FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD46 → Droplet Dodge

Droplet Dodge

By alaska

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall18633.2130
Fun16673.1030
Innovation23692.5129
Theme15333.5128
Graphics16173.3132
Audio5483.6332
Humor15662.5427
Mood17643.0529

Comments

tbrax 2020-04-21 17:55

Seems well polished. Character is a little too bouncy to control.

microwerx 2020-04-22 03:47

Nicely done game. Character is difficult to control, but I suspect it's part of this particular genre. I was getting good figuring out safe places to jump from. Music really helped set the mood.

adriczero 2020-04-23 03:23

Liked the music. Very John Carpenterish. Like the mood and the losing laugh.

cronobreak 2020-04-23 03:33

Liked the atmosphere and cute character. As others mention it was a touch tricky to control, but otherwise a nice little easy to understand concept :)

adriankrawczyk 2020-04-23 07:51

gj!!

alaska 2020-04-23 07:58

Appreciate the feedback all :)

Very fair critique on the movement though. I wanted to try for a sort of floaty feel, but ended up with something that's a bit... slippery, but indeed tough to control.

prackli 2020-04-23 08:11

The idea is nice, but the jump feels way too floaty and it's hard to control. Maybe some gravity scaling would fix .

fireslash 2020-04-23 08:49

Echoing the control issues. Ultimately while the slippery feel is kind of annoying, the big issue for me is that movement continues after releasing the movement key. This removes almost all precision from the platforming.

alaska 2020-04-24 05:10

Yeah... I can definitely agree with you both.

One of the things on my todo list was to make the gravity affect the falling movement a bit more so it'd be a more Mario-esque jump, but by the time I got to that point where I could make some quality tweaks I was already out of time. Same but not really with the slipperiness of the movement; I had it written down to turn up the deceleration in the x-direction, but in that case i just forgot to do so.

I think I'll do a post-jam rework once the results come out with the feedback you've all left. There's other stuff I'd like to personally tackle like making the Phantom a little more than just a drone with some extra attacks, implementing a way to possibly fight the Phantom and having a win/scoring mechanism, fixing some of the sprite blurriness, making the level bigger (and better), etc.

legavroche 2020-04-25 05:25

I also found the horizontal movement tough to control. But also one thing I would've liked to have was a score system maybe in the form of a timer, so I had an idea of how well I was doing in each playthrough. I think adjusting the movement and adding some high score system can really go a long way for your game.

shadoninja 2020-04-25 05:28

I had fun with it! I wish there was some sort of progression during the level. Maybe a way to attack the guy or a timer for how long to survive

dingotime 2020-04-25 05:44

Controls are pretty unforgiving due to high acceleration/speed and slippy feel - but I had fun for a few minutes, good job!

god-colo 2020-04-25 06:14

Ahhh pixel art! I love how simple your game is! It is frustratingly fun! The music fits well! The peach kept me alive most of the time because I would lose my easily with the spikes! :laughing: Greato Jobu! :smile:

alaska 2020-04-26 08:06

Considering the movement has been the chief issue I think it's probably time I treated it like a bug and fixed it... not really sure how many changes I can make before I start breaking into the "new feature" territory though :laughing:

@prackli I added some light gravity scaling, only at the falling part of the jump though.

@fireslash @legavroche @EveryoneBasically I went ahead and tweaked the movement to be more precise. The little droplet is still quick, but he's not walking on butter anymore.

If I'd have had more time I'd have loved to get at least a little timer put in or some form of scoring, but alas... Some sort of progression is a great idea though. Like "you've survived long enough here, moving to next area" or "build up a meter and attack!" kind of thing. Appreciate the good ideas.

@dingotime Glad it was fun for at least a few minutes! I tweaked the movement a little so it's still a little fast but you have better control over it if you wanted to try again.

@god-colo ありがてぇ!:smile:

bart-wach 2020-04-26 19:59

Nice sounds for the enemy.

zeppelingames 2020-04-27 01:45

Nice game. Love the SFX, well done. Alittle unsure why 'z' was jump but I worked it out.

alaska 2020-04-27 03:44

Thanks you two.

I chose 'Z' because I've had Cave Story on my mind lately and it felt better to have both hands doing something.

miltonnh25 2020-04-27 05:40

Good job with the game. I liked the concept and it was fun to play around with. It would be cool to see some more variations in the attacks and an increase in difficulty as time goes on.

shaolin-dave 2020-04-27 05:42

Nice sound effects and music. Graphics were simple but effective, possibly more effective BECAUSE they were simple, but a tad more color could help (maybe the spikes could be purple too?) It was way too easy to cheese the enemy by simply staying in a corner where he couldn't reach me, and only moving to grab the fruit. Maybe add something to force the player into moving around? Also, the play area was tiny, any way you could get it to expand to full screen?

garygreen 2020-04-27 20:30

This was fun and pretty addictive. The droplet character was cute. Was there a score on the screen? I couldn't see it.

alaska 2020-04-28 06:10

Thanks for the feedback yall. :smile:

@shaolin-dave I thought about making the spikes their own color, but in the end it just looked too tacky for me; this is where I shot myself in the foot with being too simple with the graphics (granted the speckled look doesn't look much better, but that's where I settled). I do have the health bar ticking down slowly to try and keep the player moving, but ultimately I do also need to give a little extra motivation from more attacks (ones that can hit through walls) or falling hazards, etc. Originally I did have it fullscreen, but due to bad import options on the textures everything looked blurry; but when I corrected those options the stretch on the viewport heavily distorted everything. I might play around more with it, but ultimately I'd need to make time to redo the scaling on the nodes and rebuild the level.

@garygreen There was not. I want to add one in, but I think that falls under a new feature rather than a bugfix.

alaska 2020-04-28 06:12

@miltonnh25 Very much agreed, and thanks!

nspevacek 2020-04-30 03:13

Graphics and audio were great. I agree with others that the controls could be tighter

alaska 2020-05-05 07:17

@nspevacek Thanks for the feedback! I'll see what I can do.

natwomb 2020-05-06 20:11

Fun game, jumped around for quite a while enjoying myself with this game. I would like a higher phase and/or some progression if you continue the development after the jam. Anyways, great job!

blay09 2020-05-09 12:37

Took me a bit to find the jump key (went straight into the game) - a quick ingame instruction showing the controls or alternatively also allowing space/up for jumping would be great.

I liked the music! The game felt a bit easy to me, as you could simply jump over all spikes at once most of the time and even when you messed up multiple times in a row, it was easy to quickly get back up to full health.

I think it would be fun to have the boss randomly switch between different attacks to make him a bit less predictable.