Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → Vitality!
By avi
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 536 | 3.41 | 25 | |
| Fun | 324 | 3.50 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 770 | 2.84 | 24 | |
| Theme | 722 | 3.15 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 520 | 3.50 | 23 | |
| Audio | 455 | 3.13 | 21 | |
| Humor | 782 | 2.26 | 17 | |
| Mood | 913 | 2.58 | 19 |
I really like the camera perspective of the game. The game is pretty addicting even though it is pretty short. Balancing wise, I think it is abit too difficult to reach to the third upgrade of the weapon as you lose your energy pretty quickly as well as regaining health is difficult. Also there is abit of a bug where you can pause the game even though the game over screen is shown, therefore causing both screens to overlap with each other. Overall nice work!
This game is terrifically put together! I really enjoyed the two bar system and needing to manage both at once. One thing I would recommend though is panning the camera slightly when you're aiming away from yourself.
Visually very neat, and i like the sapping of health and spirit. Couldn't quite get that far, though. Nice entry
That was a lot of fun! very smooth controls and great visuals. NOT ENOUGH BLOOM jk there was lots of bloom and it worked great. I felt like my aim was just a little off from where i was pointing, but it was easy to adjust to. Great job!
I especially like how the weapon fires in this game, Good Job!
Love the sounds you used during the gameplay. Speaking of gameplay, it's also really fun to play.
This is surprisingly polished for a 2 day Jam good Job!
Boy, this was pretty fun! You did great! Love the whole feel of the game, and the different weapons as you fill the bar was neat. Though, if my case, it was too easy. Once I had the fully upgraded weapon, I could 1-2 shot pretty much anything. Possible fix would be to make more powerful weapons consume more energy per shot? I dunno.
Overall though, great fun!
@mrpiedpiper Thanks for trying!!
Yeah -- i was having trouble figuring out how to balance the difficulty lol. I had some friends try it out, and they said it was too hard, so I changed the exchange rate to 1 health to 2 spirt, till you get to 500 points, and then it becomes 1 health to 1 spirit and eventually becomes less and less
Yeah I should have made the shotgun shots cost more spirit -- will do so after the Jam is over!
The audio is great, very rhythmic when you're firing your weapon! The difficulty definitely needed to ramp up though, maybe some more enemy types would have done the trick?
Good job!
Awesome, great work! :smile: :top:
Nice job, the game is pretty fun! Nothing like some good old shooting hordes of enemies. I could see it being built upon in the future with new enemy types and whatnot.
Difficulty is a bit weird. I started with reserve hearts scattered over the floor while I stood still and gunned down every cube that showed up. I ended circling the enemies with no spirit left (I could definitely notice the ratio of health to spirit changing, as you mentioned). Even then, it isn't really that *difficult*, per se; you can mostly outrun them while shooting them.
I think the main thing in that regard is just a lack of mechanics. Games where the enemies simply home in on you and touch you to damage you tend to fall a little flat in engagement. If you're too slow, it's unfair; if you're to fast, it's tedious and too easy.
Given some differences in types of enemies and some extra mechanics (and more than 3 days to make the game, of course), I could see it being challenging in a more meaningful way.
The sound was nice. I like the kick in the level 1 weapon sound; honestly, it felt nicer to use than the stronger weapons just because it had more "oomph" to it.
The environment is somewhat hard to see. Enemies, being all neon-bright, were super easy to spot and had great contrast, but the player and the pillars in the environment were kind of hard to keep track of.
All in all, good job! It controls and plays well, especially considering the time frame!
*P.S.: I managed to get my movement stuck early on; not sure how I did it, but some combination of using WASD and arrow keys at once caused me to be stuck moving diagonally up-right even when I released the keys. I fixed it by pushing them at the same time a bunch until it worked.*
@caseyh Thanks for the awesome feedback!!
Yeah, Ill definitely try to make it more of a challenge Post-LD
regarding the lighting-- its a bug that I didnt notice till later haha. The lighting is much better on the desktop versions (see screenshots up top)
Ive figured it out how to fix the bug, and have it ready for me to upload -- but im not sure if Im allowed to do that? The bug was due to incorrect "Color Space" build settings in Unity...
I like the lighting you got going there
Pretty good concept. I just wish it was more challenging.
This is the kind of game I expect from a programmer game developer. It's fun but the default shooting seems a little too powerful and I can go for forever. At 5000 points I just stopped shooting and see how the will get me. I would have added an increasing of difficulity over time of total objects in the map or increasing the spawn rate Captura de pantalla (22).png
The gameplay and concept is solid but I wish the health to spirit change wasn't as brutal. The reason is cuz the max spirit shot is SO satisfying to use. I can see it being hard to balance though, if you drop more hp orbs just for that, then the no-spirit shot build will just get stronger unless that's tuned too. Others have already pointed out how additional enemy types could force the usage of spirit, like anything that just runs faster than you, and I'm sure you can figure out some other ideas for that.
All in all, the core is good and the basic aesthetic is coherent and consistent. The tie to the theme is there and a few more mechanics to force decision making on the player will spice this up nicely.
@nekonyo, Thats an impressive score!! Yeah I think post LD I might add some more spawners after a certain score. Currently, all that changes as your score increases is the exchange rate... Do you think increasing the number of enemy spawners, especially so that the player will be forced into the middle, will make it more challenging (there are no spawners in the bottom half of the map)?
@peachtreeoath hahah yeah I had a tough time coming up with a good exchange rate... Ultimately I decided to stick with a linear exchange rate that changes as you get more points. Based on the reviews, Im still not sure how to proceed -- some people who have commented said it was too easy. Maybe I just need a difficulty setting that the player can manually set. As for additional enemies, I was thinking of one that shoots, and one that has a shield in the front, and some that are faster zombie like enemies. I was also thinking of maybe assigning waves of enemies rather than a continuous stream. Opinions on waves of enemies VS continuous stream?
It is good to distribute the spawn points but the most fun is to find a small path every short amount of time to run away from the enemies running for you. I didn't need to go to that part of the map until the very ending for taking a screenshot of a horde. So, maybe, I would like myself to see the horde of 10 cubes coming from a lot of directions instead of a coalition of them together, it doesn't have to be a continous stream, it could be waves distributed around the map so you don't have an easy escape.
About difficulity the default weapon is enough for getting rid of your enemies. So maybe changing the % of convertion and weakening one the default weapon in favour of the second weapon will be great, you sacrifice a lot of health that you may or not recover. Therefore it makes sense to balance it that way.
This game is yours and you should decide how to balance it. It isn't the most original game but I keep seeing amazing new popular games of shooting like a game about cubes (actually I have never played it). So maybe you get some inspiration on those games
That's a really good question actually, I've never really thought about what waves vs continuous gives you other than breathing room in between waves and maybe more concrete progression goals. Agreed with @nekonyo on the difficulty especially revolving around the power of the 1st weapon.
Thanks, the fact is that if you keep shooting the cubes with the default weapon you will be able to keep the same amount of cubes
Thanks a lot, @nekonyo and @peachtreeoath! Really helpful feedback :D
Yeah I think spawn locations and making the default weapon weaker are simple changes that can help!
And yes, I dont think this game will become the next Hollow Knight, I think id just like to improve it for my own satisfaction :) was thinking about training an ML Agent to play it -- that might be interesting.
ML agents, that is a great improvement. Unpredictible movement will make the game harder of course. Right now they cluster group together and you can be shooting at the same place while running easily
It remind me the cow level in the diablo series. More seriously it's smooth (with the feed-back), dynamic and fun. Well done (even more because it was a solo gamejam).