Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Coda Highland
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | 👥 | Network Bridge | jam | 343 | 3.68 | 3.50 | 2.91 | 3.58 | 3.61 | 3.65 | 3.47 | 3.67 |
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | The Tacks Collector | jam | 619 | 3.18 | 3.30 | 2.34 | 3.40 | 3.42 | 3.60 | 3.22 | 3.14 | |
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Marianas Miner | jam | 578 | 3.35 | 3.76 | 2.76 | 3.95 | 3.34 | 2.86 | 2.52 | 2.89 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | 👥 | Call of Aether | jam | 701 | 3.47 | 2.97 | 3.68 | 4.24 | 3.66 | 2.78 | 3.50 | |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | 👥 | Adrift | jam | 2.91 | 2.79 | 3.36 | 3.41 | 3.12 | 1.43 | 2.54 | ||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | 👥 | Loading Zone | jam | 503 | 3.65 | 3.68 | 3.68 | 4.38 | 2.75 | 2.34 | 2.79 | |
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | Starshock! | jam | 955 | 3.13 | 2.96 | 2.34 | 3.32 | 3.05 | 2.73 | 1.78 | 2.85 | |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | 👥 | All-Nighter Simulator | extra | |||||||||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Overclocked | jam | 1189 | 3.17 | 2.77 | 3.26 | 3.89 | 3.32 | 3.09 | 2.61 | 2.81 | |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | Skyloop | jam | 1351 | 3.07 | 3.07 | 2.94 | 4.00 | 2.44 | 2.77 | 2.05 | 2.26 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Lily vs. the Swarm | jam | 1339 | 3.45 | 3.42 | 2.85 | 3.90 | 3.73 | 3.52 | 2.36 | 3.40 |
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | Nullified | jam | 792 | 3.20 | 2.96 | 2.66 | 3.00 | 3.82 | 3.29 | 2.37 | 3.18 |
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | 👥 | Watt Balance | jam | 767 | 3.21 | 2.95 | 2.76 | 3.39 | 3.18 | 3.47 | 2.00 | 3.27 |
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Golden Lord | jam | 776 | 3.10 | 2.94 | 3.05 | 3.05 | 3.26 | 2.69 | 2.89 | ||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Swirling Infestation | jam | 1156 | 2.75 | 2.52 | 2.76 | 2.52 | 1.84 | 2.66 | |||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | The Dungeons of Indianapolis | jam | 952 | 3.05 | 2.80 | 3.45 | 4.02 | 3.70 | 2.86 | |||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | 👥 | Network Invader | jam | 443 | 3.56 | 3.50 | 2.91 | 2.54 | 3.58 | 3.89 | 3.52 | |
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | 👥 | Depths Disconnected | jam | 3.36 | 3.18 | 2.45 | 3.72 | 1.66 | 2.33 | |||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | 👥 | Diminishing Lands | jam | 316 | 3.46 | 3.55 | 3.28 | 3.02 | 3.00 | 3.50 | 2.06 | 2.89 |
Gotta echo the other comments: The difficulty curve is too shallow. The game doesn't get interesting until there are seven or eight different fruits to keep up with, so it starts off boring. It gets pretty frenetic later on but that's no good if you lose people's interest before they get there.
I have to agree that it's too easy. I never had my pack more than three rows full. That said it's a good idea, and I think you could really soup it up by introducing some additional bonuses, like combo rewards for clearing items with every move without having to make a move that doesn't clear anything.
This is by far the most effort I've seen put into cut scenes in a jam game.
I think the controls are fine. They feel just like an Asteroids game ought to. Yes, it's challenging, but that's the point. The only thing that might improve on the controls is to make the turn speed faster.
Huh. That's strange. I thought I fixed the Win64 build after I got earlier reports of it. I'll try again in the morning, or maybe I'll just take down the 64-bit version since I don't think it's going to make a big difference.
@ReiMari Yeah, I know that. I thought I fixed that already but apparently the download link is still serving up the old version or something.
@jamie-reed I have a guess about the cause of the freeze, and it happened to me once during development but I was never able to reproduce it. I have some ideas for failsafes that I could put in for a post-jam update.
As far as the Win64 version is concerned, I think it'll just be easier to take down the Win64 version since there's no reason to have it distinct from the Win32 version. I've relabeled the releases appropriately.
@jamie-reed Oh shoot! Thanks for pointing that out. I've fixed it.
You have to press Space to respawn after dying. It's something I should probably have documented. The main reason I have it on a keypress instead of a timer is to give you a chance to wait for the enemies to wander away and that was faster than implementing temporary invulnerability after spawning, but even that rationale doesn't work considering you can't see where you're respawning -- it's a rough edge that I just didn't have time to polish up before the deadline. I do appreciate the feedback!
HTML5 build: http://xmpps.greenmaw.com/~coda/ld42/
I'd add it to the list of links in the article but for some reason it won't stick when I save it. I'll try again later, maybe it's just a site issue, but until then... into the comments you go, link!
With some help from another developer I've tracked down the likely culprit: the particle effects are a lot more demanding than I thought they would be, and while my development machine has the specs to keep up with it on the Mac build, older machines and the HTML5 build are both more significantly impacted. I'll tone down the particle effects some and release a "lite" version.
@grahhhhhhhhh @jamie-reed I've lightened up the particle effects and added some functionality to make offscreen particle effects use much fewer resources. This should hopefully solve the issues you've encountered. Thank you for your help and feedback!
@jamie-reed Actually that's a pretty good tip. Thanks for looking into it. I didn't realize that the textures were going to stick around like that after all of the references were released, so if I memoize the functions that generate textures that should help.
@jamie-reed Thanks for the tip about the profiler! I didn't even know about it -- learn something new every day. That was exactly the issue, and memoizing the gauge textures instead of regenerating them dramatically improved the memory usage. I really appreciate it the help! New builds are uploaded.
@mowztouch The maelstroms grow in size, crowding you out of parts of the map if you're not careful.
Way to rip off Chrono Trigger's battle music. You know that's against the rules, right?
This was a lot of fun! I didn't expect a typing tutor game to be this enjoyable. (It might be nice to have an easy mode so I could give it to my son to play so he can get better.) The battle sounds are very Earthbound-esque.
Very peaceful! I agree that a zoomed out view would help, especially when playing with a trackpad.
It's a really good start. Is the text SUPPOSED to be absolutely unreadable?
I mean, this is more running IN space than running OUT of space, but I'll allow it! :D
The scroll wheel doesn't work on Mac, and I agree that everything seems just a bit too slow-paced to be entertaining. Good luck on improvements!
@cristihkj The UI does look like the screenshots, but I can't tell if I was getting damaged or not, since there wasn't much feedback about impact (or if there was I couldn't tell it apart from the trails of my own attacks). I can definitely tell there's supposed to be more gameplay than what I was seeing for myself.
A game in Scratch! Well done. Maybe you'd like to look at my son's entry, which is written in Snap (after he discovered Scratch wasn't able to do this): https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/running-out-of-space-3
Pretty fun! It took a little while to figure out how to actually make things happen but there's something particularly satisfying about how it handles.
I had a lot of trouble with the play control. Picking up boxes was finicky and sometimes the boxes clipped into each other. That said, it's clear what you were aiming for and with some polish this could be really good.
I really like the idea and I'm sure my son would love this game. However, the scroll wheel is a really bad choice of input method for discrete selections like this -- not all mice have scroll wheels that click one line at a time, and I have to turn mine VERY VERY carefully in order to pick a tool. If you want to use the scroll wheel, put in a rate limiter so you can't change tools more than once every, oh, 150ms.
This was cute! The animations are really nice, and the orbits feel good to watch. I just wish there was a little more I could do before the planets spawned.
@rexpeppers I'm trying to nudge him towards a non-visual programming language. He's got Python experience, for example, but he abandoned it after discovering how terrible the bundled graphics APIs are. He wants to learn Unity next but I didn't think it was a good idea to throw him into that in a jam context.
I know the feeling! I got called into work during LD41 and the rest of my team gave up. When I finally got out of work I just about gave up myself out of despair because there was so little time remaining... but then I had a brilliant idea and hacked together a game in the last three hours.
I agree with dietzribi's comment about improving how the content scrolls to make it easier to read, but it was fun to discover what everything did.
This is really well done. The physics feel great -- the right balance of floaty and controllable. Getting the hang of combos to make sure you keep your ammo full is a fun touch.
Is the big cross the ending?
I wasn't able to get far enough to ever see the sacrifice stuff. If it hadn't been brought up by other commenters I wouldn't have even known it was there. I'm sure I must have just been missing some obvious-in-retrospect trick to clearing the level I was stuck on. But I played enough to see that this game is very shiny and pretty, and while the play control took a bit to get used to it works quite well.
It's a good idea and reasonably well implemented for a new jammer, so take the advice that follows as an experienced dev wanting to help you grow, not as criticism against what you've built.
Custom physics is THE way to go for a 2D platformer in Unity. It's not as hard as it sounds and I'd advise getting some practice in. I don't mind sharing my code from older jams if you'd care to take a look. One trick to remember for game jams is that if you have behaviors that aren't working quite right, think about how you can turn it into a game mechanic instead of a bug, because rocket-jumping off of the side of a block is actually kinda fun.
To add an idea that hasn't come up in thread yet: Instead of having sacrifices open up a LONGER path, have them open up a NEW path closer to the entrance. That avoids feeling like you're retreading a lot of empty space while still keeping to the mechanic.
I would also advise putting in an animation that makes the sacrifices feel more impactful. It'll really bring out more of a polished feeling.
Go figure the VIP has no sense of self-preservation and is so self-important you can't tell him not to go somewhere. XD
@godsboss I think that's a Firefox issue. Try Chrome or Chromium.
That was a fun little diversion. Very gruesome. XD
I didn't notice I'd misclicked in the opt-outs! I opted out of Humor when I meant to opt out of Audio. I was able to add the opt-out for Audio, but I can't remove the other one...
EDIT: Oh. The site was just lagging. It actually DID let me change it. All good!
@meenners Yes, you can be destroyed. You have 100 HP and the monsters deal 8 damage per hit. Your strategy is... not quite what I intended and I should probably have the difficulty ramp up based on more metrics than just how many you've killed.
@seanw You COULD attack faster in an earlier build but I discovered that it was just too powerful and you could just spam it and never take damage.
@jared-york @seanw Thank you. :) This is the first time I've ever done pixel art for a game before and I didn't know that was a skill I actually had!
@boopsgames Thank you, but this isn't my first entry at all. It's my seventh, and I've been programming for 30 years. ^^()
@boopsgames Nah, no worries! It happens. I still appreciate the feedback!
@hao-tian If it stopped suddenly that means you hit a bug. If you can reproduce it I would appreciate a copy of the error out of the Javascript developer tools.
Nobody else has commented on it so far, so I will: The random name and description generators were a brilliant touch.
I see potential here, and while the graphics are really simple they do a good job with the music to set a good mood. Unfortunately, it feels like the game is entirely too dependent on RNG -- no matter what strategy I could have picked there just weren't enough Order missions coming up for the first four times I tried to play it (which meant I couldn't reject bad ideas, either), and then I got really lucky on my next play and got the mission that boosts everything several times in a row early on so everything was staying maxed out all the time.
I expected to just play one game of this to evaluate it for the sake of the karma.
I ended up playing four games in a row trying to optimize my strategy and I'm going back for another one. EXCELLENT game. Well done!
If I may make a suggestion: Drags can be annoying for laptop users. Could you consider supporting a click to select a card and a click to put it on a patient? Or even better, number keys to pick a card and a click to put it in place. That way reaction time isn't so limited by hardware.
I disagree with the "lack of variety" complaint because it's a jam game. (My personal approach to this issue is procedurally-generated content. It's a little trickier to do with a puzzle like this but not impossible.) The graphics and theme were great.
A suggestion for non-mobile play control would be to permit dragging as far as you want, or to pop up directional arrows on a click so a move is click-click that you can manage quickly. Repeated short drags are particularly challenging with a trackpad.
A solid entry, especially for a younger team like yours! Keep up the good work in future projects!
I agree that this is more like a short bit of interactive literature than a game, but it's definitely worth going through it to see what you've made.
I have to agree with @ente and @betz, I can't figure out how to actually play. It seemed fairly obvious that you just picked the cheapest options for the first couple of launches because that's all you can possibly afford, then twiddle your thumbs on fast-forward for a long time because there's no obvious way to make money except to just wait for it to slowly increase. Ten weeks later and I've not even made half a million cash when the cheapest rocket I can launch costs way more than that. What am I missing?
I agree with @adventureislands that it really needs more speed.
I found it REALLY hard to play on a laptop, because I have to click and drag with my touchpad. It doesn't even fit on my screen either; I had to zoom out my browser window. Maybe add some keyboard controls for non-mobile users?
But I can see what you were going for and it's a really cute game, so kudos!
The movement controls are kinda fiddly. I would recommend putting a dedicated "stop" button on the UI (or even adding keyboard controls) to make it easier to stop a robot near a wall, because right now it turns around and the button that WOULD have stopped it now makes it turn around again.
But overall, great game!
This was pretty fun. I have to agree that it would be more playable if the two actions were on the same button, and the fence made it a real pain to pick stuff up there, but those are really the only complaints!
I have to disagree with @aurel a little bit. Plenty of historical consoles -- especially the Atari 2600 -- had sprite scaling and rotation, so pixel size consistency isn't always a strict requirement.
Well done! I found the throwing mechanic to be kinda awkward, but the idea was hilarious.
Any chance of a Mac build?
Yeah, I've tried it. Doesn't work out-of-the-box and I haven't tinkered with winetricks enough to figure out what's missing. I wouldn't mind helping you package it up if you want to share the source, though; there's no reason this shouldn't be able to work with a native build of PyGame.
@hugonun That's a useful report to look at, but it looks like the issue has mostly been resolved. There are some adjustments to be made, so that thread and a couple threads linked in it will be useful for the porting process.
This was a lot of fun! I've never been a fan of using the up arrow for jumping, though, which made the game a lot harder than it needed to be.
> Thanks! But what exactly do you mean by the up arrow? The controls are WASD so assuming you mean W? Sorry about that but I had to make it either W or space and since I ended up using space to switch between characters I used W to jump
@eddie-li Yeah, I meant W. Why were you limited like that? Unity lets you bind to any keys you like. I actually see this kind of game usually done with arrow keys for movement and Z and X for action buttons.
Re: bugfixes, the rules have this to say:
> Certain Bug Fixes are allowed. You can’t add new features, but if something broke or didn’t work correctly as you were finishing up, you can fix this after the deadline. You are asked to highlight the changes you make in your submission (a short change log). You probably wont get a 2nd chance with some players, but at least it wont be a problem for future players.
It doesn't really feel like that much of a "sacrifice" but the game is fantastic in and of itself!
Pretty solid, though since you seem to be an experienced team I'll give some more pointed feedback for you to help you improve the game's polish.
The bullets are nearly ignorable. Give them more visual feedback, maybe a bolder streak for the flight path and definitely a bigger impact animation to show where it hit.
The steering feels weird. The car just slides around instead of feeling like it's really gripping the road. This is just a graphical thing; the play control itself is just fine.
EDIT: Wait, this is your first time? In that case, this is super impressive. Good job!
I've been programming for 30 years and I've never actually RELEASED a full game outside of a jam context. The best I can lay claim to is mini-games on a forum site.
There's no shame in having room for improvement in a jam game. You took exactly the right attitude: do the best you can in the time available and focus on getting the important stuff done first. Polish is for day three if you have time left over after finishing the game mechanics. The feedback is if you want to move forward with it post-jam like a lot of people do. Some Ludum Dare games have gone on to see publication on consoles.
The HTML5 version isn't working right now. The loading bar gets to full and then the CDN throws an HTTP 500 error trying to load assets so the game never starts.
And for whatever reason, Stencyl thinks I don't have Flash...
And I'm a Mac user!
I wanna play this game. :( I'll bookmark it and come back when I get on a Windows machine for a while.
Whatever was wrong before, the HTML5 version is working now. That was a lot of fun. Very "Lost Vikings". Good job on the pixel art, and the audio fits nicely.
This is pretty solid. A postjam version would benefit from a greater variety of cards to play with, and animations and sound effects to provide feedback on what's happening. But the core mechanic is well thought out and balanced.
That was amusing. Nice game!
The theme is technically optional. Don't let the other comments get you down. The important part is to make a game. Yeah, you won't score too well in the theme category, but that's fine -- my first jam game didn't fit the theme either, mostly because our artist abandoned us instead of making graphics that felt like "ancient technology".
You should have opted out of the audio category since you don't actually have any audio.
That said, the game itself isn't awful. It's sort of sparse, and if you're a novice to game jams that's to be expected. Next time, be sure to include some information in the description on this page instead of just the credits.
@noodlemaster Thanks for the feedback. :) I completely agree with all of your points, and it's mostly because I ran out of time. This was a really ambitious project and I bit off more than I could chew. I'm working on a post-jam version that will really flesh the game out.
I'll point out that while the extra batteries are randomly placed, the power stations are always in the same place every game. Should help with replays, though of course there's not much reason to want to replay in this state.
Added a web build!
If the WebGL build has memory problems, you can also try the postjam version:
http://xmpps.greenmaw.com/~coda/stuff/WattBalance-postjam/
I only noticed the issue after I started working on a post-jam graphical update, so there's a lot more to the postjam version than just the fix.
@drskort If you want to see more vivid zones, check out the post-jam build. Variety was planned but I ran out of time; I have several powerup ideas and at least two more enemy types i wanted to include.
Yes, folks, I know about rating other games to get eyes on mine. I've been doing that too. >.>;
@pl4typus The recharge mechanic was a last-minute hack to give you SOME way to actually finish the game. I had meant for it to be more active, with defeated enemies dropping partial power cells that let you quickly recharge.
When you clipped through the ground, had you been falling from a distance? That's the only case I can think of where you can get enough velocity to confuse the hitbox detection. I need to slow down the terminal velocity, I guess.
The world is procedurally-generated, so it actually only requires tweaking a couple lines of code to change how big the world is. Making it smaller wouldn't have given me any more time to work on powerups, or I WOULD have.
Overall, I really appreciate the feedback!
@acearcher There's a map in the postjam version, linked in the comments thread. There are more batteries in the postjam version too because I was working on adding some more powerup types and needed places to put them.
I'm really glad you like the corner animation. That took a lot of work to get right. Honestly I should have probably hacked up something to work around the problem instead of taking the time to fix it, that was like three hours of debugging when I could have spent that time adding another enemy type.
This reminds me a lot of Epistory, which is a good thing. I expected to have fun based on reading the description, and I wasn't disappointed. There's more strategy to it than just typing words as fast as you can, which is an interesting wrinkle to the typing game genre.
Wow, I'm REALLY impressed. This is by far the best jam game I've ever had the privilege of playing. The play control is spot on. The graphics are charming. The music is solid (I wish i could compose that fast!). And I really have to say, "press any key to work" is hilarious.
Nothing wrong with flying. Makes perfect sense if you're a spirit!
It caught me off-guard when I beat the game and I didn't even see the last screen because it popped up right as I was slashing, so I ended up skipping right past it.
Pretty fun. Would be interesting to see a sped-up version.
That was pretty fun and the graphics were great, but I think AceArcher has a really good point. The kiting strategy worked for me, too.
You might want to make sure you can't kill yourself with upgrades, by the way. I died because I had exactly the right amount of health to afford an upgrade and didn't notice.
I have to agree with the other comments that the hitboxes seem a little finicky. Games like this have always bothered me when you can't attack up or down. But that's really my only major complaint -- I love the humor!
Even before I play it, I have to give huge kudos to the premise. It's easily the most innovative interpretation of the theme I've seen. Very clever!
Having played it, I did find a small bug: I somehow managed to skip a level because the "next level" dialog was doubled up, and dismissing them both moved me along. But I had a lot of fun along the way to 700MHz!
Side note: It might be better for gameplay if you had to unlock the stuff from the tech tree each time you moved to a new data center. The strategy seemed to be "build a zillion bitcoin miners, then blow it all up and install ethereum miners once you've stockpiled enough funds" -- there's no benefit to building your thoughts up once you've gotten a full unlock.
This is pretty solid for a first jam game. It's got decent puzzle design.
Solid! This is definitely a game where gameplay was a priority, and it shows. It's very playable, with good feedback on everything so you know what's going on.
Pretty solid game! It's a little too slow-paced at the beginning; I found that the best strategy was to just spam all of the glyphs in every color because I could hit targets before they even came on the screen. And on that note, the WebGL build seems to crop significant portions of the screen off of the visible area, which makes it hard to interact with the shop and makes it even more likely that I won't see stuff coming. But that's fairly minor overall, because the game itself is enjoyable.
@justcamh Oh, I didn't get that far. The screen boundaries clipping off my view made it too hard to make progress. Strategy is still VALID, inasmuch as it's better to spam sigils than to just wait, but I doubt it's an overwhelming advantage. (EDIT: Also if you can see the edge of the color glow then you can start spamming in the right color before you can see what the sigil actually is.)
A touchscreen helps too.
If you need more difficulty ramping options, you can also have things move at different speeds. Having a surprise intruder zip in faster than everything else is a nice spark of "ack!" in a game like this.
EDIT: Accessibility suggestion: If you want to take this up a notch, you could add a colorblind-friendly modification by putting distinct shapes around the incoming sigils so that color isn't the only distinguishing factor.
This game is unplayably fast on one of my computers and won't even start up at all on another. I can't really give you a fair rating, I'm afraid. Sorry. :(
Not bad at all. Kinda vaguely reminds me of One Must Fall 2097 visually. It starts off way too slow (OMF2097 did too) and I think you should put some more feedback in when you throw an attack and when you deal or take damage so it feels less like whiffing at the air all the time. But there's the core of a good fighting game in here and it just needs some polish to really bring out the best part.
I can't blame you for completely dodging the theme. Creative sidestep!
I have to agree with some of the other comments: the play control doesn't feel tight enough. And I experienced GaryS's problem of starting out upside down. (I'd recommend locking the camera's orientation to the player and limiting how far up and down you can go.) But I definitely see some potential here.
I have to agree that the game is too slow. Since the energy-drain mechanic is basically a time limit, the game would feel more engaging if the whole thing felt more frantic.
This would be really interesting with couch co-op play. There's a kernel of a really good idea in here and you could make something big out of this.
I accidentally bought the earplugs before dying to the noise, so that kinda got in the way of progress. Oops! Still, cute game, nicely done.
@very-dark-lord The "magazines" are movies you can put in the TV.
You mentioned a WebGL version, but I don't see it anywhere?
Not bad at all. Not every initial layout is winnable, which is a bit disappointing, but that's the only major issue. More levels would be nice, of course!
@rialgar The maze was laid out such that the monster you need to have at least one shield to defeat was sitting in the only path between the start square and the shield shop.
Actually, @philomory, the best strategy is not to dump it all in one, but to balance across two. Since it's an RPS system, no matter what your opponent picks you've got a 1/3 chance of getting an advantage, 1/3 chance of being neutral, and 1/3 chance of getting disadvantage. This means min-maxing two stats means you have a 2/3 chance of not having a disadvantage.
Always match your strategy to your deck. The target number reduction overwhelms everything else at high levels.
I beat Masters with 8 Strategy, 8 Bold, 5 Combo, 5 Aggro, 10 deckbuilding, 10 trading, and 8 observation. Was a lot of fun. Spent too long on it. >.>
I played through the game twice. It's a really interesting concept that's not hard to play and engaging to watch unfold.
That said, it could really stand to get a few more dryland/forest herbivores in the deck. I had a hand of four forest carnivores on multiple occasions...
Wow. Just... WOW. This is by far one of the best LD games I have _ever_ played, and I've been doing this since LD36. It plays really well, it has great graphics, it's fun and engaging, the premise is interesting, it has meaningful progression... There's really nothing not to like about this.
So take these suggestions as a way to really push this game to the next level, not as criticism against what you've built, because this is something that could really be awesome:
Some good sound effects would really make this, although given how many entities there are you'll want to be careful about it (and definitely have the sound drop off pretty quickly with distance).
+1 on being able to cancel cannon construction, and I think I agree with the suggestion that it would benefit from having a puzzle mechanic of having a limited number of cannons. (And if you have that, then of course you'll need the ability to move or salvage a cannon once you've built it.)
The lava is a bit punishing. I would suggest moving the player to safety when they hit the lava because right now I tend to just get stuck bouncing around in the death pool until I run out of lives.
Having some prebuilt stages for tutorials is good, but you might consider doing some procedurally-generated worlds in order to increase the game's replay value. I'm open to providing some assistance in that regard if you want some help; procedural generation is something of my specialty. (Of my nine Ludum Dare submissions to date, seven of them have been procedurally generated... well, technically eight, but The Dungeons of Indianapolis doesn't count because that's more like procedurally copy-pasted. :stuck_out_tongue:)
@pinosaur Yeah, I had plans for more graphical variety, but I decided to focus my efforts on getting an actual win condition in my game for a change. Only the second time I've done that since I started doing jams, and the first time that it actually worked the way I intended it to instead of just being hacked together at the last minute.
We'll be doing a postjam version!
@gold5games Actually, that's an error in the map generator. It's not supposed to put you in a place where you can't jump out without the booster, unless you can't get there without the booster in the first place. But there's one map where I made a mistake in positioning the blocks and you can't actually make the jump I thought you could make when I designed it.
@thepiratenun I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Yeah, I know about the clipping bug; my character controller was designed for characters the same height as a terrain tile, and I decided to focus on getting the game done instead of fixing the issue. I'd never gotten permanently stuck from it, though.
I was hoping to have an intro/tutorial section; I thought it would be really good for engaging the player if you could start out with most of the powers exploring the red server before the worm arrived, and then the signal corruption damage would start and force you to run away, and then there would be a little bit of exposition to explain what happened and what you needed to do. Unfortunately, I lost a few hours during the weekend so I didn't have time to flesh it out the way I wanted.
@gustavo-christino I'm not quite sure how you missed the life bar. It's at the top of the screen?
We had plans for at least two other enemy types, but getting the final boss implemented was a much higher priority.
I wanted to do a lot more with the music but the composer that helped me last time wasn't available this time.
I have to agree that the whole thing is way too slow-paced. The quit command also doesn't work on Mac.
That said, this is a LOT of content for a jam game! Good job! A large, fleshed-out game with lots of powerups and enemies and reasonably designed levels.
You definitely made the right decision to go for the jam instead of the compo -- game jams should be a fun way to exercise your skills, and taking more time to come up with something you're proud of is better than trying to cram in something you're not happy with in less time.
It was a really interesting idea and I love how you took the effort to work dynamic music into your game. It adds a lot of flavor to the game.
Bones meta FTW! Like @hcursino I was all arm bones... but I was fighting it out, using my speed to take potshots and then get out of the way before taking any damage. I had a score of 2550 before I spawned right on top of an enemy at the start of the round and was killed even before the camera could focus on me.
The music doesn't worn on Mac, sadly, so I can't meaningfully rate this game on audio.
My time was 8:08 too, coincidentally. I definitely appreciate a clicker designed for being completed as fast as possible instead of being designed to intentionally stretch out gameplay.
Fullscreen mode doesn't work correctly if you don't have a 16:9 display. I have a MacBook, which has a 16:10 display, which means that when the UI gets scaled to fit vertically. Since this is Unity, this will take a little bit of math to do correctly, but it's not too hard -- do a Google search for "unity camera fit width" and you'll find good advice.
@mahalis Where do you grow crops? What is a field part of?
This was an interesting little diversion. I haven't encountered a game like this before.
That was hilarious. It kind of reminds me of QWOP.
I should point out that the rules for opening your game up for audio votes are that you have to make the audio yourself. If most of your sound was picked up from a website, you're not eligible for audio ranking.
Thanks for the guide. I'm apparently not very good at this. ^^() Kudos for using the format to play up the surreality.
The scene change animation was the best part for sure. Very creative. I hope you had fun making the game!
The difficulty curve is way too shallow. I only ever took a single hit to my wall and that's because I tried to get fancy with an air strike once. If I had stuck to my guns (ba-dum-tish) I wouldn't have even taken that hit, and later rounds felt easier than that even.
The aesthetic is interesting. Reminiscent of REALLY old games, although it's a bit inconsistent in that regard because some stuff is too smooth. :P Took a long time to get used to, but it worked out all right in the end.
Solid! It's a simple enough concept but fast-paced and strategic, great for a quick fun game.
It's a really good start! I'm glad to see the effort you put into it, and it runs pretty smoothly. A big trade quest is one of the things I'd considered for my own submission.
@chuchuw If the trade quest is the only thing in the game, I think the single inventory slot is a better design. You can always leave stuff on the ground; figuring out how to optimize that pathing would be the key to optimizing the run.
I gotta give you credit, that was pretty clever. The editor UI is really hard to work with (I second the request for instructions) and I would recommend allowing the user to drag to place down a series of tiles.
I like it. :) It's a simple concept, pretty well executed. The graphics and the play control fit together well.
It starts off a little too slow for my tastes; maybe it might be worth considering some sort of "speed up" or "jump" command to make it scroll faster if you think you can do it safely. Maybe if you want to add a balancing mechanic, you can't steer or grapple while accelerating/jumping.
I might suggest a mouse mode for the grapple.
I think one thing that would really help with the difficulty is if you got a second or two of invulnerability after taking some damage, and have the rock knock you away, so that getting caught underneath a rock isn't effectively an immediate game-over. That would make health more meaningful, too.
For some reason, the scissors don't do anything for me. I can't even cut one hair.
@barravelbzh I had someone else report that same error. I've got an inkling I know what the problem is. In the meantime you can reload the page and try again.
@creamybacon2 The rate of fire was tuned for game balance reasons. It was faster early on but it made it possible to just sweep up and down the screen and plow through without any risk.
@simonreiser I'm open to considering an adjustment to your flight speed, because you're right. Thanks for the bug report (pun not intended) about the game over screen! I'm not sure exactly when that broke but I can certainly fix it.
@nomppie The bombs DO clear bullets! They have to actually make contact, but using them to get out of a jam is definitely an intended mechanic.
I actually had an upgrade in mind but I didn't have time to implement it before the end of the jam. It wouldn't have been particularly difficult to do (the advantages of building your own engine!) but I thought it was more important to get the final boss done first.
@super-hadoken It isn't a matter of whether enemies are on the screen or not. There are just a couple places where firing is explicitly disabled for gameplay reasons.
@jk5000 Did that happen when you or the butterfly died, or after you beat the boss? There's a known issue with the game over code not working reliably when you die but I'm not aware of a problem with the endgame.
@terribletriojoe That's really weird. I wouldn't expect caps lock to make a difference because the space bar doesn't capitalize. I'll see if I can reproduce it. Were you still able to maneuver around the screen?
@lespaul59 Thank you! :)
@jk5000 Oh, that's interesting. That's a failure mode I didn't anticipate. Beating the final boss (it should have been a patchwork monstrosity made of the other bosses) doesn't check to see if you're still alive afterward so it shouldn't break because of that. I wonder if there's some other unrelated place where the state is getting out of sync... like it thinks it's already in game-over state so it can't change into it again, but the UI is still in gameplay. Thanks for the report and I'll look into it.
@terribletriojoe Oh! That's REALLY informative! Thank you so much. If it's related to the handling of the pause state then it really narrows down where the bug might be.
It looks pretty good, and the sound effects work well. The field of vision effect visually works really well but there's something a little bit off about it because my cops didn't shoot things I thought they should -- do they only shoot when the center of the target is in the light cone? The pacing is too slow for my tastes and it would really help to be able to make the officers pause for a little while -- the first time I lost because my cops hit the end of their lines even though the target was right there in their sights.
(EDIT: oops, accidentally posted the wrong commentary to the wrong game)
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get this running:
``` coda@localhost:~/Downloads/spacemercenary/application.linux64$ ./ludumdare_46 Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError Caused by: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: Index 1 out of bounds for length 1 at processing.core.PApplet.
@lorwon I didn't have Java installed in the first place, so I had to install `openjdk-14-jre` to even get that far. I get the error message consistently no matter how many times I run it.
I’m impressed! It took a little while to figure out exactly how to maneuver effectively, but that’s my only real complaint. The graphics really remind me of PS1-era games, which seems appropriate for what it is. The sound works out pretty well, too. I don’t know if the accent is acted or if it’s the way you normally talk, but either way it fits the style pretty well too.
If I had to provide some constructive suggestions, I’d make it more visible when you’re starting to go too slow, perhaps by having the rocket itself flash instead of just the speed. To take it to the next level I’d consider adding some stunts.
I expected the red boxes to damage Alfred, but they don't. I was surprised to discover that they affect the platform instead. The general gameplay is all right, but you could stand to add a little bit more content because the game doesn't have much replay value.
Big kudos on the robot movement animations! Did you build the kinematics yourself?
Is there supposed to be sound? It's not working for me if there is. Otherwise you might want to take audio off of the categories you're being rated on to avoid confusion.
This game is beautiful. Excellently done, good controls, interesting puzzles. I'd almost not believe it was a jam game with this level of polish.
Have to agree that the second level was really hard to figure out. Even once I realized there was a shadow sword, I couldn't figure out how to get it on the other side of the barrier. I'm still not sure what I did differently on the run that worked.
It's a really clever idea and I like the presentation. I have to kind of agree that it's hard to figure out what you're doing, and if this were to get some post-jam polish I would suggest in-game informational messages.
This is an interesting idea (and it might be fun to try it on a dance pad). My biggest problem is that the beats don't loop in a steady 4/4, there's a significant gap between repeats.
@doot > You can skip laps with going back a bit behind the starting line and coming back. Sadly, this is the fastest way to complete a lap. However, doing this you won’t collect any coins so this makes playing normally a better solution, which is great.
That's odd. I thought I fixed that. Thanks for the report.
@jelle-vermandere > But the game feels a bit too easy because you’re just driving pretty much in a straight line all the time
The straight line changes starting in track 3. The AI cars also get substantially faster as the game progresses; I've not been able to get better than 5th place on track 5.
@blaster391 > One annoying bug I noticed was the music not looping, meaning in later levels I would be driving around just listening to the engine :c
Okay, that's really weird. It's worked for everyone else. Can you tell me more about your setup? What browser, what operating system? The only thing I can see that might potentially cause the issue you're talking about is if Unity's DSP code doesn't work right on some platform.
@blaster391 Hmm, that's odd. I can't figure out what's wrong. Thanks for checking, at least.
@nyubi I'm definitely not a newbie. :) I've been programming for over 30 years. I like teaching, though, so if you want any pointers you can feel free to reach out.
The graphics are excellently executed, and the character controls feel pretty good.
I have to agree that the camera is WAY too sensitive. I can't move my mouse a small enough distance to actually control it, which makes it really hard to make progress. The blue light is also really hard to see coming, so it took me a while to figure out why I kept resetting. Maybe put a point light source on the object so it casts colors on the walls as it gets nearer?
This was really challenging. It's addictive! It looks simple, then it's hard, then it seems like you've got it figured out, and then it throws you for a loop (pun intended). Well done!
So. TEDIOUS. XD If it wasn't the point, I'd be mad about it! But I can't be mad, because if I get mad then I'm going to be politely asked to leave, and then I'd have to start my tasks all over!
This was hilarious. XD I think I'd enjoy it on a touchscreen instead of using a mouse, this would be interesting with that kind of tactile input. A great idea, wonderful adorable graphics, the sound fits great... Possibly the best game I've played so far this jam!
Well done, especially for a first jam! You made the scribble art style work for you.
I don't think the health bar works? It never looked like it was going down, and then I died.
I like the graphics! It's quirky in a way that matches the concept you're going with.
I can see what you're going for here, and the retro pixel graphics are nice. I can see this being potentially interesting if you were to improve on it post-jam.
Not bad for a beginner at all! It's simple but effective, and you've got solid graphics.
You should probably opt out of getting rated on Audio. The rules say you can only get rated on the things you created during the jam.
Nice lemonade. Pleasantly sweet with a bit of a sour edge. :P
Simple, but playable. It's a bit slow-paced -- being able to click to advance the text would help, and panning the screen could be faster. But it works well for what it is. It's too bad you weren't able to work in the theme!
Big fan of the physics! Handles well.
I see what's getting people caught up on the puzzle solutions: First you're taught that shooting a block while standing on a broken tile is dangerous. Then you're required to do exactly that. The thing to remember is that shooting doesn't break the tile you're standing on, and it'll only break if the block you're shooting is too close.
Good puzzles! Enjoyed solving them.
The graphics are really impressive. The play control works but it feels like it's missing some impact; maybe it just needs some more animation. I feel like the enemies are too durable -- it would feel more satisfying for most enemies to go down in a hit or two so that the tougher ones are a bigger surprise. Overall I found it enjoyable, but the spell customization was completely baffling. I couldn't figure out the rules for what runes went where, what caused me to take damage, or even why runes would sometimes disappear when moving them.
Extremely minor post-jam update -- tweaked volume levels to keep things more bearable. ^^()
@knexator I think I might have made the way the matrix rain chases you a bit too aggressive -- I didn't want to make it possible to get the game into an unwinnable state, but I guess I didn't reset those well enough when you die.
@qookie Glad you liked it! I'm amazed that it's even possible to fall through the ground... What device are you playing it on? The only way I can imagine clipping through the ground is if you manage to lag it really bad. (I haven't gotten around to implementing swept collisions yet. Maybe I need to make the FPS floor higher or add support for frameskip.)
@qookie That doesn't make sense... that shouldn't make a difference. I'll have to look into it. Thanks for the report.
@fae-pdf Moving yourself does increase the heat, but even after solving just one puzzle the cooling is good enough that if you're the only thing on the screen then it can keep up with the heat you generate. The sparks and the matrix rain both generate heat just by virtue of being on the screen, so rushing into an area without clearing things out with the debugger will get you overheated pretty quickly.
I appreciate the feedback on the clarity. I'll add some notes to the description.
@fae-pdf Does the new description on this page help?
@reccy Tutorials are a luxury I don't have time for in a jam. ^^() Thanks for the compliments!
@ditam Thanks! I started putting that kind of thing into my jam games in LD45 because I realized I didn't want to get people to get turned off from checking out the content just because of the difficulty. (I don't put debug commands behind game inputs -- I just export functions and call them from the console. :P )
@destroyertech Thanks for the report and the compliments!
@pondo You know what's sad? I think a fair number of jam participants won't even recognize the visual references. :( Makes me feel old! I'm a bit surprised to hear that the platforming was unresponsive, though.
@human-writes-code @nazorus Thanks! I'm glad you liked it!
@anaxie-studio Standing still isn't good enough to stop it from rising by itself. You need to solve puzzles to make the cooling stronger, and you should be careful about moving ahead too quickly so you don't get too much stuff on screen at once.
@rose @rost @diharaw94 Thank you for the feedback! :) Yeah, I feel really good about the graphics and music this time around.
@gunnbju I tried to start the game with easier puzzles! ^^() The first three puzzles are on a small board with only a few items to arrange. It doesn't work on a smaller board than that -- a 2x2 can only rotate, not shuffle.
@doc-kaos It's a bug that other players have reported. It seems that if you get unlucky and lag during respawning, you can clip through the floor and fall into the void. Definitely not the end of the game!
Well now, that's a horse of a different color!
Yeah, not bad! Not what I expected, but well executed. Having the sugar cubes reset when entering the tractor stage was kind of a problem, because there was just no way to get past the second fence.
I have to agree with a lot of the other comments -- it's too slow to be especially enjoyable in a jam context where you're going through a lot of games. But I like the idea and I can see it being compelling if it were polished up!
I'm impressed! Even though it's low resolution, the animations are fluid and expressive! The play control is tight, and once I got a feel for it I felt like all the hits I took were my own mistakes rather than being overwhelmed.
Over 130 seconds!
EDIT: Is there supposed to be sound?
It's not about visiting the site for the first time. It's about interacting with the page. The best way to deal with that is to have a button that you click to load the game (like itch.io does) so that you have a guaranteed interaction.
The play control was pretty solid! And the graphics served their purpose well. Sound would have really taken this to the next level. The only real complaint I have is that vertical visibility is so poor when you have a wide window.
Cute design, very retro. It's hard to tell what to do, though.
Is there supposed to be sound?
I managed to get stuck in a jumping animation where I was sliding above the ground and not able to jump again, so I had no choice but to fall into the goo. :(
The game looked nice, and that shockwave effect was pretty nifty. It plays way too slow, though, and having the player just slam to a halt when he stubs his toe on the barest whiff of a corner really makes it feel clunky. Don't be too discouraged -- platformer physics are hard! It took me a long time to polish mine up in a way that felt good. Keep working on it and I'm sure you could make this really fun.
Sound isn't working for me. :( But much love for zoomy kitties!
Very atmospheric. I usually expect games like this to be more fast-paced, but in this case it makes sense because you need to have time to make the repairs. (I think I'd still up the speed a LITTLE bit. It's too easy right now.) I like the simple but effective repair minigames. The idea has a lot of potential if you were to flesh it out.
(By the way: The description says that the right mouse button is shoot, and the left mouse button is fix, but it's clearly the other way around.)
This is... really hard. ^^() I have no idea what I'm doing. There's not enough information for me to feel like I can understand it. I like the art, at least! (Is there supposed to be sound?)
I have taken inventory of my surroundings. There are, in fact, two small bird skulls in the room with me. They are still housed within living birds, but they are there. I would prefer that they remain there.
A solid little game. The controls are kind of hard to work with but it feels intentional, as part of it being unstable. I was able to get three satellites into fairly stable, non-intersecting orbits, but trying to deal with an incoming meteoroid just made everything fall apart!
I like the mood! It's surprisingly relaxing, considering you're juggling a bomb. The play control worked better than I expected it to. I wonder if making the platform tilt be bound to mouse movements might make it feel more "unstable."
Well then, not bad at all! :) I definitely appreciate the additional depth beyond a normal clicker game.
Maybe achievements would be a good addition if you want to expand on it post-jam.
Thanks! II hate it! :D
I was considering a minigame collection, too. Decided against it, but I see I wasn't the only one with the idea.
Cute graphics, nice music, and I _love_ me some rhythm games. But the timing windows are _punishing_! I've got a kind of cheap keyboard and just the squish of the keys is enough variability that I can barely clear anything despite being able to clear 17s in DDR. ^^()
I'd like to try to play it, but it doesn't seem to work in Wine on Linux. Since it's a Unity game, can you make a Linux or web version?
Seems to work, but I can't pick up apples for some reason! Also there's no quit command anywhere so I had to use a window manager keyboard shortcut to kill it.
It's also nightmarishly difficult to control with a trackpad. XD
But overall, solid experience!
The button to draw more tiles never said anything but 0, and for whatever reason it wasn't letting me put stuff down sometimes and I had to reload the page to make it work. It's an interesting concept that's very on-theme, and I could see it being very enjoyable with some more UX polish.
@matt-swieboda Oh shoot, good catch on the bug. Let me fix that real quick!
@bxyzzz They're not affected by gravity, they're rockets. ^^()
@jacob-diaz Thanks! :) I decided to lean hard into it once I decided on a space shmup.
@akai-syuuichi The game is harder than I meant it to be. ^^() I didn't have time to tune it the way I wanted to.
@partysquadmember They're spawned with a pattern but they path around the asteroids, so any pattern that might have arisen gets drowned out. There was supposed to be more of a pattern as the game progressed as well, but I didn't get the chance to add in more enemy types.
@rogueagente Huh, I went with mouse because I thought WASD would be unfairly difficult. ^^() But I suppose I can work that in later.
Wow, super solid entry. I was surprised by the overall execution -- good graphics, good sound design, good writing, and mostly good gameplay. My only criticism is that while the curses are usually pretty ignorable every once in a while you'll get one that totally swings the game... Hikari got silenced on the first round of the final battle, leaving me to cross my fingers that I could deal enough damage before running out of HP.
Moo. Moo! MOOOO!
In all seriousness, there's a pretty good game in here, but interacting with the cow locked the game and I couldn't do anything. Hilarious audio though. XD
Hey, another space shooter!
Pretty solid. Would be fun with twin-stick controls, I think.
I'm a little confused by the mechanics. I see how it's supposed to work, but it seems like my best strategy is to just spam cards without paying attention. But I can see what you were going for. The graphics are solid and the humor is pretty good.
That's ridiculously hard. XD But it's a cute idea.
Interesting. Very atmospheric. Normally I'd say getting lost in a game is a bad thing, but that's exactly what's supposed to happen in this one.
I don't get it. ^^() I can handle the bombs but I went like 30 seconds without any interaction prompts from my date? But from what I can see, it's a really intense game. Good stress. XD
Something about the new version of Unity doesn't work in Wine, so I can't play it on Linux. :(
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you after you uploaded the Linux build. It works great! I love this game! My wife is an artist that used to do commissions, so I get all the feels here. XD She'll love tablet support if you build that in.
Not a bad start. Graphics style is nice!
I have to agree with the other comments -- the camera controls really need some work. But the play controls work fine! Nice little ambient game.
Hey, just to let you know, you should opt out of the audio category if you used third-party music. The rules say you should only ask for feedback if you made all of the assets for that category.
Really good puzzle platformer! I think the jump physics could use a bit of refinement but it doesn't interfere with the game. Cute graphics and good puzzles.
I did a text adventure for a previous jam: "combine two incompatible genres" -- I mixed text adventure and racing sim. This has a similar vibe, in that it's mashing together time-based stuff with a text-only interface. It does a good job of keeping things tense!
Not bad at all! Simple, effective. Solid gameplay loop. As a matter of personal preference I'd like something a little more frenetic (faster reload but more enemies) but this is a well-executed game.
That was cute, and pretty fun, although it was really, really easy. ^^() I didn't see the wave at all until I hit the top of the map where there was nowhere left to run. I like the combat system!
I really like the overall aesthetic. The angular design works a lot better than I would have expected! Good sound design, too. And the control scheme is odd and awkward, but clearly intentionally so -- it's charming and it fits what you're doing.
Though I will caution you: The stork-summoning ritual is broadly considered NSFW. ;)
@erroneous Melt ice into water, then electrolyze water to get hydrogen and oxygen.
@pen-island-games Interesting perspective, thanks. I was actually aiming for it being more of an exploration thing -- since the instructions say what you're trying to aim for, I figured people would want to try to figure out how to get there.
@jozgames Yeah, that's not a bad idea.
@zungryware Thanks for the feedback. Balance is definitely something I was concerned about. I tried to make sure you had enough stuff in your starting inventory to explore the systems to see how they worked, but I didn't have time to fully balance everything.
You're not supposed to be able to hold two rocks. Trying is supposed to just bounce the other one off.
@erroneous @pen-island-games @jozgames @mrs-wheelsx @zungryware In case any of you are interested, I've uploaded a postjam revision of the game that fixes the game balance -- you were all right, it was way too hard and a little too opaque.
@pawel12 Yeah, the similarities to Subnautica occurred to us while we were reviewing what we'd put together.
@scott-cooper Thanks! I don't know if there's quite enough to this one to keep going with it long-term; there are other games in my back catalogue that I'd rather return to -- Nullified is the one I'm most interested in building out.
@zungryware Thanks for taking another look! You're probably right about shortening the overall game duration like that given what I have here.
@zach-rouhana Sorry, I don't know if I understand -- is there too much information, or not enough information?
@pawel12 Oh, huh, I just reproduced that bug. Not sure how that happens. Did you run out of oxygen?
@aweskybear Yeah, that's the kind of polish that's hard to get into a jam game. I thought I was doing pretty well with spawning the character somewhere that you naturally discover that there are objects you can interact with, that you can move two-dimensionally in space, that interacting with some objects opens up an interface, and that you can craft new items based on what you have in your inventory using those interfaces. That's more implicit world-instruction than I've ever had an opportunity to include before; that's something I'm going out of my way to pay attention to more as experience makes the coding aspect of game development take proportionally less of the available time.
Little bit confusing to figure out how to play it effectively, but once I figured it out? Not bad! Graphics are nice.
So before I get to the good stuff... the sound effects are EXTREMELY grating.
Which is a shame, because this could have made a really good rhythm game. Since your weapon fires on a fixed timer and the shots travel at a fixed speed, you could easily have had everything sync up with the music -- indeed, I started having an easier time when I started thinking of it as one.
The graphics aren't bad at all -- I feel it captured the aesthetic you were going for. The difficulty starts REALLY slow, but it ramps up well.
The graphics are trippy @.@ and the play control is a nightmare! XD But I guess that's what you expect from a rage game, right? Well done.
I wasn't able to play it, sadly -- for whatever reason, the mouse controls simply did not work at all. I could only face in one direction and I couldn't shoot anything.
The visuals seem nice, at least?
@zungryware Nothing particularly weird -- Chrome on Ubuntu Linux. (Well, Pop!_OS, but that's Ubuntu.)
Heh, cute! I don't quite see how this fits the theme of "limited space" but it's a simple but pleasant game to play.
That was cute! Kind of a pain to play single-player, as you mentioned, but it handled pretty well overall. I especially liked how damaging stuff made your loot worth less.
I can't quite figure out how to play it. I think I like the idea as far as I can see it, but the sound doesn't work on my computer for some reason and none of the mechanics seem to work... One time when I started the game, no enemies spawned at all, and then the screen started shaking but nothing happened.
I'm a sucker for the scribbly hand-drawn papercraft style -- one of my past jam games used that style, with my wife doing the illustrations, and I think it's probably my best jam game ever. And the premise is hilarious! Well done.
@anton-florey I'm glad you liked it! Thanks :)
Stuck? **SPOILERS FOLLOW.**
Milder spoilers: * Spirits like it when you talk to them with the same rune in both slots. * Fundamental spirits are scared of the opposite rune. Advanced spirits respect the opposite. * Only the fundamental spirits offer gifts. Only the advanced spirits desire them.
Direct spoilers: * Gnome, Undine, and Sylph can teach Augmend of Offering if you try to give them something. * Sylph teaches Augmend of Receiving once you have talked to all four of the initial spirits with doubled runes. * To get the Quintessence rune, summon with Lightning+Wood or Wood+Lightning, and Rain+Metal or Metal+Rain. * Aether won't talk to you until you have given a gift to each of the advanced spirits.
@mxbi @wombatty Thanks for playing! I'm glad you liked the effects.
I would have loved to polish the interactions more to help with the guidance, but I spent too long on the graphics and didn't leave enough time to implement the actual gameplay. :sweat_smile: I was fixing game-breaking bugs in the endgame all the way up to the deadline.
I usually care a lot about the sound design in my games but I just straight up didn't have time this time.
@seanmercer Thanks! Truthfully I have regrets about how much time I spent working on the VFX, and the circles get ALL KINDS of screwed up if your computer lags while drawing -- I should have implemented that differently.
@mistiemaedae Thanks for the feedback! I've passed along your comment about the spirits to the artist.
I got comments from other people offline about the book being a clumsy way to navigate, and I think it's a good point.
@itskdog There is a reset button, in the menu that comes up when you hit the charcoal. You generally shouldn't need it, which is why I didn't make it more prominent. But I do think I agree that some more feedback would help.
@darkwolf The second one isn't a bug -- once you have the Alchemist's Stone, you've completed the game, and there's nothing more to do with it.
The first one is something that has been reported to me by someone else too, and it's kind of weird... I'm not sure why it would behave that way.
Thanks for all of the comments!
@anton-florey Ask Undine to transmute the Darkened Materia to turn it into Cleansed Materia. Gnome and Sylph will also need to be involved to purify it more, and then Aether will turn it into the final form. And yeah, a symbol menu is one of the interfaces I was considering.
@soundgnome I'm glad you liked that! My wife drew out a design that I really wanted to make work, but it was just way too complicated to work with the way I had set up the drawing routine.
@spexxilove Clicking random things is kind of the way the elemental-alchemy genre of games works. ^^() I tried to make it a little less arbitrarily random but I know I could have done better with communicating it. I ran out of time, which is why I had to give spoilers instead of weaving it into the dialogue.
@creeper-nade @dymino Normally I care a lot about the sound design of my games! I usually put in sound effects at least, and I try to write music for them, but I just totally ran out of time this time.
@dymino If you don't have any items, you can't summon any spirits if the Augmend of Offering is drawn. And since you only ever need to successfully offer items four times, not being able to remove it could get you stuck if you do things in the wrong order. I would rather have polished up the UX so that it wasn't necessary, because I do absolutely recognize that the current approach is a hack that was necessary to make the game playable, but with six hours left before the deadline I was focusing on making sure the game could be completed at all.
I think I see what you were trying to do, but the game didn't give much feedback, and it doesn't even all fit on my screen. Keep working on it, though -- let's see what you can pull off next jam!
The only complaint I really have is that the hitboxes are a little finicky. I dropped several items inside the tables instead of giving them to the customers, and I couldn't pick them up afterward.
But it was an enjoyable little game! Nice mood, cute graphics.
Sometimes it's nice to have just a short, easy, simple game with an amusing premise -- this is one of those games.
This is really charming! You absolutely nailed the aesthetic you were going for. I agree with @franminaverry that this would make a fantastic minigame puzzle to include in a bigger game.
What the HECK. XD That was absurd in the best possible way. (Not a big fan of the voices in the audio though.)
It's very short, but what content is here does do a great job of setting the mood. Did someone on your team write the music?
Apparently demons don't care about substitutions for the summoning ritual itself, but you'd better get the right offering!
A lot of the interactions seemed really flaky. Is there just a set timer on the scenes where the items first appear before they can be interacted with?
Eek, this is really hard with a trackpad! It would be easier if you could move with the mouse pointer, because my trackpad turns itself off when you push keys on the keyboard. But it runs really smoothly and I can see a lot of potential in it -- it kind of has a bit of Pac-Man vibes.
Hey, not bad at all. How long have you been making games?
It's sort of interesting to compare the similarities in concept between this game in mind -- an alchemy game based on summoning -- but how absolutely different the games are beyond that.
That was a lot of fun! It's a really nice twist on the tower defense formula -- the summoning mechanic really adds a LOT to it. Good work!
@m0rph1y Geez, rude much? Jam feedback is supposed to be for constructive criticism. And comparing team size is pretty meaningless -- I had _one_ dev (who was also the dialogue writer) and _one_ illustrator (who got sick and lost a day and a half), and my son chipped in a couple of 3D models. And most jams it's just me. That doesn't make my games any better or worse. It's just a different way to participate.
This was very ambitious. It's certainly on the upper end of the amount of content I've ever seen in a jam game before. I could provide critiques of the weaknesses, but the other comments have already said everything I could say, so I'll just say... I feel like you achieved what you set out to do. Well done.
I couldn't for the life of me figure out the solution to the puzzle with the seven vertical water strips and the hole in the middle of the bottom half of the screen. I know I need to shift boxes with the wind wizard, but everywhere I can think to put him, he himself would be in the way afterward!
But for what I COULD finish, it was a great experience. They're good mechanics, if not immediately obvious, and the visuals are solid.
Seems pretty solid overall. I really like the overall mood it creates.
Nitpicky suggestions to add a bit of polish: * Try different scales, like maybe a pentatonic scale, to help each song sound more musical instead of just random. It wouldn't involve changing any logic! * Fade the notes out instead of just stopping them. Right now, it clicks at the end of each note.
The fact that my comments are about music instead of gaming should be a good sign. :)
Took a bit to get used to the controls, but the graphics are nice. It's quite an experience. The audio and fog make it feel very tense.
You rated my game so I’d love to give yours a review, but I’m on Linux. Any chance of a WebGL or Linux build?
I'm not sure the solutions I found to the puzzles were necessarily the intended ones, but I'm happy to have gotten all the crystals. Great game!
Man, the visuals are a blast from the past. I used to play the heck out of an old DOS game named Excelsior that looked a lot like this.
excelsior.png
It occurs to me after the fact: Maybe I should have had a separate high score list for LOWEST scores that escaped to the surface.
Taking your time to grind more points makes the game easier because of the extra lives. This was intentional: I wanted there to be a reward for drilling around in the depths of the map. It's also part of the game balance, because in the shallower waters it's easier for the Cephaloids to find you and the treasures aren't worth as much. It creates a small progression of difficulty through the game.
But what this ends up meaning is that more skilled players will actually have LOWER scores at the end. They'll need fewer lives to win, so there's less benefit in searching for treasure. The limited ammunition was intended to promote smart navigation and dexterous dodging, and the ammo refill when dying was intended as a mercy for players who get cornered. So that means players sprinting to the surface won't be engaging in as much combat to get points that way, either.
This means, in the end, I realize that my game mechanics work together to make a low-score competition an appealing way to play!
@milano23 You were so close to beating it! Less than 400 feet away from the surface!
@rainbeau @trevor-lentz Yeah, I wanted to write some music for it but I ran out of time -- I had to switch game engines 24 hours into the jam, because at some point between LD54 and now, something changed out from under me and now my bespoke game engine that I've put hundreds of hours of work into has become annoyingly flickery and I couldn't figure out how to fix it.
@veztron @tinykidtoo I'm glad you liked it. :) I intentionally made the enemy pathfinding work like that so you could set up moments to feel like you're awesome.
@jtap I would have loved to add music but I didn't have time. As for other improvements, I've had a few thoughts since submitting the game about things I could have done differently -- maybe having drilled blocks explode outward with a knockback effect, or adding a charge-up drill rush attack that you could use even if you don't have harpoons.
@martta What OS and web browser are you using? I didn't use anything fancy at all for graphics; under the hood there might be a frame of lag here or there as it generates new parts of the map (because trying to generate the whole thing at once was REALLY laggy) but I don't think that should have caused ongoing lag.
I tried to make respawning as user-friendly as possible by making the enemies run away from you when you die and by giving you a full refill on ammunition and a period of invulnerability, but... yeah, if you really get swarmed in a corner that might not be enough.
@samuel-hollywood-summers Oh, indicating offscreen enemies is something I hadn't even thought about. Thanks for the feedback! That's a good idea.
@designernap That's heartwarming. :heart: I'm glad he enjoyed it! Maybe he can participate in a future game jam -- my son was 11 when he [made a game for LD42](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/running-out-of-space-3) and his game scored better than most of my games ever have!
@chuckeles Funny, I didn't code in any jump scares! :scream:
@eugenik @perrin I appreciate the feedback. :) I'll be sure to check your games out.
@atsh Glad you had fun!
@aweskybear Yep, I used simplex noise with a threshold based on depth to make caves that thin out as you approach the surface. Converting that into a tilemap with nice edges and corners was a challenge but fortunately it was a challenge I solved back in LD44 and converted into library code.
I wrote a [post-mortem](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/marianas-miner/marianas-miner-post-mortem) where I discuss how I handled the game balance. I actually realized I wanted the enemies to get more numerous as you went UP in order to have good game progression. But if I had achievements then I could easily imagine one for touching the bottom of the map or something.
@aweskybear Thank you :)
That was a nice little experience! :) Though I'm not sure what you were supposed to do with the big rock? It had an interaction prompt but I couldn't figure out what to use on it. Eventually I just slipped around it -- I'm not sure if that was intended; it felt like I was sequence-breaking.
The animations are fantastic! And the foley is great. I like how the music kicks in when you start drilling.
But... I couldn't figure out how to make it STOP drilling. I know you said that you set it to Stop and wait, but I waited and waited and it just kept going until I got a game over.
Lots of kudos for the animation, and the voice acting is solid.
Found the three easy endings easily enough... found the door code by chance, then went back to figure out the right way to do it, and it really feels like there's a clue missing -- how were you SUPPOSED to figure out the 7th button? And then I found the last ending... which was easy enough, but it took me three tries before I did it without making any mistakes.
Gotta say, that wasn't good for my thanatophobia. >.> But that's just a me thing.
> I’m guessing if you found the door code by chance you’re running the bugged original jam version?
No, 0.1.2. You're right that I didn't guess it organically; I ran `strings` on the data package to see what assets might be hiding out in the game that I hadn't discovered and that was the only 6-digit numeric-only sequence I found. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
> If you spend your whole life running from death you may very well forget to live. Now ask yourself which of those outcomes is truly scarier.
Oh, I know. But I'll be turning 43 in a few days. By the statistics, I'm most likely past my halfway point. I have a wife and a son. If something happens to me, who will take care of them? My wife has had a lifelong struggle with depression... If something happens to _her_, who will support _me?_
It's an uncomfortable reality, but I try to let it drive me toward making my little part of the world a better place.
Not a bad concept! Could use more content than a single level because it's over so quickly, but this is the seed of what could be a decent puzzle game.
Very nice animations! It took a little bit to get used to the play control but once I did it was pretty fun.
I stumbled into the final fight basically right away and beat it with... surprisingly little effort. Might be a little bit easy? ^^() But it's an interesting concept and the music wasn't bad.
> it is either impossible or too straightforward with kiting in a circle.
Circle-kiting is exactly what I did.
I liked the mood and the graphics!
It wasn't entirely clear how the game was supposed to be played at first -- maybe you could just put a little bit of instructions on this page here? And I had a lot of issues trying to get stuff to connect to my shell. Sometimes it would look like it worked and then if I moved in a different direction it would just fall off.
Is there supposed to be audio? I didn't hear anything from the Linux build...
Where's Waldo?
I love it when people have creative takes on the theme, and this definitely fits the bill. Well done!
The depth of field effect looks really good, too. I'm surprised you opted out of being rated on Graphics.
I wasn't able to hear any voice lines, oddly. I could hear the camera zoom and shutter effects.
That was clever. Very amusing, and managed to evoke a tense, spooky atmosphere without ever feeling outright scary. (I'm not fond of horror games.) The music did a good job of setting the atmosphere.
This was a very well-executed game. Good job! Top-tier graphics for a jam game, and the music is good. A very cohesive experience.
The following comments should be taken in the context of me saying this is a very good game. These suggestions are for polish to take it to the next level, not to disparage your hard work.
* It's hard to tell what's going to hurt you. Turret bullets and bomb blasts are kind of hard to see, and I'm not sure where the hitboxes on the flaming skulls are. * Having to pick bits up instead of having them auto-collect doesn't feel good IMO, especially since the bombs can get in the way. * Damage (both to you and to the enemies) could feel more impactful overall. A punchy sound effect and a nice sharp visual cue would make things feel more powerful and significant. * The UI looks great but it's not always obvious what's supposed to be a button. A different font might also really help tie together the sci-fi aesthetic. * You can get a feel for the timing, but some sort of cue to indicate missile recharge would be nice.
Props on the writing. It's a very simple concept, but it's well-executed.
You gave me some good advice back in LD55, so I'll try to return the favor here. :)
I think there was a good opportunity to have more of the interface react to your answers. Perhaps having the tree blossom in complexity with each answer, or shifting layers of the audio to reflect the green/red/gray balance of the answers.
Having the colors of the tree in the background animate as you did is a nice start, but I think you could have made a more meditative experience with some sort of slow, gentle animation that fills more of the user's field of vision -- maybe even just a background gradient that very slowly cycles through soft, dark colors.
You rated my game so I'd love to give yours a review, but I'm on Linux. Any chance of a WebGL or Linux build?
It was nice and ambient. I liked the visuals and the mood. The character could have moved a little faster but that's just a minor nitpick.
The audio started off all right, but the layers didn't feel like they harmonized well as they added up. It was never too dissonant but it felt more tense than relaxing toward the end.
I don't know if I could exactly call this a "game" but I don't think I need to. It's really quite a nice experience. (Until the end, of course!)
I think you could have gotten away with slowing things down a little. It's fine as it is, especially since you don't want a jam submission that people are reviewing to feel tedious. I just wonder if taking it slow and easy on the way down would feel meditative on top of being educational.
That was INCREDIBLE. The graphics were amazing and the audio was atmospheric. The concept was super solid. I wish I had more time to get good at it.
If I had to nitpick: Getting out of the brake area is a little finicky. The timing for the jump to get on top of that ledge is kinda tight.
This was pretty fun. I think I was starting to get good at it but the hitboxes feel really punishing, and not being able to stop makes precise maneuvering kind of tricky. The tradeoffs from the powerups make the decisions interesting -- it makes me want to take slightly more speed than I'm comfortable with so I can afford to spend some later.
Small bit of advice: Getting hit doesn't feel like it has enough impact. The sound effect is kind of soft and there's not a lot of visual reaction. Making it pop a bit more would add a nice bit of polish.
This... has a solid chance of being the weirdest, creepiest, most bizarre game this jam.
Did you write/perform the music? I was surprised to hear more than one track as the game progressed.
The gameplay concept is surprisingly similar to one of the possibilities I was considering when I was brainstorming for the theme, but the presentation is... very, very, very different. XD
Looks interesting, but I'm not on Windows. Any chance of a web build?
Custom game engine? Nice job. I use a custom game engine, too, though mine is Javascript so I can do web deployments -- otherwise, I too would be using C++ as my language of choice.
I don't think it really needs to be said that this is a pretty basic experience. It's a jam game, so of course it is. Applause for what you got done.
@someone I'm aware. :) I've known about emscripten since about 2012. But there are advantages to using web-native tooling. A really big reason is that I can make changes without needing to recompile, which is also why I'm not using TypeScript (which I like, and which I would be doing in a professional environment). I can inspect the running state of the code directly in the console and use the debugger without need of source maps. I can even hot-patch the running game to try things out.
That said, I have occasionally been tempted to use wasm in some of the performance hotspots like matrix math and collision detection. I've optimized the everloving heck out of that Javascript code, but I'm not so foolish as to think I can do better than a modern optimizing compiler.
Interesting idea you have going here. Always fun to experiment with a new language.
I got my deck up to $5170, and then the market crashed it down to $250. I thought maybe there could be some extra value if you had certain combos in your deck, but that doesn't appear to be a mechanic. The real charm in the game is in seeing what you pull, but I think that you could have built out the gameplay some more.
@pado I'd be happy to take a look at your game tonight!
Good point on the double jump. I tried to make it self-evident with double-arched tack trails, but I'll edit that into the description so people know in advance!
@derek-glennon Bumping into the books was supposed to be intentional, but I can see how the effect might look a little strange. Probably should have smoothed it out a bit so it was more clearly trying (and failing) to push against them. Thanks for the feedback!
@guyingrey Thanks! Yeah, I'm pretty happy with this one overall, but I did run out of time to really flesh things out at the end. I had to stop with just the three obstacle types and a really basic repeating background and I still ended up with only half an hour to bash out the music. (That is the fastest I have EVER written music for a jam game. Not my best work by far, but it's good enough. Honestly I'm surprised I managed to get that much written.)
@beatquestgames Thanks, I'm flattered! I'm really not much of an artist (my wife drew the splash image for me) but I guess I can do okay with robots. That janky SNES-style perspective where you're looking at the sprite from both the front and the side at the same time makes it a little easier. I kinda cheat by picking simple shapes for everything!
@deruitda Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.
@toppervideogames Your speed is based on the number of tacks you've collected since last time you fell off the desk. Glad you had a good time!
There's one more ranking to be achieved above that one. :)
@ukulelefury Well, I mean, you can't collect them all. :slight_smile:
@bluedingo The double-jump getting lost is weird. I've seen it happen but it's so rare that I haven't been able to diagnose it.
@atsh I have more puns where that came from! :grin:
@sslees @fan Glad you enjoyed it!
@automathan I hadn't considered the possibility that the cups might look like special items. I really should have, because I've had that same problem when playing in other games -- thinking something dangerous was a valuable pickup.
@yarli Yeah, I know about that one, but I didn't discover it until after the submission deadline. Since it doesn't break the game I'm not TOO worried about it, but clearly I need to run more timesteps in my collision handling.
@chi-ink @antax02 Thanks! :slight_smile: I'm glad it all came together for you. It felt like a stroke of inspiration when I came up with the idea.
@sergs-workshop I had originally implemented a dash instead of slowing down, but it wasn't as fun to play because you would basically always want to be going fast. So I switched the controls around so that the faster speed was the default and you could push a button to slow down. And yeah, the UI is the generic title screen that I use for all of my games because I didn't have time to customize it.
@fireslash The logic to place the obstacles tries to put them in places where they aren't completely unavoidable, but given the jam time constraints I couldn't polish that forever. That said, the light bulbs in particular are designed to punish you if you try to rush through -- I did some math to make sure that the light bulbs start to fall at exactly the right time to hit you if you keep going the same speed.
@larazofia Yeah, I would definitely have put more work into layout generation if I had time. It's kinda awkward as it is but I'm happy that I managed to get done what I did.
@ranarh Oh man, imagining that little guy scooting around on my desk sounds great.
@arkadi-voronchenko It's supposed to be fast, so I can't tell how fast "extremely fast" is. Can you take a video?
I won? But I had only made five of the potions!
I love the fact that I get to play as the Gelatinous Cube for a change! It really fits with the dungeon theme, and the whole thing comes together as a cohesive package -- visuals, audio, gameplay, and theme. Well done!
I got the golden chicken!
It would have been nice if the graphics were a little larger. My eyes aren't what they used to be! But I love the aesthetic. The sprites look fantastic and move very satisfyingly. I especially like the lights around the UFO -- very nice touch!
Audio is quite solid too!
It's a shame that the game doesn't actually work. I see where you were going with it, and I hope you learned a lot along the way!
The dithering effect is an interesting choice of aesthetic. Unfortunately I got kinda motion-sick while playing it, and it didn't help that several days I had to wander all over before I found the trash. (I did notice the smoke. That helps.) Sound design works pretty well.
A simple but cute clicker game. Not much to it but what was there seems to work pretty well.
Some advice:
It was hard to catch the papers because I could never tell if I was or wasn't going to actually catch them. I had a similar comment for another game: Impactful visuals can make a HUGE difference. You both had the same design issue -- your weapon (net) is always present, visible, and extended, which is good for showing your range, but then when you swing with it, it really doesn't look that much different from when it's idle and it's not clear where you need to aim or how long the effect is active.
Consider this: You have a faded-out circle showing where your net will grab when you swing it, but as you're just riding around the net is held back. When you press the button to swing, it has a sharp, quick animation where it whips out and pulls back that only takes a few frames.
That said: Kudos on writing for the bare metal. (Or at least, as bare metal as web browser games can get.) I built myself a 2D game engine with HTML5 technologies that I use for my jam games, too. (Mine's mostly ES5, not ES6, but that's just because I started working on it while Internet Explorer was still a meaningful compatibility target.)
I have to echo the other comments: The game is visually beautiful and the music is nice. The sound effects are mostly okay (though I've never heard a butterfly buzz before). However, the economy doesn't really do much for the game -- it's not hard to build a plot that has every possible combination of flowers right off the bat. Still, it was a nice experience. Don't let the critique get you down!
@uniowl @faby Re: color-blindness, you've made a pretty good start already by having the flowers differ by more than just color. You could make another good step by improving the contrast, because especially with the shadows it can sometimes be a little hard to distinguish the details even for me (I have good color vision, but my eyes are getting a little old). Applying some lighting effects or particle effects to distinguish different classes would probably do the trick for the butterflies -- you've even already got element symbols that you could use for visually-distinct particles, and that would tie together the information that you already have.
Bokey Bokey Bokey Bokey Bokey
Reminds me of Work Time Fun, for PSP... or said another way, if WarioWare were an office cubicle job.
The music is an interesting touch. It's simple, inoffensive, and sets the mood -- sufficiently competent, nothing amazing, but it gets the job done.
The cards were well done. Got a few good chuckles.
Aw. It crashed :( I was really enjoying that. I got through 25 light-years but I wanted to see if there was more story after that planet!
I love the artwork! The music is pretty good too. The play controls are okay -- I think it would be better if there was a visual indicator to show that you're in the right place for a pickup, and maybe if you didn't have to be at a COMPLETE stop that would help? That was the part that felt the weakest. But that's the only complaint I can make!
Shiny raytracing! You know, that's something I've never tried to build myself. I should try it one of these days.
Side note: From a game perspective, it would have been nice if you didn't have to hold the mouse button down to move the camera.
This game really feels like it needs some audio to go with it! It's quite nicely polished as it is, and a bit of sound would really take it to the top. Well done!
If I were to nitpick: I've never been fond of keyboard+mouse controls for top-down games. I always feel like I should just move toward my target and press an attack button, or maybe use WASD for movement and arrows for attacking, twin-stick style. But that's just a matter of personal preference, not really a criticism.
That was an interesting little game. The subtleties are... well, subtle! It was pretty easy but it was a lot more active than I expected just looking at it. Good fun :)
Pretty good attempt overall. A suggestion: Games need to have good feedback to let you feel that things are happening. You can't really tell when the scythe is just drifting there versus when you're attacking with it, and it isn't clear what's going to deal damage or not. Some nice sharp animations and some impact effects will go a long way toward making the combat feel more satisfying.
Dang. The game crashed on me twice, something about losing the WebGL context. I really wanted to see more... I had one room up to 8x. Really chill vibe, I liked the concept and the atmosphere.
I think I cheesed it...? I found a place I could walk off the map and just go straight to the end. Whoops.
Very chill atmosphere, nice graphics, and I liked the concepts. Good storytelling. If I were to suggest an improvement, it would be to make the UI a little more clear. Sometimes the text was hard to read, and it was hard to tell what was active.
Unfortunately the game crashes on startup for me. It might be because I'm not running Windows so I have to run the game through Wine.
The play control needs some polishing. It's really easy to accidentally oversteer, especially during speed boosts, and it's hard to make maneuvers precisely so I ended up answering a couple wrong just because I couldn't steer into the right answer. But the graphics and music work really well together and fit the trivia game theme, so kudos to that!
This was not the game I set out to write. The game I set out to write was, in fact, a racing / roguelike mashup instead of a racing / text adventure mashup. But between having unexpected technical difficulties trying to manipulate meshes in Unity and getting called into work on what was supposed to be a vacation day, I had to abandon that game. (I might pick it up again later; I think it was a solid concept.) This was a crushing blow, as it would have been the first time I failed to complete a Ludum Dare game since I started participating in LD36.
But then I had THIS hilarious idea.
I wrote this in the three hours between getting out of the office and the submission deadline. It's not going to win any award for best game (although it might potentially win one for fastest time from conception to completed implementation) but I think the joke is solid enough to score well in the humor category.
@jezzamon Thanks for the feedback. You're not the first person to script their way into a win. ;) My boss did a very similar thing. You're the first one to comment on the DOM getting too big, but that's very useful to know -- that should be easy enough to deal with.
This is a fantastic game with a fantastic concept. It's almost like a 2D SuperHot. Really impressive, especially considering your age!
Well, I can't really play it, because I don't have a controller. It wouldn't be fair for me to rate it. If you publish a post-jam version with keyboard support let me know and I'll give it a look!
Extremely hard to play on a laptop. Maybe consider twin-stick controls? (use arrow keys to shoot and wasd to move) Also none of the spells worked for me...
@tigerj I recognize that's how it's meant to be played. The twin-stick advice is because Blizzard themselves realized that and made the console version of Diablo 3 handle that way.
Also: I have a health bar class that provides a sprite that auto-generates textures. You make it a child of the prefab and it does the rest of the work on its own. Would you be interested?
:thumbsup: Happy to provide some insight. Good luck with future development!
The music sync is a bit off so it's hard to play, but I like the concept and it looks good. And it's really interesting to see a Ludum Dare entry written in Scratch!
I'm on a Mac, and I'm interested in playing this, but I can't get the game to start -- neither the mouse nor the keyboard seem to do anything at the title screen.
@MegRabbit You can release a post-jam version, but only critical bugfixes and ports to new platforms are eligible for scoring -- the game that people are judging needs to be materially equivalent to what you completed during the 72 hours.
For me... This is REALLY hard to play with a trackpad. I would suggest adding keyboard controls -- maybe number the card slots 1 through 9. But I like the concept and the music works pretty well!
It's hard to treat this like a rhythm game because the timings are so broad. It also takes a lot of practice to get used to mapping the colors on a single line to the buttons -- I would consider making four lanes like most rhythm games because it's way easier to keep track of things. But I like the power mechanic, and the rhythm-ness of it doesn't interfere with the platforming elements.
This is one of the most visually impressive jam games I've played. Well done on that regard! The concept is interesting and I think it would have been fun, except...
The controls didn't work very well at all, I'm afraid. For starters, Ctrl+W means "close tab" so trying to swim forward and descend at the same time instead makes you have to start the game over. It really struggled with recognizing when a button was pressed or released. Maybe I should try hooking up a controller.
That was adorable. :)
I know the feeling of trying to cram in an entry at the last minute. I got called into work for one jam and by the time I got done I only had three hours left. I was about to give up but I thought of something easy to build that was on-theme and I thought it was utterly hilarious. It was [a pretty terrible game](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-dungeons-of-indianapolis), but I had a fun time making it -- and that's what counts, isn't it?
Heh. Bribery. Are we the bad guys? XD This game feels like it takes a lot of skill to succeed even though we're cheating. I like the audio!
Easter egg: On a technicality, this is my first game soundtrack to feature lyrics.
What, you don't hear them? Here's a transcription:
> SIGNAL SIGNAL SIGNAL. > > SIGNAL. > > SIGNAL. > > SIGNAL.
``` ... .. __. _. ._ ._.. ```
@mr-flower If you heard 80s arcade sound effects then I have succeeded at my goal! :grinning:
@pojemnik I don't understand. There is a restart feature. You can quit from the pause screen to go back to the title screen at any time, and there's a "Back to Title" button on the game over screen.
@prismapunch The control scheme issue was something I knew about during development. I would have liked 360-degree control but my custom game engine doesn't support arbitrary sprite rotation. I'm glad you enjoyed it anyway!
@beastpanda I really appreciate the detailed feedback. Thank you very much! :slight_smile: The player ship should have just as good of audio as the enemies because it's using the same code... I made the player's weapons fire quieter because you were going to hear so much of it. Did I maybe make it too quiet?
@yodak Feedback: Appreciated!
@aweskybear Heyo, nice to hear from you again! Yeah, my son was pushing for a smart bomb weapon too but I didn't want to overcommit during the development time -- likewise I didn't have time to work in another enemy design he had created assets for. In the end, it ended up being the right call: it meant I was able to wrap things up into a complete package before the deadline, even if I did have to cut some pieces that I would have wanted to include. (I wanted an actual boss fight, I wanted some ending music, I wanted a victory splash screen with more artwork to make it more rewarding.)
@itero-proto Thanks!
@6knowledge Yeah, balancing the lasers was tricky... I wanted them to be scary enough that you couldn't just zoom past them and ignore them, and I added a hint section specifically to say how to beat them, but I also know that sitting outside of range and beating them down isn't very satisfying. Glad you had a good time though!
@ty-victorson Thanks! Glad you had a good time.
@arnage Oh. I think I figured it out. The animation isn't properly cleaning up because the game ends in the middle of it, and that breaks the state machine. Thanks for the report. (There's also a known issue where those animations interact poorly with the focus-lost detection.)
Not sure what's up with the background breaking, though. I only saw that a single time during development and I fixed it right away... I don't see an obvious way that could break at runtime.
One of these days I want to add controller support to html52d. I was thinking about it for this one but I didn't end up having time before the jam started and I didn't want to spend time during the deadline hacking on the engine.
@gecko64 Thanks for pushing me over the line, and I'm glad you had fun!
@lcstark Hm? There's music, was it not working for you? You can listen to it here: http://greenmaw.com/webgames/ld59/assets/bgm.wav
@lcstark What browser / OS are you using? That's really surprising; I used .wav specifically for maximum compatibility...
@lcstark Thanks. I'll look into it. I guess Firefox's idea of when an AudioContext starts is different from Chrome's idea of it -- Chrome doesn't consider the context to start until the first call to `play()` (which happens after you click Start Game) but apparently Firefox is considering the context to start the moment it's initialized.
I can see a possible avenue of future development for this game that could take it to the next level. This is a solid base set of mechanics that could lead to an interesting approach to an RTS.
Not really my style of game, but that's not your fault. Graphics are nice!
If I had to give a criticism, I would say that the game is far too slow. It would be more fun if it were more reaction-based. But it's a complete package that's put together well, so good job in that regard!
Oops. I managed to get a robot stuck, which soft-locked the game because it never returned control to me.
The sound design is on point! The experience as a whole fits the theme very well. There was one level where the positioning was really finicky but otherwise it felt approachable.
The window size being fixed is mildly troublesome because the text is too small for my aging eyes to read comfortably. :( But that's really just a nitpick.
@gecko64 Re: graphics - If your teammates want to, they could also register ldjam accounts for next time. If you all follow each other (there's a follow button on your user profile page) then you can add them as teammates.
Really solid! Reminds me of playing Laser Mayhem as a kid. Music is simple but effective. Would have appreciated a few more sound effects along the way, but it's not that big of a deal. Kind of _easy_, but that's fine for a jam game.
It would have been nice to be able to zoom out, or at least to pan faster. The whole thing was just a bit slow-paced. Not enough to hurt the overall experience, but it would be an opportunity for polish.
Not sure why the audio doesn't work for me, so I can't really rate you there. :(
I overall liked it! I think it started a bit slow -- perhaps the drones need a little bit bigger of a radius so that the overall early pace picks up? And the escalation at the end seems REALLY abrupt since Destroyers are so powerful. But if the only thing I can complain about is pacing, you're in a REALLY good place. Well done!
Oh, turns out all audio in my browser was broken. Fixed it, tried again. Music is really solid! Sound effects aren't bad but something about the way you mixed the audio makes them not quite fit in with the music? Really a minor thing, not really a complaint.
Not bad at all! I managed to get a score of 18.
Best sound design you've had so far -- the music really fits the mood. Except I'm not sure what's up with that Windows sound effect? Especially since I don't use Windows!
Fairly impressive that you have that many objects moving smoothly with a handcrafted engine. Well done. (I suppose it helps that you don't have to worry about collision!)
It was sort of tricky to manage the zoom scale (maybe ctrl should have been for making it faster instead of slower?), and the fact that the green stars blink slowly in the main view doesn't help with spotting them.
(Side nitpick: You have a typo in "periscopic" :wink: )
The UX decision makes perfect sense now that you put it that way. (And yeah, I saw the "Detected!" message and I used it.)
I found the Windows sound effect: it's at 0:30 in the background music! Did you have a notification come in while you were recording it or something?
A few other little comments:
* At least on my computer (Linux, using Chrome), the green circle doesn't show up until I click once, which forces a miss. * Sometimes the game shows a "PAUSED" message but it's still taking clicks in the background without showing what's happening, and there's no message saying how to unpause it. * The mute settings don't stick across plays.
All just points of polish that don't detract from the overall experience.
Solid game! The sound design is excellent, some of the best I've seen in a jam game. (There's a bug where the wind sound cuts out abruptly instead of looping or fading but it's not a big deal.) And the graphics are pretty good.
It is BRUTALLY difficult. This isn't a bad thing -- it's okay for games to be hard -- but it's true.
The slow walking pace is good for setting the mood but it makes the game as a whole feel kind of tedious. Maybe if you come back to this afterward you could tune the pacing a little more, speed up both the player and the blizzard to keep the difficulty consistent but make walking from place to place feel a little more engaging.
I'm not sure the ending works (unless that's what you meant was broken in the web build?) -- I got to the giant pile of neonite that the megacluster radar pointed me to but I couldn't interact with it no matter what I tried and then the blizzard got me.
I was never able to get the 20 seconds and return thing successfully, either -- it was just too hard. Maybe I'll try again later.
> I was never able to get the 20 seconds and return thing successfully, either – it was just too hard. Maybe I’ll try again later.
Huh. I did it, but nothing special happened.
Fantastic game, one of the best I've played! Got just shy of 1400 points after practicing for a while.
I had to fiddle with my mic settings to get it to feed in loud enough to trigger the start of the game, but in the end I found a good balance where I could tap my mic to jump and that was a lot more playable than trying to yell. Kudos for the creative use of input methods, though!
The hitboxes feel a bit punishing. Several times I thought I was going to land on top of a car but I was just barely in front of the windshield.
Uncovered a link for people to try: https://files.jam.host/embed/$429693/47869/index.html -- I'll report back once I've played it myself.
Alas. I got it to load but it doesn't work. The plugs don't connect to anything. Visually it looks nice, at least!
@6knowledge Oh, I see, it was working the first time and I just didn't understand how to do it. I can see now that it's even more incomplete than I thought, but that said -- well done getting this far, and I hope you got some good experience for next time!
I'm quite confused! ^^() I don't really understand what's going on, and somehow I got the "stole all of my mushrooms" ending even though there were still clearly mushrooms on the screen. But it handled fluidly and it was an interesting experience. Graphics were pretty nice too!
My browser's audio was broken so I had to come back and try again, and the sound design is solid. Well done there!
Very smooth animations and gameplay. Might have been nice to have keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs, but that's really the only suggestion I can make.
Link that works: https://files.jam.host/embed/$425136/47866/index.html
It's an interesting idea. I can't play it properly because I don't have a numeric keypad on my laptop, but at least I was able to work out a way to hit the target for the first player. Creative use of field-based physics!
This is EXTREMELY difficult because you can't shoot enemies from far away and the laser takes so long to recharge. I feel like even when I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, it felt inconsistent. I couldn't even get through the first floor.
How... utterly, utterly bizarre. And the jokes are so... cheesy!
The controls were really difficult. I figured out how the cheese cutter works, but a lot of times it wouldn't let me click once I had it in the place I wanted it, and a lot of times I couldn't get it to move the way I wanted it to. But I did eventually finish the game! The graphics are solid and the sound design is pretty good.
I got stuck trying to decode the signal on the 3rd column. I had all of the collectibles and I thought I understood what the symbols meant, but nothing I put in unlocks the 4th column. Otherwise, this is a well done puzzle game and I enjoyed it up until then!
@tmc Yeah, I know I was inputting it right (I realized all of that) but apparently my interpretation of the symbols managed to work for the levels but somehow not for the passwords!
The game doesn't load for me in Chrome. :( Had to switch to Firefox.
This is visually very polished and the controls seem to work pretty well (aside from the known placement bugs), and the concept is solid. I think the main weakness is the lack of feedback when things happen -- I died twice because I didn't know I was taking damage. The game is _brutally_ difficult and some checkpoints might have been appreciated.
It's sort of like a different take on a cover shooter. Seems pretty nicely polished.
It's a little tricky to play on a trackpad, especially a trackpad that turns itself off when you use the keyboard. I'm not going to hold that against you -- that's a weird issue with my laptop! But it does mean that I kinda got stuck at the 6th room when the difficulty got to be too much for such clumsy movement.
@mr-flower Learning how to focus scope is a _core_ part of the jam experience! It took me a long time to get my routine worked out to where I have it now. Good luck in the future!
It's an interesting concept but it's definitely very challenging. I had to pause to have any hope of getting anything done, too.
Side note: A ship that was supposed to be labeled QO27 had its third flag being red on top and white on bottom, which isn't anything on the list. 2 is supposed to be yellow-red-yellow horizontal bars.
Oh, dang, I see, it was just too small on my screen for me to distinguish it properly. Never mind then!