Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → delauraen
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Witches Brew | jam | 862 | 3.31 | 2.84 | 2.65 | 3.97 | 4.05 | 4.05 | ||
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Grocery Run | jam | 2.37 | 2.25 | 2.58 | 3.04 | 3.08 | ||||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Baby Delivery Service | jam | 993 | 3.13 | 2.97 | 2.63 | 3.80 | 2.73 | 3.56 | 3.15 |
Appreciate the instructions to get started - movement feels a bit off sometimes when choosing to go into opposite side buildings. You end up having to click multiple times or visit an adjacent house to get the pathing correct.
When you get to later game it feels very satisfying watching multiple buildings go up at once!
Was a pretty neat concept, balancing between cargo and defenses - wish there was a little more initial instruction/tooltips. After embarking there wasn't a lot of feedback on how you were doing and it seemed like a lot of downtime just watching. Loved the art style and effects!
Awesome game concept for a gamejam! Loved how you brought it all together with the audio - such a great observation from a horror perspective. Definitely felt a little bit difficult/balanced with the reloading/flares.
I had some Alan wake flashbacks - love it!
Loved the game feel, could literally sit here and play for a while just running around and spider man swinging. Very fun! Great asset usage
I love the art! Nice little hack and slash feel - wish there was more to play!
Cute game! Loved the little interactions and mini games within, I kinda wish the movement was just a tad bit faster, felt a little floaty and slow but for beginner friendly platformers it's nice!
Overall there's so much nice polish to the game, the moving tutorial, the heartbeat on low health, hit animations, sound design and art comes together well! Just wish there was more to play :)
Game feel was super nice, took me a minute to realize there wasn't direction other than distance. The sound effects were hilarious and a little surprising at first. Loved the particle effect explosion!
NO- NOT THAT ONE. First playthrough I just wanted to cycle through all of the responses. Upbeat theme and nice feedback to user. Clever game loop, enjoyed playing it!
Cute game and the drawn assets fit it nicely. Controls were a bit confusing at first, I think because the text was also hard to read. It would be nice if we could also reduce the volume a bit, it got pretty repetitive quickly. Nice job!
@congeesetador Thank you! I definitely was going for a bit of a comedic effect with the physics haha. Thanks for the heads up on the 2 groups of enemies at the end, I was able to debug this before the end of the gamejam but might fix it in a later version.
I quickly built the enemy spawner using Targetpoints in unreal and a simple ai move to function; I'm wondering if there's a render range to this.
@ugly-robot Thanks! I can't take credit for the music, but I did like the upbeat style from joshuaempyre.
As far as Openstreetmap there is a plugin for blender - I picked a random place, rendered some roads/houses/buildings; intended to make it to develop multiple levels. Instead I just rendered a single house model and duplicated throughout my level. Here's the repo for the plugin https://github.com/vvoovv/blender-osm
@whywhy you're absolutely right, I had to scope things down a bit as I ran into some technical challenges using unreal for the first time.
I plan on making a few different versions to learn more but here's some of my ideas that never made it to this build:
- Implement the story into the actual game, goal is to meet x amount of deliveries to 'Meet your bonus' so you can provide for your stork family. Once you reach the end of the level if you're below the expected deliveries it's a 'game over' otherwise you can continue to next level. Each level would have an increase in difficulty, either via housing placement /enemy placement / combination of both.
- Add a high score tracker
- I'd like to add a short intro cinematic, since I've never worked on one before, would have helped sell the comedic factor seeing the actual baby asset up close maybe haha.
- Add some polish to the baby deliveries, initially intended to have windows break(even added the fracture mesh but never implemented it), interactions with the families accepting deliveries(funny chat box responses), visual effects to indicate when you hit door/window so player has more feedback they got points.
@zbugba - Thank you, this feedback is really helpful, constructive and I very much appreciate it. There's so many good points here and I agree with your breakdown, you can see where I struggled to combine/implement features that didn't necessarily make sense as a whole. Next time around I'll definitely be applying this thought process as lessons learned.
Gave me a lot to think about, thanks again!
The game loop is very fun, and liked the details you applied to it!
Love the art style! Camera controls were a bit hard to deal with in some areas, and text moved really fast (maybe on purpose?) in some areas. I thought it was fun/clever way to require plugging in to charge to be able to reach next areas. Felt a little buggy in some places though, 3rd plug didn't let me charge until I reset a few times.
Overall fantastic game for a jam!
Time between tutorial and first level seem too long, but after that the pace is pretty good. Love the bloom on the graphics, can tell you are familiar with pixel art design! The lightning with predict spark path was a nice surprise too
I didn't realize what I was supposed to control at first, and it was pretty difficult to aim. I loved the graphics and sfx!
Nice art! Wish there were some controls listed maybe in this page directly? I only got the first 2 buildings and couldn't figure out how to upgrade or get the new ones. Also once you select a building you can't un-select it so you get stuck if it doesn't seem to fit.
Unique idea and with more time I'm sure these issues could be easily resolved - great work!
Music was awesome! I liked the concept a lot and felt really satisfying to play. Impressive you were able to include helpful tutorial and a little setup to the setting!
Love the graphics and the atmosphere, nailed the retro look. Fun and interesting concept! Overall was fun to play and kinda hope to see more on this!
Might have been nice to add a tooltip or hightlight around interactables - I can see some people not familiar with floppy discs not realize where to 'use' it 😂
@mrsamafu appreciate it! - there's definitely a lot to make it into a full game but was happy to get concept working
@antoine-aubert - oh no! I'm new to unreal so it's possible the prototype assets I had set to the highest. I'll consider this next time as there's no reason this should be.... that gpu intensive 😅
@jozgames - hope I'm not butchering the translation but the bag lady and learning how to attach to the model was so funny looking so I just had to include it
@anton4ik-dev - thanks! I'm hoping to put in more work in the next few weeks to make it more complete. I kinda built out functions but didn't really have time to put it all together 😅
@shpimpasta - Appreciate the valid even if a little harsh feedback 😁, I totally agree that there isn't really a complete experience here. I put together a couple of different mechanics during prototyping because at first I was prioritizing learning, but when it came to integrating it I ran into issues and of course scope creep. As someone still somewhat new to unreal engine and working solo it can be difficult to commit enough time into this while planning appropriately. This also explains the pickup/drop bag behavior, I avoided an actual inventory system and instead used attach to actors via collision, when it was just one bag it was fine but adding multiple I should have revisited the problem.
Thanks for the comments and appreciate you playing my ~~game~~ sandbox!
The pixel art is very endearing and well done. I do with there was more feedback to the player for firing/killing enemies/moving rooms but I can understand fitting that into jam priority wise. Nice concept!
Graphics were pretty intense, not really sure why. Impressive work with getting animations, enemy ai, auto-door functionality - camera view felt a little hard to use(or maybe it was my frame rate), if the interactables were easier to see this may not have been as difficult.
Nice concept and complete gameloop!
Neat little point and click puzzler, great first entry!
The knockback from attacking is a little jarring but everything else feels pretty great, nice job! Ending was funny, I def just spammed left click most of it but was still pretty fun concept
cute little game, loved the retro graphics
The art is really cute, i love it. It's a lot of text at once (but understandable for jams) and took a minute to understand what to do. I couldn't tell if I was selling anything or people were visiting the store. Everything else seems pretty straight forward. Cute little gameloop!
It took me a second to realize how to activate the skills and combine the different abilities but once I figured it out it felt well designed. I like the different combination of obstacles.
The parallax is also super cool!
Thanks all for playing! I definitely had more fun designing the level/world this time around than anything.
I had plans to implement some type of puzzle at each 'collectible' but simply ran out of time.
In the next few weeks I will be putting some time in to put in a little more polish and make it a more playable experience so keep an eye out 😊
@kanity - wow thanks for all the specific feedback! This is all super helpful :v: I was definitely getting some visual inspiration from the first spyro games, I love that low poly fantasy look of the artisan home world levels.
- I had it so you could walk thru the water but it felt weird, I added collision but then realized I should have made the height higher so you can't just walk across it xD - I agree, I didn't really know how to do a proper dialogue system so I just went with trigger events and should have figured out a way to dismiss/skip text. I believe the first ones must be based on load time so I overlooked it completely. Since then I found that there's an open source plugin I could have used (version 2.0 probably!) - Mouse sensitivity I didn't really think about, I think this is just default but maybe it's related to some of the way unreal implements the firstPersonPlayer (since it plays similar to a shooter in the tutorial) I'll check this out in a future session sometime - We were going for a more eerie/creepy vibe with midi. Initially I had asked @catharticmeat to procure some sfx but then he came up with a few of his own tunes that I liked. It might have worked better if we had a few different tracks so it wasn't constantly looping? I haven't heard of digger but I'll have to check it out!
As for assets I did use a marketplace pack since I was focused on greyboxing everything first (I'll add some pics for the devlog!) so the art wasn't created by me but I created all the landscaping and used some megascans for foliage and whatnot. I put together the POI's and @catharticmeat helped detail it by building out the cauldron/hut/cave/swamp areas.
I credited some friends who I asked for some specific jobs (writing the dialogue and helping with audio and some level design) unfortunately they don't have accounts or have really entered gamejams before which is why they aren't tagged but I'm pretty sure I locked them in for next time around as they had a lot of fun seeing the process evolve!
@trevor-lentz you are 100% right about the trees, I have already added this as a task in the next iteration but I'm finishing up with another project atm! It was annoying while playtesting and I should have considered just replacing that 'realistic' collision with a much less chunky one.
Hahaha who knows maybe there will be another ending soonTM 😁
First postjam update (its been a busy few weeks) - I added a lot of little things people requested along side a few new things. I'm currently working on some better puzzles, but in the mean time I hope the world is a bit more explorable and bonus points to whoever can find the easter egg!
Ahh this was a great little interactive puzzle game, I have a soft spot for point & click games. The audio/voice overs were very eerie; really helped develop the creepy mood. The fact that there are multiple endings also makes it so a short game can still be explored for more story depth.
Very nice job!
Really sick effects and catchy loop, gave me some megaman nostalgia - the secret level was interesting too, well done!
Neat idea, and nice character art - the controls did feel a bit floaty and slow plus the knockback when running into walls felt really jarring. Nice job for small team!