Planetary Shift by Flatgub 2014-08-30T06:00:00
Nice puzzle game for sure. Think the difficulty curve might be a little high, but maybe that's just me.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → intersectiongames
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Don't Eat The Damsel | jam | 679 | 3.00 | 2.35 | 2.79 | 2.24 | 3.97 | 3.19 | 3.16 | 59 | ||
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | nanoTransit | jam | 327 | 3.30 | 3.41 | 2.85 | 2.24 | 3.64 | 3.20 | 2.92 | 3.07 | 62 |
Nice puzzle game for sure. Think the difficulty curve might be a little high, but maybe that's just me.
Not sure that I found the "goal" either. Explored pretty much everything in-game, and read all the transcripts on the website. More of an experiment for sure, I think.
Thanks @Miziziziz. I changed from Dropbox to Drive, so hopefully that helps with the situation.
@xandy We included two harder difficulty levels for people looking for more of a challenge.
@gwa It's hybrid of both bottom-up and sidescroller. Your perspective is sort of always changing.
@Tosic
It's an issue with DirectX. You can try updating it, and see if that works.
Thanks for all the awesome feedback everyone! We really appreciate it!
Cute and frustrating for sure. Took me a bit to figure out a rhythm to get my out of the starting gate but I can get over 50 seconds now.
Really liked this one, a lot of fun. Quick and easy to pick up. I sort of wished I had a little longer than a minute to collect stuff though.
Seconding a lot of the critiques you've gotten here. Having no way of registering current level of health also made things tough.
Nice. I liked this one. Controls felt a little cumbersome and I kept getting hung up on the scenery, and I forgot that I could jump, so the black dancers pretty much overwhelmed me until the very end. Really good interactive experience.
Have you ever played Space Alert (or Galaxy Trucker, which is set in the same universe)? Space Alert's a cooperative board game. Your game has a bit of a similar feel to it, in story and mechanics. Which is pretty cool.
The stability mechanic took me a little to figure out. What I was supposed to do there (rapid tapping, not just one direction or the other) to control it wasn't immediately clear.
I agree that this is a good run at a Super Meat Boy style game but the difficulty curve could be a bit smoother. The character is too floaty even if he is supposed to be hard to control. It was very fun to play for the first first runs though!
Really like this one. I'm a fan of platforming, especially on the trickier side. This one wasn't super punishing, which was nice. Sometimes you couldn't react until after you've seen the scanline play out, but there were places whre I saw you indicated future platforms and things, which was cool. Maybe try and make that more obvious.
Like the idea behind it. Flying did feel a little stiff, and I didn't realize I needed to protect my portal until I fully read your description. I just flew around killing things, and picking up drops. I also didn't realize where the indicator for my lives was until my second playthrough, and sort of wished I could see my score as well.
Nice little game, was made a little difficult by the auto-harvesting and movement. I also couldn't find any way to restart the game after a loss without refreshing the entire page.
Cute game. But it froze up completely during the boss fight every time I tried to run it. Felt like some BGM was also needed. Loved the randomly generated levels though. Increases the replay value.
Jumps felt pretty floaty. Wasn't a bad thing, just sometimes I wanted to be able to execute smaller ones, which was sometimes hard.
It's a very solid interactive experience. Art and sound are all great, as is the story. Story doesn't break any new ground, and the ending could have been a little stronger I feel, but the piece as a whole really works. The movement of the dragon is part of what really sells it, the flying is dynamic and natural. Beautiful piece of interactive art.
This was a fabulous idea, the learning curve is just a little too mean. Even just using the arrow keys to direct the spell direction would make things much more fun. I loved the idea behind it, this is a really awesome skill based game, and not just twitch reflex skill either. Right now its just a little harsh. Maybe some training levels might help remove some of that, and instill some muscle/brain memory in players. If you do your tutorial right, you probably wouldn't even need to adjust the current control scheme much.
Nice little puzzle game. The Box was definitely my favorite. I had the most trouble with The Tree, I had a problem seeing "the pattern" I guess. Compared to the other two, in time spent on them and difficulty level, the last puzzle seemed kind of simple. I really liked this one though, having different sorts of puzzles makes you think.
I have to agree to that cross-hairs would be very helpful. It is very difficult to aim besides spamming fire to see where you hit. Nice work!
Seconding the critiques about collisions, especially for the stones above the lava. I fell through that middle pillar at the end multiple times. You also couldn't move left and right fluidly in places because you got hung up on the terrain, and jumping was the only reliable form of movement.
Hi guys! Thanks for all the comments, we really appreciate all the feedback!
Overall, we were aiming to do something a little different with this game. Our artist got to have really cool experience in being able to do traditional illustrations for a game, and I got to do some more in-depth writing. All our past games as a studio have been small, and traditional, so lots of sprites, and backgrounds, etc, and lighter in the story department, so this was a chance to play a bit.
I've mucked around a very tiny bit in Twine before, and the artist had never used it, so part of the reason things are the way they are is just too little time working with a new engine. We've learned a bunch, so hopefully we can improve story formatting, and add extra features like sound in future games. And maybe fix up this one.
Plus, I ran out of time for a final edit. So yes, there should be more paragraph breaks. That much I know.
As for writing style, and sentence length, I'm used to more traditional fiction writing. I don't normally have images to lean on, and there is a large part of me that believes that writing, even when it's intended to be delivered with visual media, still ought to be able to stand on its own.
Still, there's never a perfect piece and there are probably a few places where sentences can be tightened and made more svelte. That's editing for you.
No chapter waypoints was a deliberate choice, but it sounds like that's pretty frustrating for people, even for something on the shorter side, so something to keep in mind for the future.
We really do appreciate all the comments. Especially me, since it'd be pretty easy for me to keep doing personal project Twine games in the future.
@chaoseed
Yeah, backstory for the world was something we joked about a little during the jam. It's sort of a "riff" on "all those stories." Time contraints do always make things interesting, and I'm a little rusty, I don't write as often as I should.
Plus what's here is already a little text heavy for people, so we'd either need to cram things into the images, try and slip things in here and there, or include an option to read supplemental material.
Length (especially) and world building (which I haven't done excessive amounts of) are something I want to play with more in the future, as a result of this effort, and people's comments.
We've done some work on a tricky platformer ourselves. It's easy for devs to get too used to the controls of their own game, and so opinions from unbiased playtesters are good.
Took me a bit but I finally got it. Wasn't really trusting the cat and dog at all, but I guess that's how it's supposed to go, based in the description. Maybe I just wanted it more like that traditional logic puzzle, one constant liar and one constant truth-teller.
This is a pretty solid puzzle game. It may not be the most original idea, but the design is very appealing. The level design may become a bit monotonous but overall, well done.
Neat idea, and a nice little game. Movement feels a little slippery, which works (looks at games like Super Meat Boy), but if you're going for that effect try and tighten up and polish the physics there.
Sometimes power-ups would appear right under/next to me, which sucked when they were negatives ones. Power-ups are pretty crucial to this game, so try and make them shine. Maybe some new ones that change the Snake's behavior.
Having another snake for multi-platform movement would be cool. Maybe different levels, some w/ obstacles? Works great as is, but that's one way to spice if up if you were trying.
Page also scrolls down for me whenever you drop a bomb. It eventually stops, but the top of the window is cut off. This is playing "on Chrome, on a nice computer" but not in fullscreen mode.
Like the idea behind it, has a original feel to it. Energy meter wasn't obvious for me either. It also felt like the lightning bolts stopped spawning. I would get a few, right at the beginning, but then no more would appear and I would eventually lose because of it.
I like the idea behind it. The time put into level design shows. It'd be cool if you could implement some way to plan ahead better, perhaps being able to look at the level layout for all future levels and needing to remember each one or something, like Concentration. But harder.
Also, if you're planning on taking this game further in the future, you can currently place blocks outside the playing zone. Just something I noticed.
Seconding the constructive criticism from everyone. Felt like I could hang up on people, or transfer them, and they'd just call back to continue the conversation where they left off, with no context whatsoever. Couldn't win or lose, only see the story unfold with no clear end. Characters were all great, I wanted hear from more people, helped in part because I wanted the same ones to stop calling me.
Nice to see another interactive fiction. We did a game in Twine too.
Felt just a little too linear for me, but the choices suited the story well, so it was okay.
I think a lot of readers will only play through once, so you may want to make the hook a little more obvious in all of your branches. That would probably help people come back to make different choices as well.
Nice interactive art piece that memorializes the accomplishments of one of the firsts.
Great visuals, but I struggled with a few things, and as a result, couldn't get past the first scrolling level.
I had to run it in fullscreen, which isn't a problem, but in windowed mode, the camera was locked onto the goal point.
I also don't know if this was intended, because the screenshots show a white box, but I have nothing to indicate where the PC is on screen, other than a pink haze.
Nice job, especially for less than 18 hours. Solid little shooter. Difficulty curve does a little steep. I think the first wave at least should be a little easier to allow the player a little bit of time to get used to the game/mechanics/controls.
Loved it. This was my favorite out of all the ones I've played so far. It's a great little experience.
The effort put into it really shows.
I don't think it's weird that people expect science or realism. We did a game that had strong roots in biology, and people loved that part of it. They loved that realism. Finding that perfect line between fantasy and realism can sometimes be a challenge, especially for simulation games like this. You've done a great job so far though.