Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → flokitall
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | Th | Gr | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | Sea Monster | compo | 572 | 3.00 | 3.28 | 3.44 | 3.20 | 2.96 | 45 |
Paperwork has never been this much fun :)
My only criticism for the game would be that it could have followed the theme a bit closer, perhaps via the backstory or by presenting the consequences of your actions or failures.
Other than that, everything about it is awesome. The mood, the art, the humor, everything fits together really well and the game-play is engaging.
Tried to punish the guy with "Top Secret", saw what happened. Nice touch!
Interesting take on the theme, loved how the game's message is conveyed via that income value and how doing what's right was enough to get you fired. This is a great example of narrative by mechanics, well done! Played it again just for to read the "winning" message at the end.
Personally I felt that the coffee mechanic didn't add anything to the game and the game would probably have been just as good without it. I do understand the need to convey the love for coffee though :) Unfortunately I did have some issues when holding shift and trying to drink it. It only happened once or twice and was probably linked to the fact that I played the game in a web browser.
Really enjoyed this, felt like an audio version of Papers Please :)
The graphics and mood are top-notch, well done! The woman's voice adds a lot to the experience and makes the game even more disturbing.
Awesome, awesome work!
Awesome game, it definitely held my interest for the longest time out of the games that I've played so far. Great job!
The graphics fit the theme well, the movement of your minions was pretty smooth. I was expecting at least one instance of a minion getting permanently stuck on a wall or something, but the path-finding worked flawlessly.
I have seen tower defense games where you play the bad guys before, but this has probably been the most enjoyable one so far.
My only nitpicks with the game would be:
- the progression felt much too slow, I replayed the same portion of the level way too much; perhaps the game's difficulty could ramp up a bit slower
- I wasn't a fan of massive clicking needed to spawn minions (this is probably my biggest complaint)
- it took me a couple of minutes to realize what I could do and how the minions were following my mouse, not my character; some tips in the description would have helped
Overall great game, made even more impressive by the fact that it's a Compo, not a Jam!
Fun game, good difficulty curve and fits the theme perfectly! Well done!
My only complaint would be that the red section sometimes shows up at the very start of the bar and is practically impossible to hit. I did later realize however that I could wait for it to fill up completely and then come back down, but that isn't very intuitive.
Overall, this was really fun to play, the intro was funny and the game-play would probably work well on a touch screen as well :)
Simple but fun, well done!
I did have some issues figuring out how to control the characters. Tried clicking them, using the keyboard and some other random stuff before I figured it out. Maybe showing a quick message when the game starts (like "drag a portrait to move") would help people out.
Color coding each character and their food was a great idea, it helps figuring out what goes where much quicker than thinking about the theme behind each of them. Making the difference in colors more evident probably wouldn't hurt though.
This is the sort of gameplay that would probably work on a touch screen. Add a couple of levels with gimmicks and some better graphics and you have a pretty decent mobile game :)
The game looks awesome!
Everything was impressive, right from the main menu and all the way through the game-play. Great graphics, great sounds and genuinely scary (although that might just be because I'm bad at horror games :) ).
There were minor downsides to the experience, such as the mouse not being confined to the window or not being exactly sure what exactly constitutes an usable object (I tried closing the green light on the dashboard multiple times). Perhaps a thin outline when hovering with the mouse could show exactly what you can interact with. It was probably just me, but I couldn't figure out how to on the car, despite reading your instructions.
The other minor nitpick is that although the initial cut-scene can be skipped, the discussion on the telephone can't. That made trying to retry the game much more annoying after sitting through the discussion several times before.
Overall, great work, the end result is scary, well polished and an amazing looker!
Games in this action / "bullet-hell" genre are generally more fast paced, with a lot more emphasis on the player's movement in enemy fire. Perhaps increasing the player's speed would make the experience more enjoyable? That way you would need to dodge through the enemy bullets while also trying to take them out. Right now your ship feels somewhat sluggish.
I think your decision to make your own bullets destroy the bullets of your enemy was an interesting one. Most similar games just let projectiles pass through each other. I think that idea is worth exploring, although you'd need to give the player some way of pointing his weapon, not just shooting straight ahead. Right now hitting anything is difficult since you're firing in a straight line, just like your opponent, and your bullets are canceling each other. If however you were able to point your weapon, the game would become more about firing without intersecting the enemy line of fire, while also dodging things. Seems worth experimenting with...
Theme-wise I enjoyed it, the feeling that you're essentially a ship like all the rest, going against a super powerful hero, all while some evil overlord is explaining his vision. Well done :)
Awesome, well polished game! Great job!
The music and art fit together really well and the film grain effect adds a lot to the atmosphere.
Glad to see you've also put this on mobile devices. Obviously this would be way beyond the scope of Ludum Dare, but if you're considering working on this further, online multiplayer (asynchronous or real time) would be a great addition.
A minor change that would be nice would be shortening the animation between turns, right now it blocks input for quite a long time and it takes up a bit too much space. Other than that minor complaint, awesome game!
Read the spoilers after playing the game, must say I didn't expect that depth for the mechanics. However, I did just brute force my way through the game, holding down space and moving around the map.
This is the kind of game I could see going on Last Week Tonight or something :)
Awesome art and theme, great sound effects and a simple, fun game-play. Good job!
This puzzle took me so very, very long to get right, which made it even more satisfying in the end. Awesome job!
The design for the puzzle was great, the theme is represented quite well, overall an impressive little game.
The only thing that I'd change would be to add the ability to skip the lose screen, instead of being forced to wait a second. Other than that, everything is great!
Interesting concept that's definitely hard to execute well. Well done!
The game's mechanics were pretty tough to grasp initially, probably because I didn't really understand the goal of the game ("I killed or possessed everyone, how come I didn't win the level?"). The learning process would have been much smoother, for me personally at least, if I were told at the very beginning that my goal is to possess the boss, not kill him.
Once I understood the goals and mechanics, the game was pretty fun. I really enjoyed the approach you needed take to solve the last level, nice puzzle design on that one :)
I'm curios why you chose to add the "Follow" mechanic. The game would probably have been easier to understand without it, since it's not immediately evident that you can only affect the neighbors of the selected minion, and as far as I understood things, your available actions (or their chances of success) don't depend on the minion you currently have selected.
Nice concept, nice puzzles and the game fits the theme well. Good job!
A fun mix of platforming and a bit of stealth, well done! The controls could be a bit tighter, as it sort of feels like you're floating whenever you jump, although multi-jumping was still fun to try to get right.
I must admit I had the most fun trying to escape the level by continuously wall-jumping and then bypassing all of the traps.
Fun little asymmetrical multiplayer, nice job!
This would have been a pretty fun little game even if you only had two tanks fighting each other, but giving each player a character that plays completely different definitely made the game a lot more interesting.
The music suits the game and although I'm not a fan of the graphics, they do their job. Nice touch adding the volume controls!
Well done!
Deep Sea Monster reminds me of Flappy Bird for obvious reasons, so I'd love to try it out on a mobile device. The control scheme (tap anywhere on the screen) would fit that platform perfectly.
I'm curious if you had the time to experiment with damaging obstacles (walls that if you touched, you died). I think that would be an interesting twist on Flappy Bird's mechanics, the fact that at any point you can decide not to eat a risky submarine in the hope that you'll be able to make up the lost light later in the level. That's unlike Flappy Bird where you essentially HAD to take the opening in each wall. That little change would introduce a nice "risk-reward" mechanic.
I did encounter a number of bugs while playing (subs or myself falling through the ground, pressing space too much and shooting through the roof and a couple of instances where although I ate all of the incoming subs, I still couldn't refill my energy in time), although nothing really major.
Fun little game, nice job!
@Multiplexor: thanks for pointing that out, I've replaced the Web link with a link to the Newgrounds page for the game. The Windows link still points to the .swf file if people want to download it.
It's odd that the game didn't load for you, I'll see if I can fix that. It should work on Newgrounds though.
The sound effect when at full rage and pressing Space is scary, had to turn down the speakers. If that was on purpose, well done :)
I wasn't too sure what to do, besides using the T button to change and pick up things to increase my rage. I did lose the game once after being spotted by the guards, but I'm not sure what's the objective, if there is one.
As other people have mentioned, the camera has pretty big issues. Fixing it somewhere above the level and disabling the physics interactions for it would have made the experience much smoother.
Fun concept and surprisingly difficult, well done!
I liked the detail put into the eye movement, as well as the ripples on the ocean's surface. What surprised me most though was the variety in enemies, I wanted to play more just to see what else was in the game.
Because the game is completely mouse controlled, quite often I ended up using the jaws instead of dragging the body. Perhaps binding the jaws to Space and using the mouse for movement only would have worked slightly better.
I made it to 30%, yay :)