FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD46 → LD 46 - Guinea Pug

LD 46 - Guinea Pug

By notredamstra and Evert

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall11423.5368
Fun4073.7568
Innovation14843.1568
Theme21943.0368
Graphics13083.5667
Audio11143.1467
Humor2243.8566
Mood14103.2965

Comments

demontoon 2020-04-20 21:24

So much fun ! I like it, great job ! (but omg this music)

majk-fl 2020-04-20 21:32

Lovely game! I love how pugs ragdoll acts while jumping :)

yoshify 2020-04-21 08:45

Entertaining little game :D

m0dsat 2020-04-21 09:01

Simple and fun game. Was actually quite addictive. Pace was well balanced. LOVED the pug ragdoll animation in the intro, and would have liked to see more of that. Thanks for the game!

fabighindaru 2020-04-21 09:09

Very fun game but it gave me strange vibe in the beginning ^^

magnusfurcifer 2020-04-21 09:11

Very fun concept here for sure, with a bit of polish it could be a commercial game.

Also that story cut scene was probably the funniest thing I've seen in an LD game this jam lmao

despdair 2020-04-21 10:35

good story, I liked the way you explained it

humphreysmedia 2020-04-21 17:48

Very funny concept and finally a good use of pugs (controversial, I know), but the ragdoll physics really made the game and suited the story, graphics helped it too! Just wish the story was shortened a little as it took a while so get through all the text.

emcio969 2020-04-22 10:33

Good game !

evert 2020-04-22 12:18

Thank you for the kind words @magnusfurcifer! And thanks for picking up on the in-game ragdoll humor @majk-fl @m0dsat @humphreysmedia :smile: @demontoon haha yes, you can blame me for the music :sweat_smile:

kostasvs 2020-04-22 12:52

Credits on a very well made and funny game! Randomization, challenges, and story make a very good job! Well done!

izokia 2020-04-22 21:29

This was a really fun endless runner type feel. Nice goals to reach and items to grab. Along with two modes to play. Really good job. OH AND MUSIC, LOVELY

jasonsumm1 2020-04-22 21:30

Haha funny concept! That story >.

uppitydonkey57 2020-04-22 21:31

Fun! although I am very bad at it.

ondrasej 2020-04-22 21:38

The visuals are really cool, and I liked the idea of a pug in a bottle. Controls are OK and work.

What didn't work (for me) was the random generation of the levels - the maze doesn't really make sense, and the boosters point away from the game (or backwards) more often then when one needs them, so the game is more about progressing carefully and watching and measuring each step than about progressing forward and moving fast. So it didn't really feel like I'd expect an infinite runner to feel.

Maybe it would be better to drop the random generation, and add a bunch of hand-crafted levels with proper difficulty progression.

anagf 2020-04-22 21:39

I had a good time with it. I kinda feel bad for the poor pug, but the game was really funny and the idea was nice. I specially like the procedural generation of the platforms, although sometimes it became harder than others. But overall is a nice game

heyycap 2020-04-22 21:56

Funny... But the pug is already alive because of the capsule! Why do I need to bounce around? I am sure you tried to make sure there were no impossible situations, but I definitely got in some really tricky spots due to the pesky boost pads. Good job, though, funny take on infinite runner/bouncer.

jacksendary 2020-04-22 23:41

Funny but personally I felt it a bit hard to control sadly

EDIT: Also I'm having a LOT of issues running the WebGL version, and for some reason on my screen (21:9 aspect) it only renders half the game on the left side of the monitor. Also Hello fellow dane and greetings from Aalborg ;)

evert 2020-04-23 08:29

@jasonsumm1 Great idea :) I'll put page skipping on our list :sunglasses:

Thanks for the feedback @ondrasej! We initially did have a few handcrafted sections, and we definitely plan on going that route! The random generation was a result of having something more than just a repeating pattern, and as @anagf and @heyycap pointed out it is far from perfect. We made sure that the maximum gap size between tiles is fixed so that there are no impossibly large jumps, but the boost pads can still make things nearly impossible. Sorry! We'll make sure this improves! :D

Thanks for playing and streaming @jacksendary! Greetings from Copenhagen ;)

annie-owl 2020-04-23 22:12

What a cute game :slight_smile: The only problem I ran into (or maybe it was intended?) was the fact that first person view was not resetting after I died

blubberquark 2020-04-24 07:16

I find the dog/bone theme really weird, because the bones you show are like the kind of cow bones you give to a dog to chew on, not dog bones. That gave me mixed feelings. Was it a "dog chasing bones" idea first, and you changed it halfway through? Why would a dog chase its own bones? Is dissonance this part of the humour?

Some more constructive criticisms follow. This game needs: 1. A way to change window resolution. 2. More structured level generation: Start out easier, make the jumps more difficult further back, provide a "safe" but slow path and multiple "fast" but tricky ones. 3. More varied environments (I realise it's just a jam), for example something like a wall or raised block that stops your jump might have gone a long way, especially if you place it to "catch" the player character in a safe spot before a chasm, or as a ramp to make further jumps. Maybe you did that. I didn't get terribly far. 4. A better visualisation of the hunger clock/advancing wall of Doom (hello Ludum Dare 14) to know how far ahead you are. Could be floating numbers and lines under the playing field, I don't know.

2 and 3 together could really turn this from a hard to control YouTuber humour experiment to something with replay value. As it stands right now, the gameplay doesn't deliver on the promise of the strange story intro.

evert 2020-04-24 20:48

@annie-owl Congrats on getting that far! :tada: This is a bug that crept in at the very end, thank you for reporting it! We'll get it fixed :)

@blubberquark Wow, thank you very much for the detailed criticisms. Regarding the bones: the ragdoll came first, collectbles came second, and we somehow turned them into dogbones :sweat_smile: Though with the 'clean-up' idea I think we sort of made it work, it is definitely something we can change. Thanks for the suggestion! Regarding your feedback: 1. Check 2. Yup! We had a system in place for that, but all we managed to 'hand-craft' in term of segments is the warm-up bit (with no holes). I blame this omission on time. 3. There are no raised blocks further down, just one or two more 'tile types' (shock & a first-person-view-for-5-sec). We did think of having obstacles flying accross the path that would bump you, but never got there. Thank you for this suggestion too! 4. Excellent idea :) We're planning to work on this a bit more, so thanks again for the detailed feedback!

cadstor 2020-04-25 00:33

I loved! The whole mood of the game is perfect, and the idea is great. Very good work :3

systematic 2020-04-25 11:26

Lots of fun for a little while. I think I found a sinister undertone in the game. If I'm not mistaken, the bones you are collecting are the pug's bones which he lost in surgery. When you collect the bones, a chomping noise is made, suggesting that the pug is consuming his own bones, a very dark game indeed.

midnightmist 2020-04-25 18:24

Very challenging and fun game! The controls were easy to understand without any instructions and the story mode is interesting!

evert 2020-04-25 18:53

@systematic Oops, good point! :rofl: that was unintentional...

primum-ludum 2020-04-26 07:20

It is difficult for me to control the capsule, because it is not clear where it will fall after the jump. Sometimes I got stuck at the edge of the platform and got out by long pressing "w".

I like this runner. It's great that the dog has a funny little backstory. Also the game has a very nice minimalistic style. Great job!

chuchugeralt 2020-04-26 12:48

I actually laughed out loud while reading that story! Poor little doggo. Really loved the concept and the style. But (as already mentioned) the random level design was kinda hard and it became more or less luck based. I could see myself playing that on my phone with some fixes in the future!

ch4oticau 2020-04-29 03:50

Nice game! Really had fun with this one.

* The pug slapping the ground in the little intro for the story was hilarious, actually got a laugh out of me.

* The controls felt good, and it was satisfying to use the arrows to do "trick jumps".

* The game was challenging enough, but not frustratingly hard, I felt like I could actually get it if I tried hard enough.

The sound was great and fitted the graphics, and the music was a nice choice too. I almost think that the music could've been a little louder.

Nice work :)

meelo 2020-04-29 04:26

That story was so good - I mean, for me, the reader (not so much for the Pug and all its bones). This is a really solid entry - I enjoyed playing many times, and when things were going well, it felt great (especially when new things like green arrows/red electric things showed up for the first times). I found it a bit hard to control - it felt like there was a lot of luck involved, but still enjoyable. My suggestions would be to increase the angle of the perspective (make it closer to top-down - maybe even use an isometric projection) to let the player view more relevant information at once (it would also help if the decaying blocks came with more warning - I never managed to survive once I saw them show up from behind). The pug's shadow is a really nice and helpful touch - could help if there was some better indication of landing position when you weren't in mid-air. It also seems like the level generation is some sort of independent random choice for each block - it might work out better if the generation had some sort of "planning" to it to make intentional contiguous paths (and contiguous gaps too) or other features that would give the player a more easily understood world - there's just a bit too much entropy in the generation as it is for a player to really get what's coming up. In any case, I enjoyed this game quite a lot as it is - well done.

Oh! And the music was really nice!

evert 2020-04-29 21:15

@chuchugeralt and @ch4oticau Happy to read that the game got a laugh from you :smile: The trick jumps were something we were going for, but the random level generation unfortunately means you need quite some luck to get a good sequence.. will be improved upon hopefully!

Thank you for the suggestions @meelo! We tried having a few new things show up for people who manage to get farther into the game indeed. Unfortunately that is harder than it should be because of the random generation of the level (it took quite some effort to have this work still, because the level is 'random-but-with-no-gaps-larger-than-a-certain-value', and that gap finding & fixing algorithm took more time than I had hoped!). With some more time and effort, I am sure we can get a nicer contiguous path thing going, with a decaying block indicator in the UI :smiley: Thanks again for the suggestions!

Also happy to hear that you (@ch4oticau and @meelo) liked the music (my very first honest attempt at some composing :sweat_smile:).

bloham 2020-04-30 07:58

Poor little pug! I somehow regret playing the Story mode! I like that when you did that the scene is not restarting, but you get teleported back and the scene is rebuild. Its definitely a game for a laugh as sometimes you manover yourself into impossible situations and the zone is just coming and get you. I liked it, its a fun game! (But the story... xD )

duke 2020-04-30 11:28

Very cool. The graphics look very polished and the core game play works really well. The collision detection and jumping mechanics feel good. It's great that you added challenges to your randomly generated levels, as well as special fields and collectible items.

The random element of your game was the one thing, that frustrated me the most, though. Often times, some jumps were annoying due to arrows pointing in the wrong direction, making progress very difficult or even impossible. So even if I had no problem navigating the levels when everything fit, once one of those arrows appeared, I was done for.

Still, very fun skill based runner with a lot of details and stuff to to. Great job!

oakwarrior 2020-04-30 14:37

I found this to be an enjoyable and fun game with some quirks. One of the more catchy games in terms of "let me try one more time..." in this jam :)

fabula-rasa 2020-04-30 20:05

Loved the intro! Poor, poor Pug. Music was great and the jumping sound effect was glorious. The game itself feels well-polished and is on a rather hard side, due to the chosen perspective and random levels. But it feels very satisfying to complete a level. So - well done!

epicload 2020-05-02 08:02

Cool game mechanic and nice art style!

trexxak 2020-05-06 06:52

Oh wow, this is really cute! :D

Appreciated the short introduction story, and was left curious what "pugspective" is (was that the first idea for your game? Now I want to see a game based on a pug ragdoll :DD )

Very straightforward, fluent gameplay loop! Had a lot of fun playing, thank you!

f1krazy 2020-05-07 17:32

Very entertaining! I do feel sorry for that poor pug, though.

The randomly-generated level makes it very difficult just to keep going, never mind complete the objectives - my best distance was 78m, and I'm not sure how well I did with the other two objectives. I could probably take it easier and get further if it weren't for the blocks fading away behind you. Even so, the game manages to hit that sweet spot of being difficult without being frustrating, and instead enticing you to keep going and try and beat your high-score.

It'd be better if there was some clearer indication of how you were progressing. For example, instead of going back to the first tier of challenges when you fall off, it could keep you on whatever challenges you're on but just reset your progress to 0. I hope I've explained that well enough.

Anyway, good job!

gameovermexico 2020-05-11 04:32

it cute, I love the pugs and bones, the random levels its grate, good job!

jk5000 2020-05-12 08:25

The visuals, music and story is all really good and funny. The gameplay idea is simple and good, but I am not a fan of random generated levels. Overall is this a good jam game.