Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Draknek
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥈 | 2009 | 16 | Exploration | Topsy Turvy | compo | Innovation | 4.28 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Po | Cm | Te | Jo | Co | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | I Have No Mouth, And I Must Create Blocks On All Sides Of Me | jam | 9 | 4.40 | 4.24 | 3.97 | 3.79 | 3.68 | 3.50 | 2.50 | 3.33 | ||||||
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | Slime Saga | jam | 255 | 3.54 | 3.64 | 3.85 | 2.46 | 2.64 | 2.90 | 2.35 | 2.68 | 46 | ||||||
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | A Good Tunnel Is Hard To Dig | jam | 155 | 3.68 | 3.65 | 3.58 | 2.23 | 2.71 | 35 | |||||||||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Play with the cat | jam | 3.30 | 3.40 | 3.16 | 28 | ||||||||||||
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | A Sneeze A Day Keeps The Crates Away | compo | 167 | 3.65 | 3.59 | 3.83 | 1.63 | 2.91 | 2.64 | 3.26 | 2.78 | 35 | ||||||
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | You're Pulleying My Leg | compo | 14 | 4.22 | 4.03 | 4.12 | 3.56 | 3.25 | 2.57 | 2.79 | 3.08 | 51 | ||||||
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | 1-2-3-Ban | jam | 76 | 3.64 | 3.95 | 3.77 | 2.64 | 2.48 | 2.32 | |||||||||
| 2012 | 25 | You are the Villain | Legacy of Hamelin | compo | 237 | 3.23 | 2.91 | 3.59 | 3.36 | 3.50 | 2.29 | 2.75 | 2.90 | 32 | ||||||
| 2012 | 23 | Tiny World | Dr. Biology's Educational Game | compo | 273 | 3.24 | 3.26 | 3.78 | 2.67 | 1.69 | 2.19 | 2.58 | 1.97 | 51 | ||||||
| 2011 | 22 | Alone | By Your Side | compo | 133 | 3.18 | 2.85 | 3.24 | 2.80 | 2.37 | 2.76 | 2.31 | 2.45 | 2.19 | 24 | |||||
| 2011 | 21 | Escape | Not the Sharpest Sword in the Box | compo | 65 | 3.52 | 3.33 | 4.26 | 3.07 | 3.00 | 2.55 | 3.28 | 2.15 | 1 | ||||||
| 2011 | 20 | It's Dangerous to Go Alone! Take This! | Legend of Parasite | compo | 108 | 3.10 | 2.96 | 3.75 | 2.20 | 3.25 | 1.32 | 2.20 | 2.68 | 7 | ||||||
| 2010 | 19 | Discovery | Dinosaur Dance-Off | compo | 35 | 3.50 | 3.37 | 4.11 | 3.43 | 2.89 | 1.62 | 3.98 | 2.50 | 6 | ||||||
| 2010 | 18 | Enemies as Weapons | Super Collide-Em-Up | compo | 45 | 3.19 | 3.57 | 3.45 | 2.38 | 3.43 | 1.42 | 2.88 | 2.64 | 15 | ||||||
| 2010 | 17 | Islands | 108 seconds of loneliness | compo | 80 | 3.02 | 3.05 | 2.56 | 3.56 | 2.71 | 1.11 | 1.76 | 1.18 | 10 | ||||||
| 2009 | 16 | Exploration | Topsy Turvy | compo | 25 | 3.36 | 3.32 | 4.28 | 2.72 | 2.76 | 2.68 | 2.38 | 2.28 | 16 | ||||||
| 2009 | 15 | Caverns | F = ma | compo | 101 | 2.62 | 2.14 | 3.32 | 3.14 | 2.59 | 2.44 | 2.43 | 3.00 | 17 | ||||||
| 2009 | 14 | Advancing Wall of Doom | Robo-Jimmy and the Bouncy Adventure of Doom | compo | 92 | 2.80 | 3.40 | 2.58 | 3.22 | 3.68 | 3.61 | 3.30 | 3.39 | 3.06 | 1.50 |
| Year | MiniLD | Theme | Game | Rank | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 24 | Pick 'n' Mix | Tetris Fight Club | |||
| 2009 | 11 | Sandbox | DeformaBall | |||
| 2009 | 9 | Time | Wacky Audio Experiment |
Draknek leaves an average of 10.7 feedback comments each event.
My only annoyance is that when you hit the button late, graphically it looks weird that the enemy isn't hit when you're reaching over/through them to hit that specific spot on the ground: the visuals clash with the gameplay.
Other than that though, good job!
Could do with more consistent button usage! My first attempt to play:
* click new game, doesn't do anything, okay so it's a keyboard game
* press space, doesn't do anything
* press enter, go to world map
* use arrows to move the camera
* press space/enter, doesn't do anything
* click on starting town, doesn't do anything
* click on other towns, but on the image of buildings and the hitbox isn't big enough to detect it so it doesn't do anything
* Eventually hover over the right part of a town so it becomes obvious that yes it is mouse-based even if it doesn't seem that way
* on town info screen, press enter, doesn't do anything
* in fight, try to press arrows/space/enter/anything. Nothing does anything.
* go back to this page, see that you have to use WASD in the fight, not arrows.
And then the fighting isn't convincing enough even though the village is 96% gullible and I don't even know what triggers the fight to end.
Hopefully that's helpful!
Could do with more checkpoints. If there was a checkpoint midway through each level I think I would have persisted and got further, but as it is, it feels like it's asking me to repeat parts of each level for no good reason.
Bit weird that the knight doesn't attack you.
UI needs better feedback: clicking frequently gives either very minimal feedback or no feedback at all. Ending your turn has no feedback if the enemies choose not to move. No visual indicator of whether a robot has moved and/or pushed this turn.
Mechanics were slightly more interesting than I was expecting, but when I got to a level I couldn't figure out, the enemy movement made it not very fun to keep trying at it. They seem to have very simple movement rules, but then sometimes they wouldn't move even if they had a path to me?
To put it another way, I think most good puzzle games allow you to look at a level and think everything through in your head. You can't do that so much here.
The level I got up to had two of my robots and three enemies, separated by a crate.
Nice graphics, nice water physics!
The "each tentacle can deal with a specific threat" thing is kinda arbitrary, which detracts from it a bit for me. Not sure what the alternative would be though.
A score for how many things you've destroyed would probably make it a bit more engaging.
A few bugs that you're probably already aware of: had a plane crash but keep firing underwater. Had some torpedoes explode before getting to me.
It's very frustrating that on the first bounce, I have to fire the ball before it comes back to the starting location. Might be valid gameplay reasons for this, but it feels like the game is interrupting me mid-action - I've got the mouse held down and I'm aiming and then bam you have to restart because you waited just a little too long.
The tutorial is really misleading as to the kind of game it actually is!
Would have played more hand-designed puzzles but I'm not interested in being presented with a giant grid of tiles where there's too many possibilities and that will take ages to play.
Feels awkward that if I kill an enemy, they'll still hit back that turn.
The sound effects weren't that clear: sometimes I'd hear a sound and know that something happened, but I wouldn't be sure if I'd been hit or not.
I didn't get very good: melee enemies feel very punishing when I only start with three health initially.
Incredibly similar to Snakebird! But not as hard.
If you've played Snakebird then I do think you should credit it as an inspiration. If not then you should check it out to see an example of parallel invention in action.
Unrelated to that: I would have liked undo/reset buttons.
Initially I found it really awkward that I have to click the red/black decks twice to get access to the next card. After playing a little I realised why but I feel like the UI could be improved somehow to make it less weird when there's nothing in the available part of the deck.
Would be nice if I could see an entire stack.
Got to 6/2/1/3 before I got into what I think was a state where I couldn't do anything, but wasn't 100% sure.
I found the interface a bit awkward: maybe would have preferred a single interact key that would sometimes give a choice about what to do?
I didn't realise enter was a used key until I read the description below.
Really nice job of teaching the mechanics!
I didn't find it completely intuitive that walking next to a monster would turn me into a monster. Initially I assumed that there was a monster suit I was walking onto to transform.
Otherwise, nice job! Good that you got to submit something :)
Amazing audio.
The sonic boss didn't seem to be very fun (when I have bread at least) - lots of health and does lots of damage.
Did you really have to include the direct quote "it was an unconventional weapon"? :P
This is kinda buggy: I overwrite the spikes if I move towards them from behind.
Lovely graphics! Neat mechanic.
The rules for when you're next to multiple sticks are very unintuitive though. Always felt like a bug when it prevented me doing something.
The map on the last day was bigger than I'd like, made it really frustrating and I stopped playing eventually. Was enjoying it until that point though!
Couldn't give 5 stars for graphics because it doesn't contain a terrible cat drawing.
I like the snake gun a lot, the water gun felt less interesting to me though.
Level design could have been stronger I think. The last snake gun level was particularly frustrating.
This looks great but it's unfortunately really tedious to play :(
Too unforgiving for me.
Left/right movement is way too slow!
Starting from the beginning each time doesn't really add much other than needless frustration.
This laptop doesn't have numpad keys! That didn't seem to disadvantage me too much though, since you can just reset.
Also would like arrows to work as well as WASD.
The credits are very abrupt, I can't tell if that's actually the end of the game or if I missed something.
6 & 7 hours since accident seem a lot less focused/elegant than they could be. 8 is good.
9 has an extra crate and a really basic solution? It works to introduce the new mechanic but it's not as focused as the earlier introductory levels.
I kinda want you to be unable to entangle a crate while it's under a laser wall. (Mechanics interacting in interesting ways and all that)
10 it's really weird how pushing an entangled crate off a conveyor belt, it moves due to the push and then moves due to the conveyor belt (which it's no longer on). Should be the other way round or the conveyor belt shouldn't apply.
0 Weird how I can get the crate on the button and then rush to the door
8 hours since last accident was the most interesting puzzle. More like that!
This is lovely! I think it's a good length.
Nice way of doing pulling as well as pushing, too.
Yeah, I like the graphics!
Wish undo wasn't disabled, I don't think it improves the experience.
This is a fun way of combining different mechanics.
Probably worth putting a message to say that you can switch the characters around: I didn't immediately realise that was something I could do.
Already been mentioned, but this would feel waaay better if I could hold a key down to keep moving in that direction.
Levels could be smaller to demonstrate the concepts: found particularly with the "farmer will shoot foxes" level and thereafter
Restart fade is really long
As with all puzzle games, could do with undo :)
Not finding the puzzles interesting yet (got to "dogs can't chase into burrows") - rather than introducing the gameplay elements all at the start, what I'd prefer is introducing one gameplay thing, then having a bunch of puzzles using that thing (and maybe previous things) that show why that thing is an interesting mechanic.
In other words: these early levels are all tutorial, no fun :(
Ugh, this level being in two parts with no undo means screwing up the latter half means having to redo the first half, which is awkward because of controls. I'm out!
Graphics are lovely though :)
I really want to keep playing this, but there's just not enough checkpoints for me. If there were twice as many checkpoints, I'd probably enjoy it twice as much!
Looks lovely :)
Since it's not fullscreen, I can easily click outside the game and lose focus.
WASD should be the default rather than arrow keys. Or even better, they'd both work and you could use either without configuration.
The initial oxygen bubbles looked like they were a hud rather than in the world.
I can die by shooting too close to the wall? :/
Volume levels of sfx are too high.
Didn't get out of starting area because it takes too long to get anywhere.
Really hard to read with everything all in caps. Might be okay, but also the comma and period look really similar in this font.
The justified text is also occasionally awkward with massive spaces.
In the cavern, the textbox bg should be over the white silhouette?
Lots of content here! I really have no idea how much story is hiding away.
For puzzle games I almost always want undo, but I realise that wouldn't have been a priority given the limited time. Some of the levels are quite big and accidentally making a bad move near the end of a level is frustrating.
If it wasn't for the jumping, I'd want to get rid of the smooth movement and have everything be tile-based. Probably would still prefer that even though it would make jumping more arbitrary (go one up and two along). Maybe I've spent too long with PuzzleScript!
Glad you had time to finish and submit this! Good luck with the next thing :)
Minor, but that rest of it is so beautiful that I wish up/down made me look slightly up/down, just so I can see it responding to those inputs.
Awkward how I can't walk over a depressed switch.
Block pushing is a tad slow.
These are not massive problems, this is lovely so there's not a lot to nitpick.
Less minor: Should do a one-time save whenever you get a key or an ability. The wall-climbing challenges in the bottom section are too harsh/not fun.
I like this enough to want to complete it, but I'm just not enjoying this walljumping so will have to stop here with 3 keys. A real shame, I hope you'll change this in a post-competition version rather than just going "nah, it's meant to be hard".
Not a fan of the way that fish hurt you but don't collide with you in any way. Think it would feel a lot better if they pushed you around ever so slightly depending on their size.
Would also like to get rid of most of the numbers: if you had a health bar rather than numbers, and if you could see the number of treasure chests being dragged behind you. Probably do need to keep a number for score though.
It's very awkward how dying reduces your score as opposed to reseting it to zero. Weird situation where if my score goes negative then the best thing to do is to reload the page. Doesn't add anything.
Music very unsettling.
Well that was... err... something.
That was the most perfect ending possible.
The webpage this is embedded in doesn't have scrollbars, so the only way of seeing the bottom half of the game was to resize my window. Browser bug?
Mid-air jump seemed unreliable: it's not a fixed number of mid-air jumps but I couldn't work out why sometimes I could jump in the air and sometimes I couldn't. Needs time between jumps to recharge? Not well communicated.
As others have mentioned, graphics aren't always super-readable.
Some levels have solutions which I don't think were intended.
Ends abruptly. In general I'd suggest cutting game mechanics which you didn't properly explore, as opposed to shoehorning them in at the end.
Congrats on completing your first Ludum Dare!
Presentation is rather at odds with the story, haha! I can't make myself see the visual style as anything other than "abstract puzzle game".
Wish the blocks disappearing triggered again so that the explosion graphic always disappeared instead of only sometimes.
Wish I could move the cursor through solid tiles (and it just changed colour to show you can't swap): the way I have to navigate around them is awkward and doesn't add anything.
Realising I'm glossing over the good stuff, just trying to give useful feedback :)
This is fantastic! Great work, lovely puzzles :)
Nice concept!
Levels not quite as compact as I generally like in my puzzle games (too much pushing things all the way across the whole level) but that works to make it feel more like a sea than an artificial puzzle.
Sound isn't working? It's in the source-code version but not the actual game.
Love the interactions, this is neat.
It didn't feel like I was ever reducing the sun's power, so it felt a bit futile. I guess it is anyway: trying to stave off the inevitable as long as possible, but I would have liked crushing bloomed flowers to be more obviously rewarding.
Didn't play much, scored 4159.
I did not realise that the wardrobes had a gameplay purpose!
Collision is rather unforgiving.
Red squares I'm confused by. At first I tried falling through them but they didn't do anything. Then a bit later I accidentally fell through but they killed me.
Same level: it's just as awkward trying to jump up through this one-tile hole and it is trying to fall through the one-tile red squares. Finally do it and realise I can't jump up there: must need to change clothes and then I'll be able to fall through, but wouldn't have realised this if I hadn't come back here and read about the wardrobe. Swap this level and the next one!
Trying to jump over this death-barrier in the next level is too painful, I'm out.
Shame, there's scope for interestingness but the controls/collision are just too awkward for it to be enjoyable :(
Loved this. :)
Pity there's no audio, it would really improve the experience.
I want to play more of this but I keep getting spotted really early on and I can't replay from there! :(
Also disappointed that I can't deathsmooch as a guy.
Great idea!
Music is good, sound effects less so.
Main complaint would be that levels are less about smart thinking ahead than I'd like.
Download link doesn't work for me :(
Nice concept!
Actually playing was occasionally tedious but that's a consequence of the limited visibility and not much to be done about it.
Graphics are nice.
Didn't feel compelled to get all the fruit, and by the end was hoping for something to change it up a bit.
Works well enough though.
:( No in-game reset button.
Planets are annoyingly easy to screw up. No idea which direction I'm meant to be going in the overworld.
Neat concept!
I found the actual clicking on people to be occasionally annoying (they're moving and there's lots of bystanders around).
I wish the tutorial was less in your face, you explain too much too soon.
Graphics are good, far too zoomed in for me though: no reaction time.
First level was way trickier than it should have been
Took me a while to find the "hit dinosaur" button.
Controls are awkward but I got used to them.
Argh, this opening cutscene! Why are you doing this to me?
Got to the game and I have no idea what's going on. Where'd this balloon come from? But I guess I completed it?
It's a nice idea, been done before (Tiny Plumbers) but that's not a problem really.
Found level 4 frustrating. Sfx annoying.
Understood the goal easily enough.
Found it confusing that the rockets shake the screen when they explode. I thought I was being damaged.
Also found the death-by-falling-off rules very surprising. I would have expected you to just be able to wrap around as many times as you like.
This is nice! Occasionally the puzzles involving the move-toward-you enemies or the ball were more time-consuming than I'd like, but other than that no complaints at all.
That text is really hard to read in that colour!
I couldn't see it initially, started the game just by mashing the keyboard and then had to go through the whole keyboard to find which button was "talk".
I found it really unintuitive that I had to click on doors to open them. It's a good thing you were closing doors behind me or I would probably have taken that key all the way back to the beginning before finding the weapon!
Combat seemed mostly unfair, I died a lot...
Controls are rather awkward, made it a bit of a pain to play. Particularly how the order of the buttons would change around...
Got to the end though.
Love the twist. I wish the puppies would whine as you put them down, might make me feel guiltier.
This is more fun than I was expecting!
Sfx is a bit obnoxious with headphones.
Movement would probably feel a bit better if it moved 90% of the distance towards the mouse per frame rather than being 1:1 movement.
Should ignore the start-game click for the purposes of activating the burning.
I'm disappointed there is no combo bonus: it looks like there is, but actually it's lying and it's just 10 points per moth.
Left/right arrow keys move but up doesn't jump? In general for Flash games, the arrows would be the primary controls with WASD as the backup, rather than the other way round.
Would be good to have the ability to restart from within the game if you die.
Your jump seems to go to wildly varying heights even if you just keep the jump button held down the whole time. Sometimes clicking on a block wouldn't remove it. Both these issues might be frame-handling code going wrong maybe?
Spotlight/buildings are nice. Would be nice if there was a goal or something to aim for (# of monsters woken up maybe?)
The first time I played In got into a second cave fairly quickly (with water and gold) but then found nothing else. The second time I played I never even found that much.
So map generation needs some balancing.
The soldiers' lines were amusing.
Pathfinding was sometimes annoying: once some of my guys got stuck inside a tree and a few times they couldn't work out how to follow me.
Didn't find the collision annoying except in the top-right corner where I went to collect the three extra dudes. Then got hemmed in by the two groups.
Made me laugh.
Didn't expect it to close the instructions when I clicked to give the game focus.
I found that I forgot about my walking controls and just used the mouse to move everywhere.
Didn't personally find it a fun mechanic, but am glad you played around with it anyway.
Not sure why it's a download when it runs in a browser. Next time it'd be worth finding someone that can host it for you if you don't have a website yourself.
I opened it up in the background then closed it because I wasn't sure if there was an opening I'd missed. Now the guy is just running in a black void: he jumps off the right edge of a platform and when he hits the bottom he respawns to repeat it forever.
Restarting doesn't get me anywhere: he's just stuck like this...
(On Ubuntu here)
I am not a fan of installing something to play an LD game. A self-contained tar.gz would have been preferred.
Really wasn't clear that down ducked and up jumped until partway through my first play.
No way to replay after dying?
If I hold down the shoot button it only fires three shots at a time, but if I mash it I can shoot constantly. Is this intentional?
Having to replay the start every time just gets too frustrating to want to continue. I probably would have played for much longer if I'd had a hefty score penalty whenever I died but was immediately thrown back into the action.
Eats up a lot of CPU and slows down, so definitely worth optimising it.
Looks very nice.
Having to press space 3 times to restart is annoying.
Best was 14 seconds. Concept is neat but it never really felt fun to me: maybe could do with faster countdowns on the blocks but fewer lasers?
I like useless book which gives you random quotes. Not sure if your plan involved it becoming gameplay-relevant but I'm going to choose to believe it didn't.
The exploding sprite effect is nice, I'd be interested in seeing source just for that.
Gameplay of this really confused me until I re-read your instructions several times. For one thing I thought the package was indicating which of my couriers was selected.
It died after a few turns with this error: http://pastebin.com/4d7M2NXs
Couldn't run this (through Wine on Linux).
The error seemed to indicate that you hadn't packaged the correct version of the CRT manifest/msvc* DLLs but I didn't investigate much.
The way the blue box can jump makes it kinda annoying sometimes: you can instantly die when it moves from one place to another.
Apart from that, a solid towlr.
Really cool graphical style, unfortunately I can't play it (Linux).
Not sure why one of the links says "web" but is pointing to a zipfile.
I get a "CRC failed" error when trying to extract the files from the rar: looks like the file is corrupt, maybe try re-uploading?
I'd second the suggestion to improve the packaging situation.
I played this expecting that there would be some way to get away from him, but I couldn't find any shortcuts. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough.
Graphical style is very cool.
At some point the text started to go offscreen rather than wrapping round. Quite annoying, up until then I was really enjoying the varied dialogue.
Other than that, this is really nice! Despite the amount of repetition.
I was expecting sis to have gameplay ramifications but I couldn't find any. Re-reading instructions they have different behaviour? I was controlling the grey one the whole time.
Some jumps were very frustrating. I stumbled into the end without feeling like I'd explored the place to my satisfaction.
Could do with a sound effect when you catch a fly, general cat sound effects would also be nice but possibly get frustrating quite quickly (not a reason not to do it though).
Nice effect on the title screen, how much time did you spend on that?
It's a bit weird to me that only the guy can pick up the bag of litter but he doesn't need to physically take it to the litter box: the cat instantly becomes able to use it. But it's a puzzle game, so that's not really too important.
Niggles: collision physics seems a bit off. No reset button?
An interesting change would be to make it so that the cat moves faster than the man. Would probably make it a lot harder but there might be some cool puzzles.
No voiceover. :( The particle effects are nice.
I wonder if the gameplay would be more interesting if you could jump to send the items up in the air letting you reposition them a bit.
Confusing! When it started I had no idea what was going on or where the player was.
Sometimes when I'm next to an enemy it will tell me to press space, sometimes it won't. No idea why.
No in-game instructions = bad.
Looking at instructions again, it is very odd to me that pressing space does not actually do anything, just tells you what has already happened. You could just automatically display that status text!
Pretty frustrating with falling off-screen being insta-kill.
Fairly solid apart from that though.
The blurriness of the text looks really bad to me.
I never felt sure if pressing the clone button would actually do anything or not, I am assuming because there was a timeout on the cloner that I was running into. Could do with more feedback there.
Concept is great but the gameplay isn't quite there yet. I don't think you're far off something excellent though.
It's not obvious what the active regions for picking up an oxygen tank are.
When a dead body and a crystal/train track are overlapping there's no transparency.
The biggest problem is that it just feels incredibly samey. Once you've played for a minute you've played exactly the same experience as if you'd played for ten (ignoring completing the game or running out of oxygen). The mazes are just too big (and too numerous: I got to floor 4 and didn't find the end) to be interesting.
Desperately needs audio: some appropriate music and a variety of breathing sounds based on the current oxygen level would give this so much more atmosphere.
I encountered the broken maze bug once.
This is really fun!
Didn't realise you had a shield initially though: possibly should mention that in the intro?
The control scheme is so floaty that when I die it doesn't feel like it's my fault: it feels like the game is just annoying.
Obviously these controls are intentional and central to the level design, but this makes it not fun for me: it's not quite the same (good) kind of frustration that some games pull off really well.
No death animation if you get hit by falling slime?
Gameplay is solid but frustrating in parts.
As increpare says, in Firefox the scrolling is broken so you can't see the instructions. Take out the CSS "overflow:hidden" and that should work.
You get humor points for the abrupt ending when you die and the submission links. :)
This is cool, I will probably come back to it later to explore properly.
I can't get S or R to work: they don't seem to do anything at all. Ah, I see they don't come as standard on this ship.
Enemies are too fast: they end up just swarming me and it doesn't look right. Quests aren't implemented I guess?
Needs a preloader.
Kept clicking offscreen but not much that can be done about that. (Although, maybe embed the SWF with whole-screen width, with the game centred in that?)
Anything requiring clicking just after going to a new screen is tricky because the mouse needs to be in a totally different place.
At first I thought I was just controlling the camera, didn't realise for a while there was a boat. So perhaps should spawn player outside of the island (would be nice if there was collision detection too).
Was just playing about and then I died of scurvy. Hadn't read the instructions so that came as a rather abrupt surprise, but that was amusing.
This is great! Nice work.
I think the player could move a tad faster though. Physics can be a bit off but nothing that ruins anything.
Sometimes after I deactivate gravity I can't use my double jump and that's very annoying when it happens. That made the jump in "overview" frustrating.
Didn't explore everywhere, are there multiple endings?
This is neat! Didn't realise I could retire, so I died in space...
You need to collect at least two body parts from each enemy you kill to not run out of ammo, and that's just not happening for me. Framerate issue? The body parts never bounce, they just turn static as soon as they hit the ground, meaning you have to catch them in the air, which is luck as much as anything.
Some of the jumps are harder than they need to be. There are a few places requiring you to jump three squares horizontally and it just seems impossible. Possibly a framerate issue?
Music is nice and fitting: did you record it yourself?
Control scheme isn't great. There's really no reason to have to click on a "mind control" button: there is only ever one action you want to perform on any given monster (brainwash or give orders).
The mouse has a really annoying lag. I didn't consciously notice it at first, but it makes it feel really horrible to do anything.
The zoomable graphics look fairly bad at some resolutions, as pixel art generally does when scaled up/down arbitrarily. I think this game would work best with a constant scale, having the whole city visible all the time without camera panning. That would fix some of the other awkward aspects of the control scheme and also you could touch up the art to make sure it looks good at the fixed resolution you choose.
Some in-game reminders of the weakness triangle would be useful (i.e. on mouseover when you're giving commands), as I'm not going to commit that information to memory.
Very satisfying when you hit a lot of them quickly without missing.
Graphics and audio are great here. Conversation never quite seems to make sense, but that makes sense anyway due to the setting.
It's unfortunate that progressing means redoing the same sections of dialogue until you get the "right" choices, I think that loses some of the immersion.
Borrowed music should not be in a competition entry: if you want to do that you should enter the jam.
The third form is a bit odd in that you don't need to influence the movement of the enemies at all to get them to kill the boss.
The eyes and a mouth form is a massive difficulty spike compared to the previous forms. Among other things, the collision boxes are way too large. In the end I gave up, I would have liked to finish but it just wasn't happening.
You can move the player out of the game area which is a bit weird. Not sure if it's intentional or not.
Graphics for the game and the mini-map are very different styles which is a bit weird.
BG music is nice and unintrusive.
With a game like this I don't think you gain much by having lives: the only thing they accomplish is to make me annoyed that I can't start from the same level I just got to.
I didn't realise that you could hack robots the first time I played. Some in-game instructions about that would be good.
Gampeplay was a bit easy, it might be more interesting if all the enemies could put you in danger.
Liked the enemy that turned you into a flying octopus. Would have liked more variety like that. With more types of enemies I think you could get some interesting puzzles here.
The game was too hard if I tried picking them up individually so I just held down the mouse button and grabbed all of them together. It was like a flying party of soldiery death.
As others have said, collision boxes are way too big. That's fine when you're colliding enemies into one another, but really annoying when trying to avoid them.
Love the name.
Played through to the save half level before I lost interest but there are some nice ideas in there.
It seems that sometimes you can shoot a robot and it will get stuck on the terrain. I've only seen this happen to red or green robots, maybe it can happen to blues as well.
Had to compile it myself since you linked with SFML 1.6 and the version in Ubuntu is 1.5, but that's not your fault.
Enemies should probably stay within the gameplay area. Possibly dead enemies should too.
Time doesn't reset when you die.
Supporting WASD as well as arrows would be nice. Collision could stand to be a little more forgiving, both on enemies against the player and on bullets against the enemies.
A life system would make it less frustrating. One small screwup will send me all the way back to round 1 so I've only got as far as round 3 with the different yellow enemies.
Graphics are very cool.
It's not immediately apparent that it's going to be a hopeless struggle to just last as long as you can, so there's quite a disparity between the initial experience and the endgame.
I'm not sure how I'm meant to avoid being swarmed by a whole bunch of enemies at once, but when that happens I don't seem to have any ability to stop them.
Oh man, this is so hard! Really cool though, and really satisfying to complete.
Lovely game structure, and the gameplay mechanic is neat.
Didn't have a problem with the difficulty level.
Really weird controls, they take some getting used to. Instructions screen isn't massively clear which doesn't help, and unfortunately the gameplay is frustrating even when you know what you're doing.
I really like the idea though, I think it's awesome even though I'm rubbish at it. Enemy variety is good.
Sound is nice, and for some reason reminds me of the music I made for my first LD game so points for unintentional nostaligia (although yours is better).
Bug: running off the side of the platform doesn't kill you.
Love the gameplay here, and the setting. Don't change it to be sea anemones, that would ruin some of the charm!
I have weird input issues where the guy sometimes seems to want to drift towards the middle. Is that intentional? I'm not sure it adds a lot to the gameplay and it feels wrong.
Background is cool but doesn't really fit with the game.
Down as an alternate key for picking up enemies would be nice.
This is beautiful.
I like that you tried a strange control scheme, but I don't like the control scheme itself: too frustrating.
Graphics are neat but his tail seems to disappear in bite-size chunks rather than actually moving.
I like this. Especially the graphics. Music would have been nice.
Would also have liked a score or something to reward you if you got all the optional pellets.
Doesn't really have much to do with islands.
You were complaining in IRC about people taking this seriously, but I think it's pretty awesome. Be proud!
Game mechanics are lovely. Game itself can turn into stumbling around blindly: I think I'd appreciate it more if it focused on puzzles rather than exploration.
Controls are annoying: you keep moving if any of the direction keys is being held down, but you move in the direction that was most recently pressed even if that's no longer down. So if I keep left held down and then tap right I will move right for as long as I hold left down. Really screws with my expectations.
Music got annoying quite quickly unfortunately.
Somewhat annoyingly, I found most of them too hard without the hint and then too easy with the hint.
Graphics are lovely; I wish there was some ambient music as well to create more atmosphere.
This is really weird but quite cool. Controls are pretty much unusable though.
The Linux startup script should have #!/bin/bash instead of !#/bin/bash on the first line.
Damn bat!
This is rather lovely. The actual interaction with the game isn't particularly streamlined but the gameplay itself is novel enough to counter that.
Really cool game mechanics. Definitely needs more instructions though.
Either a time limit or a target amount would be nice.
A great idea well implemented. Music is very good, puzzles are tricky (as they should be).
Controls can be a bit annoying, especially trying to get out of the water.
The idea is great, but the player movement is terrible. He accelerates far too slowly: really kills the fun.
A more fleshed-out version with that fixed would have a lot of potential.
Graphics and animation are very cool, as is to be expected from you.
There are camera issues, but that's to be expected in a 3D game like this. Controls aren't perfect either.
Concept is perfect though, there's totally a compelling dragon simulator game in here.
Dialogue was entertaining, especially Sarah's first response.
Nice toy, but as a game it feels rather aimless.
Just something like an arrow pointing in the right direction (through walls) would help.
I deserted my own ship! Wasn't expecting that...
Asking "how fares thee" never seems to work.
The mechanics are a bit non-obvious, but that's part of the fun. Like, why does making someone the skip make them sad and angry?
Minor gripes: the control system takes some getting used to, and it's annoying how the HUD covers up exits consistently.
Would be nice if you didn't die so easily, but other than that it's excellent.
Faster movement would be nice. Other than that, good work.
Minor bug: if you restart the game before the leader board shows up, you have to navigate it with an invisible mouse and the game doesn't pause. But thinking about it, a very similar problem exists in my game too, so I can't be too annoyed by it.
Music doesn't play in Linux. It and the sound effects are great though.
I dislike this as a tolwr, because there's no process of slowly twisting your mind around what the game mechanics could possibly be. Instead it's just confusing and then you die and/or win: there's nothing really pushing you towards the solution.
With no idea how fast I was turning, I found it very difficult to visualise the level.
What would really help is a visual indication of which way the player is facing, so you can tell whether you've turned 180 degrees and are sending sonar waves back the way you've come or if you're looking at a new passage.
Or if instead of distance to exit you had direction to exit (fast beeps = ahead of you, slow beeps = behind you).
Would be nice to have something more than a sound effect as reward for finding all the collectables.
Shame that the background audio wasn't made by you, but I'm not sure it fitted the game amazingly anyway. Some slightly different music/ambient noises for each section of the level would have really worked well together with the drastically different colour schemes. But that would probably be too much work to do in 48 hours.
I have no idea what just happened, and that's the way it should probably stay.
I managed to get stuck as the exploding-head on adult body somewhere around the left side of the level, I think near the place you turn into a baby. I fell down a hole and then at the bottom there was a one-tile high gap I couldn't get through.
Well that was... interesting.
Would have liked the echo to travel a bit further and linger a bit longer. Movement a bit slow and you seem to get stuck if you try moving along a wall pushing into it.
Music is very nice, but only seemed to play once, and is unfortunately drowned out by the sonar sound effect being so annoying and comparatively loud.
Love the sounds. Would be better if the bee flew faster.
This looks and sounds lovely.
The gameplay could use some work, but the core mechanic is strong.
I can't get out of the second level. I have a feeling it's impossible...
This is neat. The hint system manages to just save it from being too tedious, although obviously some gameplay would be nice.
A nice variation on Snake. Went too slow to be particularly fun, but a good concept.
Nice and simple: it works well. Would have liked more bosses though.
I love this! Took me a while to solve, but it was totally worth it.
It was annoying having to wait for the animation to play out: a speed up would improve it here. Also would be good if you could just click anywhere in a grid square.
Other than that, I think the only thing needed is more levels (and hence some kind of difficulty curve).
LD45 — Start with nothing (1)
Null Is Zero by Sunblast 2019-10-15T11:14:02Z ♥ 0
Nice idea! Level design could probably have been stronger though. Last level has a solution that doesn't involve the blocks in the right area.
I found having to press R twice to reset awkward - in practice I've not found many people accidentally reset in my games.