Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Orbitals
By pvg
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 3.33 | 11 | ||
| Fun | 3.16 | 11 | ||
| Innovation | 3.55 | 11 | ||
| Theme | 2.55 | 11 | ||
| Graphics | 2.77 | 11 | ||
| Audio | 3.16 | 11 | ||
| Humor | 1.66 | 11 | ||
| Mood | 3.05 | 11 |
Great Example of a simple concept done well! Your game has a very strong gameplay loop that is very addicting to play.
If you were to spend more time on the game I would consider making different difficulties that you can play on. Mainly because it might open it up to more people, but it's understandable if that's not the direction you want to take it in.
Overall Amazing work!
Great game. Really hard maybe slowdown the other balls, and less spawn.
Overall can be a really good game if more polished. i really enjoyed it but Its really hard my best score 85
@meepster Thanks for checking it out! Yeah, as I was working on it, I realized it was really hard. I could have made it easier, but I liked keeping it as an example of a "hard mode." I think it's a reasonable seed of a game that me or someone else could extend into something bigger.
@acsid The only bit that I really spent energy on balancing was the rate of spawns for the first 30 seconds or so. Believe it or not, it used to be _much worse_! I've gotten up over 100 a few times, but one of my friends really took to the game, and they just reported breaking 200! Their score of 230 is the best I've heard of so far.
Cool game. I think the clear background makes it very hard to control, since I can't clear see where I'm going. Also, it moves soo fast. I don't taht would be an issue if I could see the background, though
@ooboob It should have a faint, slightly cloudy background. It's quite faint by design. (It's just a noise texture on a plane, incidentally.) I thought about making it more prominent but never really prototyped that. Anyway, thanks for the feedback and checking it out!
I really liked the gameplay loop on display, and the core concept is very functional, I think that if you plan on expanding the game or coming back to it, you should increase the pickup range or have the pick-ups attract toward the character within a certain range. Otherwise, the game is really fun, nice work!
@inidal-dev Yeah, I thought about adding an attraction range, but I ended up liking the hard fun of the precision movement. There is very little wiggle room for picking up new charges! It's a fun "hard mode," but I know what you mean---a gentler on-ramp would probably be better for marketing.
I didn't have a gamepad to try this out with, but at least with a keyboard the controls are over sensitive. It's really hard to make precise movements when you accelerate so fast. But despite that I really liked the concept. I might try and find a controller and see if that would help :smile:
@eloraju I purposefully did not include gamepad controls to keep it hard :)
I think it would be fun to try these mechanisms with an analog stick, though, to see how it feels.
This concept is brilliant!
I kind of wish I started with more charged orbs, as about half my plays are just that first struggle to get the game loop going, and those runs feel terrible.
The controls, oh boy. Most of my deaths were from either trying to move between enemies to a pickup, which gets me crushed unexpectedly because their route changed. Or from steering around a pickup till they caught up to me, because I have no sense of how fast my orb is moving. The lack of reference for momentum really kills the controls, because as I play I do not know if a light tap or a full hold is needed to twitch out of the way or line up an orb collision. I see what you were going for, and I think with some points of reference for the momentum it could work better. A simple way to fix it might be to add a small particle trail to the orb and make the background just a bit more contrast.
I think if you just tweak the movement to something a bit more "bullet hell dodge" friendly, you could even keep the homing enemies and get really crazy with the spawns/pickups.
You've got a really fun concept, and it did feel really awesome when I get a run going! I can easily see this becoming super addicting with some minor tweaks to the control feel and some homing pickup behaviors.
I love the cycle of gameplay between having a full "armada" of orbs and then feeling super vulnerable by smashing them to invest in more pickups. For a compo 2 day entry this is fantastic, you even have sounds and music! :smile: :thumbsup:
okay overall I liked it, most of my deaths have been trying to hit the bad guys with the orbs and I crash into them because I can't tell how fast I am going. my highest score was 125. And I got that by ignoring the bad guys and pickups entirely and just coming back later when they are gone. made the game really slowish compared to the other runs where I got about 50-80 points. but I think it's because most of my deaths were from trying to hit the bad guys. Anyway, I did have fun and it had sounds! I think with a bit of polish it could be fantastic.
Hmmm... I'm not really sure what I was meant to do here. I pressed space as instructed then the other balls seems to just fire randomly at the one in the middle. I tried pressing space again but the yellow balls just blew up. A simple tutorial or some more hints might be helpful?
I really liked the music!
@wilsk Use the yellow orbs you summon to smash the red orbs before they smash into you. You can take two hits before the game is over.
@gawain-doell Thanks for the detailed feedback! Like I mentioned above, there should be a faint mottled background, but I suppose it is too faint. It is the main way to see your momentum. I would make that part more clear if I revised it. Also, I agree that the first move is really hard, and it leads to a lot of zero-score runs---that's part of why I kept it so short, so that this is just a momentary setback. I usually just grunt and try again, but I understand that it's more frustrating to some players. I'm not really a "bullet hell" player, so there are probably conventions of the genre that I am missing. Anyway, thanks for checking it out!
@tristan-doell In all my testing, I never tried aggressively kiting the enemies. They do get faster over time, which I put in as a foil to just running away, but I did not get to balance that, nor the size of the play-space. (In fact, I wanted it to be infinite but ran into problems understanding how to make that work with the rest of my systems. I should go back to that and figure it out.)
@pvg I figured that was the idea, but it wasn't obvious to me how to do that. As I said when I hit space again the yellow balls just blew up. It seems obvious to others but I struggled a little to work out what to do :grinning:
@wilsk Ah! I have seen that happen, but only very rarely. I had a hard time debugging that one. I thought I pushed a fix for it, but it was a shot in the dark. Drat! I am uncertain why that happens, rarely, that the satellite orbs act like they hit something when they didn't. Just goes to show, there are always bugs...
Great concept with a lot of potential! - Most of my deaths were due to the non-precise movement controls, which made it annoying. - Seems that there's no need for the ball summoning to be user-triggered, since you want to activate them instantly all the time - maybe it would be more fun if they would just be auto-summoned when picked up. - I feel like the health should go back up after not being hit for a while, currently it feels too punishing. - I agree with the feedback about the first set of orbs being the hardest, after that it gets easier. Maybe a bit of balancing could fix this. - I also encountered the bug about the game starting with zero orbs, if holding space down for a fraction of a second too long. Sounds like the code might be checking for key down instead of key press?
I found it very difficult to pick up the charges and the movement speed was too fast making the movement feel unprecise. After getting enough charges to where I'm not running for my life it was fun.
@flogram I thought about making the pickups automatically generate orbs, but I there wasn't time to test it. I found that, in my own play, I would often send out my orbs defensively: if there was an enemy approaching, I could push them off with a targeted release more reliably than I could try to line them up. Obviously, a longer development time would allow for playtesting variations like this. It could be fun, but it's not in the cards for me.
@butterinabucket Yeah, part of what I like about the game is the rapid movement between terror and confidence and then back to terror. I was originally skeptical that giving two summoning power for each destroyed opponent would immediately make the player too powerful, but I quickly found that it didn't always help. The orbs "out there" make a player feel good but aren't very practical for twitch response, at least in my own playing. I love unexpected behaviors of systems like this.