Protoplanet by Benjamin-L 2015-12-15T06:09:00
I did a windows build using the MinGW rust compiler instead of MSVC. Hopefully this will work better if you don't have the visual studio runtime.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → benjamin-l
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | 👥 | The Miracle Mineral | jam | 1590 | 3.05 | 1.94 | 2.15 | 3.57 | 3.40 | 2.33 | 3.86 | ||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Keep IT Alive | jam | 1089 | 3.55 | 3.23 | 3.52 | 3.42 | 3.90 | 3.97 | 3.63 | ||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | 👥 | All You Can Eat | jam | 745 | 3.25 | 3.38 | 3.15 | 3.50 | 3.13 | 3.41 | 2.77 | 3.33 | |
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | Rusted Robots | jam | 645 | 3.34 | 3.13 | 3.20 | 3.18 | 3.13 | 2.63 | 2.86 | ||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Interplanetary Billiards | jam | 4.00 | 4.33 | 3.66 | 4.00 | 4.66 | 3.33 | 3.66 | 3.33 | |||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Slime Mold Revenge | jam | 560 | 3.23 | 3.13 | 3.43 | 3.60 | 3.30 | 3.21 | 3.55 | 60 | ||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Protoplanet | jam | 692 | 3.13 | 2.64 | 2.81 | 3.45 | 3.52 | 1.75 | 3.25 | 49 |
I did a windows build using the MinGW rust compiler instead of MSVC. Hopefully this will work better if you don't have the visual studio runtime.
I (hopefully) fixed the low FPS issues by adding culling to the shadow and object rendering.
Very nice graphics and audio. My main complaint is that the FOV is very buggy but overall I liked it.
Very elegant design. It could use some harder levels though.
This is very well done! You did an incredibly good job creating a mood here through both the text and the sound. I really liked the way that you had to guess what various people would reasonably say although I think it could have been a bit more in depth with this part. This is one of the best submissions I have played so far. Great job!
This is very well polished and probably the best one I have seen so far. The graphics, audio, and mechanics are all great. It is difficult, but also very fun. Great job!
This is a very good game! I love the concept of using shadow puppets.
I am trying to run this on Linux with "love ./source/Neko.love" but I get this error:
main.lua:542: attempt to call field 'getDimensions' (a nil value)
It actually doesn't destroy specifically the projectiles shot by that human, only the ones in the path of your projectile. I agree that this needs to be tweaked a bit though to make it more clear. Part of the problem is that the projectiles destroyed only disappear after the projectile you fired is gone because my implementation of turns is quite broken.
Overall this game is very good. The audio gets kind of repetitive after the first few levels but I like the idea of playing one note of the song after every move.
Wow! The audio in this game is very well done. I really like the dynamic effect when you transform. Great job!
The graphics are great!
I liked the fast pace of this game combined with the permadeath mechanics and easy death (surprise: I like roguelikes, although mostly the text based kind). The bullets looping around the world was a nice touch, but in general, I felt like the combat was a little simplistic. More variety would have been nice. The homing missiles are great though. The artwork looks very good and I liked the music. Overall, this was pretty good and felt polished. I got to level 6-3/3. One more thing: the level dislpay is a little confusing. Nice job!
Wow! This game is really good! It's really hard, but also very simple, and very fun. Nice job!
This is a really cool game, and quite difficult. I love the animation at the beginning of each level, and I enjoyed how you had to balance the different factors that could cause you to lose (not combining things, being too slow, putting too many things in one place, etc.). The music and tutorial are also quite nice. I did find it really hard, although I'm not sure how much of that was me and how much was randomness.
@anuke The main library we used was [quicksilver](https://github.com/ryanisaacg/quicksilver), which I didn't really have any prior experience with. It was easy to set up and use, although there are definitely some missing parts and things I would do differently. I'm thinking of trying to make a new library for next time. Rust gamedev is way easier now than it was a few years ago, and not having to write all the lower level graphics code is quite nice for getting things together quickly. You can take a look at our code [here](https://git.chronicembetterment.org/ld42/), although it's *very* messy.
This is pretty funny. I didn't figure out a good strategy, but the sound effects are very disturbing. Nice job!
This is a really cool game, although I ended up embedding myself in the walls pretty frequently. It looks like this:
I'm using the web build, which may be the problem.
This was really fun! I love the amount of polish.
The mechanic of trying to isolate the blobs on one side while avoiding trapping yourself is pretty cool. It would possibly be better with more easily predictable movement of the enemies though. I also ran into a situation where I had split the field in two pieces, but neither of them fell down, so I was stuck. scrot.jpg Other than that this is a cool game. I really like the music and sounds!
I love the concept of this! It's pretty fun to play, although I definitely feel a lack of control. Nice job!
It was a little hard to figure out what's going on at first, but this was a fun game. I feel like it got impossible after a point, but that might just be me. Great graphics and music!
This is pretty fun. I was a little confused at the beginning as to whether I was supposed to save people or drop them to their deaths, but once I figured it out it was pretty fun. Nice job!
Nice and simple game! I had fun playing it, but I have a few suggestions. There should probably be an easier way to retry after dying, since you can die relatively quickly, and going back to the menu is a pain. I also think maybe the music should keep playing when you restart, but this may just be because I die very fast. Along that line, the difficulty seems a *little* high, although not too bad. I was also not sure what the incentive is to hit the pirates. It probably increases the score, but that mechanic is not very transparent.
@tattomoosa there are a few other endings, but they're related to specific chains of emails rather than to the general scam stuff. We definitely would have wanted to add more content and results from replying to scams if we had more time.
Do you have a screenshot of the graphical issues you're getting? I know about a few issues currently, but I don't think they match up to what you described.
This game is fun, and surprisingly difficult given the simple set of mechanics. Being able to push the orb around with the same move used to push around enemies is interesting, especially since you can accidentally throw the orb into danger if you aren't careful. One thing I think would help this game a lot is having the enemies telegraph their actions with audio and visual cues. The game seems like it's very much about prioritizing dealing with enemies in a way that doesn't put the orb in danger, and I think this would be more interesting if you were able to tell *when* any given enemy would pose a threat. Currently, it feels a lot more random since I don't have a way of guessing track of when a blue orb is going to transform into a black one, or when a green orb would shoot at you. Taking this even further, it might be good to be able to have a hint about enemies spawning before the actually appear, so you could position yourself to prepare for it.
This game was pretty cool. It took me a while to figure out what was happening, but once I did, it made sense. I particularly liked the mechanic where the ogre wants you to sacrifice a particular villager, and you have to decide whether it's worth taking the morale loss to sacrifice somebody else.
I had a few minor frustrations while playing this, and found a significant glitch. First, it would be *really* useful to be able to see whether a villager can be promoted to a higher level job without having to click on them first. In the current version, I spent a lot of time randomly clicking on villagers until I found one that could be upgraded.
The glitch I found happens when the ogre is rampaging through the village killing people. If you take the person that the ogre is currently targeting and sacrifice them, the ogre chases them onto to conveyor belt and then disappears. From this point, it looks like the ogre is gone and you can play completely peacefully.
Overall, the core game loop here is pretty fun, and with more polish this game would be really cool.
I made it to level 4, and the game seems pretty fun so far. Using the dash to knock enemies across the room was really satisfying. The graphical style is very cool, and I liked the sound effects, although the music loop got repetitive pretty fast. I wasn't really sure how to effectively use the block ability, but maybe if I play more, I'll figure it out. I also think this could could really use some variety in enemies. Maybe every level or so, introduce something new in addition to just throwing more enemies at the player.
It took me a while to figure out the mechanics, but once I did the core gameplay loop is pretty good. I kinda wish there was a way to reroll the upgrade, maybe at the cost of some resources. Right now it feels like once you get an upgrade that requires diamonds the game is pretty much over because they're too rare to find before you run out. Maybe my strategy is just bad though :)
@wintergatn thanks for the feedback! As it generally goes with game jams, there were a whole bunch of things that we planned to do but then cut. One of those was props and events in the environment everywhere. I definitely agree that better composition would help a lot.
We also just realized a *huge* problem. 99% of the game's content is in these cassette tapes, but there's nothing indicating to the player that they should be clicking on the tapes. Lack of playtesting with unfamiliar people will do that :)
@william-v-b thanks for the feedback! Yeah, the lamp physics turned out to be quite the time-sink, but the end result is fun. You used to be able to spin it around and do tricks but we decided that doesn't quite fit the mood.
@mmason thanks! I'm super sad about all the things we had to cut. Liam recorded himself singing this fantastic coal mining work song, and we were going to put it on some of the tapes and then distort it like crazy and play it in the giant room near the end. Ran out of time for the editing though.
@raptor851 Does it output any logs? This was mostly developed on linux, so it *should* work. Also, what audio system are you using (alsa, pulse, jack, etc.)?
EDIT: nope I actually just broke the linux build. lol. should be fixed soon
... and now it's actually fixed
@raptor851 yeah, we ended up slowing down the movement a bunch in order to pad out the time in between tapes. The goal is that you finish one tape slightly before getting to the next one, but we didn't have time to really tune this. Ideally the level would be a lot bigger and more varied, and walking would be slightly faster.
@simex yeah, that's the only ending. Numbering the tapes is a good idea. Our level ended up being entirely linear (and also almost entirely featureless), so it's pretty much impossible to find them out of order or miss some. I'm not sure players would necessarily recognize that though, so it makes sense to number them so that people don't worry about it. If we had gotten to do more interesting level design it would have been even worse.
@oc1d thanks! I definitely would like to have subtitles, but they would need to be optional. Accessibility is super important.
Wow! This is such a unique concept, and the minimalist audio and graphics work absolutely perfectly!
This was pretty fun once I got the hang of the movement. There are a few things I think would be nice to have:
- The player is currently incentivized to play as conservatively as possible, mostly staying on the ground to avoid the risk of hitting the spikes. I think it would be more fun if there were mechanics that forced you to get off the ground and take risky actions. For example, a timer that you collect balls to reset, forcing you to go for riskier balls more frequently.
- Some way of teaching the player the movement system and mechanics. This would be hard to do, since it definitely isn't to me how you would explain the movement, but it would help a lot.
- Some graphical fluff when you get hit or collect a ball
All in all, cool and unique game.
The art on this is really nice! In general, this is a super polished entry. It could potentially have used more mechanical complexity, but as it is this is good, and polish is worth a *lot*.
I've never really seen the idea of a platformer with extremely low gravity before, it works pretty well! I didn't realize that shooting the enemies would stop them from spawning projectiles, so I ended up doing things the hard way :)
You nailed the character movement, and the music is great! Farthest I got was room 5. I think this would have been improved by more enemy variety, but it's pretty good.
you are chained to an egg and are falling down a pit
This isn't a real hole, it's a mindhole mate
Wow, this is incredible. The only complaint I have is that some of the dialogue got cut off the screen. The art, writing, music, and voice acting all fit together perfectly.
@emily-pitcher no, it was cut off at the side. I have a 4:3 screen, which is probably why. There was only one section with issues, which was when you're talking to the painter relative. I can get a screenshot if you want.