baknik 2018-12-03 05:09
This game is my favorite so far! I really like the way the map is revealed as you move around. Love the decisions you have to make on how to use your people. Well done and well executed!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → Slithering Dark
By pkenney
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 85 | 3.76 | 36 | |
| Fun | 84 | 3.70 | 36 | |
| Innovation | 58 | 3.76 | 36 | |
| Theme | 123 | 3.85 | 36 | |
| Graphics | 263 | 3.27 | 36 | |
| Audio | 243 | 3.00 | 35 | |
| Humor | 185 | 2.98 | 33 | |
| Mood | 67 | 3.78 | 35 |
This game is my favorite so far! I really like the way the map is revealed as you move around. Love the decisions you have to make on how to use your people. Well done and well executed!
Its a really good concept. A dark and spooky music in the background would have added so much to the atmosphere.
Pretty good. I enjoyed the aspect of never knowing if one of the dark mosters was gonna be just in front of my face when I turned a corner. However I feel like some of there placements where a little silly specifically the ones that where placed directly ontop of a pod.
Nice work! Here are my thoughts: - You definitely nailed that "claustrophobic tension" you mention in your description. - I love the little details, like the faint pitter-patter of the walking sound effect, and the animation on the "c'mere" command. - I wish the Game Over screen contained the same results (such as number of people eaten/abandoned/etc.) that you see when you successfully complete the game. - On that note, I love the way you do the ending (open the door and - phew! - the whole room is empty), but the point at which it ends feels rather arbitrary, considering that all the levels are randomly generated. I'm not sure how to solve that problem without making the game infinite, though. - I was going to talk about how difficult I found the game to be, but I realize after looking back at your second screenshot that I probably wasn't playing the game exactly as you intended. It never occurred to me to split up the characters *on purpose* to minimize risk. I figured the whole mechanic of moving one character at a time and calling the others to you was just a way to simulate the difficulty of moving in a group. So, I basically just kept everybody together as much as possible, spamming the spacebar whenever I was running away from the monsters and exiting with whoever survived their attack (which was usually not many). My strategy was probably a bad one. Nonetheless, maybe it'd make sense to include some mechanic that *forces* the characters to split up at some points, which may help along the realization for folks like me. - When the main controls are WASD and spacebar, the Tab key is in a pretty inconvenient spot when you need to use it quickly. I'd recommend moving the ~~"c'mere"~~ switch-character command (edit: whoops) from Tab to Shift, so the pinky rests on the key naturally.
Pretty good! I really enjoyed the tension of darkness as both danger and progress. I like the feeling of "I've already got a backup body, so I can just throw this guy into map exploration and it's not a big deal if he dies."
Some weaknesses: * I don't really feel compelled to take multiple bodies to a new floor, since I can always outrun and usually shake a monster. * I don't know which body I'm going to swap to, so it's hard to lose a monster if I have to switch mid-run. * Monsters only have 2 states: Idle, and chasing. They never look around for you. I think, if they lose track of you, they should search that area a bit.
Pretty interesting stuff. The darkness feels super claustrophobic.
Thanks for bringing this by the stream! I enjoyed playing it!
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Phew, took me several tries til I started developing better strategies. You nailed the theme so organically. I was playing by splitting up the group and playing carefully one by one. But when I died in some spots, the monsters would see the rest of the group as they passed by and carnage would ensue later. At some point I finally realized the genius of the empty 3-wall rooms.......that if you get spotted (which you inevitably will), one of the best things you can do outside of crazy micro, is to just park your guy in that room and let him die in peace. The 3 walls will basically seal in the monster for the rest of the group. Pure genius man.
Of course there's the other sides of sacrifice which is figure out which people need to be left behind because they're being chased but you don't want to jeopardize the group, and also if you see the stairs and don't want to risk searching for an extra life. I saw a lot of parallels in our games where you kind of have to juggle having more people for more safety, but juggling all those people against the risk of more obstacles became a delicate scale you really had to pay attention to. So you effectively had 3 sacrifice mechanics organically built into the game, without any explanation needed.
Overall I really liked the game feel. My favorite coop game of all time is Monaco, and the sneaking + the running away is a bit similar to this game, because when you run away from cops in Monaco, you also don't want to jeopardize your teammates. It's a very hectic chase where you're quickly trying to plan an escape route based on where your teammates positioning is. Of course, that game has a lot more mechanics like bushes to hide in or traps, but the same realtime chase planning is there which is awesome. One thing I did during my chases was to really pay attention to the order my tab was working in. Though @foxor is right that it's hard to know which character you'll switch to, it is possible with some planning. For example I would put a character next to the exit button so if I'm chased I can just run onto the exit, quickly tab and then push the button.
It's hard for me to think of improvements but I'll give it a shot. My first thoughts are if there can be more use of multiple people rather than acting as a lives mechanic (if you store them by the start, or the exit if you're lucky to find it early). I don't have a specific idea for that though. The other place that could be interesting if there was more than one person to rescue on each floor. Like a random chance for another person or another item. The reason would be to add a choice to continue exploring and weigh the risk against just going to next level after a rescue. Just some thoughts, the game itself is just great.
Oh man, it is so hard to get multiple guys out. I wasn't sure what most of those door rooms were for, but I bet I could have used them to lure monsters in there. I couldn't ever do it and make it out but I think the idea was I was supposed to sacrifice someone in there so that it would be easier for everyone else ;).
Exploring was tense, had to take it slow so I don't run straight into one of those creeps, but it felt good to lead them off into a spot where it wouldn't bother you anymore.
I had a hard time controlling multiple at once, but again I think that was the whole point. I can see where the sacrifice theme plays in. Hitting that elevator button under pressure is brutal :P. Wish I could vote on your game this time around cause it was very good. I really like how you did the fog, I might take a look at your code to figure out how if you don't mind. It looked very good and added much to the atmosphere.
Good job!
Nice job, good submission. Follows the theme pretty well, in a less direct interpretation than most of the submissions. The fog of war really added to the mood. I enjoyed.
I enjoyed this! I think it's easy to go along as just one human, but trying to get more than one at the end seems tough! I had 3 at one time, but they got quickly eaten. I wonder what a multiplayer version would look like. The revealing darkness felt very good. Sometimes I found myself just barely tapping along.
Hard to believe, such a good game, the number of comments
i love your ludum dare 40 game so much :)
Neat 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/SIjkcYjuHDo
This is a compo game??? Amazing job!
I really REALLY love the bubble shadow effect that you have created. I have never seen anything like that before! This feels so polished, the art is amazing and it's just simply amazing that you managed all of this in 48 hours.
This is one of the best games of this compo! I was really interested in playing it, thanks!
fun :)
Nice entry! this is amazing for a compo! I really liked the effect when the map starts to reveal (I don't know how it's called, fog of war?)
Could you set your game to "Windows Download" on your itch page? I would like to play it via Itch client but it shows as "not available on Windows".
I will just say something besides the main sacrifice schema (which certainly is greatly made). Didn't expect such a traditional RTS battle shadow system could add this much fun to exploring a map! really has to be cautious for every step and discovering either a lift or a monster is some kind of refreshing experience!
Also I just notice as I play ld games if the art work is not fancy, our brain usually starts to play more role in imagine and tends to make the game a bit more fun. Interesting. Shall I try to spend less time on graphics next time? lol
Really cool and original concept game and oppressing feel here :) I think you somemhow reach your goal on setting a tension in the gameplay.
I especially loved the way the AI reacts and displays its state, combined by the anxiogene feeling that the dark fog brings. It often ended in panic, one character being followed by the monster and getting trapped, or discovering another monster that could see NPC, making tension grow. The way monster could see you once they are discovered, or that the group won't follow you if they do not see you, is a simple and clever way to make the gameplay strong.
I did not found it so hard to get through the end and was able to save 5 out of 14 characters on the second time i could end it, but I think I'll try to reach a better score later :) I loved the minimal art style and animation, letting place for imagination (hmm naked people!) and allowing to focalize on the gameplay. The saved humans count keeps the game the *arcade* style, it still has your usual original gamefeel touch in that way :) By the way, as it's been said here, the gameplay sticks to the theme naturally so this is a great and smart thing.
It would probably have been real great if you had time to add some moody music along, but the absence of it sticks with the claustrophobic feel and I guess you did a good choice focalizing on gameplay rather than spending precious time on music :)
I also love the cool way you have to integrate tutorials to the game. Maybe adding some text message reflecting the score at the end would push the player to try harder? Great job once again!
Cheers!
That game is brilliant ! Perfectly fits the theme while still being fun. Only missing a soundtrack :smile:
Great job great job great job great job great job !
Very cool! I played about halfway through before remembering there was a "c'mere!" button, which really made things a lot less tedious. I did find the difficulty fairly low (it's relatively easy to lose the monsters around a corner) but it didn't detract from the tension of stumbling on a monster around a corner, nor the thrill of the flight when you're trying to lose it. I like the layer of needing to lead the monster on a chase that avoids your other people as well, especially in cases where that means stumbling through the dark elsewhere.
Because of the lower difficulty I didn't find myself very motivated to explore and find extra people after stacking up a couple early on, but knowing now that there's a score to play with does provide some motivation to go back and try to maximize the number of people I saved. Forcing the monsters to sit and digest their meal after a kill definitely ticks the "strategic sacrifice" bit, and I'd be interested to see how the game plays if it kept ramping to more numerous and/or more dangerous monsters to force those sorts of sacrifices a bit more. As it was it saved my life at least once, but I didn't have an opportunity to use the mechanic profitably, it was more of a grace period on the game's part than something I was able to capitalize on.
I found the strategic nature of the darkness really interesting as I got a better feel for the game; I learned to intentionally leave areas of the map unexplored in order to maximize my cover - maybe I was drawing the wrong conclusions, but it seemed like line of sight for the monsters could be abused that way since monsters can't see out of the dark either. Lots of interesting tactical stuff if that's true, which I like.
The procedural levels were cool, and felt high quality. I also really like the effect of the darkness and the little animations, and I chuckled at the ending too with the bucket of free clothes. Neat stuff!
Thanks everyone for the nice feedback! I have now played, rated, and commented on all of your games.
To those who mentioned wishing the gameover screen showed stats -- DAMN BUG. On my screen it does show, but I anchored the text to the top and bottom, instead of center, and as a result it behaves poorly on most resolutions. It's a shame because that's really the "suggestion" that you should play for more than one human. The game only gets tough with larger groups.
I have uploaded a web version which is identical to the compo version but changed that anchor so the text is on the screen instead of on the moon somewhere.
Especially thanks to @birdwards who has only rated a few games, but left such in-depth feedback, really appreciated. I see your game hasn't got that many reviews - so if anybody is looking for a game to play, throw birdwards a review.
@peachtreeoath you know, I'm dumb, I didn't notice our games had in common the "hard to manage a big group, but safer to stay alive with one" but as soon as you pointed it out I agreed. I always appreciate your deep dive.
@logicon211 thanks for hitting my game up even though you couldn't participate this time, looking forward to the next Killbane installment. I was telling some friends about "ADOPTED" the other day, people love that story.
@cerno-b I was unaware of the importance of the windows flag for users of the itch client, it has been updated. If you have further problem with that, let me know.
Reflecting back on this one, I feel pretty good about it, but it's far from perfect - the TAB switching is REALLY clunky, the colliders on the cryopods are annoying, the elevator switch is too small, the monster is a bit lifeless without animations, and most of all the procgen mixes things up OK but doesn't really create truly novel situations. I think a few new interactive elements would be required for this to take on a nice minesweeper-esque puzzle nature.
You should have seen me making all those sound effects in the final 90 minutes. I used frozen celery for the monster-ate-you sound, and then 20 minutes later when it was soggy and limp I flapped it against a cheese board I had been snacking on to make the footstep sounds. Foley is weird.
@logicon211 you're of course welcome to dig through my code if you'd like, but here is how the fog works:
I have a Darkness object. It has a 1-unit square dark panel, with a circle around the square that's got 10% transparency to give the look of a hazy edge while still covering all contents from sight. I have a placer script that puts one down every 1 unit interval in a grid to lock up the whole level. There is also a sub-object to each of these, which is a second haze-circle which "wanders" to a localPosition of Random.InsideUnitCircle. This gives the crawling slithering feel to the edge of the dark.
These Darkness objects all have their gameObject's layer set to a custom layer called "Darkness".
The way they are removed is through a "Vision" script which is attached to the human prefab.
Here is that script... there is a little akwardness in the way that half of it is static. This is because the monster ALSO clears some darkness when it wakes up, and in typical jam fashion I just made another call into this same code but did a minimal refactor to allow it, rather than really extracting the common parts into some other class.
Because there are like ten thousand bubbles and I'm calling the search for them every frame, I went ahead and used the "non-alloc" version of the search, where you pass in a pre-existing array, and the length is not modified, but instead the int returned indicates the count.
public class Vision : MonoBehaviour { public float Radius; private static int DarknessMask; private static int BlocksVisionMask; private static float BlockLeniency = 0.6f; private Collider2D[] seenList = new Collider2D[200]; void Update() { ClearDarknessAround(transform, Radius, seenList); } public static void ClearDarknessAround(Transform observer, float radius, Collider2D[] seenList) { DarknessMask = LayerMask.GetMask("Darkness"); BlocksVisionMask = LayerMask.GetMask("Terrain"); int seen = Physics2D.OverlapCircleNonAlloc(observer.position, radius, seenList, DarknessMask); for(int i=0; i
In turn, when the darkness is told to clear, it checks if it overlaps a monster, triggering aggro if so, and then just destroys itself.
If you're curious about any of that, fire away.
Well done on the game my dude!!!!! You were really able to create this claustrophobic aspect to the game with the black fog around! I like the difficulty curve of the game and I really loves the sound effects! Those really helped convey this sense of mystery during exploration! I would have liked to see maybe some more ways to get around enemies besides simply running away from them but then again... I don't know if that would take away from the feel of powerlessness ..? Either-way I really enjoyed it.! Well done on your submission!
This is a really interesting game! I love the darkness mechanic, it adds so much tension and anticipation to the gameplay. The team member concept was also really cool! Great work, I'm excited to see what you make next LD! :)
Thanks for updating the Itch settings, I just played the game from their client.
So first of all, I love the fog-of-war effect with the black circles: Simple, yet elegant, fits right in with the overall vector graphics style. The randomized characters are a nice touch as well. Also absolutely great job on the audio! I always wanted to make a game with custom-recorded sounds, and I imagine this can be a lot of work. You did a great job here. The sfx you created feel really great. Unfortunately, music was missing overall. I know you wanted to go for a dark and brooding atmosphere, but some faint ambiance in the background would been immensely satisfying, like some low humming sound or these cliché high-pitched strings from horror-movies or even some low-key clanking noises that give the impression that something, somewhere has gone horribly wrong.
It took me a while to get into what the game wants from me, and this would probably be my main point of criticism: You can play the game in multiple ways, with the extremes being to save nobody or to try saving everyone. Since the game does not give a preference you can play either way. I chose playing through without rescuing anyone and was quite frustrated when it turned out the game would one-shot kill me right away and I had to start over. Fortunately for me, there is a small visual glitch that allows you to see single pixels shine through the gaps of the shadow-circles, which indicate where the exit is. If you play the game without trying to rescue anyone, this glitch makes it a lot easier.
In the end I realized that there was a tally that rewarded the maximum number of people rescued. So I tried playing it again with the goal to save more people and realized the game became much easier that way. It may have helped to have the tally on screen while you play to find this out earlier, but I understand that having any form of stats on screen may have impacted the atmosphere.
Trying to save everyone proved to be very hard, but it made for a cool moment where I had a few guys standing on the elevator while my main guy was exploring the area, when a monster started chasing him which led it closer to the elevator, so I quickly switched back to one of the elevator guys and slammed the button, saving a few people but leaving main guy to die. It's nice to let these little events develop by themselves, although personally, I would have preferred to have clearer stakes while playing instead of looking at the numbers at the very end. Knowing how many pods you missed right after a level may have given a more immediate sense of failure than just seeing a global rundown of the number in the end, but again there's the danger of losing immersion that way.
Control-wise I appreciate that you allow both WASD and arrow control, although I probably would have preferred to activate the elevator with an action button. Once I pushed the button by accident and once I missed it completely while on a close chase with a monster which subsequently caught me as I tried to turn around.
Another issue I found was that the game gives no clear indication about its length. If I'm not mistaken, it seemed to be randomly generated (great job on that!), but the downside to that is that it is not totally clear whether there will be an end or not. I think it may have helped to introduce some new elements now and then to show the player that there is progress. Even minor things like changing textures, or maybe some lines of text at the beginning of the level, anything that shows progress, could have helped with orienting the player within the game's length.
Although all this seems like a lot of criticism, I was able to see how much thought went into the game overall. I guess it's a hard task to make a truly atmospheric game that clearly communicates its mechanics without filling the screen with meters and numbers. With that in mind, great job on your entry!
Fun little game :)
Again another really interesting and polished game. I really had a lot of fun with it, it felt very easy to control, tense and explorative. It was deceptively simple, as at times I often felt myself making very conscious decisions over drawing enemies away whilst sacrificing one person, and whether it was worth collecting a new person or sticking with the few I had. In the end I ended up not being able to beat it, I personally didn't realize it could be beaten and thought it was an infinitely randomized game, so I will definitely have to come back to complete it. The graphics were very simple, and it was easy to tell everything apart. One thing I would have liked would be to have more colour variation in the people, just to be able to tell them apart even more. There was a great mood greated, with the smoke being really claustrophobic and tense, in the future I think adding some music or ambient audio would be great to create an even greater sense of foreboding, even having subtle quiet enemy noises when they're hidden would create a constant feeling of dread. Overall this was a really clean game, it was unique and well excecuted, nice work!
I like this. I was creating a narrative for the characters I saved. At one point I had someone that had green hair, so they were Krusty the Clown. I really liked the intro and the title screen being part of the game. It was mechanically solid and enjoyable. Great work :clown: