FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD48 → Savestate

Savestate

By monkosum

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall834.0024
Fun833.9524
Innovation144.4524
Theme8752.2224
Graphics5203.3424
Audio3443.3323
Mood3253.4420

Comments

wunarg 2021-04-26 07:03

I kinda like the idear though i found it very hard to control as you can easily press s slightly after you die on accident and erase all your progress.

drom1x 2021-04-26 07:19

Cool idea, grants cool level design

phthalogold 2021-04-26 07:35

Very cool concept - the one thing I would change is the controls and move the save and load function to the right side of the keyboard or the mouse so the right hand controls that while the left hand control the movement. Otherwise, solid game with a lot of content and nice level progression.

fluffygamedev 2021-04-26 14:05

Cool little game ! :) I love the concept. The music and graphics give a nicely polished impression. The progression is pretty neat too. I like that the player must use at least once the save/load keys to move on.

The only issue I have is with the controls being hard to use. But other than that, I thoroughly enjoyed playing Savestate. :)

yaboycj 2021-04-26 16:24

Great Gameplay Mechanic! Never seen anything like this before.

sode 2021-04-26 16:50

As @phthalogold said it would be awesome to have the save and reload be on the mouse. Also could you not save the music as reloading the same part again and again it starts to hurt my ears

frogravity 2021-04-26 19:55

Really nice game! It starts simple, but all the different twists on the partial save-state were very interesting. I liked the ending :) As others have said, the controls aren't very intuitive and while save-stating the music is a nice touch, it sounds pretty bad, but other than that, great entry!

wooliii 2021-04-28 02:54

This was super addicting ! In the beginning I enjoyed not being punished by failing at platforming, it alleviated a lot of the stress that comes from platformers. When you introduced the save-spawn mechanic, I thought it was a really good mechanic conceptually, but I'm not sure I would play something like this to the very end. Once I was in a loop of dying-spawning-dying-spawning in rapid succession, it became a little overwhelming and not as interesting.

With that being said, I think the premise is awesome. You could totally push this farther with new mechanics that take advantage of your save state system to keep it really fresh and interesting.

Great work for 48 hours I'd love to see this pushed farther :)

mduo13 2021-04-28 04:36

Really cool concept and surprisingly polished for a compo game. (Except, I guess, for the parts where it crashed on me, but maybe that's because I was running it on Linux via WINE.) The level progression is smooth, there are cool visual effects, the sound effects fit nicely and the music is groovy. As @sode points out, it does a disservice to the background music that it gets interrupted and restarted so frequently as you load the save states.

One of my major difficulties with this one was the controls being mostly on WASD. Jumping with space and moving with one hand on WASD is something I have plenty of experience with, and I could also handle moving with the arrow keys and having action keys where the left hand could use them, but having to manage load and save states on one the same hand that's controlling left and right movement was rough.

Also, just like with classic save states (ah, memories of ZSNES) it's all too easy to overwrite a good save state with a useless one by accidentally mashing the save button when you want to press load. Having some kind of buffer or log of previous save states to revert to would make it a lot less punishing when your mind blanks and presses the wrong key (as mine does a lot). Listen, sometimes it's like, "I want to make a save state at the top of the jump. Ok, jump, I'm at the top, top is up, press the up button (W)! Aww, @#$%, I just loaded my save state at the bottom..." But even that's much better than the opposite, which also happens.

Still, I think you're onto something really cool here and of all the compo entries I've seen, this might be the one I'd most like to see a finished version of.

stevenjmiller 2021-04-30 14:59

Extremely clever and fun game. The pacing is great and the ending was a very nice touch. I also would've liked the ability to use the mouse for save/load, but I got used to the controls fairly quickly. I would be interested in seeing an expanded version of this.

sentmoraap 2021-05-01 16:48

Excellent idea! On the top of that it has polished graphics and music. I would have liked to be able to change the controls, my brain has issues with save/load state being on the usual move up/down (or forward/backward) keys when there is actually some kind of "up" key somewhere else. The hitboxes might be a bit smaller.

shawn-moore 2021-05-04 02:28

I love the play on save states as a game mechanic! I think a bit more polish would go a long way, especially on the art -- although I did think the visual effects like motion blur were charming. But, I can appreciate that exploring the mechanic as you did took up the bulk of the 48 hours. Great job!

sigill 2021-05-10 23:49

This sounds really cool and I'd love to play it! Unfortunately my anti-virus is blocking this from running, I don't just add exceptions for 'random' downloads and I don't have a virtual Windows machine set up. If someone happens to have a video of a playthrough then I'll gladly watch that!

cruise-elroy 2021-05-13 04:25

Really cool concept you've got on your hands! I could very easily see this being expanded into a much bigger game if you had the ideas for it!

suchista 2021-05-15 15:30

Hey, I like this game! The idea is really cool and especially the level design shines here. The artstyle was nice too, althought I'm not a fan of the player's square look. The controls were a bit confusing, but I got used to it after a while.

jack-lance 2021-05-15 18:48

Very clever idea :) I like that you iterated on the idea by trying to save different things, and also brought back levels that the player had already done but now with different mechanics.

epb9000 2021-05-16 19:20

@sigill If you don't mind a little (read: lot of) lag I recorded a playthrough here (X11 was freaking out during recording and causing some pretty intense thermal throttling):

https://youtu.be/soCInVx4wGY

Small note: To make the game playable for me I remapped my W to space and set load and save to J and L respectively in a similar way by remapping keyboard itself. (And made s trigger M so it wouldn't do anything.)

Given the timings required for this game, a controls remap option would be very nice to have quality of life improvement.