Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Maintenance Bot 46
By gurglesprain
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 799 | 3.10 | 25 | |
| Fun | 950 | 2.65 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 723 | 3.04 | 26 | |
| Theme | 650 | 3.54 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 474 | 3.52 | 26 | |
| Audio | 1.33 | 5 | ||
| Humor | 1.50 | 7 | ||
| Mood | 828 | 2.78 | 23 |
Would've appreciated the movement to be a little faster or rather the overall game being faster. Moving from one side of the ship to the other got a bit boring at time. Also, since the oxygen doesn't deplete that fast there wasn't much urgency. Neat idea, but yeah I just think if you upped the speed a little bit it could be more fun. Also maybe adding more variety of tasks it could be more enjoyable.
`(Heavily inspired by FTL :))`
Oh yes! I felt the FTL vibes right from the screenshot. Good job!
Nice concept, but a bit repetitve. Maybe make ship smaller, and make the game faster?
Sometimes If the breach is close to the button you keeps opening and closing the door. Even if you are not directly touching the button (i.e. button gets trigerred up to 2 cells away, or around the corner.)
The game looks really nice, but the player movement speed quite slow.
The FTL vibe is real! As @seagull said, good concept, maybe not that well implemented. Adding more things to do would make it really better. Keep up the good work!
Controls need to be sped up a bit. Good concept that could use a bit more polish.
The mood of the game is cool, the gameplay feels a little repetitive after a while. Maybe a minimap or an indicator of where the affected areas are could add to the game. It's a cool idea!
This captures the atmosphere and stress of the situation perfectly in my opinion! Great concept that has a lot of potential :)
Great Concept, but adding an end goal and upgrades would be amazing
Great starting, but needs more content, a bit boring after a while. The art style is good, but maybe some sound and music would greatly improve the atmosphere :) Anyway, good base for something, keep it up! :)
nice idea, it would be cool if there was a score system or something to keep the player coming back and playing multiple times :)
I like the game and the feel of it. Most of the time you are trying to understand where is that rear room located, so maybe something like a minimap or another visual clue could be great. Also, you can add crew members on the background trying to fight space pirates. It would be interesting to witness some intergalactic tragedy as a little robot trying to do his simple job.
Some really great feedback everyone, I really appreciate it! So motivating to have people actually play something you made.
Having crew members was part of my original concept, so you could bring them tools etc. and had to keep them alive - that would give extra incentive not to let oxygen vent completely from certain areas. A minimap is definitely a great suggestion, you could hack something in pretty quickly too - will have that in mind for whatever I make next.
This game feels a bit hollow without any indication of progress, or end goal. I assume the oxygen spread bug you’re referring to is why I had a breach show up every couple of seconds after I played for several minutes :)
It wasn’t absolutely clear to me what closing the doors was for - if they cut off oxygen loss, why isn’t it optimal to just seal them all off asap?
Some suggestions on how to make the game more engaging:
-You could have multiple (perhaps programmatically generated) levels that increase in size and difficulty, and say that the robot keeps getting assigned to new stations
-You could introduce new mechanics, like toolkits of various types for various issues, and only being able to carry one at a time
I can't figure out what's the end goal of it? Also this ship must be immediately destroyed when reaches the next planet (if it can), because it's as fragile as the babies in my game.
Hey, @gurglesprain ! You left us some really helpful feedback and I'm hoping I can do a bit of the same:
This is one of the tightest games I've played so far. Almost nothing feels clunky, unnecessary, or untethered to the theme. The visual style is simple and really telegraphs where players should be spending their time. The controls feel natural. The progress gauge does exactly what it needs to do. And while I would've loved some sound, I really appreciate that the focus was on gameplay first and aesthetics later.
The only thing that didn't feel quite there - and I think other folks mention it in some way or another - is the bot's speed. I found myself holding shift constantly, and I wasn't sure why I'd do anything else. But there's a million other approaches to try (discharging the boost all at once, making it unusuable until fully recharged, or just ditching it in favor of a higher speed).
This could easily be expanded on and, if you ever do, I'd love to play.
Nice FTL vibe with the graphics, the red oxygen, and the slowly-spiraling-out-of-control crisis! At first I was like, "yeah I got this under control, I'll optimize my repair abilities by locating centrally in between breaches!" HAHAHAHA "IN BETWEEN" BREACHES! Soon I learned the error of that thinking!
Who built this ship anyway?? And didn't I JUST FIX THAT EXACT SPOT?? ;)
Game is pretty cool, but I wonder what could be done to juice up the feel a bit. Couple of comments in that direction: I did wonder what it might feel like if the game was faster overall - faster movement, faster breach repair, faster crisis arriving... did you experiment with mixing up the speed during the jam? When playing, I also noticed I caught the edge on corners a lot because I was seeking to minimize my travel time, and I was wondering if the colliders are all boxes. Sometimes a circle collider can be nice for avoiding "stuck" moments. Lastly, maybe allowing diagonal movement instead of only the cardinal directions would be worth considering.
Maybe I'm just a speed freak though. I do like to zip around in games.
Congrats on your first compo LD!
@pkenney thanks for the great feedback - definitely my biggest issue was running out of time for any play-testing, definitely speeding everything up could bring a bit more excitement.
I didn't get a chance to debug the collision issue, the character is a box collider and the map uses a tilemap collider. It seemed like you'd especially get stuck on open doors, which was odd because the door collider is completely disabled. But a circle collider would have been a nice easy solution to fix that!
A very pretty game with a nice feel, really well drawn tiles and the moving starfield is a lovely touch. I think you've already identified all the things I would out that could be improved, I would definitely play a post-compo version of this and I think this concept really has a lot of room to expand and be something quite different from FTL, but with a similar theme.