smbe19 2018-12-04 02:10
Awesome game, really fun to play. Love the whacky art style.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → Jesus Take the Wheel
By xelphyre, peachtreeoath, fdr, gswong, elykyevrah, DoubleDragonBimmy, evedoll, Chro, Zetafactor, Grayson Bartlett, Oort, Jarmo and kambing
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 57 | 4.08 | 150 | |
| Fun | 43 | 4.07 | 150 | |
| Innovation | 24 | 4.14 | 150 | |
| Theme | 306 | 3.78 | 150 | |
| Graphics | 301 | 3.93 | 149 | |
| Humor | 5 | 4.44 | 150 | |
| Mood | 105 | 3.94 | 144 |
Awesome game, really fun to play. Love the whacky art style.
Amazing.
The music is poppin'! Super wacky game, its really fun. Maybe controls are a bit sticky. Will test more.
Ok so in the middle of the game, I found myself wondering when is this game going to end? Which is a rhetorical question. It's not going to. One other thing I was thinking about was how you weren't exactly rewarded for having multiple cars out on the road at the same time. It's almost a hinderance because you're unable to focus your attention on one car if the only thing indicating how well you're doing is distance traveled. Maybe a simple point multiplier for having multiple vehicles out at the same time, or like a a bonus for fewer accidents or something like that.
Oh sure, you come into this world with a cheerful "beep beep!" But we all know that soon enough you'll be playing your part in the the death revue. If you make it a scant 38 miles, be grateful and consider yourself lucky!
Just try to stay on that straight and narrow. Sometimes you'll have someone watching out for you, but the road through the valley is long and difficult, and you don't want to be asleep at the wheel.
What's that you say? Incoming death wall alarm? No problem! Hang on, I'll just adjust that a liBOOMsplat. Oops. And like that it's over. For you at least, and your motorcycle pals. But this semi isn't going anywhere! Who all these fools are that decided to stroll the superslab in their sneakers, I cannot say, but this semis tires barely flinch. Oh boy, a reward? Outstanding, I'll take this one here. How nice! And now it's just OH MY GOD WHAKABLAMMOCRUNCH.
AND NOW YOU'RE TEXTING???
...
I definitely had to make some sacrifices in this one! I managed to jam the prtscr button at what was my peak chaos moment and captured it here: https://imgur.com/V3aZbzb
I had a lot of fun with this one. Never felt solidly in control. Or at least when I did, it was a quickly-shattered illusion. I played the first few times exclusively with the mouse, and had a hard time getting about 2-3 cars for any long stretch. I switched later to a combo kb-mouse game, and by being able to make tappa-tap adjustments on the keys I could better control things.
If I could change one thing I would make WASD work, since mouse is right hand, and arrow keys are also right hand, but I have one left and one right. I'm also not sure the "runs out of prayers" mechanic is necessary, as it wasn't that much fun to be locked out, and the game was crazy enough without it. I may be wrong about that, and it's required to drive the game to conclusion, in which case nevermind!
I very much enjoyed the zany out-of-control chaos, with the theme, music, art, controls, everything, all working to a coherent vision. I don't know exactly where the right level of control is, and I feel like when you chose which side to err on, you erred on the side of chaos. Likely the right call, but there were times where I was like "REALLY?" All in good fun though.
So very well done, this is a nice, fun, funny, coherent package.
Excellent choice with the music, and really love the implementation on the arms. Had to give it 5 stars on the theme! Great stuff!
The first game in this LD to make me break out laughing hysterically. The whole thing is ridiculous in all the right ways. You never get a break in the chaos of trying to save all these dumb souls from ramming themselves into walls or the even dumber pedestrians crossing this superhighway.
If I can complain about anything, it is that Jesus doesn't always seem to respond to your attempts to control a different vehicle. This might be intentional, though.
But in all, incredibly well done in pretty much every way. You have earned a 5/5 star overall rating here.
Wow, that was... interesting. :) Nice art style, and the music fits really well. I think I'll be taking a bike to work the next couple of days.
@pkenney Haha thanks for the anecdotes, always good to hear what's going on in the players' heads. The prayer meter was something we made strictly to prevent the meta of just holding onto 1 car and ignoring every other one for ease of play. By having many cars, you should generate more prayers and discourage the 1-car strat. We didn't have enough time to balance this though, as the more cars you have, the more pedestrians you run over, and you'll run out of prayers anyways lol. Also, we do have WASD, I neglected to put that in the desc until now.
I was so confuse with two hand handle two car, but it is fun to play ^_^
Really nice game, congrats!
What a solid game. This is a LD gem in my opinion. The graphics are spot on, the game is fun and funny. Kinda of awkward lowering the volume mid run, but other than that, great job!
Sometimes a car spawns and crushes into an obstacle before you have time to click on it and drive to another lane. Other than that realy nice game! Lot's of fun and pretty stressful
@JakNak72 yea, that something we didn't have time to fix unfortunately.
First game that made me laugh hard in real life. I think this is will be the humor winner :) Don't get me wrong gameplay was solid as fuck as well.
amazing haha. Love the music.
I find it amazing that you've managed to coordinate such a large team for a game jam. Awesome game!
magistral !! orignality finally in this ludum dare thanks
just an imporvement of control and its good for publishing ;)
A pretty ridiculous game and I really enjoyed it! It was so chaotic trying to keep everyone from dying. Also it seems like pedestrians in this universe can run as fast as cars based on their movement. I loved the theme and that Jesus was fantastic. Overall very fun and interesting.
Excellent game. The prayer system doesn't feel retrofitted and does more than just prevent 1-car. Running over pedestrians creates a "soft loss" condition which scales up faster than the hard loss condition of crashing all your cars. Without the loss of control I worry that the number of obstacles would need to be increased dramatically or the game would go for far too long.
The car movement, swerving, and crashing physics is spot on. I never felt like cars were crashing due to minor impacts, and they tended to crash when they should. This allows for some fun stuff such as making rafts of busses that keep each other aligned when one falls asleep.
My biggest piece of negative feedback is that, apart from not losing, it does not matter what you do in the early stages of the game. Put another way, the difficulty of the game scales with your score. This means that a player seeking a high score has nothing to do in the low difficulty parts of the game. I like the solution suggested by @wilhelm - a score multiplier based on the number of cars (although he was not solving quite the same problem).
Other than that I just have quibbles. Selecting cars can be finicky at times. It takes a while to notice the effect of running over pedestrians.
Amazing little game - I love humor based around the song of the same title, so this immediately caught my eye on the games tab! A little too chaotic for me in the end though, too many warnings going off at once for me to control my pitiful 3 or 4 cars at a time, and pedestrians were the biggest sacrifice because even changing lanes didn't always save them since they were sometimes crossing from other lanes. Slowing the game down a bit more in the beginning to get used to everything might be a big help to players adjusting and learning to strategize before the speed things up.
My only comment would be that a better song could probably be found - while the style of religious gospel music fits the theme and the game nicely, I'm not sure that particular song's energy levels are high enough to be the best match for how chaotic and energetic the game feels. Good work on everything though, I love the arms! I didn't notice Jesus making any faces while I played since I was focused on trying to save people, but the screenshot that pkenney put in their comment is an absolute Big Mood.
Ridiculous! I think control could be improved.
You could add a mode where both of Jesus's hands can control a vehicle as the game progresses.
I don't know what just happened, but I loved every second of it. This game is amazing! It's hilarious, fun, challenging, and great to look at. The premise is very funny, and the laughs continue throughout the game. Really solid effects here too - I love when vehicles explode, collide with one another, or start to spin out of control. The difficulty begins to really ramp up as more and more vehicles are introduced, but it's not done in a frustrating way. This is a fantastic entry, and you should all be proud of yourselves.
:pray:
:pray:
It made me crack up! LOL very unexpected after playing 10+ games tonight off ludumdare. It was challenging and unique! great job. (I've always been a little creeped out by religious artwork so it added a level of eerie to the game for me) Great job!
Hilarious concept! Really silly music too and oddly satisfying to hit pedestrians...
:pray:
Love the concept and humour, haha. The gameplay's fun too!
:pray: I :pray: loved :pray: this :pray: game.:pray:
The Jesus art with the long "touchy tim" arms was absolutely hilarious. (youtube it if you don't get the reference) I played it several times. I loved the motorcycles but man they just love to die.
@phearbot lol that's a pretty accurate description. We were actually initially shooting for the famous Raiden toothpaste laser look at first, but that proved to be a hefty task. https://youtu.be/5TRkEOY3_kA?t=1846
Gosh, it's an amazing experience! Had so much fun playing this one! Can't stop laughing :pray:
love this game. Haha literally Jesus take the wheels.
It is crazy and funny
Damn hilarious!
It took me a few rounds to really get to grips with the controls. I think having 2 hands but only being able to move one car at a time, while it makes sense from the gameplay you were trying to accomplish, made it a little bit visually confusing.
Other than that, though, I loved that the cars all felt pretty unique and had various difficulty levels in terms of keeping in control of them. I like the polish that in this, from the grimacing Jesus faces to the obituary blurbs that appear on top of each of the corpses. One of the few games I played that I actually cared to try and get a high score (15.83 miles btw, probably garbage but pretty proud of it).
Great concept! It's very difficult to master, it could be used to sensitize drivers about the danger of distractions at the wheel! Nice job!
I am the master of the world:)
This is actually soooo funny!! Love it!
Wow Jesus isn't much good driver! :laughing:
I loved the idea! the mouse control is not much smooth, but still a great game!
What I liked most was Jesus faces when the cars crash! Hilarious!
The persons walking on the street aren't good Christian, so they deserve to die! :smiling_imp:
So much fun I would play it on a mobile for sure
My Jesus, what a fantastic game, art, gameplay, music, very good, I would like to criticize something, but there is nothing I see for now, very good
I believe that you tried to play my game and it happened problem, I do not know if you saw a version that I did installer, I downloaded and there was no error, if you can test my game again I'm grateful
Funny premise and well executed. The music fit the game perfectly. I love the way you did Jesus' arms. Nice work!
GLORIA A DEUXX this game is great, in without words keeping doing amazing games like this plz sorry for the brasilian meme
Oh man, THAT GAME IS AWESOME HAHAHA
Ok. I love this. Absolutely fantastic. The whole package. Well done.
absolutely hysterical lmao this was incredible.
Hilarious game, loved the concept and it was well-executed.
Whoa, now that's a big team. Were you all together? I think we all would love to see some photos!
---
I was about to write that the mouse controls fest wonky and awkward, only to find out there are keyboard controls too!
I was about to write that sometimes my vehicles spawned right into a wall, just to find out I could click them when they were still ghosts.
The gameplay is challenging and not furstrating. It was very atmospheric, and I was loudly calling my drivers names for not driving properly and looking at their phones.
What could be better? I didn't like clicking to select next driver. Maybe using some keys to cycle through the vehicles? Or make each vehicle have a number and you can select them with your numpad. It was frustrating when I clicked a vehicle and tried to start maneuvering it, while in fact I just sent another vehicle into oblivion.
I think it should get hard sooner. Or maybe have several difficulty levels?
I always felt like I lost to some random bullshit. 4 drivers falling asleep at once, 3 walls spawning right next to each other, vehicle refusing to turn the way I tell it to (yes, I had prayers left) etc. I never felt like I lost and it was actually my fault.
Jesus sometimes blocked my road even when there was vehicle I was just controlling below him.
Stories of the victims in game end screen are a lovely touch.
THIS is why I ludum dare. It's all so beautiful and heart-warming.
Stop and rest if you feel sleepy.
Played with the mouse and it felt really hard to control, but you probably already knew that. The level design and telegraphing of obstacles felt fair at all times, props to you. Vehicle physics felt a bit janky, but it played in the intention of the game anyway.
A really fun game that makes you go "goddamnit jesus !" Thanks for your entry !
@boltkey We aren't all together locally but it's all my friends spread across the US over the years. It is quite the challenge with NONSTOP merge conflicts and game design clashes but we keep honing ourselves each LD. And yep, (for @pandanym too) we did try to find a fine line between tight controls and loose controls to get the feeling of chaos while managing all the cars, thanks for playing!
@peachtreeoath I feel that you nailed that balance, well done.
Your game was played on my stream ( twitch.tv/ursagames ) for the second day of Ludum Dare streams - you can find the timestamp of your game here: https://goo.gl/N2rkr8
Great effort :)
Amazing game with cool graphics!)
liked it :D the face when crashing waas hilarious!
I'm Jesus! xD Nice game!
Game is Hillarious. Multi-tasking was soo fun. The checkpoint system works very well too. Can Jesus control two cars at once?
@mza Nah, we thought that would be hectic and kinda unnecessary so he just swaps his arms as he plays, I know it's visually confusing. Thanks for playing and yea, we really wanted to make the player feel a sense of losing control as the game ramped up.
Nice and innovative idea! Really gets chaotic quickly and showed me once again how terrible i am at multitasking
My goodness this game is just too much lol. I'm very bad at this game but I had a blast. How did y'all come up with this idea?
i had no idea what i was doing but i had fun doing it -- thanks for making it
@shulololo tbh I don't remember the exact path, but according to this side of the mind map we went Sacrifice -> River of Souls -> Jesus Sim -> Jesus Take the Wheel. We were actually 1 vote away from making the River Peggle game that's on that same branch.
mindmap.png
This was amazing are you all near each other or were you working far away. I could barely hold it together on twitch https://www.twitch.tv/videos/345732966?t=02h50m27s
@tigerj that stream was so satisfying to watch, your reactions were everything we had hoped for in our players :). Yea, our team works remotely in all the US timezones and it is exceptionally hard to coordinate. We keep pushing our size limit though and have managed to survive without total meltdown so far with the experience and processes we're building.
Awesome game! Very funny and gameplay is great too. Easy to learn hard to master, but is it even possible to master it? So many people suck at driving.
Holy shit! :D That was both fun and funny, music fit very good, good job!
SuperJesus)
It's a fun game with art that also fits the game. The cars were hard to control but with Jesus on our side, what could go wrong? :)
Haha, awesome game! I enjoyed playing it, although it is quite overwhelming. ;) The pedestrians are nearly impossible to miss, so I quickly decided to ignore them. The fact that I not only had to steer the cars in the right lane to avoid collisions with sudden road blocks, but also ahd to try to keep them straight made it very hard (and funny). Although the cloud was over the vehicle, I still sometimes had trouble seeing which car I was controlling (especially with the three tiny motocycles, and it seemed that the truck doesn't have a green highlight). Because of the steering mechanic, the response of the car was always a bit slower than I wanted, which also contributed to confusing wheter or not I was in control of a car.
Great choice of music, it really does a great job with the mood. I enjoyed the graphics and especially the facial expressions of your Jesus figure. My high score is 35.13 Miles :smile:
Congrats with your game!
This game is nice XD The music matches the game just right. The idea is original too and I like it a lot. Especially the face Jesus is making when a car is crashing. Just gold.
Keep up the great work ;) Relly good job.
hahah really enjoyed, omg theres a thousand people working on this game hahaha. pretty cool, really funny!
This game really defies your multitasking skills. I would prefer the controls to be a bit more responsive since it is already difficult enough to control multiple vehicles at once, but hey, the concept is great!
This is just amazing dude! This is so fun, and the Jesus' face when you crush someone or a car is priceless. The gameplay is also cool, how'd you do the tentacle hands?
That's why I love Ludum Dare... because it allows games like this. The devs seems to not have blinders on, and they space in something that they normally wouldn't makes. Really solid entry! Keep it up! :)
This is amazing. Really original, good looking, fitting to the theme and overall fun! The huge team definately payed off. Congrats guys!
@hav24 haha I'm surprised how much mileage we've been getting on the wince face. For the arms it was a combination of unity LineRenderer, bezier curve calculations, and dynamic material length. There was quite a bit of work to get it to look right and respect all the sprite layers but we're very happy with the end result.
Haha this is an awesome game! Love the dynamics and idea of the game itself. Managed to make it 10 miles without killiing everybody! Loved the captions over the dead as well and the faces JC made as I messed up :D
Was a bit confused how the 'Prayers' bar worked... it was something to do with the amount of control I had in the game I think but could not pinpoint exactly what was happening to it/how it was being spent.
Alright, here's my thoughts:
The fun was top notch! It got crazy trying to protect all of the vehicles, although that is something that was an issue. It was almost impossible to control more than one car before an obstacle came onto the screen, which meant that I had only one car for pretty much the entire game. The controls could have been a bit more streamlined and that would have helped the difficulty, but I think that the massive difficulty was, for the most part, not an issue in this game. I don't know whether making the controls more or less manageable would help. My rating: 4.5 stars.
Innovation. Heck yeah. For this theme, this is the single most innovative idea I've seen used, and it works! My rating: 5 stars.
You used the theme in a non-standard way and used it well! My rating: 5 stars.
The graphics were interesting and strange, but they worked in a unique way! The textures on the arms were a bit stretched out, but other than that, it looks great! My rating: 5 stars.
This is actually the first game that got me laughing out loud this ludum dare. Phenomenal! My rating: 5 stars.
The mood was pretty amazing, although the music wasn't a perfect fit. It had its benefits, but it still wasn't the best. However, the other sounds, graphics, and gameplay all made a really great mood. My rating: 4.5 stars.
Overall, this is one of the best entries I've seen yet! Everything about it is extremely polished and executed well, and it's all done on a strong idea foundation that fits well with the theme. Astounding work! My rating: 5 stars.
Great job, and good luck!
Cheers, The Koala Squad
Wow! Normally sensory overload is a negative for me, but in this case I had a big smile on my face the whole way. :laughing:
First and foremost, the music really made this game for me. I need to hear zany up-tempo gospel music over ever car chase scene in movies from now on! :smile: Audio and mood are your flagships with this entry, in my opinion.
The art has strengths and weaknesses. The religious theme is carried throughout pretty well (the stained glass warning signs are a nice touch), but there's some variations in outlines and a bit of a ratatouille of colors (I see brown, red, orange, ochre and yellow that seem to not really work as a color ramp) that weaken the aesthetic a little.
Jesus did block things with his head sometimes, just on the edge of him turning transparent. 35.05 miles was my best score, though there was a lot of luck involved. Great entry overall!
This is insane! But I am very bad Jesus :(
hauhauhauah I love it!
Funny game, had a good laugh, it's actually pretty difficult aswell.
Hm, what did I just play? Well. it was pretty awesome. I can say that much ;) Interesting concept and great music and art style. Well done. I don't think there is much more to say for me. Well done.
Not sure what I just played. But I loved it,
is it ok to say "OH MY GOD" ? hahahahaa
This is so silly! Well done!
Haha, great one :D Alot of fun doing all that divine jobs.
You've just nailed the theme on this one. Too many times I've just thought to myself 'Well, that car's screwed, might as well let them go and focus on the rest' and don't get me started on those bloody pedastrians... The wacky artstyle matches the hectic nature of the game really well and the choice of music is on point.
There were a few tiny things that bothered me a bit. Namely, a car can intially drive/spawn where it should't. At least one car spawned in a wall for me and exploded immediatelly. Jesus sometimes gets in the way (mostly he becomes transparent, but a few times, he covered a car and I couldn't tell what was its state). I'd love to be able to just chuck the mouse and switch between the cars using something like Q and E. Too many times I've noticed a sleepy driver and I'd click them too late. Then again, maybe it'd make the game too easy.
Other than that, it's a complete package of fun, good looks and polish.
2018-12-13 22_58_35-Jesus Take the Wheel by PeachTreeOath.png
What the hell did I just play. It's really good, loved it ! The controls were chaotic but really original, great entry !
Also, having 13 people on your team is quite a feat, the only time I was in a team that big for a game jam was an utter disaster.
Anyway, good job !
Jesus is my airbag!
It took me a while to get into it, but after that, it was really fun!
This game is funny and fun, but hard! It's hard to switch and control multiple vehicles at the same time, but that's part of the fun!
Good god! How the hell (Sorry Jesus Dude) did you manage to involve so much people doing the game? We were struggling quite hard making ours with 6 guys. The most important thing that you've made such a great game. I trully enjoyed it. It's fun, addictive, hillarious, beautiful and unusual. I am not even sure I can add something else to that. Super good entry!
Funny game! I included it in my compilation video series of games from the Ludum Dare, if you’d like to take a look :) https://youtu.be/8e_nn2L0xnc
Hey thundercleez! Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my livestream!
If you'd like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/346058131?t=12h02m48s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
Very fun game! Simple rules, hard to master! I like it I like the bizantinium graphics :D
It gets wild after a while. Very fun, made me laugh a lot. Great attention to detail and very fun.
Jesus seems to be such a nice fella, very keen on getting most people killed and trying to give a "helping" hand... oops that other car. Definitely not my fault. Bad building coming out of nowhere. Very fun. Great style and very hard. But I didn't really feel like it mattered too much if everyone died or not. It was a great ride failing each and every way possible.
One Concept I Liked About The Game: * I liked how the music fit the game's mood and how the music started to become fast and chaotic when the game started to become really chaotic as well.
One Concept I Disliked About The Game: * The tutorial is not that good and more work could have been put into the tutorial to explain every aspect of the game that is not obvious for the player.
When I saw the classic Jesus artwork and wide wobbly arms, I felt immersed! If you continue to develop this, when I held a car and pressed the arrow keys to move, and then everyone died, I wasn't sure if that was from veering off road, or something else, and not exactly sure what my goal was.
That was an hilarious take on the theme. Had a fun time with it. I like how on every checkpoint you get to choose the new car that will appear on the road.
Awesome work! I loved pretty much every aspect of the game: the visuals are looking good and well polished,it sets a mood that reminded me Monthy Pyton, coming along with great humor. I especially loved the stories that are related to people killed in the run, that seemed infinite and could watch this laughting for almost as long as I played. I also loved the amazing job done on music, with variations on the same theme. It sounds good even looping in background while doing something else, watching the screen scroll down revealing all the corpses and short stories.
I could reach 37 MI, then Jesus had no more power so it was everything in freestyle, killing pedestrians from everywhere for awhile ; a real carnage! It takes some time to get used to control and understand how to deal with drivers getting out of control. I loved the different mechanics related to the type of cars and found the 3xbikes very smart and fun to manage.
To go further what can I say ? some random ideas : a multiplayer mode, some unlocks and goals, some more crazy obstacles ands ways to die and it could result in a very hyping and addictive game :)
Very polished and addictive entry, very professional! Congrats! :)
Cheers!
Nice idea! I feel like needing a lot of arms to control everything too.
Music is also brilliant.
The Main screen image alone already shows how good the visuals are.
So much done with so many people is probably already a win. :smile:
Congrats on such a strong finish! Really tough with such a large crew, really impressive.
@pkenney thanks man, it's our best yet and I'm super shocked at the humor and innovation scores!
Oh well, there probably weren't THAT many kids on the school bus.