Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Frabjous Studios
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | π₯ | BANKWAVE: Neon Networth | jam | 749 | 3.42 | 3.02 | 2.87 | 2.62 | 4.45 | 4.18 | 3.66 | 4.02 |
I don't know why there's so many of them and why they won't run, but they don't stop coming and I'm here for it.
Loved this entry! I had fun. It was short and sweet. The graphics were pretty good. I think the death sounds on audio needed to be randomized with a few more takes, or balanced a tiny bit better.
My only negative feedback: the font was very hard to read, and it was so small in the UI on HTML that I couldn't really make out how many arrows I had.
This game is SO good! Very fun! I love the use of Minecraft logic and the simple design that makes it feel very rewarding. Every level includes additional features that make it so much fun.
Literally all that I felt like it was missing was a simple gradient on the skybox and some music.
You should **absolutely** finish up this game and sell it on Steam for a couple of bucks. It could be a hit. You owe it to yourself to try. Reach out to me if you need any help. @FrabjousStudios on Twitter.
FYI: I was able to play this on a Macbook via Crossover and everything ran perfectly well.
Ahhhhh!! All the Pico-8 Games are sooo gooood! I'm going to need to build in it for next year!
This is an incredibly charming game with people who feel like real people. I love the lo-fi aesthetic and cute graphics. And the devs did some really neat stuff with the waves!
Charmed my socks off. For real.
YESSSS!!! Thank you for fixing it! This game is SO good! It's easily in my top ten of this jam.
*Fantastic* one-button mechanics; great pixel art, and really good level design. This is the perfect sort of Jam game where you do something really innovative and cool and then spend days two and three cranking out levels to make players happy
Only negative comment I have is that I couldn't figure out how to get started on Level 7.
And one other nitpick is that rotating pixel art isn't always great, but at least it looks like you've gotten the shader working in grid mode properly. Good work! Solid entry! Wish you all the best!
> This gameplay was inspired by the fishing in Stardew Valley
Fishing in that game gave me contractions too. :T
EDIT: Ok, now that I've actually played it... here are my thoughts. It's way too difficult for me to even come close to winning. But I'm choosing to believe this was an intentional design decision, as a social commentary on post-partum fatalities before modern medicine... that's what you were going for, right? π
10/10 for the concept though. Somebody had to go there. Congrats for being original. Made me nostalgic for Newgrounds Flash games. π
FYI: This runs fine on an M1 Macbook via CrossOver.
@bobbie Really? You anticipated this? This submission came as a total surprise to me. π
Very cute voxel art! Good music and fantastic animations.
I did notice a few issues: 1) red swordsdudes would start spawning in the middle of the screen instead of spawning alongside wagons, 2) when a wagon is attacked too close to the edge of the screen, the beer also spawns off screen and was unreachable for me.
Very fun game! You added a lot of interactions in a very short time. Great job!
Mega kudos to the devs for accomplishing a multiplayer browser game in only 72 hours. I can't get it to work right now but they deserve all the love for actually staying committed to pulling this off.
Keep going! Reach out on Twitter @FrabjousStudios if you're having issues with server load -- I've got a tiny bit of expereince there and I may be able to step in and help. π€
This is such a cool idea!!! I will play it.
EDIT: Loved every minute of this. I apologize in advance for pretending to be Captain Kirk.
EDIT2: Er... not in advance, I guess.
What a fantastic little roguelike! I love the lowpoly assets, which reminded me of Runescape. It was a lot of fun!
There was a tiny bit of camera jank, but it work well enough to be playable! The biggest flaw for me was the mouse controls, and a few times I had a lot of issues with merchant UIs showing up when they weren't supposed to.
Overall: 10/10 would haul wagon naked again. You should be very proud! Keep being awesome.
The idea of not letting the books tip over was really interesting. I would have liked an explanation for why these books must be kept in a stack -- some magical reason?
Graphics are spot on :100:. The music was very good but I felt like the R&B vibe might not fit the theme -- (but that could be a matter of taste).
I did feel that the controls were pretty slippery.
I think what this game is really missing is a timer to get the player more invested in reaching the goal on time. It might make it too hard, though. I'm curious -- did you try anything like that during development?
You know you've done something special whenever you've got a game a player can enjoy even while they're terrible at it.... π
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I had loads of fun here; this one's a keeper. The mechanics are excellent and a lot of fun. With more levels and a leaderboard, I could see this becoming a successful mobile game.
One thing I did notice was that the delivery to a satellite will sometimes fail -- I think the game might have a particular satellite in mind -- I'm just not sure which one it is? Let me know if that's wrong, though.
EDIT: ohhh there's an arrow.
This is definitely the best submission I've seen so far! Great work. Very smooth.
The only negative thing I have to say is that the keybindings feel a bit cramped. That's an easy fix, though.
Well done, sir!
This seems like a really innovative take on the theme, but I had a hard time understanding what to do because I couldn't figure out how to rotate the camera. Also it was very easy to use up all my metal at the beginning and never get it back. :T
Love the music and overall vibe. I could definitely see this idea becoming a thing.
@peterfiftyfour I'm on a MacBook playing with a trackpad π π
I think two finger scroll oughta do it. We'll see.
A Metroidvania in a Game Jam is *ambitious* but you really pulled it off! This game has a lot of atmosphere and packs a lot of fun into a small amount of time.
One thing I love about the Metroidvania genre is that feeling of exploration you get while you're playing. It think with some more graphics assets you could be setup to do something really cool here!
The difficulty was a bit high for me, to be honest -- but I also suck at platformers. Great job!
This game is fantastic. I had a ton of fun but didn't read the instructions so I didn't realize I was supposed to pair the right baby with the right parents (duh!) until it was too late! π±
Fantastic game; great music and sound assets. I love the chunky pixel art. Good concept too! A memory game where you have to actually try and form associations and connections with the parents, to get it right.
Great job! This game really delivers. π
I couldn't stop smiling while I was looking at the screenshots, but I can't get this to run on a Macbook under CrossOver. Hit me up if you'd like help testing out other Operating Systems so you can increase your reach!
This is really good! The game looks absolutely beautiful and the music is :100:! I am STILL in love with The Wellerman so full marks there from me! :grin:
I had a pretty difficult time reading the legend at first; I feel like some colors would have been a more helpful guide. That said, the player has plenty of time to figure things out before the pirates arrive. This did make the game a bit of a struggle, though.
The idea of using a quill to draw out the path the boat will take is pure genius! I never would have thought of it and it is very creative. Unfortunately, I also think it's the major thing that's keeping this game from being more fun. I had a hard time controlling things using the track pad, which led to me being sunk by pirates :(. I suspect that just clicking and dragging to have the boat move in the current direction of the cursor would be easier for the player to control. Or maybe a compromise would be to slow down the pirate ships in order to compensate.
Voice acting?! In a jam game!? Now this I've gotta see!
EDIT: Holy cow this thing is great! I don't think I've seen a surreal piece like this in LDJam 53 yet! The attention to detail in this game is phenomenal, from the sound design to the art assets and everything else I actually want to go back to explore this world again!
The vibe this game brings felt exactly like it should have. Cyclopean architecture, weird characters, everything was just :two_hearts:
The only critique I have is that using some additional textures might have been helpful -- the tiles tended to become repetitive over time.
10/10 would roleplay a creepily supple paperboy again.
FYI: I played this on a Macbook via a Windows Emulator (CrossOver) and everything ran perfectly.
What a nice little endless runner! I had lots of fun. The visuals are fantastic and the art style really matches well. It must have been fun to put all those assets together and see them turn into a town!
Also; this has got to be the worst traffic jam ever to appear in a videogame. π
One thing I didn't understand is what was happening to make my score go up. It seemed random. Was it?
10/10 would sprint endlessly to deliver thing to place again.
What beautiful pixel art! This was truly a joy to watch and play! I played with a keyboard and mouse on my laptop and everything ran just fine.
The animation style makes it seem like the screen is running at a low framerate during the 'tutorial' scene; when it's actually not. This could be a stylistic choice, though.
Text scroll speed is fairly slow, but I loved the sound it makes. It wasn't clear I needed to press 'Alt' to advance the text. I also wish I didn't have to listen to his speech every time I die.
I feel like the health mechanics might need some tuning to change the difficulty. Felt like I was dying a lot. Or maybe this exactly what you want for a jam to encourage a brief game loop.
Sound was excellent; I did feel like I was missing some music, but I understand the omission.
Overall, this is an **extremely** solid entry. Mega kudos to you! Keep being awesome!
Check out our entry: it's an immersive synthwave capitalism simulator. ^_^
This is an excellent idea for a game. You've taken sliding puzzle mechanics and mashed it up with a quick shortest-path algorithm to create a coherent and extremely interesting concept. I had a lot of fun and I especially like how all of the puzzles combine together into an overall puzzle. Very nice!
With better graphics, a tutorial, and perhaps some roguelike mechanics to enable puzzle generation, I could see this game doing really well on the casual games market or on mobile platforms. Don't give up on this idea! Hit me up on Twitter if you'd like some help. @FrabjousStudios.
Well done! Keep being awesome! π
This game is so much fun! It also has the most sensitive scroll wheel on the planet.
Very funny. I love resource / time management sims like this one. You should take it forward. I'd love to see what it looks like at scale.
I didn't see the "giving birth" title coming but I understood how it worked.
I *definitely* didn't see this one coming. π€£
This game is in my personal top 10. I could **not** stop laughing. What an absolutely bonkers and insane concept.
Somebody PLEASE deliver this team an aware or a box full of straightjackets IMMEDIATELY! Probably both!
EDIT: graphics were janky af in HTML5 for me but I couldn't care less. Well done! Bravo! I hope you win something! You deserve it!
EDIT2: The bigger surprise was the LEADERBOARD?! Nice!!
Nice retro game! Somebody's been practicing their raytracing. :grin:
I'm in the 'wandered around for a bit' camp as well. I think starting the player off in a maze before giving them a goal to pursue might need to be reconsidered. A small tutorial section that puts the player in a larger room with the initial goal would be an improvement on the current progression.
I am quite pleased with this. It is an extremely satisfying experience -- and on the Pico-8! Thank you for making me happy.
This one doesn't run under CrossOver on Mac. :frowning2:
Reply if you get a Mac build working and I'll give it a try.
What's this? Another Synthwave game?! I must play it *immediately*.
This was fun! I was even able to get it to run on OSX using crossover. Performance was bad through the emulator though (but that's not on you!). Solid work! :)
I am tempted to submit a rating for "Fun" without playing based solely on the description of the controls... But that would be wrong.
You're right about feedback about the clock! We had planned a day/night cycle and it's implemented... but the shader refuses to do what it's supposed to. Might be related to using an unstable branch of Ebitengine because we're _living on the edge_.
Thanks for playing! Final submission will be ready here soon.
@katamary We're about to post the completed submission. Give it another try if you get the chance. :pray: There's a bit more polish on it now (still no day/night cycle though :C). :D
@morepixels is there really a *wrong* way to play?! :shrug: If you had fun you were doing it right! :wink:
Thank you @clowreed53! @jaycifer, @elekkay and PinkVirus each did an amazing job!
@cinterre thanks for playing and for the kind words! That's excellent feedback. I had imagined that the player would explore this for themselves, but maybe some hints would be helpful. In any case it's good to hear you found this feature on your own!
@remus
> Papers Please showed features slowly and guided you through stuff. I donβt see what I need to do here clearly.
Excellent point! If we take this idea forward (and that's a very strong possibility) we'll be sure to put much more consideration towards teaching the player what to do. For the jam I thought it'd be interesting to see what comes out of it if we follow what big corporations sometimes do and just toss the player behind the customer service desk and let them figure it out.
I'm so glad that you got the reference that we were going for! Papers Please was our biggest influence for this title. Thanks so much for your kind words! :pray:
Thank you @eli-heinrichs @tul-games and @mikyll!! Thanks for playing and for the kind words!
> Also the game crashed on me a few times, not sure why.
@hotaloca what platform are you running on and what part of the game were you in? If you get the chance, I'd love a bug report at https://github.com/Frabjous-Studios/ldjam-53. :pray: Thank you for your kind words!
@100th-coin THANK YOU πππ for sharing your experience like that! It is incredibly enlightening. And we will be making a few major changes to the employee onboarding experience as a result. Can we give you playtester of the year??! There's an LDJam category for that -- right??
@francis @cepeka Thank you for your kind words! We are aware of the crashes and as soon as our devs have had a bit of a break we'll look into getting them fixed later this week. π
Thanks @arthur-sorignet-gautrot and @joe-cowman! We are definitely considering keeping this game going. You might just see it on a Kickstarter soon. π Thanks for playing and keep being awesome!
@lisek-gagatek between you and me there are some race conditions that I need to resolve... :T Part of integrating with YarnSpinner. These are responsible for the vast majority of the stability issues right now. Thankfully, I have a good idea for a better design I can use to address them later this week. I'll be sure to post here once that's happened!
We also have each day locked in at 10 minutes of play time, when it needs to be closer to 6 minutes, based on the amount of content we have.
All of that means that there is much more of a story than players have been able to unlock so far -- we were able to include seven days of gameplay in the LDJam edition! Once the bugs and crashes are resolved that content should become accessible for all players.
@velvetlobster we'll add a ticket to the backlog to have this sprite punished for his indecent behavior. :T
#EDIT: https://github.com/Frabjous-Studios/ldjam-53/issues/14
@stefan-funke That bug should be fixed in the most recent release: v0.4.2. :fingers_crossed: Try it out and let us know what happens!
@obe-dot Thank you for your kind words! The artists really did an amazing job in a brief time.
@forager Fullscreen is F! Let me know if it's not working.
@blank-3d absolutely! The major thing this game is missing is a tutorial. Mr. Supervisor isn't very helpful, is he? :T
@purrseus I'm developing on a Mac, but I have a friend on Windows and we'll be looking at it together later this weekend.
@conduit @purrseus v0.4.4 should be up within the next 10-15 minutes or so -- I've been told by a Windows user that it's much more stable. Let me know if you run into issues.
If either of you are able to run the game via cmd prompt -- it might show us logs during a crash, depending on the root cause.
@weeping-rupee fullscreen is the F key. Does it not work for you? My Windows playtester reports it's working for him in v0.4.4.
Next jam we'll be sure to rebind it to Alt-Enter. :)
> It would be nice if the shredder didnβt appear until the day you start using it.
My thoughts exactly! I had wanted to animate a little panel that would open up but decided that time during the Jam would be better spent on a day/night cycle (which works now! at least for me). Thanks for this feedback ππ»
> I didnβt get why a sketchy robot was trying to give me all his cash, so I hit the panic buttons but nothing happened. I think it was just the money delivery?
Why on earth would you think your employer would give you panic buttons that actually work? :T
> It takes a minute to get used to but something like that could make this game quicker/smoother to handle.
Thanks for this idea! It's a great one. It could work great, but I guess I didn't think of it because I develop on a Macbook where I only use a trackpad (i.e. right-clicking is _hard_). I think for the commercial version we might have a 'trackpad mode' that enables something like the current Shift + Click system.
Thanks so much for playing and for providing excellent feedback! :pray: Keep being awesome!
@sarah-alexa thanks for the kind words! I'm glad to hear that the core game loop is engaging! Devs on the project right now aren't quite the target audience for it, but we've decided to stick with it! We'll be polishing it up over the next two months or so before we start hyping our Kickstarter.
> You already know about the crashing but I thought it might be worth adding that every 1-3 seconds, the game consistently freezes for a good half to full second which makes it pretty hard to interact with.
Damn, I really need to get a Windows machine that I can profile it on. Everything's so smooth on my MacBook. :T Thanks for the bug report! We'll look into it. π
@sarah-alexa @remus @cepeka @mikyll @conduit @francis @obe-dot @forager @katamary @madbarron @weeping-rupee @purrseus
Thanks for playing! You might be interested to know that we're doing a Kickstarter! You can join the wait-list to get an email once we announce the campaign!
https://bankwave.frabjousstudios.com
@weirdbitgames The story and plot are exactly what we're excited about.
This take on standup comedy is so bleak it's clear at least *one* of you has some experience. Am I right? π€£
Great job on this! Very clever use of the theme -- I love the games that think outside of the box like this one. Camera and everything looks fantastic. Sound & music totally works, and I love the aesthetic. Main character looks a touch like Louis C.K. -- was that intentional?
The only critique I have is that the hit boxes in the second minigame were a bit too coarse -- I would have liked to be able to dodge between the letters in individual words. As is, I was only able to avoid being hit by going between the words.
The final minigame was fun. I wish telling a joke in real life was so easy!
10/10 would be heckled again.
FYI: this runs great on a Macbook via a CrossOver emulator. π
Can't get it to play under CrossOver on OS X -- if that ever gets sorted out I'd love to give it a go!
The pixel art looks so good! I want to play it but the HTML file is broken. :(
Respond once it's working and I'll play and rate! :thumbsup:
This game is a gorgeous work of art and its creators are beautiful people! π
Congrats on submitting a narrative-form game! It's much appreciated! Gives me Tokaido vibes -- Tokaido the boardgame. π
Very cute! Interesting choice of input -- I thought that was the best part, honestly. I wonder what all of those stickers are really for. π€