falestress 2023-10-02 19:44
I really like the work and especially the concept! Congratulations to you all ! It gives you ideas!
Small idea: Why not connect the player's life directly to the environment? Well done ! The game is fun and original!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → Air-Raid Architect
By groverburger and zungryware
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 154 | 4.01 | 30 | |
| Fun | 135 | 3.98 | 30 | |
| Innovation | 94 | 4.07 | 30 | |
| Theme | 273 | 4.07 | 30 | |
| Graphics | 612 | 3.55 | 30 |
I really like the work and especially the concept! Congratulations to you all ! It gives you ideas!
Small idea: Why not connect the player's life directly to the environment? Well done ! The game is fun and original!
Nice graphics and concept. Could do with some game balance though :-) Well done!
A fun little shooter! I do wish there was some more interest to the gunplay, the shotgun was a welcome addition, but its transient nature was a shame. The primary gun made the bigger bosses feel a little bullet spongy.
A couple of times I fell down through the floor, but for the life of me my jetpack wasn't enough to get me back up there again, just hitting the bottom of the platform with no way back up.
If there had been something like an ultimate to build up using drops/kills of weaker wasps, to then dispatch the bigger bosses more quickly, I would've stuck around a while longer.
cool concept! i like the ability to plan before the battle. I wish the gun was a bit more fun to use (maybe rebounding bullets or something to make it more than just a pea-shooter). Great Job!
@flaterectomy I think of the shotgun as more of a timed powerup than a weapon. It was meant as a pacing mechanic. Every so often you get to go on a rampage. Did you ever collect a second pistol? Once you get that, the enemies melt like butter.
I really wish I had gotten the chance to get someone other than me to playtest it. I think the game is really fun if you're skilled at the mechanics, but I don't know how fun it is for people who haven't been playing it repeatedly for 72 hours straight. Now that you mention it, I think we should have given the jetpack a higher fuel capacity to reward the player more for conservative use and make it easier to save yourself from falling.
That was brutal! Nice work! Did you use a game engine for this?
Fun game, and very cool take on the "limited space" theme. It was truly daunting to see literal space being taken away from you.
I think you could have been a bit more generous with power-ups, the basic pistol is far too weak for later waves, and shotguns/2nd pistol last very short. Also, I misstepped a few times and fell to my death -- but maybe some time penalty (respawn) during which your territory is defenseless is punishment enough?
The mines/bombs also seem extremely strong. Once they were there, and I was with single pistol, it was instant game over.
Overall very fun and intriguing mechanics! :)
@roboimuri Yes. We used my custom voxel engine which is based on groverburger's custom javascript game engine. We use a real homebrew setup here!
@bromeon The powerups are pretty easy to get a lot of if you make good use of the shop's reroll button. In particular, you should make sure you reroll for the pistol once you get past wave 3 or 4 since it's a very strong permanent upgrade. That also goes for hearts when you only have one left. That's an interesting idea for the death mechanic though. It would certainly be nail-biting to sit there while you watch the wasps tear down your territory for free! It kind of goes the other way around. Currently, you preserve the environment so that you don't fall into the the void, rather than avoiding falling into the void to preserve the environment. I'll definitely consider that for the post-jam version.
Very impressive for a game jam, and it fits the theme very well.
The jetpack definitively saved my ass more than once!
The basic pistol is a bit weak and the shotgun is hard to come by. Maybe more enemies per wave with less health each would be more interesting?
Well done nonetheless!
Really fun! Definitely a very clever idea, I especially liked how the powerups were tied to different terrain so you had to choose what to buy both based on its space and what it gives you
I think it's a best game I have played on this jam, great feeling while playing and the movement remainds me of quake games :d
I played this over and over! Only got to Wave 7. This has to become a full game, it's got a addictive gameloop and I want to keep playing over and over.
I wish I knew how much jetpack fuel I had, made jumping for coins very risky!
Fantastic game, my favorite of the jam so far!
I think this is my favourite game of the jam so far! The theme fits perfectly and giving the player the option to choose between new structures and powerups makes each playthrough unique. Great job!
This was a ton of fun!! Frantically jetpacking around shooting down wasps as my island slowly gets blown apart... My only complaint is the lack of a mouse sensitivity setting, cause the default setting felt too slow for me. Other then that, awesome job!
@cacadeperro groverburger implemented the movement controls to make it as much like Quake as possible, complete with circle-jumping and air-strafing.
@smitner I am working on some post-jam changes already! Not sure how much I'll get to develop it, but I definitely plan to further improve it in a few ways. The most recent thing I added is positional audio, so you can tell where enemies are coming from.
@chailotl You can control mouse sensitivity with the + and - keys. Glad you enjoyed!
The concept is awesome, can and should definitely be expanded. The jetpack mechanic works great and fits in perfectly.
Unfortunately the combat is extremely unfun. The spread is obnoxious and the enemies take too many bullets to kill.
I would very much like to see a post-jam update, I liked it a lot despite the shooting.
I wasn't able to play it, sadly -- for whatever reason, the mouse controls simply did not work at all. I could only face in one direction and I couldn't shoot anything.
The visuals seem nice, at least?
@coda-highland Strange, nobody else has reported that issue. What browser and OS are you using?
I first thought the mouse controls were not working, but then I realized the mouse sensitivity is just really low. Firefox on Linux.
It was still fun to play though :D Also it's very impressive that you used your own engine!
Fun game, great idea! Got to Wave 6. I WISH I'd realized I had a JETPACK before I got a gameover!! Killing the badguys wasn't that fun, but I LOVED jumping and grabbing the gold before it fell (I would've done that a lot more if I'd known about the jetpack!). Really cool building mechanic. Loved the shotgun and wish I'd got it more. Main gun felt a bit weedy, and this game NEEDS some badass quake music :guitar:
@zungryware Nothing particularly weird -- Chrome on Ubuntu Linux. (Well, Pop!_OS, but that's Ubuntu.)
Super cool game! For some reason it took me a while to realize I had a jetpack, but once I got a hang of the mechanics I was COOKIN! I with the starter gun was like a liiiiitle more powerful.... I felt a little silly after dying early with the shotgun sometimes. Great work! The voxel mechanic is really cool!
Good roguelike fps game with nice minecraft-like art style. Tho mechanisms right now is a bit too few, it's a solid base for a commercial game in the future. I feel like roguelike game is very hard to balance in 72 hours, do you guys have the same feeling? Overall it's a great game. I had some fun playing it.
This game had a great approach to the theme. The "limited space" really kicks in as the wasps wreak havoc on the map. Also great PSA about wasps being assholes, ever time I try to eat outdoors they come and try to eat my food & table.
The rebuilding mechanic with different structures was a cool feature, Initially I was confused about what good it does, but when they started shredding my floor it quickly became a big decision what to pick each wave.
Nice touch with the jetpack and multiple different weapons, overall a great entry! :x: :bee: :x: :gun: :smile:
The concept and the graphics are pretty cool. As others have said, the main gun doesn't feel good to shoot at all. Just too much spread and too little damage. For me, most waves were ending with the enemies just despawning because I could never kill them fast enough. I also didn't notice any sort of meter telling me how much jetpack fuel I had.
Also, something with the mouse and player movement felt REALLY off. Sometimes my mouse sensitivity would seem to jump way up and then go back down again. The mouse was even moving on its own a few times. Walking movement seemed to speed up and down as well. I wonder if maybe some of the physics logic is tied to the framerate?
@dovodx
The purpose of the spread was to ensure the player can't just stand on one platform and snipe enemies from afar. It was to encourage movement and reward the player for getting closer to enemies. A lot of people have been saying the gun deals too little damage, but I've never felt that way. I'm wondering if the people complaining about that never collected a second pistol. Admittedly, I should have made the wave 4 shop contain only structures with the pistol so the player is guaranteed to get it. I can see why a player would think, "Why would I buy a pistol? I already have that!" The jetpack fuel meter is supposed to render right underneath the crosshair. Is it not showing up for you?
jetpack.png
What browser are you playing on? The weird sensitivity might be caused by mouse acceleration turned on in your OS. Chrome allows the pointer-lock api to override mouse acceleration, but not all browsers support that. The physics engine is tied to framerate, I think. Did you have framerate issues while playing?
@zungryware I was playing on Firefox. Tried again on Chrome and didn't notice any issues with the mouse or player movement. I can understand why that fixed the mouse issue, based on your comment, but I have no clue why the movement jank also seems to happen on Firefox and not Chrome. Maybe the browser messes with the frame pacing or something? My computer should be more than overspec for this game, so if anything my framerate would've been too high if that was the issue.
I also got further, thanks to those issues no longer being there, and I can definitely say the second pistol makes shooting feel better. It's kind of a slow grind until you get one, though. On the jetpack recharge, I think I didn't notice it my first couple times playing because it recharges so slowly that I didn't realize it was there, even with a battery (not sure if batteries stack, I only sprung for 1). I do also think the jetpack drains way too fast, especially given how extreme the gravity is. Making what seems like a small jump to grab honey got me killed more than once due to how fast I ran out of fuel.
As far as encouraging the player to move goes, why not have the enemies shoot at the player's feet some of the time? They seem to be content to shoot parts of the ground where I'm not standing, which actually doesn't really punish me for standing in place and shooting them. At the same time, the environment can be destroyed so granularly that I'd have to be looking at my feet a lot to make sure I'm not going to fall into a player-sized hole and lose a life just for that. Maybe the environment could consist of fewer, larger pieces that take a few hits before being destroyed, that way falling to my death wouldn't feel as "random", if that makes sense.
@dovodx
I'm not really sure. I test everything on Chrome since it seems to be the most optimized for games.
I attribute a lot of this game's problems to me being too good at it. I learned early on that the best way to use the jetpack is for horizontal movement. If you tap the space bar rhythmically instead of holding it, you can cross the entire map on a full tank. Add in a circle jump and airstrafing and you only need a half tank. Mastering this technique is key to getting lots of honey. If you want to go vertically, however, you need a full tank to go barely ten voxels up. I'm thinking we should increase the jetpack capacity and make the initial press instantly drain a few percent to balance between horizontal and vertical movement. The batteries do stack. Each battery gives +50% (additive) recharge rate.
There was a plan for an enemy that would directly attack the player, but it was cut due to lack of time. So while you can stand completely still while killing an enemy, you do have to move around to get to a different enemy. Also, the shotgun encourages you to take specific angles to line up multiple wasps. Though we could definitely do more in that department. The enemy AI attempts to shoot loose, singular voxels so you don't end up with all these random floating voxels. But you can end up with a lot of random holes. The way I play is to just stay away from places with lots of holes or thin floors and make liberal use of the jetpack to get to safer places.
Thanks for the in-depth feedback! I plan to do some more work on this game after the jam is over, but it's a tough thing to balance for both skilled players and normal players.