ludovics 2023-05-02 01:37
Pretty good except for the eagle part. It was quite difficult
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → Swallow Express
By tomssuli, kakka22, Saana, Mayu, tuulosss, duckman, SilentLegion, Turgunen, Dasnukki, koalanalle, Salvation, Nani and Ivapeppa
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 859 | 3.31 | 46 | |
| Fun | 662 | 3.35 | 46 | |
| Innovation | 1032 | 2.78 | 47 | |
| Theme | 266 | 4.21 | 47 | |
| Graphics | 828 | 3.27 | 47 | |
| Audio | 435 | 3.44 | 46 | |
| Humor | 530 | 3.18 | 46 | |
| Mood | 630 | 3.48 | 47 |
Pretty good except for the eagle part. It was quite difficult
I see the Flappy Bird inspiration, but it is a smart move! Good music and sounds, I also like the difficulty all in all! Thank you!
FYI, The download link on LD is dead. I found it to be quite challenging, but that's more or less common with LD games as play testing and balancing doesn't really happen much. It's a good idea to hits forgiving, so that you don't have to start over all the time.
I did very much like the foresty theme and music!
This game was fun and also frustrating since it reminded me a lot of Donkey Kong Country 2 which was absolute childhood trauma XD Keep up the good work!
Nothing original, but the pace is good. And a nice atmosphere too.
I thought this was really fun! At first I had some difficulty with the controls but once I got going it started to make more sense. The animal noises and dialogue were cracking me up. At times the hazards would blend in with the background making them a little hard to see, but other than that the art is good! The animal kingdom can be pretty cruel sometimes :)
I love the story! the twist with the bears dinner, the dogs owner, and the *Boss fight*!!! Nice work!
I recorded myself playing the game, though the recording seemed to freeze during every instance of dialogue? I don't know what caused that... my OBS settings were set to record window. Luckily I was reading all the dialogue out loud.
Here's the recording! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCUCCbqygbY
@100th-coin Nice that you enjoyed our game and the plot twists! :D The dialogue actually opens a sub-application so it's basically a different window. For this reason we put the game to full screen and recorded the whole screen for that video.
...Thanks you also for making let's play, but anyone of our team couldn't open your youtube video, it just says it's "being processed". Maybe it's available later.
@100th-coin Okay, now the video worked. Hilarious stuff! I loved the different voices you made for the characters xD
I looked into the saving problem and couldn't reproduce it... There was something wrong with the LDJAM download link though, but we tested downloading the game to multiple computers from the Blackenter-link and the saving worked ok. Also we couldn't reproduce the not-grabbing-letter -bug in the beginning.
It was really fun! The movement took me a bit to get used to but I got the hang of it. The art is very good. Congrats to everyone! The story is really cool for something made so fast, I couldn't ever write this much stuff so fast lol, very good!
Totally loved the atmospere and sounds! Kinda harmful for my spacebar but worthed it!
I like the sound effects and music! I feel like I'm in the forest while playing the game!
@joaopbax I was also amazed of the amount of story we got out. This was the first time we had a dedicated story sub-team in our game team and they worked wonders!
all fixed.
@yoddaa
No, we do not have itch.io at this time and of course it is not commonly downloaded, because it's the game zip. It has been rated only 14 times, so probably downloaded 20 times...
Also, I don't quite understand Chrome's logic for flagging files being potentially dangerous for not being downloaded much. With that logic every file is dangerous until certain amount of people have downloaded it? ...and how it becomes safer if the exact same file is moved to itch.io?
Simple game but tells a heartful story. The control reminds me of Flappy Bird, but then I found the bird gets a little gliding ability which helps travel fast. The final boss part is quite tension, tried a few times to pass.
Move is kind of like flappy bird but adds a lot of fun and some difficult of the game. The art style is unique and awesome. Also really love the sound effects!
This was quite enjoyable, but something that was really difficult for me was that there wasn't enough visual separation between the background and the obstacles you bump into. That made the eagle section too tough, IMO. But overall it was fun and kept me going for quite a while.
ok. I will try again..
I succeeded to download without the warning , I thing it's gone and safe. played the game . very cool I feel that the space bar key really captured the bird fly. I will delete my other comment. overall very good story and game. good job.
Cute game, loved playing for the swallow and the concept overall. Don't think the arrow right in front of the swallow is necessary, though, steals the gaming experience for me. Thanks for the entry!
Impressed you were able to have a story element in such a time constraint. Congrats on finishing the game jam!
Lovey little game, lovely graphics and game-play feels good, could have expanded it a bit with some additional features, but I guess thats for post-ludum~ It's a neat little nature game~ love the bear!
Great game, I really liked the part with the eagle! Some of the animal textures could be better, but I know they are difficult to draw. The .exe even worked with wine on Ubuntu.
@100th-coin @nekowei and others who did a playthrough...
I made a fix for the scores. Some people reported getting an error submitting scores, and while I never got the error myself, I think that fixed it because some testers reported not getting the error anymore.
If you're interested, you can download again and try your hand in making a score. Esc skips conversations to save some irl time. (the game itself doesn't count time when a dialogue is playing)
I've already played some "Bird delivering something" games here on Jam and yours was the most fun until now.
Loved the dialogues and the SFX when the animals are speaking (remember me Banjo-Kazooie from N64 and bring back some nostalgic memories)
Unfortunately, a weird bug make me get stuck in the ground and I had to start all over again :cry: .
bird-error.png
Suggestions: - you should change the obstacles color to better contrast with background. It's really hard distinguish one from another. - The duration of the game is maybe too long since you have to constantly press space to keep flying.
Finally, I liked the glide mechanic and the fact that you added a ranking.
My best time was 00:04:54
Overall, a good game.
@joao-marcello Very nice that you liked the game enough to try speedrunning, thanks for the suggestions :)
When you press esc there is "press if stuck" -button exactly for that kind of stuck-in-the-ground-bugs.. of course it possibly ruins your speedrun as you can lose some time being stuck.
congrats on this fun game! I really enjoyed playing it (my spacebar didn't :joy:)
Very nice game overall! Great job! For some reason my gamepad wasn't working with the game, so that was a let down, but I gave my spacebar a nice workout instead. The dialogue added nice flavor to the missions and gave motivation to keep going. The graphics are appropriately quaint, and the music felt right.
The flying felt a little bit frantic overall, but still manageable. The glide function didn't seem to be of much use as it mostly felt more effective to just keep tapping the button instead.
On the eagle part, the game froze for several seconds while it was loading the sky scene and then again when re-entering forest scene, but it did eventually work.
Can report the same bug (getting stuck below the ground) as the commenter before me. Other than that I really liked that you put story in this! The flying controls were cool too, but in some places I would have preferred less obstacles that push you back so far. Well done!
The controls are too sharp and uncomfortable, and the spacebar jumps are too weak. By the end of the game, my thumb began to ache from frequent pressing of the spacebar. Additionally, the cacti and their ability to throw the character off were irritating. Some of the graphics elements don't blend well together. However, overall, the game was incredibly fun and engaging, and I didn't want to put it down until I finished, despite the control discomforts. The humor and story are simply delightful! 😁
A swallow carrying a coconut? Unfeasible for an European swallow, it must be an African swallow then. (Someone might get it... I wish... I hope).
Also, I decided tu borrow myself underground in one of the last deliveries so I had to redo everything to reach the ending. The game was fun but I really did not want to lose all progress so far into the game.
@chusmimax Ah, I See You're a Man of Culture As Well. We added the coconut just for this reason :smiley:
This game was fun and interesting! Great job and good luck~
Super realistic birds and deer contrasted with blocky grass floating in mid air is pretty charming :laughing:
@binroot Actually those are meant to be tree leaves and not grass, but nicely observed from the images. We actually had 5 different artists doing the graphics this time so it was bound to be a mashup of different styles :slight_smile:
What did you think of the gameplay? What about the plot?
pretty good speed game
This was nice, I even made it to the top 5 in the leaderboard :) I like the overall idea and the backstory is really rich. Sometimes the collisons with ceilings got me stuck (but you have nice unstuck button), and the backstory is nice, but perhaps you could have include bit more gameplay content as well, since you force player to go back and forth for quite some time. Would be nice to have something that would break it, as I feel that some players might not be motivated enough to see what is at the end. And that would be shame ;) Good job with your game and good job in coordination so many people!
@jin9310
Thank you very much for the nice and constructive review!
Actually we had planned some more gameplay elements like upgrades and speedboosts when eating bugs on the way, enemies and a way to defeat them, also branching storyline and a whole second map... Alas we had some challenges managing a team so big and also couldn't think of a way to balance all planned gameplay.
So we ended up cutting lots of planned content on the last day's morning. We stuck all the planned animals in a single map and went with it and in the end it felt like a good choice, as the game would probably have ended up too long with two maps plus the eagle chase.
I think that this game is a really good use of Flappy Bird-style mechanics. In particular, I really like that the primary punishment for failure is loss of time rather than, e.g., dying. This makes the game much less frustrating than Flappy Bird as a whole, while it still feels better to do better at playing.
More specifically, I love the feeling of speed in this game, when I really get a good flight going. It just feels good to do well at flying, and so there really doesn't need to be any sort of death mechanic. It is fun to fly fast, I want to fly fast, and I do like to try to score reasonably high on the leaderboards that you all always have in your games, although I'm not sure I did too well this time. :smile:
And, the glide mechanic is a great addition to the traditional Flappy Bird mechanics. It's actually a little difficult to pull off, because whenever I want to glide I usually have already released space, so hitting space again sends me too high. Learning to use the glide effectively therefore actually takes some practice.
I did find the eagle chase a bit frustrating but ultimately it was not too bad. I think it took me around 3-4 tries. If I had lost really late in the chase sequence I might have disliked it more, however.
One thing I did find somewhat frustrating is it is actually kind of tricky to visually distinguish the obstacles from the background, especially the hanging vines. I think this isn't too bad during the normal gameplay, because again, there's no real penalty -- and so it's kind of fun that there's an intrinsic difficulty in distinguishing the obstacles from the background. Like, I actually have to learn to really watch carefully -- and I did get better at this! I think that's kind of cool and kind of fun.
But, it is definitely more frustrating during the eagle chase, where you can't make very many mistakes, you have to keep going as fast as possible, and the map is completely distinct from the rest of the game, from what I can tell. It did seem like there was relatively low obstacle density in later parts of the chase map, which I think was a good decision for this reason of visibility.
Going into this game I was thinking there might be some darker or macabre elements, given the twist in your last game. And I was absolutely right. It started with the grilled chicken and just got worse with the bear. It definitely takes this fun flying game and makes it quite a bit more sinister. I think this is interesting, as it really defines the game's tone / emotional state.
That is, had there not been these darker elements, I think I would describe this game as lighthearted, cute, maybe sweet, due to the ending with the pigeon. But... instead I think I would describe the tone as maybe ungrounded or dreamlike (or maybe even nightmarish). These darker elements just create this clash with the other elements where everything begins to feel irreconcilable (so, dreamlike). And to be clear--this is meant to be a description, not a criticism--I just want to describe the feeling I get from the game, as I think it's a good thing to describe (and it is a very unique atmosphere! I haven't played a lot of games like this).
Whatever the general atmosphere of the game is, I do appreciate a lot of the art in the game. A lot of the animal portraits are pretty nice, and the ending scene looks great and is, as I said, sweet.
Overall -- this was a really fun game in terms of raw gameplay, and there's definitely a solid narrative backing as well. Great job!
@honey-pony
Thank you dearly for your long and throrough review! Nice to see someone recognized the amount of thought we had put in when making different aspects of this game.
We took something familiar from flappy bird and adjusted the gameplay to have a speedy feeling, that you would feel actually like the swallow and I'm glad that the feeling translated to you as player too. Gliding mechanic was idea from our main playtester and that little change brought surprising deepness to mastering the game.
The eagle part took lots of balancing and was actually made easier 3 times around while playtesting and developing... The original scene was hardcore level and enjoyable only to masocore players like myself, so I'm glad that I got second opinions about it before we published the game.
The obstacles disappearing to background was an oversight and not a designed difficulty feature. We should have put the collidable objects even more distinctive. Especially the one spiky vine camouflaging itself to the birch trunk was terrible mistake and should have been caught before release... But now it is what it is.
It was nice to hear what feelings our game awakened as - exceptionally this time around - we had a separate two-girl story team putting tens of hours to planning and writing the story and dialogues. Lovely that you appreciated the contrast of different tones in the storytelling, it was intended and even I got a dark feeling when I first time played through the game with most of the dialogues in and got to the second deer part.
Congratulations for making a high score! We seem to have some recurring speedrunners try-harding our games each year, so good luck trying to beat the top scores. Even I couldn't beat them this time :sweat_smile:
I love the art style of this game. The hand-drawn graphics and watercolor-like textures give it a unique and artistic feel
Big scope for a jam game, but made more sense when I saw the credits at the end and all the people who worked on it! Nice job! The controls were a little wonky, but once I switched to using only my right hand for the spacebar and my left hand for WASD it got much easier. The story was fun, other than that I was forced to kill a deer in return for ONE BONE. But I guess bear redeemed himself in the end. Overall, 2/10 because your barn swallow's face is red instead of rusty orange. Just kidding. The barn swallow sounds were magnificent though.
@mark-a-pressler
Thanks for the nice review,
I mostly gametested with a controller and a little bit with arrows+space.
Great that the story made you feel something... There might be many motives why the swallow did everything, or maybe he's just a yes-man doing what everyone asks.
In the last hours of the competition I realized that we didn't have voice for the main character. The sound team had already gone, so I quickly made some swallow imitation myself. Glad that it worked! 😅