PhotoBound by PIXEL^3 2014-12-09T22:33:00
Interesting mechanic of moving the camera with the character. Feels frustrating when you don't see how to solve the puzzle.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → ketura
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Mut-ant | jam | 1426 | 3.40 | 3.27 | 3.57 | 3.55 | 2.75 | 2.25 | 2.73 | |||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | Spam Space To Exist | jam | 665 | 3.35 | 3.45 | 3.53 | 3.88 | 2.82 | 2.74 | 2.42 | 3.02 | |
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | 👥 | 1st / 3rd Last Word | jam | 758 | 3.30 | 3.05 | 3.77 | 4.07 | 2.72 | 2.50 | 2.77 | ||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Pathogen | jam | 618 | 3.16 | 3.00 | 3.21 | 2.58 | 3.16 | 3.44 | 39 | |||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Tanks for Playing | jam | |||||||||||
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | You're the Boss | jam | |||||||||||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Snowman's Revenge | jam | 199 | 3.62 | 3.72 | 2.97 | 3.34 | 3.43 | 3.69 | 48 |
Interesting mechanic of moving the camera with the character. Feels frustrating when you don't see how to solve the puzzle.
Like you say, not much of a game without a goal from the resources, etc. A good solid start, though. I would include the ability to place multiple things after clicking so you don't have to keep going back to the menu.
Thanks! I'm pretty surprised it turned out as well as it did, lol.
The lack of a score is the biggest complaint, and is quite valid. I wish I hadntve had to work today, or it would have definitely been included. Oh well. It will be the first thing implemented if we develop it further.
No I do not. It doesn't flag it on my computer. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I'll see if I can find out what's happening.
Oh, wait. If you're talking about the "Uncommon Download Warning", there's probably nothing I can do about that unless the game gets popular.
@elemel: no we didn't, heh. The lights idea was taken essentially wholesale from Five Nights at Freddy's, and we didn't implement it fast enough to reevaluate the idea itself much.
@Valon: the game starts at 12 and ends at 6. You only hear what time it is when the clock tower rings.
Ah, so it's a multispectrum Ikaruga, nice! The ice power is a bit hard to actually regenerate with since it keeps bullets at bay. Add some audio and baby, you got a real game goin.
Fun enough, though I have to question the decisions to make the paddle spherical and the movement acceleration, which makes movement frustrating and decreases one's tolerance for what could otherwise be played indefinitely.
This is a very...different idea, lol. Was great fun, though more keyboard controls to allow faster interaction would be nice.
This is great, probably better with touch screen controls than a mouse, but the idea is solid. I would add some sort of visual element to make it more obvious what spheres are connected, like two different shades of each color for "connected" and "not connected" to take out the guesswork.
This is an interesting concept, though the balance is woeful. It seems far too much time was spent on things of negligible value (idle animations, hell, animations at all) instead of on basic balance. I wasn't able to get to the end on easy, the requirement to juggle all six sides was interesting but far too difficult based on the random nature of the enemy spawns and the very low frequency of the brown powerups that power everything.
Still, if it were polished and balanced, this could make a great game.
"Playable" for some definition of "Playable". The contrast between the player and the background made me think I had a smudge on my monitor, and the crippling lag you point out makes it hard to do anything meaningful. Forcing a reload of the page to start over leaves testers with little drive to keep trying, never put obstacles to restarting.
Interesting difficulty screen. Kind of wish the ASCII level was actually gridlocked instead of just a reskin, though. The snowflakes blocking landing areas seems to ramp up the difficulty very quickly, as moving left and right is monstrously difficult, so you're left just waiting for a good spawn.
The screen's a bit cramped, else dodging would be easier. Some sounds are annoying (wall hit) while others that would be useful are missing (portal generation). I also have beef with the three-shot upgrade, since it feels like a downgrade in a lot of ways.
Fun enough, though.
I actually remember that screenshot showing up on the feed! Cool to see it completed.
This is an awesome concept, and pretty well executed. My one beef is not being able to manipulate the order cards are played in, which is what gives Fluxx its strength. How else is it determined when you play "Play 2" and "Play 1" in a single turn?
Overall, though, love the concept, and it's executed well for the compo.
Ehh. Things move fast enough that it may as well be completely randomized each tick.
Taking dissimilar mechanics from two different genres does not a solid game make. You took the most annoying parts of both (random, unskippable fights and tedious platforming) and it ended up about as well as you'd expect.
Also, never utilize a joke character as a regular entity. Jokes get old reeeeally fast at that rate.
This....has a lot of problems. The incredibly glacial pace, the horribly random nature of the goal, and bad execution of the drops themselves (I kept having my artifacts count jump all over the place, from 9 to 18 to 11 and back). Judging by the intro, you spent more time on the backstory than you did on the mechanics. Next time, get a game and then come up with a backstory, not the other way around.
Much Meta. So Topical. Wow.
Not being able to shoot the enemies as they're growing is a pain, and no HUD is an oversight. Good start for a game?
Double jump is annoying, as others have mentioned. The randomly generated rooms sometimes resulted in sections that could not be jumped past, like a series of sections required to get upwards that were only 1x1 spaces, and thus too small to jump in. Nice concept, though.
Fun enough for a little shooter. The three-hit thing is a bit much, I would prefer something more flexible (such as 3 hits within X amount of time to lose). The orthogonal shooting makes it difficult to utilize the powerup.
Eh. Not a game, more a tech demo, if that. Controls are nonintuitive.
This is a great concept. Something fleshed out to have more events and longer missions (with the ability to ignore transmissions as suggested) would really be a fun game.
I have a bit of beef with the fact that bad morale results in losing. It would be better as a modifier of the other stats, not outright catastrophic failure.
The food should be differentiated from the fuel by lower rate of consumption, methinks. Otherwise you have two resources that are basically the same and never interact with one another.
Overall though, quite good!
Sorry to hear that, wijnen. I don't have any actual Mac or Linux boxes to test these on, I just built them from Unity in the hopes they would work. If I hear of any more problems I'll take it down.
So this is actually kind of a brilliant concept, changing between different grid types. The controls need work; clicking on each tile to advance is a pain, I would have preferred wasdqe.
What the hell am I looking at.
This. This is what people mean when they say "art game". That was a trip and a half.
At first I thought the concept of shifting the rooms by pressing a button was a bit weak, but the room where you walk around the pillar...fantastic. This is seriously a good mechanic, and you ought to explore it more in the future.
The ending was a complete trip. I assume you *purposefully* removed the background buffering? lol. It fit right in anyway, if it WAS just a bug
Ah. So seems you should have focused on getting the gameplay to work, rather than the crowd and the dance floor. You've put dessert before dinner, and while it looks nice, this is essentially just a screensaver if there's no actual gameplay mechanics.
So this is kind of a neat concept, but the focus on speed doesn't let the strategic elements of shrinking and growing be a factor, since when you're going so fast you just want to be as narrow as possible. I would eliminate the speed focus altogether and just have interesting puzzles.
Also your dialog and character focus is annoying. Dying so much results in me abusing my poor space bar to skip all the dialog again. And you have like a novel in your description that I didn't bother to read because this is a game jam entry with like ten minutes of play, why do I need to spend the same amount of time digesting backstory? Just focus on the mechanics.
Nope, not getting out of my chair to walk a third of a mile for a jam entry. Nice try. The voiceover on the menu options was kind of weird.
Instantly needing to restart just because you've been caught is a pet peeve mechanic of mine, and it's no better in this one. The movement is really clunky; why would I ever walk when I could sprint? Why did I need to get the eyeballs?
Oh, and I wouldn't waste any time on the writing. The mechanics needed polishing, and quite frankly the "story" was distracting and very, very poorly written. Would have been preferable to have nothing at all in that respect.
Graphics and audio are alright, but gameplay trumps all. Make that your focus.
Kind of a buggy mess; it crashed on me once and not knowing the backspace button I thought it had frozen. The controls that you have listed on this page need to be listed within the game itself...and some of them are nonstandard at best. Why can't I hit esc to exit a screen? The answers to questions should have been answerable with the mouse, I mean, you obviously had hit detection in for the full-screen scenes.
Not a bad premise for a game, but I would have played up the different identities and abandoned the security questions altogether...why are the guards grilling members of the household?
Nice graphics, but the gameplay is confusing. Things seem to hit me when they're nowhere near, and the amount of timing required to hit things while they're green is pretty brutal. The amount of health you have left doesn't seem to be communicated, either.
This runs into issues when both players are jamming keys with input being lost. Also apples can spawn on rocks, that's no good.
Competitive snake is a good idea though. Good execution otherwise, I think.
Oh, the sides of the screen taking health feels a bit unfair. Maybe wrapping would have been better?
So Ikaruga as a platformer. That help screen needs to be mandatory, lol. The spawn rate is waaaay too high.
Overall not bad, though.
Runs well, and your puzzles nicely used the toolset you gave the player. R being suicide was a rather obnoxious surprise. In the first room, the ceiling walk wasn't very obvious (that you had to hold up), and I ended up discovering the other forms on my own and running past. Not being able to morph in mid-air, except for the invuln form, was obnoxiously inconsistent.
Overall, not bad, though. Good work.
Nice visuals, but the core is a bit weird. Why does the Viking exist? It's faster to get around as the cow, and the dragon obviously lets you jump high, but this guy just seems to exist to remind me why I should be in some other form.
I do enjoy that your camera work actually helps me feel larger or smaller depending on form.
Kinda laggy.
That....is a lot of clicking. Not a terrible concept, but oh man does it require work on the index finger. It's also a bit random, in that you have to just kind of brute force large amounts of each of the starting elements before figuring anything out. Nice art though.
Frankly it's broken. Is it a platformer or a top-down space game? After the fourth time attempting to use it as a platformer and getting punished by the gravity turning sideways I had to call it.
Mouse sensitivity was so high I had to manually adjust my mouse down for it to be playable.
These "puzzles" are pretty whack: come at a shrinking door from a random angle, open random tiles, pick up pennies everywhere, and the numbered door puzzle I just went through doors randomly until it worked (admittedly there were a lot of places you might have hidden the code and I just didn't look). Puzzles should be about figuring out the rules of a world, not random encounters.
Visuals are pretty decent (tho the handprint decal was overused).
Good mood, but it seems like past a certain point it's ripped enough holes through floors that you can barely outrun it via elevator.
Also I get that the point is to keep the monster unseen, but even a little bit of wall-cracking animation or something as it shows up would be a huge improvement to just "you died".
The dialog didn't really do it for me, but I have to admit, the moment where you try to go left and then spam the keys to move right was well done. There's way too much talking. I get that there's need for a bit of setup for your particular implementation of the theme, but it's a bit too much. Also not sure you can actually get passed all the saws (is that a vacuum sound?); there's a part where the timing of the horizontal saws seems to make it impossible to actually continue.
Game gets reeeally laggy, and I'm not sure making the player hit "action" before each throw is a good idea, it messes with the pace a lot. The actual gameplay is as solid as any bubble bobble clone tho.
I felt like most of the time I had to resort to a sort of guess'n'check strategy; I knew the length of the next move and there are only so many options, so any clever thinking is going to get beat out by trying the 3-4 choices for each move. Visual and audio experience is decent.
Oh, and there's an issue where you don't have enough horizontal space on the screen to rotate fully in both directions; this is particularly annoying for the loop control as you can't simply reverse in the other direction without changing your input.
A decent idea but some of those prompts are roooough. Even "Start With" had me banging my head against the monitor, I even gave up and it wasn't until I came here to write a comment and typed it out that I realized it was referencing the theme. Going back there were a few other fill-in-the-blanks that were a bit esoteric, such as the one in the screenshot; the fact that you had to put a hint in the scene (which I thought was a hint at first and not a verbatim answer). Needs a lot of focus testing to get those puzzles right I think.
The rest was well done tho.
Windows build worked.
Clearly didn't care about the theme, but that's fine. Some of the levels are a bit much, the ⌘ in particular. It's possible to get stunlocked right at the beginning and it takes some time to be able to move.
Overall not really a fan, it's at the same time a bit too simplistic for a three day contest and too overdesigned/difficult on the level design side.
Web version worked fine for me.
I have to say, this is a rich get richer game in that the starting handling is absolutely ludicrous. Maybe speed would have been a better risk/reward thing to be constantly boosting? Still, once a few blobs are had it's easier. The various triggers are visible, I don't think that was intentional and it made for some confusion until I realized they didn't block you. Crowd reaction noises (I think reacting to movement?) felt satisfying.
This was surprisingly engaging; I first thought it was going to be a drag with the slots but then realized this is basically a deckbuilder with little control over what cards you have. Biggest complaint is that the reusable combos are wasted if you've killed all the things they remove; combos are rough and that feels bad to get a combo you can't meaningfully use. It's even worse for the tiger king and storm combos, since you don't always control when you get their effect and it feels worse to pass on a big combo than to use it suboptimally.
Over all, a solid concept that could do with more options, combos, and content. But not bad.
Solid controls, and I like the combination of the seamless overworld and dialog interactions. Hitboxes on those confidence sprites is a bit low, tho, it's easy to accidentally breeze past them when it looked like they were getting hit.
The wall-running and so on feels really satisfying, but there's a reason that precision platforming has such a poor track record in first-person games, and the slipperiness doesn't help any either. There also seems to be a missing hitbox on the two doors before the pawn? I had to give up on that part after not seeing how to progress.
Ehhh. The yellow light being in the mix with red and green was a decent enough twist, tho it resulted in me just trying random combinations until something worked. Needing to change rooms to see if the combo worked was obnoxious, too. The space bar was non-obvious, especially when the button looks like it's recessed into the floor (which should then be weight-activated).
Also a bad thing that I had to kill it with task manager to exit after finishing. That's a no-no.
@mruniverse try ramming :P But that's on us for not making it more clear.
It sort of feels like the whole jam was spent on what little visuals there are. The concept is barely there, and the lack of feedback when it crosses the line makes it hard to tell if we're doing what you expect, and makes it even harder to want to try and even get the thing around that whoooole big ol orbit. Sorry man, but it's just not there.
Not a bad concept, but I think the controls should be in the game itself. Cute art.
Phones and harmonicas not being able to rotate in spite of taking the same number of slots is sort of obnoxious. The rest is done well enough, tho there's a lack of content and it feels like there's far too few people to talk to with how low the success rate is (tho perhaps that's just part of the point?)
I do have to ask tho, what _is_ that sphere collision doing? It's a very pleasant interaction that doesn't feel glitchy or accidental, about as smooth as you would expect such a thing to be.
A decent enough game loop, but it really should go to a 'game over' screen on death to let you restart without having to mess with closing the window and restarting (and the web version totally breaks after you die the first time, even on reload). The blaster shot is waaaay too ear-piercing, and with no pause or easy restart it felt too dangerous to reach for my system volume.
Ah, battlebots. Good homage. Mechanics are competent enough, took a few tries but was ultimately successful. It's a good difficulty curve for a five minute game, so kudos on getting that done well. Should have let each saw get attached to a different random face of the robot tho.
Frankly I actually quite like the low-poly style. With some better animations, it could almost stand on its own. I feel like the combat was more or less a chore here; sit around a corner and snipe/stunlock everyone until you could get to the next recording. I did greatly appreciate the particle effect that leads you to the next one once you've killed everything, tho, that is a great touch.
@aliha You have to include everything that Unity outputs, which should include your game's exe, a UnityPlayer.dll, and a few folders as well.
Also TextMeshPro is one of those included things, I don't think it disqualifies from the compo. Disqualifications are seldom for tools and more for content. You can't use other people's art or sounds, but you can absolutely use the programs they've written to generate art or sounds, and no one is going to complain that you used a plugin that makes text look slightly better.
This really needs some in-game guidance. I can sort of see where things are going (now that I've read the comments), but even just putting what's in the comments in a drop-down screen would help loads.
I appreciate that the enemy colors line up with the powers of the orbs, but some on-screen indications of how to use them would be nice for the learning curve. It's also obnoxious that blue orbs give one shot instead of like 3. Still, tight controls, fun enough for what it is.
This is actually quite slick. I'm not a huge fan of the hunger getting snuck in as an unlockable, but it is what it is. The stunlocking on the various lasers for the most part negates any advantage to having HP most of the time, too, which made that upgrade feel a bit superfluous.
The movement itself is quite polished however and feels satisfying to move around with.
Having the button for "toggle flashlight" right next to the button for "restart level" resulted in a lot of frustrating restarts in the middle of frantic gameplay.
Good job with the audio, particularly the random unit noises.
First time I played I made the mistake of buying the merchant stand for 0 gold and accidentally winning? Then saw the reviews here and figured I'd missed something so I went back. The idea of trading up to something is decent, but there's a lot of busy work in talking to everyone with very little context of who wants what and what your goal should be. Good job on the visuals tho.
Well, there's a scene. Looks like a decent enough foundation, but between what I assume is a vertical phone resolution and the lack of progression, there's not much to rate. Good effort for what it is, tho.
404 on itch.io. Message me and I'll rerate.
Never mind, I saw the windows download link. You are aware that github has a dedicated Releases section for putting a zip of just the game? https://github.com/NicholasParry/LD45-Jam/releases . Needing to go back to the root of the project and download the entire repo on a page you didn't link is a pretty high bar for something like this, I'd advise fixing that.
While baiting the user into hitting esc is cute, it makes it look like the game is broken. Jump is pretty floaty and hard to control. On the 'kill them all' stage I missed the jump and fell right in the gap, and had to force kill the program from task manager. At this point I figured I had done my due diligence. Keep trying, my man.
Not bad. Frankly I think the player's speed ought to be much higher; it's hard to get more than two or three crates into your fort area during the time allotted.
lol there's no collider on the back wall of the first room.
After restarting, I have to say the only thing scarier than the audio track is the graphics. The wires are pretty hard to tell are wires, and after fixing two wires in the second room it wouldn't let me proceed.
I think there was a decently well executed mystery thing going on, but the actual walking around and interacting with the world part leaves a lot to be desired.
Good concept and execution of the main mechanic, but the level design needs to hold the player's hand a bit more until they're used to walking around, I think. I spent the whole time wandering and then died on the chain link fence when I got too close. More indication or hints of where to go would be nice.
Still. Good unique and competently executed concept; the rest is just details.
Cute and striking art style.
Level design was surprisingly well done, the 'huh?' moment at the door after the gun was great. Camera zooming back to the start when you die is headache-inducing. Had to give up at the wings, the controls are just far too floaty for that space. Oh, and the second moving platform in the first area doesn't seem to always let you jump.
Still, competent enough for what it was.
The win condition for each level was a bit obscure, and for how tight the shots need to be the gun projectile is really too big. I would have also liked a display for the food available that made it more clear which way to scroll, since your menu was always changing. Fun and well executed tho.
Game froze on me twice on opening. Third time I was able to move around, but the camera is reaaaally not calibrated for the mouse. Was constantly having a hard time keeping it looking straight. Eventually I fell through the ground and fell forever, which was around when I finally started to gather what the core conceit is. Ah well.
@gavin-camlin Ryzen 1700X, 32GB DDR4 RAM, Radeon RX 580. Three monitors, main one the game ran on is 1440p.
This is an interesting dual-game interaction. I do feel there are some things that are a bit cheap: the dungeon locations seem like all you can do is memorize their locations, and without the option to look below you a lot of the worm placements in the dungeon are gotchas which, again, require you to just try, fail, and memorize where all the enemies are. Good platformers play fair in that they teach you about a pattern before slamming you with it in various ways, and this lacked that.
This game oozes style. The audio of the root digging is really well done, and the flailing run animation is great. I also enjoyed the route tracing, as it made retreading after a cheap death that much easier, and did a lot to make sure that, while cheap, those deaths were as minimally frustrating as possible.
@marcio-miranda Thanks! Yeah, the difficulty bounced back and forth between "brain-dead easy" and "frantic" near the end of development, and I think it's still towards the "frantic" side. You can't infuse items of the same level (so a basic Part and a tier 1 Gene won't do anything), but I should have just allowed it anyway to avoid confusion. You can always right-click to discard a card, even if it's put down on the board. There was a tutorial planned which would have gone over all of these issues one at a time, but alas.
@ava-rae Thanks! I'm pretty pleased with the mechanics themselves, even if the polish left something to be desired. I recorded a bunch of audio to use when I wasn't at my desk, but sadly didn't have the time to import it. It would have definitely improved things.
@madalaski :D Your comment fills me with joy. I definitely think that audio cues for the different actions would have made it much easier to track even if one wasn't paying close attention. I also found myself wanting the ability to 'lock' cards in the hand and add a "discard all unlocked" button to reduce the carpal tunnel, and keyboard shortcuts would have fallen under the same QoL improvements.
I don't know if I could come up with a game based just around this concept, but there *is* a more complicated RTS-lite that I've been considering that uses many of the same concepts...maybe I'll take a closer look.
Thanks again!
@mark-a-pressler @adam-clayden thank you for the late reviews! Yeah, I definitely struggled to get things balanced just-so, meaning the tutorial (as always) was left in the dust. One of these jams I'll have enough time to spend a day polishing/tutorial-writing...
@solifuge wow, I think you pushed me over the edge into rankability! Thank you and everyone else who thought to donate their time to play games right at the end! I'm actually quite touched; things have been busy and I forgot to keep up, but you saved the day nonetheless.
I left a more in-depth response on your YouTube page, but it bears repeating that I'm impressed that you managed to intuit about 90% of my intent just from the gameplay, in particular noticing how you were left cognitively busy to the point that you couldn't track Anita so well (which was intentional, separate from how good the execution was).
Thank you everyone for your lovely feedback!
Took me a minute to realize I was supposed to move with wasd/arrow keys. The mouse-based interface for the instructions implied that would be the primary mode of interaction, but that was not the case.
All the resources run out at the same rate, which offers no distinction or importance. You should try to have each one tied to some other stat, such as speed or shields or resource-acquiring speed or something, to give the player a reason to care.
You put a border around the world in what's supposed to be a space game? No no no. Make it loop seamlessly (hit the top and subtly teleport to the bottom, etc) or procedurally generate more as needed.
Where's the win condition? I see a loss condition, but no *goal*. If survival is literally the only component, then there at least needs to be a score system so I can have the implicit goal of "score more".
So first off: it's beautiful. Definitely best looking game so far. The gameplay does a good job of evoking toil, but there's not really any *challenge*. You harvest far more turnips than you need, and there's no downside to rejecting the people asking you to give stuff away. Wood *almost* comes close to being a problem, but it basically comes down to doing your chores each day and you're more than set. Ended with close to a hundred turnips myself.
Honestly it could probably be "survive a week" and you would get 90% of the same experience without the IRL toil.
Also, I think the word you're looking for is "satiated", not "saturated".
Design-wise, there's some frustrating elements: the fact that all resources disappear at night (instead of just re-rolling at dawn), the fact that enemies collide with resources (meaning they build up and cause fps lag during the day), the aiming is hard, and the waves of enemies during the daytime makes it hard to actually gather resources (until you've made your base impervious). It feels like if resources despawn at night, enemies should despawn during the day.
It's really just a game of setting up a core of towers around your treasure but off the path enemies will use to get to it, and then putting spike traps on all critical paths. Eventually I just spent nights traveling around the world looking for choke points and putting traps down where they caught on corners and it eliminated the vast majority of incoming enemies easy. By day six or so I think I had it impervious, and I eventually destroyed all my spike traps to see that I slogged through to day 14.
Graphics and music are pretty good. The day/night cycle is not obvious at all, and I would have preferred a timer to the vague circle graphic we've got.
Sign says you can pet cats, can only pick them up. 2/10 would not recommend.
It's a nice juggling of mechanics, mostly related to the clouds. The attack sound effect was a bit too low-pass and hurt the ears when too many or too frequent attacks occurred. The cloud-summoning song could have stood to have been more obvious, and the tree being in danger of wilting could have used a sound effect to clue you in while you were busy fighting monsters, but all in all it came together well enough.
I fell through the floor twice randomly. The prisoner bot is also easy to accidentally knock over and thus make him move around flat on the ground, which means he gets caught on any slight threshold gaps. I would advise locking rotations on your physics and/or make the important parts kinematic so they don't have to worry about getting unnecessarily bumped.
Also, is "next mission" actually a different level, or is it just "replay"? A simple wording change would make that less annoying.
Controls are a bit slippery. The level layout suggests that you can wrap left->right or up->down, but it doesn't. I would either surround the whole level in cell wall, permit wraparound, or wrap the whole level in empty space. No sense having two visuals for the same concept. Getting stuck in the cell walls was frustrating, but once I got the hand of flying around it was a non-issue.
mechanic seems workable enough, although it seems a bit *too* simple at times. Decent idea, decent execution.
Good job on graphics, but there's little else I enjoyed here. On a repetitive game like this you need to pay close attention to how long it takes for actions to take, and each build action and roll felt like it took forever by the end. This wasn't a mix of two genres so much as a mix of two minigames. I don't know what your RPS implementation was, but it's suspicious that there were never ties; it quite felt like there was no actual play involved and you just pressed the button to see if you got a coin flip to continue. Having to individually "pick" each build action near the beginning was pointless, since the choice only matters once you get a cannon. TL;DR good art, meh design.
This is spectacular! *This* sort of thing is what we need more of in educational contexts, something that drills a skill while still being at its heart a *game*. I loved the little choices you had to make, I was pleasantly surprised that the mine and farm had *different* upgraded bonuses when I was expecting a lazy copy-paste, and the words themselves were all appropriately thematic. The graphics and audio were well done: crisp, clear, and easy on the eyes/ears. The only thing I was missing while playing was medium term management of the different resources, like if the combo for the farm took like 60 seconds to cool down then I'd be incentivized to farm while building, for example.
Amazing job tho, 4's and 5's where it counts. This should seriously be considered for fleshing out into an actual commercial title aimed at kids.
It dumps quite a bit on you and expects you to know what everything is and what it does. I guess my chosen monster starved to death without food? But I wasn't able to figure out how to purchase the food from the lab, nor how much it would have been in spite of working for a day to get souls.
The fonts are a bit much.
The "check vote" having the same sound effect as the "blow kiss" was a bit confusing. The lack of on-screen updates was a bit annoying, but I guess having it on the phone was a subjective design decision. The chaperones chasing you was a good bit of design, but other than that it's a bit of a chore.
I'm not really seeing what the second genre is. This is a shooter with RPG elements, which isn't exactly incompatible. The money was actively confusing at first; it looked like an attack as opposed to something you were picking up. The UI had bad contrast; yellow text for the money amount? Hard to see. The shop wasn't immediately obvious that it *was* a shop, and if the items I accidentally purchased were any indication, I'm not sure why ammo is a thing in a game like this.
A passable shooter, but not much else going for it.
Heh, we actually had this same idea during the brainstorm process. Glad to see someone did it. You spent a line in your instructions apologizing for not having time to write up instructions, and then wasted more time telling us that the goal of a shmup is to get far and rack up score. We know. Screens of this nature are to tell us the controls, and would have sufficed with "type words to replenish fuel, LMB to shoot, space to clear screen". There was audio on the main menu, but then it defaulted to mute in game! I almost thought you had no more audio; I'm glad I checked as it wasn't until my second play that I got to hear that great track. I only played on easy. Different difficulties is a bit much for a LD game; who's going to keep playing over and over? I would have preferred you focused on a single difficulty and didn't spend time implementing a concept that most people won't take advantage of. The game is a bit hard with no powerups and ludicrously simple with the maxed out powerup. Fuel ought to drain more the bigger gun you've got, making it a tradeoff.
The rhythm part was super duper fast, felt like I never had a chance to catch my bearings there. Also it seems to preserve my digging progress through death, not sure if that was intended.
I don't know if this is intended, but the mouse controls are horrible. I *think* it was meant that the ship follow the mouse cursor, but it was like it was exactly halfway between following the cursor and rotating with every X movement of the mouse. Needless to say, it was a frustrating time trying to even aim, let alone maneuver and shooting along with the beat. Decent idea, but this implementation just leaves me fighting the controls constantly.
You've already noticed the most glaring weaknesses, but a stealth game doesn't feel stealthy without audio. In the future, prioritize the aspects that are most core to your game's experience. Good job on what you did do with the level design, even if it was just the one. Feedback as mentioned is crucial; bringing an unprepared food should have shown some sort of error and instead of a bar should have been three dots for the pot.
This is the best game I've played so far out of this Ludum Dare. I applaud your incredible design choices; our team looked at doing a real-time/turn-based hybrid during our brainstorming but nothing we came up with was as good as this. The balance of bullets only moving on the opposite turn is genius, and the overall design space available is huge. The only thing missing is some sort of mechanic that *does* interact with your enemies during your turn besides the set-and-forget bullets, but that's more of a thing to explore when fleshing out the idea in subsequent levels. The boss was a bit lackluster since you could just keep nailing the same area over and over easily, but that's a balance issue, and everyone knows balance is out of whack in a LD.
Bravo on your design. Keep making games, for all our sake.
This is actually super fun. I loved the aesthetic, it managed to embrace the jaggyness of super old school 3D graphics, while at the same time being well-styled. The controls made the game frantic but manageable. My only complaint with the weapon was the lack of oomph or range, but it fit the idea of motorcycle jousting so I guess it gets a pass.
Well done, could probably be fleshed out into a full game very nicely.
(Loved the U L T R A graphics! Also you can't fool me; you couldn't get a GUI to work so you stuck keyboard commands where gui buttons would go, lolol)
The, ah, the gameplay doesn't make much sense. It's just sort of bouncing back and forth and hoping you bounced right without having any sort of feedback as to what you're supposed to be doing or even what you're supposed to even be *looking* for. A controls screen would have been nice; I *think* only the left and right arrow keys are used (+space to jump), but I'm not quite sure. Still, good job on getting something out there that runs. Don't stop on account of old farts like us that like to poke holes in everything we find.
This was very confusing. I get that art games don't have to condescend themselves to be playable fun, but this was a bit out there. The giant was confusing, the flare gun (?) was hard to use, the distances walked were pretty far for how little there was to actually see, and there lacked any real direction or point to it.
It didn't literally crash tho, so congrats on getting something that technically worked.
Game's a bit hard, even on the easiest setting, but most of that is in grasping the odd turning and boosting controls. The extremely limited shooting feels restrictive rather than tactical, and it feels inconsistent that everything advances time except for changing thrust. Still, good quality of audio and graphics, and it feels like it's just lacking some polish with the controls.
I'm a mean bastard who has left very blunt feedback on every game I've rated. Don't hold back; if you see some issue let 'er rip in the comments below.
Also, if the mac or linux build doesn't actually work, please let us know so we can take it down.
@kevin-mooney Yeah, we came to the conclusion that we tried to hard to get an idea that satisfied the theme as well as possible and in the process lost somewhat in the fun department. As an FYI, tho, your gun doesn't overheat, but it shuts down after getting shot too much by enemies. This only reinforces the fact that the feedback was suboptimal, however.
Was going to review, but it's taking forever for google to zip it in your drive. You should link an already zipped game instead of a folder with the files in it.