The Void by Linus Lindberg 2022-10-04T06:16:34Z
Pretty impressive for compo submission. Great job. I like the use of theme granting upgrades.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Astrydax
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | The SUMmoning | compo | 1.75 | 2.00 | 2.50 | 1.25 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | ||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Didn't finish | extra | ||||||||||
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | Reboot | extra |
Pretty impressive for compo submission. Great job. I like the use of theme granting upgrades.
Nice. really enjoyed the vibes. Solid entry.
Really good audio, Felt like I was back in a 90s arcade playing Raiden as kid. Really nice Developer. Graphics are cute and humorous.
I enjoyed it. Almost felt like I was playing Old School Rune Scape at the Motherlode mine. Theme this time was indeed a bit challenging. Congrats on finishing on time solo!
Interesting. I love the concept of using cards for a tower defense style game.
Interesting game, I really appreciated the mechanics and strategy to playing. You can tell care was taken into creating the art for the game.
Hey ya'll great job on finishing the jam. Good audio, controls feel good. Love the little hedgehogs.
Good graphics. Controls were good. It most have been challenging making a maze generation in such a small time frame.
Really solid submission. Good gameplay loop, amazing audiovisuals. Mood is really cohesive to set the tone. Only suggestion I have is it appears your physics material on the player/objects has friction turned on and you'll get stuck on walls while trying to move beside them. I enjoyed my playthrough.
Absolutely amazing game. One of the best I've played so far. Amazing audio and art. Character controls are very tight and responsive. Level design is great as well. Very impressed.
Awesome game. Seriously good game mechanics.
@turegrappa Thanks! I chose the art style because well I'm not an artist and minimalism is all I can pull off lol XD.
Jokes aside I followed a guide similar to [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW1oRou_WzQ) (can't locate the right one) tutorial last year for Affinity Designer (fantastic software thats far cheaper than adobe tools) and it's actually super easy to make passable graphics for non-artist devs with affinity designer. The isometric tools make it so simple.
@leorid Difficulty tuning in this type of game was actually a lot less intuitive than it seemed. I cut like 4 or 5 floors I had designed, added extra lives, and reduced the hit points on the hit point box. To my surprise, doing all these things actually did very little to change the difficulty (measured by how much time remained in an optimal run). I didn't want to cut further floors as the final result is the minimum required floors to have the 3 puzzles that made the cut. I came to realize its important to have enough floor real-estate to see the compounding effects of good player optimization actually pay off.
The hit point box serves as an additive flow gate, where the first cursor gets through the slowest and all future cursors get through slightly faster than the last. The issue with this is even though the gate is additive, there's a second bottleneck as the first cursor through the gate performs an essential role of holding down one of the buttons and still remains the weakest link holding back the effectiveness of all future cursors.
While the hit point change had quite an impact on only the first cursor that made it through it did little to affect the overall difficultly of the whole game.
At the end of the day the best thing I could do to change the difficulty without losing any of the remaining puzzles would be to adjust the time for each live (which exponentially reduces difficulty as just adding a single second adds a total of 12 seconds, 1 for each life, and in turn each subsequent cursor gets to build upon the extra time the previous cursor had with increasing efficiency). But I wanted to keep the game inline with the 10 second theme.
I did want to change the size of the main cursor to stick out more wants the chaos swarm of cursor starts to set in. Even I was having a hard time keeping track of my Active Cursor in development. If I keep building the project now that I have less of a time constraint this will probably be the first feature I add.
I really appreciate the feedback and thank you so much for taking the time to play.
@nash Thanks so much for the play! I wanted to add a floor counter but ended up running out of time. The choice to make the floors have colors was actually just to provide better anchoring for the player. When all the floors were the same color it was actually hard to tell if you went up or down or rebooted to the first floor. After adding the shake effect and reboot soundfx it was a little more noticeable.
In the first version this was quite an issue. I was unable to have any delay in the gameplay loop whatsoever or the replays would break. Once a cursor "dies" the next live MUST start immediately. This is even causing a bug with the very first life due to the delay the opening dialogue creates. This is a pretty heavy design limitation I hope to be able to fix in future updates.
@leorid there were puzzles that had you going back down that ended up getting cut, they are left in to go back down to collect extra points for a high score since you really only need to hold a button for maybe a second or two, just enough time for future cursor to go up stairs.
I really like the point you make designing the puzzles to where future cursor don't actually need to visit other floors. That would have been MUCH better design. I'll take you up on that for future updates!
Great graphics and mood. Cool fusion of ASCII and Neon. Got my butt kicked trying to beat this one. Really enjoyed it.
Top notch vibes. You did an amazing job with such a limited color pallet in such a short time.
I liked the kawaii spider. Great mood cohesion and great art. Took me a few tries to understand how to play. Great job finishing the jam.
As you said the game feels really polished apart from UI. The audio is super punchy and having good firing sounds really go a long way great job there. Having grown up on Asteroids I was a bit thrown off by the controls expecting Yaw and thruster controls and had a hard time adjusting.
Great submission, congrats on finishing!
really cool game, a bit complicated. Love the graphics and vibe.
I love that you've turned LD into a game series. Fantastic graphics. Mood is top notch. Always enjoy a nice Graphic Adventure game.
Interesting game. You did a really good job of making everything cohesive in giving that eerie feel. Good pacing and progressive difficulty.
Fantastic entry! Top notch audio/art. Controls feel great. The mood is very cohesively eerie. The entire experience feels very well polished. The low range point light is such a good touch to really drive home the "bottom of the ocean' feeling. Innovative use of the theme in the sonar mechanic.
Good audio. Really liked the spotlight effect very good touch to spice the design up.
Ha ok this game is hard. Great work. Wish I could make it further in the game.
Very Relaxing. Enjoyed my time.
Cute game. Really liked the graphics and you put together a really appealing splash scene.
Seriously Beautiful Game. Good use of theme. I always try to give some helpful feedback. I'm not sure if there's audio or if it's bugged for me but it did feel like it really needed some sound. I think the game could benefit from having some checkpoints, I had a hard time making it too very far. It's a little unclear where the hitboxes for the lighting actually is at times.
Seriously solid submission and congrats to your team on finishing the Jam!
Great job. Congrats on finishing the jam.
Pretty impressive as a compo submission. I couldn't imagine trying to make all those assets in such a short period of time. Good take on a classic.
Very simple concept. Still fun to play.
Wow extremely original. I went in blind and at first I thought it was just going to be a cute song creation tool. Then the music notes came falling back down toward me and it turned into a rhythm game. I did have a bit of a hard time realizing when the measure would start loop for each recording... I probably need to work on my rhythm.
Blown away that this game is made entirely in preact! Well done, really enjoyed it!
oops
@kroltan @pupirka @caz-creates-games @worldofmush @mrwarranty @evoleo @flying-dog-fish @saprina289
Hmmm the embed was working when I first uploaded I thought. My apologies, here is the itchi.io link, it's also updated on the game post. https://astrydax.itch.io/the-summoning
@kroltan Yeah, I ended up rushing out the final deployment getting down to the wire and not having sleep. Typically my design philosophy is anit-tutorial. I like the super meat boy approach of designing levels to only have 1 very specific solution depending on a single mechanic that isn't directly conveyed to the player instead leaving them to figure it out and building from there.
thanks a lot for all the feedback and help you provided here.
Which categories should I have opted out of? I didn't really realize that was a thing.