Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Definitely Not A Pyramid Scheme
By davision
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 2.72 | 11 | ||
| Fun | 2.88 | 11 | ||
| Innovation | 3.77 | 11 | ||
| Theme | 2.55 | 11 | ||
| Graphics | 3.10 | 12 | ||
| Audio | 3.50 | 10 | ||
| Humor | 3.88 | 11 | ||
| Mood | 3.00 | 11 |
It takes a while to get the hang of and the controls/gameplay is a bit janky. It does have a lot of charm and a really fun presentation and an innovative idea :) The whole summary of events, when you die made me giggle. good work!
This game is a trip for sure. The ridiculous music and sound effects, weird graphics with hard-to-read text, and Sesame-street characters for some reason?
It took me a few tries to figure out exactly what was going on or why I couldn't move some times. (And it printed "move failed" on left side of the screen under some lighting errors.) But still I haven't been able to answer some questions. How close together do the triangles need to be before you fall through them? What causes me and the people following me to get bigger and smaller? What determines the triangles I get after each round? Does the big pile of numbers at the top of the screen mean anything important to gameplay? Why does the ground model sometimes stick through the placeable triangles?
Also, I was never able to figure out the connection between the pyramid scheme theming and the actual gameplay. I assume the people following you are supposed to be your downline? But what's the connection between that and the fact that they block your movement?
Despite my confusions, the game was pretty fun (as far into it as I could get), the sound effects were weird but satisfying, and it had some unique ideas. I just wish things were explained better.
@nullval Thanks it actually had some pretty nasty bugs in there which I have now fixed.
@zungryware That with the failed move debug text is just when you try to move in the opposing direction into the chain which results in a bump. The falling between triangles is just the collision of the leading token. So you could play risky by leaving space between them. The size is directly relative to the earnings that person gets. For the red ones its the amount of minus they have. The triangles you get are the red minus people which have the same kind of scaling. You could see the numbers for those things mentioned at the top but its not really important other then that you want to have a positive cut when you pull out by touching a green pyramid. Triangle placeing is kinda bare bones because I didn't have the time to do anything elaborate with collisions. I also wish I had the time to do some explanation and tutorial. I now did something on the game page though with tutorial images. I also fixed some bugs which made the whole thing more confusing then it should be since the scaling was buggy as well as some math and displaying. The tutorial should clear that up with the theme. If you mean the collideing klling you and the theme connection you could take it as the the people in minus finding out where their investments go and then the whole stick falling apart. Pyramid schemes are fragile after all
Bit of a sensory overload but I still enjoyed the presentation and pyramid scheme framing. Gameplay feels a little rough and at one stage I was unable to stop myself getting pushed off a triangle but the actual gameplay loop could be pretty enjoyable in a more easily readable presentation I think.
The music is great, I struggled to get past my first pyramid scheme. It'd also be great to see more of the character art :smile:
You have such a distinctive style to stupid faces, that I think you should cover more of a screen with them. Now they are very small. Game itself is very cryptic if you don't read instructions. More effort could be put for teaching player to play the game.
I also think controls could be more aligned between alone mode and when you have followers. It took me while to understand that it is essentially snake type of game, cause I was able to go any direction at first, but then those followers pushed me off the ledge.
But yeah, I see there could be fun game out of here. Bit more polish in game play and more contrasting graphics, some kind of tutorial and it's fine. It is joke game and that is good, humour get's good rating on this one
Very interesting art style to say the least. I was a bit confused by all of the numbers on the screen, maybe a small tutorial or the like would have helped a bit. I enjoyed the random faces on the chips and the mechanic of building the pyramids with their faces on it seemed interesting. Very unique!
I was very excited to play this because it looks very cool and unique. But I wasn't able to play so I have not rated.
I downloaded and ran the game. It started and I saw the playfield and heard the music, but it did not respond to any inputs. I couldn't even alt-tab out of it when I eventually gave up and tried that instead. Then after like a minute my guy zoomed off the field, it said game over, and some debug info appeared on the left side. I was able to alt-tab out then so I killed it, checked the instructions, and tried again. Similar result except I had to ctrl-alt-del to exit the game even after gameover.
Sorry! Maybe my Radeon 590 was not up to the task. Again, I didn't rate b/c I couldn't play correctly, but I thought I'd drop a note here with the experience in case it's helpful in any way.
Very cool-looking game, was sorry I couldn't give it a proper shot.
@pkenney Sad to hear. No clue what is going on there. The downloaded build also worked for me. Radeon 590 should have no problem with UE4. Maybe I figure it out for the post jam version.