Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → goffmog
It's entertaining and well made, good job. It would have been nice if there was a blast radius though because even though I knew there wasn't I kept instinctively sending the bombers to very crowded areas which was totally the wrong strategy... Far better to pick off the stragglers. Would have easily won counter-intuitive! :)
I have the same problem as Zillix, but unfortunately no old PC to try it on :( Could the problem be that you're using an old version of GM? My 3D card is bang up to date and does everything I could ever want it to do besides make coffee.
Alistair It's been tested on Vista and Windows 7... The installer should have installed .NET 3.5 if available but it may not have. Other than making sure you have the .NET 3.5 framework and SlimDX installed I really don't know what to suggest. :(
Alan, thanks for the feedback. Did you play the game long enough to get the fast enemies? And did you mainly go after the shiny things or just try to kill the enemies?
I understand your point about making it more of a puzzle game, the need for level design is something I deliberately avoided.
Hi madpew, that's odd. I haven't found any bugs in wall placement. Are you sure it wasn't simply that placing the wall would have blocked an enemy's path to the player? (see instructions).. Hmm, I guess the theme is accidental from the point of view of the enemies :)
Thanks madpew, helped me realise I needed to write the instructions as close to the top of my entry description as possible. I'll definitely be doing the next one :)
pekuja, glad you liked it. I think the way to play is just to try to keep the enemies away from yourself - go for the shiny things - and, as another reviewer put it, let the collisions happen by "accident"... Next time I'll either go with Web or make sure the game has fewer runtime dependencies.
The "source" download does include binaries which should run providing you have .NET 3.5 and the SlimDX runtime installed.
Definitely one I will go back to to try and beat! One thing Hey that's a fun game, it's hard to begin with but after you hack your first box it really starts to flow. I did have a couple of frustrated restarts before I could figure out how to play though since I didn't realise you had to double click the servers :) Clever interpretation of the theme.
Absolutely AWESOME!!!! At first I thought it was just way too hard and I was going to mark it down and not even bother to comment... But something about it kept me playing. 15 was the best I could manage, but something about this game is just great... Make it easier to keep away from the big guy and add some other factor into it to keep it slightly varied and this could be one that people play for hours! This is just one step away from greatness.
SURVIVE! YES!!!! Knew I'd come back to this one :)
Unlucky, it was an interesting idea and I'd liked to have seen what sort of game could be made using this theme particularly if the humans were moving about doing stuff and you had to try to blend in with them as much as possible and maybe you have to try try to posess another one while nobody else is looking. I hope Beth liked it! :)
I liked it a lot - it was great fun to play and very satisfying sending peasants to their inevitable doom. I would have liked a way to zoom out and maybe had a few more terrain features - after a while it's repetitive but short of adding in new locations and new enemy types I don't see what you could have done to prevent that. Good job.
It was a bit of a mission getting the thing to run, I pity anyone without experience of visual studio and who couldn't also recognise that it's an XNA 3.1 project and needed a specific runtime. You would do well to put some guidelines in your entry description.
Hi, I didn't participate this time but I've just played through the top few games and this one really stands out for me. I would have voted it top overall. I had to play it three times to see all the endings, and it's the sort of game that still makes you wonder if there's not something else you've missed. Awesome game.
Thanks everyone who tried this out so far! I haven't been replying and haven't made a post mortem post either only because I've had some more serious things to deal with IRL since almost the instant that I finished the compo.
A few things I will quickly reply to now:
The original intent was for game to be a bit like multiplayer Gauntlet, I simply ran out of time to have Gauntlet style projectile weapons.
Shooting was the very last thing I coded. There are 3 issues with the zombie shooting mechanic. Firstly the zombies bunch up to the extent that what looks like 1 zombie is often a stack of zombies. Secondly, the real position of the zombie on the server is not the position to use to determine if it's been shot (the client is trusted because it was quicker to code it that way) and thirdly the check to see if a zombie has been shot depends on what tile both the player and zombie are in. Which is a problem since this is determined by the sprite hotspots and not by bounding rectangles.
I spent about 40% of the time writing the networking code and about 40% writing the essential drawing, animation, pathfinding and collision code. less than 20% was spent on proper game coding and graphics... Loking forward to the next Ludum by which time I will have proper base code, as this is the tech I think I want to use.
Finally, I think the firefox issue is related to firebug. I developed the game in firefox and there is an awful lot of stuff output to the firebug console. I'm not sure what happens when firebug isn't installed/enabled but chrome clearly ignores it.
Thanks again guys.
Sorry about the server, it died due to lack of socket exception handling in the code that sends chat messages to all players, for whatever reason it tried to send a message to a player who wasn't connected anymore and crashed :(
Thanks KungPhoo! Swords and potions were planned in the original design, along with races and classes and the game actually supports multiple eye colors and facial expressions but I had no time to do the character creation screens, or the shops :( Glad you enjoyed part of it, sorry you were killed by "The Internet" :)
Thanks for the feedback Jonathan. HP is always out of 100 but as you gain exponentially more exp your attack and defend ratings go up. Attacks do a base damage of 1-10 multiplied by the attackers attack rating divided by the defender's defend rating. There aren't any health potions but entering any of the doors in the village will heal you. There are even some doors lower down in the dungeon. none of it was planned that way but lack of time towards the end meant I had to quickly come up with something other than the AD&D (2nd edition) ripoff system I had planned.
Thanks everyone for the continuing great comments! I'm up against at the moment in terms of free time to spend rating other people's games, and polishing up a post-compo version. I haven't even got round to a post mortem :( I had a bit more time to spend on game mechanics this time around as I used some of the networking and rendering base code from my last entry, which was a multiplayer game where you collected jewels from a maze full of zombies. I posted that before the conpo started, to be within the rules. Last time it was a 36 hour struggle just to get the basic node.js/canvas framework together.
That was truly great! The only thing I'd have done to improve it (besides making it bigger!) would be to let you change direction in mid air... There were a couple of places where the perspective made it difficult to tell what you were horizontally aligned with - I got stuck on the jump from the ramp because I couldn't tell where exactly that floating platform was, maybe projected shadows would help? Anyway, I had a lot of fun playing this and it was one of those ones I *had* to beat - spinning blades will never get old, and the main character has real personality :)
Really good game, great graphical style but do get a native English speaker to proofread for you in future! This is the kind of game where you want people to be absorbed by the writing, with sloppy English you detract from all the positives of the mood, plot and style (which are top notch). As good as it was though, I couldn't really get the evolution connection.
Well I hear a crazy rapid repeating beeping noise and in about a second I'm told it's game over, without seeing anything obviously happen. I'm pretty sure it's within the rules for you to fix the bug and re-upload but it's pushing it a little to ask players to fix your bug for you :) Please at least upload a bugfixed version and I'll play and rate it.
I don't think it's working properly for me, I see a cell in the top left, and another cell appearing and moving towards it, everything else is black and the controls don't seem to do anything.
Still seem to have a big problem with the inventory, I tried to use the egg and the breakfast together but broke it so that I can no longer pick up the egg. incredible that all these assets were created in 3 days, there's a good reason why the graphics in my game are all either procedurally generated or made out of primitives ;)
Would have been nice if the jumping was analog so you don't always have to jump your full height. The graphics were charming :) I could never manage to kill any of the flying guys.
I can't download it - the windows link goes to a page with 2 download buttons, 1 of which tries to make me download something called iLivid, and the other spawns a popup advert window. Why didn't you just upload the file to a URL? Can anyone help? I'd really like to play this.
I put down all the horses, and felt bad. Then it crashed and I felt even worse. So I played it again and it's brilliant :)
Quite fun but the physics are awkward and it's possible to get stuck and have to restart. Overall a nice idea though :)
Impressed by the sheer amount of content here, but I wasn't sure whether my companion was supposed to be able to do anything other than follow me around - so I really didn't see the point in him. Combat was tough without exploiting the fact that enemy projectiles can't pass through terrain, while your arrows and sword both can. Then it was too easy. Realy enjoyed the journey through the game.
Really liked the art style and sound - please make it into a longer game! the jumping mechanics after you're evolved are excellent, I was afraid I was going to find that bit too hard when I realized how to get past it but the little guy responded exactly as I thought he should have, well done for paying attention to gameplay
Got stuck on the level where the goal is on a collapsing platform and I can stay near it for long enough. I could only get anywhere in this game by exploiting the jump mechanism to basically fly, and move along ceilings. I think this game is a case where raw physics does not make great gameplay - and it needs a helping hand or two. The interactions may by realistic in terms of the physical model but they're not really as fun as they would be if the platforming mechanics were more traditional.
I liked it :) But it took me ages to complete the breakout style level - with the motivation of finding out how the gameplay would evolve after that, only to find it was just another breakout level with either one less paddle or more score :) Breakout is fun though :)
I like it! especially the name ;) This is a really charming game.
Charming! Like it very much :) I have absolutely nothing negative to say and I'm very impressed that it's your first attempt at making a game. Conrols get stuck occasionally and I haven't ever used flashpunk so I'm not sure whether that's a coding bug or a bug in flashpunk itself or just caused by the performance of the laptop I'm using! Do not listen to anyone with anything negative to say about the art. Your art has a clear sense of style, it is consistent and, as I've already said, charming.
I liked descent back in the day but this type of game always has me yearning for the cockpit of my trusty Tie Fighter! good graphics and sound but the overall effect was slightly nauseating for me. I guess I'm just old :)
Instantly love the style and humor! found it just too hard though and ended up randomly killing everyone and anyone just to watch them flee :) Part of the problem for me was the colour of the background, I found it difficult to see black lines on the dark background - wasn't friendly to my 2560x1600 resolution either.
I'm giving you one extra star in every category because your source directory is called "sauce"! Matching multiple blocks at once was really challenging and rewarding - this is one I'll come back to.
Found this really hard! If someone can tell me what to do when I get to the bit with what looks like a door and some red blobs on the ground, I might play some more :) One thing I would fix is the jumping mechanic. It's counter intuitive that you have to press up first, then left/right - I kept trying and failing to do running jumps before I realized this.
Couldn't get a supernova or a planet but this has real replayability value and is a joy to play through, lovely mood - and space is always awesome, but doubly so when it's educational too. It seems to crash when I switch to another window, but other than that it seems stable for me
I wish this game was more fun to play, the sound is great but it's let down by the gameplay itself :( Maybe I just suck at it.
Really like it! It tickles a special part of my game appreciation organ.
Fun but gets easy too quickly - I like the way the units spawn and attack and think this would make a good first level in a game on a larger scale with more levels and unit types - something like Revenge of the Titans.
This is a really good idea!!! And nicely presented too.
Like most have said, really tough learning curve and a game that throws a lot of stuff at you without you really having an obvious starting point. The constantly changing numbers gave me an overwhelming feeling that lots was going on that I needed to do something about, but didn't know what things were good, what things were bad, and how my actions would affect them. Really interesting idea though, would be cool to see a game like this at a slower pace, and with more of a graphical representation.
As others have said, it's really hard to get a sense of whether what you're doing is having any effect, or how the scoring system works. My only other feedback would be that if you're going to have such a text heavy intro sequence you should get your copy proofread by a native English speaker. Awkward grammar is the best thing for killing atmosphere.
Really cool, reminds me of my entry in some ways ;) I'm planning a game based on my ld24 engine that will have more of an element of indirect control - this game gives me some good ideas and tempts me to factor evolution (or at least, a learning process) into it too.
Monkeys, guns, good stuff! Geat name too.
Unfinished, which is a shame, I could see where you were going. What you did manage to get done has a very nice feel/mood to it, except for the camera controls. If you do a post-compo version, please change the camera, it's not at all fun to use and it detracts from the gameplay. Graphics are great.
Cool to see a Linux only game - made me boot into Linux for the first time in a while, but if I suddenly become horribly addicted to Angband again it'll be your fault!! Found it too hard near the end but might replay. Anyone running Windows only could just grab the latest Ubuntu windows installer, it installs and uninstalls like a regular program, gives you Linux in a proper dual-boot setup and doesn't require you to partition your hard drive. Do it!!
Nice, did you write the mud engine completely yourself or use an existing codebase? (I'm too lazy to look at your code!) I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't much room for exploration, and that I couldn't really interact with the environment. There were a couple of other players there with me, I consumed one but nobody else seemed actively connected.
My last 2 LD entries were multiplayer games too, one of which heavily relied on having other players online. I think there should be a way to search for multiplayer games as I don't see how else we're meant to get enough players to make it worthwhile doing one.
Known bugs:
Creatures rarely ever face the right direction
Creatures sometimes go beneath terrain
Terrain chunks have visible seams
If I'd had more time:
Explosion effects when you shoot down invaders
High score table
Music and sound (sigh)
Should have done differently:
Should have used Unity's terrain system instead of my own, since I did nothing special with the terrain in the end.
Should have used Unity's physics
should have been 2D? :)
Thanks for the comments guys. There's another pretty major bug where half of the time the "endgame" invasion doesn't seem to work - either the bad guys don't manage to reach the creatures or the death ray doesn't work. Sometimes it works perfectly though, I think it's related to the steepness of the terrain the creatures are on - when the terrain is flatter the game works better overall. If the monolith spawns on the side of a steep hill it's better to just restart the game (F5)
Jeremias, your ship uses a fantastic futuristic magnetic levitation propulsion system, it flies under water because it can :) I tried it out both ways and thought that it was more fun like that.
The heart means they have mated (and can't mate again) and the arrow means they've been beamed up (and thus mutated) in the info at the bottom right when you pick them up, it tells you this too.
The big black rectangle is also intentional, it's an artifact you brought with you that attracts the creatures. Actually, it's the source of all your evolutionary powers too!
Yes the help texts are too wordy - context sensitive cues would have been better but the way it works was just quicker and easier to get into the game in time. Also should have made them queue up and not disappear until the player presses something. All good feedback, thanks!
David, the basic instructions are at the top of this page, also if you get lost on the map there should be little floating icons around your ship showing you the direction of the monolith/creatures/etc. The idea is simply to pick them up and put the blue ones down near the pink ones to encourage them to breed. When you pick them up they evolve, but only once per creature. Their offspring can then reach a higher evolution level than they did (if you're lucky), be evolved and breed with another of the same or higher evolution level to create even more evolved offspring and so on until they're as evolved as possible in the 3 minute or so time limit.
Hehe, the original idea was that once they grow the arms at the last evolution stage, they would have claws and be able to fight back against the invaders, who originally looked like the creatures but were black and red. I decided there wouldn't be time to do the fighting mechanics so changed the ending... unfortunately what I changed it to turned out to be more complicated and rushing it caused the bug that stops it working half the time :(
Thanks for playing again David - your game was really good, I need to have another crack at it to see if it's possible to beat the last stage :)
Jedi, sounds like you had some hilly terrain :) The problem is that, just to get it ticked off of my to-do list, the algorithm finds the nearest creature to the player does so by distance in 3D, when it really should be doing it by distance in the xz plane. So when you're floating over a creature at the bottom of a steep hill, and there's another one half way up the hill, the one you beam up will be the one on the hill because technically, he's closer to your position in mid-air.... doh!
BrothersT, lol, there's the connection to kittens for you. My original design had primordial ooze instead of water and you had to beam up ooze and drop it on the creatures to evolve them - but I culled that to save some time.
juaxix I'm struggling to get what you mean by the circle around the UFO. The ship does follow the terrain height in a similar way to which you describe, except instead of raycasting it gets the optimum height directly from the height data the map is generated from - the UFO floats gradually down/up to the desired height - and that was the effect I was going for. Following the terrain at a constant height seemed less fun to me - although that's exactly how the bad guys move.... Re. the screenshot... Well, you're prety much screwed at that point :) Did you read any of the helptext? That was meant to act as a guide.
Hamster - given more time I'd probably have more of a context sensitive help system that would point out what each thing is the first time you encounter it.... This is one of those games that seemed like a very simple idea at first and only later did I realise the number of points at which it isn't totally obvious what you should be doing - especially if you don't read the helptext.
Josh, sorry it doesn't work for you :( Are you using WINE on a Mac? I think the web version should work natively in Chrome or Firefox on Mac with the Unity plugin. I keep meaning to do a windows build but right now I'm travelling and don't really have the resources but I'll see if I can get one uploaded on Wednesday.
Yanmania, godaddy are an enormously massive domain registration thingy, my domain is registered with them. I guess you were served a domain parking page. I haven't been having any issues though, have you tried again?
Thanks Ollie, your game was really good! One of these days I'll make something that's a simpler concept that I can polish a bit more. did you check out the bugfixed version? endgame should be ok in that (it hasn't crashed for me yet)
Because I found it more fun moving about like that, zooming up the side of hills and floating down into valleys and trenches instead of just floating boringly.
It's interesting that people think the way the saucer moves is a bug :) I spent quite a while making sure it didn't just follow the terrain at the same height, and did something more interesting. The saucer has a preferred height that it adjusts itself to, but it doesn't do so instantly because I wanted to create a specific effect reminiscent of playing old helicopter flight sims with auto ground avoidance.
RawBits, the deathray is still buggy even in the bugfixed version, it has to do with how I'm rotating the camera, the angle I think the player is facing starts off correct but drifts as the player does a lot of rotation. Beaming up creatures should be fine now though, I assume you're using the original buggy version in which case the reason you don't beam up the right creature is that it's taking vertical distance into account when finding the nearest creature.
Awesome sound - why are the balls so small?? :) I found it hard to time my kicks, which in the interest of giving the benefit of the doubt, I'll have to put down to my being rubbish at it rather than dodgy collision detection. Incidentally, I never liked being stuck in goal at school, and refused to use my hands :)
Technical issue kind of spoil the game for me. I collected all the carrots but the text still said 1/5 - I collected something else, about which the game had nothing to say, then got stuck on a wall tile :( Played it another time, now slow pointy things seem to fly out of me at random and I occasionally teleport back to the middle... I have no idea what's going on!
Wow, this needs to be played by more people. Everything about it is great. I especially like the lighting/death sequence and the music is epic!
Excellent atmosphere, really well crafted and eerie environments with lots of interest. I liked all the little devices to keep the player curious and that it was possible to work out what to do by just walking around and observing things.
Really liked it once I realised I can only press z and x while I'm dead :) Did you try it with the ability to spend xp to evolve at any time? I also liked the fact that when you evolved your enemies did too
This one is a real gem! Great fun but I thought it actually got harder once I grew legs. Finding games with key+mouse control systems a bit awkward on my laptop so need to replay this once I get back to my desktop PC. One of my top 10 of this LD so far.
Vilborg, nice solid tower defence game... Rate a few more games and you'll get a load more ratings yourself! Josh, I think it's time you just got yourself a PC ;)
Really nice, especially the mood. I had serious performance issues in Chrome on my laptop but couldn't even get the game to load in Firefox. I might try again when I'm back on my desktop PC.
Tough game, reminds me a little of pipemaia, etc. If you make it into a full game, consider making the first level a bit easier than this :) Also maybe the ability to reject the current block for a score/time penalty would be good.
Ouch that last level is tough :) I found the first level difficult to work out but got there by trial and error, the tower level also stumped me, I jept looking for extra keyboard controls before I realised clicking on stuff also did something. Find it really bizarre that you couldn't get my game when it's so much simpler than yours ;) But good job!
Good ideas, the game could be more fun but there's more depth to it than you usually get from an LD entry. Always nice to see people doing procedural worlds, I spent half of LD getting my own terrain generator to work but didn't really take advantage of the fact that I had it, by making a game that only took place in a small space within the world.
A lot of fun! Good job :) People seriously need to stop leaving comments on games that are only available for Windows, just to say that they don't work on another OS under emulation - especially when that game is written on a framework/engine that everyone knows doesn't work well under emulation.
Took me a few attempts at level 1 before I got used to the pace of the game - The graphics are excellent, the dialog got a bit tiresome though and I have to admit I skipped almost all of it. If the text was more integrated into the gameplay, instead of cut-scenes I probably would have engaged more with the story.
Lol, good stuff :) As one of those people who doesn't see how you must exclusively have either God, or evolution, this appeals to me on many levels :)
The more I figure out about how to play/win this, the worse I become at surviving :)
Wow, what a hard game - found it kind of random whether I managed to kill a kitten or not when I shot it, and more accurate at long distances for some reason. Understandable decision to go with billboards for the monsters, that's something I'll have to consider for my next LD instead of making them out of primitives as making one 3D model takes me closer to 48 days than 48 hours ;) Oh to be an artist.
I think actually you're supposed to create assets from scratch in the 48 hours. You can reuse some code that everyone has access to (unity's built in scripts and shaders) but with textures/models/sounds/etc you should at least modify them in some way. I originally meant for the creatures in my game to be furry, but dropped that idea because I just couldn't make my own textures that would work properly with the fur shader I found in the asset store.
lol - that was fun :) Actually found the runing jumping bit much harder than the final battle... Don't like running jumping bits :( Not going to score you lower because of it though.
A great deal of fun. Satisfying to play and destroy things :)
I liked the idea but found it a bit difficult when touching anything seemed to hurt me and it was difficult to time my attacks. Great graphics though and I like the captions that appear above the creatures. Speech/thought bubbles was something I wanted to have in my own entry if there had been more time.
Very hard, especially due to the random behaviour of the creatures that evolve. Good game though, I part of the greatness of Super Meat Boy was that although it was brutally hard and the levels were complicated, they were deterministic so that if you didn't improve by increments you only had yourself to blame, you were never unfairly wiped out by a random game mechanic. Please add a comment that you can wall-jump though, I didn't realise this until I read someone else's comment! I thought I was completely missing somethig I had to make the evolved creatures do.
Make an easier version please, I suck at it ;)
Lovely little game, well done, nice to see a level of polish too - I have to start making simpler games in future.
Was fun once I figured it out but the creatures seem to die randomly :( It would be great if there was a system that warned you when one was in gander of starving/etc. Took me a while to figure out that the mouse was involved at all, I kept wondering what they're supposed to eat and when they didn't herd together when I told them to.
arrgh, very addictive but when I finally got the thing at the end I picked it up and it floated off into space and I couldn't put it in the circle :( I had issues with placing things properly, as others have mentioned but overall, a really bizarrely compelling game. Well done :)
I haven't really worked out what it is but it would have made an awesome screensaver in the 90s :)
Awesome title... Actually, awesome game too :)
Wow
Definitely one of the best entries, very pretty, good music and classic gameplay!
Well I see the space alright but I couldn't find any blah, I've been going for about an hour now...
Maybe a few more minutes, maybe there's something out there. Maybe it's amazing?
What if it's aliens!? :o
I don't know if I'm qualified to be the one who makes first contact.. What was it they put in Voyager?
I can play the first few bars of Johnny B Goode but in space, can anybody hear you strum??
I feel that these are the most obvious of the many questions raised by this game.
Looking forward to this, it looks a very similar idea to mine, if the screenshot is anything to go by!
So lovely, this is the reference point for 5/5 for mood!
Wow, this is seriously addictive! The controls and the turning speed are just right to make it challenging but fun. The music is ace too. Will play this again.
I just love the way this looks, and the general idea too, nothing much to add to the previous comments except that I hope you keep making games!
Cool idea, unique puzzle mechanics always score highly with me because they're the thing I most want to be able to do in game design, but can't.
I found the platforming controls a bit tough, like others did, more counter-intuitive than actually bad once you get used to them.
I didn't think your use of the theme was bad at all, I like it. I'm generally preferring entries like this that do the inter-dimensional type of thing over games like the one I made that just have a load of planets in them with some tenuous connection between them :)
Best point & click Trek game since the 25th Anniversary!
I have one Star Trek reference in my entry, can you find it? ;)
I think this is exactly what Kardashev had in mind when he proposed the type III civilization.
Thanks hexagore! Most of Saturday was spent on just getting the planets right, Sunday was about half on the UI and half on the ships. I think I spent more hours overall on this one than I ever have before in LD, worked right up until the deadline.
I guess I should write up a post-mortem!
TrainDude, lots and lots of Frontier and a huge amount of Transport Tycoon too :)
@TD5 Thanks for that, post compo version will now have a zoom slider! (but you should still get a better mouse)
@Bubble - Either you've clicked on a planet on the list at the bottom, that's supposed to pan the camera over to the planet. Or it's actually the planet moving and not your camera :P
@Flyinpig5 Yeah, clearing the notifications is basically the main gameplay element at the moment :)
@holgk I'm open to suggestions about the camera, there are a million ways I could change it - what do you think would improve it?
@rejooh I was slightly embarrassed to learn it actually should be "belay" that order - which makes sense when you're the only person in the galaxy who knows what the word belay means!.. I must be drinking the wrong kind of tea.
If anybody tries out the Mac or Linux versions and they compare well with the web/windows version please let me know so I can remove the (untested) from those platforms.
@rfgpfeiffer You're right, I saw that too the other day :) Population sizes for inner worlds are always in millions even if they're 0, just need to add a special case for that. Will be in the post compo version as I do want to occasionally have an inner world with nobody living there
@eemmbbeerr - interesting, I get a lot of variety when hitting re-generate... things like numbers of worlds and moons etc are all based on our own solar system so there's only a slim chance that you'll end up with more than 4 inner worlds. Maybe the random function is always returning the same thing in Linux? Outer worlds (gas giants) will usually have moons and may have as many as 8.
Super fun! Makes me wish I'd spent half as much time making gameplay for my entry as I did making everything else!
Loved the atmosphere but would have liked some more guidance on reaching my objectives, not quest helpers per se but perhaps some subtle visual or audio clues when I'm "getting warm". Impressed by the amount of hand crafted content, there's a reason I almost always do something procedural for Ludum Dare :)
Ah, the 80s was the decade for space trains. They don't make space trains like they used to anymore.
Fantastic graphics and engaging gameplay, what else can I say?
The one thing I'll criticize (but not much because I do this a bit too!) is having to get through a bunch of UI screens before getting into the action. I think the game would benefit from a short training (hehe) section immediately as you enter the game before it hits you with all that stuff. Not only because people are impatient but because the choices you're making about what equipment to buy are relatively meaningless when you haven't yet experienced any gameplay.
There was no option to give it spacetrains/5, so I settled for 5.
This is what happens when you have indigestion after breakfast.
I think it shows how hard it is to come up with original or unusual mechanics that have some strategic depth to them, but it's definitely fun and challenging. Solid game, high marks from me!
Lovely polished looks and sound, much of a Galcon vibe about it with a similar theme to my own but a very different approach. Only wish I could speed it up. Will come back to this later, please add a time compression feature :)
Great presentation and gameplay but I thought the controls slightly let down the amount of fun available. Overall a top entry though! Happy you posted a port-mortem or I wouldn't have found it.
Really like this kind of thing and thought of something similar for my entry but avoided it because I find level design too daunting :) Fun gameplay!
This is a really nice idea. Caught me out a few times until I got the hang of really surveying the spectral world as soon as I found a safe spot and then planning my route. Splendid use of the theme!
There was one bug I had where sometimes pressing 1 in the spectral world on any level would transport me back to level 1 in the normal world. Not sure if this is just me misunderstanding something though.
Also sometimes I seemed to lose momentum when switching worlds in mid jump, this might be me not being very good at jumping games.
Overall there's a really good game here that deserves some extra polish, more levels, and another iteration of the controls.
Awesome! I hope you have time to check out my entry too, we had a similar idea only you got MUCH more gameplay into yours, beter graphics and a better mood! I really can't rate this highly enough.
Needs a save function and time compression :)
It's overall a good game, but I found it hard to enjoy because it was too hard for the wrong sort of reasons. A good job for 72 hours though!
Very nice! Compelling and with a wonderful mood, gets very hectic.
Woohoo! The first procedural star system I've seen so far except for my own - I like the ideas and the console thing as part of a spaceship control system could be made into an interesting game. Keep doing things with stars and planets :)
Disgraceful misappropriation of the theme, and quite fun! Lots of potential for different game modes, you should get on the phone to the producers of Countdown.
Shooting and space, can't go wrong with that!
Very cool! Must come back to this when I have time to complete it but thoroughly enjoyable, creative and well presented. Gives me game design envy!
Awesome! Kind of the thing I was going for with my game except 48 hours wasn't really long enough to give the player many gameplay options and/or flesh out the types of goods available, etc.
This is so awesome! You got so many of the mechanics into this game that I wanted to have but couldn't get into mine in the timeframe. So much gameplay here I have to come back to this later. Hope you continue working on it and would love to know your thoughts on my (similar in some ways) entry.
Nicely done! I found it a bit confusing at times though, the graphics are cool and the physics really work.
Kudos for writing it from scratch, that's what I did for my first LD, except that I used SlimDX rather than OpenTK. The reason I use Unity now is so that I can easily port to web, but there's a lot to be said for having complete control over the graphics pipeline and game object framework.
I like this game more than is probably reasonable! Excellently made, polished, complete and incredibly charming. Just how I like my Ludum Dare games. (although my own ones never are)
My only gripe is that I'd love to be able to control the ship with keys or joystick as an option, or maybe be able to hold down the mouse button to keep going feels like I'm clicking more than I should have to.
Would love to see this worked on more, very interesting game, really good idea and use of theme. I like how the goods are broken down into Need have and hate. I might have to steal this idea if I do more work on my own entry :) Great to see so many nice scifi sim/strategy games being made for this LD. Like the use of algorithmic music too!
I saved my planet!
Killer presentation, I found it hard but entertaining and pretty much bugless!
Puzzle games like this never fail to impress me, such apparent simplicity but I never in a million years would have thought this up for this theme!
Tough game! The graphics really work well with the animation and the theme to set the silly tone of the game. it's difficult to tell which way you're facing when you're not moving but then I guess that's deliberate to encourage you to keep moving.
Didn't manage to find Earth but might try again later!
Sweet! I wish I'd come up with a puzzler approach to the theme instead of trying to rewrite every space and management sim I've ever played :) Really cool gameplay, polish it and sell it!
This is unrelated to the theme, there's no source, and it has ads. Please consider removing the ads otherwise it could look as though you're gaming the coolness rating to make money.
Very interesting idea, lovely mood, lots of style. Might be improved dramatically if there was some sort of goal such as a wormhole you were heading for and an indication of how far away it was, then you could have levels :) (if there was, I didn't notice it, sorry) I have to second the call for a wider field of view too.
I won! I have no idea why :) A first solo game with controls and graphics and animations and a win state is not bad at all and builds confidence!
It's pretty standard in Ludum Dare to overdesign your game and have to cut it down at the last minute, often into a completely different game.
This is ridiculously fun and the physics that cause the moon to stay in a fixed rotation around its axis must be mind-blowing.
Well crafted take on a classic, style and charm in spades and a cracking tune to boot. noeatinginmycab/5 !
Wow, this is a legit great concept. First one in this LD I'm giving 5/5 for overall & fun. Seriously good little puzzler, I want this on my iPad :)
Really enjoyed this one, nice original idea and super presentation - sounds fit the aesthetic, good job! Level design is good, certainly up until level 6 it was fun to replay to get it right. It's nicely done so you can see straight away what you should have done, and the rest is a test of memory.
Superb work, especially the graphics, on another level in terms of production values from most compo entries. The aging mechanic is a nice twist on the traditional time-limit. Crucially, it's also fun! :) It has enough charm that you want to try again even when you fail miserably. I will look out for this on iOS!
Very ambitious making MP with matchmaking for LD, lovely graphics, atmosphere, and the keyboard jam is groovy too.
I had one game but then got disconnected and couldn't reconnect until I reloaded. Sadly, no more matches were found :( It was a bit difficult to figure out exactly what was going on and what effect my controls were having.
Very cool idea, very difficult game but just the right side of frustrating to be fun. I found the text difficult to read at times when it ran over the planet but that's probably my fault for having a small laptop with a huge resolution. Nice and atmospheric (if you'll excuse the pun)
Really lovely game, oozes charm, difficult as heck too :)
Hi Cyranh, thanks for spotting the problem with the windows zip - I thought it was a bit small :)
As for the rest of the issues, it sounds like you're playing in a tiny window, unfortunately the game isn't designed to work on anything smaller than 1024x786. The second button changes the difficulty setting. The snowball does indeed get too big for the last couple of gates, I'm not sure I can consider that a bug though, when you play on the higher difficulty levels you can use the ramps to jump the gates and still collect points for them.
About the controls, the idea was for it to be a bit like skiing, there's more friction when you're facing horizontally accross the slope and you can use this to regulate your speed a bit by moving from side to side.
2pae thanks for playing, can you elaborate on the control bugs you found?
jamaster96 thanks for playing - I agree about the momentum, it was one of those things that was never going to be perfect considering the lack of testing I did. In hindsight I think most people's problems with the speed would be solved by making the gate poles fall over rather than stop you dead.
knason, thanks for playing! The level design is a bit wonky in parts and there are a couple of places where sometimes you jump as you hit the joint between slope sections. Did you try it on any of the harder difficulty settings? (they add ramps, etc)
Humanics, crikey, what are you running it on to get 1000 fps? Also the physics are framerate independent so I think your problem is that you're playing in an alternate reality.
Thanks for playing alyphen, and for the comments. Agree with you completely, unfortunately I had a lot less time for this LD than I usually do or I would have got some music in, made the scoretable at least persistent (if not global) and added a bit of polish.
This game reminds me why I', not a stockbroker. Nice to see a html/js game that doesn't use canvas!
Really really solid entry, so much fun, runs beautifully.
Really can't find anything negative to say except that having to throw lots of snow at houses before I can squish them gets a bit repetitive and stops me from just rolling around squishing things which is where the real fun in this game lies. I would love to see hills added too.
Nice to see another snowball based game :)
I am finding myself partial to a bit of master baiting.
Ouch that was brutal :) Very atmospheric and has the potential to be a relaxing game if it was just a little bit easier. I get stuck on the level with 4 orbs and a pulsating green circle that doesn't seem to kill me. It seems impossible... Maybe there's something I'm not getting?
I like the idea but I had some problems with the game freezing when I assign a new breeding pair while two are still on their way back from the, err, breeding tubes.
The visuals are truly wonderful but I just couldn't get the hang of the controls... I know that's kind of the point but it left me wondering whether the game was working as intended, try as I might I couldn't seem to get much course correction besides moving up and down.
Nice use of the theme and nice to see an "Arkham" game actually related to Arkham and not Batman :) The AI was pretty easy to deal with, would be interesting/harder if maybe your cultists were split up into multiple small teams - an option to play as the investigators would also add replayability. Overall, very fun to play :)
I spent all my money on expansions :(
I liked it, music feels a bit like it was just added for the sake of it but I completely understand that, I almost did the same for my entry.
It would be cool if houses generated tax income, also it would be good if the game detected if you'd got yourself into a situation with no income and not enough money to buy anything new and gave you a bit of extra cash - especially the first time it happens.
Kudos for doing a sim/management game as an LD compo entry, I did one last time and know all about how time consuming the UI requirements alone are!
Cool, really enjoying this although it's hard and it took me a little while to get the hang of how the actual shooting follows on from the choosing who to shoot. The one suggestion I have is that you might remove the timer for the first couple of rooms, or at least slow it down a lot more, giving people a chance to get the hang of things. (You know nobody reads instructions, right?)
Lovely little game, the combination of the music and the colours is great, has a nice relaxing quality especially on easy. Full marks for mood!
Wow, this is for people who found flappy bird too easy! Took me a while to get the hang of the gravity and stop sticking myself to the ceiling, it's a nice twist on the flappy gameplay though... Really hungry now.
Ban this sick filth!
The questionnaire alone is the best game I've played today. Forget the shooty bit, if you work on this some more just add more questions.
So much more fun than I expected, well done :) Love the sound effects, great idea too.
Yay I won! Good solid game and there's some strategy to winning too. I don't think I found any secrets though :( Great use of both themes!... Now I wonder where I can get some cookies from right now.
Nice, very cool graphics and fun gameplay that doesn't take long to get the hang of. Really important to read the instructions though - first time I played I didn't realise holding the LMB makes you jump higher, some way of indicating this ingame would be great.
Great game, very impressive for three days work, especially the graphics and atmosphere. If there's one piece of advice I have, it's one that you probably know already but just didn't have time to do anything about. That is, people judging Ludum Dare entries do not read instructions, *ever*. Even if sometimes they do, this is a good rule of thumb to work by.
Had a lot of fun with this one, when I was able to keep the cursor within the window ;) Great graphics, and kudos for having a guitar soundtrack!
Found it much too fast and difficult to be a lot of fun, nice sound and atmosphere though. Perhaps consider having it start slower and then build up speed?
Finally, in the dialogue your tenses are allover the place. Please consider getting a native English speaker to proofread your writing next time. This is a pet peeve of mine, as poor dialogue can undo a lot of otherwise good work on the mood and narrative.
Lovely game, deceptively cute but hard as nails. A little bit of early warning before enemies appear would go a long way.
Nice game! I wish there were more levels and more moves (maybe different combinations of buttons/timing?) Animation is great and gameplay is fun. I think I got lucky on my first try because I haven't won since :)
Really liked the sound and the gameplay idea is solid. However the controls seemed to let me down at odd times, once I figured out you actually have to move the mouse to move (otherwise you can only move left) I found that once I'd used the polarity switch once, the controls seemed to drag to the left. The only other gripe I have is that it got frustrating having only one life and having to return to the title screen and replay the story to get back into the game.
Great art and really imaginative use of the theme. Also accomplishes the rare feat of making a short music loop not get annoying after two repeats. Still trying to get to that Christmas tree :)
Great graphics, tough game but I persevered, being an Osmos veteran. The controls take a bit of getting used to, and that definitely seems to be a negative in most people's eyes. I guess it's part of the nature of Ludum Dare that people get through so many games so quickly that they don't have time to get used to anything that isn't immediately familiar
I liked it, though my keyboard didn't ;) inventive use of both themes to make a multiplayer button-masher!
Lovely graphical style and innovative use of the controls. Who would have thought a party of four could be controlled by two buttons? This is one of my favorites so far.
eww
Very innovative mechanics but in practice I found it way too difficult to deal with guards and a bit too slow getting anywhere :( Still, more fun than Prison Architect! Also, when you're going with dialogue to build atmosphere it never hurts to get a native speaker to proofread your English.
Wait... Is this Frog Fractions 2?
Next time I totally fail to make a reasonably accurate map of the world for a game, I'll have to remember that line ;)
Well done though, this is a really nice game if a little bit frustrating that you have to go back to the beginning when you die. One thing to work on for your next game is the mechanic of moving smoothly along walls without sticking to them. The sounds were great :)
If Chaucer wrote erotic paperbacks.
Lovely graphics and visual mood setting but it's very short and the difficulty is kind of random. Seems a shame that the game is so short after all the effort that must have gone into making the graphics, nonetheless the gameplay and controls are solid. The one suggestion I would make is to make it easier to see the helper arrow when you're in your biggest form.
'Twas terribly tantalizing, truly titillating... Tremendous try!
Terrific little platformer. I enjoyed this so much I was sad when it was over so soon :( The music is lovely, and animations and mechanics feel great. Graphics are my kind of pixel art, representative without being stylized, low res, cute, and well animated. Good use of the theme, love the way you phased in the animal abilities over a few levels, great design. I'll be looking out for your next game!
@CodeCast Nothing shifts into anything, because themes that lead to constrained mechanics are rubbish. As I said, there are shapes and you shift them from place to place. As I also said, the original mechanic had you actually turning the cows into things but the eventual game is how it is because after a certain point I had to get some gameplay in that I was going to get done in time. Comments/criticism about the things I *have* done would be really appreciated. Thanks for playing.
@Per guilty as charged - the missiles were a 47th hour addition after the land corruption mechanic failed to work out. They're very much the minimum viable product :)
@KodingNights I don't understand, do cows not look like that where you're from? Terrain was a big part of the original game-plan and ended up being something of a backdrop. The world is different every time you start and creating the meshes is what's really going on during the progress bar bit.
Would indeed have addressed the controls in the suggested ways, it's no exaggeration though to say that all the gameplay elements including controls went in, in the cheapest ways possible, in the last few hours. Thanks for the feedback
@ceosol Sounds like the controls really were a lot more sensitive for most people than they are for me. I wonder why that is. The red balls are fired from the tripods up to a certain range, but they're fired through a curve so sometimes you won't see them until they land on you... It's lame, but for a mechanic that was thought of and executed in less than an hour I'm perversely proud of it. You're right about scope being an issue but actually it was the scope of the original design that ate up all my time. Thanks for playing!
@cornand34 Yeah a agree, it's hard achieving mood with only graphics and gameplay. I spent about an hour playing my guitar on Saturday, got some nice weird ambient scary stuff down, and made a ton of sound effects with sxfr but in the end just didn't have time to do any sound code :(
@bluszcz Hm, I'm actually surprised Unity webplayer works at all in any Linux browser these days. Sorry about that. I may try a WebGL build too.
@bentglasstube Thanks for playing and for the feedback. Controls are obviously hypersensitive for a lot of people, though for some reason they're ok for me... there's probably a bug somewhere. As for picking up multiple cows - it isn't explained very well but basically that would ruin the challenge, a new tripod spawns every time you return a cow - and two spawn every time you eat a cow.
Terrific game, can't fault the gameplay, graphics or sound. Lovely mood and music, and fit the theme perfectly. I really would have liked to see more done with the level design. It was promising at first when you had to spike yourself to get out of the room with the small entryways but that was the last time I remember that I had to go down a level to progress - the rest of it was avoiding being hit while using various jumps. I think this game could be amazing given time to design more puzzling levels. Truly enjoyed it.
Nice idea, and nice graphics overall but the UI, as I'm sure you're aware is a little bit confusing... Also, I wanted the monster to stay cute :| Maybe he could be a friendly monster to hide under the bed as a guard?
Gameplay is pretty fun, but a bit too hard for me. I had a few strange graphical glitches playing on the web build, only a quater of the background showed up and the first time I played the game didn't register my directional arrow presses. Otherwise, really well presented and polished, and bang on the theme. Nice one!
Really fun game, found the perspective a bit tricky at times but enjoyed the whole experience, lovely sounds.
I really like the sound, visuals, and mood but the controls would benefit from some work because they distract from what is a good game mechanic. I would probably ditch the physics engine altogether since there are no physics based elements in your game. You're sort of working against it rather than with it. All it's doing is making movement more complicated and less predictable than if you wrote your own mechanics - and that makes it harder to design tight levels.
So glad I played this, this is one of the most classic game mechanics done absolutely brilliantly. I had to play this all the way through and I was not disappointed by the finale. Love the graphics and the sounds and most of all the gameplay and level design. The only flaw I could find was that it was possible to exploit the health powerup respawn in a couple of places. I got lost once or twice but it was a good kind of lost, the kind of lost you want to be in an oldschool sprawling top-down shooter. This is pretty much the perfect Ludum Dare entry.
This game is too good for words. Fortunately I'm so verbose I *transcend* mere words. Sound stopped working at one point but that could have been my PC's fault. This is an absolute genius puzzle mechanic and deserves to be on everybody's smart phone, laptop, iwatch, etc. I'm always in awe of people who invent original puzzle mechanics in LD entries but to do that and then go on and manage to design as many levels as you did is even more impressive. This is a potential winner for me.
Pretty fun game, and definitely a good job for an hour! My own entry is a bit of a last ditch rescue mission in terms of gameplay but you've done something much more compelling.
I came here so that no more kittens would have to suffer... And I stayed for the thumping soundtrack, the sweet CRT effect, and the strangely compulsive gameplay!
Took a while to get my head around it. Love the audio. This isn't your fault but on my small laptop with a ridiculous resolution the game runs in a tiny window that makes it very difficult to see clearly what's going on. Communicating what's meant to be happening is often the biggest challenge in LD. Great innovation, good job!
This game is gorgeous, a timeless classic of gameplay all tripped out. Had me reaching for the lasers. Oh alright then, I clearly don't have the rave vocabulary to do this justice. Audio and visuals set just the right mood to keep you entranced and the starting pace is just right for someone like me who rebounds pretty hard off of things like super hexagon. It's a delight to the senses.
This is way better than I expected, the mechanic makes it significantly different from regular tetris and just when you're starting to feel like you're getting into your tetris groove, you remember you can't rotate things. Definitely makes the challenge different, possibly harder. The only gripe I have is that the perspective occasionally makes lining up the blocks a little bit tricky. The music is a great 48 hour accomplishment all by itself.
Tremendous game for a compo entry, I love the look and feel and hope you'll check out my entry which also has vertex shaded procedural terrain! As an addition to the advice about height testing, I'd add that it's better to save your heights into an array and look that up, than it is to keep doing perlin calculations. This also makes it easier to ramp up to a more complex terrain function if you wish. I found the controls a bit tricky and would also love to have an altitude indicator. The graphics are just beautiful, and the animation is delightful.
Really fun mechanic that works surprisingly well and must have been tricky to get to work! Really good job, totally original and I liked the presentation too. I did find the jumping controls a little bit tricky and ended up doing an extra jump a few times unintentionally.
I'm not normally a fan of bullet-hell games due to not having superhuman reflexes but I loved this! The effects asyou get hit are great, the music is brilliant, the feel of everything is superb.
Ludum Dare - or "How I learned to stop being frustrated and love platformers again" Really like all the ideas here, and the execution is great and just the right side of being too difficult for me. Great sound!
Superbly atmospheric, beautiful, and great use of the theme. Controls are fiddly as you say but forgivable considering the obvious effort that went into the rest of the game and the level of polish. Great job!
This game is beautiful in absolutely every way and the amount of work that must have gone in to those models,textures and animations, and that music, is staggering. Well done indeed! This concept definitely deserves to be made into a full game.
Very pretty and I like the idea a lot, I'm always impressed by LD entries that are puzzle games. I can see you spent a lot of time on the models/textures, some animation would have been the icing on the cake. I did have some of the bugs others are reporting, movement got stuck in one direction and after recovering from that the shape-changing stopped working.
Really nicely polished, great sounds and core mechanic. Wonder where you need to go from here to make it a larger game? Levels maybe? Some more mouse mechanics such as eating cheese or scaring elephants down corridors? I had a lot of fun until the map was just too crowded to continue. Nice one!
I felt a bit lost in the combat section, but as a veteran of many a tetris clone I enjoyed that part of it. I very nearly did tetris myself but I struggled to think of a unique mechanic to add to it, so props for innovation definitely!
I'm not usually a fan of unforgiving platformers and this one was a beast. Thank you for not having enemies! But in an LD context it's refreshing to play a platformer where the mechanics have actually been written from scratch rather than being fudged with a physics engine, it's always more satisfying this way. I tried, I really did, but after the second time of falling off just before eating the berries that turn you into a bird, I had to quit :) Good job!
Love the graphics and animation, sound would have been great. Definitely worth the little bit of effort it would take to make a post-compo English version. I thought it was a bit of a shame that the typing is completely random letters, rather than words. It makes the difficulty curve hard to control as some combinations are harder than others. Glad I didn't have to switch to a German keymap though :) Sehr gut gemacht!
Very cool mechanics, as always I give high ratings to anyone making up an original puzzle mechanic for Ludum Dare.
Aw hell yes, the A600 was what all the *really* cool kids had. This would be the perfect deer simulator if you added the ability to shoot the potted plants!
Wow, a lot of work went into this and it looks great. I wish I was better at playing it :) Definitely one to come back to.
I know who dunnit! It was the...
*muffled screams*
*dull thud*
*silence*
Trying to install the runtime, Windows tells me I already have another version and that it won't install :( Running the game crashes. Shame, this one looked really interesting. It's because of issues like this that I switched to making web browser games, and then to unity.
Took me a while to figure out what I was meant to be doing but I really like the visuals, they take me back to games like Midwinter and Birds of Prey on the Amiga and I love the use of multiple cameras. Hope you keep going with this one.
Congrats on getting your first game done. It was a fun little platform/puzzler, it would have been nice to have found a few more uses for the alternative shapes on the last level but I think the best suggestion I can make would be to fine tune the jumping and movement, everything felt a bit too much like it was underwater... Unless of course, it is meant to be underwater :) Good job!
The music is phenomenal and the worst thing about this game is that I have to stop listening to it, to write this comment. It took me a while to figure out why I kept dying and why I needed to go through some of the holes but when I got over my temporary stupidity I had a lot of fun with this and enjoyed the mechanics, and you're totally right about lens flares.
Really nice, innovative take on the theme. This is the game I wish I'd thought of!
Truly beautiful game visually and has great sound too. Gameplay works once you get the hang of it - judging when you should be a larva and when you shouldn't is a bit trial and error though. It's only once you already know a level's layout that you really can tell when you need to conserve energy and when you don't. Great job though, I really enjoyed it!
I was a flying bunny and I claimed the iron throne 10/10 Shades of Zelda in the soundtrack too :)
Very polished game, the models and animations are second to none. The sound sets the mood well. But I really struggled with the controls, they're pretty unique. It's also very hard to hit things in combat because he doesn't turn to face the mouse pointer when it's close to him, so the intuitive thing of clicking on the creature to punch it often means he stands and punches in the wrong direction. :( A bug? Or something I'm not getting? I didn't get very far. My instinct is that a lot of people are going to assume the controls are broken because they aren't what you'd expect from WASD + mouse with an isometric camera. But a beautiful, beautiful game in terms of graphics. Maybe I'm just not up to it :)
You made a game in 48 hours, that's pretty bloody amazing in anybody's book! I also bit off more than I could chew with my original design and all the final actual gameplay was thrown together in the last 6 or 7 hours. Yours is one of the few games where I've actually downloaded the source because I want to see exactly what you did to get those lines :) And I enjoyed it a lot more than I have a few other entries where everything apparently went according to plan.
The world needs more single-player games like this, especially as everyone on agar.io now does that ridiculous teaming up cheaty thing on the free for all servers... Ok, where was I? Oh yes, your game. Really solid delivery of this kind of gameplay. I would definitely think about some different AI behaviors to liven it up and increase the challenge.
Really slick entry, the music and sound are brilliant - amazing that you created all that, to that standard, in less than 3 days. The feel of the game is great... Best shotgun since Doom? Possibly!
I thought the basic gameplay of dodging and ducking into the right holes and selecting the right shapes was excellent and really compelling. Found it hard to stop playing and actually found myself wishing it would speed up a bit as I was really getting into it. Music was great too. Really strong entry. I can second some people's opinions about maybe indicating the holes better, perhaps color coding around the rims?
Game of the Year, amazing. I can't stop playing it. It's got everything. 10/5 for humor.
This is a great little game, it was really fun to explore although I only found one golden fold. The mood is very relaxing, even in spite of there being no sound. It was a little bit confusing at first because I seemed to be able to switch to the elephant and bird as often as I liked and then I lost the ability and had to go swimming for more folds. The background/terrain textures seem a bit out of focus, you can maybe sort this out as a bugfix? Really enjoyable game though. Origami and shapeshifting is one of the best uses of theme I've seen.
Really good game, and pretty amazing that you were able to make so many assets and yet still get things so nicely balanced and playable in such a short time.
The graphics are good and the soundtrack is well produced, well done for putting a game together in such a short space of time. I felt that perhaps this game shows a little bit of why the original snake worked well on a grid system. Also I would have enjoyed a single player mode - maybe with an AI player? Snake AI has got to be a fun thing to do and maybe that should be the first addition to a post-compo version? I enjoyed seeing this.
Wow, this is brutally hard at first but really addictive once you get into a rhythm. Great use of the theme, lovely responsive controls and nice sounds. As someone who's woefully bad at reflex based games I'd love to see an easy mode added that either widened the field of play, or slowed things down a little bit, or both. I will definitely come back to this later! I'd also make it possible to skip the intro/instructions screens with a keypress.
Neat idea and Pretty cool that you made all those models in such a short space of time. For me, all the enemies seemed to get bunched and I wonder if maybe introducing some variation into their path-finding would help make them a bit less predictable. But I had fun nonetheless.
Everything about this game is absurdly charming, I think the moving sound effect may be the best sound effect ever created. I had lots of fun. One or two bugs that you probably know about, sometimes the scaffold doesn't animate. Also it threw me a bit that I wasn't able to jump while already moving, jumping and then moving while jumped was all that seemed to work when "drawing" lines. But these are minor things, I'll definitely come back to this one!
Terrific, I wish there were more levels. A bit of polish would go a long way in a post-compo version. Then you can monetize it ;)
Hey there, I will stick something up at that link with whatever I actually have before the submission deadline but can't make any promises that it'll be good. I'll probably then follow up with a post-jam version that actually has a game in it :)
It genuinely took me a while to realize what was going on with the coins - when then made me want to go back and re-play it from the start. Making the health bar so large was a great idea. As other have said though, the wall-jumping felt a little bit off. Awesome job overall though, a pleasure to play!
Hey Beebo thanks for the feedback. I was making something totally different at first for which the large procedurally generated maze made sense. I completely agree that it doesn't really work.
Shame it's against the rules to make changes now, making the maze smaller is literally a case of tweaking 2 numbers :)
I was having a similar problem to Kure with the screen size, except that my screen resolution is 3200x1800 so I really should have been able to see the whole thing.
The solution for me was to "disable display scaling on high DPI settings" in the compatibility options for the exe. I think It's a problem that's specific to 4k laptops running Windows 10 but you might want to make a note of it for other players.
Cool game btw :) Great animations and a simple concept that nonetheless made me want to beat it.
Amazing you made a simulation of life in Northern Europe in the summer of 2018.
Every LD there are two or three games I remember and that I come back and play, this is one of those ones for me this time around. Love the gameplay, graphics, and the mood, and the difficulty is just about right that I feel as though I make progress with each retry.
I.. Um. It coming right at me I swear. I think I need a shower now.
Good job getting a game like this made within the deadline, would have liked to have seen a score table of some sort to close the game loop and give me a reason to replay.
I feel the improbability of this game appearing in an LD42 about space, was less than infinite... We almost had the same idea only it was supposed to involve poetry, so it's probably best we didn't go there.
Anyway
Gameplay: Awesome
Graphics: Lovely
Bacon rolls: Quite good
Use of theme: Best in the known universe
@linheha thanks for playing, and for the advice! Good catch on the controls, it's probably unfair to assume anyone's played Reigns.
As for the graphics, there's a reason we've disabled that voting category and it's because all of the graphics are 3rd party, hence the inconsistent style. Top of the list of things that must be done to a post-compo version of this game is acquiring an artist!
@lucas-carvalhaes Hey thanks for playing. The premise is that you have limited space for cards you acquire and you have to carefully manage the combination of stuff you end up with. The exact way the cards interact is something you have to learn but I agree with you that there's room to communicate more about what's going on to the player. Essentially, you play to tell your story.
@sheldonzs The reason you see duplicate scenarios is perhaps not obvious. It's a card game and once you've run down to the bottom of the deck of valid remaining cards without picking up enough things to fill your inventory, everything is re-shuffled and you start drawing from the deck again. What's missing here is an animation showing the discarded cards being shuffled back into the draw deck.
Great feedback everyone. @gudval we may end up doing a post-jam version and anything that helps us get the balancing right is good. @azumin and @rend, we actually built an engine that supports chaining events together and setting variables, which together would have allowed for Reigns-like storytelling, but we simply ran out of time to design any content that used these features. @cassandrakhaw did a monumental job writing all the various token cards we wanted, plus enough variety in the story cards that lead to acquiring them, while also having a full schedule of real work over the jam period.
Thanks for the feedback @remco it's all extremely valuable. Some of the points you've raised are due to limitations of the engine we built during the jam and sheer lack of time to implement story cards with some of the features we did build. e.g. You can't actually award specific cards, only a random card of a certain type, hence the rations thing.
Also, I personally find the presence of many plushies helps to mitigate psychological stress.
Lovely game, building up the world had a sort of Carcassonne feeling to it and I especially liked how the population dynamically reacted. Bear attacks ftw!
I liked the presentation and the idea but some combination of the controls and unclear instructions made it too hard for me to figure out how to do anything :(
I have no idea how to figure out the start :(
Strangely fun and oddly atmospheric... I'm fairly certain there's a moral here somewhere. Really enjoyed it!
This was something very ambitious for Ludum Dare! Congrats for making a stab at it and I'm looking forward to seeing what you build on top of this. Would love to see this made into a full game. Not much to add on top of what others have said but for me the biggest quality of life improvement would be the ability to keep the camera at the same angle while laying down buildings. Also a little bit of attention to design in the UI goes a long way in Strategy games.
Really charming little game and a very impressive amount of work in such a short time. Slightly let down by random bugs that caused the game to freeze for me though.
It's a puzzling puzzle game at times but a magnificent effort. Amazing that you included the ability to design new content!
Hey! I was sad I didn't really have the opportunity in the rating scheme to vote for the animation, which I thought was awesome, I especially like what you did with how the background responds to the rhythm section. I had a lot of fun... Where did you get the music? Sounds like the kind of stuff I could find a use for in future projects.
Vegetable murder is more fun than it has any right to be.
Aha, another space horror game ;) I had a lot of fun, these mechanics are always enjoyable and I liked how it fit the theme, really well executed!
This game was so cute I exploded
Everything from the music to the animations to the little bits of narrative is impossibly charming, precise and polished. This is a top shelf Ludum Dare entry.
Hi, I really wanted to play this but as others have said, you're missing the data folder from your Windows distribution :(
Charming game, good job!
Cool game! I liked how it forced me to balance multiple needs, in the end it was because I'm bad at the shooting part, that I could never really let the train stand still long enough to adequately repair itself. 1665m before my train gave up.
So late in reviewing this one but wanted to give it a proper play first. Love the sci-fi theme and graphics, hugely enjoyable gameplay. There's something really satisfying about sliding open doors and about the way your character moves in general. This was lot of work, I've always been in awe of puzzle mechanics in LD entries because it demands not only making a solid core loop, but level design and content creation too and it's impressive that you delivered all that and with a level of polish too.
Oh man this is incredible. I'm always in awe of original puzzle games made during LD, it's the surest way to get a high rating out of me, especially when there's so much content and the presentation is tight. Music is lovely too.
You really put a lot of work into this, it's not easy making consecutive walls of text entertaining especially in an event like this where nobody reads anything, ever :) I really enjoyed this, it was proper IF and not just a short story with bits to click on, the music was great too.
Thanks for playing @ubershmekel Part of the intent with the game is that there are multiple solutions to each level, which is why the scoring system is based on seeds used, area covered and turns taken. Trying to find the optimal solution for each score criteria is the actual challenge, rather than beating the levels. So thanks for sharing yours!
All of the solutions are based on common still lifes, oscillators and spaceships that are associated with GoL, in most cases there is a clue in the name of the mission. Perhaps I should have gone as far as including a link to the Wikipedia page since it's only the last level on which you'd have to dig deeper than that to find the optimal solution. But I think you have correctly observed that it's not the strongest of game mechanics.
Yeah I'm not a fan of restrictions in games where the objective is optimization. You should be able to pass a level with a sub-optimal solution that works and then go back later after you discover new things and improve your scores.
Thanks @jeremyfa ! For anyone stuck and in need of a hint, look up Conway's Game of Life on Wikipedia and scroll down to the patterns. Some clues are in the names of the levels.
Wow thanks @lars-erik that might be my first ever 5-star rating.
"Type 2 fun" is what I like to call it. Thanks for playing!
Hey @nobongo thanks a lot for the feedback! One of my hopes when making this was to introduce some other devs to GoL and cellular automata in general and their potential for use in games. GoL has appeared a number of times over the years, usually as part of procedural generators and in simulation of things like growth and spread of organisms. X-Com creator Julian Gollop used it in a few of his earlier games which is where I first encountered it.
Thanks @randomnine My biggest regret is that I didn't make the board big enough for you to construct a glider gun. That was going to be the objective of the final mission but by the time I got to designing it, it was too late to resize the board thanks to a couple of hacky programming decisions :)
Thanks @fififox, it probably isn't the best fit mechanic for a game jam but the necessity of looking up patterns is part of the "gameplay" - rather like the Zachtronics games on which the scoring philosophy is based. A post-compo version of this would likely include a pdf manual with example patterns.
This is an example of game jam games done right. No-nonsense mechanics and scope, fun gameplay, high level of polish. Great job!
Music actually works by being repetitive and a bit hypnotic, fits the gameplay.
This game is gorgeous, relaxing and super satisfying to play with the orbital mechanics. The little dude is so personable it's one of the few LD entries where I've felt legitimately sad when I died. The music fits perfectly too, and it's a pleasant change from the kind of serious sci-fi orchestral or electronic themes that you usually find accompanying space based puzzle games. Really well done!
Wow this game is great, seems at first like classic gameplay but has a nice twist and throws some surprises at you too. I think you got the difficulty curve just right. The mood is lovely as is the music. Had a lot of fun, thanks for making it!
This is honestly the first time I've seen an analog game as a Ludum Dare entry. And I like it!
Really smart use of the theme and I loved the fact that there was some strategy involved in which breaks you should fix first based on your income stream. Nailed the authentic 8-bit presentation too.
Oh noe, my blob is going to take over the world!
I found this really charming, nice work :) I kind of want a hard mode where health decreases faster, and maybe maybe multiple axes of alignment. I also now know which foods are evil, good, and neutral. So it's an educational tool as well as a game!
I think it crashed during the final wave for me :( But I really enjoyed it while it lasted :) That's the trouble with dwagons, always hungry. Also something about the design of the steaks that the knights turned into really reminded me, of the Dragon Steak from Dungeon Master, which is a steak made of dragon. Maybe a dark twist there? Love the sound effects and voices.
A very pretty game with a nice feel, really well drawn tiles and the moving starfield is a lovely touch. I think you've already identified all the things I would out that could be improved, I would definitely play a post-compo version of this and I think this concept really has a lot of room to expand and be something quite different from FTL, but with a similar theme.
"What if Shadow of the Beast had survival and crafting mechanics?" Is a question I never before thought to ask, but one which you have answered admirably.
Really enjoyed the mood and the oldschool side-scroller vibe even if it was hard to tell at first when I was collecting materials.
I figured the humans were the entirety of the problem here so I started nuking cities as soon as I could. Copenhagen first of course. I'm still pretty far from completing it but the fact that I'm on my third try and still have about a million more games to rate says a lot for how much I like this! It has that "just one more century" quality that all the best GSGs have.
Awesome job making a whole strategy game with a world map within the time limit, and completely from scratch too. The music is great, establishes the right mood, the mini maps are a nice touch too. If there's one thing I would change first it would be to have some visual differentiation between the different types of building on the map. Also you're probably aware of this, but the offset bug gets worse if you resize the window. I think that puts it into the territory where you'd be allowed to fix it post-jam.
Ozwomp!!! I think I want to see more of these characters and their world :)
Great job making this in your own engine, and completely agree with the sentiment about Unity. I've done a few previous entries in my own html5 engine before but they were all 2D, this is impressive stuff. At the end of the day I felt I would get what I wanted to do, done, much faster in Unity than any other option this time around but I have high hopes for next time. Thanks for being an example to us all.
Very imaginative use of the theme and the gameplay is challenging, in fact a bit too hard for me. I managed to make some of the shapes change in the second panel that came up but I didn't get any further than that though I get the feeling there are a lot of mysteries to unlock in this game.
Absolutely lovely, I took ages over the tree maze level because I was convinced touching the trees with the egg would break it! The music works really well with the pacing of the game to achieve a nice mood.
Deliberately killing the baby is easily the most satisfying thing you can do. And that's not something I say often.
If you expand on this game I would definitely consider hand crafting levels instead of infinitely adding more, but I always appreciate a bit of procedural generation in game jam entries.
Nice game! It's very satisfying to play and has a compulsive quality, not all game jam games are as tight and as well scoped as this and few get as much fun out of such simple mechanics. I think it's great that you put in the extra effort to make the controls accessible.
I love the idea and I had fun playing it. I found the controls difficult at first, especially the delay between holing down the mouse and dragging out the force/direction but once I got used to it it was a really enjoyable system.
There was no sound for me, I guess you've fallen foul of the same Chrome update issue as I have.
Thanks for all the positive comments everyone, I really enjoyed this LD and despite not getting in all the features I wanted, everything seemed to fall into place for once without too much stress and quite crucially, the game loop is complete without any major bugs.
I feel I should say something about the music though. It's an original recording but the melody isn't original. I ripped it off* of an obscure demo version of an obscure track called The Machine by an obscure EDM group called Vision Talk. I came across it one day in the dark recesses of Spotify and thought it sounded a lot like it belonged in the soundtrack of a mid-90s football game and bookmarked it for future reference.
* It's also ripped off badly because I have no ear.
Please consider giving ratings for humor and mood. Even if you didn't think much of the puns, or thought I failed to create any significant mood at all, low ratings are better than no ratings. I would like to get all categories up to at least 20 so I can actually have a score this time. Thanks for playing!
Open world racing has never been so much fun... Seriously, this is more fun than GTA. Did you ever play an old PC game called Quarantine? It was more of a shooter but your premise reminded me of it, being about how quickly you could get from point to point in a city, running various missions and upgrading your taxi as you went.
This is amazing. I work with a chap who's very closely associated with both wargaming maps, and DDR, and if you polish this game I would love to try to persuade him to review it on Twitch or Youtube.
This is an outstanding game jam entry! the 2D/3D mix is very hard to get right but very satisfying when it comes off. I'm always jealous of programmers who also know how to make stuff visually appealing. This would be well worth balancing and releasing as a full game.
Really enjoyed it, nice mood setting and cute graphics.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this game is that towards the end I found myself believing the guy in the chair deserved it :) Great execution, pun intended.
I liked it, very challenging, great sound.
That was so much more fun than this idea has any right to be, one of my favorite of this LD, good job!
I must be doing something wrong because I can't tackle at all. Kudos for making a turn based soccer game, I had a similar idea. And I will never do a sports game for Ludum Dare again!! Because people seem to be actively avoiding playing/rating them :(
I don't see what's funny here, I live in Skåne and this is precisely why I don't own a toaster.
Wow that was hard but interesting. I completely get that it's difficult to balance games in 48 hours, I don't think I've ever made a balanced game even when given 18 months :) Great job getting this done for the compo!
Oh no, I was so turned off of the blue commander by his opinion on Watership Down - by far the best war novel about an improvised mission behind enemy lines.
This is a gem among LD entries, one of my top picks from this event. Please please please post your source. I actually think I might be a requirement for the compo, and you'd be surprised how many of us would love to take a peek.
At first I thought clicker + RTS was a natural combination that missed the point of the theme, but the twist absolutely nails it :)
Hey @ViridianGames, nobody writes good code for game jams :) But part of the reason I asked about the source is that it actually is in the rules, since yours is a compo entry https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/rules "Source code must be included." and I really don't want to see your game disqualified.
A few thoughts on the gameplay:
When things are fully upgraded you should probably not show the testicle clicking mini-game anymore otherwise it just becomes something you have to wait through in between days
It's too easy to accidentally skip text at the start of the next day, or even select menu options by accident if you're still frantically clicking when the night ends.
I also always ended up in the gym no matter what I did.
Upgrades seemed not to affect the story gameplay at all, just like in real life. So I'm going to assume that this social commentary on masculinity is intentional.
Terrific gameplay and great presentation, this was one of the best for me.
Best genre combination! Also a seriously good game, this is one of the best of the compo for me.
Really enjoyed this one, first rate presentation and fun gameplay.
Blimey this is terrific. Nice going guys!
Great take on a classic game, the music is lovely and creates just the right mood. I hope you get enough ratings, I'm struggling with that myself right now.
Felt like there could have been some bugs with the movement controls but besides that, this was a very solid and well put together game, well done! The only suggestion I would make is to figure out a way that the controls could be a little bit more intuitive.
Hey, we had similar ideas and I really liked your take on it, both in the style of the execution and the decision to have the turns play out the way they do. Awesome job!
Loved the level of polish, especially the music. Found the gameplay really tough though. I'm struggling to see where the theme fits in. It seems like it's FTL with a different skin, which in itself is an awesome achievement for a weekend game jam and I'm in awe of what you achieved. But boats in space seems more like a natural fit for FTL's gameplay, rather than something that it should be incompatible with.
Nice game! It's similar to my idea in many ways so I was very impressed that you managed to get a satisfying AI done for it. The animations and characters are great too. Though I understand that the control system faithfully references old tactical RPGs (and hence fits the theme perfectly), I would actually love to see you add a mouse control option too.
Kudos for doing this from scratch with no framework, I've done LD like that before and know it's a challenge! The gameplay was enjoyable. Actually it was super fun. But I felt limited by the lack of any kind of goal. Maps with objectives and limited ammo or something else to add some urgency would turn this from a fun experiment into a seriously good game.
So much mayhem, so much fun!
This is pure class, I'm going to return to this. As others have said, one way to really push this game to the next level would be to throw in some non-obvious and maybe context sensitive commands that reward players for experimenting.
Such a fun concept, this is so much better an idea that driving cars into balls ;)
Really enjoyed this one, well done!
I enjoyed it and rated it, but I'm afraid it might be breaking the rules of the compo to use sprites directly from Doom rather than create your own versions within the 48 hours.
Super fun and valid combination of genres, I like the idea of having both players responsible for different aspects of gameplay with different styles of gameplay it's very innovative. Sure, there are rhythm platformers but making a game that's both a rhythm game and a platform game is a unique twist. I'm going to come back and play this some more with a second person.
Really nice idea, I had the same bug that some others reported but found the game really well planned and executed overall!