Robo Power by jahndis 2017-08-02T16:40:18Z
The puzzles in this were really well designed and the forced looping made it really interesting! I just wish there was a fast-forward option like in Space Chem.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Herman Chau
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | 👥 | Patchwork | jam | 96 | 4.15 | 3.86 | 3.78 | 3.60 | 4.34 | 3.71 | 2.61 | 4.28 |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | 👥 | Limbo Library | jam | 24 | 4.32 | 4.23 | 3.59 | 4.01 | 4.46 | 4.15 | 3.69 | 3.69 |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Genomix | jam | 644 | 3.74 | 3.35 | 3.67 | 4.12 | 3.60 | 3.46 | 3.63 | |
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | Beggars Can Be Choosers | jam | 287 | 3.71 | 3.78 | 3.50 | 4.10 | 3.76 | 3.47 | ||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Haka the Robber | compo | 202 | 3.61 | 3.65 | 3.04 | 3.16 | 3.59 | 2.14 | 2.44 | 3.04 | |
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Power Ring Facility | compo | 89 | 3.81 | 3.61 | 3.76 | 3.28 | 3.33 | 2.11 | 3.05 |
The puzzles in this were really well designed and the forced looping made it really interesting! I just wish there was a fast-forward option like in Space Chem.
The difficulty in this is just right, speaking as someone who likes masochistically hard games :stuck_out_tongue:
On my first try I managed to make it to the level where you're required to beam down the enemy and on my second try I managed to make it to the level with two paths, the right one being just beaming down a lot of enemies (I ended up trying to make it through the left path). It's getting late but I'm going to try to beat it tomorrow.
I definitely think having the timer as a time trial mode would be a lot better. Or even time trialing specific levels as in Dustforce would be nice.
I'd also love to make some levels for They Are Watching You once I beat it. I feel like this mechanic could produce some really cool levels and could make for a game with a lot of depth!
This was really cohesive and the characters' dialogue was very well written! You guys just gained a fan! I need to go check out your other Ludum Dare games now :grinning:
One minor thing is that the map + bus graphics looked a bit rough and out of place compared to the rest of the game.
I managed to get few new buildings and earned $500 for the next month but then stopped because I couldn't see if there was any way to speed up time or not. Like what others have said, I think I would have greatly appreciated some sort of indicator to know how fast time is passing or some idle animations to show that the game is running.
Thanks Ace17! The HTML5 link should be fixed now!
Thanks everyone for playing and rating Power Ring Facility! I finally reached 20 votes and after the voting ends I'll be starting work on a post jam version that will be uploaded to the itch.io page!
This was good! It feels a lot like Don't Starve and I think there's enough variety of things to do that I tried playing around 5 or 6 times!
There was a bug where I tried to trap the bunny next to the fire pit but the bunny was still there, with the trap and I couldn't actually get any meat from the trap. The trap mechanics did work for the bunnies further south though.
I **really** enjoyed this game! I like puzzle games in general and the input + audio feedback for this made it really smooth and fun to solve each sequence. I ended up getting a high score of 25 before getting an impossible sequence:
impossible.png
And here's the "solution" the game revealed when time ran out: impossible_answer.png
I hope you make a post jam version and add a more difficult mode too!
I thought the graphics were really well done, but I didn't really actually find the gameplay that fun. It seems like there was a lot of content but I didn't manage to get very far and see most of it.
One weird thing I noticed was that if you fullscreen the game, there's a weird horizontal jitter in the pixels (kind of like the tearing you sometimes see without vsync but instead of tearing I would notice some rows shifted to the right or to the left by a pixel).
Nice game, I really like the bright saturated graphics and the fact that you can fly in a loop! I think adding some ambient music and some NPCs with messages to have some small worldbuilding and it would be a really relaxing exploration game! :grinning:
It's awesome to see more games being made with Godot! I think this could make for a pretty cool game if you added more actions to do and a lot of random events that could happen through the day / night.
I love the idea for the game :) I think that you could take this idea further and make a really awesome platformer!
The second level was actually very hard for me. I kept getting stuck for no apparent reason although I was able to eventually get through by jumping whenever that happened.
I think it'd be cool if there were windy areas that made the fire larger and there were puzzles that would require your fire to be at a specific size so you would have to adjust the size of the fire using nearby water or wind elements.
The dithering and lighting effects are awesome! Could you do a write up and share how you achieved them?
Loved the game!
I really liked the music and aesthetic!
Like @incobalt, I thought the lag on changing directions was pretty annoying. I also felt like there was no reasonable way to dodge the enemy bullets and that it was hard to tell how I'm doing.
Some suggestions: - Have more saturated colors for the player, enemy, and bullets so that they stand out more - Increase the friction so that the controls feel tighter - Make the enemy AI easier to understand so the player feels like they can predict what is going to happen and avoid them.
Wow, this was super awesome! I loved the courtroom setting (it reminded me of Phoenix Wright) and it felt like a super interesting blend of Japanese visual novels and Western text-based adventures!
The plot was also really good and kept me engaged until I got all 3 endings without a walkthrough :smile:
The game mechanic is pretty interesting and it seems like it could lead to some interesting puzzles. I think it would help to add some visual indication of what walls would disappear and where the red dots would move when you press space. Also, it feels a bit too unconstrained right now with placing walls and blue dots.
Anyways, great game for your first Ludum Dare! I certainly had fun and enjoyed playing through the tutorial + a couple levels!
I rated the game 5 stars for all the categories! It was really really good :grinning:
Are the levels randomly generated? If so, good job with that :)
The graphics look pretty good, but I think the gameplay could be a lot more interesting. Rather than forcing the player to memorize the level, how about the following idea:
Every time your lamp goes out, the level layout randomly changes. It then could end up being something like a roguelike except the level gets randomized every X steps.
I love the base mechanic and some of the puzzles were pretty clever! I think the physics are a bit jank at times but that's fine. I'd love to see some more content, there's a lot of interesting level ideas that could be added.
One idea for improving the game might be to make the walls transparent so you can see what the level layout looks like!
Thanks for the feedback everyone! It's definitely a bit rough when you start out as a beggar, but as you start accumulating a bit of wealth it becomes a bit easier :)
One tip is to maximize coin gain until you can get to around 5 coin and then try to balance HP and coin until you can start snowballing.
@bodaciouslycrazy, thanks for the report, you're right. I just did a playthrough and noticed that too!
One other glitch is that the "Beg" option for Merlin shows +5 hp but it's actually +10 hp (the intention was +10 hp)
Thanks @bodaciouslycrazy and @mankarse for the bug reports, I've uploaded a new build with the bug fixes!
@peachtreeoath, thanks for the really detailed review and I'm glad the mechanics and strategy eventually made sense to you!
To be honest, we were pretty worried about balance since we were so focused on getting enough content in during the jam that we did nearly zero playtesting. And there are definitely things like not enough events that use up rats, the knight storyline requiring too many items, etc. that we will rebalance in a post-jam game.
As for how we came up with mechanics, we spent about the first 2 hours of the jam brainstorming, here's a snippet from our group chat: ``` > a rags to riches game > start off as a beggar and beg for money and then later on you buy stuff with the money, trade it, barter, etc. The gameplay would be "pick 1 of 3 options" at each turn of the game. E.g. "Beg for money from the visiting noble" "Attempt to steal the passerby's pocketwatch" "Sing a song and hope someone gives you some gold" > depending on some stats and stuff the options at each turn change > Similar to [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reigns/id1114127463](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reigns/id1114127463) but the setting is you start off as a beggar and you win the game when you become king. ```
The coin flipping mechanic came once we decided on this idea and then thought about how to make the choices more interesting. A couple of us are really into [Dicey Dungeons](https://store.steampowered.com/app/861540/Dicey_Dungeons/) at the moment so we thought about a lightweight version of Dicey Dungeon mechanics and landed on using flipping coins instead of rolling dice.
@jake-marks, thanks for the playthrough! The stormy weather event ended up being pretty rough in the jam version since it can show up before you even have 5 coins and make you take 5 hp. Nice job getting a shield and apple pie!
@omiya-games, congratulations on the win!!! I'll look into the Apple Showdown bug, it's probably a simple typo of `items` instead of `item`.
Thank you for the detailed review and I'm glad you enjoyed the game and the systems we implemented!
This was really fun, the difficulty increase felt really good and it became pretty tricky towards the end to figure out a sequence of blocks that could go through the narrow corridors! I'd be interested in a write up of how the procedural generation worked.
Ended up getting a score of 611 on my second playthrough. 1122 is a lot :O
I really like this! It fits with the theme pretty well and I like how the mechanics allow you to create pretty intentional level.
Here's a small level I made that makes use of an "advanced" technique in the game :)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ell83x8lt723ivz/saved_room.sav?dl=0
I also might try making a level based on riding up walls with diagonal dashes later.
Thanks so much for adding checkpoints! Here's a tough level I put together (you'll need to rename the file from 'two.sav' to 'saved_room.sav'): https://www.dropbox.com/s/8rp3ashmo85y00g/two.sav?dl=0
two.png
Would love to see a timer and death count as well! There are also some minor issues with the physics it looks like, e.g. if I dash into a wall and then try to dash in a different direction and input the second dash while still stuck against the wall, it continues to dash towards the wall instead of in the new direction.
EDIT: @silkworm-sweatshop, would you consider releasing a fan-created level pack for the post jam version? I'd love to make more levels of varying difficulty and to explore interesting ideas in the game!
@peachtreeoath, nice game! I definitely see a bit of the Dicey Dungeons influence :)
I managed to escape on the 8th day, with just enough actions after doing a beach party on the 7th day! I like the mechanics and there are some interesting ideas such as having to keep rats or storms around for the advanced tech and the tiger upgrade only usable once. I think from a balance perspective though, it doesn't seem that worth it to keep the rats around; I think it would be interesting to have more upgrades that let the player feel like they can mitigate the rng more (e.g. an interesting choice would be upgrading the number of actions vs an upgrade that lets the middle character move 2 spaces for 1 action).
Congrats on your first solo LD!
This felt really polished and there was a lot of content for a game jam game!
Things I liked: * Shooting bullets according to a rhythm + the trade off between health and bullets were both interesting systems! I agree that the implementation didn't end up being that deep but I think the basic concept is really neat and there are a few ways it could have go (the bullet in the center of the line doing double damage, enemies that have shields that quickly regen so they require rapid fire bullets to damage, etc.) * The variety of enemies and bosses was impressive and I like how the enemies in a stage show off new patterns of attack and you have the boss use said patterns to reinforce the skills you teach the player.
Things I didn't like: * I wasn't actually a fan of the voiceover and would have preferred having subtitles for it. * The first two bosses seemed too easy and you can just tank all the hits and have enough damage output to win directly.
Love the music! The length was just perfect for a short chill playthrough :)
Hmm, I agree with @jasper-hansen, there I finished and the mirrors didn't fully make sense to me. The first level with the exclamation block didn't seem to do anything with the exclamation block and there were multiple levels that seemed to have unused components?
I think the basic concept of being able to only move to the portals and then manipulating the portals instead of your character is an interesting mechanic though!
Finished it, amazing puzzle game! I realized a couple levels earlier than I needed to that I could roll large segments and was glad there was a level that required you to do that :)
I think the 15th level is significantly harder than the 16th so maybe swapping them would be good?
One of the more unintuitive mechanics is the fact that you only attach to one thing at a time so that levels like "Backwards" can work; I think having a dotted line or something showing you just what will get attached and pulled based on your current state might make the game a bit easier to read.
The additive and then subtractive mechanics were cool, definitely fit in with the theme very well. The small bits of dialogue on the characters were also really good.
I think air momentum was a bit too much and like @snowdrama, I couldn't complete the game after returning the gloves :/
The puzzle ideas were really nice, I think the second to last level where you had to use the 2 inventories on the ground in order to make room for the 3x3 was my favorite! I wish there was an undo button though since you can permanently mess up if you didn't configure your inventory shape correctly. I had to restart and play through the puzzles again when that happened.
The art in this is really great and gives a pretty good atmosphere!
I don't think anyone above mentioned it, but I noticed you could actually clip through a lot of the walls. One example is you can clip through the walls in the room with the switch and the gate and clip into the key room.
The graphics were really good in this! I wish there was a bit more content :P
Great game! I wish I knew rolling and attacking used the same stamina bar when starting off since I would probably have upgraded stamina over health if I knew that.
The graphics are really good and I think the game would be amazing with some music!
Writing this after getting to level 14, I'll probably finish it up later! The mechanics are pretty good and the puzzle design is very challenging. The fuel on the logs was kind of confusing, I think it would have been clearer if say, the log got a white outline when it's facing up and a black outline when it's facing down.
Level 12 took me a while and I assume it was a deliberate misdirection into making the player think you needed paper by each box? I think the solution is pretty clever but wonder if the misdirection could be gotten rid of by placing one of the boxes a bit further to make it obviously impossible in one direction and adding an extra paper that started off burning somewhere.
Overall I really enjoyed the game and it's always good to have more puzzle games :)
The humor was spot on and the difficulty ramp and overall game feel is great!
Easily my favorite of the game jam so far! I love difficult games built around a simple but innovative mechanic and this game was exactly that.
I'd probably buy and play a full version of this game with more content and some sort of story that ties it all together :)
Managed to barely keep them alive with one dinosaur remaining! So much clicking though haha
Really loved the graphics style of this game and nice to see threeJS being used. I think the way the camera followed the player was a bit disorienting (it feels like it was lerping too fast maybe?)
Great puzzle platformer! The retro aesthetic was on point and the puzzles were well-designed! I also thought the music and sound effects matched the game really well. One minor complaint was that towards the end it felt like a lot of new mechanics were introduced but they weren't fully developed. I'd love to see some more conveyor belt levels and levels that involve the falling platforms.
What tools did you use to make the game by the way?
Cool, thanks! I haven't heard of Abundant Music generator. I might try using it next time I do a game jam so I don't keep just using public domain songs :P
I loved the aesthetic! Controls felt good and I wished there were more to play after I finished the level :)
This was a ton of fun! Is the level with the eggs that home in on you and the penguins the last level? I was definitely survived until the bar reached the full amount but nothing happened.
The music and sound effects are fitting too and give a pretty good retro vibe.
The graphics and music are so good! I think the gameplay is pretty fun too but the difficulty curve was a bit too slow in the beginning. The last level was a good difficulty and maybe having some more long horizontal levels would have been nice.
I liked the concept and art! The amount of time each battle takes is also just right and it feels like you make progress at a steady rate.
I think the gameplay and player feedback could use quite a bit of work though. Some indication of how much mana is required for each spell, a cooldown timer for each spell, some numbers to indicate how much healing was done and how much damage each fighter is taking would go a long way to making the game more playable. Since as it stands, unless I do manually calculate how much mana the group heal vs single heal consumes and how much they heal for, it's hard to tell which one I should use. Similarly, I can't tell how effective the armor is.
It would also be pretty useful if instead of the armor spell at the first fountain, you get a spell that lets you make enemies target a certain fighter so you can distribute the damage equally then use the group heal.
Overall I see a lot of potential in the idea and think it could be a pretty fun game with strategic elements and a tight core loop!
I really enjoyed this. The beginning was a bit rough but I think the difficulty curve was pretty good (I made it to the level "High Ledge" before stopping) and it helps that the pieces are in a fixed order throughout the entire game. The art is really good and easy to read and the mechanics are a neat blend of Tetris and Lemmings.
Some constructive criticism: - Movement feels a bit slow and part of this is the fact that the UFO has requires some minimum key pressed time before moving. I think it would feel a lot better if the game registered all key presses and queued up the animations (with some max input buffer of say 3 inputs). Another part of this is that the animations in general are a bit slow and a fast forward button to skip waiting for the lemming to move to a specific part of the screen would be helpful. Finally, I think piece dropping could be slightly faster since it's a bit hard to judge if a piece might hit the lemming by the time it drops. - In the level First Morning, I think it would help to remove the pit to the left. That level took me longer to complete than the next 2 or so, partly because I was getting used to the game. Having a timing element where the game state permanently changes if you don't act seemed like too much complexity for the first level. - (minor nitpick): It'd be cool if the background animation showing you how to play were replaced with a keyboard animation if you're using keyboard, given that the game already has some logic to detect between a keyboard mode and a mouse mode.
Overall I really enjoyed this and it's in my top 3 of the jam so far!
Super chill and a good amount of mechanics were introduced over the course of the game! I liked how non-linear some of the levels felt despite it just being on a single loop.
I also saw you created Efi in the previous Ludum Dare, I really enjoyed that too!!!
The graphics look great and once I got to the glitchy blocks the game made a lot more sense and became really cool!
In the beginning though, I had no idea how the controls worked and only eventually stumbled upon pressing ESC to display the controls. I think it would have helped to force display them at the beginning of the game.
Thanks @fireslash! Yep, we got a bit too ambitious with scope I'd say :p. Post-jam update perhaps?
Super fun and a great interpretation of the theme! I really liked that the enemies had animations before they attacked and the boss was well designed too!
Loved the humor too :D
Oh no I ran into a bug, the browser page also froze up so the game probably got _stuck in a loop_ somehowbugc.png
Loving the game so far! The coins are challenging to get and this is such a cool way to use the idea of wrapping around. The grid snapping and preventing you from pausing the loop when you're in mid-air definitely makes this a thinky puzzle game in a platformer's guise :p
One minor thing is that gravity felt a bit strong and there's not much leeway in the platforms you need to reach so the execution was also a bit difficult.
Really loved the mood here and it's cool to see you guys doing a game with 3d graphics! It looked wonderful and had cool depth blur and animation of the platforms changing in the background. I also liked the idea of parrying the bullets from the bats.
I agree with most of what @avavt wrote in terms of improvements. I also think the enemy design could use some work since right now it seems to encourage passive play a bit too much (i.e. just standing still and parrying bullets or hitting the spider once and then immediately backing away). I think being able to parry the spider's attacks would be helpful and maybe making a split second flash to white on the enemies right before they attack to help with timing when you're near them would help.
Really cool game, the level/enemy design feels very professional and in line with the genre and I loved your particle effects a lot!
I didn't fully understand how the scoring mechanics worked, but if there were some sort of multiplier for killing enemies with copies of yourself, I could see the high score runs being incredibly strategic and requiring a lot of skill.
Great game!!
Great game, it's basically kururin but I liked the level designs and the music was upbeat and fun! Managed to beat the game in 2'19"47 so quite a bit below the 3 minutes you posted about :p
kururin.png
I assume the goal of the game was to build a closed circuit with as many lamps as possible? I think I got 4 lamps and managed to get a score of 339 that way.
One suggestion for improvement is instead of generating an infinite array of random pieces, I think the game would be more interesting with a several handcrafted levels where you can get all the lamps into a single circuit within the given number of moves. After the player does all of those then they can try a randomly generated puzzle perhaps.
The boat game was very neat mechanics wise, it was fun to shake the mouse and move the fan! I also liked how each game had a visually distinct color palette. If the game continued on and each mini game got progressively more creative / wild in terms of mechanics while still maintaining the same control scheme that would have been amazing.
Also, I think the second game could be improved a bit with some lighting or something to help you better perceive how close the platforms are to hitting your spaceship.
Awesome game! We did something quite similar with a looping roguelike where you can get a choice of upgrades and curses after each loop so it was interesting to compare.
Interesting that others noted you can just pick all the cards and you end up nearly invincible. I didn't realize that and just mostly picked one card at a time focusing on health regen, drain and the shield and did manage to win the final boss that way.
I really loved the graphics, enemy variety, and the various buffs and debuffs you could get! One small complaint is that I think the player's movement speed seems pretty slow which made dashing felt strictly better, especially since your dash also damages. I pretty much just ended up playing the game via dashing.
I agree with AlekM, building up speed was super fun. I managed to get enough distance go past the portal!
The graphics were also very nice!
It was a cool game! The black hole effect and the music getting more intense I really liked. One thing that got me kind of stuck was when I dropped my crate in the lava in the second level and had a lot of trouble retrieving it.
Cute flappy bird like game! I think the walls should spawn at an irregular interval and the player should automatically start with forward velocity. On my second run, I just stayed in place and didn't press left and right and it made the game fairly easy.
Amazing game! The only thing that would have made it a bit better is if there were an animation on enemies before they shoot.
Really interesting mechanics! It took a while to get going but once I was able to bounce and glide I could bounce and then glide immediately after bouncing to gain a lot of height!
I managed to get 2 of the chimes and I think I need to work more on hookshotting to get further. It feels like you lose all your horizontal velocity for some reason and doesn't seem quite natural (at least to me).
Also really enjoyed the chill exploration atmosphere of the game!
Thanks @clue and @qzqxq! I should try to get a respectable score on your game first before I rate and leave a comment.
Thanks @le-slo! Gorogoa was definitely the first game we wrote down as things to draw inspiration from. I agree, the puzzles are mostly lightweight escape the room-esque puzzles so nothing particularly clever there :p
Thanks for all the comments!
@sakura-magika, we just put together [hints / a walkthrough](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y693Yhgz1WX2E5VQ8CL1XWgW9Vzhvm7X_lQrR3apC2Y/edit?usp=sharing); hopefully they help you enjoy everything the game has to offer!
Great platforming movement and really nice theming as you descended the depths of hell. I love how pretty much each circle of hell reused some earlier game play element, usually in an ironic fashion. The destructible terrain mechanic was used well, the music was pretty catchy, and the difficulty curve was pretty good.
I think my only complaint is that the level design has quite a few blind falls / leap of faiths that make it hard to "sightread" a level. I think given the nature of the game, it's hard to avoid this in the level design; maybe something like a camera that accelerates downwards as you fall so the player stays in the top 1/4 of the screen could help.
The art is really cute! Like others said, I think a bit more enemy variety and having some background music would be good.
Awesome entry! I loved how the interactions fit together and there's interesting tension in moving a water tile over to extinguish a lava tile, but then using soil or grass tiles to cover the water back up. The metaphors and scoring made sense and I love the ambience and sound effects.
I managed to get to 76 but saw some commenters got to 86. Wow!
Wow the leaderboard competition is so fierce. I reached 604 just now so barely missing the leaderboard cutoff.
Love the mechanics and the background track is great. I just read your detailed gameplay notes and didn't realize at all during playing that it was deterministic; I thought it was random with some weighted probabilities to make it more likely for you to be able to continue to form chains.
It's cool to see you all added colorblind accessibility also!
Absolutely amazing game, definitely my favorite of the jam. I loved how there were many types of movement mechanics and how you used the tether in multiple ways.
The graphics and music/sound effects were also super good; the physics felt great to me and it feels like a rare underwater platformer that's extremely fun to play!
I managed to clear with 17 deaths my first time around; I'd love to go back and try a couple casual speedruns.
This is really really good! Everything from the graphics to level design to audio is top-notch. And there's so much content too!
I had to wonder who was the team behind this and it turns out you all also made Trick Keys for the GMTK jam. I loved that game and it probably my top platformer pick from that jam!
Going to follow you all on itch now and I'm looking forward to your future jam games :)
Definitely an retro "Nintendo-hard" feeling platformer. I managed to eventually finish it but I think it took me around 35 to 40 minutes and I think it was pretty rewarding to do so!
The level design is deliberately unforgiving in a lot of places but there's actually quite a lot of variety given the number of distinct gameplay elements.
The graphics are pretty good too and all the player characters and enemies had nice animation.
This was cool! To be honest, I didn't quite understand the musical element to it and I just placed the sharks so that I could reach the music notes. But I like the idea of platforms synced to music somehow and having the players build their level before playing.
The sharks and sounds were all really cute and I enjoyed it!
76 deaths: win.png
The aesthetics of this were really good! I'm a pretty big fan of platformers and I was glad to see a stylish and polished precision platformer :)
Thoughts: - Some of the levels felt repetitive since they were similar to previous levels but with more spikes. It would have been cool to have some harder levels that only focused on a certain type of obstacle (e.g. spikes only and there would be lots of small gaps along the spikes to require you to land in those gaps / wall-jump along those gaps. There was one level like that that I enjoyed) - I think the attacking mechanic felt like it wasn't very useful / didn't contribute much to the game. Perhaps there was some potential for levels that were full destructible? And if the key didn't persist, then it would have some puzzle aspect to it where you need to destroy blocks to get to the key but also make sure you leave blocks behind to get back to the door. - I feel like the hearts + keys should be reset when you die in a level rather than have it persist with you.
Nice, I just recently played some Puyo Puyo and it looks like this is a similar mechanic but turn-based and instead of real-time + rotation you get to choose whether or not you want to drop or reject a given piece.
I cleared all the levels and think it's actually pretty interesting; have you guys considered adding an infinite mode and also some system to prevent you from infinitely rejecting pieces? My first thought would be you could reject at most 3 pieces in a row before you're forced to accept the next one.
The art's also pretty cute and pop-artsy.
Nice game!
win2.png
The invisible block levels were kind of frustrating and I was pretty confused at first when I saw three characters, but I enjoyed the secret shop, the interconnectedness of the map, and the overall gameplay!
One thing that was a bit disorienting was that my two characters could get out of sync with their jumps since one lands could land on a platform before another. I don't know if it would help, but maybe each character would have a different sound effect when jumping to help sync up with the visuals?
How did you code up the background title screen by the way? Did you basically do a software shader for that lava effect?
@Ben Pearson, thanks! Yeah, there are quite a few mechanics introduced; which parts specifically were confusing?
@Potondo, thanks for the feedback on the text! I also thought it was a bit hard to read, but a bunch of the spacing was already hard-coded to work with that font so I didn't have time to switch >.< Crouching lets you move after enemies, so for example, if you're standing left of a ghost and the ghost is about to move down, you can crouch and move right and you'll end up behind the ghost. If you don't crouch, you'll move first and attack the ghost and then the ghost will move down a square. The first GIF show's an example of crouching to get behind a ghost and then back attacking.
@Jiri Hysek, thanks! The procedural generation code took quite a bit of time to write but I'm pleased that I got it to work nicely! And yes, the death sound was intended to be a bit annoying (so hopefully you try not to die :P).
@sprvrn, thanks! I've fixed the issue with the page scrolling when pressing up ad down now!
@aengusm, yeah, I considered adding descriptions but ended up forgetting and ran out of time to add them. The smoke bomb randomly teleports you to another tile. The shuriken can be thrown left/right to instantly kill an enemy. The potion makes you invisible for 5 turns. Thanks for the feedback and I've made the sounds a lot softer now!
@Le Slo, yeah, the crouch mechanic is probably the most interesting aspect and it's what lets you instant kill enemies :) With enough patience and practice, you should be able to win most runs, though my random dungeon generator definitely isn't perfect and can sometimes generate long hallways that are unclearable except with items. I usually carry a shuriken or potion with me and if I've used up both of them I keep a smoke bomb to give me an exit strategy in case I make a mistake. The smoke bomb is also a good speedrunning strategy since it has an equal chance of teleporting you to every square so if you get it early, it'll likely teleport you nearer to the exit.
@Gavin Camlin , thanks for playing! Yeah, I've made the death sound a lot quieter now. The sound effects were all very last minute and they'll be something I keep in mind next game jam. Music/audio's not my strong suit, and I should work on improving in that more :P
@vfqd and @piegames, yep the maps are procedurally generated! My implementation for the level design mostly mixed a couple approaches for level generation described in some roguelike articles + some of my own additions (e.g. triangular rooms).
@piegames, yeah, I was quite surprised how stealthy the crouching mechanic actually is! I agree that mistakes are a bit too punishing right now, especially with no way to get more hearts. The smoke bomb item is a cheap way to mitigate that (it'll teleport you to a random square on the map when you use it) so that you can escape a bad situation.
@TheLucky, thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree that I should have chosen a more readable font (once judging is over, I'll add a fix for that :) )
@piegames, oh okay, I completely didn't realize that, thanks!
This was super fun! I really liked how colorful the graphics were and the music was simple but not annoying :)
The way you select tiles and move them around is a really nice mechanic. Once I thought more about how tiles that are diagonally touching could be useful I managed to do a lot better! The melee attacked seemed a bit lacking in the current version though, I just used arrows to shoot the enemies mostly :P
The graphics and music are really good! I like how there's a good amount of animation so the game feels alive even when you're not doing anything.
I do feel a bit cheated though since it looks like it's impossible to win. The entire swarm alternates between moving horizontally and downwards right? There's 11 moves before they reach the bottom row and there's 13 enemies so it doesn't look like it's possible to win :(
The combo-ing mechanic is interesting and I liked the music quite a bit. Also, it's cool to have different powers to choose from :)
Congrats on your first game jam!
Yay I escaped! The art and music are really nice and overall, I thought it was a really solid game jam entry :)
The controls were a bit fiddly though and the first spikes part was pretty frustrating since the two platforms were slightly out of sync.
Also, somehow I mashed keys too fast and got this to happen: bug.png
This was a really good game, my favorite of the game jam so far! Got a high score of 304 so far :smiley: 60.png
Things I've noticed: - Coins can explode out beyond the fence - You can clip through the door without opening it my moving diagonally into one of the corners - Plants will still target / attack you while you're in the house (I always make sure I go to the very top of the house before sleeping because of this) - You can cheese a lot of the plants by getting them barely within sight horizontally and then shooting them. It seems like they need to be within a certain range to attack you and I can stand outside that range to shoot them. Maybe this could be solved by giving a time limit per day? - The 6-cost plant seems not very cost effective? I didn't write down how much it gives, but it didn't seem like a lot and my build order was generally 2, 2, 3, 4, wait a day, and then build 20's.
Nice, the later levels definitely reinforce the platforming aspects by having to do some horizontal movements while jumping. I'd love to see a level where you have to jump through a section that has spikes both above and below, so that you time the horizontal movement midway through your jump!
One thing that got me was not realizing that I had to press the arrow keys multiple times in order to move horizontally fast enough for those parts where you jump over spikes. I was actually pretty confused / frustrated at first until I figured out I was supposed to jump, wait until I can't see the red anymore, and then mash right / left.
Anyways, neat game!
@TimeLoad, yeah, I managed to clear all 8 levels and the last few felt kind of puzzle-y to me :) And yeah, like you said, you had to memorize that there were 2 spikes so that you had to press right three times and such.
One other thing that confused me a bit was not realizing when I died (the sound effect was kind of quiet).
Another cool thing to have might be something like conveyor belts (traditional moving platforms would probably be too hard / frustrating) so you could have something like this ```` ^ $ O -----> <---- * O --------------> ^^^^ ```` where the arrows are conveyor belts, * is the starting player, O is a block, ^ are spikes, and $ is the goal.
I managed to pick up some items by right clicking on them as they floated by and cleared the first mission but couldn't seem to do anything else. :(
Yeah, this was great! I'm on level 6 right now, and really glad you added the shuffle card types in there. Level 4 took me a lot of tries since it was pretty tight and an unlucky draw made it hard (or impossible I think?) to complete the level.
I also liked how attack cards can help you move and how there's no friction in the air so I can use one move card and then just keep using jump cards :)