johnnysix 2020-04-20 03:06
Good stuff! I had trouble lasting more than a minute as the bats took me out quickly, despite my flailing the torch!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Friendly Fire
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 399 | 3.56 | 34 | |
| Fun | 540 | 3.25 | 34 | |
| Innovation | 854 | 2.85 | 34 | |
| Theme | 771 | 3.35 | 34 | |
| Graphics | 173 | 3.96 | 34 | |
| Audio | 228 | 3.53 | 34 | |
| Humor | 650 | 2.46 | 31 | |
| Mood | 160 | 3.71 | 33 |
Good stuff! I had trouble lasting more than a minute as the bats took me out quickly, despite my flailing the torch!
This is really cool. I love how when you die all the bats come and start eating you.
Cool stuff!
Notes: * I like the death sequence a lot * It took until my that you could drop and light kindling to keep bats away * It didn't feel like I was 'in control', so to speak, I feel like the game should ask the player to make more conscious choices.
Hey there, I was curios how the other "Friendly Fire" named game looked like :) Feel free to look up ours.
The gameplay loop was simple but worked well enough. I like the simplistic art style and the lighting effects work great to increase the mood and actually matter gameplay wise. The little looped soundtrack works aswell. Nice touch to have two different version of it for menu vs gameplay. Reminds me heavily of Nier Automata.
The level itself was a bit barren and the enemy spawns become predictable very quickly. A more intricate dungeon design would be awesome. Finding the ladder after getting 100 gold was a hassle, but after a while, I was able to get out. I think that could be solved better somehow than pure try and error.
Solid entry!
Hello fellow friendly fire :) Nice to see a different interpretation. I really like the music and the art style and the gameplay is very decent. The mood is good and overall it is a solid entry. A bit more variation in gameplay would have been nice.
This game has a lot of charm to it :) Really like the audio and the pixel art. I think the concept is good too but I think opening the chests takes a smidge too long. I think it'd feel better to have the chests open faster even if that meant needing to increase other speeds to still get the risk trade off balanced. Really great work!
Cool game! I really liked the art and the death animation was very cool :) After a few minutes I feel that there is a lack of over-aching purpose as I felt that I was surviving just for the sake of surviving.
Nice little game - i first didn't understand what is the final goal. But i really like your art and music.
Neat! Love the glow effects and the catchy music, and especially how the music shifts when you're dead.
Very nice compo entry, looks good, plays good. Looting chests seemed to be taking a bit too long, but it also played well into the survival aspect, so I'm not sure
at least you don't show in the end how the player dies :P Nice one, but I miss the end goal possibly.
Interesting game, and I really like the pixel art. The spawn timing for the bats seems very random, and I was wondering if it would even be possible to win at one point when they kept coming as I tried to open a chest, but they calmed down after a while. Then I discovered I could light fires in front of chests while opening them to keep the bats away.
I was scared of walking anywhere else than in a straight line from the ladder at first, but then I figured out I could use kindling as waypoints. I don't know if that was intended, but it lessens the need for a big arrow pointing to the exit, so that the spooky big cave atmosphere can remain.
I tried to let the fire die out just to see what would happen, and it just kept burning, but with almost no light. I think if you were in that situation and didn't have any kindling left it would be a bit annoying, because finding more would be almost impossible. Maybe it's better to just let the player die in that case.
Cool game! I really like the artstyle and the gereral atmosphere! For me the gameplay was nice until a certain moment where I realised I wasn't sure what was the goal, I was walking around to find things, but found it quite repetitive. So if there were more stuff to discover, maybe a bit of a story as the mood is really cool, and a clear goal (which could come from storytelling) I think it would be great! But well done overall, loved this mood!
@fryer Thank you for your input. You're the first person to mention using the kindling as a breadcrumb trail back to the ladder, and I am really happy about that. That was one of the reasons for being able to drop kindling without lighting it, but I didn't want to be explicit about it and see if anybody thought of doing that. :)
So I tried playing this a couple times but didn't manage to win. When I did finally collect 100 gold a bat killed me despite me thinking I had pressed Z. Can you not swing your torch when next to a chest...?
The gameplay is mostly solid, but I do think there is one small problem: when you stop interacting with a chest you lose all the progress you had. Once I literally had the bar visually completely full but stopped pressing X to deal with a bat, and I had to start all the way over because I didn't quite finish opening it.
I also feel like the bats are kind of annoying? Like it's kind of hard to tell how close you have to be to ward them off. I guess that's kind of the point but it seems like combat against the bats could be more satisfying.
I did like the graphics, for the most part, but they do break my personal rule of pixel art, which is to never mix pixel art resolutions. I think in this game, this is most egregious with the progress bar--it looks really out of place.
The music is appropriate but probably too short.
Overall, solid entry. I liked the various uses for the kindling and the tradeoffs of lighting it on fire to make it easier to find your way back versus needing to keep some for your torch. I also liked the death animation.
@honey-pony Darn, you caught me with the progress bar. :) I was running out of time so I reused the torch bar in the UI, shrunk it down, and put it on top of the chests, so yeah the pixels are different sizes. I loved reading your critique, thank you for taking the time to write it.
Fun animations. Excellent chiptune soundtrack. I lost track of the ladder pretty quick. I was able to figure out how to reignite the torch and collect treasure pretty fast. Took me a bit to get a hang of the controls, but otherwise smooth experience. Jam on!
Came back to listen to the soundtrack again. It's so short but lovely. :D Can't get it out of my head.
Thanks for coming back and writing those kind words, @very-dark-lord! I'm no musician, so I could only make a short jingle (it's only 16 seconds long!) and hoped that by making it dynamic by fading the different tracks in and out would give it enough staying power and not annoy players. Having said that, I do have a recording with all tracks together in one .wav file. And since it's all open source, you could download it and save it for later use without having to boot up the whole game. You can do that by going to [this page](https://github.com/diego-escalante/LD46/blob/master/Assets/Sounds/Music/All.wav), right-clicking the "Download" button and selecting "Save link as..." Enjoy!
Oh dang, the music is really nice! I love the design for the character too! It's a very solid design for such few pixels. I love how the music changes when you die. Great work all around!
Great atmosphere! Controls a little too "sensitive" for my taste, swinging the torch correctly at the bats has a really tight time window and opening the chests, the button doesn't seem to do anything a lot of time. Or it's probably just me failing. I give it 2356 stars out of 5, would go spelunking again!
Cool graphics and retro mood. I had the hardest time fighting the bats, though…
I liked the gameplay and art! Repelling bats with a torch requires some skill which makes it even more fun!
Nice lightning!
Neat game. It took me a little while to figure out that I needed to swing the torch to make the bats go away. I managed to get 60 gold on my second try. The flame effect looked good.
One of the best compo entries I've seen so far! I really like the fire and the illumination fxs. Sometimes I wandered for too long until finding any treasure or danger tho. Nice job!
It's pretty well made and the idea is fun, but it's a bit too difficult. Chests take a lot of time to open and you have only 1 life. It feels bad to stop channeling a chest to repel enemies or die and know you have to open them all over again.
The art is great and loved the lightning! Keep up the good work.
A really nice entry! Pretty well polished for a 48h game.
I had an issue with chest opening, namely that if you stop opening a chest you have to start again. The time to open a chest is way too long for that. This can lead to annoying situations, especially later in the game, where you're almost done opening a chest and there's a bat incoming before you can finish.
A kind of related issue is having chest opening and kindling dropping on the same key. As you try to drop a kindling in panic, the game thinks you're pressing X to open a chest, so you don't manage to drop the kindling in time and the bats eat you.
Other than those small issues, I loved it. The art style looks great, the music and sounds are pleasant to the ear. Well done! ;)