Princess Saving Princes by Fnkee 2014-12-10T01:28:00
Wow. Definitely my favorite interpretation of the theme! And with great music to boot!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → gelisam
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Tordle | extra | |||||||||||
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | 👥 | The Tree of Bounty | jam | 619 | 3.37 | 3.07 | 3.78 | 3.48 | 3.25 | 2.93 | 2.36 | 3.48 | |
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | Hoard | jam | 485 | 3.48 | 3.50 | 3.53 | 4.38 | 3.20 | 3.23 | 3.12 | ||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | 👥 | Crunch Time | jam | 558 | 3.46 | 3.19 | 3.99 | 3.74 | 3.34 | 3.08 | 3.29 | 3.26 | |
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Outside | compo | 94 | 3.78 | 4.00 | 3.42 | 4.26 | 3.10 | 3.21 | 3.42 | 3.55 | ||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | 👥 | Mite Makes Right | jam | 2.80 | 2.60 | 2.00 | 2.66 | 2.16 | 2.66 | 2.60 | 2.40 | ||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | 👥 | Mite Makes Right | jam | 2.80 | 2.60 | 2.00 | 2.66 | 2.16 | 2.66 | 2.60 | 2.40 | ||
| 2016 | 37 | One room | I've Seen This Room Twice Already | jam | |||||||||||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Tetroidvania | compo | 86 | 3.80 | 3.68 | 4.30 | 4.33 | 2.98 | 2.33 | 3.03 | 3.41 | 87 | |
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Growing Up | jam | 772 | 3.03 | 3.00 | 2.94 | 3.32 | 3.88 | 3.18 | 3.10 | 62 | ||
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Lumber Jacques | jam | 601 | 3.11 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 3.76 | 3.13 | 3.02 | 3.60 | 2.79 | 87 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | I've Seen This Room Before | compo | 182 | 3.63 | 3.67 | 4.08 | 4.04 | 2.76 | 3.16 | 96 |
Wow. Definitely my favorite interpretation of the theme! And with great music to boot!
For those who, like me, wished for an extra hint for the chest puzzle:
<SPOILERS>ᴎ</SPOILERS>
That was a nice surprise! But the galaxy background really made my eyes hurt.
I calculate that at full speed, it would take me 3.5 more hours to reach 200k, so... f*ck this shit, I'm getting a drink.
I couldn't play it on my machine because it requires Java 8, which doesn't support OS X 10.6; I guess I need to upgrade...
Please name your link "Windows" instead of "Download Game". exe files only work on Windows.
@ruthiepee, the black-and-white images are a fallback version in case the textures aren't found. Since you saw them instead of seeing a crash, I'm glad I put them in :)
For the textures to be found, the working directory must be the same as the executable's. Try opening Terminal.app, navigating to the folder and running it there using "./ludum-dare31".
@dorkster: Wow, that's quite an incomprehensible error message! I suspect I might have packaged too many .so files with the executable, causing some interoperability issue with the so files on your system. Deleting the duplicate .so file should help, but this message doesn't help us very much in figuring out which.
To those who gave up because the puzzles were too hard: here's a walkthrough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S2D_-qNV4U&list=UUj3bTCRO7WUVBQLtOhnc6Sg&index=1
Many innovative ideas (throwing body parts, repairing the platforms you're standing on), a few unusual mechanics (switch between characters to teleport back, weird gravity), and a whole lot of confusion as to what's happening and how to do stuff. I recommend focusing on only one idea per game in order to have the time to polish it.
When I press Q to fly, my character starts going up and never comes back down. As a result, the game is unplayable for me.
Great atmosphere! I managed to get on the bar counter, but I could not find the button to dance :)
Reminded me of Escape From Puppy Death Factory, in which you use a different kind of swap gun.
So hard! I love it!
So, basically the game "There's no time to explain", but with a character which is even harder to control, more difficult traps and fewer checkpoints? I can see that I'm the minority here, but that's just not my idea of fun, sorry.
Those simple rules lead to a surprising number of different strategies!
The combat was great! I liked how the level design made those same enemies harder and harder.
I got bored at wave 5. Anything good happening afterwards?
Maybe I just didn't figure out the strategy, but I felt like there was too much luck involved and not enough skills.
I like the concept, but the gameplay doesn't emphasize it much. I would have separated the game into levels and introduced one emotion at a time, to give the player the opportunity to figure out which actions affect each emotion and which impact they have on the gameplay.
I don't get it. Is this a game or an interactive experience? Is there a goal to accomplish?
Interesting story and dialog. Had problems with the fishing pole minigame that froze. Loved the idea of interlacing the story with minigames.
(rating and comment by my teammate François Mayrand)
My entry was also beaver-themed! ...and also had irritating enemies which kill you before you've had the chance to see them.
Impressive amount of polish on the character movement. Level design needs work: since swapping brings you to an area which is far from the current camera position, I often died immediately after swapping because of enemies I couldn't possibly have known about in advance, and that felt unfair. Another cause of unfair deaths: sometimes the enemies face you after you swap with them and they kill you immediately, and sometimes they face the opposite direction and you survive. It wasn't clear what was determining this, so it felt more like luck than skill.
Best game I've played in the whole jam so far! You really know how to teach a mechanic through level design.
So frustrating! I died often, of course, but unfortunately most of my deaths were because of the poor keyboard controls. Many gaps require going-to-the-right + jumping + pointing-down + blowing, but S+D+M+N is apparently too many letter keys. I then switched to the arrow keys, but by then I was too used to using my index finger for firing and my middle finger for jumping, but that control scheme uses the reverse. I wish I had a gamepad.
When I was using qwerty, it was weird because it seemed like I could only move in certain directions. Then I switched to azerty and I often stumbled upon a bug which would similarly disable certain directions!! Horribly frustrating. Gave up after getting stuck inside a dungeon with a button and an invisible wall.
Beautiful welcome screen art. Music and sound effects are perfect for the game mood. Played a few times but didn't get very far. The slow shooting speed makes the game too hard for me :(
(rating and comment by my teammate François Mayrand)
I closed my eyes and moved around. I was completely lost. It seemed obvious to me that I should use my mouse to spin around until I heard that my target was in front of me, and then move forward, but the sounds I heard didn't correspond to what I should hear if I spin around in a room.
Eventually, I opened my eyes and discovered that the game ignores my mouse input once my mouse cursor hits the edge of my screen. This makes the game completely unplayable for me.
The early enemies did not do a good job of training me to use my abilities so that I am ready to face the harder enemies. Instead, I used chose randomly for the first few enemies and it worked, and for the later enemies I didn't have enough time. I eventually noticed that some lines caused some enemies to wait longer, but I couldn't figure out the relationship between lines and enemies, it was just trial and error. It also took me a while to realize that it was better to always use the same emotion or two than to mix up all four, as the counters mechanically imply the opposite.
The music, sound effects and art create the perfect dreamy space mood for this game. Love the particles and lighting effects in the tunnel. Also liked the physics of flying the capsule that has a pulsed engine. Couldn't get past the first turret after a few tries.
(rating and comment by my teammate François Mayrand)
I click in the textbox, but what I type doesn't appear and my character always says nothing. Unplayable for me.
So sad...
That's it?
Very innovative, but I felt like the outcome of the game was mostly determined by luck (the set of available blocks is random, right?) and not by my strategy, which ruined it for me.
It took me forever to understand the controls, and now that I do understand them, I hate them :(
I enjoyed how different the three characters felt. Beating the game with all three was hard!
I did not rate the game because we're supposed to rate the Compo version, and unlike the Local web 1.2 version, the Compo version is only available for Windows.
On OS X 10.10.5, running the bash command fails with the following error message:
loading...
Loaded:/Users/gelisam/ludumdare/rendu/native/liblwjgl.dylib
loading...
Loaded:/Users/gelisam/ludumdare/rendu/native/liblwjgl.so
loading...
Loaded:/Users/gelisam/ludumdare/rendu/native/liblwjgl32.so
loading...
Loaded:/Users/gelisam/ludumdare/rendu/native/libopenal.dylib
loading...
Loaded:/Users/gelisam/ludumdare/rendu/native/libopenal.so
loading...
Loaded:/Users/gelisam/ludumdare/rendu/native/libopenal32.so
loading...
Loaded:/Users/gelisam/ludumdare/rendu/native/lwjgl.dll
loading...
Loaded:/Users/gelisam/ludumdare/rendu/native/lwjgl32.dll
loading...
Loaded:/Users/gelisam/ludumdare/rendu/native/OpenAL.dll
loading...
Loaded:/Users/gelisam/ludumdare/rendu/native/OpenAL32.dll
native
end
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:497)
at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.jarinjarloader.JarRsrcLoader.main(JarRsrcLoader.java:58)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at yo.MyGLFW.init(MyGLFW.java:87)
at yo.Display.<init>(Display.java:65)
at yo.Main.main(Main.java:6)
... 5 more
High production values! But a bit unbalanced: I think the more expensive flowers aren't really worth their extra cost.
The OS/X link points to a Windows-only download?
I really liked it! I only wish it was possible to use keyboard buttons instead of mouse buttons.
Lots of potential! I would have enjoyed a longer match in which I would have had the opportunity to try different strategies regarding which units and buildings to build, as those systems look like they have some depth to them, but in practice the time limit was so short that the only way to win I could find was to take all the units we get at the beginning and to kill everything without bothering to create new units.
The movement seemed so random, I'm not even sure if I did manage to move the balloon left and right or if it was just my imagination.
Great use of the theme! At first I assumed I'd find the optimal gun configuration and stick with it, but it turns out it's easier (and more fun, and more thematically-appropriate!) to constantly reconfigure the gun according to changing circumstances.
I could not play the game on OS X, the game exits immediately with no error message.
I really liked the ending :)
In order to play the game on OS X, I had to run the following two commands:
chmod a+x TwoFingerPlatformer.app/Contents/MacOS/love
mv TwoFingerPlatformer.app/Contents/Frameworks/OpenAL-Soft.framework/Versions/A/OpenAL-Soft TwoFingerPlatformer.app/Contents/Frameworks/OpenAL-Soft.framework/OpenAL-Soft
16. Isn't it too easy to avoid the TVs and couches? When I had about 5 seconds left and was clearly not going to make it further, I intentionally stopped at both, because otherwise I feared I would have missed content. Turns out there wasn't much to miss :)
I like the idea, but I felt like the randomness of the card had too much of an effect on the game compared to the order in which I choose to play them.
I finished the game, and I still have no idea how.
The collector moves *way* too fast. I didn't feel like I had any control over the outcome of the game: I can steer away from a blue dot, but only at the cost of crashing into tons of other random stuff on the other side of the level, so it felt like the outcome of the game was quite random, only depending on what color the things I crashed into were.
Loved it! I liked:
- the risk-reward of trying to eat a piece which is about the same size as me, not knowing if I'll double my size or crash (thankfully it was usually the former)
- the fact that avoiding the obstacles automatically became harder as I gained mass
- how you managed to create a second game mode which felt quite different just by disabling whether we gained or lost mass
- the fact that the different planets had different personalities (cheer up, Mars!)
- the science! I never imagined that accretion would be this much fun.
- the ending! I didn't realize what I would become until after the water phase.
The music was quite repetitive and not very space-like though.
How do I control units? I can't do anything except "Cancel" after the cutscene.
Hmm, does it count as two buttons if I never relase one of them? :)
I gave up after learning how to jump because Long often turned instead of jumping, making it unplayable. That's unfortunate, I really wanted to play more!
Reminded me of the game "One of the best birthdays" [1] by tom7, from LD24. I'm afraid that's the most positive thing I can say about the game :(
I gave up after getting a few upgrades because I kept falling through things that looked like platforms but weren't, and bumping my head against things that looked like empty space but were actually platforms. This is not the kind of difficulty which makes a game fun.
[1] http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=1984
Got stuck on the second level, freezed once I reached 500 but I need 700 to win.
Doesn't run on OS/X, here are the messages from Console.app:
2016-05-08 1:01:38.249 PM emulate[27558]: PyInstaller Bootloader 3.x
2016-05-08 1:01:38.249 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: executable is /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS/emulate
2016-05-08 1:01:38.249 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: homepath is /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS
2016-05-08 1:01:38.249 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: _MEIPASS2 is NULL
2016-05-08 1:01:38.249 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: archivename is /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS/emulate
2016-05-08 1:01:38.250 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: Extracting binaries
2016-05-08 1:01:38.250 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: Executing self as child
2016-05-08 1:01:38.250 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: set _MEIPASS2 to /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS
2016-05-08 1:01:38.377 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: AppleEvent - processing...
2016-05-08 1:01:38.377 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: AppleEvent - installed handler.
2016-05-08 1:01:38.386 PM emulate[27560]: PyInstaller Bootloader 3.x
2016-05-08 1:01:38.386 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: executable is /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS/emulate
2016-05-08 1:01:38.386 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: homepath is /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS
2016-05-08 1:01:38.386 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: _MEIPASS2 is /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS
2016-05-08 1:01:38.386 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: archivename is /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS/emulate
2016-05-08 1:01:38.387 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Already in the child - running user's code.
2016-05-08 1:01:38.405 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Python library: /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS/Python
2016-05-08 1:01:38.469 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Loaded functions from Python library.
2016-05-08 1:01:38.478 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Manipulating environment (sys.path, sys.prefix)
2016-05-08 1:01:38.478 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: sys.prefix is /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS
2016-05-08 1:01:38.478 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Setting runtime options
2016-05-08 1:01:38.478 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Initializing python
2016-05-08 1:01:38.508 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Overriding Python's sys.path
2016-05-08 1:01:38.508 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Post-init sys.path is /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS
2016-05-08 1:01:38.508 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Setting sys.argv
2016-05-08 1:01:38.509 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: setting sys._MEIPASS
2016-05-08 1:01:38.509 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: importing modules from CArchive
2016-05-08 1:01:38.509 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: extracted struct
2016-05-08 1:01:38.509 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: callfunction returned...
2016-05-08 1:01:38.524 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: extracted pyimod01_os_path
2016-05-08 1:01:38.524 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: callfunction returned...
2016-05-08 1:01:38.525 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: extracted pyimod02_archive
2016-05-08 1:01:38.525 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: callfunction returned...
2016-05-08 1:01:38.535 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: extracted pyimod03_importers
2016-05-08 1:01:38.535 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: callfunction returned...
2016-05-08 1:01:38.536 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Installing PYZ archive with Python modules.
2016-05-08 1:01:38.536 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: PYZ archive: out00-PYZ.pyz
2016-05-08 1:01:38.536 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Running pyiboot01_bootstrap.py
2016-05-08 1:01:38.569 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Running pyi_rth_pkgres.py
2016-05-08 1:01:38.842 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Running emulate.py
2016-05-08 1:01:38.854 PM emulate[27560]: emulate returned -1
2016-05-08 1:01:38.854 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: OK.
2016-05-08 1:01:38.854 PM emulate[27560]: LOADER: Cleaning up Python interpreter.
2016-05-08 1:01:38.862 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: Back to parent (RC: 255)
2016-05-08 1:01:38.862 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: Doing cleanup
2016-05-08 1:01:38.862 PM emulate[27558]: LOADER: Freeing archive status for /Users/gelisam/ludumdare/one_letter_werewolf.app/Contents/MacOS/emulate
2016-05-08 1:01:38.863 PM com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (emulate.232628[27558]) Service exited with abnormal code: 255
I had the same problem as @thunderklaus. I'm on OS X.
The sound is great, except there's one sound between levels which was sometimes annoyingly loud, so I had to turn it off :(
The post-LD version is especially excellent, I love how we keep learning new abilities which give us more and more control over the world!
Starts way too easy, but then becomes surprisingly challenging! I got stuck after obtaining the S block, because no boss appeared at the end of the level.
The best shape-shifting design I've seen so far, and I've seen a lot!
Given the theme, it's not surprising that so many other entries also allow the player to shift between different forms. Some automatically shift you at predetermined times, making the result feel more like a juxtaposition of separate games than a game in which you can shape-shift. Others allow you to shift at will, making the result feel like your character has the abilities of all the shapes together and that only being able to use one ability at a time is an artificial restriction. Others still restrict the number of times you can shape shift, discouraging you from exploring the very part of the game which makes it unique.
This cleverly works around the pitfalls of the "shift at will" approach by making you find an enemy with the proper shape before you can shapeshift. This small moment of planning between deciding to shape shift and actually shape-shifting really focuses the game on shape-shifting itself rather than on using the abilities of each shape. And by immediately re-spawning a new enemy with the old shape as soon as the player shifts, the game makes it clear that shifting back is going to be easy, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of the "restricted shape-shifting" approach. Very well designed!
I couldn't figure out why walking over tiny squares as a square turned me into a triangle, while walking over tiny triangles as a triangle killed me instantly?
Very unclear, this game needs a tutorial. I kept dying without understanding why, and the fact that there's no restart button made it even worse.
didn't work for me, instead of shape-shifting, my character just became permanently unresponsive when I pressed shift.
The brutal difficulty wouldn't be so bad if I felt in control of the character.
Nice! I enjoyed finding all of the endings.
The source link says there are no files?
I really liked this game! I'm not a fan of endless runners precisely because they're endless and thus offer no sense of progression, and so I really appreciate how this game takes the mechanics of an endless runner and yet delivers progression in spades: manually ramped-up difficulty, checkpoints, and even new powers!
My only nitpick is that I would have allowed the music to continue in a loop instead of reseting it every time I touched an obstacle, which in my case meant every few seconds :)
I gave up in the level in which the boulders are falling on you -- wait, that describes every level -- the one where you push a button to make them fall. I turned into a turtle and survived the rocks, but then I couldn't move nor transform, and getting there was hard enough that I didn't want to try again.
I don't get it. Is it even possible to last more than a few seconds? If I don't move, I get shot and I lose, and if I move, I fall off and I also lose :(
I couldn't run the game on OS X. It built and launched properly, but it didn't respond to any key so I couldn't get past the menu.
> Though the controls felt a bit stiff
Fair enough, but so are the original Tetris controls I was trying to emulate :)
> rotating to invalid positions was a bit strange, don't know if it was intentional.
At first I tried to just ignore such rotations, but since the center of rotation isn't immediately obvious, I added some feedback to show why the rotation was disallowed. How would you display this feedback?
Is there a goal to this game? I can plant more things and turn into other shapes, but that gets old pretty quickly if there isn't something which can be accomplished using those new shapes.
The different visuals were great, but it was too hard to control the jumps. I don't think that using the food to limit the number of transformations was a good idea, since the whole point is to use the different forms for different tasks but the energy system discourages trying out the different forms to figure out which one works best. Maybe make use find all the food in order to open a secret door or something instead?
You clearly worked very hard on this, with an intro sequence and multiple tilesets and music and voice and everything... but the result simply wasn't fun for me. The controls are horrible (I keep either bouncing so high that I can't see where I'll land or being inexplicably unable to move or jump unless I transform first), there doesn't seem to be a way to hit enemies without being hit back and so it's just a question of clicking fast enough that my energy bar doesn't drop too quickly, and the transformations didn't really add much to the experience.
Why end with an alert loop??
Doesn't work on OS/X (nor on Linux, presumably) because you used backslashes for your image paths.
The character moves way too slowly. This is especially excruciating in the long level with the invisible blocks
A suggestion: when I transform into an object which I think is appropriate but the dad doesn't, maybe show an example object which would have been appropriate for that location?
This is the first game I try in which our character's ability to shapeshift is beyond our control. This makes this game refreshingly different, but it also means there is a lot of waiting around for a shape which is able to go over the next obstacle.
I couldn't play your game because I couldn't figure out how to install the libraries: pip failed with "cannot import name HTTPSHandler" and I'm not familiar enough with the Python ecosystem to know how to work around this. Why don't you package your game like everyone else?
Nothing happens when I launch the OS/X version.
The intro dialogs disappear too soon, and the battle dialog stay visible too long. How about dismissing the dialogs with a button?
Do different shapes have different effects on different enemies? I felt like it was always the same text and the same amount of damage. except when we miss. I wish there were hints to find more words, my imagination is too limited!
Clicking on the link on my Android led me to a black page with a blue download button, and clicking on the button led me to a blank white page?
Great graphics, but the text goes by way too quickly! How about a "continue" button?
I didn't feel like I had much agency over the outcome of the fights, we just both shoot as fast as we can and the one with the least amount of health dies first. Speaking of which, how about displaying a health bar?
And if we're supposed to use P to restart whenever the camera mysteriously flies away, how come it restarts us at the ship and not at the beginning of the new room which caused the camera to fly?
The gameplay is ok, but why subject our eyes to so much pain? I think the flickering effect might have been reduced if the camera didn't also move so abruptly.
The lag on the WebGL version was unbearable, I gave up after pushing my first block.
In the jam version, which button corresponds to "A"? I couldn't figure out how to interact with the small monolith.
Way too hard! Maybe begin with easier levels?
Since the link is to a zip containing a .exe and not to a webpage on which we can play the game, please relabel your download link "Windows" instead of "Web".
The game keeps randomly restarting for no apparent reason? Is there a timer and the game is only supposed to last for a few seconds, or do I die without realizing it, or...?
Could you at least show us which one was zeus when we lose? Then we'd be able to gradually learn from our mistakes.
Crashes immediately after the unity logo on OS/X 10.10.5.
The controls are pretty broken, and I couldn't figure out how to get past the second purple column, very early into the game. Very catchy music though!
The web version takes a long time to load, then displays "area for memory initializer should not have been touched before it's loaded"
Eggplant, did you run the executable from the folder which contains the "images" folder? From the command-line, I mean; Finder doesn't set the present-working-directory based on which window you're looking at.
I got killed by termites a couple of times, played better and killed a few termites, and then I got bored because it didn't look like exploring or killing the rest of the termites would do anything.
I couldn't play the game; the font is way too small, and when I try to zoom in using CTRL-+, the text moves offscreen.
Even on fast forward, the cut scene takes forever! Don't get me wrong, that cutscene is super funny, but, you know, only the first time around. The game itself wasn't as good as the cut scene, I gave up after two attempts and didn't feel like it would be worthwhile to improve my skills. I think it's because it wasn't clear enough which was the character who caught me, so there isn't a tight enough cycle of improvement to make it fun.
I encountered a few bugs: I lost to the tutorial guy and my health didn't regenerate, clicking on an item sometimes gets them stuck in their blue selected form but cannot be clicked or moved anymore, and sometimes the camera is off-center so half my items are offscreen and I can't select them during a battle. Still, every time it made the game unwinnable, I reloaded and tried again, because this game is FUN! After beating the seven I even played it through a second time, trying to optimize my resource usage to beat the secret skull boss.
Nice twist on the pipedream formula! Getting power to the engine quickly before the enemies fire at us is a much better motivation than having liquid mysteriously start to pour in before the pipe installation is complete.
Mechanically, being able to swap pieces around instead of having to place a predefined sequence of pieces in order is also a big improvement, I feel much more in control of my toolbox, and yet the time pressure means I'm likely to pick a piece from the random ones surrounding my destination, so I'm not over-powered either.
I wish the effects of "shield strength" and "engine trust" was as clear as that of "life support", "hull integrity" and "phaser charge". Putting the shields up didn't seem to protect me against torpedoes, and activating the engines didn't seem to allow me to dodge them.
A suggestion: maybe shooting the enemies should cause them to back off for a bit? This way there would be a risk/reward tradeoff in trying to complete the phasers before the rest, because it would give us more time to fix the rest. As is, the incentive is to always complete phasers last.
My only complaint is that the music was quite repetitive.
For me it's the opposite, I like the sound effects but not the music! I guess you can't please everyone :)
I gave you a good score for Innovation; the gameplay isn't super innovative for the stealth genre, but using robots as enemies is a great way to justify those existing mechanics: the enemies keep walking back and forth in a fixed pattern because the robots are simply executing a for loop, and we can see their vision cones because they're using lasers or something in order to see things!
I'd recommend some kind of transition when you display the text messages, it's really jarring.
I liked the difficulty later in the game, but not so much the tutorial bit. Maybe give more room for experimentation instead of a text-based tutorial?
I'm not a fan of the mouse-based movement, how about WASD to move the robot and arrows to move the camera, or vice versa? Or just center the camera around a point a few cells ahead of the robot.
Amazing game, it has kept me entertained for hours!
I didn't realize that the recipe list was in the game, so I spent a ton of time trying different combinations and writing down the results. Eventually I saw, or rather I thought, that there was a logic to the recipes, that it wasn't simply a secret list of recipes which work while the rest gives junk, like in some other crafting games. There is certainly a logic to which combination produces pure materials, bracelets and necklaces, and so I was convinced that this was some sort of puzzle, that by experimenting I would learn more about the logic of the recipes and I could deduce how to make the masterpiece. Unfortunately, I was wrong, there was some logic to some of the recipes, but in addition to those logical recipes there was also a secret list of special recipes which couldn't possibly be deduced. Oh well!
I got a good laugh the first time I got "large junk" instead of "junk"; I had made a complicated contraption for electrum + electrum + electrum, and I thought the supersized junk was a way for the game to tell me that I was trying too hard... Oh, that might have been a good recipe logic! The recipes which combine too expensive stuff would give a large junk, those which combine too cheap stuff would give small junk, and those which are incomparable (some items are cheaper than the target, some are more expensive than the target) would just be "junk" :)
I think that having to build an assembly line in order to try a combination is a great way to solve a typical balancing issue which crafting has. In some games, we have access to an infinite supply of (a subset of the) materials, and we can combine them freely. For example, the adventure games which allow you to attempt to combine any two objects in your inventory. Since this is low effort, this leads to a thoughtless style of crafting in which the player simply tries every single combination without thinking about which ones might work. In other games, attempting to combine two items consumes those items, even if the combination fails, and so when we get a rare item we are unlikely to experiment with it for fear of losing it. By having the player build an assembly line, we can encourage experimentation by having an infinite supply of materials, yet combining them requires some effort, so the player is less likely to brute force and more likely to think about which combinations are likely to work. Hence my attempt to figure out the combination by experimenting. It's also really nice that the positions of the resources means that each combination requires a slightly different assembly line, so this experimentation doesn't get boring. Especially since there are several obstacles which naturally emerge out the interaction between nearby assembly parts, so some assembly lines are surprisingly more complex to complete than others!
Dragging the "increase population" card to a city's action slot didn't work for some reason, and when I pressed "next turn" I saw that unused cards are kept forever so I'd be forever stuck with that broken card, and I gave up. Looks way too complicated anyway. Maybe introduce the different parts of the game one at a time instead of all at once?
The first 6 notes of music were super promising, but then it stopped and the game remained silent for the rest of the game? Weird.
I was carefully saving my cubes in anticipation of running out, but it turns out we have plenty!
Having a secret ending makes the game feel much bigger than if it had a few extra rooms, good call!
So I have managed to find a Windows machine on which to play this, and this time the window was much smaller than my screen, so much that I could barely read the text. So I tried to reduce the screen resolution, but strangely the window didn't seem any bigger. At the smallest resolution each letter was only made of a few pixels each, so clearly your engine does resize in order to account for different resolutions, by making sure the window is too small regardless of the screen resolution :(
But, I did not give up! I dusted up my older, non-retina mac and finally, the game window was just the right size. So finally, here's my review!
The graphics are amazing. I had a really hard time understanding what the robotic voice was saying, subtitles would have helped a lot, but I see you know that already. One thing I did not see mentioned: there is a transparent island straight right from the teleporter! I thought it was a secret, but there was nothing on it, so I guess it was a bug instead?
I liked the idea of exploring a large unknown world in search of crystal fuel, but that got boring quickly. If you want to expand the game, here are a few low-effort changes which I think have some potential to make the endgame more engaging:
* keep track of the total number of different crystal locations found, win once we find them all * an object which shows a map indicating where the remaining crystal locations are, but prevents them from respawning, so you have to find an efficient route through all the points on the map. Maybe a faster-flying, faster-draining, palette-swapped version of the ship??
Nice! It took me many attempts to figure out to make progress, but that's fine since that was the fun part. If I already knew from the get go how to play the game, I don't think I would have liked it since clicking scraps isn't super engaging and I didn't feel like my spending decisions mattered that much.
One design decision I really don't understand though is why do we have to go to the main module in order to see how much of each resource we have?? This makes the rest of the game more opaque for no good reason. Like I for a while I couldn't figure out why spending apples on the greenhouse didn't do anything, and it turns out we're harvesting them not spending them! I also had to write down the prices of all the buildings and upgrades because after switching from the page which shows the price to the main module to the alchemy table I had already forgotten which materials I now had to craft in order to buy the thing.
A few bugs I've noticed: the X button isn't visible unless you play full screen, that X doesn't work while the cube is at the top-left of the screen because it brings you right back inside one of its buildings, and upgrading the solar panel didn't work even though I had the necessary resources.
Finally, a suggestion: since it's the scraps which we can click on, not the shooting stars, perhaps it is the former which should announce their presence with a sound, not the latter?
There's way too much stuff going on on the screen, it's not at all clear when we're supposed to press space. The "Ok" and "Great" feedback helped, but it took me a while before I figured out that "Great" did not in fact indicate that I had figured out which circles were not supposed to intersect, and that I should aim for "Perfect" instead.
Regarding the theme: you chose a planet becoming a star, but wouldn't it make more sense to start as a star? If I remember correctly, as the fuel inside a star gets used up, that is, as the star runs out of power, its internal nuclear explosions can't push back against its own gravity anymore, so the star collapses, which can somehow causes it to go nova. Going nova would provide a better justification for pushing away the asteroids than just "deciding to stop growing"!
Please use another key than ESC to bring up the menu: in the HTML version, ESC leaves full screen mode, so in order to play in full screen mode you have to press ESC twice to bring up the menu, and then go back to full screen, which is needlessly annoying.
Didn't work for me on macOS 10.10.5, I see a black screen with red circles around it and a 15:00 countdown, but I don't see any questions?
> I just wish the background room chatter continued through each of the scenarios.
@kunonooni The background music is supposed to play in a loop independently of the scenarios, did you perhaps accidentally mute the sound by hitting M?
I enjoyed the game, but found it too punishing sometimes. There's a spot in the second level in which I can either spend an energy bar to jump onto the top platform, or try my luck using the bottom path, in which case I am likely to bump my head on the ceiling and fall to my death because of the narrow gap. Which would be fine, if lives and energy bars weren't in such limited quantity! Maybe give fewer energy bars but refill them every level? Or start with zero and hide them around the levels? Because there are some gaps which are clearly impossible without an energy bar or very few coins, which is frustrating because some coins seem impossible to dodge and I don't know how many such gaps there will be over the entire game. Those large gaps also discourage me from experimenting with the bars in other interesting situations such as for dodging the cops or to access hard-to-reach coins, because any use of an energy bar in an area in which it isn't mandatory feels like a waste.
Also, it's a bit weird to be leaving the bank with 0 coins and an empty bag. Maybe the bank could be the end of the level instead, so instead of robbing the bank, the robber is depositing his coins there so he can start the next level with an empty bag?
I got all 7 presents, but nothing happens to indicate that I won? Or is there an 8th present I have missed?
The controls when going backwards felt reversed to me, an "invert X axis when going backwards" option would have been helpful.
@LeviDSmith Huh, I double-checked and you're right, only the jam allows you to use pre-existing assets and then opt out of the corresponding category. Any idea why? My previous understanding of the rules was that there are many categories, plus a 9th category "compo", and you have to opt out of the categories for which you don't qualify: you have to opt-out of the music category if you use pre-existing music, you have to opt-out of the graphics category if you use pre-existing images, and you have to opt-out of the "compo" category if you collaborate with others or take more than 48h (but less than 72h). That made sense. The actual rules, in which you also have to opt-out of the compo if you don't qualify for any of the _other_ 8 categories, doesn't make much sense to me, can you explain the rationale behind it? Am I allowed to submit to the compo and to opt-out of the music category if my game has no music at all?
I like the idea that the player's actions affect the camera, but the camera didn't affect the gameplay much. What if enemies were following you from screen to screen, and you could de-spawn them by getting them outside the camera?
I'm only missing ending two in the post-compo version, any hints?
Huh, so that's what a walking simulator is like? I had stayed away from the genre because I didn't think I'd like it, and it seems I was right. None of the objects I pick up are _supposed_ to do anything? The NPCs are giving me quests, but that's just flavour text, it's not a task I can actually complete?
Sorry, I'm new to the genre, so I can't yet tell if I dislike your game because it doesn't live up to what the genre can offer, or if I just dislike the genre in general.
Cute characters though!
Oh, and the walking controls are weird: sometimes, the character keeps walking in a straight line after I release the key, and this caused me to automatically enter and the get out-of-bounds in the tree house.
Okay, I get it, drinking the potions make you drunk, which makes it harder to see where you're going. Ha ha. That definitely fits with the theme, but if it makes the gameplay more frustrating and unfair instead of just "harder", is it worth it? Randomly dying without explanation was no fun. I eventually figured out there were "Dart Traps" shooting bubble-looking darts at me, but it would have felt less unfair if those dangers were shown to the player _before_ they became hidden from view. Same for skulls. Maybe reset the amount of occluders at the beginning of every level, or on the levels in which new kinds of obstacles are introduced, to give the player a chance to understand how those obstacles work?
Other unfair things which made the problem worse: * backgrounds which look like platforms * invisible platforms and auto-grip vines which block your jump and cause you to get killed by a Dart Trap
Despite all these criticism: the game was quite fun, but I enjoyed it in spite of its gimmick, not because of it.
In addition to this main criticism, I also found that the basic rules of the game were unclear. It took me longer than it should to figure out: * that even though the occlusion effect of potions lasts forever, their double-jump effect must be used before touching the floor. Maybe add a tossed-away-bottle particle when the player hits the floor? * that those random explosions are keys unlocking the locked doors. Maybe make that happen immediately when the player picks up the last key, or when the player touches the door? Having it happen when the key touches the door introduces a delay which makes it harder to link the action of picking up the key to the resulting explosion, and since there is no longer a door at that location after the explosion attracts the player's gaze to that location, it's not clear what the explosion was about. * that skulls disappear when you pick up a potion. It's not a logical consequence, and since the skulls can be far away from the player and also their position is now hidden by the occluders, the player will only later discover that the skulls are gone, without realizing which action caused that to happen. Maybe temporarily remove the occluders around them and have them flicker out of existence instead of instantly disappear? * that the potions allow me to double-jump. Despite making it through the tutorial which is supposed to teach me that, in the level after that I couldn't understand why the X button seemingly only worked during that tutorial level. I think the level in which we're trapped in a narrow pit and we need to jump-dash repeatedly in order to escape would have been a better tutorial, because it's more obvious that the sequence of bottles corresponds to the sequence of jumps, as opposed to a coin-like pickup which guides you during a tricky jump.
So... you found a bug in your jumping mechanic, and you decided to make that the main mechanic of your game? That's certainly an unusual source of inspiration!
Unfortunately, I think that mechanic was poorly communicated. I don't see why a chicken should be able to go faster by repeatedly jumping, and it doesn't feel right for a chicken walking on grass to have such a slippery slowdown when releasing the arrow key. Even in your description you are hiding the explanation of your core mechanic behind a cryptic "I CANT FIGURE IT OUT!!! Watch this" link, which makes it seem like the player is expected to figure it out on their own even though the game does nothing to lead the player towards that discovery. Speaking of not guiding the player very well: I still don't know if I'm supposed to throw my chicks at the yellow arrow or if I'm supposed to gather them all around me and walk past the cliff myself. I also have no idea what the yellow egg does. I see that there is a game somewhere in there, but I can't play it, because the rules are too unclear and the controls are so frustrating that I don't really want to spend the time to figure it out.
(I didn't rate the game because I did not feel like I saw all there was to see)
Some people complained that there isn't any score, but look at the top screenshot, there is a "0" above the "click on a car to stop or start it" instructions.
@gris, you complained that the music was too quiet, but it was already quite loud at my computer's lower volume setting. Presumably you've tried increasing your computer's volume, so are you saying that the music is too loud _relative_ to the sound effects? The sound effects indeed seem louder than the music, but that's how I like it at least. I guess that's why games have independent music and sound effect sliders! I wouldn't expect an LD game to have that level of configurability though.
Some people complained that the game's difficulty should ramp up more quickly, but I guess they must be very good at this game already; I played a couple of times and I still find the difficulty to ramp up quite quickly. Maybe a difficulty setting would help?
Finally, the biggest missing feature in my opinion is a pause button, as I had to make a difficult decision: I could go check why my cat is meowing right now, but all my hard work keeping this intersection safe will be in vain! Thankfully the game is very hard so my cat didn't have to wait very long :)
The itch.io link 404s
Good production values, but not very engaging gameplay. I tried it twice, both times was a long boring fetch quest followed by instant death. I didn't feel like the deaths were my fault; maybe if some radar or arrows warned of the exes from further away, and if the shops had fewer dead ends?
5 out fo 5, best game in the Ja-- wait, this is a Compo game?? Amazing.
I got used the controls very quickly. One nice touch is how we get more points when stomping a higher pile: this gives more experienced players something interesting to do in the beginning when the boxes don't fall that quickly. It's easy to make a game adjust its difficult by making it get faster and faster until it reaches the player's skill level, but making that slower section more difficult by convincing the player to make it harder for themselves is a much more impressive feat! The fact that sealing the boxes first is encouraged (required for combos, allows you to clear a column more quickly) but not necessary is another way in which you accomplish the same effect. Bravo!
I only have one improvement to recommend: maybe add some special case logic to avoid immediately adding extra crates to the columns which have only just become full? Because of the combo system, there is an incentive to let the columns get full on purpose and to clear them at the last minute, but it's not possible to do so when the box which makes them full is immediately followed by another box. Because of the incentive, when this happens it doesn't feel like it's my fault for letting the column get so out of hand, it just feels unfair.
@yngvarr, it works fine for me in Chrome 63.0.3239.84
Amazing, 5 out of 5! The only thing I would improve is that since the power level is much more important for gameplay decisions than the player's health, I would swap the two bars to make it easier to see whether we're about to accidentally murder a poor plushy dragon thug.
> Things are interesting until 250$, or maybe 450$
Oh good, I don't feel so bad for giving up after 260$ then.
Since one of the only thing which keeps the player going is to see what's the text box is going to say next, the fact that this text fades away so quickly is quite frustrating. I missed a few because I was looking at the art, but I sure as hell ain't playing it again to see what I missed. In fact, the whole time I was thinking "what a stupid game, why am I playing this", and the answer is "to see the entire game, so I can judge this submission more fairly". Now that I realize that there isn't an ending and that we are supposed to give up at some point, I think this game is mean to its players, and as a result, I no longer feel like it deserves to be be judged fairly. 1 out of 5.
The link 404s :(
I played enough to get a high score of 1291, but I now realize that I have no idea which tactic worked well enough to lead me to this score, since I don't do nearly as well with my current tactic. That tactic is to (A) avoid fighting monsters unless I have to or if I have enough meat to get back to 100%, otherwise it's too risky because the game might force me to fight in the next floor, and to (B) pick up the gold and the chests when I can. I see in the description that each chest both helps and hinder, but I can't really tell either way; because the flooding is on a timer and I can't pause, there is no time to examine the numbers and besides I don't remember what the numbers were a moment ago anyway. Adding "+1" and "-1" markers next to the affected numbers would make the effect clearer, and if some of those markers were colored red and other green, it would drive home the idea that each chest is both a blessing and a curse.
I was often surprised to die for apparently no reason, but I assume it must be because of the flooding. If the flooding bar stopped moving after death, it would make it more obvious whether it was indeed the cause of death. Even better: since you already have nice raining graphics, it would be much clearer to use them to indicate the flooding level, this way it would be impossible not to pay attention to it.
The game was fun enough to keep me playing many times, but I still think the actions would benefit from more intrinsic rewards, instead of mere points. For example, perhaps there could be a special door every couple of levels which could only be opened if the player is strong enough (has enough XP) or can pay the fee (has enough gold)?
A few unrelated comments:
* The ship music is really good, where's it from? * The fast and exciting "ou ou we go" music really doesn't fit with the action of walking in slow-motion towards a cave while the credits appear. * Spacebar didn't have any effect on the bullets for me. * Trading loot for longer-lived bullets didn't seem to make much of a difference in the gameplay, so I didn't have much incentive to keep playing after unlocking two bars of duration. * It's hard to judge the graphics since there is such a huge difference in quality between the ship part and the inside-the-cave part. Clearly, there wasn't enough time to draw the in-cave characters; but what that means is that you should have spent less time polishing the ship. It's better to have average art everywhere than amazing art in one place and placeholders in another place. I think? * One thing I think you did really well was the difficulty tuning. As I became more experienced, I wandered deeper into the cave, causing the difficulty to adjust to my now slightly-higher skills. Until eventually I felt like the game was too easy and I wandered way deeper than I should. On my way back, however, I sometimes ran away from the monsters; towards the right. To my surprise, this gave me more loot, even though I had already pillaged that room a moment ago. This also increased the difficulty, meaning I now had to run away from the monsters more often, which made the difficulty even worse. And since I had wandered far into the cave, I now had quite an ordeal in front of me in order to get out! I didn't make it. Which is great: just as I thought the game was too easy, the game gave me an unexpected challenge!
It was fun, I want more!
Fun, but the level design isn't guiding the player enough. The first few steps teach us to boldly run into the unknown, trusting that a parasol will be waiting for us if only we can get there fast enough, but then the player is punished for relying on this new knowledge by a step in which we have to wait patiently for a shadow to appear instead of running towards it. And once the player learns to wait, sometimes they have to wait for a very long time before realizing that this time, they were supposed to run!
I recommend adding a visible water bottle near the beginning of the steps in which the player should run, to indicate that they are supposed to go and grab it right away. Also, the first moving shadow should be introduced in a safe environment, in which the distance is short enough that the player could reach the shadow by running even if their timing is completely off.
Finally, the music: I liked it, at first, but I died many times and eventually it started to get a bit repetitive. I also really liked the ending, very funny!
I found the game a bit boring to be honest. At the beginning the world is large enough that I couldn't even tell if it was shrinking or not, but the instructions said to wait until you're dim to capture the next white blob, so I tried to do that. But my brightness stayed constant when I was near the white blobs, so I felt like I could easily stay "balanced" by just staying there and doing nothing. So I quickly got bored and tried instead to capture all the white blobs and kill all the black squares, that was more fun but of course I quickly got crushed. While crushing the player for picking up too much light certainly fits the theme, if picking up light is required to make the game fun, then the game disincentivises having fun, which is counter-productive for a game. Maybe if the goal was to destroy a certain number of black squares without getting crushed, so that the obvious approach of becoming over-powered by picking up all the white blobs would not work?
> Right now I am working on using Magenta to create a AI that writes game music for me so I can do that category next time.
@turbulentwinds Nice, kind of like bfxr but for music then? If it works out, do you plan to make it publicly available?
@turbulentwinds Ah, adding the chaser makes all the difference! Now I feel like I need to clear up the black squares (even if they don't add to the score) while carefully avoiding both getting too bright and too dim, and I must do so quickly before the chaser catches up, excellent. Amazing how adding a single enemy can put all the other mechanics in a whole new light!
Looks fun, I wish I had an AI to play against! Or a friend :(
A couple of suggestions. First, it would be _really_ helpful if you showed a +N next to the number which will change and then change it after a brief moment, instead of changing the numbers instantaneously. Otherwise it's really hard to figure out what just happened. For example, before you added the explanation for the symbols, I thought the skull was attacking the other players, not myself!
Second, now that I know what the skull does, those cards never seem worthwhile, it's just too steep a price for not enough benefit. Especially since I may end up being forced to play those cards in a circumstance where the benefits make even less sense, if all the other cards have the "play again" symbol! For example, attack 3 lose 2 is basically equivalent to attack 1 in a two-player game, and to an attack 1 + give everyone else +2 with more players, which is really not helpful.
Finally, a small tweak which would add a lot of strategy: if you only refilled your cards up to 4 instead of replacing all your cards with 4 new ones, then each turn would be more interesting, you might try to keep some coins cards for the next round in the hope that you'll be able to afford an expensive one. This would also make those "play more cards" cards more valuable because they would allow you to play your less powerful cards to make some room for some hopefully better ones.
Oh, and I just encountered a game breaking bug: I played "play two more cards", then "play one more card", then "attack a player", chose a player to attack, expected to be able to choose my last "attack a player" card, but while the game says "select a card to activate", my cursor is still only able to select a player, which does nothing.
Jumping feels extremely sluggish, to the point where I couldn't last longer than two popups, and so haven't really had the opportunity the explore the unique aspects of this game. Try triggering the jump when the spacebar is _pressed_, not released. This is especially annoying since many other platformers use a press-and-hold mechanic for jumping higher, whereas in this game press-and-hold leads to not-jumping and death.
Speaking of death, I kept dying without understanding why until I realized that those plants which seemingly do nothing were silently taking away some of my health. Maybe give some visual feedback, like making the character flash and recoil, when they get hurt?
Really cute, and I'm impressed you managed to make an AI in such a short amount of time!
I didn't really understand what I was doing though. We must both pick up the food in order to throw them at our opponents, but also avoid the food when it is being thrown: that makes it a bit ambiguous when it is safe to touch a piece of food, do I have to wait until it has stopped rolling on the floor and is completely still? I saw that my count was high at the end of the game, but I didn't really have much feedback during the game about which of my actions led to that count. Maybe make the characters flash when their count increases, to indicate that they are "taking damage"?
The "win", "retry" and "can't attack" chimes fit well with each other, but not with the rest of the music and sounds.
I ended up brute-forcing level 6, as I couldn't find a way to predict where the dogs would go and therefore couldn't plan ahead. I managed to complete the reward level on my own though!
I see how the more pieces you have in the puzzles, the harder it is, and that the more orbs you have unlocked, the harder it is for the player character, but I didn't quite understand why the orbs had that effect?
Also, in fullscreen mode, there was a very visible vsync issue whenever the player was walking.
I found six endings: horse, mom, date, cactus, dog, and movie. any hint about how to get the last ending?
@kizu Thanks. So you can only reply to him when you happen to be looking at his profile when he messages you? That looks more like a bug than a secret ending...
@kizu he seems to talk 45 seconds after the game begins, no matter who I talk to before that point, but if I click on his notification or on his profile after that happens, I don't have the option of replying back. The only way I managed to see the menu with the two possible replies is if I am already looking at his profile when the 45s trigger occurs.
If you didn't make the audio yourself, remember to opt out of that category!
I didn't feel like I had much control over whether I was slightly ahead of the pack or was stuck being pushed by it, so I didn't feel like it was my fault when I lost.
My mac _claims_ that the app is corrupted, but it isn't, it works just fine if I manually execute `./BURROWEDTIME.app/Contents/MacOS/Mac_Runner`.
I liked the gameplay, especially with the bloodbarrel gun. At first I thought it was too easy because I wasn't dying often enough, but then I realized there was a permadeath mechanic: contrary to what @PeculiarCarrot said, you don't have to re-buy guns you've already unlocked, unless you die, in which case you do lose all your guns and your chronopoints. Speaking of chronopoints: grinding to get all the guns took forever! I got especially frustrated by the expensive joke-gun which only pushed enemies around without dealing much damage. Maybe it requires a different play style, but because of permadeath, I only had a single shot at learning that new play style on the fly, and I didn't.
So, great gameplay and great production values, but the gimmick didn't click for me. The "least time" option is literally impossible, unless you're very lucky maybe, and because of the permadeath there really isn't much of an incentive to gamble and pick a shorter time than necessary. Similarly, the "show clock" button didn't do anything when I tried it, so I it never seemed worthwhile to spend my remaining time to continue exploring after finding the exit.
One suggestion: maybe "more light" should mean "more blue light collectible things which give a lot of chronopoints", so that grinding would take less time? It might even already be the case, I don't know, the amount I found varied so randomly between runs that I couldn't tell. Showing how many I found out of the total would have clarified that.
Also: the level number increased after each exit, but I didn't notice any effect. Were the dungeons supposed to get harder, or maybe bigger? If they were, and the goal was to get to level 20 or collect a total of 50 blue things or something, then the gun grinding would turn into interesting perks along the way instead of the main goal, and would probably turn from tedious to enjoyable.
> The game mechanic of balancing between time and difficulty is interesting, although it doesn’t really go as deep as I’d thought it would - as either extreme would render it pretty impossible, and a middle of the road choice would be somewhat optimal. Ended up just dodging the enemies as shooting them would waste more time, so the weapons seemed a bit frivolous, which went against the shooter style of the game. Skulls were just impossible to dodge at times making it seem like unfair difficulty.
Interesting how we ended up playing in very different styles! I agree that the "least time" option is impossible, but the "most time" option is fine, I spent my time actively pursuing and killing all the enemies I saw in order to farm chronopoints. And while those skulls are indeed pretty hard to dodge, I sometimes managed to be quick enough to kill them first using my trusty bloodbarrel, so it's not _that_ unfair!
On my first attempt, I focused on building as many of the 3x3 and 3x2 pieces as I could, and I got a whopping 793 Fl. Then I realized I had build a row of houses which was preventing me from ever reaching part of the map, so I restarted. I aborted my next game early because I realized that the a portion of the map was cut off by mountains, making it impossible for me to fill all the non-water-nor-mountain spaces. On my last game, having learned some good strategies, I managed to cover every reachable square-- but then I realized there was one tile surrounded by water and mountains, so I couldn't fill this map either :(
I have a few comments about the rewards. I didn't really try to complete them, but they got completed anyway as a side-effect of trying to place every tile without skipping too many. As a consequence I often didn't notice that I got a reward until I looked at that corner of the UI much later, so I definitely think there should be some kind of notification telling you that a reward was obtained. The rewards could also be a lot more, err, rewarding? The farm was the worst reward: both times I unlocked it, I had covered so much of the map already that I had no spot to place it. The bridge sounds like it would be super useful, but both times I obtained it, I had built my city as if water and mountains were both forever impassable, so I didn't have a spot ready for it, and so I didn't find it that useful. Maybe I need to mimic the Tetris strategy of leaving a gap for the 4x1 to clear four lines at once, by putting roads towards a piece of water, hoping that I'll eventually be able to cross it?
Finally, a few comments about the production values. The tile graphics are really good... but the vanishing point road is really bad. The music is also good... but I eventually grew tired of it and turned off my speakers. I played a lot though, so this probably says more about the quality of the gameplay than the quality of the music :)
Neat concept, I wish I had thought of it! I think it would make more sense if you could go back and swap tools after discovering that you gave away the wrong one though.
[SPOILERS]
On my first playthrough, I tried to avoid giving away the bunny, thinking that there would obviously be a secret ending if I didn't give away the most useless item... and then the ending surprised me, making me thing that on the contrary, there will be a secret ending if I give away the bunny and somehow manage to keep two tools? So I tried again, attempting to give away the bunny and to jump over gems... but neither worked, so I guess there is only one ending after all?
[/SPOILERS]
@swini, under which circumstances did you experience the lag? Are you talking about the fact that the item transparency and red marker conflicts take a little while to get updated? Pixel-perfect collision detection is slow, so I intentionally disconnected the updating of those conflict markers from the moving of the items so that you could continue moving items smoothly without having to wait for the collision-detection to complete.
@flashviper That's too bad, I wonder why it doesn't work for you? One thing I was worried about is that the music file is pretty large, so I was worried that the browser would wait until the entire file was loaded before calling window.onload, but luckily my tests indicated that the browser only waited for the core assets to load, not the music. Maybe that behaviour is different from browser to browser though. Which browser are you using? I'm using Chrome.
Also, could you tell me at _which_ loading screen you are stuck on? There is an HTML loading screen made of a piece of text you can select at the very beginning, while the core assets are being loaded, and then there is a fancier canvas-based loading screen made of a piece of text you cannot select before every screen, including the title screen. This way you don't have to load the images of all the items of all the levels all at once at the beginning.
@rubiksjr Just to make sure: is the rotation too slow even when pressing shift? The fact that pressing Shift can be used to move and rotate items faster is documented in the bottom right, so maybe on your screen these instructions were obscured by the audio controls?
> I only had to get rid of the wheelbarrow!
@frank-gevaerts You did?? That was not intended, you must be really good at fitting objects! Our intent is that [SPOILERS] you should be able to complete the first level without giving away anything, then you have to give away the wheelbarrow, a shoe, and a certain orange object :) [/SPOILERS]
I like the idea, but stopped at 130 points, not because I got surrounded by crates, but because the prospect of looking through all of my piles to see if I had already received the packages which were being requested was too daunting. With my lack of organization, I guess I am my own worst enemy!
I then saw @spacemonkey 's screenshot and was inspired to come up with a better filing system: pink 0 through 9, green 0 through 9, then blue 0 through 9. That didn't work out either, this time I gave up at 110 points once it was clear that the boxes were piling up faster than I could sort them into my filing system, that the three target boxes were probably buried deep under the incoming boxes, and that I would never get to them.
So... I tried again. This time my strategy was to never stack any boxes, so that I could easily see if I had received the target boxes already. That worked better, as I only gave up at 190 points this time. Once again, the boxes were coming in faster than I could file them, so I switched to maxing out all my piles in the hope of getting through the incoming boxes... but I quickly gave up once I saw that three boxes were appearing by the time I had placed one.
So I'd say that the real enemy in this game is not running out of space... it's the rate at which the boxes appear. It did not feel like it was my fault for not being fast enough, it felt like the rate of incoming boxes was way higher than it would be humanly (or should I say-- robotly?) possible to handle them. Under such circumstances, I think it would have been better to pick a win condition after a humanly-possible number of waves than to offer a high score to whoever is the most super-human. I've never been a fan of score-based games though, so maybe that's just me.
Great production values, and very enticing gameplay, I played many rounds! My only complaint is that the enemies never seem to go where I want them to go when I dash into them, but maybe I simply need to practice more.
The n/100 is a very important UI element I almost missed! I would have stopped playing after the first death, because the gameplay looked very repetitive and it seemed like I had seen everything. I'm glad I stuck around, getting to the end was fun! I never felt like I was running out of spacebars though, I only ran out of hearts. I guess I should use the shield more :)
> About the music, I din’t made them, I use Universal Sound FX and download audiojungle.
Oh well. If you did not make the music, please opt out of the Audio category, it's in the [rules](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/rules).
I like the pixel art graphics and the color scheme. I think there is a lot of room for improvement in the UX:
1. Hovering over the build tiles should display the price, like it does when hovering over an existing building. 1. When upgrading a building, the (displayed) upgrade price doesn't update until the mouse is moved away from the building and then back. I wanted to try a strategy in which I only upgrade my townhall using the resources generated by my townhall, so I kept my mouse over it until I had enough lumber to upgrade it again, and at first I couldn't understand why I couldn't upgrade despite seemingly having enough lumber to do so. 1. When the peasants eat, the wheat goes to the cell the peasants were in at the beginning of the animation instead of going to the peasant's location. This was confusing because it sometimes looked like the wheat was going into the red cells, and so for a while I thought my opponent and I were sharing the same resource count and that for some reason our buildings were consuming wheat. 1. When the peasants die of hunger, the pink explosion attracts the eye but does not explain what just happened; since I was not looking at the peasant before it died, I have no idea that there was a peasant there, only that there was a pink explosion. Since these explosions seemed to occur equally over cells of all colors, at first I thought the map was being bombarded by mysterious pink bombs. 1. Since it takes a while between building a house and a peasant getting out of it, it is easy to miss. It took me a while to figure out what the houses do; at first I thought they'd raise the maximum number of units like in warcraft, especially since there is a prominent "2/2" which implies that there is a maximum of 2 units. I still haven't figured out what that "2/2" means nor how to get either number to change, and I also haven't figured out what upgrading the houses do.
Despite all this, some of the UX was great: animating the resources towards the things which spend them and from the things which generate them makes it very clear what is going on, and animating the resources as they grow rather than only spawning them fully-grown at a slower rate allows those resources to stick around long enough to make it possible to figure out that they spawn around the corresponding buildings.
Speaking of which: we are competing with the AI to take control of the spaces before they do, but at the same time we need to leave spaces empty so that resources spawn on them! It would make more sense it it was possible to claim an empty space without preventing resources from spawning on it, or if we could destroy the enemy buildings in order to make the spaces free again. If we were the only one constructing buildings then this would be an interesting tradeoff between using a space for resources or for buildings, but since the AI will build on those cells, we instead have a perverse incentive to destroy the environment before our opponent does. Which, now that I think of it, is a pretty hands-on way of demonstrating how the capitalism model can be ecologically harmful, so if that was intentional, bravo!
I've never played Friday the 13th but I did see some videos of it and so it was instantly recognizable. I enjoyed the fighting, but the memory gimmick seemed like an afterthought, as it didn't fit very well with the rest of the game. How about: you need to collect some items (by beating each of the cabin monsters) in order to access the boss area, but those items take some space in your inventory so you can't carry as many potions anymore, making the game harder as you progress. Currently the game instead gets easier because as time goes by, we get more and more opportunities to grab potions!
You make amazing multi-level puzzle games every day and now for Ludum Dare you make a game with a score and no levels?? I did not expect this! (and I like the puzzles better tbh)
I did it! It really wasn't easy. Or rather, I now realize, it didn't _feel_ easy, but in fact it was your clever game design which led me to feel that way! That is:
* The narrow field of vision made it feel like I was lost in this huge world, and had no idea where I was, but after being killed by the green sphere a few times, it was clear that the only way to avoid it was to [SPOILERS] fly above it, which led me directly to an exit I didn't even know existed. [/SPOILERS] * The fact I had to press the spacebar so quickly made it feel like I worked very hard, even if it wasn't _cognitively_ very hard, only physically draining. Having to press the spacebar quickly makes thematic sense too, since flies are twitchy and flap their wings very fast. [edit] oh I'm such an idiot turns out you can just press and hold [/edit]
I still have no idea what' the green sphere is supposed to be though. The only way to discover it is to fly close to the source while it is still small! Maybe the "you lose" screen should show a spray bottle or whatever it was instead of a generic sad face?
I couldn't play on Chrome nor Firefox. In Chrome 68.0.3440.84, the game just shakes whenever I try to shoot and then I get stuck in an infinite loop of shaking, and in Firefox 61.0.2, the tab crashes after a few seconds.
I went back and played a second time just to make sure it is possible to lose: yup, it is, so it really is a game after all :)
I like the fact that 75 and 42 have so completely different voice styles, but was a bit disappointed to see that all the other characters have the same voice style as 75. Just one more voice style would have been fine, the different antagonists can all have the same voice; but the same voice as our avatar? That just feels weird.
Phew, I finally managed to play your game, but it wasn't easy! I'm on a mac so your html link was my only hope, but that linked me to a downloaded instead of a web page, so after opening the zip the first time I thought it looked like the source code and I assumed you used the wrong URL. But today I tried again, and I saw that the zip contains an index.html file, so it really was the correct URL! Then I discovered that chrome refuses to play Unity games from a local index.html page U_U. But I found a way! I spun up a local server using `python -m SimpleHTTMLServer` and I could finally play. I probably wouldn't have jumped through all those hoops if I hadn't seen @philstrahl play your game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-osF36Qsiuo) on his channel, so... Positive: your game looks so fun that after seeing it being played on youtube I jumped through all those hoops just so I could play it too. Constructive criticism: maybe host the html version somewhere so that less motivated players can play it too? :)
Also, I lost the same way as Phil, by accidentally spending my last food. Maybe warn the player when they're about to do that, by making the arrow red or something?
About the bug: while it is true that some of the diamonds mysteriously couldn't be removed, hovering over the diamonds reveals which ones can't be removed, and eventually they do become removable! You could easily turn this into a feature in which diamonds are sometimes locked for a certain number of turns :)
Sometimes I was allowed to remove diamonds even when I wasn't immediately next to them. Maybe another bug?
Please clearly mark that the link as "POST-JAM VERSION", and provide a separate link to the jam version. Making improvements to your game after 72h is encouraged, but it is the 72h version which is being scored.
Wow, that was hard! Especially level 9, the holes are moving so quickly. I took me a while to realize that the pattern was fixed and that I might survive by memorizing the pattern, flipping the world around was a great way to hide the fact that the pattern is hard-coded!
A small nitpick: I kept dying from falling into space, not from the enemies, and so the death animation didn't make sense since there's no ground onto which to fall.
I was watching @philstrahl play your game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-osF36Qsiuo) and he was stuck early on, and it was frustrating because he wasn't trying the things I would have tried. Then I realized I was silly: I can play the game myself and try those things myself! I'm glad I did, because the puzzles were fun and it would have been a shame to have them spoiled by a video of someone else playing your game. I finished the whole thing without any further hints, it was hard but fair!
Please use the dedicated section for your links, this way you can specify the platform on which each link works and help reviewers who can only rate games which can play on the platforms they own. For example, your Google Drive link is to a .exe, which only works on Windows, so you should put that link next to your Source Code link by clicking the "Add +" button and selecting "Windows" from the drop-down. Thanks!
@andy-d, I translated it too but I still can't figure out how to get to the upper deck, any hints? [edit] never mind I figured it out [/edit]
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This was great! 5/5 on mood: I was worrying about my food resources, then I was so relieved when I accidentally got infinity scrap metal and I realized that by achieving that with my vital resources, I might be able to survive in the long term after all. Later, I laughed when I saw that some cards cost infinity as well :)
I wish there were more chapters: the same story, but divided into smaller chunks, so we get a chance to learn more about our supporters and our past transgressions.
The only negative thing was the interactions in the last chapter: I already had infinity of all the regular resources when I began the last chapter, so it was only a question of finding the right cards and then I immediately got infinity of the new resources as well. I think it would have been a nice opportunity to use ordinal numbers or cardinal numbers, so you'd have to spend 16 x infinity of one resource to get infinity to the power of infinity of some other resource or something.
Please let us know if the Linux build works for you, we've done our best but aren't 100% certain that it works.
I found the flower and journey endings. You're saying there are 7 in total?? That's a lot! I guess I need to keep looking...
Haha, you found a really good way to turn a bad situation (running out of time) into a good situation (even more fourth wall humour)!
Haha, I spent way too much time playing this one! The difficulty is really well balanced, I almost never reached full health and sometimes opted not to buy an upgrade because the enemies were too strong... and then I regretted it in the next level, when the enemies were even stronger and that upgrade would have been helpful :)
Speaking of upgrades, the effect of the upgrades is described accurately but not viscerally: improving the speed of the pistol by such a small amount seemed like it wouldn't make a difference, but on the contrary, it makes a huge difference and after I bought too much of it, I even had to switch to a different weapon because the recoil was huge. I don't know if the other similarly-small upgrades have a similarly-large impact, as a poor experience with the shotgun and llamas made me stick with the pistol.
Speaking of llamas, the rate at which new enemies are introduced is also good, the llamas and wizards were introduced as soon as I felt the orcs were getting a bit repetitive. That makes me think that there is probably more contents to be seen if can reach the higher levels, but I keep dying. As a result, my only complaint is that I wish there was a way to save or at least mute the music, because while I really want to finish this game, I don't think I can do it in one sitting :)
Oh, and to those who couldn't figure out how click on the upgrades: turns out the hitbox is quite small, you have to click on the title of the upgrade, not its description.
Unplayable on chrome, all the HUD graphics surrounding the game are there but the game itself is a grey rectangle. Works great in Firefox though!
It took me a while to figure out whether I was successfully dodging the bullets or not, a sound effect when I get hit would have made it much clearer. I like the sonic-rings approach, it allowed me to beat the Level 1 boss even though I'm terrible at this game by constantly re-grabbing my one remaining sphere. I didn't understand the link to the theme at all until I accidentally entered a lab; it wasn't obvious at all that I could enter those! The first time I saw its door open, a projectile coincidentally appeared through it at the same time, and so I thought these labs were invincible turrets or something. After that, it became a lot more clear how much I suck at this game because I always only have 2 or three spheres when I enter the lab and so the only thing I can afford is to switch my projectile to triangle. So the sonic-rings approach makes the game playable for me while still providing a clear challenge: get enough rings to buy stuff. I eventually managed to buy a few, but I never managed to increase my sphere capacity.
I'm looking forward to play the post-jam version!
It took me a while to figure out what it was the red gems which filled my time back up, not the coins. Since I'm a golem, not a feeble creature, I expected to be able to fight the monsters somehow, but apparently they can only hurt us? That's a shame, because the layout is such that hitting them feels unavoidable sometimes. I didn't feel like my skills mattered, I was just picking rooms randomly, usually away from the monsters, and being punished for picking wrong.
I think one easy way to make the gameplay more strategic would be to drastically lower the rate at which our life drops. Now instead of being a game about running around randomly and furiously grabbing everything we can while hoping for the best, it becomes a game about strategically spending life points to kill the monsters, and then remembering where we left the unopened gems we need to heal back up. And once we find the exit, we again have an interesting choice between risking to continue exploring vs banking our gains. With the current system, continuing to explore feels way too risky to be worth considering.
Since levels 1 and 2 were so similar to each other, I was not motivated to accumulate the gold required to open level 3. Maybe if level 1 only had monsters, and then just enough money to unlock level 2 at the end, if level 2 had gold scattered about, and then a final gem in the end which you could use to go back and explore, and level 3 had gems scattered about, allowing you to explore a much larger maze?
Oh, one more thing: I kept getting stuck on the sides of the doors, that was annoying since it made me lose time, and even more annoying when it caused me to get hit by a monster. Aiming for the middle of the door is probably not the challenge you had in mind when you designed the game, so I recommend using some invisible diagonal colliders on the corders of the door, to funnel the player towards the center of the door.
The variety in the graphics and names was quite impressive!
> It was really cool trying to balance being able to defeat the monster without losing later on :)
Wait, is that even possible? I mean, the prices aren't even given, I don't think we're meant to think strategically about this...
Now that's my kind of game! Cute cat, clever mechanic, a good mix of figuring out the solution to the puzzle and then executing that solution. Eventually I reached a space puzzle in which the door behaved as an obstacle instead of a trigger, does that mean I beat the game but you didn't have time to make a win screen?
Really high production values, very impressive! Too bad the mini-games were nothing to write home about. Which is not surprising, given that you've basically written 5 games in 72h!! I think it would have been much better to focus your efforts on a single mechanic, dialog trees for example. You already have a route which allows the player to take the grandma's soul instead of Tom's, so I think you could probably have made it so that most dialog choices allow you to take one soul, and you have to find the dialog choices which allow you to take two souls, e.g. both Tom and the grandma, or both Maddi and Luca, or both the mother and Olivia, etc. Even better, there could also be a secret pacifist run in which you befriend everyone by taking zero souls, and then they buy you an even cooler hat or something :)
On macOS 10.13.1, I get “mouseherd is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash."
It worked, thanks!
Amazing game, I do want more! Alas, looks like repurposing your existing steam page backfired, because the page doesn't seem to exist anymore.