mrbamboo 2021-10-03 22:45
Awsome for a gamejam. I love the style ! The UI is realy lean ! Good job !
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD49 → Serene Stability
By jharler
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 54 | 3.98 | 27 | |
| Fun | 219 | 3.50 | 27 | |
| Innovation | 158 | 3.68 | 27 | |
| Theme | 268 | 3.58 | 27 | |
| Graphics | 47 | 4.16 | 27 | |
| Audio | 27 | 4.05 | 27 | |
| Humor | 402 | 2.06 | 18 | |
| Mood | 62 | 3.83 | 26 |
Awsome for a gamejam. I love the style ! The UI is realy lean ! Good job !
Everythings really clean and well made especially considering it was made in 48 hours, although I felt like the gameplay was a lot of trial and error to find the right angle
I got to the 8th level, then the Unity crashed for me (webGL), couldn't get past it.
Nevertheless!
Pros:
- I'm always a fan of such 'clicky' games. Especially, when you get your mind out after achiving 'stability' - Speaking of which, hard-on theme reading. I like it! - Great usage of simple graphics - Music is very relaxing. Wish I had time to make my games sound like this. - Easy to grasp, hard to master - Different 'items' makes the challenge more fun!
Cons:
- Unfortunately, the exact area-of-effect of each item is very hard to read. For example, I am not sure when attractor actually pulls the stabilizer. This makes the experience less fun. The effect is multiplied by the 'bouncy' animations of each helper item (like changing radius back and forth)... I would suggest indicating a bit harder approach here. - Encountered few crashes here and there, and the 3-4th level would not reset on it's own.
Overall, a great entry and a must-play. I was watching this one a bit closer, and I'm glad you finished!
What a great concept! I'd legit play with something like this for hoooours. Graphics are great, tutorial is perfect, smooth and shiny!
Got a crash after the double repell level though.
@mrbamboo Thanks! I appreciate the kind words.
@slimmerburger Thanks! The gameplay loop is just that, figure out how you want to manipulate the stabilizer and then adjust the manipulators until it goes to just the right place.
@mikoziq
Wow, thanks for the great feedback! FYI, I found and fixed the crash if you're interested in trying again (you can Launch/Retry 5 times and then skip the levels you've already done). I've discovered that the Windows build is much more forgiving of missing references than the WebGL build is.
I spent more time this entry on sound design than I usually do. I had to redo the music a couple times to get the vibe that I wanted. I'm very happy with how it ultimately turned out. It's one of the few entries of mine I can play and not have the music get annoying to me.
I agree with you that it can be tricky to know the exact interaction area for each item. I debated whether I should add a bounding circle showing the exact location, but didn't have enough time to try out that idea.
@pinkemma I think I could play this for hours too, but I don't know if I have it in me to create the hundreds of levels that would take! Haha. I'm glad you enjoyed. FYI, I fixed the WebGL crash so you should be able to get through all 20 levels. You can launch/retry 5 times each level to be able to skip the ones you've already finished if you want. There's no penalty for doing so.
Great game, very impressed with everything, love that you can win in different ways, I got lucky in some collisions XD
Really enjoyed the tutorial that lead you nicely into the gamplay
Also, the athmosphere of the game is great:) Good Job!
Wow, you are a pro, this is so polished the glare is killing my eyes :sunglasses: I mean this is clearly a top level entry. If I may offer some criticism, I'd say since this is a trial and error game, the level should restart quicker to allow the player to progress quicker. Personally I'd get rid of the fade-out/in. Thanks for creating this, cheers! :thumbsup:
This felt quite polished for a jam game. Like others have pointed out it's a bit too much trial and error. Maybe you could improve that by showing more of the trail before launching, so that you can already see how the trail is affected while placing repulsors.
A great game! The sound and visual design create a realy nice calm mood and relaxing atmosphere. Its an innovative gameplay with a good amount of polish. I think the game mechanics could be a bit more forgiving. Often I hit in such a good angle - but not good enough for your game.
I like the concept and the clean graphics, but I agree with others that it's too much about trial and error and micro-adjustments - the bouncer in particular was very volatile.
Good job, though :)
Very meditative game)
Awesome graphics, mood and feeling I get playing this game. I do think the game was a bit too hard for me (too much trial and error)
Love this game, my best over all at this time. Very good tutorial / level design with so mani levels. Great job!
interesting puzzle, it was interesting to play, the sounds are very peaceful
Great game! Concept, graphics and sound are excellent! I haven't encountered any crashes (running on Windows 10) but the browser embed has a visual issue: the dotted lines don't show up for me!
Overall, the gameplay is more frustrating than it could have been, and I agree with @mikoziq's comment about the area of effect.
What I would add is that, because you implemented the effects as hard-toggle when the stabilizer particle gets inside a certain radius, the effects of moving a tiny amount can be huge in the trajectory, which makes it extra frustrating!
This sort of dynamics here is already a non-linear chaotic system (which will be sensitive to initial conditions), but this hard radius for the influence to affect the particle makes it much worse, and breaks the notion of "tiny continuous change in initial conditions lead to continuous change in trajectories" which is essential for the trial and error nature of the game.
You could go with a force proportional to 1/r^2 like gravity or electromagnetism (or 1/(e+r)^2 for some minimum radius "e" to avoid infinite forces), but the effects at a long distance tend to make this sort of setup difficult to play with. Changing the power from 2 to something else doesn't tend to help much in my experience. I would suggest then playing with a polynomial force that goes to zero after some max radius, something like:
function force(r) { if (r > MAX_R) return 0; return FORCE_INTENSITY * Math.pow(1 - r/MAX_R, FORCE_DECAY_POWER); }
Graph would look like this.
polyforce.png
So (1) you don't get infinite range; (2) you don't get infinite force at r=0; (3) easily tunable by three parameters: intensity, decay and max_r.
Anyway, I think this would keep the continuous nature of the force nicely and would allow you to fine-tune the parameters for gameplay purposes well enough.
Just my two cents! But overall, excellent concept and execution! :)
This game makes me feel like a space scientist to adjusting satellite's obrit, and a billiards player. Hope to change the single ball shooting into a eletronic laser beam like multi-shooting way, to save my replay times. This will improve level play feedback a lot.
Great concept! I wish there was more incentive for keeping at it.
A raelly good entry. Amazing artstyle, easy to understand but hard to beat, and a chilling atmosphere. Well done!
I love the art and music. I wish there was some sort of visual that showed you the orbit you were aiming for, might have felt less like trial and error. Really cool concept!
Cool graphics and sound. I feel like repositioning of the objects need to have more clear feedback to the player, because most of the time I find myself not solving puzzle, but going through "make small adjustments, play, fail, press restart". But when it finally works, it is a really nice puzzle game
I loved your game. I had basically the same idea for a previous jam (never did it). Great that someone made it in some form and with such a lovely art and fun gameplay. Really liked
I loved the concept and overall execution. Personally, had a bit of trouble with tuning the attractor, since it seemed to very sharply drop off the closer the particle got. Seems to defy the expectation that they behave like charged particles or something of that sort, and the further they are from those objects especially the more powerful the effect. Aside from that, I think this game is definitely an impressive feat for 48 hours. Although I don't imagine it was *too* hard designing levels for this sort of concept, I do admire that there are plenty of levels to explore the concepts with.
Thanks everyone for playing and commenting! My apologies for taking so long to get back to you.
@johnathan-peres Thank you!
@morris I'm glad you found the tutorial useful. That came from my own experience of playing LD games and not having a clue as to how to play some of them. I try to make my games intuitive and add tutorials to help when I can.
@gus-the-shark You did remember your sunglasses, right? Haha, thanks. You're right about the level reset time. The fade out and delay are actually necessary to how I did the reset. If I had more time, I would've liked to have made it reset faster.
@bewelge Great idea. With using Unity physics though, I'm not sure how to best go about doing something like that. I did have that thought too, I just didn't have enough time to explore how to implement it.
@majadroid Thanks for your input. I do agree that it can sometimes miss what seems to be an accurate shot.
@python-b5 Thanks for playing and commenting! I appreciate your feedback.
@bassilij Thanks!
@immow Thanks for playing and for your feedback.
@gaming-night Wow, thanks for the kind words!
@wyl-team I'm glad you enjoyed the music. I spent significantly more time on the audio design in this game compared to my usual game jams.
@lucasvb I'm using the Shapes package for the lines. I'm not sure why it wouldn't show up for you other than it might be some graphics card issue with the shaders that it uses. I appreciate you taking the time to offer the extensive feedback that you did. If I decide to explore this concept further (or do something similar in the future), I will definitely utilize what you've shared here.
@izaya Thanks for playing and for your feedback!
@manio I appreciate your thoughts and thanks for playing.
@kewdev Thank you for the kind words!
@chainsawmcd Thanks for the feedback. There was a dashed line surrounding the unstable objects that showed the orbit. Someone else said the lines weren't showing up for them. Was this your experience too?
@kukurammus I agree, the pixel-perfect nature of placing the effectors can definitely be frustrating.
@blackquiltro Thank you!
@cameron-dunlap I agree with you. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to play with the effectors as much as I would have liked before I had to start making levels, and once I started doing that I wasn't comfortable going back and tweaking how they worked. I appreciate your feedback!
Great vibe to this, it's calming and interesting. I played a while, and got past the run of double-object-type levels. I stopped at the one with a pink circle-wall in the center just because I'd had a good run and was getting tired of things.
I might have played even longer if the restart was paced a bit more briskly. The various graphical effects and audio sounds really work well to create the mood, but that fade-out-fade-in on restart takes quite long and I experienced it SO many times while playing that it dragged on me a bit. Especially when I had to fiddle with the circle-bouncers, which have such enormous swings in output per tiny change in position that they require quite a lot of attempts.
Didn't mean to focus on the critique side, because I really enjoyed this. It was relaxing and fun to play around with, a number of cool puzzle ideas packed into a nice aesthetic presentation that I enjoyed spending a bunch of time with. Well done!