Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Literally Void
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Triage and Motion | compo | 169 | 3.50 | 3.70 | 3.20 | 3.67 | 3.65 | 2.60 | 3.65 | ||
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | Sacrifice Golf | compo | 216 | 3.47 | 3.32 | 3.86 | 3.57 | 3.32 | 2.63 | |||
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | Angriff | compo | 245 | 3.52 | 3.73 | 3.63 | 3.97 | 3.07 | 3.23 | |||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Spacecards | compo | 322 | 3.42 | 3.46 | 2.86 | 3.51 | 3.11 |
Great game, it was pretty hard to reach the left or right sides though.
@evogengames I don't change how the mouse works when keys are being held down; it sounds like your operating system is doing that.
Thanks for the feedback!
I use my own engine, so it's totally possible - although I didn't think about that, sorry.
As a quick fix, you can use the link https://itch.io/embed-upload/2782495?color=222222 instead.
Thanks for the feedback!
@joonamo It's multiple levels on top of each other.
The menu says "ld48" haha
For anyone else running this on linux, you need to `chmod +x StasisBreak.x86_64` before you can run it.
edit: '+X' is wrong, '+x' is correct.
Great game feel and effects!
Very challenging! Neat way to handle branching paths, too.
I think the game's private on itch.io.
Great graphics and sound design, puzzles are challenging and fun.
Great idea and execution!
This is awesome! I love how self-descriptive things are, visually ~~(except maybe the shockwave timer?)~~ and all the graphics/telegraphing feel super natural.
The subtle screen shake is great, and the "shattering" effect is awesome as well!
EDIT: The shockwave timer is telegraphed as well, oops!
ESDF is just personal preference -- I've been using this for a long time now in many other games.
Thank you for the kind words and awesome feedback, @gamedevzach @stoickekis @nicholas-maddalena @castitatis @thesnide !
@sergilazaro ESDF gives me a lot more real estate for keybindings close to the movement cluster, and thank you for the feedback!
Great game!
Game feel is good, I really like the pixelart + simple shapes aesthetic, and the monochrome artstyle looks great as well.
Enemies getting closer, presenting a bigger target, is very clever (even if unintentional :) and really scratches my "design itch", hah.
Feels super frantic -- nice job!
I love the simplicity of this game! I feel like it might have been better if enemies spawned at random distances, to mix things up a bit and make it so enemies aren't just a "circle" surrounding the player -- but that's a minor complaint (if that!)
Awesome feel and juice. Everything feels really dynamic, great job!
Everything is so good about this! Great concept, level design, abilities, audio, graphics, and (most importantly!) all the juice!
The only criticism I have is that the magic aura obscures the health and cooldown bars. Good game overall!
Here's some ~~complaints~~ feedback:
* It's hard to judge when the timer is going to go off. "Every ten seconds" starts from when you start the level (it seems) which means I have to watch the timer carefully and note what the last digit is when I need to time something precisely (mostly on level 2!)
* Sounds play only on the left side (not a big deal), and they get quieter the further from the origin the player is (even less of a deal, I only noticed this on level 4).
* The player can walk on coins, sometimes.
But this is still impressive for 48 hours!
I absolutely love the music.
Unfortunately, the framerate fell as I went through the game; and it was getting unplayable about 6(?) levels into the lava stages.
I'm not sure why, but I can't download this---I'm getting a 404. If you've done everything right on your end you may want to try reuploading the game!
The art is gosh-danged *gorgeous!* And I'll push back against what some other people are saying, the music is *incredible.* The dissonance makes it better, not worse, and I *will* die on that hill.
Minor nitpick: it says "ulocked", not "u**n**locked".
I'm genuinely a little sad that I decided to look for a hint instead of trying to figure out the book myself.
(It seems like other people get caught up at the same place, too; maybe the candles could have been placed one-by-one, to suggest fine interaction and solve two birds with one stone? But I almost feel unworthy of suggesting any part be changed!)
This game deserves to win. :heart:
@warren-fisher Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you like the music more than I do, hah. The sounds were all made in LMMS---not the right tool, but in the end the best tool is the one you have. And I'd expect this game to be measurably worse for how addicting it is! (not very, but my brain is just built different™ :) )
@cleverdumb Yeah, even catches *me* out, and I made the dang thing LOL. Thanks for the review!
@daandruff I'm glad my game design is good enough to change your opinions <3 And yeah, before the jam started, "being overwhelmed" was one of the feelings I was aiming to give, and (IMHO) it worked out pretty well!
@theyflower That's totally my fault, sory. I didn't test enough with other browsers, and I believe it's fixed now. Thank you for appreciating a worse game! ;)
@vinzbad Thank you for the bug report, and I believe it's fixed now. (It took me a while to replicate because only scrolling wasn't working, and I personally use the `R` key to rotate turrets instead of scrolling!)
Thank you all for the kind words!
Whoops :upside_down: I several confession to make
* I misread @vinzbad's comment, have *not* fixed drag and drop, and could never replicate this issue.
* There was another bug (never assume there's only one bug!) that broke rotating turrets with the keyboard (sorry @theyflower!)
Thanks for the kind words, @arcolm and @thegreatcarpet !
Thanks, @drgcandle, @merrow, and especially @sodagummy for the feedback! I agree that I should've made it clearer---I'll keep it in mind for next time :)
@thomas-bringer, @kirass thank you!
@rcxa Thank you! Now I'm sad I didn't think of that though :)
@Cosmo8 Thank you! And yeah, I hit creative bankruptcy the moment the theme came out, and decided that building *something* was worth it.
The capture and summon mechanics have *incredible* juice, and the puzzle-platforming mechanic feels awesome too.
An unfortunate oversight is that the controls don't appear until after you've moved, hah. (And also, this doesn't affect most peopl) but on a high refresh rate monitor everything jitters. (I believe that's because physics only run at 60hz by default))
I kept dying on the level with the first wind(?) enemy, and that sent me back to the start of the *previous* level; dying on the final level sent me back two levels.
The combat and puzzle-platforming parts felt at odds with each other; in the next-to-last level I didn't really summon any souls because they could've prevented me from completing the puzzle portions of the level.
Unfortunately I couldn't ever beat the final level; I kept arriving there with one or two lives left and in the interest of time management I had to concede defeat :/
With all that said, though, it still felt awesome to platform and capture enemies and summon souls!
This game's *juice* is *incredible!* and the SHEER PANIC of the siren makes me all the more likely to mess up, haha.
I think I've also managed to softlock the game---if you click the active button again *after* the minigame starts, the summoning menu doesn't show up again. Incredible sound design and music too! The sound, especially, add a lot of juice.
Maybe you could color code the buttons themselves, too, that way you wouldn't have to memorize which button goes where; but I don't know if you're intending to make this part of the challenge.
I'm not sure why, but I couldn't find the magic orb after I hit 30/30 enemies (and it kept going up too) --- I'm not sure if this is an entirely different threshold, though.
Incredibly fun game, and y'all are awesome!
This is a nice core game loop, and the story's great too! I do feel it's a little repetitive, and I think mixing up the incoming patterns would go a long way; but regardless, I had a lot of fun!
Good game! Would be nice if the demons stayed around for a bit, but you're *summoned* ;) by Belzosbus so fast...
It's a fun game. Got 233 points! ("Don't spawn too many ghosts" was just a suggestion... right? ;) )
Screenshot_20240415_182133.png
Art and sound design are great! I think it would've been a little better if ghosts could draw in front of the player, but I do understand it would harm readability and probably require more systems.
I spent a lot of time playing this game, haha.
~~*Alright, now that we've unlocked the Goblin the game is pretty much over---*~~
Awesome game, the feel and juice is *on point*. Congrats!
I love the dialogue, and you've nailed the UI interactions too. Congrats!
That ending made me laugh out loud; +1 on the writing! The gameplay is admittedly a little simple, but the combat difficulty feels just right---there were several moments where I wasn't sure I was going to make it out alive, and that feels great.
And other people have said this before me, but you should *absolutely* be proud of yourself for the voice acting. It may not be very understandable (and I feel terrible saying this, sorry! I don't want to discourage you!), but getting out there and *doing it* is awesome. And the music was good too!
Never before have I been so frustrated at my own dexterity, haha!
I don't think the `W` or `S` keys do anything (unless I missed something?), so it's a little confusing having them show up at the start; but I do understand that just showing `A`/`D` may have been more confusing :) Maybe fade out the W/S keys? Just a thought!
When I was messing around on my second playthrough, I managed to clip through the level, and restarting sent me back to the first room; not a big deal (as before, it was my second playthrough (I couldn't get enough of the rats(!))), but you may want to think about failsafes in the future, and *again* again this did not effect my enjoyment of this game!
I didn't hear the music until I turned up the volume near the end, but it fits well. Great puzzles (I got a few a-ha moments; those are always awesome) and well executed gameplay mechanics!
...and (SPOILER?) thanks for the laugh from "Gravity Rat"!
The demons are adorable :)
One tiny nitpick is that if you have a lot of demons, the damage numbers all stack up and you can't tell how many times anymore. I found the game really engaging, good work!
Unfortunately, it seems like the camera doesn't follow the player after the first level :(
Love the art, especially your drawings for the introduction!
@sodagummy I feel bad being the one to tell you this but now I can't get past the intro, it just stops on the controls screen :(
That last level was SO TOUGH but it was worth it for the art :heart:
The core loop is actually very engaging! My best score was in the 40s, when it was getting just a little crowded :) I feel like the movement physics could be tuned a little better, but overall it was surprisingly fun.
And did you mean to leave reviews off? I don't see an option to review the game, but I don't know whose end this is on---you submitting the game, the Ludum Dare backend, or me not seeing the thing right in front of me, haha.
Gave everyone the "nothing but rat burgers" special. 10/10 no notes.
The music is a little jarring when it starts---maybe there could've been some sort of music from the start? But when it does play, it's *incredible!*
Awesome art and sound effects too!
The core memorization loop feels very well tuned. That feeling of *why didn't I remember that?* is awesome!
*Huge kudos* for the music, too. It's a huge accomplishment to make music this good and also *make the rest of the game*, so congraulations on making the deadline!
I have a 144hz monitor and that made the game a *lot* more hectic before I turned my monitor's refresh rate down, haha. I love the positive feedback loop of more bullets -> more dodging -> more bullets, too---it really feels like you're on the knife's edge of surviving the whole time.
There's a bug where if you press `ESC` it just shows the menu and doesn't pause the game---you have to press it twice to actually pause.
On the topic of divinities: I found myself placing them only at the start of the game (to be fair, this was *because* I was trying to see if using divinities were helping or not), and one problem that crops up is, it's hard to judge if they're helping between one run and the next---there aren't any obvious points (in my experience!) where I can go, "oh hey, if I placed/didn't place [X] divinity maybe I could have survived!", and the moment-to-moment gameplay is the same whether or not my bullets are larger.
And that's reinforced from it being tedious to place/destroy divinities during gameplay, which incentivizes a per-run choice instead of being a moment-to-moment thing.
That being said, I still found the game enjoyable! And I was surprised with how fun the core shoot-where-you're-moving-to mechanic is; it seems like other games generally use a joystick-style control loop, and I feel like the single-room global-mouse thing works really well. (Although now that I think about it, that's probably *because* it's a one-room game!)
I survived to 4m26s legitimately! ~~and 7m with one exploit and 16m with another sorry for brutally critiquing and then breaking your game so much :')~~
This is fun! I do feel like it could have better contrast; it's hard to see where enemies are, as they blend into the background. And I like the loop where being inaccurate makes the game harder!
Amazing concept! It might be better if you got score for correct words, to encourage you to move the paddle to the wrong place for more score. However, as it stands, this is an amazing game. Also, sometimes the ball goes through the paddle. I haven't figured out what causes this, unfortunately.
The color palette is great, and the turn-based technique is really cool!
@ORECROS I didn't have time to add sound. Maybe next time :)
@KRP I agree, probably should've added much more polish! It really adds a lot to a game.
@lavwa Thanks!
@the-dustin-holmes Haha :)
@notgreat Definitely agree.
@Tim Eriksen Thanks!
@Dakota Jones Agree as well :P
@Moczan Didn't think of that, it would've added a lot.
@Distrait Great points! I didn't really think of keyboard difference when making the keybinds, I'll be sure to take it into account next time :D
@Jack Hipson Yep, pretty much. My art is pretty bad though.
Amazing game! although the screen shake lasts a bit too long (in my opinion).
Is this unreleased? The itch.io page just goes to a 404.
Great game! The only problem I had with it is how hard it is to get the guns/water. Maybe expand the hitboxes for "good" stuff and shrink the hitboxes for "bad" stuff?
Great game! It was a bit hard to get used to the controls (if you can call them that) though.
Linux export works totally fine! Thanks for exporting to it though :P Too many games are windows-only.
Great concept! The graphics are amazing.