Short Fuse

jpiggs 2022-10-04 00:32

I really like it! The graphics are really good. Though I have noticed a few bugs. The player's animation doesn't seem to reset after dying, and I didn't see a way of quitting the game. Resuming also seemed to crash it. I think with a bit of minor bug fixing, this game has a lot of potential. The animations are great and give the player a lot of personality. I kind of wish the explosions were a bit stronger, since it takes multiple explosions to break walls. Overall, really solid!

2022-10-04 09:15

An interesting concept! The art and sound is extremely well done for such a fast project and shows some real talent. However the game's direction (or lack there of) lets it down.

1: There is no clear indicator of how to progress or even a simple tutorial. While discover-able game-play is always great, with ProcGen, it's just not realistic to expect players to understand. 2: The major mechanic, exploding every 10 seconds, is poorly represented, with no visual element to tell you how long it is until your next explosion. 3: Death happens at random for poorly explained reasons. Could be fixed with better explanation. 4: Explosions could be way more impactful; blowing up many blocks in one strike would provide urgency and also make the explosions far more impressive.

Still, it was fun running around on the first level for a bit, seeing the cute main character and hearing his lil explosion noises! Good work.

gangrue 2022-10-04 11:41

Bomber man!!! I used to love that game as a kid. Awesome jam game and I love the concept art. The explosion noise is a bit much but the sound design is well made, it's just a bit loud.

shiro-white 2022-10-04 15:10

Love the character design!! It surely has potential, especially in a sense of comedy! Some how it reminds me of Cuphead. would def love to see Fuse again in the future. I couldn't help myself when he starts to scream XDDD. Please also check out our entry! We took inspiration from Bomberman as well!

orionhart 2022-10-04 17:00

@Jpiggs note taken! we were thinking that we would lower the explosion timer after the jam ratings are over, so the pace isn't impacted as much. but we should have adjusted values for sure. and yeah, bugs bugs! you try to squash em and more pop up last minute. we had a couple game breaking ones at the final hour so that was our rush.

@locemo for sure. there were some hiccoughs in the development process that lead to us not leaving enough time for playtesting or exports, and one of the things I've historically been poor at is building in a tutorial in time. definitely a good note. in addition to making the explosions stronger, we could have increased the radius to make it even more fast paced for the jam. the challenge was balancing it around the 10 second timer, and the fact that we had originally planned to make proc gen more robust (I have a page of notes in front of me on what we were planning on doing) but had some issues before even getting to that which prevented us from making more cohesive, navigable levels. for now, they're mostly just pretty labyrinths to showcase the mechanics!

@gangrue thank you! I didn't have time to offset the individual sound levels (left that to the sound designer) so I added a sound a music mixer in the settings menu. are you meaning the sound effects overall are too high volume, imbalanced between effects, or that the sounds themselves should be replaced?

@shiro-white for sure! we'll take a look at the project. thanks for checking out ours! Fuse hopes to see you in the future again as well (maybe with a full roguelike game design shell!)

Thanks all four of your for your feedback. We'll take it down and use it!

gangrue 2022-10-04 17:38

@orionhart I think the noises are great. I just thought the explosion noise was a bit loud. nothing major.

parsonb 2022-10-04 18:02

I laughed out loud when my character first exploded. Really fun character sound effects. I do wish there was a countdown for the player to see how long until they blow up! Great art overall as well. Well done!!

thorpalsson 2022-10-04 18:08

Great game, only problem I had while playing was the waiting you have to do between explosions while trying to "mine" in to areas, overall great job!

orionhart 2022-10-04 18:26

@parsonb absolutely. you can spot the unfinished indicator on the character's head! unfortunately, we forgot to finish implementing the fuse shortening and the fire getting larger before time was up. the only current indicator is the speed your character runs at. it speeds up closer to explosion time!

@thorpalsson thank you, and I agree. one of the downsides of the theme was that we realized 10 seconds feels a bit long.

ryan-dotsikas 2022-10-04 20:23

Awesome job with this! I absolutely love the idea of playing as a bomb-headed person that blows up every 10s, so clever! I like the minecraft-inspired feel but applied to self explosion haha To be honest though I really couldnt find the stairs down despite spending a while all over, but I must've just missed it. I also wasnt sure how to get water on me to get rid of the slime since I couldnt explode rocks to get water. But I thought this was gorgeous and really enjoyed playing. Awesome job!

narudgi 2022-10-04 20:26

Nice entry, the main character is cute and the mood is great! It was low fps on embed, it's nice you can download it!

wilko 2022-10-04 20:28

Good game with a great looking character, sometimes I found that I didn't know where to go or what to do and when I pressed esc and then tried to return to the game, it crashed. The main menu with individual volumes was greatly appreciated. :)

lenan 2022-10-05 01:34

Cute game with an interesting concept.

The graphics were nice and the music was good too, but i started to feel annoyed by the character screaming every time he exploded. Very cool to actually see the concepts of the character and art.

I felt very lost and didn't know exactly where to go, i also had some random fps drop but nothing and for some reason i just randomly died and didn't understand why.

Thought it would be nice to have a main menu.

orionhart 2022-10-05 19:16

@ryan-dotsikas thank you! there was actually a bug that was preventing the exit stairs from being generated that I only caught after I woke up post-submission! turns out coding 30 hours straight to the end of the jam leaves you prone to mistakes... and an 18 hour sleep. So it was a hot minute. There is now a post-submission bugfix patch a la the rules that only fixes the core issues.

@wilko there was a bug preventing the menu from working properly. I've pushed a fix to the webgl and download.

@lenan sorry about that. we wanted to get sounds in, but we didn't iterate on them very much! very valid criticism, and we'll change the sounds in the future. there are fps drops on webgl. we do intend to make a main menu post-jam, but for the jam submission it was unfortunately not implemented, and your criticism is 100% valid.

orionhart 2022-10-05 19:41

There is a known issue with browser memory and reloading scenes, causing the Restart button in the Game Over screen to not function correctly in browser. You will unfortunately need to reload the tab.

paulsams 2022-10-06 01:10

To be honest... The tutorial in the form of a picture is good and the concept itself sounds cool, but here is the implementation... It's a quiet horror of some kind. It's just impossible to play: implicit damage, arrows are strangely made, for some reason it lags hard during an explosion (I really don't understand what such a thing could have been done from the point of view of the code). But the animation, the character model, the slug - it's just very good. Well, it was still a fun idea to look at, thank you.

orionhart 2022-10-06 01:36

@paulsams thanks for your feedback. so I know, was it in the webgl version or the desktop version? the implementation of explosions we did was fast and loose, and works better on desktops. i agree also that arrows are generally unclear. we would love to do a shader that renders arrows behind objects when they're occluded, and also turn the block destruction into a shader (they're currently a sliced up cube object that gets replaced when the object is destroyed). there wasn't a lot of balancing done because of the scope of the project, so yeah- 100%, the implicit damage and constraint of the timer make the game pretty punishing.

misterstripey 2022-10-06 02:09

Hey, I really enjoyed talking to you on stream and playing your game! Here's the vod link of me playing short fuse. It should be up for a week or so if you'd like to share it with your team. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1610268632?t=01h50m02s

Where to begin? I really admired the vision you had for this and the execution that you followed up with. It was a really ambitious jam game and you delivered on almost all of that ambition. The world and characters felt alive, the music was BUMPIN, and I was having a great time even when I was blowing myself up in slime-headedness. Your team should feel proud of the work you accomplished this weekend. It also tells me something that you're tirelessly working on infographics for the game AND busy with your job AND submitting the game to be played on streams. You're putting in real work and it shows!

If I had to get critical for a second, I'd say the movement was a bit slippery and certain consequences were a bit too punishing (holes & slimes). But for a jam game, some difficulty spikes are to be expected. What matters more is that I was compelled to continue through the challenge. The visuals, music, character, and mystery of what lies another floor down kept me playing.

Great job and thank you for sharing the game!

lepoulet 2022-10-07 10:52

I really like the run animation of Fuze. The music was cool too. Thank you for the entry

tinylittlestudio 2022-10-13 09:54

There is really not much to say that others did not already mention. The game looks beautiful but the gameplay feels a bit off. The game does not explain itself very well and everything just seems a bit confusing. But it does have a lot of potential. Good job!

hacktier 2022-10-20 21:18

Cool game. The game looks good and plays well. Nice work.