pinballjunior 2022-04-05 16:56
Nice game with cute art.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Sir Blocksalot
By jhandsy, drumgadget-433 and Fraz
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 725 | 3.50 | 41 | |
| Fun | 486 | 3.57 | 41 | |
| Innovation | 169 | 3.85 | 41 | |
| Theme | 310 | 3.97 | 41 | |
| Graphics | 250 | 4.19 | 41 | |
| Audio | 283 | 3.76 | 40 | |
| Humor | 673 | 2.95 | 39 | |
| Mood | 597 | 3.56 | 40 |
Nice game with cute art.
well done, the game is really cool to play
Very nice little game, love the pixel art!
Pixel art is top notch but could not for the life of me figure out what to do with the hammer
This pixel art is immaculate. I do think some kind of game over screen with how long you lasted would be nice, but in any case wonderful job team.
Great pixels, great soundtrack! Fun take on arcade block placers.
When you die holding some blocks the blocks stay when you revive...? I don't think it's intentional since it feels like when I can't really pick those up but I am also unsure since the blocks you do place properly stay. But expected bugs aside, Overall I liked the art and sounds. If I had one complaint about the game it would be that I can't last longer than 10 seconds but maybe I just haven't gotten the hang of it yet. The game as a concept and as a whole is pretty good, nicely done!
Really fun game. Took me a few tries to get the hang of it and pick up what all was going on, but once I did it was a lot of fun. Challenging, but not so hard I felt like I couldn't do anything. Having the warnings of where the fireballs would hit was a VERY nice touch that made the game playable, would have been too tough without that. Okay, think I'm going to go play some more.
@pwnzer Ah I thought I fixed that bug! Oh well. Yeah it's a little harder than it needs to be! It was a tough game to balance cause originally it was supposed to be multiplayer.
@cryptomnesic The hammer actually has a pretty big hitbox when you drop it, so you can break blocks and fireballs. Also you can repair the castle by picking it up and dropping it over and over again. I realize that its kind of odd to represent swinging a hammer by dropping it, but it felt like a cool design choice, haha.
It took a while to figure out what I was supposed to do, but once I understood I had a good time. It would be nice to have some score or something to keep track of how good you're doing. I don't know if it's something weird on my end but the music seemed to only play in the left channel? The sound effects played in both the left and right channel, but the music seemed to be stuck on the left.
Also, I did softlock the game a couple of times, when I spawned in a place where I couldn't move.
cool puzzler, that always keeps you on your toes. the difficulty seems really well balanced! i didn't get bored or frustrated - quite the opposite actually - i wanted to survive as long as i could. i would have loved a highscore-system, where you could see how well you did compared to your best run :)
Really nice art and music, gameplay is nice but it isn't very clear when does a run start and when does it end, sometimes it seems like you lost but the elements you placed before are still there, I'm not sure when is dying part of the run and does it reset the game
Really polished pixel art and chip music. =) I like the frantic gameplay, but wish it would ramp up a little more gradually so I can build up a better defense -- even if I know it'll get vaporized eventually. =) Nice work!
Cool idea with the mix of Tetris and defense. Great pixelart and fitting music :)
I find the hammer pointless, as repairing takes too long and it is much better to build more. Making it a single hit to repair to full might make the decision to build vs repair more interesting.
Congrats on the submission.
Dope soundtrack and art, and the gameplay was fun too! Having a score would definitely have helped me play it a bit longer to try and beat my score. I liked that the pieces were tetris shaped, having to slot them into place definitely added some difficulty! It may be interesting if the player is told what the next shape they are gonna pull is, so they can plan where to put it!
Well done!
Thanks for great responses, everyone. :)
@zwodahs Yeah, it can be difficult to use effectively. The hammer originally healed the castle SO quickly, that you could entirely forgo building your defenses, lol. I think we ran out of time trying to balance the castle healing-rate for one player. We had planned on this being a multiplayer experience, so P2 might may been tasked with castle repairs and fireball-smashing duty. I'll keep that in mind if we make v2.0! Thanks for your feedback!
@raphiell Thank you!! Yes, a score would have been a nice addition for sure. We wanted to do something along the lines of having a point value that counted up and showed you "how many citizens you saved" at the end of your run. A "next up" block queue was also on our list of features we wanted to add. Ahh, time is always a challenge with LD! Thanks for the feedback :)
This is a very nice entry! By far the best use of a grid based system I've experience in a long time!
Very cool take on the theme, and on the polyomino puzzle game. The bushes are a great mechanic to make the player think a little more, and to hurry up defeat without making things seem totally unfair. I do think it might have felt a little better to control if the player was locked to the same grid that the rest of the game is — always being between blocks gave it kind of a slidey feel to me.
@slecornu Thanks very much!!
@caeonosphere Glad you caught the bush detail! And that’s a good observation about the free character movement vs the grid placement. We may have to experiment with grid based movement! Thanks for the kind words and critique :)
Beautiful pixel art. This is what pushed me to test your game. The retro sound is nice too.
I can confirm there is a visual bug. hammer_visual_bug.png. When you die as you are holding a tetris piece, it is still displayed on the screen, but do not count as real blocks.
We really need an explicit feedback at the end of a game :
- show some score (how long have we played). - fix the bug and remove held blocks. - completely clear the boards. It's really weird that we keep rocks and bushes of our previous game. It would mean our high score of the current game depends on the previous ones.
Currently, we sometimes don't event realize we started a new game. The knight is put back in the middle of the board and the castle is healed, that's all. It's really too bad because it removes the incentive to play "just one more time to see if I will do better". I'm sure I would have naturally played about ten more games if there was a clear separation between each game.
It's hard to guess if the tetris piece we are holding can be put on the ground or not. And when not, it's hard to guess which part is blocking. Very often, I was clicking at random until I found a place to put my piece. Maybe the red squares that shows where your piece will be could change color to indicate if there is free room or not.
Anyway, nice game. Thank you !
Bem criativo, pena que fica repetitivo com o tempo...
Great game!!! I love the art for this one, and that's just the icing on the fantastic cake! :D
The art is really cool and I like the combination of tetris and tower-defense. I had trouble understanding how the orientation of the polyminos were determined.
Really cool old-school NES/arcade style fun. Great idea!
Seems simplistic at first but has some depth to it, i can see this being a game where if you spend enough time you can achieve real mastery. There are layers to it, when to repair, when to bulk up your defense, the tetris-style optimization of your layout, don't wall yourself in, keep an eye on the dragon!
And I only played for like a few minutes.
Graphics/sounds/theme match the old school mechanic nicely.
Some constructive criticisms: - the instructions should be in the game itself, instead of in the description - the outline of how your block will sit was hard to parse sometimes, for me. perhaps a clearer indication of which blocks it will fill up and which spaces are currently blocked would help - probably not helpful to have rocks and bushes, there should just be 1 type. I spent a while trying to see what the difference between them was mechanic-wise and there doesn't seem to be any.
This a great little game, you guys! Creative concept, great graphics, and audio was on point too. As others have pointed out, some feedback on how you did and clearing the board after deaths might be a nice touch. Also I did experience some performance issues. The longer a round lasted, the slower the game seemed to perform. Maybe there are some scripts running on every frame in the instantiated objects (rocks and bushes) that are causing some cpu lag? Not sure the cause. Regardless, this is a super solid entry that you guys should be proud of! Well done!!
Really nice & interesting one! Great pixel-art & music. I found out that somehow the block graphics stay there, probably after you die? :sweat_smile: There's also lose screen/text missing, as it always just resets, and I'm not sure what exactly happened - a score and castle HP bar would be welcome. Perhaps even a preview, of blocks that you could get when you're near edge (pink rocks) and want to get some. Overall, really great job! :smile:
Love the electric guitar and all music. I didn't found any score or you lose message, that's me most missing part IMHO
this game was fun once i figured out what to do. i found the dropping mechanic to be a little difficult but not too make it fun. thanks for making the game.
I would love to see how this turns out with different level patterns. Dropping could be more fluid, but really cool idea