Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → gafblizzard
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Monastico: LD43 entry | jam | 2.45 | 2.20 | 3.15 | 2.90 | 2.10 | 1.55 | |||||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | 👥 | Bait and Switch: LD41 entry | jam | 520 | 3.50 | 3.22 | 3.02 | 3.18 | 4.11 | 2.44 | 3.88 | ||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Capital Offense | compo | 322 | 3.37 | 3.54 | 3.65 | 2.85 | 2.81 | 2.62 | 3.04 | 45 | ||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Morse GRO | compo | 377 | 3.36 | 2.97 | 4.24 | 4.27 | 3.33 | 2.63 | 2.96 | 3.18 | 60 | |
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | You are the GM | compo | 241 | 3.43 | 3.34 | 4.07 | 3.78 | 3.17 | 2.93 | 3.60 | 3.24 | 74 | |
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Q.T. Feline Disruptor | compo | 739 | 2.96 | 2.77 | 3.17 | 3.30 | 2.49 | 2.38 | 2.60 | 91 | ||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Card Quest | jam | 709 | 2.98 | 2.92 | 3.13 | 3.64 | 2.28 | 2.37 | 2.64 | 2.73 | 95 | |
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | A Tale of Two Megacities | compo | 788 | 2.97 | 2.59 | 2.68 | 2.39 | 2.71 | 3.49 | 2.46 | 2.92 | 81 | |
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Lost Villages | compo | 895 | 2.83 | 2.54 | 2.83 | 3.63 | 2.77 | 3.03 | 2.40 | 2.62 | 63 | |
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | Mondricraft | compo | 812 | 2.93 | 2.27 | 3.21 | 3.82 | 3.39 | 2.53 | 45 |
I like this entry, but it is very difficult even on easy. I'm not sure the AI actually needs a 2-piece advantage on easy. :P
Also, having a restart key would be nice since I kept having to press enter in the URL bar to reload once I realized I had messed up the first few moves.
Lastly, is there an element of randomness to this? I felt like sometimes territories would go neutral or not be captured as expected, but I suppose I am wrong.
Good suggestion, what I should do is put the command cheat sheat on the HTML page. I don't know if I'm allowed to edit that since the submission deadline is past, though.
And about fill rectangles breaking out of their area -- do you mean the E drag rectangle, or the fill with D? D fills entire regions (and can also change the color of drag rectangles and delete them). Using D to fill rectangles completely is the easy way to do it.
I only included the drag rectangle so I could recreate this: http://academic.udayton.edu/PhillipMagnuson/soundpatterns/microcosms/micropix/min_mondrian.jpg
That painting was also part of the reason why I didn't include a drag rectangle option sideways instead of just up and down. :P
If I'm allowed I'll put the controls next to it. :D
And yeah, it's not a game. I'd like to have thought of some sort of game to use the painting-creation concept, but partly I didn't think of one and partly I didn't have time.
I added the instructions. And yes it's very much a toy. Next time around I hope to aim for a game. :)
The pace is very frantic. I didn't know any way to avoid two of the hits, so getting the second key must be difficult...
Very cute style, but I could not find more than 7 or 8 clicks. If there was some way to see what other values it was looking for so you could aim for them, that would be neat.
Very clever art, and amusing pokemon-style approach. I assume the store and breeding center do not do anything right now, and there is nothing to do after defeating a champion in the fence, but it's neat. If you have the time and interest, you could make a very impressive game with this art style and perhaps a different theme.
Verl well done and polished, but a bit difficult and stressful without checkpoints, knowing that at any time you could screw up and fall all the way back to the bottom. :( Still, good job with the theme and especially the audio!
Nicely done graphics. On Firefox I could not see the lightning bolt increasing, so I did not know how much I could reinforce, but that may be a known thing.
The full screen red is kind of harsh on the eyes. A softer color might have been nicer. Interesting idea. :)
The enemy positioning randomness seemed like it might screw you over, but interesting minimal take on the graphics and gameplay. It reminded me of Nethack.
Very cleverly done! It is indeed a sort of Conway's game of life with music, but made into a puzzle.
You might want to add a fast-drop button since impatient Tetris players might want it. :P
I didn't know there was any twist until I read the comments about stacking blocks -- three in a row seem to always vanish, so I wasn't sure if there was any reason to stack blocks on top of each other. Once I thought I saw a block bounce.
This is simple but very polished. I kept noticing little things, like the indicator showing which way the player's square is facing, and the consistent color palette, and the darker rectangles showing where the obstacles are going to cross. It was a bit too hard for me, but some people might really like it.
Thanks for the comments. It is tedious and without challenge -- originally I planned a "par" mechanism and some other things that would add variety. The auto-dig was more to avoid so much clicking. Unfortunately I was too slow and just tried to get everything smooth by the deadline, cutting out what I did not finish.
I didn't rate because it didn't work in Firefox 28.0, sorry. :(
You might want to add a note on the submission page that Left and Right are the only controls (as far as I know). It took me a few seconds to figure out what was going on while I pressed keys. :P
The mood is good and the idea is probably promising, but I feel sorry for the fish, who cannot win and who apparently managed to become trapped in an area with walls on ALL side.
Enjoyable music and audio feel, the game made me smile. The bombs also felt powerful. One minor thing that would make it even better would be if the bombs made some sort of explosion sprite (or at least some sort of effect) when they kill a summons. This might also help differentiate between the normal weapon and more advanced weapons.
The main problem I saw, which also got me killed multiple times, was that sometimes the ship randomly stops firing. It's not overheated (I got the whistle noise when I overheated, and I'm pretty sure I had an empty meter in this case), and I had ammo (or an infinite weapon)...but mouse clicks no longer register.
This is impressive and creative, but in the "Please seek psychological help" way rather than the "This is a good thing" way. :/ I realize it may be artistic expression, but please consider it.
The font is really difficult to read, though perhaps that was intentional. The = button doesn't seem to work for mute, at least on Firefox.
The overall style is very consistent, and the mood is good, though I'm personally not fond of the extreme low resolution.
The game seems quite difficult to not have level-based restarts though. Running through the first few levels with no interaction just adds extra time, so I quit after dying 5 or 6 levels in. :P
Oddly addictive. Became very laggy 4-7 days in, on Firefox 28.0. I was never sure if wheat/stone/wood/trees did much.
It looks decent and works pretty well, but the mechanic gets old quickly. Having different enemy types, or something the player could do besides dodging and boosting (shield? heal?) could make things more fun.
Decent text-based adventure game, though it gets pretty click-heavy. It has promise if the rooms had more description. Without landmarks a lot of them seemed the same. I died once, but being able to immediately go back to where I made a mistake was nice. I also found one room without content. I managed to escape in the end!
Interesting idea. I was not fond of how you have to drain one emotion to use another one, and I wasn't sure what the different colors of enemies around the body meant. The graphics are nice!
Neat graphics, but the mouse sensitivity is super high (Unity web plugin, Firefox) and the mining laser takes super long to destroy anything. I got down into the Minecraft-esque area and found a crystal, but it was quite frustrating figuring out which blocks were in my way, and waiting for the mining to finish.
The idea of crying and throwing tears is funny, and the graphics are cute and consistent. Unfortunately, every platform having a pixel down on each edge makes the controls SUPER frustrating, since you can either get stuck on the front side, or slide off the back and get stuck. The loss-of-balance animation plays, but you can't jump or run back on. Maybe that was on purpose, but I felt like it hurt the game more than helped it. Also, I noticed a robot did not respawn when I retried. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not.
The idea of crying and throwing tears is funny, and the graphics are cute and consistent. Unfortunately, every platform having a pixel down on each edge makes the controls SUPER frustrating, since you can either get stuck on the front side, or slide off the back and get stuck. The loss-of-balance animation plays, but you can't jump or run back on. Maybe that was on purpose, but I felt like it hurt the game more than helped it. Also, I noticed a robot did not respawn when I retried. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not.
Oh, and either jump should be higher or more floaty or both, in my opinion -- I think it might feel a lot better then.
Clever ideas -- I muddled my way through some of the transparent or fallthrough mechanics, but probably wasn't smart enough to comprehend them completely.
Unfortunately in my opinion the voiceover is primarily annoying, and the game would have been better with only music. Also, even with my mouse sensitivity all the way down, turning is really fast. It would be nice to have an option to lower that.
Amusing. I like the mechanic of absorbing shots. :P
Looks nice, but I think it would be better with more positive rewards instead of becoming a gradually more obese and unwieldy fish who is doomed to die. :P
I like the way the seaweed moves when you brush against it, though going near it is a bad idea.
First, a couple of minor issues: I had to fullscreen the Unity web player in Firefox, because for this game right click brought up the menu. I think there's some way to have right click work even in windowed mode, but I don't know it myself. Also, the hook sound is kind of annoying and it's slow. Last complaint, the treasure in the star was hard to find compared to the map. :P
That said, really well done. The graphical style is great, the boat controls are great, the music is soothing, and the whole thing is cute. Being able to look at the map from overhead while looking at the map is very helpful!
I was confused by the cutscene skipping playing many messages rapid-fire, but I think that it may have been working correctly. I did not figure out how to break any blocks -- having S depend on the location of the mouse cursor is very confusing, and I seemed to be buying $30 picks and trying to break a rock above my character. I tried to time when the marker hit the green area (or the red area), but neither worked. Special note -- nice dialog box graphics.
Good idea, not actually very difficult to pick up. The single most important suggestion I would make is that there be a counter of the number of dark hexagons left. They are hard enough to see as it is, and the game over seems very abrupt (with no retry button) because it is hard to know how many moves you have left. I assume the game can be won if all layers are cleared, but I did not reach that point. I was also not sure what the dark hexagons meant.
The concept of immunizing yourself before ramming an enemy to destroy them is neat. Getting enemies kind of stuck to you and taking a lot of damage is not so fun. :P
Learning Unity and 3D at the last minute is brave. The idea was creative. :P
At least on Firefox, the framerate very quickly gets really bad, so I couldn't really play long.
I also couldn't figure out what to do with the treasure chest. I dug up to the one on the right (digging up doesn't seem to require the 'x' key), and it fell down, but I didn't find any way to break it open. Then I tried digging down, and got trapped underneath it on the bottom right. :P
Some minor notes: There's a typo (instead of "magnificent") in the sky text, and if you press left/right/left/right the car seems to jump ahead.
I couldn't get Z to jump either inside or outside of the car. I also got stuck after sleeping in a building and nothing seemed to let me back out. Neat style, but seems a bit buggy right now.
I died while reading the rules, and couldn't find a key to restart without reloading the webpage. :P The rules seem pretty complex to not be able to pause and review them, which is a bit frustrating combined with no easy way to restart after you die.
The controls reminded me of Lunar Lander and were really tricky to maneuver precisely. I think I finally managed to put a drill down, and pick it up later with a green bar. It played a ding noise. I didn't see any science bar change however.
The orbital mechanics and how the drill and moon can go rotating past are really neat conceptually though!
Nice music! What did you use to create it?
The mouse sensitivity (firefox) is really high. An option to adjust that might be nice.
Interesting idea, but there didn't seem to be any downside to emotion vision (or upside to having it off).
The bigest problem I found was after I picked up a pink heart 2 or 3 rooms in, the only way to move forwards was with a blue heart, and I couldn't get rid of the pink heart. I tried putting the pink heart back, and trying to grab a blue heart, but neither approach seemed to get rid of the emotion.
Nice graphics and atmospheric level. The start reminded me of a horror game, though I forget the name, one where start in the snow and find the entrance to a strange underground area. In your game it turned out you go through the world into another world underneath. :P I'm not sure if there was a goal or a reason not to run all the time, but I made it to the house at the end, and saw a black screen afterwards when music started playing.
Cute graphics. The engine seemed very laggy (Firefox 28.0). The hit sound seemed to be about 0.25 seconds behind when the player would touch the ground, and controls were very floaty.
Clever idea. There didn't seem to be any reason not to fire constantly, so an auto-fire mode might be nice to save the player's mouse finger. Although, it was hard to see where you were firing, so a more crosshair-shaped crosshair might help. It was also quite difficult to rotate properly to reach the firing missiles, though I imagine that was intentional. The missiles hitting the shield with no way to heal or dodge was a bit frustrating.
The reset button 'R' doesn't seem to do anything, at least on Firefox. The music is cool, nice job! :)
It would be nice to be able to press a button like 'H' to temporarily pause and review the controls. They are fiddly, more so than a normal FPS-style system, but I imagine that's on purpose.
The first time I found a treasure chest I couldn't figure out how to pick it up and just tried driving near it, but I seemed to have gotten it afterwards, so it must have worked. Is there a notification sound or indication when it happens?
Neat atmosphere. Overall the walls and controls counteract that a bit though.
Decent idea, some more variety or a win condition might help make it more interesting. I did not like the horizontal speed the character reaches, since it felt a bit like ice skating.
Interesting concept, and very creepy mood as a result. The mechanics were pretty simple, and if you want to avoid overusing the vision ability, there is a lot of downtime while you wait for it to cool down. I realize it might be too easy, but maybe something else could balance it.
Nice graphics and clever idea. Having to control TWO characters at once is rough.
One problem I noticed was that it seemed possible for the random level generation to make a gap so wide, you cannot jump over it -- unless it requires a max held-down jump at the last minute, and I just did it wrong?
Very impressive for 48 hours, and neat concept of the underground attacks hitting buildings. I was confused looking for coal but I guess it's invisible?
It took a while to get enough wood up and running at the start, but then it wasn't bad once I spammed more woodcutters. The sonic emitters confused me (and what I think is an "emitter prime", the label cuts off short) -- I put two of them down, but they didn't seem to affect the underground pigs at all. They just ate my building and then started eating the emitter. :(
Nice art style! It was difficult to figure out what to do, and the jump (at least on Firefox) is super short, so I couldn't actually climb any platforms. I think it's a multiplayer thing where other people connect and you shoot at them.
One minor bug, the sound stopped working for the shooting effect after I played with it for a minute.
First off, this is really good, and I guess that is why my complaints feel so frustrating. It could have been AWESOME but for a few things. For one thing, sound effects or music would be nice and could reduce stress. For another thing, the jelly bits look really nice when you kill jellies, but they make it hard to see, especially when the level is filled with them and you suddenly enter a new level, and those bits are still around.
Perhaps most importantly, the game feels super arbitrary. Yes there's the color wheel...but which color wheel? Red seems to be "more" opposite blue than green on some wheels, and blue opposite yellow. But purple/yellow are apparently paired? I'm probably crazy, but sometimes it felt like single hits would kill, and other times it took multiple hits.
Early levels would be great for introducing the concept if you stuck with color opposites...but only early levels, apparently everything dies in a single hit, making the multiple hits in later levels very confusing.
Ultimately the game made me want to largely avoid combat at all, and it becomes an exercise in repeatedly running through early levels and seeing whether the apparently arbitrary jelly spawn/goal spawn/jelly movements in later levels decide to humor you as opposed to completely trap you or block the goal.
If some of these things were addressed, this could be a great game though. Sorry to be so negative.
Good concept, nice puzzle game. Reminds me of combinatorics and graph theory.
The main two suggestions I have are that either you should be able to restart a failed mission instead of the entire series, or money should carry over. Maybe I was mistaken, but it felt like any profit I got from finishing a mission early didn't help with the next mission, and then it hurt to lose all the fancy tools I had gained. Promising ideas though!
Entertaining idea. I really liked that ramming the ships with boost would knock them in the air, and that you can go flying out of the water like some sort of tentacled whale.
The controllable tentacles were a novel concept but didn't seem to add much to the game, since I basically just tried to run into the ships and wave my tentacles around.
I was a little disappointed I couldn't launch myself out of the water and die beached on the shore.
The concept of supporting a village with digging is cool. Unfortunately it seems super slow to dig, especially to dig gold blocks. Also, my gold generation did not seem to increase even when I put trees next to houses.
I assume the only control was the up arrow? It took me a minute to figure out the timing. Nice for 3 hours. :)
Nice graphics and neat idea with the tile flipping. Unfortunately the bike seemed to randomly flip over or get stuck sometimes, and once it got stuck upside down like a beetle. 'R' seemed to reset it which was nice, but I notice your Controls listing does not mention that.
It was also difficult to tell why enemies were resetting, and hard to see the edge of the map until you were on it.
Tron is always neat for a theme!
This is my favorite Ludum Dare 29 game I have played thus far. Not only is everything super polished, but there are a ton of levels.
I especially liked all the little design details. One level didn't have enemies shooting when it would have been too frustrating. The switch mechanics were varied. The enemy bomb indicators are a good idea. The instant air dash mechanic is awesome.
Pretty much my only complaint was that the very last level (17), you briefly get a final score screen, and clicking resets to the start of that level rather than showing you an overall final score/congratulations screen.
Great job, I'm very impressed this was done in only a weekend.
It felt very difficult slow to move around. I like that the main character had a lot of HP so you do not lose too quickly though!
Thanks for your very kind comment! I'm glad you ended up happier than you expected playing my game, even though my game is very simple and silly.
I like your vector graphics. What did you use to make them?
I'm not sure if it was a bug on my system, but it happened twice: In Firefox, performance starts out great, but after I have explored the map a few times, everything slows to a crawl and it is not really playable.
The ideas of breeding and using creatures to navigate different map areas and collect items are good!
Cute, simple, short, and not frustrating. I liked the funny planet faces!
@Crefossus thanks, that's actually a good point about spacing above the game. Next time around I'll try to put a little spacing so it isn't jammed against the top.
@jprogman, I think I actually ran out of time before I made a way to lose in the second part. So once you get there, you won't go back to the first part.
@ripter, I think I originally considered neighboring tiles, but that would have been more logic so I went with the simple global method. I tried to give an idea of what the tiles do in the help screen, but there's room for improvement.
@mrexcessive, sorry to hear it -- I only have Firefox/IE on Windows 7 to test with. It should just be normal Flash.
This is very impressive for such a short amount of time. The pulling mechanic is quite an unusual (to me) twist on Sokoban, and actually very difficult to think about!
This game was funny! At one point I ended up on top of the boat which had rotated to be upside down, but I was still alive. :P
Thanks for including the mouse slider bar! The sensitivity reset when I got to the green section but I think that may have been on purpose.
This game would be easier if I wasn't stubborn and wrote down a map.
It would be nice to have WASD in addition to arrow keys!
The music reminds me a bit of pokemon, but unfortunately I had to mute it eventually so I didn't go totally crazy. :P
Pretty frustrating especially with no crosshair and no lighting since it's hard to tell distances and aim.
The graphics are nice, though the theme is minimally connected. The random explosions killing huge waves of your units seem completely unexplained, annoying, and unfair. It seemed to happen near the enemy base, and I did not see any explanation for it mentioned ingame or on the page. It was also difficult to see what sort of units were strong against what, and the AI units seem to be able to mass on top of each other and do nearly unstoppable rapidfire attacks.
Is there a way to use your own random explosions to take out huge waves of enemies? The only explosions I ever saw in my favor happened BEHIND all my troops, on top of my own fortress.
If you build an 800-cost troop, the enemy can apparently spawn an entire wave of 10-20 archers, behind their fortress, completely offscreen, which will do permanent rapidfire until you lose.
Am I missing something obvious? Most people seems to be winning easily, but the only thing I finally found that worked was endless spam of archers and small units.
I tried not building the 800-cost unit, and the AI got a synchronized group of green punching units. Nothing seemed to kill them, and when they got near my base, once again the explosions appeared BEHIND my base and did not touch any enemy units at all.
One user interface detail -- the "highlighted" color is the same as the "recharging" color, which might make it confusing about when a unit is available.
If the explosions happened near your base to simultaneously kill big waves of enemies, like the enemy can do to you, the game might be less incredibly frustrating. :(
Very polished entry, though very sad!
Funny idea. :) Restarting the whole thing from the beginning when you lose on the second part was frustrating though.
Also, pressing space to advance the cutscenes did not seem to work immediately.
This was a clever idea! I managed to beat it as a single player, but I did screenshot the progress halfway through so that the next time I continued I was able to do it faster by looking where the bars should go. :P
I'm not sure if the planets flashing around was on purpose or a glitch, but this was definitely a unique entry. :P
Very amusing -- I played against one player for a while, and they were nearly unstoppable. But once I got to level 2-3 I became nearly unstoppable instead. It's an odd mix of higher levels being very strong, and dying being very punishing.
It can be a little difficult to know if your shots are connecting, also. It kind of felt like shooting reduced your mass, so one needs to play strategically instead of holding down the mouse button, a neat tradeoff.
Very creative idea and interpretation of Connected Worlds!
Why is the income shown as per day, but the expenses shown as per week, though? :P
The idea of stories on a page coming to life is neat. :)
Oddly soothing. I was expecting a very frustrating QWOP-like game and it wasn't!
Kudos for including both WASD and arrow key controls!
Nice job with the music changes in different sections!
Great art!
Unfortunately the gameplay decisions were SUPER frustrating -- it makes little to no sense with the lava for fireballs to look like they are falling from the sky, but have even the trails do damage, and the fireballs never land. If they impacted certain squares so you could dodge, that would help. If they even moved slower that would help. If there were a pattern instead of being random, that would help.
Similarly with the robots, sometimes there would be laser shots that you apparently could not avoid whatsoever, because the level stops you moving up and down.
The result is a game with neat music and great art, but the gameplay makes it a frustration instead of a joy. I do not mean to be rude or unkind, but I am just trying to offer constructive feedback because the good parts are quite good.
I do see that you uploaded a cheat version that addresses the difficulty. :)
It looks like this is well-made (I did not notice bugs) and there are a lot of factors involved. I made a similar but much simpler game and I know even that took a while to try to balance, so I don't envy the process of balancing this!
I never really understood how the different planets balanced in the fuseboxes though. Sometimes numbers would shoot into the 400-500% range without an obvious reason.
The controls are a bit glitchy in Firefox. Impressive idea with the building + linking. I did not figure out how to get the second crystal unfortunately -- is the idea to somehow build platforms into the sky?
Funny descriptions. :)
OUTSTANDING graphics! Good music!
I do wish there were WASD control options in addition to arrow keys though.
Mysterious! I did not manage to figure out the computer once I got the cover off, though.
The spinning control pod with right click is a cool idea, so you can shoot behind yourself as you fly along. Shooting down enemy ships (I am guessing the goal is destroying all the red guns) took a long time though, since the guns take so many hits, or one hit each with the slow gun.
I ran into some issue where if I switched out of the window and back, my mouse cursor appeared, and even going to fullscreen mode after that did not recapture the mouse cursor. As a result I could not play very well after that, since turning was too slow and/or the moue would escape.
This is actually quite cute. I'm glad you finished! My one big complaint is that when it shows you your rating ("Liked" etc.), any keypress instantly makes it vanish. Since you're almost guaranteed to be pressing a key right when/after you lose, you miss seeing your rating almost every time.
Excellent sound design! It was almost like a rhythm game when things got going.
Boxes sometimes seem to glitch out or be missed by robots even when you replace all the factory workers, however.
Overall very clever idea.
Excellent sound design! It was almost like a rhythm game when things got going.
Boxes sometimes seem to glitch out or be missed by robots even when you replace all the factory workers, however.
Overall very clever idea.
(commenting again in case this replaces the earlier comment): I managed to beat it once, but trying to beat it again, glitches make it very frustrating. Otherwise it would be awesome! In particular, the vertical green lines are the worst offenders. Sometimes you can be standing at them, not even a robot, and yet the boxes will spin and hit the ground.
Another big issue is that sometimes the SAME box seems like it can repeatly trigger the floor hit, ending the game very quickly.
If the robots were good at carrying boxes and the boxes did not randomly drop out of the machines, it would be super satisfying, kind of like a playable blue-ball machine.
One more comment, I thought you might be amused by this, developer: http://abload.de/img/boxeskkkqa.png
Having probably lost a few times because of glitches before, it's only fair that I won because of a glitch that stopped boxes from hitting the ground. :D
I'm a bit confused since I only seem to be able to build 2 turrets with the starting money, and since I never get any more money before the enormous waves of enemies arrive, I can only kill a few enemies before losing.
Nicely made but very difficult! Sometimes the portals seemed to appear too late for you to even escape.
Nice piano improv! The clicking, especially combined with tiny squares (and not knowing whether I was doing the right thing by clicking on them) got frustrating though.
At least in the web version on Firefox, it felt like the sounds were a little delayed after the key presses.
Neat idea though! With some more music, this could become some sort of rhythm game.
Just replying to your comment, haha at batman voice...that might have occured to me when I was rushing to record the last few lines before submitting. I'll take it as a compliment. :P
Great drawings! The background sounds were scary. ;_;
I also ended up marrying a giant blob monster and I'm not sure how to feel about this.
Neat idea of a window through a device, kind of like ghost-hunting. I wish the arm went up and back down a little more quickly though. :D
A bit frustrating (everyone hates flying enemies, and the birds are no exception), and the end of the jump freezing is odd, but otherwise pretty polished. It might be nice to have a counter so people know how close they are to the end of the game.
It may not be very related to the theme, but it was amusing. Angel kitty is so sad. ;_;
Jabba vs. Bowser, who will win!
The game was amusing, though the controls confused me -- sometimes the jump key let me jump 2, 3, or more times. Sometimes I would get stuck not moving at all! That might have been conflict between the up and right keys.
Cute graphics, but very hard game! I wish the enemies did not chase you. :P
The controls are frustrating because it seems like if you let go of a key, movement will stop, so you will frequently abruptly come to a stop.
Cute rat thingy protagonist!
Kind of scary/creepy with the whole red theme. That monster with its arms up was like something out of Pan's Labyrinth.
Nice music! It was also nice of you to include a mute button, even though I did not need it.
The tech is cool, but a "winning" goal and maybe some reasons to expand and upgrade could probably improve it further. :)
Clever idea, but I don't think we are allowed to use premade sprites for the 48-hour compo. It's fine for the jam though!
I figured out the problem these creatures are having -- they need arms. It's no wonder they got slaughtered.
The game is amusing, but kind of difficult even once I figured out to hold the left arrow down to try to autotarget. I found a bug twice where if you get to the shrine, then leave it, then die (in the south part of the level), the down arrow doesn't work when you go back to the shrine and get the eyebrows again.
Nice pixel art, but super frustrating gameplay:
1. No WASD, only arrow keys
2. Movement in different directions does not seem the same, so you might move slowly up, but suddenly dart sideways.
3. Holding two directions may make you move extra fast. I'm not sure if I imagined this.
4. There are a great many difficult obstacles and instakills, which are made more frustrating by the lack of checkpoints, slow animation, and rather stressful music loop.
Cute idea. I survived indefinitely by using the dodo's most overpowered ability -- walking on water while all the animals commit suicide!
Kudos for including both WASD and arrow key support!
Very nice pixel art. I was a bit confused by the boxes being limited to the center floor area, since I thought maybe I need to redirect the crystal beams into something. Eventually I destroyed the crystals and dropped the yellow one in the hole, which I assume is the win condition.
Nice graphics, but the difficulty was so high that I didn't end up seeing some of the cool stuff in the screenshots. :(
I really liked the music when the snow level started. SEIZURE WARNING though, that screen-flashing effect could be dangerous.
Kudos for having both WASD and arrow key support!
I like the idea of two characters in different areas who keep getting annoyed at changes the other one is making. Where did these wolves come from!
Also, those final enemies were scary...
Interesting take on the genre. I was a bit confused by the controls though. It seems like the ship cannot turn unless you've been holding the up arrow to get some velocity, I think.
One negative note, I really dislike respawning enemies. I died because of them. Q_Q
I actually have a 360 controller and was able to play using it! The graphics are cute and the idea of playing delivery person is clever. Who knows what those planets are going to do with the poor pets though.
This is very creative and amusing! Fun game.
Great graphics and funny sounds. A little music might have been nice. :)
The first time I beat it I completely missed the part about arrow keys and was just using the mouse. I wondered why it was so difficult. :P
One thing you might do is make some control box outside the level where the mouse can click and drag for the direction changes. Otherwise, it can be difficult to click and drag the mouse precisely for a quick motion change.
The hat is a funny choice!
Great work on the graphics and art!
The game itself seems VERY difficult however. Even the first two light beams are easy to screw up, and with the slightest mistake instantly resetting the whole level (instead of a checkpoint, or a "thread level" meter), it is sadly hard to see all the cool stuff in your level.
Nice intro!
Jumping 2 squares high is kind of tricky. Also, I found a knife but once I found the rocket ship the knife stopped working even after I died. I could still switch with 1/2/3.
I really like the checker floor 3D effect art!
This is well-made but very difficult to do two things at once while also catching the letter! If you ever update it, adding WASD as a second option in addition to arrow keys would be super helpful. :)
I love the idea of space taxi! Unfortunately the momentum controls and slow turning made navigating in space a bit less fun than it could have been.
I'm also bad at lander games, and it was way too easy to kill yourself even on the target platform because you were moving slightly too fast or something. I think if there were less focus on the fiddly lander mechanics and more focus on the taxi dispatch missions and so forth, it could be a lot of fun!
Crashing Flash on the snowman was no good since it affected other tabs. Other than that, very clever, though pretty difficult.
Nice music and interesting idea, like a mix of Conway's Game of Life and Go.
The problem is that it's close to being a good game, but it comes across as SUPER frustrating. A couple of reasons for that:
1. The popups as someone else mentioned are bad, rather than ingame messages.
2. For a strategy game and/or action game, responsive user input is probably important...yet there is so much fast randomness, even on the slow setting, that you quite often can click somewhere and it's gone. Or the piece you just placed is gone.
3. Once 70% board control is reached and the remaining 30% is just solid blue, it seems to require either a trick or crazy tedious timing, and the randomness seems to favor the AI.
If the randomness didn't happen, and/or if it happened only when you clicked, I think this game could be a lot better. Having it running constantly just moves it into annoying territory.
I don't know why dropbox is giving an error for accessing links right now. I can look for another host if this is still messed up tomorrow.
Dropbox is back up now.
A mute button would be nice since the music loop is not completely seamless. It is catchy otherwise.
I finished with 0:42 left. :P Funny idea.
I'm not sure if there is a game win condition since I stopped at level 6 or so. Nice art, and the sound effects are very satisfying. It would be nice if there were medkits, or if enemies did not spawn so close to you.
About the key/mouse problem for new rooms, I suspect the problem has to do with the GUI system, since it happens after you click the mouse on buttons.
What engine did you use? I'm not sure why the game would be 10MB unless it's the engine itself, since the graphics are pretty straightforward. Or maybe music?
Also, what did you use to make the music? I like it!
The music is good, and the concept is clever. It's very difficult though, and the blue/green colors are almost identical.
Nice art! The sound was really loud with headphones though, even if I played the version without voiceovers.
The ant farm idea is fun.
The controls feel a bit awkward in regard to jumping/sliding.
You might consider adding a retry button since I could not find a way to retry without reloading the webpage.
I have a few suggestions, hopefully so many is ok:
1. The glitch mode feels kind of seizure-inducing. I really wish that wasn't there.
2. Do the enemies HAVE to get the bonuses like one shot one kill? If they get the positive effects, then they should get the confused spinning effect or the can't shoot effect as well. Otherwise it's kind of annoyingly unfair, not fun and unfair. :P
3. The bullets sometimes do not seem to shoot right at the mouse cursor. It feels like there is some sort of deadzone where the ship resists turning, and this can be really bad if you thought you were lined up to take out a ship.
4. When enemies start shooting rapid-fire, you can take a ton of damage SUPER quickly, and health is super rare. Some sort of hitstun that lets the player avoid so many repeated hits might be a really welcome addition.
I did not make it past round 5 so I do not know if the game has an end.
On the plus side, the game looks really nice, and the idea of switching rules is creative.
Rather fun, though dizzying game with the spinning.
Positives:
1. Great graphics
2. Funny planet
3. Neat mechanic of blackholes redirecting missiles into themselves, ships, and pods.
Negatives:
1. It would be nice to have a win condition instead of playing forever and losing. Maybe destroying a set number of ships or saving a set number of people.
If there is audio I couldn't hear it. Holy carpal tunnel batman though, please let me hold down a fire key (or even the arrow keys) to shoot instead of having to mash them. :P
I'm also not certain how this related to the theme since it scrolled for me.
The music was nice, but the sound effects were too loud! A mute button would be nice to mitigate that.
It seems that the previous type of building you selected will get repeatedly built, which can burn money and map space. You might want to have a selection square appear in the lower left, then go away after one click so you have to select the type again.
The game seems to take a very long time and it's sometimes not obvious why players get unhappy, making the rating abruptly go way down.
Overall this is a really solid entry though! Works well, clever idea, well-implemented, rather complex system, funny names.
This was amusing and I liked the music. I only found one way to launch the coin at high speed though -- flipping it into the POW poster. Was there some other way to get high speed that I missed?
Also, hooray for snowman!
Great work for compo! The slow motion was well implemented, even though it was QWOP-style complicated to get a ninja to actually be successful with moves.
I know limited time makes stuff difficult, but if you continue working on this:
* A win condition would be nice.
* Using mouse to steer instead of A and D would be nice.
* The crafting did not seem to work -- even with 3 stone and 3 wood, no more arrows appeared in my inventory unless I grabbed an arrow pickup.
* Snowmen and their attacks should be blocked by obstacles.
* As you mention, you should not be locked in place from touching a tree. Even making the mining instant would make it more fun.
The artwork is great on this and really evokes a mood of being off in some remote European forest, attacked by folklore monsters at night.
I wasn't sure if I was ever digging properly though. The blacksmith changed what he was asking for so MAYBE?
Pretty funny! Near the end the door stopped talking.
Very fast game development, and I hope you had fun learning Blender. Did you mean to submit as a jam entry? It shows up as a compo entry, which means you have to make everything from scratch, but it sounds like you used some resources like the skybox for the background.
The game itself is simple but oddly stressful.
Very nice, polished game. I particularly like that the dwarf is invincible. Unfortunately he really needs a diet because he walks SLOWLY.
I finished it even though I don't like tower defense games in general, so there must be something there. I enjoyed the music too!
The mood is TOO good. I kept getting terrified I would be caught when I would alt-tab and one sound effect would still play from the background. Is it just me or should the boss walk back left sometimes too? Maybe I just missed it. :P
Outlandish creation! The movement is really weird though, since it feels like you are short, and sometimes you can press a button and go flying sideways for no apparent reason, I suppose until you touch the ground again. Normal FPS controls with spacebar to jump might improve this.
I like the visual style of hte beams going up into the sky.
Outlandish creation! The movement is really weird though, since it feels like you are short, and sometimes you can press a button and go flying sideways for no apparent reason, I suppose until you touch the ground again. Normal FPS controls with spacebar to jump might improve this.
I like the visual style of the beams going up into the sky.
Like someone else said, you can use free art like this, but you have to submit for the jam instead of the compo. :)
The art is cute and it was kind of addicting. I think with some nice background music, some more animations, and some sound effects, it could be pretty fun. The storm didn't seem to do anything bad to me but I didn't really mind.
It would be nice to have a win condition instread of guaranteed loss with high score. Very difficult game. Very funny game though, and cute art.
Mentioning the controls (and a mute toggle) would be nice. I had to find 'X' to shoot as well. Also 'A' and 'D' move left and right, but 'W' does not jump for some reason.
The game seemed to get laggy near the end and it became quite difficult to find platforms to jump on to reach the boss. With how easily you die, the other enemies and hazards could probably be disabled in the boss phase without hurting the experience.
Very clever idea with the wall climbing. I didn't realize how you were supposed to get to high areas at first. I couldn't make it through the last level or two without jumping so the snowman melted more slowly.
Abdominal Snowman is a great title.
In some of his last moments, Bob the space marine wondered, "Why did I never learn to shoot diagonally in weapons training?"
In some of the rest of his last moments, Bob wondered who had coated the cargo bay floor with ice.
Nice idea and good mood. For fast typists it seems to drop letters, and takes a VERY long time for anything to happen. A few minutes are ages when you've typed up a novel or three in the meantime!
Great graphical style, good music, good execution. My main complaints would be that it would be nice to clarify that arrow keys are shooting (it took me a while to figure this out and they have a musical clef symbol next to them I think?), and the screen shake would REALLY be nice to disable. With the sea of bug corpses, a million bullets, and a shaking screen, it gets nearly impossible to see what's going on.
Also, is there a final boss? I got several levels in (15? 17?) but did not know if there was a number I was aiming for.
I just tried the post-jam version. Much better with less clutter and less screenshake! I'm not sure the screenshake is even necessary, but it's much more playable now. :) Those watermelon bugs are really hard to dodge, but I finally managed to win, even!
Great sound and nice graphics. I kept wanting to aim the tank gun up, but I did not find a way to do it.
Super difficult -- at least in Firefox, every instance of Death is really rapid fire, and the shots seem to make your own shots go off. I only managed to find an item once or twice. The fire seems to run out nearly immediately and not do much damage, and I didn't find any to buy other weapons. If there was a way to avoid huge swarms of death enemies just showing up anywhere you try to walk on the map, it could be cool.
It took me a bit to figure out the camera was following the gems around. That's a neat idea.
Unfortunately the game was really hard for me. The short-range attack seemed very difficult to judge if it would hit or not, and if you lose you have to replay the entire thing, which is pretty slow! And without hit invincibility on your character when you take damage, you might take a bunch of damage very quickly.
Nice art!
Oops, correcting myself, I was nearly at the end when I died. So that's not so bad to walk back there.
Nice background art for 48 hours! What did you use to paint it?
A couple of suggestions for the game (besides sound effects or music):
1. You might change the monkey sprite to show a shield when it's active, so you know that it is up.
2. The shield seems to heal you after you take damage, instead of completely preventing damage.
3. Each time the menu is opened, the score resets. I'm not sure if the high score is saved either.
I did not rate this and did not finish it -- sometimes the arrow keys seem to get stuck so you cannot move in certain directions to continue.
This is a good idea and might be a big hit with a bit of polish. Some things I noticed:
1. Not allowing 2-letter words makes it really difficult to hit certain squares.
2. I discovered you can go back over your own track which saved me when I would have been stuck due to no 2-letter words. This is a positive for me, though.
3. Going back to the very first level with any loss is pretty harsh.
4. Sound effects and music would be great, of course.
5. Is there already code to verify that you can finish a level with the letters you are given? If not that would be good so you don't give players impossible levels.
6. Did the instructions mention that you cannot use a word twice in one level? If so I did not see it, and that caught me by surprise.
7. The letters vanishing right when the train starts robs you of an extra moment where you could be thinking of words. Maybe this could appear somewhere else on the screen instead, like a word balloon from the train.
8. After I played a while, the letters 'M' and 'E' appeared in the middle. of the level for no apparent reason.
9. I got the blue bonus circle once but never figured out what it did.
This is quite polished, runs very smoothly, and it is an interesting idea to warp to other levels instead of dying.
I have a few suggestions if you are interested:
* I probably didn't realize there was a double jump until playing a few levels. You might want to mention that in the instructions on the webpage, unless I just missed it.
* Being able to use WASD for movement and a different key for firing would be really nice. Arrow keys are uncomfortable for me to use to play games, though I saw you mention gamepad support.
* Once you have completed most levels, it becomes a bit tedious to die or finish levels over and over until you get the one level you are actually looking for. This may just be my opinion however.
Overall good job! Nice consistent, minimalistic, visual style.
The controls were difficult to get used to. Interesting camera perspective swinging back and forth! It was amusing how the criminals would spin around when you got near.
Kudos for allowing both WASD and arrow keys! I am not sure this is a good type of game for diagonal movement, but it was an unusual choice at least.
The room transition sound is VERY loud. I kept turning my sound down.
It sometimes seems possible to get trapped in hitstun and take many hits in a row, especially against a wall or while trying to attack / charge the special jutsu.
I got all the items and found the secret room. Great artwork and animations everywhere!
Very involved system for only 48 hours, nice work. I thought the game was going to be super confusing since I did not really follow the tutorial, but then it made sense and I won the game after a while.
I'm not sure if the tower is bugged though. It says it is a defender unit, but I seem to be able to attack resources past it.
I didn't get the interview, but if these interviewers were anything to go by, I'm pretty happy I didn't. It was like being in some sort of slow interview hell, with music eternally playing in the background!
The game is suuuuper laggy on Firefox. Opted out of rating since the zoom was laggy and even after wheels, things were very slow and stuttery about once a second. I was playing using the standalone web version instead of the embedded version.
A mute toggle for music would also be really appreciated since music can get a bit old in games that go on for a while. The text was also suuuper slow to scroll.
I'm getting a crash when I leave the tab in Firefox for some reason. The game runs other than that, though. I am not sure if there is a win condition, or if you just play forever in the modern stage. I did not get everything fully upgraded.
It would be nice if keeping the mouse held down would auto-fire weapons, since I might often click but the weapon would not work due to being on cooldown.
However, the graphics are great, and the idea is very creative.
Very creepy, but I also saw the same bug where I was hovering off a floor. I didn't rate it for that reason since I could not really play further.
After I lost maybe 2 times, no keys including space seemed to restart the level after losing, and I had to reload the webpage. This seems to have happened every time I lose twice.
This is an incredibly difficult game though, and I -have- played Bayonetta. It's really easy for enemy attacks to be chained and hit you (even if you're doing the moving dodge). It would also be nice if dodge could be a different key, like 'C'.
Also you mentioned 6 enemies and 9 difficulty levels -- is there a way to win? Are the enemy types random and you just try to survive for a high score?
Overall good idea and nice presentation, just super difficult.
Kudos for supporting both WASD and arrow keys. Funny audio. Way too hard though. I would like a way to win, but it was so random it seemed nearly impossible.
Fun and to the point. The "ding" sound when an invader is destroyed is kind of loud and seems to lag to play a bit after the invader vanishes, though.
There seems to be a bug where the mute button doesn't work. Nice job with the GUI to buy and upgrade things. I never managed to get enough money for even a single anti-tank weapon though, even if I wiped out every enemy unit before the waves of tanks and only built 5-7 towers. Once you start losing money for enemies getting past it seems impossible. Maybe I just missed a trick to get enough for anti-tank weapons.
Impressive for so few hours! Oddly addicting too. I think my high score was 640 points, though I did not sign in to use the leaderboard.
There may be some sort of memory leak. In Firefox, it starts out super smooth, but by the time you've gone through 10-20 zombies, it gets very stuttery. Reloading makes it smooth again. I also saw once or twice where a bullet appeared not to register on a zombie, or maybe passed through a zombie.
Being able to upgrade the weapon sooner would probably make it more fun.
Kudos for making WASD a control option. Cute game. I liked the hand-drawn look of the bark "wave".
Very soothing music. I'm not sure if the background pieces have any significance -- it seemed the only mechanic was trying to bump the light repeatedly.
Clever idea, and I finished all but one of the puzzles, but it would have REALLY been nice to have hotkeys (like 123, or QWE, or whatever) to quickly switch between the block types. Having to glance over and move the mouse quickly to pick blocks makes it extra frustrating when you don't see in advance exactly what the block will look like when it gets placed.
Coins also block obstacles which is a bit troublesome.
A mute button would be nice for the music. The mechanics are very impressive though -- all the turn-based stuff works smoothly. It was pretty easy which was a nice thing for me. I am not great at stressful games. :P
Very solid entry! I didn't realize at first that no matter how much damage I did to my own 1-HP cards, they would get eliminated.
I didn't rate this since I couldn't figure out how to really play it. The GUI constantly flashes on and off in the top left which is annoying and makes it hard to monitor health and points. Also, I tried clicking totem, tree, and even fireball, then "Do", but nothing ever seemed to build or happen. This was on Firefox if it makes a difference.
Good sound and atmosphere. Time passes slowly considering how suddenly you can lose the entire game -- maybe that's a sort of commentary on war, but it might not be fun to play.
I'm not certain what good the jump button is, since this war is apparently taking place in a low-gravity zone despite bombs falling quickly, and jumping just means you'll die earlier.
Protip: Hold the up direction after leaving the ladder. This will alow you to do a stylish victory dance after surviving 8 days.
I forgot to mention that the shelter damage is kind of hard to see, everything is so dark. I'm not sure I was aware what I should have been repairing until I had lost an entire roof section.
The mechanic of controlling two things at once with different controls was pretty neat. I get the feeling you didn't care for this theme much. :P
Funny game. I got fired the first time, but the second time I just cleaned windows and ignored almost everyone. I got my payment!
The snowman amuses me. :)
The music the first time I played was super catchy. Pity I can't give you an audio score because you opted out of being rated on that!
Even aside from the odd perspective making it hard to see where you are, even with the shadow, the dark colors make it VERY hard to see. Things blend in really easily.
Kudos for hard work on complicated stuff! I hope you got some much-needed rest.
Simultaneously creative, depressing, and funny. Nice work on the random interfaces -- I think I noticed being able to drag part of a web browser around for example. I cracked up when I saw the MMO chat scrolling.
Nice artwork, but holy carpal tunnel batman, please let me hold down arrow keys to fire. :P Diagonal shooting might be nice too.
I am not sure if the game has a goal or if it goes forever. I got to the huge black monsters but stopped after a while.
I forgot to mention, you might want to add some sort of loading message when you press escape. On Firefox escape freezes the game (presumably while loading) so some people might think the browser is frozen.
I'm not sure why you left the humor category out, since I would have scored you high there. :P
This is quite a unique idea. I thought it was extremely unfair at first until I figured out how to pick up powerups. Still, a lot depends on where enemies and walls and powerups are generated. Making sure that no enemies generate near your player's starting position might help.
Also, the isometric angle made it very difficult to tell when I had room to walk or not, which is bad for a game that completely depends on avoiding collisions.
I was very amused by the bear animations. It would be nice to have a health meter of some sort so I know how much damage Helga has taken though.
Also it would be cool if I could win instead of just surviving!
Especially for your first Ludum Dare entry, ESPECIALLY for the 48-hour compo, you did awesome! This is a creative idea, fun to play, and not frustrating. Good job. :)
Fun game, and nice art, but SUPER difficult. Is there any way to win? If so, it would be really good to have some sort of wave indicator so you know when you're near the end. I finally managed to wipe out all the red guys, but the purple guys just kept respawning infinitely with their most powerful fighters. I would expect them to stop once they were all gone.
@cutandriel, Thanks for the info!
About your question on my game, the "C" cards are actually supposed to be "again" cards, with a looping arrow on them. I didn't draw it very well. :P They make the last attack or defense card repeat, but they only work if the last card you played WAS attack or defense.
This is very creative, but has several annoying aspects which I hope you will forgive me for making suggestions about:
1. It is very easy to get stuck on walls, especially jutting ends.
2. It can be very easy to miss red circles, especially if they spawn inside walls. I saw one spawn outside the level once.
3. I did not really understand why some circles were small bumps, and others were huge stuns that apparently reset hearts all around the level. Why do the hearts reset sometimes and not others? Why are the hearts so far away, or so few, or so many, other times? The randomness makes it frustrating, but I suppose one can say that sort of thing about love too. :P
For positives:
1. Nice music, though a mute toggle would always be nice.
2. Great art! Fancy visual design.
3. Unique mechanic ideas.
Kudos on the variety of controls -- both WASD and arrow keys!
Nice background art. The wrap-around was a clever touch, and I did not realize at first that the goal was to touch the slaves first before the fighter, so I kept dying. :P
Funny art style. I like the king's animation when he gets hits. Sometimes the double jump did not seem to work though.
A reset would be really appreciated instead of having to reload the webpage, especially when it takes a while to load, walk to the map again, and read the map again.
It was also easy to sometimes accidentally click the wrong direction since I was not sure where the direction button boundaries were, and I clicked too quickly without watching the overlay text.
I got to the second screen though!
Creative idea. I felt like I had very little control other than assigning a number to a ship though. What if I want to tell a repair crew to focus on the life support instead of a different ship section? Maybe they do that automatically.
This was oddly addictive to play. It would be neat if there were even more pictures behind the cards, and you needed to click to continue, since I wanted to look at some of them more. Very pretty.
I like the dramatic fiery background. :P
Thanks for letting me know Dropbox was down for my game! I don't know why -- I can login, just not access links to my files.
I didn't rate your game yet -- the call button went away on day 4-5. Is that supposed to happen? I can't seem to continue.
I tried again, and I think "Economy" may actually be bugged. Even if you choose the positive economic option in nearly every question, it jumps to Dreadful and stays there no matter what. I started at "Decent", and with maybe two - and 3 + it was immediately at "Dreadful".
It would be nice if you could hold the mouse down instead of clicking so much. Nice graphics and music. Interesting idea of being locked into one place instead of moving around. It seemed unfair at first until more child blobs spawned, and then it was easier.
I am guessing there is no win condition -- I quit some time after 1300 points.
The merry-go-round style and cardboard style is creative, and it looks like a ton of work went into graphics, style, art, etc. I didn't want to have to fight people though, so I played as a peaceful person. I jumped over all the first round of police officers, but got killed by one later near the apartment.
Is there a retry button? I couldn't find one, and the game takes several seconds to load if you reload the webpage.
You can fire your weapons before the game actually starts. The player character appears during the title, too.
Is it possible to run out of ammo? There seems to be no ammo counter, yet I reached a point where neither weapon did anything. Actually, it seems like if you press the fire button repeatedly, it will cancel your shots, so your weapons will simply not fire.
The bullet you fire seems to stop halfway across the level for no obvious reason. One time I blew up a bike with it instantly. Another time or two, I hit a bike and nothing seemed to happen...making me instantly die because the weapon fires so slowly. Especially if this is an endless shooter, a higher fire rate would be fun.
Lastly, are you associated with Hello Games? Their Joe Danger game/series is the only one I've heard of.
Awesome graphics, awesome music, super frustrating controls and physics.
If there were a meter showing you when rage ran out, or if stomping were a permanent ability I think it would be more fun.
Also, movement sideways is SO fast and slidey, and jumps are SO non-floaty, it makes actually trying to land precise stomps or jump onto platforms very difficult. You have to hit jumps right at the peak to even get on platforms.
The music is AWESOME.
The game zoom/unzoom speed is pretty slow though, and it seems brutal to undo all the way if you miss something in the Simon Says part. I did finish the Lights Out part before that, though.
Pretty well-implemented but super difficult. Close accuracy being almost required makes for a lot of retries and waiting.
Also, if you fail a few times, by the time you get to the very left side of the level, the game becomes super stuttery. I suspect there may be some sort of memory leak and/or really high CPU usage that doesn't seem to happen with most other Unity entries. Maybe check if you are creating and/or processing new objects repeatedly, and try not to do that if so.
Clever concept, but I have some suggestions for execution if you take this further (bugs that require browser reloads aside):
1. Restarting from the very first level is rather punishing. I'd like to restart the second level since the levels take a while to play, and a lot of that can be spent waiting on the character to run back and forth.
2. Speaking of restarting from the first level, I tried clicking the X in the top right thinking it might reset that particular level. Nope, back to title screen in one click, losing my progress.
3. This really needs a jump button key. Spacebar, 'W', whatever. Or at absolute minimum, let the player click anywhere. You already prevent players from building super tiny platforms, so just letting them click anywhere would make being able to jump where you want to less frustrating.
4. Blue doesn't seem like a natural danger color to me. Slow-moving bat, maybe a moth? The key was a prize apparently. Maybe the bat is a harder-to-get prize? Nope, instant kill, back to title screen, lose progress. That seems like the sort of thing you might want to warn about. :P
5. Snapping blocks to a grid would be nice so you don't end up with glitchy sets of two blocks next to each other that don't quite align, and the character jittering on them.
I really like two aspects of this game:
1. The regenerating shields, missiles, and ammo make it quite forgiving. Otherwise it would be very frustrating since the playing field is so huge.
2. The enemy-seeking missiles as a simultaneous alt-fire are clever since they can both tell you where off-screen enemies are, and provide a satisfying assist fire / finish off enemies.
If you work on it further, some way to not block the middle of the map would be nice, so you can always play in the magnified view. It would also be nice if it were easier to pinpoint enemies in the big view. Some colors blend in too well too see easily.
The sound effects were really ear-piercing but thankfully you included a button to toggle them off.
Overall I think this is a great game idea! You should continue it and try making a full game. As someone else mentioned there should really be a win notice though. I was confused why the timer wasn't increasing and had apparently been playing, with a crowd of robots attacking, some time after actually winning.
May I ask what software you used to create the music?
Answering my own question, you apparently use FL Studio. Thanks! :D
Nice presentation and smooth gameplay, but losing points on upgrades or weapon switches is frustrating. I think it could still be fun if the switches were free after initially purchasing the weapons.
Also, the music and sound effects were a little annoying.
Can't vote for the game either.
Kind of weird since I'm not sure if it's trying to teach morals or not -- it criticizes you for lying, yet apparently tries to encourage you to guilt trip a girl for thinking you're ugly. That was the only option I found from searching nearly all the paths that actually worked, but maybe there are others.
Funny in a weird way though, like a choose your own adventure where practically every option is terrible.
Where did you record the audio? I was thinking it was some good use of a source clip, but then I noticed it was a compo game. You found somewhere really ideal since I never noticed it looping.
This reminds me a bit of Final Fantasy Tactics. :)
It was a bit difficult to select the square you really want with the mouse. If you work on this game some more, you might try adding keyboard shortcuts so there's not as much mouse movement. The buttons were a little small so it was a little difficult to click.
I ran into a bug on the 4th level where I tried to grab an empty square and the game apparently froze.
Very impressive for 48 hours. I wasn't sure exactly what the last power word did, other than reveal the chest.
Nice presentation, though pure dodging without watching the enemies ever die was a bit unsatisfying. Maybe I am a bad space pacifist. :P
Nice work, though I'm not a fan of the losing health part. Makes it more of a stressful memorization game (and working around mechanics game) than a cool alien game.
I did have problems at T joints since I couldn't figure out a way to climb in, and had to stick on the roof instead.
I do like the wall/ceiling walk though! It reminds me a of an ancient game called XEvil, before the graphical update. The aliens in there could run on walls and were pretty terrifying.
Nice atmosphere.
Sorry about the entire game restart when you die. I think I submitted pretty close to the deadline and did not even implement level restart checkpoints. On the bright side I think a complete game run takes under 60 seconds at least. :P
I liked the space pig. I also liked the idea of stacking up shots and then shooting rapidfire! What I didn't like was the space pig getting too fat from all the donuts, so I can't steer well with like 6 donuts stacked up. :(
Also chickens should not have fireballs. They are tough.
I liked the player-friendly mute option and restart counter. Nice graphics and lots of content. The low vision range was a bit restrictive though. I liked the zoom for the vacuum.
Unfortunately, infinitely-respawning enemies is one of my host hated game mechanics. :'( Having to walk up the really slow stairs for the boss every time was also saddifying.
I probably killed myself many times by getting locked into the wrong direction. It would be neat if you could change directions while holding the vacuum. I finished it though.
How did you reproduce the AIM noise or whatever so accurately? That sound effect is spot-on. Also the music is nice, but one tiny extension at the end could make it loop more seamlessly I think.
One huge issue for me, the momentum while running is kind of like trying to stop on ice. Less momentum would make a puzzle game more fun, I think.
The physics for the player also feel very physics-game-ish and glitchy (think QWOP) instead of tight, and the completely dark level was frustrating. I wanted to use the awesome puzzle mechanics instead of sitting close to the screen and staring, looking for black spaces. :(
Jumping was difficult because of the physics and landing momentum. Perhaps some of that was intended to let you squeeze between blocks, but I feel avoiding squeezing between blocks might be best, even if it takes a bit of redesign.
That said, I beat the game. Great concept (even if not really fitting for this theme), great potential, good graphics. I really like that even distant blocks highlight when you levitate them.
You submitted with an audio rating, but I didn't hear any audio. Is that intentional?
The concept itself is neat. I liked turning one turret, and then hiding behind it so other turrets killed it.
I even beat the unreasonably hard level.
Polished presentation, peaceful music, nice work besides the theme.
A zoom option (mouse scroll?) and an auto-restart would be nice futures if you keep working on it. :)
Being able to hold down F instead of buttom mash would make my hands thank you. :P Funny idea though. It looked like the astronaut was dancing while killing the aliens.
Also I didn't hear audio -- if you didn't finish it, did you mean to submit without audio as a rating category?
Was this your first Ludum Dare? Welcome aboard!
The art was supremely trippy, and rather scary. Unfortunately the game was too hard for me...one hit kills were frustrating, especially since even with non-inverted aim, the projectiles seemed to clip into the ground underneath your feet when you fire.
A level restart button ('R'?) would be nice, but you can kill yourself off the bottom of the level so that's okay.
The beam is fun to use, satisfying railgun feel. I destroyed the earth instead of winning though. =(
The pickup sound was a bit loud and annoying compared to the music for me.
Very minor note, your Ludum Dare page description still says the "R key" can toggle Music and SFX, when it's actually the 'M' key. :)
Other than, funny idea! I like that it's a sort of less stressful version of Sokoban.
Nice touch with the mouth moving when the character talks.
I ran into a bug several levels in, where I killed an enemy in the top right with a laser, but the same laser killed me by shooting to the right. The mute/unmute button still worked, but R did not work. I had 3 push squares left over. The screen just froze with two "Argh!" labels on screen.
Emotions makes me think of the upcoming Pixar movie. I like the voxel graphics on the portrait.
9 million points might have been a little higher than necessary to win since gun upgrades seemed to mostly stop before that point.
This is one of the most hilarious I've played. I pronounced the title before realizing what it was going to be, and then I was even more amused once I started playing and saw the various animations.
Even 5000 honor is considered shameful though. I fear there is no honor total high enough. :( SHAMEFUR DISPRAY
Creative, but the voice is annoying, presumably on purpose. :P
I want to play this, but right now the web version is giving a download error. :( I'll check back later and try to play and rate if the dropbox content comes back up.
I played it once the dropbox thing was fixed.
It's a hilarious and clever idea, and the graphics are really cute. Unfortunately it has some major problems that kind of ruin the experience:
1. The walking speed is super slow.
2. The walking sound effect is super annoying, and cannot be muted.
3. One of the greatest gaming evils of all, infinitely respawning enemies. :( I even had a dragon respawn almost instantly, which is very frustrating when it takes even 5 piano hits to kill a dragon, and presumably several misses along the way, and the player only has 4 health.
4. It may be possible to randomly get damaged while sitting on a ladder if there's debris nearby. Possibly also by falling debris.
5. The game revolves around climbing up, but there is no way to zoom or change the camera position to see what's above you.
6. The previous two issues combine to be bad because dragons above you will block a ladder, so you're almost forced to rain debris on yourself due to the piano falling apart after it lands, and you can't see much further up to aim higher.
7. Pianos spammed gets really noisy. This is a tough gaming problem in general though, so it's not reasonable to expect this solved in 48 hours. :P Some things you could consider would be limiting the max volume, the max number of sound effects, scaling the volume up to some max as more get dropped, etc.
Even if nothing else changed, if movement speed were doubled (without the squeaks), and enemies didn't respawn, I think this could be a hilarious and fun game.
Thanks for the kind responses to my comments! I know how last-minute sound goes -- I was quite unhappy with my entry and didn't have any sound and music at all, so it certainly wasn't as good as yours! I just wanted to provide detailed feedback. Good luck if you continue your game more!
The music is pretty good! What's sad is that your sound effects are so loud, they overpower the music. :(
One-hit instant deaths are also frustrating, especially when things like the diamonds and planets move faster, or stick out from the background, so the player feels like they are supposed to attack/dodge them.
Bullets sometimes (I think I saw this once?) firing from offscreen, and shooting in random directions, make this incredibly frustrating. Enemies can come from the bottom or the top (unlike typical shoot-em-ups), and seem completely random (instead of a certain type spawning at a certain point in time).
Bullet hell games can work because of deterministic bullet patterns, and a small ship hitbox. Neither exists here. Being able to hold down a button to repeatedly swing the axe would also be nice instead of having to buttonmash. It's hard enough without requiring the mashing.
I say all that not to be mean, but because I'm a bit sad: The music and the graphics are decent and this looks like it could be quite fun, if not for the extreme difficulty and frustrating elements mentioned above.
This was one of the funniest games I've played this Ludum Dare, though maybe it was because I played it late at night. :P I could see how the voiceover could be annoying, but it entertained me.
The collisions and deaths could be frustrating but I'm guessing that was the point. I managed to beat all 3 levels.
I have very mixed feelings on this.
On one hand, you made something super polished graphically. On the other hand, it is very irritating to play. I mean that not as a personal insult or anything, but as player feedback. A few particular notes:
1. Bloom seems way too strong to me for the sword rocket and the sword beam. In particular, the sword rocket being so bright means you're likely to kill yourself a couple of times trying to figure out the initial jump timing, because there is a gap between the platform and the sword, and you didn't see it very well.
2. Jumping feels very annoying because the height is so low, and the player starts to fall again so quickly. There seems to be infinite walljump, and there is a doublejump, but this still feels counterintuitive compared to other platformers. Also walljumping and double jumping should probably be explained ingame if the game is continued. (Double jumping might have been mentioned ingame, apologies if so).
3. For a game filled with tricky timing and instant deaths, the game over delay is super super SUPER annoying. Many games like VVVVVV or Super Meat Boy may have instant deaths, but I think those sorts of games may also offer a quick path back into the action to avoid frustration. With this game, there are a few seconds where you can't do anything but stare at a bar, repeated over and over. Even if a bar is only 2-3 seconds, multiply that by a bunch of deaths in a session, and a player may literally spend minutes just looking at a game over bar.
4. The powered-up beam attack can apparently not destroy the little blocks that your handgun destroys, which felt odd. It took me a very long time to figure out that the sword could self-fly through the second or third checkpoint.
5. It would be nice to have a clearer visual or audio indicator that the sword charge is full. Sometimes I would get particles but no beam, which might result in instantly dying to an enemy.
6. There is no handgun charge shot, and I can buttonmash to fire rapidly. It would be really nice if I could just hold down the fire button instead of having to mash, since players are just going to rapidfire anyway to destroy blocks and enemies. Might as well be nice to the player! :D
7. Since I can control the sword but not the player while riding on it, it would be really nice if I could fly it backwards. I can accelerate the level by flying forwards, but not being able to stop or go backwards is just an added frustration without much fun or satisfaction coming out.
I hope you will forgive my very detailed comment, but the clash of such polish with several irritating mechanics apparently made me feel strongly enough to take some time typing it out. Good luck in your future development!
Great graphics!
I like controlling a guided missle, though the speed is fast enough that it was pretty tough. :P
I feel like this has idea potential with sound effects, music, and polish. One small suggestion I would make would be to make the death and restart much faster. The reaction timing is so fast, it is rather frustrating to wait while frozen in death before being able to play again.
Neat idea and lots of levels. Cute graphics with all the pickle zombie scientists.
Sound balance note, the jump sound effect is super loud compared to the (cool!) music.
Landing seems to have a delay before you can use a syringe, which can lead to some frustrating deaths. Just think of all the sweet, radical airborne jumping syringe stabs you could pull off!
I don't like the ending. :(
It reminds me of the Spelunky teleporter, but I don't remember that having a telefrag ability. Telefragging is a lot of fun! The only real annoyance was no checkpoint (and not even a healing point) before the boss, so sometimes trying to rush back to the boss you would take damage that made it more annoying.
The soundtrack was pretty awesome! I'm guessing you didn't put sound as a rating category because you used a free loop or something? Still, good choice.
The jump sound effect was a little annoying and loud.
Besides that, awesome job! I cracked up when I saw the first "SICK" popup, and the slow motion was pretty fun. I even found out you could aerial slash during the slow motion, which helped a lot. I ended up getting the ultimate victory. :D
You could probably make this sort of thing into a more complete game if you wanted. I was a bit reminded of Guacamelee -- I loved the forgiving combo system in that.
Cats! The string things are black in the web version rather than red. Also the string things move too quickly and are not fond ENOUGH of cats, since sometimes they would still chase me instead of hugging the boxes. :(
The old town style is actually kind of neat, but I have a few suggestions if you work on this further:
1. A different control scheme (especially mouse steering) would be really nice. FPS fights against enemies work for stuff like this because you can strafe.
2. Some sort of crosshairs. Since enemies are so hard to see, there's no way to strafe, and the clip only has 3 rockets, turning to fire off quick shots at enemies is super difficult.
3. Some sort of feedback for enemies and/or a map. Knowing you hit them, knowing how many are left to win, etc. Enemies are really hard to see because it's dark, and do a lot of damage.
Creative, solid entry. You might be able to expand this after the compo if you wanted.
I forgot to mention, it was kind of difficult to place the scripts. Doing the game in 2D, or snapping things like scripts to the slot, would make it easier.
Most annoying music loop I've heard this Ludum Dare! :P
Amusing idea, though I didn't see way to party, only scare people. I did like the solid/ghost mechanic though.
Mechs are cool! Nice idea with the 3 mech types.
I really didn't like the civilians running around and being super difficult to distinguish from enemies, however. Sometimes it even seemed like killing a mech gave a civilian warning, and I'm almost positive there was an armed civilian at one point so I couldn't just look for guns.
The camera movement when you switched from left to right was disorienting and made it annoying to shoot up. I would prefer an option to lock the camera on the player, and people who want a switched view could use the other option.
The game says the lasers pass through yellow walls, but those walls are green. The slo-mo was really cool in the last two levels.
Very impressive for 48 hours. I loved Mirror's Edge. This was fun even though I don't typically like a lot of violence. You might try Call of Juarez: Gunslinger if you've never played that. It has some nice bullet time, though not movement like Mirror's Edge.
Wall-running and jumping alien-style was awesome. The soundtrack worked really well.
This game could probably be rather successful if you continue it, and two gameplay suggestions if you do so:
1. I never figured out if health automatically regenerated, or if my character had a fixed amount of health. Knowing this would be nice. If there's a fixed amount of health, I would at least like an option to show a health meter, since I never knew how close I was to dying when I attempted the debug level (but did not finish it). I also couldn't tell if getting hurt triggered bullet time, or only getting near enemies.
2. Momentum felt odd when you were not already moving. This is probably intentional, but I think having something closer to a Mirror's Edge feel when stopped would be better, instead of a sluggish feel.
I was amused by how with tons of gun upgrades, this game basically became a reverse bullet hell by wave 20-30. Enemies were barely able to get on screen.
Interesting idea, though the scrap cannon was so slow it did not feel very powerful. It was also a little annoying how enemies could fly off screen and escape. :P
Cute graphics and idea! So many slimes, it's like Final Fantasy up in here. :P
I kept getting an error about not being in shadow even when I was completely hidden by a tree. I liked the graphics and being told to watch out for bears when I am a bear.
Really clever theme idea. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are quite fun.
I could never really figure out what a thrust and parry looked like, though. The thrust button seemed to make me run forwards, and I couldn't really figure out why all the backup cards were behind the fencers, since it tended to make everything more awkward. Ditching some or most of the physics and using more fighting game animations with parry/thrust/block etc. animations might be one way to go if you continue this. :)
The background seemed to have some sort of scoring, but that was also not super clear.
Super well done. I wasn't sure if the 3:00 counter in the top middle meant -- placeholder for now?
This is already very polished, and you could probably make it into a commercial game pretty easily. Add some goals / levels so you don't just do the same thing every day. Maybe have different customer breakdowns on certain nights. Throw some other race types into the mix. Add more furniture types which get unlocked as the player keeps playing. Lots of room for expansion! :)
Also, thank you for not making me click for beer! Just moving mouse is very nice. :)
For some reason, the super-fast hat throw is REALLY satisfying.
I wanted to comment again because I forgot to mention, the hat spinning around after it hits something is also really satisfying, lol. :P
Welcome to Ludum Dare! Tough game with instant death. Checkpoints would be nice.
Pretty scary too. :O
Pretty creative idea!
I liked the waves bouncing everywhere. It did not seem like the waves went in order though. If you have green-blue-yellow-red, I think it would make more sense for the waves to fire in that order.
Also, I got to 800 score and I think defeated all enemies, but did not find anywhere else to go. I am guessing that is the end of the game?
The arrow did not always change immediately when I moved the mouse.
I hate spiders so I welcomed being able to blow them away. :P Cute idea!
Nice atmosphere. As mentioned, finding a way to transition between layers, even if it's a simple gradient or a piece of custom background art that combines two environments, should make things less jarring.
The ending was also a bit abrupt, since the player is insure if they are supposed to press something, or wait, or what.
The walking was a bit slow for me.
One note about the HTML embedding -- you might want to center the game in the browser window so it's more visually pleasing. :)
Cute graphics, music, and idea! Congrats on your first game ever. :D
If you keep working on this game to make it bigger, I think you might try making the rolling speed faster. It was pretty frustrating. You could also try gamepad / mouse support so the camera can be adjusted. It was tricky to see what paths I could roll through, and what paths had trees.
Also, picking up bushes and trees katamari-style would be fun, but you might consider that too similar to the katamari games.
Nice graphics and neat idea. I had a companion weapon idea too, but with an overhead view instead of a side view.
Having a control reference on the Ludum Dare entry page might be useful since I promptly forgot the controls once I started playing and had to figure them out by experimentation.
Unfortunately especially without checkpoints, the game was hard for me since the owl powers seem very slow to trigger, and movement is also slow.
If this is a compo entry, shouldn't there be a source link? (perhaps a dropbox zip)
Also I agree with the other comment(s) that if you tighten up the controls and polish this, it could be a neat full game! Maybe start with only one or two powers, and get more as the game goes on.
I was confused for a while since I didn't realize I could walk through the shop on the left, couldn't tell if I needed to water plants more than once, and couldn't tell if the starting spike plant was actually hurting enemies. Sometimes they just seemed to walk through it? Once one of the first enemies seemed to eat the spike plant too.
Feedback when upgrading would be nice too, so you know that you've done it.
I only ever got to wave 5 or so. Having a way to heal plants, or some sort of backup if enemies got through, would be nice. As it is, it's very frustrating, especially since the plants seemed a bit random with whether they damaged.
With the slow player and camera movement speed, having a longer pause (maybe even infinite until the player presses a key) between waves would be really nice so you can spend money.
Good graphics, but this game doesn't seem to relate to the theme. It is also incredibly anti-player-friendly with what seems to be complete randomness from the bomb distribution.
It's possible for the bomb to kill 2+ blocks in a single column, meaning even if you manage to shelter under several blocks, it's half pointless compared to just trying to run around and dodge.
At one point I spent maybe 3 minutes running back and forth, with nothing else on the screen but a 2-block column with a gunner on top. Even though I would run up to the column so the bomb exploded in that area, it took that long for the random distribution to happen to hit that one column.
It's kind of funny that the bomb can directly explode on top of the girl without hurting her, but the fire (or touching an enemy even if they don't shoot) instantly kills her.
One more comment since I just saw the napalm reply: Napalm seems a fairly conventional weapon to me, and probably has a less random explosion / spread distribution than this. :P
Great variety of game over sound effects, and very unique idea. I wanted to like it!
Unfortunately the super slippery physics (walking on ice effect when you try to stop), slow acceleration, and camera angle makes the game very difficult and frustrating. A pure side view would make things a lot more clear, as would (I think) making the player character a lot more responsive.
I liked the feeling of the buildings orbiting you before throwing.
Welcome to Ludum Dare!
A speedup button would be nice, or maybe a restart button since the first few rounds were very tough for me. I had hardly any money to afford more than 2 hens at the start. A cheaper penguin would help too. :)
I think one big thing for a tower defense game is making towers target the enemy closest to the base. Sometimes it seemed like the hens would shoot enemies that were further back, letting the enemies in the lead keep going even though they were in range.
Also I pressed escape to try to cancel shopping since I did not want to place a tower, and lost all my progress. :( It would be nice to at least continue from that wave if I lose or accidentally press quit.
Welcome to Ludum Dare. :) I am a little sad there was no way to win. Good luck on your future entries!
Just a heads up, I don't think compo entries are allowed to use premade music. Jam entries can, however. Sorry if I misunderstood what you meant.
I got stuck behind a tree when landing on a platform. Also, trees don't seem to count as platforms so the rainbow did not reset.
The jumping is kind of fun, but I feel like it needs to charge faster and there should be some sort of visible indication when you reach max so you know how long to hold the button down.
I think you can change your category to "jam" instead of "compo" by the way. A lot of compo games don't even have music because people run out of time.
For the web version, I think you would need to right click the HTML and copy a public link so people can access it directly.
My only real complaint was the loot being a little too random. In at least two games I found no items at all. In other cases I kept getting hardly any items -- just one or two. It would be funnier if there were a huge variety, and you had a better chance of a combo.
Improvement suggestions: Some sound effects for the "weapons" would be awesome. Not having to click "go back" every time I check a location would be awesome.
ALL THAT SAID, well done! Hilarious entry with a great mood. The first time the burglar appeared with the crack of thunder, it made quite an impression.
I disagree about the difficulty. For a game jam / compo game, I really liked that it was easy! I still died the first time, and beat it the second time.
Having an easier game means people rating 50+ games can see all of yours, have fun, and rate it. This is better in my opinion than them having to spend half an hour. It's not reasonable to spend half an hour on every game because they are so hard.
As others may have said, the red corpses were confusing. Red is usually a warning, dangerous color. Maybe turning them from red to gray would be better. I feel like there was also a partly red enemy that was still alive.
The weapon customization was my favorite idea here. You could try making a fun full game based on this concept. The rocket launcher with sniper power was quite satisfying when the blocks went flying.
The hologram idea was interesting, but I could not tell what the holograms images were. Maybe someone with a club, and sometimes fire was generated.
There seemed to be a lot of issues with the English translation if you work on a bigger game.
The Reginald dialogues were really annoying to me.
Exploring an abandoned area is cool.
I forgot to mention, you can walk off the edges of the screen.
Creative idea. I'm assuming there is only one level? After reaching the red square, the game zoomed out.
My comments are from the Unity Web Player version. Not rating since there seem to be several bugs.
There didn't seem to be much feedback when changing floors with the stairs. When I kept pressing up, I ended up in a completely black, empty level. Pressing down a few times seemed to fix it. The same thing happens if you press down while on the bottom floor.
Eventually, pressing up and down just stopped working at all, while I was on a normal floor.
Pressing space to chat seems to pick someone near you, but NOT necessarily the person you are overlapping. Sometimes someone would pass you, but you would keep getting voice lines from them, instead of the person you were trying to check.
Clicking on each name in the notebook for details seems to take 2 clicks instead of 1 after you click the green tab.
Also, once I had a question mark appear outside of the level, to the left of the staircase.
Seems a bit offensive (could have used other pictures for enemies), but kind of oddly simple and fun. I see a bunch of people saying they couldn't choose what direction the hoop went, but it seemed to me I could always press a direction key when the meter was full and throw a hoop that direction. Am I mistaken?
Also, HUGE thanks for mentioning Plogue Chipsounds! I'll have to ask them about potential license issues using it with a digital audio workbench, but I love the song you made and the product looks awesome.
It was a little tough to figure out how it worked, but clever idea. I really like how the arrows turn sideways to fly in.
I'm not sure the game is working. When I shot things like cigarettes or bugs, I got negative points. When I left them alone, I got negative points (when the bugs got to the middle).
I didn't find any way to NOT get negative points, so I didn't rate.
KITTEH!
Cute game but very hard, playing the updated version. Ammo seems randomly to give you different types of ammo. So some games you will have enough, and other games you might get a mostly useless weapon.
Also it might be nice to have enemies spawn away from you, or have some brief period of invincibility, Mario-style, when you get damaged. Otherwise a squad of soldiers can spawn on top of you and nearly instantly kill you.
Two more comments! One, I kept trying to use the mouse scroll wheel to change weapons, and scrolling the webpage instead. This probably isn't something you can fix on Newgrounds since I think even if it's possible, it would require Javascript.
Two, you might try making Q and E switch to only weapons with ammo. I don't know if this would be confusing, but it would save time when you're just trying to grab a weapon, ANY weapon, and you have a bunch of empty slots.
Cute art. :)
A restart button would be nice (at least on the web version). It would be nice if you could restart that particular level...but my game has this problem too so I understand about the lack of time. :P
A few bugs if you continue working on the game:
1. It seems possible to get stuck in the ground after jumping or falling.
2. Holding a direction against a wall makes you get stuck on the wall.
3. After finishing the second or third level, the game seems to end instead of continuing or giving a game over screen.
It would be nice if there were a final goal. I thought with the difficulty level I might need to defeat some number of waves, maybe like Streets of Rage or Ninja Turtles.
Nice idea and pixel art though!
Great job! Sadly I didn't have anyone to play multiplayer with, but I tried the mechanics for a bit. Stopping is difficult since you get moving so quickly, however.
The idea of using waves and the graphics of those waves is awesome!
Restarting all the way from the beginning is really soul-crushing (my game has the same problem but is much shorter at least :P).
The idea is kind of neat, but ultimately I'd rather just press a button to use the different pen types instead of type words. The art has a nice style, but the blue sky cloud flashes are a little seizure-inducing.
I didn't finish because I died just after the black tornado and restarted all the way to the first level. ;(
Impressive job creating such a complex Pokemon-style system in 48 hours. Nice graphical consistency.
If you work on it in the future, a few suggestions:
1. Music does not seem to loop smoothly in some case(s).
2. Part of the battle theme reminds me of a Pokemon low-HP jingle, which made me wonder if I was low HP, haha.
3. Prices all around seem quite expensive. Having to pay for healing between fights was probably the most annoying part of this, but even single-stat point upgrades seemed to cost hundreds.
If you tuned some of that stuff and added a game around it (perhaps not as huge and complex as Pokemon of course :P) it could be pretty cool!
A restart button would be nice. You submitted your game for an audio rating, but I don't hear any sound. Is that intended?
I like cats, though the level-flashing was pretty hard on the eyes.
Neat idea, and peaceful music. The bird sounds were too loud compared to the music, for me.
Unfortunately level 6 seemed to depend too much on randomness for me. It takes a very long time to wait and see if ants will move in the direction you encourage, with the very limited spray amount.
Nice job with learning programming, though it was pretty laggy in Firefox 37.0.2 after a few attempts. Good luck in future games.
The needle is clever, but there still seem to be a few bugs. An enemy seemed to teleport to me once after being frozen by a button. It took me a while to realize buttons freeze enemies especially since they continue through the enemies. Also, enemies still hurt you even after they are 0 health and dead, until they vanish.
Also this is nothing to do with you really, but I really wish Ludum Dare had an option to disable web embedding, since it makes it a big pain to play web games (they get embedded in a tiny window, or play the music/game twice at the same time if you open in another tab). Even clicking screenshots doesn't kill the web embedding.
The hat was cute. :D
First off, awesome graphics and clever design. I like the fish growing!
Unfortunately, with the tiny hitbox (especially on the first fish), and especially the knockback, the game is super frustrating. If the hitbox was bigger, if there wasn't knockback from your own swings, ir the enemy melee hitbox were smaller, and/or if you could melee the life preservers to destroy them, I think things could be a lot of fun. As it is, it is very frustrating. :(
Also, since the enemies are already challenging, and so many clicks are already required, is it necessary to melee the pickups? Perhaps just walking over them to grab food would make the flow better.
The health meter fish bowl is cute, but it is difficult to know how many hits away from death you are, so that also led to frustration for me.
There might be a bug when I restarted and got a very long fish. I reloaded the page to fix it, but that might actually be a nice feature for a small game...the longer fish was way more fun, even though it still had the same sort of small hitbox and player pushback issues.
With screen size as small as it is and the life preservers being unblockable and undestroyable, their speed is pretty fast.
As huge and mazelike as the level is, having a win counter of some sort would be nice. I didn't know if I needed to get all the food or defeat all the enemies, but apparently the answer was neither -- I randomly got a WIN popup while still playing, with maybe 2 enemies and 1 food drop left. Or maybe I got all the food drops but there were 2 enemies left.
I know it's just a 24 hour game, and again you had great graphics and clever ideas, but I wanted to try to give some detailed feedback if you work on this past the competition. :)
Correction, I meant 48-hour game. :P
I won! Suuuuuper long game for a compo entry, crazy amount of content you created there.
The HP ups were really appreciated. If I had died because of no healing, and there wasn't a checkpoint (I didn't die so I don't know if there are checkpoints), I might have stopped playing. :P
The different fishes are a great idea, but the default fishing rod option seemed really bad, perhaps on purpose. The first knight enemies are so fast and do so much damage, managing to land even one delayed fishing rod swing feels like it should do more damage since it's so risky. :P Or maybe that's the point, and the player is just supposed to reply on powers.
I forgot to mention, the knights knocking you into the air seems to make the invincibility period nearly useless, because you can be hit again by the time you land where you can do another attack. Great job overall though!
Very addictive puzzle game. The last puzzle had me confused because I was overthinking it.
For the level before domino, what is the intended method of getting through the top right portal? The only way I could find to do it felt glitchy, kind of wiggling in place until the portal let you essentially walk past it.
The boss once glitched up on the left block and kind of teleported.
Having a boss health meter would be nice. The game has a ton of potential, but the boss is very frustrating. The game goes from feeling like a puzzle game to feeling like almost complete luck due to the random boss motions. Also, the boss won't shoot when you're on the blocks above...unless they have spotted you, in which case they will keep shooting you in the foot while you can't shoot back.
Without a health meter I don't know if the boss needs 5 shots or 20 to kill, and I don't know if the boss backshots are actually hurting the boss, or if the only way to damage the boss is through normal shots.
Having some sort of onscreen indicator that shows when you can use the backshot again would be really nice, so you don't get killed through trying to use it too soon.
...after playing further, apparently backshots DO hurt the boss. I died at the same time, but the game apparently counted that as a victory.
Long story short, I think this is a funny and awesome idea, and if you fix the boss level and some of the glitchy-feeling physics, you could make something really neat out of this!
Ultra impressive for 24 hours. I managed to win on the second try. I seemed to get stuck on the side of a street once but I might have just been confused.
Making music AND a ton of art assets in just 24 hours is crazy, good job.
I like that you can press a direction before reaching a corner, and the character will turn once the corner is reached. That is player-friendly.
Sorry, 48 hours, you are right. :P
Maybe not closely related to the theme, but it is a very creative idea. You could potentially make a puzzle game that involves matching a landscape or something. :)
Thanks for the comment! I'm thinking of something like you describe, with player interaction or player personalities providing depth in a more complete game.
For your game, the controls are rough (hard to know when you can bite, and biting blinds you) but the graphics are neat!
Lots of content for a 3-day game. I beat level 11 and yes it took a while.
Interesting mechanic with the rolling -- I don't know if it was just my computer or not, but when I was rolling fast, it did not seem to completely cover the wall, instead covering say, 80% or 90% of the surface but leaving a few bare spots.
One suggestion I would make if you continue work on this is to get rid of the top-of-screen kill. I'm not sure it is a common mechanic players would know about, and it felt kind of frustrating instead of adding to the game.
Dropbox seems to be having issues right now but I'll post again if the site starts working.
That was fast, it's working again!
@Zccc, replied on your page -- the players can't beat the monster, but if they're all alive, one ending explains why this is. It's just a silly joke. :P I'll probably remove that aspect if I develop the concept further.
Thanks to everyone who rated! I'm super happy since this is probably the best I've ever done in a Ludum Dare, and I'm working on a full game now. :)
I escaped! It was quite difficult because of the bounces (and I didn't know where to go or what exactly 4 of the chemicals did), but nice job doing it in 12 hours. :) Nice art too!
Thanks for the comment on my game! The two winning endings depend on whether the players are all alive. If they're all alive that's the good ending. :P
Sorry for any confusion -- the players lose in any case. It's just a joke since if they're all alive, one ending explains why the Dungeon Master wanted them to lose.
In the third level, the player sprite stayed in the werewolf form, though visitors would still talk to them.
The werewolf died with the other werewolf at the end. Hopefully that's on purpose and there wasn't any other ending?
I forgot to mention something positive, sorry! The graphics are super well done, great work. This pretty much nailed the 16-bit RPG look. The music was nice too.
Kind of hilarious and kind of reflects my own feelings.
I'm glad this got #14 humor, nice work. :P
I didn't realize you had to press space to start the game since clicking didn't work. Even the main menu is a puzzle. :P
I liked the ranged charging mechanic. I found out you can even charge diagonally!
It took me a while to figure out how to tame machines, and I think I've figured out how to use them, by pressing space to pick a target? Several machines don't seem to have a use though.
The microwave is especially brutal with the apparently random pattern. :P
I finished the the final level and the missiles.
I'm afraid it would take too long to get to 100, especially with the score resetting. I am not turtle enough. :P
Nice art! Looks like something that would be on the Game Boy Advance.
You might want to add left click as an alternative to spacebar. That way I can avoid destroying my spacebar. :P
Decent twist on a concept.
Funny idea about the themes. What does spacebar do? I only got WASD to do anything.
Creative (and scary!) art and concept. Some sound effects and music could help complete the mood.
The quit button doesn't work for me in the web version, but that's a minor detail. Cute work with funny soundtrack.
The moon and sun faces killed me. I love how concerned the sun looks.
I wanted to play this but the web version didn't work in FireFox or IE. :( Let me know if you change anything and I'll try it!
@greysphere that's really strange. I specifically tested with IE11, automatically updated to the latest version, on Windows 7. I get a message that explicitly says this browser isn't suported. :(
It may be an emscripten thing because someone else's first-person emscripten game didn't run on my browser either.
With Firefox 40: uncaught exception: abort() at jsStackTrace@http://www.templegatesgames.com/hegemony/Game.js:1:21832
stackTrace@http://www.templegatesgames.com/hegemony/Game.js:1:22015
abort@http://www.templegatesgames.com/hegemony/Game.js:38:39322
assert@http://www.templegatesgames.com/hegemony/Game.js:1:11926
Module.setupFileSystem/<@http://www.templegatesgames.com/hegemony/Game.html:84:1
done@http://www.templegatesgames.com/hegemony/Game.js:1:102505
IDBFS.syncfs/</<@http://www.templegatesgames.com/hegemony/Game.js:1:84987
IDBFS.getRemoteSet/<@http://www.templegatesgames.com/hegemony/Game.js:1:86421
IDBFS.getDB/req.onerror@http://www.templegatesgames.com/hegemony/Game.js:1:85719
Tough until I started just puking to stay small and avoiding obstacles instead of trying to blast through them. Interesting idea where eating is actually bad for you. Cute drawings.
This is really tough. I tried doing a really simple city simulator game a few jams back and it's hard to balance.
Some of the things I have the biggest problems with are the tiny game size and font size (I have a ton of screen room unused -- a fullscreen option might fix this...I was playing the web version). I have to lean way in to read certain labels. Maybe changing the font color could help too. I didn't even realize there were more buildings available at the start because they're scrolled off the screen by default.
I also had a lot of trouble figuring out why some buildings wouldn't build. The power plant would build sometimes, but not others. In both cases I apparently had population and ore, and I tried different landscape types. Eventually it might appear, but by then probably too late for the house I wanted it to go with.
Very ambitious though!
I couldn't seem to get the can to move from the starting position without using the spray, so hopefully that's intentional. I also had trouble figuring out which side of the can was moved by which control, but I suppose that's also intentional. :P
Wow at the vocal audio! And nice clean 3D assets.
What a soul-crushing game, but I suppose that was the idea. :P I like being able to shuffle papers around on the desk though.
The tentacles can move to the middle of ships and attack through the floor, and I'm not sure if that's intended. Also, existing tentacles could interfere with the placement of new tentacles.
The battle music was a little annoying to me.
One thing that made it hard to use strategy was, I did not know which crew members would attack first, so I did not know which ones to target.
I hope you will pardon my comments -- I know jams are a lot of work in a short time -- it's a cute idea, and I played it all the way to max level and defeated the city!
Quite impressive content for 48 hours. Your pixel art was very consistent and detailed, and the mood was appropriately gloomy and soul-crushing.
I only noticed one bug in Firefox, where the music stopped if I switched tabs and never came back.
I have one suggestion for the game in general -- don't automatically change to the next line of text. Having different text speeds and clicking to advance are both great, but as it is, if you glance away for a moment you can still miss when a line of text changes over. You might have a tiny [>] continue button in the corner, and clicking anywhere could still continue to the next line of text.
It might be nice to have a cancel option (click empty space?) in case you choose a spell and then change your mind.
Is there a way to do a basic attack instead of an ability/spell? I didn't figure that part out.
The sound effects are quite loud on my computer, drowning out your nice music.
I like the humorous names and text. :)
One possible bug: I saw a ball get stuck as if there were an invisible ball. Also, the music did not seem to restart when I lost and played again.
Creative puzzle idea. It gets complicated when things affect balls to the sides as well as balls above. It might be nice to add some sort of target indicator so you can tell exactly where the ball will go.
Does the monster do something? I did not notice it having any effect on the game.
I can't seem to attack in the web version -- left click does nothing.
Very soothing game. This could be popular on mobile or tablet devices. :)
The frog looks nice! He is not a monster.
Nice job getting something submitted even if it was at the last minute! My high score was 380. Three symbols at once seem like they would be quite tough.
Oh, and the color matching was much appreciated. I think I would have done worse if I had to purely match the symbols.
Wilhelm scream is funny, though I'm not sure we're allowed that in the compo unless you recorded it yourself (in which case, great imitation!). :P
Nice use of a simplistic art style for a big city scene. I found everyone! I also really appreciated that I could keep looking after the timer ran out. I was afraid I would have to completely restart.
Trumpomari Damacy! Creative for sure. :P
The "candy" sound is really loud when you return back to the house. Other than that, cute take on the theme!
Cute octopus. I liked the jump mechanic, and I reached the win square! It's impressive to do a jam entry on top of a compo entry.
This was actually really amusing. I liked doing low-gravity jumps around the room and knocking things over!
No audio played on the web version for -- not sure if it's supposed to be there since I see the audio rating category.
One suggestion, you might want to make the enemy cubes flash when hit so you know you're damaging them. :) A retry button would also be nice. If there is one I didn't find it.
Cute art!
I got to the frog king, though I'm not sure if I beat him or not. The jumping height is a tiny bit too short to be fun...I could bounce off frogs in some cases (like to get the heart), but if the frogs jump down you can't do that so it's pretty tough.
Very creative entry, though rather confusing to keep track of everything. :D
Congrats on getting to completion! :) A restart button might be nice, since I died and had to reload the page. I won in the end!
Cute and funny, nice clean stylized art. He moves so slowly though, it's no wonder his boss wants to fire him. :P
Amusing sound effects. :P I won, though it took a couple of tries.
I also saw that it slowed down a bit near the end while I was waiting on the last plant to get hungry.
I had the same bug as NickMakesGames, most of the graphics disappear on FireFox shortly after playing. Skipping rating because of this.
Why did you opt out of audio? The sound design was pretty great!
One minor note, I think the Roman numerals on the bottom are not quite right for some numbers (like 7?).
Great graphics and mood! Interesting idea with the single attack at a time. It captures the feel of a huge, slow monster.
Having a level number shown (maybe briefly) when a level starts would be nice, since I knew there were 15 levels but I lost track of how close I was to the end. I beat all the levels though!
I thought this was a very innovative puzzle idea. It required thought, but was not so hard as to be frustrating. The art was nice and clean.
I feel it is rare to see a platformer where an AI is doing the platforming and you are doing something else. This is a creative change of pace. It was tough at first since the player jumped so quickly, but I managed to beat the story mode.
Your garden (or yard or whatever) is pretty!
Neat idea, but I'm passing on rating it since it was nearly unplayable for me on Firefox. Super laggy. The mouse cursor also seems to be offset by about 2 squares for some reason.
The snail is very slow, which I suppose is authentic for a giant snail. :P
I like the moonlit village mood! The graphics worked pretty well with it.
I found a bug: When I lose and restart on the web version, the WASD controls stop working so I have to refresh the page.
I did not feel very powerful or scary as the fish monster, because there were so many red things chasing me. It was almost like I was hiding in the dark from THEM instead of chasing swimmers. :P
My high score was 2625. An underwater monster in the dark is an unusual take on the theme. I liked that the fish and swimmers were animated.
Also, congratulations on your first Ludum Dare entry!
This runs super smooth and responsive, nice work. The camera shifting focus on direction changes felt a little disorienting and could make some people dizzy, though. I'm not sure what the best way to handle the camera would be.
Nice job capturing the feel of a Smaug attack!
I scored 1249 before dying.
Very polished artwork. Nice mood with the sounds!
This seems like it could be made into a decent mobile game if you found a way to use touch controls. :)
Sorry to hear you had so many problems during development. The laser worked fine for me in Firefox.
I can see why Kul'Chkk's time in this realm is so brief, since he moves so slow. A faster movespeed and building destruction speed could be entertaining, though I don't know how performance would be affected.
Creative idea though I may be missing a connection with the theme. One suggestion: Try removing (or greatly lowering) the momentum from the ship controls. It might be more fun to do quick maneuvers then.
Congrats on your first ever Ludum Dare!
I squatch'd all the hunters in the level (not sure if there is more than one level). I think having WASD controls might work better than following the mouse and holding W.
Nice minimalistic art style. The firelight brightness changing occasionally was a good touch.
Interesting gameplay, reminded me of a MOBA. I wish I had a range indicator for the Z spell though. Predicting where it would hit was tough.
Interesting fuzzy graphic style. As Wevel pointed out, turn order does not seem to be enforced, and you can capture the king if you want.
The art reminds me a bit of Don't Starve. After I got spotted by a monster for the first time and restarted, the walking speed got REALLY slow and I had to reload the page.
Having the 'R' key reload in addition to clicking the R square would be nice.
The monsters can apparently see behind them and through very tiny cracks (when I blocked a door I was still spotted) which makes the game super difficult. I think the boxes may be using some sort of physics instead of just sliding perfectly straight, because occasionally they can get caught on edges.
The mood was spooky.
I did beat the game, however.
"September Cancelled", hahaha.
The play was very slow but I suppose that was the idea. Very funny and neat idea with the realtime events.
Nice job with all the graphics and interactions in 48 hours!
This is probably the most unusual monster I have played thus far. Whipping your hair back and forth to destroy enemies was pretty entertaining. The slingshot mechanic was neat even if it meant I would propel my vulnerable eyeball into a monster or spikes.
It was really nice that you could keep playing as a smaller monster so damage was not as punishing. The one thing I noticed that was really punishing was that dying on level 5 meant you had to replay all the levels again. I still replayed them and beat the last one anyway!
Oh, one more suggestion. If you work on this some more, try making the slingshot mechanic more pronounced, and giving the player some invincibility frames (changing the eye color or something to indicate this), so you could use the slingshot mechanic to bash through enemies you don't want to tentacle.
Silly fun and kind of addictive! Putting the roar cooldown indicator at the top might be helpful since I didn't notice it at first. Also the spinning right now could make some people dizzy. :P
I got a high score of 133435.
Just a heads up, the web link is 404'd, though the embed works. And the Source link goes to a game page instead of source.
Super impressive mood, graphics (though I feel kind of like they're going to give me a seizure in fullscreen or something), music, and level design. The alien moving faster and jumping higher as the game goes works well.
I took out the last astronaut with a flying jump and it was close, on a dramatic catwalk. Unfortunately as a dumb alien, I ate all the astronauts and now no one is alive to fly the ship!
I like that the crab bounces with the music. Catchy sound loop and cute crab. I beat all the levels, though the end ones got tricky. Performance was a bit sluggish in Firefox sometimes, though I didn't take off points for that.
This reminds me of Pokemon. Ambitious! Battles were a bit slow.
Resting repeatedly didn't seem to refill health to full for some reason. Even after losing, health stayed at 0. Battle history also did not show up for me.
Innovation points...that was not what I expected from a snake game. :P Pretty entertaining.
5611 high score maybe? For some reason, the tutorial was WAY more difficult for me than the game itself. It took forever for me to time the 3 shots so that each of the obstacles got two shots each. I felt like one should be enough.
Unique idea with the diagonal pixels! Nice audio too.
I just put up a post-compo version that comments out one line to make it eaiser: Now, the ordering combination waits forever so you don't have to time the space between letters. Sorry it was so difficult!
@tompudding I know the feeling. I checked and beat the hardest version of mine on the first try, but I know I made the game way too hard for people who aren't familiar with it. Sorry everyone!
@SP0CkEr2 nice work! I only know one other person besides you who did. :P
Dizzifying!
That was pretty unexpected in multiple ways. I never got a good end. :(
Thanks for including a key to tone down the flashing lights! I didn't expect a gun to be climbing a vine, so points for creativity. It didn't seem to be possible to lose or win as far as I could tell.
Nice entry. I beat it! Good mood. It feels very "snakelike" if that makes sense.
One suggestion, the rabbits could pop out a little sooner. There were many times where I was just waiting for them to pop out. :)
This was ridiculous in the best way! Great concept! It feels like Mad Max meets pirate ships when you fire huge broadsides driving past other trains.
A winner is me! Pretty tough though, without checkpoints.
This is a clever idea, but the random effects are SO random that it seems like you have to play for a very long time to have a chance of the proper combinations showing up.
It seems possible to have 3-5 negative effects happen in a row, and no real way to avoid it. At one point I think I got the same effect 3-4 times in a row.
Food, power, and love are especially hard to increase. Just now, I went through 30 events in a row with ZERO events that had the possibility of increase food.
It's especially bad because one effect makes you choose between food and love. Love is very hard to increase, but if you lose food instead you're losing love anyway because of hungry people. So I try to focus on food first, but as mentioned, you can easily go through 30+ events without even having a chance to boost food, and there are MANY chances to lose food instead.
Just once I managed to get through the first round with all positive values, but that was because of luck, and then it went downhill because of the balance. How did you manage to beat this game yourself? :(
I got to 2:08 -- how many levels are there? There seems to be fullscreen spam of obstacles somewhere late in level 3-4.
It would be nice to be able to beat it. :P
The game seems cool, but I was bad at it. I think one thing that makes it confusing is that the shadow is diagonal because of the light source. So, it's hard to judge what vertical line you are actually on. Maybe some sort of highlight on the ground could help with this.
Two, the block hitboxes are big, but the extra life hitboxes are VERY small. I was carefully trying to him them and I kept missing them. :P
The WebGL build didn't work that well. The Unity web plugin works great in Firefox, so it would be nice to have that version available for better usability. Not scoring for now because of the download-only versions.
The graphics look nice though! Like Grow Home meets Wipeout. Nice audio too, though you don't have an audio voting category.
@mactinite the web player works a million times better, thanks! I'll play and rate. :)
Good music choice though I guess you didn't make it since there is no audio category? The graphics look nice. I got 1574!
This idea is clever, but it's very frustrating to play. :( I couldn't even beat the second level because of the direction the springs are angled in. The "L" key in particular is extremely likely to make the frog bounce left.
141 score, 102x combo I think. Was there a victory condition? It seemed to get faster and harder but I wasn't sure what ot aim for.
The graphics and audio were quite good, by the way.
I got to 545 points. The music is nice and bouncy! It kind of makes me want to press buttons along with the music.
Trying to aim for the tiny holes was tough, had to alternate the keys quickly.
I was able to beat it even on the web version. Sometimes the "Boost" or "Heavy" labels would get stuck in the middle of the screen though, with me unable to activate the power.
I never noticed the "Corruption" or "Repulse" powers, though sometimes the screen went wavy.
There's a lot of good stuff going on here! Nice graphics, nice sound loop, and very clever use of the two additional themes that mix in depending on which button you hold down.
I kind of wanted to hear what BOTH would sound like mixed together.
If you wanted to take this further in a full game, you could do neat stuff with combo bonuses and maybe upgrades. I was fun lining up the laser to hit multiple enemies.
This reminds me of an old spaceship game where you had to lift things or land. Neat, and I'm glad this doesn't have a fuel gauge.
Unfortunately it's very hard and slow for me. I almost got to the end of the second level, but it took a very long time, and then one wrong move instantly restarted the whole level -- I would have had to collect all the cows again. :(
5 cows per level might be more fun in my opinion.
I got to 14 once. Pretty with the shaders, and very impressive, but also very frustrating. Almost invariably, a red sphere would appear directly from the bottom of the screen, leaving you with hardly any reaction time. If the camera centered on the ball closer to the top of the screen, that would allow more time.
Also, there seemed to be a LOT of red spheres compared to blue spheres.
I started on hard mode! It took a few tries, but I finally won. :D
One note, the description says that the Man-Eater destroys soldiers next to itself, but it only seems to destroy ONE soldier if you place it next to two.
Pretty humorous responses. I got to the part that explained what happened with the two buttons, but I couldn't find a way past that. Is that the true ending, once you get the "NICELY DONE!" option?
Whoops, I just found an option to continue past that. Some options occasionally seem bugged, since I think I was getting random "No food" etc. replies when trying to choose different things.
I only got a score of 5. I didn't understand the controls at first, but they actually worked okay once I got the hang of them. Creative concept. The Unity plugin worked great in Firefox, by the way.
I don't see any score counter on Firefox 42.0, sadly. (Not scoring game, just providing feedback)
Whoops, I found the score. It should be a little closer to the song in my opinion. Also if the A and D squares have nothing to do with the music, then they should probably be visible longer, or have some way to predict them like scrolling Rock Band blocks.
Interesting idea anyway!
I got to 326. It would be nice if it saved your highscore, or had a way to continue, since just as the game gets interesting, it also gets too hard for me.
Neat idea and very stressful, though.
I got to the point where I had two cells, but sadly food became very hard to find. Also some sort of arrow(s) pointing towards your cells would help. The map seems infinite and it would be easy to get lost, since food was so rare. :P
Also, sometimes the pellets didn't seem to vanish when you picked them up, though they could still be shot. Cute faces on the cells!
I beat it! The graphical style and music were very nice. However it was very difficult for me. My own game is also quite difficult so I can't blame you too much, but that's my feedback. :P In contrast with the nice relaxing mood, the narrow corridors and plant speed were quite stressful.
I played all the way to freedom! Though it didn't seem to end there, I stopped at that point.
It was neat that you could knock balls out with the sides of the crane without grabbing them. Unfortunately, even with the stability upgrade, the crane seemed to swing a LOT when you are trying to position it.
It was kind of fun playing with the physics though.
Congrats on making your first Unity game. :)
I was only able to eat one fish. I think most swimming games invert the vertical controls, so pressing down would make you go up.
Inverting the vertical controls and reducing the turn rate when you let go of the control could help a lot.
I was amused when my planet got as big as the screen and I won. :P Creative control scheme to use the two-button constraint.
How did you manage to beat this? On Firefox 42, not sure if it's related to framerate or not, it's basically unplayable because it's so fast. I managed to get to 4.89 or so. I want to like it, but at least one of the following needs to happen I think:
1. Use about 25% of the current number of red balls.
2. Maybe avoid spawning red balls near the player. MANY times I died in less than a second of spawning.
3. Don't kill the player on red ball hits, instead just bounce off of red balls.
4. Slow down turning and movement speed by 50% at least.
5. Slow down red ball motion.
Any one of those could make it much more fun. :(
@MrDave those were by design, but they are understandably frustrating. :P I figured the bombs would be too easy otherwise.
The redirect happens once the target point is reached, and depends whether you fired right or left at the start. But yeah it isn't obvious.
@subpixel With limited time I didn't bother designing the waves. It might have been neat to let the player memorize the positions.
@M2tias Yeah, it's a bug that all keys can be the same thing. :(
Super impressive doing this on a ZX spectrum. It feels very authentic. Gameplay is simple but takes some thought, and it gets scary when lots of enemies are nearby.
Crazy good art.
The sound effects are very loud on my system compared to the music. The music is nice enough though.
This game is SUPER super hard. Being able to restart levels, or even disabling wall damage so you can learn to use new powerups, would be nice. Holding the button to see the powerup position can get you killed the first time you gain a powerup.
Just a note, if you are holding or tapping A to shoot, it is easy to skip dialogs by accident.
Neat music! Very chill.
WASD would have been a nice movement option.
I won. But it wasn't easy, dagnabbit!
I know you changed the mechanics at the last minute, but if you work on this some more I think locking player movement to a grid would make it a lot less frustrating. The stressful Sokoban idea is decent but I feel it needs crisp controls.
Cool idea for level-sharing!
I got to floor 4, but I never managed to get an attachment to do something even when dragged to the robot as far as I know. I tried making a gun attachment, and even had 2 of them attached in the circle at one point, but it never seemed to fire at enemies and I could only fire at enemies myself.
Good mood, spooky. I escaped!
One complaint about the text: Expanding from the middle makes it hard to read until it is finished. I would prefer starting from the left. It almost gave me a feeling of motion sickness and there is a LOT of slow text. Instantly appearing text would be even better to me.
I like the roll move. Nice animation and fun to use. Maybe being able to roll through enemies would be cool? Having instant retries was appreciated.
I'm not sure which things are WebGL version bugs so please forgive me if I'm mistaken on these:
1. I told you about the air control thing (which is apparently a WebGL bug). It's very hard for me to do jumps without using it because some jumps seem to have very little startup time, and hitting the edge of a ledge bounces you down.
2. Another WebGL bug, hitting a ledge/roof bounces you sharply down. This is a problem several levels in for a long jump.
Super tough. I found myself using double jump and not dashing very often, since dashing gets you killed easily. I got up to 16.
Sometimes the random block placement seemed to make jumps impossible even with dashes.
Nice art style.
This is clever. I felt dumb because I beat easy mode without realizing you could shift the lines VERTICALLY. That made hard mode much more reasonable.
Nice twist on asteroids. Pretty tough with how slippery the ship is!
Nice art. This feels like it would fit an Indirect Control theme.
Unfortunately the purple bullet turrets made the game too frustrating to play past the first 2-3 levels. It is already very difficult to maneuver the colored shapes into the last few gray shapes with them bouncing off each other, and having to constantly dodge just makes it more tedious in my opinion.
Very clever but very difficult. It took me forever to transform into the snake, and then I lost immediately after (which is apparently intentional).
Apparently it was addictive since I played it like an hour to beat it. :P
Clean mechanics. I won! I kind of wished I could turn off the music though. :P
Nice graphic design on the menu screen. I got a high score of 16.
The audio was annoying to me but some might be amused. :P
The gameplay was innovative and worked well. I just wished I could toggle mouse mode instead of holding down a button.
Runs smooth even as WebGL, I'm impressed. Clean game, works well. The only thing I'd say is that the non-grid movement makes turning corners difficult.
I can't figure out what to do after switching. :( I herded everything to the ship, and herded everything to the energy, but neither does anything, nor does pressing X.
Have you seen my bear Tibbers? :3
The monster controls well -- the jumping slash was a good move. Nice atmosphere and music.
I was lucky that in that high-security lab, all the elevators were unlocked. :P
I forgot to mention, having checkpoints was great.
Good work, especially for the last minute. It's like Sokoban with a twist.
Nice music. The isometric controls took a bit of fiddling but worked ok. I wanted a run button, or faster walk speed maybe?
I escaped!
Thanks for including the mute button. ;)
You're brave trying to do 2D pinball physics in Unity. I can see the idea, though in practice it was pretty difficult to get the ball near the enemies.
I want to like this but I can't figure out certain things. How do you get a yellow slime? They only seem to turn golden or wicked etc. I tried a 6/0/0 slime and a 8/0/0 slime, but it doesn't let me fulfil a "6+/0/0" "pure potion" order.
That said, it's very compelling other than that, and I spent a long time TRYING to figure out how things work. :p
*edit* I figured it out! Sometimes potions can be goals, and not just pets.
Also at one point I got the information overlay stuck and it would never turn off.
I won in 31 turns! Sadly, I'm merely TOP 3. D:
I kind of wish I could see how many levels there are to complete, like 1 / 8, so I know if I'm close to winning (there are a LOT of games to playtest and limited time). However, hardly anyone does that. :P I did end up finishing the game, though the victory screen appears to be a level with no goal.
That said, this is a really excellent submission. It's a little hazy but sort of fits the theme with the robes tearing -- that was a clever mechanic. The music is well done, the visuals are great, the little touch of the downspout spraying water is nice, the voices are amusing, the controls are solid, and it looks like it might work on mobile.
Great work coming up with a unique puzzle game in a very saturated genre!
Comments and rating based on original submission version, easy difficulty.
Music: Nice and atmospheric, but I couldn't really turn it up to listen because then the sound effects were far too loud in comparison.
The icons seem reasonable, but need a text tooltip as well, since a lot of the time I couldn't figure out what they did. I tried to resupply, which made an arrow window come up, but none of the arrows seemed to transfer anything. I must have clicked the wrong order or sent something to scout first. I got it to work afterwards I think? But it still seemed to take several click before the window would appear. I think what I was missing was that I couldn't trade with a ship if it was involved with EITHER end of a trade.
The random scouting made it hard to have much of a strategy, since I would see something like 15 fuel collected and nothing else, even though I have full fuel already...even on easy.
Eventually I made it to the homeworld!
Overall it was a reasonable spacey game, nice work.
@caspercaper17 that's exactly the sort of feedback I was interested in! I do want to make a bigger map with the various mechanical and strategic options I mentioned in the description and see if it's fun. I'm interested in whether the idea has any potential to pursue further.
@ericm @hectigo @rumor thanks for the very helpful input! I'll check out your pages as well.
You're of course correct that there's not near enough strategic options at present. I think at minimum I would want to force players to sacrifice an entire building (thematically, they would be giving up a particular job in order to focus more on being holy).
This was quick and easy to understand, once I figured out that carrying more fruit and sacrificing more people made me move more slowly. I think you're right that feedback could help, since the game ends suddenly and sometimes there's not much indication that you triggered something.
A crosshair would be nice since it was very hard to tell where I was aiming.
Shooting through walls is weird and painful too since you can get shot from offscreen. Shooting when you're on a ladder only hurts yourself which seems odd.
The procedural generation was clever, though it seemed to generate towers with platforms too high to jump on sometimes. One time this blocked the only path out of the spawn point. Likewise it can generate 2-block-high gaps that you can't seem to jump through.
There doesn't seem to be any reason to shoot enemies other than to avoid damage (but maybe that's enough).
If your wife appears on the minimap she's hard to see. I found her and won, but it still said I had a score of 0000 though I think I had time left?
Lastly, you may not know, but the frog meme has unfortunately been co-opted by neonazis so you really might want to avoid using that.
The mechanic seems interesting, but the death sound is VERY loud.
Not disabling page scrolling or locking the mouse meant that jump very often would scroll the page, ruining the mouse aim. The character also often gets stuck in one direction.
I wish there were a way to know if a level is possible with my current ammo count, since otherwise I might have to rewind 5 levels. I played a long time but never made it past the level with the tall pit on the left and the door in midair.
Quick retries were appreciated.
That's a lot of voice recording work! It got a little repetitive but was still impressive. :p
I didn't feel like I understood the battle system -- after a failure or two I understood that I could ignore some skills and increase others like damage or defense, and that got me to the final boss, but of course I died fighting there. I wasn't sure what I should improve to survive that fight.
@dk5000p ah, thanks. I was wondering if I needed to increase damage, and I wondered if there was any downside to tanking speed.
This was really impressive visually and mechanically, though it doesn't feel super strong on the LD theme to me. It was also difficult to see the GUI and the ship sometimes even with the different camera modes.
However, the orbital idea with changing orbits and different weapons was really neat, and I played until I beat the AI. It reminded me a bit of Planetary Annihilation!
This was so stressful to manage both things, but I managed to win in the end. Gameplay was very smooth, so kudos to whatever engine you used. Unique idea.
Being able to hold down the button to fire would be nice. Also, I had a hard time dashing accurately since it goes so far.
Nice art and nice work on the music!
I wanted to drag the minimap ala Starcraft but could not.
Great graphics! The 3D chip style is really unexpected for a compo game.
I suck at RTS games even in turn-based form, but this was a really creative approach with the network and chip analogy.
The background art is outstanding!
The common RPG issue of very slow dialogue and voice acting cropped up but you probably know that. For some reason the game got quite laggy after a while, too.
The subtitle font was super hard to read for me on a 1680x1050 screen. I think a solid background for it might help, or possibly a different font.
This is a great, unique idea and oddly addictive. I felt I did not really understand what made the snakes and spikes spawn, however, and sometimse I would repeatedly die for no apparent reason.
I think if made into a bigger game, it would be more fun if the player character did not run around while moving the Tetris pieces -- maybe a control mode toggle button could be used.
@MaxKlimenok you need a fish of the largest possible size, and all other fish in the level must be gone first (escaped, caught, released, whatever). Thanks for playing!
@warzoku if you are on a laptop screen that might be it. It needs 1024x768. Can you try the second link instead of the gamejolt link? It might show the whole game there.
@warzoku I should learn how to use itch.io. Sorry about the sleeping thing, it happens 1 hour for free website hosting. :P
@Saering Sorry, I don't have instructions in the game. Check the description on the Ludum Dare page -- it shows you the Controls and Mechanics.
The key is that the purple fish only eats the biggest size fish, and only if all other fish are gone. :)
@Ryunos thanks! Yes, unfortunately some laptops may be too short to see, and we did not realize at the time that there are still desktop/laptop systems shorter than 768 pixels.
This is super appealing and creative. The art is nice and consistent, and the mechanics are varied enough to be addictive. You might be able to make a full version of this.
I don't know if it was the web version, but I could not see crosses or keyholes on the ground, so I just had to play blindly until I realized something was hallowed ground. I ended up getting to floor 6.
@justinooncx no you're right, apparently I never tried the Magnifying Glass! For some reason I got the feeling from the description that it related to multiple floors or something and acted more as a hint you weren't supposed to use, so I never used it out of fear of losing money.
That makes a lot more sense so I bumped up the fun rating.
This is quite promising, so I hope you will forgive me for making several suggestions. The art is clean and works pretty well despite the rageface balls, the music is fitting, and the RPG mix with pool is pretty fun. However, there are several things you may work on if you make a full game:
* The big one is physics, since that is key in any pool game. If you shoot at an angle against a wall (e.g. in a tunnel), you bounce perfectly horizontally instead of bouncing off the wall at the expected angle.
* Being able to look around by dragging the board would be good, as other(s) have said.
* I kept having problems accidentally unequipping items. I think white backgrounds are intended to tell they are equipped, but you might consider an item border. There also seems to be a bug where if you pick up a duplicate item, the game thinks all copies are equipped, so if you disenchant the duplicate you have to then re-equip the original.
* The levels seem hand-designed which is great, but they also seem to be in random order. I played until I saw a duplicate level. Being able to play through a sequence of levels (maybe with bosses) might be fun.
* Instant kill feels very harsh considering it takes a while to build up good random loot, especially with the physics that sometimes bounce the wrong way (e.g. the tunnel example above). Getting bonuses for fewer shots on levels, or allowing you to hit hazards a few times before dying, might lessen the pain.
The braille is an interesting idea, though the scan area could be a bit bigger. I'm glad you don't have to hold down the button.
I beat all 8 levels.
The tick...tick...tick sound was really loud so I couldn't hear your music well. Otherwise the game worked all right. I didn't QUITE fully understand the rules on when groups will trigger and when they will not, but it was enough for me to play for a good while until I lost. :P
This is pretty neat. As other(s) have said, the clicker stuff could be basically ditched and you would have something interesting along the lines of SpaceChem or other Zachtronics games with a series of puzzle challenges.
One request that might not be obvious -- a way to disable the moving black square while executing would be amazing. Especially at higher frequencies, seeing the square flashing really quickly is very unpleasant visually and might be a seizure hazard.
It's a great distracted driving simulator. I got maybe 5-8 choices into the conversation but ended up crashing. Very creative idea.
My score was 7-5-6. I didn't envy the job of the worker on the left. He has a very hard life. :'(
Nice music and art style!
I may be dumb, but I'm struggling to understand the connection to the theme.
The game is super challenging -- I tried many times but never found out if there's an obstacle past the vacuum cleaner. Very solid art. :) Amusing visual effects and great work with the level damage!
Unfortunately, even with the volume all the way down, the screamer sound effect is ear-piercing. :(
Thanks for the seizure warning, I appreciate it.
I got through 4 waves or so before stopping. I don't know if it's just the web version, but mouse sensitivity was SUPER high on my computer in first-person mode. Moving only a tiny bit would move the crosshair a lot, so it was really hard to aim. Also shooting at long distances didn't seem to hit the enemies.
It's an unusual concept, but I couldn't figure out what made it switch between top-down and first-person mode. Is it just on a timer?
Last comment, I think switching tank controls for a more traditional WASD would work better.
Also nice graphics! The shadows are very fancy.
For some reason the WebGL version didn't work on Firefox (can't press 'Y' to start) so I didn't rate. Other WebGL Unity games have been running fine for me. I'm wondering if it's because it's embedded in a frame or something.
The idea isn't bad, but I had two main complaints.
1, the characters are basically all assholes and there's not really a way to avoid that.
2, the food seems to be so random that you can literally sit there collecting 9 of something you don't need, just waiting for a 3rd cucumber or something to finally spawn. I assume this also means the food gets thrown faster the whole time. The worst of it all is that the extra food you collect doesn't count towards the next level so you have to do it all over again. :P
I played until I beat all 3 levels though.
@MaxKlimenok I think that change would make things a lot better!
Also make sure you play Overcooked on Steam if you haven't already for a hectic team experience.
I really liked this! I like games such as Advance Wars or the old Shining Force games, so this appealed to me.
I won 12-0 because I am a master Basketball player and the AI did not want to shoot much even if I stopped guarding them. I think if you made a full version you would need to add some sort of additional mechanics and stats for blocking, guarding, stealing, and the like. :)
I got to about turn 320 before it froze. Annoyingly I can't get music to stop playing even after the web browser page closed...super weird.
Heads up, the music is SUPER loud. I had to turn down my volume almost completely off. I think the volume combined with the music tone waveform (triangle or square wave?) makes it very intense.
The gameplay worked okay but I kept finding myself wanting to play as a non-turn-based platformer instead. :P
I won! Interesting concept but I felt like I was going to get carpal tunnel with all the clicking. :P
I did not expect a typing game. The words are pretty long but fortunately I am a fast typist. :)
I think infinite lives might be a good idea because you have to experiment a lot with the hitboxes and slow actions, and dying because your impulse jump slightly touched a triangle makes me sad.
The graphics are really cute!
How many weeks are there? I only survived 3.
It was a neat feeling to realize after trying a couple of times that the different robots had different patterns for each ability. However, I didn't figure out any very strong ways to combine the different robot patterns, as someone else mentioned.
I think the levels should probably end once you reach the goal, since there doesn't seem to be any reason for you to keep doing stuff once you reach the goal early, and you can just keep skipping days to the end.
I think the potential is pretty good overall. It feels quite polished.
Great level design, modeling, lighting, and atmosphere.
Unfortunately the soundtrack sounded like it would be neat, but the sound effects (water splashing, panel beeps, etc.) were SUPER loud in the balance for my headphones, so I never got to appreciate it. Otherwise it would have probably added to the atmosphere.
It took forever to accidentally add clams as bait. For some reason it didn't seem to register at first, but eventually it happened and I solved everything!
Also howdy to fellow fishing game creators. :P
Drifting was fun. :P Hope you have more time next jam! At least you submitted something. Usually when I run out of time I don't get anything done, let alone in 15 minutes.
This was neater than I expected. Execution didn't seem to be completely deterministic because sometimes the character would do different things with the same timing, but mostly it worked fine.
I beat every puzzle, though once puzzles got long, I found myself wishing for some sort of mid-level save point so I could only work on testing that portion of the level instead of watching the entire level again.
This is both innovative and very slow to use menus each move. I beat level 1, but couldn't figure out how the combat worked for level 2.
One way to slightly speed things up would be to move the enemies simultaneously.