Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD49 → Ethereal Runner
By FedeGelo, jabsatz, Nahuelito and Pancho
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1055 | 3.28 | 70 | |
| Fun | 972 | 3.21 | 69 | |
| Innovation | 1297 | 2.72 | 69 | |
| Theme | 1243 | 2.94 | 69 | |
| Graphics | 874 | 3.47 | 70 | |
| Audio | 680 | 3.24 | 69 | |
| Humor | 1005 | 2.51 | 65 | |
| Mood | 669 | 3.49 | 70 |
The art gives me a slight Lovecraftian vibe to it. It all looked pretty good! Maybe a few things that would make it more fun, give the player more base speed so they aren't crawling in the beginning, and maybe make the player a little more visible. Loved that you included a tutorial too. Great job!
This felt very well made. I liked the surreal graphics and sound, and the gameplay felt surprisingly polished and fun for yet another ludum dare endless runner. The graphics reminded me of some old flash games, and I mean that in a good way.
I found myself dying whenever I thought I had a double jump left. I think this is because as you progress and start moving faster having to deal with enemies and projectiles, its easy to forget whether you just jumped. Maybe make the falling animation slightly different when you're in the air with a jump available. Or maybe I'm just bad at the game.
Either way, great job on the submission guys
Agree about the Lovecraftian vibe! Nice horror themes for the Halloween season. I like the thought put into the magic mechanics with the tradeoffs and risk vs reward. And it's pretty satisfying blowing stuff up. Cool submission!
Loved the look of this game, it was really gross in a good way. Very cool that there was a tutorial, too.
Nice atmosphere with great combination of graphisms & music. Tutorial was good to have. Good job! :smile:
Nice game! Loved the restrictive mechanics and the art
Nice game. Is the little purple outline intented to be there even with no magic?
@federico-giorgi it's intended to grow along with the magic, there might be some slight artifacts when it's at 0 though
solid all-around entry! I especially liked that you took the time to make a tutorial.
Interesting game, liked how things changed as you went through the levels. Though it was quite difficult at times you had the good sense to add checkpoints which made it not as unbearable dying all the time. My only real issue was I was unable to run it in Chrome and kept getting this error "null function or function signature mismatch" but it worked in Edge
Glad the game had a tutorial. Even still I kept getting the shield and explosion mixed up. After some time I liked the trade off of having magic but more enemies or less magic and not being able to kill them. Good entry!
Overall great entry. Nice work with the tutorial. The text in it was a little to much for me. I Liked the mood. Good Job!
nice one! I like the spacey-surreal look as well. For me personally, it's a tiny bit too floaty, I would have enjoyed it more if it were a bit faster. But that's really only a minor point. Solid entry!
Really cool! The mood from the audio, visuals, and story was really cool. The game was a little text heavy for me at the beginning, but I really appreciated the touches like being able to press space while the typewriter effect was going to instantly display all the text as well as the small text animations sprinkled in here and there. Having a tutorial level was a neat idea to ease the player in instead of dropping them right into the deep end. Great job, cool game!
Very interesting game. I like the jump mechanics and especially the dash. Good job.
Amazing game! I loved the smooth movement and overall great game
@thatmanrobin Interesting to hear that it didn't work in Chrome. We left the executable just in case something goes wrong on browser though. Maybe we should make it a little beat more clear in the itch page.
Atmospheric graphics and a good challenge! In my opinion, there is too much text in the tutorial, but it really teaches game mechanics.
Very cool game! Downloaded to try again later. Great work, team!
Great game! Had to stop myself from dumping too much time into it. The mechanics are great: I like how you have to be resourceful with your attacks if you want to go fast. The controls and visuals give it a nice arcade-like feel. The music also makes it feel like your traversing the depths of hell, or whatever cursed plane your on.
Cool game! Simple but effective ; I just think it lacked a little bit of music in the tutorial area, but well done!
@guilloteam this was actually on purpose, we added a "howling wind" kind of background music to give it a more barren feel and more contrast with the actual game
Very moody and atmospheric, with really cool art! I do wish the player had been a little faster early in the game; I died a lot so I spent a lot of time slow. Nice job overall!
very nice game! Took me a second to get the hang of juggling the 3 mechanics (yeah I'm an idiot...) having to balance the speed vs attacking vs shielding was very cool. Congrats to the team!
Quite excellent art & mood. Too many keys for my preference (and, assuming the player must always be ready to use any of the three, attacking with ring finger is not very intuitive), but they serve the purpose of what the game was meant to be.
Wow. This is some good game. I liked the art and the mood and enjoyed playing it!
I love the graphic style. Glitchy, pixely, dark colours, dystopian ... fits very well the theme. I love the fair controls: i.e. jumping is still possible when falling and touching a bit the platform (I played another game which was opposite and no fun). I would have preferred a controller support. With keyboard it felt like twisting and breaking my fingers. But still I was able to play, but had to think too much about controls, which took away from immersion.
This is a surprisingly good game with the presentation that got me interested. It sets the gameplay in its narrative, which is only in the tutorial but which is totally suitable - how cool is that :) The gameplay itself is simplistic yet captivating, and if you like this style of graphics, it is a pleasure to look at.
I liked it, well done!
Really well executed tutorial, was really necessary as the mechanics are quite complex :D Nice style as well, I really like the glow effect you get as you gain magic!
Very good concept and character. The tutorial is a little bit annoying and the movements could be more fluids. Overall, it is a pretty decent game, congrats!
Really enjoyed the game, music and graphics worked really well to make a dark mood. I liked the way the theme tied into both the gameplay and the graphics and general mood.
Tying the player speed to the magic made me not want to attack because the movement became quite slow - I think some balance there would have been good. My favourite strategy ended up being to charge up magic and fly through the level. Nice to have a tutorial, but the blocking text boxes were pretty distracting - a more passive tutorial would have been nicer?
How do I start game in the web version? Only tutorial seems to be available. BTW Pausing the game with a tutorial text in the middle of the jump is really annoying.
I think the game could use a little bit more dynamism, the platforming doesn't feel polished enough to be really fun but i'm pretty sure it can be easily fixed The game has a great potential ! good job !
@shigor the game starts after finishing the tutorial
@jabsatz: tried reloading - in firefox I know have press space to start and the game runs. on chrome, even if I do the tutorial, after it ends it shows press space to tutorial. (but I've seen weird errors like this in the damn chrome in more entries, I'm now using firefox for playing everything)
@shigor thanks for the report, to be honest we initially tested it in firefox. we tried chrome after a couple of reports, haven't been able to reproduce other errors found. I will check this error later anyways, sorry for the troubles
I think the tutorial segment should have been more intuitive. When you load all of the game mechanics on the player at the start, via slow loading text I might add, it feels like being given a lecture before you can play the game. I also had to take the dash jump three times as it required near perfect jump, which shouldn't really be required in a tutorial. Finally, the time from death to restart was fairly long, especially for a tutorial segment. I did, however, enjoy the game bringing me right before the point where I died.
The game's mood was pretty good and you guys had an interesting take on the theme. Still, I couldn't help but think the game was fairly slow paced, especially given the "runner" in the game's title.
would be greate have more time to be invested in this game, there is potential
Everyone noticed this amazing art! great job!
I always like a runner with an acceleration mechanic, a la Canabalt. The amount of text in the tutorial was a bit much, I would rather the humour is sprinkled throughout than frontloaded, but it was still amusing!
Well done!
Fun to play. the attacks were very satisfying. For me putting the attack on z feld a little weird. But I'm an Azerty user so z and x don't neighbour for me. :) Like the dark "theme" and the nice tutorial
I like the visuals a lot and the game is very fleshed out with mechanics and audio/fx. It feels really complete. I think the tutorial was a bit long given the simple mechanics, but I was intrigued by the lore! I think I would have enjoyed longer platforms/running segments between the fights, because I felt somewhat slow. Really cool universe you've made here!
Wow, super cool, I felt like I was playing a metal album cover :sunglasses: Love the whole direction you took this game, it's super aesthetic in a very unique way! And plays well too! Great job!
One thing I, as a QWERTZ-keyboard user, dislike is having to use the z button, but well, no one can expect every developer to respect every keyboard layout. And I can change it in my settings, it's still a tiny annoyance.
oh damn @douwe-ravers @purrseus , we definitely did not even think about AZERTY or QWERTZ distributions (specially ashamed about the QWERTZ one since I live in germany :sweat_smile:)
will definitely find a way to fix these things in the future, thank you!
Great entry!! I love the art and the backstory, mechanics are interesting, specially the risk reward in using magic to defend yourself but running slowly in the process. This is a very solid entry, congrats!!
Good tutorial, and art too, but color scheme and animation transitions a little destroy immersion.
Really liked the mood.
This is very atmospheric and I love it. Great take on the theme
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Thanks to everybody for reviewing our game!
We're very happy with the end result of this game jam, whatever the results are, and also hope you all had fun playing our game! We're currently in the process of making a new, post-jam version of Ethereal Runner that will include general fixes, polish and some new features, including an online leaderboard!
We hope to make this nothing more (or less) than a fun web game you sometimes remember exists and play for a couple of minutes, but we have other projects for the future as well. If you'd be interested in this, or any future work, feel free to follow our team account on twitter: https://twitter.com/glassbrickgames
Anyway, that is all from us here. Thanks again to everybody, and good luck with your own submissions!
@jabsatz I can’t wait to see what you guys are uping to.