FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD51 → Sweet Nightmare

Sweet Nightmare

By almost, Adafheyesh and Quack Doctor

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall3323.7441
Fun2573.7541
Innovation1263.9241
Theme1034.2141
Graphics2804.0641
Audio2853.6439
Humor2853.4038
Mood5123.5240

Comments

faust-mi 2022-10-04 14:43

Great and funny. I got a huge pleasure from playing! Excellent job!

vimmagic 2022-10-04 15:58

This game is so cute and fun! I liked figuring out the different controls, especially launching myself with the mouse. Great job!

dusho 2022-10-05 18:06

that is some crazy game.. feels like playing several games at the same time. a bit hard to keep track if change happened or not.. game looks amazing

tankou 2022-10-05 18:20

This game was very fun! You got a cute (and tasty) topic here, the music keeps in mind and the possibility to submit an highscore gives a positive feeling of competition. I also love the artstyle! Great work!

oakhardt 2022-10-05 19:05

Okay that was fun! I liked the Art. Was pretty cute. At first I was totally caught off guard because it just started and I was right in the middle of the chaos! I didn't read the description to be honest and didn't knew what was going on, but after a minute or so it clicked. Also at first glance I couldn't make out which sprites are collision and which are items to pick up. Maybe the collision should just be plain toast (but nobody likes plain toast) or instead give the items an outline or make them move a little bit. The snake movement killed me two times because I got stuck. Made it pretty high up the Leaderboard :D Overall really cool idea and most importantly it was fun!

doridie 2022-10-05 21:37

This was the most fun game i have tested so far. Great job!

aeveis 2022-10-06 04:29

I think my best score was 24! Is this multiplayer? It feels like a pretty good simulation if not, I liked that all the enemies are essentially other players that are also switching. I kind of want a bit of a hint on how all the controls work, but I think there is also some fun in figuring out the controls. Not sure if there was a way to "attack" for every control scheme though. Overall interesting idea, nice job!

almost 2022-10-06 05:59

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

@aeveis, It is a single player game, the red characters are AI controlled, and try to move towards you. Yea it takes a bit of time to figure out each of the controls, and not all player characters have a way to attack. There is an indicator in the bottom-left to tell you which buttons are relevant, but understandably if there are enemies coming at you, you may not have time to notice it.

doot 2022-10-06 21:42

Nice game! The idea of changing controls is well executed, the clear indication of when it's going to change next helps a lot! It's very cool that enemies also change how they move / attack, it adds even more variety.

Level designed felt a bit chaotic sometimes, and maybe some parts of it were less adapted to some controls scheme (snake often felt cramped)

Thanks again for submitting it on stream, I had fun playing it ✨

mhorth 2022-10-07 20:44

So ambitious to not only make one character controller for a jam, but 5+?! Nice job. I do feel like that caused some of them to work better than others. There were times in golf mode that I couldn't play the game because enemies were on me, so I was moving a little bit, so the golf club was disabled. But the flappy bird, popcorn thruster, and standard shooter all felt nice.

It's a really really cool concept and I bet if you had another day to work on polish, this would have been a contender for winning the jam. As is though, it does feel a bit unfinished, mostly in the "game feel" department.

almost 2022-10-08 00:20

Thanks :)

Yea it's definitely true that some of the characters are over or under tuned, and if we had a bit more time we would've had a number of tweaks to make some of them a bit easier to control or to feel more satisfying.

inksun 2022-10-08 03:08

Cool game! The art style is very cute and the gameplay has a lot of fun!

2022-10-08 22:45

If I'd have to nitpick, the playing space is a bit too crowded, and the blue circle made me think this is some sort of "shrinking zone" effect at first (blame PUBG on that). Otherwise - very impressed! The candy-store graphics are nice and consistent (with itself, and with the audio), the gameplay is fun, and the idea of having several completely different game styles - as opposed to modifiers - is what really sells it. Congrats on a great entry!

tobius 2022-10-08 22:49

Overall

Fun and whimsical "flat"-former with randomly changing controls and abilities.

Fun

Pretty fun! Trying to collect the fruit while avoiding enemies and hazards is always a great time. Having to adjust to the randomly changing control scene was definitely interesting and kept me on my toes! The different "modes" were each surpisingly different feeling which was pretty fun as well. One critique is that there wasn't great feedback on whether enemies were taking damage. I felt like I shot them alot and they didn't die, which was a little disappointing. I also didn't like that there was no way to heal (at least that I could find).

Innovation

Good innovation here, using similar game-styles in this way was really smart. The level designs worked for all modes of gameplay surprisingly well! I've never seen a game that transitions between those gameplay styles like this before, very well done.

Theme

Great job with the theme, changing controls schemes every 10 seconds is always fun and I think you pulled it off well. I would've liked to see more things in the game tied to every 10 seconds to really double down on the theme, but because the game itself was sort of changing already every 10 seconds, it might be fine without it.

Graphics

Adorable, well executed graphics. Everything fit well together and was just perfectly fruity. I would've liked a little more color variation and contrast. Maybe some green kiwis and shadows / outlines would help that. Overall, very well done.

Audio

Cute audio, I liked the melody! I think it fit well with the art and gameplay as well. I really liked the two different sountracks! I think it would be a great improvement to even have slight variations of the melodies for the different game-modes to really enhance that experience of swapping between game-modes.

Humor

The whole thing is pretty ridiculous its funny. Some of the different game modes like the gold one actually made me laugh! Because the sort of implied humor though I didn't find much humor in the game itself.

Mood

This game has got a definite "whacky-cute" vibe to it. I really enjoyed the mood of the game, it was all a bit absurd and cute and fruit.

deprecat 2022-10-08 23:01

Cute art and a nice concept for switching control types on the fly! It keeps the action going and switches the player from feeling either empowered or vulnerable. I was pleasantly surprised at just how many gameplay styles you fit into this one entry and the multiple music tracks were also a nice touch!

Some thoughts if you expand this out:

You've done a lot here to make the sprite changes and environment color help show that the controls have switched and give a general idea of what's changed - I feel like you can go even bolder here with more extreme shifts. Potentially changing entire backdrops, tones, color palettes, etc. We all definitely learned from this jam that 10 seconds is not enough time for much of anything, so making those changes even more bombastic can help instruct your player on not just that the change has happened but exactly what they need to do next. Examples could be: the entire arena looks like a golf-style minigame when the golf club comes up, switching to a DOOM style environment with metal music when the player gets a gun, to a space theme when the player gets the jetpack. I think going all-in on the spectacle of the genre switches will help sell the changing action.

It could also be interesting for players to get a tetris-like prompt on the next powerup and the ability to skip that ability for another random one. This can give players a moment to get themselves in a good spot for the mode switch and strategize, or get a free skip to another gameplay style that may work better in the position their in.

almost 2022-10-09 00:02

Whoa, thanks for the detailed feedback!

@tobius I totally agree that it is hard to kill enemies. There is a brief invulnerability given to both player and enemies after taking damage that unintentionally made enemies too hard to kill. There are a bunch of numbers tweaks that I wish we had time to make. It's correct that there is no way to heal, partially as a way to ensure that you can't live forever.

One other "Every 10 Seconds" thing that we considered but didn't end up implementing was changing an objective function every 10 seconds, so you could sometimes have objectives like kill enemies, go right, go fast, and so on.

@deprecat Oh yea, changing the music, art style or textures when the rules change would have been sweet. A "next powerup" indicator also seems like a good idea, especially for transitions to a rule set like snake or the car where you sometimes crash into a wall right after the rules change.

ofthebrand 2022-10-09 08:14

Took a second to get the hang of the controls of each powerup/mode but once I did it was quite a fun and challenging experience. Had quite a lot of fun getting that score up each time I played.

dimesto52 2022-10-09 14:30

nice graphics but the music loop is way too short but it was fun

natpat 2022-10-10 01:46

A cute little idea! I liked the character and enemy designs and the little music loop. The idea of changing controls scheme so widely every ten seconds was an interesting one, and I'm impressed with how many different control schemes you came up with!

I did think it could use a little bit of balancing - I found navigating away from enemies almost impossible with some control schemes, especially with the number of enemies and the tightness in some parts of the level. The screen also felt pretty busy sometimes, with the enemies and fruit not always standing out from the background.

coleslaughter 2022-10-10 03:26

https://youtu.be/Xty0TvPfvGA?t=10728

Thanks for submitting your game to stream!

Kinda crazy how many different mechanics you were able to cram into a single weekend. I like how significantly it changes things up, too. Took a while to learn, but once I got it, it was pretty fun! :slight_smile:

mtabasco 2022-10-10 14:00

A very cool idea with beautiful art :smile: Also adding a leaderboard makes me want to play until I enter the top 10! To give you some feedback, I sometimes got confused with the map layout, and for some mechanics it gets a little bit difficult to move. I guess having more feedback for when the mechanic change would also help. But I can see this was a very ambitious idea and you did a great job. Congratulations!

irriadin 2022-10-10 22:40

VERY inventive design and the art is great! It's disorienting when the gameplay changes, but I had a lot of fun trying to figure out what to do in the moment. The popcorn backpack was my favorite mode. Great work!

eravil 2022-10-11 10:25

Nice stylistics, good job!

bamberga 2022-10-12 01:58

this is the best of the 'control changes every 10 seconds' game that i've played this jam, congrats! this one has by far the most thought put into how to make that change fun and engaging. I really like that the enemies change too.

enderswype 2022-10-12 14:03

hurray, i made it on the scoreboar,d good enough for me ahah, nice mini games !!

jag 2022-10-12 19:49

I really really loved the art and music for this! It has such a cute relaxing vibe to it. I think the change in controls is a really fun way to add some excitement. It got a little chaotic towards the end, but I enjoyed it all the way. Great job and thank you for the game!

rdawg7 2022-10-14 21:01

Love the concept for this - really good idea. Music and art is great and enjoyed the mood! Gets harder as it goes along but I'm sure with practise I might get better 😂 ! Had a lot of fun though

veelivar 2022-10-15 10:02

I adore the concept, and love the art. Definitely something I'd happily put more time into.

In future, it would be nice to have some way to reduce the learning burden with some of the modes - I played it a few times, and there's still some I'm not sure what they do. A visual or audio theme associated with each would be a possibility?

alpharock6 2022-10-17 04:32

Made it up to 500 points! This was a really creative set of controls! I also love that the enemies are utilizing the same set of movements, it gives a huge variety of combinations of cat & mouse interactions. Lots of great art and subtle UI cues, great job, love this entry!

almost 2022-10-17 15:25

Well done @alpharock6, that's a really good score!

Thank you everyone for the feedback :)

llynee 2022-10-18 17:27

Incredibly addictive! Even after writing this, I am going back to play more - the controls take a bit of getting used to but it's super fun even when I'm not so sure what I'm doing. Really cool game!

codey 2022-10-18 18:43

Makes a lot of fun! Nice idea!

saskle 2022-10-18 18:50

Great entry! Clever use of the theme and cute audio and visuals. I got stuck a few times because the enemies were blocking me and the controls took a while to understand, but otherwise a really fun game. Love the circle that gets smaller and smaller as visual cue for the 10 seconds mechanic.

amarokczukay 2022-10-19 10:02

very fun idea, with some interesting and original art, congrats! it's challenging to navigate between different controls, which is a good thing! very nice game!

trexxak 2022-10-21 21:41

Hello randomness, old friend!

As others said, astonishing how many different games you crammed into this one! Also always a big fan of RNG, so that's another plus :D

Thank you for this great game!