Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → BoltKey
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | I💰I💎I⚔️I | compo | 222 | 3.31 | 3.31 | 3.31 | 2.88 | 2.59 | 1.87 | 2.52 | |||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Susane the Sub | compo | 212 | 3.75 | 3.94 | 3.21 | 4.42 | 4.05 | 3.21 | 3.02 | 3.50 | ||
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | Dynamo | compo | 529 | 2.96 | 2.81 | 3.20 | 3.54 | 3.01 | 2.84 | 2.15 | 2.93 | ||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Kevin the Can | jam | 349 | 3.89 | 3.83 | 3.75 | 4.18 | 3.51 | 3.39 | 3.71 | ||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | Float | compo | 354 | 3.18 | 3.15 | 3.35 | 3.81 | 2.33 | 1.84 | 1.46 | 2.57 | ||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | Rising Pyramid | compo | 215 | 3.40 | 3.44 | 3.61 | 2.56 | 2.51 | 2.25 | 2.76 | |||
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | An Adventure within a Deep Forest | compo | 31 | 4.06 | 3.96 | 3.70 | 3.65 | 3.23 | 2.54 | 2.50 | 3.32 | ||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | TeTrans | compo | 175 | 3.66 | 3.60 | 3.77 | 3.81 | 2.59 | 2.52 | 2.08 | 2.63 | ||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Snakeout | compo | 113 | 3.80 | 3.88 | 3.98 | 4.35 | 2.80 | 2.58 | 2.21 | 2.85 | ||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | SiniS is not in Space | compo | 209 | 3.61 | 3.67 | 3.73 | 4.09 | 2.61 | 2.20 | 2.21 | 2.92 | ||
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Battery | compo | 321 | 3.33 | 2.36 | 4.30 | 4.15 | 1.89 | 4.10 | 2.70 | |||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Earth, 3568 | compo | 291 | 3.28 | 3.28 | 3.25 | 3.40 | 2.65 | 2.51 | 2.00 | 3.03 | ||
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Just pick a number | compo | 23 | 4.08 | 3.76 | 4.61 | 3.63 | 3.12 | 2.76 | 4.21 | 83 | ||
| 2016 | 36 | Ancient Technology | Heat Ray Defense | compo | |||||||||||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Chocolate box factory | compo | 259 | 3.45 | 3.45 | 3.22 | 3.36 | 2.91 | 2.00 | 1.89 | 2.54 | 73 | |
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Upright | compo | 233 | 3.57 | 3.43 | 3.86 | 4.07 | 2.41 | 3.08 | 3.77 | 3.16 | 60 |
That was hillarious. The thought of you recording all these sounds in the middle of the faculty building with other devs around is really... interesting. I was laughing my ass off since the beggining to the end. However, I was clicking furiously right before dying, and clicked Restart by accident. Why is that button so big...
Oops, my bad. I got confused with you constant posts on the page.
Level 8 can't be finished, green acts as normal floor.
Really interesting take on the theme.
The concept is interesting, but one thing that's a bit odd is that once you get the balls together, it is easy to get to the finish simply by tying them and navigating with arrow keys. What could be interesting - balls can be navigated only if they are untied.
The concept is good, it looks good, but I think it could use a bit more than 2 types of dangerous stuff. Also, the difficulty curve could be a bit steeper. I think it was a bit too easy even at the top. I think, at the top, there should be something dangerous on like 2/3 of tiles to make it very challenging to get to the very top.
This was absolutely hilarious. Killing these sheep was as satisfying as it could ever get, the bit bigger hitboxes helped with that. It is very addictive, I just want to keep playing again and again.
The graphics and audio were great. Clever concept and executed perfectly. I would absolutely LOVE to see a post-LD release with upgrades, powerups and similar.
Also, I got 97 seconds, is that good?
Is there a reason of the rabbits taking so long to come out? It is really great concept, level design is smart, but waiting 10 seconds for each rabbit to come out of his hole is weird.
I like this kind of exploration games, but it is really a shame that it doesn't restart on a level but you have to start from the first level every time.
Some paradoxes happen, which makes it a bit weird but also funny at the same time. I liked the idea.
Man, this is so hard. I finally finished second level after a lot of trying. But I like it. Unique take on the two buttons theme. Could use some music.
I really liked it. The idea was great, it was smooth, it was addictive and it just worked. Good job!
The only complaint is that there is no restart button.
It is smooth and just works. Also look quite good.
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At first I was like: 0 deaths, watch me. After 32 deaths, I was like: Ok, I take it back.
I was very sceptic about this concept, but turned out ok. It was very hard, but once I got used to it, it was possible. It is kind of like learning combos in Mortal Combat :).
I finally got it. Took me so long just to realize what to do to progress. It should be somehow more obvious. Also, like MadmenProducitons mentioned, the movement speed is weird. I think it could have been a decent game with this concept, but sadly it is not. What a shame.
I suppose I won with 3000 score. There could be some finish screen or something. I liked the feel of progress.
I have never seen anything like it, as a concept, it is really good.
Without sounds, it is quite underwhelming and kind of boring, but the visual effects are smooth and look good. It was a bit annoying that I couldn't choose from which part of my ship will I fire. Maybe if it fired as close to the mouse as possible.
Is there an ending? I got 742. It seems impossible after taht point.
Anyway, I really like your fusion of themes here. I think it should be clearer that you are supposed to eat fish. Also, it would help if fish were facing both directions. The artwork is.... interesting.... I really like the art on plant though. I also like the feel of progress with the environment getting lighter.
It could use some music or something like that too.
Very nice game, I think the concept is clever. But I have some major problems with it.
First - why the hell does key "c" close the window? Like... why? I had to actually remove it from my keyboard because I kept pushing it by accident. It was very frustrating.
Second - the movement was too fast, like others mentioned.
Third - the red thingies should be respawn points. It was very frustrating that I had to go through the whole game all over again when I failed that jump near the end. If only it wasn't so linear maybe.
Also, ingame instructions are missing, and the controls are not intuitive (shift).
But like I said, I really like the concept.
I have no idea what is objective of this game. Crashing into balloons seems to have no effect. Graphics and sounds are okay though.
The graphics are funny and nice. I didn't get it at first, but once I understood how it works, it was fun for a while. Then it became easy and repetitive. But I kind of liked it.
Clever concept, but could have been executed better. As it is, you just kind of stop with one guy on a button, and don't have to really play with the speed.
Nice little exploration game, I kept playing because I just wanted to know what comes next. I think it would have been better if you kept normal control scheme, this system was just... annoying. The graphics were pretty good. Also, could have been a bit longer.
Really nice graphics and the feel of it. However, the controls are just stupid. I have one hand on mouse, and the other on keyboard, and I have to move my hand all the way to the "h" key from arrow keys. If only it was wasd or something.
Can't play on Webgl, Chrome, Windows server 2012. Log:
UnityLoader.js:1 GET http://www.pixelstuff.fr/ld34/wegl/Release/wegl.js 404 (Not Found)LoadCompressedFile @ UnityLoader.js:1LoadCompressedJS @ UnityLoader.js:1(anonymous function) @ UnityLoader.js:1
UnityLoader.js:1 Invoking error handler due to
Uncaught unknown compression method
UnityLoader.js:1 Uncaught unknown compression methodo @ UnityLoader.js:1DecompressAndLoadFile.o.onload @ UnityLoader.js:1
UnityLoader.js:1 Invoking error handler due to
Uncaught incorrect header check
UnityLoader.js:1 Uncaught incorrect header checko @ UnityLoader.js:1DecompressAndLoadFile.o.onload @ UnityLoader.js:1
UnityLoader.js:1 Invoking error handler due to
Uncaught incorrect header check
UnityLoader.js:1 Uncaught incorrect header checko @ UnityLoader.js:1DecompressAndLoadFile.o.onload @ UnityLoader.js:1.
Very good game, I really enjoyed it. Nice difficulty scale (for me). I loved the idea that you have to compromise with you size so you live long enough and fit in between spikes. I would love to see more levels and enemies in perhaps post-mortem release, I think there is potential in this concept and idea.
Sometimes I died when I was being pushed by wall to the right. The moving walls felt a bit buggy as a whole. Nice sound effects for a compo entry.
This is so soft, polished and sweet. Just like die Curve, but nicer. The AI is a bit retarted, but that is understandable. The music is very well chosen.
There is nothing... new in this game. There are hundreds of platformers that have spikes already. It could get a bit harder near the end, and the portals could be used in a bit more clever ways.
However, the music was quite good.
I gave up after 3-4 tries because it was really annoying having to re-kill all the easy monsters to get to the hard part. It would be much better if it was more like levels, and when you die, you could try again with the same mutation. I want to try different strategies on that one hard monster. The huge mutation on screenshot looks pretty epic.
I like your use of the themes though.
It was basically a one button game really. It was kind of boring and unsatisfying. The melodies didn't really make much of sense. I didn't really enjoy it.
The concept is quite interesting, what a shame it's so short. I think way more complex and interesting levels could be thought of.
Conceptually very nice idea, but somehow id doesn't feel good. It should get harder / more complex with time. For example, you start off with just heights, then introduce colors etc.
I like the idea that you don't have to match all aspects of the squares, but the more you do, the better.
I really like this concept that you have to throw object around so you can get somewhere. I bet some of the chambers had some pretty interesting puzzles, however I don't have the time to get there. The player movement is quite natural. However, at least some sort of tutorial would be nice, I had no idea what to do until I took a look at the description. Just a plain text displayed with objective and controls near player start is quite enough. I enjoyed the sounds. However, the difficulty is a bit too high. I didn't manage to feed a single peach after like 10 minutes, which was quite unsatisfying. Also, there seems to be an annoying bug. When you throw peach into a corner, you seem to be not able to pick it up. Also, I fell through the ground once, but I know how much pain it is to make proper collisions so I am going to overlook that.
The sounds were nice.
It was kind of satisfying to grab 5 balls at once, also finally getting that whale out. I got freedom, but quit afterwards. It got repetitive quickly.
It was annoying that half of the play time, I had to just wait for the timer to reach zero. Maybe if it grabbed after 2 sec of inactivity or something.
The graphics are very nice, love them. It is smooth and feels good to play it. The idea is very nice too. Quite hard to play, but once you get into it, it is fun and challenging actually. It is very well balanced, not too hard and not too easy.
However, I think it is lacking in audio, which makes it feel quite underwhelming. The sounds could be more exciting somehow (like BLAM, KAZAAM, SHOOZ instead of burb bubumb bumb), and some simple music would help greatly.
Really nice job on the music.
The gameplay is an interesting take on a classic. I enjoyed it.
I don't get it. There are no in-game instructions and on-site instructions are not clear. I have cells everywhere, but I have no idea what to do with the tumor. However, I think it is interesting concept (from what I saw), also educative.
I doubt you used the correct tool to create this kind of game. It is not bad but could be a bit... bigger. Like, some additional modes or I don't know.
I won, but I still don't really know what is going on. 3D graphics are unnecessary in this kind of game I think.
The artwork is very nice, I like your creative use of just circles to make whole character. But. It is basically a copy of agario with a twist. Not a lot of innovation here.
It is very bold move to make an online game though, but it seems you managed the network stuff quite well. It actually works, which I can imagine how difficult was.
Absolutely brilliant job. You rock.
I just got 3.367 and rank S. I think I won. In the end, I had 5 hostile takeovers and got about 24 extra months. I think additional months are a bit overpowered (and hostile takeovers too).
I had to give up after several tries. I got to the part where there were like 3 knights, and after that when I warped before a wall, I fell into a hole imediatelly and I rage quit. It really needs save points.
But the graphics are really nice and gameplay is good too. I had no problem with the controls (after I read the description). Yeah, it is a bit weird that in-game, the controls are explained AFTER you use the controls. I would really love to see the whole gameplay, could you make a video perhaps? I don't want to get frustrated with it anymore
I love the transform animation. The level design is pretty good, the difficulty scale is on the spot.
Interesting idea, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes quite repetitive. You just mechanically insert tiles one by one. I think it would be much more interesting with limited space to move the pieces around.
The level design was not that good, it was pretty linear and straightforward. I really liked that you had to get back to previous form once, I would like to see this idea implemented more. But it seems that everything else took a lot of time, so I guess you didn't have much time for proper level design.
Great job on the music!
Also, were you inspired by Robot wants _ series? It is very similar to your concept. If you don't know it, I recommend it.
This was fun. I don't enjoy text games or soap operas in general, but I quite enjoyed this game (which I find quite weird lol).
I got only one ending. I can imagine just how much writing had to be done. Good job on that.
Wow, this was fun. I would add some indicator of the order of shifting. The game was very intuitive. I think the map of the upcoming board should be isometric as well, but I got used to it pretty quickly.
I got 45 score. The best strategy seems to be in the shape of the T block most of the time as it can fit in most of the boards, and just switch to the others sometimes if it can't.
The music that kept slowing down was a bit weird.
It was very atmospheric, the sounds were nice. I was getting dizzy at times. It took a while to get used to which key is which shape, but once I got it into muscle memory, the game got quite easy. Got 145, then there were like 3 super fast shapes that killed me instantly. Is this intended?
I loved the way it changed shapes. Great execution of simple graphics.
Also, you should share your source code since you are in compo. I am really interested in how you made the shapeshifting look so smooth.
You are missing a ":" after http in your link.
I laughed out loud, the funniest submission yet. I only realized I could change modes of 'observe' and 'interact' with my right button after the first run, so I had to "play" again to see some of the jokes.
First things first. It really REALLY sucks that you start from the first level every time and have to play through 3 minutes of exactly the same obstacles to get to that hard part again.
The sounds were pretty good. Music was great, and I loved that Portal style narration. I liked the style of the game and the way my shape always got into the just right rotation when passing through a shape.
The core concept is a bit boring.
I like the concept. The target switching is a bit awkward. Sometimes it even switches to the same dot twice before switching to the dot I want. If it went in clockwise direction or something, it would have been much better.
Addictive af, as I like to call it - Flappy Bird effect. You always feel like you can do better after every mistake you make. You know exactly what you did wrong, and you know you are not going to do it the next time.
Got 419 so far. But I will be able to get more hopefully.
The ding sound should go off after you pass the obstacle completely. It was frustrating when I died thinking I was safe after I heard the ding.
I love this style of games, and this one was very good. Great job!
Really great idea. Doesn't fit into the theme too well, but I really like these merges of classic games if it works out. And it did in this case.
Omg, the graphics. They are perfect.
Smooth visuals and audio. Like it. But oh man, it is so short. Also, it is a bit counter intuitive that you can pass through red block when it is moving.
It was fun. I like how in the last level, it was not just about finding a pattern of the pieces, but you also had to carefully move all the other pieces around just so you can put that one piece to place. I would love to see more levels like that. I think the theme is not very well implemented (yet). Also, there is not too much innovation in this.
If you are going to further work on it, make the target area clearer.
Like it. But I think limited lives is really unnecessary. Also, the replay after death took just so long.
That was... interesting... it took me a while to figure out what to do, but I did it in the end. The walking animation was cute.
It was weird that some words were longer than others, yet there was the same time for them.
Very interesting take on the theme. I got 43
It was a bit weird that some shapes of the 'ship' are strictly better that others. It would be the best if every pickup of the heal thing upgraded my character by a tiny bit, so I would start with a small striker with one laser cannon in the end I would be some kind of epic mothership with 8 cannons or something like that. Or as it is now, I think it would have been better if each ship would be good for something different (like one is slow but fires fast, other fires into various directions but in bursts etc).
The effects and sounds are perfect, but it gets boring after a while.
Nice. What a shame there are no sounds though. Also, the theme implementation was weird.
That was great, the best I played so far. The graphics - great. The sounds - great. The concept is exactly on the spot for the theme. The level design was clever. Gameplay was smooth.
However, it took me stupidly long to realize I could change shapes after I collect the gems, it should be added to the controls in the main menu.
Sometimes it was a bit frustrating dying in stupid ways, but it was very satisfying to beat in the end.
Also, I don't understand what is the turtle good for.
The coin near the start point behind that small hole was only collectible using rabbit -> fish -> mouse, this one took me a while.
I would love to see this made into a full game with more animal types (like bird) and more levels.
My time was 1:11.32. I kind of want to speedrun this.
The sound effect were genial. I especially liked the stairs placement sound. The level design was not that good though. Levels were pretty easy and straightforward.
Wow, this was great. I felt more and more powerful with time and it felt awesome. Really good feel of progress. The effects were cool. Best bullet hell I played so far. Great job!
The concept is innovative but I am not a huge fan of the execution. There should be more levels with ideas really embracing the concept.
I really like the concept, but I don't feel there is too much analysis and planning needed. You know, there were like two points where I had to stop and think for a while, otherwise my moves were pretty much given.
I would like to see perhaps smaller levels which you can see all at once, but with much more possibilities, where you have like 5 different shapes that all look correct at the first sight, but only one of them can get to the finish eventually. Then you would have to actually think about what are you doing, and perhaps even backtrack from the finish to find out the whole solution.
I like the sounds.
Oh shit, there is a map editor. I already managed to discover basic controls (wasd to move, tab to change layer, and mouse wheel to change block type (a bit counter intuitive)). I however have no idea if or how can I play the level. I would love to create some custom levels.
Holy shit, this is hard. I finished the first floor and was like "Huh, that game was hard". Then I realized it was just first level of I-don't-want-to-know how many. I gave up after 20 minutes on the second floor. I got other things to do today and I don't want to loose any (more) hair.
In all other aspects from difficulty, it was really good. Audio was perfect. The graphics. Oh my god the graphics were great. So cute little alternations of the beard movement for different forms, things like that. Gameplay was smooth.
The main concept is not very innovative. The shapeshifting idea is interesting, but I think it is useless as it is - I do better if I am in the small form all the time than if I try and switch my forms. What a shame it is not a bit more flexed out, with more enemy types, so shapeshifting would be actually useful.
Love the music. The graphics are great. The explosions are great.
I also checked out the log and enjoyed it.
Great entry! Towards perfection, there is missing music and some sort of long term progress.
Loved the graphics. As I understand it, there is no point to being a solid, right? Also, it took me like 5 tries to realize what am I supposed to do and which forms dodge which obstacles, and after I died, it took like 10 seconds (or at least seemed like that) to play again, which is just far too much.
I loved the game over screen though.
The concept could use a bit more work, the difficulty needs to scale more.
I liked it. I almost immediately knew what to do, so points for that.
I was missing an undo button, as it was very easy to do an extra move.
Also, the theme was not so well interpreted imo.
The graphics were perfect. It took me two tries to understand how to play, but after I got it, it was really enjoyable. I think I will come back to this later.
Nice idea. I like how you had to control every character differently. The graphics and music are very atmospheric.
Great implementation of the theme and overall execution. I think it could be a bit more interesting if it was taken a bit differently though, as a logic game where you see the whole map and have to set points where the hero transforms to another shape. The levels would be a bit more complex so there would be some challenge. But this one is very good as well.
I give up. I spent like 30 minutes on it already and still can't get past that long diagonal lethal line. It is just too hard.
I enjoyed it. Got 888.
So, I guess the idea is that puzzle is figuring out how it works, right?
Here is what I found out so far. To reduce shapes, you need to shoot a color with the next color in RGB (so you need to shoot red with green, green with blue, blue with red). The other way around makes the shapes grow. If two same colors meet, it stays the same.
The arrows on ammo means that all the shapes it meets change color like red > green > blue > red.
I have no idea about the direction control though. Apparently if there is a triangle, it goes in the direction the triangle is pointing. If you approach a shape from a side where it has perpendicular side to your direction, it bounces you back and nothing happens to the shape. But this rule is not universal either.
So yeah. I don't get it. I guess I lost.
The graphics are really nice. The concept is good. I really like these fast-paced highscore based games. I got 45. Failing never seems like a mistake of the game but a mistake of the user, which is good.
As a Tetris enthusiast, I love the idea. I got 41 and it was fun. I don't think the blocks should drop to fill the holes. One of the core concept behind Tetris is that you should avoid making those holes. Also, it feels unnatural that you can make shapes that are not connected. When I am dragging, I expect to highlight all the sqares I move across, and if they are already highlighted, they should stay so.
Beautiful. The changing music gave me chills, and it was so smooth I just couldn't notice any transitions on anything. Great job!
I tried it a while ago and quit. Now, as I finished my game, I decided to just win it, and so I did. It is quite easy once you get the hang of it and get past the hard part at the start. I liked the music, good job on making it in time! Also, I didn't find the way to get any of the gems. Is there a way to get them?
It is one of the games where the main challenge is just finding out how to win, which I like.
@Ieyfo I meant the gems which were ruby, diamond and... that third one. Listed at the top of the material list. Sorry for not being clear. The others were mostly metals, which I of course collected and sold. I had the gem chance on 64 max. I tried to follow the tip to "click fire" but that didn't seem to have any special effect.
I suck at riddles, but at least I have the excuse that I am not native English speaker. I got stuck at third and had to check the code for solutions. Nice graphics, clever riddles.
I like the take on the theme, and the art. Also, the idea with rotating items is itneresting.
I won. The idea is nothing really new or interesting.
I like the combination of speed and quick logic in last levels. For longer that I want to admit, I thought cassettes could move only on free spaces.
It feels really wrong that if I pick up a cassette and put it back to the same place, a new cassette appears anyway.
Damn, I wish it was not the middle of the night so I could play with my cousins.
I love the idea and take on theme. But, although I haven't really played it, it seems to me almost impossible to match the number when the other player is trying to do the same all the time. Maybe if there was a time limit after which the one who is closer wins?
The art and atmosphere was nice. It was very hard, I gave up and used macro recorder.
It is a great concept and theme usage. But the execution has several problems.
A tutorial, although it is very boring thing to make, is very important, especially in games like these. Very few people are going to read help before playing. I had no idea what I was doing, and I was completely lost the first time I played it. In this case, two consecutive texts in the middle of screen saying "Each house has 3 people" and "Drag professions to houses" at the start and "You need 10 food to replace dead human" a bit later would be enough for me.
It would be much better and intuitive if there were buttons for professions near each house. It felt really weird (and uncomfortable) that I had to drag it to them.
Hp bars would be really convenient.
Also, the random movement felt weird. I know how hard it is to implement proper AI, but I think this is one of the games where it is almost necessary.
The professions were not very visually recognizable. At first I thought the medics were bleeding soldiers. It is hard to recognize at first glance a soldier just by several black pixels in his hand. It would be better if all the professions were as contrasting to others as scientists are now.
I just found a self-sustaining configuration which is 4 swords, 3 foods, 1 science and 0 medics. Medics seemed very weak to me.
And ending animation would be nice.
The web link gives me 404.
Works now :).
Wow. This was very interesting. It was very funny, the funniest entry I played so far. I laughed out loud. Religion and art were my favorite parts.
My smile went away pretty fast at that war. That was very unexpected and quite strong actually. I was experiencing true fear as the unknown phantoms of the night were approaching me and I had no way to defend myself.
@n42k Thanks for feedback. I wanted to simulate a bit the difficulty of precise aiming of light with mirrors in real life. You have to move them carefully and estimate where the light lands, unlike for example guns where you see exactly where you aim with gunsight. I was playing a bit with the idea of having some handles on the other side of the mirrors which you could manipulate, but it turned out to be weird.
I don't really understand how you implemented the theme :D. I kinda liked it, shame there were no sounds.
It is frustrating. I thing the game reset on death is unnecessary, level restart is enough. It is very hard, I gave up on like 6-8 deaths.
SFX was nice, the fact that you could hit a bomb and still survive was a nice element.
I give up after like 15 deaths. I really like the discovery element to it. I managed to get only up to 2 pillars to connect to my base.
I had no idea what to do and all the ways to die were often frustrating.
Really atmospheric though, really fitting music.
Wow, great compo entry. Loved the graphics, the face actually looked like a face and the bull actually looked like a bull. Good job with that :)
The audio was good too.
The length was ok. It all worked really smoothly and I didn't notice any actual bugs. Really polished.
One of the best I played so far.
Very polished and smooth, loved the take on the theme!
Great concept, nice execution. Could be a bit longer and harder.
I liked the concept, but I was hoping for more rhythm incorporation with the name.
Very simple, yet it took me very long to get it. Not very polished and complete though.
One thing that I really didn't like is names of the files index.css and index.js. "index" is a name reserved for the default html page in a folder, and should be used almost exclusively for that. Conventional names for css and js files are "style.css" and something like "main.js", "game.js", "behaviour.js" etc.
Really great entry! Great job with the audio and the visuals. Really atmospheric and polished. Loved it all the way!
I like the concept, but it ways way too easy for a puzzle game. There was always excess of tools. I would like this much better if there was always a unique solution and some optimization would have to take place in order to solve the puzzles.
Wow, great game all the way. The best one I played out of the 50 probably. Great sounds, good graphics, superb usage of the theme. And just the right difficulty too. I would not be surprised to see this game at the top of several categories.
I love the graphical style of it. Also, I am glad I am not the only weirdo who has had a plank of wood in his room for years for no reason whatsoever. I don't know whether I "finished" this game, but I think I found all the places already. There should be some progress indicator perhaps... Also, kinda good music. Loved the narrative.
I have no idea what I am doing, but I like it. But it has really nice visuals and sounds. The jumping seems a bit bugged.
Wow, great all the way. Best puzzle I played this LD. Very good difficulty scale.
Kinda basic concept, but I like it.
I really enjoyed this. Absolutely atmospheric. Great work with the sounds. It really creeped me out when I got to the trashy room for the first time and the game crashed.
You were asking whether the 6000 players in Just pick a number are real. They are, and they are coming from reddit. Check my updated entry for more info.
The music was really great. Have you heard of Fytch music? Your music reminded me of that.
Obviously, there was not much innovation in game mechanics, but that was not your goal I think. The ending was neat.
I had really similar idea to this store management game, but gave it up. I am glad to see someone else finish it. I liked the graphics.
Really liked it. Gave up at the shotgun level. Great sounds and visual for a compo entry. Really polished and finished game, good job!
It is just mean to bind restart key to the default reload key in a shooter game.
Getting a hard hit with a heavy box was super satisfying.
Loved the theme and execution. Great graphics and audio for a compo entry. But what is up with the controls? It is very counter intuitive. Why not just assign up arrow to jumping and space to hit?
Great visuals and feel of the game. The shooting only in the direction of movement felt very strange. The game could have been a bit more flexed out.
I loved the execution. The sound effect of falling building were perfect. I loved the humor and style of the game. I guess I just love Löve games.
I don't get whether the support walls are assigned randomly or if there is any system.
I really like the polish on this. There are so many small things like the shake on impact and the level transitions. And the mechanics were nice too.
However, I am not a big fan of the level design. There were so many spots where you had to make the pixel-perfect jump, and it seemed more like based on luck than skill, to the point where it started to become frustrating.
I like the idea, but not so much the execution. Some (any at all) sounds would help it a bit. The blocks should not be falling continually but tile by tile (just like in Tetris). Also, pressing the down arrow permanently sped up the blocks for me, so when I pressed multiple times, it gradually fell faster and faster. That broke the game on the second level to the point where it was unplayable.
The gameplay felt very slow. Maybe hard dropping of the blocks with space (like in tetris) would help.
Also, there should be some in-game instructions that you should right click to move around.
Overall, I didn't really like it.
Wow, great job on making a multiplayer game for LD, it works very smoothly. The collisions and jumping are not very buggy, the only thing that felt wrong was jumping up through a gap 1 tile wide.
The music was nice too. Great compo entry.
Oh my this game is HARD! The controls feel good after a while, but I didn't like the randomness of direction of the projectiles. Also, I would appreciate some checkpoints so I don't have to start over every time.
It was so heartwarming and calm game. I love your art style and narratives.
Technically, it is a well executed game. It works, the mechanics are quite interesting, difficulty is good. But I just really don't like the story.
I quite like it. You made a working rts, which is a great feat for Ludum Dare.
It was sometimes a bit confusing mainly because there were no hp bars. The guards didn't seem to do their jobs correctly, and it was quite frustrating that I had to click each individual square to be destroyed instead of selecting more of them at once.
And what a shame there are no sounds.
One of my ideas (I didn't end up making) was also some one chat room puzzle thingy. I am really glad I can see it even though I didn't make it :). Right now I am the only one online though. Maybe later...
Wow, I löved everything about this game. I like (and make) optimization puzzles in general, but this one I liked a lot.
Finally beat it after about an hour. The puzzles were challenging but not frustrating, and it was very satisfying every time I solved a level. The last one was very clever, and trial and error was very ineffective over actually thinking about the level. Once I realized there has to be the shortest possible path between the doors left, it became easy.
I liked how the correct layout (sometimes) actually made sense in how the actual room would be laid out.
Probably the best puzzle game this LD for me.
Also, nice use of the theme.
Nice idea, it took me a while to get what is going on. I don't understand why the black hole is a thing.
It was a bit slow and felt a bit incomplete though.
I really liked it, nice use of the theme. Good atmosphere. It however feels a bit unfair that it takes a while to figure out what to do and how to move.
I couldn't find the rag.
It was very difficult to the point of being frustrating. It could be a bit more forgiving. I like how the shadows are made, however it felt a bit weird that the bullets cast shadows too.
I liked this. It took me about 3 tries. The controls should be more clear. I loved the style and transitions.
I love the idea. It looks very polished. I really liked it.
There is a really old (>12 years) game just like this one right? The nostalgia just hit me hard, I remember playing it all the time as as kid. Do you know the name by any chance? Each player had a brush, but other than that it was just like this.
Anyway, I really liked it. The music was good. The AI could be a bit better, but in a game jam this short, there obviously was not enough time for that.
Quite big and flexed out game, and quite polished too (haven't encountered any bugs), but quite uninnovative. Same concept has been implemented so many times already.
@HuvaaKoodia Oh shoot. I just moved the main screen to the middle, because originally it was in top left corner on white background. I forgot that the mouse position was still calculated based on page and not the canvas. It is fixed now, thanks.
The version on Kongregate worked always, that's probably why @Togis didn't experience the issue.
What a shame you didn't have the time to flex it out a bit more, it is very flat as it is now.
I really like the pixel art.
I however got a game breaking bug. I cannot click on other planets in the solar system.
I really liked it. Great graphics and funny story. Nice new idea. However, I didn't really like the level design, it was quite flat.
I almost forgot how I loved the classic core platformer action! Very nice execution.
Great graphics!
It was a bit frustrating that the whole "world" restarted upon losing all hearts.
Got 213 on second try. The way my planet pulled the laser shots felt very unnatural. I think there should be much wider range of my gravity.
Loved the cute graphics and feel. Great job with the music as well.
Absolutely beautiful regarding the game mechanics. Very simple but very difficult. I finally got it on like 10th try.
I tried and figured the gameplay myself (after a few confused runs), and succeeded eventually :)
It took me a while to understand what is going on. The grammar was not really good, which didn't help either.
However, it was a really bold move to create a strategy game, and it worked.
My game is kinda similar-ish.
I loved the way the trajectories smoothly changed.
Wow, that was enjoyable and cute. The ending was funny. Nice interpretation of the theme!
Is there a way to "win"? I understood that the "pray rating" is some sort of score, but I managed to get over 1000 and still the planets got destroyed.
It took me a while to realize what people were for (resource gain multiplier).
Anyway, after I understood how things work and played with it for a bit, I managed to get score of 1289 and I think that is my limit. My build order was 2 houses, then many mills (about 30). At this point, I could not comfortably collect all the mills. So next step is about 20 mines. Then, 2 cities (because since you reach 100 mil pop, more people are useless). After that, just furiously click everywhere and build as many churches as possible (while possibly balancing wood and gold income by building more mines). Here is my planet just before the end: marble.png
I loved the overall idea and concept, great job on making the multiplayer work!
There is no goal or anything complex, but as a proof of concept, this was good.
Nice graphics and execution! I found the gameplay a bit boring after a while. Python lagged really bad on me. The idea with moving around the keyboard was interesting.
Music was absolutely beautiful.
I have read the explanation and played it about 5 times (getting 87k in the last run) and still don't really know what is going on. Some ingame tutorial showing the game mechanics would be nice (especially when the mechanics are so complex).
This game is beautiful. I loved how my worm got some additional features as it grew.
Reminded me of Tasty Planet. I just love that series.
It took me very long to understand what is going on, the instructions were not very helpful. Once I did however, it was quite fun.
Wow, really great entry. So smooth and I really like the graphic style. Spot-on use of the theme. But, what a shame it is so short. I have so mixed feelings about this.
I really liked it! Great idea, nice execution. It is very hard to balance out a turn based strategy game, but this one just works. I could use the option to pass, especially in the early game where it felt a bit frustrating when I had three strong cards and there were almost no enemies. I made it to turn 38 on the first run, where I chose the strategy of keeping the global 2 damage card for the last moment. Overall, really nice job.
Wow, really liked this! Great use of the theme, very entertaining and engaging. I just wanted to keep playing again and again, trying different strategies. And the killing of the enemies is really juicy.
The game mechanics were quite clear even without instructions. I played on 4% and didn't have a cord with me, so I had to stop quite early. I love the theme interpretation and integration of the power level into the game.
The idea of the game itself is quite uninteresting and not really too much fun.
It got super laggy when a lot of fire appeared. Kinda ruined the fun.
What. I mean me too thanks.
Wow, very clever concept and actually quite fun. It however is a bit too short and small...
Nicely atmospheric. It was extremely laggy for me, and I had to wait about 5 seconds after every turn.
The sounds effects are seriously very annoying.
The concept is quite clever actually, but it should be much faster.
The theme felt a bit forced on this one, I just didn't feel like it worked with the other game mechanics. Some of the last levels were pretty interesting. I would like if the bat movement was more predictable.
A really nice game, good interpretation of the theme and decent execution. It was maybe a bit too difficult at times... aaand I just realized I could have attacked, that was not really clear. But I finished the game anyway. I got the virtual pacifist achievement at least lol.
Won :), some physics was a bit weird (boxes falling with constant speed and tapping x being better than holding it). Difficulty was alright.
Great art and flow. In the air, the character had a bit too big inertia for my taste. The concept of the creatures was a bit flexed out only in the first few levels, then I could finish the levels while ignoring the critters.
Also, only after finishing the game, I read that I can interact with stuff myself or throw the creatures. So I guess I finished it on a hard mode?
Thanks guys! I know the UI sucks, turned out the online component took longer to get to work than expected. I thus didn't have time to make UI nice and do overall cleanup, so it is thrown together in a hurry. At least I tried to duct-tape that with the tutorial, right.. :smiley:
@exezin Thanks ^^. I do games in vanilla JavaScript mostly. Turns out JavaScript is pretty fast when not spoiled with millions of frameworks and graphic libraries. Also, there are no images used for graphics in this game. All the graphics are generated by html
@darthnumbers Thanks. Music would make it definitely better, but I knew that *my* music would make it much worse. I settled for soft enemy sound effects and didn't experiment much more, because I know how my attempts at music turned out in my previous LDs :smiley:
@Anon Ludum Dare is not about anti-hacking skills (there are other jams for that), it is about making games. Even such reputable brand as Kongregate, for example, can have leaderboards "hacked" as simply as `kongregate.stats.submit('score', 9999999)`. There is not really a simple way around it if you think about it, by principle. JavaScript is an interpreted language, so users can (and should be expected) to do literally whatever they want on the client side, and send whichever requests they want to the server. On server side then, there is no way of telling whether the user really won the level or not. You could only prolong the process for the attacker, but you really cannot do anything against this type of attacks.
The game leaderboards are basically in the hands of the users, which can either make it a nice competition by playing it fair or ruin it for everyone by "hacking" it (which is the case for many Kongregate games). For example, leaderboards in Anti-Idle the Game are not hacked simply because the author asked the users nicely to not hack the leaderboards. I am not going to go through the trouble of obfuscating my code, because I don't want to challenge the hackers for a fight, and it would still be hackable anyway.
And that's the sense of community here, that we can trust each other on such things (just like we trust each other on not doing vote manipulation, not making major changes to games after deadline and such).
And I am humbled that you went through the trouble of getting into the game from 5 different IPs just to get a message across.
I cannot run the game, 7-zip says "[File] cannot be opened as an archive"
The ending really got me, great job.
The ending really got me. Great job!
Fun quick little game with very juicy feel. Got 1070 after a while. I don't get the point of the time limit, when there is rising difficulty over time. I loved how you could lose axes by throwing them on the carts.
Nice game, but I am confused by difficulty scaling.
I absolutely love the idea and general concept of using your coins to get more coins by feeding them to the piggybanks. The execution is not that great though. There is not much to do except for clicking coins in the middle and clicking wolves when there were any. There doesn't seem to be any end or goal, except for the numbers getting bigger, seemingly endlessly.
I love the dubstep action you got going on.
It got very laggy at aroud 70 pigs for me.
The music was great. The jkl minigames didn't need any attention, I was just tapping the keys to the beat and it worked.
Somehow got 36 once. Cute little game. The bricks are unfair, but I feel like it fits the overall feel of the game.
The controls were not very intuitive, and it took me good while to realize I was putting the buckets on a grid. I would appreciate some lines marking the grid to which the buckets get locked to. It was quite annoying when I could not put the bucket to the ground because I was standing too close to the destination, just as a snowflake hit the ground.
The game was very fun, with some actually interesting strategy, if you want to really go for the highscore (which I always do). You naturally want to lock in your buckets near the sides of the map, and as close to each other as possible. That means you need to use as many of the snowflakes that fall to sides to lock in the buckets, so you should have at least one almost full bucket ready at all times. It is also important to exploit the bug where you see the shadow of the next snowflake for one frame after a snowflake lands, and it also is useful to know that there are always exactly two snowflakes falling, and the snowflakes that fall near the top fall sooner.
Although I did make some mistakes in my best run, I think I did alright. The game gets several new interesting aspects at around the 130 snowflake mark.
swc.png
As you can see, I got a bit unlucky and had to split my path exactly in half, which led to an inevitable loss. In the end I got 192.
The theme was not really there though, as it was rather beneficial having more buckets, as they still were catching the falling snowflakes. It almost felt like an incremental game in this aspect.
The audio was alright.
Concept is not very new or innovative.
It really bothered me that I couldn't tell which drops I could eat and which not when they had similar size to mine.
Really nice chill mood, good flow of the game. Some graphic effects to make the drop eating juicier could improve the experience even further.
So I played couple rounds, tried different strategies and stuff. The game is really polished, I like that.
In a run where I finally thought I did alright (220s, 5768 score), it still said "I am slightly disappointed". Should I aim for bigger score? Am I playing it wrong?
@Nick-Rafalski Why do you think it is easy? What is your best score? And what makes it unbalanced?
Wow, this game is hard. I gave up after about 6 tries of level 2.
I like it! It felt quite thematic. I would love if there were more flood levels and the water would rise gradually.
I found an exploitable bug - if you keep alternating between two screens, your food and health will stay at max but the time will keep counting. If you get up on the big elevated piece that spans over two screens, you can use this for infinite time.
The arrow and bow/rocks didn't feel too powerful, perhaps I just suck at using them. It felt wrong that I could not shoot from the high ground to the low ground.
Chaotic movement of the foxes was a bit annoying :D.
Ok, I rage quit after dying just before the end of level 6 for like 10th time. I found it unfair that the robots could shoot through walls but I could not. Also, the extra weapons didn't feel too much more powerful than just my basic pistol. The controls were very hard, but that's because I am not used to that control mechanic.
Great work with the graphics for a compo game, they look really nice.
@radical-dog Thirsty for a revenge? Challenge accepted!
Thanks for feedback! My playstyle is picking more stuff at once, so I run out of space quite often. Maybe I am playing it wrong.
I would love to make a board game based around that core idea, I actually have quite clear vision of how it would look like and some ideas. However, I have other board game projects I am working on right now. It definitely inspired me though.
I got an error during the loading screen.
A TDR has been detected. The application must close.
Error code: 7
It may be an error on my side, but I did not experience it with any other games.
@jharler [log.txt pastebin](https://pastebin.com/7JuxBm24)
I have NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 and Intel i3-4170. Most of Unity games are a bit laggy for me, especially when they are not optimized.
When I got my 4k display, I had to tinker with some settings and override some stuff, so the problem may be from that.
As always, the game is perfect.
Very fun level design, very fun gameplay, nice polish.
Absolutely on-spot audio.
I really hope for you to get some top 5s. You deserve them.
Great atmospheric music, good job!
A bit confusing at first, but eventually I got it.
One of my initial ideas was defragmentation too, but in more light and 2d style. Glad to finally see someone else use this theme, but I don't have VR sadly.
I won... I guess? I got to size 10/10, and after eating some more, the game over screen appeared.
I love how it feels squishy even on the square grid.
The key thing to realize was that when the pink snake eats, he is immobilized for a second, leaving enough time to mobilize to the other side of the map, sneaking just under his teeth.
Loved the sound effects and overall style. I definitely prefer this over 8-bit.
Level design was nice. Game was a bit short though.
I may be badly missing something but there's a part which I just cannot get through. "and jump more pitfalls and dash through [something something] your home to". I always hit the "your" with my head while dashing and fall into oblivion.
Man! That was so cute! That's all I have to say.
I completed sector 19 with total score of over 54 000 and the game froze and then crashed wiping my progress upon clicking the "next sector" button. :frowning2:.
I absolutely love the game. Usually, attempts at real time strategy games for LD fall flat for me, as the decisions get easy and it all is just eh, but this one was pretty good. But boy, would I kill for a pause. I understand that modern rts mechanics like control groups are out of scope, but you should replace those with pause. After around level 15, I was limited by how fast and accurately can I click at small objects (which I hate to do and suck at), not by my resources. It was simply frustrating to see 5 ships idle while I try and queue up as many people to rescue as I can for the one ship I have selected. And I never knew if I queued up to save the people on the planet or whether I missed by 2 pixels and didn't queue that up! It just became more fps than rts! Also, at the level start, I could not look at the whole map and carefully decide where is it optimal to build new ships and which people need evac asap. I knew the clock was ticking, fast. I just delivered the first resources I saw to the first factory I saw. It didn't feel like rts at all. I didn't optimize my resources.
I would enjoy this game about 5 times more if there was a pause possibility. Please, make it happen. I know it cannot be that hard.
This. Game. Needs. Pause. Everything. Else. Is. Perfect.
While I really like and enjoy the game, I think there are some fundamental flaws.
First, the wrapping game design. I didn't like the system of penalties for failing games. It is frustrating. That may be the point, and it makes it more thematic, but it takes the fun away from the game. There comes a point (after 21 completed games) where the speed is so fast it is impossible to keep up.
I don't think it is a good design decision to make things harder when dying. Penalty for dying too much should be game over, not making the game impossible to actually complete.
Maybe if the game speed was based not on games complete, but games remaining? Meaning when you die and get GLs into your drawer, it gets slower again? That way, it would be always possible to complete even on the first run.
Minigames sometimes were impossible, particularly breakout, where the ball went directly into one of the lower corners. That's pretty frustrating when it is one of your last games.
Also, I didn't like the transition between instructions and minigames. I had no idea when the switch happens. Especially when the instructions last different amount of time for different minigames. This was frustrating particularly in the acid minigame. I would like for example if there were instructions with a countdown timer in form of a bar or a circle, and the initial minigame state would be visible in the background.
Highscore! Ping me if anyone dethrones me and wants to challenge me!
That was one of the most intense experiences so far in this LD. I got very lucky with my grabs early, and knew that run was it. I had one last spot empty on the very left side of the boat with score of about 2050 and 15 seconds left on the clock. I started grabbing garbage. I knew I needed value of at least 150 to hit the top. I then grabbed a ~$180 fish but accidentally dropped it. I knew I had to stay calm and hope for the best. There were 5 seconds left on the clock. Then it happened. A $198 whale in my hand. I immediately put it in the left most spot without second thought - I should have held it until the last second. I placed it and freaked out. My ship started to tip over. With about 2 seconds left on the clock, the ship headed to its doom. Those two seconds were so intense - will it make it? Will it tip over? I didn't know. I screamed "SURVIVE! SURVIVE PLEASE!" At that point, I knew I had the highscore. The ship just had to survive. I think that half a second more would be enough for my ship to sink. Then the victory screen appeared and I was so happy that I made it.
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The game is very good. All the aspects are so nice, it plays very well. And of course the lovely *splash* screen. And the puns. I am very sparse with my 5/5 ratings, but I think this game is the one that gets 5/5 overall and fun from me.
I love the game, the idea and the execution. Graphics are great, like everyone said. And I loved the comments of the worker.
There however was one detail that made it very frustrating for me and drew away most of the enjoyment. That is that I have to be precise with my clicking when loading boxes - especially when the screen moves. Maybe it would not be such problem if the screen was still. It felt like the main part of how much score I get was how accurate my clicking was when loading the boxes. This game, in my opinion, should reward time management and quick planning, rather than first-person shooter skills.
I would give each box much bigger range where it can be clicked and make them glow when the mouse is near enough. It would be nice to have them glow green when you can pick them up, yellow when you can't reach them and red when they cannot fit your cart.
If you made those changes, I would love to return to the game and hunt the high-scores.
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It took me quite a while to understand that the numbers on the boxes were their size. I thought I had to read the number on each box and based on that deliver it to the correct shelf. If instead of a number you had a picture of the correct box above the shelves, it would be much clearer.
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I would prefer mouse controls for movement rather than wasd, but that may be personal taste.
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Also, the high scores didn't work for me.
Also, my game is a pick-up-and-deliver too, maybe you would want to check it out?
Simple idea and okay execution.
In a runner-style short survival game that is controlled exclusively with a keyboard, it is very wrong to have to click *twice* and *with your mouse* on *buttons that have no feedback* to restart. Also, both buttons are literally the only clickable thing on the screen, so it could as well at least be "click anywhere to continue". Returning to the starting screen is so unnecessary. I know it was probably a bit simpler to restart the whole game including the title screen, but it makes it so much more annoying to restart.
It is very little detail, but these details can add up in bigger games and can spoil the experience although the core game can be perfect.
Making it in 3d is just unnecessary for this concept imo.
I love the idea.
I don't think I understand the column clearing system correctly. I though that I should make full rows just like in Tetris, but I had full row (or in this case column), and the guns didn't reload. Then, some guns reloaded seemingly randomly.
The idea is very innovative and fun, the game not so much unfortunately. No sounds, gets quite repetetive, and the line clearing is seemingly bugged (or I don't understand it correctly, could you please explain it?). The difficulty curve was very slow for me, it started getting challenging in the last 30 seconds.
What a shame about the audio. It would add a lot to the experience.
I like it! Nice little relaxing puzzle.
I still have no idea what are the rules for what can be merged and what cannot. Is that the point? I would like it better if I knew the combinations and had to carefully decide what to combine when so that I don't lock myself out.
The gameplay is not very innovative or fun, gets very repetitive after a while.
I got negative space on my disk - I guess I won?
I wanted to make something very similar for LD38. I wanted to make it strategic, like yours, but ended up skewing towards a [skill-based game based on gravity](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/earth-3568).
Finally finished with 100 deaths flat, most of whose were on level 3, which I just could not figure out for a while.
Lovely concept idea. Physics were quite wonky. What a shame there are so few levels, this idea could be much more flexed out.
Unfortunately the game was running at about 10 fps for me so I stopped trying after 2 runs. I wanted to cheat and see what the game looks like but apparently I need the paid version of the Clickteam fusion engine?
Anyway, I really like the atmosphere - from an unsuspecting everyday commuter to a desperate fighter for life in mere seconds.
I really liked it! It is clean, simple, compact. And challenging.
There are obviously some tiny problems, like lack of time and score display, but I see you are very well aware of all those. The core gameplay is very well polished.
Alright concept, clean execution. The "pop" sound was too sharp and not very satisfying.
Nice little puzzle game, I liked it!
I don't think speedrun really makes sense in puzzle games like this.
Nice level design, I enjoyed solving some of the puzzles!
I found the sound effects to be a bit annoying and distracting.
Very neat idea and execution! It looks really nice!
The controls were for some reason very unresponsive for me. My W got registered only about 70% of the time. And picking up boxes was quite annoying too - why can't I pick up a box that I am standing on, but I can pick up a box that is on the other side of the screen?
That was very fun and challenging. It took me a few runs to realize I don't need to actually push the box into the deposit space, so I could have multicolored belts. I then tried the strategy of just drawing one big circle around the edges just to find out that doesn't work.
After about 15 to 20 runs I finally won. Towards the end, I was pretty much just hoping that the new routes work with the belts I built so far. Also, my factory wasn't *technically* fully functional, because I had to manually split a belt once in a while.
Aaand, I just found out about the possibility to pause the game. That made things a bit easier :). It would be nice to have all the controls on the left side of the screen. I got another very nice factory which works cleanly and rigidly. But why, oh why does it pause when it says that my factory is functional! I want to see my baby move! I want my number of boxes go up indefinitely! What did I make the factory for if not to make a number go big?!
I didn't really find a good use for splitters - they just mess things up. You didn't use them in your example either.
Also, kudos for small download size. That's why I don't even care about the lack of sounds.
@nate954 Yeah, I think those are small enough changes. I think only things that change the actual gameplay should not be changed.
Already said my comments in the Elysia stream.
Level design is extremely clever - solving the puzzles was very satisfying. And I am still stuck at 13.
What is the goal of the game? It is very unclear.
I really liked it! Fun light theme, clever gameplay. It took me way too long to realize I could scroll the windows.
What... the hell... did I just play. This is one of the games where I would switch to porn if someone approached me, because that is easier to explain :D.
Gameplay was not that interesting. But I guess that wasn't even the main goal with this game :).
Got 670 after few tries,
Initially, I was very confused. I had no idea what was the goal, what are the controls, nothing. And no, I didn't read the game description here on LDjam or itch.io. You should not expect people to do that. I then opened up the "help" section of the game, but that didn't contain instructions on how to play the game either - just the controls which were of not much help. I then randomly got pieces of same color together and they cleared out.
The game ramped up very slowly. I think one run of a game in this format should take about 1 minute to play through, 3 if you are good. My runs lasted usually around 6 minutes, which is just far too much. I cannot think of a better example right now, but a game from this LD [Seasaw](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/seasaw), which I think is in the similar style of "time-limit-based high-score puzzle action game" does this really well - I just wanted to keep returning and try to up my high-score. The time limit there is set to exactly 1 minute, and it is just enough. I know setting hard time limit may not work with this game, but you could set other things to get closer to that mark. I think time bonus for placing pieces could get smaller (or if it does - get smaller faster).
Another thing - feedback. That is an important thing in most games. You need to let the player know when he did things right and reward him. Placed a tile adjacent to same color? Play a small rewarding sound and make the tiles glow a bit! Player cleared some blocks? Play a sound, make the blocks explode, add fireworks! It may seem like it takes long time, but for example graphical effect of coins in my game took me exactly 30 minutes to make, and it was so much just because I wanted fancy stuff like gravity and the coin rotation (which you don't need). And I think they look alright and reward the player. Also, the "active" block should be visually distinguishable from the others. There is a great talk [Juice it or lose it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg) that explains these concepts very nicely.
Next, the timer. I think it is an important enough timer that it should be more visible. Also, visual timers > text timers. A bar at the bottom that counts down until the next black hole. Blocks at the edges slowly getting darker. Pie-chart timer in the background. A timer with at least one decimal place displayed just above the block. The possibilities are endless. Also, this way it would be more obvious that you get extra time for placing blocks.
I didn't really get the "story". It was very unnecessary and didn't make sense. Black hole... but it is around the play area? It doesn't even attract anything. And... I make planets... which are not round? From pieces that randomly appear from nowhere? I would just scrape it. It is obviously duct-taped to an abstract game because "like, space, get it?".
Phew, that was a lot of things to cover. It may seem like I didn't like the game, but I really enjoyed it! The core idea is very fun and engaging. Hope I helped.
The graphics and overall look and feel are really nice.
After a few tries and actually finding out how stuff works (exact production of buildings and bonuses), I got what I think was a decent run with score of 25466.
I would love it if I saw which bonuses are going to appear next.
Just to let you know, using third party sounds (or really any that you didn't make during the jam) is forbidden in COMPO. I think you should either switch to JAM or upload version without sound (although I think they are nice). You should at least opt-out of rating in Audio if nothing else. Also, you are missing out on so much fun making sound effects!
To the game. Classic concept, but in interesting and new theme. I didn't really understand what was going on when I got infected and whether it was a good or bad thing. Anyway, I got 261624 after several tries.
Nice clean bullet hell.
The entropy system took me a while to understand.
There is nothing super innovative or new, and the use of the theme is quite meh.
I like it! I see inspiration by Mamono Sweeper, is that right?
The playing board holds far too much information, much more than what is needed. And it is very crowded and confusing.
It took me a while to realize how the game works, particularly what the items do and that I lose them on each monster.
Eventually I got it and reached the stairs.
I like the system and I think that with a bit of further work, an interesting puzzly dungeon game could run on it.
I like the core concept. I always like games based around color, there are not many of them.
I like the visual and sound effects. They really add to the experience.
It would be nice if you had some mixing cheatsheet somewhere on the screen.
Like you said, it is easy to cheese the later levels, which I did...
@caveman54 Thanks for testing. I don't test in other browsers during jams because it is just so annoying and boring, and there simply is not enough time to get a game working on all browsers, 1 is just enough :smile:.
@atium-addict Thanks. The overal game structure simply invited me to make a tutorial like that.
@baknik Yeah, that "feature" was left there when I adjusted the moving. I could fix it easily, but I think I will leave it in the compo version. It is definitely not a game breaking bug.
Anyway, guys, how far you got and how difficult did you find it? I literally have no idea about difficulty of the levels as it is nearly impossible to test the levels myself when I know the solution upfront.
@Ravarion Thanks! I didn't make nearly as many levels as I wanted, but the few I have am pretty proud of :smile:. Quality over quantity, right?
@numeralien About the perspective. It should have been done differently, the "camera" should have been higher. But since I had most of the images and core game done already when I realized that, and I really didn't want to remake all of the assets and also adjust pretty much all of the rendering, I just the added support features of reducing opacity of objects and change of perspective to help with that. Also, you are unable to jump when you are under water, and that's a feature, if you mean that.
@anyonebacon Yeah, I didn't give too much care to the sound and it definitely is a bit rough around the edges.
@twopm Thanks!
@sky-coding Did you finish it eventually? That's a known bug, but since it is far from game breaking, I am keeping it there.
@rgrem Good to hear the levels are not too easy :).
@khaotom Good luck with solving that!
@benbusby You are right. I didn't have much time left for audio, and I just suck at chiptune sound design. I like to record and edit proper sound effects, but it would not fit a pixel art game.
@mcrewind Glad to hear some of the levels were challenging! I will improve the audio in post compo, and fix the perspective bug.
@erendelous Thanks! It was a lot of fun writing the narrative!
@linus You can jump over obstacles, and water becomes an obstacle when you cannot swim.
@zemmi I selected red for sword, because sword associates power, and so does red. I chose green for jumping because for some reason it associates agility for me.
@peachtreeoath One of the later levels took about 40 minutes to make and it was really interesting and new process for me and I am glad that I have reached a bit out of my comfort zone this time! I always started with a core idea of a level, added a bunch of obstacles and tried to solve it. If I solved it, I made it harder (by replacing some grass with rocks etc), if I thought it was impossible, I adjusted what I thought would help me when solving the level. Then repeat until you get to a tight level. But I quickly ran out of the core ideas. I know there is so much more to do with the level design and I sure do hope to return to it and make it an actual game with some nice number of levels.
I hope (once I get better at designing levels for this) to usually make it impossible to clear all the bushes without picking an orb.
This is not a game, goal of Ludum Dare is to make a game.
That aside, I liked it. The sound effects and atmosphere were nice. And the message too.
First of all, it obviously seriously lacks polish, like proper tutorial, restart and others.
The game itself is actually interesting strategy-wise.
First, I though that the optimal strategy is to just kill all but one bug in the start. Then, I had one bug which just didn't grow fast enough. Because by killing, you don't just preserve more food for other bugs, but also lower the amount of potential bugs that get lucky and eat a lot of food at once.
Another aspect is that if you have more bugs, theoretically the average time to get food is lower, since if a bug goes to a food far away, it is likely to get eaten by a different bug and the first bug perhaps finds food which is closer. Also, you can keep the bugs you know will not win just to strategically clear some areas of the board.
I got score of 36 and think I found a strategy that could be good. In theory. All the strategic decisions sadly get vastly overpowered by the random factor, but here it is.
At the start of the game, select one of 4 quarters of the board, the one with most food and least ants in it ideally. Kill all the ants that are not potential winnters going into the segment. Once there are 2 or 3 ants left, hope for the best. They are more likely to select food from the area you protected, saving them distance they need to cover.
It would make the game more strategic and less random if you highlighted the foods that some bug is going to.
Whoa, now that's a big team. Were you all together? I think we all would love to see some photos!
---
I was about to write that the mouse controls fest wonky and awkward, only to find out there are keyboard controls too!
I was about to write that sometimes my vehicles spawned right into a wall, just to find out I could click them when they were still ghosts.
The gameplay is challenging and not furstrating. It was very atmospheric, and I was loudly calling my drivers names for not driving properly and looking at their phones.
What could be better? I didn't like clicking to select next driver. Maybe using some keys to cycle through the vehicles? Or make each vehicle have a number and you can select them with your numpad. It was frustrating when I clicked a vehicle and tried to start maneuvering it, while in fact I just sent another vehicle into oblivion.
I think it should get hard sooner. Or maybe have several difficulty levels?
I always felt like I lost to some random bullshit. 4 drivers falling asleep at once, 3 walls spawning right next to each other, vehicle refusing to turn the way I tell it to (yes, I had prayers left) etc. I never felt like I lost and it was actually my fault.
Jesus sometimes blocked my road even when there was vehicle I was just controlling below him.
Stories of the victims in game end screen are a lovely touch.
Application folder: F:/Users/BoltKey/Downloads/CavePaintings-1.0 There should be 'HardcoreCavePainting_Data' folder next to the executable
(yes, I have extracted the archive)
Solved: renaming ld43_data to HardcoreCavePainting_Data worked.
I liked it! It took me emberassingly long to realize what is going on and that I am the dude in the middle of the screen shooting ink.
The game is fun and feels very complete and polished for COMPO. The visuals are lovely. The concept works really well with the theme and I really like the game design.
The difficulty scaled up a bit too slow, making one playthrough very long. I would expect one playthrough of game of this format to take about 2-3 minutes (up to 5 if you are doing *really* good), so I have more incentive to play again and try to beat my high-score. I got 22230 on my second run when I actually knew what I was doing and I absolutely don't feel like trying it another time, as I know there will be a lot of long and boring grind before I get to the hard part.
Jumping felt a bit wonky and unsatisfying.
Fun game. I always love voice acting in games and yours works very nicely!
Clever concept. I think the scoring would made much more sense if you got score for each individual bird based on how much time was left when he got home.
That was lovely.
I really like the idea and level design. Basic set operations with a little coat. What a shame there's no random level generator!
It was a bit unclear how the multiple traits worked on one disease. I thought there needed to be both traits present to kill the desease, but eventually got it.
The theme is very nicely interpreted.
The music was bad, I muted it after a while.
The font didn't load for me and I was stuck with Times, which looked bad and messed up the layout...
I kinda like it. Simple, straight to the point, but quite fun. Got 252 on my second try.
I am not a huge fan of the background, it doesn't fit the rest of the visuals.
I enjoyed it. Nice and simple.
Conventionally, I would expect + to be at the top and - at the bottom.
The theme is not there at all for me - probably a bit too abstract :smile:. I just don't see the connection between sacrifice and subtraction.
When the game is controlled with keyboard, it is awkward to have clickable buttons. "Press space to restart" is much better.
Also, 0! = 1, instructions unclear :smiley:.
Cute interpretation of the theme and great job on music!
The game however was not quite there for me. It was not really challenging or interesting and got extremely repetetive after a while.
The UI makes it so annoying to play. I really want to like this game, I like the graphics and the overall feel. But there are too many fundamental UI errors that I just can't.
First and foremost, scrap the "confirm" button. There is literally no reason to need to confirm the actions when you can easily take them back. And the options that cannot be taken back, eg. eating food, doesn't have confirm button? Doesn't make sense. And it is placed so far away from the actions you mostly pick. When you need to click 3 times to make once action, and all the places to click are so small and awkwardly far away from each otehr, it is just annoying.
The actions have too much text. You should replace them with pictures. Compare "Collect bananas (+1)" and "+:banana:". This way, you can have all the actions be about 4 characters wide. Then, you could have all the options for all the characters on the screen at once. Also, it will be much more readable.
The option box blocks available resources.
The dudes should have HP and satiety visible even when not selected. Even better, have them show which action they are going to perform, even when not selected.
I think everyone should have a default action selected, eg. collect branches.
Next, the options that you cannot choose should be unavailable. It is frustrating having your dudes do nothing for the day.
I loved so many things about this. The graphics are cute, the sound effects are on point, the game gets challenging at good pace. And the little things such as screen shakes and many more work perfectly.
Sometimes, it was a bit too unforgiving in my opinion. But that is probably because I suck at rhythm games :smile: . Got about 32 on second try.
Did you record/create all the audio yourself? Like the birds, volcano explosion and all that?
I like it conceptually, but there are many UI and other issues.
Resources should be pictures (you can just use Unicode symbols, aka emojis. It is equally as complicated as displaying just text plus finding the correct symbol.). You should use different font, Arial is generally a good choice. Building options should display right next to the building, not on the other side of the screen, since there is so little information.
Also, there are several general RTS conventions every RTS game should follow unless it has a really good reason not to. If you are building a structure, you should build only one and then get back to default mouse mode, unless you are holding shift (in which case it is as it is now). Right click should cancel selected building.
Buildings should definitely have people working in them displayed at all times, not only when you hover over them. Especially since your dudes die over time, and you don't know which buildings they died in, and where they need replacements.
Default HTML buttons look ugly, and it is really simple to have nice looking buttons. Good start is a [button css generator](https://www.bestcssbuttongenerator.com/).
Also, the whole layout is very wide. imho a web game should fit into width of max 1000px. 1600px is just way over the top. You should just scrap the brown panels. Have info from panel on the left on top of the screen, with just resources and worker status (as is conventional). The panel on the right should be below the play area (again, as is conventional). Then, you comfortably fit into 800x600 without any major changes to the play area
Now for the actual game. As it is, it is very easy and there is not much pressure to evolve. You can win just fine (and perhaps it is the optimal way) if you build just the basic buildings without upgrades, get 185 dudes and use them to evolve 3 times. Evolving doesn't feel like "whoa, finally, I cannot wait to see what I just unlocked". As it is now, having much more restricted space could help, as you would have to be much more efficient with it, and evolving certainly helps with that. Or just have evolves unlock something essential for further development. Maybe, if fields unlocked after the first evolve, so at start you would have to live on hunters, and after evolving transfer into more efficient fields.
Also, you can get to infinite state where you just keep sacrificing workers and get potentially infinite score.
Whew, that was a lot to cover. Hope I didn't discourage you and you will work some of my suggestions into post-compo! (I don't see any difference between compo and post-compo?)
@martomate Wow, your score is absolutely amazing! Is it legit, or did it glitch out or something? I thought my 490 was good, lol. How big was your biggest group?
EDIT: So it turns out I somehow forgot to reset score and money on reset. Fixed.
Also, @martomate, I will have to adjust your score as it was added up over several games. (sorry)
@Lubaka Thanks for feedback! It lacks a lot to be an actual game, and based on the feedback, I will probably end up properly finishing it up. I simply ran out of time as I began making this game 9 hours before the deadline...
@generalanimal You are right, there is a bit of a stretch. Initial idea was trading slaves. I abandoned that, and wanted to make it about managing slaves building your pyramid. Then, I stuck with the pyramid theme.
@gonutz
Thanks! I find the game design to be the main part of any game, and that's what I put the priority on.
Glad you enjoyed it and congratulations on finishing it!
In the scores, it turned out that I didn't reset score or money on reset, so some of my scores were probably not legit. I just cleaned up the database a bit.
I just played several runs, and could get around 150 consistently with 261 high.
I think it is important to really rush the opening of the first mine. Eg. place first two blocks, cash one double and two singles and open the second mine right away.
You obviously don't want to have hanging blocks, especially if there are many blocks yet to come from that mine. This requires some planning ahead and you should know exactly where the stone goes the moment it arrives for all the mines.
Sometimes there are situations when you want to keep the stone ready for a while, but you should check that there are not many stones left to be delivered from that mine.
Once you have all the mines up and running, you want to start building your main combo. If you can get a combo of 10 symbols at the end, that's 110 points extra (if you don't use the money gained from it).
Also, some macro management is important, as you ideally want to dry out all your mines at once. Upgrade speed of the mines that will take the longest to deliver all the stones and don't just blindly upgrade the mine from which you need the current stone the most.
@peachtreeoath Thanks for playing and congratulations! If you manage to beat my highscore, ping me so we can start a little high score battle!
The high score is embarrasingly bugged, and thanks for pointing that out. I just had to get it working with 30 minutes left before the deadline.
I really do hope to make a post compo polished version. I just have absurdly many projects right now that I have open and would love to finish, but school and life get in the way :smile:.
Very small and simple with not much to it, but it does what it does and it does it well. User interface is good, the game plays well and it feels polished.
The core game is just not very exciting.
I also don't see the theme there.
The special effects and gameplay are perfect.
I am a bit confused though. I am stuck in the death screen, not having enough hearts to purchase ressurection.
I give up. After several tries, I got to "half way".
Simple and nice, as always.
Man, this game is hard.
I don't like that buying upgrades costs score. If the goal is to have the highest score, it is correct to not buy upgrades. I think that you should have it so you earn score for all the money you earn, but pay only money, not score, for upgrades.
I played a lot of runs (15?), and got a 56 in a decent one.
I have no idea what I am doing. But it is fun!
The idea is quite fun and I think that with some work, an actual game could be made from it.
The game is not really just yet. The way to win is pretty straightforward and linear.
The music was not good.
I loved the graphics and walking "animation".
Quite nice execution. I don't think I understand the theme interpretation.
The game got boring quite quickly as a good part of what I was doing was just waiting for the lasers to stop firing. No challenge, just wait for the lasers, move to the next part and repeat.
Great polish! I won.
It got very monotonous after a while.
I didn't like I could only shoot in 4 directions.
The drag and drop is annoying. I would much rather be able to just click the buttons and they would get added in order. Or, click once to select activity, and click multiple times into the calendar to schedule it. Or, even better yet, keyboard shortcuts. This sole reason made me stop playing after 2 play throughs.
I like your interpretation of the theme. Really nice look and feel, other that UI.
Loved it! Short and sweet. Lovely look and feel, gorgeous voice acting and nice art.
The theme interpretation is cute.
A bit too short, but what is there is quite fun.
Really like it! Nice interpretation of the theme!
Why do I have to hold up to double jump, but don't have to hold anything for walljump? It is inconsistent, and I think the up arrow rule is just redundant.
I am not sure about the badges at the end of the levels. First, I have no idea what are they awarded for (after completing the whole game), and they don't really make sense if you cannot quickly switch between levels and see which badges you have in which levels (same for the level times). I have no idea how many badges have I missed, and I really don't want to play through all the levels just to get to a level where I missed a badge.
With the badges, it feels like I didn't really finish the game, and it would be super tedious to try and get them all.
This is the one of few games I feel comfortable rating without playing it. Innovation is a definite 5/5.
I got stuck in the second level. I didn't get any upgrades and couldn't get to any higher places.
Also, alt-tabbing made my computer go nuts.
Alright interpretation of the theme and cute graphics.
While it is nice that the shop is not controlled by mouse, I think that 3 specific key strokes just to place a box is a bit too much. I don't think there is a reason to have any inventory or shop at all, there is never a situation where you would rather have 3 boxes in your inventory than 9 health. Why not just place boxes with space and open chests with c, making it cost 3 and 2 hp, and just cutting the shop? The hotkeys made me lose a lot of hp just by mistyping.
I had a feeling that the spikes were unfair.
I restarted the level with the first yellow button several times. Then, I hit the "start again" button by accident, which made me quit immediately.
I would much rather have interesting puzzles with limited amount of hp per level than many levels connected together.
Your links are dead (404).
Very ambitious, what a shame it lacks polish so heavily. But it is understandable you just didn't have the time in Compo. I would absolutely love to see a finished post compo version.
I have no idea what each building does, how much does it costs, I don't understand how roads work (my workers seem to carry random resources around mindlessly and eventually get stuck), I have no idea how should I build my roads to actually work. The controls are not very friendly. Right click should not open context menu. I don't know what I have selected. It lacks tutorial, and even the game description was not very helpful understanding the rules.
Fun and polished, but I kept feeling like I am dying to "complete bullshit". The following example just made me rage quit.
st.png
Some checkpoints along the way could be nice, as it becomes a chore to repeat the first parts again and again when dying. And it is a chore made out mostly of waiting. I get that it is a stealth game, but waiting is not fun for me. Last, I think the guards should take more than 1 frame to turn around.
Pretty cool as a gfx and sfx demo / tutorial. Great music, graphics and everything. Great job guys!
Really nice mood. Liked it!
When I first saw the art and premise, I thought I would love it. However, there are so many things standing in the way that don't make it very enjoyable experience to me. Collissions still are weird. Camera doesn't move in expected ways. The game is clearly incomplete, with only one station being relevant. And the core idea is not all that fun either.
It has very nice graphics and audio, but in my eyes, a game should always have the gameplay first.
Congrats on completing the jam nonetheless!
What did I just play... I have no idea what it was or what I did.
But I liked it for some reason. Cute and light.
I got 14 plants.
The game got very repetitive after a while, probably because of the lack of different types of bricks and powerups that I am used to from other breakout games.
Adorable, fun, clever, challenging. My favorite from this LD so far.
If I were to dislike something, it would be the camera movement. I felt like my field of vision was very small. It would help if you moved the camera so I see more in the direction I am going.
Great polish! Love the visual effects and overal feel.
I don't know whether there is a goal. Is it even possible to eat the big triangle? I didn't manage to do that. I got score of 8702.
From what you wrote earlier, it is impossible to eat the big triangle, so I don't think I understand its purpose, considering the plane is infinite and you can just move to different part of the map. And I didn't find more triangles that were bigger than me.
Another thing - in this type of game, I want to become gradually more and more powerful, with the goal being getting to a final state where I can do anything I want. This game however did the opposite - at start, there were many triangles to eat, but as the lasers started to shine more, I was getting smaller and less powerful, and there were less triangles to eat.
My game is quite similar to yours, feel free to check it out.
I gave up after a while of having no idea what I am doing. Having the command line interface at start is not a good idea, especially when it lacks essential command line features such as selecting previous commands with up arrow, staying in focus after pressing enter, command auto completion, scrolling etc.. And in web version, the help section overflows, so it is not much of help.
It is a shame, because it sounds like actually fun game, but for some reason you decided to make it worse with the command line interface. Was it supposed to be a joke? Was it supposed to make it rewarding getting to the actual game? I don't know. Either way, I didn't understand it. Why not put the energy it took to make the command line interface towards polishing the game or making a proper tutorial?
Man, this game is HARD. The last level is insane.
The text was too slow and it felt weird not being able to move when the text was rolling.
The premise is cool, but I don't think the changes made the game any better, especially the "visual effect" that made my framerate drop into oblivion, rendering the game even harder.
That said, I enjoyed it and finally finished.
Quick question: What?
That said, I liked it (and won after like 5 tries).
Lovely graphics and feel. I am certain you wanted to make it have more content, as the gameplay is a bit limited as of right now.
Thanks for feedback everyone!
@furfel While I understand your opinion, I was aiming more at the puzzle platformer where you see the whole level and need to figure out solution, rather than "explore" platformer genre. Also, that would require more detailed sprites, and we may have not had enough time to make that look good.
@hexiez123 Agreed, but with time restrictions, I decided to go with fixed resolution as I didn't want to deal with reponsivity.
@hiisileiri I don't think I understand your remark about flower feedback. When you save a flower, there is a sound effect and the plant grows yellow flowers.
I have one single question I would like to ask:
"what?"
Anyway, I liked it.
First of all, don't hide my mouse cursor please.
Second, I have no idea what is going on. I don't even know what the goal is - are the red cells enemies? Or are white the enemies? Should I destroy them? Or should I destroy the whole map? Should I create as many white cells as possible? I genuinely don't know.
I have lost several games. I have been trying to understand the game for good 10 minutes. So far, I have found out this: each turn, you move one of your tiles. If red tile meets white tile, white becomes red. White sometimes shoots. Red explodes. Thats' it. After understanding those concepts, I was able to destroy all white cells just to see what happens, turns out I won.
After winning, I still have no idea how most of the game works: How does white reproduce? No idea. How explosions work? No idea.
Nothing of this is explained in-game nor here.
I believe there is a good game underneath all that is "lost in translation", but I just don't see it right now. Sorry.
I like the idea, execution, art, sound effects. I really want to love the game. I very much enjoy all tetris-style games, and this looks like very creative take on the genre.
But the controls are so non-standard it drains most of enjoyment from it for me. Although you don't mention it anywhere, I think it is no secret that this game is very similar to Tetris, where the standard controls are almost opposite to your controls. After countless tens of hours of playing Tetris, I have standard Tetris control scheme deep in my muscle memory unfortunately, and even after several minutes of playing, I keep pressing up arrow trying to rotate the block and mess up my play area, or press space to hard drop, messing up also. Although there is not "standard Tetris controls comittee" or anything like it, extremely common scheme is up for rotate, down for soft drop and space for hard drop. Adjust the control scheme to match at least those, and I would love to come back and give it another go. I am not rating the game just yet.
I know it is silly, I know I sound arrogant and sassy, but just the control scheme is a huge problem I have with this game and a deal-breaker for me.
I gave the game another go. As all the batteries have the same starting orientation (why is it different that the orientation of the "next:"), it seems like the best strategy is to play without rotating and always place the block above the start spot - I got to level 45 using this strategy, and it was not very fun, while I was able to get to level 15 tops using "normal" strategy.
I like the concept, but the battery rewards definitely need some tweaking for the game to be fun.
You didn't tell me in the stream your game was also about keeping plants alive! I guess my theme interpretation was not that original after all :)
I liked the game and I hope I have found all the endings, and I enjoyed the process of learning the game. I didn't like that the selection blocked the view of the flower, so I did not know how healthy it is when selecting next option.
What a shame there are no sound effects.
Love the core concept. I finished all the levels and enjoyed solving them all. Really clever level design, lovely and juicy animations and sound effects and no bullshit mechanics.
I may have missed something, but there seems to be no keyboard input at all (correction: there is shift for slow down), which I think is a shame - I kept pressing space bar to start/stop the brave, as it is the standard key for play in most video editing software etc., to which this game felt awfully similar to. Also I would have liked to see number hotkeys for items, r for restart. I don't like to having to keep hitting tiny buttons on the other side of the screen.
Music when Brave was moving was nice, but I would have liked some thinky music for the design part of the process.
I don't understand why it was only possible to slow down to 0.5, and not speed up, which was what I wanted most of the time anyway.
Also, the language is not the best, but that's not a big deal - most of the things were understandable.
I have played the webgl version, but the bugs somehow added to the bizarre experience this game was.
I don't know what to think of the game. But I had a nice laugh, so that's something.
Either way, nice voice acting.
Finally won, but I just cannot get myself to 100% it, it is just too hard.
Very polished graphics and fun platforming. The inertia was a bit wonky at times. Sometimes it felt like I couldn't change direction mid-air.
I didn't really like how taking hits threw me (and the egg) around, making me lose more life.
I like the idea and overal execution, however it evidently is not really complete.
I have killed all the police and kept going a while, but there doesn't seem to be an end or a goal, which is a shame.
Shooting doesn't have enough feedback, and I don't know whether I cannot hit the enemies because I am too far, because my aiming is poor, or because I am in cover. I would add lines of where the bullets go, make the hit effect a bit more visually distinct.
I also interpreted the theme as keeping plants alive - so far I thought I was the only one. I invite you to try my game out :)
About the game. I finished it in 530s.
Love it, love it, love it. The atmosphere was great, music really fit the mood, and I absolutely adore the mechanic that the platforms that you connect the life you are carrying with become alive as well. That mechanic was very nicely executed and creatively iterated. It is a bit shame that you didn't juice the reverse operation a bit more.
The learning curve was very nice too - not too easy, not too hard. Except perhaps for that bit where there were alternating small vertical pillars and lasers - I was on the verge of rage quitting there.
Big kudos for configurable controls! (although menu navigation was a bit clunky)
###### Also, I got the secret ending. Love it!
So I found 4 secret rooms and the alternate ending... is there more?
EDIT: so I finally 100%d the game.
or did I?
Lovely illustrations and "voice" acting.
After a couple of tries, I finally won, but there were some issues I had with the game. It is very unclear where the supervisor sees, but more importantly, the unskippable text dialogues are extremely long - about 11 seconds each, if I am correct. And since they are always the same, I literally spend about 33 seconds of each attempt just waiting for the dialogues to finish, instead of playing the game.
The game was alright. I didn't like long restart time and fake loading screen (don't tell me it takes 2 seconds to load red, blue and black circle). It was first an unnecesarily long death animation, then the fake loading screen, AND a long countdown.
But I have much bigger problem with this entry: If I understand correctly, this is a game made 2 months ago for the Brackeys Game Jam 2020.1. You just took the game and submitted it to Ludum Dare. If that is the case, it is not okay and strongly against the Ludum Dare spirit. You cannot just take a complete game and make it into an entry for Ludum Dare, and it definitely does not qualify as a boilerplate basecode. You better have a pretty darn good explanation for that, or don't hope to attend Ludum Dare again I guess.
> so it is not an unfair advantage when you think about it
@Gehad, Ludum Dare does not have a handicap system afaik. Imagine a 500m race, but some people decide they will start at the 200m mark because they think they are slower than their competitors. Does that seem fair?
@Gehad You still don't seem to understand what base-code is, so let's have another example.
Let's just pretend there is a hypothetical house building jam, just like we have here, but about building houses. There is a theme, time limit and everything. Competitors are allowed to have base of their houses already built before the competition. One competitor, however, has a house already built. It is not anything great, a simple wooden cottage, but still a house you can spend a nice summer weekend in.
The competition starts, and while everyone is building their houses, the one competitor just paints the walls of his house and repairs a damaged roof. He then claims that he built the whole house in the time limit, and that the house he started with was just the base.
Now, was he playing fair and by the rules, although he knew he was standing against professional teams of builders and architects building beautiful residences and had no chance of winning anyway?
(spoiler: no he wasn't)
Lovely theme interpretation. I suck at those clicky games, got 1:39 and never was really able to get that exponential growth of the population, (perhaps eventually with one mega asteroid wiping up the whoe population, which would be a game win) which would have been nice.
It took me a while to realize I can click the dinosaurs to change their direction, which changed everything. I kept them all near the side of the screen, but eventually one single fast big asteroid wiped them all up.
Nice illustrations and visual style.
Movement speed was absurdly high. I didn't like I couldn't see where I am going - the camera should move so I see in front of me, not behind me.
Piano music was not great and looped poorly, drum music was alright.
I unfortunately didn't complete the game because I kept dying to things I couldn't see coming.
I loved the intro animation.
Interesting premise. It probably makes sense, as the most important topics are related to so many other things, and the more important topics generally just have longer Wikipedia articles. I wondered how you calculated the topic scores - at one point, I thought it was how common the word is in some dataset. But your calculation makes much more sense.
Very innovative.
Thanks for comments all!
@albertofdzm Oops, fixed
@zachary-barbanell that was my oversight, I disabled the automatic key repeat, as that was obviously not the way it was meant to be played. Thanks for pointing that out! (also, I cleaned the leaderboards a bit. Sorry...)
@helekopeter The lost control was what I was kind of aiming for - just like you can control a fire until it becomes too big
Like it! Cute little animations!
The controls get a bit choppy and not very fluent.
Also, I keep dying randomly in the level with grass and flying spikes at start even though I am on a platform.
Great concept, great execution. Congrats!
I love the idea and the game, but it is so hard, I cannot get past 20%.
One of the things that annoys me is that I don't know where my shield ends, as there is a gradient, so I don't know whether I should stay or quickly rotate almost a full revolution.
I love the graphics, effects, juiciness of the monsters and the models. Really polished and adorable.
The game itself is very repetitive. I have no sense of progression, apart from a new monster every dozen levels.
I think it is polished. It is true that there are no sound effects, just a single level, no menu, not much graphics and yadayada, but it plays very nicely and smoothly and it is fun.
Got 30 loops after a bit of practice. Infinite run is definitely possible with the correct technique.
Would be really glad to see stats like best lap, avg of last 5 laps etc.
And obviously more levels and online scores.
Congrats for abandoning your previous work and still managing to put a game up!
It took me way too long to realize what is going on. Not many people will read help, and while proper in-game tutorial is a pretty complicated thing to pull off for a game jam, something as simple as
if (gameTime > 100 && gameTime < 200) displayText("Shoot those enemy ships by pressing space") if (gameTime > 300 && gameTime < 400) displayText("Send astronauts to replenish plasma from the planet") if (gameTime > 500 && gameTime < 600) displayText("Bounce the astronauts back using your ship")
can do wonders and takes minutes to implement.
That said, I think the core concept is really creative. The game got quite repetitive quite fast, with not much of difficulty curve (apart from shrinking number of astronauts).
I tried pressing A on the thingies, whatever that means, but cannot get my thingy to move around. I have been clicking around and randomly mashing wasd for good 5 minutes now.
2:59 on first run.
Really getting the Windows XP space cadet vibes from this. I loved that game.
Creative use of the theme.
Nice and simple. Very well polished, platforming is fun and smooth.
I don't like that I don't see how many levels are yet ahead of me.
Maybe you know of [Chronotron](https://www.kongregate.com/games/scarybug/chronotron) back from 2008, it uses similar mechanics you do.
10/10 video, hilarious.
Couldn't get myself to finish the game myself, as I don't really enjoy restricted vision and repeating the whole game over and over again.
Also, I don't like forced full-screen.
I love the theme interpretation, and the puzzle mechanism is just so compact and elegant. Just 2 elements, but so many creative uses and puzzles. I am actually really impressed. I don't give these out often, but this is definitely a 5/5 innovation.
Nice tutorial narrative.
I gave up at level 11. It is just too late for this.
It got a bit samey after a while with nothing more to explore. Got 451 first try, and don't really feel I could do anything differently or use different strategies on my second try. Nice vibe.
I really, really like the game. It has nice replay value, great game design and learning curve. After a while of trying, I got score of about 1100. Audio is really fitting and not annoying (as often happens with custom chiptune).
I still don't understand what the purple pills are for.
I like the theme interpretation.
I think I won. I managed to get an area of size 73. The trick is to select a side and only place one color on it. Fun puzzle game, reminds me of 2048.
I want my money back, the fish can fly in the sky.
Pretty scary and well polished. Controls don't work in webgl version.
Nice polish, it feels really good to play and control.
The difficulty curve was a bit slow and the playthrough a bit long.
Nice concept and vibe, but there is desperately little actual gameplay with no replay value.
I thought I was getting into a resource management RTS, but instead got a nice little puzzle game. Can't say I am complaining though.
The game ended just as at it started getting samey.
Great job on the overall vibe and polish. Really impressive for 48h.
The game, however, feels a bit unfinished. I was able to reach the bottom consistently with only about half of the upgrades. There doesn't really seem to be an end of the game, unless I am missing something. I was even able to dig through the bedrock, only to find out I ended up being stuck. Also, I understand that more enemy types were planned but you didn't make them in time, but that aspect of the game feels a bit unfinished too.
One thing that really bothered me were the combat animation times. The animation that tells me I got 3 gold (the same 3 gold I get from every other space) takes 5 seconds to complete, and is completely unskippable. I ended up avoiding combat not because I would not be able to finish it, but only for the long animation times. That definitely didn't feel correct.
Awesome concept and superb execution. Gets a bit laggy after a while.
Using music that you did not create is against the rules and the spirit of Compo. I invite you to prove me wrong, but I doubt that you single-handedly created over 15 minutes of high-quality soundtrack along with the game over the weekend. I don't know where you got it from, but I also suppose it is under a license that obliges you to cite the author. And lastly, you should *at least* opt out of the "audio" rating category.
@pd-dev I stand corrected, that is completely legit.
Really like the concept. Adorable graphics and decent sound effects.
What a shame the gameplay is not really completed. After understanding what is going on, I was quickly able to go infinite.
I would like to be able to automate more, maybe if it went just a bit in the direction of idle game.
It was weird that the "shaking" artifacts took much more time to get than the "rock" artifacts.
Finally, after a few tries I got a clean run. But I am pretty sure 139k is possible.
Cute, fun, quick. Like it.
I would appreciate a quick restart option.
Really like the careful mining mechanic.
The webgl build has much slower cart for some reason.
Also, great job on the music and art.
Wow. This game is hands down my favorite for this LD, let's get that out of the way. Absolutely adorable graphics and animations, creative and extremely addictive gameplay, catchy and fitting music.
It lacks a bit in polish though. These are the problems I have noticed.
* Way too many controls. Fixing walls and refueling should be imo triggered by left click. * Space does not always cause jump. * Mole sometimes glitches into digger, out of reach of Johnny's hammer. Game breaking and really frustrating. * When digger lands, Johnny changes direction when repairing walls, so he stops repairing. * There is always only one of the 3 sound effects for the digger playing, so when it needs both fuel and water, it sounds like it only needs fuel. * No sound of crumbling walls: incosistent with sound of the digger * Fuel / overheat warning triggers when there is still a lot of time to deal with it. * Sometimes, resources hover above Johnny's head. I feel like resources should not collide with Johnny. * Johnny sometimes gets stuck just near the bottom of the drill and becomes completely unresponsive, breaking the game.
With that out of the way, I am proud to announce that (after much longer that I am willing to admit) I won and demand that sweet spot in the leaderboards. The score is not great, but at least I won.
won.png
Absolutely love the art style and voice acting.
I would appreciate a steeper difficulty curve and faster gameplay to improve replayability.
Also, is there no ending? My human has been sleeping for 24 hours straight now.
Very creative, fun and working concept.
Some mechanics were a bit confusing. It took me a while to realize that when I pick up a hammer, not only one bridge is destroyed, but also I gain another hammer into my supply.
Also, it took me a while to realize why sometimes I build a bridge of length 4 and sometimes 3.
Also, animations could use some work. It is always nicer to watch things move around fluently rather than choppy.
Wow, very impressive. The attention to detail is very good. It is really fun and satisfying.
If I had to change one thing, I would have like to have my cooldowns and energy available visible near the mothership - it got quite hard having to keep looking into bottom right corner to check my stats. And it gets surprisingly tactical, managing several minions, and thinking of where to go next.
But really, great job. I love so much about this. I got 44% destruction and 391 victims on my 3rd run.
Creative! I got stuck at level 7, I didn't really understand why the butler was not moving.
At first, it was very hard to see what is my objective. I still don't entirely understand how do I defeat the opponent: do I have to hit him enough times? There is no feedback on whether I am getting closer to beating the level.
I really love the ambience and vibe of this.
It doesn't load for me on Firefox :(
I was able to get to the candles in the corners, but got stuck on lighting them and almost gave up. I must have been doing something wrong. Also, at the start, it took me way longer than I care to admit to find out how to open the car and get stuff out of it. Anyway, I got an imp. Don't really want to sit through so much of unskippable dialogue just to try all different offerings combinations, but the game and the atmosphere is the good kind of dorky. Really like it, but, as already mentioned, the slow unskippable dialogue (or, actually rather monologue) is a significant issue.
I like the idea, I can see it being a pretty good game! There are however many problems in current version.
The controls don't make any sense at all. The fact that I have to select something, although I can select just one thing, is not good. Help menu option not working didn't make a good impression either.
Arrow keys (or wasd) to move the player is the industry standard, and you should have a very good excuse to not follow standards like these.
To shoot, you could perhaps press a hotkey, which would also be displayed and clickable next to your ammo, then select a direction.
Having to read the game description before even being able to play the game is a major flaw in my eyes.
Enemies killing me instantly after spawn was super annoying, I would almost say game breaking.
I liked the music and atmosphere. The kill sound effect was a bit annoying. Graphics are very basic, but kinda worked.
Highscore not showing in a highscore-based game is very awkward mistake and a hard one to oversee.
Theme interpretation and the idea is quite nice, but the execution is lacking.
Also, usually when you say something is randomly generated, you don't mean just that the enemy spawn points are randomly selected. Usually, that term is understood as the game having some sort of procedural generation, like generated levels or something like that.
Sorry for being a bit harsh and direct with my feedback, but that is what LD is all about - learning from your mistakes!
Alright game.
I don't understand why you went with the dark and scary look and feel, with this concept I would expect bright and colorful fireworks and butterflies style.
Collisions not working properly was a bit annoying at times.
I got to level 4 and it seems insanely hard. Is it actually possible to complete it?
The music was not that great.
Wow, that was good! Love the music! Visuals are perfect, gameplay is so smooth and responsive, challenging but very fun!
What a shame there are not more puzzles, perhaps randomly generated. I, being bad at runner games, died 15 times in total, so the puzzles got pretty repetitive.
Also, it is quite non-standard being able to push multiple blocks in sokoban games. I was looking at a puzzle for a while, thinking it was impossible, until I randomly found out that I could push more blocks at once.
I don't really like the theme interpretation. In this case, there was not really much of genre fuse or combination, it felt more like two separate games that I was being switched between and there was almost no interaction between them (like "if you solve a puzzle in low number of moves, get higher jumps in the runner" or something like that).
@JCMonkey Thanks, glad you liked it!
@john-darrington Thanks, although I know the balls bounce in a way they should not. But mostly, it works.
@Poroh I have a bad habit of making challenging games... Hope it was not frustrating for you!
@Andreadbx Thanks, at first, I had no inspiration, but in the end, I got something usable.
@radical-dog All my past musical creations went horrible and made the game worse, you are right some music would be nice, but I just didn't make any. Could you be more specific about graphic polish? Which parts you didn't like? Which graphical effects would you want to see added?
@mAnimal There is no music because I cannot make good music, nor had time for that. Which kind of upgrades of the game you would want to see?
@Jiri_One Be more specific about the graphics please, I quite like it as it is. What feels unpolished about current version?
@el-pepi Nice catch, never had that happen to me. It should be fixed now. I was considering adding a head, but ended up not doing that, because it usually was quite clear to me where exactly I was. Maybe I will try to tweak the head rendering a little.
@drikdrok Glad you like it, really appreciate it! I play it every now and then, and still have fun!
@Linus I had Achtung die Kurve in mind, one idea was to make the snake move just like Kurves, but that was far too hard to make work. With sounds, I was aiming for satisfying and soft sounds that don't get annoying after a while. Graphics could be changed, you are right. Thanks for great feedback!
@Sholf @Rombus Thanks! The theme ended up being quite inspiring!
@Vyolfers Practice makes perfect :wink:
@Blinkenlights I focused on the gameplay, so audio and graphics were not that flexed out.
@Lerc Maybe it was because of the explosions of red balls? Even when you get hit by the explosion, you die.
@acoto87 Thanks! Honestly, I was quite surprised to see that it actually worked so nicely once I made it!
Thanks for all the comments!
@FormalCloud Soon...
@edj99 Short individual length but high replay value was what I was aiming for. I didn't have much time to really make the graphics nice, gameplay was my number 1 priority with this game.
@samuel-henderson @Keithdae I felt like when I changed the gameplay variables, there were always some interesting new aspects of the gameplay. I ended up making multiple modes, because I just couldn't decide!
Wow, this was very fun! Love the idea!
Great music and visuals.
The gameplay itself was a bit lacking though. I tended to forget which letter was which color. Also, it felt a bit unresponsive, I often missed although I was pretty sure I hit. But that could be caused by my not-exactly-high-end pc.
Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raHUKmMFizE
I am in love with the idea! Perfect theme interpretation! Also, great job with the graphics and sounds in COMPO, they really do look very nice!
The gameplay sadly is not very flexed out as it is. You just build up, while defending yourself, and then climb up. In every single level. It gets extremely repetitive and the idea is just not very well used and juiced.
I really like it as a proof of concept, not so much as an actual game.
Very nice idea and great theme interpretation. Your entry is more a proof of concept than an actual game though, sadly. I would *löve* to play more than just one actual level.
I had the same problem as @dylan-rainwater, updating LÖVE fixed it. I think a lot of people are going to have outdated version of LÖVE from previous LDs. I don't know much about the framework, but I think it could be an easy fix to replace the cryptic error message with some message about outdated engine.
It would make a lot of sense to have the arrows synced to the beat since one of the genres is a rhythm game.
The last level took a while to complete and was actually quite fun! I was confused after that, since I got stuck in the first level again after finishing the third one. A simple "Thanks for playing!" text on screen takes like 2 minutes to make and makes it feel much more complete.
Love it! I suck at memory games, but still managed to beat my brother. We played three games and he won two, but I won on score total, which totally counts, right? :smile: We didn't read any instructions (except for controls) and we were naturally a bit confused about the fact we actually could use the powerups. We played the first round without even using them, but eventually figured it out.
It would be nice to have even players, just like in [Curve Fever](http://forum.curvefever.com/play.html), for the ultimate mayhem!
It is a clever combination of two wildly different genres. Really like it!
That was fun! Really great job. Clever idea and it just works! Very nice visuals and audio!
Got 45,100 on second try. Didn't really feel like giving it a third try. Perhaps because of quite long time of a single run and relatively slow progression/difficulty curve.
It was also a bit frustrating waiting for a repair to reach me, while there were also bullets coming right at me.
My game is also breakout, except crossed over with snake!
Great idea, love the concept.
The hardest part was always the first note, especially in the sequences of 3. I always missed it because there was just not enough time to see that I am already playing.
Also, in the like 4th level, I got stuck at the bottom and could not get up to the remaining enemies. I ran out of time, and had to start from the first level again. Which I of course did not. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Finally, after about 8 tries, I finally won!
It is not very clear how movement works at start, but eventually I got it. It took a while to get used to the strength of the jump, but after a bit of practice, I was able to control my jumps quite well.
The fact that when dragging a card, it snapped with top left corner was a bit annoying and unnatural.
I didn't really like that the coins are randomly spawned. I had runs where, although I played optimally, lost just because I didn't get enough coins on the cards. ("what a lucky day" on victory screen was quite fitting :smile: )
Also, I don't think buying a card and ending up with 0 money should be a losing condition. I had plan of collecting bunch of coins after placing the card I bought with exact coins, but lost because I "ran out of coins". That felt wrong.
Love the theme interpretation.
The visuals and audio are really nice!
Also, there is a bug with jump refresh. You are able to double jump if you hit a platform from a side.
A really nice, polished game. Love the idea, and execution. Very good music and overall sound effects. Great job!
Yet, I will pick out some things I didn't like:
What is the point of having separate missions and time trials? I would be much more happy if there were just the two tracks, each with medals you can earn.
I think the game was a bit too much zoomed in to see anything useful on the track. I was looking just at the minimap whenever I wanted to see the track.
Very long respawn time. Time trial games like these absolutely need one button restart.
Also, bumping into walls was very frustrating, in the way it kind of steered me into wrong direction. I would want (and expect) them to just slow me down!
Nice! After a few tries I won!
Great fuse of two great genres.
It was super fun driving around in roller-coaster-like tracks. I used to be a Trackmania junkie, and this brought some pleasant flashbacks :smile:.
Several things I would love to see being done differently:
I would prefer if the minimap had lower zoom, but showed the whole map at once.
I would very much prefer for the monsters to have HP bars, especially the boss.
Some way of telling which levels a tower is at by looking at it, or have levels shown on the minimap, so that I can plan ahead which upgrades I buy for which towers, without having to stop at a tower. It was very satisfying to upgrade a tower twice and activate it, without even slowing down.
Also, the game has very low replay value, which I don't like too much.
Thanks for adding hotkeys, they were really convenient.
Voice acting was great and fun, and did a great job at both setting the atmosphere and telling player what to do.
Cannot open it, make a build in a zip.
Really great fuse of two great genres! And, very fun game.
I got 16240 on my second try in the web version, but the fact that it didn't save to online leaderboards was not really nice.
On my third run on the PC build, I managed to hit the infinite state.
tetris.png
I could have gone forever (until my hands started to hurt REALLY bad), but I have other things to do today and other games to rate so I stopped at 40k :smile: (not at all Warhammer reference). Maybe if a challenger arises (@david-boeger?), I will give it another go to confirm my title (ping me in that case :smile:).
I admit I used to be a somewhat competitive Tetris player, so the game was pretty easy after I got the hang of the ball.
I never managed to score a trout, not even a triple.
I find it beautiful how it all just worked. The way I had to make the ball not hit the lines I was about to complete, but make it hit the blocks that clear a line, how I could reshape (or even remove) the tetriminos I didn't like, how I sometimes had to dodge the ball with my tetrimino, how there were in total 3 losing conditions, but they all felt very natural. There was quite a lot going on, but everything was so intuitive! So, great job on that!
Also, your Tetris implementation was pretty good. Compared to many clones that I have played around the net at least.
The multitasking aspect was very nice, and very natural too.
So yeah, it was super, super fun and I love the idea and implementation.
Let me give you several comments about some minor issues I had.
- E for rotating should have been W. I found it quite annoying.
- I would prefer for the tetriminos to have colors, preferably according to the standard Tetris color scheme. I see that it doesn't fit the retro style you were going for. I didn't like the overall aesthetics.
- I didn't like the way the ball bounced off the bar. It kind of "snapped" to a position several pixels from where it should be
- When I had a broken tetrimino falling, I couldn't rotate it near a wall even though I should have been able to, because the checker assumed that the broken off cubies were still there and should not get beside the wall
- Of course, some difficulty rise after a while would be nice. But I may be the only one to have this problem.
- Super minor issue - how the shades on the blocks were not all in the same direction.
So yeah, that's all. Best game I played so far this LD. Also, sorry for sweeping the competition, I guess I may stay at the top for a while :smiley:.
@david-boeger @honest-dan I just got a trout without losing a ball, which was a new challenge, completion of which ensures **Trout Platinum Club** membership. It took a lot of tries. It was pretty much all about keeping the ball above the blocks most of the time, because whenever it got below, it messed it up. I got lucky with how the ball started to bounce horizontally.
Also, the dropping of the pieces seemed much faster than in previous version, that helped a lot.
https://youtu.be/8mX8bq7jebo
(sorry for no sound)
First of all, this is a great concept and perfect interpretation of the theme! 5/5 for both theme and innovation!
Second of all, I got a high score in hard, yay (@Keithdae try harder :smile:)! It was so much fun figuring out the optimal strategy!
Seriously, I dig it. I would play the hell out of it if it was more flexed out, balanced and polished game.
The controls were intuitive, understanding what is going on took a bit of trial and error, but I got it quite quickly.
There are, however, several flaws in this version.
First, the bug where the thing I am shooting randomly jumps to the top left is seriously so infuriating. When I have been waiting for a specific building, carefully aiming it so it lands exactly where I planned it to and then it just glitched away, I was mad.
Also, I experienced a strange bug (in medium mode):
zumascreen.png
Next, once it sped up like it does when you cannot play anymore even though I still was able to play. Maybe, it was because I had no turrets left and little money, but money makers at front, which were just about to make me money to place next towers. So yeah, that was annoying as well.
I know, this is Ludum Dare, I know, you had just 48 hours. But the bugs were really annoying and game-breaking.
It was a bit frustrating that even though I had thousands of dollars, I couldn't do anything about avoiding death, because I was blocked by my own towers. But that is a part of the game I guess.
Also, it seemed (in hard mode at least), that whether I lose immediately or build some sustainable economy was all about how lucky I got with initial tower selection. Maybe having some kind of ability to select what to shoot would be nice. For example like in Zuma, where you can swap the next two balls in the queue. Some option of a quick restart would be nice at least.
No music nor sound is a shame, but I completely understand you and I didn't mind that too much.
I would seriously love to see this made into an actual big game, with more turrets, enemy types, nice graphics, sounds, multiple levels and everything! You really should keep working on it.
EDIT: Also, healers healing dynamites was a bit silly :smile:
Great job for the first game jam, hope it was a nice experience for you!
The game mood was quite fun, but low replay value and lack of actual gameplay is always a minus for me.
I disliked that I didn't find a way to skip the text writing. Especially since there was often repeating text. When you have this style of text presentation, you should always add a way to skip it.
Wow, what a great game, with seriously impressive level of polish and amount of content for a COMPO game.
Very nice graphics, and I love the jokes in the story.
The game concept is very clever, and it works very nicely.
I had problem with the up arrow making the block fly instead of rotating it. Up arrow to rotate the tetromino is the industry standard, and muscle memory really screwed me up several times.
Quick restart button missing is a big minus. Once, I instinctively pressed f5 to restart level 4 (after like 8 failed runs), and my progress didn't get saved either. Shame...
Fun and cute take on the theme. What a shame the levels are always the same, even though they are procedurally generated.
Fellow Trout club member!
I love the core idea. It felt like there was not much strategy though, just have them both on `$$$` and just make it a bit cheaper for whoever happens to fall behind. That made the game quite not enough interactive.
Voice acting was nice, and loved the story! The graphics were a bit too... abstract.
I would love for example if there were multiple resource types that I sell to the guys, and have to think strategically what to give them cheap to boost certain aspects of their force.
The idea is suspiciously similar to Ludum Dare 18 winning entry [Fail-Deadly](http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?uid=2073), about prolonging war between two sides, but with a bit different idea in mind. Maybe you wanna check it out.
Nice concept. I would love to play it if it was more flexed out and polished, where I would pick cards once every while and fight various kinds of enemies. Clever idea of combining two quite different genres.
The level is just far too long and repetitive.