sweltj 2023-05-02 01:21
Really cute and excellent! Even more impressive that you did this in C++, I'm new to game dev but I aspire to be like you. So much talent and creativity here!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → Snail Mail
By martenscedric, winter2277, William Wells and adrien-tremblay
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 211 | 3.95 | 26 | |
| Fun | 209 | 3.85 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 69 | 4.10 | 26 | |
| Theme | 67 | 4.43 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 469 | 3.87 | 26 | |
| Audio | 309 | 3.67 | 25 | |
| Humor | 214 | 3.76 | 23 | |
| Mood | 335 | 3.81 | 26 |
Really cute and excellent! Even more impressive that you did this in C++, I'm new to game dev but I aspire to be like you. So much talent and creativity here!
@sweltj Thank you for the kind words, we really appreciate it!
The theme song should top the Billboard charts! I want to listen on repeat https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WheezyWiseWizards/SnailMail/master/client/res/music/snailys_song_v2.mp3
Pretty cool game! very cute, my gf smiled watching it
I kinda felt a bit confused with all the timers tho.
Cute! Interesting take on a find the path game making the other snail make a path traversable again (I like the reason :joy:). Song was great too!
Cute graphics. Nice job.
Really nice! I agree with @sweltj @whywhy @silkworm-sweatshop the graphics are cute.
Cute little entry!
The "don't backtrack" mechanic is pretty common for puzzle games, but the neat twist on the formula was managing the different colors of snails which could affect the possible paths of the other. The game is full of personality with the various mail recipients and the title song with actual live singing.
This is subjective, but I think this kind of game often works better without a timer. The hard part of puzzle games usually comes from evaluating your choices and making the correct decision, rather than clicking buttons quickly. It also can be hard to get your bearings at the start of a level if there's immediately a timer counting down.
I drew the snailman and added him to the pixel fan art compilation on [my profile.](https://ldjam.com/users/jeremy-ryan/)
snail.png
Nice work for 72 hours!
Snail Stuck!
Still faster than our local snailmail haha :D
Finished all 12 Levels. The difficulty curve was very well designed :)
Really enjoyed the game! The audio was great and the puzzles were interesting. The timing of things confused me a little bit and after a while it was a bit repetitive but I had fun playing! Great job!
@jeremy-ryan Thanks for the excellent fanart! We are really pleased you enjoyed the game.
From our post-mortem analysis, we do think the timers were unecessary. What happened is that we had two different visions for the game, from different team members. The first one, being a more pure puzzle game without timers where the game would be chill and the player would need to think through the moves. Levels would need to exploit the snail mechanics neatly. The second vision was a hectic game with a lot of snails to manage in parallel. The 12 levels provided with the game were mostly designed to be good puzzles instead of being hectic. We don't think that these two visions are necessarily mutually exclusive but there was not a single good level designed with the second vision, making the timers a pain point for anyone wanting a chill experience.
Great job on the game I would even say you ppl SNAILED it :grinning_squinting_face:
but seriously tho loved the implementation of color trace path element
@martenscedric I actually enjoyed the timer, you could think through your moves before starting the timers. Without the timers this would have been just another puzzle game for me and would have gotten a lower innovation score for sure :)
Great job! I loved the puzzles in your game. I wish the arrows hitbox was a little bigger, or had some sort of visual feedback when they were selected, a couple times when I was frantically moving my snails, it took a couple clicks. Otherwise though, great game, congrats!
This was a really good puzzle. It had me strategizing frantically with each round. I like the vibrating speech balloons when the customers were running out of time -- that offers the best feedback for their urgency.
The idea is interesting. It turned out to be a fun puzzle game. Loved the pixel art.
Looks like OpenAL is crashing on load, throwing AL_INVALID_OPERATION on every subsequent call
I loved playing it, I like that the levels teach us slowly the rules and all ! Really nice idea, the timer is a bit stressful, but overall I had a great time <3 BTW the assets are sooo cute :D
Nice little puzzle game! The visuals, audio and gameplay matched well! I did have an issue where sometimes snails just wouldn't spawn or the arrows to control them refused to appear but when it works, it worked very well. I'm surprised you managed to fit so many puzzles in for a game jam but you did a good job of starting easy and getting more difficult as it goes on. Very well done!
@raptor851 Sorry for the inconvenience. Perhaps there is too much music tracks (due to it being loaded separately for various BPMs) and so your audio card is too loaded with data. Please try updating your audio drivers or try with a higher performance computer
@winter2277 this is a workstation w/ 128 gigs of ram, geforce 4090 and full pro audio setup, pretty sure it's not a lack of audio memory.
The errors indicated it was most likely trying to load an audio device hard-coded by name or layout and because it failed to load the audio device it wanted it just crashed because it kept attempting to play audio on a device it failed to open.
A fun puzzle game! The timers get real stressful, real fast, so it might not be suitable for the Sudoku kind of crowd. I really liked coordinating my various slime trails and repeating each level to ensure I don't miss a single delivery. I found the specifics of the puzzle solving very refreshing.
Really fun and unique. The real time mechanic added cool twist for the puzzle, the presentation and art was very cute! The difficulty curve was also just right :)
@raptor851 This game has been built with the same version of SFML we used for our 3 previous game jams and you are the first to report this issue. The only difference with our previous games being the amount of tracks, it lead me to suggest this hypothesis. I cannot comment on your theory as I am not a developer of SFML. Again, sorry for the inconvenience but having no way to debug your issue on our side there is very little we can do.
I was not even too lazy to go through all the levels. Great idea and implementation. 5/5 ^^
I think it's quite difficult to develop puzzle games in a short window, so hats off to you! I liked that you mixed it up a bit and the timed element prevented me from thinking about it too much. Thank you!