nichiiexe 2022-10-03 22:45
This is so fun to play! Awesome job :D
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Magical bombs to relax/defuse to
By sethios and Whitenoize
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 498 | 3.60 | 35 | |
| Fun | 642 | 3.31 | 35 | |
| Innovation | 243 | 3.72 | 35 | |
| Theme | 209 | 4.06 | 35 | |
| Graphics | 283 | 4.05 | 36 | |
| Audio | 1 | |||
| Humor | 399 | 3.17 | 34 | |
| Mood | 163 | 3.97 | 35 |
This is so fun to play! Awesome job :D
The game is very fun! It was a bit hard for me to understand at first but i like the creativity :)
It is very pretty but also very stressful^^
Beautiful game in terms of graphics and the background music. Gives a great chill vibe to the whole game. It was really difficult to grasp the basic concept, though. Remember that you guys have practiced this game for 72 hours, but new players only get a few minutes! An in-game tutorial is always much more helpful than the description on the Ludum Dare page. And I often felt that 10 seconds was way too short to figure out what to do, but that's obviously a problem with the theme itself and not your game :)
Nice concept,i like magic
Nice idea, but its a bit much for 10s. Well done :)
This is an adorable game. 10 seconds is really hard to find the correct bomb type and cure for, but i guess it takes multiple attempts to learn. Issue then is just that after you learn it you don't have to look it up anymore
The game looks really nice and the atmosphere is also very relaxing! Sadly I could not quite get the hang of all the different things to do, so it was a bit too stressfull to figure out what to do in only 10 seconds. :(
Such a pretty and cosy game! Great challenge, hard at first but once you play it again you get used to it and it gets really fun!
Very interesting game concept, the music was quite soothing and a cool contrast with the game's fast pace. figuring out how to defuse the bombs is a little hard, it was a bit hard to understand that i had to click on the Symbolic modules for them to defuse. Besides that, it fits the theme very well, it has a fitting artstyle and fairly fun gameplay.
loved the mix of lo-fi chill and bomb defusing stress, it was hard to understeadnd at first but after a bit it was enjoyable. the style was charming too
Great job, went with you advice to give it a try understanding the game first and you are right! Figuring out the mechanics is a challenge but it is very rewarding. Overall - great game!
Audio is resetting after you hit retry. Pretty hard to grasp what is going on in 10s but after a while you start to get it. Great atmo and visuals!!
This was both soothing and difficult at the same time:D Symbolic modules are such a fantastic game feature that I just went with it and guessed, but wow it was a lot of fun. I adore the visuals' distinct style!! Thank you for a fantastic experience! :D
So Simple, but I love it
This was really fun, chill and also stressful lol. I got 22! Matching the rune was the hardest for me, wand casting was a nice break. Good job!
I'll be honest it felt more frantic than chill when i was playing, but maybe that's just me being a slow reader. Still had fun though. I love any game where you interact with a pretend computer.
It looks so sweet! Great job!
I like the mood in this game, lo-fi music with beautiful graphics. Maybe it would be nice if you added an explosion when using the wrong poison, because I just use everything until I find the right one. I also lost when the symbolic module hid under my screen and I couldn't click on it. Overall I really liked the game!
Love how well the graphics match the music and are both contrasted greatly by the frantic gameplay :D That being said, I felt slightly overwhelmed by my defusal tasks and only occasionally succeeded. Still enjoyed the calm atmosphere, though!
A game where you have to figure out the rules, I love that! =D It was very satisfying to resolve. Although there are some aspects that made understanding the rules more complicated than necessary. the first one being the time limit, creating a tension and not allowing to fully read the menus. My first attempts were mostly me rushing through the windows to read as much as I could before a reset. Secondly, it was not always evident to see what was interactive, and how. I tried to drag other things than the potion, did a hocus on every elements of the screen, and it took me a while before I realized a could click on the symbols to change them, even more to understand that I could also validate them with the button next to them! In the end, I wish I hadn't have to search what I could do, to instead focus to how I could use the tools I dispose.
Because once everything was clear, the game was fun! Identifying the stars by trial and error was a great puzzle, as much as learning the potions and symbols combinations! I finished with a score of 31, then the game didn't send me a next bomb. I'll take that as a win state! :p Also despite the readability issue, I like the visuals of the game. And presenting the rules in the format of virtual folders is a pretty fun idea! I had a great time playing this and learning how to defuse magic bombs. Good work!
Love the aesthetic! The gameplay seemed very overwhelming at first but studying the rules and making little mnemonics for myself was great "star: neutralize with opposite, void is void, ice/telluric the opposite goes to void (with telluric=fireish)". The symbols were a bit hard to remember for me but still doable, also the cast amount being in order of the folders helped a lot (wonder if this was by design, if so I appreciate it :D). I hit a bug where sometimes the symbols would spawn under the timer so I couldn't click them and then at level 30 nothing spawned until I lost.
I wonder if the "levels" were at least partially hand crafted. The difficulty progression was really well done and it seemed to throw these interesting levels at you sometimes, it felt better than just random levels (or if it's random levels I just got lucky :D). The art and music were both great, actually surprisingly chill to play after you get used to the rules!
Cool and interesting game with good graphics
@itooh Thank you for this detailed feedback! We agree that 10 seconds is a bit short for understanding the rules, especially with the way a bomb is thrown at the player right away. If we had just had a tiny bit more time, we would have added at least a "How to play" submenu in the main and pause menu to explain things to the player in a secured space. We've also taken your feedback about interactable objects into account and have included visual feedback when you hover your mouse over an interactable object in our post-jam update.
We're glad you enjoyed the game despite these flaws! For the issue of the game not sending you any bomb after a score of 31, it is a bug with the difficulty system that is now fixed, sorry you suffered from it :/ Congratulations for reaching such a high score though!
@bqq Here's another mnemonic, to know what potion you should use to defuse the fire module on a telluric bomb: "On this Earth, you gotta fight fire with fire!" :p We didn't notice this practicity in the folders before you mentioned it, but it's great to hear that it helped you and will help other players in the future! About the bugs, we've noted the different bugs and issues that players encountered from the various feedbacks we received, including yours, and both of the issues you had (The symbols appearing under the timer and the bombs not being spawned anymore) have now been fixed in our post jam update, sorry that you suffered from them :/ Reaching a level of 30 is a pretty good feat though, congrats! We never expected anyone to get past level 25
For the levels, we've made a dynamic difficulty system tied to the in-game score. To try and explain it shortly, we have made multiple difficulty levels that slightly alter the algorithm for constructing the bomb (It notably alters the number of possible modules for the current bomb, as well as the probabilities of some modules appearing over others...) This difficulty then goes up depending on the player's score. This is how we could for example create the first levels that serve as an introduction to a type of module (We would only make one of this specific type of module available to appear on the bomb for the current level) before ramping up in difficulty. Then, it was just a matter of configuring the next difficulties to give the player a good difficulty curve. We didn't have a lot of time to finetune it, so we're glad it provided a good experience!
> Added an outline effect to interactable objects when the player hovers the mouse on them.
This is against the rules because you removed the original version. Please upload a web build.
Thank you for telling us! We're sorry about the breach of the rules. For us, the outline was more of a quality of life improvement than an addition. We've reuploaded the game's original version to the ldjam page. We've also tried to upload a web build (Of the original version as well), but it doesn't seem to be updating.
I like the idea of defusing bombs to lo-fi beats, the art style and sound effects along with the music gives a unique atmosphere to the game.
About the gameplay, elemental modules are simple enough, select the correct ingredient from a look up table. The player being able to memorize the table after some time gives a good sense of improvement and looking these up isn't too hard either.
Symbolic modules are rather pointless in the current state of the game as they can easily be disarmed by brute forcing, just try each symbol until you get the right one, there's no punishment for getting it wrong.
I didn't really understand the alchemic modules, they never disarmed regardless of my actions :F
It would be nice if the next bomb was delivered immediately after the current one is defused, waiting for the next bomb to arrive hurts pacing after the player masters the basics of single module bombs
good entry overall :]
I love the idea of this game, but once you've memorized all the rules it becomes a task of dexterity, and I didn't look at the computer files at all after a certain point. I only lost when I got to 6 modules and the bottom one was cut off, but it seems like you fixed that in your post-jam version.
Overall, I really liked it! The idea of having to do research to figure things out within 10 seconds is pretty cool, it's a refreshing take on the usual "microgame" style. I also really love the comfy vibes. Everything felt pretty intuitive aside from the wand (which i had to read your game description to understand).
I guess my only real complaint is that it doesn't go deep enough! I want folders within folders, hit me with the wikipedia experience lol. I would like to have more incentive to preemptively research things I haven't seen yet, just to be prepared for them when they do show up.
P.S. Regarding submission rules, you're allowed to re-upload to fix actual bugs, but gameplay tweaks and cosmetic changes are forbidden. "Quality of life" changes would fall under the latter, unless you could honestly say that it was intended to be there in the first place, and a bug caused it to be missing.
You nailed the chill vibe and aesthetic to the game, but took be me a bit of trial and error to solve some of things. And not enough time to check through the computer for some on the solutions. However, the progression from easy problems to harder ones after the first few is a nice ease in of difficulty.
Nice concept!