Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → againey
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | 👥 | Spider Collider | jam | 156 | 3.78 | 4.00 | 3.81 | 3.51 | 3.51 | 3.75 | 2.80 | 3.31 | ||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Drunkle | jam | 435 | 3.40 | 3.24 | 3.64 | 3.96 | 3.00 | 3.83 | 3.57 | 3.26 | 46 | ||
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Deserializer | jam | 165 | 3.66 | 3.60 | 4.28 | 3.49 | 3.20 | 2.95 | 2.54 | 3.56 | 72 | ||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Dartfield Basegolf | jam | 802 | 2.83 | 2.67 | 3.09 | 3.17 | 3.06 | 2.19 | 2.52 | 59 | |||
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Symptomatic | compo | 203 | 3.58 | 3.12 | 4.50 | 3.62 | 3.31 | 2.67 | 2.86 | 45 | |||
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | Inversionaut | jam |
againey leaves an average of 22.3 feedback comments each event.
Maximum fall speed was pretty aggressively limited, made control pretty awkward. I was frequently wishing for a more parabolic arc on the way down, but it almost instantly became a linear float downward, like a feather or parachute rather than a marble. This made it hard to touch the ground and reset the double jump. Maybe that was intentional to add to the challenge, but it mostly just made me feel like control was being taken away from me.
Intriguing, but I don't really feel like I have sufficient ability to actually ever be in control. If there's skill to be had here, I couldn't find it. (Which of course might just mean that I'm dense at the moment.)
I think part of the difficulty was that the avatar rotation was opposite of the world rotation, and that once you've assigned a rotation to the black or white state, you can't remove it and simply have a naked move up/down action.
Pretty clear and appropriately challenging on the faster speed. I could tell immediately that my must-beat compulsion was kicking in against my will. Normally I avoid games that produce that experience because life is already full of enough frustration as it is, but I know that plenty of other gamers enjoy that experience, so I'm taking it as a positive sign. :-)
I was left wondering how the game would feel with a bit more physics instead of a constant-rate turn and constant speed with no inertia or sliding. Maybe not better, but the curiosity did cross my mind, for what it's worth.
Powerups or non-lethal obstructions (mud pits, for example) could help liven up the courses.
It was only upon reflection that I realized that the route trace is actually kinda cool. I wonder if there are ways to draw the player's attention to it once winning (or even after losing). Obviously outside the scope of a jam, but it'd be the perfect sort of thing for a leaderboard. Let people compare their trace against the best scores.
Or maybe color code the trace after a race according to various factors (distance from wall, distance from top player's route, distance from pre-computed optimal route), using something easy to visualize, like the standard green->yellow->orange->red to signify good/bad (or something more colorblind-friendly).
Everything works smoothly, cleanly implemented, and the graphics, audio, controls, and such all felt consistent. But boy does it get difficult quickly!
Given that enemy bullets can come in at angles, but movement is limited to a single line for obvious reasons, dodging feels like it could use some assistance. Faster ship movement, perhaps acceleration, double tap for a "dash" or popping up a half second directed shield or something. Faster player bullets too, as a compensation for the fact that they can't be angled to aim directly at enemies the way enemies can do at the player.
Also, I wasn't expecting the powerups to be time-limited (and at first didn't notice the expiring icon at the bottom because I wasn't looking for it). Maybe it's just because of my expectations from similar games, but I kinda felt a little cheated when my machine guns ran out. I want powerups that I can feel like I earned, and then I want to be able to keep them if I earned them.
Wow, very fascinating. All sorts of nuance to be had here, it feels like. Certainly some balance issues and some UI issues, but it's already quite engaging as it is, and I get the sense that there's a lot of potential here. Feels a wee bit like a more complex version of Go, with how the pieces on the board can't move, and yet there's still some regional subtlety with areas of influence and such. However, the limitation of only placing pieces adjacent to existing pieces does lose some of the essence and depth of Go in favor of different gameplay. Whether that's good or bad or neutral is hard to tell, but my gut slightly suggests a loss of depth; I felt a bit too limited in my options at times; not enough flexibility to adapt one's strategy in response to an opponent's moves.
An attack cell turning an opposing energy cell back into a stem cell seems possibly overpowered for the defender. Frees up the cell to become something else. Though I discovered later on that this just requires the attacker to get two attack cells in place, or to attack just once and risk that this helps the defender before a second attack can take place on a later turn.
I think there need to be more things that can be done with energy. Such as inner cells with extra energy can be assigned to give one unit of energy to a neighbor each turn, but only if the cell doesn't do anything else that turn. Or get energy involved in attack/defense mechanics. (Maybe that's what you were thinking when you said that energy isn't handled correctly for attack cells?)
My biggest UI gripe: Once an action has been assigned, it's impossible to tell what that action was, and my memory is crummy. Once the board gets full enough, it becomes hard to remember which cell is assigned to do what.
One closing thought (after playing it for a full hour), even once one player has a clear advantage, the losing player seems to be able to make it tedious for the winner to actually win. As far as I can tell thus far, there's no "tipping point" at which the obvious winner can steamroll the other side and quickly mop up. Being able to do so is typically a good quality to have in a competitive strategy game.
Can't tell if there's much of a strategy. Also hard to keep an eye on the mana. If managed perfectly, will mana actually replenish quickly enough to keep up with all the annoying neighbors, or is it inevitable that eventually the mage won't be able to cast enough spells to get rid of 'em? Having a way to speed up mana regen would be welcome, even if only temporarily; especially if it involved some skill to accomplish.
Not very clear which fishes are safe to eat and which aren't. And I was surprised to find I can eat radioactive barrels. Must do something other than what I expected (death), but never noticed it. Screenshot implies one grows/mutates, but no clue if the barrels contribute.
Hit boxes are also hard to estimate. I'm not quite sure what parts of my fish or the other fishes are part of the collision body.
And it appears that stuff happens off screen too, since I heard the *bling* noise when I was off the top of the screen avoiding a big mess of large fish.
Not actually starting the game until the player first presses up/down even while stuff animates in the background was a simple, subtle, but nice touch.
Plenty of content, lots of levels. Were they randomly generated?
I didn't see an energy bar, so I'm not sure how that was affecting my play, nor did I know how close to death I was. What I did discover was that the dash was super powerful, so that's essentially the only move I ever did. Only reason I died was because I got sloppy over some spike traps.
The max duration to activate double click felt a little short, but maybe I'm just being lazy. :-) I'm with Chubb, though, about holding down LMB to walk or something.
Really liked the intro art style. The music was very nice, and I was pleasantly surprised to get different tracks for different levels.
The actions felt like they had some lag which was a bit frustrating, along with the inability to control the jump height/distance. The rocks also seemed to have some awkward collision behavior which added to the frustration while I was still learning the appropriate timing.
In the spots with the powerup followed by scorpions, is it possible to jump through the two scorpions stacked one above the other? Because if not, it makes the powerup absolutely necessary, and if the player accidentally jumps over it for whatever reason, then they've essentially lost, as they have no hope of getting past the scorpions. Missing the powerup should make it harder, but not impossible. And putting the powerup in one of the split sections of the level would give the player a decision of taking the easy route and missing the power up, or the harder route to get the powerup and make the scorpions easier.
Intriguing concept. I actually tried sitting back further from my screen to see if I could defocus my eyes a bit and have each one stare at its half of the screen. Perhaps the distance the two platforms are from each other (affected by size of display device) could therefore affect difficulty?
There are probably all sorts of directions one could take this if extending the gameplay mechanics. Different shaped objects (or platforms). Different physics materials with adjusted bounce/friction or other attributes. Target receptacles with a variety of behavior. Plus any number of aesthetic themes one might layer on top. (Arcade basketball was the first to come to my mind.)
Pretty cool, super easy to figure out, at no point was I really confused, and lots of elements of the game are nicely polished.
The limited number of sprite frames to represent the direction of the vessel caused me some problems though, because it made it a little hard to tell just how much of an effect a brief hold of a thruster was going to have, until I discovered that I had held too long. The feedback the game is providing the player is limited, in other words.
Also, there seems to be an asymmetry with the two thrusters or the center of gravity or something. Holding the right thruster alone with gradually produce an ever expanding spiral, but holding the left thruster alone will quickly result in a wild spin in one spot. Going straight still works as expect, but trying to adjust the vessel's angle is tricky because adjusting clockwise behaves differently than counter-clockwise.
One other minor suggestion: Provide some visual indication around the target station (like a glowing/strobing ring?) in addition to the arrow. This is just in case an intermediate station is in the direct path toward the next station. If the player isn't watching the arrow super carefully, they're likely to head straight for the intermediate station, wonder why they're not docking, and only eventually notice the arrow is still pointing elsewhere.
Wasn't sure if there was much of an objective other than to keep building up, after I noticed that the tide was higher each time it came in.
And since the construction interface was not quite as satisfying as I wanted, I quickly gave up trying to come up with my own objective. (In particular, I couldn't place things in quite the orientation I wanted, or tell precisely where in 3D space they'd be, which is understandably a challenge with any building game using a 3D perspective camera.)
The interface was also slightly more frustrating because I chose to play in a window, and the mouse cursor wasn't locked to the window. Kept clicking outside of the window and switching other apps. I believe doing Screen.lockCursor = true during Update() might fix that.
But I agree with the others, the growth of the trees and especially grass, the selection outline of items, the water and sky, all look really good. I did wonder where the moon was, though, which one would presume was the cause of the tides. ;-)
Took me a while to figure out that each shoe was a separate object. Kept clicking on the one that was smelly, and wondering why I couldn't put water in a bottle (or a coffee pot, before I discovered that the pot was for the dirt). I guess that an inevitable challenge of making a point-n-click: making the correct actions sufficiently unambiguous to not cause frustration, but also sufficiently non-obvious as to avoid being completely boring.
Beyond those particular thoughts though, things were well done. The art and the feedback from the robot was more than enough for me to know what the interactive elements in the room were, and to eventually piece together the proper sequence of actions.
A small suggestion on the seeds: If they were to flicker a few times before they disappear, that could be a helpful indication for the player to decide whether to keep running toward them or to give up and manage something in the other direction. Or in the case of blue seeds, when to start running toward in the hopes that they'll disappear before the player gets to them, making it easier to get to other seeds beyond the poison seeds.
Some of the proper ordering felt obvious, while some of it felt arbitrary. For example, why can plants grow before a rainstorm, but trees won't grow unless apparently one does the wind first, followed by storm? I got trees by pure accident, not semi-intelligent exploration.
The fact that things like trees and fire were elements to discover through exploration provided a really cool feeling, but it needs to be coupled with a sense of agency by the player, as though they were intelligently responsible for making the discovery, at least partially. Well, I'll admit that it is subjective, but that's the sort of experience I'm hoping for in a game about exploration and discovery.
Tough. Very intriguing dynamics that I think could lead to interesting gameplay and player choices, but I didn't feel like I had enough time or effective control to really experiment much before I lost and had to start over. A gentler learning curve in the early stages could have had a dramatic effect on my experience.
Technical note that affected gameplay: I eventually got in the habit of jumping to the top of the hill when it was clear I was going to lose. Since the game doesn't reset the player's location when it restarts, that's a notable advantage, being able to grab the seeds immediately rather than laboriously hop up the hill.
Very creative, and lots of room for interesting scenarios. It got too difficult for my weak will after something like 10 levels, though, and I had to give up.
Solid foundation, but I think what I felt was missing the most was additional "juiciness" to make the experience more exciting as I got really close to 100%, or to make the experience more informative when I got too far below 100%. What you had looked really good, but I found myself watching the barriers explode, and since they exploded the same way every time, I had a harder time distinguishing how well or poorly I was doing beyond splintering or not.
Good use of the brake sound effect when running into things; I liked that.
Building in the race minigame as a thing to just stumble upon was pleasing.
The collision bounds on the worm's mouth felt a little small; there were times I felt I'd gotten close enough to a human/potato but still didn't actually eat it. It's a subjective point, but I can't help but feel a little cheated out of a rightfully deserved potato. :-)
The music and mood and graphics all felt like they fit very well together.
The nature of it being a platform but only allowing left and right movement made me feel excessively limited in my options. I think I might have been shooting something out at regular intervals, but I couldn't quite tell. They also seemed to always or often go right, which was less helpful when stuff was to my left. Ice at the edge of ledges was particularly confusing.
Too often, out of platformer habit trying to get away from the flying baddies (since I can't jump-dance around them), I tried to run off to the next platform down before it had scrolled. It was depressing to lose simply because the ground was still a few pixels off the screen. :-(
I liked this one; it had a solid core, even if rough around the edges. Music and sound effects fit the mood well, and controls worked as I expected them to (other than Enter not working in the menus).
One of the early bits of tutorial text disappeared before I had read it all; if it mentioned how to switch between the three malware types, I missed it; only figured it out after mashing buttons. I think they would have been more convenient on the right-hand side of the keyboard, so I could easily play with two hands, and thereby move/act and switch to a different malware type more rapidly. As it was, worming through a vent and then hiding as a trojan was awkward.
Not knowing which pairs of vents were connected was frustrating. Maybe that was actually part of the gameplay challenge: Figure out the connections without doing anything that will get you caught. But since I entered the game with a different mindset, I found that lack of information annoying.
I was confused by the tutorial saying one normally needs to go to the start to finish the level, but not actually being able to do so within the tutorial level.
Looked pretty and had good touches of polish, such as the bouncing people and the monster's dreads.
Would have preferred a more traditional camera, rather than a fixed rotating one, especially given the lag it exhibits when the character is moving quickly to the side (I was able to get the monster complete out of frame; makes navigation frustrating). Also, the left/right rotations were inverted from what I would have preferred, but I was mostly able to adapt.
Not much gameplay, as had been noted. Almost gave up before it ended and I realized that there was a timer and a kill count. (I managed to skip that part of your description above, whoops!) But even just basic UI elements with those two values on them would have prevented me from thinking I was just running around in a small tech demo with no objective. The fixed camera made it particularly hard to recognize that there was a moving shadow that could be tracked.
Pleasantly moody music. I want to say that a few sound effects would have added a lot to the experience, but upon reflection, I realize that I felt as though I was watching a silent film, which could actually be a desired aesthetic which could be expanded upon. Nonetheless, I felt unpleasantly disconnected from the action, needing some additional feedback as I killed the people below the monster. Especially since I couldn't actually usually see the people below the monster, again due to the fixed camera.
Once I realized that all the enemies had the same pattern of sleeping followed by two bursts, I was able to get through pretty easily. But before that point, I was getting frustrated by the almost complete lack of visual/audible hint that an enemy was about to send out a burst. I'd be floating by it and then immediately get hit with no opportunity to react.
Since learning the pattern is the central element to the game, multiple levels could naturally involve enemies with different behaviors and patterns to learn, and also the combination of two or more enemy types whose behaviors interact in curious ways. Make the player have to think about how to adapt to increasingly intricate patterns.
A couple minor glitches were encountered; got stuck on walls sometimes, as was mentioned by someone already. Also once got in a state where I couldn't go through a portal. But after dying, everything was working properly again.
Couldn't tell what the alarm sound was meant to indicate. It would sometimes play when I got hit, but not always. It would also sometimes play when I clearly did not get hit.
Way too many steps necessary to get to actual gameplay. (A login system especially seems excessive; I spent a few seconds just wondering what type of account it was trying to create and if I even cared to click the Create Account button, before doing so and finally seeing the explanation.)
Then after dying, I was punished by having to immediately go through nearly all the dialog again. After two deaths, I gave up trying.
All I can say about the gameplay experience itself was that it seemed like the fist/foot hitboxes were too small. I couldn't tell if I ever did any damage to the cherries, or if they died simply because they jumped on me. Never made any money, so I'm not sure what actions needed to be taken to get it.
I apparently suck at riding a bike; I drove off the edge quite a bit. It was hard to judge where the edge really ended, given that the collision body and the graphics didn't match very well.
I liked the guns. On my second try, I went for swords, but didn't like them as much. They're simply too dangerous when approaching gun ships that could fire at any moment. Given the massive amount of control granted by hooking ship position directly to mouse position, the optimal strategy seems to be to focus primarily on dodging everything, and using guns to slowly take everyone out. I ended up just spinning in a circle with four guns for a while before I eventually just got sloppy and died.
It's a compelling concept, but I feel it needs some more nuance to drive interesting decisions. Maybe also a way to slowly grow in power while *reversing* some of the damage, so that there's a stronger sense of progression.
Humorous as heck, and unlocking new silly items is always fun, but ultimately the fun ran out, both because the combat mechanics were hard to decipher, and the behavior of the various weapons generally *felt* about the same, even if *technically* they were different.
Also, the rotation/testing screen was awkward, especially if I accidentally approached the table from a non-standard angle. The weapon would show up in a fixed world position, but my camera would be in some inconvenient orientation, and I couldn't reorient the camera, or cancel out of the dialog without committing my settings. If I got the settings wrong, I had to trash the weapon and rebuild it, just to fiddle with the awkward XYZ rotation angles again.
I did manage to get up to unlocking bread and a boot and such. But I gave up when I hammered a fried egg to a head, and the physics engine decided to freak out and bounce the head off screen somewhere. But given that this game gave me an opportunity to describe a bug that involves nailing a hard fried egg to a forehead, I'm not really complaining. :-)
Pretty cool. The possibilities of using different types of weapons in combination with each other for effects not achievable by a single weapon type on its own is promising. The windmill + 10 ton weight was the best example of sort of effect that I saw in the levels I played.
Gravitation felt a little weak, but maybe I just wanted objects to fall more quickly thereby making the game easier. :-) Sometimes clicks didn't seem to register, though, which was slightly frustrating. Might have been only when I was trying to use multiple weapons one after the other quickly; is there a cooldown?
The level with the zombie potions defeated me. I found myself wishing the zombies would last longer before they faded. There was very little chance of getting a significant chain of zombie infections. Maybe with windmills I could have gotten more. Crowd control is what it's all about.
Finally, sometimes the weapons would get placed in completely useless positions, such as bows pointing in directions where an enemy will never travel. Minor, but made me sad when things came down to the wire and I only had a few weapons left, and most of them were incapable of achieving anything.
Very clever. Add a few supplements to this core mechanic, and I bet you could come up with an endless collection of interesting puzzles.
The loss condition felt like it happened rather abruptly, but upon reflection, I think it was just the fact that the game play screen was replaced by the "They caught you" screen. I think somewhere in my brain, I wanted to continue to observe the map and where I and the guards were when I got caught, and I was mildly surprised and frustrated when I couldn't. But that's just a minor UI polish sort of thing.
Pretty solid. The physics felt good, including the double jump and wall slide/jump. Although the single-height jump reduced the amount of control that I could exercise.
The diagonal wall reflection was pretty intriguing, but since the boss was almost always out of frame, I mostly just spammed the attack everywhere I went. If I was patient enough, I think I could have defeated the enemy without ever really engaging him directly. But that might just be a limit of the AI, which I'm sure would be difficult to actually make highly intelligent in only two days!
I was hoping that I could hold down two arrow keys and fire diagonally (thus allowing for vertical/horizontal walls to also participate in reflections, and diagonal walls to consume weapon fire), but I suppose that would require introducing a small amount of latency for keyboard tappers, because the game would have to wait for a few milliseconds after one arrow key was pressed to find out if another arrow key would be pressed soon enough afterward to justify a diagonal bullet. Though a cheap way out of that would be to spend those few frames starting the fire sound and drawing an omnidirectional muzzle flash that doesn't care which direction the bullet will eventually go.
Okay, I'm rambling now. Excellent competition entry!
Couldn't figure out how to actually *do* anything intentional. Clicking on the beat seems aggressively strict, and sometimes I was apparently out of sync with the beat without feeling like I was. Though I'm far from an awesome drummer, I do practice a ton, and so I've developed an ear for hearing when my rhythm is off, but in this case, I felt like I was on even when the game didn't think so. I dunno.
But it appears that the game doesn't penalize off-clicks, so I just started spamming the mouse button repeatedly, and that seemed to effectively keep my power bar near max. And then I tried moving around and doing things, but I had no sense of control, could barely aim for the enemies. The sudden shifts in camera position didn't help. I eventually discovered the tire-looking thing, but didn't know how to trigger it; only seemed to occur when I was in the air. Couldn't tell if orbiting served any purpose. Seemed to just keep me away from the enemies that I had to do ?something? to. I eventually eliminated one enemy, though I don't know how. Gave up on the other two because I didn't feel like I was learning anything more about how to play.
It moved so fast, I never had a chance to comfortably look at the city networks, or figure out a strategy. And the interface made it difficult to act quickly. The AI seemed capable of placing a unit instantly upon getting enough points, while I had to wait until I had enough money to click the unit type I wanted, and then click the city I wanted. That small difference in time seemed to cause me to always be behind.
If there were any nuances of behavior with the networks and such, I wasn't able to recognize them. This seems like it might be the kind of gameplay that would work better as a turn-based style rather than real-time. Give me time to consider my move; give me tooltips and info panels describing the immediate effects of any particular choice. I wouldn't be surprised if this would bring out or enable some really deep interesting mechanics, but I just couldn't find any depth the way it was setup.
Controls were a little too laggy to be comfortable, especially the attack control, but the jump to some extent.
I wasn't able at first to recognize the friendly zombots from the enemies, but eventually got over my button-mashing phase. The vulnerable enemies with the red glow was even harder to recognize, even when I knew to look for it, because it was very similar to the purple, and was often gone due to my button-mashing before I noticed it. Maybe that's just due to my poor gameplay style, but a subtle sound effect might have helped to indicate that something had changed with an enemy's state.
I was definitely happy to get health from the rescued friendlies, though I wish the health would just come straight to me from the left side of the screen. Having to turn back and pick up the health felt like an unnecessary nuisance. And the fact that my health bar was more of a damage bar, filling up as I got closer to infection, was briefly confusing. I suppose it wasn't bad per se, but I'm cautious about going against UI conventions without a very compelling reason.
Definitely had a lot of good stuff going for it. Good clear graphics, loading/tutorial screens, effective sound effects and music.
The control was unpleasantly constraining though. Especially since there was a little bit of inertia tied to rotation, but you can only rotate while moving forward, I had a really hard time actually running in the direction I wanted. It made the game more difficult, but not in a fun way.
The smoke cloud on the zombies could maybe benefit from being less opaque, too. There were times that I couldn't tell if the zombie underneath was done for, or still moving, and if so, moving in which direction. So I didn't have the information necessary to decide where to run, or where to send my dog.
Being able to toss zombies (or oneself) in the air with the dog was a cool effect, but I couldn't tell how to trigger it intentionally, and it still seemed to cause the dog to come to a standstill momentarily. It would be interesting if there were ways to utilize the dog that required more skill, but enabled stronger attacks, or more efficient attacks that didn't suffer from the momentary stun.
Moving around is really tedious; the controls are not friendly, don't feel right.
On the second room where I had time to rearrange things, I took a bunch of time to lay out a long strip of boards so I could sprint to the door after pulling the lever. But I got tripped up with the controls when trying to quickly do the 90 degree turn onto the lane of boards, ended up dying, and then was disappointed to see everything reset back to it's original location. If it were so tedious to rearrange anything, or if I felt like it was just my own clumsiness which made me lose time getting to the board lane, I wouldn't have minded as much. But as it was, that's when I got frustrated and gave up.
Also, a minor bug, but when hitting space in the middle of moving (even if the character is 95% of the way to the next tile), the character picks up whatever is in the *previous* tile, not the tile he's moving towards. That got me confused a few times, as I was wondering what had happened to the thing I had previously dropped.
Invisible walls seemed to be everywhere. Sometimes it seemed to just be glitchy collision detection that would go away if I moved around enough, but other times it seemed permanent. In particular, I couldn't get anywhere inside the castle thing because there was an invisible wall just beyond the black button-controlled wall.
Not that I knew what was happening in the first room inside the castle anyway. Not sure what the create was, why I couldn't shoot it, when or why it decided to occasionally move forward, or why it walked through the entrance in the middle. Nor could I determine why the entrance was no longer usable and would disappear if I shot either of the orbs next to it.
The camera was really obnoxious in the desert, the way it lagged behind the character. If anything, I want a camera to move out ahead of the character, so I can see where I'm going and what enemies or other relevant objects are areas I might run into.
I thought at first that I could only use balls as ammo from near the lane that I was firing at, so I was more cautious about spamming three or four balls down a single lane. Then I discovered that I could instantly use any ball available, so I started launching more. Given that they keep going after eliminating a Pomeranian, it seemed like a good strategy to just fire off a bunch of bowling balls and let them do their work. Not much thinking required. But eventually the speed and frequency of Pomeranians overwhelmed me, naturally. One way to encourage not spamming balls might be to give out bonus points for having more balls in the queue, ready to go.
I had to get used to the fact that the ball launched from the right side of the character. Obvious, given the nature of bowling, but my gamer brain kept expect the ball to emanate from the center of the character. Maybe if the character was actually visibly holding a ball on the right side my brain wouldn't have been so stubborn.
The mouse look being entirely independent of WASD movement direction felt unconventional, but I was able to mostly get used to it. The lack of wall slide, especially against foliage, was less easy to adapt to. (It might have just been a high degree of wall friction, but the result was the same.)
Made it past one bear with the bananas, though I wasn't sure how non-thrown bananas caused damage. Nor did I have any clue at first if I was actually making progress against the bear, or if I was simply stunning him, and he'd always wake back up and attack. A health meter, or maybe at least some audibly changing indicator might have helped with that. But I stuck with the banana approach and then saw that he poofed out of existence.
Also damaged a second bear using an angry radish. It was convenient to have had a room where I could grow the radishes with water, so I at least knew that mechanic, but it took getting to the next room with the bear to have any clue what the point of watering radishes was. I was hoping they'd give me health, because I lost a lot experimenting with that first bear. Ultimately, I failed to defeat the bear with the radish because the only source of water was very inconveniently located in a dead-end. If it had been in a loop, I would have had a better opportunity to experiment.
Camera and movement were both very unnatural; too much inertia. Starting location of the player was unhelpful. No targeting reticle. It was weird that the completion screen came up before the physics system or score had settled.
My curiosity about the 20K item managed to keep me playing a while, but it got kind of tedious. Here are some thoughts I had along the way:
Even though superficial, it would have felt more rewarding if the sound effect for collecting more valuable items was different. Maybe even just raising the pitch up by a half step for each tier.
Given the window's short vertical distance, only one forward stroke strength, and slow turn rate, it was obnoxiously difficult to aim for and collect gold. Once I got a radar, all I did was swim straight for the radar object, ignoring everything else along the way. Trying to pick up all the stuff passing me by would have slowed me down too much, especially since I couldn't see objects early enough to efficiently aim for them. If: the turtle was placed at the bottom of the screen (upgrades arranged vertically on left?), or the screen zoomed out the faster the turtle was moving, or multiple radars could be active at once, or some more controlled form of side swimming were available, I might have bothered with the side stuff. Instead, it was just aim for a radar object and go to auto-pilot.
Some control schemes you could play with would include: Long press on forward key does a strong stroke, while shorter taps would do weaker strokes for better control. Turn keys could apply one or the other flipper, inducing both rotation and a little bit of forward movement. Quick tap on left/right key could shift turtle to the side without rotation.
Some indication of distance with the radar; I found myself aiming just to the side of the target object, so that I could tell when I was getting close (because the dot started veering off to the side more quickly). It didn't make me any more efficient, but it was valuable psychologically to see that I was making progress toward the object.
The lateral movement of the waves messed with my eyes and made me always unsure I was heading directly for the dot. I felt like I was always going slightly sideways, even if I wasn't. It was a nice effect in isolation, but once the game became mostly about swimming towards a radar dot, it became mildly unwelcome.
Hehe, pretty good. In particular, the various options of pie throwing based on duration held. Though I was kind of hoping that the final variant would hit multiple clustered people in one shot. Herd them into a corner and then get them all at once.
The flee AI felt nicely done. They flee early enough to be irritating to catch, but not so early that they're easy to herd. That they even flee from long range pies themselves was a nice touch.
Scattering powerups around the level could add more interest. Temporarily get a different type of pie. Or charge up pies more quickly. Or have a longer scare radius to make herding easier, or a shorter scare radius to sneak up close to people. Or move more quickly, or other people move more slowly. Et cetera.
Good job on supplying a tutorial. I actually managed to die on the last tutorial rocket, but it credited me with surviving the tutorial anyway; it was very forgiving. :-)
I couldn't tell the difference between blue and green items, though. I thought the tutorial said something about using blue items three times, but I aimed it, let it loose, and it was destroyed, and I couldn't figure out any way to reuse it.
I was also unpleasantly surprised by the fact that if I took too long to aim an object, it would simply vanish. Indicating this countdown through some audio/visual method would have helped.
In the end, and because of these lost projectiles, the spawn rate of new projectiles was too low to adequantely keep up with the rockets, and there wasn't anything I could do to remedy this. Maybe if there were ways to play more efficiently, such as by taking out multiple rockets with a single projectile, I could build my way back up to having a few spare projectiles laying about. As it was, I had an empty play field, saw a rocket spawn, waited for a projectile to spawn, and then tried to click and aim it quickly, hoping that I still had enough time before the rocket hit the house. Usually I didn't.
My ice pick attack felt very finicky. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, and I couldn't tell why. I got the impression that attacking a soldier from the front was more reliable than from the side, but that might have just been my brain inventing a bogus strategy.
Movement was also awkward. It was less of a critical issue, but colliding with a soldier apparently caused the game to forget that I was still holding down a movement key, because if I killed the soldier, or he moved, or I moved to the side (while still holding down the original key also), I had to repress the movement key to get moving again.
Between those issues and semi-unskippable cutscenes, I made it to the second level twice before I just gave up.
The core physics felt pretty good, but given the player's jump height, the level felt cramped vertically. And he was unable to jump upward through the higher of two blocks stacked on over the other; may have been intentional, but caught me by surprise.
I presume there was no actual objective for making progress, beyond collecting cereal. If there was, I missed it.
Painfully slow; as Kushulain said, seems to be tied to the number of dynamic objects being drawn.
Even if it were running at a much faster speed, though, it felt impossible to be able to reach and shoot down all enemies, given the speed of the player unit relative to the speed of the enemies. I spent my first $80 on a movement upgrade, hoping that it would carry over from one game to the next, but it doesn't appear to do so. That would be one way give the player a chance, though they would have to suffer through a lot of losses without giving up for that to work.
Controls felt a little floaty, especially while falling, and the hit-boxes on the floors were particularly odd to navigate.
On the second level I wasn't sure where to go, and ended up jumping off into nothingness.
Seemed odd that the enemy bullets would hit each other. Not necessarily bad design, especially since defeated enemies could still act as shields for the player, but having level design such that tanks were initialized in positions where one would shoot another in the back seemed unusual.
It was tricky to learn to control by the dude and the RCCAT simultaneously, without stomping over the dude with the cat. I think the lethality of the cat to the player was a valuable gameplay element addition to the core concept of controlling two characters at once.
It was tough navigating, though, because the viewport was centered on the player, not the cat, even though the cat was the one at the front of the action. I would have preferred if the viewport had either been centered on the cat, or at least centered on the average point between the cat and the dude.
Once I got the hang of it, I destroyed all the enemies I could find, but the game claimed that I still had 10 enemies remaining. Since I couldn't find them, I decided to just stomp all the remaining houses myself, because what else is a person to do with a gigantic RCCAT and no objective? :-)
With only one pair of farters up top, in only one configuration, and with a predictable stream of zombie cows differing only in speed, it became a little monotonous after not very long. It was definitely functional, but the decisions I was making while playing the game just felt rather flat.
Nonetheless, it was complete and didn't cause me any troubles or confusion, so kudos on successfully navigating your first Ludum Dare!
The game didn't fully capture the mouse, whenever I rotated too far and then clicked to fire, I'd end up switching to another window, because the cursor was outside of the game screen and active. Alternatively, in fullscreen mode with the game on my left monitor, I decided to only rotate one direction, so my cursor was always on the left edge of the left monitor. But then I kept muting/unmuting the sound every time I launched a sheep. :-/
Part of me wished that the sheepapult direction was tied to the camera direction. To prevent that from being overpowered, you could still cap the max rotation speed of the catapult, but still have the catapult rotate in order to realign with the camera. Might at least be something to experiment with. If you tried that, you could even have the vertical camera angle tied to the catapult "charge", with a visual indicator on the ground for how far the sheep will go. Then again, maybe I'm just wanting to make the game trivially easy. :-)
A minimap would be a nice added touch to know when knights are popping up behind the player.
Nice effects with the growth! Too bad you didn't have time to work in an objective. Perhaps things that soak up water and dry the plants up, and plants that help propagate water automatically, with the objective being to create a self-maintaining ecosystem.
Aiming was difficult, since it was strictly tied to movement direction, which was awkwardly modified by object collision. Since I was using the mouse button to spray water, I kept expecting I could use the mouse to aim. My brain refused to learn otherwise.
I had a hard time navigating the far side of the sphere, mostly because the camera angle made it hard to see over there. Maybe tie camera rotation around the center vertical axis to the horizontal mouse movement?
The first time around I also got stuck on the side/bottom, and simply couldn't roll my ball back up the sphere. Intended?
Not very forgiving. I can understand the instant game-over for poisoning the wrong customer. But for having a customer leave, or failing to poison the target, game-over felt harsh. I would have preferred to see a point system, or some other means of penalizing the player or making the game harder due to those mistakes, without instantly slamming them with the worst possible penalty.
I liked the art style, though the target icon at the bottom was a little hard to see and match up to the larger icons of actual customers.
And naturally, sound effects could have gone a long way to enhancing the experience and mood.
Having a visual indication of the satellite's communication range would have been useful, and would have made the game mechanic make more intuitive sense.
Also, having music but no sound effects feels a little backwards in terms of priority. Being able to both see and hear the disruption of communication (as well as unwanted damage to the satellite) would help a lot in terms of letting the player know how well or poorly they are doing.
Boy, I suck at that. The randomness of the first two forms of AI make it really hard to know when to use your weapon. And since there's no way to recover health, it's preferable to not hold too long and cross the threshold at which your weapon causes you damage. But a small radius weapon makes it that much harder.
I suppose the overall concept of tradeoffs is sound, but I feel like there are a lot of things that could be balanced to make the core concept work well.
The implementation was solid, though.
Rather humorous. And it may have been unintentional or a hasty hack, but I liked how after winning, new but invisible and harmless enemies were still spawning, and I could still shoot them and get more burgers.
I was so confused by this game. For one, the menu was hardly navigable because I couldn't tell which item I had selected. I eventually discovered what the letter 'a' looked like when selected versus not, and managed to get the 3x zoom and start the game, finally. I don't know if that was by design or just a graphical glitch on my machine.
Then I kept getting hit by the falling weight, wondering where it was coming from until I saw in comment that it was actually my own magic. I don't know if sound effects would have helped clue me in to the fact that it spawns at the exact moment that I press the key. Or perhaps if it spawned more on screen, with a little animation; I just thought it had always been there and was falling from above.
Not too bad, though at first I couldn't tell why I wasn't blocking pizzas, until I realized I had to wait until the pizza was over the marker before pressing the key to block it. I know it would take additional time, but certain kinds of animations could go a long way toward explaining why that is. For example, using a skillet to swat the pizza, but if you swat too early, the skillet has swung all the way forward and the pizza simply flies over it.
I also had to rotate my keyboard in order to use the QAZ keys semi-comfortably. And I ended up just rapidly pressing the key corresponding to the row of the next pizza that was incoming. That worked up until level three, so maybe I should have learned more careful timing. I noticed that you could block two rows simultaneously, which made controls a little more awkward. I think I would have preferred if there was a short cooldown (quarter second?) per blocker, but each blocker could be activated independently of the others. That would also allow you to make the advanced levels more complicated, with pizzas in more than one row simultaneously. Though you might need something like an energy bar to prevent players from just pressing all three blockers over and over simultaneously. It replenishes only fast enough to support activation of 3 blockers per second, for example, but is large enough to active 6 blockers in a second before running out of energy and having to wait for it to recharge. Just some speculative ideas to consider.
That was an interesting exercise for my brain. I'm so used to tracking a single player character that I'm controlling that my mind didn't want to temporarily jump over to the possessed enemy. I kept getting confused at first, but gradually got better.
I was also learning to not possess an enemy until after the bigger dude fired its occasional shot, but then an enemy spawned right on top of me and killed me, which was disappointingly out of my control.
It's a minor point, but the second spawn noise (when the enemy actually appears and starts moving) felt a little strong to me. The first sound was less abrasive, and the second event didn't seem significant enough to warrant being communicated to the player with such a bold sound. The first sound presents new information, and so the second sound should just be enough to confirm/finalize what the player is already expecting, that the enemy has finished spawning. Though I will say that talking through this does make me appreciate that there *was* a pre-spawn event followed by the actual spawn.
I like the concept, and the levels visibly generating as you go, but the control scheme felt off. If I had to speculate, I think it is because rapid motions with the mouse work better horizontally than vertically or circularly, due to pivoting about the wrist. Maybe you could ignore the mouse's vertical position entirely, and determine the fishes location purely by translating the mouse's horizontal position into an angle value, describing the angle around the player that the fish is pointing.
Alternatively, you could do some fancier math over multiple frames to determine the mouse's average location and point the fish in that direction, and then calculate the amount of overall rapid mouse movement to determine how wildly the fish is swinging back and forth around that direction. Rapid mouse movement (regardless of specific direction) results in rapid fish swinging. Rapid movement within a very tiny range results in the fish also swinging back and forth rapidly, but in a narrow range of angles, while broader mouse movements makes the fish swing back and forth across larger arcs.
I feel like you might have something fun here, but experimentation with the controls is needed.
Couldn't make it past the wide spikes on the second level. I have a suspicion that I'm suppose to warp once, then swap places with the enemy on the platform, but I don't have the agility to pull that off.
I can understand the feature of getting stuck inside objects when warping, but one thing you might experiment is having a bit of a forgiving margin of error: When a player warps into a solid object, if there is open space within a certain distance above the warp location, then set the resulting warp location to that open space instead of within the solid object.
Alternatively, or in addition to that change, try making the click location correspond to the player sprite's *feet* rather than the sprite's center. That would make it easier to accurately determine where to click in order to teleport just above the ground without getting stuck in it.
Looks pretty. But the spacebar key (and the R key when restarting) barely work on my machine. Most of the time the presses are just ignored. I tried super short presses, long presses, medium presses; regardless of the timing, seemed to be about the same.
Got to the second level, where it appears that the blood supply is limited and you take damage. Is there anyway to determine what your current blood quantity is? I noticed that the avatar graphics are different, and at first I thought its body was actually getting thinner as I spewed blood. That would be a cool effect, if you're healthy and full of blood, the body looks healthy. As you become weaker and have less blood to spew, you become thinner, bonier.
It's definitely got a goofy mood and some humor, but the mechanics were just too disappointingly thin. And I kept watching the instructions and thus didn't get a good chance to watch any silly alien animations. I was worried I'd miss their heads exploding too, not knowing exactly when that would be or what it would entail.
Not too bad once I figure out effective timings, distance, and positions for clicking. But could have used some visual indications of the gravitational effect. The widescreen aspect ratio was a bit of a problem too, making asteroids from above or below extra obnoxious to deal with.
And I feel like the force of gravity and it's drain on energy could have been substantially tweaked. Its effect is very strong when really close to asteroids, but it drains energy really quickly too. Since most of the asteroids seemed to be heading directly for Earth, what I generally did was give each asteroid a very brief click really close. It didn't deviate the asteroid's direction in any predictable manner, but just about any deviation was sufficient. But regardless of the super brief clicks, I was still almost always out of energy. Even if some alterations would make the gravity equations less realistic, such as reducing the significance of the inverse square law, it might nonetheless improve the feel of gameplay.
I did live long enough use the actual unconventional weapon, but not long enough to ever discover what the consequence would be if I hadn't. Regardless, you get theme-squared for having a second-order thematic mechanic.
I felt constrained by the constant-speed running and the inability to shine the light in any direction other than the direction I was also running. Although constraints are a natural part of games, I was wishing I had at least some additional control to compensate for the above two constraints. Because as it was, facing the ghouls out in the open was suicide, as was trying to run past them. The only strategy that seemed to work was to hide behind each cluster of boxes, destroying any ghouls visible ahead before venturing out past the boxes again.
Visuall, the lighting didn't seem very clear. A sharper light cone would have been useful. And the light cone doing more damage as a ghoul got closer due to more intensely concentrated light could have been an interesting mechanic that could have allowed head-on attack of a ghoul and viable option.
One last thought is that you might add a timer and a distance measurement, and save high scores. Maybe have a milestone every 100 meters, and each milestone records the fastest time you ever made it that distance. Also record the farthest distance regardless of time. These metrics would give the player something to compete against, even if otherwise the game were exactly the same.
Pretty cool. Has a lot of potential for interesting puzzles if you were to add larger levels and vertical movement. Especially if you need to swap one object with another a long ways away, but navigating between the two seems to also require swapping objects, thus resetting your shot on the original object.
Roaming enemies could add a further twist, making you decide whether you can avoid them without swapping, or question what more complicated effect swapping them to a particular location would have, given that they move. Physics could also make a lot of the swapping puzzles rather intricate.
I wish I could make $50,000 in a month pumping out tiny adventures. :-)
There was certainly a mood of urgency and profit over quality. Deadlines often seemed to be unreachable. But the lack of a pause except when selecting the next project was the biggest cause of that mood. Interesting effect, but not fun. As a management sim, I wanted to spend time looking over project and worker stats so that I could match things up the best, but I barely had the time to do so. It turned into more of a memory and reflexes game than a management sim. Not sure if that was the intended effect.
I also noticed that quality quit going up once the task was complete. Would be a nice effect if a worker who had nothing else to do could continue to improve quality (still limited by skill, of course) even after finishing the task overall.
It also felt like project complexity was influenced most strongly by number of employees. I think it might be better to base it on some other stat (or combination of stats), such as money in the bank, or total revenue earned thus far before expenses. That way, hiring more people will be the natural gameplay choice of being presented with bigger projects, rather than the other way around. That way, the game will lead the player to a degree, rather than the player having to completely lead the game toward greater complexity.
Tilling I could do. I tried planting, but I couldn't tell what I was holding, or if anything got planted. Usually I'd just see either nothing, or an apple drop on the ground. Once I saw a tree grow after a few seconds, but that was a surprise since I hadn't seen anything happen when I tried to interact with the tilled ground.
None of my attacks seemed to have any effect. Not sure if I wasn't close enough, or just needed to attack more.
And the controls had some glitches. For example, if I was holding both W and D and therefore moving up and to the right, and then I released W, I would continue moving diagonally, instead of heading directly to the right. This made it hard for me to feel like I was confidently in control of the avatar.
I gave it a shot, made it through to the end, but the commas and phrasing produced a rhythm that I found to be rather laborious, filled with too many pauses. But maybe my mind simply isn't in a poetic mood at the moment; it is a rather subjective affair.
The ambient sounds upon beginning particular scenes was a nice touch, though.
Creative interface style, though it quickly became so irritating in practice that I gave up. :-( Typing the enemy's 3-character code wasn't the worst. Having to hit three separate keys to simply move a bit was too much though. Maybe a compromise where movement is achieved just by pressing WASD once, but it only applys on the frame when the key is pressed. So if you want to move up a bunch, you still have to hit W multiple times, once for each bit of thrust. The force multiplier could slowly ramp up if the player is repeatedly hitting the same direction quickly.
Not too bad for such a short period of time. Kudos for trying a second time after the first idea fell through; I know that can be discouraging.
I did have a hard time telling if the color matching was actually doing anything. I seemed to have plenty of success just staying one color (black in this case) and firing at the big blob of enemies. They'd slowly die regardless of their color, and trying to match their color didn't seem to increase that rate any.
The fact that all enemies move at the same speed and with the same basic AI while the player character moves faster meant that all the enemies turned into a mostly harmless blob that was easily avoidable.
Eventually my down key got stuck, and I couldn't move off of the lower boundary, so I died.
Heh, pretty goofy. Not much to do in terms of gameplay, though. It appears that the direction of the hula toss is dependent upon the direction you use to start dancing, so you have to make your decision of direction before you have the relevant information. And once the decision has been made, you're locked in. But the opponents also seem to always alternate between left and right, so it becomes a trivial decision in the end. Or I suppose you could just spam left/right as quickly as possible. My fingers didn't feel like doing that tonight, so I didn't find out how effective that strategy would be.
Well, I'm lost alright! No matter which direction I wandered (diagonal was faster, by the way, due to not dividing by square root of 2), I never found anything. The friendly animals gave me something blue when my dog attacked them, but I don't know what that was for. (<continues playing> Ah, experience, I see.) My lantern always ran out of oil well before I found anything interesting. When it restarts me, it seems to be already pitch black much of the time, and my lantern doesn't even last a single night.
<continues playing> Well, I finally found the cabin. But got frustrated by how easily this dude keeps getting lost every single day. :-) Being lost without any clear idea of a strategy I could employ to resolve my problem was not particularly fun, unfortunately.
Couldn't tell if I was accomplishing anything when I was just making people jump rather than sail off smoking, and had a hard time figuring out if there was any particular timing that would give me a good success rate at the latter.
I also lost on some levels without any clue as to why. Especially on levels where the screen was fixed (no where to go left or right) and I filled the green bar all the way well before time was up.
Level selection was cool, once I figured out what it was. :-)
Very good job! I got a little frustrated on at a few moments, and almost quit, but the game kept me playing long enough to make it through all the levels.
I never ended up needing the wooden statue; I used the car as a weight before I discovered the statue existed. Tried to use the statue at the very end when the spikes descended into the water, but was disappointed to find out that it didn't float, so I simply had to restart the level.
Controls felt a little stiff, but not so bad that I couldn't do what I need to do.
The variety of "weapons" was fun. Though the fun was lessened when I had to micromanage three different weapons in a short period of time to get through a spot. But that's just because that's not my preferred style of play.
Controls were hard to figure out; I kind of managed to make a few things I could walk on, but was too frustrated by the limited ammo, really bad lag, crazy colors, and my tendency to fall off into the infinite abyss. I might have stuck with it a bit longer, but I didn't even know where I was suppose to try to get to by building stuff; nothing that I saw drew my curiosity.
It wasn't bad, but the one thing that's stuck on my mind was how frustrating the visibility was when going from one room to another. I was getting shot at, but couldn't see into the next room and thus couldn't safely shoot back and risk killing a hostage. I couldn't even see the bullets coming at me in order to dodge them until I was actual in the next room.
I tried with the pistol and the shotgun; I liked the notable difference in how they handled. I would have tried again with the machine gun, but I realized that given the visibility issue above, it is far safer to free as many hostages as possible through negotiation and go in with the pistol which is effective enough, than to go in with the ability to generate a whole ton of bullets quickly in a building filled with a bunch of hostages.
The viewport was enough to get me thinking about possibilities, so that's might be a good sign. I know plenty of games have used the limited sight mechanic in dark areas, but it is usually either a circle around the player, or a cone starting at the player's location. It could be an interesting deviation to have the visible area be a region around the look-at target (probably controlled by the mouse position), and the actual area around the player could be blacked out, as in your prototype. That might make it more intense, as enemies could quite easily sneak up behind you while you're distracted with some action elsewhere.
Actual flashlight physics could be used to light up the ground with an ellipse where the player is looking, and also light up the front of any enemies or other objects between the player and the look-at location, so that enemies couldn't approach from the front, while still keeping plenty of suspense due to risk of attack from behind.
The controls were quite sluggish, and I couldn't figure out precisely what was causing the sudden changes of velocity. It didn't seem to be the orange balls, because sometimes I could be right next to them without being affected, and other times I'd fly away suddenly without any orange ball being near. The same with the rotating arrows.
But overall, the use of all edges of the screen as the only loss condition and the use of physics to push you toward the edge might hold some gameplay potential.
Any reason the platforms were practically the same color as the background? I didn't even realize there were platforms for the first few seconds of gameplay.
Wished my guns couldn't get downgraded after getting upgraded. Having triple lasers, and then accidentally flying over a single laser pickup was disappointing, but maybe that was intentional? If so, having them float around like asteroids might have made it seem more inline with the gameplay. Or maybe even better, getting hit while possessing three lasers would destroy one of the lasers.
Without a goal, without any meaningful decisions, without compelling feedback when completing (or failing to complete) the various tasks, and with the motion blur making it subtly annoying running around everywhere, I lost interest pretty quickly. The visuals (other than the motion blur) were good though.
Pretty cool little simulator. I wasn't sure at first if you had implemented any form of income, but I was happy when I saw the credits begin to accumulate.
I couldn't figure out what the brown X icon was on houses. I presume the green was no food, and yellow no electricity, though I was also unclear how they eventually got food and electricity. I built solar panels and greenhouses, and eventually the icons went away, but the causal connection and timing was murky.
The guys wandering the roads gave the colony a good lived in feeling, but were they actually doing anything? I couldn't tell. Also, did there different colors mean anything?
Super-minor interface observation: Deselecting the active tool when left clicking on an invalid spot was unintuitive to me. If I made a trivial mistake clicking in the wrong spot, I had to then reselect the tool again to build in the intended spot.
After left clicking at the title screen, and after that screen faded, I was left with just a black screen, other than the three stats at the bottom. I would occasionally get a sound effect, but nothing visible. Eventually I got the game over screen. :-( Clicking didn't seem to accomplish anything judging from the sound effects.
I was using the Windows version, on Windows 7. Only error message I saw was "libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile", but I'm guessing that's not the problem.
The violence of the camera shake did a good job setting the mood. Now if only there were gameplay elements that made the player have to balance which enemy to attack and how to get the timing right. As it was, I just held the mouse button down and went crazy on every skull that appeared. And then got bored and went crazy on the walls. (It was a nice touch that beating the walls caused similarly violent camera shake.)
Was there any player control at all? It's a really interesting AI/ALife simulation, but that seems to be about all it is at the current stage. I wanna know how I'd stack up against the AI. :-) I find myself also wanting a way to speed up the simulation.
Hilarious.
Got a little slow when there were lots of corpses on the screen, but that made the game easier, not more frustrating, so I didn't mind too much.
I was hoping for and expecting a fourth upgrade, but I guess it didn't matter much since the fifth phase was the last.
As for upgrades, I went with turret first, farmer speed second, and field size third, and that worked out pretty well; wasn't too hard.
The variety of animals was fun. Especially since chickens had different behavior than the others. Animations and sound effects would very easily be capable of extending the humor further.
Controls were somewhat limiting and at times confusing. Making horizontal and vertical movement independent from each other would have been nice, and also allowed diagonal movement. As it was, holding down right, then also holding down up and subsequently releasing up while right is still held did not result in intuitive behavior. I first traveled right, then up (since the up key overrode the right key), and then continued going up even after letting up on the up key, but still holding right.
Given the instant loss penalty for missing a plane, and missiles that go down/right, my strategy was to always head straight for the top left of the screen, firing guns and missiles simultaneously as fast as possible. Given the speed of my plane, the location of the enemy planes, and the timing of enemy bullets, I would often either get hit by a bullet on the way up, or not get up there in time to stop the highest enemy plane. Basically, there were plenty of opening game states that I felt I simply could not ever survive, making it feel unfair.
I liked the moonwalking Santa; it made me smile.
The fact that the gifts spawned from the <0,0> point of the Santa sprite made the far right chimney less appealing than the other two. Spawning the gifts from the horizontal center of the the Santa sprite would have been more balanced, especially given that Santa can face both directions.
Couldn't figure out how to drop stuff into my stash, so I was stuck with 8 items in my inventory and couldn't pick up what I presume were important or useful items. Also couldn't figure out what use certain items had, such as the skull or dagger-looking thing.
The combat was tricky since I couldn't attack while moving, and all movement happened strictly on the grid. Might have been a bit less frustrating if my sword had an arc, so I could hit guys diagonally.
The limited indoor vision was claustrophobic. Part of that might have simply been the small tile size, but even if it were of more ordinary size, I think the range of sight would have felt constraining. An explored fog of war might have removed most of the pain, though, since I was most frustrated by not remembering the layout of the map.
There were a bunch of walls on the left side that weren't colliding with the player properly. I just walked into the room in the western forest without even having a key.
The idea and execution had a lot going for it, and I spent some time trying to get used to the combat controls and explore the areas, but eventually got annoyed. I think the room in the forest with all the loot was the the point where I gave up, because I couldn't pick any of it up due to my full inventory.
Not being able to see my health/ammo made it a little difficult to figure out what was going on, and a little frustrating when I ran out of ammo and then inevitably insta-died when I got hit trying to scramble for some of the flashy blocks that I thought might be ammo or health, but was unsure about. Had there been a life bar, counter, or something, I would have been able to immediately get relevant feedback every time I fired my gun, got hit, or picked up a flashy block, and could have quickly figured out the life:ammo relationship.
I also wasn't quite sure what the numbers meant at the bottom of the screen, or on the respawn screen. But that might've been more clear if there were other players playing at the same time as me.
The platform physics felt pretty good; glad to have the ability to drop down through a platform. I did sometimes have a bit of difficulty jumping sideways onto a higher platform; the horizontal distance was sometimes too much for the player's run speed.
The player's hitbox felt a little off. There were a few times I got hit when I was expecting the bullet to miss me. I think this mostly occurred with vertically moving bullets that were passing to the left or right of the avatar's rectangular body. Is the hitbox still a square? Or a circle? But I was pleased to notice a short period of invincibility after getting hit. Adding a visual indication such as blinking/flashing a bit could be a nice touch for that state, too.
I missed it at first, probably because I just took it for granted, but the hit particles were a really good touch!
Controls were very difficult. Ground was very slippery, and acceleration was way too powerful for me to control, in the air or on the ground. Slopes made the slipperiness particularly hard to manage.
The limited vision really was the least of my concerns, and didn't contribute a whole lot to my experience.
I see what you mean by ZettyMath. :-) I couldn't figure out how to reliably aim, so I just constantly tossed out entire walls of fish skeletons while moving up and down the screen until I got unlucky and a snowman spawned right on top of me.
Is there any strategy to this? It seems completely random as far as I can tell, with no reason for me to pick any one circle over any others.
Was a little confused by the mechanics. I seemed to get more ants by attacking beetles, rather than by digging to pheromones.
The game also became unbearably slow after around 125 ants. Around 1 to 2 FPS. It would occasionally and briefly speed up again, only to quickly drop back down to super slow frame rate. Judging by the events that happened when it would briefly speed up, such as worker ants digging to a designated pheromone spot, my hunch would be that it is pathfinding related.
A game that insists on running in fullscreen, at a non-native resolution, and exits every time you die, even during the initial tutorial segment, is rather frustrating.
Aside from that, I could have benefited by having some sort of visual indication of how close a block was to being considered "at the screen". Maybe if the blue walls had lines on them that were parallel to the edges of the screen, and the blocks cast shadows onto the walls, it would have been easier to know precisely when I needed the view to be at a certain location to catch a blue block.
Wasn't sure at first when I was actually doing damage to enemies, or which objects were actually capable of being damaged. Maybe a sound effect or some visual representation could have helped, such as a small flicker on the enemy when it gets damaged.
Clever, simple mechanic. One of the frustrating aspects, however, was remembering if I needed to press up or down to reverse direction. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to remember, especially given the color of the player controlled point, but for some reason it was. I was frequently speeding up right at the moment I intended to reverse, because I was hitting the wrong direction. Maybe use another key to control reverse? Or a double down tap to invert direction, but maintain current speed?
The game seemed to end when I still had a second or two of time left.
The forklift was a fun little addition, but there wasn't much for me to do other than to simply wait for it to pass. Maybe if I could have set the box I was hold doing at the top of the first ladder and grab another box while the forklift goes by, I could have felt like I was strategically optimizing my efficiency.
When I tried to place a box into an invalid/overlapping spot in the truck, I would have preferred to just receive a small invalid style sound effect, leaving the box still under my position control. The message box made me think the game crashed for a moment.
The physics of ladder climbing slowed me down quite a bit. Especially in the areas where the ladder passes through the floor, I would actually get stuck between the upper and lower edges of the floor too easily.
Hit boxes on zombies, graves, and energy balls seemed like they might be a little too large?
The lantern on the house in the background also made it trickier for my brain to recognize the red energy balls as an actual gameplay element. They sort of just blended in with the background. Not sure what they came from either, but my movement was painfully slow when trying to avoid them.
The hotspot on the swatter felt a little off. Like I had to aim with the the part where the handle connects to the swatter surface, rather than in the middle of the swatter square.
An additional graphical touch you might try out would be to slightly alter the shade of green randomly for each bug splat, so that when they start to pile up, it really starts to look exceptionally disgusting. :-)
Physics were a little wonky, and the mechanics of the torch and harpoon didn't really lead to particularly interesting gameplay, but they didn't get in the way much either.
The level design had some interesting elements in it. Collecting the bonus for example could only be done by backtracking, though one didn't have to use the slow harpoon to get back to the first zombie platform, which was a small nicety. Also the fact that zombies wouldn't always spawn above the same platform where they end up wandering caught me off guard a few times before I learned how to navigate the level safely.
Not sure what the point of collecting loot is, other than to just do it, but I suppose the collection mechanic was at least implemented and tested well. Also not sure if there are a finite number of identical levels, or if it just goes on forever, increasing the level number.
The voice acting was fun, and fit the music well. Could have benefited from some ambient zombie noises.
I needed three hands to play this game. One to rotate the piece, one to move the piece, and one to move the camera. It would have been nicer if piece rotation were tied to a mouse button. As it was, I just picked a spot on the screen and stayed there, not using the mouse at all. If a piece was on the far side of the play field (or worse, the left or right side), I just gave up trying, if I couldn't move the piece to the front of the my view quickly. Which was another difficulty: holding down an arrow key only moved the piece once, not repeatedly at the maximum rate. Made it annoying to try to move a piece to a region of the playfield that I wanted.
But I only played this single player; it would likely have produced a more interesting experience in a multiplayer context. I imagine it could get pretty hectic with four people, which would have been a good opportunity for extra elements that would fit a high intensity and fast paced mood.
One small note: I find it better to round the displayed time *up* rather than *down*, so that when there is only a fraction of a second remaining, the timer says "0:01", and the exact moment the timer actually reaches zero is also the exact moment that the display says "0:00".
The woosh skill was an obnoxiously weak defensive maneuver, and jumping even with the jumping boots felt limited. The broken glass vision was an interesting concept to try out, and was implemented well technically, but it didn't really produce an engaging experience for me personally. Along with the limited defensive and avoidance capabilities, it made the experience just frustrating. Though it did effectively produce a mood of danger and near helplessness. I guess that's just not the mood I felt like experiencing right now.
Too painfully difficult for me. But it was fascinatingly interesting how the arrangement forced the the eyes/brain to try to focus on two separate locations on the screen in a very counter-intuitive way. My neurons didn't want to cooperate, but I imagine they'd adapt given enough time. I'm curious if that could be adapted in any way to a practical improvement in hand/eye coordination or flexible reflexive thinking.
Maybe I just need to first drown myself in caffeine before playing a game like this. The arrow indicators were immensely helpful UI element, but I apparently needed even more help than they provided.
Perhaps starting off with a slower vertical avatar speed, and/or slower moving, more regular, or less dense obstacles, and then gradually making one or more of those variables harder over time, could help generate and maintain a state of flow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29
Really emphasizes what I've always said about football, that it's a turn-based strategy game (with real-time combat, though not part of this version). I like the concept.
Would have appreciated seeing a little more indication of potential effects on screen when choosing between the three different play styles. With the timer always counting down, I didn't want to take time to refer back to the instructions.
Kidney stones as an injury was hilarious, by the way.
The physics of jumping was too frustrating. Couldn't reliably jump high, making the cat chase annoying.
I was rather disoriented by not knowing what my HP was at any given time, nor how to interpret the "N at M" message when encountering enemies, nor exactly what events were happening as I moved into/out of rooms containing enemies.
The way the UI for current floor was arranged top-to-bottom was also confusing, since up-stairs moved me down in the UI, rather than up, and down-stairs vice versa. The fact that a down stair on floor 1 went to floor 8 was surprising also (I should have paid attention to the game's title). Between that, the random teleports to arbitrary floors, and the frequency of difficult monsters even on the early floors, I had a hard time staying alive. Most of my deaths felt random, not due to my own mistakes.
Edit: Ah, now I see that STR is essentially HP, and INT is like MP. Rather curious how one gets weaker as one gets damaged, and gets dumber as one uses magic. Finally managed to clean out the entire castle; was pretty easy, but only after getting lucky enough to find better equipment as a warrior.
Good framework, but was lacking any real gameplay. I never had to make a decision that seemed to matter, or solve a puzzle that felt rewarding.
I thought the horde provided an interesting game mode. As soon as that happened, I found a small cluster of remaining healthy cells (or even just one lone cell), sat on top of it, and fired rapidly in all directions. It does probably make a lot of the best times incredibly similar though, since most people will make it to that point, and then lose within a narrow range of time.
At first I didn't realize that my unit could also run into the infections to kill them, so I was carefully avoiding them and worried every time I went to the edge to grab DNA. The end-game horde was also less interesting within that mindset, as I could no longer pick up DNA or run to the remaining healthy cells. My end-game play style thus changed when I figured that out. But early game hardly mattered because my unit was so crazy slow.
I had some annoyances with the evolve feature. As soon as you choose an evolution, the game resumes instantly. So I found myself trying to press the mouse button on the play field *as soon as possible* because in the later stages, every single moment of firing is important. I'm spraying bullets everywhere, and the fewer bullets I'm firing, the lower my average rate of killing off the infection. But I also then had a bad habit of getting the timing wrong a few times, or clicking outside of the window and bringing some other window to the foreground. Having just a fraction of a second delay after choosing an evolution would have made that feel less frustrating.
The evolution menu also didn't update the numbers in the buttons correctly when I had 8+ bits of DNA and did multiple evolutions at once.
A notable visual indicator for where my cursor was could be useful. I was having a hard time tracking by my unit and my target simultaneously, and peripheral vision was almost no help, since my unit, the DNA, and the mouse cursor were all too small for my peripheral vision to care. Visually knowing when I had enough DNA to evolve was also a little tricky.
Very difficult action. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not my cup of tea. For what it's worth, I think the tentacle eye stalk killing me with a laser was when I said, "Nope, I'm done." It was a cool effect, but pushed me over my limit of what I felt like handling.
When the game started, I thought I was just on the main menu, trying to figure out how the game started. I did like that the main menu was "live", during that time when I thought it was just a menu. :-)
The music restarting jarringly when the level restarted was noticeable.
This was pretty awesome. I think it has a lot of potential.
One idea that came to mind to reduce the difficulty and give some more control to the player is two have two different bottom grids. It was frustrating when I had cleared out the entire grid without finding the direction I needed, only to be left with a fully reset grid and a random chance of failing. Being able to choose when to clear out and reset one grid, while keeping the safer partially known grid in reserve, would help. Or perhaps a way to pick up or otherwise save control tiles across a reset.
Combined with that, have some more safe spots in the upper level, so the trick is to reach a safe spot before having to reset the grid, or else be stuck taking a gamble.
A visual nitpick was that I really wished there was something visible that immediately indicated how many adjacent controls tiles there were for any given tile, regardless of direction. Sort of like how minesweeper used colors (but yeah, colorblind issues would pop up). Granted, not having this only meant I had to do simplistic adding of single digit numbers in my head, but I'm lazy! :-)
Curious concept, but something rubbed me the wrong way about the script. It seems like a very difficult script to write without totally oversimplifying or stereotyping everything, even for a native speaker, and probably even for a professional psychiatrist.
I think it would also be useful to have a clearer sense of progress. In many cases, it felt like each question and answer was completely independent from the rest, regardless of order. I don't know what mechanics were *actually* occurring in the game code, but I didn't feel a strong connection between questions or from the order of questions.
The in-between conversations with the nurse were a nice touch, though.
The UI for guessing the disorder was a bit confusing. At first I thought the three columns of specific disorders somehow mapped to the three categories at the top, but it was actually just three separate sub-menus. To help with that, perhaps add something visual to indicate that the disorders currently visible on the screen all belonged only to the category that had most recently been selected.
I couldn't figure out what was happening or why. I presume it's best to send people to the circle of hell indicated, but maybe not? Is that a tradeoff between keeping demons satisfied and just punishment? I also kept getting fired, even when I thought all indications suggested I was doing okay.
It wasn't obvious that the cards at the midnight hour were upgrades or whatever. The first time on that screen, you can click anywhere and get back to the game, so I didn't even realize that the cards were any more than artwork. The second time the screen showed up, I tried clicking everywhere and must have eventually clicked a card without fully realizing it. The third time I started to figure it out, but still didn't know what each card did. Then I discovered at least that the boat adds an extra boat. Still don't know what the other two do.
The music and artwork set the mood very well. I especially liked the background art. Too bad there weren't any sound effects though. And I didn't really notice anything thematic that I'd identify as "beneath the surface".
As for the game play, seemed rather easy, and I never felt like the decisions were that tough or interesting to make. I essentially just always used the unit with the highest "best of N rolls" stat for the type of roll that was weakest for my opponent. For example, if an opponent required +6 Stealth or +5 Combat to defeat, I'd use whatever unit had the highest number of combat rolls. Seemed to be a reliable strategy.
There were also very few opponents that did anything other than gain/lose random unit. It would have been interesting if, for an example opponent, choosing a stealth roll would have one risk/reward pair, while choosing a combat roll would have a different risk/reward pair. Especially if some of the risk/rewards were small, while others were large.
Overall, it seemed like too much randomness, and not enough relevant decision making. And the special skills mostly felt inferior to the standard rolls, because "best of N rolls" is statistically very favorable.
The UI was at first confusing, just because I didn't know if I was playing or looking at a tutorial, and I didn't know what clicking on a card actually *did*. Through experimentation I realized that the first gameplay screen was basically choosing which area of the city to fight in, and the second screen had the opponent on the left and my available units on the right. But none of that was obvious at first.
There was also some issues with the available unit list. Selecting any unit other that the bottom one failed to show the unit's portrait or special abilities. All actions were still available, but I didn't always remember what the special abilities did. Also, once I had a lot of available units, the stack began to overflow off the screen, and I couldn't even read the full text for the unit on the bottom.
Finally, a possible bug: In the Matrix, I ran across a Net Queen, used a hacker matrix roll, and it said "Success! You get:" But it didn't list what I got, and I got nothing, while I was expecting to "get encountered unit". I had six units at the time.
Great attention to details that added to the experience.
I would have appreciated some options, however. Mostly I was just following the lights. Having some choices to make could have made me feel more engaged and involved. For example, the jump seemed to make the crowd extra happy, but could be made as a high-risk/high-reward option. Or more strongly play the monster against the crowd; that is, placating the monster often works against pleasing the crowd, and vice versa.
Also having some heads up about where the next light would be could help. It felt pointlessly frustrating when the next light was clear across the room and would be gone before I got to it.
The experience that this game generates is rather unpleasant. But then, that's kind of the whole point, so in that regard it is very well done. Any suggestions I might have would probably detract from that mood.
For example, I would have liked more feedback about the effect that my actions had, especially feeding and hugging. Also more feedback on the effect of the noise we were making. But I bet more feedback and clearer mechanics would have reduced the significance of the mood.
It's cool that you aren't actually given the details of the story; the player has to imagine what's going on. But a sense of progression could have helped. For example, a carefully crafted interest curve could do wonders.
http://marvinhawkins.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/a-word-on-interest-curves/
I take it the confined controls are meant to simulate an endoscope, but I just found those limitations frustrating more than engaging.
Was the cancer actively spreading while the game was running? It might've been interesting if there was some warning about where the cancer was going to spread to next, like a blinking area that was under threat; could give the player the sense that they can strategically get ahead of the cancer.
Maybe also include some mechanics about how the cancer spreads, and how they player's actions impact that spread. Maybe different tissues impact the spread in various ways. Or different laser frequencies affect the cancer behavior.
It was an interesting tech demo that could be taken somewhere, but it was lacking in mechanics, and I doubt that a scoring system would be sufficient to add the intrigue that a good game needs.
In terms of game mechanics, I found the core concept intriguing. I bet there are a lot of interesting ways one could expand those mechanics.
As for the narrative theme, I had a hard time reading all the text while paying attention to all the little sphere coming at me. I think this was a bit more difficult because entire thoughts would be spread out across a few different pieces of text, some of which I could read comfortably, others I could not, with moments of game play distraction in between also.
I also didn't feel a strong connection between the mechanics and the narrative, since the meaningful decisions didn't usually actually seem very meaningful. Mostly I just avoided the bullets as best I could, chose to kill some of the lesser mobs because hey, why not, and always sacrificed the prior lover for the next. Didn't see any reason to do otherwise, which made the decisions feel rather flat.
I couldn't really figure anything out regarding combat. Who was attacking me and when, or how to strategically attack back. I ended up just pressing z repeatedly since that seemed to attack in all directions (despite what the animation suggested), sticking a few presses of space in there every now and then to dig. That seemed to work most of the time, but sometimes I'd end up taking damage from someone and I couldn't tell who or why, or what to do about it.
There wasn't enough feedback in the game. I couldn't tell what was happening most of the time. While underwater I had pretty much no information, such as nearby depth charges or sonar pings. I also wasn't expecting depth charges to have such a huge range. Kind of ruined it for me when I realized that getting inside the circle of a destroyer seemed to mean certain death.
It took a while for me to realize that the gray things were mirrors and the yellow background was a beam of light. Part of me wishes that this were more obvious from the beginning (maybe by having the beam already hitting a mirror at the start). But part of me appreciates the feeling of that ah-hah moment when I figured it out myself. (I was tempted to leave the game before figuring it out, though, so that's always a risk.)
The compactness of the multiple stages of the puzzle is very impressive.
I thoroughly appreciate that restarting only restarts you back to the point where you most recently destroyed light sensitive blocks. I would have quit the game out of frustration otherwise, no doubt about it.
I was briefly disappointed when, upon reaching the orb, I realized that I wasn't done yet, but wasn't sure what to do. After shining light onto the orb and accomplishing nothing, I figured the only thing left was to get the orb out of the ground, so at least I had yet another couple of ah-hah moments there (the first being a false ah-hah).
Simple, clean interface, but with good subtleties whenever contact was made between worms.
The wriggling of the other worms worked well to make their trajectory hard to instantly predict, and the fact that they would sometimes have pretty steep angles made it challenging to decide where to go.
The contact sound effect kept happening after losing, while the scene faded out. That kind of annoyed me, but then again, losing wasn't meant to be enjoyable. :-) Nonetheless, it took a bit away from the otherwise decent sense of polish I felt the game had.
The opening wave of worms was also a little sudden and dense, because they were all spawned simultaneously. I would have liked to see a progression of difficulty, starting easy at first, and then gradually getting harder (more worms, steeper angles, faster movement, larger wriggling amplitudes, et cetera).
I couldn't notice enough of an effect from the increased speed, so I just quit trying to use it.
Congratulations on first graphical project in C++! I know that can be daunting.
If you wanted to explore the graphics library more, I think a high value effect could be implemented for the monster spawn event, perhaps a scale from 0% to 100%. I got a little confused at first when I grabbed a monster and it seemed to merely teleport from one location to another (it was actually a new monster).
The game could probably also benefit greatly from some improved physics and AI. Maybe add some inertia to the player and barrels, make the barrels obey buoyancy below water and gravity above water, and have the monsters follow some sort of jellyfish logic, a la Mario. For example, every two seconds, they pick a random upward/sideways direction and dart there, and otherwise they just gain downward momentum due to gravity.
Some form of difficulty progression could help too, as the player gets a higher score. More barrels, faster moving monsters. There are probably all sorts of creative options, such as monsters that try to get nearer to barrels or something.
Being able to view your score *after* losing would have been nice, as well as having a way to restart from within the application, rather than letting it auto-exit and then have restart the application manually.
The upgrades were a welcome surprise; for some reason I completely wasn't expecting them. Having to pick them without any pause in action was a bit tricky though. But once I knew what they all were, I found myself thinking ahead about what my next upgrade would be, which was a pleasant experience.
The complete lack of enemy knockback, combined with the fact that they turn around instantly in mid-air to follow you, became particularly frustrating, as it basically gave me no options once one of the enemies got too close.
I also didn't realize at first that I could fire downward; I guess the water didn't look watery enough. And I kept trying to *move* down for a while, because the intro screen mentioned S as a movement key, but gave up once I guessed that I must be stuck on the surface.
A few simple sound effects from something like sfxr and family could have gone a long way to adding much needed juiciness. Or a simple flashy visual for bullet/enemy and avatar/enemy collisions. Also for leveling up.
The stats could have been made larger too; given the pace of the action after a few levels, it was difficult to efficiently glance at them.
Around level 11 or so I made a silly mistake and shot a bullet into a brick. It said to hit restart, so I hit R, remembering what I had seen on the entry page, and not realizing that there was a restart level button. That restarted the game from the beginning. :( Just when the levels were starting to require a bit of creativity, but I was too lazy and annoyed to go back through the other levels again.
Many of the levels were pretty easily solved with fewer pieces than were provided, so I was a little confused by the extra pieces.
Not sure I really buy the connection with the theme; seems like quite a stretch.
Given the side view, it would have been much more intuitive if the hitbox didn't extend vertically to the very top of the avatar sprite, but was more a hitbox for her feet. Predicting where I could move was a bit tricky given what I saw on the screen versus when the character would stop, and walking through the first door surprised me because it happened well before I felt like I had actually reached the door.
There was also a brief moment of confusion at the beginning due to not realizing which keys did what, though that was quickly remedied with experimentation. I also didn't realize for a while that the second number on the ammo display was total bullets, so I was extra careful to conserve my ammo (which was admittedly just my own brain fart, and it did actually help with the boss fight).
Purely horizontal bullets felt like a painful limitation, as well as not being able to fire while running backwards.
Most enemies were too easy to exploit, especially since bullets wouldn't spawn unless the enemy was on screen.
The way the boss broke out of his vertical movement, got faster, and acquired bombs added some intensity to the fight, but the fight was mostly just tedious.
Can't run the game. For some reason the page always shows the "unity web player install now!" button, despite the fact that when I click it and go to the download page, it claims I already have 4.3.5f1 installed. Tried it on Firefox 28 and 29, Chrome 34, and IE11, and after re-running the web player installer.
Thematically, it felt more like a classic two-worlds concept than one where the second world is beneath the surface of the first.
I found the controls to be a little too granular to achieve precise movement. The pancake flipper level in particular was tricky. Near the top, I kept trying to jump off the edge and switch dimensions just as the block was near it's peak, but I kept falling off because of tricky controls. I eventually realized I could switch dimensions while just standing right on the edge, no jumping. A different visual transition between dimensions (such as a fade, maybe slower), or expanding the size of the upper-right room might have helped make that clear.
The way that certain objects existed in both dimensions while others did not was intriguing, as well as behavior that differed between dimensions (the dude carrying the log). It wasn't always clear how these elements worked at first, but it didn't take much experimentation to find out. With more levels, one could probably begin to design some standard visual indicators that suggested predictable behavior to the player.
The audio mix was a little loud on the sound effects, but otherwise I'd say the effects and music worked well with the game. The music and color scheme set a consistent mood.
LD35 — Shapeshift (4)
Shifty Witch by jordgubben 2016-04-27T22:43:00
Got through the whole game without even discovering that there was a shape shifting ability. Saw people comment on it, then button mashed until I found it. (Shift key for anyone reading this wondering the same.)
I was gonna say that movement was quite slow (but not so much that I couldn't win), but I guess the shape shifting kind of nullifies that comment. Though in retrospect I wish the shape shifting had better enabled me to deal with the last dudes coming from behind the player.
As others said, the art style was quite pleasant.
SteamPunkPuzzleGame by 3T3A 2016-04-27T22:35:00
Took me forever just to figure out that the arcade box labelled "controller" wasn't just a description of the controls, but was the actual controller. I kept walking up to the block trying to press E (and eight thousand other combinations) but nothing happened.
I wasn't a big fan of the full step movement. Always makes jump tasks extra tricky. And when you can't even see the character's feet, it just feels incredibly clumsy, like the player is in control of a drunk person who refused to fully cooperate with the inputs being given.
Solid Shape, and the shape of things to come. by McBeef 2016-04-27T22:04:00
Confused at first about the controls, and what type of game it would be. I was expecting action, or at least roguelike, but once I figured out it was a puzzle game, and moves were limited only by pathfinding, it made sense. A movement animation might have helped. The key directive that I think was missing was that the relevant decision for the player to make is who the next bad guy is to kill.
The levels were designed quite well, but I have a feeling that due to the mathematical properties of this particular puzzle system, it'd be really hard to design more difficult levels with complex or non-intuitive solutions.
SPY by vados 2016-04-27T21:47:00
Guards are crazy relentless, but humorously incapable of opening their own numbered doors. It was only after I got #3 stuck behind its own door that I could figure out that it'll track me until I change to a different number. I was hoping there was a different way to lose a guard's attention (get far enough away, hide in another room).
The cycling of the text between readable and garbled was almost a good touch, except that I think it should have remained garbled for a far shorter interval. Having to wait a few seconds in order to continue reading the instructions felt like an unnecessary nuisance.
Once I got a number of rooms in but got caught, I didn't feel like restarting and "suffering" through the same challenges again. But that probably says more about the type of player I am. Would have welcomed checkpoints or some other system of saving progress.