Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → DETRITUS
By occultone, Firesong Bard and Christian Williames
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 388 | 3.57 | 29 | |
| Fun | 472 | 3.34 | 28 | |
| Innovation | 795 | 2.98 | 28 | |
| Theme | 784 | 3.26 | 28 | |
| Graphics | 164 | 4.13 | 28 | |
| Audio | 287 | 3.42 | 28 | |
| Mood | 329 | 3.42 | 28 |
Nice little game. I really liked the polish. Only issues I had were staying oriented. I think having some kind of radar or arrows pointing where hostiles are coming from would help and the mouse was a bit sensitive. Outside of that, it was a lot of fun, great job!
Thanks @jessefreeman! Fair points on the arrows, I had built a system for it but it actually exposed some of the AI trickery we used to make the game feel more fun when it was active so I ended up disabling it. Mouse sensativity is an issue we're trying to figure out because it varies from machine to machine, we suspect something changed under the hood in Unity 2018.
(Also, we're big fans of Pixel Vision 8, it and Pico get used often in our day to day prototyping)
This is one of the coolest looking games I've played this jam! Can't say the same about the controls though, since the mouse turning had no dampening system in place so the turning speed just kept increasing to insane levels as the mouse moved farther from the center, and it was really hard to control! Well, once I got used to that...I played for a long time. Killing those huge energy ball shooting cannons was so hard! I'm still not sure what the conditions are for warp to become available. Audio had some problems where 2 or more voices would sometimes overlap. And once I got game over, I couldn't restart at all because the cursor was stuck in the middle(maybe because I was in fullscreen mode?). A tad rough around the edges but I liked it!
Pretty good. Can confirm the linux version works, apart from the fact that sound turned completely into random static noise midway though my playthrough. Does warping require you to hold space for some time intentionally or was that a bug too?
Warping does require you to hold space. @grizeldi
I had no idea what was going on but I am sure that I was having fun. To be honest, the number of navigation controls had me overwhelmed so I only used W/S + Mouse and rarely A/D. Although the LD page contains instructions, I feel that an in-game tutorial would be nice since trying out and getting used to the controls was my main problem. Beyond that, flying and shooting was really fun and I spent most of my time shooting everything I see to examine if they will explode (or at least get damaged).
The game looks so good too. I especially like the sphere that surrounds the zone. The sound effects and music were my favorite part of the game. The menu also looks good but after losing the mouse stayed locked and I couldn't click anything so I used Alt-F4 to exit the game. Overall, besides the few points that need some polishing, it was really great.
Technically, what you did in less than a few days is just amazing. The mood is great and I like the main aesthetic. At first, I strugled hard to fight because of controls but after a few minutes, all became more easy. This project reminds me StarFox - and this is a compliment. However at this stage, it coud be interesting to add some new features so as to break the gameplay which can be annoying after a while. Overall, it's one of the most impressive entrty for the 42nd LudumDare session. Bravo ++
I would've liked if the mouse control was a little bit slower and without smoothing. Somehow it was pretty hard to hit things. It was already mentioned, but i felt a bit lost in space. The art & audio was great by the way.
Non the less, definitely one of the best games i've seen so far - congrats!
Edit: Just wanted to mention i've played the Linux 64 bit build and had no problems (Ubuntu 16.04)!
This game has a very polished look, and the physics feel right, but the controls are a bit sensitive too me. It takes a bit to get used to and man, once Im used to the control and can shoot down some of the enemies, the particle effects when killing them is so satisfying. Great job for that!
If there is anything other than what other people suggested, I think the enemies blend in background especially when moving in high speed so I would appreciate either a highlight on the enemies, or lock to one enemies so I can focus on it. Idk if you have considered the camera trick that you zoom out to cover both your ship and an enemy that player targets, it might work for your game (or not).
Again, really well done with the graphics. Im not the best player in shooters but Im really feeling the juice in this entry LOL.
Sorry guys, I've been bad about responding. I'm really overworked right now.
@yetman : Yeah, we need to look at the sensitivity. It seems to vary wildly from machine to machine, not sure what's causing that. Tutorial is a good idea, we just didn't have time to do it... seems to be a thing with our team: We never managed to do the tutorial.
@geckoo1337 : That's really great to hear! We havn't gotten as many reviews as we were hoping for so it's good to hear someone enjoyed it! Yeah, we had some ideas for upgrading weapons, missiles, etc. But simply ran out of time, one of our team members had Jury duty so we lost a lot of man hours.
@testlab : I'm glad the Art and Audio is something you enjoyed, that's my Wife and My contribution this run so it's always a fun thing to hear... This was another jam where I did less programming and more art. Next time I'll probably go back to Programming to give our Designer a break. Thanks for testing our Linux build, I'm glad it had no problems.
@nam-nguyen : That's high praise, the physics was something we probably spent 48 Hours on getting to feel just right. Glad the particles were to your liking! Picking out enemies is a problem: I wanted to do a highlight or outline shader but it didn't look good so I ended up nixing it. I may try it again next jam or if we ever do a non-jam version of the game. I hadn't considered the camera zoom mechanics, I'll give it a shot next time I'm tinkering with it! Thanks for the Review!
Great game! Very cool and interesting! :D
I tried the game with keyboard and mouse controls at first. The mouse sensitivity was too high, making it hard to aim, but I managed to get by. After that, I thought using a controller would make things feel more natural. What it actually did was make my aim go from bad to worse. I could fine-tune my aim with a mouse. With a controller, the high turn rate made it near-impossible to aim, and anything I did hit was the result of spray-and-pray. I kept wishing for some sort of target-locking feature that would, say, point the weapons at an enemy for you as long as you can keep it in a certain area in front of you.
The visual effects were nice, though. I particularly enjoyed looking at the glowing trail my ship left behind.
Very enjoyable game, gun play needs a little work. Other than that good audio, graphics, and design.
I was surprised at how good this game looked. I'm not very good at this type of play. I tended to move forward and backwards while shooting, which worked ok. When I went to turn the ship, I felt like I wasn't entirely in control.
Was the boundary closing in? I couldn't tell if the area was shrinking to fit the theme, or if it stayed the same.
If you work on this after LD, I hope that you add voice narration. Even if it were a UI overlay like the classic Starfox, it would be good to immerse the player in what is going on in the world.
@cristihkj : Thanks for playing!
@cbdevilla : Yeah, we're gonna need to figure out the sensitivity thing. I might need to swap to a different version of Unity and see if that fixes it. (Or add a Mouse Sensitivity slider). Thanks for the review: Target lock is a thing I've been thinking about when we go to add missiles or the like.
@darkguardsman : I think if we update it, we're gonna do some fixes to the velocity of projectiles, and add some effects to make them feel punchier. Thanks for playing!
@saoi-games : Boundary wasn't closing in, but as you play the world gets more and more difficult to navigate as the Debris and Detritus (Hey!) builds up. We actually had a lot of voiceover work, was it not triggering?
Nice jam entry here! I like how ambitious it is, it really tries to get to a pro polish, and tackles some really hard gameplay-design challenges.
I liked the slick production and graphics, as well as the sound/music and voiceover. I did run into a couple of odd tech issues, for example once I warped while the lady was welcoming me, and this seemed to reduce the volume but it never came back, so the game stayed really quiet. It also crashed when I exited.
Gameplay-wise you did pretty good, but you ran up against two of the toughest design challenges around.
First, it's really hard to orient in 3D space. This is just an inherent problem with the sort of game this is, and you did an OK job of reducing the problem by locking me inside the sphere and putting lots of objects in there. At some point, if there is enough stuff around, the gameplay stops being Tie Fighter with the orientation problems, and becomes Descent, aka Doom in a spaceship (indoor spaceship?!) which has no orientation issues.
I felt like your game falls someplace in between. I often got really disoriented when I used a lot of thrust, so I adopted a style of strafing and mouse-looking, and trying to keep a sense of where I was. If an enemy did a fly-by I never really got the hang of spinning around with the mouse to track them if it was quick. I felt off all the time: unsure of what was behind me, imprecise in my spinning and tracking. The most confounded I got was when I hit the barrier unexpectedly and got spun around by it, which wiped my mental model of my orientation and left me confused for several moments.
I think this is a really hard problem to solve, and your game does a decent job but not perfect.
I'm not sure what would fix it. Certainly higher visual contrast between the small fighter enemies and background would be an improvement. Some clearer indication of taking damage and from which direction might be nice. You could consider creating some durable scenery by which the player could orient, for example the sphere could be three colors: top mid bottom, just to create a feeling of "where am I?" Even better if this is gameplay-relevant somehow, giving a shape to the game.
But when I wasn't feeling disoriented, I did enjoy the freedom of motion, and I found your controls pretty intuitive, although I mostly only used AD+mouse and a bit of WS. I tested QE but didn't use them.
The second huge challenge games like this hit is what to do about projectile velocity inheritance. I'm an old Tribes player and we know this issue well. If you inherit 100% velocity, your shot never hits an unmoving target where you aim, while if you inherit 0% velocity you can aim at unmoving targets but not in relative space. There is no answer that doesn't leave a player feeling a little awkward in one situation or another... It seems like you went with 100% inheritance, which is imo the right choice.
But it feels weird to aim at the unmoving ships while slowly drifting strafe-wise right, and then miss my shot wildly. After adjusting to the orientation of my movement, I had a huge adjustment phase for my aim. Mostly I tried to still myself before shooting anything still.
I think you may have made your projectiles a bit too slow, though. The amount of lead I have to put on a moving target is HUGE if they are anywhere near me.
However, I did eventually get a feeling for the amount of lead required, and the movement orientation, and it was really fun to start shooting down the enemies in that case.
I took this video of the second time I played through. I think I killed like 370ish enemies. This shows me trying to shoot things with the heavy primary weapon, so I'm trying to line up shots and get the lead right:
https://youtu.be/jZ1X2nq2S38
So you see that eventually I'm able to hit a pretty decent percentage, but there was definitely a difficult ramp-up.
Anyway, I enjoyed this and was impressed by the graphics, the overall package that really felt like a game, the variety of stuff. Nice work!
@pkenney : Wow, this is an incredibly valuable review, thanks so much for the depth you went into while examining the game, it's very much appreciated!
Audio Bugs R Us this Jam: We got a bit over-ambitious and really wanted to use FMOD, but had little experience with it. Next time I think we'll have that tech down and it won't be such a drag, because it was incredibly valuable to have our audio designer able to work on it full time in her own environment. (Also, some of it's features are seriously nifty).
Haha, I'm glad you saw the Tie Fighter inspiration in there. That was one of our major references when examining the Genre (X Wing vs Tie Fighter, Wing Commander, Starfox, and others) were there for our design sessions on the Friday night of the jam. Descent is a good reference, I completely forgot to pull that up! You're spot on with the solution, and I was actually working on a 3D Model for a "Projection Rig" that would sit on top of the bubble and be the thing the player could orient around but I simply ran out of time, one of our team members had Jury Duty on Monday and so I had to change gears. It's absolutely correct: We should have put more emphasis on it.
Since the jam I've actually been working on a bunch of systems that I'd probably build into the next version of the game, like Target Lead visual markers and a better outline shader.
The barrier is a perenial problem. I think we needed to add a force that pushes you away from it when you impact it so you don't get caught on it. Next time I think: This was a good learning experience.
[Q] and [E] was put in for me. I enjoy the spinning, action packed nature of certain types of flight games, and I wanted the ability to pull off a few maneuvers that controlling my Roll would give me.
There's some bugs with our Velocity Inheritance that I spotted the day after the jam, and I badly wanted to fix them but we've erred towards not updating the build, as it's questionable as to whether that'd be modifying Gameplay (And thus, an update would violate the spirit of the LD Rules). I think if we could get a few things fixed it would be easier to deal with. This bug is likely the reason the projectiles feel slow. It's not inheriting the correct velocity from the ship, it's being throttled and sometimes inherits negative velocity.
I'm glad you enjoyed the game, it's our teams first "Action" title so we were really going all out to test our skills! Thanks for the review, it means a lot!