You Have to Dye by Dialock 2013-09-02T00:48:00
A striking representation of what hell might be like for colourblind people :P
Has a surprisingly compelling core mechanic! And I like the bizarre nature of the storyworld.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → 4xisblack
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | Green Dragon | compo | 55 | 3.87 | 3.79 | 3.97 | 3.21 | 3.14 | 3.72 | 3.77 | 51 | ||
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Armageddon | compo | 800 | 2.81 | 2.09 | 3.46 | 3.86 | 3.45 | 2.22 | 2.18 | 3.39 | 51 |
A striking representation of what hell might be like for colourblind people :P
Has a surprisingly compelling core mechanic! And I like the bizarre nature of the storyworld.
I find it interesting that although the game gives me enough information to position my cursor properly before anything bad happens, I still prefer to try reacting to feedback at the last possible moment. This might be because our eyes are better at detecting motion in peripheral vision than, say, reading those numbers as they count downward.
I should point out that knowing you can click the timeline to skip back and forth is pretty critical to making the interface usable. You may want to leave a note in the instructions up there, as it was not obvious to me at first.
Once you get a hold of how to manipulate the timeline this thing becomes remarkable. It is, perhaps, the smartest implementation of tactical puzzling I have ever seen.
The ability to instantly and partially reconfigure any one of your characters' behaviours resolves many of the frustrations inherent in squad tactics games (losing after a long fight, making a superficial error and dying/having to reload, etc...). It also permits much finer balancing of tactical situations because as a designer you can think about individual moments rather attempting to balance an entire encounter so that there are enough (but not too many) solutions.
Just off the top of my head I can think of several AAA games that would have benefited from this variant on the rewind mechanic: Baldur's Gate (also Dragon Age, etc...); Rainbow Six; Commandos. Essentially any game where the point is to emphasize tactics and configuration puzzles above reflexes and risk/tension. You could also very easily turn this into an actually-good version of the insipid 'hacking' minigames we see all over the place. You could do all kinds of stuff with this.
TROPES VS DRAGONS IN VIDEOGAMES: Dragons in Distress
Makes me feel nostalgia for my days messing around with RPG Maker XP which is pretty cool. I like the idea that the protagonist is lost in one of the roughly-sketched worlds we made (and soon abandoned) as adolescents.
TABURU FRIPPU! Adopts the dynamics of a pre-NES era action game (albeit with a larger health meter than we may have expected back then :P) which is neat.
Having myself spent months working on a randomly-generated runner in the past I know how annoying writing good generation algorithms is, and this one is pretty damn convincing for 48 hours! The visual aesthetics remind me of Action Button's ZiGGURAT (my favourite mobile game!) so that is cool too. I like the concept of a guy trying to run way from what is obviously an unavoidable death; it's delightfully morbid. Music is catchy.
It does seem apparent from the inclusion of a 30 second run that the final design ended up somewhat far afield from the theme :P
I like that you have to both find the instructions you actually need and then attempt to flood the remainder of your queue with whatever worthless 'turnabouts' are available so that you don't crash into a wall. An interesting take on the whole 'RoboRally' thing.
I like the disorienting feeling of moving between spaces in the dark, especially when it leads to creepy dead ends.
Nice choice on the audio; I can still hear that pulse thing buzzing in my head.
Nicely done. I was able to complete two of the three necessary steps before resorting to your walkthrough (WHY/HOW WOULD/COULD YOU EVEN GLUE THAT THERE :P)
Super pretty. The thruster trails are an excellent touch, especially given how the ship flips around when you bank.
A fun little concept executed well. Nice touches on the level select screen; it looks quite striking. Given how large these towers need to get I may have appreciated a bit less delay between block spawns (and a bit finer precision on the spins).
Yay personal games that are actually about things! Ludum Dare could use more of these IMO.
I am not sure whether you intended the ending to be an infinite black screen with breathing noises in the background, but I certainly hope you did because it was intimate and bizarre and cool.
The crazy air acceleration is actually pretty fun once you get used to it. Oh cactusman; why must you be so aerodynamic?
Nice! That there is a solid puzzle progression, and the tension imposed by the 10 second time limit is well balanced.
I brought this to work today to play it with a coworker. It is, indeed, pretty awesome with 2 players. The characters offer a surprising amount of variation. I played the ghost guy and my coworker played the twins; at one point (when Giant Mode was on) my player got sandwiched in between them and they dragged me around for a while. Was hilarious.
Looks great; nice cohesive pixelly aesthetic. Surprisingly addictive despite its simplicity. Love that shooting sound! Would liked to have seen a more thoughtful integration of the 10 seconds theme, as I suspect the game could benefit from a bit more of a sense of rhythm.
I like the idea that purgatory is a sort of badly-gamified and largely inequitable bureaucratic ladder into heaven. It's as if god read half of one book on gamification and thereby judged himself qualified to revolutionize the whole 'afterlife' thing.
Amusingly, the consequences are exactly what we game designers might predict: When you reward all gameplay with superficial 'achievements' and other scorekeeping systems your players lose any intrinsic motivation to explore those systems for their own sake.
This is a damn good looking game for a compo entry! I hadn't heard of Stencyl prior to checking out this project; it seems pretty cool as a high-level game maker thing, but something about this SWF it has made is causing maaaajor lag even though Flash is theoretically more than capable of drawing that stuff efficiently. Even on Chrome (and with a screaming fast processor) I'm getting quite a bit of lag.
I suspect it has to do with those torch light halo effects. Are they done with vector graphics?
A very solid puzzle platformer in the tradition of Braid (especially given the 48 hour time constraints :P)
I actually kinda liked the janky movement; gives the experience a bit more character.
Damn this thing is big! Amazing you could get this much done in a weekend. It was a lot of fun to poke around the game world; I'd be curious to see this thing in a more exploration-y style instead of the current challenge-based style(I personally could do without the spikes/hitpoints, for example; it's enough for me just to move around as a ball).
Well balanced! I also like the way it looks.
This is my first 5 star game of the jam! The art, lore, humour and music all coordinate to produce something truly striking. Miss u Phil Horse D:
Cool! I like the idea that the character I'm controlling has to communicate the nature of this mysterious other dimension to me verbally.
Cute! I the lo-fi style of putting iconic on top of photographs; it plays well with the sound effects to produce a unique gameworld. I also think the circle of life metaphor is pretty clever and ties in well with the theme :D
Thanks for the feedback y'all! I've corrected the bug to do with spin direction feeling reversed.
Having the little hearts beep when you're overtop your partner is a skilful narrative touch! I also appreciate that you included some nice accel/deccel in the platforming physics; there's a good sense of sticky friction going on.
Clever! Funny! Compelling! You've got yourself a videogame here.
I thought the lack of visibility was interesting, but paired with the unforgiving combat mechanics it can feel a bit muddy.
My hypothesis: If you iterate on the combat stuff a little (some invulnerability time after taking damage, some more transparent attack feedback) I think you'll find people start to enjoy the light/shadow thing more :D
Cute character design!
That old man didn't need those crops anyway! Not where he was goin'.
I think this game is very cute, and I found the platforming bits at the end surprisingly compelling.
Cool! I like the way this game looks: The concentric rings are very evocative, and the trails are a nice touch.
While the collision mechanics do make for a couple of interesting puzzles, I'd be interested in trying a version of this game where destructive collision could not occur; there would be less resetting that way, and I think it would move the game more towards cultivating your own little solar system rather than merely accomplishing arbitrary tasks.
I like the physics! It's fun to careen around bashing things with your trailer; would be even more fun if you could blow up pirates that way :P
This fits well within the emerging genre of asymmetrical couch coop games I've seen around the internet lately; it'd be great for parties and whatnot. I like the unique take on the theme! I also like that the godfather will lie to you; it creates interesting moments where two people accuse one another :P
Bullet hell games are not my usual thing so this was a bit of a crash course for me, but I'm happy to report I got through it. That was cool! The art looks beautiful in that retro-modern way; the rock-like red heart is super evocative. The explosions are well-animated and feel crunchy. I found the bullet hell mechanics fairly compelling. Well done :D
The music is really well-suited to the visual direction; together with the sparsity of the gameworld they create a powerful sense of isolation.
I also like the spotlight effect that happens during combat! The space invaders mechanic is not fun in the traditional videogame sense, BUT I think it makes for a weird/cool narrative device.
Cool! I like that the controls take some getting used to; they are sort of Flappy Bird-esque in that way (and I mean that as complimenet :P). The narrative arc (asteroids -> space ships -> screen flip -> big ships -> lunar lander) helps build tension as you get progressively further, and I like the symmetry it brings to the game (is also very appropriate for the theme).
The completely procedural graphics and sound make for a pretty authentic 'retro' feel. I was able to work out the timing between worlds with some simple experimentation, and from there the solutions became clear. Well done!
This game has a cool look!
It was fun once I got the hang of the economies involved. Scored about 800 :P
The art style on the letters is pretty neat! It'd be cool to see it applied to a larger project at some point :D
Definitely achieves that broughlike feel, which I find super impressive for a compo :D
A remarkable throwback to the era of Commander Keen. 5 stars :D