Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → Battle Billiard Galactic Edition
By anudin
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 496 | 3.47 | 20 | |
| Fun | 326 | 3.50 | 20 | |
| Innovation | 517 | 3.25 | 20 | |
| Theme | 891 | 3.11 | 20 | |
| Graphics | 988 | 2.80 | 20 | |
| Audio | 80 | 3.91 | 20 |
This was a lot of fun. I played it 4 times and got a score of 64! Also the music was great, really pumps you up! Watching your gif again after playing, I now understand what I should have been doing with the space bar, I'll have to go play it again and see what me new score is!
118, knowing what to do with the space bar helped :)
@lost-dutchman-software I'm seriously sorry to the lousy tutorial, note that you get bonus points if you manage to collide two rockets! My highest score is 1600 on wave 24 but as the dev I have a bit of an advantage ;) I'm looking forward to see more scores
I think i'll play this again later but for now this is my high score
Capture.PNG
You made effective use of simple shapes for the visuals. Looks stylish. The movement took some time getting used to, but it clicked after a while. Gameplay was nice too and I love the music.
@kungkras One of the goals for this LD was to limit myself to simple shape which helped me to focus on programming - I might keep this direction for the next LDs (even though I enjoy doing graphics but it takes sooo much time)! Movement was designed to feel "floaty" as in space but I agree it's not perfect - I haven't found the perfect mix of floaty and snappy. Do you have any suggestions in this regard, specifics that I could change with the movement? Thanks for the feedback!
Got 188 quite easily. The mechanics are interesting.
I felt the best tactic was to avoid the enemies and only use space for emergency situations if something is about to crash into you. Trying to play pool with the enemies was more fun, but less efficient score-wise. Maybe that is something you could try to balance. Very cool idea anyhow!
As @kungkras said. Great use of simple shapes.
@reax I'd suggest you play around with the pool mechanic a bit longer - each "kill" you get earns you 25 points which amounts to 25 seconds of survival.
It's a considerable boost but I still agree with you especially later in game. I could give more score bonus, give less points for survived time and I also played around with the idea of adding bonus "pickups" that appear from time to time for a short timeframe and give an extra big boost if you hit them; in order to break repetitive gameplay - sadly I didn't have enough time to implement it. Do you have other ideas regarding the balance between dodging and the pool mechanic?
Thank you for the feedback!
@Anudin It's hard to point out something concrete because I don't know how the underlying system works exactly, but when it felt difficult it was usually because it sometimes felt like I was accelerating differently even though the input was the same.
But other than that, I liked the movement. It felt sort of like a billiard ball, which suits the title, and if I got too little or too much acceleration, it was nice that I could double tap the WASD keys to get more movement to correct it.
@Anudin I'm not sure, but I think if you click on a circle, it aims directly at them? If you could instead aim manually around the target you could make it fly certain directions like in real pool. Correct me if I misinterpreted the mechanic.
@reax You are free to aim anywhere within that circle and the bullet shoots precisly where you aimed, allowing said pool behaviour.
But I agree that the implementation is misleading, in fact in the beginning the bullets had auto-aim and the circles are kind of left over from that. On the other hand I like the visual effect of them, maybe a better tutorial would have helped ;)
@anudin My mistake. I tried the game again and you're right. I didn't realize you had a small circle around your cursor. It makes a lot more sense now.
We have a similar concept and I like your realisation. I have to say that you should make some mid-wave upgrades as we did. It will help to upgrade gameplay a little bit.
If you are afraid to loose the game pace I recommend you to make a smooth slow-mo transition into upgrade panel.
I found a bug, though. After you died press ESC twice and the game will continue to go.
Really cool game!the sloe montion really sits the game i enjoyed it! Good Luck🍀
Came back for more and got to 209!
Super replayable! At first it was annoying how long it took to get my charge back BUT after a few tries I see that it makes the bounce/rebound kills that much more satisfying.
@lost-dutchman-software Awesome! I need to learn how to add a leaderboard for the next LD though... Makes stuff THAT much cooler.
@seizethedia Thank you for the feedback! Colliding two rockets was designed to feel special, that's why the charging takes some time, the explosion has a different color and particles and the screen shake is more extreme (don't know if anyone noticed this at all? ^^). You might still be right though, lowering it by something about 0.5 seconds sounds like a good idea. But it's also a penalty for missing, when you collide two rockets you gain full charge!
I'm also still thinking about how to move more focus towards the billiard mechanic and disrupt repetitive gameplay. Two things that I want to try are: - A classic combo bonus, more kills in shorter time give way more points - Maybe automatically re-enable slow motion when two rockets collide so you can try to get more kills right after and connect them to a combo
Also I'm thinking about slowing down the progression of difficulty so there's more time to aim. Might need different kind of targets though or the game could become boring.
@anudin what if some objects were not enemies and instead are collidables you can use to destroy enemies (like the white ball in billiards basically!). Powerups might be cool? One that was a bomb that clears all incoming enemies perhaps? :D
@seizethedia I like the thought of a billiard ball or something in this direction but I'm a bit opposed towards powerups - not because I don't like the idea but in LD I try to experiment and play with unusual mechanics and powerups are one of the most mainstream (and my entry for this LD is already dangerously close to a generic bullet hell game - sadly I wasn't too inspired by this theme) ;)
I could imagine something like a "Godshot" feature. At random times there would spawn a billiard ball which will introduce an additional layer of indirection: you would need to hit the ball with your shot and the ball would need to hit an rocket which in turn would need to hit another rocket... Would be brutally hard to hit but give an absurd point bonus.
Really nice bullet hell concept, I love it! The music is great and matches the game's spirit completely. The difficulty is nicely managed.
Now a few comments about what could have made this game even better. For a fast action game, the ONE important asset you need is ---> responsive controls, and I was really dissapointed with that: The character takes too much time to reach max speed, and most importantly the bullet time takes FOREVER to activate (what's the use of a bullet time if there's enough time to die twice between the moment you click and the moment it takes effect?).
The bouncing on the boundaries is really not a thing. Its buggy and adds too much randomness. A simple wall would have done the job just right.
I had a bug where I cannot reset the game if I die on the spawn spot.
@cydouzo First of all: thank you for the feedback!
The hard thing was pulling of a mix between floaty and responsive controls - because I wanted that space feeling - I might have ended a bit too far on the floaty side. On the other hand I really don't want it completely snappy, I might have to tweak some values there. Maybe it would suffice to make the boost more snappy? So the normal controlls would be a bit floaty but if you need to get away quickly you use the boost.
I agree that the bullet time takes too long to activate.
On the bouncing: what do you mean by randomness? It's only buggy in the sense that it allows you to leave the arena before it throws you back which was a design decision because it shouldn't feel like a hard wall but like an organic pull when leaving the area - which could've been communicated a lot better but was veeeery far down the bucket list ;)
Did you have some other buggy experience with the boundaries? The bug on spawn is new to me but I fixed some stuff in the post LD version which might have already fixed that. I don't know if I will release a post LD download but I hope to do so.
@anudin now I understand your game design ideas, but it would have been better if I understood them while playing. A snappy boost/bullet time would probably be enough.
The boundaries didn't feel like some kind of pull, but more like a rubber wall, it definitely needs some balancing. I called them random/buggy because it would sometimes bounce you harder (and sometime reaaally harder) without any explanation.
Beside that the game is well polished, and I'd definitely play a post jam version :D
@cydouzo I don't have the code in front of me right now but I think the speed with which you get pushed back into the arena depends on how fast you move out of the arena (your momentum).
Yeah, there are serveral presentation issues which make most of the game really un-intuitive and it's a shame. Sadly such things are most of the time out of scope during LD - I'm happy if I at least get some good balancing done - which I'm quite happy with this LD.
I'll let you know if I release a post LD build. I hope to get some kind of controller support going because I think that would be pretty cool combined with fullscreen on a TV.
Nice game, @anudin! It was, seriously, pretty fun. It actually made me replay it, which, to be fair, doesn't really happen to me. The tutorial, for me, wasn't really necessary because the game is easy to understand. One thing that I had a problem with was the boost. When I double clicked, nothing happened. But I am also playing in Chrome, so this may be the problem. By the way, double clicking to boost in a game that uses WASD + Space doesn't really make sense to me because the control for boost could have been easily on the keyboard, since you don't have to aim, or anything. Anyways, a really fun game with very nice music (the graphics didn't really impress, but got the job done)! :)
Awesome game! I really enjoyed it and played it for a very long time!
@luca1152 "[...] since you don’t have to aim, [...]"
Can you explain this in more detail? You have to use your mouse to aim.
@anudin Right, my bad. I guess I didn't really used that mechanic that much to register it :)). Sorry!
@luca1152 Ah okay I thought I didn't understand you correclty - no problem. I've got some presentation issues going on in the game which make things a bit unintuitive.
Shoutout to all the commenters, the first post LD version is fresh out of the stove (on Itch.io). @lost-dutchman-software @kungkras @reax @interpol @crafty-mine @seizethedia @cydouzo @luca1152 @smbe19
@anudin No problem man!
nice :D Is it the same link as on the page?
The rocket collision mechanics are a little hard for mastering, since the rockets are too small, but this worth it. Probably this game would be funnier with a bigger hit area when the rockets are spinning, maybe with a bigger rockets. I guess that if you make the controls more accurate (less "sliding") and make the game faster, this would be more funnier.
I missed a high score feature. Besides this, very nice game. My high score was 264 points.
@kungkras There is a download link on Itch.io (yeah same link on this page), it's marked with POST_LD.
@felipedev I don't think the rockets are too small but you still have a point: the collision response doesn't take account for the shape of the rockets which is physically wrong and unintuitive - but I couldn't change that in time.
Also too fast would be to hard later - I could implement it with a difficulty system though.
Completely agree on the highscore system I need to learn that for the next LD. That is a game changer.
Got to 231 points without knowing that I could shoot at all (didn't even read the description or see the gif xD). I think it'd be even more fun if you can bounce around frantically dodging the rocket instead of slowly moving around.
Great job though!
Also I wonder how you did the collision in Godot? I don't see how a circle inside a circle could collide.
@dleanjeans You could use the *_exited signals on Area2D or as in my case I just checked if the distance between center and player is bigger than the circle radius. I didn't use the physics engine by the way, it's all custom code so I have full control over what happens.
@anudin As I bounce around the edge, I occasionally bounce back really fast for some reason. Probably has something to do with your custom physics.
@dleanjeans That's correct - it's dependend on your current velocity as far as I remember. So it was a design decision but it's not really well communicated to the player. Some visible force pushing you back and sound effects could have helped but were out of scope.