tellyhead 2022-04-04 10:29
Didn't think I'd be playing a Pellet simulator today, yet here I am, fun game.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Pellet
By austin-sierra and fkhaller
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1082 | 3.20 | 57 | |
| Fun | 808 | 3.26 | 58 | |
| Innovation | 293 | 3.69 | 58 | |
| Theme | 576 | 3.75 | 58 | |
| Graphics | 1260 | 2.30 | 58 | |
| Audio | 842 | 2.80 | 58 | |
| Humor | 593 | 3.08 | 53 | |
| Mood | 1174 | 2.96 | 54 |
Didn't think I'd be playing a Pellet simulator today, yet here I am, fun game.
- Background image is bit noisy, making it hard to see the pellets - Game was getting some random hitches in the web build, couldn't see exactly what was triggering them. - Unclear why the game page asked for an age before allowing the game to be seen. - Interesting flip on on snake - Would have been nice to have some volume sliders for the music and SFX.
@adroitconceptions took off the age gate thanks for the heads up about that
Graphics are what they are and at first I was a bit disappointed because I used the wrong controls (AWSD) and didn't understand, then got the twist of it when using the arrows!
Really like the concept of flipping the roles in a snake game. Good job overall!
it gets a bit laggy once there are a few snakes on the screen but apart from that solid game!
Interesting idea. When I saw the screenshot I assumed I was going to be playing snake but in fact the snakes were going to be playing me. I liked how the music and sound effects.
My main gripe with the game is that it takes a bit too long for the games to get interesting. For the first 30ish seconds you can basically survive by doing nothing.
Overall, though, very fun idea and a great take on the theme!
Nice game! I love the concept. Music and sound effects are great. I think the game would benefit from having a smaller screen, as it seems a bit easy/takes too long to get difficult.
Interesting idea. - The moving camera was nauseating for me. - Also got some lags after a while. - I didn't realize who I was playing on the first run.
Reverse snake? Interesting idea, good job!
Love the reverse snake idea :D
I like your game and enjoyed playing it. Cool idea to play snake the other way around. I love the animation of the snake on the start screen :D - it's hilarious!
Little laggy, but it's fun and challengeing. good work!
Fun twist on a classic game, a bit laggy as people have mentioned and the camera movement was a bit jarring at times
I didn't notice if I could somehow lead the snakes, but interesting take! As people have already said, the background is really noisy and the camera seems off.
Good job!
@chaoseiro yes you can lead the snakes and even trick them into hitting walls although if they come across another pellet which is closer or you get too far away they will lose interest
Fun concept that matches the theme well. The presentation and controls are a bit rough around the edges. Thanks for streaming!
I love the idea, haven't seen any implementation like that of snake. I had a good laugh!
I scored 315 before my death. It was really interesting and fun experience, i had a good laugh! But i didn't understand how to control player character at first ;)
I loved the concept! I think that the size of the level coudl be tweaked so that there's less idle time for the player: the map is so big and the AI is so slow at the beginning that I barely had to move at all. But when the Blue AI comes out it's when the fun really begins!
This was super fun, also to see how the game gets to its knees once you play with 0 pellets. It is a fun concept that definetely has some potential. Well done!
I've never seen a snake game like this! Very cool idea! Music was very relaxing to listen to.
@andidebob yes, i had to do many tweaks last minute so that the pathfinding AI didn't struggle. When you remove all pellets and play on the big map every snake is at its maximum pathfinding distance so the calculations slow the game down. Given more time I wouldve centralized the AI rather than put one on every individual snake, its very resource intensive i learnt.
Very nice game. Some future improvements could be to indicate where a snake is about to go and to indicate where the player is at the start, maybe have some slight visual diffrentiation. Liked the music, sound and the art was simple yet effective.
Okay, so first off I love the music for this game. It's got a great sound to it, and I like the choice of instruments. Second, the innovation on this is great. It's really funny to play as a pellet trying to escape the snakes. It's a wonderful spin on an old concept, very cool. One thing I think would have been cool to include would be some way to kill the snakes, though I wonder if that would draw away from the theme of escaping the inevitable death? I dunno, I just really wanted to show those snakes up, what with their slithering and all. Overall really cool and fun game, I like it a lot.
Hey, so since @austin-sierra was so helpful with my game, I figured I'd share some tips regarding enemy ai here. So, first off, these tips are for quickly building an enemy's pathfinding, for an advanced system, there's other stuff you need to do. I'm gonna give some tips to make it SEEM like you wrote a decent ai.
1. Don't keep checking the path. I assume you're using A* or something like that to find your paths? You need to set a timer for each entity, and update the path when it hits zero. Otherwise, just let your enemies go in the "wrong" direction for a while.
2. Not all enemies need to be pathfinding during gameplay, you can just set some of the enemies to be moving in mostly random directions and the players won't notice because they're being chased by the "smart" enemies.
3. You can, and should, consider having shifting behavior based on proximity to the player. It's way cheaper to have your game check distance then to go through full pathfinding algorithm. You can either count the number of tiles if you're using a grid system, or use a distance formula, I like Euclidean - sqrt((x1-x2)^2+(y1-2)^2).
4. Don't be afraid to use a less complex algorithm for enemies if you're strapped for time. Your player doesn't know what's going on under the hood, and so long as the illusion of enemies thinking and trying to reach you is there, it doesn't really matter how you did it.
This is just some easy changes that can be made to enhance your ai performance with limited time. Most of these changes take very little time to do and can impact performance quite a bit. Also, a disclaimer, I'm not an expert on this. These are just tips from personal experience over the years, maybe some of them aren't 100% good advice. This is just advice to help you with making things quickly. Also, I'm not looking at your code, so I don't even know if you're already implementing some of this stuff. I just figured since @austin-sierra was so nice, even going so far as offering to share some of their code with me, I may as well share some knowledge myself. Take care, and once more, I do really like this game. It's very innovative and the music is wonderful. Okay. Bye now.
@circle you hit the nail on the head with all that, most of your tips i ended up doing in the last minute- wouldve been nice to have all those tips written out at the start of the jam lol! ya thanks cheers mate
@austin-sierra yea I figured you probably already implemented some of this stuff. Maybe someone else will read it and benefit. shrugs. It just takes up time to implement things though, throwing it all together. I guess jams like this hone that skill. Anyways, cheers.
The concept and gameplay are great, but you know that I have to say it: Graphics is kinda bad. Maybe you should find some free assets to enhance it. It will take some time, but the overall experience will rise dramatically because of how playable this game is :heart:
Interesting take on snake! As others have said, the background is a bit noisy, especially since your character is so small, and since the rest of the graphics are simple it would fit with simpler background graphics. Maybe a plain single colour wold be enough, and perhaps some simple grass strands for a bit of a visual flair. Player could be a bit bigger as well and I think the camera movement is mostly disctracting when you already can see the whole play area anyway.
Good work and interesting to read you thoughts on AI pathfinding!
Very interesting take on a classic game! At first I thought "this will be simple", but it got more challenging. This game could've looked a lot better with a less messy background, if you'd gone with a more clean look. But great work, nonetheless!
Nice spin on the Snake genre! And fits the theme too! I like it!
Haha that's fun to try to inverse role in a same game. Great idea, and quite well done, good job !
Fun game ! got to 313 but since 250 could not play properly anymore :/ the game was waaaay to laggy to be able to dodge
snake.jpg
Very cool game! really interessting take on the theme I like it a lot. The game lagged a little bit for me, but that might be because I played on a 4k monitor
Excellent idea and fun. Pacing a little off. Player Pellet red also? As mentioned a little laggy. With tweaks and spice would make a cool mobile type game.
I can't play too long it's start lagging. There are few things to improve like aligning pellets with snakes, but I think it was hard to dev a AI + the game so congratulations for that for a ludum! I'm frustrated that I can't play more!
Cool :) At first I didn't understand what to do, then it became easier :) When there are a lot of snakes, it's hard to play. Part because of the red snakes, part because of the glitches of the game! It is better to remove the camera offset!
Refine the game and release it! And maybe it will become one of the famous masterpieces of casual games! :)
snake2.jpg
I did it :)
@ausstein holy crap bro
some more notes from my highscore hunting:
maybe having the snakes not spawn from the corner you are closest to could be an improvement. it is incredibly frustrating when a snake spawns basically right on top of you.
I can confirm the lags do not come from the 4k monitor but probably from the pathfinding and collision resolve
Nice game! It was a really interesting idea, taking the game of snake and flipping it on its head, and it works surprisingly well! I particularly liked the AI on the snakes, it made things a lot more dynamic and interesting than just having them move about randomly. More and more of them showing up as time went on was a good feature as well, it kept up the challenge and it was great to get them to collide with one another. It's very impressive that all the AI and movement was coded in just a weekend, so congrats on making the game, I had fun!
Nice flip on the classic snake game. I liked the slow build up of the difficulty. I think the camera movement is not necessary as it cause to much movement and detracts from the visibility of the game. I liked the fact that you have the same sprite than regular pellets, it forces the player to move to remember where he is, therefore putting himself in danger. That was a nice entry, well done! After a few tries, managed to reach around 200 score, pretty impressed that some people got higher scores ^^
Fun game. Judging from the screenshots, it just looked like a snake game but playing it, it wasn't one. Creative idea turning snake around and being the thing that gets eaten by a snake.
For the movement, it seems like if you're moving diagonal, you're faster. Ever heard of the Pythagorean theorem? a² + b² = c². So for example, you're moving 1 to the right and 1 to the top at the same time. Your total distance traveled isn't 1 but square root of too because of the Pythagorean theorem.
So if you're moving diagonal, you have to divide the speed by sqrt 2 to keep it consistent
Fun game! When there are a lot of snakes on the screen, it gets a bit slow I felt. @circle already gave great feedback about that, which is better and more thought trough than what I would come up with ^^
Also the screen moving while the pellet moves, is a bit distracting.
The music is fun! Did you play that yourself? Or is it some program like garageband?
@wouter52 Yeah i played it myself on my banjo
Fun game, I like the role reversal from the classic snake ahaha, and I love the instrument played yourself! I tried recording my kalimba but couldn't get the sound quality nice enough like you've seemed to!
I won't reiterate stuff other people have mentioned, but here are a few quick and easy tips to polish a game very quickly:
- Use a consistent color scheme - I’m terrible at picking out colors, so I use a color scheme generator when I need a new one, like https://coolors.co/e9d758-297373-ff8552-e6e6e6-39393a. If you don’t like the colors you can just reroll them, or lock some of them in and just reroll the ones you don’t like
- Pick a fun font - There are lots of default fonts installed, but if you don’t like any of them, you can pick out a custom one from a site like https://www.dafont.com/ (just make sure the license permits whatever use you intend it for), download it, drag it into your Unity Assets folder, and it’s ready to go! It’s actually kind crazy what a different font can make; getting one that matches the vibe you’re going for can completely change feel of the game!
- If you're working in Unity, add lots of particles! Don't go overboard and flood the screen with them. My philosophy is that almost every action and event should have a reserved, appropriate particle effect, but even just adding a bit here and there can have a surprising difference in making a game feel more polished. This can be the most time-consuming to implement of these tips, but there are also very simple ways to implement them that don't even require code. Examples: have any moving elements leave a trail of particles; have important buttons, characters, or items radiate particles; create particle effects that go off when an item/character is spawned in
I played Pellet at my Twitch Channel, and it's a good game but there are some issues that I hope it can be fixed with time like the assets, but the game is really calm and good.
Ah btw please make a button to mute or lower the audio, because the song is good but with time it gets tired :/
I really liked the idea of the game and it was easy to play =) I was a bit put off by the snake on the cover page and main menu (mostly because of my caterpillar phobia).
Thank you for sharing your game with me on Twitch (MsMiaChar). The playthrough can be found at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1451579897?t=00h01m34s
@charq @gabriel-dias-oliveira-de-almeida thanks for playing on your streams!!!
Really fun and unique game! I love the sort of country vibes the music gives. The snakes being able to eat each other adds a lot of strategy.
Some notes: The camera movement is a bit odd. Adding WASD as an alternate control scheme would be nice.
Good game though, especially for a first jam game.