Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → Assault on Crown Archipelago
By aurel, linear, Thomas Kresge and angiekatneko
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 272 | 3.71 | 55 | |
| Fun | 318 | 3.54 | 55 | |
| Innovation | 510 | 3.15 | 54 | |
| Theme | 880 | 2.93 | 54 | |
| Graphics | 320 | 3.93 | 54 | |
| Audio | 58 | 4.03 | 54 | |
| Humor | 247 | 3.37 | 53 | |
| Mood | 163 | 3.81 | 54 |
What an amazing game you've made in just 3 days! This was quite fun to romp around in, and that harpoon mechanic was quite unique! I had some trouble navigating the caves and I wish the visuals were a little brighter. Otherwise, all you really needed was a save mechanic and this is a really fun 3D platformer! Well done! I loved the art and sound effects!
The fact that we're killing monkeys is kinda unnerving-- it makes me feel really bad. Overall very well put together game and impressive for a jam game, no doubt. Solid effort with a great premise. Music is intense and puzzles are interesting. Combat is definitely hectic when you're surrounded.
I really like the story-telling of this game! (as in, I like how you just wake up in a cove next to a giant pile of grog XD) My favorite parts of this game were the harpoon gun(although it was glitchy and hard to use sometimes, but at least it was cooler and better than the other weapons) and collecting the coins. The puzzles were really confusing and THE NIGHTMARE HORROR MONKEYS SCARED ME SO BAD. It was supposed to be a pirate duel/battle kind of feel but my experience was HORROR MONKEY NIGHTMARE FUEL whenever the monkeys spawned BY THE MILLIONS so it made it even worse for me xD But the only island where it wasn't bad for me imo was the one where there were monkeys out in the open so I could see them in the world and the waves of monkeys spawned them in less amounts.
The harpoon gun is love, the harpoon is life. It was so nice to use both as a weapon and as a way to parkour. Although some parts were strange (I had to jump weirdly/awkwardly to parkour well). The hitbox on the harpoon can be strange sometimes. I would suggest when you spawn monkeys in waves, put an extra wave in front where there's a few monkeys, and then ramp up to the millions of monkeys (player expectation and all). The island map grayed out areas makes people think they should go there, but they can't. I love the little graphics all around the room of the pirate ship. Very homey and wholesome.
I think there should be a quick-travel button on the map that just teleports you back onto your ship (as long as you're outside of combat). The water shaders look REALLY GOOD however it kinda clashes with the rest of the game which is darker and broodier. I really enjoy the water shaders. Very nice game! Lots of content for a ludum jam game. In fact I think it was because the map editor code was re-used, you were able to have a game with so much content. But it's fine, I'm pretty sure if you were seriously trying to win the jam(which has no prize money anyway) you'd have a lot more reviews! Good luck with your game!
I have to appreciate the nightmare the protagonist finds themselves in when they drink the grog.
There's a lot of nice things going for this. I like the harpoon puzzle solving mechanic and the music pitch-bending is a nice touch. I haven't gotten all that far, but just on mechanics alone, I like it.
I think of Monkey Island a bit much with the presentation here, which makes me kinda feel bad when I'm on a Monkey Murdering Spree TM.
For a small bit of feedback, I can't help but notice you have to WASD into the instruction teaching the player they need to WASD to move, which is a bit ironic.
Otherwise, I kinda like the game. I haven't gotten far at all, but it gives a good first impression.
It could really use a save mechanic of some kind though. That would really be nice to have added (especially if you expect people to try for 999 coins or 250 for the ending)...
This game was sooo long! It definitely needs a save feature. I managed to get 250+ coins but was a real drag finding the last 2 chests I needed.. ended up dying on that place the Anchor is unlocked, and eventually quit.
IIRC I ended up playing for about half an hour.. Initially I got impressed by how polished the graphics, features and sound effects were. I enjoyed the first 15 minutes of it.
Eventually the gameplay (AND ESPECIALLY THE MUSIC) became repetitive, and even if I was practically 80% close to the end, it felt like such a big drag to gather the few last ones. Also, the thought of you expecting me and the other players to listen to the same music track for 30 minutes frustrated me.
Even if the features are super polished and A LOT for a 3 day jam (which is impressive), you should keep in mind that this is still a jam game, and possibly hold back with the time-wastey playable content. Also keep in mind that I ***personally*** prefer action-packed games, so that might be just my bias.
I would probably rate higher than what I intend to if I were to rate in the first 10', so I'll keep that in mind while rating. In overall, Well done, game's very impressive!
This is an amazing game! For the time given your team has done an incredible job to make a fun and grabbing experience! I had a blast playing this, thank you!
I liked it although I think there was too many monkeys at the same time, being drunk was fun, the harpoon gun was great and it reminded me a lot of old 90s game that I loved.
Okay, my some thoughts about the game now... Concept is really cool, I like the adventure/exploration games, but the goal of exploration isn't quite clear. I landed outside the ship, then I landed on ship, I had to collect some coins, then some bottles, but why? I didn't see there any reason for this actions. Of course, then the point was kinda clearer, but still I had to deduce why there I have to collect the coins etc.
Graphics and audio. Music was really catchy and it suited really well to the atmosphere of the game. Sounds too anyway. Graphics looked kinda like these from older games, but it wasn't bad, I liked them.
Although, the game looks really polished and refined. The hints (skipping this stage when the player were on the ship) are wrote really well. In overall, really cool entry!
Very impressive game, well done! The harpoon platforming feature in particular is really clever. I had a bug playing through the first non-tutorial level, the message about how to view the map wouldn't go away until I finished the level, and I think that prevented the harpoon tutorial from ever appearing (the tutorial noise played in the harpoon room but no message appeared because the map one was there?).
Dont know it is a bug or i did something wrong. But since a have opened map at the ship first time i didnt get any new info text. I heared sounds like im supposed to get new hint or piece of story but still had text about map. Anyway FPS/adventure is fine idea but i missed theme alot.
Looks nice, but wasn't made in 3 days :P
@360 everything that was required to be made in the 3 days was made in 3 days (all artwork). The only thing that may have been a grey area here is we used a water shader (which we tweaked). It was more or less procedurally generating the look of the water, so we sort of considered it code. We didn't write the shader, but we did adjust a few things on the resulting material. Is there something specific that caught your attention? All of the 3D models, game mechanics, and artwork in general was made during the competition time. We do carry over non-art elements in an "LD kit" we keep around. That's things like the player controller, the interaction system that allows the player to press 'E' on things. We have a generic main menu and settings screen we reuse, etc. We also have a very nice level editor that we use to speed up the level-making process. But yeah, all of the art and game-specific code is made in the 3 days. Base code, bug fix builds, and ports are done outside of that time (as per the rules).
We are going to release a timelapse pretty soon. We didn't capture all 3 days because we occasionally forgot to turn the timelapse capture on sometimes, but we'll have most of the process covered so you can see the proof :)
Linux version would be great, sadly cant play it..
@360 If you're interested in seeing how we did this in 3 days, I've got a timelapse from my side of things. I wasn't as involved with the level-making/art work side of things, but I did a large portion (~90% of the code), the UI, the map, some modeling, some texturing and audio integration.
My time lapse of the process might not be as interesting as, say, our 2D artist or our 3D artist's time lapse, but I did only sleep for ~6 hours during the 3 days of the entire jam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tchUjr5F6-c
My footage starts from Saturday morning as I didn't take any video on Friday night, which I spent mostly coding the Player logic and integrating a data architecture system in place. I didn't think a timelapse of me writing and tweaking code would be particularly interesting.
We wanted to get around to building 7 levels, but we didn't get around to it and scrapped some of our earlier ideas and limited it to just a tutorial and 4 other areas, 2 of which were rather hastily done and we're not particularly happy with. That said, we're aspiring game developers and would really like any other feedback you might have to offer; did you enjoy the game? What was fun and what was frustrating?
@bitzawolf - Thanks! We thought about doing a save-based system, and I ALMOST could have written it in there. We already had level saving, so that we would synchronize the states of coins, chests, pickups, ammo, ambushes, etc, but I didn't have time to implement anything that would save the file, as we figured that most people who play LD games just run through and never touch them again, typically. We had too many other mechanics to code, and we decided to scrap file-based saving in order to try to polish up the other stuff.
@popdaddygames Thanks for the feedback! We took a lot of inspiration from the Serious Sam games - trying to see what it would be like to mix a collect-a-thon with a enemy-wave based game, and this is what we came up with. So hectic is what we were going for... we intentionally made the enemies weak, but decided that it was more about the fun of trying to make it out of the chaos.
Sorry about the monkeys! We had a few more enemies planned, but when it came down to the wire, all we had time for was that we adapted the existing monkey model (which we arguably could have textured better, but how often in your life have you had to paint a monkey's skin, lol) to work as different types of enemies (spears/knives/blue shaman/red shaman), since we were running low on time.
The music might have been a bit loud and needed some balancing, but we kind of got the final pieces of music near to the end of the project and we didn't really have time to balance out the audio levels.
@kimily Thanks for playing our game! Our original intention was to have all weapons that could be used as mechanics, and we gave the harpoon gun the "standing" mechanic. We wanted to have wooden barriers that you could break down with the anchor, and stone barriers that could be broken with the cannon, but we ran out of time and quickly threw together the little buttons.
Since I worked on the map, I am sorry about the grayed out islands. I spent a lot of time making the map, and I wanted the map to feel more alive, so I included extra islands just along the outskirts to try to make the world feel more living.
The fast travel button is a great idea. That's how we had it originally, but I guess I wanted to get people to explore and learn the areas a little bit. That's why we had the little rowboat or whatever. It got to the point where we had so many bugs where we could leave levels, that we eventually just removed the ability to fast-travel from the middle of levels and forced you to make it back and around.
I unfortunately don't have any timelapse of the level creation with our tool, which we're hoping to sell soon. It's a non-destructive boolean CSG system. The following is a video that describes how our "level creation tool" works:
https://youtu.be/QOM_HVP6kSk
Basically, this meant that we only had a few geometry pieces that we actually used to make everything, which made it quite easy to slice them together.
Yeah... we took a week break after the jam to relax and have only started reviewing other games this week. The jam left us a bit drained and burnt out.
@davidsheadgames Thanks for the feedback! The grog stuff was a very last minute addition I threw together on the last day - originally it was just supposed to heal you, but our musician liked the idea of adding a grog effector on the music so I threw in the drunken lens distortion effect. We still wanted players to mostly heal up using coins, but it made the battles either too easy or too hard - either the coins were worth too much, in which case the monkeys were easy-peasy or too little in which case you kept running out of health. So we added grog in order to give you a way to heal, but still be a bit punishing :)
Monkey Island was definitely an inspiration for this. You can think of this as some weird mix of Banjo Kazooie, Serious Sam, and Monkey Island.
As for the WASD thing... yeah, I know about that. It's just, my hint zones were coded for player entering them, and because the player started in that position, I didn't have time near the end of the jam to tweak the hint zone logic to handle a player that starts in the hints. I originally had the hint right where the player started, but I was really sleepy by that point and didn't have the patience to figure it out so I just moved it up a bit.
The 999 coins were there simply because we didn't have time to create the remaining two levels - there's only like 335 coins in the game.
I technically wrote an internal save system (you'll notice how you can go between islands and it'll remember which coins/pickups/ammo/ambushes and whatever you've done) but I didn't get around to turning into a file-based save system. We figured most people rating games during LD don't typically actually replay a game, they open it, play it, and then never touch it again, so we decided to just not spend time implementing the file-system based save mechanic. It only takes about 30-45 minutes to get all of the treasures and coins, and much less if you're just trying to make it to the ending screen.
If you get around to playing through it, let us know how well you did - the ending screen gives you a little page you can take a picture of and let us know how many you collected!
@lyrcaxis I mentioned this above, but I technically wrote a serialization/saving tool to save level states internally, I just never got around to writing one that would save to disk and reload from disk. We just decided to cut that feature since most people don't typically replay Ludum Dare during the rating section.
Lone Palm Island is pretty tough, but a lot easier once you get the Hand Cannon from Pyramid Island. I think we wanted to add a few more chests to make it less tough to get to the end, but as with most game jams, we ran out of time, so we made do with what we could.
Our original hope was to make an action heavy game based around combat and fighting, but we wanted to ease players into it - which is feedback we've gotten from our previous LD entries. I'm curious, which of the parts of the game you might consider "time-wastey" - as game developers we're really trying to go for "fun" but "fun" is such a tough concept to nail down, so it really helps us to know what you thought was definitely NOT fun about our game!
Yeah - we had three musical tracks - the ship track, the island track, and the battle track; and I do agree that we could have used more variety - we didn't know how many levels we'd be making at first and how long they'd be, so we worked with what our musician made for us. We mostly asked him to get us sound effects, and he focused more on the SFX and ambience side than the music side.
@aurel if I had to narrow it down to one thing, I'd say its the exploring part, searching all around(literally) the pyramid to find just change, together with some difficult platforming that isn't as rewarding as you'd expect from that difficulty (on the 70 coins 6 chests area).
I've personally replayed many games I liked and/or had to pause. If you intend to make more long games and post them for game jams in the future, I would suggest including an analytics/data-collect tool, which tells you how many people reloaded, got each weapon, played through the end, etc. This would give you the best kind of feedback :)
Of course you'll have to program this beforehand but that's fair enough if it's just analytics imo.
Very cool game! I love seeing people doing nice 3D games like this in LD. The whole package felt complete too. Not sure how it fits into the theme though. I for one loved the monkey enemies. Great job!
Really impressed at what you were able to do within the time. One suggestion I have is a lot of the levels were really dark and relied solely on the scenes ambient light, giving the player a torch or just having more light sources in those dark caves would have helped a lot. It would especially help if the lights were focused on areas I was meant to go, as I got confused and lost a few times. Combat system was functional but could really have used some more work, it didn't feel great.
With regard to what Lyrcaxis was saying, I'd really suggest taking advantage of the free analytics tools that are part of unity now. Things like the funnels are really great for getting an understanding of how people are actually playing your game.
@aumbra We chose to interpret the theme both as story and mechanic - You're a pirate; your entire life is your treasures. When your treasures get stolen, you go on this rampage to retrieve your lost booty. Additionally, we mention this in the tutorial level - but all of the coins you pick up heal your health. So from a mechanics perspective, the currency you grab heals you a certain amount, which is useful during the ambushes to conserve the coins flying around the various arenas to stay alive.
This was fun. I like pirates. The way the glowing coins disappeared after collecting them reminded me of the game Descent where blowing out the lights made the whole level dark. I enjoyed the monkey enemies though they got a little repetitious after a while. Altogether, this feels like a AAA game compared to many LD games--no wonder you all were tired.
A very impressive achievement. Everything seems to work, lots of level geometry. Honestly got bored and a bit nauseous (dang grog) by the time I was done with the second island, so I had to call it a day.
a bit to much handholding in the beginning for my taste, but otherwise very well done.
I got all 10 coins on tutorial island, and made it back to the boat, found the map, but the map would only let me go back to the tutorial island. How do I get to the other islands from the boat? The only green option on the map was tutorial island.
Still, a very polished entry.
@cheesepencil - if you click on the locked islands, they unlock if you have the requisite number of coins. It's interesting though - you're not the first person to have run into that problem. How would you have liked to see an island that's unlockable but is locked at the moment? I'm not a UI designer by any means and it really helps to know that you found it unclear how to unlock the other islands.
@theStartlestare This is our 8th LD - and we always get people who don't understand what we consider basic mechanics of crouching, or pressing Shift run faster, Space to Jump, etc, so we explicitly wanted to add a little tutorial - I wanted to add a way to skip it, but we didn't have time to code that in.
We also wanted something with a bit more of a gradual increase in difficulty so players aren't overwhelmed at the beginning of the game.
@microwerx - thanks for the feedback! We had planned to do multiple enemies, but when we barely got the monkeys animated and rigged by Sunday evening, it just made more sense to add varieties of monkeys rather than trying to add the other enemies we wanted to have.
@aurel I moused over all the islands in the map after I got the 10 coins on tutorial island. Some lit up red (like the ending ship and a few of the islands on the right side of the map) but the only one that would light up green was tutorial island, which I could visit as much as I wanted, but no new coins appeared (and if there was a chest on tutorial island I never found it).
I think the UI is fine, it's that either I'm very dense or I found a bug. I'm not ruling out the former though!! :laughing:
@cheesepencil You just need to click on the red island to unlock it and make it accessible.
Thanks for submitting the game for our stream! enjoyed playing. Hope you liked the feedback!
It really seems hard to believe this game was made in only 3 days. The environment is a bit to dark to see at times. Getting drunk from bottles is a great idea and well done too.
Excellent. The amount of level design done is amazing. The game has polish I would not expect from an LD entry. In general, I would not expect this much game from an ld entry. It actually reminded me of games I played years ago like Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 - so great job for evoking that. I've played a lot of LD games over the years and this is easily the best 3d game I've ever rated.
@flying-dog-fish, @firesplash-entertainment We've added in some brightness controls - turns out that some people's monitors have different gamma settings than mine, so I didn't notice how dark it was until I tried the game on my laptop!
Yeah, darkness was an issue for me, be really nice and complete entry for such a short time. Great work! P.S. I also felt bad harpooning monkeys.
Confession: I could only get through 2 or 3 levels before feeling motion sick. This was even before I realized I could drink booze in the game: something about the game's controls and dark graphics makes it hard to stomach the camera movements. That, and probably the low framerate my poor computer can muster.
I did get up to the harpoon, and I find it fascinating it operates as a platform. It is a very thin platform, so it was a bit frustrating to figure out where I can land on the harpoon. Perhaps adding some "ghostly platform" effect would help aid the player on the size of the harpoon's platform. In addition, the angle of the harpoon seem to be based on the direction the player aimed, which made the whole thing very fickle; I would have liked it if the harpoon angled to the normal of the surface it attached to. It might also help to put a clear highlight on the harpoon so that it's recognizable from a distance, and most definitely from the wall it's attached to.
Another confession: fetch-quests are a pet peeve of mine. I'm not a huge fan of needing to collect nearly all the coins within the 2 first levels. I often felt like I needed to read the level designer's mind to get as many as I can. Combined with my motion sickness, I couldn't really play for too long. Sorry.
@arkinrev - there are brightness controls in the settings. The game is already super ultra bright on my computer, so we added additional controls for people who have low gamma monitor settings. What did you think of the hand cannon, or the swinging anchor?
@omiya-games I hope you didn't play the WebGL version - it runs a lot slower, but people were asking for one, so we did it more for mac/linux support. Either way, that feedback is really great. The harpoon logic was coded very quickly, and we have a bit of magical "embedding" logic, as well as we do a bit of magic to raycast backwards when you first fire so that you can't fire through a wall, which meant that we had to just use the shot angle rather than the intersection normal for our collision logic.
The problem that we have is that, at least in the indoor levels, very few of the walls are straight vertical. We have a lot of strangely shaped geometry, and if you shoot horizontally at it, then it hits the wall and the normal of the wall could be pointing 45* up, which would be a very strange interaction.
That said, I really like the idea of making it glow or adding a larger collider on it to make it easier to stand on, because falling off it is pretty easy, however it's only really hard if you're doing some of the later climbs when you have to scale the pyramid with the harpoon or climb the tree with the harpoon.
The later levels use the harpoon climbing more, and you get two more weapons (Hand Cannon and Anchor).
@lodugh It might be a bit slower, but we built it out for WebGL - I don't know if that works on Linux or not, however. Please give it a try and let us know.
I have to say it was a brilliant game but if think you should add a save
Woah it's really impressive how much you managed to make in just 3 days! It's a bit of a shame there's no save mechanic, the online version crashed on me and all my progress was gone. Otherwise I think I'd finish it, I really had fun playing!
@aurel I was using the Windows 64 bit build, rather than WebGL. Even turned off Ambient Occlusion, but that didn't seem to help. Then again, I have a retina screen, so the high resolution may be part of it.
For the harpoon angle, really, my feedback is about having a flat platform to make landing on it easier, regardless of the angle of the wall it's actually attached to.
@omiya-games but did you adjust the brightness slider? There are two sliders that control the gamma and the gain properties on our post-processing.
@aurel Don't think I did. I'm not sure how that would improve the framerate?
I played through 2 (3 if you include the tutorial) islands on the WebGL version and eventually stopped, mostly because the low framerate made it too hard to fight the monkeys (unfortunately I only have a mac :( ).
From what I saw, this game is pretty awesome! There is an extremely impressive amount of content and everything looks great. I enjoyed using the harpoon in platforming as well as just exploring and collecting coins. I thought the tutorials were great and seemed to cover pretty much everything that someone might get stuck on; in particular, I had a lot of trouble getting out of the room you get the harpoon in and appreciated the tip to "climb up" the wall by repeatedly jumping and shooting.
The combat I saw was also exciting and fun. Honestly, my biggest issue with it is that I'm a wuss when it comes to horror games, and the combination of monkeys randomly appearing + the monkeys themselves looking terrifying + the general dark atmosphere eventually made me reluctant to continue exploring. Even something like always giving a countdown or warning of some sort before enemies appear would have reduced the "jumpscare" factor by a lot (I'm probably an outlier when it comes to this though). Though I will say this really goes to show how engaging the game was - definitely 5 stars for mood.
Other minor things I noticed: - I would have liked to have to press a button to drink grog. I got annoyed multiple times by accidentally moving over a bottle when at full health and having to wait around for the drunkenness to wear off. The actual drunk effect is great though. - I would have liked some indication of the total number of coins/chests on each island, which would have given a better idea of how much progress you had, and besides, you already provide that information on the map (though not when you first select a new island, which was kind of weird)
I loved the music, and just in general everything was very polished, like with the battle music fading in/out. Overall, this is a really impressive game, especially for 72 hours, so great job! I'll try to get around to playing the whole thing at some point.
Loved the cartoony graphics and the piratey music :)
Grog + Monkeys = Nightmare Fuel, holy shit!
Other than that there is just so...much...CONTENT here! It's pretty insane! So many secrets to uncover and places to explore. Hat's off to the level designer. I'd have to say my favorite island was Lone Palm Island. Super flavorful! :)
Kinda wish there was something there for the ending, I went back and looked around for a few more chests just to get it, and all I got was a congrats screen. :/
In terms of a few minor nitpicks, I did find the first-person platforming to be pretty cumbersome, especially when it played a crucial role in progression. Also, the theme seemed like a bit of an afterthought, but I'm more forgiving of that if the rest of the game is solid.
All of the weapons felt unique, and I especially enjoyed how the cannonball weapon ricocheted off of walls/enemies for multi-kills.
This is some stellar work here. Awesome job, you guys!
Many things seemed to be made very well in this game. Though, I must say that the web version is completely unplayable and should be omitted. It's too dark to see anything most of the time and the audio is glitched.
Ho-ly-crap! I'm convinced you just took some obscure collectathon game from 2004 and put it out as your entry... I mean there's no way anyone could make a game so polished in just three days, right?!
It's got it all, great music, great graphics and tight controls! I don't even know what to critique here (granted I only played through the Smugglers' Cove since so many people submitted their games on my post and there's so little time)
I will be back though, and I will give you some more feedback once I'm through with all the other games.
My first impression, though? It's just amazing!
I am amazed! The amount of content here is aweome, if I have to pick anything to praise, it is the level design. You have made small levels that reward exploration and curiosity. it goes without saying that the sound and art also add a lot to the game. Well done!
@king-kujito - there's brightness settings if you press Escape and go to the settings menu to adjust them. We're using the Gamma Color space which means it varies for everyone's monitor settings, but I didn't have time to add a proper color calibration in there.