Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD41 → Birder x Runner
By local-minimum, skymandr, picapica and devadatta
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1034 | 2.93 | 26 | |
| Fun | 911 | 2.91 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 950 | 2.89 | 26 | |
| Theme | 693 | 3.45 | 26 | |
| Graphics | 1050 | 2.34 | 25 | |
| Audio | 484 | 3.14 | 26 | |
| Humor | 332 | 3.34 | 25 | |
| Mood | 801 | 3.02 | 24 |
Nice! I love the background ambience, and the hand-drawn aesthetic.
There are a few too many things for me to think about at once here, but that seems to a recurring thing that I'm running into with this theme.
I need to be better at multitasking.
Nice audio, makes it seem like a walk in the park, but the game is definitely not :)
Number 1 runner and birder x runner!! This game is definitely a challenge, and it's great to have a scoreboard to climb. The audio is very atmospheric, but I feel that the art is very basic and not up to your usual standard - the elements are discordant, but not in a way that I would recognise as thematically relevant.
It is a fun game anyway, it made me want to excel at it!
@randomhuman As the graphics artist, I agree that the birds are somewhat out of theme. Besides the blackbird however the theme is ironic: birds that either cannot fly, are extinct, exotic or mythological/fictitious, i.e. birds you'd never see flying in nature. It would probably have looked nicer and more coherent with only blackbird-style birds.
Good game. These are two of my favorite genres. I really like games like this that have scoreboards. I think it makes it more enjoyable.
At first, I thought the two would make an easy fit, after all, you walk when you're bird watching, and what's running if not faster walking? Surely you'll just see more birds! Of course, this game was quick to point out the factors I missed! Running past too fast to catch them, or missing your step because you tried to look back, those aspects made it clear how this game fits the theme.
I appreciated the range of interesting birds, though it took me a while to get to grips with the game. In the end I managed to get quite good at the running part, but less good at looking at birds. Quite the opposite to real life!
Good work integrating a leader-board too!
Thanks everyone for the feedback so far. I'm happy you like the scoreboards, I lost the better part of a day setting it up.
@simonhutchinson You might be on to something, I'm having the same issues, with our own game too. There might be hidden reasons why some genres are generally not combined :wink:
@randomhuman I saw you rob me of my :medal::s lurking on the highscore service. And you are very right, we were missing some of our highest level weirdness consultants this jam. When that happens, sometimes you can't help but making your own :tractor: _The Straight Story_ :tractor:
@RockhopperGames In real life it is much easier I've noticed. I've steadily climbed in my species of bird per kilometer score. Last one was 3.26 species/km. Still it is a bit dangerous when you get distracted and forget to look where you put down your feet.
I don't feel like these two themes mashed really well, it felt more awkward then anything else. I loved the audio and the general ambiance, but this art style was not the greatest. The graphics should be consistent, if the birds look too different from the character and the environment, it just doesn't feel very connected. Maybe all black and white would have worked better.
At the beginning I didn't know what was I supposed to do with birds, but after few minutes I finally got it. The game is really enjoyable and audio is a perfectly fit. The global highscore is very good idea, that kept me in this game for few more runs, just to get better time. Well done guys!
Pretty good idea, it was really difficult trying to do multiple things at once and not screw everything up :P I just think it would be nice to let the player know how the bird x run score is computed, since now it seems kind of random - birding definitely seems to have higher influence there, but it is hard to try to improve in this ranking when you don't know how it is done (I understand it is meant to be a measure of how good you are doing both things at the same time, but I feel like knowing the rules of it would be better).
That A and D system for running is great. The moment it sunk in that the sound effect was for a foot landing I got the metaphor. I sucked at identifying birds, however.
In my mind, both bird-watching and running are meant to be fairly relaxing activities, but the time-sensitive multi-tasking in this ended up making for a very stressful experience! Outside of the "story" section, this also felt like it was missing some of the trademark wackiness I've come to expect from your games.
This was an interesting idea, but I think the execution was a miss for me.
@Altron I updated the description above to more clearly indicate exactly how _Birding x Running_ was calculated. I will update on itch too. Thanks for the heads-up, it's so easy to think everything is 100% obvious when you're the one designing it :sweat:
@sean-s-leblanc I agree with you more or less 100%, though inverting some that is relaxing and making it stressful (or perhaps more interesting the other way around), I think is a good tool. I promise next game will focus on absurd and wacky again.
I can't decide if these are the best, or the worst graphics i the jam.
As not an outdoorsy person I had no idea how incompatible bird watching and running were until I was trying when playing your game, I've learned something today.
Nice combination of mechanics. I'd suggest adding more feedback to player input (let them know when they nail the press or fail horribly). I'd also consider placing the "walking bar" closer to the center of the screen. Congrats on finishing the game in time!
I suppose this is some hellish combination of Pokemon Snap and a runner :). Game was very tough in a good way, I actually haven't seen a multitasking game where you had to hold over something without looking. The birds were pretty hilarious, like the sphinx bird you can see right up front. Just for effect, having a little trophy/collection case on death showing what you're missing (if you added more birds) would be a neat thing to add replayability.