Router Runner by JustinMullin 2021-10-04T22:35:34Z
Very cool! Gameplay was really straightforward, easy to jump right in. Cute graphics. Fun game!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Fionnabhair
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Containment55.bin | jam | 852 | 3.32 | 3.07 | 3.55 | 3.07 | 2.02 | 3.70 | |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Death Or Taxes | extra | ||||||||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Get Down From There! | jam | 2.83 | 2.66 | 2.00 | 3.41 | 3.71 | 3.35 |
Very cool! Gameplay was really straightforward, easy to jump right in. Cute graphics. Fun game!
Very funny and creative. I'd never want to eat at this diner, though.
Love it! Challenging and a lot of fun!
Laundry that takes 7 hours? Believable. Taking the dog for a 10 hour walk? Excellent. A shower that takes 6 hours, though?! You'd be too pruny to do your taxes after that!
I loved being able to explore all the different ways to procrastinate (I see myself in this picture and I don't like it). I did find the camera angles a bit weird, and it took me a minute or two to adjust to that view. I couldn't find a way to get a good look at the dog!
Hahaha, that was great. That intro is a great way to hook people in. I would have appreciated some explanation of what the icons meant, but the game wasn't so punishing that you lacked the time to figure it out. I really liked the artwork style and how that contributed to the dystopian feel. Here I am, a happy red wagon with an arm, and piles of trash so overwhelming they're not even in focus.
Very funny, and I love the aesthetic and design. Very 90s.
There was a second or so when I couldn't shoot anymore, but I hadn't reached the completion screen, and I thought, is that it? I lost? I don't know if that feeling was built in to the design, but I did have a moment where it seemed like it didn't matter how good I was, I lost. (I was only 68% good.) Full marks for theme!
This game is beautiful. I cannot get over how amazing the artwork is.
@axelrinaldo Noted on the colour! Can't have a text-based game that's hard to read. Glad you enjoyed the writing. I appreciate the feedback!
@mirianbr I was worried that it was getting too long, to be honest! I'm so happy that you were interested enough that you looked at the other branches.
@nullval Thank you! Glad you liked the name and the twist.
@saintchristopher777 Glad you liked the game! But if you're considering any tax shenanigans, you don't know me, okay? 🤪
@anna-constable Thank you! I'm glad you liked it, but you really shouldn't encourage me to make it longer; I'll never get something like that in a jam deadline!
@joe40001 Well, so long as she doesn't disapprove, I'm sure that relationship can be mended.
@a1stakesauce Thanks, and noted. Something I wanted to add to the game was an "inventory" the player could see. I was keeping track of that behind the scenes, but making that visible to the player had to be cut. Adding puzzles as well would be an interesting idea, too.
@rose I made the unfortunate decision to use a numbered array to store each scene of the story, and by the time I realized that was a terrible idea, it was too late. I managed to keep track, though, so if you think I can't keep track of *your* 20 versions, oh ye of little faith...
@ldjq Adding that back button was something I needed in order to test the game. I don't like punishing the player (because I don't like that sort of game myself), so it stayed. I put all that work into adding branches and writing scenes, it would be a terrible idea to not let the player explore. (And some of the failure scenes were the most fun to write!)
I think this game needs two things. One, a playlist. Youtube, spotify, whatever, just something the protagonist would be listening to.
Second, this game needs to *not leave me hanging like that* **how dare you**.
Yeah, I also thought the game was about collecting eggs (and avoiding the doggos) until I got to the comments here. Maybe more explanation is needed right off the hop?
I played solo, and my poor mouse definitely needs a break. This was an amazing game. The concept was great, and I loved that leafblower. Just spinning it around and watching the papers blow away was lovely. The whole game was lovely, but spinning with a leafblower was just 🤌 .
So at first I thought I could just spin around shooting, and it took one planet's worth of destruction before I caught on to why that did't work. To the denizens of that planet: oops. But seeing an arc of missiles spiralling out from the planet is still satisfying, even if my gun is pointing 180° in the wrong direction.
As others have mentioned, the visuals are great. Using clouds to cover up errors strikes me as a very creative solution!
It's an all-around great game.
So, it took me a few tries to figure out how cashing out actually worked, but it was a good game as soon as I did. Like @likirus mentioned, it would have been easier to navigate with a mouse rather than just keyboard.
I couldn't find a way to bypass the shop without buying something, which is what I usually wanted to do if I didn't like the upgrade options or I was just low on cash. I think that might be by design? It certainly made the game more difficult.
Managed to get as high as $19,000. No plans on going to Vegas anytime soon.
I remember playing a board game as a kid where you dial numbers into a large, pink phone, and they give you clues regarding who had a crush on you. This game has a pigeon, and the point is that you *don't* have a crush on him, but the feel of contacting people for gossip brought me back.
As I was playing, though, it started to feel a bit repetitive. Getting good dirt got a bit harder, but the overall gameplay didn't seem to change. Some sort of story evolution might help? Like, who is giving the queen the names of these terrible people, for example. (Seriously, tho, that royal advisor sucks.)
I am *here* for the psychedelic images. It helped make the mood of this game feel unique and surreal. Absolutely loved it.
I did run into difficulty with the game play where my encounters wouldn't end, and I'd be in a bit of a loop interacting with others. I played the web version, maybe that was the issue? Not that it stopped me from playing, though. Slug needs their crouton, after all.
Very cute concept, and the gameplay was really straightforward. The art looked great, and I thought the music was fitting.
Top marks for graphics for sure. As a mythology nerd (RIP folklore theme), this was definitely a game I had to play. But, as others have mentioned, I struggled with the controls, especially when it came to jumping. I never made much progress because I got lava'd, since I couldn't see the platform I was aiming for.
I made it to round 8 with a miner-archer-wizard team. I would have loved being able to buy more than 3 units for my team. But I suppose if wouldn't be thematic if the player won, right? Great game! I enjoyed it.
This is one of those games that I opened, played a bit (cultist swarm ahhh!), lost the tab, then played some more when I found the tab, and ended up losing maybe 30-45 minutes to? I was determined to beat it, and I did! There's a fair bit of strategy and complexity involved, especially for a jam game, which made it really enjoyable, even as Shoggoth was driving me mad. The artwork is great; I'm not an artist, so I can't really articulate what I liked, other than to say that it has style. I did have a hard time with the background music, however. I thought maybe my browser was blocking it, so I refreshed a few times, but it was just really quiet compared to the sound effects. I would have loved to be able to hear that better without cranking my volume up so high, as that meant the sound effects were a bit too loud.
Great game overall, though. Anything that I sink so much time into playing deserves top marks there!
@negator2vc I tried it out again in Firefox and Chrome, I think it's a bit better but the difference in volume between the effects and the main background music still seems significant, at least to my ears. It's not bad if I play on my phone, though! (but the graphics aren't as nice, alas.) I may also be an outlier, as I do tend to listen to things at a lower volume than other people might. Also, yeah, audio problems with web versions might definitely be a factor; I was fighting with that a lot with my own game. I use a Mac, though, so I can't test out the downloaded version.
Aaaaand now I'm sucked into this game again! 😆
@negator2vc finally got a chance to test out that Mac port. I ran into an issue in that it wouldn't launch, the error message, "ForestofMadness is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the Trash." Apparently this is because Apple is adding an extended attribute to the file, com.apple.quarantine. I found a solution [here](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253714860?sortBy=best), tested it out on my own machine, and then ~~played~~ *debugged* for a few rounds, with no problems whatsoever (aside from all the cultists).
I don't know if there is a way to port the game in such a way that this doesn't happen, especially if you can't test it yourself, but maybe add a help file to the zip with instructions on removing the attribute?
This is fun! I liked the tower defence mechanic a lot, and the music choice was really on point. Totally sold the vacation-gone-wrong idea.
What I liked: the graphics are great, and I had a good laugh when the hare was suddenly riding the stag. The dialogue was also great; it was funny and it made the characters more fleshed out. That said, I would click to advance the dialogue, hoping that it would display it all onscreen so I could finish reading it, but it actually skipped ahead, and I missed the rest of what what the character said.
What I would have liked to see: some kind of skill progression. There were a number of battles, but my characters always had the same actions, and those actions never got better as the game went on, nor did I get more max HP or mana. There wasn't much reward for winning the fights, which made them seem a bit repetitive.
I did find a bug where an enemy killed Vni before Hare acted, and since Hare's action was to heal Vni, I was still able to use him, and I don't think he lost any mana for taking actions, either. Or maybe Vni's just that good! You decide!
Ultimately, I think what really makes this game stand out is the artwork, the dialogue, and the story/worldbuilding. The battle system has a lot of unrealized potential, but that's jam deadlines for you!
@milano23 thanks for letting me know! Turns out a bug "fix" was hiding important files, which wasn't evident in the test environment 😅. Thanks for your comment, I wouldn't have caught it otherwise.
@dxk2294 yeeeep, I was really missing some of those things myself, especially that up arrow key as I was testing. There were commands that I really wanted to add, but ultimately I ran out of time. Also, there was a bug that would prevent you from finishing that I didn't know about until getting these comments, whoops! I've never made a terminal game before, and it ended up being a lot more difficult than I expected. (Day 1 me was so naive.) I want to come back to this project add do those things, hopefully in time to make the LD EXTRA deadline, but we'll see. Thanks for the feedback, though, now I'm feeling EXTRA motivated!
@zliebowitz that is super helpful feedback, thank you!
@suvi @jkyd @negator2vc Because of your comments, I went and gave my game another run, and it has taken me literally *days* to figure out what was going wrong and how to fix it, because the game wasn't allowing access to certain files and directories even if the prerequisites were met. The problem was that it wasn't happening every time I ran the game on itch, and it wasn't an issue at all in the Gamemaker test environments. Re-wrote the code that handles file/directory access, and I really, really hope that's the last of the bugs. Thank you again. I'd heart those comments a hundred times if I could.
At the moment, I don't have plans to add local builds. I stick to HTML5 builds because I can't make Windows builds (I work on a Mac), and Mac builds seem to require paying for an Apple developer account, and making games is just a hobby for me.
@merrow Thank you!
@ha-kuro This was my first time building a terminal-based game, and when I was describing my idea to my husband, I made the mistake of speaking the words, "it'll be easy!" out loud. Nope, turns out it's the most challenging project I've ever attempted. Whoops! Glad you liked the game!
@elorabrynn @just-a-cat thank you!
@kjscott whoops, maybe I buried the twist a bit too deeply after all! I did try to leave hints throughout that you, dear player, might be being played, but I also had to cut out some content because I ran out of time to write it (and film it; the original concept had video files). IMO, the best twist is unexpected the first time, but the second time, you can see how the foundation was laid.
@ilbini that's some really solid feedback. Adding a tab autocomplete function is something others have mentioned, and would have been really useful as a player, but also for me; I kept mistyping those file extensions myself! Behind the scenes, they're useful, because it tells my code if something is a file or a directory, and which function(s) to run. Sound effects were definitely on my to-do list- those old computer sounds were originally going to play when opening/pushing, before I ended up just having them play on a timer (and that code was only added maybe 15 minutes before the deadline). Had to sacrifice stuff to the jam gods, unfortunately.
@human The images were pretty easy, actually! I used GIMP for those. Convert to grayscale, invert the colours (unless it looks weird, I was inconsistent about it) then adjust the brightness, contrast, and levels to eliminate some of the greys and get it closer to a true black-and-white without losing detail. GIMP also has a video degradation filer, which I used to apply the scanlines. Finally, add a layer of green overtop of it all, blend mode set to multiply. I *could* have saved myself some steps by using a shader instead, but ain't got time to code that for just a handful of images.
The final image was the most fun. That's my kitchen. Alfred Hitchcock used chocolate syrup to make fake blood; I used strawberry. The original image is very pink.
This was, overall, an enjoyable game. As others have said, I wish there were tooltips of some kind to tell me more about what the various bonuses meant, how effective each summon was against the various monsters (and which summons were weak to them), etc. Also, I'm not sure if this is a bug or expected behaviour, but I wasn't able to "collect" different forms (the knight, the dude, etc) unless I validated at that point, and didn't keep going to get other bonuses. I wanted to summon a strong, beefy knight, dammnit!
The artwork was nice, though, and the way that I had to follow paths and work out patterns in order to summon the best creatures was creative and interesting, and trying to discover what was on each question mark really kept me engaged. I was even disappointed when I managed to beat the boss before unlocking everything!
Finally, and this is such a small thing, but: you offered the option to adjust the music and sound effects volumes. Something I've been struggling with when playing jam games is that I found the game's music to be so much quieter than the sound effects, and when I saw you let me control that, I was so excited. I know you opted out of audio ratings, but I had to mention this, because that sort of control made the game so much more enjoyable for me.
Too short! I was really enjoying myself, but then I beat it, alas. It feels really polished, and I love the visuals. It's a really creative take on the theme. I'd love more!
This is a cute game, and a different take on the theme. I haven't been able to fully blue all the students- as it turns out, hiding in a room and waiting for your fellow blue minions to spread it to everyone isn't an option- I enjoyed the game! Now, where can I get my hands on some of that candy...
Is there supposed to be a way to banish a summon? I can't seem to get past the first level because I'll place one demon poorly, and the only way to fix that problem is to restart the level. The concept and the graphics are wonderful, but it's just too frustrating to keep having to restart 🫤.
Ha! Nice take on the theme. Simple, enjoyable, have some stars, no notes 🤌.
I keep coming back to this game trying to do better. It's fun, very replayable, and the way your character's apperance changes as new body parts are added/changed is so wonderfully silly. Only thing I might add is an instruction screen at the start, I don't recall seeing one and I wasn't sure what I was doing at first. RIP game 1 chimera.