FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD43 → Absalom And The Golden Mullet

Absalom And The Golden Mullet

By dbongames

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1703.8435
Fun4983.2736
Innovation1003.8035
Theme6413.2735
Graphics584.4335
Humor4842.9229
Mood164.3836

Comments

djh 2018-12-06 04:24

The first impression of overall graphic was great. But camera rotating and too much chromatic aberration make it hard to know what's going on...

mrspeaker 2018-12-06 04:27

What?! This was made in 3 days? That's it, I quit.

It's beautiful.

egawag 2018-12-06 04:28

This was a very interesting game. I loved the puzzle solving aspect of trying to connect the dots! well done and very innovative!

yeoldecoot 2018-12-06 04:36

I really like this game but I only have a 110 chain to get past the main entrance and in order to get that I can't reach the door

galan 2018-12-06 04:56

Really love the aesthetic, looks great and felt really calm/eerie. The puzzles were solid as well. I just wish I could figured out how to get into the Vault: that one drove me up the wall.

I'll second @djh on the chromatic abberation, though, my eyes actually hurt a bit now.

Although I enjoyed the humor, I do question how well it melded with the aesthetic, but that may just be me.

Overall great entry, and I'd love to solve more of these puzzles.

icxon 2018-12-06 05:23

Solid and atmospheric puzzle game. I don't like the fact I needed to re-do the whole playthrough just because I missed to nodes at the very beginning. Like there is no chance to make a mistake.

Posters is a really good touch. I can feel the plot and the narrative behind the gameplay. Just amazing work.

The game looks very blurry on my PC and I have a couple visual artefacts as well.

Here is my playthrough:

https://youtu.be/XTjV9XfsnwY

afroant 2018-12-06 07:11

Outstanding atmosphere. I really liked the cross section details. The game was too hard for me to finish (didn't know you could walk with the red lines on you!), but looks like I made it to the last level. Really solid entry. Good job! Wish there was more to play!

gucio-miszcz 2018-12-06 08:17

Cool game, with some innovative mechanics. The only thing that made it hard to play was that it was too dark for me - was barely able to see what is in the room.

gronther 2018-12-06 16:18

Great aesthetic! The dark environments and neon lighting made for a very atmospheric experience. On the flip side, it was rather hard to see what is going on at some points. Gameplay was very innovative, although not being able to move the camera around felt a bit limiting when looking for hidden nodes. Music and sound effects were nice and the entire game had a polished feel to it. There were some lighting issues though, which made peering into the dark for connections a bit annoying. Overall, very good, with a good implementation of the theme. Kudos!

dbongames 2018-12-07 16:09

@djh @galan I do agree that there could be less blurring and chromatic aberration. I think it was left in so high because I knew what was going on so I didn't have to strain my eyes so much to see details. As for the story haha. I didn't have time to combine the aesthetic and story together like I wanted, I wanted a more satirical feel than goofy which just didn't quite combine smoothly.

@icxon Whoa, that's awesome to see a video of somebody else playing the game! It really gives insight into how somebody else goes about solving puzzles and playing the game. Extremely helpful! :) As for the artifacts, I believe the one on the second level is caused by the particle system, I'll have to fix that sometime in the future.

@mrspeaker I would highly discourage you from doing such a thing!

@afroant I know, I didn't explain that part! I guess that's what happens when you leave the tutorial for last.

@gucio-miszcz Noted, thanks for the feedback!

@gronther Glad you enjoyed it! It looks like a panning camera would have helped out a lot! I really don't know why I didn't add it... Lessons learned I guess haha.

dbongames 2018-12-07 20:24

Just an FYI, lighting is much darker in the web version, but in the downloadable is much brighter and easier to see things. Sorry guys! Will try and see if I can find a solution for that.

fahrenheit459 2018-12-07 22:17

One of the best graphic's !!!

The mood is here ! Environment and lighting/rendering feet very well !

The gameplay is pretty cool and the mix of camera control and character movement work well ! I didn't catch why I die thew times and maybe a small explanation should have be cool but... anyway this game is really cool !

delhaize 2018-12-08 00:01

The graphic is very good i love the atmosphere of the neons and the game play of the energy links :D

enver-arco 2018-12-08 01:22

Nice atmosphere but the aberration on the graphics hurt my eyes a little

eric-smith 2018-12-08 05:42

Very nice little game. Pretty unique idea. I loved the music, very subtle and casual. The bloom was a bit too high and it was giving me a headache on top of the darkness. On the second level when you go into hack mode and then click the yellow node, you get a message saying "Not a power source" and if at that time you leave hack mode, that message remains. It was then I wasted 5 minutes wondering why everything I hovered over was saying not a power source. :) Good job! :clap:

dob 2018-12-08 06:18

I love the music and the dark art style, and the world you've created. The shift in perspective with rotation was a little weird, but I got used to it. A little hard to figure out what you're supposed to do at first, but definitely fun when you figure it out.

james-leib 2018-12-08 08:44

Really nice atmosphere! I love how you created a unique artstyle just from post processing, although the chromatic abberation was a bit much.

I didn't really understand the theme part, I thought the player always had the same level of power.

wowa 2018-12-08 09:11

The graphics and the atmosphere are great! One of the best so far. The puzzle mechanics are nice. I wish that the camera could be more supportive (the limitation felt like a handicap) and less chromatic aberration would be good (some important gameplay elements were hard to read). But overall great entry! Well done!

randomphantom 2018-12-08 10:15

Great mood and atmosphere, and the 3D environments were neat! I'm not a fan of the small text though and the game mechanics while interesting was a little unintuitive as you didn't know what distance was "too far" for the red nodes. I'm not sure what was the sacrifice inherent in the game other than JDog too. I finished to the third level and somehow reset to the start.

hectigo 2018-12-09 09:28

Mood of the game is great, but I feel like you sacrificed the gameplay a bit to get there - the darkness and chromatic aberration make everything less clear.

And while your own power nodes are single-use, most of the environmental ones are not, which is a bit unintuitive. It wasn't clear to me at first what I'm giving up when connecting one of my own nodes. It could've been made clearer with a message like "total robot power now 50" or similar - could be a synthetized voice saying it for extra effect. Also if you waste your power early on before knowing all the mechanics there's no way to recover it later. Some better visualization for how long the power node range is would have also been very welcome.

Hope I don't sound too harsh since the game is still pretty innovative, and I like the look of the graphics and all. For a three-day project this is definitely impressive.

bbaf 2018-12-09 12:10

Beautiful and atmospheric game. Of course, it requires more polishing (camera control, post-processing effect, puzzles balance), but this is understandable, considering the scope of work. Still, you managed to achieve a huge bunch of features for these 3 days! Nice entry, good luck with voting :wink:

ytaha 2018-12-11 08:41

Great game. After 5 tries and near 1 hour, I still couldn't finish it. It took some time for me to understand the controls. You really need to decrease chromatic aberration.

dbongames 2018-12-11 18:54

I would just like to publicly apologize to everyone for the headaches caused haha! I'll definitely be more cautious about the chromatic aberration and screen blur in my future projects. @enver-arco @eric-smith @james-leib @wowa @ytaha

@fahrenheit459 @dob @james-leib @hectigo @ytaha I totally understand the confusion, and it has become apparent through your guys feedback that more intuitive game-play and direction is needed. I want to definitely focus on these aspects for my next projects as it would really improve the players experience more than anything else I think.

Thanks all for the honest comments, keep it real folks! :thumbsup_tone1:

alext-design 2018-12-13 08:39

@dbongames Hey, really cool and atmospheric. I was confused how to do certain things, unfortunately. Had fun kicking the trash can around lol

You can watch my pitiful attempt here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXivIA8AWXc

tekses 2018-12-18 14:20

I really liked the graphics of this game. It set a really nice mood. I had problems with the zoom though and the sounds would have supported the whole thing a lot better. Nice job.