FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD44 → Designated Victim

Designated Victim

By toasteater

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall184.0453
Fun104.1153
Innovation1263.4753
Theme623.8252
Graphics1143.7754
Audio363.8451
Humor2132.8248
Mood1613.3551

Comments

zactical 2019-04-29 04:53

Incredible! This is the most fun game I have tried this LD! I really enjoyed the mechanic of switching polarities, it made the gameplay super exciting. It did take me a bit to realize how to progress through the rooms, but figured it out easily enough. That last room is a real doozy! Amazing job!

toasteater 2019-04-29 05:01

@zactical Thank you! The way to progress is mentioned in the last page of the tutorial, after you destroy the turret, but it may be a bit easy to miss. Most of the game scales to your playing ability, but the boss always approach at full throttle. There're enemies that can be farmed for life, make full use of them if you're having difficulties!

zanyg 2019-04-29 05:05

Very enjoyable experience, great music, theme, and a really innovative concept to match. The controls felt tight and only having to use WASD and the mouse helped out a lot. I'd only question the usefulness of the terminal shops - for the earlier rooms, I would just ignore them all, and use the large amounts of time to carefully dodge things instead of swapping polarities.

limzijie 2019-04-29 05:41

Nice game. I enjoy playing this game. Thank You

notb 2019-04-29 05:41

Looks great plays great feels great! I like the back story too nicely done

shp 2019-04-29 13:14

Cute drawings, I like the ikaruga mechanic, took me a second to figure out how to proceed though and lost my first game pretty early

toasteater 2019-04-29 13:27

Thanks to everyone for playing! It does appear that the game needs to do a better job at telling players where to go. It's kind of hard to figure out when working alone and it's invaluable to know!

florian-thurner 2019-04-29 14:28

Great game, the visuals and musik/sounds are nice and the controls feel good. Switching polarities is an interesting mechanic, adding more skill potential to this bullet hell type of game. Enjoyed playing it a lot!

zetius 2019-04-29 14:52

I love your game! The gameplay makes me addict. The sound isn't at all disturbing if I had to say a negative point, it would be room 1 I spent 3 minutes without knowing what to do since to interact with the bonus distributors you have to be in front. Kiss on you

toasteater 2019-04-29 15:03

@florian-thurner Thanks for playing!

@zetius Thanks for the feedback. The tutorial could be made a bit more clear I guess! For now, I'll add that to the controls section of the page.

randdir 2019-04-29 15:12

i'm really sorry @toasteater but unfortunatly i couldn't play the game. Start with not the first screen but more the game room. And got invisible wall on the first room and cannot leave from it ? Don't know if it' has been repported to you... shame :'(

toasteater 2019-04-29 15:17

@randdir Sorry, what do you mean by "start with not the first screen but more the game room"? I can't seem to understand that very well.

If by "the first room" you mean "Room 0/10" at the top-left corner, then that's the tutorial room. You have to follow the on-screen instructions to progress. If you want to skip the tutorial, right-clicking on the first page will take you directly to the game.

randdir 2019-04-29 15:26

Okey my bad i just miss some instruction and can play it clearly. But to be more clear with my bug is that your invisible wall to not leave the room 0/10 is not really in front of the exit. So I can pass not join other room and thought it was a bug. Sorry pal xD... guess need more sleep. By the way nice job had to speed up like in classic crawler, really like the game and graphics. Keep it up bro !

toasteater 2019-04-29 15:43

@randdir To be honest, I can't decipher a large chunk of your comment, but I think I know where to look at now. Thanks for playing and giving feedback!

scott-steffes 2019-04-29 18:18

Always cool to see more games made in Godot! Great Job!

symphonia 2019-04-29 18:20

I really like this game! The graphics look great and the gameplay is really smooth! Great job :smile_cat:

fat-cat 2019-04-29 19:42

Really fun game! The sound effects and music is nice, and I like Touhou games so this gameplay appeals to me ^^

plexsoup 2019-04-30 04:38

Great game!

week-of-the-agents 2019-04-30 04:58

Pretty graphics, exciting gameplay. Very good. A little bit unbalanced, but it is common problem among 48h games.

toasteater 2019-04-30 06:18

Thanks for playing everyone! Glad you enjoyed it!.

digigee 2019-04-30 08:25

The bullet patterns were awesome! I beat the boss but I am still a little unclear how exactly the health system works but I'm sure that'd be easier to pick up on with a second playthrough. (I'm terrible at reading in game tutorials)

liauj 2019-04-30 08:27

Ikaruga! This was alot of fun, even though I'm absolutely terrible at bullet-hells. I liked the art style as well (which was what attracted me to play it in the first place, actually).

toasteater 2019-04-30 08:38

@digigee Thank you! Health is represented by the time left in your life (upper-left corner). Taking hits reduce health, and absorbing bullets increase it (by a much smaller amount). I agree that the tutorial has some room for improvement.

@liauj Thanks for playing! Glad you liked the art style.

fullmontis 2019-04-30 13:07

Just wanted to point out that the linux version's executable doesn't seem to work for some reason, I had to copy the Godot executable from my project to make it work. After that however it worked perfectly.

This reminded me of Ikaruga, and it was just as hard, I'd say. I think you did a great job in balancing the mechanics, I especially like the fact that you have that the character's time is also your time, so you have to make choices quickly. Excellent job!

toasteater 2019-04-30 13:13

@fullmontis Surprised that the executable didn't work for you, especially as I'm developing on Linux myself, but I'm glad it worked out in the end. Thank you for playing!

If you care to provide some details, which distro are you on? I don't think it should matter since Godot is mostly static linked, but there might be edge cases.

fullmontis 2019-04-30 13:48

@toasteater I'm on Ubuntu 18.04.2. I did another test and it actually runs when I open it from the shell. It says that it isn't an executable but a shared library, so maybe that confused the distro. It's also much bigger than my own executable (95MB vs 30MB).

toasteater 2019-04-30 14:12

@fullmontis I see. I use a custom build of Godot with various PRs from myself cherry-picked. I also compile with Clang and optimize for speed (as opposed to size, which you might be doing because you're exporting to Web). That may or may not explain the problem and the size difference. I'll look into this when I get the time. Thanks for reporting!

naruvan 2019-04-30 14:22

Amazing game! Switching polarities really adds a lot. It really feels great when you polarity switch at the right moment and catch all the good bullets and dodge ~~all~~ most of the bad ones!

rolly 2019-04-30 14:36

Waw, what a nice entry. I am honestly impressed by every single detail in this game: gameplay, visuals, audio, prologue, everything. Nothing much to say, great work!

caevv 2019-04-30 18:03

what a great game. as an avid binding of isaac player, i immediately loved it :) great work, especially for a compo submission. i didnt quite understand the boss, maybe i was supposed to die there since my weapon got removed. guess i didnt read the text careful enough. only thing i'd change would be maybe SFX for hit effect of player and towers. maybe the description for the items you buy could get some more highlight or details. anways awesome game!

t-bo 2019-04-30 19:02

Cute charater, nice concept and nice intro ! Beautiful game ! :clap:

potatolain 2019-04-30 22:38

Not a lot to say that hasn't already been said but this is a fantastic entry! The mechanics were great and felt solid, and you nailed the theme. I liked the switching polarities idea, and love that you added a boss at the end.

Thanks for a fun entry!

toasteater 2019-05-01 02:04

Thanks everyone for playing and giving such kind words. I'm very flattered!

@caevv You need to survive for 60 seconds for the boss fight. I think it would be clearer if the boss had a timer of itself, but the boss intro (cutscene?) was hastily added during the last hours by a sleepy me who didn't realize it :) I agree that the items are under-explained. It's quite lacking especially given that time continue to flow as you inspect the upgrades. Thanks for the feedback!

aileron 2019-05-01 10:11

An artist! Awesome game. My biggest gripe (minor) was the vendors not showing their upgrades without being in front of them (could be intentional). Also for some reason my brain often got vendors and enemies confused. Great music, cute artwork (certainly made me click), and nice work on the bullet spreads!

justuspan 2019-05-01 11:43

Rapid pace and exciting play experience.I'm too nervous to read the store description carefully since the time counter keep in losing time, maybe a visualized icon indicator can help player greatly here. The music fits the battle pace well and it create a atomsphere like those classic bullet-shower game. The switch mechanics is also helpful to increase the varity of this game. Really enjoyed it, thank you.

toasteater 2019-05-01 13:22

@aileron As for the vendor machines, I did set it up that way, so you can say it was intentional. I can see how the behavior can be annoying when you're short on time, however. The vendor machines can use some additional visual and auditory cues, too. Thank you for playing and giving feedback!

@justuspan Using icons for upgrades looks like a very good idea to improve readability. Thanks!

golden 2019-05-01 16:18

This is great! I'm a big fan of Ikaruga that uses the same mechanic so playing this was a treat! NICE JOB

mikelovesrobots 2019-05-02 01:56

Nice bullethell! Loved it.

jakobthequizguy 2019-05-02 18:16

Wow, very impressive game! The concept is cool, the graphics are nice and the audio is great. I really like the enemy movement and bullet patterns. One time a vending machine spawned too far down and I couldn't interact with it, which was a little annoying. The boss was great. Overall one of the best games I've played this LD so far!

candlesan 2019-05-03 08:57

Excellent game! Great music, sound effects, game design and execution on the concept. Love the roguelike manner in which there are different powerups on every playthrough Also love the rad art Great design on the enemy bullet spreads too and the way that scales up. Overall this was a fantastic entry!

jimbly 2019-05-17 03:31

Neat game! I'm pretty terrible at this kind of game, finally, after about 5 attempts, made it through 4 rooms ^_^. Had fun though, and all the art was good!

island-jam-2-group-3 2019-05-17 22:11

Loved the mechanics! And the grapchis and sound were also awesome! Nice entry!

PS. I made it to the 9th room

toasteater 2019-05-19 05:05

Thanks for everyone's feedback!

@jimbly I learned it's hard to make one difficulty fit all. Glad you gad fun!