FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD46 → Keep it burning!

Keep it burning!

By BenjaminTausen, ghayoub, kevin-meissner, noel-widmer and LloydCorfex

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall15533.3579
Fun18053.0378
Innovation19252.9177
Theme13763.5978
Graphics10783.7279
Audio9163.3278
Humor18262.2363
Mood10263.4978

Comments

beforeeternity 2020-04-21 00:18

reminds me of shrek 2 the game, nice!

maxim218 2020-04-21 00:29

Beautiful sound effects and game atmosphere. Atmosphere was like in a horror game. I enjoed playing. Thank you for your work.

batswinger 2020-04-21 00:33

Haha very good! My game is also about keeping the light on to hold away the darkness ;)

hamzeh 2020-04-21 00:45

reminds me of skyrim, damn it you forced me to give a good review

listonos 2020-04-21 00:46

The graphics are very impressive for a game dev jam. The mouse sensitive was almost unplayable low but it was better with controller. Also great mood.

btelman 2020-04-21 00:56

Would be nice to add slider to adjust mouse sensitivity. Can't really move around that well with a mouse. A controller worked better, but still a little slow to look around

noel-widmer 2020-04-21 01:10

Thank you very much for your feedback so far :D We will consider adding configurable input (for mouse sensitivity) after we get some rest. In the meantime it might be a good idea to switch to a controller if your sensitivity is too low. "The mouse works on my machine" as naive developers would say :P

bruyere-alice 2020-04-21 10:17

I really like the lighting on this Game, pretty impressive. Honestly, well done !

sanicspeedgames 2020-04-21 10:19

You made a great game. Nice graphics and good atmosphere.

laurailine 2020-04-21 10:24

The camera rotation with the mouse made the game unplayable. I like the mood and the audio.

wet-band-aid 2020-04-21 10:27

Very nice atmosphere

hangarter 2020-04-21 10:31

Very nice graphics!

lesslwo 2020-04-21 10:42

Solid entry. Looks nice, plays nice. Some better cues for when all the crystals are mined would help, since the way their models change is not really consistent and therefore a bit confusing.

Reminds me of the one dwarf game for some reason lmao

ghayoub 2020-04-21 11:42

Thank you all for your feedback! You will be able to adjust your sensitivity in the next update ^^

janetheodd 2020-04-21 11:45

I agree with the mouse sensitivity issue. Otherwise beautiful game! Liked the Achievements :)

crishnate 2020-04-21 11:58

Atmosphere is very impressive, so love it.

mehrdadsh 2020-04-21 11:59

like the visuals

inacho 2020-04-21 12:14

Solid game! The scaling difficulty feels great through the levels. Loved the graphics and how the SFX play on the environment, it creates a dense atmosphere that enriches the gameplay.

slimbun 2020-04-21 12:19

Overall, it was a great game. But there was a few things that where really annoying: 1st of all, The controller is not very good, 2nd of all,There was no tutorial to explain what I need to do.

ghayoub 2020-04-21 12:24

Hey @slimbun thanks for your feedback! We didn't find time to do a tutorial properly so please check the "How to play" section in the description :)

We are working to fix the sensitivity problem so it would solve the controller problem :)

ghayoub 2020-04-21 13:09

Update: Now you can adjust the camera sensitivity in the in-game options (Escape to open) ;)

noirdrive 2020-04-21 13:22

The atmosphere gave me goosebumps, impressive :3 This game may be the birth of the mining/thriller genre.

bakaraf 2020-04-21 15:59

Really impressive one, and a frightening too :) I think it would be more immervise if the music didn't stop between level, but maybe that's only me. Congrats to you and your crew !

nikchernyakov 2020-04-21 16:17

Nice graphics and I like the start menu style

lestat 2020-04-21 16:18

Very well done. It fits the theme nicely. Good job!

andrew-david 2020-04-21 16:30

Great Game. I dont know if you will continue it, but if you do it would be cool to add different types of gems, tool upgrades and stuff. Great Artwork and sound.

neuronezero 2020-04-21 18:19

Nice game! You really don't wanna be left in the middle of a dark cave without light. The only thing bad I can think about is the lighting from some crystals makes you believe there is a fire nearby. It's not consistent for every crystal pack to have that kind of light, or it is less visible and then you don't make the mistake. So I'd say it's either volontary to trick the player(wich then is good) or you should taint the crystals light red so you can differenciate it from the fire pits light. It's just a detail but it bothered me ingame.

splitpainter 2020-04-21 18:22

Love the gameplay, visuals and sound. By the way, that's a big team - how did you guys coordinate in this short time? Honest question, because next time I want to work in a team since I always work alone and I can't imagine sharing tasks with that many people in just 2 days.

lloydcorfex 2020-04-21 18:39

@splitpainter we just 'met' a few days before and done a little warm up jam (with an other topic) and we just worked really well togehter. Everyone was excited and willing to do the work. So we discussed who will do which task and done it.

Thank for all your feedbacks and keep away from the darkness!

jonah 2020-04-21 18:45

super cool execution of the theme!

👍nice game

noel-widmer 2020-04-21 19:00

@splitpainter Very good question. What worked for us in "Keep it burning!" was to reduce coordination as much as possible. We didn't had time to come up with a common understanding of a "good structured project" since we only met a few days before the jam. Assign topics to people and let them be the soul editor of that topic. Simplified example of our work: we had 1 visual artist and 1 sound artist which are already well isolated topics. Then we had a character engineer, an achievement/settings/game events engineer and a procedural map generator engineer (the map is procedurally generated even if we ended up using fixed seeds in the final version because random seeds were not fun to play). We seldom had to work in someone elses domain which reduced the number of issues that could have happened.

splitpainter 2020-04-21 19:02

@lloydcorfex @noel-widmer thanks for the write up. That's quite impressive, just giving around "do the art and we meet later", and then connecting all the dots correctly. Awesome.

kevin-meissner 2020-04-21 19:21

@splitpainter If you want to know the tools as well: We used Google docs to work together on a brainstorming right at the start. Then we visualized the idea with an online whiteboard to make the vision clear for everyone.board.JPG And then we used Git to bring our work together.

pusheeneiro 2020-04-21 20:23

Nice entry with great graphics.

maytch 2020-04-21 20:40

Good job Ayoub, very atmospheric!

dvd 2020-04-21 21:16

Very cool

kp-cftsz 2020-04-21 21:52

Any chance for other OS builds soon? Looks really interesting but I'm unable to play it

ansaws 2020-04-22 00:15

I love the gameplay on this and is polished the music is very good but a little loud and the disable button did not work. Overall amazing job.

bluelightning365 2020-04-22 00:17

Great game. The only complaint I had was that the game was a bit clunky without a very high DPI mouse. The music was great, but it was a little loud and the button in settings doesn't work when you try to turn it off. The graphics are great, and the gameplay was fun and simple.

bongooo 2020-04-22 07:03

Just played! very nice! Probably I will tweet about this in the next day on this page https://twitter.com/Free_IndieGames !

ghayoub 2020-04-22 08:02

@kp-cftsz I don't think that would be possible for the time being, apologies.

raivk 2020-04-22 14:40

Nice game, hard a hard time with the mouse sensitivity (even after setting it to max in the settings), but anyway still managed to play ;) Ventured quite far in the mines haha, cool music and mood

noel-widmer 2020-04-22 15:49

@raivk The sensitivity is an interesting problem. Setting it to 30% makes my mouse way too fast. I thought nobody would ever use the 100% setting. Classic. We might increase it even further if it is still too low. Thank you for the feedback :)

duke 2020-04-22 16:43

Had a lot of problems with mouse sensitivity. even at full settings, it was still a pain to look around. Couldn't really play it like that. Made it to level3, but the gameplay loop doesnt't seem to vary much. Is it just random fire and crystal placements? Just having the darkness as an enemy can get boring after a while :) some more gameplay in that department would've been nice (good old bats or rats, fending them off with the torch!)

The graphics looked nice. Music and Sound were ok, but didn't really fit the mood in my opinion. Especially the music seemed a bit out of place. But still nice that you made an effort to include music.

The core loop couldn't really hook me, so i couldn't motivate me to play more than the first few levels (having the slow mouse issue didn't help either)

kevin-meissner 2020-04-22 16:59

@duke Thank you very much for your detailed and honest feedback, we appreciate it a lot :-)

effarek 2020-04-22 19:48

Great game, I enjoyed it :)

2020-04-22 21:27

The idea was interesting, though the lack of polish definitely makes it feel a bit strange. I did notice post processing on your game (with some bloom coming off the crystals), but I think what it could've especially used was some color grading. If you use ACES (filmic) color grading and changed your shadows to be a bit more blue, it might fit the sort of stylistic look the game was going for, but that's mostly subjective so take that with what you will. I also believe it could've used some particle effects for mining, which you could do by making a particle system, marking the renderer as mesh instead of billboard, then applying either the crystal material or something emissive to add a little extra pop to mining. Speaking of emission, it would've been good to see the crystals glow in the dark a bit more, as they give off a light source but the material itself doesn't appear to be emissive in nature. I did like the texture work on the crystals though. I should also mention the aesthetic feels a bit disjointed at points, with some of the rock textures feeling a bit more realistic than stylized, but I won't mark that against you.

I thought the upgrade mechanic was interesting, and overall it's something I'd consider a game more than a walking sim like some of the other submissions.

microchasm 2020-04-23 07:44

This feels like a vertical slice of a larger survival game, which is cool. Good atmosphere, and with upgrades and achievements it has the trappings of a complete project.

For feedback, I'd point to games like Minecraft. Whne you use your pickax, it hits almost immediately. Any delay where the player is waiting to be able to do something feels bad. Also, good games are a series of interesting choices-- give us more choices!

That being said, I think this is more complete and polished than most entries, and has a nice feel.

pushkan 2020-04-23 08:10

Nice art, misic, but dont give me goal. dont make me fun.

n-feofentov 2020-04-23 13:54

Nice entry! I like that you've implemented the whole achievements system! Great job!

palvel 2020-04-23 17:17

Optimize the game!! It would be 5/5 if it didn't lag

raytheonly 2020-04-23 17:51

oof, played it quite a bit. Was really meditative to run around searching for glowing stuff.:D

I find giving feedback always useful (even though this is a jam and time and resources are sparse): Mostly it is just little things, like the torch animation is a tad to slow but the mining animation is ridiculously fast (didn't realize I was swinging a pickax at first). The music worked well, simple, gave the sense of the atmosphere, and didn't started to bother even after a few minutes. But I had the feeling the frequencies clashed a bit with the sfx. At first I wasn't quite sure about the procedural levels. I even died just because there were no fire for ages (maybe it was intended). But after two level it felt nice, how it expanded every time. Giving a sense of progression. Nice would be if there were some unique Assets set in each Level, just to give it a bit more awe.

remember this was a jam, so these a super minor things. I think the biggest improvement would be to make the darkness feel really threatening. At first I didn't even realize it is a real threat until I saw the life bar turn red.

All in all. super solid entry! I lost myself playing it and really liked the idea of the achievements (I'll steal this for my next jam game... hehehehe) :)

zepapa 2020-04-23 23:42

Great game! Loved the concept and when the torch went out, it got stressful with the wind and darkness. My only note is I'd say the animation for lighting the torch was really good but too long. Overall, great game and I'd love to explore more of the caves and mine more!

marcusnystrand 2020-04-24 09:16

Very impressive considering the short time! I think you nailed the mood.

Little bit laggy on my computer though but then again my PC is 12 years old

amazura 2020-04-24 12:06

really awesome.. cool graphic and love the audio. you even create the achivements for this game, that was incredible.. :thumbsup:

jk5000 2020-04-24 13:17

This is an interesting and very well made jam game. I love the games music and the atmosphere. Well done.

james-joubert 2020-04-24 18:17

The concept is there and the mood is nice and calm. It's not the most creative game unfortunately, I've played a lot of torch games this jam. The achievements was a nice touch.

Maybe a creature or two that lurks in the dark, or something fun in between.

Would've been nice to see a little bit more from a team this big.

Keep at it and I'm sure with a few additional features this game can be a lot of fun to play.

trexxak 2020-04-25 10:13

Overall this was a very nice entry! I don't have too much to complain. Gathering the crystals is a bit awkward sometimes. You think you get only one out but get 4, then the next time you think you'll get all and get none. The only other thing that could be detrimental is that it gets samey very fast. The first three level were really exciting, but my curiousity sated and so the fourth level I didn't even care whether the torch runs out.

On a completely different note: The whole game through I thought how cool this would be in VR :D

zimennik 2020-04-26 19:41

At first I tried to just speedran on one charge of the torch. On the first levels, it worked. But then, when the caves became more complicated, I began to lose. Thanks for the game, the atmosphere is incredible!

josephbyam 2020-04-26 22:14

Having fire and stressing out. My favorite past times.

fabula-rasa 2020-04-27 22:05

The mood in this game is really great. I liked your approach to lights in the world :).

Mouse felt too sensitive to me - even when I lowered my sensitivity down to 1800 dpi. But then I discovered the sensitivity slider you added and all was well :). I also experienced some jumpiness, for a lack of a better word, not exactly lag, but looking around didn't feel smooth.

shakedimus 2020-04-29 14:30

At the lowest sensitivity the camera still jittered around every time I tried to move. It was unplayable, so I didn't rate it. Can't find the sensitivity slider they are talking about above.

ghayoub 2020-04-29 19:46

@shakedimus Enter in-game and press "Escape" you will find options there :)

lazzydev72 2020-05-07 17:54

Realy Like it. Good Job I liked the lighting alot And the caves too. :v:

2020-05-08 10:14

Neat concept. I included it in my Ludum Dare 46 compilation video series, if you want to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/a4mUfaMtGeE