william-derksen 2022-10-02 23:41
Polished as always! Beautiful Backgrounds and Particles! Simple and but engaging gameplay! I'm curious if you made the time charges less common the further up you go?
Verdict: You should release this as an app
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Eleventh Second
By jeremy-ryan
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 8 | 4.23 | 36 | |
| Fun | 13 | 4.20 | 36 | |
| Innovation | 123 | 3.61 | 36 | |
| Theme | 62 | 4.10 | 36 | |
| Graphics | 4 | 4.59 | 37 | |
| Audio | 8 | 4.36 | 36 | |
| Mood | 8 | 4.32 | 37 |
Polished as always! Beautiful Backgrounds and Particles! Simple and but engaging gameplay! I'm curious if you made the time charges less common the further up you go?
Verdict: You should release this as an app
@william-derksen Batteries do become less common as you go up, as do regular platforms (and the ratio of batteries to platforms decreases). Hopefully the difficulty curve isn't too sharp --- that was one of the biggest complaints about last jam's game. I also have some number magic to prevent particularly bad strings of bad luck.
Thanks for playing!
Dude this game was actually so awesome, as soon as I saw "Eleventh second" I clicked, great title and a great take on the theme. There was a great story, and very simple mechanics done well. I loved the feeling of hitting the powerups and also of reseting the time. The whole game was superb and well polished, great entry!
Amazing entry! Nice Audio and Graphics, particles used perfectly, simple but entertaining gameplay. By far the best game here i've seen so far.
Only little thing i have to complain about is the keyboard usage on a mouse based game, every reset felt a little bit bad because of that - is there any reason why you didn't just chose clicks as input instead of Enter and R ?
@osh-studio Thanks for playing!
@thoastbot To be completely honest, because the menus and resetting were the absolute last thing I implemented and I just didn't think about it haha. "R" is common for resets, and I just didn't think about the potential annoyance until it was shipped.
Glad you liked everything else though!
Lovely graphics and super novel concept. Really into this. Super well done all around. May be the best I've played so far!
Excelent game, excelent atmosphere, excelent feeling, excelent art. I loved it, it's one of the best games i played in this jam
Amazing and stylish. Had lots of fun playing it. Really liked the deformation on the particles, and the audio was effective without being overpowering. Did run into a lack of platforms and bombs causing some deaths.
AMAZING! Very polished, feels very comfortable to play it, the sound and particles make it a very satisfying experience. I really enjoyed this game.
Beautiful music loop. Lovely background. At first I found I could just spam click but that quickly changed as I saw the frequency diminish. Simple to learn but the butt-clenching panic comes up quicker than you realize. Great job!
A lovely entry :)
Very nice polish, pretty fun to play. I remember playing Eleventh Hour - this is a great follow up!
507 is the furthest I could make it.
Great art. The grapple is super satisfying! The time slow down is super effective at giving a sense of speed.
Fantastic art, music, and extremely fun gameplay. You definitely managed to nail that certain type of addictiveness through its polish/juice, even if the gameplay isn't that complicated. Also it's pretty awesome that you were able to make a sequel to your previous entry. One of my favorite entries so far!
What a beautiful polished little gem! I really appreciate the short and simple but really well done little tutorial at the start. Had a wonderful time playing this on stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1609528446?t=2h42m44s
It's very polished and fun! Aesthetic and gameplay is on point. I managed to defuse the bomb at 1000ft, but it was pretty hard to be honest.
Minor gripe is that the tutorial message flashed past, so I was a little confused at the start, regardless I understood the gameplay very quickly. Also, if possible a Linux / MacOS build is very much appreciated as well.
Wow this game is very polished !
We feel the speed while playing, the effects are crazy good :)
I also really liked the way you used the theme.
I enjoyed playing thanks !
Great polish work! That grapple feels really good.
I like the music on its own, but it doesn't quite fit the gameplay to me.
Solid and polished game. Played it for half an hour to get to 870 but then quit...
You can get to a position where there is no way forward when the only platform is at the bottom of the screen. Also, I really would have liked to have full screen mode, as I died so many times when clicking out of the window's top or bottom
Otherwise, nice game. Gameplay loop kept me engaged for long time. Also, this would probably convert very well for mobile. I liked the graphics and the music & sfx that were a continuum from your last game :)
@tomssuli There is a full screen mode! Press F4 to toggle it (there's a subtle label on the title screen that's easy to miss).
I will say I don't *think* there's a way to get it into a state that's impossible to move forward --- or at least I haven't seen one. It might require some precise timing to grab a low platform at the last possible second to scroll up. The platforms probably do get too spaced out toward the end.
Thanks for playing and for the feedback!
Extremely fun! Since restarting is so quick, It's very addicting to try again to see if you can get a little further than last time. Grappling time batteries was super satisfying.
It's a little tricky near the end when there's just a single platform on the bottom end of the screen. I don't know if it's impossible, but I was never quite skilled enough to pull that off.
Still, after a handful of tries I was able to reach the top of the clock tower. :) I had a wonderful time playing this. Well done!
The graphics are amazing! I especially like the background scenery and the grapple animation. The tutorial was really nicely integrated, and the gameplay felt very intuitive. There was also some depth to it, like by the end I was learning to grapple things while still being launched upwards, rather than waiting until things stabilized. I think the music could have been more intense/fast-paced, or even gradually increased in intensity as you got higher up, but on the flip side it was nice and relaxing which helps combat the frustration of missing a platform. Overall a worthy sequel to last time. Great work!
Really beautiful game! It was a great touch that the background gears turn backwards when your time machine goes off.
@jeremy-ryan Thanks alot for instructing the fullscreen. I must have been blind to not notice it, since there isn't that much text in the whole game :laughing:
After switching to full screen I finished the game in my second try :slight_smile:
eleven2.png
p.s. That song is so beautiful! Reminds me of compositions of the legendary finnish youth-gospel music composer Pekka Simojoki.
@tomssuli Wow, thanks for taking the time to come back to it!
Glad you liked the music. I was originally going to do something closer to [Eleventh Hour](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/eleventh-hour) and have a more intense, electronic sound... but ran out of time so decided to just record my keyboard because it was quicker.
(Speaking of which, thanks @juxipolo and @paul-nadan for the feedback on the music... I agree! Would have loved to have made something more suspenseful for the gameplay and kept the piano version for just the "you win" screen)
Oooh this felt great to play, the physicalness of throwing the kunai and grappling upwards is really sold well through both all the elements of the game it almost felt like my mouse haptic feedback in it 👍 Extra props for doing a continuous narrative across multiple game jams 🙌
Very nice, this felt really good to play, the art and music feel are all very polished. Really enjoyed that you chose a more "chill" feel so the game is almost "zen" like. Not beat it yet lol but I get a little further each time. Really enjoyable game!
Cool concept reminiscent of the tree escape sequence in Blind Forest, and a blast to play. The music reminds me of Child of Light. You're at least a top 10 contender, especially in gfx/audio
I thought this was an endless arcade game like icy tower and I set a personal goal of 1k feet. I didn't expect it to be the actual goal. An endless mode with leaderboard could be a thing
1000.png
I thought the game was rigged past 900 feet. Ball generation is very random and chaotic; sometimes you get one right where you land 10 times in a row, and sometimes you don't get any because you quickjumped past them all. You can catch balls mid jump but it's cheesy
980.png
And sometimes there were multiple platforms on top of each other, and sometimes they were very scarce. These platforms were so low I don't think it was possible to move forward unless you latched to an offscreen platform above
750.png
I think world generation could be a bit more pseudorandom, but it's not a big deal
@alaah Thanks for the feedback! Platform generation is definitely an area for improvement.
The batteries had a flat chance of spawning (I believe 15% of all platforms near the end) but also a failsafe for bad luck (near the end, you can't get seven platforms in a row with no battery).
The platform spacing had a constant minimum distance between platforms, and the maximum increased as you went up (probably a bit too much).
See method spawn_new_platform() in [the code](https://github.com/jeremycryan/LD51/blob/main/frame.py) if you're interested! There was probably a better way to handle it, but I was implementing the difficulty scaling right up to the end so didn't have much time to fine-tune.
Really fun, I kinda wished there was an endless mode ngl. I loved the time bomb mechanic and how overpowered the bombs are, it makes the moments where there isn't one on screen more tense. LOVED the artstyle and effects!
Screenshot 2022-10-09 234109.png
Ha! Finally made it. That final stretch is intense. Amazing entry. Can't believe this is a compo game.
As always, really good ld entry ! I liked a lot the design and the game, and the feeling you get when taking a time battery : )
This was a really fun game! The gameplay is simple and fun, and having a quick way to restart made losing not feel annoying. It definitely got harder the closer to the end you got.
I think I found a bug though. I don't know how to recreate it, but I somehow died right after having collected a time battery. Maybe I died right as I picked it up and it didn't count until after time started ticking again, but I don't know :/
Screenshot 2022-10-12 234910.png
I like the looks of the game. If I had to nitpick a little, one complaint would be that some text looks smooth, while some does not. It's really not that big of a thing though.
The music was also good. I feel like it fit the mood of impending doom that seems impossible to stop.
Overall it was a fun experience playing your game :)
@persikan Thanks for playing!
I have seen that bug before --- I think it might happen if you grab the battery exactly as the time runs out. Unfortunately I ran out of time to investigate further because it seemed really rare.
> some text looks smooth, while some does not
I think this is because some text is being rendered by PyGame and some of the text is actually images being loaded in. I think I had antialiasing disabled in my image editor since I was doing pixel art. Oops!
Amazing game! One of the most fun ones I've played this jam - the hook mechanic was just so well done. The music and graphics - especially all the visual effects - were also absolutely incredible.
As others have mentioned though, the platform/battery generation felt a bit too random & unfair: I felt like most of the times I died were because I had a too long sequence of platforms without batteries, or the only platform being too close to the bottom. Also, there were a few rare instances where a platform was directly below/above a battery, and when I tried taking the battery, I ended up hooking to the platform instead, leading to a loss.
Lastly, while the intro text implied an ending, it was pretty easy to miss the "thousand feet" line and think it was endless - I only noticed it when I restarted the game after a few tries. Perhaps showing the goal somewhere in the UI, or even counting the feet backwards like your previous game, would help?
Other than that, really awesome entry!
@frogman Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for pointing out the "thousand feet" UI piece... I actually did have plans to add UI for that initially. The clocktower graphic in the intro sequence was originally going to be a little map on the side with a "you are here" indicator that goes up. Ultimately I didn't like how it looked in the mock-up and scrapped it, but definitely feel similarly about the need. Maybe a simple "out of 1000ft" on the game over screen would have done it.
And platform/battery generation is definitely a common theme. Definitely something to design more deliberately next time!
Another wonderful game from Jeremy Ryan!!!
I can't believe how perfect the difficulty was. It took a little bit to get used to, then once it clicked it was just satisfying and fun and exciting.
Bravo and best of luck! My team (myself included) loved the art that you made of Raidar!!!
Beautiful work, I love the art style!! The animations are excellent, The controls of the game are very good, very smooth!! Peaceful music and the art style work very well together!! Love this one!
Its a minor thing, but I absolutely love the fact that the gears in the background actually mesh. It would have been so easy to place them randomly in the background and have them spin at random speeds and a random direction (that's almost certainly what I would have done) but you took the time to add in that small detail that few people would notice. I think that's emblematic of the general polish of this game as a whole. It looks and plays SO well.
As others have mentioned, making the platforms and batteries more sparse as the game goes on can make it a bit frustrating towards the end, but dying and restarting are so seamless and quick that I hardly minded. As long as the game didn't screw me on platform placement, I welcomed the challenge towards the top as it sometimes required new strategies like grabbing a battery while still rising to continue your ascent. It also would have been super cool to have an endless mode with a leaderboard, but that might be ambitious for a compo entry.
The graphics are great (I really like the grappling hook animation), the sound design is simplistic but great, the game feel is great, and the replayability is great. This is definitely a contender for one of the best in the compo!
youwin.png
Excellent work! I love how juicy everything was, especially the batteries. A great little touch is how they move to you just slightly when you hook them with the kunai. It was kind of unforgiving, but I enjoyed the challenge. I also really liked the silhouetted art style. Well done!
Eleventh
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