Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Down Whale
By notpjriavs, daniel.onstott, Mehul, ryanwoods, Allie Irwin, Enrique Romero and Janet Lin
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 440 | 3.80 | 57 | |
| Fun | 588 | 3.56 | 58 | |
| Innovation | 795 | 3.31 | 58 | |
| Theme | 404 | 4.00 | 58 | |
| Graphics | 91 | 4.48 | 59 | |
| Humor | 545 | 3.15 | 54 | |
| Mood | 852 | 3.54 | 57 |
Absolutely stunning art and very fun to play. I wasn't quite able to piece together how to efficiently refuel, but it was very fun anyway. If anyone gets a good strat, let me know! Over all, this game has a crazy amount of polish.
So far the meta seems to be to stockpile fuel on the platform. A friend managed to get to the 6th wave using that strat.
Enjoyed the game. Combat needs a bit of work, felt a bit stiff. The rest of the game was really well made :)
Great graphic and atmosphere!)
Fantastic graphic and innovative mechanism
The graphics are stunning (except for maybe the UI). Overall, I enjoyed playing it. Good work!
cool game, i like it. Can you rate me on my game too ? please
Great! Well done guys, I would love to play a more polished version in the future! :D
The artwork is breathtaking. I really enjoyed the idea of the drill just continuously digging, and having to run off to the sides, then just freefall back into the drill! Great work overall, keep it up!
Wow !!!
Congrats on this one, amazing art and the game mechanics were pretty fun!
incredible graphisms
Love the art! Killing enemies felt very satisfying.
Very fun game, great match to the theme and good gameplay. That art is amazing as well and it feels like a great little package. Only issue was the camera would get very weird and jumpy at times.
By far the best-looking game I played here so far. It really tells that half your team is made of artists :) Also a lot of fun to play, although I find it a bit frustrating that the game ends when you run out of fuel... why not just stop the drill?
Very cool! Art, sound, action - all great! I did have trouble figuring out the fuel mechanic at first though - it isn't *immediately* apparent that refueling is something you need to worry about! Great entry though!
Amazing artwork! I didn't understand that I could leave the ship at first as I was waiting for it to slow down or stop at a certain level. Once I learned that you were able to jump off and then jump back into the ship the game became frantically fun. There's a lot of game here for 72 hours of production time.
The evironment art is stunning!
The artwork is fantastic. Well Done!
Very visually striking art, nice work
This game is very well put together. The textures on the walls kind of had a Rick and Morty vibe to them which I thought was cool. The first thing I liked when I started this game was the menu. It was well developed with the settings that were available and it was nice to see the credits with art for each individual person who worked on it. The gameplay itself is solid and enjoyable although part of me wishes the drill was slower and there was more exploration in the tunnels around it because I liked the world that you built. One issue I had was that sometimes sound effects wouldn't play when fighting through waves. I also ran into what I assume was a bug in one of my playthroughs where the "Wave Incoming" alert did not go away after I completed the first wave so I didn't know when to run back to the ship. Overall this was a solid entry, great job.
@ruddgasm These are all excellent comments thank for the feedback! We are very exited that you enjoyed the game!
The title and environment art is truly awesome! Like a commenter above I didn't realize that foraging for fuel is a thing you need to do at the beginning as well. Great game!
I like this art and mechanics!
The artwork in this game is crazy. It shows that you put a lot of work into it. :thumbsup: I liked the gameplay and the overall concept as well. It took me a while though to figure out that I can leave the drill to explore. :laughing: The sounds and the music fits well in the mood and atmosphere of the game. Great work! :wink: :bug: :fuelpump:
This is hard. The graphics/music is super, I see you know what you're doin' :) One of the guys above mentioned the texture reminds him to Rick and Morty. Same here! Maybe not that crazy though :)
Very nicely made and polished, once I found out you were supposed to leave the drill it was a lot of fun running off and coming back to the big hole left by your drill. I liked to just throw my fuel down and then jump into the hole after it. Just a few small things like it took me a while to find the "press E to pickup" sign as it somehow blended in, or how it wasn't immediately apparent you were supposed to leave the drill. Very minor in the grand scheme of things.
The artwork is really nice, gameplay is catchy, maybe the difficulty could be more challenging. Overall great work!
The gameplay loop and aesthetic have a lot of promise. I feel like maybe with a little bit of fine tuning (enemy placement, fighting, initially maybe a slower drill speed, a way to lob the fuel at a distance, minor tweaks and polish all around) people would happily be willing to pay for this game.
I think the art has a really great direction and the gameplay loop seems really promising. This could be a great prototype to iterate on imo.
Absolutely stunning art in this game, especially on the title and death screen, but ingame looks great too! The gameplay loop works pretty well and the controls are responsive enough, it just felt good. Really enjoyed this overall, though I must say I get a bad feeling when drilling into such a majestic creature, even if they're already dead...
It's a really unique idea! I enjoyed the game loop and the art style worked well too. My major issue was the camera snapped quite hard back and forth when I left the ship, sometimes it was a little disorientating. Would work well as a full product. Has lots of potential!!
Wonderful game art, it looks stunning! I would say it was a little difficult at first as I wasn't sure how to get fuel, all I knew was to pick up the weapon and shoot enemies, but after playing again I managed to get a couple waves into it! Great job!
Beautiful game with a compelling loop. I really enjoyed dashing into the "caves" to find fuel.
My best run involved abandoning the gun altogether and just using melee. There might be a balance problem there.
Great game, hope to see more!
It was a bit hard to understand what was going on and it took me while how to refuel the tank but other than that insanely good work on all sides.
Amazing job guys! the art is sooo good, I love it. A quick tutorial would be nice in the beginning though.
Great job! Outside of the camera freaking out a few times after jumping out of the ship, this was super fun! The art was really well done with the main player character having a very 90s vibe to him. Well done!
The picture of the game is amazing! Strong sense of illustration. The color composition has a strong impact and a strong sense of atmosphere. The content is full of creativity!
Fantastic graphics and atmosphere! Gameplay seemes solid and engaging.
Odd, can't seem to find a download link on the itch.io page. :cry:
The description looks promising, but there is no download link.
Download link was removed (by accident) for a day. It should be back up for those of you who missed it. Sorry!
This game was amazing, from the gameplay elements to the art style and sound fx , great job ! I would totaly pay money to play a game like this.
great art style and interesting idea, but overall frustrating experience because you can't stop your drill or understand how to return to it
Down Whale
_Whale whale whale, what do we have here?_ Considering we're the folks from the _Whales And Games_ team, I was immediately intrigued by the idea of scavenging through a giant whale and seeing which sort of loot these ~~sea~~ celestial dwellers had to show from the inside! :whale2:
I'll be honest, and similarly to @ruddgasm I was also expecting the gameplay to be a bit more tunnel focused from the screenshots rather than being mostly about the drill with the occasional fuel trip through one of the side-routes. I had to read through the comments here in the page to understand in the first playthroughs that you're meant to go through the side-paths, and then drop into the drill shortly after - and ideally with fuel with you. The idea of making it all procedurally generated is fascinating though! Even then, I did fall off the map once and got stuck in a hole another because I didn't have enough jetpack fuel. It happens. :sweat_smile: I think it would have been interesting if you could stop or slow down the drill (even if it cost you fuel to start it back up again) to explore the sides a bit-more.
One thing I had a complicated relationship with were the graphics. While they look great while still, such as in menus (the menu art is extremely gorgeous/vibrant) and screenshots, during actual gameplay and motion it's a bit hard to get readability for a lot of the things that are going on on-screen at the same time. It took me a while to realize that the glowing green rocks on the sides gave you currency, and that, likewise, that those green rocks were the same currency that is obtained from enemies, and that it was not just a green blood particle for added effect!
When the camera is zoomed in, like in the side-tunnels, the game looks and reads mostly fine though it does feel like it still has a bit too much going on at times. It could have used a bit more simplicity on the background while the foreground could have kept the same level of detail. While on the drill and in other scenarios, I feel like the game could have used a bit more feedback, like flashing or screenshaking when the player gets hit as it was a bit hard to see when I was losing health even with the big health pie. The combat was decent, though with just that bit more of feedback I also think it wouldn't feel as much stiff as some comments have mentioned!
I hope I didn't sound too harsh! I do think that there's stuff to like here in the game and I really like how you went and also had every single of your team members in the credits screen with their own individual portrait. That's a nice gift to each of them!
If you guys continue doing more _Ludum Dare_ either on your own or as a team, I genuinely look forward for more stuff from you folks, as it seems you have some very interesting world-building ideas as presented here in this game. I look forward to them! Cheers! :whale:
Nice "Moebius" art style!
Art and audio are 5*, very solid and fun game. GJ
As mentioned on stream, I think it needs to be a little clearer that you need to depart from the ship to grab fuel. Perhaps it could start out moving a little slower? Also, it would really help to have a big flashy warning for when you're running low on fuel. [EDIT] Also, the camera was a little wonky, perhaps you could increase the smoothing on the zoom in / out? It felt very rapid.