Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → Sick! Virus Busters
By raptorspank, k1lrk1m and TheGreatMinky
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1078 | 2.78 | 35 | |
| Fun | 1087 | 2.51 | 35 | |
| Innovation | 746 | 3.14 | 34 | |
| Theme | 846 | 3.20 | 34 | |
| Graphics | 965 | 2.57 | 34 | |
| Audio | 598 | 2.96 | 34 | |
| Humor | 833 | 2.28 | 32 | |
| Mood | 1010 | 2.70 | 34 |
it needs some better indicator about the systems reconfiguring, like bars with separate rectangles or something, at first i thought the shooting doesnt even work or something.. maybe also a warning thing saying you cant shoot right now or something like that
UI could use some scaling depending on resolution, but besides that I enjoyed the concept! Good job!
I love the mood, and the music, but found the controls and ability shifting hard to understand.
Thanks for the feedback! The UI definitely can use some work, we wanted to make it so disabled systems would look different but we didn't end up having enough time to get that figured out.
I like the idea and music! But it's hard to see which systems are enabled.
Fun concept. Like what the others said, the controls are confusing. I wasn't able to figure out why I wasn't shooting sometimes and not rotating, or moving other times. I suspect a few adjustments would make this an excellent experience.
I couldn't figure out after exploring and moving around, the shooting didn't seem to work at all. The audio was fine, but no UI telling what to do, when shooting is enabled, how shooting is enabled etc.
Couldn't beat the first level but the idea is neat.
It's a fine concept. However, if you want to incite the player to go fast (by putting a time limit) you should make it easy to switch between gears and to know in which state your ship are easily (as well as the enabling/disabling being visible but that is already cover). But congrate on your first jam :D
nice mood and all works combine smoothly together. Nice work!
I wish my nanobot could be cuter and more of the cartoony style. I loved the virus XD. The mechanics are interesting lovely concept . Good work on audio gotta admit. Some more work on game feel would be great. Nice job
I think it's an interesting concept for a game. I like the idea of switching the power to different areas of the ship, but found it difficult to do quickly which made it too cumbersome to switch often. I think some sort of map that could be drawn as you explore or a slightly zoomed out view would help ensure the players aren't going in circles. I like the song too.
I like the concept, but got confused at times, mainly at the UI and what the reason was that i lost a system. I also lost the first time I played without seeing an enemy, but that might just be me lol.
As others have said, it was hard to tell what was enabled and what wasn't. At first I just thought it didn't work until I saw comments in here, so then I played it again and was able to kill a bunch of the enemies. I did find a few areas that I just couldn't move past. Felt like an invisible blockage or something. I think to improve the controls you could just have the w key propel the player in the direction they are facing. It was a bit strange flying sideways while shooting. Art was pretty cool. Good job on the jam!
@draekdude Thanks! Definitely needed to do more to make enabled systems clearer. We probably should have started with horizontal/vertical movement and shooting enabled, rather than just the movement systems. There are actually invisible walls so that's likely what you ran into. Rather than a wide map, it's a relatively confined space that you need to go from either end of. I wanted to put some sort of "signal weak" message when you reached an invisible barrier but I ran out of time. I probably should have made sure to include that from the start though.
This is a pretty interesting game idea with very unintuitive implementation, limiting the play area to a smaller arena with invading viruses and allowing the player to get used to designating memory to different features would allow some learning space with the mechanics both for player and designer.
xD there was too much blood :P nice work
@steamhat thanks! We probably made the level a bit too big, that's certainly fair. We kept nerfing things to try and make the game a little more forgiving but I think we probably could have gone a bit farther without making it too easy too.
Sorry about the too much blood! Quite ironically, two of us are pretty queasy with the sight of blood and we probably made it a little too close to realistic at times haha
The idea of having a limited number of mechanics available at any given moment is cool and a good connection to the theme. The level design could be better, the levels are too big to traverse in time. I like how you can use the blood cells to boost yourself around, I couldn't finish the first level even with that boost tho
@kizilejderha Honestly, I didn't think about using the blood as a boost, that's definitely an interesting way to get around! I definitely think the difficulty is a bit too high, we probably should have had a little more health and then narrowed the play space further than that. Thanks for playing!
Interesting concept! I liked the idea of swapping out mechanics, but I think you could have made more out of it by building the level in such a way that required certain combinations to beat a puzzle. I just turned off rotation to enable the shooting and was able to get pretty far with that.
It was really tough for me to tell where I was, and the very flat walls (and invisible walls) didn't do a great job of conveying that I was inside a body. I think a more organically-shaped level would have helped with that.
@cody-raethke Thanks for playing! I definitely agree that the level design fell a bit flat, we wanted to make one of the levels a lot more confined and in a heart-shaped series of rooms which probably would have conveyed the idea a lot better. Unfortunately we just ended up running out of time on that.
Making a couple of puzzle levels or sections could be a great idea for shaking up the gameplay too, that's a great idea!
Nice game, I didn't quite understood why I die randomly, but nice touch with limited inventory slots
Liked the concept very much. I always find it interesting to manage your stats by having to decrease one to increase another. However, it took a good long while to understand how that actually worked. I think the game could use some UI upgrades. Also, it took me even longer to understand that the map continued in all four directions. At first I couldn't understand what I was doing wrong because I wasn't even seeing any virus. I think maybe having a virus moving in and out of the screen in the first visible portion would clue players in that the map is bigger than what they see at first. Overall though, good game!
@damp-squib Thanks for playing! I definitely agree on it needs some UI upgrades. That's a good idea for helping players realize there are multiple directions to go. I think it may have been better to have the first level be a stationary level and then used the bigger level layouts for the later levels too.
I really like this idea! Moving inside blood vessels, that's very interesting.