FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD49 → Top Texplosion

Top Texplosion

By jaker

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall7533.5224
Fun4173.7024
Innovation6263.4324
Theme11183.1124
Graphics12682.7724
Humor4733.3722
Mood11712.9723

Comments

mvasko2 2021-10-04 17:30

Nice game, I like it.

As you said, it can be pretty hard at times, but that's OK. The puzzles are very well designed. It's pretty fun to fly around with explosions, it reminds me of TF2 and Teeworlds.

The graphics are basic, but tolerable :slight_smile:

> There is no audio because your character went deaf after one too many explosions to the head.

Fair enough, but it's still a pity :smile:

P.S. You got my respect for coding it in raw C++, good job! :thumbsup:

shp 2021-10-04 18:38

Very nice, soaring through the sky with explosions is always fun

jaker 2021-10-04 20:48

When I told my friend about the concept for this game, they said it was a lot like rocket jumping in TF2. I can't say that's far off! In hindsight, it would have been useful to look at rocket jump maps as a source of inspiration.

ukulelefury 2021-10-05 03:21

lol, "You used to be able to hear, but years of blowing yourself up has rendered you deaf." Aw, shucks. I hate it when that happens.

This is compo? You must have been more well-rested than me. Words are hard. ...but really, I'm so curios, how long did you spend writing all the different you-are-dead messages??

I found level 3 VERY hard. Not sure what I was supposed to do, but I eventually made it by just placing the bomb and jumping with the right timing and ignoring the middle little platform (a red herring?).

At one point, the game did crash on level 3? (hop and a skip), and I had to restart.

Level 5 was interesting, and challenging, but I knew I could do it, so that was fun.

I eventually gave up on blitzing bomberman. That was tough!

Fun concept and mechanic though! I love the bomb propulsion. With a little polish, this could be a great game!

...and now I've just seen your playthrough. I didn't think about the combo-bomb propulsion increase, and I definitely wasn't thinking about the jump-momentum preservation. And wow, you make it look easy. Maybe I was doing something wrong to make the jump spacing harder?

And in C++, nice!

thefatgalaboo 2021-10-05 04:12

Super fun game! Explosions are always so fun lol

flywolfe 2021-10-05 06:43

Super fun! And props for doing this engineless. Felt pretty fair the full way through and required a bit of thinking on how to progress. That last level was insane, though haha. Great job!

jaker 2021-10-05 07:20

@ukulelefury Thanks for the comprehensive review. I appreciate it (as well as the other commenters)!

- I originally submitted this to the compo, but upon realizing that I missed the compo deadline I changed it to regular jam. - The difficulty varies wildly due to both a lack of time and playtesters. The middle platform in "Skip and a Hop" is not supposed to be a red herring, but due to the inconsistent explosion force it may seem so. The soon-to-be-released update should make it a little more consistent. - I'm sorry about the crash. I was experiencing some memory bugs near release and I thought I fixed them all. Apparently I haven't! It's tough tracking down those buggers. Fortunately I haven't gotten any other crash reports yet :fingers_crossed: - Oh, and I only spent about 15 minutes on the random death text thing. It's just an array of 7 strings that I randomly pick from whenever the player dies.

Again, I appreciate your thoughts. I'm learning a lot from others playing the game (mostly about how certain things are unintuitive :D). Perhaps I will make a postmortem detailing my learnings.

samarthmp5002 2021-10-06 12:29

Pretty noice! Graphics could use a little work though

ominusgalaxy44 2021-10-06 18:23

this game was pretty fun! jumping around using explosion force is always a good way to go in a game, it's just so fun :smile: ! it was just kinda laggy though

fermingimpel 2021-10-06 18:31

Good game, I liked the mechanic of the jumps with the explosions

heremeus 2021-10-06 18:45

It was quite difficult but I enjoyed the bomb jump mechanics. A little bit more in-air control could make it a bit more accessible I think.

There's one big critique though: The ragequit button is way too close to the resume button. I got quite far before I accidentally pressed the button and lost the progress.

jaker 2021-10-07 02:07

@heremeus Thanks for the feedback! I intentionally made the air acceleration low to encourage good bomb placement, but I think that was a mistake. The ragequit button being close to the retry button is another problem too. I can easily add some spacing and maybe rename it to "Quit" so it doesn't resemble the word "Retry" as much.

ikernoya 2021-10-07 12:55

Super creative! loved the concept of the game

tomasaquistapace 2021-10-07 13:12

My god... you code all of this! I'm just starting with the graphics code and it's really hard. You are a master!

minibobbo 2021-10-08 19:07

I loved the humor and the funny comments on death took away some of the sting of failing the levels over and over and over and over.

Sound and music would have been nice, but I'll buy the "you went deaf" explanation. One thing that might be nice is to make the buttons bigger and space them out a little more. More than once I finished a level and hit Restart instead of Next...

Nice work coding it all in C++!

epb9000 2021-10-09 05:29

@minibobbo I vaguely remember a video that came with one of my playstation magazine demo discs back when I was a kid with the developers of Crash Bandicoot talking about using funny animations to lessen player frustration with dying.

I wonder how hard it would be for me to compile this in Linux...

jaker 2021-10-09 05:47

@epb9000 it should compile fine on Linux if you can provide PhysX binaries or can figure out how to correctly add PhysX to the CMakeLists.txt

epicureanistik 2021-10-10 06:02

The game is pretty fun to play, although sometimes bombs will just eat my jumps. It would be nice to have automatic restart / restart key when you die to speed up the game loop.

python-b5 2021-10-10 19:24

Impressive coding this in plain C++ :)

The game was really fun! The levels were well designed, and the mechanic has a lot of potential. I think better graphics (being able to tell that the bombs are bombs instead of cubes) and audio would really improve the game.

Great job! :)

johnlee-cooper 2021-10-10 22:11

Fun premise, cant go wrong with bomb jumping. its a little hard to tell exactly how the bombs are going to be set off or how their momentum will effect me, but the FPS controller is nice and smooth and its satisfying to complete a level. Could use polish/audio/art assets but its pretty fun!

electric-bonfire 2021-10-17 16:13

Knowing how this game was made makes it a lot better, but the core fun is there, even if it's a little unpolished due to weird behavior with the bombs sometimes. Great fun!

jaker 2021-10-18 08:53

@electric-bonfire The bomb triggering and explosion forces are not as robust as I would've liked them to be in an optimal sense. Heck, it took quite a bit of finagling PhysX (and reading API documentation) to get it to behave how I wanted 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time... well, I'm sure you're quite aware :D