FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD47 → Twist Turn Shoot Burn

Twist Turn Shoot Burn

By gamepopper

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1703.6853
Fun1673.6053
Innovation1563.6553
Theme614.1852
Graphics1493.8153
Audio443.9251
Mood1023.7049

Comments

ludumdaredevil 2020-10-05 00:18

Very cool game! I loved the graphical style and the music.

michael-parrish 2020-10-05 05:02

I loved the atmosphere! The slowing down/speeding up mechanic was cool too. Nice job!

jonathanfdr 2020-10-05 19:27

Really really cool!! I love that "rush" atmosphere that the game gave me. I dind't reallize at first if i had to kill the red thing or collect it, however I feel like this is my fault.

I get a little bit frustrated when I tryied to kill the enemy in a "curve" but I ended up dying because the the projectiles did not go on the enemy direction.

Add some new mechanics (directional shots, powerups, etc) and make a full game out of it, i'll would love to spend some hours in it!

allas 2020-10-05 19:53

Love the music and the visuals! The gameplay is quite challenging and can be a bit hard to wrap your head around when navigating those curves.

q-bert-reynolds 2020-10-05 20:53

The high pitched gun SFX were not my favorite. Other than that, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

clemonades 2020-10-05 22:30

Really dig that sythwave retro (idk what exactly you call it but you know it when you see it style) that the game has going. Controls felt satisfying, great job!

mikelovesrobots 2020-10-06 06:40

Nice work! Loved the music.

foursay 2020-10-06 16:36

Enjoy the feeling of shooting though its a bit challenging. Nice music btw!

blue-pin-studio 2020-10-06 18:45

I liked this submission a lot. Especially since it seemed every level was procedurally generated. The music was very good but perhaps it would be wise to default to audio to 50%. it blew out my eardrums :P

madbookstudios 2020-10-06 19:30

Awesome track. The control scheme felt unique but intuitive. The art style is really nice too and all comes together as a really great complete package!

mza 2020-10-06 21:00

Awesome game enjoyed playing it. I got an error msg worth sharing:

I used the gamepad when playing and I pressed the start button and got the error msg along with a error.txt saying "Error loading font: arial.ttf".

Also, are the level tracks procedurally generated. Let me know, im interested.

gamepopper 2020-10-06 21:10

@mza Thank you! I'll look into the error message, it shouldn't be loading that font anywhere. Also yes, the levels are procedurally generated, I wrote about how I did it [here](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/twist-turn-shoot-burn/making-levels-random-in-the-final-hour).

dreamscale 2020-10-06 22:51

Loved everything about this! The music was great and it feels really good to play.

jordan-kelly 2020-10-07 11:36

Obviously the soundtrack is a banger but I'm most impressed with the technical accomplishment. Your feed is a really interesting read. I see you're one of the criminals who voted for this year's theme :D

jd557 2020-10-07 11:55

Great game! Love the aesthetics and gameplay. It also feets pretty nice with the theme.

Mad props for the small touches with the Fast-forward/rewind mechanics (speed up/slow down sound, analog trigger support).

I think this is one of the best games I've played yet on this compo.

andidebob 2020-10-07 12:49

Such a fun little timewaster. The controls could be put on different buttons since x and z are a bit far apart on a qwertz-keyboard. Other than that this is pretty cool and the random levels are pretty impressive. Well done!

judgezedd 2020-10-07 14:33

This is amazing. Really got that 'one more go' about it. In fact, the smallest bit of feedback I have is to suggest that the gameover text shouldn't blit in, and you should instead be able to die and basically immediately restart. Which is essentially saying I'd like to play more of it, quicker. Which I think is a positive.

nikolaj 2020-10-07 18:10

wow, great job, really fun, great look, great sound!

jharler 2020-10-08 18:57

This is a pretty intense game. Trying to keep the controls straight in my head to get the guy to do what I wanted was a real challenge. I don't know if that's a flaw though, as it definitely lended to the challenge of the game. The visuals/audio are great and the tutorial at start while simple, was spot on and very helpful. Nice work!

justcamh 2020-10-09 16:01

Hey, I played your game on stream! Here's the vod if you wanna rewatch; https://www.twitch.tv/videos/765076622

Thanks for submitting your game!

roidz 2020-10-09 18:38

i LOVE the style of this game, the music, art,gameplay... all seem to blend perfectly together. great entry! The fact it's made in his own engine makes it even more impressive!

shelvid 2020-10-09 18:43

23, I am king of the world. Very fun little game, well done on the entry and impressive that it was made in a custom engine!

lone-wolf 2020-10-09 21:15

Love it! The music was a bit loud at first but once I turned it down it was great.

erikiene 2020-10-09 22:10

Very solid experience! I liked the style and the difficulty of the game. If I were to add something as a patch, I would probably make it apparent when the enemy is about to jump as otherwise the player is left frustrated from a seemingly random death. Or that might already be in there and I'm just missing it :D thanks for the experience!

nethead 2020-10-09 23:12

aaaaah so impressed with this game! everything is done so tastefully and there's so much energy here. as a note tho for some reason (on ubuntu derivatives at least?) it requires libtinfo to be installed; apt install libtinfo5 seemed to work fine but it would not run before that.

eduardo-yukio 2020-10-10 10:05

I found your postmortem randomly while I was searching for chronolapse lol, and I liked it very much, your tips are excellent! Especially those about scope and sticking to what you know: my biggest mistakes on my last two compos.

This game is simple but very fun! I played the postjam and it is bugging a little though: the characters teleport a little bit forward near the corners.

The music is AWESOME!! I left the game open while I write this so I can continue listening hehe. I'm a programmer who is willing to learn how to do these kind of music, so let me ask you: how did you learn? I'm planning to study some basic music theory but don't know where to go from there.

Thanks for the tips and the fun!

gamepopper 2020-10-10 12:39

@nethead Yeah, I've had a couple people notice that. Turns out the Linux build has a curses dependency because I output stuff to the terminals.

@eduardo-yukio You're welcome. Learning basic music theory is a good start. I also learned to play piano when I was in primary school, but most of it is intuition and learning different chord progressions and melodies.

marcmagus 2020-10-10 21:54

Great quick arcade-style game. Quick and a ton of fun to play with, really hits that "one more" feeling. Fantastic music. I think all it needs is SFX when you shoot the baddies to complete the sense of satisfaction.

The CRT simulation looks really cool but probably needs an accessibility option to be able to turn that off as it got to be a little overwhelming after a few minutes of play. Audio settings start really loud and aren't preserved (even reverting to loud on backing out of the game to the menu) which is frustrating.

(It's a specific ncurses compatibility dependency, too; the Arch package is ncurses5-compat-libs, ncurses and lib32-ncurses are insufficient)

almost 2020-10-11 04:47

Interesting mechanics - though movement felt intuitive enough after a bit of practice.

Aiming seemed to be the main challenge. I found that I could (sometimes) shoot through walls, and this seemed like a decent way to shoot enemies from a safe distance, but since I could only sometimes do it, it might have been a bug. For enemies that don't turn when I turn, I could setup an ambush and wait for them to come to me. I got to 13, but then there were enemies coming from multiple sides and I bumped into one when trying to run past it. Pretty fun once it got going.

Some minor issues: I went back to the main menu on accident a few times with X, and going to the main menu seems to reset the volume of the game, which was annoying. Also, in the main menu space was select instead of z/x. Pressing escape crashed the game with an error about failing to load the font arial.ttf (Windows)

gamepopper 2020-10-11 10:05

@almost Thanks for playing. Yes, shooting through the tilemap is an intentional strategy, although bullets have a lifetime of three seconds so some may not reach all the way depending on the level.

Fortunately, the other issues you've mentioned have been fixed in the post-jam release.

@marcmagus Someone else said they got it to work by installing libtinfo5, but I've removed the ncurses dependency in the latest postjam build. :)

tricky-fat-cat 2020-10-11 13:44

Oh, I like this game. Stylish visuals, interesting core gameplay and level design. Difficulty curve is smooth and enjoyable.

roikku 2020-10-11 17:05

Great music! Needs some work on the controls.

toccio94 2020-10-11 19:31

It's a very stylish game, I liked the minimal visual + chromatic aberration, and music fit it.

It took me a while to get used to the control system, it may be a bit hard to use. It was also weird that the level changed every time at the beginning, I've more or less understood that there were no level but maps were you could score. It could be an idea, but then the score is really tied to the map you made it so you would need a leaderboard for every one of them.

I've managed to make 50 points and I'm somewhat proud of it lol, but I think it's all too rough (gameplay side) to really be interesting to learn deeply. Some improvements could totally change this. An example, shots could follow the loop too, and disappear after a bit. I say this because it was really annoying to aim at those red things with a straight bullet when it was all so curved!

I've just seen this is a compo game tho, I'm really impressed by the polish of it! Reading SFML is also nostalgic, since I used it too for my first ludum dares years ago =)

Don't take me too harshly, I like to give suggestions/my thoughts, and I liked it! It's a very nice work!

elysiagriffin 2020-10-11 21:10

Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my livestream!

If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/767505473?t=0h38m37s

Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D

💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady

https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin

aeveis 2020-10-12 02:54

Had some fun, level change was unexpected but cool. The FX makes it a bit hard to tell where the enemy is coming form as they are all the same color, but overall interesting movement. A cool point was the bullet would travel through the walls so you could shoot at enemies far away on the big map if you maneuver carefully. nice job!

honest-dan 2020-10-12 13:17

It took a little while to fully grasps the way I can "aim", such as shooting whilst going around corners (as bullets travelled through the walls), but once I understood that and got used to the controls, the game felt like it was getting more and more engaging. A nice novel idea, with audio and visuals aligned well.

lyje 2020-10-24 14:32

Amazing PSX vibes!

matootsy 2020-10-25 16:07

This is the kind of game where all is perfectly polished. For a jam it's really well made! Simple and efficient. And it's completely in the theme. The control is perfect. Very addictive. I was surprised to discover that we can even slow down and speed up with the LT and RT buttons! The effects are sooo good. Only one "problem" sometimes some big courses paths are a bit out of screen. Otherwise it's a complete clean entry.

coleslaughter 2020-10-25 22:00

[Thanks for submitting this to the stream this weekend!](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/780628065?t=00h31m34s)

It's super impressive that you were able to pump out a game this juicy in a compo! I love the simple premise of it, and I feel like a certain niche of high score chasers could really get a lot out of this game, well done!

omiya-games 2020-10-27 01:42

As mentioned on the stream, I really like the movement of the game. It has an excellent frenetic presentation that encourages risky play. The procedural level generation is a nice touch as well.

One thing I didn't like, despite being fundamental to the gameplay, was the aiming and firing. I constantly felt like I was working against the game's limitation, and even felt the satisfying fast speeds to work against the careful nature of aiming. That's also not to mention that the way the enemies randomly spawns, sort of makes the pacing of the game haphazard.

Of course, I also had a lot of difficulties with controls, where left or right keys had unexpected behavior when moving vertically on a track. That...didn't help.

https://youtu.be/vvR6P6ZVvL4?t=5744

gamepopper 2020-10-27 10:48

@omiya-games Yeah, I did consider allowing the player to also aim upwards, but I couldn't quite get aiming right because it always looked like the bullets were moving in the opposite direction of the player as they were moving upwards.

The left/right directions were written with the intent of having the player change to the direction they set, regardless of what orientation they appeared in (so if the player was moving left, and the player pressed right, the player would always change direction to go right). Obviously the implementation I had in the compo was a bit broken in areas because I didn't expect players to constantly hold a single direction. It's been fixed in the post-jam build.

2021-09-15 09:08

I don't understand how you can waste your time on such simple games. Of course, the game can be difficult, but there is no plot, good graphics, or something more exciting, such as teamwork. That is why I prefer to play cs go where all of the above is present. I've already sold hundreds of skins on https://skins.cash/ , I'm not going to stop, because I've played very often.