Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → KJScott
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Bad Rooms | extra | |||||||||||
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Defend 'till the end | extra | |||||||||||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Space Station Alpha | compo | 477 | 3.47 | 3.12 | 3.42 | 3.39 | 3.71 | 3.17 | 3.52 | |||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | CMY Invaders | jam | 157 | 3.68 | 3.47 | 3.53 | 3.83 | 3.26 | |||||
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Village By The Lake | jam | 310 | 3.31 | 2.55 | 3.29 | 3.89 | 3.46 | 2.84 | 2.50 | 3.63 | 92 | |
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | 10 Second Slaughter | jam | |||||||||||
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | Vs. | jam | 357 | 2.91 | 2.51 | 3.26 | 3.59 | 2.55 | 2.11 | 2.06 | 2.44 | 100 |
Things start to become clearer as you make progress, and yes it does start off very minimalistic but gradually changes. Just keep pressing the one button to begin within and then start pressing other buttons as they appear, clues about what you should be doing start to appear as you go along.
@allinlabs - I wouldn't feel bad about not figuring out what to do, some playtesters I get it to had no idea also and needed a little prompting. I've added a little description of what to do on the entry now, hope it helps people. I don't want to say too much as it'll spoil it if you do start to make it through to the later stages.
@noddy2006 - I tried that but it got confusing fast until you learnt the patterns because you had to look at the symbols, find the one on the right, then look back at the left and having a < symbol going the other direction just made it look wierd. It's the one major thing I'm still unsure as to what works best and I had too few playtesters who hadn't played it during development.
@tombsar, I don't know what the issue is. I worked on the graphics for the game hopefully one of the programmers will get back in touch and let you know how to resolve the issue. By any chance could you post the appropriate lines you need to remove incase anyone else has the same issue.
The other developer and I were talking about a lack of closure towards the end of the game and the interaction but we had a limited amount of time to work on the game, for 15 hours work we're happy with how it turned out.
I was doing fine until level 7 when the difficulty spike just got too great for me, after that I stopped and left it at that. Before then it was an enjoyable little rhythm game, and it was nice to see the evolving story that went along with it. Music was nice as well.
I would definitely save try to do something the sudden difficulty spike on level 7.
The graphics on the cards was really great, gave a kind of holographic 3d depth to them and some of the best cards I've seen.
It took two games to get to grips with the basic mechanics of the game, and a lot more to realise there were more mechanics I had only just started to realise were there. By about the fifth game I really managed to do a lot better extending my gameplay to 19 years which was my best. I was unsure if there was an end-game or it was a game that kept on going until you lost so I ended up stopping after my next game (which was 14 years). Very much enjoyed it and would like to see this flesh out a lot more.
Amusing little game. It would have been nice if the stuff you pick up to burn didn't trigger passengers from other components, it makes it hard to throw items to stockpile them to move them back and forth from the engine. Also a little guide in the game description of the order of how much fuel everything provides would be helpful as would allow people to get to know what to look out for and maybe stick around a little longer.
Discovering I could throw things and knock people out was fun XD
A few issues and bugs: * Would be nice if after you lose the game gives an option to restart. * It seems like every third set of shots don't appear on screen or appear to do anything at all * Would be nice if you would get out on the same side of the buildings for quicker movement * Damage from zombies might happen so quickly that there is no intermediate damaged state, just straight from healthy to dead. Introducing a few frames of immunity would prevent this.
The audio, graphics, and overall design I think is good it just needs some work to polish and refine the idea into a more workable format for playing.
There was a minor bug when it wouldn't appear to register a move so I would sometime end up trying to compensate and suddenly take two moves which used up precious power, however due to the abundance of power I was always able to recover.
I found the raising of the arms of the robots not only cute but a very simple way of identifying who I was controlling at the time. Overall a very cool little game with an interesting mechanic and well put together.
Took a while to figure out exactly how to play the game, after that it's a game that requires some patience and planning to carry out. It is built on some simple but well executed trading principles with three different personal resources you have to manage to keep yourself alive. Definitely worth playing.
Definitely could do with being a little brighter so it becomes a little easier to navigate, this could be either the torch or just overall. With that you could also throw in more mechanics with either brighter torch but batteries, or maybe take a stick from the fire reducing it's life and an inventory slot but saving battery life.
I only ever found one, maybe two logs maximum logs per game. This meant my highest score was 51. Apart from that, there was nothing fundamentally wrong, just needs some additional work on it.
Needs a description of controls or machine requirements to play.
Cool game, nice music, well polished and delivered. It was nice to see the different level sizes and the ability to randomly generate levels so you could play. Maybe a few different environmental things such as barren mountains or say houses for a little variety. I think with additional work this could make a great little game to play.
The total punnage of that game was pretty high, very enjoyable to play through and listen to the different timelines play out. My only complaint is that I wanted more :(
The total punnage of that game was pretty high, very enjoyable to play through and listen to the different timelines play out. My only complaint is that I wanted more :(
@kjscott I think you went back in time and accidentally ended up posted twice there -_-
I like it, for a short amount of time in development it turned out to be a really good and interesting game.
It would be nice when you get the setup right so no goblins would die it would auto-move the goblins to completion so you didn't have to keep clicking on the Next Turn button over and over again, or just provide a button to allow you to auto-move when you feel that you have the setup right. Would just make the user experience a little more friendly. Maybe a transparent background?
The goblin escape animation was cute, was a shame you couldn't see it on the earlier levels. The death animation was a bit time consuming and you couldn't do anything until it had finished playing.
Fun little game, was interesting to try and solve the puzzles. Will definitely try to come back to it when I get a bit more time!
For future updates I would recommend the following: * An in-game mouse sensitivity slider which would help players have a bit better control over where the cursor ends up every frame * An infinite mode to let players have fun with the mechanics of the game without having to worry about winning or losing * Music/audio on/off or slider
I did encounter one bug where a first level solider was eaten (and counted as eaten) but was left floating up in the air.
Overall a very polished game, very much, fast paced and easy to get into and learn the mechanics. It would be nice to see in future iterations maybe some additional mechanics which you can open up or discover. A must play game I would say.
@minibobbo, yup! that's the bug!
Nice game, enjoyed playing it and the time/score font is really cool and works well with the style. For the limited number of graphics used for the game it works out really well.
I would make the faint red bullets fired by the ships more visible, maybe give them a black border so they stand out more against the blue background.
The style was really great and some of the best audio I've heard so far. I thought how the cards actually mixed the music together to get different styles playing but which did hang together was really awesome. The actual game part was really easy, just drop any old card and then start using your specials and it kept the party mood constantly going. Maybe if the specials raised only one or two of the different groups it might have been a bit more difficult. I would honestly say just ditch trying to get "scores" and just make it about the music, that worked really well!
Ended up with a final score of 73050 with 30 tiles left. Not a bad little tower defense game. I felt that the explosion volume felt a little loud against the background music as it became overwhelming towards the end, so much so that I turned it off. The controls could have been implemented slightly different with keyboard shortcuts and highlighting of the options so you knew what it was you were working on.
With a bit more polish, variety, and upgrades, maybe some other setups, this could be an interesting tower defense style of game.
Having a MMO to play, definitely a cool thing. I can already see that at this point over 6000 people have played it. One of the most innovative ideas I've seen in the compo so far. Definitely going to delve into the source code on this one to understand how this was all put together. Probably the first game that's ever driven me to go do that.
I felt there was a difficulty jump between level 2 and 3 and between 5 and 6. At times the camera control using the mouse was really hard to fine tune and I wish I could have just locked it in place as a floating camera or same angle on my character so I didn't have to worry about it. Also between when you got caught and had to start the level again it often felt something was wrong there, something to do with ending text and start of level text. I'm sorry I can't comment on what it was, something just felt wrong, like I had to click one too many times to get going?
Aesthetically it was really well done and well polished, what I did manage to play I very much enjoyed and would like to see more of it.
Was finally able to play the game!
I did notice at a few times it did look like I should have been able to place something down but the cursor suggested nothing could as the UI didn't pop up, so it was sometimes hard to judge where to click (especially when trying to frantically save everything) that it felt a little disruptive to the gameplay.
The latter parts of the game it was so hard to keep up, nearly all the time the fish of the sea where almost completely extinct and there was nothing I could do about it. I enjoyed the game and I could definitely see it having an appeal as a way of supporting the message it was focusing on.
@rodrigo-denubila, I've found it's often at the edges between water and the darker green where the problem manifests most commonly. You'll see it as the beach kind of land colour. There's where I've encountered the main problem of not registering a click.
Fish happens!
I loved the style and aesthetics of the game, and the bits of audio was incredibly enjoyable. The UX was in keeping with the style and worked well. Definitely one of the funniest games out there. I would love to see more things to interact with and see. Very tamagotchi-esque and kinda makes me want to create my own now.
At times it was really hard to pick up the objects with blue halo due to the speed at which the game was going. I had a couple of times where my cat seemed to get stuck as managed to get a trashcan stuck on their head. The most effective technique I had was to just grab one of the support beams and continually (without letting go) just drag it under the cat as it allowed me to keep it and would always move just under them. Personally I would drop the scrolling speed just ever so slightly to give a little bit more time for response.
A really good implementation of a platformer and escort game in one. Very much enjoyed it and the audio and graphics were very cohesive with one another. The controls were responsive and tight, and overall a really fun experience. Definitely would like to see more of this and want to remember to try and come back to play this again.
It was hard to know the rate the population would grow and what the current population was so I got a few game overs without really ever knowing why. To manage it I would travel all around to look to see what had changed or just sit around somewhere away from the police waiting for time to pass then burn one or two, so it ended up a lot of hurry and wait. I think a tracker of current population, even if it's a vague value, it would help so you knew when you could act or do something without risking getting a game over.
@snowdrama, I hadn't noticed it. I will have another look tomorrow and see if I can spot it.
At some point the controls for swapping characters got locked. I was stuck as a police officer (hadn't build a hospital yet) for about 2 in game days and wasn't able to swap out. I clicked on each of the tabs and pressed all the keys and nothing seemed to work. Eventually I double clicked on the police officer and it swapped me back to the neutral running around person then after that a single click on the police officer tab seemed to work fine.
Really well made and polished, the audio and visual work well together. It's really tricky to figure out what some of the best combinations are but that's half the fun of putting together a team and positioning and see how it goes. Once you start to get a handle on how the game works it gets a little easier to make longer strings of passes (saying that my record is only 33 at the moment). Good game!
While it's nice that the controls are simple and minimalist, the time it takes for the tractor to do anything (especially if you're trying to deal with the whole field) is far to long and you quickly end up in a losing state. It would probably be best if there was only a single field with maybe more increasing with upgrades or speed up the tractor to make it a bit more accessible.
There is a potential idea in this but you need to think about the mechanics of the game, along with the playability for the user. The core idea though is good, just needs work to polish it.
I managed to find a few ways you could die: rock falling on you the moment you spawn in the level, letting the chat die, landmines (all the ones I discovered so far). I didn't manage to understand when I could start texting but I figured early on I had to as it was probably another way I was going to "lose". I did experience in one game on the second level, the mine blocking one route and the rock blocking the other. It looked pretty much impossible to win that attempt. There was also the odd periodic lag in the game.
Besides that, I really liked the game, the graphics were cute and coherent all the way through, and the dialogue that you had in the game was funny. The clear art style and simple obstacles focuses on the key aspects of the game, the platforming, without being a detriment. Definitely worth a look by people.
There seemed to be a bug or positioning issue with your robot if you land in the water, can be incredibly hard to get out of it once you're in there. Otherwise, nice game. I liked the audio and sound effects that went with it, was able to play along quite easily and enjoyed it.
The updated version definitely plays a lot better and is a lot lot easier to know what's going on.
It looks like the hit detection of the bugs is in the head, that means after a certain point you're watching them attack the egg when it's impossible to stop them or interact with them. By that point the game should get to the game over just a touch quicker so you can jump into the next game a little quicker.
The game needs a slower difficulty spike, it's too fast and too frantic to start to develop strategies and understanding of how you should handle it if it's game over within 10 to 20 seconds.
There's definitely a huge amount of potential here, using the PICO-8 fantasy console it's allowed you to create a very well polished game very quickly and I am itching to play it more but would need to be able to ease into it. I will keep an eye out for future developments if you make them.
Simple but nice concept, I echo a lot of the same sentiments of the previous players. Would like to have seen more, that's all.
Having the audio play consistently rather than restarting on game start etc would have been nice. More life from each health tile would have gone a long way. In-game screen to explain the tiles always helpful. Having the loss of life game over and end of game screen being different would help to differentiate the two so you knew you got to the games end rather than game over.
Interesting concept you have there, especially for a puzzle game where the life carries over.
Hahah, the alternative ending! XD I didn't see that coming! So glad I got to play, and just the kind of genre I like, quite fitting the story as well considering the theme. Overall what can I say, it was well polished, everything that it did I think it did well. The only thing is I want more now, more meat for the player....
Glad to see another Pico-8 developer out here.
Willow.png
Nice and relaxing simulation, was beautiful to see the plant growing. If only I could do more with it!
I liked the day/night cycle, and it was cool that it could be used to heal or destroy enemies (at a higher cost). I would have probably have preferred for the solar balls to be faster or instant pickups to keep the pace going, and for the whole game to move faster than it already does. The controls are a little "floaty", gravity probably needed to be a bit greater so that it produced more natural looking jumps.
490, that was my high score. Heh, really felt like no matter how quick I could click it was always a losing proposition and just a matter of how long I could keep them alive for. Definitely a fun little game this!
I managed to overfeed my fish, I didn't even know this was possible from the UI of the game!
It was really easy to miss that my fish was getting hungrier, the background for the bars was confusing. I was expecting the coloured section to start changing except it was the background behind the text. Also time and health seemed to do nothing.
Bug occurred, appeared via development console when stunner exploded near bomb:
Ensure Read/Write is enabled on the Particle System's Texture > Ensure Read/Write is enabled on the Particle System's Texture Ensure Read/Write is enabled on the Particle System's Texture NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object Ensure Read/Write is enabled on the Particle System's Texture Ensure Read/Write is enabled on the Particle System's Texture > NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
Nice little game, took a few goes to figure out a strategy that I felt worked well into the later stages of the game. Some of the early waves felt a little sluggish as just took a while for the battles to fight themselves out. would have been nice if the units had a little less health or took a bit more damage just to get through each individual shoot out a bit quicker as you knew how it was going to end up fairly quickly.
I did encounter a couple of issues when playing, when my mouse went off screen or lost focus I on at least one occasion got stuck always walking down the screen which was really hard to counter and unlock. There was also some bouts of lag at times early to mid-game (of 2 minute games) which made it a little frustrating (I was wondering if cleanup code for bullets being off screen was working). The 8 way axis felt a little off when firing diagonally but I can't quite put my finger on way.
The graphics were great, the sad duck at the end with tears was sadly funny, and the chicks were super cute. The gnomes were amusing to see and their laugh made me smile.
Honestly one of the most fun games I've played so far, but then again I really like seeing how Celluar Automata can be used in this way. Simple, sleek, and well made. My first 5/5 game.
I loved the mini-games throughout the game. There was just enough variety to keep me interested, and you had the ability to choose what you tried and the difficulty level yourself. I did find the number of days a little bit grinding after a while but it was definitely more tolerable with the variety. It's a well made, very well polished game with an interesting storyline. Worth playing!
Instructions text bleeds off screen so I can't read all of it, it can only be fixed if played in full screen. As mentioned the verification for some of the levels seems wrong.
I liked the whole concept though I would need to go off and brush up on my logic gates and draw out logic gate outputs to get the last one, good work though.
Took me a while to realise what was going on and how to do it, once I figured out that I could play music it was deeply compelling and I wanted to see what I could do and make with it. Definitely would like to see more options or possibilities with it! Could be a really good relaxation game to play around with.
I never knew hot air ballooning was so dangerous! Not a bad little game. You probably have gotten more out of the view if you did it horizontally rather than vertically as there was a lot of dead space above and below the hot air balloon.
Not getting lost in space when you are surrounded by what should be thousands of navigation points was really difficult; two possible options for this, either have something that would allow you to ping your main ship (say at the cost of an additional limited resource) or by having an option to restart the game rather than reloading the entire page or waiting a long time for the o2 to run out.
One bug, when I pressed J when in the shuttle after getting some fuel I just started going wildly off to the right and pretty much ended the game for me that time right there and then.
Definitely going to keep on trying to play this to see how far I can get, there is a lot of potential in this concept.
I kept killing it with love, and that one question... oh that one question, I should I spotted you before I killed it with love again. It was a really fun take on the Tamagotchi style game. You did a good job of making the control scheme for it so simple, and the different scenarios you come across can be quite funny based on how you answer them.
The music and background effects created a nice audio atmosphere. There were issues with the movement animation but I really loved the compass which helped show the direction and simultaneously how much fuel you had left. That was a very good addition and made it really easy to see what was going on.
It would have been nice if there was say movement blockers such as trees, which could form part of a renewable resource of occasional dropped branches. Also, a note in the splash screen saying press ESC to restart after game over.
Even knowing that fully grown grass is worth triple the points, I've still not been able to get out of the first stage having tried a half dozen different strategies. For a tutorial level I feel that the difficulty is too steep, requiring me to get the solution fully before I can progress. A smoother entry way with a "you're almost guaranteed to win unless you pretty much do nothing" would allow players to have a sense of victory and accomplishment before ramping things up more slowly, allowing them to try out different tactics. Hitting the metaphorical brick wall can be off putting.
Maybe provide some more information in the description of ways of getting further to help out us more lowly-players progress further if we need it.
@tudvari, I only receive coins after each rain which was about 20 to 30 seconds apart? This gave me realistically about 3 cycles of purchasing (initial money, rain 1 and rain 2).
So I have the first round to dig a few holes to ensure area for flowers to spread and reach full maturity, and maybe plant another plant. Then I have to sit and wait until after it rains again when I get a bit more money. Very very very rarely i might see one or two coins appear in-between rain cycles.
@tudvari, mostly on holes to keep the land wet enough as quickly enough the land would dry out. if I didn't make some initial holes then there wasn't enough land left to spread out to. I had originally tried spending more money on seeds then holes but would only generate 4 coins, never enough to make any more holes so all the land would crash and burn. I've tried combination of 0 holes, 1 hole, 2 holes, 3 holes, 4 holes and so on to see if I could get any combination to have enough time to generate full grass and preserve the land long enough before I lose it all. I have yet to figure out the combination which makes it work.
@Tudvari, working a lot better it seems! I implemented my first "bad" strategy and got a new highscore for me of 1940, then I implemented what I thought was a better strategy and got 3555. Whatever your changed made a huge difference.
@tudvari, after you commented on the bug I had wondered if it was a timer issue XD Seems my suspicions were confirmed.
Not a problem, I wanted to get on the next level so it was good to know when it got fixed to retry.
Interesting game, I managed to get through to the first shed upgrade before I had to do other things. It feels a little slow paced but all the controls were pretty intuitive so was easy to get into. overall I had fun, just wish I had a bit more time to invest into it to see how it carries on.
Took a while to figure out how to play, being able to swap the between phage, virus and the other thing was helpful. A lot of the game consisted on getting them onto the board but a few times I hadn't realised I had run out of credits so was watching until the time ran out and I could then start up the next game.
The overall visual style was pretty consistent with itself, the audio may have been a little too harsh for the game but I can hear how you tried to match it to the gameplay.
There was a glitch I don't think was mentioned was with the settings menu, all the volume sliders were set to zero when I first started but audio was playing. When I first started sliding one to the right you could instantly hear the volume go down then slowly go up as it moved across. Another audio glitch was if you clicked Main Menu from the settings window it restarted the audio but if you clicked close it just carried out. You can probably just ditch the main menu option there.
Other than that, wonderful little game. Loved the audio, the sad french le sigh, and the game play was interesting as I got into it. If I got a fart on the previous round I was hoping that I got something to clean the water and didn't have something really bad drawn against me that I would lose before I had a chance.
The idea of the the defensive mechanisms is really good, took a little while to figure out how best to approach it but when I did the idea was fun. Preparation for a level felt like it took ages, would have been nice if I could have separate grab and drop so I could stack up say up to 5 batteries to move everything more in one go rather than having to travel back and forth to get everything setup the way I wanted to.
I have no idea if I won or lost XD
Really cool job with integrating the music with the game, simple but effective. It was fun all the way through, even I usually suck at rhythm games. I loved watching the animations of the dancing as I was listening, was even bopping along to the music as I did so.
Bug on the "New game/Continue Game" screen, if you press X while over the "New Game" option it says no save found. Probably shouldn't matter which key you press and just start a new game. Though I haven't tested it I expect that if you press Z over "Continue Game" it will start a new game. When walking, the layering of the objects on the ground is incorrect and they float in front of you. When the beds are fixed and trying to pick up the battery, you will see it above the text box. The options for not playing again just took you back to landing on the earth again so didn't seem to quit.
Earth with the tiny 2x2 pixel moon was really cute. Overall the graphics were good, well designed an in keeping with the aesthetics you were going for. It was simple to play and get through though it lacked a little challenge throughout. It was a nice little diversion.
I kinda skipped through the initial in game explanation of what all the controls were so I had to figure it out as I went along. Thankfully there was quite and polish you did on the game. It's a really cute game and very much enjoyed playing it. Hope you do well in the rankings!
Not bad variation of this, took a while to figure out the best pattern in order to maximize the number cells kept alive.
I only got a total score of 20045, my overtime clicking just wasn't fast enough to get anymore wood after that. The graphics and audio really came together to set the mood and atmosphere of the game. Nothing was overly done but created a wonderfully blended atmosphere to the game. My only downside to the game is I just went back and forth to the different screens and clicked on either wood or mushrooms, maybe just something more mid to late game would have kept it a bit more interesting throughout the entire game.
Collision detection felt a little off, the hit box size might have been broadly applied to even the empty space. I could see at times that I was clearly out of the way (pixel wise) but still took a hit. This made it harder to play as I had to be really out the way and that sometimes meant I was too far out to hit the car out of the way.
The basic concept is fun and interesting, definitely needs more polish to get it more playable. I did have at one point about 3 or 4 old ladies trying to cross the road completely blocking the whole thing XD There was no way I was going to survive that!
Once I understood the objective of the game it was pretty fun, was able to keep going spreading the fire everywhere. I think it would have maybe worked a little better with the controls if you didn't have to worry about the countdown and just selected the direction and then decided walk/dash at that point.
Cute, nice and relaxing to listen to the music as playing around with some drawings. I had half expected for whatever you draw to be used in some part of a mini game but alas, that did not happen. Nice experience but less a game though.
The audio was really good and brought a great amount of mood to the whole thing, it was short and would have definitely have been improved by your planned additional endings. I read through and seems like it would have provided some interesting variations to see.
After the first couple of games, where I died really quickly, I eventually got a handle on the mechanics of the game. The basic game loop of collect resources and recharge battery are well implemented, and with the randomization based on the seed it means you could try out and come back to certain layouts when you want. The problem is when you get to about 10k+ requirements for materials, it becomes a pretty slow and tedious game was there is little to keep you occupied and if you stick to a relatively safe strategy then it just becomes a matter of time before you get what is required.
If the different resources each improved different areas of your ship, then you could start to introduce a hunting mechanic in the players own head. The choice over do you mine the slow irons or fast gold and platinum then become important choices.
I would definitely take a look at the core mechanics of improving your ship and see how you could tweak them to make the core game loop more entertaining. With some improvements I think this could be a really good game.
If the food landed on a sharks back the fishie would stay on the same height and basically spelled a death sentence. If you were able to move the fish to either edge of the screen (top or bottom) basically rendered it completely impossible to lose the game.
Not a bad little game, could definitely do with a bit more polish to make it more playable. Would be interesting to see what a revised version of the game would be like.
Having to click on the cat I felt just added to the difficulty far more than it needed for a platformer, just left clicking and right clicking would have worked more than adequately. I would have also stuck with keyboard controls for the creature and mouse to interact with the environment.
Beyond that, the free camera was a really good idea and very welcomed to be implemented and it was a pretty decent game overall.
Fun little game, I kept going at it to see how good I could do. I think my final score was about 150 on my best run. My only suggestions would be it would be nice to see final score after you die in the game and when you start a game to press space to start after reading the message or have the instructions as a separate button in the main menu.
Fun little game, I kept going at it to see how good I could do. I think my final score was about 150 on my best run. My only suggestions would be it would be nice to see final score after you die in the game and when you start a game to press space to start after reading the message or have the instructions as a separate button in the main menu.
The graphical style was cohesive all the way through and the audio track and chirp worked out very well. Good solid game, the controls are tight and I like how you not only had to worry about your own position but also the "bird" (which you already know doesn't look like a bird XD).
Agreed, https://foxplayer.itch.io/hans-in-purgatory-webgl doesn't work. As I can't do downloads on this machine it's unplayable for me.
A couple of little things: The time before the first wave of enemies just felt a little long of sitting there without doing anything. It might be nice that a second before the next wave arrives the QSLP are highlighted, with say yellow background, to show what keys you have to press in the next wave coming.
Overall well polished, good quality music, and what you've implemented seems to be pretty bug free. Would like to see more stages with different variations on the existing mechanics.
Nice game, it was an interesting way of handling the scene interactions. I really did like how the people in your team would request to speak to you, definitely added an interesting element to it.
Once I got use to the interface of how the game worked I found it very slick and fun little innovative game, it felt very easy to get into the flow of things. I only got as far as the third round of different types of obstacles attacking the familiar and I wish I could have spent more time to see what else might appear. Definitely worth a go! Would be nice to see the game developed further.
I loved watching the TV seeing Panda news! And playing the game within a game as a tester was fun. I was sad there wasn't that much to do but I would love to see an expanded version with audio and more activities.
I also liked there was one audio track I could find... Flush!
You already explained the weak points of the game in your own description so not much else I can add.
I tried the game out.
I would definitely suggest you add an example round or two so the players can see how the game is meant to be played and maybe an example of resolving a crisis with cards shown on the table and what not. Also I would maybe give some general advice for first time players for what they should try to do in their first game before trying more advanced strategies.
Otherwise it was interesting, took about 20-30 minutes to setup and start maybe playing (I wasn't keeping time). Overall I enjoyed it.
Maybe because of the lag I had while playing but it bugged out several times, once my yellow player disappeared off screen, another time the blue and yellow got locked together, another time the blue player would appear in the wall.
It was hard to properly assess because of that. FYI: I played all three games using the AI Love and HTML5 version
A well polished game, simple and fairly quick to go through. Would definitely like to see more of it. I liked how the failure scenarios played out and the final report at the end. Would definitely like to see more of this! The only thing is the control scheme between moving around and the computer felt a little off, they probably should be more in line or similar so you don't have to remember to mentally switch between two different control schemes.
There was a moment where the game froze a little but it then immediately started up again.
I really liked the map that filled itself in as you moved around, helped make it a lot clearer to myself where I had looked before without having to put additional mental load of myself to personally memorise it. The multiple resources, energy and health, which you have to balance in order to not lose the game meant I had to keep a little more situational awareness but I never felt that energy was ever much of a threat even when I had gone exploring for a long time. You did well with the alerts warning you of incoming waves and when energy was running low, so that was really cool to see. On the second game around I could see the pick-ups were randomly placed so I couldn't memorise the locations.
Overall a pretty solid concept, there could be some areas of polish with the map graphics and enlarged map (in my personal preference, would have worked better if it was centered on your current location). Good interesting game, ended up playing three times just to see what it was like.
@lcstark, I'm afraid not. I think there was no enemies nearby but there were somewhere around on the map somewhere, it only happened one time so I wasn't able to capture and remember all the details, plus it was only a momentary hiccup but enough that I noticed.
Nice basic concept, you could definitely have done with more time to expand on the idea and improve the difficulty and the base underlying mechanics.
Some direction to say that you need to press the > arrow to create the potion then click on the potion might go some way to helping the playability aspects of it.
I found it easier to just move the mosses directly without using the allies at all, also as mentioned a restart button. The controls felt a little hard to use at times, when I thought I had selected a moss and then tried to move it. A highlighting showing the type of interaction you were engaging in would have been helpful so I didn't waste time and have to go back and try to remove the moss again.
Interesting idea though, with a bit more polish you might have a pretty solid basis of a game there. Maybe through in some more tricky variations to add some variety.
The art style works well and is cohesive. The controls were a little troublesome when I wanted to shoot while right next to a door, I would jump in and out. Moving the inventory to an on screen display as there were only three items and using the Z and enter/exit rooms would have been better. Sound would have made a great addition even if it was just a couple of SFX here and there. More extensive gameplay would make the game more interesting to play.
The baby chicken was cute, and I liked the warped screen edge effect. Music and audio was a little off, the repeat cycle for the background music had a long gap which felt odd and it seemed like sometimes the SFX didn't trigger or were lacking in a lot of places.
I think it would have been nice for maybe the chicken to escape your hands so you had to try and rescue it from other dangers such as the spikes as a nice extra challenge. Otherwise it was never that challenging for how far I got. Overall not a bad entry.
I liked the music going on in the background against the frantic trying to stop the kids but I would probably go with something a little more frantic to go with the mood.
The excitement of the game died off once I realised I could shove them in the corner of the kitchen and just nudge them if they were getting away as if forces them to stop and then they often go back the way they came. Made the game super easy after that, and with the stress of keeping them alive why would I want to go back XD
With a couple of tweaks it could be a really good coffee break game. Overall played and handled well, very enjoyable as a quick break!
Some initial thoughts: * Good expansion of mechanics throughout the game * Good reuse of dance mechanics (also, total surprise they were added!) * Well polished, with good graphics and some great music throughout the game and stages
It was a nice little story which didn't overstay it's welcome and wrapped up within an enjoyable amount of time. Friendly Fire was pretty easy to pick up and get started, I even spent a little time after I got one of the later mechanics to explore as much as I could.
The only drawback was sometimes I wanted to press E to skip through the conversation and close the dialog box (right at the very end) but I don't think I could, I had to wait for a timer to trigger.
Took a while to understand how to use all the controls, when I finally did I was able to complete the game. Would have been nice for additional levels after the first and only level.
Lifting the spikes up ended up being a pain as it didn't feel like I was dragging and dropping them upwards properly, definitely some work needs to be done on the handling of that.
I made medicine and it seemed like some of the villagers were injured but I couldn't seem to figure out how to give it to them. Had I made the wrong kind or was I doing an incorrect interaction?
The presentation of the book style journey was great, and the audio went very nicely along.
I think in the theme of a book it would have been nice if the choices would have been inside the book, on the page at the end of the text giving more of an impression of interacting with it.
I played through about a dozen times before I stopped, so I didn't get to see every ending so I was curious as to how the rest of the story would unfold.
Playing the game more than once in a row meant you kept your previous rewards, that actually made it a lot harder to complete as your options would sometimes be 2-3 attacks for several turns with no defensive moves. The movement was a bit clunky, numerous times I would move, attack and then as I was going to hit end turn move away as I still have movement left.
I think you had a very interesting design there, really ambitious and would definitely like to see a more polished and more complete game. I want to see where this might go.
I struggled with some of the platforming elements, either jumping off the edge of the screen, or the hitbox colliding when I wasn't expecting it to. At least at one point in the game the enemies weren't dying when I touched them. On more than a few occasions the enemies seemed to spawn and get stuck in the walls. The UI definitely needed a bit of work to make aspects of it clearer for the user in both of terms of visibility and placement.
Once I got past a few of these things I was able to progress to about level three, though it was tricky with the unkillable enemies to make it that far.
For a first attempt it was a pretty solid game, you all did a good job and should be proud of that.
Very easy to pick up, the crowd, flashes, and visual interruptions worked well to confuse what was going on and force you to pay attention to what was going on.
The game works pretty smoothly as is, I would have made the person move faster than the slimes so that you're able to rescue them if they're some dinstance away or have the slimes spawn somewhere in the arena and both move slowly so then it becomes a more tricky navigation problem.
The lack of a reactive action of blocking the arrows meant that if you were close by the walls you could have your game end with almost no feedback and time to respond. Also a high score would have been nice to see if you were improving.
Not bad, enjoyable and definitely could turn into something with potential.
Between levels I would say display your stats so you can see what the chests outcome effect has to stats overall.
There are some good examples of similar style games out there which might help with some of the difficulty aspects: * Only allow to go no more than one left or right step going down corridor * Boss monster at the end of each level * Sub-boss monsters (center path so player has to take it)
Minor tweaks might include: * When reward is given from chest, immediately allow sacrifice again to speed up purchasing * Increased speed at which monsters get tougher * Once special double attack/heal bought remove it * Blank tiles so not every tile is reward
I think with a bit more development this could be a really fun little game.
I did encounter an issue where at least after my first game the tutorial messages were still showing up but I was able to go from city to city, and when starting a new game the screen would flicker from one scene to another then back again for one part of the intro sequence.
I hadn't caught it the first time around but you greyed out the different places that you've visited already which is cool but it wasn't quite bold enough to obviously notice. The dialogue I enjoyed and the music was great to listen to in the background while playing. I'm hoping that sometime after my fifth attempt I might actually beat the game XD Hasn't happened yet :(
Managed to win on my first go though it felt really touch and go at times. I ended up sending off and sacrificing a lot of my workers for long trips simply so they would use up less food when back at the camp. Would like to have seen more scenarios in other play-through for a bit of variety.
Windows 10, Chrome, the game was a bit laggy at times. I found the waves a little slow in building up in difficulty but after about 4 minutes the pacing seemed a lot better. I feel it would have been a little easier to play if when destroyed, any health/+ symbols stayed in place and weren't affected by your own bullets.
The mechanics worked well, sacrificing your own health for the health of the heart made for interesting choices at time in the balancing of resources.
Overall the game was great, fun and definitely ends up being quite a hectic game. Against the "chill" music it makes it funny.
The key layout could have been improved to make it easier to perform all the actions but I'm suspecting that this is intentional to make everything far more stressful and complex that it needs to be, which works well with the greatly increasing intensity so I wouldn't mark it down for that.
It was so hard to try and keep up with the messages and understand when and how to fulfill all the different needs, it definitely takes a few goes in order to get more competent at the game.
I liked the hummed music in the background.
Towards the end of the game the battles became long and grinding, speeding up the sequence or the ability to skip through the delay between each stage would have made it a lot more playable.
Written dialouge was humerous and enjoyable to read.
I don't think I could skip the next scene or go to the next dialog, ended up having to hit ESC key to get past the first dialogue when it got stuck. Eventually managed to play the game, after the first game that went horribly wrong I finally got a handle of what I could do and how to play. I mostly ended up throwing the woman at the enemies as she often didn't take damage and made sure she was moving so it was harder for things to get her XD
Really cool concept, I was glad I survived long enough to get a couple of purchases. Those little kids were brutal tapping on the glass! It was a really well thought out game with a lot attention to detail, great job!
I love the space battle mode! It's a great way of gameifying the game of life. Would definitely like to see more initial state patterns, random initial state patterns, and changing rulestrings. Maybe a "design your own opponent" kind of thing too.
Definitely a lot of potential in the battle mode, the rest of it was nice to see but I think paled compared to what I thought the main attraction was.
The music was super-loud on my headphones so I had to turn it off.
Hah, I liked having Monkey bodyguards. I'm sure there have to be a lot of different branching paths for this game, it's going to take a long while to get through them all.
I found that after you lose if you keep waiting more knights come out and ends being even more humourous game over screen than before XD
A charming little game, the audio and death cries of the dragons were funny. The only drawback was the slightly too long charge time for even the quickest shot, when you've got a knight quite close as you missed it can be almost too late to fire and send a fireball by the time they're 2/3 of the way there when it feels like you should be able to react in time.
If you swap between full screen (which is needed to get the text to display correctly) and not full screen, it can lock in some of the commands causing you to, for instance, keep using up all your water and being unable to stop it. This pretty much crippled my game for that run. I think the audio clicks when it loops again.
I like the idea, the movement felt a little fast compared to the atmosphere.
It's a pretty eggciting game, managed to get a bit of the way through my after scrambling my inputs a few times I kept dying. It fried my mind at how it all hung together. Incredibly well polished and put together, you all did an eggcellent job them. I will eggstract myself from this now before I go too far...
Game runs on HTML5 now is appears. A couple of bugs, fell off the edge and it didn't reset. Just kept falling until the flame ran out. The game is a little bit laggy when playing sometimes, this makes keyboard input a bit difficult at times. The collision detection for trees in particular seems very inconsistent and sometimes it would feel that I could get close without dying and other times barely brush them and I had to restart. Second level you seem to start up in the air for some reason, then as you move you fall down. And then I got this after I died on time:
"An exception has occurred, but exception handling has been disabled in this build. If you are the developer of this content, enable exceptions in your project WebGL player settings to be able to catch the exception or see the stack trace."
Controls were hard to manage. Whilst the mechanics seemed to be more based on reality they lacked fun and responsiveness to move and pilot the ship around to explore, if the controls were based on actual rocket science then putting in a proxy for gravity so it would have made it more fun to play.
There was quite a lot there in terms of controls and being able to review things. The pacing was good between reading and actions, so it felt like I was doing things more or less constantly. I felt that the speed of screen updates was a little slow even when I was doing what I could to get through the text as fast as possible. Nice little entry there overall.
@lauramei the link doesn't work, a couple of variations I tried did nothing.
Would have worked well as a tile based puzzle game, rather than the pixel perfect movement required but then again that would have changed how some of the traps worked. When you died would have been able to get back into the game quicker if the level auto reset. On completing a level it would have been nice to be able to auto-move to the next level without having to click on Menu then select the next level yourself.
I think with some of the mechanics you had in the game, traps, multiple characters, and so on, with a bit more thought and polish on the level design this could definitely start to shine as a game. Some of the levels you didn't even have to go all the way through, it was easy enough to double back on yourself.
Definitely one of the more innovative games I've played so far.
Took me a while to figure out the mechanics of the game, plus the whole keep the fire alive but not too great. it's a good interpretation of using Conway's Game of Life. It might have helped with a line showing you where you were going to throw and what the area of effect would be. All the same though, it was pretty decent game.
On level 5 I encountered one bug, where as I was swapping my negative block back to a negative person they were just close enough to touch the door while the positive person was also touching the door. The code didn't seem to like it and though it was playing the animations of having won it just locked the characters in place. I had to press R to restart.
I enjoyed the game (and also completed it), it was a good puzzle game to make in such a short amount of time. Took a few attempts to win at each level but got there in the end. Definitely good game!
Echoing the same as everyone about the attacks.
At times when I was pressing space the controls for operating one of the locations kept coming up, this was considerably distracted. The shots felt a little long in the time they traveled through the air. The game was considerably easier once most of my people died. There seemed to be some of the people I couldn't send home or would just sit on the island and do nothing.
Nice polish on the graphics. I think if a lot of the UI issues would be resolved this could be a great little game.
The start of the level is a little difficult where you can lose a lot of health before you even really get started. After that the game worked well, it was interesting to try and get through the obstacles while managing your time and trying not to crack yourself open. Fun game!
It would be good that if you completed the game for it to revert back to the start after pressing any key, that way you could play again.
Hah, I liked the featured description of one of the people you've saved at the end. Very funny.
I do echo the sentiment of some others in the comments, something to do during times when you have no patients would be good.
A minor tweak might be needed for selecting options; the cursor went to computer default to overridden by in-game cursor when an option was available. If there were two states for the cursor (selectable option and non-selectable region) the it would keep the cursor more in keeping with the rest of the game.
As was not living this person life, having the background and history, as well as not knowing the personalities of the characters you can meet, it can be difficult to assess what happened so what the "best" options are, in the sense of "getting things off your chest" as per the instructions. That said, by going through the story and seeing the reactions I can start to get an understanding of what happened in the past and I start to learn about what happened. So I think it depends very much on the authors intent here, whether it's meant to be a voyage of discovery of the main characters life and actions or a look at how to resolve coming out of a depression/anxiety and handling it. If this was cleared up then I think this could become a much more refined story.
I enjoyed playing it and I think with some additional polish it could serve as a valuable game for some.
I did have a few issues with the controls when jumping left and right, it's hard to describe but there was something that just felt wrong? Like the position, speed, turning, handling. Just something in that area compared to the rest of the controls was just a bit off.
The game was really fun, I enjoyed the different things I slowly learned my slime could do. The storyline worked well with the concept of the game, though not sure where all the food came from originally XD Maybe throwing in small animals and woodland creatures might have seemed like too much!
Fun little game, took a while to figure out how to perform more successfully. Still haven't quite managed to win the game but got within a day or two. It seems pretty well balanced for the difficulty and during you've picked though sometimes even succeeding at a single day seems to be more a matter of luck than to do with any particular choice on your side. Maybe seeing a few more additional cards ahead would go a long way to giving the player a chance of succeeded. That could be restricted to a card type so you don't immediately have that but can choose to get +1 more layer and forgo bonuses to health or network.
Took me a while to realise about the click+hold even though it was clearly described, I got distracted by the double mechanic that I never really took advantage of it until late into my play session. I did once or twice get stuck on the side of a barrel, never quite falling off but unable to act until the screen pushed me along. I also would have liked to have seen the difficulty ramp up a little quicker than it was but it did give me time to practice a bit more. The background and foreground elements were really good and cool to see as they appeared and disappeared off, nice touches!
Echoing many people here, the control scheme definitely needs some work. Being mouse driven with either +/- on/off for each city or click to highlight a city then one set of keyboard controls (say QWE) would have made it a lot easier to manage. Maybe also having it with different levels, start with 1 city, then 2, then 3, and so on so people can get use to managing everything, slowly building up the difficulty.
There's definitely potential here but needs some polish to see how this might truly come out.
Sometimes game over felt sudden and arbitrary, I wasn't able to discern the rules for that based off visual cues or in game actions so I was left a little confused. I was eventually able to figure out the dashing mechanics based on your description and playing around in game. I think I got to like level 4 before I finally succumbed to whatever made me lose.
Not a bad little game, quite enjoyable but definitely some extra in game explanation of what's going on would help but I managed to piece together most of what I needed to in order to play.
There was a minor bug with the swiping of the phone but that wasn't a determinant to the game.
The music worked really well with the environmental aspect, and the ambient sounds helped bring it to life and also provided a nice audio clutter of things which helped make the game more hectic.
The game struck a really nice sweet spot between visual clutter and hectic atmosphere that has made this one of the best examples of this type of game in LD46 so far that I've encountered. I want to try and remember to come back to this at a later date and keep playing to see how far I can get.
Several of the levels were a bit buggy, I never saw levels 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, and 12 I think as when you get the "try again" screen if you wiggle your mouse near the door and press some keys before clicking try again it seems to skip the levels.
Would have benefited from some simple sound effects for the different things to give audio cue as to the next "attack".
I thought the octopus kind of thing at the "try again" screen was cute XD
omg... so horrifying! The hair... the bulging square eyes!!! O_O
I truly felt it would eat my soul if I saw it.
Simple enough but for someone who doesn't play a lot of shmup games I found the controls a little hectic to work with, saying that I playing multiple times getting a bit better every time as I really want to see how it ended (i couldn't as ran out of time to play).
I did notice that at one point the audio faded out and didn't return for like a minute or two, wasn't quite sure what was going on with that.
I think the un-skippable text would have been more entertaining and tolerable for players if they had a reason to watch through it, maybe different lines of dialogue, different artwork, something to make to rewarding and enjoyable for the player. I know it's meant to be a "punishment" for cheating, but a players time is important and they should be entertained during that time.
The graphics worked really well and really added to the humour of the game. I did encounter one bug where the timer ended up going down without the start of game text having been completely removed. This only appeared to happen if I was on another tab at the time waiting for the text to finish displaying.
My first reaction is that it very much reminded me of the Sims. The concept was good, I liked the music but with audio clipping when it reached the end of the loop and being very much the same I quickly tired of it.
The game itself is good, though no matter what you do someone is going to die at the end of it due to travel time from one station to the next. There is no way to keep everyone alive in the long run, just a matter of how long you can stave off losing. It does feel a lot like what being a parent is about except you don't get woken up randomly while you're sleeping XD
Not bad little game, would have liked to have seen more variation of enemies and possibly a way of seeing the trees expand more. Maybe have some other things that you need to protect in the forest as well such as animals. Definitely some potential there.
It wasn't quite clear that the number associated with the campfire on the UI that this was your score, I thought it was the number of additional logs on the fire there were so when I finally died (around 95 score) I had started to wander waaaaay off as I had gathered a ton of pickups and wanted to explore more.
That being said, when you don't chop down every tree you can use them to help guide your path back. The pickups were really cool little touch I hadn't expected when playing and added a lot of interest to search further and find out what else there was to find out there.
I wasn't sure what the end point of the game was, just to rack up a high score or to survive a set amount of time. Apart from that, good game, would like to see it built upon and expanded more.
Would have been useful for the game to restart after the game over screen after a while so I didn't have to keep reloading the page. Once I got the controls and the gameplay figured out it was quite fun to play. It would have been nice to see some sort of enemy you had planned in the game.
Unskippable intro without controller, at least by the controls that you described. I think ESC key worked but it wasn't documented anywhere. The audio seemed to stutter on my machine (but that could be only my machine that's the problem) along with the occasional bit of game lag at times. At times I felt like the cloud summoning or the movement in the game just felt slow, for something that felt like it should be a faster paced game it seemed to trudge along at times. That being said I played for a while to see how the game was, after a while I just stopped as there wasn't anything new to see. I think with some polish this could be a decent little game.
@fabula-rasa , now you mention it like that, yes it's clear but when I first read it I took it as "To ESCcape press B to skip" which is why I didn't think of pressing ESC key
@civmaniac, windows 10, web build, chrome v81
Game had a bug where the third gunner I had lost the ability to upgrade it to the first stage upgrade (400 coins).
Once I have completed all the gunner upgrades there isn't anything to do for a long time, this creates a problem with pacing. If there were additional actions or something which required the player to interact more with the screen it would make the game more engaging. At that point I just had to wait until I built the wall and won the game.
The music was good but the speed of the beat was difficult for me as someone who has always found rhythm and shmup games particularly difficult, it felt like there was only a frame or two in order to get the right keyboard input in. At times I would spend ages just simply not moving because I couldn't seem to find the exact right time to hit the key.
Instead of maybe not moving, just cause it to release a person from the list but still allow you to move around so at least it makes you feel like you're doing something other than failing.
One weird thing my person managed to go underneath the stage? I was busy looking at the success/failure of my inputs and by the time I looked back I had disappeared.
When I got something going it was fun, rewarding, and a good atmosphere to the game. The graphics were really great alongside the lighting effects.
For those people who can play a game like this, probably going to be a really great and novel experience on the genre. Would definitely like to see more put into it.
It's really hard to get the balloon through some of the obstacles, but the physics of the balloon was handled really well and felt good. The audio gave it a very eerie atmosphere to go along with the dark woods. The highlighting of obstacles using the light was very in-keeping with the aesthetic of the game and a good visual indicator for the player to help focus their attention on what needs to happen.
Screen doesn't fit in with the boundaries making it hard to interact with. The volume bar is incorrectly set to 0 with sounds at full volume when you start. Some zombies seem to appear out of no where.
Took a while to get use to the controls. Given the mouse input, it would have worked better if the play area was square so circular movements could have been used and easier to click on enemies.
Items dropped didn't always feel like they were being eaten by the 'IT' so it was hard to know if there was a bug or the amount of hunger it removed was so minimal that it wouldn't appear to update the value. Apples and cherrys dropped just outside the hut if they were misaligned is when it seemed to happen the most.
Picking up apples after they fell from the tree appeared to not pick up immediately until I had moved away and come back at times. With the fast pace of the game the controls need to be really responsive.
I found the cherry to the south annoying with the placement of the kiln like thing as I would often get caught on it.
The music and sound effects were really grating, I ended up having to turn them off when using my headphones. They work well though with the general aesthetic of the game but it would have been helpful if they were either a little lower in volume or a means to lower the volume in game.
I found it strange that there was such a difference in the quality of graphics between the walls and the ships/cube in the center of the screen. Would have worked better to keep both to the same level of graphics.
The maze structure and enemies were a little too simple and just relied on poor hand eye co-ordination to cause eventual loss of health.
The first stage audio was a little repetitive but having it change after you awakened(?) the boss was an interesting highlight. Definitely one of the best parts of the game, quite enjoyed it.
I loved how the moans of the undead things would fade off based on the distance, gave good non-visual feedback as to what was going on. The feedback from your daughter was helpful gauge of how much time I had left. I did find the controls non-intuitive to start off with so took a while before I was able to really sit down and play the game. Once I did it was pretty easy to manage everything even at the latest stage.
Might have just been my computer but going between different screens ended up really lagging everything. This might have contributed to the feeling of the firing controls feeling sluggish as well. I did think that the hitboxes for both the fox being hit and hitting the owls was too big, probably just a flat box check rather than sprite mask checking for more pixel-perfect checks. Due to that it felt at times that the fox was being damaged unfairly according to the visual feedback I was getting.
The visual art style and audio were really good, I think with a bit of work in some of the areas this could be a really good solid game.
I had two major issues while playing the game, the first was that often the enemies would be off-screen either full screen or not, and the second at wave 6 the game froze. I only scored 1 at the end of the second game (the one that didn't freeze), so I wasn't sure what the scoring criteria was.
The basic idea of the game is good, the mechanics are well thought out and once I understood how it all worked I quite liked it. Definitely needs a bit more polish but could be an interesting little game.
A couple of bugs, if you complete the game (I won on my go) then if you restart the enemy priest doesn't move beyond their starting point and your followers total carries on over to the next game. Also, sometimes when holding Q when standing right next to a flag it would appear my animation was set to laying down on the floor.
It was a interesting game, I quite like the mechanics but all the controls felt a little sluggish. Would definitely like to see this idea expanded upon.
Position of the spaceship should probably be further back as it's just wasted real estate and limits the players ability to see what's coming up. The intro sequence of the lines moving in worked well and set the scene nicely and it was nice to see a little bit of storyline in the game itself.
Resets:0, Deaths: 23, Floor breaks: 434, Steps: 572, Dashes: 122 - I finally won!
There were a lot more levels than I was expecting, the graphics and audio worked really well together and the sound of you falling to your death was funny. Some of the puzzles early on were maybe a little too easy but the intention very clearly led you down understanding and mastering all the mechanics before you continued so I salute the level design and very much think that it should be kept as-is.
Cute game, a bit short. The most tricky part was the moving log platform on the water, kept repeating that over and over again. Maybe some longer levels with checkpoints would have been good to really get stuck into the mechanics of the game.
My rock is all grown up now! I want to kick it out of the house to go get a job -_-
Funny game, would be nice with some sound affects of the actions you're taking. A nice little time waster but alas, lacks any replaybility unless you added in different types of rocks like Igneous or Metamorphic. Maybe swap the TV for a radio to play some classic rock...
My record was 257, a few times got trapped in almost inescapable situations. Also felt that being killed by the rear of the spear limited my ability to move around as the spears would then take up between 2 to 3 tiles at any one time which considering the 5x5 board represents quite a bit of space for each set.
Hah, I loved the game. The very alienesque creature and food desires. It took a while to start to understand what everything did, while normally I would say this would be unwelcome I think this was very much part of the design. Experimenting with the different combination. My only really drawback was even though I knew I had the right food it was sometimes difficult to drag and drop it on to the plate which caused a very minor frustration.
On the second level the controls are really awkward to control, trying to move from one ledge to another felt an ordeal within the maze. I loved the music, hearing staying alive was funny when I finally realised what the song way.
Take a look at the controls for moving so that you have more time for freedom of movement and getting from one location to another.
I loved the graphical style, though the audio was a little lacking for the game. It would have been nice if there was something keeping track of how much of the day is left. I did feel like the days were getting shorter and shorter as it got closer to the rescue time. Day 4 was my record in the end.
Simple, sleek, and very interesting in the balance of mechanics of trying to keep yourself alive and the fire alive. Really gives a choice with different consequences applied. Definitely a good little game.
I had a few instances where I was moving into an enemy but causing any damage but I was receiving it, I needed to back away before it started to recongise my attacks. A few times I had tried eating food but it did nothing for my hunger bar. Maybe it was only fish that was working? I would also have had the player start with the sword equipped.
One of the best implementation of a keep the fire alive with the different obstacles, wind, rain, wolves, along with the mythological story you drew from to set the scene. The checkpoints were really welcome though their relative closeness and short length of the game meant that it was pretty easy to get through the game even after one or two setbacks. Overall though, really great.
The fog could have been a little more transparent with maybe layering a few more on top to obscure the scene just as much. It would have been nice to see during the night scenes for the vehicles to have their headlights on.
I was curious as to why when I died and chose reset, why the number of ducklings needed to save went down but the level remained the same. Was that to allow people to still experience the higher levels and make it a bit easier for them?
I liked the different weather affects, and how even though it was the same level with just the addition of a few extra obstacles you made it feel and react quite differently each time. It made it very enjoyable and fun. Though the poor ducklings when you fail... :*(
Good solid game, took me a little while to figure out the controls. I disliked that I would numerous times not realise I had clicked on the station addition I wanted then dropped it right over the controls. This meant it was wasn't energy and would die of really quickly.
With some additional polish this could be a good solid game.
Sound track was nice, calming and pleasant to listen to. One of the few I haven't had to turn off part way through. It was a good pick for it.
The graphics could be a little jerky under certain situations when swapping from one state to another, particularly the bird. I felt that it's flapping movement could have been done a little smoother than the sudden jerking up in the air.
I loved the concept of holding the bird and it escaping from the hands every so often, added a whole new challenge to the game.
The collision detection felt a little off, like I was getting killed even though I felt I hadn't quite touched anything.
The big text at the start "Bring back the chick" got in the way of the environment to begin with, could have been better putting it up in the "sky" where there was more empty space where it wouldn't interfere.
Though the gameplay was very simple, the art style was really good and engaging with the little bits of sound effects worked really well and brought it together as a whole. Very well polished and worth spending the 5 to 10 minutes to play around.
Cute little game, I forgot that I shouldn't overfeed the creature so I ended up letting it get too full and die :(
Good solid game, the only drawback is I would say the quality of the environment and the living creatures seem to be different which means it lacks a little graphical cohesion between them.
Considering the timescales I think you packed a lot into this little game. Once I got use to the controls I was able to do a lot better.
The inventory positioning when you move items I think needs to be aligned a little better, needs to be center aligned rather than away from the cursor. Maybe a mouseOver would be useful to explain what each of the items does. Might be good to start with one weapon and/or everything else already in the inventory bar so players can get use to them quickly.
The recorded voice audio clips were funny, the music feels a little out of place after a while but it's fun.
I felt a little sad when I didn't get any extra "damage" for hitting a zombie in the head, so it always took 3 shots with the pistol regardless.
The difficulty felt like it spiked really quickly really early. Maybe more quicker rounds with fewer zombies building up over a slightly longer time to give the player more time to get use to the controls and dealing with the bigger waves.
Personally I had more difficultly in the third or fourth round as the shotgun just couldn't put out enough damage and was slow to shot, I was wondering if I had to go back to the earlier weapon to keep up.
Was playing Earth 2.1, I had one definite bug where an asteroid appeared literally in front of me without any warning and destroyed one engine then before flashing wore off immediately destroyed another engine. Another game I hit one asteroid, it re-positioned me into another asteroid after engine was destroyed which hit an asteroid then immediately hit a third one ended my game. The pause button didn't seem to do anything. Losing to this is frustrating.
On a playability front, when the planet appears in the distance it can be virtually impossible to notice any of the asteroids from then on against the dark blue background as they fade into the dark colour of the planet (this only happens on darker screens). I did eventuality win with 100 people left alive.
Definitely needs some polish to handle some of the gameplay issues that I've encountered. The minimalist audio works well with the space scene. While the gameplay area graphics are well polished some aspects of the UI could do with some additional work and polish.
I encountered a few issues with boxes just disappearing or not being picked up correctly (plus the controls were difficult to grasp), but aside from that it was an enjoyable little game. My favourite moment was when I drove my forklift inside the truck as the doors started to close. If only it had got trapped in there and driven away...
@magnusfurcifer, @sirsnowy7: I've updated the description a bit to try and explain what I didn't have time to do in the game, hopefully it'll make the game a little easier to play.
@nicolas-diniz, I added a visual guide to what things do what. Hope that helps a bit!
@darkfire92, I had planned to change the heartbeat under certain scenarios and/or add more music but ran out of time for that.
@runuchok, I had planned about half way through development to scroll the screen along with the player as they moved but things were too deeply coded in to change how I did it so I had to back out of that update. Definitely something I wanted myself but lack of time prevented that.
@fiakaiera, I agree with you about the UI. The UI moving was partially tied in to how the camera would pan when moving from screen to screen. At the same time I was going to have the camera pan with the players movement I was going to make the UI stay static but it was not feasible to rework the code in the time I had left so I left it as is.
I felt like there was little point in energy towards the end of development, oooooh... Now that I think about it, I could have coded it so that if the alien gets to you but you still have energy that's drained first...! doh! That would have given it more use and a kinda last stand backup. Will definitely see about that post-ludum.
The things that need fixing behind objects should be fixable by pressing X, as it will scan all 8 tiles around the player and try to fix things nearby. However in the rush I may have missed the placement of some objects and rendered some tiles unfixable.
@ironygames, I had thought about a save state but that would have been too much to do with Pico-8 and the time I had given what I was doing. So you were looking for something to revert back to just skip the intro part it might be doable.
@cptn-b, @m8rix, @endurion, I've updated the guide again to explain a bit better what everything does. I'm hoping that it explains the purpose of what everything in the game is and what it does.
@endurion I added the two objects you need to find to win the game into the guide to make it a bit easier to understand and figure out what to look for.
@louiejams and @hare-software, yeah I've tried to do a lot of work to improve the documentation on this page to help out players. Unfortunately due to the rules I'm not really supposed to add new features in, and having an in-game page to try and give a better explanation is therefore off the cards. But if there are areas you think needs more explanation I will happily write something up and add it to the page. Anything to help as I know that's the number 1 feedback, confusing! XD
@fabula-rasa I updated the text just above the links to try and give a helpful "warning" for people to read the description, you weren't the first person to do that XD
@naali, there is a final popup that is triggered if you either launch the lifeboat or trigger the radio and survive 100 - 200 turns. If you see that message pop up, you know you survived
@g12345, you probably fired the ammo as you were likely standing on a grate when the alien appeared. I should probably alter that for future iterations.
If you can trigger the radio, having a small room where the O2 isn't used up as you move around can mean you don't suffocate to death at the end. It's utility is not helpful in most cases but sometimes it is.
I'm thinking I should update the icons some more to explain a few other bits of the game. Thank you for the feedback, gives me a place to look at updating things tomorrow.
@sirsnowy7, @misterkeefe, @magnusfurcifer, @nicolas-diniz, @ironygames, @psychic-ash, @fiakaiera, @runuchok, @endurion, @cptn-b, @louiejams, @tudvari, @fabula-rasa, @morcado, @g12345, @polarcube, I've made a few bug fixes to the game:
1. Fixed bug of players dying really quickly (gave everyone the spacesuit to start off with) 1. Fixed bug of players being killed by unseen alien (prevented alien from coming through grill while player is on it - hopefully) 1. Fixed bug of players not having feedback of what things do (provided in-game description of icons in icon form... closest I could do within the games existing functionality) 1. Fixed bug of players not being able to move for one turn after trying to pick up scrap when already at max capacity
While this might not fix all of your individual issues I hope this might go some way to resolve some of them so you can get a little bit more out of the game and experience some of the later areas and survive to explore for longer.
Any additional feedback I'll see if I can incorporate into potential bug fixes.
@fengol, I quite agree. That's why I've been working on a post-ludum version which will have a proper tutorial level and much better exploration and opportunity to explore the mechanics in game before you get to try out the game proper. Alas that is not something I can release for the compo due to the rules.
@duke, I completely agree with your assessment of the controls. I've spent the last couple of weeks creating a post-jam version which hopefully eliminate most of the control issues and explain a lot more about what's going on in the interface. I was thinking of implementing a kind of menu system to decide more complex actions and provide visual feedback of where you are targetting.
@lcstark, the gun is only meant to drive away the creature for a short while rather than kill them. It gives you a few turns where it will keep away as much as possible.
A new version is slowly being worked on, it has an interactive tutorial level which you can explore and get a bit more first hand understanding of how everything works and eventually randomised 3x3, 4x4, and 5x5 layouts you can choose from to play.
@akitl, you're unable to kill the enemy, only drive it off.
The post-jam version will make this a bit clearer (i hope) with a more extensive tutorial level and expanded description.
@tobiasw, very common response and something I am going to try and address in a post-jam version which I hope to flesh out a tutorial level which walks you through all the different bits.
The whole description and iconography was thrown in to minimise the lack of time to have a proper tutorial through everything and try to keep within the rules of the competition.
Thank you for taking the time out to try th game and provide feedback, I am certainly working to try and address those issues.
Glad to see another fellow PICO-8 developer out here! One bug I came across, if you lose and start again the towers remain from the previous game making the second play through super easy in comparison. After I won the bottom left showed "[nil]" and I wasn't able to restart the game without resetting the cartridge.
Overall a really well polished game, very enjoyable and I would love to see an expanded post-jam version so I could play more of it.
Very interesting, the higher your health the more challenges you face so you kinda have the difficulty change as you go along but also fits in with the whole theme. Really very well done.
Maybe if the music volume was lower then as the combo bar gets lower a raising volume warning sound allows the player audio feedback of when running out of time without having to look at the combo bar and waste a bit of time.
On one occasion, while I was viewing another tab, my combo bar had somehow run out of time but hadn't killed me. This left me able to still play the game without having to worry about the timer. I tried doing it again but it didn't trigger again.
Lastly maybe store a high score locally so you can compare against your best game.
Overall a pretty solid game, keep up the good work!
Played the web version. The controls for the toaster felt sluggish to be recognised and when they did the acceleration was far too fast to be controllable. I was unsure from the visual feedback if the fridge was attacking in the floating toasts. The game felt like it was lagging a lot of times. If i used the mouse to turn off the sounds in-game then my fridge also moved as well which put me out of position leading to a game loss.
The underlying mechanics of the game, with the dual control, was really good and if the control sensitivity was resolved would work really well! It was pretty intuitive to me to operate the two, keyboard for one and mouse of the other.
Fun little game, would have been nice if there was more to feed the beast and the platformer element of the game was a lot more involved beyond the initial start. I think what I mean is, I want more of it as I'd like to see where it would lead to.
I did get stuck on at least two occasions as the placement of obstacles either got me to get stuck in the environment or unable to jump. Only with some lucky jumping around I was able to get out of it but I could see some people getting stuck and giving up before they've even really experienced the game properly.
Some of the collision detection from the enemies ranged attacks seemed like it included your sword as the hit box, meant fighting some enemies you almost always got damaged if you weren't quick enough. It would have also have been nice that after the game I could go back and play again instead of having to reload the page again.
On the first instruction page the "click to continue" is half covering the border so it looks cut off. When you interact with your mother, picking her up, there is a jump in the animation where you've brought her nearly up to full height then it jumps back to the resting down animation then back up again. If you face your mother when picking her up then turn the other way, the caravan for a single frame jumps to the other side before realising it was in the right place then jumps back again.
I got lucky on my second game that the wizard was just two screens away, within searching a total of four screens I earned enough to turn my mother back to normal again and win. That's just the luck of the RNG gods I presume!
I would say the animations and graphics need some more polish to them but overall it was a fun experience and definitely worth playing.
The sailing was a little fast, and using the space made me go faster than I needed to go. Some sort of compass showing the way to the lighthouse as a reference point would have been good. I wasn't sure how to deliver the green boats to the lighthouse, I just assumed that when I touched the green boats that happened? A little unsure there.
I only managed 4 days of being a shut in, I miscalculated and watched some anime for fun. Oh how that made me too lonely... :(
A really great cohesive design of the art, though maybe a little more could have been done on the audio (but I think it worked fine with the minimalist design there). The only draw back is I wasn't sure how effective any one action would be, the variation seemed so wide that it just seemed I had to do one thing then nap, do one thing then nap... unless that was the whole intent...?!
Very enjoyable, would recommend.
I liked how your swarming routine worked out, it was nice to see them clump together. I was trying to spot if you had designed as a single lead insect which all followed or if had all the neighbours influence the direction of their nearest neighbours. Would be curious what technique you went with in the end.
I had fun with the game, something cathartic about splatting all of them and mildly saddening when a ladybug was got :(
Simple, straight forward and very easy to pick up and play. I enjoyed it a lot though would be nice to have a bit more variation of different challenges to face along the course to give it a bit more replayability. The minor bug I was going to mention has already been picked up so don't need to comment on that.
Took a few games to figure out how to play, once I did I managed to get nearly everyone out alive after just one day>night>day cycle. A pretty simplistic game but it's enjoyable, would definitely like to see an improved version of the game with more options or differences in the environment. The fire & ice concept was a good one.
I liked how the music would stop when you pressed space to make the character stop.
Not sure but you might have been missing an option for evolving resistance against the heat. The music was a little repetitive, would have been nice for an in-game option of turning it off.
For a first entry it wasn't bad, definitely need to look at the balancing of the evolution points. Found the simplest way was to just dump everything immediately into evolution points, grab 2-3 points of resistance when I could then just spend points as I needed to keep up the population.
Controls can be difficult and a bit unresponsive, the checkpoint system is a life saver, it's not obvious if you're handling onto the ice or not which is particularly difficult near ice where you slide.
At the first check point when you climb up the wall, there is a moving platform. It is always moving away from you when you restart at the camp. This means you just have to sit there, doing nothing until it returns which makes for a dull experience. On top of the difficulty of this first challenge I'm sure it's a point that will cause a lot of people to stop.
The babies face is hilarious.
I loved the concept. I found the game a little unresponsive at times to with the controls making the platforming elements difficult to contend with at times. The game suffered a little slowdown for me when all the screen affects where in operation, making the controls even harder to control.
Overall I liked the visuals and the subtle audio that went along with it.
Using the fires as both the light sources and effectively the scoring, to see how far you can get worked very well.
Fun little game, I ended up giving up on Level 5 only because it got a little more difficult and was taking more than a few minute before I figure out the answer XD It's a good piece of work, you should be proud, solid and polished. Could just do with sound.
I did find the time it took to load between the game and main screen a little long at times when I just wanted to get back into the game. The controls felt a little clunky, that the animation and key presses weren't quite lined up but it might have been related to the type of animations that were used.
I liked the idle animation where the horse looks at you, I also liked the hidden areas and how some of the apples you only had one chance to get them else you would just have to carry on with the journey.
Would have been nice if you have to click on something or press a key to go up the steps, one time a ladder was in-front of a door and I forgot about it and went up a level before I was ready to. There were some lag issues when the vision range was reduces. By level 8 the game started to lag more frequently without any other thing going on making it almost unplayable. If you held down one direction key then the game took a long while to update, if you also pressed other directions these would be carried out but you wouldn't see the individual steps.
It's a really cool concept, I really liked the whole concept and I would love to see more. More mechanics, more variety in adventurers, more things that you can do like laying a trap by staying still, maybe seeing the adventuring parties wandering around the place. Heck, maybe you could leave baby chests all over the place and you might want to go check up on them.
Holding down Z avoids the button mashing as it will automatically trigger multiple key presses. Minor graphical glitch I felt, with a large number of packets if you started to move the last packets position seemed to jump a lot rather than moving position smoothly.
Good use of the PICO-8 engine to knock out an overall good game, was fun to play.
So there was a bug, if you didn't close down the initial dialogue option when starting a level you could still gain dust so you could trigger off the end of level sequences but battery wouldn't drain. This made every level a lot lot easier. The controls just felt weird, with the still continuing in the same direction when you try to strafe, the additional directional change was probably not high enough. If it was intended like that to replicate a romba then it might have worked better if you couldn't change your viewing direction at all and just had it so you could press one button at a time.
Interesting visuals and where you were going with the gameplay, felt a little cluttered at times (pun intended) on screen with the dust particles in the air along with all the rubbish on the floor. Might have worked aesthetically more if it was just kept more plain and simple. It was an interesting concept.
The start button is hidden at the bottom of the screen with high transparency, so it was hard to know how to start playing the game.
The slow-mo effect makes the game feel as if it's lagging, I don't feel it needs it.
One of the most effective ways of keeping your person alive is just hiding their head at the bottom of the screen. It would be good if the top, bottom, and sides of the screen also also cause your to lose.
The controls were really sluggish making it hard to jump. Not sure if it was a bug but at times I saw several of the bug creatures just facing another another and not moving anywhere as the collision detection seem to lock them together. The last major bug was probably if a bug hit you then the collision detection dragged it towards you pretty much ending your run if you weren't careful.
The basic mechanics of the game; the egg, healing, heat, power, all really good concept and definitely an interesting resource management scheme for trying to play the game. You have to really think about being quick, when to sacrifice health and when to use up the energy to shoot things. I think if this was polished enough it would make a pretty decent game.
370 was my record! The audio feedback of being left speaker or right speaker was quite frankly a lifesaver, it allowed me to focus my efforts of running back and forth without missing things too much. Probably one of the most effective uses of SFX that I've come across so far. That graphics worked well. Overall, pretty solid game.
The onscreen graphical tutorials and explanations is one of the better implementations of explaining to the player (me) on how to play the game and was very much appreciated, I got into the game very quickly even though I found the controls hard to manage.
A nicely made, well rounded game. I loved the aesthetic of the game with the pusedo handhold game acting as the interface and the background. Gave it a really strong feeling of being an old school game. I did find the repeating music a little annoying after a while and I was glad it was really easy to turn it off from within the game itself.
One minor tweak would be the colour of the red for the fake "nintendo" logo, if it wasn't as bright red and more like the border colour it would stand out against the grey background a lot better.
There were a few bugs, kept getting stuck jumping up and down without being able to move at the exit tunnel to a level at times. The health/restart at the beginning didn't seem to trigger at times so it was hard to figure out what would start me at the beginning of the level or what would start me at the beginning of the game again.
It's an interesting idea, definitely needs a bit more polish to make it more into a better game.
Good little game this, I did like how the large meteors would destroy the trees should they land on them and had a much bigger explosion radius too.
Music was a little repetative, I enjoyed the different games that I could play but would have liked to have seen more of them. I found the easiest way through, at times a little grinding games, was to just go to dodgeball and sit in a corner where I would rarely get hit to power up the battery.
The flappy bird mimi game was funny. I think it would have worked ever so slightly better if all the onscreen assets were moved and reused from the original battery powering up to make up the whole of the scene but it was close to it.
I encountered a bug where upon I ate the last number of the level but the monster thing still had a turn, moved over me and ended the game.
Took a little while to get into the game and figure out how to control it, for an indirect control game it's pretty decent. I would definitely like to see more options or variations of what you could influence as at the moment and given time you would eventually "win" without doing anything at all. All the actions do is allow you to reduce the time between now and when you win.
I would definitely love to see an expanded version of this game.
This is really fun game, surprised not so many people have played this. The audio is cute and the storyline to go with it is really well done and put together. The only thing I would say is the music should fade out and then the new tracks should fade in when there is a track change, just helps the flow of the audio better.
I would have liked the z+x keys explained in game, even if it's a "z to jump" "x to skip" as would have helped me get to grips with the game a little bit quicker.
Also on mobile, I had to full screen the game else the up button wouldn't work. I had almost abandon trying to play until I remembered Pico-8 could do that and hoped it fixed the issue.
I enjoyed playing the game and I would like to hope I can come back to playing it again some more. If it's on the Pico Bbs would probably try to favourite it so I don't lose track of it.
After losing I tried starting again and the game froze, I had to reload the page to start again. This happened every time.
Purple background and blue text is a bad choice to the instructions page, it makes the blue text seem fuzzy and harder to read. White text would have worked a lot better.
As you could push the cats around if you touched them, I think with a little work I'd be able to shove them into an inaccessible area but it was hard to test as it kept breaking after every game.
The art and audio are very much in keeping with each other, a kind of rough and raw style so I enjoyed them a lot. I did find the controls, such as multiple clicks to flap higher, a lot harder to use than anticipated and some of the layouts it seemed almost impossible that you would ever pass the obstacles so I felt like I lost through no fault of my own (might also be a complete lack of skill!)
With some polish on the level generation I think it could make a pretty good game.
The jumping mechanism should probably be replaced with a double jump which is a bit more common. Collision with the side of objects felt like they were sticky, rather than pushing the player away allowed for a sudden hit then fall. The game relied a lot of memorising the locations of all the pitfalls without any signposting ahead of time where these were.
There is definitely potential of a game here but I feel that some of the mechanics and signposting of issues needs a little work to help make it a bit more playable for people.
Sometimes when on top of the button/ledge thing, it was really hard to hit anything else as it seemed like the collision detection was off. It took me a while to realise there was some slow health regeneration and it was a shock when I realised there was friendly-fire on XD Kinda lost the first time because of that.
Once I got to grips with it I managed about 6 or 7 stations but I wasn't sure if there was meant to be more levels. Was a fun game and ran smoothly.
When I finally realised you were trying to get 100 BPM I managed to rack up a score of 19500.
Having some sort of indication of what you were trying to do would have gone a long way to helping get to grips with the game more quickly. Once I got going I started to have fun but beyond once you figured it out there isn't much else to do. I would suggest throwing in some additional mechanics into the game, think ala Surgeon Simulator with strange things going on to make it more complicated.
Really struggled with the controls on my computer, I did however manage phase 59 and about 150 enemies killed. Half to one third of the time when I attempted to start firing nothing would happen, turning seems haphazard if it would work or not, and I found if the game wasn't in full screen before I started playing it was even hard to control. Once I had figured out the best way of handling these, overall the game wasn't too bad and very good for being done in 48 hours.
Using WASD controls to change the thrust vectors was a little difficult and led to quite a bit of imprecise movements. Having a heading, which you can change at a very small cost of fuel, then using the main engine to move and/or having side thrusters might have given a more fluid type of control for this genre of game. Overall it was a nice little physics game.
For a compo entry you're supposed to add a link to the source code (I think the jam is more flexible and doesn't require the source code).
I liked how the dust cloud appeared infront and behind the player, trying to manage shooting and jumping was an interesting challenge which I've not encountered really encountered in this particular style of runner game before. Overall not a bad entry!
Outputting the current turns happiness, power requirements, pollution etc would have been super useful and made the game a lot more intuitive to play. Also a retry button would have been good. After reading the rules was able to do a lot better compared to my first game, nice idea for a game.
Really nice idea, I liked the physicality of having to run off to get the resources in order to build up your own defenses. The delay between animations starting/stopped and when you interact with things caused a little frustration, having accidently clicked the chop one too many times meant that during this incredibly tight get was losing a lot of time because of that. I did really like the partial upgrades that you could do, really nice idea there.
Using a trackpad mouse for this was really hard to control properly, if I was using a mouse or a pad with pen this would have been so much easier. The aesthetics were great, and the audio all went to creating a great atmosphere. The only bit I would say is the little bar at the top which went down with each failure/level could have been made into say an ink pot on ink line with the same art style as it could then have conveyed the same information whilst represent "spilt/lost ink" and just tied it all a little together and provided a little better feedback to the player as to what it was. Still an awesome game though.
Hahaha, I love the way you've themed the game XD I would recommend changing the dragging to be right-click to toggle on and off as holding down any mouse button for an extended period of time isn't great feeling when you don't really need to. The music was a little loud but glad could turn it off. A volume scale would have be nicer but appreciated I could toggle it at least. Very cool game.
I didn't know closing down ads and not allowing cookies could be so fun XD Really interesting take on it, I loved it.
64 turns myself, could have lasted a bit longer. I didn't think that the opposition needed to be boosted up making it impossible to defeat in a single turn, just an endless supply of re-enforcements would have been sufficient enough as eventually your board position should probably break down. You can ramp up the re-enforcements by increasing the number or utility of the units as time goes on (say by eventually only spawning queens and knights). Overall really quite fun and would like a see a more polished version of the game.
I had for a moment wondered if it was possible to "win" the game after capturing a piece through a bit of luck, then more pieces started to spawn in and it dawned on me I was going to lose... Nice game! The only thing I would mention is music just ended at the end when it's been played just felt a little sad. Would have been nice if there was some music inbetween since it was nice to hear.
Playing the game was very intuitive, the visual and audio feedback helped a lot in understanding what was going on very quickly. If the beeping was different for each belt or the light more obvious against the large screen then it would have been easier to keep track of things and be able to keep track of it all in your head. It was nice sense of pressure throughout and the steadily building up of anxiety inducing tension. Nice work.
I'm curious what kind of time someone could get with an autoclicker for the space bar.
It took me several attempts to figure out how to effectively move around, and it may have just been the laptop I was working on but the game ran horribly slowly to begin with for a run or two before it finally seemed to calm down and catch up (fogging and limiting the render distance might have helped a bit with that). Definitely a few issues with getting inside the draw boxes of the different objects but considering it's a compo entry a pretty solid effort there given the time constraints. I think a more polished version of this game could be quite interesting to play as it has an unusual gameplay mechanic.
After a couple of restarts, after I vaguely knew what I was doing but I could barely find a strategy that could get me just into orbit 4. The setup of requiring 10 components in the first orbit then increasing by 5 each orbit I can see as ramping up the difficulty but if combine the fact if you have under the required components it still consumes them all AND damages the station it makes it nearly impossible to get beyond orbit 3. The balance between ore generation and refining feels completely off. One drone can keep up with two refineries but if you get two drones the sheer cost of building a refinery and inflated cost of saving the station means you'll barely get anywhere into the game. The game controls feel a bit off, when not in full screen if you put your mouse cursor to the edge of the screen it doesn't scroll which is pretty common for this style of game. The map might also scroll and puts your camera into a weird position right at the start of the screen which wastes precious seconds. It might be better to start off your initial drone at a ore node and give the initial building some bare bones level of refining.
I can see a lot of potential for this game, with a little bit of extra time refining the issues and a bit polish you'll see a lot of dividends from this.
@jamie-slowgrove, been there before XD You all did a good job, just next time remember to do the balancing sooner rather than later XD
A really nice idea. With a bit more polish such as letting blocks fall down when there is nothing underneth, a bit easier to destroy blocks you're next to, and a form of double jump to prevent you from getting stuck so easily it would have been an amazing game.
The time for the game story text to appear on the screen was a little long, if the text was animated/scrolling on screen or the next paragraph appeared faster, or press a button to skip to the next line would have helped immensely with the immersion and pacing. I didn't want to interact with various story elements due to amount of time just waiting doing nothing or waiting for the same bit of text to repeat itself for the third time.
The concept was good, a branching story themed in the FTL style. I can see from the static graphics where you were planning to go with the overall idea. I got to the end, was an interesting story concept.
A good game, my one main recommendation would be on mouseover the different things you can implement to get a vague idea of what the outcomes might be (good/bad/random/unknown) so you can have a little more of an idea of what might happen if you implement it.
Nice idea. Some time at the start before the first obstacles appear would give the player time to experiment and get use to the controls before the game really starts, I would sometimes start the game and die within 40ms. I think the start button being in the center would help also get the player very quickly into the idea of how the controls work might help.
The audio for the groan could have been dialed down just a little bit but it did add a great grating sound, which if I'm right got louder as the monster got closer. It would have been nice if you were able to just click on the exit and it would autopath you out as often would get caught on the edge of the exit and would then waste precious time there. The game concept is really simple but with the time pressure it works really well once you get a hang of it. Really nice work there!
@pordrack, I had debated with myself (briefly) about the scoring mechanism. In the end I just went with a flat time elapsed since the start of the run, though I had wondered about adding in asteroids destroyed too. If I had done that then I definitely would have added the current score to be visible. If I was going to extend the game a little more that is definitely one of the things I'd implement right away.
@the-fazzo, The red was meant to represent where the asteroids turn the ground to lava, I had thought about adding extra "clouds" when they hit which dissipated but that would have taken way more time. My original idea for health was to have little pixel wide "cities" and then people "moving" around the world traveling from one city to the next. The endgame would then have been when the last person was killed, however given the time I was going to put into it (keeping to roughly 48 hours even though was a casual extra entry) I scrapped that idea. If I do a post jam version that, and music, would definitely be added.
@Fifut, totally it does! And the thousands of miles per hour winds created a nice gently breeze first thing in the morning :)
Yeah, was set to super high spinning speed which was super simple to slow down but I just wanted to show off the world as it spun around so didn't think it was too much of an issue. If I had more time I would have put stars in the background and had them rotate too.
@skruffye, yeah the balancing of the game was a tricky thing. How to make sure you were doomed but without making it too much of a long drawn out game. The way I went with was with a simple 0.01% chance of spawning an asteroid every frame (30 frames per second), increasing by 0.0001% per frame. Meant that in time eventually you'd be totally be overwhelmed. Far too simplistic for anything that I would consider a game jam or prototype but it worked well enough. I'd probably go for more of a wave type scenario if I was doing an non-jam version, but then again I'd do more work on the asteroids themselves so hits don't automatically destroy them but might deflect them instead.
I did take a stab at some music but it didn't sound super great, so I spent the time adding the sound effects to at least give the gameplay a little bit of oomphf instead.
@salyon, I did originally have the gun moving around faster (about twice the speed) but I dialed that back as, even with the gimmick of preventing you from moving while holding down the fire button, it became a little to easy to whip around the world to shoot everything down. It then kinda forced tough choices of which asteroids to shoot down and which to leave. Incidentally the damage of the asteroid was the radius squared, so it becomes super important to shoot down the big ones first!
@knatt, thank you! In the first iteration it was a little more complex than it was right now. The asteroid would hit leaving the red afterglow, and wiping out everything that it landed on. Eventually it would cool to grey stone and nearby water would flood in with shallow water then deep water and refill the area if there was water nearby. That was a little too much for the fantasy CPU as it was not well coded so I eliminated the difference between deep and shallow water. Made a significant difference. In theory, if you can have enough asteroids hit you can fully eliminate all the water leaving only a grey rock behind.
@grumpy-gecko, that all took far longer than I had hoped! About 75% of the 2 or so days I spent on this was on that alone. I used some crappy code to wrap a 2d map over the globe and setting the image pixel-by-pixel (my math-fu isn't strong enough atm to do it better than that). Basically I grab a 32x32 of the 2d map, preserve the y coord but scale the final x coord based on the difference between itself and the center and the map against the width of the circle at that given y coord. Gave a passable approximation of a sphere and the clouds hide a lot of the glitches underneath it XD I'll give your game a try out and see what it's like (thankfully there is an HTML5 build so I will do that soon).
@Japes, thank you. I didn't really like the concept for the game jam (which is why I stuck to the causal extra entry) so if I was going to do it then it had to be a learning experience for me. That's why I ended up with the rotating earth and damage to the planet to play around and practicing with texture mapping. I was happy with what I ended up with, even if it does need a lot more work. The clouds cover up so many coding crimes XD
@mavvy, thank you! I was first thinking I wouldn't need the extra VFX but it just felt completely lacking against the void of space. I had thrown in right at the start a palette shifting for pixels to become darker over time, was pleasantly surprised when it worked out that well. I did try to differentiate between the exhaust and explosions to make it a little easier to tell the difference between the two. I didn't get around to particles for moving the gun or asteroid hits, but ah well.
@tornadopiggie, as a couple of people mentioned I think it would have worked a little better with some music and would surely benefit from a bit more depth. I thinking of working on a post-jam version of the game to try and add a bit more too it. I wouldn't expect a massive change, I think the basic concept works fine, just maybe an extra mode or two which can address the problems (thus preserving the original game)
@andrewkennedy, ah I remember playing asteroids on arcade machines at the seaside and also whatever port there was for the Spectrum. I often stayed around in the same place as was often just easier to play that way XD And yes, the speed was specifically restricted to make it more of a challenge and to force the endgame a lot faster. If I were to do another endless mode I would modify that to be faster. Originally it was twice as fast and that felt about right, at the current speed I found myself really having to think did I want to move or not.
@tornadopiggie *takes notes for a post-jam version* uh-huh, go on... XD
I tweaked the button press to reduce spam shooting but still leave it fairly quick, to compensate for that you couldn't move whilst shoot. I could see implementing waves, different obstacles, weapon types/effects etc. I did have a vague plan for the inhabitants themselves to launch random missiles themselves, which would be similar to an automatic second gun, but I didn't get around to implementing people so that seemed kinda silly.
I did also want to implement asteroid colliding with each other, what would mean you'd end up with a huge field of fragments which would end up hitting the world (or destroying each other, never got around to testing out that idea).
Hmm, I have a second completely unused button so I could get it to swap weapon/gun types so you can choose the weapon in the best situation and I could even add a second gun anyway by having a second (up to 7) player. That would then modify the difficulty and can do that on the fly.
@cube-logic, yeah the original build was twice as fast for both movement and shooting. I tweaked it down solely for the balancing of the game for the jam so you couldn't get every rock and had to make choices thus leading to your inevitable demise (this also included the not being able to move and shoot so you could track objects whilst shooting).
I will be looking at a post-jam version which will specifically address the movement often mentioned.
@harksa, yeah 75% of my time went onto just doing the planet graphics and the clouds cover up the errors. I know music is my weakpoint, so rather than subjecting people to some horror I used what time I want to spend on the game towards the SFX instead. Post-jam its one of the areas I want to work on to see if I can write something appropriate, was watching tutorials beforehand to try and learn more.
@levi, I agree with you on the dryness as you put it. One of the factors why I limited move speed, to help reduce overall game time by forcing a loss quicker, and something I couldn't come up with a quick solution for without some considerable effort. As i was vaguely trying go stick to 48 hours overall i felt was sufficient to cover the theme. Post-jam I will try and address this, currently reworking the original code to preserve the jam version as-is and provide other "better" modes of play. And yeah, most of my time was on the planet visuals. Took me far too many hours to just wrap the 2d map to a circle :( i have some tweets of the hourglass world i managed to create in the process :/
@aune, there is a free to use web version of Pico-8 (https://pico-8-edu.com), it runs functionally the same as Pico8 and was created for educational purposes along with making simple tweetcarts (a whole genre in and of itself).
The asteroids being sent back gently was semi-accidental. When they break up they actually have a random X and y speed assigned but limited to a range of -0.5 to 0.5. If they were up close, the absolute values were likely to be a lot higher so it just happened to come out that way. I did try a few other implementations, such as trying to impart the missile speed and explosions to push them away but this ended up feeling more natural and a whole lot easier to implement.
@congusbongus, you should just be able to hold down the fire key and it should fire at exactly the same rate however you wouldn't be able to move at the same time. Yeah, I agree with the music. Still learning how to make not awful music by myself. I know enough to take sheet music and implement it into Pico-8 but that's not the same XD
@bufalloo, thank you! That was the area I spent the most time on so I was hoping people liked that and given all the comments I think it was time well spent.
@fionnabhair, yeah the clouds work so well for that. If you look carefully there are times where the land seems to squish together for a moment before expanding again, and tiny islands disappear and reappear at times even around the equator (way more prevalent at the poles). Because of the way I implemented the code (very simply and crudely) it can easily overwrite already set pixels so tiny details get corrupted. Hence why the clouds provide a nice distraction!
@christian-zommerfelds, I totally get you there. I had originally thought of adding a limited number of shots that regenerated over time. Figuring out how to balance that in a short space amount of time meant I cut that and just limited how fast you could shoot and restricted you to moving or shooting. I do want to go back to that idea with the post-jam version, plus upgrades, faster speed, power etc (I.E. more of a game and a sense of progression).
@machwerx, yeah it's setup so you can either move or fire but not both at the same time.
@chriiis88, yeah about the aiming. I had originally tried to implement a form of aiming assistance but it didn't work very well so I abandoned that in order to focus on other things in the time I had given myself to complete the game. I'll look at that more for a post-jam version.
@seanc the health bar was added in part to help actually add an end point to the end in a reasonable manner. Previously you would just get overwhelmed and the game was still going on, so it helped create a more natural endpoint so you didn't have to keep going past the point you knew it was all over for you.
@codebug I totally sympathise with your feelings. For the sake of the theme (and to help push the player towards inevitably losing) that was intentional for the game jam but not what I would have done for a properly fleshed out game. A sufficiently skilled player with either fast fingers or autoclicker would have been able to spam the screen full of missiles thus preventing a loss (and probably crashing the game in the process too due to memory overflow).
@markopolodev I think it's possible to pitch bend (though a little CPU intensive), or at least add some more variants to the missile sounds. I completely hadn't thought about that and will add that to the post-jam version to help break up the audio a bit.
@mira I will be altering the movement speed and firing mechanisms post-jam, that was purely in to help bring a game to an end sooner (to fit the theme better) rather than dragging out the gameplay beyond what I thought was practical fun.
@naali, will be working on a post-jam version that will extend the gameplay a lot more and add more to it. Right now working on a waves and endless mode and still figuring out exactly how I want to implement them XD
@life-lich powerups, or variant weapons to deal with different scenarios will be a post-jam feature. Will be playing around to see what works best.
@life-lich, I'll be updating the itch.io page with the final build, might upload to lexaloffle for any test builds. Best way to get in touch regarding update would be on Twitter under @NerdOfGamers.
@trizalio, yeah the X tapping was an oversight. I had thought I had limited the fire rate in the jam build but I got it wrong. Ah well, people can spam fire by tapping XD The dark asteroids are "behind" the planet. If you watch the light asteroids hit and the darker asteroids hit, you'll notice the damage is applied differently. It was a tiny little effect but I felt it would add a little more "realism" to the damage.
I had to plug in my mouse as my trackpad was really not working with this well at all but after that went a lot better. Was a slight issue when you got a large number of creatures on screen (or spawned overall) as the framerate tanked a huge amount but I'm sure with some extra time you'd be able to resolve that. I managed to defeat the eye and scored 10th overall (at the time of writing). I really enjoyed how you did the mechanic for this, definitely worth polishing out the rough edges.
Cool concept, I loved how each time you got a pill you became smaller and smaller. That was both the great aspect of it and also one of a few niggling issues of the experience. I think the same green pills were shared between the different levels and occasionally respawned. If you had different pills for each level (say blue for one size down, purple for next size down) and kept the original green ones but scaled up it would have added to the immersion sense of scale you created. Music was really cool.
I did encounter the odd bug with sometimes being off screen then jumping back to off center.
I liked the healing mechanic, slowly regaining health as you killed enemies. I would like to see the difficulty build up a little quicker or introduction of other enemies faster as repeating the same effectively level over-and-over again was a little tiresome. There was on occasion where the enemies spawned right next to me, a little exclusion zone around the player would help prevent that. Nice little entry though!
The audio levels need to be a more little balanced between background audio and the game SFX, the initial beep you hear as the game loaded was a little jarring (audio volume sliders in the menu would fix that). I -loved- the speed slider, which more tower defense games had this. When I click upgrade I wish there was a way to back out of it, rather than discard upgrade as you've already spent your cash and I hadn't realised for a while it was doing that. Using a set random seed modified by the current luck value allows you to check upgrades before committing to it as you might not want to spend the cash right at that moment and just want to check out the potential upgrades first. I did get a 50% range increase followed by a 50% range increase and wasn't sure if the two applied together or if the second 50% range increase overwrote the first one, UI would helped a little here. I did really like the range of different upgrades, rarity and the luck factor though. Very cool implementation. I would have liked to be able to click off a tower once it was selected. I kept playing this over and over again to try out different strategies, so that in and of itself marks itself out to a good game. Great work there!
I really loved the visual style, the minimal but very appropriate SFX and music worked wonderfully with the game. I would have made the interaction F key and the dialogue key E the same, also have E to fast forward through dialogue sections for people like myself who read a lot faster than it was being displayed on screen meant it was a little frustrating. There was a tiny visual glitch when the text went off the edge of the screen before wrapping itself back around, the wrap around needed to happen one character earlier. I Would have skipped the quick time events and the small interaction at the start just stuck with it being a visual narrative as it worked best with the story you created. Overall though, really good work.
It would have been nice if there was a directional arrow allowing the player to know where the asteroids are coming from. Visually if you had the cracks underneath the city landscape you could have had two types of damage being displayed, one from the planet cracking up and also different stages of building collapse. I loved the little details on the vehicles, weapons, and the sound effects that went along with it. It was nice to play something which just let me worry about moving rather than having to aim carefully at every asteroid that was coming. Nice game!
Your asteroids are almost exactly how I wanted to do mine but I didn't want to put more time in to make them look as pretty as that XD
Felt like there were a couple of minor bugs such as the squeel time starting when you just put your nose out of the starting area but not enough so that when you head back it doesn't restart again, plus there was one when I ran out of (cooking?) time but it still allowed me to do some more jumping and try to complete the level (even after hitting another bit of lava). It also would have benefitted from an end of game scenario which didn't happen, you just retried the level again.
I found the game pretty intuitive to figure out in the first few seconds, it played well, and the audio certainly matched the gameplay adding a bit of humour to the game which not every game can pull off. Nice job.
I love how the music plays when you hit each of the different towers, and it's nice that you have to actually hit towers or each you lose a lot of points. My first go I ended up with -100 or -200 because I was just spamming all the time XD Finally ended up with about 450 points before I lost.
Pretty decent game over all, I liked how each time you were hit you moved on to a different stage of your life. That was a really nice touch. A few times when hitting the timers nothing seemed to happen, and on occasion it didn't even look like they connected either disappearing before they had visually collided (might just be a check and removal before draw update). It'd be nice if the mute option for the audio was inside the game rather than just the menu, and it'd help to identify the highscore in the top right so you know what it is compared to the current time in the top left.
As puzzle games go, once I got a hang of the summoning mechanic (the tutorial-esque/level selection screen at the start could have been used to help show this) it was a pretty fun game, just the right kind of level I was after. Not too hard, not too easy, required a little bit of thinking. Nicely pitched there.
The graphics and idea were cool, though it did feel like a few times when I was trying to summon allies that the keys weren't registering in the order I pressed them in, or at all? Was never 100% sure but something about the summoning input didn't quite feel right.
Deceptive simple yet elegant little game, very interesting mechanics and fun to play.
Very cool little game, big drawback for me was the constant having to click to keep summoning sheep. If it just summoned sheep whenever I had the money it would have been a much smoother experience and focus could have been kept on the chaos growing as you have more and more summoned creatures. Good game though!
Really nice use of the using the trappings of a summoning circle/ritual as the control scheme, thought it was awesome little idea.
I did figure out I could open up the summoning book while the summoning wheel was open, plus I could click and work the summons at the same time but it was really hard to easily memorise any of the patterns as they felt like they had no underlaying pattern. I just wanted to rely on just one as I could remember that single pattern. Would really help to have them able to be seen at the same time.
I think in my second play of the game one of the monsters was left over and pretty much instantly destroyed the big building/main base? (just tested it again, and yes the monsters aren't cleared up after losing).
Menu feels a little clunky as I have to click the button to get to the next page rather than a single click to continue (if it isn't that then the transition time is too slow).
However the gameplay is really interesting and the summoning actual felt like summoning creatures rather than just selecting from a list like any other tower defense game. Interesting concept overall!
A few issues, holding down to move just hurt hand, I never actually died when I ran out of health, after a while my summons even though I paid for them didn't appear. It was an interesting idea, just needed more polish to smooth out the issues.
I really loved the artwork and audio, they worked very well together. It's a really nice cozy game!
I completed the first two and then got stuck (not very good at word games) but I have to say this is a wonderful wonderful word puzzle game! Excellent work and hugely thematic!
The summoning system is cool, though was incredibly hectic trying to find the different elements I want at the speed it would go through the different floors. Either a break between floors or a pause to sort through to design the creatures would make it feel less hectic, it's that or an improved sorting system to find all the elements I am looking for to help me create a creature to my desired design faster.
Having the ritual becoming harder and harder to decipher as you went along was cool, though it did feel like one of the words didn't exist in my options. I think it was "in" or something like that (was in the third and final stage).
Probably just my computer, but until I plugged in an external mouse (as I was using inbuilt mouse) I could just not get the touchpad to work properly. When I finally plugged in a mouse it finally worked properly. Really cool game, I'm just going to bookmark this as I would like to play a lot more of this!
I loved having to dig up the parts and stitch them together to form my unit, I ended up being in a hurry so ended up with 3 arms and 1 leg for at least one of my units XD From someone who plays and designs a lot of necromancy style games this was a really interesting concept to come along and very much enjoy playing this. Thank you for making it!
Nice little entry you did there, there were a few times (at least on my mobile device) it seem to hang while I was being chased leading to worries I would be caught but always worked itself out. Took me three attempts to finally got use to the controls and rules before I finally won with $10 and 30s to spare. I did find it was a little easy to drop all your donuts unless i could quickly press and release to O button but otherwise worked fine. Looking forward to seeing what you bring to your next jam.
Apart from a few lag spikes (might have been my computer) and getting stuck when flying, it was a neat little game to play. The audio effect for the first sacrifice was funny and I really appreciated that I didn't have to go back all the way to the start and backtrack as I got further along, you respected the players time and that was a really good thing to implement.
I really like the summoning mechanism for this, would have liked to have seen more/replaceable options for this but I had a nice time figuring it all out even though I maxed out after my third attempt. The game was well put together.
404 on link to itch
After I figured out you could just take a menu from one person and give it to the next person entering things went soooo much faster. Cool little game!
I was a little confused by the ending, wasn't sure if I had succeeded or failed XD The hidden elements were fun, took me a few pokes around to figure out what I was missing and where to find them.
Some of those were really hard to squeeze in, and in the real world, some of those you just can't move XD Really funny interactions there and the comments were funny. Fun game!
It took several plays in order to figure out how on earth to play this, once I finally "got" it then the fun definitely increased a lot. Definitely one of the two most unique takes and creative implementation of the summoning concept I've come across so far.
@tomssuli buff did one of three effects, shield which halved damage (and reduced chance to be damaged in first place), bow which fires continuously providing chance to cause damage at range while casting other spells, and a weapon which allows increased chance to hit and damage but risky to pull as you can get hit too.
X/C does roll different directions for me. What keyboard layout do you have as might have affected play? (I use UK/US layout)
@thelastslowpoke Yeah, the right to start I wasn't happy about that much either but as I wanted to have the last 7 days of voting I shipped it as it. That was like the third iteration and I was hoping the text would just be enough (and looks it it just about worked). I will add some actual in-game instructions for the post-jam version to explain how to start playing XD Glad you figured it out and had fun though!
@prepe that would be partially because I released it so late! Was only 3 days ago when the big flurry of playing is long over.
I purposefully kept sounds low so as not to be overwhelming and glad I got that about right for headphone users, can never be quite sure myself.
Everyone seems happy with the AI, as am I. The wizards have a super simple script. I have a heatmap that decays over time. The AI calculates distance+heatmap*2 for each rough 16x16 px block and then picks one with lowest value (ignoring blocks close by). If you hit the wizard they are set to flee exactly away for a while. And that's it. Gives them the appearance of dodging and trying to find a place to launch attacks from. Plus the chaos going on also helps!
@frankiesmileshow you know, there isnt even an explaination outside of the game. It's all just in my head hoping people magically get it from a few names and images... oops, I think I forgot that whole part. I will definitely do that! (And also add in a description now to game page too!).
@zinkler, the cooldown timer (and a casting timer) do appear behind the spell name but I dont have any numbers displayed to show how long that is (or for instance fireball has longer cooldown than all other spells). But as you mentioned it I should probably add a "spellbook" in-game which explains the details of all the spells you know and what they do.
I hadnt actually thought of having icons, it would have been sooooo much clearer than the sometimes hard to read text. I will immediately start to add that to the post-jam version.
Two very useful ideas I will see about adding! Thank you.
I could not get past round 6, felt like I was really close a few times but just couldn't get over the finishing line. Awesome graphics and interesting idea.
This would have benefited from having an in-game mouse sensitivity controller, or if there was having it far more easily accessed as I never found one, as it made controlling the game exceedingly difficult.
The game itself had an interesting idea, cool to see full 3D first-person game as there haven't been many I have come across yet.
Took a couple of goes to figure out how to play the game effectively, surprisingly just hiding out near a bunch of trees made it a lot easier (albeit a lot slower). There is a nice concept here but definitely could do with some additional summons, ramping up of difficulty, or just more content. Nice seed of an idea here.
Oh my, those floaty controls were funny trying to get anything done XD Really worked well with the aesthetic of the game. Great work!
It took a while to figure out how to get started on this, eventually I figured out that I had to hatch the egg. Then I got stuck again until I realised I had to use the egg to interact with everything on my behalf. Might have benefited from the egg being "hatched" right away to just get play started as it nearly lost me from playing during those two humps. However, once I figured that out it was a cute little game.
The Dr. Seuss theming is strong with this one but works so well with it. Just a couple of notes, having a button/prompt to let you know to go to next bit of text (or skip) would be great, also tooltip reminders of keys when interacting or something off to the side would have been nice.
Could not get the embedded version on Ludum Dare to work as it required Space to start, which meant that screen would just scroll down the page (seems like Edge won't get focus on the embedded game)/
Using the up arrow/key to jump would have been helpful, making the game easier to play. Having space means that the screen sometimes jumps down if you don't full screen the game. As some other people have said, definitely need a cooldown for the hammer else the boss fight is over by just spamming the attack. Overall an interesting idea though.
Even though I haven't been able to figure out how to do anything in game (my efforts usually ended up with invalid shape name), the graphics and innovation around that are absolutely breathtaking. Truly a work of art. If the UI could be enhanced to make it a lot easier to interact with the summoning system it would elevate this game immensely. I would strongly suggest doing a post-jam version of this.
Auto-clicking would help with the game play immensely! Otherwise an interesting concept there.
Absolutely beautiful, loved how you combined the summoning theme with a rhythm style game. If you had longer would be interesting to see what you could make of this but for now makes a great little short game.
Really fun little clicker game, took me a little while to figure out how to play but once I got going was pretty straight forward. Shame there didn't appear to be anything beyond 66 souls/corpses that I could summon but what there was was nicely implemented.
I played the embedded version on edge, I did have some situations where it felt like my units weren't shooting but maybe still killing things, and the units seemed to wobble around and get stuck feeling like they weren't attacking at all...? It was weird which detracted from being able to fully engage, however overall it was a pretty decent take on a tower defense game.
Really liked this game, though everything felt so small! Was hard to see any much detail. Could almost imagine this as like a stealth/raiding style game with some more direct interaction over the summoned units and maybe other guards/enemies walking around. Still, nice gameplay though.
I couldn't figure out how to pick up/interact with an object. What's the method of interaction?
It was soooo dark (maybe also because I have my screen light turned down a fair bit because on battery on my laptop) but still managed to play ok. Definitely would have benefited from some extra UI elements to understand what was going on, or why I couldn't summon things at time but only having 72 hours to make everything I think you did a good job to get to where you did.
First time I've come across a memory game for the theme, neat little idea that.
The game was visually great, very polished given just how little time you would have had to implement them. The audio works very well with the aesthetic of the game, and having a playable tutorial with any game makes it super easy to pick and just get started! I will cover some of the drawbacks which I don't think anyone else covered below:
Aiming was difficult as shots fire from center of your character which is not precisely in the center of the screen (it's where the feet start), meaning unless my cursor was directly pointing exactly where I wanted I would frequently miss as the shots would go high/low.
Trying to manage a mouse for aiming and shooting, WASD for movement, arrow keys for buffing, and 123 for summons meant that my hands were all over the place meaning quickly got overrun. An alternative input schemes would be hugely welcome. Scroll wheel to select summon with RMB to summon then maybe switch WASD to buffs would limit having too many controls to manage, alternatively use QE to cycle summons with RMB to summon, or QE to switch between move and buffing. Just something to limit the hand movements XD
Very cool entry though!
The embedded version of the game is failing, says the following:
"Uh oh! If you're seeing this error, it means I can't find your index.html file.
This usually means you created your .zip file by zipping the entire folder, and index.html is somewhere like MyGame/index.html. If you recreate your .zip with index.html file in the root, this error should go away.
See the embedding guide for more details. ludumdare.com/resources/guides/embedding/
404 Not Found"
Playing on edge browser.
The game desperately needs an auto-click function, it kept hurting my fingers clicking constantly. Just hold down the mouse button and let it fire on repeat. Wasn't sure what I was summoning or the cost from the UI, that could help with a bit more clarity. Otherwise, not too bad.
There's another game I've seen that uses a very similar mechanic to building armies (you defeat them then take their units and incorporate them into your own), so it was an interesting little twist build up resources after you defeat the enemy army to then get spend it how you want to summon your own army. Played it several times over as it was fun to play.
Definitely a fun little game, with a few more tries I might be able to figure out a strategy that won't let me die horribly after a while XD
Cute, simple, and straight forward. I carried on playing this game until I had won and had fun. Was a nice little game!
The sliding around with your vehicle was just crazy XD Trying to get it to go where I wanted felt like I was battling the game itself just to go anywhere, it did very much live up to it's name.
I wondered where the summoning theme was going to come in, when it finally triggered I giggled a little. Funny and interesting take on it. Poor bird XD I fear for their existential understanding.
Honestly feels like this was created to farm voting on probably their actual game...