weirdybeardyman 2021-04-27 21:57
Very polished and clean looking visuals, nice simple and fun concept, but I found the slimes pretty hard haha
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Bl*bert
By jesterseraph
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 452 | 3.80 | 22 | |
| Fun | 384 | 3.72 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 842 | 3.27 | 22 | |
| Theme | 840 | 3.70 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 661 | 3.87 | 22 | |
| Audio | 600 | 3.55 | 22 | |
| Humor | 1 | |||
| Mood | 731 | 3.62 | 22 |
Very polished and clean looking visuals, nice simple and fun concept, but I found the slimes pretty hard haha
Brutal, hellish, also... elegant. I like the early warning of how the slimes are moving. Giving the player more information is a good design decision in my opinion.
Woah this is great Jake!! So so polished, super fun and a great successor of QBert, I also just remebred that I still suck at this game haha. A good adition could be a leaderboard to compete with other jammers. You did an amazing job, Congrats! :D
simple as that. Maybe the music could be more discrete: it entered in my brain like a drill. Nice job anyway, I really appreciated
The controls are hard to grasp with the isometric vew, but the graphics and the experience feels clean and polish, and it's fun to play !
That music! I felt like I was descending into madness as I went further down the steps. Nice touch :D
Really nice game ! music work very well with the game good job
Awesome, game. Made me want to keep playing over and over to try and get a higher score even though I really couldn't haha.
- Core gameplay is simple and feels well-polished. - Music and sound effects fit in nicely. - Difficulty seems a bit too high; I had difficulty getting very far down at all.
Super polished entry and simple but very catchy mechanic. It took me a few rounds to really get into it but after that it was a zenlike experience for me and really started to get a lot further into the levels on each try.
Slap on a leaderboard and add some unlockable characters and you've got a Casual hit.
Visuals looked really nice, audio was pretty good too, core idea is pretty nice, my main problem is controls, i haven't played the original Q*bert and i am not used to that perspective, but it felt really unreliable, when i often would go in the direction i didn't want to, i decided to try it again while writing and i got a bit more familiar with it, but still my brain thinks a = left down, d right down, maybe if you would had to use a combination, s + a/d to move down left or right and w + a/d to go up left or right would work better? or atleast as alt controls, but as i said, not really used to isometric games, movement feels a bit slow, like when you land there's a second in which you are on the ground, but can't move, which does feel a bit annoying to me. another problem i had was that enemies were just too fast and not really well signaled, a redish blob would work better, or if you think it will blend to much with the ground, just something more distinctive than white the next tile they gonna jump on could be more orange too, also the enemies were a bit too fast in my opinion, the game gets pretty hard, pretty fast, i am not saying it should be super slow, since it's a jam game, peapole gonna play for like 5 minutes, but it just feels like there's pretty much no difficulty progression atm, just starts hard from the start, other than that the game is really well made and a solid entry!
Very nice game. Q*Bert is a nice inspiration. I played a while so the gameplay and the difficulty are on point (challenging and not frustrating). The only thing I would change is that the ennemies and the bonus look very alike.
Good work :clap:
Wow, it was a lot harder than it looked! Watching you play the game in the discord voice channel made the game look like a breeze! I think I passed to 100 tile mark, but I'm not sure. It would be cool to provide the depth of your last run on the title screen as well! I like the music that you added, and I know it was literally the last thing you put in the game, but it does get repetitive rather quickly. That said, the pitch shifting with the depth definitely makes it more interesting and works very well!
I think if the enemy hitboxes were a bit more lenient when mid-air, I would feel less "cheated" out of losing some of my runs. There were times where I definitely thought I was going to be sliding right past them just in time to avoid dying, but alas. Really cool entry!
LD_dang.PNG
More times than not, I would avoid the orbs, because turning back to get them would put me in way more danger than collecting the orb is worth. ha!
This is a very fun game to just try over and over again. Like my tetris addiction, I kept trying to get further over and over. I don't know how I could improve it myself, but if you still have ideas to make it better, I would love to see you do it! Very good entry, well done!
@weirdybeardyman Thanks! Yeah, the slimes are definitely a lot more dangerous than you'd initially think. I maybe should have scaled their difficulty a tiny bit more, but I personally like the learning curve of "okay I know how to dodge them, now I just need to not make any mistakes for as long as I can!"
@qorthos Thanks! With more time I would have given some death screen tips like "slimes spawn on the sides of the map and beside holes!" or "slimes always move in straight lines!" I feel like it would go a long way to helping folks learn the behaviours so that they can predict them.
@webox I've seen leaderboards in a couple other games. Is it easy to implement? I'm always terrified of trying to get something like that working within a jam lol.
@leggy Thanks for playing! Yeah, the music was made in 8 minutes and slapped onto the game in 4, for a total of 12 minutes of effort right up at the deadline (thus all the bugs were music-related :sweat_smile:). You may have played before the latest fix, but the music is a touch quieter and also pitch bends the deeper you travel (see patch notes for my goof on why that wasn't working).
@tomtomgome Yeah, I would have loved to make this native to a joystick but unfortunately that wasn't really an option for a game jam, so I defaulted to standard TRPG D-pad controls. I didn't want to make people even more confused by having to learn some weird new set of input keys like QEAD or something, but maybe it would have worked better with a proper explanation instead of letting players try and figure it out themselves.
@squerf Thanks! It was kind of my cheating way to make up for the music being insanely simplistic and rushed. It works better as a short loop that's incredibly repetitive when it pitches down as you travel deeper and deeper. Plus I don't think I'd be capable of making music any better than that LOL.
@nyanpierre Thanks! I really rushed the music, but I tried to capture that classic arcade game vibe with the square waves and repetitiveness.
@anuke Thanks! Game difficulty is definitely something I'm trying to work on. I wanted it to be punishingly hard to give that classic nickel-eating vibe of classic arcade machines, but I could have at least created a smoother difficulty curve to begin with, like the first slimes spawning further apart and moving a little slower. Sadly I ran out of time before I could really tweak those kinds of numbers, so the game suffered from the typical developer dilemma of "well it's not quite challenging to me, so it's probably fine."
@cg-fred I just might have to do that! It wouldn't be super hard to turn this around and slap it on an app store. Unfortunately I lack confidence in my artistic abilities so I don't know how well I'd be able to make a bunch of unlockable characters and such ^^; Thanks for playing, Fred. I'm glad you were able to get into a groove! I fell into that same zen a few times while testing it out lol.
@noeloskar Yeah a lot of your critiques are actually hallmarks of the era and the type of game, but you're absolutely right the difficulty is a little much and a little fast. The controls are standard for isometric games on a grid, but the game is actually about learning how to predict slimes, not dodge them. The jump is intentionally very clunky ;)
@verygenuinecraze Good point! I tried to add some distinguishing features like how the orb has a faint light, but what I really wanted to do was make the ground an orb was dropping onto to turn a different colour to signal it as safe. It wouldn't hurt to also give it more visual difference though, thanks!
@hare-software Thank you so much for saying the words every game developer wants to hear: "This is a very fun game." Hearing "this is polished" or "the visuals are clean" are appreciated, but it's hearing people say they had fun that keeps me coming back to game dev.
@100th-coin Yeah doing some playtesting I wished I'd added a depth high score as well, but originally didn't think it necessary since there's a max depth of 150 anyway. And I ran out of time before fixing the hitboxes ^^; Rest assured, it's on the list of adjustments to make in the post-jam update. I had to make a similar adjustment with Egg Rescue in LD46. I did actually make the hitboxes a little smaller than the characters this time, but not quite enough clearly. I also got cheated out of a couple runs during my playtesting from the mid-air collisions. Thanks for playing!
The orbs are definitely a bait :eyes: but if you can find your zen and collect all the orbs, you can get scores like this:
unknown.png
Generally the orbs are actually something you should aim for after you're able to complete the 150 depth run without collecting them. A sort of NG+ for separating the casuals from the Epic Pro Gamers:tm:. In that above run I collected all but a single gem on my way down.
@jesterseraph hmm I don't think it's hard, since you're not really concerned with "cheaters" you can do a ver simple rest API to post and fetch high scores. If you don't wat to mount an infrastructure just to hold a simple leaderboard, you can use a free leaderboard service like Epic Online Services (which is compatible with most engines). There's probably others too, but I've been told this one is fairly easy to use
Cool riff on an old classic!
I liked the game, but I wanted it to be faster. Everything was slower than I wanted... I was hammering the button three times between each leap, and then when I failed the torturously slow restart was so disheartening. Then I would get back in the zone and be having fun again, but always hammering hammering wishing it was faster.
I would probably have played 5x as much if the speed was doubled.
The art style was nice, but the way it changed and got darker as I went deeper, along with the pitch shifting -- just great. I also liked the design touch of the yellow per-warning of the incoming enemies. You gave me that, and then if I make the mistakes it's my own fault that I lost! Very nice.
Overall enjoyable entry, nice work!