2024-10-08 00:08
Could be a me problem, but was unable to download the ZIP.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD56 → Stolen Colors
By EklBirifine, uniowl, bulba, pacelin, Tryam, MatiMay and the-spinning-sofa
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 140 | 4.00 | 66 | |
| Fun | 170 | 3.85 | 66 | |
| Innovation | 29 | 4.19 | 66 | |
| Theme | 592 | 3.62 | 66 | |
| Graphics | 105 | 4.40 | 67 | |
| Audio | 243 | 3.69 | 64 | |
| Humor | 574 | 2.98 | 59 | |
| Mood | 230 | 3.91 | 65 |
Could be a me problem, but was unable to download the ZIP.
The art style is charming and I love the story behind this game! It did take me a while to understand how to play this game, and I think would heavily benefit with a tutorial scene.
I played in the preview and my cursor was a weird rainbowy box. It looked kinda cool but since it was hard to click and see I'm guessing it may have been a bug?
It was a neat idea though so I wanted to play anyway. I tried hard to spawn enough creatures to survive the first attack but never quite managed it. Agree with crushedsummers, maybe a tutorial?
(˶ˆᗜˆ˵) I also had some problems with the learning functions, but the gameplay is fascinating (although sometimes it was unclear). The plot is interesting, and all the sprites are charming. (,,>﹏<,,)
(if the artists see this: you draw charmingly, I was pleased to see your work in the game).
@rmgraham
Hello. We are sorry that you experienced difficulties downloading our game.
Please contact me at Discord to resolve this issue.
bulba1914
@crushedsummers
Thanks for the feedback!
We worked very hard, but we didn't have time to add tutorial to the game. We will soon release Q&A and a short video guide.
@rufenerd
Thanks for the feedback!
We are aware of this problem and are already trying to solve it. We are sorry that you experienced difficulties while playing.
We will definitely add tutorial(video) soon.
@imai-time
Thanks for the feedback!
We will convey your kind words to our artists <3
@crushedsummers Thank you very much! This time, we didn't have much time to cover everything, tutorial in particular. We'll try do our best with in-game explanations next time!
@rufenerd Thanks for the feedback! Although there are no tutorial in-game, we added how-to-play explanations on the page.
A bug with the cursor was very unexpected :(
@imai-time Thanks a lot! You right, without any explanations, it may be a bit unclear on how to play and beat the game. We added explanations on the page!
@rmgraham I can download archive without any issues. If you still can't, you can try browser version instead (or try to download archive from itch.io page, if the issue is about ldjam website)!
Itch page: https://thespinningsofa.itch.io/stolen-colors
i cant beat lvl 2 first castle but i love the game i feel like the diffuculty is rising very hard stil great game congrats to the team !!
Really cool looking game, the gameplay is kinda mysterious to me and the difficulty rises hard but it was overall a good experience
Beautiful game, I really love the looks and the idea behind the gameplay! It was really hard for me however, didn't understand how to finish even level 1 but gotta keep trying 'til I make it! Congrats for the game!
@danoka thanks for your feedback! You right, we didn't have much time for balance :( but we want to improve it in postjam releases (if any will be)!
@yoanntsitionis yeah, gameplay without any tutorial or explanations can be tricky to get right away! Didn't tuned the difficulty very well. Thanks for feedback!
Wowow what a cool game! Love the overall concept of drawing runes to create a party, and the battle mode and classes + upgrades, impressed with the complex the system you have here!!
Love the art, super cute/cool character designs. The mouse tank is really funny lol. I like how you guys opted to animate them simply in engine. The art polish seems well scoped. Really interested in the color shader you have! The title screen is so pretty and it looks awesome with the shader applied.
Music and sfx are great as well, really appreciate the noises to indicate time running out on the runes phase.
Awesome work and congratulations on submitting!
@fleur thank you! I hope you did manage to beat level 1 at some point. We worked very hard for the visuals and gameplay and we'll try to do our better best in later games!
@sofimei thanks a lot for such lovely response! Although I want to point out that music wasn't made by our team, we linked all sources in Credits. Glad to hear that you very liked the game, we worked really hard and we'll do our best in the future!
The web link on both ld page and itch page seem broken?
@pious it seems very strange. You can try windows version instead. What browser are you using? We'll try to look into that later
I slowly discovered several strategies that help, which is always cool in a game. The difficulty ramps up really hard. World two's first fight beat be 5 or 6 times. I finally got through but then got demolished by the world 2 boss. Didn't even do 10% damage. I like the graphical idea of finding more colors, but I only got to see the one red :(
I played for a good half an hour, it is fun, but probably much harder than you realize.
Also, some of the difficulty seemed to be from unforgiving RNG. I had a world 2 first battle where I only saw 4 or 5 summon squares and they were all in corners.
I think the difficulty would be pretty balanced if I kept my army when starting world two. But since I start from scratch it is really hard.
I really did enjoy the game.
@uniowl I'm using firefox! What browser is recommended?
@pious one of our team members also had an issue with Firefox today. We tested it in Chrome, Edge, Opera and Arc (all of them are Chromium-based browsers).
Awesome project, one of the best from this jam for sure! The graphics are on point and the idea of colors returning to the world as you progress through the game is really cool. The only problem I've had is with the difficulty, it scales really fast.
@damien-black thanks a lot for such detailed feedback! Indeed, our balance is pretty challenging, we would like to fix it in the future. Also it is very sad that boss' completion is based too much on luck :( Return to main menu was also our oversight, it was planned to restart just current level.
I hope that we'll get to fix all the mentioned issues later, after the jam ends
@radiorat thank you! Glad to hear you liked the idea. Difficulty is pretty rough indeed as we didn't leave much time for this important task :( Hope we'll get to fix this in the future!
I really want to love this game: the art is great, the soundtrack is a bop, restoring colors after every level is an awesome sense of progression, and the core mechanic is super innovative. I just... don't get how the gameplay is supposed to work. Because the preparation for a battle is time based, I feel compelled to draw as quickly as possible, as opposed to being strategic with my choices. And because I can choose like 10-15 circles with a single rune, it doesn't feel like I'm making conscious choices & tradeoffs so much as greedily & randomly grabbing as much as possible. Add onto that the fact that there seems to be no way to see the buffs I've applied to my army, only how many creatures I've spawned, and I really feel like I'm stumbling around in the dark.
In the end, I just drew runes as quickly as possible, focusing on the spawns since that's the only thing I could tell was doing anything, and amassed a pretty massive army. I easily won the first battle, but not because of any skill or strategic thinking on my part, which felt wrong.
Off the top of my head, I could see a couple things helping with this. First of all, you NEED to be able to see the attack speed, damage, etc of your army & how it's increasing with the circles you choose. I could also see limiting the number of runes per preparation phase, so maybe you get 60 seconds to decide how to allocate your, I don't know, 5(?) runes. I'd also decrease the number of lines you can draw per rune & maybe add in some more blanks/locks so the player has to be a bit more strategic about the way they draw connections. Then, of course, you can make different levels require different strategies to beat, so the skill of the game comes from understanding what your opponents are doing & how to counter it. If all of that was in the game, I could see it being a really interesting army design puzzle.
I know this comment ended up as a bit of an essay, but I only write so much because this game has so much potential. Apart from the gameplay flaws I love the world you're creating here!
@ember44 thank you for very detailed feedback! I'll try to answer on mentioned points:
Valid and reasonable point about time limitation. I would like to try something other next time, more like quantity-based maybe? (for example, instead of time, you have limited casts)
Lack of display of the bonuses is indeed may affect perception of value of such bonuses. Maybe some visual indicator will help with that 🤔
About line count and bonuses amount: blanks and locks were indeed added to limit too much drawing freedom, but me as a game designer just didn't leave enough time to balance everything this time, which is a serious mistake of mine that can alter player experience in a bad way.
Your tiny essay is very valuable and I want to look into the mentioned problems. Actually, we are planning on building a postjam version with bug- and balance- fixes, and I think I'll try some gameplay changes, and I hope we'll manage to fix problems you mentioned.
If you are interested in our further updates, you can follow us on twitter here: https://x.com/thespinningsofa. We'll make a post about postjam version when rating ends.
Thanks again!
Nice game! I really like the theme and the rune idea! Love that we unlock colours as we advance. While I found the rune concept intriguing I feel that it has some issues. I am supposed to make the best runes possible but since it is time based I just rush and do whatever. Also it seems that the spawner symbol are the most important, so I always try to link those and never really care about what other rune are doing. And since it seems that the symbol spawning are random (or fell like it?), I did not manage to make a balanced party and win. I personally was not a fan that the dexterity seemed so much more important than the strategy. But beside that I really quite liked the game!
@leo-leo thanks for the feedback! Your struggle with time limitation is understandable, and we will seek for ways to fix that in the future. Dexterity-based gameplay is not something we planned originally and it needs to be changed. Glad to hear that you still liked the game!
Managed to play on Chromium!
I liked the game! It was a pretty interesting idea, pretty innovative to do a speed army builder to not only focus on troops but also their stats, so you have to think quick and act fast but also with purpose! I liked it and loved the designs, the colors and use of it was also pretty phenomenal.
The audio felt a little out of place but I understand it works in a pinch! I felt like there should've been a tutorial or at least some sort of entry level thing to tell you these are spawners, these change stats, etc. I was lost when I first tried it, and then saw what you were doing in the gifs and read it and it made sense, so that was good.
One of the stronger entries I've seen in the jam thus far, so great work! Congrats!
@uniowl Thanks for fixing the cursor bug! This game looked fun so I came back to check and it worked great. Figured it out and had a lot of fun, raised my ratings.
Pretty cool idea and great graphics. Brutally difficult and a bit unintuitive to understand - took me a few tries before I realized I could spawn more than one unit at once if I did it right. Would have really benefited from a tutorial, eager to play more if the user experience is made more clear!
I'm stunned by the polish on this entry, great work to all the team, it work very well, it's really good and the concept work well !
Art work is very charming! The army building mechanics are really cool as well!
Did find it got difficult quite quickly, would be nice to retry a level rather than having to start all the way from the beginning again.
Overall really good game though!
I spent so much time losing until I realized that you need to choose everything very quickly. That's when I understood this game! I really really liked it, it's fun to play, the art is pleasing to my eyes, all cats are cute (especially wizards whoosh!). But in fact, this is the first high score for innovation that I give on this LD! Good job team!
@douuggggg @tori @jhax @daria-toni Thank you so much for the kind words!
Our team worked hard all through the jam. We are currently preparing a post-jam version. In the new version, the display of information about the improved characteristics will be added, the waves will work on a count-based system, instead of time-based. The main shader will be improved. Well, a couple of critical bugs will also be fixed, which no one has found yet)) And balance edits, of course) And also a small tutorial) The last preparations are left)
The art is so cute!
The game is really fun to play ! But how I wish the character can walk in a more natural way! And the color looks a little bit strange...
I really like the concept of the game, but it is deceptively difficult. It took me a couple tries to get past the first fight due to learning the game, and I still haven't beaten the first fight of level 2. I agree with the feedback above about how the time based prep phases encourages faster drawing instead of smarter, and how some way to judge your army's stats would be nice. For other suggestions, I think that it would be nice to make the spawn symbols more distinct. Right now you have to waste time hovering over the symbols to learn if the sword, the sword with a plus, or the other sword with a plus is the add fighter symbol.
I think the artwork changing as you take back colors is a really cool idea, and nicely executed here. The music wasn't a wow for me, but it got the job done. The only potential bug I ran into was one where some fighters stood basically still for a few seconds, then moved forward for a few, rinse and repeat, while the rest of the army moved at a steadier pace. Overall I like the game a lot.
The music is pleasant and some sounds, but I have a little bit of the sounds of carnage and game over caused a cringe, but this is a matter of taste. The theme is taken into account and the gameplay is ideologically very cool.
@pious glad to hear that! We're already working on a postjam version that takes into account some of the feedback (like stats, sort of tutorial, etc.). But this probably will be available only after rating ends (I think this is fair and in spirit of jams). Thanks for the feedback!
@rufenerd super cool! Thanks for playing!
@alwayshungry thanks for feedback! We didn't have much time to do proper hand-drawn animation so we took simpler approach to animate with code just to make creatures a little more dynamic. Similar reason was for coloring: effect kinda works, but it wasn't fine tuned as we wanted. We'll keep working to improve in the future!
@andriana-mantidfly thanks for feedback!
@darkwolf thank you! We already found a few bugs related to creatures navigation, but it was after the deadline :( Good point about symbols distinction. In fact, they are already had supposed to be more distinct with the coloring, but due to desaturation effect it is a lot harder to notice, hehe. There's a room for improvement
will play this until i beat it please keep working on it its so cool!! it took me a bit to understand the time limit becasue i cant read apparently lmao
very interesting game and concept! It took a bit to figure out how to play it especially the runes, i think it also struggles a bit since you can't see the enemies you're going to fight so you dont know what parts you need to focus on building, lack of clarity is really the biggest issue i have here, but I do really the art and once again the concept of colors being stolen is very interesting, and I like how thats visually shown with color coming back into the world when you collect runes, I would love to see this game be expanded upon in the future I think it has a lot of potential!
@rosalyn @kyoryucomic Thanks a lot for the feedback! We are already working on expanding the game as a post-jam version. There will be balance edits and about 5 bugs fixed, which no one has found yet))) Thank you for thinking that the idea has potential, we will try to meet expectations. We will release the post when we make the latest balance edits)
beautiful graphics, as well as interesting mechanics for creating your own warriors
A lot of my sentiments of are mirrored by what others have said. I think there is genuinely something very fun here, but the brutal difficulty of the game and the ridiculous amount of luck required to win gets me very frustrated. Level 2 is possible if you get lucky and the boss doesn't use their stomp more than once, but the second time I made it to the level to boss, it just stomped 3 times in a row and everyone either died or had nothing left but a single hit. Besides those factors though, you genuinely have something great here. Y'all should be proud of making something this technically impressive under the constraints, and I think this is one of the most well put together games of the jam. Looking forward to that balance update.
@hatik thank you for your feedback!
@neoawesomeon very glad to hear that you liked the game (besides difficulty and luck problems ofc)! We work hard on some improvements thanks for y'all feedback. Our programmer was very pleased to see that you aknowledged technical challenges that we faced! We'll notify you when postjam version will be available
Wow this game is so cool
@pious thanks to your report we finally managed to track the issue down and fix web build for Firefox browsers for future players! Hooray!
@pachino55 thank you!
This game is really good! I love the art, the audio, and the gameplay. It's definitely one of my top favorites of all the games I've played so far in this Jam.
The character art is adorable and the gameplay mechanic is surprisingly challenging. At first I thought I could just spam scribbles without paying attention but that quickly failed me in the second round when we need to be very mindful of getting spawners as well as maximizing runes. I adore the usage of colors(or lack thereof in at the start) and gradually regaining them from the enemies, it's a very unique and interesting story point!
We really loved the colors influencing gameplay but just a tiny critique being that we wished the locks and spawners were more visually noticeable. When the time is against the players it's really helpful to be able to see things quickly in our peripherals because when we're drawing so fast we're focusing on the end points and it was really easy to miss the locks and wondering why our lines weren't registering. Plus because spawners are by far the most vital part of winning it would've been nice if they were more noticeable. Overall though, a really great game and interesting mechanics and a lot of fun! -Swan
I love the concept. But I didn't really understand what I was doing at first. Maybe it's just me, but I can't see the cooldown when I play, it is offscreen. That made it hard to know what to do. As others said, A tutorial level would have been really great, as well as seing the buffs you apply. This game has a great potential!
@axodo thanks for feedback! Could you provide us with a screenshot or your display resolution? maybe this was because you played in windowed mode? UI canvas is too big when played in small screen, but it's fine when you go fullscreen. We'll look into that issue.
I just played using the player on this page. Here is a screenshot: Sans titre.png
@axodo there's tiny "Fullscreen" blue button on the bottom right. Try use vertical scroll to see it fully. "Esc" to leave fullscreen. We probably should change canvas size because it doesn't fit very well on this website...
Holy ****, probably coolest game I have seen so far here! Maybe if u had a mini tutorial inside the game it was easier to understand, but I already can see this idea on steam or better mobile marketplaces. Go make a kickstater !!!
@sofimei @damien-black @ember44 @leo-leo @darkwolf @kyoryucomic @neoawesomeon @swanboat @pious and many others! We are happy to announce that we finally made little **postjam version**!
We took in serious consideration your feedback on the game and tried to make it better. Original version is still avaiable for ratings.
Main changes: - We removed timer entirely in favor of turns so that player will make more strategic decisions. - We added stats panel so player can actually see his progression. - Took our time to do proper rebalance. We experimented a bit with the randomness and made a game more fair (it is still not super easy but very much manageable!) - Tutorial explaining basic gameplay! - Made some minor graphical changes, both for UI and game. - Fixed some bugs (including support for Firefox).
All changes listed in *Postjam changelog* section.
Huge thanks for help! I would love to hear your thoughts on this! Please note that this version is **not** made to improve our ratings or anything like that. We wanted to provide player with best experience (and learn from our mistakes). So please if you try this version out, don't change your original ratings.
@artallester thank you! We added an in-game tutorial in postjam version!
This is fun; wish there was a way to skip ahead if you lose a wave though
I played through twice to try and amass a bigger army :)
Screenshot 2024-10-14 163151.png
@daflamingpotato damn, that's a huge tiny army! Thanks for feedback! Interesting thought on skipping capturing sequence, we'll think about that!
Hey, can you put the post-jam HTML5 somewhere? Glad you went to turns, I think slowly!
@damien-black the first option is Windows here. If you prefer web, we made both versions of the game in single web-player (jam and postjam) right here and on itch. Jam version is not changed (except two bug fixes listed in general Changelog) so people can still rate the original one. You just hit play and choose option on the right (option on the left is jam version).
a.png
The art style is awesome!!!!
I think alot of people already stated the things I found strange - looks like the post jam version should address them!
Reaaly lovely character design. They are absolutely adorable. (My inner furry is satiated). Wish there are more variety but that can't be helped with the time given. And the walk of death once you lose a wave maybe is a tad too long haha. But overall amazing game, one of my favorite in the jam.
Nice game!!!Very interesting aspects in game !!! Looks Wonderful 10/10!!!
It's an awesome work wether during the jam or after, for the feedbacks pn the post-am version I think you could end the game when the ennemies kill your army and not when they reach the castle, easier and more smooth. There is also a bug where my army didn't push all at once but soldier by soldier (destroying established formation) but of course you did a terrifying job !! Well done guys
Love the style, seems like a huge job on that :o
@uniowl I'm loving the post-jam changes you made! At first it still felt a little random to pick what stats I wanted, but once I started to put together a bit of a strategy making my army became a lot of fun (in case you're curious, it's to prioritize tank & mage spawns, then damage, health, & attack speed). It does feel like a lot of stats to learn, especially for your first playthrough, but that's not necessarily a bad thing; it gives a nice learning curve.
I think you also did a great job balancing the different classes against each other. I don't know how much of this was in the original game tbh, but seeing the enemy warriors shred through my tanks but then get killed by my mages really drove home the importance of looking at the expected enemies and planning my army accordingly. I feel like you've now got a really strong foundation, either to leave as a finished game or keep building on!
The one thing I think needs fixing: as @tarisma mentioned, my soldiers (tanks, usually), would occasionally get stuck and not advance with the rest of the army, which can be a fight-losing bug if you get unlucky enough.
@ginxel thank you
@hcs-hades it actually already addressed! try it!
@tarisma thanks for feedback! You right, waiting of enemies approach seems to take too long. About army push: there's something wrong with navigation system. Seems like allies block the path for each other or smth
@arthurmtro it is!
I dropped my Color collection(
@ember44 glad you found some time to try postjam version!
> At first it still felt a little random to pick what stats I wanted
We didn't wanted to change rune generation too much, but made some changes related to bonuses' weights. Every time you don't get certain type of bonus, it's chance to spawn increases a bit. So that it is still random but more uniformly distributed (there's lower chance that you won't get certain bonus for a long time).
> I think you also did a great job balancing the different classes against each other. I don’t know how much of this was in the original game tbh
I only had time to balance base stats of units, but enemies and allies 1v1 of the same class were equal. It was difficult to balance when you have timer because you have to guess how many casts will player make. And in postjam version we properly balanced every wave, which is a lot easier since you know average speed of player's progression.
> my soldiers (tanks, usually), would occasionally get stuck
Yes, we didn't find a solution to this bug yet. When you have too much allies, sometimes they block each other's navigation :(
Thanks for very valuable feedback!
Great visuals, decent SFX, groovy soundtrack (even if canned), and a simple-to-learn but tough-to-master system. It's overall a solid entry; good job!
I enjoyed this little game. The concept, the unique mechanics, the story and the cute characters. Is the limit time or number of actions? I thought it might be timed and it got me nervous ^^
The best game I've played on this JAM so far
@nrankin13 thank you for feedback!
@ido thank you!
@danila-lihotin thanks
The sound effects are SO cute! I also really enjoy the Epic Mickey vibes.
Wow! The game is so wonderful! Keep making games!
@daveco @sasa-2010 thank you!
very fun! at first i didn't really understand what I was supposed to do but I did and I felt stupid for not getting it lmao
The artstyle is really good! cute designs, very strong presentation, interesting. The music, some really nice bangers in here.
there's a lot of depth to the gameplay and I found it compelling. I managed t get to the very end once I understood all the mechanics
vary good entry!
@tetracold thanks for your feedback!