Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → dalbinblue
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | Lamb Lines | compo | Fun | 4.46 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Expendabots | compo | 10 | 4.20 | 4.05 | 3.82 | 4.17 | 4.11 | 3.40 | 3.02 | 3.50 | ||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Scaling Up | compo | 3.90 | 3.40 | 3.20 | 3.40 | 4.50 | 4.00 | 3.80 | 3.30 | |||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Lacerti and the Puzzling Dungeon | compo | 35 | 4.02 | 4.09 | 3.05 | 3.12 | 4.32 | 3.60 | 2.84 | 3.73 | ||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | Lamb Lines | compo | 11 | 4.20 | 4.46 | 3.66 | 4.31 | 3.70 | 3.95 | 3.95 | |||
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Lightrunner | compo | 30 | 4.04 | 3.72 | 3.36 | 4.09 | 4.04 | 3.54 | 3.77 | |||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Comet Core | compo | 4.00 | 5.00 | 3.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 4.00 | |||
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Grippy Mouse | compo | 28 | 4.05 | 3.90 | 3.70 | 2.55 | 4.25 | 3.80 | 3.06 | 3.68 | 46 | |
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Line Square Tower | compo | 74 | 3.85 | 4.00 | 3.76 | 4.14 | 3.95 | 2.58 | 2.65 | 3.00 | 28 | |
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Momma's Little Monster | compo | 54 | 3.97 | 3.94 | 3.43 | 4.39 | 4.06 | 3.57 | 2.86 | 3.58 | 52 | |
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | Monster Pizza | compo | 35 | 3.97 | 3.94 | 3.89 | 4.26 | 4.36 | 3.56 | 3.96 | 3.59 | 66 | |
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Tuba Knight | compo | 36 | 4.00 | 3.85 | 3.10 | 3.95 | 4.00 | 3.62 | 3.50 | 3.59 | 35 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Tower Falling | compo | 140 | 3.69 | 3.72 | 3.41 | 3.59 | 4.09 | 2.88 | 3.31 | 54 | ||
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | The Lair of Maldar | jam | 10 | ||||||||||
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Armadrillo | compo | 140 | 3.70 | 3.83 | 2.86 | 3.75 | 3.57 | 3.03 | 2.74 | 2.97 | 66 | |
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | Dirt Cheap Dungeon | compo | 30 | 3.91 | 4.00 | 2.86 | 3.23 | 4.00 | 3.26 | 3.20 | 3.55 | 69 | |
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Captain Pico and Ensign DeGaro in Ten Second Time Bomb | compo | 256 | 3.39 | 3.26 | 3.15 | 3.69 | 3.90 | 3.29 | 3.09 | 3.35 | 52 | |
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | Fractured | compo | 20 | 4.09 | 3.74 | 3.79 | 3.40 | 4.28 | 3.81 | 2.41 | 3.92 | 100 | |
| 2012 | 25 | You are the Villain | Royal Reptile Rampage | compo | 178 | 3.34 | 3.12 | 3.08 | 3.80 | 3.46 | 3.15 | 3.02 | 3.29 | 100 | |
| 2012 | 24 | Evolution | Tad's Adventure | compo | 46 | 3.74 | 3.43 | 3.15 | 3.89 | 3.90 | 3.22 | 2.06 | 3.08 | 82 |
I thought it was fun, but couldn't figure out why I sometimes lost my bonus multiplier (do ou lose each ability as you gain a new one)? Also, I found it fairly easy as well, most enemies can be killed by starting at the top of the screen and firing then moving just below the enemies fire. They are slightly behind in movement (or larger) and will usually get hit.
Hehe, liked the humor.
Cool platform choice. I haven't done anything with the game boy advance in a long time. I have a programmable cartridge, but I don't know if I have the software to program it anymore, or access to a machine with a parallel port to get it loaded; if I can get everything setup I'll give it a try.
The first play through I thought I had defeated the boss (it's life was at zero and I wasn't near a shot as best as I can tell. The second time through, I got a game over after only two of the characters were expended (it was just as the boss was appear, might be related).
Other than that, it was funny and well put together.
Awesome game, fit the theme well and was quite fun once I figured out the correct sequences (I was going backwards on the bird thinking there was some strange continuation from bird to human).
Also, you get the award for the first time I activated the overlaid num lock on my laptop since I've bought it two years ago. It also caused me to write half this review bef6re 5 rea35zed n40 36c2 was st533 6n!
Nice adaptation of Mario Brothers. Found a bit of a glitch (cheat). You can actually knock out an enemy after if falls off the edge of a platform if you hit the platform just as the enemy is next to it. It make it a lot easier to knock out the enemy because you just need to walk over a block instead of jumping up.
I found the controls a little difficult (though I'll admit I was never really good at asteroids or lunar lander). The dinosaur sounds made me laugh quite a bit (reminds me of "Dinosaurs that Shoot Lasers when They Roar")
Fairly decent game. The controls were awkward on a laptop keyboard though; consider using space over the enter key.
First note, both your "Windows" and "Installer" links go to the same file which is the installer (A bit of a bummer since I wanted to avoid installing). Any I did install and play. Pretty cool; felt a lot like "Sword & Soldiers" but much faster... a bit too fast actually. I didn't have enough time to really determine a strategy based on intelligence points, and every time I tried to get the surplus food to get an extra IP I would get overrun. In the end what seemed to work was spam the build unit button and use superior numbers to overtake my opponent.
Holy file size Batman!
I think I elaborate on the movement issues. First off your character moves really slow when not running; painfully slow. The jump is also way too floaty, the player should move up faster and fall faster given the tone of the game.
The wall jumping is difficult to do, and that maybe due to having played Super Metroid and other similar games. With your control scheme the player needs to be pressing towards the wall to jump then immediately switch directions if they are going to bounce between two walls. It's a little more intuitive to push the direction they intend on going first then jumping. From an implementation standpoint, when you would start a slide, if the player pushes the opposite direction make them stick to the wall for a split second.
For the dash, I found it irritating that I couldn't change directions while dashing. I had to let go of the shift key and then change directions. This might be less of an issue if the normal movement was faster and I didn't want to dash everywhere.
Finally, this may just be my preference, but I think you should swap the controls on the Z and C keys. It feels more natural to my to use my index and middle finger more than ring and pinky for controls, and it would put jump in the right most button which always felt more natural to me on a keyboard.
Very fun, and engaging. The level is well designed as well. However, for the life of me, I couldn't get the door open. I ended up with three keys, I'm guessing there are more but I didn't see any more obvious locations and kept running out of gems. Ended up somewhere around 43% evolution.
GAme movement was a bit slow, also for some reason every time I tried breeding the child would die the next turn; not sure what I am doing wrong.
I took a tomorrow off, to recover, so I will see what I can do. I haven't used Linux in a while, and have done very little development in that area so I can't make any promises. I'll keep that in mind for the next competition.
Ben, after each level the game asks you to lose an existing ability before letting you choose new ones. When my brother was testing late into development he suggested that I make it more obvious that you were choosing an ability to lose. The dialogs look nearly the same, and at that point it was too late to do anything about it before the submission deadline.
@BMacIntosh Haha, not sure yet. Probably will clean the game up and expand it a bit more.
@braingale; There's definitely some balancing issues that need to be dealt with on the "normal" attack, and while the game is solvable without buoyancy (especially if you take spikes or shocker instead), I think I need to reduce the effect of gravity so that you don't have to mash the jump button as much.
@Sestren, hehe, I had to throw that one in. I'm a big NES nut.
I am having the same issue I get a blank unresponsive windows 7 x64 bit.
Very well written, notices a small glitch in the "story" part of the game where you could shoot then scroll over and find you bullets floating in mid-air. Didn't really detract from the game though.
Interesting ideas. I found it very slow to gain the points needed to an evolution, even with the cheat. The "Mario's Coin" noise for attacking is funny though.
I think you may have some bugs in the game. First, everything costs 5 instead of the stated 25 above; but it looks like you have to have at least 25 in funds for the purchase to take effect. It is possible also possible to go negative, or make a purchase that has no effect (if funds is less than 25, you are still charged to the upgrade, but the stats in the top-left corner are unchanged). I found that I could wait until the funds were above 25 then buy and upgrade every second or two and get to the point where the helps overran the screen pretty quickly.
Found the game funny, but there didn't seem to be a losing condition. I let some animals get through but didn't notice any difference in the game (like a loss of life or a quota of deaths, etc.)
Good first attempt. I could not get the game to fire when pressing space-bar (is this a late mutation?)
I also found that sometimes enemies would bunch up on the edge of a platform and stay there, making it difficult, if not impossible to make it to that platform and making the level unwinnable.
Unfortunately I am unable to run this game. I get a version error (I made sure I had the latest version of Java installed). The specific error I had is:
C:\Users\Kris\Downloads\LudumDare24FINAL\LudumDare24>java -jar LudumDare24.jar
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: ludumdare24/L
udumDare24 : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClassCond(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(Unknown Source)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
Could not find the main class: ludumdare24.LudumDare24. Program will exit.
Cool for thirty minutes worth of work. Feels like a very minimalist version of Doodle God or something along those lines.
Not too familiar with Java, but I could not get this game to run. I made sure I had the latest version of Java, but when I ran the game via the command line (java -jar RunGame.jar) I got the following error:
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: game/core/Driver : Unsupported major.min
or version 51.0
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClassCond(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(Unknown Source)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
Could not find the main class: game.core.Driver. Program will exit.
Exception in thread "main"
Fun game. I was starting to think it was going slow then I got to the last area.
As a note, the fireball(?) projectiles shot out were really small and hard to see so I ran in to them often and had to restart. I would suggest making the projectile bigger or zooming the level in a bit more (i.e. instead of having nearly 3/4 of the viewport black, zoom the graphics so that the circle takes most of the visible area).
Found it surprising fun for a very simple game; good first attempt. I saw a few issues, bit I think they have all been covered.
On a side note, when I first opened the page I did a double take on the screenshot; I thought the dinosaur was urinating!
I enjoyed this entry. For some reason I especially liked how you represented the evolution generations. I had a little difficulty reading the abilities from the pictures, but did eventually figure out it was (from bottom to top) splash, speed, range, damage. There wasn't much time between the start of the wave and when you could build, making it necessary to plan things out and memorize each tower. As a suggestion, you could either show the states for each tower all the time (at the cost of playfield size) or allow the player to build their tower in preparation before the wave comes.
That certainly was interesting. I ran through the game a few times, but couldn't see any difference in the outcomes based on the BioGrid or anything else other than having enough <scrbbles> for the Monkey. Am I missing something there, or is this just being funny.
Had difficulty with the controls. The big issue here was that the player could catch up to the mouse, so I ended up having to keep picking it up to move. The mouse should just point you in the direction you want to go and lead the player's movement. Also, halfway through level 3 I lost my beam attack and couldn't complete the level.
Very fun and cool use of theme. The difficulty did ramp up faster than I thought it would (I would have hoped I would have survived to the third generation).
It was fun, but I had a lot of difficulty with the controls (specifically aiming), and all too often I would start or evolve into something where I could barely see my character or my character's bullets.
I did like the game, but found it somewhat frustrating that you could nearly clear the board and then get a chain reaction that would fill the board faster than you could stop it. Because of the speed in which things grow, and the mental effort it takes to figure out what the next iteration of Conway's algorithm will produce, I'm not sure a fast paced shooter is the best choice. As more strategic game where you have some more time to plan out a move may be less frustrating, but overall awesome idea.
I had quite a bit of fun with this game. It might be that I'm exhausted, but I had no luck with level 8. Also a bit annoying but when you are one move away from being attacked by a cat, there is absolutely nothing you can do stop it as usually both turns will give the same results. Not sure if a single undo would be useful here, but it's irritating to know that after working through a large number of turns on a puzzle seeing that you are one away from starting over. Given the mechanics of the game, I'm not sure if there is anything that could be done to alleviate this.
Fun game and fast. Quite enjoyable.
Had a missing DLL error. Downloading and installing the DX10 runtime did the trick (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details-a.aspx?id=35 for anyone else having the same issue).
In game, I found it really difficult to control. I would use left ctrl to scroll around but every time I pressed it, the globe would jump and I would have no Idea where I was. Also, for some reason healing didn't seem to work. The continents health never went back up.
Interesting concept, and fun. Building does tend to drag (I ended up going and playing some other games and then jumped back to this one), though I typically enjoy more twitch reflex style games.
I think I found a bug in the game, or at least an odd "feature". The units with an armor mutation can no longer capture nodes, which means if you take armor on all three units, the game is impossible to win.
Hmm, installed both redistribution packages and still no love.
Feels a lot like Doodle God (even has the swoop animation) with one good addition: after every few objects the game clears defunct elements so that by the end of the game you are not just rubbing item together with about 40,000 possible combinations.
As a note for this game and all the rub items together to get a new item game, it would be nice if the game would pop up with a notice as you hover over one item on another that you have already made something with that combination (by showing the product. After a while you forget all the combinations you have tried and have to sit through the animation only to see that you have a duplicate item.
It took me a few rounds to determine how the game worked exactly; specifically that you had to go back to gray to pick up a new color. You may want to add a comment in instructions that you have to go back to gray to get a new color (you stated how to make the player turn gray, but not why).
Two suggestions for the future:
1) The controls are stiff, in that if I was quickly tapping the arrow keys, most weren't registering. Since there is no animation, I should be able to move from one block to the next as fast as I can press the key.
2) As you stated, there was no winning or losing due to time constraints. As a quick way to add a game over condition, you could add a quota for each level and either make the board small enough or congested enough that the player can't just get all of one color in one shot.
Very long introduction to the game. I would suggest breaking the story up with a short introduction at the beginning, and then fill the user in as they started each level.
Also the sound could use some work. The initial song during the intro made me think the game froze, and some of the sound effects (like the elevator) were simply ear piercing.
I like the Atari vibe. The appearance would a bit more complete if you made the text look retro as well. I'd don't know if it was a time constraint or if graphics is not your strong suit, but making the text large and blocky like the rest of graphics would make everything come together a little better.
Additionally a few more enemies, or more aggressive enemies would be nice. I found the game too easy because I could outrun all the enemies or sweep past them to kill them quickly.
Had a ton of fun with this game. It's something I would definitely keep and play again after the competition.
Fun game, but I found it difficult to hit an enemy except be circling around behind them to the only position they weren't firing at. The players shots actually went a little diagonal so if you tried to shoot by aiming at the enemy between shots it would always miss.
Pretty fun. Ended up dying at what I think is the boss.
Very hard to play. At the very least, I would suggest using shortened commands, such as the first letter of each possible choice and also just show the list of available options when prompting a player to play their turn, I kept having to type in help to remember what I needed to do.
Very interesting. The evolution in the game is very subtle and minor. This doesn't seem to be so much a game but an experience, but a good one none-the-less.
From a technical side, I noticed in the credits that the you used GarageBand in making this so I'll assume there was supposed to be sound. Not sure what the problem was, but the game was completely silent for me.
Interesting concept. I need to read the hints, because I didn't realize that you were invisible initially until I read the comments (my bad). In any case levels 2 and 3 are really hard on the eyes; consider a softer color choice.
Interesting looking game, but a bit monotonous. I way in the comments that there are nine types of enemies, but I only think I saw 2, and I played for a few minutes just mowing down what I could find. The turrets didn't seem that useful as they were destroyed way to quickly.
Game looks great, and has a lot of potential, but I found it really buggy and eventually unplayable.
Initially, I had difficulty getting the web version working, which was due to Chrome. No big deal, I just downloaded the Windows version.
Next was a resolution issue on the game. You game doesn't scale well from the intended 800x600 image size. Unity defaulted to 1024x768 and when I had it selected the title screen was off center and the action selector was rendered over the play field instead of at the bottom.
Next one of my tribes dissapeared. They were still there (I could hover over them and see their stats) but they did not render.
Half way through the second age I could no longer perform any actions, I could select and action, and it would use up a time unit on the bottom, but nothing would actually happen in the game.
Now this is something that really that's really cool and hits the theme on the nail. Once I figured out a good balance to get evolution going I saw some interesting patterns forming and was amazed by how the intelligence came together. I was hoping to run this on my desktop and just let the simulation run overnight but it won't render on that machine, and the game has a tendency of overheating my laptop when fast-forwarding.
I'd love to see a feature where you could inspect an individual creature to see their code and follow. I'd also love to see a debugger where you could watch a creature execute their code an see the decision making process.
This is definitely a game where I need to poor over the code.
Fun, cool game. First thing I did though was walk down the hole on the right on the first level (think it was multi-screen).
Very difficult game; I couldn't get past the first stage. The green items you are supposed to collect change to enemies way too fast and I could end up being swarmed and killed in a few seconds.
Also, the 64-bit version crashes when I run it. The archive is about half the size of the 32-bit version so I'm guessing it's missing some files.
Really couldn't figure out what to do in this game. Not sure if the ice meteors so anything.
Interesting idea. For some reason though I'd get overly aggressive against the dinosaurs and then forget to collect the genes!
Yep, getting the same error. Second game that I and issue like this today. I did make sure to download the latest version of Java.
I can't seem to find a good combination to defeat the blue towers at the end. The last six are always left.
I had a difficult time trying to figure out how to influence the game and eventually give up.
Also to kevincorrigan's comment, the issue is likely that the XNA game was compiled in the wrong profile. By default XNA uses a HiDef profile that requires an DX10 or DX11 (can't remember which one) video card to run. If you set the game to the "Reach" profile you lose some things like advanced shader support, but the game will run on a DX9 compatible card. Unfortunately most of the Intel integrated graphics popular on laptops and older cards don't support the HiDef profile.
I agree, very frustrating, but also fun to play.
Haha, the ending was funny! Overall fun game. Two bugs though:
1) There is a point in the top right where to can squeeze through and exit the map.
2) In the lower right area there is a group of rocks where the enemies can get stuck. I was fairly low level and the only thing I could eat was stuck with two larger monsters, making it impossible for me to grow to the next level. I had to kill myself and start over.
As other has said. A lot of work to get it going. Note also you need to make the link/batch file actually open the game too. I fixed the link and got a happy pig; though it was an intro to the game, then when I couldn't continue realized it was the default application for love.
Very interesting an nice looking. As others stated I as able to get by just on melee, ans did have a lot of trouble with the stairs, and often triggered the alarm with a guard off screen (I know there is a line of vision light, but the cue of an actual guard is easier to see and grab your attention).
Yep, having the same problem as master4523, the game freezes for quite some time as soon as an enemy gets in range of one of my units.
Good to see a turn based strategy done in two days. The pace is very slow though in the crawl over to the orphanage.
Cool music and nice screams. The game is a bit slow. Suggest speeding up the game and cutting the time.
All I could think of here was "Mavis Beacon Teaches Torture". Interesting albeit frustrating mechanic especially with the glitchy physics and over distorted music. You really are a villain.
Not entirely sure what I was supposed to be doing here. Pressed every key on the keyboard, but the only thing I could do is move the character with the arrow keys. Also at one point the game got stuck and had me moving up all the time when pressing no keys on the keyboard.
Bal'nok is a bit slow which makes it quite hard to defend both gems given the number of enemies.
That was a funny diversion. I would make a note that the last scene didn't really fit with the rest of the game; It reminded me of "Spike: a Love Story" (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/568517), which incidently would be a great contender for this theme, but didn't fit the rest of the overt asshole scenes that preceded it. Something like puppy punting or rolling a paraplegic into alligator infested water would fit better (wow, I am a bastard).
Very impressive game, really good difficulty level and strategy in unit types. Got it in three tries, and on that third try I only had one second left.
Indeed, you will need to include a link to the source code to qualify for the 48 hour competition; if you don't want to supply the code, you could switch to a jam entry, which doesn't have that restriction, but it may be too late at this point.
Scored 5200. Not sure why I found a train consisting of the word "TRAIN" so funny.
I do need to fix the controls. I didn't actually try the game on a Game until after submission and found it awkward. I should also probably swap flames and running on the keyboard.
@surpy - The level was hand designed, though a bit frantically; I only played through once from start to end before submission.
@everyone else - I REALLY need to fix the controls, to those that play, what keyboard buttons would be most common to control? I'm left-handed and may have everything reverse what the other 90% of the population finds normal.
@blob, oh I have both Demon's Crest and Gargoyles Quest 2 as well, though i will admit that I have only finished the original. My game collection is actually quite extensive and at the same time pretty sad: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/87314864/TheCollection.jpg. (Note I am definitely a retro gamer).
There's something funky going on with the detection logic on the last level. I got caught many times when I was nowhere near a hippies line of sight. Did finish it though.
Unfortunately I'm getting an error in the installer "C:\windows\SysWOW64\msiexe.exe the service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion". Windows 8 is the likely culprit. The comments make me really want to try it. Any chance for a non-installer version?
The lighting is nice but the camera was getting me sick after a while. The rubber banding was too tight and jerky, and really needs to be smoothed out.
Having to use an installer was a bit annoying (especially since when I went to uninstall it later I found that the program name (platformplay1) didn't match the name of the game so it took me a moment to find it. If you could avoid an installer, it would greatly appreciated.
Other than that a pretty solid game and concept; it is quite a challenging game to get through. One complaint on gameplay is that the jump isn't always immediate. There are times when I would press it and the player character wouldn't actually jump for maybe a 1/4 or 1/2 of a second, which is disastrous with the precise jumps that this game demands.
It's a good solid start to a game; if you were done early you could spend the remaining time polishing. Play the game a few times (or better yet get someone else to play) and see where you can improve.
As for the game you have now, it is unfortunate that you can stay on the ground and amass a really high score while outrunning all enemies.
This is really the mot polished and complete game I've played so far. I have two small nitpicky item that I found while playing.
1. The center of radiation on the humans seemed off. Sometimes I could walk pretty close and only get one bar of radiation, other times I'd be halfway across the room being hit with two bars.
2. With such a polished and well built game, the game just ends with a sudden wall of text. It would have been really nice to see some ending graphics like a room with a human passing out, or a scene wit the player looking around in a room of dead bodies. I'm guessing time was against you at this point considering all you did put together.
@epiplon - It is possible to dodge everything but difficult note that there is a small gap the layout of the guns. You can get there just in time to avoid the shots.
The controls are difficult work with; I kinda needed three hands. Might have been better to make the spawn minions as right click so that only one hand needed to be on the keyboard. Other than that it was easy as the hero always seemed to get stuck.
You've got a solid start to a game there, but it looks like you tried to be a bit too ambitious. As others have probably said, try making a game you can build in one day, then spend the rest of the time polishing it and tightening up everything to make it a great game. In your case, you definitely could have dropped the lighting effects and weapon system and spent more time on game-play. Also a suggestion would be if you aren't already doing so, take the reusable, generic parts of your game code and package it up into some solid base code so that next time you have some of the heavy lifting done and can be a little more ambitious.
It's a jam entry, so I think pulling art and sound from other sources is permitted, but this is a bit excessive. I would agree that there is a lack of polish and some consistency. I would suggest sticking with a single type of villian (such as those in 8-bit video games) and an art style so that each scene fit together a bit better. It was just a bit to random and confusing as to what the point was.
Oh my am I bad at this game. I made only one point in all 10 attempts at playing and that was accidental. The game is hard to control and the only thing I seemed to be able to do was boost down into the sea.
Unfortunately I am not going to install eclipse either. I suggest for the next competition do the warm-up game, and get down the release process down pat (make sure people can download and run the game without having to download anything else and without an installer). Or take this game and work on it until you can get it to work outside of eclipse as a post competition version just to make sure you are set for the next competition.
It's an interesting idea, but unfortunately pretty frustrating to play. My biggest problem is that the length of time holding the mouse to set a bomb is so different from the actual detonation time of the bomb, making it incredibly difficult to time your attacks in the game. I ended up just guessing at the approximate charge and sending as many bombs as possible just to hit the chip.
Also, the graphics with everything on the screen moving so much at a fairly low frame rate, I started to get a headache. I think the animation needs to be smoother or the patterns toned down a bit.
Surpy, I saw one of the comments above about the "no suitable graphics card" above and noted that you used XNA. If you haven't heard of this error before, it has to do with profiles in XNA; there is a Hi-Def profile (selected by default) that gives you more features but requires a DirectX 11 (I believe) device, and a "Reach" profile that works with DirectX 9 compatible devices. You can make this change to the project by right clicking on the project and selecting properties. Doing so will open the game up to more players.
got it to work by downloading it then opening the swf in Firefox. Nice game with good graphics and sound. The fly recharge is slow (note the exact same comment has been said of my game) and you drop really fast when you fall.
Interesting idea. Could not get past 4 fourth level (I think). I found at least for the first three levels that if you keep your units separated rather than punched up more seemed to get through, which seemed odd compared to other tower defense games.
It took me about 5 or six runs to understand how to play the game then I got it. Only had a score of 136 though. I found a good strategy was to alternate between completely clearing out the ground then completely clearing out the sky.
Given the speed of the player, and the slowness in turning, it was was nearly impossible to actually dodge the rocks or aim for gems. This made the beginning slow (it took about 6 or 7 runs before I got enough gems for the first upgrade. That said, I think this could be improved by going in one of two ways: one, scale the game so that the player can see further down in the level and aim appropriately, or two, change the game into more of a simulation where you don't control the missle directly, but are in charge of upgrading in order to make it to the end.
Given the title, I would have liked to have seen a bit more humor in the game. It wouldn't have to be much, maybe a bit more story, or just some sound effects (like tree-hugger death quips) just to get the mood up.
Could not play; got an error "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\msiexec.exe the service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion" when trying to install. Windows 8 machine. Note that I do have XNA 4.0 installed already, would it be possible to get a non-installer version?
I;m feeling a bit stupid here. The comments above say the game is too easy, but I could not figure out to spawn a zombie, nor could I get the boulder more than halfway up the screen.
The game run's really slow on machine and It's no sloucher. Considering that another developer stated that game ran too fast, I'm guessing that the timing of you game may be based on CPU speed, rather than based on actual time passed. If you are not checking the amount of time past since the last frame was drawn and updating everything based on that time span, this could be the reason for the speed issues.
Also, for some reason I couldn't jump more than about one blocck high, so I really couldn't get far.
Fun. but really hard game. Didn't get too far.
I do agree the controls are a bit difficult to work with, though I will admit I have trouble getting controls to work well myself.
Unfortunately found this game really difficult to play. The monster popped up right from under the ship almost every time and drained my health way too fast. Additionally the controlled were incredibly difficult to use (especially for someone left-handed).
Unfortunately there's something going on with google docs right now, it gets about a tenth through the download and then I get a network error so I can't play. I'll try again later to see if the download works.
Download worked now; I think google was having some issues yesterday as I had problems with other entries on sites.gogle.com.
The dropbox link is bad. I cannot download your game.
The clicking controls made it dofficult after a while on a laptop. I would have liked having dedicated buttons for each column (like using 1 through 4) so that you could be a bit more precise. Especially as the cars start to pile up, it would be good to get precision shots out.
Just a note, you might have missed this from the rules since it's your first time, but for the 48 Compo entries, all assets need to be created completely by you within the 2 day time frame. This means that the photographs of goats you pulled from the internet should not have been used.
Other than that, a pretty solid asteroids clone, although the forward impulse is a bit too fast. I taps up and shot off really fast making it really difficult to then dodge the goats. I would have liked a slower acceleration.
Interesting idea, though the controls a a bit unwieldy. I found myself flailing about with the controls to figure out what I needed to do. As a suggestion, you might be better off making A, S, and D dedicated to one of actions rather that a control mode so that the player doesn't have to remember what mode they are in.
I've got mixed feeling on this one. I understand it's not really a game and accept that it's a story with some game mechanics; but I think I would have liked it more if I could sympathize ore with the antagonist (considering the villain theme). I'm trying to think of something that would help the story a bit; possibly something involving the wife actually at the jail. To be honest, I initially thought that he was trying to kidnap his wife back from a lover, and I also think now that he was doing the kidnapping for the bigger payout to satisfy his wife, but I think these points were a little too vague in the representation.
Innovative and interesting concept. I really like the fact that you have an AI to play the level you set up. One frustrating thing though is that if you are too low when you spawn an enemy it won't appear but you will be deducted the recruitment points.
The game is way too easy. It's possible to just spam the shooting button faster than the opponent to win every time (or at least as far as I got which was 15 rounds). Also a bit an annoyance is that the shot is not fired in the direction you last pushed but in the direction you last moved (as in if you were moving in one direction and tapped the other direction and it only slowed you down, the bullets will still be going in the direction opposite of what you pressed).
Ha ha! I started playing it for some reason thinking that I had to jump from building to building and kept pressing the space when the AI would do the same thinking I was controlling the jumping for three solid games.
Anyway, besides my mental lapse, interesting inverse running game. In the back of my head I see playing excite bike as a kid trying to make the level impossibly hard for my friends.
Wasn't 100% what I was supposed to do. Was it just run forward and crush animals while dodging the superheroes vehicular projectiles?
As with others I had some difficulty understanding what the differences were. In one game I ended up in a large room with nowhere to go, and in another (when I was pressing random keys to see if anything happened) I popped through the level into the black space and got stuck.
However, having a close relative who is dyslexic, I am very impressed by your work, and would suggest that you continue with the game. Just because the time limit is up for the competition, doesn't mean the game should be stopped. Add the features you missed, learn from any issues you had while putting this together, and try again at the next competition, or one of the more related mini LDs.
Haha! This is one of the few entries that made me laugh. I lost the game with because I was short $2. Cool idea, and definitely one of the more innovative games I have played so far. I like to see more variety in what items you can get and the things you could do with them, but some of them were quite funny.
Also, don't put yourself down so much like this. There are other here that have been doing this for a while now, and some that are professional software developers that can make the competition intimidating. You made a very cool game here and certainly one of the most original in design. I hope to see your entry in the next LD.
I cannot for the life of me figure out how to collect the sandwich. I touched it, I stood on the sandwich and pressed every button on the keyboard, but I cannot figure it out.
Really great for a high school team. Great that you could work together and accomplish much in such a short amount of time. As for the whole packaging up of the game, yes you could make an installer that did everything for the user, but most people on Ludum Dare, myself included to prefer just downloading an executable and running without having to install the game (as it's a pain to clean up afterwards). Also, I did also lie the lighting effects quite a bit as well.
Very well polished, but I did have some difficulty figuring out what makes a monster quit, and lost a few monsters for reasons unknown.
Cool work, and good use of theme. Solid, if short game play.
It's unfortunate that the audio is from another source. Other than that, I think the game would also be a lot easier to play if movement wasn't strictly tile based as it made jumps hard. Also, I'm not sure if it was me, but I felt like the control were backwards to what I was used to. I dropped the package almost every time I went to jump.
Interesting idea with the on rails area shooter style, but the enemies seemed to just spawn on top of me, and I just had to click where the player was (wasn't actually sure if I was getting hurt or if I could actually die). Nice start, hope you continue it.
The game is unfortunately unplayable due to slowness.
As stated, the game seriously lacking in difficulty; even staying in the line of sight for the enemies and trying to die took a while.
Definitely a good start. Needs additional level, and then probably after that a good arcing jump to make the gameplay feel smoother.
Really well polished game; lasted 98 seconds.
That's a pretty difficult game; it looks like the only way to beat the hero is to exploit his AI though. It seemed to just end though (I believe I reduced his health down).
Nice comic intro; but the mouse for attack was a little wonky for me. I would have just liked an extra key on the keyboard to attack.
Pretty cool; would have been much more helpful if I could see where my minions were, maybe through numbers or a heat map.
Sorry to hear of your dilemma. Too bad game maker doesn't auto save.
Absolutely fantastic music, but unfortunately but unfortunately the game is quite short and buggy. The biggest issue is the physics; often times I found myself stuck or just floating in mid-air. the space between the second and third platforms is the worst.
IT's a good game. Not my cup of tea, but still a solid well put together game.
Unfortunately could not run. Got an installation error on OpenAL. Are you sure that OpenAL can't be distributed as a linked library in your application rather than needing to actually install the library?
Still having no luck. The addition of OpenAL libraries in the game folder didn't fix the issue, but I did get on another machine (Windows 7 instead of Windows 8) and was able to install OpenAL. I'm not stuck on a Unhandled Exception: System.EntryPointNotFoundException: unable to find entry point named glBindFrameBuffer in DLL opengl32.dll.
Getting the same download issue.
Definitely had the feeling you were intending something more grand. Hope to see you continue your work and post updates on LD.
Pretty cool. For some reason the upgrade menu kept being skipped after the first few waves. I could see it for a split second then it was gone, even if I had not touched anything.
Odd game. The controls are a bit clunky with zoom on the mouse and everything else on the keyboard. Would have been easier to control if everything is on the keyboard.
Played to completion. Interesting simulation for 48 hours work. There weren't that many negative effects in the game, and after about 30 days I was getting money so fast I couldn't spend it. I would have like to see more challenge, but given the time frame for the competition that is understandable. Also noted an odd bug where it said 995 of my pushers defected (I think I only had 2 at the time).
Looks like a good engine start but unfortunately the game didn't materialize; from the first NPC I got the hint that the player is probably the villain (well the theme didn't help with being subtle).
Hehe, I actually got it without reading the comments. Kudos for the subtlity and giving me the, "aha!" moment.
Good start to a game, but attacking felt kind of useless and jumps were super hard to control.
Same deal with me and the bombs then the goat. Once everyone does panic, it gets really hard because the enemies will stand right over you shooting and making it difficult to hit them.
It's a good start to a game. I suggest continuing with the game and add enemies, perhaps multiple ships to control as your armada gets bigger, and planetary defense that you must combat and employ on your invaded planets.
Also, the game does need to work on speed issues with the actions, because everything did feel like it dragged on.
Probably the best name for a game I've seen yet, though not sure I would call mother nature a villain here (no points of that though). Ran into a bit of a bug where the game just kept scrolling left no matter what I did.
Really nice style in the game's graphics. Set a really nice mood.
Very cool concept. Got stuck on the third level (can't figure out how to get him when he jumps high). Also the music was very good.
Oh my is this a hard game. One complaint is that the platform logic is a bit off. More than one the platform would slide out from under me. That especially sucked in Tokyo where the platform goes really fast. Reminded me of Prince of Persia (must have been the floor switches).
It's a little frustrating as most of the targets are swept up by vehicles on the sides which were piling up and making it difficult to get to any of the critters.
Well that made me uncomfortable, and didn't appreciate the "swine" comment at all. Also a little jeering that after I left the game and started typing the review the game popped up with more text.
Huh? I couldn't understand that at all or understand at all what I needed to do. So confused...
Certainly took the alternate theme to heart.
Bit of a disturbing game. Took me a while to realize misses will cause game over. Quite hard since the babies disappear very quickly.
I think you might have missed part of your instructions; it looks like to actual cast your ability (at least the fireball) you need to press space first to activate the spell, then Q to actually cast it. Other than that leveling up was very slow. I killed three slimes any only got 2 experience points total.
As others have echoed, I too cannot run it on a 64-bit windows 7 system.
The games got a great level of polish and style which drew me in, but it gets really repetitive and way too simple. Also the scoring depended on way too much luck (as in what the character would drop) more so that my skill in actually attacking the other characters in thescene, and the whole bank ROI stuff just confused the hell out of (which may have been the intention).
Sweet Game. Just barely eked out a victory. Two small notes to really improve the game, one have some sort of notification when a dungeon is no longer defended, and for a little bit of extra challenge, after the last wave timeout hits the end, let the remaining heroes finish their trek through the level. I probably would have lost if I had to deal with the remaining heroes on the screen.
Pretty cool game, but without an antagonist element the game is just a waiting game. As an odd glitch as well, at one point I clicked the invade city button and the game kinda half reset. All the cities reset to an uninvaded status, the board was filled with my expansion elements, I still had all my money, income, and goons, but everything in the black market and expand menus were back, so I'm not sure what happened.
I'm not sure if you intended it or not but the game crashed right when the dog was taken out to be put down. I laughed so hard. If you did intend it, genius, if not still very funny.
Okay, that was funny, and the art and music style really meshed well with mood of the game, but that demonic abomination of an operation-like mini game is ridiculous! It took me half an hour, using a digitizer pen which should as precise as one can get. Finally with my resolution as low as it could go I got through. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Anyway still a really good game.
Pretty funny; really slow movement though.
Interesting idea. Difficult to aim though (damn tank controls). Also couldn't shoot while going diagonal, but that may be a limitation of the number of keys that can be pressed on a keyboard in a specific region.
It is quite hard; the only thing that helped was that often the soldiers would try shooting through the wall at zombies and ignore me. But as soon as I'm against a soldier I can't get distracted, I'm toast.
Beautifully styled game. Really hard to control on a tablet computer without a proper mouse, but I will not hold that against you at all. I will need to get an external mouse and try it again later. Good show!
Did work no problem for me (Windows 8 64-bit). The controls were really slow, and turning was excruciating (it steered like an actual boat, which in the case of a game might not have been for the best). Nice map though.
I figured that would be the twist when the second time the witch/demon/red guy appeared but did nothing to defend itself.
Very good music and interesting game. The pusher was difficult to trigger, as clicking just off it in the yellow just above or even below triggered the platform above.
Certainly an innovative concept. Unfortunately I had an issue with collision in the garage(?) where I as stuck in the top right corner in the table and couldn't do anything.
Definately has a Ski free vibe to it. As a note, I found it possible to sit at the targets screen and wait for the targets to walk into view and identify them while still seeing my target. You may be better off if you hid the crowd until after the targets list has been closed and the level starts.
Nicely done; one of the few games that really makes you feel like just being a evil person ("You are a Bastard" was another really good one). Very solid and well polished game. I had come difficulty controlling (playing on a touchpad), and would really love dual analog control, but not a big deal for a game made over the weekend.
Really good solid game, quite fun. Is there any difference in the heroes that come to attack. Didn't really notice, but I was wondering if there were any different patterns that that may affect strategy.
That ended suddenly. the game was fun, but the last level up at the purple blocks, I died a few times while attacking the enemies then falling into the spikes below (which I could not see). Making them visible for the jumps may help make the game less frustrating. Not sure what the game had to do with the theme though.
Good atmosphere, and certainly an interesting idea to us color mixing as a mechanic, but it doesn't seem like it went very far. As a note, when jumping from tree to tree, you can't distinguish between the top of the tree and the ground making it difficult to judge how close you are to an edge, and I kept falling through the green trees.
Funny, and certainly minimal, not really a game. I think it would have been more forgiving if there were additional scenarios or branching paths where you had to think a little to get to the minimal level. The idea has some goo potential but the experience ended so quickly.
Interesting idea, but the game-play stagnated too quickly. After about 10 levels or so the same started to fall play. As other stated some variation in the game play would have helped.
One thing I think you can improve on in the game the ramp up time before the cars come together is way to long (unless I missed something).
Beautiful game with an excellent atmosphere, but the game-play is lacking. An obstacle or some progression in the game that makes the players feel like they are accomplishing something would help.
Interesting game and excellent use of sound. I'm unfortunately not too good at this game (found some items, but had difficulty interacting).
It certainly is a minimal entry. I suppose it's a game because you can win it. Would have loved to see you compact the code as well to make that minimal (there was a joke entry I saw earlier for a game that worked similarly that fit in a tweet.
That was needlessly violent, and funny. Attacking didn't seem to work half the time when I jumped which was a little frustrating. Happened most often right at the apex of a jump (when trying to attack the door). As the ground raised up it got a lot easier.
Cute game. Didn't feel too challenging. Your comments seemed to imply that more predators would keep coming, but I didn't get overrun after playing for a while, so I don't know if there was a difficulty ramp up in the game as it progressed or it just went very slowly.
I also could not get past the dialog. The game feels promising, and the story is great, but I couldn't get past it, nor am I sure if there is anything else other than the dialog.
Controls were pretty hard. Cool idea, though; not sure how the spider blocks worked but still found them useful.
The graphics were nice, and while innovative, the game was very difficult to control. The major issue was that you needed to draw a line then wait for the dot to travel along the line to hit the cell. This took too long and made aiming very difficult. In the end I ended up just spamming the buttons in a circle that just hit everything on screen (seems there is no limit to the number of attack lines I can have out at once).
I had the same problems with the game resetting after a short amount of time, it looked like it was happening after going straight for a while, so I'm wondering if it's a matter of moving out of some boundary on the map, or an error in reading the players position. After a while the game did crash completely as well.
This was nice and refreshing entry; very different from pretty much everything else I have played. I waited a while to review this from when I played, as I too didn't think it melded well with the theme and saw your comment asking for details on why reviewers felt that way. After thinking about it for a while I didn't have a good reason; I think its actually because it's the elements around the story that are minimalistic, but actually story takes center stage (pun intended) that many of those elements didn't really cross my mind. Yes the game is played out on a stage, the music is minimalistic, the graphics are too (everything is just a static overlay), and the controls are too as everything is just casting one of 6 hymns. It's the story that makes you not pay attention to those things, and overall I think that is a far better accomplishment than making your game obviously match the theme.
A good start to get your hand in programming; though a shame you didn't go further. You should continue with it (leaving the extreme minimalism behind) and work on making it a game with a proper lose/win condition.
That got frantic rather quickly. I couldn't win a round either, it was fun, but I felt like I lost most of my life because the enemies kept spawning right behind me and attacking. If there was some warning of where they were appearing it would make things a bit more reasonable.
Put a smile on my face playing, and really got into the music. I saw a few people get frustrated at trying to understand the rules of the puzzle and gave it some thought. A simple second puzzle where the detuned computer is obviously broken, and provides negative visual feedback (like sparking) when turned on would help clue the user that not all terminals will be good. I'm still thinking about how one would introduce the computer that fixes the music in a simple fashion.
Quite difficult, also the in game music is pretty jarring, enough that I needed to turn it off. Title music was good though.
@Hayawi I'm seriously considering picking up an Apple developer account and expanding this game out. I've watched a few people play it to understand the design issues (thanks Jellycakes) to see what works and what doesn't.
@captainkraft, I wish I had more time to make levels to ramp up, they get hard quickly.
@cahman, my brother suggested that I actually put in a zooming function to make it possible to see the level as a whole (though too late to get it in). Others suggested a hint system; something subtle.
@Tyro I agree there as well; the game needs a lot more puzzles in between that teaches the user patterns. I got teaching the core elements, but I need to make the initial puzzle smaller to teach techniques. I also need to remove the guessing puzzles like the four buttons in a line puzzle (or a least simplify it so that the player can see the rules).
@Dietrich, I've watched a few people play and the biggest issue is feedback. A user needs to know one way or another that an action has an effect, I'm designing out a few solutions, some subtle, and some more obvious (like a zoomed out camera).
@SonnyBone Wow, really? That means a lot to me!
@StMatn The game did have music. Were you accidentally muted or was there a glitch in the game that I need to address?
That's really my kind of game. I would like to see the difficulty start off higher as it took a long time to ramp up, and also in my first play I got hit with a wall where all five sections were blocked so you might have a glitch in the level generation logic. Second time got to 100 before legitimately dying (jumped up too early).
The theme is a bit weak, and it gets really hard at level 3, but the execution is well done.
Game is buggy for me as well. Windows 7 64-bit. As soon as I move my mouse over the tower (without clicking) the tower explodes and I get a game over.
Really gets to the inner OCD. My final scores were 63, 60, 81, 68, 71 68. In most cases I had to leave on block on the outer area (worth ten) and had all the 1 point spaces covered. I'd love to know what the actual minimum scores are. Did like the game quite a bit.
I found the controls really sluggish as well, which made it difficult to aim and dodge enemies.
Good level of difficulty, dodging the advancing blocks from the top of the level really helped, though in a few cases I didn't know where the exit was before the descent started and it got a bit frantic.
The game starts out good, but got tedious very quickly; with a default slow movement and a weak jump, coupled with the long levels with an instant restart all the way to the beginning, the game got quite frustrating. Consider checkpoints, more stronger jump/run abilities so that the player is not impeded so much in avoiding obstacles.
Simple, fun game, with appropriate graphics. Played a few times, didn't get too high, mostly due to the poor mouse control on the laptop I'm using (but I will by no means hold that against you).
Quite challenging as it should be for a bullet hell; got about two-thirds through the enemies. There was at least one pattern that was impossible to dodge, which is not good for a bullet hell game, and the collision box felt very large (most bullet-hells I've seen usually have a tiny hit box). Despite the music being very basic I did get into it.
Nice easy controls for a typically complicated genre. Two comments: would like to have seen a few harder levels as it wasn't too difficult, and on the last level I got a few shooters lodged in the wall somehow and couldn't get them out. I was able to complete the level without them though.
Felt a bit easy though slow. In most cases, you could just hold the intended direction of the destination and just wait for the colors to rotate. Suggest change up the color order or redesign levels so that you need to follow specific paths to get through the level rather than holding one direction and waiting. Also, that music gets painful pretty quick.
This game starts off quite hard, and controls of space being jump and the use of the mouse made my hand hurt very quickly. As a suggestion, use up as your jump, and put the speed dash on "E" and "Shift" then you should be able to hit all the controls comfortably on one hand for keyboard and one for mouse.
Cute game. I pressed K and saw a subtle change in animation but it didn't have an effect on enemies, did I need to collect something to attack (wasn't obvious).
The puzzles were fun and the plot interesting, but the waiting time between puzzle was a bit annoying. Didn't really get the theme though.
Pretty cool. Not sure if there was an ending or not, but nothing seemed to happen after pressing the button in the labyrinth other than taking me back to the previous location (unless of course I was supposed to go all the way back, if so shame on me).
Music is excellent, but there were some poor color choices that made the bullets very hard to see. Also, it was very hard to dodge, while at the same time it felt like I could absorb a lot of damage so dodging often wasn't necessary.
I had a lot of trouble with the controls; they lagged quite a bit, especially on the pac-man levels, but also on the platforming.
the music and atmosphere are nice, but the controls make it nearly impossible to play. Additionally, while the rewinding process is a cool effect, it takes way too long, and with the amount of obstacles it's also really frustrating.
Okay. I almost rated you low for a simple port solitaire; then I thought, well this may be the persons first game and was learning a tool so I went back and looked at whether or not you had done LD before and saw a bunch of games and realized some thing is not right here. You gave some really subtle clues I missed the first time, and some good misdirection in the comments. Well played sir.
Good start to a point and click adventure. Got stuck after leaving the apartment building, I believe the game crashed as no controls seemed to work. As a note, you may want to reduce the number of controls to just the mouse (perhaps putting arrows on the edge of the screen.
Cool game. Found a bit of a cheat for the last level; if you walk up through the corner of a block you can walk slightly embedded in the blocks from the side. This allows you to walk straight up to Stalin without getting hit by the cannon.
Really fun game, with a great style. The only issue I hit is that when you get larger, there is a chance that your shape will just throw you way in the air and make navigating the rest of the level really hard to complete. Stopping completely seems to lower the chance of this happening, so it may be the speed of spinning your... well whatever you are... at high speeds that's launching you into space.
Interesting idea, but the controls were way too slippery and I ended up sliding off the platforms too often. If you are requiring such exact jumps, don't make the player slide so much.
It's got good humor and graphics, but at least for me was way too minimalistic with the gameplay. I clicked and won the game. I understand that you were just learning the language, and it looks like you did well for only a weeks worth of experience, so I hope your future entries have more gameplay.
Certainly fits the theme. I think I made the game angry by not clicking "Click".
Cool use of different level designs based on drunkenness. Given the length of the game, I'm guessing the new technology, artist availability, and first time in the competition limited the scope.
Cool concept with some interesting puzzle. Quite short though. Would definitely like to see some more levels.
Got up to "pretty good". There is an issue of a lack of feedback. There is nothing really indicating I'm moving, and the enemies pop up too close to dodge. A simple fix of a grid on the ground so you can see movement, and indicators on the edge of the screen that enemies are near in certain directions. Good music though.
Fun with a good difficulty ramp. Probably would have done better if I wasn't so tired.
Simple game. I've seen a few games that work like this before, but usually one of the two that you move is an enemy (like in Link's Awakening). Shame you could not implement detecting the win condition for a level. I got really confused and had to read down to the comments to see what was going on.
Good game, but got repetitive rather quickly. Two immediate issues I saw: first off, the enemies take a large amount of hits to destroy, which means the entire time I spent running away from the bats, and couldn't collect much. Second, the shooting sound is so loud and irritating that I didn't really get to hear the music while playing, which is unfortunate since the music is good.
The game has a nice atmosphere and story, but unfortunately i'm a bit confused by the controls; left clicking seems to move a random soldier each time, and the guns never seem to hit anyone (I only had the first shot in the game work). When I clicked an actual soldier, it moved that soldier in the opposite direction as I wanted, and if I clicked the location I wanted them to go to, they all stood still.
I was quite confused until I saw the extra clue about looking for the dot. Pretty crazy game with lots of style though.
This game is quite hard. The slow tank controls with fast hidden projectiles does make it a bit frustrating. It's definately in the category of die, learn, repeat gameplay, but a bit too much for me. As a specific suggestion, there is at least one place where you cannot outrun the projectiles in the level and dodge in time (at least to my knowledge), and a good twitch game should be able to complete without a single mistake.
I had trouble getting the game to start as well, and did run the server executable. The server showed the text red, but the game just showed "Wait" and never started.
I actually think it starts off a bit too difficult. I like difficult games, but I also like a ramp up on difficulty and the hard controls with a narrow path and the fast moving platform at the beginning was asking a lot for the beginning of the game.
The game has promise but the player shots are really slow and weak, so I would have to absorb a good amount of enemy shots to get enough in to kill an enemy. I did better just dodging enemies and shooting asteroids for points.
Like the concept of the game and it was fun. The music gets a annoying after a while, and there seems to be a small bug when you shrink it shifts the player slightly to the left so I would momentarily stuck in a all some times.
Did have trouble with collision detection and hit invisible walls. As a suggestion, make the collision box for the player only the bottom half of the sprite, then collision and moving around (especially in the smaller sections) feel much more natural.
31000 points. I would like to stress to the people that quit early, keep playing the game. This one got an entire room laughing. I'll agree it's not much of a game, but it is certainly entertaining, and that's what's important. Good show!
It a fun game, but very difficult to tell where I am in relationship to everything.
Good use of sound, but a bit confusing as to why one specific type of building should remain (or what it represents), I am at a loss. I also removed everything I could but nothing happened; is there an end condition?
Best music I've heard in a game so far; reminds me of the music from Final Fantasy Adventure. As for the game, fun, but really hard to control. I only ever managed to hit four enemies in a single game.
Tried playing the game; unfortunately when I run it, I get a flashing grey screen and cannot continue. Running Window 7 64-bit.
Good game, very hard though to aim. The one issue I have is that the game is that when you hut a bubble, your ring and position are hidden, so you don't know when you will appear or where, and in a few rounds with the game, I would appear with a bubble overlapping me and take another hit over and over again.
Fun, with a groovy art style. Made me laugh a lot. Movement had a lot of slide to it which made platforming difficult.
Played a few times, highest was 100 second. Death (waking up) hit me way too often by the color blocks spawning right at my position. Other than that nice entry.
The shape morphing is nice and smooth and looks nice but it's unfortunate that a game did not come of the work.. Hopefully now that you are more familiar with Moai, you'll be able to put it to better use next competition.
It's a cool idea. The AI was a bit too easy though, as I was able to defeat the enemy every time by looking ahead only a turn or two.
Cool game, but quite hard, I ended up loosing nearly all my life when I spawn in a room and a zombie with a gun spawns next to me.
Fits the theme, but the currents do get frustrating especially with the large hit box when you get to the spikes.
Fun game, strange ending.
The music is nice but the game is frustrating. I end up getting a game over jumping over obstacles where it looks like I cleared the obstacle, I can't see it below me, but the game registers as a hit.
Enjoyable game. The hit box felt big, or at least things felt like they hit sooner than I thought they would.
Good game, though super hard to play on a keyboard. The AI was pretty easy to beat (once you got the puck on his side, the AI would usually shoot the puck such that it would bounce right back and hit his own turret).
Simple solid game. I think I need a speed somewhere in between the normal and next higher setting, as the default speed was too slow, but I did portly the next speed up (might be because I am tired though).
Really nice game. I'm only issue is the line size matching is very finicky and I missed a lot that lines that I thought I should have gotten it (it was very close in these cases).
I like the concept and enjoyed playing to the end. I would like to note that it's easy to get a ball stuck in a wall making it easy to win some levels. Also after a while the tones sounded harsh (could need a softer tone, could also be related to the stuck balls triggering the sound very quickly).
Okay, that took a while to figure out. My vocabulary feels woefully inadequate or at least my spelling for this game. Best score is 8.
Not sure what the overall goal is in this game. I kept building a tree but couldn't really tell if I was doing good or bad.
This game oozes style, the sound work is amazing, and while some of the puzzles are really difficult to follow, it helps to add tension to the game and get you worked up in just the right way. The puzzles do get repetitive, and I would suggest variations on each individual one (where for a given scene you didn't have to press action at the same point each time) as it would make player think more before acting.
The game looks great, but my attack spells don't seem to do much, I fired about 20 fireballs at an enemy with no effect. I'm guessing this may have been addressed in the post-competition version, but I haven't looked at it yet (wanted to review before I looked at updates).
Beautifully simple game. Love the graphics and sound. Targeting is super hard, and I unfortunately was defeated many many times. I blew up so many of my own buildings, and more than once saw my projectile pass through the cube which was frustrating.
Cool concept. Reminds me a lot of Closure. A bit difficult, especially with a slow character, but a lot of fun.
I got a crash after selecting default port to host, or rather it just hung. Any ideas?
Cool idea. Quite a bit for a 48 game, I am impressed. As a note, the jumps was very floaty and I would often miss the mark on precision jumps. Also, felt like the jump and shot buttons should be reversed.
Well polished game, and fun. Played with my brother; turns out I'm pretty terrible.
The game is creative, and started off good, but did feel pretty tedious after a while unfortunately.
I had trouble getting to the right item in time to do anything. Couldn't get better than 3000 points.
Got quite confused on how to build the machine. Also found that I could just outrun the enemies which made the game a lot easier.
Good game, really had to think outside the well, box you got there. Funny, and I like clever say progressing through the game. It's also a nice touch that you have slightly different narrations for levels after you die.
Fun! Reminds me a lot of the iOS Hypership out of Control.
the game could definitely use a way to restart if you lose. Other than that, I think there might have been something odd with the collision detection (or me) as several times I was pushed back and didn't see any projectile actually hit me.
Cool concept, feel stupid though. Got the password, but couldn't find the disk.
I really like the non-linearity of the game. I got stuck after a while, and couldn't figure out what to do with "Alex" or get much use out of "kitchen" which is probably where I needed to put together to proceed. Really innovative idea.
Suese, can you tell me specific areas where you fell off? I thought I fixed all the collision bugs.
Lcass, did you get a specific error?
@olafurw Do you have a specific error message or a stack trace? I have tested it on many computers and cannot reproduce the issue, though it sounds like a ton of people are having a problem.
@LordHellMax, the boxes should only be staying in the air when time is stopped, if not, I've got another bug.
The music is fantastic. I would love to hear it with more realistic sounding instruments. As for the game, my only gripe was that it was very hard to tell if there was an enemy coming for you when you weren't right next to a light until it's too late, even if you went slow, making the game very frustrating when I would get far and get attacked in the darkness repeatedly.
Okay, that was just some stupid fun. I'd love to see move of this.
The music was great and the graphics were good, but the gameplay got very repetitive after a few levels, and the spoon tossing at close combat got frustrating. It looks like when you fight a waiter the "tell" he does just before throwing the spoon does not trigger so you can't dodge except to wait for him to throw then pop up and attack blindly for a short period of time.
The graphics are nice, but I hit two issues that made the game a bit frustrating. First, more than once a group of jumping spider would spawn right where I was standing, killing me instantly, and second, the large round creatures will trigger a hit even if we aren't touching. For the second issue I think the issue is that you are using a square bounding box for the enemy, which means in the corners collision will be detected even though the enemy is several pixels off. You can mitigate this will a smaller bounding box or by using distance from center to detect collisions on round enemies.
Nice game, with a good level of fear induced stress with the spacebar not working initially (the first time I needed to relight the flashlight I pressed it, then started rapidly mashing the button hoping for a light. One thing I did notice is that there seems to be something odd with the normals in some areas as the lighting seemed inconsistent with what I would expect from a flashlight. Sometimes one object or wall would me much brighter event if I wasn't pointed directly at it.
P.S. Thanks for your help in debugging my game. I have the issue fixed now so you should be able to run it.
MediaFire pulled the download, can you put it somewhere like dropbox or another site for download?
Has a very Dr. Seuss feel to it. The game play is very repetitive though.
Cool idea, a lot like P.B. Winterbottom. The controls are really floaty making the game difficult to get the character to where I need it to be. It might be easier to control if you limit the maximum horizontal velocity, change the acceleration to be much higher so that you can aim a little better. Also, for some reason I found the first level the hardest.
Felt like VVVVVV or Metal Mech with more of an emphasis on puzzles (which is a good think), as a note on level design though, on I think the fourth level, where you need to unlock the path up, you have spikes that aren't visible until you move up. Since you can't see them until you go up, most people will die the first time through. For a puzzle game, where you have already solved the puzzle this is very frustrating. You would be better off if you did one of the following:
- Remove the spikes,
- Make the spikes visible, or
- Train the player to expect spikes by placing the same blind spike traps early in the level so the player can detect the pattern. If you did that, the player is more likely to blame themselves for failing the level then on the game for the cheap shot.
Absolutely fantastic! As a question, is there more than one ending, as it seems there could have been one more thing I could have done in the last room.
Fun platformer, and I really like how you represented the health of the player. I did find it really difficult to attack enemies without getting hurt if I had to jump to attack and the theme was a bit weak, but otherwise a solid entry.
Nice graphics. I was a little confused when I died, there were no gas bubble on the screen (does life just slowly drain or something?) If so, the game ends automatically far too soon as it was still quite easy. Also, the first time I ran the game I think it crashed while the digesters were eating a knight the same time I was clicking on it. The pause button didn't appear, but everything just stopped and I couldn't get it to resume without refreshing the page.
I like the Vectrex style. Unfortunately got an error after defeating the level three boss:
main.lua:905: attempt to perform arithmetric on global 'num' (a null value)
Traceback
main.lua:905: in function 'activephase'
main.lua:1530: in function 'update'
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
I think I found the people exploding out of other people when spawning to be the most entertaining. The game did eventually crash, but it was just hilarious to see piles of people hugging me.
The music is great, and the art style is nice, but I'm having difficulty understanding what is happening in the game. Some symbols just disappear, the wife/daughter mourns (which does make sense), and you turn into a pulsating cloud when you are over the woman on the top, and even though the sun set you can still move around. I'm not quite getting what the game is trying to tell me.
Oh this is cute a simple platfo... Oh god, the blood... it's everywhere!
Nice graphics, and solid meatboy like gameplay. As a small design note though, the small lava bubbles on ground on level three are not obvious that they are a obstacle and I died a few times before realizing it was an obstacle.
Fun up until "Every loves to push barrels". At that point the collision detection made it very difficult to play s you would be pushing the barrel and it would catch on the large collision box for the small stones. An easy way to fix this is to clamp all movement to the block boundaries (or half block boundaries like in the "Legend of Zelda") which would make it easy for the player to line up a block with the gap he or she needs to push it through.
It's been a long week, so I just got down to playing the game. It's an incredible amount of polish there for three days with fantastic graphics, sound, and control. I really enjoyed the game and glad you put together a dream team.
Two little nitpicky thing to make the game better though; the didn't feel frantic or epic. The waves felt very controlled and relaxing because you knew you had time to deal with the enemies. I think a small touch of having an enemy or two either come from the sides or slide in fast would add some tension by breaking up the pace a bit.
I would have also liked to have seen some much bigger enemies near then end. Everything was scaled pretty small, and a ridiculously large boss or just some physically scaled up enemies with slightly better health and attacks at parts would also help to make the player feel like they are progressing more and accomplishing more.
These are minor items, and most things that would be hard to address in a three day time frame, but they are something to think about if you pursue the game later. In any case, awesome job on making such a polished and fun game.
Very creative use of theme (and educational since I went and looked up leptons and spent a while researching the topic). Ran into a bit of an issue though. About the third or fourth attempt at level two, the textures for the leptons turned into while blocks, then at the end of the game the ending was just a blank white screen.
A good game, but surprisingly frustrating that you can't move backwards diagonally. You can move forwards diagonally, but not back, and that kept tripping me up.
Made it through level 106. It's a super simple game, but fun. Two things to note though. One, you should probably come up with an algorithm to determine the player can actually get to the exit in the given time, as at the last level I was going with max acceleration and speed and was nowhere near the exit by the time the timer ran out, and I was running towards it the entire time.
Second, the music was not written within the 48 hour time period. If you are doing the 48 hour competition, you cannot use music created before hand (this music was from at least May 2013), only publicly available samples for instruments to make music. If you are Eric Skiff, I don the proverbial hat to your composition skills, if not, good choice of music, but you should really change your entry to a jam entry for using music from outside the competition where it is allowed, or remove the music.
The game is fun through.
Interesting use of the theme. Unfortunately, shortly after starting the game, I got hit with a random encounter with three enemies that countered nearly every attack and caused so much damage that I couldn't defeat them after about twelve attempts to no avail, I had to stop.
The first few levels were okay, but by the third or fourth with seven enemies rushing into an a four block section it became incredibly difficult to get an attack before you die. It took me a good 30 tried or so to get that level cleared.
A solid entry, had some difficulty with a few later levels where the platforms were really small and it took longer than ten second to complete. Basically, I needed the light for pretty much the whole level but could not complete it in time, so it took a while to memorize some of the jumps.
Props for the nixies tubes. The game feels solid and really smooth except for the slow jump, which I'm guessing is either from a slow pre-jump animation or that jumps only trigger on some sort of time boundary.
Made it to Level 28 with 129 points. It took me a while to figure out the logic, but good puzzles. It looks like the level generation was random, and there was one level where it was impossible to get one of the chests (the mountains only left a one block high gap and you needed two to get through) so keep that in mind when building any future random level generators.
Very fun; my brother just keeps beating me. I will be bringing this game up again and again in the future until I actually beat him.
Hey, sonnybone! I just jumped in to check out your entry and I'm getting a 404 error to your website. Can you check your link? I'll check back tomorrow morning.
Okay that got some great style. It's about as far from the #nokill sub-theme as one could go, but I didn't do anything with that either. The comments at the end were hilarious, and made me go back a few times go get some more of a macabre humor.
I like the style; it really sets a good mood. The game felt a bit laggy. I wasn't sure if that was on purpose or not, but I was surprised given my computer is no slouch.
@Tym0r and @Kep, I'll take a look at he knock-back logic.
@Senevri, did you get a specific error? What locality is your machine in case that's the issue (I've had those problems before).
@SonnyBone, thanks for the really detailed feedback! The bug with the doorways is interesting. The way it works is it calculates each frame if there are any enemies in the list or room actors and swaps state as appropriate. The first thing that came to mind is that you glitched an enemy through the wall so that you couldn't kill him. If that's the case I think I got that fixed, but if not, I may have more to look in to.
@ehtd I will admit that I did look at the sprites from Lolo and a dozen other games for inspiration and some animation guides.
@kirbytails7, thanks for the information. The song was an MP3 file, so there may be a codec issue. I switched back to just a plain wav file (it's still a small download).
@Darkcoder That issue is because of how I handled objects that reset and objects that have a permanent state in the game. I unload sprites for temporary objects when you leave the room, but also before the camera pan is performed. I can probably fix it in 10 minutes or so by attaching to the camera move complete event instead of at the initial loading of the room, but it's not a game crasher so it would not be in the spirit of LD to make that kind of change after the deadline.
@TeddyNashor I used Famitracker to make the music. It replicates the NES sound chip which is about as complex of a music composition as I can get my head around.
Awesome game with very soothing atmosphere, but quite hard for me, my bother is much better. Really loved it.
I'm still getting a 404 error trying to download the game.
Cool game, with really nice background details and actually having the robot subtly change! Did find a bug with the double jump that at one point made be jump more than two times, then later made me jump a huge amount and out of the level bounds.
Also a note, the game does work on a mac; I used chrome and the unity web player and had no issues.
Really nice fast paced action, really tight controls as well which is uncommon in games made in 48 hours. I really enjoyed it.
Really nice technical game, fun, but really, really, hard. It's too easy to fall of the edge of the map when pushing the minions, when you leave them alone as they meander off on their own, and when they attack the enemies as they will latch on and push everyone over the edge. I think making it so you can't fall off, or at least make the minions smart enough to not walk off the edge would make the game a lot more fun.
Nice and heartwarming especially considering the number of you get one bullet style games. Good solid puzzles. The player's movement was a bit floaty, and as a recommendation you probably could have consolidated all the different actions to one button since you could only do one at a time, but other than that really cool.
I'm impressed with this. It's a cool defense game, and unlike anything I've seen before. The graphics and music go very will together, and the side comments from the worm and egg add a lot of character to the game.
That is some catchy music, and I like the retro homage to not only Zelda but other games as well.
The power-ups were pretty cool and overall gameplay is solid, but it did unfortunately become a bit stagnant after a while. Also, I don't know if this was on purpose, but the game experienced some serious slowdown when the "deadly gyration" or whatever the power-ups name is, was activated, and I was using a pretty beefy machine.
Very funny game. Me brother really enjoyed smacking me around. Oh and also we slapped each in the game too.
Cool, simple pac-man like game. I especially love the music, it's some of the best music I heard in an LD game done solo. The only gripe I have is that once the level is full of fire it gets very difficult get the last few acorns and I usually get pinned in with the dogcs in the few remaining spaces.
I was playing on a Windows VM in mac, the game started in the lower right corner, If I drag the game into view all the graphics move off screen and I can't see anything to play. I will try on a normal windows machine later and see if I can get it to work.
Cool story mechanic and tie in with the music makes it a really nice experience.
I'm a little conflicted here. I'm not sure if you were making a satirical jab at linear games and the fallacy of choice, or a legitimate game that forces you to make permanent permanent decisions. The stem of the confusion is that it is possible to get all the coins and get to all the rooms (unless there is something hidden I missed). I would have thought there would have been some sort of trade-off where it would not be possible to get everything.
Toning the metaphor analysis down though you have a solid game engine and a nice art style so props for your first LD entry.
The game was fun, felt a lot like Galcon; the atmospheric sounds were a nice touch to it. The game really felt like a race to con conquer the big squares first and get a unit advantage. The upgrades or other planned additions would have added the variety that this game needed. Despite that it was very cool.
The graphics and sound are definitely about average for an LD game, but the game-play is very awkward. Attacking is possible, but ineffective as the enemies will hit you in the process. To fix that you could either have knocked the enemies back (so that they would not hit the player on a successful attack) or make the player's attack longer range with feedback showing the attack (as it was difficult to tell if I was even attacking).
Really hard game, took me a while to get through a single maze. I think may make sense to only put a subset of the enemies into any given round instead of all at once. Congratulations on your first jam entry, glad you could complete the game!
I really dig the art style and the tone of the game greatly. Great job!
It's a cool inverted wack-a-mole game. Nice simple, but quite fun.
So much fun! Especially with two people playing simultaneously (seriously get another person to shoot for you). I'm also really happy to have check points.
Had some difficulty it the contrast int the game, to the point that it started to hurt concentrating; though that could just be from a lack of sleep. I also had a hard time figuring out what did the poor pig in. I didn't see anything around me and then the game would end. Some audio cues would make the game a lot easier to play so that you at least know if there was something coming from behind.
Also as a note, I saw you mentioned that you used a royalty free soundtrack. In the 48 hour competition you need to make your own music, you can use samples and instruments from other locations, but the actual composition needs to be yours. It was an honest first time mistake so no big deal, but keep that in mind if you compete again. That said, congratulations on completing your first game.
That's a great funny game! Not rating audio because of the source, but everything else is great! It's funny, innovative, and hilarious! The best score I got was a 29, but I think there is a bug. I got 11 points for stewing a strawberry. Not a big issue through.
I like the idea, but the controls were really difficult for me (might be because I am left-handed and was a poor aim with the right hand on the mouse). Letting me jump with W would have made the controls a bit easier as well, but that might just be my personal preference.
I really like the idea of the random disabilites, but I had a lot of issues with the controls and and visual feedback. For me none of the weapons showed on the screen so half the time I went to attack an enemy I would get hit myself. As a result, I could only get a few rooms in unfortunately.
Beautiful artwork, really cool game; controls are a little difficult; will try with gamepad later.
A beautiful example of doing something very simple, but poring on the polish to make it a great experience. Got it in 4 tries. Good job!
Very catchy music. The premise of the game is certainly the strangest I've seen so far. Despite that, it is a serviceable platformer. The complete restart from the beginning of the game was a bit annoying considering the precision of the jumps needed, but I suppose that is the theme's fault.
I almost got it. Missed only the E after 4 attempts. The game is quite innovated, but I had difficulty playing for two reasons. First, the "1" you play as is not lined up with the other characters on the screen (vertically it's right between two rows) so it makes it quite difficult to figure out which row I'm interacting with, and second, the player moves really fast making it difficult to get lined up with a particular row/column when navigating the maze.
Hilarious game! I ended up with about $54 dollars before the bathroom took me. I'll have to try again later to see if I can make it to $100.
Reminds me a lot of something like paperboy. The puns are great!
Nice use of theme. I found it very difficult to dodge as the red blocks move very fast and you can spawn on the side of the board where there is no way to dodge. I would also suggest a faster restart for the game by pressing "R" or space to take you right back into the game rather than the two buttons.
Really cool. Certainly the most innovative game I played, and probably the longest game I played. I thought with the first level the game would be easy, but then I played the other levels, and the challenge went up to the right level. I very good puzzle game, I'm glad I got to play it.
Haha! Looks like a modern interpretation of Super Press Space Bar to Win (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/495903). A cool, funny non-game, that entertains. I could put more in the review, but I think this review (of SPStW) would sum it up nicely: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2Z23SAFVA&noredirect=1
P.S.
The last achievement you get is pure gold.
I had to bail on the game at level 4. The single block platforming is just too hard. But despite that, this is the first game where I've played where the theme was strong. Most things I've played needed an explanation in the comments or something along those lines to understand how the game relates to the theme.
This is fantastic! I can honestly say I have never played or seen a game that works like this. I think you have a good contender for a winner in this competition.
The game certainly made me feel uneasy. If that's a reflection of your own life, I hope things work out.
Reminds me a lot of mighty flip champs except that you have more freedom to switch between any plane instead of having a set order. Also a nice story to go with it; I found myself narrating it in a poor english accent a la Thomas Was Alone. Cool puzzle game, though some of the levels with tiny platforms mid-shifting was really frustrating.
Well designed levels; it got very hard, but was very rewarding to complete a level. I didn't finish, but will come back later.
Even though it's broken with the slippery food, it's still fun. Hope you can figure out the issue.
Super cool idea. I was a bit sad that it was over so quickly (unfortunately I found that it was easy to see the item to interact with as it was usually the one thing not moving). Would have like to have seen additional layers to remove on each scene so that the transitions weren't so fast, but despite that I am super impressed with the entry. It's really cool as an interactive art, and certainly one of the more unique entries I've seen period.
Pretty fun game and nice puzzle, I feel bad that you didn't get to put in everything you wanted, but what you do have is polished.
I also had no issues, and when I profiled it the game only used about 200~300MB so you should be okay in most cases. Enjoyed the game but the controls are difficult, though I was never good at tank style controls. I though perhaps of having the level rotate around you instead of turning, but bounces might be too disorienting. In any case fun game, though I'm that good (only about 300 points in my best run).
Really cool game. Feels almost like an inverted pipe dream game. There was as lot of good strategy in the game, though there were a few levels where spawning aliens could complete it, most required a lot of thought and careful bating of girls to get them in the right position. Also very funny, though the highly public toilets is a little disturbing.
Really great puzzle game; I had to stop and think though a few of the levels because they looked easy but were not once I got started. Also, the audio was good and very appropriate to the game (the music reminded me of old sound blaster 16 midi music).
Nice simple strategy, almost puzzle game. Would like to see a ranking system in the game though as the first time I played it I fell asleep and still won (it was last night after the end of the competition), but I didn't know if I actually did well.
Very nice complete game with well fitting music. The game is nice with smooth simple controls. It might be short, but it is complete with an actual ending which is often rare in this competition.
Hey Sonnybone! Super moody, and excellent music as always (I'm getting jealous about that talent as I still have no clue there). The game definitely reminds me of the game passage (you should take a look at it if you never saw it). Would like to see more to this story especially little glimpses into the others that went down.
I tried but I am no good at this game. I haven't been able to get past the first enemy. I guess my biggest problem is that with a rhythm game that doesn't match the music makes it difficult to time the hits. As the patterns that came down got more complex I ended up hitting the buttons too early and took a hit. The aesthetics are pretty trippy though with the pseudo ascii art.
@Therrato, that's not actually a bug, the upgrades were specifically coded to refill. I suppose I should have made the fuel and live upgrades more expensive to compensate (or make the refills cheaper).
@caranha, I'm going to try and port the game to monogame and see what I can do. I don't have a linux machine, but I do have a mac and parallels, so I can see if I can port that way.
@tuxxilla there are a few really addictive games. I spent about 2 and a half hours on http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=5839 to get through all the puzzles.
@SonnyBone That is extremely flattering, I will make one admission through, my father named the game after it was described to him. Everything else was mine, but he came up with the name of the game (and to be honest the names of nearly every other game I submitted for LD except for Fractured).
@kirbytails7, One of my friends found the same issue a an hour or two ago, in the bottom center area of the game (near one of the golden chests). It's a bug in the map where part of the brown dirt is not marked as drillable so you switch back to platform mode if you get to low, and there is no platform data there. I fixed the bug and uploaded a new version as it is a game breaking issue.
Also if people are interesting in how the map data is put together, download the source and open map.tmx in tiled (http://www.mapeditor.org/). You can edit the whole level in that program.
Haha, the sound effects are hilarious , and really nice to see someone not just use SFXR (like I and almost everyone else did). The game is really cool, but I found one bug in the game that initially made it very frustrating. While you can use both WASD and the arrow keys to control, the up arrow key doesn't work the same a W. Once you land once the up arrow will let you take off but not let you go any higher than a few pixels from the surface, which made it super difficult to attack without getting hit. Once I switched to WASD, it was a lot easier to control.
The music and animation was fantastic, but the pace of the game was very slow, and it honestly felt like you had something much larger in mind for this game but didn't have the time to actually get that vision into the game. Unfortunately a good way through the game I fell off the edge of the level and was stuck at the bottom of the level map with nowhere to go and couldn't complete the game.
Very impressive that you implemented an RPG like game in three days. The battle system was interesting, though a few of the abilities seemed kind of useless if you did the math versus normal attacks. I would have liked to have seen a little more variety in the actual levels, as until the last room, there were no branching paths, but that might be a lot of ask for a 72 hour game build.
One thing that did cause a lot of problems was the grammatical issues in the dialog. If you didn't do this before, you probably should have written up the dialog in a word processor that can do spelling an grammar checks. Fixing typos looks to be allowed in the after time corrections (check the rules yourself to be sure), so you may be able to do this cleanup now.
unfortunately I received a fatal error while playing when I clicked on some shattered glass on the first floor. See below:
___________________________________________
############################################################################################
FATAL ERROR in
action number 1
of Mouse Event for Left Button
for object O_Glass:
Push :: Execution Error - Variable Get -1.Able(100008, -1)
at gml_Object_O_Glass_Mouse_0
############################################################################################
Tried again, this time no bugs to be found. I got further, but got stuck when I got the lighter and freed the robot. I think I see the progression to get to the basement, but I can neither fill the cup nor open the right door, and I've run out of ideas. Despite that this is a great game with a lot of character. I'll probably try again later when I have a fresh perspective.
Okay, played the game again. That's not such a happy and cheerful game anymore. I think I understand the theme a lot more in this game; it's the game itself that has a lot more beneath the surface. Haven't found all the secrets yet (got three so far), but the game is very much different if you start to look for them. I'll give it one more go a little later once I play some others.
This is certainly the most well polished game so far music is good, graphics mesh well, and the control is very smooth. About the only thing I would like different is a little more vertical visibility, since the enemies come from above and I got hit many times because I couldn't see what was coming until too late.
I liked the different weapons that came with each wave and that you switched between being attached and attacking to heal (reminded me of Rampart for some reason). My only gripe was the machine gun attack, there was no pattern so it was very hard to dodge bullet and only once did I get through the line of fire without getting hit. My final score was 73.
Clever! Liked subtle clue, but I won't say more ;-)
Pretty cool game. After a few runs I found that I could actually cheat to the top by drilling a small vertical shaft that the enemies couldn't get to and zig-zag my way up to the surface.
That was pretty dark. I think the weirder part was as I went though the game rooting for the person escaping, only to be hit with what he did. Having lived with neighbors with similar problems, all I could says was... that was interesting.
After four plays the best I got down to was midway through the mantle (5000 left to go?). The music and graphics are great, especially with the changing scenery as you plummit further and further towards the center of the earth.
I have two thoughs on improving the gameplay. First I think there is a bug in firing the weapon, sometimes a shot will make it to the bottom of the screen, and other times the bullet will just disappear part way though the shot. This forced me to just rapid fire in the hopes one of the bullets would hit something. Second it seems the further down you go the harder it is to move around. By the time I got to the mantle, I couldn't steer at all so if something was near me, I was going to hit it. This second bit got very frustrating as I did want to see what happened at the end. I may come back to this after viewing a few other games.
First off, excellent game; it felt a lot like a boardgame mix between Simcity and Neuroshima Hex (which is an awesome board game if you've never heard of it). I really liked the placement strategy and the balance between economy and population. My final score was 156, though I'm wondering if there is a population cap at 150.
Given your comments below, it soundly like you are open to some criticisms. Note as I said, I loved the game, and these comments are me really wanting to see it polished into something great.
The plot felt a bit off as you progressed. Many of the tiles didn't fit the mood of the setup of the game you put together, and a few name changes would have made the game feel a little more cohesive.
Second, when placing a tile, you would see the net benefit of playing it, but the numbers that resulted after placing the didn't match the changes you displayed. I'm wondering that is because the +/- values shown only covered the effect of that tile, and not the changed in other tiles affected by that placement. If this is the case, it would make sense to either show the overall effect of placing that tile, or make if very easy to see exactly what the effect of each tile is when placing so that you better evaluate your moves. I had many times where I would go to place a tile to get +3 fame, and after placing it, my fame would actually go down.
Third, the music is excellent and the graphics are appropriate for the kind of game you are building, but the projector effect is a bit too strong and distracting in the actual gameplay.
Fourth, you stated that there is a random number of turns, but you also encouraged people to aim for a high score. These seem at cross purposes. If high score is a goal, make the turns fixed, and call attention to the number of turns left. This will help people to put together a better strategy, and determine the best time to switch from an emphasis on economy to be able to get the bigger tiles to a population emphasis.
Finally, I believe I found a bug in the game when you restart either by completing a game or returning back to the main menu mid game (I will admin, in one play through I didn't like the starting tiles and restarted). The bug is that if you restart, you can't select any tiles to actually buy and are stuck at the first turn. You have to refresh the page altogether to play again.
Oh and another thing, if you could figure out how to make this into a multi-player competitive game, either as a board game or video game, you would have a buyer. This is the kind of stuff my friends and I would eat up.
Very impressive from both a graphics and audio standpoint especially for the timeframe; but I will be honest, I didn't get into the gameplay. I think part of the problem is that the ogre moves so slow while the torch moves so fast, it was very hard to judge how far you move from torch to torch. The jump was very hard, and if I failed at it, I would have to take a long time to get back to that point because of how slow the ogre was.
Took me a while to figure out you had to hold the mining button down (I kept tapping it and wondering why nothing happened). Would have liked to see some other level designs, or something where the levels layout added some more strategy to the game; however, as nice solid first entry complete with sound and nice fluid control.
I got to the third level, but couldn't figure out what to do next. The only thing I found I could make are Na2O and CaO but the game did not like that. Also, had a problem with the audio where each level would play a new song, but didn't stop the song from the previous level so you would here several songs playing at once.
Wha... what did I just play? I give you props for taking the joke theme a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y s-e-r-i-o-u-s. The artwork is funny, and very much disturbing. I'm just happy i can type really fast.
Really nice simulation with good depth (no pun intended). I was confused about the eating part until I read the comments as well. You may want to add some additional instructions to the description above as a good number of people do read it and will benefit from it. Very nice initial LD entry, congrats.
I took a look at your enter. I agree, our games are similar in concept, through you went much more for resource management and an deep upgrade system while have a super simple upgrade system and a heavy focus on action and speed. Pretty cool idea, though as I got down to the level where I needed uranium for upgrades, it started to get tedious as I had to dive for 20 seconds to get the actual resources I wanted, and would only get a few uranium each dive.
Saw your note on my game. Let me know when you change the game to make uranium better and I'll test the game balance.
You've got a nice atmosphere and some solid controls. Pity you only had time for a small tech demo.
Got my brother to play with me. He didn't like it, though it may be in part because I won every time in which I didn't accidentally jump into a pit. I really do like the strategy of pushing people into a pit rather than just trying to shoot them (though enough shots will also kill them as well). Once suggestion would be to have a faster restart after each round. It may seem minor but having to move your hands off the controls for the game to restart the game especially since rounds are so small disrupts the play quite a bit.
That was certainly interesting. Very good story driven experience, taking a touchy subject and representing it well without putting in any really base humor. While it might not be much of a game, it certainly is entertaining.
Had a problem getting Chrome to give control the Unity web player, but got it working in internet explorer (not 100% sure what happened there as I played other unity games today in Chrome). Anyway the game is interesting, especially on how you fix each problem (usually games like this are just a matter of going to a station without interacting to fix it, so good job there). Unfortunately there was no difficulty scaling, so after a while it got really repetitive.
MY high score is a miserable 19. It's a cool idea, but I was frustrated that there were too many times where I couldn't see either end of an obstacle and ended up with an impossible to dodge situation.
Pretty cool game, but hit a few bugs that made it difficult to play. First was that the enemies often times respawn immediately, i.e. if you kill something it immediately appears just above and attacks you before you have a chance to do anything. Second sometimes the enemies seem to be able to fly very fast and overrun you. Finally as I entered the third area I was immediately transported to the demon who pushed me quickly to a corner and pinned me there.
Despite this though you have made a cool game with a fairly and did get enough time to put in plot and a lot of nice touches.
Very nicely done. It's very rare to hear voice acting in an LD game, and that was especially well done. I will admit I'm fairly bad at FPS games so I was overrun by robots several times and couldn't get to far.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing here. I fought a lot of balls and died. I eventually found another door when through it and fell of the edge of the world. Was there and actual way to find what is creating the balls or was that just some flavor text.
Despite that, good job making a 3D game. Even a basic 3D game is difficult to make, and I know almost nothing about 3D development so that's awesome.
Nice simple shooter. Found a bit of an exploit in the game though. All the enemies funnel down to the center of the screen as they progress, that means you can move near the top of the screen to avoid them. Specifically, I could line up the top fin of the ship with the bottom of the score text and continually fire. I would hit enemies, but would never get hit. I was able to do this for about 10 minutes slowly getting points.
Fantastic graphics; kinda wish there was also sound, but oh well. The cam is basic but well done, my only complaint really is that the bounding box on the fingers seems a bit large; I died a few times when I was near a finger but didn't actually touch it.
The engine looks pretty well made, but I got confused really quickly. I couldn't get past the snow and nothing in my inventory seemed to help. Also, when I tried mining and hit or, it said I needed a drill. I though I had one, but couldn't figure out how to use it.
It took about 2 hours, but I got through all 32 levels. Really good challenge and had a lot of fun playing. Found two things in the game that I think are bugs though. first I got the impression that you are supposed to save the babies, however you can still complete a level even if you kill them so long as the babies die before the lava flows out the volcano. Second, and more serious, you can let the lava leak out to the surface through a non-volcano hole and still win the level so long as you hide in water while the lava flows. It looks like you are checking to make sure 'Nic didn't touch lava and not did the lava rise above the surface level. Despite that I avoided the exploits and had a blast playing through the game.
Got a score of 97 by surrounding myself with the dots. I was a little confused by the controls (not the controls themselves, but more specifically what the weapons were doing). I had a cannon and a katana, but all that seemed to happen was I would drop little dots that acted like land mines.
Now that said, you did get a working game made, which is an awesome achievement, and perhaps just some terminology changes in the game would have made this make a bit more sense (which you did kinda address in the description). It's also really cool that you put the whole thing together from scratch rather than use an engine or a lot of prebuilt stuff.
This is the first time I've seen touchscreen windows compatible game in the LD. I have to give props just for that if nothing else. It is a nice solid Qix game, with more time to think about your moves without a time limit of the line runners that sped up arcade versions I'e played before.
Look me a while to see the energy up in the top left corner; those are really small dots. After seeing that things were much smoother. Additionally it took a while to produce more energy which in and of itself isn't bad, but the game didn't really indicate what was happening. The game is cool and quite unique, but it would e much better with some more direct feedback to the user (something as simple as a progress bar to show energy conversion would help a lot).
Really tiny game window, made it super hard to play without changing my game resolution; however, once that was done, it was pretty cool. I am impressed that it was done in two hours.
That was random. Not sure what it has to do with the theme, but your animations are nice and smooth and the game controls well which is a plus. After a few tries I found you could bounce on the enemies heads, but after a while I just dies midair. Is bouncing slowing taking down health or something?
This game is way too hard. I'm guessing you are going for flappy bird-like game, but this is still way too frustrating.
After a while The game does crash. It's at random times some I'm guessing it's probably a memory leak or premature deallocation issue. Specific error is 0x71002a95 referenced memory at 0x00000000. Memory could not be read.
Did you upload the smaller version? Both links are still over 200MB and marked as malicious.
Final score was a poor 295. I got suck in the wall half way though, but still managed to win.
The music is definitively the strong point here. Not only was it a good song, it also matched will with both the theme of the game (the bells for holiday) and the strong base line for the tempo of the game.
The thing I didn't like was the controls. It looks like your implementation was relying on key down to move the player, so if you held down the keyboard button there was a delay until the auto key repeat kicked in. Next time I would suggest seeing if you can poll the keyboard to see if a key is down and not just pressed as it will make movement smoother.
Additionally, I see to making a note that you weren't able to stomp the bug that gets the player stuck in the wall before the deadline. You are allowed to correct game breaking bugs after the competition ends, and I would encourage you to do so.
@interface; You are correct. The game requires the XNA redistributable. The download is available as a link next to the "Windows" and "Source" links.
@justinooncx, watch the shadows on the ground, you can be crushed by the level above if you are not standing in a hole. I updated the game description to make this a little more obvious Additionally, not all levels checkpoint your progress so you might get sent back a level or two if die.
@superpokeunicorn I found a computer that also exhibits this issue and will fix shortly.
@superpokeunicorn The issue was with high DPI screens. It should be fixed now.
@JayCee23, fixed the bugged level at the end (it wasn't registering any pillars in the level for some reason)
@5you The trick with the firing squad is to start running as soon they fire. The shots will blow up the pillars. Pause for a split second (just enough for the shot to pass you) at the rock on the right then run back to the hole before the next level drops on you.
@Budi. Second line of the description, but I stated it in a coy and probably unhelpful way. I'll update the description to be more useful.
@egos it's definitely a case of not exploring the mechanic better. I made the mistake of spending too much time build mechanics into the game and less time designing puzzles (all the levels were designed in about four hours). I had some ideas about levels wit unlit bombs that you need to create chain reactions to be in the right place at the right time to not get squished, but I ran out of time and the game definitely suffered for it.
The graphics and sound are fantastic (if you wrote that music in the time frame and recorded it, amazing!). The game is very simple though. My best score was 11 (lowest score is best right?). I really love the cutout doodle style and if you had more time to develop the game play it would be fantastic.
This was surprisingly run, and quite hard. The best I did after 5 or so tries was three circles. The best strategy I found was to look for the object that left an unbroken streak when rotating the pieces as the circles had no border. My only issue is that in nearly each search you would have a few items bunched up near the same quarter of the view. Almost all of the shapes bunched tight together in a small section of the screen a few larger one off to one side, and then a large empty section. If the circle was in the tight bunch of shapes, it was nearly impossible to see.
Neat idea, a little clunky though. Couldn't figure out how to replenish energy (though burning crystals would work, but that just did heat for me), so the game ended quickly unfortunately. Good use of theme, and I like that you had the courage to do voice overs (not a lot of people would do it).
Nice work making a solid multi-player game, and great use of theme. I have the pleasure of getting a four player game going when I tried it out, so that was a great chance to play it properly. My only complaint was that with one hand on the mouse and the other on the WASD keys, it was hard to jump because the space was so far from the other keys. Making "W" jump would have solved this. As it stands, most players when I played just went to the bottom of the screen or stood in place and shot as much as possible from where they spawned.
Fun game with a cool exploration mechanic and good audio as well. You stated that there were four bosses; however, after defeating the first, the game would not let me progress much further. I would also like to state that the game is very generous with power-ups, so I ended up with 8 helpers by the end which did make most enemies very easy.
The game's graphics and music are really great. The main theme sounds a lot like the Sirius Cybernetics customer support anthem (from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio drama, and whoa is that an obscure reference). The have one major issue with the game. The enemies spawn very slowly. I would kill a monster and then wait for ten to fifteen seconds sometimes doing nothing what-so-ever. Some increased difficulty would be great.
Also for as nice and happy as the game is, that description above is a little disturbing.
A good start to a game. It was a little confusing with the tumbleweed like object. I'm not sure what they did, and I'm guessing they were a feature you started to write but ran out of time to do. My other suggestion would be to add some sort of scoring system. I didn't see anywhere an indicator of how many pieces of ore I shot down or how long I survived. For games that are "play until you die," either of these would be a good indicator of how well you played and would spur additional plays.
Very nice simple game. Completed it o my second time (didn't realize until too late that you needed to ration the water and soil to survive the last two days). The graphics and controls are very nice as well. Controls are very easy to mess up, so it was good to see the first game I rate get this done right.
The only real critical items I have to say are
1. As you stated, no sound, and
2. It was difficult to tell if my attack hit the enemies that take more than one hit or if I was being effective. The first time I played I thought I was attacking a large bug, but it was actually outside the attack box even though I thought it was hitting. A flash, or a little "-1" poppoing up over the head of the enemy (or an audio) queue would have made this a bit more obvious.
Could not figure out how to complete the introduction. After knocking on the door and hearing you sing (nice by the way), I couldn't figure out how to continue. Good thing you put in the skip intro button.
As for the game proper, the biggest positive was the sound. Music is hard to do but you got it. The first few times defeating the boss were pretty easy; wait for the snowman to start casting as spell and then spam the hand weapon. Having a non-interrupting weapon was actually easy as you could get a bunch of hits out. I had some difficulty figuring out how to aim the weapon, but then just decided to attack from the direction it would show.
After a while it got harder to just use that same strategy, though it mostly worked. I believe I defeated the boss 5 times before dying.
This is quite fun. Something nice and simple, controls are good, and while simple, it focused well on game play which overlooked to often. Also I like the subtle facial expressions and little details in the game. It's got a lot of personality and commend you for that.
Pretty cool idea, and the music/sound is really good. I'm under the impression you intended on having more steps, since it ended pretty quickly (I'm guessing you ran out of development time), and you had a lot beautiful rooms designed out that you didn't get to use.
I also hit the bug where items duplicated as I used them on areas of the screen (I think the issue is that if you drag an item it still thinks there is a copy in inventory), but I was able to complete the game so no harm.
I really liked the concept, and reminds me a bit of the classic the incredible machine for some reason. The only issue I have with the game is the way you switch blocks. Trying to hit the tiny check boxes, especially with a track pad is really frustrating. I spent most of the game pausing the level so I could switch the block direction then unpausing to place them. One two things could be done:
- make changing blocks keys on the keyboard so it can be done fast
- place the blocks before you start the level and then watch the level and adjust as needed
Simply stunning artwork especially for the time limit. I only ran through the game once but I'm guessing the ending note changes based on what you pick (kind of like a perverse personality test). If I get time I may run through again.
The only think I had issue with is the controls. At least on my machine, the game would auto-scroll based on where the mouse was, rather than scroll as you moved the mouse. As a result you couldn't stop the scene, and the game actually started to make me feel motion sick as a result (which is surprising for what is a static image).
Wow, some harsh criticism. This game is hard, very hard, but that's not a usually a problem. It's that when you fail, the game is completely throws you back to the beginning with no sense of progression. You get 90% through and die, all progress is stripped away. So there's a few ways to fix this up:
- The obvious answer, one that has been mentioned before is checkpoints. I'm going to guess you don't want that one.
- Make the levels smaller and ramp up by making each a distinct race. Looking at the level, you've got probably 7 or 8 distinct levels in the game design, but because of the theme they are mashed together. Make each one a separate accomplishment so the player gets that punch of endorphins for completing a section and getting one more star over their competitions.
- Make this game much more deviously competitive. I noticed that you can push people into walls to destroy them. Build on that instead. Make the game about sabotaging each other and the level it's a little easier.
- Add some pacing. I noticed you can't stop in the game, but actual racing has a surprising amount stopping and slow time. Let your players stop for a moment to think about the challenge they are facing. This will let the other players catch up and keep the game hectic on the players terms, not the games.
You should watch this "Extra Credits - Difficult Games vs Punishing Games" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs, it's give you some other ideas on how to make a game hard (which I really like) but not punishing.
Very nice graphics and a nice simple solid game (High score after 5 plays was 98). The only issue I have is that the file size is huge for what the game is, 150 MB uncompressed. My guess is that there is a lot of default items placed in the application (I noticed a tutorial folder and an issue tracker among other things). It you continue to use UE4 for future entries, take a look at publishing settings and see if you can turn all these extra items off as it would help a lot.
I nice solid foundation. Even when there are a ton of objects on the screen the game runs smooth and the enemies don't overlay, which means you are doing some good efficient collision detection which is pretty hard to implement.
My biggest difficulty was the shop. There is a lot of information on the guns making it difficult to read and compare when you can't pause and have zombies chasing you. You would probably have been better showing three upgrades to the current gun like "+2 magazine size" or ".3 second faster reload", something that would fit on the button. A player could look quick and see his options in a split second, and even if he selected the wrong power up from what he wanted, he knew it would still be better.
It's really cool to see someone put together a SimTower like game in 72 Hours. The controls were a bit clunky (only a handful of my clicks would actually take effect and right clicking seemed to be more effective but still not reliable). Also, some explanation of how the game works in the description would be helpful.
One other note, your judging categories look like they are reversed (it's showing the categories you didn't implement rather than the ones you probably wanted to keep). I didn't rate the game as a result. If you fix it later, I will come back and vote properly.
Awesome to see a young developer trying their hand at Ludum Dare, and also one who has the sense to think of a reasonable level of scope to get the game done in time.
The game is solid, but as others have stated, pretty easy (though I did take to hits before I completed the game). One thing that I also saw was that sometimes the tower would shoot pretty far away to hit the enemy was it was walking away, but didn't start shooting until they were fairly close, so I wasn't sure of the actual effective range.
Very beautiful looking game! I'm going to admit the first time I read the description I thought it said "Play as a newborn kitten..." and was trying to figure out what that had to do with sailing. I unfortunately didn't find the chest.
My only real gripe (other than there isn't much gameplay as you stated) is the controls on the spyglass. It was really difficult to move about. It seemed like there was a way to look up or down, but I couldn't find a consistent way.
A positive note is that you do have good pathfinding. Most games I've played in Ludum Dare where you click on a destination will just hit an obstacle and stop. Your game will move around the coast, which is really nice.
These are really nice graphics and nice big area to play in. My biggest issues was that it was pretty easy to get overwhelmed by enemies, and I couldn't find a good strategy to attack them in a way that didn't hurt me too, so it was a lot of grinding and drinking potions to get through the slog.
Pretty funny experience. The game seemed a bit buggy though. I would get a lot of calls that looked like they were mid-conversation (none of the options looked like a greeting so I just had to select something at random). Also, transfers didn't seem to always work because the light would still be on for the line I was on. Regardless I did enjoy the calls and discovering the silly story from bits and pieces of the conversations.
It is an innovative concept, but quite confusing; the sound is also good. A couple of issues I had:
1. The game is lags a lot. I have a very good computer, but it really struggled (it was actually difficult to scroll down to do this review.
2. I wasn't sure what to do with the yellow balls, it seemed like they were hurting if I let them go down.
3. The red balls stay on the screen too long. I had difficulty right from the start when I had multiple red balls appear quickly or a red and a green ball spawn next to each other.
I liked the idea of the game. Super hard to beat the AI in the game (lost many times), but pretty cool to use the portals.
I did find a bug in that at least on Windows the game crashes when you try to start another level after ending a previous one. Starting the game back up works to play the next level, so it isn't that big of a deal though.
The game is a great idea, but it's very difficult to play right from the start for a few reasons:
- It's very difficult to get food to the middle guests since all the items move as far as they can go. There needs to be something built into the level to bounce off of to get them in order.
- Often there food the customer wants to eat is not on the board
- It's too easy to push a few items together permanently making them immovable. This greatly reduces mobility on the game board.
Despite this, you have one of the more innovative ideas so far, and I encourage you to explore and improve the game to iron out the issues and make this a really good game from a later release.
Nice start to a game, it's solid and the atmospheric music works well. A few asthetic recommendations to help you improve:
- First off the game is very monotone in the graphics, making it visually difficult to see the patterns for the maze. You are also using very similar pattern for the floor obstacles and outer walls. Humans are very good at seeing different patterns but when everything is the same it takes a much longer time to process. Older 2D games often use cooler less saturated colors for background items such as the floors or outer walls, and warmer, brighter colors for active elements to make it easier to see the actual threats and obstacles easier to recognize.
- The chose to have a player bounce was rather odd. It might make sense for a none human character to do so (say it the player was a ball) but under this setting it was a little disconcerting.
- There is a lack of feedback in the game as to whether or not you are going in the right direction. It definitely feels like if you keep randomly choosing a portal you will eventually win. Perhaps having more maze rooms that are slightly different in color (progressing from dark to light or something similar) so that you can see progress, while taking the wrong portal might take you back. It would help players feel like they are getting closer or father away from the end, while giving them clues as to whether or not they are actually choosing the right portals with just having them do an exhaustive search of all portals.
Completed the game getting 9 out of 10 stars. I'm guessing the last was on one of the two blank screens but I couldn't find it.
The game was fun, and the audio choice worked well with the game. It was pretty cool with the multiple, misplaced and rotated screen. I'm guessing there are many games like this, but you were the first I saw so you get the innovation vote.
The controls were a bit slippery though. It was very easy to miss a platform even when its not rotated or misplaced, and levels 5 and 8 were definitely the most frustrating because of this. Also the wall hanging mechanic was a bit wonky, and often when I tried to jump from a hanging position it would immediately get me stuck in the same location. It's probably possible to fix this by triggering the wall hang logic only when the player is falling, but that's making quite a few assumptions on your code.
This game is rigged! In the three times I played, I lost at 1:17.
In all seriousness, this is a great game. The pacing is good, the controls are each wonderfully unique, and the gameplay fits in well the theming of the game (music mastering).
After six or so tries my best is the god of nightmares (the last boss?) A really solid game. All the bosses are challenging, but none are unfair. It is possible to defeat each of them without a single hit. My only complaint is that some of the hit boxes are way too large (it is very difficult to dodge the starfish when it moves toward you).
You packed a lot of fun in for a game made in 48 hours. If I get time I'll have to come back and finish the last boss.
My high score is 16890. Very fun, reminded me a little of the bonus levels from shatter. If got nothing critical other than maybe adding some intense music to make it that more frantic. Nicely done.
@SuperPokeunicorn. This has been fixed.
For Levels on the lowest number of people
- 6 to 23 with 5 seconds left
- 7 to 23 with 4 seconds left
- 5 to 23 with 6 seconds left
For levels with the highest number of people
- 7 to 77 with 0 seconds left
- 9 to 77 with 1 second left
- 11 to 77 with 1 second left (SO MANY TRIES)
Fun puzzles-like game. I haven't seen anything like it so quite original. I found setting up bananas at choke points were the most effective and get them out super early was key.
Sorry you weren't able to finish your game. It was a very solid platformer with good controls and an interesting start to a story. Unfortunately I was able to jump off the world midway through level two (I glided off the edge to the right after getting the glide ability), and at some point the audio just cut off. There were a lot of leaps of faith in this game or open areas to jump over. some background cues would help, but as you said, you ran out of time.
That was an exceptionally well polished game for 48 hours. The sound and the graphics are amazing. The gameplay was fun as well, though it became extremely difficult to dodge or attack the enemies. I think this was because of two things:
- The Rodin thinker statues take up a huge amount or real estate on the screen, and either they hit me even though I was at the back of the level and they were up front (which would imply you're using straight up 2D collision detection, or something else is hitting me and I just can't see it.
- I kept getting a very slow weapon that has a short range and can only be first one shot at a time. With the number of enemies entering the screen, this weapon is pretty useless.
Despite these two things I had a blast.
P.S. my high score was 5880.
That was super hard. It took me about 20 tries to defeat the two enemies and reveal the stairs. I think part of the difficulty was that it was hard to tell if I was doing damage, or being effective (they take a lot of hits). I know there is audio, but the sounds were very similar, so I had difficulty telling if it worked. Perhaps changing graphics or color to show progression on defeating an enemy would work?
I quote enjoyed this game, though I will admit, I'm terribly good at the game. It vaguely reminds me of Shatter, which I also like. I got a high score of 92.
My biggest difficulty was the enemies off-screen. I'm not sure if this a real issue, as it is pretty close to the view of geometry wars, and a lot of other similar games, but I think I would have had an easier time I could see all the enemies as once. Also, I would like to see a few more enemy types (as I like the game), but well, you did it in 48 hours, so it's understandable.
Other than that, the controls are great, the music is good, and I had a lot of fun.
Very cute game, very hard though. I got it on my fifth or sixth try (I just got into a pattern of landing 2 or so hearts then run up until after the attack was performed. Took a long time.
Additionally, found an entertaining bug. If you were holding shift when you lost and kept holding shift, hugs will register on the monster when it walks over you. You can eventually get "Monster Calmed" even though you lost.
As a note, your primary link is broken. It's pointing your you own computer you local network. The mirror link does however work.
The game is cute and fun, but it gets repetitive since it takes a while to get any upgrades. I would make two suggestions. Make it possible to get upgrades that would increase money making direct (such as increase star spawning). Secondly, I would move the bubble down farther on the screen; it was nearly impossible to dodge when fast falling enemy appears.
Also, the music is very good. Very few entries have music so it was great to get good music right off the bat.
Made it to 4950 points. I agree with volatile dove, having to pick up your hand to press sing makes it difficult. Additionally, using the mouse to attack when there isn't smooth scrolling felt difficult as where I was going to aim is moving (might just be me though as I'm not a big PC gaming).
This is absolutely hilarious game, and if you don't win on audio, I'd be surprised.
The game play was a bit problematic. I played for several years, but didn't really see a huge rise in standings. I'm guessing that if you rate someone higher than they rated you last year they'll trend up, and if you rated lower they'll trend down, but without some statistics up when I got to voting it was very difficult to determine who I should vote high. It was also difficult given that I didn't know who else was competing, so I couldn't think ahead and hold the better points for the right players.
Despite this I did have a lot of fun playing, and laughing at the incredible amount of strange music you put together.
Pretty hard game. My best after a dozen or so plays was 10 enemies defeated. The stun is good but doesn't last long enough if there is more than one enemy on the screen for me to get much further. Despite this I had a really good time playing it. A two player mode would be awesome.
Mac version works just fine. Really cool concept! My first couple of tries I did badly because it seems like the game doesn't register your attack until you stop making sound, so big yells actually work against you. I made it to level 21 with 789 points by quickly say "not" super fast for a couple of minutes. It pretty much covered the screen with my attack, except of when I needed to breath which I did sparingly. I'm... i'm going to pass out now.
After over a dozen tries, I could still only get 6 points; I usually got hit the moment I miss a pull or on a successful pull it would move me just far enough to be in an enemy's line of sight. Perhaps a small grace period with movement would fix this case. Despite these issue, I did however enjoy the game.
@interwebsninja & @jelinib, I agree. After submission, I had my brother play and he struggled a bit to see them initially. I should have made them blink or some thing similar (maybe move the arrow to above the target when you get it on screen).
@matthewd678 I don't remember if I coded that as one of the fail conditions (I think I didn't but customers will eventually complain enough). The game is about being very careful so I understand the difficulty. If it make it any easier, the hitbox is centered around the feet and is wider than tall, so that if you approach from the bottom it's usually easier. The hitbox for picking up/delivering is also slightly larger than the destruction hit box, so if you creep up to the pizza parlor, you should be good.
@kingpirux I balanced the game at the end so that destruction would still let you win. I was toying with the ending of making actual destruction real money so that it was neigh impossible and let you rampage after the pink slip, but didn't have the time.
@robot souls games, the game was built to be practically impossible to not destroy something. I actually wanted to put in people and a lot of small items like trees, signs, street lamps, etc. that were low damage penalty but pretty much impossible to avoid.
@derr you're absolutely right; as many have notices, it's not obvious to a lot of players where the drop off point is. Something animated at the point, like a bobing arrow or flashing the aura below the building would have done a lot of the game.
As for the timing, that's the thing I'm struggling with in expanding the game. I'm trying to make the game continue to be fun after more than a few minutes. I've played with a few concepts, but nothing has clicked yet.
The graphics are very well done, but the controls are very confusing; jump almost never worked right. Additionally, I wasn't sure if there was an end condition. I was able to defeat the player a handful of times, but when when I purposely tried to die, I found the player wasn't really hitting me. I left the game run for a few hours and my health was only down a few points. Not sure if that was intended or not.
Congratulations on your first entry in LD!
First of the graphics are great, and the music is appropriate to the tone you were going for. The game does seem a bit incomplete, though, which makes sense given your last post about burning out. It's tough working on a game almost straight through, and I've found proper sleep and dedicated break times (like eat away from the computer) do help you focus when you are making a game.
I'm guessing the helicopters I saw in an earlier post were either incomplete or something in the game is causing them to not spawn when I play. I do hope you work on this more and get it into the jam, but if not, learn from your first game and improve going forward!
This reminds me a lot of the game "Spike Trap: A Love Story" though a bit simpler due to the time constraint. I love how this game is oozing with style, and it was fun but did get repetitive pretty quickly. I am however pleased to see your entry supports pretty much any platform available.
Huh, that was certainly innovative to put together a prequel to an actual full production game in an LD entry. I guess the theme just worked out that way. Really great use of theme and atmosphere. I liked it quite a lot, I would have liked to see more gameplay in it since the rest of the presentation really drew me in.
Nice eerie graphics. The concept is pretty cool, but once you get a good machine going and start breaking even (I would spawn 6 or so larva and kill them just before the first -3 attacks), the game gets repetitive. It's definitely a good start, and with some additional strategies (think different mutations of the larva) the game could really pick up.
Very nice presentation and well polished educational game; I played all the way through the four levels without too much issue except for what seems to be a bug. After about 50,000 to 60,000 points on a level, it would grind to a near halt, where I would only get one jet coming down at a time slowly, while I was being shot by four or five somethings that were offscreen; this was happening even when I killed all the enemies thus far in a wave, and hitting the panic button would always bring the game back to the previous level of panic with all three enemy types. This definitely looks like a game you could polish up and sell on mobile platforms, but this pacing bug will need to be addressed.
Congratulations on your first entry. Not sure why, but I really liked the style of the giant. The gameplay was pretty solid other than there didn't seem to be need for jumping in the game (I'm guessing you were planning on having arrows shoot along the bottom as well). Also, the volume for the music was very low, and didn't notice it for a few minutes into the game, which was a pity since it was very good. I ended up turning up the volume quite high and holding down the guard button to listen to it for a while.
Mine final score was 1368.
Survived 9 days, didn't realize there was a drunk different from normal villagers until I saw the comments below (I pulled the trigger too early once I saw him accuse two different people of being the werewolf.
The presentation is really good; I couldn't tell if the levels were random or planned, but I got a few levels where the werewolf accused the priest or vice versa that made it easy. My only real complaint though was getting the statements to disappear so I could see if there were other messages. I would mouse off them and sometimes they would linger for a while.
Despite that, awesome job distilling "One Night Werewolf" into a single player game.
Now this is a very well polished game; the graphics and audio are definitely at the level of a commercial game. The gameplay was as others said a little repetitive. My guess here is that the game let you solve most levels with a much simpler solution than intended. For example, for zig-zag, you could just lure the kid across to the left and immediately eat him. The zig zag would have been more interesting and probably more fun, but by giving the player a tool that draws the target directly to their spot, it makes forcing a more interesting solution very difficult. I also thing the flashlight's effect was too lenient and as a result, I could just run through the obstacles rather than lure the target from safe spots.
Also, for the record, 134 Candy used, 15:36 end time.
Sorry it's late and I hit the submit button a little early. I just wanted to add, that this is a great game in need of a few tweaks, but more so than anything else I've played thus far this could be turned into a real commercial product if you were so inclined. I did enjoy it and sorry if I sounded too critical at first. I'm just a bit tired and should have gone to bet a while back, but got into playing your game instead.
Fantastic job! The game was fun, easy to control and very funny. Usually I like to leave some critical feedback to help people improve, but I've got nothing, so excellent work.
Okay, I played through the entire game, and I am still confused. I think I get that the player and his opponent are the same person; and I'm guessing the entire game is just "your" imagination playing out a few random items on your desk, but I'm still just very confused about the whole premise. Maybe I missed something.
In any case, the presentation was good, but the gameplay was a bit lacking. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the levels just seemed like a slow grind. I didn't see much of an advantage using any unit except sometimes the clock, and it seemed most effective to just rush either the top or bottom lane with oranges and hope that the spawns are on the opposite side.
I think the game play would be better if the different units actually felt like they had more drastic advantages/disadvantages than what was shown, and maybe if the gameplay was fast or if you could see the whole level at once, it would feel less tedious.
@ViliX64 no problem. I think the story might have been a little more clear if near the end and in the end scene with the mirror, that the "opposition" was a little more overt about either helping, or getting the the "imaginary" head to realize that there is something deeply wrong. I think a more dramatic mirror scene might have also helped (not sure if that means anything to you, but I have something in my head that's hard to describe).
Nice arena shooter with good graphics. My only major complaint is that the hit boxes on the enemies are really big. Usually when you have full range of movement and the characters are rendered like a side view, the hit box is only the bottom half of the each character so that you can walk behind characters when you aren't in plane with them (Look at castle crashers for an example). The issue this brought up was that with the boss if you saw him coming at you from the bottom of the screen, there was a really good chance he was going to hit you regardless of what you did. That said I did finish the game after 4 or 5 tries.
Also as a side note I think I found a but where it you hit "R" while in game it takes you back to the title screen and afterwards the music never plays again even after you press space.
It's quite a scary game. The only thing I would change there is that I would put in a scarier sound for when you get hit by the alien; the "pop" that is used just doesn't feel right.
Other than that, I'm not sure whether or not you're supposed to actually be able to kill the aliens. I've gotten times where I've got a good dozen shots on it, but still got hit and it disappeared. It's very well possible that this is a horror game where you aren't supposed to win, so I'll assume that's the case (or else I'm just really, really bad). Other than that, nice 3D shooter, with good controls.
I was unfortunately not able to get this to run either. No error message when I ran it, but there was some information printed to the screen if it helps:
[Assets] Loading assets from C:\Users\dalbi\Downloads\stacktrace_ld33\assets.pak
...
[Assets] Done loading.
1.0 2.0 2.0
2.0 2.0 4.0
2.0 1.0 4.0
4.0 2.0 6.0
0.0 1.0 2.0
Note that no other UI window attempted to open, just that as a message and no further.
@TheMorfeus, I just tried running your game again after seeing it was fixed, and think I hit a much worse issue. I clicked new game and it went immediately to what I think i the ending (The first screen it shows is "Another databank, i must check what is says."). Can you take a look at your current release again?
Well, I finally got a few hours to sit down with this game. I love it, but I think I've been defeated at this point. I solved half the assignments, (at least on paper), but I got stuck on figuring out test 4.
My only suggestion is that it's difficult to edit a program once written. If you make a mistake, you need to delete back to the mistake. I understand writing a text editor is very hard, so I won't begrudge the difficulty in program editing.
Sorry to hear you're first entry didn't work out and that you switched last minute, but awesome that you still stuck with it and submitted a new entry. That's a brave decision when it is so easy to just walk away.
As also stated by others, I would like to have seen more variety in the gameplay as far as enemies and strategy (it was too easy to just mash buttons), and perhaps less variety in the monsters given the time you had (then again those assets may have been from the first attempted game). Additionally, I found a humorous bug; when you die and the game over screen appears, the game is still running in the background. As a result, you can keep mashing S and D and continue to rack up kills.
The download was difficult; I was only able to get the game to work by copying the game folder to my personal google drive then downloading the whole thing as a zip file. You should package your game up as a zip file; very few people will have the patience to figure out how to get it to work.
That said, unfortunately the game was nearly unplayable for me. My guess is that the game's controls are updating movement impulse a fixed amount each frame instead of based on the amount of time that has passed. My machine is very beefy, so the controls were super fast. I could only draw a few lines before I got a game over each time.
Despite this though, congratulations on doing your first dare! Game development is hard, so I hope you learned a few things and will come back next time.
HAHA, I swear the music is being sung by Cartman from Southpark. This game is beautiful, and incredibly well polishing. You guys did a fantastic job.
The only difficult I had with the game is aiming. When playing it seems like the beam only hits enemies if the mouse is actually on the enemy, which wouldn't be so bad except that the beam is so bright and extend past the mouse, making it easy to lose track of the cursor. If the beam ended at the mouse then it would be a lot easier to tell where things were.
Really cool level design with a lot of details. I did like exploring, but did rather poorly on finding the people (I still had 14 left when the timer hit zero). I ended up spending too much time trying to get the guy in the jungle-gym-like house in the corner. I would have played longer, but for some reason I got incredible amount of motion sickness from the game.
Really cool idea. Reminds me of Gnilley (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYPwYfbi8jA). I ended up gettings suck in the first deep pit and couldn't get out. As much as I try to complete all the games rate in Ludum Dare, I was light-head from screaming and had to stop. I'll try to come back later after a lie down. Other than that, the game is beautiful; and while you didn't make the art assets, the randomly generated terrain on the level is really well done.
Pretty cools game, I do like the gameplay quite a lot, and I don't recall seeing puzzles like this in other games. My biggest complaint is the controls though. The triggers on the attacks you can perform are very, very small, and the way you have the game built you need to jump from one trigger to another very quickly. I missed so many of the triggers while playing that it did start to get frustrating. If you go back and work on the game, I would suggest going and seeing if you can increase the size or of the clickable area for each trigger so that even if you don't hit it exactly you you will still activate the attack.
The game is very pretty, but I wasn't sure if it was possible to lose without actually seeking out the heros (i.e. if you remained passive, there was no end condition). I killed about fifty heroes then let the game run for a while and didn't get penalized (was that your intention?
Also, I was a little sad to see a whole large level around the character, but for the intended game play to be centered in a very small area. Despite this, the game is beautiful.
Really nice zelda like game, and serious props for making and in game editor as that is a lot of work to put into a game. I did enjoy it, and had fun exploring the game, but I have one small question: for as large as the world is that you made, why is Pluto's heart and Pluto in a single straight line? It's possible to miss most of the game if you just head down. Other than that, the sound effect choices were a little odd, but not to the detriment of gameplay.
Really good gameplay concept; haven't seen a game like this yet (in or out of Ludum Dare). I will admit it did get frustrating on the levels that had the fireballs in it. The game is difficult to control with the fast moving aim arm, so timing is nearly impossible. On those levels I just prayed I didn't hit the fireballs when I made my shot. I made it through all 9 levels, but it was very frustrating at times.
To be honest I think the game ramped up too quickly. I think a lot of interesting puzzles could be made either by letting the player control the direction of the shot (thus opening up much more precision levels, or by have more puzzles that don't have instant kills and random shots being fired, but are treacherous in that the enemies themselves are damaging until you get up to your level and the player needs to solve the correct order to move about the level without painting them into a corner.
Despite this, you have a very good start to a great game, and one that would be mobile friendly with the single button control.
Awe, that's so sad, and cute. Had a lot fun with the simple game, though after a while it does get repetitive. As a note there is something rather odd, when standing at the bottom of the screen I kept seeing civilians dying in apparent suicide.
Highscore: 127116
228 was my highest score. For a randomly generated song, it was very appropriate for the game. Despite that, a nice simple game executed with a great amount of polish. The graphics are great, especially the very detailed background. Good job!
Really good concept, and a lot of humor. I had a difficult time really zeroing in on what the post makeup was actually doing to my reader base. Specifically, it didn't seem like anything I put together for the post actually had a specific effect other than that people liked length more than anything, and if I made any of the three too small, it would negatively affect me. I think that a good addition would be to have comments from the user to give you hints why they did or didn't like the post.
So, umm I started playing, and the little guys were fighting, I stuck some together and they got bigger, but the other little ones didn't like that and took up a pacifism strike leaving their weapons behind. So the big one's felt bad too and dropped their weapons and I thought everyone was going to be happy. But no, the weapons then started attacking by themselves, and the little guys got scared and started vibrating. I panicked and tried to get rid of the weapons and just pressed some buttons and the little ones all turned black and ran in circles then did some kind of magic dance and the weapons disappeared. I thought everything was going to be fine until one of the little black guys started to grow, took over the entire screen and then my computer started to freeze.
THIS ALL ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
So what I'm trying to say is, what did I just play?
In seriousness this was super funny and super random. I'm not entirely sure my inputs had any real effect, but it's great to see a program purposely go off the rails like that.
Good start on a game; it's a bit short and the ending is just a bit cruel, tough I found I could run past the last line of helicopters and run round the outside of the screen space until the game final froze. I would have liked to also here some sound effects. If you weren't aware there is a great tool SFXR (which I used as well) that can generate a lot of sound effects very quickly. I'll admit that the sound effects in my game only took about five minutes to generate and add (music was much longer), so once you figure out how to play a sound effect in your game, generating them should take very little time.
I like the game's design and concept, but the shop was very slow to get upgrades, so after a half hour, I still hadn't mad much progress through the second cave (I got up to the first point where you need to make a higher jump, didn't have the power to jump up high enough and spent two more play sessions getting enough XP to jump high enough to progress. I love the idea, but would have liked to see less of a grind on the game. Just making the upgrades be slightly more powerful each time you upgrade would have worked, but for 48 hours, balancing is extremely difficult.
Way to go finishing your first LD!
Despite the game being pretty simple, there are two things I really liked here: 1) it is possible to let the vehicles go between your feet (a lot of run/avoid games just use the entire bode as the target), and 2) the pseudo 3D grid on the sides. I checked your code and it is hand drawn, which I think is awesome; it gives it a cheezy 80's animation vibe.
Love the artwork on this. Reminds me a lot of "The Behemoth" games. Music is also amazing, and I can't tell if you did this intentionally, or if it was just in my head, the actual pace of the game seems to match the beats of the music (almost like a rhythm game).
I had a minor control issue. When in full screen, clicking the start button didn't register, so I ended up running in a window, this was fine except the frantic nature of the game had me clicking outside the game window a ton of times. I'm guessing this is an issue with Unity and not your game, so no points off for that.
Also, the game didn't seem to ramp up much as I played. I ended up getting around 516 kills, I don't know the exact amount as the score disappears the moment you die, but throughout that whole last play the number of enemies appearing for a given time seemed about the same.
Other than that, this is a wonderfully polished game.
Final score 10064. I liked the idea of building out a force to take on the monster, especially with some of the crazy attacks (not sure throwing fish was actually helping), but was slightly disappointed that the game ramped up the money so quickly that by the end I was building the most expensive dwellings as fast as I could click the menu. I also definitely enjoyed the switchover from villager to enemy. It looks like there could be some good strategy in creating villagers that are good for initially defeating trogg, but wouldn't hinder me as much in the second half. I ended up in the end funneling the villagers through a narrow passage between two vouses and some trees such that I could keep going back and forth killing a ton of villagers without giving them enough room to attack. Nicely done.
This was a nice cathartic game after a long day, and very funny too. I did specially like that you had to be pretty frantic with the controls to stay ahead on health, so the challenge was pretty balanced. The game is also pretty funny, and while I initially though the controls where space is movement and the arrow keys were actions would be kind of messy, it did actually work well.
My highscore was about 18,100 or 181,000 (it disappeared quickly because I was mashing space when I died).
Definitely reminds me of SimCity, specifically what I would do to my brother's cities when he wasn't looking. Definitely a nice laid back game. I got through all the levels without a problem, which either means I'm amazing at it, or more likely there isn't a fail condition. Quite fun, and funny to see the mother explode for no reason. Also one quick question. I noticed in the fourth screenshot the tsunami is moving right, but I only ever got it to go left. How do you change the direction of the attacks?
The music is absolutely excellent. The controls are a bit difficult, but as you stated this was on purpose. Unfortunately I was not able to finish the game after about 10 attempts. I got to the point where there were 5 birds or so on screen at once and couldn't find a safe way through. In any case beautiful job on the art and sound work.
I like the mechanic of the chain reaction, it wasn't necessary to use, but was a nice addition. I would love to see some level designs were you had to think through the level layout and use the chain reactions specifically to hit all the humans (for example, placing a human far enough out of range that the only way to attack is through a chain). Other than that, the controls and gameplay were smooth, though if you play cautiously it's a fairly easy game. I will admit though, balancing a game with this small an amount of time is super hard.
The graphics are very well done, and detailed; they are reminiscent of "Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet". The game is very solid as well, with the only complaint there that if a shot has escape velocity, it takes a while for the level to reset for another shot.
The biggest thing I would actually say to improve was the length of the game. It's a very fun concept, and only having two levels where the solution wasn't immediately obvious did make me crave more. Looking at your timeline, I can see why this was the case, as you only worked on the game for about 16~17 hours total, which is still impressive for how polished the game is.
Overall, excellent job, especially for your first entry.
It looks like you are missing some files: Specific error on run:
java.io.FileNotFoundException: res\scores.save (The system cannot find the file
specified)
at java.io.FileInputStream.open0(Native Method)
at java.io.FileInputStream.open(Unknown Source)
at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(Unknown Source)
at java.io.FileReader.<init>(Unknown Source)
at com.pokeyone.ludum33.Game.loadScores(Game.java:94)
at com.pokeyone.ludum33.Game.<init>(Game.java:68)
at com.pokeyone.ludum33.Frame.<init>(Frame.java:7)
at com.pokeyone.ludum33.Frame.main(Frame.java:20)
Okay, followed the other commenters posts and got the game working. Nice simple, somewhat educational game. My highscore was 2140.
My suggestion here is that the game doesn't seem to ramp up fast enough; it went super slow until about 180. Additionally at about 1200, the numbers were so blurry that I had to rely more on pattern recognition that reading the actual number to continue playing. Despite this well done on what I'm guessing is your first entry (you have no blog posts so I can't see your profile to see if you made any other games).
@PokeyOne balancing a game is very difficult. If you can get someone to play the game while in progress (like a sibling or friend) it really helps.
Excellent fun. I had better luck just rampaging rather than being stealthy. I had some issues where there was a delay in popping out the ground, but that might be the machine I playing on (emulating Windows in Parallels). Despite that this was fun, hilarious, and all around well done.
Things I learned today:
1. What the "corpse fruit" my co-workers from the Philippines had talked about,
2. Circle division by chords,
3. The 100 green-eyed dragon puzzle,
4. That my knowledge of Dental Puns from working the dental industry actually has a use,
5. That infantile tactics used in the movie "Monster Squad" can also be used in a video game.
In all seriously, this was a fantastic play, and really funny. Great job on your first Ludum Dare entry and hope to see more like this in the future.
This is a really good game. It's got a super meatboy vibe, but with more of a puzzle nature. The wall jump was well done, though there were a few times it glitched out and ran me up the wall. I think the best thing I could say was that the level design and pacing were good. The level was just long enough to not be frustrating, even when I died several times in the level.
I think you have a good solid grasp of level design for your first LD entry; and I'd love to see what your next game will be with so practice in asset creation.
Congratulations on your first Ludum Dare entry! When I saw the screenshot, and the name, I thought for sure you were making a Simon game, but I was pleasantly surprised that you made something unique. The mechanic of the changing inputs is actually really cool, and does mess with your head and muscle memory. Additionally, the amount of style you put into the simple concept really makes the entry shine.
The only improvement that comes to mind is that when there are multiple birds of the same color on screen, when you press the corresponding key it removes the birds that's further away rather than the closest one, which is counteractive (as most people will be tracking the more immediate threat and will think the wrong input was put in).
After 5 tries, my best score was a measly 97 points.
Very funny premise and really cute graphics to go with it. If don't know if you intended it to or not, but the beat of the music didn't match the moves in the game; this confused me a little as I had a tendency to try and hit on beat like in other rhythm games, and the beats were incredibly pronounced in the music. Other than that, worked find. Had some trouble with W vs S, but I'm guessing that's just something you'd get muscle memory for after repeated plays.
Haha! That was good fun. The only odd things I noticed was that the roar attack didn't always work, and I couldn't figure out specifically why. I'm guessing it's on a timer, but there's nothing to indicate how long I have before I can use it, so it was a little frustrating on that part. Still it's a minor thing to otherwise hilarious fun.
Highscore: 86350
Saw your note on my game; you are indeed correct, I completely missed the UI elements at the bottom.
Your game is absolutely beautiful and very funny. The only criticism I have is that the randomly generated nature of the level generates impossible situations, either where there are thorns on both side close enough that you can't swing around the totem without getting hit, or a totem is shifted so that you can only go up one side but there are thorns at the bottom. In the end, the highest I got was 20.
Reminds me a little of air hockey and dodge ball. Your game is pretty interesting, those a GagaPete the AI is simple (but hey, good AI takes a lot of time to write and no one in the competition has time).
The only thing that really confused me was how to determine when a could grab the puck vs. when it would smash in and hit me. I'm guessing it was speed vs. my strength (augmented by the power ups), but I couldn't really tell. If that was the case, having the puck change colors when it was able to be caught would be helpful.
Wow, that's really impressive to make a gameboy game in two days! Did you write this in C or straight up assembler?
Now on to the game. It's very cute and fun. The only criticisms I have, is that there are a few places where walking from one room to the next is an instant, blind hit on an obstacle, usually water.
Makes me wish that my old bung carts still worked. I haven't done anything on the gameboy since highschool...
This is a really great frantic game. I especially love the frantic escapes you need to be done if caught by a trap.
I do have one suggestion. Given how fast this game runs, some of the moves are a little inconsistent which tripped me up. Specifically, moving up if a double tap up, while down is a single quick tap. This caused me to jump too far down some times, or not actually jump up to the next level. I often tripped up because of this, and didn't get more than 850m in a run. Despite that, this is a beautiful, great game.
You're moan for killing peons is great. I do however get the impression that you were intending on doing more. As other's have mentioned, there doesn't seem to be anything negative in the game such as a time limit or resources being depleted. It looks like you can just assign the peons to a resource and let the game run on it's own. Specifically, I currently have 2049 peons mining the same location and over 100,000 resources. I'm guessing this was just a matter not enough time.
What I am impressed about is how buttery smooth the game runs with 2000 peons; it's using almost no CPU resources, and the game doesn't shirt at selecting them all at once. So for reasons unknown I decided to take this to an absurd level. At once point I had over 100,000 peons on the screen (see https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/87314864/TooMuchJand.png). The only slowdown I saw was when I mass sacrificed them. Finally, mass-sacrificing 120,000 peons in one shot took down your game.
I know this probably wasn't the intention of your game, but I did have a far too much fun trying to break it.
This is a very interesting game. I actually really like how hands off it can be. You only have to perform a few actions to get things going (it's a lot like Sim Earth, a little bit of tweaking, and not much micro managing). I did get an exception twice using the web build, both times while taking an item (once was a mountain, the other was a church). Unfortunately debug support wasn't turned on so I couldn't get you an specifics on the error.
Very nice game, excellent graphics, paired with some great music. I did find the collision detection on the blue circle seems particularly touch as I know I stopped on something to eat a bunch of times and it didn't count it.
Additionally, I found it easier to rack up points eating everything in the third row rather than trying to build up the combo to a super munch. The best I got going for combos was around 2200 vs 3200 by eating the last row as fast as possible. I think making the super munch available after getting three of the same would balance the ability a bit better. Despite that, awesome game!
Nice take on snake with some a good twist. I liked the additional mechanics. I would have loved to see additional levels to test out these mechanics, but I can absolutely understand that time constraints make it difficult. I will also note, timing tight turns is very hard. In the middle of the spiral, I needed to turn well before I can see movement, so there was a large number of mistakes until I got the timing down. Other than that, cool game.
Good use of of both themes, also it was interesting that in each form the controls changed slightly as dragon progressed. I did find some weirdness in the controls though. After the first form, the keyboard doesn't seem to work, only the mouse. This made things very difficult on a touch pad with no dedicated mouse buttons, but was a lot better once I got an actual mouse to play.
Out of curiosity is there anything after the third form? The first two changed after five meals, but the third form I know I ate more than five.
Highscore $12797. While there was little direction of what combinations would do, I kinda gathered from the tongue in cheek atmosphere that throwing in any animal is cheapens the product.
Now, while you didn't make your own sounds, you showed really good sound direction. You picked good music and sounds, and really built the game around that musical choice. The game ramps up at just about the time the music builds up as well, leveling up for a more frantic feel. Without that song, I don't know if I would have given the game as much thought, but with it I really enjoyed what you built.
This was fun; I finished the game hoping for more levels. The one criticism I have for the game though was that the flipping processing was disorienting, specifically, I had to find the ball after each flip as the level flipped about it's center, rather than round the ball, which is what I was concentrating on. I'm not sure how easy it would be to do with your implementation, but having the camera center on the ball at all times have made this easier.
Other than that, very nicely done.
The game is beautiful, especially for something made that over a weekend. The game is incredibly difficult; I found that once I was airborne, the game became nearly impossible; usually a line of bats would come across in a tight pack, and there was nowhere to go because the jump was so wide that it was bound to hit something.
Also the game was a bit intuitive in that as I got bigger and looked stronger, I was actually getting weaker and far more vulnerable. It would probably have made more sense to give the third form an attack, or something that would make it a bit easier to progress.
You've got a great presentation going here, with some control issues that need to be sorted out. I encourage you to look at the game's balance or controls post competition to see if you can make this shine.
Final score 2919.
That was quite fun and hectic by the end. The game was especially good at knowing the right things to do whenever I pressed A which was great for the speed of the game. Excellent job.
The graphics on the game look really good. There are some gameplay issues though that make the game difficult to play. First, the ducking action has a significant pause before the action, making it difficult to use (either it doesn't duck until after the obstacle hits the player or the duck is delayed to the point there I fall off the platform). Jump doesn't have this problem, so I'm not sure why the delay occurs.
Second, at least in my experience, nearly every purple mushroom appeared at a location where I was forced to jump into the mushroom or fall, so I had to hit the purple mushrooms. This was a bit frustrating.
As recommended, I played once before reading the manual to try figuring out the game, and a second time after looking through the manual. I actually think I appreciated the game much more after looking at the manual, at the very least I understood the enemies a lot more.
I really like the game. It's very board game like, reminding me a little of forbidden island for some reason. Actually would love to see this as a board game with multiple players. The only difficult I could see is implementing the random teleport, but otherwise, it feels like a good fit.
While I like the game a lot, there were two things that were annoying:
1. The controls were a bit annoying. I understand you were using the theme two buttons, and it works, but I moved the wrong way several times due to the mechanic, and just wanted to use arrow keys to navigate.
2. The symbology used was odd. Specifically, several of the symbols look like they would be more appropriate for other actions. For example, the bomb or teleports looks like it would be better for laser, and the +3 coins would look better for the bomb.
Interesting concept, but unfortunately frustrating for two reasons. First it is incredibly difficult to switch between controls. Considering you only have to actions (and a lack of action with stopping), it probably would be easier to control if on action was jump and one action was move further.
Second, there seemed to be some oddness in the velocity of both the run and the jump actions. Especially with the jump I found there where three distinct heights that it randomly selected when the jump button was pressed. Most times it was a normal high, but often it would only jump one block or launch two thirds up the screen. This made it very difficult to do precision work.
In the end I couldn't get past the level with multiple platforms, it was just too difficult.
This is a really gorgeous game. I love how organic the world looks despite being made mostly of solid colored squares. As others have stated, it's easy to get suck in places in the game (I actually clipped through a wall running while tiny). Also there seems to be a lot of invisible walls in the game.
I know this is part one, so I'm not sure how far this game went. I got to the first big tower and got stuck (i.e. I couldn't figure out how to progress). I could see larger items in the distance, but I couldn't get to them. Is that the end of the game or is there more?
Neat! I love picross, and thought this was pretty cool as well. I noticed there was a way to flip a row tiles gold all at once, but I couldn't figure out specifically how to trigger it when I wanted. I thought it would be something like othello, and the gold would be flipped if crossover a path that I had already marked the other end but it didn't seem to work that way.
Additionally, I found an interesting bug. When you lose, and all the ants appear, you are still in control. Additionally, no further ants spawn. As a result, you can clear the ants and then just continue playing as normal. The game will happily jump to the next level. I am 100% not ashamed to say that I solved the game with a negative -247 seconds this way.
I really love sim city games, so I was looking foreword to playing this from the screenshot. Unfortunately the game seems to an interesting simulator hidden behind some rather difficult issues:
- First off I went through the tutorial, but it wasn't as helpful as I would have liked. I didn't figure out how to mine trees for resources, which ultimately prevented me from continuing once I had zero resources.
- Selecting buildings is VERY hard, especially on a touchpad. The values would change on the slightest of movements. In this case I could have suggested assigning keyboard keys to cycle through options (or a menu system as Duobix had suggested, though that probably would have taken a while to write).
- The currently selected tile would have benefited with some help text, namely the name of the building, and what it does. I know the tutorial went through it but it was a lot to memorize in once shot before playing.
- Given the amount of things to remember, actually putting a bunch of the text in the submission description would help, as players could refer to it while playing. This is also something you can change now without having to modify the game.
- There is a lack of feedback on the buildings built. I think this may tie into not knowing what the buildings were when being built, but it was also very difficult to see what each building was doing to understand how it affected food, money, resources, or population.
I feel your ambition in this game, and would love to see some post competition work done on this to make it easier to understand. It looks like there is a lot to this game, I just wish I knew how to play it properly.
Cute game. It was quite fun, but there are some strange (realistic?) physics that made the game a bit wonkiness. First I found it possible to get the dragon fast enough to launch through a wall on the outer ring. Additionally, it seemed like the dragon was very heavy and caused the wheel to turn when laying on an edge.
In the end I could only get to level 11. It was very difficult to get the dragon into a gap above above the player where you couldn't roll around an edge; the dragon would just whip too fast in the opposite direction.
I'll give you fill marks for innovation. That game was trippy and hurt my head after a while, but in a good way. The game is solid as well. I'd like to see how this will play out multiplayer, so if I get a chance with a few friends or co-workers, I'll see how it plays that way as well.
Once I got used to the movement this game is quite fun. Also I really like the symbols used the enemies. They do a good job of explaining what the enemies do, but are stylized nicely to look interesting. The only criticism I had was that it was very difficult to dodge enemy fire when attacking as your range is very small and maneuvering is slow.
My best time just under 2 minutes.
Well done sirs and/or ma'ams. This is a great game both from style and gameplay. I enjoyed it enough that I would have loved to see more levels. The only suggestion I would have made is that considering you could only jump two directions, using left and right for the jumps to cut out having to use two keys for some moves might have been more efficient. Other than that, great job.
I figured I would hit a game like this sooner or later, I just didn't expect the first to be so well done. The game is incredibly cute, I love the fact you start on a leash, and I really love the scale you took it to. The only issue I found was it looks like you didn't adjust the clipping distance as the monster got larger and the camera moved up. By the time I got to the size to eat the tower the Only a very small portion of the monster was still visible, and even less of the remaining level, which is a pitty as I really wanted to try and clear out the entire level.
Also for some inexplicable reason there is a soccer ball floating in the sky in the middle of the river. Couldn't figure that one out.
Hey, welcome to Ludum Dare, and congratulations on your first game!
As others have said, the style and art direction is spot on, but the field of view is way too narrow to make the game fun. simplest change would be to move the player off center so that you have a little bit more time to see what's coming. The other change would be to switch to a horizontal orientation so that there's more space between the edge of the screen and the player.
Really nice homage to Another World. Definitely really nice looking, and the ground biters are certainly as tough as the original ones. The game is a bit frustrating tough, especially with the long distance between the checkpoints and the random boulders. Regardless of that, fine work for two days.
Also this went through my head after dying numerous times : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwNaJAH_8-U. It's Heart of Darkness not Another World, but the games are similar.
This is a really great game! The theme was spot on and very fun. The only things that I would recommend is to have some variation on the level structure day to day as it gets repetitive to work in the same level each day/night, and the jumps felt a little off in the night phase.
@tauntButtered I did want to put music in, but I was traveling most of the weekend, so something had to be cut unfortunately.
Nice simple game. I do have a few suggestions though for future projects. It was a little confusing in the mazes to figure out the end goal; I know the panels for color changing were supposed to be hidden, but it might make more sense to call out the location of the end of the level so that players have an idea of their end goal.
Second, the controls were a little off, as you could free rotate the level but really needed to move along specific lines. I'm not sure how complex it would be in Unity (I've never used it), but it might be possible to limit movement along the lines of the mazes such that when a player presses a direction (say up) you would move along the axis that is most closely aligned with moving forward in the current perspective, rather than moving directly up and scraping the wall.
I got stuck as well at level four until I scrolled down and read the comments. You may want to add a note in the description text above that you need to use all included shapes.
Other than that, an interesting puzzle, though a bit difficult to get one's head around at first. I'm trying to think of some other indicator in the level that doesn't require adding up all the edges just for speed. Perhaps color coding the pieces as well (each color is a direction) will help players quickly see what's going to happen when the level starts running.
Interesting idea. It took many attempts to figure out how the game works (hint to other players, you need to select both the new color/shape, then the one to replace). And its also it's really difficult given the speed of the pieces moving in. It might be a little better if the game started of slower until the player gets used to all the colors and shapes in the game at once.
Pretty cool, the graphic are good and the sound is fantastic. Reminded me a little of the very old game "hunt the wumpus". It took me a few tries but I finally did manage to get the monster.
Well that was trippy. I'm not sure what I was doing (I understood how to play), but balloons to skateboard, butterflies to shapes, was a confusing choice of game design to say the least. It was interesting, and I do like the music, but did get repetitive after a while. I was also funny to spawn a hundred skateboards at once and watch them go nuts on the level.
Nice game, though I think the player's movement was a bit slow. Also as a few others had noted it might have made more sense to either have dedicated buttons for three shapes or toggle between the shapes with Q and E such that the transform happens immediately.
That was extremely trippy. I got through to the fifth dream.
There were two areas I think could improve the game. First there were a lot of narrow passages or places where only one path was available that caused a guaranteed hit from an enemy.
Second after gathering all the trickets the game was just a matter of finding all the enemies; there was no longer any risk left in the level. It might make sense to make that phase timed, and it failed, switch back to a trinket phase.
How many actual words did you record? I spent so much time trying to find how many recorded that I got an F. I seriously thought I had twelve real time hours to write the essay and was taking my time. Also video games made me lose the video game, and that statement makes my head hurt.
Nicely done! Two items I noticed; first, by the time you get all four, or even three different enemies coming, your shooting rate is no longer fast enough to shoot all the enemies, so it's just a hope that your life holds out before the boss. Second, there was no feedback on damaging the boss, and since the hit box was large, it actually looked like my shots weren't reaching Santa so I thought I might not be damaging him. Other than that, nice entry.
Congradulations on your first game. Initially I wasn't able to run the game, getting the error message:
There should be 'Elemental Escape_Data'
folder next to the executable
But I downloaded the source and threw the executable in that folder to get it to work. I couldn't figure out how to interact with the elements in the room and got squished (or rather clipped out then walked off the edge of the room). Despite that, congrats on building this, and keep working at your passions.
Congradulations on your first game and welcome to LudumDare. You're game is pretty good, but overly challenging because of a few issues that you should be able to address in your next game. The big issue is friction, which is way too low for a precision platformer. This is causing the player to slide a lot on the platforms, and to fall off smaller ones as soon as he or she lands because the player can't stop in time. This happens especially when a player tries to compensate by hitting the opposite direction as they are moving while jumping in air. Often times the player would run and slide backward upon hitting the ground 3 or 4 conveyor belt units before they stopped, which is longer than most platforms.
Second, there doesn't seem to be any checkpoint system or I had too much difficulty in the game to get to one. This is exacerbated by long start up time after dying. These together cause players frustration because they feel like they aren't progressing and have time to think about it. Your solution would be either to checkpoint the level so that the user can see their progress, like Mario or most standard platformers, or to make respawning faster by moving to right when the conveyor picks up and the first platform is in view so that the players concentration is never broken, like Super Meat Boy or Bit Trip Runner.
In any case you made something fun, and have a few ideas to make this game (if you choose to continue it) or the next that much better.
Did you make that music in the 48 hour period? It's fantastic! Other than that the game is pretty cool. The only problem I had was that often when starting the next level there would a ghost at the start point and I would immediately be hit and lose a life unfairly.
Also as a small note, I'm very happy with the small note, making the arrow to shoot alternate the rotation direction made it much easier it make controlled movement faster. It is much appreciated.
Really nicely done, but incredibly hard. I could only ever get out one turret before I was completely overrun. Perhaps a little lower BP requirements at the end to get some headway against the horde coming at you.
@rburema you can hook down to the left hook from above it. The grappling hook will just reach it.
@soundless_dev Yep. The idea initially was you were in a single room and had to pull parts of the level to you rather than move to them. I didn't really didn't pursue it far enough, but still enjoyed making it.
Unrelated to other comments, but just as a reward to those that do read these comment; my father got a look at the game when I stopped in yesterday after the competition for Sunday dinner and his first comment is, "Why did you draw a mouse in a speedo?" I told him they were shorts and it was suppost to be cute. His response, "No, Mickey is wearing shorts; that's a speedo." Thanks Dad.
Very nice looking game with a lot of interactivity and a very solid engine. The actual gameplay was a bit confusing though. I'm guessing it was a bit of a sandbox, but I didn't really understand how to use half the items in the room (crayons, or how to catch with the ball).
As a note your entry is marked as a compo entry, but I didn't see a link to the source code. As part of the competition, you need to supply a link to the source as part of the rules.
The game looks wonderful, and very impressive to build such an game in 48 hours. There wasn't much actual puzzle solving for an adventure game, but given the time not a big deal. Question though, how did she hide the key before having her body locked inside the chest, and why would your uncle leave you in that room with all the evidence. I think I might be overthinking this for a 48h competition.
I also got the error message
___________________________________________
############################################################################################
FATAL ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object objWall:
Fatal Error: Can not create vertex buffer of size 98304 bytes
5813 vertex buffers allocated with total size of 965472 KB
at gml_Object_objWall_Draw_0
############################################################################################
Notes on my system if it helps:
- Windows 10
- 16.0 RAM
- Laptop
- I do not have any form of game maker installed.
Nice little arena shooter. I wasn't sure what the heat stat was for, but everything else made sense.
Unfortunately, I played this game on a laptop, which made the game very hard (because of the touch pad rather than a dedicated mouse). Game pad controls with dual analogs would be wonderful for this style of game, but I'm not sure how difficult that would be to implement in Love2d.
Also, I did find a bug where I could move pretty far off the edge of the map either to the right or down, there was an eventual barrier, but it was pretty far back.
Technically interesting game, it is unfortunately very slow to make money; I let it run for ten minutes and hadn't made enough money to hire or buy new equipment. However, despite that, it's pretty cool to see a complex manufacturing pipeline together in 48 hours. Well done.
Best time was a measly 41 seconds. You audio was solid, and I liked the alien designs, but the controls we're a bit off; sometimes I would try jumping and nothing would happen. Also, I'm not sure if it's just me, but it felt a little disorienting that if you didn't push any buttons, the player automatically walk to stay in the same place on the screen. I would have expected the player to stay connected with the same point on the octagon as long as the angle isn't too steep.
I'm getting a 404 on the Windows download, and unfortunately cannot play the game.
I really liked this! The puzzles were good, and some took a few minutes to totally figure out. Also was the easter egg slurping up the last of a soda or the sound of phelgm.
The game works well mechanically, but there is some balance issues here. It's incredibly difficult to keep sleep and temperature near optimal while having enough money to build and fire the cannon. The infinite money version helped a bit with learning how things work, but perhaps some levels of difficulty before the normal game to build up skill in the game would help.
While simple, this game is interesting a rather unique among the other games I've played in that inaction is often better than action when possible. It's also very peaceful to stay and stand in one place when you can (the sound design is fantastic!). As a mild introvert, I can understand the overwhelming feeling of the presence of other people, so this speaks to me, especially after playing it right after Christmas. Good job!
Also, my best alone time is 101.2 seconds, mostly hiding in the corners.
Very good music and cute graphics. I unfortunately had a very difficult time against the AIs. It would just move back and forth along the same line and I couldn't figure out how to damage it. I wonder if there could be some punishment for going over the same location repeatedly or over your own line.
Interesting game play that reminds me a bit of if strategy mini-games in Final Fantasy 6 and 7. The AI seemed very unfair though, as I saw in the first round it spawned four grunts and several other units, which meant it could spawn more that I had available. I was also pretty confused by what unit did what so it was a lot of random guesswork picking units.
Took me a while to figure out how to play. I was under the impression that I needed to swing up to get out, but then realized you can wall jump after looking at the posted video (good idea!). The game was quite fun, but the fact that the timer doesn't reset until it ticks down was annoying. More than once I thought I had the level finished but ran out of time because I only had four or five seconds left after grabbing the crown.
I took the try not to mess the house up seriously initially, but first round my opponent spawn on the couch; roombas must weigh a ton 'cause that couch went flying. After that it just made sense to trash the place. Getting the computer was surprisingly hard, as it's really difficult to sneak behind it. Other than that, cool game in general, though I was only able to play the single player game. IF I can get over and see my brother we may try the two player version.
Very nice solid game, especially for it being the first time you used a tool. I was able to both endings, though I don't quite understand why doing what you did gave you the good ending. I would have liked to have seen a consequence to that action, though I'm guessing you had it planned out but ran out of time.
Very fun. You did a great job using your time wisely to make something simple but very polished. I enjoyed the game very much but wasn't particularly good at it (clocking in at 38.80 at my best), but it definitely is a game that requires a lot of practice to master.
Usually in the Ludum Dare a lot of arena shooters get made, because, well, they are easy to make; I'm very happy to see that you've made something really innovative and fun with the genre. Once I realized that I could hold down space and warp, the game became much more strategic. I'm very happy to have played it.
This is nitpicky, but one thing I would love to see is instead of increasing the length of time on a level, vary it up with other enemy types or more difficult terrain (such as spiked floors or walls) so that the game stays fresh.
Hehe, a very funny and unique concept, and a pretty out of the box interpretation of the theme. I don't think I have much constructive criticism on this game, it is very well made. The only thing I would mention is that in a few levels the ducks, geese, or whatever they are spawn at the same point as the player and end up blocking movement for a while right off the bat. I got two failures off the bat before I could even really move.
Nifty little growth game. Took me two tried to get through (I got shot too many times on the farm stage before I realized I could jump up over the farm house). Really did like the slightly unsettling music.
There were a few inconsistencies mechanics that were confusing though. First, movement speed seemed to work oddly. Sometimes walking became incredibly slow, second most smaller enemies are consumed on touching them from any orientation, but the soldiers in the last scene won't be consumed if you jump on them. Not sure why but with the slow horizontal movement sometimes I thought I was going to get shot too much before I could get off the soldiers and eat them from the ground level.
Okay, so I initially had the same glitch issues as others. Going through the clear data option does fix the issues people have stated. My guess is that you have something uninitialized by default that is good on your system because of persistent data. As a simple fix for the purposes of the game jam you can just run the clear data route in start so that others can play (you can fix this now as game breaking bugs can be fixed after the 48 hours).
In addition here is some constructive criticism: - It wasn't initially obvious that robots reaching the other side of the screen kill you. An extra line in the help screen. Likewise it wasn't obvious what finished a level. Have a countdown on the level or again information in help would have reduced the confusion. - The Polynesian (?) robots introduced in level 4 can be impossible to hit. At times they can start running at the bottom side of the screen and the time it takes to turn and shoot them is too slow until you are completely powered up. At level 4 that felt a little unfair.
Edit: okay now the source links are showing.
@WillData thanks! The map is included as one of the download links.
@batheo3000 and @FloBar, nearly all the time was spent designing the levels. Other than standard jumping, the only player controls are air jump and forward surge. There are no enemies, and the only interactive elements are two pickups and a checkpoint, each are maybe 20 lines of code. All told coding was only about 6 hours of the time. The graphics consist of a small set of tiles (around 60) that are reused in slight variarions to make areas look different even though they use close to the same graphics.
@jakylgamer you may need directx, the other platform link is to the directx installer
@shell-pirate Thanks for the detailed critique. I do need to figure out the analog controls on the pad as that was the first thing noted by someone I had play yesterday when they were physically in front of me. I'll can probably patch that in without a lot of work. I believe the stiffness in some of the controls is that the two boosts are a fixed direction, you either boost directly horizontal or directly vertical. The horizontal one is probably fine, but the vertical one can feel stiff especially if you are in the middle of a horizontal jump. I could probably implement a diagonal jump based on the direction the user is pressing which would mitigate the issue, but that will take a bit more work as I'll have to retool a lot of the rooms to accommodate that extra ability.
Finally, with the collision detection on the wall, I'm not sure what you mean there, can you elaborate more?
I also received a crash. The error log file is as follows:
``` Game DLL requesting 128.00 mb of memory main: app path: C:\Users\dalbi\Downloads\Ludum Dare\LD39_JumpingJehosaphat\JumpingJehosaphat main: user path: C:\Users\dalbi\Downloads\Ludum Dare\LD39_JumpingJehosaphat\JumpingJehosaphat main: initializing 128.00 mb of memory OpenGL: creating DC OpenGL: setting pixel format OpenGL: creating OpenGL context OpenGL: setting context to current OpenGL: Vsync: false OpenGL: setting viewport Could not compile shader: 35633 Reason: ERROR: 0:12: 'output' : reserved word ERROR: 0:12: 'output' : syntax error syntax error
OpenGL: Unable to compile vertex shader. Failed vertex shader: #version 330 core
layout (location = 0) in vec3 _ztvv_position; layout (location = 1) in vec2 _ztvv_uv; layout (location = 2) in vec3 _ztvv_normal; layout (location = 3) in vec4 _ztvv_color;
out PixelInput { vec4 position; vec4 color; } output;
uniform mat4 model; uniform mat4 projection; uniform mat4 view;
void main() { gl_Position = projection * view * model * vec4(_ztvv_position, 1.0); output.color = _ztvv_color; }
Failed fragment shader: #version 330 core
out vec4 _ztfs_frag_color;
in PixelInput { vec4 position; vec4 color; } input;
void main() { _ztfs_frag_color = input.color; }
Unable to compile OpenGL shader program main: Failed to load default shader: shader-solid ```
You weren't kidding when you mentioned difficult controls! Getting my head around that some of the controls had to be toggled on and off while some didn't, as well as the thrust being in an odd location made playing this difficult, especially with the initial area being so tight. The fact that I kept needing to move my hands around the keyboard to play the space shooter part of the game made it pretty slow going.
I would suggest your movement controls be set up on WASD and no necessarily need to turn them on (just have using them expend energy) then you'd only have to worry about shields and shot for most of the game (besides upgrading the ship).
Other than that, the sound that was there was appropriate, and the graphics were good, though the glyphs on the ship were difficult to determine what they meant until you upgraded one and read the name from the event log.
So, first off I do like the controls. At first I thought, wait why are actions on the arrow keys, but it's a pretty good way to emulate a gamepad on a keyboard. Also the music while odd initially (at first I thought it might be procedurally generated but then it started to come together, and I like the touch where the soundtrack changes slightly as you enter the caverns.
From a critical standpoint, I think I agree with some of the other comments that it is tedious to run back and forth through the same area over and over again. Some back tracking is fine, but having to do it many times gets irritating. There's two ways to solve this. One is to move the start location to a central area so that you have different areas to find with out the same intermediary. Another is to branch early so that you don't need to go through as much of the same area. Finally, reward the player with something that made it easier to back track such as bombs that open a hole you couldn't get through previously, unlocking warps along the way.
Finally, I think the implementation of the bats are a bit off. They move quickly often along an axis you can't shoot on and cling in a location you can't always shoot at. If you get more than one on you it can completely drain your life in a few seconds before you can break off and shoot them. Additionally, they sometimes get very fast and bounce off the walls a lot.
Great concept and use of theme. Even though you bought assets for the game you did make a good choice on aesthetic which helped the overall flow of the game. I did hit a few snags while playing, though. First I did hit a lot of the camera issues others talked about. Additionally at some point I lost the ability to drink coffee. I was standing next to 3 or 4 cups and pressing E did nothing. Are there empty cups in the game? I wasn't sure because all the cups up to that point would disappear once consumed.
Disclaimer before you read this; I played with headphones first, and had no luck, but could here things better with regular stereo speakers.
After a lot of trial and error I started to get a handle on the mechanics and was able to get to level 4. The best I could gather from the game play was that I had to figure out what door the sound was coming from and not go in that door. This seemed simple enough and I got far solely on that information.
A few games in, I realized there was a flashlight that I can use (I'm guessing I was good at hitting the door the first time). Again I thought this was a limited resource to find doors as you get later on and thought that was it. Then I read the comments and saw comments about the speed at which the enemy was coming and comments about the graphics being great (which not to offend, but so far all that I had seen was a static scene which while not badly drawn wasn't particularly special). All this leads me to believe I'm missing something about this game. I don't know if I'm not, but it gives me an uneasy feeling that even by level 4, I wasn't sure I knew what I was doing.
So, given this, the biggest issue is that the game doesn't do a good job explaining itself. I know there is a "How To Play" section, but I didn't gleam a lot of information from it ("Click on the door you think is safe" is too obtuse if the game doesn't teach you what is safe). I'm not suggesting that you spell everything out, as that would kill the mood, but you need a way to teach the user the language of the game in a lower risk environment. A quick way would be to really telegraph the audio at the beginning, and slowly obscuring the audio in a logical manner, or using specific sounds relevant to the scene that help clue you in as to what is happening (knock over a vase, or closing a window to block out the outdoor sounds) or using the same things to manipulate the scene.
Also as a note the audio direction is great, and you should focus on explaining what is going on through audio to keep the mood consistent. I'd go so far as to narrate the story rather than have the user read it.
The game has a very nice arcade style to it, and while minimalist, even the two note "song" in game works really nicely given the aesthetic. The game does end quickly (or I'm bad), but what I would recommend if you choose to continue developing this, is to add some "set piece" enemy patterns that can be used for big recharges to perpetuate the game longer.
Also note, my high score was 3040.
Congratulations on your first entry! This is quite program to destroy a keyboard (I was tempted to record the sound I was making hitting the key as fast as possible and upload it for your listening pleasure). The game as has been said is pretty limited which is fine from a first attempt aspect, as getting anything is a huge accomplishment, so I'd say take away the areas that slowed you down and turned this from a Compo entry to a Jam entry, and work on that in between now and the next competition and work on improving that.
Made to the boss in level 3 a few times. I enjoyed the game but did get frustrated at how much work it took to get to the boss only to be one shot killed by it despite having a ton of life left. I think it would be a bit less frustrating with a checkpoint for getting to the boss (or even simpler, make the boss it's own level). Very challenging games can be okay so long as the retry loop is tight, but in this case you have a longer level with a lot of timed jumps to repeat to get to the boss and after a while that can get frustrating.
First off the graphics look great in this and you've got some good humor; I unfortunately couldn't read through all the text as sometimes it would flyby too fast (it would advance multiple times on a single click if I wasn't very fast), but what I did catch was good. I also liked now the enemies advanced like they were puppets. It was a funny gesture that helped the aesthetic of humor.
I was a little sad that there didn't seem to be any audio. I did see a comment above that there wasn't enough audio, so I'm wondering if the build I played was broken (I played on the web). Additionally, it took a lot of getting used to the position of where the lightning bolt would come from since when you turned around wasn't in the same position. Moving the place where the lightning came from closer to center would help prevent this confusion.
Additionally, for most of the game, spamming the sweeping lightning bolt would complete the level with ease. Level 8 and 9 required a different strategy and were a lot more interesting. I'm not sure the best way to prevent people from sticking with this strategy (possibly enemies immune to that type of lightning) but it's worth considering who to encourage experimentation on different strategies instead of going for a boring but effective one.
Also as a note to your previous comments on getting an official notice, this is a community judged and reviewed competition; there won't be any official notice other than your peers. While you are free and encouraged to continue developing your game after the competition and link the post-competition version here, you need to keep the original version playable as that is what you are being judged on. The only changes that you can do that would replace the original version and still be good from the competition are fixing game breaking bugs or minor fixes like spelling errors that have no bearing on the mechanics or aesthetics of the game.
Congratulations on your first entry! After a couple of plays my score was 424 (note that the score seems to keep ticking up after game over). Nice solid simple game. The first few tries I got a game over quickly because of overcharge, until I learned not to use the bonus until after a few charges, but after that I understood the strategy. Good game!
Nicely done for your first LD entry and for only coding for a few weeks! The game is perfectly solid from a gameplay aspect. Recharging was a little odd, some times when I stood on the generator it filled quickly, other times if felt like it wasn't recharging at all. The sound is great and the graphics work too. Good job overall.
Beautiful sound and graphics, and you did a very good job teaching me how to play. The first time I played I hit a game ending bug. I found the room with the security door after only unlocking one security terminal (forgot what it was actually called but they are the blue lightbulb things. I went back up but it put me back in the same room and couldn't leave. Was able to complete the game on the second try.
The game is fun and well designed. The biggest suggestion I would give is to extend the size of the window a little bit so that scrolling isn't needed. as I needed to walk to each edge to see if there was a door. Is suppose this wouldn't work in the last room as it is bigger than the other rooms, but for everything else this would be a big help.
Finally, the sound was catchy enough that I did actually sing the monitor text boxes along with the music. Good job there.
Final score 660602. Entire screen was ball, entire life is ball. BALL.
As a serious note, this feels like a physic engine test more than a game, but that's not a bad thing. This is the kinda thing you get a few people together and just laugh and go nuts as the game get gets more ridiculous. You've also gotten a good base for a collection of games, with minimal extra work you can make a ton of great games that can be strung together in one cohesive unit based on smashing things with a ball. Two player combat, time trials, single shot high score runs, attack and defend specific buildings. Small variations can make a great party game. I did have a lot of fun until of course the entire screen was filled by ball.
First off there is a bug where the music can play multiple copies after restarting the game. I played about 7 times in testing with a restart and by then the music was getting painful.
The game is fun and both the graphics and sound design are excellent. The flying enemies are very hard to dodge. I would suggest making more forgiving hit boxes. Also I would like to see some more variety as the game, despite how short a round is, I think some additional variations being brought after a few planet recharges would make things interesting. Then again it could be that I'm bad and didn't see any more content. The longest I lasted was 3 minutes.
The controls were very concentrated on one side of the keyboard, making my right hand was very jealous of my left hand with this game. Moving at least the drift button over would have made the controls a little more manageable.
Second the cornering is very slow, making some of the turns extremely difficult, or else I didn't get the hang of it. On the second course, there is an S turn right after the last checkpoint before the lap marker, and for the life of me I could not stay on the track. I feel handbrake turning would be very useful in this case and would make managing the tight curves possible. Then again, I don't play much racing games other than Wipeout, so I'm partial to handbrake turns.
Despite this though the games aesthetic was great. The music was appropriate for the mood and everything looked great, but need to either make the controls a bit tighter, or ease the player into them with some difficulty ramping via easier initial levels where they can learn the controls better.
The controls were very concentrated on one side of the keyboard, making my right hand was very jealous of my left hand with this game. Moving at least the drift button over would have made the controls a little more manageable.
Second the cornering is very slow, making some of the turns extremely difficult, or else I didn't get the hang of it. On the second course, there is an S turn right after the last checkpoint before the lap marker, and for the life of me I could not stay on the track. I feel handbrake turning would be very useful in this case and would make managing the tight curves possible. Then again, I don't play much racing games other than Wipeout, so I'm partial to handbrake turns.
Despite this though the games aesthetic was great. The music was appropriate for the mood and everything looked great, but need to either make the controls a bit tighter, or ease the player into them with some difficulty ramping via easier initial levels where they can learn the controls better.
Congratulations on your first game! It's always great to see new people try out good ideas.
As a quick note the instructions are wrong, at least for my keyboard (US), left is A not W. That was a bit confusing, but a quick description edit can correct that.
The music and graphics are great, but since you opted out of them, I'm guessing they weren't made specifically for this game. The game play is good but schizophrenic; specifically it feels like I'm playing to games simultaneously, the math game and the collection game. Both feel like kids game (not a bad thing, it does feel at least slightly educational), but together it is confusing who your intended audience is. It might be worth rethinking how to combine the two ideas in a bit more cohesive manner. Perhaps putting the numbers on pipes and having to catch the right thing and put it in the bin to select the answer or something similar.
Additionally, something is not resetting from game to game, as subsequent restarts are faster to the point that the game will give an instant game over after a while. Additionally there are times where both match answers spawn in the same vertical column making it impossible to hit the correct option in a few cases.
Oh dear, that's quite the interpretation of the theme. You made it worse for yourself instead of us! I thank you for that.
So as a quick note, I played the web version first, and there are issues there. Virtual Man just doesn't work, neither does clicker. High scores don't save. So I switched back over to the windows version which does work better. The games are nice, and while the aesthetic is simple, the uniformity across the 20 games makes it very cohesive. I also love the gratuitous explosions you've put throughout the games. It really makes the games pop much more than you would think.
I think the one thing I wound suggest to add is to have some form of communal score tally so that your score is the sum of all scores. This would require some balance on the game scores but shouldn't be too bad.
Also Lander... I hate that game. I am so bad.
@anaconda-games Do you have specific one's that you had issues with. I had a few people play the game after submission and watched them play, and the on people seem to get stuck at is "Blocks can also block wolves." I may need to provide a hint on that one.
@kogasilverdragon I think you are the first person to say they actually completed all the levels without help! I've watched five people try to complete it and get stuck so I was afraid the game was too hard. This makes me feel better.
Wow that was a lovely game! The aesthetic works very well and the game is very fun. I would definitely like to see this game expanded. I don't have much in the form of constructive criticism, which is a testament to how well you put together a fun game. The only think I had issue was it took me a moment to figure out the correct button to use to make a shot the symbol looked like a 0 but it ended up being Z. Didn't take long to figure it out. Thanks for the fun evening after a long day!
PS: Only six piggies destroyed. I think that was rather humane overall.
Not sure if my dumb luck was through the roof or what, but made it pretty far without an injury (except running out of toilet paper, that took 99 health). I survived to the point where I had unlocked everything and wasn't sure where to go from there. I may have just been lucky, but I had very few injuries so drug resistance didn't really factor in as much as I thought it would.
Anyway, the concept is pretty cool; I suppose if you wanted to continue this, sponsorship and or trending themes would be interesting additions; both would reward you with money or people if you took on challenges that matched wants, but you've have to time it to hit the height of it and not lose people from being old hat on a trend.
Hey this is a pretty nifty game; hard, but very quick to restart a level and you don't lose too much progress which is nice. I enjoyed it to the end. I did find a few things frustrating, mostly minor, but I'd like to give the criticism to help you improve. First off the boss fight was very frustrating. I'm not sure you need to make it less difficult, but I thin it might make sense to make a few levels before it that have some more of the same traps (like platforms pulling you into spikes) to get the player used to the attack. The other thing was that there were too many levels where if you didn't immediately react at the start of the the level you would die. A Cheap death like that is a bit frustrating especially when a player is trying to get a handle on the level itself. Consider moving back the chasing enemies a littler further back or have them shine (telegraph position) for a split second so that the player knows immediately that they need to react. Finally, the colors which nice stylistically made it difficult to understand what was and was not background. Typically old 8 bit style games would use warmer colors for foreground and cooler colors for the background. In your case using blue and green might not make sense for the background but either brown or a darker purple would work in here.
Okay just realized there was a pause menu with palette options. The grayscale works better for understanding the graphics, but I think you're still better off introducing an additional color for the background elements that the player can move through.
The graphics and sound on this game are quite impressive! I player the game quite a few times, but didn't get very far due to a few issues. First off, the controls feel very sluggish when swinging the sword. Looking at the animation, there isn't a lot of leading frames, but it still feels like it takes a while to make a swing, which in turn make combat feel clunky. Second, there were spots where the bat would spawn just after a spike, and wouldn't wake up unless you jumped over the spike towards them. This would guarantee at least hitting the spike and because there are so little invincibility frames I'd usually lose two hearts there, making it impossible to proceed by skill in those situations. Finally, as a side note, I did have a case where a blob/slime wouldn't die when attacked, but kept dropping the little spheres. There might be a bug where the enemy doesn't despawn.
Sorry for going on with that. The game is beautiful though, and I love the sound track. I think a few small tweaks would make this game much more enjoyable. You aren't far off from something really good.
Nice well to put together stacking game! Lots of strange unique items to deal with. I do have an exploit though that makes the game easier. You can spawn items over lava to discard without penalty. This means you can pick out your next piece and just get things like boxes and computers that stack easily.
Great concept here, and the game looks really nice, but ran into two issue. First off, the game runs very slow. I'm running on a surface pro 2017, which while it's not a gaming rig, is certainly no slouch either, but I was getting very low frame rate (maybe 5fps) that made it hard to figure out what was going on. Second, there didn't seem to be much of a penalty for buying help with the water. I didn't get any penalty at the end for the amount of water I had. It did feel like a case of not completing everything you intended on the game, and if so I'm curious if you'll continue developing after the competition.
The game looks nice, and I especially like the designs of some of the monsters a lot. The actual game mechanics were a bit clunky though. It was very difficult to determine how to make an egg survive. Initially I thought that you just had to click the egg as soon as possible, but that would cause the egg to just die further in the foreground. Eventually I guessed you had to let the egg stay in it's spawn location until just before it cracks then move it forward but I wasn't entirely sure. Can you clarify?
Congratulations on your first game! I have two small suggestions to help improve it if you desire to pursue working on games. First off there is some odd collision detection on the lymphatic elements, causing you to die sometimes when on a gray platform. An easy way to detect that is to drow to the right from the first platform and walk towards the left edge of the platform, you'll die before reaching the green. I'm guessing the collision bounds of the player sink slightly lower than the platform due to gravity and then you push it back up when you detect collision with the background. If that is the case, testing for background collision and moving the player up before detecting if they hit the trap should fix this.
Second, jumping is very stiff. You need to jump straight up then fall in the direction to want to go to get from platform to platform. Allowing a jump arc would be much more natural. You can probably find a document on how jumps are implemented in super mario brothers to get the exact algorithms used as that would be a good starting place for "fun" jumping mechanics.
Howdy! So I'm playing on a laptop with a touch pad so controls are bit of an issue, but I was pleased to see that you supported both QWERTY and AZERTY keyboards which made things easier to control. The game looks and sounds very nice; I see you opted out of sound and graphics, but even it they were pulled from other sources, the aesthetic is nice and cohesive.
I had an issue in game play on the first wave the first time I played, and again on the second wave. There was one enemy that I couldn't kill. I tried rotating between weapons with 1 through 4 and the elements with E, but nothing seemed to work. I'm not sure if I had to marry up the element with a specific weapon but if that was the case, I didn't seen anything specific on the enemies that would make it easier to determine what combinations are required.
I'll try again and see if I can cause it to happen again.
The artwork on this is very nicely done, especially the alien. I do have two issues. The hit box on the fish is very finicky. Even when I got a situation where it bounced off something and was motionless, it was difficult to successfully click it. Second it didn't feel obvious how to maximize score given that score for eating was proportional to the fullness it provided. So I wasn't sure what to do to actually improve. Perhaps some way to mitigate fullness so that strategy could be developed on gaming. Not sure, just felt it was missing something.
Also note: my highest score was 400.
Howdy! So here's an interesting bug, I started the game up and then got distracted for a moment before I pressed start, and then as soon as I started the game, I hit a game over screen lasting for 600 seconds even without actually playing. I think part of the game scoring or timer starts as soon as the game runs, not when you actually press the start button and get control. Also this game
Besides that the game looks great. It makes sense, though initially I built a few buildings too away and had issues, so as a suggestion, a radius of influence on the buildings when dropping them would be nice. It does ramp up pretty quickly, and you end up with an overcrowded map with people that can't be satisfied. As a suggestion if you pursue this, it may make sense to provide spaces that cannot be taken by house, and be able to build over spaces.
Despite those criticisms, this is a very polished looking game that was quite fun to play. Great job.
Best score was 5864 after 191s.
Didn't realize this is local multiplayer, I'll get my brother when he's off (either later tonight or on his actual day off to get some proper testing), but I did test a single player game, which by itself was fun. I'll update the review after playing with him, but my impressions so far. First off, just a quick suggestion; you should spell out that shield and dashing cost honey. It wasn't immediately obvious that was the case when I started playing, and I couldn't figure out what the cool down or anything like that until I realized all my honey was gone. This should be a quick change to the instructions so that should be an easy change.
Second, the controls are great; this is an area so many games mess up in Ludum Dare, but you rightfully kept it simple and made a good choice on what to use that was pretty universal for all users. I'm playing on a laptop with a touch pad and the controls worked just fine. Gameplay was also good, though presentation was pretty simple, I see all three folks listed as "Programmer" so that's understandable.
Finally, I don have one concern on gameplay. It's completely loss of honey on death. As far as I could tell it was a one hit kill; so it feels that a lot of the three minutes playing will be randomly losing everything and then getting back to first place by someone else randomly dying rather than skill. It may make more sense to only penalize the player with some lost honey, or have bee hitting cause you to drop honey that others can snatch up. That way skill would play a little more into the final result.
@feedlipe Glad I could be of help. I'll get more feedback as soon as I can get a a partner for the multiplayer.
@rodel77 @bloodjohn @winnie33 You are correct about font. I've corrected the issue for readability.
I quite like what you've done here. I expected a lot of games to have a wall coming in to crush you aspect to them, but I was really happy that you made them part of the actual puzzle, by making the process controllable and predictable, as well as an integral part to solving puzzles. I was able to make it to level 9, but after 50 attempts I had to concede, I think I see the solution, but it feels like it's a matter of being incredibly precise on movement, and I couldn't find the exact movements to quite get into the little room housing the exit (I was squished enough times above or below). Is the margin of error that tight on that level?
Congratulations on your first Ludum Dare entry! Your game is a bit confusing; it feels like the game was a bit more commentary than game (in that you will always lose), but I did manage to at least keep peace alive until the second to last tiny piece of ice. The audio is good, but there were some odd effects on the penguins' graphics that didn't make as much sense. Specifically, some penguins would turn completely black but still be moving around, and one penguin turns blue for reason I can see.
Play through #1, I can do this, wait no stop, STALP! 17 cats later I lost. The extra strays making it challenging. Ended with 17 cats and got yelled at. Play through #2, let's rub the cats together to see if I can crash my computer.
In all seriousness, the concept was simple but appropriate; and a nice joke since you are literally herding cats. The cat's movement makes sense, not too frenetic, but stubborn. The only technical issue I had was that there were times where either pick up the cat or putting them down didn't trigger as expected. I couldn't figure out if it was an input reading or a hitbox issue.
Sound is very good in this game, but the controls get me very confused; I feel left and right are reversed as A turns right and D turns left. I spent so much of the time pressing the opposite direction to what I wanted to go (I haven't played a lot of games with tank controls, but I don't remember them working like this.
A very cute and fun idea. The game is very composed and has some good puzzle elements I would like further explored. I really would love to see more puzzles here as it was over way too quickly.
Cool idea of make inventory one use slots. The bounding boxes on the character and environment was a little wonky. Sometimes the area would be clear and the character would get suck, and often it would look like you could go off to the next room and you are blocked by nothing. To fix the first, you could shrink the hit box slightly into the characters, and for the second, just make sure the edges that you can't walk through are drawn with a barrier that matches the collision box.
Good use of theme. The controls had a bit of issues in a few ways: - one logic to determine throw was odd, I had to kind of struggle until I got an angle I liked. I think you were moving an aiming point, but angle and throw distance would be more intuitive. - There is bug that when picking up characters, often times I could not move until I dropped them and picked them up. - I fumbled on the controls a lot. The three buttons didn't click well for me. It's not that I can't play games with many buttons, but the controls didn't feel very distinct. I think the controls could have boiled down to a single button. tap to grab and drop, hold to throw.
@jcmonkey, Yeah I watched a few folks hit that bug and one other. Unfortunately it's not game breaking so I can't sneak in a fix for the competition.
@jackson-makes-games It's a bit tricky to do it. I should have put some simpler levels first to teach making bridges. The trick is to build a bridge on the right side of the block to get across to the left side, drop a bot on the left to prevent the block from sliding. finally you need to put an exploding bot on the right side to remove the bridge blocks, and run over to the left side before the bridge explodes.
Very nicely done! I'm impressed across the board on this one; do wish for a longer game as I was having fun, but game jams are very hard to have that much polish and a ton of content.You even had a good difficulty curve. I would like to see some more to this game if you get the time and inkling to continue it.
I can give one piece of constructive criticism. The hit box on the player when in the larger state was difficult to determine, especially when jumping or falling (there was a point I needed to jump up through a narrow gap, and hit the blocks to the side a few times until I got through) a solution would be to have the body trail above or below the character when moving vertically so that it's clear that the head is the bounding box (if you changed it to that) and what will fit through the gap.
It's an interesting idea and aesthetic (reminds my a bit of ZX Spectrum), but the lack of any choice, especially with such a heavy story hurt it a little bit. It's a good joke, but the super seriousness of your character to the silliness of the other planets is a little too jarring between. Some middle ground would serve the game better.
Good use of the mechanics but the game was very difficult. I lost a large number of units on the first round (I was down to just soldiers and mages) and I would lose a lot more characters than I would ever get back. I never got beyond three battles.
Ooh this is the first really fun game I've played. It was a bit random feeling at first, but after a few plays I started to understand how to control the character and make shots. I do enjoy it and need to see if I can get someone to play with me later. The theme felt a little weak, but game is fun, so kudos!
A fantastic amount of polish here, in sound and graphics. The idea is executed well, though there are a handful of issues that detract from the overall experience. The controls are a little slippery and the level that zig-zagged down with cannons is way too long. Games where dying a lot to complete a level need to have a fast restart cycle. Think something like super meat boy or Celeste where each puzzle may cause tons of death, but each play cycle is seconds long. By the lower levels I was waiting around a minute, and with 50 deaths, the level devolved down to tedium. Splitting that level up into multiple levels with tweaks to patterns an solutions would flow a lot better.
Like the mechanics of the card game, and the graphics are cute. The only issue I had was that once I got to the boss the deck was shuffled such that there were no attack cards, just buffs and green cards. I couldn't actually make a hit. Either you could generate a stacked deck, or write logic that ensured a hand had at a minimum a few attack cards (i.e. mulligan). You would possibly need to swap some cards out if the player got into the same position I did.
Congrats on your first game! The game worked well; the only bug I found that it was possible in some jumps to embed yourself in the wall and get stuck for a bit, but you could wiggle your way out and jump again. I'm also impressed that you put in a map on the pause screen; that might be a first for me seeing that. One other thing I noticed was that I could keep jumping back and forth into a room and re-kill the same enemies; that sometimes game me points to spend, sometimes not. I'm guessing there was a level up system or something but it wasn't obvious.
@drprettypatty yeah so the game loads all the actors for a room, but the collision bounds extend out beyond the current room, so a monster could theoretically go explore the entire map. They get cleaned up when you solve a room or leave it, but I probably should have handled it better.
@jharler I spent most of the time programming the mechanics. The level was about 7 hours of design, while the music got only an hour, and it shows.
This game looks and sound great, but the place of the game is very slow. I spent a very long time typing on the first round and while I can type pretty fast, took a lot of typing to cause damage. Additionally, in the second round after the first or second block of text, and at the end it wouldn't progress to the next block, so I just had to sit there and watch my character get slaughtered.
@megamasterx Pulling it down now.
Okay, I got through round two now, barely... after that round it said press space to continue, but wouldn't continue. It looks like from your description above that may be the entire game though?
The game is a pretty cool concept and one I wanted to play more, but I had two issues that made this game feel irritating. First is that this game crashed a lot, making it difficult to make any progress in the game. It always crashes on the menu, and usually after about 5 rounds, though I've had it happen sooner. Second, the ship controls are way too fast, and I ended up killed myself too much by moving down to far even on a quick tap; it might have been less frustrating if the bottom of the screen just stopped the player instead of killing them.
Wow! This is the probably the most complete game I've seen in Ludum Dare ever. You nailed aesthetic, and mechanically it felt so much like a parody of oregon trail. It's been a long time since I have played the original, but it feels just right. About the only thing wrong I notices is that the Sheriff likes to beat a dead horse; he killed my partner then shot him three more times before switching over to my main character.
I made it 189 days before being shot by the sheriff.
This game is the incredibly fun. I made it to level 9 before losing, and enjoyed it the whole way through. I am also very impressed with the subtle language you used in the game. Very little is actually outright explained, but the visual cues teach a lot, and while the board is completely filled, the simple art style and use of color, make it very easy to understand what is happening. Thumbs up all around!
This is a really fun game! I don't see much of the theme here, but that doesn't mean it wasn't cool. I do like the mechanics of changing the shadow direction to get information. The controls were a bit frustrating, especially on the small platforms, but overall I enjoyed playing your game.
@quixatocs My first thought would be to make the horizontal motion less floaty. It's a bit slippery, and mid air direction changes are hard as momentum in the previous direction still exists. While it makes sense from a physics standpoint with such small platforms, the tighter controls would be more helpful.
The game is certainly humorous! I did get confused a bit on whether or not my choices were positive though. I lost points when I got someone happy that they were having someone come to their birthday, but I couldn't tell why. It seemed very random. Also there seems to be a slight offset between the audio beat and the options selected, as sometimes I would here the beat, hit enter but still be on the old option, but I can certainly forgive that, as syncing games to audio is really difficult.
This is a really cool idea! The game feels incomplete though. For a while I was stuck, then I realized that there was a different set of moves. While an undo was probably too difficult to build in the time frame, restarting a "chapter" when the board is reset probably could have been easier to do. Just something to keep in mind if you continue this.
So very cute! The aesthetics were excellent, especially with the dead pixels and line glitches that could happen on a basic LCD panel. The game rather repetitive, but I understand that this wasn't really about game play so much as the "story" you were going for, so it makes complete sense it worked the way it does.
Wave 1: What I am I doing? Wave 2: No turrets, you are helping the golfers. Wave 3: I don't understand, what's the strategy. Wave 4: Wait I can upgrade. Wave 5: Wow this is getting a bit frenetic. ... Wave 7: This is kind of funny. ... Wave 10: It's so beautiful.
Okay, seriously, it's a bit random but really funny to watch. Really cool concept and would love to see more like this.
I think you found a good audience for your game here with a high programmer demographic. I love games like space chem, so this is up my alley. It took me a while to figure out the numbers as they were random until I realized you run through several iterations to prove someone didn't brute force a solution, which is nice. While the interface is simple, that was a lot to build in 48 hours, so kudos.
I also encountered the issue listed about but was able to restart and play through without issue; my best play through is level 9 with a score of 3600. So the concept is nice once I figured it out. A little bit of instructions on how gaining life works with the matching part would have been helpful as it took me a few tries to get the hang of it. Still not sure how much life I get per match or if there are different rules for different situations. Despite this, the game is fun and I could see it being expanded into bigger game.
Nicely done; the gameboy aesthetic was wonderful, and the game was very well done. The only complaint I had was that the platforms weren't timed together, so you needed to wait a while sometimes to get them lined up in a way that you could actually make the jump. Also I think it was just me, but I got the possible end codes down to two from all the clues, as 3 could be in two positions and match everything. I swore I put in both codes and failed, but came back later and put in the correct code with about 4 seconds to spare.
I did find one convenient bug. You can pause on the passcode dialog and still control, so it pauses the timer while you put in a passcode.
Also not sure why but the game automatically took a screenshot of this at the end. Was it there to prove I finished it, or am I missing a secret somewhere? LudumDareSnapshot.png
Unfortunately I wasn't able to get folks in to play a multiplayer game when I was tried (I tried getting a bunch of folks to play with me that I knew but they all were a bunch of bums). I had the issue where all the triceritops would congregate roughly where I started but floating in the air so I couldn't attack them. This made it difficult to progress. Eventually they would start walking off into the ocean. I think we could consider that a game breaking bug, so if it can be corrected it's well within the rules to resubmit with that fixed. If so tag me and I can re-evaluate and also see if I can get someone to play with me next time.
I for the life of me couldn't get anywhere in this game. I would get in nearly perfect inputs but the AI still beat me. I think you may need some difficulty levels to get people up to speed on it. Despite that the game is quite solid and looks great.
Took a while for me to get the handle on this game. I was never good at asteroids, so this was a bit fiddly for me. A guide, especially for the shots would help, or perhaps a line that shows the last few moves, but despite that I did pretty good at least on easy. The sound track works well, and the game is solid mechanically, so nicely done.
Congratulations on your first game! It's simple but fun to break things randomly, though I think I fixed a thing with the smashing, so I've got that going for me. Also the caveman was very short, I managed to knock over the chair and use that to get to the cheese, though I was saddened that I could not smash the cheese; I tried very hard. From a technical standpoint I think it was possible to look up or down far enough to start inverting the camera, I remember getting disoriented at one point, and pretting forwards but walking backwards. Not entirely sure how I did that though.
At first when I saw this, I though, this should be easy. Boy did it get hard fast. I did really like the decision to match the colors of the characters to the shooting lanes. It did make it easier to line up bonus scores, at least until the there are so many letters on the view. Also the audio cues helped let me know when there was something fast approaching to get it taken care of quickly.
Also my score was 319.