Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → LaneDavis
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Overall | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| š„ | 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | The Space Between Us | jam | 4.60 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| š„ | 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | The Space Between Us | jam | Audio | 4.71 | |
| š„ | 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | The Space Between Us | jam | Graphics | 4.84 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | Cosmic Collapse | jam | 66 | 4.18 | 4.07 | 3.81 | 3.82 | 4.22 | 4.30 | 3.80 | 4.00 | |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | The Inevitable Snowman | jam | 81 | 4.10 | 4.03 | 3.79 | 4.15 | 4.60 | 4.45 | 3.28 | 3.83 | |
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | The Space Between Us | jam | 3 | 4.60 | 4.50 | 3.93 | 3.81 | 4.84 | 4.71 | 4.51 | 4.68 | |
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Cat-Astrophe | jam | 63 | 4.06 | 3.78 | 3.53 | 4.11 | 4.15 | 3.95 | 3.58 | 3.87 |
@dilem thank you for the comment!! I took what you said to heart and experimented with adding a rounded "lip" to the platform collision. In our next version, it should be a little easier to slide on to a platform if you land right at the edge. I agree it was a bit unfair sometimes -- especially since the platforms really **look** like they should be rounded.
Thanks again for playing and for the useful comment š
Nice concept and execution! As others have mentioned, the sound effects and music are great!
I was really impressed by the ability to map controls, how well put-together the menu was, and the readme (though you may want to double check the formatting of the readme -- it ended up being distorted a bit in sublime text).
Had a few suggestions on small things that might improve the experience quite a bit if you choose to keep working on this:
**1.) Complete a level immediately when you have enough Deed Score.** This is my single biggest gripe with the game. In most levels, the scoring is generous enough for the player to complete the objective within 5-10 seconds, and the rest of the time is spent aimlessly.
**2.) In general speed everything up.** Everything is so slow! The end of level card ("you have delayed your death!") takes *so* long, and movement is *so* slow. Even the last second seems to linger forever before the level actually ends.
**3.) Give some degree of a "tell" on which direction the NPCs are about to move.** The one frustrating bit about gameplay is that the good NPCs frequently dodge your healing. This is totally fine, but I found that pausing and waiting for the NPC to move wasn't *quite* useful enough (for my taste, anyway), since the player moves pretty slowly. It would be nice to add some kind of hint, such as the NPC looking in the direction he's about to move, so that an observant player can anticipate their movement.
**4.) Penalize the player for hurting the nice NPCs.** Okay, so I'll admit, it was really funny that cornering an NPC, damaging him, and then healing him back up repeatedly is a thing you can do. It even fits nicely with the music and the sinister look of the main character. But it's way too strong. Playing this way, you can earn hundreds of points very easily, and it unfortunately kills the challenge of some otherwise challenging levels.
I wished I knew what the icons and numbers meant. On the other hand, this is one of the few LD games I could see myself really sinking time into. Amazing work!
NOT MY FROSTY COOOOOOOOOOATTTTTINNNNGG.
Super fun! The maze level was obnoxious, but I guess that was kind of the point. The premise was great, and pulling off sick dance moves while moving around was a ton of fun.
This was pretty fantastic. The scoreboard got me into a heated rivalry with my far more talented friend and I am now pretty steamed that he did better than me.
I will rate the game down 0.5 stars out of pure indignation.
On the other hand, it's certainly the most enjoyable strategy game I've played so far on LD.
You scared the bajeezus out of "my friend."
Seriously the atmosphere and sounds were very well done. Props for getting an atmospheric game done so quickly!!
Easily the best hot dog simulator I've played all day.
This game was awesome. Tight jumps and fun controls were a highlight of my LD experience. On the other hand, there was a fall in level 2 where my friend and I consistently fell through the floor. If you are in Unity, consider adding some linecasting to check for that.
@remco thanks for the review! If you have a sec, would you mind schooling us a bit about linux permissions? This was the first game I've built to Linux, so we're still feeling our way.
Glad you got it to work in the end!
If Elon Musk were to release a beemobile in two weeks I'd break open my entire piggy bank now that I know how fun bee drift phyics can bee.
In game two, pollen nitros plz?
@sorlok: bee cool.
Had a ton of fun playing socker boppers with the inimicus at the end. Fun final encounter and impressive dialog in the time given.
A little sketchy on the theme imo, because more was better throughout the game except for the one point where you could collect 6 fire flowers.
Shooter and pinball? Two great tastes that taste great together?
Thanks for filling a gnawing void in my chest that I didn't know I had.
It's DINO MITE!
Impressive tutorial implementation! I was wracking my brain on how to produce a tutorial in this amount of time, and you guys really nailed it. Nice production quality there.
Unfortunately, that's where the success ended for me. I seem to be one of the victims of the jump not working (even in the post-jumping build). Sad to see an interesting, high-polish game undermined by an unfortunate bug! I'll be checking back to see if you guys manage to fix it. Good luck!
Hey, just a thought for you: you may want to update your link to let people know that you've got more than just source code. I almost missed this gem! I thought "nah, no way I've got time to figure out how to compile the source," but @hystaf's comment above helped me figure it out.
Impressive little micro-quake! Very cool. My two biggest beefs are the glacial firing rate and the fact that enemies and pickups are the same color. Led to quite a bit of bamboozlement and some rather tedious gunplay. I think that resolving these two might make for quite the fun experience!
@jcb Yes! Right as the jam finished, we posted a build with some level-loading errors. Those should be cleaned up now in v1.2 in the same folder.
@heather-flowers Totally agreed on your second point. That level feels much more appropriate for an optional slog deep deep deep into the game. We hit people with it way too early. We played around with some level ordering in v1.2, and are talking over shortening that one based on your comment.
@ghostmaple Thank you! I feel exactly the same way. On the other hand, I totally hear what people are saying about the last level requiring either pre-existing godly platforming skills or saintlike patience. We're seriously considering holding L (or l-ctrl) to speed up time for your ghosts. Seems like a great idea, so thanks to those who proposed it!
@dorkulon, @treslapin, and @justcamh Thank you all! We particularly appreciate your commentary on the crystals. We've watched a few dozen people play in person now and... everyone does exactly the same thing! Egg on our faces: we'll definitely swap those crystals out for something more innocuous looking in a future update. Props to you for great feedback.
@mouthlessgames Thank you so much!
The effect is called a low pass filter. If you're in Unity, you can just add a "Low Pass Filter" component onto any gameobject with an audio source and it'll do the same effect! Of course, you can mess with values to your liking, but I used a timer to ease in the Cutoff Frequency from 10000 (during normal gameplay) to about 300 (during the pause menu). The ease-in happens over about one second, so it ends up sounding pretty smooth.
Yikes, this runs into one of the most difficult parts of compo: explaining just what the gosh darn hickety heck is going on here. I was bamboozled from the start, especially toward the goal!
I think you might be able to salvage a decent score here by offering some manner of explanation on what the player should do here. I see that I'm meant to bring particles to the exit, but nothing really makes it clear what the exit is.
Good luck with your future development!
Cute characters! Also, fantastic mood setting. Music was understated but really grew on me. One aspect that I would like to see a (small) improvement on is with the wall jump! I found myself jumping and wall jumping at the same time! I think that making the wall jump happen on button down instead of on button held would make navigation much smoother.
On the other hand, exploration was great! I liked that as I explored, my previous mistakes paved the way for future success.
Woo! Part of the 10/10 crew!
Seriously, what a good time. I love all the flair you managed to pack into this minimalist experience. Perfect scope. What a treat to find. As others have said, the leaderboard is the cherry on top. I just wish the experience were a *liiiiiiiittle* longer so there were less perfect scores ;)
WOW rarely do I see a game with this much charm go to waste. You simply *must* rethink the level design here. I was so ready to fall in love with this game given the humorous and well-executed intro, the fun music, and the character design of the god. However, ain't nobody got time to ferry 10 tediously-place rat corpses to an altar just to progress through the first room.
Marking notifications as ON here, because I'd love love love to be pleasantly surprised to find that this game has been updated. Withholding some ratings for now in case there are improvements.
Nice work! I'm impressed at how full-featured and balanced (if incredibly difficult!) it is. My biggest hope is that you consider making combat go substantially faster, or maybe offering an option that let you do such. Each turn boils down to a pretty simple choice, so I think speeding though the animations with a little less wait would improve the user experience substantially.
Also, I always restart whenever I have a Cleric stack on top. Losing your first turn every combat for zero benefit sucks!!
Seriously though, I'm impressed how finished this is. With a few little QOL tweaks, this could really delight.
Probably my favorite game I've played so far this jam. Gave me the old kaizo mario bros feeling. This was lovely from start to finish. Only two issues:
1.) You very often can't see things below you that you're going to land on. But hey, that's the game and life isn't fair. In theme, but happened so very often it did start to wear on me.
2.) There's a bug (gamebreaking in some places) where you can continually dash and jump if you're running into a wall.
I did it!
That game was amazingly cute. Extremely nice work on the controls, and I loooooved the tension of how the high score mechanic pushed me to make my character more vulnerable by leaving the rope out longer.
The blubs splitting was a costly surprise the first time. I was bamboozled. However, this was a small price to pay for what was ultimately a very satisfying mechanic.
Also, special praise to your powerups! These were both telegraphed excellently and were also very fun to play around with. Some very smart decisions made here by the blob buster team. Bravo!
Nicely done! The only think I'd love to see here is giving the player a little generous nudge a pixel or two when they try to turn a corner. I had to back up and realign myself a LOT here. Still, played through to the end and definitely would have kept going if there was more.
Timer at the end is a nice touch!
I'm with Josh! The opening was almost too good: got me hyped for the devilry I hoped would soon unfold.
Hey! Nice work! One of my favorites here so far. I have a few beefs with some minor grammatical oddities, especially toward the end (e.g. "And Wilfred complete the challenges of the Cave." could be "And Wilfred completed..."), but overall these were very minor. The story was interesting, and you've developed a better mood than the rest of this edgelord clown factory of a theme.
One request: it would be fabulous to implement some sort of way to know that the first bottomless pit is in fact bottomless. I was bamboozled.
This is a fascinating concept, and you could totally wring a fine game out of it. I enjoy the slow movespeed, especially since that gives me all the more reason to want to teleport. I thought there was an enjoyable balance between wanting to chase after chickens and dreading farmers. I felt powerful, but also had to consider my route before engaging big groups. Top work on the gameplay side.
On the other hand, for this genre, you've got to know that feedback is king. There are several points in this game during which a player might be confused about what's going on:
1.) Enemy bullets. Make these big and slow. Dodgeable is better than deadly. As is, I wasn't sure that the farmers were doing anything until I'd already lost quite a bit of HP.
2.) Hit sounds. Humans respond significantly faster to audio cues than visual ones. Even in the absence of big visible bullets, having some sort of "ugh" sound when you get hit (and even an impact sound when hitting enemies) will help players understand and enjoy what's going on.
3.) Gun state. It would be nice to have some kind of indicator on the gun itself what state it was in.
Oh man, I was so on board, and then you lost me.
Brilliant use of music, and wonderful level design, particularly in how you anticipated the player's movement (and used camerawork) to so perfectly tutorialize the "hop during the beat" section into the "fall quickly" section. Just aces all around.
And then you fall, and with no apparent warning get vaporized. I guess I'm supposed to fall into the middle part so I can watch the laser?
Can a brother get a checkpoint?
As above, all the little details add up to make this an extremely polished, engaging experience.
I just wish you'd turned this talent toward something other than making the most aggravating experience I've seen done in Unity. Wow did I hate my time here. Extremely nice work on capturing the rushed, stressed, delirious feeling of hurtling toward a deadline, but at least when I code something, I have some kind of vague notion on how much more work I need to do before I'll have a working product. Here, I would have killed a man for the chance to see how many more blocks I needed to make a good game. 10 minutes is just way too long to keep a player doing hasty, repetitive work with no indication of progress!
How do players affect one another? I get that you can kind of sort of block one another, but I'm not really seeing how my actions make any impact on my opponent. The strategy seems *really* simple: go first and then always pick the high value options. It seems like you might be able to get more out of the game by blocking your opponent's spaces, but I digress.
I loved the pick up and place mechanic! Brought me right into the board game feel. Also, huge props to you for implementing a two-player turn based game here. As someone who has tried it before, I know that takes a TON of work, so congrats for pulling it off.
Nice 3D work!
I couldn't tell if I was moving or not. I spent a bunch of time trying to enter various movement inputs and I couldn't tell if it was doing anything. I threw out almost everyone right at the start and spaced out my burners, but it seems like it didn't do anything because I ended up in the water all the same.
Impressive post-processing work in this amount of time! Very intuitive camera control. I would have used a touch less motion control, since I ended up feeling fairly sick by the end.
So hard! And so hard to stop playing!
Loved it, and I hesitate to ask for any convenience features, since I think that anything that makes it easier might well take away some of the ruthlessness that contrasts so nicely with the aesthetic, but I think a few tweaks might make for a genuinely more enjoyable experience.
First, I'd LOVE a short hop here. Being able to control the height of my jump would make dodging SO much less frustrating, and let me position my buddies more quickly and easily.
Second, I'd like just a bit more friction. A handful of times, I was just beginning to celebrate a seemingly-perfect jump only to slide over and off. Maybe this is just an issue of taste, but I feel like the game has enough challenge going on without the added unexpected deaths due to sliding.
Gorgeous art. Great sound. Would recommend.
I'll third the folks that said awesome tutorial. I loved the design, and the fact that we always had about three different things we wanted to do with our lasers. Incredible coherence of design: you really got a TON of cool stuff out of that one mechanic.
Whoa! Exciting idea here. The execution didn't grab me as much as I was hoping (I ended up just using the minimap and treating the loss of depth as just a fancy "fog of war"), but I think you've grabbed onot something really neat here. Nice work!
Brilliant! Love the mood. I didn't think it was possible for someone to make me hate watermelons, sausage, and donuts, but you found a way!
As others have said, I would have loved it if the bag could somehow pop out pieces right on the fridge screen so I'd have to spend less time transitioning. On the other hand, I feel like having the trash on another screen might be appropriate game-balancing and punishment for imperfect play.
I was a bit confused by the tiles under the bag and next to the trash. I was never able to figure out what those were for. Additionally, I think it would have been cool to see some kind of score counter during play. You keep players kind of in the dark about how scoring works until the end, so I had no way to evaluate how much of a sacrifice I was *actually* making by chucking that donut.
Still, nice work. Always a joy to find a game that so nicely delivers on its premise :D
Wow. Beautiful menu and backgrounds!!
One thing I'd love to see here is some friendliness toward iteration. Each play-death cycle took a lot of time, and it took a fairly tedious process of trial and error to figure out the important parameters of what each slime does.
Iteration and trial and error should be fun! It would be so much easier to iterate if you introduced new slimes with a single-screen puzzle so that we could get a nice handle on each slime's properties. Additionally, if you could move slimes around after failure (instead of completely restarting), it would remove the tedium of trying to find the exact position one needs to be.
Anyhow, I had a blast. I just nearly quit after the second level, and think you may be able to make a few tweaks to keep others from doing just that.
WOW. Top marks on theme here and I am absolutely astounded at how big of a game you managed to make under jam conditions.
To ramble a moment, I think it's interesting how jams really seem to incentivize pushing for small experiences. A 2-minute, highly polished experience will earn higher marks than a game like this, that saw equal care divvied across a 30-minute adventure.
Fantastic work. Very nice to see someone attempt and do so well at creating a longform experience.
One of the great problems with this theme is that it pushes people to make oodles of feelbad mechanics (kind of similar to last year's miserable "The More You Have The Worse it Is"). This means that there are just a ton of games creeping around out there where you start in the most powerful position you will ever occupy and just lose lose lose until the very end.
Fortunately, this game strikes an interesting balance: I felt as though the balance was wrapping me like a delicate gossamer cocoon. Did you do any balancing where good events happen more often if you are close to death? I continually felt (in my multiple playthroughs) as though I was riding the very edge of death from about the midpoint until a very welcome lucky break and satisfying conclusion.
My biggest request is that you find a more attractive way of presenting text. Because that is the main point of the game, it was a bit of an annoyance to have to read thin black text on blue in such a small typeface.
Cool use of the theme! I was a *bit* unsure of the connection between the dark demon man and tron tanks, but I thought that the overall execution and idea of sacrificing controls for greater power was an excellent direction to take.
I was a bit confused on the level design. Were things automatically generated? It seemed, particularly in level 3, that the exit was placed in a location that would take a rather obscene amount of time to reach. With the current levels, I think you could get away with making the main character a tad faster.
That said, I thought the animation to shoot was excellent! I could totally see this becoming quite engaging, especially if you reached enemies that moved quickly or offered interesting firing patterns to dodge.
> Couldnāt really get far unfortunately, did like 20 tries on yellow orb room but couldnāt do it >_<
Yes!! I really struggled in this room as well. IMO the hard part was that each of the other rooms so far had been a simple task along the lines of "do the thing I tell you in the most obvious way possible". When I got to the yellow power-up room, my "puzzle brain" hadn't been activated yet, so I didn't look for a puzzle solution.
Adding to this... the jumps, even starting from the first room, had felt pretty tight and difficult. For this reason, when I got to the yellow power-up room, I just assumed (for my first dozen tries or so) that it was just a really tight platforming challenge.
All that aside, I enjoyed the game! As others have said, the color choices here are wonderful, and you managed to get some inventive and well-implemented power-ups in the time allotted!
Ryusui said: (Thereās also an OCD part of me that wishes you could upgrade the Research Module as well - and perhaps there should be some secret utility to upgrading the Historian XD)
Great point! One thing I wish I'd thought of during the jam is at least having Research Module have a ā icon or something instead of a "1". It does feel a little incomplete when you're done!