Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → Stork Run
By ditam
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 360 | 2.92 | 23 | |
| Fun | 302 | 3.00 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 316 | 2.92 | 23 | |
| Theme | 198 | 3.88 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 345 | 2.83 | 23 | |
| Audio | 323 | 2.27 | 22 | |
| Humor | 227 | 2.73 | 19 | |
| Mood | 357 | 2.57 | 21 |
The explanation of the additional commands was presented step by step, making it very clear and easy to understand! The added commands were powerful and exhilarating. Furthermore, the simple yet expressive graphics made it enjoyable to watch. The expressions of falling and changes in elevation, in particular, have a great sense of realism, which is quite impressive.
I like how you can drop multiple packages on the same house. Good job!
Some of those houses definitely got more babies than they bargained for :rofl:
Great instructions, made it easy to play.
This is actually pretty nice idea. Bit strange that there are helicopters with rockets (and the anti-air system seems not to be working) :D Also there are notes about faster speed, but either the increments are too small to notice, or there are none? But really nice and orignal take on the theme. Good job!
Thanks guys! I've fixed some bugs and adjusted the pacing of the levels today, so you can get through the boring parts quicker.
Thanks a lot @zundou! I was also very happy with how the elevation shift animation turned out. Actually there's an entire second layer of clouds that's almost never visible due to a bug, but the other one works well enough on its own.
@kuggenhoffen thanks, it almost sounds like you had a hard time finding _something_ to complement, heh. But also, I can see how that's not an unfunny mental image. I do appreciate it either way!
@hatheus what babies? :-p
@jin9310 I've adjusted the speed increments a bit, they should be more noticeable now. The anti-air system might be a bit unintuitive - it rolls a random set of red "hit zones" around you, so you might not get hit at all - maybe that's why it looked broken. Originally I was planning to have this as a mechanic to add some strategic decision making (ie. whether to use evade or not), but in this jam version there's no point in not evading. Maybe in a post-jam version sometime!
Nice idea. Easy to understand. Feels a bit rushed, I think if you had targeted the Jam instead of the Compo you would have had more time to polish it and make it feel much better. Good job submitting to Compo though!
Fun game with well explained controls. It felt weird being targeted by helicopters with rockets, plus that overpowered dash capable of taking them down, but sticks to the theme and certainly has an addictive component that makes me want to keep playing. Good job.
The idea was fun an contols were intuitive.
It would be nice to have some ui element to now health. Also, since everything is controlled with a keyboard, a shortcut to go to next level without using the mouse would be great.
Nice entry overall, great work!
Short but fun game! I've delivered many times in the same house and it felt a bit like cheating the system, not sure if was intended, but had fun thinking about some parents got extra delivery hahah. I also didn't use much the dash. Anyway, good job.
Why are they sending war helipcopters to shoot up a stork? With babies?!!
Is a fun game, simple but effective. The different abilities are quite cool and I loved the evade effect. The sound effects got a bit annoying but is okay for a jam game. Overall good job!
Thanks @jose-bonilla! I appreciate the fair criticism, and I see where you're coming from, I definitely had a large backlog of polish and extra content that I didn't get around to until the deadline. At the end, my hubris got the best of me, I got my eyes too set on the compo this time. No regrets, but I think I'll be going back to the jam format next time around.
@daniboygg I absolutely agree that involving the mouse just for that one action is just bad UX, I'll be fixing it.
@sebastian-m I couldn't quite flesh out the lore here, but there's no babies involved, don't worry. In the end, there's only some breadcrumbs of information on the level ending screens, but my basic idea for the story was this: !> These storks are running some non-specific smuggling operation under the guise of delivering babies, hence the increasing resistance from the ground.
Nice entry :) I really like your tutorial ! Dropping babies on houses like they be bunny humping ahah
It was a nice twist on an established game loop. It was not always clear if I had successfully delivered a new life at times. The dificulty ramped up nicely and it was well thought out. It lacked a little juice in the interaction and that left it feeling a bit flat as an experience. Good work none the less
Cool game! It did take me a little while to figure out where to drop the babies to get the points, but the steady increase of mechanics and difficutly was very good.
I like retro graphics and unlocking new abilities as you go and how you present is very clever. I guess you can deliver the packages to any house? Unless I missed something. It'd also be nice if we could only deliver to the houses with a flag or indicator of some sort. Overall a nice retro entry, gj!
Fun little game. I think some of these levels I definitely didn't deserve to win but the game said I won haha.
@arron-fowler Oh yeah, there's lots of juice missing. There's no new lives involved in this game though (see my spoiler tag above).
@chuckiee Yeah, it's a complete free-for-all with packages and houses, limiting that didn't even make it onto my to-do list during the compo, let alone near implementation. I tried adding difficulty in other aspects of the levels - but I see how a more fleshed out system for peaceful deliveries would also improve the transition experience later as the focus of the game shifts.
@jnaver thanks, I figured surviving the level is victory enough. I didn't have time for any grading system to begin with in the 48 hours, and at least this way every player is more likely to see the additional content on the later levels.
Thanks everyone for your feedback!
Having to aim to drop something very far below is a fun mechanic that I don't think I've seen very much before. It is surprisingly difficult to aim well, which is I think because of the intrinsic fact that the targets are very far away -- so there's only a small range of locations that result in a correct hit.
Interestingly, one mechanic making aiming more difficult was the spawn location of the package. I kept expecting it to spawn in the player center, and I had a hard time really learning how to position correctly. I think this is interesting, because it seems like the kind of thing that would be straightforward to adapt to as a player.
I do think that the game probably should not have restarted all the way when you lose. This is for the following two reasons: 1, it takes a long time to play through all the levels, and 2, there are some mechanics that are difficult to learn about quickly.
In particular, the anti-air system does not have a clear functionality when it first appears. In fact, I still don't understand it entirely... one of my runs, the red targeting dots appeared, and I figured I had a few seconds before I had to evade... but then I died almost instantly, which was very confusing.
So, because there's these mechanics that take a couple attempts to learn about, and because it takes a long grind to get back to where they show up, I think it would be best to restart at the level you died at (or maybe have a lives system that resets your progress entirely after losing a couple lives, for a compromise).
After losing too many times, I ended up simply cheating by deleting the checkPlayerHealth() function. :sweat_smile: I actually love it when Ludum Dare games are written in plain JavaScript -- it can be a lot of fun to mess around with a game's internals like that.
I do think that the combat mechanics were otherwise quite fun. I think that there's a nice mix of things... avoiding the guys on the ground, as well as being able to fight back directly against the helicopters if necessary. Then, the anti-air systems are actually kind of scary with how fast they can kill you, adding another layer.
Overall -- a fun concept in terms of story and I liked the gameplay, both the package delivery and the general combat. Just a little too hard for me to beat legit. :smile:
Thanks for the detailed feedback @honey-pony, I truly appreciate it. I'm glad that you liked it overall and kudos for hacking it! :) All my entries so far were pure vanilla JS, so the only barrier to modifying them is the messy jam code, heh. I'm glad you were interested enough to go through that trouble.
I don't disagree with your complaints, most of them are due to the compo time constraints. The anti-air seems confusing for many to begin with (there is a randomness element involved in whether it hits you or not), and I'm pretty sure there's some bug there related to its timeouts too - you are meant to have a few seconds to react.
Regarding the package spawn location, I intentionally moved it a bit higher as if the stork was dropping it from its beak, but iirc the actual hitbox calculation is via the actual player center. Since you're familiar with the internals already, you can flip the DEBUG global var to true for a little helping dot.