FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD54 → Shrinking Universe

Shrinking Universe

By erroneous

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall3422.7325
Fun3322.7125
Innovation2753.0625
Theme2843.1525
Graphics3422.2924
Audio2582.6821
Humor2012.5023
Mood2952.8022

Comments

uni-isnor 2023-10-02 00:43

The visuals were rather busy, I ended up just spamming the attack button hoping I would kill the enemies before they killed me as I could not tell if they were attacking or not. The idea is great however.

erroneous 2023-10-02 01:20

@uni-isnor Lol yeah the player is really small, I could maybe have made it focus on the player and have the world move around him but that would've taken a bit more thinking and time. I tried to give the enemies some roundup like with their red circles but its not very well explained. Thanks for the feedback!

lettas 2023-10-02 05:10

Nice idea. Took me a little to get accustomed to the controls but once I did the combat felt really solid, especially dodging meteors and solar flares (? I think that's what they are). Also, nice music and sfx.

xinux 2023-10-02 16:48

Nice variation in the levels. Hard to know which sprites are possible to pick up - maybe they could be automatically picked up? Controls are hard, would benefit a lot to be able to use arrow keys. Good amount of mechanics, and nice to have difficulty setting. Very ambitious for a 48 hour jam!

germdog53 2023-10-02 19:51

I had a hard time figuring out how to play exactly. There is a lot going on and it doesn't ease you into it at all. Once I got going it was fun, but the learning curve took a bit.

op-orange 2023-10-02 20:41

Really nice game! loved the design and the idea, really nice music as well

erroneous 2023-10-02 22:51

@op-orange lol I thought the music was a weak point because I made it really fast in Musescore without knowing what I was doing, thanks!

monsieurduck 2023-10-03 00:02

I like the circular world idea, but it took me a bit to figure out that I needed to hit things to collect them in the world

treblecolby 2023-10-03 01:25

There's a lot going on here. I like the idea of a resource-collector mixed with a planet defender game. With how many background mechanics there are on the side, I think a tutorial could go a long way. I saw you mentioned the music being a weak point, but honestly it wasn't bad! Overall there's a lot of ideas here, which is all you really want from a game jam. Great job!

passbykamenrider 2023-10-03 01:41

Haven't tried pygame but this game looks really cool. Love the idea of collecting resource and escape in limited time, reminds me of DRG (really obsessed with it recently).

seam00se 2023-10-03 01:42

I really loved parts of the level design! The planets with the solar waves were really creative, using the shape of the planet to the game's advantage. It was a little confusing at first, but I ended up liking it. Nice Job!

plepletier 2023-10-04 00:46

The idea is cool, but the visuals make the game challenging. I got killed, but I don't know why. The screen was shaking, and there was too much visual information; I couldn't figure out what to do.

coda-highland 2023-10-04 03:23

I can't quite figure out how to play it. I think I like the idea as far as I can see it, but the sound doesn't work on my computer for some reason and none of the mechanics seem to work... One time when I started the game, no enemies spawned at all, and then the screen started shaking but nothing happened.

sudocoffee 2023-10-05 01:50

Everything is untidy and hand-made, and I kind of love that. It feels like I'm exploring some weird universe where nothing quite makes sense. The shrinking universe theme is a lot of fun.

One small bug: if I lose and click Esc to go back to the menu, it doesn't reset the timer or start a new world.

hora-timer 2023-10-06 09:48

Nice!!Nice!!

ididgame 2023-10-06 12:28

neat concept, i quite liked the environmental dangers like asteroids, the difficulty seems way too punishing though sometimes

erroneous 2023-10-06 22:17

@ididgame Thats why I added difficulty options :) (i could have probably made easy mode a bit easier tho)

noya 2023-10-07 22:20

Fun little platformer / survival game. 😊 Graphics and sound effects were simple but nice (only the crashing asteroid was a bit noisy, had to turn down the volume). The loop of landing on a planet, spotting resources, gathering them, fighting robots and getting back to the ship is quite addicting. I stopped playing after a streak of 12 and think I would have continued if the challenge would slightly increase with each level (less time, more resources to gather, more dangerous hazards etc.). All in all well done! šŸ’œ

PS: Cool that you used pygame šŸ

PPS: If anyone wants to play this on Linux, you can download and extract the source.zip and run the following commands:

pip3 install pygame~=2.5

python3 ld54.py

erroneous 2023-10-08 01:18

@noya Thanks!! I agree that a difficulty curve would have been cool, but harder to balance (took a while for me to even balance the cycle time lol) and I’m not the best with balance. Maybe some better time management could have allowed for that :)

pierre-marie 2023-10-11 21:20

The concept is interesting, I was a little confused at first as to what I needed to do to repair my ship, but once I understood it, it was a breeze. Enemy movement is rather peculiar, though: if I had enemies following me to the north of the planet, and I switched from north-west to south-west, they went in the complete opposite direction. Good realization otherwise!

erroneous 2023-10-12 01:40

@pierre-marie Yeah I had trouble with the stupid circle planet movement but like it works fine at keeping them separated most of the time

gilborn 2023-10-17 15:12

Nice concept and well done with different enemys / events / "round" Levels ;-) Fight with the enemys would have benefited from more feedback wenn to parry / attack. I had some fun on the planets :-)