Snake++ by Gnarly Narwhal 2017-12-05T20:19:13Z
Good Game! The music can get a little annoying when repeated a lot, though. It's an interesting take on snake, and it makes use of the theme quite well.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Alex Davies
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Patch Panel | compo | 4.11 | 4.15 | 4.11 | 4.61 | 4.26 | 3.76 | 2.80 | 3.72 | ||
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Drilly's Journey | compo | 13 | 4.15 | 4.21 | 4.25 | 4.30 | 3.80 | 3.27 | 3.18 | 3.57 | |
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Undermined | compo | 104 | 3.95 | 4.16 | 3.33 | 3.91 | 3.79 | 3.72 | 2.54 | 3.29 | |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | ReBeat | compo | 88 | 3.85 | 3.74 | 4.40 | 4.01 | 3.91 | 4.09 | 3.04 | 3.48 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Pug Panic | compo | 83 | 3.97 | 3.73 | 4.14 | 4.42 | 4.27 | 3.95 | 3.95 | 3.83 | |
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | Failing Human | compo | 150 | 3.54 | 3.25 | 3.35 | 3.62 | 3.67 | 3.32 | 3.14 | 3.00 | |
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | More Sacrifices! | compo | 59 | 3.85 | 3.73 | 2.83 | 3.64 | 4.04 | 3.85 | 2.81 | 3.10 | |
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | 9 Lives | compo | 545 | 2.95 | 2.76 | 2.51 | 2.65 | 3.70 | 1.54 | 2.74 | 2.57 |
Good Game! The music can get a little annoying when repeated a lot, though. It's an interesting take on snake, and it makes use of the theme quite well.
Cool idea, and great execution. The graphics are good, and the music is catchy but not invasive. Very well done!
Nice, clean graphics! It doesn't really feel like that much of a sacrifice though
Very nice graphics, but the movement seems a little bit slidey, and the jump seems slow. Other than that, great visuals and audio!
Sorry to hear about the slow motion. I think it's a bug. If you're playing on mac then that might be it, but I tested it quite a lot on windows and it didn't do that with me. :( I'll look into a fix now.
Huh, well I guess I'll just scrap the slow motion. Honestly got no clue why it's happening. Oh well, it's not a big deal.
Hopefully it's fixed now
Weird. I've tried to fix again. If it happens again then I'm pretty sure it's a bug with Unity, because I've no longer got any code changing the speed.
I think it's fixed. Just had a friend who was having problems with it before play it and it worked, so it should now be fixed.
weird, i'll take a look
sorry, it's not happening to me, so i can't tell what's causing it
No, i recorded it by scraping two knives together then heavily editing it to boost the treble. Thanks for the advice though. I guess I got quite good at the game from testing it so much, so I made it a bit too hard :P
Nice game. Some quick tips for 2D in Unity: 1. If you're using tilemaps then also add a Composite Collider 2D to it - it'll fix getting stuck on the ground. 2. If you're not then try putting a circle or capsule collider on the player. 3. Put a physics material 2D on youre player, with no friction or bounciness (both set to 0).
Nice idea! Not quite sure it fits with the theme that well, but it's quite a fun game.
Great game, especially as a DOS game. My only criticism is that the paddle feels a bit floaty unless you spam left and right constantly, and the level change areas should be blocked off while a ball is in play - I kept accidentally moving into them.
Nice, relaxing game! It is a bit vague as to whether there is an actual goal in mind though.
@mrtnldm @sebastien-bourgeois thanks a lot for the feedback! I'll make sure to get a cleaner font, or keep the layout readable next time - the help menu was a bit of an afterthought :P
@duke Thanks for the feedback! I originally intended for this to be a prototype - a throwaway idea, but as I implemented it, I realised I had taken too long, and if I didn’t finish it I wouldn’t end up with a polished game I could be content with. I’m not really a big fan of clicker games either, so I don’t really know what differentiates a good one from a bad one, but I did my best to try and make it at least nice to look at and listen to, even better if the core mechanic may be a little lacking.
@chuckeles I agree - the achievements really added a lot. It was a bit boring before I added them. It seems like everyone had trouble reading the help screen :P I think it’s a kerning issue with the font.
@glimaleite Thanks for the feedback! I didn’t have much time left to make balancing changes, so the balance wasn’t based off much testing. I agree that there needs to be a better tutorial - I should dedicate more time to it next time, to avoid confusion for players. At one point I even toyed with the idea of a difficulty slider, as it seems a lot of people found it to be too hard, and a lot too easy, but decided against it to keep the game simple. Something that I did want to add though was a special hard mode, where as well as managing your organs, you had to remember to breath (with the lungs), otherwise you would rapidly lose health. I actually made a lungs sprite (you can still find it in the source code), but ended up running out of time to implement it.
Great job, especially on the artwork - the only thing it needs now is some music!
Quirky little game! Great fun, good sound, and decent graphics (some animations would be noice). I love the humour!
Not bad! You did quite a good job with the graphics, although try to keep all of your pixel art the same resolution/pixels per unit. The sound effects weren't bad, but the gun sounds could be a little louder. Also, some music would have been nice; if you don't have music software I recommend Bosca Ceiol as a starting point!
Not bad! As has been said before, a proper palette of colours goes a long way. Also, note that at some resolutions , the end screen has gaps at the bottom and top where you can see the game world (i noticed a few pixels gap at 1080p). Also, would recommend using something other than a flying button to get back to the title screen, as the player can still walk around at the end of the game and the button might miss.
Quite a good little game! It would be nice to have some more enemy types, and for the difficulty to increase slower, but sooner - I spend about 2-3 minutes playing before it got challenging, and then died almost instantly, as it went from about 2-3 enemies on screen to 7 or 8.
Great game! Really hard, and addictive too. Would've been nice to get a few checkpoints though - it was a little too hard at parts.
Great artwork and sound design; things to improve: - Slow down the enemy spawn rates slightly: a lot of the time there is way too many on screen and you can get trapped in a corner - Make the extra enemy types + chests appear sooner. At first I thought there was only 3 types of enemy, and it would be a shame for people to not see those great animations
Great idea, just wish it was longer!
Great game!
#### Things I liked - Great soundtrack - Clean sound effects - Simple but effective graphics - The mouse's character - That dithered lighting effect is incredible
#### Things that could be improved - The movement around walls feels a little bit sticky, but only on corners. - Some explanation about how getting hit works: sometimes I could get hit once, sometimes twice before dying. - Mark the download as a windows build on itch.io so people can download it in the desktop app.
Overall, this is a polished entry, and an effective idea, but next time I would try to incorporate the theme into the gameplay loop, rather than being mostly thematic (as counter-intuitive as that sounds).
Great job! Super polished and great visuals and audio. Controls are a little bit floaty for my taste, and I'd make the hit box on the spikes a little smaller - generally, it's better to have any death hit boxes smaller than a sprite, as it can make it feel more fair and forgiving, even if it's less accurate.
Not so much 'keep it alive', as 'bring it back to life', but a fun game nonetheless! Very polished and simple game play loop done well. My only criticism is that the grid-based movement feels a bit strange at first; almost floaty.
I love the death sound :laughing: It gets me every time - that inhuman 'EgHhhEGh'
Great game, great graphics, great idea, but way too hard for me to manage. Unless I'm missing something (which I quite possible could be), this is going to be far too difficult for many. I happened to make a similar style of game, and mine is far easier (although not as simple) than this, and many people struggled.
Keep in mind that not everyone is going to be as good as you - you've had 3 days of testing and bug fixing to practice.
Thanks for the feedback! I'm not really sure about the difficulty - it's really hard to judge it when only you've played it.
I also would have loved to make a more interactive tutorial, but ended up only having time for a simple help screen :( .
@sndr @saviqq Thanks for the particularly in-depth feedback. It's really appreciated. @masterkrepta @evert @wekaj @alexey-akulovich Thanks for the comments :) I'm glad I really captured that feeling of panic! @lcstark I completely agreed about the tutorial. In fact, it was on my list of things to do, but due to time restrictions (and my bad hacky programming that would need to be reworked), I had to cut it.
@mravec Thanks for the advice. The different colours sounds like a great idea to improve readability.
@jason-woerner Thank you for taking the time to leave in depth feedback. You comment on the small margin for error never occurred to me, but I reckon that you've pin-pointed exactly the reason people find it too hard. Thanks again for the insight; zooming the dog camera out should help the difficulty problem significantly.
@conor-galvin I agree about the tutorial :smile: I wanted to integrate a tutorial with the gameplay originally, but only decided halfway through making it, and my messy code made it pretty much impossible to manage it within the time. At least I know for next time that I should make a plan sooner rather than later.
@fabula-rasa Thanks very much for the feedback. After testing it more after submission, and from everyone else's feedback, I've decided that for the post-jam version (when I get the time to finish it) will most likely either tone down the popups massively, or remove them completely for another mechanic that feels slightly less unfair.
Great game, with great balance. The graphics are lovely, and I love the contrast between the monsters and the unicorn.
#### My advice: 1. Add a sound queue, or explosion, or some kind of graphical change to signify an enemy dying. I always was a bit unsure of whether an enemy died, because they slowly fade out. 2. Add a fire rate limiter of some kind, or implement a system for holding down to shoot - It feels a bit weird when the best way to kill enemies is to walk into their face and spam the mouse as fast as possible. It's also just a nice quality of life change for lazy people like me who don't want to keep clicking.
Great game, lovely (yet dark) narrative, and clean visuals. I just wish there was more.
Love the game! Just a quick tip - mark the platforms for the itch.io downloads, so they can be installed via the itch desktop app. Some people might be using the app, and may not play if they can't install it.
Just realized you can prop-boost yourself to fly :P. Kinda fun but kinda broken. (Prop-boosting is dropping and grabbing props (items) inside yourself to get the collision system to move yourself upwards)
The music is incredible! I'm amazed you managed to make this in such a short time.
Nice graphics and audio, but almost unplayable from the buggy jump and controls, as well as the owls having so much health. The main issues with the game have already been mentioned by Bredian, in the comment above.
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I love the music and sound design! My only real piece of advice to improve is to make the hitbox on the swatter slightly smaller than the swatter itself, even if it's only a few pixels. Doing this helps to avoid losses that 'feel' unfair even if they are accurate.
Edit: A better idea would probably be to make the bugs' hitboxes slightly larger than their sprites, and the ladybugs' hitboxes slightly smaller than their sprites.
Great game - a cool exploration of a looping 3D space using portals. I really like the puzzles, although the mouse sensitivity was rather annoying. If you haven't already I'd recommend taking a look at Sebastian Lague's video on Portals in Unity - it fixes a lot of the problems with portals like these, such as recursion and flickering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWpFZbjtSQg
Cool game - almost therapeutic to play, or it would be if not for the button-mashing giving me what feels like carpel tunnel :) I'm guessing that's not intended. Other than that, a solid entry, but I feel like there could have been something more to moving down a level, other than just a colour change.
Cool idea and good execution of it. I know it's been said by others already, but I do thing that the level design could have catered more to the gameplay, and I also wish that the theme was more prevalent, but overall, a solid experience :thumbsup:
@shigor Thanks! The core mechanic is based off Dr Mario and Puyo-Puyo, which I think were what Dr Robotnicks Mean Bean Machine was based off.
@lifeforce Sorry about that! The leaderboard doesn't function correctly on the Web version - it works fine on the windows/mac/linux versions. I've updated the game's description to better show this. Unfortunately there isn't much I can do about it, as the leaderboard system I have uses http instead of https, which means that itch.io's web player automatically blocks any requests to it.
@ilprinny Yeah, I've added a warning to the description on the itch.io page about that. The desktop version works fine - it's just unity doing weird stuff when ported to webgl
Scoreboard is fixed! I swapped the hosting provider to one that supports ssl, so the leaderboard should now work for the online version.
@bamallama Thanks for the feedback! I originally planned to have some mechanics like this - my main two ideas like this were explosive tiles, and 'strong' tiles that would take multiple hits to break, but I sort of ran out of time to add them :P
@secretpocketcat Yes, I'm using PlayerPrefs for audio settings. I'm aware of the problem but it's not really a bug with an important feature, so I'm not too fussed about fixing it after the compo has finished. Normally I would use a proper save file or cookies solution, but PlayerPrefs is quick and easy :P
An incredible amount of polish for a game made in 72 hours! It's not the first time I've seen a game with this concept, but this is by far the best execution of it.
Fun to play, just a shame that the enemies were so bullet-spongy. It was easier and more fun often times to just run around enemies than to fight them, as it took so long to kill them, and then even longer to reload. Overall, though, a nice idea, and fairly polished execution.
Actually managed to find 6 ladybirds. Interesting idea for a game, but I feel the in-focus depth range for the depth of field could probably be a bit larger, or maybe you could have a more linear falloff to the depth blur (not too sure but I think even just fading between in-focus and out-of-focus linearly could look decent). Really neat take on the theme though!
@jordanfb Thanks for the feedback, it's intended that you can reach certain places early or out-of-order if you try to break it. I tried to design it so that the easiest/most obvious path showed all the content, but tried to leave it open for finding skips.
@dhim I intentionally didn't box in the areas too much so if you try to you can probably find unintended paths or places you can get to. If you really know what you're doing I'm pretty sure you can skip some areas pretty much completely. Thanks for the tips about github too.
@sudocoffee Thanks! I'm not the happiest with the level design at the start, but once I got the building the purple underground area with lava I think I got the hang of it and I'm pretty happy with everything past that point.
@tad-i-guess Thanks for the feedback. I really wanted to get music in but just didn't have time, with being busy for most of the Saturday with other stuff. Originally I wanted to design the level so that it was impossible to get stuck, but it turned out to limit the puzzles quite a bit, especially with the physics being not quite perfect - adding the restart (R key) button helped quite a bit.
@gargantuan-janitor Thanks! Yeah, I really should've used a separate collider for detecting lava.
@sypiac Yeah I'm not really sure why that prevents digging - I noticed it once during playtesting before submission but didn't have the time to figure out what causes that bug.
@python-b5 Thanks for such detailed feedback! I agree about bouncing off corners - the main reason I used a circle collider is so I didn't have to deal with rotating the collider - originally the player would drill in whatever direction you entered the ground at but it was almost impossible do design levels around. Drilling into walls is an unintended side-effect of reusing the code for that old version. Also, yes, leap year was a pretty big inspiration - I'd not really seen that kind of puzzle-platforming before it so wanted to try and make something similar myself.
@liam Originally I'd intended for it to be somewhat more open-world, with collectibles, so re-tripping older checkpoints made a lot more sense then, but I didn't get around to fixing it once I decided to make it more linear.
I might make a post-jam version at some point with some music and bugfixes/adjustments based on all of this feedback.
Love the atmosphere! It might've been nice to have more variety in the fish as you go up. 2000m is quite far to go considering it's the same fish the whole way.
Neat game! I love the atmosphere, and it's pretty polished looking for a compo game. It's not entirely obvious at first though that the rocks and buckets can be jumped on to move back up a level.
Pretty neat idea, but it feels a bit restrictive with the hitboxes - there's some pretty weird shaped items there but it feels like the hitboxes are always roughly rectangular.
What a unique and cool take on the theme! I really love that you made so many of the sound effects (and the music) with just your voice/mouth, and the fading out/changing of the music as you get deeper adds so much to the atmosphere.
This is a really interesting idea but it could do with maybe some more tutorialization, and it would help massively to be able to save certain structures or at the very least copy over stuff from the previous level, since most of them seem to quite naturally follow on from the previous level. I think especially for the not gate-related levels the idea that you have to capture a value in a loop of nodes to get a constant value is not very obvious, especially when you can't connect two nodes directly to each other in a loop. Overall, a really interesting idea though, and very well-designed levels, and of course impressive given you're hand-rolling wasm.
Interesting take on the theme.
It might've been good to have an unbreakable layer at the bottom to stand on, as it's pretty difficult to figure out what's going on when you first drop down and start getting stuff thrown at you 😅.
Really cool idea! I think it might be useful to have a countdown before recording inputs - it's quite challenging inputting them when it begins immediately.