Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Cheesey Bob
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Cave Dwellers | compo | 203 | 3.62 | 3.76 | 3.52 | 3.50 | 2.74 | 2.29 | 2.89 | |||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Ready, Deck, Go! | compo | 545 | 3.05 | 2.86 | 3.36 | 3.73 | 2.63 | 2.50 | 2.80 | |||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | An RPG For Ants | compo | 459 | 3.28 | 3.21 | 2.97 | 3.66 | 1.93 | 2.19 | 2.38 | 48 | ||
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Miner Fish | compo | 928 | 2.79 | 2.61 | 2.50 | 2.96 | 2.30 | 1.80 | 2.64 | 2.59 | 54 |
@sknoslo, my screen res is 1920x1080, but the game runs in an 800x600 window. I can see the ants in your screenshots though, but not at all when I run the game. It may be because I'm on a 64-bit system? I tried a bunch of compatability things to no avail.
Here's the screenshot:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/qybvincj8602vhp/screenshot.png
Very interesting concept! It was a little hard to tell what was going on though.
Could really do with a "hold down button for continuous fire" mechanic (it seems you fire as fast as you click, so my hand started to hurt towards the end). Other than that, a good but simple game with very nice music.
The really great art and sound design creates a good atmosphere in this game. Would have liked to see the people you find follow you out of the mine.
It was quite hard to tell which direction the plane was oriented in the cube. Other than that, not bad - and definitely innovative!
A solid entry with nice graphics and sound effects. A little on the easy side though.
Very fun to play! I liked the low-fi aesthetic in both the graphics and sound, which complement each other well. The digging mechanic is well implemented, and works well with the planes dropping bombs on you. All round a really solid enrty. Hard though - I couldn't beat it. Can I ask what happens when you reach the TRESHUR?
Good all round game. Clearly had a lot of thought put into the design.
A really cool concept and interesting take on the theme!
@Infraviolet this may be caused by
1) running the execuable without extracting it from the zip.
2) not having the 'img' folder extracted to the same location as the executable.
If it's neither of these, then I'm afraid I can't help.
@Others: Thanks for the positive feedback :)
@SuperIzzo
Thanks :D
Yes, you do get hungry faster when you are bigger. Also, the food increase you get from eating is proportional to the ratio of your size to the other fish's size. The balance of these are the things I'm least happy with. I didn't want it to be too easy, but I think it's ended up being a bit too hard.
The voice is hilarious! I really enjoyed this one.
Wooooaah! 10/10, 100/100, Best game! Best game LD31! Really loved the way the player controlled and the way enemies spawned in, in particular. So gooooood! :3
By far the most intense game I've played this LD! Great concept and well executed. The only improvement I can think of is getting it to run at a higher frame rate, if that's possible. That might make it easier to keep track of what's going on!
I managed to get just over 58000 :D
Really well executed concept - love it! I managed to beat it (having savegames was definitely needed) and there was a good amount of content. The last boss fight made me chuckle!
Great little game with really cute graphics!
I feel it would have worked better with keyboard controls, but other than that not bad.
Fun and nicely polished. Could have done with being a bit longer, but otherwise very good!
Nice game with superb graphics and audio
Very nicely put together game; could have done with sound effects & music, but otherwise flawless! First one I've actually looked at the source for :)
It's good to see a game inspired by the theme, rather than fitting the theme coincidentally... *cough* all those snowman games *cough* :P
Really cool concept!
I feel as though this could have been an interesting game if the "mixer" was fixed and if there was an objective to the game.
The windows version works fine for me :)
We're rating humor but not fun? :( I found it pretty fun...
It's simple but well made. The overarching victory condition gives it just enough extra depth over vanilla RPS to make it interesting.
Absolutely amazing pixel art! I really liked how the jump functioned as a downwards attack. The idea of constantly shooting and moving in the opposite direction struck me as odd at first, but actually gave the game a really unique and interesting playstyle.
Nice chill game! The music was really good, and the parallax background was a really neat touch to the graphics. I think not having such long gaps between obstacles would have made the game more engaging at the start.
Thank you all for the kind words! I'm glad people were able to enjoy this. Art and sound design are not my strong suits, so I definitely deserve criticism in those departments - something to aim to improve for next time.
Apologies for the difficulty spike! I should really have done something about that after playtesting, but didn't for whatever reason. If anyone gets completely stuck on a level, you can edit the data files to change the win condition for the level (though you'll have to restart the game). The "level_x" files show the layout of the level and the "levelData_x" files have the win threshold on the second line.
Congrats @sh1rogane!
Thank you all for the feedback! I'll see about making an updated version with a more approachable difficulty curve.
@lexyvil I've now put the installation instructions from the itch.io page onto this page as well. The file "Cave Dwellers.jar" is an executable java file, so you should be able to run it as you would a .exe file.
If your pc can't run the file (after extracting it from the zip), then you may need to update or install java for the game to work. This is free, but if it's too much hassle for you to do this for a LD game, then I'll understand if you skip this one. Though, as far as I know, it's pretty standard to have java, so this shouldn't be an issue.
@lexyvil A lot of people are having trouble with that level (in hindsight, I did make it too hard for the first non-tutorial level). So, here is the solution:
https://imgur.com/a/Dt3ZVbl
I think the levels after that are of a more appropriate difficulty.
@the-tophat-demon Sorry about the audio! Was the issue that the volume wasn't balanced between different sound effects, or were you getting inconsistent volume between repeated plays of the same sound effect?
@the-tophat-demon That's very strange. I'll note that down as a bug. Thanks for getting back to me.
@crastinator Thank you very much!
What I did for the main levels was make the map, then play around with it in game for a while to see what score I could get. This method, of course, only works for open ended puzzle games like this, and I wouldn't recommend using it for anything other than a LD game, as it's really not exploring the possibility space thoroughly enough.
I think what I did right in terms of puzzle design was the tutorial levels. For those, I wrote a list of all the aspects of the mechanics that the players should know, then put them in the order I thought they should be taught. For each aspect, I then made the simplest possible level which required the player to understand that aspect.
If you want to hear some good advice on puzzle design, you should play through Portal with the director's commentary on.
Absolutely incredible! Such a fun game! It took me several tries, but I managed to beat it - the boss was a really cool way to end it. The visual and sound effects were really great, in particular the player's gun was very satisfying. The addition of the strafe-dodge was a really cool idea which helped you feel a lot more in control during fights.
My only criticism is that it was pretty frantic. I think it could have been made even better if the game speed was turned down a bit - everything else kept the same, just a slightly slower pace so you have a bit more time to react to stuff. Maybe I'm just getting old though, ha!
This was really fun! The audio and visuals were really satisfying too. At first I thought running out of space wasn't going to be a problem worth worrying about, but past level 10 is definitely was. I appreciated that you gave options for restarting at later levels, as skipping the slower early levels (which are necessary when you play for the first time) makes replaying the game much more enjoyable.
If I had to give a criticism, it would be that there seems to be a point at which you cannot defeat all the enemies even when spending all your time shooting them. It would be nice if playthroughs were able to last longer somehow.
Cute art and fantastic music. I found the movement controls a little bit too floaty, and it was quite hard to direct shots. Other than that, a very enjoyable game!
Cool game, thanks for sharing! It was very fun to play once I figured out how things worked. I like the easy-to-read retro graphics too.
I think it would've been nice to have more prominent damage sound effects. There was a sound effect for taking damage, but it was hard to hear over the shooting sound effect, and I couldn't hear any sound effects for shots hitting enemies.
I used a dualshock 4 controler via USB, and I was getting the bug mentioned above where only the left/right shooting controls responded, but only on the web version - the win64 version worked fine. The problem seemed to be that the 'fire up' control was stuck on (so I was always firing up and could only change that to up-left or up-right).
@alexfalkenberg I'd be happy to test a new version whenever it's ready. The bug is probably something really wierd and technical seeing as it's version-dependent.
I know how you feel with the sound effects. Mine are always last-minute and never sound as good as I'd like, haha! Although last LD, I did discover that recording sound effects can work well, even with a terrible microphone.
Thank you! Best of luck to you in the rankings!
Very impressive for a first Ludum Dare game! As others have said, increasing the difficulty over time would be a nice addition. I liked the sound effects and music; the concept for the shooting mechanic was cool and worked well; and I thought the pixel art characters were really fantastic!
This was a very enjoyable game! I really liked the idea of having a practice area in the instructions screen. Good music, sound effects and graphics too. Very small nitpick, but I think having press-release rather than press-press would've felt slightly nicer as a control scheme.
Very fun! The controls felt good and the game was a perfect length. I would've liked the camera zoomed out a bit, as losing sight of the ground every jump felt kinda disorienting.
Also, it's a small point, but I appreciate that you put all the files in one folder in the zip, as it removes that little bit of hassle from the downloading process.
Good take on the theme. Every element of this game was implemented really well and feels really good. I was particularly impressed by the smooth fading indoor/outdoor transition.
Also, I thought the audio was fine.
Absolutely fantastic game! Really clever how you've implemented speed, acceleration/deceleration and turning in a turn based setting, and especially how you've linked the match-3 into that in an interesting way. I really like how it adds a layer of strategy to the match-3, because you are looking to get different power-ups depending on where you are on the track. Really nice music and sound too. I suppose the graphics could be polished up a bit, but that's really the only crtiticism it's possible to make.
@morphine Thank you, that was really useful feedback and I'm glad I got it so early on - I've updated the description with some explanation of how to play.
@number6406 @TheMonsterFromTheDeep Thanks for the detailed feedback guys, I really appreciate it!
Balancing and progression were definitely areas I completely neglected, so I agree with your points. I was torn on how to do the difficulty, and ended up going for the easy-to-implement option of an arcadey, everything-gets-harder style difficulty curve. But this doesn't gel well with how the card system works. In hindsight, I think the better option would've been a small selection of hand-crafted levels and limited availability of cards.
Strangely, it never crossed my mind to have the AI actually race alongside you. This would be a really cool thing to add!
Ooh, a fellow java dev! I shall check out your source code ;)
I liked the sound effects and the simple, clean graphics. I think the animations may look better if the bobbing was a little more subtle.
The core gameplay worked well, but could've really done with more content - buying upgrades didn't appear to do anything, so there wasn't much progression besides the stats. There didn't seem to be any way of finding out what each stat did. The game had a solid foundation with a lot of room to grow into something interesting.
Quick question - what does 'PV' stand for?
This was pretty enjoyable, if a bit slow paced. I would have liked the option to advance time manually. The art and sounds, though basic, do have some charm to them. I found the portraits and dialog quite amusing. Overall, a very well rounded entry.
Really fantastic game! The gameplay is super fun and the graphics are perfect for this kind of game. Some sound effects and music would have been nice. Personally, I enjoyed learning what you can shoot/jump over by experimentation (after all, there are only a few different obstacles). My best score was 1342.
Out of the 16 games I've played so far, this is my favourite by a long way. Not the most polished, but definitely the most fun.
I got destroyed in the first few fights while I was still learning, but I found the difficulty level seemed to peak at some point, and I felt I could've kept winning indefinitely. It would've been nice (though completely unreasonable to expect for a Ludum Dare game) to have some kind of curated difficulty curve with a set ending. Especially with the different deck types giving the game lots of replay value.
I really liked the amount of content and the depth of the mechanics. The different deck architypes in particular were really interesting. Loved the music and the art. The attack animations were satisfying. I would definitely be interested to see this developed further.
This was really fun! Fantastic art and audio (I wish I had your pixel art skills).
High difficulty though (my best was 3140 / turn 54); the main challenge was avoiding collisions, which sometimes felt impossible or unpredictable - I would have liked to see slightly lower object density and some way to tell where the other ships were going to move next turn.
Overall this is a really good entry. I liked the positional attack/defence bonuses for an extra layer of strategy. The HP/damage values were well chosen too.
Really enjoyable little game - I would have liked more levels to play! The ones you had were very well designed. Gameplay felt really nice and smooth once I'd got used to the controls. Fantastic audio and aesthetic (I'm a sucker for ASCII though).
Cute! As mentioned above, timers would've been a good inclusion. Some audio would have been nice too. Everything that's in the game is really good though. The difficulty curve in particular was spot on.
Better story than No Man's Sky! Fantastic mood - the music and art are lovely. The execution of the theme combination was really interesting and well done too. I really enjoyed it as a short, atmospheric, arty experience. I don't think it suffers too much from lacking mechanics.
Now... I normally don't like suggesting additions to people's games (I value the dev's artistic vision over what I or other players think "would be cool"). That being said... I thought it would've been cool if you played through the decline of your civilisation. Like, after you conquer all the planets, you have to click back through them as they are lost/destroyed/conquered, until you are back to the one you started at, at which point the game ends. I don't know if that's anything like what you had in mind for the game, but I think it would fit the story and mood you have.
33rd for mood! Good job man!
Absolutely incredible! Awesome music - I love how it changes when you're cooking. Amazing pixel art. Really fun gameplay. Satisfying sound effects. Cute food icons and funny text-splash things (is there a word for those?). A true Ludum Dare masterpiece.