mehrdadsh 2020-04-20 16:57
funny graphics
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Eradication
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 855 | 3.02 | 22 | |
| Fun | 656 | 3.12 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 840 | 2.87 | 22 | |
| Theme | 1006 | 2.77 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 701 | 3.15 | 22 | |
| Audio | 703 | 2.62 | 22 | |
| Humor | 164 | 3.55 | 22 | |
| Mood | 740 | 2.92 | 22 |
funny graphics
Nice game! I really enjoyed the dialog, it was pretty funny :)
The lighting in the game is pretty cool, it definitely help with the tense atmosphere of the game.
I do think there are a few game mechanics that could use some work: - The grappling gun keeps you in place once you've arrived, which has caused me some trouble with enemies. I think it would work a lot better if you automatically stopped grappling once you've reached the destination. - The enemy lasers shoot really fast so there's no real time for the player to react. I would either increase the vision from the player or slow down the lasers because a lot of the times it feels like I am getting hit out of nowhere. - Although the lighting is nice, it does make it a bit hard to understand what the level looks like. You could try having a separate darkness for the playable space vs solid wall so the player can better understand the layout of the level.
I also encountered a bug where I grappled to a wall and ended up on the other side, although I tried grappling again and after a few tries it put me back into playable space again.
Overall, I had a lot of fun playing. Great work!
Love the stupid graphics and the quirky messages. :joy:
I agree with the comment above about the lightning. The levels are a bit hard to read, as it is unclear what's a wall, what's a door, and what's just darkness but walkable. Also, complexity might need tweaking as there's a very small window of reaction, especially when it's the first time that you encounter those enemies. Maybe visual or audio cues about nearby enemies could be a good way to go to solve that.
That being said, I do understand that in 48 hours it's very hard to get game balancing right. So I can't leave without saying: good work overall!
Btw, if anyone has issues opening MacOs version and keeps getting a "Can't open application error", way to go is: chmod a+x LudumDare46.app/Contents/MacOS/*
@quichi Thanks for the feedback!
I thought about letting the player press E to un-grapple, but I ran out of time. I agree that it would be better to just stop the grapping when they arrive.
In any post-jam version, I will probably give the enemies a timer once they see the player before they shoot, so that the player can at least see what is going on. For the current version, I initially had twice the shooting frequency as now, but I didn't slow it down any further, as I my AI isn't at all refined, so having to learn to maneuver around them and hide behind things added a much-needed challenge.
I'm not sure how I would tint the "wall space" separately, but I guess it would a good idea to have some dim ambient lighting for the playable area to help with this issue.
Sorry about the wall glitch. That should resolve itself if I add the auto-disconnect thing. The force just builds up over time, so if you are too close to the wall when you start, there is a good chance that you will phase through.
"Warning: Contains extremely pixelated nudity" hahahaha
is very funny , good job!!!
Liked a lot of items and great humor.
Very funny story, and love the grapple mechanic except that I wasn't ever sure how to release the grapple and I ended up getting stuck against the wall and dying to aliens. I also unfortunately clipped out of bounds somehow... But other than that great little top down shooter!
i got inside a wall using the slimy hand xD
Hmm, was about to give up and quit so many times but stuck with it till the end. Banging my head against the unfair and unforgiving wall until I made it through.
Made like no sense in the grand scheme of things. Seems like you just slapped on every mechanic you could think of there and like none of them had any practical use. The grapple hook had like no uses. Sure it could make you move faster trough those slowing tiles and what ever but then you stuck you to the wall for a split second which would pretty much always be punished. The crystal thing was very unnecessary too. I'm not even fully sure what it did. Was it like some kind of instant cover thing? And then the orb. Still like no idea what it did. If I had to guess I'd say it was like teleportation but in my case it was more like disorientation and certain doom.
The first kind of enemy was weirdly the deadliest one. So unfair. They shoot you from outside he screen obviously outranging you easily. Their shots are like lightning fast almost impossible to dodge except on the max range. And they did way too much damage too. Like the only way to kill them was to cheese them through the walls or corners. And you for sure had learn their position the hard way around. So unfair and punishing.
The same "lets just slap on everything there" mentality was in the graphics too. The art itself was fine but there was like no rhyme or reason for most of the things. Why only one arm? Why the (extremely pixelated) nudity? The whole flashlight thing felt like an addition just because you wanted to do dynamic shadow stuff. There were some red keys and health pickups (which could have easily been more plentiful) on red ground which made them very hard to notice. The red key could have replaced with some other color without affecting the game at all except making them more visible.
The dialog box "scrollbar" didn't indicate too well about there being more text. Gladly there was like a single row of pixels visible from the next row which hinted at it even though it looked more like a bug. Changing the box size or font size so that you see almost half of the partly visible line is like a cookie cutter UX trick to let users know about there being more. Of course a more visually informative scroll would do wonders too.
The damaging tiles added like nothing to the game. Well maybe just annoyance. Kinda same goes for the slippery and slowing down ones. Other than the ones that had an item in the middle could have just as easily been walls.
The respawn timer was pointless too. And you could even keep playing while your were dead. Wonder what would happen if you'd trigger a door or some other important bit while dead...
And kinda funnily as a contradiction, audio department was not packed with everything you could come up with. It was actually very sparse. A lot of the things were missing a sound effect completely. And of course the lack of music didn't really help here either but I can't really blame you too hard on that.
Anyways, I've listed quite a lot of flaws in the game but it wasn't bad by any means. It was an amazing amount of stuff you managed to do during the weekend but at the same time you spread it so thin that nothing really stood out as the main hook of the game. It would have been better to take one mechanic, hone it to perfection and build a game around that. Good job though! :thumbsup:
Truly a EXTREME game where INSANE things happen haha, i tried, i tried really hard, but i could not complete the game, i gave up when i had to grapple towards an enemy who keeps shooting and one hitting me from outside the screen. dont know if you intended for the enemies to shoot at you from outside the screen, but , .... does it make it hard...
@antti-haavikko Thanks for the feedback!
I agree that the AI was unbalanced. If I had more time, I would have given the soldier guys some random spread and tweaked the bullet speed, but their main purpose was to force you to hide behind things. My main combat premise was to have a player with a close-quartered weapon, and enemies with ranged weapons, making the game purposely difficult. Even though there are several unbalanced aspects, frustrating parts, and areas with broken AI, I think the difficulty turned out fairly well in the end.
The game is definitely possible without any of the special abilities, but they give you more options for completing the levels, which gave it some variety. For example, there were several situations where you could bait the enemies to coming around the corner and killing them, but you could also use the hook to grapple to them before they can kill you, throwing acid on them the second you reach them. The ice thing bounces off of a wall once, then turns into a barrier on the second collision. If you shoot it straight into a wall, it will bounce back to you and give you a barrier that can be used to hide from the soldiers for a few seconds, but it isn't very useful as I made the lifetime too short.
The respawn timer was there because the death screen was very last-minute and I thought it would be better than just re-loading the level without any transition. It would have definitely been better to have a screen that fades in quickly, and can be closed by pressing a button, fading out quickly.
The art was definitely rushed. I only really had time to draw one interesting tileset (the hex one). The arm thing was just set-up for the alien-abduction premise, to give the character motivation for killing the aliens. The (very pixelated) nudity was there to add some level of ridiculousness to the game. Often LD entries can be pretty boring to play for, so I tried to add a few silly things to make it more entertaining. The flashlight was really there because having a large number of fixed lights looked really strange in the maze area (you may have noticed that sometimes shadows bleed around the corners into lit areas, this was everywhere).
If I had more time, I definitely would have changed the text system. The scroll bar was just a built-in feature of Godot, so I figured that I would just leave it with scrolling instead of having super-small text. If I had more time, I probably would have put some pulsating arrows to indicate that you can scroll in any available direction.
Sorry about the heart placement, I should have probably given them an outline. I tried to place most of them on blue tiles.
The red tile level was pretty rushed (you may have noticed that two enemy sprites at the end weren't even actual enemies as I didn't have time to test the level to find that out). I wanted something red-color-schemed and couldn't think of anything more interesting that a rush level. The last item, the red dust storm thing, teleports you out 90 degrees counterclockwise. It was meant to be used in that large room to get out quickly, but the AI got kinda stuck, so you could just walk past them in the end.
I put most of the sound effects in at the last 20 minutes or so, so I wasn't able to cover everything I wanted. I would have liked to place some footsteps and more weapon sounds to help with the guys that hid behind corners. Unfortunately, I don't have any experience making music, and my game-jam-related ambient sounds have ended up pretty bad in the past, so it was probably for-the-better that I didn't include them this time. :)
@kekkodude Sorry about that! They aren't meant to shoot you from off-screen, but I think there were a few that shot you early when I was testing it, not sure why, I'll have to look into it. I didn't mention this explicitly in the game, but if an acid bottle hits both you and an enemy, it only kills the enemy, so you can sometimes rush them and hit both of you.
I think you are talking about the guy after the maze (on the level with 2 keys), if so, that one was unfortunate, because his AI made him enter the maze when I originally designed the level, but by the time I had finished the game for the jam and changed some of the AI, for some reason he wouldn't move anymore, and I didn't have time to debug it.