coda-highland 2018-08-14 03:44
This is by far the most effort I've seen put into cut scenes in a jam game.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → Eventful Horizon
By bitdecay, nandemoguy, Shadoninja, Michael Wingfield and Jacque006
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 68 | 4.02 | 72 | |
| Fun | 98 | 3.83 | 71 | |
| Innovation | 27 | 4.09 | 72 | |
| Theme | 430 | 3.70 | 72 | |
| Graphics | 251 | 3.95 | 73 | |
| Audio | 89 | 3.89 | 73 | |
| Humor | 437 | 2.87 | 62 | |
| Mood | 108 | 3.83 | 68 |
This is by far the most effort I've seen put into cut scenes in a jam game.
I think there was a problem with the MacOSX version, theres no sound, and after you press start the hatch opens then it just freezes there.
But ok, based on the video playthrough, this game looks amazing! It's pretty amazing what you were able to achieve, well done! The music is great, and love the rotoscoping, so much polish!
A great core mechanic that really rewards developing skill with it. Successfully finds that rare "easy to learn but hard to master" sweet spot. As my confidence grew I found myself chaining my Teleball throws rapidly, only to realise I'd lost track of my orientation as my next throw sailed into the black hole. A great experience!
Really Really enjoyed the game! I like the teleportation ball system and the crazy changes in gravity/camera angle. The music was super fun and reminiscent of older days!
Really great game! A couple of times the ball went through the cracked (?) ground. Felt glitchy. But it wasn't game breaking. Always sorted itself out by throwing again.
second the cut scenes comment, and overall very entertaining and pleasantly surprising with different tiles/textures having different effects on contact. Found it to be quite difficult mastering the gravity-while-screen-turns, but very fun regardless!!
Love the theme and the creative mechanic! The graphics are awesome, but they are in a few different conflicting styles. One thing that would be nice is a checkpoint; it takes long enough to get to the black hole that it makes me not want to keep trying as many times as I would like to if I could just try the race part over. I really love the idea and playing with a unique mechanic.
It's a nice game, albeit I didn't really know how the teleball system worked. Sometimes it will hit the surface and I won't teleport to the location but other times I instantly teleport the moment the ball collides to the surface. Despite that, it's pretty fun to mess around with. Also those are some very nice looking cutscenes. How did you get the time to make those?
Incredible work! Very unique method of movement... I am a fan. Visuals were beautiful and the amount of content in this was phenomenal. Great job with all the cutscenes(?) too. That introductory animation was especially incredible!! Some notes- While getting about three minutes in, I found myself loosing my sense of direction.. not necessarily direction as in what's up or down (I think it's cool how you loose that one) but direction as in where the player needs to go and what platform is next up. Also, there were a couple times where accuracy made things difficult. Throwing the ball thing over the first barrier took me at least fifteen tries, and let's not talk about the part where you have to bounce it (which was a cool "Aha!" moment, don't get me wrong!). Definitely a great game!
There is a metric ton of effort put in this one. I can't say much about it though. Everything I wanted to mention is covered in a different post in some way or another. However I do think a checkpoint system would have sealed the deal for me.
Extra props for the game title: Event horizon remains one of my most beloved movies out there ;)
All the best, good luck!
What an amazing game, the artstyle is amazing, love the sounds and music. awesome but simple gameplay and the cut scenes are really nice! The best game I found so far!
How did you guys made the intro? it looks neat. The first bit its a nice tutorial but you should show what button to press (not everyone reads the description). Also I got a bit lost with the camera rotation after teleporting, its still a nice effect if I may suggest a compass arrow that indicates where to go forward.
@harark We used the Unity Tilemap plugin along with some of the built-in physics. It wasn't properly culling the internal edges between tiles and we didn't have enough time to figure out how to fix it. You're right, though, it does seem to sort itself out -- so the fact that it's not game-breaking lead us to spend our time on other things.
@josehzz We recorded video of ourselves and used a technique called Rotoscoping to animate it! It is fairly tedious, but it leads to very 'real' looking animations.
The idea of adding a compass came up too late into the jam for us to put it in, but we had considered it. If we had another day to work on the game, that and a quick controls tutorial would be first on the list of things to add.
Woaw truely impressive game! The concept is great, really enjoyed the gameplay, the camera made me feel a bit dizzy however x). As said above it is obvious that a lot of effort have been put in this game, really nice work !
Amazing work! Graphics are so cool! And the intro scene too! And also the gameplay! Well, really good job!!
This was a lot of fun! The learning curve felt really smooth going from just throwing wherever to actually having to plan out your shots. And the visual presentation, including the cutscenes, was very well done! I did unfortunately lose motivation when I died pretty far in and it just restarted from the very beginning... Maybe some sort of checkpoint system would have been nice. Apart from that, great job! :)
Holy crap this was fantastic! The opening cut scene was awesome all on its own! Your primary mechanic was challenging, and I liked how the game sort of taught you before the black hole part came. The different materials and their effects on the ball gave variety, and the constant pull of gravity from the black hole added an additional challenge. I would have liked to see a checkpoint system, but other than that great game! I can tell a lot of effort was put into this one.
@veilastrum Yeah, we didin't expand on the ball throwing directly within the game, instead option to put a blurb in the description and letting players work it out for themselves. Using the mouse button after throwing the ball, you could activate/deactivate the teleportation in a sense, allowing you to bounce the ball. The tiles covered in black "vines" retain the tile's effect on the ball, but do not allow teleportation to them.
We did discuss a checkpoint system but had some other items that we wanted to address before the submission deadline.
Serious kudos to you all. Very well designed overall and a unique concept. Definitely one of my favourite entries so far! :)
Insane polish levels. Love the mechanic and the Out of This World-esque cutscene visuals.
Great Game! good gameplay and animations
This has to be one of the most polished games. One of my top favourites so far. Incredible work.
This game is just awesome!
Nice Game. The Graphics where nice. Everything felt nice.
What an entry! Those cut scenes are incredible! How did you make them?
Only rated the audio since I'm stuck playing web games for now. Cute, sounds a tiny bit like Terraria.
@echo-team thanks for checking it out! If you don't want to play desktop games, check out the YouTube playthrough we uploaded.
@ryanjavanshir It's a technique called rotoscoping. A bit tedious, but leads to some really cool animations.
So you acted out the scenes?
@echo-team Yup! All three of the intro clips were originally videos of me taken on a phone. Our artist @nandemoguy then trimmed them down and rotoscoped and tweaked them just a bit to get them to look the way we wanted.
@bitdecay Cool!!!
this game is amazing,I like it;
This is a really cool entry! I love your take on the theme, and the core mechanic is so unique!
I also enjoyed the art very much, but those animations take the cake, well done!
I really enjoyed playing your game, very nice entry!
Oh this game is sick :D
Oh wow, I will be shocked if you guys don't win. The cutscenes and animations were amazing. The music and sound was perfect. The whole art style is great. You obviously put a ton of effort in. The way the camera flips around is way cool too. I like the original mechanic of throwing yourself to where you need to go, it's not necessarily the funnest way to move through a level but it's unique and really cool. Well done! This submission almost makes me feel bad about mine because I probably only spent about 10 hours working on it.
By the way, such a beautiful ending.
@cobear25 thank you so much for your feedback!
It is really encouraging to hear everyone's really kind words. Thank you so much everyone!
Okay, this is a very good game, so I'm gonna be picky.
The game mechanic is extremely good and original BUT it's also difficult to get used to. I see that you made some arrangements with the difficulty so that the player has some room to mess up, and that's great. But it's still frustrating when you lose and have to start over from the very beginning. What you need here are some checkepoints and a way to skip the (very good) cutscenes.
The throwing mechanic works well, but the little box takes forever to disappear when it falls into space, you need a way to fix that (it adds to the stress, but not in a good way).
I don't understand the purple sticky tiles. Do they do anything different than the "sand" ones? They really look like something dangerous, it's a bit of a problem.
The level design is great. It might lack some direction from time to time, but when I played it I had no problem to get to the end.
The mood is very good too, there's a good sense of mystery, you feel the horror of space in your bones.
I can feel that a lot of effort has been put into the art, but the style is still a bit bland. The texture are a bit boring, some lighting would help, and you should not use so many desaturated colors (all the greys seem to have a 0% saturation value, add some of the ambient color of your game in it)
Well, I guess that's all I have to nitpick. It's really an excellent entry, definitely one of the best of the jam. Great job, please tell me if you make a postjam version! :)
@kokonaught thanks! We posted a postmortem about our known miss on the checkpoints, it was discussed but didnt get implemented before time was up. As the artist I had a pretty good chunk of work to do, and to top it off, I had to bow out at 48 hours to go to work on Monday, so I had to pick my battles in that regard. I did intend to do more with the textures though and even add some animations, also I wanted to do more with lighting and make unique player sprites for left and right facing animations, but time didnt permit. All of your feedback is on point and well received. Glad you enjoid the game!
@kokonaughtoh, and the purple tiles are "sticky". They significantly impact slide and bounce physics on the teleball.
@nandemoguy thank you for your answer, I didn't feel the difference with the purple tile, I'll try it again tomorrow.:) Great job on the art in only 48 jours, the scale of the game is very ambitious.
Looks really cool! well done!
Cool! I like it :thumbsup:
Very impressive game, love the mechanics of movement via a ball and the flipping directions. Only issues I spotted were that you could get the ball slightly into the ground. Which would result in the player getting stuck. Though could eventually get out with repeat ball throws.
The cut scenes take the cake haha, pretty fun gameplay when the physics were working right too :thumbsup:
Just AMAZING.
Very surprised by the cut scene. I seriously said out loud "Are you serious?!" when I first saw it.
I was amazed that even though the map was going around in circles, I didn't lose track of which directions to go.
Cool mechanic indeed. Level design is neat and the audio fx really add to the mood of the game. And OMG the rotoscoped intro, say whaaat. As many have said above a checkpoint system would make this 100x more fun
The effects in this game are amathing, the animations are good, the sound is very nice, and the mechanic of teleportation feels good, I didnt like the fact that when you die you have to watch all cutscenes again but really cool game.
The visual effects like the parallax and black hole distortion were really wonderful. I was also very impressed by the cutscenes because that's something I haven't seem very much in game jams. I do feel like the gravity shifts on your throw were a bit confusing sometimes. Nice job!
@seizethedia Yeah, a checkpoint was next on our list of things, pretty much -- but we ran out of time and we had to drop it to make the deadline.
Really interesting game concept, I liked it.
It would have been nice to have a checkpoint after you pressed the button, but that wasn't such a big deal, because I was able to complete the game after all. I was a little bit confused about how the gravity system works throughout the whole game. Better explanation on how it works would have been also nice, but I do understand that in a time constraint of 72h it's impossible to pull off everything.
Other than that the game was fun to play through. I loved the graphics (especially starting animation) and the audio. And as I've already said the main concept of moving with only your teleportation device was really interesting and something I haven't seen before. Good job.
A really nice game ! The mood and the story are really well installed and the mecanisms are really cool with all the differents surfaces ! Like the graphims too ! Really good job !
SUPER CREATIVE! The game gets 5 for many categories for me, and knowing that you have put a lot of work in the audio made me pay attention to how the audio reacted to player's action. The game mechanic is super duper cool, I really think this game will do well as a complete release. One suggestion from me is to have an indication of the direction of gravity, because when the camera rotate for a while, I lost sense of direction (which is no big deal) and the cube is behaving not as I expected. I would expect the gravity to also rotate with the camera, but if it doesn't, an indication of that would be much appreciated to players I think. Overall a very very solid entry. GJ!
PS Another suggestion: keep the trajectory of the last shoot so players have an anchor to adjust from that if the cube failed to land
This game shows the power of team work! Cool music, polished graphics (i loved the absorbing effect of the black hole), original and well made gameplay and this incredible rotoscoped intro. So many things we're not used to see all-together in a jam game because of the time constraint. But you managed to do all that because you were 5, and i suppose you were really well organized to divide this huge amount of work.
The only thing i regret is an option to skip the tutorial and the black hole cutscene. Despite the fact these are really cool, i had the feeling i almost spent more time reapeating them than playing, so i didn't finish your game :-(
Thank you for sharing your game with me. 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
@saoi-games Thank you for trying our game and for your awesome review! Digging the stream!
Ouch, no checkpoints! Cool cutscenes here, impressive how much was crammed in here for a jam game. The teleball throwing mechanic was really satisfying in general until some later sections penalized you quite heavily (in terms of time spent) for missing a toss. The different tile types were a good idea, but I feel like for the most part there wasn't a need to let the teleball keep bouncing along on them (unless forced to).
Great job overall.
cool game concept!