Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → Slime Venture
By mruniverse
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 359 | 3.10 | 25 | |
| Fun | 244 | 3.28 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 260 | 3.17 | 25 | |
| Theme | 334 | 3.19 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 424 | 2.58 | 25 | |
| Audio | 329 | 2.63 | 25 | |
| Mood | 423 | 2.54 | 23 |
This is a pretty good game, and i like the innovative mechanics most, but the controls were a bit weird sometimes. Still, i had fun playing it and would have played more of it if there were more levels. I think this game mostly needs a bit more polish, better graphics(the slimes are now just squares?) and some sort of music.
Thanks @wie , I'd love to polish this up and add more levels and some slime Textures. Glad you enjoyed it!
I think I ate a slime that shrank me too much and I disappeared? Not sure what happened but either way my player disappeared :P A bit more in the sound department would be awesome, and maybe some more texture variety and a background to make the graphics a bit more interesting. Also, 3500fps lol
@sigton It's entirely possible to get eaten by other slimes, sadly I didn't add a way to notify you of such
I like the idea, could definitely be expanded to some deeper puzzles, would really enjoy more levels where you have to trade off being bigger and safer vs being smaller and more agile.
Having to click to continue between levels is rather annoying, would be nice if you could continue with a keyboard button press. Also, please rename your .zip to something more distinct, when download lots of games, it's hard to find games I download when they're all named "LD43" =). I got stuck when I pushed all the way up to a wall, jumped the exact height, and then was stuck in the ledge, unable to move. Acceleration/deceleration was a bit too slow for my tastes, made the controls feel really swimmy.
@jimbly Thanks for the constructive feedback! Basically everything you mentioned are things I'd love to revisit. Sorry about the .zip name, I'll keep it in mind for next time. As for the glitch, can you remember what level you were stuck? You should still have control authority in midair and I honestly never got hung on the environment so I'd like to track that down if possible.
4th level, grab the 3 blue slimes, then drop down, slide left into the first wall, if I jump up (without holding any other directions), I "land" aligned with the top of the platform, and then am unable to move.
@jimbly Thank you, I'll put it on the todo list post jam
This was a pretty cool game! A nice addition would be a restart button for when you die. I'm generally not a big fan of acceleration based movement in platformers, so can't really fault this game for it :smile:
I wasn't able to complete level 5 - whenever I got past the first blue slime (not easy to begin with) when I hit the first green one my slime just disappeared and I couldn't go any further (like @sodaro said, a restart button would be nice but at least you added a level select so I didn't have to go through the thing again).
Thanks for including the FPS counter though, now I know I was justified spending what I did on my computer to get over 6000 FPS.
@sodaro Did you check the help page? backspace will reset the current level. If it's not working when you get eaten by a larger slime I'll definitely have to look into it. I'm glad you liked it :) @slashee-the-cow You can only eat slimes smaller than yourself. I need to add better feedback to let the player know when they died. FPS from Java's JME can be crazy high for simple games like this, and people say Java is slow!
This game shows me you have worked so hard. Nice job!
@budark Thank you :)
@mruniverse Oh my bad, must have missed it, ignore that part of the feedback then :sweat_smile:
As a concept, I think this is brilliant. An easy to learn puzzle game and 2d platformer at the same time! I found the only strange design decision to be the momentum based movement, makes it unnecessarily hard to solve the "puzzle" which I would've made the main gameplay mechanic (this might be subjective). Would also like to see some distinction as to where the goal is, got confused as to where I'm heading a few times. Excited to see where this goes, nice job!
The mechanics are unique, and I think have a lot of potential, since they can kind of mix platforming with a puzzle game. I would like to see more levels that use that puzzle aspect. You might want to include instructions on how to launch, I am not sure everybody knows what they need to open in order to run it.
Interesting idea! The randomness of the "enemy" slime jumping made some levels more frustrating than they need be, along with the inability to restart after losing. That said, I liked the puzzle elements of having to figure out in which order to eat things. Eating a larger green cube causing me to be eaten instead was a neat touch although it took me a bit to realize what happened.
Java/JMonkeyEngine! A blast from the past for me. :) I like the mechanics. The floor felt kind of sticky, or, the controls too accelerative, which made it a bit difficult to play. Nice slappy sounds. Lots of potential - it's a nice start to a great game, so good job!
Edit: Oh yeah, it was a bit strange to use the mouse for the menus when the rest of the game is in keyboards!
@codekim I'm glad you liked it. Objective markers are definitely on my list of todo's. The physics based movement was purely because it was just faster to implement using dyn4j dynamics than roll my own movement, although I am working on a 2d sprite based system for JME that will allow easy binary or physics controls in the future
@c1fr1 Thank you. Making puzzles is hard but something I was trying to consider as I made levels. When I get around to updating this I will hopefully have figured out launch4j and will have easy executables for all major platforms.
@hempuli I need to add an in game tooltip telling players you can reset via backspace. That is entirely my fault as it seems several people have missed the instructions page. The random jumping I thought was cute but I understand it makes level5 a pain. I'll probably add a "slime jump timer" parameter where slimes can be given jump times or left on random.
@gwinnell JME is awesome! It needs more love. Thank you for your interest and I hope to get around to cleaning this project up!
There was a lot of friction with starting moving and not as much when stopping which made the controls a bit hard for me, but I did like what I saw. I was glad that you had a level select, since I failed a lot in the later levels. I discovered the backspace key for restarting a level eventually. Level 5 was very confusing for me, though. You set up this idea that green slimes make you bigger and blue slimes make you smaller, but all the slimes at the end killed me, regardless of their color. I found that jumping over them was easier than running under them, though.
@incobalt The friction should be the same all the time, I don't try to modify it at least. I also need to convey to players when they get eaten, and give a better learning curve that you can only eat smaller slimes. Thank you for the feedback and I hope to address these issues in the future!
Interesting mechanic. The controls and the visuals could have been a bit more refined, and maybe some background music might have been nice.