Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Adiwan
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Unicycle Balancing | jam | 358 | 3.80 | 3.93 | 3.69 | 4.60 | 3.82 | 2.88 | 3.65 | |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | Lasso-Loop Whiplash | jam | 270 | 3.91 | 4.13 | 3.75 | 3.95 | 4.27 | 3.90 |
I want to like it more but the immediate halts in the gameplay loop is frustrating to say the least. Because there is no way of recovery when the "ball" hits the planet it basically ends and I have to restart it and begin anew. I would highly suggest to lift the ball into orbit when crashing on the planet. Sure it's not "realistic" but you don't feel so frustrated each time you hit the ball.
@faithcaio Cool that it has been dealt with! When I'm done with reviewing a ton of other games I'm coming back and play the post-jam version.
I really like the foundation of your game idea. The way it's handled now can be easily exploited and making the game very easy. Just by moving up towards the screen edge and only by switching directions I could avoid the bullets easily. Right now I don't know how to improve it. Introducing more threat sources (not only the one at the bottom) or limiting the player's ability to change direction, as you did with the slowdown. It's a hard balancing act. It somehow evokes memories how I played with my compasses (the circle drawing thing) in geometry classes.
I dig the concept. The constant "ticking" of the time put me in a little stress but I finished it. Sadly there is only one level and only one way to solve it. Personally I prefer not being stressed during puzzles but it was easy enough here. I believe it could be fun if the time only advances when the character performs an action, Superhot style. I enjoy more the strategizing than the hectic aspect.
The vaporwave and the cybertrucks ooze out of this game! I like the shop concept. I imagine that it could be nice to have two "pitstop lanes" for purchasing health and speed for buying them without the interruption of the gameplay flow. Although I made the mistake to buy as many speed upgrades early on and went out of control, haha.
That's the stuff. Chaos ever evolving and expanding. It took me a while that objects can be rotated with the mouse wheel (I urge you to mention this more overtly because it's a critical part).
It's like Frogger, only driving in circles! Love it!
That was a darn fine piece of ranching.
For me it's just crashing into the planet within the first second. And whenever I am fast enough with the mouse to enable the thrusters I'm out and explode.
It's absolute madness. Everything happens at once! I played it a couple of times and I barely finished one cycle. I was running in literal circles fixing the breaches and fixing systems and had no time for the prisoner's needs. Despite having a working oxygen station I suffocated. I think a post-jam version with a more gentler difficulty curve and more in-game explanations could make it tons more fun.
Conceptually it is a fine idea. As a player I wished to see the whole map and a choice in which cards should be used upon death. Also there should be a restart button when you're dead and no available cards. Despite that I like it.
A welcome change of pace reviewing all of the jam games. You cannot go wrong with arcade-y goodness.
Haven't played a Wolfenstein clone in a long while. The lamp mechanics are good. As I was walking I had troubles judging how far I could go when the lamp was put down. I believe having a visual indicator for how far from the circle the player is (tinting the peripheral view or something else) would be great.
Dammit Dijkstra! I am bad at computing the shortest path in the head. It's a cool training game to teach children finding a shortest path in a (directed) graph.
Sokoban³. It's very solid and was fun playing.
I played a few rounds and I gathered some thoughts: It's a nice little casual game with some potential. Instead of collecting boxes as main objective to get points I would prefer counting laps, that would also emphasize the "loop" aspect a bit more. This would give the game the aspect of "outlasting the odds" too. At this point you can also just "park" the car in the corner or any edge and wait for a box to appear. I had several times that a weapon box simply spawned in front of the car while picking up one, messing me up. For some reason there was a lot of flickering of the car when the mines went off.
I had somewhat of a difficult time aiming as the camera constantly drifted away using a XBox controller. Slicing objects is fine and nice but it does not matter how the enemies are sliced. The horizontal slice was usually the best as it was less prone missing my targets. And having the enemies clumped up at the huge hemisphere I get more at once. Your core loop in this should involve using different slicing angles. Enemies that are only you can only slice with the right angle. When so using a non-motion-controlled controller (i.e. XBox) I would use fixed angle increments that match the enemies with the least amount of button clicks, or using the (right) analog stick.
I agree the one hit death is very discouraging, especially when it's hit with a fatal error. The dimension-shifting with the teleporter is a nice idea.
Very fun. This has the right amount of absurdity to make it work as a video game. Only bound to a gallows' rope and not by reality.
I like the concept but I'm usually bad at puzzle games and didn't get much enjoyment because of that. Despite that it has great things going on. In a out-of-jam scenario I could see mechanics that prevent the player to overuse the dragging ability and just pull the cube into the goal.
The concept is interesting. Blocking and fighting feels a little bit delayed and it lacks the oomph and immediate impact to give a greater satisfaction fighting the enemies. I tried playing it with the XBox controller and keyboard with mouse. For some reason the mouse view rotation is very choppy. I also think that there should have been a visual indicator for the cycle breaking. When approaching the gate those collected crystals could have been automatically inserted, showing the player how far they have come.
@flashcash0402 @cinar It's my first ludum dare jam. I wanted to prepare the page beforehand but I somehow managed to publish it before the submission. I was a little bit confused. However the game is available now!
@shipster Thanks! I was very ambitious and wanted multiple levels to make it more replayable but I combated with this one level. Placing over 600 items and rearranging them took longer than anticipated... Haha. Seriously. If I knew it took so long I had written an automatic placement tool to pre-arrange them.
@gelgavish Thank you. In the early stages I imagined a "health bar" for the sheriff and the goal was to knock him off as fast as possible. I thought it was more exciting to turn it the other way around and pressure the player with a hard time limit to do the same and give points instead.
@wobbleblocks It's a good and dependable honse.
@voidsay Yeah... I cannot 3D model for the life of me. I'm more proficient with CAD modeling than anything organic and artistic. If I had to 3D model everything the voting period would be over.
@pschichtel Physics games need to freak out from time to time. It's their whole appeal :laughing:
@roboshamit Hm... The human dragging the horse and smashing into things... :thinking:
I've added now a WebGL version https://adiwan.itch.io/lasso-loop-whiplash-webgl I've uploaded it just for convenience and accessibility reasons. It has some unpleasant graphical glitches I have to investigate. So, please use only the executables and not the WebGL version for the rating as they offer the better experience.
@edalbung Haha! I like the way you think. That's a different game for a different jam. Next time (when appropriate) it'll be a horse-powered sticky wrecking ball.
@narom42 In Unity I used a chain of "Configurable Joints" with "Capsule Colliders" and "Rigidbody" Components. Each segment of a rigged tube had a set of these above. Then each of the ends was attached to the horse and man via "Fixed Joints". Beware: Do not use too many of them otherwise it gets unstable very fast :laughing: In my first attempt I used 20 segments and it was flipping out in seconds.
@ghuyajil Definitely! I imagined Tony Hawk's Pro Skater style of objectives if I had more time. "Push the goat on the rails", "water the flowers" (demolishing the water tower), etc...
I've played through it and I don't know if there are any branching story paths. While playing it I was frantically scanning the whole screen and clicking on every object as there wasn't any clear indication which objects are intractable until they suddenly light up when pointing at them. It was frustrating as a player that there were multiple scenes with no interactions. I know that the time scope was too tight to make more things to happen, that push the narrative forward or not.
The in-game control explanation could have been bigger. It took me a restart of the game to re-read the control scheme. As @gonzalol I was stuck for a moment and didn't realize "E" was the key to open the door (before I had to restart the game).
That was a brain twister. No wonder octopi have a small brain in each arm.
I had a decent time with this game. I have not a problem with the ice physics of the items but I rather preferred that the rope didn't have self-collision and any collision with the player character and the sheriff. It limited my range of movement hugely in a frustrating way. A slightly increased movement speed could also increase the playability a bit. The puzzles and the ramp up in difficulty was just right.
I didn't come very far in the game. My head struggled too much with the controls, especially when I had to think to defend the inside and outside, and aiming wasn't as smooth as I hoped for. It took me several times to align my guy in order to shoot the archers. A little bit more smoothing could maybe do the trick. I also can see it working well with an analog stick where you have a more precise way to choose the direction.
I had a lot of fun with your game. Devilishly simple in concept but astoundingly fun.
Very solid game. Pressing "R" to restart can be very easily abused when missing a shot haha.
I had big problems with the 3rd person camera as it was constantly colliding with the environment making it difficult to orientate myself. A top-down view would have been sufficient. The tasks and all the chaos around is already disorienting enough. I would also prefer a "Wario-Ware" style of task description what to do. It would make it easier to prime the player and focus on the task at hand. I also would have preferred only to have one interaction button. "Begin Task" and "Interact with an object in the task" appears to be redundant.
I really liked the concept. The levels felt very linear as there was basically only one optimal and obvious way to solve the levels. A few oddly-shaped building blocks in the sequel would be nice. :wink:
I cannot play it as at the beginning all platforms are above the player at the top edge of the screen. Despite jumping multiple times I cannot reach the platforms in time. (I have a 1920x1200 (16:10) monitor if that matters)
I have a soft spot for typing games. :keyboard:
It's solid idea but oh boy I got furious with the *unstable* controls (keyboard). When I thought I got the controls it threw a wrench into my wheel and tumbled over.
Interesting but my head had problems getting the dice directions at first as I have not really understood the explanation here. A "How to play" in the game itself would be a nice extra that shows visually how to control that darn cube :smile: After I got the controls it was quite fun.
I gathered 3 objects and after that I searched the whole map for something to do with them but I gave up after 5 minutes.
@sode I was thinking about the very same thing you mentioned. The preview is born from my own frustration of some games with randomly generated hazards and obstacles that felt that they came out of nowhere. In this case the observable falling distance is too short to react in a meaningful manner. The preview makes it a little bit easier but in my playtestings it gave the player more confidence that the game isn't rigged and there is a minor strategy aspect with it.
@orangutanrider Yeah. I can see that it gets boring very fast with the simple objects that are already in the game. Currently the number of spawning objects increase by one every 20 seconds.
@colbymakesgames Funnily I doubled the weight right before the release :sweat_smile:
@monninen I hope it's not too addicting like some people were playing Flappy Bird :smirk:
@yogurtthehorse It was past midnight while I was very, very tired after a Dungeons & Dragons session. Imagine a very tired and exhausted face.At first I imagined a human balancing stuff while balancing on a rope but I'm very bad at asset creation and animation (i.e. very slow), so I cut that element back and replaced it with a unicycle, which itself is hard to keep stable. An alternative idea I threw together was more a title than game idea: "The Fable of The Unstable Table" where you control each table leg QWOP-style and transport objects from A to B without dropping anything. But that would have been more work than I could do within the time frame.
@micheldever @lucasvb With the benefit of hindsight I also see that a weighted distribution of objects makes it more exciting. I relied too much on the randomness being random enough to make it interesting. After the jam I update the game to add this feature.
Maybe I'll polish the game even more and offer it for Android with accelerator controls :thinking: But that's low priority for me right now.
@quanperfect Thanks! The objects are there to mess up the balance. Putting aside how the current randomizer distributes the objects, I imagined that the objects hinder you in a way when you lean to one side. All objects on the board slide to the leaning side and are putting you at risk of falling down. Also I imagined that when the randomizer puts a lot of heavy blue objects on one side you can slide the objects to the other side to compensate. Well... That was the plan.
Clearer than most manuals.
The very short time to get the item and the very poor visibility makes it harder than needed. I ran circles from the bathroom into the bathroom as I tried to memorize the floor plan. :smile: A little bit more brightness could have been helpful.
Not bad. The boat could be more controllable in general but I liked it.
I had quite the fun while it lasted. I enjoyed ricocheting the cannon balls off the wall to the enemies.
I hulk out. I couldn't finish it. I was magically drawn to collecting the green dots :sweat_smile: Not bad though' :thumbsup:
Not so bad. I couldn't finish as I gave up after I couldn't avoid a collision near the end multiple times. The one hit "kill" is quite unforgiving, especially when the collision occurred behind my back and outside my view. Maybe you could implement an easy mode where the collision vector is taken into consideration.
Keeping real plants alive is hard enough :sweat_smile: