baknik 2023-05-01 03:43
The game feels very complete! I love that you had the time to not only make the mechanics fun and work well, but you've also included a narrative and great assets. Congrats!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → earthmover
By dishwand
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 116 | 3.77 | 31 | |
| Fun | 186 | 3.44 | 31 | |
| Innovation | 125 | 3.58 | 31 | |
| Theme | 365 | 3.01 | 31 | |
| Graphics | 127 | 3.82 | 31 | |
| Audio | 104 | 3.62 | 31 | |
| Humor | 120 | 3.30 | 30 | |
| Mood | 110 | 3.64 | 30 |
The game feels very complete! I love that you had the time to not only make the mechanics fun and work well, but you've also included a narrative and great assets. Congrats!
It's harder than I expected :D Nice sound effects!
I like the story and the visuals. The game idea is fun, but for me I found the puzzles to be too difficult.
Fantastic gameplay, visual, storytelling and sense of humor. Solid entry
@baknik thank you! i'm glad it came together :)
@sinusquell hehe, i had fun plucking together some random sound effects, glad they worked for ya!
@jk5000 thanks for playing! i definitely cranked the difficulty up, perhaps a bit much ;)
@josemwarrior thank you! glad some of the humor shone through
Really great entry. The puzzles were pretty challenging for me, and I liked the little idle dialogue lines from the protagonist.
I didn't understand what to do but this little creature makes me smile, thank you for that!
I'm not really a fan of puzzle games, but this was interesting. Game feels complete. I liked the pixelated rustic feel and rolling felt really satisfying. Narrative was a nice touch. You could have maybe added a simple puzzle at the beginning where it's clear how to rotate the legs. The first level was a bit unclear with what you should do, but otherwise great game.
Wasn't expecting to see a Bloxorz-like in this jam! Honestly was difficult to figure out the solutions. Sound effects were really pleasant!
@speakwithplants the idle chatter was fun to add~
@liven thanks for trying it though! in retrospect the game is a bit tough :)
@elementary appreciate the feedback! yeah, i think i was a little numb to how disorienting the movement mechanic is at first after playing it so long. would like to smoothen out the intro if i ever did something with the idea again!
@ollie-d hehe, glad someone caught the bloxorz inspiration!
Very cool game! Sadly I fucked up as I tried to restart with pressing R once and not holding it because I did not read correctly. I love the extending sounds. And I already wanted to give a minus score for not having music, then I read that you wanted to add a theme but the atmosphere was better without it and I fully agree. It's better without music and just some ambient sound.
Fun game and cool vibe! The controls took a bit to get used to, but once you master them, it gets a lot of fun!
Saying that, I feel kinda funny. Not to plug, but we have a similar game with similar controls (did not work on that), but you too have used a set of booster rockets on the side to visualize thrusters, turning and speed. Just like our artist did. Looks like this is the way its done irl and you two are on the same vibe :D
Loved this. It's really fun and quite polished work.
Good art and sound effect. This is a slow pace game to me, require a lot patient but get a special fun feeling.
Wow! What a pretty-looking game! The color palette and shaders did an incredible job creating atmosphere! So many little touches, like the level start animation and the "inside view" on the top left, to the weather-effect shaders and vertex animations. 5/5 on graphics for sure.
And the puzzle design is great as well. Very cute, having the player move around to "find the PDA", but it's really to train them on the controls. My favorite level was the one with all the ramps. It had several great catches to figure out how to set up movement for future sections of the level. I think the pushable blocks and ice blocks had the most interesting designs. They force you to think ahead and how moves now will affect the future.
But then you committed game design cardinal sin #1: Making you sit through unskippable dialogue whenever you want to retry. But the real pain was the lack of an undo button. I was really wishing I had that once I got to the falling blocks. It sucks to have to restart the level from the beginning every time I want to try a new way of moving through the ice. It just goes to show that no matter how much work you put into fancy shaders, weather palette shift effects, custom assets, and ambience, it never matters more than the gameplay.
I didn't finish the game. I played for over an hour and got to this point:
iceberg.png
I got the crate into the chute, but then the exit was revealed and I did not have the proper ice blocks left to angle myself at the exit. That's pretty messed up, considering I had no way of knowing where the exit would appear beforehand. It was a pretty fun level too and I felt clever for beating it. So the realization that I would have to restart felt like a cruel joke at my expense.
But despite those issues, it is a super fun and engaging puzzle game. I am so impressed on how much you created here as a solo project in two days. Fantastic job, seriously!
@dishwand I just want to make sure it's not a bug, but the end is reached when you reach the white screen? It did feel a bit abrupt, but following the dialogue it feels like it should be the ending?
I was also wondering if this is an original idea or did you see the mechanics somewhere else, since now I want to play more games like this.
I actually ended up coming back to this game, so you definitely did something right. I don't know why, but I kept thinking about it after playing it.
intricate puzzler, feels like the rolling potatos game I forgot the name
Very nice! I'm personally not a fan of the 'rolling-cube' puzzles, but I did love your twist of adding the extendable feet - and I absolutely adore the world you created. Beautiful, serene, funny, and totally unique. I loved your water effect especially! I will definitely have to check out that mat/shader. Shocked this was a compo game - your art and audio and writing really came together to present such a wonderful little slice of life.
@zungryware sorry about the frustration, i hope you still had fun playing it :) totally agree about the unskippable dialogue & lack of an undo system. the former escaped me in the final hours of submission, while the latter was an intentional concession from the start since it'd be a bit of engineering feat to get it all working in time. and FWIW, definitely didn't mean to "gotcha" with the level exit popping up at the end! anyway, thanks for the kind words and for playing! there's only one more screen after that one, and it's just a little ending screen.
@elementary right! that's the ending, definitely a little abrupt & unclear, but intentionally so on my part ;) i think the closest games are bloxorz and stephen's sausage roll, but the core concept of the game actually came from messing around with pistons in minecraft. thanks for coming back to finish it!
@ugly-robot thanks so much for noticing the worldbuilding & aesthetics! it's a little heavy-handed, but i'm glad it worked for you, i actually think it's what i'm proud of most in this entry.
@dishwand You could maybe have the player restart after finishing, after they press a key, since I really thought the first time through it might have been a bug, so I played it again just to be sure since it becomes completely unresponsive, but following the story it does make sense. I really liked optimizing the puzzles. The first time through I just kind of guessed it, but afterwards I tried doing the levels in as few moves as possible, which you can probably turn into a scoring system if you want. It felt really satisfying once I understood how the cube moves.
Definetely the most creative game i have seen in this game jam so far! :)))))
Nice little puzzle game. Reminds me of that sausage puzzle game.
This is a really fun puzzle game. It's super challenging but it makes it feel all the more satifying when you complete a level. I didn't quite get to the end, I got to the same level as @zungryware however I feel I will for sure be coming back to finish it. Some funny lines from the the person in the box (Bell I think?) and I think the choice to forego a musical theme for quiet atmosphere paid off. Good job, a great entry all round!
I do feel really bad for Bell swishing around in that little metal box though...can't be comfortable!
This is really well done, I have not beaten it yet trying to figure out what pressure plate your talking about.
Oh man my nightmare, sokoban + rolling puzzle :smile: I'm so bad at these... I like the graphics & general mood, I'd like to skip the texts if possible in any game, so that was a painful thing to wait. I love the extension & retraction sound, I just pressed space randomly to hear that. Nice one!
@robertthebastian I actually did come back and finish it. (Only because I had left the browser tab open.) Turns out it's the last actual puzzle in the game.
Most of the time I was just guessing and brute forcing my way through it. :laughing:
Very charming game! Reminds me of old PSX games. If anything, I would make some sort of bar or indicator you are resetting. Now you kind of had to figure out you hold R for a bit instead of just pressing it. I thought it was broken at first.
Edit: I also meant to suggest extending the dialogue background to full width since some of the text was overflowing.
Good job!
This is really cool. I really like the retro 3D art style you've got. Reminds me a lot of Stephen's Sausage Roll, which I am also really bad at haha. Great job!
@robertthebastian i promise Bell is strapped in so it's (fairly) comfy in there! thanks for playing :)
@zealous-coder one of the tiles in that level has a dark blue square on it! would have liked to put a better visibility texture / model instead
@chuckiee totally agree about the skipping text. thanks for checking it out though!
@stefan-funke i definitely noticed this about the core concept. i think some of the later puzzles do a better job at emphasizing planning out your moves vs. randomly moving around. so if i ever did anything with this idea in the future, i'd love to smooth out the beginning to force the player to get a better understanding of the character movement!
@coderaurus thanks for the compliments! the dialogue overflowing was an intentional choice actually, i thought it was kind of endearing!
@cinterre definitely was an inspiration! thanks for checking my game out, even if you weren't great at it :D
@dishwand I saw the dark blue square, and moved the rover over it though when I did it didn't do anything.
Ah I see nvm, I got it, I thought that the little bots would be able to be placed over pressure plates.
The sound effects lol. Love it. Very original. Took me a while to fully grasp the concept though.
I can see what you're going for, but this is the kind of game that requires way too much for me, it's a bit too hard to visualize the needed moves for me. regardless of how dumb I'm with puzzles, the presentation is really good!
Nice presentation, and seeing the main character move inside of a cube was very funny! I like how you present the new challenges. Pretty challenging though, I was often just guessing. I wanted to mention the dialog overflowing the background, but seems that this was a deliberate choice. :) All in all, great entry here, well done!
Nice mood. You made great amount of work as for compo game! Great work! 5 for mood and GFX.
A great puzzle game! The aesthetic side is amazing, I'm feeling strong PSX vibes here. ;) That and especially the rolling cube movement reminded me of an old game called Devil Dice though that was more action-arcade than puzzle.
People have already mentioned some of the issues I've found (like the need to have skippable dialogue), so there's not much for me to add here. One thing I'd perhaps consider adding is some sort of indicator telling the player what to do at the beginning of the game - if the player needs to just "roll around a bit", perhaps showing some sort of counter, counting down with each "step" to show the player they are actually doing something (right) instead of just rolling around in confusion. Or maybe some sort of objective list in the corner of the window? Something like "move around (0/30)", "connect to the hook", "move package into the delivery slot".
The sound design is great too. With such a chill mood it's easy to make simple and small sound effects feel jarring, but you've made them just as relaxing as the rest of the game. Perhaps it could use some slow mellow tune in the background, but the sound of the waves on its own felt pretty good.
@lcstark thanks so much for the comprehensive review & thoughtful feedback, it's really appreciated :)
actually, about halfway through the development i started to realize that the core puzzle mechanic was, as others have described, a little bit cumbersome. i think the "language" that the player learns as they figure out how to control the cube is actually much better suited to a fast paced puzzle-arcade game. so, thanks so much for sending Devil Dice, i'd never heard of it and this game is fascinating!