Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → evbo
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 👥 | 🥉 | 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Cosmo Beat | jam | Audio | 4.59 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | 👥 | Tenoch's Turmoil | jam | 207 | 3.79 | 3.66 | 3.27 | 3.92 | 4.17 | 3.69 | 3.80 | |
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | 👥 | Cosmo Beat | jam | 20 | 4.27 | 4.12 | 3.97 | 3.97 | 4.31 | 4.59 | 3.54 | 4.00 |
Cute game! I'm a little annoyed with myself that I needed your hint to find the third ending. Obviously what you've done is phenomenal given the time constraints. If you had any more time, I would have liked some bleep-bloop sound effects to round it out. Great work!
I loved it! Totally got the retro vibe. The music and graphics really sold it. I enjoyed having to plan out my moves and pick good times to use the Electro-Blaster.
This is a really well made, unique game. I agree with the other commenters saying the pacing needs a bit of work, but this was a very pleasant experience nonetheless.
I think I would have preferred a single set of keys for single player with a button (maybe space?) to toggle between the two, since I was rarely able to move both robots at same time without confusing myself.
If you polished this up and sold it, I would pay for it. Great work!
I was able to walk straight through one of the generators, and I felt like the hitboxes on the collectibles could have been a little bit more generous, but other than that I have no complaints. This is a really solid entry. Great work!
The music sets a great mood, and I really enjoyed the wavy effect on the sprites.
I still don't think I've figured out what to do. I instinctively want to mine the resources on the side but they all say I need an Examination Station and I don't know how to build one of those. It would be nice if you could include some hints to help people like me get started.
Overall, nice work!
This is easily the best use of the theme I've seen so far. I'm really glad I didn't let the phone run out and start trying to brute force the solution.
The only thing that bugs me is the control scheme - WASD + mouse (or arrow keys + space) would have made more sense to me.
Great idea, great execution!
I really enjoyed the mood of this game. The ambient audio was soothing and the graphics were quite charming.
Unfortunately the X on the module close-up screens that I can see in your screenshot appears to have fallen off the left side for me (at least in the web player), and Escape exits full screen before taking me back to the main screen.
I would have liked a simple sound effect when converting resources to let me know that the buttons were doing something when I clicked on them.
I think cleaning up some of the relatively simple UI issues would go a long way. Great work overall!
This was a super relaxing and pleasant experience. The opening cutscene does a great job of establishing the premise and the goal without any text. My only real complaint is that the experience was too short!
Nice work! The gameplay was fun and choosing a gun had a real impact on how things played out. Each one felt quite well balanced.
The controls seemed a little unconventional to me, but I picked them up quickly. The thing that bugged me the most was the gun names in white text on a light background - I had a really hard time reading them.
Congratulations on completing your first Ludum Dare!
I really enjoyed the hose-like spray effect on the weapon at full power. Something about it feels so satisfying. The whole game was a really cohesive complete experience. Fantastic work!
It would be nice if there were a way for me to restart without taking my hands off the keyboard.
I really liked the pixel art characters!
Thanks to everyone for their kind words and useful feedback! We've added a short FAQ section to this page to clear up some of the confusion.
@rosypenguin Sorry to hear about the lag on the later stages. I have a few ideas for how to make things more efficient that I'll incorporate into a post-jam version if I get time.
@will-walters Glad you enjoyed the music! I'll pass your question on to @zorsy. We tried to keep the red enemies predictable and work in some rhythmic variety with the blue/green enemies. They each need to be hit at a specific point in time and should match rhythms that you can hear in the songs. We noticed a lot of people missed that so we added it to the FAQ.
@klianc09 I think you're right - the enemy hits sound correct when I play, but if I disable that sound effect and listen to my key presses, I end up playing quite late. It's possible that the delay in playing audio is too long and I'll have to remove that sound completely. I'll spend some time looking into it and possibly do a write-up if I find anything interesting.
Unfortunately there's nothing in that post that helps me with this particular problem, but it was nice to get some reassurance that a few of the other decisions I made along the way were correct. Sadly I don't seem to be able to play the browser version of his game, and the other links are dead, but it looks really cool in the video. Thanks for linking it!
Cute game that delivered on what was advertised. The plane physics were quite convincing!
Glad to see Python 3.6 make an appearance. I ran from source with no problems.
I enjoyed mastering the skill-tester-like qualities of the beam. Not sure if it's just me, but I missed the bucket a few times because I expected the cows to keep their momentum when released instead of dropping straight down.
I loved the hand-drawn art. Great work!
I didn't find a way out of Anarchy Mart, but I did find some interesting ways to die. I definitely appreciated being told what the valid actions were after something didn't work.
I'd appreciate not losing power while the skill tree is open - there's so much to read! Also clicking the skill buttons seems to fire and drain power too.
It looks like you've done a lot of good work here. My advice would be to focus on tuning the controls and core FPS mechanics so that your more interesting mechanics have a chance to shine through.
This is very impressive, especially for a Compo game. The visuals were pleasant and cohesive, and it felt satisfying to work out strategies and have them pay off.
My main gripe is that panning the camera drove me absolutely nuts - every interface like this I ever remember using would have the have the camera move such that the mouse stays at a fixed point on the ground, effectively like you're dragging the ground around, not the camera. The current system means that when I move the way I instinctively think I should (and I did that often under pressure) the camera goes the complete opposite way I intended. Having said all of that, I think this would have worked better with more traditional RTS camera controls where you move the mouse near an edge to scroll in that direction.
Camera controls notwithstanding, I thoroughly enjoyed this game. Great work!
This is great! The gameplay is addictive, the squelch sound effect makes killing enemies really satisfying, the gameplay was tough but felt very fair.
My only real gripe is with the skill mechanic. It took me a *really* long time to figure out how the menu worked, I think mainly because the level my skill was *currently* at was only implied by the surrounding options. And then once I did figure out how it worked, I ended up maxing the two skills I preferred and then doing an annoying jiggle back and forth at the end of alternating levels. I also felt like it interrupted the flow a little bit.
Definitely a solid entry overall. Great work!
This is a very strong entry! The concept is cool and the game is exceptionally polished as others have noted.
My initial intuition was to tap the drums in a constant beat, but once I worked out that two quick taps were enough to make the hamsters run rapidly to a position the game got a lot easier, though it did lose some of the drummer feel. Personally I'm partial to rhythm games, so I'd love to see what you could do with this concept by mixing in more traditional rhythm elements.
Overall this was an interesting and fun experience. Great work!
I absolutely adored this game! The idea was clever, the levels were well designed, and the environment felt really cohesive.
For minor nitpicks, I agree with the other people saying the hitboxes were a bit off, and I wish the movement were just a touch faster, both walking and jumping. If you had a little more time, a death sound effect that made me feel bad for killing so many slime girls would have been great.
I also would have picked different images to advertise this game - the title card made me think I was going to be playing a Doom clone, and the screenshots are cropped which gives them a different feel than I got when playing the game.
Overall this is a really impressive entry. Great work by everyone involved!
Great game, loved the humour. The screamer was great, but after all those warnings I was hoping it would be louder.
My main criticism is that a lot of the clickable things didn't change the mouse cursor when moused over, which meant I sometimes resorted to clicking anything and everything in a rather aimless fashion.
Really enjoyable experience overall. Great work!
It took me a while to figure out I needed to talk to the mayor a few times to get past the first day, but after that this was an absolutely amazing experience! I looked at the files before deleting them and saw they were just zeroes which ruined the immersion for me just a tiny bit; perhaps you could fill them with random data instead? Also if the content of each file was unique, you could catch people trying to rename files and tell them off for it.
I'll be surprised if this doesn't place very highly. Fantastic work everyone!
Thank you to everyone who has played our game and left feedback so far! We really appreciate it!
@sharpyfile Do you mean that you don't feel the power-ups have an impact in the early game, or that it's hard to tell that you have them?
@donitz Honestly I never really gave the choice of jump button a second thought, but now that you mention it, it's super easy for us to add a bunch of other options. Thanks for pointing it out!
@alph Thanks for your kind words! I was a little sad to have to opt out of audio ratings because we didn't make any of the music or audio clips, but I did spend a fair amount of time picking them out, so I'm really glad to hear you appreciated how we put them all together.
Thanks again to everyone who has played, rated and commented! We've reached the rating threshold and can breathe easy for a little while.
@danielclarc Thank you so much! And I agree, the inputs required to pull off an effective double or triple jump at triple speed are quite demanding. For the post-jam version I'll consider lowering the gravity slightly and decreasing Tenoch's base speed accordingly to make sure he still jumps the same relative distance.
@vimlark Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it! Each extra jump was meant to let you skip one platform vertically, but as I mentioned above the inputs for that are quite demanding. I'm really glad that the base movement served as a solid fallback and you had fun with that regardless. (For the record, that looks like a pretty good score to me!)
@publicidadeba That's awesome to hear, and those are all great suggestions! We tried as much as possible to reflect the game state in the environment to remove the need for a HUD, but I totally agree we needed something to indicate your score during the game. And a high score tracker would be awesome, I'll add that to the post-jam version!
@wiredoverload We found a bug after submission that caused Tenoch's horizontal speed to scale inversely with framerate, so if your monitor has a high refresh rate and Unity is trying to match it, that would explain why you're experiencing "very low horizontal speed". If that's the case, perhaps you could try setting your refresh rate to 60Hz and seeing if your experience is different. When running at 60fps the game should be very fast-paced, and if you're platforming well you should have time to make multiple loops back to Chantico before having to make an offering to Netzahualcoyotl.
Thanks for playing!
@wiredoverload I've updated the game to fix the framerate issue without requiring you to change your monitor's refresh rate and added a changelog to make a note of it. If you do get time to try the game again, please let me know if that addresses your problem.
@dk5000p If you were having trouble with just the single jump, it's possible this update will help you too.
Thank you both for your feedback!
This one definitely entered the realm of "funstration" for me. I got 2967 fairly early on and then it took what felt like forever to finally crack 3000. My high score in the end was 3059.
My main gripe is that charging a shot never quite felt natural to me. I would often get caught in a moment of indecision and then be stuck with an overcharged shot that I had to figure out how to get rid of. Perhaps some sort of click + drag for distance would allow me to make quicker movements.
The music was catchy, and the graphics worked well. As others have said, this is a great interpretation of the theme. Great work!
This is super innovative, I've never seen anything quite like it before! One small thing I'd like to see added - I personally hate mixed keyboard and mouse controls unless there's an obvious reason the gameplay needs it, so I'd like to see alternate keyboard buttons for advancing dialogue and creating assets. (If you already had them, I couldn't find them, in which case some instructions would help.)
Keep up the good work!
Great game! The artwork is beautiful!
I found placing the vegetables to be a little bit finicky for my taste at first, but once I stopped worrying about placing them perfectly the game became a lot less frustrating. I also felt the difficulty curve was off - I failed the first level several times before I was able to complete it, and then I finished the remainder of the levels on my first attempt. I'd like to see the timer relaxed or even removed for the first level, and then tightened as you get into the later levels.
Overall I really enjoyed the game once I got into it. Great work!
Dead simple, but challenging and surprisingly addictive!
It was nice to have something to aim for, but why stop the player at 14? It lets you place a 15th circle, but doesn't score it, and won't let you place any more after that. I'd get more replay value out of it if I could start aiming to beat my own high score.
Some of my circles had colours that looked very similar to each other, and some had colours that I personally considered unappealing. If you aren't already, I'd recommend having a curated list of good colours to randomly pick from, and a little bit of code to make sure they don't repeat too close to each other.
The particle effects were nice, the music was catchy, and the game was a great experience overall!
Great concept, well executed ;)
If you're looking for things to improve, I'd focus on the movement. In particular when I push left or right there's a very noticeable delay before I actually go anywhere, and this can make some otherwise quite simple platforming tasks frustratingly difficult.
The sound effects were great! The last level where you throw Lumpy down a blind pit and his screams let you know there's lava down there is a great bit of level design.
This is fantastic! The music really sold the idea of a heroic slime adventure. The sound effects were cute and gave me a real attachment to what was effectively a blob with a crown. The graphics and overall aesthetic gave me early Crash Bandicoot vibes, which I loved.
Perhaps this was just me, but it took me a while to work out that I didn't need to be on the ground to fling myself, and then it took me even longer to work out that I was actually sticking to the background wall; before that, I thought I'd hit a bug every time it didn't let me do it.
I found the slime blobs a little finicky to pick up sometimes, so I would have liked the hitboxes on those to be a little more generous. I also felt that a maximum fling could have done with a little more power, but perhaps that would have thrown the balance of the game off.
I was a little disappointed when all I found at the end was endless black screen. I started trying to work my way backwards through the stage until I hit the control bug others have mentioned and decided to quit.
Overall my criticisms are mostly nitpicking; I absolutely adored this game! Everyone on the team should be very proud!
The music was smooth, the story was questionable, the sound effects were mildly disturbing. This game is disgraceful. I love it.