FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD44 → Library of Madness

Library of Madness

By ectucker1, Jbomb57, Bencrorules, Samiya, yubs, iparisi and Nift

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall6673.3251
Fun8522.9351
Innovation5713.0851
Theme8562.9648
Graphics3623.8451
Audio2313.6250
Humor8172.3140
Mood3353.5851

Comments

camocc-studios 2019-04-30 02:13

The controls don't feel very responsive, but apart from that its a very good game (love the music)

jofersgames 2019-04-30 15:11

The tilework is lovely :)

lucas-vieira-santos 2019-04-30 15:59

It was great the graphics of the game, a different and interesting mechanics, and the sounds, the music in specific is extremely comforting!

dasmaichen 2019-05-01 21:20

The wobbly effect was very interesting—kudos for implementing that. :sparkles: Also thank you for providing a web version of the game!

ronin748 2019-05-02 04:04

Nice graphics! Also glad to see Dart getting some love!

black-potion 2019-05-02 04:08

Niceidea and animations.

don-shinski 2019-05-02 04:16

Enjoyed the game! Using the wobbly effect for Sanity was a nice addition. Neat project, thanks for making it!

dazzleisace 2019-05-02 16:01

Nice graphics and cool music :) well done!

corqi 2019-05-02 16:20

I liked the idea of your game. You really nailed the theme! The audio and graphics were nice too! Also the insanity, that affected our vision was good. But I really didn't like moving mechanics. Because of the fact that instead of letting player jump, fall etc., you have to stand in special place and then hit jump button, I didn't really felt I can control the character. I also found a bug that is caused by this weird moving mechanics: In the place shown on the picture below, player cannot climb this bookshelf. LD.png Besides this unusual mechanics, the game is great!

sleepqt 2019-05-02 17:00

Nice graphics, love that music and game concept, the best entry I played so far. Keep it up, great job!

ectucker1 2019-05-02 21:46

@corqi Thanks for the feedback, I'd definitely try for more flexible movement if I had the time. That spot there isn't actually a bug though; the player would have to clip through the platform above to get onto the bookshelf.

vinegarlove 2019-05-02 23:27

Gameplay was definitively its strong point. A lot of thinkgs to experiment with. As other said, the controls were a little bit clunky but overall i enjoyed it. (didn't finished tho).

caramelcode 2019-05-02 23:48

Overall this is a really fun game! The concept is cool, great job!

trusty 2019-05-03 00:46

Really nice looking game, the music helped set the scene too. I had a tough time getting through the game due to the combat though. Great concept.

gonutz 2019-05-04 07:13

The walking animations match the controls, they both feel very blocky. I think you might have been inspired by Another World and Flashback a bit with the tile-based walking and the jumping up and down onto platforms. However it does not feel very good in my opinion.

Another problem that I have with this game is that although it does explain the controls in a nice tutorial, good job on that, it does not explain what the powers are that you get from the books. It took me some time to realize where you were going with it and that QWE are the three spots for powers that I am supposed to be careful about as what to override next. Nice idea but the implementation is not that great. First it is not really explained which is OK since you figure it out pretty quickly, but then I had some books where there was an enemy near by so I just ran there, took the book and ran back, leaving me no time to read the book's title and make a good decision.

This probably stems from my next issue with the game - the combat. Is it even possible to kill anything in this game. I hit something five times and it did not die so I assumed these things never die. If I cannot kill something in level one, I assumed that they were invincible. Then I wondered what the sword was for and figured, enemies are probably just too strong.

I think your game has a lot of potential but that you made some poor implementation choices leaving me with the feeling that there is some much better game here, waiting to be freed. This is not supposed to sound as negative as it does, I know how little time we all have in Ludum Dare so this is all fine. I am just giving you my honest opinion and try to point you to some issues that I think would make the game better. Sorry for giving a review that is more on the negative side :-)

The graphics are really well done. Especially the background and the monsters, they all fit together nicely. The icons at the bottom seem a little out of place, they are not casle-y enough I think.

The music is OK but feels very generic and is not the best fit for the graphics. Though it conveys kind of a dark atmosphere, it is not quite there I feel. I find it still a bit too light for the game, especially when the world gets darker over time.

Overall a solid entry with a couple of small things to improve here and there. Keep up the good work, I am excited to see what you have for future LDs!

ectucker1 2019-05-06 01:20

@gonutz no worries on sounding too negative; it's good feedback. I'd definitely have gone with a non-tile based movement system if I was confident I could do the physics well in a weekend. I'm not sure what's happening with combat for you though - enemies should only take 3 hits to kill with Slash, and 2 witch Force. Are you sure you're actually hitting them? combat.gif

luckydaisy 2019-05-06 03:55

Would love to see this executed outside of the tile like system. Only real issue I had was at times it felt like I didnt have full control of my character.

Really enjoyed the music + the feel of the game. The learning process of the tomes was really enjoyable too

Well done

eric-smith 2019-05-06 03:58

The controls were hard to get used to at first but wow the art and music are amazing! I was thankful for the little hints to tell me what keys to press. Good job you guys! :clap::clap::clap:

justcamh 2019-05-06 06:42

Heyo, looks good, but I had a problem. The game took around five minutes to load. Then, when the tutorial taught me to use the down arrow, my computer crashed when I pressed the button. That wasn't the game crashing, or even the browser. My entire computer crashed. Not sure what the heck you were doing there, but I can only imagine it was something on your end, coinciding with the down arrow press. I ran the game on Chrome, Windows.

feips 2019-05-06 16:07

This was definetly the strangest game I played on this jam (yet). The movement feels a bit off but I was having fun and played it through (At the cost of 17 sanity though, because I wanted to know how bad the distortion would get). Well done.

pepnou 2019-05-06 16:12

Really cool game, the deformation effect is well done. I expected something a little more extreme when you lose sanity, maybe 9 wasn't enough ? The music is awesome.

Good job for this nice entry !

gbugge 2019-05-10 19:52

I love the idea to show which key to press. Very nice tutorial. But it was really hard to get used to push the down arrow to drop down. Very unusual to me ;) The game is fun and graphics and music are awesome.

eduardo-yukio 2019-05-11 18:16

The gameplay was a bit weird to me, like having to be exactly at a certain position to be able to climb up or climb down a platform is too clunky, not dynamic. Sometimes when I was too close to the enemies, I couldn't hit them but they could hit me. Not being able to just drop from a platform seems very unintuitive. I think I picked the tome of vanishing two times.

The art is very well done! The little details like the colored books, grass on the walls, it's great. The music is nice too!

The level design is good, I felt compelled to keep going and finish the game. The game starting to getting weird and creepy with each book picked was an excellent touch too, good job!

puppetmaster 2019-05-15 20:45

Very nice graphics with cool particles. The mood is great. The controls are a bit choppy.

By and large a great game. Congratulations!

shunaky 2019-05-17 18:40

Cool graphics, you definely need to work more on the movement as it is very weird as it is right now... But the game is pretty cool, just keep working and improoving it ^^

pl4typus 2019-05-19 18:54

Remembered a bit of original Prince of Persia with the controls. That was nice :)

gustavo-christino 2019-05-21 19:15

Evaluation...

1 - Mechanics and Learning: It was interesting to know that I would not have the freedom to jump all the time, but only to interact with ascents and descents (I remembered some Atari games). Learning to move was quiet, especially since the game features a simple tutorial right on the first screen. Using some mechanics (tomos) was a bit complicated (just reading the page to know some things, including why the vision starts to get messy).

2 - Flow: Attacking, at first, did not prove very accurate ... So I died many times (especially without knowing how many health points I had). This cycle of deaths and restarts ends up being a bit frustrating with time. After I got the hang of it, it started to be less stressful (though death remained a very strong punishment, returning to the beginning of the stage, even more so with a screen in the middle of the path asking to push a button; could return to the game with any key other than N, instead of R, on that screen between game sessions, to make it easier not to be finding R); the tip is only in case the producer wants to do something like that.

3 - Narrative and Polishment: The narrative did not perform fully within the game, which could be done outside the jam time, so I think it might be a good start for the post jam version. The graphic art of the stages, the character and most of the items was nice. The creature's art (it looks like a bull's head or something) got a little different from the rest (another thing that can go through polishment to the post jam version). The song starts out nice, but it gets repetitive (even more so when the screen starts to play, so it's going to make me nauseous; maybe that was the intention, but I suppose that can be polished as well).

4 - Culture: With narrative development the game has the potential to attract audiences; taking advantage of some innovations that the game seems to present (movement different from the pattern and the emergence of new forms of interaction during the game).

5 - Monetization: I believe that, with the right polymetones, the game can sell in some store (like Steam); if it has many stages and a mostly involving story.

2020-05-19 10:59

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