Terminal Velocity

mateu 2022-10-03 21:34

As always a super solid entry! The graphics look really good, the audio does a great job at making the gameplay cohesive and understandable, and you have a pretty good gameplay loop. There are a few games that this reminds me of, I just can't think of the name of them. I love the use of online leaderboards. They really add a lot in terms of replayability.

My biggest gripe with the game is the difficulty scaling. It's super easy for a few minutes and then it suddenly gets noticeably more difficult with the addition of more obstacles. Sometimes it's too hard to see what's coming up which is also frustrating, as it makes it feel like I wasn't in control of when I got slowed down. Once you do get to the more difficult part, it doesn't get any more difficult, so then it just becomes a test to see if your reaction time is fast enough.

I definitely like the take on the theme, even if it is a bit loose, and I can tell there was a lot of effort put into this. Great job!

triangle-point 2022-10-04 02:04

really fun good job

kitkii 2022-10-04 19:57

Amazing game. I loved it. The fast speed action and dodging the lasers by flipping is so cool. I got 3rd place, but your Dev team has that 1st place on lock but loved how you can see who you're competing against on the left. I got a lower score first time round then went back to try and score higher and can see how this adds some replayability. I couldnt figure out what the easter eggs were though.

mhorth 2022-10-04 21:06

@triangle-point thanks! If you have the time, could you let me know if you noticed any bugs around showing your score at the end? The leaderboard seems to have not recorded your run, so I can type it in manually if you remember what you got. Thanks for playing!

mhorth 2022-10-04 21:08

@kitkii thank you so much! I worked hard to convey the feeling of speed with all the sound and visual effects, so I'm very happy to hear that you enjoyed it.

ryan-dotsikas 2022-10-04 21:29

Wow this was awesome, I had a ton of fun! I love a good fast-paced endless racer and this definitely scratched that itch! Some awesome touches were the score board showing people on the left, the fact that you can flip to the opposite side (and the boosts and obstacles that required this!) as well as the nail-biting 5-second countdown. Right towards the end I got to checkpoints after it said 1, so it was super tense. There were for sure some stretches where things just happened to line up and I didnt have to do anything but then there were tough sections. Really great job though! (JeeroyLenkinz on the scoreboard)

walaber 2022-10-04 21:34

really, really solid entry! the feeling of speed is great, and the obstacles ramp up just enough to be interesting throughout. I really liked the "flip" move, it added a lot to what would otherwise be just simple left/right dodging. Great graphics and sound as well!

chocolat-endive 2022-10-04 21:34

I managed to get to the fifth place (around 5k points I think). Once there is some moving red beams it gets pretty hard!

Some kind of variation in the tunnel could add something to the game.

Good job!

lorwon 2022-10-04 21:34

I think I can play for hours ! The game is really well made !

What I liked: - The graphics. - The sound design and the music. - The speed ! - The online leaderboard (that's so cool).

Improvements: - Maybe you should increase the difficulty a bit faster.

Good job !

phoenixofforce 2022-10-04 21:36

I used to play games like this on the phone all the time. Here i somehow thought you had to press W to get faster, so later i completely messed up because i couldnt jump ^^' Very well done!

msplanlos 2022-10-04 21:39

That has to be one of the best entries I´ve played so far! Had so much fun! :) The leaderboard is such a nice thing to have in a game like this. Great game!

hagamosvideojuegos 2022-10-04 21:44

Really interesting game.

Good control, good theme and good feel.

Well done!

fluffy-kaeloky 2022-10-04 22:12

Pretty good entry ! I had a technical issue with the game at first that absolutely wanted to launch onto my vertical second screen. ALT-Enter didn't work to make it windowed, so I had to launch it with the -monitor 1 argument to get it on my main screen.

As for the game, it's pretty fun ! I really like the inclusion of high scores. However, I feel like the game isn't really fair sometimes and leads to frustrating collisions. Sometimes, the tunnel bends so much you can't see right in front of you. When a laser happens to be right after a sharp turn, you sometimes have no way of avoiding it. There is also the issue of having impossible patterns. I had a few times a rotating laser cross with a boost in the middle, or boosts in the middle right before a ring laser (Impossible to flip back again in time to avoid it).

Having boosts right before a laser pattern is also pretty tough. It will mess up your timing on rotating lasers, and if you get hit, you usually don't get a boost for a very long time after that, making it incredibly frustrating.

Otherwise, I had quite a bit of fun ! Landed 2nd place. Congratulations on making it to the LD51 !

2022-10-05 00:34

This game Hits all the NOTES! Fun, Self explanatory, and really hits that feedback loop that other games tend to miss out on. This is a game that I can compete on and want to come back too. Great Job and I found the Easter EGG!!!! For those looking you might want to see how quickly you can jumppppp.

mhorth 2022-10-05 01:11

@ryan-dotsikas so happy that you enjoyed it! I had some of those moments too during playtesting where the countdown was at 2 or 1 and I just barely got too a checkpoint, and I'm glad you liked that tension.

@fluffy-kaeloky sorry to hear about the monitor, I've honestly never heard of that before so wouldn't even know where to begin looking for a setting to fix that :laughing:. You're absolutely right about the unfairness caused by random generation. I did implement a rule that lasers and checkpoints weren't allowed to be close, I could have done the same for boosters but just ran out of time for perfecting the difficulty curve. A tip I found (not by design) is that if you stay towards the outside of a curve rather than the inside, you have a much easier time seeing what's coming up ahead. Regardless, glad you had fun!

chillertyp 2022-10-05 05:39

This reminds me of... all the games where exactly this happen. But even without innovation still fun to play.

amythyst 2022-10-05 05:57

Had fun! Lots of nice polish here, really digging all the aesthetic touches and the leaderboard! One thing is it would've been nice if instead of the game slowing you down so much when you hit a wall it just knocked you back a little bit. The game got significantly less fun when I was slow, and since I'm bad at action games I hit the walls a lot. Great job!

infinitycore 2022-10-05 09:33

What it is isn't very original at all, but it is very well done, I might actually come back to this after the jam is over.

tygrak 2022-10-05 19:58

Very very nicely polished, I love all the small details -- having a good leaderboard is super cool, especially as it shows you when you are close to pass the score of others (if I understood correctly :)). And a nicely made menu too. Good job!

mhorth 2022-10-05 21:19

@chillertyp, @infinitycore I truly appreciate that feedback. I was ignorant about other games that did the same thing. If you have the time, would you let me know some of the good ones that you've played? I'd like to do some research and see what a professional version of this idea would have looked like.

kostas-nik 2022-10-05 22:22

Feels fun to play, really good vibe and sound, would like to try it with more free controls. Good job

aristurtle 2022-10-05 22:35

That was amazing fun. It brought me back to when I was a kid at the arcade playing S.T.U.N. Runner. That game was my jam, lost so many quarters there.

I liked that the game let me get comfortable with dodging the traps and then switched it up on me and started rotating them. Visually impressive and audio choice, even if you didn't do the audio yourself, matched the game very well.

Solid work.

yoko-san 2022-10-05 23:55

Wow, this game looks so nice and polished! Really nice gameplay and mechanics. Maybe you could make a rhythem game out of this :)

boxedmeatrevolution 2022-10-06 01:49

Had a lot of fun, I made fourth on the leaderboard but I'll be back for a higher placement later :wink: Everything felt tuned just right, I felt like I was just barely dodging the lasers every time.

abdonatioera 2022-10-06 02:01

The graphics were very nice, highly polished. Gameplay was fun too, there was a real sense of speed.

borabee 2022-10-06 04:09

Very fun and solid game! The mechanics were easy to understand since the design and difficulty progression is very good. I also especially liked the graphics (you really nailed that illusion of speed and made me dizzy with all the twists and turns, which made the game more challenging!), sound (narrated countdown in the end was NIICE) and the real time leaderboard!! I got 6th place but will try for higher later! One thing I found a bit weird is that sometimes when I'm going very fast and cross the red bars, the decrease in speed doesn't compute. But I'm glad it didn't or it would be much much harder haha Also I didn't understand what the flip was for until my third playthrough and kept thinking there was no way to dodge the bars with a hole in the middle.

peachtreeoath 2022-10-06 20:11

VERY fun game. In terms of pure fun this is probably the best I've played this jam. But even beyond the fun factor I noticed some very good things put in there.

I personally haven't seen a racing game like this where you are locked into 6 segments. I've certainly seen games where you can loop around the track, but this was new to me. Roughly like a "3d" endless runner. I think that decision was GREAT. The reason is because those loop racing games tend to be pretty hard to orient yourself in and hit things with precision. As a result you would have to slow down the game a lot to help players. But since Terminal Velocity gives you 6 sections, the player can focus less on the controls and precision, and more on what track they need to be on. As a result, you can crank up the speed like crazy and test that instead. An excellent design decision!

I love how you keep evolving the effectiveness of the leaderboards every game. In some ways I think this discrete (rather than continuous like Space Ninja) might've been more effective here because I really didn't have time to look at the leaderboards until a checkpoint was coming up. I loved staring at the left side of the screen as I passed a checkpoint, watching me climb up high, and then get back into the game. Very, very motivating as usual.

I landed at #7 and am happy enough with that. I drastically improved my scores once I started using brakes more. Not something you often think to use in an arcade racer, but it definitely help me set myself up correctly. The brakes were tuned very well and don't slow you down needlessly. This is a very impressive entry and you have a good feel for making the gameplay exciting using just a few mechanical concepts.

score.png

mhorth 2022-10-06 21:35

@boxedmeatrevolution and @borabee thanks so much! The laser colliders were made quite undersized to go in the players favor, which I think contributed a lot to the feeling of making a clutch dodge just barely in time. I bet this is also the reason you may have visibly crossed a red beam and not been slowed down. The only other reason I can think of is that I was lazy and didn't program any special interactions like "what if you're at boost speed and hit a laser, should you only lose partial speed?" I just set it up so whatever collider you entered last would take priority. If you hit a laser and then next frame hit a boost, you'll go at boost speed.

_Colliders.png

mhorth 2022-10-06 21:45

@peachtreeoath I'd heart your comment twice if I was allowed! I always really appreciate your insights into the deeper layers of game design. You're spot on that I actively try to give players the simplest baked down version that my games can be with the fewest possible controls, and only the mechanics that directly add to the fun. I find myself getting burned out on some AAA games where I start the tutorial and there's already 15 different moves I need to keep in mind. I say "no, no that's such overkill, 75% of that doesn't actually add to the fun, and the rest can be introduced over time instead of frontloaded."

Glad you found some use for the brake! I'll be honest, the only reason I made that an input at all is because I wanted to put a brake light on the vehicle and make it light up when someone pressed it :laughing: Hopefully you enjoyed that small detail. Also I noticed you played on ultrawide for that extra racing experience :wink:

peachtreeoath 2022-10-06 21:55

LOL that's hilarious about the brake light. Yes I found it super useful and used it before a lot of the obstacles. For some of the spinning ones I'd actually just brake to pass it rather than switch tracks, if I calculated it'd only be a small brake-time.

almost 2022-10-07 00:34

It's cool and I like the visual style of the lights in the winding tunnel and the floating lights in the menus.

I noticed that there were a few cases on the leaderboard where someone with less distance or time had a higher score, so I was unsure of how score was calculated. I also noticed that score only went up when I touched a checkpoint. After playing I see the info in your game description here but it might have been nice to know in-game.

It felt good to get into a rhythm and stay at full speed for a long time. Some of the spinning obstacles later are pretty tough to time, which is fine I suppose since difficulty is supposed to ramp up.

I found the dodge a bit disorienting so I didn't use it too much. I think it would have been neat if it caused you to drive on the ceiling instead of spinning your camera so that you are on the bottom of the track, but that might have been disorienting as well for different reasons.

I made it to the top 10! For now, anyways.

mhorth 2022-10-07 20:20

Thanks for the feedback @almost! I did have to make that decision very early on in development whether the player would spin around a stationary tube, or the tube would spin around a stationary player. I went with the latter because then left and right would always make sense. If the player went upside down, left and right could get switched. So I didn't fully explore the other option, you may be right that it would have been less dizzying.

itsboats 2022-10-07 23:58

3rd Place! Sick game! I love the simple gameplay and minimal graphics. All the subtle bits of polish you added go a long way in making this feel like a finished game

TerminalVelocity.png

jag 2022-10-08 04:26

You absolutely nailed the sense of speed on this one! Excellent shaders and just all round fun. Great job!

stefan-laimer 2022-10-08 14:31

This game plays and feels amazing! Currently 4th place but I think I can do better. I only wish you could see the leaderboard without having to lose a game first.

score.PNG

mhorth 2022-10-08 20:53

Thanks everyone! It makes me so happy to hear you all having so much fun with the game :smile:

coleslaughter 2022-10-09 03:12

https://youtu.be/04UQz6th9Ko?t=11345

What a great entry! I loved the way you made obstacles/boosts that could only be interacted with via the flip mechanic. It elevates the flip to be something more than just a dedicated speedrunner maneuver. Very nice touch. :ok_hand:

jefvel 2022-10-09 17:28

Yet another fun game with global highscores! The score progression on the left is really cool, and makes it easy to see how far you've gotten on the leaderboards. Gotta try to get to at least top 5 :)

One thing is that I feel like the road curves too much sometimes, so it obscures what's in front of you. In those cases you have almost zero time to dodge obstacles. And the jumping is a bit confusing, does it jump two spaces to the right?

Other than that it's a solid experience, nice job!

2022-10-13 21:07

Great game ! Right now i'm third on the board. Good job !