PUMPKING RISING by peringo 2023-01-10T02:31:26Z
I can never be trusted with metering my own difficulty. may the pumpking forgive my soul. ohno.png
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → JudJudson
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | 👥 | TranscendAnts | jam | 503 | 3.48 | 3.09 | 3.89 | 4.03 | 3.64 | 3.14 | 3.04 | 3.13 |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | 👥 | Poltergeist for Hire | jam | 890 | 3.29 | 3.27 | 3.11 | 2.84 | 3.55 | 3.65 | 3.29 | |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | 👥 | N.O.A.S. | jam | 597 | 3.20 | 3.02 | 3.18 | 4.05 | 4.18 | 3.41 | 3.78 | 3.36 |
I can never be trusted with metering my own difficulty. may the pumpking forgive my soul. ohno.png
The audio kept not playing, so even at the final punchline the game was mostly silent other than music :(
I agree with @dkdwrek , the little descriptions are very endearing. My zombie really liked feet for some reason :cold_sweat:
I really enjoy the gameplay loop! I do wish it had music though. It feels a little empty without it.
I really, REALLY like the style all around! I like the mix of "keep killing to stay alive" and mark of the ninja-style side scrolling stealth. Probably my favorite game I've played so far!
vraiment magnifique! vous etez fous!
I soft locked myself by accidentally planting only plants that don't produce gold. I didn't realize only wheat makes you money!
@mola0404 WE DID IT! WELCOME TO MINIMUM WAGE
@lukas-boersma Your goal is to harvest the plants! If they are grown enough to have fruit, you can walk up to them and press E to pick them. If they are grown enough to have more than fruit, you may have to press it multiple times or hold it. The indicator above the plant lets you know what to do (mashing or holding)
@peringo Ideally, we could have had some way of telegraphing their remaining health. In retrospect, I could have given them a bar showing the number of taps remaining. You can hit E on them a few times, run away, and then return and finish them off. The idea was that they would cover an area and pressure you away from it, keeping players constantly moving. I wanted both plants to mildlypunish their own uprooting style, so that it always felt a little on edge and risky: The melee plants are a race between you and the plant and can often be hit and run, while the hold plants promote standing still which ideally makes you think "oh man i hope that pineapple doesn't land before this finishes." I'm glad you enjoyed!
I really, REALLY like the music! The game itself is a little hard to parse, though. I really love RTSs and the idea of harvesting your enemies is super cool, but I think it could use some smoother interfaces. I kept thinking it was loading and not realizing it was my turn.
Really fun! I liked being crazy overpowered haha. Much prefer over the top to getting a bunch of 1-5% increases and feeling no impacts.
It's honestly a little scary how much fun a game can be with just feedback. I was mashing left click and surviving without much issue, but I still played for several minutes just because all of the flashing, screenshake, and particle effects felt great! I think the lifesteal is a little too high, to the point that even from the beginning I was under no threat of losing. But sometimes you want a game like that, and apparently I did :P
The atmosphere in this game is simply wonderful. I really love the combination of glowing magmatic surroundings and the bassy sounds of platforms grinding along. It was really relaxing. ... but part of why it was relaxing was that there wasn't a ton to the puzzles! What was your intention with the mechanic for charging batteries? I think it would be really interesting if, say, you had a platform that was travelling through sun so you could only get a partial charge, or if you could use partial charges at all. But in the puzzles you've made so far, all it does is make players wait with batteries before they use them. Basically, the concept is really intriguing, but I don't know if it was explored enough! I'm still really glad I played this game, though. It mellowed out my evening.
I was having performance issues whenever the ground of the basin was on screen. If I looked up, I got smooth framerates again. Other than that, fun game! I like the feedback loop of plant shrooms -> grow more shrooms -> plant more shrooms, and I also really like the choice between using mushrooms as fuel or spreading them out as defenses.
Hold on a minute, I just spent 72 hours programming! Ah, I guess several more can't hurt
WONDERFUL game! I love the idea, I love the execution, it's fun to fiddle with and has a great tone. The music, sound effects, and art mesh well to create a sense of unease and wrongness, it's just so cool! I had to stop playing after the third level (with the quilt) because I couldn't lift up the newspaper to reach the button under it, but that does not diminish how much fun I had with this game. LOVE IT! Oh, also the audio when you win is insanely, insanely loud. It's a little rough :P
I really liked the atmosphere: No music, clacky typewriter sounds (I think that's what that was!), and a shadowy not-so-great flashlight. Felt awesome! I just found the gameplay a little frustrating, which I think was the point. I loved spending a little lonely time in silence, jetting around the place. Great job!
I liked the art a lot, it reminds me of that flash game series The Visitor. Gameplay was fun! I think it would have been ok with a goal of 10 aliens, though. 30 was a biiit of a grind.
The sound design in this one is top notch. The way the music deepens when you walk into the back room, the sharp sound when you hit the minigame perfectly. I also think it's just generally well implemented: it seems like the counters only go up when the blood actually reaches that part of the process, which makes the blood shooting through pipes all the more interesting to watch. The character animation is great, and overall the tone reminds me of Haunt the House in the best ways!
The AI was pretty resilient, so with that as your goal you definitely achieved it! More sound effects would have helped a ton - sometime the enemy backcapped one of my settlements and I didn't notice until it started attacking my other ones lol. There's also a music volume slider in the settings, but I didn't hear any music. Did that just not make the cut or did I install it wrong? Overall, fun game! I played it a couple times and left on a win (let's not discuss the other times)
I love tetris so much and this is a genuinely super interesting version of it!
Hi! I think your game embed is broken - we had this issue when we initially uploaded too. If you have "data caching" enabled in your project settings, the embed on ldjam.com probably won't work. In Unity, go to Edit -> Project Settings. In the project settings window, click the "Player" section on the left side. There's a set of tabs at the bottom half of that menu; click the third one, it should say something about "WebGL" when you do. Data caching and the compression style are in there! DataCachingDisable.png
I really enjoyed the concept! The character designs are really weird and evocative - I'd love to see more, or see evolutions as they combine. Generally, I just wanted more. More UI, more explanation text, more money! The battles sometimes dragged long, though. If my team and the enemy team had a healer, I had no way of targeting the enemy healer so my summons would just keep smacking the healed unit. I would have really liked being able to attack with my own mage or something like that. Cool game!
Super cute game - love the silly dance poses and the various creatures. The concept is solid and really fits the theme, and I really like the glowing outline art style. I ran into some bugs, like getting stuck in the invocation ritual or not being able to get a new assignment after helping one customer, but they tended to go away if I was patient. The squeaky toy sample in the music was ridiculous, I enjoyed it a lot :)
And in case you didn't know, rating other people's games makes the Ludum Dare algorithm bump your game up and show it to other people! If you don't rate anyone, you won't get rated much at all. Good luck to you guys!
Wonderful, I'll go play it again!
Hey! I think your LD web embed is broken - this is pretty normal, cause there are some obscure settings you need to change for it to work. If you go to Edit -> Project Settings -> Player, at the bottom there's a section with 4 tabs. The third tab has WebGL settings, and in there you need to disable "data caching" and make sure the compression algorithm is one of two options. If you do that, then rebuild your game, it will almost certainly work on the LD website! This happens to me every jam :PDataCachingDisable.png
The game was wonderful, one of my favorites this jam! The mechanics with manipulating the orb were especially interesting and strange. It reminded me of Tainted Jacob from the Binding of Isaac, with the "this is your strongest weapon, it follows you and it can also ruin you" sort of thing going on. The story was engaging enough that it kept me curious and playing when I felt discouraged by losing memories a lot, and the great music contributed a ton. Overall, phenomenal game!
Absolutely BANGER art
It's definitely still pretty fun! Give yourself a chance, you don't have to sell yourself short in the description. The tower you can build is very satisfying, and making a tower defense where players can edit the terrain is a pretty crazy system to implement. The only TD I can think of that did that was the Gemcraft series, and they forced players to leave a path open so they didn't have to make the walls destructible. There are great ideas here, and what is in the game is fully implemented from what I can tell. You did well!
Our sound designer's wifi is currently dead! He has several assets created for sounds like the bowling ball's impacts or wood breaking, but he hasn't been able to get them to us for several hours. We'll patch them in the moment we get them!
EDIT: I have the assets and a build is in the works! Loyal fans, stay tuned! O7
SECOND EDIT: The build I uploaded this morning has the new sounds! I just forgor to update this comment again lol
@bearcage hahaha, I considered tutorializing the "put down" button but then realized that forcing people to figure that out themselves would drastically increase rates of amusing messes. Same thing with telling the player how to check their objectives last - I wanted them to mess around first, and hopefully have fun/find something silly to do on the way. Super proud of how it turned out, and thanks for the feedback!
long lost cousin @coffie ????
the path of a butler is a truly sisyphusean task. Not every soul is prepared for the battle, the internal turmoil, the philosophical war of taking cookies out of the oven. @hardlyquinn I understand your fall in the line of battle and will remember you as the dear soldier of cooking you were. amen, and bon appetit.
@swerky you are banned from my kitchen wtf
@enad96 it's honest work and somebody's got to do it
@rex240 The music wasn't selected, it was made! Every track was made by our composer. And yeah, seeing that the low content has been the primary complaint I can't help but feel at least some responsibility. I was the main organizational force and lead designer. It feels like it was on me to help us allocate our resources more effectively, and there was definitely some waste as a result of us not hammering down exactly what we were going to do early on. Because we iterated and cut ideas, things like animations and sound effects were made that didn't wind up getting used. I feel really bad about that, because I liked them so much but I wasn't going to force them into the game to the detriment of its overall quality.
@tricky-fat-cat that was VERY intentional - we prioritized creating a fun sandbox to fool around in and populating it with lots of bespoke and/or destructive objects. To try and encourage people to play in it, we delayed giving them a clear "win condition" in the hopes that they'd have fun breaking things, stacking things, and experimenting and continue to be interested in that through the objectives.
The task list was short but over the course of the jam we realized we were having fun just ruining the environment so we emphasized the environment. I still get distracted when I come back to play the game, lol. If I had to change something, I honestly think I'd obfuscate the tasks *more*. I want people to have to respond to the game's systems with flippancy and mischief - making the objectives clear cut seems to have lead a lot of people to beeline the objectives and go "oh game's over that was short."
We're likely going to expand this game in the future, since we built it to be scalable. My priorities are probably more interactive objectives (responses to using poison in the mixing bowl, needing to put the full mixing bowl in the oven, laying the table with a very loose definition of cutlery and plates, etc.) and more natural controls (the ability to push and pull objects while holding them, rotating them, things breaking far less when you're just pulling them off of shelves). I'm not sure a long list of objectives is what makes this kind of game good, so much as active and responsive objectives.
Tl;Dr - I want the objectives to be hidden so people are experimental in trying to find them.
@heretic Octodad and I am Bread were maybe the two first direct game references I pulled on to communicate the tone we were going for to the team. Overcooked was another one, we wanted that tone of sickly sweet perfect familial environment that you do very callous destructive things in, played for comedy. It's kind of an honor to be compared to octodad!
@dissonance-generator you hit the nail on the head 😅. The initial pitch was "alright, let's have you play AS the guy who gets summoned, and do tasks to the letter but not the spirit." GreatOT pointed out that while that fits the theme in writing, it doesn't integrate it into gameplay. If/when we expand the game, I'd like to make the summoning items more relevant, if not necessary. But for the purpose of this jam, it let us set tone and include fun silly items without putting a saw or a bowling ball in the kitchen for some reason.
There is still pre-spawned poison, though. What can I say, some people stock marmite in their home.
@tricky-fat-cat Are you talking about the hand crosshair obscuring what you're looking at, then? Because that makes sense, yeah.
My crippling runescape addiction lead me to skip multiple levels! Had to lock in and come back. Fun game, the art is super cute and I'm a sucker for rhythm games. I wish the visuals of the gameplay elements were a little spiced up, though! More interesting sprites for the notes and more effects when you hit them would have gone a long way.
@pseudonclide Well I never lost so I wouldn't know B)
But I think having more presence on the screen in general for the core gameplay elements would be good. More custom/stylized sprites for the letters coming onto the screen and something stylized for the place where they "strike." I'd never thought of it before, but I think this is why most rhythm games of this type give the player a "highway." It gives the oncoming notes a sense of fitting in with the rest of the scene, where they feel abstract in this game. I think it only really sticks out because the personality and art of the other elements is so good - the lightning when you miss a note is hilarious, and so is the sprite for a dead summoner. And the dance moves as you play are awesome, as well as the expanding sprites over the course of the game. So please don't take this as an overall negative perception - I loved your game! I just think the UI definitely could have fit in better and been flashier!
oh I also love the "heh" face when you win lol
@pseudonclide With UI elements in Unity games, you can lock them to always stay the same size by changing their Canvas Scaler component to "Scale with Screen Size," and then entering the resolution you developed the game at! LockUIScaling.png
I'm a sucker for card games, and this is no exception. I had to find a resolution where I could see all the buttons and most of the cards, but from there I had a great time trying out different orders and strategies. I wish there was more mana generation in the deck, or your mana per turn escalated with each turn, but that might not be a good design idea. I just always find myself wishing I could make crazier and crazier decks in card games, and this definitely scratched that itch.
Every day I wake up and take a step towards becoming this wizard
Love the warioware homage. The variety in microgames is pretty amazing for 72 hours, and I love the little punchlines - the skeleton, the goat, all of it was great! Especially with the mouse-drag microgames which is new to me. I haven't played any warioware DS games if there are any.
I agree with argensis - I found the summon was sometimes even a liability, since enemies would unpredictably change directions to target it over me. I struggled to survive past wave 2, since the enemies seemed to move about as fast as me and I couldn't tell if I was hitting them or not. I kept moving closer to try and hit them since they didn't seem to be dying.
LET'S GOOOO TYPING OF THE DEAD GAME!!! Generally, one of the most cohesive entries I've seen in this entire jam. Lots of it all fits together - the music, the UI, the enemy and environment art, and it all feels high quality. I really, really enjoyed this game, and it immediately got me wondering how you would expand it given more time. I think that's always the mark of a great jam game!
@holysparks He's mostly saying "magic has no effect on me"/variations on "u suck + u stink + ratio!"
I think the choice to make it a command-line text entry game fits the tone of your game immaculately. The pacing of the messages responding to my commands was rough, though. It was hard to tell when the game had actually acknowledged my commands and done something in response or if it was an automatic event from the game. I think your concept was cool, and I would have really liked to see it fully fleshed out! Especially if you still had WORK while you were working on this, I wouldn't feel bad about what you put together at all.
I really like the art, and the tone and theming generally reminds me of FAITH. I was impressed by the enemy pathfinding. Whenever I try to set up enemy pathfinding there are innumberable issues with clipping through walls or not finding the player, and I didn't see anything like that. I also really liked how the salt seemed to be placed in ways to prevent the late-game portals from pouring enemies down onto people in the first couple rooms. Left me wanting more - more enemies, more mechanics, more! Which I think is always a hallmark of a good jam game. Strong entry!
Hey, your ldjam.com unity embed seems to be broken! If you disable Data Caching in your project settings and rebuild, that will probably fix the issue. LDjam.com has kind of weird conditions for unity embeds to work. DataCachingDisable.png
This game climbed into my brain and took it over. Absolutely great. I played until I had hundreds of units and the game started lagging. This is absolutely my jam!
Fun puzzle game! Very chip's challenge.
Neat game! Cool concept, I liked it :) Impressively fully realized for a compo game!
When the sheep started scattering, it got pretty fun! I would recommend increasing the scatter for a little more variety. I feel like it'd be really satisfying to gather up sheep from all across the screen.
Also, holy cow the whistles are loud and high pitched. I'm sure it's realistic but it hurt my ears :(
Love the tone! The concept is great, I like the oddball style. The gameplay would benefit greatly from randomization of colors and letters over the course of a round to avoid feeling monotonous, but overall great game!
This one's a little rough. What does it have to do with signals? I jumped around a bit and collected some stuff, but nothing really happened. Platforming was slippery... I dunno. The character model is well drawn, and I like the 90s style 2D sprites for every rotational angle!
Very cute! The control scheme is really creative, and the humor is on point. My only issue is that the control scheme is also really random, meaning I had to spam things a lot to get even remotely close to what I wanted to do. I think I would have had more fun if I had crazy combinations that let me control one bird directly up-down-left-right, and then later in the game my memory was challenged by a time limit.
As is, the tone, style, creativity and humor all MORE than make up for a slightly lacking gameplay experience. Overall, very strong!
Ants :)
@steven-garberg The ant movement is synced to the BPM of the music. They pause for a moment on every downbeat, to try and make for a satisfying sort of synced movement across the colony. Our sound designer was honestly incredible, it was my first time working with her. She made parameters for the time signature, BPM, and an event that triggered the frame any beat occurred. It was super interesting and fun making a living soundscape with her!
Unfortunately, it suffers somewhat in the web build with the limited memory allocated to the game. With higher ant counts, the sound starts to fall apart in the web build. If people are interested, I can make a desktop build and a download link for a higher fidelity version!
@seong Our first concept was that gathering food would be a basic numerical affair. Ants would have been "assigned" to a food source, and each ant assigned is +X food per second. But our goal was to have ants make their own decisions, while the player "signalled" them to try and guide them towards *good* decisions. So we needed fuzzier, less predictable ants, which meant that calculating food income rates got complicated.
With the Ludum Dare, it's always a fight what you manage to fit in and what you don't. The thing I wish we had had more time for was tutorialization and UI elements in the game space to help you guys understand what's going on. But yeah, your ants starve when the total food cost of feeding your ants is less than how much food you have. It's skewed to avoid a death spiral because ants that are holding food are never selected for starvation deaths.
I'll look into how we can tweak numbers for a balance change along with any bug fixes we squeak into another build sometime this week. We probably need to look at whether there's a bug preventing the objective items from being interacted with.
@deathandrepublic the food sources never run out. We didn't want to create a stressful pressure where you have to complete the game before all the food sources on the map run out and every ant starves. Instead, they have a limit to how fast you can pull food from each food source to encourage spreading out to as many as possible.
Very moody. Love the atmosphere, love the full window perspective embedded in a website. The sound design's great, overall very cool. Now, I didn't understand what I was supposed to be doing. I think perhaps I wasn't supposed to eat every scrap of metal on my satellite and feed it to my tether? Either way, I had fun bouncing around, catching scrap and playing with physics. Good game!
This is incredible lol, the art is implemented super well, the gameplay is tricky but pretty engaging and the graphics are awesome. Made me laugh constantly.
yeah I fucked every animal on noah's ark, what's it to you tough guy
Very silly game. Short sweet shooter platformer. Making this by yourself is nothing to sneeze at. Great job!
I'm a sucker for incremental games, so I enjoyed this one. I like the FOV as a point of scaling, and it's all well-implemented! I enjoyed it a lot, and finished it.
Took me a whiiiiile of slapping her over the head with lettuce while I waited for her to get back to that one piece of shoe leather she was eating. After a while though, the dumbass waiter realized the guy who had knocked five glasses over, written sos in his fries, and dropped his fork every time it was given to him was in trouble.
Cute game, good art, would have loved to see where else you'd go with it!
Incredible looking game, truly outstanding art. The audio design is also great, and it's very somber and immersive in tone. The gameplay is pretty simple, but that does not detract from the game being an outstanding solo work, let alone a FIRST AND SOLO work. Keep at it!
Hi! My team member is unable to play your game in Opera GX, and it might be because your game has data caching enabled. If you haven't already, check your project settings.
Click Edit at the top of the editor, then Project settings at the bottom. Click the "Player" category out of the categories on the left of Project Settings. Scroll down to the section labelled "Publishing Settings," then uncheck the box next to "Data Caching."
This has screwed up my embeds before, I hope this helps!
I'll play your game now (it works for me on firefox :D), and leave another comment in a few minutes!
Cool concept! I like the idea of having to define the space in which you can fight, and the mixing and matching of colors to enable different loadouts is especially cool.
...uuuunfortunately, I think I got softlocked? I wound up in a canyon immediately after unlocking the blue signal. I found some pylons, but I couldn't jump on them to get over the ledges that had me trapped. There weren't any doors or anything, and even after a few minutes of searching I couldn't find any way out. Was I missing something?
Oh! Because the wall was magenta, I assumed I needed magenta signal to plant a bomb on it and break it
Lol, cute game with excellent art. Makes me think of classic oddball flash games. I'll come back round when we've published to give you a rating!