FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD55 → Phoenix Delay

Phoenix Delay

By aeveis and MusiShen

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall6473.5026
Fun3613.6826
Innovation9073.0026
Theme9543.1426
Graphics2284.2226
Audio534.1826
Humor3393.4526
Mood5503.5826

Comments

bitluderrb7804fr 2024-04-15 10:22

The embedded game doesn't seem to work, and the HTML5-link is password protected.

fisu 2024-04-15 12:11

Same problem, embeded game stalls on opening and itchio is password protected

aeveis 2024-04-15 13:23

@bitluderrb7804fr @fisu i will get the embedded version working later. the itchio page should be published now - thanks!

100th-coin 2024-04-15 16:42

The music is an absolute bop! I really enjoyed the windy particle effects.

I tried speedrunning the game a few times, though the ending portal was showing up inconsistently? I don't know if there's something in the code going wrong, but in my last attempt the portal showed up after a minute of empty level.

Anyway, this was lots of fun. Great game!

Here's my full recorded play session.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJf9E3GUerA

jnw 2024-04-15 19:17

Animations and music are amazing!

bitluderrb7804fr 2024-04-15 20:21

I love the music and the sense of speed! But I was a bit confused for a while about what to hit and what to avoid, and when to use dash. But I really like the feel of the game.

mateusboga 2024-04-16 13:51

Great entry! Simple, but effective, like the other games I've seen from you ^^ Feels a bit like flappy bird with mixed with a racing game, which I haven't seen before.

velvetlobster 2024-04-17 19:24

this is like flapbird on steroids lol

I am not gonna lie I was pretty confused with the choice for controls in the beginning though, I noticed that clicking does something but after reading I saw that all game can be controlled with the keyboard.

this is pretty hard and perhaps not being able to quickly evade, maybe with a special power idk, can make it a bit frustrating since what you want in this type of experience is the speed (at least I like the feel)

great pixelart and music btw

mikropiru 2024-04-20 14:05

I liked the graphics and music a lot, and the general feel of the game. I also had some trouble figuring out what I should and should not hit, but I _believe_ I got the hang of it quite soon.

I was afraid this would be a flappy bird clone but I was pleasantly surprised by what it really was. In general, nice job!

lereveur 2024-04-20 15:04

Not the most playable game you've done (speed mood is here, but I think this made the response time hard to anticipate), but as cute and shiny as always, so, well done!

aeveis 2024-04-24 03:35

@100th-coin thanks again for the play through vid! the way things are spawned in the game are pretty janky as the bird is actually moving very slowly and it's the background and enemies that are scrolling which in retrospect was not the best idea for when things can spawn in and out, but I did make it so if you go past far enough and back it should spawn things in if you didn't hit it.

@jnw thanks!

@bitluderrb7804fr Part of the joke is that you're just running into everything and I maybe should have committed to it (rather than have the crates slow you down, just everything makes you go faster) but I'll probably have to think it through more next time!

@mateusboga thanks! I had a thought of maybe adding pipes like flappy bird but you just blow past/explode them, but the level design was pretty rough.

@velvetlobster i had added touch controls for just testing on the phone. But it was half baked and those controls should not be used on the PC. I think i probably should have gone more in on the speed in retrospect - thanks for the feedback!

@mikropiru thanks! you just hit everything when you are going fast - but I could have factored that into the design a bit more.

@lereveur thanks! I was thinking less about response time and more of how things would just happen as you run into them, but perhaps could have thought it out a bit more.

wildcodeplay 2024-04-24 06:08

Wow that was really fun. It took me about 3 minutes to finally summon the ultimate attack xD. I love the humor used in this games. Graphics, SFX, music goes together really ,really well. Firstly I didn't catch that I need to go through the summoning circles :). Also the speed effect was :heartpulse:

alzhu1 2024-04-24 06:18

This was fun, I got a time of 2:39, for what that's worth. The game looks and sounds great, and plays pretty well too. I didn't realize I had to hit the flying things (not sure what they are exactly) to gain speed, and crates seemed to slow me down. The sense of speed was great, just some better conveyance on the obstacles would be good (and if they were meant to be a joke, like you mentioned perhaps everything just speeding you up would be funny). Really great job overall!

rekiem 2024-04-24 14:10

Seems to be an evolution of flappy bird concept, ahah very cool, the graphics and sound effects fits very well with the mood of the game too.

kerdelos 2024-04-24 22:31

I'm quite fond of this kind of scoring game but found the flappy bird controls kinda got in the way. I would have prefered a more direct kind of control on the bird.

Also at first the warning signs confused me a bit and I tried to avoid the others birds before discovering they were actually a nice boost.

I did took me a while to get to the end and it's cool you had the time to make a dedicated animation and dialogue for it.

The graphics and the audios are very nice and fit well together, good job !

edj99 2024-04-25 07:38

Gorgeous graphics, animations, effects and audio! The soundtrack is a bop. The dialog box is so well done. Those aspects are nothing short of professional quality.

I feel like the controls are a little awkward. IMO the forward momentum should always be applied, and since gravity is already always applied there should only really be 1 movement button (up) which you could remap to "space" or "left click:

I understand if this was a time limit thing, but there should be a meter that limits the number of boosts you can do that resets either over time or by picking up an item.

I was a little confused why you get a speed boost when you run into other birds (bugs?). I guess if they're supposed to be bugs it's a bit like the bird eats the bugs and gets an energy boost?

Some kind of progress meter would be great as well, since I had no idea how long the game would go for.

Sadly the embedded game isn't working for me either.

_Edit: after a refresh the embedded game works_

abcdef65g 2024-04-25 09:48

Very clever idea for the theme! Kind of sad that my wizard had to wait 2:57 for the phoenix to show up, but oh well!

The graphics look great and the overall look of the game is very cohesive and professional for a jam game. The speed effects are nice and effective, and when the phoenix picks up speed, the player really feels it. The difference between the obstacle types wasn't clear to me at first, but I like how hard it gets to dodge obstacles when your speed increases. There was pretty much no downside to dashing though, so I would suggest making dashing the default to simplify the control scheme a bit.

Good game, I enjoyed it!

citsua 2024-04-25 14:32

Really good feeling of speed! The controls felt a bit too floaty to me, but maybe that's because I'm unfamiliar with this genre of games.

torcado 2024-04-26 06:23

this is great! the sense of speed is super powerful, it's a really fun feeling. my best time is 2:22! I think the controls are a bit more convoluted than I'd expect. I'm surprised that holding right is necessary at all, that was the main confusion at the start. I also find it strange that you need to press flap repeatedly to go up, holding the button doesn't trigger anything beyond the initial flap, but the inverse is true for diving, that you hold the button to continue accelerating downward and pressing dive actually cancels the vertical momentum. and then both of these actions have unique behavior with dashing, where if you are holding flap you *do* gain upwards momentum after the dash ends, and if you are holding dive you gain downwards momentum only if you are moving fast enough horizontally, otherwise it has the same momentum cancelling behavior as pressing dive. anyway this all just resulted in me basically spamming the flap, dive, and dash keys. Beyond the control scheme, I do wish you had just a bit more control of your movement. It feels like most of the time the objects show up faster than I can redirect my momentum, and hitting what I want is left up to luck. Outside of that, the art and animations are amazing as always, they add a ton to the experience. the music is also really good. Every time I ended a run I felt like I could've improved and wanted to try again, I played it like 5 times haha. Great job as usual!

aeveis 2024-04-28 04:48

@wildcodeplay thanks! glad you had fun! The smaller summoning circle increase your overall speed, but the one you really need to hit is just the last one.

@alzhu1 Thanks! Yep, your observations are correct - I would have some good ideas about what to change though if I do a post-jam version!

@rekiem thanks!

@kerdelos thanks for feedback on the controls. That's probably something I could iterate on more as I realized how "fast" you go.

@edj99 Thank you! That's a good suggestion about the movement. I think my general thought was to have the player feel like they were contributing to the speed as much as possible, so more y movement make sense. The dash does have a delay, but it is very short. In a way I did want the player to press the keys a lot, but could probably give some more thought on how to make it more meaningful. The general idea of the boosts is that since you are a phoenix, everything you touch explodes and gives you a boost (I kind of back pedaled on the crates though so that made it less clear).

@abcdef65g Thanks! I didn't want to make dashing the default, but I could probably think of ways to make dashing more meaningful.

@citsua Thanks! Controls are definitely a thing I could continue to experiment on.

@torcado haha very correct observations for the controls. I think what happened was I knew I wanted things to go fast, but I was starting from the mindset of a platformer (even though perhaps I was thinking of helicopter and flappy bird). So there was some granularity to the controls I wanted to keep, but didn't see how it didn't work as well when things are actually speeding past. I would say my intention was for the player to spam the keys, but perhaps the ideal would be a "meaningful spamming" where you can accurately control where you are going even if you are going really fast (like the dashing giving you better up/down control - which may be kind of the case but not enough). Being able to see things I think is an interesting problem - which is why I added the notifications but the icons on them could probably be more clear. I was also thinking of some rhythm game type conventions where maybe you just see a line or so appear so you know where to "line up." Thanks again, I think you have the fastest time!

jhax 2024-04-29 18:53

There's so much to love about this game! The beautiful pixel art caught my eye straight away as I was scrolling through games. The concept is really playful and has a lot of humour to it as well. It's got an easy to grasp mechanic at it's core but the way the movement has sort of a bit of friction to it worked well to sort of not make steering around too trivial. The music also fits in really well

Had to replay it after noticing there was a dedicated bird noises button as well!

labcatgames 2024-04-29 19:41

Really solid submission. Very few weakpoints to mention, mostly all great! Adorable, exciting, funny; well done! Would have been really nice to have additional content, perhaps you could use proc gen to build levels as the game is being played and achieve an infinite runner. For a game jam though it's a great prototype and execution was near perfect.

The speed lines were clutch, I was glad you were able to convey proper acceleration and the way your pheonix moves further towards the right side links the speed to difficulty, amping up the tension exponentially. Simple, yet powerful mechanic. The flapping / diving control scheme was a bit unwieldy, but fun to try and wrestle so I get that you don't want it too easy. It's just a bit too floaty and delayed to feel like I'm really in control.

Music was awesome, absolutely nailed it, sfx were great and also, I liked the dialogue; very cute text frames and portraits. Visually the only thing I would consider is staying consistent with the art style for the foreground and background. Seeing the chunky pixel art in front of the higher res horizon is just a little discordant. Great work overall!

kanity 2024-05-02 01:43

Random thoughts while I play:

- Animations are cute! - My favourite button is for "making bird noises", that is ESSENTIAL and "bird noises" are adorable! - Going up felt a bit hard, not as fluid and as if the movement was resisting me - Would be neat to see how much distance we covered and how much we have left

resultsss.jpg

Wasn't going for a speed record but that's the result ig x)

It was fun! I'd love to have more fluid movement, it felt hard to control. But I love the idea, the animation when we speed up, the sounds and the art ^^