Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → ILD Games LLC
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Date With A Devil | jam | 842 | 3.00 | 2.50 | 3.21 | 3.77 | 4.02 | 3.63 | 2.89 |
Really neat concept! I'm not quite sure that standing at a goal flag will save the balloon from the rising lava, though. ;) I had expected to land on top of the mountain, rather than staying inside the caves!
I love both the fishing cat character and the alligator designs that you came up with, they're really cute and appealing!
I jotted down a few notes as I was playing:
I was challenged and engaged during the river segments, but the fishing minigame felt a bit too easy - The slow moving meter meant that I was never in danger of missing a cast, and because the fish did not move around on screen, I was also never in danger of missing a school of fish.
I'm not sure if I was doing something wrong (Or loaded up my boat with too many fish), but I almost never had a chance to drop the fish after a collision with an alligator - The ship sunk within half a second, before I could even react. This never felt unfair and never killed my enjoyment (I did hit an alligator, after all), but if the goal was to let players bail out their ship, you might want to slow the timer down a little bit before you sink.
I also found a bug on one playthrough - My boat sank on Day 1, and I was forced to sit and wait for around 30 seconds for it to get back on screen from the river before I could catch any more. Once it got back, my boat then started randomly sinking during the fishing segment, presumably because it hit an alligator in the river as it slowly walked over to me.
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All in all, great job getting this all together for the jam! :)
This was a lot of fun! The climb up felt really clever, I really wanted to give you props for designing each level such that the space felt completely different if you were climbing up, compared to climbing down - That must not have been easy!
This was a ton of fun! Like @tosunami, I ended up playing for like 20 minutes. The music was also incredibly jamming! Props to your composer!
My only gripe is that it was too easy, so it got a bit repetitive after awhile - Even after 14000+ points, the only way that I was able to die was if I spammed my sacrifice abilities constantly, and even then, it took quite a bit of time to lose all my lives.
I unfortunately couldn't understand the audio at all with the distortion applied to it, but the platforming and puzzles were fun! :)
I came here to say that I was stuck with no way to restart, but saw you post about the H key to reset - You might want to put that in the game description to help fools like me who get themselves stuck.
I ultimately had to quit on level 7, because I did not have the patience to build a bridge of corpses so that I could make the uppermost jump. I was having fun up until this point, but that became tedious very quickly. :(
Edit: I gave it one more try, and realized that the jump to the switch *is* actually possible without a corpse bridge. It was really unclear to me if I could make that jump or not, and I had originally settled on it being impossible, because of how tight it was.
@sadsmile I had skipped most of the description on the Ludam Dare page and jumped straight to the itch link (My bad!), so I had missed the controls on the page here. It might be a good idea to copy them over to itch as well, for foolish players like myself.
I did end up beating the game after I figured out level 7, and I got ending 2 - I killed most of them. Whoops! But sacrifices must be made! ;)
Really cool concept! Moving the runners around felt really fluid and smooth, and it was generally fun trying to manage the chaos of all of them bumping into each other! And the "final sacrifice" gag at the end got a laugh out of me, as I directed my minions into the lava pit.
I do think this idea would be better served a series of shorter levels though, because I ended up losing all but 3 of my runners, and then the game became trivially easy to manage (Because they all fit together in one group). I didn't really want to replay to get a better score after this, because I knew that I'd probably end up getting culled down to three runners again without a *lot* of practice, just because of how long each level is.
I got to the wave of four cacti before quitting. The idea of a deckbuilding/drafting RPG is really neat, but because you were drafting the cards at the same rate that you used them, it felt more like your options were being arbitrarily limited each turn, rather than like you were drafting to build towards some cohesive strategy.
The graphics were very appealing, and immediately caught my eye. The sounds unfortunately did not match the cute and appealing visuals, and ended up turning me off from playing longer due to their volume and grating tone.
While there was a lot of charm, and a lot to enjoy (I loved that you were trying to cool down a soda at the end of each level!), having a limited number of lives felt like a hindrance to the overall design of the game - There were a few times when I found myself unable to progress I simply did not have the lives necessary to progress, due to sloppy platforming earlier in the level. It was very frustrating to traverse through a level with a low number of lives, only to discover that it was impossible to complete due to a mistake from a minute ago.
Because the game was mostly testing platforming, rather than puzzle solving using the sacrifice mechanic, the lives never felt like a limitation which forced creative thinking, just a restriction which would occasionally force me to have wasted time.
I really want to check this out, but even after mashing every key I could think of, I couldn't get the game to start via keyboard! What's the key to start the game?
Edit: It's right click! In case anyone else got stuck like I did. :)
After playing it, I can safely say that this was a ton of fun! I definitely want to give it a try with a bunch of human players, instead of just CPU, and props to you for writing AI so that people can try it out singleplayer!
Cool game! It took a long time to get a hang of it, and I wish that there was a multi-select feature so that I could move my civilian ships all together.
The fact that my ships didn't move the amount that I told them to each turn really messed me up. :( I would plug in a long movement, and the ship would get stuck halfway along its path, and then die.
I'd also like to echo the other players who say that it was really hard, and hard to learn - I ended up dying on the first level, within a few turns, and had no idea what I was doing wrong. After reading the comments, I realized that you could use batteries and shoot (Somehow I missed this, even after reading the How To Play menu) and gave it another try.
On my second playthrough, I basically sat in the spawn to start, and knocked off the enemies as they came to me, up until waves started appearing behind me that I could not aim towards, which felt very unfair. I understand that you probably didn't want players sitting and killing off all the enemies before moving forward, but there should be a better way to disincentive that than spawning enemies which you can't aim at.
Despite my grips, it's honestly a really neat game! I think that this could be polished up into something really cool, after the jam is done!
I played through a couple times, and it took a lot of experimenting to figure out how to play, and even after spending awhile at it, I'm not completely sure that I figured out everything or was playing at all properly, so take this with a big grain of salt! (For example, I never discovered what the exploration stat did)
It seemed like there was not really much that I could do to influence the course of the town past day 3 - The main thing that would kill me was running out of villagers to sacrifice each night, rather than a lack of food. In comparison to the ever-dwindling population size, food was a non-issue.
It was also strange that you let players press the End Night button if it would cause them to game over. One of my most successful attempts was ended when I miscounted how many sacrifices I had made, and accidentally clicked End Night button when I still had one more to go.
I really enjoyed the sound design though - All of the sound effects felt satisfying, and the music was calm and enjoyable.
A fun twin stick shooter! I found myself not using the warping mechanic very often because I wouldn't know what was surrounding my off-screen warp point, and as such I found it very difficult, even on the "Piece of Cake" difficulty.
The "Piece of Cake" difficulty was strange though, because the game would go from lulls where there were no enemies for several seconds (So that all you could do was wait), to a surge of enemies that I could not keep up with. If those peaks and valleys were smoothed out a little bit, that would have made the experience a lot more enjoyable.
I haven't played a text adventure in ages, so it was neat to see one in a game jam! That said - I haven't played a text adventure in ages, so take this all with a grain of salt!
The bear ended up being pretty frustrating to deal with, because I would take meta-game actions (Like listing my inventory), or try to take an action which was not allowed by the parser ("break beehive"), which allowed the bear to catch up to me and eat me. I'd suggest only progressing the bear when "real" actions are taken, as opposed to moving it with every command entered.
I was also a bit stumped on the beehive until going into the help menu - It was strange that "break"ing the beehive was parsed correctly (But not allowed), but "open"ing it was the correct answer - I wouldn't normally think of beehives as something that one opens up without breaking them. Likewise, the fact that I had to drop the honeycomb, when "give honeycomb to bear" was correctly parsed (But refused) was frustrating, as it felt like an unfair death.
Because the game parsed these commands properly and had a unique response for them (but chastised me and disallowed them) implied that taking those courses of action were incorrect. Because these weren't parser errors, it was as though the game was telling me "I understand what you want to do, but you cannot/should not do it", so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the correct solutions, before going to the help menu and discovering that I just needed a different verb.
@frank-gevaerts Glad that the feedback was helpful! I also realized that I never said that I enjoyed the game, so I also wanted to pass that along! I tend to get pretty nitty gritty digging into details, so hopefully the feedback didn't come across as too negative!
You have a really neat concept, but it was very very hard, to the point where I put it down at level 2.
The lock-on time was especially brutal, and made it nearly impossible to get behind the tiny cover of a dead tank. This was exacerbated by the fact that the controls were warped ever so slightly be the camera perspective, so that when I hit (for example) right, I would actually move up and to the right.
The multiple spawn points in level 2 were also a bit tedious, as they meant that I needed to do the exact same work twice, once on the left half of the screen, and once on the right, until I had a path for the two sides to meet up.
Despite my nitpicks, this is a unique idea, and I think it could be polished up into something that's pretty fun! Great job, especially for a compo game! :)
It was fun, and the art was very clean and cute!
I have a few minor nitpicks that might help the experience a bit - I noticed that if you did not release a button by the time it scrolls past the window to hit it, you'd be penalized as though you pressed the next button incorrectly. It took me awhile to figure out why I kept failing right after entering an input correctly, before I realized what was going on. Rather than checking if the button is being held down, you might want to check if the button was pressed down on a specific frame.
It also took me until the end of the game to realize that the volcano had a face that was telling you how close to erupting it was. If you make a future revision, you might want to give the face a little bit more contrast, so that it draws the attention of the player better.
The bullet hell gameplay was pretty fun! It would have been nice to have some sort of visual feedback on enemies to show that they were getting hit by your bullets - It had a hard time figuring out if I was killing something, or if I was just barely missing, so having some sort of feedback would have helped make the shots feel more impactful.
It took me a little while to get a hang of the controls (The combination of using the mouse to select units and spaces to blow up, while using the keyboard for actual navigation felt a bit strange at first), but it was a really fun puzzle game!
I agree with @birdwards that the function of the key was a little bit unclear at first - It felt like, I just walked through the same "end of level" warp without a key, why do I need one now?
The puzzles were well designed and smart - I never felt like the answer was too obvious, but it also never felt like I was beating my head against a wall. Good job!
I have one gripe though - The fact that restarting brings you all the way back to the first puzzle felt needlessly brutal, especially when later puzzles are very easy to accidentally make unwinnable. I got through quite a bit before I needed to reset a level, and ended up putting the game down when I realized that I'd need to slog through all the puzzles that I'd already solved, just to get one more attempt at the puzzle I wanted to be solving. :(
A well executed puzzle concept! It would have been really helpful to have some indication of what each switch did, because I had to go through a lot of blind trial and error to figure out which switches would open the doors I needed, versus which switches would fry me with a laser, which unfortunately killed the pace of the puzzle solving.
I also ran into a strange input issue at this level. Whenever I got above 10 or so moves, it would randomly start dropping inputs, so that I would have to hit the same button several times in a row, in order to move one space. I stopped playing at this point, as it was very difficult to continue.
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This is probably the epitome of a great game jam game. It's got a really tight focus, great style, and a really neat mechanic to build around that's really thematic. I started playing intending to try a level or two before bed, and ended up beating through the entire thing in one sitting. Great job! :)
My only complaint is that a few of the levels required very tight platforming, such that it was unclear if I was solving the puzzle incorrectly and needed to figure out a different approach, or just needed to execute better. It turned out that I did have the correct solution figured out, but I was just a few pixels off from where I was supposed to be when jumping, or throwing a corpse around as the knight. Once a player has the correct solution to a puzzle, it should be clear that they're on the right track.
One level in particular that I remember having trouble setting up properly was this one, where the mage had to stand almost entirely off of the platform, in order to hit the switch when thrown by the knight.
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@antti-haavikko @neipo13 It's totally possible that I did it completely wrong! :) Sounds like that might be the case hahah
The game seemed to have locked up after I built the first shrine and offered Aphrodite a pig. I then built a Theater, and could not do anything but build more - When I clicked on the shrine to make an offering, nothing happened, but the day progressed. :(
Interesting subject, but it felt like the dark (Slaughterhouse?) section was drawn out a bit too long. I ended up dying near the end of it, and being sent all the way back to the beginning and having to replay several minutes of the chase sequence felt overly harsh, so I ended up putting the game down there.
We're looking into the leylines issue, thanks for bringing it to our attention, @dk5000p! So far we haven't been able to reproduce it internally, but hopefully we'll figure it out soon! :)
We've (hopefully) fixed the leylines issue now! Thanks again for reporting it, @dk5000p!