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Ethereal
Ethereal
By foodzilla
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 501 | 3.44 | 31 | |
| Fun | 447 | 3.34 | 31 | |
| Innovation | 566 | 3.08 | 31 | |
| Theme | 1023 | 1.98 | 30 | |
| Graphics | 742 | 3.05 | 31 | |
| Audio | 148 | 3.75 | 31 | |
| Humor | 871 | 1.47 | 25 | |
| Mood | 511 | 3.32 | 30 | |
Comments
justcamh
2018-12-04 03:00
The mechanics all seem to be in place, and the game looks really good! I was sad that there was so few levels, but I did enjoy them! There probably could have been a bit more difficulty, but that would likely come with more levels. You say that you 'lost' an evening to make music but I don't see it as a loss; it was a gain! The music is great and really sets the mood for a puzzler. Overall, the mood was very good, and the graphics were well considered. Could definetly have done with some sort of UI; maybe a main menu, level selection or a number to indicate the current level. As you mention, the theme is a bit lacking, but nevertheless, you have made a great little game!
Thanks! :) I had pushed a single 'final' level before I realized I was slightly over time (by about 20 minutes), but it had been already 'almost there' by the time the submission hour ended and I just spent too much time tweaking it.
I'll be putting additional levels on a separate URL I'll include in the description, so people can enjoy the additional content but still see where the status of the game was at the end of the compo!
Jeremy's music added an incredible amount to the mood of the game. :) It was highly motivating in helping me design more puzzles, too.
Made slight changes; I disabled SPACEBAR because it was completely unnecessary. I also fixed a shortcut to the last level to make it harder (rather, to close a quicker runaround of the puzzle)
Tweaked the orb timer on the last level to be less nonsensical. Changed the box colors to be less ugly...
Right now I got stuck at "HURT", but I'll share my impressions up to that point: I love the music! It's beautiful and calming. Definitely worth the time spent! The graphics could be slightly "softer" to match it as well (rounder? muted colours or a limited color scheme?), but the minimalist design fits it as it is, I think. Can you @ me if you expand it with more levels?
And since you were talking about expanding: I would appreciate an addition of optional hints/tips for what the various types of boxes do, or (if you add many more levels) having one simple "tutorial" level introducing each new function. But that's for larger scope than a game jam! As for the level "HURT", though, there's another small thing I ran into: I don't quite know how it works, but it seems to only partially restart (you get sucked into the black hole and re-appear in the corner – I thought that's a regular restart at first, and only later I noticed that the blue and green timers didn't re-appear as well). It's definitely just a detail, but it could be a little confusing, unless I misunderstood.
Anyways, it really is nice and I'm impressed you made it in such a short time!
*Edit: Passed "HURT"!*
Awesome effort! The minimalist art and music really worked well together. I'm interested in knowing what your original vision was for this as you mention that you could've worked with the theme better if given more time. I thought the puzzles were challenging enough, and I hope you continue working on it to reach the vision that you had for it. Great entry!
@legavroche I was going to involve a lot more choices in levels that involve things like a) trapping your character by surprise b) requiring you to kill your character to advance or c) having to put yourself in an unfavorable position in order to complete a puzzle (like a harder, more deliberate version of ENCLOSURE :) )
Of course, these ideas might appear in a kind of expansion pack!
I'm glad you like it. I had to ramp up the difficulty a lot because of the limited amount of levels I could make. Would you believe WITHIN was actually harder originally? 0:)
Wow what a great little puzzle. This is superbly polished and fun to play. The music sounds fantastic and really sets the mood. There are so many nice graphical details. I love that you get to learn by exploring with minimal hints.
I really can't say enough nice things about this one. Congratulations.
Pretty good jam entry for feeling under the weather! The time spent on music wasn't a loss, it really set the mood and made the game much better. :musical_note:
@jcroisant Yeah! This time around I was pretty lucky; I was feeling bad on the tail end of something, and not wrecked right in the middle. The music was excellent, and I was super happy to show the final game off to Nitacku afterwords! :)
THIS GAME IS AWESOME. JUST FINISHED IT AFTER A LONG TIME OF FAILING LUL (WHY ARE YOU SCREAMING?!?) I DON'T KNOW!! But seriously, really awesome entry. I don't even think hints would be necessary for this as far as the last level. They just have to figure it out. At the beginning of the game, it would be helpful to know how many times you can go though different color lasers. and that going over another color, kills the color you're currently selecting.
jk5000
2018-12-05 07:51
Super simple, but also a fun little puzzle game. The best part of this game was the relaxed and calming music.
Thank you for sharing your game with me. I played it on my stream tonight at https://www.twitch.tv/saoigames
I have rated your game, but all of my feedback was captured in the stream.
You can hear my comments in the archive at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/344864136
sickdot
2018-12-05 08:27
I really liked the mechanics and the mood :D Music is really good and relaxing. Also it was easy to understand what to do, overall it is a great puzzle game.
Made very slight tweaks - debugged an issue with the timers. also added a pit to a level that doesn't impact gameplay, but slightly plays to theme in select situations.
raffe
2018-12-05 20:26
Nice, the music is chill and makes for a good mood. A bit better graphics would please me more, but the game mechanics are really good. Didn't have a single bug while playing and it was just overall quite nice. :)
A fun game for sure, although I wish some of the behaviors and mechanics of the game were more clearly shown. I always love when a game teaches you how to play without actually "teaching" you. Something I struggle with myself. Enjoyed the experience overall though, congrats! :)
trusty
2018-12-06 03:53
Fun puzzle game, relaxing ambiance. Definitely post if you add more levels.
joh
2018-12-06 04:17
Really good game, elegant, fully functional and challenging. I felt the game introduced the mechanics at a good pace and in ways that their usage made sense even without tutorial. nice design. the last two levels were kind of hard though. Lots of trial error and piecing out what works. Still, was a great unique relaxing experience.
I loved it! The last level, Ache, was pretty tough, but i got it. nicely made.
Love the style. Relaxing, challenging and super fun. Felt very polished and slick. Colors work awesome with the art and the little hints at the top are a great touch. Awesome work!
kirke
2018-12-06 09:44
I love your level design! Your puzzle are really enjoyable, I totally relaxed with them (of course my brain now is emitting a light of wisdom xD). Great! :)
The mechanics were there. I would've liked some more information on exactly how things behaved, but I figured out most of them eventually. Good puzzles, and nice music.
Wow! A simple mechanic but so much fun! simple, clean graphics and audio were easy to understand and comprehend, and the physics were just right. I didn't see that it had any implementation of the theme though.
Five new levels so far, not uploaded yet... but two of them are hard enough that I'm wondering about making them "secret levels". In either case, I need one more done and then I'll upload and release them as a tiny "Post Jam" release of some bonus levels :3
They aren't all that amazing compared to the original five, but I wanted to see just how far I could go...
@trusty
To those interested, I've added an additional link for 'post jam' content. Just a few more levels (most easier than ache), and a couple of secret levels that are... challenging.
The link is above, but also here: http://gwbloom.com/dev/games/ludum/ludum43.1/
You can skip the initial six levels with the '5' key... :( but I recommend trying to complete at least most of them first!
matank
2018-12-18 06:49
Awesome game! I've played the original jam version but it definitely left me hungry for more so I'm going to check the post jam levels now :)
I found the level before last to be the hardest (at first I didn't notice the colors on the left hand side and made them disappear by dropping too many items into pits, and then after I passed to the left hand side I was confused with how I'm supposed to turn into the other colors to finish the level, but I managed to get it in the end). Really liked the mechanic, and the music you wrote really added to the mood!
Phew! I finished all of the jam levels as well as the post-jam content. Some of them were quite clever!
I think (in my humble opinion) you really ought to consider easing into the introduction of all of the new obstacle types and mechanics, especially since you are going for the route of "show them to you and let you figure out exactly how they behave" (as opposed to handholding the player by telling them exactly what everything does). I think that is a fine approach, but I think it started to break down a little bit for me because I felt like there was one too many things I didn't understand in a given level at the same time. I think it would have been nice to have easier levels that show a new component in relative isolation, so that I can grok their purpose, interspersed with more difficult levels that weave the different obstacles together in clever or unexpected/tricky ways.
I guess in other words I would have liked to see the same general difficulty, but more levels to spread it all out. For example, the "barrier" level introduces not only the two different colors of "goal" blocks but also the laser barriers at the same time. They're not shown in isolation so it's easy for me to come out of that level without fully understanding what the barriers actually do (for example if I just happened to pass through them the right way), especially since it seems like you can pass through barriers N times or something?. Similarly in "Hurt" we get introduced to both the holes that need to be filled as well as the blocks with movement restrictions, etc.
Sorry, I probably belabored that point more than I should have, I'm sure you get the idea and of course YMMV. Anyhow, aside from that, the minimalistic UI works just fine, though I think some calm and soothing sfx would have really been nice as well, something like gentle electronic sounds, or maybe chimes or light percussive notes. Overall pretty fun game despite seeming (understandably) a bit rushed! I am also always impressed at people who can design clever puzzles during a jam timeframe, so props for that.
corbak
2018-12-18 13:16
Really nice puzzles. Really well thought. Actually it gets your brain to smoke a bit :P Well done !
@matank I didn't write the Music, that was Jeremy/Nitacku. He was using my computer though :)
@ddrkirbyisq I wholeheartedly agree! First, on the sound effects. That's great advice (on the types of instruments)! I knew ahead of time I couldn't include sound effects for time concerns, I wanted to finish the code early enough to properly design levels. Even then, I kept on tweaking and polishing more than I should have.
I tried to design the 'sacrifice' level to finish off the theme... the last three you see in the 'post jam' version would have been there in place of ACHE, but I couldn't come up with anything for the theme in time. In the end, I really like my solution for the level SACRIFICE.
-------
I've had a lot of suggestion for more of an introduction to the elements (particularly I was struggling to telegraph the 'laser fields', you can tell that was a mechanic introduced late in the dev cycle). That was actually the single thing on my "wish list" when I was finishing up HURT and ACHE; 'if I had time for two more levels, I'd put one before and one after BARRIER'. I didn't even notice any of the other flaws (like the poor health telegraphing or the spacebar mechanic) until I was right at the finish line. In the end, I started using a different trick for a similar function to the laser fields in later levels.
For the post-jam content, I didn't want to adjust the original game flow, so I never added those better introductory levels (just tacked new extras on as 'bonus levels').
I will probably do a POST MORTEM in a week or so discussing these bits below. If I was going to completely redo it, I would probably do the following (just for flow!):
i) lasers - change the lasers to draw 1 through 4 lines for 'laser strength'. 4 lines being bigger and uglier and hopefully obviously fatal. I tried to telegraph it in BARRIER, but in the end I functionally only use lasers at 1 and at 4. It was too difficult to introduce the 'strengths', so I'd have to do more to work around this or alter this element entirely.
ii) health - change health to be four direct line circles of your color, instead of just thinning the body. Knock one off for each. Also properly telegraphs the laser-count damage above.
iii) ENCLOSURE - restructure this to properly force the player to confront the 'risers', and to see that they can sit on both empty and color-fill tiles.
iv) BARRIER - introduce the lasers in a previous level (3a? vs 3b BARRIER, and 3c), likely through a level where you have to grab different available color spheres in a 'common area' to change color. Introduce the pits in a subsequent level (a 3c?), with a requirement of having to grab a color that will fade. No push blocks/filling of pits on that level.
v) HURT - with the above level (3c) and laser/health suggestions(i and ii), the speed elements and damage elements in this one fit.
vi) ACHE - I couldn't come up with the design I wanted for the "SACRIFICE" level at the time, so I made one challenging level to top it off (just like with COLORSHIFT). I moved levels that were even more difficult than ACHE onto a "secret" path, and controlling the difficulty was a tricky one for this project. I actually had to redesign ACHE at the last minute as my partner had finally jumped on and tried it, and found a couple of bugs (and sent me some feedback).
--
Actually, something I'll have to do is include some POST MORTEM thoughts on puzzle design in a jam. In short, it's hard! But I'd like to start a discussion on what people do for that. :) I'll talk about what I did in the POST MORTEM to come.
That's another thought... if I were to remake this in something else, I wouldn't want to do it in JavaScript the second time around. What should I use?
I want to use Unreal, but I may use Unity.
The problem is, most of the game elements are free-drawn for a reason; it's easier to work with visual tricks like "the circle gets thinner", or "the lasers combine colors". It's also easier to add more dynamic elements (such as variable size/shaped objects).
Are there any tools anyone knows of to freely draw or combine shapes/colors in Unreal or Unity? What would you use to accomplish something in the same visual style as this game? Is avoiding sprites even possible?
bbaf
2018-12-19 18:03
Cool puzzles with nice visuals! Good game.