Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Hiccups
By cogcomp
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 383 | 3.07 | 34 | |
| Fun | 383 | 2.90 | 34 | |
| Innovation | 459 | 2.48 | 34 | |
| Theme | 476 | 2.31 | 34 | |
| Graphics | 304 | 3.25 | 34 | |
| Audio | 209 | 3.26 | 34 | |
| Humor | 167 | 2.93 | 33 | |
| Mood | 345 | 2.88 | 33 |
The embedding combined with the emscripted generated html seems to behave badly. To play the embedded game, press the white are to the right or left of the game twice. The game should have keyboard focus after that. If that doesn't work, then just use the external site: http://www.cogitarecomputing.com/hiccups/index.html
Added an excruciatingly long playthrough of the game on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/qTCiaqn26PA
cool little platformer, nice work on sounds and art. Comic sans...why?!?
Just some rapid-fire thoughts in a sting of sentence fragments: It's a nice and well made platformer. It reminds be of Bubble Bobble for the NES. I think the sound effects are a bit loud. Some volume sliders would be nice.
Overall, it feels nice to control. There's a huge amount of variety in the enemy types, all of them animated! It's cool how much you fit into this game! Lots of variety in the tiles too. It's got a lot of decoration!
I think the theme is arbitrarily tacked on, if not entirely irrelevant. I found myself spamming the shoot fire button, and never noticed the "hiccups".
The music is pretty cool, but as mentioned before, the sound effects are super loud and make the music harder to hear. Anyway, cool game and nice work!
@thegamearchitect Believe it or not it actually isn't Comic Sans. It's "Source Sans Pro Heavy" that I've intentionally softened up to get more of a Bubble Bobble cutesy feeling. :smile:
@100th-coin You got it in one! I think the reason why the theme feels tacked on was that my method to get an idea this time was along the lines of "what games could work even if you didn't have a fire button" and Bubble Bobble popped into my head :smile: It turns out that no... Bubble bobble without the fire button is just really frustrating so I added back in the last minute...
The dragon was cute but I found the gameplay to be a bit lacking. I can see how it would be frustrating to wait 10 seconds before firing, but it's also trivial to win if you can spam the fire key. I also felt the controls to be too floaty. I did like how there were so many enemy types and different tile types to keep things interesting.
Nice job with emscripten! Had issues with the embed (space kept scrolling down), but the alternate web link worked fine. One minor improvement suggestion - maybe blink the player at the start of the level, often had to move him to figure out quickly where he was
@cogcomp Well done! I was impressed by the variety of enemies in the games. And the overall mood is very well. There are some suggests I'd like to share: 1. You can add some animation when the enemies is hit by the flame. Some enemies were not responding when the flame hit them. And then I figured out it is not a bug. It just took more than one shot to finish them :) It's would be better if you add some animation that shows the enemy has been hit. 2. The controls feel a bit floaty. Maybe you can make the player character moves a bit fast. Overall a nice and fun game :smile:
Oh wow. You pulled the full arcade game! The amount of content you put together is crazy!
@lustdante Thanks! It took ages and I definitely spent too much time on the graphics :sweat_smile: when I should've focused more on the code. It just works out that way sometimes.
I agree with @xenoparticle that it's a little easy if you spam the space bar (which I did :) ). The levels are rather short, maybe you only have ten seconds to beat them before a bubble-bobble-like ghost appears and chases you? I get strong bubble bobble vibes from this, might as well take one of their good ideas :). This was really fun, I had a great time and the presentation is great. Nice job.
I really like the audio design!
> You’re not supposed to but it can get rather annoying having to wait 10 seconds even though the timing is kind of the main feature
Haha, this issue was one of my main fears while brainstorming for this jam (both for my own game, as well as all the entries I'll try), gotta love the gordian knot solution to it.
I did play before reading that though, so I was thoroughly confused. Fun entry though!
Nice arts. Love the music. Too bad adding space to fire up completely removed the theme from the game and made it a platformer like many others. Maybe your initial idea would have worked with a different level design. Not bad though :)
You pulled off quite a bit of content in such a small amount of time. I would have liked to see some UI for health and time remaining. There were pickups for both of these, but I never knew how much health or time I had left. There was also a third type of pick-up that I wasn't able to figure out the use of. There were a few bugs too. There would be some weird physics interactions if shooting fire while jumping into tiles from underneath. I'm not entirely sure if the intention is to be able to pass through these tiles at all, but if so, that physics interaction should be dealt with. Also, it seems like when you get hit from behind, your character gets pushed backwards. They should probably be pushed forwards in this instance as that is the opposite of the direction they were hit from. The character also felt quite float as well, it would probably feel better to have the character fall faster. Otherwise, great job! There were a lot of different environment tiles and enemies in here, and the game functions correctly from start to finish!
Very interesting take on the theme. Really makes you think how long 10 seconds can be. :) I really loved the sound effects; spitting flame sound combined with the cuteness of the dragon really made me laugh every time. When it comes to feedback, then the controls are a little bit floaty and it feels like getting hit just throws you off too much. Thankfully you included generous amount of lives. Anyway, great game, loved it!
Good entry! I enjoyed the art and the music quite a bit, and the amount of content in here is great!
I liked the game. Nice animations, especially fish with a horn. I liked that there are different kinds of enemies. For example, ghosts that fly through obstacles. I would work on the controls to be more responsive. And it is not clear how many lives the player still has left. I never died.
Feels very Bubble Bobble in the best way :)
The graphics were cute, the monster designs all reminded me of arcade game enemies, and it was cool to see this aesthetic but without pixel art.
I know 10 seconds wasn't a decision you made, but it really goes to show how the theme could have been nicer with an "every X seconds" flexibility :) Thank you for adding the space bar to help with that!
There were some problems with collisions, especially when jumping up into a tile. I also managed to get damaged in the corner and fall out of the level at one point.
I personally liked the character movement being a bit floaty, it kind of reminded me of older arcade games and it also helped keep the difficulty up since trying to hit an enemy becomes much riskier when you can't instantly escape their line of fire by jumping.
Gave me NES platformer vibes but felt really smooth to play. Attacking was great the combination of the sound effect plus so much fire shooting out made it really fun. The only thing is I enjoyed it so much I kept spamming attack and rarely hit the 10 second timeout.
Also liked the feedback of being hit by enemies.
The music never got boring and there were so many levels and enemy types this easily kept me engaged right to the end.
Doing it all in C++ and SDL's incredibly impressive.
Yeah the 10 second timer didn't work well, so wise choice to just skip it lol. Thats the way of things. Platforming was off on my machine, where hitting the bottom of blocks didn't behave right, but the graphics were nice and the fire felt satisfying. Nice work.
I found movement to be _really_ fast, and then I noticed in your gameplay video that it is much more reasonable on your end. It's a common gotcha, but maybe for the next game jam, try to make movement framerate independent. :)
I ended up spamming the spacebar a lot, but I enjoy the large variety of enemies and levels. There's a lot of them! Great work on your game.
Wow, you managed to get a lot of different characters in this game. Even by the end, there were still more enemies being introduced and they all spiced things up quite nicely. The only thing I would think to tweak, is the mix on the sound effects, they overpower the music a bit. Despite that, it's a solid entry!
I like the variety of enemies in your game, and the fact that some of them even transform over time. The controls were a bit to floaty for my taste, and you either had to wait a long time to shoot, or could easily beat the levels by spamming space. Maybe you could have added a feature to 'level up' your hiccups and get them more often each time. Some sort of timer to see how much time you had left until the next one would also be nice :). Despite that, I did enjoy your game!
Wonderful introduction text and game, Ted (nefarious king of the pig trolls as he is known to his enemies) stood no chance from the beginning.
At first I played it with the space spamming, but I felt like it should be played sneeze-only so I did a sneeze-only run afterwards too, and it was super great fun! Tactically deciding which enemies you take out, which platforms you clear, which enemies become too dangerous once you leave them alone too long (double sped-up Ted was the truest of true nefarious menaces). I made it through with 11 lives left, but there were a couple of times were I felt like it could go either way. I thought this was a wonderful mix of tactical (almost turn-based) and platforming gameplay you found here! Great job at making something cool and unique of the theme!
Also Hiccups was very cute.
Wow really impressive you pulled this off in 48 hours! I've personally tried to do LD's in the past using just SDL2 and C++ also, but always ran out of time. Not only do you have to build game engine components, you also need to build an actual game. This has a bunch of levels, lots of unique enemies, and music/sfx. So yeah, good stuff!.
As for the game, I really appreciate that you added the ability to shoot with space lol. At first I tried playing without it, but it was very frustrating having to wait so long between shots, especially since the first level has two enemies that move up and down and are easy to miss with your first shot. I do like the idea of a dragon that automatically shoots fire every X seconds, but maybe x=10 is a bit too much. But besides that, it was a decent little platformer, and the first particles were fun to hit enemies with.
The writing gets an 11/10 from me. Nice work!
I started off trying to do a spacebar-less run, but I failed quite early... I was unable to hit essentially anything, neither the jellyfish in the first level or the snail in the second level. I think that, fundamentally, 10 seconds is just too long, and that's for one subtle reason:
Learnability. It takes me 10 seconds after booting up the game before I even know what my attack will look like. This means the very first instance of the attack is almost certainly wasted. But, more importantly, to practice the attack at all will take me another 10 seconds every time. This is an excruciatingly long time just to get one more chance to improve my skill with the attack. It is essentially like a platformer game, where the first level is around a second long (i.e. the length of the attack), and every time you die, you have to wait for a 10 second death animation. I think framing it like this makes it more obvious why it is so hard to get into the game from the perspective of a new player.
Because, after playing through the game with the spacebar, I watched your video, and the hiccup mechanic honestly seemed pretty cool. When the player already knows how to use it, it is honestly interesting the kinds of strategic gameplay that it requires. It feels like a puzzle getting slotted together.
So, that said, here's a couple thoughts on things that might mitigate this problem: 1. Simply have a shorter timer for the hiccups. This is in some ways a bad solution, as I do think there is some value in the 10 second timer in particular. It has a specific feel to it, that maybe you would want to keep. 2. Start the timer 5 seconds in, and have a visual indicator for the whole timer length. This makes it much faster for a new player to get into it, as they only have to wait 5 seconds for the first (wasted) hiccup instead of 10; it means that restarting a level gives you a fast timer, making it possible to quickly try a practice shot; finally, having a visual timer simply gives the player something to latch on to. With no visual indication whatsoever, 10 seconds feels like an absolute eternity--with some sort of visual indication, I think it would actually feel like less time and would also help newer players get a better sense of how they should plan their shots, I think.
So, all that is to say--I like the way that the game works. I like the cool path planning and puzzle solving that a timer-based shooting mechanic introduces. It just requires, in its current state, a lot of patience to get into the game properly, and I think there are ways that it could be made easier without sacrificing the current rhythm or intrinsic feel of the game.
Cool game, really well done. The game plays well and is fun. Nice work.