jake-barter 2018-08-15 19:06
A fun and addictive game. I liked the simple graphics and the sounds (maybe a little too quiet). One problem I had was that the score wouldn't go up. Other than that, great job!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → Clot!
By ghoster and chronicbite
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 243 | 3.72 | 83 | |
| Fun | 215 | 3.65 | 83 | |
| Innovation | 91 | 3.85 | 83 | |
| Theme | 192 | 3.98 | 82 | |
| Graphics | 307 | 3.86 | 82 | |
| Audio | 408 | 3.22 | 76 | |
| Humor | 577 | 2.61 | 32 | |
| Mood | 432 | 3.29 | 74 |
A fun and addictive game. I liked the simple graphics and the sounds (maybe a little too quiet). One problem I had was that the score wouldn't go up. Other than that, great job!
The idea is good however I was a bit confused as I couldn't move blocks arround, I think just pushing it would have worked better. Also I don't know if it's intended but the game detected my Xbox controller and the player was moving up everytime I didn't move which was a bit annoying. I liked your artstyle. Good job.
I'm glad I found this one, it was a lot of fun to play! The graphics are lovely and I especially love the way it zooms in when the game starts. I really like the combination of shooting/dodging and matching up the blocks; it's a realy interesting take on the theme. It looks great, plays great, and is overall lovely! Good work!
Jake, maybe it should have been clearer you get points by collecting the gems from combining the blocks :)
Good idea, but I'm not sure if it was working right. Like the previous commenter mentioned, the character was constantly moving upward, which made it difficult to control, and I could not figure out how to get blocks to actually move. I would dash into them and nothing would happen. Like I said though, it was a good concept and it worked well with the theme.
Hey mrsylar59, thanks for your input. The game does work with a controller if you have one plugged in however it shouldn't be behaving like that. to avoid that bug you can unplug the controller , sorry about that :(
Hey AFlatThrasher, i think that was a bugged related to the controller support. My bad, thanks for playing my game !
Hi! This is a neat little game! It took me a bit to figure out that I was supposed to push the blocks into groups of 3 to get points, so for a while it was just mindless shooting. Maybe that should have been more clear. Also wasn't a huge fan of having to install it onto my computer with a setup. There also wasn't any clear way to exit, had to use task manager. Despite those hiccups this is still a fun and well-crafted experience! Well done! I also noticed you didn't have many grades. Have you been going out and grading other people's games like you're supposed to? The site recommends grading at least 20. (P.S. I didn't grade the audio because it isn't your own.)
One thing I didn't like was the fact that enemies could shoot you from outside of the circle. Other than that, it's been pretty fun! But yeah, please do make the music/sound effects a tad louder ;)
Very nice game! I enjoyed playing it and I liked the mechanics. I found the controls a little hard to master but after a while I was used to it. It is so hard to align the blocks! I couldn't push the blocks though, that could explain why it was a little tough for me! At the end, I was just surrounded by blocks everywhere :D Maybe you should work on the balance. I liked the sounds too, they fits the game well. And your graphics are very cute. Let me know if you work on this game, I want to see further versions. Great work!
Wow! Great game! Funny graphics, good gameplay and good audio (althou they should be louder).
@jake-barter the score goes up when you match the frozen enemies!
Having to install it is very annoying specially as this is a game jam, but, it was worth it. Also, i don't think it fits very much the theme... it would be perfect in LD41 thou (mix two genres)
@aszu Thank you! I feel like it matches the theme espeacially if you can survive long enough to see the arena shrink to the smallest it can go and you see the blocks accumulate XD Wish i could make it available to play online but i believe the web license for the engine i used is a couple hundred bucks :)
@purrfexionator the audio is all me except for the music, which i credited, I think a tutorial would have been made things easier to understand quick (ill definitelly keep that in mind for next jam). I think if you get the zip download you don't have to install btw. Thanks for the feedback, i'm currently going out and rating other games :)
@Niarkou Thank you for the feedback, yah like many people have pointed out its hard to understand what to do. should of had a tutorial (ill had one later as i will definitelly be working some more and correcting a few bugs)!
This game seems interesting but the controls were buggy with the Xbox 360 controller: the blob keeps going bottom-left if you don't touch the stick (probably because you need to implement a deadzone in your handling of the input, meaning if the axis has an absolute value under a certain threshold, you act as if it were 0) and I couldn't move the frozen blocks, I tried using the dash and random buttons but nothing did it :(
Otherwise, the sound is pretty cool, the visuals are really cute and coherent, kudos for making a really cute game icon and a good looking itch.io page! I hope you update the game with a fix for the controller, I'd love to play it some more :)
@lucien-catonnet Thank you for the feedback! yah some people have complained about the controller input (my first time doing that so yah ahahah, i figure since it worked for me maybe everyone would be good). I will defenetily be updating the game in a few days adressing some of these complaints (especially the controller thing) so follow us on twitter if you want to get notified :)
@lucien-catonnet @aflatthrasher @mrsylar59 controller issue hopefully fixed
I really liked this! The visuals were impressive and I love the concept.
Nice take on both the theme and match-3 genre !
Pros : - Minimal but cute artstyle makes for readable action - Nice audio and sound feedback - Clever gameplay loop - Placement and frequency of ennemies is well balanced - Controls are displayed in-game
Cons : - Pushing blocks together is hard, much harder than the normal dash - Instant death is a little frustrating in this case
All in all, great job !
i like the way you converted this theme into a really great idea, i also like the graphics,really nice. The game is smooth without bugs (exept for the score counting) but for a LD game it's just amazing ^^ i'd like you to test our game and leave us your opinion
Great job! Really like the aesthetic, very clean look. Thanks for bringing it by the stream!
@jlv Thank you for that pretty in-depth break down haha. I do agree with your points, there is a lot that i would like to add, probably later if possible!
Great game I really enjoyed the mechanics! It let me play around with building the great wall of china to save me from those reckless figures (spoiler it didnt work out as planned). Still though its cool to see mechanics being used in different ways for different strategies, that is good game design in my opinion!
The graphics, music and effects are great! The replay value is high as well, I just want to beat the 700 score :/ and win with my great wall.
Wouldve ben nice to have the charge connect with the blocks a bit better and to maybe hit 2 at once when you go inbetween. And the red ones are just hell, a wind up time might be nice :)
Great game, had a blast, please let me know when youve updated it!
Great job! I really like graphic and idea.
Smooth controls and clean design, a very good game overall. I think the circle should shrink based on score instead of shrinking overtime, that way it would remove the "randomness" aspect of it. Also, some enemies attack from outside the circle, I think that is a little bit unfair.
Great job.
Very clever idea, and it fits de theme very well. My only issue was that my character was constanly moving/shooting to the right (played with xbox 360 controller), and then moving boxes felt a bit inconsistent at time. The dash felt very rewarding when evading enemies with it, and I really like how I could choose where to kill an enemy for better cover from other enemy projectiles or to minimze how much I needed to move boxes to score.
@brandon-napky @cassio-eduardo @timbelion Thank you for playing the game!
I like how the game ramps up in difficulty as you have less area. I loved that you had to organize the blobs and dodge the enemies.
Just awesome! The gameplay is very fun, and the puzzle aspect is perfect. The enemy variety is cool, i also dig the style and the music choice (sorta synthwavy), though it could be a bit louder relative to the sound effects. Honestly, this is my favourite LD42 game ive played so far, awesome job man!!
Great game! I like the combo of those two types of games
@tinykidtoo @merpader Thank you for playing my game I'm really glad you guys enjoyed it!
@slojanko That's too kind :) Im glad you had fun playing the game!
Fun take on the theme. The black blob is adorable, loved it's change of animation while shooting. Great visuals and audio!
Really innovative idea combining shooting and match-3 gameplay (reminds me of the previous theme as well), and I love the sparse expressive graphics! Music was a little too soft and inaudible. In terms of balance, the red circles are really insta-death. Otherwise, great job!
Nice take on the theme. Those red guys are mean haha
Nice game, good graphics, and audio. Had a few problems with spawn rates. Enemies would come a few at a time and then would not spawn for several seconds. This made pacing a bit odd. As well would have liked a little more HP. As baiting enemies next to dead ones is a bit rough. Then to get one shot feels bad. Overall good game :)
I had a lot of fun with this one. The only negative I can think of right now is that the audio is too quiet; I turned my volume all the way up and still could barely hear it.
I really enjoyed this! I said this on another game earlier today too, but I can't believe I'm seeing a match-three game with an original mechanic. The character controls well, the few graphics look pretty nice (very nice details on the connected blocks), and the game is deceptively difficult if you're playing for score. I like the song, too. Even though it's simple, it's a lot of fun to play. Great job!
Had a really nice visual feel, I like how consistent it was throughout playing the game. The animations looked really clean as well.
Had the same issues that others mentioned as my game pad was plugged in and it started shooting constantly, once I unplugged that and just used the keyboard it was better. I found the pacing wasn't great as the enemies would spawn at really irregular intervals leaving my little blob sat there looking bored, and when the enemies did spawn I'd usually get killed within a few seconds if there were more than one of them. I failed to score anything as I never collected enough gems or managed to push them together.
Overall the game had a really nice feel to it, just a shame the pacing and my inability to push blobs around the screen meant I never scored! Really good work for 72 hours!
If you haven't created the audio yourself but instead used royalty-free music you should opt out from the audio category :)
Really orginal take on the match-3 genre!
I gotta say this is pretty good! The audio and the graphics are simple yet effective, well done! I had quite a bit of fun with this one. The only thing I can say is that I'd love a bit more HP. 3 Strikes and you're out but the 1HitKO does provide a bit of pressure into the game. Well done man!
@itsonrandom Thank you for playing my game! you can push the blocks by dashing into them in the direction you want , I wanted the enemy spawns a bit random but I get what you meant!
Also trying to fix controller issues, but its hard to test because it works with mine so I have no way if I fixed it or not when I change it.
@steffo @hanin @sidnoea @the-sand @darkguardsman @max-cahill
Thank you for playing my game, it makes me really happy that you enjoyed it and had fun! Working on a small patch, that i will post later today probably to adress a few of the issues you complained about :)
Really nice game! the combination of mechanics was great and I really liked the art style. I especially thought the animations and sound effects made it feel nice and responsive. I think that the spawn rates may be too high as when trying to push blocks into the right place it's really easy to get swamped by enemies. That meant it wasn't possible to do too much with the matching mechanic and I spend most of the time just shooting. Also maybe an indicator of where enemies are coming from on the edge (maybe just a colored or grey dot) would help as sometimes when I was near the edge I got killed by an enemy that just became visible which was a bit frustrating. Overall great game! :slight_smile:
@bearmask-studios I posted a post jam patch on itchio that hopefully fixes exactly what you are complaining about. Thanks for playing the game!
Really attractive game. Game mechanics are cool. Kind of difficult. Had the same issues as some others in the comments where I was unable to push blocks most of the time and was unsure of how to collect points. Is really cool otherwise. Replayed a couple times. :)
Really great Idea I love it. It was fun to play !!!
Sweet idea, to combine 3s and shooting enemies. Works quite well!
I have a Nvidia Surround setup (3 screens multiscreen setup) and I was surprised that your game looked great when playing it on all 3 screens! Meaning the game still only utilized the screen in the middle, but the UI and game were not stretched over all 3 screen like in some AAA titles. Other than that I liked the sound effect and the gameplay is very fun!
rsz_asd.png
Hey besides the bug that the score doesn't increase, I think the game is pretty fun. I was trying to build a wall around me so the enemies cannot come through haha, I still think that idea can be done, but the permanent death (die with 1 hit) is a bit too harsh. Otherwise I really enjoyed the game, the transition to the new scene was very smooth too, good job!
Heyyyyyyy guess what I really cant leave the game without doing it so here I did it LMAO
22.png
Mac users? :)
Enjoyed the puzzle + shooter combination to interpret the theme. The way that the space taken up doubled up as cover for the shooter aspect was a nice touch.
@nam-nguyen HAHAAH That's really good! The score is not bugged as far as I can tell, you only score by matching blocks of the same color in a line of three ehehe exacty to prevent strategies like yours! Glad you had fun
@tuism Working on it, unfortunatelly the engine I use makes it harder than it has to be XD I will post about that when I get it sorted
@realmar You know what? totally unintentional but Im glad it works fine for you. I scale the UI to primary display so thats probably why it behaves well. Thank you for playing my game
@jern @biebras @dokalfar Thank you for playing the game and for leaving feedback, glad you enjoyed it!
@happyhour Thank you for playing! Good to know you liked it!
The art is nice and effective. The gameplay is very fun. The shooting part could use some juice as the bullets feels a little weightless. But the moving, and pushing blocks parts are already juicy enough IMO.
@tuism Mac version is up. (and hopefully working as intended) enjoy :)
Really loved the idea !!! Just I didn't realized until 5 long tries that the goal was to make lines and rows.
I scored a nice 1170 score before leaving it :)
All is good : the art and with eye candies, the sound and music, the gameplay with this nervous dash, the insta-killing enemies, the impressive rows of block popping (when making combos?). Really nice and polished !!!
Well done team !
This game is really good ! I really hope you're going to push forward this concept because this could be a very good game to develop ! I'll follow you to keep updated about it :D
Art is great, sound design and visual effects are pretty good (I especially like this glue like stuff around the blocks). The whole idea of the gameplay is pretty consistent and would be very great if you'd elaborate more in a postjam version. I'm glad you guys made this game, I'd love to play this against someone in a sort of Robotnik Mean Bean Machine inspired gameplay !
My sole complain would be about the "one hit kill", that's really harsh while all we want is just build stuff mostly :D but that's a good idea of mix up between puzzle and action, the player is always active ! Amazing work !!
Not sure why, the mac version doesn't work, the OS says it's damaged and "should be moved to trash". I've seen this error before but I don't know how it might be resolved.
@tuism Hey! thank you for testing it for me. I've gone ahead and uploaded a diferent version to itchio, a .dmg this time. Please go ahead and download it instead. Then, follow the instructions in the Instalation info of itchio or the readme.txt available in the downloads.
Sorry about this, I hope this time arround you get to play it, I had never tried exporting to macOS and I wasn't aware of the hoops apple makes you jump through if you aren't paying them for a registered dev account + the version of the engine I'm running has a bug related to exporting macOS builds -_-
Again, thank you for your interest I hope this time I got it right :)
@fabienc That's actually a fantastic score, congrats! you should go pro ;)
@demn Hhahah you know what? I wasn't at all familiar with Robotnik Mean Bean Machine I've gonne and researched it and its fantastic XD If I get arround to picking this up in the future again my upmost priority is for sure to add some sort of local co-op/versus mode and more special blocks!
I'm glad you had fun! Thank you for playing and following :)
I tried the jam version (not post jam) for the vote! As already said, the score does not increase in this version!
I love the graphics and the controls ( we have early the same control system in our game if you ant to checkout)
The game concept/gameplay is really cool the fact that enemies make you run out of space but you can organize them to refill space is really innovative :)
Maybe the dash should be in the mouse direction because I was a bit confused in a first time (maybe it's just me ^^')
In any case, great entry and great job !! :)
@thibaultar hey! The score should go up but you need to make lines of three blocks of the same color to get gems (that's the only way). I should have made that more obvious probably! Thanks for playing!
@chronicbite aaaaah ! I'll retry ahah
cool idea! I also love the idea of goo since world of goo haha - probably the enemies should not shoot in the first few waves to have tzhe chance to get into the game first?
@firesplash-entertainment Thank you for playing, yah the game is a bit hard, it was my goal but it might make it a bit too hard to get into. I will take that into account for the next jam!
Very fun and inovative! Good Luck.... Try my game please, it is about push block too!
@leophys thanks! I will
Playing and rating... I will evaluate (in writing) later because the time is running out. :)
Evaluation ...
0 - Main Mechanics: Given limited area, escape from other entities (which attack in various ways).
1 - Secondary Mechanics: Shoot at monsters by generating stop pieces (which can be pushed and docked): it's interesting and fun to be able to shoot (I tried inviting a second player so one could move and the other could shoot, it was challenging to do that). Accelerated walking (same command to push stopped pieces): can be useful (mainly against the green beings and in situations of risk). Snap pieces to punctuate: it took time to understand that this could be done (even having written that there is a dual utility for the button in question). I believe that this difficulty may have been found only by me, but if it is not, I believe that the ideal would be to do an introductory level, putting elements to be combined. Or even create (in a menu) the possibility of playing in "plug-in training" mode.
2 - Learning Curve: Understanding the elements (except for details cited above) is simple. For me the most complicated was being able to play with only two hands (hahahahahah, the commands were difficult, but I did not play in a comfortable position). The first encounters with each different entity are sufficient to reveal their intelligence (this is positive).
3 - Flow: The game becomes more difficult with time, given the reduction of the illuminated area and given to the transformation of the entities into stopped pieces. Also, having to split the time between pushing and "running away" is quite distressing, hahahahah. The game is action from the beginning, with brief intervals (maybe letting the intervals between waves be clearer).
4 - Love Points: The graphic art of standing pieces. The "charisma" of the main character. The challenge itself. The diversified intelligence of enemies.
5 - Presentation of the Narrative: There is not much to evaluate at this point (I do not know whether it matches the game, it seems to be more of a "sporting" type than a "story-based game" but it might be interesting to add (in case of continuity of the project, possibilities for insertion of novelties)).
6 - Art Polishment: The graphic art was very interesting (there is always room for polishing). Visual effects could be added (sparkles etc). The enemy when nearby could make sounds sometimes (maybe it was an interesting feedback to give players, which would allow the development of the game flow).
7 - Monetization Attractiveness: I believe that the game could sell by itself, if they create different levels, giving more time of game.
8 - Community Generation: A Facebook page could help the project generate community (if you create invite me).
9 - Cultural Dialogue: By not having narrative, the game brings interest to be similar to other games of combination of pieces; contributing culturally from the moment it is added in the set of games like that. The game would say more about culture and influence it more if it had a greater focus on narrative and / or character design (I believe). Congratulations.