Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Helslo
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Lost Focus | compo | 252 | 3.00 | 2.76 | 3.84 | 3.42 | 2.76 | 2.64 | 2.42 |
At first I did not realize the controls were waiting for the earth signal to reach me to start moving my ship and was very confused about why i couldn't stop my turning, once I noticed the timings though I was much more easily able to control the ship and had a lot of fun maneuvering around!
I really like the mood and the music fits perfect. I did notice that I was consistently finding the signal at the intersection of my first two lines, and then I would have to actually get further from the point to send another line. It felt a fully packaged experience though and I enjoyed playing!
I liked it. The size of the hitbox you control made me feel like you could grab a single bit from the connected bits but it seems like you either get them all or none?
Very reminiscent of beat saber, but with bits... Bit Saber?
I actually quite liked waiting for the planets to line up and the time speedup was definitely appreciated. I was trying to get to the furthest planets but kept running into an issue where after connecting to my 3rd planet/moon I wouldn't be able to buy more factories. Since I was no longer incrementing up even at 100x speed it was taking a while to add to my signal.
Really impressed that you were able to commit to how the language system works so quickly. Unfortunately didn't get super far in but really liked the setup! For some reason my brain/eyes are really bad at finding the underlined words in the emails and I kept missing some(i think bold would make it easier visually, but then might also take away the feeling of searching through the email in detail)
This was a great experience both gameplay and style checked a lot of boxes for me. I also liked the little story that was happening on the side, the smoke did seem to sort on top of the text which made it hard to read sometimes, but not a huge deal at all.
Looking forward to seeing Walter steal the volcano's job in the future!
The noisy text coming together during tuning was very satisfying. The loop is a nice touch. Makes me think of a possible longer version where you play through it multiple times and get more information each time or something like that.
I really like the animation that plays when you guess the saint. I had fun going through each sin since you gave some of them unique flavor. I do think the basic emojis slightly broke the vibe that the music and other icons were creating, but overall I thought it was neat.
I like the wordplay in the title and logo. Enjoyed playing around with the mechanics. Sometimes you high roll and get the perfect pheromone ants which is very satisfying, especially when they setup on permanent food sources. I liked the idea of the temporary resources, but it wasn't very clear to me if they provided more food or what their benefits were.
Very nice and chill experience. I think the diagonal movement isn't normalized, which makes the tractor move faster on the diagonals. Not really a huge deal but once you go diagonal it then makes me feel a bit slow when going back to a cardinal(unless I am just hallucinating the speed difference). Great game!
Once I reached the first source tower I really enjoyed driving around. There may be a few invisible walls at the bottom of the map that I kept running into. I think if it started me at the first signal tower I would have been less lost at the beginning for sure.
I was a bit confused about needing to use a signal change to start each level so I thought the controls weren't working at first. I had a good time figuring it out.
I wasn't able to reproduce it, but on level 4 I somehow absorbed the C email which I'm assuming isn't intended.
Hi @Liam, whenever you shoot it always deletes your old signal, so you can jump and then shoot downward again to create stairs in the first room. The different colored blocks effect the signal, so the purple blocks it, blue allows it to bounce more. In that second room with the purple, you must shoot the signal into the black walls and use your returned signal as a wall for wall jumps. Thanks for playing and hopefully with the suggestions you'll be able to play through to the end (its very short).
@liam, I have noticed in watching others play, the 2nd room seems to be the hardest, I suggest shooting at a good distance from the wall to allow the signal to get wide enough to make the wall jump easier. I did run out of time at the end to add good explanations of things. (If you do reach the final room you will want to shoot at the purple ball until it grows and turns red and then jump into it)
@kristinamay, thanks for the suggestion for a screenshot. I have added a quick youtube video which should hopefully help out
@cagibi, @skale, @rinnnzy Thanks for the feedback! Starting to realize that my countless hours in precision platformers might have made me blind to the difficulty, probably could have ramped it up quite a bit more gradually. I'm glad people are enjoying the mechanics though!
@domenixius thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree about the platform size(and also the cleanliness when sometimes it gets broken). I originally wanted to make it so that once a signal particle hit the player, it would actually spawn a new platform that matched the player hitbox and then destroyed all particles that were inside of the new platforms hitbox on that frame to make a clean new surface. Unfortunately by the time I got the current iteration working it was already well into day 2 and all i had was a basic white Unity square as the player and a pit to test the particles and had to move on. Actually ended up finishing art and starting level/mechanics design at like 7:40pm in full panic mode. Luckily the way I setup the particles made it trivial to add those mechanics last second or otherwise it would have just been basically a repetition of the first room with different platforms.
I'm glad you enjoyed!
I like this little squirrel guy so much. The sound design for him dying is so good yet so sad.
The mood and ambience are great. I found myself a little impatient with the golem's speed and the speed of the boy pushing the box, but overall very nice. I think the little door/wall animation is a great touch.