Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Ahoy!
By basileios
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 756 | 3.17 | 22 | |
| Fun | 799 | 2.92 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 840 | 2.87 | 22 | |
| Theme | 1025 | 2.67 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 827 | 2.92 | 22 | |
| Audio | 605 | 2.90 | 22 | |
| Humor | 756 | 2.22 | 20 | |
| Mood | 934 | 2.52 | 20 |
Really good movement and the shooting feels very satisfying. Althought I feel like there should have been some measures implemented to stop players from just spamming the cannons while moving really fast. It would also be great to be able to fire out of both sides. Otherwise this is great.
Very cool idea, but imo the fast paced combat works not really well together with the tactical element of positioning your ship correctly. Or maybe I'm just bad at this :D
you can fire out of both sides - it says it on the main menu. sorry for the confusion, each mouse button fires a cannon from it's side of the boat :)
The game was really interesting. The mechanics were interesting but some things like the turning was not refined at all. The wind was a neat idea though, but it takes a while to understand, and its much more of a determining factor then in other games that use it. (Like golf games have wind but it doesn't things dependent on them.)
I was quite interested in using the movement mechanic, but I had a really hard time really understanding what was going on. I think having the red compas around the ship could be a great change as darting back and forth from your ship to the bottom left of the screen became disorienting very quick. I would've appreciated having a clearer indication of my own direction too. the ship's direction was quite hard to read on the small sprite. maybe something like black arrow around your ship or something? it was quite fun anyways, hope you keep improving!
thanks @inkedsplat, good ideas
Very fun concept! The wind mechanic is cool but I think that you should find an other way of indicate the wind direction because looking at the tiny compass in the corner of the screen is a bit hard when you are in the action! And maybe you should make the wind change constantly instead of changing just between levels!
The idea is great! I didn't understand how to play at first, but after that I had pretty fun!
A great time! The ship controls are a little hard to get used to, bu tthe music and art style combo is very nice, and the cannon sound is satisfying. I will say that it's really easy if you just spam space and left and right click furiously, but it was fun. I wasn't expecting a boss fight, either! Good job!
@thefoppian thanks a tonne! My main focus was on the feel and making those volleys feel satisfying. Balancing was quite hard to do (early on the game was way too hard and the final product is a bit too open to spamming). There's somewhat an aim with the spam thing. I wanted to emulate the feeling of lining up your enemies and letting the cannons rip (what was called 'crossing the Ts'). Thanks for the feedback - it's my first real game which isn't UI/text based in a while so it's good to know how to improve.
I found the controls confusing. It wasn't clear to me exactly how rotating the ship with space bar works, and I had trouble figuring out which directions my cannons would fire. That being said, the sound of the cannons firing as well as the particle effects of the cannonballs and the ship's wake were quite satisfying. Good work overall.
Interesting concept, I was a bit confused with the boat orientation as the sprite is quite small but the controls were good and that wa quite fun to play with!
This was too hard, the rotation is hard to handle, I should be able to rotate my ship wherever I want without having to do almost full rotations each time I want to change my aim (maybe it is possible but I did not notice it). The wind direction is indeed shown on screen, but it is so little it just does not attract the look, so you are just moving around and figuring out where the wind blows. Also, the mechanic is interesting but it has no point here. If the map had borders where the ship would fall, then there will be a point to add some wind mechanic that would make each round different (that might not be the best example but you get the point). Here, it is just making the controls harder for no particular reason and no additional fun. Also, this does not fit the theme because you have to keep the ship alive. Well technically it does, but fitting in a theme means that the gameplay/world building itself should work around the theme, and just having a health bar is clearly not enough.
However, don't take this feedback the wrong way ! I think the overall game is nice, but it just missed some basic points, that could have make it a much better submission. The game is working well, there are graphics, audio, gameplay loop, and that is also very important to notice so good job for that! Keep up the work!
It's an interesting concept, and I really liked the game feel(sound and visual effects). With that said, I couldn't really get used to the controls. It feels like shooting directions change inconsistently, so I often times ended up shooting in the opposite direction of what I meant. When there's a lot of stuff visible on screen, it's a bit difficult to keep track of where my boat is(I feel the boat should maybe stand out a bit more?).
@saering @fancypants thank you for the reviews! I find the most common thing people say is about the movement. Both of you also commented on the boat being hard to see, which is a problem. Do remember, though, that there's a fullscreen mode which should make it more visible. @fancypants about the firing, the idea is that it fires out of the left and right sides of the boat relative to its position. That means that it's the -angle and the angle - 180 (or something like that, there was a lot of trial and error involved. @saering you talked about the game not fitting the theme. The truth is, the original idea I had was that you had to guide the boat into port while it was sinking, which would fit the theme a bit more. However, I had technical issues and the game wasn't as fun as I would have liked it to be so I cut that aspect and adjusted the game to be something that was fun and built on the main bits of what I had.