Yalg'th, the Meta-Demon by Jezzamon 2015-05-02T06:05:00
That got a laugh out of me. Main issue is that the music stops looping after a few minutes, and there doesn't seem to be a way to exit the game from the starting screen.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → amras0000
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | They Came while I was jogging | compo | 406 | 3.29 | 3.16 | 3.23 | 3.31 | 2.79 | 3.37 | 3.27 | 3.20 | ||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Power in Numbers | compo | 328 | 3.40 | 3.19 | 3.61 | 3.72 | 3.06 | 3.08 | 3.40 | |||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | ZhenCo Ghost Management | compo | 309 | 3.43 | 3.09 | 3.88 | 3.04 | 3.36 | 3.31 | 2.31 | 3.31 | ||
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Last Question | compo | 230 | 3.47 | 2.94 | 4.10 | 3.85 | 3.90 | 3.57 | 4.15 | |||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | You Are World. | compo | 87 | 3.80 | 3.23 | 4.07 | 4.19 | 3.92 | 3.61 | 2.25 | 4.38 | ||
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Aperta Corporata | compo | 183 | 3.54 | 3.15 | 3.31 | 4.00 | 3.88 | 3.08 | 2.59 | 3.20 | 56 | |
| 2016 | 36 | Ancient Technology | Lorem Ipsum or Engineering for a Civilized Age | compo | |||||||||||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Ohm My, Color Me Squared | compo | 173 | 3.60 | 3.52 | 4.10 | 3.23 | 3.40 | 3.03 | 3.07 | 62 | ||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Yarnful Days | compo | 129 | 3.75 | 3.19 | 3.68 | 4.00 | 4.00 | 3.86 | 2.77 | 4.21 | 76 | |
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | People Can Be Monsters | compo | 645 | 2.94 | 2.79 | 3.48 | 3.39 | 2.50 | 2.50 | 3.20 | 2.97 | 65 | |
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Toby the Reckless Giant | compo | 1012 | 2.58 | 2.61 | 2.74 | 3.16 | 3.39 | 2.83 | 2.33 | 2.66 | 56 |
That got a laugh out of me. Main issue is that the music stops looping after a few minutes, and there doesn't seem to be a way to exit the game from the starting screen.
A sounds great, can't get enough grid-based puzzle games
Very nicely done, offsetting on many levels
Overall, I enjoyed my experience. As far as issues go, the game does get a bit grindy, with the amount of levels and the time it takes for each word to appear. In most games of this style the words usually appear before the last one has finished moving, limiting the downtime that this game has. The spell counter mechanic was a very nice addition.
Gorgeous
thanks to how quickly the flip happens, any aiming was reduced to hoping that my timing was alright. Otherwise, a well-polished game.
Getting eaten by the enemies is an interesting way to go; main complaint I have is a lot of ledges just barely out of reach, but that's nitpicking. solid little game.
If anyone is having trouble running this, It's written in Java 8, so update that...
I couldn't really figure out the scoring system there.
The link points to a shop page, can't download for free
nevermind, I'm just blind
110MB is a bit big for a download, any chance you could split it up into zips for each platform?
The sound effects got on my nerves a fair bit; high pitched squealing isn't generally a pleasant sound to hear with each jump. It would have also been nice if the enemies stayed frozen a little bit longer when covered in small snowballs (the cooldown on the big ones is fine, but even when they're maxed out on snow from the little ones, there's just not enough time to run past)
the mouse acceleration and lack of screen lock make controlling with a mouse a bit difficult, and I couldn't seem to find a gamepad button bound to "action", or a way to configure one in the launcher.
Furthermore, the tutorial audio took a bit too long to play out, and the audio triggers didn't replace any previous clips already playing, leading to overlap between the (pretty long) monologues. Might have been nice to see less frequent comments on the part of the narrator in favor of a more thought-out puzzle, or more of them.
Otherwise, pretty nice aesthetic, might be nice to see a few extra puzzles added in post if you're up for it.
props on the VR inclusion, wish I had a cardboard to try it
Props on including an exe for us lazy non-java-updators.
My biggest issue with the game is the lack of theming. The weapon is a selfie stick, the enemies are aliens, and you're picking up fruit. I realize you're going for a retro arcade aesthetic, but it's not appealing to me. It'd be nice to at least have the collectibles be smartphones or photographs, and the enemies grumpy anti-selfie people, or something along those lines.
Main nitpick would be the lack of a crosshair. It's a solid game otherwise, well-polished, explored several mechanics, and felt like it ended just when it needed to. Well done.
a pretty standard twin-stick shooter with a bit of an awkward control scheme. The models don't really seem to fit any sort of theme, and the weapon isn't all that creative either... I'm sorry, but the game doesn't have many redeeming factors.
The guards react nicely to things being thrown at them, but it's hard to see how much damage is being dealt in either way.
The animation up front took a while, and I couldn't figure out how to answer the purgatory thing; I couldn't find any mention of it in the verses listed...
Added controls to description, hope that helps :T
@Mental Atrophy : I can't seem to reproduce the issue. In the web version a Unity menu does show up, but the houses are thrown as well. Try the standalone downloaded versions instead if it's an issue.
The end of the game got a bit grindy since I couldn't increase my cash flow any more, so I havnen't seen the ending. Otherwise, a fun idea; wish I could rate for humor.
I noticed you have an audio category, but I couldn't seem to hear anything. Otherwise, solid game, no complaints.
I...wow...this is amazing. Intuitive mechanics while maintaining challenge, a brilliant clean aesthetic, all around one of the best games I've seen so far.
The game feels pretty surreal, in the best possible way. You've mastered the theme.
The FAQ says otherwise, but Mike's the boss...
I can't seem to run the game, getting the error:
"The program can't start because MSVCR120.dll is missing from your computer."
After a few rounds, it seemed like the enemies started adjusting to my hiding spot. If that was intentional, that's quite impressive. A very fun game either way.
I had to switch to firefox to get it to work, and even then I was only able to control the game until I died once, and then I lost the ability to provide inputs again. Since the game threw a unity blurb at the start, could you maybe provide a standalone?
I enjoyed the game, graphics and sound are spot on, and the take on the theme was amusing. Somehow it managed to be both extremely tense and too easy, though. After 3 sessions I got a bit bored, since I didn't see any challenge and the game was getting a bit repetitive.
The graphics are spot on as usual, but there's a lot of level/game design quirks that make this a thoroughly frustrating experience. There were too many times that I'd try to reach a tresure chest only to hit a wall and fall straight down through a gap in the lower level and die. There are very clearly defined levels, which gives a sense of accomplishment only until you realize there aren't any checkpoints. And too many platforms are just-out-of-reach, seemingly designed to make the player fuck up thinking they'll reach them.
And having to mash the attack button is never fun.
Probably the biggest fault in all the game is the starting room. You die very easily in the game (even getting health upgrades still requires you to get a random heart drop, which I never managed in the right order) and getting back into the game after death involves waiting for the Game Over screen, mashing through the start screen, mashing through the intro dialogue, and walking out of the room. I know you can do better, bitslap :T
Very nice looking game, but I didn't enjoy the gameplay much.
The shatter effects were phenomenal, the music was amusing.
The gameplay was very quickly reduced to "hold w and mash O and P" which wasn't too amusing. It would have been really nice to be able to see what's in front of me, or to zoom out and see the destruction I'd made.
Biggest frustration in the game: hitboxes. They're all way too large. I couldn't tell you how many times I died by something that didn't touch me. And to compound the problem there were several situations where I thought I could squeeze through something only to be murdered by it.
In the third level, there's a series of raising walls that follow a random pattern. Some runs I had through them were fine, and others were infuriating sessions where I'd only barely have enough time to sneak by if at all.
The music and art are spot on and beautiful, and the platforming carries with it the frustration, difficulty, and heavines off being a wall.
I would like it if the stamina gave some more indication of running out. Maybe a screen flash or a noise so I don't have to keep looking up to the top of the screen.
And finally, spikes do continuous damage, which wound up being another minor frustration.
Very well done. Idea is solid, voice clips well-scripted and read.
Just two things:
First, I noticed that there seemed to be multiple voices. Were these all your manipulated voice? If not you may need to put this entry in the Jam instead.
Second, I was confused by being able to click on the names/religion/etc of the entries. What did selecting those represent?
AS has been said, the game does devolve pretty quickly into not touching movement and just tapping hjkl repeatedly. The AI moves into the corners to hide and doesn't damage you.
The graphics seem like placeholder graphics. If you were going for a handdrawn aesthetic, it didn't come across as such.
Overall, solid idea but the gameplay just isn't quite there. Maybe dedicate a bit more time to polish next time? Make sure to avoid any obvious strategies that break the game.
The procedural generation is probably the biggest positive of this game, but it really doesn't add much to the gameplay. I think I'd have enjoyed a handcrafted town more than the random splatter of buildings. I think you spent a bit too much time working out all the procedural generation and didn't have any time to get the gameplay polished. There's definitely effort here, but it didn't contribute to a compelling game. All I could do was poison the well and see some people's avatars turn green.
What I'd really like to see in a game like this is various amusing interactions with the various items: "you threw fruit in the well, now everyone is drunk"
"you threw sticks in the well, you've clogged it and everyone's dying of thirst"
The music failed to load in the game, ended up downloading it off github to have a listen. I think the repetitive bass line works to its detriment; you would have been better off just leaving the melody.
There were some issues with the tutorial. It told me to try destroying a building. After I did that, I didn't get a reaction, so I went on and destroyed every other building on the map. Once I'd done all that, apparently a bunch of triggers happened at once, the text whizzed by too fast too read, and I wasn't sure what mechanics there were besides "click to destroy buildings"
The game clearly had some effort put into making everything relatively polished, but it really doesn't stand out. It's the most obvious interpretation of the theme with unfortunately mediocre texturework (for your team size), some pretty good godzilla music, and rather repetitive mechanics.
It's not a bad game, but it just doesn't stand out.
Enjoyed the game overall; music was nice but didn't seem to loop as well as I'd like.
I would have really liked to have a dash or some other way to move around to catch the faster things running from me.
What you've got there is a choose your own adventure. What you need for a good choose-your-own-adventure game are:
-Good Writing
-Frequent Choices
The choices don't even have to be meaningful, but just putting a "continue" button down at the end doesn't constitute gameplay... and while the writing had some decent ideas, it really didn't hold up with as much attention as you were giving it. There were too many words, not enough happening, and the jokes were all very obvious and slightly dull.
If you want to make a choose-your-own adventure again at some point, make sure you put a lot more effort into making the writing flow better. Cut out fluff, assume your audience is familiar with cultural tropes - don't explain them.
The start of the game was promising. I was hoping the EULA would have the answers to some puzzles later on, but that expectation didn't pay off. But once the survey ended the game got about as dull as a data entry job.
As a headphone user, my ears are in pain. The sound is mono and only plays in the right ear, and it's very loud and high-pitched. Everything else about the game is amazing, but the audio really made the experience unpleasant.
The game is relatively compelling (got me to finish it, even if it dragged on a bit) and you nailed the mood. There's just a lot of small things that bothered me throughout the game:
-The music, while nice at first, eventually got repetitive and grating.
-The mountains/pipes/etc aren't textured at all.
-There are clipping issues in places, both between pieces of geometry and with camera intersections.
-The texture on the ground isn't tiled properly; you've just reflected it across both axes, without hiding the fact. Photoshop's bandaid tool is your friend.
-Theme! How is this in any way related to "You Are the Monster"?
Finally, in the end credits you mentioned that you didn't make the music. If this is true, I believe Ludum Dare rules request you disable voting on the game's Audio. Thanks.
Pleasant experience overall.
The lack of music hurts the mood severely. Ambient koto noises and a rushing stream would have made this game. Also Q didn't seem to do anything.
Would have been nice to see the rocks be slightly less round, or at least not obviously scaled spheres (normal maps are your friend).
Otherwise, very nice fish graphics and a good style. I enjoyed the game overall.
First, some issues: The audio wasn't very pleasant on the ears. The explosion effect was very piercing and the music was a bit tedious. The quips were a nice touch, and added some humor to the game, but they got repetitive pretty quickly; might have been better to have them come up even more rarely.
Finally, the dashing mechanic didn't seem to do enough damage to any of the people, and I ended up just waiting for my explosion to recharge most of the time. Dashing only seemed useful at the boss.
Thankfully, with the explosion mechanic, I was still able to have a lot of fun with this title.
Frustratingly difficult, couldn't get past the snipers-on-the-roof stage, but the frustration was satisfying in its own way. I rage quit, but enjoyed the game immensely. There's a lot of mechanics there that work together brilliantly. I've got no criticism for this title, great work.
Hey, I'll give this a proper review/rating if I remember to later, but for now I'm unable to play the game because of the unlocked cursor. Could you please update your game with a "LockCursor" script somewhere?
function Update () {
Cursor.visible = false;
Cursor.lockState = CursorLockMode.Locked;
}
Very nice, the graphics were quite charming and the gameplay enjoyable and very well paced. The voice recordings peaked a fair bit which ruined the audio quality. I'd recommend speaking further away from the mic next time, or turning down the gain if you know how to do that (some hardware will let you adjust gain, or your OS may have the setting). Nice job overall.
There's no hook at the beginning of the game. What makes idle games vaguely amusing is that the start is actually pretty busy. Timers start at a few seconds and very gradually increase to hours and days. This game throws the player into deep water before teaching its mechanics or providing any payoff.
Regarding the Download: it would be much easier if the files were zipped up into one file.
What the game does it does well. I had to get my gamepad out to control the cursor properly, but I really like controlling my velocity rather than my position.
The game is just a bit poor at explaining what it's doing. I'd like the game to tell me "Movement keys will only change your speed, not your position." and "Your goal is to color in the black lines before time runs out. If you draw outside the lines you will be penalized." As it stands, I'm still unsure of the exact mechanics or what my goal is.
the Bonus Game is a nice touch, though Sandbox doesn't seem to work.
Oh, and you've made a development build. Avoid that, it adds a console that gets in the way.
Cutest game I've played so far, your voice is amazing.
Two issues, though: It was hard to determine what was earning the creatures' trust. I tried feeding them, sitting in the pond with them, singing to them, and eventually I got their trust, but I had no clue what was working or not.
Also, the textures look really photorealistic. Were they all made by you?
I'm running Windows 7 64-bit. Getting the following error when I try to run Platofmer.exe:
The program can't start because api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.
I hope you get it fixed, the game looks rather cute.
Cutest monster game I've played. It's a very basic platformer, but very well executed with good controls and interesting level design.
Another ld-er mentioned that he heard the music before. Where did you find it?
I thought it might be a Kevin Macleod piece. Just fyi, he publishes all his music under CC: Attribution. This means he's given you the right to use his music wherever, but he requests that you mention him in any work that uses his music.
This format is preferred, ideally you could edit this text into the corner of the opening screen:
"Music to Delight" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Furthermore, the jam rules do request that you disable rating the audio category if you used pre-made assets.
Thanks!
P.S.-sorry if you've already mentioned him in your credits; I didn't get that far in your game so I might be making a fool out of myself here. >_>
Idea is great, your writing is fantastic; the stats are a bit obtuse but fit the theme. I couldn't seem to ever get an enemy stunned, and the wild swing was far too inaccurate given that it used stamina and didn't do all that much damage compared to the attack.
Reformatting C: was a nice touch. Got a fair few chuckles from the game overall. Nice job.
P.S. - since you're using unity, don't publish development builds. That just adds an annoying watermark to the corner and pops up the console if an exception pops up.
Girl jumped straight through the final bird in the first level. That is, there was no hitbox to catch her. There were times when the jump arcs would line up in such a way that the girl would leap over the final bird. The graphics are very nice, the mood was excellent, but the game is frustratingly difficult from the start. Some more knowledge of the jump arcs would've been nice. Also, the game doesn't seem to tie in much to the theme.
I assure you, Thome, that everything in the game is of my own creation. The only non-fictional things mentioned in the game are: England, France, and Ludum Dare. All content is made by hand in Photoshop, Unity, and various audio software.
I realize you're frustrated at the negative response to your game, but don't you think it's a bit childish to copy the text of my comment to mock me?
Mathieu: Which version are you running/on what system?
I can't really reproduce the problem, then. I've tested the game thoroughly on win 7x64. Sorry :T
I'm keeping this page open in my browser in the hopes the game will be fixed someday. Do you have an ETA on that, humbleness? :(
First off, issues with the downloads:
Windows - I get a "Data Not Found" error: "There should be 'EverybodyHatesTheFishboy_Data'
folder next to the executable"
Unity should have made a data folder in the same directory as your .exe, make sure to include that in the zip
Web - there's a "development build" watermark - make sure to unselect that when you build a finished game
As far the game, I couldn't seem to get the leap to be consistent. Sometimes it'd be a proper full-screen leap from a very short dive, but usually it ended up just being a tiny splash no matter how far down I went.
A tiny bit more movement speed (both horizontal and vertical) would have helped a lot, the game feels very sluggish.
First off, animation is beautiful.
Second, I opened up my volume mixer to make sure; it's not that the sound is quiet, there is no audio coming out of the game.
For the great majority of the game, I assumed my goal was to destroy all the things. This led me in the direction of RSI, and was generally frustrating. Once I realized I could ignore the round things the game got a little better, though it only lasted a few seconds past that. It would have been MUCH more satisfying to be able to smash through the round things just by running into them, without mashing the action button. Working sound would have also made the experience several times more satisfying.
Visual effects are stunning, very solid game. I was a bit dissapointed to find that I couldn't walk through a wall that I'd destroyed. Also it seems like bullets can pass through some destroyed walls, but not all?
The hitboxes are very hard to judge.
The dragon falls through the floor when dying.
The levels are built such that it's unreasonably difficult to avoid falling into most pits the first time around, since they're offscreen exactly where you'd naturally land jumping from a platform.
The dragon has robot legs for some reason?
And the background is too short, easy to jump over.
and finally (and this is easy to fix) DON'T PUBLISH DEVELOPMENT BUILDS - they make a console pop up, you don't want that.
I do like the fact you start off from the right side, like a boss would in a standard platformer, and I like that the level design seems to be built from a player's perspective.
The entry needs a lot more work; I've seen worse first attempts: this one runs fine and works mostly as intended, which is more than I can say for a lot of entries. And I wish you luck with future projects. But the game just lacks anything to make it stand out. sorry.
Very amusing concept and take on the theme. I just wish I could mash something other than my mouse button.
Phenomenal.
If there's a problem with this game, it's that the humans really sneak up on you. It wasn't immediately obvious that they can walk on acid - that caught me off guard the first time. Also, several times I thought they were miles behind me when they killed me. Footstep sfx would have really helped the matter.
But that's just a nitpick. Amazing work.
Very fun, polished, doesn't get repetitive, music is great and fits the game, graphics same.
There's a pretty obvious exploit where once a monster has hatched you can go to the shop and return to change who you play as. Might have been nice to choose a monster directly instead, or not to have the option to change out of an unfamiliar one. Nitpicking heavily there, though. Great work.
I realize your description acknowledges the game is unfinished, but you did publish it so I'll critique it as I can.
Easiest thing to fix: don't ever publish a development build of a unity game. There's an annoying watermark in the corner and any exceptions that show up (and they do, a lot) get thrown up on screen.
Second, you added a collider and physics to the buildings, which really seemed to be intended as stationary objects. If you don't put a rigidbody on a building, it won't move. Simple as that.
Finally, the currency value on the UI was completely covered up, and the buildings were weirdly semitransparent sometimes, the buttons sometimes worked and sometimes not. If you have any if(Input) statements in a FixedUpdate() function somewhere, move it to Update(). That should help with that issue. Good luck with patching up your game, if you still intend to.
Ridiculously frustrating game.
First off, movement mechanics: each press of the spacebar seemed to move me at most one pixel forward, maybe less. My hand was starting to cramp before I reached the toybox on the first screen. I had to write up an autohotkey script to get through the game.
Second, the timing on the traps was complete guesswork. I realize in retrospect the audio cues were supposed to help, but the whole audio just became an ambient mess and I ended up just skooching forward and stopping at random points until the threat passed. I can't imagine how frustrating this would've been if I hadn't been mashing space 30 times per second. I generally like audio-based mechanics, but these just didn't work out because of the input system. Sorry.
Holy christ man, I nearly fell out of my chair there.
Spent like 10 minutes trying to catch the running bastards, even managed to kill 2 of them, but after that they didn't die even when I landed right on top of them. So I travelled to the right and nearly ruined my undergarments. Not entirely sure what the ending was all about (PoKeMoN reference? I don't know much about the series but the reference to a "trainer" tipped me off), but it terrified me.
Also, the music was very nice at first but it very quickly got frustrating. And the pacing was very slow, the gameplay did feel fairly repetitive and took longer than neccessary.
Overall, a fun game.
The graphics were rather nice, especially on the intro.
The music was very enjoyable, though the sfx much less so.
The main issue I had was the timer seemingly randomly jumping down, I had no idea what was killing me.
The humans squished well, the tanks felt a bit less fun to destroy.
As far as improvements; it'd have been really nice to have some better indication of the foot recharge rate. I didn't really have any idea how to plan out my stomp timing.
Very nice animation work, really satisfying and heavy.
I actually forgot I was playing a ludum dare game for a bit there, and started getting frustrated that there wasn't more of it.
The game looks pretty good, but the delivery is lacking. If you don't mind, adjust the downloads like this:
Zip up the .exe+data
upload the .html to some free hosting service (github or itch.io work pretty well)
Make the three options seperate links on your ludum dare page.
This should get you more reviews.
One more issue: When you make a first person game, make sure to bind the mouse! There's a few simple functions in unity that'll do it for you.
http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Screen-lockCursor.html
The submission breaks several Compo rules. It uses pre-made assets and direcy copyrighted materials. You might want to put this in the Jam instead. You're allowed to use pre-made assets in that. Thanks.
The highscore system and camera style are both rather nice.
However, the platforming is extremely laggy. It takes forever to start moving, and I had trouble just jumping onto a platform above me. When I did manage to jump on the enemies, it seemed random whether they damaged me or died. I think you put too much effort into the online components and not enough into designing the core gameplay to be enjoyable.
Also, it's impossible to restart the game without submitting a high score. A "restart" button next to submit would've been very helpful when I didn't want to tell the world I got 0 points.
On a less important note, the game froze up/kept spawning spiders after death/was generally randomly unstable. But that's to be expected from ld titles.
P.S.- I have no idea how the game relates to the theme.
The writing's decent, the mechanics relatively intuitive. My main concern is that it took far too long to get to a level where I could even think about approaching an adventurer, even with a sword, and the combat required to get to that level took a good while thanks to the text delay. Because of this, the game quickly got tedious.
The mutations mechanic was really nice, though, and actually involved the theme in a way other than flavor. So good job overall.
Had a good laugh throughout; the music gets a bit grating but hey.
I really like the implied themes here. I might be reading too far into it, but the whole "there's no penalty for killing innocents" aspect intrigued me (can't tell if there was supposed to be an analogy to drone strikes). Only complaint is that the levels drag on for a bit too long. Very nice job.
I didn't feel compelled to go more than a few stages in. Idea is solid but I don't know that the level design complimented it.
Also might be helpful if the controls were displayed in the tutorial levels instead of only in the instructions screen.
Very well done. The game's difficult from the start, and, unlike what I'd expect from abstracted mechanics, actually feels a bit like I'm growing a plant.
The game's definitely difficult from the start, and might benefit from a slightly gentler curve up front (first 4-6 levels) - something simple to introduce the mechanics and mode of thinking you'd need for the rest of the game. The first level is good for this, but it might've been good to keep a tutorialish feel going until level 4.
That said, the save feature does allow the player to put the game down for a while and pick it back up with a fresh mind, which is excellent for this genre.
As far as I've played it, the game seems well designed and certainly feels very smooth to play.
The audio is spot-on, the voices are very amusing and the music fits the theme perfectly and is really nice to listen to. I spent the first chunk of the game walking in rhythm to the music and very much enjoying the feeling of that.
It's definitely interesting to have a tile-based game in which the player occupies multiple tiles. It wasn't the most intuitive, but once I figured out I eat with my head it made sense.
The combat is painfully repetitive, though. The amount of dodges and light scratches just makes the event drag on, and since there's no way to skip cutscenes or auto-attack, I'm just stuck mashing X until my hand hurts. Since you're aping pokemon, one of the things that makes the grind more bearable in pokemon is that you can take out much weaker enemies with one, two hits max. That balance would have improved this game greatly.
Also, running should really despawn the enemy you're running from, since I ended up immediately getting into combat after running.
After a couple evolutions, I got stuck with no food anywhere in range. I tried exploring but I couldn't outrun the enemies and after not finding any food for about half a dozen battles I just gave up.
Sound and visual design is great, but the core gameplay needs serious balancing.
Great idea, great execution, great atmosphere. The last day put a smile on my face.
Main issue I had was that no matter how well I performed there never seemed to be enough troops and supplies coming in to cover the losses. It was really hard to tell how much my abilities actually influenced the course of battle. It makes sense that the available troops have to be redistributed by HQ and not a technician, but my actions felt a bit meaningless.
I wasn't able to see any punishment for failing letters, either.
As a complete nitpick, I started out waiting for the sfx of the dashes and dots to finish playing before sending the next symbol, but the ended up with me failing the letter. I had to mash the combination, which ended up with some of the dashes merging together in audio? It worked fine, though, no big issue there.
Great audio design, too. I realize the music's not yours, but the contrast between that and the military noises really lent a unique mood to the game.
If you could make a sandbox mode (as a seperate download) with the obstacles removed and the rotation sensitivty turned down a couple notches, I could play this for hours. I'm serious, btw. If you could add an alternate sandbox download that would make my day.
A lot of games this LD have done the vine/snake thing, but I don't think I've seen one done this smoothly or beautifully.
The controls were smooth and worked well with the level design. A bit awkward to get used to, especially when trying to jump onto a 1-block platform (instinct told me to adjust for straying too far right by pressing left, then when that catapulted me to the left to press right, etc)
Biggest frustration early game was that the autoaim didn't differentiate between enemies and chests. It would have felt better to aim for any enemies within range (and not behind a wall) before any chests were chosen as targets.
I liked the intro level which let the player figure out the mechanics without the threat of death. And the the slot machines as a method of upgrades worked really well in the game's setting/theme, while also being balanced rather well.
Because of the knockback of the weapon, I found it impossible to stay on 1-block platforms after hitting the chest there, and the gold always vanished before I got back on/caught any.
Also, mashing right quickly enough on the slot machine seemed to always give me a reward. Not sure if that's intentional. Waiting between button presses worked like you'd expect a slot machine to.
The concept is really good and the detection of lines vs dots could be worse, but the game kept resetting my letter. The timing even on the post-compo version is incredibly precise, not just in terms of how long to hold a dash for, but just in getting all the symbols in before the game arbitrarily decided that my ..-. is actually a ..- and an E. I couldn't finish the game before I got too frustrated to keep going.
Given the low-bandwidth premise and the space aesthetic, I think sending 0's and 1's using the two buttons would've worked much better than trying to work with the morse timing.
Fast-paced, manic, and tense are not adjectives I thought I'd ever apply to a harvest moon lookalike. The combat/survival is excellently balanced such that I'm constantly trying to click somewhere and do something. Music's solid as well. Great work.
Nitpicks:
-it's not immediately obvious how to gather wheat/drink water.
-The screen size/resolution is hard to see on larger monitors
-if you don't plant something immediately, you're liable to start starving before any wheat reaches maturity. A day's leeway would have been nice (some food in crates/hunger is slowed for a day)
-After a couple of days, food stops being an issue and you're free to focus on combat, only occasionally dealing with farming or drinking. Since you're not constantly discarding your weapon, the combat becomes a whole lot easier and the enemy waves don't increase in strength at a proportional rate.
I ended up playing this some more the day after first trying it (really compelling game) and survived for 30 days:
I moved my farming operation to the river for easier water access, but after a couple of days there my gun despawned when I threw it in the corner of the river. Normally it bounced off, but the one time it just vanished leaving me defenseless.
Other than that, if you just implement a couple of minor fixes post-LD this would be pretty much a perfect game:
-pathfinding needs to be improved
-add a piece of food or two in the crates so the player has a moment to figure out the controls
-resizable window
-make it easier to find the hoe and gun among the farm, visually. I usually ended up having to pixelhunt until the prompt came up.
Here's a log of an issue that showed up:
You startled her.(if:)'s 1st value is the number 0, but should be a boolean.► She jumps, turns, and asks how she can help you.There's nothing before this to do (else:) with.►.. TWICE. She jumps, turns, and her eyes grow wide as her gaze falls to your now porn-legend-sized penis.
----
otherwise, there's a much larger array of options than I'd expect to see, but you sort of paid for that with the choices not really being consequential (I'm not wearing underpants > I'm not wearing Pants > game says "and yet you wear underpants?")
I couldn't stop laughing at the bouncing animation. The general mood and graphics work really well, and the world is very pleasant to explore.
Possible improvements:
-I'd kill for sfx of wind and waves crashing into the island, even with no other audio
-the navigation was very confusing and I pretty much always ended up trying each combination of direction+holding/not holding the button. A cleaner system might have been somethign along the lines of:
---if moving right, hold right to turn right, don't hold right to turn left/go straight
---if moving left, hold left to turn left, don't hold left to turn right/go straight
-when you can't turn down a certain path, the character glitches out a bit but there's no further indication. Ideally I'd like a message to popup saying I can't go that direction, with a hint as to what abilities I need. Alternatively, at least mark restricted areas with a red direction arrow or whatnot?
Thoroughly enjoyed the game, though.
The core concept of the game is interesting, with a tool to destroy obstacles that requires you to get into danger to use it. Unfortunately, the controls really break this entry. They feel very twitchy, stiff, and generally hard to use. I never once felt that a death was my fault, and the one time I got to the moon I felt pretty much no satisfaction from it because I was mildly steaming from having to restart so many times.
It seems like the audio clip of the road traffic doesn't loop properly, and there's a pop on the seam because of mismatched waves. The way you'd normally fix this is either fade in at the start/fade out at the end, or: cut and paste the first half after the second, and crossfade at the seam (give a bit of overlap between the two clips, fade out one clip at the same time as you fade in the other).
Still, good use of the theme and great idea. Just a bit lacking in execution, unfortunately.
Great work. Puzzles were brilliantly designed, and paced just right. Music and audio design perfectly suited the graphics ands setting. Beautiful game all around.
Minor complaints:
It was difficult to tell how many units of water I'd need to grow most vines; I usually had to work through trial and error to figure out which platforms were reachable with 1 water, and which I needed 2 or 3 for.
The platforming on the vines felt very stiff, and getting down 1-block-wide holes was very messy. I had to hit 'up' to actually mount the vine in a way that allowed me to climb down.
Very minor complaints:
Some of the graphics had outlines and other graphics didn't, which seemed a bit jarring at first though the style grew on me throughout the game. Very nice looking otherwise.
The final level (summit) seemed a bit too easy... just grab the water on the right, move back down the ramp before the fire starts, grab the water on the left, do the same thing, climb up the plant in the middle, step to the left, grow the nearest plant there, climb it, put out the fire, take the water, water the plant to the left of center, leave. There was a whole lot of level outside that central area that seemed like you intended the player not to run back after grabbing the first two bits of water?
In summit, on the top level, there's a plant that grows out from the level below, between the two sprouts. If you grow it all the way up, it clips through the platform, and if you then try to climb it, the protagonist gets launched into space and dies off-screen.
It took me a few tries before I realized that when I pressed both arrow keys, exploded, and had the entire screen explode with me, I wasn't actually winning anything. Got really confused as to why I didn't get hearts. Once I figure out that I had to charge up an explosion the game went more smoothly.
The control scheme primarily was a substantial bugbear. After I finished turning, there'd be about a second during which I couldn't turn again, which made the controls feel really stiff and unpleasant.
Also, it would've been nice to have a bit more visual feedback on the explosion radius of various ships. Add a shockwave graphic to show how far they reach, maybe.
For games where you're getting resources for the sake of resources, it's important to have a cutoff point. Something simple like "get 10,000 resources and the game will display a bad drawing of a bonfire" provides a goal to work towards and makes the tasks along the way seem at least somewhat meaningful.
As it stands, though, I had an embarrasing amount of fun throwing peons to their doom and watching an endless centipede of workers carrying stone to and fro.
One minor issue is that I had a tree spawn below the resource counter so I couldn't read the second digit at all. Maybe put a bit of a margin on the left for the resource spawner?
Music's great, visuals are solid, and the design seems good, but the game's just a bit too glitchy to be playable.
Dashing seems to involve random jittering which sometimes tries to clip through the central platform. And jumping with Y sometimes makes X jump as well, at random points. I've found the most effective strategy to be mashing both Y and X quickly, which causes both buttons to leap away from the central platform and avoid all the obstacles.
Also, X and Y on a QWERTY keyboard are incredly far apart (I'm guessing you were developing for a QWERTZ). A and D might have been a cleaner option.
There's a lot of elements at play here, and a lot of them seem superfluous. Ultimately I was able to mash one of the keys and just push forward when given the option, and that won me a couple games. I still have no idea what the buildings accomplished, or what combat actually affected. If the end goal is to push forward, try and make the abilities around that, rather than around combat, maybe?
I did like the idea of being able to control the enemy's actions.
Also, a couple bugs I came across: the game freezes/locks up if S < 0. And at one point I had both options (A and D, both buff and debuff) be identical.
The core principle of the game is very clever and enjoyable. If it wasn't a unity build and with some UI improvements (and some changes to the theme, I could see something like this being a minor internet sensation for a couple days on a subreddit somewhere :P
Most of my issues are with the UI, though. It straddles the line between ornamental and minimalist, and doesn't really commit to either. I think a cleaner design would do away with the buttons: Have two trees, one on either end (one good, one evil). Clicking on the tree or its corresponding bar would help that side. The level could be displayed somewhere on the corresponding tree's image.
Alternatively, you could keep the bottom bar as it is, and make the main play area a bit more interesting. Instead of the blue line, have a mess of green and red branches or leaves. Maybe play with negative space a bit.
Still a nice concept, though, and the execution's not bad.
The concept and mechanics are solid, but the game feels very unstable and rough around the edges.
You can hover in the air slightly if you hold the jump button down, and rubbing against walls while jumping boosts your jump as well.
The hitboxes on the obstacles are a bit unforgiving as well.
Good concept, though.
The growing mechanics look really nice and smooth. The main issues I had with the game design were that I had to stop every couple moves to restock on water, and more importantly, that my plant got despawned as I went along.
I'd have loved to zoom out by the end of the game and see a giant branching behemoth that I've built.
Maybe in place of the red circles which force you back, you could have markers where you end that particular branch, leaving the flower there? Then you could assign a random position somewhere along the existing branch structure that the player could continue playing from. Aside from the resulting aesthetic, it'd mean mean the player could gather the water droplets more quickly as time went on. While they're a nice balancing mechanic early on, they quickly get tedious with having to constantly stop and wait. If you could grow out your water gathering operation, they'd remain a limiting factor early on but would become less of a bother late game.
Bugs:
-I ended up having two parallel stocks turning simultaneously, about 200px apart horizontally. The flower would jump between them if I mashed right or left enough.
-The A/D keys would become unresponsive if I turned too far in a given direction. Not sure if that's intentional or not, but I'd like to be able to make fuller spirals.
First off, the graphics are impressive as all hell. Great job on those.
The terminal on the side is a very nice touch as well.
The combat itself is nice and tense, since you're always able to outrun/outmaneuver the enemy, but have to get in vulnerable positions to fire.
Or rather, the combat would be nice, if the cannon shots registered consistently. There's a deadzone directly around the SENTINEL in which you can't hit the enemies, and that deadzone is exactly where the spawners aim for. I could see that being by design, but half the time even when I move away I can't hit the bastards.
Most of my damage was due to shots that visually appear to hit not registering.
Get that fixed and this would be a great game.
score of 71. The increase in size as you make mistakes was a nice touch, though the final zoom level was larger than my monitor (any way you could grab screensize data in html5?).
Main complaint is the travel time of the grandma. I think the game would benefit if:
-the color switched the frame I hit the appropriate button
-I could only hit a pill when part of it was over the dashed-white-line
Solid game otherwise.
It's katamari damacy, more or less, and you've definitely managed to copy over a lot of the charm from it, between the music, the fabulous king of the universe, and the kitchy artstyle.
But the satisfaction of gathering things is limited, for two reasons:
-first: in Katamari Damacy, when you ran over an object, it'd stick in place on your katamari. This would make for weird irregular shapes that became harder to control, and would ensure that whatever was last put on the ball would be visible. In Seicho Boru, you threw all the objects the player gathered into the center of the ball at random rotations, which just made a lot of clipping issues and a bit of a mess. On top of that, late-game it didn't feel like a "add things to the pile" game so much as a "collect things to grow your size arbitrarily" game, since things would vanish before I reached them and get attached somewhre I didn't see them.
The solution to this would be, when you pick up an object, to SetParent to the ball, but not to touch the localPosition of it.
-second; katamari's difficulty and appeal came from the constant increase in the size of things you could pick up. In Seicho Boru, pretty much everything is the same size (within a small margin of error that you overcome in the first minute of playing), so there doesn't seem to be any point in growing, other than to reach the end of the game. I think it would be a much better game if you varied up your model sizes a fair bit more; any given area should contain a mixture of things you're able to gather at that level, and bigger things for context and challenge.
Smaller issues include the intro taking way too long. The character's nice and the writing is funny enough, but it just drags on way beyond its welcome. In writing cutscenes, less is more. Also, the ball gets weird behavior when hitting some walls (most notably the south of the menu select), where it floats up toward the camera.
Overall, the writing's cute and you've nailed the aesthetic, but some of the balancing needs work.
First off, graphics are great. I really enjoyed the fact the monsters walk away after you die. The audio needs work, the music especially didn't seem to fit well.
The gameplay itself obviously isn't anything new, though it definitely felt just a bit sluggish and heavy, hard to pin down what was the exact cause. Something between the blurred visuals and not a whole lot of feedback to crashing into an enemy. It might have helped if the enemies were easier to make out against the background, and exploded or got knocked back as they died. Something to make me realize the momentum at play.
First off, I really don't think the game benefitted from the two button controls. The text was small and hard to read, and the limitation of only being able to change some things at a time really didn't add much to the gameplay. I'd have much preferred a set of sliders to control everything, and you'd still be sticking to the growing theme.
If I pushed the game too far in either direction on temperature, I ended up getting a few rows of brown dots and black rows above and below them, and every other tile was spazzing out. I have no idea what that's supposed to signify.
Overall, I think the game turns take too long. It would've been nice to have smoother animations on a much slower clock just to know what's actually going on.
The game idea looks really interesting but I think the player just needs more feedback on what's happening in the garden.
I can tell you spent a lot of effort on the vine growing, and it does look really nice, but I feel like your effort may have been a bit misplaced. The game overall just felt a bit tedious: jump, water, jump, water, jump water.
I think the game would have beneffited immensely if, instead of jumping up to water the stalk, you cut out the watering altogether and had the stalk grow when you reached the top, or collected some item or other. Then you could have some terror coming up from the bottom of the screen and force the player to climb ever faster on the stalk.
The sound effects are really quiet and the controls could do with an in-game explanation (especially "hit enter to continue conversation" - I'm not used to using enter on a game that uses z, x, and arrows so it wasn't obvious at all and I thought the game was broken)
Even without an objective, I see the appeal of a perpetually growing city like this. The mechanics you have for clumping buildings together are really solid. The game falls apart for me on one issue, though.
In my eyes, a world builder like this should be about exponential expansion, where the city starts out with 10 residents and a little cornerstore and by the end of the game you're plopping down giant skyscrapers with spare change. You, on the other hand, went down the cookie clicker approach, where you match growing income with growing prices, making any gains on the player's part a completely meaningless skinnerbox.
Instead of increasing the price of each building with each one placed, I think you should've just made the upgrades more potent and exponentially more expensive (though still at a static cost). At that point, the player still has to increase income to afford the upgrades (which are neccessary because of limited worldspace), but the city actually shows the progress the player's made.
(P.S. - in your dropbox links, if you replace 'dropbox.com' with 'dl.dropbox.com' you'll get a direct download instead of going through dropbox's page)
The game looks nice enough, and the core design idea is solid, but there's a few things missing from the execution.
If your game is based on thought-out placement of blocks, make sure the grid they're on is clearly visible, either by making them large enough to be unambiguous or giving some visual guides.
As it stands, the spinning perspective did very little in the way of showing me where things were (I would've preferred standard top-down camera controls). The tiny cubes meant I kept being a block or two off from where I meant to be.
The game's a bit unplayable as it stands.
First issue that came up: the top-fight and bottom-left ability descriptions are partially obscured by the edge of the screen or the color picker respectively. You might want to fix that.
As far as the game itself goes... it's a relatively average jumpy dodgy sort of thing, with the gameplay mostly boiling down to sitting in one spot and moving back and forth or jumping occasionally. Not the most exciting thing, but it does the job.
More importantly, though, I've got to ask how this ties in to either of the themes. I didn't see anything growing other than the wave number, and there's at least 3 buttons used for controlling the game. I'm honestly confused there.
First off, regarding jam rules: if you used pre-made music, it's asked that you opt out of the audio category. The same applies for graphics if you used any pre-made assets.
I only saw the first two levels (because the second one was too difficult, as explained below), and while the graphical aesthetic is rather cute, I really didn't enjoy this as a pinball game:
-probably the biggest issue is in the boss level. Any direct path to the boss is blocked by bouncers. So There's no real way to use skill to defeat the boss. The only thing you can do is flail randomly and hope that the ball bounces off randombly to hit it. Having a tunnel you need to hit or a smaller hitbox on the boss would have provided similar difficulty without relying on luck.
-the flippers take far too long to reset. In a pinball game, you want the flippers to be either up or down at all times, with as little downtime in between as possible (1 or 2 frames of transition max).
-the controls for the flipper are both bound to the mouse. This means that I can't realistically put one hand on either flipper control without some scripting locally. Try Z and / or the two shift keys for a more fluid arcadey experience.
-and as a minor nitpick, since the menus are navigated with the flipper controls, I ended up choosing an option because I was in the middle of controlling the flippers, before the menu actually loaded up. A much cleaner solution would be to have the player move the mouse over the option they want to select (this wouldn't sacrifice the theme, either).
Overall, it's a LD game so I'm not expecting the best pinball game I've ever played, but for future projects, those are the conventions pinball games tend to follow. Good luck :)
As much as I realize you were sticking to a theme here, I think this game would work much better without the control restriction. Most notably, I'd like to be able to look around to find the blue blobs.
While building your own shaders is nice and all, you could accomplish something indistinguishable visually with a semi-transparent solid-color material in unity, a rotational animation on the droplet, and a normal map on the ground.
I think you tried too hard to reinvent the wheel and ended up running out of time before you built the cart. The game doesn't have enough to do and the controls feel like a hindrance more than a design feature.
It seems like you're taking a lot of cues from Osmos here, and there's just a few annoyances based on the elements of that game you didn't port over:
-Most significantly, there's no way to tell which things will kill you and which won't. Their borders are just vague enough that on multiple occasions I got destroyed by things that definitely looked smaller. The ideal solution here is to color them, say, green when they're smaller than you, and blue/red when they're bigger.
-As another minor annoyance, though this is much more excusable in a LD entry, there's no real feedback as to how much mass things take. In Osmos specifically movement would result in a little blob of mass being spewn out in the direction opposite of movement, though I'd imagine there's other solutions to better signify how much mass I lose per click/second/boost at a given size.
-the hitboxes are also very unclear and don't match the graphics
-Finally, it seems to me like you applied the same force/cost the same mass regardless of the player's size. Or at least the increase didn't scale properly with the mass of the player. By the end of the last levels the game was a bit hard to control. Would've been nice to just spew out more mass per second in exchange for the same speed I had at the start.
Definitely enjoyed the game, save for the annoyances. Nice work.
Minor nitpick here, but a lot of people don't read several lines into a description, so try and provide the controls for your game in the game itself.
More generally speaking, the game's rather pretty but the mushrooms seem to fall on their side whenever I throw them. I'm not sure if that's intentional, but it looks a bit glitchy. Since you're working in unity, I think a better approach would be to disable the physics on the mushroom once it's planted (mushroomObject.GetComponent<Rigidbody>().SetActive(false);), and just keep the collider as a trigger so any baddies that walk into it get killed. (make sure it's only a trigger so Nia can walk past it and it doesn't get knocked over - trigger colliders don't have physics)
I've got to ditto OfficialProjectFantasy there. The food was incredibly tiny, to the point of it making more sense to just change directions randomly and hope for the best at the higher levels. Larger food pellets, or just a more zoomed-in grid would have helped. I loved the control scheme, though. Wreaks your brain a bit.
having the music open in my browser meant that it wasn't on loop, and I couldn't be bothered to restart it.
Significant bug: Difficulty doesn't reset on restart; the speed you had continues on into the next game.
The game's a tad glitchy for what it is. if you walk off the left side of the screen, sometimes the level restarts and sometimes it doesn't. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if not for the fact the game tries to pull pranks on you several times. I'm basically left questioning whether something was intentional or a glitch every time something breaks. The drop before the box wasn't so much of an issue in this case as the last ending flag. With the box, at lesat you had the narrator to justify it. With the last flag, I was convinced the game'd broken again and only went off the left side of the platform because I wanted to restart the level.
As a rule of thumb, I personally consider it bad design to mismatch your level geometry hitboxes and your level appearance. If there's a hole in the floor I'd like to fall through it and if there's not a hole I'd like to move over it. (same principle goes for invisible walls mid-level). Holding information back from your players is a cheap way of adding difficulty or puzzle elements.
All that aside, the core mechanics are reasonable and the level design does some cool things with them.
I'm really not sure why the protagonist had that light-grey growth on the front end of their sprite, it didn't seem to serve a purpose and looked a bit naff.
And it seemed like when I hit the enemies from the side I'd still bounce off them somehow.
@Muffinhat - I used a sampler for the piano and a subtractive synth for the glock. Used Reason 5 to input the MIDI from a keyboard I had lying around.
@mrjorts - you can see the whole rainbow if you move back towards the lake a bit :)
Nice work, great atmosphere. Main issue is just the lack of difficulty. If you'd matched the changes of symbols to the audio pulses you could force the player to have much tighter timing on their changes. Maybe start with two training rounds of each pattern without losing health, then force the player to match the timing tightly not to lose health.
It feels really odd for a summoning ritual of ancient gods to be this trivial is all >_>
Should be noted, I didn't notice the post-LD version until after I commented. Forcing the player to hit the start as well as the end of each rune would still improve the game, though, I feel.
The screenshots and description look really cool, but there's no game.
I have to second Andrew there, holding the space bar would be a much smoother control scheme. Also, some visual indication of when I can turn would be great. something as simple as the drong turning red while unable to turn.
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but the presents grab onto the drone at random points and don't shift to the center. (I'm assuming you're setting the drone as a parent to the presents' transform, in which case you want to also set present.transform.LocalPosition = Vector3.zero;)
Finally, the present dropzone is far too small. I feel like a circle about 3 times wider than that square would have worked much better.
Great work. The turn speed and controls are just right for a smooth dogfighting experience. I had some issues with the boss seemingly not taking damage once I got him to a small ball. It could've just been my bullets not hitting him, though.
Biggest issue I had was that there didn't seem to be a way to tell how much more damage I could eat up. A red flash when my health is low, or a healthbar somewhere on the screen would've been really helpful.
Very well done, this is the best approach to the two-options-at-a-time mechanic I've seen so far (most other games just restrict your options at random, you've ensured that any one choice only has two options). The writing's really nice and atmospheric.
Main complaint I'd have is that it seemed like foraging the trees gave me enough food to cover all my needs until the end of the game. I did build farms and farmers, but having 10 food at regular intervals from the 2 trees in my village would've covered what was consumed by far.
The game could use a fair bit of balancing in general. I pretty much never saw a use for my [non-food] resources except for rock carving, and neither the statue nor the tower seemed to do anything.
You did make up a lot of the balancing issue with the rust and the fact the game ends after the dragon's killed, though. Good job on those.
Very nice game.
Game's very nice-looking, but the obstacles often can't be avoided, the suns and purple balls fall far too quickly giving no reaction time. And the obstacles sometimes hide behind others, again giving no reaction time.
Core gameplay is solid, though (if frame-droppy at times), I just can't get past a few tens of points and level 1.
Overall, a fun little game; difficult but very nice-looking and easy to grasp, fits with the theme.
There were a handful of times I really don't feel like I should have survived when I did. The spikes sometimes line up perfectly and the only way to avoid them is to use the invulnerability of the movement animation, which doesn't feel terribly fair or intended. I feel like the game would've worked much better with clearer deliniations of where the player should be at a given point. I'm mostly nitpicking here, though. The system works and isn't hard to learn.
Only other complaint is that the sound effects are a bit grating.
I'll admit, based on the art style and the genre I was expecting to dislike this game, but you've done solid work here.
The stamina on the shots is a really cool feature that really makes this a relatively unique shmup, and the enemy variety forces you to use both attacks consistently. The timing on new enemy types is pretty great, too.
The only nitpick I can think of is that it's a bit difficult to dodge some of the projectile attacks, since they fly at you faster than you can fall/fly out of the way. But you can see them coming so it's still dodgable. Just difficult.
It's a solid game, great work.
First off, brilliant interpretation of the theme. The flight model allows for smooth turning and moving forward.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to gain altitude, and any attempt I made at flying eventually ended in a crash.
The model's a tad unintuitive; a tutorial, or at least a learning environment would've been appreciated.
Finally, after a crash there's really no way to recover. mashing both buttons only pushes you further into the ground if you're flipped over.
This was a mess to get working. First mega.nz tried to download its own downloader for me, then once I managed to circumvent that, the bat crashed because I had whitespace in my pathname (put quotes around pathnames in the future). Once I fixed that, the bat only opened up cmd and cd'd to the appropriate directory. I was able to start up the file by just navigating to the appropriate spot and opening it, though.
Regarding the game itself:
The pod racer itself looks great. It's far beyond what I'd expect from an LD entry, and shows a lot of fine detailing and crafting.
Everything else suffered for it, though. The level geometry is messy and hard to follow. The sound effect for hitting things is far too long and plays too often. Half the assets placed in the level don't have their hitboxes set. I couldn't figure out a way to move the second pod, and the game didn't register when I finished a lap.
The movement was actually rather smooth, except for the constant crashing into slightly glitchy obstacles.
I think the game would have benefited from a larger open play area with some sand dunes to leap over. Scrap the track design and just give me a desert to play in. No second player, no racing, just a sandbox. The driving mechanics would've really worked well for just jumping off hills at high speed.
The game really doesn't fit into the theme, either. It's just a generic racing game.
Sorry :T
biggest issues in the game right now:
-the maps are too big, takes forever to get to the other player's play area, and with the max zoom as it is it takes a while to even find them.
-it takes far too long to create units, at least initially. A 4x game like this should never start with 100 turns of both players waiting for a settler, especially in a hotseat. Maybe allow the players to choose starting locations so they're both in forest?
-To get my warrior across the map, I had to: rightclickdrag to get my carea to him, click on the warrior, click on the 'Move' button, click on the space I wanted him to move, click end turn, rinse and repeat. My mouse hand is cramped up now. This would be easily fixed with a hotkey for "next warrior" (tab?) and a hotkey for movement (M?). I couldn't be bothered to get more than one warrior to enemy territory because scaling such a huge territory was painful with even the one.
-There's no end-of-game. When all a player's cities are sacked, nothing happens. I'm guessing this is to allow a player with a warrior to retake a city, but there didn't seem to be a way to destroy warriors from what I could tell? I know one of mine did get despawned, but I don't know how.
Otherwise, the mechanics are actually really solid, and the production chain makes for that great dynamic of building up an economic base, and timing the start of the war machine just right.
Title's brilliant, levels are well-designed, humor is spot on, and the lore matches perfectly with the mechanics. Main issue is with the controls.
Mashing W doesn't instantly increase my size, there's an inconsistent delay between zooms. And the size increases are never big enough for one increase to cover my needs, so I've ended up mashing W a lot just waiting for the delay to pass so I can get to the size I need to be.
To solve that, either try making bigger jumps in size (plan it out so I can hit 'W' once and be at the next size most puzzles want me to be) or let me mash W to grow quicker.
Enjoyed my time overall.
The music was a fair bit grating. Tocatta and Fugue in D is much quicker, so hearing the slowed down and un-quantized version on primitive synths was...unpleasant. The graphics are nice, with the scanlines and all that. I feel like the cash you get per plane shot down is a bit small, takes a long time to get to the $1000 you need, and the game doesn't have enough content to make it enjoyable.
Ramming other planes seemed like an effective strategy. Not sure if that was intended, but it was rather fun to do.
Also, seems like the bullets despawn when they go off screen, even though there might be enemies there?
As an improvement, I'd recommend that powerups spawn a lot more often (think several weapon changes per minute) your plane get much faster movement, and have the whole game zoomed out a lot more (larger playing space, smaller planes). There wasn't really enough room to dodge properly and the whole thing felt sluggish and heavy.
It's definitely an interesting submission. It was definitely a bit tricky to figure out what was going on exactly, since it seemed random whether pushing in a certain direction would expand my fungal empire or just waste the lives of by back row soldiers to no real effect. I'm not sure if the AI was just really good at countering or if the overall size of the population changes the calculations there.
The game's very difficult, at least against the AI. Seems like the best strategy is to do a landgrab and avoid fighting for as long as possible. Not sure if that's the intention.
Overall, this is definitely a very cool area control games, but I'd like to have a bit more feedback on what I'm doing or how the game's resolving the border conflicts.
The game does feature growing as a measure of health, but I don't see how the growing actually affects the gameplay. It would've been nice to have, say, movement use up mass, or to be able to destroy antibodies smaller than you. Maybe even tie it in to the passages you were coming through, where you have to let an antibody damage you to get through?
In the higher difficulties, it's a bit hard to tell whats watery pseudopod and what's vulnerable water surface. Since you don't want to hit the chlorine with the central panel, this makes aiming a bit difficult. Having a stronger indication of safe zones would have been useful.
I think the game would benefit greatly from either a time restriction or stronger AI in the shoppers, so they run away from you. As it stands, a perfectly viable strategy seems to be just aligning yourself horizontally and waiting for the shoppers to walk into you randomly.
The sound effects are a bit grating. and the background texture could use some work, but I've seen worse on both accounts.
The segmented snake looks rather nice, and the game's pretty fun, so not bad overall.
P.S. - if you replace 'www' with 'dl' in your dropbox url, you can skip opening the dropbox UI.
The humor's good. My main issue with the game has to be the sound, though. Each one jump emits several identical sound effects, which drive me up the wall, and they don't stop if you hold down the jump key.
The core idea of the game is really nice and exciting, but there are just so many minor annoyances that I was unable to enjoy this game at any point.
To start off, the game's far, far too slow. At the start it took far too long to get the 25 coins of regular income I needed to start blueberry farming. Then, with every plant taking more time to grow, the game just dragged on far beyond its welcome.
Second issue, and this is a huge one. To control the mouse, you need to click and drag. But the mouse isn't locked to the window. So I was left having to click, drag to turn a little bit, move my mouse back over to the other side of the screen, drag again, to do any sort of turning and my wrist is absolutely killing me right now.
You made a really nice asset for the chef and gardener (though why they're wearing winter clothes while it's "sunny" I'm not clear on >_> , and the plants look fairly nice as well, but with the complete lack of texturework on the walls and building it loses a lot of the overall effect.
Finally, don't make the user hit 'f' on every single plant. Let them gather in a radius, or have the plants gather themselves, or let them hold down f to gather everything they walk past. My hands are in pain from playing this game :T
In short: lock the mouse to the window, speed up the growth time of the later plants, increase the selling price of strawberries, let the user hold f instead of pressing it, add some texturework to the walls/building and you've got a pretty fun game.
I'm sorry that I'm so harsh, but I think you should've simplified the character assets and put some effort into balancing and designing the gameplay.
outstanding bug: not sure if it's intentional, but you can easily place overlapping plants; you prevent the player from placing plants while standing inside another plant's area, but if I stand outside of the area facing in I can easily make the plants overlap, though that does make gathering them difficult.
I can get to the first two grails just fine, then there's a vertical shaft I fall down, and a checkpoint at the bottom. I can't reach the grail to my left there, and the jump to the right is unrachable as well, at any size.
The jumping itself is very clunky. It seems like you move upwards at a set speed, then fall back down at the same speed. A more natural jumping animation should start at a certain positive vertical speed, then decrease that speed every frame.
If you change the download link from www.dropbox.* to dl.dropbox.*, you can skip the dropbox UI.
The title is cute.
The game's missing a lot, but the mushroom growing mechanics are rather nice. I think you could've done a lot more even with limited time if you ignored the enemies, the walls, the plots, and the character, and just had a small environment for throwing spores and growing mushrooms (check out Viridi for an example of what I mean). If you're limited on time, try and adust your design to account for that, focus on fewer mechanics, don't spread yourself thin.
I'd have really liked to see a small first-person spore-firing, watch-giant-mushrooms-grow-from-tiny-spores-over-several-minutes thing.
It's snake, there's not much else to say on that front.
the sound and graphics are a bit grating and the board is a lot smaller than I'm used to. if you were to double the boardsize in both axes, add a green nokia-style filter, and make the snake fill the entire squares instead of little shapes inside them, this would be a much more solid rendition of snake.
The game lacks any real sense of satisfaction. The animation was nice and the texturing decent, but by the end of the level I'd hoped to see all the clay people get smushed but instead the giant rock landed first to the side of them, missing them all, and then just bounced off them on the second level :T
I was able to walk off the map without a problem; you've got a square map there, just clamp the player position to the map bounds.
The camera angle for the overhead view sat in an awkward position where it wasn't cinematically satisfying but also didn't give me a proper view of the entire arena.
The animation's really well-polished, the sound effects were fun to listen to, but the coding and gameplay design need work.
Are you familiar with stuff like the Humongous Entertainment games? Usually children's stuff where you'd get to click on various bits of the level and nothing much would happen but you'd get this cute animation? That's what this game is missing. I want to be able to click on a bird and have it fly away, to knock on a window and have it open/close.
Obviously a bit more control over the building appearance would've been nice too, but even without that you could've made the experience a lot more dynamic with a couple of extra animations.
Still, very pretty artpiece.
Awesome. The dynamic of coins to purchase lives actually gives incentives to coin collection without the stressful overtness of a lives counter. And the balance is just right that I didn't have issues getting to the end once I learned the controls but also didn't feel like I wasn't challenged, and my coin count stayed within 10-40 bounds throughout most of the game.
regarding XCV, I found myself consistently moving my fingers to ZXC every time I scratched my nose or stretched my hands, so while you're being more open to other keyboard layouts you're also working against hard-engrained muscle memory.
Afaict after you've used up all your bat jumps you get another extra boost which transforms you back into a human, and there's one optional jump that uses that feature. Good on you for not making it mandatory to use the mechanic, but it definitely wasn't obvious or signposted well.
Also, it seems like there was a slight shortcut at one point, but I just barely couldn't make the jump (3 horizontal squares, then a big rectangle to their right, then a jump from the big rectangle onto a platform to the left). Not sure if that was intentionally misleading or if I can make that jump somehow.
Anyway, awesome work. As always you've managed make the rest of us look shite in comparison :P
First off, the graphics and general aesthetic of the game are spot-on, consistent, very well done. The various forms feel like they need a bit of balancing but that's the case with any game jam so that's mostly a nitpick. The game is super visually impressive. Like, damn.
Gameplay-wise, it's mostly standard for a vertical shooter, except for a couple distinctions from the norm:
The main genre-convention-defying thing here is the extremely large hitbox that the cat has, for bullet hell standards. That makes maneuvering him very difficult, especially with all the tight spaces and walls to navigate through.
The second genre-convention defiance comes from damage on contact with walls. Typically if you get crushed in a v.shooter you die, but otherwise walls just push you around. With the damage as it's handled here it just seems to make navigating more frustrating without adding a whole lot of enjoyable challenge.
Generally, those tropes exist for a reason and it hurts your game not to follow them.
The movement also feels fairly sluggish and unresponsive. I realize that with the ninja you can't move left/right while firing, but it seemed like there was a moment after I stopped firing when I still couldn't move.
The levels (at least the first few, which I was able to get to) are designed in a way that reinforces the issues with the mechanics. They're filled with tight spaces and obstacles to dodge, with heavy bulletspongey enemies that don't pop well and occupy too much of the screen.
Generally, I'd like a much, much smaller hitbox, weaker enemies, and a lot fewer navigational kerfuffles.
On death and restart, the background music overlaps with itself.
I'll probably come back and play this some more when I'm less tired and can focus on getting further into the game. I'm curious what you put there.
My main gripe is the method of generating energy. Having to mash w and s is tiring and unsatisfying.
The actual wall-building wasn't particularly compelling either, mostly just grinding out enough energy, ploping down the bits the stars ripped out, rinse and repeat.
Just not a lot to the gameplay to keep me interested.
Also, the audio was very unpleasant and grating, especially the extremely loud end-of-game effects.
The graphics are super pretty, I'll admit, but the gameplay just doesn't seem that well designed. I feel like this sort of gameplay would lend itself well to a tower defense variant of some description, or maybe something where the core will provide you energy while you control it, but you must build out with floors to move to other cores before your original one depletes.
The graphics are very impressive; give me a bit of a courage the cowardly dog feel. The gameplay's simple enough, a bit generic, and not a whole lot going on. I'm not really sure what the decrepit/standard transition was supposed to be doing, and it mostly made it hard to see/dodge the obstacles, but it was definitely pretty.
No clue what's going on with that description, though.
The game operates on a grid system, but the player moves fluidly. With the player being the same size as the grid, this means that it's difficult to squeeze into tight corridors, which lead to a lot of frustration, given how often they're used. Either make the player a lot smaller or lock their movement to the grid.
I think the game would have also benefited from making the burgers wear off with movement rather than with time. It makes more sense thematically, and it'd allow for tighter, more intellectually challenging puzzles, rather than the current battle with the game's movement system not to push the rock too far or not far enough before the timer runs out.
The level editor is a nice touch but with the mechanics as they are the platform's not really suited for a lot of good levels.
Fun little game really. Especially for a one-day entry it was actually kinda satisfying. Bit of a bug after time over and restart, the shapes would dissapear permanently after they went off the right/left edge, and often one button press would cause the lines to shift twice instead of once.
Didn't get a chance to play the original since my browser doesn't support Unity Web Player.
The dialogue's hilariously voiced and generally a very pleasant dark camp thing. Main complaint is just that the dialogue implies a lot of things that don't pan out. At one point in the "Is tommy a shapeshifter?" line, it seems like there's a consensus, at least with bobby, that tommy is a shapeshifter, and this doesn't translate to his ultimate answer. It would've been much more fun to find these hidden flags in the conversation I feel, and get a more organic-feeling argument going.
Still, had a very good time, especially being able to convince everyone that they're the shapeshifter after all. Nice work.
Very nicely done. The graphics are quite pretty and smooth, the controls are relatively responsive, and there's a lot of feedback for getting exp, getting new levels. The enemies are well-communicated and consistently colored, all that's solidly built.
A couple of things you could definitely improve on, though. To start with, death is far, far too punishing and far too quick. Once I'm knocked down from death machine to Kobe I can't really do much if all the enemies around me are still balanced as though I was the death machine. Sure there's more experience to pick up, but I can't get to the experience with all the overpowered enemies around me. As a simple improvement, you could make damage remove only one level, instead of dropping down to Kobe. If you do want to go down the traditional twinstick route of bringing the player down to zero, have player death cause most of the enemies around the player to be vaporized so I'm not instantly swamped with enemies while I'm trying to regain my power.
I've already praised the visuals, and you do make a good effort to distinguish the enemies, but they're the same color as your shots, and as such the screen gets really busy really quickly. It's hard to make out what's enemy, what's projectile, and what's a spawnpoint. Most of my deaths in busier moments of the game were to things I didn't see coming. More color variation between projectiles/spawnpoints/enemies/enemy explosions would have helped a lot, as well as a bigger contrast between foreground and background, and smaller/less pronounced graphics for the player's projectiles.
One further aspect of visual design is the point/experience popups, the +100's and such. Half the time I'd have the entire immediate area around me covered in the stuff, which made it really hard to see the enemies through the fog. I'd have much preferred a bar at the bottom of the screen, or an arc around my character, that just increased as I picked up the pellets to signify progress. Something less obtrusive.
Finally, this might just be me being used to standard single-direction-pointing twinsticks, but the fire rate seemed incredibly slow and threw me off many times, where I'd be expecting a projectile to appear a lot earlier than it did and get killed because of it.
Still, I had a good time with the game. Nice work.
Had a lot of fun with this one. last two levels were a bit too difficult for me, but that's not a bad thing. Only complaint is that it felt like sometimes, especially right at the start of level 4, I'd lose a bunch of my speed when switching to the glider, and other times doing the same thing I'd keep a lot more. That made it a bit hard to predict when to transform into the glider or how to do the run-up, since the tiniest input change could make a huge difference over the course of the flight.
The audio design is really unpleasant. Screechy noises combined with a cheap repetitive house loop don't make for a comfortable listening experience.
I wasn't able to figure out how to sacrifice anyone. I brought a random guy into the room with the pentagon but nothing happened. The pentagon would glow red if I walked over it but none of the buttons seemed to make the sacrifice happen. When I changed into a bat the dude just started screaming (again, really unpleasant sfx).
The guards seemed to run after me even if I was human, though very inconsistently, to the point that I could be being chased by one bouncer and run straight past another without him caring.
A better tutorial would have been very welcome, I couldn't figure out what to do.
On the bright side, that transitioning animation is beautiful.
technical issues first, holding space on the title screen drops the framerate and does little else.
The game is absolutely beautiful.I'd want to decorate my house with this game. And the theme interpretation is pretty neat.
But this is a physics puzzle game. And physics puzzle games conventionally operate on the principle of 'set stage up, play, watch what goes wrong, alter slightly, play, repeat'. And the issue with this particular title is that when something goes wrong, the entire stage resets to its original position. Initially, this isn't a huge issue since you you're only clicking one or two shapes. But later, when you get to grids of dozens of little shapes, which you have to re-click every time you lose the level, it gets unbearably frustrating. You do want a button/key which resets the stage to default (maybe keep that as [R]) but keep another button([Space] might work) for 'keep everything as I set it but reset the physics'.
The music is a 4 second loop that drove me insane as well.
Level design-wise, the game seems to love (pun intended) to throw new concepts at the player with no introduction in the middle of levels which claim to be introducing something else. Like the stage that explained how lines work and then arbitrarily required you to change the shape of the goal. I realize there's limited time to make levels in a compo, but tutorials are important.
Still, those graphics are amazing.
The voice-over is fairly neat, though a bit grating after a while. The animation on that train...operator...person is actually pretty fantastic
Gameplay itself does have a couple issues, though, and the UI could use some extra pampering too:
-In real life, trains without a complete track in front of them either don't move from their station or crash on the way. The behavior in the game isn't very obvious, and on level 2 especially if you don't touch anything when the trains depart you're unable to finish the level.
It would make much more sense to either let the player choose when the trains depart, or to have them wait until a connection is established.
-With how the trains operate, there's nothing stopping the player from building track as the train goes alone, removing track from behind the train and placing it in front. The levels don't seem designed with that in mind, so I'm guessing that's not intentional.
The UI is a bit of a mess. It should be immediately obvious which train is heading to which station, instead of having to crossreference a schedule with info you only get by clicking on the stations, all while a timer is ticking. "Blue train goes to blue station" would've been much more clean.
And having the bottom of the screen tell me to find the "Next" button in the top right corner is just confusing. Keep the 'level end' message and the 'next' button in the same area.
The voice-over is neat, but you're holding the mic way too close to your face, and on top of that the sensitivity is way too high.
Depending on the mic aim anywhere from 2 (headset mic) to 6 (standard handheld dynamic) inches away, and before recording watch the mic levels to make sure they're somewhere in the middle of your meter. You can always boost quiet audio, you can't fix corrupted audio.
The game isn't bad overall, but there's just a lot of tiny things that grate on me far too much.
James Coote: your GPU driver probably doesn't support OpenGL. If you're running an integrated GPU that's typically the issue. Not much I can do about that, make sure your drivers are updated and such.
Sean: create an empty file in panda3d_build\python\Lib\encodings and name it __init__.py . Get back to me on the ludumdare IRC channel (#ludumdare on AfterNet) if the issue persists.
sorry about that, uploading took longer than expected. Switching hosts finished now, though. Grab the files while they're hot :)
aeveis: the graphics driver you're running doesn't support OpenGL, and I haven't built an openGL-free version yet (probably won't this LD). If you're running a laptop with two GPUs (typically one intel and one amd) you're going to have to manually switch to using the better/amd one to run this game. If your GPU doesn't support OpenGL I can't help you.
Very silly game. Well-polished and well-balanced, too. Good work.
The game feels awfully slow. The graphical effects of the buildings exploding are quite fun, but it just takes so much waiting around holding down a single button to get there. I'd have liked to spend the entire game as the pinata, collecting candy to keep my timer going or something of that nature.
Also, with very rare exceptions, score doesn't make people want to keep playing your game. Set concrete goals, like knocking down an entire city block.
This is one of the rare cases where I don't abandon a literary game after the first paragraph, and your writing pulled me through to the end of a couple arcs. Minor complaint is that the shapeshifters almost could've been replaced with any other monster/alien/android with a skinsuit. I feel like there's more potential in the theme. Good job, though.
Core mechanics are decent enough, nothing new but playable.
Main complaint is with the audio design. The sound effect of shapeshifting is screechy, loud, and very unpleasant. My personal rule of thumb is not to use timbres with few overtones where I can avoid it, but if you have to aim for the old speaker vibe at least don't use such a high pitch.
The writing's passable, not particularly engaging and got in the way of the puzzles more often than not. I think a lot of the jokes didn't have the proper setup, or the proper timing. The punchline is just delivered far too early.
The physics doesn't feel very polished, on many occasions I was able to jump off vertical walls or pixel-width ledges, the mass of the objects is a bit unpredictable (I wasn't expecting not to be able to move as a box with another box on me), but the system works well enough to finish the game.
The graphics could've used a hell of a lot more contrast. I could see what was going on well enough, but the game really didn't catch my eye. Flat squares with no normal mapping and a greyscale noise filter thrown on them don't make for particularly tasty eye-candy. I'd have liked to see some stalactites, some gemstones, anything. And the light attached to the player doesn't have the effect you're going for if you don't provide a background to light up or normal maps to make the lighting realistic. Crazybump's free and takes a couple seconds to operate. Use it people.
Admittedly, I played on wine, which might have screwed with some things. If you throw a linux build up I'll happily take another look later. But unity tends to run fine through wine, so I'm going to assume the bugs I encountered are yours and not wine's.
I started off the game trying to form the tangrams, but couldn't find any way to rotate the pieces and all but 3 of them (judging by your screenshot) were offscreen to the right, where I couldn't reach them. So I couldn't cover the entire shape.
This didn't seem to matter though. Just selecting the recipe and hitting 'bake' (With no pieces on the plate) made the customer happy and satisfied.
The audio clips a fuckton. If your audio guy has a preamp, use that, otherwise either find some other way to drop the sensitivity of your mic when you record, or just hold it further away from you. People notice bad audio quality sooner than bad visual quality, remember.
And the animation on the recipe book, while kinda pretty, took ages. If I can only see two recipes at once, I'm gonna be trying to flip through that book pretty fast and if I have to wait a whole second between each flip that's just unpleasantly frustrating.
Once my first day ended, I got a "good job you won, click here to go to the next level" screen, and when I didn't click the next level button for a couple seconds, a "you lost, click here to restart" screen was overlayed on top of the first, not letting me progress.
I have to imagine this isn't your intended end user experience. Remember you're allowed to fix game-breaking bugs and reupload them, just maybe mark the new version as not the original.
Also, you're missing your source. Fix that asap.
Intro had me laughing pretty hard. The camera on the death sequence is also pretty damn effective for mood setting.
I don't know that knocking everything down twice adds much to the game, just made me a bit confused (it didn't seem like things were being persistent and I initially thought I had to knock everything down twice in one go).
Eventually I knocked everything down that I could and the game didn't seem to register my victory. I probably missed something, but I tried punching everywhere I could with no success.
I mean, it's a simple game, very little going on etc.
I'm not entirely sure how you structured your AI, since it was very easy for me to force the red square in a position where it had a clear view of me but didn't fire (it was stuck against a wall and unable to move towards me, but I was next to it).
Death is insubstantial. It doesn't reset your progress or move you back.
With some fundamental pathfinding ('if player_pos is in a given rectangle of the screen, move to set position that can aim into that rect'), about a dozen more enemies, and randomly spawning objectives this might have been a bit more fun.
The core idea is fairly amusing, and the graphics are pretty nice. The animations feel varied, the hits make a visible impact. Unfortunately, the game does get repetitive very quickly. A log of the unlocks didn't actually change the game up much. I wasn't able to get very far playing without the starting bones, or without the chasm map, and the horrors didn't seem to do much unless the kids randomly walked onto them, which was very rare.
So the only thing that could've kept me interested were secondary weapons, and those dropped far too rarely.
I think the game would have benefitted from a lot more passive buffs; some to improve your basic bones/boomsticks with flames or toxins or w/e, some to provide a more ambulating alternative to the horrors - various zombies and bats walking around. That'd let the player get more powerful over time to match the increasing number of kids, and seeing your house evolve would've just been fun.
A further idea that piggybacks off of that one might have been to vary the appearance of the cabin slightly with each upgrade, binding-of-isaac style.
Regarding the control scheme, since this is a html game, you generally want to avoid using arrow keys for controls (same goes for right-click). Hitting up/down made my browser scroll and gave me horrible motion sickness after only a couple of turns.
Regarding the game itself, my main complaint is just the lack of feedback. The mechanics are fine and reasonably challenging, but there's no satisfaction in making a complete row. As a simple imptovement, lerp the position of the rows over 0.3s or so to make them slide.
Ultimately though, you really should've put some more effort into making the finished rows pop more. Anything would work, like adding a white rectangle over the line for a split second or giving the finished blocks some rudimentary physics and applying random forces, but with the complete lack of feedback there's not a lot keeping me going.
Wow...this is...really fun and compelling. Great work.
Minor gripe: at some points near the end of the game it seemed physically impossible for me to reach the target shapes without bumping into others. But that resolved itself with time and I was able to finish without an issue.
Core principle is solid, and the game is pretty fun to play, even to the point that the janky don't really get in the way of enjoyment as much as they should.
At one point, I got stuck in a corner of the road, but the game released me after a quick struggle.
Far too many times the game didn't register me driving through the gate with the right color, and reacted as though I'd hit the wall of the gate or used the wrong shape.
The input handling takes some getting used to, though it ultimately prevents fast-paced driving. After each gate, I'd have to halt, turn towards the gate, then accelerate again. The car'd be uncontrollable otherwise. I think you could resolve this by making the track radius much larger (And therefore the curve smoother) and knocking down the turning speed and linear acceleration.
Every so often I'd get killed and not respawn. I'd be unable to move with 0HP while other players played around me. The only way to keep playing was to refresh, which wiped my progress.
The single biggest issue in the game is the unlock system. While it does incentivise murder, it also means that a new player joining the server is at a severe disadvantage. There's no way to fight a zombie as a soldier. If you had made everything unlocked from the start, it'd make for much more fair and intense battles, rather than the current state of one player camping on the server with everything unlocked bringing ghosts to a mage fight and zombies to a warrior fight.
Really, I think the game would've been much better with absolutely no restrictions on transformations. Focus on 3 or 4 forms which counter each other well, and force the players to think quick and switch to an appropriate form depending on the other players.
Also, the mage missiles wouldn't register hits occasionally. Seems like that was related to distance between mage and target.
P.S. - Jam rules do allow for premade assets, but if you use third party graphics, it's requested that you disable voting in the Graphics category.
At least at one point, the stitches actually didn't let me select my wounds, they just showed an empty scrollable list.
The lack of sound hurts this title a lot, I'd kill for some nice meaty orc grunts and visceral slashes.
The game could benefit a hell of a lot if you let the player choose one of several body parts on battle end. As it stands getting a good deck together is very luck of the draw, and it can kill a run if you don't get the needed cards.
Also, I didn't come across any cards that'd let me remove non-wounds from my deck (I'd quite like to get rid of the trip or strategize for instance). I feel like compared to the other cards in the game it wouldn't be particularly overpowered and might help in creating a good deck composition.
Also, drawing cards really should be a quick action. Strategize being in the starting deck feels like wounding the player from the start :T
First off, congrats on your first Ludum Dare. This isn't a bad entry. Simple enough mechanics that make sense and you've made some decent levels with them. Definitely enjoyed my time.
On the critical side of things:
The writing's a bit too pretentious for my taste. Doesn't add much to the game, doesn't really hold any consistent narrative arc. There's a bit of a buildup to the finale but it feels forced and coarse. The ending twist is unexpected, but not satisfying. I think I would've preferred a "Thanks for Playing!" with a drawing of a thumbs up. But that's just me.
That being said, the narrative does lend the game some cohesion and encourage the player to keep going, so I've got mixed feelings on the matter. I definitely think you should have spent more time on the writing, even at the cost of one or two of the levels, to make the experience more satisfying.
Regarding gameplay: the game's desperately missing an undo button. All mistakes are undoable but it can take a hell of a lot of effort to compensate for a single wrong buttonpress. Telling the player to press 'r' to restart should happen in the second or third level, not halfway through the game. I had to use that key several times before the game told me; stumbled on it by accident.
In terms of presentation, the graphics are fine, really. Not beautiful, but functional. Could benefit from a stronger minimalist ethic (solid colors instead of gradients, a cleaner white background with a very subtle grid overlay, either thicker borders or no borders on the shapes, and more visible end-points), but that's just aesthetic preference. I've seen worse :P
The cut between levels is a bit too abrupt imo. A fade out->fade in, or a 'good job! press any button to continue' would've given the player a second to savor the victory before throwing them back in the fray. Though I guess that doesn't fit the lore as much :P
Very nicely done. An interesting take on the theme, good execution, plenty of amusing content.
Kinda surprising to use Unity with this particular art style. Don't think I've seen that done before.
Initially, I was fairly confused why my cards were being reset, and often didn't notice they were. It's not obvious or stated that shifting/getting a clue ends your day.
At one point I got the clue "highest point is >1000m" and then next "highest point is > 500m" - not sure if you wanted to prevent redundancy like that or not.
Some potential improvements, if you ever build a post-LD version:
There should really be a better indicator of when a day ends and how many cards you have left to play. Possibly some animation to show the cards being reshuffled, maybe a stopwatch with 5 states, with the end-day actions being nearby?
It's also fairly difficult to read how much HP/Detection/Awareness/Progress you have, and there were many times when I thought a card would push me to 100 progress but it didn't. That may be intentional, but it'd be nice to have either a numerical indicator or some markings along the various lines every 10 points or so.
The chuckle (I think?) sfx on the main menu is a nice touch.
The system you've got there definitely has a fair bit of effort behind it, but that may have been misplaced, since it really doesn't feel natural or predictable; pulling on one end of the blob affects places that really don't feel like they should be moving right now.
Because of this, the game feels less like a puzzle game and more like an exercise in frustration.
I think a better design philosophy here would've been to try and make a triangle grid and let the player drag their shape along that. Have a look at Mushroom 11 for a loose example of what I mean. Then you could smooth the edges a fair bit to hide the fact you're working on small triangles. I think that would've been both easier to build and more natural to play.
The texture work here is really impressive. Solid effort there. Unfortunately the gameplay doesn't really match that quality. The sphere movement is waaaay too sensitive, and I can't tap my way along because taps don't actually move the sphere. The early levels have far too much empty space on top of that, which means that half the time I'm barelling through the level until I fall right into an obstacle and have to restart.
I will say, having the player shift shapes to jump or attack does make for some really interesting platforming dynamics. If the controls were tighter I think I'd enjoy that much more, but the concept is pretty solid.
All the excitement and thrills of entering your credit card number :T The mechanic of right number does one thing, wrong number does another has potential. Maybe you have to fit a shape (keep it down to 6 sides or fewer) into a specific hole? Throw a timer on that and it'd be a pretty tense experience of "do I follow the orders or not"? As it stands, not a lot of game here.
Right, sorry about how harsh I'm going to be here but I'm just trying to be honest, hopefully you can take this as constructive criticism for future endeavors.
The graphics are Kenney's, the music is MacLeod's. You handled the level design, and possibly the game physics/input handling and the swapping mechanic.
I don't build platformers, I'm really not sure exactly how to make a character controller that feels comfortable and fluid. I know it's difficult to do so. But what you have here is just unpleasant to use. I've seen worse, to be sure, but this physics setup doesn't make for a solid platformer. I'd love to explain how to improve it but I don't really work in platformers and there's better people out there who have guides and tutorials up.
Level design - wise:
The very first segment of the first level is solid. It teaches the player how to move and jump, and it shows off the mechanic of jumping on red things only being available to the red character. The player tries to jump for a platform and misses, then jumps with the red character and makes it.
But in the second level, things start to get messy. Yes, there are arrows but they're pointing in all sorts of different directions, contradicting each other. The other guide the player could reasonably follow is the coins, but those lead straight into spikes. The end result is that I don't know where to go or what to do in that level, and when I try to do what's suggested I'm punished.
Continuing on, checkpoints. Platformers have had them since platformers existed. And not without reason. Walking into the side of a spike and being put back to the main menu is gutting and unpleasant. Mark down which level the player's in and drop them in at the start of that, rather than at the start of the game. Ideally just set their position to the level's start.
Please don't take this the wrong way, I realize you're not terribly experienced and I'm not trying to put you down. Keep on trying, you'll get better with practice.
The herding mechanic with the green ghosts is kinda compelling, might have been nice to see a bit more of a focus on that. The purple ghosts are just a bit tedious, since there doesn't seem to be a way to lock them in.
Most of the frustration I've had with the game is from the transformation mechanic, though. If I'm not standing perfectly still I can't switch forms, so half the time I'd be right next to a purple ghost and try to switch back to the maiden to catch it, but I'd be stuck mid-animation and not switch until the ghost is halfway across the map.
Also, the game does get a bit repetitive over time. The levels don't seem varied enough, and it's just a lot of busywork after a while.
I got through a couple levels until I got to one where there's a little 3x3 loop directly adjacent to the top edge (no grass between it and the wall - generally avoid that in block-based level design, makes it seem like a level exit). There, I caught all the green ghosts I could see, caught all the purple ghosts the fox could see, and the game claimed there was one ghost left, which I just couldn't catch no matter how hard I tried.
Running on Linux my Desktop Environment ireevertably crashed when I booted the game. I didn't have anything else unusual running, so it's hard to imagine something else causing that. You'll pardon me if I don't try again.
Your engine's missing one very important aspect: numpad control. You don't understand how restrictive it feels to have to aim on a grid in 4 directions.
Aside from that, the engine's cute, legible enough. The lack of color's a bit offputting but it's ld so I'm not expecting too much there.
There's not a lot going on in the game, which is fine if you're just showing off the engine. If you'd had time to make the enemies path around the walls (and gotten more of them to spawn!) it might've been fun to clump them together and watch them all explode. Really, having enemies that are substantially faster than you, which swarm the screen uncontrollably, and which have to move around the same walls you do would've added a lot.
I'm playing on the Post-LD version.
This is certainly something new.
The graphics are clean, with a very pleasing color pallate. So great job there. I'm not sure that tanks fit in with the "ancient technology" theme but I get what you're going for.
I like the integration of the healthbars and charge meters into the designs of the catapults, adds to the cleanliness of the whole game.
The gameplay itself has a large number of issues but at its core it's very well designed. I really like the idea that a lot of the time you have to aim in a way that you'll miss the enemies to get your walls and allies in. I like that the more allies you have the harder it is to place anything down. I like that the game forces you to account for every shot and every improvement you build because there's a very real chance it'll screw you over more than it'll help if you don't get it right. All this came together to make me want to keep playing for far too long. It's a fabulously addicting game, despite what at first glance seems like repetitive gameplay.
But it does have issues. The first thing that becomes obvious is that the movement is extremely floaty. This is supposed to be a piece of heavy machinery, but it behaves like I'm on an ice rink. In almost every scenario you want to have the player character stop moving the instant the player releases the movement button, and this is no exception.
It also would have been helpful to have a very basic background so I could see where I was moving when there wasn't anything else on screen. But that's just a nitpick.
The actual shooting arcs felt very unpredictable at the start of the game. Over time I realized that the direction I was moving influenced the velocity of the shot. This did lead to some nice moments where I can move back and forth to make my shots go further, but with the movement controls gets a bit irritating and hard to understand. I do like the mechanic, quite a bit, but it should be better communicated. Also, it felt like I could influence the shot by moving after I'd fired it. Don't know if that's part of the mechanics or I was imagining it, but it's something that didn't feel right.
I would have liked to see some sort of aiming hint, a dotted curve to show where I'd be launching. I realize it might be out of the scope of an LD, but it would have helped a lot. If you only showed the start of the arc it'd still leave a lot of challenge without obscuring the mechanics.
The damage model I've got very mixed feelings on. It didn't take too long to understand that only rocks travelling downward interacted with anything, and that they'd interact with /anything/. And more often than not this just got me frustrated since I'd be sitting in my wall trying to fire at something close to me, and the rocks would just get stuck in the wall I was occupying. There was a deadzone in front of me where I couldn't hit any enemies that got too close because the arc would end up peaking while still in the wall. But at the same time, the friendly fire mechanics added a lot to the game. I couldn't tell you how you could improve this system to make it less irritating, without losing the challenge and artism of the friendly fire aspect. But it could use a bit of touching up.
Something that's /definitely/ out of the scope of the LD, but which did get me a bit annoyed, is the AI, especially of the friendly units. I'd have 20 of the buggers out and about, but only 2-3 were actually helping me fire at the enemies. The rest would be holed up two towers behind me taking care to rip apart the wall I was standing in. The firing mechanics of the game require careful control and a lot of thought, and the AI just wasn't up to the challenge. I'd have honestly liked them to just stand in front of my furthest tower, tank hits for me, and fire without an obstruction.
Do note, I only get this in-depth on the issues of games I really enjoyed. So please take this rant in the best way possible, I had a ton of fun playing this title. Keep up the good work!
The game's obviously beautiful. Great color choices, very soothing aesthetic, loved the tail on the white sphere. The sound design adds to the atmosphere and charm.
The controls were a bit troublesome for the sole reason I had no idea which way I was facing unless I was moving. And since I could get stuck on terrain moving to check my direction wasn't always an option. The reverse did help things slightly, but I'd have liked a small arrow pointing frontwards.
The first time I played through the game, either something glitched or I solved the puzzle accidentally and got the final beam stuck to me. Since the beam then rotated the rest of the mirrors, I got really frustrated trying to solve the puzzle while the beam kept screwing up my positioning.
I restarted the game and played through it to realize the puzzle'd already been solved.
And I realize it's LD, and the experience was enjoyable as-is, but I feel like the short length of the game harmed it for me. A slightly more complex puzzle where I'd had to get to grips with the mechanics /before/ I solve it, or a short intro sequence to make me understand what the beam's doing, would've helped a ton.
Very nice game regardless.
At the start area, you have the credits for art and programming, but you've left out who made your music. Haven't put that in the description either. What's going on there?
I couldn't bring myself to actually finish the game. It's not that I couldn't figure out the puzzles, they were easy enough. But the controls were so horribly unpleasant I had to put the game down. In the first puzzle, with the jars of water, 4 times out of 5 the game wouldn't register I'd clicked on anything. The little animation on the jar would play out, I'd click, then click again on another jar, and nothing would happen. To get through that puzzle I had to just click until my hands got sore and my ears were buzzing with the repetitive music.
The second puzzle wasn't particularly difficult either, but again arduous to complete. The combination of a tiny game window with wonky field of view, the colors which clashed horribly with each other and hurt my eyes, the droning music, and having to constantly spin around to click on the tiny paint buckets just drove me mad.
I hate to be this critical, and I recognize that a lot of effort's been put into this title. There's certainly a lot of different mechanics and art assets scattered about. But it lacks focus and is just an unpleasant experience on a very base level.
The game's very nice, and though it doesn't fit the mood much I did get a giggle from reading about how the human race collapsed from nerd glasses and a shitty taste in music. The puzzles/button clicking were well-designed, gave structure to the game, and added to the desperation and atmosphere.
A slight bug to note on the linux build: The game would read my mouse position on the absolute width/height of my monitor, rather than where it was rendering (which was some 30px offset down from my actual resolution for some reason) which made clicking on things a bit difficult, though highlighting the menu options did resolve most of the actual issues there. Setting any resolution other than my monitor's resolution made the game unplayable.
Since you're running unity, would you mind getting a linux build up? I can't seem to run it through wine; getting stack overflow errors.
So this might be the most fun concept for a drum machine I've seen. More than anything, this is the first drum machine I've used in a while which doesn't encourage genre tropes. I clicked around, fiddled with things until they sounded nice, and suddenly found myself in the midst of a polymetric 5/8 thing that sounded weird, exciting, and great.
It's not easy to predict the exact timing of the balls, and the sounds aren't intuitive and congruent, but the system manages to dodge the pitfall of confusing absurdity and get into this really nice zone that I'll probably come back to a couple more times before this LD runs its course
The art's awesome, the sound design is impressive, and I like the principle of the game, but it's awful at communicating...anything. I initially assumed that my boost would work as a doublejump (or triplejump when I got the first upgrade). And this worked for the most part until at random times I'd just get an error noise and the boost wouldn't work. I know there was an icon of some sort in the upper right but I couldn't figure out what it did.
I couldn't get past a certain point (still at 2 squares) purely because I couldn't get the boosts to work. I'd really like to see more of the game but either I'm missing something important or the game's bugged. :(
I'd like a better indication of when my boosts are available, how many I have left, and what I need to do to get them back. And I'd like a better indication of when I'm going too fast to land "softly". Other than that, nice job.
Only other thing I'm confused about: how does landing a block on eyes tie into the "Ancient Technology" theme? o.o
First off, really liking the combat. Each dinosaur type has a different strategy you have to use. The platforming isn't exceptional and didn't seem to add much at first, but it did give the combat a sense of pacing and purpose, and let me skip battles if I was quick enough.
All around I enjoyed this title. It's quick enough that any issues with mechanics don't have time to get grating. There's just enough enemies that by the time I got bored of punching dinosaurs I had a gun, and by the time I got bored of shooting things I had a boss.
Nice work.
P.S. - The contact button doesn't work, at least through wine.
Seems like the only thing I could do was whip and pet the slaves, and aside from the whipping causing my happiness to go down (or unhappiness to go up? really confused) neither option seemed to affect the game.
I need more agency, more challenge, and more feedback. This is just a really long loading screen disguised as a game :T
Some of the slave animations were cute. Maybe just having a couple sliders to the side to control meal rations, sleep time, etc would be a nice alternative to the whip/hand. And let me know how my actions are influencing the game.
There's a couple really big issues that kill the game for me:
First, the mouse sensitivity is insane. I can't bring my hardware down any lower and since you're in unity I can't trivially change the code to fix it, so I wasn't able to get past the first level. Aiming is just a battle to see that I don't spin out.
On top of that (and more obvious because of the sensitivity), it seems that if I turn too far left or right I stop turning. In an FPS I kinda expect to be able to turn in one direction indefinitely.
You may want to upload a Post-LD version with those balance changes so your game's actually playable.
Those aside: sound didn't play for me and it was kinda missing since there wasn't a lot of feedback. I'd have liked to see bullets represented somehow outside of a decal on the enemy, either as a little pellet or my own laser beam. I want to know where I hit the wall when I miss. But those are all issues that require time to fix, so no biggie on not getting them this time around.
And some minor nitpicks: It was a bit difficult to realize when I was in range to pick up a weapon. You may want something like a "RMB - pickup shotgun" to appear if the player's looking at a gun and in range of it, so I'm not clicking frantically from just outside the pickup range.
The shotgun also feels like its range is far too small, but maybe that's just me.
The inability to reload is actually kinda cute, forces the player to switch weapons frequently. And being without a weapon in the middle of combat is exciting.
I've got to wonder how this all ties in to the theme though. The robots are pretty generic futuristic, not much ancient about them. I'd have liked to see spear combat, or at least an ancient-egyptian aestheti (basically just color the walls and robots yellow :P)
The game's fairly compelling and fun. The graphics are clear, the sound design works, the mechanics are clear and well communicated. Great job all around.
I've got a couple nitpicks:
The sound for picking up artifacts is a tiny bit earpiercing, but I know I'm more sensitive to high frequency beeps than most.
I'd have much preferred to be able to hold down the dig key instead of having to mash it. I might run a script to automate the mashing if I was playing this for longer, but it's always nicer when a game just lets me hold down the key.
It might also be that I only played near the surface, but the Pan-Terra mining beam felt far too slow to pose much of a challenge. It might get more difficult further down.
And as a potential improvement, I'd normally expect the mining beam to only start going once I start digging.
None of that affected my enjoyment of the game though. Nice work.
The game as a whole is very pretty, with a very nice aesthetic and mood. The graphics are stunning as always.
Most of the time I'd criticize a ld game for feature creep, the overambition generally causing no part of the game to actually work well. You're the first case I've seen of a LD game trying to do a dozen different things and still doing them to a playable level. Each component of the game functions to a greater or lesser extent.
And as much as I can criticize each puzzle for being a bit easy, repetitive, or a touch tedious, the game as a whole holds together really well. Again a first for what I've seen of these sorts of Ludum Dare entries.
I liked light chess. And to an extent I'd have liked a stronger emphasis on that minigame. It's not something I'd seen before and it could probably hold an entire LD game on its own.
...it feels really weird trying to criticize this game. It does have a lot of problems that arise during gameplay, like the dusting requiring far too much clicking and the vines being just a bit too simple and giving you the solution if you misclick. But the length and structure of it all makes those problems almost irrelevant in hindsight. The brushing may not have been the most engaging way of going about things, but it did get my focus on the characters I'd be using in the later puzzle, and made that one a lot more enjoyable for the extra context. And because of the variety in the puzzles I never got bored or tired of the brushing. It was over in time to keep me playing.
You've basically done everything that I'd have condemned and avoided, and managed to make it into a very capable, engaging title. I'm a bit stunned. Great work.
Very nice game. Doesn't do a whole lot different from the whole candy box genre but the aesthetic's very pleasant and there's a fair bit of content and balancing for a ld game.
I got a slight graphical issue when I placed down my first town center. Both my coal and iron "production per second" values started jumping frame to frame between some really low negative number and a high positive one. This made those two values a very illegible flashing thing. I think this was caused by the fact I was trying to produce iron without a stockpile of iron ore/coal. The values would drop because my smelter was using them, then rise again when it couldn't.
A couple minor balance things: the gift from the gods was only really helpful at the start of the game and got in the way later on when I was trying to fine tune my population and worker distribution. Because the buildings never really got all too insane on production values a lot of the game was spent placing down rows of buildings. I'd have preferred a power-up to let me place 3x3 grids of buildings to the gift of the gods thing.
It was a bit dissapointing that gold mines only required wood and stone. I'd spent the entire game building up ever more complex production chains and then had to shut them down to get the ending. Would have preferred that the gold mines required stone bricks, clay bricks, and iron.
The 1% improvements didn't seem effective enough for their cost. The farm houses and town centers ought to bring in 5%, maybe with a cheaper 1% version of both.
Most importantly, I built the golden statue and there was no ending! Give me a paragraph of story, fade to white, anything! The whole game I'd been working towards this achievement and nothing happened :(
Still, had a fair bit of fun with this one. Nice work.
The aesthetic is stunning, the game looks amazing. I just wish the game mechanics actually complemented the puppet theater theme. I'd like to be able to shoot the strings holding up the planets to make the swarms stop spawning, or to have a bit of a scene change in between the planets. This just feels a bit dissonant between the art style and what I'm doing in the game.
The sound design is kinda cute at first but it does get grating fairly quickly. The bullet sounds are far too loud and the music lacks any real structure. The ancient grekoroman style can be really nice to listen to, but random dyssonant voice clips just get on my nerves with time.
Regarding the space shooting:
The UI could also use a bit of work to make it more clear when I get a powerup, and what I assume was the stamina/power bar didn't seem to go down unless I really mashed on my mouse button. Not that I had any issues with the autofire.
The game feels really easy, or at least the difficulty ramp is far too shallow. Felt like if I just kept moving and kept my distance from the swarm, pointing my mouse vaguely in their direction, I could survive indefinitely.
Not a bad game by any stretch, but it just lacked some cohesion for me to enjoy it much.
That got quite a giggle out of me when the game started past the intro screen. Wasn't expecting what I saw. I couldn't figure out how to defeat the knights for love nor money though. I know my catapult turned into a swordsman if I got to the furthest square, but slashing didn't seem to have any effect no matter how much I mashed the spacebar, whether the knight was right next to me or in the castle.
Aside from that slight issue the game's fairly self-explanatory, so good job there. The format you've chosen is notoriously hard to communicate anything in.
Graphics-wise the colors you've chosen don't really fit together too well. You've got a mostly blue theme with the background, the buttons, and the name, but then a very brown/reddish overlay and bright red button names. I can't actually read what the red letters are saying on that background and that whole region of the screen clashes horribly with the rest of the colors. Generally try to stick to colors closer together on the color wheel; when you do have to use reds in a blue scene make sure to make them desaturated.
Had some fun with this one though, nice work.
For 16 hours this isn't bad. There's a nice variety of levels, decent art, and even an amusing backstory. You got a giggle out of me with the ship flying-off animation at the start. The game itself feels a bit...hard to control, in a bad sense. It was very difficult to predict my trajectory even vaguely, and you were asking the player to hit very small targets. I think a lot of the problem came down to the ship not rotating at all. It was difficult to tell which direction I'd be accelerating in. Some particle effects from behind might help for the same reason. There's probably also something you could do with the physics but I suck at movement so I can't help there. I wouldn't say the game feels bad, especially given the time constraint. But it doesn't feel as smooth as I've grown to expect from space/gravity games.
P.S. - if you replace your dropbox link's "www" with "dl" you'll skip dropbox's gui
Short and sweet. The game didn't last long enough to make me notice any issues in the mechanics. The intro "dropping" sound is a bit high pitched and unpleasant, but that's a very slight nitpick.
The graphics work stunningly well. Everything feels coherent, with a nice set of colors. The music is paced just right and works great with the atmosphere.
I don't know if the "drop dead and let your corpse escape" was intentional or a bug, but I am glad you kept it in! It made for a great, silly experience. I only played through the game once, and finished as a corpse, so I didn't try out the shooting that people are talking about. But just getting blasted over buildings by enemies and rushing panicked over cars and ruins was great fun.
Thanks for the experience.
Cute concept. The glyph making works well enough, and seems to have a wide diversity of non-dick drawings in its database now :)
These sort of ciphers work best for long phrases, like the quotes you have set up. Titles of games or films were a bit more frustrating since I might not recognize them. Though having a puzzle consist of about half dozen different short phrases might work too.
The UI is simplistic but works. To keep with the ancient theme, you may have wanted to use a brighter and darker sandy brown. Just a personal preference though.
Though I only played it on my own I would love to give this one a go with another player. The game feels like it'd offer a lot of strategic depth and was already wrecking my brain in the dummy games.
The art and sound design definitely work for the theme. I wonder that a more minimalistic approach wouldn't have worked better but in the end it still looks relatively nice and suits the Ancient Tech theme. Aside from the buttons to rotate not being particularly pretty (I'd have preferred arrow-like triangles in place of the rectangles) my main complaint would just be the delay between inputs. It takes too long for the pieces to fall into place, it takes too long for the buttons to pop up on screen, it takes too long for the board to turn, the animation to play out, and the next turn to start. But in the end it doesn't hurt the game too much, just might get irritating after a dozen games or so.
Very nice work.
Great job on the art, the sound design's not bad, and the dialogue gave off a nice scent of rick and morty.
The controls were intuitive and well-communicated, and the game has a nice variety of traps to avoid.
I did have an issue with the speed of the game though. If I just ran to the left I'd have no time at all to respond to incoming threats, but if I took things even slightly slower than full-blast the snakes would have no problem catching up. I think the game would've worked better if the snakes were just a bit slower, so the player wouldn't have time to think about incoming obstacles as much but could actually stop for half a second without taking damage. And if you feel that'd make the game too easy, maybe just have a stereotypical wall chasing the player slowly?
Would have also helped to have a more zoomed out view, higher resolution, or at least for Odi to sit further to the right of the screen.
One final complaint is that it took a bit long to get back into the game, for the genre. A game with frequent deaths gets irritating fast if you're not back in the action within a second or two, and having to go through two loading screens and even a brief intro room each time I died didn't make for a pleasant experience. Just throw up a "you died, press r to retry" text and respawn me soon as you can.
Second LD entry I've seen in the first day that's not a game.
Regardless, very fun to watch. Music's fabulous, graphics are clean, the carnage is beautiful
If I have an issue with the mechanics, it's that the bricks the walls are made out of are far too deadly. In a couple games I ran, the algorithm was using them as weapons. As much as particle effects are fun to watch, it gets boring watching simple bricks drop from various points to optimize splash. Crossbows and cannons are far more exciting and I wish I could see more of them.
As a mode of interactivity, it might be interesting to let the player upvote/downvote various ideas to discourage this sort of repetition.
@AWOL nope, it's all blender. I had to cut back on a lot of the fancy near the end because I'm apparently awful at texturing. Panda's pretty good at dynamic geometry but with the 29 hour time limit I didn't think I'd have the time.
@joe40001 You know how it is with optimization and ludum dare :P I'm wondering how you'd imagine representing the vertical axis on a 2D game.
So I'm generally fond of the narrated gameplay genre. Gives the player something to focus on outside the game, and introduces the story without pulling the player into arduous exposition segments.
The issue here is that you've added arduous exposition segments regardless :P. The intro sequence as you have it now should be no longer than 30 seconds: "Oh you shouldn't be here, I guess I'll help you find your way home, let's go. End scene." Any further storytelling should happen during the stages proper. Frontloading exposition is really unpleasant and jarring.
The gameplay itself is kinda lackluster, but then you've mentioned as much already. Most importantly I'd have liked more weapons to have an autofire feature. Mashing a mouse button isn't particularly compelling and can lead to rsi if done for extended periods. On top of that, it seems like a lot of the bullet hitboxes don't line up with their models. With the automatic weapons at least I had to aim a bit to the left of the enemy to hit them (at least the crosshair worked fine).
The graphics aren't all that bad. The bloom's a bit excessive but might as well be for the timetraveling atmosphere. The colors work well enough and you can easily tell what everything's supposed to be.
The story concept's not amazing, admittedly, but it'd work much better given a stronger presentation. You spend far too much time repeating yourself and umming and emming. You'd probably improve both your work speed and the quality of the narration if you just write out a script of 1-3 sentence segments, then follow it to the word during recording.
Oh, and unless you're being particularly innovative with your worldbuilding, or really need to fill time, don't bother explaining magic. "Get the artifact and I'll get us to the next place" is justification enough.
If you're running on unity, you could probably make a linux build without too much hassle. I know a lot of LD people prefer the system and wine doesn't like unity games with spaces in their titles, don't ask me why.
The game looks very clean and nice, functions well, and is fairly easy to understand. Very nice job all around. I especially like the ability to screw over the other player. Only complaint I might have is that the game's a bit too easy, at least using the strategy of miners to build up points and just spamming out assassins works a bit too well.
This is really neat. The graphics style is cute and well put together, the actual sailing mechanics are spot-on and fun to play around with, and the writing's not half bad either.
I beelined straight for the kraken when I got the 5 people there. I'm guessing you expected as much from your players :P
Only two minor nitpicks: if I picked up a survivor while the main story text was playing, it'd get cut off. So I missed the last couple lines after feeding the people to the kraken. I'd have preferred a buffer system, where new messages are thrown first-in-last-out and clicking cycles through them. Also, I got stuck on two occasions:
first between a pair of islands, where I didn't really have room to move forward or back to build up speed, and later when I'd unanchored with the wind blowing directly into my bow and my stern pressed up against some island geometry. In both cases I couldn't get any speed up which meant I couldn't actually turn, no matter where I placed my sails and rudder. Eventually through wiggling and luck I got out of both situations and kept playing, but I'd have liked some ability to get out of those scenarios, maybe some special action available while anchored near land.
Really enjoyed this game. Nice work!
The core concept does have a lot of potential but the game just felt very frustrating all the way through. The movement felt like my first time trying on ice skates, and the blocks wobbled wildly out of control whenever I picked them up. On top of all that, my mouse got unlocked from the game window at some point which meant I kept clicking off on my other monitor.
As far as I could tell, it felt like you were trying to take control away from the player, and force them to make something abstract and unintentional. And if that was your intention, here are my thoughts: to make that work you can't let the player feel like what they've ended up with is bad, or wrong. And while I can see how you tried to do that with the end screen, I consistently felt like I'd done something wrong when a block would fling itself off the specified platform, or fly off into the distance where it wouldn't be counted towards my pyramid. I had no significant control over what was happening, but I kept feeling like I didn't want what was happening to happen, I felt like the game didn't want me to let it happen. IF that makes sense in a rambly sort of way.
I would've much preferred to have standard fps controls, where when I stop holding down a button I stop moving. And while I see what you were going for with the wobbling bricks I think the experience would've been more pleasant if they'd just stayed where I was looking. I'd have liked to be able to scroll my mouse wheel and have the bricks come barreling towards/away from me, and to have the z-rotation of the blocks stay constant relative to my camera rather than the world. If you'd done all that, this would've been a much more satisfying and relaxing experience for me, rather than causing the frustration it has.
And hey, I don't get this harsh in a critique if you hadn't done a lot of things right. The graphics and audio are very well-designed, the end screen is highly amusing and helps the game immensely. And the core concept of the game is a really nice one that I could see myself enjoying with a couple tweaks.
Should be noted the Linux build breaks my DE if I extract into a directory with a space, but that's standard for unity nowadays.
That aside, the game's nice enough. Finished it without too much trouble, though the last level did force me to think for a while.
The one bad thing I can say about it is that neither the mechanics nor the graphics are particularly legible. It was hard to tell for instance what's a solid unbreakable wall and what's a trapdoor. And when using teleporters, it took a bit of work to actually find which one my character was on this time. The colors blended together too much. Nothing gamebreaking, but I'd have liked to have a better idea of what each tile is and how it works.
Enjoyed it overall, nice work.
First off, love the tiny one-file executable. Always nice not to have to download 100MB of random libs that aren't even used.
I briefly entertained the idea of using Hero's robot as a basis for the game, but couldn't think of anything interesting to do with it, so I'm glad someone else has picked up the baton.
The tutorial scrolls past a bit too quickly, I'd have liked to click through it instead but it's fine otherwise.
Regarding the meat of the game: Often with robot-programming games the appeal comes from having to install a number of instructions before they're executed, forcing the player to conceptualize the worldstate in a number of turns. And I think you lost a great opportunity here. I would have loved to see a game where I had to push around blocks, or navigate mazes by individually controlling when each wheel is turning forwards and back. As it stands it's just a bit frustrating to navigate since I have to re-input the same mouseclicks over and over to run down a longer corridor.
I wasn't able to get past the second level. I got to the exit and the game wouldn't let me progress. I imagine I had to get all the coins but I couldn't get past the gears without dying and being sent to the main menu.
A couple things I'd have liked fixed, from what I've seen of the game:
Death should restart me at the current level, rather than the main menu.
The rotation animation could be smoother
Fixing the ending of the second stage, and ensuring the player can't walk through the walls there
Hotkeys for all the buttons (!!) - clicking in the same positions over and over cramps my hand a bit
Being able to buffer more complex instructions
Not a bad concept, just wish it'd received more polish and care than it did.
Had a lot of fun with this one. The graphics are smooth, the traps are amusing, and I'm quite a fan of the destruction on the trees and signs early on. The ending boulder chase was predictable but still cute.
I liked that you added checkpoints, and the corpses piling up added to the charm quite a bit. All around, a very polished and well-designed experience, caught me off guard a lot and I had a lot of fun.
A couple minor concerns: the most striking flaw of the game (outside of the lack of sound) is the really tight view angle. In the arrow stage especially it was really hard to see anything not directly in front of me, which meant dodging the arrows had to come down to pure luck. I'd have liked a much wider fov or a third person perspective, just to see what's going on around me better.
A couple times I ran into glitches to do with the triggers, where the arrows started firing 2 or 3 times as often as they should making that section impossible until I died and restarted. And the controls felt like I got stuck on the terrain a couple times, but only very slightly and not enough to cause an issue.
A very minor nitpick, the checkpoint just after the bridge starts you off facing the wrong way.
Very nice work though, keep it up.
Cute game. The art is pleasant to look at, the sound design works well for the theme, and the puzzles are well-designed and fun to complete. I got the impression in some of the later levels that people would be much more forgiving to sliding block puzzles as a whole if they had more than the one spot open. Having a couple spaces to work with just made things so much less of a headache and so much more enjoyable.
I don't know if it's a bug or intentional but the speed at which water flows seemed really inconsistent level to level and even block to block. I'm almost tempted to say that water flows /slower/ where there are a lot of paths converging? Feels like it should be the opposite.
Overall, nice work. Had quite a bit of fun working these out.
Side tangent, really wish you'd package the 32- and 64-bit builds seperately so the zip wouldn't be 200MB.
The game looks very pretty (though you'd benefit a lot from cutting down on your specular values if using Unity's shaders; they tend to make things look like a magical girls transformation) but is absolutely impossible to control.
To start with, the plane goes far too fast, and almost immediately exits the game world if you don't hold down the brake. The roll/yaw are far too twitchy and turn you around far too fast. The yaw actually feels really unnatural for a biplane, and should either be left out completely or very slow.
What I'm assuming happened is that you set constant values per frame on your acceleration/turning, and then tested them on a slower machine/slower build. Remember, always take into account the frame length on this sort of stuff. I think Unity uses FixedUpdate for that, though my memory's hazy.
There are a couple big issues that arise from the uncontrollable speed, aside from the unpleasant handling. Presumably because of either unity's default shaders or some sort of fog effect, the entire world becomes a white square if you're too high above it, so once the game launches me out of bounds it's impossible to see anything to steer by until I'm too close to avoid crashing. Second, once I do crash, half the time the game lets me fall right through the terrain. I don't remember what fix you're supposed to use for that in unity, but if you're letting the player go a million miles per hour you need to check for edge cases in your collisions. Finally, once I've exited the world and tried to come back in, most of the time the world's actually gone. I'm not entirely sure what happens but if I try to approach the white square I'm just greated with a grey screen with some particle effects on it.
So...an interesting entry to be sure, but it's unplayable at the moment.
Game was easy enough to get into, even without reading the instructions. And I commend you for that, since making a strategy game clear during a LD is something I very rarely see.
For a strategy game though, I feel like this doesn't offer any real choices to the player. You send out scouts to the nearest planets, if you can, then select the nearest enemy and target them, rinse and repeat. Selecting an upgrade every minute doesn't really add much to the enjoyment.
A lot of the actions you're having the player do could easily be automated, and -in other games- often are. I think the game ought to have these sort of mechanics running in the background (send scouts out to nearest planet, target nearest enemy) and focus on something else for the player interaction.
Maybe it could've helped to be able to move around the mothership, either to dodge enemy attacks or pickup scouts about to get left behind. Or to be able to use the resources gathered to launch fighters or shields. Plenty of things you could do with this format, just a matter of being a bit more engaging and giving the player a bit more agency.
Well, this is bloody good. The game mechanics are intuitive and fun, the level design takes advantage of them without being too grating/repetitive, and the art is absolutely stunning. I had to double check the page a couple times to check that I wasn't playing a jam game with premade assets. The music's very nice to listen to as well though it did get just a tad grating at the end because it's a short loop. I liked the changing ambient backdrop depending on which loop was spinning.
If there's any complaints I could level at the game: the arrows' hitbox was a bit unpredictable. I'd have liked to have, say, a section of the wall painted with a faint red color to indicate the danger zone. And at the last level, you just change up the colors of the lines without warning and scold the player for it! That's hardly fair. If you're gonna make a puzzle game you shouldn't arbitrarily punish the player for following the mechanics you've been explaining to them all this time.
Very nicely done. A bit content-short but you're aware of that much. You nailed the experience of googling for a problem and getting really obscure blog and forum posts to decode. I'm not sure how someone not familiar with ssh could finish this game though. Didn't seem to be any hints to use it except that it's the natural option.
The IRC channel felt all too realistic (save for the @'s anyway). Loved the timing, loved the dialogue. Interesting choice to give the player a "help me" lifeline and then kick them in the bollocks for using it, but it helped the mood a lot.
This is by far the most realistic hacker game I've played (of those that describe themselves as such). No unrealistic and bloted GUIs; recognizable commands; realistic methods.
Please do expand on this.
Bit of a bug report to start off: At some point, just as I was about to finish building my automated system, I lost the ability to move contraptions around. If I pressed E on one to pick it up, it'd just disappear for a second then fling itself all physics-like from underground near the center of the room. Since I'm now unable to place any contraptions the game's effectively broken. I wish I could tell you more about what's causing it or how to replicate it, but if you manage to fix it please do post an update.
The game itself is really fun. I giggled a bit at (what I assume to be) the Viscera Cleanup Detail references. The physics on the cans and bottles are just silly/wonky enough to be amusing to watch and produce satisfying chaos, without interfering in the basic function of the game. One reservation I do have is that the contraptions (save for the basket) really shouldn't be physics-enabled. When I placed them down I wanted to be bolted to the floor. Being able to ping off into space because I nudged them the wrong way was more frustrating than anything.
If this were a fully-fledged 72-hour jam game I'd probably be complaining about the graphics. They don't get in the way of the gameplay, and I typically don't care all that much if something's shiny or not, but in this case there's such a strong emphasis on playing with your environment that having such basic white models restricts my immersion. But you only had 24 hours to make the game so I'm not gonna hold this against you; it's not too bad for the time frame. I like the floor texture especially. I recognize it's for the best that you didn't focus on that aspect since you were able to make the gameplay fun and solid. But I do wonder if the project wouldn't have been better off had you outsourced the graphics and music; either to someone hanging out on IRC or just to some public domain work.
As I said though, the graphics didn't get in the way of the core enjoyment of the title's mechanics. Thanks for the game :)
The concept's simple, and ties into the theme decently enough. I love the audio effects and music, and there's a fair bit of polish in the animations. Unfortunately, the game ended up being horribly buggy for me.
First, the hitboxes seemed to be way off, especially in the late game. I'd run through a crowd of blobs and only the ones near my center would get consumed.
The camera seemed to zoom out in really weird and unpredictable ways; I'm sure it had something to do with my size but with that size constantly changing it was hard to get a handle on what I was looking at. Some control over the camera zoom would have helped here.
At some point during my game, something happened which caused all the blobs to get tiny and run away from me, bumping into each other and getting even smaller. [ http://i.imgur.com/zpm56JM.png ]
A couple design flaws: it's a bit difficult to tell which blobs are bigger/smaller. Color-coding them like in Osmos would have helped a lot.
It's also easy to get stuck between a couple larger blobs, losing size with each bounce with no real control.
I realize bug squashing takes a while and with ludum dare you have to cut your losses somewhere. And this game shows plenty of potential with its graphics, audio, controls, and AI. But the general feeling of an unstable, buggy experience kills a lot of the enjoyment.
Phenomenal work as usual; it's always fun playing your titles.
The game has a very solid difficulty and mechanics ramp, introducing new concepts and challenges smoothly and always building on what was there before. Any complaint I had about the mechanics was eventually washed away by what they evolved into.
I will try to nitpick a bit, though, since a "you're great!" review isn't all too useful for personal improvement. My first impressions of the game was actually a little bit negative; the consoles and buttons don't really fit into the bunny/foresty theme you've got going, and although the transition animation was cute, the consoles in the early game felt more like doors/passages in a standard platformer (and therefore bored me a bit as it's nothing I haven't seen before in a million games) than like something that was modifying the level itself. Later on in the game, when the overall structure of the level would stay the same and only a couple platforms/enemies would change in a given transition, the mechanics felt a lot more smooth and creative, and I enjoyed myself a lot more. I'd have liked a stronger focus on that style of level design in the early game.
As a matter of personal preference, I might have liked a tiny bit more focus on puzzling and a tiny bit less focus on (moderately) precise platforming, but I can't say I didn't enjoy the mix you had going.
Thanks for the great experience :)
P.S. - would have loved some swaying grass animations
The golden rule of LD level design holds true here: if it's just right for you, it's far too difficult for your players. The tiles in the later levels were very small, and the perspective was such that even with the smooth controls I rarely felt like missing a jump was my fault.
Mechanically, the game's rock-solid and well polished. The one suggestion I could make in this department is to allow the numpad as a control scheme. Since there were a lot of diagonal jumps, being able to make use of 7913 would've helped a ton.
The graphics and writing are smooth and satisfying. The sounds are a mixed bag; I'd have liked something more woody for the jumping/popping but that's a personal preference. The music does get tiring quickly, though.
I think theme-wise, you'd have been better off keeping with the generic furniture set throughout the game; just constantly rearranging the same furniture in ever more devilish ways. As it stands some levels just feel graphically incomplete. I understand where you were coming from regarding variance though. I just don't know that it added much. There may have been some ending you were leading up to but, as mentioned above, the platforming just stops being fun or reasonably completable for me on the first lava level.
I had fun painting green and yellow gradient swatches on the walls. The animation and character graphics are impressive for a Ludum Dare game, so great work there. The physics didn't work particularly well and I saw a lot of clipping issues; I wasn't able to hang the picture on the wall because it fell through said wall. Also I couldn't find any nails or a hammer, though I see them in your screenshot.
I also have a couple graphical reservations. Shadows should never be pitch black; it was hard to see anything in even the slightest shadow. I'd have liked some form of ambient light so I wouldn't have to pick up the objects and rotate them to see what they are. Also, the hanging lamp seemed to have its normals all funky. I also couldn't paint the walls underneath the windows.
The ending was a little anticlimatic, though I realize that you probably ran out of time before you were able to create a second cutscene. Even if all you changed was the text, I'd have liked to see the lady come in the room to end the game.
All that's not to say this is a bad game; I had some fun with it. But if you were to tackle something like this again, I think you could improve in that direction.
As a side note; if you used premade assets (in this case, the music), the Jam rules request you opt out of judging in the respective category (here, Audio)
Very nice use of dark humor to make an enjoyable experience out of a serious topic. The game's difficult as all hell but it's not like you didn't know that, and in a sense, given the theme, the difficulty adds to the experience, inspiring panic and fear in the setting of thermonuclear war. If you click multiple times at the start of the game, the door's animation will be a bit jerky but that's a very minor nitpick.
I realize a lot of the game is based around reading through text messages and limiting the input the player receives, but at times I felt like I could've used a couple extra indicators of whether the enemy was escalating or deescalating. A little display with "number of submarines active" or "number of silos open", or even just a pair of lights that flicker to indicate if the message you're receiving is positive or negative may have made the game more playable. The text was just scrolling too quickly for me to ascertain if the actions of the enemy nation were escalating or deescalating the situation.
Enjoyed my time though, thanks for the entry.
Windows 10; it's just displaying a black window in the top left corner of my screen. I can click to make a blue square appear.
For a first attempt at a unity project this isn't too bad; the tile creation animations are cute, as is the player's idle/walking one, and the level has a nice "gotcha" mechanic, even if the solution's pretty simple in the end. The movement was a fair bit jolty and a bit too fast. In a block-based puzzler I'd have liked each button press to correspond to one block moved. I also think the visual design could be improved by making the spikes a slightly different color than the blocks.
This game is a perfectly addicting platformer. I could lose hours to it (and have already). The controls are tight, the obstacles /just fair enough/ where every death is clearly my fault.
I'd love to see this kinda of game implemented as a proper IRC client, where I can join any network and play on its messages.
As far as extended features go, I'd also have liked to see the letters have a bigger role. As it stands, most of the fun levels are just punctuation, and I'd love to see full-on sentences or poems used as levels, with various letters (not just 'o' and 'v') being used as props.
Still, it's an excellent game with a very innovative idea that came through to a super smooth title. Great work.
The shaders are pretty great, and the level design's not bad either. I couldn't bring myself to finish the game, though, just because every time I'd fall off the world, all my powerups would be removed. Playing through the same piece of a puzzle game over and over gets tiring fast. Just being able to keep the upgrades you'd received after a restart would've helped the game a lot.
The music's very soothing, and as much as the sound effects aren't bad, they do sound a little bit cheesy and out of place.
The whole aesthetic and movement style gave me strong Antichamber vibes. Very abstract and impersonal, in a good way. It was an interesting solution to use disconnected solids to form your walls; I doubt the shaders would have made standard geometry visible so that's probably where you got the idea, but the end result looks very unique and helps both the themes and the puzzle aspect (I'd imagine if I got further in the game I'd be able to cross through some of the walls)
Nice work.
I thoroughly enjoyed the game. I loved the drunken stagger animation on the flying-through-space animation.
I clicked out of the window a number of times because the security screen was too close to the edge and hard to hit. Would have been nice if the game had paused when out of focus, or if there had been another 50px of buffer between the window edge and the side screens.
I also lost at least two runs to the fact that I apparently can't read the word "OUT". Feels natural to have the input on the left and the output on the right, and in the panic I didn't have time to notice this was different. But that's a ridiculously minor nitpick.
I don't think I can say anything else bad about the game. It's well-designed, the graphics fit the theme, the writing's very competent, the sound design and music work well, and the mechanics are solid and polished. Great work.
P.S. - How you managed to keep 6 programmers organized during a LD is beyond me. Congratulations on that.
I can't say I didn't have fun, and for their simplicity the graphics convey a pretty compelling atmosphere (though I'm still not sure what picking up that pineapple did). The issues you do have aren't too complex though so I'll try to run through them.
The start and ending screen appear on-screen for at most a couple frames. That's far too little time to read them. They should probably wait for the user to hit a button the user doesn't normally hit, like enter or spacebar.
It's difficult to tell who's attacking whom. A little animation of a sword swinging or even a red "BLOCKED" text would have helped.
The movement is mostly fine, except it's difficult to move exactly one space without falling into lava. Both for this and the previous issue, slowing the game down a bunch would be very helpful. Make movement take 1.5 to 2 times as long, make attacks even slower. Let the player get to grips with what was happening.
The AI kept walking into lava. I don't know if this was intentional, if you weren't sure how to implement the AI, or if you just ran out of time. But for a simple "walk towards player while dodging obstacles" behavior, A* should work just fine. On the other hand, this bug made the game more playable since the AI was very hard to defeat in combat, even while carrying all the upgrades, and this allowed me to just abuse their pathing and drag them into lava.
I'd have loved to see actual players in the game. I feel like with a slightly improved combat UI this would be a pretty fun game to beat up strangers on the Internet with.
Overall, the game does need some polishing but the core gameplay is pretty compelling, if a bit finicky.
Very nice work. The puzzles are well-designed and challenging, with an appropriate difficulty ramp and enough leeway not to be irritating. The theme isn't my cup of tea but it was well-executed, graphics, sound, writing and all.
The game feels very content-rich, with all the little animations happening throughout the room, the little rumba-cam, and the varied mission requirements.
There were some issues (as there are with any LD game), but this title is a solid, polished, and quite fun puzzle game.
The main negative thing that stood out was the lack of music. Even some simple third party thing would've helped the mood immensely. The whir of the rumba alone got a bit grating after a while.
The other big issue was that a number of the targets (especially many of the footsteps) were very difficult to see. The slightly darkened dirty tiles fought for visual attention with the shadows, the animations, and the desaturated background. I was close to ending my playthrough at the 4th level because I couldn't visually find the last target I had to go to.
I couldn't find a way to move the camera, and it wasn't zoomed out enough for me to see the whole play area. This was problematic in two situations: first, when finding that last footstep/dirt splotch, which could well be off-screen. And when I finally summoned the demon, it spawned out of the camera's field of view so I didn't get to see it!
Going back to the style (and this is completely subjective of course), the color choices felt a bit too desaturated, samey, and grey. The models are well-built, but hurt by the fact that nothing really pops out in the graphics. I'd have liked the greys to be whiter and the greens greener. And possibly most importantly, I'd have liked for the predominant color in the game to be something other than gray. (Talking here mostly about the floor and walls).
But all those issues are fairly minor, and perfectly excusable with a game this content-rich and solid. I had a great time playing it, thanks for the work.
The premise of the game got me laughing right off the bat. The writing supports that and the general camp atmosphere is very cohesive and pleasant.
Main issue with the game is the same as with minesweeper - you can lose on your first click, and often have to just guess. Since there's also fewer walls than there are tiles in minesweeper, the chance of that happening is bigger, and it killed a number of my runs. However, you did justify that saying the protagonist has no idea what they're doing, so aside from the frustration it did make me giggle a bit when I'd just tap a house gently and the whole thing would fall apart.
The sound design might be the best part of this game. Everything from the varied menu music to the whistling to the vocal sound effects are well-designed and compliment each other and the atmosphere in general. Only real issue is that after breaking a wall there's a bit of a high-pitched "hm" after a second of silence, which feels unintentional.
Minor nitpick - I feel that the green area of the building shuld be the largest contiguous area, rather than the first area created. But I see the reasoning behind this option and it works just as well.
The game itself is very nicely designed and executed. The fact I'm building the hotel up myself made me shout at myself down the line for placing everything way out of reach. There only being one open space at any given time meant that I couldn't settle into a rhythm, and had to stay on the edge of my seat for the entire round. And the genuinely funny reviews were a nice break from the panic.
I couldn't play it past day 5 though, for the simple reason that my hand was starting to cramp up. Having to constantly mash up and down fast enough was strenuous, though I'll grant that it was a very effective control scheme. The only suggestion that comes to mind would be to distribute the load between the player's hand somehow, but I can't think of an intuitive way to handle that.
Still, I enjoyed this game while I played it and will probably come back to it when my hands are less tired :). Good work.
I might come back to this one when I have more time to try and get a better score. The interactions between the characters are interesting and as mentioned in other comments the characters are memorable and predictable.
I don't know that I have a bad thing to say on this one. Nice work.
I'm going to be a tad overcritical here; I did enjoy the game.
There were two very different gameplay experiences, and I liked having the option of multiple endings in a LD game. The rebellious path was more rewarding mechanically and more fun to play. I'm not too clear on what the meteor is supposed to symbolize, if anything, but I just took it at face value and enjoyed flying up to space with my fish buddies to fight a meteor and then splattering everyone on its face. The abstractness of it all reminded me heavily of frog fractions.
The problem I have is with the octopus section. It just feels like your message is very heavy-handed, to the point of being unpleasant. The experience felt like I was being lectured on the perils of capitalism in art, rather than experiencing those perils. The game's message suffered because you kept demonizing the game industry to the point where any realism was a joke and I was playing a stalinist propaganda piece.
And one last nitpick, following orders isn't "logic", it's "obedience". Mashing random keys isn't "imagination", it's "rebellion".
What I did enjoy is that obedience led to the dolphin having some cash, while rebellion led to the dolphin dying a painful death. I'm not sure if that was meant to be your message or not.
As I said, I did enjoy the game. It's a strong title mechanically and graphically. I just wish the writing left a little more to the imagination.
Funniest game I've played yet. Great work on the writing. The animations were a bit camp but hilarious at that.
The only problem I can come up with is the initial zombie attack. My instinct (and I doubt I'm alone) when I see an NPC continuing to talk, is to hear them out to the end or until they start looping, just for the fun of reading the dialogue. In this case, this meant that before I even started playing the game I knew the exact solution to the puzzle and the boss's weak spot, which detracted from the fun of figuring things out. A really quick solution would've been to make the attacked scientist wait a couple lines before changing to something different ("press x to fire" could stay on the screen while I pressed z 9 times, and only change on the 10th).
Thanks for the laughs. :)
The Linux build doesn't seem to boot no matter what I do to it. I can't run the windows build on wine either, since it requires DirectX. I know in the past I've had issues with Unity because of a space in the filename, though I can't say if that's what's happening here. The screenshots look compelling, just wish I could play it.
https://gist.github.com/amras0000/b3e62b38901a0ff7a079b27b25b039d9
The models are all very nicely done, as a slightly surrealist but very cute and painterly little environment. I got flung around the map a fair bit because of weird geometry, but I recognize that building separate collider/visible maps is a bit more work than a LD may allow for.
The game ended a bit too quickly for me. The den seemed to occupy an important space in the world but no gameplay happened around it. Maybe some form of "winter is upon you, hide in the shelter" mechanic would have helped here.
My main complaint with the game is its balancing. Some of the attack patterns are unexpected and difficult to predict or dodge. Others are laboriously slow and force the player to wait an eternity while the animations play out. And because they were randomly executed, there was no difficulty curve as the game went along. If I got a streak of easy animations I'd get bored and just sit there not pressing buttons. Then I'd get a random hard one and be completely unprepared for it with no real way to respond. The game didn't feel like I had a lot of control.
I think the game would have been a lot better off without that random element. Dodging things can be a fun compelling mechanic in itself, but the player needs to know what to expect. A solid repeating pattern the player has to learn would've been a lot more satisfying to eventually beat.
A couple nitpicks on the asset design. The button really ought to disappear after the player has pressed it. The constant dinging was a tad irritating. Also, since the walls removed themselves fully to attack you, they appeared to offer an escape path offscreen. Maybe leaving some form of border around the existing walls would have helped communicate that better.
This game is the darkest, creepiest, most Swedish thing I've seen this LD. You have nailed the atmosphere to a tee. Fantastic work. Everything from the naming to the character art to the music to the unabashedly minimalist body horror made this title stand out from the crowd despite its relatively simple (or at first glance unpolished) mechanics.
If I was looking for a fun set of mechanics, here's where I'd mention that the pieces could snap into place, or that you could make it more obvious what the grid lines were, or maybe that with a time limit the controls for dragging the pieces over should feel more responsive and less clunky. I'd even criticize you for the experience I had where I was dragging the last piece into place when the time ran out.
But I'm not going to criticize you for any of that, because -with the theme- you've managed to turn all that clunkiness into a feature. Because I had the police on my back I was feeling the pressure of time. Because I was arranging body parts into furniture the clunky controls and weird misshapen pieces made sense. I'm not gonna expect turning a spine into a coffee table to be a clean or easy task.
I noticed the pieces I was using were randomly generated each run to fit the shape. That's a kinda clever solution that I don't think I've seen before. It did make the puzzles much easier than in most games of this style, but the time limit wouldn't have allowed for harder ones so it all balanced out to a fun system.
One last thing to note - I ran into an out of memory error twice during my game.
The concept of the game's nice, and I like the design of the rooms. There's just a couple mechanical flaws/bugs that make the game almost unplayable. Pity, because it looks like it could be fun.
The ball really needs a shadow. It's almost impossible to tell how deep it is in the room and I've lost many a ball to thinking it was near the back wall.
More importantly, the ball doesn't keep its position within the room during rotation. It stays in place and the room rotates around it. This makes it really hard to predict where the ball will be when you're finished rotating, since it'll have moved erratically to some random spot dependent on the rotation pivot. This is the biggest issue with the game right now.
I'm also not sure that the front hole adds much to the game. I think the game would've worked fine had you had walls all around. Incidentally, here's an idea to increase visibility of the ball: store each face of the wall (and maybe some of the internal geometry) separately. When the camera's pointing in a given direction, just hide the associated wall so the user can see in (but keep the collision geometry). Or use your transparency effect on that one wall, keeping the rest opaque.
Throughout my play-through I felt like the game was throwing challenges at me I couldn't complete with the pieces given. Maybe I wasn't being clever enough, but I couldn't find a better strategy than shoving what pieces would fit in the frame before they disappear, and praying for what I need to finish to spawn.
I feel that the three main issues with the gameplay are as follows:
The pieces move down the screen too fast, and there's too few variants on the screen at any given point (never enough to actually complete the frames). The vertical conveyors should be longer(or the pieces smaller, more numerous and slower), and the pieces shouldn't despawn until they're actually off the screen.
The frames dissapear before they've left the screen (often I just had to place that one last piece and couldn't because the frame would just vanish)
Actually dragging the pieces in place was too finicky and inconsistent. The pieces would drop back to the conveyors unless I was dead on their positioning in the frame (difficult to do with everything moving), and trying to select them in the first place was a pain (for the same reason). I felt like I was fighting the game to get the pieces in the frames. Again, slower conveyors and a more liberal snap-to-frame would've solved this.
Some additional suggestions to make the game feel more structured and give the player some more agency:
There should be less piece types. Either let the player rotate them or design your puzzles so only 4-8 different piece types are needed to complete them. This would make it more predictable what options the player's going to have in a couple seconds and help plan out the solutions.
The frames should actually allow usage of different piece types. Too often did you spawn a frame that requires specifically the pink or grey pieces in a given spot, or one that only allow a T/L shape in one spot and requires straight ones all around. Simple shapes, like squares, circle-approximations, maybe a + composed of 5 2x2 squares, would all work. Force the player to strategize and find ways to fit shapes in, don't just force the solution onto them.
I think the mechanics have a lot of potential, but they do need some polish to reach it.
Regarding the music: the intro screen had amazing music, but the actual gameplay loop got grating fast.
The game's solid and mechanically polished; I especially enjoyed that at the end I couldn't see my score. Put the tension right up to 11. The powerups added a new dynamic to an old format. The AI was clever enough but still beatable with the right strategies, and I feel like if there'd been a multiplayer component it'd be pretty frantic and satisfying as well.
My only real complaint is on the graphics. The game's trying to be minimalist, retro, grafitti, and mario kart all at once, visually speaking. I appreciate the background to the main game board, because it helps show the player's velocity and give some perspective to the scale. And in fairness I'm not sure myself how to run this aesthetic effectively. But with relatively simple mechanics (polished or not), the player's attention is drawn a lot more to how the game looks, and in this case it's just a bit too messy and inconsistent.
It's Ludum Dare though, and I prefer a mechanically polished title to an unplayable mess with good graphics. Good work on the game.
First off, great concept and I love the shaders. I only played through the glitchy artsy version but it was playable enough. The death white noise went through the doors, which felt like a bit of an unfair death since I had no way of seeing it coming. It may have been nice to have a more obvious (no pun intended) signal for when a wall was about to appear in front of me, but I can't fault the approach you took with the monitors changing color.
I got the gun, went down the elevator, and found a code for "A". Then I hunted around but couldn't find anywhere to input the code, so I went back up the elevator and shot a bit at the hearts in the white noise spawner above me. Eventually it stopped spawning white noise, and after exploring for a second I fell off the world. So, might have been nice to (pun intended this time) signal where the player should go a bit more clearly. Maybe you could have added some big fuck-off arrows which would be visible through the colorful fuzziness.
Regardless, I really enjoyed the game. The rewind mechanic worked well both with the obstacles and the theme, and the artstyle was cohesive and compelling. Nice work.
The core mechanics are pretty fun. The speed of the car and the spacing of the parking spots/competitors makes for some fun and frantic dodging around the streets. I tend not to be a huge fan of retro-styled music and sfx, but I could get into these.
I would have liked to see income play a bigger role, mechanically. Maybe every day I have to repay a loan, or make more cash than a competitor (the second option would make for some interesting dynamics of crashing a competitor's vehicle, paying the fine, but also cutting their profits). I recognize that level of balancing and worldbuilding might be outside the scope of the Compo, though.
I don't have much else to say, really. The game's fun, arcadey, polished, and has an aesthetic that it holds to well. Good work.
Very nicely done. the writing had me chuckling throughout, the gameplay was engaging and explored the mechanics thoroughly without being repetitive. I love how large of a level you were able to fit into a relatively small screen.
I'm slightly curious about the aspect ratio of the game window. The height actually didn't fit on my smaller monitor, and I feel like with a very slight redesign of the world you could make something more friendly to horizontal monitors.
The writing's superb, this level of camp humor and constant predictable pranks somehow feel perfectly cockroachy in itself. Only thing I felt was missing is some conditional dialogue for, say, trying to squish krilgor or the questgivers.
When I first saw the tweezers, I was expecting them to be much more difficult to use. They're large, the hitboxes they're trying to hit are tiny (especially the worms at the start), and the perspective doesn't lend itself to careful aiming. But I was immediately pleasantly surprised at how little effort it was to squish things.
It could be that I'm a messed up human being, but for the ending I was ready to squish krilgor. Maybe have a dialogue along the lines of "oh god what are you doing get those away from me" where the only way to proceed is to squish him. That may have been a lot harder to design properly though, and the current ending's pretty good too.
I really enjoyed this title. Keep up the good work, sheep.
There's a part of me that would have really liked this to be written in curses, not love, and played from a terminal. The graphical inteface felt just a tiny bit more than neccesssary for the game.
That thought aside, I loved this experience. A minimal control scheme which distracts you from a text adventure is not something I've seen before, and I do adore it. Every other instance I've seen of a game merging long text narratives and action gameplay, the two have had a solid dividing line. One has always been paused while the other was going. But this merges the two in a really satisfying manner. Great work on that.
One concern about the story: after all the dialogue is finished and I'm on the ending screen, I get to keep playing. Based on how the story ends, my course of action is obviously to aim for something to crash into. And what I'm expecting is a final piece of dialogue that accepts death as the final solution to the predicament. While the story's still unresolved, I'd be ok with the death scene being "I didn't want to die. Press space to try again", but once the story implies I should kill myself, I want a longer paragraph accepting it.
Some more nitpicks about the mechanics: I wasn't too clear on what the 3 red numbers meant. I didn't know if their order mattered, if the objects were some distance to my left/right, or directly in front of me presented in random order. Also, it seemed like sometimes I'd be getting really low numbers (~300), then turn a couple degrees and suddenly get really large ones. I just wasn't sure how to map the numbers to the actual map I was navigating, which meant avoiding obstacles mainly came down to clicking around the compass until the numbers got big again.
Maybe that was in line with your narrative though.
Still, I really enjoyed this game, and would love to see more like it, with the act of reading and absorbing information itself a realtime gameplay mechanic. I'm looking forward to seeing more games you end up making.
The graphics are interesting enough. I managed to get a fish specifically by hitting an area of the sea with no fish in it. I kept getting reset towards the center of the screen. And while I'm enjoying the piano track and there's a lot of it, the minor stumbles are very audible and irritating. I suppose they add to the feel of the game in some sense of the word.
I can't honestly say this is a bad game, it feels deliberate but I don't understand to what end.
I can't honestly say I didn't enjoy this, though by all rights there are not enough mechanics for that to be justified.
This distinctly feels like the ending to a Blendo game, and I'm happy that this came to be during a ludum dare.
But commenting on this game at all is difficult.
I can't tell if a more fitting saying for this game would be "if at first you don't succeed, try again" or "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results." Both seem oddly apt. The sound effects are fun to listen to, though it's a bit of a shame there wasn't some lighthearted music to go along with the game.
The writing's good, though the main impression I got out of it was that ducks have an unhealthy obsession with toasters.
My main mechanical complaint is that there's no way to skip turns. If no one higher up is answering my calls, I'm forced to chit chat with one of the nobodies in my inner circle. While this does mean I get to see more of the writing, the relationship I gain makes no difference to my stardom.
(as an aside; I hate to mention my own title in someone else's comment feed, but I tried to give you some closure on your concerns with the turtle dying, in a reply, and I don't know that ldjam notifies you of those)
The graphics are gorgeous, if a little inconsistent at times, and I do love the design of growing and shrinking and the various ideas you've associated with it. My complaints are purely mechanical; either easy mistakes to make or bugs you might not have noticed.
I do love the theming. Two childhood mascots tied together into an artstyle and mechanics set fitting for them both. The sound didn't play for me so I can't comment on how that tied in.
Unfortunately, the most noticable aspect of the game is the controls. As a rule, you should never control a platformer's character with physics. I know it makes intuitive sense to try that, but there are many issues in practice. Just check the "make kinematic" checkbox if you're working in unity, or disable physics interactions on the character in whatever engine you're using, and use custom code for the movement.
In the last level, you have a leap of faith. It's good that you postmarked it, but at the size I attempted to jump (pretty large) I wasn't able to make it. It's not a minor oversight, but it meant I had to guess at what size the invisible ceiling would allow me to pass.
It seemed like I could only jump on the yellow enemies but couldn't damage the blue ones. At first it wasn't too clear if that was a bug or intentional, and it took me a couple levels to work it out. The wording of the tutorial made it seem like I should be able to jump on all the enemies, though I may have missed some text because of the control scheme.
I realize that larger Alice could jump higher and that makes sense to me, but it seemed like the increase in jump height was much larger than the increase in Alice height. Nothing wrong with this mechanically, but it felt a bit off.
I did enjoy the game overall, despite the wonky control scheme. The levels are well designed and short enough not to be irritating if I failed. I may have liked the hitboxes to be more obvious. Some of the platforms that weren't rectangular could have done with a flatter top.
Nice work.
Very well done. The writing is very atmospheric, the visual style cohesive. The music fits into the theme well.
The puzzles feel quite a lot like block sliders, only with a lot more freedom to move. I know I've seen this mechanics set in previous LDs and I've really enjoyed it every time I've seen it.
One quick complaints: in the level select, X both closes the dialogue and lands on the planet. This means that to get between levels I have to hit X twice, and this has thrown me off almost every time: I'd reach the planet, hit X, not land, overshoot, grumble, move back, hit X.
The game has a lot of levels for a compo, and I do applaud that each has its own dialogue and varied mechanics. But the impression I got after some 14 levels is that the mechanics aren't varied enough to warrant this many levels. Certainly, each new race adds something new to the puzzle, but because the levels up until where I played are all just 4x4 you're limited in the patterns you can use, and a lot of the puzzles (to where I've played) just come down to blocking off tribbles then sliding everyone into the largely obvious right position. I don't feel particularly challenged playing through the levels, and the game's aesthetic doesn't *quite* lend itself to a zen state of mindless clicking like you'd get in, say, hexcells.
The above is obviously a highly subjective criticism, but I would have loved to be able to skip ahead in levels. With the warp drive system, you had a perfect opportunity for that. You'd just need to unlock the first stage in each quadrant and a player who's not feeling engaged with the current set of levels could jump ahead in difficulty to where they're more comfortable.
I can't fault the game on any objective measures. The design is solid all around, and the execution is spotless. It just feels a bit too long. Keep up the good work.
The main element lacking from the gameplay was some form of obstacle to the initial drilling portion. There's a trivial solution to make the claw game easier by just not turning during drilling.
That aside: The graphics are pretty compelling, and I like what you're going for both in terms of theme and mechanics. The claw game is a bit too difficult to control, but with a bit more polish on the controls this could be a great little game. I'm always a fan of any title that makes me hate my past self's decisions and have to work around obstacles I made myself.
The music's fun to listen to, but short enough that it gets grating after a while. Both with the music and the graphics/animations you've managed to nail a very cohesive mood, one of hostile, impersonal industry and mining for greed's sake. Nice work.
@huvaakoodia thanks for the feedback! The god is what allows you to progress from feral life to primitive, but I suppose I never explained that properly. Having my game mechanics come across clearly is something I struggle with more than anything, so I'm grateful you pointed this out.
In the spirit of addressing your other complaint, allow me to try and give you a narrative to explain the turtle's death. (Inasmuch as a narrative can be scraped together from panicked ramblings scribbled during the last few hours of LD) Consider this: the glowing orb you got during the game did only circumstantial work, uplifting some animals and giving them something to stare at in the night sky. Sure, it got the glory and the title, but when you consider who did the heavy lifting of making the world come together, you might be tempted to reconsider who the true god is.
(To be clear, this is in no way an expression of my own beliefs. But I'm sure you could chalk this up to symbolize any number of belief systems, if that's your thing.)
The game's definitely interesting, if a fair bit repetitive. I love this interpretation of the theme (second time I've seen the little prince used this LD), and you've definitely managed to capture some of the charm of taking care of the prince's planet.
I would have loved to have some gentle music to accompany the gardening, the lack of sound definitely hurt the mood of the game. But it's Ludum Dare so can't be too harsh on that.
The baobabs always spawned on the start of a day. It may have felt a bit more natural to have them sprout at random times, maybe with a subtle scale increase (spawn at scale=0.1, lerp to scale=1 over a second or so).
The volcanoes had a warning system if they were about to blow, but I would have liked some better visual indicators of the 5 stages of dirtiness. Maybe something like changing up the height of their spout.
I hate to encourage people to conform to the norm, but it felt like you were aiming for a specific gaming experience so I might as well bring a couple design practices to your attention that I've seen accomplish something similar. You seemed to want each day to be a little more frantic, and force the player to switch between a couple different tools to solve problems ever more quickly and with ever higher quantities. But, despite the switching of tools, at the end of the day the game only actually involved clicking on each thing a couple times. It would have been nice to have a more involved procedure for cleaning out volcanoes and rooting out baobabs. Something to the style of typing various quotes from the book to clear out baobabs, or having to hold the mouse close to the rose while watering it.
Still, it's a sweet little game, and with just a bit more variety in its mechanics it shows a lot of promise. Thanks for your work.
The sound effects are much louder than the music. I learned this the hard way, after adjusting the volume to suit the music.
On entering the first level, it was very unclear what terrain was passable and what wasn't. It was quick enough to work out but the bushes you can pass through really have no right to be there.
On the whole, I very much enjoyed the design of the puzzles. They're devilishly difficult, and have a slight air of "gotcha" to them, but they're small enough in scope that they're not frustrating to solve. Unfortunately, their presentation leaves a bit to be desired.
The mechanics you have to work with are a bit unintuitive though. enemies can pass through boulders if the boulders are moving, boulders can pass through walls but not through keys. I feel like with some stronger visual indicators you could remove a whole chunk of the annoyance that comes from figuring out the solution to a puzzle, and then realizing that the world doesn't work the way you expected, and having to repeat it again while cursing the developers.
On each turn, each enemy takes its turn in order. This means that when a lot of enemies are in a level, I have to wait between each move. With a game where I have to repeat each puzzle a dozen times to work out the solution, this did get on my nerves. The better option, I think, would have been for each enemy to move simultaneously to the player.
Despite those flaws though, I really enjoyed this game. It made me feel a bit stupid for trying to grab keys I didn't need and generally poked fun at the fact I never looked far enough into the level. I don't know that this design style would have worked in a much larger scope, but for this title it's perfect. Thanks for the game.
The core concept is great, the controls are well designedx and feel very smooth, and the graphics are pleasantly thematic and fit together with the music and the mechanics. I can't fault the game on its gameplay. Good wrok.
I did have some concerns with the level design, though, or at least with the first few seconds I was able to get through.
During the first vertical line area, the best strategy I've found is to just stay blue and hide under all the walls. The section would've been much better if you'd introduced a fourth color that nothing can pass through, and forced the player to shift color to fit the walls. Or if you'd forced the player to jump through the vertical areas by leaving a gap in the floor.
Right after that area is the obstacle I couldn't get through. I can't jump through it no matter the color, I can't roll through it because the floor isn't safe, and I can't see to land under it without smashing myself when I try to get back up.
It's a pity I couldn't get any further though, the game looks like it'd be really fun for quite a while with some better levels.
The first strategy I tried out with this game was the obvious one - mash J repeatedly without moving. And to my great dismay, it worked. The game ended up feeling really shallow and repetitive because the optimal strategy is to ignore most of the game's mechanic and just get a good rhythm going with the bat.
And this is really dissapointing because the graphics, sfx, music are outstanding and the core design idea is solid (if not terribly innovative) and promises a lot of fun dodging and timing challenges.
There's a number of fairly simple ways to resolve this issue. Most trivially, you could force the player to face in the direction of the ball, or add a cooldown to the bats, maybe a .1-.2 second animation of the bat going back into position for the next swing. If you were to go a bit more extravagant, a charge-up mechanic would be nice, where I have to hold down the j key to pull the bat back, and release to swing it, with force proportional to how long I've been holding it.
Great work on this title. I would love to play it with friends as a simpler alternative to Lethal League but the optimal strategy weighs it down too much.
As a quick note, on the WebGL version, the objective bar gets cut off.
This is an interesting title largely for the controls. You're using zero-gravity spaceship physics to control pollen. Wouldn't have been my first choice, but it works well enough. One tweak you could do to really improve these kinds of controls is to control with the mouse rather than the keyboard. Left click to move the pollen's velocity towards the cursor, right click to move it away. In Unity I think you'd want to use Vector3.MoveTowards.
In terms of graphics, my main complaint has to be the fonts. pure red doesn't look very good in most contexts and this is no exception. I would have liked to see the font you used on the title be used throughout the game, maybe in a dark green with a light-green outline.
Other than the font, the game looks quite nice. I love the blur on the backgrounds and the wind effects.
I got through the first 4 levels without too much problem. The first three were a bit samey, but also pretty quick. On the fifth level though, it seemed like the objective increased dramatically, and I couldn't find enough pollen to complete even half of it. I tried waiting around for the respawn, but at some point the game just decided to kill the stage and make me restart it. I don't know what happened. Maybe I ran out of some hidden or off-screen timer? Since I couldn't return to the main menu I had to stop playing there.
As has been mentioned, holding down the shift key doesn't add much to the game, and in my case it made the experience just that bit more frustrating, since hitting the right side of my keyboard was made more difficult.
The main thing I'd have liked is to be able to repair 2 or more keys at once. I do like the time management aspect of not being able to fully repair a key instantaneously (though I've seen effective uses of that mechanic, too, in other games). But because of the health bars being very obvious, and the repairs taking as long as they did, I felt like a lot of my time was spent watching progress bars fill up, which is never a fun experience. Granted, this is highly subjective and a massive nitpick, but it's a gripe that stood out in my playthrough. In the spirit of constructive criticism, here's an alternative I might consider to avoid that problem: press the key once to start repairing, a second time to stop. make fewer keys be damaged at any one point, but make repairs take longer. allow 2 or 3 keys to be repaired at once, so the player's always hunting for new targets even while keys are repairing.
Still, besides the nitpick I can't fault the game on any front. The sound effects are fine, the graphics are nice and polished, the design's very nice for a LD game. Very nice work.
Very nicely done. The visual aesthetic reminded me strongly of 1000 amps, with the clean monochromatic squares. The puzzle mechanics are well-designed and your levels utilize them to a thorough extent; the undo feature takes a lot of the edge off any frustration I might have for the later levels; the progression in difficulty is very smooth.
I'll admit I was a tiny bit disappointed that none of the buttons on the window header worked, and that there weren't any puzzle elements to do with resizing the window, but in fairness this way probably worked out for the better. And using a non-microsofty window layout would have clashed a bit with the script kiddie storyline.
Music did get a bit grating, just because of the vibratos and offkey/offrhythm aspect. Would have preferred something a bit cleaner for a game like this. And maybe the tile graphics could have used some work when it comes to overlap; it was difficult to tell when a tile with a padlock was covering a solid tile and when it wasn't, without moving the window around. But these are both very minor issues. I loved my experience with the game.
The game's missing commas and theming.
I haven't seen this particular timer mechanic in other clicker games, and it definitely added some interesting dynamics (like buying out a bunch of a type just before its timer ends to maximize profit), but without any real reward to work towards the game feels a bit shallow. Cookie clicker had cookies, Candy Box had a story, idle RPG had boss monsters, this doesn't really try to do anything. I'd love to have even seen a background that starts empty and fills up with animals or buildings or anything, and the generator descriptions adjusted to match. Or maybe just some kind of "buy this mcguffin" endgame.
The numbers are also a bit too large to be meaningful; without commas or spacing, checking my balance involved either carefully counting the digits or just mashing on the various buy buttons to see which one works.
I don't really understand why the game's displaying my mouse position or score or depth.
I walked to the fried egg in the sky then back and eventually figured out I had to count the sheep to continue but I counted to a couple hundred and they kept coming so I kept counting and I am at 1701071 now and I don't know if I can finish the game I want to but my mother stopped calling and I think shes worried because Ive not turned the computer off or slept since friday but I want to finish the game it looks fun so I just want to ask for help because I want to finish the game but I can't follow the walkthrough good job on the game wish I could see the good ending thanks.
I have a feeling the game would be a lot more playable if I knew where the potions/glowy things are located. As it stands, I never seem to have enough time to figure out where the next potion/glowy thing is, figure out how to get there, and reach it before I vanish. Especially since checkpoints aren't as frequent as they could be, meaning I have to memorize a complex and hard to execute route only to fail because I don't know where to turn on the next sprint.
Sticking to an exploration focus, I'd recommend doubling the amount of time it takes to be invisible, so the player has a chance to look around and return to base before they die. If you'd like a more frantic run-and-dodge scenario, some positioning hints wouldn't hurt. A zoomed out camera, or shorter sprints so the next checkpoint is always in sight would work. Or some level design hints (signposts with arrows, etc).
I do like the concept of the game; it's an organic time limit that interacts with the core gameplay quite nicely. And the controls are definitely workable for the system. You've pretty much got the timing down right. I just couldn't get very far into it because of the level design.
I love this entry. It has a beautiful charm to it, and some very interesting feedback. I tried to be a bit of a dick and just pick all the most stupid options, and the game scolded me for it, in a very satisfying way. I am curious about your writing process; I imagine you reading out the various stories to G. and just recording her response, though I imagine she was a bit more active in their creation. Either way, you came out with a great little gem. Thanks for your work :)
Oh, and congrats on the impressive amount of art and content you managed to create while taking care of a 3 year old.
I have to stop myself now because I think I've been playing this game for an hour and I'm starting to run out of grid paper on my desk.
Excellent work on the level design. The first 30 levels were a breeze (for the most part there was only one battery you could reach from every other battery) but the difficulty got pleasantly headsrachy from that point on. I made it to level 42 before looking at my clock and calling it quits.
It wasn't immediately obvious that I had to step on every battery, nor was it immediately obvious that I could only collect batteries on my last possible move. But the level design introduced the mechanics well enough that I didn't have trouble learning the game.
My one gripe with this title is that whenever you collect a battery, you lose control of your elephant for a second. After resetting a level enough times I start to build up muscle memory for the path I need to take through it. When I hit a battery and lose control for a second, I instinctively put in the next few inputs, which get ignored, and then the game shoots me off in a random direction, forcing me to start over.
I love the black and white grid; around the late 30s I realized that you could only go on same-colored tiles from even batteries and opposite-colored from odd batteries. Mapping out the potential connections this way, both in my head and on paper, helped me get through some of the tougher challenges.
The music and aesthetic feel very similar to John Cooney's This Is The Only Level. I don't know if you were thinking of that when making the game, but there seems to be a resemblance. And you managed to pull off the same feat of making fairground music bearable to listen to for long periods.
Keep up the good work.
Simple mechanics with a lot of polish and balancing applied. There are a lot of resource management games, and not a lot of them understand what makes the mechanic enticing as much as this one does.
The graphics all look very nice; the cities are gorgeous, the generators are also well done, and the UI is very clear. The components just don't seem to work together too well. On the one hand you have the flat shaded pastels of the city (which look stunning and have a ton of variety), on the other the colorful cartoonish generators, and then the UI which simultaneously tries to be minimalist and have the weirdly fancy red X's up top. Each of the 4 components would work really well in its own artstyle, I just wish they were a bit more consistent between each other.
I felt like I had a much easier time on the larger map, but enjoyed the small one more. Main reason for this was that on the large map, at least for the first couple dozen tasks, I had the freedom to give the city exactly how much power it needed, making everything run at 100% efficiency with no overflow. On the smaller map I usually had to overproduce, which gave me incentive not to power a building until something else popped up. If you could recreate that same inability to match power demand to supply on the larger map, it would've made that map more fun I feel.
My final score on the large map was 44.
I really enjoyed this game. As mentioned, I feel like it's really well balanced and the UI communicates everything very clearly while still managing to fit some flavor and aesthetics in. It's a pretty literal and maybe unexciting interpretation of the theme, but the mechanical design and polish more than justifies that. Great work. Keep it up.
The interpretation of the theme's great, and I love the intro sequence of the zoom-in. The game overall feels fairly floaty, which you tend to want to avoid in these genres. The jump lasts too long, the turning feels a bit clunky.
Two things the game's missing, which I think would have made it into a decent entry: - in a typical infinite runner, you either can't turn the character (only strafe) or turn only at 90/60 degrees. In this title, I could just turn around and run into a wall for arbitrarily long, and the sense of urgency and muscle memory inherent to the genre was lost. - checkpoints. You have a great system of subdividing the game into 5 levels, with a bridge across them. Just spawn the player on the last bridge if they die.
Still, it's not a bad effort. Keep it up.
I liked the distribution of tasks at the start of the day; I didn't really know which task corresponded to which minigame, so there was some guesswork involved, but I definitely had to make some decisions to avoid running out of the 3 power bars.
The minigames themselves suffer from a couple problems:
They're all a bit unbalanced, even for a ldjam entry. The letters are pretty easy to hit, the ice cream is floaty to control, and the basketball seems to have a mind of its own.
There's also an inconsistency between when the games start. Some give you a couple seconds to read the rules before they even show up, while with others, I could waste half the clock because I was assuming the text would dissapear. If you want the player to get into a rhythm of quickly learning and performing a task, make sure the instructions are presented in a consistent manner.
It was also fairly difficult to deduce any relation between how I performed in a minigame and what the power bars did. Granted, I mostly failed the minigames and the power bars were fairly low at the end of the game, but after each minigame I didn't have much idea what was going on. And there seemed to be no punishment for running out of a given bar?
Overall, I think this game has a lot of good ideas, but it tried to do too much for ludum dare and didn't get enough polish in any area to stand out. Also, the music was a bit grating.
Managed to get an A my second go through. The pace is a bit quick but that actually fits the narrative quite well. I had a good chuckle at the meta-narrative, and all the descriptions.
The whole game's got an air of absurdity around it; the coffee machine being the most expensive item in your house notwithstanding, and that air really carries the whole thing in a delightful way.
There are a number of UI elements that remain unimplemented. The Generators, some "TURN OFF" buttons, the size of the description windows, etc. I don't know if that was something intentional or if you just ran out of time, but you definitely get the impression that Blackout was made in as much of a rush and panic as the game you make in Blackout.
All in all, very nice work. One of the funnier games I've played so far, really enjoyed it.
When I started in windowed mode, there were some buttons offscreen to the top right that I couldn't reach and that weren't there when I entered fullscreen.
I soon found out they were the language select, and that the spanish(I'm not good at languages so just guessing, sorry) option was a fair bit incomplete, with a lot of placeholder text and UI issues. Only the sailors' speech wasn't English. Once I restarted the game and booted into full screen I was able to continue in English.
On the first day, every sailor except Vaugr told me that the mutineer was Vaugr. All 4 of them. I wanted to end the game there and execute Vaugr, but after a couple minutes of random clicking around the room I wasn't able to find such an option. The game did continue to scold me for not making up my mind soon enough though, so maybe I was missing something.
So for the next 4 days I dutifully clicked through all the text, giving a light reading to each to make sure I didn't miss some major plottwist where everyone BUT Vaugr was conspiring against me. They weren't; Vaugr was the mutineer. So until the last day, I spent all my gold on making Vaugr's life miserable. I would send a bully out to beat him up before he came in, just to make sure he had all the reason in the world to hate me. I even bribed some of his shipmates to encourage distrust. And then I killed him.
I really wish I could have the option to kill him earlier. The bulk of the time I spent playing this game was a bit pointless, with no real deduction to do or particularly amusing text to read (The writing isn't bad, but it tries to communicate information more than it does entertain, so when I didn't need any information it was a bit moot). Or maybe you could've spent the first 4 days trying to figure out who can be trusted and what sort of social structure exists on the ship (maybe manipulating that structure?), with the "who's the mutineer" question only appearing on the last day, to keep the player in suspence.
As it stands, the game's reasonably pretty, with some interesting mechanics and a very solid aesthetic. I wish I could've enjoyed my time with it more, because the effort and polish you put in really shows.
P.S. - the song you play as the backdrop to the intro and main game has been bugging me for years. Literally years, because for the life of me I can't find which of Bach's pieces it is. So please, save me from that misery and tell me what that music is.
I'm not too clear on what the orbs floating around me were doing, and until I read the description I didn't understand what changing my color accomplished. But beyond that, the game's really fun. It's decently balanced, with no real issues with controls or hitboxes. Feels fun to play, and the design's solid.
When freezing the enemies, it seems like any new enemies that spawned at the edge of the screen were able to move before the time was out. I don't know if this was intentional, but it felt a bit odd. Didn't notice any other bugs.
All in all, a simple game, but one I definitely enjoyed.
Graphics are stunning, the sound design and music are hugely impressive, and the procedural generation is remarkably polished for Ludum Dare. Excellent work there. The game does suffer in some other areas unfortunately; the AI doesn't seem to work properly. I could run in front of cats without them doing much about it; I could steal in front of them and have them chase after me and not do anything when they got there, I could hide right in front of them and they wouldn't have a clue where I was. On many occasions I saw them fail to get through doors or walk into a corner of the room. So, no real challenge to the game. But just exploring and moving around the beautiful interior was enjoyable in itself, so I still had my fun with it.
As others have mentioned, camera controls would be excellent, even just at 90 degree angles, and I would love to be able to better tell where I can hide. It's not at all obvious which elements of furniture have that property.
I'm not clear on how the game ties in to the theme, though. You don't seem to be running out of much, unless it's just meant to imply that you have no power in society?
I enjoyed this game a fair bit; the potions forced me to keep re-evaluating my path, the visual design was pleasant to look at if not super shiny, and the movement, while nothing particularly innovative, was smooth and responsive. The game's polished and fun to play.
In the spirit of constructive criticism I do have a couple minor gripes. For one, the hitboxes in the game are a bit unclear. I occasionally picked up items when my character wasn't touching them, and a lot of my deaths were caused by hitting some invisible barrier around the obstacle. Also, I think the game just runs out of steam after a couple minutes of a given game. The recipe seemed to only change once, and my speed never changes, so once I got into the rhythm there was nothing to challenge me. I'd have liked the speed of the game (both the vertical and horizontal speed) to increase slightly over time, or for the recipes to become more complex, maybe requiring more ingredients.
I know some other people have suggested making potions serve other potions than just keeping the game going. I think with the time you had it was a good idea to focus on just the one behavior. But if you were going to expand the game, having a number of similar potions with different effects could add a lot of interesting gameplay. Maybe you turn the next 20 pickups into obstacles, or get a speed boost, or maybe you concoct a poison and lose half your energy. If you were to combine something like these with the increasing speed of the game and increasingly complex potion combinations, there could be a lot of fun in frantically trying to work out the right ingredient combinations without flying into a wall.
Still, as it stands the game's pretty solid. Nice work, and do keep it up.
I think the core concept of managing a power grid and your fundamental design are pretty solid. But as I'm writing this with a cramped up and sore right arm, I feel like I need to complain about your UI design.
The major issue I had is with the spinners. They're unintuitive to use, but more importantly just uncomfortable. Any knob design I've seen in software (DAWs, etc) used a system where dragging upwards would rotate clockwise and down rotates counterclockwise. Took me a while to get used to this game's system. And if you do want to have the user actively spin the knobs, for the love of god don't force them to do half a dozen rotations every few seconds. Keep it to minor adjustments within one rotation of the knob. Minor things the mouse is designed for, not spastic movements that will kill a user's arms.
You have a lot of empty space in your main UI, and a lot of important information is hidden in submenus that require an extra click. There's no reason you couldn't display the power produced, power demanded, and current cash amount in the main screen.
The music fits the theme, but I did have to turn it off after a while because it stopped every few seconds. In any game, if your music draws too much attention to itself it's going to get grating. Pauses like this one pull me out of the game every few seconds and get really irritating after a time.
Some notes on bugs. It's LD so they're not unexpected but might as well let you know. If you hold your mouse on the knobs, they go towards the negative. This adds to their unintuitive nature (took me many games to figure them out!) and makes moving them towards the positive or making fine adjustments more difficult because if I stop moving my mouse they start dropping.
After the game ended, and I reached the congratulations screen, my power, money, and score all continued ticking up for a couple minutes, presumably until the hamster cells ran out. Would have been nice if you either sped up the simulation (Time.timescale in unity, I believe?) or just summed up how much power was left in my cells and added that to the totals.
The bug @indiealchemist described happened to me too, but that's not a huge issue.
Also a bit frustrated I dropped to 99.8% uptime because of the unlabeled power button >_>
To be clear: I'm complaining a lot because I think the core design and mechanics of this game are really cool, the graphics are solid and this has the potential to be a really cool game of balancing with an idle clicker element to it. The UI design just killed my enjoyment of the title, and that's always disappointing.
The whole aesthetic you're going for is very well executed, though I personally find it a bit tired, since every casual game in the world seems to use it. There's not a whole lot of game to comment on, but as a visual art project this is a pretty damn good effect to make from scratch in 72 hours. Wish I could say the same about the audio, but the sound effects and music are just too generic not to be draining.
I recognize I'm approaching this from the perspective of wanting something new and exciting, while you've clearly gone for a strict genre alignment, which I should respect. So by all means, though I didn't enjoy the art and music personally my hat goes off to you for it. I don't really see how this ties in to the Running out of Power theme, but nevermind.
A couple bugs in what little exists of the gameplay: - You seem to render newlines as the literal characters '\' and 'n'. Would be nice to be able to send in multiline messages, but even without that you could at least use a String.Trim() there - clicking the left arrow takes you to the first page instead of the previous one - you display empty messages and allow people to vote on them. Just, message = message.Trim(); if (message.Length > 0) SendToDatabase();
Also, would be nice to see exactly what rating each message got and which number page I'm on.
Super minor gripe, but I'd have liked a 'press A/x to start' prompt at the start. Also the Xbox d-pad is awful and if you could update the game to allow joystick control that'd be great.
I spent more time on this game than I was expecting; really enjoyed it (as usual with your entries) despite the limited scope. I eventually got bored after 276 coins, but that's down to honing in on a slightly exploit-y strategy.
When I started the game, I tried jumping between the enemies and collecting their hats. But I soon found that, with my decreased movement speed, I'd tend to lose my stack to enemies dropping down from the ceiling, a bit too quickly for me to anticipate them. However, if I stood right under the coin box, no enemy would drop on me. AND I'd have instant feedback when my stack got tall enough. So I stood under the coin box, and limited my inputs to the jump button. I could even hold A in mid-air to hover long enough for an enemy to walk underneath me. Some hats flew off to the side, yes, but I could reliably catch enough to keep myself alive and reach the coin box.
With this strategy, there was a key number of hats where I could wedge myself between the enemies below and the coin box up top, and generate huge amounts of coins. This only lasted for a second or two before I'd collect a hat, become too tall to jump, and lose the stack. But the noise and the numbers increasing were the most satisfying thing, and I kept coming back for more of that experience.
I was a bit disappointed at first that there wasn't any music, but the weird atonal sound effects made a really atmospheric tune of their own. The entire game added up to a compelling ambiance which I'm not sure I can describe.
All in all, great work. Glad to see you back after the LD hiatus, hope to see more awesome games from you in the future.
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I'll admit I was intimidated at first by the instructions in your description, but the game explains itself well enough. There were a few mechanics I wasn't clear on, mostly to do with the risk assessment. Each consequence had a number next to it, and I assume higher numbers were more likely (maybe as a percentage chance?) but I couldn't tell what was influencing the numbers, or if they were entirely random.
The presentation's solid. All the graphics are clean, the UI is very legible, and the music and color scheme provide a good sense of ambience.
I would like to see what resource card I lose when I get a damage consequence. I probably could have done some counting to work that out but it didn't feel worthwhile.
I lost my first playthrough because I went straight into the city, but the second time through I stuck to the outskirts of the map until I got enough people to venture inward. This proved a much more effective strategy.
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Nice work all around.
The chatter dissapeared for me as well. Seems like it just stops to loop after a while.
The game was a fun challenge, and the jokes on corporate culture got a couple giggles out of me. I should complain that I wasn't able to see the whole puzzle at once, but in fairness I didn't find that an issue. The levels were short enough that going back through them was pretty quick.
I wasn't sure what happened with the start of the non-tutorial level. If on the first phase, I put the Target class over Server, I can't place Server over Receiver on the second phase, even though both it and the Source/Sender symbols match up. There's probably some mechanic I missed.
Nice work on the title.
Fun little concept and well executed. I think it'd make more sense to fit the entire level on the screen at once, since I was surprised on a couple occasions by an element of the puzzle that was off-screen. And maybe an undo button or an auto-moving snake might have added a bit but under the time constraint you've done enough. Nice work.
The intro sequence is amazing. I spent a good few minutes just listening to the music and watching the animation before I even started playing.
The gameplay itself isn't particularly compelling. I didn't feel like I had a lot of control over what was happening, and because the bombs would always go off after the pluses the randomness was always working against me. If I tried to strategise and avoided activating a side with a lot of bombs on, eventually the bombs would just agglomerate there and I'd have to set off a huge chunk of my map. There was a bit of a balance there, where the bombs would create a lot of small islands which the pluses could really easily populate, then the pluses would create big chunks of land that the bombs could easily destroy. So there were definitely some interesting emergent mechanics at play, I just didn't feel in control of any of them, and wasn't able to leverage them to get the 100 tiles.
But I still played this game for a good part of an hour. In part for the stunning graphics, but for the most part just for the music. As I mentioned earlier, I liked the intro sequence the most (and wish it was in the game proper) but the entire soundtrack is amazing and I'm in awe you got it done in 72h, even with a dedicated composer.
Thank you so much for the experience, and keep up the good work.
The graphics are gorgeous, and the mechanics are interesting to play with; always a trade-off of an easier path vs a long-term loss.
The floaty camera has been mentioned already and does take some getting used to, I think the game would've been better with a camera that only moves when the player does. The controls themselves are solid, but because of the camera they feel heavy at first.
I only got as far as the 3 tiny platforms with vertical lasers along the floor. Couple reasons I had to stop there. The checkpoints are a bit too far apart, for one, so I couldn't get back into trying that area without a fair bit of repeating what I'd already done. The laser hitboxes are also much wider than the graphics indicate. The damage area seems to cover the entire tile, not just the thin band of the graphics. So half the time I'd lose health and get knocked off the platform without actually being in the path of the laser. The floaty camera also made it a bit hard to land on the tiny platforms when I wasn't being lasered. Finally, I'd always try to get on the first small platform from where the lasers dropped me down to, and the platform was just a bit too high.
I'm disappointed I can only review the first area of the game, but try as I might I can't get through to see the rest. What I've played looks great, feels alright, and was pretty fun to play. Thanks for the game.
The shaders with the color pallets you've created are stunning. Best I can tell all you can do is walk around and change the colors until you reach the roof? Couldn't find anywhere else to go. There's not much of a game to comment on here, but it looks very nice.
The game takes a bit to learn, but the AI is just predictable enough that you can dodge most but not all of their attacks if you know what you're doing. I applaud you for the balance. One thing to note is that the hitboxes on the island are a bit hard to read.
The ship combat alone is pretty fun, and while the graphics are simple the color palette is very smooth and satisfying. I don't know that the mechanic of your ship being weighed down adds much to the game.
If this weren't a Ludum Dare entry I'd recommend setting up networking for this, though. Higher-scoring players having weaker ships because of the weight of their treasure sounds like a neat balancing feature.
@jons-games I'll try to get a tested mac .app together later this week when I have access to a mac machine. For the time being, you could try to install Python3.5 (not 3.6) in `/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/Python`, make sure you're cd'ed to the game directory, and run the `ZhenCo` executable. I can't promise it'll work, but I'd appreciate the feedback.
@init-py @wskilljoy Would you be able to elaborate on what bothered you in the UI? Was it just difficult to interface with (hard to click on things? generally clunky feeling?), does it look bad (too messy? weird fonts/colors?) or is it hard to find your way around it?
I know the GUI was one of the big hurdles while designing ZhenCo, so I'd love to know where it failed.
@serpentworks-games There should be a Stop button which replaces the Start button in the upper right which does what you're looking for.
I always like a multitasking game. The graphics are fairly interesting and the music's not bad, and I think you got the pacing and balance right; I felt challenged but not faced with an impossible task. I did have some issues with the pong game having a bit unpredictable physics, and when I lost the game I could continue to play indefinitely (though my score was capped at that point), but neither of those were gamebreaking issues.
The UI at the bottom felt a bit clunky. Given the really interesting and colorful theme you had going with the rest of the game, I'd have liked the score and strikes to be a bit more thematically arranged. Maybe instead of a 0/5 counter for the strikes, you could have 5 rotating cubes that dissapear with each strike. Maybe add a bit of a red screen flash when one dissapears (there wasn't much of a visual indicator for the strikes).
My final score was 128.
The graphics are super clean, and I like the way you tutorialize the mechanics. I couldn't really get past the second level though. It really should be split into two levels; one with the initial boost and one with the pair of boosts; I kept dying in the second half and had to wait through the entire first section, with no way to speed through it. More importantly, though, the hitboxes on the boosts don't work at all.
On the two boosts, I know I need to pick up one of them but not both. If I pick up the first and jump the second, I don't have space to jump the spikes. If I jump over the first, I can move right through the middle of the second but the hitbox won't register and I won't pick it up.
If you get this fixed (totally allowed under compo rules to fix game-breaking bugs) I'd love to have another go.
I like this take on the 'mash random buttons for code to appear' genre. I've only ever seen it used for random simulated hacking, never for tech support/social media. And I like that you let the player opt in to each round of jobs, letting them skip the jobs they don't like as much. And each job category does feel slightly different. Writing code for a game is a different feeling from replying to customer service requests is a slightly different feeling from hacking.
Having the text speed up over time was a really nice touch. Gave me a chance to read the first few lines I was writing then speed through the rest.
My main gripe is something I was worried about when the theme was announced. "The more you have the worse it gets" can apply to a gameplay experience as much as to the setting presented. And you added a lot of busywork which after a while just becomes tedious to go through. You put a fair chunk of effort into making realistic text for all aspects of the game, but after the 30th identical customer support email I stopped wanting to read anything the game put before me.
In some respects I think this effect is useful to your narrative. Your protagonist is stuck doing random menial work which they must continue even as they goes on their espionage adventures. Someone who doesn't care what they do online, so long as it brings in some cash. But on the other hand, it's not particularly gratifying to have the same text appear over and over, and in my case it actually distracted me from the story. You got me tired of reading before you started showing me the interesting parts.
I'm not trying to pass a value judgement here, I don't know what your intention was. If you were trying to focus on the aesthetic of person-doing-random-internet-jobs then I think you succeeded, and I applaud you for your effort. But if you were trying to tell a story, hint at something interesting in the code the player was writing, or make the experience though-provoking, I think you've distracted from that purpose.
This was really fun to play. I love the idea, it fits the theme perfectly, and it's something I could never have come up with myself.
My one complaint is the lack of gamepad support. Navigating a tight spiral near the end of the game, trying to get those low numbers near the center, is basically impossible with 4-directional keyboard controls. I would have liked to use an analog stick for that, and I know unity can support it without too much hassle.
You can also move your character outside the screen, which caught me off guard a number of times; there's no real way to recover if you've forgotten where they were. Keeping the controlled character bounded to the screen would have helped.
The music's great. It does loop a couple times through the game but given that you made it during the compo I'm just impressed that it never got on my nerves and set a great folk mood to the game.
Great job all around. I hope you go out and rate some games so more people discover this.
my best run
@eusekerci in the spirit of following the rules, you may also want to opt out of being rated in the audio category.
The writing here is very good, if a bit preachy by the end. You've managed to make a self-deprecating and self-aware game that doesn't feel like it's doing that purely to justify its shortcomings. I had a good couple laughs, and you managed a very solid gradient of tone in your writing, from the cheesy through the sarcastic to the self-aware to the pretentiously deep.
The gameplay is also decent. It's pretty bog-standard run and jump and shoot platformer faire; I think the character runs a little too fast so you can bump into enemies a bit too easily without noticing them coming in from screen right. And I found a slight bug where an enemy could get stuck not moving on the edge of the screen but still killable. But the shooting's pretty fun and the controls are tight, so I was able to have an mechanically enjoyable experience.
What stuck out to me was a slight dissonance between the run/jump/shoot and the writing. You were writing for an exploratory contemplative game, but coding for one filled with action. The writing seemed to want you to give me long stretches of art with occasional action setpieces. But what you gave me is a pretty consistent level of difficulty and stable gameplay. It's a bit hard to verbalize and it didn't impact my enjoyment of either part of the game, but playing through Information Overload felt like playing two different games. On the one hand, it's Eversion. On the other hand, it's a deus-ex-machina walking sim.
Either way, I really enjoyed my time here. Thanks for the game.
Beautifully done; simple mechanics and a ton of graphical polish. I did get stuck for a good while unable to find the raincloud, but got through it in the end. There's one red rectangle in the caves down at the bottom that I would've liked to play with too. Some sound effects would also add to the charm, but that's down to time constraints more than anything I'm sure. Very nice work.
I love the concept but the controls feel way too floaty for me, and the bullets are pretty hard to dodge. I wasn't able to survive very long. I feel that in a bullet hell it's important that the character stops moving when I let go of a button.
Restarting the game is also more laborious than it needs to be. I'm presented with a button, which I have to ignore or else spend a long time waiting for a connection. Instead I need to press R on my keyboard, then press Enter, then reach over for my mouse to click 'Go'. In a game where I'm going to die after a couple of seconds, I need to be back in the game the moment I press 'R'.
Still, I like the concept, would have liked more polish but can't expect too much from the timeframe.
I like the idea, though I feel like you might have spread yourself too thin building two game modes. The FPS segment had jittery controls (in the webGL version anyway) and was pretty trivial since I could out-range all the turrets and wasn't locked to the enemy paths. The TD segment wasn't particularly gratifying either, since the turret and enemy variety were limited and outside of placing turrets I had very few strategic options.
My first run of the game, I didn't realize enemies would be coming from more than one direction so I built up defenses around the first entrance and wasn't able to do anything at all to save myself from the second wave. I learned my lesson and the second run went much better, but I wish the multiple entrances had been better signposted. Maybe start the first wave with enemies coming from all sides.
The game's very busy visually, which didn't help the multiple entrances issue. Every structure and enemy are the same shade of blue, the ground is very noisy, the skybox seems unrelated to the game, there's unusable turret slots scattered all over. I think with the simple mechanics the game would have benefited from a much more minimalist graphical style, polished to make something a bit more coherent.
I ended up completing the game without too much trouble, and the menu worked a bit differently than I'd expect. Continue would throw me back into the completed game (normally I'd expect it to start a new level). Quit didn't work in the webGL version but that's to be expected. I ended up just flinging myself off the map since you gave me that option.
It's not a bad game overall, and it shows that you put a lot of effort into it. I just think you could have focused that effort to make something simpler, but more coherent and polished.
Just a heads up, the web version doesn't lock the mouse so it's impossible to turn around. without moving the cursor out of the game window.
Also, getting to the appropriate color is a bit inconsistent. I eventually got killed because I couldn't find the blue gun for a good 30 seconds of trying to switch between colors.
A lot of the other comments have mentioned an inflation mechanic, but I was able to beat the game easily without noticing one. I was able to print as much money as I needed, then invest that into making people like me and industry productive. The only problem with that approach was that my hand started to cramp from the clicking, but that felt like a UX issue more than a mechanical obstacle. I understand I missed some core aspect of the game, so I don't feel right criticizing it fully, but from what I've seen of it I think it's too easy to make all aspects of your country happy. No threat really appeared for the duration of the 4 years.
Took me a bit to work out the controls but it's a fun little toy to play with. I do have one complaint about the controls. Because you can't change which strings are lifted while the string is moving left/right, it's hard to get into a rhythm since I have to wait a second between each row.
What I'd really have liked is a scheme where strings are lifted while I'm holding their number, rather than a toggle. Have the left/right string move a lot quicker (0.1s or less) and remove the restriction on only changing lifted strings when it's not moving. The experience would probably be a lot smoother.
Sure, having an option available never hurts. Keep in mind someone playing the game for 5-10 minutes isn't going to experience as much strain as when you playtest your own game for hours on end. But that's definitely an issue I hadn't considered.
The music's super calming and the game's a really relaxing city designer. There's enough complexity to make a deep and engaging compo entry, but not enough to make the game confusing or frustrating. There's a lot of polish put into the feel of the menus and it creates a great atmosphere.
I'm pretty sure I just locked my game up at 657 florins, and I kinda wish the game would do a check for possible placement spots and let me know when I can't place anything else. I guess I could start the game over and try to fill up the entire available space, but that seems like it would largely involve just hoping/paying for the 1x1 roads to appear, since so many areas are locked off by narrow passageways.
I feel like the game is missing something more exciting to work towards than "fill up the map" or "gain all the money", but I can't think of any goals that would suit it.
All in all, I think this is a great title, and while I have some complaints they're minor and didn't stop me enjoying this game. Great work.
As others have mentioned, the game link is broken. The screenshots look very polished, wish I could play the game.
So first off, this game is polished af. The music's amazing, the graphics and animations are fantastic. The design of the levels works really well, and there's a visceral satisfaction to plowing through a load of pellets. And you managed to add a high scores board. All in 12 hours. I'm thoroughly impressed and this game's fantastic.
So I want you to understand that my complaints about the controls are here only because I played long enough for them to become an issue.
Also, after a large number of games my game froze up, but I couldn't tell you how to reproduce that.
So you know how the best strategy in snake is to, well, snake your way around. Move one block down, all the way to the left. One block down, all the way to the right, and so on. In most snake games, I can get into the rhythm pretty well, but here I kept smashing into myself because I pressed left just a little bit too early. It's hard to tell exactly why, though it may have something to do with the music being at a different tempo than the game. Would have been nice to have movement synchronized to the beats.
The second most frequent deaths were caused by screen transitions. I eventually learned to memorize where my snake had been and avoid those areas, but in the first few games I kept running into myself because my tail was just off screen enough to catch me off guard. I think the game could have been a bit more zoomed out (maybe twice as far away) and maybe the transitions could give a bit more warning.
Still, great work.
Keep in mind that reaction time only applies to unexpected events. If you do zoom the camera out and make random offscreen collisions less likely, then the player will have plenty of time to anticipate the move and react in time. In fact, waiting for the visual stimulus of the snake moving before I could press a button is part of what's throwing me off: I'd like to just run off instinct and make fast button presses.
At the very least it wouldn't hurt to try.
Credit where credit is due: the graphics and UI for this game are polished and clean-looking. Took a little bit to work out the controls, I would have liked pick up/drop/open to all be on 'E'. But it's playable and a fun concept.
I think this game is sorely lacking the depth to pull the design off. There are not enough stacking combinations, not enough item rules, not enough rules restrictions, and not enough different objects (sofas, TVs, arcade cabinets, pinball tables) to open up. The strategy atm is very shallow: set aside one wall of the house, clear it. Start from the top. If the given item can be placed there, place it. Otherwise, move one square down and repeat. Since I don't need to worry about stacking order this always works. And I can get far enough into the game with this strategy that I get bored long before it stops working.
Most concerning is that you actually made a lot of assets for the game - the TV, the sink, the monitors and doors and sofas. But all you ever give the player is lamps and unmarked grey bricks. There's a lot of effort put into asset creation that you never implemented into the gameplay. And that's just sad to see.
The general game feel is pretty nice; like others have mentioned the X dash doesn't seem particularly helpful since half the time it just put me inside an active laser. The strategy I ended up using was hugging the bottom wall and moving left/right whenever a laser or bullet was about to hit me. Got me pretty far, until the general repetition of the gameplay made me too tired to respond quickly.
I don't know if the design of the game predicted that strategy, but it's the only one that seemed to work, just because I could only shoot upwards and the bottom row is the only place nothing seemed to spawn. Maybe making this a dual-stick shooter (WASD to move, arrow keys to shoot like in Binding of Isaac maybe?) would have helped: it'd let you place enemies on the bottom row and force the player to move around in 2 dimensions and actually dodge attacks rather than scoot left and right.
What was a little annoying is that the health regenerated over time, but did not regenerate between levels. So if I was low on health, the best strategy was to leave one enemy alive and dodge their attacks for a full minute or two to get my health back. I would have liked my HP to return to full on the start of each level so I didn't have to wait.
The music isn't bad, though it did get a little grating at times. It's not that I mind atonal stuff, but lively atonal stuff gets tiring quickly.
I enjoyed this game, and though I did get tired of it I would not be opposed to playing it again, or an expanded version. Nice work.
I don't really understand the mechanics of the game; I tried playing as a judge but just got a note saying I should wait until more players play as policeman. I then tried playing as a policeman, and got treated to a very long intro sequence. Then a guy came up and started explaining things I had to note down. But the typewriter didn't register over half my keypresses, and adjusting it precisely was impossible. So I just wound up with a bunch of random characters in random order on my paper and eventually got tired of waiting for something else to happen.
I would love to come back to this game, but I need the typewriter to register my inputs properly, and I'd like the rules explanation not to take longer than some games take to complete. Just throw a line or two at the start: "you have 13 lines. Take notes from the witness. Later these notes will be used to...something". If you have time to do those two quick changes for a post-LD version hit me up and I'll try to give a proper review.
Some other people seem to have said this already, but it stands repeating: the level design does not match up with the core conceit of the game. I really like that the enclosing walls pick up enemies and move them around the level. And I could see a lot of cool action puzzle elements you could implement with boxes/enemies being pushed through the level by the unstoppable force of the enclosing walls. The game already lets enemies go through the level's hitboxes if they're pushed there, so way I see it no reason not to make that into a core mechanic.
What you have is a decent platformer, with occasionally sticky but generally smooth controls. I can't really complain about this as a game jam entry. It's definitely fine. I'm just dissapointed because the mechanics are there to make for a great puzzle game and you have no levels that take advantage of this.
Wait, I lied. There is one massive complaint I have about this as a fast-paced platformer. After every death is a 5 second animation of the racoon being crushed, then the score slowly crawls on screen, and all this time I'm mashing the A button to get back into the fucking game. Don't do this. Please. If you make a game where the player will die often, give them their controls back within half a second. If this game was longer, or more difficult, I wouldn't have finished it because waiting to respawn was so frustrating.
Also, if you have a post-jam version up on your site, please add a list of changes in your description. Sometimes the changes are small enough that the compo can still be judged by the postLD version and I get a better experience. If I don't know what the changes are I'll use the old version to be safe and this might be to your detriment.
The sfx and graphics are great, especially for a 9 hour game. With this LD's theme I would have expected a game about habitat destruction rather than invasive species, but the setting works well enough.
I did run into an issue with the first big cat, which just looks up and down. The area below it is navigable, but there's an invisible wall above it that killed me two or three times. I think @simplepotential ran into the same issue.
I don't understand why you chose to use tank controls for your movement. They didn't make the game any worse, they're just a strange design decision to make for a game where you play as a bird hopping along the ground.
The hitboxes were also a little bit hard to work with, both on the cat vision and the foliage. I wouldn't say they were unfair, but I think you could have been a bit more generous on both accounts, maybe making the player hitbox smaller would have helped, or making the visuals of the foliage smaller and cat vision larger than their respective hitboxes.
I did enjoy this, for the setting and atmosphere especially, and the gameplay - if not particularly polished - didn't get in the way.
I like the idea, and I like the photo aesthetic, but the game suffers from poor communication with the player.
The hitboxes are unpredictable; often I'd place ex. two pots where there is a large gap between them but the game would throw them both out of the box.
The amount of weight that a box can carry and the weight of the individual objects isn't shown anywhere. Not even an approximation. I know that I can pack 1 item per box, but the game penalizes me for doing that. So I'm left with a game where every box I send has a 50/50 chance of failing or success. That's about as fun as repeatedly flipping a coin.
The value of the objects isn't specified either so I can't even prioritize high value items.
The menu design is great; I like the animations and the photos are really clean. I want to find something to enjoy about the gameplay but there is no information I can use to work out how to play this without prior knowledge of the weights you've assigned. Even a manual would help.
@hakro the music is made with an old version of Propellerhead Reason and an even older Yamaha keyboard.
@dunin I added [this walkthrough](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amras0000/2034bb8db7fc556d4a704a9090cbe62b/raw/9c1dddbee826bd942012c00c9f0803487ac3bdf2/walkthrough) to the description, if you want to give the game another shot.
@mike-inprinciple @randdir I did include [a walkthrough](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amras0000/2034bb8db7fc556d4a704a9090cbe62b/raw/9c1dddbee826bd942012c00c9f0803487ac3bdf2/walkthrough) in the description. Hope that helps you get past the second level.
@randdir yeah, the art isn't my finest work. It would have looked fine if I had time to work on shaders but time constraints took their toll. I wanted to focus on making the game complete and fun to play, so aesthetics took a back seat.
@remco there's no mechanical distinction between burning and non-burning rubble. You can travel over both and both hurt you equally. Walls being sticky was an issue I tried for a long time to fix but ultimately had to give it up to meet the deadline. Thanks for the in-depth feedback!
A lot of Ludum Dare participants make 12 hour games. There's even a 1 hour game jam that takes place during LDs. It's totally doable, but you have to keep your scope tiny. In the case of Downfall, the amount of stuff you wanted to do did not have a chance to be complete in the time you had available.
The game is playable in principle, and has a solid foundation, but it's plagued with weird design decisions and bugs (and I honestly don't know which is which). I will do my best to critique the game in light of its being a 12 hour title, but a lot of this could have been avoided if you didn't try to do so much.
So the first issue came up immediately when I started playing: the A key doesn't work. I can steer with the arrow keys or with Q/D, but even then half the time my input doesn't register. After a while the 'powerups' started kicking in, which either made the game unplayably fast, tediously slow, or randomly changed the game state in ways I could not begin to understand for how frequent the changes were. I felt like my input didn't have much impact on the state of the game, compared to the random stuff that was happening without my control.
I was not able to work out what caused blocks to disappear. At one point I made a 2x2 square and that vanished. At another I made an L shape (4 blocks high, 2 blocks wide) and that disappeared. At another point a random event happened and half my blocks vanished on their own. So I don't really know what I was aiming towards.
There seem to be 2 blue colors and they're virtually impossible to tell apart.
The controllable area "shrunk" every so often but the blocks still fall outside it. So by the endgame, where I only have 3 columns in the middle, the vast majority of blocks I have no control over, and can't speed up. So it's just a waiting game until I get a block I can actually use.
Here's what I'd like from a 12 hour game: Blocks of solid colors (red, green, blue, yellow, orange, pink) fall from the top of the screen. I can move the blocks left and right. I can speed up the blocks by pressing 'down' or 'S'. When I make any set of 4 connected blocks of the same color they disappear and I get 1 point. If any column reaches the top of the screen I lose. Done. Make that, add some sfx and music and polish up the graphics/tutorial/difficulty if you have time left over.
You asked for honest feedback, I hope this fits the bill. You tried to do too much. Keep your scope smaller next time.
The concept's great and the game's fairly polished, with really tight mechanics and a very compelling gamefeel. There's not a whole lot I can comment on since the game's so simple - and that's definitely a strength.
I did find it a little hard to work out what qualified as a valid loop though. Sometimes a left-right pair would vanish, but an up-down pair would not. Sometimes placing a block pointing at a grey would make the grey vanish, sometimes it wouldn't. On one occasion I made an up-down-left-right loop which didn't dissapear. I don't know if the behavior I was seeing is by design or if the game is a little buggy. In either case, would like to either see the bugs fixed or the behavior better explained.
Still, game's great. Good work.
This is fantastic. I only managed to get two escape drives so far but I'll likely go back and finish the game when I have more time. The combat is satisfying, the game constantly keeps you on your toes, there's always an objective in sight and there's always a number of things to keep track of. And the game is short enough that this probably never gets tiring or repetitive. The design is great, the polish is great, there's a lot of work put into this and it shows.
Two minor issues I ran into: - The web version doesn't seem to expand in full screen mode. It's very small and hard to read. It's not a problem on the download version, but it does make the web version pretty unplayable. - One ring spawned inside a planet. I was able to dash into the planet to recover it (which felt glitchy itself), but I had to try a few times and really this shouldn't happen in the first place.
Some design considerations, which didn't really impact the game: - The rings could have been placed further apart, maybe across the planet's atmosphere. That might force me to stay on the planet a little longer but I can also appreciate that searching for rings might have made the game more tedious. - The spinning camera made me a little dizzy at times, especially in the tutorial. Maybe keeping the camera rotation fixed would have made the game a little easier to read, though it may have removed some of the excellent hectic nature. - maybe the map overlay could have been partially transparent, since the enemies did not stop coming while I was checking the map I would have liked to react to them quicker.
From the start this game looks amazing. The backgrounds are fantastic, the bleeding particles are great, and the blinking animation is creepy and thematic. All around this is a fantastic looking game.
The design is a pretty basic breakout concept, with only a few bricks actually necessary to beat each level. What I don't understand is why you keep some of the bricks around even after they're hit - this made for a really frustrating experience - especially in the level where the eye appears - because you'd place NEXT LVL bricks in places that are nigh-impossible to reach with the game's physics.
The physics are the source of my main complaint, though. I could not for the life of me predict where the ball would bounce when I hit it. One theory I have is that it's completely independent of the ball's velocity and depends only on where on the paddle it bounces. Another is that the paddle reflects the direction of the ball. It's very hard to tell. And because of this aiming felt difficult. I can appreciate breakout games with complex physics, but if you're going for a low-resolution game with flat surfaces and large bricks like this, and no powerups to overcome janky physics interactions, I end up feeling like I have no control over the game and it's just playing itself.
I understand you were going for a dark theme where the game would punish you for hitting the wrong blocks but only reward you sometimes for hitting the right ones. And it's nice that the game gets harder throughout the level. But because I didn't feel in control of the ball at all, any blocks I hit were a result of random chance. And while getting random rewards for random ball bounces is nice, being punished by randomness isn't particularly fun, mostly frustrating.
In summary: I think this game has a lot of polish and you executed a simple concept very well. I just couldn't get much enjoyment from it because the physics felt a bit off.
I beat the game, eventually. Finding spaces for the weird shapes I'd been given and constantly rearranging my canvas was fun. But the bulk of the puzzle seems to rely on trial and error. Initially the rules make sense: combine two reds to make a red 2x1. Combine two whites to make a white 2x1. Combine two yellows to- wait I can't do that. Ok. I can combine two white 2x1s to create an S block, and two red 2x1s to create an L-block but now I can't combine the remaining two white 2x1s for some reason? There seems to be no logic after a point with what colors go together, or what shapes they'll make when they're combined.
Rearranging the canvas is the fun part of this game. Creating new blocks is the tedious and grindy part. Just clicking every block to every block. I tried to figure out some deeper ruleset behind the combinations, but I couldn't find it.
What I would have liked is a more consistent set of rules: you can only combine the same color. You can only combine pieces of equal size. And the orientation they have when you click them together determines the final shape. That would be nice. Then there'd be a puzzle to building shapes that will fit on your canvas.
As it stands, I've come out of this game a little frustrated. The backdrop is really pretty and the mechanics are creative and have a lot of potential. But you haven't explained your ruleset.
"Well Done you Cleaned the Buiding" - I don't know if that means I got every person right or not. I'm going to write the rest of this review assuming I got it right.
With this style of game or detective fiction there tend to be red herrings, convoluted chains of reasoning, and the whole thing gets muddy and confusing enough that any answer could be correct. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, you lay out everything simply enough an idiot could understand it and ruin the puzzle. But this game manages to dodge both those traps, and offers very subtle hints that you can pick up on (which I won't get into so as not to ruin the game for others).
In other words, the writing - if not particularly funny (the jokes fell a bit flat for me) or interesting in its word structure - manages to convey exactly the right information in only a few sentences. This combines with the simple rules of the world I gleaned at the intro and makes for an excellent and tense puzzle. The no-nonsense gunshot and sudden burst of color add so much to the aesthetic that tension creates.
The graphics are cute, and not bad for a hand-drawn sketch. The walking animation is a bit weird, but that's never easy to draw. And the transition animations between the rooms look great. The lack of music almost adds to the atmosphere so I don't think it hurts the game much; it helps lend a gravity to the sound of gunfire.
The one issue I had was that dialogue selection seemed to only work on the numpad. If I was on a smaller keyboard I wouldn't have been able to play the game. Non-numpad number keys seem to be ignored.
This also doesn't fit into the theme all that well in my opinion. You tried to tie it in with the overpopulation aspect but that's only a bit of backstory and could be completely removed without changing the game much.
Out of curiosity, how did you make the gunshot noise?
For a 10 hour game, this is excellent. You managed to get a good design and even include sound effects in a short time. For a Compo game, this is still pretty good. Sure the design is minimalist, but I love how the principle of time-management plays out while you race against the world falling apart around you.
The first level was easy enough, since I could more or less beeline to the goal. The second level is where the game shines, since it forces you to plan out a route and then requires perfect execution to win. I think were this a longer game I would have preferred a turn-based system, maybe on a grid, since the controls did feel a little sticky and the hitboxes and time limits were unforgiving. That would change the focus purely to planning the route, rather than executing it. But this isn't a longer game, so what you have works fine.
All in all, great work.
when I hit the blue wall on the bottom, I got the "You won! Press Space to Continue" screen but pressing space did nothing. I was able to hit esc and select the level again but I wish I could restart without waiting through all the animations.
There's not a whole lot I can say about the mechanics; I wasn't able to work out what determined which direction the wall was coming from, and it would have been nice to have some way to track where the keys were, other than learning the levels through multiple playthroughs. Maybe 4 arrows around the player. Some more depth wouldn't have hurt, but I understand wanting to keep the scope small. The controls were a little bit floaty, since the character doesn't stop when I stop pressing the button. I don't know if that's intentional.
You might want to add "esc to exit to menu" to the game's description.
You explained how the movement mechanics work - you apply more force the longer you push. But even so, it was a bit difficult getting used to them. I often felt like random physics events would cause me to suddenly gain a huge burst of speed and fly across the level to my death. The graphics are nice, though the UI could use some work.
I ended up using the strategy of only pushing boxes off indirectly, using other boxes as cover. That seemed to make the weird physics events happen less often. Though after 41 points on my last game I did fly across the screen and died.
Being able to jump at the end screen is a nice touch.
My first playthrough I gathered 6 coins, but wasn't able to spend them because I didn't understand the controls. I got there on the second playthrough, but suddenly having to use a mouse to select an upgrade was a weird design decision. I would have preferred walking into the shoes/hammer.
I was able to purchase the shoes, but didn't notice an upgrade to my speed. I couldn't also upgrade the recycling because the game ended before then.
And that's kinda my biggest gripe with this game - seems like whatever I do the tide eventually just reaches the top of the screen and kills me. If it weren't for that, I could see this as a really fun game where you increase your speed while the trash collects further and further away from shore, forcing you to get the speed upgrades so you can reach it before the tide comes in. Then you have to spend some coins to push the level of the tide back so you don't die, and upgrade the recycler so it can keep generating you cash. Those are some very slight changes that could have improved this game immensely.
I would also like a counter for how much trash I'm carrying.
The graphics are fantastic, and the game feels great (if a little repetitive) in a steamworld dig sort of way, where you dive into the depths to collect resources to then upgrade how well and how deep you can dive. The execution feels great. It's just the design that I have a gripe with. All in all this is a good entry.
It seemed like the cracks in the track were slightly out of phase with the soundtrack. If I pressed exactly with the beat of the music I'd get orange notes or misses, but if I played a quarter-beat early I got yellow notes pretty consistently.
The choice of the notes you could play also felt a bit off. Especially on the M key, the seventh did not sound appropriate to the background music. ZXCV sounded fine, playing in the upper registers was a bit iffy. Maybe next time stick to a pentatonic scale on small projects, hard to go wrong with that.
Like people have said, the concept is very creative, and a great interpretation of the theme. You didn't finish it, there's no real goal to work towards, and the score is illegible, so it's hard to judge the game for what it could have been. But as a browser toy this works quite well. Nice work.
It seemed like the cracks in the track were slightly out of phase with the soundtrack. If I pressed exactly with the beat of the music I'd get orange notes or misses, but if I played a quarter-beat early I got yellow notes pretty consistently.
The choice of the notes you could play also felt a bit off. Especially on the M key, the seventh did not sound appropriate to the background music. ZXCV sounded fine, playing in the upper registers was a bit iffy. Maybe next time stick to a pentatonic scale on small projects, hard to go wrong with that.
Like people have said, the concept is very creative, and a great interpretation of the theme. You didn't finish it, there's no real goal to work towards, and the score is illegible, so it's hard to judge the game for what it could have been. But as a browser toy this works quite well. Nice work.
Just a reminder that the COMPO rules ask you to provide source code for your game.
My final score was 1406, and the game did get a bit boring for a while before then, largely because it got easy enough to be a bit repetitive after a while. I should note I played on the LD42 version, not your update. I think the problem was that if I stayed on the high end of the strength meter, I could more or less shoot only the largest possible balls and clear out most of the screen before any of the villagers managed to make it halfway down. Maybe a better mechanic would have been to reset the player's strength after every shot, or at least make the larger balls take off more strength so the player would always end up overrun. Or just make the villagers start taking multiple hits, or move faster.
I did have an issue with the controls; you use the mouse to aim, but receive no crosshair, so you're basically guessing at where your mouse is at any given point, and whether moving it left/right is going to cause a subtle movement or fling the aiming arrow across to the other side of the wizard. Three possible solutions I could see here: 1. add a crosshair 2. make the aiming cursor move based on the mouse's X position, ignoring its Y. (so a motion of 50 pixels right would always correspond to a 15 degree rotation clockwise or whatever) 3. add controller support, so I can use an analog stick to aim and A to fire.
This is a very good entry for your first LD; the design is simple and creative, the music is decent, the general gamefeel is satisfying. It does lack some mechanical polish and the controls need work, but it's a good attempt and I did have fun with the game for a few runs. Nice work.
This is fantastic. The mechanics follow a Papers Please system but you put your own spin on the theme and UI. The sound is really clean. The voiceovers don't get in the way but you probably didn't need to explain the game in quite this much depth, and on repeat playthroughs I'd like to switch the voiceovers off.
I enjoyed this game a lot, but my favorite bit was the giant fuck-off dictionaries crashing on the table every so often. They take up a huge amount of space and are just so large and heavy compared to anything else. There isn't a sound effect for them falling on the table but my brain inserted both the sound effect and the dust cloud from context.
I eventually died from thirst while trying to translate some german. And while I like the thirst mechanic in general, I think the thirst meter should be larger and more obvious when it's close to 100%. It's frustrating in any game to be killed out of the blue without warning, even if it was justified.
Also, the W and S keys should be swapped. The current setup is unintuitive.
I was able to continue playing after I died, even change the stats on the end screen. The only thing I couldn't do was read the labels on the sorting slots because of the grey overlay, but if I'd memorized those I could continue playing.
A pause button would have been nice too.
At the end of the day the game is just a simple left-right dodging setup, but I do like the theme of inventory space you've got going. Like @biodiesel mentioned, this setup could be really interesting with some more items, especially ones that would let you clear inventory space or destroy items in your path. That would offer more of an incentive to collect some items, even though they might bring you closer to death.
I would have liked hotkeys to use the potions, since my touchpad locks up while I use my keyboard. Also, the speed boost didn't seem to work properly; at least I didn't notice any speed increase, even though the sound effect played.
My final score was 37.
Can't say I noticed what @ngupsilon mentioned about powerups spawning in safe areas. For me, powerups spawned pretty much wherever, sometimes in completely unreachable spots.
I think there's a point of no return in each game where there is enough fire that even if you were constantly extinguishing it you will die eventually. It fits with the theme, and it does force the game to end eventually, but it's a weird state to be in where you're just waiting for the inevitable and trying to put it off. Not a bad one, just not something I've seen often. Usually these situations just frustrate me but this one was fine.
What I do have a problem with are the water bombs, since it seems impossible to predict where they'll land or what area they'll cover. A crosshair or big blue circle would have been helpful, especially since you can't seem to influence how far they go.
My final score was 1263.
@tom7 said basically everything I was going to - a lot of the mechanics in the floor stages are unclear; I'm not sure why the power thing in the middle was sometimes cracked when a boss was around. It wasn't clear for a long time that I was falling off the edge and resetting the stage. And sometimes the mass of enemies and player all of the same color made the screen pretty unintelligable.
I was unable to move at certain points, and the movement controls occasionally felt unresponsive and sluggish.
I do like that you've made a modernish action dual-stick shooter with these limitations. It feels very nice to play, even if a little confusing.
The spaceship stages were a fun little diversion and a welcome bit of rest from the madness, but the spawn positions of the levels need a lot of work. On one occasion I spawned right on top of a level entry when I exited the previous level, giving me no time to prepare for the next floor stage. 5 times in a row.
Overall I think this is an excellent title and a great example of how to do a retro game right - use modern design principles and limit yourself only to the tech.
My final score was 34765, but I wasn't really running out of lives. I just stopped playing because the game was getting a bit too hectic and I didn't actually know what was going on in the levels, I just sprayed in random dircetions and apparently got enough 1-ups to counteract the deaths.
So I eventually learned that my bomb count was in the top left. I also eventually learned that my camouflage would only work for a few seconds at a time, but I could not see any UI elements to indicate how much I had left. Would have liked that.
You keep saying in the comments there's a light switch, but it is impossible to see the light switch because **everything is pitch black** - you can only turn on the light if you know how the level is designed, which defeats the point.
Anyway, after a ton of trial and error I made it past the first level. Got to the green exit trigger and got thrown into another pitch black room. This one had really tiny X's on the floor, but I couldn't place any bombs or use camouflage to see anything. I also seemed to lose my player model. I don't know if the game glitched out or if this is by design, and that's not saying great things about your game.
Eventually I got tired of running around with no bombs, no camo, and no way to restart the level, so I stopped playing.
Games are primarily a visual medium. There are exceptions, but this isn't one. If you make the whole screen black, there is no way to navigate the levels. You keep touting the light switches, but they aren't even slightly indicated. You keep touting the camouflage, but that only shows you part of the level and isn't available in the second level. Maybe you could work off memory after you get ambushed, but of the however many times I got caught by an enemy the light turned on only once. I get that you wanted to play with darkness. That's fine. But you need to offer an alternate method of navigating, and the ones you provided aren't available most of the time and don't work that well when they are.
Sorry man; you've hidden anything good about the game behind a bad design decision. No easy way to put this.
The sound effects were what ultimately drove me away from this game, but it has a number of frustrating issues.
The core design requires very little strategic thinking from the player, and the core gameplay loop of walk-to-trash, walk-to-output gets tiring really quickly. Maybe a focus on rearranging the trash area would have worked better. Maybe a certain pattern of trash or recyclables could cause them to disappear, or maybe you'd need to operate a lever to make the falling trash/recyclables fall into the right output.
TVs and gameboys can't be recycled as plastic. They contain a lot of copper and gold wiring that - if you want to recycle them - needs to be disassembled before you can sell the casing off for remolding. Rubber ducks are sometimes made of synthetic rubber, but I wouldn't be comfortable throwing them in the plastics category either without some additional context. I don't know why you didn't just use plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic cutlery, plastic food containers. Things that are unambiguously plastic, instead of making the player guess...
Especially with nothing to go off but a low resolution drawing, you need to make things more clear if you want the player to sort your items.
The sound effects got to me the most, though. Every few seconds, I'd get a horrifyingly loud, high pitched, and distorted screeching blasting out of my speakers. It's far louder than the music which is the thing I'm hearing most of the time. How did you not get annoyed by the sound while playtesting this game? It drove me nuts within a few minutes of play.
I really don't want to be this harsh. This isn't a lazy game; you've created a lot of assets for it and polished the lighting and movement controls. But I also want to be honest in a review, and the experience you've provided me with is frustrating. I'm sorry.
Obviously the unreal shaders are amazing and the particle effects and block and transition animations work really well. And I commend you for not trying to complicate matters and just using graphics that work. The text in the air looks really nice, too.
Mechanically though, the game is about memorization and trial-and-error. There's one point in the final level where the game tells you to move upwards and you have two blocks that are moving upwards. But one leads you to the exit, and one to a dead end. You even make the red herring start moving first so the player doesn't notice the correct one is an option. There is no way to beat the last level without failing, restarting, and trying again until you've memorized the pattern. The other levels are less egregious in that respect but it's always a factor.
These graphics could have complimented a simple and engaging puzzle game, but instead the game just feels like a really shiny and heartfelt "fuck you" to the player for not knowing the levels ahead of time.
The game's simple and clever and works well enough for what it is. It's interesting to see a game with all the focus tunelled into the AI, but it's a good AI for the system so I guess you divided your time well.
With a gamepad plugged in, I was forced into a gamepad+mouse situation, where I could only control the game with the gamepad but could only control the menus with a mouse.
I started the game with a gamepad plugged in (as it usually is) and was surprised to see WASD and the arrow keys not working. I got to just a few seconds left on the clock when I picked up the gamepad and started moving around, but I was able to win that game regardless.
And that's my biggest problem with the design of this game. Because of the shrinking level, you will always be right next to the AI at the end of the game (they tend to stick to one edge and not move much). So all you need to do to win is wait 29 seconds, tag, and hope you're lucky enough to move away. Anything else is a waste of time, as far as the game's concerned. I would have much preferred a king-of-the-hill system, where you track how much time each player has spent being "it". Maybe make the score increase faster towards the end of the game to add tension. Then whoever got more points being "it" loses. That would lend some significance to the bulk of the game.
The other problem I had is that the AI had insanely quick reflexes. You do get a little bit of knockback which means it is possible to start running before the AI reaches you, but more often then not I'd get tagged back immediately. I wonder about starting the two players further apart after a tag, or giving a half second of invincibility.
For your first entry this is very good. You kept the scope low, and you put a lot of effort into one aspect of the game, while making sure the rest was clean and polished. And it is fun and satisfying to play. I just wish the game wouldn't invalidate a game where I spent the first 20 seconds running away only to be sniped at the last second.
I think everything I wanted to say has been said already but I'll just repeat it: The game is way too easy. Ignore the cookies. Press "W", "D", "W" for about a second each, and win. Again and again. The instructions tell you to reach the "top" but I got to over 100 levels with no end in sight. And since the music resets at the start of each level I got treated to the first 1.5 seconds of your music over and over and over again, which started to annoy me a couple dozen levels in.
Small things you could do to fix the game: make the enemies start in random locations, rather than always at the center (just make sure they don't spawn on the player!). Make the music keep playing across levels, instead of restarting. Make the goal to collect cookies, rather than reach further levels. Make each consecutive level harder - faster enemies, more enemies, more cookies.
I don't think this is a bad game in design or in execution, but it's horribly broken right now, and the optimal strategy makes for really bad gameplay.
level100.png
I can't give this game a complete rating because of a consistent crash so I'll refrain from some of the categories until the issue is resolved.
I tried to move the window to the side of my screen, but whenever I clicked during the instructions the window would snap back to the center. I'd like this not to happen, but it's not the end of the world.
The main game music is fine; it's not the greatest but it's cute enough. I do have an issue with the title music because it's very repetitive and distracting and makes reading the instructions difficult the first time through.
The game itself seems fun; the AI seems to be making reasonable choices. The red ghosts will sometimes chase the enemy's yellow ghosts but this only seems to speed the yellow ghosts up; I've never had a red ghost destroy a yellow ghost or recover the ball it was carrying.
I could probably comment a lot more on the strategy of the game, but it crashes very consistently after a few minutes of play, and I'm not sure what causes the crash. It's usually when I try to plant something.
``` ############################################################################################ FATAL ERROR in action number 1 of Step Event0 for object obj_witch:
Unable to find any instance for object index '100233' at gml_Object_obj_witch_Step_0 ############################################################################################ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- stack frame is gml_Object_obj_witch_Step_0 (line -1) ``` other indices: ``` 100103 100061 100070 ```
You definitely included instructions in the game description. And the controls. And I definitely should have read them. I didn't. But figuring out what the hell was going on and trying to solve a sliding block puzzle in the 5 seconds I had without moving the car. While hearing your beautiful and ever-deeper voice telling me to SPEED UP. SPEED UP. SPEED UP. SPEED UP. was definitely an experience.
After that the game was surprisingly easy, but maybe I just like sliding block puzzles too much.
Nice work and stuff.
This is a fantastically clever puzzle game. The design of the levels caught me off guard many times. Everything's tutorialized properly, and you did a great job leading me on to a false solution. Great job there, really. The music fits the aesthetic and I'd like to see it on soundcloud or the like. Graphics are also impressive. Relatively minimal, but incredibly clean and legible, and with a pleasant palette.
There's one minor failure of the design, I think: I had to spend a few levels just counting things. Grid squares sometimes, but more often cards. How many warps did I have, how many switches, etc. I understand that you were trying to meet the LD theme, but I think an interface where I had a number next to each ability, rather than a set of cards, might have been easier to use for those levels. On the other hand, you used the order of the cards to great effect in training and fooling the player. So I'm on the fence here.
The amount of different mechanics is impressive for a compo game, too. I want to find any other points to critique the game but it's so thought-through and polished that I can only say good things about it. Keep it up, I'd love to play your entry next LD.
This is a great little puzzle mechanic, implemented in a fun casual setting. All in all a pretty fun game. I managed to get through the first two levels with no trouble. On the third I got myself into an unwinnable position. I kinda wish the game would recognize that but that might be difficult to implement in a LD.
I'm actually not sure if the 3rd level that generated for me was winnable or not. I wouldn't know how to tell.
In terms of UI, there's just a few quality of life things I might change if you ever want to improve on the game: - There's no way to select a tile adjacent to the tile you've selected. You can click on another tile first to change your selection, but that's finicky. Maybe have right click deselect the existing tile? - I would like to see the complete map after I'm done. It's satisfying to watch the A* navigate through my maze and to dig through the map, but it would be more satisfying to be able to zoom out and look around at the chaos I've caused after the level is complete. - As a moonshot, maybe you'd want to add a hint system, where valid moves on the border glitter a bit if the player doesn't do anything for a while. Since this doesn't work like a match 3 usually does, my brain is having trouble finding the appropriate patterns
Other than that, and the unfortunate lack of music, I can't really fault the game. It's got a consistent and clean set of mechanics with a lot of room for emergent strategies. Great work.
As others have said, the driving model in this game really breaks it. Turning is way too slow and there is not enough friction. It's difficult enough to drive down a straight road; making a turn without veering off into the grass is basically impossible.
I got through the first two levels with barely enough time left on the clock, but the third seemed like I had to know the map well to actually beat it, since there's branching paths that aren't all visible on the minimap.
I really like the transition animation between the driving and the shooting.
Shooting didn't have much weight to it, I just had to locate and click on all the enemies. I wonder if a little bit of kickback on the player camera, or a more visceral death animation would help this section.
I think the driving music was a bit too aggressive and sine-y and grated on me a little after a few levels. The shooting music tones down the frustrating bits so I enjoyed that a lot more. Oh, and it's rare to see a LD game with multiple music tracks so nice work there, and with the transition.
Overall, this game feels like it just needed a lot more love put into its core mechanics (the driving and shooting models), maybe at the cost of the maps and objectives being less fleshed-out, or fewer levels. I know I've made the same mistake myself sometimes, prioritizing content without a good baseline mechanic. Maybe keep that in mind next LD.
It might be that I'm sleep deprived and tired, but a rocket falling onto me while I'm busy counting blades of grass is the most terrifying thing I've experienced today.
The mountain king theme is really well rendered, shame that I could barely hear it over the repeating sound effects. Quieter sound effects and a score displayed at the end would have improved this game a lot.
I admire your commitment to a several-minute song. A lot of Ludum games I've played this time around have claimed to be rhythm games but offered only a 20 second loop. Yours delivers, both musically and in terms of a pretty long scripted level.
There's not a lot else to say about this game. The mechanics are solid, simple, and fairly engaging. There's a good amount of visual and audio feedback when you hit something (though as mentioned, the sound effects drown out the music, so maybe tone them down a bit). I can't complain. Good work.
Can't seem to run the linux build:
``` ./ld41: error while loading shared libraries: libSDL2-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory ```
The graphics are the game's strong point, as people have pointed out; the animations are impressive for a compo game. My chief complaint here is that while you can't game over, you can softlock: If you spawn in front of a bunch of turrets you die instantly. If you parry before they kill you, you're stunlocked and can't move. Eventually my game just glitched out and would only spawn soldiers off-screen to the left, because I'd been pushed back that far by the bullets.
I would have liked to be able to choose where I spawn, so it's not right in front of a turret or in the middle of enemy fire. Also, really confused about the score. Spawning new soldiers felt insubstantial, since I could get the score back just by attacking the air in front of me.
On the title screen, I noticed I was playing v 1.3. I'll assume you're playing fair and you released that within the submission hour and the numbering is just a weird development quirk.
I love the title screen. The animation borrows from the rest of the game while still looking distinct. The animation of the disappearing level in general is amazing. This is by far the best-looking and most aesthetically interesting Unreal game I've seen in a Ludum Dare.
The narrative made me chuckle a good few times. The echo adds a tone of taking-itself-seriously that's undercut in a tongue-in-cheek way with the absurdist statements and comedic timing. What you probably didn't intend is that the timing reminds me very strongly of a 90s preschool-level edutainment style ("_click on the...APPLE_")
All in all, a great-looking, great-sounding game that doesn't overstay its welcome and offers a quick surreal and absurdist adventure. Nice work.
I love the aesthetic, I love the idea, and I love the levels. I kept telling myself I need to stop playing and do productive things, but I got hooked and saw it through to the (somewhat confusing, are those tears?) end - with `@:106`, I think.
Some nitpicks as is tradition: - As others have pointed out, respawn is way too long for a precision platformer - Even though I enjoyed the platforming, I did not like that my character kept moving after I let go of the movement keys. The level design didn't make this too annoying, but it feels like bad practice to have slippery controls in this genre. - The collectible (and neccessary) hearts don't differ at all from the background (and blocking-your-path) hearts, so -in the last (or second last?) level with hearts- I spent a good while trying to pick up the heart in the top left corner, before realizing it was part of the background. - There's a bug where the falling platforms won't respawn after a death, so there's no way to finish the level. - A lot of levels seem to be designed around getting all the hearts/keys and getting to the exit in one go. But if you die after getting a heart/key you keep it. This did help alleviate some frustration as compared to the alternative, but I can't shake the feeling the level design doesn't match the mechanics. - I really like the blood splatters, though they were only ever really visible on the falling platforms, where they looked out of place floating when the platform fell.
The animation's great, the sound design matches the theme, the color scheme is minimal but works (except, as mentioned, for the pickups. Same color and same symbol between what you can interact with and what's background is just bad form). Really enjoyed myself with this title. Great work, keep it up.
The audio and visuals are fantastic, the core idea is solid, and there's a lot of variety in the enemies, pieces, and levels. All around, great work. The game is let down for me by a few quality of life things, but that's largely a subjective thing.
The controls on PC at least are difficult to use; the pieces are fairly slippery when you try to click on them; because of the speed of the game mouse control is just not ideal. Either having a slower tempo on PC or some sort of keyboard control (hotkeys for the various towers/columns don't seem too hard to implement) would help the experience immensely.
A more minor gripe is that pieces disappear when they reach the top. They can be recovered if you drag them to your hand before they get there, but doing so takes time and, as mentioned above, is fairly finicky with a mouse. Automatically returning pieces from the end of the board to your hand would save a few more headaches.
I understand that the focus here is on touch controls, though, so I can't really fault you for the issues I've had. The game's really well polished and fun to play. Nice work.
@L14-Game-Studio were you not able to rotate the camera?
@Lewis-Quaife I take it the camera control wasn't sufficient?
Should also be noted, you should have full control over the difficulty :). Police won't spawn unless you get a wanted level (stars in the upper right), and any black-jacket enemies will only attack you if you shout at them. I'm a little confused what the problem is. Thanks for the feedback though.
Some quick admin before I get to my review: If you could add a quick note in your description on exactly what changes you made in the post-LD version, that would let LD participants better decide which version to play. (side note, your itch.io page is set to request money, not sure if that's an intentional choice or you mis-clicked there)
I elected to play the 1.0 version.
- I love the writing here; it's abstract and childish and there's a lot of jokes scattered around. - Pawn movement is slightly buggy but you may have fixed that in the post-LD version. - I'm not entirely sure why the enemy pieces seemed to vibrate most of the time. - The game doesn't offer any challenge, either in the dialogue or in the chess. This adds to the narrative you've written, so it's not a bad thing, but I also wouldn't mind an actual real-time chess puzzle mechanic. - I do wish there was some music here, but spending that time on writing was not a mistake. The writing did come out very nice.
The experience was surreal, and innovative, and I enjoyed it. It's hard to find much more to say about this title, so I'll leave it at that.
As a caveat I'm not particularly fond of the metroid aesthetic or metroidvanias; and there's not all that many horizontal shooters I actually enjoy. So this probably soured my opinion of the game which, as has been mentioned, is very polished and stands up quite well objectively.
A couple design concerns that seem standard for scrolling shooters these days: - The starting weapon (the only one I've used so far) requires repetitive tapping instead of holding down the attack key. I understand that you wanted to be able to charge the weapon, but I'd much rather have the charge shot be on another key. maybe X. - There is no way to control the speed in this game. I'd like shift to slow me down and let me dodge tight clusters of bullets (you can have ctrl be used for boost, though I'm not actually sure what that adds to the game). With the current control scheme I ran into bullets way too easily because my character would fly across the screen at the slightest provocation. - The hitbox seems to extend beyond the character a bit, making a box around him. This might just be my perception, but it was frustrating to be hit by things that shouldn't have hit me. Almost every scrolling shooter I've played has a hitbox the size of a few pixels in the middle of the character. - I like the healthbar; it's less punishing than instant death whenever you hit a bullet. And I like the health refills that get dropped. This is not too common in the genre but I like what it does for the game. What I do have a complaint about is how little invincibility you get after a hit. I ran one game where the entire first screen (including the first boss) I got through taking no damage, entered the second screen with full health, and got shot to death by the first set of turrets.
These might seem like nitpicks, but given how standardized and formalized a genre you're working in it's pretty vital to have speed controls and a tiny hitbox, at least in my book.
A couple more minor notes: - There seems to be a bug where you can move off the screen while traveling to the left. - There's no indication when the boxes are going to spawn a new enemy. I've lost count of how many times an enemy would just spawn on top of me and take off my health.
The game is pretty good overall, in terms of level and enemy design, in terms of the weird branching path idea, in terms of the aesthetic and mood. But there are too many sources of frustration for me to continue playing to the end. I might come back to it later when I have more patience.
I love the idea; at the start of LD I was wondering how to interpret the theme as a musical one, and couldn't come up with much. This nailed that approach. There's not a lot of challenge, but I'm a sucker for in-game music mixing and the points system definitely encouraged me to change things out throughout.
I do have a couple nitpicks and a few suggestions: - I object to the idea that electro and classical are somehow incompatible :P - You have a set time limit of two minutes; but your music loops every few seconds. Having a two-minute soundtrack for LD isn't unreasonable, especially if it's the main focus of your game. Especially considering a number of instruments are just playing bar-long chords or drum loops, I think you dropped the ball on this one. The game's really missing a complete song structure. - The points are, as I mentioned, a good system to get me to change things up, but I wonder if there wasn't a cleaner way to integrate them into the UI than colored numbers. This isn't that significant though, the current UI works. - I'm not sure why you chose for the final score to be an average of the two. I feel like this system would reward you for just playing to one crowd, rather than keeping a balancing act. Maybe I'm missing something about the design, but I think I would have gone with the final score being the minimum of the two others.
Should be noted that on my second playthrough, I elected to have all the instruments play classical/blue for a while. The red audience dropped in score as expected, and stuck at -001. But the *blue* audience's score also dropped, at a rate of a few hundred per second, down into the negative thousands. I wasn't able to recover that game.
Still, I'm only pointing out these issues because I think the game's pretty great overall. I enjoyed my 3 minutes here. Thanks for the game!
I know a lot of people are complaining about the lack of mechanics, but personally I don't think the game needs more than it has.
What you have is a dumbed-down and simple-as-can-be reflex game. The only thing simpler is the same thing but with one button controls. The pace of the game increases over time, so no matter how good you are at pattern recognition the speed eventually catches up to your abilities. The mechanics work, and don't need fixing.
But everything around that is polished to absolute perfection. The animations are gorgeous, the story, if cheesy, is very well presented. The sound design is fantastic. I might have a slight complaint about the music, but it fits and doesn't get in the way. Fantastic work.
As has been pointed out, the text is tiny and hard to read. I played in browser, so I was able to zoom in that way, but the text really should be much bigger - you have the space.
I was tempted to write my review with the noir language you were using, but I know I can't even begin to reach the *excellence* on display here. The language had me impressed and laughing for most of the game. It's beautifully camp and perfectly moody.
On top of that, you managed to back the moody language up with a phenomenal visual and audio atmosphere. The endless tunnel and abstract architecture gave me a strong Beginner's Guide vibe (probably helped by the streetlights being a dominant theme :P). I adore that aesthetic it's very rare to see that outside of Davey's work, so thank you for getting it to work so well.
The puzzles aren't the greatest mechanically. They fit in the theme, but they feel unnecessarily contrived. The first two puzzles made sense - they were simple almost tutorial-like devices that gave the player the feeling of participation without breaking the timing (again, Davey Wreden comes to mind). If all the puzzles had been in this style I would not have complained. But the latter two puzzles (the math and code) broke the immersion the rest of the game had so wonderfully kept. I had to google "sawbuck" and the code didn't seem to register the correct answer so I tried a bunch of strategies, tried to work out if SWIFT was referring to a bank, googled some more, then came back and solved it. I think more input-the-right-word puzzles would fit in with your theme, if you do want to create that challenge. Button pressing didn't do much for me.
I love the footsteps, I love the shaders, I love the writing, and I love the atmosphere. If you'd had nothing else in the game I would have been a happy camper. The puzzles added a layer of depth and purpose, and even if they didn't stand up on their own, they contributed to the game as a whole, making it that little bit deeper and more enjoyable. This is a LD gem and I hope you keep on doing stuff like this.
P.S. - all this said, I have no idea what incompatible genres you were combining here.
The sound effects were funny. The level design worked really well for the game. There's not a whole lot to say, since there isn't anything the game does wrong and despite being fun to play and mechanically interesting, it's not particularly complex. You got everything right, polished it up, and made a solid game. Good work.
One thing, though. "Blind-friendly" I can accept, but "visual game" is not a genre.
The theme is pretty great and I imagine I'd enjoy playing something like this as a kid if it came bundled with an old windows installation. The monsters work well enough and the interface is legible. But I think you've restricted the game so much that it just becomes frustrating after a while.
My first run through the game I got lost right off the bat. I ventured a little ways from the card room and was unable to find my way back. A teleport home button, or a minimap, or an arrow pointing back to the card room, would have been appreciated, as would some markers making the card room stand out from the other walls. I understand I could die to teleport back, but there weren't always enemies around.
I restarted the game and this time I only followed one wall so I could find my way back. This worked well enough but I had to backtrack constantly, making the game really slow and tedious. Again, I understand the intention that I'd pick up cards along the way using solitaire rules, but at any given point there's a very small chance I'll actually find the card I need, and if I didn't bring the cards back to the card room I'd forget where I left them because I could not find my way around - everywhere looked the same. Besides - after 6 minutes of play I'd only found 6 or 7 cards.
It's also worth pointing out that since I could drop cards anywhere in the world, the 4 stacks I could create on the wall of the card room seemed a bit pointless.
I think there's a very different approach you could have taken that uses more or less the same mechanics, but would have become a much more compelling experience: - Scrap the card room. Put the solitaire interface in a HUD: 4 spaces for aces on the top, 4 spaces for stacks on the bottom. - Add a LOT more enemies, and put the player in tense arena situations with 5-10 cards left lying around after the dust has settled. Also, change the dungeon layout from a corridor focus to a lot of large rooms with a higher render distance. - Don't let the player drop cards, only pick them up or rearrange them in his HUD. - If the player doesn't (or isn't able to) pick up cards after an encounter, get rid of them after a while.
I know I'm describing a very different game from what you seem to have had in mind. It's something I personally would have enjoyed a lot more, as it wouldn't have forced me to stop the exploring/fighting to run back home after every encounter. It seems other people are enjoying the game you have now more than I am, so it's possible I'm not the target audience here.
What it comes down to for me is that I'm really impressed with your combat and movement mechanics, graphics, and overall aesthetic. I really wish I could enjoy your game more, and it frustrates me that so much good work went in this design direction. There are a lot of good things about this title, so please keep participating. I would love to see what you come up with next LD.
It took me far too long to figure out that the 4 same-colored blocks had to be in a line, not just adjacent. I also needed a bit to work out when blocks would fall, and when they'd stick around. Once I had that down though, this game proved to have a lot of depth and strategy to it. I don't think I ever felt like I needed a speed button; the game's slow but not unreasonably so. Wouldn't hurt to have one though.
One issue I had with the gameplay is that it was difficult to judge distances. I had to do a lot of mental arithmetic to figure out where my snake would fit, and how. I think a visible grid (both on the map and on the snake) might have helped with that, but I'm not sure.
Also, I'd have liked to have a restart button (or known what it is if you have one), since I had to restart the game after every game over and had to return to level 1.
I definitely enjoyed my time with this title. It's got a good idea behind it, with good execution and a fair bit of depth. Good work.
I'm always going to enjoy a game with a dedicated 'Dance' button. I love the map design and the graphics are cute. I initially assumed other tofus were other players, which speaks wonders to your AI design. (I mean, I assume it just picks a random direction to walk in, but still.) There are a few issues with the game though, most notably that it seems to be impossible to win.
I spawned a few times directly on an obstacle, or in the water, and died immediately. Then I found a good strategy, ran from danger zones, and managed to reach the end of the game, where the last zone was deleted. And then I lost the game, because I was in a forbidden zone. There were literally no non-forbidden zones on the map. I understand the game checks for surviving_enemies==0, but I have no ability to interact with my enemies, so if another tofu just happens to survive to the end there is nothing I can do. I just lose.
Some more minor gripes: - the controls feel floaty; I can't ever stop moving and my acceleration is pretty fast. I'm not sure if this is supposed to make me feel more like tofu, but sliding around is always going to be an annoying movement system. - enemies eat you but you can't eat enemies. What's up with that? No justice in this world. - rivers speed you up. I don't really understand why.
To be clear, I did enjoy the game. I liked dancing around and because death was so easy and I could do nothing but wait the whole experience was tense. I definitely felt like I was in a battle royale situation, where everyone was out to get me, and each other; though one in which all I could do was hide. Bit of a pity about the lack of sound but it's LD; what can you do. I'm just a bit bitter because the game arbitrarily told me I lost despite getting to the end.
I disagree with most of the comments before me. Yes, this game is pretty fun, but it doesn't really need a goal, or a target. The mechanics work really well for an endless scroller with high scores as the main incentive. It just needs a bit more of a challenge to really shine in that area.
I think this game would be a lot stronger if: - there was no way to stop accelerating - the harvester increased its max speed over time - there was no way to go backwards on the course - the game ended once either side of your harvester was completely destroyed
Incidentally, the harvester can turn around fully and reverse down the course, but the camera doesn't follow it. So it seems like you had something like this in mind, just didn't implement it fully.
Either way, good work. I löve the faux-3D on the tractor. The music's repetitive, but nice enough for a LD entry. The physics are fun to play with.
There are many 48-hour games that do less and less competently than this does in 6 hours. This is really a great entry. Difficult, yes, but not unfairly so. I might come back and try to get through the last 3 levels later. It did take me a few minutes to learn the controls and mechanics, but the game's simple enough that I don't think it needs a tutorial. Great work, really.
This is wonderful. A slot machine for a match 3 game is a fun and weird idea and your execution is spot-on with loads of polish and a great design all around. The graphics are clean, the mechanics are intuitive and strategically rewarding. I'd say the game's a bit on the easy side, but that's honestly to its benefit; I can only imagine the frustration of having a difficult game be this random.
If I'm being super nitpicky I could point out that when you get a reward the animation for getting all the coins plays out a bit long. On the one hand I know you're trying to emulate the drawn-out reward of getting a jackpot, but I think you've overdone it just a bit. And maybe skipping the quests should carry some sort of cost with it.
But that's all I can really fault the game for. Great work, and keep it up.
P.S. - after writing this comment I came across a bug where after a match was made the pieces wouldn't fall and I'd be left with 3 empty spaces that would move around with the board. This resolved itself when I made my next match. I think it had something to do with de-focusing the game tab.
It's a warm spring day and the birds are chirping outside, which added to the mood a lot. The aesthetic is beautiful, and you've managed to get a lot of aesthetics and feel-good-ness out of some pretty minimal graphics.
On my first attempt through the game, I talked to everyone, then fell off the world into the water. A shallower beach or an invisible wall would have been useful, since I wasn't able to get back up. After restarting the game, I decided I'd like to make all three gregs love me, but as soon as I finished helping emo greg the game ended.
I accidentally skipped a lot of narrator text; I'm used to textboxes in games where the first click skips the text animation, displaying the whole thing, and only once all the text is displayed does a click go to the next line of dialogue. But here I either had to wait through the animation or I didn't get to read the narration.
Aside from those nitpicks I really enjoyed my time here. It's hard to pin down the mood of this game to any one component; the music, graphics, and tasks you're given all contribute to the overall feeling and I think you've done a great job here.
First off, this game is gorgeous and the aesthetic is beautiful and I don't know why you disabled mood because I'd be rating you pretty highly on the atmosphere you've created.
Two real quick and super minor nitpicks I ran into when I started playing:
One. The non-fullscreen window barely doesn't fit on a 1080p screen and there doesn't seem to be a way to resize it
Two. The first thing you see when you start the game is "F" right in the middle of your screen, so instinctively you build a branch, which is an awful use of your first 25 acorns since it does nothing to protect you.
Now back to the compliments.
This game does a lot of things right. The arc on your firing means there's some skill to the aiming and you don't just click on the enemy. The enemies seem to come in ever faster at just the right rate that you always have to be building new defenses; after the start of the game it's not enough to rely on your peashooter. There are enemies to counter every strategy. The game is dripping with polish and good design and I love it.
That said, I still don't entirely understand the point of branches. Sure, if you're trying to defend against high-flying wasps they're necessary, but they're incredibly expensive to deal with one of the few enemies the peashooter works well against. Maybe you could place a catapult on a branch to increase its range, but I didn't get far enough into the game to test that hypothesis.
I'm likely going to go back to this game later and try to find a better strategy than what I've been trying. You've really done some good work here. Thanks for the entry.
P.S. - My high score after a couple tries is 7 minutes 50 seconds.
The controls have a very slight delay to them. That's the only fault I can find with this title. I didn't have any trouble controlling the character; the platforms were large enough and jumps had enough leeway that it wasn't an issue.
The music is genuinely lovely, the concept is creative, the colors do a really good job of conveying how much you don't belong (the color scheme is consistent and beautiful, punctured only by the player character). I'm always a sucker for perspective games, too, and I haven't seen one play with shadows like this. (Though I have to wonder how anything is casting a shadow on a pool of magma...) The checkpoints are generous, the level transitions elegant. I could keep going, this title is very polished.
There was one tiny bug in the shading: in the helix level, standing on the bottom level, the top platform was a slightly different color from the rest. When I got higher this stopped being an issue. I imagine this is something to do with Unity's lighting. This had no real impact on anything, but since everything else about the game is fantastic it felt worth mentioning.
Great work.
The idea has a lot of promise, and it's very novel. I think it's let down by the fact I can only move the paddle in a fixed time to the edges of the screen. If there were, say, 3 or 4 positions along the bottom of the screen I could predict where the ball would be and move there. But as it stands it's more a game of timing than of typing. While the ball's bouncing around I have all the time in the world to type the only word that will do anything, then I just need to press enter at the right moment; a task which is difficult because the paddle moves too slowly to predict accurately where it'll hit.
I lost a couple balls to the collision bug but you know about that already.
It's not a bad game, or a bad concept, but I think the controls need a redesign to make the game more playable.
Still can't seem to run on Linux, seems like you forgot to include some libraries:
```./ANightmareOnTheCannedGoodsAisle-linux.x86: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory```
The dinosaur stuff is pretty abstract but it does fit the LD theme pretty well. The mechanics are solid and polished, the game looks awesome and handles smoothly. It is far too easy to win just by keeping the phone open at all times though; you can steer well enough from what's on either side of the screen. I feel like there'd be a lot more urgency if either you had to look down to text (limiting the view of the road some more), or if you were punished for taking your time/crashing. I was able to get through the first level by gathering up time at the start of the level (until I had like 45 seconds) then just driving to the goal without looking at my phone.
This isn't a major issue, and the game's much more fun if you text and drive like you are in a hurry, but the broken strategy does exist, and I don't know if you intended this. And at the end of the day it's probably better a game like this is too easy than too hard.
A couple aesthetic bugs I ran into: - the voice clip peaks a lot, especially on the "smoooth" recording. And since it plays frequently that does get a bit irritating. - the exit button is stretched on the game over screen; the font isn't properly rendered. - on one playthrough (don't know what caused this, but this was the 45 second one) the space bar seemed to either select a random option on the phone (the phone wasn't up) or just play a random voice clip.
All in all I really enjoyed the game. Thanks for making it, and keep it up.
All in all the game's not bad; the controls felt a bit off and I could run off the screen, but as has been mentioned the core gameplay loop is relatively fun to play. I do have a couple comments that came up while I was playing: - What is going on with Jin? Really. He changes in a single frame from a monk's tunic to a black delivery uniform. He can walk through cars, and time stops while he's in control. I do kinda like the idea of having a much slower and punishment-free experience to break from Jang's panicked and difficult journeys. But I had no idea what was going on thematically. - Why does Jin go back to his station automatically, but Jang has to run back? - No, really, what the hell is Jin? - The hitboxes on the cars seem a bit off, I'm pretty sure I died a few times while Jang was standing right on the dotted line, or before he entered the road. - Jin is apparently a metaphysical motherfucker who can walk under the screen and walk onto Jang's road. And the cars all stop for him, and he can push cars backwards with his MIND. What the hell? - I can walk on top of buildings but under cars. - The music loops, but stops after a set number of loops if I don't switch to Jang soon enough. - What?
In summary. wat.png
I love this entry.
It's far from polished - it's lacking music, there's no tutorial, the game doesn't pause in build mode and half the time it won't even let you enter build mode ("must be on flat ground"). So there's definitely a lot of room for improvement.
But it does the actual vehicle building really well. there are a lot of block options (most of which I didn't understand), and multiple methods of moving the vehicle around. It's missing an option to rotate the blocks (I'd like to have wheels facing sideways!) but there is still a lot of freedom in how you design and control your vehicle.
And at the end of the day, one really good mechanic can make even a buggy and unpolished game really fun to play.
I tend to be awful at these types of games, so my best design was a thruster on the bottom and left of the vehicle which I could use to steer myself above the map. My final score was 44216.
Great work.
I want to like this game, because the trailer is good, the aesthetic is nicely executed, and the mechanics are promising. I can't get past the first level, though, for a couple reasons: - The bombs are unpredictable in what they'll hit. If I place a bomb in a given tile, I'd like anything in the surrounding tiles to be effected. On multiple occasions, enemies weren't hit by explosions that felt like they should've reached them. Just increase the range of the explosions if nothing else. - The level has a lot of what seem to be dead ends, traps, or red herrings. You need to have a full understanding of things you can't see until you're screwed. This wouldn't necessarily be a fault; exploring and learning a level can be rewarded, except that: - Death is easy, frequent, and sets you back longer than I'd like.
In a way this unforgiving nature adds to the aesthetic and brings back memories of older ideas of game design. But it doesn't make for a fun experience in a Ludum Dare entry. I don't see why water should kill you rather than stop you moving over it. I don't see what explicit and unpredictable traps add to the game. I guess at the end of the day it's a subjective thing, and I really wish I could like this game more because everything else about it is really well done (the art, the audio, the aesthetic, the mechanics design). But I can't get far enough into it.
In the spirit of keeping grading fair, you should probably keep hosting the version you had at submission hour. Just add a second link and mark the new version as "post LD" or the like.
With the changes you made I was able to complete the game pretty quickly (I knew the route from my previous play-through). Some of the design decisions still get on my nerves but that's entirely subjective. Seeing the radius of the bombs helped a lot; killing the skeletons is still difficult but I managed to finish the game without having to do so.
Regarding making the bomb avoid walls, you could probably do a quick raycast between the bomb and anything it's supposed to hit. Or lock the bomb&explosion to tiles, and draw explosions explicitly on nearby free tiles, bomberman style. But I understand that there's a limit on how many things you can fit in your scope during the compo.
Oh, and since I forgot to mention it last time, the trailer for this game is really well done.
How I've usually seen the after-deadline rule interpreted is that if people are physically or realistically unable to complete your game because of a bug, then you can fix the bug in the first few hours after submission and update the game. For anything less major: aesthetic, quality of life, re-balancing, etc., or anything done well after LD is over, the standard I've usually seen and followed is to have both versions available with a quick note explaining the changes.
I wasn't able to finish the game because I got two sets of double saws, after I'd already placed single saws on two of the final three levels. So I wasn't able to finish the game. But I did get through the entire deck, except for the one double saw card that was impossible to place.
The animation on the player is fantastic, and the general aesthetic - though it's split down the middle with a half classic flash game, half old windows solitaire background - works quite well.
The game could also probably do with some better labels on the "exit" and "restart" buttons - I assumed the reset button was a "draw a new hand" button and lost a lot of progress.
Aside from the randomly unfinishable scenario though, I do really like this game. Between the dash, the double jump, the well-balanced levels, and the tight platforming controls, I was able to get through some fairly ridiculous challenges.
I like how the last three levels of the game have to be finished in one go; it gives the ending a bit of a boss level feeling. And I like how the spikes and saws have various tiers of difficulty.
If there's anything I would add to the game it'd be a few metacards: redraw hand, discard card, skip one level. Have them come up very rarely to get the player out of particularly impossible situations. But that's a consideration for if you ever want to expand on the game; it's solid as it is.
All in all, I'm impressed. This is a very polished and satisfying title to play. Keep up the good work.
P.S. - While the other dungeon solitaire isn't as good a game, it's probably more deserving of the title than you are. I mean, where are there dungeons here?
A couple notes about the controls: -Since you're using a lot of rectangular platforms, a grid-based movement system probably wouldn't hurt here (in the style of a step platformer) - Given a system like this, it's imperative that when I press a button the character starts moving, and when I let go of the button the character stops moving. On the exact frame of the input, I should see the character react. For some reason you have almost a second delay on any inputs which makes the game really frustrating to play - Regarding jumping, what you seem to be doing is checking if the spacebar is down, then increasing player velocity if the character is standing on something. This allows me to jump up towards a platform, keep spacebar held down, and get launched up very high, potentially breaking the level. You should only ever check for jumping on the frame I press spacebar, not on every frame it's held down. - I think you used Unity's physics engine for this, though I can't be certain. There is basically no good excuse for using physics on a player character. No excuse at all in a platformer. I don't understand why Unity encourages it; half the platformers people put here from that engine have these exact issues.
Really nice game; not an uncommon mechanic but I like the unixy aesthetic. There were a few spots where the controls didn't feel perfectly spot on, but I was able to get to the end of the game without much of an issue. The ending was pretty clever, too, merging the mechanics with the story in a pretty satisfying way. That said, I think the game crashed before the ending played out in full. After the 'did you just...' line displayed and I pressed enter, the game closed. This didn't seem intentional.
I was expecting that at some point in the game you'd have the letters jumbled and force the player to unscramble them to get what they need. The closest I saw to this was when "jump 3 dash 4" could be written as "jump 43 dash". Having everything appear more or less in order in the level did communicate what you wanted the player to do, but also removed part of the challenge.
The writing in the game wasn't really its strong point. The relationship with comma felt a bit awkward and unnatural. It didn't hurt my enjoyment of the game, but it's worth mentioning.
I really liked that many levels had multiple routes and backup letters lying around. It's rare to see a platformer with branching paths in a LD entry.
All in all, I'm impressed, and I really enjoyed myself. I wish I could see the full ending, but I got enough out of the game without it.
I went with the black orb, and read through to the end. This is really not my literary genre - I'm a skeptic and atheist so reading about souls and faux-immortality didn't strike home. And probably for that reason I found the ending really unsatisfying. At the risk of spoiling the ending, there's no closure as to what the thing is, it's just described as "inexpressible". The others have words, but this didn't.
I don't know how much of this was yours and how much was borrowed from the public domain, so it's hard to rate this fairly from a Compo perspective, this feels like it belongs more in the Jam. For what it's worth the wordsmithing is compelling both in the weird introverted descriptive things (which did make me hate the protagonist, but objectively they're just well written) and in the more direct "here's what happens" adventure game stuff.
I would have also liked closure on the people in the cottage and garden. I didn't understand what role they were supposed to play, or what they were supposed to symbolize. But again, not my genre, there's probably something I'm missing.
The puzzles were surprisingly compelling and logical. The world was small enough I could navigate it easily and find all the items I needed easily as well. I did get a bit lost after I picked up the orb (tried putting it in the cottage, boathouse, sea, brook, and outhouse). I think you could have given a bit more direction there. But it was the last real puzzle so it's not the end of the world.
I tend to avoid word-heavy games, and I tend to avoid supernatural/spiritualist literature. But this pulled me in, for some reason. Nice work.
I cleared one memory board and got 1010 points before dying on my last run. Doing multiple things games are difficult to do in a Ludum Dare, what with feature creep and building what amounts to several games in the span of one short jam. But you've done good work here.
I do have a complaint about the sluggishness of the game, though. It's not enough to break the experience, but it does get in the way. The memory matching has a very long animation and often -due to the delays- the game would turn off a different pair than I was trying to select. I eventually got used to and compensated for the delays, but I would've preferred if when I clicked a tile it immediately turned over (or had an animation <0.2s). The shooting bit also suffers from slight sluggishness and a general floaty feeling. Again, it's not as bad as it could be; for your first LD this isn't bad. But because of the camera angle and slow bullets and not-entirely-clear hitboxes, it was difficult for me at first to aim properly at the rabbits. I would have liked to either have clear-set columns that the rabbits would travel along, and I could jump between, or a wider projectile (like with the spread power-up, but all the time), or faster projectiles.
These are all relatively minor complaints though, and pretty subjective at the end of the day. I would have liked a snappier game, but this isn't bad. The game's pretty well-balanced, the music and visuals are very pleasant; I enjoyed myself. Thanks.
When I saw the bomb mechanics I initially assumed they would get irritating. And they do rely on trial and error, which isn't a great mechanic. But somehow you managed to balance the game in a way where I could use the bombs without much trouble. Good work.
Obviously would've liked to see audio (I assume there wasn't any, and there wasn't just an issue with the playback). You might want to disable scoring for audio for a silent game.
One bug I noticed is that I could unreliably fire shots through the laser gates. I don't think that was intentional, but I got through a couple puzzles that way.
The writing in the game is its strongest suit. I wish I had a bit more time to read it, without constantly racing the clock. I like the general vibe and I like the quotes you've written.
I hesitate to brand this game a roguelite, or a roguelike, or a god-game. Mechanically, it's really nothing more than a maze with a time limit, shader, and some collectibles along the way. Not that there's anything wrong with that. As I said, the writing carries this title - having simple mechanics is very much justified and desirable. I just don't think you need to up-sell your game with the genres you mentioned (though I understand that you were trying to fit under LD41's theme here).
The graphics weren't particularly difficult to read, but if I could change anything I'd like the exits and collectibles to contrast a little more from the walls and floors. I skipped past most of level 4 because I didn't notice I was walking into an exit.
My final score was 2190 years with a peak of 3435 followers.
The writing was nice, and the game surprisingly difficult at first. I like what you did with the last character especially.
I would normally point out some flaws with the game. And I guess I'm not too keen on the music, or how it resets on each menu. But honestly, the whole thing is pretty polished: well balanced, well written, doesn't overstay its welcome, and doesn't have any real issues that came up during my playthrough. Nice work.
OK so yes what everyone's been saying is true, this game is far too hard. But that's a very shallow criticism, and I don't think anyone's talked about the root of the problem yet:
First things to get out of the way, I adore everything about this game - the idea is brilliant, the graphics are clean, the mechanics are weirdly intuitive despite being something I've never seen before. The music's atmospheric and plain good. All around this should be a fantastic game.
There's a really frequently repeated adage that how satisfying a difficult game is is tied to how long, after a failure or death, it takes to get back to what the player was doing. I know it's been said a million times but it's worth repeating. Because this game completely fails on this front, and this alone has turned this from one of the best games I'm going to play this LD to one of the most frustrating.
To start, the game punishes you for unfair reasons. I can dash, with the volume well above the required 3 bars. But if, _after I've pressed the shift key_ the volume drops to below mine, I die. I quit the game on level 4, because you gave me what amounts to one or two frames to make each jump, then asked me to time, with the same precision, a fall onto another platform. I was able to do this twice, and died immediately afterwards both times.
Once you do get fail, the game just revels in your failure, making the player feel like shit. First you get a giant red "YOU FAILED" for a good chunk of time, along with a sound effect that completely kills the mood of the game and drives itself into your skull after the ntieth death. Then, you get sent all the way back to start of the level, with the music back at the initial state. So now you get to repeat all those difficult jumps and wait for half a minute to get back to the one part of the song that lets you progress and try again.
The switches should act as checkpoints. The game should let you take 2 or 3 hits before it sends you back. Or at the very least, the music you've set should stick around when you're sent back to start. If you feel like this would trivialize the game too much, add a setting to toggle "baby mode/hardcore mode" on and off.
The third level was somewhat cleverly designed. The one long fall you had to make was possible because the song playing gave you a few seconds of persistent level2 volume to make the fall safely. The fourth level, at least until you hit a switch, is just impossible bullshit. You can't consistently make a _frame-perfect fall_.
I desperately want you to make a post-LD update to this game, because it does SO MANY THINGS SO WELL. But you need to: - get rid of the timed falls and frame-perfect jumps on the 4th level, or wherever else they appear later in the game. - add an easy mode where switches (and the orb) are checkpoints. OR give the player 3+ hitpoints each level. - get rid of (or add an option to get rid of) the TOO LOUD death screen. The player should be in control of the character at most 2 frames after their death. And change the sound effect to something less grating, more smooth. - get rid of the double-spike in the dash volume. Only count dashes as failure if the volume's wrong when the shift key is pressed. - maybe let the player make noise a frame (or a few frames) before the volume spike happens. This isn't crucial but it would turn this into more of a rhythm game and could add some nice flow. And please mention @me if you upload a post-LD update. I would love to play it.
So yeah. I'm really frustrated because this is a fantastic and amazing game that I can't enjoy because you failed at the most basic principle of platformer design. Please fix it.
P.S. - the game reads inputs when it's not in focus, like when I tried to type this review without losing all my progress. But since I can't pause the game, or make it ignore my spaces, it's just making the game over noise every few seconds and driving me insane.
The game's cute, the music's nice and despite being repetitive and upbeat it never got irritating. The writing's a bit flat but it does the job, and after a few minutes of play I was able to figure out the robots' preferences and the rest of the game I didn't make any major mistakes.
As others have pointed out, the game is a bit slow. The messages themselves moving slowly wasn't an issue; I'm on a touchpad so this actually helped. But getting a reasonable score on either side takes many, many messages, and a lot of time. I got to the stage where the model bot would accept flirts and had a beating heart, but the sports bot's hearts are growing way too slowly.
A lot of LD games of this style (learn the rules by trial and error) run into the issue of having unclear rules that are hard to categorize. For the most part, though, your adherence to clear tropes makes it obvious which message belongs to which category (except for the TV and pizza message). I appreciate that.
So really, if the game had ended after both bots had 15 or 20 hearts, I would've had a great opinion of it. As it stands, it's still good, just drags on much longer than it should. Nice work.
Most of what should be said seems to have been said already, and you seem to value hasty comments so I won't stick around too long.
- I would have liked to have the second platform be one you had to depress/offend/make leave, since it was set up to look like you should remove a blockade rather than jump over it, and having that variety might have added a lot of extra depth to the game. - Some checkpoints/acknowledgement of progress would have been nice, rather than starting from the start after every mistake - the lack of music really detracts from the cute mood here. Even a quick recording of you humming a tune would have helped a lot.
You might want to flag the game as unfinished (as opposed to Compo/Jam) so it doesn't show up in the list
Today I learned that `JUMP` is a difficult word to type.
This game is fantastic. Lots of polish, a consistent artstyle with a very well-designed UI, and most importantly a very compelling set of mechanics. I like the screenshake when you mistype a word, I like the keyboard sound effects, and I think the boss at the end of each level is a great idea.
As far as complaints go, I might have liked jumps to be a little easier to make; typing the word is hard enough, timing when to hit 'enter' is a frustrating challenge. The game seems to lack the little bit of invisible platform that most platformers provide (so you can jump after you've run off the physical edge), and it's additionally frustrating to be stopped in the middle of the fall and asked to type another word before you fall to your death. The music's fairly repetitive, and there doesn't seem to be a way to mute it (a 'mute' command would have done nicely :P)
Initially I was a little confused as to why there were `WALK` and `STOP` commands. This seemed to remove some of the quick reactions that a runner like this usually requires. But I was quickly convinced that stopping didn't actually give me more time to type, and it proved particularly useful when I needed to pause the game.
I consider this one of the best games I've played this LD. I look forward to seeing what you do next Compo. Thanks for the entry!