Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → Pool Frog
By notnasiul
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 66 | 3.96 | 77 | |
| Fun | 99 | 3.78 | 77 | |
| Innovation | 126 | 3.62 | 77 | |
| Theme | 145 | 3.82 | 77 | |
| Graphics | 26 | 4.29 | 77 | |
| Audio | 83 | 3.66 | 76 | |
| Humor | 64 | 3.46 | 72 | |
| Mood | 89 | 3.68 | 74 |
This is great fun! The controls were a bit weird at first, seems odd that you can't aim whilst not charging up a jump. However once I got over that I started really enjoying it. The presentation is great, I love all the particle effects and the way the lilies bounce off each other--the underwater koi look great too. Always great to see Pico-8 games in Ludum Dare. Nice work! :)
Quick, but fun, and challenging game. Love the old arcade feel to it. Music is cute and fun as well. Aiming took a bit of getting used to, but once I understood how the aiming worked it was fun catching stars and flies.
nice game, I like the feeels!
- I liked the art style and the frog animations. The sound was a nice arcadey touch. - The game loop felt quite good but there seemed to be a lot of fish slow to catch you and only one fly, so it was pretty risk free to fall into the water and there was no real safe area with the amount of fish. - It took me quite a bit to figure out that eating flies is not automatic when I come into contact with them, it could also be cool to be able to eat flies mid jump, maybe with the tongue extending in the jump direction or getting stunned upon falling down after trying.
great, chaotic fun. it took me a moment to learn how to time my jumps right, once i did i got to 678 points. seconding the previous comments about the visual presentation, this game looks good! i particularly like the ripple effects around the lily pads; they're very effectively adding tension.
Very nice and polished game. I really like the animations, especially on the fishes. My suggestion is that maybe you could somehow make the jump direction line more visible? It easily gets lost in the scene
Thank you for your commments! Will note those down for a post-jam update ^-^
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Really enjoyed the game. very polished for a game jam game. I wish that when you got to higher points in the game the difficulty spikes more but besides that the artstyle, music and feel of the game is near perfect.
OOO this game scratches an itch that I didn't know I needed until now. What simple fun! It looks and sounds fantastic. It took a while to understand how the aiming and movement works but after awhile I got the hang of it and just kept playing. I didn't even notice 20 minutes went by...
The controls took me a second but once I was going I was off to the races! I got to 2000 and it seemed like the difficulty kind of plateaued but I did enjoy getting there a lot! Love the art, too.
Great piece of work. So engaging!
Lovely little game. Timing the jumps were fun. Allowing the player to swim to the nearest lily pad before the fish gets you, makes it more challenging which is great. Well done!
What a cute litte game! I always find it impressive how people like you are able to create fun games with such severe limitations! Well done
I like how you don't instantly die when in the water. The player gets a chance to find a safe place.
Very fun and cute game! It took me a while to figure out how to eat flies but this game is really addictive. Good job! :frog:
I'm so happy you are enjoying it! Thanks for playing! :D
Very fun game! I like it. It fits the theme well and does make for exciting gameplay.It would also make a great casual mini-game if it is on mobile.
The animation of the pixels (or is it particle effect?) is amazing, and I love the hilarious and fast-paced feel of the ruffles colliding or the white splash of the frog swimming in the water and all the ruffles crashing into each other!
i'm always amazed at how pico-8 games tend to be great! it was not easy to handle at first, but everything looked so cute so i wasn't discourage to try again. superb art, great job!
What a great little game! First try was very confusing, but then I got the hang of it and it was an awesome experience! Here's my highscore:
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Love the animations! The water effect is really great. Also the sound and music is cute. Well done!
awww, this is adorable!! loved the vibes soo much! The animations are just INSANELY good!!! you are an animation genius!
Wow, the graphics and animations are top notch. The sound effects are also quite nice
Super great game!
super awesome its really cute and looks great
Cute game! Love the art and animations. I'll never look at koi fish the same 😂
Super cute game, loved the graphics and aesthetics.
This is a clever idea! I think you implemented it really well, though the controls took a little bit of getting used to. It looks really cute and the audio for it suits it perfectly. Great job!
Good little game and very fun! Maybe have to rotate after pressing the button to jump is a little wierd to me, but otherwise it's a really cute entry!
Super cool entry, took me a few tries to understand the ranges of the jump, but when I got a good grasp, it was really satisfying and flow-inducing. Perfect job, congrats!
Very cool little Pico-8 game! Simple amd efficient! The graphics are very cute and the game feels very juicy! I just wish the game would kill me a little more easily to add more challenge. (maybe bigger collision radius on the koi?) As it is I gave up after reaching 984 points or thereabout. Still, I had fun playing, this is a good entry, well done!
I love the art of the cute frog, especially when they're struggling to get back onto a lily pad. Giving me a chance to get back onto a lily pad when falling into the water was a good mechanic. I played for about 10 minutes without being able to figure out how I was supposed to catch the fly.
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Wow, this is such a nice game! The sounds, the water effects, the cute frog, they're all amazing!
Thank you a lot for playing! I'll certainly increase difficulty as score rises, making Koi swim faster or waterlilies degrade faster. Or both :D
Juicy, cute, and difficult! Really great game, made me want to keep trying over and over again.
This game is so incredibly cute! A very charming and endearing entry with a strong personality and identity. It's bite-sized and perfect for a jam like this - while it could definitely be expanded further, I think this is great as-is, as well!
Fun game, really liked the charming art and animation. One thing perhaps if you were working on it more - would be to change the jump/aim mechanic , since the screen is bounded, having the arrow point outwards towards a 'wall' wastes time, maybe either have it automatically invert angles so it faces inwards when at an edge, or maybe have it more of a timing based thing, where you have lilly in reach for certain window of time and have to jump when it's a specific distance?
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Very nice game, maybe just a bit too easy, after the first try in which I died immediately, I just kept going, it might make sense to slowly increase the difficulty, for example by making the fish (are they?) faster so that you have less time in the water, or making lilies sink sooner as time goes by. Well done nevertheless
Good idea, @johnnysix. Yes, I'll tweak a few things, like @sbeif proposes - increasing difficulty is one of them, but I'll consider the jump angle too. Thing is, you may want to launch the lily pad in a certain direction (originally there was a hole to put lily pads in!). I'll consider that option!
Very fun for this little game, so cuute ! Good job team ! :D
Couldn't stop to play it, very absorbing and fun game but lacks some music a little bit.
It's me alone, @falestress :D Thanks for playing!
Ah yes, @kekyr, I'm a programmer, know not much about composing. Tried my best with menu and game over tunes, but so far that's it. I'm learning. Thanks for playing!
Interesting concept and nice design.
A bit hard at first, but too easy when you understand how it works
@notnasiul so it’s even more impressive, well done ! :)
I hadn't seen the compo format, sorry :)
What a lovely little game! I spent way too much time on it hahaha :joy: It took me few tries before fully understand all the gameplay tricks, but it really was fun to play, even if I didn't manage to get the kind of high scores I saw in previous comments (I only got 2405 at my last and best try) The graphics are cute and neat, the gameplay is simple yet rich, and the game is juicy and full of details one gets only when looking with attention - as the koi design and moving pattern, or the funny face of the frog while jumping… So, well done and good job! (and instant follow because I don't want to miss your next entries)
The artwork is fantastic! I think the game needs to ramp up in difficulty, I got to about 3,500 points before I decided to stop playing, not because I lost, but because I simply stopped having fun. Imagine a lilipad you have to avoid, because it has a friendly snail on it, or something. Perhaps every 1,000 points, a lilipad is removed (to a limit, I think keeping 3 lilipads would be balanced for a late-game highscore run) Maybe in the late game there could be both a fly to catch, and a bee to avoid. Something to spice it up after a long run! I also fell in water touching the fish many times, but I got out unharmed. It might be a bit too lenient?
Anyway, this was super cute and I enjoyed my time with it. The splash effect is really cool too! Great job!
Edit: I read through your postmortem, and it seems like you already know all the stuff I said.. whoops! In any case, this game turned out great, and I'm glad you have your own ideas to improve it. Cheers!
Really cute frog, cute arcade game, really funny and use of theme, maybe more difficult in this game can be better, less leafs for example, I can not feel the challenge in the game, but it's a opinion, I love the control feel, graphics, sound...
Well done! Take a candy! :candy:
Never before have I been so enamored by a frog. The frog is adorable, with its happy idle, the way it yeets itself from lily to lily, and those frantic attempts to climb back up. The gameplay is quite fun once you get the hang of it, although as others have mentioned, it felt a little too easy to escape and recover after a miss.
Fun little game! The frog was adorable and the animations and everything were amazing!
Great pixel game. It's impressive how well the ripples in the water are represented. This has to be the best pico48 I've seen so far!
@thyoi Thanks! But you should see the things people do with Pico8... my games are really simple when compared! :D
Highscore : 1233, those god damn carps keep eating me and the fly wasn't really cooperative. Nice little game, great oldschool arcade mood. Good job!
This is really lovely! Cute frog, poor flies. And poor frog, occasionally! You've put Pico-8 to really good use, the graphics are gorgeous and the various effects are really nice. Audio is good too and fits really nicely. The game feels like it would be stressful but the calming sounds and the relatively long amount of time before a lily pad buckles made it feel quite relaxing. I do wish I could aim before holding the jump button but overall it's really good!
What wonderful game, really tight designed. I'm tempted to make a frogger comparison/joke, but mechanically it has more to do with asteroids. It's quite challenging to aim where I'm going to jump to, but also where the lilypad is going to be at. The fly was being quite evasive too, I really only managed to eat 3 or 4 max!
Peak 8, very cool. I found it very fun, very well executed graphics at peak 8. Sounds well fitted too. I didn't see any problems, it took me a while to discover that I could get out of the water and control the direction of the jump, but everything was intuitive, the way I like it, without boring tutorials on the screen explaining everything with lots of text. Great entry
I had to rate this a solid 5/5. I loved everything about it. I love the idea, I love the graphics, I love the sounds. I like how it seems polished and well thought through. Everything is easy to identify, the shadows perfectly assist while aiming your jump. The fly for extra points. Its exactly how a jam game has to be and it's even playable in browser. And it even fits the theme. The only downside I could think of is that it's actually hard to lose, I just eventually stopped playing at about 2500 points since it doesn't seem to get harder or have any other limiting factor to keep the game from just going on forever, presuming you don't mess up. This may actually be my favourite game so far, despite or maybe even because of the simplicity.
Very cute game!!
I really like the frog character, the animations are really cute and charming! the sound effects are pretty good, altho it would be nice if there was music too
The gameplay is nice, it took me a second to understand the controls it but after that the game, but once I did that the game was fun! The game is pretty easy but I actually like the relaxed pace in this one.
I liked it, good job!
Such a fun and cute game. Love the arts and animations! Though it did take me a while to figure out how to aim.
This reminds me of another fun frog game on iPad I played at least ten years ago. It was about collecting frogs and making them jump around on lily pads. I just couldn't recall it's name...
@octahedron I think it was Pocket Frogs? You could collect tons of them, right?
@laserpanzerwal Thanks a lot your feedback! I'm planning a post-jam version to fix difficulty progression and maybe show the jump aim line all the time (although I like watching the scene without it!)
Thank you a lot for playing :)
Cute little game. Controls took a while to get used to, but love the art and sound. Excellent work!
Oh no, this little frog is way too adorable. It's a crime to be this cute. I missed my first few tries, sometimes landing on seemingly random lily pads, but I managed to conquer it pretty soon. Thank you for making such a sweet little game :)
Is it even possible to eat the fly? My high score was 615 and I swear I got the frog and fly to collide a few times but nothing ever happened. I started to wonder if it was just set dressing... all in all this is adorable and complete, and another great PICO-8 package.
@cheesepencil frogs only eat flies when they are comfortably standing on a lilypad :D She will do it by herself, no need to rush it :)
**Hello there, these are notes I took while playing. (Okay, I didn't write a lot)**
- Awesome particles for limited medium - Fly mechanic looks superfluous (only because frog)