B.U.B.B.A. Express

feferuco 2020-04-20 02:46

I liked the ship moving along with you, but the game could be more forgiving.

tater-hater 2020-04-21 05:09

I love the ship concept. I really did enjoy playing the game and flying BUBBA. cool concept and good execution

albuquerque 2020-04-21 05:16

The game is pretty hard, but I like the idea and it put me into the mood of keeping BUBBA alive <3

vano 2020-04-21 05:20

Nice little game, I really liked the way the game controlled and felt like it was overall really intuitive. The game is EXTREMELY difficult. I like a good challenge game though so I thoroughly enjoyed this little simple entry!

ranjan 2020-04-21 05:22

I like the idea! I couldn't actually get to the end, either me or bubba would always die, still, had a lot of fun with it!

mekuri 2020-04-21 05:27

This was fun! I liked how you both had to take care of yourself and the ship. Initially I thought I found the 'win-it-all' strategy, by simply staying on the lower levels and pick up scrap metal to repair the ship, but these pesky bots also finds their way down there.

The first time I jumped off the ship I really had this sense of 'dread' watching the ship fly away from me (although I quickly realized it was easy to catch up)

I'm not sure if you can win this game, but I didn't manage to, after several tries. I definitely enjoyed this, and I think I'll add it to my collection of the Ludum Dare games. (I keep some games around that I find quite good, and this was one of them)

The graphics were really nice, and the audio was quite okay.

Keep up the good work, and thanks for sharing!

im-the-progamer 2020-04-21 05:30

I loved the idea of the game. I thought there could be more balance though. I started out fighting the enemies myself and it was too hard. Then i realized i could hide under the ship and collect turrets while my ship did all the killing and the enemy bullets couldn't hit me. This made the game too easy, and i didn't feel like i had earned the victory. I did like the massive acid pit at the end though. overall very nice

macdoom 2020-04-21 05:34

Hard as nails! Only could get 2 turrets installed before getting killed. The idea is really original. I like the simbiosis between the player and his jaggernaut. The difficulty ramp could be a LOT flatter. Nice work!

eli-delventhal 2020-04-21 05:57

Solid entry, real bullet hell! When the robots first started shooting I was like "holy *crap* those bullets are *fast*!" But I still had a good time. I think this overall has good potential.

Some feedback points: • The UI was ultra tiny on my MacBook Pro retina display Firefox. • I didn't think repairing BUBBA added a lot to the game, it was pretty tedious to jump down to get junk and bring it back up to the center. I would have rather been able to grab a lot at once, or something like that. • Agree with others that once you install turrets it goes from too hard to too easy. • There was way too much to understand at first without context, especially in that tiny UI.

Good entry!

chromaphase 2020-04-21 07:11

the house is so cool, neat little idea, try to make the character animation and physics more fast and interesting !

lcstark 2020-04-29 10:19

A great idea! It's a nice bullet hell platformer, adding the twist of a moving base was great and made the whole thing unique. Leaving the robot to gather turrets / scrap added a lot of tension to the game. ;)

One problem I had with it is that is too easy. When first enemies arrived, I hid behind B.U.B.B.A.'s head, shot them down, taken their turrets and mounted them on three forward slots. From that point on, the game almost played itself. Even if I mounted more turrets, the enemies were destroyed before they got in their range. To fix that, I'd propose three changes to the game: 1. Make the turrets do less damage. I think they should serve as support for the player instead of dealing the entire damage themselves. 2. Make the player gun more powerful, but restrict it's usage. Right now, the player can hide behind B.U.B.B.A's body and shoot from cover. Making it so player bullets collide with B.U.B.B.A. (even if they don't do damage to him) would give the player the need to come out of cover in order to shoot their enemies. 3. Spawn enemies from all directions. Right now, enemies all appear in the front of B.U.B.B.A, making the back turret slots useless. If some enemies arrived from behind or from above it would add the need to think about turret location a bit more.

Other than that, it's a pretty solid entry. The sound effects are nice, and the music is great. Well done! ;)

pizzasgood 2020-04-29 17:05

@lcstark Yeah, I didn't have time for balancing things so the difficulty is a bit wonky. It doesn't help that the enemies are stationary, either. If I'd had time to give them movement, the smaller bots would have managed to avoid much of the turret fire and the ones that survived long enough would have wound up following along behind B.U.B.B.A. to whittle him down until you manually cleared them or mounted enough rear turrets to keep them under control. That would also have enabled spawning enemies from other directions in the first place, like you mentioned. If I'd had another half hour or two, that's how things would have worked, and it'll be one of the first things I'll fix as I expand this into a full fledged game.

I don't quite agree about not letting B.U.B.B.A. do the majority of fighting himself, though I understand where you're coming from. The thing is, this isn't actually intended as a bullet-hell game. It's supposed to be a salvage and maintenance game, with the player supporting and upgrading B.U.B.B.A. as he plods implacably toward his destination. That'll work better as I add more enemy and weapon variety along with other sorts of equipment to mount so that you'll have more choices and strategy. I'm also going to break him up into separate destructible modules so that you can experience minor failures and mounting tension instead of the current all-or-nothing approach.

That said, the expanded game is definitely going to have a slower beginning where you have to do most of the work of defending B.U.B.B.A. until you can get him geared up before it transitions into more of a scramble to put out fires and keep him running.

Fun fact about the sound effects: B.U.B.B.A.'s engine rumble and the initial sound of him rising out of the ground are both just my voice. The engine rumble has some post-processing, but IIRC the rising-up sound is raw audio from me making a growling sound into cupped hands. Maybe "growl" is the wrong word; that makes me think of a throat sound, but this was upper-back-mouth sound. It worked way better than I thought it would.

lcstark 2020-04-29 17:16

@pizzasgood

>I don’t quite agree about not letting B.U.B.B.A. do the majority of fighting himself, though I understand where you’re coming from. The thing is, this isn’t actually intended as a bullet-hell game. It’s supposed to be a salvage and maintenance game, with the player supporting and upgrading B.U.B.B.A. as he plods implacably toward his destination. That’ll work better as I add more enemy and weapon variety along with other sorts of equipment to mount so that you’ll have more choices and strategy. I’m also going to break him up into separate destructible modules so that you can experience minor failures and mounting tension instead of the current all-or-nothing approach.

Ah, I see! That sounds interesting. Can't wait to see how it pans out! :)

>Fun fact about the sound effects: B.U.B.B.A.’s engine rumble and the initial sound of him rising out of the ground are both just my voice. The engine rumble has some post-processing, but IIRC the rising-up sound is raw audio from me making a growling sound into cupped hands. Maybe “growl” is the wrong word; that makes me think of a throat sound, but this was upper-back-mouth sound. It worked way better than I thought it would.

Yeah, those worked really well! I guess that's the standard for making sounds for game jams - I've used edited sounds of me hitting a water bottle and a tea mug. It's amazing what little post-processing can do. ;)