ring 2018-12-04 10:09
Visually pleasing, cool platforming. I was able to play it no problem. There are places where a player can be guided a bit more (when train breaks and player needs to leave it and when player has enough parts to fix the train)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → De-Railed
By occultone, Firesong Bard, Courtbird and KaraTai
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 179 | 3.83 | 20 | |
| Fun | 556 | 3.21 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 455 | 3.22 | 20 | |
| Theme | 515 | 3.47 | 20 | |
| Graphics | 126 | 4.26 | 21 | |
| Audio | 141 | 3.77 | 20 | |
| Mood | 19 | 4.34 | 21 |
Visually pleasing, cool platforming. I was able to play it no problem. There are places where a player can be guided a bit more (when train breaks and player needs to leave it and when player has enough parts to fix the train)
I really like the art of this game! The concept is also very cool!
Great work, as always. Your team consistently does a great job of building the mood you're aiming for. Gameplay definitely sold the idea of exploring treacherous terrain without ever trapping the player. Combat felt suitably clunky for playing a character who's primarily an engineer - the slow gunfire forced you to think more about positioning yourself for an engagement instead of just charging in. The pixel art was very well done and the character animation felt clear and expressive. Sound was great - everything inside the train felt suitably sparse and moody and the music in the platforming sections gave momentum without overdoing it. The song over the end scene really tied things together.
I got the Selfish and Confusing endings (as well as breaking the game by destroying ALL the cars). Are there other endings to find?
@ring @fede : Did one of you guys forget to vote in the audio category?
@ring : Thanks! It's good to hear that you found the platforming pleasing. Yeah, I did my best to signpost that as best I could, I was worried there wasn't enough info and it sounds like there wasn't.
@fede : Thanks!
@atmospherium : Mood and atmosphere, gotta play to our strengths! I spent about 6 hours doing repeated playtests, unit measurements, etc on the Levels so I'm glad they worked so well. Very excited combat sold the character, very early on when I was working on the design, I decided to build the combat system around animation commitment (in before someone says the words "Dark Souls"), and designed the ranged system around a clunky, inaccurate interface. Mel did such a great job with the song at the end, it's good to hear someone made it that far! There's 4 Win endings and 1 Loss ending. Wait, did you also destroy the train engine?
@occultone I destroyed all the cars other than the engine. Next time I left the train and came back it was just a black screen. It took me playing the game decidedly wrong to do it (didn't collect any engine parts), so I don't think anyone else will end up with that result unless they try.
Good to know, thanks.
Left all of the cars in the wild and finished alone. Good game very well polished!
I really liked this.
* The game looks fantastic. Music and sound design set the mood pretty well. Gameplay loop is simple to understand and effective. The only odd thing that comes to mind was the player character wearing a seeveless shirt while walking around a seemingly freezing cold. (But it's barely a complaint.) * It took me a bit to realize what the purpose of being able to explore this massive train with no seeming way to interact with anything besides the decoupling. Revealing that purpose through gameplay alone and with no warning at the start was a really good decision. * The game could benefit from some control instructions. I don't know if it was just me, but it took me a bit to realize "up" was used for interacting. Or that one could descend from an upper platform on the train by jumping downwards (I genuinely thought I was stuck for a moment). Beyond that, the game is self-explanitory enough. * It would have been good to be able to control the rotation of the gun. I found myself having to deal with the issue of enemies spawning on slopes, making it impossible to get a shot in. * The camera does pose a bit of an issue during platforming outside. Because the main character jumps so high up, and the camera follows, it's generally really hard properly land on the adjacent platform -- simply because it's completely out of view until the moment you land.
Overall, through, what complains I have feel pretty minor. Really great work!
@sockyman : You sure you played the right game? =P Good to hear you thought it was good.
@dwam : Fantastic Feedback, thanks! Mel and I noticed the sleeveless shirt thing pretty late and elected not to say anything. Aubrey, our Artist, is from Hawaii... Phew, I'm glad. We have some visibility issues with the Exclamation marks, but we wanted to force the player to run around so it sounds like it did it's job. Yeah, I meant to have more of a tutorial, or at least, something in the pause menu. But as you can see, we didn't get around to even getting the pause menu up. Next time... Ah, so that was intentional. However, the enemy placement and behaviour suffered due to the AI being... rushed... They're supposed to notice you from further off and position themselves in a better location for shooting before they charge. I really just need to knuckle down and re-code that camera...
Thanks for the Feedback!
Took me a bit to figure out the controls and mechanics, but did eventually get it. At some point, I just started jumping over enemies rather than deal with them :P Not sure if maybe I should have dealt with them more (perhaps some of them yield more part?). Of course, I got the Selfish ending :up:
Stopping off points were a bit long to traverse -- I'm guessing there was intended to be more to do at them and fill them out with more content. Would love to see the game worked on some more, solid concept!
Music was fantastic! Likewise with the art, hands down this one has set the best Mood of the games I've played.
@fede Thank you so much for appreciating my art <3
@atmospherium Thank you so much! The Engineer is probably one of the most fun characters that I ever designed/animated for.
@dwam ^^; Yeah that was my bad about the sleeveless thing. Originally, I imagined a lot of the gameplay taking place on the train. When the game evolved, my concept did not. Partially due to lack of time, and partially with me getting attached to the current look of the character. If I were to revisit the game I would like to incorperate an interactable prop that would hold cold-weather gear the character could change into.
How come you have so little ratings? Very solid entry, my highest ranking in mood so far! That snow stepping sound was exquisite! Apart from stuff that can be blamed on 72 hour timespan (a bit samey environment, unpolished or underexplained UI etc.) what really bothered me was two things - first there's no reason for me to track shooting and melee to mouse buttons when you don't use your mouse to aim. I had to play on touchpad and it was really weird. Button bindings would work much better (and if I just missed them, then I swear I tapped all the common shifts, controls and alts, so they must be well hidden). Second, there was no way to tell how many enemies I am attacking or are attacking me - the sprites aligned perfectly, so it could've been one or thousand, nobody can really tell. Also I had a weird camera bug - sometimes the camera did not follow me, but just let me run close the screen boundary and then it started moving (like it was a screen to screen camera, not follow camera), but that wasn't a real problem for me. Still one of the most feeling heavy games I've played so far! Gonna check some of your work if there by chance isn't a game like this! Thanks for this game, it was a pleasure to play!
I'm getting a "The final station" crossed with Starbound sort of vibe from the game - I'm very impressed! The music and sound are fantastic and the art and animation are good too. I will say the combat is a bit shallow and feels tacked on, and being out in the wilderness feels a little aimless, but overall the experience is still positive.
@honey : Really useful feedback. We honestly should have a better way of showing the controls. [Z][C] were the ones you missed I think. We used the Arrow Keys + [C][Z] control scheme which is pretty common for the kind of indie platformers I play. My fault, I'll have to fix that next time. Very glad you found the feel of the game pleasing!
@pogo : I looked up The Final Station just now, yeah that's pretty close! I'll have to pick that up! Yeah I think if I'd spent more time with the AI and done more content generation it would have been better. Glad it was overall positive!
I really liked it. It's one of my favorites from this Jam for sure. :smile:
I was almost at the end but I encountered a bug where I did not enter the train on the level with the larger monster. I kept trying to enter the train but eventually jumped really high instead... I then moved to the far left by choice to see if anything was up on the ledge and fell out of the level, where I was able to pan the camera back and forth over the level. I assume I was falling infinitely below the game screen. I was using a controller when this happened.
I noticed that the sound effect for hitting the ground got louder than they are supposed to be. When jumping in the train it starts out at the perfect volume, but after playing the first outside level and coming back into the train it's too loud.
I also feel like the enemies should start out facing left. Most of them are just facing a wall and can be ignored.
I played it again with mouse and keyboard and was able to make it to the end :smile:
Hey. Beautiful graphics! The idle animations is a bit too much/ too fast, I feel, but otherwise also really cool, that you could implement it! I won't say much else right now about the game, because I got stuck on some level and wanted to ask, if it was a bug or if I just didn't find what I had to do. Situation: I went outside two times for engine parts. Then I had to decouple a wagon for more parts. After this some engines got broken (I saw it but couldn't do anything, or could I?) and the train stops, but there is a storm outside, so you can't go outside. And then I tried to interact with whatever was there, but I couldn't find anything to do. As I read thorugh some of the comments, I am pretty sure, that this was not an intended ending and there was more to explore. So did I do something wrong? Did some event just not trigger?
@trevor-hayes : That's an interesting bug, I'll have to look into that because it sounds like something failed to load, or had something else load on top of it. It's also curious that you were able to escape the level as I thought I boxed it in. Sounds like something with the character physics came unhooked. Glad KB+M worked, I'll troubleshoot the issue with jumping as that sounds like something is accruing velocity somewhere. @ente : Hmmm. If I had to guess, I think what happened was the game probably loaded outside twice, and when you re-entered it triggered multiple events at once, leading to an unrecoverable game state. Nasty sequencing bug, I've added it to my list, thanks!
Finished the game (with the "Good ending"). It's a pretty neat idea! Definitely a bit rough around the edges. Here's some assorted feedback:
- Resolution is quite large for a web game! Not all of us have 1080p monitors, please think of us plebians who are running at 1440x900, or 1280x1024! - Controls and mechanics were a bit unintuitive -- should you maybe at least list your games' controls in the game description so that people aren't stuck at their keyboards hitting every key like I did? - Felt weird that I could shoot/attack with keyboard if I wanted to, but only interact with the confirm dialogs with the mouse. Maybe add a keybind for that? - The enemies had a cool visual design; unfortunately it was quite trivial to jump right over them while running at full speed, so I only ever interacted with one or two of them before I decided it would be faster to just skip them altogether. I can't really speak to whether you achieved your dark souls-like feel or not since I didn't really participate in combat. - The large "boss" at the end was a cool idea, but unfortunately I was able to cheese it quite easily by coming from the upper route and simply staying on its right side and attacking -- it was never able to hit me. - The platforming sections were...alright. Because of the visual scale and camera zoom, the actual platforming jumps involve =several= blind jumps where you can't see the platform you need to land on. I managed this fine since my reactions are quite good, but I can imagine this being quite frustrating in the later levels. - Backtracking all the way back to the train after finding parts got really old, really fast, and got progressively worse as the levels got longer =( - The platforming physics were a bit odd, especially the acceleration which seems to be stepped instead of using a smooth curve. It didn't really cause me any issues, just felt odd that you start moving slowly and then suddenly speed up very quickly. - The snow landing noise was a nice touch, but why only a landing-from-jumping sound and no footprint sound? It felt like 75% of the game was either spent running to the right or the left, so some nice footstep sounds would have at least broke the monotony a little bit. (I do understand that nice footstep sounds are hard to find and vary, though) - This is more minor, but the very bright upper portion of the background was a bit much, especially against the snowy tops of the platforms.
+ The snow particle effects really added a lot to the visual look and feel of the game. + The parallax scrolling of background layers was also much appreciated. + The vocal track at the end of the game was quite a pleasant surprise! That together with the main level music definitely set a sort of somber tone for the game, which I'm assuming was intentional. Quite effective. + I think overall the snow terrain combined with the somber feel was one of the strong points of the game, which is a good thing since there was so much mindlessly running through the snow with nothing else to think about!
Thanks for writing up a post-mortem! Always nice to see people's process and lessons learned.
The visuals and the audio are really nice! But the game play was a bit weak and the controls felt weird. The parts where you were running around could be done much better. But the game looks and sounds awesome and if the game play was on the same level it could have been a great game.
Nice game. Love the overall idea of having to pull a train of refugees through the landscape, but the Theme is... kind of shoehorned heavy-handedly. There are just isn't enough spare parts to fix the train in full, so the need to disconnect a cart feels not like a hard choice you have to make, but more like an inevitable step to progress further.
If I was designing the game like this I would have made the following: - You have a limited time you can spend outside the train. When the time is up - you are returned to the train automaticlly. - If you didn't return in time or didn't collect enough spares, you have to wait a day, spending 1 unit of fuel to keep the train warm while standing. Or you can scrap a cart to get an extra spare, and move on. - Fuel is limited. Maybe extra fuel can be found in the countryside. And you see how many more moves you have to make, so your choice of sacrificing a cart, or fuel for one more go to the countryside is more informed. - Early levels might actually let you collect extra spares, if you explore them fully. Middle levels have exactly the number of spares, but you have to explore them fully which is increasingly harder to do considering the freezing timer. - Final level(s) have less spares than needed, so unless you took extra effort to get an extra spare in early game, and didn't waste it in midlevels, you would be forced to sacrifice a cart. And maybe force to sacrifice 1 cart anyway...
There were also a couple technical hiccups that made the game worse than it should have been. First (and more obvious) - for some reason background music stopped when the landing "Thump" sound is played. Which happens quite often.
And secondly - camera. It is always lagging behind the character, which means that you often don't see the platform you need to jump to. And screwing up 10th leap of faith in a row and having to start the whole series is bad enough. Even if you don't land on 4 mobs who shred you to pieces... Oh, and after I got killed, and restarted the game (from the very beginning, which also was kind of bad...) I had a bug that didn't let me to interact with anything.