Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD49 → BALANCING ACT
By anchorlight, RetroAleStudio and IRememberDFG
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 728 | 3.54 | 39 | |
| Fun | 624 | 3.52 | 39 | |
| Innovation | 880 | 3.18 | 39 | |
| Theme | 904 | 3.37 | 39 | |
| Graphics | 473 | 3.89 | 40 | |
| Audio | 291 | 3.75 | 39 | |
| Humor | 721 | 2.94 | 37 | |
| Mood | 640 | 3.50 | 38 |
We meet again @anchorlight! This was an interesting entry. I tried playing through two entire times, and both times my game froze up and i lost on level 5. I really like the sound and art for the shooting, although im not entirely sure what the projectile is supposed to resemble. Cool entry!
P.S. im disappointed its not a submarine game, would be funny if all of your ludum entries had sumbarines in them haha
@blue-pin-studio No subs, but technically Zoe is in the elevator the entire time playing a Cello. You just can't see her or hear her. :shrug:
On the particles, they are... um, RE-PULSE rounds. We had prototype bullets that "exploded" as several bullets, and I thought the visuals could use some neon so we got weird sci-fi explosive bullets instead. No real thought process behind it otherwise, you know how I am about neon.
The freeze-up is actually the way the game handles failure. It's supposed to have a little failure tune that's pulled from a cancelled proceed sequel, but for some reason audio isn't coming through-- that will be fixed alongside the elevator animation in today's hotfix. After that, I want to fine tune the wave system because the stability multiplier and elevator zones are both incredibly temperamental right now.
Now that you bring it up, having a nuclear submarine themed tileset would be a hilarious one-off room type. I guess that's something to look forward to in postjam!
I like the game`s visual, and the sound is also really good.The shot in the elevator is kinda cooool. Its easy for me to understand the gameplay.so i tried two run on the windows, the first run just normally end at 5th floor,but the text in the end screen seems just didnt fully displayed, cleared floor just displayed as"Clear Fl", the other run stuck at 7th floor, i swept out all the redguy(the counter already showed 0) but the elevator didnt appear, seems the redbar reached the end but i managed to get a kill at the same time.
P.S. really like the neon in your game. XP
Just tried another run, seems the red guy sometime like wondering on the edge of the stage.ﾟÅﾟ)
@elittk A few things:
First of all... the AI. I lose sleep at night thinking about Unity pathfinding. I've noticed that the AI are pretty terrible at understanding the edges, mostly because they run at a high speed and they can get stuck bettween the edge of their path and the outside kill box. We left this behavior in because it led to enemies hurling themselves out the window on their own, which we thought was hilarious in testing. I have a few ideas to fix the stuck aspect, but they took a backseat to much more urgent issues in past updates-- hopefully we'll get that figured out soon with most of the critical bugs ironed out earlier today.
Off the top of my head, the game shouldn't allow you to survive Instability maxed out, wave or not. The actual end game triggers when the number is a little HIGHER than the meter's maximum so the meter scares you a bit earlier. I'm going to guess this is why you perceived the meter as full, but I have no idea why the elevator didn't show up as this behavior hasn't come up at all in testing. I'll see if I can break it with high instability on the next testing run, thanks for the report!
The part that confuses me about your comment is "Clear Fl." I have no idea what string you're talking to as to my knowledge there's no text mid-game other than the "ELEVATOR AVAILABLE" prompt, the elevator counter, and the Enemies meter. A screenshot would help a lot in finding the area where this happened.
I'll start looking into your report next time I'm in front of Unity. Thank you for your feedback!
The game was a solid entry! I played till level 6 where I hit a glitch and couldn't get any furthur. I might make the bullets pop out from the floor a bit more. Also maybe incorporate walls into a post jam build maybe collapsing the building too!
@anchorligQQ截图20211006130916.pnght here is the screenshot, seems my description is kinda confuzing(I m learning English), its in the gameover screen. after the animation of the text ends, it just stop as the screenshot
played the windows ver
@elittk Okay, this helps a lot! This is... strange. I'll need to do some further investigating. If you could tell me your operating system, it'd help a lot in narrowing things down.
Not sure if I'll narrow down the exact source, but at the very least I can add a failsafe.
Pretty good game.
@elittk @sploky @simpathey @blue-pin-studio
To anyone that had elevator issues before, we now have a solution worked out. v0.19LD will be properly announced later when we have a graphic to go along with it. In the meantime, here's what we got for it:
- Working WebGL2 port - Essential Elevator fixes - Bullet collision system updated to be more reliable and avoid self-collision - Input and enemies disabled during wave intermissions - Results screen should properly display text
Thank you for all of the feedback we've received! Patches may slow down until postjam unless something urgent comes up.
I really like the art and audio on this one. It has a pretty unique Hotline Miami-esque style, which has not been that common in this game jam from what I noticed. I love the little details such as the 3D elevator transition between levels and the way the game seems to freeze up when you get a game over, as if the game itself has lost all stability. I really love how the bullet particles look, but I feel like they are almost a little too big. Unless I got the center of the bullets to hit the person, the sprite would often times cross over them and not do anything. Beside that, this was a really solid game.
@proxy-games Thanks for your feedback! We did bring up Hotline Miami and Mr. Shifty a few times behind the scenes as reference for the pace and style, and we even planned on having the black background start pulsing colors when the tower started to destabilize. (This unfortunately didn't make it in, along with some particles like sprinklers and rubble that would start to fall at a certain percentage)
The bullet mechanic definitely needs a bit of work, unfortunately this one probably comes down to miscommunication. Our original developer designed explosives that had a decent range, and when I was bugfixing and polishing the VFX, I mistook it for a much smaller explosion then increased knockback in testing-- effectively making the bullets high velocity micro-missiles instead of the original area-of-effect attack. Once LD is over, we can add an alternative particle or sound when you hit non-destructibles so you know when you actually hit an enemy or not.
As for the finale screen, the reason it's so unpolished is because we only got the slowdown in. It was supposed to have a screen effect, but everything related to rising instability got cut for time (it was that or the elevator sequence, and we already had the elevator model from the tutorial screen). Before the patch, I even forgot to call the audio file in and just had a delay exactly as long as said audio file, so that was embarrassing :sweat_smile:
Again, thanks for giving our game a look!
VOD from when I played: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1169455753?t=47m07s
I think it would be cool if the destructible props actually impacted the stability, so you had to be careful of where you shot. That's how I thought it behaved initially.
@jitspoe Honestly, the fact that this never occurred to me during development bothers me a lot. The destruction was something I pushed for because it looks cool, but in retrospect the destruction alongside the theme of saving the building from attackers feels like conflicting information. We'll keep this in mind for postjam builds as we continue to fine-tune the Instability system.
The focus of the Instability system was originally that enemies would stand on opposite ends of the towers, and when everyone was on one side it would cause instability because the building was being weighted unevenly. The final implementation is a heavily simplified version of this because it was temperamental and not very fun. Hopefully we can clear up any confusion with a better description in a future patch!
Interesting game. I liked the transitions between 2D and 3D. The only thing I'd like to point out is there's a slowdown when you die. It seemed to me that the game would crash even. Good entry!
I am not really sure what stability means in this game, it keeps going red and except for just shooting more enemies I don't really know what to do. Really nice visuals though
@megalukes Thank you for giving our game a look! As for the slowdown... I know it's there because I put it there. :sweat_smile: When you die,the Timescale is set to 0.1 while the final sounds play. It was an attempt to make a dramatic moment out of the final collapse of the building, but we didn't have time to put the particles or background color changing in. The music cue is too quiet and the game still has input enabled, so I can't blame you for thinking something went horribly wrong... it's not executed very well. We'll need to find a way to clean that up a bit in a future update.
@duckonaut BALANCING ACT is an endless horde based game. Enemies present in the building weigh down and destabilize the tower, so you launch them out of the building as fast as possible before moving onto the next floor. Every second, the stability decreases based on an algorithm that counts the number of enemies on the floor and applies a base multiplier that increases as you go further up the tower and away from the solid foundation. You also have stability replenish slightly every time an enemy falls out of the building. I realize that the naming scheme as well as the destructive environments imply something more complicated, and unfortunately I didn't catch this confusion in time for shipping. A simple tutorial would have gone a long way, which is why we even have the first floor with the grey tiles; classic case of time constraints, really. In any case, thanks for giving our game a look and apologies for the confusion you had along the way! Hopefully we'll have this clarified in postjam builds.
Finally had a chance to play this this morning and its great. The music is fantastic and loved the overall visuals. The menu is especially cool visually. Main issue with the gameplay was that firing the gun doesn't feel very satisfying, may have benefited from a beefier sound, some screen shake and maybe faster moving projectiles. Game kind of reminds me of Heat Signature for some reason, likely the firing enemies out of windows. Overall great work!
@drunkardwolf This is the first time Heat Signature's been mentioned. It wasn't a specific game we mentioned during development, but now that you mention it I can see the resemblance.
The final combat system definitely feels like we should have designed a full auto weapon. We planned for a single shot with full auto and big grenades as a powerup that would spawn at the end of the wave with limited ammo, but these features didn't make it. I liked the sound itself, but I'd agree that a) it gets repetitive and b) it needs way more bass-- the sound itself is just me going "KAH" into a mic with excessive distortion, so it could have used another sub sound to beef it up.
Thanks for checking the game out!
Soundtrack is really cool in this game and I like the sprite work. Elevator transitions looked amazing as well. Well done to the team.
Feels super polished, fun and has a good amount of music.
Very good entry, I thoroughly enjoyed it
If Hotline Miami and Nitronic Rush had a baby. A must play with Direct x14 and bloom
ITS A VIBE!!!!!! There's a REPULSOR RAY in my hand and PULSING SOUND in air. This game definitely has an identity and it wears it on its sleeve. Well done.
I love this concept, wish it was easier to found enemies, but meh its a game jam
@codeman1010 The enemies that get stuck on corners can be a real pain. We'll definitely be taking a look at what we can do to make them more fun in postjam.
Great entry ! Congratz
A pretty fascinating top-down shooter with an interesting gimmick. Nice job.
Great game, loved the graphics and sound! Nice difficulty build-up scheme, after 3 tries got to level 4 only... gonna try more later!
@tricky-fat-cat @matias-correa @llaumegui Thanks for giving the game a go!
@matias-correa in specific: if you need a little extra bonus fire rate in your favor, here's a consolation prize for the fact that we didn't get a full auto weapon into the game in time: on any of the downloadable desktop versions, you can still use Left Ctrl as another fire button so you can spam out Ctrl and click together to double your fire rate. It's a default Unity binding and there's no maximum fire rate. I wouldn't recommend trying it on the browser versions though, the risk of hitting Ctrl W is too great. We might correct this since as the online leaderboards roll out, but we'll see how the first postjam version turns out.
The postjam versions will have some additional weapon types, and semi-auto weapons may have an additional slow automatic fire attached to them.
I am back to find glitch! This game was really amazing to play! Thanks for joining us live!
I finally had the time to come back and rate everything I played so far!
Here is a link to the vod of the review if you wish to see it again: https://www.youtube.be/watch?v=h15d_WbzH64&t=7225s
Love the vibe of this game! The transitional animations and sounds really add that extra touch that make a game feel more put together and polished and isn't just cut to next level. The animations were nice but to add that extra bit of polish, it would have been nice to have more visual/audio feedback when actaully hitting an enemy since you could see your bullet thing explode but that was very slow in comparison to the enemy moving away after getting hit so I feel like maybe a punchier animation would suit it better as the enemy gets quickly pushed back. A little sound effect would have been nice too and you can add a bit of random pitch variation to that just for that extra pizazz :) The hit boxes on the bullets felt a little small as well. Felt like I defo should have hit them when I didn't...
Very small thing, it was a bit strange that the elevator disappeared after touching it and you would still move for a brief moment before the transitional animation kicked in.
Overall, really well put together game where you've clearly thought about the game as a whole rather than just the gameplay itself. Well done!
@togis It was a pleasure tuning into your stream as always!
@teto All valid criticisms. I definitely feel like the bullet sound gets repetitive, and you're hardly alone in how the bullet impacts on enemies are a bit awkward (launching by Explosion Force instead of force in a certain direction). Randomized pitch is a neat trick, we'll get a 0.9-1.1 range into the next build!
On the elevator: This was a bug introduced in the final patch of the game. It happened because the longer the elevator is present, the more of a risk that it will run through the script for level transitions 2-4 extra times, spawning a 16x difficulty wave that unfairly ends your run; as a dirty fix, I had the elevator slip under the map the very frame that it collides. The elevator system as a whole will see some dramatic changes before release, but unfortunately in its current state it's too volatile to make sense of.
I appreciate the feedback and hope some of the coming changes next month will remedy that. We haven't quite discussed how we'll roll out towards a full release, but it's very much possible we'll have interim demos that will implement certain fixes.
Awesome production value. The graphics and music were great!
So sad to start a game and see it is in memory of a good doggo :( The gameplay was ok but I felt like the enemies's AI was not at it best ^^' I think you have a good premice for a complete game but it needs a bit of work to increase the fun. Also, wasn't a big fan of the music. Good work overall!
@jonathan-lorenz The focus of the AI before launch was just to get it working, so they're fairly aimless and unfortunately tend to get caught on corners a lot. They'll definitely see some reworking before ship.
I am a little curious as to what you didn't like about the music. There are parts of 'Shaking and Trembling' (the gameplay track) that definitely need some fine tuning as I didn't have enough time to give it another quality pass like the title track got (should be a simple matter of quantizing the notes as they don't line up cleanly with the time signature). If you have any other specific problem with the existing OST, I'd definitely like to hear it so I can make sure the final score keeps that criticism in mind.
Tested both the Jam version (for rating) and the last one (0.19, for feedback).
Loved the menu, very good looking. The soundtrack was also quite good. The jam version was a bit too bugged (player character meeting invisible walls, the stuck on level 2 bug, etc...) but those were corrected in the later version already. The jenga tower idea can be very good along with the elevator transitions (which would need some texturing/polishing still), but I feel like those ideas are a bit underused in the game atm, as there aren't any elements that really remind you of it in the actual game whether that be in the level design or the art direction. Also the patch note upon launching game feels a bit unnecessary and it would be better to have a button in the menu to open the patch notes rather than always having them open first. On another side, I don't know if that was intended but the game slow down a lot for a few seconds before the loss animation starts which feels nearly as if the game was freezing.
@vladadamm All fair criticisms as far as the day-zero submission is concerned-- the hectic development didn't do the game any favors, as our original intent was to make a pseudo-strategy game that played more into the Jenga aspect. We had to cut the strategy layer, so we just gave the player movement and built the game around that idea. The art design was meant to convey having random tower bars slammed together at random with missing pieces being outdoor-type areas, but I agree that the cohesive window borders and lack of variety make it feel a lot more like a random set of tiles than separate blocks of towers. (for example, the playground was supposed to be what happened when the right/left block was pulled, inspired by the skate park in DREDD, while the Hangar was supposed to be the result of pulling the center block-- the idea being that even without the building's main structure intact, the space would still get rented out and used). Hopefully we can convey these ideas better postjam!
The pathfinding bug was especially unfortunate as we had it fixed just after that submission-- it turned out to be a bug where the Navigation mesh was baked with two static walls that we used during testing, and took no time at all to patch out once we knew what was going on. While the elevator was never meant to be anything more than the coolest wave transition I could think of as the game gets harder for every floor you go up, we hope to add more unique floors that take longer to clear so that it actually feels like you're making progress every time you enter. It would also help if the map accounted for the elevator's presence instead of it just spawning-- it was supposed to at least come out of the ground, but all hopes of that went out the window when I realized just how volatile the elevator trigger was.
As for the slowdown, we didn't get the instability effects in. I've got a few ideas for how we can make the building's collapse more visually interesting, but more on that when we're past the drawing board.
Good point about the patch screen as well. I won't have time to patch the game this weekend, but getting a hotfix in for better menus shouldn't take long once I sit down with the editor.
onelast.png @blue-pin-studio @elittk @sploky @proxy-games @jitspoe @megalukes @duckonaut @drunkardwolf @eldogg @cottonfloweryellow @cratthew @deathhound @eric-schmiel @codeman1010 @llaumegui @tricky-fat-cat @matias-correa @togis @teto @lilkrit @jonathan-lorenz @vladadamm
Okay, I think I have everyone tagged here. I sincerely hope I was able to return your favor by checking out your own games-- if there are any I missed, I humbly apologize.
The reception to BALANCING ACT has been incredible-- sitting at the 67th percentile overall, it is both my first Jam game and my strongest relative overall score in LDJam... ever. It's honestly hard to describe just how much of a light at the end of the tunnel LD was this time around. I started this jam devastated over a recent loss, and gave up on Compo before the jam even began simply because I knew I wouldn't have time to submit a game. I owe it to the diligent work of our starting programmer @irememberdfg for putting together the foundations of what would become the first arcade game I've ever worked on, and the incredibly talented @retroalestudio for creating the objectively best artwork to appear in one of my game projects. In short, once we got going thanks to the efforts of my peers, this game took off, and I'm immensely proud of what we put together.
>I never imagined actually reaching the submission stage this jam. I certainly didn't expect to do so feeling so great about our game.
The strengths of our combined team ended up making BALANCING ACT the kind of game I could _never_ make on my own. It's fast, it's frantic, and you can pick it up in seconds. No slow burn ambience or atmosphere, no interpretive cellos or spinning neon fountain lights-- this si the first time I feel like I've been able to work on a game where fun is the primary focus, and it flipped everything I knew about LD on its head. Once again, it was an incredibly close ship where a number of bugs bested us, but with a few days of aggressive fixing we got back on our feet and back to blasting red dudes.
Once again, I owe it to this incredible community-- there's a bond here that can't be matched anywhere else, where developers stick out for each other and encourage one another to succeed. It keeps me coming back every single time, despite the odds, and no matter what terrible impact a 48h programming session may have on the body, it's all worth it going through the rating period once more and getting the opportunity to hang out with an incredible cast of developers from all around. Whether a previous acquaintance from LD47/48 or someone I newly met this jam, it's once again been a pleasure to spend these last two weeks with you.
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Special thanks to @jitspoe , @togis , @eric-schmiel , @codeman1010 , @simpathey , and everyone else that broadcasted our game over the last two weeks (I know I'm missing a few and apologize sincerely)-- I've certainly taken a number of notes, ranging from "That should be a simple fix" to "How did we not think of this?" I strongly believe that your live feedback will help us turn this humble jam into a proper commercial title that captures the spark of funfound here while ironing out the laundry list of issues.
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To every single one of you that gave criticism and feedback, thank you for giving us what we need to take BALANCING ACT a step forward. While we haven't fully settled on a Steam release, we fully intend to take this game commercial in the postjam. The next few weeks will be a bit crowded, but if no updates roll out, at least expect a short devlog here and there detailing what the team has been up to while preparing for the year ahead.
Congratulations to everyone that managed to pull together their own projects-- especially those of you that managed to score in the double digits and lower! LD49 had some of the finest entries I've seen yet, and I enjoyed running through all the different interpretations of unstable and collapsing things. See you all in LD50 and [hopefully] when BALANCING ACT is fully released in 2022!