Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Astralore
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | Astrum Dare | jam | 507 | 3.46 | 3.10 | 2.93 | 3.39 | 4.15 | 3.82 |
This was very fun! My score was 15500. I really appreciated the complexity of the applications of a bunch of simple mechanics, and the huge amount of thought that went into each puzzle and the arrangement of them to teach the mechanics. Great work!
I downloaded the version linked on itch, but when I run the .jar I get errors. :(
Do you have an idea for what might help me become able to run it?
the dome jni error.PNG
Wow this is so adorable!! The sound effects fit in nicely with the feel of the game. I kind of wish there was a bit more challenge - perhaps if the human dropped things at a faster rate as time goes on? (Maybe the game does do this and I hadn't noticed, though!) I love being a little ghost that can fly through things though! :ghost:
Nice concept! I agree that it would be fun for the spawn rate to increase over time, or something else to make it feel like it is ramping up. :slight_smile:
It was great fun. I always dreamed of owning a 40-floor 5-star hotel... It'd be taller than any building in my region!
I think it would have been nicer to have some time controls to let you speed up the game, so you could play it more actively instead of always letting it run. It also was a little small without the ability to resize the window or fullscreen it. I'd be looking forward to any new bits you add to it!
I also had the issue where no hotel or instructions show up. It went away after I started the game for the third time or so :thinking:
infinite hotel.PNG
What a fun concept, I had a good time playing. It seems like you could do a lot with expanding the mechanics from here! What I would appreciate the most is some kind of info at the start about what it takes to break a joint, so I could have a better understanding of what kind of structure would survive. :slight_smile:
I also had trouble figuring out how to spin the pieces until I looked at the comments. This is a nice and relaxing game, though as others have said, I think it would be even better if the difficulty ramped up as you progressed through the levels. It sounds like your original idea would have been cool too!! :smiley_cat:
Lots of complexity in this, great job! :smile: I was very confused at first and thought the ice blocks were ramps.
Very difficult! My highest score was 12 seconds. I love the aesthetic, great work! :smile:
I had a really great time playing this, you did a great job getting in so much complexity! I had some trouble with some of the hitboxes and sometimes couldn't get the cards to drop into the slots for charging or upgrading. I really liked upgrading stuff and chaining together multipliers :D
I hope you got a good sleep and I'm looking forward to reading the description!
Very fun! My final high score was 4403 :smile:
I really appreciated the dialogue skip ability and also the visual cue of each ship's lasers charging. I kind of liked having only one life, so if you do end up adding more it might be cool to gate it with a difficulty - as in, 3 lives: casual, 2 lives: moderate, 1 life: challenging. Overall very fun and a nice amount of polish. :blush:
This has a very fascinating mechanic set! I would really like to see it combined with more tasks to accomplish. If you continue working on it and add other metrics, maybe something to gather or materials to use for repair, it could provide a great motivation for players to continue and try to reach new locations. :D
This game is great! We managed to survive after several attempts. I want to point out a couple of bugs that showed up when we played it, though.
First, when you're in the train station, every time we bought a ticket, the ticket would disappear if clicked. It works fine if you drag the ticket into the "Use" box, but if you just click it, it seems to vanish and can't be put into use or inventory. I'm not sure where it's going to, maybe it's too small for me to find after dropping it. (I had to restart when this happened)
Second, there's something a little off about the collision, I think. Sometimes you can just sort of glitch through the dirt walls and then you just float upward until there's a gap in the dirt where you stop and are deposited into the gap. Which makes it easier to cheat at the game, but defeats the purpose a little bit haha.
As others have mentioned, the story text is REALLY small and hard to read.
Lastly, after we completed the game, whether by winning or losing, the cursor vanished for us every time. We had to exit the game and restart it to start another run.
(Also: Is there any point to the glowsticks? :thinking: We just left them at the bottom since you don't really need light haha.)
Great use of the theme! Enjoyable survival game. :smiley_cat:
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention we were playing on fullscreen, with quite a large monitor even. Specifically, I mean the story text is very small - all of the other in-game text is fine.
I played through approximately 15 days before I had to go to sleep. :sob:
I appreciate the effort that went into writing so many scenes that indicate varying levels of success! :smirk: That's pretty cool though they seemed to get repetitive quickly (Something that might be solved by having a smaller brothel, so you aren't burning through the scenes so fast.)
Like others have said, the gameplay feels repetitive and a lot about matching numbers. I think one way to easily expand on the strategy aspect would be to have a larger pool of random clients. Right now, the player always gets the same group of clients every day until they buy a girl and vanish forever. It would be more interesting to have a larger group of clients that patronize the brothel but aren't there every night. (Like, if you had 32 regular clients but only eight show up on a given day and it's randomized who they will be.) Otherwise you just end up pairing the same people over and over until they leave.
I also noticed that approximately 25% of the time, the text would tell me a girl leveled up a skill but this wasn't reflected in her stats afterward? Most of the time, it worked fine though.
One last thing! The "EXIT" button on the GUI is in a really awkward place. I was constantly reminding myself not to click it, because it feels like a location for an "OKAY/SUBMIT" button. Consider moving it to the top of the screen?
You guys did a great job with this! I hope you'll expand on it in the future! :smiley_cat:
Great start! I liked arranging the turrets although I'd definitely like to see more info on that screen, with various power levels or rates of fire visible. I also agree about the usability fixes like being able to place more than one of the same kind of turret without clicking back.
I also was shot at from offscreen a lot, and never saw any enemies. My turrets couldn't target them, so mostly I slowly floated around and lost hp. It would be cool for this part to get more attention in the future, adding more enemies, polishing the controls, and adding objectives. :blush:
Great job on the visuals and sound effects of this game! Music was a nice choice, very stressful haha. I thought I beat the game... but then I got locked into airplane mode!! Oops, haha.
The game closes once you reach the end, which I feel isn't ideal because you have to restart it to play again. This might be a style choice, I suppose, but it's a little frustrating. Also, the text in the beginning that explains the game appears veeeeery slowly and is not skippable as far as I can tell, which is frustrating when you are doing multiple playthroughs. :thinking:
As some other commenters agreed I think it would be really nice if there were instructions, and a little feedback when you have interacted with stuff especially when planting. A little green dot in the pot maybe? If the progress bars were larger and more prominent that could also help people figure it out fast. :slight_smile:
Overall I had a good time! I played it over and over until I got very surprised that I had won :smile:
The salubrity metric and randomization were a bit confusing. It was difficult at times to figure out exactly why some action was having a particular effect. I did really like the extra facts in between scenes, though, a nice touch! :smiley_cat:
The bananas and little flowers are very cute. I liked the slime moving around you but it was difficult to understand what it meant for my movement! As far as I can tell it doesn't get in the way. It would be cool if the bananas kept spawning so that players could keep rushing around trying to get them and then get back to the exit before their greed fills the screen. c:
Fun combination! I like games where you also have a logistical role as well as combat. It would be cool to see it expanded after the jam. It would be nice if right-click rotated the pieces? That way it could also be played with only a mouse.
This was a fun tiny level! I thought the platforming design was well thought out. It's too bad you didn't get to make everything you planned, but it's sad to sell yourself short in the description. Everybody has to compromise for jams, maybe it'd be cool if you just mentioned it's one small level and let the level stand on its own?
I really like the itch description, and also really liked your justification for not adding sound. :D
I'm not sure how I feel about the concept, but it's certainly unique! If you'd like more people to play it, maybe you should host it on itch.io? People will find it more immediately trustable than a google drive link. :slight_smile:
I found the controls a little difficult, kind of dizzying. I also think it is very much too easy to win at the very beginning, and too difficult at the end. Possibly if the world started with more people and the spawn rate was decreased, it would be more competitive at both ends of the time range?
Otherwise I thought it was well-put-together. Good work!
Amusing game! I'm not that good at this sort of game, I can't even pass Wave 4... But good execution and interesting choice to make the "space" theme equivalent to a health bar!
I played through this several times, but I found that every time I started over, the game got more and more laggy. The dragon's expression icons being a little clearer might be nice also! (I couldn't even tell they were changing at first, haha.)
Man, this feels like a game that I would have played in my childhood. And probably lost at a lot. Great job with the level of polish on this!!
That was fun. It was very difficult but I think I managed to make it through both levels! When I ran out of time on the second one it flashed a different screen and returned me to the main menu so if that is how it is when you finish the second level it might be nice to make it a little more clear that you have won :blush: I also would have appreciated a little description of how the game functions at the start, with the shield timeouts and such.
Overall very nice and challenging! Great work! :smile:
I felt like this was a really clever interpretation of the theme! The bit where you were choosing what to forget was pretty great too. I feel like the gameplay ended up feeling more frustrating than intended, though. :sweat_drops: I didn't like waiting for the blue screen to go away every time I forgot to forget haha. Maybe make the blue screen take a little less time?
I'm also really glad it didn't have a bad ending, which I expected it would...!! :smiley_cat:
This was cute and fun! It asks for an audio rating, but as far as I can tell, there's no audio? I love all the floating text, though! :smiley_cat:
This was really neat, the different options for transit make for some unusual strategies I'm still figuring out. Some of the numbers on the smaller sectors were a little hard to read, but I love the overall aesthetic.
Very good work! I'll be trying for a higher score. :)
When I go to open the .rar it says 'the archive is an unknown format or damaged' :cry:
I would like to play your game but I cannot get it to run! When I download the rar and attempt to extract it it says "The archive is in an unknown format or damaged." :( Could you maybe check it and re-upload?
This took us a lot of attempts (damn liars kept tripping us up!) but we did finally beat it!! Very amusing and well-balanced game, I can think of nearly nothing to critique! Perhaps turning the "Space" indicator green once all the other criteria are in the green? So that all icons can be green when you win, which feels satisfying to the player. (Though this is more of a style choice than anything else.)
Thank you very much all, your comments and all the nice things said are very appreciated and encouraging! :blush:
@volt450 If you mean the first puzzle, did you try validating it anyway? Either that, or if you work on it for 3 minutes it should advance you anyway. The game is made so that the plot will continue even if you can't solve any of the puzzles, and they also get easier over the course of the story. :slight_smile:
Oh no @volt450 ! :sob: Well I'm very glad you had fun anyway :smile: Thank you for playing!
@redrosewings thank you very much :blush: