peace-of-cake-games 2021-10-04 21:47
Gosh, this is chaotic.... those Plip-Plops really enjoy making me spam buttons!
This game is adorable! The art fits the mood quite nicely, and the difficulty curve is perfect.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD49 → Plip-plop! Unstable Conditions of Care
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 771 | 3.50 | 35 | |
| Fun | 478 | 3.65 | 35 | |
| Innovation | 276 | 3.75 | 35 | |
| Theme | 528 | 3.77 | 35 | |
| Graphics | 1122 | 3.15 | 35 | |
| Audio | 471 | 3.53 | 35 | |
| Humor | 252 | 3.75 | 34 | |
| Mood | 703 | 3.47 | 35 |
Gosh, this is chaotic.... those Plip-Plops really enjoy making me spam buttons!
This game is adorable! The art fits the mood quite nicely, and the difficulty curve is perfect.
@peace-of-cake-games ahh thank you! literally just now I was finally able to beat the final level for the first time hahaha. i must have tried it 50 times by now. i kept questioning myself, if i made it too hard, but in my heart i knew it was just right, and i just needed to care for the plip-plops with everything i had.
i can't describe how rewarding it feels to finally achieve true plip-plop love!
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Great fun and unique concept, though eventually it just turned into absolute madness trying to take care of my plip-plops.
I love how insane the game gets by the last level! Frantically juggling four tasks is a fun concept, especially when they involve different control inputs (tapping vs holding). The art is cute and I really like the piano-themed sfx. Very nice work!
@thatmanrobin thank you for playing, absolute madness is exactly what I was going for!
@brainloaf-studio plip-plop insanity! yeah, I was going for the feeling of "it's easy to pat your head, or rub your tummy, but hard to do both at the same time". I'm really really happy you liked the music and sfx! I made it all using one piano library, just tweaking various parameters to get different qualities of sound. I wanted the final level to sound something like an absolutely chaotic classical piano score.
This is like tamagotchis on meth, really cool idea and well executed.
At the third level I am already overwhelmed and just mashing buttons - it gets crazy fast! Those plip-plops are pretty needy huh ;) Interesting game.
Fit perfectly to the theme. Oh man simple but damn I got confused with my keys. I like the music, it fits to the style.
@cireneikual222464 thanks for playing! i'm really pleased with the difficulty curve, level 1 is trivial, level 2 is surprisingly more difficult, given that it just adds one more task, 3 feels crazy, and 4 is absolute chaos.
a good fit to the theme, liked it a lot
@exmxpx "tamagotchis on meth"... this is my favorite description of the game so far, thank you!
Nice work! Very intense gameplay, but once you get a hang of it, it's a good challenge!
It's a very silly and fun game! Multi-tasking the little pets is very cool and funny. I do think that having the option of mouse and keyboard would be better. Otherwise, great game!
heey thanks for testing our submission, I followed you for the next jam. Great job with your game, the difficulty of the last level is insane xD, I barely made it. The audio feedback is fantastic, loved the sounds for the different actions, also plip plops are kawaii
Plip-Plips are just adorable!
Having to press buttons fast is not my favorite mechanic, but your implementation actually requires finesse, you can't just go button-mashing ;). The game gets really difficult really fast and the atmosphere is wonderfully hectic. I wonder how this would play on a controller.
It's a unique take on the theme and a nice jam job!
So.... All this week I was like "maaaan, I can't feel how to play my game and experience all that spectrum of feelings 'cuz I know how to play by heart", but you guys literally gave me my own experience with a way better learning curve than we did, thank you! I only don't like these strange music I get when I tap buttons, but MAYBE the problem is that I do to wrong, I need to figure out it, still. And this Plip-plops so cutie. Would love to see a pillow with them
@thatanonoword thank's for playing! i considered making the buttons clickable, but it would be impossible to play this game only pressing one button at a time, so i felt like mouse controls wouldn't add anything, just be confusing, since the game can't be beaten using them. touch screen could definitely work though!
unless you wanted to do both at the same time? like, would you have liked to be clicking and holding on the water/heatlamp, and using keyboard for everything else?
@gamedevtraum i'm so glad you liked the sound design!
@fabula-rasa yeah, controller would be cool! i think i'd put hot/cold on the triggers, food/water on the shoulders, and then maybe map wobbling the joystick to scooopidy-doopidy. i'm glad you appreciated the finess, it was very important to me to design the game such that blindly button mashing would lose just as much as not doing anything at all.
@yogurtthehorse i just played your game, how funny that we ended up doing such similar concepts! thanks for the kind words, i'm glad you got to experience a plip-plop emotional arc! for what it's worth, i think your visuals and UI are awesome, though pretty jumbled, but in kind of a warm, nostalgic way, much more fleshed out than mine.
These little plop plops eat and drink too quickly, when the next level was like "Congratulations, you adopted more plip plops!" I was like, THEYRE TOO MUCH IN THE FIRST PLACE :laughing:
This game was adorable, and I was laughing out loud while trying to keep these little plip plops fed. Cheers!
This artstyle is so cute! Amazing game, the concept is great and the actual gameplay is challenging and entertaining, well done!
Cute fun and definitely chaotic, love the cute graphics and how chaotic it is, which really fits the unstable theme, was not able to complete the final level but still enjoyed the game nonetheless.
This is a good way to take the unstable concept and I loved how the plip-plops just stare at you the whole time 🤣 This game was hilarious and cute at the same time!
this was really fun to play actually. Pressing all the buttons at once seemed like it might be overwhelming but in practice it was just the right difficulty curve and I managed to complete the final level on the 5th go :)
I really like how musical this game is - piano is such an expressive instrument and this game really illustrates that! I like the take on the theme, because by the fourth level things really do feel... unstable. It's really hard! The graphics are cute and go well with the audio. I think the one thing I would change would be to make the meters visible by default, as the first couple of times I did the food level I had no idea how well I was doing or why I was getting certain scores. Once I had the meters though, the game mechanics made a lot more sense to me. Nice job!
This game is really promising==> the combination of the music and the visual aesthetic is very winning. I wished there was a more immediate feedback about when your food/water/poop is in a bad state, because i felt like the fact that i had to basically guess as to how bad something was detracted from the game a lot. I thought it was a very unique take on the 'manage multiple things at once' type game but i thought the gameplay and feedback would have benefited from a little more tuning.
@shadowyxp-games that's exactly the feeling i was going for, thank's for playing!
@r3l0ad1 meow, i'm glad you liked it!
@patrickrmc yeah, the final level is a challenge for sure, glad you enjoyed it!
@jayjack i'm glad you liked the plip-plop stares, i really wanted to do more with their expressions, maybe in a post-jam version...
@adam-jewell oh yay, congratulations on beating it! i'm actually impressed it only took you five tries. i hope you liked the peaceful scene at the end!
@bamberga thanks for the feedback, i completely agree that the game needs more direct communication to the player about whether something is in a good or bad state. my plan was to add diffent facial expressions to the plip-plops near each item (food, water, poo), and have them look happy when it's good, sad when it's bad, and dead when it's really bad. that would make the player both understand what's going on better, and be more engaged with the plip-plops themselves, rather than just their food/water/poo.
@mediflect thank you so much for playing, i'm really glad you liked the piano sounds! i made all music and SFX in the game using the same piano library (except the shaker when you start a level), just changing different parameters to alter it sound for different parts. i really wanted the audio, visuals, and gameplay to all have this cohesive "plinky-plonky" feel.
that's an interesting comment about the meters, a lot of people who tried it actually found the meters made it even more difficult, just adding to the already chaotic visuals. the core experience i wanted to create was to really have the player feel really engaged with the plip-plops and their conditions, and i felt like showing the meters would create a disconnect from that.
i consider showing the meters "developer-mode" than anything, i enabled it in the final build i submitted as a last minute decision because i realized it was hard to visually understand what was happening in the latter levels
as i said to @bamberga , i definitely agree that i fell a bit short of the core experience i was going for; it's not obvious how the plip-plops are doing based on the visuals for their food/water/poo. i think having dynamic expressions that show them happy/sad/dead depending on the conditions of each item would have gone a long way in improving the player's comprehension of how well they're doing, and removed any need to see the underlying data via the meters.
This is really cool entry. I know that multitasking is not my best skill, but this is hard. Nevertheless I had a real blast playing it. The sound is just so fitting, great job done!
That got so intense! The plipplops are very cute and I want to look after them, and the audio adds a lot of pleasant charm. Definitely fits the theme as the game gets more unstable as it goes along.
However, if the game wasn't cute, but instead scary, this would be a great design for a horror game. Trying to manage all the food and poop and temperature etc in order to avoid a jump-scare would be terrifying. Maybe I just feel that way because as it stands the game is balanced to be very difficult :)
@jin9310 thanks for playing! i'm glad you liked the sound desing :3
@evangreenwood ahh, adding a horror twist, that's a great idea! like maybe the plip-plops turn on you and devour you alive if you fail. that would be such a fun surprise, since they're super kawaii and the graphics are bright and sunny normally, to get grimdark gruesome when you lose.