Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → A Following Wind
By digitaliliad
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 117 | 3.68 | 85 | |
| Fun | 179 | 3.39 | 85 | |
| Innovation | 63 | 3.85 | 85 | |
| Theme | 160 | 3.64 | 84 | |
| Graphics | 97 | 3.85 | 85 | |
| Audio | 55 | 3.77 | 84 | |
| Mood | 62 | 3.84 | 84 |
The fact that the gusts continue and can mess up other ship paths makes things interesting. I can't just spam wind and have to consider what else is in that direction. It's a bit hard to tell how much of an effect each gust is giving though. There were some times when I thought the wind touched the ship but they didn't change direction as much as I expected.
I really enjoyed the music and the artwork on this game!
Woah, this game is harder than I thought. The game looks very nice! Like what @tykenn has mentioned, the wind mechanic, where it affects the whole world is very great in my opinion. You can't just spam winds (like what I did).
I don't know if this is just Linux via Wine, but the window is too small in my opinion. But overall, this is a very nice game!
This gave me some real Settlers 2 vibes in the graphics and sound department. Really good! I found it hard to understand how the winds were controlled by the input. But a solid idea!
Appreciate the feedback! I've pushed a bug fix for some unintended wind behavior that might be causing the confusion. <3
Really love the way you visualize the wind! Really nice aesthetic vibe overall. The waves around the temple looks super cool too. I love the snappy pixel art overall.
Audio seemed a bit low for me so I really had to crank it up. But love those foley sounds, and the chill background lute.
Gameplay was fun and satisfying as well, but occasionally the ships would stop responding to the wind and get stuck in crash-courses that I couldn't seem to affect. Not sure if it was user error or a bug.
Although I loved the wind visuals, it was a little confusing to know exactly where the "game interaction" was taking place, since they were kind of appearing and disappearing all the time and I would lose track of the vectors I had drawn. Sometimes a ship would rush past before the gust of wind intersected with its path since it would kind of slowly crawl along the click-and-dragged vector path. I think my instinct was to want the wind to be a bit more immediate and semi-permanent so I was more aware of what vectors active on the screen.
Overall, really fun concept and excellent work!! I had a great time playing. :)
This is really great for a first jam entry!
Engagement starts to drop after the first few ships because the difficulty never really increases, so once you figure it out, it's a tough sell to keep playing. It would be neat if the amount of ships started increasing, or there were moving obstacles to avoid. Or even pirate ships that are in pursuit, which would make you have to change the course of one of them without affecting the other.
The visuals from the screenshot drew me in, and I was not disappointed! The wind effect specifically was just really cool looking. The audio was simple, and effective.
There was an issue with the spawn timer not ramping the difficulty correctly. I fixed this and added a web build!
Finally got around to this! I love the graphics but I probably mentioned that on stream already at some point? and I really like the wind vfx in particular. I just wish the game felt a little bit "faster" but I wouldn't know an obvious way to do that that wouldn't result in ships crashing a LOT more
This is an amazing entry for the first jam! I love the artstyle (and the wind, it looks amazing), it reminds me of 90s games and it looks really good. I love that the wind keeps going and can mess with other ships later. In order to make this game more challenging, I would perhaps try to spawn more and more ships eventually or speed them up. That said, awesome first entry, I bet it won't be the last one!
Lovely idea and sprites! I especially liked the wind effect. Some points,
* The game would be better with more clear visual feedbacks when we drag mouse to create the winds. Even a simple line could work. * The background (sea) looks bland and dark compared to the sprites, I assume you hadn't time for background. * I thought the white ships crashed when they reached the temple and played that particle, in a sense that the Faith score decreases. * Hard to read the title screen.
Your idea has a nice potential, good job!
Fixed one last bug that was causing an issue with ships crashing offscreen immediately after spawn.
By the way, I didn't notice the game had audio till I saw your patch notes. It's almost silent at my side.
Thanks for the tip! I thought I'd fixed that issue, but it seems to still be affecting some players...
I *love* this idea! This is really cool! The art and music are great, the wind animation is really satisfying. Could use an end-game or more intense escalation later on, but pfff, honestly I have very few notes. Very nice job!
Awesome idea, a wind management god game! First of all I love the music, and the gameplay itself gets pretty fun with all the boats to manage and having to think how one gust can affect several.
Did you use a line renderer for the wind? I really like the way the trails move.
One way I would improve this would be to make the wind feel more responsive and maybe a bit faster, but then again the current speed could be the whole point of the game.
In any case this a great entry for a first game jam, kudos to you for doing the compo. Good job!
Thank you @nazorus the wind sprites are all just the same animating ancient greek-style curly shape
Cool mood, cool music, cool graphism! Congrats!
So so fun. Creative interpretation of the theme and great vibezzzz
Loved the wind effects and the vibe was immaculate. Very chill and vibey. Could play forever
The concept is nice, it seems pretty easy so far - I wonder if it would make sense to ramp up the challenge, like increasing the number of ships or pirate to friendly ratio etc. Got a score in the 30s and felt I could go on forever.
@argensis definitely! I think just tuning the faith changes could do that. I'm hesitant to go too crazy with the spawn rate though. Thank you all so much for playing and for the thoughtful feedback!
Love the concept! The art is really good and the music fit's so well! Good job with this entrance! Great game
Well, you saw me play so you have some idea of my thoughts ;) - Very nice entry, pretty, plays well and feels good. I appreciate the emergent challenge too :p
I loved the idea and the Caribbean vibes! :slight_smile: Reminded me a bit about Pirates! which was probably my favourite game some decades ago...
At first I imagined it would be easier but the winds carrying out through the world after you'd summoned them made it more challenging, in a good way. And I think the number of ships increased in just the right pace, making it difficult after a while to steer the pilgrims away from the rocks and each other.
A solid entry!
Amazing game, mind blowing that it was finished in such a short time!
Really Enjoyed this! Makes me think for the next jam I want to focus purely on a novel concept, rather than going straight into making the game! Audio was nice and as complex as needed without going overboard.
I really liked this take on the theme! The execution was quite good - the graphics and audio are well polished. I think it would be nice if it were a little easier to see what direction the wind is moving in. Good job!
Really liked the graphics, especially the wind effects. It was a lot of fun to manage the boats when they started to get up in number! Well done :)
Very polished, visually stunning and the music was very fitting and enjoyable !
My only complaint is that it feels a little slow, I would've enjoyed some gradual speed-up or perhaps currents / storms that make ships go faster momentarily.
Great job all around :)
Super simple yet quite interesting. At the beggining I was kinda spamming wind until I realized it was messing up the boats on the other side of the screen, that's a nice twist. Sometimes I found miself wishing there was a fast forward button.
So at first I was confused. But then I decided to actually read instructions you provided. And then I was not confused anymore. I love the graphics, it's very crisp, I would even say that it gave me some "Vlambeer" vibes (that is a praise in my book). I would personally add visual feedback on mouse dragging because at first I thought that my clicks were not registering. I like it! You did great job and it's even a compo entry. :clap:
This looks like a concept that could easily becoming addicting with a little more tuning. The presentation is nice, very clean; The visuals and sound are spot-on. The gameplay feels a bit off to me, though. The ships averaging their direction based on the wind means I have a higher chance of needing to summon more than one gust of wind, as opposed to just fixing the direction of that ship and then moving on to help the others. This creates a compounding problem where I have too many gusts of wind messing up the other ships to the point where it makes it harder to fix where they're going, but I have to use more gusts of wind to fix them. The problem gets worse when I try to use a gust of wind on a ship that should fix it in one go, but it either misses somehow or connects with the ship much later than I expect, which contributes to the snowball effect of messing everything up since each gust continues until it's offscreen.
I think the cognitive load of having to keep track of all these ships at once is enough without the wind making it harder with its infinite range and less-than-responsive way of averaging the direction of the ships. I think better, more obvious/immediate visual feedback to tell me when a ship has been influenced by the wind would go a long way as well. The graphics and sound are great, just needs a little more fine-tuning with the mechanics.
@dovodx thank you for the thorough feedback! Unfortunately, I just didn't have time for balance tuning in the compo. Honestly, I never even played the game all the way through until submission had already ended... Pro tip though, you can handle this issue by overcorrecting (i.e., hitting a ship head-on with a gust of wind will turn it 90 degrees), but I do agree that it's a huge issue with the game, as is. Thanks again for playing!
Great stuff, this was so fun to play on stream! Thank you for the submission :)
Screenshot 2024-04-16 192515.png
Cool game, I liked it!
Very solid first entry, and to the compo, too! Impressive how good the wind looks, and the tuning, too. I really felt like I could save ships that were on the brink of hitting something. Then considering the impact on all the other ships was very interesting. Really cool mechanic. Nice work!
It's beautiful ! The music and design are great.
The ocean texture could be more than just a color
I don't really like how the boats are unresponsive, but hey it's boats after all !
The concept is fun and chill.
I would have appreciated more types of invocations to mess with them, like big waves, storms, sharks, kraken...
Maybe randomized rocks and islands too
If only there was more time, @magalix ! I am def tempted to keep working to improve this in the future.
@amberfall92 thank you so much for playing, and for the kind words and encouragement. Appreciate you!
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what a fun game! Such interesting mechanics, I've never played anything like this before, I really enjoyed it! Well done for completing it in such a short amount of time, you did a great job!
A pleasant atmospheric game. I like the creative idea, I haven't seen anything like this before. Well done
I really like music and art
First off: really good job in general, especially for your first compo! It's a real achievement just to get something over the finish line, and I especially love that you've come up with such a unique gameplay idea.
Right now the game controls feel a bit unresponsive/difficult (tho difficulty isn't necessarily a bad thing). I think a visual indicator would really help with the feedback, like a white line or arrow indicating your cursor start and wind direction (see picture below).
One thing I noticed while playing was that it's very difficult to successfully steer all the pilgrim ships when there's multiple ships near the temple, as the wind will push the ships on the opposite side of the temple off course. Maybe this is intentionally difficult, but I think an interesting mechanic would be the ability to control the strength/length of the wind bursts, i.e. holding/dragging a short distance for a short burst of wind, and dragging for a longer distance for a longer burst of wind. This allows the player much more control over the ships and might help it feel a bit more responsive instead of fighting with the controls.
This is a minor suggestion but it would be nice if the black ships also had a skull icon on the flag, to communicate more clearly that they are evil/pirate ships. I understand that you didn't have time with the compo tho.
Those are just my suggestions! Feel free to take or leave as you see fit. Congratulations on your first compo, and hope to see you around future game jams :) You've got really interesting ideas and I would love to see you continue.Untitled-1.png
Love this, concept is simple and addicting, wish we got better visual seedback when "selecting" the ship good job
Such a cool idea! I love how the wind travels across the whole screen, so a wind that helped you for one ship can mess up another. The only complaint I would have is that the collision box for ships colliding with each other could be a little more genorous, I have lost multiple ships because I thought they would sail next to each other and they then just crashed. All in all a super cute game and an awesome first entry!
@crylica thank you for the thoughtful feedback! The wind is definitely intended to be unwieldy (ships don't turn on a dime) but I agree that some visual feedback could go a long way to explaining that. I like the idea of experimenting with controlling wind strength and even lifetime with the drag. I'm also tempted to show what the new heading of a ship will be if you summon a gust of wind right on top of it. I think a lack of tutorialization is making the game feel unresponsive when it's really just unintuitive. I'm not sure if there's room for a skull (the sails are like 6-7 pixels across) but I'll try to sketch one up and report back. Thanks again for playing! I really enjoyed your game as well.
@two1san definitely noted! If I do continue working on this game, I will be working hard on providing better feedback to the play on what is going on when gusts of wind hit ships. Thanks again for playing! Loved your game
@andidebob I appreciate you! I also really like the whole-screen wind travel, but maybe half-screen or variable lifetime might be good too. If I develop this further, I will be sure to tighten up the collisions. I didn't manage my time well and had no time leftover for balance, which I'm regretting. Thank you for sharing your game earlier, I enjoyed it!
A Following Wind 17-04-2024 23_51_21.png
Very cool puzzle game lol. Great presentation overall. Love the art and the music was pretty catchy.
I like the overall concept and how you pulled it off. It really did make me feel like a god
Like others have said, I think some more visual indicators were needed, if only to know for sure that a ship was turning. I know you mentioned on the game's page that I didn't need to spam the wind, but it felt like I had to sometimes since the ships weren't really turning sometimes. This system also kinda makes it hard to turn ships in tight corners, but if anything it's realistic at the very least lol
I also like how I had to make sure that when I sent a gust of wind, it didn't re-direct some other ship. It was a cool layer of strategy to consider.
However, I think the game needed more audio feedback in general. My biggest issue with this game was that the sounds for ships getting destroyed all sounded the same ( i.e a pirate ship getting destroyed sounds the same as one of your ships getting detroyed ) so I constantly had to keep checking the faith and score counts and take my eyes off the game, which would cause me to lose more ships as well.
Another issue that resulted from this was that I wouldn't know where exactly a ship crashed, so I constantly had to look all over the screen for that dust cloud that would be left over, which isn't exactly helpful in a game where you need to keep track of 100 things at once.
All things considered, for something made in under 2 days for the compo, this is damn good. Awesome job
@badpiggy thank you for the lengthy feedback! The fact that the ship only partly turns to meet the wind is causing a lot of confusion. I'm thinking that if I separate the sail sprite from the ship and have it turn to meet the wind more quickly than the body of the ship, that might help with the *feeling* of unresponsiveness at least. Indicators for wind direction on mouse down could help as well. Audio indicators could definitely be differentiated better. I think maybe I could add a shipwreck sprite, so that you could look and see if it was a pirate or pilgrim that crashed. Thanks again for playing, I had a LOT of fun playing your game this morning, and will definitely revisit it.
those silly silly pilgrims jumping into ships they don't know how to use lol. this is was really fun! it's a simple concept but once you realize that wind can continue to travel and effect other ships that you don't want it to it gets really strategic. I heard on stream that you made the sounds yourself and I'm mindblown by that because the sfx sound like a realistic recording from some free library you did a great job at that! did you do the music yourself too? honestly for your first game you did pretty good, congrats! and welcome to LD :smile:
fun little game, although it could've used a short tutorial - I had no idea what to do at first until I decided to actually read the game page
This is a super original take on the theme, and technically very impressive! The art is nice looking and very fitting with the overall vibe of the game. The music is beautiful too. Incredible work, doubly so for a compo entry, you can be proud!
Fun game, i love boats so i was instantly hooked up :P i stopped at score 100 (had 40 faith at this moment) I love the fact that wind continues all across the map, it can mess up everything (especially when you summon loads and loads of wind x) )
I ended up playing this for much longer than I anticipated! It's such a calming little game, (until you see a ship on a crash-course and start frantically trying to spin it around...). Great Job!
Awesome game! I loved that the wind can affect ships you didnt intend to move (since it the wind goes so far)! It gives game more depth! Great design choice! :hearts:
This is not really a criticism of your game but it was a bit hard to play it on a touchpad 😅
I saw the other comments and the idea you mentioned of having different directions for the ship and its sail seems very promising.
I found it interesting that we have an experience that is both chill (slow ships, calm music, summoning some winds here and there) and hectic (too many ships to take care of, ships crashing here and there, colliding with each other...) at the same time :)
I absolutely loved the music on this! I agree with BadPiggy that I kept *feeling* like I should spam the wind, even though I knew that I didn't have to do so, because of the way that the ships would slowly turn to meet it. Your suggestion of having the sails meet the wind first, then slowly turn the body of the ship to match sounds like it would be a perfect way to give the player more direct feedback as they blew the ships around :)
I ended up playing this way longer than I normally play score chase games because the vibe was just really enjoyable! I did eventually stop before I died, because it felt like I got into a sustainable rhythm and was gaining more faith than I was losing on average, but it's a game jam and figuring out the exact balance for endless games is really hard to do in 48 hours :) Overall, it was very enjoyable, and an awesome first time entry!
@0x-void-x0 I really admire foley artists, so I def wanted to make my own sfx, and I did record the music on my mandolin! It's a handful of traditional Irish tunes I've learned over the years.
@timo654 the lack of tutorialization is my biggest regret. I'll def try to make more time for in-game tutorialization during the next LD - I'm hooked on LD, btw.
@mortith that is the highest score I've heard of so far, congrats! I did realize that the difficulty curves out and you can just kind of get in an endless grove, but most don't get there, so I'm impressed you did!
@wendel-scardua I appreciate the touchpad feedback, and I'm heartened by your appreciation of the balance between chill-game and challenging one. I def have more work to do to refine it though.
@koolruz thank you! Yeah, locking the ship directions to whole-integer vectors had a lot of unintended side-effects in terms of usability, but we can fix that. I think that I may move away from endless score-chaser (and scrap score altogether) and instead have multiple levels with different faith thresholds required to advance...
@sozey @oblivioncreator and @funnypumpkin thank you for the kind words! I'm very encouraged to continue with it.
Thank you all for playing, and thanks again for those of you who shared your games with me onstream this morning! I might keep doing this until rating ends if the demand for it doesn't fall off too fast!
Thanks for submitting your game to the stream! If you wanted to watch it again in the future heres the vod of the stream (with a chapter for your game)
https://youtu.be/Foe4js2jhJ0
And I'm the host for the ludum dare score chasers tournament this Ludum Dare. Wanted to ask if youre fine if I put some gameplay of the game in an intermission video. Last year for reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM_eIvjBmIQ
Would love that, thank you @ategon ! And thanks for taking the time to play the game!
During stream, being sleep deprived, I managed to do 39. Completely forgot to pay attention to the score, I was just vibing XD
I came back to see if I can beat my score and... Well, I did better. Did you change the game? It is much different, ships are faster, it also felt easier etc. If you did change it, I suggest you to keep the original one for the jam and a seperated post-jam version. So jammers can check both and see the differences and can vote on the original state (we can check it out again and speak about it during the next streams if you wish)
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@burchyn WOW @_@ look at that high score! That's amazing... You know the game's difficulty curves out after like 5 minutes right? I wonder how long it must have taken to reach that score...
I went back to your VOD to check what day you played it, and it was two days ago (4/16 PDT). I made some bug fixes the previous day (4/15 PDT), but that's it, and it was certainly well before you played.
I want to reassure you that I haven't changed it other than the posted bugfixes. Perhaps it felt different to you considering the sleep deprivation, and possibly gaining a better understanding of the mechanics?
However, there are so few ships on your game over screen, I am a little concerned about that... was that indicative of your experience the whole playthrough, or just a lucky screenshot timing?
Anyway, I'm definitely impressed by your score, but I'm even more encouraged that you felt like playing it for so long! I'm torn between leaning further into chill game or challenging...
Oh my God, I definitely have to write a big feedback for this piece of art!
I really like everything in the game. The most amazing things is your idea of implicit control. And you know what, a meachanics that spread a wind much futher than you do is a very good idea that makes gameplay much deeper. I mean, you want to change a direction of one ship, but the wind spreads futher and effect anothers. That's really good idea. The arts and music are very suitable for the mood of the game!
Also, I have a few ideas what I would add to make it a bit more fun: - I'd change the balance, because it's easy to win. For example, to make punishment for pirate ships much bigger and punishment for destroyed allience ship also bigger. After some score the game becomes harder, because an amount of ships rised. It would make a nice challenge together. - I got 125 score and I think this game is infinite. I'd just add the win condition, like 50 score.
So, I think it is the best innovation I've seen on these jam. You inspired me for some new game ideas as well. So thank you a lot for your game! It makes really nice and peaceful mood!
@meranolean thank you for playing! I really appreciate your feedback, and I definitely agree that the balance is all wrong. I did not have time to address that during the compo. Thank you for the suggestions on how I might improve it post-jam. I am excited to see what you make in the future <3
For those curious, after talking further with @burchyn and her partner, and comparing VODs of playthroughs of various streamers, we have discovered that there appears to be an issue that is causing either the game or ship speed to vary for players on different machines. I do not feel like I can address this (mainly because I can't find the issue) within the scope of post-jam bugfixes. I am simply adding a known issues section before the changelog. If anyone is wondering why their experience varies, hopefully they find the above warning along with this comment.
I managed to get to 33 before I lost, loved the gust particle, and how you rotation of the ship sprites looks, real nice! I felt i was a tad slow, but it might be the issue you mentioned with the speed difference on different machines. Lovely entry great stuff!
Nice game! I think you made great use of the theme and did something different! I really liked the art you made, the wind particles are the standout.
It's really quite impressive what you put together with so many 'firsts'! The game looks nice, good colors, clear and clean graphics. I loved the music. Seriously did :smile:
The gameplay itself is unique, and it's fun for a while. It lacks some difficulty progression or an overarching goal. As it stands now, it's very easy to just go infinitely. The difficulty doesn't really grow with time, there is no overarching goal to strive for. So, it just gets old after a while, and you don't really want to continue.
Still, I had fun playing while I did :grin: It's a really good piece of a compo game, and you should be proud.
I stopped here: Screenshot_12.png
Congrats on your fist game jam! Really cool game concept and nice art style! Some feedback: - the game felt a bit too easy and a bit too slow, I would suggest to make fish move a bit faster - pirate ships were not as big obstacle as I wish they would be, I suggest they should avoid rocks and islands, correct they course after a while and maybe if they are close to normal ship to start to go towards them, - the wind indication could be a bit better, as someone show on the screenshot in posts above, - I think it would be more interesting if the faith would not go up, so loosing it had more consequences, or if it is too much, then maybe a gold-sails ship that moves way faster than others and guiding it to the temple would restore the faith? Besides that, well done! It is a solid game :)
@fabula-rasa I'm glad you liked it! You're very right in that the difficulty curves out too low and you can just go infinite. I ran out of time to really balance the experience, unfortunately, but now I know for next time that I need to reserve more time for balance tuning and tutorialization. Thank you for playing, your game was great!
@zimny11 thank you! You make excellent points of course. I was told most people would only play my game once, so I opted for a slow ramp-up in difficulty, but that has problems. You make me curious about how it might feel if the ships had more of a mind of their own, and steered as best they could into/against the wind... Having special objectives (like gold-sailed ships) is an interesting idea! I'll definitely work hard on tuning any postjam releases I make for this game. Thanks again for taking the time to play and leave feedback <3
You're crazy to tackle compo for a first game jam ! But I have to say the result is pretty cool ! Cute graphics, interesting gameplay, especially with the idea that your actions can affect other ships in the future, I really love how it forces you to carefully use your wind. It really fits into the kind of games I like, where all rules are simple but interactions are hard to master. As others already pointed out, the main weakness of the game is the legibility of interactions : you don't really know the exact size of the zone your wind acts on, and the direction of ships is not always clear as they are so tiny on the screen. My main strategy to avoid that kind of problem is to think about things in terms of interactions : list all the things that interact together gameplay-wise, and make sure there is a visible feedback that show that the interaction is there. If you have gusts of wind, island and ships, you need something for every couple of those elements. Feedback can be anything : change of sprite, particle effect, tint effect, small scale animation, etc. It does not even need to be beautiful, but it needs to be there. For the wind/boat interaction, you could make the boats have a sprite with sails on that appears only when they are in the wind, or they could change color if you don't have time to make a different sprite. The zones for gusts of wind also need to be clearer. Maybe just a transparent sprite that displays the exact zone would make it way more clear. I hope that will help, great job and see you next LD ! ;)
@digitaliliad Togis told me you identified the problem with the speed and the bug making the game a whole different game.
I actually 'killed' myself by letting the game run itself at 306 score. It was super easy, very different from the game we played on stream. I was around 100 score and I still had 60 something faith. It became very repetitive and I could go forever with thousands of score easily. But that is not fun. It just needs a whole lot of balance.
I love the idea of the game, once again, great job on first Godot game and it was amazing to meet you on this LD :D As for the feedback, the ones we gave during the stream still applies.
Some challenges to make it more engaging; krakens, sirens, whirlpools.. Strong chimes sfx, some particles effects when you reach the temple, killing pirates can give some points as good karma, different difficulty ships perhaps...
Keep on working on this, if you are passionate about it. It will be an amazing game that I would be absolutely addicted :D
The game is really good. Got a really good balance of hard and fun, and that's a hard thing to do! And it's really addictive trying to beat my high score. Great job!
such a fun little game! very unique mechanic, and the music was nice a fit the vibe for sure. I could see this theme idea turning into something very cool if you ever decided to take it past the jam
A sea game with depth. From a new player perspective, I think the most complicated parts are:
- Trying to correct boats while close to the temple. - It makes the side-effects of old wind is more obvious. - As-is, it seems to message to the player that they should have taken care of direction issues earlier. - Player feedback when starting a wind. - Having a starting whoosh sound effect that is different for a failed click versus a successful swipe could help confirm the player executed an action. - Adding a visual, slightly-opaque arc to the front edge of the wind gust could make it more obvious, and the current wind could be a trailing effect for flavor.
If you work on the game longer post-jam, I think you could randomize the island and rock positions some as long as they don't overlap with the same type.
The pixel art and realistic music compliment each other well, I'm not used to that mixture but you did well with jaunty strings and satisfying crunches when a ship wrecks. Great job with the color contrast too, I can still identify everything uniquely through a black-and-white filter.
@nbumgardner thank you for your thoughts! These are great ideas on how to improve player feedback, which is definitely lacking. I do have ideas for making different levels, and randomization could certainly augment that. I'm really glad you like the pixel art / analog music pairing. I wasn't sure it would work, but I'm glad that it resonates with people! I never even thought of testing the values with a black-and-white filter! I should do that next time, in case I don't luck into good values, haha!
Very aesthetically pleasing - artstyle stands out from the crowd, and I was really vibing with the music. Pretty visual for the wind too, though it was sometimes unclear if it's going to affect the ship. The collision shapes for islands and friendly ships could maybe provide a bit more room for error. Overall great compo entry.
What a lovely little game. Sound fits the art and gameplay perfectly, was a nice whole package. The only thing for me was that it scales in difficulty a bit too slowly. Would've loved for it to get even more intense as time went on. Really nice entry!
A Strong entry, very enjoyable gameplay, if a bit slow at the beginning
While I enjoyed the graphics, I felt like the 8 directions assets of the boats (you can hardly do better in pixel art I suppose made the exact direction that they were going in a bit difficult to track (I think they move in more than 8 directions?), I would add some kind of visual reminder for that
Awesome mood and great visuals, only thing i'd wish would be more indication on how the wind will spawn or affect the boats, but I was able to get ~60 score, so I had fun for sure! Great entry for a first submission to LD!
I love the concept of the game its so simplystic and yet challanging since one wind you summon can make one boat go straight and can set the other bout on other side go the wrong way I love it!
Great concept. I like how you play as god of the wind. Pretty fun especially when your boats get caught in many crosswinds you summoned earlier. Also love the background music and sounds.
love it! reminds me of an old iphone game called flight control. the wind particles and graphics are very effective, as is the audio in contributing to the overall mood. though it got hectic quick, i feel like i wish it would have kept scaling up or getting faster. great work!
I like the wind mechanic. Worrying about a ship on one side, only to discover that I messed up all the ships on the other side is really fun. Graphics are really nice too for a compo. Great job!
The art and mood are perfect, needs some balancing but I'm sure is because of time. I may speed everything a little and add some extra mechanics after some time like shooting cannonballs from the bad boats, maybe some power that you can use with right click (idea: maybe a whirlwind that sinks the ones in the center and the further ones change the direction depending on how far they are). But dude that in 48h on your own is crazy. Simple and effective, i love it <3
I really liked that the wind keeps going, it brings an unexpected strategic element. I think that either a bit more control or a bit clearer feedback, would really bring it out better. Cool entry!
The graphics and the music remind me of old MS-DOS game. Regarding the game mechanics, I concurr with @crylica. The wind is unwieldy and feels unresponsive. Adding a thicker particle effect under the cursor and a stroke in the drawn direction would definitely make things better. Also, regarding the ship speed being tied to the frame rate maybe you should have computed your physics in `_physics_process()` instead of in `_process()`. I made the same mistake in my first Godot game in the previous Ludum Dare. Other than that, good job! And thanks again for playing my game (Apprentice Binder) on stream.
@andriybyelikov thank you for the feedback! I will begin postjam dev this week, and will take all of this into account. I'm still trying to understand why, but yes, that is definitely the problem. I've already fixed it in the postjam version, but since people have asked for a more difficult game, I'm just telling them to play at high FPS right now, haha!
This is a really great concept. I dig the art style and the music too. I particularly like the wind visual!
I have so much respect for this as a First Jam, First Compo.
I also think it's a pretty good working prototype for a really great little game, should you choose to develop it. There are some great suggestions above in the comments, and I won't add to those as I'm sure you have plenty of ideas on where to take this.
Overall, really impressive, lovely work!
It's an interesting concept, mouse dragging doesn't always work but I've had a good time playing it. Good job!
Interesting game. I love the music and the level of detail in some of the visuals, the wind effect and the gradient around the islands, the foam effect around the temple. It looks great. It's also cool that the gusts can carry on and affect ships on the other side of the map, but that makes it quite difficult!
Cool concept, and well executed, my only feedback would be that it sometimes felt like the wind affected ships different amounts so I wasn't reliably able to predict what the ship would do, but that's probably a skill issue on my part.
What a super cool idea!! I love the graphics and those wind animations :) Music & sounds fits perfectly. I thought at first that the game is a bit too slow until it was crowded with the boats and then I lost suddenly :)) It's really cool that the boat can hit another boat as well. Great job!!
Very nice! It was very relaxing and stressful at the same time :D The sound was all choppy for me unfortunately.
@fractal thank you for playing! I presume this audio issue was with the web build. I will try to reproduce it. Are you on a Mac perchance?
Hey! I so like your game that I decided to write a comment after results. I'm sure your game desirve much higher score! Keep doing it, well done!