scott-steffes 2021-04-27 16:19
Oh heck yeah! I always look forward to the next Nuclear Arms game. Great take on the theme!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Nuclear Arms 8: Navigate the Hate
By logicon211, Bodom4ever, volt450, BaronB, yoshiwara, FTL_Sloth and Amanda Gallant
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 337 | 3.87 | 35 | |
| Fun | 256 | 3.84 | 35 | |
| Innovation | 724 | 3.37 | 35 | |
| Theme | 903 | 3.65 | 35 | |
| Graphics | 908 | 3.68 | 35 | |
| Audio | 163 | 4.03 | 34 | |
| Humor | 31 | 4.30 | 35 | |
| Mood | 375 | 3.92 | 35 |
Oh heck yeah! I always look forward to the next Nuclear Arms game. Great take on the theme!
The performance and music is cool. Good job!
Loved the game! Had way to much fun trash surfing
Really fun game ! You did very well ! Future ain't so bad with we have Craig by our side ! :D
Nice game, surprised at the amount of levels and storyboards! Felt like the gun could have used some more hitstun on enemies, as it felt dangerous to straight up fight them I just ended up kiting them while jumping backwards :sweat_smile:
Surprisingly mechanically challenging, but the satisfaction of shooting a bear in the face is incomparable. Killbane is a great character, and I'm now going to go binge the last 7 nuclear arms games
This is hilarious. I especially love that it's a recurring series, such an awesome idea. You guys should be proud of yourselves. :smile:
pew pew ! Very fun game x)
Love the art style and the gameplay! I am very surprised to have so many levels in this Jam game. Nice Job!
"Bullets aren't for babies!". Well thank you, now I feel bad hhahaha. Great, hilarious game. Love the sound effects, had fun playing it!
I really really liked this game. And OMG you had the Frogger 1995 sound effect in there too. This games humor was off the charts and one of the most original interpretations I have seen.
First of all - HOLY SH*T, ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY, THAT THERE ARE *8* NUCLEAR ARMS GAMES ALREADY? You have my respect just for that, and god damn am I going to spend my Saturday night playing them.
Other than that... Well I never would have thought, that I will be using "its like Inside Out met Quake", but well, here we are. I love playing game, and getting the feeling, that its developers had as much (if not more) fun making it, as I did. Great job!
You know that old joke about the two guys camping, and the bear shows up and they're gonna run for it, but one guy stops to lace up his sneakers. Pal is like, "you can't outrun the bear!" But sneaker guy is all, "I only gotta outrun YOU!"
In this game you still can't outrun the bears, but there ain't nobody else around. And there are like 200 of them!! Oh boy! They even wear wristwatches to taunt you about how much time they're going to take from you, although I think they might actually be compasses. What do bears know, except killing?
I really liked the 3 orbs system. It let me opt into 2 levels of difficulty on a per-mission basis in case I got stuck (I mean, maybe I should have tried red just to see, but c'mon I got more pride than that)
Really liked the mix of different types of challenge. Some of them were super-intense, and it was good to get a little break with some of the chiller ones that were about platforming or searching, to let the cramp in my hands subside.
Really enjoyed how each of them called back to a previous game in the series! Poor Killbane, just trying to do his thing. He's a sport.
I finished the first time with 2 yellows and the rest green. And yup, you guessed it: the two yellows were the bear levels!
A meltdown, sure, but I had to go back and challenge myself to get a FULL meltdown, so I went back and ran it again going for green on all of them.
The Killjane level, with the bears and the trash, was nuts to get green on. I had to try it a lot, an experiment. At first I thought the trash was a problem because it let the bears sneak up on me. And disoriented me.
But then I discovered the trasholine strategy. Bears can't hit me if I'm in the sky!! I don't know if that's how you intended me to finish that level, but I shot like the first 3ish bears and trasholine-hopped my way through and back.
A couple of small points that dinged me: - The "Press E" on the answer pickup and podium could be a bit more generous. I definitely lost a number of runs to each. I mean especially the answer: hopping up and down on trash thrashing my mouse around spamming E!
- OMG the bear sounds. They are always right behind me swinging, and when I turn around they aren't. But then when I don't turn around they are! I think their sounds ignore the walls, maybe? It really increased their danger level because of how disorienting it was.
After trasholining the Killjane level the other difficult green was Handsome Wizard, the other bear level. I went back and forth on whether to go carefully or turbo... you did a good job of striking a balance where it was a close call and worth trying both. Having no trach to bounce on in this level, I did experiment with running up the walls, but I didn't get very far with it: https://imgur.com/uBH0ovU
Overall this game was really fun! I loved the voice acting, the graphics were great on the enemies, environment, and story scenes, and the controls were tight and action a blast.
Great job, glad to see your crew back in action.
Ha! Glad you enjoyed it @pkenney. We were a bit behind on polishing/balance near the end of the day Monday so it was a toss up whether or not we made the game too hard/too easy, but we figured the 3 orbs let people kind of choose their own difficulty so to speak. The bear maze is my favorite personally only because it actually made me get anxious when playing it, hearing those bears stomp around. The sound definitely went through walls too, that's something to look into in the future for sure!
Also jumping around on the trash is totally a valid strategy! The walls maybe not so much (if we were able to smooth them enough haha). If we had more time I think we'd spend it maybe adding some hit registry on the enemies, make em flash red or something and knock them back a bit more. That and a few other odds and ends but you know the struggle ;).
Thanks for the reviews everyone!
Yeah the bear maze was my favorite, too, a nice intense level that forced me to fight on the run.
That was the level where I was like "finally, I did it!" only to realize I was standing in front of the closed exit holding the green orb because my E hadn't registered on the podium. (To be fair I was definitely doing a drive-by E).
I was thinking about that moment a little more, and what would be the right way to be more generous with the E interactions. Obviously you could just make the collider larger, or convert from a raycast to a spherecast to give a larger target to look at. But there's another trick I'm always using, which is to smear out in time the acceptable moments of getting (Look At + Press E) such that they don't need to happen on literally the same frame.
Looking at your code you do the clear and direct thing:
if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.E) && lookingAt)
Where lookingAt is set by a Raycast:
Physics.Raycast(transform.position, forward, out hit, interactRange, layerMask)
I have the same pair of checks for jumping in my game. Player needs to press the jump button, and have a raycast decide they are on the ground.
But it SUCKS when you press jump and don't get a jump, so I smear time in both directions to allow for a too-early jump and a too-late jump, and then define a tolerance for each. This is a small thing but it deletes a lot of feel-bad moments from the game feel:
private bool JumpTriggeredRecently() // instead of checking input directly { return (Time.fixedTime - lastJumpTriggerTime) < PreJumpTime; }
private bool StillInCoyoteTime() // instead of checking raycast directly { return (Time.fixedTime - lastTimeOnGround) < CoyoteTime; }
Then the parts in update/fixedupdate that check the input/raycast just set these time variables.
Obviously a jump in a jumping game calls for WAY more focus than the pickup/podium interaction in your game, so not saying you should have this. But it's a cool trick to have in your bag for whenever you are timing a button press with some kind of physics check, and once I started doing this trick I was hooked and use it all the time now.
Adding Coyote time to non-jumping related things is a next level idea. Will definitely be trying this in the future
Big fan of the voice acting and generally ridiculous story lol. I had a lot of fun discovering the new enemy types as the levels went on, and always trying to go for the best answer. I do think the enemy damage can be a bit unfair at times, and some tweaking on the damage values could be nice. Still had a fun time though - nice work!
The orb system is actually quite innovative. Not just mechanically, but thematically speaking it made perfect sense. It was a bit of a challenge/reward system like gold/silver/bronze, but integrated in a much more interesting way than just 3 levels of timed goals.
The gunplay was solid. I liked that there was quite a delay between shots. That plus the audio and effects made snapping around and pelting heads feel very good. The enemies WERE a bit scary in the sense that they could nail you if they were only mildly close, but at least you healed us between rounds.
I too, enjoyed jumping around on the trashbags (or black balloons? they sure acted a lot more like that!). I managed to stick myself in a corner and farm those bears for a while. Even without the corner, damn it was fun to bounce on those things and just shoot around and explode everything. Super visceral.
Really good stuff overall. Your team always manages to squeeze in mechanical surprises I don't expect and that's what I come here for! Unrelated but have you guys always had the Silver Surfer game over screen? I thought that was great but not sure if you use it in every game.
Thanks for the review @peachtreeoath :). They're supposed to be trashbags but yeah we made em kind of light so they could be tossed around. And yes we've used the Silver Surfer in every game so far. It's just too funny not to include at this point. It's always nice to see people who've recognized our past entries
This was so FUN! I love the visuals, the story in the beginning was great! The designs of the enemies are super fun! Whenever I hear footsteps I just KNOW there's a bear behind me ready to punch me.
The voice acting and sound design are fantastic! The gameplay felt satisfying, the shooting is done well. The plot is funny. Just overall a solid entry.
The only thing I can nitpick is that I couldn't figure out where the green and yellow orb were in the crying baby level. I assume I had to use the cars to climb up but that didn't work out :D I just have trouble thinking when there's a timer going.
Great game! Well done!
I must apologize, but I've not played the other games in the serious previously.
This one has a nice feel to it. It reminded me of the early 90s computer games, but with better graphics than would be available at the time.
For a game made in a weekend there is surprisingly alot of content. The game feels whole even though its part of a larger "saga".
I appreciated the way you interpreted the theme. Going into one's mind to find memories during a press conference was unique. I'm not quite sure what the skeletons represent. I wish there was a bit more explaination about what they represented. I wondered if it is something that would make more sense if I played the previous games.
I downloaded the Windows version but I didn't hear any sounds. I'm not sure if that was intentional or a bug. Others commented on the sound so maybe there is just an issue with Windows ?.?
This was a pretty funny game! I loved the storyline, as I've never seen one like this before, and it was fun seeing the cutscene results! Sometimes the levels got a little too tough, and other shooting mechanics and weapons could be cool, but that's too much for a weekend. I did complete the game though successfully, so nice job getting the game in that state!
Awesome game! Kraig is really a charismatic character. Loved it!
very fun time and style. The gunplay is solid.
Okay, now I'm a Killbane fan, waiting for the next part. =) Collected all the green spheres. The labyrinth level is slightly difficult, bears can attack from any direction. Very cool, great job guys!
Nice game! Brought back a lot of duke nukem memories :D
Congratulations on your game, the mechanics still need to be improved, but this is understandable when it comes to jamming, but you already have a good plot in hand, reminded me of those futuristic films from the 90s by Arnold schwarzenegger, a big hug, and I look forward to it. your ratings regarding my game.
I absolutely love the character design! It looks like this, being the 8th installment in the Nuclear Arms series, has had a lot of love put into it! I was able to cheese most of the levels by spamming jump while hugging walls, but I still had an absolutely great time throughout the entire game! I LOVE the voice acting! Seriously incredible work! The inner monologues are amazing too. Great job writing the story, and the humor is top notch. Nice work.
I checked out some of the earlier Nuclear Arms games, and It's neat to see that you started with LD32. That was my first Ludum Dare as well, and it's crazy to see how much you've improved along the way!
Nice one.... Cheers
Finished with I think that is the good ending (only one wrong just to see what was the answer ^^) but thanks to the "wall jump".
I never thought a series would be possible for jams. I will have to test the others now ^^
Congratulation for the voice acting ! Well done
Nice voice acting! I included it in my compilation video series of a bunch of LDJAM games! https://youtu.be/9MwVPzD0l-Q