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Nighty Night, Nosferatu
Nighty Night, Nosferatu
By shawn-moore
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 23 | 4.09 | 37 | |
| Fun | 43 | 4.02 | 37 | |
| Innovation | 12 | 4.32 | 37 | |
| Theme | 211 | 3.81 | 37 | |
| Graphics | 210 | 3.71 | 37 | |
| Audio | 87 | 3.77 | 37 | |
| Humor | 156 | 3.39 | 35 | |
| Mood | 107 | 3.71 | 37 | |
Comments
jdeedubs
2022-04-04 21:49
This is a really solid game! I love the animation when lil' Nosferatu explodes. I died quite a lot, and I liked it. I felt like the difficulty was fair. I'm really impressed with the shadows, and the way you have to predict/react to how the sun affects all of the pieces on the map. This is some deep gameplay, and I think you can get a lot of mileage out of it if you feel like making this into a bigger game. I would have loved if the scenery was a bit more...vampire themed? Like gargoyles and mausoleums, gothic things that would evoke the Stoker aesthetic. Anyways, top notch work!
muriel
2022-04-04 22:08
I really liked this game, good music, good art, solid mechanics and the best of it is that it reminds me to real life.
As a programmer I feel like Nosferatu when I go to the beach xD so I had experience already :)
Jokes aside good job, thanks for this entry :)
Thank you both so much for the kind feedback! :) I’m glad you enjoyed the game! Definitely hear you with the gothic aesthetic - that’d be the first thing to improve if I had a few more hours :)
Fantastic! Great music and visuals, controls are clean, and the game's enjoyable throughout. It's a concept I haven't seen done, and it's even more fun that it fits the theme quite well.
mwillsey
2022-04-05 03:05
Super fun game! I loved the mechanic: super intuitive and requiring no explanation, but it allowed you to create some really challenging levels! Great work on the level design especially, and overall awesome game :)
jcmonkey
2022-04-05 03:39
the in air velocity made it hard to try and jump on the small blocks, and when i landed on the small blocks it felt slippery.
Thanks for bringing your game by my stream for playtesting! If you’d like to revisit the play and commentary you can view the highlight at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1447203097
Thanks again for all the feedback, and I enjoyed your stream Marc! Sorry the game didn't work well for you jcmonkey :(
This was fantastic! Phaser huh? I'm def going to have to check out the streams. I actually didn't read anything I just click the image that said play and the game started. The game is so well done I immediately understood the objective and loop, then got sucked into it. Amazing 12/10, would play again lol
zack-hd
2022-04-06 05:10
I love the main mechanic, the level design is superb and was masterfully done especially considering how much time you had to make this. The twist near the end caught me off guard. Incredible puzzle platformer, well done
Gosh, thank you @clemonades and @zack-hd ! In jitspoe’s steam when you saw the last level you said “oh my god” and that one comment made my day :)
jitspoe
2022-04-06 08:26
Had fun playing this on stream! Really cool that you did the whole breakdown of development stats and such.
Thanks for the great game!
I'm super impressed that you did this for a compo! It looks amazing and the music is good, tbh that is the most impressive part of this compo entry, that you got such great original music in there in the short time. It's also very fun and funny! Also Phaser +1 stars for that! Phaser FTW!
jcg
2022-04-07 03:20
Really awesome use of lighting here! What drove you to use illuminated.js? I think as you indicated, there are some frame pacing issues on Firefox, appearing longer into play.
The numbers in this submission are a submission in their own right; awesome to get that insight :)
I delayed the inevitable, but perished 12 times.
I liked this one a lot. Fit the theme well, and I liked how freeform some of the levels were. Definitely seems like it could be extended post jam with more levels. Good job!
milq
2022-04-07 03:38
The idea is great and I loved it, it's very addictive! The music is a bit off (I'm not a big fan of procedurals). Also if I could vote for all your work in reporting your process I would vote you with the highest mark, great game!
kimberly
2022-04-07 03:43
I so badly want to give critical feedback for this game, but I'm having trouble finding anything to stick my claws into and tear apart. With that much finished in this little time, it's clear you know what you're doing. Soo.. instead I'm just going to spitball ideas as if there had been more time. :wink:
The movement system felt pretty good, although jumping on single wide platforms was a bit tricky.
I'm curious if the timing on the sunlight death mechanic would still be intuitive without the UI above the character.
A more vampire-style tileset, maybe a white sun and some leaded glass? :eyes:
The weird dithering effect on the gif compression actually looks kinda cool. Honestly no clue how that could be reproduced, but I want to see more of that in games.
Oh yeah, what does the M key do?
The game was really fun, I like the growing intensity of the light as you start to scorch alive... or unalive? I would have liked to see a number maybe, to know which level it was when I finally gave up(I'm just bad at games).
The whole avoiding the sun was super fun though and it was a good challenge to figure out what my next steps should be if I didn't want to turn into dust.
2022-04-07 08:00
Really great game. I liked how it was sort of an "anti-platformer" in that getting to the highest peak wasn't really the goal. Made you think. The polish on this was also really good. Felt very slick to play :smile:
Really nice platformer concept. The artstyle is really nice, I love the way the shadows give the game this pseudo 3D feel similar to Super Mario Bros. 3. The controls were nice and tight although the general character speed was a bit too fast for my taste. Also unfortunately every time I left the shadows my framerate tanked hard so I could not finish this one. What I've seen is really nice though :D
@jcg Bummer the lights slowed down for you! Illuminated definitely has the best looking shadows, and it worked well enough on my development machine. It wasn't until I tried it on an another computer that I realized I needed some optimization :) And yeah, I couldn't just use the lighting system from the game engine I was using, since the shadows needed to be extremely pronounced and overexaggerated for the game mechanic to work at all.
@dae-udain Heck yeah! 12 deaths is the lowest I've seen so far!
@milq hehe I am absolutely rubbish at composing and playing music, you caught me ;) Glad the gameplay made up for it!
@kimberly thanks for the constructive feedback! I shouldn't have put in any one-tile-wide platforms, yeah, I didn't really intend for that ever to be part of the solution. I just needed to completely block the sun at the beginnings and ends of most levels :) The little health bar is from me overcommunicating the game mechanic, but yeah maybe not needed since the rest of the sounds and visuals communicate it pretty effectively as well! And I agree, I do think the single biggest improvement would be to all-in on the vampire aesthetic throughout the art. That one's mostly due to poor time management. :) The M key is a debug feature I left in for showing a meteor shooting star sort of effect, no impact on gameplay! I wasn't entirely satisfied with the visual of it so I'd meant to come back to it and never did. You're the only one who's found the M key so far. Anyways, thanks again for the thoughtful suggestions!!
@payaosito hehe yeah having a level indicator and maybe level select would be a good idea. There are 13 levels in the game. If you feel like it was that one particular level that made you give up, you can use the `n` key to skip levels. But either way glad you enjoyed what the game was going for!
@pcarl anti-platformer is a good way to put it! :) A similar dynamic is the players I've watched often immediately rush to get to the other side of the level for no particular reason, only to get caught in direct sunlight. Usually the better plan is to wait for the right timing. So it's also maybe a little anti-speedrun too! Gosh I didn't realize I created a commentary on platformers lol
@initialposition aww I'm really sorry about the framerate :( if you feel inspired, maybe another browser would work better. For example I was surprised Chrome seems to be a little bit more laggy than Edge. Anyway your reference to SMB3 is making me blush. :)
marvis
2022-04-08 21:37
wow! good idea = good game!
Excellent game, with a smart concept and well executed. I thought the player was a little bit too quick on his feet though, was not so easy when the landing area was just one tile wide :laughing: and apart from that, I did suffer from framerate issues which made it even harder to platform. The SFX and music are quite fitting. All in all, awesome submission, great job !
Super impressive and very polished, especially for a compo game! Unfortunately I experienced the same long stutters as some of the other people here when leaving the shadows (Win10, Firefox), but overall the experience was good. Great work!
(P.S. I'm also a huge fan of the data you collected and graphs of how much time you spent doing what, the insight is really cool. Maybe I might try doing something similar next jam.)
Thanks for the kind comments :heart:
@forgin-bits @dingledorf sorry the game was laggy for you! :( If you feel inspired to give it another shot, trying a different browser *might* help. Having a smooth frame rate also does make the controls a lot easier to manage.
And yeah I geek out on Quantified Self so it's always fun to figure out how I'm spending my time and how I might better allocate my time next jam! Like this one clearly proves I could spend less time on coding and more time on art :)
dans17
2022-04-09 04:27
Wow, this is an excellent concept and very well polished! The level design was great, and I loved the way the lighting gets progressively more red the more you stay in the sun. It took me 63 deaths, but I was finally able to beat it.
Really cool idea! It almost felt like a spatial puzzle to figure out what path you needed to take to stay in the shadows. My one criticism is that the shadows' edges were very diffused the farther they were casted from the objects; makes sense in real life, but in this game it meant it was difficult to know where they started and ended (especially with the second blue sun). I'd personally like to see this game with crisp solid shadow edges. Still, this is a wonderful experience, nicely done!
Really great idea for a puzzle platformer! The level design was great, the sound effects and music were well made, especially with the organs, gave off a vampire-feel to it! The platformer controls felt very tight, only had an issue on the smaller platforms, but by issue I really mean me being bad at precision platforming lol. The variety in the gameplay as the levels progressed added a good level of challenge and the over polish was amazing with the death effects, the screen-shake and the end of level animations with the platforms disappearing: felt very retro and I really liked it!
I especially thought the spinning platforms were a great addition because of the way they force traversal of the level and stop the player from just "camping" a spot. From a puzzle perspective, the buttons attached to the turning platformers required a good deal of puzzle solving, and they were really fun to use!
The stages with the two light sources felt a bit punishing as it was sometimes hard to distinguish where you could stand for it to be safe, I'm sure if this was a full game, the more levels I played using it I would get use to it though! The text maybe should have been a more obvious pixel art font, that sounds like such a nit pick, because it is, but just for some extra retro points!
It was quite hard to think of any critical feedback because of the fact that this is such a well polished game with a great concept and executed amazingly. Overall, I really had a lot of fun playing and this is an amazing entry!
Overall deaths: 25 😎
@dans17 glad you enjoyed it! \m/
@diego-escalante Yeah this is secretly a puzzle platformer disguised as an action platformer! :) That's a great point about the shadows. Having a diffused edge to them looks visually better but yeah, it does come at the pretty steep cost of muddying the core mechanic. In case you're curious, here's a comparison of the difference:
shadows.png
Actually, you know what... just for you I snuck in a secret hotkey: if you press `c` during the game it toggles between crisp shadows and diffuse ones. Enjoy! :)
@black-flag thanks for very kind words! 25 deaths is really well played!! Glad you enjoyed the spinning platforms and what I called the drawbridges... those were the two twists I added to open up the design space: automatically-moving platforms that cast shadows, and manually-moving platforms that cast shadows. :) And yeah for the font I like your idea, I wonder if I could find a gothic-looking pixel art font to make a more consistent experience :D It didn't even cross my mind haha. That last level was intended to be a challenge, but I think you're right that it was more "incidental challenge because the UI is a bit hard to read" rather than the puzzle I was going for with the rest of the game.
tigerj
2022-04-10 15:06
I thought this was awesome and very unique. It's a very creative cool game. I enjoyed each puzzle and the secret at the end :smirk: Overall this is one of my favorite submissions and was a hit on the stream.
highlight: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1451440143?t=04h45m02s
P.S. I also realized I streamed your LD43 pig headed pirate and LD44 jump coins.
I'm working to migrate the database over to my archive page on itch, they will be available soon (highlights and links).
@tigerj thanks for playing my game! I’m sorry I missed your stream but I did watch the vod last night. I’m glad you enjoyed it!! You were wondering what the white dotted line was that showed up toward the end - it’s meant to be a shooting star :)
tigerj
2022-04-10 15:24
@shawn-moore it's really cool. great job.
Great game I love the mechanics! Also, the vampire setting is nice, the music fits well.. overall great job! I'd love to have this idea myself :)
charq
2022-04-11 03:30
The game was very cute and fun to play! I definitely struggled with some of the levels but got lucky with a few =)
Thank you for sharing your game on my Twitch stream (MsMiaChar). Please feel free to revisit my feedback at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1447734991?t=00h14m05s
mathglo
2022-04-13 03:24
Great use of the theme. I think the choice of background and graphics could match more the vampire (like old mansion, etc.) Other than that, I find it very amusing and fun! Great entry!
I liked the variety of the puzzles you've managed to create around the same idea of avoid the sun... But I almost didn't manage to finish the game because sometimes it would almost freeze my browser - For a moment I thought the last level made the whole tab blank on purpose as it coincided with the two suns meeting in the sky 😅
Gave your game a little shout out on the GitHub blog post @ https://github.blog/2022-05-05-ludum-dare-50 🙂
@lee-reilly so cool! thank you!! 😄
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