Junkyard Space Race by BoxedMeatRevolution 2022-10-05T02:57:50Z
I liked the art style, very fun and wacky :) building your ships was great, I enjoyed tinkering until I started having the only ships that could make it to the end of the run
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Fuse in a Bowl
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | 👥 | Swarmed In | jam | 535 | 3.60 | 3.67 | 2.60 | 3.27 | 3.83 | 3.19 | 3.63 | |
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | 👥 | With the Grain | jam | 343 | 3.80 | 3.28 | 3.51 | 4.22 | 3.84 | 3.77 | 2.50 | 4.16 |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | 👥 | FarmUp! | jam | 117 | 3.93 | 3.66 | 3.54 | 4.29 | 4.08 | 3.68 | ||
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | 👥 | Perihelion | jam | 173 | 3.93 | 3.67 | 3.73 | 4.37 | 4.47 | 4.45 |
I liked the art style, very fun and wacky :) building your ships was great, I enjoyed tinkering until I started having the only ships that could make it to the end of the run
It's great, really liked the clear and simple art style. The audio feedback for about to lose a city is intense! It's great from a gameplay perspective, I really don't want to know what happens at the end.
I started getting blue cities and I didn't know what to do with them, maybe some explanation would have been good there.
Great job, had a good time with this one :)
The switching music was fantastic and the weapons felt powerful, I think the sound and the knockback really sell them.
The flamethrower feels like a bad roll, I struggled to live for those 10 seconds, maybe it could have a different purpose than low damage in a wide AoE? Or intentionally lean into the "bad roll" and give the player a longer warning window that they have to clear out enemies before getting a bad weapon and being on the run.
This was very satisfying. Good job!
I loved the art, the rotating sun and the lights felt very cool every time they came around.
I would have liked to be able to jump the gap on the top floor when gravity's on and have a bit more control when it's off - I found myself waiting for the gravity change so I could go side to side more than once. Jumping also feels inconsistent, I think you can only jump on one frame in the idle/running animation, otherwise your input is ignored.
This didn't get in the way of me enjoying the game though, I enjoyed hunting for things and especially liked the placement of the broken cable.
It felt very cohesive for a minigame-collection, and I liked the mini puzzle the first time I got the balloon.
I think writing your own player controller would go a long way to improving this, the physics (and in particular the player's friction) interrupted me a lot.
Great survivors game, and I like the sci-fi theme. It also had a wider variety of upgrades than I was expecting, the first time I played I got basic stat upgrades (I got to level 30 in that run) but I played again and got the lasers, extra shots, and the shurikens offered. It would have been good to know those exist as options beforehand somehow, but it was fun enough without them for me to come back and find them organically.
Also, I really like that you've got a web build, makes it much nicer to play when reviewing jam games. Good job all round!
I really liked it! The art was great and it had some curve balls like the aggressive frog faction.
I think it would be better with more feedback when you don't have the resources to trade with people/repair ships as I didn't understand why I was losing rep for a while. It would also be nice to influence who comes to your station, I was waiting on weapons way longer than anything else.
It had a very positive mood in working together to build a station, and I always got a chuckle out of seeing the "I'm craaaaaazy" guy. Great job! 🙂
It's a sweet game! I got to round 21 with 100 survivors and died that round. I think it'd really shine with something on top of the dodging/shooting. The ship and the asteroids looked very nice, I think they'd look even better if you grounded them into a cohesive world using more particle effects, but more subtle than the nuke thrusters.
@tommo120 Thank you! That's a solid time. There're 7 collectables in total, so one more for you to find... happy hunting!
@benk thank you for your comments - I've updated the LD page with all of the source materials.
@benk thanks! I had a chat with the guys and we're cautious about adding a stranger to the group just before starting a new jam (both personality-wise and security-wise, I know I have added some passwords to our Github secrets that someone malicious with repo-access could get at if they tried). I'll add you on Discord and have a couple of chats before the next LD and see if we get on :)
I enjoyed it! I appreciated the laser sight that told me "this guy isn't your friend" :P I explored a little and found the key and the chest, and managed to trap the farmer behind his house so I could get away safely. I was a little confused when I completed the game as I ran into the bug I saw in other comments where my score rolls over, but other than that I had a good time.
A straightforward game, nice and simple. I liked how the red one continued to get faster and faster as the game went on, made it a bit more difficult and ensured the game ended.
The purple guys were moving super fast on my computer, it made it difficult to predict and dodge them. Was that by design? I have a high refresh rate monitor, maybe you needed to multiply their movement by the frame time to slow them down on my computer?
Great job nonetheless, and it looks like you used your own engine/wrote the game from scratch? Amazing!
I had a good time getting through the first season. I loved the physicality of holding the different tools and using and dropping them in world. I found that I couldn't quickly swing my mouse and click on things though - is it tied to the physics update rate? Fixing that would make the game feel a little better.
Regarding your mouse issues in the description, I've done first-person web builds before too and I think it's a Unity issue. At the time, I looked it up at the time and no one else had fixed it either.
Nice job! Had some fun making the potatoes and I found the secret cache :)
The block placement and line drawing are very satisfying and tactile with those little animations and sounds you've put in there, especially the rising pitch on the chimes when you draw the line.
~~I liked the macro level strategy of once your weeds were 2 or more different between columns you had to sacrifice some plants to become weeds otherwise that column was now unusable, although the absence of inverted L pieces meant this propagated the whole way across to the left of the risen column. For each plant pattern, maybe the player could choose to place a single weed block instead to fix their mistake?~~ I've just reread the instructions - you could still get to those blocks by stacking outside of the build space! My bad
Nice job, especially with your own engine!
Brilliant cartoony graphics! The models look really cute and toylike, they made it very fun to play around with.
Unfortunately on completing the first level in the web build I got a crash so I didn't get to see the victory screen
The controls were very weighty and matched up with the hefty tractor you are driving, and made it more challenging and satisfying to drive.
Great job!
Excellent choices for music and fantastic art, you created a truly terrifying atmosphere! I got to the ending that turned me into a plant.
The animations and delays between flipping cards were very long and frustrated me when playing the game. Also at the start of a round there is the time for the cultist "show cards" power even when I didn't power them, and it had no feedback that it was in progress or that it was done. I think adding more responsiveness and reducing dead time would improve the game feel a lot.
I enjoyed the strategic element between rounds and had to make some tough decisions (sorry Joseph!). I managed to hold on with 2 dudes. I couldn't get my devotion any higher than 115 as it decayed as much as I added to it between rounds, and then I turned my other guy into a plant. Really nice job!
Enjoyed it! I liked the music and the mini fit-the-blocks puzzles fit in nicely with the game (have you been playing Dredge recently? :wink:). I would have loved to see that come up more, most people only wanted a few things, and spam double-clicking placed the items fine.
I think the timer is too muted for its importance to the game - you could "announce" it more using a full-screen effect like darkening as dusk approaches, or, since you created the music, raising the tempo or adding a countdown-style panicky bit to the end of it.
Very nice game! Great job :slight_smile:
It's a good masocore game, but I didn't know that I was getting into that. It might be worth advertising it as such so people like me don't begin to criticise your design choices even though they make sense within the context of the game you wanted to make.
The game looked very nice and the distinction between the foreground and background was clear. I also appreciated the generous hit box on the player character, it always felt fair in terms of collision when I died. Nice job
Very satisfying harvesting! You could have probably stopped there and still done great in my eyes.
I wasn't challenged by the combat or oxygen timer, so I didn't spec into them when upgrading. I think I'd have preferred if you'd focused on making one of the problems more interesting and removed the other one completely.
Still, I got to swing a scythe and had a good time doing it! Also, I am now freeeeee
@jackypark9852 OSHAs are just suggestions on our farm! The icons on the right are the next seeds in your seed bag. You can't plant a seed if the bag is currently empty, and you might choose to plant seeds in different plots, especially apples when you get them later in the game.
@yikatong what seems to be the issue? I just checked our game on [our Itch page](https://fuseinabowl.itch.io/ludum-dare-52) and it's working fine for me. What does it look like on your end?
working itch.png
@shaunyeap yes, Overcooked and PlateUp! were our main inspirations! We started out with customers in our concept as you described but we scoped it out so we could spend more time polishing. Thanks!
@benk Thanks for your feedback - I think your third point about being less difficult is most critical. I balanced the seeds and timings so that you'd get to the fun stress as soon as possible while trying to keep it approachable, but most people (including IRL friends) have mentioned the difficulty. I will make an effort to balance the difficulty more in future!
@zungryware wow that's the highest score I've seen outside of the devs! I'm glad the trees were a nuisance, they're there to increase the difficulty in a more interesting way than just reducing the timers (although we do that too later).
I'll make sure the responses to player actions are different for successful and unsuccessful player actions in our future games, that sounds frustrating.
I'm glad you enjoyed it! Most people have said it's on the difficult side, you must be adept at games!
@pcmaster thanks! Most assets were made during the jam. The crops came from Kenney. Everything else was completely ours: world, tools, soil patches, weeds, outro scene, player, particle effects, all animations (including the plant animations)
@youngartifact thanks, didn't know about that one. I'll make sure we have a look at it and don't make the same mistake again
The subversion in level 6 was great! That twist added so much to the game, it was fantastic!
I thought there was a similar twist in level 8 as (SPOILERS) the first time it placed the two blind guys in the booths, so I thought I could bring the victim in there and get him. Fortunately for them, I apparently healed their blindness by shooting someone in front of them.
Great job, excellent writing and novel puzzles!
Time for some simple fun! Nice idea, and the intro cutscene was funny.
The steering felt like you could start turning faster than it would return to straight. If you're using the Unity input system to balance it, I'd recommend increasing the gravity to at least as high as the sensitivity.
The different set pieces gelled well with the rest of the game, they were a good addition to the core mowing-people-down gameplay. Nice job!
You've achieved a very high level of polish! All the art looks fantastic. I was also impressed with the difficulty curve, it feels easy enough at first and then ramps up well and introduces the other plants at a reasonable pace.
I used the starting tool the most and I never managed to use the wide meteor tool. Were you able to use it effectively while creating the game? It feels like there should have been some other draw to it e.g. making this the "destroy everything" tool instead of the lightning.
I made it to turn 34. The attack preview and the in particular the feedback about what you will not destroy is clear and simple, perfectly fitting a strategy game like this. That's just one of the many good choices in your execution. Really well done!
After quite a few false starts I managed to get my economy going and win! I didn't harvest any of the other resources because I felt I needed to focus very hard on yellow and white to build more miners, and the turrets I could get were good enough.
I'd appreciate a little more explanation or in game UI to help me along when I started as it's quite opaque and wrong decisions cause death after a minute, which is a very long time to receive feedback. On the other hand, the feedback was clear: I died because I didn't have guns, because I didn't have resources, because I didn't have miners on the right seams. I almost put it down after a couple of deaths but I'm glad I persevered.
It's well put together, the game flow works well and I enjoyed the final moments before winning, it was a good payoff. Good job!
As challenging as it is charming! It's satisfying to last a couple of years but I couldn't manage any longer than that.
I found the duration of the season change animations quite long. They were useful in telling me where my food was coming from and going, but it prevented me from playing through the game when I wanted to quickly test out different strategies. I'd really like the option to speed it up/skip it if I'm already familiar with the game.
I'm sure there's a winning strategy in there somewhere, but it's just out of reach for me! Nice game :)
Box and Stone! This was an excellent little game, and hilariously on-brand for dwarves. I especially liked the difficulty curve, they gave you a good chance to learn the controls and then mix things up in different ways like the low ceilings. The instant reset also ensured it was fun to experiment. Nothing outstayed its welcome, the game was very focused and I enjoyed every minute.
I just want more! I could imagine more small elements akin to the minecarts that you also control with the mouse and I'm sure you have plenty of ideas yourselves. That's the sign of a great jam game :smile:
Very addictive! It was fun learning how to use the cannon effectively, firing short and trying to find buildings to act as backstops so I would come to a stop and start running earlier.
The whole game was well done. If I had to recommend the next steps I would suggest making running more interesting - adding ledges, steps, and jumps so you have to do a little pathfinding.
I'd also suggest building the city on an island with insta-kill/insta-reset water on the outside to deliver the overshoot penalty immediately, instead of forcing the player to spend a few seconds doing a boring run in a straight line. Hopefully, that wouldn't affect your game when played well, but would make beginners lives a bit easier.
I played 3 runs and managed to get 11 deliveries in my last one!
This was perfect! Enjoyed everything about it, from the slightly weighty player movement to the Super Crate Box style weapon switching. The enemies were very well balanced: Slightly tough but predictable on their own, but they could overwhelm you if you didn't keep thinning them out.
All the weapons were powerful enough that it sometimes made sense to take my least favourite weapon if the distance was shorter than the other options (chain lightning :angry:). That entire "choose your delivery" concept was a great extension of the Crate Box level up system, I appreciated the extra control but the game still rewarded me for using all the weapons.
Fantastic job! Best of luck
Stunning art, this oozes with polish! I really liked being tricked into visiting "my friends" in one of the later levels.
I didn't enjoy the tip system at first. It felt like it added complexity for no reason, but then you go on to use it to create interesting puzzles. I wonder if I'd enjoy it more if the starting puzzles didn't have tipping and later levels (like 3+) introduced it.
Fantastic job, great execution!
Simple and functional, getting the core loop working which is a big task in any game. Nice one!
I found that if you walked along the pavement next to different houses the interaction prompt would disable, which interrupted me playing and understanding the game at first. If I had to guess, you have the `OnExitCollider()` call immediately disable any interaction that's available, instead of only disabling its own related one. If this is the case, try adding a [HashSet](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.collections.generic.hashset-1?view=net-7.0) and adding and removing interaction points when entering or exiting. I would then enable or disable interactions if the set is empty before adding or after removing.
The message board worked perfectly and the responses when I went to the wrong houses were a nice touch. Good job :smile:
Very nice! The sounds for the different operations and delivery were very satisfying, and they were balanced well with the music. The audio, the graphics and the controls gelled well together and produced a pleasant toy-like feeling - sounds like that's exactly what you were going for with the "family friendly" theme from your description.
The character got stuck a bit while on conveyors and moving past objects like scanners. If I'm using Unity physics for my player characters I find it's best to turn off friction on the player and implement my own in game-code.
I enjoyed your game - Really impressive work!
Very cute art style, I was trying to plan my routes but it got too hectic and I had to panic-send my cars every now and again :smile:
I found it difficult to spot the crates' destinations when I hovered over them, which made it difficult for me to plan the routes. I enjoyed the route planning and would have liked to have done more of it.
I really liked the difficulty curve you set up. The intro was great for getting me on my feet, then as you started getting longer distance deliveries it matched my skill + my upgrades very well. I was only just ahead the whole time.
Brilliant game! I will enjoy my yacht. :sailboat:
This was brilliant! Loved trying to put stuff on my boat at first... then giving up and flinging it to the port. Very satisfying controls!
I was impressed with how well you'd implemented the kraken's "animations", they felt the right amount of weighty and it was fun to play with. I even taught him to dance
dancing kraken.gif
Hahaha this is great :laughing: the failures were great, stumbling over words and stuttering, as well as me telling the jury that I'm guilty at the start of my defence.
It's always a problem with rhythm games, but I only got to see bits and pieces of the funny slides as I was focused on delivering the words with the right inflection. I still got to listen to the bouncing beat though :smile:
Nice job! Would invest in sunglasses for cats.
Completed it! I really liked the destruction mechanics, and especially how eager the towers were to shoot through their own friends :laughing:
The sailing was slow and deliberate, which feels very grounded and nice. The cannons were also slow, but this felt frustrating - I'd have preferred them to move a lot faster. Maybe you still want/need the precision, so adding a "sprint" might give the best of both worlds.
This was really impressive already, then I read this is on your own engine... that's fantastic! Best of luck with it
Really fun, and a nice spin on the theme! The gameplay loop encouraged this hectic overcooked-esque time management, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
I especially liked the green sniper tanks that required me to play differently and do some target prioritisation. It was too hectic for me to understand what the other tanks did, but I didn't need to react. I could just play normally and they would die soon enough. I think it'd be good if it was clear what the different tanks introduced, maybe you could introduce each of them on their own for a while at a reduced difficulty too?
Impressive work! I had a great time.
@ruruie @shgamerk thanks for your reports, I'm looking into the audio issues now
@ruruie @shgamerk the audio stuttering has now been fixed - thank you for letting us know!
I struggled but managed it! Got a couple of aha moments - 9 and 12 really made me work for it!
I found in levels 10 and 11 the camera angles added a bit of unneeded difficulty, I prefer having all the information at the start of a puzzle level so I can solve it in my head (or at least make an attempt!)
Other than that, I really enjoyed it! Great game
I am unable to play for the same reason as @jackaljk
What a great game! I love how much you explored the single mechanic, especially the informational use in the arrow level.
I also found all the elephant graffiti :smile: