FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD47 → Shadow of Archimedes

Shadow of Archimedes

By Cocohop, Ellen Kjiersten, eckkert, Greme66 and Zhohan

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1034.1255
Fun2833.8056
Innovation1074.0555
Theme1964.1556
Graphics2044.2456
Audio3103.7653
Mood1234.1054

Comments

cursedembassy 2020-10-05 23:00

really cool game. I liked the artstyle! :)

potatopancakes 2020-10-05 23:01

This is a super cool concept! This is probably my favorite game I have seen so far today.

2020-10-05 23:02

Very cool game! the only thing that it is a little bit confusing. I think it would help a ton to have a tutorial and a indicator of where on the planet you are. Other than that this game is very cool!

patsui 2020-10-05 23:06

+Clever use of the theme

+mechanics are polished and game feel is great

+good atmosphere

-could use some tutorialization since it's a somewhat unique idea

Overall it was intriguing and a really solid entry, well done!

str0nkyk0ng 2020-10-05 23:07

Really cool art style! I loved the concept of having to balance yourself between hot and cold. Personally, I would've enjoyed a little more instruction on what to do, but overall great job!

arbex 2020-10-05 23:08

Solid entry

eckkert 2020-10-05 23:08

@Anonymous

Scroll the mouse wheel backwards to zoom out. :)

rodgems 2020-10-05 23:09

Loved the whole mood behind the game. Crafting was a bit ambiguous, wasn't toooo sure what I was making at times, love the concept, would love to see a fully realised version some day!

sneakysushi 2020-10-05 23:09

Very good aesthetic and gameplay. Great work! As the previous commenter pointed out though, a bit confusing at first.

vadzim 2020-10-05 23:09

10 overheating/ 10

maxtemple 2020-10-05 23:11

Love the concept and the mood, very fun to play with mouse! it could be a great mobile game!

arifacid 2020-10-05 23:12

cool atmospehere, cool idea

misterm 2020-10-05 23:12

Like your game: graphics and music are cool. Good Job..

firetwoonenine 2020-10-05 23:12

Much harder than you may first think... freezing or burning to death is always right around the corner!

The visuals and sound are excellent. I've not been able to get too far into it because once you get going, you can only really stop moving for about 5 seconds before dying of heat exposure.

This game is an excellent concept, all that I think it really needs is a difficulty tweak.

primalshadow 2020-10-05 23:13

really cool concept

snowinn 2020-10-05 23:14

This is a really cool idea ! I love the artstyle as well it looks amazing for a game jam game and the music with the art sets a nice atmosphere. Next time, I would include a tutorial or better instructions, because I died a few times trying to figure it out ;). Great job!

blind-lemon-games 2020-10-05 23:17

Love the mood

2020-10-05 23:18

Really cool game! Arts, animation,music are so perfect for the game atmosphere and mechanics so interesting!

mmason 2020-10-05 23:26

A fantastic jam game, well put together and challenging, but able to be finished in a reasonable amount of time

6smith 2020-10-05 23:29

that was a really fantastic experience! i went in without reading the description and i was still able to figure out what to do with only a little trial and error, and eventually i beat it! really interesting mechanics and take on the theme, nice graphics and music, good minimal UI. the only thing i would suggest is maybe an icon on the machines to indicate what they produce. really awesome fulfilling experience, good work you guys!!

theo-guerin 2020-10-05 23:31

amazing game! i spent thirty minutes on it without even realizing it ^^' always like "oh come on one more try"

wujood 2020-10-05 23:32

I re-terraformed archimedes and i liked it! There were some glitches with the UI at times, but overall a very polished and challenging game!

cieroceramics 2020-10-05 23:33

just incredible. I spent a long time playing this, and I think I will spend more. I wasn't sure exactly what structures did what. but I feel like the ambiguity was part of the fun. I also took advantage of a glitch to get more than the fair exchange of raw materials :P. all in all, outstanding job.

ina 2020-10-05 23:34

Great Graphics and Atmosphere. Took me a moment to find out what I'm supposed to do, but that was the fun part in this game. Really awesome game.

fryer 2020-10-05 23:49

I didn't understand that you could click the icons at the top to build structures at first. I thought they were inventory slots or something, but after overcoming that misunderstanding I started getting resources and slowly rebuilt the planet.

One thing that'd help a lot would be some sort of indicator on the machines you build showing you what resources they give you. I kept forgetting which machine did what, and the silhouettes weren't giving me much of a hint about what to expect, so I wasted a lot of resources at the start.

Numbers showing how many of each resource you have would also be nice. The floating trail of icons gets a bit crowded after a certain point.

wikers 2020-10-05 23:54

very vet very nice job!!!!!, it has a lot of potencial!!!

bellringerquinn 2020-10-06 00:02

Really amazing job! I just wish there was a tutorial.

anant-ahuja 2020-10-06 00:03

Took me a few restarts to get the game but absolutely loved it. I played it till the end and found it fun. Amazing visuals but the guitar riffs sealed the deal for me. Honestly big part of why I played the game till the end was because of the music.

federico-giorgi 2020-10-06 00:27

I could really play this for many hours. I had to take a few rounds to understand the mechanics, ma after that, they game felt fantastic! The art style is really unique

cax 2020-10-06 00:28

Cool graphics and feelings when playing, pretty slow progression but gameplay is very meditative thats why it's still cool

aurath 2020-10-06 00:28

Excellent. The only things I would change would be to make it clearer what the function of the machines was when they are placed on the ground.

bakemonomori 2020-10-06 00:40

REALLY AWESOME, I HAD to finish it!! So here I am! Maybe, you could have had a pause menu, but after that, really fantastic!

zashers 2020-10-06 03:45

I liked the ambience of the game, very moody. If the mechanics were more forgiving then it might be more fun.

alekm 2020-10-06 03:48

Great concept and it has a lot of potential.

ree-rolph 2020-10-06 14:33

Oh wonderfully done. Beautiful, evocative, interesting. I'd say I'd like to see more of it, but it felt perfectly formed. Good work!

makiyoshi 2020-10-06 19:29

Awesome! I really like the audio, it's very juicy, and the graphics are very clean-looking and pretty. At first I felt overwhelmed by everything that was going on, but when I grasped the mechanics a little better it felt very compelling. The use of the theme is great and the concept is really interesting. My critique would go to the overwhelming start (adding a tad more of in-game info would've been nice) and the player character moving too fast, lol. The temperature also rises and lowers a little too fast for me, I kinda wanted to build the machines and appreciate all the game's artwork with less of a hurry. All in all, I think you did an awesome job, congratulations!

necauqua 2020-10-06 20:09

Very good audio work, and I also liked the style, minimalist silhouettes are just what you need for this type of game.

Also your theme interpretation is pretty on point, well done.

Tip of the hat for HTML5 (especially native and not like Unity or something).

--

To answer your question from my game - I did not use WebGL because I didn't have much prep (I would've loved to). I was just drawing to a canvas, and it has text rendering.

To answer your question even better - I did GL text rendering in the past (successfully) and you for sure need some library(ies) for ttf parsing and positioning because fonts (glyphs and their positions and uv's) are stupid hard and complicated.

eckkert 2020-10-06 20:15

@necauqua One strategy I was considering, although we didn't have nearly enough time for me to try it, was rendering text to a hidden 2D context which could then be uploaded to the GPU. In modern browsers, it is easy to get data out of canvases and in to textures with the ImageBitmap thing, although Safari does not have it yet. (There is probably another way but I didn't research far enough to find it.)

necauqua 2020-10-06 20:18

@eckkert, funnily enough, this is a viable form of caching, I think Android does that - render some text to a texture and then just use that texture (instead of 2 triangles per letter).

eckkert 2020-10-06 20:23

@necauqua Oh, I mean more than caching - in the browser it is possible to render text in a 2D canvas like you did (with builtin browser APIs), and then transfer the data to a texture in a WebGL context like we're using. That removes the need for your own code to handle fonts.

wouter52 2020-10-06 21:36

I played this game longer than I was supposed to haha, I liked it a lot. First I did not understand how to get the resources, but by picking them up and putting them into the contraptions I learned they generate new items. The art style is gorgeous Well Done!

potti 2020-10-07 10:04

At the beginning I overlooked the fact that I had to build resource machines, I wasn't quite sure what the inputs for the machines were at first, though it is reasonable well communicated through colour (maybe a tooltip when hovering would have been nice).

Good take on the theme.

trexxak 2020-10-07 14:25

ld_s2a.png

YESS! I finally made it :D

The minimalistic artstyle is incredible, the perfectly fitting score music is an instant favourite for me! Concerning the gameplay, I would have liked a pause screen maybe, as it's pretty painful to start anew when you just made enough progress to reach the endgame, but at the same time I think I understand that it would run against the leitmotif's grain of an endlessly spinning, incredibly dangerous world.

I did encounter a graphical bug though. Sometimes when building or feeding a machine, the icon would not change to display you just filled up the corresponding slot.

Other than that - congratulations, you again succeeded in creating one of my favourite games :D Thank you for your amazing work!

aviv871 2020-10-07 14:36

Graet entry, I really liked it! nice take on the theme. Good luck!

mekuri 2020-10-07 15:27

I really loved this game. Took me a while to get it, but once I got I was hooked. I haven't beaten it yet, was close once, but I'll definitely go back and do it. Got a tiny bit tedious when you had to run around to get back to your 'base', but I suppose the idea is to build in multiple places- Tbh though, this is probably the game I had the most fun playing so far- So very good job, and thanks for sharing :-)

codeman1010 2020-10-07 20:18

This was amazing, I was really felt like the 'loop' was the real champion of this.

eckkert 2020-10-07 20:49

@trexxak We would have liked a pause button too - unfortunately it was a casualty of the deadline. ;)

@mekuri Personally I like to have separate coal, water and metal bases, built 120 degrees apart. I agree about the running though, if we had had more time to polish the gameplay, we would have made the planet a bit smaller.

matootsy 2020-10-24 11:30

It took me a lot of time to understand that we can build structures while clicking on the icons at the top. (I had to read more the HOW TO PLAY) before starting ^^ Anyway. Very good post apocalyptic mood. Nice sound atmosphere, and I like how the ressources are following you. The concept to go right to cool down and stop before freezing is interesting, but at the end, I'm just walking/stoping all the time. But it's a nice entry. A good concept and a nice experience well in the theme.