kotori-itssuke 2024-10-09 02:18
Actually looks like a game made for full release in Steam, best I saw in this jam so far, lack of description gives a lost media vibes tho...
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD56 → Meatheads
By sztobar, bigwhiteshogun and dans17
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 538 | 3.56 | 25 | |
| Fun | 519 | 3.43 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 400 | 3.47 | 25 | |
| Theme | 479 | 3.76 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 265 | 4.10 | 25 | |
| Humor | 3.38 | 11 | ||
| Mood | 497 | 3.56 | 24 |
Actually looks like a game made for full release in Steam, best I saw in this jam so far, lack of description gives a lost media vibes tho...
The lack of info (at the time of playing—it has info now!) made it tough to figure out, but once you knew what the deal was, it was *really* fun! The frog's OHKO stomp blast thing really made it crucial to recall your units to keep them alive long enough to profit on meat. :D
meatheads.PNG
The concept is fantastic and definitely has the potential to become a full-fledged game. Here are a few suggestions:
- Food should spawn continuously: I ended up soft-locked when all my units died, and I couldn’t get any meat. - Poison spots feel too punishing: Once a unit touches the poison, it’s pretty much game over for that unit. - Controls are too complicated: Simplifying the controls by reducing the number of keys would make the gameplay much smoother. - Unit variety needs improvement: The different unit types feel too similar. Adding more variety and unique abilities would make each unit type feel more distinct and engaging.
Overall, the animations are excellent, and the game runs smoothly. Great job!
It's a very fun game when you get grips with it! It is too punishing sometimes though. You need meat to summon the units, but you also need units to deal damage and get meat. If the circles didn't instakill, it would be easier (losing all the units because of 1 mistake is very punishing). So I would either make it not instakill, or give more telegraphing for it (telegraph time is decent, but for such a deadly attack you definitely need more). The strategy I went with was spamming melees: I didn't need shield one because I just retreated when the frog used a melee attack and attacked only when it had an attack animation, and the ranged minions are very expensive with very little damage; so a lot of resources for not so much value, moreover when you can lose all of it with one attack. But it is challenging to balance the difficulty though (I've certainly made some mistakes with that previously haha). The artstyle is cute with patapon-like monsters! And the font is stylish. The music would've done wonders to this game! Certainly a fun and creative entry that deserves much more ratings. I love the boss battles and minion control!
Looking forward to a potential update! Maybe I'll get better by then. XD
@kotori-itssuke Thank you for your kind words. We are extremely sorry for lack of description at the beginning, we were super tired after jam and we had to recharge our batteries before doing the extra work. Everything is in now, so we are hoping you will give our game another go. We hope you'll enjoy your time with our game more now ;)
@meep I am star struck and in awe. Every LD no matter if I take part in it or not, first thing I always do is to check if there is new Adelie game. To have you, it's creator, to play our game and play it in a state were nothing is explained, extremely buggy and unbalanced, and stick with it and figure everything out on yourself is astonishing. On top of that you beat it! Let's say this, you just reached new level of awesomeness for me. Thank you so so much for playing our game.
PS I already played your new game on Monday while taking short break from our game, def will play it some more and rate your game.
@ghpxi Yeap. I agree 100% with all the feedback provided. We were aware of most of those issues even before the game was playable, and we had plans to fix many of them, sadly LD is unforgivable and we simply run out of time. We are planning on at least having a post jam version of the game with all of those issues and many more addressed. Thank you so much for playing our game.
@risminator Agree with everything you said. As mentioned above, we are aware of many of those issues and we want to fix them and improve the QoL of the game. The frog boss is hard because it was never meant to be the first encounter, or the only encounter on that matter. In my hubris I designed game with the encounter count of three, with each one introducing new units and gradually rising the difficulty. I was very naive and over ambitious, cause I'm really glad we manage to finish at least one of them :D Thank you for your feedback and your time. We hope you enjoyed playing our unbalanced game at least a bit ;)
@rincs thank you so much for streaming our game and giving it a go, we definitely can at least promise a post jam update with hopefully all of the issues the game has addressed and add more value to it. We hope you had fun playing it, specially after so many hours of streaming and being exhausted, this game must have been rough to handle. o7
I really love the art direction and sprite work done here! The game runs real smooth, and once you get over the learning curve the game is pretty fun!
My criticisms have been brought up already by other comments but yeah: - softlocking - difficulty could be tweaked a little - some unit tweaking
I think a tutorial would have benefitted this game greatly. But I get it, this is LD and there's not always enough time to implement those kinds of things unfortunately.
Otherwise, great entry and I can't wait to see what the team comes up with next!
I'll echo a lot of what others have already said. I don't think I have any "new" feedback to give. So I'll just say despite it all I had a great time playing and managed to win on my 4th or 5th attempt. Nice work!
I did a few runs trying to beat the beast! It's good fun and a nice challenge dodging the attacks. As others say, I kept running out of meat. I wish I could have a weak attack as the player to gather some crucial meat maybe? The commands work well though to draw your minions back and forward to attack which saved a few from getting got! Art and design is generally great too. Nice!
very beautiful art, thoughtful game, I'm very glad to see this on Ludum in 3 days, great job
Okay, I finally managed to win, took me like ~6 tries i think. This game reminds me a lot about Tooth and Tale, which I love (as you can guess from the avatar xd).
My first approach to the fight was to buy only yellow critters and just kite the frog by attacking once, immediately retreat, reposition and repeat with the idea that their attack cooldown would run out when repositioning. It kinda worked, but I noticed that I can't switch my commands quickly enough. When I pressed E to retreat, I would need to wait ~2s to be able to attack again. I'm not sure if it's intentional, but it made playing with this strategy quite frustrating, because sometimes I'd think I commanded the units to do one thing, but they didn't do it. In the end I won by just spamming red ones, they are really OP. The biggest factor is that frog's melee attacks are way weaker than distance ones, so it's better to keep units close and heal them, rather than trying to dodge and navigate around the map.
The frog's AoE is fricking off the charts, it can wipe your whole army in one attack if you time things badly and it was the top #1 reason when I was losing. Making projectiles go through no more than, say, 3 units would really help.
I really liked that boss telegraphed attacks in a very clear way, it's such an important detail and props to you for implementing all of the necessary indicators (marking where goo projectiles fall, etc.). I wish the boss had some kind of repositioning attack, e.g. when jumping it could land on the opposite side of the map for example, would make the fight more dynamic.
Also, the very simple thing that would imho improve the game is to make the fight harder with time by adjusting frog's time between attacks based on it's hp.
Generally speaking it's a really good jam game. Allows for enough depth to develop strategies, looks and plays good, gj.
Overall, a really fun game. Took a little time to figure out and tricks for winning, but once I got the rhythm of things, it was not too bad. Would have been nice to have a little random meat drop or some other way to spawn units if you lost all units and meat. Or make that a game-over state. Unless I missed something, the music and sfx volume sliders don't do anything (no sound), which is too bad--that would have added a lot. But despite those minor issues, the game was a lot of fun. The animations were great. The characters were fun. I liked the different options. Controls weren't too bad, overall (on PC). Overall, great work!
LOVE this one! Super satisfying once you've got the hang of it and you start emassing a big huge gang of monsters :smiling_imp:
The frog's animation is hella smooth as well. I'd love to see this one expanded out into a whole game with a bunch of different bosses!
If I had one suggestion, it would be to have the main guy have some very weak attack so that you at least have a chance to recover if you've lost all of your guys, but that's only a minor suggestion.
Great job guys, you should be proud :)
I loved the art direction, and the fact the gameplay presented a genuine challenge. The frog's eyes alone were fantastic.
Beautiful game, feels like this is the start of something really cool you didn't quite manage to fit in the LD timeline. As it stands it's bit overwhelming to get into without really enough hand holding to get me into how to play it properly. I started to get it a bit after staring at the pause screen. Hope you folks keep working on it.
Game what is only big boss fight? sign me in! It was great, and frog was fantastic. Maybe kind a hard figure it out how to play. Good entry
Thanks for submitting your game to the stream! If you wanted to watch it again in the future heres the vod of the stream (timestamped to your game)
https://www.youtube.com/live/I2NaC9C0rDI?t=28201
Also Wanted to ask if youre fine with me using gameplay from the game in this LDs [score chasers tournament](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/$405421/ludum-dare-score-chasers-qualification-begins) intermission video. (Would play in the breaks of the tournament on my stream). Last year for reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuddhZScWxo
The art style is really great !
A bit confused to have music and SFX volume setting but no sound nor music to hear x)
Need a way to spawn a few meat when you've depleted all of your units because right now you have to restart every time it happens :/
Anyway, it was fun to try to have an army of primitive little creatures :) Nice job !
*ps : And I think I've just added your 20th rating x) You're welcome :D*
@ategon thank you for playing, we would be honored if you used our game in your tournament.
@wegpast as your blogpost mentioned, we had settings and everything for sound and music implemented we just run out of time to even add a royalty free track to the game XD Loosing all meat and units was supposed to be a fail state, but again we run out of time to implemented so we had quick restart option in the pause menu :P Like I mentioned, unfinished and unbalanced, it's def not my best jam game, but boy I would lie if I said it wasn't my favorite one so far XD
You were actually our 23 rd rating, but we appreciate your vote as much as if it was in any other order ;) Thank you for playing brother o7
Really nice looking! I found this very difficult - pretty much always I'd get hit by one attack that wiped out my whole party which I thought was at full health, and I didn't have any meat left to spawn new ones :(. I restarted a few times, but couldn't seem to survive more than a minute, let alone do much damage ^_^. Controller controls worked really well, I like the color-coding of the unit types with the button colors!