FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD42 → Runnink out of Space

Runnink out of Space

By wan and aurel300

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1103.9248
Fun3423.4847
Innovation234.1248
Theme3933.7347
Graphics2144.0550
Audio1623.6948
Humor1413.5843
Mood1083.8347

Comments

wheffle 2018-08-14 03:12

This looks like an awesome game, but unfortunately I can't figure out how to drag and drop green words into my inventory. Is the release version bugged or am I doing something wrong?

But like seriously, this looks awesome and incredibly polished. I'd love to get further into it.

aurel300 2018-08-14 10:14

@wheffle Hmm, that should not be an issue. Make sure you've got the correct answer typed in (the game tells you when the word is right). Then it turns into a little rectangle card. At that point just drag and drop (i.e. hold the mouse button down on the card and keep it held until you move it to the inventory :D).

A quick way to test this (spoiler alert), in the Social Room (the room just below the Starting room), the answer to the left guy is "hey". Try if this works?

crabcrabcam 2018-08-14 11:31

Brilliant game. Beautiful art, amazing audio, and the theme is great. A little tricky to get the hang of and some puzzles require outside knowledge or remembering a lot of little details about what people have said (I'm terrible at this so didn't get very far :P) but if that's the sort of game you like this is an amazing one to give a go.

udo 2018-08-14 12:51

This is wonderful, exceptional job on the puzzles, the graphics, the design. well done! I'm not even close to done with this yet :smiley:

wheffle 2018-08-15 04:22

@Aurel300 Right, it works on my desktop! Was weird on my work laptop, who knows why.

Was super happy to play through this more. This is pretty incredible, I can't believe you guys did this in 72 hours! Really fantastic. It made me super nostalgic for old point-and-click adventures. My only complaint would be that it was a little *too* much like a 90s point-and-click sometimes; some of the puzzles were very obscure, and there was a lot of backtracking. It might have been nice for the blue bubbles to be given to the player as "abilities" that stayed with you so you wouldn't have to run between them to shape words so much. That might have been quite a rework though.

One of my favorites so far. Awesome entry!

mza 2018-08-16 11:13

A very unique idea. Animations are super smooth and very well done. Graphics are well done too. I fealt that you should incorporate the tutorial in your game somehow.

steffo 2018-08-18 14:48

AWESOME!

Not being a native english speaker, I had some trouble with some parts, but the walkthrough helped a lot. Very well done!

(Try to rate some more games so you get the exposure you deserve too! :) )

adonisdevs 2018-08-18 20:30

This is an incredible game! Very puzzling and thought provoking, definitely something I will return to later. The art, music, sound fx, it was all really good! Extremely polished, and it's incredible that this was made in less than 72 hours!

kapiteinkoekwous 2018-08-18 21:55

Hey there! This game was played on www.twitch.tv/arjendesign just now! Incredible game, really fun!

zicboy 2018-08-19 06:55

Awesome game. I was pleasantly suprised with the overall mood of the game. Hope you develop a post jam version for this!

norrimo 2018-08-19 12:28

At first I like the Zork intimation and also the humor in your scenes. :D But I couldn't solve any of your riddles. Maybe because I'm not the best in the english language. The only puzzle I've solved was the one which you spoilerd. xD Anyway, I love your world and that was enough for me to be happy. I like also your soundtrack. Is really old school but that was maybe your intention.

aurel300 2018-08-19 14:14

@crabcrabcam @udo @adonisdevs Thanks for playing and for the comments! :)

@wheffle Glad to know it worked eventually. Yes, I realised that the backtracking is just too annoying a little bit too late. I mitigated it slightly with the double-click to warp but it's not enough for sure. If I ever do a post-jam version, that is the #1 gameplay change I would do.

@MZA Yeah, tutorials are not my strong suit x) At some point I was considering having separate maps (the first one being tutorialised), but at that point it would already be a large code change. And having a single large world opens up a lot of possibilities for interesting puzzles which use multiple word operations. So in true spirit of old-school point 'n click adventures, the player has to figure it out themselves :D

@steffo Thanks! I know the game is not super friendly to non-fluent speakers (English is not my first language either), but I don't think word puzzle games like this can be made "internationally" accessible, it just goes with the genre. And, I was waiting for our stream (with @DanaePlays) for rating other people's games, don't worry.

@kapiteinkoekwous Haha yup, I was there. I must say ArjenDesign played the game surprisingly well!

@zicboy Maybe :)

@norrimo Yup, old school (inspired) games are what I do for the majority of Ludum Dares. Also, there is a [walkthrough available](http://ludum.thenet.sk/ld42/walkthrough.php) if you're stuck and want to see the rest of the game :)

g12345 2018-08-22 10:16

Hey! I still haven't finished the game but I was halfway enough that I can rate it and comment on it.

English vocabulary isn't my best part, so this is going to take a long time.

I had problem with the oil puzzle, i thought it was oil 'spill'. but then i was playing voxel's game and he actually used the oil word.

Before I forget, this game is, as other people said, AWESOME :smile:

chris-coe 2018-08-23 06:40

This... wow. This was incredible. Wow. This was made in a jam?! Like... wow.

Almost everything here was just so amazingly witty, logical, yet difficult. I felt a real sense of accomplishment from finishing it. I took notes as I went, which hopefully isn't considered cheating <3 but it worked for me.

And I say almost everything, because a certain peculiar individual in the Social Room only accepts one, and exactly one, input. If there's a logic behind that, I haven't figured it out... but I got my word in the end!

Geez. Good work, seriously. Just... wow.

saoi-games 2018-08-24 01:20

Such an innovative puzzle concept.

bustosman 2018-08-26 08:15

I'd say the gameplay is decent, and some of the humor in the game makes it even more fun. The transitions into different areas are pretty cool, and the riddles are definitely challenging. For the general's riddle, it might just be me, but I wasn't sure if the answer was supposed to be somewhat obvious, because it felt as if there's not enough provided to get the answer. Decent entry!

rahim-pxr 2018-08-27 00:59

Nice game, I hope to see more updates and improvments sooner. If you don't bother take a look at our game when we focused on Graphics and visuals and see the results that we got: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/spacelab-42

logicon211 2018-08-27 01:19

Graphics were top tier. Took us a while to figure out that our map was also our inventory space, but once we got that it made things very interesting trying to figure out where to store the words. Really interesting use of the theme!

glock00 2018-08-27 14:36

Just watched your timelapse and checked your homepage. I can tell you are an experienced game programmer/designer and very professional in your approach. I like it. That's all I wanted to say because it's not my type of game but I wish you all the best :) Oh yeah, music and graphics are very well-composed!

phlip45 2018-08-27 15:44

Graphics were great and music was pretty good. I played for ~ 20 minutes and didn't get tired of hearing it. The gameplay is interesting and I get how the theme would come into play if I played longer. One thing I would have really liked is that if your map had a direct route to a place, being able to click on it to travel straight there. Once I figured out the answer to a puzzle it was pretty tedious to walk all the way the to the chef to chop off two letters, then all the way to the train to turn it around, then head back to the chef only to realize that I didn't actually pick up the word at the railway station... That is the point when I stopped playing. Being able to fast travel (assuming you have a proper route in your memory box) would alleviate this problem while not really taking away from the game (in my opinion).

Overall though it is a great job! playing for 20 minutes is twice as long as I usually give a game, so yours had me hooked for that little bit.

matank 2018-08-28 07:21

Amazing game! I had a lot of fun, though eventually the word games got a bit too tricky for me :) I did manage to get quite a lot through it, actually, after banging my head against it for almost an hour :) Still I gave up eventually because I really have to go to sleep.

The only complaint I have is that there were a few rooms where clicking on the object didn't seem to trigger the interaction - instead I had to click right next to the object, wait for the character to very slowly walk next to the object, and only then clicking on the object works.

In any case, awesome work :)

axoona 2018-08-28 22:55

very nice entry. Graphics and audio are really cool and I really enjoyed the general mood and the narrative. Also transforming the map into inventory was a very neat move, makes a clean UI and adds additionnal challenge.

As a non english speaker I found the word puzzles very challenging (= too challenging to be fun) especially the green riddles with which you need to start to be able to get anywhere, it would help if there were maybe rhymes or something, it actually sometimes sounded like a poem (I liked those little textes a lot).

A part from that the game mechanic of transforming the words is actually quite fun. Overall it's excellent game that could become just be a little bit more accessible :wink:

laurim 2018-08-29 00:56

Really awesome game! It was definitely challenging, but very fun. The whole concept was really original. Good job!

(Spoilers) - Only issue I had was that the guy in the social room wouldn't convert the m -> n on any word. The only time it was used was for the word "blind." I had it as "blimd," but it wouldn't convert. I restarted the game thinking it may have been bugged, but got the same issue at that spot. It turns out it would only switch the m to n if the word was "dmilb." No other combinations would allow it to swap. Not sure if this was intentional, but it took me forever to get this. Other than that and a few minor glitches with the movement, very well done. I'd love to play an even longer version!

aurel300 2018-08-29 09:59

@g12345 Yeah, I realised after the jam that `spill` is actually a much more natural answer there. I added a couple of letters because I had to admit it wouldn't be a reasonable riddle otherwise. Thanks for playing :)

@chris-coe Thanks! Taking notes is encouraged of course :) The one individual in the social room? Are you talking about the medicine guy? What other solutions did you think of?

@saoi-games @rahim-pxr Thanks for playing :)

@bustosman It was perhaps not the most direct way I could phrase a riddle for that word. Still, I think if you know army ranks, it is not that difficult.

@logicon211 Thanks. I'm glad people can actually spot the theme in the map / inventory mechanic as well. Way too late I realised there is not that much need for having all the rooms discovered, providing you with a lot of free inventory space. Starting room for example :) But I knew it would be easier for people to find the correct paths from green words to yellow ones if they actually had the words in their inventory so they could look at them. I guess it is a trade-off.

@glock00 Hah, thanks for the comment, even if it is not your type of game ;)

@phlip45 Yeah, in about the last ~2 hours I realised some of the words would require way too much backtracking. Being able to teleport using the map would be a very nice solution, but I was worried about implementing it improperly (in particular, there is a short period of time where you are locked in the lower third of the map without having access to the rest – I wouldn't want the player to be able to teleport out of that). So instead I implemented the next best thing I could think of, double-clicking to warp. In a post-jam version, should there ever be one, I would have the player actually take the transformation with them, so they can change the words in their inventory, without having to go to the room where they found that transformation.

@matank I'm actually not sure what you are talking about, since you cannot actually click to move in the game, other than on exits. Maybe your player character was climbing up a ladder and you were trying to start the interaction? I know this is an issue that I didn't quite have the time to fix. And thanks again for mentioning me in your post!

@axoona I'm aware of that – but I think for a challenging puzzle game centred around words this is simply unavoidable. Sorry it spoilt the fun for you, but I hope you enjoyed the game anyway :)

@laurim This came up in one of the streams actually … That particular transformation was added very much last-minute into the game (because I didn't realise blind has an "n" and climb has an "m" :D), so the text doesn't explain it very well. It is not bugged, and it is not meant to transform m -> n, it actually does mi -> ni :)

matank 2018-08-29 12:55

@aurel300 ah, yeah, I meant the fact that it ignores interactions during the climb. I guess in my perception the interaction wasn't starting but I thought my clicks we're somehow causing the character to climb up while in fact it was just climbing slowly and ignoring my clicks :)

shakedimus 2018-08-29 19:14

This game is pretty magnificent. I played it over several days for multiple hurs and loved every minute of it! Because I played it so long here were a feew minor things I noticed, there is a bug in the warping that it sometimes happens twice. Also it would be nice to have an icon for a place were you got a word this couldve saved me a lot of time. Again it was a really great game, craszy that you have made this for a jam! Great mechanic btw!

wrenpirate 2018-09-03 22:07

Okay, I'm a native English speaker, and I needed to use the walkthrough (thank you for that!) I couldn't figure out how to activate (3, 4); there was nothing to click. And without those letters, I couldn't solve (3, 5). I have a strong guess for the guy on the right in the Social Room, but I don't know where those letters are going to come from. I agree with the above comments about the backtracking and the cleverness of these puzzles. It's a little bit like the legendary interactive fiction "Counterfeit Monkey," which I needed a lot of help to solve, but went through the whole thing because it was so much fun. Five stars for your sense of humor. Thanks for letting me turn off the music. I appreciate the 8-bitty-ness of the graphics, but the text is very hard to read! I wish I could have gotten further, just to admire the weirdness of this world. I also wish I could speak another language well enough to make puzzles.

aurel300 2018-09-04 09:01

@shakedimus Thanks; the double warping happens when you double-click more than once. I noticed it, and it was too late to fix it, but frankly I kind of like it :D

@wrenpirate Sorry for that – I updated the walkthrough with a specific instruction for (3, 4). If you don't warp around by double-clicking, you should notice that your robot slips on the oil on the floor, so you cannot "stop" at the interaction point. Thanks for playing and I'm glad you enjoyed the humour!

zeriver 2018-09-04 09:11

Another very ambitious game for Ludum Dare. I really like pixel art and the transitions between the locations and how UI slides when you enter the 'conversation mode'. The idea of sharing map space with 'words' is really innovative and interesting, to be honest it didn't impact the gameplay that much but it was still a fun mechanic. The puzzles were challenging, they slowly were getting more difficult but manageable (although completing the whole game takes some time). Writing is really good and witty, definitely gives the game some charm. In overall it is a really great Ludum Dare game.

ursagames 2018-09-04 14:15

Heckin' good entry! This actually became my favorite entry out of the 200+ that I played on stream. Thanks for sharing your game with my stream awhile back. Your game was played around 2:12 into this vod: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/300724241