My First Ping Pong Massacre by Martin Vilcans 2012-12-20T20:23:00
Particle physics are nice (although weird they destroy things?) Shame I couldn't really see any of the things it said I destroyed. Sound would have gone a long way.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → bradleypollard
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | 👥 | Perihelion | jam | 173 | 3.93 | 3.67 | 3.73 | 4.37 | 4.47 | 4.45 | |||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | GRIDLOCKED | jam | 503 | 3.46 | 3.26 | 3.76 | 3.55 | 3.45 | 3.07 | |||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Tetrift | compo | 273 | 3.43 | 3.76 | 3.10 | 3.95 | 3.43 | 3.30 | 24 | |||
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | Objective | compo | 528 | 2.97 | 2.97 | 2.86 | 2.43 | 2.97 | 2.68 | 2.38 | 2.77 | 55 | |
| 2012 | 25 | You are the Villain | The "Great" British Weather | compo | 69 | 3.63 | 3.25 | 4.26 | 3.78 | 3.50 | 3.33 | 3.69 | 3.20 | 64 |
Particle physics are nice (although weird they destroy things?) Shame I couldn't really see any of the things it said I destroyed. Sound would have gone a long way.
Artistically fantastic. The music was a little irritating unfortunately, and it got really frustrating how often you would move 2 squares instead of one, and fail near the end of a puzzle and have to do it over. This is why these type of games generally have an undo last action button. Sadly I think it was a rather uninspired genre to choose as well as block pushers are pretty dull, and adding a narrative doesn't really change the gameplay.
The only thing that kept me going till the end was the story, which was damn creepy. Not really sure what it all means, or how you were a villain, but yeah.
Fire felt reaaally weak, was unfortunate. Graphics were neat enough.
Agreed, playing as a moustache is pretty funny. Overall the game's tone is great, love the way people explode too.
Keep getting stuck at the smooching bit, can't take zee money because if I blow up the person I instantly get spotted, even though I smooched the guard!
Has potential indeed.
This is actually pretty neat. Really nice sprites and once I finally worked out how the buttons worked it had an interesting "lemming" esque concept.
Shame it wasn't finished.
Looked really nice and had great music. Game felt weird at times. Was too short, yet you spent too long picking flowers. Which is like, the whole game. Definitely was expecting a twist at the end though. Also it waited a loooong time on that final title screen.
That's pretty awesome that you had both a shooting and driving section (even if they weren't that dissimilar :P ). Loved the added touch that you could murder your friends! Shame the game itself was so easy. Literally just hold space and walk left till the driving sequence :P Pretty good!
Neat concept! Were there plans for more enemies (down the right side?) I don't know if they factor in maybe if you win or something because I found it real hard to stop the guy.
Ahhhhhh this goes really badly with two monitors! Not something you were expecting I imagine, but still. Luckily you included the source so I will try and edit out the full screen and see if I can actually play.
Couldn't work out how to fix it I'm afraid :(
Unfortunately a little while in I realised you could just hold W and never die. But before that it was quite fun, if a little tricky.
I kinda like the idea of the guy you're controlling not directly being the villain, and the game looks completely gorgeous, but it's not very game-y. Also it was annoying how you had to stop to see if a ? would appear so you could interact with something.
Can't get it to run I'm afraid :( Batch file just opens and closes!
It's a shame it is so unfinished, the idea at least has potential (although sounds like a riff on the ending of Braid :P)
Art is nice, at least. Game didn't let me inside the castle. Which I think it was meant to.
Dang this came out pretty well in the end! The map screen is really useful, and it's good to see the archers are a little but more accurate :P Flying mostly feels good, would be awesome if you had a little more sideways movement control though.
Do check the tips and control descriptions above to get an idea of how the happiness works (to improve your score)! And thanks for playing.
@Zazibar But that would be too easy (and no fun)! :P
@Rex Sorry, I don't really have any experience with Monogame so wouldn't know how to get XNA games out of Windows!
@DaGamesta Thanks! You're right, there are a lot of very interesting interpretations :P
@zenmumbler I haven't heard of that game before, but I will certainly check it out if I subconsciously imitated the music haha!
@doos Thanks for going to the trouble of installing XNA to try it out :)
@Jeremias I will definitely consider taking another look at this once I've had a break over Christmas. Never had so much feedback on anything I've made before, it's great to hear people's thoughts!
The flag was nice, even if it is invisible one side. It's annoying that the gun shoots to the right of the crosshair, and hitting people multiple times is just effort. Otherwise solid game, even if I couldn't complete it and fell off the map :P
It's some mindless fun, can't complain there. I think the time attack style is beneficial in the style of game you have, and the physics when you hit dudes is appealing.
One complaint I will raise is you get stuck on walls really easily. Not like, stuck so you can't move, but once you hit a wall it's hard to turn away from it cause every time you touch it again you get turned back towards it.
I have no idea what's going on or how I'm meant to control this! I managed to accidentally do the first two levels while I was trying to read the intro and now my dude has disappeared?
Yep, if you move up and down too much the guy disappears completely :O
Game is hard. Really hard. Not quite sure why everything only moves when you do though.
The concept was a neat idea though.
Really awesome idea! I felt like sometimes I was choosing blocks and still losing lives, might have been me. Very nice AI, music could've done with some work though!
Art style was really nice, however the pigeon really could do with snappier controls. Also bouncing off things kills you too much.
It really was short! Was there no sound also? Ending had its merits!
First off, I love the name. Will play now.
Nice to see someone else letting you take control of the weather! It didn't crash for me, although the tutorial seemed stuck at the point where I had to set a dude on fire? He was just running round trying to put my fire out and I couldn't interact with him. Fire kept spreading though.
Daaaamn! I was wondering where it was going with all the powers, and then you get MAX and everything goes crazy! I smiled playing this game, great fun.
Web link is dead, will try exe
Pretty neat! Well executed idea if not original. Music was great (although DEFINITELY not original :P )
Love the Monty Python reference and the game does well what it sets out to do! The limited scope hurts it a little though, woulda been nice to see some expansion on this idea along the lines of what others have said. Liked the art too! Tiny window size is somewhat appealing, although I don't know why.
A bit unfortunate you can complete most of it without pressing anything, but otherwise nice art.
It took me the longest time to realise you needed to use the "loudness" (size) of the meows to work out where Mr Snugglebutt wanted to be stroked and get a heart! Really needed instructions. Once I had that down though I got defeated by the blue guy. Damn blue guy. I got to 10 hearts.
Shame there was no on screen score. One hit death seems a bit harsh but other people said they completed it. Rotation is nice. I liked the insane reverb on the sound.
Can't get it to run :(
Java Plug-in 1.6.0_37
Exception: java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: main/View : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
Art is nice, concept is certainly unique (it's a strategy game masked by the theme of love) and it fits the theme well. Good job!
The use of light is pretty great. Did always wish I could change the light level when I was lockpicking. And talking about the lock picking, your minigame is actually pretty good. And lockpicking minigames are usually terrible. I liked how it got harder with less light.
The text bubbles would always disappear too quickly and I had no idea what was going on, but the physics based gameplay was pretty fun.
No points for the goat, what is this?! Game is pretty hilarious, although you can get stuck upside down in a flipping loop quite easily. People were great!
Idea is fantastic, but it's really hard to control the scaling. Plus the jumping really needs some work.
Cool idea, but it felt a little too slow. It's a shame there was no sound either, as that might have made it feel a bit more immersive considering the graphics.
Pretty tricky! Like the way the people will gather resources to build their homes. Was confusing at first with no explanation.
Mood and art style was fantastic but otherwise it felt a little lacking. Wish you could have strafed, that would have helped a lot with getting stuck on things. Also the "guards" or glowing orb things don't do anything at all. And as someone else said, the torch stops working on the floor a lot. I eventually found the bomb place (which drops them on your head? And you can keep dropping em, which is a plus I guess) but nothing happened.
Why shouldn't I use my torch all the time as well?
The total lack of sound was jarring. The gameplay itself was a little lacking, I ended up just jamming on all the keys as fast as possible as I had no idea what roaring achieved, and didn't see why you would ever want to aim a boulder up or down.
Was the ending scene just floating up? I was expecting something... more.
Just while I'm in the moment of playing it I noticed the attacker's health has gone into negative numbers in the throne room - is this a bug?
Will provide actual thoughts once I've finished my game :)
First of all, it has a very pretty UI. Some tool tips fall off screen but that's okay cause you can read them in other places.
The game is very abstract however, and it's not obvious necessarily what's going on all the time. I kinda gave up looking at the numbers and ended up going by my "feeling" of how things were progressing haha.
All the choices of upgrades are cool, it seems weird however that a lot of really powerful ones (that even benefit the earlier locations) are stacked to the rear end of the game. It makes sense in a way, but it's almost more beneficial to target like the "+5 Attack" say at all locations earlier on so it holds the attackers back longer, no?
Anyway, thought it was really cool and quite different.
Pretty sure the negative numbers are a bug. Over 100 turns survived just by jamming the next turn button with 30+ skillpoints not used :P
Ah man. This is freaking awesome. Not only am I a sucker for sound effects made with your mouth and cats, but the phsyics in this was so fun. The way the buildings fell down was awesome, the noise missiles make when they run out of fuel is glorious and once I found out you could jump I was loving it.
Literally the only complaint I can leverage is that the lasers have such a pitiful range. Otherwise I love it.
If you go to the first blob thing, it makes a CPU explode a lot then throws you back to the main menu? Weird. Also I teleported outside the map once and the game crashed.
Other than that, the main mechanic was good and interesting. Had no idea how to play other levels than the tutorial though.
I like it. A lot. And I don't know why ahaha. Once you find the rhythm you feel like a boss when you hit the change before it even happens and there's no static. Shame I can't rate it cause I didn't take part this time!
Also, fuck the star.
@kibertoad The bar for XP is at the bottom, although it's really hard to see as it's a similar colour to the background :P
I won! Jumping one block high jumps was a little finicky, however really neat game. I liked the muffin gun and nonsensical plot.
Turns out my intensely well thought out strategy of choosing the same door every time bit me in the ass. Also, it proved my Stats teacher wrong for telling me you always have worse odds if you switch your choice after being shown one door.
Awesome stuff. Some good difficulty balancing in repeating levels till you have enough upgrades to succeed depending on how good you are, and the music was nice.
@SerialVelocity: Yep, if I had had more time I would have loved to implement an arrow to point you in the direction of the objective!
@daredevildave Thanks! I'm terrible at art, so it was hard to make it obvious which tiles were repair buildings and so on so you could drive over them.
@Narariglez Thanks!
@recursor Thanks! I'm considering trying to get a version with a pointer to the next objective done in the future, and possibly putting it up on the Windows 8 store.
Also cheers for the feedback guys :)
@Tonasz Thanks! Yeah unfortunately it's a little unclear - given more time I would have added arrows and also a screen to explain what the gas and repair tiles do, doesn't help that I can't art :P
I'm not quite sure what the puzzle is, it's a match 2 game that can be solved by clicking randomly on the screen?
Graphics and so on are nicely done though.
Game was rough to start, and damn those pirate invasions at your home base. The upgrade system was cool though.
I liked the different art for the upgrades, like new weapons and so on. It was hard to play considering how some of the arrows were off beat, would have been nice if there was a little more rhythm to it - but great first entry!
Really cool! Also, did you use Hexels for the art? Loved it. Had good fun trying to work out the logic of it - however, the Pilot seems to cause a bit of a contradiction :/
At the start it says he is not a citizen, but then he says he's a conspirator. Conspirators always lie which means he would have to be the villain! But then, villains always tell the truth, so he is a conspirator! We have a contradiction :P
Hitting escape closes the game, and now I am so sad :( Was trying to combine my 200x chicken with the last remaining chicken to "win"! :)
This game is awesome, you basically made cookie clicker with chickens, and chickens are the shit.
It's a shame the sound doesn't work, it would have added a lot!
I was a bit confused at the start, mainly because I'm an idiot and can't read (I presumed green was right position and blue was correct but wrong position) but also I thought that the lights were in the order your dudes were. Then I remembered you don't get that much information in Mastermind. Neat though!
Graphics are gorgeous, gameplay, not quite as much sadly.
After I used up my laser to kill 3 cats I just had no laser anymore... I presume more was meant to be dropped so I could pick some up? Made it kind of impossible to play sadly. Best graphics I've seen in a LD game for a while though.
Audio was sweet. Also, I like how you used the One Direction idea to make me actually have to think whilst playing a platformer. It was weird having some aircontrol, but when you commit to a jump that's it, you have to go for it.
I still haven't closed your game just because I'm listening to the music. Is there a download for it somewhere? :)
The ending, although clearly not done, is actually great. The way the music stopped and then there was just nothing there. I approve.
Love the ship design and their abilities. Got all the way to the boss with a score of 19080! Sadly died to it :P
Love the snowballs and sounds :D Also fits the theme really well!
Love the art and the day-night cycle! Plus the comic strip style into is awesome.
Graphics were nice, even though you couldn't see a lot because of the darkness. Would have been nice if there was an item to increase your view, or if killing a box gave you more time.
Hahahaha you got me. Damn you.
Not gunna spoil it for others, but I got a great ending. Also a really cool idea for a game. Recommended!
I love how you spoil the end of the game during the game ahahahah. This is amazing, I love it.
I think the projectiles are a bit too fast, considering how you move. It's basically impossible to react to them if you're off centre and it becomes a game of luck.
However, interesting execution of the one direction idea.
Didn't realise I shouldn't move, but the outcome is in a roundabout way the same regardless.
Interesting, and I like the visual style.
Water is gorgeous, and I like the boats and subs too. Game is hard though, only way I found to succeed was to drive backwards on the surface while zoomed all the way out shooting. I guess you can't shoot underwater?
Was a bit confused to die because I ran out of air too, seems like a weird limitation for a sub :P
Gameplay seemed pretty solid. Graphics were nice too, considering the timescale. Were the grey patches representing being underground?
As others have said the jumping seems a little off, it double jumps sometimes too. Did die rather suddenly next to the switch, I guess the fire hit me, it just didn't look like it did.
Decent entry!
Absolutely loved the concept. Art was very well done too. I down to just 2 stakes but couldn't get past a particular level as I couldn't solve the puzzle sadly.
From seeing this on Twitter I almost think it's a shame some of those gorgeous graphical glitches didn't make the final version :P I'm curious, why does it switch to a "fake" window occasionally, when in multiple levels you demonstrate that you can do it using default windows? Is it due to the graphical problems?
Thank you for all the comments already! I've yet to start checking out some other games but glad to see some nice feedback :)
Thank you kopo and madk for the screenshots - that's something I totally overlooked when working on the game!
This is really cool actually, but I couldn't tell what any of the special abilities were except for the snake form. I enjoyed playing it though and beat all the other bosses (ignoring the locked teepee of course).
In a related note, the snake boss is damn near impossible. At least when you had no special abilities it was.
Really like the way it looks, and the way different shapes combine makes the puzzles fun.
That said, wasn't a fan of the level design. I felt like level 3 had too many blocks too soon and I was frustrated when I fell down the hidden hole at the bottom of the screen!
Gets very fast very quickly! Nice idea, I feel like it could have benefited from a few ways to shake it up though, maybe showing the shapes and trying to trick the player.
I like the idea of trying different combinations to discover the different monsters! Looked and sounded really good too.
My one suggestion is to make the game a little more difficult, I felt that the hints showed up too soon and there wasn't much urgency to the gameplay.
I like the concept (and anything with cats in gets bonus points) but I do have to say it felt very hard to successfully take out another bot. I got what I felt should be direct hits and it went straight through, is the only way to kill to make them fall off the bottom? An indicator of where the bottom is would be nice too, it currently just is a race to the bottom (since there is rarely a way to get back up after destroying the terrain) and then suddenly you fall off!
Very impressive creation given the time limit. Art was nice, although I kept wanting to rotate to see behind a lot of the buildings (despite the hover transparency). Some indication of progress would be nice too, since I played up to level 10 but I wasn't sure of the progression. Puzzle mechanics were really well thought out (even if it took me a few levels to clock what actually caused a tile to fall down).
Art and mood were fantastic, I think the walk speed could have been a tad higher. Couldn't find the last secret that was teased but enjoyed by time with the game nontheless.
In general I like it, even if the main focus is really just how fast you can drag. Some extra feedback about when you have clicked on a tile (e.g. colour change to show it's clicked) would be nice because sometimes I missed drags and didn't realise till I released and it was too late. Got quite far though which surprised me as you kinda have to play on instinct.
I love the way it looks, the hand drawn art goes really far. That said, the game gets very hard very quickly and I can't see the benefit of having both push and pull. Once you start using one you don't really have time to switch to the other because if you ever stop moving its very hard to not get hit! It would be good if it was more obvious which part of the spike balls will kill you, since it feels like a lot of it is safe to touch but that isn't obvious from the art.
For some reason I had absolutely no idea what the game wanted us to do for the first 3 attempts, but when I realised it's just keyboard Twister we had a great time! It does seem like unless your keyboard has N-Key-Rollover it will start to forget which old keys need to be held down though, so you can kinda cheat.
Loved the art style, and I know you didn't make the music but it fit in really well. For me, I kinda wished that strafe and rotate were swapped around (would be a good option to have to toggle it!) but the game itself was relaxing and fun.
Love the way it looks, really pretty. Fits the theme really well too. I found it hard to understand why you might want to go to the next level before placing all the buildings, and placing the level it seemed like I was unable to directly line it up with the old grid so it would always be off balance (maybe this is by design!) Good game though.
I love the aesthetic of the game, and the concept is great, interesting twist on your usual block pushing kind of puzzle game that is instead more about carefully moving around the disks to plan out your route.
I was about to leave a comment saying you can't beat level 2 until I had a eureka moment and realised the error of my ways. Always good when a puzzle game gives you that feeling.
Gorgeous art, shame there was no audio as it really could have benefited from some sound to give more feedback on the shooting. Love the character designs (the mozarella was cute) but I felt the enemies took a little too long to die.
Game looks fantastic, and I love the gameplay. The little robot is really cute and I like the one hiding at the top.
I would have enjoyed playing it a lot more with one simple tweak to the controls - just commit to tank controls. When I first pressed A and it just rotated my robot without moving sideways my instant reaction is to press W to move forward again, however this just turned me back again. Once I got my head around that I still kept overshooting my targets because I was tapping A to turn and then holding it after to move - it basically seemed impossible to only move one square!
But, that said, for a Compo game this is really impressive and I enjoyed my time with it.
Very nice art, I think if you had a preview of the direction you were aiming the rabbit it would help a lot! Sometimes I thought I was aiming straight but it went slightly to the left of my target.
Love the way it looks! It was sad to kill so many doggos though. Also this might be a bug but I could use the Q to fly ability as much as I wanted on the first maze.
@swift You're right about the tooltips, unfortunately we didn't get a chance to fix the bug where they display the wrong text and get stuck. Thank you for the feedback though, the % gate is in fact division (integer division to be precise) - but you are right that the icon is confusing!
@squabbler Thanks for the bug report! When you say the left side, do you mean outside the grid? I believe we intentionally allow you to replace one gate with another, but if it went out of the grid and covered an input that would be bad. Also, revealing outputs one at a time was an intended design choice since you might discover you need to re-plan your original solution to meet all the new outputs (to go with the theme of having increasingly less space). Sorry you found it frustrating!
@the-triumvirate Some gentle music and soft interaction SFX is already on the todo list :)
@deprecat Thanks! The Endless mode only just made it into the game in the final hours of Monday morning, glad you liked it.
@wahooney Mobile is on the list too, just need to re-work the rotation controls and do some testing!
@shockeye "I think you should have just made it so any time to click on the outputs you can drag out a connections." This is a great idea and how I hope to make it work in the future.
Thanks to everyone else who I haven't replied to, Robo_Chiz and I definitely intend to keep polishing this up after the jam and the feedback about the initial frustration has given me some ideas of how we can ease players in (and make wire mode more intuitive) in the future.
At first I was starting to think the game was too easy, but it certainly ramps up! I'm glad it had a help screen but the way it was presented did mean everything I read immediately left my brain one pop-up later. That said, the icons were fairly clear in terms of what they did. I didn't realise till the second boss that the tiles being deleted actually blocked movement - it's a nice use of the theme.
I was however a little confused how the selecting mechanic worked. Sometimes I just couldn't select anything and I couldn't deduce if there was a range or a cooldown on selection as it seemed a little random. I think some sort of cooldown meter (maybe there was one and I'm just blind) would make when you can select cells more readable to the player - at first I thought it was just broken!
I really want to play this (it looks fantastic) but I cannot open the .rar file with 7-Zip (it says it's corrupted). Could you please upload a .zip alternative? Thanks!
Really fits the theme well, and visually it looks great. Totally captures the feel of being on a crowded tube train. A little frustrating to play as I couldn't work out a reliable "strategy." I also couldn't necessarily tell what was changing between levels, is it just the time? Audio was enjoyable, and not overbearing. All in all, good polish for a Compo game!
Loved this, glad I took the time to play it even if it took longer than I expected. I am annoyed at myself for not finding the clues for the servers and rads until I read the comments here (even though I - *spoilers* checked the "follows" and missed it amongst the red herrings). I brute forced the servers because it doesn't take long to, but once I saw a comment here I found it and got the rads.
Some feedback would have been nice from the login screen (it doesn't tell you incorrect user/password when you try wrong ones) and the console could have been more user friendly (give a different error for a correct command that just isn't calibrated, instead of saying the command doesn't exist. Also, auto scrolling down when entering commands and supporting case-insensitive commands too). Overall though it was incredibly innovative!
Love the way this game looks, the aesthetic really fits the gameplay mechanics. Very cool idea, I was just rubbish at it 😅
Very pretty to look at, and the audio built to a wonderful crescendo at the end as the chaos mounted up. I was actually a bit frustrated with the keyboard controls at first since everything is on a diagonal angle it made it difficult to launch the passengers (pressing W+A+E all at once is a pain). Using the mouse and realising I could just spam throwing rapidly helped alleviate this.
Overall though it's an incredibly polished game for a jam and I enjoyed my time with it.
The loop gave me Deathloop vibes where certain things had to be done at certain times (e.g. areas closing off or projectiles arriving) which I thought was a nice touch. I did get stuck on the final puzzle (I had 4 symbols I wasn't sure how to decrypt) but up till that point the puzzles had been satisfying to solve, reminded me of a good escape room!
Really liked the music switching back and forth with the worlds. Platforming was easy to control, which was nice. Also the puzzles were challenging in a good way. Having the preview on screen is smart too.
I do agree that it would have been perfect if standing on the left or right side of the final level changed the music! 😁
Not knowing some of the films made the QTEs a bit hard to judge sometimes - that being said, even when I did know the clip (e.g. Matrix) I expected the button press to come at a different time! I think the ones that had the prompt coming in from off screen helped a lot with this. Really novel way of using these clips though!
I really appreciated how as his dong got longer the game became even harder to control 😂 Definitely made the game funnier for me.
Initially I liked the unusual movement but near the end I kept getting my forwards and backwards messed up!
Thank you for all the feedback so far! @relick That's a very solid 100% time, wonder if anyone can do better 👀
@benk Thank you for the kind words. You're right, we opted out of the Audio rating as the music and effects were from royalty free sources. Those are credited on the itch.io page, I think we forgot to put them on this page! For reference, the music was "Ether Vox" from the wonderful https://incompetech.com/
@fireslash Given more time I would have loved to smooth over some of those off-by-one tile jumps you describe. Part of it does add additional challenge but I totally understand what you mean when it feels like there's a tad too much momentum sometimes!
The different costumes were very enjoyable, the one riding a horse was my favourite. I think putting down items should have been a different button to interacting because in the panic of the 10 second timer I kept accidentally dropping things if I missed what I was trying to click on 😂 Some of the puzzles were pretty tricky and satisfying to solve!
Also frog