My Dr Ian by maxking1234 2013-05-01T22:06:00
Nice simple platform game, the jumping feels a bit odd though. I liked the music, I think it worked well with the gameplay.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → acro
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Combine Carnage | jam | 440 | 3.32 | 3.29 | 3.14 | 3.59 | 3.77 | 3.90 | 3.95 | 3.41 | 37 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Dragon Slayer 89 | jam | 561 | 3.14 | 2.76 | 3.27 | 3.86 | 3.65 | 2.33 | 3.16 | 36 | ||
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | One Hundred in One | jam | 186 | 3.35 | 3.47 | 2.74 | 3.55 | 3.61 | 2.73 | 2.77 | 2.97 | 64 | |
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | Min's Journey | jam | 326 | 2.97 | 2.82 | 2.56 | 2.91 | 3.26 | 2.71 | 2.44 | 2.79 | 71 |
Nice simple platform game, the jumping feels a bit odd though. I liked the music, I think it worked well with the gameplay.
Quite an interesting entry and something different from what I've played so far this LD, although I don't think it really matches the theme. I think you did a good job of creating a creating a moody / creepy atmosphere. I agree with the comments about the way the dialogue is displayed though and the narrative could have been clearer. That aside, nice work.
It started to get frustrating when I didn't think I'd get through that 3rd-from-last level. Then I realised I was enjoying the challenge immensely! By the end it was a shame there weren't more levels, but what's there is really well designed. Only things I did not like so much were that the water-drain animation seems a bit too slow, and I had to install google's irritating browser to play this. Firefox doesn't get mouse pos via event.x unfortunately, you need to check for x,y being undefined and then use something longwinded like x = event.clientX + document.body.scrollLeft + document.documentElement.scrollLeft - canvas.offsetLeft;
It'd be good if you could fix it.
Impressively feature-complete, slick, and very charming. Quite a few entries seem to have taken 'minimalism' to mean 'simple gameplay' which I'm not at all sure about, but apart from that this is truly impressive. I can see a lot of care and attention went into all the little nuances, like the tangrams-like character and pattern designs, the little guy pointing toward the mouse; the moon phase showing the time passing. What amazes me is that you had time to pay attention to things like that in the time frame.
The look and feel and sprite work is really great! It looks like a complete whole, and every sprite is perfectly suited to purpose, plus the incidental particle effects like rocks breaking, blood when you are hit, really make a difference. It feels really polished. The gameplay seems a bit limited after a while but there are just enough levels with variety that it's stays interesting to the end. Great job!
I like the experimental nature of it. Would be good to see more levels but that's the curse of LD :) Good effort.
Once I realised what was going on it became quite addictive. Good audio feedback, it works really well with the art style. Good job!
Really liked the look - pastel colours, mushrooms/fairy-like, and the gameplay design is really promising. i really got stuck trying to work out the 4th level. Maybe was missing something. After a while the colours/harsh lines and tiny character got a bit sore on the eyes. other than that, very likeable indeed!
I didn't see any boss, but the help message hyped it up. :(
Apart from that... WHAT the HELL is going on!! First I thought I was a hobo on a scooter in a shopping centre full of Super Saiyans. Even though it said "click mouse to fire" I still took about 5 minutes, and 50% damage, before realising why the handbag only fired downwards. (I needed to move the mouse to aim) So I'm a goofy lil' old lady? And there are ninjas phasing in and out of the walls with a surprisingly cool smoke/dash animation, and they say "impossibleeee" when killed. The 'getting hurt' sound effect actually hurts the player's ears. And what freaked me out was, the lil lady's voice sounds different between saying she's out of attack and saying she's recovered her attack stamina.
In summary: this is INCREDIBLE! :D
Having told a friend about the 'minimalism' theme, the first thing he thought of was "something like Limbo's art style", so when I saw this I had to give it a shot!
Technically good, with a good amount of graphics and mechanics for the 48hrs, but are you kidding me with that spike pit with the tiny ledges? Is it possible to get past that? Very frustrating!
Fun game, I liked the music and retro art style. Not sure the gun as a power-up is very fitting with the fantasy game setting and also I had a couple of issues with collision detection though. The gameplay is good and with some additional enemies and weapons would be even better. Overall nice work!
Played the 72h version to rate, haven't looked at enhanced. It's really cool, and a really impressive amount of animation, content and style for 72 hours - it's very polished in appearance. The gameplay feels nice and fluid, with some challenging parts but seems to have less finesse than the graphics. My only slight moment of frustration was the trial-and-error aspect of when moving planets disappear.
Only things I'd have wanted improved for enhanced version were: I had really no idea what the captions were supposed to be saying, they didn't make much sense. And the loading time for that amount of graphics/sound was just ridiculous.
1151 is my high score! ...Is that good? Anybody?
Never played fruit ninja myself, but there's just 1 flaw in this that you wouldn't get on a phone/ipad: clicking frantically outside the window, only to realise the inevitability of losing when the game gets mouse focus back!
All told, I really like this, and it's a very complete thing for the time you spent.
Also - you might not realise it, but "click to start" is a actually quite a clever touch, getting around Java sometimes not gaining window focus. I wish I'd thought to do that!
This is very relaxing and cool- it has a great mood. I like the look and feel, and it fits the theme nicely in many ways. I cant really work out how to "rate" the graphics: I mean, they look really slick, but ultimately they're simple.
Anyways, I thought the part where the circles reversed was quite clever and snapped me out of my lazy expectation that I'd get out of the start of that level just by waiting. You should've said it was a feature, not a bug!
I also like how the game starts without you really knowing that it HAS started. The first screen is supremely well designed in that regard. Going to play again now. :)
Interesting and challenging game. The graphics are basic but the gameplay is good. Well done.
the core of this is good because it's really just "have fun, blow stuff up". I think that's quite bold to try to explore the theme with 'minimal gameplay' because it seems like there's not much to it, which can't be good. But, you really managed to make a lot of fun with a very little. Downsides have already been said, I agree with Benjamin about the colours - maybe a desaturated foreground, or background, would make the player more distinct.
Also I somehow didn't realise that bombs need to be touched to go off, at first, and my first instinct was to just ran in a straight line placing hundreds behind me... :)
Takes a bit to get going but once all the mechanics come into play it's a fun platform puzzle / platformer. Nice artwork as well.
Short and sweet! I haven't tried impossible mode It doesn't sound fun. The small offset animations on the little character add a lot of charm! It didn't run smoothly for me, it jumped and twitched vertically for some reason - maybe slow redraws: this machine doesn't have a good graphics card.
The ambient sounds work very well and I really liked the graphics. The counter and water level give a good sense or urgency. Well done.
The wall placement and slowing down is an interesting twist and works against you by making it harder to gauge enemy speed, so actually really clever. The little dudes twitchy walking is also cool! There's no music playing - but the jar version has a 30mb wav in it - for future entries you should use a different format for the audio.
I must disagree with some of the earlier comments: I think it's easier than most Megaman boss fights. In fact, it's very well balanced, Major Pain has a good range of moves, great learning curve, and lives up to his name! Threat detector is a nice feature to start with, too.
Your interpretation of the theme seems similar to what I came up with, but yours comes across more clearly, and I really liked the power core being the "discovered true important thing" after she is deprived of all the other superfluous things (which actually, weren't as good). You made the theme ring true with the gameplay/progression really well, which I don't know if our team entry quite managed. Top marks for that!
Just in terms of gameplay I'm not sure what was meant to happen with the power core, though: I just kinda ran into him. And a shame there was no ending screen, the art is cool! Nice feel, nice to play, and slick.
You should totally use SFXR next time round - it'd be ideal for sound effects for this kind of action shooter.
Great job!
Enjoyed this one. Some of the word choices were pretty amusing. I think there was too much of a delay after you miss a letter and maybe a smoother difficulty curve would have been nice, "yi", "de", "doo", "necromancer" :) Overall good fun, great audio feedback, well done.
Fun game, I really like the art style. The green room is very difficult unless you go there first and there wasn't really any ending. Overall I enjoyed playing it though. Well done!
Strangely compelling! Hats off to you for making something like this for a 48h contest! I have not yet found out the 'secret' but the bridge building caption was worth playing for, so far. I had to guess from other people's comments that it became possible to proceed further than the starting zone... as lots of it isn't apparent. My first attempt led to strangling my economy by building things in the wrong order, but I got past that on a second go. It'd be interesting to know if you had further plans/features for this.
I like the look! The screenshot is nice, and grabbed my attention. But I was rather let down by the 'game', which isn't really there. I walked in the grass until stuff levelled up, increased attack, and got more "shapes" -- was it shapes because I was an egg? Why was I an egg?!
I went to the hospital every 20 seconds to refill health, then after a few minutes went to the league over and over and total health and cash went into the thousands... and then it seemed like there was no more... Visiting the hospital after getting 20 league wins put 'total health' back down from 250,000 to 146 or whatever it was meant to be. So I didn't do that the next time. Total power seemed to stop increasing, too.
But having said all that, my RPG-brain compelled me to max those numbers, and the graphics made me expect a lot because they're really interesting.
I like the concept and the style fits well with the theme. As others mentioned though the interface needs a bit of work to make it more intuitive.
Good for the development time. Would be nice to see some AI and additions like being able to shoot vertically or in a different direction to your movement.
Thanks for the feedback guys, really glad you enjoyed it :) TheAwesomeProgrammer, are you sure the game window had mouse focus, sometimes that can be the problem.
Thanks for the continued feedback guys, we really appreciate it :)
@drstik you use wasd to move and arrows to fire, you need to find the end of level portal to progress. Space only works to start the game.
@pentaphobe, chances are it's the Java version, can you try download the latest version, 1.7.
@enzo, the sprites were pre-rendered in Blender, they do look a bit like clay :) I'm really happy with how they turned out.
@zkenshin Thanks for reporting that, I've fixed the crash bug and re-uploaded.
I like the gameboy style art and animation in this one. As the others have said the controls feel lose at the moment and you move too quickly. Maybe a longer cooldown between taking damage would help with the difficulty. Also could improve the random location jumping of the bad guys, I ended up stuck in one. A few small changes and polish would make a big difference. Overall I still enjoyed what I played. Well done.
Most things were guess-able from the UI, but I couldn't work out why Healthcare was off the bottom. The scrollbar was staring me in the face for 10 minutes and I never saw it. The drag and drop is kinda frustrating - there's no indication before you drop what will actually drop where, and moving stuff back left-to-right just to drop properly on another left panel got quite annoying. But this is still compelling for some reason - maybe the appearance of intelligent stuff happening ;)
Anyways... played for a bit. The food ran out. I have no idea why. Now I actually feel hungry...
Fun for a while, but later on the lack of variety starts to get boring - is there an end? The music on the title screen is GENIUS! I don't know where the concept came from, but it's so silly it's actually brilliant! The scared animations of the other blocks is great, too.
Hi, I wanted to play this and it seems other people have, but after clicking to start, the arrow keys and WASD do nothing. I've tried this in Firefox, Opera, Chrome and in desperation, IE10. Has something changed, why is it broken?
Incredible! I played "web ('original entry/hardcore')" for a fair rating. I managed to reach the end. And it's very, very good! They always say first person platforming hard to do right, but the push-pull 'jump' repulsion thing felt good, and works pretty well. With more time I can see it could have been tightened up. Other parts control a bit worse (loosely), like the walking, and wall collisions were a bit soft and loose.
Getting past the swinging bar magnet right after the potato was tough, but kind of good as it made me more familiar with the bar magnet. The holy singing potato voice got annoying after I fell in like 38 times, though. :D
Only a few things I didn't like: I didn't give a very high score for graphics because it was too high contrast - I realise this was to do with theme, etc, but lowering the saturation or lighting it a bit more naturally would really help make it easier to play for longer. My eyes started to hurt (although, maybe because I've been staring at a screen for 5 days with not much sleep ;). Relatedly, the areas where the lights were just turned off: that felt a bit cheap. However the jumping sequence was good there for some reason, despite being a pain to see anything. Lastly, the variable magnet strength is offputting, especially when it's really powerful room-leaping pulls one second, and barely reaching something 2 metres away straight after.
But, still, these things didn't stop me enjoying it, and it's the best game I've seen so far! Great job!
One of my favourites so far, has a bit of depth to it. Really enjoyed the opening and ending sequences. Well done.
Never have I seen a little voiced audio and two frames of animation used to such hilarious effect. Mwahahahaha! Brilliant!
The music suits it really well; the idea is very cool. But after a while, with so much dimension-flipping, I found the colour difference between dimensions was kinda harsh to look at. The inability to see where I was jumping got kinda frustrating, but again maybe just because of the forced flip-back when you're inside a block.
It is a clever game mechanic, maybe slightly more visual clues to platform positions could reduce the annoyance too. The thing that stopped me playing, unfortunately, before I got to the cool-looking screenshot above was the uneven framerate. I'd love to play a smoother/faster non-html version some day. Actually, I'm saying too much that's just picky griping - this is genius, and I give 5 stars for graphics!
No idea how you made that much animated pixel art and gameplay mechanics in 2 days. Just awe-inspiring!
Very clever idea, and very good use of that minimalist painting pattern. I'm intrigued by the fact that many commenters said it was 'too easy'. I read the instruction about high scoring, so was keeping ledges to a minimum, and I found it frustratingly difficult! I rage-quit after about the 10th attempt to get past level 1. For some reason I kept trying to collect the circles near the bottom, where falling off is almost guaranteed if you've fallen from a great height and the nearest segment is very short. I'm scoring this high for innovation. Great entry, well done.
Loved the atmosphere, look, great use of the ambient music and sound. Brilliant. Liking the dialogue, too. "Plasma-ier" needs to be in the dictionary! Only thing I didn't like was the really frustrating dialogue box blocking until Enter keyhit every time you fall off, made so much worse by the pillar/spike room before you get plasma hands. Loved the plasma hands, though! Also a bit glitchy with room transitions. Clever use of colours and amazing amount of graphics for a 48h game as well. Overall, really enjoyable. Doesn't have anything to do with the theme, but I'm not complaining! :D
Nice work, the music and art direction work really well together with the simple game mechanic. I agree with Spierek though, you should make the objective a bit more obvious.
Very challenging, and I can't make out what this has to do with the theme. I think the controls are good - it feels solid and precise, and I like the that the view area *is* that limited, it makes sense from bug's eye view. Maybe. But given that it's so easy to die, it is far, far too slow to reset - die, press enter, fade out, fade in title screen, press enter to play, fade in, show "level 1" overlay again. There's just no reason to go back to the title screen. I quit after dying for the first time in level 2 and having to back to the title screen again. That's just harsh!
Starts off a bit slow (over 10s before first enemy) and could use some more enemy variety but well done on finishing a game! Also I noticed that I became invincible after I died the first time and didn't take any damage when colliding with enemies throughout.
Incredibly good! The graphics are AMAZING (Was that a Dune level? Were those CHIBI FREMEN?!) So much variety, all looking great. The break room is fantastic, as well. And the controls felt really tight. great job!
A great idea that fits well with the theme - I wish I'd thought of it! Good overall atmosphere, theme, title screen, music, etc - it feels like a proper horror game. The difficulty of catching one in time is just far too tough, though and it's hard to tell when gameplay actually begins. Mouse-turning seems far too fast, and the webplayer is bigger than my monitor for some reason so it has scrollbars and doesn't capture mouse properly. I've not seen this with other Unity entries, so perhaps it's something that can be set in the ide.
clicking the phone, awaiting the (very nice, smooth) animation, and playing the minigame for +10 secs... takes about 9-10 seconds. So I can either do that, repeatedly trying to gain at most 1-2 seconds, or I can attempt to figure out what to do to "pass". But, on such a tiny time limit, it's not intuitive; it's trial and error, with no time to experiment. That's especially bad because the failure condition not only doesn't leave any chance to retry, but it takes you to another seemingly arbitrary level. So in terms of design, it doesn't work. But in terms of quality audio and art, it's completely outstanding.
Lots of content and I like the graphics. Would be good if you could move faster and the enemy AI could be a bit more aggressive, just now it's too easy to avoid the encounter.
Sooo much fun, and the cutscenes are really great! The main section was kinda easy and there's not much variation in what to do, but what's there is very enjoyable and the status effects were nice. Great animation and sound, too.
I enjoyed this one. Short, fun and good use of the theme.
I think the queen is a bit glitchy - when i first pressed X she appeared but then left again immediately so I didn't know what to do. It's not very intuitive, but having said that, after reading the website description and trying again I did work out what to do eventually. I like that you tried something a bit unconventional and different, and the sound and art is absolutely outstanding.
Compelling, great fun, and well polished. A shame there's no sound, but I liked this very much. As a puzzle game, it works well. I lost track of time playing it. The 10-sec reset was quite a bold and risky move, but in fact it works remarkably well - it makes every single section into a tight race. The only thing I would want to see changed is the lack of visual indication that Low-gravity is active (it was annoying that it reset after every 10 seconds - but would've been fine it I could SEE that it had switched back off). Also, the controls are weirdly mapped, and only explained once. After I got the gloves the first time, I had to quit the game, write the title screen into a notepad document, then replay.
...and after writing this I only just realised this was a 48h compo entry, not a jam entry. Well done indeed!
good effort on features - the noise screen on gps, cave visibilty, everything - i take it at least some of that was prepared in advance of the competition? it seems like a lot. There was no sound for me (Windows 7) double-clicking on the jar, but running with java -jar it did work. I have no idea why that should be. The '10 second' thing seemed tenuous. Also I didn't read the controls properly first time, and was eaten by a bear while reading a journal entry.
I haven't seen any other BGE ludum dare entry before - do u know if there have been any? I'm downloading the rar, hoping it contains the .blend, as I'm curious to see what's all in there. I'm very interested in your whole process, as it's something I considered before LD26 (and in the end I just used Blender to make all the prerendered sprites for that). So it'd be good to know how your time was spent, etc.
As for the game, it's a little disappointing that the critical path through the maze is so short, and even after all the F1 help text I never worked out how to fire the fireball (as noted in the other comments) - so the controls could definitely improve. The lighting was a little bit underdone so lots of areas blacked out - but I can understand that, you probably didn't have time to increase the lighting everywhere and AO/shadow-bake to make the walls look ok with that, so how it is is a fair compromise.
I wasn't aware that mouselook in BGE needed much/any scripting, as there are quite a lot of game engine demos showcased on BA or BN that use it. But if it does need it, honestly, the scripting system in blender is particularly easy and fun to get into and python is easy to use - don't be afraid to just try something with it even if you think "it's too complicated" or you think you won't understand. All the best!
It looks gorgeous! The shaders on the pillars and the tron/glowy feel is superbly well done. From your video it seems maybe you got too good at it while playtesting! I find it impossible, and as a result repeated attempts are frustrating and kinda unrewarding, which is a shame. I managed hi scores of 0, 1000, and 0. So, congrats on the extreme quality of the gfx, sound, and controls, it's just a shame the gameplay is so tough.
The stylised graphics look kinda cool, but... the overall design doesn't work as it is. Well done for trying something bold and different, I really mean that. If I may offer some observations - the problem I had is that there's no clear correlation between the keys I press and what's happening on screen. The "camera" moves to follow the lurching motions between the two combatants, but this constant motion means I don't know when I've done something by hitting a key, or whether it would have happened anyway. This is more of a problem than it might be, because I can't tell which combatant I'm meant to be, so I have no sense of what I'm actually controlling. I can guess one of the red bars is my health (I think it was the top one?) and a blue bar is my stamina (top right?). I'm still not sure about that, but the blue stamina bar seemed to have the most immediate change when I pressed a key. Perhaps a different colour association could make the player more prominent and underline his HP and stamina bars). The red/blue kendo stances at the top and bottom didn't seem to correlate to key/direct events either.
beautfil lowpoly look to the background, and great colours. I didn't realise the 10 seconds were the only chance to grab 'towers', and after that I lost immediately, having not clicked on any Dolphins. After that, clicking on more than 2 dolphins made it impossible to lose - so, it needs a bit of difficulty adjustment. Art and sound is top notch, though.
clever use of 10 seconds! I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere, though. Is it winnable, or genuinely infinite as the title implies? Spamming behemoths wasn't as effective as I thought it might be... Only criticism, there's somehow too much text and it's a bit fiddly getting started.
Literally, properly 'awesome'. I don't think I saw everything, and will play it again. I was a bit bored with the start. The most prominent things to walk towards - those high spire towers - seemed climbable from a distance, promising much, but just misleading. That felt like too much walking, but maybe was my own fault. The last few minutes more than made up for it. The theme link seemed a bit tenuous, but the timespan/slow idea is extremely co
the graphics and audio make this so enjoyable! The characterisation is amazing for such a short production. "Haha! I'm strong now!" The gameplay is a bit clunky and the strikes/enemy clipping is a bit fuzzy, but I can't believe how many graphics assets u made given the time frame! Very impressive!
wow, so much content and stuff going on! the extreme language in the first level was unexpected and therefore hilarious, and the cutscenes - SO MANY! Didn't have much idea what was going on, but enjoyed it all! Holding up and pressing X seems to turn you into teleport lines and you can't move, and pressing X resets the level...? anyway, great job on the art+animation! Was there a tie-in to the '10 seconds' theme?
OK, without reading ur description (I tend to play first and ask questions later) I rather enjoyed this - had no idea what was going to happen, but this is a *great* idea and a fun and clever mechanic. One thing, though. My Skyrim character is a werewolf, and I like playing as one! So, how come I get game over for successfully killing everyone? Surely that's the goal? Or was I meant to get myself caught? This could be really something special with just a bit more expansion on the gameplay ideas. I quite like the dinky toy-town look of things, too.
You had me at "you're a vampire" - then the game won all my affection with the fast-beat running animation, and the digging mechanic feels so fast and fluid! Great execution of the ten seconds theme, a decent challenge all the way through, and especially in level 3. There's a great deal of game mechanics as well considering the 48h limit. Nice one!
Fun game and I liked the minimalist graphical style. Would love to see a multiplayer version. Would be nice to have a mini map to see where you are in relation to the goal and some improved enemy AI.
Very clever theme use - the best I've seen, in fact. The game's also very pleasing to the eye. The platform sequences are really very tightly timed, though, and unforgiving. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I will probably return for another go later, but I grew really rather frustrated with the 2nd level as there's virtually no margin for error. The audio seems too loud and I wasn't a huge fan of the sound effects, but they did fit in with the feel of the game.
Hey, the concept is nice and fairly original for the 10 seconds. I like the webcomic-style manga characters and the element cards (they look very appealing and well designed, despite probably taking about 10 seconds to draw :P ). Less good is the lack of explanation as to what elements do, and how I almost won in 5 rounds, then was beaten by fluke hits and winners by the AI (fire beats water? Rly?) Also highly saturated blue and red constrasting like that is physically painful to look at.
Fun frantic gameplay and a good use of the theme. I liked the retro graphics.
Good graphics and quite challenging. I found the wall jumping quite difficult to pull off though.
Unable to downlaod the game
Got the download to work. Very nice graphics and I like the animations. Jumping feels a bit floaty and I'm not too sure if I was winning or not.
weird to control (multi-jump sticking, hammering up to climb, boxes, too-fast acceleration) various quirks, etc, ALL OF WHICH CANNOT DETRACT from the fact that you have a Jack Bauer audioclip counting down and a cute bubble-headed girl and a hapless fat kid dying repeatedly and hilariously on fire or falling to the pavement. I can't believe I just said that, but I cannot stop laughing. Fantastic!
I'm rating this higher than anything else I've seen. There's just so much gameplay here, great atmosphere, a nice feel to the gameplay/physics, and real challenge. Those Executors are reminiscent of Scrabs from Abe's Oddyssey, and I get an immediate terror reaction seeing them. Killing one feels amazing. The bow feels amazing. The fact I accidentally killed the guy who gave me the bow... feels amazing. The pixelly death animations are brilliant. And somehow, the hapless bridge-helper guy at the start of the yellow-background area always gets shot in the face by the arrow I loosed to drop the suspended rock. I am currently pleasantly stuck messing around with the placement of rocks at the old guy, but I know how to do it on the next attempt. Did you really make all this within the time limit? It's absolutely fantastic! The only annoyance is the glitchy player state machine for wall grab/climbing and facing direction. I'm choosing to mostly ignore that because the rest of it is so goddamn good.
I really quite liked the way the feeling of loss/frustation creeps up on you as the control loss prevails. It struck a chord with me of 'trying to fly' or attempting something, but being unable to maintain it, and there's a vague sense of loss to it. But, sorry, there's very little else to latch onto and I don't feel it did anything meaningful with '10 seconds' or the black-out intervals. It's bold of you, but I feel maybe it should be marked as a 'not-game', as I was kind of misled by the initial expectation of more control/engagement. That may have been your intention to play on that; I'm not sure. It has made me think a bit, but for me it doesn't evoke anything particular beyond what I've said.
Deserves to win outright. Addictive, cool, amazingly well animated and produced. Visceral, silent and deadly...
I spent so long trying to perfect and pass the later stages - just brilliant.
nice graphics, and loved the voice sounds on inoculations - and the game is slick and nice, with two things letting me down a little - it didn't seem possible to see/reach everyone in time, so don't you inevitably lose pretty fast? The game then insults you at the end. So that wasn't fun. How calibrated is the difficulty? It seems pretty harsh.
hilarious eye-catching text on the main screen there :) And simply inspired use of kittens :) I didn't actually use the upgrade system - will probably try again, though. Would've been good to have some SFX for when kittens appear/drown, as I somehow didn't see them all and didn't know when one had drowned off camera that i'd never even seen. but all in all, good fun.
I'm amazed you did this much in 48h, with all the elements needed, AI, progression, units, FoW, and levels. I was a bit dense to start with: at no point do you explain that the player is BLUE (I thought the camera starting on the right was just to show you how to move it with WASD) and it doesn't explain about moving units, whether you can select buildings, etc. I spent the first few minutes frustratedly trying to issue orders to a red tank. I'm advance wars' biggest fan, and so really wanted to like this, but maybe my assumptions worked against me (orange star?). Anyway, once I persisted and realised I was blue, it got pretty darn good. The worst thing is the pathing - the fact you can't have a unit path through another unit, so they all seem to roadblock each other (unless I missed something else). I think I crashed it by somehow getting an infantry unit to occupy the same space as a scout truck.
One other oddity you might be aware of: sound doesn't work (Win7 64bit, latest JRE7) when you double-click to run the jarfile: it only works from commandline java -jar (and a load of debugging lines spew out as well).
This is really great for a compo game, I must admit.
simple graphics did the job, it's clear you spent a lot of time playtesting and making the whole thing really smooth and polished - the quality really shows. For a 48h game, this is very, very well done indeed! Good use of the theme, as well. This held my attention completely and I couldn't stop until the very end.
Great graphics and music. I liked the ghost trick mechanic once I got the hang of it. The randomness could be tweaked a little, a few times I died straight away because there was an object right in front of me. Good fun though, well done!
I kinda assumed the grass meant safe spots, but then there isn't actually any cue, so I found myself waiting for the spikes to appear - and with that, the 10 seconds seems a bit too long for trial and error. The graphics are cute, but a bit flat (different hues, too-same value). Rather original, though, and quite compelling. I only quit because of the jitter/slowdown when jumping far.
Impressive progression, variation, depth, and amount of playtime. And a nice UI. I think the character art has a lot of charm, too, and there's a lot of it for the time.
The only parts I didn't like were on #12 (and #15), the 1000 ton hammer: there's no way to anticipate the first one, you just get game over immediately. It's an interesting addition with the block mechanic, but it's not fun because there's no way to tell to keep it in reserve and no way to know to use it immediately. I failed that same monster a second time by using a block on a punch, not realising 1000 ton hammer could happen again, and didn't realise there was another way out of it (ie arrow interrupt).
Similarly on #15, there's no way to anticipate 2 wipeout attacks in succession - and there's only 1 way to survive; it's never possible to heal through the damage, you have to interrupt and block. I used my block up experimentally, so I wiped.
The music is too quiet by default, would like to be able to hear it.
But I should point out I've now played this for longer than any other LD31 entry, including my own. I really, really like it overall! Used 9 continues finishing and ... ohgod I don't even want to know what hard mode is. Well, maybe later.
Did you really make all this art and so many encounters in 3 days? very good stuff!
Wow, I've thought about making a card game for Ludum Dare before but always thought it'd be infeasible - I'm really impressed you managed it! I like the flow of play, it seems quite well balanced and came down pretty close (although I still won on my first attempt).
I like the resource types but found it a little hard to intuit what needed to be spent on what -- it would be easier if you had perhaps colour-coded the numbers, eg green for science and blue for energy, matching the icons.
Also, when I and the CPU were both at about HP 9, I first noticed it seemed to stay there, even though I played gunshot cards.
I guessed that generators or scientists gave some kind of shielding effect, but didn't know what was going on.
You can guess, then, I didn't read the whole instructions page. It's a high-contrast barrage of text in a bold, headline sans-serif font -- it *hurts* to look at, and would be easily fixed just with a less heavy font, and some less contrasty colours.
Overall the game is OK to play, but I felt would be nicer if it had some more visual cues showing what is happening, for example when it locks out for some time period, you can't click to continue; you have to wait. You can't see your own cards when the opponent plays one, and the card effects aren't 'obvious' if you're not closely remembering what all the numbers were.
Still, even saying these things, I'm really pleased to see a card game on here, and I've enjoyed playing it through several times now.
Very nice art style and animations, seriously impressive for such a short amount of time. The economics were not really clear but after reading some of these comments above it made more sense. Also as some others have mentioned the barrier to entry is a bit high with the long explanation. Overall enjoyed this one, well done.
Fun game once I figured out what to do : ) For some reason the sides of the screen are cut off even on full screen mode. Would be nice to some pickups / items. Multiplayer would be quite fun and frantic. Good job.
Totally brilliant. Initially thought it was too easy, then got to the octo level. It ramps up nicely, very smooth (left/right motion was a little too fast for my liking). Presentation / graphics are really nice.
Only two things I'd criticise are the player blends in a little too much sometimes, and, after you kill the big things like the thing at the far right side of the first level, they continue making the red damage burst effect when shot, so it was hard to tell if I'd killed it yet or if more shooting was still required. I stood shooting that thing for a good long time before deciding 'it's probably safe to go nearer now'!
Hey, thanks for all the nice comments. BoxedMeatRevolution, yeah we basically didn't have time to finalise various things. The left ledge in the dragon room should have held a magical sparkly victory treasure. We'd have also liked to reset-loop back to the start portal, with increasing 'levels' and a score, but as stands you can only beat the dragon. Well done for beating the dragon! I'm off to check that linked game, thanks.
Very nice graphics, probabaly the craziest entry I've played so far : ) Would be nice to have a bit more variety in terms of enemies and weapons. Also the difficulty curve is a bit low. Well done though!
Leo, nice job on the graphics! I downloaded the .blend and would like to know how you got the aliased, sharp pixels appearance as shown in the animated gifs on the blog post. Just rendering after opening has pixel blending/anti-aliasing happening. I've tried making pixel art with Blender in the past and always had problems with that.
As for gameplay - it's a bit strange! Also, the sound was too quite (and I had skype on in the background) so I couldn't hear it at all and thought it had no sound.
The option choices would be much better if you could just click next to them instead of the bottom of the window where it shows '1' and '2'.
There's animation of a woman falling out of a window, but that didn't happen in the game? Was this finished?
Overall, nice idea and cool design, but there's not much gameplay which is a shame.
I played this because it reminds me of the look of a game map I drew in mspaint decades ago, but I didn't learn to code until university, so kudos to you for making a working game. Definitely keep making them.
There seems to be a completion bug: I foolishly let one vehicle escape on Wave 5 (it indeed takes *ages* to reach the end - would be nice if you could do something about that, perhaps detect if a baddie is beyond all the towers, and the player has no more money to place more, and in that case accelerate that vehicle.) Anyway, when it reached the castle, and I presumably should have taken damage, I 'won'.
Nice presentation and audio. Would be nice to see the difficulty ramp up more quickly and have some more variety in enemies / powerups. Well done.
Very eye-catching game title, although there's something wrong with you! (In a good way). I found this too frustrating to be enjoyable, probably down to the relentless unstoppable feeling coupled with the clunky reloading. Got on much better second time after figuring out when to shotgun, but still have no idea what the bow does.
I'm willing to accept that it may have appeared to me to get harder too fast purely because I couldn't figure out when to use the shotgun properly. But whatever it was,
the pacing/appearance of big snowmen seemed to unfairly block too many smaller ones from damage. As others have commented, some kind of more pronounced reaction to shots would help a lot. The shotgun seems to spray particles rather than having an abrupt burst to it, so it was hard to tell when it had worked and when not. Most of the time it aggravatingly didn't seem to do anything, but once I cleared over half the screen in one shot. No idea what was going on there.
The model and animation are surprisingly high quality, it's just a shame there's not a bit more variation.
Hi guys, thanks for commenting on our entry; would've loved to know how far you got into it :)
Um, so, "Blockade Runner"... this will be blunt, harsh and to the point. Sorry, but it's meant constructively and I won't mince words.
Players don't care what makes a thing work, only about the experience presented. And this is just about the worst possible way to strain someone's eyes: looking for a tiny spot in a wide field of highly saturated colours, all of which are mixing together and moving.
The 'graphics', image/asset wise, could be made in under an hour.
Three of the six times I ran it (including the first time), it randomised into an unconnected rectangle. I tried something like that in LD30 ('Connected Worlds') and had to spend a long while ensuring connectedness - in the end didn't have time to finish the entry, so I totally understand you just leaving this with the occasional break. It always seems like it shouldn't take that much time, but it does.
Also (still playing devil's advocate, here), I didn't read the wall of text concept/description until after playing the game.
I was, however, quite intrigued by the screenshot, as I couldn't work out what it would be.
All that stuff about '20 themes' and 'being a robot'... what? No, you're a painfully slow-moving white dot!
The graphics are genuinely, impressively horrible. The use of saturation inflicts pain (although I've been staring at a monitor for 3 days already), while hue and saturation aren't used at all! If the aim was to strain the player's eyes to the maximum possible extent, you couldn't have done much better.
The only way it could look worse would be to make the victory/death screens raw Cyan, Magenta, or shocking pink, instead of red/green, or perhaps flickering rapidly between red and blue to trigger epileptic seizures (please don't do that).
One of the screenshots shows circles. A circle would be really useful when you spawn.
So, as a game, it's outstandingly bad.
I found the most interesting aspect here to be Alex's timelapse video - I also use Eclipse Luna and didn't know it's possible to block-edit vertically, so thank you for that, I learned something :)
Seriously good game! So many well-made mechanics going on, the gameplay is really solid and fun.
I love the high-tension music change-up and the huge scope of possible stuff to do. I haven't even made it anywhere near a vault yet! The escape-to-double-your-score mechanic is very well considered, too.
This is very complete for a jam entry - how many people contributed to this on your team?!
I disagree with the comment asking for a crosshair, I think the aiming mechanic works well as-is, making it down to the player's own accuracy.
Some very minor nitpicking:
1. Is there supposed to be no way to see/know your health? Kinda irksome.
2. It's very more-ish and quick to retry, but prompting for high-score name every time is really annoying there.
3. I'm a bit concerned as to why it tries to change a bootup registry entry when it runs. I'm not terribly happy about that, and glad I have spybot system shield on. That is nothing to do with your game though, i'm just very paranoid - it's probably just because my own installed version of Gamemaker Studio needs updated.
Unfortunately can't rate : (
Amazing style, polish and coherent overall presentation. Loved the story cutscene; never played the Taito games you mention but it put me in mind of Super Mario World's little vignettes and Wario Land, as someone else mentioned.
I disagree with everyone who said Z+X was odd/difficult - I can see this working amazingly on a NES controller.
Only had a few tiny issues: I wasn't aware of any time limit in the levels so was a little confused by the 'Hurry Up' messages, and didn't get that they related to the rocks.
I managed to get a dino stuck on the left hand side of one of the levels - can't remember which, maybe 3 or 4 - and the collision detection wouldn't let my ice hit him there. Other than that, some wibbly clipping when using the down dash, but I mean...
is this honestly a jam game? How in the... even... what the... it's astonishingly impressive, and kawaii.
Now to admit my total stupidity: I clicked on what I thought was the main thing, thinking you'd embedded the game in the page. I spent over a minute pressing Z and X to start, wondering why the web play didn't seem to be working, and why it kept looping, but nonetheless impressed that there was a rolling play demo. I was thinking 'the frame rate seems a little bit choppy...'. Then I realised I was watching a .gif, not the game itself.
*ahem*, so, thanks for that, as well.
Really nice consistent graphic style, and brilliant sound. Love the guitar starting in, and the wee play-animation on the title screen, and the mood of the game-over screen vocals :)
I would carry on playing this to get more than a few levels in and increase stats, but the health pickups are so rare and the hitboxes seem... somehow stacked in the enemies' favour.
Was this all a solo effort? Very, very impressive.
Liked it so much, in fact, that I'm gonna nitpick small but annoying things that aren't really to do with gameplay. ;)
No quit key? I tried returning to title screen with Escape but seemed stuck in game. Also can't pause.
Initial startup: I conscientiously read the controls on the website. I thoroughly read the "how to play" essay/screen. I started the game, and instantly forgot what the controls had said. Couldn't figure out how to attack. I knew WASD, and recalled something about having to charge the guitar and transform, and arrow keys attacking. I hit keys at random. Skeletons hit me. I got annoyed.
Weirdly, it didn't occur to me to hit spacebar. Enter seems an odd mapping as well, here. In any case: please consider having the control explanation inside the gameplay.
Speaking of annoying, I went to start the game a second time and: there's no way to skip your logo and get straight in. For shame! After I sat through it appreciatively the first time?!
On a similar note, after pressing start to begin the game, the little guy walking up the screen takes far too long. The same on game over: waiting for the broken guitar head to fall - it's just a long unskippable animation and I just want to get back in the game, so it's kinda punishing me for wanting to play again.
anyhow, these are all really tiny nitpicks because I've nothing real to criticise about the game. great job, I'll be playing this more after judging etc. I'm curious about that easter egg.
Boing! Nice avatar!
Thanks so much for the pixel art timelapse, that's really helpful and inspiring to see.
The game is phenomenal as a whole package. The lack of good sound to complement all the rest is a real shame. I initially thought the movement speed was too fast, especially for certain one-wide ledges, but no; actually it's perfect given how the rest of the game is laid out. It's never over-reliant on single-tile platform precision.
The level design is extremely intelligent and well considered, with very good gating and brilliant use of the few well-designed enemy assets. The platforming puzzles combining spikes, jade dragons, jump hooks, etc, escalate beautifully. And the ledge positioning/safe zones are really tight, satisfying to overcome, in fact for all the looser feel of the game control, some segments even reminded me of some of the 100% item shinespark set pieces in Metroid Fusion.
The only thing I noticed worthy of criticism was that I felt that after getting the cloud in a bottle, the scope of where I could go became much broader, but all the rooms looked too similar. You all clearly did an insanely huge amount of work during the jam, but if there'd have been any way to colour-differentiate some of the bigger areas it would've helped to prevent some sense of getting lost later on.
I look forward to finishing this, and regret that I don't seem to be able to save my game... or indeed buy the full product!
Just sat and played this for 20 minutes straight, longer than anything else on the site. And judging by other comments I didn't even scratch the surface compared to some others. Level 10 seemed kinda far off, even, so there's still more I've not seen, like I kept going wondering what the 'tree squirrel' thing was about.
Hopefully you won't take offense when I say the graphics look like crap - but that really hides the fact that this works amazingly well! Alas, I reached a narrow choke point and all 5 of my squirrels got trapped and I was separated and overwhelmed, so a bit buggy with squirrel pathing getting stuck in the blue obstacles (was that.. water?). Right-click shows all your hitboxes/steering behaviour vectors, was that meant to be visible?
But anyway - the music is really good, it sets a nice tempo for play.
The mechanics all complement each other really neatly, and this is a great use of the theme. It's also really impressive the amount of movement behaviour you got working - I'd have thought that would take weeks of work to debug and get fun gameplay out of, but this proves me wrong on that.
Graphically very well presented. Interesting concept of using combined weather effects to attack your targets.
What a cool little game. Very nice visual look about it.
Really nice vertical space shooter. Not a particularly original concept but quite good fun. The menu is very clean and functional and the in game graphics were consistent. Good entry overall.
Fun little arcade game. I had some performance issues e.g. jittering and I had a few problems getting the input to respond to my keypresses but overall a fun little submission.
Some really interesting ideas. Well done on making four different mini games. Very impressive and innovative.
It takes a while to understand this and the 'tutorial' structure is easily missable (I somehow skipped it by accident the first time just trying to get past the title screen.
But the art is gorgeous - the animation is really beautiful, the cape, teleport, shoot etc, boss appearing. The music fits it so well.
I wonder if the non-apparentness of 'what to do' is deliberate? It does need the text explanations, but they're somehow not prominent enough as you don't naturally look at the top/bottom edges. But - having to figure out what to do by trial and error gives a lot of mileage on playing the game, while it sits there looking and sounding gorgeous.
Hahaha, ahh, very good, very droll. :) That's the most original use of theme I've seen so far.
I especially liked the planetary graphics, very reminiscent of Darwinia, and the music... very reminiscent of great tongue-in-cheek B-Movie music. Monsters Vs Aliens, or something.
I played a few times trying to see how to play better / optimally. Didn't quite figure out if it was better to wait for higher value sites to bomb - always seemed to just run out of bombs and laser charge eventually.
I wonder if you had planned for more scope of gameplay, like some way to regain bombs or regain laser charge. It was a bit frustrating having no ammo left and only able to run the timer down waiting for laser power. I may have missed something, ofc.
Also: is that a real online leaderboard?! Holy smokes!
Innovative and in-keeping with the theme. It does get repetitive after a while but the cow launcher is good fun.
Easily drawn in by an LD entry purporting to do something with survival horror, I was a bit disappointed, sorry to say.
And, sorry if this sounds harsh, but this seems very unfocused, like you put in too many ideas. (eg a file select screen?!)
The 'development build' and IndexOutOfRangeException and NullRefException errors were initially rather distracting, but I see you say you've fixed those (they still seem to be present in the web player version I tried).
The controls aren't apparent within the game, it would be nice if there was some prompt or cue in the starting room to lead the player on.
The (bad) platform physics made trying to stop next to a switch extremely difficult, though I see you say you've fixed that now too? Again, it seems it wasn't fixed on web player.
The absence of sound effects and music is grating given the amount of work that has clearly gone into the graphics. (and, eg, some sound for knowing if switches have been hit would be great, as the animation is a little small and hard to see). Even some minimal sfxr beeps for switches, or something.
The floating robot assistant didn't seem to have any point. I suppose it is the 'unconventional weapon', but must have missed how it works/what it does.
It didn't seem possible to die or fail (not that I tried), in that I effortlessly avoided all enemies, and it's quite easy to clear entire rooms with a single jump and never come close to an enemy.
The lighting idea seems promising, but the 7th or 8th room is all but unplayable as it's in total darkness and you can't see what you're meant to be doing.
I didn't really work out what the lighting was actually reacting to, or what effect it had. Perhaps you could have had a clearer example without other things being in the room.
It'd be cool to see something more focused on just a few of the elements in there, and with better platform control, but I was a little disappointed.
incidentally, we tried to make a pixel art survival horror entry for LD29 jam and didn't finish in time. So I know it's difficult to get all the pieces in place to convey the survival / horror aspects. Kudos for attempting it.
Cool idea combining a game like Mortal Kombat with the dialogue attack/defence system of a game like Monkey Island. Shame you didn't get a chance to finish it off.