My Relationship with a Cube by Stending 2020-05-10T15:11:23Z
Quite fun, it really stands out among these games for having gameplay that is refined and balanced enough to enjoy.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Eckkert
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | 👥 | Inner Pieces | jam | 731 | 3.62 | 3.06 | 3.81 | 3.93 | 3.89 | 3.37 | 4.16 | |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | 👥 | Shadow of Archimedes | jam | 103 | 4.12 | 3.80 | 4.05 | 4.15 | 4.24 | 3.76 | 4.10 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Planet Sitter: The Galactic Inquest | jam | 752 | 3.68 | 3.34 | 3.75 | 4.16 | 3.87 | 3.55 | 1.87 | 3.60 |
Quite fun, it really stands out among these games for having gameplay that is refined and balanced enough to enjoy.
The #1 baby stealing simulator of LD46.
We didn't use a game engine either. :) LD is not just about putting together the fastest Unity demo possible, it is also about showing off what a good programmer can do!
Good game. The thirst timer added just the right amount of pressure. It took me a little bit to get used to the inverted camera controls, but it felt natural after a while. The text was a bit blurry on the HTML5 version, perhaps you'd like to look in to nearest neighbor sampling.
@neontropics How interesting. No, I did not try fullscreening it. Thanks for letting me know that workaround!
Bigly game, absolutely yuge. A hot cup of covfefe on a cold morning. However I noticed a bug, the fireballs stopped rendering halfway through the second level, and they became invisible. I guess that's a commentary on the press getting distracted by celebrity news. ;)
Trying to keep a baby alive inside of a machine that keeps turning itself off... sounds like a social commentary on devopsing NodeJS. :)
Very cool game with great-looking art. I felt that it was a little difficult to tell when I had rotated the vine, timing by button presses took some getting used to. A small change that you could add later if you wanted to improve it would be a directional indicator that was always in the cells that were about to grow, which changed directions when you pressed the keys.
Our sister game! Yes, one of our team members noticed your game right at the start. Our games turned out very different in the end!
What a lovely game! My mean free path was about 0.5AU. ;)
Nice track, I should play it next time I throw a party.
Just a heads up, your Linux build is an empty folder! Let me know when you have fixed it and I'll come back and play your beautiful game.
These motivational quotes would have been good to have during the jam. :)
Congratulations to your team for designing a UI-based game that is so fun! The clues were good and not too difficult to solve. I have to admit that I didn't really understand the mechanism behind the "puzzle" box, it seemed like I was putting in the random seed for how the game was selecting codes. Was that meant to be part of the gameplay? I also should mention that I found it quicker to use external tools to decrypt the messages than pressing the code buttons - were there supposed to be any clues as to which letter to press? I was usually able to recognize how messages were encoded at a glance, but it felt like translating that in to button presses had to be a matter of trying random ones.
Great job on the art, and absolutely outstanding music.
I liked the asteroid physics. Unfortunately when I landed on a planet, I got sucked down in to the ground! I slowly sunk downwards and I couldn't seem to get out.
Really cool game though, it's like mini No Man's Sky.
Interesting combination of 3D and 2D art, it gives me an idea of something I can do next jam. I liked how the progression was shown by the thing slowly growing out of the pit. I also thought the animations were pretty good.
Very nice art style. I discovered that I could beat the game by letting my ship spin freely while I held down both shift and space. So it is not just an arcade game, if you are clever it is a puzzle game. :)
Very nice, the design is cool, and the engine you guys wrote is very advanced. It reminds me of Dwarf Fortress. If you were to develop it further, I would actually recommend something that a lot of people have recommended for our game - it could use better status messages, so that it was visually obvious why a monk wasn't taking your commands, for example. One of the dangers of a game with a highly sophisticated internal model is that it won't come across clearly what factors are influencing what other factors. With a simulation as deep as yours, that is even more crucial.
Thanks for posting all of your libraries, I'm interested in trying Rust next LD and your game is helping me learn. Also, very interesting thing you did there with the procedural ship generation. Our jam game has semi-procedural planet generation, but it leans heavily on assets put together by our amazing artist. I also think it's pretty sweet how you got it running in the browser, did you use that rust to webassembly thing? In any case whatever you did beats Unity hands down.
Very nice drawings, it is a pretty game.
A very difficult game with a good design and interesting mechanics. A game with this much mechanical complexity could easily be confusing, but your UI made it clear to me what everything meant, and what I needed to do.
That doesn't mean I beat it, though. :)
@ghast-neoh Well, it's appropriate for it to be a hostile farming simulator - you're playing on top of a giant rock! :)
You raise some great points, ctClarke. If only we had more time to balance! There is so much untapped potential in our engine, as you correctly point out.
P.S. Have you tried firing excess population out in to space? They will float around out there for quite a while, and they seem to be able to handle it without complaining too much. (Select population in the lower right corner, and right-click. It's mentioned in the tutorial but many of the people we have shown the game to missed that detail.)
@trexxak We really like that idea, if we continue this after the jam the bars are going to get mapped to the mouse wheel for sure. Little things like that are more than crucial.
@blubberquark Thanks for helping make Pygame! Yes, we have run on the latest 2.0 pre, it's necessary to get it to work on recent OSX.
The terrain is a mix of hand-drawn and procedural: our amazing artist Ellen designed height and temperature maps for the planets, to which the game adds the sealevel and temperature offset of that particular planet's state. The bias+state temperatures and elevations are then used as x and y coordinates to look up a color in a 2D colormap, the result becoming the color of that pixel in the planet sprite. This was all made possible by Pygame's Numpy integration. This particular feature took all of my time for a day in sum, but it was worth it. :)
@prakkus Thanks for the feedback! Although it isn't easy, it is actually possible to fire resources through space from one planet to another, so that you can transfer them without having to fly. A lot of people who play our game don't even realize that resources can become little physics projectiles, which is probably because they never render if you are so close to the planet when you fire them that they are immediately consumed.
Intriguing concept. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but eventually it started to make sense. This is a very unique and creative engine idea, and it's different from all the other things you see out there. I bet it would make a very interesting game if developed further.
Fun game, but I think it crashed. I was following the green square (the one leaving behind a trail of yellow) when it closed. Other than that, it was fun, I liked the idea of having a posse of followers. In a sense they were trying to keep you alive, which is an interesting interpretation of the theme.
Definitely the fastest-loading Unity game I've seen. It's a great build.
Clever idea and just the right length.
I liked this game a lot, it was one of the few LDjam games I played to the end. The only suggestion I can think of would be to have each jump time be shorter than the last, during a single keypress. Then the frog would accelerate when you were crossing large distances in a straight line. Great work!
Advice for Linux users: Do a chmod +x in the terminal on the game's executable to make it runable. It runs fine after that.
A quite ambitious idea. Not many people take on multiplayer for Ludumdare. Fewer get it working. Great job.
This is very creative. I soon noticed that the orbits weren't geodesics , what's the math behind them? It kind of reminds me of Bezier curves. I liked variety in the planets, were they procedural?
One of the few Unity browser games that I was able to run. No framerate issues for me, you produced a good web build. I had some trouble getting the robot to move though, I typed "motor.left=1\n motor.right=1" and the arm extended.
Our sister game. :) Thumbs up from one "running around on a planet with a temperature bar" team to another.
All I get on Web Unity (ubuntu) is a black screen with UI stuff on it, though. The game doesn't seem to be working for me.
Wonderful art and an intriguing mechanic! I was looking around for a way to accelerate the bar (the game has a lot of waiting when you know the solution), so I mashed my keyboard... and the game froze. I was able to figure out that R triggered the stone thing and K paused the game. You might want to write those down somewhere.
Also, great job on the coding, it ran well and wasn't a huge file. (I am happy not to have another copy of Unity on my hard drive. ;))
Something you might find helpful to know: Github has a "releases" feature that might be helpful for the zip serving you're doing.
It took me a while to figure out, but I was able to understand it eventually. I also wrote a WebGl engine for this jam (although I used Javascript). The advantage of drawing on the 2D canvas like you did is text rendering. We used text sprites in our game, because text in WebGL is not easy!
Interesting controls, it felt like I was pulling a bowstring. I appreciate the 2001 space odyssey reference. :)
@Anonymous
Scroll the mouse wheel backwards to zoom out. :)
@necauqua One strategy I was considering, although we didn't have nearly enough time for me to try it, was rendering text to a hidden 2D context which could then be uploaded to the GPU. In modern browsers, it is easy to get data out of canvases and in to textures with the ImageBitmap thing, although Safari does not have it yet. (There is probably another way but I didn't research far enough to find it.)
@necauqua Oh, I mean more than caching - in the browser it is possible to render text in a 2D canvas like you did (with builtin browser APIs), and then transfer the data to a texture in a WebGL context like we're using. That removes the need for your own code to handle fonts.
@trexxak We would have liked a pause button too - unfortunately it was a casualty of the deadline. ;)
@mekuri Personally I like to have separate coal, water and metal bases, built 120 degrees apart. I agree about the running though, if we had had more time to polish the gameplay, we would have made the planet a bit smaller.
You're back! I remember your game from LD 46. I don't usually use Windows so I'll have to download the game later, but I'll be sure to play it when I get back.
Funny, I liked how the customer rating didn't even drop when people fell off.
Very difficult driving! Reminds me of the canal level in Half Life. ;)
Clever, and not too difficult. I was hoping that someone would make a hamster wheel game. :)
Thumbs up from another WebGL team! I see you used D3, that's a good library. I think you did a good job on the procedural generation, platformers are particularly hard to generate.
What port does the game run on? I didn't see that written anywhere.
I was hoping someone would do the Two Brothers interpretation and I was not disappointed.
The animations were fluid and the game was quite enjoyable. The grub got me when I was trying to get those fruits in the upper right corner!
This is a really nice game, the humor works perfectly and the gameplay is challenging but fun.
This was pretty nice, and I was glad to see that it performed well. It's not easy to get browser games to run right, even 2D ones. Like some other people mentioned, the camera moved a bit more slowly than the player; but I think that is an easy improvement to make, just zoom out, or speed up camera following. (In our game, we spent a lot of time tuning camera speed. It's surprisingly hard to get right on the first try.)
I wish there was a way to add "black" dye to reduce quantities of the other dyes. I think you have a really interesting concept here, where the objects in the game are either collectibles or things to avoid, depending on where you are on the color bar.
@johnnysix Haha, that's really funny. I see it now on the first line of your description.
Yeah... nobody read our tutorial either. ;)
One strategy some people use for game balance is keeping track of the player's performance and adjusting the difficulty based on it. Maybe you could set it up to raise the speed with every success and lower the speed with each failure.
High five from the team that made another therapy game. :)
I like how it's head-to-head. Honestly every multiplayer game should work in split-screen. Shame how game companies don't want to do that, it cuts back on the social aspect.
I also got stuck on the three-body bug. Nonetheless, this is a very innovative mechanic and I like it a lot.
It was a fun tech demo. I think it would be nice if the attraction to the mouse was stronger; I was able to tell it was going on, but it would be cool if it was longer-range.
This was a clever interpretation of the theme. I was able to figure out interaction, for some reason the first customer didn't want the food to be fried - but after I figured it out the game went smoothly.
That's a cool background.
Cool game. A couple tricks I learned:
- Building up a protective layer of iron ore on the floor so that uranium wouldn't be deleted.
- Moving the uranium over to the core before rotating so that it would automatically snap in when the right angle had been reached.
Charming and simple, as always. We didn't realize that the game ended on the cloud level, so Zhohan got up to 3167 points before ragequitting!
I see someone else liked Outer Wilds. ;)
It took me a little to figure out that it wouldn't take words shorter than four letters. Too bad, because I am really terrible at anagrams. ;)
The art style was pretty cool. I kind of liked how jumping made your character pause, it was like they were winding up for a big jump. I noticed that the lighting wasn't the same in all of the player's walk frames; it might have been a good idea to look at the histogram under "levels" or "curves" to fix that in an image processor. Unlike some of your other reviewers, I don't think the game was too short. Ludumdare games are meant to be short introductions to novel artistic concepts and game mechanics.
I liked the aesthetic. It was a bit confusing when the house disappeared after I filled up its resource requirements. No crashes for me, the technology worked just fine.
Nice game! I got to $25524 and level 20. I liked the art style, and the animations were fluid (I appreciated the motion blur on the pickaxe.) I noticed some rendering trouble with the borders of the tiles. I would personally recommend making the tile geometry *slightly* bigger than the tile, so that the gaps are always filled. A lot of other 2D Unity games seem to have that problem too.
This was a really nice game, I liked the art a lot. It's also nice that the player character was corona-safe, wearing that mask. ;)
I couldn't figure out how to defeat the extra-tall enemy near the start so I went back, did a difficult jump to get up the wall behind it, and then jumped over. I'm not sure if I was supposed to defeat it normally. When I got to the boss, I was initially worried that it would have the same issue, but then I realized that I had to hit it multiple times to get it down one notch in health. If my guess about why I was confused about this is correct, I think it might help if every hit changed the color of the enemy, changing it in smaller steps if the enemy has a lot of health.
The movement was very fluid, and I liked the walljumping mechanic. It's also worth mentioning that your game didn't have the tile seam bug that most other 2D unity games seem to be having - whether that was because you fixed it, or because of good luck, that counts in your favor.
High five from a team that also made a therapy-themed game!
I got 60%. This is a very charming idea.
It might seem like a minor point, but I really liked that you put it in a folder inside the zip archive. It saved me some work organizing it amongst all of the other LD games.