Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Dan C
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 24 | Evolution | Breuoakt | jam | 169 | 2.86 | 3.18 | 2.96 | 1.14 | 2.48 | 3.35 | 2.06 | 2.52 | 56 | |||
| 2012 | 23 | Tiny World | Atomsmash | compo | 76 | 3.69 | 3.24 | 3.66 | 2.34 | 4.07 | 2.96 | 2.46 | 3.71 | 57 | |||
| 2011 | 22 | Alone | 10,000 Space Leagues from Delta Station | jam | 37 | 3.11 | 2.94 | 2.47 | 2.89 | 3.03 | 3.06 | 3.26 | 2.32 | 1.95 | 87 | ||
| 2011 | 21 | Escape | Flight of the Cobra | compo | 474 | 1.77 | 2.00 | 1.82 | 1.60 | 2.20 | 1.00 | 1.14 | 2.00 | ||||
| 2011 | 20 | It's Dangerous to Go Alone! Take This! | Item Quest | compo | 166 | 2.79 | 2.90 | 3.07 | 2.86 | 2.83 | 1.33 | 2.85 | 3.00 | 10 | |||
| 2010 | 18 | Enemies as Weapons | Green Triangle Ship vs. Alien Chaos Spheres | jam | 9 |
| Year | MiniLD | Theme | Game | Rank | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 25 | Worst Game I Have Ever Made | You Are Now In Space |
Dan C leaves an average of 25.4 feedback comments each event.
VERY impressive graphics and sound.
The game isn't actually much fun though. It's annoying trying to aim through the character's head and the aiming controls feel like I'm moving my weapon through custard.
Since the bad guys move so much faster than the player does, and sneak up from behind, and the weapon moves so slowly, it's pretty much impossible to shoot or avoid them all.
You seem to have captured the bleakness of existence pretty well :)
Graphics and sound are awesome, and I love the idea. I'm just not sure it's fun, though.
It's ridiculously difficult to figure out which character you're supposed to control.
Interesting idea and nice graphics and mood, but not fun at all.
It wasn't clear exactly what I was supposed to do to 'click and scrub'. Hold down the button and wiggle the mouse? There wasn't enough feedback for it to be clear if I was doing it right.
Awesome for four hours!
I was too stupid to figure out the multi-push rule on my own but the rest was fun to discover :)
Fun puzzle games always get five innovation stars from me because inventing fun puzzles is hard.
This is lovely :)
Can't create an OpenGL context on my GeForce 9400M.
I had a feeling someone would do something like this. Love the use of the theme.
Shooting gallery games aren't very fun, though.
What is it with people making browser games and then zipping them up for download? Put them on a website for goodness sake.
Not really playable. The character jumps way too high and so the game doesn't show enough of the upcoming terrain to allow the player to time their jumps. The boost mechanic doesn't seem to do anything useful.
Can't get past the login screen.
27239
This is brilliant! Absolutely love it.
I like the idea, but it's not remotely clear what's going on :(.
The graphics are good though :).
I vaguely recall seeing a very similar game a few LDs ago and that didn't work very well either :(.
Quite nicely put together but it's not very original and it gets boring quite quickly.
It's a bit of an odd idea that it can ever be a good thing for a meteor hitting a planet that looks a lot like earth :).
Some warning when the planet is about to change colour would be nice.
It's daft to make a browser game and then force players to download a zip file to play it. If you'd just dumped the files on Dropbox without zipping them up, you could have just linked to the index.html and it would have worked.
Presentation and mood are excellent. There isn't much of a game here but I like it all the same.
Very difficult! But nicely put together.
The level select screen is clever but a bit annoying. It's difficult to tell what you're supposed to click on at first, and the click targets are too small. Also, it's a bit mystery-meat, there's nothing to indicate the difference between levels except trial-and-error. I don't think it would be much fun trying to choose a level if I were colour-blind, either.
Audio is lovely and well-suited to the game. I like your no-assets graphical style but it's not so interesting as in RGB which made such good use of motion.
As usual you seem to have ignored the theme totally, which is fine by me :D. You could have put a kitten in or something, though.
Oh my goodness.
Not only is this both visually and aurally astonishingly beautiful but you've introduced a game mechanic that, as far as I know, is completely unique, clever, easily understood and very well-suited to the genre. Kudos!
A couple of slight misfeatures suggest to me that you didn't quite get everything you wanted into this game, but the attention to detail in other areas more than makes up for it. I particularly love the little flashes of blue introduced to the enemy graphics when you score a hit, and the delightful subtle animation on the title screen.
Some very small things that seemed to be missing or wrong to me:
* There's no sound or animation when the player gets hit.
* I wasn't sure if the lack of a scoring system was a deliberate design choice or just for lack of time. It seems to me a lost opportunity, it would be possible to come up with some interesting scoring mechanics involving the teleportation.
* I would be inclined to pass the whole palette through a filter increasing the contrast slightly, and maybe slightly increasing saturation for hues at the redder end of the spectrum.
* The smaller enemies could do with a couple of frames of animation to make them less static, and similarly the player ship could do with a couple of extra frames of animation to make the tilting smoother. (In general though the use of animation in this game is impressively complete and beautiful for a 72 hour game).
* When the boss returns, components that have already been destroyed are briefly displayed.
* You could do with a sound effect when teleporting, and a more specific visual effect.
* The sound effects seem to be slightly mistimed, possibly due to MP3 delay.
* I also find the connection to the theme a bit tenuous, but I'm not really in a position to complain too much on that point given that my game doesn't have much to do with the theme either :).
These are all nitpicks though, I love it. It sounds like you exhausted yourself to make it but I can assure you it was worth it. I won't be exaggerating to say it brought a little tear to my eye. :)
It's a nice idea but it doesn't feel very finished. Resources are inexhaustible and I can very easily and very quickly build up an enormous supply of food and fill the screen with soldiers, there's no real sense of danger or challenge.
I've never pressed x to be injected before, does it hurt?
The very first thing I noticed is that there's something wrong with the collision detection at the start of the game. My ship explodes for no reason, which is very annoying. The workaround you provide doesn't seem to make any difference.
The second thing I noticed was that the lives counter doesn't get reset at the end of a game, which means I have to refresh the page to play again, which is also very annoying.
The third thing I noticed was that the collision detection is worse than I thought. My ship also explodes for no reason while playing, which is utterly infuriating. I think this happens because you're using bounding box collision in such a way that big chunks of the bounding boxes are outside the colliding objects. You should greatly reduce the size of the bounding boxes in order to give the player the benefit of the doubt, or use pixel-perfect collision detection instead (it's quite easy to do this in Flash but Flixel doesn't help with this as far as I recall).
The easy mode doesn't suffer these awful collision problems but it is also far too easy and therefore boring. It's basically impossible to fail in the easy mode so long as you're conscious.
The boss fights are particularly pointless in easy mode because the boss is even more harmless than the standard attack waves.
If these things were fixed I think the game would be quite fun, if rather repetetive. As it is I just find it frustrating.
The graphics could do with a bit more variation, particularly in the background, but they are inoffensive and do the job nicely.
I liked the music and I thought it fit very well. The sound-effects are also chosen well.
I liked the particle effects particularly when the player's ship explodes.
The presentation of this game is exceptional.
I'm sorry to say though, that even using a gamepad the controls are absolutely horrible. Absolute positioning is not a good way to control a character.
If you're using gamepad with analogue sticks that have a circular restrictor, such as XBox 360 pads, then it's impossible to move the character into the corners of the screen, which makes impossible to hit a lot of stuff.
The camera controls are too slow to be of much use.
I'm afraid the control issues did colour my impression of the whole thing, but otherwise it's great. Good System16-style retro arcade gameplay and great use of sound. I was mildly disappointed by the ingame graphics but only by comparison to the intro graphics which are really cool :).
Great stuff!
The graphics are lovely as is the nice smooth animation. As others have mentioned, though, it could do with a bit more animation in some places such as maybe a jump and stomp animation.
I liked the shrinking world representing the shrinking population.
I like the idea behind the gameplay but it's too easy to dodge the bullets. It could do with some different attack patterns introduced gradually over time to make the game more difficult.
The goal of the game seems to be a bit confused. One of the stated goals is to eat humans since, as you said to me in IRC, they're delicious. However, since there is a hard cap on the number of humans I can eat before the game ends, I can score many more points by instead jumping over humans and concentrating on destroying buildings instead.
I really like the little touches in this game such as the snoozing character on the title screen dreaming of the option you're pointing to, the subtle use of background graphics as HUD, the parallax starfield (even if it is technically wrong :)) and the trees in both background and foreground.
The scoring could be made more interesting by maybe giving a multiplier for humans eaten/buildings destroyed in quick succession, or something like that.
I'm not really sure what the timer is for, and it keeps counting while paused :).
I'm a bit fed up with hearing autotracker songs now, although you've picked a relatively good one. I hope that people will soon start to at least change the default samples, and maybe do some editing of the output to make the tunes a bit more interesting.
Innovative gameplay. The intro made me giggle. Unlike some others I liked the graphics, which have a good bit of character and humour to them, and work well in spite of their simplicity.
I like the gameplay idea and it has some fun potential but it doesn't really work in practice. It's too easy to just sit on the earth and spam space. At the same time if you're playing 'properly' it seems rather mean that the earth gets damaged when you touch it, since the game pretty much forces you to hover round earth constantly. I found it difficult to get any control over which direction I sent the aliens :).
The explosion sounds could do with a bit more 'oomph', possibly by overlaying a low- to medium-frequency sine or square wave with a short attack and decay.
Autotracker is really cool but I tend to think that its output requires a lot of work to turn it into something reasonably listenable. I would have preferred no music to be honest.
The planets and sun and orbits aren't to scale! The player can survive standing on the surface of the sun! You're messing with my mind!
Great mood. Not much fun to play though because it involves so much slow aimless wandering. Also the collision detection leaves much to be desired.
It reminds me a bit of Terminal City on the C64, for some reason.
Five community stars for haxe and MTASC :)
Nice graphics and use of the theme.
I can't judge it on much else though, since there are no other players online right now.
Terrifying. Beautifully put together, nice work.
It was a bit disorienting that collisions don't take account of perspective, so that the top of the player's head collides with the bottom of a wall.
Doesn't seem to be possible to successfully empty your bladder.
This is great!
It's too grindy for me, though. Killing the aliens was frustrating because they are so small and take so many hits. In the end I found that I had so much health I could just go straight into the middle of a swarm of aliens and take the eggs without worrying too much about getting hit.
The music is great, as are the background graphics.
Extra community star for linking to Album-a-Day. I didn't know about that and will give it a go some time!
It's no fun but it's quite well put together. Nice audio.
For 48 hours this is exceptional. Great graphics and sound, nice simple idea, and it conveys its mood really well. The connection to the theme is dubious, though.
As other commenters have said, you really need to tweak the level generation so that it doesn't produce impossible situations, though.
Also, the bounding-box collision detection feels unfair, because some of your obstacles are much smaller than their bounding box. For example, the cable that's hanging down from some horizontal ductwork - I would have made that non-collidable.
Overall I am very impressed.
Touching :).
Getting killed by ridiculous stuff and having to start from the beginning is annoying.
The shrill brass and woodwind parts in the music really hurt my ears and I had to turn treble way down on my hifi to be able to stand it at all :(. I want to quite like the music, but it's just too squeaky.
I couldn't quite work out the relationship between my actions and their consequences, but then I've never been able to do that in real-life dating either.
Oh, just read the spoilers in your blog posts. It turns out I did have a pretty good idea what was going on, but I didn't twig that the characters getting killed off were the ones I was closest to.
I quite like the idea but I got a bit lost to be honest :).
Great atmosphere!
Idiosyncratic and almost completely lacking in logic. I like it!
Although the graphics aren't amazingly well drawn, this game is so full of lovely graphical touches (such as the parallax effects, and splashes as you skim the water) that I can't help but rate the graphics highly.
The game is let down a bit by the collision detection.
The posters in the background with the player's face on them are a great touch.
I love the idea, and I don't mind the subversive use of the theme :). The game is quite fun once you get the hang of it.
It was difficult to understand what to do at first though. Because instruction to 'press left and right' is built into the game, I was expecting it to tell me the other keys I need to know about in order to play, but of course it doesn't. Therefore I failed quite a few times before I came back and read the description fully.
The ideal solution would be to put all necessary instructions in the game, but even no instructions would be better than this since it would be more obvious that players need to read the description carefully.
(Yes, I know, I am lazy).
I like it. It tells a story, succinctly.
Bizarre! I love the concept.
I feel like you could have explored the unique movement mechanics in a more interesting way though. The parts where you have to fight against opposing particle streams are annoying.
Lovely graphics. I particularly like the time-of-day colour mapping.
Unplayably buggy and jerky.
You really should have made the intro properly skippable. Skipping using backspace is a start but it doesn't work properly and it can't skip the first couple of bits of dialogue. Nobody wants to watch the same cut scene repeatedly, especially when they've got 890 other games to play.
Lovely graphics and sound, though.
I like this. The ending is quite touching :).
I love the idea. It's almost unplayably buggy and jerky though. I wish you'd at least smoothed out the camera movement.
Lovely graphics and sound, though.
Can't download this, as mentioned by other commenters. There are several 'download' links on the page you've linked to but none of them allow me to actually download the game, they just redirect to other random sites or pop up ads.
If you don't have your own webspace, Dropbox is a good way to make your games available for Ludum Dare, since it actually works properly and doesn't bombard downloaders with ads.
I love this. Small, neat, and perfectly put together.
Extra community stars awarded for organising CB2 Indies :)
This isn't very well packaged.
Not everyone will have Java installed and Java doesn't put its binaries in the PATH by default, so RUN_ME.bat won't work for most people.
Also, if, like me, you have a 64-bit Java in the PATH, it still doesn't work because 64-bit Java can't load the 32-bit DLLs that are required to run this game.
I had to edit RUN_ME.bat to point to a 32-bit Java as follows:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_16\bin\java" -jar -Djava.library.path=lib/ comatose.jar
(The exact path will be slightly different for those who have a different build of Java installed).
I love the idea but it doesn't really work in practice :(
The logic puzzle is particularly flawed since 'OR' is always the best choice for every gate.
Ugh, if you click outside the game accidentally, it crashes the browser. How on earth did you manage that? Given that the game involves semi-frantic clicking, that is not really an acceptable bug.
That aside, it's a fun game with lovely graphics. Doesn't relate to the theme, though.
Nice idea and well implemented. Good graphics too.
There's not much sense of progression, though. It felt like the game wasn't getting any more difficult and that I was just doing the same thing over and over again, which got boring quite quickly.
At one point I lost because the character was walking on a tile near the bottom of the window, and a monster appeared at the bottom of the screen right next to the character and killed him before I had a chance to do anything. That's a bit unfair and you probably should have guarded against that happening.
The sound effects are annoying.
It's getting stuck with a console window open for me too :(.
Oh... I won! I wasn't actually expecting it to be possible to win so that was a nice surprise.
For five hours this is very good indeed. Nice graphics!
What the dickens is going on? I say, chaps, is this what passes for sport amongst our trans-atlantic cousins?
It's extremely irritating that you've packaged the swf up as a rar. If you'd just put it directly on your website then we could have played it directly in the browser instead of wasting time decompressing it.
I'm not sure how it is that the cat counts as an 'artifact' and not a 'life sign', but I suppose that would spoil the concept :).
Lots of nice little touches in here, I particularly liked the particle effect when you walk across sand.
It took me a couple of minutes of frustrated clicking to figure out that I had to click on the *text* of 'Missions', 'Tutorial' or 'Credits' in order to activate them. I'm sure I'm not the only one who will assume that the surrounding rectangle is a 'button' and won't be able to figure out how to start the game. Please don't do this sort of thing, it's really annoying.
If you're going to make a 3D jumping game then it is a good idea to give the player some indication of where their 'feet' are. It's very difficult to judge a jump just from the camera position. Since judging jumps is the only real challenge in the game, this just makes it feel unfair.
I wish you hadn't put in the impossible fourth level. I know you said that you only designed three, but leaving that in is just confusing.
I didn't really see how it related to the theme, although you were in the jam so perhaps it wasn't supposed to.
The beginning of the game is really annoying. I spent about 10 minutes moving around looking for a light switch in an almost totally dark room full of obstacles. I nearly gave up before I found one of the torches on the shelf above the bed.
I think I got to the end. I was standing in the garage shooting zombies with a pistol, and then the game slowed down terribly for a few seconds before the credits appeared.
I like the mood and use of the theme, and for some of the time I was genuinely quite frightened :)
In general the game suffers from dodgy collision detection. It's quite annoying trying to manoeuvre round obstacles. Also, it's annoyingly difficult to 'use' an item. Sometimes it's difficult to tell whether it's possible to use an item because the game is just not responding properly.
Otherwise, great!
Lovely use of audio, but it's no fun having to listen to the same long sections of narrative repeatedly. It reminds me of Dragon's Lair in that there's scarcely any game at all. The audio just makes it worth playing.
Great style, good use of humour. Love the random messages and the way the whole game pulses in time to the music. Great stuff!
Interesting and original idea but unfortunately boring to play since gameplay consists of nothing more than pressing space at defined intervals.
It would have been helpful if you'd mentioned that the key to transmit power is space.
Clicking the ships doesn't seem to do anything, despite the instructions.
I tried it in Chrome and Firefox, and it seems to be really buggy and jerky in both. Maybe that's just on Windows, or due to dodgy ATI OpenGL drivers, but other WebGL stuff works fine for me.
Lovely music - very fitting.
The graphics are also very nice, although they could do with a bit more texture.
I'm not really a fan of these sort of exploration games, but I'm sure it's a fine example of the genre.
I liked the idea of adding weapons to your ship and then losing them when they run out of ammo.
The game seemed to get easier as it progressed, which made it a bit boring. I stopped playing after a couple of minutes but felt like I could have kept going forever.
Everything about this game is lovely: graphics, music, gameplay.
I felt that the difficulty curve was too steep. The game is quite long so I felt you could afford to be more gentle at the beginning. I found it very difficult to avoid running out of fuel, even once I knew what I was doing.
Like some other commenters, I really didn't like the enforced wait time after a crash. Also, when you run out of fuel, the game gives you so little fuel back that it tends to run out again before you even get a chance to collect more. That gets old really fast.
The ending made me laugh, and a nice use of the theme. The game is very long for a Dare, though, and I suspect that a lot of players won't have been willing to keep waiting through all those pauses to see it, which is a shame.
The graphics are very beautiful, but it's a shame there isn't just a little more to do.
It was really interesting to see how the graphics progressed during the competition.
I like the way that the powerups encourage the player to move round the screen, instead of standing in the middle and shooting diagonally. The graphics are quite pretty. The gameplay could do with a little more variation, though.
Cute idea.
At first I thought I had to get the rats to walk in between the cats, which makes the game pretty much impossible. It took me a few attempts to figure out that the cats fire their lasers immediately when there's a rat between them, even if you're halfway through a turn.
It's quite fun but it could definitely do with a bit more graphical pizazz. As it is it feels very static.
I also found it a bit clunky that I had to keep clicking 'next turn' even after moving all my cats.
One major problem in my view is that as the game progresses, more cats seem to make the game easier, not harder.
Also, it didn't seem to fit the theme in any particularly interesting way.
Wow.
I am dazzled, astonished, and entirely in awe.
The graphics are beautiful, and I don't just mean the boobies. The music is nicely put together and it fits. The dialogue is well written and funny. There is a surprising abundance of all three of these things. I am completely amazed that you managed to put all this together in 48 hours.
The use of the theme isn't exactly startlingly original, the story is entirely predictable, and it's full of cliches, but in light of all the rest I really don't care.
The pony is pretty. This game is highly impressive.
That's odd. I page-searched for your entry a couple of times but it didn't show, so I assumed you never entered it. Then you mentioned it on Twitter so I looked again, and it's staring me in the face.
The graphics are really lovely and seem to be quite different in style to your other games, which I like.
The idea is, as I'm sure you're aware, very similar to Soul Brother, but it's still quite clever, and interesting to see the idea in the context of a Zelda-esque game.
I like the dual interpretation of the theme. On the one hand there's "It's dangerous to go alone" -> multiple playable characters and "take this" -> take control of other characters, but at the same time you've managed to merge that with the otherwise very boring and obvious "Zelda" interpretation. Or am I reading too much into it? I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt with my rating anyway :).
I'm not sure if it's fun though. Once you get the basic idea of what to do, it's fairly obvious how to proceed, but it can get a bit dull waiting around for the right enemy to shoot at you. The enemies have an annoying habit of killing each other instead of you, which serves to extend the wait.
Does the initial character deliberately look like No-Face from Spirited Away? Because if so that's kind-of clever :).
I think I noticed a bug, which can be reproduced roughly as follows:
1. Wait for one of the shooty enemies to shoot two shots in your direction.
2. Get hit by the first shot.
3. You die and take control of the shooty enemy that killed you.
4. The second shot hits the spot where you died.
5. The shooty enemy dies and the game is no longer playable.
I got the cheese!
I didn't immediately understand that I had to go inside the hut before embarking on my quest, so my first attempt was a disaster. Just showing an open door on the hut instead of a closed one would have been a useful cue, since closed doors are often not passable in this kind of game.
I agree that the lack of explanation is a weakness but I did enjoy the fact that none of it makes any sense. A quest into a dangerous dungeon to retrieve cheese? A paperclip that shoots fireballs? Oh my eyes like stars and my soul again in Eden!
The graphics are simple but attractive and very effective. The animation on the boss is cute :).
The game itself is a bit dull though. I never really did see the value in games that force you to wander around looking for switches to open doors. That mechanic works better as an irritant in an otherwise good game than as an engine of fun in itself. Also, it's a shame that all the rooms inside the cave look nearly exactly alike.
I did try to catch you out by walking all the way back to the house instead of going through the final door, but you thought of that ahead of me so well done for that :).
This is a pretty cool game but the way the pick-ups are implemented spoils the fun a great deal for me.
Some of the pick-ups are worse than useless, but you're forced to pick them up because the game won't give you any more ammo if you don't. It's particularly irritating the way that new weapons replace the previous weapon and sometimes leave you with hardly any ammo.
The black hole is especially annoying in this regard, because if you don't notice you've picked it up you're likely to drop it on top of the portal, which causes all the enemies to zoom towards it and cause more damage. If you do manage to use it right, then it's a highly destructive weapon, but then you're left with no ammo and nothing to do until the portal deigns to give you another weapon. Also, because the portal is dead centre, the black hole is bound to draw some enemies towards the portal no matter where you place it, and with no ammo you're left with no way to defend the portal.
The background graphics are simple but effective, and I really like them. The foreground graphics aren't as good but they're perfectly serviceable, but it is a shame that you used the same rather ugly sprite for all the weapons except the flamethrower.
I noticed that the flamethrower doesn't seem to work properly: the flames just stay still in one place wherever you fired them (or is that intentional?).
The music is very nice and fits the game really well, but you didn't create it yourself during the competition, which is against the rules. The music does add to the game, and it would be a shame to lose it, but at minimum you should have added a note asking judges to disregard the music when scoring (I see that you did credit the artist on your blog post accompanying the entry, but it's not really obvious).
I'd really like to see an updated version of this game with a few tweaks - it's a good start but the handful of little problems make me not want to play it very much :(. To me, the most obvious improvement would be to make the black hole a 'helper' instead of a 'weapon'.
Lovely graphics, and some clever gameplay mechanics.
I really like the design and rolling animation of the main character and friendly NPCs :).
I'm also very impressed with how much you managed to get done in such a short time.
I found it too slow-paced to be fun, though, and the music is a little atonal for my taste. Also, the interpretation of the theme is too literal to be interesting, but at least you didn't make a Zelda clone.
The choice of name is... odd.
I'm all for silly dialogue (I even included some randomly-generated silly dialogue in my own entry), but if I'm honest I didn't find the dialogue in this game sufficiently amusing to carry the entry, and there isn't much else to it.
However everyone else seems to like it so I guess I'm just humour-impaired.
I did like the interpretation of the theme, with the items provided being more of a hindrance than a help, and the protagonist never actually getting to go on his adventure. But then, I'm a bit biased because I had fundamentally the same idea, although I made a completely different game out of it.
For me it gets stuck at the beginning of what I presume is a countdown (while displaying "3"), but it looks really cool.
Do scientists always pose sexily and wear burlesque gear while they brief you for dangerous space missions?
A curious idea, and it's kind-of interesting to watch the collisions, but the 'control' part seems to be missing. I jabbed at various keys and sometimes something seemed to happen at the beginning of a simulation, but I couldn't tell you what or why.
I don't understand how it fits in with the theme at all.
I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but the music is truly awful. My ears were in searing pain within about three seconds. Silence would have been far preferable.
The minimap always crashes for me in the first level, regardless of whether I've used it in the tutorial. For that reason I didn't get past the first level.
The concept is OK although you seem to have shoe-horned it into the theme. There's some potential for interesting puzzles, although that potential didn't seem to be met (but perhaps I didn't get far enough through the game).
It's annoying that the teleporters move so slowly. It is rather boring to have to wait for them to gradually crawl towards their destination.
Really nice creative interpretation of the theme.
The presentation of the first screen is beautiful, but a bit too ambitious. It would have been better to spend that time on the actual game.
It did take me a while to figure out how to get into the game from the first screen.
At one point some of my orphans ignored the path I set up for them and ran straight towards the policeman, which was a bit annoying.
It was also kind of annoying that the game leaves the district you're playing as soon as an orphan brings back enough money. Each time that happened, some of my orphans still had money in their pockets which was lost.
I like this use of the theme, but the basic idea seems to be the same as BigBoyBlue's (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/04/29/a-possible-idea-target-market/). Is that a coincidence?
I couldn't find a way to craft anything other than planks and wooden swords. I purchased some iron but there don't seem to be any recipes that use it. Am I missing something or is that part unfinished?
The character encoding errors are extremely distracting. If you are going to use characters outside the ASCII range you need to configure your web server to specify the character set you are using in the HTTP response headers (UTF-8, in your case).
Interesting idea and well presented. Great work. I too was disappointed by the short length, though.
One screen wants me to press enter to continue, then the next wants me to press space. What were you thinking? That is really irritating.
I kind of like the fact that you get a different weapon each time. Some weapons make the game far too easy though. My level of success was generally determined by what weapon I started with.
The manual reload is not obvious at all. It took me a couple of tries to figure out that I didn't just have ridiculously small amounts of ammo. It'd be better if it displayed a message, or reloaded automatically, but I realise it's difficult to fit everything in.
It's hard to see what's going on most of the time. The graphics could do with more contrast.
Kept me occupied for a while. It was annoying that the enemy I was swinging tended to hover in mid-air. That didn't make it much use for knocking away other enemies. Otherwise it was fun, though.
I wanted to like this but I found too frustrating to control with the mouse because you don't necessarily have a gun that's facing forwards. It would have been a lot more fun if I could have controlled the rotation using the keyboard.
The enemies take far too many shots to kill considering the slow rate of fire. Annoyingly they seem to take only one shot to kill once they're attached to your ship.
I liked that you could attach to enemies without shooting them first, but it seemed inconsistent when that was allowed and when not.
In the end I found it was easier to not bother attacking and just play the game as an avoid-em-up, but that wasn't fun.
I liked the music. I also liked the graphical style.
I like this a lot. Everything about it is polished and it's fun too.
Like a lot of other commenters I especially liked the size = health thing, which was immediately intuitive to me even though it's not something before.
It's a nice idea but unfortunately the gameplay often descends into a frustrating struggle to get the enemies round awkward corners.
I died quite a few times on the third level before realising I could pass through the walls. I don't mind this, but it would have been helpful to point it out! :)
The graphics are cute, I particularly like the mix of colours in the trails and explosions.
I like the graphics but I couldn't make much sense of the game.
I went around destroying the enemy bases and dragging the bits back to build up my own, but there didn't seem to be much relationship between what I was doing and how long I lasted. After a while a whole bunch of enemies appeared and I got annihilated. I couldn't work out if there was some strategy to avoid this or not. I never was any good at strategy games so that may be my fault.
At one point I found that I couldn't fire any more. I'm not sure if that's because of something I did or didn't do, or if it's a bug.
I couldn't point to where but I feel like I've seen this idea before a few times and it's never worked for me. Looking at some of the other comments I do feel like I'm just not getting it. Sorry!
This is great. It reminds me of the way arcades used to be, before everything was spaceships and guns. I say this without irony, knowing that my game prominently features both.
The graphics remind me of the family members in Robotron, so I was half expecting big fullscreen pixel-shatter animations. Actually, I think it could benefit from some of those, but then I think that about everything.
I liked the way the scoring system rewarded hitting more than one couple at a time with extra points. I would have liked to see more complexity there, to reward more interesting play.
It reminds me -- just a bit -- of a C64 game named Stars and Rings, which has a similar mechanic involving spinning an object and releasing it at the right moment. However, I don't recall seeing anything else remotely similar, and I love the mechanic, so full marks for innovation.
I was just slightly confused by the direction the partner took when I flung him. He headed 90 degrees clockwise relative to the direction I expected. I was expecting him to keep moving in the direction he was moving when released, if that makes sense. Instead, it behaves more like the main character pushes him directly away. I don't think this is a big problem. Actually it might even be easier to control as it is, but it was counter-intuitive to me at first.
The sounds are great and I wouldn't change anything that's there. However, given that it's a game about dancing it really ought to have some music.
Unlike the author and some of the other commenters, I think it's a clever and fitting use of the theme.
I had a lot of fun with this. I look forward to seeing an updated version with more different types of dancers. Please don't change it to an underwater theme. I love it as it is, and it would lose some of its charm.
I spent quite a lot of time on this, but in the end I just couldn't make head nor tail of it. Sorry.
I worked out how most of the minigames worked, but almost all seemed to behave inconsistently. This is probably because I was missing important plot points that -- as you say -- lack explanation :).
The game would have been better without the dialogue. I'm all for humour, but I'm sorry to say I didn't detect any. The dialogue also did not help me understand the game at all. For me it was just an annoyance between pressing F5 and trying to figure out what was going on.
I hope you'll try again at future Dares. Next time I'd recommend trying to get one idea working before you add complexity :).
The graphics and sound are absolutely beautiful. I particularly love the coloured particles that appear when the balls collide. I'm quite fond of using glowy vectors myself, but I hope you won't mind too much if you find some of your other graphical ideas make their way into my future games.
To me the goal seemed fairly vague. With more than one scoring ball on the screen I was expecting to score different points for different balls, or score bonus points for scoring with two balls at once, etc. Scoring only by the number of shots taken seems uninventive, and doesn't leave much room for incremental improvement between a good score and a great one. Most courses could be beaten in one shot just be firing the cue ball as hard as possible in a random direction.
I found this quite innovative, because although the idea of blending Pool with Mini Golf seems fairly obvious, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything similar. It reminds me a bit of Lightning Break or Lightning Pool, but those games are still located on tables with four sides and six pockets.
I agree with some of the other commenters that this *just barely* fits the theme. But I still love it.
This is really, really impressive given the time constraints. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the theme and I fear it's only fair to award a slightly reduced overall score for that reason.
I didn't mind the difficult jumps, although I probably would have increased the jump distance just the tiniest bit -- about enough to give you an extra one or two pixels leeway in the last jump in your shot4.png above.
Other than that I'm going to agree with everything said by the other commenters above.
This is really cool. Beautiful graphics, clever use of the theme, and wonderfully simple and fun.
If I were being fussy I'd say that it doesn't quite fit the theme because the words aren't really being used as weapons. But the game is so cute I just don't care.
My only real criticism would be that I found that I could score quite highly by just pushing the left arrow as fast as I could and ignoring whether the messages were compliments or insults. I'd like to see this rectified by adding a time delay between an incorrect response and the next message appearing.
Like some of the other commenters I'd have also liked to see a bit more variance as the game progresses, for example by jumbling up the colours.
It's an interesting idea but the implementation is rather too flawed to be fun for me.
It'd be better if the mounds arranged themselves more evenly. They tend to be tall and narrow, which is difficult to climb.
It'd also help if the default direction of fire wasn't downwards. It'd be more helpful to fire in the direction the player was last moving, and require the player to hold the down arrow to fire downwards. The current behaviour is particularly unhelpful because firing downwards destroys your progress.
I really liked the innovative idea. Unfortunately I found that the fun was let down by confusing controls and mechanics - which is a shame because I believe the problems I observed could be fixed fairly easily.
It took me a long time to figure out which direction an enemy would get flung in. At first it seemed totally random, but eventually I worked out that if you last thrusted forwards, then the enemy gets flung in the opposite direction to the direction you're currently facing, and that if you last thrusted backwards the enemy gets flung in the direction you're currently facing. I'm not sure I can even explain those rules to another human being, so you might want to consider simplifying them. My preferred choice would be to fling enemies in the direction the player is facing.
I don't agree with L that Asteroids-style controls are inappropriate. Actually I found the controls confusing because they were insufficiently Asteroids-like in the space setting. I wasn't expecting turning the ship to immediately change my direction of travel, and it took me a while to figure out what was going on. I think I would have been happy with Robotron-style controls or Asteroids-style, but I struggled with it as it is.
I'd also consider fixing the size of the ship. I didn't find much use in changing it, except to 'cheat' by making it really big and spinning around in the centre and over the bases.
You said on your blog that you're somewhat embarrassed by the code. I don't see why. I took a look and it looks perfectly reasonable to me. For two days' work it is remarkably clear and well-documented.
I liked the ragdoll physics and the way the zombies fall down when punched. That alone was enough to keep me amused for a few minutes.
Unfortunately there isn’t really any skill element because you can just hold down the mouse button and run towards the zombies. It also rather dented the fun for me when I realised I was invulnerable.
LD24 — Evolution (25)
Bit-Craft Evolution by eyehawk 2012-09-18T00:49:00
Five stars all round! This is exceptionally well presented, makes great use of the theme, and it's *really* fun to play! I love all the crazy variations on the player ship :D. Very inmpressive for a 48 hour game.
Ikaruga Devolved by ChronoDK 2012-09-18T00:32:00
Lovely work!
Life is Pietzsche by Rave Radbury 2012-09-17T23:13:00
Nice use of the theme and good graphics and audio.
The music and the semi-abstract plot reminds me a bit of Rez Area 5 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAyU76Vpr_o). This is a good thing :).
The plot is a bit ironic to me, because the game itself appears to exhibit one of the common faulty assumptions about evolution, which is that the unit of selection is the individual or species, whereas in actual fact the unit of selection is now generally understood to be the gene. That's sufficent to absorb Nietzsche's objections to Darwinism, as I understand them. Perhaps that was your point, I'm not sure. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene is a particularly lucid explanation of the various interesting consequences of this idea, which it originated (and it doesn't contain any of the shrill ranting that he has sadly subsequently become known for).
I don't understand the title, which makes me wonder if in fact I have missed the point of your game altogether :).
It was a bit difficult at first to figure out what effects the different traits had, since it wasn't immediately obvious that my character would also get bigger no matter which trait I picked.
I quite liked the gameplay. I felt it could have done with a bit more variation, although it's not at all bad for a 48 hour game.
The controls were a bit awkward and in particular I noticed that if I dashed without holding down a direction key, then the character would always dash right no matter what direction he was facing. That was quite annoying and kept tripping me up even after I figured it out.
I quickly figured out how to stave off the enemies in the last stage for an arbitrarily long time. You could probably have done with gradually increasing the spawn rate, and gradually starting to spawn enemies from more directions, in order to guarantee eventual defeat.
mintys by mitkus 2012-09-16T18:43:00
I love the premise. Great use of the theme and fabulous execution.
Get the cake Cube Guy by tumoxep 2012-09-16T18:39:00
This is far from being the worst game I've played. I quite liked the msuic and the graphics are nice in places. Shame about the 'gameplay' and the graphical glitches :).
Uberlution by Robotic 2012-09-16T13:33:00
Although this is *beautifully* presented, unfortunately it doesn't really work as a game.
It gets much easier as it progresses, which is very much the wrong way round for a difficulty curve. The theme does make it rather difficult to avoid that, unfortunately.
The 'om nom' sound effect spoils the mood created by the beautiful graphics and music. I think you should have left the humour until the end, which I did enjoy :).
Survivalism by Walt 2012-09-16T13:23:00
Really cool idea, fun to play, and awesome graphics. Innovation points!
It could really do with some sound but otherwise this is a great entry.
I wish you'd made it more obvious that I have to push 'enter' to start though. That's not a terribly common choice and there isn't any clear indication.
Adventures in Text-topia (Unfinished) by Benn 2012-09-16T13:05:00
It's a shame you didn't finish. Come back to Cambridge soon :).
Evulotion : Adventures of Dyslecsia by caribou 2012-09-16T12:54:00
Tip for anyone who can't rate this because they have nobody to play against: ask in IRC :).
This is really fun, although it's confusing that as God you can always drag all the mobs but they don't necessarily spawn.
I didn't really understand what constituted a 'round'. As God, I never seemed to be able to spawn any but the first three mobs.
It seems too biased in favour of God, but as pointed out to me in IRC (too late!) the point of playing as God could be to make the game challenging and fun, not to win.
The World of What? by Kaytus 2012-09-16T12:30:00
I'm impressed that you were able to build something so big and complicated, but I feel like you would have been better off keeping it simple. For Ludum Dare, I didn't really feel like I had enough time to dedicate to this game to really understand what was going on.
It does have lovely graphics and sound, though, so I have rated on those aspects only.
Involucion by elxris 2012-09-16T12:20:00
I can't make any sense of this at all, I'm afraid.
Glider Drop by tomhunt 2012-09-16T12:14:00
Awesome idea! Innovation points!
The controls are a bit confusing but it's fun to play :).
'The Neon Pink Philosophy' by Zed 2012-09-16T10:58:00
Cool! I had a giggle.
I didn't unlock the true ending though :(.
Pink Swarm Evolution by DomNomNom 2012-09-16T10:41:00
Really cool toy. It's trivial to design a winning pattern, though.
SURVIVE by Ragzouken 2012-09-07T16:24:00
Nice! Took me a while to fully understand what to do, but quite fun once I got the hang of it.
Unlike some others I rather liked the sound :).
The Darkness Evolve!! by juaxix 2012-09-05T05:06:00
What's there is quite nicely put together. Good use of sound.
The camera angle is... stylish, but a bit *too* extreme :)
The universe feels a bit dead, even before I convert it all to dark matter. Could do with a little texture animation or something.
Land Evo by flashkick 2012-09-03T14:53:00
Fun!
Slight problem is that it seems to get easier as the game goes on, which isn't the way difficulty curves are supposed to work :).
Lucas's Quest Backwards by Volute 2012-09-03T14:49:00
Nice graphics and cute cut scenes.
The game itself is a chore to play though :(. The controls are awkward and the levels feel really repetitive. If you shortened the levels so the player gets to see new stuff a bit more quickly, that should help. I think the player movement needs some tuning to be fun too, but I'm not sure exactly what is missing.
Unfortunately I got fed up with the gameplay before I got to the end so I guess I probably missed some of the best stuff. Sorry :(.
Social Evolution by Jorjon 2012-09-03T01:27:00
Lovely presentation and quite fun to play.
I feel sorry for all those ladies, though. The player character is a jerk! :)
Evolution Heroes by Rubel 2012-09-02T20:56:00
Great graphics and sound. Good use of the theme. Amazing amount of content for a 48 hour game.
It's let down quite badly by the controls in places.
The worst controls problem is that some of the characters cancel their attacks if you press z again too soon. This is really misleading in the case of the first character, since the attack animation plays but no damage is dealt. Took me quite a while to figure out what was going on.
Space Amoebas by bigbadwofl 2012-09-02T20:35:00
Nice graphics and sound.
Could have done with some more obvious indicator when you gain the ability to eat other ameobas.
Gapaos by mipi 2012-09-02T20:26:00
Baffling.
The text is almost illegible and the 'rocks' are almost invisible against the background. What were you thinking?!
The Kittelutioning by Norgg 2012-08-28T01:35:00
This is absolutely awesome :).
Box vs. Nature by pekuja 2012-08-28T01:32:00
This came out really well.
It isn't the first time the walls of CB2 have made their way into a game :).
Space Ham by FunByJohn 2012-08-28T01:25:00
I'm intrigued by the idea of having to compete with my own offspring :).