NSA's Where's Snowden? by Will Edwards 2013-08-28T06:04:00
PAPERCLIP!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → hoqjed
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Fallarska | jam | 273 | 3.58 | 2.74 | 3.11 | 4.47 | 4.74 | 4.00 | 39 | |||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Sadu - Clown For Hire | jam | 414 | 3.42 | 3.05 | 3.26 | 4.26 | 3.84 | 3.68 | 4.16 | 3.37 | 35 | |
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | Interloper | jam | 119 | 3.79 | 3.17 | 2.93 | 3.57 | 4.42 | 3.97 | 4.18 | 65 | ||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Silk | jam | 63 | 3.91 | 3.57 | 3.80 | 3.62 | 3.62 | 3.66 | 4.28 | 81 | ||
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | DrawL | jam | 258 | 3.38 | 2.76 | 3.62 | 3.69 | 3.92 | 3.42 | 3.85 | 39 | ||
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | The Voyage | jam | 183 | 3.27 | 2.93 | 3.36 | 2.65 | 3.38 | 3.04 | 2.26 | 3.48 | 52 | |
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Intensive Care | jam | 118 | 3.50 | 3.12 | 3.44 | 3.62 | 3.29 | 3.11 | 2.28 | 3.06 | 72 |
PAPERCLIP!
The presentation of this is pretty phenomenal considering the time limit. The audio and visuals were just fantastic. Starting a wave and having the colors in the crystals shift along with the music is really well pulled off.
Now, that said, the gameplay suffers quite a lot. I didn't find the "shooting" mechanic enjoyable at all and found it very difficult to hit the white orbs. The character also takes quite a bit of damage all considering and this leads to having more noticeable redundancy in the game.
This is easily one of the most visually striking games I've played thus far on Ludum Dare, but actually playing the game? It's very forgettable gameplay and feels like it was forced into the game because it's supposed to be a game. Personally I would have almost preferred just removing that aspect and keeping the game more abstract so you could focus purely on what you did well... the visual/audio experience.
Oh, and I didn't really see the theme in this one either. Ten second intervals for the waves I assume?
Overall, it provides a super rich atmosphere and pure visual spectacle considering it's a 48 hour entry. But it falls flat because of the uninteresting gameplay. Good job though, deserves attention for the visuals alone.
Super polished graphics and sound. In 48 HOURS?!?!
Not sure what you were going for with the mechanics. There doesn't seem to be any purpose or thought behind rewinding time such that it adds to the game. You just do it every time it's available. Same with your shadow clone that shoots. It's cool and devious to implement on a programming side, but it didn't change anything. I just kept shooting. Odd that there's no health system for your character. I can keep running into enemies to stop them.
Man was this a visually impressive entry. Pretty great art and visual style went into this, really great job on that. The gameplay itself was enjoyable too. It was great running through and figuring everything out while playing levels. Lets see one of my main complaints about the game, which is easily solvable is that the alarm ring when you time out is pretty jarring, didn't like that sound very much.
Oh and there was a level that I couldn't get past... Don't quite know how to explain it. It basically had a wall with four other wall pieces jutting towards the player, didn't really see a way around it. I though jumping up one of the ramp things before would hop over, but didn't seem to work.
Either way, really nice game you guys have here. Good job.
-Dylan Gallardo
Great fun! I found the jump pretty ridiculously high, but it's personal preference haha. It was nice running around and snatching some chickens, then proceeding to bring them back to the home. If you plan on pursuing this game further, perhaps a double jump of sorts could allow the mobility you'd like without instantly propelling the fox pretty high.
Some other notes, I would have like some sort of feedback for when I was about to spontaneously explode haha. Not necessarily a timer, but some sort of indication. Ummm.... I played for maybe two or three minutes, but I didn't really notice any incentive to actually gather the chickens. So that could have been incorporated a bit better, I'm sure you had/have plenty of ideas for that. Alas, time constraints. Good luck in future projects!
Dude, you got VOICE ACTING!?!!??! Nice music in there too, character controls are smooth.
Would be nice to see guard silhouettes so i know how close i am to hitting one when i'm behind them. Is there supposed to be a 10 second timer to get the crystal? The guy who talks to you says something about 10 seconds.
Alright so I'll run through what I was thinking the first time I played. The dragon taking up the princess in the beginning was slightly confusing the first time, as I was trying to control something. Of course I quickly realized when gameplay started what I needed to do.
Some things feel a bit off with the game. It feels a bit unfair, as you can't really see what's directly below you until you're basically on top of it already. On top of that when you DO hit something it's either insta-death or one of two hits until you die. Makes the game feel kind of impossibly difficult, not really in a good challenging way. It's just sort of frustrating.
-Dylan Gallardo
Gorgeous game! It's pretty visually impressive and I liked the direction of taking a slower paced approach to the theme. The game lacks in having a point to explore the world though. There wasn't anything exciting enough near the start in the world that would make me want to venture to a further point. I understand the time constraints though, and you really made something pretty impressive for the jam. Great job overall on the visuals and atmosphere, the interaction lacks some, but aside from that it's a fantastic experience.
Well, you certainly established a mood. Nice rotation mechanic too, reminds me of fez. The polish on this game is fantastic.
I did get stuck looking for the last item, and it can get confusing about where i am in the house and what room connects to what. Perhaps a map would come in handy (not sure if you've played Gone Home, but it has a handy map for exploring a house). Not sure how the theme fits into it either. Every object i encountered gave an increasing number (which is handy in knowing how many objects are left), but i didn't get to the end so not sure how 10 seconds fits.
For 72 hours, you guys pulled off one hell of a game.
I thought the game is almost under a sort of guise, like it's almost trying a bit too hard to be something it's not. That something I would think it's trying to be is cerebral, meaningful, maybe enlightening. But it doesn't really hit any of those marks properly to me.
Here's where I think the game took a bit of an odd route for how you labeled it. It essentially boils down to similar issues some point and click games tend to have, and that issue is completely relying on player trial and error to solve the puzzles the game presents. Now the game is supposed to be abstract, but I think in reality it's pretty far from that. The gameplay isn't very abstract at all, it has very concrete ways of solving the puzzles and there's no other way to go about it. Dressing up the game with surreal art doesn't make the game itself abstract.
Now, all that picky word selection stuff aside, the game just isn't ultimately very rewarding as an experience. There's either a very obvious solution or there isn't. And when there isn't an obvious solution it quickly becomes a frustrating affair figuring out what to do.
As a plus though the art and music weren't bad and provided the nice sort of surreal/ambient thing I think you were going for. My main suggestion is trying to get the way you play the game similar to the way you experience the other parts of the experience. Best of luck to you in your future projects!
I know you were killing for time but some audio would have greatly improved the atmosphere here. Giving what the graphics couldn't do for the game in such a tight schedule. I liked the darkening of the screen, it reminds me of another game called "I CAN HOLD MY BREATH FOREVER" which is quite similar and what I can imagine this could have been.
Lets see... aside from that the controls were nice, but navigating the area wasn't very... "clean". The tiled approach didn't quite suit the organic nature of the body, and made traversing tight area difficult. That said, the game isn't too harsh on players so it's easy to forgive frustrations when it "respawns" you back on the same screen.
Would have been nice to see what you had planned for an ending to the game!
Interesting concept. Nice job with the graphics (i see you took advantage of the toon shader!).
I love meth cooks too!
Fantastic atmosphere guys, really great job pulling that off. Exploring the scenes with the light was a really nicely executed mechanic. For the atmosphere alone (visuals/sound) the game is definitely worth checking out. Extra nice compliments and such go out to the sound guy, nice job. I really liked getting to see this game.
Ah yeah, seems pretty bare. Though everything seems to be in the game and seems to work well. There's not really a whole lot for me to say about it to be honest. It's not bad at all, but there isn't much to keep me attached to playing for very long.
I do want to say good job though moving on from an idea that could have held you back from making anything at all for the competition! Better to have regained your composure and finished something than to get stuck and give up or upload something completely unplayable.
It has a preditable ending, but otherwise makes you think about what you should do indeed. Too bad there's no option to leave both (or just the mother at one point) and save yourself.
Nice job for 72 hours, especially for coding AI.
Right, as some previous posters have mentioned the learning curve is quite steep. That said, it's pretty impressive how much was put into this game in such a short amount of time.
The video tutorial was extremely helpful in picking up the game to get started playing. Without the video I was basically clicking and trying to figure out how to control the game.
Now controls should definitely be mentioned here because the keyboard/mouse combo was pretty awkward for me to get accustomed to.
That said, if you invest a little time into the game it's interesting. Complex to pick up though. Ideally the game should be user friendly enough to allow someone to come in, click around and figure some things out. Not everything mind you, but get the gist of the game. I would work on user friendliness on this and future projects, it deters quite a few people not explaining the game in the game... if that makes sense
-Dylan Gallardo
I recommend playing the web version of the game currently, the others have minor visual issues.
-Dylan
Thanks for the glitch report Will, highly appreciated. Just as a thought, if everyone would also like to mention how many patients they save that'd be super cool. It'd be nice to have more info on how the game is played.
Nice job Norgg! Yep, with good strategy you can play it indefinitely. Nice to see someone come back to the game and want to figure it out some more. Thanks for dropping back by and leaving another comment. Gives me all kinds of good feels.
-Dylan Gallardo
@Norgg
You made my day, perhaps my week.
- Farhan
Great graphical and sound polish for a short amount of time. Facing backwards before shooting adds novelty, and POO!
Would be nice to control the height of the jump for tricky shots (like butterflies). I didn't know how to get out of the little crawl space with the poo on the first level, as I couldn't jump when crouched.
Great visual style. Minimal, and the colors pop.
It would be REALLY nice for the controls to move relative to the camera view. The objectibes are also a bit hard to read, what with grey text on a grey background.
This was pretty much more or less what I was expecting to see from the 10 second theme. That's not to say it's bad at all, it's just expected. The screen effects are the best part of this for me, emphasizing the intensity and rush of it all. The audio and graphics play into everything well and in the end it's a solid game. It gets a little monotonous after a while but it has nice little effects.
MULTIPLAYER?!?! AWESOME!!!! Oh, collision detection is off. Dayum.
Right, this is pretty interesting actually. I was surprised a bit with the game, it had a certain impact that worked well for it. The game works well for the most part, I did find one glitchy-ish thing. If you accidentally jump out of the window you just continue to fall into the blackness until time runs out. A nice remedy would be to just restart the level after they cross a certain distance of falling.
Aside from that the game worked fine. As someone else noted you're going for tension here. So the air pockets really work against some of that often providing too much of an easy route out. Now, since it's worked into the gameplay already I figure a good way to add more tension while keeping the air pocket layout would be to have the air pocket slowly drain of air. Then the tension of being stuck inside without completely unlimited resources is still there, while still retaining the air pocket in the level design.
Aside from that the art was fairly good for what was done, a little rough around the edges for some things (like the air pockets, safe zones, and "edges" of the layout that are surrounded completely by a black abyss). The audio was fine, the song choice fit the intensity and the other sounds worked fine in the game.
Visuals are awesome.
I wish the movement was more precise, perhaps so it didn't have movement decay/growth and just a fixed movement rate for more precise movement, which probably helps when you're trying to dodge a million things.
Also if you're not moving the ship faces the default up position, which is frustrating. Perhaps always facing right is most useful as that's where enemies spawn anyway?
The original link wasn't dead for me just to let you know, downloaded fine! I definitely liked the visual style of the game. Very nice look for the amount of time involved. I thought that the puzzles weren't bad, they didn't normally take too much effort to figure out how to do something after one try, but it's rough making clever puzzles in such a short time. Overall though everything felt pretty polished and not really super rushed. The scrolling backgound left me wondering if you originally tried something very different, but aside from that it's pretty cohesive. Good job! The music also was pretty good, it fit the game and didn't hold it back or anything. Seems like others also don't mind it!
Pretty damn good for a couple of hours.
Major damage has a bug that makes it do 6 damage when cursed instead of 2. As you know, lightning is bugged. I'm guessing create water was to boost lightning damage, but it only does 2 damage when wet.
Nice looking lion sprite.
Visually confusing.
That's a great concept, trying to tell a story about being a boss. Nice looking art style, great animations.
When i repeatedly told the workers to go back to work when they stopped, i got a smiley face every time meaning they're happy that i told them to get back to work. Not sure if that's the story you were going for.
Lots of great things to say about this one. Turrets slowing down enemies and allowing you to sprint gives the game depth. 10 second rule makes you bunker down near an energy source, but you're trapped so if it's not well defended you could get into a lot of trouble. I played for 10 minutes and would have for more if the phone didn't ring. Sound is great, music seems fitting, graphics are a nice minimalistic style that clearly displays info about game state, such as enemies, turrents, their HEALTH (nice on this one). Fantastic job, and in 48 hours?!?!?!
I did have some issues placing turrets. Sometimes i'd try to build a turrent in my circle since i had enough points but it wouldn't register. I had to click multiple times before it worked.
You could grow this into a full release, i'm not kidding. You have something special here.
It starts strong. As you move away from her it gets fuzzier, perhaps meaning you need her guidance. But it suddenly ends and keeps repeating, so i kept getting detached and losing interest.
The looping mechanic is interesting.
Timer seems to be going too slow for 10 seconds. ALso, i thought actions are saved between loops, but i keep dying to radiation even though i got radiation protection in the last loop. ANd other actions aren't saved, such as getting the hyperdrive regulator, if that's what i remember it being called. Frustrating.
Very nice art style to go along with an interesting game! The gameplay was nice, enjoyable enough to keep me trying a few times. One HUGE thing though that I didn't like very much at all was teleporting and being instantly killed because you were standing in the wrong area. I understand it's supposed to be dangerous and unknown where you'll teleport to... but man is it unfair at first. I think having a sort of "transition time" between the actual switch to preview what's ahead would have been nice, that way you don't punish the player for what they can't see coming.
The gunplay worked fine and was entertaining enough to keep the game enjoyable for a few minutes. I quite liked the concept of teleporting randomly, I just wish it were a bit more fair for the most part. I think that what you have here is fine and a good overall submission. But I also think that this concept of teleporting randomly could have been explored much deeper and had some really interesting gameplay..... perhaps if the project continues after LD.
But great job! I liked this submission.
I found the game a nice change of pace from other entries, but I wasn't engaged enough to stay with it long.
I liked that it was more story focused and presented me with a somewhat intriguing area to explore immediately. As soon as I went into the cave though to find that the enemies were one hit send you back to a checkpoint machines I wasn't as thrilled playing it anymore.
Another thing too, I found the platforming a tad floaty for precise movement. It's kind of minor, but since the area's designs are crafted to only allow one way up/down it led to some frustration needing to repeat the same jumps again.
It's weird though because even though it may seem I didn't really enjoy my time with the game... I kind of sort of did? I think it was mostly the dialogue and some witty lines that left a certain charm for me.
Played the windows version, I found the game intriguing from the screenshots, but actually playing it was a bit dull for me. I believe the structure of the maze itself may be interesting, but it's very hard to distinguish any specific section from another (I'm assuming intentionally). But this is also the problem I find with the game, I always felt lost, always, maybe with the exception of hitting a dead end and being like "finally! I have some point of reference".
There was a lot of wandering, a lot of squinting to see through the ever present fog (that gets fairly annoying after a while), and a lot of feeling like I was getting nowhere. I do remember one segment that did remind me of the game AntiChamber though, it seemed like an endless path, I walked straight for a while never seeing a side path. Then I decided to turn back and what do ya know, there was another path just a little walk behind me. "Interesting" I thought to myself.
I got to a point where I was getting some spooky noises that didn't quite mesh with the game's atmosphere and decided I didn't want to play anymore. Somewhat due to the fact that I expected a jump scare at any moment considering time constraints lead to things like that.
Call me a coward haha but I'm not much on being scared and hopeless in a foggy maze. It was a good try but the same wall patterns/fog and lack of feeling like I made any progress led to me leaving the game prematurely.
As someone else noted, more visual distinction would have been nice among the characters.
I also found there to be too many players on the field. Perhaps after playing it for a while it becomes easier, but I found that it was overwhelming for the first few seconds to figure out what was going on.
It also makes it difficult for a specific individual to get items, since the likelyhood of being the closest to where it spawns exponentially goes down with more players.
It was a nice idea overall, but I felt like it was too chaotic personally. I didn't feel as if I had any impact, I was but a pawn put on the field to battle other, better pawns haha.
The web link isn't working!
The thing that pulled me into this game was the art style, and one of the few things I ended up truly appreciating by the end of this was the art.
Don't get me wrong, the mechanics work well and there isn't anything inherently wrong with the game if you don't mind grinding at hordes of enemies for a while. But I don't like grinding at hordes of enemies.
The use of the theme is a pretty huge stretch, somewhat comical considering the use but still a very large stretch.
Oh, the audio was nice, that was an enjoyable too.
The visuals are stunning, the animations alone were really well done. I had a fair amount of difficulty figuring out what to do to effectively finish a level. By the time I finally figured it out I had already lost interest sadly.
In the first level I thought that you were supposed to somehow get through to the spot the spider actually comes from, since it appeared to be the main "passageway" and I knew pushing the button unlocked it. I was surprised to find that the exit was right by the button, and that you have to click exit to actually leave.
Well "why have the exit right by the button" I thought to myself. It was just sort of odd I thought because this setup didn't take advantage of any of the gameplay aspects I was just introduced to from the start. Making people wait in corners so that the spider wouldn't see them or something while we snuck around it was the approach I thought was needed.
I think the main problem people like me are having with the games first level is that the exit isn't very identifiable. It's sort of tucked off at the edge and is discreet. Some people may also not be noticing the exit button you need to press to move on.
Overall I really like the visuals and atmosphere, but some of the design decisions made it difficult to understand where exactly the game expects you to go in the beginning.
The tiles popping in as you wander around the map was a wonderful effect. The major thing that made the game somewhat difficult to tolerate after a certain amount of time is that there isn't a point of reference or any environmental distinctions after a while. Nothing really separates one area from another aside from the way the tiles spawn in.
I enjoyed the game in a weird way though, wandering around blasting everything I saw was satisfying for a few moments but grows old after a while. Especially when the exit is nowhere to be seen.
Overall it wasn't a bad game but I felt like I didn't have a lot of purpose for doing anything I was doing, aside from, you know, points and stuff. And points and stuff can only carry a game so far without growing dull.
Really really fantastic and such an engaging way to tell what you wanted to tell. I really liked the way the dialogue was presented and the meaning of the game felt... important.
It didn't feel too vague or too much like you were forcing the concept to seem huge and existential. It was just delivered seamlessly through text and gameplay, and we are all better off now because of it haha.
Really great job, I enjoyed the game very much.
Stunned that you did 3d in the time constraint. Superb polish for the graphics and music.
Unfortunately the physics are wonky when trying to put the items onto the tray. Seems there's no way to save things from dropping off your tray when you press E to collect them. And the quick time event for tapping the mouse buttons was a bit annoying.
I'm not normally one for a game based soley on puzzles, especially when they involve grids of blocks haha.
But your game is very enjoyable! It's nicely paced, building up to somewhat unexpected complexity for a game made in a short amount of time with a seemingly simple concept. Also fantastic job on your first LD!
I can't really think of any negative things to comment about. All of the mechanics work well for what they are and it was a joy to figure out each rhythm.
I did have one thought though, it would be interesting if the sounds were to change occasionally. I became a bit fatigued after a while listening to the same tones. Having more variety also would allow for players to have to learn new sound/color associations. After a while you figure out the relation between sound/color. Could be good to shake that up on occasion.
*Please note* We've run into a potential bug for the Windows version of the game. If the game seems "jerky" or like it's running at double speed please use the Web link instead.
-Dylan
Thanks for the comments so far guys! Much appreciated.
Specific responses to:
Tex Killer - Yes very Star Trek Inspired
Nelien - Thanks, the ending was very very rushed. It's admittedly pretty tacked on. Very good idea about connecting the narratives, that could have been interesting.
-Dylan Gallardo
Huh... that was really... bad haha. Gives me the "I know this is a bad game but I made it anyways because I thought it would be funny" vibe. Can't say I didn't expect it though.
I didn't get past the first level. I tried it a few times but knowing that there are more levels afterwards (probably equally difficult) and if you die you start all over? No thanks, not for pixel perfect jumps.
So the one, main redeeming factor of this game for me is dying. "Wha?" you may say? It wasn't the fact that I had to start over that I enjoyed. It was the satisfying thump the arrow made and brief pause as the game sort of visually acknowledged to me "yes, you died, and you've got to do it over now". That was great, satisfying in a game where I would expect to be instantly reset to the beginning.
Now this brief pause as you die does acknowledge one issue where I believe some frustrations stem from. Maybe 1/4 the time I noticed the arrow didn't really hit where I would imagine the hitbox to be. It would sometimes collide about 5-10 pixels away from the character image. This is not good at all when you're doing pixel perfect jumps/actions.
I would recommend setting the hitbox to be slightly smaller than the character. That way when an arrow hits you don't feel cheated.
Also the difficulty, I can understand yes, you want it to be difficult. But there's a difference in being hard, and being just downright brutal and unfair.
Your game I feel fits into the later category. Just simply because the very first level tasks us to insanely jump on short platform towards insta-death arrows shooting in a fairly fast loop.
It's a blast to walk into the club and see everyone dancing.
Holy SHIT. For me, you accomplished what you set out to do for this game. I'm glad there was the intro for listening to a conversation before you make choices, gives you a bit of time to soak in the moment.
Controls were fairly good, which is a good thing for a platformer.
It was odd to have to wait for the platform. It would be nice if it either moved faster, or the camera was pulled back so more of the level is revealed in the frame.
Simple and clean concept, very nice there. Graphics are also great. The background doesn't get in the way of identifying the fish, good use of color.
Not sure what the benefit of NOT pressing space after the midway point is, so to me it seems like that could be an automatic thing once you get enough points to evolve. It also felt odd to collect a super small fish for 400 points and a giant one for 100. Seems scale of the fish and points they give could have been linked more.
Ah the atmosphere for this is wonderful! A few things kept me from finishing it, but someone should give you a high five for getting this made in the time constraints.
I'll start off with the good. I adore the art style you went for here, I've appreciated this low poly look for a while now. The music is also fitting, and the foggy build up just enhances everything.
The bad. Well, I found that if you tried to rush and accidentally rammed your boat into a rock then you'd often get stuck in it. It just got a tad frustrating, I restarted the game twice for the same reason.
The "floaty" boat controls may have attributed to some of this frustration, but I can't totally blame it. I kind of wanted to like how the boat handled.
And last but not least, the idea of having all this atmosphere and then sending me on a fetch quest for these red objects wasn't appealing for me. It felt like a last minute gameplay decision.
The windows link worked for me.
The visuals and audio were superb! Great job on that. I also liked the idea of the "combat" and how all of that worked. Though it did take me a little bit of time to figure it out.
I thought I could just play the game without the tutorial but quickly found that to not be true haha. Good you guys had that in there.
While the game overall is very well polished, I didn't care too much for actually going to carry out each grannies wishes. Which I think for me was a combination of needing to memorize what she was looking for, then going down to the zombie horde, defending myself and being somewhat overwhelmed with all of the heads on the ground :/
Oh man, where to even start on this one.
I'll start off by saying that your game made me feel like a jerk once I figured out what to do with the match.
I really really don't understand why you start the player way up in the sky... and then drop them down... to an island with nothing on it.
Then failing to use the match on... well you don't have many choices... but failing to use the match spawns you back in the sky. Where you start the odd descent once again. Until you do the deed.
I mean, well for all intents and purposes this is essentially a Unity test, not really a game to be enjoyed in my opinion. Though I suppose you have to start somewhere!
I quite liked the art style of this game. I wasn't too keen on having to distinguish who was most likely lying, which pod was the nice choice etc. I think this was most likely due to an information overload of sorts.
All of the information given to me as I played felt somewhat generic such as "Red Terminal B" tells me "John Malkovich is most likely a liar". I mean, after receiving 5 or so bits of this kind of information I was kind of like "I don't give a damn" and I randomly selected an escape pod.
Maybe it was because I didn't have the patience to play the game at the moment, or because the game didn't give me very much incentive to care all that much.
Oddly though, my 3 or 4th random choice actually landed me on the pod that wasn't a deathtrap and I was totally happy... until I realized that it really didn't change anything for me. All the outcomes felt the same.
I actually really really enjoyed this. The humor is great, and actually affects the gameplay also in interesting ways. I'd say that also, even though you say you didn't get to finish it I liked that it was so short.
A game like this could have easily ended up long winded, with puzzle after puzzle. I found the length to be long enough to leave me wanting for a little more, and still happy with my experience.
Really great job guys.
Woah, great controls and physics. I think pulling the camera back would benefit as it's hard to get a sense of the area and see where i need to go.
Damn, those graphics and the are polished. An interesting puzzle/platformer.
Great looking and sounding game, with extra points for the name.
Indeed moody.
Very atmospheric, thanks to the great sounds. It would have been nice to have a flashlight underwater, as it was a bit too dark to see for me.
I failed to load twice, with it saying "download error, please retry". Your guys unity file must be pretty big, as it's taking minutes for me to download it.
Wicked music, but i found the third level impossible to get all the ducks
Damn good graphics, damn good audio...damn good shanking.
Wonderful visuals and very innovative mechanics. I loved the take on the theme, even though I suppose "entire game" counts as each individual level in this case.
As much as I loved the mechanics conceptually, it grew a bit tiresome after a while pulling at each corner to figure out which ones would lead me to building pathways to the goal. But it's really clever, and I think this idea of having a platformer tied into the paper-folding mechanic could be explored much further.
Really, really great job coming up with such an interesting concept in such a limited amount of time.
Damn good, simple, and original game. Fantastic polish and just a great concept. Great job.
Hmm... not a fan of the click-fest angle, since it gets repetitive quickly. Aside from that though, there were a couple of things that could have used some polishing.
Being able to right-click to push more seemed.... questionable, since it brings up the right-click window also... which is odd and probably should have been avoided since it can cause issues. (someone right-clicking, then accidentally hitting "save image as"), which brings up the save dialogue box and ahhhhh, it's just a messy implementation for such a simple game.
The only other thing that may have been nice is to have some sort of splash when you push the cat to the other side, maybe animations for a cat walking/pushing. Just some additional visual indicators.
Maybe also cut out some of the cats, since the game is already fairly repetitive, I'd say having half the amount of opponents would be more suitable to the pacing of the game.
This was fairly nice overall, though breaking the rocks and doing things in general gets tedious after a while. I ended up beating the game, though about 3/4 way through I was feeling discouraged and just powered through it to the end. So while I did finish, I think it overstayed its welcome and went on a bit too long.
I liked how the game expected you to learn everything by experimenting and talking to the characters. It was nice that there weren't any "wrong" ways to go about it, and even though the rock spawning made me think something was time sensitive at first, I learned I could take my time and chat with the locals.
The visuals were really well done, very polished, clean animations. The audio was also pretty nice, and the moment the music kicked in was really refreshing and encouraged me to keep playing... it was interesting it had a delayed entrance.
Some small bugs, there was one rock I couldn't smash for some reason (you could walk through it though so no harm done). Also there was one point in dialogue where I had the pink blob propaganda talk to the blue blob (I think his name was lucien). And he said "lucien told me... blah blah", when his own name was lucien.
Pretty nice game overall, it just dragged on a bit long.
Played it solo with a controller. I thought the idea was interesting, and it's definitely something that could be expanded on more.
It was somewhat difficult to intentionally hit the ball correctly, having that auto-target in there was a nice touch and probably helped a great deal though. Perhaps the ball was a bit too sensitive, since touching it sends it flying all over the place... creating a nice bit of chaos... but at the same time making things a bit haphazard.
The idea of limiting the player to jumps was a cool avenue to explore, though that in addition to the overly sensitive ball creates a loss of control which I found to be somewhat discouraging.
I didn't mind the lack of direction, I ended up trying to only score in the right goal since it made a more positive sound.
Huh actually a pretty interesting concept considering quite a bit relies on luck... but it still feels very strategic. So great job on balancing those aspects so it doesn't feel like you've been cheated by the game's random properties.
I played it solo against a single bot and it beat me haha. I was sort of disappointed halfway through because the bot was a solid 15 or so spaces ahead of me, but I was really surprised to see how the end of the board worked (and it was a fantastic design choice to prevent someone from wanting to quit because someone is ahead). This was pretty polished overall, the game and its graphics were both solid and clean. It seemed pretty well thought out for a compo entry.
AWESOME. Gameplay, graphics, and audio are also superbly polished. Great concept and humor.
Graphics are pretty nice and the game is fairly engaging. Having only one life helps with this. Great job!
I found it interesting how sometimes a compelling narrative would be revealed through the phone/items every once in a while. I liked that approach and even though the game can be random it felt personal at times.
I was wondering where exactly those clothes were coming from however. I could swear I was just washing the same ones over and over haha.
Nice job on the audio too, everything was perfectly mundane. Matched the setting pretty well.
I liked this concept, and the simplicity of it. Also creative use of the theme for sure, 5 stars in that department. The visuals were also very nice, clean, and felt appropriate for how the game felt. I thought the audio could have been a bit less "active", but in retrospect it also fit the game.
There were a couple of issues however. I found trying to click on specific objects a bit difficult, as the surrounding objects and ones layered underneath tend to also be selected and tossed out. This can also work as an advantage, sometimes just clicking once and saving 4 animals in one swoop. But it all felt a bit too easy, and by the end it felt pointless to try to only click on the animals.
That was mostly because the points rewarded for clicking an animal vastly outweighed any points that would be taken away by clicking anything else. After a while I found I could just click constantly in one spot an toss out nearly everything but still rack up tons of points. So the other objects probably needed to have higher penalties.
Although I liked using spacebar to slow down the conveyor and the sounds associated with it, this mechanic also felt somewhat pointless by the end since holding down spacebar permanently wasn't penalized. Also after finding out what I mentioned previously about the point values I had no need to slow down the conveyor since I was tossing objects out of peoples luggage with little care (which was humorous, so extra stars in that department).
Overall, this was a very clean and appealing game in terms of how it looked and felt. But it sort of dropped the ball in terms of providing interesting gameplay because the mechanics were easy to exploit and resulted in a lack of challenge. In order to remedy this, improve the precision of clicking certain objects, increase the point penalty for clicking "wrong" objects... and perhaps figure out a motivation for the player to not want to constantly keep the conveyor slowed down.
I enjoyed your game and it has some very good things going for it, specifically in style and all the little things you did to polish the visuals, movement, and sounds associated with the conveyor. Great job on those.
- Dylan Gallardo
I liked the visuals of the game, the isometric clean style is very appealing. But I think the game has some definite kinks that hold it back from being straightforward to play.
First is the character positioning and the shadow. Shadows, normally when used in this manner, help the player understand their location in the world space. But here they end up making it more complicated to figure out as the shadow tends to show even if another platform should be covering it. It also may be somewhat off-centered, and the player seems to get off-centered also... which doesn't help. Those problems make it really difficult to figure out what tile you're on... which is something that is really vital to this kind of game.
Aside from that, I think the world's transition animation wasn't playing correctly for me... as the transition wasn't like it is in the gif in the game's images. It sort of pops in, like the game skipped some frames in the transition or something.
I liked the approach to the visuals and what this could have been. It seems like this game just needs a couple of bugs fixed so that those graphical problems don't happen with the player's shadow and and whatnot.
Looking at the game again, I think some of the issues come from the elevation of the game. So when you go up a level, it offsets the player/shadow position oddly. That, in addition to being able to see the player/shadow when you're behind blocks.... causes a lot of visual misinformation.
the visuals are nice and clean. i was confused what the defeat status was. a couple times i got defeat very quickly with the red hex still up and almost all white hexes still up. introducing new missiles at a slower pace would have helped me learn better, as right now it's very fast and confusing.
I really enjoyed the music playing in the background, though the actual game sounds were a bit too loud in contrast.
It took me a little bit to figure out that I was defending the box/area rather than trying to move it around. There was also a glitch after you lose where the game seems to get stuck somewhere between the game over screen transition. It happened twice out of like 6 replays... so it wasn't just a minor inconvenience since it happened fairly often.
The movement was clean and I liked how things reacted to the ground pound move. Though I felt very limited very quickly with that attack since the enemies pour in really fast.
The art was also nice and simple, easy to distinguish things from each other. Though the giant grid bars surrounding the main tile confuse me, and seem somewhat unnecessary since you never travel out of your main area.
Wow. EXTREMELY polished. Great graphics and background theme. 2 sides to the maze adds nice variety. WASD controls don't seem to work but the arrows keys work fine. Fantastic job.
NOOOOOOOOO!, I KILLED THE PINEAPPLE!!! as always, stellar humor and level design. i loved the hard way.
ps. i died again in dark souls 2...like 4 times. one day...
It's an interesting concept, though I'm not a fan of unlocking things by waiting on points to accumulate. Though figuring out words and typing them makes it less of a waiting game, it still uses a lot of intentional obfuscation to hinder the player's ability to figure things out in sort of cheap ways.
I guess what I mean is, turning the display on and off and blurring the text seems like a really cheap way to add difficulty to a game. It's also not as rewarding to figure things out because typing the words themselves isn't engaging as they seem to be randomly selected. Meaning they aren't tied to each other in any way, and lose their intrigue because the users realize that it's all a bit... meaningless.
It mostly just falls a bit flat in terms of interesting interaction. I never felt like I really figured anything out for myself, I was rewarded and given a pat on the back for... not really doing much... waiting... reading text and typing it. It all felt like a hollow victory.
I think in order to improve that, abandoning the pay-gates and constantly increasing point rewards would be good so you reward players for what they do (rather than what they don't do). Interaction with the tv could be a bit more dynamic... perhaps move antenna to clear static?, change channels, things that require the player to be more involved with figuring out what the tv is displaying. Then finally, figuring out what to do to make typing the words themselves more interesting. Perhaps rather than a single word, they are constructing an entire sentence... and each word they find on the tv gets them closer to being able to guess what the whole sentence is? There are a number of ways to tackle each of these mechanics and the only way to find out if they're interesting or not is to test them.
The main thing that threw me off at first (only on the first run) was the lack of indication of the player shots "hitting" things. I didn't know at first that the rocks were able to be destroyed, mostly just because they didn't react to the first couple shots.
The atmosphere and general visuals for the game were really well done however, and the impression of the submarine having light was nice.
It did get quite repetitive after a while, but the concept kept me around playing longer than I expected. I liked that I actually was somewhat fearful of the creature after it transformed for the first time. It made me wonder what would happen if I didn't love it... would it eat us? Not knowing encouraged me to keep it very satisfied haha.
I also noticed how as it kept transforming the food and water drained pretty quick, nice touch to allow the gameplay difficulty to increase over time.
I ended up quitting after two or three transformations? Things started to look bad after the supplies were running low and I was getting a bit drained from the repetition.
yes! great humor with this one.
Kind of surprised to see you didn't opt to be rated on the audio, the music was fitting, even if it doesn't have accompanying sounds of gunfire and whatnot.
I enjoyed this, it was simple, but a pretty interesting take on the tower defense-ish vibe. Nice to have the variation of the 4 different troops, though I didn't feel the need to move them around toooo terribly often. They all seemed to handle the varieties of ants pretty well, the main differences being their range and shot speed.
The clean aesthetic made it pretty simple to look around and figure out what all the important stuff was. Though the one thing that was interesting was the choice to have a tile they have to go to stock back up on ammo. I like having it as a separate tile since you take notice when they need to move to it, though it does prove to be a very slight annoyance when you want to move someone and they're somewhere in the motion of resupplying. (since you tend to want to click on their actual position in space rather than the tile they're supposed to be at).
I liked everything though, good job on this.
Stellar presentation, and the fish-eye effect is a really nice twist to see on the theme. It's interesting being able to see the whole map but only really being able to comprehend it if you stay still and look closely at the surrounding area. It creates this really nice focus on the immediate area while keeping the player aware of their greater surroundings.
The game itself is well crafted, sort of standard, but everything is solid and helps to reinforce the main fish-eye attraction. One thing though, I was under the impression for a while that after building a nest you had to press the "s" key to activate it as a spawn point due to the s below each save point. I think a non-letter symbol would be a nice substitute so that it isn't confused as a key that requires to be pressed. Aside from that I found everything intuitive and straightforward to pick up and understand.
You really shouldn't be so hard on yourself about the graphics, Unity's lighting engine carries most of the weight here anyway and does a good job of making it look polished.
The idea itself is creative, and I think it was implemented somewhat well-ish but obviously could be taken much further.
The area that really needed the most work was the audio. Really, don't underestimate how powerful and important audio can be to really create an experience. The music in my perspective wasn't a great choice and seems like an afterthought. It doesn't match the dark atmosphere of the game and picking something that was more somber could have helped a great deal. I think this game's world would actually feel very good without music and relying more on atmospheric sounds. Having footsteps, a gunshot sound, ricochet sounds, etc and having a great deal of reverb (echo) applied to each one would have really created a nice claustrophobic atmosphere for this.
You had a really nice direction and concept here, so don't knock yourself down too much about this entry. I think you should spend a little more time adding in some quality sound and making small changes to gameplay to really do your idea justice. If you revise it some, feel free to send me a link to check it out again and I'll give you my thoughts on it. You can find me on twitter as @CriticalMammal.
Wow, this was surprisingly engaging. The audio and visuals while simple, had a very polished look. But it wasn't even just the visuals or audio that made this excellent, it was how it was all wrapped in the mysterious mechanics also. The gameplay was similar to the rest of the game... simple, but mysterious.
I did get to the end, but the only real negative about that was I wasn't entirely sure why I successfully completed the tv puzzle. I think I got all the faces to be content... not happy or sad, but somewhere in the middle... but the game jumped along too quickly to the end for me to observe my own successful action.
I really enjoyed the free-fall punishment for failing the tv puzzle. It was a very fine balance between being a fair punishment (in that it took you away from the main puzzle) while also being intense and polished in its own right.
Overall, very, very nice job on this all around. I'm not entirely sure the significance or meaning behind this, but the game carries its weight elsewhere so that the obscurity of it is acceptable and adds intrigue rather than frustration or pretension.
it's hard to see the bullets, and the controls were awkward (i agree with WASD to move), otherwise great job on finishing.
Nice concept. There seems to be a couple bugs. For words "screen -> is" I collected 0 where I should have collected 1, "a -> canvas" collected 1 where i should have gotten 2, "a -> game" collected 2 where i should have colllected 1. I think those are the only ones.
That was a lot of snowballs.
Awesome I won hehe. The trivia questions tend to repeat quite often (though I know it's because of the random nature). Excluding cards as they are picked up from the random question list would have been a good move so you don't get the same questions unless you go through all of them first.
I found the gate unlocking to be confusing... as I'm still not entirely sure why they all seemed to unlock in one turn... and I wasn't quite sure how many of each color was needed for each gate.
I escaped the yeti just in time, he would have eaten me if I had taken one more turn. I thought it was odd he had such a crazy amount of moves each turn. Maybe he was "rolling dice" too, but he was totally cheating, home field advantage for him.
I found the music was a bit intrusive, especially for a thinking question game. The frequent high chimes in the tune are just bound to eventually wear down on players over time. Good call on the sound button, though I tend to like having audio personally, even if it's distracting me hehe.
I did like the idea of rolling dice and treating it like a board game though. It felt a little more "classic" than some of the other entries I've seen doing similar stuff, in a way that invokes some nostalgia for me. It feels like one of the games that would have been on my family's computer from the early 90's. Like SkiFree, maybe it's the music or the board game aspect... or the snowman theme that creates that nostalgia.
Well, I have to say this didn't do a whole lot for me. It's sort of interesting to make something that's almost entirely composed of pop culture references, but there didn't seem to be an effort to connect them in any way. This makes the whole thing really disjointed, and makes it feel pretty hollow since it doesn't seem to really have an interest in creating a dialogue about anything in particular.
The lack of interaction really cripples this quite a bit. It's not so much the idea that in order for it to be a "game" you need "game stuff" like enemies, platforms, princesses, whatever. It's the feeling I get that you wanted to represent all the references with audio and images FIRST, and then figure out how the player was going to see all of those things. Since the gameplay's purpose is only to get the character from scene A to B, it's essentially about as interactive as a slideshow presentation.
Since the interaction is a really important aspect to an interactive experience, I wanted to elaborate on it a bit more with an example. In the Matrix reference (red plant or blue plant), you are forced to take BOTH plants to continue. You're (possibly unintentionally) conveying with the game mechanics a paradox, and it contradicts the film reference completely. Now, that's actually kind of interesting, but the whole game plays out that way (enter scene, collect/move to X thing, next scene). Not having commentary on it also invalidates the notion that the lack of choice meant anything. You can sort of see where I'm coming from when I say how important the interaction portion is in games. Just like any other medium, you can communicate ideas with a game; except unlike other mediums you can do it with interaction.
The audio itself here isn't bad. The narration itself was good, but the content was lacking somewhat. Each scene and it's commentary was completely separate to each other, so it didn't flow well from one to the next. In addition, there are many occasions where the narration plays over itself if you trigger certain things too early. A couple ways to handle that would have been to wait to play the next audio when the others have finished, cutting off the previous narration and playing the next, or spacing things in the game so that the player is less likely to hit multiple triggers simultaneously.
The art seemed to be intentionally embrace it's weakness, so I won't go into that too much. I suppose it matches the mood of the game, since it's sort of lighthearted.
Overall, the game has a hard time meshing with itself. It often seems to randomly pull references out of nowhere for no real reason aside from the fact that they're references to things. It's lighthearted and quirky sure, but it never really finds its own voice because it's too preoccupied reminding you of other things.
Really fantastic job on this. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but the way things are put together it creates a really wonderful atmosphere. I played the postjam update btw.
First off, I like how things are just difficult enough to figure out so that you're about to give up... but then you do a sequence right and something new to play with pops up. It's a really wonderfully rewarding experience fiddling around with things and being rewarded with new ways to interact with the game because of it.
The music and sounds create a really nice layer of immersion, though I did find the red button sound to be somewhat annoying after a while. But it's forgivable. The music especially is actually really nice to just listen to... I've got the game running in the background and it's lovely.
The visuals were also really nicely handled, and adding a little image for every type of ending was a nice touch. Everything just really meshes well with itself.
I ended up finding 6 of the endings myself before giving it a break. But I'm leaving the game very satisfied, rather than frustrated or bored. Also, nice use of the theme. Great job guys, it's a really nice little compact experience.
A pleasant experience overall. Sort of funny how the aardvark just takes advantage of the manatee's hard work.
It's simple, easy enough to pick up and understand (though it took me a minute to learn the manatee was defending the food). It's also very beautiful in regards to the artwork and visuals. It works well overall, but I feel like there's something lacking and I grew discouraged after a while when I realized it was a seemingly endless cycle. So my manatee lost its will to continue defending the fruit and the aardvark ran out of food :(
Wow, this game sounds quite a lot different than I imagined from the images. Visually it's got this really clean aesthetic, and then the 8-bit chiptune and goat sounds start playing haha.
I ended up liking the game, though the character's jump and goat throwing seemed a bit too floaty to me. The spider's hitboxes were also a bit unclear, since their legs reach out really far... it makes them seem much larger than they really are.
Overall nice job, it's lighthearted and pretty to look at. Good use of the theme also.
This is surprisingly ambitious for a first time jam, great job guys! I liked the board game style approach, since it has a strategic feel because of the turn based nature. Of course, with the limited time it is apparent that not enough time was left at the end to balance the game properly.
I found that most of my characters would completely destroy most zombies without a scratch. Though I did end up with one character who was knocked down to 5 or so might which grew tense near the end trying to "protect" him by navigating away from zombies to the helipad.
I think aside from the balance issues though, I had an issue with how information was displayed after you end a turn. I enjoyed the card drawing aspect, but if you split up characters and sent each of them into a building... it wasn't very clear which cards were being drawn for which buildings. So that left me with quite a lot of detachment towards the 4 characters, as it hindered my ability to recognize when their stats were being changed. Since a lot can happen in between turns, figuring out the best ways to display information to users is really important. (but I definitely understand that the time limit cut into a lot of the time you guys could have used to polish that).
This other thing goes back to what I just mentioned, but I apparently picked up all the vaccines without realizing it in the game. Having a vaccine count or something would have been nice in case someone misses information somehow. So yeah, I ended up exploring every single building/park/graveyard on the map haha. Then returning everyone to the helipad to be surprised that I must have not noticed picking up 3 of the 4 vaccines.
Finally, I noticed a bug near the end where if you selected one character, and then selected a different one... you could move your currently selected character to the other character's potential movement squares. Which means you could essentially move a character with 1 speed to tiles they shouldn't have been able to reach.
I'm sorry if all my criticisms give the impression I didn't enjoy the game, I did like it quite a bit! I think you guys did a really fantastic job considering how much you managed to pack into the game in such a limited time frame. The fact I could write up so much about the game (and still not even mention certain mechanics) goes to show that it has a lot of potential depth.
- Dylan Gallardo
Nice job on this! The graphics were surprisingly well polished. The movement was also intuitive and simple to pick up and understand. I've seen a couple of other entries that share a similar approach to being able to walk around the borders and some of them become difficult to control when inverted.
I also liked that you could change your direction mid-air. That wasn't something I expected and felt like a very valuable addition to the game.
After a couple of tries I got past the first phase of the sea king, but didn't survive much longer past that.
It seems simple, but you guys did a good job creating a nice polished experience that is more difficult than it seems to be at first.
nice music, and the graphics do what they're supposed to. killing enemies was tedious rather than engaging for me. there's so many, you shoot pretty slow, and they take multiple hits to die.
Very cool concept. To make it more interesting, it would be nice if there were also multiple items that she would go to that would comfort her when you scared her, but you could keep her away from them if you're quick enough to activate scary objects close to them.
Nicely done.
Even though there isn't a ton of content, you've got an eye for putting together visuals and creating an atmosphere in a short amount of time.
Just keep working at it and you'll keep building off of your previous knowledge. This is very much reminiscent of "Lone Survivor" and a couple of other games that have come out recently with the horror-esq sidescroller approach. Basically, even though this wasn't "finished", I think you showed you'll be able to handle yourself whenever you get more experience.
Also, good job with the dialogue at the end to signify the game wasn't complete. I really liked how that was incorporated in the game itself. It would have been nice to be able to move afterwards though, since I still sort of wanted to look around at what you did. (ended up restarting).
Oh also, the music was fitting for the game up until it brings in the more aggressive guitar parts. It's still very fitting during the early portions though, even though it's an older piece of yours.
See you next Ludum Dare! And keep up the good work! I'd be interested to see what you can do when you balance the amount of visual effort with the game design portion.
Excellent job on this, and a very creative approach to the theme. I really liked the overall concept of needing to balance out the channels with family interests so that you can bring them together. It's pretty well executed for the time limit also.
The transitions that characters showed went a long way to help determine what programs would work for the different members. I also liked the turn-based aspect, and how it became more of a puzzle than a real-time juggling act.
Great job on the visuals also. Though I tend to dislike extra screen clutter that isn't completely relevant to the game's mechanics, I appreciate how much work went into this visually in such little time. The sound was also handled very well, coming up with audio for each channel I can imagine was... difficult.
This whole project just has a really nice charm to it. Excellent job on nearly all aspects of this entry.
HOLY...CRAP!!! you guys did this in 72 hours?!?! alright alright, must compose myself.
it's polished UP THE WAHZOO. the graphics are superb, and the AUDIO!! wow! i could listen to that music outside of the game too. the sound effects are fantastic.
the controls are absolutely perfect, reminiscent of a link to the past. it has a great feel to it. dashing feels amazing, and thanks to limited health it doesn't feel overpowered either.
the pacing is FANTASTIC. starts off slow, introducing new enemies and such, and gets harder over a good period of time.
my one nitpick is that the player doesn't have enough invincibility frames after getting hit. i got hit by 3 tornadoes around the same time and lost a chunk of health. some more knockback on the player when they're hit would be nice too.
this game, jesus...this is like 2-inches from being ready to sell. actually no, just sell this is as, it's DAMN GOOD.
i tried playing the web entry on kongregate, but all i get is a red screen. i didn't put any ratings, so i might check back later to see if it's working.
the graphics are great, especially the explosion effects.
the game bugged out for me. a couple enemies spawned in wave one, then they disappeared. waves 2, 3, 4...up until 8 happened, but no enemies spawned during the waves.
it's a gorgeous looking game. i had difficulty with the controls. when i'm moving to the sides, sometimes jumping would work and other times it wouldn't. in the second room, it's hard to notice some of the structures because they're so dark.
i'm glad you're taking this beyond ludum dare, it definitely has potential.
It took me about 5 tries to get used to the controls, then i managed to make it to 1.56x speed.
The blue square that shows different slots to move to is unessessary, as all it did was confuse me in the beginning. I thought the blue squares was my character, and it confused me why it moved in the opposite direction i wanted it to.
This is a cool game concept. I feel with some polish and testing it could absolutely be a fully fledged game.
Technically speaking, there is an objective, which is to not be hit by one of the centipede squares... since it kicks you back to start. I did enjoy the lack of score, since it allows the player to see the game mechanics as they really are.
This was very clean, and while it isn't very innovative, it does show promise since you stripped away things and revealed the game for what it truly is. I appreciate that "honesty" in the design, and it helps me sympathize with the lack of interesting interaction.
Since it does actually have an objective (don't get hit), and a way to avoid that (shoot blocks), there are ways to exploit the game fairly easily due to a design choice. Since the "bullet" isn't consumed or destroyed on impact, you can clear out entire rows of blocks by sitting in one spot (ideally one of the spawning sides) and shooting repeatedly. Also since you can shoot as fast as you tap space, there are very little limitations to encourage players from exploiting the obvious.
Of course, this leads to an underwhelming experience because the mechanics don't end up being that interesting to interact with. The endless nature of the game compacts this and makes any action the player decides to take feel irrelevant... whether they destroy blocks or infinitely restart the same sequence over and over due to their pacifism.
Oddly enough, I still felt compelled to write up all these criticisms even though it's fairly obvious where the game is lacking. I think it goes back to that honesty in the design... and how you didn't make any attempts to increase the longevity of the game with pointless score-keeping. In the future it could be good to keep this in mind, and to explore game mechanics with as little additional clutter as possible. Keep up the honest work.
As some others have said already, it's a bit confusing why exactly certain actions work and lead to winning the game. I played and won twice, but I'm not entirely certain why I won on each occasion.
I knew it had something to do with using specific characters (perhaps in a sequence) to soften up specific people so that you could get the middle guy to give in. It just seemed really vulnerable to guesswork, and players can do things by brute forcing their way through the game rather than thinking about why certain things work/don't work.
It's a nice concept, very nice graphical style, intense mood... but the gameplay itself isn't terribly intuitive to figure out. I think that if there were a focus on less player controlled characters then some of the mechanics may have been more obvious for this size of game. 4 characters all at once is a bit... much to throw at someone at once while figuring everything else out. The same could actually go for how many people to interrogate... since having three people but only seemingly needing to interrogate two to win... seems like there's definitely some stuff that could have been cut to make things clearer.
Try to focus on introducing mechanics to the player in a way that builds up rather than tries to do it all at once. But overall, good job!
- Dylan
Some hints towards the controls and instructions would have been nice to have in there. It was somewhat difficult to figure out exactly what needed to be done without even knowing if this was a mouse based game, if it used the keyboard at all, what you need to click on etc.
Since all the images and icons are static (even when you hover over them) it's difficult to tell what exactly you're able to click on or what is expected to be used. I eventually figured most things out, but it took a lot of trial and error, clicking, and clicking again.
After figuring the game out a bit one thing that bugged me was that when you selected a unit to attack something (to just see if it possibly could attack), and nothing was in range, that unit couldn't be used anymore. This isn't really ideal since early players won't know what their move radius or attack area is at all, so it's punishing to lose a turn like that... especially when each unit's moves are pretty significant.
Mostly you guys just need to work on communicating to the player how to interact with the game (and it doesn't need to be heavy handed with tons of text). Simple things like, when the mouse is hovering over the button, make it seem highlighted... same thing goes for selecting units and many other areas. Find ways to teach the player what to do, and if something is just really complicated then fall back on text explanations to give the player an idea of how to play.
Eh... please don't submit stuff like this. If too many people do this just to vote on games it'll clutter the Ludum Dare page with tons of these.
Simple, intuitive, just great. And very nice background music too. Great job.
Interesting concept, but it has a huge flaw in that when you want to move to another side... you normally have to get around the corner cannons. Since there's no real warning with when they're going to fire, it's very easy to get hit just by a corner cannon, much less all the other ones firing at the same time.
The implementation just seems a bit... sloppy I suppose. All of the cannons seem sort of haphazardly thrown in to make the game more difficult... but it comes at the price of making that difficulty feel really cheap.
Some nice things may have been giving the cannons a "warming up" animation, so you can identify when they are about to fire. Cutting down on the number of static cannons in the game and adding the possibility for them to move, so that they still can potentially shoot anywhere... it's just less all at once. This could be introduced slowly so that they don't move much at first and get more intense at time progresses.
Really superb job on this, there are a number of things that really stood out to me while playing.
I don't normally mind 8-bit/9-bit music but it does wear on me after a while depending on how it's arranged. While the first track was running I was thinking to myself, gee, this music is starting to get a bit abrasive on my ears. Just a few moments later I completed a level and the second track kicked in. I started to smile because it felt like you perfectly anticipated when it'd be appropriate to change the audio.
The level transitions are pretty stellar also, and just really helped make everything chug along at a smooth pace. I get what you were going for with them, and it would have been an incredible match for the theme if the level pieces were being rearranged without needing to pull in/push out extra parts. But yeah, that would have made the level design a pretty ridiculous task for the timeline. Good job nonetheless on coming up with that interpretation of the theme and implementing it visually.
The level design itself was pretty solid. Even though there were a couple of different mechanics being introduced all along you did a good job introducing each one so that there wasn't any confusion about how things worked. I'd imagine there are a lot of potential ways to arrange all those mechanics together to create some devilish puzzles. I liked the interaction between a couple of them specifically. There was stuff I didn't expect like seeing a spinning blade trigger a switch, or having platforms block the wind fans from pushing you upwards. Some good interplay between the mechanics there.
In the beginning I did die in a spike pit and it spawned me a couple of times back in the pit... which creates this pretty overwhelming audio/visual strobe feeling from the repetition. But it's more than forgivable, and as I played I generally found the spawn decisions to be fair. If there were limited lives or something it would have been a bigger issue but luckily that's not the case.
Also, nice touch at the end displaying everything in-game. Another one of those things that made me smile to myself because it was just a nice sort of way to end it. It provides a small amount of really loose and carefree interaction at the end, and tapers things off nicely rather than an abrupt cut to black credits approach.
It's definitely interesting mostly due to the idea of rotating things to get them to fall the direction you want. Very cool and novel concept, though the blocks falling upwards was a bit of an odd choice to me. I think that may have thrown me off a bit in the beginning.
I found it somewhat hard to intentionally match up 4 squares. Sometimes I would do it intentionally, but most of the time it was blind luck. This may have mostly been due to the game's pace starting out fairly intense from the get-go, which means I never had a point early on where I only had to focus on a couple of blocks. The block spawning can sometimes screw you over also, reinforcing the blind luck since they seem to be able to pop up anywhere on screen as long as it isn't currently filled. I think I only really noticed this one main time, where I had a couple of blocks falling where I wanted and some random yellow block spawned between a potential match I had lined up.
The graphics were fine, though having that side panel slide out could have been nice to give more screen-space and be less of a distraction. The audio was somewhat similar, where the bg music was fine but could be distracting to some.
Clever idea, I think the main improvement would be to have some more balanced pacing (specifically in the intro), so the player can adjust to how the game works. Also working on spawning blocks in a non-obtrusive manner. Aside from those things it's a very solid concept and implementation. Great job for a compo entry!
Really nicely built atmosphere and I like the brief feeling of confidence it gave me when you're tasked to turn a couple of switches on in a row.
Sort of makes you feel like you have all of this vast experience because you're THAT pilot you see in movies that flips a couple of switches effortlessly to get a ship going. And then the countdown sequence started, and all sorts of doubt went through my mind. "I'm definitely not qualified for this, I was just following on screen instructions... I'VE ONLY DONE THIS IN VR TRAINING LET ME OUT". Then everything is okay because the launch ended up going alright, confidence restored.
I think the main thing that did end up taking away from my enjoyment was how direct and controlled the whole experience was. The only part that I truly felt like I had direct control over was the pitch, everything else I turned on or off because of the plainly obvious instructions. There wasn't any experimentation, I never really felt like I learned how to do anything or that I had to learn in the first place. The game led me with a carrot at the end of a stick the whole time, and even if I wanted to try to flip some other buttons on/off I couldn't. I can't, say, turn the engine off mid-flight like an idiot, or turn the radio off and pretend I'm going AWOL. It's just not allowed and that really breaks me from the experience.
Another bit of criticism was how the game ends (both when you succeed or fail). If you try to crash, you get this really sudden and static "game over" screen. It was just way too sudden, and a quick fade to black/white with a crash sound would have probably gone a long way to help with the consistency of the rest of the game. Actually even just a slow fade to black as you enter the fail state would have been a pretty effective transition by itself (then fade the game over screen in).
The "win" screen was pretty much the same, a smoother transition would have gone a long way to help reinforce the mood of the rest of the game. Of course, I understand that stuff didn't make it because of time constraints. It was just sort of disappointing to leave such an atmospheric experience on a flat note.
Overall, it's a really nice atmospheric experience which is excellent for Ludum Dare. 5 stars in graphics, audio and mood. But it sort of drops the ball a bit as an engaging interactive experience, so that aspect would need to be addressed more if you continue work on this.
Dark Souls! I'm sorry, I'm going to make a lot of souls comparisons. It reminds me of why I like the souls series. It's not necessarily because it's hard, that's a part of it, but they're really atmospheric... and encounters can be tense. This definitely has that, though it's fairly rough in some aspects.
The visuals were definitely interesting, and I'm sure the grayscale aspect helped to keep the artist(s) sane. I do think it could be tweaked a bit so that certain areas are less muddled and give the feeling that you can't quite see what you're doing. It's not terribly common, and through most of the game it works well, but visual confusion can happen especially in tight spaces. Animations were also very nicely done for the most part.
One aspect of the controls that I didn't like was the sprinting. If you started sprinting and tried to go at an angle you start sidestepping and it's very clunky feeling. It works better if you run and use the camera to point your character in the direction you want to go, but it's awkward since sprinting is the 'a' button with a pad. Aside from that the controls work fairly well.
Combat is nice, it's not perfect and has rough edges for sure, but it does also capture the souls feel, at least in the strategy and mental aspect. Study enemy patterns, figure out holes in their defenses, and exploit them. I like that process and you've got it. I loved it when you introduced the first two-on one fight, and I was inclined to slowly back up down the hallway and lead them into the open area. Then I proceeded to divide and conquer. Some interesting level design and enemy placement there.
The combat did kind of feel... disconnected though. It was sometimes difficult to judge the attack range and actually hitting the enemies felt a bit hollow. There's very little feedback there aside from the audio cues you get.
I tried a bit of everything, I actually ended up using the crossbow a lot even though it was a tad awkward. I found out it was three shots to kill so that kind of ended up being my go to method for dispatching enemies since I could get a better idea of the health they had left.
Oh, the audio work was nice too. Specifically the rattling sounds the monsters make... gah, reminded me so much of a souls game.
Umm... the only other thing that comes to mind for me was that it took me a while to figure out that I could consume enemies in order to gain health. I think maybe that could have been hinted at better. Perhaps some sort of glowing "loot drop" effect to indicate there's something to collect.
Overall, fantastic job. It's not perfect and there are a lot of aspects that could be improved but for the scope and the timeline it's seriously ambitious and impressive.
I agree with others in that when you start getting much larger it actually becomes much more difficult to consume things. It's partially because of the hitbox changing and partially because the npc jumping patterns are out of your control and sometimes you needed to just wait for them to "sync" up correctly with you... or desync, whatever.
I think actually just spawning in much more over time and altering the hitbox as you grow would be probably the simplest solutions. I would have liked to see more of the npc's getting larger too, since I found that aspect interesting... coming across a bigger npc and knowing it's like that for a reason. Not just because you spawned it in randomly larger.
I actually didn't mind the one button aspect for the controls though. At the very least it makes the game simple to pick up.
After a certain point it does seem like the kind of game where you just want to leave it idling because you kind of want to see what happens but you don't necessarily want to actively play anymore.
I have to say though, this is probably one of the better "I didn't like the theme so I made something silly" games I've seen for LD in general.
- Dylan
Really nice job overall. The game seems well rounded in all departments, gameplay, art, and sound. I glazed over the instructions enough to understand the basics, though it's fairly verbose (which is both good and bad) some people might like the extra hints, but others will skip it because they just want to start playing. Introducing the gameplay in a more natural manner would have been preferable (slower start and ramp up pace over time, hands on learning). On the other hand, the tutorials do look quite nice so that's a plus ;)
At the end your monster stops spawning eggs and so I essentially waited for the nuke to go off while I tossed humans around. From the end game message I assume I played the game correctly and "won". I just found that bit slightly confusing while playing because of the wait duration for the end to arrive.
Aside from those criticisms the game just works well. It feels challenging and once you understand it the game is paced fairly well in terms of the monster grow/feed/throw loop. Really nice job to everyone on the team, you guys should be proud!
Here were my end game stats
---------------------------
Overall score: 10158
Parenting Efficiency: 100
Monsters Saved: 31
Monsters Lost: 49
Eggs Lost/Eaten: 88
Humans Devoured: 34
- Dylan
How the heck was something so polished done in just 7 hours? Even for the full 48 hours this would have been extremely impressive. That baffles me, honestly.
The mechanics work fairly well, and once I got the ball rolling (ha) with the controls it wasn't actually too hard to navigate. I found that if you enlarged the upper corner of the direction you wanted to go you could actually gain some pretty decent speed.
The "monster" key controls is an interesting move to try and match the theme, but sadly it just felt really unintuitive to me. In some ways that difficulty of mapping strange keys to movement directions is interesting, but it's also fairly frustrating knowing that if they were mapped differently it would have made for potentially more enjoyable gameplay.
That said, the organic nature of the monster creature was stellar to play around with. I loved everything about the movement. My favorite part is the level 5 area where you slide down between the cramped walls.
The art, audio, and general ambiance is spot on. I mean just really, really good, even without considering the time constraints.
- Dylan
Ah, I remember seeing this one on Twitter mid-development.
It has a really nice atmosphere and I enjoyed wandering around, even though it felt a bit directionless (both in terms of movement orientation and the hunting motivation).
Over the course of playing I found and killed two rabbits. They yielded nothing but bloodstains... and so I decided I wouldn't kill any more rabbits. After walking around a little more and noticing the repetition in scenery I decided to quit because I felt like I had mostly seen what the game had to offer. (I noticed someone else mentioned some sort of monster so I re-visited the game and did see, shoot, and apparently kill that).
I found the mouse movement to be overly sensitive, toning that down and smoothing it would have helped the experience a lot for me. The hunting itself was also a tad bland as an activity. It boiled down to me running (or walking) around like a madman until I saw something run away from me... then it's just a matter of following it until I figured out how close you can get to it's detection radius before it runs. Then shoot to kill.
Not that it needs to be "gamified" more or anything. It's just that the AI reactions and the skill required to use the bow was fairly straightforward and lacked depth.
I did like the weather effect transitions though. Especially when the wind goes calm after an intense session of rabbit murder.
- Dylan
@Tuism yeah I actually found out sometime after publishing that there was already a game called Interloper, I was surprised I hadn't heard of it.
I agree that the game ends up being pretty straightforward and doesn't put up much of a challenge. Farhan, our programmer did an awesome job though considering how late we came up with the mechanics for the gameplay. He probably only had 30 something hours (including sleep) to implement pretty much the whole thing. So while it's not the most dynamic thing ever, we're still really proud of the work that went into it.
- Dylan
Really nice graphics, though I realize they weren't made during the jam.
The gameplay itself was enjoyable though for some reason it didn't leave a huge impact on me. Something felt missing to me, or maybe my expectations were just off from what it actually was. The levels were structured in a way where most of the time I felt solutions were very easy to come up with. That feeling might also come from how little reinforcement there is on the rating system. It sits very quietly down at the bottom and I actually hadn't noticed it for a bit. In my head that sounds great, I generally dislike blatant "bing! bing! bing! you're a winner!" star systems in games. But I felt like something needed to be there to either encourage or enforce less sloppy methods to progressing through the game.
Certain levels I didn't care for, like the domino one and there's another called pitchfork that's similar in approach. They don't really allow for much creativity on the player's part because they very heavily imply the obvious solution.
The ones I enjoyed most balanced the "you can do this" hints with the structure and consequences for blowing up something that might have been vital for structural stability. The building in the screenshots with the very long beam is I think a good example. It has this obvious points that you're tempted to blow away, but doing so might cause you to fail later after you take out other chunks. There are many times (even in that example) where certain treasure can be collected by blowing away a wall that won't cause any overall structural consequences later.
It's kind of a strange thing because I know how much work this kind of thing takes, and that it's impressive how it was actually pulled off. Something about it just felt somewhat lackluster though. But maybe you're just unlucky and I played it while in the wrong mood ;) I do feel awfully nitpicky about it.
Anyway, fantastic job on the entry. It's very polished and you've done an excellent job putting it all together in such a short amount of time.
- Dylan
I sure made a mess of all those boats haha. This was a really entertaining little entry. It's just packed full of sail smashin' wilhelm screamin' octopus flailin' goodness. It fulfills all my primal "I just want to smash everything" needs.
I did find the health damage aspect somewhat confusing. Since there's so much debris on-screen it can be pretty difficult to tell what's doing what to you at times. Sometimes I would stop and try to figure it out, until I remembered I was an octopus and all I wanted to do was smash more stuff. I suppose there are an awful lot of splinters floating around.
My final score was 86598
- Dylan
The music is so devilish! Fantastic presentation and a unique idea. I'm taking the stairs from now on...
Kind of surprised there isn't a web version since it's in Unity. I've noticed a lot of other people are still using the unity webplayer and it's been working fine for me (of course it's not going to be supported on chrome much longer though).
The game itself was nice. It was sort of basic but it's a solid game for a solo shot. The sounds helped quite a bit to me, that splat sound that people make is really satisfying haha. Also figuring out the javelin throwing patterns was interesting. It kind of contradicts your typical expectations which would be to jump onto enemies. But here it generally seemed better to try and avoid jumping since you'd typically end up in more danger. Though falling with style was definitely a thing.
It's not mind blowing but it's not bad either. Overall, it's a nice solid game you should be proud of.
- Dylan
Wow. Like others have said, very addictive game. The theme is there but it's kind of just a sprite swap between the enemies and the player. But quibble aside, great presentation, gameplay was challenging yet fair, very dark souls-esque. Fantastic entry, wonderful job!!
Do those people seriously just eat literally anything they find on their doorstep? Gosh.
The tutorial image does help quite a bit, though I wish some of it was a little more intuitive through the gameplay itself.
The graphics are the definite strong point here. It's kind of what kept me around playing it, because it looked like a nice game.
I'm afraid I didn't actually enjoy the game part of it very much though. It felt very tedious after I learned the main pattern you had to follow. Pick up object, throw in ground, water, water again, pick, leave it for the people. It just didn't hold my interest, and I ended up quitting before I drained the people bar fully since I thought I kind of saw where it was all going. Though I did manage to get one of em killed... maybe that'll teach the rest of them a lesson about eating doorstep food.
I did like the cute oblivious monster approach though. Kind of a "I want to help people!" attitude, but proceeds to seriously screw stuff up haha.
Some audio in here would have been a great addition also. Atmospheric woods-y sounds and stuff for the main interactions. Maybe even some kind of background music.
It was adorable and I really wanted to like it based off of the visuals and humorous screenshots posted for it... but it just didn't do much for me in the end. At least it seems like you had fun creating it though! I do admire games that give off the feeling that the dev just enjoyed their time with it.
- Dylan
My fingers gained muscle from spamming up and down. AWESOME!
Great gameplay, well paced, and fantastic presentation. I felt the monster was a bit slow which made chasing archers annoying. Stellar job!
I really like the overall design of the game. The visuals, the audio and of course the physics oriented gameplay feel really nice together.
I did find it quite difficult to actually get the people to properly fling into the mouth. I found out later that it was much easier for me if I grabbed them by their body rather than their heads. The heads are the obvious thing to grab though because of the proportions.
The people felt really "heavy" to drag and it was quite easy for them to kind of slip out of your control because of that weight. I had to kind of drag them back a bit before I flinged forward otherwise they wouldn't have enough momentum to get even remotely close. I also found the perspective to be somewhat confusing at first, since you're dragging left and right but there's some depth there that's hard to gauge. You do get somewhat accustomed to it over time though.
I wasn't sure if it ended at some point or not. I played it over a couple of times and enjoyed myself. It's fairly difficult but also ends up being pretty rewarding when you do start getting the hang of it. I found the satisfaction bar perhaps drains too quickly though for most people to be able to manage it without spending a fair amount of time failing (which might be frustrating to some).
- Dylan
You have a nice concept and great graphics, but the knight's movement random movement coupled with not being able to control the height of my arms AND only swinging one arm at a time makes randomness too prevalent, and turns it from a potential skill-based game into a frustrating luck-based one. If I had more control over what I'm doing I feel I'd enjoy it more.
Nice, I've been seeing a lot of these physics-based awkward to control sort of things and I tend to enjoy them. This one has a method for me that tended to just work in most cases. That was holding the 'O' key to keep one set of legs up and moving the other set of legs in large swooping patterns to sort of "fly" and push off the ground. It's very elegant looking once you get it down haha.
Knocking over the buildings tended to be mostly "rubbing against it until something happens" at first, but once I got my octo-swooping method down I was flinging my arms into buildings like a champ.
The game description says you knock stuff over until you fall over, but from what I could tell there wasn't really a fail state in terms of falling over. Being on the ground is just kind of the natural octopus state, so as far as I could tell you couldn't really mess up. Which is fine by me actually.
Oh also, really nice art and colors used. It's simple but does a good job. I really wish there were some audio in here somewhere. The silent flopping around just felt like it needed something.
Played it on the web through gamejolt and the controls text was very difficult to read. Luckily it's not hard to pick up and figure out though! I also played the windows version and it worked as expected and of course looked better full screened.
The concept is solid and I like the idea of having a sort of body-snatching stealth mechanic. The execution of the idea felt somewhat rough though. Not bad by any means, I'd say it's definitely a good base to expand on, but it feels like it still needs more work and polish.
The guard patterns and level design were pretty straightforward. It kind of seemed like there was some struggle to try and keep the design interesting and there's some very noticeable repetition in some areas. On the plus side the possession mechanic redeems these flaws somewhat and I enjoyed navigating through areas just killing all the guards along the way. In these kind of stealth based games I tend to not take my chances leaving someone around to catch me ;)
The art wasn't very attractive to me in general. Lots of very small repeating textures and parts that don't necessarily look like they fit visually together. For instance, the floor texture and lighting underneath the player have a smooth look, but the walls look very flat and harsh in comparison. It reminds me of an early pc game look and retro in a "hasn't aged well" way.
The sound is also pretty basic. Again, like the art the sounds have a very old feel. There aren't many of them either so they can get somewhat repetitive (especially the possess/unpossess sounds). A looping ambient 8-bit track might have helped make the game feel a little less empty audio-wise.
I did a random search for ambient moody 8-bit stuff and found this as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T2oBTbilyM
Also, there seemed to be a bug where if you pressed x to leave a body prematurely the transition from body to player would play again when the timer WOULD have run out. It's not game breaking, but it was fairly noticeable since I pressed x pretty often to leave guards early.
- Dylan
I left a comment earlier, but returned back here on a whim and noticed some people were complaining about the bug where they guards rapidly look two different directions. I just wanted to mention that my method for taking out those guards was to approach them directly from their sides, rather than trying to get behind them, and it consistently worked.
Also, the bug seems to be an issue where the guards are trying to move to a position but constantly overshoot it. To fix that kind of bug you could probably do something like...
if (x < goalX - guardSpeed) {x+=guardSpeed;}
else if (x > goalX + guardSpeed) {x-=guardSpeed;}
not tested, so I might have made an error, but the idea is to create a zone as the goal rather than a specific number.
Wow, for such a short time period you guys did a STELLAR job. Some nitpicks though. The kids are really passive, so it was a bit alarming to find i could feed them to the monster since the motivation to do so isn't really there, despite being poor (that's a pretty drastic action for some money). There's also a bug where I click on two sheep to sheer them, but the mother stops mid-action for both of them and I get no wool, and the sheep shear animation continues to play.
Despite this I gave you five stars. I love coming across games that push the medium and this definitely does that. And made in 72 hours, holy crap!!
Had a bug early on where Theseus spawned out of the map and apparently got stuck somehow (he would rotate but wouldn't teleport anymore), which I'm not sure how that happens since his main method of travel would seem to solve that.
I might be somewhat biased with this aspect, but the minimap bugs me soooo much haha. I generally don't care for games where my focus is drawn to only ever look at the minimap, making the main scene take a backseat. The map is essentially a "better" view of the game, so in this case I was almost solely looking at that. Seems like the map bit came from some crossover with the "a map will be useful" theme.
I didn't personally find the game to be terribly challenging, but I could see some places where you could easily get cornered by Theseus. Sometimes his teleportation works against him though ironically, and he'll be in a position near me but will poof away haha. Seems like his movement could have been rounded out a bit more. Though it is an interesting solution for not having to deal with wall collision and pathfinding stuff haha.
As others stated, the mythology aspect is an appealing setting though and the movement and whatnot works fairly well. The mouse rotation aspect seems like you had an idea there that wasn't implemented, since it doesn't seem to be used for anything. I almost think it would have been more satisfying to have a set amount of people in the labyrinth rather than being endless. This is because the difficulty doesn't really change throughout the experience, so it's fairly easy to lose interest when the player realizes that they'll just keep doing the same thing in a loop.
- Dylan
This game should REALLY be getting more attention. I understand it's not finished and most of the game wasn't implemented but what IS here is really nice. Remember to play and rate other games, I know it can be discouraging when a project doesn't pan out as expected but to me this is still a really solid entry.
I absolutely love the art haha. It's freaking adorable, and it's incredibly consistent. EVERYTHING is drawn in that style, even the health bar. Wow. I even like the roughness where you can see some of the parts that were erased haha, it's just brilliant.
It seems like the programmer had their hands full but what's in here is still very good. The movement is nice and has some subtleties to it. The platforming is decent and at the very least handled collisions and whatnot well. The jumping felt perhaps a bit over exaggerated but works nicely with the block sizes.
Last but not least the audio work was also on par with everything else. Nice little jumping and "hurt" sounds give extra impact to actions and the background track is cheery and matches with the tone of the art.
I dunno, maybe the animations and stuff just really make this thing for me but everything has a nice feel to it and makes me smile. I would gladly return back and play and give additional feedback on a post-jam version if that became a thing.
Also consider creating a Unity webplayer version, I've noticed other people are also still uploading webplayer versions even though it won't be compatible with chrome soon and they're working fine on my end.
- Dylan
The art is great, but I felt the knights run at you way too fast.
You nailed the graphics and audio design down. It's simple but it all meshes really nicely together and I didn't find any of the sounds annoying or overly tedious. That can be hard to pull off.
The game itself is also enjoyable. Again, very much like the art and audio it's simple but just executed very nicely. A previous comment by ChosenCharacter made a very good point that the further in the game you got the less intense it felt and more tedious it felt. I probably got the crowd down to about 50 or so before I felt like I had seen enough. I'm not sure if there's some sort of end game thing, I may return to it at some point to see.
Oh, also I just started the game and tried to figure out the controls myself. I got the movement down easily but it took me a while to figure out that left click was how you pushed. I didn't realize you could carry them until I read the description. I'd encourage having some sort of little controls graphic or text in-game (on the main menu perhaps) just in case someone dives in before reading the game description.
- Dylan
This one really sucked me in. I kind of started it and glazed over the text at first, thinking "ah it's a text adventure, probably will just be okay". But as it progressed I grew more an more immersed in the experience.
***I'll try to be somewhat spoil-free out of respect to the game, but I also want to hint to the dev as to the path I took. Just go play the game***
As I continued to play the mystery built up because of the pacing with the narrative. Decisions play out elegantly, making it feel like you don't get those cheesy "oh you picked that option, you died, oh well" paths.
My first playthrough really just worked its way up to the climax well. The way the game kind of psyched you out was interesting: "is going to the town a good decision?" "what happens when you get there???", "who am I? Who's that? Why why why". The ending was extremely satisfying and was very much not in line with my expectations.
I especially liked the bits where you were given information, and clicking on the links cycled through similar content. That was a great way to use the text to convey confusion and doubt.
Nice job overall, it's kind of hard to rate this game in certain aspects ("fun" I'm looking at you). But you nailed the mood, especially considering it's all delivered with just the vague images and text.
- Dylan
People will do anything to get back their cats...even stepping on pits of despair!
Beautiful game, however the controls were pretty frustrating. Great attempt at innovating with the two button controls!
Look no further. This game is the winner of the jam!
Addictive, polished, and great gameplay. Well done! A real hole-in-one ;)
Fantastic game! great mood and lots of polish / juice, and the mechanics work very well.
@PlasterPhantom There actually is audio. Which build did you play?
Very relaxing game, really nice mood. Nice graphics and music.
Phenomenal graphics and mood, like wow. I think there's too much stuff before the player actually gets to play, like listening to the notes repeat three times :(
Extremely well done! I loved having to keep track of the packages, very stressful but in a good way :)
Also having the pushing of packages as physically based was a really nice touch, it made skill a very important part of the game. Well done!
Cool concept! SO the menu has "history mode" which confused me, as I think a simple "Play" would do better.
Also, i got to the second level and just got destroyed right away. i think there needs to be more time for the player to react and there was too much on screen at the start.
Otherwise well done!
Nice entry, but i feel the difficulty ramps up waaay too quickly. i was swarmed like 30 seconds in.
Great art. Those weeds frickin stresed me out lookin so gross.
Great little game, having to manage how much ammo you had was fun! Awesome art as well!
the human touch makes this entry shine, great job. i eventually found out i could pick up items from their containers without opening them by spamming randomly, but i solved everything (i thing) aside from the lock box in the drawer as i didn't know where to get the combo from.
Also it's wierd how there's 2 interact buttons, which I would just combine into one.
5 stars all around, nicely done.
hmmmmmmm a bit all over the place with pacing and it feels fairly disconnected with all its ideas, but you did a great job for the amount of time you had.
Great graphics and audio. The controls felt waaaaay too heavy like others have mentioned which makes controlling the ship not very interesting, and it gets on the verge of unfair with level 3 when you're asked to go through a corridor of spikes and you have little control over your momentum.
Still a great entry, nice work.
the screen-wrapping trick is really cool. i just jumped in place :)
Great concept and some nice level design make a short sweet game! Awesome music too.
Wow, very admirable that you got a functional racing game in 48 hours. I agree with the above comment, the controls felt too loose and would benefit from feeling more like a mario kart, but then again you had 48 hours so bravo for what you made!
The screenshake and overall game feel is pretty spot on. My wrist got tired from spamming the shoot button though :(
Neat little game!
Woah, super polished!
Oh man, Nick Cage never gets a break
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!!!
Interesting movement mechanic. I think with some tweaking (like lower the acceleration when holding Z/X to give more control) you could make it really interesting to move. I know you have z for right and x for left, but you should really switch those. I get that it implies which side the smaller cube comes out of, but it's not enough to muddle what you're really doing which is moving left/right.
Your one fatal sin however: you put in a timer :(
The game's already hard enough to learn the controls of and I wanted to experiment with them to learn them better, but the timer is all "nope, too bad".
High marks regardless of all this however, nicely done.
Nice little game. For future reference you could do with a LOT less text. Like even just "click buttons" and "walk on switches" would be more than enough.