tommyflower 2019-10-10 12:23
Nice environment. I really liked the lamps and the dust effects.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD45 → Lost Temple of the Monkey God
By aurel, linear, Thomas Kresge and angiekatneko
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 299 | 3.70 | 37 | |
| Fun | 317 | 3.57 | 37 | |
| Innovation | 622 | 3.10 | 37 | |
| Theme | 798 | 2.98 | 37 | |
| Graphics | 176 | 4.15 | 38 | |
| Humor | 1 | |||
| Mood | 75 | 4.07 | 37 |
Nice environment. I really liked the lamps and the dust effects.
Very nice and atmospheric game. I wished that I could continue playing after collecting the relic to explore the world more. I had the feeling that there was some sort of climbing blessing which I missed. Can you spoiler me, and tell me how many blessing there are. If there is more to discover, I will play again.
One negative thing: my GPU (1070 Ti) was at 100% with "PC Master Race"-settings and at like 60% with "Web / Console"-settings. I think that is a wee bit high for this game, maybe you can optimize this.
Untitled.png
Hey why can't I choose my team at the beginning? I wanted to be on the Blue Barricudas! :P
Great atmosphere & graphics. Was fun to explore, though I got stuck on the rolling ball puzzle. It looked like they shot out way too fast to actually use the ramps to control their path, plus the ramps were a bit annoying to move around. It wasn't clear whether that was what I was supposed to do or if I needed some other power to solve it properly, but I didn't find a solution or anywhere else to go so I got stuck there.
At least I didn't get spooked by any temple guards. Would love to play this again if it were polished a bit. Nice work!
@adhesion Yeah, the rolling ball puzzle may have been a bit much. The proper solution was to turn the ramp at the bottom until it's pointing backwards (so the balls have to roll back up-hill as they shoot out). That slows them down enough so they gracefully fall down onto the horizontal 'ramp' below.
Glad you enjoyed the atmosphere, it was fun to work on :D
Wow this is a really impressive game, the graphics are great! I will say that some of the puzzles were a bit much to me, but if I have more time I'll have to come back to this. Great work!
Visually stunning, with great graphics, shading, and mechanics. I found the game a little hard to get into, with so many choices and a fair number of difficult platform jumps. I might have preferred something a little more linear with a learning curve rather than the open world. I'm very impressed with all that you got in there, and with the variety of parts and puzzles. Very nice work.
You mentioned a WebGL version, but I don't see it anywhere?
Yeah, we tried the WebGL version. We ran into a slew of problems in the WebGL build that we tried desperately for a week after the jam to fix. We finally got a fix up but there were side-effects. We use a 3rd party sound engine called FMOD, and the latest version seems to be not working properly with WebGL. Also our volumetric lighting plugin (Aura) doesn't work in WebGL and it didn't look as nice as the Windows build. For the moment it doesn't meet our quality standards and we decided to take it down :(
Really great work! Immersive with the environment, sounds, music, etc. I got to the end. If I restart the game without exiting, I can't recollect the coins I've already gotten.
@heyycap Ah, yes... that bug. Yeah, I think we fixed that, but the build we have up doesn't have that fix. Thanks for letting us know - I'll make sure we get a build up soon that has that bug fixed in it.
How long did the game take you? We spent a bunch of time coding the minimap and implementing the other mechanics that our level design was a bit hurried and we had to scrape a lot of content, so we're curious how long you felt the game took you. Were there any really frustrating parts? What can we do to make something like this more fun?
I beat the game without finding the owl/minimap. It took me a few tries. I think the 3rd try I got it. Actually, what really helped me the most was increasing the brightness. The first time I played, I didn't even see a passageway because it was too dark.
Otherwise, I think a little more direction might be nice at the beginning. By the 3rd time, I knew where to go, but only because I had been to each of the rooms several times.
There was that big room with all the snake statues in a circle and the big door... I was interested in that (and couldn't open the door).
I enjoyed how the sound/music changed when you went to different environments.
The first time I played, I got the metallic ball stuck in the rocks (which I also would have been interested to get past if it were possible).
@heyycap The ball technically isn't necessary to get to the water chamber down below, and the owl is right at the beginning behind the door in the room with the snake statues. If you push the snakes off the platform, the platform rises, and the door opens to the owl blessing :)
We intentionally put the blessing there so that players would get the owl right away to be able to have a map showing them the layout of the temple, but I guess there's nothing stopping players from skipping that entire puzzle. Hmm..
Thanks for the feedback! That really helps.
I actually did try to push the snakes off the platform right away, but there sometimes wasn't enough room around the platform for me to push the snakes off, and they bunched up with each other. It's generally difficult to control how you push things.
One thing I do remember – when you break a vase, your character recoils. So if I'm on a ledge, and I break the pot, I might fall off the ledge.
Glad it's helpful!
Incredible game, reminds me a lot of the first Tomb Raider games. The movement was a bit glitchy and I couldn't finish the game due to a bug where I got stuck in one of the crouching tunnels. Regardless, it's unbelievable that you managed to make this game in such a short amount of time. Mood, Graphics, Fun, Overall 5/5
Nice throwback to 90's / early 2000 exploration games ! I found the ball puzzle pretty hard and not really fun, since the ball were so fast and "heavy".
I spent some very quality 30 minutes :smile:
I'm terrible at this sort of games but good job, it's really polished and playable. It somehow kept me entertained for quite some time, I also spent a long time on the ball puzzle. I wish pushing things was more controllable
hhhhh actually I am not good at playing this type of game but I have to say it is a wonderful game! Especiaaly the mood and graphics!
Nice game. Good atmosphere. The sky should have been much brighter though. Struggled for too long getting to the ledge above the ball puzzle without the double jump as I only had 23 coins at that point. Managed it eventually though. Got dead-ended in the room with the river as I did not have dive yet, then had the bug of coins not appearing on restart. Being launched by breaking pots was irritating, also broken pots being in the way and having to wait for them to disappear. Final score: 58,38,3,16:07. I didn't find the map useful. Missed it entirely on my first attempt. Interesting height effect on it though.
Wow! What an unapologetic old school exploration game (that 33rd coin was pretty devious). I too did not actually get the owl. I think I just knocked over the statues and continued running off or something, but good to know that wasn't needed anyways. I've never been this engaged in the atmosphere of an LD game before, probably because 3D is rarely done, and even more rarely done this well. This is probably the last game I plan to rate this jam and holy crap, thanks for leaving me with such a great last impression. I spent quite a bit of time of this game and a big part of that was how professional and cohesive the level design all was. Awesome job!
This is phenomenal! Holy hell how was this made in 3 days? Not only the most polished game I've played this LD it's the most polished game I've played ANY LD. Graphics and sound are top notch. The lighting and atmosphere is great and the game is very engaging. My only gripe is the ball puzzle because it's tough to get right. I'm speechless on this one - game of the jam without a doubt!
Wow. This is amazing. The graphics are really good, the audio sets the mood and it has tight, intuitive controls. Amazing job! Best of luck to all ya'll over-talented people!
Amazing game. Graphics are really great, they set the mood of the game. Some puzzles are very difficult but overall is a really good game. Good job!
WOW one of the best LD 45 games ive played :hearts: Good job :heart_eyes:
The puzzle where you have to push the ball at the beginning is very broken. I tried it twice and the ball got stuck in a corner. Having tilted corners would have made it less frustrating. Great game! I love the graphics!
@cydouzo Yeah I agree. We ran out of time, so instead of fixing it we figured "eh, the player can get there one of two ways, so even if you get the ball horribly stuck you can always swim down the star-shaped pool once you get the diving ability"
VERY cool game! Cool done, even though I didn't guess the riddle
Super fun, didn't have an issue on my 2080. Best game played so far!
Great design, I like the concept of using coins as key conditions instead of how, in most games, you collect them just to get some score. To be honest, it took me probably 5 runs all around the map before I was able to find the fourth coin, and I was about to give up just moments before noticing the crouching area :) Bug reports:
* The aforementioned crouching area could get blocked by the pottery that's destroyed in front of the entrance, and the only solution is to restart the game. I consider this a severe issue. * There is no proper introduction of the controls, e.g. the E key to interact, and the About menu goes against a de-facto consensus, as there are usually just some credits under About. I would expect the keys to be mentioned in settings, as if to re-map them. * When closing the About menu, an accidental double-click causes the player to press the Exit button - that's some unfortunate button placement. I sure hope noone does that in the middle of the gameplay :) I guess that's why people usually do a double-check before quitting the game. * There should be a mouse sensitivity option in the game, as your constant is just too slow. It takes the camera the same time to rotate only 45 degrees as it takes my cursor to go from left to the right side of my screen. (This is a good choice for some pro-games within FPS games, but in a puzzle game it's just annoyingly too slow :) * By the way, I'm not too experienced in occulsion culling myself, but wouldn't that prevent the need to load the next part of the level? (The character sometimes does a glitchy jump after the load. It reminds me of the loading in Half-Life games :p)
I hope this'll help you in your post-LD endeavor, good luck! :)
@scsc This is really good feedback. To answer some of these:
1. So honestly, the crouching tunnel thing is... well, a bug, or put another way, we ran out of time and thought we fixed it but each person thought someone else fixed it :smile: The pot pieces do get smaller and disappear when you're not looking at them, but that is not well conveyed to the player.
2. Very valid points. An intro area that teaches the E key would have been wonderful.
3. Thanks for pointing this out. Normally we reuse our menus from a previous game, so we pre-test them, but this time we made a new one, and failed to test it properly.
4. The old menus we used to use had a mouse sensitivity option, but we... forgot it this time :/
5. So, this particular issue is... a big one. Unity ships with an occlusion culling that works in theory (and we did use it), but each shadow-casting light seems to slow down the scene, culled or not culled. I think this is because Unity re-renders the entire scene from the point of view of the light (6 times for a point light!) to generate the shadow maps, and due to how big light radii are for a decent-sized lantern, they rarely get culled out. There's some nice optimizations we could do, such as bake our lights with a shadowmask setting, so that it fades between baked light in the distance and dynamic shadowmapping up close. Honestly, we just didn't want to deal with baking lightmaps in an LD entry, since getting those parameters dialed in takes time, and baking lightmaps each time you update the level also takes time. It was easier to just write a nice level transition system and split the level into pieces. The splitting of the level also made it easier for different people to work simultaneously on their own part of the level without having to share a scene file and worry about scene file merges. Hopefully the loading areas didn't affect the experience too negatively. We tried to make it as seamless as we could, but you know, LD only has three days :slight_smile:
Thanks a lot for all your feedback, there's some great takeaways here! Good luck on your score!
@linear Interesting, thanks for the information about technical details related to lighting, I haven't had enough experience with this yet, so I will have to learn more about the shadowmask etc., hopefully I'll be able to use these tricks to also optimize FPS in my lighting-based game :) By the way, wouldn't additive scene loading also solve this issue in a more straight-forward way? I was thinking that it may be easier to prevent the glitchy transition, and the scene loading could be also done asynchronously. Too bad there isn't any all-in-one solution provided by Unity, I feel like this is the kind of issue that everyone will face at some point and we should strive for a proper standardized approach :)
@scsc Yes... asynchronous loading is the way to go. In fact, it is one of the only major items still left on our original cards from the project. I quickly prototyped out the level loading with a Hard load, planning on moving to an async model... but... well, we ended up not having time to finalize it into a nicer async workflow. The code supported it, but there was a bug where the player could technically walk backward out of the async loading area and possibly screw everything up, so I just didn't have the necessary time to do it right and kept it as a hard load.
I had wanted to have some UI pop up during the Hard Load, but alas, time.
As I did the UI this time, I also am sorry that I didn't add the slider for Mouse Sensitivity. I kind of just forgot. Oops.
Yeah, this time we didn't have the time to work on a Tutorial Area, mostly because I spent almost an entire half day working on getting a dynamic map to work, and writing custom shaders for that was not my strong suit. As a result, we ended up cutting any tutorial-like experience.
That said, thanks for the feedback. It's really helpful to see how we can improve. Can we ask what you found to be the most "fun" part of the experience? We're really doing these LDs to learn about what makes a game fun.
@aurel I haven't previously finished the game, so I went back and I must say that it really takes a huge amount of time to realize that you can move those ramps - not just one, but both, and that there is a final solution to make the ball trigger all 3 switches. At first I was trying to catch the ball by pressing E, and later on I was looking for it on the ground :) Also the way the ball often fails to roll over the last ramp made me worry that I will have to use my body to redirect it :P By the way, just like some comments previously mentioned, playing with low brightness definitely makes player easily miss even some of more obvious parts of the level, including the ball itself.
Overall it's a nice exercise to look for solutions with minimal hints, but it honestly gets frustrating very quickly. On the upside, the atmosphere was so great that it felt authentic for the entire time, just like a player that would be left to second-guess himself if he were in a real temple. Most of us can only dream of making such an immersive level over the course of a few days without stealing tons of assets like free models and textures ;)
Still, I would expect a little bit more of complexity when it comes to the interaction with objects, and maybe some feedback in the form of a story progression, so that the player doesn't aimlessly wander to previous rooms where there is nothing to do, before I would consider this worthy of some official post-LD release :) Though when it comes to coins, I appreciate that the level can be completed even if some of them are missed, so that there is no need to strictly point the player to the missing ones (if a player won't notice them once, he will probably miss them again, e.g. if they are right above another platform that he had cleaned up). It is really challenging for a mind to properly memorize the entire level though, as one will get very easily lost if he doesn't hold everything in memory. The minimap would greatly reduce the difficulty, even though it would reduce the immersion a little bit :) What about making some simplified version of a map, so that the player has to understand the associations himself anyway?
I must strongly complain about the last door though. When I first played it (that's when I blocked myself in the crouching area), I saw the "33 door" in an unapproachable area, but when I played it later, I was no longer so focused on pushing all the random snake statues, so I completely ignored the one that you have to push down in order to unlock the door. What if the player pushes it to a wrong direction? I had to come here and read the comments in order to learn about it, as I remembered the "33 door", but had thought that it was simply somewhere else :) I would definitely never find it on my own.
Anyway, here is my score for the record :D It was fun after the worst part was behind me :P
monkey.png
Pretty awesome! Loved the exploration aspect, and *thank you* for implementing fast swimming. The puzzles were cool, and I really enjoyed just looking around all the areas. Minor things: (1) I got stuck in a vent (something about crouching + running), (2) I got an iron ball stuck in the corner (forever?), and (3) the player's hit box was weird (I could look down to make my hitbox smaller). Very minor though --this was great!