FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD41 → Super Dashball

Super Dashball

By secretpocketcat

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall774.0653
Fun414.1153
Innovation2293.7552
Theme1944.0852
Graphics3483.8652

Comments

captainpilot 2018-04-24 12:46

Awesome little game. Good choice on making the new dodgeball match the same direction as the returning ball to make it harder to score quickly.

mainghia95 2018-04-24 12:51

It's a fun game. I have a fun time dodging things and dash around.

Mind to check our game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/daxua

rajtar 2018-04-24 14:35

Simple yet brilliant. Dashing fits perfectly in this idea, music is nice. I'd love to test it in multiplayer mode. :D

chema-esteo 2018-04-26 10:15

17 points on vanilla level. Too hard to me, although, good job!! give it a try to mine, let us see if you reach the end of the level :D https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/jammer-tank

mazzletov 2018-04-26 10:17

The Dashing feels very heavy and that's a very polished feel. Too bad I'm on an Azerty keyboard so it's difficult for me to use QWAD :sweat_smile:

Please also play/rate my game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/flaptris-flappy-bird-tetris

saibotk 2018-04-26 10:26

Again, nice innovative game, super fun and good work 👍

riordan 2018-04-26 10:44

The game is simple but fun. Dodging while trying to score certainly isn't an easy task. I like how there's some heft to the dashing; it gives it a pretty good impact.

I'm not sure if it was intended but dashing while remaining stationary might be a nice touch. Good job!

blakemcdeezy 2018-04-26 11:02

That was a really fun and polished game! Great sound effects, you chose the perfect Kevin MacLeod songs, really addictive, the game gave good feedback. Yeah, this is a favourite of mine - great work! I wish I had friends to play it with (violin starts playing in the background)

von-vista 2018-04-26 11:05

A simplictic game, as well as graphics, but very fun gameplay, as a fan of rage games myself, I can have fun while having a hard time.

Great job!

asyzruffz 2018-04-26 11:13

Very interesting concept, though I've only managed to score 17 on Vanilla. Good game! Try **[mine](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/fowlcard)** out pls...

lemonbalmgames 2018-04-26 11:31

I have nothing bad to say about this game. Great use of a theme and loads of fun. Graphics are fitting (strong Videoball vibe) music and sound effect are even better. You even made a multiplayer mode and a few different levels. Super Dashball is one of the better games that I reviewed so far!

digitaldude555 2018-04-26 11:33

Graphics are simple and clean. I really like the responsiveness when you hit the wall you "juiced" it well. I got a score of ten until I realized dashing awarded more points more risky behaviour rewarded. That's good game design. You combined the genre as well as it could be done I think.

Anyway my score was 16 on vanilla, tried other game modes but they didn't add anything that made them better than good ol vanilla. Couldn't test the two player mode but that one looks fun.

Overall 4.5/5

draperdanman 2018-04-26 12:13

Fantastic! I had been really looking forward to playing this when we spoke on Twitter. Finally got a chance to play some games today. Excellent work!

wrexialmt 2018-04-26 12:23

This is so fun in multiplayer! In SP i felt it was a bit too hard for me since i suck at bullet hells and they are supposed to be like that, but the MP, God that was fun! Love the tiny details, being able to push the other player and body block him, being able to clip through black's with the boost (probably unintended, but hey it's not a bug, it's a feature! Thank you unity Discrete collisions), the little screen shakes, the scaling of the player up/down for "no obvious reason" but it gives a feel of incremental difficulty (we deduced it was due to time or due to end from not being reset correctly, both of which are still awesome!). Highly recommended game! One weird bug, or maybe we're just dumb, in MP player 1 always wins xD probably the text "Player 1" isn't being set correctly in the post game.

langotriel 2018-04-26 13:51

Generally solid and lots of nice QOL additions on the menu (like satisfying sounds and dynamic feedback on sliders). A few design tweaks and this could be really fun. Good effort!

king-kujito 2018-04-26 18:13

Very fun, graphics support the game's feel and it fits the theme. I'd say make this an e-sport!

joltjab 2018-04-26 22:43

Made it to 600!

Got a clip made by jcmonkey

seen by, and approved by @SecretPocketCat

https://clips.twitch.tv/KindExquisiteKaleBrokeBack

joltjab 2018-04-26 22:44

The game is also super fun!

acoto87 2018-04-27 05:21

Nice little game! The graphics and music fit very well the style of the game.

Didn't make that much points, less after seen @joltjab made his 600... :)

yngvarr 2018-04-27 09:04

The first computer game about squash I've ever seen. This is really fun and also perfectly fits the previous LD's theme. =D I like this graphics and the mechanic, both simple and effective. Definitely will come back with a friend to test a multiplayer mode.

tweedle 2018-04-27 21:09

simple yet challenging - nice work indeed! :smiley:

jin9310 2018-04-28 22:22

The challenge is real and the fun is immense. I'll have my friend to stop by tomorrow and we will definitely need to try this in multiplayer. Great job man!

goat-toaster-games 2018-04-29 12:38

This was a fantastic take on the theme and very well implemented. Very simple and fun!! Nice work!

secretpocketcat 2018-04-30 22:31

Thank you all for you lovely feedback. If I haven't rated your game yet, I'll get to it. I'm slowly, but surely getting through the list. If I don't leave a comment, I have or will rate it, but I tend not to leave comments unless I have some suggestions or criticism to give.

@CaptainPilot Originally the direction was random, but then I just lowered the speed, but kept the direction so the player would see where the bullets would hit.

@Rajtar I hope you get to try out the multiplayer. I do consider it the meat of the game and don't forget to share what you thought if you get to try it out.

@Mazzletov If you are on Win or Mac, try the standalone build. That let's you rebind the keys.

@riordan Initially the player was able to dash from stand-still, but there was a bug with the direction of the dash, so I removed the option and unfortunately didn't have enough time to reimplement it before the jam ended.

@BlakeMcDeezy :blush:

@LemonBalmGames Correction - I even made a singplayer mode :smile_cat: The multiplayer came first and then I was deciding between working on an AI or putting in singleplayer and other stuff with the remaining time. BTW. I do know Videoball, but I still haven't gotten around to play it.

@digitaldude555 I like to give the players the option of risky play, so I'm glad you respond to it well.

@DraperDanMan Thank you. I tried to play yours, but it was offline. I'll try again later.

@wrexialmt Yay for multiplayer feedback! Glad you've enjoyed it. I do consider it superiour to the singleplayer, but I'd like for the bullethell to come though a bit more, actually. I might do that in a future release with a closed off map so that players just have to survive, but there's still the option of choosing other, less hectic maps. What do you mean by *'the scaling of the player up/down for “no obvious reason”'*? The map-clipping and scorescreen were fixed (hopefully).

@Langotriel Sad to hear on stream you hated the dash controls that much. I'm wokring on a post LD version, which might be easier to get used to.

@king-kujito You can't force an e-sport. Would love to try though :laughing:

@joltjab You cheeky bastard! :clap:

@Yngvarr, @Jin9310 Please don't forget to report back once you try out the multiplayer :wink:

@mainghia95, @Saibotk, @asyzruffz, @acoto87, @tweedle Thank you. :smiley_cat:

groverburger 2018-05-01 05:29

This is an interesting idea! Very fun and unique, once I figured out the controls.

mak3c 2018-05-01 08:35

Wow this was one of the simple games that really is entertaining to play. While my gf wasn't the greatest at this I felt I was pretty good and I'm now looking for a better opponent haha :D Will recommend to some of my friends as well.

secretpocketcat 2018-05-01 12:42

@groverburger The controls (well, the dash) might get some getting used to. I'll try to simplify that in a post LD version. Thx for giving it a shot.

@Mak3c Glad to hear that and do let me know how it played out with more skilled players. I played with my GF and she did alright, but I can't be sure how critical she actually was this being my game and all. I played it with a friend who plays mostly twitch-reflex-based games (FPS mostly) and he was actually beating me shortly after trying it out for the first time :laughing:

larzan 2018-05-03 07:57

Great idea, love the art style, a very polished entry. It was a bit difficult to control the movement, but i guess it is just a question of getting used to it, i can't think of any way to improve on it.

secretpocketcat 2018-05-03 20:38

@larzan Thank you for trying it out. I'm working on a postjam version and one of the main goals is to more the controls more intuitive.

rainysolar 2018-05-04 18:39

Simple and fun, very addictive. I made a bullet hell for myself and very struggle when there is too many bullets fly around me. I wish I can have some countermeasure to these bullets I made, then I could make a higher score.Great game! :D

kingofwhawha 2018-05-05 19:18

Just played it with my cousin! It's sooo much fun we finally stopped to leave a comment.

One problem though... We were playing on the browser. I was pressing right-ctrl to dash and my cousin was simultaneously pressing "w". As you know, the shortcut key to close tab is ctrl+w. So the tab just went POOF! Gone! We just stared at each other like who the heck just did that before finally realizing that the key combination was the problem.

We then downloaded the Windows version and the problem was gone.

Anyway, this entry is so full of fun. The audio was perfect and the game design was excellent! Great job you guys!

peachtreeoath 2018-05-06 05:59

Dear god 600 pts, I can't even imagine. The mp actually reminds me ever so slightly of Laser League (just happened to get that through Humble Bundle recently) where it's a pretty honest dodging game where you can mess around with other players indirect by dashing them into hazards and stuff. Really, you have a surprisingly fun game here, and I got some flashbacks back to my Jezzball days. Even with that experience though, I could only muster ~50 pts after many playthroughs in sp. Great job!

saoi-games 2018-05-07 02:24

I’m not sure if you were able to see it, but I played your game on my stream at https://www.twitch.tv/saoigames tonight.

When playing your game at first, we didn't realize that we needed to be a goalie and prevent our colored ball from getting into the goal on the left side of the screen. We thought that the ball the same color as you would kill the other player. Once we figured that out, it changed how we played the game.

I really liked the levels that had a block in the field. It added to the complexity and increased the gray bullets making it feel more like a bullet hell than a two player game of pong or a 2D game of racket ball.

We played the WebGL version and had an issue with using Dash on the keyboard. The button for player two was shifting focus out of the game trying to bookmark the page or open a different window. I'd recommend not using those keys in the future. I do not have numpad on my laptop where I was playing.

If you added more levels, I could imagine playing this on a console with controllers. Do you plan to add up to 4 player support? This has all the characteristics of being a great couch co-op game.

yngvarr 2018-05-07 17:21

@secretpocketcat, I finally got it (multiplayer mode testing) covered and can tell you that it's really fun! We laughed like never before, mostly when scoring several points in a row and sending a ball into a wrong wall. Also, it's a special pleasure to bump your buddy into a bullet-ball using dash button. Great experience!

secretpocketcat 2018-05-07 21:10

@rainysolar Thank you, creating the bullethell yourself is kinda the point :wink: (and you at your own mercy by making it too hard for yourself by creating way too many mostly vertical bullets etc. The current postjam version actually adds a shielding mechanic which helps the player to survive for a bit longer and/or destroy some bullets, but that needs further tweaking and playtesting.

@KingofWhaWha Glad you enjoyed it. I don't test the final jam builds enough it seems (and mostly do Editor and Win build testing), so this flew right by me (thinking Unity would actually catch and not propagate some of these basic shortcuts). Thank you for sticking with me and trying out the standalone version. BTW. it's just me, no other guys, I'll consider that in the future (although I'll probably do my 3rd LD solo as well).

@PeachTreeOath Thanks. 50 points ain't actually that bad as the top legit score (not leveraging any glitches and design flaws) that I know of is 77, which's mine. Laser League looks pretty cool, I'm gonna add that to my bucket list.

@saoi-games I remember seeing you stream, but thinking you do just VR games, so I didn't even submit. Seeing your comment is a nice surprise and I looked up the VOD and greatly enjoyed watching you play. I actually considered adding a variant based on your initial understanding of the rules/gameplay, but then decided against it as the goal is to keep the rallies as long as possible (and then as hectic and bullethelly as possible) and scoring the points would go against that. Of course, you can still play as a goalie and when I playtest with others I tend to do just that and do so fairly aggressively, but I think that's just upto players and adds a bit of depth/'strats', at least I hope so. I shouldn't have overlooked that browser shortcuts problems (as mentioned above). I (somewhat) fixed that in the web version by rebinding it to Enter (Return). I consider the dashing to be fairly important for the game, so if you ever feel like giving it another shot, you should now be able to do so with the same setup. On the other hand, it's nice to see you had fun even without using the dash. I'm (slowly) working on a full version with more levels and I do intend to add support for more players (maybe even 6 if I add bigger maps) both as deathmatch and teamdeathmatch. I'm also toying with the idea of semi-randomised level layouts as you mentioned in the stream - that's a swell idea! If that sound like something you'd be into, then I wouldn't be opposed to a [follow](https://twitter.com/SecretPocketCat) (I don't really tweet that much). Anyway, thank you for playing and your critique.

@Yngvarr Awesome! There's something beautifully evil in pushing others into their demise, isn't there? :smiling_imp:

illabom 2018-05-08 17:01

wow this is a really good game. I absolutely loved it. Its simple and fun and addicting well done. Great choice of music and sounds! Really impressive.

check out my game if you get a chance

peta 2018-05-11 09:02

Hi! Nice game! It is great fun!

Would you rate my game? https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-game-that-bad-that-it-is-actually-good

Thx a lot! :)

rockhoppergames 2018-05-11 10:17

I was shocked to see you saying you hadn't played videoball, considering how similar the art styles are! There seem to be strong thematic sensibilities here too, in the mixing of videogame mechanics with sport aesthetics. I'm curious how much of the aesthetics was informed by the time limit, compared to your original intent, since it's definitely an interesting road to go down!

goffmog 2018-05-11 11:10

Terrific gameplay and great presentation, this was one of the best for me.

secretpocketcat 2018-05-12 17:19

@illabom, @peta ,@goffmog Thank you :blush:

@rockhoppergames Videoball is on my (superlong) list of games to try out. As for the artstyle, it was more of a skillbased decision as no experience in making art is my actual bottleneck in that department.

ava-skoog 2018-05-15 15:46

Wow! This is one of those really simple but also really effective games. I never quite managed to settle on projects like that for jams myself, but I can imagine they're very rewarding to work on because you can get the mechanics down relatively quickly and then just spending the rest of the time polishing, polishing, polishing. Is that right? It definitely feels that way anyhow!

I feel like I have to expand on that. Came here because you posted in my gamepad thread, so that alone helped make the game feel great, but it probably feels really good with a keyboard too (for some reason I didn't think of trying that until writing this) because everything just feels so perfectly fine-tuned. I feel like I have absolutely full control over every minute motion and no matter whether I approach the ball dead on or by spinning my little cube it always seems to go exactly where I expect it to. Whenever something goes wrong and I die I 100% feel like it was my own fault and that I can identify exactly what I did wrong. I'm blabbering on here, but I'm genuinely amazed!

Audio and graphics work great as well, tho I know you opted out of the former category. Still, my compliments to the author of the tune! Good choice. Really liked the scrolling backgrounds.

Would've played some more if I didn't have so little time left to keep playing a couple of more LD games before the rating period is over! <3

P.S. You seem to have written "player 1" over both controller schemes on the help screen, where I suspect the rightmost one was meant to be "player 2". :p Doesn't really matter, but thought you'd like to know if you hadn't noticed already!

honest-dan 2018-05-15 17:45

I played this for far too long :D its one of those games where you feel "I will do better *next* time". And then you just keep trying! The mechanics are simple but deep enough to make the game challenging and some strategies can evolve. Also dash control adds a mechanic for the player to master in order to improve their performance. Love that a two player mode was also available, wish I was so alone that I had someone to play with...... anyway!! Great game :D

shelvid 2018-05-15 19:26

Super fun and well made, polished game which is pretty addicting in its own sense! Love the music choice, sound effects and... everything. really great game, well done!

secretpocketcat 2018-05-15 22:11

@ava-skoog Thank you, I actually think the collisions in this (jam version) are still a bit dodgy (teehee). I'm working on a postjam version and I'll try to further improve on that. Oh and thank you for playing the standalone version (the Player 2 typo is fixed in the web build, so that's how I know :smile: ).

@honest-dan I had a blast watching you stream. Cheers, mate.

@Shelvid Thank you :blush:

ava-skoog 2018-05-16 10:34

@secretpocketcat: Yeah, for some reason the web player didn't want to play sound in any Unity games yesterday so I basically had to, but I also imagined gamepad input would be more likely to work well in the native build. c:

secretpocketcat 2018-05-16 16:06

@ava-skoog Unless you had a browser/OS bug, I'd reckon you've encountered the issue caused by a recent Chrome update. My game actually doesn't start on load, so it shouldn't be affected by that. (I've tested it after the dreaded update). Strangely enough, both my gamepads work alright in the webbuild. Overall performance however is more of an issue, especially collisions in my case...

ava-skoog 2018-05-16 16:28

@secretpocketcat: Ooooh, I actually did read about that update but I'd completely forgotten about it again! Probably that then since I did update Chrome on the same day to see if I could fix another game that wouldn't start. :c But yeah, I just downloaded your game right away so I haven't actually tested the sound on yours specifically. I just stopped playing web builds in general after I noticed it the first time. Gave it a try right now tho just to see, and indeed sound does work, so yay!