Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD49 → ENTROPY
By egawag, ThePirateNun and Nobongo
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 122 | 4.06 | 32 | |
| Fun | 423 | 3.70 | 32 | |
| Innovation | 443 | 3.59 | 33 | |
| Theme | 485 | 3.82 | 33 | |
| Graphics | 74 | 4.51 | 33 | |
| Audio | 29 | 4.30 | 32 | |
| Mood | 60 | 4.25 | 32 |
Outstanding graphics & visual style, it feels incredibly polished (especially for a ludum dare game!) The audio and music were also simply brilliant! The take on the theme (entropy being the inevitable unstability) was also really refreshing. In general, great job!
Your visual styling is excellent and the audio enviroment and ambiance made it a pleasure to spend time in. Thanks for the submission! High Schores for mood
Beautiful and also has a bit of challenge (which I did not expect). Maybe it could get kind of meditative with slower falling speed, I'm not sure.
One of the best games I played this LD. Feels like three LD themes mashed together - "stuck in a loop", "Unstable", "The more you have the harder it gets".
Great minigame, the music is soft and does not get irritating at all even after a few loops and greatly complements the visuals, which are fantastic (except the white blind-flashes at night, I hate those, but it fits here completely).
Probably the only think I can think of on improving is the fps controls - possibly reset the angle or something on attaching, because I found myself in that over the head spiral, where you cant really move the mouse/view as you would normally to all sides, if that makes sense. Like if you look up in some FPS, you cant go more to that direction and have to rotate another way to reach the point you want. And in a game where you can lose your orientation in 1 sec, it might be 'something'.
Anyways, one of the best entries I encountered so far, good job!
Beautiful visuals and audio. The controls were a little sluggish for me, and I kept on wanting to look farther "up" from my perspective but being unable to because of the kind of camera used. If I could change one thing, it would be that - making the camera easier to control while looking up. That said, it was a lot of fun, and I was tense the whole time trying to find my next target!
That was beautiful and poetic! :slight_smile: Music progression after each portal makes me want to go further and further into the endless void of space! Great job!
Сквозь вселенные - к звездам! Или сквозь звезды - ко вселенным. А вообще, звезды бывают не только круглые, но и квадратные!
Спасибо за игру ^_^
Wow that was actually an incredible experience. I totally didn't expect that given the screenshots, and thought it might just be a pretty game.
The game gave me an intense feeling of being left behind. That everyone is leaving for rapture and you're trying desperately to cling on and be one of them. It was a lonely feeling. You even feel a bit angry at these darn cubes for moving so fast without you. I believe this feeling happens because you start out in control, with the cubes helping you as allies, but they get increasingly faster and distant and you lose control.
Gameplaywise, you are required to use a bunch of tricks you don't normally do. I actually really liked the FPS lock. What it forces you to do is manage you angle as a resource. So you might pull in one direction for a while, and then quickly do a 180 to help return back to the group. The limited hold was an obvious design decision so that you can't just hold onto a cube forever, but it also creates some interesting risk reward scenarios. As you run out of time you have to very quickly assess which cube to hold onto next. Is that cube stale? Is it going to fly away by the time I do a 180 and aim at it? Those sorts of decisions.
This was a fantastic game and I'm extremely impressed. Not many games evoke emotion for me, and certainly not one without a story. Throughout my 15-some LDs I don't think I've ever given out 5 stars across the board, so this might be the first one.
@uglyswedishfish @jpgfg @raykon @prostone @cromo @annie-owl @xpoho Thank you all so much for playing and for the awesome feedback! The support is seriously so appreciated, and good luck with your games!!
@peachtreeoath As someone who makes things to hopefully provide an emotional experience, your comments really mean a lot. I so appreciate all of the kind words and thank you so much for playing!
You have a simple and elegant concept, where the execution is very focused and very well put together, resulting in a cohesive and impressive product.
I loved the aesthetic, and I liked the main grapple mechanic. I appreciated how the music and aesthetics ramped up every level. I liked how easy the first level was, compared to the last one which felt quite challenging which I thought was a good move.
I do have some criticisms / suggestions, in case you want to continue developing which I think you should.
The gameplay and music becomes too repetitive for the length of the game. In the first two levels, the music is so simple and barebones (albeit pleasant) that it became samey within the first minute. I think the style of music did fit the game well, but I feel you need to spend more time on it so that even the base track sounds good when repeated, and then expand upon it level per level.
If you are going to have 3 (or more) levels, the gameplay needs to change more than just speeding up. There need to be some new elements at play.
The levels themselves are probably too long. Shortening them could help with the repetitiveness. Alternatively, the gameplay and music could speed up *mid-level*, and you could have just 1 level or two levels. This way, the gameplay is dynamic within the same level and you maintain the entropy.
Lastly, I think the WASD and Jump are completely unnecessary and actually detrimental to the game. Ultimately, I will never need to Jump or move without the grapple (from what I undertstand). So including those two options alongside the grapple just confuses the player, and it just means that it takes the player longer to understand that the game revolves around the grapple.
Lastly, if you plan to keep developing this game, how do you add replay value? Do you compete against others either in terms of score or in terms of some kind of PVP? Do you have obstacles you must dodge or other level interactions you must engage with?
Lastly, I always imagined it would be cool if the game kind of flipped up side down, or rotated, or the goal moved, to make it feel like there is no true up and down, as there is in space. Just a random idea.
Anyway, thank you for reading my feedback, great job!
Really nice entry :) I liked the concept a lot and the character movement feels really good ! The game looks nice : it's clean, sober and quite simple to understand what's interractible. I also really loved the mood of the experience, and the music going crescendo is really helpful to that. The only thing I would have to say about the controls is that sometimes it's a bit "hard" to estimate what's the max distance you can hook. Otherwise, this game feels really polished, good job !
The music was awesome! The game atmosphere really made it for me. Simple mechanic yet effective and satisfying. Plus, I love that shader on the cubes, it looks really cool! It took me a while to get what was happening at first, and I appreciate how the game handles falling down in a very seamless way.
Really really enjoyed it, very interesting and simple idea executed really well. I love the materials for the cubes, and I love the music that accompanies you as you climb up. Especially that the music evolves each time. The grapple is fun, and I like how it slowly fades away, albeit sometimes that wasn't always easy to read for me. Very very good entry!
Minimal, but very aesthetic. I like the shader you used on the blocks especially. The music increasing in tempo each time was also a nice touch. The grapple was fun to use and felt reasonably easy to control, though it felt real back when lining up a shot only to have the block move away at the last few frames (perhaps check if the player is aiming at a block before moving it?)
Either way, this was a pretty fun, condensed experience. Good job!
Very nice entry! Beautiful visuals and audio (my only nit-pick on the visuals would be the font rasterisation looks a little off to me).
A simple but fun mechanic with nice correspondence to the them as well.
Awesome game. Looks like you had a lot of fun making it, guys! A thought come to my mind during the game: maybe you could do that when the player bumps into a cube, say, the green one, the background changes and the player is now in the green dimension. So each cube in itself would be a portal to another colored dimension, but this black hole on the top remains the same. That way the game would seem even more dynamic. And this reminds me of the Futurama episode where they had different dimensions in boxes and traveled by jumping into them
This is a really simple concept, but it's executed very wonderfully. The aesthetics are gorgeous, and very well done for the game jam. The music as well is the some of the best of the game jam. The gameplay mechanic is simple, but it's very well done. Grappling onto cubes is very satisfying, and there's enough control to it to prevent yourself from just slamming into the cube you're grappled onto. The introduction of each stage with the cubes slowly rising to the beat of the music is very well done, and sets the mood very strongly during the first time playing. There isn't much else I can say here, honestly. This is just a really well done experience. Wonderful work!
Beautiful! One thing it could benefit from IMO would be a space simulator controls, since you're almost alway looking up (like Freelancer or something). The way it is my mouse gets always locked in the middle of the screen. Apart from that, I have no nitpicks. GJ
The game looks and feels great! At first I wasn't a fan of limited time for the grapple, but I've learned to love it. It kinda made me feel like Spiderman, jumping from one cube to another, never stopping. It also added to the mood of the game, as it never lets you to just sit in one place, forcing you to keep going. The one thing I'm not fond on is the mouse lock, it just makes targeting blocks too difficult for no valid reason. There's enough difficulty with trying to judge distance and hitting blocks before they move away from you. And I have to say, when a block runs away just before you've grappled to it and you don't find another one, seeing all those blocks run away from you as you fall down to the beginning, it just makes me want to keep trying. Well done!