rustywolf 2023-05-01 03:47
Player can get really fast, and its hard to keep track of your position. Fun otherwise
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → Delivery Squares
By elementary
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 389 | 2.58 | 31 | |
| Fun | 368 | 2.65 | 31 | |
| Innovation | 311 | 2.94 | 30 | |
| Theme | 349 | 3.15 | 31 | |
| Graphics | 398 | 1.81 | 31 | |
| Audio | 339 | 1.18 | 29 | |
| Humor | 336 | 1.85 | 30 | |
| Mood | 386 | 2.00 | 31 |
Player can get really fast, and its hard to keep track of your position. Fun otherwise
Fun concept, feels like you need to fill a printer with ink! The player movement might be a bit too fast so it is difficult not to die in few seconds.
I can only agree with the others, the player can rocket around. Maybe it would have made more sense to have a separate minimap instead of around the player or something. It's always interesting though how hooked one can get from such a simple game.
It was already said 3 times but yeah things really go too fast, making it a bit hard to play and enjoy the rest of the game, otherwise it looks interesting
@xwilarg, yes I know, I had trouble balancing the player movement, but at the end I seem to have gotten used to it. The trick is to not hold down the direction key for too long, I did cap the max speed, but it might still be an issue. I'll upload a fixed version later reducing the max speed and increasing the friction, since it seems to be a major issue.
Indeed the game is much better once you have a good grasp of the speed, managed to fill the 4 "printers" bar full of ink
Pretty fun game! It took me a couple of tries but I managed to get the gauges to stay filled in practice as long as I would continue. Good job!
Took me somee tries to understand how the game works. Once I did, I was having trouble keeping my square inside the larger squares. But overall, a solid entry.
I had struggled for a bit, but once I got used to the movement, it was okay! Pretty cool submission ultimately, nice to see a lot done with simple geometry.
I found the controls and indicators to be very intuitive which is something many games don't do. Alas, I found the game to be quite difficult not due to a lack of understanding of the controls, but simply because of the immense tokyo-drifting. Keep it up!
I kept the city alive for at least 3 minutes. I gave up after a while because the bars were full and draining very slowly. The core game loop is simple, which is good, but also can be limiting if the skill ceiling is reached too quickly. Were there any additional features that you had planned to include but weren't able to due to time? I really don't like typewriter effects because I often read faster than the type appears. My little pet peeve, I guess. I didn't realize I could skip with [space] until I started trying different things.
The radar feature was nice, although I don't quite understand why it was smack in the middle of the screen. It didn't block anything, but I didn't realize initially what it was trying to tell me.
@defrag I'll add the skip option key to the description, sorry about that. I also hate the text, so I added the option.
The game balance was upset after fixing the speed problem, so it's relatively easy now and I didn't want to change the code too much to compensate, but even before the the fix, game balance wasn't perfect, so I moved the variables to the top of the script so that anyone can change it to make it harder or easier depending on preference. There are a few other things I can do to fix the game balance, for example the distance of the sources, but I'll leave it like it is for now and maybe add a fixed version to the downloads when I get time, if it's even possible to fix.
Now that I got some quality sleep the game seems pretty terrible in my opinion, but I haven't entirely given up yet. Besides I did get some pretty good ideas and base code for future projects from this.
i like this exploration of the delivery mechanic! i think with some sort of increasing difficult & upgrade system this could be quite addicting
@dishwand I was planning on adding an upgrade system and increasing difficulty, but getting everything to balance in time would have been impossible, I was already spending about half my time play testing to make sure I wasn't making it impossible, so I stuck to the basics, but at the end I still messed up the balance. I'm planning on fixing a few things and making it a bit more complete after the jam, but thanks for at least trying it.
Got me a while to understand what I am doing, then it got fun with resource management. Reminds me of io games like agar.io
There's something clever at the core here of collecting various inks needed "stay alive". From a game design perspective, the mechanics feel a bit flat. If you're going to give me 4 ink resources to track, I'd like them to be evolving at different rates / have impactful traits. Without variety in ink behavior, everything feels a bit monotonous. Good concept!
@the-neon-shark A lot of ideas had to be left out due to time constraints and me trying to get the game balance right. I never thought trying to keep stuff balanced could be this hard, just changing one variable could mess up the entire game and then everything else would need changing, which was what happened with the speed fix.
The four different types were actually meant to be lives, with different rates. Rates changing depending on how much it's filled, which is kind of still left in the game in the form of the red bar limits. Having a bar fall to zero would lead to losing a life, but I couldn't really get everything to balance so I removed it. There was a lot of other things that also had to removed due to balance issues for example the four towers of the city were actually meant to represent the ink stores, which could break or be rebuilt and upgraded. I would really have liked to make it more coherent and fun, but I'll leave it for after the jam if I have time. I still think there's potential here, kind of reminds me of Leaf Blower Revolution in a sense, but I thought it would have been slightly too ambitious to make it an idle type game instead of a simple score based system, since it would require decent variation in content, but now that I had more time to think, it might have been the better approach to this style.
Don't know about gameplay but controls here sucks.
I tried to win. But it were too hard for me.
@vydra Sorry, sometimes the squares you have to collect spawn too far and after the speed fix it might be impossible to collect and return in time, another strategy you could try is only filling up around half of each and getting back, or do the nearest one first, since the score decline depends on the number of bars below the red.
If you have trouble with controls let me know what's wrong, is it the speed, slow down rate or acceleration, there's still a bug with the acceleration speed which is tied to the frame rate. I accidentally removed a delta multiply with the fix, but it shouldn't be significant enough to cause issues since the max speed is capped.
There's been an issue for me with two of the colors too similar (I'm mildly color blind), but other than that, it's a fun concept. Cheers
@hakro Thanks for trying at least, sorry about that, I was actually keeping it in mind while working, but I guess I didn't vary the hues enough to make the colors distinctive. I should have tried playing in black and white before uploading to make sure the colors were different enough. I was also considering adding shapes, but time constraints were a problem.
I enjoyed this, but once you get enough juice in the main box the challenge basically goes away, some sort of adversary that knocks the juice on of you in transit might be a good idea. But overall it was fun.
I agree with others that the player has too much inertia when they stop moving (the high speed itself it fine for my taste). The game doesn't have a fullscreen option, and when I used the arrow keys they applied to the whole web page first, so e.g. when pressing the down arrow key the page would scroll down a bit and only then it would start being applied to the game itself, which was quite frustrating. It took me a long time to figure out what to do; the colored bars on the bottom left are basically unreadable until you realize what they mean, and I didn't realize the little colored squares are actually directions - I thought they are the squares you need to gather, and couldn't figure out why they move in such a wierd way and why I can't ever reach them. Overall the game concept is a good one, but I'd say the game needs some work with explanations & providing feedback to the player.
@lisyarus What browser did you use, since it was tested on Firefox and Chrome variants. Sometimes you have to click on the embedded window so that it can grab the input keys, otherwise I could disable arrow keys for page navigation, which should work on the download version, but I'm not sure how it would react to embedding.
I'll add an explanation of what to do to the description and I'm working on a post jam version so any feedback on bugs or mistakes are welcome, thanks for playing.
Fun idea. I think this game would look much better if you changed the colors to be of the some color palette.
Also bug: WASD controls don't work on non-english keyboard layout.
Cool concept, I like the idea to integrate the minimap into the game the way you did. Good job :)
It was a nice little experience. I find the display of the other squares very good (map)
Nice little jaunt, good clear concept that has a fair bit of potential to build up from, good stuff!
I agree with the comments about the controls being a little fast and floaty, but a solid entry non the less. Good job!