sprites look great, audio fits in well and the music is just cherry on the top. Seeing the humans flee in terror and crashing in to fences was a good laugh. The only gripe I've got with it is that controlling your subjects is sometimes very tricky. Them having a bit of a mind of their own is nice at times, but I swear some times some of them do the opposite of what I want them to do. Perhaps I didn't feed them enough and they are rebelling? I really enjoyed it either way.
Very well done! I kinda wish that once you died either one of your followers could pick up the crown and keep going, or just having a certain amount of lives though. The graphics and music fit very well. I tried but failed to destroy a building by running all of my followers into it. :(
2017-12-13 03H13M52.png
Now, this was a completely different and clever type of experience than the one I was expecting. The concept of being the king in-control of a hoard of vermin and being responsible for their survival is definitely an interesting take on the theme, and one that made a very different experience. Never thought commanding rats around would be something I'd be doing anytime soon. :rat:
The gameplay was pretty fun, although the only thing I didn't really seem to get at all was really the follower's behaviour. For most part, it seemed like a group of mice would follow me closer than others if I accelerated, while others would have a more noisy and random movement pattern. I didn't feel like I was in control sometimes, and even if that lack of the control was part of the theme here, it put me into questioning if at a certain point I couldn't just get a game over because all of the mice would just decide to run into a building. However, reading the other comments, it seems that understanding the movement comes with practice, although, to be honest, even after a few playthroughs, I really couldn't figure out most of the ways they moved.
I also felt slightly confused in regards to what the different icons over each of the mice's head meant. Some of them were easy to figure out, such as when the mice were hungry, or when their speed was increased, but some like the... vampire teeth? and the power icon weren't as obvious for me as despite the intention. I can assume what they probably do, but I didn't really get to a point where I was able to clearly be sure of it.
I found the game to be quite pleasing when it came to the graphics and the audio. Everything in terms of graphics really popped out and there was a really humorous (and disturbing) tone with running over the humans and proceeding to get a nutritious meal out of them. Presentation was really a forte in this one.
[In behalf of our team](https://twitter.com/WhalesAndGames), thank you for this mousy and funny experience, but I personally think I'm going to keep sticking it to whales. Thank you! :whale:
Nice game, governing rats is not as simple as one may think :smiley:
Thank you everyone for your comments! I have been busy for the last few days but I am now going to start clearing my backlog of games to review. It's great to hear all this feedback on my game :D
@jorgegamedev Wow! Thank you for such a detailed review! You raise some good points and in fact, your two main complaints are the two things I wished I'd dedicated more time to addressing. In general, the rats have a maximum speed that they can keep up with you - this is randomly assigned when they are first spawned. Faster rats will be able to follow you further to the right of the screen, while slower rats will hang back. It was intended to make the horde feel more organic, but unfortunately, it was implemented a bit hamfistedly and it doesn't work as well as I'd like.
In terms of the icons, that is another thing I didn't have time to properly explain in-game but tried to make them more or less self-explanatory. Evidently I failed :D The vampire fangs power-up make rats cannibalistic and allows them to eat the corpses of their fallen companions. The shield allows the rat to survive running into one fence, instantly breaking it. The lightningbolt allows the rat to attack and kill a human (if it can catch up to him). If I take the game further I'll be sure to explain that better, thank you.
Nice graphics, interesting game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 40 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecGDWM6QdpE