Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → Solar Eclipse
By maodev, luxiffre and Soramajo
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 223 | 3.94 | 28 | |
| Fun | 98 | 4.05 | 28 | |
| Innovation | 454 | 3.50 | 28 | |
| Theme | 1115 | 3.06 | 27 | |
| Graphics | 273 | 4.15 | 28 | |
| Audio | 158 | 3.96 | 28 | |
| Humor | 576 | 3.09 | 28 | |
| Mood | 319 | 3.82 | 28 |
Having the attack tied to jumping is a pretty interesting idea and provides some additional difficulty, cool way of handling the double jump too. I wasn't able to complete it but I enjoyed what I played of it. Fantastic sprite art, character design and audio, and some cool worldbuilding. Would love to see the future project you mentioned in the description someday.
I think that it's really cute game.
Great game! The core mecanics are great and make the game feel smooth! I would love to see this game but with a challenging fully vertical level! Maybe checkpoints are missing but the game is still excelent. Congrats!
I really enjoyed your game! The artstyle is very cute.
Everything was great! Visuals, audio, core mechanic. The hit detection is a bit weird though, as the shadows can hit you multiple times in one second and your hp just goes negative(see screenshot).ssnew.png Still one of my top 10 games for sure!
Wow, that was really cool. The music reminded me of an old game called 'Pizza Ninja Cats'. If there were checkpoints and you didn't have to restart the whole level, it would be my favorite game on the jam.
This was fun! I enjoyed the feel of the game, I got the hang of the mechanics pretty quick. I just wish you didn't have to start from the beginning when you die. The art is also very nice, great jobb!
What a charming game! I like sound and graphics of it, thank you!
Really nice platformer, well polished for the time you had! Love the graphics, environment & chara-design are both great! The music is nice too! You should add some invincibility frames when the player gets hit, else we can lose all our HP in a single "hit" when an enemy traps us against a wall... Great job besides that, once again congratulations for the character design!
This is amazing and I loved it, best game I played so far (probably because I love action platformers). The idea of having the double jump tied to the attack is very cool, the art and music are great and I really hope you'll continue development. That said I really don't see the theme here. It almost feels like this doesn't belong to this specific jam more than any other jam (or perhaps you took one of the discarded themes "every input does two things" and applied it to just one input :P). Anyway, great job!
Side question: did you develop any other games? I'd be interested in seeing more of your work but you don't have other LD projects here unfortunately. From the quality and polish of this however I'm pretty sure this isn't your first rodeo
Oh and one more minor thing: the dialog was a bit too fast to read comfortably.
@gog @scratch You're absolutely right of course, there should normally be invincibility frames in games like ours*! The reason that we didn't implement them (and a few other important QoL things) was simply a lack of time. One of us couldn't be there during the last day and we underestimated the impact it would have on the scope ^^;;;
But I'm relieved to hear that you still enjoyed the game! We were actually rather nervous going into the rating phase because this game ended up being below our usual quality standards in several ways, but the response so far has been surprisingly good. Then again, we know that the game dev community tends to be overly hesitant to point out flaws, so thank you for your constructive criticism, it's much appreciated! :green_heart:
*edit: Our game designer just let me know that there actually are invincibility frames in the game (indicated by the player flashing red) - but they might be broken or too short. We've recently switched to programming in Godot, so it's possible that things are just a little wonky atm. But all of this edit is just to say that we didn't forget about invincibility frames. My bad ^^;;
@sbeif Thank you very much!
The idea tying us to the jam's theme is supposed to be *delivering the final blow*, but I'll admit that this might not be very obvious. We thought about voice acting the narrative, in which case we could've emphasised that part, but we didn't have time for it in the end, so now it almost became like an accidental easter egg. Of course, even the original idea was a bit of a stretch, but among all the other ideas that we had during our brainstorming session, this was the one we were the most hyped for (especially since all of us find the current theme rather uninspiring and boring). And so we simply decided to value fun over strict theme-compliance. No regrets! :grin:
And yes, we have worked on other games before! All three of us are part of a small studio called [**Moonlit Monitors**](https://moonlitmonitors.com/). I should probably add that to the description, thanks for asking! Most of us have been working together for several years creating small games for university projects and some game jams, but we haven't released many of those. We did, however, also make one large-scale game, a precision platformer called [**Germinal**](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1967940/Germinal/), which released this year after three years of development. It's arguably a better reference for the level of polish that we normally aim for, though some people dislike how its visuals are somewhat similar to that of Celeste. (Which is one of the reasons that we're now focusing on showcasing that we're very much capable of creating something entirely unique... Ig it became a bit of a sore spot.) It's different from Solar Eclipse, though, in that SE aims to be more of a metroidvania whereas Germinal is a precision platformer, as I mentioned.
Ooh ok I get it, I completely agree that this edition's theme was very disappointing, I almost gave up because of that and ended up partecipating mostly because I decided to try making my first online multiplayer game and suprisingly succeeding (although the game itself ended up being very simple because of that)
Dude Germinal looks amazing! And it's my favourite kind of game too (Celeste is one of my favourite games and I have to admit I can see the similarities, but in a good way it seems)! It's definitely on my to buy list now. Do you have any plan on porting it to switch by chance? I'd love to play it there.
@sbeif Happy to hear that you like it! :smile: It's unlikely (at least atm) though that we'll port to switch in the near future. One reason is that most of us are currently short on time because of university studies. Another is that we're also trying to become economically sustainable atm, and Germinal unfortunately wasn't all that successful because we didn't have much time or expertise in terms of marketing. So unless some huge influencer picks it up and makes it popular, it's unlikely that it'd be worth the effort :/
Wow! Nice platform. One of the most mood games I've played in the jam until now (yeah I'm a huge fan of platforms :slight_smile: ).
Interesting idea of using the attack command together with the double jump, though this makes the game a lot harder to master.
The pixel art is beautiful and I loved the design of your main character (remember me Bill from Dragon Ball Super).
The music give the Asian climate that your game intended to convey, but I missed some more elements from that culture to be perfect.
Some suggestions: - Add some checkpoints would be a great addiction to your game, considering his difficult. - The dialogues take up a lot of screen space and distracting after a while. Turn their off after we dead could be one solution or else you could shrink the font size.
Overall a great game! Good job!
Cool game with cool music. I like the mechanic, jump-attack combo. You are teaching players with excellent levels. But I felt that the upper attack range should be inscreased, as I were always attacked when I jumped. Moreover, the keyboard sensitivity (movement reaction) is too high to control.
Welcome to play my game as well.
This is great! I like the controls a lot, they feel simple but they have a lot of depth with the movement you can do. Nice art style also. Good job!
@joao-marcello First off, thanks for the comment!
> The music give the Asian climate that your game intended to convey, but I missed some more elements from that culture to be perfect.
The reason behind this is actually not quite straightforward, so here's some background info.
One of our main sources of inspiration was Bhutan (which is why our NPC is a takin, for instance), because it's one of the few ecologically sustainable countries in the world and at the same time also one of the happiest, so it synergises really well with the solarpunk setting that we want to aim for when we create the game that this game jam is based on, someday.
So naturally before I began working on the soundtrack, I researched Bhutanese music. I'll summarise what I found.
There's several different genres, some are more traditional (most notably zhungdra and boedra), but there's also pop genres (of which rigsar is by far the most popular). Folk music, especially zhungdra, contains mostly vocal elements which are also quite elaborate, so it was more than unlikely that I would do them justice within the time frame of the game jam considering I had never done or even heard Bhutanese music before. The vocal of rigsar, on the other hand, is less elaborate and strict (which is one of the reasons why it's so popular: it's easier to sing), so its melodies were more suitable for the scope of this jam.
I also researched the musical instruments that are usually used in Bhutanese music. The most important ones are the chiwang (a type of fiddle), the dramyin (a type of lute) and the lingm (a type of flute). Rigsar often uses a few other instruments, e.g. the yangchen (a type of dulcimer). One thing that I noticed early on was that folk music often didn't use any drum elements (in which case the dramyin is used to give the rhythm). The music that did was usually the religious kind, but that usually didn't have many melodic elements, which wouldn't have fit this game. Interestingly, rigsar often uses synth drums it seems (see [this track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymBiWeDLtmw) for example).
One other thing I noticed rather quickly is that they use a pentatonic scale, but it actually took quite a while until I found out which one it was because there's very little information on it online... (It's CDFGA or CDEGA - I used the former rearranged to DFGAC.)
There was still one major problem, though: Bhutanese music is actually rather slow (except some of the rhythmic religious music, but like I said, that one lacked melodic elements). And while I personally really enjoy and prefer slow tracks, I didn't feel like they fit the atmosphere and narrative of this game.
So in the end, to get a feeling similar to that of Bhutanese music, I used the same pentatonic scale and similar instruments, but at a higher BPM (I opted for 170 BPM, which is a lot, but since traditional music is around 85 BPM, it felt kind of similar to me). I chose Jhator (sky burial), which is also practiced in Bhutan, as the topic of the track because it fit both the narrative as well as the BPM really well. Now, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I don't have Bhutanese instruments just lying around in my apartment, and I won't spend money just to buy digital versions just for this game jam. So I used the instruments that I already had that sounded somewhat similar to a fiddle, lute etc., but of course they won't be spot-on. To compensate, I tried to simulate the vocal embellishments of rigsar in the melody of the fiddle. That's why the fiddle's melody now has all these little wobbles. I'll admit, though, that it probably would've sounded more authentic had I just also included flutes. I originally planned on doing that, but because the deadline was drawing near and there was still programming to do, I had to scrap them, unfortunately.
So in the end, it's a mix of me not having access to traditional Bhutanese instruments nor the experience necessary to emulate it well, and certain adjustments that were simply necessary to make the music fit with the rest of the game.
Nice game! The graphics and music is very good. Controls and physics are little bit unresponsive.
A bit hard, but a nice game. Music and graphics are really cool
Pretty good! I managed to get pretty far but then i think i reached a part that had an impossible jump? At least i couldn't get past it. I also noticed a bug where enemies can send you flying off the screen. And the double jump button was a bit clumsy to press (q).
Despite that, its a solid effort and i'm looking forward to next entry!
Love it!
Great game! Artwork was really good. The song was great. I think sound effects could've been a bit louder. They seemed to be overshadowed by the music. This felt like a really good start to a game. Given more time, I could see you expanding on this and making some more challenging levels. Really solid game. Congrats!