hansj 2022-04-05 13:46
Really cute and fun game! Funny that we weren't the only ones thinking about diminishing light and keeping the dark away!
Would love the dialogues to move a little faster!
Something to be proud of, great contribution!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Flickerlight
By GoogleFrog, avareii, david-liddelow, istaera, Hoheinheim, Valintone, Wolvi and Leris
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 98 | 4.08 | 25 | |
| Fun | 600 | 3.45 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 552 | 3.45 | 25 | |
| Theme | 150 | 4.17 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 423 | 3.97 | 25 | |
| Audio | 179 | 3.93 | 24 | |
| Humor | 663 | 2.97 | 22 | |
| Mood | 85 | 4.21 | 25 |
Really cute and fun game! Funny that we weren't the only ones thinking about diminishing light and keeping the dark away!
Would love the dialogues to move a little faster!
Something to be proud of, great contribution!
I love it. It felt like the dialogs should have been maybe skippable and I would like to use keyboard more instead of my mouse.
The music, sound effects, lightning, NPCs with different dialogues and ways to do stuff, crafting all of that is just amazing. Very nice thing you have done there!
The story is also very very nice with a gentle touch!
Download link for Linux seems to be broken, I found it at https://github.com/NeptunianAxolotl/LD50/releases/tag/LD-Jam-Fixes -- also had to download Love2D, but then it worked! Ran a bit slow, not sure if there's a release mode I should have ran it in or something.
Was pretty cool -- I like the take on the theme, and the art was great, especially the conversation-profile art. Would have been cool to have more stuff to build that would affect things since it started to feel a litle samey cutting down trees and recruiting people. I accidentally threw the only piece of coal I found into the fire, and couldn't find a pick, so I couldn't make a coal bin.
Excellent! Thank you very much!! Unexceptable atmosphere of pre-apocalypse, according to music of course. Really love your game, spent about 30 minutes and going to spent more. A little problem with optimisation, when bonfire starts to burn really wide.
Love the game, I was a bit slow as to finding the axe. But great dialogue, graphics and design!
Played over 20 games in LDJam 50 so far and this is honestly my favorite by a stretch. Everything about the game was great. Did you make the background music yourself? I was indifferent about it at first but as the 'lore' revealed itself I realized how somber the music is with its distortions and all. After about 10 minutes in I was really tense and couldn't even tell why. I played the WebGL version and it started lagging after about 20 minutes, so I downloaded the Windows version to try later tonight. GREAT JOB!
This has some really nice atmosphere, though the sense of inevitability feels kinda slow, but maybe that's the point. This isn't rushed, by any means, and the slow pacing of the dialogue forces that, often frustratingly for me.
Overall though, I like the idea!
Very interesting game! Great atmosphere and addictive gameplay. Perhaps it would be more convenient if it showed what the fireflies are doing and where they are.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone! There's always that moment of tension before the first comment - but now I know exactly what's wrong with our game and I can relax! ;)
@hansj @taaada @otterfaelure that's a fair point about the dialogue - I got so caught up in balancing tension vs. readability that I completely neglected usability. Also, every line is manually timed - which is great for attention to detail, but bad when sleep-deprived people (like me) forget to update timings during dialogue edits and one line ends up hanging around for 5+ seconds.
Next time we do dialogue, we'll put in a 'next line' or 'skip interaction' button. Some of the interactions are kind of verbose, but I think a lot of them could be condensed into a summary paragraph for people who aren't into dialogue.
Certainly we also didn't expect the game to be as long as it ended up being. I thought to myself - 20 minutes, max. Instead, if you use up all your resources as intended, I suspect it could last about an hour plus (edit: I had a good run that went for 43:42; I think 50 minutes might be possible, but I don't think 60 is). Regrettably, we didn't have time to properly test all the interactions between fuel harvest/consumption rates etc. But this means I can play the game myself (semi-) blind later, so ngl I'm pretty stoked about that :)
@vgel the game is designed to scale - once you find tools for things, you can hand them to people to do treecutting/mining jobs - or task them with wandering around and finding these tools themselves, provided they are close enough. Unfortunately, we lacked time to polish this progression so as a result there's a bit of a barrier between early game and late game that requires either luck or concerted wandering around.
@truebach thanks for playing! I'm not the guy to help with optimisation, but I'll boop one of our other devs and he might have suggestions. LOVE can be a bit temperamental and chuggy sometimes depending on how it's run. In the meantime, all I can recommend is to try the Windows version, if that's not what you've been trying already.
@leolferraz that was meeeee <3 I'm glad it had the desired effect! We tried something new this time - the moment we had the theme and mood more or less nailed down, I put the music together Day 1. This allowed us to use it as a guideline for the mood over the rest of the game. You guys are the final judges, but I think it helped.
Given that my usual approach to music is sitting down at 6AM on Tuesday (Australian time) in a panic, this approach was definitely more relaxing (and I could stress about other things instead!).
(I also wrote bgm for when you see the stars, but we didn't have time to put in the triggers for it. I put it up on my soundcloud [here](https://soundcloud.com/shoulderdrake/flickerlight-starry-sky-bgm). The default bgm is there as well.)
@baka hahaha haha haaaaa - no, I kid, this is actually a really good idea. I just wish we'd had enough time to do stuff like this. As it was, we didn't even consider scoping it in :)
Thank you all again for playing! I'll put up a post in the next day or two outlining all the scope creep that got cut last minute :)
Ah man, the dialogue artwork is super adorable! The pixel graphics are nice too, especially the trees! I love the little interactions among the bees, and how some are cooperative, and others tell you to get lost. It's fantastic. Great work!
Guys! I'm back again. Think, your game impress me more than anything else. Today I sat to my keyboard and just start to playing some piano improvisation. After few minutes I have cycled on one strange little solitude theme. And how was my astonishment, when I realised, that was the theme from that forest!! My wife has confirmed, that was it. Wanna play it more and more. Honor to your composer. Great, Great!
@truebach thank you very much <3 your comment made my day! In case you missed it in my previous message, you can find the track [here](https://soundcloud.com/shoulderdrake/flickerlight-main-bgm).
It may also please you to hear that we've slowly started poking at a post-jam version of the game :) no ETA or details or anything, because there's still a lot to do, but the work is being done!
Played it for like 20 min? Really fun to play :)
Really addictive... before I knew it I was on a 30 minute run! Such a beautiful game and gorgeous audio, too. It's so expansive, plenty of resources to consider at all times, such good balance! I'd love to see some "mining/chopping" animations if this was made full scale, (obviously- I'm not expecting this in a jam!), it's such a beautiful game as is though!
Very charming game with amazing 2D artwork. I was constantly talking to one of them who wouldn't be my friend. Exploring the area trying to find new things to build and make. I'm sure I didn't discover something with the emeralds but I survived over 30 minutes so im not complaining, I think I did well enough. very well made for a game jam and I wish I could see some more polish if you had more time with animations of something perhaps this could be a full game easily.
This game looks and sound breath taking. But the light kinda was that big of a deal for me. I would loved to see it burning a bit faster. And maybe I found a bug.. If you close the build tab by pressing on build rather then the x it froze or maybe I was just stupid. But overall an awesome game and the AI really suprised my much respect.
@tigerchris2000 Thank you for your feedback! I tried to re-create your bug and it's allowing me to close the window by pressing the build button without issue, is there any chance ESC may have been bumped or pressed? As this does pause the game.
[Blog post!](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/flickerlight/the-looming-spectre-of-scope-creep)
@kitkii thanks for playing! As much as a character falling into depression and refusing to talk further fits the mood, I'd love to add more complexity to these guys in future. Maybe they mutter to themselves about something, and open up if you bring them a specific item?
@realtanhen did you know, I threw together a list of 50+ things to polish and add in post-jam, and job animations weren't even on it? Thanks for the reminder XD this would do a lot to help immersion!
A like this game a lot. So many features. I wanna see the full post-LD release.
A nice game. I love the gameplay and the mechanics are surprisingly complicated, in a good way I mean. Though the mac version does not play very smoothly, I dunno if it's about the optimization.
Thanks @k4m1, I wouldn't expect the mac version to work well since we just take it on faith that the mac build works well. Nobody tests on mac.