Last Platoon

afkmuch 2018-12-04 01:53

I felt like the turrets took a little bit too long to kill, also the audio was really loud to start.

2018-12-04 01:54

I thought the voices were funny. I found it hard to tell that I was dealing damage, and also seemed to encounter a bug where the yellow spheres didn't appear. I'm not sure why it happened.

thefoppian 2018-12-04 01:59

Interesting game. I didn't really know what I was supposed to be doing, and I don't know if me shooting the gun did anything. Was it supposed to? One thing to improve would be some way other than the boxes to hide / dodge / destroy the turrets, because otherwise you just get hit with no way to stop it, which is frustrating. Loved the SFX lol

jamesdude 2018-12-04 02:02

very impressive I struggled to make progress but had a lot of fun

darkianmaker 2018-12-04 02:39

@afkmuch I didn't have time anymore to twiddle around with balancing health and damage in the game, but I get what you mean. Audio-wise I wanted to get audio settings into the game, but didn't get around to it which left everything hard-coded and loud for unsuspecting headphone users I expect.

@e-a-s-t I wasn't able to come up with a way to show health of enemies and destructible objects in time, sadly. Were you in close proximity to a wall with your gun when you tried shooting?

@thefoppian I might have forgotten to add in a hint that blowing up the reactors would open doors. I didn't get around to balancing damage and health better as I was running out of time, but perhaps for a future update.

@jamesdude glad to hear you had fun :smiley:

firebug 2018-12-04 03:21

As someone said above, with headphones it was a bit loud, but overall this is a fun little game, especially for a first entry! The graphics and audio (esp voices) add to the entertainment, although I admit I was confused for a while what I should be doing.

pkenney 2018-12-04 06:33

OK I played this for a while. It's great that you were able to make an interesting 3D game for your first LD entry! Well done!

It was kind of interesting to explore the space. My favorite feature by a mile was the leftover bodies from my previous lives. This helped give me a sense of history in the space. Because the space had the same wall, floor, and ceiling tiles used throughout, it was super-easy to get lost, but this bodies feature really helped with that. The best moment for this feature was when I blew open a door and thought I was entering a new area, but waiting for me on the other side of the new door was my dead self. Boom.

Turrets were annoying at first. It seemed like they were either in range and then were way too strong, or were out of range and were way too easy, and took so, so, so, so, so, so many hits that it was just totally impossible to strafe-dodge kill them and totally tedious to safe-distance kill them.

So there's a design flaw with turrets, something is off. But as I played, I realized the turrets also had an important purpose, which was to highlight new areas. If there were turrets, I hadn't cleared it! And believe me I know, because I definitely tried just dashing past turrets, but it didn't really work.

The feature I just downright hated was the random invisible fireball traps. The first seven or eight times they killed me I had no idea what had even happened. I was just walking along, and then I was respawning at the beginning. It was only after I got some of the health pickups and actually survived a blast that I even saw the fireball. I thought maybe it was a bug, or a monster behind me, or something. I really think if you're going to kill me I should get to know something about what happened. And just having random squares that if I step on them, BOOM. If I missed something, like a mine item on the ground or something, that helps me deal with those, sorry, I didn't notice it.

Another negative was the infinitely-looping sounds. Was this a glitch, or intended? A voice said "Zoom Zoom" on a neverending loop. Another voice had a long fancy line, like "Not only am I the final boss, I'm also a nuclear bomb" and he said it over and over and over FOREVER without stopping, the whole time I played. That was not cool. :(

I got into exploring, and I blew up four reactors. That felt like a lot. After that, I died a few times. Second to last time I died it was to a random explosion trap. The next and final life I found a new area but I had little health and it had like 10 turrets, and I was like screw that, because I couldn't take the voice repeating the nuclear bomb line anymore. I tried to dash-run through rather than grind the turrets down, but I got killed and that was that.

Looking at this review it sounds maybe too negative. But please don't take it that way -- for bad games I don't even bother pointing out the tough stuff. But this game was pretty impressive for your first LD entry and I felt like it was interesting enough with the exploration and the body-leave-behind mechanic that I should go ahead and dump out all the little things that got in the way of me digging in even further. The idea is honest takes on the negative side can help you bring even stronger games next LD.

Nice job, especially for a first outing, and welcome to the game.

darkianmaker 2018-12-04 14:49

@pkenney I will respond by paragraph number :slight_smile:

1] The bodies were also capable of blocking bullets for you or blowing up booby traps if pushed into one. I didn't have time anymore to start changing things around texture wise to make areas more distinct, but I will if I do an update.

2 and 3] Yeah, as you might've seen in earlier comments this issue comes down to me not having enough time to change the damage and health values for turrets for gameplay balance. But they did fulfill their purpose: make it hard for a player to just run through the whole game.

4] You ran into the booby traps then, I gave them a point light to illuminate the tile they were active on but if you don't know to look for that you can easily miss it (that was kind of the gist as well) and I know I have missed them at times whilst testing because I didn't pay attention. :sweat_smile: I made sure to place props in areas where there were either multiple traps or a trap blocked access to another area so the player could push them into a trap.

5] That was something I noticed as well during my final test but at that point I no longer had the time to find out why the sounds were ignoring the 3D space and just directly playing to the player regardless of distance. It is something I intend to figure out for an update so players don't hear the final boss in the start area. Might also add a soundtrack and some other audio features I was planning if I can fix it.

6] Well if you already blew up four you were already on the final stretch to the final boss, but it is understandable that you stopped with the evil boss constantly droning in your ear. :sweat_smile:

7] Don't worry about it, your pointers help me fix the faults that this game has and can lead to me learning new things that I can take to the next LD. Also thanks for the praise, I didn't expect my starter entry to be so impactful :smile:

darkianmaker 2018-12-04 15:35

Okay for everyone with issues about the audio, I found out what the issue is and it is a simple oversight on my end to turn audio source from spatial 2D to spatial 3D :sweat_smile: It will be fixed in an update