2thegamechanger 2023-10-02 01:48
I dont know what to do :( But it looks really cool!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → Space slug
By normality
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 319 | 2.98 | 28 | |
| Fun | 339 | 2.63 | 28 | |
| Innovation | 194 | 3.34 | 28 | |
| Theme | 315 | 2.90 | 28 | |
| Graphics | 103 | 3.82 | 28 | |
| Audio | 192 | 3.14 | 27 | |
| Humor | 230 | 2.29 | 26 | |
| Mood | 199 | 3.25 | 28 |
I dont know what to do :( But it looks really cool!
@2thegamechanger Yeah I didnt end up getting the hyroglyphs for telling you to hit things done before my time ran out.
For anyone else that that is lost you interact with the world by ramming into things.
It took me a surprising long time to understand what was going on and what I needed to do. And even in the end I'm quite sure I did not fully experience what the game has to offer. While I like the art style, it makes a bit hard to understand what some objects are and how to interact with them.
Adding a short tutorial or organising the level in a way that the player gets to interact with all of game's parts separately would go a long way. I think this game has potential but it takes a bit time to open up for the player.
Neat control scheme, and overall I think it's a neat concept with a very good art style. Like some others have said interacting with stuff is a bit unintuitive, but overall is fun.
I broke down the brown material (dirt?) by ramming into it, and then shoved the yellow square (star?) onto the mini brown bits, and that changed the composure of the yellow square. I feel like I'm getting closer to something. Can I get a hint?
Interesting idea! But yeah, I suggest adding an instruction of what to do to the description. It took me a very long time to figure out how to spawn new ground tiles, and I'm still need unsure what yellow and brown boxes represent.
Oh, and car-steering-like movement was annoying, I wish A and D always rotated me in the same direction.
@binroot Yeah you have the right idea and it seems the tutorial like thing wasnt as intuitive as I thought, if you shove the yellow thing onto the empty air it will create a new platform (I called it the printer).
@holyblackcat I actually used to have the turning like that then changed it, I agree with you that it was easier that way, I don't know why I changed it but in my mind it was along the lines of this is how its supposed to be.
@nash I tried to make the tutorial (the first place you start) not tell you how to play but I think im going to add a short written tutorial of how to play in the description. Thanks for the feedback!
I didn't managed to understand what I had to do/what i'm doing wrong (even after reading the written tut on the page), but the graphics are good and I think there is something to dig to fully appreciate your game.
@kaimon Thanks for telling me, I'm wondering if you could check the new one and if that clarifies how the game works? I added what things look like and what the goal is if that helps.
@normality Ok that's way better now ! Don't hesitate to put some # before your written tutorial in order to make it heavier for people who will test your game (one or two # would be enough)
cool idea.. definitely needs more tutorial. Also the camera was a bit intense.. maybe a little interpolation. Great entry voerall
I love the style of everything, the concept and the audio too, although some spacey music would have done well here. I think the game itself is quite hard but overall it was a fun experience, I love the pixel art asteriod waves too, can I ask how your experience in game maker was? I haven't used it.
It's a nice idea, I really enjoy the heavy pixelated art style and the mood you created for it. I think I eventually understood what had to be done, but to me what mattered more was the slug's movement which was what I was battling with the majority of the time. This is a kind of a management-ish game, and IMO having action-physics type of movement be the primary way to interact with things works at cross purposes with the game. This is only my opinion, of course, but you either want to explore the management side of the game and make that the best it can be, or the go for the action side of it. There are probably ways to manage to mix both together, but this iteration didn't work for me. A really nice and solid effort though, and again, I really really like the art style you have going on here, so super good job on that!
I started getting it but yeah as said by others, tutorial is needed. But I like the art style and general mood of the game!
@osh-studio Personally I have not used any other game engines but gamemaker has been able to do almost anything that I want to put in a game.
I would say from my perspective that the ability to have everything in one place (art(sprites), code, objects, levels) is very useful for quick protypes and testing out new ideas. The thing that causes the most friction personally is how code is very segmented for organization but can be hard to navigate quickly when you start having a lot of seperate objects and scripts.
It definitely takes time to learn but it is good enough that I don't think I will switch unless they start doing some shady money grubbing stuff.
@a327ex Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, some ideas I've had for how I could've made the movement better are controller stick or trying to move towards the mouse.
I kinda wanted it to be a physics based management game to act as an 'enemy' that the player has to contend with kind of like how in a platformer you have to fight gravity (in a sense). I wonder if making the players movement more simplistic/straight-forward would improve it making it feel less like you are trying to wrangle the player so you can focus more on managing and dealing with the asteroids.
I actually like the combination of management tasks with physics-based/challenging controls and feel that it fits nicely with the threat of the asteroids as the main theme. I think this would work with some tuning of player movement and controls. The art style is great! As other and you have said, this game desperately needs a good introduction for the player to understand what is going on. Anyway, cool entry!
I really liked the menu. Every single animation is good and i liked the overall mood of the game. Didn't quite understand what to do though.
Here are some things I thought about when playing!
Like others have mentioned it was difficult to understand, I understood how to print more tiles and that I had to protect my grass, but what exactly gave me points or how I lost the game wasn't clear to me. Sometimes the big score counter would show up, and sometimes it was going up and sometimes it was ticking down. When it came up the final time it was ticking down from like 3000 to 1000 but then my final score was something in the 20,000s. Maybe that could be more clear, either it could be visible at all times or something, and show my actual score. Then it would be easier to piece together what is good and what is bad.
I played it for about 10 minutes but I didn't feel like I was making much progress, I would build up squares and the asteroids would take them out, and then repeat. I assume that the asteroids get more powerful and more common which makes it harder and harder to protect the grass but the pacing was a bit too slow for me, and I guess I was too bad at the controls to build fast enough to make progress.
There was a lot of camera shake and camera movement which made me a bit nauseous, and I'm not usually one to get nauseous from games (I liked Hyper Demon, if anyone's seen that game :sweat_smile:)
The graphics and audio looked fantastic, especially the menu really impressed me. Great work on that!
@marcus-otterstrom Thanks for the detailed feedback, I really appreciate it!
I see how a lot of that is unclear, since I wrote how it all works I guess that just slipped my mind on how confusing it all is. Its meant to give you points based on how many surviving grass you have at the end of an asteroid swarm. I wanted to have the total score displayed at the same time but I thought that it would be better if it was hidden and you only got to see it after you finished but looking back that was probably only because I knew how it all worked.
Yes I agree that is repetitive and I think in part thats because (I think) there is a bug in the asteroid spawning code somewhere that spawns it in a place that doesnt actually hit your platforms but worked most of the time and it slipped through.
For camera shake do you think some sort of interpolation would make it better? Less of it and only on very important things? I really like lots of camera shake and I guess I'm not the majority there.
And again thank you for taking your time to play and formulate your thoughts for me.
I think the harshest and most honest critique I can give to you is that I quit less than two minutes in because the movement system was atrocious to me. It goes so against the norm of top down movement that, even with a guide, I kept wanting to just hit D to go right instead of having to turn to face the right direction and then move forward from that angle with W. And although it might be easier if I was using something more analog, the key presses were so sensitive and so heavy that it drove me absolutely mad. It took me (what felt like) forever just to hit the dirt pile. I knew I was done playing when I went over to hit the yellow cube and aimed my little guy just perfectly to slide right into it (from very close range as well) and, despite that, I went soaring over the top of it and off into the distance. I would feel like, for a game that requires (what I'm assuming) quick action and tight control, the control scheme would be a bit easier to understand/use.
I think my fear with a control scheme like this is that, like I mentioned briefly earlier, it's so different to what people would expect that even with a tutorial, the mindset/thought process/muscle memory that would come out during urgent gameplay could ultimately end up screwing over the player. I know this happens to me in a lot of different games, either because my hand drifts one key row over or I really do just default to how I think it should play. And honestly, because it might be such a non-issue (or even a bonus!) to some players, I think having multiple available control schemes available would be great! If the game controlled by aiming the direction/angle with the mouse and moving forward with just one key like W or space or whatever, would allow for the same sort of loose, rapid-change, flowing control that I think you're going for here.
Finally, I know the game takes place in space, but I felt like the color palette was a bit lacking. Try checking the absolute values of the colors you're using to see what colors pop against each other and what colors blend into each other. I'm not sure if it was the colors or just the movement, but even with what little time I spent in the game, I started to feel a bit dizzy/headachy.
@viktorthegreat I appreciate the honesty! Im not too sure how the best way to implement the type of movement I want is, I did think through quite a few different movement systems but I find it hard to achieve what I want with them. Perhaps if the tutorial for the game had a section that tried to get you familiar? Like an area that you have to turn around a few bends before it asks you to aim so you at least have a bit more familiarity with the movement system?
Also I was thinking but didn't end up adding it that maybe turning speed should be adjusted depending on how fast you are moving so the turn radius would always be the same, thus making it feel less unpredictable. But I probably still should have looked into alternative movement systems.
I'm not that good at art and I really just chose what felt 'right' after testing a few options without thinking about how they work together. I'll make sure to keep in mind how they do in the future, and thanks I don't think I would have spotted that one.
Would you say that the dizziness might have been caused by the camera being very aggresive? That seems to be an issue too.
@normality
It's kind of hard to say, about the dizziness. Because I still can't really tell what *exactly* it was, but I feel like it had to do with the movement speed and, yes, to a degree, how fast the camera would have to whip around in order to stay focused on the slug. It could also be the colors in the sense that, because they tend to blend into each other, your eye has to work harder to differentiate things. And when THAT combines with the superfast movement and whippy camera, it all gets harsher.
And yeah, maybe if the tutorial was a bit more thorough to get the player more used to the control scheme, it would help a bit, rather than having them in a very large arena-space and tell them to aim for a (relatively) smaller object. An easy-control or more tuned down version (like a menu toggle or something) could also be helpful if you want to maintain the high speeds for players that are ok with it (and even default to it), but want to give a helping hand to those who either can't handle it visually or those who can't manage it physically. Giving each player the option to choose what they feel most comfortable with is, in my opinion, better than shutting players out.
> For camera shake do you think some sort of interpolation would make it better? Less of it and only on very important things? I really like lots of camera shake and I guess I’m not the majority there.
I think less of it and only on important things makes sense. To be clear I think it was the screen shake *and* the fast camera movement when you move around that made it too much. Maybe the camera could be more stationary and only move when it really has to, like it has boundaries that you can move in without having the camera move. Or maybe it could just focus on the middle of the player instead of slightly in front, that might cause less jarring movement. It's hard to say exactly what would work well without trying it out for myself, haha :) Interpolating slowly might be a good thing to play around with as well.
And I totally get the liking camera shake, I like camera shake too usually. In fact I had lots of it in my game this jam but I toned it down (probably too much, in retrospect) just because I thought I might make people feel dizzy (and you generally want to use it when it actually tells the player something important, IMO). Screen shake is a fine line and I don't think there's an amount that everyone will like, some people want lots and some people can't stand any camera movement at all. In a perfect world one would have time to make it configurable for the player but when you only have 48 hours it's hard to get time over to prioritize that... :)
I think what you managed to make in 48 hours, including a tutorial (however confusing it may be) is really good work.
Floating parts are really cool-looking and creates a good atmosphere. Makes you feel like they are actually floating on space, it's much better than just basic tile-based solution. Happy gardening sim
I really like the idea, but the controls were hard to get used to. The fact that walls are "sticky" means it's possible to get stuck in the tutorial level, since you can't move the printer once it has hit a wall, although that's less of a problem after the tutorial (I appreciate that physics is tricky and it's you've done a good job of not letting solid things overlap).
I honestly thought the controls were fun! I think a WASD-to-move-in-that-direction scheme would have made the game less interesting to play. Instead, the tank-style controls meant there was less I could at any one time, so I had to strategize about what to focus on in a given moment. I liked the asteroid swarms (especially the massive asteroids), it was always a stop-what-I'm-doing-and-defend-now moment.
The camera felt fine when it was smaller in the browser (I played the GX version), but when I made it full screen it did feel a bit jarring. I think the problem was the low resolution, combined with how the pixels snapped to the grid during movement. I'm not sure what GameMaker has to adjust this, but if you had a way to make the pixels scroll smoothly across the screen, that might make it feel less jarring. The screen shake also might feel better if you limited it to foreground objects, but didn't shake the stars in the background.
I had to read the instructions in your description to figure out what was going on at first. That's a hard part to get right in a game jam though. Only other suggestion is that I wish I could see the score while I was playing. Otherwise I couldn't figure out how the score got calculated at the end.
6295 second try:
6295.png
@tesseract Yeah I have had some issues with the stickiness but they were rare and I added the walls in the tutorial after I had already made most of the game so didn't even think about that and it had little test time (just enough to make sure it was playable and shouldnt lock you out of completing it).
@sudocoffee Thanks for the solutions for camera shake (And playing the game)! There are solutions for snapping to the pixel grid so thanks for bringing that to my attention. I agree that making you have to focus is important and part of what I was trying to do but I think I should have made the controls a bit more accessible be that slower speed or consitent turning even if the style stayed the same.
It is a *very* interesting concept. However, as with many many games (including mine) it seems that the greatest issue with games is **user experience**, e.g. *for players to EASILY understand what to do*.
This is vital! If players are to *play and stay*. Haha.. play and stay.. just made this up term.
Your game needs to either be *self explanatory* (which is not the case) OR you need to have a VERY good tutorial / textual hints on every step the player should / can take. Also, since it's abstract, it's not very clear what object does what.
I very much liked the asteroid storm. But that was the first time I realized I am in space :D Imagine people are lazy! I am lazy...
You know what fixes ALL of the above: **make a video** of you playing. AT least a GIF / e.g. ScreenToGIF does wonderful job (keep it under 4 mb to upload directly on the site).
GOOD LUCK!! I very much like the abstract shapes and colors : )
@aweskybear Thank you! This has definitely been an issue... I'll see if I can figure out how to get a video on the site to make it even more clear.
@normality You can embed a youtube video after publishing one (you just need to see the proper markdown syntax / embed link for this). Others have done it I think : )) GL!