nitesh 2026-10-19 07:37 ♥ 1
Damn fun to play! Best part is when elements from one game go into the other!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD60 → Dr Break Boom Invaders
By jimbly
| Percentile | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | LD60 | Ever | |
| Overall | 17 | |||||
| Fun | 17 | |||||
| Innovation | 17 | |||||
| Theme | 17 | |||||
| Graphics | 17 | |||||
| Audio | 17 | |||||
| Humor | 15 | |||||
| Mood | 17 | |||||
Damn fun to play! Best part is when elements from one game go into the other!
I new about stress before.. But damn 😆 Very nice idea, and execution. 👍
Love how I have to continually choose a game to neglect for a while so I have enough attention to split between the others. Invaders killed me most often; I could always send pills from Dr. Mario into Kaboom as extra HP, and blocks in Dr. Mario never built up fast enough to be a threat when the Breakout ball would make a trip through every so often. Probably should've directed the ball over to Invaders more.
High score 9196. Feels like it has a really high skill ceiling by game jam standards, and I'm nowhere near it.
Funny concept! It was fun figuring out how to "cheat" in each minigame, invaders definitely felt the hardest since even when you get the ball in there it requires micromanagement to keep it bouncing, in addition to it having a slow movement speed so last moment saves are harder. All of the other minigames felt like they had downtime where they could be safely ignored.
Oh boy my brain hurts now. Great stuff, the CRT effect is... *chef's kiss*
@nitesh Thanks for playing! Yeah, the elements going from one game to another wasn't even part of my original plan, but pivot during the jam, and I'm glad I did!
@incd021 I'm sorry to have caused you stress -_-
@jacobwinters Yeah, Invaders is the easiest to die in, multiple times I considered give you multiple HP in that one, but it didn't seem quite as true to the original, and it's good to have some impending doom, I think =). Very nice score!
@kaliuresis Also a very nice score! Luckily if the ball is in Invaders I don't count it against you if you miss it (same with the falling blocks, where there's no way to catch it), but Invaders still needs a lot of attention =)
@adam-gould Thanks for playing, and sorry about your brain.
Somehow my first run went pretty well 😄 Maybe my health values at the end are interesting for you:
Bildschirmfoto 2026-10-21 um 11.45.35.png
Some notes: * It was a nice twist when the wall started to break. But it made Dr. Mario basically a non issue * Kaboom was pretty easy, I didn't fully understand when you actually get game over there * Space Invaders is (as already mentioned by others) the hardest one. I actually ignored it for the most part at the begining, because I thought it would solve itself with time. But then noticed halfway through my run that I only have one heart left there and had to put some focus there 😄 * The slow movement in Invaders felt off. Even when I focused my intention there the movement didn't seem right
Cool entry!
I had a chuckle when my breakout ball broke out of its lane and started wrecking other stuff. It turned an already chaotic game into something more with extra strategy. Juggling all the lanes at the same time was hard and stressful, I didn't expect to lose due to space invaders but somehow I did, because I was too focused on the other games and trying to get the ball into dr mario since that was easier to solve than waiting for RNG colors while timing it with the other lanes.
Really fun combination of games but I don't think I'm going to try and beat the current high score lol
I had a real blast with this. I'm a sucker for the aesthetic. (Thank you for offering a setting to turn CRT filter off though!) It's such a relief when you finally get some walls down so the ball can wander off and let you focus on the other lanes more for a while. My brain also appreciated the rising-tone for score combo (I think I hit +30 or something at one point?).
Really great entry!
@oadt Thanks for playing, and that looks like a high score! In Kaboom (or, my variant of it), you lose when all of the blocks at the bottom get destroyed, and the Dr Mario blocks could be used to patch it back up. It clearly should have ramped up its difficulty quicker!
@frib Glad you liked it! And yeah, though I really enjoyed making this and find it fun, I'm also not going to try to beat the high scores 😆.
@nondev Yeah, the ongoing combo of Breakout is so much fun, glad you enjoyed the sound FX there, I'm pretty happy with how all those turned out together.
I really like the DOS vibe. The walls of random characters, and the way everything loads in piece by piece when you unpause are pretty hype. Some thoughts:
* It was fun moment realizing the games could "break out" of their containers and spill into other games. There are only the couple features that do this, but they both add some interesting strategy to the game. * I used d-pad on a controller, which felt pretty good (even if it's slightly less precise than a keyboard). I'll usually take controller over keyboard when it's available. * A couple quality of life suggestions might be a way to skip the tutorial, and also a way to pause but still see the levels/hearts/etc. First playthrough, all my attention was on the gameplay, and I couldn't look down long enough to figure out how the UI worked. * Invaders is where the game's difficulty curve comes from. Since the aliens always advance, it's the main timer you have to pay attention to, and the increasingly large stacks mean you have to spend a larger percentage of your time each loop dealing with those aliens. Without Invaders, I think you could hold right and continue to gain points indefinitely.
Final strategy:
* I held right for most of the run. It kept Dr. Mario from ever filling up, gave Kaboom a constant resupply, and kept the Kaboom bucket at that resupply location. * Holding right or left lets you keep the Breakout ball in a single column, so you can keep every game at roughly the same location without having to move far. It also means less points from Breakout, but most of my score was focused on Kaboom. * Most of the action happened between breakout ball hits. For the first half of the game, I spent that time moving left and right gaining more points/levels in Kaboom. * The second half of the game was still spent holding right, but in survival mode. Occasionally, I'd need to gain lives in Breakout, so I would clear a couple levels there, and just ignore Kaboom for that moment (since it was my main scorer, it always had plenty of lives). * Surviving Invaders was trickiest. Sometimes I'd have to drop everything else to clear out some of the aliens. But if I wasn't in a rush, I could keep the "hold right" strategy going by moving Breakout and Kaboom to the left edge, holding left for a bit longer, and then moving Breakout and Kaboom back to the right edge before the Breakout ball made its next hit. That let me slowly inch the Invaders ship towards the middle where it gets more hits. * Since Invaders is the game's main timer, the slower I can level it up, the longer I have before the game gets out of hand. Keeping my ship to the right did an alright job, since it hits a low number of aliens, and always clears one column at a time (and each column removed slows their descent). * I didn't try this, but the optimal Invaders strategy is probably to avoid clearing each level as long as possible, and then (whenever lives are availalbe) losing a life just before clearing. That keeps Invaders at the lowest level for as long as possible. * I just ignored Dr. Mario. The only times I leveled up there were when then Breakout ball entered the area and cleared the level for me.
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One of my favorites so far (but bear in mind I haven't played that many entries yet 😅). The DOS theming makes me nostalgic for the time I used to make QBasic games on an old PC as a kid (the smiley character was the protagonist of a handful of platformers, and even a fighting game of sorts).
@sudocoffee Wow, what a score! Great strategy, too. I guess my variation on the traditional _Kaboom!_ gameplay (in which you lose if you fail to catch 3 bombs) made it too easy to game 😆. For the visuals drawing in, it's fun, but I had to set the virtual terminal's baud rate to Infinity during gameplay otherwise it was just terrible 😅.
@wendel-scardua Thanks for playing! Yeah I've got a lot of nostalgia for that same period, clearly =).
As other's have mentioned, it was really satisfying when the break-out ball went to the other lanes. Also a bit of a respite. It did feel quite overwhelming but the game had a nice amount of margin so that it didn't just end right away. Instead as the minutes added up, even though it felt like I struggled and only looked at the two left-most lanes, it got more and more exciting. I think I got a decent score in the end.
Both the ascii visuals and the shaders on top of that felt really nice.
Really good game!
Play-through with more feedback. Or well I was so focused I was silent a whole lot in this one 😆 But some comments here and there: https://youtu.be/or0B2cQo-Gk
@local-minimum Thanks for playing and sharing the video! I don't normally do high-intensity games, so it was very fun to watch and listen to where you go dead silent having to concentrate on what's going on 😆.
What an incredible frankenstein of games you have made here. I really liked the concept and the interactions between the games. I had never played Kaboom but the rest were very familiar and that one was easy enough to pick up. The audio was great (if anachronistic) and the visuals with the text were really well done. I found the CRT curve effect a little over the top, so maybe separate options for the curvature and scanlines would be nice. Well done and thanks for sharing this.
@bentglasstube I also had never played Kaboom, but I'd implemented 4 games, and one of them was bad (I actually cannot even remember what game it was at this point, jam-fatigue, I guess!), so I started looking at old Atari games that could be played with paddles moving only left and right and it seemed like a good fit, with some tweaks so it wasn't instant-death (though that made it a bit too easy). Thanks for playing!
I had to look through my Git history, and, oh, the original 4th game was ["Dodge"](https://web.archive.org/web/20180915075150/http://ludumdare.com:80/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=55346), an actual DOS game I made for LD37 - "Ancient Technology" which was a good fit thematically, but was too hard to multitask.
Good idea, but hard gameplay. For me, at least
Fun game, but hard! I like how the games start melting into each other after a while, becomes very chaotic. Would be nice if pressing down caused the tetris block things go down all the way immediately, since now I mostly just neglected it until it was too late, and maybe have a few seconds of downtime for the individual games once you beat them. Looks very cool too, very old techy. Nice entry!
This was so cool. Whatever part of your brain this tests I am sure I failed lol. I loved the vibe and the way the walls in between the games could break that was a cool doubling down on the idea,
I really loved the combination of these classic games and how they interact with each other. I'm not young, so it was not easy to keep up with all four of them, but I tried anyway 😄
The implementation of each game is great, the CRT effect is spot on, SFX and that they create a soundscape is so good, this all returns me back to 90s with simpler games, waiting for them to load from floppy forever, but still enjoying them.
They only non-intuitive thing for me was that I didn't track lives very well for each of the game, I had no idea when I'll lose any of the games to figure out the better strategy to be in the game for longer.
Here's my short play through:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlsJym7aI7w
@apoly Thanks for playing and recording a video! Yeah, I should have showed lives more prominently somehow, although I'm not quite sure how 😅.
@jimbly I got the idea of lives fast, I just didn't have time to learn/remember the rules when you lose a life in each game. It's not a big deal, and I'm sure on a more deliberate play through anyone will figure it out.
The best aspect of this game for me was sound. Stereo sound made me understand where something is going good or bad and thanks to that I managed to get 14k points
@online-play Thanks for playing, and glad you noticed the stereo effects! It was _really_ confusing before I added those and I'm happy with how that turned out. I wasn't sure if anyone would actually notice though, as it's, probably, mostly a subconscious thing that just feels right when it's working. Nice score!
Loved the throwback ASCII / DOS aeshetic. Instantly transported me back to 1993. I don't know if I possess the multitasking skill to truly excel at this combination of games simulataneously, but the idea is really great. Awesome implmentation, and great idea to use old classics in a new way. The difficulty seemed to ramp up in a fair way also, which I suspect might've taken some time to tune and balance. Fun entry!!
Great idea! Not only do the games run at the same time, they also interact with each other!
@yowdie Thanks for playing! My difficulty balancing worked out pretty well - for most of the games it was basically: figure out a difficulty at which if I was completely paying attention to just that game, I could barely survive, and set that as the level 99 difficulty, and interpolate the values between the starting difficulty and that 😆. I also basically halved the starting difficulty after watching my roommate play for the first time, which is about what I expect as usually near the end of a jam what I feel is "easy" is like twice as hard as easy should be 😅.
I am absolutely awful at multitasking, so I was shocked that I found this to be manageable! It wasn't *easy*, but I had fully expected to burn out as soon as I had two games running simultaneously. I suspect that a better player than I could keep track of the different game more easily, but for me it felt like an exercise in frantically figuring out exactly how much I could drop the ball on any one game before I had to give more attention to it 😅 I really appreciated the generous life count, which kept me from absolutely losing my mind as I played.
The first time breakout broke out and taught me that the games could interact with each other, it was such a fun surprise, and it completely changed the way that I was playing. I suspect this is part of why I found it manageable to juggle so many tasks at once; the interplay between the games made the whole experience feel as though it had combined into one meta-system. Great job making what could have been an overwhelming and disjointed experience feel like one cohesive whole! It feels so natural in the end product that it's easy to overlook, but that is some seriously impressive invisible design work!
All of the games felt great to play on the terminal display, with the minor exception of Space Invaders, which I never quite got the hang of. I've played plenty of LCD-based renditions of Space Invaders as a kid, and I would have expected the terminal display to play just as well as an LCD screen, but (for me) the low speed of the shots, the ship, and the aliens didn't read super well; I could never get an intuitive sense of the movement of either the aliens or my shots as having real velocities, so I could never quite figure out how to line up my shots such that they'd collide (which is why Space Invaders was the game that knocked me out 😂). Weirdly enough, I suspect I would have had a much easier time parsing things if the speed were doubled, because my brain would have interpreted the cell-by-cell movement as real motion. As it was right now, my brain kept interpreting everything as a strange turn-based system.
Overall though, this was really well done! I only bring up the issue that I had with Space Invaders because I think it could be useful feedback, *not* because it lowered my enjoyment of the overall experience. Great job with this :)
@koolruz Thanks for the detailed feedback, and glad you got into it! Yeah, I'm also not great at multitasking like this so I tuned it so that I was having fun with it 😆. I think you're right with the slow Space Invaders, although I think I had it faster and then I'd just look away for a moment and then look back and I was dead 😅. Maybe using the half-block characters like I did for the breakout ball would just have been better (gets effectively double the vertical resolution and therefore double the illusion of movement) and helped... It's definitely the game everyone struggled the most with.
Really enjoyed this one and I want to shout out the sound design because it was not overwhelming while playing 4 games at once. Some things that I thought about while playing: - Really cool that you can influence neighboring playing fields - most of the time, I forgot that the third game exists - The move speed was a little too fast for me for the 4th game, but was pretty good for the others. Not sure how to balance that properly. -
