Zombie Fisticuff Quarrel by deps 2010-08-23T16:18:00
Punch the zombies! Quite a solid 48-hour game. The graphics do an excellent job of conveying meaning. Sorry, no rating for sound because my VM that Gosu runs on doesn't do sound.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Jamin
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | It's a Platformer | compo | 154 | 3.50 | 3.28 | 3.35 | 3.80 | 3.92 | 2.44 | 3.17 | ||||
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | It's a Sliding Puzzle | compo | 392 | 3.05 | 2.42 | 3.45 | 3.40 | 3.45 | 2.16 | 2.29 | 2.77 | |||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Please Don't Step on My Hat | jam | 2.25 | 2.20 | 2.40 | 3.20 | 2.65 | 2.50 | 2.83 | |||||
| 2012 | 24 | Evolution | Many Mans and the Mutant Clones from Space | compo | 697 | 2.25 | 2.50 | 1.74 | 1.33 | 1.77 | 1.71 | 1.74 | 60 | |||
| 2011 | 21 | Escape | Where's the Bathroom? | compo | 481 | 1.69 | 1.69 | 1.38 | 2.62 | 1.83 | 1.00 | 1.29 | 2.86 | |||
| 2010 | 18 | Enemies as Weapons | Squibble Attack | compo | 160 | 1.86 | 1.50 | 2.60 | 3.00 | 2.00 | 9 |
Punch the zombies! Quite a solid 48-hour game. The graphics do an excellent job of conveying meaning. Sorry, no rating for sound because my VM that Gosu runs on doesn't do sound.
The website is down. The website is down. (trigger glowy sticks and flashing lights)
Ah, there it goes.
Oh no! Windows binary is missing the MSVC redistributable and running the source straight through Python is giving me an error.
AttributeError: 'property' object has no attribute 'setter'
The installer does not seem to run under Wine.
I'll give it a try sometime after I've rebooted into Windows.
Gives me a weird complaint about not having OpenGL 2.0 and exits. I'd try to figure out what the problem is, but I can't seem to find your source.
Will give it a go sometime after I reboot into Windows.
Playable game. I'm a bit disappointed that it can't be played by two people right off the bat. Also, those graphics aren't doing their job... I had to read through your explanation three times to get what I was supposed to be doing.
You might not think it, but it's actually a lot more fun to read bits about your weekend game-development endeavor. Concept sketches, WIP screenshots, banter about what you're working on at the given moment... hell, throw in photos of your food and pets if you really have to.
Keep at it; I appreciate your hard work in producing this game and I look forward to seeing your work come the next Ludum Dare!
Alright, so I've decided...
The name of this game is actually "Squibble Tea Party".
The Squibbles want to invite the Whomp to their tea party, but the Whomp isn't fond of that idea because Squibbles tend to get excited and explode in groups.
I might be able to host the binary for people to play via a PuTTY session to a server... but first, I really want to know how the theme applies.
Hah! I got it to bug out on level 4. Guy died and it didn't switch me back to my character. No idea what to do on level 5.
Nice take on the theme!
I think something like a simple two-frame walk would have done wonders to round-out the look of the game.
Also, I don't get what the others are griping about... space, control, and starting from the beginning when you die all work fine by me, but I'll admit that it *does* bug me that you have a "click to start" in a two-handed keyboard game.
Doesn't seem to run under Wine. I'll take another look once I've rebooted into Windows.
Looks like I'm not the first to say, but Xander, you're using the entire sprites as collision boxes in a game with an angled view. Think about where the characters are standing. If you want to be really nice to the player, try a radius-based collision centered around the characters' feet.
Your game is awesome and complete. Everything ties in amazingly well for a game developed in 48 hours. All the more reason for me to be aggrevated that your journal is empty and the only coverage of your game dev expedition that I can locate is what little is on your Twitter feed!
I really look forward to seeing more of your work. I hope to see you at the next Ludum Dare. And I really hope to get some insight into Xander's 48 hours the next time around.
Does not seem to run under Wine.
I'll give it a try sometime after I've rebooted into Windows.
Mind packing in a copy of the MSVC redistributable with your game?
Ahg, the website is down! I'd like to try out the Linux build.
Is there an affine transformation (camera) for the game that you could adjust? I think this game would work a lot better zoomed in.
Aside from that, there's a lot the graphics could do to convey meaning in this game. Currently it is completely up to the player's imagination to determine when the blades are in the air (dangerous) and on the ground (not dangerous). Even after playing for a while, I have no idea what the blast radius is for the player's attack. Also, since the player is stationary on the screen and the game field is relatively empty, the ground could *really* use a tile pattern of some sort (it would help me with judging distance while playing).
After having played this game, I will remember to never give a robot a knife.
Don't have any Apple products, but this is the kind of game I'd catch myself playing from time to time on my phone.
I do feel like the game needs more incentive for playing well... as it is, slowly wiping out turrets one at a time (spending as little time in the cross-fire as possible) is a more effective strategy than dashing into the midst of things and trying to wipe them out quickly.
This game is gorgeous. If the sound didn't skip I'd be tempted to rank it a five.
The controls for the dialog are wonky. Try disabling the button for the first half-second that a new dialog is displayed... that might correct all the problems.
Fun little game! Straight-forward and has a very nice pace to it.
I did catch myself realizing a bit late that I had evolved. I guess the new icons on the screen should have been evidence enough, but I was naturally expecting more of a Mario-style grow/shrink sort of thing.
Oh, however, GAH, chording E+D to dash right. Maybe throw a key like that on shift instead? My fingers will love you for it.
I'll have to go back and play Asylum, and I look forward to playing more games built by you. Thanks for the awesome!
Bit of a strange game. Placing traps/perks wasn't immediately intuitive. I'll have to see if I can corner a buddy to give head-to-head gameplay a try. I *think* the game will play out very rocks-paper-scissors-ish, but I don't quite have the split-personality to confirm that.
The audio and visuals are beautiful... though I'm not too sure that needs to be said. : )
I know he's going to lose, but... but I have to vote for him! I just have to!
This is a really fun game that you've made here. Although I'm not sure (at all) how the breed / mutate sliders work.
Bronze on every level, three gold so far, and still working my way through.
Have to agree with some of the other feedback here. A cooldown timer of about half a second when you get an alternate tile would help a lot. Perhaps accompanied by a sound.
Developing patterns was a lot of fun, but I ended up playing *really* slow in anticipation that I'll be given an alternate tile at any moment.
Fun game. Different. I really like that it's open to the player to choose which cells to go with.
Kinda wish there was a break-down of how I did on all of the stages at the end of the game.
I also really wish there was a time limit... or maybe a cell limit that would trigger a game-over. If the player makes poor choices, it can be much quicker to restart the entire game than to try and switch strategies.
Very impressed with the variety of cell behaviors. For how time-limited this competition was, you still managed to make each behavior work very well.
That makes a lot of sense.
I can think of one more game mechanic that could be useful for squeezing gameplay into a tight development time schedule. "Hold X to restart level." If you've ever played Osmos, this is the mechanic they used if you're likely too small to continue. By leaving it as an option, it lifts the burden of worrying about whether or not your conditions are too stringent.
I really like the warp flowers that send you back to the beginning. Oh, those are spikes? Okay, that makes sense.
Serious-like, the stuff that kills you doesn't always stand out and after zooming in (Chromium's page zoom), I can honestly say that I'd prefer playing this game at about half the resolution with those beautiful graphics in their full glory.
You've created a solid platformer here that I will have to come back to beat. Awesome stuff.
Fantastic game. Of the games I've played so far, this game really embodies the theme.
The tutorial was helpful, but after three or four pages I went wall-of-text and immediately clicked through to the main menu.
I think you've given yourself far too much criticism with the tutorial. The information provided is very condense... the problem that I have with it is that it tries to explain too much. For such an intuitive game, I don't think you really needed too much more than to let the player know what he can click.
Not being entirely sure whether one seed is an improvement over another is part of the charm of this game. I did appreciate that the inventory is auto-sorted, but I would have appreciated the game significantly less if I wasn't sometimes forced to just guess.
The only part of this game that really leaves me disappointed is that there isn't a higher difficulty setting. After breezing through hard, I really feel like playing more, but there's nothing in this game that will be challenging at this point.
It was fun while it lasted. If you do revisit / improve this game in any way, I'd love to see it.
Wowhereallymovesfast.
I can't really comment on gameplay here. Looking around feels natural, but the moment I try to move forward, it feels like I'm wearing rocket shoes. If you haven't already, you might want to try just slowing down the player's walk speed and see if it benefits the gameplay.
Gameplay aside, the aesthetics of the game are nice and it's a classy theme. I would be interested in seeing future versions of this game.
Fun game. Having the text in small print down at the bottom of the screen chipped into the impact of the writing a bit. Would have loved seeing some still images to go along with the text (I get the impression that's where you were going with it), but the text would do just fine front and center too.
Oh, and mutants. MUTANTS! : D
I like the concept. Fun to mess around with, but after playing a few times, I really don't understand what the "evolve" option does or how it's meant to work. The vehicle I end up with seems to be completely random.
Great setup. Fun dialog. I beat it just to see the ending.
I ended up playing this game for a while without the whip because the Flash, as it is embedded on the page, was giving me problems (space bar was scrolling the screen, even when Flash had focus). Not being able to use the whip had an interesting impact on gameplay that I'd like to share.
Without using the whip, there are spirals that will eventually trap all of the enemies into small locations. While more fun, this unfortunately has the side effect of making the game fairly difficult to beat.
With the whip I was able to beat the game. However, with the whip, it honestly doesn't make a significant difference in gameplay whether the spiders were there or not.
Cool game. Really straight forward, so I'm just going to mention a few things that aren't necessarily good or bad, they just stood out.
* Bullets do not exist outside the screen, but enemies do.
* Ship hum effect sounds good, but loops poorly.
* Frequently clicking outside of the game.
* Gaming the evolution system makes for a dull play experience.
Congratulations on a dare completed!
@timtipgames, just hit me... the icon doesn't fade when you're out of ammo (restocking bar at the top right). Thank you for complaining about that! I'm not sure it would have ever occurred to me.
There are so many things I like about this game. It looks great, it controls great, it sounds great, it's genuinely fun.
But no matter how I slice it, it's a grind-house.
I'd like to throw out a couple thoughts on trying to seriously reduce grind.
With the distance increase, perhaps you could also increase the speed that ball travels. It'd greatly reduce the amount of time spent on levels that have already been beaten.
It could also help if it didn't feel like I was doing the *exact* same thing every play-through. I completely understand that there's an order to the levels. The gradual increase in level complexity is very nicely done and is quite a pleasure to jump into. You might be able to retain this excellent pacing by adding slight variations to each test and randomly selecting which variation of each test the player will be given each play through.
Interesting little game. I'm not sure how I feel about starting out invisible, it's a bit frustrating.
Dude, it's like you've totally been to my house. I listen to this kind of music all the time while doing everything. From making dramatic poses at my front gate and reading books to watching television and sitting around in inside the spare cardboard box I have sitting around my living room.
And you wear a motorcycle helmet around the house too? Awesome!
And sorry man, I made you a cookie, but I rated it.
It was good!
Thought I accidentally clicked on one of the images instead of the game link the first time I opened it.
Awesome work. The fact that all three segments of the game use the same map is what really sets this apart. Excellent level design.
Awkwardly enough, my favorite part of the game is the very beginning. Most of the additions (including graphics and audio) felt oddly extraneous. If I didn't know better, I'd think it was some sort of jab in the side at more modern gameplay. However, knowing exactly what the Ludum Dare crunch does to concepts, it plays out rather poetically about how less can be more in a Ludum Dare competition.
Fun game; the graphics and audio really rounded it out. Many thanks for a fine LD submission!
Nice to see that you're working on game physics post-competition. Practice goes a long way!
I like the randomly changing background pattern. And no, I'm afraid I can't name all the systems. Never did own a master system. : )
That's. Freaking. Awesome.
However, I have to personally recommend against doing this. Switching technologies mid-game is just asking for things to break, mid-game.
For a more casual audience (I beat the game, but to be fair, I personally tortured myself in high school playing through cruel, unforgiving games), you might consider widening the single blocks to two or three spaces.
I really hope to see you build more text-terminal-style games.
Like the game mechanic. Agree with other commenters, but I'm going to use the phrase "simply impossible to see".
And I'm not absolutely certain that they are the identical sound, but the "carrot shooting" and "bullet hits ground" sounds are practically identical. For this reason, listening to the audio is actually counter-productive to playing the game.
At the moment, it's just too difficult to play (for the wrong reasons), but with a few tweaks, I think this could be a really cool game.
After some random clicking, the game suggested that I let my followers on Twitter know that "I beat it mercilessly".
Touché.
And if I put pop tarts in my N-Gage... I could get a Nyan Cat.
Camera jitters. Otherwise a very fun, very playable game.
+1 falling off the edge of the world. : D
I agree with photex; this could be a real fun phone / tablet game. Replace space bar with tapping on a piece before picking it up.
Maybe consider dropping new pieces in a grid on the side rather than randomly placed. The wiggle effect is neat, but it seems to interfere with grabbing pieces.
Elegant, fun game.
From the technical front, the game is pretty neat. It's got a landscape, vehicles, units, AI, resources, scrolling, combat, menus, and building. Sure, it has rooms for tweaks and improvement, but it's all definitely working and completely playable.
All that said, I didn't particularly have fun playing this game. It could be that this game is intended as more of a sandbox or clicker and just isn't a game for me. If so, please don't mind the rest of this post, because I'm going to assume you were aiming for something a little more RTS.
With all the elements that need to be brought together to play the game, how is a beginning player meant to get started? Do they know how to select units? Do they know how to identify different units? Do they know what the different units are for? Do they know what to expect when a ship comes to attack?
On the strategy front, is there a reason that the builder doesn't do anything besides build, or conversely, that every other unit is capable of doing everything else? Are there any trade-offs between the "everything else" unit types, or are they effectively axe man lvl 1, lvl 2, lvl 3? Except for occassionally building a mine, what reason would I ever have to do anything besides building lvl 3 axe men?
I'm picking on these things in particular because it looks like you built everything you would need to get started. If I ran into this game outside of Ludum Dare, I wouldn't have played past my first death. To get me started playing, I'd bet those menus could be easily repurposed to point a couple things out. To keep me playing, just swapping around some of the unit skills would probably do the trick. Maybe only the builders can mine, then I'd have to decide between ramping up how quickly I'm building and having enough axe men around to keep me safe.
I hope you find this feedback helpful.
Awesome work! I hope to see future game jam submissions!
Conceptually very interesting. The audio and visuals are minimal, but nice. Good music!
The controls are fairly frustrating... new blocks and rotations are always at odds with each other, and I'm never completely sure which one is going to win out.
Smooth sliding on the cursor also feels inappropriate here. It's at odds with new blocks and rotations, but I can't see any reason that it has to be. Have you tried having the cursor move left/right without the smooth transition / without limiting how quickly it can move?
The last thing I'm going to say about the controls is a nitpick, but you might be surprised how much influence this little detail has on how responsive the controls feel. The game is responding to keypresses on key-up, not on key-down. I highly recommend swapping that around.
I was a little curious about how much impact my gameplay has on the overall score at the end of the game, so I let it run through eight times to get a feel for what the "default score" of the game looks like.
28, 15, 15, 9, 25, 6, 21, 45
My current high score: 91
Pretty sure my high score will be beat out by just restarting the game enough times. But I'm curious to see what strategies people come up with for this.
Very cool. Awesome work!
Oof. This game is completely unplayable on an Intel HD 5500.
@j-carlson whoah... so I did a bit of troubleshooting. Running the Web GL version because I'm not on a Windows machine. Chrome is running the game just fine, but under Firefox I'm getting framerate in the single digits. I'm not too sure why.
Thanks for the feedback on my game! It was quite an interesting challenge to build a Libretro game in 48 hours. Now that I have a lot of the technical details sorted out, I'm hoping to spend more time focusing on actual gameplay next LD.
I really like your game. It's a lot of fun and the core concept works very well.
Quick heads-up, I intentionally glossed over the front-matter for the game. Some of the feedback I'm about to give is from the perspective of a player that hasn't carefully read through anything before jumping in.
---
For anyone who's played a clicker, I think the shop layout is going to be far less intuitive than it should be. There are a few too many ques that suggest clicker gameplay-- some number that's increasing, some eye-candy that doesn't (initially) seem interactive, a series of buttons that are increasing in value, and the first couple buttons are entirely "increase the number" buttons.
By the time I launched a satellite, I was just slamming.buttons without worrying too much about the hover-text or what was going on with the main screen. Based on my previous experience with clickers, I figured that the satellites exploding was normal and random.
I can see from the comments that I'm not the only one who went down this path, so I figure I'll share my own perspective on what's going on that's getting people stuck on the clicker track of mind.
First, the game starts with something that's totally not part of the primary game mechanic. Something simple that I think is worth trying-- bump the player's starting money to 150 btc. If I had three options at the beginning, I doubt I would have been so quick to assume that the game is a clicker.
Second, the shop is ordered strictly by increasing cost. My clicker-monkey-brain just assumed that the different types of things were just associated with different eye-candy. If these were grouped (investors, defense, satellites, goal), even without labels, it would have given me pause to wonder why they are grouped that way.
Third, debris is incredibly subtle, at first. Even with the pop-up notifications to tell me that a satellite collided with debris, it took me quite a while to figure out that the dots weren't just a graphical effect and were indeed bad. I really wish I had some ideas for what could be done about this, but I'm totally drawing a blank here.
Fourth, the instruction / how to play short-text leaves no question about The Ark, but doesn't stress the main gameplay mechanic (moving satellites into orbit).
---
Outside of the whole clicker thing, I have a couple more quick thoughts.
Moving the moon distance out of the statistics view and onto the main screen would likely increase presence of an important game object that's otherwise completely invisible at the start of the game.
Laser satellite has a controller hint / reminder in the hover text. More of that would be awesome.
I'm going to stop rambling now.
Where should I keep an eye out for your game?
---
"a laser was destroyed colliding with Debris!"
Unfortunately, audio in the game isn't working for me.
The game is pretty solid. Very interesting take on the theme. Though the "we're running out of space!" messages seem forced, kind of like somebody telling a joke then jabbing me in the ribs to explain the joke and ask if I get it. (Yes, I get it.)
I really liked the not-entirely-related, spontaneous pop-up messages. The core concept of this game seems very effective-- conveying information about the game world and giving you a role in it, but it benefits from these sort of mini-breaks. I would definitely enjoy playing this kind of game with more padding between newspapers.
Awesome work!
Cool game. Style works well; content flows. It was doing some weird flickering thing-- not too sure what's up with that. Any reason not to let the player dismantle their own buildings? Also, I generally agree with the other comments about debris. Have you considered having an icon for debris and just letting it sit amongst the other structures? Might be a little more intuitive.
Neat game! The jar file ran fine on my machine. Should the exe file be marked as Windows only?
Does not seem to keep high score across game launch. Maybe this trace will help?
``` java.io.IOException: No such file or directory at java.io.UnixFileSystem.createFileExclusively(Native Method) at java.io.File.createNewFile(File.java:1023) at net.jumboturtle.game.TimerArena.save(TimerArena.java:331) at net.jumboturtle.game.TimerArena.gameOver(TimerArena.java:233) at net.jumboturtle.entities.Slime.update(Slime.java:46) at net.jumboturtle.game.TimerArena.update(TimerArena.java:129) at com.chaseplays.engine.Game.u(Game.java:41) at com.chaseplays.engine.Engine.update(Engine.java:204) at com.chaseplays.engine.Engine.run(Engine.java:276) at com.chaseplays.engine.Game.start(Game.java:27) at net.jumboturtle.game.TimerArena.main(TimerArena.java:71) ```
Just took a quick look at the source. I suspect the last two lines of `getSaveDir` are intended to set `saveDir` rather than `workingDirectory`.
@chaseplays no problem! One of the things I really like about the LD Compo is that we're all starting from scratch. None of us has 100k lines of freshly written code to troubleshoot.
On Linux, the game doesn't run unless xrandr is installed, which isn't really a problem but the error message doesn't give any hints about it. I don't... think this will be a problem for anybody else, but mentioning because I almost skipped past trying the game out.
... but I want to delay instability. : )
The audio on this is fantastic. The only thing that felt slighly out of place is one of the disasters has an effect that sounds similar to a "coin" effect for many other games.
I think there may be a resource leakage of some sort in the game. It gradually runs slower as I keep playing. Tested on both Firefox and Chromium.
And as others have mentioned, the strategy in this strategy game could use a lot of love. Given the game mechanics, I think you could prototype the strategy for this game entirely with pen and paper.
I actually like the "horrible font". The game has a nice feel to it... like a city builder in a small puzzle game. Didn't notice until the last level that the platforms don't reset when you reset the level. Also don't think I had any idea what was going on at all until about level three. Would be interested if there's any post-compo work on this one.
Love the game mechanic! Not sure the mines even need to be homing... between them, the "invisible" terrain, and treasure that spawns right next to terrain, there's plenty of stuff to accedientally crash into. That said, the only real critical feedback I have is that turning feels weirdly over-responsive based on how heavy the acceleration makes the submarine feel.
Fun little game. Simple, but the theme and game mechnic play well together. Controls almost got in the way though.
- clicking on a person's card is tricky... only their name counts; if you click on the stats it does nothing - the keyboard to start / mouse to play is a bit weird; was confused when keyboard did nothing during the game - seeing the game board before the game starts would be helpful; took three or four attempts to figure out what the game even wanted me to do
That last point is a little tricky. Given more time, I'd probably recommend tying in the intro with a very short UI tutorial. Maybe a quicker hack would be just letting the player see the first round of cards before starting the game. No real harm in giving the player the first round for free.
Everything else felt pretty good, and I definitely enjoyed playing.
Congrats on finishing this over the weekend! Also, happy to see I wasn't the only one attempting an old console game.
The music is nice. I would also like to suggest wwaaayyyy scaling down on the magnitude of the screen shake.
Really cool. The fixed resolution is a bit of a problem on the laptop I'm on (1368x768), and I think the prep menu (E) bugged out while I was playing. Otherwise, it's a simple concept very well executed.
@chaseplays it is a ten-second mechanic. The "missing piece" of the sliding puzzle randomly switches. Thanks for the feedback! : )
@vidarn I used Gimp for graphics design, Pan Docs as reference material, RGBDS as an assembler. I wrote / am writing my own simulator (https://github.com/acdimalev/gb-sim) to help with actually writing assembly code; which I can now say is _way_ not ready for public use, but I included the simulator tests in the source code if you want to take a peek. And the image processing is a couple one-off programs, also included in the source code. Oh, and _heavy_ use of entr for interactive coding.
@Steffo yeah, Chaseplays gave me a pretty good idea how confusing that was. The game layout had a column for UI at one point, but I cut that during the last two hours of development. I'll probably add a note in the description sometime today.
@monika thanks for the feedback! The game doesn't have sound. Didn't think to opt out of being rated on sound because I didn't use any borrowed / placeholder sounds.
@monika what emulator were you using by the way?
@infinitycore you beat me to trying it out on actual hardware! Mind, not sure when I would have gotten around to it. Just moved and most of my stuff is still in boxes. Actually happy to hear that nothing misbehaved; pretty sure that I've left out roughly half of the hardware initialization. What model did you play on?
@jimbly about an hour after submission, it did occur to me that it would be nice to be able to hold a button to see what the puzzle should look like. Probably could have implemented it pretty easily using the window overlay. Such is Ludum Dare. : D
@wouter52 updated the submission to remove the audio rating. Monika also stumbled over that. Glad you got a kick out of running a Gameboy ROM! I may try to set up an in-browser emulator for future submissions.
@danvil many emulators are easy to use once you figure them out, but I didn't want to leave anyone in the weeds and didn't have anything prepared ahead of time. Monika linked to a pretty simple to use emulator though.
https://gb.alexaladren.net/
Just click "Add a ROM from your PC" to upload `its-a-sliding-puzzle.gb` and it will start.
@spex130 & @commanderstitch thanks for playing and rating! If you get a chance, please let me know which emulator you played on. : )
This is... hilarious. Well done.
Same thing everyone else said about Firefox vs Chrome on the controls. Had to full-screen the game to get the interface up to a reasonable size for reading text. Overall it's a pretty cool game concept, but the controls don't do it justice.
The biggest hurdle I hit is that controls are pretty ambiguous until you hit spacebar. The instructions on the pause menu are super helpful. I think it would be a pretty big quality of life improvement to start the game paused after selecting the ship. Easy to dismiss if you already know what you're doing, and ensures first-time players see the instructions.
Other than that, I don't want to comment too much on the controls themselves. I have little doubt that a lot of effort was put into getting the controls to the state that they're currently at on such a short time scale. One thing that does stand out is that the targetting levers reset. Is there an important reason for that? It feels pretty weird that everything else remains static between detonations, but that one thing resets.
Awesome! Nicely animated, good use of sound, great game mechanic and game flow. The game is almost too big for my screen, which I have set to 768px vertical for practical reasons. Other than that, my only feedback is to please add the text for the controls (WASD to move, E to place bombs) to the splash screen.
I am a bit curious how / if you avoid placing objects over each other.
Pretty cool. Nice aesthetic and a concrete platformer. Very well done on getting the game physics to play nicely on this one. Handful of thoughts to pass along.
- Volume envelope on the jumping sound effect in particular needs to come way down. Had to turn the volume low enough that I wasn't able to enjoy the music while playing. Sad. - I like the view distortion, but it really gets in the way of the horizontal and vertical portions of the game. If you weren't already considering it, maybe a small delay so it doesn't kick in on the sections where you have to tap forward briefly? - Pretty sure I was running on air (above the platforms) at the end of the game. Not sure if intentional.
Last score and high score on the game over screen would be a solid and likely simple addition. If there was music, either it didn't play for me, or the sound effects were mixed way too loud. I do like the old arcade game feel, and I can tell the rate of cannon fire slowly speeds up. A little confused why the player is in front of the cannon while standing still but behind the cannon while moving.
Solid concept. I'm not convinced that this game is running as intended on my machine. The echos move very slow, and firing is not synchronized / they fire well before they reach the location where I originally fired.
@bosco sent. Please do me a favor and mention Ludum Dare when you first message me. I'm not great at keeping track of contacts.
Nice game flow. Had to stop after excellent to give my wrists a break.
Quick thought for early-game balance. You might want to try adding a delay before the rifts eat the fairies. I'm pretty sure it won't negatively affect mid-to-late gameplay at all. But with the pace that the game starts at, the rifts feel a bit like a random game-over.
Wow... I haven't seen someone work on a hobbyist PC since I was a kid. Awesome to see you building games for the system during LD, and congrats on finishing this entry!
Would love to see this polished. Any post-jam plans for this? The game mechanics seem interesting, but there doesn't seem to be any real space to learn them. Others have commented on the first jump and the difficulty curve. The few levels I did manage to get past were pretty fun after I figured out some of the basics, and I did enjoy the challenge.
Aside from that... walking left from the starting screen seems to soft-lock the game. : )
Nice, fun, and simple game!
2023-01-12-084011_1368x768_scrot.png
It took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. The drop-off mechanic is obvious enough once you see it, but seems pretty unlikely that anyone will accidentally make it back to the beginning corner without intentionally doing so. Post-compo, I think a demo play running on the title menu would be great here. Or maybe flash "drop off at the start" the first time the tractor is half full each play.
@mihkelroomet thanks for pointing out the audio rating! I had the opt-out checkboxes invterted. x _ x
@clyde quick reminder that I haven't tested on actual hardware! I don't think I've done anything dangerous to an actual system in the code for this game, but I can't make promises around things I haven't tested... .
@clyde hah, awesome! And I hadn't noticed while working on the game... not a fan of the default colors on the system, but they almost looks intentional on the game.
Thanks for sharing!
@antoniothereis @terracottafrog with the present mechanics and (hardware) limits on stage size, the complexity ceiling turned out quite low. Pretty happy I managed to get this one across the finish line. I grossly underestimated how much time it would take me to ad-hoc graphics that read well-enough.
@stephenwhoskins @epicgamefan congrats on building your game during the jam! It looks and sounds nice. I personally have an extremely hard time reasoning about the limitations of tools like GB Studio, so I'm afraid I don't have much constructive criticism to offer.
@epicgamefan yeah. It's my third game jam building a Game Boy game. There's a learning curve, both with learning how the hardware works and how to get stuff done with the processor. But so far I'm finding it pretty easy to take something I've done once before and repeat it.
Quick caveats. I've been experimenting with writing Game Boy games for a couple years, and I do have a lot of experience writing C code to lean on.
For this game, I wrote one small program that slices up the sprite graphics to make them easier to draw on screen, and another small program that compiles a bunch of PNG files into level data. Both of these are included in my source code. Doing things this way gives me less assembly code to write, and less code that the Game Boy has to run. A couple years ago I was doing this by hand and I heavily recommend against it. Totally worth the trouble of making my computer do it for me.
I didn't leave myself with much time to work on the game code this time around, so I basically tried really hard not to do anything too unfamiliar. The game code is probably worse off for it. Doing anything with the Game Boy processor can be really difficult because it's 8-bit and doesn't have many registers. Unfortunately, I don't have any great suggestions for anyone wanting to learn because I've found it incredibly difficult and time consuming trying to write assembly code, load it up in an emulator, see what it's doing, and then go back and make a change. So much so that I wrote a simulator this past year to help me with that.
https://github.com/acdimalev/gb-sim
@fmdkdd MGBA does that out of the box. I was using it immediately prior to writing the simulator. It's pretty neat, but I found it extremely difficult to test my GB code with more GB code. Here's a screenshot to give you an idea of what kind of thing I set myself up to look at when I'm working on unfamiliar routines.
2023-01-19-200352_1368x768_scrot.png
@samuli thanks for sharing the photo!
The audio in this game is great. Interesting puzzle mechanics.
It may be too hard to pull off during a game jam, but I think this game would benefit a lot from a rewind mechanic. It takes a lot of time to replay a level, so I found myself spending more time memorizing the sequence of moves to win than actually thinking about the puzzles.
Smaller nit-picks... . The sides of the cubes aren't particularly visible, so it would help to have the vest be either a front texture, or a slightly larger cube that wraps around the monster. And unless you memorize all of the stats, it's very easy to miss the hearts and souls decreasing; even something as simple as flashing the numbers a different color when they drop could help a lot here.
Glad to see the lore screen included in the game. : )
I can see that you're using drift to smooth out the controller inputs. Maybe dial this back and get diagonal inputs working?
Random variation on enemy speed helps spread out the monsters some. Having some of the monsters (maybe just the bats) more around randomly rather than following the player may be an easy way to add more variety to this kind of gameflow. I'm also noticing that sometimes the monsters spawn very close to the player.
Nice concept! The soft-lock and end screen are a little rough. I do see how the soft-lock might be difficult to fix depending on how you structured the game code. End screen could use some background text like "final score" to hint what's going on there.
2023-01-09-185144_584x228_scrot.png
I do like your use of the flapping mechanic, but the button mashing is a bit much for the gameplay involved. If I'm not mistaken, the "burden" penalty to flapping is gradually increased with each stick... this makes it somewhat hard to pick up on until you hit ten sticks and you also get a visual cue. I think either increasing the hover time (time between upward and downward momentum) or changing the burden penalty to only increase every say... three sticks (to make the change more dramatic), could help out a lot here.
The graphics work for the game. With this art style, I think it's actually a good thing that you didn't include a background. No visual confusion about what's going on as it is.