Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → mcc
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | BECOME A GREAT ARTIST IN JUST 10 SECONDS | jam | Graphics | 4.82 | |
| 🥇 | 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | BECOME A GREAT ARTIST IN JUST 10 SECONDS | jam | Innovation | 4.69 | |
| 🥈 | 2012 | 24 | Evolution | The World Hates You | compo | Innovation | 4.38 | |
| 🥉 | 2012 | 24 | Evolution | The World Hates You | compo | Theme | 4.43 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Super Fungus Attack | compo | 10 | |||||||||||
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | Scrunch | compo | ||||||||||||
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Organ Solo | jam | ||||||||||||
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | You Will Die Alone At Sea | jam | 253 | 3.12 | 1.67 | 3.18 | 2.82 | 3.53 | 3.24 | 3.53 | 28 | |||
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | BECOME A GREAT ARTIST IN JUST 10 SECONDS | jam | 5 | 4.16 | 3.91 | 4.69 | 2.83 | 4.82 | 3.44 | 3.16 | 4.00 | 20 | ||
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | How Can You Even Tell If I'm Just Fucking With You At This Point | compo | 929 | 2.82 | 2.13 | 3.50 | 4.06 | 22 | ||||||
| 2012 | 25 | You are the Villain | Responsibilities | jam | 176 | 2.96 | 2.18 | 2.96 | 2.58 | 3.37 | 3.66 | 2.20 | 4.04 | 85 | ||
| 2012 | 24 | Evolution | The World Hates You | compo | 7 | 4.13 | 3.63 | 4.38 | 4.43 | 2.93 | 3.00 | 14 | ||||
| 2012 | 23 | Tiny World | Breathe | compo | 380 | 3.06 | 2.87 | 3.60 | 2.00 | 3.87 | 3.57 | 3.77 | 36 | |||
| 2011 | 22 | Alone | My own footsteps | compo | 308 | 2.77 | 2.15 | 2.62 | 3.21 | 2.31 | 2.85 | 2.17 | 2.92 | 45 | ||
| 2011 | 21 | Escape | You Don't Fit | compo | 121 | 3.27 | 3.33 | 3.93 | 2.53 | 1.80 | 2.17 | 1.80 | 3.30 | 2 |
I just got to 129!! (And was informed on Twitter that apparently due to a game bug there 129/130 == 100%?!) This game consumed a surprising amount of my last few weeks, I have to admit that once I found this game I stopped playing many other LD21 entries because I was playing this too much. My new copy of "Catherine" is gathering dust because I was playing this instead. There are a lot of things in here that are crack for addictive personalities ^_^
Looked this up, went "wow, this looked cool, I should port it to mac so I can play it!". Ported it to mac. By the time I was done kosinus had already ported it to mac ^_^; oh well.
However it looks like Kosinus's mac port currently only works on Lion, whereas this version should (?) work as far back as 10.4 (Intel only), so I'm posting it anyway:
Game: http://vote.grumpybumpers.com/j/ld/etc/epacse-mac.zip
Source: https://bitbucket.org/runhello/epacse_temp
It also has an icon :D
Now I'm going to go play this.
Interesting, seems to demonstrate there's a lot you can do with the canabalt concept that hasn't been explored that I've seen. I liked how there seemed to be explicit "puzzles" here and that some of the power ups (like cheetah mode) hurt more than helped you.
Small things: The fact distance could kill you was not well telegraphed, the checkpoints remembering that you've lost health seems a little mean, it seems odd the game seems to go out of its way to give you "easy" stretches to build up distance but then as soon as you die you seem to lose all your distance?
"Also, you only lose life when hit by the bombs, the intention here being that pitfalls only serve to bring you back to the checkpoint - closer to the bombs. "
Oh! Now that actually makes a lot of sense. It would be helpful if this were better communicated in the game-- if I'd realized this was the exact rule when playing I could have planned strategy around it.
Mac version works. I got totally stuck on level 3 however and could only get by with the = trick...
Overall it was very neat, actually the concept you came up with turns out to be very similar to the one from my entry. It was interesting to see how the different choices you made from that similar starting point lead to a different game... I liked that you were able to get a story and some "events" in, the moments with the "four blocks" were surprisingly tense given how simple the presentation was and my heart was actually pounding after the game end.
The main issue I had was that the block dragging felt... maybe not clumsy, but my actions didn't feel very natural or immediate. Given that the graphics mostly "looked like" things, it felt like there should have been a sense of physicality to the things I was dragging, the buttons, etc that wasn't present. I didn't feel like I knew what the blocks I was dragging "were" or what the method of my manipulation was (chunks of wall, what?). It seems like even some simple changes, like a little sparkle at the point on the block you were dragging "from" (the blocks track the mouse slowly, so maybe the mouse is doing something like pulling with a magnetic field?), could do a lot to make it seem to the player like they knew what was going on there or like what they are doing feels "real".
So… played with this a little. Very interesting concept, and I'm really intrigued this is pure html5. I found it a little hard to play. Some thoughts:
- It seems like your character could move quicker.
- If the wall pattern were different, it might be easier to estimate at any one time how many steps "forward" were needed to get to a particular place.
- The game (seeming to) start out with that long straight section like that doesn't appear to be the best introduction to the engine. I want to try out various things, turn left and right and see what the buttons do, but if I do that I'm kind of thrashing back and forth in this thin corridor. (It took me a surprisingly long time to realize I could turn right from the start.) Then I run into:
- Is it correct that you can't remove items from the queue once you've placed them? I couldn't figure out how. This means that if you make a wrong" turn and have to correct yourself you've got tons of clutter in your deck of "moves".
- The interface in general seemed a bit odd. The use of the slider (or even if the slider *has* a use) is not obvious. The pause button is hard to use effectively since you don't know straight off what item in the move queue that, say, "3/10" corresponds to. Dragging things into the move queue would often cause scrolling (actually sometimes horizontal scrolling, which was weird) and cause me to lose my place in the move queue. If there were enough items in the queue new tiles would often not drop where I expected… I'm on Chrome on a Mac btw.
These maybe aren't fair sorts of criticisms for an LD entry, I don't know. This is still quite impressive both as a 48hr game and as an html5 game, and I did keep playing a good bit longer than I expected. It mostly feels though like a prototype for some other game that you might make later and I eventually gave up because I couldn't get the interface to do what I wanted. I'd actually be sort of curious to try a version of this with some cleaned-up UI.
I like how the nazi killed me with his crotch.
OK wow just posted this on a forum and got 8 or so people to play with me and this is FANTASTIC! It's fun to play, and I love the way it's "casually" / party line internet multiplayer.
The one problem I have with this is that while it seems like this would have been great with a couple fewer players, with 8 or so it's just unworkable-- the Ice Queen cannot protect herself, she can knock out 1 or 2 players but then the rest just barrel in past. But the game doesn't give a way to manage the # of players downward.
I would love to see a version of this with maybe some changes to address this, like:
- Limit on the number of mages on screen at once, other mages are in a "penalty box" and wait for another mage to die so they can jump in
- The ability to create a "room" with a unique URL (if you want to invite a few people to play but there are already people playing-- part of the problem when we jumped in was there were already 3 people online), or maybe the game automatically sorting players into "rooms" of 4 or 5 or so if a bunch of people come in at once on the main URL
- More stages with different maps, so even if the Ice Queen keeps losing this doesn't make it feel repetitive
- (This would be my preference, but sounds hard to balance) the Ice Queen gets stronger or weaker depending on the number of wizards (for example, given more stuff to place).
It also might help add some strategy in lots-of-players situations if the ice queen or other wizards could see how close the wizards are to being able to fireball again.
Other random thoughts: I absolutely love the music. The character movement is a little odd but I'm imagining that has something to do with netcode.
Hm... I really want to play this but... I am running this on OS X [snow leopard] in Chrome and I am having a lot of trouble getting it to run.. the screen flickers black every 3-4 seconds, and a few seconds into the game the character abruptly started running backward and would not stop. Has anyone successfully run this on mac?
This is incredible and deserves all the gushing I've been hearing. I'm amazed how intentional all the little details of the game design feel. It feels like you spent days tweaking this.
I didn't have problems with the controls, but I am still running into this weird problem where it will suddenly believe one button is being held down forever-- on my first play (in a browser) this was the "run backward" button, on my second, serious play (using miwuc's command line suggestion) I got to (rot13) gur pelcg and then suddenly it was like the"turn left" button was permanently down. I could move, but the character was constantly spinning in circles. I got frustrated and went into another app, when I came back later it had somehow fixed itself. I'm on a mac btw.
I died shortly after my controls unstuck themselves, definitely want to come back to this one however many tries it takes :D
To make your own custom level: Copy the file level0.svg out of the Internal/ folder (or on a mac, right-click the app and select "Show Package Contents") and put this file in the same folder as the app or exe; you can then edit this file in Inkscape to make your own puzzles. It places blocks anywhere it finds a rectangle; the "kind" attribute is used to tell teh game what kind of block it is. To place blocks of a special type, add a "kind" attribute using the xml editor (edit menu) or duplicate blocks that are in the default level. There is a "slider" kind that isn't used in the game. If anyone plays around with this I'd be curious to see what you make :D
Note: I replaced the Linux version linked above about four hours after the submission deadline. The originally uploaded version was missing the title screen due to a mistake in copying files to my Linux VM.
Susan, summaky-- I'm not sure I'm able to fix problems on PPC at the current time, and my ability to debug Linux is even more limited. Thanks for trying though! Summaky though, what distribution of Linux were you using?
Oh, this is very cool. I like how the gameplay concept is much deeper than it looks at first. Music is very good.
You might want to upload somewhere a version without the exit bug, I hit it on my first serious playthrough and it lead me to suspect the game was just unwinnable (hey, Ludum Dare, you never know).
You actually seriously might want to consider this an iOS/Android port, it seems amenable to touch/tilt controls and this is the kind of game (randomly generated arcade game with simple controls) that gets rewarded there. I feel like in that case it would help if some kind of metagame to encourage you to keep playing multiple times-- like, maybe you have a global score on total distance traveled, or % of games which you won, or maybe each time you got to the exit it would send you to a new "tower" and your "score" was how many towers you made it through before you lost. An approach like that might that might turn what seems like the one downside of the game currently (ie that the distance before you hit the exit is random) into something like a bonus.
The screenshot looks really intruiging, I am having a lot of trouble getting it to run in the browser though (Chrome on mac). I will try to run it later on the command line...
THIS IS EVERYTHING I WANT OUT OF A VIDEO GAME
This was great, I started giggling within a few seconds of starting and continued nonstop basically until I finished. Afterward I tried it another couple times to check for branches I missed, it took me until my third try to realize there doesn't seem to be a way to quit except by winning :O
I thought at very first this was just going to be an endless chain, Officer A looks in the puddle, Officer B attempts to arrest Officer A for public urination, Officer C attempts to arrest officer B for assaulting Officer A, and so on... what is actually happening though is much more clever. IT ALL FITS TOGETHER.
So first off, in terms of graphics, sound, style and scope this is an amazing achievement… definitely an EXCELLENT advertisement for Polycode. Not joking-- while playing I kept thinking "Wow, Unity sure does let you do a lot in a brief time" before remembering this wasn't a Unity game!
The problems I did have: The gameplay seemed very slow (the guy didn't seem to move very quick) and the AI's behavior seemed nearly random. Sometimes the enemies couldn't seem to hit anything, sometimes they would zap me on the first try (four or five times I got sniped as I was entering through a door). Sometimes they would decide to run in circles forever instead of shooting (a couple times I had an enemy run into me and just keep running instead of try to shoot) and sometimes they'd run out of the room and not come back. Because I never figured out things like what would make enemies likely to start shooting at me or not, what would make them more or less likely to be able to hit me, even where they were aiming or their bullets were landing most of the time, or what the rules were for when the "Alarm" would restart after 30 seconds vs stopping... because of all this whether I got through any one situation felt like mostly a matter of luck. Meanwhile, since in a lot of the rooms I *could* get through just by charging through and hoping I didn't get shot, I felt like I didn't have a lot of incentive to play "correctly" vs barreling through. Some of the rooms looked like they had interesting level geometry to them that could be used to get through by stealth, but it seemed like if I tried to play that way I'd be increasing the chances a random AI behavior would kill me whereas if I just ran for the exits eventually I'd get a run where the enemy would either miss me or voluntarily run out of the room or something. Because rooms were small and saves were frequent this all wasn't really a problem for most of the game, but then I got to the last four rooms, died I lost count how many times in a row trying every variation of strategy I could think of, couldn't get through and gave up :(
I feel like, if you were willing to keep working on this a few small changes could have a really dramatic impact. I like the way you implemented a stealth game that feels like an arcade game, that seems unique (basically, I'd really like to play a version of this that had predictable enough AI to support playing it like a stealth game). One obvious thing that would help a lot is a save function. Another thing that stood out to me, the fact that sometimes enemies did run off the edge of a screen seemed to suggest the idea that it would change the game a lot if enemies could chase you in to other rooms. There was this <a href="http://i.imgur.com/uQxU1.png">one room</a> that didn't seem to serve a gameplay function, but looking at it it was easy to imagine a version of the game where if you're in "alarm" mode the enemies can chase you into the next room, and then you'd need rooms like this one (full of nice big hiding places) in order to lose them.
I ran into a handful of bugs, but only one big one. Every time I saved, there was a phantom "save tile" shimmer at a seemingly random point in the room… in <a href="http://i.imgur.com/8EK8O.png">this room</a>, the switches fire continuously, not just when you step on them… and there seemed to be a lot of slowdown which at first happened only when there was a lot of stuff in the room but toward the end seemed to sometimes occur even in empty rooms. The one big bug: If you hit "M" while running, the dude will keep running as long as the map is showing… and… if the dude goes through a door in this state… he will fall OUT OF THE LEVEL and the game will effectively be frozen. I got halfway through the game my first time and then ran into this and had to start over..
I guess I'm posting a lot of criticism here, I do want to stress that the only reason I'm able to find so many areas for potential improvement is that the game had so much ambition! This is really incredible for an LD48 game.
Two more tiny thoughts: Sometimes I'd be running between two enemies and they'd both shoot sort of "at each other" as I was just between them, it would be funny if the guards could shoot each other. Also, the isometry means there's a lot of hard edges to the lines in this game, I would be VERY curious what this looked like with something like 2x FSAA.
OK, things I learned just now - don't use HTML on a comment on the ludum dare site - don't use ellipsis characters ^_^;
This was neat, I really liked the visuals. I liked the dreamlike quality where the narrator didn't seem to be questioning their surroundings (you go "outside" but it isn't snowing...).
I got four separate endings before I got to the "good" one. One thing that tripped me up is it didn't seem very obvious the connection between the final ending and what had gone before. It took me a few playthroughs to realize how the game actually worked. The ending was very sweet.
I wished that when you clicked "move" there was an option to stay put, sometimes I clicked it by accident or to check options and then was forced to go somewhere I didn't want to. It also would have been nice if I could have selected things with space bar (playing this with the mouse made my hand tired!)
Although I'm generally philosophically opposed to games using the microphone, this one did it really well. I wished for a moment there was a way to "win" but actually it's kind of neat like this, it's really just an endurance test on how long you can put up with the game's impossible demands. Full marks on graphics and audio, too. If "anti-games" are a genre then this is an excellent one.
This was a fun little play. I think I probably would have had more fun if I'd just played the game and not tried to collect all the ($)s but THERE WERE COLLECTABLES IN THIS GAME AND I HAD TO COLLECT THEM DAMMIT
I really really liked the sound effects.
I also get that error, when I double click the jar on mac Snow Leopard.
12/19/11 9:07:23 PM [0x0-0x5a05a0].com.apple.JarLauncher[21188] java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: alonegame/AloneGame : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
My java -version says:
java version "1.6.0_26"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_26-b03-384-10M3425)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.1-b02-384, mixed mode)
This seems very polished for a compo game. The style/atmosphere was neat and I feel like the basic concept could support some interesting depth of strategy. I really like your three-scripts method of doing crossplatform distribution (most java games only ever seem to wind up getting packaged in a double-clickable way for Windows…)
I did find it a bit hard to play. The instructions were cute but didn't communicate the really important thing (you need to fill up the left bar before the right bar depletes). A number of things felt sort of nonobvious while playing, like whether I was supposed to interpret the girl as running away from me or not or whether there's a way to get the right bar to ever replenish (or even just deplete slower). It took me awhile to figure out the thing where you can't pick up hearts while holding a "present". I could not tell if there was meant to be sound or not (I heard a low pitched noise periodically, possibly at random). Also the whole thing felt unnecessarily difficult-- right click to jump seems like an odd choice and makes it hard to jump with mac trackpads, also having to go all the way back to the beginning after losing on level 2 is very harsh :O
What amused me was that my misunderstanding of the right-bar rules (i.e. I didn't realize you could replenish and it was like a "time limit" as Milo says), combined with the bug (or feature?) where you can't pick up hearts while holding an eyeball, wound up creating an interesting emergent puzzle: I discovered I could only beat the first level if I carefully delivered all the eyeballs, THEN started picking up hearts, because if I walked back to grab a heart after each present then that would take up too much time but I could easily grab the whole level's worth of hearts in one circuit.
Spoilers below
Wow, this was fantastic. It felt original and was fun to play. This did a great job of creating legitimately spooky moments, like the first time I saw a blinking red light in the distance. I don't usually find "scares" in games, even when the game is designed for that, but I found myself actually afraid of things like straying off the path or the way that my shadow looked like something huge and looming following me.
A lot of moments in this looked really picturesque, I kept taking screenshots while I played. A lot of Unity 3D games look kind of same-y to me but this game avoided that. The electric noises as ambient "music" were great.
There were only a couple of problems I had. The camera did odd things when I tried to climb the "towers", like going behind/through walls and forcing me to readjust, which was distracting. (On the way back down the camera worked great oddly.) The only real problem I had was it felt unnecessary to do the battery thing three times. The first battery I found, on top of a tower, actually felt like a discovery and something I'd thought about and worked for. The second two, I basically had to comb the space to find it, which both wasn't fun and also made me feel like I was "playing a game". (I actually found the second two batteries by left-hand-rule-ing the wall, which I think if a game ever leads me to do that something went wrong.) By the time I found the other two batteries the sense of tension and threat in the environment the game had carefully built up was gone and I was fearlessly doing things like walking off cliffs (in the process finding the engine lets you do lots of odd things when you try to do that, like walk on stone walls). I think maybe the game would actually be better if the only battery were on top of the tower. (I also wondered why I couldn't try to scavenge a battery from my original, wrecked car.)
Poo :P
This was great! It felt like a full length game rather than a LD game. I think I've played commercial NES games less intricate than this. I really liked the concept (it reminded me of Pikmin), the execution was great at all levels, and I loved all the little details like the day/night cycle. I liked the (theme-appropriate!) idea of a time management obsessed caveman.
I like speedrun games so I had a lot of fun with this. After several games I managed to win for the first time at 11:05 AM. I think I might be able to get it before 11 AM if I try…
There were only a couple bugs I noticed. You could get the tasklist up at odd times (in particular you can get it up during the credits, in which case the word "Tasks." just floats on the screen, which is funny). It seemed odd (though necessary) that you could bring the torch underwater. Mostly there seemed to be some bugs around the dragon. I kept crashing the dragon, in which case you don't get credit for the riding "task". On one screen, once (I got a screenshot) I crashed the dragon and the game froze up-- the little star flew away, the caveman did not respond, the timer froze and the "r" key was unresponsive.
Hm. I had a lot of trouble with this. The art was *amazing* and I did really like the story/premise, but I couldn't really get the game itself to work. The performance went to unplayable nothing when the camera moved (i.e. when you aim or shoot, i.e. all the time) and the strange jerking when you fire made it hard to do anything. There didn't seem to be any strategy beyond "click repeatedly until overwhelmed", since there didn't seem to be a good way either for you to dodge pitchforks or for invaders to avoid being shot by you-- but it's hard to tell since I couldn't get the game to work well enough to experiment (I never figured out what the third item does). Other odd bugs: You can't move until you shoot; if you are standing with your back to a wall and an invader walks into you, you get pushed inside the wall; the mousewheel to item select interacts very badly with Macbook trackpads.
This game made me feel like whatever it was you were <i>aiming</i> for would have been really cool, I found myself wanting to play what it was you intended this game to be. Have you considered making a "completed" post-LD version?
Is it possible to interact with the purple octopus thing?
I had a lot of trouble understanding this one at first-- I didn't read the explanation, so I didn't know about the z/x keys and was frustrated because it didn't seem to be possible to win a level. I played a LOT of times trying to figure out what I was missing before I figured out how to use a match.
Once I figured out the matches, I felt like I liked the basic idea and what you were going for (the "shutter" effect looked cool, the environment looked good, the idea of trying to navigate a maze in encroaching darkness where your ability to extend light is also your health is great) but it just didn't feel like it worked. One problem was that every part of the maze was like every other and every level was like every other, so it didn't feel like there was a lot of reason to keep playing-- it was just repetitive. The fact every part of the maze looked the same interacted badly with the closing-diamond trick, I didn't have much chance of exploring the maze in a systematic way because I couldn't tell if I'd visited a particular section of the map already or not. (I felt like one thing that would have helped would have been if my character left footsteps, so I could tell where I'd been before.) So I was just performing a random walk, grabbing matches if they appeared, until the level ended... The "oh quick, a match, get it" moments just as the darkness is closing in felt like they could have been exciting and fun, but there wasn't much of a sense of either reward in getting the match or risk in failing to get the match because the effects of winning a level and dying were the same (begin in a random corner of a random map). The match-counting x-key thing didn't really work in practice because (1) there was some kind of html5 sound glitch on my machine where the sounds were broken up, so it was hard to tell the difference between one tone and three and (2) it didn't really matter how many matches I had, all that mattered was "are there more matches or not" and if the answer was "no" it wasn't useful information anyway because my only option in that case was to die.
The act of moving the "boy" around didn't really feel very fun (movement was sluggish, it was unforgiving about turning covers) and this made me feel less willing to forgive other issues.
Technically speaking though this is a really good effort so I bet you could make something more "playable" from this basis later.
Aww mean :(
The puzzle concept here is very clever, simple but original and sets up a lot of interesting situations. I guess one could say that about basically all of Stephen's games. I liked the smiling/frowning puppies as a way of providing feedback on puzzle progress a lot.
I did have some confusion figuring out how to interact with this one exactly. Part of the problem is on my first playthrough I accidentally triggered the level editor, as a result failed to notice click&drag worked because I was focusing on the editor features, and also having activated the level editor was unable to complete any of the levels. Even once I figured out dragging worked, I didn't realize you could "swap" puppies until near the end.
What's the deal with the #3/swirly block?
wademcgillis: The rules say: "Base code and personal code libraries are allowed, but should be declared and shared with the community prior to beginning your entry. To do this, make a blog post." There are no reused graphics in this entry, I just reused some functions (from the Chipmunk template code, actually) to do things like draw lines and text. If I were using something like Flashpunk I assume line-drawing and text-drawing stuff would just be part of the library.
This was a great play and very meaty for an LD48 game, it oozed atmosphere and the puzzle setups were original and the exact kind of creative, deconstructive mechanics I love to see games explore. Just… everything was neat!
The puzzles did seem just a little easy/straightforward. I wonder if you could make a more challenging version of this with more time to design puzzles...
Okay I laughed pretty hard at this! The music and graphics do an amazing job of conveying a mood and when you get into the later humorous screens they work better because the initial serious mood is undercut so heavily. I like how the graphics feel like they work whether you choose to interpret them as examples of that particular kind of lo-fi adventure game art or a send-up of that same art style.
I got a bit frustrated on my first playthrough or so because I could not tell if the things I was clicking on were making any difference. The interface was erratic enough that I thought for a moment the progression from screen to screen was random and/or the NESW clicks were being disregarded.
This was funny, impressive how much of a Metroidvania you implemented in an LD timeframe. For some reason I liked that getting shorts meant you could do walljumps, there was a sort of weird logic to that. I liked how there seemed to be variety and character to the areas despite the minimal graphics (the "basement" felt very different from the "upstairs"). I also liked how the game subtly walks you past a series of areas you can't get to yet at first-- on my first trip through the level I thought I was just picking arbitrary paths, and didn't realize I was being guided in a way that was also showing me where my goals were. Well structured.
I found the game very hard to control and this made it hard to enjoy. The triangle jump was a bit odd but was manageable, what I had more of a problem with was that there didn't seem to be a way to fall "down", you could fall left and at an angle or down and at an angle but not straight down and this made it very hard to position oneself onto small platforms. Also maybe it is just my machine (Flash often runs slow for me) but I often had jerky frameskips/responsiveness issues when there was vertical scrolling going on. And the camera didn't help things, it often would point fairly high up vertically and I wouldn't be able to see what was in a sometimes very short pit except by jumping into it. Having to go ALL the way back to the beginning on death is very harsh for a game with simultaneously so much precision jumping and also a jump that impedes precision jumping and also a beginning which is a long featureless hallway. I got a ways in, then lost all three lives on a section (near the headband) over a pit that the camera wouldn't let me see which sections down were safe or not, and where there was a lot of frameskip-inducing vertical scrolling. Mleh. I may go back and try to finish later.
I really, really liked the game over screen.
This has absolutely fantastic style and I like that it tries to have a story. It was really cool to turn this down to the "fastest" quality setting and see how everything looked kinda flat-shaded.
There didn't however really seem to be much in the way of "game" here. It was basically a walk to the end of a large, meticulously crafted 3D model and back. The only challenge seemed to come from me misunderstanding the controls. I spent a long time in the first room because I couldn't figure out the walljump, and an even longer time replaying the end because I skimmed the description and didn't realize you had to press E to pick up / drop. The game prints out the "activator acquired" and "landscape change detected" messages if you simply walk to the activator and then the altar, so I was fooled into thinking I'd done what I was supposed to do. Some things that occurred to me is that the walljump would have been easier to work out if there were jump and walljump sounds, so that I could while experimenting have realized I had performed a jump when against a wall; and the pick up / put down button really may have been a bit unnecessary, since you could have just had the item get automatically picked up when you touch it.
I found some weird issues. If I moved too quickly through the level, the game would print multiple messages on top of each other simultaneously, making all of them unreadable. When I got over the wall the final time at the end, I think I only did it by glitching the physics.
I did find the kittens! I wonder what happens if you go there with the "resource" instead of back to the ship at the end...
I liked this a lot, one of the better "Unity Myst" games I've played. I feel like a lot of other "surreal" first person Unity games could learn from this one (environment seemed to be trying to say something, environmental chunks actually "did stuff", cinematic sense to the animations etc). The cat sign did amuse me. I liked the implication the protagonist was doing all this in hopes of getting a kitten.
The "block road" bit did feel frustrating to me and it felt frustrating in an "unfair" way, i.e., it didn't feel like I was screwing up, it felt like the game was screwed up. Since I couldn't see where my feet were, I didn't feel like I had a fair chance to figure out where on the tinier platforms were safe to land.
I feel like I've played some puzzle games similar to this one before, but I liked the wrinkles this one added (reusing a single map many times to present different puzzles, I *really* liked the concept with the music). Hurt my fingers pretty bad by the end because I kept wanting to punch the arrow keys one at a time to create interesting rhythms instead of holding down the arrows as would be easier (it is to be interpreted as a good thing that the game left me wanting to play this way). I had a little bit of trouble understanding the movement rules at very first because it was not immediately obvious the game DENIES FEMALE AGENCY.
I'm not sure if I should have laughed at the "twist" midway through, but I totally did.
This was interesting and ambitious, I'll say that. The visual style was super cool.
The problems I had with this mostly seemed like byproducts of the 48 hour deadline. A lot of stuff seemed haphazard-- I felt like there was a lot of text and I didn't really get to read any of it, I had to keep my eye on the character at all times so I couldn't look at the bottom of the screen. Except for a couple levels where I got swarmed right at the beginning and there was a bit of strategy in quickly locating an "empty" area, there didn't seem to be much happening, it was basically run dodging yellow things until you get the sound effect saying you can go on. (Since the crowds couldn't hurt you the "now go for the exit" bit, though it looked cool, seemed unnecessary). It was frustrating to not be sure either how close you had to get to a yellow dot to start losing memory, or what it is you even do that causes you to hit the "no need to remember" lose condition. The actual moment-to-moment process of dodging yellow dots was quite fun but since it was the only mechanic it got repetitive kinda quick. It was fun while it lasted tho
This is THE TRUE SPIRIT OF LUDUM DARE.
I liked that in some levels I was able to "defeat" Hug Monster by tricking him into running off the level.
The ending was awesome.
This was a really neat, relaxing play. Very Zen as an experience. I liked the music a lot.
I felt like I had the most fun when I just barreled through levels without stopping or looking when I was going.
Sometimes the collision detection near the edges of floors seemed a little glitchy. Like if I stomped down on one of the "falling" floors I'd sometimes drop through it briefly, and more than once the "exiting level" animation had me sliding through a floor or through a wall. Also when I reached what I think was the end of the game, the entire game area just disappeared and all I could see was the page background as if the game weren't being displayed at all. The audio continued. Is this correct or a bug?
This is a really great use of HTML5. I love the "maps" in the source code.
Oh, this is neat. This took awhile to get going, which almost made me give up on it, but once it speeds up this actually is a really fun and fairly innovative take on the canabalt genre. Maybe clean this up for a post-compo version and give it some music?
I just want to note that this game and my game ("Breathe") are the only games in this LD48 I'm aware of to incorporate MLP-themed art :)
This is really cool, there's a lot of depth to it and I feel like I could spend a lot of time playing it just since I've never seen anything quite like it gameplay-wise-- I mean, it feels like something I want to spend a lot of time with to work out all the unique subtleties to the gameplay.
This had kind of bad performance problems on my computer, which is probably the worst macbook ever made.
:O :O This is *awesome*. I just died at the end of my first playthrough attempt... I'm amused that when I was in the early going, I went, wow, this game is not very challenging at all and shots don't hurt you much, and so I foolishly wasn't trying to conserve my health... then when I hit the difficult part I was like nooo what have I done. Will probably post some thoughts once I've beaten it...
Played this a couple weeks ago, some notes from my playthrough--
- I really liked the design of this. Trying to identify and remember goals without any assistance from the game (since you can't see the outer shells) was a cool and unique level to gameplay. I liked that this was introduced gradually, and that one of the first goals you see, you think-- oh, I'll just duck down a level or two and come back up, but in fact that first-goal-you-see is one of the last places you visit in the game.
- One of the cooler moments was escaping from a smaller area into a larger one and having the tiny sperm following me out, still small-scale. If you explore this more later that might be a fun thing to do more with.
- It would be interesting to see a speedrun mode for this where you got a time at the end, or a hard mode with limited life. Basically this the game has enough structure it looks like it could work with leaderboards of one type or another.
- This is one of a couple games I've played recently that did interesting things with presenting challenge just by limiting your sight, in that respect it sort of made me think of Where Is My Heart.
- I did like that in the early bits I had incredible amounts of health, toward the end health became incredibly vital. This seems to help with replays because even the early, easy parts become challenging because you have to actually look at things in terms of "I need to preserve a store of life in this part for the endgame".
Anyway this and Super Mario Summary were probably my favorite games of the whole LD, well done :O
This was pretty neat but it is um sort of pretentious
I liked what a large scope this game had and how much structure and design the game world seemed to have. The sort of Legend of Zelda exploration genre is one of my favorites and this was a really respectable entry toward that genre, esp. for a 48 hour game. The one problem I had was the difficulty. The game went from way, way too easy to way, way too hard, there seemed to be no way to deal with the ghosts as far as I could tell.
I liked this a lot! The look and feel were great.
I felt like the worms were unsatisfying as enemies. The little dinosaur dudes were very satisfying as enemies.
The only problem I had with the game was the jump "feel", it didn't feel quite natural somehow. The double jump *was* a bit glitchy but that didn't really seem like a problem, that was just a timing issue.
I think this is the only LD game I've ever seen with a boss fight, so good job on that.
Note: This game was modified after the deadline to fix a game-breaking bug, where you would always get stuck on the fourth screen if you had a very narrow monitor resolution (like, 1280x1024). If you want to play the originally submitted version, see here: http://vote.grumpybumpers.com/j/ld/23/4/ ...but, except for the bugfix that version is exactly the same.
This was... hah, wow, this was something different.
The music was neat and creative, and the writing/voiceovers made me literally laugh out loud (not LOL, I actually laughed) multiple times. The voice acting was, I think, the best I've ever encountered in an indie game, and I guess I can only say that because so few indie games attempt voice acting, but it actually was quite good. I spent the next week walking around going "the arrk of outerr spaaace.." under my breath. I wasn't sure if the introduction and end were meant to be taken as parody or not.
The object-gathering thing was a decently neat mechanic and helped the loopy feel, though I had trouble telling what some of the objects even were. The voiceovers seemed to be misleading me sometimes about whether or not I'd satisfied conditions or if there were more conditions to be done. I'm still not really sure what the rule was for the third object, or if it even mattered what the third object was, I somehow got the game to accept what I did but I'm not sure how. I did like the fact the game never *explicitly* told me what the heck I was supposed to be doing.
My one complaint about the game was that the actual process of moving the spaceship around was not very fun, it was hard to control and felt like work. This is problematic because the later parts of the game involved a lot of trekking back and forth. That's of course the kind of thing that's hard to get right in an LD timeframe and it didn't stop me from considering this a great LD game. But if you choose to do a post-compo version I think it would elevate this game if the play control were a bit tightened up.
Hm, I made a comment and then it didn't appear when I reloaded. Odd, will try again:
This was just a really amazing game, I think this and Fracuum were my favorites of the compo. This just works at so many levels, I love how there were effectively a lot of different layers to the levels because of all the optional challenges.
The Mario-but-not-Mario graphics were great, they reminded me of Mario Teaches Typing in a good way. I liked Bowser's mullet.
I did get some mechanics glitches (I played the 48 hour version), for example I had troubles where I would hit the sides of paratroopers while trying to jump on top of them.
What's particularly amazing to me is that such a "large", depth-filled game was made in an LD timeframe. Despite the 48 hour scope I enjoyed this more and got more out of it than some of the stuff I've paid money to the actual Nintendo for in the actual Mario Bros line lately :D
This was a neat little game, I had some trouble actually playing it though. The big problem was that right-click-drag is an almost impossible operation on a mac trackpad. I wondered overall if this might have been a more workable game with some alternate ways of doing "interface" (camera, move planet, move people). For example, why do you need to drag the people when moving them? Might a single click suffice and then they go along the one active line? Some of the writing also seemed a little awkward, also.
I really really liked the style though, the thing with diagrams and text naturally overlaid on the game world gave the whole thing a great space-age feel and just the act of rearranging the little universes felt really cool.
Original and interesting puzzle concept here. This game made me think of Q Billion.
This game seems "small" and that's probably a good thing, I liked the efficiently minimalist graphics. I feel like I could play this for a long time when I have more time to devote to it.
Played this awhile back so this is from notes:
For starters, this is absolutely gorgeous. The graphics and sound were stellar.
I had problems getting this game to run. It takes me a couple tries to actually get into this game on my Mac (running Snow Leopard), when I try to open it it usually hangs for a long time at the title screen. Sometimes it starts playing music on top of the title screen after this, but doesn't let me progress; if it freezes in this way, when I quit, I get a brief glimpse of the game before the window disappears. Once I ran, I had problems with framerate and sound stutter.
Once I got into this, I was impressed with the promise of the engine. Moving around the planetoid was really cool, it looked good, it felt good. The one mechanics issue I remember is, the double jump felt extraneous. There rarely seemed to be times you needed to use it and it felt awkward to use.
It was really cool to get down to the "heart", fire bullets, and try to outrun your own bullets.
In my notes I wrote "head through one jump". I think this means I managed to get my head partially embedded in the ceiling one time? Your guess is as good as mine.
Of course I kinda wished there was more happening-- more events and objects to serve as landmarks and help me know where I am, more of a "game" there. I eventually made it down to the center out of curiosity but there's of course not much incentive to play on with this just sort of an engine demo as it is. However it's a *really good* engine demo. I can imagine all sorts of great stuff you could lay onto this template or great situations if there had been enemies, doors, challenges etc on top of this same map. I would really love to play a "final" version of this if you come back to it.
I was unable to get this to run on mac at first, I had to go into terminal, go to the folder with the program and say
chmod +x Cosmogonie.app/Contents/MacOS/LD24
I think using 7zip broke the macintosh version.
This was super pretty, on my first playthrough it was a bit frustrating because I could not figure out what was supposed to be interactive or when. The main thing that confused me was what the keyboard keys were supposed to do. They usually, it seems like, would move the mouse blob somewhere off the top of the screen; and then sometimes something weird would happen. I think maybe I was hitting debug keys I wasn't supposed to be hitting. What I eventually realized is that at least some of my confusion was because playing the game on "good" graphics made a lot of stuff seem to not work right, like things were not responsive to my mouse actions. When I played on "fastest" suddenly the whole thing made way more sense. Anyway neat little piece of art, though I'm still not sure if I am seeing the intended ending or not!
This was neat! I really like punishment platformers so I liked the increasingly ridiculous challenges and the occasional moments of, wait, what if this level really *isn't* possible. I liked the idea of linking mutation / genetic errors with NES glitching. The lasers were RIDICULOUSLY satisfying, somehow. Like there is just something primally right about the sound the lasers make when they go off.
What I a little bit wished for was a bit more clarity on what the heck is happening. It *seems* like you have a pack of randomly generated levels, and each "round", the levels mutate a bit or combine with each other somehow? I'm given no clue what's actually happening or why though. It also would have bene nice to know for a fact if I was actually going toward anything. There was a point when the levels didn't seem to be getting any harder, so I just kinda stopped playing. Enjoyable up to that point, though.
I couldn't seem to get this to run. I am using Chrome 21.0.1180.82 on a Mac. After a long time the title screen came up, but it seemed cut off within the box somehow. When I pressed play, the game area went black for a long time and eventually Chrome popped up the "this page is not responding" error.
This was really cool, my only complaint is I wish there was MORE of it, which is the best complaint to have. I'd really like to see a post-compo version with "more to do" (i.e. a motivation to keep going once you have good stats, or an overall goal).
The gender politics of this game are harrowing if you think about it
The server was down for a couple days, yeah. Sorry! While bringing it back up, I took the opportunity to make a few improvements to how level generation works on the server:
- Reset all levels (accidentally...)
- Server will no longer generate levels where you spawn outside the level
- Specimen numbers are no longer reused
- The server now ensures every round of breeding will include at least one beatable level. This is accomplished via INCEST. If an entire generation passes with no beatable levels, breeding will be performed against the last playable ancestor. (This should avoid the "everything is unbeatable!" problem that developed by the end of last week-- before, if an entire generation became unbeatable, evolution would basically stop.)
- There should be more variety now for people who try to play for a really long time. There's a handful of tanks now that are only accessible once you've already played several levels.
Hello, today I made a port of this game to Macintosh. Here's a mac build which will work on Mac OS X 10.6 or better:
http://vote.grumpybumpers.com/j/port/rive/1/RiveGaucheMac_10.6.zip
I had to patch the code a little to get it to run on mac, you can find my source changes here:
https://bitbucket.org/runhello/port_rive
Now, I have to actually play it :)
So now that I've had a chance to play it:
This is really interesting, I love the concept both on a storytelling and mechanical level, I LOVE the visuals. I really really like the idea of a game which is simultaneously so incredibly "abstracted" and yet validly represents a real-world space. It is difficult to play or enjoy as a game however because of the awkward controls and the confusing way the game initially presents itself.
The introduction problem is pretty real. I think it would not be hard to get around this, but I think you need something in game. In order to understand what is happening here I needed not just the titlebar explanation, but also your notes here, and even your notes in this thread weren't quite sufficient. You said: "Left click to choose your direction. Clicking on empty space makes you stop.". Well, not quite. It seems the mechanics you implemented more were:
When a node has a light rotating "highlight" bar, you may click ON the node to choose it for your next node. If you click anywhere else, including on a non-highlighted node, you stop.
The game seems to have a carefully thought out visual "language"-- I like how "moving" vs "still and deciding where to go next" (a good analogy to on a train vs at a stop) are denoted by the solidness of the "rotating bars" around the dot, that's very natural. However, I don't think most people would guess this! I think people *can* understand these subtle visual languages but I don't think most people are good at figuring them out on their own, most of my own game projects where information has been indicated via subtle signals people just assumed the differences in symbols, colors etc were "noise". If you somehow or other teach people what the symbols mean, they'll know. You need a screen (maybe on the title screen?) explaining what each of the visual signs "means", and maybe an animation explaining what you need to be doing to "catch" a mark. (I don't much like the use of "particles" to indicate current location and location of next mark. It's good that both "you" and "target" are the same unique visual "thing"-- in this case particles-- the problem is the particles obscure or can get confused with the "railway cars", and to some extent obscure other interface elements.) I had to play this a BUNCH of times before i figured out how to get money, and several of the people I asked to test the mac version commented they couldn't get their money above $0 (because they didn't know what they were doing) and it took me MANY plays to figure out that your timer resets each time you score a mark. (The "police" are one of the few things in the game which is totally unambiguous.)
The nonobvious nature of the game would be less of a problem if the controls were more natural. Moving actually is pretty hard. Most things you click on will halt you, and only a couple things will let you move at all. I feel like there are many other ways this could work, maybe you should experiment with some of them. Like what if when you're moving, you just automatically switch to whatever node the mouse is over? Or clicking anywhere will cause you to re-orient in that direction? Or click once for "get off", click once again for "pick new station" and picking a new station allows you to just click in the general direction? (This will sometimes mean accidentally picking the wrong route-- which would be a good representation of riding the subways.) One thing I kept thinking would be really fun, is a version of this where you play with a gamepad such as a 360 gamepad or a PS3 gamepad, and you use the analog stick to pick direction-- at each intersection, if the analog stick is being pushed a direction, change cars and get on the car going the direction nearest to the analog stick direction.
A few more things I noticed:
* The curve of difficulty seems fairly sharp. Before you hit your first mark, there are no police at all. After you hit your first mark, police are EVERYWHERE. I have yet to get two marks in a single game. Maybe the first "mark" could result in fewer police than later ones, so that things can ramp up instead of instantly going from super-easy to super-hard.
* It occurs to me, once the "heat" is on-- if this were an attempt to represent reality, it feels like there ought to be some thing where some areas get patrolled more than others, and taking "back-road" or inconvenient paths will result in less police heat (thus forcing you to make a tradeoff between safety and time).
* As I understand, the "goal" target area is just a station which is extremely busy. Should there be anything in the visuals to indicate business of stations short of "this is a good place to pickpocket"? Should the police patrol more vigorously in more busy stations?
Aaanyway this is a LOT of complaining :) I want to stress I really liked this and I'm criticizing so much because the game gave me a lot to think about. You mentioned on twitter you were considering expanding this game later, I'm really excited to see where it goes!
i liked the writing, and the mood. i like how the graphics scroll, too. it's too short though! i wish there was more here.
i bumped up your score a point because i had fun cycling through your pixel art :)
didn't get very far, but i liked what was there (and i enjoyed the sound effects)
this was clever and very funny. it's also the closest thing i've seen in game form to playing as a villain in a warner brothers cartoon. nice job, L!
Aww, a happy ending!
I literally typed "This is a good companion to Terra Tam." before looking at the other comments and noticing Porp said roughly the same thing. I think I could happily play another 6-8 Ludum Dare entries along these lines. I did like the feints toward Wario Ware-ism in this one.
It's not really that often you find a game you can honestly say has a good sense of *comedy*, and understands things like comic timing...
-- other mcc
clever concept, and the random network names/stuff you're stealing is priceless. but i feel like this could've used a little different approach for to the execution
Hm.
In this post, note I consistently use "enemies" to describe me and "heroes" to describe the CPU.
Initial impression: Like a lot of LD stuff, this felt like a really great prototype for a game not actually present. Loved the visuals, LOVED the sound, loved the "feel" of the dungeon and the interface. Kinda rocket slime-y. I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to be doing. The fact that the CPU had many purposeful heroes at once whereas you could only control one "enemy" at a time seemed kinda unbalanced, until I realized that one enemy could kill a swath of heroes just by jamming spacebar... This sets up a kind of nice symmetry (uncontrolled heroes or enemies kill slowly, a "player" controlling either a hero or an enemy can tear through a swath), but it still felt odd.
Starting up was REALLY disorienting, the game just plain started with me watching a bunch of enemies getting killed by heroes, I couldn't tell if I was controlling anything, I couldn't tell if I was in danger or supposed to be doing something. Once I got past that and got a handle on basic movement, I still couldn't work out what my overall goal was-- if there was a way to "defeat" the heroes and make them stop respawning, if they had an objective they were working toward, what. I couldn't figure out what the bar in the topleft did, it never seemed to move no matter how many of me they killed or how many of them I killed. I killed tons of heroes and it had no apparent effect. I got down to 1 hero multiple times, more eventually just respawned. I found I could select multiple enemies at once but it seemed impossible to do anything, having selected them.
I then came back here, read the instructions, tried again. Second time, armed with new knowledge-- mostly, the knowledge that there WAS AN ENDING, and my goal was to beat 4 waves-- I was eventually able to get down to the point where there was 1 skeleton and 3 heroes, who I picked off, slasher-movie style I guess. With that experience under my belt I guess here's what I'd say:
You could do some things to make what is happening here more obvious, even without a tutorial (screw tutorials). The dots on the mini-map could be larger. It is usually not obvious to mac users that right-click would do anything (sure wasn't to me); you could avoid use of right-click or have an on-screen "RIGHT-CLICK TO MOVE". Or just have the next click after selecting be a move. The bar in the corner was near useless; it basically never left the center. if I'd just had two bars, one counting-down enemy "life" one counting-down hero "life", I would have found the game playable the first time (because I'd have been able to figure out what my goal was, or whether I was even making progress!). It would have been helpful for some kind of in-game indication of whether some enemies were had better offense/defense stats than others (it was clear some had better speed stats, but not if they were different in any other way).
Maybe waiting to respawn until the entire last spawn is dead is a bad idea. I spent most of the time playing this game falling into a single pattern: I would wear the heroes down to one hero; this hero would be wandering around in a part of the map totally depopulated of monsters. I would then select a monster nearest by, and begin the arduous process of S L O W L Y trekking across the map to where the one remaining hero was. This took forever and was really boring.
The RTS mode seemed mostly useless. If I sent a wave of enemies at the heroes via RTS mode, they'd attack SO much slower than the attacking in "avatar" mode that the RTS mode approach was *worse* than useless-- directing a wave of enemies at some heroes would basically lead to the minons all being instantly slaughtered, whereas if I'd done nothing the heroes might not have reached them and they at least had a chance of surviving. RTS mode only seemed to make sense to move enemies around to position them & set myself up to enter avatar mode. When I first started my clued-in playthrough, I settled on a strategy: I want to have enemies in place and ready to select to meet the heroes when they come out, so what I want to do when a spawn point opens is mass-select some enemies; then point them at the general direction of heroes; and then run around avataring one enemy at a time and blasting through the groups of knights, selecting a new enemy each time the heroes kill the previous one. The interface prevented me from doing this. First off, there was some weird thing where once an enemy had been drag-selected as part of a group, it seemed to stay as part of its green "group", and sometimes I couldn't individually select it later or enter avatar mode until its partner had been killed? Second off, the fact you could ONLY rts-mode by selecting MORE THAN ONE enemy destroyed its usefulness-- what I'd want to do is go, oh crap, spawnpoint, and then move the camera around the spawnpoint grabbing enemies and directing them toward the hero wave. I couldn't do this-- because once I got past the very start, the enemies were diffuse enough there would usually only be one to select per screen, and a group of exactly one enemy could ONLY be moved via avatar mode, which is very slow and time consuming. (Again: long hikes in avatar mode are BORING.) Of course, I am completely locked out of RTS mode while in avatar mode, so once the heroes killed my forces down to a one-per-screen density I simply couldn't do what I wanted (queue up some RTS-mode "go here" commands, then start avatar-mode-ing while I wait for my minions to hike into place). Aside from finding some way to make RTS-directing a single enemy possible, maybe what you actually want here is to instead of the RTSy select/direct just allow you to place "go here!" or "avoid here!" (because I might want to keep some enemies *away* from the heroes in order to keep them alive longer) markers. Is that something a game has done before? Is the game just a typical tower defense game at this point? I don't think I've ever played a tower defense game.
ANYWAY, denied use of RTS mode, what I wanted to do was surf around and opportunistically select enemies near heroes to avatar into. The interface didn't make this easy either. If I'm playing this way, the large pool of enemies I start with is basically a resource to use up-- avatar-mode candidates-- and what I'm basically trying to do is stay alert for conflicts between enemies and heroes, and once the heroes start a conflict (because without RTS mode, I can't easily) jump to that point and start avataring like crazy. This could potentially be fun and interesting once the heroes start spreading out a bit-- watching multiple points on the board and making decisions about which conflicts to intervene in and which to put off for a bit (since any conflict not blessed with your playerly sense of purpose means the heroes are just slaughtering your minions). But, because the map points were such tiny red dots, it was kinda hard to see where conflicts are happening. Larger dots might help, something I think would have been kinda cool and helped a LOT is if there was something magic on the map to indicate "conflict happening here!", like maybe every time a hero killed or attacked an enemy there'd be a flashing skull or a "poof!" expanding circle on the map at that point.
Overall this was a very *promising* game, and the problems seemed like "LD timeframe game, not enough time to master play control". But the play control was sort of a fun-killer. I expect if you spend some time thinking about and experimenting with how you control your forces and how information is presented to the player you could make something super cool out of this.
One last thing. I found that on some runs-- randomly-- the game would work, and on some runs-- randomly-- the LOVE player would freeze, forever. I would have to force quit it. I am on a Snow Leopard mac. When I beat the game, it froze while trying to start my next game. I feel like maybe one out of four launches would let me through.
How many songs are there in this? Sometimes it seemed to be playing a different song on startup.
the sprites are cute. it's too bad you couldn't get something else done, but keep at it
='(
Before I say anything else: Don't! Try! To distribute! Mac! Executables! Via RAR! Use Zip. First off, Mac users don't typically even have RAR utilities. Second off, I think RAR mangles the file attributes of mac apps. For whatever reason, the mac download above is *broken*-- as is it will just crash on startup-- I think because being stuffed into a rar strips the executable bit. (I bet the Linux version has the same problem.) I was able to unbreak the executable, and thus able to boot the program, by going into the hench_mac directory in Terminal and entering:
chmod +x hench.app/Contents/MacOS/Hench
Anyway gonna actually play the game now.
- I like that there's an online/collaborative component to this. This is something I have been wishing we could see more of in LDs.
- I feel like account creation is unnecessary. You could just as well ask for a display name, and then randomly generate an "account" which is tied to the current computer. In the previous LD I did a game ("The World Hates You") which similarly had a level server and a persistent player history, and I just had the server assign each new person it saw a 32-bit random number as an ID. The client saved that random ID in an xml file and re-sent it on successive runs. The player never had to be aware of any of this.
- I never really worked out what the black boxes or the green people were supposed to be, story-wise. From the level structure and the name I guess I figure the black boxes are invaders in the evil fortress, and the green people are invading henchmen. The game didn't guide me much in this. The black boxes look and attack like conventional "enemies" and the green people look and attack like conventional "heroes". Well, never mind theme I guess.
- I rather a lot liked the visual style, the mix of lo-fi foreground and complex backgrounds. The shadows looked neat, although, sometimes when I shot an enemy "offscreen" its shadow would remain hovering on the walkable area and I'd think it was an enemy I was supposed to be shooting. It would also be helpful if the bullets were larger or more contrasty, they were hard to see.
- Play control was nice, shooting stuff felt satisfying (aside from the "can't see bullets" problem).
- It took me awhile to figure out what the server was actually doing (i.e. that you're doing coop with your own "ghosts" and the replay ghosts of others?). That's... really cool, actually! I thought at first the idea was just that the level server provided challenges, and different players were picking off the challenges one by one (although, if that were the case it would have made more sense if you got a bigger reward for beating a harder level that had already claimed multiple player lives). The way it actually works seems much cooler. I wonder, though-- do you wind up with a thing where the fact past players "can't see" what the future players are doing, means that the past players are less useful because they're mostly shooting at stuff that the future-player might have killed already? This seems to create possibilities for an interesting sort of strategy, if all the ghosts on a single level are your own, because you could go around being efficient about, say, killing only the even-numbered enemies on your first life, and killing only the odd-numbered enemies on your second life, but it seems to mean that co-op between different people is a little less useful except on the harder levels. (Then again, I guess the harder levels are the only ones likely to rack up a bunch of ghosts in the first place, so maybe this is OK?) I wonder if there is a gameplay type one could find which is less susceptable to this "ghosts can't see what you're doing" problem. Have you played cursor*10?
- Also: You seem to have noticed that "talking" gives the game a lot of personality, but it's almost impossible to talk without getting killed! Maybe the game should use preloaded emotes with trigger keys?
I hope you reuse the online model here in a more polished game, it's very neat tech and the implementation is surprisingly sturdy for a 48hour game.
Hi Thomas-- that makes sense! I don't know what the future project you're practicing for will look like, so I can't know if what I"m about to say is good advice or not, but I do want to harp on account creation flow a bit. Trying to streamline account signup processes is sort of one of my hobbyhorses, I have this theory that confronted with an account signup box many people will just sort of walk away, so where registered accounts are necessary I want to think about ways to minimize the disruption. One way to do this might be to collapse boxes into fewer boxes. For example, in your program you have separate registration and login boxes. You can potentially merge these, see: http://sig.grumpybumpers.com/ That signup form just asks for *a* username and password, if login fails it bumps you to a registration page and autofills username and one of the password fields. Another option might be to just start with a screen that asks your nickname, it hits the server, if it's an existing account it asks your password, if it's a new account it presents a registration page with spaces for password and recovery email. This means that you do not so much get a chance to be scared off by a big complicated registration box, by the time that you realize you have to enter a password you have already emotionally committed by hitting "submit" once :) A modern AJAX web layout or Unity program of course could present a really nice interface for either of these two approaches. Anyway not something you have to do, but just a thought :) And glad to hear you're thinking about developing the ideas from this project farther.
The game pausing while entering text is a good idea, and it's uniquely possible since coop is "asynchronous". Although this is a quick shooty blast-em-up kinda game, you get very drawn into the bam bam shoot nature, so I'm not sure I'd think or want to stop this game to type something out in either case. One question is what the purpose of talking is. Is it to help coordinate best use of player resources? I.E. "I'm going left, you go up"? If this, you might want to think about structuring challenges to make this coordination *necessary*. Is talking to give character and reality to the individual players (i.e., they're talking, that makes me feel like I'm playing with people rather than robots)? If the latter, maybe you should explore allowing avatar customization or assigning specific accounts personal colors/clothing textures/something pre-configuration, so people can see who they're playing with, recognize people they've seen before, etc...
i liked the concept, but the controls were janky as hell for me. sometimes i'd just randomly stop without warning, sometimes i'd move slow, and sometimes i'd move fast. when i felt like i was getting the hang of them something random would happen. it's a shame, too, cause i was getting into it otherwise.
this game seems really interesting, though enemies seemed to clump up a lot into corners. i like the style/concept though. i couldn't figure out how to set traps, so i'm gonna go back and play this more later.
i couldn't figure out how to get past the first area. i also experienced a lot of glitches with the hostages - when i killed them they'd just respawn and start walking around aimlessly and none of them dropped money or anything like that.
potentially cool idea, though the mechanics i go to are a little frustrating and need to be tuned and i think there was too many of them for how short a game it is. also i encountered a few bugs, though nothing gamebreaking and i'm sure you were limited by time. the dialogue was also not too bad.
apparently it didn't save my rating before so i'm rating it now! to re-iterate in person thoughts, i like it and it could be seen as a sort of metaphor for reprogramming yourself during the process of transitioning
i LOVE the design of the main character. clicking and grabbing enemies only seemed to work some of the time - maybe this has to do with flash's mouse implementation. also i agree that WASD would have been better choice for character movement.
This was neat. My favorite thing was the graphics. The game was only fun if you moved recklessly at all times (it would probably improve the game if there were something in the gameplay encouraging that, like a time limit). This was unusually coherent for an LD game, I liked seeing both skill and puzzle sections-- the puzzles weren't super elaborate but it was nice to see an effort for puzzles at all. I liked how a bat causes a UFO to explode. Does it get sucked into a jet intake?
In the early levels the spaces looked very naturalistic and real-world believable, like cities or something, and then you get into the later areas and suddenly the levels are weird and cavernous and video game-y and make no sense as spaces that someone would actually build, there was a nice creeping surrealness there.
It ran very ridiculously quickly on my mac, the wolf would walk around slowly during "loading..." and then once the level "started" would zip around at warp speed. Actually, I liked this, it was the best thing about the game, it gave things a frenetic arcade-y feel.
I did find there was a dominant strategy— because the enemies tended to run away as far as possible, and because the zippy controls were hard to control, if I just slung around the wall edges I would pick up most of the grandmas/riding hoods (who were all perpetually stuck up against the wall, trying to "get away").
I felt icky, about all the murder, and the blood. Since the point of this LD is to be the villain, I suppose that means your game was effective.
I never figured out what was happening with the "badges" in the upper right corner.
How much inspiration did you take from Duck Sauce here?
i didn't get very far cause i couldn't get past one particular part of the chase scene. i dig the visuals a lot, though
i like the art style. the audio was pretty good too, until it abruptly cut out. i don't like the combining object mechanics, and i couldn't figure out how to move past the first couple areas. i'm sure there's a solution, but it doesn't seem particularly intuitive to me and i got frustrated.
wish the audio was even a little better! i do like the idea of what you do affecting the endings a lot. makes me think of Storyteller
a bittersweet tale of one little missile that could
interesting mechanics. i'm not sure if i understand the reasoning behind them in the context of a game about a prison escapse, but interesting nonetheless.
i feel like the mechanics are potentially interesting, but pretty poorly conveyed, even though i appreciated the tutorial screen. it took me awhile to figure out what things were and the purpose for them. this has potential, though. nice euro style chiptune btw.
i wasn't really into this. way way too heavy-handed for me, and that kind of ending is way overdone imo. this is coming from someone who often likes "art games" too. though i like the metaphor of jumping up and down on a red button over and over for work.
oh man, i loved this. i guess i'm a real sucker for all the movie references.
This was... pretty neat! Very stylish and a cool concept. "You were eaten by the queue matron" was a great death screen. This felt very scanty though, even for a LD game. Even on the hardest level I didn't really feel like there was any challenge. Certain elements just wound up not factoring because the difficulty wasn't high enough to put them in play-- the green "annoyance" level didn't really factor because it moved too slowly to run out before the level ended, and the matron "staggering" in the final level didn't really matter because that level had so much time you could play cautiously. (Also, with levels so short, not really paying attention to the matrons and just trying again was an option!) I'd encourage you to make more levels at some point :)
Another thing, I'm not sure about this but the game made me wonder-- You'd think the idea of a rhythm game would be to have the option of listening to the music instead of looking at the screen to determine correct behavior. But on the levels with "staggered" matrons this wasn't really an option because the "looking note" was different per matron. What if instead of the matrons all sharing the same piano loop, there were a few syncopated loops, each corresponding to one of the matrons? Like say instead of (A) (A) (D) (G) the music was something like (A) [G] (A) [A] (D) [A] (G) [D]) and the top matron was always looking left on (G) and the bottom matron was always looking left on [G] ? If matron behavior was to some degree predictable just from the music you could maybe get away with doing a bunch of rapid-fire levels of much higher difficulty...
not too bad. didn't like the writing on the intro, but the controls work, and the audio is pretty atmospheric if very simple.
oh dear
cute pixel art and good concept! i'm struggling a lot with this third (i think?) puzzle but i'm sure my brain just isn't working right now
this could've been cool, but the controls were super awkward and made it too frustrating to kill any guards for me
not too bad! the mechanic is pretty decent. i got 82 days (probably not so good). the look could use some work. the music is good, though i don't know how much it fits the mood of the game (maybe that's not a bad thing?).
this is a funny concept, but i don't know how well it really worked. it wasn't all that engaging to me, i guess. the randomly being spawned in a different points took also little while to get used to. i did like the fast paced bullet-hell vibe of it though.
i REALLY like this idea. i just wish it were longer!
very cute little puzzle platformer! i didn't mind the weird controls cuz they seem to work well enough for what the game is
pretty original idea, but i agree with what infernet89 said
this was really cute!
cute game. too short! also i found the sound a bit obnoxious. the controls reminded me of all the frustrations i used to get playing micro machines/rc pro am =D, but they were definitely appropriate given the title.
i like the concept a lot, but i couldn't even get past the second screen. also it seems to cut you off a second too early, which led to much frustration. maybe i'm just not good at games like this.
I really, *really* liked this. It did a good job of making me feel like something Important was happening before I got the rules, and it did a good job of slowly easing me into forcing me to understand what's happening. The fact by a few levels in I actually did (I think) start to work out the rules and was solving puzzles with intent rather than by trial and error was a really cool feeling. I did eventually get to a puzzle I couldn't solve and seems... actually unsolvable?
Some things that would have helped, I think: If the mouse isn't used it would be better if the cursor were hidden, as was it was misleading, I kept thinking, maybe the mouse does something after all?. Also I think this kinda needs a save feature. I'd like to put this down and come back to it but if I do that I lose my place. (I've already replayed once to the "unplayable" level after thinking, oh wait, One More Thing I Didn't Try.)
More thoughts rot13'd for spoilers: V jnag gb guvax bs guvf nf fbeg bs na nofgenpg znmr, nygubhtu gung'f abg fgevpgyl npphengr. Gur bar pbzcynvag V qvq fbeg bs unir vf gung vg frrzrq yvxr nyy gur yriryf jrer "begubtbany"-- gung vf, vg frrzrq rirel yriry V cynlrq, rkprcg gur "haorngnoyr" bar, lbh pbhyq orng ol uvggvat fgevatf bs nyy bar qverpgvba va n ebj, fnl, 3E, Y, 3Q, 5H [jva]. V xrcg jnvgvat sbe vg gb svaq n jnl gb qrfvta n chmmyr jurer V pbhyqa'g jva ol gelvat rnpu pbzcnff qverpgvba va ghea hagvy V sbhaq n fbyhgvba. V'z abg fher vs gung'f cbffvoyr jvgu gur cevzvgvirf lbh unir, ohg vg jbhyq or vagrerfgvat gb gel. Znlor gung unccraf va gur yngrfg yriryf, V'z abg fher.
Naljnl, gur "haorngnoyr" yriry sbe zr unq guerr oybpxf va gur hccre yrsg naq guerr oybpxf va gur obggbz evtug, fgnttrerq n ovg. gurer jrer gjb oybpxf ng cbfvgvbaf, V thrff 2 naq 6, naq uvggvat "yrsg" yvtugrarq bar naq qnexrarq gur bgure naq uvggvat "evtug" qvq gur rknpg bccbfvgr. Uvggvat hc naq qbja qvq abg rssrpg gurfr gjb oybpxf ng nyy. V pbhyq svaq inevbhf pbzovangvbaf bs HYQE gung tenqhnyyl jvcrq bhg gur bgure oybpxf, ohg gurer frrzrq gb or mreb jnl gb rire trg gubfr ynfg gjb bhg orpnhfr V pbhyqa'g pyrne bar jvgubhg rkcybqvat gur bgure, naq beqre qvqa'g znggre fvapr gubfr oybpxf jrer vzzhar gb H,Q.
think you said this in your post-mortem, but i found this pretty heavy-handed (but then i'm not a huge molleindustria fan either). i did like the visual style though.
there's the seed of something that could be really fun here, but i just found the controls too awkward and frustrating for me to get into it.
very cute =D. i noticed the generated path seemed to get longer each time i failed, which was a cool touch.
Hah, this was silly, but quite satisfying! I liked that you bothered to tell us what the controls were and that it was done in a friendly way, the intro and outro screens felt rewarding. The music made me actually laugh. I really liked the dinky Metroid and Zelda sound cues. The in-game music unfortunately got very repetitive, it would have been... potentially enjoyable with a longer loop.
This game just felt good to play, the graphics were fun, the mechanics of running around and eating stuff felt fun, I liked the "twist" that your purpose in the game wasn't what it appeared to be at first. It felt too bad to eventually realize there was not really any strategy or reason to what you were doing. Pre-twist, there is no benefit to doing anything you do. Post-twist, you really can't control whether you get hurt or not-- I tried like stealth, peeking in a door, checking if there's an enemy in the room, popping back out again if so, moving on if not, but often I'd get hurt *while* the room-transition animation was going on. There's of course nothing I can do to prevent that from happening, which meant whether I made it through the post-twist game was essentially random, which meant in the pre-twist game I was just ignoring everything (since there was no benefit to eating) and. It felt too bad cuz you had good basic mechanics so this could have been one of those rare legitimately fun "oh wow, this is actually a game" LDs, if we were given more to do instead of stuff like grazing just being window dressing. What if eating plants regained health, so that pretwist is about identifying plants to eat along your route and posttwist is about collecting them before you run out of HP?
In the absence of this, the game started to take on absurdist, existential dimensions. Why is the goat doing this with no mechanical reward? Why does anyone do anything? Is this not what life is? At first I thought that the idea was in the back half you were facing the ghosts of your victims, MGS3 style-- i.e. if you ate no one's clothes along the route you would see no opposition on the way back. But no, it seemed to make no difference either way. I began to see the game world as fundamentally nihilistic— no penalty for your villainy, but no rewards, either, the PC blindly, joylessly consuming for consumption's sake. At this point it occurred to me that despite the theme of VILLAINY, this is the first game I have seen this LD to raise moral issues as part of its narrative
One more thing, on my machine at least at the point of the "twist" the game would slow down for like five seconds, which was kinda annoying?
-- other mcc
pretty nifty stuff, though i think the mechanics could've been made a little bit more interesting
I really liked the visual style and the engine work on this one!
Little things: I thought this was better with WASD. I noticed a little thing where when you press a movement key while setting keys the camera actually moves. I like you left the ending "bomb glitch" in. The music seemed to have a *crazy* inconsistent BPM, like not referring to the speedup effect it just had a really wavery metronome on my machine… which might have been sorta interesting with a different song but with "The Saints Go Marching In" didn't have really any particular impact. I liked how subtle the thing was where Bob's movement gets faster and faster as you keep playing. I found it amusingly theme-fitting that your only metric of "score" was not how long you stayed alive, but how much you destroyed. I like that this is one of those games which, in concept at least, has a maximum possible score.
The main issue I had with this was it didn't feel like it had a lot of purpose. I feel like you could make something very cool about, you can destroy the landscape around you, and you must use this ability to collect clocks which barely extend your life. But this game didn't seem to do much with it beyond implementing the basic mechanics. My first playthrough was kind of aimless. Most of the way through the first playthrough I realized that the bomb-laying is in fact infinite and can be done infinitely fast and there is no reason to be worried about hurting either yourself or a clock by bombing "too much". I thus did another playthrough in which all i did was charge through the landscape, furiously clicking EVERYWHERE constantly. This was actually pretty fun, in a stupid way! :D However it hurt my hand, and also an interesting thing happened where the more bombs I laid, the slower and slower the game went. Like somehow there was a compounding speed penalty that got worse the more bombs had been laid since I started the game. I finally wound up with a score of 185980, a few seconds from death, and it was going like… ten seconds between frames. (The music stayed at its same tempo the entire time, although I think as stuff slowed down it began dropping notes).
Anyway, as an engine demo this is great. I would be interested to see a post-LD version that either imposes a bit more thought on the process of bombing/navigating, or just overall makes a more complex game with this art and mechanics concept. And maybe a different MIDI :)
cool idea. wish i could play this 2-player -_-
great idea - i wish there was a bit more ways to be evil than raising and lowering taxes in terms of implementation though.
very cute! i love the how lovingly home-made it feels. the writing also reminds me of text adventure games i did when i was younger :D
i had fun with this one. nice idea and puzzle design!
what a straightforward name! the movement was pretty awkward and i got stuck on corners a lot because of the shape of the avatar.
wade: (this is liz) i was obviously limited by time, but my plan is to add more areas to this so there's more branching paths and stuff to get lost in (sorta like Yume Nikki)
thanks, porpy! i edited the entry so people can download the windows version from there until the server problem gets fixed.
Download link is fixed. I am really sorry about that. I will try to stick in an extra mirror link with all 3 downloads.
Update: In addition to Porp's link the post has been updated with a link to a mirror of all three platforms hosted by Erik, in case the main site goes down again.. Many thanks to Erik and Porpentine.
psychopsam: the weird camera control is a part of that particular area. there are lots more areas to explore.
er, by that i meant that it's intentionally that way.
i like the idea behind programming a little robot minion in game, and how it works seems pretty complex. i sort of wish the game wasn't so particular about what you could and couldn't do. i wanted to see my robot be all messed up and goofy :)
this was very funny! loved the gfx and music too. i'm gonna come back to it once i can manage to find more things to steal.
funny concept, and the high kick/low kick/freeze options were cool. the implementation is really rough right now, though.
dancing spider robot QWOP! once i got a hang of the controls, i really enjoyed this. getting to the goal is pretty screwy though - sometimes i got lucky and one of my legs stretched really far out to it, and sometimes i was standing on top of it and i had to shuffle my legs around a lot for it to register.
Oh, this was neat. I think I enjoyed it more than QWOP, it seemed more believably playable. The controls are startlingly natural, though I had trouble with it until I figured I really wanted to be rapidly tapping the keys and not holding them down. I liked the music and I really, REALLY liked how the robot bobbed its head to the music. -- Other mcc
i LOVED the writing and the concept! i just wish it was more fun to play, adn the movement wasn't kinda screwy. sound would be nice too. but plz keep on making games!
i love my unity games! i found the controls kinda awkward, like it was a little hard to move around and i didn't know you could just hold the right mouse button down to drain blood. some sounds, even minimal ones, would've helped. i like the idea a lot, though, and the scope was pretty big.
i downloaded and it installed and it worked, but the game is completely broken. there's only one small platform and i fall infinitely no matter what direction i go in. i think you should try uploading another build because it looks like there's more?
i like that you stuck with two-button mechanics, but this seems really broken in its current state.
i like the idea a lot! i wish there were more than 2 minigames that it looped back and forth between.
pretty neat little asteroids-type game. i liked the look too. i agree with others that it got boring quickly, though - it would've been nice to see more mechanics introduced.
this is a good seed of an idea, and i like that you started out with a sort of mini-tutorial. you could definitely take this further, too. i'd tweak the movement to make it a bit faster, though - it's ok but didn't quite work for me once i got to the part with the lasers (which i had problems with because their pattern wasn't particularly well communicated).
i really liked the sound effects! bonus points cause the dog is cute. i dug up the whole yard and couldn't find anything though.
I really want to try this but we only have Android 2.2!
all the dialogue made this unnecessarily slow-moving and the controls were kind awkward. otherwise, i liked the writing quite a bit and you had a good concept.
i found the attacking at the beginning to be a little frustrating, but i'll keep playing more based on what everyone is saying
would've liked some kind of feedback on the gun, but nice concept :D
i liked the graphics style a lot. the teleport mechanic is also pretty interesting but i had a hard time not accidentally teleporting myself into the wall, so i definitely think it could be tweaked some more.
This was definitely one of the best interpretations of the "one button game" concept I've ever seen!-- I loved how it felt like a reinterpretation of speedrun games, with the annoying parts (key-mashing) abstracted away and the parts that excite me (timing and strategizing) left in. Some of the levels did work better than others, I felt like the ones where there was a timing question around how many times to run back and forth in a trapped place (thankfully this only happened once I remember) felt tedious rather than fun, and it seemed like the level design lost its clockwork-beauty element on levels where it was possible to jump onto a ladder, thus messing up the timing of all elements after that. What felt beautiful about this when it worked best was that due to the restriction of choice, every single thing the player did was precisely what the game designer intended-- down to every keypress, every bit of timing. The ladders, by creating a critical half-second or so of fuzz in either direction, made it feel like I was no longer on that perfect clockwork path.
One more complaint of sorts, rot13 for spoilers: V nyfb zhfg nqzvg V jnf irel sehfgengrq jnfgvat znal yvirf gelvat gb uvg gung qbbe crbcyr xrrc zragvbavat, naq orvat sehfgengrq ol jung sryg yvxr n pbyyvfvba oht— v.r. vg YBBXRQ yvxr V fubhyq or noyr gb whfg whzc bire gur svefg qbbe, vs V whfg gvzrq vg evtug, ohg guvf jnf abg cbffvoyr va snpg. Gung sryg zvfyrnqvat engure guna "chmmyr-l".
This game is of unusual difficulty for me because the trackpad on my laptop is broken, such that I must exert great physical force for any one click to register. (Most people who try to use my computer can't even pull off a single click.) When clicking on like one thing or two this is negligible, but when clicking something repeatedly it becomes noticeable and then very seriously hampering
My broken hardware caused the physical process of playing this game to become basically the same as what its narrative described
Every hand up further exhausting my tired arms
Not certain I can physically make it
It was interesting! I admired the commitment to the bit and I was pleasantly surprised there was more going on here than I thought at first. The one problem I did have was that it felt like it fell prey to what a lot of Twine games do, to wit, you are given no way to "advance" gameplay except "click every single button available to you". This wound up even more frustrating than normal in this case because so many of the plethora of options to try were "fatal" and started you over at the beginning. Still, I enjoyed my couple of short playthroughs after which I decided qlvat jnf rabhtu pybfher sbe zr.
This was exquisite. I loved so many things about it.
I loved the help menu, right off the bat.
I loved how the board looked as an abstract symbol even before you started moving.
I loved how I couldn't play at first because I was much too busy just playing with the arrow keys trying to make tiny instrumental music.
I loved how the center block was just barely large enough to put all four "players" in your peripheral vision, meaning you couldn't rely on platforming and had to focus only on the rhythm. The block movement became a metronome.
I love how this is— seriously— as far as I can remember, the only rhythm game I've ever played that made me feel like I was playing a musical instrument. AND I'M INCLUDING HERE THE GAME WHERE THE CONTROLLER WAS A LITERAL MUSICAL INSTRUMENT.
I loved the "oh, heck yes" moment where I realized "how to beat" level iii-- a precise set of muscle instructions that allowed me to "play" the level on a groove-- and I loved the moment where I realized, after like 3 attempts to beat the level ended with me screwing up on the last jump attempt, that my level iii strategy derailed completely when the first block left the screen (thus putting a hole in the rhythm/groove I'd put myself in).
I loved how throughly the game resisted my efforts to put it down and do anything else.
My one frustration was how the jump was very small and the game was thus quite unforgiving, even more so than seemed necessary to keep the rhythm feeling consistent. I wished the squares' hitboxes were circles.
I got to level V and stopped there, exhausted and with aching fingers. I will be playing more of this. A lot more of this.
My game session ended when I entered a room, all the exits to which had already eroded away.
Very beautiful both as a concept and as an experience.
Wait, is this actually Windows only? It looks like just a flash projector.
Hi protensity-- we fixed two bugs with corpses during submission hour, one gamebreaking, and this would have been uploaded after you played. With the bugs fixed we tested and it is possible to win. Porpentine has done it.
arrogant.gamer... Twine *couldn't* be used for multiplayer stories before we released this... we wrote the software that makes it possible *during the jam* :D
I'll be cleaning up and publicly releasing the multiplayer-Twine framework as open source as soon as I can (I need to detangle the game-specific parts from the generic parts, and I might refine the API a little). In the meanwhile thanks for letting us know about your game.
The4thCircle: The server has been having some periodic difficulties. I'm trying to take steps to prevent this from happening again. In the meantime if you see server issues happening please tweet me @mcclure111 and I'll do something quick.
It should never pause at a blank screen for more than a second. *Usually* you shouldn't notice blank screens at all, the blank screen should go by too quickly to notice. If the screen goes dark and stays that way for more than ten seconds, you can assume the server burped and your game is effectively "crashed". Sorry :( We didn't have time to implement retry/failover behavior.
Odd scores are possible
I think... if you can get a score between 6 and 8, then I'll be convinced you did it on purpose :)
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Borrowed an Android phone, tried this out. This was… well, hilarious, for starters, when I got what was going on I *really* liked the concept, and I was literally laughing out loud most of the time I was trying to play. Unfortunately I found this too difficult to actually play. The problem, basically, is there is not enough time to actually read any of the text. So what the game actually becomes is a repeated trial and error of memorizing a long "touch, touch, touch, don't, touch, don't, don't, touch" string (I met with *some* success using mental RLE). Which is… interesting in that it's sorta unique, but doesn't really exercise an interesting skill, and is *really* too bad because it eclipses what really is a very cool intended premise (make a series of very quick do-or-don't decisions, then replay until you have the correct set of decisions down) and some rather funny text. (If you're just playing the game as "find and remember this long binary sequence", this *requires* you to not so much as look at the text in the later levels, or even read the failure messages between play attempts, because too much of your brain is tasked concentrating on remembering the string and not breaking that concentration).
I think this could be a lot more playable, and its potential more met, if
- It were like, "Cloud Atlas in Two Minutes" or "Cloud Atlas in Three Minutes" and each individual segment were 2x-3x as long. I don't think you lose much by decreasing the difficulty because difficulty stays in by the sheer length of the thing and the one-hit-loss nature.
- Sound, really, would help me ground a *lot* in understanding what's happening and staying focused. Even really simple sound, like a bang or a bell on scene changes or a buzzer on failure.
- If there were more feedback given as to *how long you have left*. In the absence of such the time to act per scene might as well be zero. (The fact there's no feedback *did* induce a kind of cool sense of trapped panic which was extremely compatible with Cloud Atlas's actual plot, but it drowns out other things about the game that are more interesting.)
- …I see why you made this a mobile game, but without ease on the difficulty I think I would have found it easier to play this on a computer.
Good show tho :D
Anyway at some point in the next two years my wife is going to be going through the files on her phone, find "CloudAtlas" and go wtf is this
LUDUM DARE HAET UTF-8
PS: Please share your art with us here in the comments! You can take screenshots like this:
http://www.take-a-screenshot.org/
And upload them here:
http://imgur.com
There is a screenshot feature in the program but it does not seem to work right right now. We plan to upload a post-compo version with some of the broken features fixed.
We just uploaded a post-compo version; it's linked at the top of the page. Gallery mode, Tutorial mode, progress saving, screenshots (return key) and several other neat things that weren't working in the 72-hour version are working in this one. I recommend it highly.
01010111, the single screen mode is named "Sketchpad" and the computer does do the drawing in "Tutorial" mode (post-compo version only). Thank you for playing
Paulmcg: As described on the title screen, the undo button is the "delete" key. (See also: Equals)
LegacyCrono: Oh, I *really* like QNBdJog.png.
This is a note that BECOME A GREAT ARTIST IN JUST 10 SECONDS is an "Official Selection" at Indiecade 2014. They gave us a little badge to put on our official website but this is kind of the only website we have so I just uploaded it in the "screenshots" section here.
Neat :O I love the art and how real and spooky-feeling the world it built felt.
I think I got, and I actually liked, the forking-maze "mechanic", the problem I had with it was that you didn't really give us a way to effectively "experience it as gameplay". That is, there was no way from one particular scene to guess what the next two scenes were going to be. Even building a mental map— something I am not sure I would have considered super fun, but would have made more sense— was difficult because so many of the scenes were identical and devoid of non-Latin landmarks. Basically, what your design rewards was just trial and error random search until one found the room they were looking for. TBH I did enjoy, in a sort of anti-art way, stumbling lost and hopeless and at best able to tell— sometimes— "oh, I've been here before". But I didn't feel like I was given a lot to do. This is the one thing I would have maybe tried to improve on.
I could not figure out what if anything the harp did. (Did it break the gate in the one room?)
The post-compo version did not work for me. If I have the graphics filter on everything is just blocks. Also the transition animation is MUCH TOO SLOW for a game which rewards lots of trial and error. (And I actually sort of liked the dead silence and voidy emptiness of the original.)
OMG OMG OMG this is brilliant. I love the concept and I love the way you framed it as you "asking me for help" with a game you're playing that I can't see. Gonna be honest, I didn't play, I read through someone else's playthrough*. But I think I got the gist :)
* I'm constantly on the edge of Twitter jail anyway
** I really like that conceivably, in the middle of the game session about a museum heist, the player could be sent to jail
Super pretty (I LOVED how the clouds looked), good-feeling (movement felt nice, the music was a good fit). I feel like you didn't give me a lot to do-- it was literally "hold any button until the right balloon shows up". I liked some bits of the framing (the very slow countdown measured in "years") and I feel like with some tweaking it could have felt meaningful even if you didn't find "the one" (like, what if time ran out much quicker, and you realized that your experience lasted 80 years and felt beautiful the whole time but you never did find that one special person). As it was tho the problem was after about forty seconds it was like "ok, now what?". I tried making trying to invent my own little "game"s on top of this one to kill time, I kept trying to bounce my basket up on top of my balloon or swing the basket around in circles, I at some point decided my goal was to try to reach the ground (if one existed) and held down. I found a couple minor ways to glitch your physics engine into making the balloon move quicker than it would otherwise… :D none… of this felt like it was really part of the game tho.
As a queer person, I spent most of the game just going "but why CAN'T I date red balloons?!"
What happens if you run out of time completely btw?
Oh, I really really loved this. The theme felt personally powerful to me. I loved the writing.
I usually have a lot of trouble with Twine stories but this averted a lot of the issues I tend to have with Twine. I think the best thing about it was that it was simply constantly engaging as a story. A lot of Twine games I lose patience and just start clicking through to "get forward". This one I was enjoying the text enough to want to slow down and focus on it and also the relatively rare choices kind of stressed to me that clicking/choices wasn't really the point. But then when you DID give me a choice it felt like it really made use of what had come before (although I still don't think I know what I should have done to win, or why).
I may try this again later and try to win, I might leave it as is because the "bad ending" felt cathartic by itself.
Notes:
- If you experience framerate problems, please see Readme.txt.
- The Windows zip was updated after the deadline. The game was not changed, however, a file which was present in the Mac version was originally accidentally omitted in the Windows version. This prevented the game from launching.
It ends the same way every time.
[ Also, thanks :) ]
Stvr, I went back and forth on whether to mention this, but I have to admit… this game is not supposed to have any controls!—other than the ability to look around by having the mouse. The movement controls are debug code that was supposed to have been compiled out in the release build and somehow wasn't. So um, if you want the experience I had originally planned, use only the mouse. But I don't think "what I originally planned" is all that important, and the movement controls are *there*, so you might as well use them and it's just a different kind of experience will happen, and some interesting things including the thing you saw might occur. Let's call this, um, "emergent"…?
LUDUM DARE HAET UNICODE
FYI, I just (a couple days after end of LD) added a Linux version. It is the same as the others, all I did was recompile. It has been tested on a few different Ubuntus seemingly without problems. It may require you to install SDL, PortAudio, and FreeType in your package manager before running.
The graphics and style and music were very neat.
I think I only found one bottle and the whole thing of just sweeping out the little box for more bottles got kind of tiresome-- esp. because the "white out" thing meant I only could see what I was doing for like 20 seconds out of every 40... (what's the point of dying anyhow if you just respawn at the point you started?)
I think it would be really cool to see a larger game based on this one! I found myself wishing this were an adventure game, or something, I wanted to explore behind the doors and in the buildings and talk to the cats.
coromn, can you please give more detail? what is the error? what do you see if you run the program with the "Console.app" program open?
Also what version of Mac OS X are you using?
I uploaded a new mac build, but it crashes on any computer except mine too.
We have a windows build, but it crashes on any computer except Loren's.
Uh... we're gonna see if we can get this fixed tonight.