Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Jason
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Save Them | compo | 610 | 3.00 | 2.68 | 3.09 | 2.77 | 2.93 | 1.83 | 2.58 | 2.62 | 73 |
The mechanics all work ok, but I found the pacing a bit slow. Charging arrows is a good idea, but a bit slow and you almost always have to charge. Would have been nice to make the regular shots go a decent range and charged go even further / do more damage.
Good job on the graphics! The visuals, sound, mood, etc all were great.
Great job, really enjoyed the artwork! Amazing how much art was done in 72 hours! Sometimes I felt the character didn't stand out enough / could have been slightly larger, but everything else felt spot on for a 72 hours game!
Tough game! But its fun and has that addictive, one more try and I know I can get it feel.
I have mixed feelings about the hidden fuel. By not seeing the fuel it didn't really add much? By seeing it, you would get that sense of urgency as its running out. But since I didn't know what it was and could just ignore the alarms, I almost just ignored that feature all together. Still, I enjoyed the game!
Really great game! Everything fit together really well, sound, graphics, gameplay. My only complaint would be the controls are a bit difficult. I felt the controls made the game a bit challenging, but it fit with the game (being difficult). My only suggestion would be to allow dashing in the air on the way up too :)
At first I thought this seemed a bit basic, but with a littler perseverance through the tutorial and understanding how the mechanics work, its a very well done puzzle game. Great job!
Great style and graphics and a smart puzzle, too bad it was so short :)
So good! My favorite so far. I feel like you nailed everything. The graphics and audio and pacing work so well together. It feels almost a little laid back, but at the same time the clock is ticking. Everything worked really well for me too, I think you've got a winner here!
My only suggestion is the control scheme. This might just be a personal preference, but I would have liked another key for jump. Something like a or space. So minor tho!
I thought that was a great take on the 10 second theme. Alot of games, (mine included) use 10 sec as constant timer that feels too short. Giving the player ways to avoid triggering that timer is smart.
Like a few people mentioned, the controls feel a bit off. Jumping, a bit too floaty. But nice job otherwise!
You nailed the music and the graphics on this! Great job. But I'm not sure how it fit the theme other than the countdown at the beginning? However, I know nothing about film, so could be something thats just beyond my knowledge?
Fun little game. I agree with some of the comments here, felt a bit short and needed a better objective. Also showing all the pictures you took at the end would have been cool!
I thought the controls and the scrolling worked pretty well for the game.
Agree with the bit dark and tutorial comments, otherwise a cool idea. However, I'm not quite sure how the theme is integrated?
Great job! I loved the background music and atmosphere of the game. Some of the sound effects were a bit loud in comparison to the background music, but such a small thing. I wasn't even able to get sound done on mine!
Intro was a bit long and would be nice to be able to quickly skip out of text bubbles. But I liked your take on the theme with the flashlight and being able to recharge it at stations was a nice touch. The lighting effects were pretty cool all around. Its pretty amazing how much you were able to get done.
The mood of this game is really great. Gameplay, visuals, audio, all work really well together! Audio was especially good I thought
Cool concept, I liked the way the clones repeated your actions, and how the last guy gives you a new spawn location. Adding some type of scoring would have really improved it I think. So you could use your clones in a smart way to get a higher score.
Really well done guys! My biggest complaint was its a bit dark. And the sound volume seemed really loud even when I turned it down to my lowest setting. But otherwise, the sound effects are great and you did an awesome job capturing the mood!
Reading the description, I thought that was a good take on the 10 second theme, but I felt the implementation didn't really reflect it well. I think for the scoring, it would have helped to see what you got each round, so you could see how your performance each time affected it. For just 12 hours of work tho, its a nice little game!
Wow awesome job! Its amazing to see what you guys did in 72 hours. Since this was a unity game, I'm very curious to hear how you handled the networking. I'm new to unity and wanted to look into how it would work to do a multiplayer game with it. I would love to see the technical details on how that was done :)
Great job!
Nice job! I think the difficulty could have ramped up a little quicker and more of an arc. It goes from pretty easy to all the sudden hard on level 7. But works well otherwise! Like the animated character too.
Kept playing this after my post and have gotten up to level 10. Actually finding the difficulty really addictive! :)
Good job putting this together. I like the graphics and animation style!
I thought this was a pretty solid entry. Like you said, its too bad you didn't have time to incorporate the theme.
I found the jumping a bit too floaty. And it would have been nice to have a sprint or something for the longer passage ways.
Thanks NuSan for the comments! My plan was to have a sound play every loop, like the sound of doors swooshing open and closed. Unfortunately, I had a hard time generating the sound I was looking for with cfxr and then ran out of time to get back to it. Some sort of flashing would have worked too.
For anyone interested, I added a quick postmortem:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/08/27/save-them-postmortem/
@SecondDimension - I felt the same way about the movement tiles. I made them last 10 seconds to match the theme, but now I'm thinking if I did 20-30 seconds on them, it would have been better.
@nanrog84 - I had thought of including "speed up" tiles you could play that would increase all the astronauts' speed for 10 seconds...but again something I ran out of time to do.
@Amber - Glad you liked the idea! By far, I think not having a sound play when the doors changed state was the feature I wish I had found time for the most. I should have just used any random sound :p As for the movement tiles, they should be placeable on any tile except in the escape pod room (doesn't make sense to put them in there) or along the top or bottom tiles where half the tile is taken up with the outer ship wall. I disabled those spots since the graphics didn't look right. One idea I had, was whenever you selected a movement tile to place, to super impose over the ship some sort of guide for where you couldn't place them. Like a red grid or something over invalid tiles.
@X-Or: yeah I really goofed on the resolution, but thats what these things are for, learning what does and doesn't work! I had a full screen feature but commented it out and forgot to put it back in. I wish now I had gone with 1024x768 instead of the random 1280x768. Oh well!
Unity actually now natively provides support for 2D (announced at the latest Unite Conference), so its no longer only a 3D game engine :) However, the real reason to use it was for its cross platform abilities. I have only ever worked with an iOS game engine, but I was able to jump into Unity and easily put together a game and release for the web (and every other platform out there). Had I just stuck with what I knew, I would have only been able to make an iOS game, and probably no one would have played it.
I've now ported Save Them to iOS as well, which was very simple with Unity right off the bat. I ended up creating a second image atlas for my graphics to match the iPad resolution (instead of just letting unity scale them), which then required some more tweaking. But initially, it just worked by telling unity to build for iOS. That simplicity is pretty huge when it comes to cross platform development.
And yeah, I agree there's too much randomness in the game. Working on some tweaks for that for a post compo iPad version I'm hoping to release.
@Senstren: I just had to look up what Chu Chu Rocket was. Interesting there is a game so similar! Looking over the wiki page, it looks like one of the things they did was make the movement of the characters predictable, which would help certainly help with the randomness. I've been playing with tweaks, just trying to find a good balance between too random and too easy!
I love your take on the 10 seconds. Very well thought out. The mechanics were also spot on, a great use of physics. The checkpoints were a nice addition too.
Lol, this definitely made me laugh! Good job overal.
Great job overall except for the theme. Too bad you didn't have time to work that in, oh and a sprite for the main character :)
It was a nice change of pace to play a story driven game and explore the ship.
Oh forgot to mention, I think you did a great job of the game mechanics, jumping, etc felt spot on. And I loved the low gravity effect you could toggle.
Nice job! I like the art style and felt the controls worked pretty well. I did get random weapon once right off the start that gave me something that just lobbed a projectile right in front of myself, made that play through really annoying for the rest of it!
Cool puzzle, I felt the tie in to the theme could have been a bit better. Using 10 seconds as a time limit for things is a bit limiting (I had the same issue with some of the stuff I did in my game).
Wow great job! Checkpoints were a nice touch as were having multiple hit points. Sometimes the enemies felt a bit tough (like they took alot of hits to kill) but that just added to the sense of urgency and trying to avoid them if possible.
Nice job! Something felt a bit off with the spikes and contacting them. But otherwise it was a good game. I would have like to see the difficulty scale a bit more where timing and the proper route to the jewels required no mistakes to get them all. Maybe a way to repeat levels too, so if you finish it without getting all the jewels, you can try again.
Nice work guys! I'm constantly amazed at what people are pulling off in 48-72 hours!
Cool concept. I like the music you were able to generate with cfxr, I gave up trying to make a background loop for mine with it!
Thats cool. I definitely like the turn based approach. Maybe a collision zone around a ship to keep them from getting so close to each other would help keep the battlefield spread out. Would be cool to have a way to zoom out too. Definitely a good base to move forward on!
Wow great job! I really loved the doodle graphics. Going with the pen look really worked.
Great job guys! The two controls worked well, as with leveling them up. And having 4 options was cool too for abilities to mix it up. Really impressed!
I know how much work something like this is, so I doubt you had time to add much more. But some suggestions would be maybe health power ups to heal you and maybe another enemy type or like a boss after so many waves.
Fun game! Will you be making the source code available?
Great job, except I felt 10 seconds of life was a bit short, especially when there are not many people in the game. But man, amazing work otherwise!
Lol, this game was fun! Nice graphics and I liked how you have to turn around to shoot. The whole poo is good, flowers and butterflies are bad, was clever :)
Its probably just me, but I kept wanting to press something else to jump instead of up. My fingers kept getting mixed up. The difficulty otherwise seemed right on for me. Would have enjoyed more levels!
Nice job, not only is the game fun, but I really loved the mechanic! And being able to play both characters at the start was a nice touch. Really cool idea overall and you guys did a great job polishing it.
Nice little game. I agree with one of the previous posts, the 10 second life span is a bit limiting. Its hard to even take in the game before its over.
You know when I started this game jam, I was thinking I should do something with cats, the internet loves cats! Looks like you nailed it :p Fun game, I would add maybe allowing shopping between play throughs as well, maybe some bigger upgrades. And some detection to make sure the cats down spawn on top of mines.
Really liked the mix of turn based with the timer. Controls seemed a bit buggy maybe but understandable, they worked pretty well tho!
Interesting take on the theme. The time limit felt a bit limiting though. A bit more tutorial would have been nice, but I know it was only 48 hours!
I like the mechanic of jumping while falling, but either I missed it, or there is no mention of it in the game. Made it really difficult until I read the comments here. Also, maybe ramp up the difficulty a little bit slower.
Fun game. The first game thats actually made me think!
Nicely done! The biggest complaint I had was the sound volume was really loud. On my iMac I had to turn my volume to 0.25 bars (the lowest possible) and still thought it was loud. But other than that, it was great!
Pretty chaotic, but fun! I enjoyed the humor and mocking when you failed.
Nice take on the arcade shooter genre. I enjoyed it! I seemed to have a hard time picking up the power ups, and often they would go off screen before I could even get close. Guess its just a tough game!
Really solid entry. I love how simple it is but how well everything (graphics, sound, theme) work together.
Hilarious, need I say more?