Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → BANKWAVE: Neon Networth
By Gregg Rossetti, frabjous-studios, pixelgazer, Jayecifer, Elekkay, MrGoose, CaptainSkilly and Joshua Djakaria
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 749 | 3.42 | 37 | |
| Fun | 941 | 3.02 | 37 | |
| Innovation | 970 | 2.87 | 39 | |
| Theme | 1185 | 2.62 | 38 | |
| Graphics | 104 | 4.45 | 38 | |
| Audio | 68 | 4.18 | 38 | |
| Humor | 261 | 3.66 | 38 | |
| Mood | 189 | 4.02 | 38 |
Art and audio are great! So, I understood only one rule in this game: dragging money between the cash register and the client. Ouch, and the Panic Button! Nice work! It would be great if the player can clicking to the same banknotes for gather it all before move it into the cell. And it needs more readable feedback from the client that a time is running. Good luck!
You're right about feedback about the clock! We had planned a day/night cycle and it's implemented... but the shader refuses to do what it's supposed to. Might be related to using an unstable branch of Ebitengine because we're _living on the edge_.
Thanks for playing! Final submission will be ready here soon.
@katamary We're about to post the completed submission. Give it another try if you get the chance. :pray: There's a bit more polish on it now (still no day/night cycle though :C). :D
This was pretty cool! Not sure if i was playing it right but i enjoyed myself! really cool art and music to this game!
@morepixels is there really a *wrong* way to play?! :shrug: If you had fun you were doing it right! :wink:
What a wonderful game! Iโm a big fan of the art๐๐ I want to see more of them!
Wow beautiful game! Some indication that you have to drop money on the customers would have been good. I was also confused as to whether there was a difference between hitting next once you've done what they asked or finishing their dialogue. Otherwise well done, love the vibe!
Thank you @clowreed53! @jaycifer, @elekkay and PinkVirus each did an amazing job!
@cinterre thanks for playing and for the kind words! That's excellent feedback. I had imagined that the player would explore this for themselves, but maybe some hints would be helpful. In any case it's good to hear you found this feature on your own!
The music and art are both amazing, the game mechanically was very nice, and I found no bugs or oversights. Although I did not know what I was doing xD I just accepted every deposit, the turned away everyone who wanted money. That's how banks work right? I like the game a lot, a short writeup would be nice for it. Paper's please showed features slowly and guided you through stuff. I don't see what I need to do here clearly. I know you had way less time than paper's please so it's all good :D Very strong entry, good job! :)
@remus
> Papers Please showed features slowly and guided you through stuff. I donโt see what I need to do here clearly.
Excellent point! If we take this idea forward (and that's a very strong possibility) we'll be sure to put much more consideration towards teaching the player what to do. For the jam I thought it'd be interesting to see what comes out of it if we follow what big corporations sometimes do and just toss the player behind the customer service desk and let them figure it out.
I'm so glad that you got the reference that we were going for! Papers Please was our biggest influence for this title. Thanks so much for your kind words! :pray:
The music and art were amazing, there were no bugs but i didn't understand how to play at all. Overall pretty alright game though
Everything about this game is great! I had much fun playing it! My only advice is to make it more clear that the conversation options are buttons. Initially, it didn't seem like buttons to me, so I needed a few moments to figure that out!
Outstanding artwork, really good job :smiley: I loved each one of the character designs and the dialogue lines!
The art style and audio worked very nicely - especially liked the bank notes and the background of the city, the aliens etc. Also the boss was really very nicely done. I was not sure whether i did the job right or not some more clear feedback would have been good to track progress. Also the game crashed on me a few times, not sure why. Very solid entry overall indeed, super nice job!
Thank you @eli-heinrichs @tul-games and @mikyll!! Thanks for playing and for the kind words!
> Also the game crashed on me a few times, not sure why.
@hotaloca what platform are you running on and what part of the game were you in? If you get the chance, I'd love a bug report at https://github.com/Frabjous-Studios/ldjam-53. :pray: Thank you for your kind words!
I loved the setting! The aesthetics and overall atmosphere were amazing, and the character designs were really creative!
I don't know if I ever understood the gameplay, and I was definitely doing it wrong the entire time.
I recorded my play session so I can provide extra feedback:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5GCvmNchxg
@100th-coin THANK YOU ๐๐๐ for sharing your experience like that! It is incredibly enlightening. And we will be making a few major changes to the employee onboarding experience as a result. Can we give you playtester of the year??! There's an LDJam category for that -- right??
Really love the aesthetic, artstyle, mood, and audio! Super amazing job! I really didn't understand what I was supposed to do thought apart from giving them money. I hit Next a few times and it crashed the game.
Waaaah this is awesome !
This exact game had been in my head for quite some time !
Plus character design is on point, real hero faces here.
@francis @cepeka Thank you for your kind words! We are aware of the crashes and as soon as our devs have had a bit of a break we'll look into getting them fixed later this week. ๐
The music, art, and dialogue for this game are all incredible! Feels like a retro Papers Please. I would've loved to see a bit more feedback in response to my actions. I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to do with the slips, so I eventually just started pressing next and let the money pile up. I hope you keep working on this game after the jam, I'd love to see where it goes!
Aaaannd 20 ratings, you made it ^^
Good job, really neat graphics too. I tried to figure out what to do for a long time, I noticed the circle on the customer card but it did not seems to matter if i'm playing good for the bank or not. Also, I thought I could pass the card on a "reader" on the left. Spent some time on that too.
Other than that this game's a candy, sweet
Thanks @arthur-sorignet-gautrot and @joe-cowman! We are definitely considering keeping this game going. You might just see it on a Kickstarter soon. ๐ Thanks for playing and keep being awesome!
Awesome sprites and overall vibe. I like it how you thought about situation when someone presses the bell while taking to supervisor at the beginning. This game looked like it could have interesting story, although there was... none? It's a shame, I'd love to vibe in this bank a little longer and maybe having some gameplay goal would make the experience a lot better. I'd also love to see how the consequences of player choices would play out but for now your game feels like a black box. Some dialogue lines are neat though! Lastly, I have two little nitpicks: the font in dialogues uses anti-aliasing(?), so they look a little weird, and I also think that repeating sprite of the supervisor right after you finish the first conversation doesn't look good (given you made a lot of cool designs for this game!).
@lisek-gagatek between you and me there are some race conditions that I need to resolve... :T Part of integrating with YarnSpinner. These are responsible for the vast majority of the stability issues right now. Thankfully, I have a good idea for a better design I can use to address them later this week. I'll be sure to post here once that's happened!
We also have each day locked in at 10 minutes of play time, when it needs to be closer to 6 minutes, based on the amount of content we have.
All of that means that there is much more of a story than players have been able to unlock so far -- we were able to include seven days of gameplay in the LDJam edition! Once the bugs and crashes are resolved that content should become accessible for all players.
I am getting a kinda 'red strings club' type of vibe.
The characters are quite unique.
I tried pressing the alarm buttons to cause chaos
this guy was pretty rude
Captura de tela 2023-05-03 010502.png
@velvetlobster we'll add a ticket to the backlog to have this sprite punished for his indecent behavior. :T
#EDIT: https://github.com/Frabjous-Studios/ldjam-53/issues/14
Looks really great! Love the art style.
I somehow got stuck at the start of day 2. My boss stands before me, but doesn't talk to me. But also doesn't leave :laughing: Awkward. I tried to ring the next customer bell, but that didn't make him leave either. :laughing:
Great artwork!
@stefan-funke That bug should be fixed in the most recent release: v0.4.2. :fingers_crossed: Try it out and let us know what happens!
@obe-dot Thank you for your kind words! The artists really did an amazing job in a brief time.
Hey! Game looks awesome. Is there a way to full screen it on the windows version? It is stuck in a tiny screen for me :(
The art is great. The music as well. The heavy papers please vibes are awesome. Though maybe a more instructional supervisor would be nice.
@forager Fullscreen is F! Let me know if it's not working.
@blank-3d absolutely! The major thing this game is missing is a tutorial. Mr. Supervisor isn't very helpful, is he? :T
@frabjous-studios Oof.. it was in the description for the game. Apologies - I usually do look there for reference, I promise!
I am very, very sorry to report that your game was extremely unstable for me and always crashed after about 2-4 customers (Windows version). I tried at least 6 times, but I could not identify any trigger I could name. It's a shame, because I love the setting, music, character designs and overall atmosphere! Also the idea, it seems like a kind of spin on Papers Please, which I love. Feel free to ping me if you should release a more stable version, I'll gladly give it another try and immerse into your world! (Call the cops? Why would I need to call the cops?)
@purrseus I'm developing on a Mac, but I have a friend on Windows and we'll be looking at it together later this weekend.
First and foremost, the graphics, audio and premise were stellar. However, the Windows version kept crashing for me, around when the drone appeared. I tried multiple times to get past it and it just kept crashing. Pretty bummed I couldn't see more :( from what I did see, I really enjoyed though!
@conduit @purrseus v0.4.4 should be up within the next 10-15 minutes or so -- I've been told by a Windows user that it's much more stable. Let me know if you run into issues.
If either of you are able to run the game via cmd prompt -- it might show us logs during a crash, depending on the root cause.
Damn this game has a LOOK-- too bad you can't full screen! I played it on stream, here's the VOD if you're interested: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1812362155
@weeping-rupee fullscreen is the F key. Does it not work for you? My Windows playtester reports it's working for him in v0.4.4.
Next jam we'll be sure to rebind it to Alt-Enter. :)
I love the art and music! I dig what is going on here, but I had a lot of trouble understanding things. I couldn't figure out where to put the deposit slips, so I put them all in the trash. I thought they would go in what turned out to be the shredder. It would be nice if the shredder didn't appear until the day you start using it.
math.png
I didn't get why a sketchy robot was trying to give me all his cash, so I hit the panic buttons but nothing happened. I think it was just the money delivery?
Also, at the very beginning I didn't even understand how to have a conversation. I was pressing "NEXT" to advance the chat but my boss got upset with me for doing that!
So I like every aspect of the game that doesn't involve me being an idiot ๐คฆ๐ปโโ๏ธ
PS: Tabletop Simulator has a great control scheme where you click-and-hold to drag things around, and if you right-click while holding something, you add one thing you're hovering over to your hand. It takes a minute to get used to but something like that could make this game quicker/smoother to handle.
Great entry!
> It would be nice if the shredder didnโt appear until the day you start using it.
My thoughts exactly! I had wanted to animate a little panel that would open up but decided that time during the Jam would be better spent on a day/night cycle (which works now! at least for me). Thanks for this feedback ๐๐ป
> I didnโt get why a sketchy robot was trying to give me all his cash, so I hit the panic buttons but nothing happened. I think it was just the money delivery?
Why on earth would you think your employer would give you panic buttons that actually work? :T
> It takes a minute to get used to but something like that could make this game quicker/smoother to handle.
Thanks for this idea! It's a great one. It could work great, but I guess I didn't think of it because I develop on a Macbook where I only use a trackpad (i.e. right-clicking is _hard_). I think for the commercial version we might have a 'trackpad mode' that enables something like the current Shift + Click system.
Thanks so much for playing and for providing excellent feedback! :pray: Keep being awesome!
The music and graphics for this were so good! There was definitely a period of confusion before things started to click and make sense. I do wish it was a little clearer that you can type in the account numbers and that there was a way to store deposit or withdrawal slips that hid them from view... or even a stamp for them to hand back to customers.
You already know about the crashing but I thought it might be worth adding that every 1-3 seconds, the game consistently freezes for a good half to full second which makes it pretty hard to interact with.
Back to playing it though, once everything clicks, it worked so well. I like the day to day with the little conversations. The ability to mess with rude customers and the shift click system works great. It's pretty nice counting stuff out and making sure everything is correct! I didn't see a timer so I never felt rushed so it's a great game to relax to that I'd love to see you all keep working on!
@sarah-alexa thanks for the kind words! I'm glad to hear that the core game loop is engaging! Devs on the project right now aren't quite the target audience for it, but we've decided to stick with it! We'll be polishing it up over the next two months or so before we start hyping our Kickstarter.
> You already know about the crashing but I thought it might be worth adding that every 1-3 seconds, the game consistently freezes for a good half to full second which makes it pretty hard to interact with.
Damn, I really need to get a Windows machine that I can profile it on. Everything's so smooth on my MacBook. :T Thanks for the bug report! We'll look into it. ๐
@sarah-alexa @remus @cepeka @mikyll @conduit @francis @obe-dot @forager @katamary @madbarron @weeping-rupee @purrseus
Thanks for playing! You might be interested to know that we're doing a Kickstarter! You can join the wait-list to get an email once we announce the campaign!
https://bankwave.frabjousstudios.com
I like the neon vapourwave aesthetic! This is like a banking version of Papers Please? Honestly it looks really awesome! I'm super hype! The music is really chill and I can imagine you can do a lot with the sotry and plot! <3
@weirdbitgames The story and plot are exactly what we're excited about.
@frabjous-studios Thatโs definitely something Iโll keep an eye on!! Also I envy the deving on a Mac! I want to keep my windows laptop but I really want an escape to macOS!