Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD47 → minotorus
By acearcher
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1596 | 2.65 | 21 | |
| Fun | 1580 | 2.39 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 1439 | 2.63 | 21 | |
| Theme | 1387 | 2.91 | 19 | |
| Mood | 1386 | 2.71 | 21 |
I followed your posts - it gave me the vibes. Tried your game and the first thing worth noticing was the junky camera movement wchich made me unable to play further. By junky I mean glitchy. I know your pain tho, I also made a FPP game in WebGL and oh boy it's a pain with the mouse movement.
Yeah, I noticed that as soon as I tested out the web build but by then it was already submitted. It's completely fine in the windows build, I have no idea why the camera is so much faster and more erratic in WebGL! That's definitely something I need to do more research into. Thanks for trying it, at least!
@acearcher hey tried it second time, it's still hella buggy. Could you provide PC version link? Also are you using OnMouseDown to control your game interactions? I did the same thing at the beginning but needed to change it for WebGL
Huh, that's really weird. I'm using Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Mouse0). The windows download should be on the same itch page. I really appreciate you trying it a second time, and I'm sorry it's so buggy! I guess I need to reserve some time at the end of the next jam for bugtesting!
Well-made! It is really jumpy, but don't worry, it's just my PC. Nicely done!
I was really surprised at first, I went like "whaaat"??? I was expecting a top-down 2D side-scroller, well done! I had trouble playing it though, camera was weird and I didn't know what to do, but it's a nice change of pace seeing something a bit different than the rest. Oh and btw, I also don't like the camera control on my own game haha!
Really liked the idea! Like you already know, the sensitivity made it reaaally hard to walk through the maze. I don't know if it's a little bit laggy because of my pc or something in the game. Nice job, I can see it getting nicer and nicer as the bugs are fixed and you have time to polish it. I would appreciate some screenshots of the game here in the ludum entry too!
I'm impressed that you managed to make such a high-quality 3D game within the time limit. I was also impressed with the size of the laybrinth, though simultaneously bored by how uniform it was: you've seen one corridor, you've seen 'em all. The candle's life bar didn't seem to actually deplete, and then all of a sudden *my* life bar started to deplete and I died in one second without even seeing what killed me. Was it the minotaur? A trap? I don't know - and that strikes me as bad game design, if I can die without knowing what killed me.
There's a promising idea here, but it needs fleshing work.
Thank you for the feedback! It's frustrating that the mouse sensitivity has been such an issue, but at least now I know that I need to focus on that for my next jam. Regarding your points @f1krazy, the candle itself is the timer bar. I've heard from other people that because it's so close to the player's life bar, the blue bar looks like it's an indication of the candle instead. Now, if the candle remained the same size the whole time, that's an actual bug, and one I'll take a look at. I really enjoyed making the game, and so I probably will go back and polish it up more after the ratings are out.
Hi, I'm about to drop a brutally honest review here to try and give you some useful feedback to improve the game because I genuinely think it has potential, but it has some serious issues in its current form.
This was one of the worst gaming experiences I've had in a long time. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but this is the first time in my life that I've ever experienced motion sickness while playing a video game, and this includes a lot of VR titles since I was an early adopter of VR. I think this was due to a combination of factors from the cramped corridors, repetitive textures, the movement speed, and the poor performance of the html5 version. I had to take a break and look off into distance to compose myself. I don't know if just fixing the lag would circumvent this but I think you should definitely make the corridors less cramped and change the textures on the walls.
Apart from the motion sickness problem, there are some serious design issues that seemed hostile, like you were punishing the player and didn't want them to beat the game.
For starters, the maze itself is way too large. I did manage to get to the end of the maze and face the minotaur, but the journey became really boring and tedious the longer it dragged on. The basic premise of the game isn't bad, and it's actually kind of fun if you commit to it. I really wanted to get to the end and after getting the gold string, it became kind of fun retracing my steps, knowing that with every attempt I was making a lot of progress. This feeling didn't last when I realized how large the maze was and towards the end, just retracing my steps and running back to where I died took way too long and killed any interest I had in continuing.
Another major issue is how brutal the dead ends are. If you make a wrong turn, you have to backtrack a really long distance. It felt like you were severely punishing me for making a mistake in a game where it is impossible to avoid mistakes since you didn't provide any way to figure out where to go apart from trial and error.
When I got to the boss fight, I tried to kill it with my fists and realized it is impossible. I got it down to half health by punching it until it decided to attack me and then I died. I thought I would just have to run back and finish it off, but when I got back to the fight, he had full health. At that point I quit, but later I realized that I probably should have talked to the female npc more. It wasn't clear that she would give me more items after the string. After finally getting to the end of the maze, and nearly throwing up from motion sickness, I was so frustrated that I didn't think about talking to Ariadne to get a weapon. I replayed the game after this rage quit to see all of her dialogue, and I got the crown and sword, but I was not going to go through the maze again.
I didn't think walking through a maze would be very fun, but there was a point early on where it was. When I got the string, it became a lot more enjoyable and it made me want to get to the end since I know had a way to overcome the challenge. I think if you figure out a way to add more tools that elicit the same response, then you might have a solid premise for a full game. Similar to the felling of progression in a metroidvania but without the combat.
Now obviously you had very limited time to make this game and a lot these issues would have been avoided with more play testing. If the maze was smaller, the minotaur had less health, the corridors weren't so cramped and the textures so repetitive, this would have been a very enjoyable jam game
I felt motion sickness in the narrow spaces. I spent 3 minutes inside without any positive experience/reward. It was nice to create some dialog at the beginning, but it did not add to gameplay. Mouse sensitivity was slow in web build. Good luck with the next game.
It is a good effort for a LD, however the mouse sensitivity is excruciatingly low, whenever I tried to turn, it would take at least 2 mouse resets to actually get the camera to where I wanted it, and by the time I made it to the minotaur, he killed me before I even saw him. This could be easily solved by having the mouse act more as an axis to where moving to one side keeps the camera moving in that direction rather than moving a fixed amount.
As for level design, you should try to avoid mazes as much as possible, as by design they keep the player from knowing where they need to go, which ends up getting frustrating and feeling like no progress is being made. This usually makes players resort to certain methods of getting through them causing them to forgo any and all story beats or other useful things that they might find. For example, in this kind of maze, all a player has to do to make it to the end is to pick either the left or right wall and follow it without skipping any (potential) dead ends or turns. In this sense, not only are mazes not very good level design, but they are also pretty hard to actually design in a way that isn't easily defeated by a cheap strategy.
Otherwise, good job