Isaac's Descent by eevee 2016-08-29T03:17:00
Whoops, missed that one, sorry! You can reset the room from the menu, by pressing Enter.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → eevee
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | π₯ | Lunar Depot 38 | jam | |
| 2016 | 36 | Ancient Technology | Isaac's Descent | compo |
Whoops, missed that one, sorry! You can reset the room from the menu, by pressing Enter.
@acotis: There's a thought-bubble hint to use up/down after you pick up the spellbook... but it's disabled the first time you press up or down, even if you hadn't found the spellbook yet. So you'll never see it if you, say, pressed up at the very start of the game to try jumping. Bit of an oversight on my part.
@johnbjuice: Thank you, and already working on it!
I started out thinking I understood this, and I really liked the idea... then I realized I didn't quite understand, but I could just drag the cars in any order and it would still work... then I hit the first fuel car puzzle, and I'm not sure I have any idea what's going on. The /front/ car exploded with almost every failed attempt, which never happened in any previous puzzle, so I'm totally confused about what the traps actually do. Now I'm stuck on level 7.
I still like the idea, though :) And the presentation is great (and highly appropriate), though might be improved with smaller pixels so I can see more of the track/train at once?
I might leave this title screen music playing forever.
Glad it was the second ZZT game I've ever played. :) Even being somewhat familiar with the MZX development process, I'm amazed you cranked this much out in three days. Damn.
Cute and enjoyable, though I had similar issues with clicking, which was a bit frustrating.
It's fairly linear, and you could solve it with pure trial and error, but I don't know how you could get around that without making it much more complicated. I did like the few "hidden" items β the apple felt especially clever.
I don't think I realized the connection between the blue/red buttons and blue/red books until I was a third of the way through, oops.
I like the music! Gave it a lonely, haunting atmosphere.
FINALLY, someone has gamified Brainfuck. Bless you.
Putting "Hello world" as level 1 seems kind of intense, especially when level 2 is merely clearing a cell. :)
This is a perfect game jam concept: you can't really go much further with it without just becoming "write software in Brainfuck", which nobody really wants to do. But what's there is enough to be entertaining for a few minutes.
I've never played a crafting game where supply lines are a factor β and can get backed up, no less β and the result is fascinating. It becomes a little assembly line sim that needs constant attention and can always be improved somewhere.
It's a shame I can't decide where to draw the lines myself; once or twice I've had to destroy and rearrange buildings because the automatic line happens to cut through something.
It's also a little hard to remember which icon is what, but, eh, programmer art :)
This is so adorable and so ridiculous. I want to rub my giant cartoon hand all over houses and cows forever.
It reminds me of the oddball RPG aesthetic from the late 90s, except it looks better than an N64 and it happens to be only a few minutes long.
I'm also going to fight several of the above commenters β the ending is anticlimactic but _hilarious_. I don't think anything else would've been nearly so good.
I think the "press X to exit help" text at the bottom of the help screen is being drawn at a half pixel; it's blurred horizontally, which makes it look like "press H to exit help", which left me thinking the wasm version was broken. :) Same problem on the death screen.
The combat system is very interesting! I think it'd be a little easier to understand if the icons were a bit bigger and the individual turns were slower, so I have a bit more time to digest what just happened. I don't think using red for both "weak attack/weak block" and "skip turn/return to center" is a good idea, either, since the latter are far worse than the former. Maybe yellow for weak?
I don't think my own grid ever changes, which makes it a little stale after a while. It probably shouldn't change at random, but if you ever fleshed this out into a full-sized game, I could definitely see some way to customize my own board by collecting and placing symbols.
Oops, that sounds more critical than intended, but I swear it's because you've gotten this idea rattling around in my head now. I would love to see what else you do with it in the future!
I like the stamina idea, but is there a way to restore my health? After a bad battle on the second board I was left at 2/10 and that basically doomed me.
The lighting is impressive, but a little distracting on a fixed grid, where it looks like half of the world is constantly flickering in and out of existence. Something other than solid black would be less jarring; maybe the roguelike style of showing a dimmed version of the tile if you've seen it before.
Hm. The turning radius seems _really_ wide; it was difficult to turn around and eat anything behind me. Might be a framerate thing? The Linux build didn't work for me, so I had to try it in a Windows VM, which naturally was a bit laggy.
Echoing the sentiment about the lasers. Even when I managed to eat something, I was already in the crosshairs of three or four lasers from somewhere offscreen. At least I'm immortal when I have no segments; I spent a few minutes just exploring space as a disembodied head.
The music is charmingly intense, and it would probably feel pretty awesome if I were better at the game :)
It's not obvious that you can replace any tile with a different one at any time, but I think that's a fundamental part of what makes this so interesting β I'm not shackled to the choices I made earlier. It really does feel like playing a two-player board game against myself, continually shifting the world towards something possibly more optimal.
Despite the small number of tiles, I found myself wishing the game would last longer so I could play around with my current configuration for a while. You found an _excellent_ set of interconnected rules here; well done :)
I'm a sucker for transformation-based games! This is a bit rough, but it's definitely more than I could do in a weekend, and it conveys everything it needs to. The different forms feel very sensible. I love that the ant, the first one you get, doesn't even have any special abilities; it's just smaller. I suspect real-world grasshoppers jump a little higher than this, though. :)
I did get stuck on level 4; I figured I was supposed to switch to bee in midair, but I just can't seem to make the jump to the third orb.
In addition to other comments on the jumping, maybe turn gravity up a little? Feels very floaty.
Extremely cute concept, art, and sounds :) I _love_ the powerup indicators β works as both simple UI for what I already have, and a subtle punishment for maxing out one thing too early.
I suppose this would be easier to play if I had the xbox-style controller it was intended for! I kept forgetting what the powerups did, and on a keyboard, I couldn't even remember which key matched which direction, so I kept buying the same thing multiple times and dooming myself. Oops. It might've worked better to use four keys that form a grid, like 2/4/6/8 on the numpad. I think you could find some creative ways to indicate what each powerup does, too β like make the "cannon" the same color as the aiming speed powerup, and the bullets the same color as the firing speed powerup.
This is absolutely fantastic. I didn't realize it would be a rhythm game either until after the first few beats. Love the very 16-bit detailed spritework, damn. And I've got a special fondness for games where being attacked doesn't actually hurt you.
I was _going_ to thank you for making the health bar fairly forgiving, but then I reached level 3 and was completely steamrolled. Oh well. Good spread of difficulty, I suppose :)
Whoa, I only filled half the town and made some $60,000 almost instantly. Considering I'm only supposed to get $10 per day/week, either I'm misunderstanding something, or there's a decimal point missing somewhere. :)
The interface is a little glitchy β it took me a moment to find the menu, the "sell" and "on/off" buttons didn't go away after closing a window, and every "w" printed as a "u" for some reason.
But this does feel like a small world, short as it is, and I enjoyed playing it. I think the music made a huge difference; I'm not musically inclined enough to explain why, but it's tremendously appropriate and I like it a lot.
Little confusing to get into! I assumed WASD would be movement but didn't work, and I was halfway through the game before discovering they switched between colors/waveforms β they didn't do anything when I first started, of course. I had trouble navigating with the mouse, since it's hard to tell exactly where the player is relative to the force fields. I collected a few objects that don't seem to do anything? And it seems almost arbitrary which color/waveform will kill creatures or open locks; I ended up just trying everything, and almost didn't realize I could kill anything at all.
All that aside, I do like this take on the theme, and the idea of collecting waveforms is very interesting! I think that could be applied to a slightly more puzzley environment, maybe, where the world has subtle clues about what works where, and there's a consequence for guessing wrong. (Or maybe there _are_ clues here and I totally missed them.) I also liked the switch puzzle at the top, which seemed straightforward but actually needed a little backtracking; I didn't expect you to get that much mileage from such a small space.
Did you make the art? It looks like several different styles.
(oops, double-posted)
Ah, this was a really interesting start! A shame it ended so early. I was looking forward to some very weird claiming puzzles :)
Definitely agree movement speed could be turned up a notch; that one void tile is _brutal_.
I notice the arrow keys still scroll the containing page up and down, which you probably don't want. Works fine in fullscreen, though.
FYI, I had to manually install OpenAL on Windows 7.
Alas, it doesn't render in my VM, which makes it difficult to play! This looks really cute and interesting, too.
@samurai-spark Thank you! Sorry about the window size; it has a huge impact on the rendering of the planet, so I really didn't have time to make arbitrary sizes work, and I went for the least common denominator :)
@tinyworlds It needs LΓVE 0.10.2, sorry! If that's Ubuntu, [this PPA](https://launchpad.net/~bartbes/+archive/ubuntu/love-stable) may help. Forgot to mention this on the itch page; I'll go fix that now.
Also playing single-player, which makes it pretty short and sweet, but I do like the idea! I can see how it'd get interesting with opponents.
I'm actually surprised by the depth β I didn't expect chunks of the world to start coming _back_. They ended up nowhere near me, so they weren't entirely helpful, but a game could actually go indefinitely if you were lucky enough. Definitely agree that boxes and keys should spawn together.
Shift is a little weird to jump with, but with a four-player game I suppose you have to get creative with the keys.
This gets really hard really fast, wow :) And I forgot what the powerups did almost immediately, so I kept not using them, which made my life a bit harder.
It's an interesting take on the theme; I think my main complaint is that there's no indication of how big the planet can grow, so I'm never sure how close to disaster I am. Or maybe that's deliberate?
This is _super adorable_! I can't believe you fit it all on a single board. The torch hack was a great trick for making me forget that nothing was scrolling or moving me anywhere.
The potion mechanics looked interesting but I am _extremely good_ and never had to buy anything.
Love seeing the first boss recur as a regular enemy later on.
Had some trouble with bears sitting right around corners, but that's not your fault. :)
I feel like I'm... missing something? Duplication and a title that mentions "perspective" had me looking for some kinda out-there puzzles, but that's not what this game is about. I'm not even sure how to make use of duplication effectively β the enemy cubes seem to respawn faster than I can throw the corpses of my poor clones at them. I had much better luck just charging ahead and hoping I'd get lucky.
X is rather difficult to hit while using WASD for movement, too.
I wish you'd written more about the game, or maybe added some commentary to the demo video, so I knew what you thought about it :)