FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD49 → Core of Color

Core of Color

By qthree

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall2363.5427
Fun3633.1027
Innovation1593.6627
Theme3213.4427
Graphics2583.4627
Mood1483.5426

Comments

tailsgamedev 2021-10-03 13:46

Nice game thanks for sharing ^^

2021-10-03 15:55

Nice game, klevaya igra prawda

fabdynamic 2021-10-03 22:14

This is really cool its relaxing and hypnotic and fun. you collect molecules of certain colors and then put them together with others of that color to upgrade your ship. I really liked this and got pretty zoned out. I got confused near the end of my play session but I bet if I try it again I'll get even further. Nice Work!

richard-baron 2021-10-04 02:33

This is a really nice looking game and the way everything moves around is really nice. Would be cool if there was a little more risk/reward systems in place since I'm mostly just moving around randomly... Cool idea!!

zachary-shah 2021-10-04 02:59

beautiful and perfect in everything it sets out to be. I would like to see more video-game elements to it, as the only real progression you get is the orbit growing bigger. A sort of upgrade system based on the colors(the more red you collect, the faster you become; the more green you collect, the better particles stay attached). Great physics and cool visuals!

qthree 2021-10-04 03:26

@richard-baron Thanks! It was more hardcore at first, but I ended up making it more casual so that most players could complete it in a few minutes. For example, free dots are becoming grey when you drain them with your core, but right now drain rate is forgiving because new dots won't spawn until the end of the game round. When rate was high, by the end of the round most dots was gray and game was less satisfying and ugly looking. So it ended up like that because I was afraid I won't have time to rebalance it completely. Which is to say, game can become completely different with just few constants tweaks.

@zachary-shah I'm mostly programmer, not artist or game designer, so I've done what I do best xD I had in mind mechanic that player needs to balance different colors, so that core must consume equal amount of each color or it becomes unstable, but I'll leave it for 2.0 version.

richard-jiang 2021-10-04 03:56

I don't even know how to describe this game in words, but this is incredibly fun!! Also reminds me of Agar.io ;)

parker-nalch 2021-10-04 04:25

What a neat experience! The particles had maybe a little too weak attraction to my same-colored dots, but other than that I enjoyed it.

qthree 2021-10-04 04:43

@parker-nalch Dots' attraction and repelling depends on hue (H in HSL color encoding). If two dots have tones more than 36 degrees apart - they start to repel each other. So you need to find free dots which looks more like your orbiting dots. hsl.png

qthree 2021-10-04 04:46

@richard-jiang Well, game can look only this much unique with only dots and without any graphical assets or shaders xD

2021-10-04 05:37

Part of this feels like an effect you had to have observed while playing around one day, and just had it ready to pull out for this jam. It's a great toy, and very fun to look at and play with, but I would have appreciated some game elements on top. A score or some sort of metrics, maybe.

qthree 2021-10-04 05:54

Anonymous, thanks! Maybe, I'll try to make multiplayer version of it later and introduce competitive gameplay elements.

caudatecoder 2021-10-04 12:45

It's nice to play around for a little while. It has potential.. like being a competitive multiplayer game? Good job!

bridgeonastick 2021-10-04 12:50

It was really nice, very relaxing. It's a bit hard to keep all your dots inside your own gravitation, sometimes I have a large cluster that's following me that just dips out, maybe because i turn around too fast. But it was still an enjoyable experience for sure!

evogengames 2021-10-04 12:53

Nice game. Really lacked some relaxing music/sounds though

Well done overall!

qthree 2021-10-04 13:15

@caudatecoder Yeah, it needs a lot of fine tuning, I stopped when it was good enough (after some 10 hours xD).

@bridgeonastick What did you expect? It's unstable! It's surely a feature, not a bug! I swear!

@evogengames I had an idea to make runtime sound generation, but I have no experience in this, so I ditched such aspiration for better times.

bewelge 2021-10-04 15:24

Fun game :) But my green blob kept going turquoise and subsequently rejecting me :-/

erikengineengineer 2021-10-04 16:09

Nice Game with the colors and the black hole! I would have loved to hear a spacy scifi soundtrack!

zantze 2021-10-04 18:01

Thanks for reviewing my game!

This is definetely one of the better implementations of the theme I've seen so far! It's quite difficult to get all the colored dots since the dots are so unstable. It was fun to mess around for a bit with it, and I even got all the colors! Just wished I could have gotten all the dots on the wheel somehow. Great job, and good luck with the ratings!

hotaloca 2021-10-04 18:04

It is really satisfying to watch these dots get organized by color. It annoyed me thought that i always lost all the dots, it felt like I cannot move slow enough to avoid that, but even with fastest speed i felt it was a bit slow to move around. Knowning the Ludum Dare theme, i expected some chain reactions - maybe colors could have sticked around longer but when some sort of a chain reaction starts, thats when the problem occurs. Anyway, really nice job! Congrats.

wafflecomposite 2021-10-04 18:29

What a calm and soothing experience, really needed it after everything that I played today!

Nice game, thanks!

qthree 2021-10-04 19:15

@bewelge I bet one need good screen to notice subtle hue differences :smirk:

@hotaloca Well, is reaction at the end of the game not chain enough? :shrug:

@wafflecomposite I position my game somewhere between `Rubik's Cube` and `Pop it` :rofl:

rocketcat241 2021-10-04 20:20

Nice game, it was a little confusing at first but once you understand what's going on it's pretty relaxing.

justcallmebb 2021-10-04 21:11

LOVE the aesthetic! It's a shame there isn't a high score system or anything, but as it stands this is a pretty little game. Some relaxing background music or sound effects would do it a lot of good though :relaxed:

pennycook 2021-10-04 23:00

It takes a while to get the hang of it, but once I got going it was pretty cool. I've not played anything like it before -- very innovative!

At the very beginning I found it quite difficult to tell what I was controlling, and my brain didn't want to accept that the empty red circle was orbiting my character. Maybe drawing the orbits would help, or using a distinct shape... Maybe it's just me.

circle 2021-10-05 00:51

This looks so cool. It's like a mini light show. On one hand I wish it had more bright lights and animation, but I also think that it would fry my computer. You could totally expand something like this in all kinds of directions. It's just really interesting to look at. I wonder what how long it took to tweak the algorithm that makes the orbs circulate like that. It must be pretty complicated right? I dunno, I'm really curious now. I kinda want to go prototype some particle physics. I'm not going to obviously cause my brain is broken from all the caffeine and sugar I've consumed over the past couple of days, but still it's a very inspiring piece of art.

christianb 2021-10-05 01:45

Simple, and absolutely mesmerizing. Though I did find myself wishing I had a nice, chill track to listen to while I chased colored dots around the screen.

I kept losing dots (what felt like) randomly and had to hurry to get them back. I just wanted to have all the colors!

Fun game overall, nice work!

loveapplegames 2021-10-10 15:49

Wow, that's a strange game! As is, it's enjoyable in the sense of a toy rather than a game. The visuals and behaviour are intriguing. The core seemed to expand by itself. Would be interesting to see how to add game-like goal-based challenge to it. The core moves rather slowly, I think it's better to have faster movement to increase the pace.