memel06 2018-04-23 09:11
This is a great game concept! It's pretty hard also. Maybe the background music is too loud?
Thanks for you work! You nailed the jam theme :>
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD41 → Zumaster
By infinitycore
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 728 | 3.32 | 39 | |
| Fun | 670 | 3.23 | 39 | |
| Innovation | 653 | 3.27 | 37 | |
| Theme | 287 | 3.95 | 38 | |
| Graphics | 654 | 3.37 | 37 | |
| Audio | 542 | 3.04 | 36 | |
| Mood | 698 | 3.14 | 34 |
This is a great game concept! It's pretty hard also. Maybe the background music is too loud?
Thanks for you work! You nailed the jam theme :>
Nice take on the theme ! Overall pretty fun to play, maybe you should have made small levels with progressively bigger asteroids instead of putting the big ones at the beginning. Maybe a time limit too? Anyway, good job !
Awesome concept, It's fun to play and a bit challenging. It matches the Theme perfect. Overall pretty great
I really like it, but the level is too long. Great concept.
It took me a while to understand how I was supposed to destroy asteroids but I enjoyed it. The music is pretty cool.
Good Idea, Try to polish up the game a little bit add some more interface i like how you got around with the theme! Nice work, Keep it up!
Ah, Zuma. Used to play it a bunch years ago. Feels really smooth and satisfying to play and the music is really catchy. Some upgrades would've been cool I think.
hahahaha I love zuma! You did a good job with the theme on this one and I had fun. Good work!
It's more Bust a Move than Zuma. 😆 Still, it's very fun and well crafted. Good job!
Nice concept! The gameplay lacked a bit of excitement though. Nice music!
Perfect use of the theme! I agree that it could be a little more exciting. Maybe make everything faster and increase the force the balls apply?
Nice entry ! I really like the music and the art is simple and works well !
Great game ! Keep coding :)
Windows gave me a warning that this contained a virus. Wasn't able to play it :(
@jessefreeman It might just be windows being stupid, but I am looking into it. I tried downloading and got the same message. It looks like the installer is clean, it downloaded and intalled fine. Malwarebytes couldn't detect anything. Sorry about that.
@jessefreeman I uploaded a new build and took down the old, didn't get a warning this time.
Nice work, I like the rotational physics. Movement was good too. Very addictive.
This game triggered my completionist instincts, and I spent a long time (>5,000 points) playing it trying to clear the board. Ultimately gave up because it was requiring greater and greater accuracy and each miss meant 5 hits needed to break even.
I'd say this game could be improved by upping the difficulty on the asteroids side and reducing it on the Zuma side. As it stands the asteroids posed no real threat so it was more a matter of pinpointing the balls into the right spots.
As a side note, to clear the board you need to get it down to 1 ball of 1 color and then get 4 in a row - odds are (1/6)^4 = 0.077%
@GenTel I will take all that into account. Thanks for the input
The physics of everything was great; hitting an asteroid with another ball and having it get pushed around by the force was very satisfying so kudos for that. The spaceship movement was stellar as well. I felt like I had exactly the right amount of control when I needed it, but could also drift around in a way that felt great.
I think it could have been really cool if the when the asteroids collided with one another, they could get matches and clear for you (that might be really hard to do and then maybe the game would play for you, but it would still be cool). Playing again, it actually seems like this might already be the case, maybe it's just very rare.
Good job on the visuals. The spaceship showing the next ball to be fired looked great and was intuitive. It's a great way to give you all the information you need in a minimalist way. The balls too were great. Each of the icons looks like they belong (it's not like square, triangle, cat for example). Having the colour coding and the icons was handy because I would get a little confused by the yellow diamonds and orange moons at a glance. I'm not a huge fan of the different texts. The score text is different from the main menu text and the cursive is a little harder to read. The pop animation of the balls was quite cute. A small score popup when you cleared balls would have been nice. I never actually noticed the score tracker in the top left until I saw it in the screenshot here.
Sound effects were good. Nice pop sound, shoot sound, and spaceship thrust sound. The music was a little bit exciting which sort of captured that epic feeling of flying through space and dodging asteroids, but chill enough to not make you anxious the whole time. Except right when you load the game; you get an annoying pop sound if you're wearing headphones.
@GenTel That isn't the only way to clear the board. Getting down to, say, 3 green and 3 purple, you would just need to get one colour, then the next in order. Which is only (2/6)*(1/6) I believe. A possible way around the nearly impossible clear chance would be to eliminate a colour from coming up in your spaceship once all of that colour is gone from the asteroids.
This was a cool idea, and lots of possibilities to expand it, too. Nice job!
@Solrun Technically yes but to get it down to 2 groups of 3 you have to get rid of the other 4 colors all in a row with none of the above colors re-appearing while in the process of getting rid of the others, which is essentially the same scenario.
It's possible the numbers can be a little higher than my calculation but it does take similar luck to get to the situation you've described as well.
Very fun game, it took me a long time to get the controls right, but after I got it right, it was a lot of fun!
Congratulations on the idea!
This was our participation in: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/type-hero-adventures
Really cool. I played this for far longer than I should have. I was disappointed that there was no winning - I managed to eliminate colors, but they'd just come back in my ship even after elimination, so there was no way to clear the board. The flying was really easy - you almost couldn't die from that unless you were really reckless. Sometimes if you were close to a blob of balls when you shot, your shot would not do collision detection right, and would end up inside the blob doubling up space with another ball rather than sticking to the side. The sound was great, and the music was good, although I can attest that it gets really repetitive after 45 minutes. The controls and physics made sense and were responsive. The idea was very cool, although it might have been neat to give you a little faster way to clear the board - e.g. if you break a single ball, or a two-ball bit off a big blob, maybe it explodes for bonus points rather than having to hunt it down to find it and hook four more to it. But all these are nitpicks - it's really very cool and creative, and I enjoyed myself immensely.
@dob thanks for the feedback, you pointed out stuff that I hadn't even thought of
This game was fun and because the asteroids aren't too mobile, it wasn't stressful to play. I hope this doesn't overwhelm you too much, but I have a list of things I'd like you to consider if you make a future updated version:
- when learning the controls, I ran into an asteroid and I thought that the losing health ticks were a bit fast. I'd like to see a damage cooldown, where there's a short period of "invincibility" after the ship is damaged. Really liked how your "redness" indicated your damage level, though my familiarity with the game Heat Signature kept making me think it was how often you were thrusting.
- the music is okay--it doesn't get annoying after a bit, but I think this game could benefit from a more atmospheric, sparse, spacey soundtrack, or at least a track that's a lot longer with more variation
- it was hard for me to distinguish the orange and the yellow from each other based on color, but they also had shapes in them, which was a great addition for usability. One way to make colors more distinguishable is to mess with the saturation. Really I'd just like to see more differentiation between the yellow and orange.
- Since it takes so many of the same orbs to remove them, a way to make the game more match-able would be to reduce the number of colors by one, so that matches are more likely. Or you could reduce the number of orbs required for a match. Just right now, it seems too slow to get a match. I agree with the ideas to only be able to fire orbs with colors that are already in the playing field.
- the edges of the room seemed to be beyond the edges of the game window for me, was that intentional, or just something with my machine? Either way, it didn't feel right.
- because the red orb doesn't have a glyph in the middle, it feels different from the other orbs, even though it acts the same way (I thought it would explode upon matching, because it's red, I guess). I'd want to see a glyph added to the red one as well, just to even it out. Maybe a dot or plus?
- I really wish escape paused rather than shut down the game. It takes a really long time to play this game in its current form, and sometimes I needed a break from the intense concentration, and losing what progress I'd made up to the point that I wanted to pause was a bit saddening.
- I agree with the person above that having a small score animation when matches happen would add juice and also point the player in the direction of the score
- I really liked the asteroid physics and the way the ship moved about the space.
- Sometimes I could shoot past the surface and into the heart of an asteroid, which was mildly frustrating, but I could see how this might be difficult to address technically.
- I was wary at first of the ship controls, but they were very usable. However, sometimes my mind would mix up the shoot and go buttons.
- There needs to be a win condition since it takes so long to clear the level :sob:
- At some points during play, I wished I could see the orb I was going to shoot *and* the orb after that one, just because sometimes it's difficult to maneuver into the small asteroid crevice and if there's two of the same color, I want to shoot them rapid-fire after each other.
Overall, this was a really fun game that triggers the completionist in me too, because it felt very playable and the steps to move to the next point were obvious and felt accomplishable--it was easy to get into a state of flow. I'd really love to see a more polished version. Actually, on second thought, I really wouldn't because I'll waste so much time playing it! :) (But let me know anyway if/when there is one)
I hope this feedback helped! I thought your game deserved a playthrough after you promoted so many under-voted games, and I wasn't let down.
P.S. Because of the shade of the blue orb, and because it has a star in it, the orb looks like a blueberry and I really like that.
Even though strategically it makes more sense to leave the asteroids big and whole, the most fun I have making matches is when it'll split up a big asteroid.
I enjoyed the graphics and the music. The starting asteroids are a bit large resulting in a long game (I didn't finish). Watching the chain reactions go off was satisfying. Overall it's a fun game!
Dangerously addictive game! I liked it a lot, although I wouldn't mind a guideline aka laser pointer for enhanced precision. Well, then again, maybe it's just me and my inherently terrible aim. Anyway, nice genre mix!
A neat techdemo. The genre combo is certainly a functional one. Had a similar idea initially using hex tiles and then decided to go with the easier rectangle grid. I feared running out of time with a more complicated set up, which might have happened to you as there really isn't much to do.
Lifting more mechanics and tropes from shmups, for instance, would have helped. Enemies who not only try to attack the player's ship, but also add in more bubbles, steal them or mix them up. Stuff like that would have livened up the proceedings.
The visuals are great, audio good and the controls tight. The lack of challenge is a shame. A solid effort nonetheless.