follusior 2025-04-07 07:23
A great retro platformer, I almost didn't have enough training directly in the game (for about 30 seconds I couldn't go through the menu). Nice visuals and sounds, did a good job on the level design. Thank you.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD57 → Abgrund
By ace17
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 111 | 3.57 | 29 | |
| Fun | 107 | 3.48 | 29 | |
| Innovation | 271 | 2.61 | 29 | |
| Theme | 218 | 3.20 | 29 | |
| Graphics | 206 | 3.16 | 29 | |
| Audio | 97 | 3.46 | 28 | |
| Humor | 2.42 | 9 | ||
| Mood | 173 | 3.26 | 28 |
A great retro platformer, I almost didn't have enough training directly in the game (for about 30 seconds I couldn't go through the menu). Nice visuals and sounds, did a good job on the level design. Thank you.
Really charmed by this stickman guy
Wow, great exploration game! I noticed a lot of Metroid nods, those were a good touch. :)
I was really blown away by the level design. The trinkets were hidden well and were almost always satisfying to find. I sort of wish the map was hidden away in a more secret spot, since it ended my exploration gameplay right away and replaced it with a "follow-the-map" style. The minimap was great though, super well designed and useful. I think the pacing was also totally solid (maybe a little too much water levels? idk) and I enjoyed the combination of one-off mechanics and reused ones.
Great submission, had a lot of fun with this one!
@follusior @juno-menager @retrisma thanks for playing, rating and commenting!
> I noticed a lot of Metroid nods, those were a good touch. :)
Ahah, I'm indeed a huge fan of the 2D Metroids :smile:
> I sort of wish the map was hidden away in a more secret spot, since it ended my exploration gameplay right away
I hadn't though of that, you're totally right :thinking:
What a big world! I got lost a lot of times, but I didnt have a map but didnt know which way I went. The trinkets I gathered were then reset, so if there is a long time without a checkpoint and died i lost a lot of progress. The music fit really well, and the mixing between being in and out of water was a nice touch!
What made you choose SDL2 over SDL3 in the modern day? about a year ago I made a game in SDL3 and that was before it was officially out so I was building the library from source code but still was not expecting to see SDL2 again. Other than that I don't time right now to finish the whole game but I played through a bunch of the map and it seems really solid, I would make the stick guy walk a little faster or add a run key because it does take forever to walk through a bunch of levels sometimes but other than that I do really enjoy how this turned out. Went in expecting a 5 minute adventure, came out with a whole free short quality game!
Wow, that's one huge world! The map was really needed. I like the minimalist graphics and the music. The stick-figure drawn-like character looks great. Fullscreen button makes the game go black and doesn't return until F5 is pressed.
Great job, especially for a COMPO! Between your save points, mini map, sounds and LD, I see a lot of work, congrats!
This is excellent! I played all the way to the end. I love the the background music muffling when I'm underwater. There were only a couple small problems I noticed: - Interacting with a ladder while underwater can get you stuck in a wall, although you can unstuck yourself by mounting and unmounting the ladder - Some of the conveyors in one of the upper areas don't move the player. One of them doesn't do the conveyor animation, either. - I think the map shouldn't show trinkets you've already found. I didn't get burned by this, but I could imagine walking past one accidentally and having it show as reached on the map, preventing me from realizing I hadn't gotten it.
Atmospheric looking and sounding game! Really impressed with size of levels. Cudos for making it in c++. I accidentally closed browser tab and it seems that save isn't persistent, but oh well.
Cool mechanics I like the variety from moving platforms to unstable floors to swimming and climbing ladders. The map is Huge labyrinth I managed to find 14 trinkets before I started going in circles lol.
Great job!
WOW! This was a hugely impressive entry! I really loved how intricate the level design was. Felt to me like a meeting between Megaman X and Metroid, and this was a really really great thing! The sound design is really great also, I specially loved the way the sound is affected by when you're inside the water, this made the overall mood be soo imersive! The controls are really good, even thou i wish a little bit of buffer in a coyote time, specially in the jumping over those timed plataforms, that took me quite a while to overcome. The presence of other biomes impressed me so much! And the way the levels are connected is quite clever, really loved that!
I wish the the hitboxes were a little bit smaller, sometimes, specially when swimming, was a little dificult to avoid the spines (since a really small touch would kill me).
All that said, its overall an impressive entry, with a crazy amount of polishing and a really great gamefeel. The jumping animation with the megaman x movement made me feel really great, since I deeply love that game.
Great entry! Keep up the good work and thank you for the game!
Immediately impressed with the world scale and the mechanics you managed to make in this short timeframe. The whole game gave me a good retro feeling, and it was a pleasure to explore. well done!
Great Game!.
Loved it! The level is *massive*. Will you post the complete map after the jam? Reminded me of the Saboteur games on Z80 back in the day. Art style is also awesome. And special props for BYOT (bring your own tech), which should really be a category in the rating system (hey, @pov). You could use emscripten's shell_minimal or customized the shell html to make the canvas occupy the entire window. But that's details.
Another great game from Ace17! Ever since I discovered your game Summonere, I've been interested in your work. Your games always have a personal touch that I really enjoy, your style truly stands out. I've also always admired developers who use SDL. I did some experiments with it myself, and I have to admit it offers incredible freedom, though it does require a bit more programming effort. Abgrund, the game you've presented, is another fantastic title from you, and once again, it carries that unique charm of yours. The graphics and music are very much in line with your signature style, and they fit perfectly here. I love collecting trinkets, and the map is huge! The map design is excellent! There's really very little to criticize, perhaps just a small suggestion to consider moving to SDL3 in the future. The download links didn't work for me in Chromium, but they did in Firefox. Also, I really appreciate that you release your games for GNU/Linux. I use Debian, so that's a big plus for me. Congratulations on a great entry, I'm already looking forward to your next game!
Good job for a custom game engine
You need to add coyote time when jumping
Thanks a lot for your feedback!
@milq I've been using Debian for almost 20 years now, this is by far my platform of choice. But hey, I still have to target MS Windows :grin:
@heviosso I used to customize Emscripten's HTML, but not anymore, too much of a hassle ( I'll have a look into Emscripten's shell_minimal, though).
@Hinamarina Indeed, I'm also a huge fan of the Megaman X series!
@0x-void-x0 To avoid running in circles, don't forget you have a minimap ( by pressing Enter ).
@gdman There's no persistence in my engine at the moment. This definitely is something I'll have to add, considering the size of the map!
@henk The conveyor issue was unexpectedly hard to diagnose (but easy to fix). This is the price for using a homemade physics system :grin:
About SDL3 vs SDL2: I'm currently SDL2 fluent, I don't know anything about SDL3, and I'm definitely not going to try to learn it during a game jam. Only a very small portion of the engine code actually depends on SDL. Porting it to SDL3 is a non-topic : the day it will be needed, it will be a matter of a few days. But hey, there are lots of things a lot more interesting to do in this codebase!
About the coyote time: not having coyote time is a deliberate design choice (I might have to mention it in the game description for future game jams). I'm not going to make the game frustrating on purpose, but I think that providing the player with *some amount* of real challenge (=not everyone will win) is a mark of respect ( In this vein, I deeply respect Blasphemous ), a lot more than silent handholding when doing difficult jumps. The platformers I take inspiration from don't have coyote time ( and are probably better off without ).
Anyway, thanks again for playing and rating, I wish you all a lot of fun with this (and future!) Ludum Dare!
A stylish and well-made platformer! I spent at least 30 minutes exploring the map, swimming through caverns, and dodging spikes.
The map could use a bit of improvement — it currently doesn’t show which trinkets you’ve already collected, which makes it harder if you revisit a place after dying or falling. I also wish the jumps were just slightly stronger — I felt like I was missing that extra bit of reach in a few places.
I’ll admit I didn’t manage to collect all the trinkets — I died in another trap (but I was so close, I swear!). Still, it’s a great concept. Thank you so much!
I can agree with some of the commenters here. The controls and movements are highly reminiscent of Mega Man X.