Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → DillonEA
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Stack Overflow | compo | 377 | 3.16 | 2.72 | 3.57 | 4.07 | 4.07 | 4.00 | 2.32 | 2.65 | 26 |
Reminds me of some of those old flash games you would see with the bubbles or balloons, that you would have to destroy with like a hook or something. Except this takes that all the way up to 11. Like geez, I was having trouble by intro 3! This is absolutely insane. Love me a hard difficulty game though.
I like the idea behind this, and it definitely fits the theme really well. However, there were a few little quirks that I didn't quite understand when playing it.
Namely, stuff like the box you spawn at the very beginning will trigger one of the switches, but not the other, or why the character retains their speed when you switch while holding down a movement key.
The more intuitive responses to those actions is that if a box can trigger one switch, it should be able to trigger all switches, whether it's part of the solution or not. And that usually when you switch characters, the player you lose control of will stop moving.
Maybe there is later puzzles I just didn't see where the continued movement of the other character was important, but it threw me through a loop the first time.
Part of what prevented me from playing more of this was the situation I ran into where I would keep mistakenly pushing the box by rotating during movement, and having the box get stuck, resulting in me needing to spawn it in again.
Things like that where by a small mistake you have to take a fair bit of action to correct it did hamper the fun a little bit.
Admittedly, it could also just me being a bit too quick about things, or not being particularly patient with the game. Still, a full puzzle game based around this concept would certainly be neat!
Oh my word this idea is neat! A few nitpicks though:
The grappling hook, while fairly neat did seem to allow the player too much control over their movement that would make the game easy. At one point, I was just holding down the left key with the grappling hook, and it would just keep swinging back and forth in the same quarter circle, rather than respecting the gained momentum from the downward swing. Obviously, there needs to be some exaggeration for the sake of player control, but I feel you could have respected momentum a little more, and had the speed changes be done more through adjusting the vertical position along the rope.
Another thing that I feel would make this more fun is if you sped up the game slightly. Movement and actions feel a little sluggish. Admittedly, as much as I mentioned it feeling like the rope gives more freedom, it is true that at the top of the swings, it can be difficult to quickly gather enough speed to dodge a laser. This may contradict the last point, but there was still places where I felt my deaths were a bit unfair.
However contradictory and nitpicky my points may be, super fun game! Love the fact you kept the graphics simple, and always great to see web options available for LD entries.
Oh boy was this creepy and challenging. The eerie music and the impact of the screen-shake when you switch between states really does build up a really neat mood. It also succeeded in making me feel like whenever I made a mistake, that it was my fault, rather than the games. Admittedly, I found the platforming controls lacked precision, but a lot of my errors came from my lack of self-control and care in regards to the switching mechanic. Good work!
I must say, this is an incredibly neat little puzzle game! When I was playing it, I kept having little jumps of joy after solving the puzzles, even if they are quite simple. What's more, is the game makes losing fun too! And failure doesn't keep you waiting to try again, it all starts up again really fast.
I can't claim these to have been feasible in the time-frame, but here are some additions I feel could make this idea potentially better:
- It'd be neat if some of the actions the player could make were a bit more environmental, namely being able to click on a weapon on the wall that slips away in order for it to fire? They could not even play into the solutions, but little additional things the player could click on that would have an effect would be neat, rather than just having the few basic options available.
- A few times I wasn't quite sure if my attempted solution would be quick enough to dispose of a bomb, and there's no real indication how close a bomb is to exploding until it's already happened. Maybe a timer, or just a super obvious color change over time?
- As much as I loved the puzzle idea, it would be neat if the cliche black bombs weren't the only thing needed to be disposed of. Like, if there were sticks of dynamite that moved in a different way that would require more precision, or a clock & bomb that doesn't move, and has to be flung away somehow.
Again, I'm not saying any of those ideas would have been feasible, only that they (in my opinion) could have been neat additions on top a surprisingly fun game.
Does not work for me in Chrome, so am unable to provide a score.
https://puu.sh/sNW9K/53b4cde320.png - Don't think that is supposed to happen if you spam click the "Fight" button. Admittedly wasn't quite sure what to at first, which is what led to this happening in the first place.
I must say, I like what you did with the theme, and the game itself was a fair bit challenging, despite the simple idea.
However, it could be improved with cues as to when a student will get up from their chair, like if you had a very small timer on top of their heads so you know where to focus your attention.
Also, I have no idea what happened, but on the very first level one of the children completely disappeared, and yet I was still able to finish the level somehow. Don't know if it just wasn't rendering, or if the game just decided they no longer existed, but either way was definitely confusing.