Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Ballad of the Bard
By filip-bergkvist, felixlundh, TheDouche and Julia-Lundman
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 19 | 4.37 | 71 | |
| Fun | 33 | 4.23 | 71 | |
| Innovation | 19 | 4.39 | 70 | |
| Theme | 81 | 4.30 | 70 | |
| Graphics | 40 | 4.63 | 70 | |
| Humor | 222 | 3.85 | 64 | |
| Mood | 24 | 4.47 | 68 |
My favourite game so far; the first one where I kept trying after failing. The combination of dragging with the mouse whilst pressing spatially separate keys is surprisingly entertaining. Would like to have a "Jamming" mode where you could just strum the lute without worrying about the fire and monsters. The game seemed to freeze when the "Strange little man" walked up to the fire.
Nice work! a good bit of left and right hand coordination , just like playing an instrument!
Very nice game athmospheric. good visuals pixelart.Good work!
Nice one!!! Love it so much!!! It is great, I'd buy :) Really love arts and music component of the game!
Really enjoyed my time with this one. A fun take on rhythm games. Simple but solid graphics with addictive gameplay.
Brilliant game. The pixel art is beautiful, and I'm particularly digging the purple fire! The sound effects are great, really liked the crackle of the burning branches. Theme is also spot on. Amazing entry.
I loved playing it! Best entry so far that I have seen. I love the colors and pixel art. Also gameplay was amazing. The game didn't work correctly for me in the web build but the downloaded vesion worked really well. I did get stuck at one part and didn't understand the mechanics correctly but if I got past that then it was really nice and challenging but fun.
@freakoftheyear Thank you! Can you please tell us what it was that didn't work in the web version? I'm in the progress of fixing some major bugs for an update and would really like to sort these issues out so that more people can play the game c:
The atmosphere is great and pixel art is on point. Nice color pallet. Simple gameplay but is addictive. Great Job!
Nice graphic style :) Great job!
It's very interesting visually and the concept is cool. As a musician myself, I enjoyed this concept, though it got a bit repetitive in practice. That said, it is clear that all of you are talented game developers. Well done! The mood was really relaxing. I just kept forgetting about the fire.
Love the art, the story, the concept, the colors, the humour... really nicely executed. Favourite game so far. The only feedback that comes to mind is the "rounds" could transition a bit faster... at least, for my taste!
I stuck on level 7. Not enough sticks! Only two sticks summoned by song + cage, but thre are three wolves and the fire gets down... :(
Update - I'm just stupid :) Beat it :)
On the web version, the game didn't start, nothing appeared in the level(only the guy and nature, no sticks/bears) and it just said game over after some seconds. The tutorial worked fine but the main game didn't start after tutorial and from menu either. All of that worked on the downloaded version.
@freakoftheyear I believe that was a bug caused by playing the tutorial, losing, and then pressing "Try again", which caused the regular game to start while still in the tutorial mode... It has since been fixed in a patch. Glad you got it working anyway! Thanks a lot for the feedback c:
I loved it! A completely unusual game and, moreover, uses music as a mechanic. You can even hear the slide of the lute strings. I, as a musician, love games that use music on your spine. Really an excellent idea and very well developed and built. This game will be saved on my computer for me to play in the future.
Congratulations so much!
This game is phenomenal! Not too advertise but my game also has bears, moles, and music XD. Anyways, the graphics are really well made! the gameplay is unique and fun!. Loved all of it!
I think the way the game works and feels is really fun and enjoyable.
this is a very relaxing and focused game, i love how things keep getting more and more interesting as levels progress, though i'm most impressed it has an in-game tutorial!
Fantastic!
I loved the game! Very relaxing and it's nice to see music used in a creative way. A small piece of improvement, perhaps don't let the twigs fall to a place where they're almost entirely obstructed by terrain, it was hard to see them and click on them. Verrry good entry though, it's in my top 5!
@blue-pin-studio thank you for playing it on twitch, were planing on making it into a full game!
Unfortunately the game totally stopped when I got to the Wizard :( but I enjoyed what I managed to play til then (and I definitely plan on giving it another try soon!) The art and the atmosphere is definitely great, and I love the simplicity. The level design was very readable. I'll definitely be on the lookout for your full game~
@mrhassansan What version of the game did you play? Can you describe what happened?
@filip-bergkvist Sure, I played the Web version in Firefox. The Wizard appeared, said a line, then just stood there. The game didn't freeze per se—I'm pretty sure the fire's animation and sound was still going, but nothing was happening. The fire didn't diminish, either.
Amazing and very cozy, but still stressful game!
@mrhassansan Thank you! I'll look into it!
This is the best game I saw for now ! It's fun, really shiny and the sound design fit like nothing. Well done !
The atmosphere of this game is incredible! The sounds are fantastic, the visuals draw the player in, the mechanics reinforce the relaxed yet ominous feeling, and the little pieces of dialogue carry a surprising amount of character. Well done!
This is AWESOME! I loved the concept, the visual and that atmosphere! Sound is amazing and the gameplay as well, I'd play a full game release of this game, I'm sure. The menu buttons sounded so well that I was trying to play a song with it. Congrats for this super cool entry, great job!!!
Just had the pleasure of playing it through again and boy am I still impressed and are really enjoying the game! this is a very awesome a solid entry for sure!
@jacksendary thank you for playing the game, were so glad you liked it!
Really great! I was most impressed by the pixel art - it was amazing. The game was fun to play too. I feel like the game would have been a bit more intuitive if the notes you had to play were one after the other like a s d f g although that could also add some confusion since those would no longer be named after the actual notes.
I love this game. It's really fun and well polished. I love the art and gameplay. Really good job
Wonderful game!
Concept and setting were instantly appealing for me, and I found graphics and sound to be among the best I've seen so far this edition. Loved the palette in particular, it fit the overall camping in the forest mood perfectly! Mechanics were simple, but introduced at a decent pace, and it even has a tutorial!
A couple of relatively minor things to improve:
* To play minor chords only L-Shift worked for me, which made combinations sometimes harder to get right fast. * I accidentally burnt the stick we got by lv.3 before the explanation for moles. I don't know if stick generation is scripted or randomised, but it could be cool in terms of pacing to make sure the player has a stick available after they've seen the text.
Other than these things, congratulations to the whole team. This was super cool!
@ithildin Thank you! The Left Shift being the only working key was simply because we intended the game to be played with both hands, one for the chords and one for the sticks. I never even thought that people might want to use the right shift, since I never do personally. I will keep this in mind if we continue working on the game!
The stick spawning is scripted, and designed around giving the player sticks only when needed to not allow stockpiling too many sticks, but I completely understand that it was frustrating to lose like that, we'll keep that in mind too.
Wow, this is excellent! I love the depth of the sticks and how they're used so many ways. That and combined with the song aspect make a super interesting gameplay combination. I would love to see this as a fully fledged project, excellent work!
Cool game. It got really hard after chapter 5. And somehow losing on chapter 6 brought me back to 5. Plus, it got hard to “pick up” the hammer.
@itsdanidre Not all parts are checkpoints, 6 is not one of them. Since the levels are so short we felt like it was ok to sometimes replay two levels instead of having a checkpoint every level, since that would make them very common.
And yes I agree that the hammer is hard to pick up, but you don't need to grab the handle, which makes it a little easier to pick up. I wish I hade made the handle collider more forgiving.
This really reminded me of the classic game Loom with the using music to trigger events. If anything I felt that there honestly wasn't enough use of the music mechanic in this game, and I spent more time micromanaging firewood than feeling like a bard playing music to ward away enemies and conjour up tools. I did enjoy this game though, and it's nice to see such a unique take on the theme in terms of mechanics. I would like to see this expanded on in some way, perhaps your team could make the spiritual sequel to Loom that I've been wanting to see for years, you certainly have shown a lot of talent here.
Hello! Your game was played during my stream!
If you want to know the timestamp of when your game was played you can see it in this spreadsheet: https://tinyurl.com/yau8hjzn
And then look in my latest videos and find your game being play (after the current stream ends) https://www.twitch.tv/ursagames/videos
The aesthetics and the mood of this game is great! =) The game gets quite hard, but I really enjoyed playing it.
@mulberg glad to hear that you liked it!
This game was awesome! A really fun spin on a relatively popular concept. Art was really visually pleasing! Definitely a big plus. Game play reminded me of type racer XD. A real fun typing game that puts a lot of incentive on being fast. Nice Submission!
@izokia Glad to here you liked the game! I just played yours and left a review and a comment! :D
Wow effect triggered ! It is really really nice ! I loved the pixel art level here ! It goes the same for the concept of your game ! Such a nice idea !
I have no criticism to do, except, an easy mode for me please, the Wizard guy is too tough for me :P
Overall excellent work !
Fantastic job! I'm glad you didn't implement the bat enemies, I'm sure they would have been a pain.
@disperse Haha, maybe c:
I'm guessing you just wanted to post a small comment, but I felt like telling their story so here I go:
They were intended as a boss in the game. The player would have to switch instruments to a flute, which used 1234 and 5 on the number row instead of letters. This would give some variety, and since the way a flute is played is very different to a lute, we could make notes that required several keys to be pressed at once, say 3 and 5. Lots of art and audio was made, a new background palette, music cues for their appearance and defeat, the flute was fully implemented!
Sadly, we didn't have have enough time to implement the actual bats into the game, so it was shelved. In a last minute decision I chose to spawn them without functionality anyway, since the art was made and we really liked the look of them appearing from afar.
This did however cause the "ending not triggered" bug that I fixed the day after submission... So maybe it wasn't the best idea to shove it into the game without the time needed to test it. Oh well :)
Really fun gameplay, I got stuck at a short wizard that killed my fire. He wanted me to press "Am" but I'm not sure if I had to press "A" then "M" or something else.
@lexyvil That's why you play the tutorial c;
Pretty fun, unique game and a great take on the theme. The audio was quite good and I was surprised you opted out of that category.
I had the same issue as Ithildin where I had just burned the only stick when the mole explanation appeared, which felt kind of unfair. Running out of sticks was how I lost every time, unrelated to the typing sections (which were my favorite part).
Really interesting game ! Mechanics are really smart, using stick as a ressource for multiple action is really fun to play ! What's more, the pixel art is very cool and the work you did on the sound design is amazing ! Great job !
@stanleygray Thank you! We had to opt out since we downloaded quite a lot of the audio cues :/ It can be quite hard to find a bear during a game jam haha. Which is a huge shame because all of the music and instrumentation was made by us, and I (who didn't make any of the audio) am totally unbiased when I say that I think it's really good.
The stick shortage is a gameplay issue, however we chose to allow the player to run out of sticks since the theme was to keep the fire alive. If we didn't make that an actual threat, then we thought that we would miss the point of the theme. So we made sticks a scarcity. But they should not be too scarce at any point, since all of the spawns are scripted by us and have been tested many times. I know for certain that our level designer created a few moments where you are supposed to not have enough sticks if you refuse to use the spells, because otherwise there would hardly be a point to the spells. So I'm guessing that you didn't use the cage when we intended for the player to use them. Of course, this can feel very cheap, and nothing is ever the players fault. I guess it's just a limitation of the time we had to make the levels, and the time given to teach the mechanics being somewhat short.
We are currently writing notes and ideas for a full game based on this concept. We'll keep this feedback in mind if we end up developing it further, so again, thank you c:
This might be my favourite entry so far! The graphics and audio are all lovely, and even the lulls between commands I found myself enjoying the crackling and glow of the camp. The mechanics are very cool and fun to have to juggle. I think the only problem I ran into is that when the moles appeared, I had no sticks to hit them with (and the game ended within seconds). Would be nice to have each part be a checkpoint.
Really nice graphics, great job! I love how you made tutorial, and the game scope short, right and straight!
We streamed the gameplay live on our twitch channel (https://www.twitch.tv/firesplashtv), watch out for the highlights of todays VOD ;)
Enjoyed playing the game, even though I was too dumb to hit the right keys. Well C and G look a bit too similar to distinguish. Probably it would be cool for slower players - like me - to start with a bit more time to press the keys. I lik the idea to play with music and the multitasking. Even in first few round I sometimes almost forgot about that fire!
Regards - The R-Shift-User ;)
Amazing colors. Really minimalistic and stylish. Great job!
Aaah, finally got the time to try your game out! First of all, I have to say I love the name of the downloaded executable :joy: Am happy you're planning to make a full game out of it, btw.
Art looks stunning, the palette is superb, and the animations beautiful (that peeing wolf, damn), sound design is on point, and the bear lullabies always sound great. I absolutely love everything about it. The gameplay is very enjoyable too.
There were a few annoying bugs with the v1.0, but they seem to have been fixed. Just in case, I'll list some I experienced : shift key not triggering minor note, game not starting after clicking begin (and "part 1" hamging in the air), menu unreadable when opened on credit scene.
Thanks for bringing your game by my stream for us to check out. If you'd like to watch again, the highlight is at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/617255763
I appreciated that the music was actually musical, expanding on that could turn into something interesting with a bit of educational content.
Very nice graphics and atmosphere (and of course sound too)! I liked all the little ways how you had to protect your fire!