Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Colossal Gnome
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | Maze Trudger! | compo | 408 | 3.25 | 3.13 | 2.96 | 3.07 | 3.13 | 2.94 | 2.82 | 3.04 |
I _love_ the graphics and audio.. tiny 8x8 pixel sprites. Fantastic. Really difficult to play though, the character moves so fast and there's too much on the screen to see what's going on (obviously that's intentional) ... 3 hours, really?! incredible!
Really fun. I found it to be very challenging, Love the graphics and audio. fits the theme well, level difficulty increases rapidly. Nice job!
I couldn't really figure out what to do with all the loot. Also found the controls very cumbersome (especially with a trackpad instead of a real mouse). Nice effort though, there are definitely some interesting things going on here.
Pretty classic asteroids-like game. I've never been good at mouse + keyboard controls, I'm not coordinated enough I guess, so the controls were somewhat frustrting -- even moreso on a laptop with a trackpad instead of a mouse. Seems like the aliens affect planets without actually shooting anything at them? I couldn't see them firing anything but the planets were definitely affected. Would probably be a lot more fun if I were coordinated enough to really be able to manage the controls :)
Is it intentionally a scrubs reference, or coincidence? :D Would love to see a mac or web version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGSZlFcYnh4
Some interesting things going on here.. I'll have to take a closer look at your maze generation logic, much different style maze than the algorithm I used in my game, [Maze Trudger!](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/maze-trudger)
Controls felt a bit off to me, like pushing a big rock around an ice rink. Definitely some potential here though. Nice job :)
Doesn't scale to fit in windowed mode on my macbook, and I couldn't get past the title screen either. Unfortunately can't rate without being able to actually play it.
That's what I see as well ^^
Looks fun! Wish there was a mac or html5 version so I could try it...
Pretty fun. Was a little disappointed that it failed to load unless I disabled my ad blocker. Also struggle a bit to see how it fits the theme, but it was fun to play none-the-less.
Nicely fits the theme. I must really suck -- I never got past early teen years. :) lol
Can't play for too long -- I don't want to wear out my mouse button.. ;)
Really nice graphics, very responsive even with thousands of trees placed. Some sort of end-goal would be good, but it's still enjoyable throwing trees around on a map. I encountered at least one instance where trees wouldn't spawn where a building _had_ been after knocking it down.
Nice job :)
The tutorial guy overlay seems a little buggy.. flickers a lot when other things are going on on-screen. I found the controls a little challenging, getting back up from that 'secret' room was frustrating, got to level 3, 4? the red one where you're supposed to attack.. I had no lasers to shoot or whatever he was tellin me to use, only the normal directional buttons did anything, and tutorial dude kept popping up making my character freeze, eventually it just stopped responding on that screen all together.
I like the overall look, seems like it needs some work around a few of the various game mechanics still though.
Nice art, and music. I guess maybe the connection to the theme is that the tutorial dude is just too obnoxious to be helpful...? Based on the graphic for him, I'm guessing he is inspired by 'Dustin' from stranger things? :)
Pretty cool idea. The music was nice, I like the minimalist design quite a lot. I found the controls somewhat challenging and the lack of a defined goal is unfortunate. It was unclear how you would "sacrifice some light" as mentioned in the description, doesn't seem to be a way to shed it any faster than it wears off, and after a certain point I couldn't see any more appearing in the room, the room just suddenly started getting smaller. Due to these things, I found the actual gameplay to be kind of confusing, and frustrating. But I like the overall idea, with a little refinement you could easily market it as a nice little time-waster game for mobile.
Interesting take on, and really a great match for this theme. Graphics are basic but nothing more substantial is necessary. As others said I found the controls difficult, and that ultimately made the frustration overpower the fun.
Fun, could probably play this for long periods of time pretty easily. Pretty classic game idea, I like the multiple guns, and the responsiveness of said guns. Probably because I was using the web version, but none of the keyboard shortcuts worked for me. Nice job, fun game :)
Fun little game. I found the controls overly sensitive until I realized just tapping the left/right keys was a better approach, still took me several attempts to get to the finish and then it told me I was slow. :D lol
Pretty fun little game. I like the graphics, I appreciate the piratey sea music. Nice artwork & controls. My only complaint would that it took me a bit to figure out which ship was mine when gameplay started. I think maybe the 'select a ship' needs to be more visible.. some of my trouble may be the game-jam hangover from lack of sleep though ;)
Great job!
@jlreymendez: I think maybe all you need is a darker background behind the ship selector, and the 'select your ship' text to be a lighter color, maybe a bit larger. it all kind of blends into the gameboard beneath right now, ought to be a pretty easy fix.
Something along the lines of this, for example... b23d.jpg
I experienced a lot of movement issues, I couldn't move up much at all, and most of the time when over an item I'd bounce back the direction I came from without being able to pick it up.. that was frustrating.. Looks like it would be a good game otherwise, but with movement mostly non-functional it's not really playable.
Played in Chrome on a mac, for reference.
Mac version refuses to open for me. Any chance of getting a web version to play?
Understandable. I've yet to get windows and linux builds of my game out the door.. I should probably try to get that done tonight.
Wow, that is some _potent_ beer! :D My highest score is 15. lol
I didn't survive long enough to know, do the effects wear off after some time? If not that would probably be a good addition.
I made it to day 5. Kind of confusing how to get very far along as it seemed to end whether values hit either end of their respective level indicators.. All the way left ended just as all the way right did. Couldn't really work out if that was a bug or intentional
@vila3175 Had you collected any flares before hand? You don't start with any -- I went back any forth on that a little bit. They populate to the little dock in the center at the top of the screen when you collect them. Launching a flare will temporarily highlight the otherwise black squares so you can see the maze path. I hope you're able to see it, I'm especially happy with that feature :)
Thanks for playing, happy to hear you enjoyed it!
@McFish I didn't try it in anything but chrome as a full time web-dev I suppose I ought to know better. I'll take a look and see if I can reproduce the issue and resolve. Thanks for the info.
@ryan-temple, @masamunedragon, @btwj thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed!
Edit: Tried the last two latest version of FF on mac and couldn't reproduce the typeerror.. Bummer.
@lawzy93 yeah, the logic that detects whether a creature is encountering the player is somewhat imperfect, this is due to not using collisions but instead checking x/y values within the character data directly, if that is in the process of changing bites may not occur, if you're just ahead of on going in the same direction you may incur extra damage. Things could certainly be improved around this.
Muck avoidance strategy would be an interesting addition, but the nature of the maze algorithm used is that there is exactly one path between any two cells in the maze at all times, so it's probably not possible with this style of maze. I have noticed though that you can go diagonal around corners if you press the two buttons in close enough succession, so some things can be avoided that way -- additionally (and similar to the flaws in bite detection) if you're moving too fast it's possible to not pick up an item or trigger a cell as visited.
Definitely room for improvement. I appreciate the feedback :)
@McFish I'll have to see if I can track down a Win10 virtual machine to test on. I also need to get windows & linux desktop versions compiled too. Thanks
@jjjjason There probably are, there are lots of maze/dungeon generation algorithms. That's also the sort of thing that one could likely develop their own if they wanted as well to follow whatever rules they have. SInce generation occurs before play begins, that algorithm really could be as complicated as you wanted it to be I suppose.. it would simply delay start a bit longer.. as it stands, the maze generation does _not_ occur in preload, but rather as the first step of the 'gameplay' state. on most modern hardware, generation of a 50x30 maze (as used here) happens very fast. A more complicated algorithm would just require some kind of preload state for the gameplay itself while the map is generated. That is pretty common even in games without any real random generation that have pretty fixed level design/etc so certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Something to consider for future iterations.
@Sholf yeah I agree the audio is kind of annoying after a while -- it was the last part added just before cutoff or I'd have worked a bit harder to make it less repetitive and maybe only play the 'pickup' sounds sometimes. Didn't have time to tweak it at all.. in fact I think my bite audio sprite may have one of the muck sounds in it too, kept saving over my audio spite json files with config for different sprites so I probably screwed that up during one of the several times repopulating them. (I wonder if there's a good tool for that, if not I might have to make one.)
Thanks @jlreymendez, @realryanrogers, & @chong-lee! Glad you all enjoyed it.
@chong-lee If you're interested I have very similar maze-gen logic & a much simpler gameplay that runs on the command line with node in [this github repo](https://github.com/willvincent/js-maze). It lets you specify the maze size, and you can toggle between individual cell view, and a full map view (full map will break if you go too big on the maze size). You can also toggle between modes similar to what this game shows, maze becomes visible as you explore, or 'easy mode' where you can see it all the time (like when a flare is lit here).. Just like this game, that uses an implementation of the prims algorithm. I referenced it when building this game.
@almost I agree, it's super frustrating when you get to the end of a long path that is just a dead end, that's the nature of the prim's algorithm though. I think it would probably make sense to take a second pass through after the initial generation is done and randomly open up some additional walls in a percentage of other cells. I played with that idea a little bit last night and it was ok, didn't really change much overall though.
The maze is 50 cells wide, by 30 cells tall -- so there are a total of 1500 'rooms' in every maze. Thanks for playing glad you liked it :)
@frescogusto It's all random, while you certainly can end up in a very well stocked maze, it's also possible to have _nothing_ populate (though thats a remote chance)... The way it works is it generates a random number between 0 and 15% of the maze size (225) and then scatters that many items randomly throughout the maze. It is definitely possible to never run across any flares or health. But yeah I agree at the top end the number of items can be kind of excessive.
Sound was the last thing added, right at the time cutoff, so I didn't have a chance to tweak it to be less frequent (which was originally my intent) . Ideally there needn't be a sound _every_ time you step in muck, or pick up an item... also agree, controls could be improved :)
Thanks for playing.
@hilvon those are flares, hit space to fire one, it'll illuminate the unknown part of the maze briefly. Yes, sometimes they won't bite, usually happens when your moving quickly, or moving into the tile they're leaving. That could probably be improved, but it's also kind of nice that they don't _always_ attack, makes it a little interesting I think.
Thanks for playing :)
Not accurate for how the flares actually work, but this was the inspiration for the art for the flares: flare.jpg
@sean-s-leblanc yeah.. given more time ... Worked right up to the deadline, and didn't have time for all the things I'd have liked to do (less annoying audio, multiple levels and/or difficulty settings, etc)
Thanks for the heads up on the A\* issue, I hadn't noticed. :)
Thanks for playing.
Thanks for playing @Jupiter_Hadley! You said "stepping in stuff doesn't matter" while that's technically true, it releases more creatures. ;)
This is a lot of fun. it's challenging, mostly until you work out the controls. I found continuously holding the right button (to always be attracting bacteria) and then periodically pressing the left to move around the be very effective. I don't know if the intention is to allow it to work that way but until I did that I couldn't win.
Nice graphics, audio, great fit for the theme. Very well done!