Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD49 → Perfectly Balanced
By mhorth, miller1215 and Shohenadel
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 158 | 4.00 | 61 | |
| Fun | 161 | 3.96 | 61 | |
| Innovation | 377 | 3.65 | 61 | |
| Theme | 26 | 4.50 | 61 | |
| Graphics | 353 | 4.03 | 61 | |
| Humor | 1039 | 2.46 | 51 | |
| Mood | 479 | 3.64 | 58 |
It took me a couple tries to understand how to play, but once I did I really enjoyed this game! The controls are super smooth, amazing for a jam. Also having leaderboards ingame like that is very cool. It's a perfect fit for the theme. It would be nice if the boxes dropped down a bit quicker though, maybe in a separate speed mode or something.
Great job!
@jefvel thank you! And I'm glad you had fun!
The difficulty curve was probably the hardest thing to get right for me. I was inspired by rogue-lite games, so it's intentionally impossibly difficult on the first round. As you get more upgrades it gets easier. To balance that out, the spawning gets more difficult the longer you stay alive. The spawn rate ramps up to 1 block per second after 10 minutes, and new (trickier) shapes are added along the way. These changes are accompanied by new music tracks to show that it's getting more intense.
It's brutal when all of the blocks go sliding! I really like the chill vide, the color palette, and the general mechanics of the game! So fun!
If I had one suggestion, it would be to make the game a bit easier at the start, like making the point under the board a bit thicker.
I don't know if my score was good or not, but I got to 125!
Again, very nice job!
Very interesting concept. Somewhat difficult, but I enjoyed it. Great job!
Pretty hard, that's not a bad thing though. I'd say the curve evens out at a good rate.
Cool mechanics!! And interesting idea) I really have fun to play this game! Thank you)
Such a simple & great idea and excited really, really well! Great work!
@gamesplusjames thanks so much! This really means a lot coming from you, since I've learned a good deal of stuff from your Unity tutorials.
That's awesome, I'm glad I could help! :D
I'm probably just really bad at this but it really seemed like the moment a large cube spawned, that was the end of the game for me lol. I would pick it up and quickly move it to the opposite side to counterbalance the platform but the platform would still slide off it's column so...that's unfortunate lol. It seems like a really fun idea, though.
@sir-onionknight thanks for playing! Did you have any upgrades by that point? What you're describing sounds like the first round which is extremely difficult, by design. As you purchase upgrades (especially the springs) it becomes much more forgiving.
This game is absurdly polished and really fun! Good job. Was fun to chase highscores for a bit, but it turns out I'm not very good! :)
@mhorth I spent 20 minutes not realizing you could do upgrades apparently lol
Update: yup that makes a big difference lol. Shows me for thinking it would be a piece of cake to start out with lol
Really cool, the art is extremely minimalist but very very polished. Also for the design
Super enter congratulations
Oh noooo! That's on me, I should have made it more prominent to let people know "hey, you have money, buy upgrades!". A few of my play testers did the same thing, they kept clicking play again immediately. My mistake for shrugging that off and pretending it wouldn't be an issue.
@kaiomoi thanks so much! That's what I was going for. I'm a programmer and I know my artistic talent is a big fat zero, so I lean extra hard into taking simple shapes and making them presentable.
Really solid entry! Well, polish wise. The mechanics were unstable, as befits the theme. :) Good work!
I haven't seen any puzzley games like this that also has upgrades. That plus the leaderboard honestly made me play way longer than I normally would, so great job on those choices.
The game is 100% intuitive and I just hopped right in without needing the tutorial. My strategy was to pack the center with the largest objects, and as asymmetrical as possible. Upon looking at your video did I see you can put the large cube around the edge to keep things inside a pen. Genius!
The visuals are perfect. Clean and fits the music perfectly. In fact, the entire presentation reminds me of Viridi now that I think about it. A tad less relaxing than a game about succulents though...
Nice game! Neat graphics and physics, and cool concept. We made a pretty similar game so it's hard not to compare :)
One thing I particularly liked is the upgrade system, which makes us want to come back again and again, with new features. The game is pretty hard though, the yellow cubes are really heavy, even if it is balanced by the possibility to move them whenever you want (in our version, once the object is dropped, you can't move it anymore). All in all, it's funny to see how different a unique game concept can be declined when it is left to two different teams.
I would be curious to have your opinion on our version, if you have time :)
@peachtreeoath thank you so much for your kind words! Especially that it was intuitive and easy to pick up, since that's always my goal with jam games. I hadn't heard of Viridi, but after looking it up, you're right! We almost copied their vibe without knowing it.
@gaming-night thanks! The upgrade system was a feature I knew I wanted before we even started. After seeing games during LD48 that had upgrade systems, I found them so compelling for replay-ability. I'll definitely check out your game after work today!
I really enjoyed the game. I had to stop myself after a while because I would've kept playing all night otherwise ahah.
Definitely on point with the "unstable" theme. I will play it again soon to compete on the leaderboard!
Good job!
Oh my god, the game is absolutely fantastic ! So addictive with the upgrades and leaderboard ! Well done ! Managed to go to the 6th place haha Smooth music and nice graphics + game is super easy to learn but difficult to master. :heart:
(...) as all things should be.
Quite relaxing! I have no idea how you reached over 2k but I might try to beat it one of these days =). Use of the light is very well done and just using simple cubes you delivered a unique experience. Bravo! =)
Neat. Really good game with a great physics and a quiet mood. It fits with the theme. Well done. The leaderboard is always a good idea so as to rival with other players. My score is not impressive but I have the 7th position. I have fun playing it. Addictive and immersive. Thank you for this entry ++
I'm amazed how polished this game is! Super-clean UI, great colour-scheme, the scene game scene (although simple) looks great. Love how smooth the menu transitions are and how you can inspect people's highscores. I really wanted to become ***the master of balance*** but my methods of balance were to sporadic, guess I'm too impatient hehe :sweat_smile: I love it, actually can't really think of any constructive feedback to give :P
I have to say, I'm a big fan. I also absolutely love hyper casual highscore based games and this one is so polished. I reached 4th place in the leaderboard but only thanks to the video you posted ahah what a crazy technique, I had no idea you could throw some big yellow blocks without getting a Game Over! I played for so long. Thanks so much for that game, it truly inspired me to become better at gamedev. Also those musics are a perfect fit, especially the first one.
Cool game, enjoyed it thoroughly, chill vibes mixed with challenging gameplay!
Good job! Very enjoyable game, I love how it looks and the mechanics are simple yet innovative in my opinion
Thanks everyone for all your kind words. It really means a lot! I'm making my way through your games to give you some feedback as well.
Woah this is one of the best games I've played in this jam. And I've played quite a few. I absolutely love the music and sounds, the gameplay is addicting, and the leaderboard system is super cool and makes the game really replayable. 10/10
One thing I would add is a save system if you were to make this a full game, but at this point I'm just nitpicking.
@mateu that's a really good call. Even for me, if I open it up again to try new stacking techniques, I first groan and say "ahhh damn I gotta earn all the upgrades again." It would be a huge quality of life improvement to be able to continue playing at the "endgame" once you've gotten there. I'll do that and a "reset all upgrades" button in a new build once the jam is totally over.
@mhorth I can't really say anything, because my game is a rogue lite too, and I don't have a save system. But yeah, it would help a lot.
Yes! got on the leader board! That's a lot of fun, I really enjoyed playing.
Oh man, this looks really polished and it's actually fun to play, also props for making the theme not only a theme but the actual main gameplay mechanic, works perfectly and it's fun and satisfying, loved this a lot. I think my only feedback would be to maybe add more different shapes to it, still, absolutely fantastic game, well done!
@mhorth what hosting service are you using for the highscores? Because I really like how you save multiple variables of the player's score and display them in-game
@dj-depressive thanks! It really was a fortunate coincidence that I had just started learning databases at work a couple weeks before the jam. I knew there were easier ready-made services like Dreamlo and LootLocker, and even a fellow jammer @owca made a public service. But I found that all of these were locked in regarding what data you could store.
I thought it would be fun to put my work-learnings to use in games, so I used MongoDB to store my data in the cloud, and then found tutorials on writing a web app with barebones REST API that can communicate with MongoDB. That web app is hosted in Azure (because that's what the tutorial did that I followed :laughing:).
Then the UnityWebRequests I would guess are very similar to how they are implemented in your game, and they talk to my web app. This gave me the freedom to choose my own data structure, rather than being limited to what the pre-made service tells me to use.
Screenshot 2021-10-07 095801.png
@mhort Oooh that sounds really nice, I'll have to dive into how databases are made then for sure!
I ran into the same frustrations you spoke of with the service I'm using for our game ([globalstats.io](https://globalstats.io/)). I'm able to store which version was used when the highscore was achieved but I'm currently not able to figure out how I would limit the score's present in the game to be the one's achieved in the same version. I doubt it's impossible since I'm able to store both data-types in the same "entry" on the site but I simply lack the knowledge required to make it work :sweat_smile:
Thank you for responding!
Nice work! Simple but very additive. I was not able to pass 200, but I like the game play concept. :)
Interesting idea!
Nice concept and simple but clean art style :thumbsup:
One of the best games I played this LD! Neat graphics and smooth gameplay. I didn't particularly like that the first runs were doomed to fail and I had to buy upgrades to do better. Just somehow that felt unfair. :smile:
Very addictive gameplay, and the concept is very fitting to the theme.
Nice concept and really well executed! Found it quite difficult at first but still kept me trying! nice one :)
Great works. I really enjoyed it and it gets you into a pretty fun flow.
Holy this is so HARD, how does people get such high score! Oh well, maybe i'm just bad hahaha, I found my way here thanks to your post on sound design. I would say that even tho you didn't make your own sound, i think you"ve got a good flair to choose what kind of sound your game needs. I think the audio was well balance overall and the music well chosen. If you want to get into sound design, i recommand buying a quality recording mic and a sound card. Than there's a lot on tutorail on youtube to help you start :) For music, it's more complicated to make good music if you didn't study music theory except if you are a natural born. If you wanna learn music theory tho, i recommand you learn the music theory basics than start learning counterpoint and harmony. If you want advice on where to start you can contact me :) Peace!
What I can say... this game is Perfectly Balanced. Sweet graphics, great UI & controls. Very Relaxing and addictive. Grats!
@charles-viau thanks so much for your feedback! One of my testers found a pretty cheesy strategy to get high scores. My tuning of the difficulty/scoring could definitely use some work, as the super heavy yellow blocks aren't worth many points, but are so tough to control. He basically just throws all the yellow blocks off the side since that doesn't cause a game over. Without that strategy, the highest any of us got was around 600 using intended balancing/stacking methods.
I really appreciate the advice on audio! You got me looking at sound cards and all that jazz now :stuck_out_tongue:.
@rufson thanks very much for the compliments, glad you liked it!
I'll make sure to try out both of your games after work today.
Good game. Had fun playing and I'll be playing this more.
Really fun game. Nice way of balancing the difficulty and giving the player room to figure out the strategy before ramping up the difficulty. The visuals were killer as well - simple, clean, and somehow still a bit flashy. Great work.
I got a score of 1700, The strategy I came up with was to build a ring of yellow throw everything else out and then fill it up with blue rods. My runs always die because I accidentaly pick up one of the yellows and everything starts to tumble :(
Maybe I'll grind for the highscore later.
Overall very good and polished entry!!
@ausstein nice! You're up to 2,105 at the time when I checked the leaderboards, first non-developer/tester to break 2,000. I get why you're winning all the games now hahah. Glad you enjoyed!
Had a great time! It has a very addictive game loop - I kept thinking 'just one more game...'. It has a good concept that feels like it should be easy when looking at it but definitely has a good skill factor. The time between blocks was just enough to keep me on my toes with moving blocks around. Very good :)
This game is FUN and that is what I think is most important. I had a good time playing around with this one and the gameplay loop was addicting as I wanted to improve my score. This was well put together, nice job!
Wow this game is verrry polished, especially the GUI! (With all those fancy styles and animations!) It is easy to learn, but hard to master. You found a nice balance between easy and hard. Overall well done!
Thanks everyone! Glad to hear you had a good time with the game :)
@wouterk12 thanks very much! The difficulty curve was a piece I was really worried about, so I'm glad to hear you found it alright. I was hoping to play your game and leave some feedback, but it looks like android only? Let me know if you post a Windows or web build, and I'll try it out.
I'm a bit mixed about this game. The music and visuals is super great. It's also a well made ballance game, but the idea did not grab my interest for very long.
Thanks for the feedback! Totally fair that not everyone is going to enjoy the same kinds of games. You're certainly right that I probably could have thought up more systems to keep it engaging.
This is an amazing entry! Great presentation, especially the (I assume) global leaderboards! I really like the idea of upgrades to the physical properties of the platform- it felt satisfying to purchase. It may have been cool to have other shapes that drop too that you have to deal with, or special events like wind. Great job making this in only a weekend!
Thanks @goldey2! There are 2 shapes that do appear later in the game, but I think my difficulty curve was tuned much too harsh, as the majority of players aren't getting to the point where those shapes start spawning. If you're curious, the video in the description above will show how crazy the game gets when someone survives long enough to get the new shapes. Glad you enjoyed!
Great take on the theme! I love how well the controls and gameplay is polished - for example the catch of falling object feels nice. Great job! Btw. I had some visual glitches when rotating, looked like vsync problems.
Spin and drag - just perfect! Such a meditative game, but pretty difficult to me. The circle drops very fast and gives me no chance to manage cubes. I think (I hope) that problem is not only in my hands and reaction but also in circle's falling speed. Paint surface with string is a nice idea, it helps, but I still don't have time to replace. Again, it seems start difficulty is high and it may force player to improve his or her skills.
@tiptoe thanks so much for the feedback! I remember turning the vsync option off in Unity, but I did notice that it was locked to 60 fps when some streamers were playing it. Maybe I accidentally turned it back on at some point. I put an fps counter in the top right corner, I don't suppose you remember what you were getting?
@astramorae I'm glad the controls felt intuitive! I spent a good amount of time and thought trying to get it there. Did you have any upgrades purchased? I went with a rogue-lite system for this game where it's designed to be impossible at the start, but each attempt earns some money where you can buy upgrades that make it easier. Other users have mentioned that they didn't notice there were upgrades to buy, and kept playing in the impossible state. Could that have been the same for you?
Wow, this game was hella addicting! The upgrade system and leaderboard were genius. I loved the relaxing background music and simple 3D art style. The UI design was really sharp and instructions were easy to follow. I'm super impressed by how much your were able to build in such a short time. This was my partner and I's first game jam ever and we hope to eventually submit more polished games like this. I agree with a comment that someone else made that different shapes would eventually be a really fun twist to add in. This was definitely one of my favorite games so far. Well done!
[Thanks for submitting your game to the stream!](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1171489560?t=01h03m07s)
I really enjoyed the polish with this one, and definitely wish I had more time to play it. :sweat_smile: Maybe I'll come back to it eventually for that high score!
@mhorth I have the image teared with several horizontal stripes when rotating. It is quite distracting but maybe it is just on my specific setup. If you turned off the vsync then it might be it ;)
Gotcha, sorry to hear that @tiptoe, I know that can instantly kill the fun of a game. I really appreciate you letting me know, and I'm glad you were able to still enjoy other aspects of the game.
Hi there! Thanks for submitting your game for me to play live during my Twitch stream!
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1173738676?t=0h0m6s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
Cool game
Really great and polished game, good job ! This is very relaxing to play, and the athmosphere is super nice !
There's soooo much visual polish here - so many little animation touches (the gentle sway of the camera, the animation on the progress bar when you unlock a new upgrade, the way cubes just bloop into existence...) that make this game super satisfying to play. And on top of that, it's a really fun game! Well done!
Thanks so much @ptsnoop! A few hours before submission the cubes were just appearing at normal size and then falling immediately. The growing animation and sound effect were added as a "huh maybe this will be a bit more fun". I'm so glad I did it, it instantly felt 10x better! I'll check out your game when I get home from work tonight.
It seemed quite difficult to me but the concept is very funny, I feel like circus themes and stuff xD Good job!
Wow congrats dude, you got some really good ratings!