belug23 2019-04-30 22:43
Good little game, I like the art style I'm afraid that if play more I'll see with not dark and that is gonna be a wierd human head with frog legs. Still I enjoyed it really much.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → Aging Toads
By ristoretto
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 604 | 3.38 | 24 | |
| Fun | 718 | 3.09 | 24 | |
| Innovation | 654 | 3.00 | 24 | |
| Theme | 778 | 3.06 | 24 | |
| Graphics | 581 | 3.47 | 24 | |
| Mood | 484 | 3.38 | 24 |
Good little game, I like the art style I'm afraid that if play more I'll see with not dark and that is gonna be a wierd human head with frog legs. Still I enjoyed it really much.
I appreciated the tutorial. It didn't take long but it got the basics down. Got to a score of 55 on my second try.
Loved the art and music, maybe a little bit frustrating along time. Anyway, very nice job dude, great result.
This is a very good entry. Sometimes the age was hidden by the ground, but other than that solid, complete game with no bugs. Except for.... you know.... the bugs.
This was a very cute game! The controls for the big jump seemed a little off but overall its was really fun.
Cool art and mood! A nice platform game! I just had a hard time with the jumping mechanic.
Pretty neat game! The long jump was a little broken tho.
Really like the art and atmosphere!
@belug23 weird human head : Yeah can't really unsee that :) but kind of like the idea, might add different toads in a post jam version, or maybe for the bigger toad.
@ghostgoatsgames Yeah, I will move everything up one or two grids in the post jam version. I appreciate the pun :)
@draconimous big jump: do you mean the long-wide jump or the high jump? or with the big toad? also was it the position of buttons on gamepad / arrowkeys / wasd?
@sadsmile Long jump broken: Yeah, feels like I use it ~75% of the time when I play, which is a little too much. Need to tweak the other jumps so they become more useful.
I love it !
I loved the game! Tutorial was very nice, and the visual feedback that I got when hit was very clear. I also liked the little backstory. The moving/jumping however felt kinda slow and buggy, I got stuck on a wall a few times. However I loved the variety of enemies! Especially the exploding one was awesome, made me jump a little haha!
@ristoretto the space bar jump, you cant jump with the space bar if any other keys were being held down or had just been pressed. It wasn't a huge issue just a little off :)
This game is great! I'd go into more detail but koalaura seems to have read my mind. Keep up the good work +1
The SUPER JUMP is awesome. It's a lot of buttons and controls for a short game, but pulled together well. Some great level design in a short time, good sounds, good aesthetics. Congrats!
Nice I got 94 on second try! I pretty only used the long jump, unless I had to use the high jump to reach a ledge.
I just made a patch with minor fixes.
- I move the ground 2 block up so the UI is visible while standing on the lowest ground.
- Fixed the bug when the character would get stuck while jumping very low over an edge.
- and fixed so if you hold right and jump, the jump has priority. thanks @draconimous for pointing that one out!
And some other things, you can see the change log in the top.
I have plans for other things as well, but that will be in a post jam version.
Thanks for all of the feedback folks!
Wow, a very interesting action game with a unique movement system and a cool aesthetic, nice work.
My top score was 255. 85 was my best after a few runs, before figuring out I actually should use the transform feature.
It's a good game but here are a few thoughts anyway:
The tutorial was very nicely done, and important to include.
But I feel it's a lot of buttons to throw at the user. What if you simply deleted the left, right, and crawl features? I never used them after I got the hang of the game, they seem redundant with the "long jump" move.
Then you would have three movement buttons: high jump, long jump, tongue. That's a 50% reduction in movement input complexity but not much loss in player expressiveness.
The design problem to solve then is that they player can't turn around and face left. But since this is a "move right quick because the timer is counting down" game, maybe you can turn that problem into a positive.
You have chosen to go with the "committed jump" - when I press the button, I jump, and it is always exactly the same arc, and once launched I cannot do anything to alter the path.
This is the unusual choice, but there are excellent games that operate this way. My reference for thinking about this is original Castlevania on NES. That game has committed jumps, and also a significant wind-up on the whip attack, which works together to create a tough-as-nails action game that requires always PLANNING one "chunk" ahead.
I think Aging Toads runs into some tricky issues with this commit style of action, though. My problems were mostly around the high jump.
The high jump has a very very long hang time. It feels like it's close to 1.5s. That's a frustratingly long time to be locked out of my controls. I hate to push this button because it feels bad and breaks flow.
There is a second problem, which is about the shape of the jump. The jump is very vertical, but so are a number of the hazards.
Consider this example: https://imgur.com/q0yQ1G0
What are my options? I must press high-jump to proceed. But I cannot press high-jump because I will leap into that slowly-rising quintuple-damage enemy. So I must wait. But I cannot wait, because my life is ticking down. Even if I do wait, the window of safety between when that enemy has left, and the next one comes out, seems to be shorter than the hang time of my jump. So if I'm careful, I am punished: I wait and lose life, then jump and feel helpless for 1.5s, watch as the next bug comes out, have no way to avoid it, and I hit it. Better to just jump now and take my lumps.
The result of this is that I button mash. I play with this algorithm: "spam long-jump and tongue until I cannot move forward. Then hit high-jump once." If I hit enemies, well, so be it, because there was no way to avoid them anyway and stopping to wait just loses even more life.
The blood-drop projectiles can also align poorly with my high-jump.
I am not a big fan of double-jumping, but I would experiment with the possibility of pressing long-jump in the middle of high-jump, with the effect of instantly stopping the vertical movement of the high-jump and going straight into the forward-dash movement of the long-jump. This would mean I can jump up then dash forward to time gaps in the hazards, and I would never feel locked out of the action.
You have a really cool action core here but I think you need just a couple of key tweaks to keep me in the flow state.
The art really works well, with the layers and semi-abstraction, plus the "red=danger", there's lot of nice touches. The tongue feels great to use, and the sound effects and music work really well together.
I went on a ramble with the critique side, but that's because this is a good game with hot potential, not at all trying to smash it. Hope it's helpful.
Thanks for the fun plays, nice entry!
@pkenney Thanks for the detailed feedback!
Yeah, the transformation helps a lot. I have watched some local playtests after the jam, and most players use it seldomly, I will have to look into how to make it more used early on.
I like the idea of removing the directional buttons. I will try to see if it works. Along the same line, it might also work to auto trigger the tongue, and have another jump button instead.
Castlevania was an inspiration yes, specifically the hunchback enemies.
I agree on the example with the high jump and the pipe flies. I think the high jump can have a higher fallspeed and I will also add so the short hop will jump 2 blocks high which makes it possible to jump over the pipes with it instead.
I would transform and eat the pipe if there was lots of enemies close by, but I agree that it's too punishing to have to wait xs or get -5s because of the damage, or take -15s from transforming and maybe get other enemies for a higher score. I will probably add a mode without the time limit. I like it form a resources management perspective, but a lot of the players I playtested with just found it very unintuitive.
I think a double jump would work. I would also like to try some combinations where some jumps have air control or jump longer by holding longer.
Thanks again for the detailed feedback :)
I just pushed a post jam version to itch.
- Removed arrow keys - Automate thong / licking - Added air jumps - Added spider enemy and maggot pickup
https://etclundberg.itch.io/aging-toads