lukel 2018-08-13 19:12
“LIGHTING NEEDS TO BE BUILT!” xD
Fun game actually, surprised how long I spent rolling about trying to clear all the red.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → WASH UR BALLZ
By steampunkprogrammer and CraneStyle
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1012 | 2.98 | 51 | |
| Fun | 870 | 2.93 | 51 | |
| Innovation | 887 | 2.88 | 50 | |
| Theme | 728 | 3.33 | 51 | |
| Humor | 761 | 2.24 | 41 | |
| Mood | 1045 | 2.41 | 45 |
“LIGHTING NEEDS TO BE BUILT!” xD
Fun game actually, surprised how long I spent rolling about trying to clear all the red.
Cool concept and a really good looking game with the color effects. Really easy to understand as well and the controls worked fine. Good job!
thank you so much, my partner got sick during the dare, so we didn't get to focus on all the cool feedback stuff we had planned. So I just focused REALLY hard on making the movement feel as good as possible. I am just imaging if there was good sound and vFX how much it could have added lol.
The movement felt great and the game did everything it needed to do and did that exceptionally well. Bravo!
Thank you SO much hellspoodles, so you felt like you were flying through a death STAR!!!!! Also, cmon share some high scores here!!!! =P
I have not been able to get over my last one, I keep attempting to do a mega clear and stunning myself out on an enemy on accedent.
Nice work :D The movement feels really good! My highscore is 597 Seconds ^^ It got kinda laggy at the end
Yea, that can happen, I needed to work on a bunch of optimization, but instead I worked on making jumping off their heads more reliable.... lol priorities!!!! hahaha though getting like a triple jump off enemies to land and clear half the field, is amazing!
@marcel Egle also geeez 597 seconds, you are PRO sauce!!!
Really clever take on the theme! It's a good amount of fun too. Nice job!
@firebelley THANK YOU SO much!!! How long did you last???
@cranestyle I couldn't get past 50s or so, tried a few times but just couldn't stay on top of all the red!
PRO tip, so don't jump too much and just wizza round and flow through, but tactically when your getting hearded jump over try to land right on ther eheads before you touch ground, every time you do it,. increases the ground clean splash radius, if you do it like 5 times it clears the whole arena
Hey @cranestyle thanks for the feedback. My best run was 367 seconds. This is a very pleasant game, kind of therapeutic. I think you pulled off what you were after with the movement - it feels nice. Sorry to hear about your partner, but I think what you have is still good - gameplay first for games, right? I think the simplest iteration to improve this is by just having more levels of different shapes.
Thank you wow that's still long, it gets tough at that part. I have been doing games for awhile, I just don't necessarily do the technical implementations. lol
The movement feels very good, there is a very good sense of speed and maybe another map with ramps and stuff would be cool :D
Oh yea,m with more time I think I was at the point now to start thinking of how to expand and create a more compelling experience after.
- So the movement really feels very smooth and responsive - I had full control over my ball and that's very important. - I actually played the game without knowing what my goal, I found the tutorial text very confusing at the start. - I would like to be able to move my camera when I'm stunned, sometimes I didn't see where am I going.
Hmm, I should check, i didn't think i locked the camera, but maybe I just thought that it was another way to reinforce when your are stunned, and once your not stunned your immune for like 10 seconds. So you won't get restunned and can reset yourself. Generally speaking you only enter into stun bounces in a situation where you are getting hit by things where moving your mouse wouldn't matter, but it's not a bad point.
The ball was a little slippery initially but then I got hold of it... the concept is really cool. I felt that you could reduce the paint percentage to 80 because it was very easy to maintain 95 percent for a long time. the overall game was good and I liked playing it.
I really liked this game, I would like it if it wasn't so slippery but I got it eventually haha! Was a cool idea, and I really did like it!
You definitely achieved your goal to make the movement feel amazing. The fact that a single action (jumping) on one button has so many gameplay implications is very well designed. Jumping lets you scout, clear more and combo into even bigger clears.
Feels like the game is begging for some kind of squishing animation on the player ball and some (gross) lurching sounds.
I wasn't certain whether the % is a good or bad thing. I was hoping that I could see things cleaning, but I couldn't quite tell if the % was amount I have cleaned, or the amount I have left to clean.
Did the colors indicate anything?
The core player movement and ball movement feel really good and its a great template to build off. I'd make the ball flash when its immune. And some in game instructions would be nice too.
Controls and camera feels responsive. I wish it had some songs tho. But i had a bug where the percentage of the game suddenly drop down to 0% several times. So i beat your score haha ;) BALLS.png
PS: thank you again for the test on your twitch channel !
Truly, the balls have been washed. Good wholesome fun!
@antoined73 thats actually by design, if you jump off an enemy it boosts the clearing power.
Looks like what i need to do ius not allow you to stack up the power clear while stunned. But noot remove any power clear modification that was built up before stunned.
@mobiusdisco absolutely, literally wholesome! @antoined73 Good lord man 800+ seconds, #dedication!!!
Wish there was more to do and the game play gets a little boring after a while
i agree with @allan-kong, also i wish you had art or smth ^^ but mechanic basicly is cool
Good things first:
-> Simple mechanic, no need for tutorial
-> Control does not change direction as the ball roll, always up arrow = going forward
-> Trail of the ball, to make it look satisfying
-> Don't die when reaching the edge of the arena
-> Cool take on the theme: running out of clean space
Questionable things:
-> Too much momentum imo: this leads to unresponsive control, like if I were to go left and then when I change direction to the right, it takes one sec or so to change direction. Maybe it's just for my taste.
-> Camera work can improve a lot, especially when the ball is going through a crowded area. When the camera is pulled close to the ball, you basically lost awareness of the surrounding area. Also zooming in and out gives me a bit motion sickness
5b7398491b65e606485930.gif
-> The shadow of the big balls have the same color as the clean floor, giving false observation that the shadow is clean.
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Overall, a pretty fun game. It also scores humour for me as the game is making fun of my small ball.
Cool concept, i think the 'paint' mechanics worked really nicely. The player felt responsive, loved jumping around or bouncing off things. The camera lock was really frustrating, not sure if it was a bug or a penalty, but it ruined some of the momentum of the game. Would be cool to see some sort of power up or special abilities included. Overall good effort.
A good game idea, the music should be improved. The graphics are good. Try our game too, maybe you'll like it)
I enjoyed this entry, but I feel like your finessing of the camera worked against the playability. I found it very hard to predict where I was going to land, leading to a lot of time unexpectedly stunned. Being that this is the primary draw of the game (it makes the player feel more powerful than just rolling around), I'd suggest toying with the follow and controls, and perhaps adding an indicator that shows where you are above the ground. Overall, a great concept tho! :smile:
Additionally, for the sake of us other jammers, please use a free host (like itch.io) that supports faster downloads than Drive. It took a solid ~5 minutes to download your entry due to the size and slow speed. This could also be helped by shipping a smaller size zip, which could be immediately improved by not building in Unreal's "debug" mode.
@bloodyaugust yea, sorry for that. I am not a master at the building configurations quite yet with unreal. I generally focus on the other aspects of the development.
@nam-nguyen Good strong feedback, and a good supporting arguments.
-> Momentum, if I had more time my next step was to slightly change the shape of the ball and have it lean slightly as you change force to give it that more ( speeder bike feel ) to it and to better imply the movement and direction of force. I think the biggest flaw there is not enough intuitive feedback on understanding how force effects your movement. [ this could have also been further inforced through some camera work, but I can see where you are coming from, in this case I was intentionally aiming for that kind of feel, but can understand the frusteration when there is no real way to know that's what's happening]
-> Camera, yea the core camera is REALLY good and it's not using a standard camera, my partner got that all working and I think he did a really good job at it. That being said, due to his sickness that happened he really didnd't get a chance for us to clean up the camera and look for ways to avoid that. I couldn't touch it, haha I dare not touch such dark magic!!! BUT, I see where you are coming from. In this case, especially with the camera already pretty close, the next adjustment would have been to remove balls from colliding with the camera and having the camera go through them, but we would need to figure out a way to imply that you are inside or when you do start weaving through them, you could run into a ball unintentionally.
-> Shadow, HAHAH Wow that's a GREAT catch. I never even thought about it or looked. Yea, def should have changed the ground to not be the same color as a shadow and better outline the paint. MY BAD
@allan-kong @danielpancake
Thank you for playing, and I agree with you. I wanted to add more, but as you saw at the top the situation that lead to that. I would say, if we had reached the point that it is now, earlier, we would have been able to work on creating a more compelling and expansive experience. As you know from my stream though, I am a strong believer that the 90% of what you do, without goals, objectives, or any other mechanics in play, needs to be solid and feel enjoyable to perform. Creates the solid foundation for everything else to grow and expand.
@awix you heard music!!!!! When did music get added....did unreal do something when I was not looking... SKYNET!!!
@cranestyle I think you shouldn't remove the collider on the camera, clipping through the bigger balls would lose sight of line to the character, which I think you know is never desirable. I came across a very good GDC talk about camera work called "50 Game Camera Mistakes" that your programmer might have already seen, but it has some very neat solution for that. I think you can turn the camera angle to a worm view and maybe make your player transparent. Or yeah, transparent big ball when camera passes through them works too. Im just a fan of camera work in game so as soon as I see a game that has a dynamic camera, Im hyped :smile:
@nam-nguyen yea camera is super important hahaha. And people don't even know how important it is. It's one of those areas though where design and technical stuff clash in an epic way. By that I just mean, there is a ton of technical work behind making a good camera, and function and feel don't always aggree with eachother. But games are a unified artform FORGED in passion. That's why I say games are "FORGED." lol
I really did appreciate the simplicity this game was made with, and it was definitely challenging from the start. Only thing is that it can become eventually boring to play, but showing the amount of the time that passed can probably keep someone going for a very high score. Decent game!
First I did not like the game because I could not understand the rules in its entirety (I do not read descriptions that are longer than a couple of lines, I believe that since I am rating a game, that game should do the job). However, after playing it for a while I noticed that I am actually enjoying it! The gameplay is solid, the controls are great, what else would you ask for? Maybe some music and some sort of... theme, I guess. Because this game looks very boring to me. So, I'd like to have a tutorial and a different difficulty curve, I think it starts off too difficult. Cheers, and thank you for rating my Compactor Bot Escape game!
Good concept... I would have liked if it was easier to move through other objects. but doesn't interfere the fun!
I think there is a core of a good game here, but I have a bit of constructive criticism:
-It was very difficult to determine where I would land. I think this is a bit of a camera problem; perhaps you could tilt it down slightly in proportion to my current jump height.
-Speaking of jumping, I felt like I had very little control over it in general. I would love to be able to stop ascending by releasing jump.
-I wasn't sure what the goal was. I could infer that I needed to prevent the stadium from being painted red, but am I supposed to jump on the balls as well? It leaves a little marker of some sort when I do, so it felt like something I should be doing. Because I didn't bounce on them, however, I was penalized for trying.
-Encountering the edge of the map sends me catapulting back toward the center, regardless of my speed upon hitting it. Then I would inevitably hit a ball, which was frustrating. I think it would work better to have the wall recoil be proportional to your current speed, and perhaps reflect your angle of motion as well.
Nice game, Love how everything is balanced! Good luck, Don't forget to take a look at ours if you don't mind and see what it's like when we just focused on graphics in this game jam! Game Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/spacelab-42a
Good game concept!
Good idea! I wished there was more chain reactions (something more like a pinball machine) like when the ball touches the edge. Nice work!
Yea, I hear you! I will be doing a dare this weekend but all on my lonesome. So I will be figuring out how to best apply the things I teach on my stream and really push hard on others. I will have to find the QUANTUM of fun that is something I can reasonably achieve on my own as well.