Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Salary Zombies
By scrawny
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 174 | 3.68 | 24 | |
| Fun | 186 | 3.61 | 24 | |
| Innovation | 48 | 4.06 | 24 | |
| Theme | 108 | 4.04 | 24 | |
| Graphics | 231 | 3.63 | 24 | |
| Audio | 284 | 3.25 | 24 | |
| Humor | 224 | 3.11 | 24 | |
| Mood | 187 | 3.50 | 23 |
Really cool game, it's so tactical but easy to understand what is happening. The indicator for which zombie is attacking is really good and shows the mechanic well as I initially thought they'd attack the turn they moved next to you (which doesn't make sense now I think about it).
Good job. Unusual and very difficult, but interesting
Best score 8491
The concept is amazing. It has enough randomness to be endless, yet I feel like I can considerably alter my chances at getting a high score by thinking through my actions.
I assume the current actions are chosen at random. I would love to see it not be random and use some kind of algoorithm so that the player can expect some actions to happen at least every once in a while for sure.
But yeah, just amazing!
This is a super cool game. It's like a roguelike but reminds me of tetris a lot.
I liked how easy it was to pick up and learn. My only real issue was that sometimes you lose due to RNG.
I think it would be really good if there was a hold slot, like modern tetris, where you can press a button to store a move for later, and it swaps with your current move.
An expanded version of this with deck-building and the choice of a few actions could be a best-seller. Incredible work!
This is great, basically a puzzle rouguelike, I got destroyed on my first round but then started to plan ahead way more. Loved it, should add the option to bank 1 move, like a block in tetris can be banked for later
@bangthewall Mostly random yup, they are weighted so movement is common, tripping is rare and so on
@tellyhead Genuinely a great idea, that would add so much depth, wish I had thought of that
i like this idea. why did i think that door is exit? and best result is 11 000+
Interesting idea, i'm not good a this but the idea is original. And this is well made. Maybe just change the color of the current action for more visibility in the interface. hitt.png
Fun concept. Would have liked to rotate the camera (not sure if a bug or not implemented. Great work though!
It really does fit the them. You will lose in this game... eventually. Very good. I like that you can destroy the obstacles with the shoot action.
This was great. I was killing zombies left and right and dodging around them, then got trapped in the top corner behind a desk and got mauled.
Really cool mechanic! Love that it forces you to be really resourceful.
One suggestion for a UI improvement... I found that I kept thinking the top next action was the current action. It might be less confusing to show the current and next actions all in the same list, but highlight the current one. Something like:
#### Action Queue - > **Shoot** < - Block - Move - Move
@widdershin had some great input that I want to 2nd. This is a fantastic start to a promising game. I'd love to see this iterated on post LD. I love your art style.
Thanks for the entry!
nice
I like the whole action queue thing, very nice and innovative. I could only get to 5300+ score D:
Very nice game! It feels that the player doesn't have much control over what he's doing, though, since he can't choose the action, only where to shoot or smack (and the direction doesn't make much difference since there are zombies all around anyway). Maybe if given some ability to choose (e.g. from two random actions) and a larger queue the player would be able to do more long-term planning, making the game more interesting and deep? Anyways, fun game, enjoyed it, good job.
I got 11518 as my high score.
Very interesting game! I really like the forward-planning aspect. There's something very satisfying about chaining actions together and narrowly avoiding your brains being eaten.
around 8000 seems to be where i keep getting stuck at. interesting game.
Made it to 5k :) I really like how there were actually some strategy to this
Great mechanic! Some more action management would be nice, but overall great game. Good work!
Good job, but as one comment stated before, the current action must be highlighted. Despite this, great game.
Interesting mechanic, although it kinda sucked when I had several block moves with no Zombies around. If you do work on this post-jam, I think adding a deckbuilding mechanic like in your list of features would be a good way to go.
Also, kinda got myself cornered a bit here...
salary_zombies.png
Really cool game. It seems a bit like a board game, and I think leaning into that could be a fun direction to take it. In particular, if the moves were represented as cards, I think that would just be a more fun aesthetic direction than a plain list of bullet points.
But in general this game is very good. It's easy to pick up, fun to play, and thematically works pretty well.
I think the only real critique that can be made is that it could be nice to have some features for mitigating the RNG a little bit, as others have suggested. I don't know if such mitigation is strictly needed, but it could make the game more fun. One idea I can contribute there is that perhaps moves could be generated using a "grab bag" approach like modern Tetris games--essentially, modern Tetris games have RNG that will never generate a long sequence of S and Z moves, and a similar concept could apply here, where the RNG is designed so that there is a nice balance of actions available at all times.
My first score was 6927, my best so far is 7011.
One thing I like in particular as I play a couple more rounds is how paying attention to when the zombies are attacking gives you a lot of information and a lot more options. I didn't really realize exactly how the zombie attacks work when I first played, but their attack freezes them in place for a turn which can be exploited in some interesting ways.