Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Honey Pony
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | Impish Descent | compo | 54 | 3.97 | 4.06 | 3.20 | 3.06 | 3.15 | 3.25 | 2.97 | 3.54 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | On Hiatus | extra | ||||||||||
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Daydreams | extra | ||||||||||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Ash & Phoenix | compo | 109 | 3.80 | 3.17 | 4.21 | 3.87 | 3.73 | 4.21 | 4.30 | ||
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Cardwork Cycle | jam | 25 | 4.25 | 4.34 | 3.96 | 4.19 | 3.79 | 3.86 | 2.64 | 3.98 | |
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | Far. | compo | 276 | 3.35 | 3.27 | 3.07 | 2.11 | 3.22 | 3.48 | 2.32 | 3.61 | |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | A Halting Problem | compo | 71 | 3.92 | 4.03 | 3.50 | 2.88 | 3.75 | 3.63 | 2.79 | 3.53 | |
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | when the earth falters | compo | 43 | 4.01 | 3.83 | 3.96 | 3.09 | 3.93 | 3.51 | 3.01 | 3.67 | |
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | There, Again | compo | 162 | 3.81 | 3.71 | 3.26 | 2.51 | 3.75 | 3.78 | 2.25 | 3.65 | |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | Super Box Bot's Package Push | compo | 176 | 3.67 | 3.60 | 3.37 | 3.95 | 3.73 | 3.46 | 3.14 | 3.46 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Lost Beneath | compo | 351 | 3.60 | 3.29 | 3.28 | 2.90 | 3.57 | 3.53 | 2.25 | 3.53 | |
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | Sandbox CTF | jam | 744 | 3.25 | 2.76 | 2.86 | 3.12 | 3.16 | 2.84 | 2.23 | 2.83 |
Fun game. Would've loved to see the whole thing. I definitely think that combining an FPS with a farming game could make for an interesting product.
As it is I had fun shooting seeds at the ground. Adding lots of particle effects and other stuff would probably make it even more fun.
Really well put-together game. The tutorial was super clear, and in general everything worked smoothly and had good player feedback.
However, moving around was sometimes really disorienting. I agree with @JoeShanahan that the background doesn't help with that, but I also think that the camera controller contributes to the problem and could use some tweaking. In particular, the camera should probably stay centered on the character when you don't move your mouse (that is, your character should only move with respect to the camera frame when you move your mouse).
As I side note I never really sprinted when playing. Perhaps that's just me though.
Definitely one of the best games I've seen. Super good use of the theme, and the fact that you made several sets of assets is pretty crazy.
Game was a lot of fun to play, even if it was a little slow at the beginning. Sadly I didn't notice the speedup button until the end of the game. I don't know if it could be made a little more obvious.
One thing I think is great is that you're forced to place the parts far enough apart so that you can't trap the balls in a big cage. I'm still not sure if it might be possible to get a ball in a stable trap but I didn't try. :smile:
Music is great and I love the water effect. I'm afraid I was never able to find a single key, despite walking all the way to the right side of the map. I would've liked to experiment with the potion mechanics but they were relatively rare and I couldn't seem to aim them into the fire or water without dying immediately.
This is without a doubt my favorite entry of this Ludum Dare. Although, I am a sucker for games that remind me of Marble Blast Ultra and this fulfills that category pretty perfectly. :smile:
But really, I loved the way all the different mechanics combined. I thought it was great that when you were jetpacking and falling, you could bounce off a platform to regain some height. I thought that awesome amounts of height you could get at the end by synchronizing your force gun and jump/jetpack were super fun and really made you feel how far you progressed.
I also like the fact that the game isn't really punishing for you falling off. It hurts your time, sure, but that doesn't matter for the first time you play through. This makes it perfect for a jam as it isn't a pain to play through the whole thing for rating it, and it's a pretty legitimate choice for platformer games in general (again, very reminiscent of Marble Blast, although I don't know if that's intentional...)
I think this game would be very interesting if running it for time. The way that the jetpack has to managed as a tradeoff between waiting for the bar to fill and just going for a jump would add to that.
My time was something above 15 minutes. I didn't write down the exact number. :sweat_smile:
So yeah, love the graphics, love the choice of music, love the gameplay. Definitely my favorite game in the jam.
I had fun playing this game. The basic systems in it work pretty well. It could maybe use some extra player feedback (particles, sound effects, etc) but overall it works well.
How far you get seems to be mostly luck. My second run I got about 2000 because I got two shields early and then collected a lot of monkeys later on. Defense seems to be the only real way to make it anywhere in the game, as it's practically impossible to dodge most of the enemy shots.
I wonder if there would be a way to make the game a bit fairer in that respect. The player has very little that would let them dodge enemies. Maybe go the Enter the Gungeon route of having a moderate number of enemies per room but some with more complicated attacks?
I like the start screen with the unlocking upgrades as you get farther. In general I like how the upgrade system looks.
Game mostly worked for me. I found the crafting interface a bit difficult to use, and it seems like the arrow recipe will just craft a bow instead, which was sad. Breaking stuff seems to work inconsistently, I"m not sure why.
The enemies seem pretty hard to attack safely. However, they do get stuck in walls pretty easily.
I like the music.
Really nice game. I always like games with a Bastion-style narration and this falls into that category. The narrator could of course be more interesting -- for example, I had to go back and look at the wedding date, and it would be funny if the narrator said something about that, but for a jam game it's understandable why it isn't quite that complex... :smile:
The story is fine but I think would be a lot more impactful if you really developed the player's relationship with Nick. I'm not sure *how* to do this, precisely, but in my opinion narrative games are really effective when they are able to simulate a feeling for the player, as that's something that can only be accomplished through interactive media. If Nick functioned as a component in the gameplay that the player came to rely on, they would feel something based on how he changes throughout the story.
Of course that's just one idea and it may not really make sense in the context of this game. Just something to think about.
Neat game. I think the combined pixel art / 3D style is an interesting choice, but does work pretty well. The voice acting is definitely pretty cool, and the main voice actor does a pretty good job in my opinion.
The gameplay could use a little polishing, I think. Simply finding a whole bunch of items and trying them at the gate is a little repetitive.
One thing that could be modified a little is the level layout. The first time I got to the gate, I didn't know what the interact button was, so I couldn't activate the initial voice clip. Then, once I found an item, I knew what the interact button was and went back to the gate, but then it played the initial voice clip (not the one for the item I was holding) and so I was initially a little confused, as I had to interact with the gate a second time to use my item.
Overall solid concept. Free-form games are pretty neat in my opinion because they let you prioritize which aspects of the game you like. In my case I was prioritizing score but you can also clearly prioritize speed here :smile:
There are a few little nitpicks I have: - The hitbox on the spikes are too big. Several times I died when it looked like I was in midair (not even touching the spikes). - There's a physics bug that activates if you build a "staircase" (i.e. several small blocks placed corner-to-corner) and clip into the wall. You kind of get frozen on the platform and have to restart. - There's no real use for the medium or large platforms, because you can get the same effect by stacking several small platforms next to each other for cheaper (although this didn't effect my run as there was nowhere I needed larger platforms).
It also might make sense to make some sort of grid that you have to snap all the parts to: that way there will be a specific place to put the spawn point that will be "farthest away," and it will be possible to figure out which combinations of platforms are specifically possible, for building more optimal levels.
I'm also not sure if there would be some way to make running the game for speed more interesting than just putting the spawn above the goal. Just something to think about.
Anyways, cool game.
Pretty good game! The art is fantastic and it's pretty fun. It just gets super hard if you actually try to fill up the town progress bar as collecting more beer is pretty difficult without killing the green guys.
Awesome graphics and music. The head-bobble might be a little much at times but is pretty neat otherwise.
I only wish the game were a little longer. As in, if there were I few different things I might think to do at each step of the game before finding the right one. I guess that's the limitations of the jam.
A pretty silly game. I liked the variety of costumes that the NPCs would have.
I think this game could be enhanced if it had a little more strategy -- such as building a costume out of various components and figuring out which combination was the best. I don't know if there could also be some kind of win condition but that could help.
Cute game. The physics had some problems at certain points and I had to restart -- it would've been really nice to have a restart button as it was annoying closing the game and re-opening it. I almost got stuck in the second stage and I didn't really want to re-do the first stage so I almost quit due to that...
For some reason the boss lagged my computer a lot, which was strange.
One comment I always make when I see people mix pixel art resolutions is that I think it's a bad idea. I think this game's graphics would be much more effective as vector graphics, as that's sort of what they're used as anyways.
I did like how you play as a variety of characters through the game, especially as most of them were different kinds of specialized physics-based platformer. That was pretty neat.
@Wakubo Yep. It took a while for the trap door to break but it did. :smile:
Nice game! I completely missed that the pumpkins had to have the same faces on them the first time I played. Somehow I actually did better than when I understood that mechanic though. :smile:
One thing I found annoying was that the pumpkins you got changed whenever you bought weeding. I usually would clear a weed with the specific intention of placing a certain pumpkin configuration there and then I would be confused when it didn't fit.
One thing: you guys should add a link called "HTML5". Some people don't play games that don't have a web version available and because your game does have a web version, it would probably help you get more ratings if that was more apparent.
Highscore: 13813. That run ended when I got trapped and couldn't move for some reason.
Lots of cool mechanics in this game. I wasn't able to using the building as effectively as some people but it does seem like it can help control enemy positions. The pickup system works although it's relatively unclear what each pickup does.
I think the main problem I have is that the game is too repetitive. One type of enemy, one type of player attack (as far as I could tell), and the gameplay stays more or less the same throughout the whole game. The best way to improve it is definitely more variety.
One other thing: it's possible for a whole bunch of enemies to stack up and kill you in like an instant. I think a player invincibility frame would be a good addition.
@danidre By trapped I mean a bug, I think... I could only move like 1 pixel in a given direction but no farther, so I wasn't able to avoid the enemies.
@itsdanidre I was still on the map, and I believe there was a wall above and below me.
Pretty good game! Lag spikes as the beginning and end of each round were annoying but ultimately didn't seem to matter.
I personally would have liked it if you couldn't pickup hearts when you were at full health but I guess that's just one feature that makes the game harder. (I accidentally ate two heart pickups when trying to get away from enemies :slight_frown:)
Sadly I didn't see the note about high scores. My high score was 2375.
I think my main problem with this game is that it's too short! The first time I played I only got through one choice before it ended. Thankfully there are actually a few more branches than that, I just didn't hit them the first time through.
One thing: I think the planet graphics would be better as vector graphics.
Pretty good gameplay but man is this game hard. There are a couple problems that I want to try to enumerate so that my feedback can be of some use. :smile: I couldn't get past world 2-2 so that'll be my main jumping off point.
The first one is that your gun fires really slowly and with a very short range. The rate at which it fires makes it possible to dodge maybe one bullet at a time from the normal enemies, which I think is the primary reason I couldn't get past world 2-2. The rocket guy at the beginning shoots rockets so fast and the only way I could ever get around them was to shoot the first one and then somehow maneuver around the second one. Part of this was due to the fact that sometimes the rocket would be not exactly level with my character so there was no way to shoot it at all.
And that brings up another problem: the rockets in the second world are really hard to maneuver around. In my experience I more or less could not jump over them, which meant my only option was to sort of run away, and I had to have a bit of luck to pull it off.
However both of these things are relatively forgiveable. I think they could even be left as is and the game could be fine. I think my main problem is that shooting is really unresponsive. I usually would try to shoot right as a bullet got to me and I would always die instead. (This also happened on world 2-2). On the world 2-1 boss I in fact generally would allow a few moments of lag time so that I would not die when hitting his bullets, but then of course I was always worried I would be too far away... :)
Perhaps the player bullets should be prioritized over enemy bullets somehow so that you generally don't die when trying to fire them out of the air. You could maybe even have a frame of invincibility when shooting although some testing would be necessary to see if that worked right.
I think the other thing that generally would help is creating a more predictable pattern when two enemies are on the same floor. I was unable to kill both enemies on the bottom floor of world 2-2 once I finally got down there a few times as they would usually begin firing before I was able to.
I should say though that I do, as a general rule, like a lot of what I played. I had some real fun but I just got frustrated when certain mechanics felt really unfair to me. In particular the player platforming feels pretty good for the most part although you can get trapped on the corners of enemies and that's basically a death sentence.
I do have two criticisms of the art, if you don't mind: First, I can't always tell when something is a platform or background. The first time I saw the orange bricks I thought they were lava, and when I saw the blue tiles in world 2-2 I at first thought they were solid platforms and so I died once to that mistake. I'm afraid I'm not enough of an artist to tell you how to fix this problem, just thought I should mention it.
Second, I always tell people when I see it to never mix pixel art resolutions. In my opinion it practically never will look as good as pixel art that is all drawn as the same resolution.
As far as rotating pixel art goes, I think that's kind of up to the individual. To be clear, I'm talking specifically about scaling up your pixel art, and then rotating it. If you rotate a graphic, and then it's rendered pixel-perfect with the rest of your graphics I think that looks good (I did it in my own game) but if you scale up your pixel art and then rotate it, it isn't pixel perfect and in my personal opinion pixel-perfect graphics are always better. However I think this is definitely more personal preference, I used to actually prefer it the other way around (sort of).
Anyways, hope this feedback helps and doesn't come across too harshly. You gave me some great feedback on my game and I wanted to reciprocate. :smile:
@Shelvid Yeah, I didn't think the lag when shooting was a programmed lag--I guess I should have been more clear. It just *feels* laggy because I can't process the game as quickly as a computer, which is why it would be good to compensate with a little extra leeway.
For example, I don't know if you did this, but a lot of platformers will add "coyote-time" -- you will still be allowed to jump for a few frames after you leave a platform, as sometimes when people *feel like* they press the button "right on the edge" they are already off of the platform a little bit.
Neat game. I liked the music.
I think my favorite mechanic is that different blocks can only be built in certain ways, although it was a little buggy (sometimes I was able to build dirt on the sides of things).
Super neat game! I loved the text effects and how the world assembled itself around you (reminded me of Bastion). Music is great as well.
I just wish it were clearer what to do. I did manage to get to the end of the game but I couldn't tell exactly how I did it. Are you meant to reassemble some of the phrases? If so that's really cool but I think could be accentuated with some animation and sound effects so you know you did it right. Something like a piano arpeggio to fit with the rest of the sound.
Anyways, great job.
Very strange. Cool game. I like the bending lamp post.
The arcade portion I think is a little hard to control but I did manage to beat it.
Pretty darn good for eight hours. I really like the player character, rolling around on a bunch of wheels is a ton of fun.
I think the midair jumping control is a little non-intuitive. It seems like the left and right controls are swapped and should rotate you the other way.
Neat game. The first five or so rounds the item I needed was the very first one available so I was kind of wondering what the challenge was. And then the item I needed was buried behind like six items so I kind of got it.
I'm not entirely sure how the gameplay could be balanced so that you couldn't eventually be screwed over by the RNG but I think if that were possible it could work pretty well.
I think the art style is pretty cool.
A straightforward concept that works pretty well as an arcade game. It's just incredibly difficult in it's current incarnation: I had a consistent downward trend every time I played. It's really hard to fend off all the robbers as they move really fast, and I really couldn't use the movement controls to dodge anybody because the game is so fast-paced.
I think maybe a difficulty ramp would be a good idea, so the game would start out a little easier at the beginning (like most arcade-type games).
I think YouTube Tycoon is a solid concept for a game, it just needs more time to be implemented properly. I definitely think having more complex mechanics would be the main thing; the primary thing I think I would change is have your subscription rate not just be a constant negative, but have it go up and down relatively noisily with a varying trend depending on the quality of your content (i.e. have it start out with a downward trend but if you regularly upload good content it would change to an upward trend, etc...)
Definitely like the enthusiasm. :smile: Keep it up!
Reminds me a little bit of Runescape. Could be a good starting point for that kind of game.
Although I'm not exactly an expert artist, one thing I always recommend is to never ever combine multiple resolutions of pixel art. It almost always looks a little off. It might be acceptable when it's different between the game and the UI but aside from that I think it's generally a mistake.
Fine first jam game. Sadly I was unable to complete it as I could never seem to get across the world without my jump failing at some point. :slight_frown:
Anyways, as this is just a first game, I don't want to be too harsh. So these points of feedback are meant to just be pretty commonplace advice that are relevant to this game. - It is very important for enemies to have some indication that they are going to attack you. This gives the player a chance to dodge enemies. I was actually more or less unable to fight the enemies in your game as I couldn't figure out a way to do it without being hit myself. - Other than that, player feedback in general--i.e. indications to the player that things are happening--is very important. This includes particle effects, animations, sounds, that happen when you attack, or take damage, or anything else, really. Many first-game-jam-games don't have great player feedback, so this is a pretty commonplace piece of advice. - I say this every time I see it: in my opinion, mixing pixel art resolutions is almost always a bad idea. There are a lot of schools of thought on pixel art: whether you should rotate it, whether everything should be pixel-perfect, etc, but in general I think the simplest possible improvement to all pixel art is to make sure that it is all drawn at the same resolution. For example, the player character in your game has much larger pixels than the ground tiles, which looks a little off. If they had the same size of pixels the game would look more consistent.
Here's something though: the player movement in this game does feel pretty good. The player accelerates and decelerates quickly but not instantaneously, which is generally a good feel for characters that are meant to be very responsive. And the jumping feels good (when it works), although it could potentially be improved with variable jump height.
Anyways, hope you had fun and will participate again. :thumbsup:
@banksho
What I mean by mixing pixel art resolutions is pretty simple: despite the fact that you want less detail on the player, you should still make sure that it has the same size pixels as the ground. I guess "resolution" might be the wrong term for this. It's really just that, in my opinion (you're free to disagree!), every 'pixel' in your game should be the same size. So if one object in your game is 2x wider and 3x taller than another object, it should have 2x the pixels horizontally and 3x vertically.
This is how pixel art naturally works on e.g. old game consoles: if you look at any old NES game, all the pixels will be the same size.
Other examples include games like Celeste.
Or, just to be absolutely clear, I made an example: pixel_art_scaling.png
Your game is similar to the image on the left. I advocate art like the image on the right. This can be done either by drawing your player character in a higher resolution, or by drawing everything else in a lower resolution. My game this jam I drew my player in a pretty darn small resolution, which resulted in the tiles in my game only being 4x4 pixels. I actually added detail to them by having a whole bunch of variations of each tile.
Again, there's no rule against art like on the left. But art like on the right is just much more consistent.
As far as sprite rotation: what I meant is specifically relevant to how your player sprite is rotated during the attack animation. For simply changing directions, flipping the player sprite horizontally is a great technique that saves time (that's what I did this very game jam!). If you have a character that's particularly asymmetrical you may want to draw two sets of animations, one for each direction, but for a game jam that's not super important.
So, when I talk about sprite rotation, I mean when your player attacks, the whole sprite is rotated in a way that it is no longer aligned to a pixel grid. Basically, there are a few (purely aesthetic!) options related to rotating pixel art. It's completely fine to rotate pixel art, but depending on the aesthetic you want, you may want to change how your rotations work so that they are more "pixel-perfect": i.e. instead of having a square pixel that is pointed at a 45 degree angle, all your pixels are still axis-aligned but they represent a rotated sprite. This is something I experimented with this game jam and I think it looks pretty good, but again, it's 100% up to your tastes, and in my personal opinion, much less important than having all pixels be the same size.
Here's an example: rotating_pixel_art_example.png
Your game does the thing on the left. My game does the thing on the right. From this image it isn't obvious why you'd prefer the thing on the right, and I must admit that for *static* sprites it looks pretty bad. I think it looks okay in my game because it always happens during a continuous rotation. I have previously made games that used the technique on the left instead, and I want to be clear that I definitely think that's legit. I'm just trying to let you know of the options. :smile:
So yeah, I noticed that your enemies do have something of an attack animation, but they apply damage basically as soon as you touch them. You definitely want to change it so that your enemies only actually do damage to the player at some point during their attack animation. There are many, many ways to do this, varying by game engine. One way is to create a timer that is set to 0 at the beginning of the attack animation and incremented by delta time every tick, and then once the timer reaches a certain point, that's when you perform your damage.
I'm not sure if it helps, but [here's](https://github.com/HoneyPony/sandbox-ctf/blob/master/item_pickup.gd#L54) a place I did this in my own Ludum Dare game. The 'anim' variable is the animation timer, and once it reaches one second ('anim > 1') the game performs an action (in this case, removing the object performing the animation).
Okay, I ran out of space in my last comment. If there's anything else you'd like clarified I can try. :smile:
Actually I did want to mention: for the example of animation I gave at the very end of my comment, you can see that I'm doing `anim += dt * 2`. This is actually because this was a cheap way to speed the animation up by 2x. Usually I would just do `anim += dt`.
@BankSho
Okay, so when I'm talking about rotating sprites I don't mean making a new sprite for the animation. Rotating the sprite the way you did is cool and good. What you can do is change how the sprite is rendered so that it is pixel perfect. So you can still just have a single sprite that is rotated, but tweak the rendering options so that you get the aesthetic that you want. In Godot this is a single checkbox, more or less; it might be more complicated in Unity...
Also, you should take my advice about rotating sprites with a HUGE grain of salt. Knowing the options you have for pixel-art related aesthetics, and how to get the exact look you want, is very important. But it's also pretty irrelevant to the fundamental aspects of game development, and has no material impact on almost any other part of the game. The reason I pointed this out is specifically because it is related to your game and I wanted to come up with relevant things. But you should not put much thought into it until you have a pretty solid understanding of the actual gameplay of your game, and then what aesthetic you want. If you like how your game looks right now, you can keep it that way!
I should also mention that all this is biased due to my recent experience. I very recently started looking into tweaking my pixel-art aesthetics (and, in particular, rotating sprites), so it's something that's very fresh on my mind. But this is something I started looking into *five years* after doing my first Ludum Dare. So if you want to deal with it, that's cool! But I just don't want you to have the impression that this is a ridiculously important thing. :smile:
Okay, so that line is based on a lot of parametric math. It consists of two main parts. The first part is `interpolate_position * (1.0 - anim) + player.position * anim`. `anim` as a variable ranges from `0` to `1` seconds, and so this part results in a linear interpolation between `interpolate_position` and `player.position` between the start and end of the animation. This is because, at `anim = 0`, `interpolate_position` is weighted `(1 - 0)`, or `1`, and `player.position` is weighted `0`, so the total is `interpolate_position * 1 + player.position * 0`, so it's just `interpolate_position`. This logic applies backwards once `anim` equals 1, and for every value between `0` and `1`, we get a linear mix between the two. For example, at `anim = 0.25`, we get `interpolate_position * 0.75 + player.position * 0.25`. This is a pretty common concept called [linear interpolation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_interpolation).
Now, in context, this is animating an item pickup flying from it's original location to the player, so with just the linear interpolation, we get an animation of the item pickup moving straight to the player. This is where the `parabola` function comes in. The parabola is a function that adds additional height to the item pickup, so that it will fly in a parabola instead of a line. I came up with the parabola function by tweaking the factors in a normal quadratic function until they fit exactly what I wanted. You can play with the graph [here](https://www.desmos.com/calculator/dlt4yjktf9) (I actually used Desmos to help me come up with the function). On the graphing calculator I linked you, the `A` variable changes the height of the parabola.
As you can see, the parabola I came up with starts and ends at 0 additional height, at times `anim` = 0 and `anim` = 1. Then, in the middle, at `anim` = 0.5, the parabola reaches its maximum height. The end result of all this is that if I add the parabola as additional height, the item pickups will now fly in a parabolic arc instead of a (relatively boring :wink:) line.
So yeah. I hope that's clear enough. Most of these things become a lot easier to come up with yourself once you've had a lot of practice with algebra, and, in particular, parametric functions (which I did not learn about until I took calculus).
Anyways: If you iterate on your game I'll definitely take another look at it. :thumbsup:
Sorry that I'm not the best at explaining things but I will try. :smile:
Also, yeah, I looked at this game for a reason... you never sent me your game but I remembered that you originally left a comment on one of my posts and so I went back and found your profile. I didn't want to break my promise that I'd look at your game! :smile:
@banksho
With respect to the Desmos graph I sent you, the scale was actually completely arbitrary. :smile: (You can see that it can be set to any particular value with the 'A' slider). For an upwards-facing parabola you would of course set the scale to a positive number.
In my game though, I did in fact use a negative scale (-12, according to the source code) - this is because, in Godot, negative Y is up and positive Y is down. So for a parabola that arcs upward in Godot (in 2D), you need a negative scale. :smile:
One thing I'd like to mention: I can't think of a whole lot of uses for polynomials, in particular, in game development. The quadratic that we've been discussing is one I came up with purely for aesthetic purposes, and although knowing algebra was useful in helping me find the right numbers, I did more or less just tweak the various factors until I got the shape I was looking for.
I mean, understanding polynomials is definitely helpful. Polynomials are helpful in understanding physics, they're helpful if you're doing cubic splines, and I'm sure there's a lot of other places that they might sneak up. I just can't think of a whole lot of places where I've personally applied a whole lot of my algebra education on polynomials. :smile:
One other thing: I would definitely recommend developing an understanding of linear interpolation. It's hard to really contextualize it without having learned about vectors and parametric equations, and things like that, but it is a relatively common concept in game development, and it helps you understand interpolation in the general case. Also, in case my last post was at all misleading: linear interpolation is more or less entirely unrelated to polynomials.
Okay so I've played the updated version of the game. One thing that was improved a lot is the platforming. The jump feels pretty satisfying now (and the physics don't seem to be very glitchy) which is great. I still feel like the platforming is a little awkward, but not for reasons that are necessarily your fault. If you're interested in trying to make it even better, I would recommend looking up coyote frames / grace frames. Basically what you do is you allow the player to jump for the frames immediately after they leave the ground. So if I walk off an edge I still have a small window where I'm allowed to jump. This makes jumping off of edges easier and also helps deal with the amount of input latency that there can be on modern computers.
As far as the graphics go, I do think they are improved. The level of detail on the player's eyes and mouth (and the enemies eyes and mouth) is, in my opinion, too low compared to the level of detail on the weapons and level tiles. Or, in opposite terms, the level of detail on the weapons and level tiles is too high compared to the player sprites. I can see that things are definitely close in resolution, but the player is still a little out of place (in my opinion). I do want to emphasize that you should do it however you like it; it is merely my opinion that consistent level of detail is better.
Also, if I'm not wrong, you do have the player rotating the way I recommended? I actually do think it looks better in this case. Again though, you can disagree if you like and rotate your sprites however you want. :)
One note on the jump animation, which I think will actually be helpful: So I like that you have the stretch effect. Squishy and stretchy animations are super cool and can really help emphasize motion. Best I can tell, it is volume conserving, which is what you want. (i.e. when you decrease the width you want to increase the height so that volume remains constant; I think your animation accomplishes this).
However, once you reach the apex of the jump arc, you should actually not be stretched vertically, but actually squashed horizontally. The jump animation should go from normal proportions, to stretched vertically, to very briefly either normal proportions or squashed horizontally (at the apex of the jump), back to stretched vertically, and finally back to normal.
This is I believe the correct way to animate it. I did just try animating a square like this and it looks a little weird, so I'm not entirely sure. But everything I've done in animation makes me think that's the way to do it, so that's why I said it. Lol. I guess my advice is: try different animations, do whichever one you like best. The vertical stretch alone makes it feel a lot better than regular old jumping, so keep that in any case.
I see you also made some comments about player feedback. I think that yeah, having the enemies not immediately damage you is definitely a good improvement. I think maybe it could be improved by having a brief animation where the enemies prepare for swinging and then swing their weapon; while they are swinging their weapon they do damage, while they are preparing to swing the player knows to get out of the way. This is actually a pretty common thing but I can't remember what it's called right now, sorry.
And just to be clear, I'm not saying your player feedback doesn't work. It's definitely a solution. But on the animation side of things, having the swing animation always damage the player makes more sense, and so having the indication that the enemy is going to attack be a separate animation makes more sense.
Hopefully all my rambling helps some. Again sorry that I completely forgot about this for a few months. I hope you'll participate in the next Ludum Dare. See ya then. :)
Definitely one of the best games I've played this Ludum Dare. The platforming had a couple issues, but was overall enjoyable, and the level design was engaging.
One thing I have to give kudos for is the difficulty curve. At least for the non-boss screens, it works very well. I can't imagine how hard it is to get that right as I usually become so good at my Ludum Dare games that it would all seem too easy... In fact, after I beat the game, I played through up until the boss again and it was substantially easier. So just getting the difficulty curve right was very cool.
There are a couple small points of friction in the platforming: - Jumping off of edges can be difficult. I'm guessing you don't have 'grace frames' / 'coyote frames' implemented as those generally fix that problem. - Getting the sling to register was not always easy. In particular during the screen with all the slings in the boss fight, I repeatedly would miss the sling I wanted and then would accidentally shoot myself down. - There was some sort of glitch (?) where I would suddenly have a ton of speed when running up a wall (like 2x more than normal). This happened multiple times and killed me each time.
I think the camera controller worked pretty well, although the way it's implemented does mean you don't see as far in the direction of your movement.
As far as graphics goes, I think a lot of the graphics look good, but the parallax layers look a little strange with the low detail + blur.
Overall though great game.
Neat game. I was a little confused how to play (and I'm still not sure how to get to the blue screen in your final screenshot) but eventually I got that it was a modularized high-score game which is an interesting idea.
I think the art is pretty good but I still point this out every time I see it: I think combining multiple resolutions of pixel art is never a good idea. It's pretty subtle in this game so I think it might be relatively straightforward to make all the pixels the same size.
One thing I'd like to mention: I saw in other comment you guys made that the Windows version is behind due to compiling problems. I'd like to mention that you're allowed to re-build your project whenever you want post-compo (and even port it to completely different platforms) as long as all the content was finished during the compo. So if you have content that was finished during the competition that you can get into the Windows build by just compiling, you totally should.
Really good game. I was unable to find all the recipes by myself, I had to look through the source code to see what I could do with the corn. I think I just forgot to try it, but I also may have missed it because sometimes it's hard to tell when two objects will interact (i.e. hard to see the outline on the object you're holding). I think I kept expecting there to also be an outline on the object that I could interact with.
Aside from that everything looks really good and is animated well, and the music is pretty fantastic too. Overall the game feels more or less complete, which is awesome.
Good start to a game. I like the first screen, it was done very well; the colors showing up over time was cool. I didn't play long enough to run into the boss as it seemed like not much was happening.
I did manage to crash the game by walking off the grass downwards.
One thing: I originally wasn't going to play because I'm not on Linux. You should add a link called "Windows" to your submission so people will know it's available on Windows as well.
Love the graphics. Remind me a bit of Limbo.
I'm afraid the game is way too hard for me. I lost about half my health bar per big spider so it didn't seem like I would be able to get all 13.
I think maybe the attack should be more controllable. Only a small portion of the attack animation really has a chance to hit anything and you don't appear to have an ability to aim the attack. I think it would be more useful if you could click where you wanted to attack and your character would swing the sword there, and if the animation was only like 0.3 seconds (even if it had some cooldown).
This game definitely seems inspired by the GROW series... :smile:
I was only able to get two endings (the "Nothing special" and the aliens). It seems pretty hard to get the other ones as there's just so many combinations. I tried orders that seemed like they might make sense but to no avail.
I definitely think audio would add to the experience, and maybe some kind of animation.
Awesome concept. I love games like Opus Magnum and this is a great idea. Only problem is the game clearly doesn't want you to build a long add-a-to-everything pipe, as my a's were never arriving at the same time as my other letters. I think the combining pipes should just hold on to each letter they receive until another one shows up because otherwise I think timing it is pretty hard.
One tiny thing: please don't capture the mouse. That made it harder to write down some notes when planning my pipeline.
This one definitely deserves a 5 in theme though. One of the best uses of the theme I've seen.
@palemek Forcing more interesting combinations is definitely a legitimate goal. Although one option if you go the Opus Magnum route is to just let the player choose what things to prioritize in their individual solution.
If you do want to force more interesting solutions I wonder if one option would be a cap on the number of combinations a single letter can go through, or maybe a cap on how many of a certain piece you can place on the board. The timing issue can be one way to do it but just seems too non-deterministic.
Nice to see another Godot game. :P
Anyways, cool game. At first I was overwhelmed by trying to find a combination that would let me not die, but as soon as I figured out that apples restored more points than they cost to build, the game was pretty easy: I just went in circles around the map and activated every rune. Other people said that the whole world caught on fire but that didn't really happen for me. There were some interesting things that showed up due to the runes (such as mountains and fish) but I never would have found them on my own as there's no real reason to craft things when there's no obvious incentive to do so and that uses up valuable valuable points.
I wonder if the point system is playing out the way it's meant to, as right now it more or less just serves as a requirement to make a tree every five or so steps and a disincentive to look into the other recipes. I don't imagine that was the original goal of it.
The game was laggy on my computer as well. I'm not sure if that's just due to Godot's 3D support being relatively young or if there's something weird in the game that could be optimized.
I do like how the game has a sort of GROW feel to it without being particularly similar in mechanics.
Neat game. Some of the halloween games I've seen seem a little too gimmicky to turn into a real game but I could actually see this as a full game with a kind of cartoony zany feel to it.
That's because the story is pretty good for a trick-or-treating game. Alien lifeforms coming to earth to trick or treat is a great premise for a silly game.
As it stands the gameplay does get repetitive quickly as it takes a while to ramp up. I think if it was a more story-oriented game with levels of increasing difficulty rather than an arcade game that could work better.
Lots of very good player feedback (sounds and particle effects). For the most part this game feels very well put-together.
However, I did find that a lot of the time I was disoriented as to which screen I was on. I'm not entirely sure why this is but it happened quite a few times. The arrows being in different places also made it difficult to navigate between screens. I'm wondering if there would be any way to make the game just one screen? Or maybe have an option for camera controls that scroll up and down the world smoothly rather than one screen at a time?
I'm guessing this game is too hard for me to win, personally. Perhaps if the timer was shorter I would give it more of an effort but as it is the robots get my levers around two minutes in so waiting out that much time repeatedly would be a bit of a chore.
It took me a while to figure out what everything did. Eventually I got it, and then it seemed much too grindy, so I simply went and fought the boss and actually managed to win, although I kind of cheesed it. It appears you can kind of stun-lock the boss and, if you're at the right side of the screen, you'll also end up destroying most of the stinger projectiles so you won't get hit too much.
I did like the gameplay but I just think it should be a bit faster, especially to unlock the ranged weapon.
I also like the art, for the most part.
Cool game! It took a little while to figure out but then it made a lot of sense and went pretty smoothly. The only problem I think is that it takes so much cereal to get the stable, because by the time I had enough guys to generate cereal fast enough, everybody wanted milk, and then I didn't have enough money for the stable.
Aside from that, the art and sound is good and the gameplay is pretty fun.
Good game. I think one thing it's missing is certain graphical components (i.e. materials moving around on your parts) although this might already exist for the conveyor belts (I didn't use any).
I do think that it would be more interesting if there were more combinations you had to make out of the materials inside the factory.
One thing I really like is how well the game flows. All the placeable parts are oriented in the way that it is easiest to combine them, and the objective system steers the player really clearly to where they have to go and what they have to do.
@Richnou Just added AZERTY support (I think...) Thanks for the heads-up.
@Weine Out of curiosity, were you playing the web version or the windows version? The lag is a real shame. Sadly GDScript is the only supported language for web export and Godot's tilemaps aren't necessarily optimal for this kind of game...
I suppose it might be in my best interest to try to come up with an optimized version so that people can rate based on the intended gameplay rather than the laggy version. :smiley:
@toxiccomputer I definitely agree. I don't know if I'm allowed to fix that post-compo but maybe I'll go for it anyways so as to save some people's ears.
@niterich I'm pretty sure about the partial credit thing. Right now I have only 18.5 ratings given despite the fact that I have graded every category in every game so far.
This number actually stacks up pretty significantly: I have actually graded 20 games in total but I'm only credited for 18.5. That's more than 1 less than the actual number, so pretty darn bad.
@cdunham: Yeah the enemy spawn rate is way too high (even though I cut it down several times while developing). The best way to fight is to wait to craft a sword until you have copper, as enemies won't spawn until you have a sword.
Weird that it crashed. There is supposed to be a spawn cap on the enemies and I never activated it during testing, maybe it got activated but had a bug. Sadly GDScript is not statically typed so there were a lot of bugs that would only show up if I actually went through a certain code path.
EDIT: Yep, enemy spawn limit has a bug. It should be fixed now.
@shelvid If you have any specific recommendations on early gameplay I'd love to hear them :smile:
As it stands it only takes a few minutes to get through all the mining / crafting in the game so I'm not even really sure where the slowdown would be--maybe just in how slow it takes to dig?
I didn't spend much time adjusting the player controller physics so I can see how that could be a problem.
Glad you liked the art and music. I certainly tried.
Anyways thanks for the constructive criticism! Probably the most helpful things I've heard so far. :smile:
@shelvid yeah the CTF genre definitely doesn't come through. If I had human players competing it would work a lot better--to give you some background I was inspired by a few Minecraft multiplayer game modes I played a long time ago and had a ton of fun with.
I was more thinking of your criticism simply in the genre of "Terraria-clone," where I think it's less applicable. That's why I was so confused. :smile:
@DragonZBW Out of curiosity, were you playing on the web version or Windows version? I imagine lag might make player movement feel especially slow on the web version.
@dragonzbw Thanks. I do more or less agree, the movement speed could definitely be turned up. It is fast enough to walk the whole map in about a minute so hopefully not too bad.
@simon-parzer You probably didn't miss much, the "capture the flag" aspect is more like "farm enemies until you get a certain drop" :smile:
I have actually played through my game twice now and it wasn't too much of a pain to get the red flag, but it is relatively rare so I don't blame anyone for not going through all the trouble to get it.
@itsdanidre The crafting UI is definitely a weak point. I was kind of going for the Terraria crafting interface, but Terraria has a few extra polishes that make it work a lot better, including a big list of all the recipes so you can just click the one you want, and better responsiveness to how your crafting options change (i.e. mine won't load new recipes until you close and re-open the inventory).
In the end I figured it was good enough as I really didn't have time to fix it up. :smile:
Really neat game. Love the graphical effect, as everyone else. I think the dream mood could be much enhanced with a few tweaks: first, oftentimes I couldn't even see my paintings, as they were too dimly lit. Second, I think they should be distorted somehow, probably nothing too fancy, but even just making them "melt" or something could add to the effect.
I will say that the mirror at the end gave me a small fright (but didn't feel like a jump-scare), so good job there.
I am just a little disturbed by how big the download is. I guess Unreal Engine can be a bit of a beast.
I think that mining asteroids could be super awesome if they were vector shapes that chunks were cut out of as you mined them.
I didn't figure out how to craft anything other than the top rock-locking thing and a green thing with an arrow on it. I tried pushing the interact button but it didn't seem to do anything. I also never figured out how to refill hunger or energy. I would definitely suggest putting some more instructions on this page.
I like the music.
Cool concept. I think having the player have to wander around a world looking for specific things could make for very interesting level design, especially if there was several different choices at each point in the game.
I liked the graphics for the world.
One nitpick: The screen shake is too high, I think.
I got to the graveyard but couldn't get past there. The art style is kinda neat but, combined with the small cone of light, was really disorienting and gave me a headache :(
Cool game nonetheless. Just needs some polishing to work out the bugs and make it clearer how to progress.
Very cool. Having to figure out which two characters to interact is a really unique mechanic. Music, sound, and graphics are all pretty good.
The number of character interactions that is possible is absolutely insane. I didn't check all of them out but having the possibility of any two characters interacting with each other is crazy.
When I went through the elevator it looked like it flashed one floor and then another, and for a while I thought the game must have somehow skipped a floor, but apparently it didn't.
This is a really good game. Incredibly polished for a jam game, with a complete story and a complete set of levels.
I certainly had trouble with the stages involving the birds. One thing I thought might help is if their projectile was *faster*, as once I walked sideways into a bird dropping that was just a few frames from despawning, and I really wasn't expecting to die. Eventually the way I beat the last level was by carefully waiting for every single bird dropping to fall before going past enemies on the top row, and just getting lucky on the middle row with all the breaking platforms.
One note on polish: With the moving platforms it could be nice to have better cycles. In particular, one of the levels, the first time I got to a moving platform, I was not on cycle, and I had to wait. If the platforms picked their cycle as you got to them, not when you loaded in the room, they could feel slightly better. Of course this might not be feasible when combined with the look up/down mechanics but I think it's something to think about.
This is especially egregious when the unpredictability of playing through a level with enemies means that, unlike in a game like Celeste, there can't be a level designed with a pattern where you usually get to the moving platform at the same time.
That is of course a minor nitpick but in a game that's so well polished I think it makes sense to ask how it could be even more polished. :smile:
Fantastic game. Great graphics, great music (reminds me of Marble Blast Ultra).
There's only one thing I didn't like: the platforming was kind of awkward. Your jump seems almost too triangular..? I think probably the main problem is your horizontal velocity is pretty low compared to your jump height. It also can help to have a variable jump height although I don't think that would have helped much in this game.
Good concept and effective implementation. There are only two real pieces of feedback I have:
- It's really unclear what you're supposed to do. At first I thought that the number at the top was a timer and you had to stay at the flag for that long, so my first attempt, I left the flag, and then couldn't get back up, so I restarted.
Next, I thought it must be the number of enemies you had to kill, but I still thought you weren't allowed to leave the flag while doing that, so it was really hard to complete the levels where you couldn't see where the remaining enemies were.
I finally figured out that it was just remaining enemies with no other limitations, but that was really unclear and the game makes it very easy to get a wrong idea of the expectations.
- There really needs to be some way to look and see what's around you. On the last level I failed initially because I jumped down and landed right on an enemy. I eventually decided to just stand on the flag platform and fire randomly in circles until I hit every enemy, as there was no real way to make sure I wouldn't jump on one again.
@tort60091 The flag is a fine concept, it just needs to be explained better the exact goal after getting to the flag.
Solid concept. Surprisingly difficult: I made a few tries but I couldn't get past the second level. The first level took two tries because I couldn't tank the boss the first time around.
My one primary critique is that there's no indication of how many blocks you can hold, you just have to figure out that it increases by two for every yellow dot.
Aw, so short! :(
I think the way the game used the dash mechanic was actually rather interesting though, or at least could be interesting. Having it as your only method of avoiding hazards can lead to some unique level design, as you have to move somewhat unconventionally. The place this showed up in the game was at the spikes with the fire around them, as you had to steer into the spikes and then dash out.
The squish sound effect I kinda liked, although it maybe could use some tweaking.
Pretty neat little game. Has a very unique atmosphere and graphical style.
My main point of feedback is that it is surprisingly hard to learn what to do. I tried several times to simply keep jumping in midair over the spikes, as the platform hadn't shown up yet. I had no idea there would actually be a platform to stand on until I died multiple times and decided to wait a while after the game booted up. It simply takes too long for the platform to show up for it to be obvious to the player that there will be a platform at all.
I think the way I would fix that is by not granting the player control until the platform is on the bottom of the screen.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed it once I figured it out. It was particularly fun to pull off a jump in between two red squares. I did find that recovering after I got hit was kind of hard, because the screen flashing red was rather distracting. But I did manage to get something like 60 points?
I also think the systems that give you extra jumps and health are not very clear. But it didn't matter too much because it was clear enough that getting points was the goal.
Overall, nice arcade game with a very unique atmosphere.
Lots of good stuff in this game. I like the gameplay, and I enjoyed the narration. Personally, the narration, especially the opening narration, reminded of of Little Big Planet.
It took me quite a while to figure out that I could interact with the mask, and that I had to talk to Martin to solve the band problem. I believe someone else also mentioned this--Stewart tells you to talk to Coolio, but that doesn't actually help you come up with the new name. I guess I sort of assumed that my player implicitly put on a disguise because nobody was freaking out? Like, the tutorial kind of made me think I would need to find a disguise before talking to anybody, but it turned out I just needed one before talking to Martin.
I also never really felt like I actually solved the robot puzzle? Like, I got the Boss to not fire Martin, and then the game apparently thought that the robot was no longer going to kill him..?
As far as the writing, I thought it was mostly pretty good, although the writing around Robin seemed a little needlessly awkward.
All told, a good entry. Definitely feels like a complete game.
Pretty fun game. The first screen with the sawblades was very frustrating--perhaps I was not using the intended strategy. It felt like sometimes when you jumped into a wall, you would turn around, and sometimes you wouldn't...?
In general I would say my main criticism of the game is that some of the jumps seem too precise given how limited your platforming abilities are. But overall it's not too bad, it can just take a few tries to actually nail the timing on all the jumps.
I like the music, although it might be a little too somber, I'm not quite sure. As far as graphics--I usually point this out when I see it--I don't really like mixed pixel art resolutions (i.e. in one of the levels there was a big block, made out of larger pixels than the surrounding elements). This is of course a personal artistic choice but in my opinion it's better to avoid. :shrug:
I generally liked the game. It has a good amount of puzzle solving, and a good amount of platforming. One thing I like in particular is how many levels there are. Making a lot of levels is quite an accomplishment for a jam game. :smile:
Also, here's my final level solution! :smile: FrijoleSolution.png
One small note: it took some time to figure out which team I was. I think you should add a note to your game description.
I think there are two things that make is pretty hard to get into this game. The first thing that is there really isn't any concrete feeling that any of the options (default, surge, protect) change anything. I think at the very least some sort of way to visually tell apart which options you have chosen would make it feel like your choices matter more.
The other thing is that the controls are really hard to figure out. I had almost quit playing this game, and had most of my review written out, when I finally managed to decipher what the rotation was supposed to do. Suddenly I wasn't stuck and I could actually make progress by rearranging my more powerful cells.
Once you get into this game it's actually a good bit of fun. Having your guys snake across the map through a series of rotations to crush the enemy... pretty neat. However I'm not sure I understand the mechanics well enough to beat a bigger map than the default.
In particular, I'm not really sure how the early game works. I haven't managed to figure out what causes all the cells to merge together is those big moving lines.
This game does kind of remind me of a somewhat similar game called Tentacle Wars. In that game, you can see the energy each cell is sending to each neighboring cell. I think a similar visual would really make this game easier to understand.
Anyways, I hope some of my feedback was helpful. I'm not the biggest strategy game player so maybe I'm not the best audience. :smile:
Pretty good game. There's a very nice little story with some neat gameplay progression. Reusing the alchemy system for the story and the combat system is an interesting mechanic.
I originally found the fact that seeds had to be placed in a specific order a little annoying, it didn't seem to serve much purpose and seemed like a UI oversight more than anything else. But later I came to appreciate that as a puzzle-solving aspect of the game. I think it is a good puzzle, but the graphics and UI need more emphasis on the fact that seeds have to be placed in a specific order, otherwise it just feels incomplete rather than puzzle-y.
I think the combat could use a little tweaking. Sometimes I would try somewhat complicated combinations of flowers to no avail, and I would end up just wasting seeds. I think if planted flowers were more powerful when using more seeds, that would be better. Or maybe just have there be more recipes that are easy to remember? In the final fight I did remember the purple flower recipe because it was relatively straightforward. But I would be hard-pressed to remember the red flower recipe.
Overall though, very nice game, I enjoyed myself playing it. :smile:
Pretty cool concept. The rhyming aspect is definitely interesting, although sadly it's not as significant after the first time you lose a level.
I felt like the huge amounts of time that came between some of the beats was kind of difficult to deal with. It's not like a traditional rhythm game where you can miss quite a few things as long as you get into the general flow--because there isn't a lot of flow that happens between some of the beats. This might not be a problem--as it seems like it may be appropriate for the genre at hand. But it still might be good to think of ways to make sure the player can always feel the "pulse," perhaps simply by having them sing more of the words..? Like, maybe you could have a single button that you had to hit when the blue ball hit a word already on screen, and then you also had to hit the other buttons to choose the rhymes that finish each verse.
One other thing: when the blue ball was moving really slowly, it was really easy to completely mess up. Like, I would often hit the button when I thought the blue ball was about to change direction, but it was actually still moving down for a significant amount of time. I think maybe just a visual indicator of where the blue ball will touch down would help with that.
All in all, very unique rhythm game, and the gameplay that's there is pretty good.
Very intuitive game. It took me very little time to figure it out--although I did not figure out why my beam would sometimes turn transparent and stop working.
I think my primary point of pain would be the controls. It was kind of awkward moving my mouse up to the toolbar and then back to the screen, and it was not super easy to target where I wanted by rotating the planet. I think the controls could be made more smooth, and keyboard controls for the different tools would be a good addition.
Overall, solid little game, has a good variety of interacting mechanics while still being very straightforward to learn.
I like the combination of providing for the Unicore's needs while at the same time fending off the bad guys. I did feel like the spawn rates of the various resources might sometimes put you in a pretty tough spot--for example, no Mind resources spawned in for me until the Unicore's Mind bar was at half a heart. But I guess that does add a lot of dimension to the difficulty, so it's probably fine (as long as the game never makes it *impossible* to fill the bars).
Overall pretty good.
Really cool game! The combat was fun and got more engaging as your progressed through the game. I do think that ultimately the game ended up being a little repetitive, and could use a couple extra mechanics that would make it more engaging. Or it could be cut down a bit.
Either way, I enjoyed playing it.
One tiny thing: I almost missed out on the ending cutscene because I didn't realize I had to click to move it forward. A little thing that said "click to continue" or something would probably be good.
It took me a while to figure out what to do. At first I thought I just had to put *any* kind of logic gate that would fit, as it didn't seem like the type of logic gate really affected anything. I think I was expecting there to be a "current" state and a "goal" state, so like, the circuit would show you what result it was actually producing along with the one you wanted to create.
It also wasn't obvious that there needed to be a logic gate in every socket. This caused me to suicide once when I thought I put a gate somewhere I didn't want one.
It was also really easy to accidentally put a logic gate where you didn't want it. I think maybe there should be a button you have to press for the logic gate to actually go in the socket.
I also thought the enemy spawn rate might have been a little high. There was no way to actually kill all the enemies so your only chance was to hope to dodge the bullets.
Which makes sense, but the problem is that the logic gates spawn randomly. So it's completely random whether it'll take a couple seconds to find one, or take forever. I think on the first level with the leeks I simply couldn't find a not gate some times, and so I died.
Anyways, those were all the things that I think could be tweaked to make the gameplay better. I think the overall concept is fine, there's just a lot of little things that stack up to make it much less approachable than it could be.
I also enjoyed all the little puns on the enemies. Especially the memory leeks. :smile:
Well, this is an interesting game for sure. :smile: I think it's main flaw is it's simply rather difficult to figure out what to do.
The first time I won I just spammed left and coffee with occasional right presses. This got me a score of 797. Eventually I figured out what the controls actually do and only managed to get a score of 662 when trying to actually keep the thing centered.
I think the controls should be a bit less erratic and there should be a slightly wider safety zone, as as it stands right now it's super easy to go flying into the death zone. Perhaps the safety zone could shrink over the duration of the game, as you get better at keeping the thing centered.
Anyways, I did really enjoy the music and the voice line. Very fun stuff.
So I tried playing this a couple times but didn't manage to win. When I did finally collect 100 gold a bat killed me despite me thinking I had pressed Z. Can you not swing your torch when next to a chest...?
The gameplay is mostly solid, but I do think there is one small problem: when you stop interacting with a chest you lose all the progress you had. Once I literally had the bar visually completely full but stopped pressing X to deal with a bat, and I had to start all the way over because I didn't quite finish opening it.
I also feel like the bats are kind of annoying? Like it's kind of hard to tell how close you have to be to ward them off. I guess that's kind of the point but it seems like combat against the bats could be more satisfying.
I did like the graphics, for the most part, but they do break my personal rule of pixel art, which is to never mix pixel art resolutions. I think in this game, this is most egregious with the progress bar--it looks really out of place.
The music is appropriate but probably too short.
Overall, solid entry. I liked the various uses for the kindling and the tradeoffs of lighting it on fire to make it easier to find your way back versus needing to keep some for your torch. I also liked the death animation.
I think my only real gripe with this game is sometimes it is literally unwinnable. Sometimes you'll start it up, chase down one of the kids, but although you were following them literally as soon as you possibly could, they still manage to get themselves killed. :( I'm not sure that this is necessarily a problem, but I think it does take away some of the player's agency in a way that doesn't really seem useful to me.
Aside from that, a nice, lightheartedly morbid game. :)
I did manage to glitch the game in a way that I couldn't pick up one of the toddlers. Not quite sure how I caused it aside from maybe spamming the spacebar...?
Pretty cute game. I think, for the most part, the quick minigame structure works. Most of the games are pretty intuitive and easy to figure out. That being said, the panda game was very confusing, and I'm still not entirely sure why it works the way it does. And, some of the games are a bit glitchy: the crab game, I think, sometimes drops your clicks if they're not quite in the middle of the area.
I really like the graphics. They're very consistent. I think the music should be a bit longer, though.
One more note: I'm not sure exactly what the goal of the game is? Is it to beat all the minigames in one go? Or is it to unlock all of them and then beat them individually? I really couldn't tell, as I couldn't manage to beat them all in one go, and it didn't seem like playing them over and over to unlock each habitat would be a very fun gameplay loop.
Either way, solid game. :smile:
Glad to see you participating in another Ludum Dare!
This game has a lot of solid mechanics. The player movement and shooting both work pretty well. The guns both seemed to have different tradeoffs--I wasn't able to hit far away enemies with the shotgun.
I did think the game was potentially unbalanaced--I was never able to survive long enough to buy anything. This is probably mostly due to the long reload animation. I couldn't figure out a way to balance shooting and reloading in a way that I wouldn't be overwhelmed.
In any case, the only real concrete piece of feedback I have is that when you open the shop you might want to have the game pause. The first time I opened the shop I was reading the various things to see what I could do, and then a bunch of enemies showed up that I was completely unprepared for.
There is one bug: when you start a new round, no enemies spawn in. I have to close and repoen the game to get it to work.
Overall, solid entry. :smile:
Interesting game. The "wall" jumping feels kind of weird where you have to pull yourself away from the wall and then throw yourself back towards in order to get back your jump. I guess this is because traditionally a wall jump would push you off from the wall so having to do that manually feels pretty weird.
To me it is strange that the score has an X in front of it as usually that would signify a multiplier..?
Anyways, neat game. It is kind of fun to try to platform around even though the wall jump is hard to get used to.
Pretty neat game! There's enough little tasks to keep you engaged throughout the length of the game, and the music contributes pretty well to rising tension. I usually have some thoughts on what I might tweak, but I honestly can't think of anything (although that's likely partially because I don't play a lot of adventure games). Good job!
Nice game! I thought the platforming was pretty fun and well-implemented. The somewhat unusual physics-based platforming is reminiscent of Getting Over It.
My main point of feedback is that resetting all the way to the beginning seems like a strange choice. It doesn't effect the game too much in it's current state as the level isn't unreasonably long, but if the level were longer I think it would be a more significant problem. Again comparing to Getting Over It, the reason the progress loss works in that game is because it is nonarbitrary: you physically fall down from where you were. In this game, you don't fall down when you trip up--you are teleported back to the beginning. It simply feels arbitrary and so it doesn't feel very good. Especially because this is a game jam setting where people don't tend to spend a lot of time on a game. I think I would have had at least one checkpoint.
The other thing I think is that your water bar should refill faster while you're in a pond. It doesn't seem like making the player wait around in the water is very meaningful--there is some finite amount of water that is required to beat the game, and so you will be forced to wait some amount of time no matter how hard you try. A little bit of this waiting is good--I think sitting there dormant for a few seconds when you've cut it really close is a good way to make the game flow. But I think it could still be a bit faster. You could even make it so if you're closer to a full water bar it refills faster, so that if you're better at completing the platforming sections quickly you're rewarded with less waiting around.
On a more positive note, I liked the sound effects in the game. :smile:
This was a pretty good game. The mechanics were very easy to learn thanks to the tutorial, and there was overall a lot of nice elements, including the physics-based inventory.
I do feel like certain elements of the game make it rather frustrating. For example, I lost due to lack of fuel. But I was unable to refuel because my hand slipped when I was trying to fuel the car, and then my tentacle didn't work when I tried to grab more fuel. I think that both the drag-and-dropping onto the car could be a little more forgiving, and I think the tentacle-grabbing is a little janky and sometimes fails to work for no apparent reason.
Nonetheless, I felt that the game was pretty complete. The audio complements the mood nicely, and the variety of characters and mechanics is fun and engaging.
One game-unrelated nitpick: I'm not sure, but you might be supposed to opt out of audio if you didn't create the music during the jam. I've left it unrated in any case.
Neat little game. I like the vast amount of space you have to explore, and all the unique planets and their names. I think I mostly just find that the game goes too slowly--it took me half an hour to build up a reasonable amount of engine upgrades and cargo space, and then I decided to try exploring the outer planets and got softlocked on the orbit menu :(
There are two things that annoyed me. The first is that it was sometimes absurdly difficult to actually enter into orbit around a planet, especially with the upgraded engine. I think that the range where E will put you into orbit should be expanded a bit. The second is that the engine upgrades didn't feel like they really did anything. I could notice a difference once I had like 10 upgrades, but I couldn't notice the incremental change of each one. I feel like there is probably some way to make the engine upgrades feel a little more meaningful.
I also think it would be nice if the map would either tell you how many resources were left at planets that you already visited, or at least marked them if they were completely out of one or both.
All told, I had a good amount of fun playing this (enough to play for half an hour!) I think it could just be more engaging with some gameplay rebalancing and some tweaks to some of the mechanics.
I like the concept. The game's not very long so there's not a whole lot of interesting feedback I can give you, but I do have two thoughts: - When you die (or win) and the game is unresponsive for a few seconds that's pretty annoying. It should either have a button that let's you restart immediately, or have an animation that plays so it doesn't just look like the game ended. I originally thought I was going to have to refresh the page to play again. - I think the monster hiding could be done much more effectively with a bit of graphics trickery. Basically, have the light work as an inverse-light on the monsters, so as you get closer they just naturally fade out. This kind of fade out would, I think, look a lot better. And it would look pretty cool--as you got closer with the light, the monster sprite would kind of get camoflauged into the background. I think it would be neat.
In terms of music: I like what's there. If I'm not mistaken it's quite short and therefore kinda repetitive. But it does succeed at creating the correct kind of atmosphere for the game, which is half the battle. :smile:
Neat game. Managing the rat is definitely an interesting mechanic. I think the game is mostly fine, although I think the player control and physics could use a little work.
In particular, running and walking feels a little.. janky? Like your character doesn't move very smoothly, there's a lot of stopping and starting. And there are parts of the game where you literally have to walk through enemies--there's no room to maneuver around them. I think the "you have to walk past enemies while getting shot at defenseless" part of the game makes sense, but it doesn't work very well when you can't actually walk past the enemies.
That said, I still enjoyed fighting my way through to the ship. It was an appropriately stressful experience.
I enjoyed the music and the voice acting.
One interesting thing: there was a bug where the rat was both in and not in the backpack.
I liked the idea of having the umbrella. However, the only viable strategy I could find was to spam the space bar as fast as possible, which made the umbrella not as useful.
I think what you could do is make it so that the player has a limited rate of blowing on the flames (i.e. so they can just hold the button down), and then maybe assign the umbrella to a different button. That way you couldn't just spam the space bar, and the umbrella would be easier to use.
You could also potentially make it so that you can only blow on the flames for a limited amount of time, like a mana-bar style thing. That way the player has to juggle how often they blow on the flames, with which flames they're blowing on, as well as using the umbrella.
@lone-wolf I spent forever tweaking the audio mixing but sadly could never get it just right. A godmode could also be a cool feature, or at least a Celeste-style assist mode. Thanks for the feedback!
@hanamigi I totally agree that the weird momentum you have on the floor is a problem. I think the physics are mostly okay except for the fact that you just keep sliding. I kind of noticed this during the compo but just never did anything about it. :(
@murpyh Glad you liked it! My original plan with the spirits is you would lose them after one hit. However, I figured most players would probably die more than once, and it would nice if you had at least some chance of keeping a couple of extra spirits.
@madalaski Thank you for the detailed feedback!
The jankiness of the flying is something I'm not exactly happy with. Internally, the way it works is that flying is most effective right when you start flying, and then has quickly diminishing returns. It also has a separate velocity variable because otherwise the height you got from flying would vary wildly depending on your initial upward velocity.
The reason for the weird way the flying is programmed was so that I could force you to put down a platform and then fly in some of the sections. Sadly this probably made the flying much less intuitive. :(
One small note, though: in my playthroughs of the game, I do press jump and *then* fly. One potential thing is perhaps you weren't pressing up when flying? Unintuitively, you actually don't get any real upwards velocity unless you hold up while flying. Which is, of course, probably a problem (or at the very least should be clearer). :sweat_smile:
Either way, thanks for the ideas and suggestions!
@baby-dino-herd @diego-escalante I'm super sad that I didn't have time to put in a couple easier levels at the beginning. I think a little bit of space to explore the mechanics would have really helped both make the game more approachable and help people who don't have enough skill at platformers to be thrown right in to the hard levels the game currently has. I'm actually surprised you all are the first two to mention it! I'm sure, had I not designed the game, it would take me a while to get past even the first screen.
Nonetheless, thank you both for your feedback! :smile:
@shigor Thanks for the feedback! I am curious about your comment about the slippery controls. The first screen should be pretty doable despite the slipperiness as you don't have to move horizontally very much. Out of curiosity, were you trying to simply fly through it? If so, that is actually not intended to be possible, and I could see why that would accentuate the problems with the controls.
In particular, the intended strategy on the first screen is to make a platform and then jump to the left and fly up.
So I'm basically just wondering if you were doing the intended strategy, or if you were flying up. Because if you were trying to fly up, the awkwardness of doing so is actually intentional, to make you try different strategies. But if you were doing the intended strategy and still finding the controls awkward, well, that means that the controls are probably too awkward.
Anyways I hope this doesn't come across as an annoying or condescending comment. I'm just trying to, for my own sake, figure out whether the primary difficulty does come from the controls and physics--or if it actually comes from figuring out what to do. Knowing where the problem lies is, after all, important to fixing it. :smile:
Actually @baby-dino-herd @ogelgames @seothen I'm curious about your experience here too. If you remember, can you tell me whether you got stuck trying to fly up on the first screen (rather than some other strategy)? Thanks! :smile:
@shigor That's actually super interesting! If anything I would have thought that deciphering my level design was harder than the actual execution but I guess I got it backwards! Definitely gives me something to think about.
Thanks again for your awesome feedback! :smile:
@seothen Thanks for the feedback! I guess the takeaway continues to be that flying needs improvement! :sweat_smile:
@Allas That section is *meant* to teach you that the trampolines refill your Sprites (so you fly up, hit the sideways trampoline, and then fly to the right), but it's not surprising that that's pretty easy to miss. Thanks for the feedback!
@blobo Thanks for the feedback! Sadly I only had a little bit of time for the you win screen, and yeah, it's quite anticlimatic.
Very nice little arcade game! The controls are a little unintuitive but they aren't too complicated, which is nice. The music seemed appropriate although I feel like it was a little... empty? Like maybe it needed an extra instrument providing a bit of harmony.
I did find it a bit strange how much the fish would clip into the platform. I imagine maybe that's so that it doesn't fall off too easily? I think it would be better for the fish to not clip into the platform.
Either way, pretty nice entry, I can definitely imagine this as a full-fleshed arcade game.
Nice and simple game, very effective. Not a whole lot of complicated stuff happening, so I guess I'll just give my thoughts on the gameplay balance:
I feel like the rocket launcher doesn't really serve much purpose. It seems too expensive to afford in a single round of gameplay, and once you buy it, it doesn't have too much utility. It seems to one-shot all the zombies... but so does the shotgun, at point-blank range. I think the rocket-launcher should do splash damage to really be effective.
It also wasn't clear from the start that a) the toilet paper rolls gave you money, and b) there were no consequences to touching the zombies. But I guess those two things weren't too hard to learn, so not really a problem.
Also, the first time I got to the third round, there was a glitch (?) where a zombie ran really really fast and I lost instantly (like, it cleared the screen in less than a second). No other zombies ever moved a different speed so I'm not sure what happened.
A personal opinion / nitpick: I don't think I would have gone with the screenshake, I think I would have done some particle effects. But that's my preference.
Overall nice and simple and effective, kind of refreshing after playing some games that I couldn't quite figure out. And of course always nice to see Godot. :smile:
Really nice graphics, and I really dig the music. I feel like the gameplay is kinda janky? Like the UI will tell me the enemy is counterattacking--and then nothing will happen, but then it will say the enemy is counterattacking *again*, and that time something actually happens.
I also don't think I understand exactly how the game allocates the turns? Like, I lost in a fight because the enemy got two turns when I only got one, and so they quite obviously were able to do much more damage.
Perhaps it's simply because I don't play a lot of RPG games, so I'm not super aware of genre conventions. :shrug:
Anyways, one thing I think would really help is if you could see the stats of your attacks, etc while you were actually fighting. I had no hope of keeping all that straight in my head. :sweat_smile:
Overall, if the gameplay UI was smoothed out a little bit, I think this would be pretty cool.
Pretty hard game. I think the mechanic of the single-shot soccer ball is very interesting but perhaps not very meaningful given the rest of the mechanics--in particular, there were so many spiders that it wasn't really worth the effort to try to retrieve the ball to fight them off. Of course, perhaps your intention was that the soccer ball would feel rather like a rather futile weapon, in which case, good job.
The one thing that really tripped me up was the win condition. I couldn't figure out exactly what to do, although looking back on it, I think I probably just mixed up north and south. So that's probably on me.
I was, however, surprised to see a turkey spawn near my spawnpoint when I returned there after venturing to the right. I think I was expecting the turkeys to be a pretty static thing that was only spawned once, at the beginning of the game.
All told, difficult survival game with interesting narrative potential ala the soccer ball.
Interesting game. I tried a couple times to figure out what to do but could never get past the first day. I couldn't seem to figure out how the freeze ray could help, and it didn't seem like I had enough time or electricity to clear a path with just the mining laser.
I think I like the concept--some sort of a reverse tower defense--but it really needs clearer instructions.
As appears to be the trend, I had trouble understanding what exactly to do. In particular, it seemed like elements that should have contributed to soil quality according to their description ultimately didn't actually help, and I wasn't able to find a combination of species that didn't result in soil quality going down constantly.
I nonetheless was able to win, but it didn't really feel like I actually understood why.
If this game is trying to communicate accurate facts about ecosystems, then that is super cool--but right now it isn't doing a super good job of actually teaching me anything. I think the game needs to make the consequences of your actions clear and traceable, even if they are somehow unexpected. You could even have little text blurbs describing the kinds of ecosystem collapse that happen, so like, if all your herbivores die out for some weird reason, have a text box explaining the chain of events that cause that. I think that would be super neat, and potentially very eye-opening.
Overall I actually have pretty positive feelings about the game. It's presented in a really nice and organized way, and all the graphics are clean. I think it just needs some adjustments to make the systems that it simulates more approachable to the player.
Pretty neat game for two afternoons. I especially like the graphical style and the sound effects. However, the gameplay is a bit... slow and repetitive. I played for five minutes and only got the plants barely to the second stage. Without any real way to tell if I was making good progress, it didn't feel worthwhile to continue...
One thing I think is that there should be more player feedback. Right now it takes a long time before anything happens, so there's no way to know if you're actually doing anything. I still don't actually know how close I have to stand to the plants to get them to grow.
And the other thing is I think there needs to be some kind of active obstacle in the game. The weeds suggestion you mentioned in your other comment might be a good way to do that.
Although, one strange idea I had about this game: the two things I mentioned, the lack of player feedback and the lack of active challenge, do actually create a somewhat interesting and unique experience. The player is not trying to overcome the mechanical difficulty of the game, but rather the challenge of staying focused on a project that is not necessarily engaging. That's probably not what you were going for, but it's definitely something you *could* go for. :smile:
The graphics and audio are pretty top notch, but the game started to heat up my laptop after a while and I couldn't figure out what to do so I had to quit.
The music does get repetitive after a while given that the gameplay is pretty slow.
I think some hint of what to do would be good. I figured I was probably supposed to activate as much stuff as possible? But if all I'm doing is running around activating stuff, the game feels kinda annoying because it's really hard to tell what stuff it might want you to activate. You have no idea what you can interact with, and in particular, it's really easy to miss some things (like the torch next to the box). It also isn't clear if I'm supposed to turn some of the boxes red, or if there's certain time frames associated with different actions. I think the set of things the player needs to do needs to be relatively small so that the player isn't stuck wondering if they missed an interactable object somewhere, or if there's actually another kind of interaction that they're supposed to do that is more intricate.
I definitely like the idea of a physics-based survival kind of game. I just could not quite get the hang of how to control the cup. In it's current state, the game kind of feels like it would be hard no matter how good you were at it.
I think the cup needs to control better somehow, like maybe it should have a force that helps it turn upright over time. Or perhaps the player could exert torque on the cup through some means, such as by pressing the arrow keys, or maybe by, say, slamming it against the wall (if there were a wall).
It was somewhat difficult to figure out what to do. At first it seemed like I got marked down for collecting notes in the wrong order, but eventually I figured it out. However, it took me until late in the game to really connect the dots that "completing the song's scale" also implies that the obstacles will only fall on the spaces where notes will spawn.
I thought it was unnecessarily mean to send the player back to the beginning upon losing. It ended up not being a huge problem because the game isn't too hard--but when I first encountered that after dying on the second level I felt like "ugh, I don't want to have to do this again, if I get to level 3 or whatever."
When multiple obstacles fall in one column, it becomes difficult to tell where the shadows are sometimes--perhaps a color differentiation would help. However, I suppose part of the strategy might be to learn the patterns, either by watching the top of the screen or by ear. Really, I guess this just depends what you want there.
Sometimes the gap between the obstacles was exceptionally short, to the point where it didn't seem like I would be able to walk on the square safely--but then once the gap between obstacles became longer, the note objects that I needed to collect would usually have despawned. I don't know if I just got unfortunate RNG or if this is an intended effect--so I guess just making the intention here clearer would be good.
I really like the graphics on the platforms wiggling around. And I like the sound effects of the platforms and the jumping around. And the game is surprisingly fun once you actually figure it out. Trying to decide whether to rush in for a risky grab, and running in fear from a bunch of obstacles right over your head--it has a nice pace and energy.
So yeah. Hard to learn, but nice once you do. I hope some of my specific feedback with respect to gameplay was helpful. :smile:
Fun little racing game. I like the idea for the controls although I have to say in practice my hands got tired extremely quickly... might incentivize players to hurt their fingers in the effort to be the fastest. :sweat_smile:
I think the graphics are nice, and I really like the physics based gameplay. Adds a bit of interest as the interaction with the wall is unpredictable and potentially even useful for turning around quickly.
Overall, a nice simple game.
I found this game much too difficult. It seemed like I really just had to rely on luck. For example, the farthest I got was about 70 seconds into level 2, and I lost my second life when the crystalline loop got trapped inside a set of metal blocks. I couldn't push it out, and I was out of bombs, so I just lost.
I also lost a lot of lives to the loop re-spawning nowhere near a platform, and directly above the spikes.
I think the levels really need to be more specifically designed, or have an RNG system that specifically makes sure they are always feasibly winnable. I also think the levels should be much shorter. I played this game around 16 times, but only got to level 2 around 4 times. It simply doesn't seem like it's worth spending a minute and a half just to get another shot at level 2.
OK, here's a weird glitch. The first time I played through this game, no music had started until level 2. I opened it again while writing this review, and lo and behold, there is actually music for level 1! I honestly thought there wasn't any music for level 1, and I had written that that was a strange choice.
I like the player moveset. Being able to fly around freely is an interesting mechanic for a platforming game. I think the bomb is a very nice move to have, and it definitely saved me a couple times on level 1 when I was in tricky spots. (incidentally, one time the bomb didn't destroy a block for some reason?)
I like the idea of an invincible player character managing a destructible resource. I don't think I've played many games like that.
Now that I've seen the music working properly, I also like the evolution of the music and the background graphics through the different levels.
And I do think that it's fun to play through the game, once you sort of figure it out. I went back and played it again for part of this review, and I was enjoying myself quite a bit. However, it's simply not fun to go back all the way through level 1 again after you have just done so a couple times in a row.
So yeah. That's my verdict. Fun once you figure it out, but too difficult for me to see myself completing it. :smile:
Very nice game! In terms of graphics and audio, I think both are pretty neat, but I especially like the graphics style as it feels very unique and definitely reminds me of other puzzle games.
The gameplay was pretty engaging too! I was actually super shocked when the game ended as I was starting to really get into it. If I were to make any changes to the game, it would be adding some extra levels.
I do have some thoughts about the gameplay:
The first minor thing is it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out which object was the player. :smile:
I also felt that one thing was unintuitive: if, say, I am to the right of a clone, and that clone is moving left, I cannot move left *at the same time*. I have to wait for it to move left, then I can move left. So there's always this gap between player clones.
This isn't a *problem*, it's a mechanic that makes sense, but it is kinda hard to *feel* so to speak. It feels weird when pushing left doesn't move you left even though it seems like it would be possible to move left.
Anyways that's all I really thought when playing the game. Super solid entry overall! :smile:
I really like the graphical style going on here. It's pretty unique and looks good. And I could tell what a lot of the objects were without even having to read their descriptions, so that's convenient.
The music and sound effects are very nice as well.
Of course as this point you've heard many times the complaint about losing all the progress... I would concur there. However I do have to say I kind of like the idea of these larger chunks of the game that you have to complete without messing up--getting to the room after beating 5 puzzles in a row is a nice feeling. I'm just not sure what an effective way to lose progress would be that isn't boring and very slow--moving back through all the rooms takes a very long time!
Perhaps the game could have a queue of all the possible puzzles, and if you fail one at a given point, it doesn't reset all your progress, but it gives you a new random puzzle and moves the one you failed somewhere else in the queue? At least that's one idea.
Anyways, besides the progress-resetting conundrum, this game is very nice and has some nice adventure game vibes to it.
I have to agree that the music is quite nice. I'm honestly not sure what to say about the rest of the game--it ended before I really felt like I really knew what I was even doing.
I think the mini puzzles were a fine enough concept, although the puzzle itself I've seen a lot before. At first I thought solving the puzzles might require exploring the ship to find clues--I think that would make them more engaging, if the goal was to make the game actually require exploration and puzzle-solving. But that being said...
I do think that the narrative of this game as it stands right now is rather interesting. It almost gives you the feeling that you know exactly what you're doing as you make your way to the escape pod, despite me, the player, never having seen the ship before. The linearity of the narrative does evoke a sense of competency, which is an aesthetic I haven't thought about much.
Anyways, hopefully some of these thoughts were helpful. :smile:
I had a very confusing time playing this game for a very minor reason. So early on I got stuck on the level with one fan and two eyes, where apparently it's not possible to jump over the second eye. And so I read on a comment here something about dragging a black platform, and I found that platform and used it to solve a bunch of puzzles. It seemed to me like a really arbitrary solution to have, that also made many of the puzzles seem kinda meaningless.
I now realize that that platform was a debug element or something along those lines--it was not the intended solution to the puzzles. I went back and figured out that the actual solution to the fan-and-two-eyes puzzle was to move the bed. And I replayed the other puzzles that I had "skipped."
So one minor but important piece of feedback: don't leave the debug platform in the game! :sweat_smile:
Incidentally while re-playing the game and writing this review my computer blue-screened. I don't know if that's related to the game but it's kinda funny.
---
So aside from all that, I enjoyed the game. It's a fun kind of physics puzzler, and I think fits the theme pretty nicely. The physics were a little glitchy in places, but I still enjoyed pushing the player around and figuring out what to do with each of the fans, and all.
I can't say I entirely understood the ending of the game, it seemed like I was supposed to do something, and it seemed like clicking was causing something to happen. So perhaps that could be made clearer?
I do like the weird rag-doll-ish player graphics. Very silly. And in general I have some kind of fondness for weird mismatched photographic and hand-drawn graphics. Probably comes from my days with MIT's Scratch but it's still an aesthetic that I think is legitimate and kind of neat.
A fun game overall. :smile:
I'm not entirely sure what to call the platform I'm talking about, but on the level where you're supposed to move the bed, if you drag near the bottom this large black physics object shows up, that makes solving the level trivial. I assumed that this was used while developing the game for one purpose or another which is why I called it "debug platform" but I may have misinterpreted why it exists.
Hopefully now you can tell what I'm referring to...? :smile:
I played this game for a very, very long time, and I want to complain about how it is tooo looooong. I'm not sure if you were going for a long game or not, but I want to go over the ways in which it was so long, for me, that it became grating...
The first problem is I didn't even know there was a way to get checkpoints for every challenge. So I died somewhere like halfway? And then I was going to write my rating, but I saw there was an option that might help, and so I had to play through that whole part of the game again...
A bunch of the later levels honestly seem kind of redundant. Like they're just the same levels as before, but a little harder. I'm not sure there's any reason to even include them--there's not even really an evolution in the dialog boxes past a certain point.
Then I finally got to the boss, and I could not figure it out. I survived for a while but I didn't see any way I was going to be able to win. So I thought maybe I could turn on invincibility, as I saw that was a setting too... and lost all my progress. Welp.
One final note is I don't see any reason to have every level repeated twice.
Now that said, I can see the legitimacy in an absurdly tedious and hard game. That what makes Getting Over It great, for example. But I really don't see what the goal is with how long this game is? Like, it's a game jam entry. I have to imagine I'm the first person who's even gotten to the boss...
So... what do I like about this game? Well, I was intrigued enough by the concept to play through the first half of it twice, as I said. I think the idea of a weird story that has some absurdly hard gameplay tied to it is a compelling kind of game. I thought that the graphics and the music were both pretty nice. I like the player sprite and it's outlined-humanoid style. This game also has a good mood to it, it really projects a lot of emotion.
So I think the question you have to ask is what your goals are with this game. If it's intended to be incredibly tedious and very, very difficult, you have very much succeeded. And that is a fine goal to have! When I was playing through without the "instant restart", this game was more stressful than almost any other game I've played. And that's very interesting!
But if that's not what you were going for, you probably want to re-think parts of your game.
Whew! That's all I can really say. I really hope I'm not coming off as too harsh--I'm just trying to be honest and descriptive so you can know whether or not your game met *your* goals for what it should be. I hope you got something out of this feedback, in any case... :smile:
Addendum: I was thinking about *why I even cared* that this game is so long, and I think there's a reason: the game is based on a story, and so there is presumably some sort of reward for getting to the end--you get to see the end of the story. If this game did not have a story that I cared about, I actually would probably not mind at all that it was so long--I would just quit and call it a day. It's specifically that I poured so much time in and still didn't get to actually see the end of the story, that made it a frustrating experience. So hopefully that provides some context! :smile:
I love the idea of a train shooter. I think there could even be more cars, with a whole bunch of different possibilities. Or even a customizable train. Lots of possibilities. Trains are always a good time. :smile:
I tried playing on both the difficulty settings, and I don't think either was particularly hard. I did feel swarmed a little bit at times on the adaptive difficulty, but I managed to pull through.
I think the upgrade system is a little awkward, though. There are a couple awkward things. First is it's not really clear what each upgrade does. Health and damage are somewhat clear, but the numbers are pretty meaningless--I would thing 800 health would be a lot, but apparently not?
And I have absolutely no idea what the fire rate system does. On an endless game I cranked it up to around 100 and yet there was still no apparent change in my rate of fire. I think maybe it effects the bullet velocity? In which case it should probably not be called rate of fire.
I found that a lot of the time I would hit the whistle instead of actually opening the upgrade menu--particularly when I was trying to grab health when swarmed by a bunch of guys. The upgrade menu should probably be very easy to open and the whistle a bit more incidental.
As it stands right now, the endless mode doesn't feel particularly meaningful. The exploding enemies start coming so fast that you can just keep shooting them and killing everything, and then buying upgrades... I ended the game with 100s in every upgrade, and 40000 robot parts. I mean, I think it's relatively self-evident that a true endless mode would probably need a larger variety of enemies and scenarios that involved those enemies, so there really isn't too much to say there.
One nitpick: the player momentum feels a little weird, not like a person walking around.
But all this is to say that I think this is a very solid foundation for a game. I think this game naturally fits the idea of an endless shooter sort of thing, and it's somewhat obvious that an endless shooter probably needs more than two kinds of enemies. As I said, a shooting game on a train just seems kind of intrinsically fun to me, so it's definitely a game that could be developed into a bigger project if you wanted. Anyways, I hope there's something useful in this feedback! :smile:
@sharks
Yeah I guess I was little presumptuous focusing on the endless mode. Probably because of the "stuck in a loop" theme! :sweat_smile:
This is definitely a similar concept to my game lol. But, given that I made a similar game, I have to appreciate how much you did with so little! This game really effectively explores all the possibilities for getting a robot from point A to point B. Of course that idea isn't big enough to make more than the ten levels present in the game, and even then some of them felt a little redundant, but I have to say that overall I didn't feel like the game was too repetitive.
Of course additional mechanics and things would be great--maybe having multiple goals, or obstacles, or anything else, really. But I have to imagine you already know that. :smile:
In terms of relatively mundane feedback, I feel like the robot could potentially move faster. Other touches would be nice, like a turning animation, and of course sound and other graphical flair. That's all just somewhat self-evident polish stuff though.
Overall good job!
This game looks absolutely incredible. I was honestly so impressed when I saw some of your posts during the jam and it looks even better now that it's out. I also absolutely love the music! :smile:
I'm not sure if I experienced some glitches or what, as for the most part I only saw a single ghost every lap, and it was moving really slowly? I think the first time I got to, like, lap 4 there were a bunch of ghosts, but then I usually only saw 1, and even restarting the program didn't fix it... (I did download the "Latest" version FWIW)
In terms of the racing aspect, I think I would really like some sort of speeding up / braking like in Mario Kart, or maybe a jump feature, or just *some* additional controls for the car. I had fun playing the game, but I think it felt a little non-racing-game-ish because I didn't have any way to speed up.
But that said the game fits the theme very well and has superb music and graphics! Well done!
Pretty solid entry overall. The graphics and music are both pretty sweet. The gameplay feels pretty good for the most part, the guns are fun to shoot, which is always a plus. The platforming definitely feels a little iffy though--some jumps are just a little more precise than I would expect.
I'm probably not too familiar with the genre conventions so this might not be very helpful but: I really couldn't figure out a way to engage in combat with a lot of the enemies without taking damage. If there was somewhere I could hide I could usually duck there and shoot, but sometimes it seemed like I needed to be in the same space, and at that point there was nothing I could really do. But perhaps that's intended, as I said, I'm not too familiar.
I also think the way that enemies are invincible when off-screen just feels a little weird. I also wasn't too happy with some of the blinder enemies that show up in the top of your screen without any warning, but I suppose they do serve an interesting gameplay purpose.
Overall though I would say my impression of the gameplay is as very fun to play. As I said, the guns feel great, or at least the ones I got. So yeah, solid entry! :smile:
By the time I got to the end of the game, I was enjoying the platforming. I think it is a solid concept, and the level design makes sense.
The problem, to me, is that it is very hard to control, and I don't believe it's even very easy to learn to control. I could never figure out how to jump consistently, and the amounts of momentum and even jump height I could get could vary wildly based on all sorts of inscrutable factors.
The places where jumping was required took me forever as I tried to get the game to give me a jump...
But as I said, once I finally got the hang of just kind of praying and pointing my buttons in the general direction of where I want to go, I did have a bit of fun. The physics and controls just need to be much more predictable to really sell the experience.
And, as a data point, the game did make me a little motion sick too. :smile:
This is an incredibly solid entry. Very nicely done.
I like how I became more aware of the symmetry properties of the Bezier curve, as I could always just start solving each puzzle at any point in the curve. I also liked how my conceptualization of the directionality of the curve evolved over the game--at first it seemed like an important thing to be aware of, while at the end it was closer to, "put the point that's first in the loop at the first shape". :smile: I suppose the game sort of makes you think about how curves work. The nice properties that curves have become more obvious as you begin to develop systematic ways to solve the puzzles.
I think looping the game instead of ending it makes sense, although I thought it made have been a nice "final moment" to have the game end after it goes back to three dots and you send them through the single triangle again.
The only other thing is that, sometimes it seemed like the dot should have connected with the shapes and it didn't? It seemed like maybe the extra speed the dot got would sometimes slightly affect its range where it would hit the shapes? But I could be wrong. It only seemed to happen on one puzzle so my perception might just be tripping me up.
Overall I'd say this is the best entry I've seen so far. Takes a good, simple concept and executes it beautifully. :smile:
@sharkwithlasers Oh shoot, I thought I had responded to you earlier. Forgot to push "send."
I was going to say a have a pretty decent laptop, so I don't think I was generally having a low framerate.
I honestly only encountered that bug once so I'm not sure I could recreate it even on the original version... if there was some specific thing you thought I should try I would be happy to do so.
@zachary-barbanell Thanks for the feedback! I've fixed that glitch. There is an SFX slider, but I've added a separate robot slider if you want to disable the robot and still hear the rest of the SFX. Of course, you shouldn't change your rating as that change is post compo.
Anyway, I'm glad some part of it was enjoyable, at least! :smile:
@nicolas-kroupensky Thanks for the feedback!
But I have to say I'm a bit confused! I feel like the robots being stuck in a loop was very central to my puzzle design... can you elaborate on why it doesn't feel like it fits the theme?
@nicolas-kroupensky No problem! I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any interpretations of my game.
Either way I'm glad you had fun! :smile:
@sharkwithlasers Thank you for the feedback! Zachtronics was definitely an inspiration! :grin:
@mvasko2: Thanks for the feedback! It's too bad the robot sounds are irritating. My motivation was a peaceful game, but also a "playful" game, and I thought the robot voices added a nice bit of zaniness. Oh well! :smile:
@lone-wolf: I'm glad you liked it! :smile: That level is definitely pretty tricky. And yeah, a clear button is probably the most obvious missing feature from the UI.
@lone-wolf That's quite the accomplishment! I honestly wasn't expecting anyone would be able to beat every single level! The last five or so are pretty rough. :sweat_smile:
@squimmy Thanks for the feedback! The other people I've seen play my game had to think no matter which level they played, so I hadn't had any notion there might be a significant problem. To be honest I'm not sure I could fix it anyways (at least without significant playtesting), but thanks for pointing it out! :sweat_smile:
@seurimas Thanks for the feedback!
Honestly though I'm not sure how I could introduce mechanics any slower. I feel like the possibility space for "Destructive Interference" is so small after you've played "Foamy Conundrum" that it really isn't possible to make it more straightforward.
Is it possible that you skipped a level by accident by double clicking? (Would only apply if you downloaded the no fixes version)
@seurimas Well thanks for the specifics! I can definitely see how having one multi-robot level before Level 5 could be a good idea. I am honestly pretty happy with the levels I had in the compo version, but I guess it's always good to think about how to improve. :smile:
@sharks I had meant to respond to your comment but just now got around to it, whoops!
Anyways, I'm really glad somebody liked the robot sound effects, I was somewhat disappointed when the only comments I had gotten on them was that they were irritating. :sweat_smile: I'm glad you found the difficulty curve reasonable and the levels enjoyable. Thank you for the very kind feedback!
This game makes really good use of the theme. The idea of having to move back and forth in a rhythmic way as well as try to platform is an interesting and very difficult challenge!
The problem is that it is such a difficult challenge I am incentivized to try as hard as possible to avoid it... and so, on every level except the first one, with the disappearing blocks, I simply ran through the level before my hoop had time to fail.
I really just don't see how to successfully move through the level *and* hula-hoop at the same time... any forward motion you gain is immediately canceled when you move the other way. And so this means that the only possible strategy is to build up some time to let your hoop fall, and do some normal platforming, and then hula-hoop for a while. But this is really hard! I could never really get the timing down if I wasn't hula hooping for an inordinate amount of time...
I think, really, the way to fix all these problems is a two-step process: 1. Make it straightforward to get the hula-hoop rhythm going, for the player 2. Design the levels around having designated places to hula-hoop to build up platforming time, that the player must locate and use appropriately
I think that would really make these mechanics work. As it stands, when I tried to hula-hoop on the first level, with the traps--I kept running into the traps. This is, I think, an unfortunate intersection of too many things at once--I had to keep track of hula-hooping and keep in mind the hidden platform! Had I been able to simply hula-hoop safely, I might have gotten more used to the game mechanics.
IDK. This comment is kind of rambly, but hopefully it's something to think about at least. :smile:
Very cool little game! I thought that the different concepts all contributed in their own ways. It was a very interesting moment when I realized one of my robots died as I had taken one damage to a spike when recording it, and it had just gone through multiple loops...
I do think there are a couple little annoying things in the UI. For example, sometimes I accidentally hit Z near home when I didn't want to finish recording, and so I was forced to throw away my progress.
My biggest point of ...confusion? is the time limit. It seems kind of out of place to me. As it's impossible to know where different things are in the level, you don't know what you should do until you've explored a bit... which ends up feeling like wasted time, because you could have been recording a robot to mine that ore!
That said, I can't say I actually ever ran out of time, so it isn't really *unfair*. You *do* have enough time to do all the exploring and then separately record your robots. But it still makes the game feel really high-pressure and, in my opinion, this game doesn't seem like it should be a high-pressure game, which makes the time limit feel out of place.
But, despite that, I had a good time. I think the game fits the theme pretty well, and the combination of platforming plus resource-collection-automation is a good combination. :smile:
I didn't entirely understand what I was doing the whole time I played this game, but I did eventually get to the win screen, I think. :smile: I did almost get completely stuck at one point--I had the "world" stuck in the corner with the graveyard, and I couldn't push it to move it out, and picking it up would not work either because it would get stuck in the ceiling. Eventually I managed to get it out somehow and from then on it was not too bad.
I do think the placement of the graveyard could be made slightly less inconvenient as I also accidentally sent my Diploma over there (twice!) and had to die to retrieve it. :laughing:
Anyway, once I began to sort of understand that the game was a puzzle solving game, I started liking it quite a bit. I think the idea of manipulating all these various objects in different ways, and re-exploring the world as different characters, is a pretty good idea. And, I have to say the aesthetic of carrying around remorse the same way you carry around a diploma, is very interesting.
Figuring out what the win condition was, based only on not being able to jump, was a cool moment of realization as well. As well as figuring out what to do as the snake. That was nice.
One tiny thing I liked is that it's possible to get some very large jumps by jumping off a platform in mid-air (although it requires very precise timing!). I'm not sure that that's intentional but in my opinion it's a cool little thing.
So overall, very interesting game. I like the general idea, even if it took me a while to grasp.
This is a really neat game. I have to admit I probably didn't entirely understand the narrative, partially because I probably wasn't paying quite enough attention, but I at least related to some of the frames taken out of context. The atmosphere of the game certainly puts one in a contemplative mood.
I think I would rather talk about a couple of purely practical things: essentially, things I thought about the way the game accomplishes the game-y parts of the game. Or something like that. :smile:
So, it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that the bear was, sometimes, supposed to not be on the screen, and that at that point you were intended to push 'r.' At first I thought it was just my resolution was wrong--and it turned out it was, Windows had it set to 1920x1080, but zoomed in. So I fixed my resolution, and tried again, and then the bear kept disappearing from the screen. So I tried messing with the resolution some more. Then I started pushing 'f' every time I needed to put the bear back on the screen, and pushing 'i.' But then I pushed 'esc' by accident and had to start over, and it was at that point that I finally realized that, in fact, the bear being ungrabbable due to being off the screen was an intended mechanic, and that that was the point where I needed to press 'r.' (By the way, I used 35 restarts getting to the end. :smile: Although I must admit I used a lot of cheese, which feeds into my next point...)
The other thing I want to talk about is the physical platforming of the game. I feel like this is a tricky thing to get right, because by the very nature of using mouse-based drag and drop, the amount of distance you can get is unbounded right out the gate--there's nothing stopping the player from moving their mouse all the way across the screen and just dragging the rabbit to the exit point for each "level." Which is of course where all the cheese potential comes from. And I feel like the amount of time you have to actually try to drag the rabbit around the obstacles is astonishingly short. One I recall is the level at 1:37 in your video--where you very quickly drag the rabbit all the way to the right and then back again. I never considered using such a violently fast strategy, likely because I was trying to give it an honest, non-cheesy attempt... I was trying to methodically drag the rabbit in a big loop and land it on the upper platform, but I really couldn't get it to work.
I think cheese-proofing the physics and maybe giving the player a littttle more time to move the rabbit around would help. In fact, I think maybe limiting the max speed of the rabbit would be a good idea, so you *have* to move it carefully and consistently (...but still pretty quickly, of course). I can appreciate that perhaps the very short amount of time you're able to grab the rabbit serves a narrative purpose, but at this point I think it might be getting in the way of players actually caring enough to not just go for the cheese strat.
Or, perhaps the player is intended to use very very fast mouse movements, but not through the platforms? That would also make sense. I honestly stayed away from mouse movements unless I was specifically trying to cheese, because, well, I thought that fast mouse movement at all was considered cheese. So when I was trying to play legitimately, I always went for the slower movements. So maybe this is just a problem of communication, who knows. :smile:
One small other thing is I didn't understand when the game ended: on my game I got sent back to, I think, the beginning of the game, but everything was grayed out--but I could still move around and eventually I somehow landed myself in this big gray void, and I believe that is the ending of the game? But it looked different on the video, so I don't know if I got a glitch or something.
Anyways, aside from this very long description of how I experienced the pragmatic gameplay elements, there's a couple extra notes...
(continued in another comment, apparently!)
I really like how the game uses the windowing system. It could be considered kind of gimmicky, but I really think it works well. It makes the game seem like just an incidental part of using your computer--it superimposes itself onto your normal environment, and so makes it seem like a sort of natural thing rather than a game that I'm playing due to other motivations.
I think the aesthetics of the game and the music and sound effects are really effective. This game is not lying to you about what it is--it is not intended to be an action-packed game that you play because of its addicting fun, it is a game that you play to see what it's like, to experience it. And this game is under no pretenses otherwise.
As I said, it definitely puts one in a contemplative mood. And although I'm not super great at following visual stories, I still did get some feelings from some of the individual frames, taken out of context. And that's maybe not the worst possible outcome!
So yeah, I like this game. After writing all this, I honestly think I really like this game. I hope some of this feedback was helpful. This is by far the most feedback I've written for a game..... :smile:
So I played through all 7 days and then walked into the green square, and I think at that point the game restarted the loop? I don't know for sure though.
The first couple days I was really sold on the visual appearance of the game. The office looks normal, to some extent, but the colors and lighting are very bizarre and remind me of a bad dream.
I'm not sure I found the rather conventional horror tropes super interesting, however. I don't see what's very relatable to the average office worker about "blood coffee." The one I think was effective was the darkness effect on the 7th day, because it demonstrated that you were able to navigate this space pretty efficiently, even without really being able to see it.
That said, I almost feel the game is effective enough if it just contains a day that loops over and over. After all, that sells the point well enough, I think--a player who plays the same day over and over, will think, this is pointless, I shall quit now. But in the real world, you can't just quit.
If you do want to augment the looping mechanic with additional changes day-to-day, I think you really just need to introduce them sooner. I was very much ready to write this review as though the game repeated the same day with no changes ever.
So to summarize: I think this game is thematically pretty effective, all told. I just think that the more conventional tropes fall flat when I'm *already sold* on the repeating day concept, from having played through a bunch of repeating days. Hopefully that makes sense. :smile:
I really like the vector graphics, and I like the idea of a space-shooter tower-defense kind of game. I think, however, that the difficulty of hitting enemies really makes the game feel kind of arbitrary.
Like, as far as I can tell, the only way to obtain an extra weapon is by killing an enemy. And enemies start to show up in really big clumps very very quickly. But it is really hard to kill any enemies with just the starter weapon, so most of the time you just die immediately.
I think the game really just needs a way to have more control over being able to hit enemies. I think a good solution to that would be giving all the bullets slight tracking ability, so you can hit enemies that are *approximately* in front of your gun, rather than *directly* in front of your gun.
Anyway I did have fun once I figured out how to sort of get past the beginning stage more consistently. The game has some very nice space shooter vibes going. :smile:
Note: I played on the "Fixes some problems" version.
So for a very long time I was very confused because, apparently, on the beautiful graphics setting, the game will not despawn the first cube when you throw it in the cable, and it will therefore never spawn a second one. I spent just minutes wandering around looking for the second cube.
Once I switched to fast graphics everything worked properly.
I think the graphics are nice. I certainly love me some reflective and glowy shaders. The walking animation seems a little stiff.
The music is, in my opinion, not really there. It's much too short, and it's honestly just kind of harsh sounding.
I honestly don't know where I stand on the gameplay. I have a generally positive feeling toward the idea of an area becoming increasingly more difficult to navigate as time goes on. I think just having a bit of a more interestingly designed level would probably go a long way. I also think the game would be well served by a more mobile player--I think moving around very efficiently would be fun and thematic to an integrated circuit.
I should say that the repetitive gameplay does fit the theme very well.
So, all told, I think your entry makes sense, it has nice graphics, and it has a solid enough concept. It just would need fixes in a couple areas to really feel solid.
I love the shifting music for each loop. I also like the way that, when you die, any enemies that you had killed will still stay dead. That's a nice touch that builds on the theme of looping.
I find the grisly animations--in particular the death animation--notable. I don't really have an opinion on them, I mostly just find that they stand out--they are very important to the characterization of the game's aesthetic and atmosphere.
So yeah. A nice simple game, makes good use of the theme. :smile:
This game is definitely difficult as other people have mentioned. At first I was trying to just keep the ball in its nice loop while I built a simple path, but that strategy did not end up being very feasible. Next I tried to sort of place pieces in front of the ball and just pray that I got a compatible piece before it died. I actually got relatively good luck and I almost won--I was one tile away but then I died, and then on my later attempts I couldn't get nearly as far.
So yeah, it's probably too tough. I think maybe having an option to just play on a slow speed would really help make it more winnable.
Probably also the game should be balanced in some way such that you will never get a particular slew of bad pieces. I don't know if you're familiar, but Tetris games will, for example, guarantee that you won't get too many S-pieces in a row.
Anyways, this is a pretty cool take on the theme, and is executed very nicely. It's just too hard! :smile:
Very interesting game. The requirement to press the buttons adds a somewhat novel little challenge, but much more interesting to me is the psychological aspect of it. When I actually played all the way through the game, I kept pressing the buttons *without knowing whether I actually needed to or not*. You could have made the solution for winning the game be to let the timer tick down and I still would have completed the rest of the tasks first!
This is of course because I had already put some time into manipulating some of the objects in the game and so I didn't want to waste that time by needing to do it all over again, if the buttons did end up doing something bad.
As a nitpick I will say I felt the tasks in the game felt a little uninspired... a series of keys and numerical codes. But I think that the central concept of the buttons is interesting enough that the rest of the gameplay doesn't really matter per se.
All in all, a very unique experience! :smile:
Pretty solid entry. The levels are all interesting enough--I think that jumping off of yourself in midair is a very interesting platforming idea.
I don't love that you lose all your progress if you touch a hazard. In my opinion this is rather annoying. For example, on the last level, I had collected everything but the particle across the lava bridge. It would be very annoying to have to re-do all of that just because I miscalculated when the bridge would be activated.
I also had a feeling that the platforming just feels a little off, but it took me some time to figure out why. I think there are a couple of small problems. One, I think, is just assigning up to jump--I think this might make it feel a little worse to control. The second is I think the gravity could be turned up--although this could be unfeasible due to the requirement of jumping off some of your guys. Finally, I think your player should have a little bit of horizontal acceleration / deceleration--it feels very weird to stop moving horizontally immediately after releasing an arrow key.
But, these problems are all minor enough. I had a good time beating all the levels and would have enjoyed playing a couple more. :smile:
This is an awesome game! Definitely one of my favorite entries. These kinds of non-Euclidean (if that's the right term) games are always super interesting! And it's certainly a nice take on the theme.
If I'm going to be honest though I feel like maybe the first level is actually harder than level 4? I could be wrong here, but in level 4 I could actually see myself and could just aim and shoot directly. Level 3 also seemed easy but I don't necessarily think it's easier than level 1. Hard to say.
I think an introductory level that was just a repeating hallway could be nice. That way it's immediate and obvious what you have to do--it took me a little bit of thinking to figure it out on level 1. Although, on the other hand, having one of the puzzles be to literally figure out the objective of the game is fun and interesting in its own right. :smile:
Either way, I did love level 2. I literally said "nice" once I figured it out because it was so satisfying.
One small note is I was initially somewhat annoyed by the choice of splat sound effect for the gun... although I did get used to it pretty quickly.
So yeah! Great entry! :smile:
I really like this kind of puzzle game and I definitely enjoyed trying to figure out the right placement of the boxes and springs for each level. However, it simply becomes untenable to actually win most of the levels due to a convergence of two issues:
- The required position for each object is very very precise. I kept restarting level 3 just to try to get the first spring in the correct place. - There's no way to move things around if they're out of place! Once you finally get one element down, if the next one is wrong as well, then you have to restart--and then you might get the first one wrong again. There's no way to *just* re-do the part that needs fixing in the moment.
As such I really don't think I'm capable of beating level 3. Especially because I got booted back to the beginning of the game after killing a guy by accident. There's simply too much trial-and-error randomness--it basically becomes a question of placing down the boxes in the approximately right position, and then seeing if you managed to hit all four pixel-perfect spots or not.
For what it's worth I thought the music was quite nice... although restarting it every time I restart the level meant it restarted very often. :smile:
So yeah, I think this game is pretty strong, it just needs some tweaks to the level design, and a way to not lose all your progress, to really round it out.
I had a very hard time with this game. I was only able to figure out one of the levels without referring to the walkthrough. So I guess the most helpful thing I can do is just describe my experience, so it's clear where the game might not have worked as intended.
So the first room with the looping right turn hallway--I figured out pretty quickly, based on the line next to the exit door, that I was probably supposed to walk on the wall. However, I still kept failing the level over and over and thought I must be missing something, especially because I was apparently getting game overs somehow. But no, it turns out I was right, I do have to walk on the wall--but I actually have to start walking on the wall at the entrance to the room. I never saw the change in elevation at the entrance because there was simply no reason for me to look at the floor there, and it wasn't very obvious. So I don't think it's really possible for a person to figure out that the entrance and the exit are both elevated without simply being told.
I should say that making the floor lava here would definitely help. Or just making the elevation change actually noticeable.
The second room took me a long time too, but I was able to figure it out. However, it was really hard to tell if there was a wall or a ceiling or a floor in any particular part of the room, because it was so dark. To add on to that, the room quickly got even darker over time, so I really couldn't tell where to go. It was mostly by luck that I eventually found the side hallway that led to the exit door.
The third room I had no idea what to do. I tried running on walls, on the floor, I tried walking vs. running, I tried many many things, but I could never win--and so I had to refer back here. I don't think having "walk through a door a bunch of times" really works as a solution to any of the puzzles here, because the very nature of the game design makes you believe that that will never be a solution.
So all that said, I hope you can tell what the game is like to play for somebody who didn't design it. Namely, it doesn't really feel like it's actually feasible to solve any of the puzzles except for maybe the one in the dark room. And I should stress that this is just my experience--it is possible other people would be able to solve these puzzles. But I am writing this comment as though almost nobody would be able to, as that was my experience, so take that as you will.
Now what you do with this information is totally up to you. I should say that I, as an art nerd, think a puzzle game with arbitrarily difficult puzzles that most players would never solve, is a very legitimate kind of game. In fact, a game with essentially unsolvable puzzles, especially that third one, has a very very menacing atmosphere, which I think is what you were going for. (And yeah, having a player repeat something 47 times goes against practically all conventions and expectations--which makes it a very powerful narrative tool). But most people will probably not have a very fun time with such a game--so it really just depends what you want from your own project.
So yeah, I think this game has great atmosphere. The aesthetics of the game contribute a lot to it as well. All grayscale with ambient noise rather than music, it's a powerful aesthetic.
That's really all I have to say, I think. I hope this feedback is useful. :smile:
@skyvastern I do agree that lava is probably not the best solution, given the general aesthetic of the game--and it would probably make the level too easy. I think an elevation drop that the player could visibly see would be a good solution (so when you walk off the entrance platform you notice that your camera changes in elevation).
Very solid entry. I got to level 13. The puzzles that I played were, for the most part, quite engaging. One nitpick is that the difficulty curve is not super consistent: level 9 takes almost no thought while level 8 was quite hard. And, I would say level 12 is pretty straightforward too--although it is subverted in level 13, so I guess it makes sense. Of course, this is just a nitpick. :smile: Overall, very nice and interesting puzzles.
So I actually think that requiring a button press for each dig is a very interesting game mechanic. It certainly is not very accessible--even my fingers are a bit worn out now--but I do think it is promising. In particular, the distinction between moving through already-dug tunnels, where I can simply hold the button, and digging new tunnels, where I have to painstakingly dig each block, is a *meaningful* distinction in my opinion. It makes digging a literally physically challenging task, which, you know, digging through rock is physically challenging.
It certainly seems unhealthy to actually spam a button with my finger for this long, but perhaps that idea could be incorporated in some way that is a bit less actually straining (and more accessible).
I thought it was neat how the gems became a bit harder to find as the game went on. I do wonder if there is anything else that could be done to make the game change a bit as it goes on, as it does get a bit repetitive despite the ramp in difficulty.
Something I really like is how there are essentially no consequences to messing up. The game is just about digging and finding gems, and it is not necessary to fight through zombies or be careful not to let the roof collapse. It makes for a somewhat relaxing, and in any case, very distilled experience.
I like the graphics and sound effects on the gems in particular. Very crisp and crystalline.
I think my favorite part of this game is the control scheme. Mashing the spacebar is an intrinsically rather awkward and volatile control scheme, and although I do not know how professional limboers feel about limboing, I would say that "awkward and volatile" certainly would describe any attempt I made at limbo in the real world.
This control scheme also makes the gameplay pretty interesting despite how straightforward the concept is. In order to win I need to mash the spacebar fast enough, and start mashing at the right time. It's pretty neat.
Unfortunately I'm not sure I can beat the last level. But I had fun beating the other two.
So I really enjoy this game. Running around and breaking the blocks, as well as playing the cards, is just a really fun combination of mechanics. The interplay between the card system and the physical map of blocks to destroy is really interesting and just seems really fun.
I think it really just needs a bit of polish. There were a couple small (and maybe not small) issues I noticed.
So the not small issue is, this game really lags a lot on my computer. At least, I think it's lag. Everything seems a bit slow and sluggish, and sometimes pressing a number key does not play a card, or sometimes a bunch of cards will be played because they moved into the slot and I guess I didn't release the key fast enough. Even just moving the robot is a bit laggy. I'm not quite sure what might be needed to make the game less laggy but I would say that's its single biggest issue.
The other things are just small things: Somehow I misused a bomb card when I didn't have enough energy and I ended up with -2 energy, and the game didn't seem to detect this. I'm not quite sure what happened there.
It would be nice to include a note about how lava works, as I lost my first run to lava that killed me because I drilled next to it... I had no idea it would do that.
But yeah, aside from that, I really enjoyed playing this. It was a lot of fun to see how far I could dig, and I definitely see how the post-compo content you've worked on could make this even more fun.
There are a couple interesting facets about this game, for me.
First is, although the mining gets a bit faster, it seems that the rate of progress stays slow essentially the entire game. I eventually decided to stop playing after getting all level 3 upgrades and one level 4 because I was spending so much time on the game and not getting anywhere. The first upgrade seems especially slow simply because it requires 500 block hits at minimum to get. After that upgrading does become easier, but eventually I ended up just being in the mines for a very long time, even though I could dig a lot faster and get to the more valuable ores.
This speed of the game, where it stays rather slow-paced seemingly the entire game, is a hard sell, to be honest, but it is unexpected too. One surprising aspect is that it is almost pretty engaging, in some sense: it always feels like fast progress is *just out of reach*. This feeling is I suppose somewhat universal to clicker-type games, but I definitely felt it here. I kept thinking I was going to start speeding up the game quite a bit but I never could. I think if the game was just a tiny bit faster, this feeling could carry me through the whole game quite easily.
The second interesting thing is the fuel upgrade. So, of course, because I am so impatient, I immediately go for the speed and power upgrades. But to actually make progress faster the fuel upgrade is absolutely vital due to the ability to mine a greater quantity of valuable ores per run. This is a really neat interaction between the different mechanics.
Overall, I think that particular thing is what I like most about this game. It is kind of like an idle game, or whatever, but the mechanics it uses to do that are really quite neat. It has a lot of the same progression curves I might expect from an idle game, but instead I have to do mining instead of clicking, or whatever, and the choices I make in my upgrades manifest as physical differences of how I can navigate the mine. I think that's pretty cool.
I think the best aspect of this game is the surreal anatomy. It is pretty funny to see a game about constructing a digestive tract using brains and lungs... it is quite interesting how it severs organs from their actual function and repurposes them as arbitrary chosen game mechanics. It reminds me of some vague philosophical concept or another but I can't quite remember what... either way, it is a good way to completely change the meaning of the human anatomy.
The platforming in this game is very cool. I really like swinging around with ropes, especially the sections where the ropes wrap around parts of the level--and all this is made even more effective by the graphics, which really give the feeling of climbing around a cave, etc.
I was unable to figure out the control scheme particularly well, but I think this is partially due to the physics of how it works--for example, sometimes you have to push the W/S key for a long time before the rope will actually start to change length. Other problems I had include shooting out with a bunch of momentum after holding down S right after placing a new beacon--it seemed like I would sort of slide along the ground but then suddenly be able to extend the rope, and it would come out all at once, or something?
I think that the question of checkpoints is also worthwhile. It can be rather tedious to lay out all the ropes and then have to restart. That said, I think that the system as it stands is not really wrong as it essentially requires care and mastery of the rope system--and that's not a bad thing. It's just not what I find fun, I suppose.
So yeah, overall, a pretty nice platforming game.
This is a really cool puzzle game. I definitely would not have figured out the last level so I'm glad I didn't spend too long agonizing over it :sweat_smile: but I did manage to beat the rest.
I think that the weight mechanic of the gold pieces is interesting but would probably need to be communicated to the player better. I think really all this game needs is a couple more levels to really have a learning curve for all the possible mechanics.
Note that I did realize when looking at the last level that I really needed some way to move over to the right without changing in height... but I simply had no idea what I could possibly need to do to do that. So I think that the level design does communicate a lot about what needs to be done even if I couldn't figure it out.
But yeah, really neat puzzle game. It's hard to articulate exactly what, but it just seems like a unique sort of puzzle game--something rather novel.
This game is built on a really solid idea--the recursive maze is easy to understand and quite a bit of fun to solve. The execution of this idea is also quite good. The graphics are clean, and their simplicity aids nicely in recognizing the individual maze screens.
The incorporation of platforming challenges where the failure state was going backwards in the maze was, I thought, a very nice usage of the different mechanics.
My only real criticism is that, the one point where I had to jump on top of a maze-entrance block, it was surprisingly difficult to land right on top of it. I think the platforming physics could be adjusted a little bit just to make them control really smoothly, as there's no real need for difficult platforming physics in this game, I don't think.
I absolutely love this game. It really gives this great feeling of exploration and adventure, exploring this deep underwater environment. Learning new things about nature, even though a bit of an alien nature. Just a really great vibe.
But what really sells it above all else is the music. The music just sets the mood so unbelievably well, giving that feeling of exploration and adventure... and with a tinge of melancholy. I just love it so much.
I also think it's great how the potential of each game mechanic is really utilized. The scanner serving as the research device, but then it becomes your only protection from the hostile fish... but then the scanner beam *also* has to be used for protection! Super awesome double use of the mechanics. I also saw that in the post-jam you made the fish interact with each other... that's just great.
Other comments: - I felt bad about shining my light on the poor light-sensitive fish... at least, the ones that weren't gonna attack me. Not really a problem with the game, just thought it was worth mentioning. - The way the scanner dialog interacts with the radio transmission dialog is not too bad, but it did kinda confuse me my first playthrough. I wonder if it would make sense to have two separate dialogs? Or even add a new dialog box for each scan that occurs concurrently? - I did laugh at the hard mode ending. I admit I was hoping for something a bit more substantive though! :laughing:
I absolutely love the animations in this game. Some of the best pixel-art animations I've seen this jam, I think.
I thought fighting through the enemies in the single-player mode was quite enjoyable. I think the non-lethal combat combined with the knock-back systems makes for a pretty nice form of gameplay. I can definitely see the potential as a multiplayer fighting game.
The statues are a particularly nice feature, I think... the requirement to hit them multiple times makes them a nice source of competition.
This is a pretty silly game. The amount of depth you've managed to pull from this concept is pretty awesome. The liquid mechanics, as well as all the various interactions that the pee has with various objects, really do make for a pretty unique sort of platforming game.
Some of the platforming did seem pretty tricky... I only managed to salvage 5 pee drops by the end. I lost a lot of pee trying to get it out of the cauldron... perhaps it would be nice to allow the cauldron to rotate or something? I'm not quite sure. I did manage to get to the end despite how hard some of the sections seemed, so it seems to have worked out.
Pee as a protagonist is honestly, like, one of the most novel concepts I've seen out there. I admit I don't particularly enjoy thinking about pee, so playing this game is a pretty interesting experience... I have to essentially put myself into the shoes of... pee? The idea is extremely funny.
I think this thematic core is really emphasized by the gameplay mechanics, and I think it is a surprisingly worthwhile idea. Despite the obvious humor of the game, it really does ask me to play a game in a way that is a bit different from other games, and I think that's pretty neat.
Overall, a nice game, strong humorous foundation, nonetheless gives a unique and novel experience.
The use of the music and the rhythm in this game is super cool. It's just a lot of fun to have the drill move on the beat, especially with the beat moving faster and faster as time goes on. And of course, it means that directional inputs have to be timed with at least some care, which is pretty fun too.
I like the tradeoff of trying to go deeper to get more valuable ores, but leaving the earlier ores behind. This works even better with the varying density in ores. I managed to get a score of 915 just digging straight down until I got to the very low levels.
On that note I do really like the sense of depth. When I end some runs and see that there is a whole section I never reached, that makes that unreached area quite tantalizing.
I did find that luck played a large role in the score I got. My highest score, 1295, came in a run where there were like 5 skeletons all grouped together--so that accounts for half of the score right there. It would be pretty hard to beat in any run that didn't generate any skeletons.
It's a somewhat interesting question because I think that, playing and hoping for good RNG is kind of fun. It's really fun to see those five skeletons and grab them, knowing that I'll get a good score. But the tradeoff is that means some runs are intrinsically going to be less fun.
I like the medal system at the end.
Overall this is a really good entry. I played it a number of times due to the variety of mechanics and just to try to push my score higher. Very fun.
This was an enjoyable little game to play through. The combat was, I suppose, the core aspect of the game as it stands, and it was fun enough.
I definitely like having the random upgrade system. My first playthrough I got no items at all on the first floor, but my second playthrough I had fire most of the run. I definitely think that a larger variety of weapons would be even better, but I think that's pretty obvious...
The combat system was actually surprisingly deep--the rooms with the flying head + bat + skeleton in a tight space were pretty tricky. It might make sense to put them later in the game as they are, I think, the hardest room. My first playthrough I got a number of that room in a row which was rather hard. I wonder if the room selection system could be modified to use, maybe, a grab-bag sort of RNG like Tetris? (Where you are guaranteed to only get a small number of duplicates in a row)
I did run into one glitch that ended my first run: a bat flew off the screen and I couldn't kill it, or go through the doors. I had no choice but to suicide :(
But yeah, a straightforward little game. I enjoyed playing it.
I gotta love how many twists the game has in it. Like, okay, I can accept that making my car lower will make it faster. But then the game immediately throws a curveball and the guy starts pushing his car... but then I don't even get to *push* my car, I get to *kick* it! It's like, the most my expectations have ever been subverted.
I feel like it might even be worth it to take that idea farther... the next round, your car is so deep that the wheels are sticking through it, it seems like that could lead to a whole new mechanic!
That said, I feel like the game makes good use of the kicking mechanic. The level design is exactly what it needs to be... the second level shows you that you can shove your car through other cars, and then the third level has a shortcut that consists of pushing through the other cars. It really doesn't need much else.
Overall, really good entry. Short, to the point, still has some super incredible moments.
This game kind of reminds me of an Atari 2600 game... the music in particular, being beeps and boops, combined with arcady-gameplay... perhaps an unexpected comparison, but hey.
Anyways I agree that getting stuck in the drilling animation seems kind of annoying. However, I think it is actually a potentially pretty good game mechanic. I had a moment where I got stuck into one of the pebble-dirt blocks when I was headed in a different direction, and because those blocks take three hits, I was able to move away after completing the drilling.
To me, this suggests the drilling animation as a pretty neat game mechanic. It's sort of like, you accidentally ran into this dirt, and now your drill is stuck, and your only option is to dig the block. It's an interesting way to force the player to move with precision, but it also opens up new options when you have the blocks that take multiple hits.
One problem I did encounter was somewhat glitchly collisions with the solid rocks. At one point I sort of teleported partway across the map, which actually helped me a bit I think--but then at somepoint I got really stuck and started gliding up rather fast and then glided off the screen entirely, at which point it seemed I couldn't do anything--I suppose I was stuck above the screen, maybe? I'm not sure.
In total I think this is a fine little drilling game. If you wanted more depth in it you could add more block types, maybe even drill upgrades, etc, but there were at least some interesting aspects in it as it stands.
This is an intriguing game. For me, the essentially hand-drawn graphics plus the somewhat surreal yet straightforward story suggests that the game is somewhat meta. It almost feels like the main character of the game is narrating a story, even though there is no narrator in sight... it almost feels like the main character here is the "creator" of the game, so to speak. I may be way off the mark from what is intended here, but that's my reading.
In any case, on a more descriptive note, I really dig the music here. It is moody in a way that complements the rest of the game pretty well.
I really like the split controls between the NPC and the player character. Unfortunately I think they would only really apply particularly well in carefully engineered scenarios... I think this game could possibly work pretty well as a puzzle game with pre-designed levels where the goal is to get all the diamonds (or at least, some proportion of the diamonds).
That is, I often found that there was not a lot of point to try to figure out where to direct Luiz to, as I could usually just dig down and grab a couple diamonds, and then dig to the exit. It was certainly fun when Luiz interacted with me in interesting ways, however. Especially when he managed to grab a couple diamonds.
I like the pixel-art graphics. They certainly complement the digging theme quite well.
Neat game. Right now it is quite repetitive, to an almost extreme point... but, of course, the player character *is* a robot, so repetition is just natural, right...?
To be completely honest: I think there is quite a bit of legitimacy to making a robot game that ends up being very repetitive and mechanical. I certainly have a pretty good idea of how much I want to be a robot after I played this game. That sort of storytelling through mechanics can be pretty powerful--if that's the direction you want to take it.
I did find that the way I started completing tasks ended up as a sort of algorithm. I would dash to one station, dash and charge up, dash to the other station, dash and charge up, etc... it seems some commenters were unaware of the dash key? It definitely adds to the game, I think.
I did end up beating the game, although I too was not sure if the game was going to end or not.
I think the main graphics for the spaceship and the robot are pretty nice. I definitely like that I can see the charge of the robot and the status of the radar so clearly in the pixel art. I agree with others that I didn't find a way to read the nuclear reactor.
Overall I think this is a neat game. Right now it is very much a taste of being a robot, which I personally find a worthwhile experience, even if most people might want a more exciting game...
I think the graphical style of this game is quite neat.
I have a very hard time completing most of the puzzles as the character is not particularly agile... when the game wants me to move between two spots quickly it seems almost unreasonably difficult to actually execute the intended movement. The way the character sticks to walls and sometimes floors makes precision movement difficult, especially when trying to move quickly.
I really enjoy the use of the different flowers as puzzle elements. The lighting-up flowers are definitely a lot of fun, although I sometimes had a hard time figuring out which one I could interact with. I also like the target flowers and the switch flowers, although it took me a long time to figure out what the target flowers are. I may have somehow skipped the level where they were introduced, I'm not sure.
I think the use of lighting with the 3D graphics really makes them more effective. I have previously seen lighting applied to 2D graphics in a 2D game but lighting applied to 3D graphics in a 2D game seems more effective, I would say, so good job there.
I enjoy the knife, especially the knife throwing mechanic. Throwing it into the target flowers is really satisfying.
Overall I would say this is a nice platforming game, just with a little too sticky of movement.
I enjoyed playing through this. I really dig the straightforward graphics--combined with the hands-off gameplay, this gives this game a really chill vibe. Then, adding the goal of building the population, etc--kind of gives this game a feeling akin to a building game, all about exponential growth--and I think that combination is really quite fun and relaxing.
I think I would have liked a bit more understanding of the interplay between the various factors. Do I need to dig the nest before the eggs can grow? That's what is seemed like. Do I need food before my eggs can become ants? That is what I guessed, so I set the slider to forage, but I couldn't actually tell for sure.
I think that the food resource in particular could be expanded on just a little bit--essentially, make the ants unable to do the other tasks if the food isn't kept stocked. (Maybe this is how it works--I don't know :sweat_smile: )
On the graphics: I enjoyed the particle effects. I think that the holes being dug would be better if they were, maybe, expanding circles/ovals? The chopped-off ovals seem a bit unpolished.
Anyways, here's my scores (the clipboard button doesn't seem to work): Total - 2:05 Dig Nest - 2:05 Food Supply - 1:57 Population - 1:52
This was a super fun little game. The story was easy enough to understand and pick-up-and-play, and then the variety of levels plus the shrink ray idea was just a really fun idea. I especially enjoyed the voice-over cutscenes with the rest of the game.
I do think that the invincibility of all the enemies in the second and third levels is a little weird. It makes the shooting mechanics pretty much meaningless in those two levels, which seems like a shame as it's fun to run through and shoot everything.
It was fun to go back through and try speedrunning the game. I think the leaderboard is a pretty cool mechanic for a Ludum Dare game.
I think the graphics are on some level a bit inconsistent in terms of style, etc, but I am quite fond of them. I enjoyed the music a lot.
Overall this game is I think the most fun game I've played so far. Everything else sort of just complements the basic fun gameplay of running around and shooting stuff inside the framing of a silly story.
This is a pretty nice entry. It's definitely best new take on Tetris I've seen in a while. I really like the art, especially all the grass, and dirt, and rocks surrounding the Tetris board... and then the music--or at least the music that I got to hear--was pretty good too.
Unfortunately I am simply not very good at Tetris. My first game took maybe 15 minutes and I lost with the laughable score of... 1. My second game I've been playing for maybe 45 minutes and I've gotten to around depth 40. It seems like, at least with my skill level, the time it actually takes to get further down is just a bit too much. The game ends up being really slow-paced, which clashes with the sense I get from the presentation of the game that it should be more fast-paced.
I did find that as I learned to use the new abilities I was able to get farther faster. I think that the abilities are a really useful addition to the game, as they do help give it that sense of destruction and speed that might be expected from a digging game.
I do find that the way the abilities work is a little annoying--if you don't use them right away then all the lines you clear are wasted in terms of charging up abilities. Ultimately I think this is fine, as they would be way too powerful if you could, say, bank up a bunch of the explosion ability by clearing a bunch of lines, but it does feel a little bad.
I think that problem in particular could really be mitigated just by adding more juice to the ability UI. If the abilities really popped out when they were ready, so that, for example, I could use the earthquake without ever wasting any lines charging it, I think that would be better. At it stands it actually took me a long time to realize that the UI included a charging bar for each ability and that lines cleared while an ability is charged don't contribute to it.
Ultimately I think this game is still pretty incredible. Now that I understand it as a slow-paced game (at least how I play it), I think it is a pretty nice game. If I had a couple of hours to spend playing Tetris it would be a very good way to do that.
This was a pretty fun little puzzle game. The various ways that the ball could be positioned to start and stop doors, platforms, etc seemed pretty interesting and relatively intuitive once I sort of figured out how to control the ball.
I was a bit frustrated with how, often when I would try to activate a particular switch with the ball, I would click right when I heard the activation sound effect, but I would be too late as the ball would be immediately destroyed. I'm not sure exactly how to fix this--maybe when the ball hits the switch, there could be a window of a couple frames where, if the player clicks, the ball will teleport to where it entered the switch and lock its position there? I think that would make the game feel a lot better. I had to re-do the entire purple and orange door puzzle a couple times because I simply couldn't get the ball to stop on the purple switch.
That said, I enjoyed figuring out the puzzles even if the mechanic execution was a bit tough. I think traversing the environment is also a nice component of the game--I like having all the puzzles sort of in one big world.
This game very strongly reminds me of an Atari 2600 game. The graphics and the audio certainly give this vibe--the audio especially, being straightforward beeps--but more than that, the gameplay itself gives this vibe. It's a rather simple game, with an arcadey sort of premise, and the game supports a couple different modes based on the same core gameplay. These all remind me of Atari games. Then, on top of that, there is the sort of space vibe, with a bomb thrown in for good measure.
I'm not sure how useful this comparison is, but I really do think this game has a strong Atari vibe. I'm not sure if that's what you were going for, but I think it's worth pointing out.
I enjoy the core mining-upgrade game loop. It is, I think, susceptible to a couple problems which I want to discuss, but it was pretty fun for most of the game. The post-jam version in particular, where combat becomes a bit more doable, is really nice.
One problem I ran into on my playthough in the post-jam version is, I decided to buy the rocket launcher first. However, I found I couldn't really use it, so then I bought the machine gun. But then I was down $5500 and so it took me a very long time to get enough money for a fast ship--so I had to keep going really far down and mining crystals with a slow ship. I think a selling system would help here, so I could sell my gun or my old submarines, even at say half price, so that I wouldn't be punished too much by selling things out-of-order.
My first playthrough, on the Ludum Dare version, I died once, and that was the point that I quit... I lost around $2000 plus several hundred at least in crystals, and I was in a somewhat similar situation where I had a slow ship. So, at that point, I would have had to go even deeper to get more money, and it would take just a ridiculous amount of time to build up all my money again. I think that the punishment for dying is too much--it should probably be a fixed cost, like $400 or so.
It also seems like it might be possible to burn through so many crystals that the game becomes outright impossible? I'm not quite sure.
One thing I found frustrating about the combat is that often, a very large number of enemies would spawn, and I would essentially have to go back up to the surface--trying to fight them off would result in a great loss in health. Especially when I was stuck with the slow, unupgraded ships, going really deep for a couple more crystals, I would often lose like 3/4 of my health in a matter of seconds and just have to pray that I don't die before I can upgrade my ship, as that would result in a ton of lost progress.
In any case, I finally managed to push through to the end, and I thought that was one of the best moments in the game. Digging a couple crystals and then getting a few million dollars... it was pretty fun.
Overall I think this game is a pretty solid game. The core gameplay is pretty fun for a while--I just ran into a couple roadblocks in the mid-late game that I think could be somewhat mitigated. I also think the graphics and audio are pretty nice, especially in the post-jam version.
I really think the base idea here is pretty good (at least for a short game). I thought it was quite enjoyable to switch between building the roots and building the branches--I really don't think the game needs much else, in the form of new mechanics, or even really a losing condition--the idea of building was enjoyable enough for me.
The only real problems I had were quality-of-life issues--there's a number of these so I'll just do a list: - Sometimes the user interface would be a little laggy and wouldn't stop showing me a root I had previously selected. - A lot of the roots themselves were not visually drawn. One way I can think of to fix this is to remove the user choice of where the next roots will go. That way, the entire root tree can be generated at the start of the game, and new parts of it will essentially be "revealed" when the player clicks on a new root. - The tree started to drift off the screen, making it impossible to grow new branches. I ended up with just hundreds of thousands of water as I would just keep adding roots until I could add no new ones, while waiting for the tree to come back on screen.
But if the game was polished to fix these issues, and maybe juiced up a bit with snappy UI and some SFX, I think this would be a really enjoyable short game. If you want a longer game you could definitely go the route other commenters are suggesting and add new stuff--but I did have fun with what was there, only hindered sometimes by small UI annoyances.
To be particularly clear: just the two things, roots and branches, plus the space background, are easily enough to make me want to play this game as long as it takes to fill out the root network and reach space. Just the presence of those obvious goals were motivation enough, and the gameplay was pretty fun working towards that goal.
(I suppose my one idea to solve the root drawing issue conflicts with the presence of the clearly defined end-goal root network... that rendering problem might need a different solution)
I enjoyed playing through this game, but there are a couple things I couldn't figure out.
I never managed to understand exactly what the requirements were for upgrading the drill. I think I had to have a full power bar but I'm not precisely sure. I find that the game ended up being mostly stockpiling uranium for several minutes and then buying more power plants. I think that, generally in this kind of game, I would expect to be able to significantly ramp up my uranium output at some point, at least if things are going to cost 999 uranium. I ended up covering most empty squares with mines but it still took a long time for uranium to build up enough. Especially when I need even more to actually upgrade the drill...
I couldn't quite figure out what the bar on the right is supposed to mean. I think the first upgrade for the drill changed it a bit, but I wasn't sure what most of the information on the bar meant.
The game was a bit laggy and ultimately crashed before I could win. If it helps: I was playing the 1.2 version.
One aspect of the game I found rather enjoyable was juggling between the different building types. I would often destroy all my mines so that my energy budget was large enough so that I could tear down my wind turbines and build a power plant in their place.
I did ultimately decide to do a second playthrough, which I managed to complete a bit faster than the one that crashed. It does help to build a bunch of wind turbines instead of trying to get a lot of power plants, but ultimately I think the cost for power plants is still probably a bit too high.
Either way, it is still fun to build all the buildings and try to figure out a plan for getting the drill upgraded. I also found the audio clips that play to be quite fun. The game overall has a really nice lighthearted vibe that I found quite enjoyable.
One really tiny change that I think would accentuate that is unlocking the camera. I really like the title screen which shows a different environment from the city itself, and I think having the camera unlocked so that I could rotate it around and see the surroundings of the city would really make it feel like I was building this city, and help me appreciate it as a whole 3D place rather than a single view.
So overall, this is a nice little game. I enjoyed it enough to play through it again after it crashed, and I found the art and sounds charming.
The log is pretty long--Ludum Dare comments only fit 4096 characters. I may be able to email it to you? (you can try contacting me if you don't want to post your email publicly: honeyponygames@gmail.com )
The very end of the log is like: ``` [ 00:14:14.625 ]: [Info] House (EmptyActor) [ 00:14:16.706 ]: [Info] Spawn [ 00:14:16.710 ]: [Info] spawning ui [ 00:14:16.711 ]: [Info] X:64.00 Y:48.00 Z:16.00 [ 00:14:16.717 ]: [Info] X:1423.505 Y:1718.316 [ 00:14:16.718 ]: [Info] X:1423 Y:1718 [ 00:14:16.719 ]: [Info] X:711.5 Y:859 [ 00:14:16.720 ]: [Info] at X:681.5 Y:779 [ 00:14:21.183 ]: [Info] House (EmptyActor) [ 00:14:22.409 ]: [Info] Mine (EmptyActor) [ 00:14:24.831 ]: [Info] Spawn [ 00:14:25.795 ]: [Info] Spawn ```
One part that stands out near the end is like: ``` [ 00:11:04.774 ]: [Warning] Exception has been thrown during . Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute. Stack strace: at System.Collections.Generic.List`1+Enumerator[T].MoveNextRare () [0x00013] in
My understanding is that this game is based on a sort of reverse-time narrative? It seems like a pretty neat idea -- I enjoyed trying to fight the boss both forwards and backwards in time.
I also agree that the death at the very beginning is a pretty neat moment.
One other note: I enjoyed the music.
This is a very solid entry. The concept is simple and interesting, and a nice use of the theme. It leads to very frantic gameplay that is quite nicely suited by the music.
A couple random thoughts:
It seems like the paper planes are by far the hardest obstacle to dodge, as they can appear and hit you within a very small window, giving almost no time to react. I wonder if this situation could be improved somehow to give the player a bit more control.
Ultimately, though, un-dodgeable planes are not actually a problem, as the player can simply pour more upgrades into the frog before the beaver, which is an interesting strategy that the airplanes create. Still, might be worth considering.
I also think that the umbrella upgrades should do something different from the health, just to make the system a bit more interesting. One thing I think would be neat is if umbrellas didn't slow you down when you take damage--so they would essentially be a better form of extra health. In that case their upgrade cost might need to be a little bit higher, but I think it would still be a good change.
I like that the game eventually reaches the space environment a bit after the actual winning score.
It seemed that perhaps the music is split into two slightly different pieces, one "for" the beaver and one "for" the frog, panned left and right respectively? If so, I think that's pretty neat. It makes a lot of sense to make use of stereo panning a lot in this game because it is so cleanly split down the middle.
Overall it's a pretty good game. Very strong concept for a game executed quite well.
@nethead
Haha, Celeste definitely seeped quite a bit into this game, although I haven't actually played it recently lol. I would say that I more directly stole a bunch of ideas from Mario kaizo (the rock toss is derived pretty directly from shell jumping in Mario).
@metadept
Thanks for the feedback! I definitely wish I had made a couple more easier levels -- although I also think that the rolling rocks part is too fun to leave out. It's a tough balance 😅
Anyways, if for some reason you wanted to see any of the later levels (or the ending cutscene), do note that the F key can be pressed to skip levels.
@jk5000
Thank you for the feedback! Is there any more info you could provide about the double jump? From what I can tell it is a pretty standard control scheme -- I'm curious if there's some subtle problem with it or if completely different controls would be better (e.g. not having to release jump to activate the double jump).
@tomssuli
Thanks for the feedback! I definitely wish I had had re-configurable controls. On my computer the keyboard still works even when using the gamepad so I'm not sure what's happening there... oh well. Thanks for playing!
Edit: On the theme: I'm not sure this game fits the theme too well, but I believe my idea was going deeper and deeper -> going deeper and going deeper, i.e. going deeper two times. Sort of an abstract relationship to the theme.
@cameron-paxton
Thanks for the feedback! Do you mean that, like, it seemed like you were running into an invisible wall? There are literal brick walls in the game so I want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding 😅
On the theme: Yeah I would say this game isn't really meant to fit the theme. If I recall correctly, I originally came up with my idea when I saw someone else interpret the theme as two characters both named "deeper." So the theme was more an indirect inspiration for my game then an integral part of it.
@frogman
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback!
I think better tutorialization of the harder mechanics would be a very useful thing. I definitely didn't intend my game to be like, ridiculously opaque and hard-to-understand. I think that it would be quite possible to teach these mechanics similar to how Celeste teaches its harder mechanics in Celeste Farewell... sadly I just did not even think about it.
Personally I do think I like having some levels that are somewhat longer where you do have to replay early sections. I think it is possible to make that kind of replaying-the-same-thing fun when done right... but I probably did not do it very well here.
Anyways I do very much appreciate the criticisms. Knowing what is frustrating or downright not fun is super useful. The figures you provided for how many times you had to do stuff really give me a clearer picture of everything. Sadly I can only give you one heart! :sweat_smile:
@wheffle
Thanks for the feedback! That definitely sounds like some sort of keyboard ghosting issue, potentially... I don't think I've ever encountered it on my computer. Definitely a good reason to implement remappable controls!
@bytinggames
Thanks for the feedback! On the wall jump: it definitely requires approximately full height, which is essentially because both the rock and the player need to accelerate from the same 0 velocity so that their vertical position is matched when they make horizontal contact.
On the controls: Your comments on learning them in-game definitely make sense. I think I mostly put them there as a reference--sometimes I find I sort of forget the controls at some point in the game, and want to refer back to them. I suppose this is unlikely in my game, but I figure it doesn't hurt to have that reference there anyways. It also lets me put the controls that I haven't tutorialized: the skip buttons and the retry button.
Strangely, on my system, I can select units and give them orders, but zooming and panning do not work at all. I tried avoiding the mouse until after the cutscene plays, still no luck. :(
I'm on Windows 10
I like how this game centers on the idea of conversation. I think that the word bubbles resetting your position, while simultaneously being sub-goals, is a very interesting puzzle mechanic, especially given that this teleportation feature has to be used to solve many of the puzzles.
I think the idea that you can lock yourself out of the conversation if you go down the wrong path is pretty clever. I certainly can relate to it in any case.
I will agree that the navigation around the map can be a little finicky due to apparent hitbox issues. The game would definitely be a bit smoother without that problem.
Overall though, this was a pretty nice puzzle game despite its short length. Good job!
The use of the lighting system here is really nice. It's always interesting when a 2D game incorporates a lighting system. I think that having the lighting be important for figuring out when you need to dodge is a really good mechanic.
At first I did not realize that the orange flames should be grabbed instead of avoided, even after reading the description. Not a huge problem, just something to note.
I think that it is pretty tricky to actually dodge the platforms even when you can see them. This did lead to a pretty neat moment where I really felt the adrenaline after just barely missing the platform. The thing is, it is really hard to dodge the platforms--but it is possible. This makes *actually dodging them* a super interesting feeling. I really kind of felt like I was falling down a well--if I was actually falling down a well it would almost certainly be mostly luck whether I collided with any obstacles in it. I think this is a super neat way to encapsulate that kind of experience--and so I don't think it necessarily needs to be changed if that's what you're going for.
So yeah. Kind of a small game, but does have some really strong moments nonetheless.
I thought this was a pretty nice game.
It did take me a long time initially to locate an oxygen plant after the first one, and I had to swim back to that initial plant. I think there's like, a whole side of the map that doesn't go anywhere (the left side)? But it also doesn't have any plants so I was kind of confused.
I think that the gems that follow you around could potentially move a little faster, as I was kind of confused if I had lost some of them at first. However, I do kind of like the way they move, so it could go either way.
One thing I really like about this game is the way that the game makes use of the ocean theme. The use of fish swimming around as a health source, was, I thought, a really neat mechanic. Most games will have a static health item, so having fish that can move around and are sort of just part of the environment, be the health source, was a really cool way to do that.
It also seems to me that new health fish could easily be spawned in, etc, making the game able to be very reactive to the player. I think that if other kinds of useful fish were also added it could be really fun to interact with many types of fish.
But, as it stands, it was still a pretty fun game. Good job!
This is a really nice puzzle game. Something I liked in particular is that, whenever a new concept was introduced, the first thing I tried would usually fail--this was a cool way of making me learn more about the game. I honestly didn't think level 5 or 6 were bad at all. Still working on level 7 though. :smile: EDIT: Just figured it out! It was good too.
A couple small thoughts: - I like the graphical style here. Really crisp and clean. - I enjoyed the little quotes before the first two levels. I imagine you were planning more..? Either way it was nice. - I think it would be nice if I could hold the undo key and get multiple undos. Right now undoing is very tedious. - My computer is high DPI and so the game is a little small--I told Windows to scale it up and it's fine, but it would probably be nice to just make the window resizable.
I can see that the slow movement is a common complaint here. I definitely agree. I see two possibilities for improving the movement: 1. Allow the player to click anywhere on the screen that they are allowed to move. I think, in this case, the game should also draw the path showing how the player is moving, so that the rules of the movement become clear (i.e. have to move as a series of vertical and horizontal movements, can't move through walls). 2. Cancel the movement animation when the player clicks on a new spot. E.g. I could click two tiles to the left then immediately click two tiles above that, and the player character would move to both of those spots in quick succession -- I wouldn't have to wait for the animation to complete to make my second click.
Aside from that I loved the graphics and music. I got a sort of Stardew Valley vibe from the game--the music and environment remind me of the mines in Stardew Valley. Either way I think this game might have some of my favorite graphics I've seen so far this Ludum Dare.
I liked how the game tutorialized the different mechanics. A particularly fun moment was when I learned I could teleport into the walls--I especially like the slightly darker wall tile as it suggested I should maybe click there, and then I realized I should try to keep clicking farther into the wall.
I think that the puzzles could perhaps use a bit more depth. I didn't really have to think through any of the puzzles that were in the game as it stands.
I enjoyed the ending of the game. Very nice.
Overall this was a nice experience. The graphics & music really sell the game, even if the movement is a bit frustrating.
What I find very interesting about this game is the contrast between the framing of it and the actual depth of the mechanics. In particular, the art style is somewhat disjointed, and moreover, not animated or "juicy", or any of the other things one would expect from a video game. The art creates an expectation of non-game-ness, to some degree.
Then, the initial fishing mechanic reinforces this idea. The bobber disappears and the fish meter shows up, and it doesn't seem like a particularly deep fishing game.
But then the game throws a curveball and makes the fishing game completely different from what was expected. The fish speeds up a little bit and this doesn't seem out-of-place, but then it speeds up so much and the game changes entirely.
I really thought this was great. I was not even able to time the fish meter with my eyes once it reached the fast fish. The best I could do was either close my eyes and hit the spacebar at a random time, and hope I caught the fish, or I could try to really intuit when I should hit the spacebar. I did manage to pull off the second strategy a couple times, and it feels really interesting. I essentially had to look away from the screen and just sort of feel the internal pulse of the fish meter, and that was a super interesting kind of interaction.
And then, at the very end, the fish meter becomes even more unusual. The fish starts jumping around without a constant velocity, and so it is now impossible to time the fish based on pure rhythm. At this point I have a really hard time actually catching any fish, although I managed to get a few.
This contrast between the uneventful framing and the actual difficulty squeezed into this fish meter is really fun. This might be a weird comparison, but this reminds me a lot of the game Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby--a game that was developed, almost certainly, to be a kid's game, but ended up being ridiculously difficult to the point that it spawned memes about Christopher Robin being an eldritch god.
I don't think I have much to say about the rest of the game--I'm sure there are interesting things to say about the variety of items or the music, etc... but to me the fishing meter mechanic just really stood out, and really made this game something quite neat.
The point I think is most interesting about this game is that there is a theoretical maximum score. That is somewhat unusual for a high score game, but I think it works really well here. I can't fathom the routing and execution it would take to get that maximum score, so I am stuck still trying to just get *a* good score, based on random chance, more or less.
I think that is pretty neat--a skill ceiling, but not one that is actually really visible for all players.
I noticed in the comments someone reached the "top" so I had to go back and look for that, and I think that is also pretty neat--having a sort of secret in the game. I think there is some sort of theme buried here... you can either rest here at the top, forever, but never get any score, or you can try for a high score and meet your inevitable mortality. I think there's something there.
So that's what I found most interesting here. Nice little highscore game. By the way my highscore is 82
This is a pretty neat game! Most of it works pretty well. I like the music and the graphics--I especially like the variety of tilesets present throughout the game.
As other people have mentioned, I had trouble figuring out how to wall jump... in fact, I still don't actually know what the control is for walljumping. I usually just spam the jump button and directional inputs until something happens that seems useful.
(note: when referring to levels I'm going to use "level 1" to mean the first level with the key, not the tiny initial level)
At first I thought that the level design in the second level is a bit tedious--it seemed like trying to run over one of the crystal-shooters would always result in taking damage, so I always had to wait--but I realized in level 3 that it is possible to jump over them right as they start shooting. I'm not sure if there would be some way to telegraph this strategy to the player better, as it would make the game flow a bit better in level 2. Perhaps I didn't try jumping in level 2 because the enemies first show up in a hallway with a low ceiling? Something to think about.
One small nitpick I have is that some of the tiles look like they are going to be background details but end up being platforms (e.g. the tiles that are just a 1px outline in level 1). This didn't end up being an actual problem in any real sense, but if you want your tiles to consistently read as "ground" some of them may need to be changed.
I think that's all I could really think of to talk about... overall pretty good entry. Everything is nice and tied together and well polished.
I had a good amount of fun playing this--I kept playing far past the point where it became quite repetitive. Even though there isn't too much variety in the enemies, there is enough variety in the spells that I found it worthwhile to try them all out, and to try swapping between them more often or less often, etc...
One thing I really appreciate about the game is how much detail it gives about how to play it. It was super easy to play just because of how clearly annotated everything in the game is, and that's despite it having quite a few different mechanics. It's often pretty hard to learn how to play a jam game that has as many mechanics as this but this game was super smooth to pick up and play.
In terms of the gameplay, I definitely liked the different weaknesses that the spells targeted. It is quite obvious which enemies have what weaknesses. What I find interesting about that, is that I often don't take advantage of systems involving different enemy weaknesses, simply because I don't care to learn which enemies have what weaknesses. I think broadcasting the weaknesses so clearly, like they are here, can be nice. It allowed me to choose rather at random whether I wanted to fight the enemies more effectively be swapping to the best weapon.
A boring note: I think music is the biggest missing component here. Music adds so much atmosphere to a game. I'm sure that's an obvious point, but this is the first game I've really felt it missing... the game is so engaging otherwise that I think a bit more sound, but especially music, would really make it pop.
Overall: A rather small game, becomes repetitive, but has enough variety in content to keep me playing for quite a while. Nice entry.
I really like this. At first, the exploration seemed pretty normal. Then, the scale of the catacombs started becoming more apparent, as I kept dropping down staircases and through those brick cylinders. But then, at some point, the scale just become incomprehensible--it no longer seemed like the catacombs could seem any bigger. Perhaps this is just because I knew that this environment would literally go on forever, but I still think it's an effective game.
I do think that the part I enjoyed most was when I really could feel the raw enormity of the environment. I'm not sure if it's possible to capture that feeling for longer, somehow--I think one thing that could help is more variety in the component parts of the dungeon. The suspension of disbelief becomes harder once the same parts have been seen twenty times rather than three.
I especially liked the walled-off tunnel sections that had light coming down. I think having a couple more sections that indicate that *there is something else here* just out of reach could really add to the feeling of scale.
I'm honestly not sure whether this game actually feels like it needs sound. I think it might be possible to make it better with sound, but right now it feels pretty good nonetheless. I might even give it four stars or so in the audio category simply because the sounds in the game are pretty appropriate...
I think I would disagree with other commenters in that I don't think this game really needs anything else in terms of gameplay or story, etc... the pure atmosphere of "exploring a huge place" is hard to beat with extra gameplay, I would say.
So yeah. Great entry!
What this game needs most is more upgrades. As it stands, the only upgrade is more oxygen, which has one fatal flaw as an upgrade: it doesn't *really* change how the game plays. It lets the player play for longer, which is *important*, as that lets them get farther down in the map.
But to really *engage* the player, there needs to be something that really feels worth working towards. Right now I don't particularly want to upgrade my oxygen all the way, as I don't really want to slowly dig all the way down to the bottom of the map.
If I could upgrade my movement and mining speed to be really fast, however, I definitely would want to do that! I would be super interested in playing if I could make myself faster and faster, and I would then definitely play long enough to get to the bottom. Because that kind of progression where things feel better and better to play is *really* like, a good incentive.
Even if the total cost of all the speed upgrades would be way more than the total cost of the oxygen upgrades as it stands, I would definitely do all the work to get those upgrades. It is just more engaging to get upgrades that make the player character more powerful, as it is enjoyable to feel powerful.
At least, that's my analysis of the upgrade system in this game. I hope you find it at least somewhat useful! :sweat_smile:
Pretty nice game. Perhaps the most interesting remark I have is that I completely missed a normal part of the game. In particular, the places where I have to jump down blindly into two pits--I did not realize at all that I should check which way to go using the ball. I thought when playing that that part of the game seemed a bit strange, as jumping blindly into pits isn't very interesting.
I think it might be interesting to try to teach the player this idea at some point before then... I'm not sure. It seems most people figured it out... I guess I am an outlier. Oh well, hopefully that data point is useful! :sweat_smile:
Either way I enjoyed the rest of the game. It seems like a platformer but I would say its much more of a shooting-puzzle sort of game. I think that's pretty neat--the genre of the game is sort of blurry because the main mechanics of the game are placed into a context where I would usually expect different mechanics.
I enjoyed the ending as well. I can see a number of ways of interpreting it... very neat.
Overall this was a good entry. Solid gameplay, solid ending.
I did manage to reach the end although I'm not quite sure how :sweat_smile: but my strategy was, essentially, to explore the game along some arbitrary axis for a while and see if anything happened.
However, this is actually really cool. The game does not give any real direction from what I can tell, it just says there is a puzzle and leaves the player to try exploring and see what they can find. I think that, chasing notes that fit some pattern, and then switching patterns some time, is a method of exploration that the game essentially incentivizes, and this is very cool because it results in the player having to just, try random things and see where it takes them.
One thing I enjoyed trying in particular was hitting several of the notes before traveling deeper. Creating these little non-rhythmic melodies along with the rest of the soundscape was cool. And even though it didn't lead anywhere in a *game* sense, I still enjoyed it--and I think that's the point.
This is a very interesting game. The randomized nature of the combat means that the only way to actually kill enemies is to stall and hope that they decide to do a dumb move. It also seems to me that the combat can essentially trap you in unwinnable situations.
I think, then, the question is: how much control you want the player to have over the outcome of the game. The thematic implication of RNG dominating the outcome so strongly is that the player's decisions and skill is largely insignificant--and it seems to me like that fits with the rest of the story in the game so far.
It also could be interesting to give the player more and more tools as they complete more runs, and tie that progression into the story somehow. I think a strongly RNG-dominated game does give a lot of thematic material to work with, if that's what you want to do.
Aside from that: I liked the graphical style of the game, especially the introductory text. The gameplay of the game as it stands got a bit repetitive by the time I died (floor 12 or 13)--I'm sure adding more enemies and other things would help there.
I did enjoy the combat despite its RNG nature. It's kind of fun to keep dancing around the enemies until they make a bad move.
Neat little game. I especially liked the variety of interactions--there's boxes, bridges, the pickaxe stones, the chains with the gun, and the sand with the shovel. Then there's also the various water interactions. All of this is really cool as it means the game is constantly providing new interactions--which I think is pretty fun.
I did run into an issue where the first time I played the box that is supposed to be on top of the sand either disappeared or got stuck in the ceiling with the sand (I'm not sure exactly what happened). Either way, I was stuck, and I had no idea there was even supposed to be a box--I had to restart and then I figured out that something had definitely gone wrong there.
One other thing I liked was dropping down the cliffs and having the camera desperately try to catch up. That was pretty fun.
Pretty neat little box stacking game! I've seen one very similar entry that also involved building a tower with the exact same box-moving-back-and-forth mechanic, but this one is drastically different, which is super cool!
I particularly like the chill vibe this game has. It is essentially an arcade game, but it doesn't feel fast paced at all. It truly feels like the game is being honest when it tells you "Nice job!" after stacking only a single trunk. It's as though the game is embodying a sort of unwavering kind-heartedness. That's great, in my opinion. I think the music really works well for that.
At first I thought the game might benefit from having a slightly faster pace, but now that I'm writing this I don't think that's true. I went back and played it a bit more and I think the pace does work pretty well. And, when I sort of relaxed a bit more, I got my highest score yet (12 trunks), so that's neat.
Overall, this is a great take on the tower-building ... genre, or whatever it might be called. :smile:
This game was pretty tough, but I'm glad I managed to get to the end.
While I was descending the game, I often felt like the levels had a lot of completely extraneous elements--I was particularly stuck on Chiller for a while, as I completely did not even think about how little I actually needed to do to win it. It did turn out that a lot of those extraneous elements ended up being used for the chase sequence at the end, but I really was quite confused while going down. (I'm also pretty sure there's still parts of Chiller that are completely unused on the left side of the map...)
But, the gameplay itself is pretty good. The variety of mechanics with the bomb and the various level elements are pretty cool, and the chase sequence they build up to is pretty neat (although I personally would probably prefer if it were easier).
This is definitely probably the best use of "stability" as a direct numerical game mechanic I've seen yet. The stability meter is pretty interesting even though it's not that different from a normal health bar. The two mechanics--placing a bomb lowers your stability, and fighting enemies raises it--those two mechanics are enough to make it work quite a bit different from a health bar, and then the chase sequence at the end, of course, adds yet another twist, which is really cool. It's just neat how so many mechanics are encoded into one single meter at the top of the screen.
Pretty good game. The gameplay is pretty smooth; as I played I definitely learned more about how to use the abilities I did have, and was able to unlock useful things as well. That kind of two-pronged difficulty curve is pretty neat, I think, as it allows the player to grow on their own and get better at the game, while it also allows them access to new mechanics in a sort of drip-feed. Good stuff.
The star speed upgrade is definitely extremely powerful--I didn't actually buy it before winning, but when messing around after winning I certainly noticed how it unbalances the game.
For some reason it seems like I am unable to buy the 150 star dodge upgrade...?
I do think it would be nice if there was a sandbox mode or something. I would like to be able to try out some of the fully-upgraded upgrades, now that I've won, but it takes a lot of time to collect all the stars necessary.
That said, the game overall is pretty good; playing through until reaching the end of the story is a great experience.
The physics in this game are extremely fun. I think this is because of the contrast between your lowest speed and your top speed. At least in my experience, platformers always seem more fun when you start to crank up the player speed, but then as that speed becomes "normal" it becomes less exciting. So, because this game has a normal speed that's pretty low, when I do accelerate to be really fast it remains exciting.
I found the addition of the carrots, especially the secret carrot, to be quite fun. I especially like the way that the secret carrot requires components in all three levels.
The game is pretty hard, but it's ultimately not that bad. After playing through it once it becomes quite a bit easier to get through it again, so I was able to get all the carrots and secrets.
Overall I think this is a really good entry. The only thing really missing is music, but that didn't take away from the fun gameplay or level design.
The idea of being able to trade stats in a sort of market is pretty funny. It seems like a pretty interesting mechanic, as it creates a trade-off between getting money and getting stats; it is of course possible to build up both over time, but it takes quite a while to get more stats and more money.
That said, spending the time to build up all the stats and the money is unquestionably the best strategy, as the combat is not really doable otherwise. I do think that making it possible to attack a different direction from your movement would be a major improvement, as it's hardly possible to do much combat without upgrades when you can only attack in the direction of your movement.
It was kind of a neat experience, though--I failed over and over until I sat down and just used the market for a bit, and then I just crushed everything in my path. It's an unusual way to play a game, and that tradeoff between sitting down and doing the tedious work versus just trying to wing it is interesting.
This game is extremely mechanically fun. I think that, in general, it is satisfying to use an input system where a series of inputs need to be executed in order to perform any actually meaningful task, and this game definitely exemplifies that idea. It is just a lot of fun to have to press a couple buttons to set up a particular spell.
I think the reason for this is because it requires so many inputs that it feels like I'm doing something really complicated and intricate, even though I'm really not. But that feeling is a really good feeling nonetheless.
I really like the variety of spells that exist. I figured all of them out but the speed one, which I failed to notice had increased my speed.
The most obvious area of improvement for this game is of course polish and audio. But the gameplay is really good, I think. I honestly had a great time trying this out.
This game has a lot going for it. The visual style and the basic platforming concept (disappearing platforms with various abilities) are both just really solid and work really well together.
On the music: it seems to me like the notes that the game generates algorithmically don't really come from one unified scale...? I think if you just generated random notes from a single pentatonic scale every time some action called for a note, you might get a better result.
The later levels are really difficult, which I think is mostly fine... I especially did have a pretty good time beating level 15. But level 13 annoys me, as it seems extremely precise to get enough momentum to reach either the portal or the blue block after hitting the red block. I did eventually manage to beat it after I realized I sort of needed to hit the red block while moving vertically...?
On that front I think the main improvement would just be to make the route in each level extremely obvious and relatively easy to execute. I don't think having to manipulate your velocity incoming to the red block is a well-broadcasted technique to the player, and so it should be left out of levels until the game teaches it somehow. (Or maybe I'm completely wrong about what I need to do, which I think would also communicate my point here... :smile: )
But, I did manage to power through, and I am ultimately glad that the game had a couple harder levels. The last level especially was fun to route, as I got to figure out which ways I would be able to successfully exit the portal, and then I could plan around that. It was good.
Overall, this is probably the best platformer I've played yet this Ludum Dare--it was extremely strong in terms of gameplay concepts and in terms of aesthetic design.
Pretty cool game!
I like the way that the end screen is playable and makes bonus levels available. This is just a fun way to implement bonus levels.
The way the game teaches the player mechanics is really well done. In particular, the second screen, which teaches us that the flag is the goal and that coin collection is mandatory, is pretty brilliant in how it teaches the player.
I also think that the way the interlocking falling parts work is super cool. That last bonus level in particular I thought really made good use of the physics engine. I admit I would kind of like to be able to see the blocks falling with continuous motion, rather than the tile-based physics, but that is a tall order. (And, I wonder if having continuous motion in the game would make it harder to understand some of the puzzle mechanics...?)
But, either way, this game is just a really solid puzzle game. I think it's one of the best LD49 games I've played.
This is a neat twist on the usual match three game. In a usual match three game, I find I am usually not thinking all too hard about anything but one particular match--I almost always miss all sorts of matches that show up as a chain reaction, as I simply don't care about them. But in this game I have to care very much about every single possible match.
So it's really an extremely fresh take on the genre, because it fundamentally changes the way the game is played, and none of the way I would play a usual match three game transfers here. This game is not fast paced at all, it is very slow and deliberate, and the contrast with the way I expect a match three game to work is just really cool.
This is a really nice little adventure game. All the puzzle elements fit together pretty well--after getting the spell, I naturally looked around for stars, then tried casting a few spells before I remembered where I needed to go to teleport. Then the rest followed pretty obviously. Lots of little puzzles with pretty obvious solutions--to me, it basically just felt like a series of "aha!" moments.
One detail I think is rather interesting is the way the player moves. It seems to be essentially based on the operating system's built-in automatic key repeating feature, which is interesting because the only other broad category of games with the same kind of input, that I know of, is games made in the Scratch programming language by people new to programming. It's a very unique tic to those kinds of games, and seeing it here I can't help but be reminded of it. I'm not sure if that's what you were going for, but it's definitely the vibe I get, and I imagine anybody else who used Scratch will get a similar vibe.
The vibe I get from this game is definitely a Getting Over It vibe--the platforming mechanics are intentionally unintuitive, and the game is intended to involve falling and losing progress quite a bit.
If this is a Getting Over It sort of game, then the most important difference from Getting Over It is the lava. The lava is effectively a timer, and if I don't complete the platforming objectives in time, I will lose.
I actually think that this is a pretty neat twist on the Getting Over It "genre." It adds a sort of additional dread to the gameplay, because I don't know exactly how long the level is, and when I run out of time it could mean I'm too slow by a little bit, or it could mean I'm too slow by orders of magnitude. That feeling is pretty neat.
I didn't make it past the section with the three rows of tiny blocks, as I couldn't figure out how to do the last jump, and replaying that section kind of makes my hands hurt. I think that section could be trimmed a bit for that reason--I don't think the game would lose much by making it a couple fewer jumps there, and it would hopefully be less physically difficult to get through it.
Overall, I think this is a neat take on the "unintuitive platformer" given the timer mechanic.
This game looks and feels really good. The 3D environment and the level select menu are both super beautiful, and the game controls pretty well for the most part too.
I was annoyed there was no restart button, and that losing would kick you back to the menu--a problem which is compounded by having to scroll the menu down. I also think that the piece description text boxes that come up sometimes are a little finicky. But, these are basically just nit-picks.
The gameplay and the levels themselves are both pretty neat. I like the combination of chess mechanics and box-pushing mechanics--pulling puzzle mechanics from two well-known games is a great way to make them more obvious to the player. It's especially fun to push around the blocks and destroy the enemy pieces.
I also think the AI is pretty impressive. I'm afraid I'm not smart enough to always tell when I've trapped it, but it definitely seems to do a pretty good job, overall, at putting up a fight.
Overall, really nice entry.
Wow, the extremely slow movement speed of the crane is probably not what most people would call fun, but it has a super good feeling to it, in my opinion. That is, it really has this feeling of manipulating a giant machine--the machine doesn't react instantaneously because of course it doesn't, it's a giant machine!
I really think this game captures that well. I think the direction to take it would really be to incentivize the player.
That is, getting a high score is just not that exciting, overall, so I really don't feel like I have any reason to sit here manipulating this gigantic slow machine.
But... if there were some other goal I could accomplish with the machine, that I already cared about for some reason, then I would have more reason to want to use it. And then the physics would really get a chance to shine. So I guess, if there were some sort of larger game that this crane could fit into, maybe even just something like an idle game, then people would feel like interacting with the crane a lot more--which would be great, because then more people could experience these cool physics.
This was a nice little game. I did sort of restart the first level as I wasn't sure how to climb up after all the platforms had been destroyed (I did not know they would come back, etc), but after that it was smooth sailing.
I particularly think the ice wand is a lot of fun because of its midair jump reset, which allowed me to do a lot of climbing without nearly as many platforms.
I think the idea that each of the witches is experiencing a particular mental health condition, which is symbolized through the gameplay, is pretty neat--but I must admit not much of that was on my mind while playing the game (aside from possibly the last witch with disassociation, as parts of that screen did kind of draw my mind in that direction). I think that making those thematic elements even more explicit, if at all possible, could be really cool.
As it stands, though, the game was fun to play through. The story was sufficient to make it work, and the variety of mechanics and aesthetic themes keep the game feeling fresh throughout.
As others have said, the colored pencil art is quite fun.
What's interesting is that the small size of the island effectively places an upper bound on the highscore that is achievable. I wonder if the game would be better if it simply centered on achieving some particular score (and then going beyond if you really wish). Then I think, because the difficulty would be less open-ended, it would be a lot more grounded. Right now it feels strange to try to push for a high score because I know that there is probably an upper bound, even if I don't know what it is.
That said, that feeling of detachment that the game has--where there is no benchmark I can meaningfully relate my own scores to--is a fine thing too. And, is perhaps more thematically related to "unstable" than a grounded, specific goal would be.
I did end up getting a high score of 25.
I quite like the variety of levels for the different dimensions. I did encounter a bug where, on one of my better runs, the game didn't seem to load any new dimensions--it just kept taking me to various places in the dimension with the mountains.
Fun game! This is a pretty nice 3D platformer, I think, primarily because it's pretty straightforward. The physics are easy enough to get used to and there's no complicated camera in the way of the platforming because it's first person.
I really like the unstable platforms because they serve as fine hazards but also as very useful platforming tools. Tilting the platform down and then sprinting off the high end of it is super effective, which also makes it a lot of fun. In particular, it feels rewarding to make a jump like this because I have to do it in multiple steps, so even if those steps are objectively not that hard for me to perform, it still feels like I'm doing something cool.
I don't know if it's really necessary for the game to have a sprint key--it might make sense to just have a single speed that is equal to the current sprinting speed--but it isn't a problem. It is also true that requiring me to hold the shift key does make me feel like I'm doing something more sophisticated, even if it really is pretty simple.
I think it's instructive to compare this game pretty directly to Getting Over It. I don't know if it's directly inspired by Getting Over It, or if you've played Getting Over It, but comparing the two games is worthwhile, I think.
In particular, they are both based on the core concept of managing finicky physics in order to progress through a level. But there is one important difference, which is that Getting Over It has extremely intuitive controls, and all the difficulty comes from the physics. But this game has both unintuitive controls and finicky physics.
That is to say--almost every time I tried to do something, I would end up rotating the legs the wrong way. I would also often rotate the wrong leg. This isn't a case of me failing to master the physics--it's a case of me failing to master the controls. The buttons I pushed very rarely corresponded to what I thought they would do. I would think I was rotating a particular leg clockwise, and I ended up actually pushing the button that rotated the other leg counterclockwise. I am mostly interested in pointing out that this kind of control-based difficulty is distinct from the purely physics-based difficult in Getting Over It. (Although, I think it may be a lot more similar to e.g. QWOP).
Now, I think this is actually probably a good thing. The Getting Over It formula works for Getting Over It, but exploring different kinds of frustrating gameplay--such as gameplay where the controls themselves are difficult to perform--is a lot more novel then just making a game with the exact same frustrations as Getting Over It. I just think it is worth making sure that you're aware that your game uses a different kind of frustration mechanic, and making sure that your level design and game design accomplishes what you want.
It is interesting, for example, that a lot of the gameplay in this game is easier to do by simply holding two buttons down then by trying to do it with any strategy or precision. This is a fine thing to have in your game design. But if your goal was for the first few levels to require any real mastery of the controls, that goal was not quite met, I think.
One other comment: I find that I really like the graphics and the level design in this game. When I reach a screen, I never know exactly what the obstacles are going to be, because the scene looks like just a normal drawing. But then the obstacles end up being pretty easy to understand as soon as I run into them, and the cleverness of the level design starts to become more obvious as I try to navigate around the obstacles.
I really like the vibe this game has to it, even without music. It kind of feels like a dusty Atari game or something that I would play at like 2AM at night... no music, no background noise, just silence interrupted by spaceshippy sounds.
I did not really manage to hit a lost of asteroids. I think this is because of a combination of factors: - Asteroids are small - Asteroids have a somewhat strange trajectory - When focusing on aiming, you can easily get sucked into the sun - Your have a finite ammo supply
Adjusting any of these factors could make it more possible to hit asteroids. As it stands, I mostly just circled the sun and if an asteroid happened to be in my path I would try to shoot it right before I hit it. Or maybe it's supposed to be really hard to hit asteroids without being really good at the game, I have no idea.
I do think that most of the game mechanics are pretty fun on their own terms. It's cool to have a sun with gravity, and it's cool that the asteroids make it bigger, and it's cool to have a finite ammo supply, and finally the momentum system is really cool too. I like all of these ideas quite a bit. I just don't know how to actually play the game well, when it comes down to it. :sweat_smile:
One tiny note is I really like the way the rocket fire works. The little flame sprite is just great.
Pretty good game I think, the core concept of having all these combinations is really great. In particular, I like that it's easy to predict to at least some degree what each combination will do--I know, for example, that a "creates cube" concoction will always make some kind of cube, even if I don't know exactly how "explosive" might apply to it. And of course, the drinkable ones will always have an effect on the player, which is particularly fun because it's not exactly known what kind of effect that might have. Like, the first screen with the slime, I obviously went "what will it do when I make make a drinkable bouncy thing?" It sounds like a very unsafe idea. And that's what's fun!
The unstablium was pretty great too. I loved combining it with explosions on the very last screens, as I could just clear out everything at once. Very cool.
One tiny little thing I like a lot is the rotated computer terminals and chemical stations in a couple of the levels. It does a good job of communicating that something is breaking down, because I never would have expected to see those things off the ground. It's essentially a subversion of expectations; when we see some sprite like that in a game, we assume we will always see it the same way again throughout the rest of the game. Rotating it breaks that. It's cool.
Good entry!
I think that the multitasking involved in this game is pretty neat. You have to both track the trick-or-treaters and avoid the birds, which requires sort of paying attention to your peripheral vision. It's a pretty straightforward combination but I think it's effective--either task on its own is pretty easy, but doing both at once makes things much more complicated.
The different difficulty levels definitely have fun names. I did eventually manage to beat the hardest difficulty.
One thing I liked is I'm pretty sure I saw two birds collide at one point and fall down. Those kinds of interactions between mechanics are always fun to see.
I had to go back and play Trick or Retreat again as I couldn't really remember it's story. I wonder if the aliens in both games are related or unrelated. If unrelated, the Trick or Retreat alien may find themselves in an unfamiliar UFO after this game, it seems. :smile:
Neat little game.
In my opinion, the conversations worked pretty well. The correct answer was always obvious for me at least; the main reason I clicked the other options was to see what game over message I would get, as those were usually quite funny.
The ending test was also a great use of the conversation mechanic; it was super cool to be able to recall that the ostrich was wearing three green hats, and therefore be able to answer the hat question and have a good idea about the color question.
The walking gameplay was fine, although I think it could possibly be more interesting. In particular, it seemed like the way the penguin moved was somewhat random, and I think it might be a more satisfying game if the penguin has a predictable movement pattern where the correct sequence of lefts and rights can be learned; in that way, the player learning how to control the penguin would sort of be the way that the game expresses the penguin learning their own motion.
The minimap was a pretty neat addition, though. It made it pretty clear for me at least what the checkpoint system was, and that the walruses were hazards.
One small point is that sometimes I confused the shadows in the penguin level for water.
Overall, pretty fun entry. Definitely one of the funnier ones I've played.
@big-play-ben I did want to put a couple doors in that you would have to enter codes to get through, but I did not have enough time. Thanks for playing!
@tomssuli Thanks for the feedback! I totally agree with your points.
What I was aiming for with the puzzles was definitely for them to be easy. I wanted solving the puzzles to essentially just be a way the player participated in the story, but I also wanted it to be possible for any player to beat the game without much difficulty. I do think that the puzzles could possibly be a bit more engaging with a bit more variety.
Music is definitely somewhere I would like to improve. This compo in particular I had a really hard time getting anything done for the music.
On being left behind: I did try to include an angle on this sort of theme in the game. In particular, the overall vibe of the game is intended to be rather relaxed, and the question of whether you actually want to be evacuated is intended to be pretty open-ended and contrasted with the relaxed mood of staying behind. The game is essentially supposed to be asking whether it might be worth staying on Earth, but I'm not sure that ended up coming through very much. (The "report for evacuation" menu does not communicate quite as much narrative as I initially wanted :sweat_smile: )
@frogman Thanks for the feedback!
I totally agree that clockwise and anti-clockwise would have been better. And yeah, the evacuation screen is really not very good. I definitely thought it was likely to be interpreted the way you interpreted it, but I didn't have much time to make anything much better. Oh well. Thanks for playing! :smile:
@lovetocode999 Yeah, the turbo mode is intended to only apply to forward motion commands, which does seem a bit strange in game right now. I think if I had more animations for the ship sprite it might seem more sensible. I did try to make it clear by writing "While in turbo, the ship moves forward twice as fast" but I think it's also easy to miss the significance of the word "forward" there. Thanks for the feedback!
This was a fun game!
Something I think that might be interesting to talk about is how the game doesn't really tell you how to play it (beyond the short description). Of course we usually expect the game to teach us how to play it, but I honestly had a pretty good time while just figuring this game out... playing through a couple times and getting a better grasp on the mechanics. Maybe it's because space already evokes themes of the unknown, and of complex technical systems... but it seems to work pretty well, which I think is neat.
It is interesting how you can end up way outside of the space where there are any asteroids. One of my runs, I ended up warping there, and I thought I would have a pretty smooth ride to the finish... until I realized I had flown way out of wherever the finish was. It made me pay even more attention to where I was going, in future runs...
On that note, it's pretty cool how once you're near the finish, you can tell where it is located based on the trajectory line. Especially if you reset your velocity with S, which is the strategy I used.
A small note is the first high score I tried to upload didn't save my name. (I got #4 in speed, I remember).
Overall, this was a lot of fun to figure out and satisfying to win.
This game is pretty solid given the amount of content that it has. One point of confusion for me is that my barrels often explode when there are no enemies nearby, and I'm not precisely sure what's causing it--maybe it's my own bombs? Or maybe it's enemy bullets?
I think that the aspects that the player cannot control--e.g. all my pistol troops getting themselves killed by advancing right before I can form a larger group--are not necessarily problematic. I think that they force the player to think more strategically, and it's also interesting how I am not able to do anything the computer can't do. (That is, the computer can't just stockpile troops until it has a huge group, so... neither can I).
This game was great, in my opinion. It's ultimately not that deep in terms of mechanics--at least, in terms of mechanics I understand--but it was a lot of fun throwing things at the wall until I finally managed to win.
To elaborate: I thought that it would be possible to edit all of the bugs out of the way, but I failed to change the position or size of any of the bugs other than "bug_0". I also never managed to get the "speed" variable to do anything.
On top of that, I never quite understood how to make the game hide the intro screen or what exactly would cause it to crash. In particular, I was nearing the end of the game, starting to hone in on exactly what position variable I should give the player, when the game started to crash no matter what. I had to delete the JSON file and re-play parts of the game until it started hiding the intro screen again. (I did manage to win after enough manipulations. :grin:)
But... all of those experiences were pretty neat, really. I never really figured out exactly what worked, but I did know that I could always delete my save file and restart from the beginning. The meta way that this game is played is really cool. I always know that, if the game is screwed up somehow, there is a way to get back to where I was by changing the files on my computer. But... changing the files on my computer is also the literal gameplay of the game. So the game destroys the distinction between the game and the meta game. It's very cool.
In particular, if I decide to, say, delete all the info the game has saved and re-download it, I am in fact still playing the game. That's weird. And so I think it's great.
One of the neat little experiences I had while playing is attempting to just delete all the bugs so they wouldn't be in the way. This of course caused a crash. Killing isn't the smoothest way indeed.
The buzzing sound that is in the right ear is great. I actually didn't realize that was a part of this game until I went back and checked right now. The game continues to eviscerate the line between itself and the rest of the world.
So yeah, great game. First LD49 game I've given 5 stars. :smile:
This game is interesting.
The best strategy by far seems to be to build a single block width tower. It's pretty easy to avoid messing up each individual block placement, and it merely becomes a game of repeating the same block placement over and over. So, by my calculations, the game ends up being: do the exact same pretty easy thing 150 times to win; messing up once forces you to start over.
Now, games that require absurd numbers of repetitions of the same task are something I'm actually quite interested in. The emotions they inspire are, I think, rather unique. In particular, when you mess up, there's an absolutely awful feeling of the amount of tedium that has gone to waste. And so then, during normal gameplay, there's this constant pressure and feeling of dread, because messing up is to be avoided at all costs.
There's also a feeling of losing track of the total count. It's pretty hard, at least for me, to distinguish having done the same thing 65 times in a row from having done it 70 times in a row. It all starts to feel the same at some point.
And this game encapsulates all of those feelings just fine. It is on the easy side, so I didn't actually mess up once I figured out what I wanted to do, but it does nonetheless have some version of all of these ideas in it.
So, for me at least, that's pretty neat.
Other note: I really like the sound effects on the block dropping and locking-in. They are very good.
This game is a lot of fun. I like how it gestures at a couple of different kinds of ideas: the startup noise is very arcade-y, the music and environment seem like a monster truck rally or something, and the horse noises are cartoony. The mashup off all these aesthetics is pretty compelling; it is absurd but it is not overbearingly so. The aesthetics are unusual but they do work well together. For example, even though the only direct aesthetic resemblance it bears to an arcade game is the little jingle, the game overall does work as a fine arcade game.
The core mechanic of this game, where being too powerful has disastrous consequences, seems to work pretty well. I played the arena mode for a while and then I played the story, and it was interesting trying to balance the power bar the whole time while moving towards an objective.
Watching whole rows of enemies explode into a shower of blood after an extremely short spacebar tap definitely communicates an overpowered feel.
The violence in the game, to me, feels more comical than demonic. I think this is partially because of how gratuitous it is, and partially just because there's only one kind of enemy. But the game feeling comical does work pretty well, I think; after all, being overpowered in a game generally does feel pretty funny--I can remember times when I first activate a godmode in a game and have a great time doing silly things. I think this game has kind of the same vibe.
My reading of this game is that it works well as a sort of metaphor for PTSD, or something along those lines. I see the items in the forest as being non-literal; they are instead shapes in the forest that remind the player character of their trauma. In this reading of the game, I think it works pretty well, really. The non-literal becoming literal seems to me quite like trauma or grief (e.g. from my own experience--when you seem to see a pet who has recently passed away in the corner of your eye).
Now I have no idea if that's the intent. Maybe the intent is the teddy bear is literally on a chair in the forest. But it is my reading, and hopefully this perspective is helpful in some way at least.
Super cool to see a DS game!
I found that I was quite bad at using the flippers, but that repeatedly bumping the table upwards would allow the ball to keep climbing arbitrarily high. I'm guessing you would change that in any future versions :sweat_smile:
Using that strategy I did manage to get the ball trapped in a stable loop as others have done.
I do find that the controls in the emulator are kind of awkward, as I essentially have to use one hand for the left shift and one hand for the right shift, but then I also have to move my right hand over to use the arrow keys. I'm sure I could have just changed the emulator controls--but I wonder if there's a way to distribute a version of the emulator that already has different controls.
I do really like the way the game looks, and I like the sound effects quite a bit too.
I would say the core concept here is pretty strong. There is an inherent tradeoff in any particular activation order for the bugs, as which ones are activated first will affect the difficulty of activating the other ones. That leads to some fun strategizing about which routes are best, and just makes the level design process work pretty well.
I found the dash to be a nice addition, although it controlled somewhat unintuitively. Sometimes it seemed like it would give me an extremely large amount of gravity. I think perhaps that it is just normal gravity, but I am kind of expecting the dash to have almost no gravity...? I'm not sure. Maybe I've just played too much Celeste.
The last level was definitely tricky, although I managed to beat it in two tries. I think the difficulty curve is pretty alright all told.
I especially liked the way the gravity zones were used in the level design--having to use the gravity zones to get extra acceleration is pretty cool.
So overall, a nice little platforming game.
The first level here really had me hooked. The idea of a maze that changes as you move through it is, I think, a pretty strong concept, and the first two levels at least were pretty cool.
The third level I didn't really have a clear concept of how to solve, and so I sort of walked through it randomly until I won. I think that somehow communicating more information to the player would make the game more effective overall. In particular, level 2 worked well because I could see where the wall would disappear when I wasn't yet next to it, and so I could guess that it would disappear once I walked over to where it was.
Level 3 was less organized like that, though--there were a bunch of shifting walls, and I couldn't tell which ones were going to shift when I got near them or not.
Level 1 I did like just because it had that "woah" moment of when the maze first shifted--in my opinion, it is a very good level for introducing the concept of the shifting maze. It just works nicely, even if there's no puzzle solving.
The falling-away-ground mechanic is pretty interesting, as it adds a sense of pressure to every room. Most roguelikes I've played, the pressure mostly came from the combat itself, but here there is a pressure to get out of the room as fast as possible even when the combat is pretty easy (during the first levels).
The mechanics that the game has right now work together pretty alright--it is possible to move around and at least attempt to get some upgrades. I think the main thing this game would benefit from is polish--it's unclear, for example, that you kind of have to walk over where enemies died in order to pick up their treasure.
I do think that the disappearing ground mechanic could use some elaboration. It would be nice to see a way to buy, for example, a bridge, or something that could save the player from standing on the ground, or whatever. This is because I think it's alright for the game to have RNG elements that can randomly end your run (it is a roguelike), but it would be even better if it were possible to mitigate that RNG through careful spending and planning.
One small note is I got softlocked one time, where the ground disappeared below me but I didn't die.
I think the most interesting mechanic I found in this game is the way that the camera sort of affects my perception of the jumping. It actually, interestingly, really helps to gives the gameplay a bit of an unstable feel... so very thematically on point, there.
Wow, it's super cool to interact with a game using the microphone. It's such a rare method of input!
As far as I can tell, the game in its current state doesn't have anything I can use my coins for. I think that that's the primary thing missing. It is fun to play around with the microphone mechanics, and I can see how the game could work as an educational tool. But, players would be more hooked with more mechanics to interact with, and so I think the game would be more effective in that case both as a game and as an educational tool.
One note is I can't seem to get the voice line "Very slow, but day by day i learn something new" to input correctly. I think this is because it is expecting a comma, but I can't get the recording algorithm to output a comma.
But, the recording aspect did work in all other cases I encountered, and it was a lot of fun. I think the concept of the game makes sense--it makes sense that a game testing your speaking skills in a particular language would simply involve conversations. It's a pretty good framing device, I think.
The graphics in this game are super nice! Some of the cleanest artwork I've seen this jam, I think.
I found it extremely difficult to do most of the later levels. I think this is because the ship needs to be aligned, but when I rotate the ship to be aligned, I can no longer slow it down vertically without accelerating horizontally. This makes it extremely difficult to land the ship unless it spawns right above the landing platform. I do think I could probably do a much better job if I developed a more sophisticated strategy, but it's hard to try things over and over and practice due to the RNG.
On that note, I'm not sure if having the ship start at a random point is a good idea or not. It seems like some of the starting positions may well be impossible, or at least orders of magnitude more difficult than the other positions. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but I'm not sure I see the point. If you had a particular reason for adding the RNG I'd be curious to hear it. :smile:
I did eventually manage to win with a score of 91. I think that the physics on the ship are pretty good, overall--definitely captured the usual landing game vibe.
This is a pretty cool game. I do think the gameplay curve is worth commenting on, as it has a couple strange features.
In particular, I've seen a couple people say that 1000 was when things got hard. But this was not my experience. For me, things got really hard around 700, and progress became really slow. A lot of the enemies I was killing were dropping hearts instead of protons as I kept taking damage, so it took quite a while to get to 1000 points. But then, once I reached 1000 points, the game suddenly became much easier. I think this is because a bunch of new enemies were spawning in, so I could build up mass much more quickly, and getting more common heart drops was a good thing too. I ended up with a score of 1626.
I think the way that the electron-spawning mechanic works is really interesting. It essentially ties your score directly to the difficulty of the game--increasing the score means, necessarily, increasing the difficulty. I think this mechanic in arcade games does usually exist, but is usually not so explicit. It's an interesting choice to make it more explicit.
I found that the clear screen mechanic is something I never used on purpose, but did use by accident sometimes.
One small thing I really like is the buttons on the menus. They are very good.
Overall I think this game is pretty good. It was fun to play and the graphics and especially the sounds are very good.
I think that the physics on all the draggable objects is pretty neat. It gives them all a weight and it makes manipulating them a bit of a task--the maintenance of the nuclear factory requires some actual care and dexterity, and that's cool.
I think the problem is that those mechanics by themselves are not interesting enough to really mean much. I do like dragging things around, but the only eventual goal I have is to make more money so that I can drag more things around. So really I guess the game just needs more stuff in it--more things to buy, more things to drag around, more ways to interact with everything.
As the game stands it is especially annoying to have to drag every individual beer to the rocket. This mechanic does make sense, I think, as something that the player would eventually buy some upgrades to make faster. It is a good mechanic once it is augmented with some ways the player can make it less annoying. Right now those upgrades are missing, though, meaning that only the annoying remains.
The experience the game does provide is distinct from a lot of similar games for that reason. There is no real way to make the business more efficient or more powerful, and that gives a unique feeling. The game becomes solely about maintaining a straightforward routine unfailingly for, apparently, forever. What's interesting about that is my reaction to this gameplay loop is to say it is incomplete. This game, I think, sort of reveals a bit about my psychology with respect to games, and I think that is actually pretty cool. But I'm not sure that's what you were going for. :sweat_smile:
This game is really nicely polished! All the nice graphics and particle effects and a lot of the sound effects are really good.
I find that the unstable control scheme is interesting to try to wrangle. It is definitely not an easy control scheme to work with. In particular, I find that I am really not able to maneuver myself to avoid enemy projectiles and asteroids; practically the only reason I ever survive a possible collision with a hazard is because my shield happens to be up at that time.
I imagine it may be possible to get better at actually moving out of the way, with enough practice with the control scheme, but I think it is very hard to learn how to be remotely good.
That said, this kind of difficulty is not particularly unexpected, as this is essentially an arcade game. I just thought it was worth talking about.
A nitpick: the way the screen wrapping works is kind of confusing. I feel like I lose track of my ship when I wrap the screen.
Overall this is a pretty fun game. I don't think I'll be able to get a score much above 13,000 though.
This game may not be very involved but it was fun pumping up my highscore a bit. I got up to 3404 using a strategy involving holding left before spawning in.
Small things I liked: the falling platforms feel pretty good. The sound plus animation on them works well. The animation and sound for the death animation feels good too, with all the platforms shaking.
It is possible to get softlocked by getting stuck inside a platform. It only happened to me once. In general it seems like fitting in the 1-block vertical gaps is kind of janky.
Overall, this was a fun entry to play for a couple of minutes. :smile:
This game is pretty cool! It's not the only tower stacking game I've seen, but it is much different from the other ones and there's a lot of great features.
There are a couple hiccups I had. For a while I didn't realize that the height that the game gives you at the end is the height of the tower at that point in time--I thought it was the maximum height you had achieved. This meant I was quite uncertain how I would ever get anywhere close to 1800 meters when I almost always seemed to get around 250 meters. (Once I figured this out I got like 1200 meters).
I also think it would be nice if there was a reset button, although just waiting out the timer isn't too bad.
But onto the things I liked!
The sound design and the animation of the blocks and camera shake is all absolutely fantastic. The game feel of this game is just off the charts. The way that the blocks clang into place, and the way that the different materials do kind of feel like they work differently; it's all just awesome.
I also like how free-form the stacking environment is. I've played a number of 2D stacking games, and I like the way that the 3D environment changes things. I particularly like that having a fall is not actually game over--it's super cool that I can sort of end up with a couple missed blocks that end up who knows where and still get a good score. It's also great when things devolve into pure chaos and I end up stacking a bunch of blocks onto the ruins of my previous tower, and how the blocks are just allowed to end up sideways and they turn into a big pile.
So overall, I think this is a great take on the stacking game, with just a couple little polish issues that, if fixed, could make it even better.
This game is extremely chaotic! I did manage to get about 3 platforms from the end using a relatively deliberate and careful strategy, but the winning strategy I found is, fittingly, much more chaotic.
Essentially, I just spammed the mouse button in small increments from the frog, and tried to drag it to be close to platforms as often as possible. This worked for two reasons: First, my movements were always successful, as I never had the mouse too far from the frog, and second, the platforms don't drift as far apart when you reach them quicker.
It is pretty interesting--this strategy only works because the game allows you to be on the lava for a little bit. The particular combination of mechanics this game has is kind of unique, which leads to some really novel ways of playing it, I think.
The physics in this game are a lot of fun. There is just something exhilarating about accelerating the bike and then going down a hill with way too much momentum. The way the bike wheels spin complements this well; overall the bike is just very satisfying.
I definitely had fun beating the first two levels--the mania of trying to maintain a good amount of momentum while not losing all the papers was pretty neat. So far I have not been able to beat the third level. One thought on the third level is that it is hard to tell the foreground from the background.
At first I was annoyed that there was a timer, but I do think it actually is pretty important to force the player to go fast. The feeling of rushing without knowing if I'll be able to keep all my papers in is a pretty nice feeling. I do wonder if it would be good to let the player keep playing after they lose, though, just so they can play with the physics and learn the level layout a bit.
I didn't have much trouble remembering the rules for each object, but I did find it pretty difficult to keep up with everything happening. I think an improvement would be a better indication of how long I actually have until things explode, as for example I never really knew how long I could wait for a second lightbulb so I could use a toaster.
I also think I would appreciate a more relaxed game mode :sweat_smile: ...I think I would have more fun if I could take things a bit more slowly.
That said, this is one of the most novel action puzzle games I've seen in a while. It's absolutely nothing like the usual Tetris or match-3 games, and it was pretty fun to try to get better scores and to explore all these puzzle mechanics while under pressure. And, it is absolutely hectic. It was often extremely tense seeing if I would be able to complete a laundry machine circuit in time. So good job on all of that!
I think the platforming physics of this game are worth commenting on.
So, the platforming physics involve instant deceleration, from what I can tell. When I stop holding right, my horizontal momentum drops to 0. In my opinion, this is not the most fun way to implement platforming physics. As a general rule, I would say it is more fun in a platformer when letting go of the direction does not immediately stop your momentum (at least while in the air).
But, I'm not actually talking about this for the fun factor. What I am more interested in is the emotional contrast of those physics with the framing of the game as a chase sequence.
The game is primarily a sort of runner game, where you have to continuously move to the right. There is also a sense of urgency--that you need to try to move right as quickly and consistently as possible. So, when you maintain no velocity at all (i.e. no consistent momentum), there is a huge contrast between the feeling of the chase sequence and the feeling of the physics.
So, why do I care? Well, this contrast unexpectedly gives the game a more serious feeling, I think. It feels less like a carefree chase sequence and more like something with real weight. The player's motion must be pretty deliberate--it is, essentially, more realistic in that it is not actually very easy, athletically, to escape an avalanche of rocks, and this game reflects that.
The best mechanic in this game is unquestionably the switches. Flicking them back and forth is extremely visceral and extremely satisfying, and I think that the rest of the controls would be more effective if they were more like the switch.
More concretely: the sliders should have definitely snapped to the different increments, and the knob overall I think needs to be easier to control and more intuitive. A real-life knob is extremely easy to turn to exactly where I want it, and I think for the same visceral feeling this knob needs to be easy to turn as well. As it stands I had an extremely hard time using the knob--the first time I lost because I couldn't figure out where the 5 was, and in general I couldn't really get the knob where I wanted it to go even when I knew vaguely which direction it should be pointing in.
I'm not sure the button really can be improved; it feels fine to push. It's probably a good idea to have one really simple control like the button, as it allows the player to prioritize always fixing those, which can be done in a matter of seconds.
One thing that is really effective is the building sense of panic. The length of the game combined with the music combined with the unexpected darkness really makes the end tense (especially after I lost the first time). There is a real sense of pressure there. Good job!
The use of the 3D environment to house all the controls is a good choice, I think. A particularly important component of this setup is that the controls cannot all be seen at once. This of course would be possible in 2D, but is a lot more natural in 3D.
The result of this is that I have to constantly be aware of my surroundings, and be sure I'm not forgetting to check anything. This experience works really well, especially with the sound effects when something is going wrong. Once I got into a good rhythm the only component that ever got into the red zone was the pressure meter, but the experience of hearing that sound effect and thinking "Oh, I really got to get to that fast" worked pretty well, because I was mentally aware that the pressure meter was the only thing I hadn't checked recently.
Overall I think this is a pretty good take on the "manage a nuclear reactor" idea.
The best moment, for me, in this game was when I was very close to losing, and the dialog advanced at that point and so refilled my health all the way. Although I imagine this is a very intentional part of the game, *in the moment* it just feels like dumb luck, which is great. In particular, this is saying that, if nature happens to get us through climate change safely, it may well be dumb luck. I don't know, it's just kind of a... fun..? take.
One note on audio, is that it seems pretty quiet for me. Perhaps though I just have my computer audio set too low in the first place.
I was able to complete 2/3 of the challenges.
I think the number indicators are overall a pretty good idea, as they indicate that there is a challenge very nearby to the current state. However, I find that sometimes they seem to obscure the challenge. In particular, the center indicator seems to always count down, which is confusing as from what I can tell the actual condition is having the pendulum near the center for a long enough time. Perhaps the problem is that it disappears quickly enough that it always seems like it counts down to zero? I'm not sure.
Like others, I had significant trouble with the mouse. It felt kind of laggy, and I honestly wasn't sure if the game was actually experiencing lag or if that was just the intended physics. So I definitely think snappier controls would be better with the mouse.
The dynamic music is extremely fun. It really does make me want to keep playing just to keep the music going, which is great. This gameplay is like, the definition of intrinsic motivation, and I think it really works to hook the player. The lack of a specific loss condition is also probably important for that. In any case, it is really good.
Wow, this game is really cool. I love the graphics, and the sound design on the ball is just perfect. The core mechanic works really well, as it's a very sensible twist on tennis, and the difficulty of actually hitting the ball is pretty substantial so it is fun to keep retrying.
I only managed to score 3,337 so far. I usually lose at around the 1500 mark, as the speed of the volleys starts increasing. I think the increasing volley speed is a good mechanic, because, along with hitting the ball at an enemy, it means the rhythm is constantly changing--so you can't just get into a rhythm, you have to constantly be on your toes.
I was confused because for a while my high score was supposedly ~2000 even though I had never gotten above ~1500. That's when I realized that pressing buttons while on the title screen increases your score. That seems unintended, lol.
I did try playing with a controller and it is really fun. The one complaint I have, both with the gamepad controls and the regular controls, is restarting--you have to push the button twice, which I think is kind of annoying. Also, with the controller, I think it would be fun to be able to restart with the shoulder buttons, as then I would only need to use those two buttons to play (which seems like a very fun control scheme).
Overall though this is a really nice game (best one I've played so far!), just fantastic execution on a simple and extremely good concept.
I thought the gameplay curve here was extremely good and I disagree with 100th_Coin that allowing the towers to be placed on the center is a bad thing. On the contrary, I think this game incentives moving the towers all over the place very well--it is absolutely necessary in the early rounds to harvest as many gems as possible, and so the early rounds are all about defending as many gem spots on the map as possible.
Then, in the mid game, it is still technically possible to harvest gems but the enemies are pressing you much harder. Here, you have to essentially try to harvest some gems at the beginning of the round, and then retreat so that all your towers cover the queen.
And then, in the late game, there is no real hope of harvesting more gems, so you get to see how well your previous efforts paid off. This is the point in the game where the "inevitable" part starts to kick in, and it is just a matter of time until you lose. I think this is an especially cool narrative arc because at this point in the game, you will probably buy your last upgrade ever. And that's just kind of cool. The fact that you'll probably never afford another upgrade again is not part of the narrative arc of any usual tower defense game, but it is here.
I made it to round 15, and I might have made it slightly farther if I hadn't lost a bunch of health in one of the early rounds. Either way, it was a super fun arc, and I think every part of the gameplay works really well.
So I think the fact that the towers can all be placed overlapping, but that that strategy is a terrible strategy for a huge part of the game, actually works really well. There are no explicit constraints on what the player can do, only constraints in terms of what kinds of strategies will lose--and the strategies needed to win are constantly changing.
It is especially cool how the towers sort of change roles--at the beginning, the laser tower seems like it is slower at killing enemies, but by the end of the game, it is all-important. In fact, I have to wonder if I would have gotten farther had I only upgraded the laser tower and the ice tower.
Overall though, this is a great entry. Besides the gameplay which I have documented my appreciation of above, the graphics and audio are polished and straightforwardly good. In total this is hands down the best entry I've played so far.
Edit: reading through some of these comments, it seems some other players didn't figure out that you need to protect the gem-things in order to get more gems... I suppose more explicit explanation of the mechanics would probably be an improvement. However, I think my playthrough is evidence that, if the player does know what all the mechanics are, the gameplay loop is very compelling.
I think the core gameplay loop is fun here. It is just kind of fun to connect the different nodes together and to try to build as many paths around as possible.
I have not been able to win yet, however. I have tried a couple strategies, but so far no luck. I suppose part of the problem is I'm not entirely sure what exactly causes congestion and what can relieve it. It seems like having more paths should be able to reduce congestion but when I made a graph with many paths to the same places it seemed like maybe some of them were unused. I suppose I should pay closer attention.
The sounds in this game are quite fun, specifically the various messages that the player hears.
So overall, a game with very cool mechanics, but quite difficult to win.
The player physics in this are really nice. As soon as I started moving around I was having a good time.
I do think that the dark environment that sometimes shows up sort of contrasts with this... the mood I was expecting was a sort of fun arcadey shooter, but the lighting is sometimes very dark and makes it hard to see. I personally would probably just prefer constantly bright lighting. However, I can see how the darker lighting gels with the music and perhaps the narrative a bit, so it is I think a fine choice as well.
A small detail that I think is surprisingly good is just how fast the game loads. It really is frictionless to play in a way that I feel like matters. I honestly haven't seen anything else like it this Ludum Dare--which makes sense, I personally I almost always use Godot these days--but it does make me think, about just how much of an impact even the loading screen can have on leaving a positive impression. Looking into it, it looks like this is written with your own C++ library? Very cool.
So overall this is a very technically slick, fun little shooter.
Really cool game. It seems a bit like a board game, and I think leaning into that could be a fun direction to take it. In particular, if the moves were represented as cards, I think that would just be a more fun aesthetic direction than a plain list of bullet points.
But in general this game is very good. It's easy to pick up, fun to play, and thematically works pretty well.
I think the only real critique that can be made is that it could be nice to have some features for mitigating the RNG a little bit, as others have suggested. I don't know if such mitigation is strictly needed, but it could make the game more fun. One idea I can contribute there is that perhaps moves could be generated using a "grab bag" approach like modern Tetris games--essentially, modern Tetris games have RNG that will never generate a long sequence of S and Z moves, and a similar concept could apply here, where the RNG is designed so that there is a nice balance of actions available at all times.
My first score was 6927, my best so far is 7011.
One thing I like in particular as I play a couple more rounds is how paying attention to when the zombies are attacking gives you a lot of information and a lot more options. I didn't really realize exactly how the zombie attacks work when I first played, but their attack freezes them in place for a turn which can be exploited in some interesting ways.
I think it's cool how the gameplay in this evolves over time. At the beginning, I was very carefully aiming at each individual bug, and shooting a single bullet, due to the long cooldown. Then, as the bugs started coming faster and my cooldown decreased, it made more sense to aim less carefully and simply try to hit everything in sight.
I agree with everyone else that there should be a way to keep firing without repeatedly clicking. I actually tried playing using a macro to click the mouse, and interestingly, I only got to 3 minutes in (I had gotten ~1:50 without the macro). I think the game definitely manages to create an inevitable sense of being overwhelmed.
It is especially cool how the slow bugs become extremely important as the end of the game approaches. At first they are just a nice bonus, but at the end of the game, the only real hope is to hit a slow bug, otherwise it becomes increasingly impossible to kill all the bugs due to the huge range of directions you have to aim.
So, overall, this is a nice little game that builds a substantial gameplay curve out of a very small number of mechanics.
I really like the fact that this game is turn based. It makes the pressure to get back to the castle feel much more specific, as it will literally take a fixed number of turns to get from where you are to the castle.
I did end up trying to stay near the castle, of course, but I feel like you can't stay right at the castle--because then enemies will be able to come right up to the castle as well. Instead you need to fight enemies a few tiles away from the castle. And that's where that pressure to get back comes from, I think.
Now I did end up losing because I literally just went after an enemy who would kill me in one hit. I suppose I ended up sort of just mindlessly clicking on enemies, as my strategy. I think having a different sprite for each enemy would go a long way, so that the player doesn't fall into this mindless playing pattern.
But overall, it was a fun game with that made good use of the turn based mechanics.
So I believe I discovered an extremely cheesy strategy here. In particular, if you click the hand icon on the resource drop a bunch of times, you get a bunch of resource boxes--I can't imagine this is entirely intended, as it makes the game very easy very fast.
Here is what my game began looking like as I kept getting piles of resource boxes: Screenshot, with lots of turrets
That said, I think there was a lot of fun gameplay before I discovered this strategy (and, admittedly, I had a lot of fun building a ridiculous base as well).
In particular, I think that having a small number of human characters in your base, that can be juggled between a bunch of different tasks, is a super cool way to build a game like this. It was fun trying to send out the shotgun and a couple pistols each time there was a new attack, and then sending them back in to heal.
I think it would be interesting if the game dove into the narrative a bit more. It seems to me that the humans are very much in the wrong here, and it would be cool if the game played with that a bit as the player progresses. (Maybe the game could simply reveal more of the story as the player moves through it? Something like video logs that the player watches slowly through the game?)
Overall, a fun, pretty novel take on this kind of defense game.
Edit: I left the game on for a while and it did start getting harder after around ~6000 GB. I decided to try quitting at 6969 GB for fun then. :smile:
Cool little game! I didn't quite realize the first time I played that wall building was so important to the game. That mechanic is very cool though, using walls to redirect the enemies more efficiently than they can be killed by the towers.
I did unfortunately run into the same lag problem as everyone else.
I think the building mechanics here though are quite nice, and that's for one reason--the way that the base and the mines are built directly on top of the crystal clusters in 3D is extremely fun. I honestly think I could have a blast just playing an idle game or something along those lines with the same graphical style.
I do think it is difficult to tell exactly what the towers are doing. I can see some small particles they are shooting that I assume is their attack, perhaps those could be drawn a bit bigger.
I also couldn't figure out what exactly the large crystal in the middle represents. Presumably if I deplete the entire bar I will have mined all the ore on the planet? I'm not sure.
Overall though this is a nice little tower defense game with some extremely fun graphical touches.
Oh really? That's super interesting. The first playthrough I did I tried to build my base on the large crystal and it didn't seem to work. I just booted up the game again though and it did work this time.
But now I've discovered an even stranger behavior... every other time I boot up the game I am unable to place my base on the large crystal. I'm using the default LUDUMDARE 50 seed every time. So. Hopefully that information is helpful somehow! :sweat_smile:
It's very cool how there are 8 different minigames here, and it's cool to see a game inspired by existing mythology. I do think I would probably be able to manage the ocean task and the filling jug task indefinitely, or at the very least for a long time. However, it is definitely fun to try to keep all or almost all of the tasks going as long as possible.
I do think the contrast between the simple minigames and the actual narrative content here is quite fun. This kind of simple minigame isn't usually something you would see with a very dark narrative, and so it's a combination that I find novel.
I found the combat quite tricky in this game, which I think worked out for the most part. Fighting against the normal enemies was definitely a case of developing a good strategy and then executing it very consistently, which I think was pretty fun.
However, I was completely unable to score a single hit on the final boss (on the normal difficulty). It is cool to have an escalation in difficulty there, but I'm not sure I have the patience to play through the rest of the game each time while I try to develop a workable strategy. One way to make this work better could be to have the second enemy, for example, be closer to the final boss in terms of how hard they are to hit--that way I could learn how to hit harder enemies better without having to play through the entire game each time.
The combat was nonetheless satisfying to nail for most of the game, and I do appreciate the difficulty slider so that I can get a more complete view of the game (e.g. for rating purposes) without having to grind it out. Good job!
This was absolutely hilarious. I was laughing the whole way through. Really good job implementing a story with lots of cutscenes, and it was super fun as a parody of Infinity War.
Something I like about the gameplay itself is the specific use of the theme. At the beginning of the compo I had thought about trying to make a game where the "inevitable" part is something positive, such as winning, and I think this is the only game I've seen so far that really went for that.
The rhythm part of the gameplay, I think, can be fun--there were places where I would shoot three bullets in a row all on beat during a specific part of the music. However, it seemed to me like usually lining up the shot with the correct square made it impossible to actually hit the button on beat correctly.
I think perhaps it would work better to have no movement keys at all, and just have maybe like 4 different quadrants for the spaceship--then each quadrant would be assigned a single button, and the button would do move and shoot. Then it would just be a pure rhythm game, which, while somewhat less novel, would probably make the gameplay flow smoother.
That said, this was definitely one of the most fun entries I've played. It's just a good time all the way through. Very good job there!
@kuro Thank you for the feedback!
If I'm gonna be honest the main things I ended up liking about my game are the main menu and the music :sweat_smile:
If you want to know the theme connection, it is intended to be this: each program is inevitably going to halt, so your goal is to "delay" the halting until after the task is done.
In practice... you just move the "stop" command to the end of the program each time. So, the thematic connection ended up being extremely weak. At least for me--I definitely don't feel like I'm delaying anything when playing through each level.
@lone-wolf I definitely think that either saving the command tree somehow or having an undo/redo system would be a major improvement. Thanks for playing and congrats on winning! :smile:
@saintchristopher777
Do note it is possible to pan with the mouse in order to bring those popups into view. (This is only mentioned once IIRC so it may be easy to miss).
Either way thanks for playing!
The double-use of boxes as both the item that you need to advance as well as the item you need to protect yourself is great; it is a very simple mechanic and yet is able to drive the entire game forward pretty well. Tradeoffs and decision are the direct gameplay of the game. It's very fun.
It did take me a while to realize that the refresh button was actually faster than dragging boxes out. But, it's a pretty good mechanic as it means that every single box you drag out has an opportunity cost. I imagine in the right circumstances it would even be a better choice to sacrifice a star with very quickly advancing lava...
So overall, a very nice small game.
Solidly fun entry. First run I scored 456400 points; my highscore is 894700. Shooting things is a lot of fun, and the upgrades are a lot of fun as well. I think the arcadey spaceship mechanics work pretty well here.
One interesting thing, my first run, is that I actually totally missed that I had got the objective when I lost. That is--I had apparently collected it, but somehow I completely did not realize until right before I ran out of time. I don't think this is a serious problem with the UI indicator at the bottom, as it's probably more my mistake than anything, but it is I think somewhat interesting that I somehow was completely blind to it for a minute there.
Another interesting thing is that it seems like finding the GET IT is possibly quite random. My first run I got through level 4 and had collected the GET IT on level 4, but on my high score run I had a very hard time finding it on level 3 and could not find it on level 4 at all. (Note: I had read your above comment about how the GET IT spawns at this point).
I really like how the hazards in this game are implemented as bouncing the player ship around. This works really well, I think, as there really doesn't need to be anything but the time pressure driving the difficulty. I also think this helps make the single-stick controls work better, as it is much harder to use single-stick controls when you also have to dodge enemies and use more precise movement.
So overall, very nice entry.
I really like the framing device this game uses. It is essentially a conversation that THEMARUNGA is having with the player, and it's just a lot of fun, in my opinion, to have this demon entity simply placing games in front of me and challenging me to play. And of course, as usual, the transparent window is a great way to make things more meta and more personal.
The animation of THEMARUNGA is also very good, I think. The different faces moving around, with the hand gestures, works really well.
Additionally, it's super fun to tie the story into Ludum Dare directly. I think it would have been really cool if the game had asked for your Ludum Dare username and then, like, grabbed the title card of your game and used it as a sprite (or destroyed it, or whatever would have been most appropriate). That would be a great way to extend the meta nature of the game farther.
The gameplay itself seems quite finicky to me. A lot of this is of course because the combination of mechanics is simply very hard to control, which seems to fit a game with a demon, but some of it is just finicky controls and physics interactions. The game description says there is a way to "truly win"--if truly winning requires mastering the game mechanics, I am almost certainly not going to truly win. :sweat_smile:
I did try collecting 0 stars so that I scored 0 total lost souls... perhaps that is a victory of some sort? I think the stars are actually a really clever mechanic because any player is almost guaranteed to grab one on their first playthrough either by accident or intentionally. But of course, because they are a multiplier, a x0 multiplier is also possible, which is just really cool.
Overall I really like the narrative aspects of the game, and the character of THEMARUNGA; the one primary change I would prefer is snappier controls for the gameplay.
I think the physics based puzzles are a really interesting component of this game. On the one hand, they are often frustrating--I can't figure out how to get a box back across the conveyer on the second level, and it usually gets stuck so I have to reset it.
But--one of my favorite puzzles is the very first one, where you have to realize that you can push the box by sneaking below and around it. This depends specifically on the fact that your hitbox is skinnier than it is tall, and so would not be possible in an entirely grid-based game.
I also kind of like how it's possible to push boxes out of corners. It is somewhat janky, maybe, but I had a generally good time squeezing them to where I could use them.
So I think the physics mechanics can really shine with the right level design. In particular, I think the lava needs some major reworking, as it is very easy to hit, and the screen shake effect on it kind of makes me nauseous.
Also, a boring note, but I think you might want to change the filter modes on your sprites so that they are crisp pixel art rather than blurred.
In any case, I'm glad there was that first puzzle, as it really was a cool moment of discovery, and I think was a very good use of the physics engine.
Very nice little platformer here, very polished in terms of graphics and sound--I especially love the various graphical touches like the vines and the splashing tea, and the music layers that get added as you progress through the game.
I do have two thoughts about the platforming itself: - There doesn't seem to be a variable-height jump. This becomes annoying when you have to climb up the sets of platforms on the side of a wall, e.g. when getting the lighter. In particular, the platforms are placed so that your jump overshoots them by quite a bit, making climbing up these areas kind of tedious because you are in the air much longer than you need to be. - The swinging physics are, in my opinion, not as fun as they could be. In particular, clicking a swinging pivot kind of just teleports you to be swinging there, without much in the way of maintaining your momentum. I think that swinging physics are a lot more fun when they incorporate your existing momentum and the character flows naturally in and out of the swinging state. I can't think of any game examples off the top of my head, but I hope you can see what I mean.
All that said, this was a pretty fun game to play through, and I also went back and got the Speedrunner achievement, which was fun. It was especially cool that jumping into Maggy would skip the cutscenes for that. That was a very nice touch.
I also think that the large variety of mechanics was cool. In particular, it was neat how the teabag string was used both for swinging and for grabbing the candle, and it was cool how there were multiple kinds of item interactions (picking them up, pushing them, and grabbing them with the string).
So overall, a very good entry, definitely the best platformer I've played so far this Ludum Dare. :smile:
I think this game makes very good use of the theme. The idea of sending a drone that will crash into a planet (or, at least, be destroyed by weather conditions on that planet) but will be able to send some useful information seems to make a lot of sense to me, and is one of the more creative uses of the theme I've seen.
I also like how science is measured with a single number. That is simply fun. On that note, my best Science was 159 Science.
The way I scored my highest scores was by using one particular strategy: flying left (although I imagine right would work as well), and then essentially just hovering. My high score came because I was lucky enough to hit a random fuel bubble and so I was able to hover for much longer.
I may have been able to score even higher had I held left less... it seems like the directional movement uses a lot of fuel, and I imagine I didn't really need to move left as much as I did, I probably could have kept going with a lower momentum.
Either way, it's a fun game to play around in and look for different strategies, especially because there are a couple different things to try. The geysers seem to provide an opportunity, and staying in air seems to provide an opportunity (especially because you can fly up to space...) so I think the core gameplay loop provides a nice sort of sandbox puzzle, which is honestly kind of novel.
So overall, I really like how creative this game is and how it is open-ended yet still has strategies that can be developed and refined.
Edit: Okay, so I went back and played another round after writing this comment. And I found out my strategy is totally broken.
So, this time, I didn't accelerate left as much as I did before. As such, I didn't waste fuel accelerating left... but more importantly, I just kept colliding with bubbles, over, and over, and over again. I was sure I was going to lose at some point, but I just kept hitting bubbles. I eventually resigned myself to just giving up once I hit 1000 science, as my fingers were getting tired from mashing to hover.
And yup. I reached 1000 science. And then I spent the rest of my fuel accelerating up and left. I still had enough fuel that I hit the ceiling at the top of the space area :laughing: and then I of course fell down and lost. I ended up with 1022 science total. The lowest my fuel ever got to was like 8... but near the end there I was hovering between 25 and 30 fuel most of the time.
So that's crazy. This game really has a lot of depth as far as the strategy goes... my initial attempts I thought I would never get above ~40, then users here got 100... and now I've found a strategy that blows that out of the water.
Although... it is too much button mashing for me at this point. :sweat_smile: 1022 Score Screenshot
It took me a while to figure out exactly how the letter writing mechanic worked. At first, I thought I should track the suitor through all the regions he went to, and then go back and write to the other people in each region--but when I went back to write to the others, they said they hadn't seen him. That's when I realized that you have to send all the messages you want from a particular region at once--I think that clarifying the way this mechanic works would be the best way to make the game easier to get into.
Once I realized that I should basically just be writing a letter to every person every time, the game started making a lot more sense, and I started writing down notes about each region. This was fun, as I was building up some documentation about every region, and so there was sort of an implicit goal of just finding all the information about each region.
I did note that this started to become less interesting once I already had most of the information on a region--at this point I was still writing down every clue, but then I just had to find which of my existing clues that already matched. This started to become more tedious. In particular, I kept tabbing out of the game to a notepad and tabbing back in, and at some point this starts getting more annoying.
I think one way to make this work better could be to just have the map be the only source of info. Then, as we get clues throughout the game, we could, say, draw the crest for each country on the map, and write down which alliances it had. That way we could figure out which country was next just by looking at the map, instead of having to write down multiple pieces of information that are difficult to visually scan quickly, and without having to keep context switching to notes written outside of the game.
I do have one specific complaint about the gameplay, which is that, once you hit zero weeks, if you send another letter, you just lose. I think there should definitely be a UI warning for this, saying "if you send this letter you will be lose and be married" or something, because I wasn't sure what would happen, meaning I lost my first game and had to redo the entire first suitor.
Overall, though, I do think the information collection process in this game is pretty fun at its core. It just needs to be streamlined a bit to really shine. Good job!
I quite enjoy this game overall, including the aesthetic. I think the neon colors are pretty fun, and are actually probably the reason I clicked on the game in the first place :smile:
So far I have managed to get as far as the realllly long set of pink spikes past the first cyan spikes. I haven't managed to make that jump yet.
I think my favorite part of the platforming so far actually is the cyan spikes. The precision is pretty fun in my opinion, and there's a pretty good variety in the kinds of jumps you have to do in that section.
My least favorite part of the game is the green walls / acid spitters. There are several reasons. First, of course, is that their collision does not seem to correspond with their visual as everyone has discussed. Second, the window of time where they are safe seems extremely small--this may be slightly untrue, but the window is small enough that the visual problem becomes pretty hard to deal with. Third and finally--they are green, which is a color that is otherwise used to represent good things or neutral things (including wall decorations that are *also* spitting green particles!). The first time I encountered the acid spitter on the small platforms after the cyan spikes, I literally did not parse it as a hazard when I saw it, and so I died pointlessly, which was rather frustrating.
I'm not quite sure the best way to deal with that, as I admit I kind of like the green color aesthetically. Perhaps fixing the collision problem would be enough to make the unreadability less of a problem. And honestly, that one I died to after the cyan spikes could probably just be removed from the level entirely, as the camera angle also makes it hard to see it.
I think the fact that getting a new slime jar does not give you extra time for the current run is a very interesting mechanic. It is in some ways annoying, as it means you have to replay the same part of the game over no matter what. But on the other hand--it is kind of compelling, as it forces you to replay the same part of the game over no matter what. :smile: Seriously though--I'm kind of torn. I think that having to redo the same thing a couple times is kind of an interesting twist and even kind of fun.
In any case, this was a pretty fun platformer overall; the aesthetic is quite good and the platforming physics and level design were able to present a pretty substantial variety of challenges. And I do enjoy the difficulty overall as well, even though I haven't been able to finish it yet.
Cool little endless runner (literally).
Like others, I like the spritework and the cold effect when you max out the meter.
I do have some nitpicks with the gameplay: - The difficulty does ramp up a little slowly, which makes additional attempts somewhat tedious. - I think it should not be possible to collide with the sides of the platforms, as it is somewhat annoying. You could have walls as a separate obstacle though.
Something I really like is the ability to start freezing in midair. This enables you to do some regeneration during otherwise dead time, but does require some thought so that you don't plunge yourself into lava. I think it's a really good mechanic.
Also, the music goes hard. I'm kind of surprised it's AI generated. :smile:
I think there is something quite fun in these bomb mechanics, and I want to try to explain...
So my favorite moment when playing happened when I was on the yellow platform straight above the starting area. Here, I figured out that I can let the bomb bounce to the left wall, and then jump up under it (as long as it is currently bouncing high enough). This feels like a very natural technique built on the bomb physics, and it works well and feels good.
I think what would make me really enjoy this game is if the bomb physics were tweaked so that this kind of feeling is more consistent throughout the game. Most of the time, the bomb is just bouncing up and down in a sort of tiny hop that doesn't really make sense to try to control. So, the physics most of the time are just about running into the bomb and hoping it helps some how.
But those moments where the physics have some controllable nature to them (even though they are still chaotic) are the best, I think. Because it is fun to try to manipulate chaotic physics when they react in an intuitive way with the player. I mean, that's the core mechanic of Getting Over It--physics that are very strange but nonetheless eminently controllable and learnable.
So I think this game has a lot going for it as a difficult platformer. I also think that the graphics and audio come together pretty well here; I especially like the ridiculous grin on the main character's face. The only changes I would make is to hone in on the fun part of the difficulty more precisely.
This was a nice little game. The combat mechanics are simple but satisfying, and it is especially satisfying to upgrade the firing speed all three levels; each level gives a substantive improvement.
Interestingly, it seems like I do worse when I try to use the build mechanics than when I simply build nothing and kill enemies as they spawn. The Cover building does seem potentially powerful when used correctly, but when I build them it seems I obstruct my own movement significantly enough that I do worse overall.
I do think the building UI makes the building mechanics slightly worse, as you have to be somewhat precise with where you place them, and there's no indication that you're currently trying to build somewhere invalid. Moreover, aiming the direction of the building is strangely awkward--I think it's because, if I have the building facing in the correct direction but not in the exact spot I want it, then repositioning will change the angle.
Perhaps it would be better if buildings could be positioned with the mouse, given that the mouse would solve most of the precision problems. However, I'm not sure how the angle would be computed in that case. In any case, I think better placement UI could be a major improvement to the building mechanics.
The game was still very fun to play through and unlock all the upgrades in even though I couldn't master the building mechanics. It was neat to try different strategies and to figure out that I'm best at just plain combat. So overall, very nice job.
I absolutely love the music here. Very appropriate for the gameplay.
I think my biggest gripe is with various UI issues. It's not clear when you have actually successfully chosen a house to move, so I ended up repeatedly wasting a wall by accident and then just restarting the game. Similarly, if you actually click to close the help menu, it'll place down a wall, which meant that multiple times I restarted, clicked, and then had to restart again and remember to press a key instead of clicking.
But these of course are basically nitpicks. The rest of the game is pretty solid, although I agree with others that it could possibly be more interesting if the radiation spread was contained within the walls. That could enable some different kinds of puzzle designs, although I imagine the rest of the mechanics would have to be rebalanced.
Overall though I had a pretty good time playing a couple times and figuring out how to win. There's just enough mechanics that you kind of have to learn all of them through a couple attempts, but there's not so many that it's impossible to learn. Good job!
Nice take on the theme, there are a lot of stories that could be told along these lines and I think you all did a pretty good job making a sincere project.
I do have some points I want to make on the dialog system, as it is a significant component of the game: - In almost every game, the idiom is: press the dialog button to display all of the current message, and then press it again to advance to the next message. But in this game, pressing the dialog button will just advance to the next message without finishing the current message. This meant that I accidentally skipped a message on day 11, and at that point I just restarted the game so that I could get back to where I was. - The text is line-wrapped as it is written out, which means that it tends to flash out the side of the box temporarily as the message is written. If the text is pre-formatted to fit in the box from the get-go, it will look better. (This is somewhat tricky to do completely correctly, but if you have time to polish a text box, it could be worth getting this working right). - There was one spot where the dialog did not fit vertically in the box.
There was also one inconsistency I noticed in the story, I believe on Day 45, where the doctor told me I had exactly one patient for the day, but then when I was talking to the patient I said I have to go help my other patients.
Now these things didn't really affect the experience for me that much, they're just the things I think are most valuable to point out as possible areas of improvement. These nitpicks do not really affect the story that much overall.
As far as the story itself is concerned I really like how it focuses on a small set of characters, and how the third patient comes back for the end of the story. The idea of ending up in the exact same spot after being literally a month away from death is just pretty compelling, I think, and it is especially compelling in this format. The relationships that are developed between the player character and the patients are compelling as well; I think you did a good job having enough reoccurring narrative elements that it feels like a connection is being built, while also having developments in the plot over time.
Really nice graphics and audio on this game. It feels good to play, and I think the graphics and the sounds contribute a lot to that.
Two notes on the health pickups: one, it might be nice to make the pickup range just a tiny bit longer. Ultimately I found it wasn't that hard to pick them up, but I think the game might feel better if they were easier to pick up. Two, I think something that would be cool is making them possible to pickup for just a teensy bit of time after the phases switch--so that's it's possible to have these "got there just in the nick of time" moments right on the turnover between the phases. Sure, it would make the game slightly easier, but I think it would create some fun moments.
As others have said, it is hard to see anything in the direction of the bottom of the screen. Now, this is actually kind of fun in one way -- it means that moving to the "back" of the arena gives you a strategic advantage, as it lets you see basically the whole arena. And this is kind of fun, as it means there is a direction that you always want to be moving, and it also means there is inherent risk in picking up the health pickups that are on the other side of the arena. So I do think that this mechanic could actually be a good thing, but maybe could use some tweaking to find the exact right balance.
But yeah, overall, this is just a nicely polished little highscore game. By the way, my score was 10,810. :smile:
I started off trying to do a spacebar-less run, but I failed quite early... I was unable to hit essentially anything, neither the jellyfish in the first level or the snail in the second level. I think that, fundamentally, 10 seconds is just too long, and that's for one subtle reason:
Learnability. It takes me 10 seconds after booting up the game before I even know what my attack will look like. This means the very first instance of the attack is almost certainly wasted. But, more importantly, to practice the attack at all will take me another 10 seconds every time. This is an excruciatingly long time just to get one more chance to improve my skill with the attack. It is essentially like a platformer game, where the first level is around a second long (i.e. the length of the attack), and every time you die, you have to wait for a 10 second death animation. I think framing it like this makes it more obvious why it is so hard to get into the game from the perspective of a new player.
Because, after playing through the game with the spacebar, I watched your video, and the hiccup mechanic honestly seemed pretty cool. When the player already knows how to use it, it is honestly interesting the kinds of strategic gameplay that it requires. It feels like a puzzle getting slotted together.
So, that said, here's a couple thoughts on things that might mitigate this problem: 1. Simply have a shorter timer for the hiccups. This is in some ways a bad solution, as I do think there is some value in the 10 second timer in particular. It has a specific feel to it, that maybe you would want to keep. 2. Start the timer 5 seconds in, and have a visual indicator for the whole timer length. This makes it much faster for a new player to get into it, as they only have to wait 5 seconds for the first (wasted) hiccup instead of 10; it means that restarting a level gives you a fast timer, making it possible to quickly try a practice shot; finally, having a visual timer simply gives the player something to latch on to. With no visual indication whatsoever, 10 seconds feels like an absolute eternity--with some sort of visual indication, I think it would actually feel like less time and would also help newer players get a better sense of how they should plan their shots, I think.
So, all that is to say--I like the way that the game works. I like the cool path planning and puzzle solving that a timer-based shooting mechanic introduces. It just requires, in its current state, a lot of patience to get into the game properly, and I think there are ways that it could be made easier without sacrificing the current rhythm or intrinsic feel of the game.
This is a neat little racing game.
The "stopping on a dime" mechanic has some fun consequences. I think my favorite is that doing a jump with the ramp lets you avoid the stops altogether. The first time I used the ramp I did not know about the stopping mechanic, but I did crash, so I thought the ramp was just a recipe for crashing into the wall. But later, when I started to try jumping off the ramp without crashing, it was a lot of fun, and part of the fun was that I still crashed a couple times.
(Also, one time I ended up in the middle section, and I think the lap wasn't counted that time. That does make sense, although I don't know if there's any good way to signal to the player that they are not making progress on their lap.)
I think the conduits have an interesting risk/reward tradeoff. In particular, I often crashed into a conduit when trying to use it to beat the timer. This is a fun bit of irony, as in an attempt to avoid being thrown off my bike, I am often thrown off my bike nonetheless.
One weird thing is that many many times I ended up like a meter away from a conduit when the timer expired. This often felt annoying because it seemed like I was going to make it to the conduit right on time, and I'm not sure if I ever did. I think the problem is that, it is difficult to give the player any leeway here, because the game only really will make sense if the stopping occurs in a very predictable timeframe... e.g. if the game were to give me an extra couple of frames to reach the conduit, it may be the case that I wouldn't be able to ever predict when the stopping would actually occur.
That said, I do appreciate the leeway that the conduits give you as you're leaving them. That was basically the only way I was able to effectively use them... by brushing past them slightly before the timer expired, allowing me to keep going.
Also, I think it could be worth pausing the timer whenever the player is off the bike. It seemed like it often took me about 10 seconds to get back onto the bike, meaning that I had to delay my acceleration, and then often it took another 10 seconds to turn around, meaning I had to delay the acceleration further. If the timer was paused, then the player would kind of get a free cycle every time they flew off the bike, and I think that would probably be fair.
But, overall, it was fun to try to wrestle with these mechanics, and to see the silly ragdoll physics when something went wrong. Here are my times from the second playthrough I did:
Scores.png
Also, one note about a bug: One time when I pushed "play again" and then started the game, the camera did not change to the player perspective but seemed to remain on the menu (?) perspective.
Great use of rhythm in this game! I have also previously tried to make a shooting-rhythm game, and I have to say, yours is much better executed than my attempt was! :smile:
In particular, shooting feels really good in this game. The sound design and visual effects are basically perfect, and the animations that play when you do the different kinds of shooting are super fun as well. I like to try to mix up the two kinds of shots to get a sort of melody going.
I did find that pressing Q seemed to be somewhat inconsistent. Sometimes I would take a lot of damage while I repeatedly pressed Q trying to get the breakdown going. I guess having some more visual/audio feedback for that would be good, so that it matches the polish level of the shooting mechanics.
Actually, I just reread the description, and now I see that it must have been that I wasn't pressing Q on the beat. So, maybe just having an audio cue when you press it off the beat would be enough. Or maybe there already is one, and I'm just missing it :sweat_smile:
But besides that, this game was just really fun to play (first 5 stars I've given this Ludum Dare, I think), even if it is more of a tech demo than a fully fleshed out product. Great job!
The core set of mechanics in this game -- the timer and the lightning -- are really clever. I mean, as far as cursed items in video games go, this necklace is one of the best ever, as the mechanics actually feel like a trap that a powerful magic artifact would put you in! I think that's really cool.
It took me a while to figure out the way that the enemies worked at first. In particular, the first time I played I actually somehow glitched to the checkpoint (?) that spawns you on the stairs to the right of the first enemy, even though there is no candle in sight. As such, I was confused, as I had never figured out how to actually get past that enemy. (At that point I restarted the game so I could figure it out properly).
The other section I had trouble with was the enemy that appears at timecode 2:13 in the video. I kept trying to use the lightning, I didn't realize I could lure them away, which was obviously much easier. The red outline would flash for like half a second though, and I kept trying to hit that window, and because it seemed possible I didn't even stop to consider alternative strategies.
That is, of course, mostly coming down to that section being a twist on the mechanics, requiring the player to strategize a bit to get past it. I think the only thing I would criticize is that some other sections of the game do seem rather precise, such as the first enemy encounter, which I think may have contributed to my feeling that the intended strategy was to zap that enemy.
One thing I do really like is the use of collision shapes in this game.
Many people have already mentioned the player head, which is great of course. I actually do have one thing to say about that, which is that the enemy hooked on the ledge is an incredible payoff for that mechanic. It relates the enemy to the player character super strongly, as now they both have this nifty head-collision mechanic. And, the enemy is in a super vulnerable spot, hanging off the ledge, holding on for dear life... and the easiest strategy there, as a player, is to kill them. This is like, really neat, I think. It really feels evil, and it's just the conflation of a couple of game mechanics that we have already been introduced to. It's great.
The other thing about collision shapes I wanted to say is that I quite like the stairs. They add a good bit of precision in a way that is both pretty natural and kind of novel. Navigating stairs quickly is just a cool bit of gameplay.
So overall, I think this game is just packed with cool mechanics and cool applications of those mechanics. Absolutely some of the most creative and clever game mechanics I've seen so far this Ludum Dare.
Wow, this is such a nice entry. It looks incredible, with a very complete little world; I particularly think it's cool how some of the objects have bigger pixels, but everything still looks coherent and, simply, good.
Day/night cycles are always fun. I always love the warm colors of the sunset in games.
I love how tactile all the tools feel. I think that two factors contribute to that: everything is mouse controlled, and you can only hold one thing at a time. Or, to put it a different way: this game could be translated to VR and the controls would be basically the same. (Basically, I was thinking this would be a good VR game while playing it. :smile: )
The humming is also a very nice touch.
Overall this is probably the coziest entry I've played yet. Very good work!
The graphics here are really nice and polished. This game is definitely very appealing from the get-go.
I do think the controls as they currently stand are rather confusing. It seems like the spacebar both causes the character to jump, but it also starts a timer? And it seems to start a replay for the other characters? But then I wasn't able to successfully use R to run a replay for the other characters -- every time I tried, I wasn't able to run a character alongside them.
For example, on the level with the two pink walls, what I wanted to do was record one character moving to the right, and then I could just play as a new character and go stand on the button. But to do this, the only sequence of inputs that seems to work is jumping around with the first character, and then pressing e.g. 2 to switch to another character, and then pressing space to reset the first character and have the motion be replayed. If I press R, then pressing 2 resets character 1 and freezes them... and then pressing space starts the recorded motion going again...?
I don't know, I just wasn't able to get a good handle on the controls.
But the input recording system does seem to generally work pretty well. I was able to use it quite effectively once I figured out that I could control it using the spacebar. And I really do think the graphics fit the mechanics really nicely. All this game really needs is slightly easier to understand controls, and I think it would be a really easy to pick up puzzle platformer... the graphics and the gimmick really take me back to the good old Flash game days. :smile:
Fun game! After a couple rounds I was able to score 20 packages with 2599 points. I have to say, it's definitely worth playing to the point where it starts to get more difficult, as I think the difficulty is implemented really well.
In particular, the most frustrating aspect of the game is how items tend to pile up and get in your way, e.g. if you drag something off the conveyor belt by accident. And the difficulty scaling really leans into this. The box starts to fly almost all the way off the box dispenser, making it annoying if you push the button too many times, as then there will be a flat cardboard box in your way. The labels stop being convenient to pick up and instead fall down, requiring frantic grabbing. And, of course, combined with the faster movement of the conveyor belt, all these mechanics combine to make it much more likely that you grab something by accident, and make everything even harder on yourself.
There is one aspect of the game that I find unclear. In particular, I'm not sure whether it is intended that some boxes are outright impossible, and that the intended strategy in that case is to simply make a bad package and move on. If so, I wonder what the best way to judge that situation is as a player.
In particular, I tried a run where I just submitted nothing but empty packages... it seems I failed after 6 packages. (Incidentally, the score display on that run might have glitched out? Here's a screenshot...)
6_packages.png
So it seems like I can't just always make a bad package. As such, I'm not sure if there's, like, an upper cap on the total amount of bad packages I can submit, or if I have to submit a certain ratio of good:bad packages, or what. So, in the cases where it is impossible to submit a good package on time, I'm not sure how to figure out the correct strategy.
That said, I can reasonably assume that I can sometimes submit bad packages, due to the game description talking about "cutting corners," and I can reasonably assume I can't always submit bad packages, due to my empirical test and basically because of common sense. So I think it probably would be possible for me to play this game without necessarily needing elaboration on this aspect of it--I just won't be able to confirm that I'm not doing something wrong.
So overall, I would say this is a really nicely polished game that has a pretty cool set of mechanics and, in particular, a well-implemented difficulty curve.
Great execution on a fantastic concept! Deck-building tower defense is an interesting combination, because of course in deck-builders you generally are constantly playing cards, making it difficult to have concepts like tower upgrades. Instead, in this game, you are constantly building more towers, and that's interesting because being able to easily build many many towers is tricky to balance correctly. I think the balance in this game is pretty good though! It is not too easy, despite the ability to build many towers, but it is also not too hard.
That said, it does seem like the difficulty curve is that the beginning of each level is usually going to be the hardest part. I did have some levels where the ending ended up being harder, as the end had a bunch of fast enemies that were able to get past all my defenses, but every time I actually lost the game was near the beginning of a level.
I think that it could be nice to change the beginning of the level just a little bit to give the player more time to play their initial cards. I often was too busy looking at the map and trying to figure out where the enemies would be coming from to really make the best use of my time. So I think I would like it if there was some way to see the map before starting the actual gameplay, or if there was some extra time for the first round of cards and an extra delay for the first round of enemies. Either way.
But overall, I had a good time trying to put together a good hand. I think that there are cards that synergize well together, which is great, as that is always the fun part of a deck builder. My best strategy was using the sharps and the freezes, which went well together, I think.
Very cool sports game. I love how energetic everything feels--the music is really great, and then it really is a rush to knock your enemies out before they can knock you out. The bomb puck is a fun mechanic, as it requires either being more careful when trying to score a shot, or to just go for it right when the timer is about to expire.
I did find it somewhat difficult to control whenever all of my players were off camera. For example, it would be difficult to tell whether they were all knocked out, or when I should be swinging my weapon, as I couldn't see the enemy players that were nearby either.
Also, I think that the bomb timer could perhaps be tweaked--I often would be confused exactly how much time was remaining, as the very top of the bomb timer is harder to see than the rest of it. Once I really started paying attention that the timer was the whole outline around the sprite, it was easier to keep track of, but I do think it could still be easier to see.
But overall this was a fun game with incredible art, music, and polish. Great job!
I am certainly not very good at Tetris so I don't expect to be able to get very far in this game. But, I do find it a lot of fun to try to strategize where there are "holes," so to speak, in my current board, and to try to fill them in with my next block. It's a neat exercise, as there's also rotations to think about. I find myself often thinking of the pieces being flipped over when I will insert them... which has not worked out very well for me so far. But I have managed to clear a couple lines -- I have gotten 1485 points.
I think it's neat that the line clears count even while building the block. That was somewhat unexpected, but also can lead to some interesting "big blocks." :smile:
I think that really trying to strategize is where this game becomes lots of fun. Desperately trying to count columns from the left and the right, looking for matching spots, finding an opportunity for a row clear that happens to line up with the current chaos... it's fun even though I am bad at Tetris. I think that's great.
I love the movement scheme in this game. On the one hand, I've definitely played games before where different objects on screen are associated with different actions--seems like a standard mouse-based adventure game, right? Except in this case there's no mouse. And I think that's pretty neat.
Especially because, it would be possible to say, use the left and right arrow keys for moving left and right, and then use the up arrow for doors. That would be pretty standard. But instead it's just numbers. I don't know, the simplicity of the movement scheme, but at the same time the novelty of it, is a cool combination.
Another thing about the movement--it feels 3D in a disorientating way. Moving left and right through the world feels like rotating my head, either due to the environmental art or due to the lack of a character on screen, or maybe both. This is a weird feeling, because it is very much not a 3D environment, and it very much keeps going to the left and to the right rather than looping around, as an actual 3D rotation would. And of course, the precipice to the right, at the beginning, cannot be traversed just by turning my head. But it feels like it could be.
I wasn't sure if the star did anything. I played a couple times to check, doesn't seem like it does.
I do like the other two houses. They mesh well into the movement scheme, with the numbers repurposed for new things. The fact they both are laid out so similarly, with a door, object, and portrait, is interesting as well. It is like the way that games will reuse things to save on labor cost or because that's the only way to make the art look coherent... but in this case, the rooms are quite different even though they have the same layout. That's interesting, at least to me.
So yeah, cool game as usual. :smile:
This was a pretty fun game! I was able to get to level 15 and kill 85 bosses. I love the variety of items available, as well as the sound effects. Also, the experience points are fun--it's fun to try to collect them all at once, which is actually also strategically useful for getting health back in a controlled fashion.
The bosses and items are not particularly balanced, I think. The rocket launcher does seem to be the best weapon, with the only caveat being the dangerous self-damage effect. But it is able to kill the wizard and the red thing in 4 hits, which makes them very easy to kill.
In terms of bosses, the slime is much harder than the other two. I was able to generally avoid the other two's attacks almost all of the time, while it was much harder to avoid the slime's attack. And, as discussed, the other two would die in four hits, while the slime took more.
Now I actually think this balance difference made the game more interesting. I tended to think of the slimes as the real challenge, and the bosses in between as a nice calm period for farming some free experience. And then I also started to try to have some health in reserve for when the next slimes would show up.
One small thing: the gun icons when you level up seem to be a little glitchy. Several times the game gave me a gun that was not the one I had pressed, and sometimes pressing them didn't seem to do anything. Of course, this ceased to be a problem once I had unlocked all of the guns.
Overall, I really had a blast with this one. Good job!
This was a pretty fun game! I think the mechanics you've chosen work really well together to build a cohesive world that also has interesting strategic implications.
So, one thing that's interesting is that it really is reasonably easy to pickup any supply drop, as getting off the tank makes it slow down. So, often, if there was a repair kit incoming that I needed, I would just get off the tank, as there were no enemies in sight, and that would make it very easy to grab the repair kit.
However, when trying to pickup resource kits when enemies were nearby, the design of the tank made this a real risk. In particular, the ladder is all the way on the back of the tank--so although it is very fast to walk off the right side and pickup a resource on the right, it is actually difficult to get back onto the tank and start using a weapon. I can't just walk left again to get back to the autocannon, but I have to go around.
The variation in the two weapons is also a lot of fun. The autocannon was the most generally useful, I found, because it was both precise and fast to reload. The use of the barricades to force switching weapons was nice, however, and it also leads to the question of whether it's better to try to kill all the enemies and the barricade with one mortar shot, or if it's better to snipe all the enemies and then destroy the barricade (which is what I ended up doing).
I ended up not using the special shots very much as I had sort of forgotten what the control was. As such, I do think the game could be beaten pretty easily without ever collecting any of the special ammo. I do think the special ammo is a nice addition, as it gives another possible strategy... for example, maybe I would end up needing few repairs had I used the special ammo more often.
So overall, great game. All the mechanics fit together pretty well, and it was fun to play through it. And, I love the voice acting as well. It's a nice touch. :smile:
This was a pretty fun game, once I started to get better at it! The farthest I've made it so far is losing to the third wall art to throw out.
I think my favorite aspect of the game is routing. For example, first I would always take the closest chairs first. But later, I realized it would probably make my life easier if I were to take the farther chair for the first chair requirement, and then take the three closer chairs for the triple-chair requirement. Similarly, I later decided to pick up the coffee cup off the table for the second coffee requirement, as that made the coffee-and-dog requirement easier.
This game also made really good use of the theme, in my opinion. There is a very direct "every 10 seconds" gameplay element, but it isn't annoying, and, crucially, it rewards you for getting better--there isn't just a 10 second deadline for every action, but you actually build up a budget of time by being faster earlier. This is what makes the routing so fun, I think.
I do think a nice quality-of-life change would be to, say, draw a highlight if you can successfully pick up an item (and if you can successfully throw it out the window). I lost a couple runs to the first "pick up the person" requirement, as apparently you are only able to really pick them up by the legs.
Of course, if there was such an indicator, it would make the game easier and, more importantly, it would lose some of the inherent riskiness in pushing the "pickup" button when you don't actually know whether you will succeed. So perhaps a better change would just be more forgiving hitboxes on the humans in particular.
Either way, I do think this game is actually quite fun to get good at. It is very satisfying to successfully execute a route that you have learned and make real progress. I think the intrinsic difficulty in the controls, combined with their determinism--and so repeatability--make this happen. It is difficult to just pick up and start playing, but it is possible to get better at the controls, and it is satisfying to execute them well.
P.S. I think it's pretty cool that this is all made in a custom engine. :smile:
So I think I was technically able to win the game? The strategy I used was to destroy the left enemy base first, and then destroy the right enemy based using a cheese strategy where I stood right next to the nearby ledge so that I could attack the base, while the enemies would simply stand at the base and try to shoot me but miss.
Unfortunately I was not able to really figure out how to effectively use the workers. I tried using the rally option several times, but it seemed like if I called all the workers to the base then my village would be destroyed as there was nobody defending it. I couldn't figure out a way to just select one worker or small group of workers and tell them to attack the enemy base.
Well, so now, I tried starting a new game and immediately rallying all workers to the left base. That seemed to work that time. And then I rallied them to the right side later. Apparently my base wasn't destroyed that time, for whatever reason. I'm not sure what exactly the best strategy is with the workers. :sweat_smile: This time I guess my winning time was actually faster, so I guess rallying them as fast as possible is the way to go, maybe.
I think maybe something that would help is just being able to zoom out enough to see your village and the enemy base? That way you could at least know if you were leaving it undefended or not.
I guess maybe workers can be commanded by clicking them? It seems like clicking on them does something, but I can't figure out how to tell them what to do after clicking on them. But that also explains why I couldn't even try to attack the enemy base with individual workers... they were all off screen so I couldn't select them in the first place! :smile:
I also encountered a lot of lag when more enemies started to spawn in. It's unfortunate, as I feel like the lag is probably the main obstacle to me really being able to engage with the rest of the mechanics.
I did glance at the source code, and I have to say -- I think the navigation stuff you're doing looks pretty cool! :smile: It did actually kind of surprise me how sophisticated the workers' path planning was. It's pretty fun to see them all jumping over different platforms to get to the enemy base, and I think the map you made does a good job of showing that off. (Similarly, a lot of the UI stuff is pretty slick, both the action icons for the enemies, village, etc, and the settings menu... although I do think the settings menu should not require restarting the level to access).
Like others, I did enjoy the music and the graphics. I think this game does feel pretty polished when it is running normally.
So, overall, I think this game has a lot of nice visual and audio work, and has some pretty cool mechanics (pathfinding, and a combat system with a variety of viable combat strategies!), but is in its current state hindered by lag.
This is a nice little game!
So, first of all, one thing I think is really quite neat is the way that the back button impacts the story. In my short-term memory I can easily keep track of several of the diverging paths, and so I basically played the game as a sort of depth-first search, where I would still have some general idea of the endings (and the paths to reach them) that I had just played.
This meant that I was really, like, reading a nonlinear story, in a way that felt really natural and let me get a very precise idea of what was going on. This is pretty cool, and I'm not sure I've really seen it before. Sure, lots of games have diverging paths, but the key mechanic is the "back" button. I mean, I guess other games have probably done that before, but I'm not sure I've ever played one.
Another thing I found pretty neat was the letter that could be found. I did not go back and play the other Trick or Retreats this time, but the letter definitely was reminiscent of their stories. I think this was a really nice touch, even if its only really perceptible to people who have played the other games in the series.
Overall a nice little chill game, with a well-done nonlinear story.
@cogcomp
The game is very slow, that's for sure. I actually didn't know how long the game was until I got a chance to play through it after the compo... I believe my playthrough lasted around an hour or so. It is very much a tedious game to actually win -- this is, of course, the intended experience to some extent, although I would have liked to shoot for more like half an hour (and I would have liked to have more content so that there was a more constant sense of discovery, etc).
I personally am reasonably satisfied with the tedium and repetitiveness in its current state -- but I certainly am not expecting most people to get to the end of the game, as it's not really fun to play through IMO.
@rolferm
Wow, that's a long time. I'm not sure I personally would describe playing that long as "very fun" but hey -- glad to hear it! :smile: I hope you were able to get to the end, as I'm not sure anybody else who rates the game will, lol.
@rolferm Did you happen to get a screenshot of the countdown getting messed up (or still have the game open and can take one)? That's pretty surprising to me. There *is* supposed to be a real ending (and it worked on my computer! :sweat_smile:)
If not that's fine, of course, but I would be really interested in seeing the bug if you had had one.
It's interesting what you say about the planets. I had intended to put enough UI stuff in the game so that it would be easy to tell which planet could have what, but I never got around to it. So, I guess it ended up being an unintentional mystery...
@rolferm In any case, many thanks for putting so much time in my game and for answering all my questions. :smile:
And yeah, the tree planet is really fun to find. I actually had forgotten it was possible when I started my full-game playtest, and so it was a surprise even for me when I saw one. Made me want to add a bunch more surprising variations of the planets.
@mossieur-patate Wow, thanks for the detailed review.
So, first of all -- once you reach the core, that is the end. Nothing more after that. You can, I guess, take a picture, if you want to fulfill the goal laid out in the game intro screen. :wink:
I definitely agree with a lot of your suggestions for the game. I'm not sure exactly how I would want to implement a danger element -- although, originally the wrench was going to be used for ship repairs.
One thought on the manual: I had intended to sort of say, on one of the first pages, something like "stop reading this, go play the game, come back when you have more questions," but I didn't end up doing that very effectively. A tutorial would for sure be much better.
On AZERTY: wow, glad that works! I have in the past made at least one game where it didn't work. I think my keys are all implemented with SDL's scancodes, so it's using physical key locations rather than the corresponding character, or whatever. But I completely forgot to think about that while developing it, so I'm glad it turned out well.
As for the theme: I did think about adding some visual effects, as you suggest. If I'm going to be honest, though, if I were to extend this game out or remake it, I would probably entirely remove the 10-seconds element. I sort of had this idea that I wanted to make a space game (inspired by NASA's DART mission), and I thought I could technically tie in the Ludum Dare theme with a little bit of writing. But I certainly was not trying to meaningfully incorporate the theme.
I do think the solar panels are bugged. Actually, looking at the code ... the battery timer is being pulled from the battery level, not the solar panel level. Whoops! I may make a fixed version at some point here.
Speaking of new versions -- yeah, I'm really not sure if a balance tweak would be allowed or not. I may make a balance tweaked version and just let the reviewers play whichever one they prefer. In particular, it would probably be like a 2 minute change, with the only caveat being it took me an hour of playtesting (after the compo had ended) to figure out I needed that change.
I believe in my playtest I won with wrench level 14 and engine level 19. The wrench is, I think, not powerful enough -- in a balance tweak I would certainly make it better.
But yeah, thanks a lot for playing! And, sorry the game is so long! :sweat_smile:
@trexxak
Wow, thanks for the screenshot. This is super bizarre to me! Could you also let me know if you were playing on web or PC? I think, if it is a web-specific bug, that would make more sense to me (although I still have no idea how it could happen at the moment :sweat_smile:)
I definitely agree that the ending gets too grindy. So, just to pull back the curtain a little bit... the formula for the wrench is to roll two random numbers between 1 and (wrench_level + 1), and then take the lower number. This means that, the maximum drops per swing at level 20 is *technically* 21 drops... but that good of roll will be 1/441, so it isn't that great.
That is to say--there is no good upgrade path, with the current game balance. Even if you leave the wrench at like, level 14, (which I *think* is what I did), it still is a grind to actually upgrade the engine to level 18 or 19 (or 20).
I think that taking the minimum of two rolls could be fine game design, but the increase in drop count needs to increase more. It should probably be more like 60 or so, so that it is at least somewhat likely to get 20 or 30 (even if it's still 1/3600 to get 60 in one swing). Also, perhaps the minimum drops could be increased, or made less likely. (Maybe, max of two minimums of two rolls each? I should graph this stuff...)
Anyways, thanks a lot for playing! :smile:
@trexxak @rolferm
OMG... do you know what the bug is...
It's that the light year display is getting cut off on the left hand side of the screen. Yep, that's right... in the web version, it displays as 291503127 at the beginning of the game when it *should* display as 1291503127.
So, if you thought the game was long before, it turns out you only got 22.5% of the way through. (Of course, by the time you got to wherever you were in the game, it was probably (?) only a matter of minutes left to get to the end? If you had the engine at level 19 or 20 it definitely would have been over reasonably soon.)
Well, now the web version is set to a resolution that will always display the full HUD. What a silly bug to lose two very advanced playthroughs to, though! Especially because you both were so close to the end!
Always pays to double-check your whole UI fits on the screen on your web upload, I guess. :sweat_smile: And thanks for the screenshot, made it pretty straightforward to figure out the bug.
@lone-wolf
Thanks for playing! I totally agree on the wrench. I watched one person play through the game, and they initially thought the wrench operated in 360 degrees -- I had to clarify for them that it only harvested things in the direction of the mouse cursor. This confusion could be totally avoided just by making the wrench work for the entire circle.
@senover-games
Thanks for the feedback!
Sorry that the keyboard input got messed up on the web version, I think a similar bug must be the reason that it stops working if I enable the fullscreen button.
Yeah, unfortunately the solar panels are glitched--the recharge speed is supposed to be determined by the solar panel level, but in the current build it's (incorrectly) determined by the battery level, so the solar panels do absolutely nothing. (I suppose I am probably allowed to fix this bug under the Ludum Dare rules but I have not bothered so far :sweat_smile: )
I did originally intend the wrench to be used for repairing things as well as upgrading them... the ship gameplay was intended to be: going around making sure everything is still running, as well as of course collecting the space resources.
The planets are randomized, although they have a relatively small number of random properties. Basically, planets have flags for whether they are allowed to spawn each kind of resource (which is how all-tree planets end up being possible). Then, they have a random color, and of course the resources are randomly scattered on the planets.
And hey, cool to see you made it to the end! Thanks for playing! :smile:
@Ale
Thanks for playing! I had thought there might be collision bugs, but I wasn't able to find any game-breaking ones when I playtested. I guess it's good to know that there are.
I have considered taking this game farther, although I might want to rebuild it from the ground up in a real game engine (and with better graphics, etc...).
And, I have reached 20 votes by now. Actually I somehow have 25. Seems a bit weird, at least to me, but I guess at least I'll be ranked. :sweat_smile:
@artofluba Specifically, the mechanic I was talking about in my post was this: If user A leaves a comment on user B's game, and then user C hearts the comment, then user A will be rewarded (which is good IMO), but user B will be penalized (which is a bad mechanic IMO).
Also, if user B hearts the comment, user A will be rewarded without the penalty for user B. (So game authors should heart helpful comments on their own game).
But I did end up getting (way more than) 20 ratings. I added a note to my post to hopefully make that clearer. :smile:
Fun game, quite difficult. I had a much better time once I read the comment about how the ammo system works. I still haven't managed to get to the boss after a couple runs, I usually lose about 4-5 minutes in. (Once I lost literally like 2 seconds before the boss spawned in). I die often to knights and to running out of power.
I think one tweak that could make the game easier to get into would be to change the collected-energy display to overlay on top of the energy bar. That way, it would be a lot easier to understand the relationship between how many orbs to collect and how full the energy bar will be.
I think the shield mechanics combined with the rocket projectiles are quite fun. It is very satisfying to slam rockets in to the side of the rooks. I do find it difficult to use the regular bullets effectively, as most of the enemies are difficult to kill with normal bullets without taking damage. The knights are definitely the most dangerous of the regular enemies.
Silly note: the mothership approaching sound effects continue to play on the game over menu, and I can actually see the mothership spawn in at some point.
The music for this game is quite fun. I especially like how it seems to get more intense a couple minutes in to the game, and that building intensity definitely follows the difficulty of the game. Either way, the music really raises the energy level.
I really like the wall-dash mechanic in this game. I am in general a sucker for platforming moves that take a couple inputs to pull off successfully, as I think it's a lot of fun to get dynamic movement out of a precise combination of inputs--it makes those moves feel difficult, and therefore very satisfying, to pull off.
I do think, for the difficult platforming sections (i.e. stage 3) I might have preferred platforming challenges that were not so strictly timing based... I found that I couldn't really appreciate the platforming in stage 3, as I was more worried about not messing up the timer. As others have said, easier ways to restart would have also helped here. Especially because, if you mess up something early in the level, you kind of know that you're doomed, but you have no way to quickly restart.
That said--stages 1 and 2 are actually really fun with the time pressure. The wall jump move feels fast and satisfying, and flying through those levels with it is just fun.
And I do like the platforming in stage 3. The second section of it especially feels fun, trying to dash precisely in between the lightnings. I just haven't been able to get through all of it with only 2 lives so far. I came very close... but ran out of time in the last section.
First, a couple boring technical notes (also, for reference, I'm playing on the Windows version): - The mouse sensitivity is really high. My mouse does have a convenient control for this, so I was able to turn it down, but an option for that would definitely be appreciated as well. - There are two sliders visible that seem to be movement options or something but I can't find any way to click them. - The pause menu is a little glitchy, seems like sometimes clicking the "resume" button doesn't work... in fact, if you do push the resume button, then to close it requires pushing "escape" a second time and pushing the "resume" button a second time. - The game seems like it might be lagging? I'm not entirely sure. I know I've had lag problems with 3D Godot problems in the past. Maybe Godot 4 will finally arrive and save us all from 3D lag problems :sweat_smile:
Okay, so on to the interesting stuff.
I think that the current use of the gun is pretty good, all things considered. It is interesting that the little camera objects will spawn extra turrets if you don't shoot them. This is a great mechanic. The turrets themselves are quite threatening. In particular, I like that they take three shots, and that the gun is relatively slow to shoot. This makes trying to take out turrets an interesting challenge, especially when combined with the camera objects, as then it becomes a question of which object to shoot first. It also makes sneaking past them very attractive. I think this is pretty cool.
I think I managed to get through all the rooms in the game. I like the little side room with the desk. I haven't found anywhere to go from the room with the red light and all the turrets, so I think it must be the last one. I did, however, manage to glitch through the floor, which helped me confirm that I had probably seen the rest of the map: world_glitch_screenshot.png
So overall I think you all did a good job constructing a set of mechanics that mesh with the narrative you laid out in your game description: I really do feel like the turrets are dangerous, and that it is worth being strategic in how I approach exploring the ship.
I think mashing is a very interesting mechanic in games. It is physically strenuous to pull off (to the point where it can be actually unhealthy if you're not careful!) and so in any case it gives a real sense of weight to things. A previous Ludum Dare entry I found interesting in that regard is [this one](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/dig-box-dig) from Ludum Dare 48.
In this game, though, I find that my favorite mechanic is the mouse button mashing. It took me a while to figure out exactly what it did, and I admit that it is pretty difficult to actually pull off in the context of the game... but it is very fun, for me at least, to tap out a binary code on my mouse buttons, and more specifically, to try to do so quickly.
However, I do find myself tending to focus all my attention on the binary code at the bottom of the screen. As such, my only real hope of ever hitting any enemy is to get the heat-seeking missile upgrade, as I don't tend to aim very well. This is interesting, as it means I am one way or another mandated to also mash the R key. In general I find myself mashing all three keys to get the best chance at winning. I think that's kind of neat... the game does sort of require me to mash these keys, but it doesn't do so explicitly. It is an emergent consequence of the other mechanics.
Of course, I imagine the game is explicitly designed to mandate the mashing. I mean, the whole reason that the mashing feels so necessary is that I have only a ten second time limit and so I need my missiles, once I actually get done with the binary code, to do as much damage as possible.
I did find myself basically never using the movement mechanics. First, because I was focused on the binary codes primarily. Second, because when I did look away from the codes, it was to attempt to aim. And third, because the movement speed of the Hurt-Mec is very slow, and the tank controls make it difficult to move as well. So, I suppose the movement mechanics are in this way the opposite of the mashing mechanics... there is nothing stopping me from using them, but everything else about the gameplay makes me very unlikely to.
The other consequence of all these mechanics is that whether I actually win is somewhat random. :sweat_smile: I tend not to move out of the way of enemies, so really what determines whether I win or lose is whether they are able to shoot me before a missile that I happen to shoot wipes them out. Because: I do often fail at firing a missile; I will often get, say, 6 codes right and then mess up. It does seem like the game will give me easier codes for a bit if I keep messing up repeatedly, which is a nice little mechanic.
So, basically, I would say the thematic core of this game, to me at least, is emergent incentives. The game is explicitly a mashing game, but a raw description of its mechanics could suggest that I instead, say, run around with my Mec and aim with the mouse and shoot stuff. But then, the emergent properties mean that, in practice, I don't run around, and I focus my eyes on one little part of the screen, and do nothing but mash. So it is a mashing-game inside a not-mashing-game inside a mashing-game, if you will. :smile:
This is a pretty effective game. It is of course very simple, but I think that's what makes it work so well. In particular, it reminds me of playing tic-tac-toe or some other paper-and-pencil game... the objective is both abstract in some sense but also overwhelmingly clear; there is no need for graphical flourish, as there is no story being told besides the raw game mechanics.
And the thing I really like is that, although it is very easy to understand the basic concept of the game, it is actually really hard for me to wrap my head around the exact behavior of the opposing player. It seems like the arms are moving in a pretty simple pattern, but I can't really derive a counter-strategy that follows the arms... my only hope is to look for red stars that are forming and quickly click them. If I try anything else--something like, watching the arms and trying to see which stars they will be taking in the future--I tend to have a harder time and to lose more often.
I think that's pretty cool. The mechanics are extremely simple but it is nonetheless not possible for me to quickly build an intuition for them.
As others have said, the intro is pretty cool. It's definitely a good application of AI art -- in particular, there is no need for the different pictures to actually portray a wholly coherent location, so it's even good if they display something a little off or a little strange, as that's exactly what the hospital is supposed to be.
I like the variety of mechanics in the game. The fact that picking up the screws gives you a new ability was totally unexpected, for me, and although I didn't catch on super quickly, it's cool that running makes sounds that alert enemies to your position. I played twice before reading carefully enough to learn that mechanic, and on my third playthrough I was able to win with that knowledge.
The walking mechanic then actually feels pretty good. Creeping by the spiders and praying not to alert them really just seems to work very well.
The degree of suspense when I did reach the end of the game was pretty intense. I certainly did not want to win at that point. I was sort of thinking that the generator switch would be the end (the lights would turn back on, permanently, and then I would be basically done), so it was a surprise and a last dash of suspense when that was not the end.
I think this game makes really good use of the theme. I got so attuned to the light on/off cycle -- I could feel the limitations of my movement, and I really started to pay attention to them.
In my winning run I had two really close calls where I almost got eaten by the spider (or succumbed to the darkness, I guess). That was very intense as well.
The level design in this game is worth discussing, I think. First, I think that putting the map near the beginning is a pretty good move, although I totally missed it in my first playthrough. Second, I found that the knowledge of my early playthroughs was really helpful for my later ones, as it is actually pretty hard to find stuff in the map. Some of the items were also hard to spot on the background, such as the oil filter--that one I had a very hard time finding. One thing I think that made it harder is that areas that are marked as one particular area on the map are often not made of one connected room--you often have to go all the way around long hallways to get between two sections of an area. This means that it is very hard to just go from area-to-area and collect all the items in that area.
But this is of course a very effective decision. This kind of navigation is so awkward that it really effects the feeling of the game--and it definitely contributes to the suspense and the horror, I think. It does get frustrating at times though. :sweat_smile:
One thought I had about a small-ish change to the level design would just be to have, say, a couple different floor-tile-types or something, one for each area. That would at least make it easier to tell where each area starts and ends--I had a really hard time finding something in the storage area, for example, because I didn't really know that the right side of the map was the storage area.
The number of items required to win is, I think, a reasonable balance, but it is definitely difficult to win. It is very easy to lose, and it takes a lot of time investment to get back to the same point, and each second is kind of stressful due to the ease of losing. So, if I were to have lost in my third run, I probably would not have started another one.
Little note: after winning there is a "high scores" screen but it didn't seem to do anything.
But yeah, overall I think this is a pretty darn effective horror game. The walking is good, the ten-second-cycles are some of the best application of the theme I've seen yet. And, the level design is contorted in a way that is extremely effective. So, good job! :smile:
Really cool game! The variety of minigames was great, and the presentation is especially solid... the way that the user interface is laid out works really well. The minigames are even physically miniature on the screen!
I do think that the range in difficulty of the games is pretty high. Some of them are extremely easy, such as the sandwich game and the otter game (although the otter one is of course best on the very first playthrough, and I imagine, shines even more when in a group of players). Then one game, "rescue the diamond," is so hard that I have been unable to beat it. I started escaping to the title menu and repeatedly starting a new game just to get a couple more attempts at it, and I still haven't managed to win. :sweat_smile:
But, I really do like the sheer variation in the games. Some highlights: the train one feels really good to play. The jester one plays and sounds good. The dab one is quite funny. One thing I especially like is the variety in aesthetic styles between the games... some being cartoonier, some being pixel art, and some being more photorealistic kinds of art.
I do think that the random game selection could perhaps be improved. Several times I would get many duplicate games that I had already won -- I think in those cases it would be more fun to either get a duplicate of a game I had lost (or, in multiplayer, that nobody had won), or to get an entirely new game. Perhaps duplicate games could be rejected if they had already been won? (Or, at least for the easier games... one run I got three sandwich games, which were all very easy. One run I did win the needle game but then it came up again and I lost that time... so maybe duplicate games make more sense when the game chosen is one of the harder ones.)
On a technical note I feel like the audio balance is a bit off. The first time I played I couldn't really hear any music, but some of the sound effects came through quite clearly. Then I realized if I turned up the volume I could hear the music reasonably well... but then some sound effects were way too loud (such as the dab sound and the boop sound).
But besides that, everything feels polished and I had a good time doing a couple runs. I managed to get a high score of 9 points. :smile:
I am a sucker for typing games, and I think this one is a great concept as well. Expressing birdwatching through a typing game just makes sense, at least to me, and while playing it I definitely feel like somebody struggling to spit out Latin names for birds so that I can start nerding out about cool bird facts.
However, during the gameplay it really seemed like my inputted letters were being dropped, like, way more often than I would expect, given that my keyboard tends to work generally pretty well normally (for example, I typed almost all of this sentence very quickly and without typos).
So, I suspected that perhaps the game was only allowing me to enter a single letter per frame, and from a cursory inspection of the source code it seems like this is true. Now, I'm not entirely sure if I personally can actually type more than 1 letters per frame, so maybe this is all a red herring... but I do think it would be worth changing it. If a player can type two letters in one frame, then the game should definitely let them. (From what I can tell, this is what Unity's Input.inputString is for. But, I don't know for sure as I'm not a Unity user :sweat_smile: )
I do think that rejecting the whole string when the user messes up is actually kind of fun. It is really hard, but I think if the input system was patched as I described, it would be less annoying. One other tweak that would improve it: tell the user which character was wrong when they mess up. If that was added, I think I would actually really enjoy a typing game where I had to be perfect for the whole string.
Overall, I really do love the concept and I had a good time trying to maximize my bird facts, even if I had to try to type very carefully to have the best hope of winning.
So right when I was going to start writing my reply, I saw your comment about the new version of the game. As such, I have now played both versions. Some of my thoughts on the compo version of the game mirrored some other players, so perhaps I can give a sort of perspective on how those have changed with the new version...
Perhaps the first thing I noticed in the compo game was the somewhat unintuitive movement. I would often try to move straight up or straight down, and then end up too far left or right -- in particular, I would sometimes, e.g., intend to move up-right, so I would move right and then up... and then of course I would have gone exactly two times two far to the right. As I continued to play the compo version, the strategy I ended up using for movement was essentially to only move in broad strokes... I would know, for example, that I needed to move to the bottom-left corner, so I would hold down and left, and just sort of not think about it beyond that. To narrow in on a single ghost somewhere on the map, I would tend to sort of move in this same broad pattern, and then try to get more precise as I got closer... and here I would still usually run into trouble. I do think I got somewhat better at intuiting the pattern, by the end--and I do think learning that movement pattern is kind of an interesting learning curve!--but it did remain relatively hard.
In the new version of the game, moving precisely on the grid is easy. Like, it really is so much easier. If I had to guess, it has something to do with video game players being wired to think of parallel lines as the directions along which they move... the original compo game has parallel lines moving up and down, so it feels like the arrow keys should move us up and down, while in the updated game, the parallel lines are diagonal, so it feels like up and down should move us diagonally. (Also interesting: after playing the post-compo version, the compo version seems easier to control... or maybe I had already gotten better at it, who knows?)
The next thing I wanted to talk about from the compo version is the memory puzzles. I think these are really quite fun. My absolute favorite thing to do in the compo game was to just relax and let my intuition tell me where to go... to try to use my vague memory of what I saw in the corner of my eye to just guess and grab a ghost. This strategy, unfortunately, failed almost universally. But it was a good time. I suppose the easy difficulty of the compo version made trying this possible.
Of course, the main strategy I would use would be to track down one big group of ghosts of the same color, and to pick them off during the day phase. More particularly, I would basically try to track one of those ghosts as I was leaving the night phase, and then visually track with my eyes where one of them was walking to during the day phase. After capturing those two ghosts is when I would try to use my failed corner-of-the-eye strategy.
One interesting mechanic related to that is that most of the Pac-Mans are in the corners of the map. This means that, once I have picked up a ghost, I do not need to look where I'm going to drop it off, generally--I can spend most of my visual focus tracking that one other ghost. Although, when I was moving, e.g., down-left, once I hit the bottom wall, it seemed like I needed to stop holding down in order to actually move left and get to the pink Pac-Man. Either way, this is I think why I tended not to go for orange ghosts... they would require more visual focus on the player character in order to drop them off.
[continued...]
Another important point about ghosts: the red ones stick out a lot. I almost always went for red ghosts first, because it was so much easier to build a mental image with these red hot spots than with pink or blue or orange hot spots... those colors all tended to blend together into one mass of duller color, while the red stood out in my mind quite sharply. It was pretty easy to build a mental picture of basically where all the red ghosts were before switching to day cycle, while this didn't really work for the other colors. And of course, this is where my "corner-of-the-eye" strategy comes from... I would have this mental picture of all of the red ghosts, exactly where they were during the night cycle, and I would just head to those general locations after I grabbed the two I had located precisely. This didn't really work so well for the pink or blue ghosts... I could only build a reasonably good mental map if there was a really large chunk of them, and then I could sort of think that "oh, that part of the map is mostly pink ghosts."
All of these different mental mechanics are pretty interesting, I think. There are definitely other memory games I've played, and of course there's puzzle games, and all, but I can't recall trying to describe this particular mode of interaction before. It is almost like the game you wrote runs not only on my computer but in my brain... it gets me to "mentally picture" things in a way that is, I guess, kind of like a "memory" card game but also meaningfully different and novel. In particular, the vividness of the red being so important to the gameplay and to my mental picture is not something I can recall describing before.
Okay, now for some a couple thoughts on the updated version.
First, wow, this is much harder. I think this is probably generally a good thing--as others have discussed, the compo version does get pretty easy, as all you really need to do is capture two ghosts per round.
However, there are a couple aspects of the difficulty that I think are somewhat questionable. First, there's a strange latency sometimes when trying to drop a ghost onto a Pac-Man. I think it has something to do with pushing space too soon after moving. But it basically results in my key press being eaten, which is frustrating.
Second, picking up ghosts is really slippery. If a ghost is moving between tiles, it seems almost impossible to pick it up. What I end up doing is failing to pick up a ghost because it moves, so I follow it and hit space, and then I fail again because it moves, repeat. I'm not sure what the intended balance is here--are moving ghosts intended to be very low-priority targets? Is the intended strategy to always go after ghosts that are sitting still? That would make some sense, but it makes the memory aspect much harder as then I cannot merely keep a list of a few ghosts of the same color, but I instead have to have a general idea of the color of basically every ghost. This is because, when choosing which ghost to go after, I have to choose based on whether they are moving or not rather than by their color, and so I will need a way to know which Pac-Man to go to afterwards.
There are a number of changes I do like, however. As previously mentioned, the movement became much much more intuitive in this version. Another thing I really like: the new day/night cycle. I went back to the compo version and I was shocked at how long the night seemed in comparison. The only weird thing--whenever I get caught with a ghost during the night, I end up sitting there processing the "you got stunned" animation for a second, and once I finally move on to start looking at the ghosts, literally that very second is when it turns to day. That always feels weird.
[continued...]
One last thing--wow are the graphics slick in the new version. I booted it up and I was immediately having a good time. The ghost selector is great, the ghost blinking is great, if I'm not mistaken the shadows are also great... it feels really polished graphically. It's cool that the graphics are done procedurally--they really do feel good.
And, on the same note, the sound effects for picking up and depositing ghosts feel great too. Overall it just has really good game feel, I guess.
Okay, so, to summarize--I have lots of similar thoughts on the compo version as other players, with respect to the controls and to the difficulty level. Good use of the theme, insofar as a memory game is a really neat genre of game, and this one is a novel memory game in my opinion. And, good use of procedural graphics, especially in the post-compo version. Great job! :smile:
This is a fun game! I didn't really understand exactly how the gun pickup mechanics worked, or when exactly my guns would be reloaded--it seemed like it had to do with the 10 second counter--but it was fun to revel in the chaos nonetheless.
I think my favorite part was the final boss fight. Just, bullet hell out of nowhere... sort of (obviously bullet dodging was part of the rest of the game, but the bullet patterns were much denser and more patterned in the boss fight). It was just a nice change on the gameplay--now I had to navigate more specifically and carefully, where before I was mostly just running in circles around all the guys. So, I had a lot of fun with that.
Good job!
This is a pretty good twist on the core "space shooter" genre. It's especially fun because bigger ships almost always seem like MORE POWERFUL ships, as a general rule of video games, while in this game getting bigger is added challenge rather than added power.
More interestingly, I would argue that the bigger ships in this game make it more fun even though they don't make you more powerful. In particular, I think the bigger hitboxes are where this game becomes more fun, as the challenge level is higher but it is also a novel kind of challenge--most space shooters aren't about navigating with a really big hitbox (in fact, they are often about navigating with a very tiny hitbox!) I think this is very much in line with the title--"MEGACHONKER" very much sounds like something where bigger = more fun.
One thing that I think feels pretty good is when you slide right under an enemy ship before it hits you and fire right at that moment. It is just satisfying in some way, as everything lines up nicely.
And, of course, the more general strategy in this game is about choosing--do I want to try to destroy that enemy ship, or avoid it? And so when you make a choice to destroy the ship, and you're right on the cusp of taking damage, it is just kind of a fun little risk that pays off.
So yeah, great twist on the space shooter genre, that incorporates the Ludum Dare theme nicely to boot.
I quite like the idea of the three different phases. I wonder if they could be made more interesting, however -- right now I tend to almost never have coins to spend, and I only tweak my position slightly in order to get closer to some of enemy spawns, sometimes.
I think an interesting twist would be to have a different minigame for each of these phases. So the first phase, there would be a minigame of some sort that let you upgrade some properties. That way, every time you reached that phase, you would be guaranteed some upgrades, as long as you did well in the minigame. And then in the second phase, there could be another minigame that let you place down multiple towers. So, the better you did in that minigame, the more copies of a tower you would have going.
I think that could be a way to make the 10 second phases much more energetic and chaotic. Because I do think that splitting up normal gameplay features that would usually all be available all the time into three discrete phases is a fun concept -- but I think it could be even more fun to push it further. :smile:
Quite a fun little game. I love how the different kinds of key inputs are introduced over time. The first screen with all the E's is a fun introduction, and then of course the math equations are a nice twist as well.
I think it is interesting that each kind of code has a different degree of readability. I would say that the letters and plain numbers are the easiest to push, the arrow keys are harder, and then the math equations are the hardest. The math equations are hard for two reason: one, decoding them to a number is harder, and two: I can't reach most of the relevant numbers from my right hand. It seems like numbers 1 and 2 are the ones not displayed through equation, and I can reach those numbers with my left hand. However, the larger numbers, which are displayed with an equation, I have to reach with my right hand. But my right hand I also have to move downwards to press the arrow keys. This makes those equations hard in two different ways.
In fact, I often find myself hunt-and-pecking the large numbers, because I'm moving my right hand back and forth between the arrow keys, and I don't know how to locate numbers by feel alone while my hand is still on the arrow keys.
My final score was 131... I was not trying too hard at that point. It didn't seem like the difficulty was really rising, but reading some of the other comments it sounds like the patterns eventually got longer? I think that makes sense as a difficulty change. I do think that it would be kind of cool if the game had an ending--I was somewhat expecting it to end after 100. But it also makes sense as a high score game.
So overall, fun game, really great use of the keyboard (and the Ludum Dare theme).
Pretty polished experience all things told! Great to have a little introductory game before everything falls apart. Then, the news cutscene itself looks pretty good.
An interesting thing: it is actually surprisingly straining on my eyes to try to read the text while holding the spacebar. But, I also wasn't going to resort to just letting it scroll past on the slow speed. Near the end of the game ( :wink: ) I developed a strategy where I would quickly scroll some text on to the screen, and then release spacebar so I could read it with less eye strain.
So, there you have it... your game even has some strategy involved! :smile:
This game does a lot with a very small set of mechanics. It's definitely nice to have a game where the only control is moving around... this makes it very easy to jump into as a player. But, because everything is interacting, there is a lot of strategy involved, despite the relatively small number of mechanics. It's quite effective game design.
It is a rather tricky game. Level 5 took me a few tries; I lost with 20 tomatoes three separate times. But, it does seem possible to get better at it, which is interesting, because I don't feel like I internalized a lot of conscious choices about the strategy.
If I analyze it a bit, I think the only real strategy I could put into words is minimizing down time. That is, as I got better at level 5, it seemed to me that I was more efficiently switching to watering plants when there weren't any tomatoes to collect, and that maybe I also made better decisions about when to abandon far away tomatoes because they would take too much time to collect.
It does seem like time is the main currency here... tomatoes in the middle of the screen, for example, are especially expensive if you're already at the edge, as it takes time both to move to the middle and then to move back to the edge.
I did find it somewhat frustrating how little control I had over the two tools. One especially frustrating mechanic here is that there seems to be very little control over where the tool you're not using is located. The only way to move the tool you're not using is to hope that it flies off in a useful direction when you swap tools.
This mostly affected me on, I believe, the second level, where for some reason most of the time when I swapped tools the other tool just stayed put, and it was far away from everything else. I do think it worked out better when the tools just flew off in a random direction, as this made it more into just another random item you had to dynamically incorporate into your route, rather than a static point to keep returning to.
But, I do still wonder how the gameplay would change if the player had control over whether to pickup tools. It would certainly make it easier, as then, for example, you wouldn't have to worry about picking up the watering can when trying to deliver tomatoes, and vice versa. But that particular obstacle does seem to be rather important to the gameplay. It wouldn't be quite as frantic and tricky of a game without some degree of obstructive controls.
In any case, I had fun. It is a tricky game, but it seems to be tricky in an engaging way. As others have mentioned, there is a lot of nice polish or juice... the sound effects for collecting tomatoes, and the way that the canned tomato flies up in the air, are great effects that make it satisfying to collect tomatoes.
And, as I sort of described earlier, the way that everything is interacted with through movement results in a lot of interesting interactions. Perhaps the most important is just how collecting multiple tomatoes in quick succession works... you kind of have to push them over near the canning machine, and then sort of get on top of them. This is cool, because it's a bunch of pretty simple mechanics combining together in a natural way.
Another fun strategy is trying to decide which way to push tomatoes, in particular if the watering can is in the way. Is it better to go the opposite way, even though it's longer? Or is it better to try to jump over the watering can?
So overall, I would say this is a nicely polished game that has very well designed mechanics.
OK, so to talk about this game I first must describe the journey I took to play it.
So, the first time I played I did ... ok. I didn't really pay attention to any of the plant statistics until the very end, when I lost on round 19. So, I was basically just using the meteor parsley for everything, but I realized right at the end that it had pretty low DPS overall.
Then, for my next few runs, I started playing in fullscreen, and with the wheat turned off. I was under the impression that the wheat was just a particle effect, and I had felt it was somewhat distracting and made it harder to see my plants.
I started using a strategy based basically entirely on cucumbers, but then the game crashed on round 15, and then when I tried again, it crashed on round 19.
At this point I figured that perhaps my changes to the settings were causing it to crash, so I decided to just play in non-fullscreen and with the wheat turned back on. But then I started running into a very strange problem. For some reason I wasn't getting any money!
This was super confusing to me. I restarted the game over and over, and I just couldn't seem to earn any money. Occasionally the money seemed to randomly increase by some amount. (I thought maybe my hand was just brushing the C key...?) I tried re-downloading the game. I tried playing the web version. In all cases, I couldn't seem to earn any money! This didn't seem like it could possibly be a bug, as it was happening across different versions of the game and it hadn't happened the first time.
But I couldn't find any information in the game description or anywhere else I looked about how I was supposed to earn money. However, I saw that the source code was available. Aha! I would be able to just see what was going on!
And then, after looking through the source code, I finally realized... oh. The wheat gives you money when you pick it up. It isn't just a particle effect.
So, suffice to say, I think there should be a note somewhere explaining where you earn money from in the game. :sweat_smile:
Okay, so, that was my story. But there was more to the game then that!
So, first of all, I really love the graphics here. Super clean and crisp.
Second, the core tower defense concept is absolutely fantastic. Having the enemy ships literally pulling your towers out of the ground is such a cool concept. I have previously played tower defense games where the enemies attacked my towers, but never in a way nearly this creative or fun.
It was also fun trying to come up with a good strategy, although my first real idea, after reading all the tower info, was to basically just use cucumbers and occasionally a couple other towers (e.g. I had a dragonfruit, as well as some meteor parsleys, with each group of cucumbers). And this strategy seemed to work pretty well.
The cucumber DPS was just so high, especially given its super long range. The only towers with more DPS had much shorter range, or simply attacked very occasionally. In particular, I'm not sure whether it's worth using the shallots. It seems like they could be pretty powerful, but I never really got a good sense on exactly how much damage they were doing.
However, I did decide to plant a missdemandrake, as it seemed nice to be able to zap enemies anywhere on screen occasionally, and I also wondered if there would ever be any enemies with super high health.
Well, it definitely paid off in round 20! My singular missdemandrake basically handled the UWO by herself.
At that point, only a handful of towers had died, so I had like $2000 or so. So, in round 21, when a bunch of towers did get killed, I basically just started planting more missdemandrakes... and I won! Hooray.
(continued...)
The only complaint I had is that, whenever I had a tower selected for planting and wanted to select a different tower, I would click on it, but this would just deselect all the towers, and I would have to bring my mouse back over and try selecting it again. But I had usually started moving my mouse over to where I wanted to plant the tower... and so this would usually waste a second or two, with me having to realize what had happened, and then moving the mouse back over.
Eventually, however, I got used to just right clicking as soon as I was done with a plant. So, basically just a UI nitpick there. And of course, eventually my towers stopped dying very much at all.
Overall I thought this game was pretty great. I think it's the best of the games I've played so far. I personally thought all the enemy and plant naming was pretty fun, such as the UWO. The graphics were great, as mentioned, and I thought the music and sounds were good too. And of course the tower defense concept itself was creative and overall just fun to play with, with a nice variety of towers to try and at least 3 or 4 being pretty useful for a winning strategy. So, great job!
Very cool tower defense game.
So, the first thing I noticed when I started playing is that the mouse moved the camera, and it moved it really, really fast. This kind of made me motion sick, and I thought I was absolutely going to hate the camera for this game, but that is not what happened.
Instead, I ended up thinking the camera controls were pretty dang good. I mean, I guess they are to some degree standard shooter controls (maybe?) but I thought they worked great here, especially in the early game. In particular, although it is true that the camera moves kind of fast, it's also true that the player controls it, and can lock it in place just by avoiding moving the mouse.
This ended up meaning that I was actually having a ton of fun pointing the camera exactly where I needed it in the early game -- I would scan left and right to see if I could see any alien ships, and what's even better, is that I could shoot at them from almost anywhere on the map with quite a bit of precision! Of course, hitting the ships from so far away was not always easy -- it's difficult to predict how much they will move in the time it takes a bullet to get there -- but it was fun to try.
The other tower defense mechanics were fun as well. I ended up building two anti-airs before I built any missiles for some reason, but then when I finally did build a missile, it was super fun to see how powerful it was.
I guess I'm not actually sure what the utility of the anti-airs is, given that the missiles do seem very powerful in comparison, but perhaps the fact that they're cheaper makes them effective for their price...?
But, trying to build up some defenses was pretty fun, and I think the arc of the game ended up working out pretty well too. More specifically: at the beginning, you're kind of on your own, and you can't really stop the UFOs very fast. In the middle of the game, the UFOs come somewhat often, and there are the UFOs that will shoot at you, but your defenses are strong enough that you almost don't have to do anything.
Then, in the end game, everything becomes total chaos, and your defenses are woefully inadequate. No matter how invincible you feel in the mid game -- there's just nothing you can do here.
As my final strategy I did try to just spam the city upgrades to buy myself a couple more humans. I think that perhaps I should have tried to buy them earlier.
I do think that there is possibly some real strategic depth there. In particular, it seems like the only two factors you can really affect in the very end game is how many humans you have currently stockpiled in your cities, and how much you can reduce the rate at which the UFOs are grabbing them. I think there's quite a few strategies to explore in terms of building up big cities and keeping them safe in the mid game, especially if you could also get shields to last right up until the end, they could provide some extra seconds as well.
Although, I am not really sure what the score means...? My score was 6993 with 885 humans harvested; I lasted a bit more than 1000 seconds.
Overall, this was a fun game to play through, with a lot of fun variety (e.g. shooting by yourself vs. building towers), and what seems like some real strategic depth. Good job!
Edit: Also, while giving a star rating, I noticed that I think this is the most creative use of the theme I've seen so far. So that's a nice bonus as well. :smile:
To me, this seems like a straightforwardly good game to just play through and enjoy. That is to say: because the player has complete control over how many enemies to fight at a time, there is really no required difficulty to the game--but it is nonetheless so well put together that just playing through it, even on really-easy-mode, is just a nice thing to do for a little bit.
More specifically, the graphics and design of the game are just fun to play around with intrinsically. Particularly, the board game components are great--it is just more fun to upgrade your player statistics by adding a dice to your dice rack than it is to push a +1 button. And of course, it's a lot of fun to have the 5 dice roll whenever doing a maxed-out attack, and it's great how that feels different and more exciting than a level 4 attack, just like physically rolling more dice.
Another detail along the same lines is the card storage. There's just something so fun about having a drawer that you can slide out and put cards into, complete with some very nice shadows and the ability to flip them over (which, as far as I know, does not affect the rest of the game at all? It's card flipping for its own sake!) And of course, the card upgrade slots are good for the same reason... it's just intrinsically fun to slot something into a slot that it fits into.
On top of all that, I do think the gameplay itself has some fun components, in particular in terms of strategies. I did two playthroughs. The first one I just spawned one enemy at a time, as I was playing cautiously, and I maxed out my main attack, piercing, defense, and armor break (giving me a score of 13 days). For my second playthrough, I was trying to do a "minimum nights" run, which I won with 7 nights (probably far from the true minimum, of course). It was fun to play through that minimum nights run, though, as my strategy completely changed from spawning one monster per night to spawning as many as possible (so that I could get ~12 dice, and max out attack, defense, and armor break). When doing that, I even learned of a new mechanic, which is the way that the enemies will push chests out of the way.
There are two little nitpicks I have: - It was a little annoying to set up my screen for 1920x1080. I do wonder if the app could do it automatically somehow...? - In my second playthrough, sometimes it was not clear when it was my turn and when it was the enemies' turn, seemingly due to the number of enemies on screen. It seems like it might take them a while to think, or something..? Maybe just having, like, an "ENEMY TURN" indicator somewhere, or something, would help make the UI a bit smoother when doing big fights.
But overall I think this is just a rock-solid entry. Great polish, art, sound, and so much fun packed in as well. Great job!
Nice little idle game.
I definitely did not use a very clever strategy to beat this. Basically, my problem was that I did not have 100 pluses when I bought the square factory, and then my hex factory started eating all my pluses so I could never build them up. After reading the other comments, I realize that one strategy that would have saved me a lot of time would have been to just buy a bunch more hexagon factories so that the square would have priority.
Instead I ended up with 73,605 circle factories and 21500 triangle factories. These took forever to buy; I just used a macro that held my mouse down for me.
I'm not sure if there would be a good way to get the player to think about more strategies. I did sort of try to reason about how I could maybe get pluses to build up in other ways, but I never had the epiphany that I could instead buy more hexagon factories.
I think part of the problem is that it's not overwhelmingly clear exactly how the factories decide who gets to eat the resources. In particular, late in the game I had ~20000 blue circles, and my triangles cost ~40000 while my diamonds cost ~20000. However, the diamonds and triangles seemed to be taking turns in eating up all the blue circles. To me this seems like an antisoftlock mechanic...? But it does mean I don't have a super intuitive grasp on what exactly is going on, and so maybe that makes it harder to reason about strategies.
One solution to this would be to just make it possible to buy buildings really fast. I think this would basically be fine, as it is still fun to build up all the factories over time and get a really big circle production compared to the beginning.
I do think that the way the different shape resources interact is pretty interesting. It does enable good strategies in the game, even if I never found them. But, there were fun parts of the interactions nonetheless... in particular, the way that the circle and triangle factories build off each other is quite fun.
The graphic design and audio is also very nice. I think that using arbitrary shapes as the resource is a good idea, it makes it pretty easy to reason about the different buildings and how they're interlinked.
Well, it took maybe half an hour or so, but I managed to unlock all 31 tiles! I did reach the full progress bar earlier than that, I was actually kind of surprised when it stopped filling up. :smile:
Everything here is very polished. All the graphics look great, the music and sounds are great -- I love especially the cascading notes when tiles start to combine, especially when I had a really big village that generated lots of wheat, and there was like an entire ascending and descending scale. That was very satisfying and made me want to make more big cities.
As a small note, I saw some complaints about tile deselection... I personally did not have this problem, although the deselections did feel a little slow to do when trying to check all the tiles on the map to see if they had a built-in upgrade. (Perhaps somehow marking tiles that can be upgraded could be a good thing...?)
For a while I was stuck on 28/31 tiles. Then I found the castle and fortress, and was stuck on 30/31 tiles. The fortress was also basically dumb luck, as I was kind of surprised that there was a recipe so similar to the castle recipe... wasn't really the kind of thing I was trying out intentionally.
The very last thing I found was the observatory. What was interesting is that I had thought I had tried the combination for observatory before... but of course, I hadn't.
I think that the fact that the order that the combination is done in changes it makes it pretty difficult to mentally track all the combinations that you have tested. Now, this does add some interesting puzzle elements to the game... I remember in the late game, I did have some fun trying to test a specific combination, and building all the elements in order to make it happen.
Still, I think that some sort of tracking system or hint system would be worth considering. There are lots of possible directions for this, depending on how easy you would want to make it... for example, I think perhaps the most helpful thing would be a note on the compendium when a player has found everything that can be made from a given tile, so that you don't have to waste time trying a bunch of combinations that don't work.
In particular, if my calculations are correct, there are 31 * 30 = 930 ways to choose two tiles, where the order matters, where the tiles aren't the same. This is a lot of combinations to work your way through with brute force, and it seems like it's possible to just get lost in the weeds doing something with combinations that are completely unrelated.
Now, one thing that does help here is the order of the tiles in the compendium. I wasn't trying very hard with combinations with the enchanted forest or desert when looking for those last tiles, as it seemed like they would be near the end of the compendium if I had needed to.
Anyways, I don't think there would be too much harm in just making the game easier in this way. It could even be a difficulty setting if need be.
Still, there is a lot to love here. I thought that the variety of combinations was pretty creative, and I liked all the little details, such as the differently colored tiles for different "themes" of tiles. The "potential" system worked well too, in my opinion--it was fun to get a bigger map over time, and it also meant there was some strategy in spending the potential effectively--for example, I was happy with the discovery that forests could take over fields to make more forests, and earn a little bit more potential.
One thing I thought was really cool was the way that the game world ended up looking kind of beautiful each time that I built it. It's very fun to just have these little worlds pop up as a side effect of bumbling through various attempts to craft stuff. The contrast between the feeling of, well, let's put this over here to see if we can try X combination, and the feeling of looking at the complete world at the end, is just a really good contrast.
So, overall, this game was a very creative take on the sort of genre that its in, and it was very nice to play through. Good job!
So I played this game for maybe 20 minutes, and gave it around 8 attempts. The highest round I managed to get to was round 11.
I think my main thought is that the game is way too hard. And I think there are a lot of factors into why it is hard, and I want to talk about some of them.
First and foremost is that there simply is no real way to know when a plant will shoot. The only way to tell is based on kind of gauging how long it's been since it last shot, but this is imprecise. More importantly, however, when staying a safe distance from the plants, there is actually very little time to close in on them for the kill between attacks. This is especially bad with the initial green plants, which in my opinion might be the most dangerous enemy in the game.
In particular, if there is a large group of plants, and their timers are not all in phase, there is essentially no actual period of time where it is safe to approach. The only strategy is to walk over and pray that any plant that does shoot will happen to shoot away from you.
For this reason, I actually think one huge improvement would be to simply make plants always shoot in a fixed direction. That way, when approaching a group of plants, you could simply pay attention to which areas were going to be dangerous, and route your way around them.
And, just to emphasize this point a little more: 2 of my reasonably good runs were ended by a green plant that shot me in the face. My best run was ended by a yellow plant that did the same thing. It's just so easy to misjudge when their next shot is, and if they happen to shoot in the wrong direction, it's game over.
One other important mechanic that I think contributes to the difficulty is the camera. In particular, it is actually not possible to see very much in the direction that you're moving... which makes it very difficult to know what plants are up ahead and when they are shooting. This is mitigated to some degree in the later game, because the direction of bullets flying past you indicates where the plant came from (especially with the blue plants, where the bullets triangulate it, maybe..?), but it is still somewhat frustrating. I find myself sort of walking in steps to let the camera catch up.
Now, despite all this difficulty, I did end up having a bit of fun in my best run. It is actually a really satisfying gameplay loop to try to kill enemies who can shoot at you just by touching them. It has those nice dodging moments from bullet hells, and I think it is more interesting to have to literally go up to the enemy than it is to just shoot at them back. I think that this core gameplay can be quite addicting, especially, perhaps, with fairer enemies.
Of course, the difficulty can be fun in this as well... I think part of the joy of reaching round 11 and doing relatively well throughout that run was that my previous best run was round 8. It is fun to excel at the game.
Another fun component is the random layout of enemies. Although this can result in unfair patterns, there is one additional fun component--trying to notice where enemies are spawning in, and then killing them right at the beginning of the round before they have a chance to attack, is satisfying, and provides a nice contrast to the more cautious approach that the rest of the game requires.
So, overall, I think you have a fun idea here -- a good twist on the bullet hell genre. It's just so difficult--and difficult in an RNG-way, rather than a skill-way, that it is hard (for me at least) to commit to the 20-round grind, especially starting from the beginning each time.
Absolutely fantastic game!
So, I initially played this because I also made a deck-builder for this jam, and I saw yours on itch.io or something like that, and just had to see how other people built deck-builders for the same theme. I have to say, I think you did a much better job than me. :smile: But, our games both had a similar "water" mechanic, which is an interesting similarity!
The run I did, I used mostly tomalones + the orange plant (the one that does +2 coins for each copy of itself), can't remember its name. Near the end I switched to just that orange plant, as the ability of it to stack more money with more plants on the screen was very helpful.
More specifically, I think that an important property of cards in this game is how much money the card can earn divided by how many turns it takes to grow... basically its money/turns. And for that orange one, I was easily getting a ratio of 2 or more near the end, as it only took 5 turns to grow. Compared to the tomalone, which has a ratio of 1, I think this orange plant could be very powerful, and I might do another playthrough later to explore the strategy more.
But that's something... this game is really fun! I literally want to go back and try to explore my strategy more! I haven't played a Ludum Dare 52 game with that property yet.
So, I think the way you balanced the card deck is pretty good. There are some cards that seem perhaps overpowered, such as rain, but overall it seems reasonably balanced and I think there is probably more than one good strategy (and for cards like rain that are really powerful, it seems like they are powerful in every strategy, so it's pretty fair overall).
In particular, I definitely saw other people using tomalones... and I'm guessing it's possible to get pretty far with those. But I think that orange plant can probably do just as well if not better. So, seems like there is some nice balance there.
One thing that I think bit me is I completely misread the "+1 max energy" card. I kept reading it as "+1 energy," and so I never picked it up, as it seemed ridiculously difficult to grow for just 1 energy. But with 1 MAX energy... now that's a different situation!
That seems to be an occasional problem with deck building games -- I think I've had similar reading issues with Slay the Spire, for example. I think this was the only misread I had in this game, though. Maybe just underlining "max" would be a minor but helpful change.
I feel like the mechanics for gaining and getting rid of cards felt nice. Getting rid of cards is always powerful, for sure, but I feel like its gradual enough in this game that it doesn't feel too easy to just build a super powerful deck immediately. But it is kind of a nice feeling to be able to slowly build a better deck by repeatedly discarding cards.
By the way, my score was 169 days. Definitely not as good as some of the scores I saw on the itch page. :smile:
What a great use of image scaling in a game! Having both Alice and the trees simply be scaling images with not much other animation is a very effective aesthetic in my opinion, and what's more, the game mechanics are tied in to this scaling extremely well.
"Plant trees before you get too small" is so direct and to the point, and made perfect sense as soon as I started, watching Alice shrink.
And, the fact that you can't harvest trees when they're bigger than you makes intuitive sense -- although I did not actually learn of this mechanic until I was doing some investigation into whether the game will tell you whether you have lost. (It does not seem to -- it seems you simply get softlocked if you plant all your seeds and get too small. Which, seems to fit the in-game instructions perfectly!)
I also love the amount of strategic depth that you managed to put into this. Like, at first I thought I would just be running around harvesting every tree, but eventually I realized that only a specific kind of tree was dropping seeds. Then, as my forest got larger, I realized that I would want to try to get those trees located away from the others, so that I could harvest them without accidentally harvesting a different tree. (I was not super successful at this, but I managed to win anyways).
I did guess that I might be able to just plant a tree and immediately harvest it, as the first one seemed to be the one that would drop seeds (a nice way to prevent softlocks..?) but it seemed like once you reached a large number of seeds this was no longer the case. Maybe it's seed 5 that is always that tree...? That would make sense to me. (I had skimmed the source code to look for losing mechanics at one point, but I did not look into the tree generation at all. :smile: )
Honestly this might be one of the best entries I've played. It is a short game that manages to be extremely effective; I felt like I experienced more strategic depth and discovery in this game in just a few minutes than I have in some games that took me much longer.
And I really do like the use of the image scaling. It was especially great to see Alice get gigantic at some points, and I love the way that the image feels vertically stretched... it just feels playful, in a sense, and I think it works really well.
So, great job! And super cool that it's a 25-hour game.
EDIT: On a technical note, during my playthrough, the main music did not play for me either, I'm on Firefox. It is only now that I read the comments that I have learned there was main music.
Note that I can play it manually through the JavaScript console--specifically, if I click on the page and then use the JS console to play music, it works (if I don't click on the page, it throws an exception, even if I am using the JS console). This reminds me of some similar annoyances I was having with Emscripten :sweat_smile: . Perhaps you need to wait for user input somehow before playing the music...?
I don't have anything too insightful to say here, but I can talk about one feature I enjoyed that I'm not sure I saw in any other games I played this Ludum Dare.
The driving in this game! It's slow and takes a while, and feels exactly like driving through town to get somewhere. This is a great mechanic to have in a farming game, I think. It creates incentives for the player to avoid going to town too often, because it is slow. So if there was more progression in this game, for example, a larger car inventory -- I probably would have gone for it! It would help me save time going back and forth, and so I would be directly incentivized to participate in other game systems, by a mechanic that makes narrative sense.
I mean, this is kind of seen in, say, Stardew Valley, where getting anywhere from the farm takes a lot of walking, and there is explicit game progression that helps you get around faster.
But I haven't seen it done with a car before, and it's a surprisingly effective combination. I think this is because, at least for me, I have personally experienced having to drive somewhat far away on a regular basis for work, while I have not yet experienced having to walk through the countryside on a regular basis (like in Stardew Valley). So it really is a more personal, and therefore more immersive, framing.
For some reason, this game was lagging a lot on my computer, especially when I went in full screen. Perhaps a 4K resolution does it in...? :sweat_smile: I eventually got it to run OK somehow.
I quite liked the little achievement that popped up when I died. It was super unexpected, particularly for a four hour game. Made it feel like a much more detailed game than one would expect for four hours.
Then, I managed to get all the corn and win. So, there really is a nice variety of mechanics for a four hour game. I think labeling it as "this game was made in 4 hours" really sells the experience, makes me not sure what to expect, and then I can sort of appreciate everything that is there. Very nice!
[Spoilers for anyone who hasn't beat this yet]
Getting through this game took a bit of effort. Especially night three--it took me a couple tries to get through it. The strategy I eventually used to win was to have a plant from night one still there by night three, and then hoping I would have enough energy after eating that to get through the rest of the night. I wasn't expecting night three to be so long, though.
However, it all paid off in night four. At first I thought it was going to be completely impossible -- I was getting absolutely destroyed by the balloon pair and had barely any energy left. Then, of course, the light turned on, and I had to hide in the bushes, and I thought I would run out of energy for sure. But then it seemed like the lady was not going to go back in the house, so I guessed that perhaps I was simply meant to run out of energy here / let her find me. And sure enough, I believe I ran out of energy and then won!
This was a super cool payoff for all the hiding mechanics and frustrations trying to get food in night three. Thinking for sure that night four will just be a huge grind, and then having it be super easy instead... it's a very fun twist.
The winning cutscene itself is sweet and a great end to the game.
One small detail that I love is that the humans speak gibberish. This makes a lot of sense for the player playing as a dog character.
I think the game mechanics here are well thought out as well. The fact that crops grow did indicate to me that they would probably be worth more energy, and then I was able to start engineering strategies about leaving certain crops in place and, e.g. in my final strategy, only harvesting a single crop on night one.
The combination of the slow animations plus the rapid frequency of the balloon popping does make night three kind of frustrating to get through, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem. In particular, because night four really pays off that frustration in an incredible way, it seems to me like a good use of frustration.
So overall, this game was a great experience, definitely not what I would have expected going into it. Very cool.
So far I've played this game for about 45 minutes or maybe an hour. With my current farm setup, in 15 minutes I managed to earn ~$500, which I estimate means it will take me another 45 minutes to get to the end of the game.
So, I think I can say for sure that this game is a bit of a grind, taking at least 90 minutes to win and perhaps even longer than that. Now, I don't necessarily have anything against this. For a while last night I was just playing the game for a bit, as the core gameplay loop ends up being somewhat nice to just chill out and do for a while.
That said, I feel like there isn't enough feeling of progression to really hook me in for a long grind. The only upgrades I bought were the faster harvester, as well as a couple fertilizer so that I could make some plots closer to the shed... these upgrades do seem to be perhaps worthwhile, but the rest of the upgrades seem so expensive that I have to imagine that buying them will actually just make the game take longer.
In particular, I think it is rather frustrating that the only real way to advance in terms of money is to kill the pests, and they seem to spawn somewhat inconsistently... there will be stretches of time where the only pests that show up are on the edges of the map, and run away as soon as they touch a building.
OK, so I've talked about how the game is a grind. So what did I like?
Well, I think the core mechanic of the harvester is really great. I haven't played a ton of farming games with vehicles, so this was a bit new to me just in that sense.
But the game mechanic itself is also really neat. In particular, relying on the harvester to travel quickly is really cool. Like, there's a lot of gameplay revolving around getting in the harvester to go somewhere, getting out to shoot something, getting back in to go somewhere else or to harvest something... overall I think it's a really good part of the game.
The repairs also contribute to this--it was interesting whenever the harvester got completely destroyed, and I had to walk back to the shed to get the wrench. This was a cool mechanic as well, in my opinion.
One other thing about the harvester that I liked is that there was actually quite a bit of technique involved in driving it efficiently. In particular, exiting the harvester causes it to immediately stop, which means that quickly turning around, for example, can be done by hitting E twice and then accelerating. Similarly, whenever loading resources into the silo, I would basically hit E twice.
This braking technique made the harvester surprisingly fun to drive, as it felt like it actually took some skill, and it was fun to successfully execute the technique and drive the harvester more efficiently.
I think the other farming game mechanics were also nicely implemented. I especially thought the distinction between the planted-plants and the harvested-plants (and harvested meat) lead to some interesting interactions. In particular, whenever I killed an animal, I would try to harvest it even if I couldn't actually store it in the harvester, simply because that would prevent it from fading away.
The variety of interactions was also fun, and I think would be more than enough to keep me hooked for a shorter grind.
Although, I do think you should mention somewhere that selling meat is actually very important, because otherwise I probably would not have kept playing nearly as long... the other things are just so much worse in terms of money. I think the easiest way to fix this would be to just show all the recipes that are possible to unlock in the store, so that the player knows they should be trying to obtain a resource called "meat."
So, overall, a game with some very well-thought out and fun mechanics, just too much of a grind to play in one sitting. (Although I am keeping the game running on my computer... so perhaps I will finish it one day. :smile: )
@tomssuli I did not find the 6th resource... I honestly thought there might be one, just based on the size of the interface, but I had no idea what it might be when the birds just dropped meat same as the deer. Actually, the game is still running, so I looked around for a few minutes for it... still no idea, honestly. :sweat_smile:
I did seem to notice that having crops growing resulted in more pests showing up, especially with the harvested crops and the birds... but I couldn't seem to make that good of use of it, as usually I could only shoot, say, 1 deer at a time even if 3 showed up. (Occasionally I could get more than 1 if they went to the same spot, but this was rarer than just getting 1 at a time).
I can see that having more fields could allow for increasing the possibility that the deer group up... perhaps I'll have to try it. I do think that the upgraded shotgun could possibly come in handy, but it's just hard to commit to any purchase. :sweat_smile:
Lots of really good stuff here! Combining a physics destruction game with an upgrade system works really well, I think. Like, the combat with the upgrade system is already pretty good, and adding all the physics elements to it is just a nice way to build on top of that.
I think that framing a physics based game like this as a dragon going around destroying things is also a great idea. I have no idea if that's a new idea or not -- I can't remember all the physics games I've played -- but playing as a, basically, evil character is a great take on the genre.
The gold mechanics are also really cleverly designed, I think. In particular, it's really cool that the castles get upgraded as they collect more gold. This leads to the natural progression in difficulty, but it also ropes the player in to the story there... the player is able to intervene in the castles being upgraded, although it is of course still hopeless to prevent the upgrades due to the sheer number of castles and the fact that the dragon has a minimum amount of gold to look for.
With the main fire ball attack, I had a lot of fun getting better at aiming it, as well as sometimes lobbing fireballs over walls to attack safely. I did think the aiming felt a little weird, but I more or less got used to it as the game went on.
I found the fire breath occasionally useful, but it seemed like I was more forcing myself to use it than anything else. One thing that would happen is I would use it, but because the enemies wouldn't die immediately, merely catch on fire, I would then shoot them with the fire ball... making the fire breath attack I had done somewhat pointless.
There are a handful of glitches. First, the health bar seems a little weird. If I'm not mistaken, I observed at least two glitches: - When starting a round with fully upgraded health, and full health, the health would extend out of the health bar -- but once I took damage, it would go back into the health bar - Sometimes the health bar in the dragon den didn't seem to match the health bar I had at the end of the round...? I could be mistaken on this one.
There are also a couple problems that occur once you go too far in the game. So, once I had unlocked all the upgrades, I figured I should see what would happen once the castles reached the 99999 upgrade. So I decided to skip a bunch of days by resting.
Then, just to see what would happen, I raided a castle when it had like 80,000 gold. Well, what happened is that I harvested all the gold, and now I am at 1320/16060 gold... and I seem to be softlocked, with no way to return to the map. :sweat_smile:
Then, the other glitch is that once you do reach 99,999 gold (I tested this on another copy of the game), everything just falls apart... the castles rank up every day, and when you try to raid them, they don't have any gold or archers, or buildings.
Of course, all these glitches do not really impact the gameplay... I just thought I should mention them, because I did experience them.
Overall, this game combines a lot of cool mechanics -- upgrade systems, physics, and gold -- in a very effective way. Good job!
I love the terminal interface for this game, it's a lot of fun; in my opinion, the terminal sounds also worked quite nicely. The only complaint I have about the sounds is I think the music is too quiet.
On a technical note, the web version just does not work for me at all. At first I thought it was just a Firefox thing -- in Firefox, the intro won't even display -- but in both Firefox and Chrome, the terminal seems to freeze up when I try to type in it. The downloaded version worked fine though!
As others, the main strategy I used was to type a lot of the same character in a row to try to just grind out some information. This is surprisingly fun, although my fingers started to hurt from typing "guess" over and over; eventually I stopped typing the "guess" part because it still worked (a helpful feature, to be honest!) and later I switched to the jam version, which was even more helpful with the indicator of when the right number of characters was entered.
In terms of what made this grinding strategy fun, I think it was mainly when it got to the last few letters, where I could sometimes guess the word directly. Whenever I managed to do that, especially with a long word, it was very satisfying--and a surprisingly similar feeling to guessing a wordle, despite the very different overall strategy!
One interesting property in the game is the rhythm of word-solving. To explain what I mean: so, at the very end of the game, there were a couple two-letter words, which could be solved extremely quickly. As I was just rushing through these, it felt like a climax, like when the hacker in a movie is just about to break into the vault, or whatever. And I think that you could play with this feeling more, mainly by not having a 9-letter word after those short words.
In particular, there is a very nice contrast between grinding out the long words in the middle of the game, and between quickly cracking the short words at the end--and I think you could turn this into a very satisfying story beat, where the player accomplishes something through a series of decreasing length words, so there's this feeling of "gaining on it."
Hopefully that made sense. It was a feeling I got there, and I wanted to make sure to describe it. :smile:
One other note: at one point I did one of the optional guessing sections, and in that section guessed the word "candy"... this was a fun moment for me at least, as I am "in the know" as to the rest of the series, perhaps? I don't know, it was cool.
Overall, I think the way this game used the wordle mechanics was interesting and rather fun, despite the grinding, and it had some nice moments throughout.
Fun game! I managed to beat all the levels and the boss.
Speaking of the boss, I am sometimes not the biggest fan of boss fights, but I think this one worked pretty well. It felt like a puzzle, as it was straightforward enough to get some deterministic results out of the boss. And then it was interesting to try to solve that puzzle--for example, I had to learn that I had to kill some of the skeletons that were spawned in, or they would kill my skeleton.
(And, the boss wasn't very hard... due to the way the cycles work out, you basically get a free attack on him at the end, so you just have to get him stunned twice. I personally appreciated a boss on the easier side, as I feel that past that point it would basically just be repeating the same strategy with some slight variations, and it would get more frustrating to restart each time.)
In general I think the puzzles here were very well designed. I often tried different things that ended up failing spectacularly, in ways that seemed very intentional--as in each case, I learned a little more about the mechanics.
For example: the imp puzzle took me the longest. Once I tried using the rightmost skeleton, and saw how deadly the imp was to those characters, it became clear to me that, within this puzzle, there was absolutely no way I was going to possess the imp, and then it became clear I should attack it with that middle skeleton, etc. And that rightmost skeleton seems to me to be entirely placed there to provide the player an opportunity to see how deadly the imp is.
I think this design was very effective, as in every case where I tried one of those failing paths, I really did learn more and get better at the puzzles. Another example: in the second level, the bottom path really taught me to think about the soul counter.
In terms of the counters / monster statistics -- at the beginning of the game it did seem somewhat daunting how many there were. But I think they ultimately were not that hard to work with.
I do wonder if the defense statistic could be hidden from all the characters that don't have it, and then simply introduced along with the Golem? I have no idea if that would improve or worsen the learnability of the game.
One thing I really liked was the animation on the characters. The amount of personality in the movement animations, despite them being very simple, is just a super nice touch.
But yeah, overall, great puzzle game! Very well designed levels and overall fun to play.
@frogman Thank you for your thoughtful analysis of the game balance!
Balance is, of course, the obvious issue with this game. I tweaked it so often during the jam that it is at this point almost random.
Unsurprisingly, I myself did not play the game until after the jam ended. In my playthrough I had the exact same experience with respect to attack cards... I almost never used the powerful ones, they mostly just clogged my hand. I think the enemy rhythm ended up being lower than it should have been for sure (due to over-nerfing on my part).
With respect to the double-usage of the vampire cards--that is a very good point. I actually made them more powerful at one point, as I was considering how they would work in an attack scenario... but I completely forgot to take into account that there would be many turns where they would be useful without attacking.
With respect to hard mode, here's a secret: the way the enemies work is that there is a big list of which set should spawn next, and "hard mode" just puts you further down the list at the start. It does not increase the spawning frequency at all... in fact, it may decrease it, as enemies spawn less often when they are alive longer.
But yeah, thank you again for putting so much time in my game and giving so much helpful feedback!
@kuro
Thanks for playing, and I'm glad you enjoyed! I'm curious if you encountered any bugs in such a long playthrough? In particular, earlier I realized there is possibly a bug that suggests enemies will potentially stop spawning at somepoint, which it seems like you may have run into.
Also, I love the drawing, thank you for making it! Fits the game's graphics pretty well too, which is super cool! :smile: I would have loved to add more enemies, including such a grand encounter, but never had the time. Perhaps you were at least able to encounter the enemy bug that (is supposed to have) 9 health? That's the most powerful enemy that is (in theory) in the game.
@kuro
Oh, well good eye for style in any case. :smile:
Thank you for the observations! I did not think about the length of the no water animation at all, despite playing through a couple times now with lots of sacrificial plants who got no water at all, lol.
Like others, I had a lot of difficulty trying to survive the later rounds. I got to round 6 a couple times but I cannot seem to survive it.
One strategy I tried using to perhaps buy some time was to just put as many upgrade towers as possible in the way of the central tower. This seems like it might help, as it should distract the enemies, but it ultimately wasn't enough for me to be able to get past round 6.
I am curious how far is known to be possible -- e.g. how many rounds did you get through while playtesting? It seems possible that I am missing something about possible strategies.
But as it stands, I don't see any real way to win against these larger groups of guys. The specific problem seems to be that it takes a long time to move between the different towers, and so inevitably there will be enemies that reach one of the towers and damage it. In particular, my thinking is that if I leave tower A to go to tower B, even if I have killed all the enemies that are current at tower A, the round-trip time to get to tower B and back will be long enough for some enemies to show up and start doing damage -- but if I don't even try to go to tower B, then the enemies will do damage to tower B, of course.
I do like the novel tower defense mechanics, though. Having towers just be upgrades is an interesting twist, and I think it adds depth for them to also act as enemy distractions, even if I couldn't use that mechanic super effectively.
The upgrades themselves are fun, and it was nice trying several of them out over the course of my different runs.
And, the overall combination of the player being able to shoot while moving around, and being able to shoot in the towers -- while those towers are at the same time the object to defend -- it's an intuitive set of mechanics to learn, and they all reinforce each other nicely. It also seemed like perhaps the tower upgrades were affecting the player's own shooting while in range, which is cool.
I quite enjoyed the music, especially the music that plays during the enemy wave.
Very cute game!
I thought that splitting the game into the two separate phases was a great choice. It really does have the feeling that I am just a regular bee, working towards a dream of mine. So, I think this game very effectively tells its story through its mechanics.
The later pollen values do get a little large, but I never felt like the phase really dragged on too long. And I completely forgot about the boost during my playthrough -- so it seems to be fine even without the boost!
I also enjoyed the transitional phase between the two gameplay phases... where you are moving up to the flower within the beehive. The atmosphere is so different and also kind of calming. The only thing that I think can drag on a little long there is depositing the pollen into the flower right before the rhythm section, as there you're kind of just moving in circles and waiting, but the part where you're following the arrows was very nice in my opinion.
And of course, the music that increases in loudness as you approach is a nice touch too.
I have a couple specific thoughts on the rhythm section: - It was hard for me to tell what exactly I was doing wrong when I missed a note, especially in the first song. Later I went back and did the first song while pressing zero keys, and if I'm not mistaken the only way to mess up is to press the key too late...? Either way, some feedback about whether you missed because you were too early, or too late, or wrong key, would be helpful, I think. - If I'm not mistaken, there is no way to lose the rhythm section. I think this makes a lot of sense, because the game is just a sort of relaxing game to play through, not an intense rhythm game. In particular, I was definitely giving the game my best effort, even though I suspected that I would win either way, simply because it is fun to try. And, it was kind of nice to not have to stress out about being perfect. So I think that was a good feature. - As others have said, even more player feedback would be nice, including not only for missing a note but also for getting it right. Some sorts of highlights and animations would make it more exciting, I think. - In the third song, there were some combinations of notes where there was one at the very top and then one at the very bottom, slightly offset in time. It was very hard for me to tell whether these were meant to be played at the exact same time or not, as it's difficult to tell between horizontally aligned and slightly offset when they're moving so fast and have such a big vertical distance between them. I think maybe adding some vertical lines could help make the notes more readable in this case...? Or perhaps just avoiding that particular pattern.
Overall though, the rhythm section was fun to play through, and there were a lot of nice touches. The different poses for the main character were fun, as well as the audience cheering you on. In general the graphic design for this game is pretty great.
And, of course, the cards introducing each opponent bee, and for each victory, were very nice as well.
I also appreciated all the bee puns. :smile:
This game was a bit of a journey for me.
First, I was very excited to see cards in the description, as I also made a card game for this Ludum Dare and it's been fun seeing how others made card games with the same theme.
So, I started by just playing the online version for a bit. There were quite a few mechanics to play with, such as the movement, which has some fun characteristics, and building the map... but I couldn't figure out how to attack the enemy. Looking back at the description, apparently red cards were used for attacking -- but I hadn't seen a single red card.
I tried refreshing to start again, thinking maybe there was a glitch happening or something. I believe this time I got a single red card near the beginning, but it only had a range of one and I wasn't able to kill the enemy. So I played some more, but more red cards just were not showing up, yet again.
I tried refreshing a couple more times, and I just couldn't seem to get red cards to show up, ever. I thought at this point it would be worth downloading the source code and seeing if I could figure out why.
Much to my surprise, red cards were seemingly a simple 1/10 chance to be generated, same as e.g. the healing cards, which I had seen many of. I decided to print out the value of `x_roll` just to be sure, and yup, it seemed to not really be rolling in the 0.9-1.0 range. Strange...
Then I turned my attention to the `randomize()` call at the top of the function. According to the documentation, this function seeds the random number generator based on the system time. Aha! This must be what's causing the random number generator to not be uniform! So I simply removed the calls to `randomize()`, both in front of `x_roll` and `y_roll`, and played again, and sure enough -- this time around I was getting red cards. It still actually took a while for me to get one, but eventually they did start showing up. And then I was finally able to win.
So, to summarize... in this game, at least in the officially available version, your luck is based very much on the time that you decide to play the game. Depending on when you decide to play it, red cards might show up practically never, simply because the time values being used to roll the random numbers are much less likely to generate certain values than others.
And this is, admittedly, quite an innovative feature... a game that simply gives you terrible luck if you play it at the wrong time. But I imagine that's not what you were going for! :smile:
Nonetheless, it was a good time figuring that out. And the experience of reverse engineering that was itself not unlike playing some of your other games, namely Contact Nesigur, which had some intended shenanigans along similar lines.
That said, there were still some things I liked about the game as designed. In particular, I thought that the movement mechanics were very interesting. At first I thought that, say, the "walk" card would only let you move 1 space, i.e. move to a space connected directly to the one you're currently on. But this isn't really the case... it seems to be based on distance, meaning you can move two spaces, or cross gaps in between spaces, if the edge of that space happens to be close enough.
This is super fun, as it means that the strategy for moving around often means closely inspecting the board to see what spaces might be possible to sneakily move over to.
I also really liked the way that the create-a-new-space cards worked. It seemed like they sort of generated one shape to follow your cursor, and then generated a different shape when you actually clicked... but this feels like a nice little animation, when the shape instantaneously turns into a different one. It's just a nice effect.
(continued...)
Admittedly I never figured out exactly what the "draw a card" cards did, even though I did look at some of the source code. My best guess is that perhaps they generate new cards to add to your hand, or maybe they make your hand bigger on the next turn...? I could probably figure it out if I tried hard enough, but for now it will remain a mystery.
I found the music nice and the graphics endearing, particularly the movement spaces and the card graphics. It's just kind of fun to have big colored squares for cards, I don't know. And, in terms of the movement spaces, I think that the interesting movement mechanics I discussed are fun because of the random (as far as I know) shapes of the spaces.
So, overall, one way or another I managed to have a pretty good time with this. Perhaps it was all a genius design intended to provoke the player into doing some reverse engineering... or perhaps it was all random. Either way works for me. :smile:
Wow, this was really good. Almost everything was very polished, it looks and sounds great.
Combining farming and racing is such a great concept, and its executed very well. Having the different farming actions represented by different vehicles is intuitive and fun. The other mechanics are also easy to pick up; building different buildings for upgrades makes sense, and the various obstacles and bonuses that show up on the track also are pretty easy to understand.
I do think it's somewhat difficult to understand how time is gained. It seems like the crowd will give you time upgrades, occasionally, but I'm not sure how effective crowd upgrades are in giving me more time. The other problem is it's not exactly clear when or why "bonus time" is granted, or why the bonus time value is a particular value.
I do think that a longer tutorial section could be useful. It took me a few times stopping at the pit stop and reading the game description before I figured out exactly what to do, which seems like means I might have wasted more of my precious time that maybe I should have. Of course, the first run a player does will always have more time loss than their second run, so I guess it's not actually a huge problem. (And, once I did figure out what to do, it was such a fun concept that I just wanted to jump in and start playing!)
Unfortunately the game ultimately crashed before I lost. What happened is, I was trying to build the thing that reduces nitro cost, but I wanted to cancel out so I could read what the bonus building was. I hit "Escape" to try to cancel the building command, and then the game crashed. :(
I think that canceling a building is my single biggest gripe with the UI -- over my playthrough, I had misclicked on building purchases multiple times and had to cancel out, but it felt a little sluggish somehow...? Not sure what's going on there. Maybe it's not officially supported to hit Escape to cancel?
Perhaps I'll have to try playing again now that I have more knowledge about the game.
Overall, though, this was a really good entry. It honestly looks and sounds incredible, it's just a great execution of a very fun genre combination. Great job!
Very solid entry! Everything is nicely polished, the graphics look great, and the music feels very appropriate.
The game does seem rather dependent on luck. In particular, my best run, with 12 souls harvested, had a bunch of characters show up right next to the coffin, making it very easy to score them quickly.
On the other hand, sometimes a person will wander under the character info card, or off screen, and then you just kind of have to wait.
This is somewhat fair, as if you're seeing them walk off screen, technically it is your own failure if you don't manage to grab them before they walk all the way off. But it is rather difficult to grab somebody right on the edge of the screen, particularly because it is somewhat awkward to click near the border of a game running in the browser. Adding some extra padding around that could be helpful.
I did have to test the unfortunate mishap mechanic separately, as I didn't have any in any of my other runs; perhaps my strategy is just rather cautious. But anyways, this was kind of funny, because the first two times I tried to just grab a random person and throw them in a coffin, I actually had gotten the right person by accident. So I had, by luck, just started a run with 2 free souls, that had taken like less than a second each.
Anyways, I do think that a sound effect for unfortunate mishaps would be a good addition, and I almost didn't notice that the timer had gone down, so maybe a little visual effect there could help...?
The one other mechanic that seems a little difficult to appreciate is the info card for each human. That is, there's really not time to read it while you're scanning for them on screen. Maybe you could read each card after the game is over...? (Although, that might have a rather sinister feeling to it... :sweat_smile: )
The variety in the human characters is super fun, and provides for some nice gameplay. In particular, sometimes in the early game you can very quickly identify somebody by just one feature, which is cool. And, it makes the later game interesting as you have to kind of scan for features that you think you can recognize at a glance, and then filter down the people with those obvious features to see if they are an exact match.
So, the difficulty curve is also a great feature. It definitely feels fair and fun, the way that the number of people on screen increases over time.
Overall, great job!
Nice little game.
I think the coolest mechanic here is the flowers. It's interesting to have an item that we are trying to protect, that at the same time can be damaged by us.
I found that the controls seemed somewhat sluggish. In particular, I would often end up facing the wrong direction when trying to shoot. What would happen is: there would be a bat that I needed to shoot, but I was offset from it perpendicularly by a couple pixels. So I would turn to move those few pixels, and then turn back towards it and start shooting... but my "turn back towards it" input would get eaten, and so I would fire the wrong direction.
Nonetheless, it was very satisfying to successfully take out enemies. I think I got pretty adept at the game by the time I stopped playing, as the waves didn't seem to be getting much harder and I would easily be able to survive large groups of enemies. Flying around to corral the enemies and then leading them in the correct direction to be able to shoot them felt good, even with my inputs sometimes being eaten.
I was using Lebi rather than Gawon. I actually had no idea that they had different properties, but I went back and checked before writing this comment, and I think I am glad I used Lebi. The slower shooting speed of Gawon would just make those later waves so much harder.
I do think that the scoring system does not make too much sense in the current game. Scoring is basically inversely proportional to how many enemies you fight. In particular, if you kill all the enemies but a single spider, you are able to score as many points as you could possibly want. On the other hand, in the later waves, it is basically impossible to earn any points while the enemies are alive, because the enemies will just destroy all the plants so quickly. So, spawning new waves is basically the last thing you want to do if going for score. I think that making enemies count for points could be a good change.
Similarly, in the later waves, the plant mechanics end up a bit less meaningful, as the plants are practically always dead whether you shoot them or not. One way to change that could just be to make the enemies unable to harm the plants--I did find it difficult to shoot those last spiders while I was racking up points, because they would weave between all the flowers. This was kind of a fun challenge. One direction to explore could be making the plants invulnerable to the enemies, and making them even more important, such as by making shooting them all dead result in a loss. (I have no idea if that would be fun, but it could make the plant mechanics more important).
I played this game for quite a while; I kept trying to see if the later waves would kill me, but they haven't had much luck yet. I've racked up 1601 points, mostly in between waves. I have found it fun to challenge myself with these later waves, as it is more interesting to try to dodge the big groups of enemies while still firing into them. There's been some close calls and other fun moments.
So overall, I think you have some satisfying shooting gameplay with some fun and creative plant mechanics, even if the scoring is a bit odd. :smile:
It was an absolute blast to try shouting to control the game. I think microphone control is a great choice for this, because it is both somewhat readily available for a lot of people (unlike, say, VR support), but also pretty novel and a lot of fun to try out.
I did experience some strange latency issues and distortion with the audio--e.g. my voice would cut out pretty often, and it seemed like the audio would be delayed for a couple seconds before playing back...? I was using the downloaded version if it helps, although the web version seemed to have similar issues.
This did make it somewhat hard to intentionally control much, as the amount of time between when I would say something and when it would actually affect the game was longer than the period of time that it took apples to fall from the tree... so my best bet seemed to be to just continuously shout so that the apples would keep bouncing.
But it was still fun to play around with, and the graphics are gorgeous. The design of the monster is great -- it's just such a fun concept to have a shouting, apple harvesting monster.
Pretty cool game! It was a lot of fun messing with the different cooking mechanics, and I liked how some of them required simply waiting while others required mashing space. This actually made the game more immersive, I guess, as things that require waiting, such as boiling water, also required waiting in the game... while things that require physical effort, such as mashing things in a mortar and pestle, require me to physically mash space! Just some fun design.
The first time I played I thought the "secret room" was just automatically secret and so I didn't understand how the guards saw inside it. Later I figured out about the bookshelf, however, which is another fun mechanic.
I don't entirely understand the purpose of the skooma dealer, as it doesn't seem like there is much difference between selling skooma out the door or waiting for the dealer... in particular it doesn't seem like there's much penalty either way. But perhaps that's just due to lack of time.
I think the graphics are pretty nice and they are quite readable as well. It's fun that the pots can be turned sideways.
Overall, quite a fun game to play through, even if the selling mechanics aren't too fleshed out.
I played this first a few days ago, and got a score of ~131,000 (I thought I had taken a screenshot of it, but I can't seem to find it).
Today I decided to play again and go all in on bananas, and because I didn't really want to spam the mouse button for 3 minutes straight, I just used an AutoHotKey script that lets me click automatically. I ended up with a score of 333,000, and I had several thousand bananas that I forgot to sell near the end, so I imagine my true score was quite a bit higher. :sweat_smile:
I think that making an incremental game centered on a high score system rather than on anything else is a very fun twist. It means that strategy actually really matters, unlike in most incremental games, where bad strategy just means that it will take you longer to get through the game. And, when playing through the second time, it was fun to be able to efficiently work my way through a small apple tree to quickly unlock the bananas. It is satisfying to execute well and waste little time.
The progression is kind of fast, however. Even on my first playthrough, I unlocked most of the upgrades pretty quickly -- and in that playthrough, I unlocked all the upgrades for every plant type.
On the one hand, this is fun, because it is possible to just blast through a lot of the early stages. On the other hand, it could be interesting to have some harder-to-reach progression stages, especially in terms of making strategizing (for those highscores!) more complex and, hopefully, therefore more fun.
I liked the hand-drawn art and the sound effects. The way that the plants sort of grew over time before you could actually harvest them was interesting, espe cially in terms of, again, maximizing score... it takes some real learning (or just spamming the mouse) to efficiently harvest the plants.
And, in terms of playing with an autoclicker... the sound effects are actually even more satisfying than they are in the game, somehow the way that the clicking lines up just makes it sound great. (My autoclicker clicks every 16ms if that's relevant). I think that implementing an autoclicker as just another upgrade that you could buy could be an interesting way to implement it directly into the game, because I think it is actually pretty fun to use, and the game could have it upgrade in multiple stages, perhaps.'
And, it is actually pretty tiring to spam the mouse for so long, so having an autoclicker built in is almost just a matter of preserving the player's physical health, maybe..? Especially for doing multiple runs in a row.
Overall, though, this was a fun twist on the incremental game genre, and it was fun trying to play through it to get a high score.
Really cool game. I played through a couple times... the first time, I failed, but then the second time I was able to win (and then I was able to win with the teddy bear after that). I think the way that choices affect the story was pretty cool here. My first game I lost because I took the ride with my friend, which resulted in the police hunting me down. And then in the second game, I saw that some choices were grayed out because this time I rode the bus.
I personally like the graying out effect here; it makes the weight of my choices feel more real, I would say. That is -- as a player, I am aware that the game is not really open-ended, that the choices I have will always be finite. So the only way to communicate that something I did earlier is affecting me in some way is by literally showing it -- and I think it adds to the game.
One extremely minor nitpick: I think it would be worth considering having a reset button in the game, rather than having to refresh the page. I mean, on the one hand, forcing the player to literally re-open the book so to speak is kind of appropriate, as when you get to the end of the story that is literally the end. It's over. If the player wants to start over they'll have to manually retcon it. But, on the other hand, I feel like this game encourages exploring the branches to at least some degree, and having a reset button in the game could be an opportunity to have some custom animations or music or something that maybe made the reset feel right. I don't know. Something to consider.
It's difficult for me to write much about such a branching story, but there is one moment that I really want to write about. The very first choice, with the four items, and which one to leave behind -- it hits hard. The 'obvious' choice, and I would argue perhaps the canonical choice, is to leave behind the stuffed bear. There's just no way to know what resources you might need in the future, and when escaping a situation like this it feels deeply like you have to give yourself the best chance you can, even at the cost of everything else. At that sucks! And it feels bad in the game too. And overall it's a really impactful moment.
Overall, great game. Just that one moment I talked about sold it for me, and the rest was good too.
I thought this was a fun exercise in spatial reasoning. Once I figured out what angle counted as 0 degrees, it was nice to see if I could throw things in generally the correct direction. I personally would not add any kind of indicator for what your current direction is, I think that judging the angle mentally is a lot of fun.
I think it is much harder to judge the power correctly than the angle. I was usually off by quite a large factor. This is perhaps partially because I was playing with a touchscreen most of the time (I also tried using the mouse). Nonetheless, I eventually managed to deliver a package 482 distance units away, which was satisfying to do. I think that learning the power/distance relationship is really the core gameplay loop here, which is interesting.
I personally am a big fan of games that use controls in a tactile way, and I think this game accomplishes that. It feels like moving the mouse, or moving my finger on the touchscreen, is a very direct interaction with this game.
So, overall, I think this game does a great job of taking a solid control scheme and turning it into an interesting challenge. It's fun to play through and strive towards delivering at least one 400-500 distance package.
I played this game for quite a while, both on my phone and later on my computer. I have some thoughts about the game progression.
So I was very excited to see that this is primarily a phone game. I don't often play phone games due to the number of games with ads, etc, so whenever somebody makes a phone game for Ludum Dare it seems like a great opportunity to try a phone game. So the first time I played this game was on my phone.
However, I feel like progress in this game just plateaus pretty quickly once all the upgrades are unlocked. In particular, it seems like I can just barely earn enough honey to fend off all the enemies and maybe buy some bees. But it is very very difficult to actually grow the hive any bigger, because by the time I've earned any amount of honey and built some new bees, a new threat shows up and I have to spend forever dealing with that.
I think this is partially because I misunderstood the mechanics. I thought that the "threat" was responsible for basically killing all my bees, but now I am under the impression that the bees just naturally leave at some point. Either way, the mechanic I wish to complain about is the bees leaving at a regular interval.
This is because, at least on mobile, it is actually extremely physically strenuous to earn enough honey to spawn a meaningful population of bees in the hive. The fact that all the bees have to be bought over and over just to have a hive at all makes this game really really hard to play on phone, as you just have to keep tapping over and over, and this becomes physically very difficult.
I think a traditional clicker game would have some way to earn resources over time, namely, honey. But I couldn't figure out any strategy that earns significant amounts of honey over time. It seems like there are strategies that will earn honey somewhat slowly, but I can't imagine that the total honey earned over the lifetime of the bees will be enough to re-spawn all of them once they all leave.
So, I think my suggestion would be to make some permanent upgrades that help you earn honey/sec or similar. Because although it is physically strenuous to tap the screen so much, I actually had a lot of fun tapping the screen right at the beginning of the game, when it helped me build up some initial skills in the skill tree. I think that having a clicker component to the game is perfectly fine, because it is fun to do clicking, as long as you can take breaks -- there just needs to be a way to make progress in the game without that mandated constant clicking.
One point of confusion for me is I can't tell if there is a way to actually win. After deciding that the game was simply too hard on my fingers, I decided to try the Windows version with an autoclicker. This went much better, overall, as I didn't have to strain my fingers tapping. But, I still was not able to win, even with some bee setups that produced some honey over time.
As a final resort, I tried hacking the honey value in my save file to 100,000, as well as searching through the source code for instances of "jelly" and "royal" and "win." I can't figure out if there is an actual win condition. I think it might be good to clarify this just on the Ludum Dare page, as it definitely sounds like it's possible to win based on the current description.
(As a side note, the fact that you have save files here is really cool! That's one of those features that's difficult to implement but can make a huge quality-of-life difference sometimes, especially in the Ludum Dare setting).
So, now that I've talked about the gameplay, some other notes: I think the graphics in this game are great, everything worked well on mobile and computer (although some things are a little tiny on my phone). The music is great, Flight of the Bumblebee is a fun choice for the threat music. And of course bee puns are always greatly appreciated.
Overall, lots of great polish here in terms of sounds, graphics, save files, and e.g. the skill system. It's just difficult to play this game for a long run, due to the amount of tapping required.
Extremely spooky and tense. I got to 92% in my first run, then failed spectacularly in my next two. After starting to write this, I went back and managed to win.
I think that there is a nice balance in the kinds of tradeoffs the player has to make... do I reload now, or wait in case a zombie shows up very soon; do I try to pick off some of the far away zombies; where should I shoot the flares. This creates that feeling of tension... this game really has me on the edge of my seat.
It does feel like there is an element of luck to the game. My last run, it seemed like I wasn't getting crowded nearly as much as my two spectacularly losing runs. Also, the placement of the holy sites seems to be randomized? Which I think will also contribute significantly to the winnability of the game.
Still, there is nothing wrong with the game being partially about luck... after all, we are literally surrounded by evil here.
Overall, very atmospheric game, lots of interesting gameplay choices. Good job!
AI generated media is interesting to me. I think you succeeded in building what is, by and large, an AI generated game--it maintains a lot of the qualities I've come to expect of AI output, but in the form of a game.
In particular, although the AI is able to make surprisingly consistent choices in a lot of places (such as the stylistic consistency in the art), there are also extremely glaring inconsistencies that a human would never make. In particular, the layout of the different locations is completely inconsistent, with entrances and exits essentially never matching up, and with some locations like the "cave" having an entrance that looks nothing like a cave at all.
Another major inconsistency is in the writing. For example, the beginning, the player is told that each person will tell them the location of the next person. I don't believe this ever actually happened in the game, however. Or, the situation with the librarian that pkenney pointed out.
This is extremely interesting, especially when I try to think of what you would need to communicate to the AI for it to make better choices. For example, you could tell it to "write
I did end up softlocked in the castle, like some other commenters.
Overall, I would call this a fascinating experiment in trying to get AIs to generate a game largely by themselves (at least, that's my impression of the goal of this project). I am glad to see the bizarre novelty that AIs provide in other fields (art, writing) also exists in this project, as I think that novelty is one of the most valuable aspects of AI as it stands today.
I've tried playing something like 5 times now, and even with the info that rage management is very important I'm having a really hard time winning.
The main difficulty is that, it seems like I often do not get any attack cards after playing the cards that combo well with them (e.g. reduce negative damage), and I also will have periods of time where I simply do not get enough of a certain kind of card (e.g. sometimes I simply see no attack cards whatsoever, or no apology cards, etc).
I think this is because the cards are simply being chosen randomly every time from an overall pool, rather than chosen one by one from a deck, like a traditional card game. That is: there is no logic in the source code, from what I can tell, that ensures the player gets a balanced set of cards -- so it's all left to getting a lucky hand.
My suspicion is that this game would feel more balanced with just a traditional deck-of-cards system, where the player draws cards from their deck, and once the deck is empty, all the previously played cards are shuffled together into a new deck. Of course, there are other approaches that could be tried as well, such as enforcing some minimum rate at which players receive cards that can reduce rage.
I am curious how consistent you are at winning. That is -- if you play this game, can you win every time? I find it difficult to believe such a feat is possible, based on my experience playing it so far, but it's possible I am just bad at choosing the right cards.
Anyways... there is a lot of good stuff here. I like the double-sided healthbar, it flattens the distinction between attacking and defending in a very natural way. The rage system makes sense as a second variable that the player needs to manage, and I did find that I lasted longer when taking it account, although I still have not won.
I also liked a lot of the card effects. The way that the reduce negative damage card paired with different attack cards was cool, similarly the 1.5 damage card had some cool pairings. The compromise card in particular I think is very interesting. One thing I especially love is the way that each card is tied to some action within a debate. This is one of the elements of the compromise card I like so much -- it makes sense that it affects both parties equally, and then that leads to interesting gameplay when combined with the other cards.
Overall, lots of fun card mechanics here, even if the game ends up being quite difficult. :smile:
And I did find the secret game (I scored 33). Also, I got the QR code to work. I think that QR codes in a game, containing nothing but text, are a very interesting feature... kind of reminds me of the manual from Shenzhen IO that is downloaded as a separate PDF.
Really nice graphics and overall layout here. In particular, I love the randomly generated character names, as well as simply the variety of character portraits available, and same for the equippable items--they just have a fun variety of item graphics. The delivery descriptions are fun as well.
I found that the debt was very quickly outpacing the amount of money I could possibly earn, once I got around day 20-30. In particular, the debt is -71 right now on day 34, and it seems like it just linearly increases by 2 every day? This does seem to be fixed in the post jam version, from what I can tell in the above screenshots, but in the jam version it definitely seems like the debt outgrows the amount of money you can possibly earn per day (which is something like 50-60 at best). But if it is fixed already, well, then I guess you already knew that was a problem. :smile:
Having to map out where deliveries go is a fun mechanic. I did find that the character stats themselves were not super meaningful to me, especially with so many. I think it might be worth cutting down the stats to a small number, and then making them have super-clear gameplay implications, and then at that point maybe reintroducing more stats. That way, the stats can mean more than just "I think the bigger number is *probably* better," which is all I can intuit about them in the current game.
One way to do that would be to just have, say, some obstacles on the map that can only be cleared with X stat or higher (or you can take a chance and try to clear it with a lower stat). That would create some obvious risk/reward situations for the player, where they have a couple couriers available but have to plan carefully for which one to send in case they need a different one for tomorrow's delivery.
Either way, I think the overall DND sort of vibes in this game are great, with the map and all the portraits and text descriptions. Good job!
Fun game! I really felt the time pressure here, although I didn't end up losing. As such, I guess the difficulty level was tuned pretty well.
I thought the audio cues were a great addition, even if the game can't be played completely on audio clues.
As a nitpick, it seemed like the dark blue shirts looked slightly different on the actual characters as compared to the clue of who to look for... in particular, on the actual characters I think the shirts almost looked black? This was a little confusing in the city level, where it seemed like there could well be too people with subtly different shirts.
Overall, though, this was funny, very well-polished, and with extremely solid gameplay. Great job!
I didn't have any trouble with the puzzles in this game--I thought everything was pretty reasonable. It took me a while to find the star, but this is just because there's a lot of sky to search.
I quite like the interaction with Ivanova. When on the ground, the primary concern of the player character seems to be that we can't reach her teeth which is a great reaction to seeing a giant person trapped in a cage. Then, of course, there are the additional interactions once we get the flying powerup, which helps round out the story.
I think the flying powerup is a nice twist. First, the way it affects the player character is vaguely dark--like, her normal body is gone, and without much say in that process (as far as I know). But flying is a nice ability to get in return. The flying mechanic itself is a nice extension of the general left/right movement, and as I mentioned it means that the star requires much more exploring (as now we're exploring a 2D space rather than 1D).
Overall I think the puzzles were nicely balanced, the key seemed pretty obvious to me and was easy to find but then finding the star took longer and let me interact with caged Ivanova to advance the story and see if I could learn anything, etc.
I'm glad to see the music worked this time. :smile:
I think that this game is a really good use of Flappy Bird-style mechanics. In particular, I really like that the primary punishment for failure is loss of time rather than, e.g., dying. This makes the game much less frustrating than Flappy Bird as a whole, while it still feels better to do better at playing.
More specifically, I love the feeling of speed in this game, when I really get a good flight going. It just feels good to do well at flying, and so there really doesn't need to be any sort of death mechanic. It is fun to fly fast, I want to fly fast, and I do like to try to score reasonably high on the leaderboards that you all always have in your games, although I'm not sure I did too well this time. :smile:
And, the glide mechanic is a great addition to the traditional Flappy Bird mechanics. It's actually a little difficult to pull off, because whenever I want to glide I usually have already released space, so hitting space again sends me too high. Learning to use the glide effectively therefore actually takes some practice.
I did find the eagle chase a bit frustrating but ultimately it was not too bad. I think it took me around 3-4 tries. If I had lost really late in the chase sequence I might have disliked it more, however.
One thing I did find somewhat frustrating is it is actually kind of tricky to visually distinguish the obstacles from the background, especially the hanging vines. I think this isn't too bad during the normal gameplay, because again, there's no real penalty -- and so it's kind of fun that there's an intrinsic difficulty in distinguishing the obstacles from the background. Like, I actually have to learn to really watch carefully -- and I did get better at this! I think that's kind of cool and kind of fun.
But, it is definitely more frustrating during the eagle chase, where you can't make very many mistakes, you have to keep going as fast as possible, and the map is completely distinct from the rest of the game, from what I can tell. It did seem like there was relatively low obstacle density in later parts of the chase map, which I think was a good decision for this reason of visibility.
Going into this game I was thinking there might be some darker or macabre elements, given the twist in your last game. And I was absolutely right. It started with the grilled chicken and just got worse with the bear. It definitely takes this fun flying game and makes it quite a bit more sinister. I think this is interesting, as it really defines the game's tone / emotional state.
That is, had there not been these darker elements, I think I would describe this game as lighthearted, cute, maybe sweet, due to the ending with the pigeon. But... instead I think I would describe the tone as maybe ungrounded or dreamlike (or maybe even nightmarish). These darker elements just create this clash with the other elements where everything begins to feel irreconcilable (so, dreamlike). And to be clear--this is meant to be a description, not a criticism--I just want to describe the feeling I get from the game, as I think it's a good thing to describe (and it is a very unique atmosphere! I haven't played a lot of games like this).
Whatever the general atmosphere of the game is, I do appreciate a lot of the art in the game. A lot of the animal portraits are pretty nice, and the ending scene looks great and is, as I said, sweet.
Overall -- this was a really fun game in terms of raw gameplay, and there's definitely a solid narrative backing as well. Great job!
It took me reading some of the other comments to figure out how to properly harvest crops, but with that sorted out, this is a fun little gameplay loop. I think that fast-paced farming is kind of cool--this game feels kind of like a cross between a cooking game, where you take in orders and have to fulfill them, and a traditional farming game, where there's questions of where to plant plants, etc. I think that adding more farming features could be an interesting direction to push this in, for example, requiring water to grow plants--and of course it could also be interesting to make some customer demands more complicated, such as requiring three seeds.
One small detail--I'm a bit confused why clicking on a square sometimes opens the inventory menu. I find this kind of distracting, I think I would rather the inventory only opened when I explicitly asked it to.
Overall though, it was fun to sort of figure out the gameplay loop and start pumping out deliveries with some efficiency.
This was cool! I liked the idea of a scroll that was dangerous to read, even if it ended up not being real. :smile: I actually think that idea could potentially be used in some fun ways as some sort of combat mechanic, as well.
Still, I liked what was there. I think this game actually felt a lot deeper to me than it ended up being -- the existence of the inventory system, plus the combat mechanics, plus everything else -- it gives the feeling of a complete game, where the reason I don't end up with stuff in my inventory is not because it wasn't implemented, but rather because I ended up winning so fast.
Moving around the map with the text-based descriptions was pretty fun, I think. The map gives a feeling of playing a board game, or something, while the text of course feels like a traditional text based game.
The combat is not too deep but it has some interesting strategy. In my first playthrough I had no need for the cheat button -- it seems like with careful rerolling it's not too hard to escape unscathed (my strategy was generally that I would immediately accept any green number, even if it is 0, because there's no penalty to taking a 0 -- e.g. it doesn't grant the enemy an extra turn or anything).
I did play through a second time to look in the rooms I had skipped by accident in my first playthrough (the treasury, plus the combat room next to the king). In this playthrough I did end up needing the cheat button, although I can't recall if this was due to bad strategy on my part.
For 15 hours work I think this is pretty incredible, honestly. It gives the feeling of a reasonably complete game just by having various menus that work, and there's quite a few different mechanics and systems to play with. Good job!
Having to aim to drop something very far below is a fun mechanic that I don't think I've seen very much before. It is surprisingly difficult to aim well, which is I think because of the intrinsic fact that the targets are very far away -- so there's only a small range of locations that result in a correct hit.
Interestingly, one mechanic making aiming more difficult was the spawn location of the package. I kept expecting it to spawn in the player center, and I had a hard time really learning how to position correctly. I think this is interesting, because it seems like the kind of thing that would be straightforward to adapt to as a player.
I do think that the game probably should not have restarted all the way when you lose. This is for the following two reasons: 1, it takes a long time to play through all the levels, and 2, there are some mechanics that are difficult to learn about quickly.
In particular, the anti-air system does not have a clear functionality when it first appears. In fact, I still don't understand it entirely... one of my runs, the red targeting dots appeared, and I figured I had a few seconds before I had to evade... but then I died almost instantly, which was very confusing.
So, because there's these mechanics that take a couple attempts to learn about, and because it takes a long grind to get back to where they show up, I think it would be best to restart at the level you died at (or maybe have a lives system that resets your progress entirely after losing a couple lives, for a compromise).
After losing too many times, I ended up simply cheating by deleting the checkPlayerHealth() function. :sweat_smile: I actually love it when Ludum Dare games are written in plain JavaScript -- it can be a lot of fun to mess around with a game's internals like that.
I do think that the combat mechanics were otherwise quite fun. I think that there's a nice mix of things... avoiding the guys on the ground, as well as being able to fight back directly against the helicopters if necessary. Then, the anti-air systems are actually kind of scary with how fast they can kill you, adding another layer.
Overall -- a fun concept in terms of story and I liked the gameplay, both the package delivery and the general combat. Just a little too hard for me to beat legit. :smile:
Always fun to see a game with voice acting. Lots of interesting variety in the characters as well. :smile:
One thing I really appreciate here is that each character gets to be the solution for one of the puzzles. This means that we at least get to see a pretty reasonable range of gameplay, despite the limited scope of the game.
Another thing I liked is that, I'm pretty sure I was able to solve all of the puzzles in no more than two guesses. So I think they are well designed in terms of giving enough information for the player to logically figure out the solution rather than just trying all the combinations.
I think the worst puzzle in terms of raw guessability is, however, puzzle 3. I did actually get it on the first try, mainly because I figured that the solution was going to be distinct from the last two. In terms of the actual descriptions given, however, I find that it is a little unintuitive that Finn, who's description says "do NOT mock him," has a correct solution of Flake, who "has zero tact." Moreover, before sending the letter, there's no real way to guess that his voice will be similar to Luke, and that Luke will therefore be perceived as mocking.
Of course, this is a bit of a silly complaint. For one, puzzle 3 is still the easiest simply due to the obvious idea of trying the character who hasn't been the correct answer yet. And for two... the game is not really meant to be purely about logical deduction. The whole idea is that it's actually pretty hard to guess which messenger won't be shot, and so it's actually pretty appropriate that puzzle 3, which is difficult to guess from pure logical deduction, comes right before your ultimate resignation.
So overall, I would say everything works pretty well. The puzzles work as logical puzzles, but they also work as illogical traps that are the worst job in the world. This is a nice combination of contradictory things. And, I would say that the music and graphics work pretty well to tie everything together.
Also, the characters are pretty great. I would say my favorite character is Palla. The voice acting really sells her well, in my opinion. :smile:
Cool game! Pretty difficult in my opinion, although I apparently did make it onto the scoreboard. :smile:
One thing I found difficult is it seems like there are some words I would expect to be in the dictionary that just aren't there. Two examples I can recall: 'lop' and 'cay.' Also I feel like 'ax' seems like a real word, but maybe I'm wrong there. (Is it written somewhere that two letter words are excluded? I feel like that would be a reasonable rule, but as far as I can tell it isn't mentioned anywhere). I think that my "high score" run was largely luck. Sometimes I had no idea of any words that could possibly work, and I was just spamming the shoot button, and happened to get a word that worked. Once I completely by accident formed a 5 letter word right on the brink of death.
This is interesting, because I'm not actually sure what kind of strategy will beat random spam. Sure, I do think that some well-chosen right clicks did bring my score higher, but at the end of the day I would not have nearly as high a score had I actually tried to rationally build every single word.
I think this is to some degree a good thing. It's interesting that the game has more strategic depth than just being really good at coming up with words quickly. Moreover, random spam is sometimes a strategy that requires some thinking -- in particular, I would often have a specific word in mind, like "cup" or "pat" or whatever, and just be shooting between those two consonants as fast as possible because I know it will eventually work.
Interestingly, I think the missing dictionary words were much more punishing when I actually had a specific letter and came up with a rational placement for it by looking for one in the words. That is, both the examples I gave, "lop" and "cay," have similar words with a different vowel in the middle, so the random letter spam strategy will work for them even though it won't work due to that particular word. But when I just have the single letter "o" or "a" and I am trying to come up with a quick way to form a 3 letter word, and forming "lop" simply doesn't work, unexpectedly, it's actually pretty punishing for that strategy.
So I think that expanding the dictionary a bit could be a good idea. It is definitely hard to find a good balance between including the words that people will happen to expect to be in there, and including words that are so rarely used that they don't really seem like fair words to include. The problem is the dividing line is different for everyone. In particular, I personally am extremely surprised that "lop" is not in the dictionary. It seems like a pretty normal word in my mind.
Anyways, I did have a good time with the game. The game design is pretty good, I think, very engaging, and there are a few different strategies that work at least reasonably well. I also found the difficulty to be a nice change of pace. It was difficult but it wasn't annoying or really very frustrating. I think the graphic design is pretty clean, and the music is great as well. Great job!
@frogman @xwilarg
The unfortunate thing about the out-of-order typing problem you both mention, is that I was absolutely sure it was going to be a problem... I just never bothered to do anything about it. I figured that, although I personally found it frustrating at best, it might be interesting to see if anybody else would end up having a different experience than me. So far -- it seems to be the case that everyone dislikes it just as much as I did. :sweat_smile:
It's also super useful to hear that the typing was a bit rushed sometimes. Of course, a little bit of this is intentional, but from what it sounds like it may have been worse than I intended.
Anyways, thanks for playing and for all the feedback!
@candlesan
Thanks for playing!
I don't think I've seen the typing-game-as-a-story thing before--I would say the game I was basing this most off of was actually ZType--so I guess in that sense you could say I came up with it for this jam. But I have to imagine *somebody* has done it before. :smile:
I can't say there was any intentional difference in the sounds for the last envelope in the sentence, but perhaps such an effect would be created simply due to destructive interference in the earlier sounds, or something? Or perhaps it's all psychoacoustic? I don't know, I'm certainly not an expert on audio. Either way, thanks for the detailed description of what you're hearing! That's super interesting to me.
@ditam The flooding letters are absolutely intended, as well as the overlapping of Phoenix's letter. It's meant to throw you off, and to feel a bit broken. Interesting to hear it seemed like a bug. Thanks for playing!
I personally found the graphics here quite nice. The player character does not look out of place to me; the crosshatching effect is visually interesting and it just generally works. The wolf, when encountered, also looks fantastic, in my opinion.
I am not entirely sure what, if anything, the player is able to do after encountering the wolf. Most of the time I just lost -- it seems to drain the bar faster once the wolf is encountered..? But one time I did win even after encountering the wolf, just by following the compass instructions.
The very first time I played this, and actually a few times after that, I did not encounter the wolf at all -- I mean, I saw some of them on screen, but never touched them, and I actually won quite easily.
One thing I really like is the compass directions are given entirely through text. This had me getting out good old Never Eat Soggy Waffles (as I am generally not good with directions without such a mnemonic)... this was quite fun. I like the ways your games often require novel modes of interaction, and I think this method of directional communication accomplishes that here. It really does just require the player to know their directions and translate them directly.
And, I mean, I kind of like the way the compass insists on always providing two directions. Going back and forth and back and forth and realizing I'm really just heading in a straight line... it's a fun little limitation for the compass to have.
The snow effects and vignette and the music all work together to build a strong atmosphere, as others have said.
Unfortunately there does seem to be some sort of strange behavior happening around the dialog boxes -- especially when winning, it *seems* like there is some interactable object there, that is opening a dialog box and then the YOU WIN screen, but I can't tell what the object is or what the dialog is. I tried to look in the source code but I can't seem to get the game to run in my Godot. I did find some text strings in the file player_state.gdc that might include the ending dialog, so I suppose I can consider that the true ending. :smile:
Wow this was short but fun! The health system is cool, I very often lost all my health to the spike traps but was able to carefully recoup some and keep moving.
One thing I particularly like is the way the shotgun works. It is a little tricky to use at first, as it has very short range, but the way that the damage stacks up when you get really really close to enemies has this great risk/reward tradeoff. In particular, it took me a while to kill the first rat nest I saw, but the later ones I tried to move in closer and I was able to kill them much faster. This gives the game a surprising amount of depth, it really requires careful movement and timing to perform combat effectively. Good job!
Wow, I love this. The overall graphical style combined with this music is fantastic. The music is in fact probably some of my favorite music I've ever heard in a Ludum Dare game, it is just such a jam and the rest of the game has perfect aesthetics to fit it.
The combination of action puzzle gameplay with, say, non-action puzzle gameplay here is a fun combination as well. For example, level 3 I am able to mostly just decide when I want the different balls to roll, but then level 4 ups the ante by forcing me to deal with the situation more actively. And a lot of the levels have active components that have to be dealt with even if it's not for the whole level. I think level 4 was my favorite, in any case, as it was just fun to have the difficult directly ramp up from the previous level like that and come up with a strategy to win.
The variety of gameplay in the first 5 levels is great, and the bonus levels are all super fun too, although I admit I find them pretty difficult to actually win. But it is just cool to see these level concepts, like breakout, built all from the same stuff as the first 5 levels.
Overall, this is one of the best games I've seen this jam, I think. Neat gameplay concepts, and the music just sells the game so hard. Great job!
Cool little game. One thing I personally appreciate is just how finicky it is to grab things with the claw -- it's just like using a real claw machine, where it really seems like it should be possible to grab something and then it just doesn't work. Although, I do think it's probably a good thing that it is still much easier to grab things in this game than in a real claw machine... I think it strikes a nice balance between being finicky just like a real claw machine, while being easy enough to use to keep the game moving.
There are two mechanics I do find unclear in the game. One is, I can't tell whether anything I does influences the score, or if it's all based on what items happen to generate. The other is, I can't tell if there's much reason to use the claw lower/raise buttons. With the claw fully lowered, it seems as though it can reach every item available.
I think it could be fun to play with the third dimension in this game. Maybe force the player to lower the claw for every item and then raise it up? I personally sometimes enjoy executing sequences of inputs like that. But, it's possible it wouldn't be very fun. Just an idea. :smile:
Overall though, it's always cool to see a DS game, and I enjoy the claw-machine vibes.
One boring but important point: the items in the first level take way too long to start appearing, in my opinion. It takes ~33 seconds for the first item to show up, at which point the music sounds as though it's built up quite a bit and the game feels as though it must just be broken.
Now, this is an interesting mechanic insofar as it really makes the game drag on. If it's supposed to feel like waiting around for half an hour before your job starts, with nothing to do--it captures that feeling quite well, I think. The only flaw it it's liable to make people think your game doesn't work and click away 20 seconds in. :smile: (If you wanted to keep the waiting, because you like that feeling, I think it would help to have more animations or even a timer counting down for when the shift starts... just to make sure that everyone knows the game is still functioning correctly).
I found the click-and-drag controls gave a nice sense of slipperiness to packing the boxes. Like, it feels like you can easily mess up and have to try again; you have to be precise with your movements. This seems like a reasonable feeling for a packing game. I also liked the strategy possible in packing the boxes into the delivery bin: in particular, if you just drag and let go, it's possible that you miss and have to try again. But if you drag right until you see the number change in the upper left hand corner, then you're guaranteed that you got it in. So with the right strategy--not letting go until you see the number change--you can avoid messing up, but it does take some practice.
One thing I like a lot is the music. I did find that, when it got to the end and didn't repeat, I was sort of feeling like it didn't build up as much as I was hoping. But, besides that, the music was really my kind of music--it just goes hard, as they say.
This game is super, super sweet -- and I love it for that. The dialogs between the characters just had me smiling wider and wider, until of course the last one I just had the biggest smile on my face. It was just an absolutely joyous thing to play through.
The dialog is of course the main driving force of the game in that sense but I enjoyed the pizza delivery gameplay as well. I did not get bored of it at all -- I can see why it could be considered repetitive, but this was not a problem for me. After all, it is made extremely clear that we only have to do exactly 5 days of pizza delivery, and this just isn't enough for me to get bored.
There is of course also parallels to other repetitive, working-a-job games like farming games, and I think the art style in particular is reminiscent of Stardew Valley. The art (plus the music) is actually one of the reasons I find the delivery gameplay quite relaxing -- it's kind of like walking through town in Stardew Valley, it's just a nice space to move through.
One thing I do think would be cool: having to physically go to the blacksmith shop yourself to get the gift. I was glad that there was a separate dialog for that, but I think it would be even better if the player had to actually go there manually; I think it would make the story more immersive. That's a bit of a nitpick, of course.
Overall, this was great. I had a fantastic time playing through this. Great job!
It took some reconfiguring of my monitor resolution to make this game playable. But, once that was fixed, it was a fun little game.
As I started playing the game, I thought I would probably prefer the player character to be centered on the screen, or at least somewhat farther up. It's surprisingly awkward to perform the throwing mechanics with the player right on the bottom.
One reason for this is that I don't feel comfortable using my mouse at the bottom of the screen. This is because I am liable to accidentally click outside the window, which is never fun. I think a fullscreen mode could be worth considering, so that the player doesn't have to worry about clicking outside the window.
Instead I opted to generally click in the middle of the screen. Now this is actually kind of an interesting twist on usual throwing games. Usually you would see your aiming indicator anchored from where you are actually going to throw... but in this case, the anchor can be wherever I want. And it is actually kind of fun to try to figure out how to throw even with the player character disconnected from the throwing.
I think it does work, and it is kind of novel. So I am somewhat conflicted on what the best choice would be here -- as I said, my immediate preference is that the player is centered, but there is some interesting challenge created by the current player placement.
Besides that, I think this game is at its best when the houses start to move by faster. At the beginning of the game, I sit there aiming at each individual house for seconds, which feels slow. But later, when the houses are moving by quickly, I end up moving my mouse much more fluidly, flinging papers at each house as quickly as I can, and it's a lot of fun.
One interesting thing I realized is that spamming the throw command is much better for getting a high score -- because apparently you get points for every newspaper that lands on a door, not just the first one.
I find the sound in this game is quite fun. The music has that upbeat fun quality to it, while the character sound effects are fun as well.
It is always cool to see an SFML game. I think that games built from the ground up always have this certain charm to them, and this one is no exception.
Good job!
Nice game! The graphics are pretty fantastic as others have said, especially the environmental graphics.
It took me a while to figure out what exactly I needed to do to win. At first it seemed like the main goal was to simply avoid the ninjas as much as possible, which seemed difficult to do and made the attack and dash feel pointless. In particular, at one point I lost because I had left the dumplings on the ground to try to fight the ninjas, and so I thought that leaving them on the ground was just generally a bad strategy.
Later I managed to figure out that the ninjas were actually stealing the dumplings directly from the package, whether it was on the ground or I was carrying it. This made the game make a lot more sense, as now I knew I had to either avoid the ninjas entirely or fight them off before they got to me or shortly after they stole a dumpling. This made the game a lot more fun, as now I actually understood what was going on, and it meant I could actually productively use the dash mechanic, which is a fun mechanic to use.
Overall, fun game!
Short game, but fantastic. Navigating around the obstacles with little taps of the various keys is super satisfying. I think it is great that moving around with the arrow keys impacts the rotation of the soba boxes, it means that you can't just set your rotation independently of your movement, but rather you have to continuously course-correct with taps of the A and D keys. This is just really fun to me, and navigating the soba boxes around a tight turn is even more satisfying.
(I won with 12 soba).
One other thing is the sounds here are fantastic in a way that I don't even know how to describe. The music itself has this wonderful space vibe, and the onion-collect sound is just really really good. It fits with the music perfectly but it's also just such a great sound on its own. Like, I feel incentivized to collect the onions just so that I can hear that sound.
Overall, just a great short game.
This was fun! It is short, sure, and seemingly unfinished, but I like a lot of the playfulness of this game. It's pretty funny, and I especially like how the player character turns from a relatively normal platformer character into a gigantic horse drawn carriage. This is a sort of subversion of normal platformer gameplay, and it's fun.
I did find that sometimes my jump inputs seemed to get eaten. But I do think I eventually managed to get to the end. The dialog was fun as well. Good job!
This was a fun game to play through but I have to say I was stuck for an extremely long time on the beginning section. This is probably because I do not really know anything about text based games, but, here is a short list of things I was frustrated did not work:
- examine locked door - examine door - examine bread - eat bread - examine waterfall - examine window
In particular, the fact that so many things were impossible to examine made me think that I probably couldn't interact with them at all. I don't think I ever would have thought to simply try writing "north" had I not seen a comment suggesting it on this page.
Once I finally got over that hurdle I had fun completing the fetch quest. There was enough variety in the remaining story to keep me engaged, and I have finished three endings so far. The fourth ending seems trickier to get, however, I haven't managed to find it yet. That's a cool thing to have, I think... a variety of endings, with varying difficulties. Good job!
@evermoon Thanks!
Wait, is it possible to give this a rating? I thought extra games didn't get ratings. (I just noticed the "Ratings received" went up by 1 -- if this wasn't you please ignore lol)
EDIT: Looks like it is possible. Interesting. Gonna have to keep that in mind
@pkenney Thanks for your comment! That's definitely the idea -- I did all this work for Ludum Dare, might as well submit it even if it is unfinished. I feel like the Extra category is flexible enough for that, which I very much appreciate!
@frogman Thanks for your comment! That's actually super helpful to know, in the case that I ever end up trying to make my game engine usable more generally. Such a time is a long way away of course but it is useful information for me nonetheless. :smile:
I like the idea of an idle game that is meant to be played alongside other things you're doing. I tried to play this one alongside some other Ludum Dare games I was playing and writing ratings for, and I did make it for a little while.
I got about 4-5 Mishfus at best (some would often die as the population got larger), and I was able to keep at least one alive as long as I was actively able to check on it.
Unfortunately one of the Ludum Dare games I played did not really leave any time for tabbing back to check on them, and when I came back they had all died. I guess this is because the trees all die and then the Mishfus with them.
I think the rate that you have to check back to really keep them going is too fast to really leave this game idle for a long time, which makes it difficult to play as, say, an ongoing task over a day. I think it would take too much attention to really do it alongside any significantly long task I was trying to accomplish--even playing it alongside writing a Ludum Dare rating made my writing slow down a bit.
I have one minor complaint: Every time you click on the game, it will play something like all the queued sounds from when you last played it, so every time I clicked I would hear the eating sound even when I clicked on a gem (for some reason the gem sound would be suppressed). This might be a tricky interaction with the browser, though--I know browsers often do weird things with sound and it can be hard to put together a clean interaction.
Still, I think that a game that requires attention is itself an interesting premise. Sure, it's been done before, but this game is very needy, IMO, which is a funny property to have. :smile: That is, at least if you want to keep your Mishfus alive.
All told I think this is a nice execution of a more novel premise, and I had fun trying to keep it alive. The feeling that I was about to let all my Mishfu's die if I didn't check on them was a bit stressful, but in a fun way rather than really being a real stress. And I think that's kinda neat -- I'm not sure I've played a lot of games with a "fun stress" before.
I like the progression in this game. When I played, I didn't think about trying the "climb" mechanic until after I found all the obvious skrungles that could be reached by jumping, and then it took me a few more minutes to realize I could simply scale the walls on the edges of the room -- which is itself a cool mechanic, really making use of the geometry of a bedroom to make the game interesting.
As many others, I found the sprint mechanic annoying -- my pinky was certainly hurting from holding shift by the end. I also found the combat to be not worth engaging in -- too easy to take damage, when running away is just as easy.
I think one thing that would instantly make the combat work better is if WASD let you strafe, while your mouse position determined your facing direction. That way, you could face towards the enemies while backing up, which would make the combat more natural than: attack, turn around, run away, turn around, run forward, attack, and repeat.
One cool part of the map, to me, was the trash can. It restricted your vision more than any other part of the map, and also had somewhat restrictive geometry inside. It felt kind of scary going in there, which was cool.
I was completely unable to find the last cage between the bed and the TV stand until reading the comments here. The pixel filter made the cage completely blur into the background until being quite close to it, so I also couldn't spot it from a distance.
Overall, I would say good job making use of a bedroom as a game setting. It definitely felt good learning to navigate the space and to make use of the walls, and it was fun to see all the different recognizable everyday objects.
Really fun and creative use of the theme with the shrinking player character. I especially like the way that the enemy sprites grow more detailed (and scary-looking) as you get smaller.
I think there was a good variety of enemies all things considered. All three levels felt meaningfully different, although I do agree that the player health bar allows for tanking a lot of hits. Personally I think level 2 was the hardest for me to wrap my head around--I couldn't seem to attack the enemies without retaliation, especially the big one--it seemed like there was no way to approach. So, in that level the amount of extra health came in handy.
In general the graphics and sound were great, this game is well polished. I also enjoyed the unusual writing style for the dialog. I will admit I didn't quite understand the story until getting to the end.
All in all a very solid entry!
I liked the sound in this one! The music was enjoyable and I really liked the coin sounds. The critters may have been slightly too loud but I appreciated their cutesy tone in contrast to how violent they looked eating the slimes. :smile:
I wasn't totally sure how much strategy there was to fighting the slimes. At some point I had like 4 or 5 critters and they more or less all died to one slime, but then for the rest of the game I just had one or two critters at a time and still managed to kill the remaining 6 slimes.
The various objects sticking out of the ground were fun to see. In general I think the graphics were pretty good!
Cool little game! As a certified Spore enjoyer I certainly had fun.
I think the spike upgrade is by far the best first upgrade. It makes it so much faster to earn DNA from the small cells, and crucially gives you a very strong defense against the big cells (which otherwise seem to be very dangerous).
Strangely, I think the second spike upgrade is arguably a downgrade, as it makes it harder to move towards the big cells while still keeping yourself safe. It still seemed situationally useful though.
I think that perhaps the main problem with the game is there seems to be no way to defend against the big cells without a spike? Maybe the flagellum also does the job. But what this means is, before getting any evolutions, if you see a big cell you are more or less dead. On very first try I didn't see any before evolving but made the very poor choice to try to bank my DNA for the extra energy. On my second try I saw a big cell when at 90 DNA and couldn't figure out a way to escape. On my third (winning) try I did see a big cell, but it didn't seem to start attacking me, so I was able to get the 100 DNA in time. I guess maybe you have to stay out of their range of detection? But sometimes it seems like they would attack from off screen (e.g. I would hear the music before even seeing them).
On that note, the danger music was a very nice touch!
Overall I think the idea of a Spore cell stage but with more RPG-like upgrade / skill tree type system is a lot of fun. Makes it more possible to focus on having interesting gameplay mechanics that don't have to interact with all the possible body shapes in Spore.
In any case it was a nice little game to play through! Nice job!
I'm not quite sure how to beat the last level. From what I can tell I am generally following the best strategy -- getting all the eggs before engaging an enemy, making sure to only engage one at a time -- but the bugs in the last level just kill so many Tinies that it doesn't seem possible to have enough to kill all the bugs.
At first I thought each time a Tiny died it spawned a new egg, but I think what is actually happening is that the bugs dying spawns new eggs? In that case, it seems like on the last level I generally lose about 5 Tinies per bug and gain back 3, maybe? Except this ratio gets worse as the group of Tinies shrinks and can't kill the bugs as quickly (e.g. I think I quickly lost after I had ~17 left).
Is there some additional strategy for how to do the battles? It seems like if I could somehow keep the low-health Tinies from the front line, they may be able to live longer, which would help snowball through the final level. From what I could tell there wasn't a good way to micromanage them, but maybe I missed something.
Still, I like the idea of combat with a small army of little guys. I think the control scheme here is also kind of fun -- you can move both yourself and the Tinies by holding both buttons, and then let go of one to only move one of them. It just felt kinda good. I also think there was a nice amount of strategy even in the small amount of mechanics here -- it did seem better to me to pick up all the eggs first, and to try to isolate the enemies, and that's without having read the tips.
I also appreciate that there are *many* tiny creatures in this game. :smile: It makes the snowball effect of getting more powerful a lot more interesting than just seeing numbers going up, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are good ways to make better use of the army than I did.
This game had me breaking out the ol' pencil and paper to write down and annotate the map. :smile: In particular, I wanted to keep track of which edges actually corresponded to which doors--i.e. write down a directed graph instead of an undirected one--but it turns out the labelling in the game is actually unambiguous about this. Nonetheless, it was very useful to be able to refer to the map while actually in the maze, and also to check off each room as I explored them. I also began to internalize the structure of the maze as I wrote it down. I tend to like puzzles that require a bit of working out on paper and such, and so I thought this was enjoyable.
I didn't think the tedium of exploring the maze was too bad. There are only 3 * 9 = 27 rooms to look at, although we do have to look in both directions, but it doesn't take too long. It was fun to see the miscellaneous decorations inside various rooms.
An interesting interaction: The first key I found by accident while just holding down the "left" key. I therefore missed the dialog for it. From then on I carefully crept back and forth through each room instead of holding down the movement keys, which did slow down the exploring but allowed me to see the dialog / key pickup message. It felt more appropriate as well to go slowly than to keep slamming myself into the walls.
I think that the fading mechanic adds a nice bit of tension. I'm not sure what happens if you fade away entirely as I didn't want to find out. From the other comments it sounds like fading away did not end the game, which is probably for the best for a jam game. Still, it's a nice bit of story. I always like the ways your games have these fairytale-like stories and characters.
Managed to find all the ducks without using any hints! I think the duck placements in this game were well-tuned for the number of ducks. Most of them were quite easy, but there were a few that I spent a good chunk of time on.
In particular, the candle room seemed to me like the most interesting puzzle in the game. I noticed the lights and the candles and was wondering what their effect was, but the icon in the corner + more and more candles I discovered in multiple rooms led me to victory!
Interestingly, the last 3 ducks I had to find were the pinwheel-based one and plant-based one in the Terrace, and the hidden one in the Library.
I think my only real complaint with this game is the somewhat inconsistent interactivity. In particular, if something reacted when you moused-over it, that didn't necessarily mean it would interact when you clicked it, and vice-versa. This is why I missed the plant duck in the Terrace for a while -- I noticed that the plant moved when I moused over it, and I guess I just figured it was a visual effect like the windows that change colors. Another case is the lights in the Terrace and Library -- from what I can tell, there is absolutely nothing that can be accomplished by clicking them, but I think they're the only clickable thing in the game that doesn't result in progress.
I would have liked to be able to "look inside" various other things in the game. For example, in the Bedroom I really wanted to open up the other cabinets and drawers. I think that kind of thing would really make the game capture the sense of looking for something better. Of course, it would also make it more stressful, as looking for things in real life is not necessarily a fun experience, but interactivity tends to be fun in this kind of game, I think.
On that note I definitely really liked all the puzzles that required interaction! The duck in the toilet was one favorite--I was very confused why clicking on it didn't work, until I realized maybe I had to flush the toilet. The hidden duck in the library was cool, the candle puzzle was cool, the table in the Living Room was cool, etc. The musical windows were a lot of fun too! Despite my complaints I do think that the number of interactions in this game is pretty fun!
The only other nitpick I have is that I really would have liked to be able to click to exit the "duck found" screen (and also have it stay on screen when I want). That would have let me look at the more interesting ducks for exactly as long as I wanted while also getting back to the gameplay faster after seeing the "duck" ducks again--I almost always wanted to exit out of the screen a few seconds before it closed.
Still, that's a minor nitpick. Overall, this was a really polished entry, and quite fun to play through! Great job!
Unfortunately this game was a bit laggy on my computer so it was somewhat annoying to play. :sweat_smile: Still, I managed to beat the boss (in the post-jam version), so I guess I was able to get through the game.
I think the combat has some fun mechanics and some frustrating ones. It was very satisfying to land a midair chomp on various enemies. However, as I continued to play through, I found that I kept getting hit by enemies and being unable to retaliate--because retaliating requires backing up, then turning around (without moving forward!) and then finally attacking.
Ultimately my strategy was to primarily ignore all the enemies once I got the flying ability. I did decide to go back and get the shoot ability after finding the boss fight. I never managed to get the dash ability though.
It was quite nice to be able to prioritize upgrades like that. I figured that flying would be the most useful ability, based only on seeing the flying ants, and I was absolutely right, and then of course I made the choice to go get the shooting upgrade. I feel like this idea could even be expanded on more... having the ability to explore the map, locate goals, and then work backwards to earn upgrades was a satisfying little bit of gameplay.
I'm also glad that the boss did not require all the upgrades to beat it. In fact I imagine it's possible to win just with jumping and the normal attack, although it might be a bit tricky.
I think that a terrarium is a fun setting for a game, although perhaps I should rethink that after getting to the ending. :smile: Definitely a lot of room for interesting storytelling, and I think there was a bit of that, especially in the exposition at the beginning.
Neat little puzzle game! It's always cool to see nicher ways to build games and I don't think I've seen one that had this particular "Just a Windows GUI" construction recently. It definitely feels appropriate for a puzzle game!
The levels themselves seemed quite fine, although I think maybe the difficulty was out-of-order? For example I think level 5 is very easy. Still, the levels were engaging enough--I think I spent the longest time on Level 3 but Level 6 definitely took a few steps.
One thing that impressed me was the mouse controls. From what I can tell, they just work perfectly. In level 4 I had tried to teleport number '3' off of the A pad and through the C and A blocks, and I was surprised it didn't work--until I realized it was standing on the A pad and so of course if it stepped off the wall would be closed. Looking at the code, this looks like it's handled in an elegant way. I don't know. I just know I always have trouble with making this kind of logic correct when I make puzzle games, so it was cool to see it work so well! :smile:
Fun use of the theme! There were certainly a lot of different creatures to explore in this game.
I think the card-based approach is an interesting one. Given that the player has no control over the deck, it effectively means that we're playing a game with a random set of 5 actions we can take each turn, that might also be restricted by the energy.
Interestingly, I found that the energy limitation was only really significant during the first turn or two. Once I had one creature in each row, there was no immediate threat, so I was really only going to be playing cards if they had a specific purpose. I found that I almost always had enough energy to play every card I wanted to play during a given turn.
This also makes the exact composition of the deck during each level very important. From what I can tell, the 0-cost cards were basically just completely useless? Which means that the deck basically has a chance to give you only 4 or 3 options each turn instead of 5.
One illustrative case of all this was the level with the "your attacks get stronger over time" theme. During that level, I didn't see any legs that did movement for 3 or 4 turns, meaning I played basically no cards as my body slots were all filled and I needed to find movement to make progress. I saw the 0-cost legs many times and eventually placed some on one of my creatures who was doomed to die, and sure enough it didn't seem to accomplish anything.
Another interesting consequence of the deck / card pool is the possibility to stalemate a row. This happened in at least two of my fights--in the final battle, I didn't realize there were going to be no legs that had any damage, and so this showdown occupied the upper left corner of the screen for most of the round: Screenshot from 2024-10-18 16-06-12.png
This is arguably a good defensive strategy, but it also meant I became very scared of accidentally softlocking the game and so I played pretty carefully from there on out... made sure that basically every creature I placed had some attack and movement.
That said, all of this did mean there were interesting choices to make. Do I place a body down this turn because I have the chance? Do I wait until I get something good? Is there anything worth playing this turn, if it doesn't add attack or movement?
And it was definitely a lot of fun stumbling through the different levels and finding out what all the cards did. Interestingly, the 1st/2nd level (whichever one had the "growing attack power") was the hardest one for me, specifically due to the lack of movement available. The round with all the bugs was also very interesting, as I kept finding myself wanting to add more properties to a bug before remembering it wasn't going to be possible.
I think it's interesting how much advantage being the first player gives in this game. No matter how much health the enemy creature has, if our creature strikes first we can win as long as we have some minimum amount of damage. That said, I did still blunder a few creatures due to having the wrong amount of speed on them, letting the enemy effectively strike first. I thought the combat system was therefore pretty engaging in terms of the speed values. I think probably the most critical choices to make for any given cards was if there was some amount of speed to add to a creature that would help out.
All in all I think the variety in this game really sells it. The mix-and-match creatures are just fun to look at, such as my gnome-chicken-cat that blocked my upper lane for the whole level 4. :smile: I had fun playing through and figuring out the strategy. The number of mechanics present in the combat system plus the card system make it fun to think through and learn, even if I'm not sure the strategy gets better than "always get speed and attack". A very impressive compo entry!
@frogman @gamebuilder Thank you for playing and for the great feedback! And I'm very glad to have made it for this compo, it was a very rewarding one to have completed. I have not made a particularly ambitious effort at a compo game since Ludum Dare 49, and it's nice to have finally made another one.
@frogman The point about the first level is interesting as it matches some feedback I received in person. It definitely seems like the first level is a struggle especially for new players and might make the game harder to pick up and enjoy. I definitely agree that a good revision to the game would be to start players off with a better build. (I mean, mathematically--your power level increases by 100% or more between level 1 and level 2, so it definitely makes sense why there's this effect).
The stalling / boring combat is probably my biggest gripe with the game at the moment. I think there is a reasonable-ish variety of levels for some builds, e.g. I think level 4 (the one with 8 ghosts) tests survivability and AoE, while level 5 (the first one with regen) tests burst damage. Level 6 is of course kind of absurd, which is why I sorta made it optional (although nobody will know that going in, of course). I think that more interesting enemy attack patterns are needed to really make the game enjoyable especially for many runs in a row.
(I am very much in "Slay the Spire" brain right now and so much of my game design was inspired by that game. I think that the idea of interesting enemies that test you in different ways is the biggest Slay the Spire-ism that I wanted to implement but didn't quite manage.)
@gamebuilder I definitely agree with your point on unclear animations. I actually think there are several mechanics that are so unclear that they could ruin the game for a few unlucky players--in particular, there's an interaction where "split" imps are unable to be resurrected, which is not communicated by the game at all and could destroy anybody relying on resurrections. (And this, in fact, is why you're seeing the blue fire--the split imps from the slime relic don't leave behind a corpse to be resurrected, instead disappearing in flames.) I may end up making some tweaks to this in the somewhat-near future.
More interesting environments would absolutely be better. I tried to create a small variety of settings using my 3 kinds of floor tiles--I do think that often a small number of tiles can go a surprisingly long way--but for sure having more variety can make things more interesting (and there would be more room for world building and such).
@soloadventurergames @initialposition Thank you both for playing!
@soloadventurergames This is an interesting point. Originally I planned to make the game permadeath, which would "solve" this problem in that unviable builds would just die and be wiped, but for the game jam I wanted to make it less punishing and give multiple tries at each level. But yeah, that can lead to a problem where certain combos might just not be winnable.
To some degree this is intended--learning more game knowledge and trying again with a new build is sort of the rogue-lite way--but I don't think it quite works out perfectly for a jam game, especially with the level retry system. Thanks for the feedback!
@initialposition The enemy variety is definitely one of the primary weaknesses of the game. Different damage types is not something I considered! Thanks for the suggestions!
Interesting to hear about the lag -- on my integrated GPU Linux laptop where I developed the game, the Web version does have a couple lag spikes on the first level or two, but then plays smoothly thereon. I figured if it worked on my laptop it would hopefully be fine for everyone else, but I don't think I saw any 10 second lag spikes so maybe I was wrong. :sweat_smile:
Fun little game, but very difficult! I gave this a few tries, including after I realized I could chain together activators, and I wasn't quite able to put together a winning strategy. My high score is 11.
It seems like the available space is very restricted by the random starting activators. My final run I got what appeared to be a very nice set -- with both of them in the bottom right corner -- although I was not quite able to make anything good out of it.
I'm not quite sure how to actually put together a winning build. It seems to me like you need to have Russulas shooting in each column at least twice per cycle, which should be possible with some careful planning, but it also requires a very activator-heavy set of draws and I'm not sure if it's possible to construct it in time. It also seems like the short range of the Russulas means you more or less need them on the top two rows so that the rest of your build doesn't get destroyed (i.e. any lower, and anything critical above them will be destroyed by enemies before they fire).
It seems there must be some way to do it, given the scores in the 70s or so on the scoreboard. :smile:
I do like the puzzle here. It seems like a very restrictive set of tools available, especially given how difficult it is to route energy--from what I can tell there is no way to route a bunch of energy to all columns at once, any activator chain can only activate up to half of the columns due to the way that the horizontal activators work plus the limited number of rows.
It also is fun working through those first few enemies and trying to get a build going. Trying to strategize how to incrementally build and how to attack the enemies that are already present is a nice little challenge. I'm just not sure how to get any runs past that initial point!
One note: The Switch-shroom's description is incorrect, the Left one says it redirects enemies rightward and vice versa, which was very confusing.
The map and environment look really cool here. I couldn't quite move my defense past the throne room, but I did like exploring the map after I lost (just during the "Press Enter to Start" screen). I think in general this game looks pretty good!
As others have said the attacks are hard to use. I wasn't often able to land the fire attack, it seemed to often just disappear--and I wasn't sure how to properly use the chainsaw attack. My best guess ended up being that you had to actually get the chainsaw to collide with the plushies -- which is quite difficult to do with the way the aiming works. I think that making the player character easier to use would really help -- it would make it easier to do strategies such as "immediately buy dancers."
Here I am reminded of a somewhat similar (although rather niche) game, with a player character plus helpers to buy, and also a chainsaw being one of your main weapons: Army of Darkness: Defense. That game makes the player character quite strong as you're building up your army, and so I guess in my mind I was probably comparing this to that.
One nitpick: I found it difficult to have the song playing while the intro text was also going (two completely different streams of text going at once).
The theming of having goblins fight off plushies is a fun setup. It was cool to see all the varieties of enemies out there. And, they definitely felt quite mean! :smile:
Despite my complaints I did have fun ramping up my army a bit, and I did eventually hit the 25 cap on goblins in the throne room and tried positioning a few outside it. I didn't quite last super long, but from looking at the scoreboard I guess a pretty strong defense is possible.
As far as the art style, sound design, and general vibe of the game go: this is my favorite game I've seen this jam. Everything is super nice, the different characters are adorable and have interesting designs, the animations are great, the various physical objects used as puzzle elements are great.
I was really hoping to "get to the hard puzzles" as I was playing through. I believe there was only one level that had anything I needed to think through--almost all of the levels were simply executing the obvious steps to get to the goal. And that's completely fine for a jam game / prototype -- I often start with vibes when making games rather than building any particularly engaging content. And, I think that having a game that is just fun to interact with -- without even having deep content -- is a really good thing! (e.g. I've definitely heard that said about platforming games, and I can't see why it wouldn't apply to puzzles). But, I definitely would have liked to see some tricky puzzles!
I'm thinking the main limitation is probably that more mechanics would need to be introduced to really start getting trickier puzzles--for example, the yellow character can't really do anything to open a path for the other two, so that character doesn't have as much utility in puzzle design.
All told, though, I'm very glad I played this entry! It was absolutely a treat.
It was fun to get into the rhythm of sending out the Explorer bees and turning them back into Worker bees at night to protect them. I'm not sure I ever totally figured out what the other bees did. I just had a single Warrior and a single Drone at most times, in case they were helpful somehow.
In my winning playthrough I didn't see the bear a single time. Perhaps having a Warrior kept the bear away? If so, I guess they were pretty critical to winning, as I was generating enough wax to only hold off a handful of bear attacks. I wasn't sure however if I would need more than one warrior to hold off the bear -- it seemed like they all died anytime the kid attacked so I just kept one.
The overnight effects seemed to maybe not work perfectly? I remember one time the effect was that warriors would eat more, but during that day, although the pre-existing warrior ate more nectar, any new warriors I created ate the normal amount. The hungry warrior also seemed to have -5 to whatever task it was assigned to, so I just put it on the Explorer duty (and it sadly froze... not totally intentional! I was having difficulty keeping my explorers alive until basically the 9th night).
In any case I do think it's funny that I came to really appreciate the Explorer bees and be quite sad that they kept freezing. The variety of kinds of bee roles plus their varying impact on the gameplay definitely made for an engaging experience, I think! :smile:
It was also satisfying when I did manage to keep my bees alive and was able to make my overall bee army a bit bigger. Waking up in the morning with a huge set of bees felt quite good.
All in all I think the gameplay was pretty solid, and it was enjoyable to play through. Nice job!
Once I realized that there were upgrades to the base I was able to do reasonably well. It definitely seems difficult to keep up with the ever increasing number of spiders--in particular it seems easiest to earn food at the beginning of the game and quickly becomes more difficult as the food ants tend to die and it's hard to keep them coming when you also need to defend the base.
Still, it was pretty fun to get better at the game and I was eventually able to kill 23 total spiders. It is fun to command the ants and see them go off and do their thing. I am very glad that the AI modes are there in the game, although I wish there was more indication of what each one did, as well as some sort of defensive mode so that it was possible to keep the base safer.
Unfortunately I always forgot about the boot past a few uses in the beginning. I perhaps could have survived a little longer with it. It is a pretty funny mechanic -- the idea that this one ant colony in particular has a human on their side stomping on all the other bugs.
All in all though a fun game!
Nice little game!
I found I didn't really need to worry about the birds too much -- it was easier to focus on just grabbing more slimes, and the birds rarely managed to get me. I'm not sure they got me at all in my first run, so I tried again and definitely noticed they occasionally snagged some slimes despite my random jumping around.
The slimes were a bit tricky to land on, I found my best bet was usually to just aim in the general direction of a pile of slimes and hope I landed on some. I guess they try to run away from the tower? Which is kind of fun (or maybe morbid?) from a story perspective... all the slimes run away but then join our effort to capture more as soon as they are part of the tower. :smile:
The sounds and graphics were quite nice, the game feels polished. One particularly nice piece of sound design I think is the difference between slimes getting picked up and slimes getting taken by the birds--although I never saw the birds grab a slime, I still more or less intuitively knew that that sound was probably the "bad" sound (and confirmed it later when I saw the ticker tick down). Nice job!
I really like the graphics here! Each of the sprites looks pretty good and at first I didn't notice how many were repeated! I think the world feels nice and cozy, which I think is what you were going for.
The gameplay itself doesn't quite seem to work--I can get lots of food from the tree, but I have a hard time getting the ants out to eat it. It seems like the "Search Food" button usually doesn't do anything when I press it. I also noticed an issue where the WASD keys would sometimes not work.
I enjoyed the music! Reminds of Terraria, although perhaps that partially due to the similar game title. :smile:
Cool little game!
One thing I found interesting is that several of the puzzles were more tedium than logically difficult. I think this was actually a pretty good choice. It really made it feel like navigating a horde of tiny guys rather than, say, "exactly as many as the puzzle needs," which seems very thematically strong.
In particular, there was something satisfying about just beating the levels even if they weren't strictly speaking difficult. A good example of this is the maze level. I still enjoyed beating it even though there was no real puzzle.
I think one reason the steebs are satisfying to navigate is because there is a surprising amount of local control. This is partially due to the puzzle design helping hook steebs into helpful places, but also because the mouse pointer can change most quickly near the steebs that it is right next to. This lets you navigate the nearby steebs with a lot of control while the faraway ones can't really change what they're doing too much.
One extra bit of fun was I would always try to get all the steebs to be eating their food at once. This was actually pretty difficult and I never succeeded, but it was fun to have them all rush in to the final area nonetheless.
I liked the little jingle at the end of each level quite a bit.
Quite the concept! :smile: It is quite unique and pretty fun to have a game where the goal is to kill creatures with time rather than with any other particular weapon.
I made the mistake of buying the aging inhibitor in my first few playthroughs, which appears to basically lose the game on the spot as the creatures stop dying. It might be worth adding a note to the description about this bug.
I found it quite difficult to actually find the time to buy upgrades as I got farther into the game. I'm not sure how much farther the extra few upgrades would have gotten me. If the aging accelerator worked I imagine it would make quite a difference, both making it possible to earn more money and making it easier to keep the creatures under control. The anti-mating impulsor and crytobiosis both seemed a bit slow and could fire when there was no real need to -- I think it might be more fun if those abilities could be fired by the player with a cooldown, to help get out of a really tough spot.
The graphics and sound are quite nice! The game feels polished besides the aging bug and it definitely made me want to give it a few tries! The farthest I got was wave 12.