bigbosserndog 2018-08-13 23:23
It was fun! The AI was very simple, but made for a solid game!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → Pyramidion
By matank
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 446 | 3.52 | 104 | |
| Fun | 360 | 3.47 | 105 | |
| Innovation | 623 | 3.14 | 104 | |
| Theme | 417 | 3.71 | 105 | |
| Graphics | 517 | 3.54 | 105 | |
| Humor | 436 | 2.87 | 92 | |
| Mood | 236 | 3.55 | 99 |
It was fun! The AI was very simple, but made for a solid game!
That was fun ^^
I had a fun time! Really like the graphics and the pyramid idea x)
I like the graphics, very nice style of art. The voice over was nice as well. The game is a bit difficult for me, but I enjoyed it. The art style was still the spot on thing in this game for me.
It's fun but so hard for me! :)
Thanks for trying it out @daria-s !
Yeah, it's really hard to balance the game since you get so good at it while testing it out. Some tips for future people wanting to try it out and getting stuck:
1) The jumping snake - much easier to get under it then to try to jump over it. 2) If the player character moves really slowly it might have something to do with webGL - you can try to download the binary. 3) For the swooping bird - like the jumping snake, it's better to stay close to it and go under it when it swoops.
The art style is amazing and the overall feel is great! Good job!
Jumping snakes, made me chuckle. Great use of theme with ascending the pyramid. Mood was very good.
Woah, great game! I really like the art style (especially his walk animation and the snakes)! Game was quite hard and sometimes confusing (waiting for the timer to run out before you can exit the room). But great work dude!
Good Game! i like the artstyle and the music was great!
I relly liked the running out of space theme with the pyramid. also I really enjoyed the drawing style graphic. Though I think for that kind of graphicstyle you need really smooth animations for it to feel good while playing. maybe something in the direction of pixelart is easier for that.
I couldn't avoid the jumping snake. it was really hard for me.. i can't imagine how difficult the hardest mode is. but i really enjoyed this game in easy mode. And I love Egypt concept!
great theme and graphics. really enjoyed the spoken word bits. game-feel could be improved a bit during the run-and-jump phase
Loved this game! haha graphics and mood were spot on!
Just played game! Let me share you what I liked about it and what you could improve in the future :) But first of all, kudos on making your first game in Unity - it's going to get easier from now on!
So, what did I like about Pyramidion? - Egyptian theme. I gotta ask, was that voice in the beginning Egyptian? I'm not really sure, but if so, it's a very nice touch! - funny jumping snakes :) - the pyramid idea behind it - it totally makes sense that levels are shrinking while you're climbing up, also it's a very smart use of the theme.
What I didn't like so much: - snakes are spawning in set place, which sometimes mean they can spawn on character. Some margin for that would be great, so the spawner knows where player is and spawns snakes next to him :) - the difficulty is very low in general, the only deaths I had is because of collisions that didn't seem very much on point, - and speaking of above - collisions!
Overall, good try, good luck :)
A good idea to work on an Egyptian theme! Funny game, good work :)
That last boss was amazing! Really impressive for your first full game! The sound effects for the bird might have been a little loud, but they were really effective. Great for telegraphing which attack was coming.
After playing the game I remembered an old game for the MSX platform, named Treasure of Usas :)
I like the graphics and the concept is really simple.
It's simple but fun! an interesting interpretation of the theme. I really like the animation of the guy walking up the stairs. :)
Cute graphics, not very difficult game but I loved your interpretation of the theme (running out of space as you climb up the pyramid, genius!). Last level of the pyramid is easy. More variety of snakes could be nice. I enjoyed it, congratulations.
A very solid entry. I had fun enough to play it through to completion. I liked the graphics style. It definitely nailed the theme.
Good stuff :8ball:
Funny game:)
Charming visuals and nice non-obvious interpretation of the theme!
Very cool interpretation of the theme :) Fun but simple gameplay mechanics that made it very strategic and not twitchy. Cool art, reminded me of old windows games back in tha dayyyy. Awesome entry.
Good attention to detail with the backgrounds and art style. Simple game, but very fair mechanics and warning systems. Every death felt deserved, good balance!
The way you treated the theme is original. I liked the gameplay, not easy at all, in fact! I liked the three difficulty-levels possibilites. Great job :) Have a look at our game too if you have time ;)
Art is simple but really cool because it do the main thing - I had a feeling of ancient Egypt. Gameplay is quite simple but I like it because of good balanced! Overall opinion is very good!!!
Very unique graphics that I really enjoyed. Perfect use of the theme. This could definitely be expanded and has a lot of potential!
Really fun!
I loved the art, took me a couple tries as well to get through on easy and that hard difficulty enemy looks intense. I think the animation could use some love but you have an absolutely fantastic models to start with. A very solid entry.
As I saw on stream, the aesthetics are amazing. Great job! You even have different difficulties!
It's a little stiff, but in general I liked it. Graphics have an endearing quality to them, even if the animations leave a little more to be desired. Egyptian themes was nice. GG!
Managed to beat it. That jumping snake man....scared the poop outta me xD
Nice use of the pyramid as a natural interpretation of the theme! It was intuitive about why the space was running out. I appreciated the clear animated tell and pre-attack sound on the snakes. It was interesting how the last level ended up being the easiest to deal with the snake when I was expecting it to be the hardest. However I was playing on easy difficulty so maybe this was addressed in later difficulties. Randomizing the timing of when it jumped will do the trick to make it hella hard! Curious if the hieroglyphs actually say anything ;) Nice work
Cool idea! The difficult stage is appropriately challenging as heck. Walk animation could be further refined, otherwise I like the graphics. Not sure how to trigger the hourglass to start the countdown. Fun stuff!
The best part of this game is easily the battle music, it's awesome. My biggest gripe with this game is the snake AI (I played normal difficulty); usually, if they're heading towards you, you can jump over them, and then they will turn around to chase you just a moment after you land. But sometimes, seemingly randomly, they will turn around as soon as you jump over them, and you do not have enough time to react to that movement, so you die pretty unfairly. This turned me off from the game completely after enough times, but I did see the ending from somebody else's playthrough. The animations weren't very good, but the fact that you put in the effort to do animation at all puts this above many other games. I really liked your implementation of the theme; using the natural shape of the pyramid to restrict space was a good idea. Not a bad entry, but the gameplay was a little too simple to keep me engaged for long.
Thank you everyone above who played the game!
@wertle As I said on the stream, the hieroglyphs probably don't say anything (I picked random ones)
The voice over at the beginning is in ancient Egyptian, or at least what scholars think ancient Egyptian has sounded like (at least according to a few youtube videos I found :) )
@randomphantom the hourglass for the first stage starts out after you finish talking with Horus. For the other stages it simply starts out after a few seconds.
@sidnoea thank you! The battle music is not mine (from opengamearts) but I agree it's really nifty :) To try to explain regarding the mechanics of the snake - but just to preface, the following text is not meant to be an excuse - the fact that you - and several other people I saw on stream - had this complaint means this was not "taught" well enough in the game. I did want to give a detailed explanation for how I designed the mechanics of the snakes in case it will be interesting to you or to future visitors to this page:
The snakes do behave randomly - they would sometime turn around by random, and the decision whether to jump or walk (for the yellow snakes) is random. However, I've spent a lot of time on balancing the various speeds and behaviors of the snakes to make sure at every random decision point the player has enough time to react and avoid the snake. So, when playing against a single snake, I can pretty much 100% never die and always avoid them. The strategy is basically this:
1) Get close to the snake (without jumping), wait to see if it jumps 2) If the snake jumps, go under it. This is perfectly safe because snakes never stop mid jump. 3) If the snake keeps chasing you, jump over it, but don't be too committed to the jump in case it switches sides 4) If the snake switches sides while you're above it, go back and do not finish the jump
I worked a lot to make sure the strategy above works almost perfectly with a single snake. The one thing I had trouble perfecting in the given time for the jam was the level with the two snakes. It's not very common, but the pair of snakes would sometimes be aligned in a way where it's impossible for you to avoid one of them without bumping into the other. This is not common because the snakes are actually aware of each other and actively try to avoid situations where this happens :) However, it is not perfect and still happens occassionally.
Still, I currently manage to win the game consistently, usually without losing any lives, in all difficulty modes. I am still trying to figure out how this could have been "taught" better in the game. One thought I have is that maybe the difficulty curve is just too steep - I've noticed for instance that streamers who start by beating easy and only then move to normal usually struggle very little with normal, versus streamers who would start with normal and will die repeatedly at the second stage (with the two snakes).
A cool game! Choosing an egyptian ambience was a very original idea for this theme, and you did it very well with the pyramid mechanic.
However i found the hardest rooms were the biggest one (i played through every mode. In fact the hardest room for me was the second of normal mode, the one with two snakes) and i was surprised to see the more i advanced in the pyramid, the easier it was (while i expected the contrary, i thought little rooms were going to be very hard). But shure, it shouldn't have been evident to make challenge with those snakes ennemies in these little rooms, without making levels impossibly hard. Maybe a solution would have been to include littler ennemies in those rooms (maybe some insects? A beetle would fit in the egyptian theme), but maybe i'm asking too much. After all you only had 3 days to make this game!
Apart of this, you did a good job! Graphics are cool (your snakes make me think about shrimps, which is fun XD) and AI, even if they are really simple, are challenging : I particularly liked this level in hard mode with the bird and the snake moving together from one side of the room to another, but their moves are desyncronizing little by little and we have to deal with it (here, you managed to include challenge in a little room, despite what i said earlier).
@shertigan thank you for playing and for the detailed review! Yeah, you're right that the second level of the normal difficulty is probably the hardest :) I really wanted to have more enemies in the higher levels but it was very hard to add more snakes without making the levels super difficult. I tried experimenting a lot with adding easier types of snakes but couldn't get it to work within the time of the jam.
I don't think I've played any other game like this. Very fresh concept for me. Though, the second level is very evil when the 2 snakes corner you.
Had a joy playing this on twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/298451826?t=02h52m02s Also have a permanent link on my channel page as you have received the red tail hawk award! ;)
Nice entry!
Pros: - Theme and mood were great - Cool art and sound - Mechanics were simple but enjoyable
Cons: - Difficulty progressed a bit weird - Just nitpicking, but the walking cycle was a bit odd for me, I guess because of the arm movement
Cheers!
I like the concept!
Simple mechanic but the game is really fun and challenging. Good job. Would be great with more variations of enemies
The gameplay is simple but nice and progressively harder. I like the graphics. Good job on making this!
Simple, good difficulty progression and it kept me playing for longer than I had to give. Great entry
I felt that the last level in every mode is not as difficult as it should be, it's even simpler than the previous ones. But I loved the art style, the animation is super simple and the sounds and music are well selected :heart:
This is a very nice game. I think it's great that you managed to do all of this by yourself. About the audio, I think it would be great to have original music and SFX... that always completes the mood of the game. Nonetheless, you did a GREAT job selecting the audio-files. Nice criteria :stars: Also... are you the one talking? About the graphics, I think you had some very good ideas. Loved the sand clock and the stairs!
Maaaybe I'd suggest you to rethink the difficulty. I find the "hardest" stage of the pyramid to be not as difficult as some lower floors.
Nice work!
Thank you for sharing your game with me. As you know, I played it on my stream tonight at https://www.twitch.tv/saoigames
I have rated your game, but all of my feedback was captured in the stream.
You can hear my comments in the archive at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/300361630
Simple but difficult! plays well, and looks good!
@jazmin-giolito thank you! Yes, it is me talking in the dialog :) To create the "language" I took some snippets from various ancient Egyptian prayers I found on Youtube.
Fun but hard! Good idea with different difficulty settings. I really liked the egyptian prayers :smirk:
Just played your game on stream. thanks for reaching out!
Very well made. Would like to see more of this in the future.
I really enjoyed the game. The art was simple yet effective. Interesting take on the theme. Great job.
Nice use of the theme! A simple concept for a game that actually goes a long way. Artwork was not bad, gameplay made sense. Good work!
Nice game! Gameplay is simple but fun and very effective. I love the use of the theme and the Ancient Egypt style. Something in this game makes you wish to get the top of the pyramid. Congrats!
I liked the art!
cool!
Challenging game! I included it in my compilation video series of the Ludum Dare 42 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/tG45WDfIQds