Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Tom Has Joined a Cult
By lcstark
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 271 | 3.08 | 27 | |
| Fun | 263 | 3.02 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 206 | 3.18 | 26 | |
| Theme | 170 | 3.60 | 26 | |
| Graphics | 317 | 2.62 | 26 | |
| Audio | 247 | 2.67 | 25 | |
| Mood | 245 | 3.02 | 25 |
Good idea, love the name, but the gameplay is pretty slow. One way you could make the game more engaging is having the game in Tom's perspective, where he draws the shapes in the air using his hand (the mouse) for the cult. I think this would allow a faster game pace, and more room for unique shapes to be traced. Otherwise having summoning be a remote work-at-home job for spellcasters is hilarious. Thank you for your game! :heart:
I heavily recommend using switching on "Toggle incantation" and "Toggle movement", it makes it easier to get the character to do what you want it to do.
This game is GREAT... once you understand how you actually complete a shape. It took me 10 attempts to understand how to do it. I bet that a lot of people quit the game without having passed level 1, because they don't understand how to complete a shape.
(Spoiler about how to complete a shape) You complete a shape by leaving your incantation blue trail on top of the white lines of the shape. A high % of the white lines needs to be covered by the blue trail in order to complete the shape.
There's many things I tried initially, which to add to the confusion, it sometimes felt they worked, and sometimes it felt they didn't work: - Repeat the shape but inside the white lines (not on top of them) - Fill the area inside the white lines with the blue trail
So it took a LONG while to understand 1) when I failed, why, and 2) when I succeeded, why.
I feel like the best way to solve that was to "lead by example". Show us a character doing what you're supposed to be doing. And then we'll imitate.
After I figured how to complete the shapes, I passed all 4? levels in one go.
I feel this game has potential. It feels a bit zen / meditative in a way. The new shapes and their twists add variety. It probably plays nicer with a game controller, using the joystick.
Another issue is lack of clarity when you succeed or fail a pattern. It feels like the only way to know is whether you see the pattern counter go up. That can make it hard to figure out how to successfully complete shapes, because when you don't know if you failed/succeeded, it's harder to reinforce or discard your current approach to "completing the shapes".
Fantastic game, thank you lots for sharing!
Oh i love it! Great idea, great execution. And it's hard! One thing that was confusing to me was the background moving, it would remove frusration if the character was moving around instead of the floor. Oher that this great job!
I like the idea, but it feels a little rough still. Toggle incantation and Toggle movement made the experience a lot better. I was (and still kinda am) confused about some of the elements, like the two colors of the circle inside the shapes. It also took me some time to understand that it was less about getting lines that cleanly formed the shape than it is about covering the lines completely. I played it a bit and it was interesting, but it crashed after finishing level 1.
@phobos001 Thanks for the feedback! The idea of playing from character perspective does sound nice! I kinda started working from the point of having to place the character in the right location and trace shapes by moving them. I thought about just using the mouse control, but I figured it would make it too easy. In hindsight, it might have been a better choice. I might change it in the post-LD version. :D
@dasilvacontin Thank you for the detailed feedback! Yeah, I've struggled a bit with how to give the player better responses to their actions. In the end, I thought the sound increasing pitch as you fill out the shape would be a good enough way to point the player towards the solution. I've also added in the last minute the filling progress circle inside each shape, but I agree that it isn't really that clear, especially overlapped with a second progress-bar for possible failure on each pattern. I've thought adding different sounds on pattern completion / failure would help, but I guess they're drowned out by other sounds and the music. Anyway, I'll definitely think of better player feedback for an post-LD update!
@freakyzelga Thanks! You're probably right about it causing too much frustration, I think I'll be changing this for a post-LD update. I was worried that it would make the game too easy to play, but in hindsight I think it will be better. And if it's too easy I might play a bit with tweaking the required shape precision. :)
@enreh Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, the two colors are my poor attempt at adding some more last-minute feedback for the player - the blue one filling from both sides is the shape fill percent required to complete it, while the vertically-filling red one is filled for painting out of lines, and if you fill that you will fail that shape (i.e. it will be disabled, but won't be counted as completed). The second one is especially difficult to understand, since I've made the failure state really tough to get (as I thought it would get too frustrating otherwise). In hindsight, I'll definitely need to think of better ways to present the player with progress on each shape.
As for the crashing - I'm assuming you've played the HTML version? Did it crash with an error, or did it just freeze? If it is the latter, then it probably just took a long time to load the next level, as it is totally not optimized at the moment. I'll see what I can do to make it load a bit faster, maybe add a "loading" notification in the meantime. In the end I think I might have to scrap that idea altogether and start from scratch though. With how I made it I had to simplify the last level in last hour of the compo, because the HTML build couldn't load it due to too high memory requirement. We'll see if I can make something out of it in the next few days. :)
@lcstark Yeah, it was the HTML version, and it did just freeze.
@enreh Yeah, that takes a while to load. I've put some timers in and the HTML version on my machine takes about 8 seconds to load the first level, 25 for the second and over 50 seconds for the third. :( I'm going to start doing some optimizations tomorrow, but right now I'm not even sure if I should count that as a bug and apply any fix I make to the compo build, or just add a notification that it is loading and not frozen, or leave it as it is. I'm going to have to think this through. I'll definitely put anything I do in a separate post-LD build.
Gameplay is really slow, but the idea is neat.
It was pretty fun. I wish there was a bit more going on but good entry
Neat idea. As previously said HTML version loading times were quite long I had no idea if it was frozen or loading.
For drawing mechanics it would be nice to see feedback on the drawn part for example removing slowly those areas that are outside of the pattern.
Fun idea, had real trouble with the controls. Failed the first few times because there wasnt enough feedback on what I was doing right/wrong. Failed the next few times because I ran out of time I guess.
Fun game! I learned it was surprisingly difficult to draw between the lines. 😅 Some feedback on if you did well or not would've been nice. It is really difficult to tell if I was doing the right thing. Anyway, well done! ✡️
very meditative! the gameplay reminds me of some early mario party minigames. i would have liked to see an extra mechanic or two, but i appreciate the focus as well. good job!
A surprisingly steep learning curve for such a simple concept! You'd think the mouse buttons for movement would be intuitive, but I found it difficult instead. The toggles, as others have said, made it much better. And better still when I realized that I was meant to color in the line and not mark points, lol. It was fun once I got the hang of it. Great job, man!
I like the simplicity of the concept. I'm not coordinated enough to keep up but it's a good game. Good job!
@dishwand > very meditative! It was kinda something I thought about during development and wanted to eliminate it, or at least reduce it, but perhaps I should pivot entirely in that direction. I might experiment with removing the timers, making the drawing more precise and adding some other things to increase player focus. Might be interesting.
> i would have liked to see an extra mechanic or two, but i appreciate the focus as well. Yeah, I only added the rotating patterns int the final level in the last hour or two of the compo. I was thinking about having something like placing candles on the intersections in the patterns, but didn't have the time to experiment with it.
Once you understand the gameplay it is a pretty interesting game concept. I think the most important think that is currently missing in the game is feedback to the player. Once you complete a circle or even a whole level basically nothing happens except the circle getting deactivated or the next level starts. I always checked the score after completing a circle because I wasn't sure if it actually counted. Maybe some text like in the final level could be added at the end of every level. Otherwise I liked the music. Maybe the music could be a bit louder by default. Good entry!
I’ve played and beaten the compo version of the game and little bit of the post-LD version. I like the idea of tracing the symbols and the how on level 3, they rotate to make it more challenging. I played the game both with and without toggles for movement and incantation enabled and found it to be easier with both enabled; Although I feel like the game would be a lot more fun if the player drew at the mouse position rather than the player position as someone already pointed out.
Here are some my other suggestions/ideas:
1. Have a percentage displayed with the progress meter
2. If you’re gonna use have the player be the source for drawing and…
a. …Want to reduce player focus on one particular shape, you could introduce enemies that either follow the player or block portions of a shape and make it so that you would need to switch to another active shape and return later when it moves away to finish it or…
b. If you want to increase focus, add some sort of grading scale where the percentage of traced versus ‘mis-traced’ reflects on some sort of final score. Perhaps that score is used as a bonus objective for ranking (S rank, B rank, etc.) or the objective itself (e.g. Beat X score in Y time to progress to the next level).
Overall, the game was pretty neat and has an interesting premise, but I believe the gameplay could be improved.
This was I cool game and a great use of the theme!
It took me a sec to figure out what I was supposed to be drawing so I didn't survive the first try, but after I got the hang of it drawing on the lines it got pretty fun!
I enjoyed the shapes getting more complex as the levels progressed and the introduction of the rotating shapes was cool too!
also on the first attempt that I failed on, I was still able to control the character and draw the lines and wanted to see how far it would let me go and I managed to beat it after losing which was funny lol
Yes, I was able to do it and the cult will now take over the whole world! Very interesting take on the theme, I have to learn how to draw like this in Godot. And it's quite impressive to implement the drawing that also rotates together with the symbols!
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I understood controls very quickly, which is interesting, because many people didn't, and I am usually one of those people! All in all, I think this is a very good compo entry! After LD version could be made more interesting by introducing a better feedback when you finish the symbol and when you complete the level. There could be some ways how to perhaps introduce even more challenge, like with some enemies chasing you or something. :)
All in all, this is a great entry and I had a lot of fun, well done!
Took a little bit to get used to the controls, but they felt good once I was used to them - turning on toggle incantation made it much smoother to play imo, I was using RMB for it and I think holding both mouse buttons down at once can feel a little unnatural.
The drawing is implemented really well, and it was satisfying tracing out the more complicated shapes in the later levels in one smooth movement. Great job!
@ty-victorson > also on the first attempt that I failed on, I was still able to control the character and draw the lines and wanted to see how far it would let me go and I managed to beat it after losing which was funny lol
Haha, thanks for letting me know! Let's just call that one an extended practice mode instead of me missing a fairly obvious bug during the development, huh? _quickly compiles a patch_ ;)
What a fun and stressful game :D Surprisingly I had not issue understanding what I need to do. But... knowing what to do and being able to pull it off are two different things. I already had issues on level 2, in a fun way. Tryin g to figure out which shapes are worth trying and which are too complex and how to draw them in a fast way was quite fun. Not sure how many levels there are because I did not manage to pass level 3 (I'm not really good at precision games). As someone pointed out, maybe just drawing shapes with mouse instead of in-game character would be easier, but then again, the way it is now adds nice challenge to it. And just an idea, maybe add different colors? As in, player needs to choose color (maybe with mouse scroll?) and needs to draw not only symbols in correct colors, but on later levels parts of each symbols with different colors. Anyway, really cool game!
Thank you for your detailed and thoroughly thought-out review of my game. You've made some fantastic suggestions and clearly have a great feel for game design! I'm also pleased to see that you've remained loyal to Ludum Dare and have produced a lot of content. Keep it up!
Now, regarding your game: I'm glad to see you've switched to Godot and even stayed loyal to C#—very cool! I hope WebGL support will soon be added in Godot 4. A quick look at the source code showed everything was very structured. I played the post-LD version. There are several games where you need to trace shapes by drawing directly with the mouse. In your version, however, one needs to follow these shapes. This approach is different from others and is positively notable right off the bat. Initially, I had some difficulties using the controls to trace the patterns. Midway through, I couldnt always tell how far I had successfully traced the pattern. Perhaps the pattern itself could be highlighted differently if it isn't traced sufficiently. Sometimes, I was unclear about what exactly was wrong with the pattern, like which lines were not good enough. I also appreciated having the option to choose a different pattern. The idea itself offers many possibilities to integrate game design elements. For example, could an upgrade grant a car or motorcycle, allowing for faster pattern creation? The patterns could also be made larger to require more distance to complete.
Congratulations on your entry! Keep up the good work!