Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → mjau
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Overall | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥈 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | 4.13 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥈 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | Graphics | 4.54 | ||
| 🥈 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | Timelapse | 4.35 | ||
| 🥉 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | Food | 4.14 | ||
| 🥉 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | Fun | 3.83 | ||
| 🥉 | 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | Polish | 4.13 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Po | Cm | Te | Jo | Fo | Ef | Tl | Co | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Beam Islands | compo | 173 | 3.65 | 3.43 | 4.08 | 2.36 | 3.16 | 2.53 | 2.05 | 2.77 | 52 | |||||||||
| 2010 | 19 | Discovery | LD19 Planets | compo | 235 | 1.64 | 1.70 | 2.31 | 2.00 | 3.23 | 1.17 | 1.14 | 2.58 | 7 | |||||||||
| 2009 | 15 | Caverns | mjau's entry (unfinished) | compo | 135 | 2.03 | 1.56 | 1.63 | 2.43 | 3.70 | 3.50 | 1.71 | 2.78 | 36 | |||||||||
| 2009 | 14 | Advancing Wall of Doom | Hello | compo | 68 | 3.13 | 3.08 | 2.79 | 3.65 | 2.54 | 3.65 | 4.04 | 3.38 | 2.95 | 2.11 | ||||||||
| 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | Trivial Escape from Minimalist Island | compo | 2 | 4.13 | 3.83 | 2.83 | 4.46 | 4.54 | 3.00 | 2.75 | 4.13 | 2.79 | 3.60 | 4.14 | 4.35 | ||||||
| 2007 | 10 | Chain Reaction | Shrapnel | compo | 13 | 3.50 | 3.41 | 2.05 | 2.76 | 3.86 | 3.73 | 1.82 | 3.59 | 3.00 | 4.13 | 4.00 | 3.25 |
| Year | MiniLD | Theme | Game | Rank | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 12 | Wikipedia | wikiquiz | |||
| 2009 | 6 | Monochrome | TROMMEL |
mjau leaves an average of 35.7 feedback comments each event.
This was much more enjoyable when I started paying attention to the bar at the bottom rather than trying to memorize everything that flashed by at the start. Fits the theme better that way, too. Would've been better if the bar didn't flash all the way to black though, it can look empty sometimes when it shouldn't be.
Interesting idea, but the implementation could be better .. the speech pops up so fast you have to REALLY run for it to not "get caught", you can't see much of where you're going if you're going upwards (that huge speech box blocks a lot), and you don't really have any idea what someone will say before they say it. That's last bit is part of the discovery, of course, but it might be nice with some hints about what you were going to hear, like the person's general opinion about the grandfather, or having several snippets of text that you could walk out on at any time (maybe even walk away mid-sentence), and then later continue from there with someone else -- you kinda have part of that with the multiple persons telling the story thing, but the way you did that feels really disjointed, since the next part is told by a seemingly random person for no apparent reason. It felt artificial. Actually the entire story I got felt pretty disjointed, and this only amplified that, I guess. I think just having several choices of which person to go to next for a particular story would improve things, along with giving various people a bit of personality so you'd have some vague idea of the direction a particular person's tale was going to take (though you might get surprised, of course).
It's a nice start, but could really use some mixing up here and there (something related to the theme, perhaps). Since all the levels are essentially the same and the difficulty as far as I could tell never changes, you can just keep on going forever. Into the cave. Mm.
Nice idea. Was a bit confusing whether I actually managed to reconstruct a wall and move to the next level, or if I got killed by the enemy (scary thing, btw!), since it always seemed to be hovering nearby whenever I got the angle right, and the jump was very sudden. After a few jumps I ended up outside a square room with solid walls and no way in or any outside fragments that I could find. Was that the end?
It's very minimal, but it certainly fits the theme =). It was nice to just walk around for a bit and discover the place.
That's a pretty small window! I guess you weren't kidding when you called this Mini Ghost Hunter ..
The difficulty curve seems a bit uneven at the start. After the first two ghosts I had big problems surviving anything else, which tended to kill me in only a few hits since I was injured from the ones before and there was no way for me to heal yet, and there wasn't enough magic to kill them faster with a spell. After the random number generator decided the first two ghosts mostly missed, I managed to survive and completed the game without any trouble..
Music got pretty repetitive after a while.
Oh also, ran into a couple bugs. After I got a game over and started another game, I got two instances of the music playing on top of another. Also, when upgrading my stats at the purple orb my money display got bugged and suddenly said I had more than 7000 coins (although I couldn't use them to upgrade, so I think it was just a display error), and earned several thousands for battles afterwards. Might have been a few orders of magnitude more actually, as it went off the right side of the screen. Also ran into a couple invisible ghosts, not sure if that was intentional or not.
Anyway, apart from the issues, it's a nice game =)
This is pretty hard. No way to defend yourself that I could find, and I kept getting stuck on walls (being able to slide along them would be a huge improvement). Tried both sneaking around and running for it, and always ended up getting stuck, trapped or ambushed. It's pretty offputting how you lose all progress if they so much as touch you.
That was awesome. I love these kinds of games! Would've been nice with some sound, and navigating ladders was a bit harder than it could've been (had problems jumping off them sometimes, and lack of autograb when holding up/down and flying past caught me a couple times too), but otherwise I don't really have any complaints. Great gfx =)
Btw, there's a duplicate of the no turning back scroll in the "small well" room (through the upper door in the final room). It was probably supposed to say something else?
Interesting idea! Was a bit confusing at first, but after I figured out that the reason I couldn't pick anything up was that you can only carry one thing at a time, and that you use scrolls with C (neither of which is explained in your help screen), it went a bit better =). It was actually pretty fun for a while when I got the hang of it. A bit too simple to last for very long, but still a nice game.
Nice idea, but it seems a bit buggy. It doesn't always recognize when you do a pattern, even if it should be correct (indicated pattern without doing the same line twice, right?), and sometimes I thought the lines cancelled very fast. The last level was particularly troublesome.
(Also.. using music loops you didn't make yourself technically isn't allowed for the compo, unless you consider them samples/instruments.. kind of a gray area here, I guess..)
Behold the mighty Duckboat! http://www.draknek.org/dance/?dino=28bg
Might've been nice with a more zoomed out view or a map or something so you could (attempt to) plan your shots better, it's a bit random now since you have no idea where you're going. I guess that would've gone against the theme though, and probably wouldn't have been as funny =)
Anyway, it's still fun! I like how all the planets have unique names.
This is pretty hard, not sure if precision jumping on ice was a good idea. Seems a bit buggy also, got caught in walls all the time and completely stuck (had to restart) twice. Tried again the first, didn't feel like it the second (when it happened past the wall-jumping section). Both times getting completely stuck was when going down a screen.
Music, uh, needs work.
Also, I don't see any relation to the theme here, though I didn't finish the game. Did I miss something?
That aside, well done completing a game! First one's always the hardest. Keep at it =)
Hey, the source link is broken. Can't port the game for you without that.
Anyway, tried the Linux verison. You should include required libraries with that btw .. I didn't have 32-bit versions of SDL_image and SDL_mixer installed, so your game didn't run until I fixed that.
Since both you and the enemies take several rockets to destroy, it would be nice with some sort of health meter, or at least a little feedback.
I think I managed to destroy all the enemies, at least after a while I couldn't find them anywhere in the level. There was still sounds of shooting sometimes though. (Maybe they spawned outside the level?)
Hey, the theme was CAVERN, not CAVE! Zero sta-- oh, all right, I'll let it slide this time.
Anyway, I like this. It's fun. The music gets a little repetitive after a while, but I like how it changes when you get to a new level.
Didn't get any impossible levels, but I guess I was just lucky. It did get close though, there was one where I had to carve steps upwards in a wall to get to the sun piece far above me. Was a little surprised afterwards that it was possible, twas neat though.
Download doesn't work.
Had pretty much the same experience as DrPetter.
This is fun. The controls can be a little unresponsive though, sometimes when I doubletap it doesn't dash.
Also had the same experience as destroysound: not dashing and amassing a bat collection instead got me the farthest, but of course that doesn't give you any points ..
Mmm, walls.
Very short, but it's a nice start =)
I wonder what happened to get those scientists in this situation.
Have to agree with Kimau here, specially about the music. It got a little bit more bearable after I turned off the speakers, but the way the camera swoops around is really dizzying even when you've figured out how to move around consistently. I always got sucked into a spiral of death after a little while.
The collision detection is way off. I thought one of the bats was invulnerable since I could slash through it completely without even hitting it. Tried all the way from bashing it with the hilt close up to barely touching it with the tip of the sword, with no effect. Then suddenly it decided to start being hittable some time later for apparently no reason. Most of the bats weren't that bad, but it still felt random whether or not they got hit.
I threw my torch at the dragon, which didn't seem to have any effect. Its fireballs didn't light up the room, so I thought the rest of the fight would be in darkness until I discovered that I could just go behind the dragon's head and be completely safe there while spamming it with the sword. I guess that wasn't the way you intended the fight to go though..
You should include dependencies with the Linux version too btw (and set up loading with either LD_LIBRARY_PATH or RPATH), I had to copy a lot of libs from a 32-bit distro to get it to work.
It's a nice idea, but the implementation is very buggy. I had to use the cheat keys a lot to get out of walls etc, which makes the whole puzzle aspect kinda pointless. If you kept working on this, fix it up and give it a little polish, it'd be a nice game I think.
Woohoo, super win! =)
A little rough around the edges, but it's fun. It's got a nice explorey feel, too. With bombs! You should polish it up and throw in a few more elements and such, it'd be good.
Fullscreen mode doesn't work for me. It tells me to restart the game, but when I do, it's set back to off. Windowed resolution change works though.
Strange that movement repeats aboveground but not belowground (even in already dug tunnels). I wish it'd at least repeat in current tunnels.
I'm not sure what you have to do to get supplies counted in your total. Is it enough to bring them underground (far enough to not get exploded, though they don't seem to get destroyed..), or do you have to bring them close to the cavern? (I played the tutorial, but was killed .. don't know if there was more text to read there)
In other news, the inhabitants of the cavern learned to speak my language. This was apparently interesting. Interesting.
Great sound btw. What did you use to make it?
Procedural caves are always nice, but there's not a lot to do here yet. Nice start though =)
The first time I started the game, I didn't start moving immediately and so got pinned down by a rock and was unable to move. Would've maybe been better to start within the cavern opening so that that wouldn't happen unless you tried to escape, though it does give the start a bit of action currently =). Maybe just have a restart button in stead.
Took me a little while to figure out how to get past that shark (first tried swimming over and under it, and the carcass looked a little hostile). The effect when I got it was.. unexpected. I laughed =)
Instant death upon touching anything hostile and no checkpoints is a little harsh, specially since the collision detection is way off. Those tentacles can kill you while still a full body length away above you. The slow movement speed, while fine in itself, makes it not very fun to slog through all the screens every time you come too close to an enemy and die. I never got past that stream corridor with the three tentacles.
I somehow missed that the camera could be moved at first. This got a lot better once I figured that out =). It's great.
I guess you ran out of time? As is it's not much (well, it is a game, which is more than can be said of my entry..), but with some more work it might be interesting. Special tiles and objects and whatnot.
Oh also, it crashed on exit. Logfile sez:
-
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "game.py", line 132, in <module>
NameError: name 'LEVEL_EDITOR' is not defined
That combo system is brutal. One little screw-up, and you lose all your accumulated points =(
It's still fun though =)
Well, it's basically Boulderdash, which is generally fun, but again, it's Boulderdash, so it's not exactly innovative.
Anyway, I didn't feel like the raptors add anything to the gameplay .. they're not hard to evade in any case, but you can just block off their path by going under a rock, and they'll stand perfectly still, patiently waiting until you're done collecting shrooms. Then you can go back and open the path again, and take an alternate route to the exit as they take the long way round.
Nice music =)
Couldn't attack anything. Everyone just moved on top of each other.
Music was nice, but the repetitive speech quickly got annoying.
It was fun for a while, but gets a little repetitive. Nice use of the theme =)
Wasn't sure how to control this. No information in the entry, and no readme. Anyway, I managed to walk around a bit, got followed by a dwarf for a little bit (well, he just seemed to be blocking my way wherever I turned, though I found out later that these dwarves are in fact immaterial), eventually backed up and happened upon a treasure chest. When I attempted to open the chest by hitting enter, I was rewarded with, not treasure, but a crashing of the game! A reproducible one, at that. In fact it seems the game crashes whenever you press enter (if you've not typed any commands, as I found out later). The log states:
E:SpillLudum Dare15frimkronld15_caverns_by_frimkronmain.exe:317: DeprecationWarning: integer argument expected, got float
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "main.py", line 872, in <module>
File "main.py", line 739, in typing
File "main.py", line 694, in text_command
IndexError: list index out of range
Okay, so let's not press enter then. Started the game again, and discovered that I could type commands! Suddenly the game got a lot more interesting. Talked to some dwarves about treasure, found some (well, it was that chest again), and ..
>open chest
Unknown command "open"
=(
Then got attacked by a skeleton as I wrote 'help'. Not the help I was hoping for, but okay. Read the help text, killed the skeleton, and attempted to turn away from the chest before I realized I could try to USE it. Luckily the chest had followed me as I turned and, long story short, upon using the chest I finally got my hands on some treasure! Well, a gold pendant, anyway. Managed to combine it with its owner (heh) and got wind of some REAL treasure, apparently towards the east -- course I'd no idea where east was. Decided to try out the mine command and made myself a nice little tunnel that collapsed behind me as I went, eventually getting me well and truly lost, trapped in a confined space with another skeleton that somehow happened by. After I'd slain it, I hit enter by accident and crashed out.
So yeah. Might come back to this later, but there's more games to vote on. Had fun while it lasted though, despite the difficulties! I love this kind of game and it seems like this could be a good one with a little more work =)
Like the others, I like the caves. I liked just walking around and looking at their shapes, and the way fuel and steam tanks seemed to get more and more common the deeper you get, I thought I'd never die, though the attacks by invisible monsters got more frequent as well. Anyway, I eventually reached level 21, and couldn't find the exit! I searched and searched, and eventually did find it .. behind a wall. It was in a little bubble of its own, separated from me by solid wall on all sides. So yeah, it appears your cave generation has a little bug. Sorry =P
Other than that though, I think this is nice for what it is. Are you planning to work more on it?
Nice graphics =)
I think I hit a bug the first time I played. The perspective jumped around seemingly at random whenever I got some gold, sometimes even leaving the player offscreen. It worked fine on subsequent runs though.
Well, interesting theme interpretation.. Fun while it lasted, but should've been more of a rhythm game ;)
I'd write more, but for some reason everything sounds like innuendo now.
I enjoyed this.
The window is super tiny. Normally I'd complain about this and suggest scaling it up, but for this game it just feels right.
The sudden closing of the window without any comment also feels right. A 'game over' would've felt a little tacked on. Though, having read your comment beforehand and knowing it didn't crash probably helped with that one.
It's amazing how those flying wooden logs don't immediately burn to a crisp when they suddenly materialize above the open pools of lava, but hey, that's caverns for you.
I guess this just goes on forever? I only eventually died (at 9815 points) because I fumbled the keyboard and missed a jump, there didn't really seem to be any change in speed or difficulty in that time. The title screen (with a scroller! woo!) mentions getting 100000 points for a bonus though, so I guess something special happens then? That sounds like it'd take forever though =]
Nice character graphics.
Would've been nice with a stand-alone download so I wouldn't have to install Love. (Not that it was a problem to do so (at least not on Windows..), and now I won't have to install it again if there's any other entries that use it, so hey.)
Anyway, I don't think the sound was working right here (Windows 7) .. all I got was monotonic metallic sounds that was pretty painful to listen to (specially with headphones). I'll try it in Linux later and see if that improves things.
Wah! The first time I saw the monster (second time I played), I turned around and saw it just as it came leaping for me. A split second, and it was all over. That was scary! In a later run, I glanced at the monster as it went past, but it didn't see me. Suspense.
I wish there was a fullscreen option though. It's not as immersive as it could be when you're running around in a little box snuggled in amongst other stuff in the middle of the screen.
N/A audio, because you didn't make it. It worked great though.
Haha, this is great! =) Very simple, but it's fun.
The cavern generating algorithm needs a little work though. One time I started off in a little area cut off from the rest of the cave, and another time I saw a caved-in bear. (Maybe it'd heard of me and decided its chance of survival was higher that way?)
I think I managed to clear the cavern of both pickups and bears once, but the game didn't detect it, leaving me to wander around the empty halls until a terminal lack of Fu killed me off (at 2008 points). Would've been nice with a win message or something =)
Music's nice, but the game feels a bit unfinished. Are the onions supposed to instakill you?
Had fun with this at first. However, the controls were really unresponsive at times, which doesn't mix well at all with a precision platformer such as this! It did give me that "just one more time" feeling in the beginning, but when you feel that your failures are more because of broken controls than of your own lack of skill, it stops feeling like a challenge and becomes frustrating in stead.
Nice music though =)
Some of this was great (specially where you have to switch in midair to get to places), but I don't think you exploited the mechanics fully with your level design, and also you've got way too many rockets in there. I mean, challenge is fine and all, but some of those rooms are just plain frustrating. I liked the ones where you had to switch to block them off though.
Agreed with smx. I felt like I was just placing houses randomly (well, occasionally checking the stress map and putting in a support or two), and that the AI was doing the same.
It's a bit dark. Also, I think I managed to both win and lose at the same time on level 2.. First it said that everyone died, and then Jimmy was praised as a hero. Then level 2 began again and I instantly lost again. Think you've got a bug there.
It's fun, but not very original. I was a little disappointed that there's a maximum height =)
Yay, I won! I do like the style =). The things remaining box was a bit big and obscured the view when you wanted to look downwards, and the music was a little random (as expected for procedurally generated music I suppose), but I liked the little fanfare that's mixed in with the music when you eat things. Nice textmode graphics =)
I got stuck, I think? There was a closed door behind another door of the same color without a new toggle switch, and I couldn't find an alternate route. The twisting paths between rooms is disorienting, it's hard to keep track of which direction you're facing.
Jumping on the "it doesn't run" bandwagon (Windows 7 here). My unenlightening error box states:
"The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0150002). Click OK to close the application."
I then click OK and the application closes, so that part works right at least. Technology today.
Would've been nice to be able to select groups of goblins .. though one goblin was enough to take down several trolls, so I just split up into four one-goblin groups going separate ways and ended up scrolling around a lot.
That's what I was doing when the game suddenly had a massive slowdown for no apparent reason, my view scrolled off the map into blackness, and the game crashed. Don't see anything enlightening in the log, sorry. This was on Windows 7, with the OpenGL renderer.
Ooh, a cave flyer! I love this kind of game. This one's a bit unfinished, yeah, but it could be good with a little more work =)
As others have said though, this is very, very difficult, specially since enemies respawn as soon as you leave the screen they're on. Many times I'd destroy an enemy only to be flung off the screen and have it respawn. Sometimes I'd enter a screen right on top of an enemy too, which usually resulted in a quick death. I thought I'd even the odds a little by increasing my armour, farming metal on one of the first screens until I had enough, but doing this apparently tripled the enemy count..
Trying to run from source on Linux .. I installed rubygems and gosu, but the game still complains that it can't find "rubygem gosu". I guess I'll have to register gosu with rubygem somehow? Eh, I'll just try the windows version later..
..
Okay, it's later and I'm running the Windows version. It runs, at least =)
The game is very slow paced. I spent a long time just trying to get up to the AI, while it seemed content to just move back and forth, waiting there for me (freezing for a few seconds every move, and requiring me to click between .. lots and lots of clicking ..). When I finally started getting close, the game crashed with a "NoMethodError", with the message "undefined method `reject!' for nil:NilClass" and this backtrace:
Unit.rb:125:in `move_data'
State/PlayerChoosingMove.rb:11:in `initialize'
State/PlayerChoosingAction.rb:18:in `new'
State/PlayerChoosingAction.rb:18:in `initialize'
SidebarItem.rb:18:in `call'
SidebarItem.rb:18:in `clicked'
State.rb:26:in `click'
Game.rb:139:in `button_down'
MainWindow.rb:67:in `button_down'
LD15.rb:7:in `show'
LD15.rb:7
Yayyyy robots
Anyway, I think it's a little *too* simple and repetitive to be much fun. Just dig and avoid the balloon things. (Well, I guess they're rocks, but the concept of the ground being filled with balloons is better I think.)
This was great. Searching for the sanctuary wasn't so fun (went through "everywhere" several times since I wasn't sure where mole village started and ended.. I even tried to ask the cat, but it wouldn't talk to me again =( ), but I did find it eventually .. there was just one place I'd forgotten about. Nice music, too.
I guess there's no way to get to lower levels? I think I explored the entire cavern before I died once, didn't see any way out.
Also managed to attack a dwarf after I died. I guess it was a particularly violent death spasm.
Nice music.
It was a little slow paced, and there's some issues with the ropes .. getting on them requires you to stay at their very end even if a section of them are lying around on the ground, etc. Also, getting the AI to follow you up a rope and *stay there* was an exercise in frustration sometimes. This actually led to my downfall on level .. 3? The one after you get more soldiers .. where I wanted to climb up to the other path, and no matter what I did I couldn't get the soldiers to stay up there with me, always jumping back down (one even went past the rope and started running back and forth in confusion) .. so I accidentally triggered some critters up there while my soldiers were on their neverending rope adventure, and got mauled. After my light went out they started shooting at the wall in the general direction of my killers.
Anyway, apart from that, and the lack of sound, I generally liked it. Could be nice with a little more work =)
This was great fun! Very impressive that you managed to do a Portal clone in 48 hours. Shame there's no sound.
The portals felt a bit quirky with the push effect and facing (I see you already fixed these in the post-compo version, didn't try that yet though), but got used to their behaviour after a little while.
Would've been nice with a restart button; I got trapped in the small starting room on the "You're getting the hang of this" level with no way out and no way to die. Though now that I think of it, I could've probably made an infinite vertical loop to fall to my death.. oh well, too late for that now.
The theme feels shoehorned in, not much advancing walls of doom here. The moving checkered walls is more of a nuisance than anything, and I even used them to my advantage on at least one level. It's not a wall of doom if you can walk around on it and it sometimes even helps you getting where you want to go.
Still, well done.
Download doesn't work here either. Can't connect to the server.
There doesn't seem to be any download links on either of the download pages. I've clicked everything, and got nothing but ads. Try a different host?
Collected everything required to doom the planet, and was rewarded with a nice crash screen from love ;)
Anyway, the game was a little.. long. Had some fun at first, but it quickly got repetitive and by the time I finally collected the final piece I was desperate for the game to end.
The game was very slow to react at times. The targeting area was following the mouse cursor at a snail's pace, and fireballs (which looked nice btw) seemed to change their destination in midair. That is, if I eg tried to do a quick circular sweep from left to right to remove a chunk of ice, all the fireballs would end up landing in a small spot on the righthand side. Or maybe it just cancelled the first ones.
Music was nice but sounded like it was constantly running out of buffer, so I got short bursts of white noise at random intervals. Could be because of Windows 7, I've had some issues with sound in other things (not like this though).
Apart from the technical issues and the eventual mindnumbing tedium, it was nice. =)
Hmm.. The directory in the zip is called LD13, and the game screen seems to feature roads prominently. Meanwhile, no advancing wall of doom is in sight. Sure you're in the right compo here? =)
Anyway, the game ran here, but I didn't figure out how to actually do anything. I could click on points and get some info, but that's it. Tried clicking other places, dragging between points, pressing keys, nothing seemed to have any effect. I'd guess you didn't have time to implement any actual gameplay, but your journal and 5parrowhawk's comment implies otherwise.. so I guess I'm just dense. Some instructions would've helped perhaps.
What, no directory in your tarball? Bad telaviv! Baaad! (Okay, so it was only like 3 files, but still. Bad!)
Anyway, yes, the game. I played for a bit, and then thought I was getting screwed by the random level generator until I realized I could move boxes around freely, not just click and drag already existing groups of 3 or more like I'd done til then. That just made it even easier than before though =). So I kept playing for a little while, then decided to lose on purpose just to see what would happen. Nothing, as it turns out.
So yeah, seems a tad unfinished. Still, interesting idea! I don't think it's got much to do with the theme though.
Hard but exciting =). Frustrating controls though. Didn't finish, got beyond the crocodile chasing the duck once but died on the twist after. Nice music.
Same problem here.. kept dying for no apparent reason. Nice idea though.
That was pretty short =). Fun while it lasted, though.
I didn't like the controls much. Arrow keys for movement, space to proceed, mouse clicks to warp .. feels like they're all over the place. Maybe A/D or something on that side of the keyboard for left/right would've been better.
Also, sorry, but the graphics is terrible. Look up some color theory and try making it less busy next time maybe? =]
Btw, if you die on the second level, it's possible to be stuck with no gems at the start, so you have to restart the game.
Tried to install pymunk, but it failed for some reason, so couldn't get this to work.
When I first started playing this, I thought it was going to be at least a bit hard, because I assumed it was going to be like a match-4 with two different match mechanics, and blocks doesn't move when you remove them. But then I discovered that blocks doesn't have to touch to be candidates for a match, and it suddenly got way too easy. You can basically just keep matching colours and not care about anything else, and you'll keep the wall all the way at the top of the screen, waiting for it to give enough new blocks so you can match again. Maybe it starts going faster after a while, but it didn't seem like it did and I wasn't having much fun since there wasn't any challenge, so that's where I quit.
So uh, I guess the high pain threshold or forgiving mind that the readme mentions is due to slow repetitive unchallening tedium? (Wow, that was negative. I'm sorry.)
I see it's your first LD though, so well done on completing a game in 48 hours =)
That was fun! It's a little annoying that your walls of Doom are cancelled if you happen to drag a little bit too far though, would've been nice if you could complete them after going back inside the circle.
I like how you're destroying the village to protect the village from being destroyed.
Didn't like that it grabs the mouse at the start in windowed mode, and none of the keys to ungrab etc work before the game runs .. so you can't move the window, or go fullscreen, until the game starts. Also, why ESDF? The nice thing about WASD is that it doesn't use the F key, which has that nub or whatever it is those things are called. Either have that on the middle finger (RDFG?) or don't have it at all, or it upsets the balance of the.. ok, that's somewhat hyperbolic perhaps, but still. Also I found myself automatically adjusting to WASD and having to readjust back to ESDF all the time for some reason. It's a bit weird actually, I don't play a lot of FPS games, so I didn't think I was that used to it, but apparently I am. Who knew.
Anyway, the game is .. chaotic. Collecting a few of the data spheres is no problem, but then there's always a few left that seem to be trapped inside other cubes with no way to get at them except waiting for the wall of death to close in so the spheres will clip through the cubes enough for you to get at them, but by then everything is utter chaos, you don't really have much control, and you'll be dead in a second anyway. I saw the "enter the portal" message a few times, but didn't see any portals.
I think the potential is there and this is a game I could like. It reminds me a bit of a hectic version of "My Cockpit Is Bigger Than Yours" from TIGsource's cockpit compo, which I loved, though of course in that game you navigate mostly based on sound alone, it's not hectic at all (rather the opposite), and there's no wall of death, and the atmosphere (which was a huge contribution to me liking it so much) was completely different, so it's not similar at all, really.. (Well, you collect things.)
Anyway, at the moment this one's a bit more frustrating than fun, I think, because of the control issues (for me, anyway), spheres hiding in inaccessible places, etc. Also, the movement speed is a bit on the slow side.
Well, they're certainly walls of doom. Can't argue with that.
Anyway, it's a nice simple game. Can't think of much to say about it right now.. Very minimalistic, but fun for a few tries.
Wow, that was awesome! Reminds me a bit of Super Hypercube (except you're not rotating the pieces and punching holes in the wall in stead).
Nicely polished, great style, excellent audio that adds to the atmosphere, fun and exciting to play .. my only complaint is that it's too short =)
Well, almost .. I also think this would perhaps have been better with mouse controls. Specially on the biggest level, where there wasn't a lot of time to move around considering its size. On the other hand you could say that's part of the challenge; it did make it a little more exciting when I didn't know if I'd make it over to the right spot in time..
I like your handle. It's like you're some kind of superhero or maybe even a supervillain, hiding in your secret lair, biding your time while quietly knitting all kinds of stuff in preparation for that day sometime in the future when it'll all be essential for your mad scientisty plans to succeed. They will all pay! Or receive knitted gifts perhaps, who knows what those secret knitters think.
Anyway, you made a game! I can only assume you knitted it, which is pretty amazing really. I played your game and won a bit, and lost a bit, and like DrPetter said, I think that's it. (Also, I agree with nilsf about the wall.)
Didn't have much fun with this.
At first, it was very frustrating. Since walls disappear as soon as you let go of the mouse button, you have to catch the mice exactly if you want to get all of them; there's no time for waiting for a mouse to hit your line, or other mice will throw themselves at the cats in the meantime. But, if you draw the line too close to the mice, they get stuck, flickering back and forth under the line until you let go, at which point it's pretty much random which way they're going to go. So you have to be very careful to avoid that behaviour, drawing the lines exactly, not too far away, not too close, and not hold the line too long .. and hope you didn't draw a tiny bit too close to the mouse, or the mouse might get stuck, change direction twice, and just continue forwards anyway.
After a little while I got a feeling for where to draw the lines and didn't have much problem keeping the mice away from the cats, but then there was another problem: It was very repetitive and still not much fun.
Looks like some of the other commenters enjoyed this though, so maybe it's just not for me. Well done on completing a game, anyway =)
Had fun with this. Almost gave up on the level just beneath the roof where you have to jump under a laser that blocks your path, but eventually got it after many, many tries .. was happy to see the roof next then, and thought the game would be over. Nice twist there =)
Hiding the first key behind the ladder was pretty unnecessary, specially since it's the first level with locks/keys. Also, could've used some checkpoints inside the big hotel area perhaps (was getting tired of dying for the nth time on that ladder up again..), and a health meter for the boss would've been nice.
The red brick wall was a bit of an eyestrain.
The music was terrible. Short repeating loops like that tends to get annoying, and the random notes of the boss music wasn't exactly pleasure for the ears either. The game would've been better without it. Sound fx was ok though.
Nice level design. The difficulty curve felt right, and I think new elements were introduced at a good pace. The sudden boss fight and subsequent ending was a bit of a surprise though.
Didn't find any secrets. I guess they're inside the hotel, since there was a bunch of inaccessible doors and such, but I don't feel like going through all that again to hunt for them, at least not right now =)
Is there any reason to not raise the tax? I tried raising it to 100% just to see what would happen, and I just got filthy rich. My reign of terror was unstoppable until the rainbulbs came along and slaugthered everyone. My rockets and soldiers went straight through them =(
The sound disappeared sometimes.
Anyway, it's not amazingly fun, but it's not terrible either. It's ok. =)
Timelapse is a bit long btw.
So I ate the cake, but got killed off anyway? Tried to run away to the right, but still got caught offscreen. Oh well, at least I died with deliciously moist cake flesh on my tongue.
Pretty simple game, but well done for just 3 hours, and it was fun while it lasted. I specially liked how you used audio to heighten the sense of imminent doom as the wall approaches. Volume was a bit low though.
The interface killed this one for me.
The worst problem is the cursor. Why did you decide to make it invisible? And worse, it's even blocked by some obstacles so you have to navigate your invisible focus point around them. You do get used to the controls after a bit, but it still feels finicky and annoying, like controlling the game is a chore. Not good.
That would be bad enough in itself, but then you've got the 3d perspective projection.. which may make the game a bit more interesting visually, but it's just completely unnecessary for this. The gameplay is all 2d, so the perspective adds nothing except maybe a little more vertical range, but a minimap could've done that. An isometric projection would've been much better.
Combine these and, for me at least, the game becomes almost unplayable, not very fun at all. Sorry =(
This game almost evokes that special feeling of surreal detachment you can get when the world crushes down on you and everything is utterly hopeless. Might as well just play with the ball then, make a game, beckon the wall closer so you can make more of those satisfying wall-to-wall bounces, until it's too late, the ball pops, and reality comes crushing in, and you die.
Almost.
Music adds to the atmosphere, but you don't get points for that since you didn't make it yourself.
I won! Um. Yay?
Found a little bug btw: Sometimes logs get stuck on the trampoline thing for a while.
This was fun. At first it felt a bit pointless since there didn't seem to be any way to lose, but then I noticed the minimap =). It does get a little repetitive after a while though.
Also, like others have said, clicking outside the window is a problem. Would've been better in fullscreen because of that.
Btw, I lost on level 4, but then progressed to level 5 anyway. Bug?
Also also, the little terminal window doesn't close when you quit the game (windows exe). It insists that you press a key. =)
This one starts out pretty fun, but goes on for way too long. Some more variety would've been nice. Also had a problem with major slowdowns when lots of people were following me.
It's a nice game apart from that though. The wall of doom feels like a real threat, with its constant booms of doom and that extra little bang when it gets one of your stupid followers. I also specially like the little icons that pop up above people's heads.
Some slight music would've been nice perhaps, or like DrPetter suggested, rain.
Got rewarded with some horrible metallic screaming when I apparently won, which was a little unexpected. I'm guessing that's a bug =)
Controls feel slow and floaty, making it kinda awkward to control. Was slightly fun for a little bit there though ;)
The window doesn't have a close button here btw. (Windows 7, if that matters.)
Also, no source code? (Looks a bit like you used an existing engine?)
Worked fine in Wine here. I really wish you'd stop using rtf for your readmes though, there's nothing wrong with plain text ..
Anyway, it's an interesting concept, but like noonat I felt the gameplay collapsed into just running around and spamming the borders, and I could stay alive for a long time.. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something.
I like the atmosphere though.
Doesn't work here, I just get a grey window (and sometimes some sounds).
Gah! Blue cyclopean bats! My one true weakness!
At first I was having massive slowdown problems with very uneven framerates, to the point of rendering the game unplayable. Luckily this was fixed by running it in Firefox in stead of Opera.
I was surprised the first time I fell into what I presumed was the bottomless pit at the bottom of the screen and discovered that it was not in fact a bottomless pit at all, but rather normal floor to be walked on in relative safety until the inevitable surprise attack by stealthy bats from below the screen.
It feels a bit unfinished. Despite this though, I think it's a nice little game, and I had some fun with it. Challenging, too! With some polish I think it could be pretty good.
Sadly fading.. Those words popped into my head when I played this. It's the name of a SID-tune, which is now playing in my head. Starts out with a long solo and then gets some really nice bass and melody just as it ends. Funny how the mind works.
Ahem. Anyway.
Feels more like interactive art than a game. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.. I wouldn't call it fun though =]
Oh god, math.
Surprisingly fun though ;). Also, the walls of doom in this game really instill that feeling of, well, doom. Worthy of their name, they are.
Um. Is the sound supposed to be white noise in a short, endless loop?
The game itself didn't seem to work right either. Some other squares went flying by at first, and the background changed colour, but then my square was all alone on the screen. Nothing else happened. Did I miss something?
Well, I got it to run eventually, clicked to start, got ready!, and ... um. Nothing?
But yes, nice food.
Clicked once, and it was off! And on it went, on and on and on .. Minutes ticked by, but the Colo-- ahem, Wall, showed no sign of stopping. Whee!
It finally came to a halt several minutes later, and subsequently crashed flash.
Reminds me of Nanaca Crash, except there's not really anything to do here. The autonomy kinda makes me think that this isn't meant seriously at all =)
The first time I started this game, I hit a bug that caused the game to detect space as always being pressed, so it skipped past the info and death screens, and the block guy always moved upwards and died instantly, in a never-ending death loop. Quit and tried running the game again though, and it worked fine then, and has since. Didn't do anything different that I know of the first time.
Anyway, when it worked, this was fun. Felt a little bit odd to escape from the wall of firey doom *downwards* .. I guess the sun is going nova or something, but even if the block guy ever manages to reach the bottom of this seemingly bottomless spiky elevator pit he's doomed to a firey death anyway. Those birds seem remarkably unaffected by the situation, too. Not that there's any obligation for everything to make sense all the time =)
Was a bit annoying that bonus points and birds sometimes spawned in unreachable places (inside spikes, halfway inside the fire).
Not sure what my best score is exactly, but it was somewhere around 3600. I was just pressing space to go up at the time, so the death screen was skipped.. Having to press a different key to dismiss the death screen would avoid this problem (eg enter?).
Saturated red text on a blue background was *not* a good decision. =)
I like the block guy btw. He looks so happy! No worries about the impending firey death.
I love this. Played it in real text mode for good measure =)
Gameplay is very simple, but it's fun, and it's got charm in spades. I really like the little comments the game give you. "My goodness, you fell asleep!" I picture a crazed and starved hill climber on an unfortunately timed feeding frenzy as monsters walk the earth and the oceans of the world rise, all the while a victorian era gentleman flying above in a balloon or something shouting comments and encouragements at the climber, eventual shock when he dies, followed by stubborn disbelief when he tries to move after death. Wonderful.
Was a little odd with the invisible wall at the left at the start though. There's food past it, but you can't get at it. Also found a bug: the message box doesn't clear on restart, so old messages are overwritten, the end of longer messages getting appended to shorter new ones.
Yay, cake!
Had fun playing this. It's perhaps a bit too easy, but the narrative really adds to the game. It transforms it into something spooky and alien, something otherworldly. And it's you! =)
The game was a little unresponsive at times though, had trouble building stuff sometimes. Also seconding that being able to remove accedentally built walls would be nice.
Yay, I survived! Didn't seem like much of a prize to risk your life for, but hey. Made me think of Smash TV, but of course that's only because of the "deadly gameshow" bit since it's not even remotely similar to this.
Anyway.. Apart from the lack of levels this seems pretty complete. You even had time to put in a backstory, which was nice =) (btw, for a tiny moment the "quit" button there made me think it'd quit the *game* .. wouldn't make sense of course, but it's labelled almost the same as the quit game button on the main menu).
Nice difficulty curve and variety in levels. Not much of a challenge though (well, would've probably been worse if I'd tried to get everything, but I wanted the poor guy to survive). Also, the wall of doom didn't feel like much of a threat at all; it was behind me all the time and didn't let itself be known apart from on the minimap (which was nice btw). Some rumbling sound effects and threatening music would've helped.
Got the first level again after completing a bunch of levels, I guess that means I won? Very retro that, but a win screen would've been nice =)
Anyway, I love games like Lemmings and Zep's Dreamland, and this is basically a mix of the two (except you can't remove blocks), so naturally I quite like this one as well =). I had fun playing it. Having to juggle finding a path both for the unicycles and yourself while conserving blocks, and making sure that neither you or they get stuck anywhere, makes for some compelling gameplay. The levels were varied considering they all used the same elements and didn't feel like they were repeating concepts too much. Well done =)
On the less positive side, placing the blocks where you wanted them to felt a little finicky at times, and the wall of doom theme felt a little shoehorned in. Graphics could stand a little touchup, but works. Also, I see others mentioned music, but I didn't get any music here (Linux, used start.sh). Sounds worked though. Also, there's not enough levels ;)
Doesn't work in linux. First it complained about not being able to include "rubygems", whatever that is (I do have both ruby and gosu installed). Commented that out, now it can't find images/Black.png, which is no wonder since it doesn't exist. There's a file called black.png, but Linux is case sensitive. Renamed the file, got errors about another. Don't feel like going through all of that right now, so I'll pass on this for now. Might try it in Windows later.
Congratulations on finishing your first Ludum Dare =)
Was a little confusing at first since the protagonist starts offscreen, and he's sometimes even obscured by platforms at the start. Also seems like the random platforms can screw you sometimes, making configurations that's impossible to jump. Apart from that the game is ok. Not terribly innovative, but it's fine for what it is.
Was about to stop playing when the faster-moving platforms started dropping, and I thought that was a nice twist until I saw that ALL the new platforms moved at the faster speed. Would've been more interesting if you mixed things up a little; a slow platform here, a faster one there, etc.
I didn't like the sound much. Better than no sound at all, but the effects you used was a little too annoying at length. The graphics is simple but works, if perhaps a tad heavy on saturated red =)
I just got the first room endlessly repeating too. Is there supposed to be more? As it is it's not fun at all since you're just holding down the right arrow key for as long as you bother to, but with some levels and obstacles and stuff this could've been a nice game probably. Too bad you didn't have time for more!
This got a little bit too repetitive for me.. Maybe I'm playing it wrong, but for me gameplay was reduced to simply running around in circles with space pressed. At the later levels that strategy had to be modified a bit to survive, but I just couldn't get into it. Oh well.
On the plus side, the wall really does look evil =)
I failed spectacularly at this the first couple times, but it was fun when I got the hang of it. At level 2 I managed to get lodged on a wave right next to the tsunami, racing to the goal (and past it) at great speed =D
Couldn't get past level 4, though .. I suspect I need to use the jump to avoid getting stuck, but I couldn't get it to work reliably.
Title screen pic is great btw, but I guess I can't give points for that since you didn't make it .. would've been nice if you'd tried to do something like that yourself, maybe use that painting as a reference or something. The rest of the gfx is ok =)
Had to replace all the backslashes in the file paths in main.cpp and gameObj.cpp with forward slashes to make it work in Linux (fyi, forward slashes in paths should work in Windows too), and it crashed when I attempted to go fullscreen, but other than that it seems to work.
The game doesn't seem finished though. Random RPG battles for battle's sake aren't usually my idea of fun in any case (needs story, or challenge, variety, etc), but it was sort of fun-ish in the beginning to do different things to avoid dying. However, it was pretty easy to get to the point where I could kill things in one hit and have no chance of ever dying again, and no different or stronger enemies appeared, but by that point I'd really lost interest anyway.
I never had use for potions, btw. I did try the magic attack a few times, but since it didn't seem much different from the regular attack I stopped using that to save the mp for healing in stead.
I like murder mysteries. I really wanted to like this game too, but unfortunately I think it's a bit *too* minimal to be much fun. It's kinda fun-ish to try to figure out who did it by watching the movements of the suspects (name font was too small btw, a larger one certainly wouldn't hurt), but then again that's all you really can do.
Also, when you click the handcuffs icon the crime is apparently solved for you, so it didn't actually feel that much like a game to me (except you know if you guessed right or not, of course). That could have been because I had the wrong person selected when I clicked the handcuffs though.. I did figure out who the murderer was, but I thought I'd get a selection box or something when I clicked the cuffs. I tried running the game again to see what happens if you actually click the right person before clicking the handcuffs, but I couldn't get it to run again even though I probably tried more than ten times, it just kept crashing (using the windows version).
So anyway, it fits very well with the theme, both in graphics style and gameplay, but I think the minimalism in the latter hurts the game =/
I really like the murder generation system you created, though. That worked great =)
Fun for a little while, but gets old fast. Like others have said, I think it's perhaps a bit *too* minimal. 5 for theme though =)
I really enjoyed this for a little while. Exploring the world was fun, and the descriptions of things added to the atmosphere (the descriptions *could* have used some variation though, but eh, minimalism). Then I met the mummies.
I'd already explored everything prior and taken what I discovered (a sword, and some potions I should probably have saved for later since they didn't seem to do much..), and a bunch of mummies ended up blocking the path forward, the only place I hadn't been. So, since I got really low on health and power or whatever it was by fighting those mummies (at first I thought the 'o' was health btw, then I saw that the 'd' only decreased when mummies hit), there was nothing to do but going back and forth to try to gain some health, which was just tedious. Then it crashed when I'd managed to fight off all but one last mummy =/
The "graphics" was a bit too sparse for my taste. The letters could have been closer together, I mean.
This was great, though a little bit on the easy side. I felt like I got way overpowered after a few upgrades. Maybe it's just me, but I started to feel a little sad for all those bots I was mowing down (specially since they were no match for me after a while), some of them even looked like families. And in the end, all he got for his trouble was a big, black void. That's bleak, man.
Still, I enjoyed it =)
Had to comment out the psyco loading to get it to run, should probably make that optional. (psyco doesn't exist for 64-bit, and last I tried it on 32-bit it kept making things segfault anyway).
Tried the fullscreen mode first, but once in it I found I preferred the windowed mode, so I tried to get back to that by hitting f again. That didn't work. Had to quit and restart the game.
Once I was back in the game, I discovered I really had issues with the controls and couldn't get the ship to go where I wanted it to. After struggling with it for a little while I got a tiny bit more used to the controls, but not enough to actually have any semblance of control (specially not when things started shooting and I had to dodge bullets), so I gave up and quit. Seems like it could've been fun with better controls though.
Also, the font used for the credit digits doesn't really work. You can sort of make out what it's supposed to say but mostly it just looks like a mess of pixels up there.
Fun game. I also like how you reinvented the number system. Who needs latin digits when we've got TEN-SIDED DICE? It actually makes the game feel slightly alien -- not very, because you can still understand everything, but it's there, just a little bit. It's almost a shame you had to have the instructions text and "press space to start" in there.
Great little game! Pretty standard fare as platformers go, but it's minimalistic and it's fun. The movement felt a bit off, but I got used to it soon enough. Would've been nice with more levels =)
Is there any way to get the topmost coin of the arrow at level 5, btw? I tried and tried but couldn't get it.
Not very innovative (points for humor though), but fun for a little while. Nice music =)
Well, it's certainly minimalist =). Perhaps a bit too minimalist actually, it really needs some sound. Nicely polished aside from that, and fun too, which is always a plus.
The music detection thing crashed when I tried it at my full music dir, so I had to copy some mp3s to a dir of their own to make it work.
Anyway, managed to sync it up to some demoscene music pretty well for a little while there, but it kept slowly drifting off. Was fun while it lasted though =)
Sorry, but I have to agree with the boring comments too =(. I compiled the source for Linux, and at first I thought I'd done something wrong since there wasn't any rotation even after I'd played for a bit. After reading the other comments here I dropped some pieces at random to at least see the rotation in action. Never would have seen that in normal play, or at least not before I'd quit out of boredom. It's just too slow, too easy, and not very interesting (though the idea in itself was). Food was nice though =)
Fun game, if a little dizzying. Should probably loosen up the camera a bit to lessen that effect, not tie it to the position of the ship so rigidly. It's a little loose, but not loose enough.
Also, pretty much the only minimalism I can see in this game is in the controls, but unfortunately I think they actually detract from the game, specially the aiming. You do get used to it, but not being able to aim where you want is still downright annoying, specially when you have to choose between avoiding obstacles and hitting things. For example, on the warehouse planet I was forced to go round the planet several times inside that cave without being able to kill one last groglot that was always standing in a spot where I had to go upwards to avoid crashing into things, meaning I couldn't actually shoot the damn thing more than perhaps a few times per round, while *it* was free to shoot fire towards me every time I went by. In general, I had some issues taking out the last (generally hardest to hit) thing on the levels, having to take several round-trips, though it could've been worse =]. The warehouse planet was the worst in that respect.
Also, the eels were pretty unforgiving. If you hit one, each segment will take a sizable portion of your remaining life, and they've got what, 7 segments? At the speed they're swimming you're pretty much dead if you scratch by one once, it was much less damaging to just barge into rocks to avoid them.
Still, it's a nice game, fun, and with an impressive amount of content for 48 hours. (Wish *something* had happened when you win though.)
PS. Had some issues with slowdowns at the water planet (using the optimized version). Decoupled fixed logic rate please =)
Like DrPetter I can't get the game to accept anything I type despite trying to capitalize things, so I'm just going to N/A this too.
Never heard of Pepsi Blue before.
Something was wrong with the sound, like it was constantly running out of buffer or something. (I think it's a problem with the local pygame though, so I'll just n/a sound.)
Had to disable the included libraries to get it to run, as your bundled SDL doesn't have pulseaudio support.
Anyway, not a very challenging game at all (unless you're an epileptic I guess), but I did get some more fun out of it by trying to go as fast as possible through the levels. (I was a complete failure at that, but yes, more fun.)
This crashed on me unfortunately. I'd gotten some sort of powerup or something that made all the grey balls blue, and collected a bunch of them at once, when I got this:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./dots.py", line 56, in <module>
main()
File "./dots.py", line 35, in main
engine.draw()
File "/tmp/LD/erik/dots/Engine.py", line 330, in draw
enemy.draw()
File "/tmp/LD/erik/dots/Thing.py", line 27, in draw
self.circle.draw(pos=(self.x-self.radius,self.y-self.radius), width=self.radius*2, height=self.radius*2, color=self.color)
File "/tmp/LD/erik/dots/Image.py", line 25, in draw
glColor4fv(color)
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/OpenGL/wrapper.py", line 667, in wrapperCall
pyArgs.append( converter(arg, self, args) )
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/OpenGL/arrays/arrayhelpers.py", line 28, in asArraySize
incoming,
ValueError: ('Expected 4 item array, got 5 item array', (0.29999999999999999, 0.29999999999999999, 0.29999999999999999, 0.87, 1))
I had fun before that happened though. Food looks good, too =)
What Hamumu said.
Hm, this is a clone of something, isn't it? Different levels though, and I don't think it had monsters originally. Anyway, apart from the ones where you just move all the crates from one side of the level to the other (boring!), it's fun, so yay. Nice ending.
This was fun! And certainly minimal (well, except for the pyopengl requirement, but I won't hold that against you). Nice effects, too.
Nice game =). Some sound would have been nice though, and the controls were a bit awkward. Something like left mouse to move turrets, right to rotate and perhaps double-click to shoot, maybe shift+mouse to move the camera, would have been much better, I think. Also, sometimes it was hard getting turrets to rotate.
The 3D engine is great (impressive work for 48 hours!), but I can't help but feel it actually detracts from the game, since for this kind of puzzle game it's important to get an overview of things, and the core gameplay is all 2D anyway. I ended up playing mostly from an overhead perspective, but then the HUD got in the way occasionally. Also, targetting rays are difficult to see over light areas (and to a lesser degree over water too).. though I think that might be because my gfx card doesn't support a floating point render buffer apparently.
Anyway, apart from that I liked it =)
Well, I like the game, but it's pretty much just a Deflector clone, isn't it? I mean, it looks like Deflector, plays like Deflector, has the same elements as Deflector.. The only thing I can see in the game that wasn't in Deflector is the mouse control, since most C64 owners didn't have a mouse .. (buttons feel backwards btw, I keep thinking right is CW) .. the levels feels pretty Deflector-inspired, too (though they're not exactly the same I think).
Anyway, apart from the complete lack of any innovation at all (so that's a '1', sorry), it's a good game, and well done. Music is nice (and in stereo!), but gets a bit repetitive. Would've been nice with some sfx.
Too bad you didn't finish this, looks like it could've been fun. Nice gfx though.
Argh, why enter to start the game when it's all controlled with the left part of the keyboard and the mouse?
Anyway, it's sort of fun for a little while, but like others have said, there's just not a lot going on there. It's basically just running around in circles, which gets old. Also, when I got killed it was usually by a head popping out of nowhere right on top of me, which was somewhat annoying.
I like the music though =). Simple but nice.
Didn't run.
Hm, interesting game, but I didn't really get into it. The movement of the guys seems pretty random (as others have said), so it felt like it's based more on luck than strategy really. Also, sometimes I couldn't create new guys even though I was below the maximum and had enough cash.
Great that you included an AI and a tutorial btw. The tutorial went by too fast at times though.
Not rating this since it's another two-player game with no AI =/
I had fun playing this (though it was a bit on the easy side perhaps). Also, great music! The victory music caught me by surprise and made me laugh =)
It's kind of fun-ish, sort of, though it seemed a bit pointless, specially since bubbles pop by themselves after a while anyway and the score wasn't visible when I played it the first time. Found out about the widescreen bug and tried it a bit in windowed mode afterwards, but it still felt kinda pointless. (Er. Sorry.) Perhaps limiting the amount of shots you can fire in a level would have made it feel more like a puzzle? I did have some fun driving around dodging bullets, though.
Also, while the continue feature is very nice and appreciated =), the delay when you get killed and have to click continue in the menu doesn't work that well; you have to switch between using the keyboard for the ship controls and the mouse for the menu (so a hotkey for continue would've been nice), and when you keep getting killed on a level the delay of the game over message can really get on your nerves as well. So, an instant, no-delay retry would've worked better (with some sort of unobtrusive feedback that you lost), would've been easier to get into "flow" then.
Very nicely polished game though, so you get points for that =)
The game tended to quit when I failed level 4 or a random level and sometimes when I won, too, which was annoying. I assume that's a bug.
Anyway, it's a good idea and somewhat fun while it lasts, though the first three levels felt more like tutorials and then there was just one more. So, needs more levels! The levels generated by the random level generator doesn't work at all unfortunately, they're too random and not fun to play at all.
Creepy player ship thing =)
What Hamumu said. Also, what kind of dog is that? It ATE my kitty!
The game started when I pressed Alt-Enter to go into fullscreen. It pauses when it loses focus though, so that's good =)
The Rat in a Cage level was very frustrating, as the bombs kept killing all the girls before I could get to them, being trapped in my cage most of the time. Also, I don't like how the level objectives lie to you! "Frickin' Live" says to me that just not getting killed would pass a level, which is completely wrong; you have to get some unspecified amount of points as well, and you don't actually lose if you get killed on those either (except Duplicity?).
Still, it's a fun game! Specially when things get frantic =). Where's the chain reactions though? Yes, explosions make other bombs explode, but that rarely happens, the game doesn't seem to take advantage of it at all..
Hm. I usually like these games, and feel like this should have been more fun than it was, but .. it wasn't. I'm not sure why. I see sol_hsa had the same experience, so it's not just me apparently =/
Also, my keyboard locked up when I tried to fly forward (or backward) and turn and fire at once. That's a hardware issue (the space key is in the same keyboard rectangle as the arrow keys), but it's a pretty common problem, so you should generally avoid layouts that require using space and arrow keys simultaneously (google 'keyboards are evil' for more info =)). Joystick/gamepad support would've fixed it too =)
Oh, and nice music. Simple, but I like it =)
Didn't run.
I love the idea, and the style, and it's nicely polishished, but.. yeah, what Hamumu said.
Ooh, this was fun! And original! And fun! I almost gave up on level 5 after countless tries, but then magically got it somehow. The game's really got that "just one more time" quality to it =). Great game.
I really like the idea, could have been a lot more fun if the game had been more finished I think =]. As it is the game ended up feeling somewhat 'empty'.
Also, this is another game that gets hit by keyboard hardware limitations (google 'keyboards are evil'). Don't mix holding space with arrow keys! The space key blocks movement. (I think there's something else wrong too though, since ctrl seemed to block the arrows sometimes too, which isn't usually the case when it's just the hardware's fault)
I liked the level intro text scroller =)
So, um, it didn't crash, but is the floor supposed to do psychedelic palette shifts whenever the camera rotates?
Anyway, I generally like marble rolling games and would probably have liked this one too if it wasn't for the absolutely horrible controls that makes anything beyond level 2 completely unplayable =/
Still, it's a nice idea (no explosions, woo) and I liked the music =]
What was I supposed to be doing here again? I mean, I read the in-game instructions, but nothing much seemed to be happening at all, except people kept dying for some reason. I think the most exciting moment was when I accidentally landed my lander thing on its head and was stuck there for a while.
Nice physics though.
Too bad this wasn't finished, sounds like it could've been an interesting game. Points for journal and effort though =)
So I'm supposed to float around and eat things to multiply or something? Whatever I'm supposed to do, I'm absolutely horrible at it .. or so I thought, I just played it once more and managed to win somehow (if the purple logo thing means I won). Er, either way I didn't find it particularly fun, sorry.
Fun game. It can be really exciting jumping around avoiding fireworks when it's all around you, but it gets very frustrating to have to start over from level 1 whenever you die! I lost count of how many times I played through level 1 and died on level 2, and then finally, FINALLY got it, it felt like a real achievement to get to level 3. I figured I'd instantly die, but I got through that somehow (fun chase!), and instantly died on level 4 in stead. Then I instantly died on level 4 a few more times after playing the others again and finally quit in frustration to go write this =)
So. A continue feature would have been great, maybe have less hearts to start with to even it out. Barring that, some sort of short invulnerable phase when rockets hit you. Doesn't have to be long, just something to prevent you from losing all your hearts at once. On the other hand the game does have that "just one more time" appeal as it is.. So frustrating though.
Also, rockets need timeouts! I repeatedly spent several minutes waiting for the last rocket on the Nth playthrough of level 1 to stop circling in the middle of the room without hitting anything and just go explode already.
The graphics is great. Very cute =)
Argh, more fine-tuning.. I basically agree with what Hamumu said, and also what DrPetter said about the rotation buttons being backwards (also, click+drag to rotate would be better, I think). So yeah, I like the concept, but it's tedious.
I managed to fall through the floor into a grey void within the first couple of seconds I played. On my second run I had a healthy stroll across some spikes and defied the laws of physics with my grapple thing.
So, er, yeah. As you say yourself this isn't really complete at all. It's a good idea though (if not entirely original), and could be a good game with some more work.
Fresh take on the chain reactions theme =), though I only saw a 'chain' and not many reactions..
Didn't like this one. At all. Sorry. It's a boring matching game clone with clunky and laggy input, no win condition, and where's the chain reactions? I see them in theory, but since the game stops between the "chains" it doesn't feel like chain reactions at all. Is this game finished? Doesn't feel like it is.
Nice high score feature though.
Mmh, not very fun. Even if I'd liked this kind of game, the difficulty doesn't seem to increase over time and it seems completely random, so there's not much of a game to speak of in any case.
Original take on the theme though =]
This was great. Running around with the burning fuse following you can be really nerve-wracking, specially if you try to go for points as well as survival. Fun! Great character, too.
Would've been nice with a visible timeout before the fuse starts burning though, and maybe some music.
Nice idea. It's somewhat fun to play with for a little while, optimizing the layout to get higher scores.. but it feels kinda pointless, feels more like a toy than an actual game. Considering the subject that might have been intentional, though? =]
I felt the matching algorithm usually went off too early, not waiting until blocks are settled, so potentially huge combos fall by while small same-color matches go off right next to it. Gravity also didn't work right, I usually ended up with some floating blocks around the screen.
The game's a bit slow, which dampens excitement somewhat. I would also have liked to see plenty more over-the-top "eye candy" effects, making fun of casual games .. the ones you do have are nice enough, but not really over the top. I can't help but feel there's some lost potential there. Hard to do for a 48 hour game perhaps =)
Doesn't run.
I love the idea, and it's fun to play, but.. it's kinda creepy. Even before the guy that eats people, I mean. It's got this sense of impending doom, like there's some fundamental wrongness lurking beneath the surface of things. That's probably just me though.
Also, I don't like how you have to return to the main menu when completing a level in stead of just starting the next level right away. Also had some issues with things falling through the floor and such.
Other than that, I like it! It's a fun puzzle game. Well done =)
Why does this game remind me of Red Dwarf? (Also, Star Wars..)
Anyway, I didn't seem to be able to lose, so it's a wee bit on the easy side perhaps. Great idea though, and great music =). I also like the planets whizzing by on the title screen =)
Yay, another bullet hell shmup! =) The idea seems to be the same as mine, pretty much, and unforunately the implementation of the chain reaction theme suffers from the same weakness .. I still believe it could work well, but the level doesn't really take advantage of the chain reactions, so you barely notice they're there most of the time.
In any case, I had fun with this. It's hard, but hey, these games are supposed to be hard =) .. goes by a bit fast though. Nice audio, graphics isn't fantastic but works. Too bad you didn't have time to finish it (though you still made a more complete game than me .. =])
This is a game I think I'd enjoy if it wasn't for the constant pixel-level adjustments which really utterly kills it for me, specially since the level design makes that seem intended. Other than that, well done.
zIt's not much of a game, but I had fun just xjumping around with my happy creepy disembodied head, sculpting and floodfilling the landscape. Could'vzxe perhaps worked well as a two-player game, competing for the most squares?
..hm, actually I can move around even as I type this, since the window apparently doesn't care about input focus.
zAnyway, I'd like to give you a billion points just for including a dypp scroller, but there's no category for that, so I'll guess I'll just make you a trophy or something later on. Nice music, sfx and gfx, too.
Erm. I didn't really get this game, at all. I accidentally killed my fairy a couple times and played with the laser orbs and diamond thingy at the top of the screen (which didn't seem to do anything except making noise?), and then suddenly I managed to get her over on the right side of the screen somehow, but then when I switched the orbs to try to get her further phantom lasers started popping up from nowhere, going all over the place and killing my fairy again. Then she wandered off-screen and stayed there until I quit the game.
I have no idea where chain reactions were supposed to come into this, but since things seemed a bit buggy I guess I might have missed the point. I'll just put N/A for theme.
Also, I didn't get any sound in the right speaker, it was all in the left one.
A nice little game, but the UI could use some work. When placing breakers (also wood, but I'd gotten used to it by then) I kept thinking it'd end up in the current square in stead of the next one and put down too much fuse, which was particularly annoying since there's no way to undo placing a fuse if you accidentally go too far, and there's no way to restart the level either except for clicking the detonate button and wait. Would've been nice to be able to drag-n-drop fuses and click to place breaker/wood, or even to just use the keyboard.
Also, switching between fast and slow fuses doesn't take effect until one tile after the one you switch on. And why do you have to press enter to proceed/restart? Mixing required key presses into a mouse-only game isn't good. And there's no sound, and I didn't like the music. ;)
But apart from that I liked it =)
Great game! It's fun. Gets addictive when you've figured out what to do =)
An idea, maybe you could be getting points for large combos? Space could rotate colours in stead then maybe, so you'd have some control and could set up large combos while trying to survive. That'd be a bit different though =)
Anyway, I really like this. Well done!
The controls in the compo version made it completely unplayable, so I tried the latest version you posted (c, 21. dec) .. which I guess I shouldn't use for voting purposes since you added features so far after the deadline, but I wanted to see what the game was like. Still didn't really like the controls, but at least I could move around.. herding crabs felt like herding cats though, just scattering all over the place in stead of going where I wanted them to. So I didn't have much fun, sorry.
Nice title music though.
Can't download(?). I just get an empty directory in the zip.
Not very innovative perhaps, and the level design was a bit on the easy side, but the rest of the game is well done. The detonation process was a bit odd though, I expected either instant explosion with the little nisse being cast off to one side or maybe getting a timeout for running to safety in stead. The ice also got me by surprise since it didn't really look like ice to me. Still, I got used to it and had some fun while it lasted =). Also, the last level was nice =)
Nice game! It was fun, if a bit short. I wish the wires didn't just hang straight down all the time though, would've been nice to have more possible ways to connect them and such. Also, where's the chain reactions? Couldn't see any.
The music set the mood nicely at first but then got really repetitive and annoying really fast, so thanks for including the option of turning it off =]
LD29 — Beneath the Surface (28)
Shadows Below by HeroesGrave 2014-05-03T01:03:00
You should include libfreeimage.so.3 and libglfw.so.3 in the download to make it easier for people to play your game =P (and maybe some of the things they depend on, too, if it's anything nonstandard. objdump -x file | grep NEEDED to check deps. don't include system stuff like glibc)
You can get the runtime linker to look for libraries in the executable's location by setting the executable's rpath to $ORIGIN when linking it*. Or if you can't set an rpath, provide a wrapper script that people run instead of the executable that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH**
It's better that you fix that once for everyone than everyone having to hunt down dependencies before they can play your game
(I didn't try your game yet because Ubuntu doesn't have glfw3 in the default repos and i didn't feel like downloading and compiling that from source right now. Might try again later.)
* with gcc, you do that by passing -Wl,-rpath,$ORIGIN when linking, but you'll have to escape "$ORIGIN" from the shell and maybe your build system too depending on what you use. you can check if you got it right with ldd. in a makefile, you'd write -Wl,-rpath,'$$ORIGIN'
** here (if the executable's called "Shadows Below.bin"):
#!/bin/sh
cd "$(dirname "$(readlink -e "$0")")"
env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=".:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" "./Shadows Below.bin" "$@"
Organ Run by kunzbe 2014-05-02T23:50:00
Nice game. It got a bit frustrating when i was caught between a bunch of level-turners in one level though.. i just kept falling and turning, and the easiest way out was into a dead end that lead right back into those turners. Almost didn't get out at all. Also, the second timed challenge didn't reset the level orientation when the time ran out, so i had to do the entire level upside down.
Underground by f7f5 2014-05-02T23:28:00
This is very hard but also pretty fun! I feel it's my own fault when i die, which is good =). Some of those rooms can be very quick to attack you the instant you enter though.. i missed being able to escape in panic to the previous room.
I like that you can choose between killing everything to be safe or try to dodge your way through.
Down key to fall a bit faster might be nice. It's fine without it really, but when you game over a lot and have to fall through a lot of rooms to get back to where you got to last time, it'd be nice to get there a little faster.
Both the title screen music and ingame sfx disappeared after a while. I liked it while it lasted though.
Didn't complete it, but i think i'll try again later!
Tell Me About Your Childhood As A Nervous Goldfish by garygreen 2014-05-02T22:44:00
I like the style =). Nice music.
The Deepest Darkest Trench by trueyomic 2014-05-02T19:16:00
The collision detection is pretty unforgiving.. it'd help a lot if you made the bounds of the fish smaller, i think.
Also, the controls felt a bit imprecise for some of the things you're asked to do. The collision detection doesn't help, but i think it's also due to the speed of the fish. If it had some slight inertia (not too much!), so it didn't jump straight from zero to full speed, it'd be easier to position the fish more accurately.
Bug: Horizontally moving spikes has a bright line flashing on the left hand side (web version in chromium)
Anyway, it was still enjoyable =). Thanks for the generous save spots =)
Under The Sea by hgouveia 2014-05-02T03:08:00
Very nice start! Lots of little details. Movement is a bit stiff, but i guess that's just part of the unfinishedness.
The Colors Beneath the Surface by VictorDoval 2014-05-02T02:44:00
This is pretty neat! The gfx and ambient music creates a great atmosphere. (wish the music didn't suddenly cut off like that though)
Those two greens are very similar to each other. It wouldn't've hurt to separate them a bit more, i think =P
Save your tribe! by FrameMatt 2014-05-02T01:48:00
I got eaten! And i was tasty! Yay!
It's a bit weird that fireballs just.. stop you, instead of maybe bouncing you off or something. It's easy to get captured on top of a row of fireballs, and little you can do about it except shuffle a bit, wait and hope you pop back down.
The music is nice, but doesn't really fit the situation. I suppose you went for the humor category there =]
The menus are mouse only and ingame is keyboard only. It'd be nice if the menus could be controlled with a keyboard too.
I like the little comic in the instructions screen =)
Maze Sweeper by Turkey 2014-05-02T00:44:00
It's a neat idea, but not really very fun as is.. you just try to find the path with all your clicks, and if not, probably run into a wall and die.
Would've been nice if there'd been some kind of incentive to reveal less tiles (score? or maybe some tiles would be dangerous to reveal?), and some alternate but less reliable ways of telling where there's floor (floor marks, shadows, other things walking around, etc), so you'd have to decide if you could tell without revealing too much, or if you'd rather pay the cost to be certain.
Anyway, well done on completing and submitting a game =)
Sundiver by kmakai 2014-05-02T00:18:00
I like this, but yeah, the skulls in the compo version are way too hard. It felt like it was mostly up to luck if i'd be able to clear any particular level -- several times there'd be like three or four skulls coming at me in a row, each one almost impossible to dodge (specially with the field of vision reduced..). Just one skull wasn't too bad, but they had this habit of ganging up on you.
(The skulls in the post-compo version are a lot better, but they're almost too easy again.. not the skulls themselves, but i think they take off less health, or you get more health from the stardust, or maybe there's more dust? either way, you recover pretty quickly even after getting hit)
I wish there'd been more variety to the levels. Maybe i didn't play far enough, but they pretty much felt the same. I think there was a bit more debris in later ones, maybe? It was pretty subtle though, and as for skulls, i got a ton of them in level 1 a few times, and only one in later levels other times, so that seemed more up to the random number generator than the level.
I liked how some 1x1 corrupted blocks looked like corrupted skulls. I don't know if that was intentional or if i was just seeing things, but the first few times those went by i was wondering if they'd suddenly wake up and come after me. Would've been nice if some of them did! (Well, not *nice*, but, you know =))
Beneath the surface by siondream 2014-05-01T22:59:00
Couldn't figure out what to do in the second room. It doesn't help that the parser doesn't distinguish between words it doesn't understand and things you can't do, and it's pretty strict in what words it accepts in each situation..
examine door - you cannot do that!
look at door - you cannot do that!
look door - (description of door)
look rock - you cannot do that!
push rock - (pushes rock)
So if i'd tried to "look rock" before "look door", how would i know that "look" was a real command, but used on an object that didn't support it? It makes it hard to learn the vocabulary of the game. Maybe i'm trying to do the right thing and just using the wrong words, or maybe i'm on the wrong track entirely and should try something else. Who knows?
I know, it's limited how smart you can make a language parser in a weekend. Just distinguishing between "not understood" and "understood but can't do that" would help, though.. Also, if you look up input words in a table of synonyms, that could also remove words like "at" if you don't need those. Little things like that help a lot.
Anyway, the presentation's neat. The typewriter effect, little touches like the sliding text at the start and the way the border pulses a little (you can imagine holding a candle in a cave).. sets the mood =). I like the music, too.
Reflection by thebmxeur 2014-05-01T22:12:00
The controls (switching in particular) felt a little imprecise and unresponsive at times, but i think that was actually mostly because of the lack of a "shadow" in the top half. It's more difficult to tell where you are without that, and there's no feedback to tell you if you tried to switch into a wall. Some audio would've helped there =). The first ring was by far the hardest because of that, i think.
Underground Labyrinth by Gh0stnet 2014-05-01T04:20:00
There's not really anything to comment on here.. but on the bright side, with what you learned this LD*, you're better prepared for the next one! Yay! =)
* here's one thing: put flash on the web! not in a 7zip archive =)
Thermonuclear Mutant Bunker Survival by YSelf Tool 2014-05-01T02:43:00
First time i played this i just spammed bullets everywhere and suddenly was unable to shoot, so i figured i'd run out of ammo, and it'd be a better strategy to try to actually aim at enemies and take them out with a single bullet, if possible. So i tried to do that.
But that didn't feel right either. I felt like i spent a really long time just sitting there picking out enemies one by one, never in any real danger.. occasionally there'd be a flurry of a bit more threatening activity (when i levelled up, i think?), but it'd die down again soon enough. Level progression was very slow. Ammo(?) in the lower right didn't seem to deplete at all, but if i was shooting more often it did, and it didn't seem to go back up, so.. i don't know. You're supposed to just sit there and carefully aim at things, i guess? But it's so sloooow..
So yeah, i think that hurts the game. You have more interesting moving enemies further in, and i like those more, but to get to them you have to put up with all that slow waiting and picking, and even when you do there's just a few followed by more waiting.
In short, i think this progresses too slowly. =P
Bathysphere by jurnacsr 2014-05-01T01:54:00
This is neat =)
Not a lot of replay value though.. it's a bit too easy, i think. There's tons of fish, and you can move pretty fast, so there's never really any problem getting a decent score. The "forks" seem a bit superfluous, too -- i guess you could get a bit more fish by using them right, but since you collect fish just by crashing into them too, and you move as fast as you do, there didn't seem much point.
Nice presentation.
AbstractShooter by NightDreamer 2014-04-30T23:28:00
Tried playing with an Xbox 360 controller, but it didn't work (Linux version), so i used the keyboard instead.
Anyway, it's pretty minimal as shooters go.. Keyboard controls are a bit weird, but ok. I think the biggest problem is that the random enemy placement isn't very exciting, and it doesn't really change over time either. The game... works, does what it's supposed to with what it's got.. which is good! But there's no sense of progression or anything, it's just kind of there.
The music is nice! But.. you credit someone else for it, and the 48 hour compo is a solo competition, so i can't give you points for that. Sorry.
Good job on meeting all your set goals though =). More games should have parallax scrolling.
Chassis Driller by Griz 2014-04-30T22:50:00
Yay, i won =). Had fun with this for a bit, but it'd be nice if there was more variety as you dig deeper into the ground. You've pretty much seen everything the game has to offer right away, only thing that changes is how long and fast you can keep digging. I mean, they're nice upgrades, but it doesn't really lead you anywhere new.
Still, it was nice for a while =)
Played the Linux version btw. It works fine, but the executable in the Linux zip doesn't have execute permissions, so people have to add that manually before they can run it. I don't know how you made that zip, but if Unity did it for you, someone should get them to fix that =]. If you made the zip yourself, you generally have to use something that understands unix file permissions to get that to work (like zip on Linux or OSX)
Kriller Whale by spock9a8 2014-04-30T22:19:00
I played the jar version on Linux. The game popped up an empty gray window and then took a loong time to load.. Maybe put a note about loading times in your description, so people give it some extra time? I was pretty sure it had froze when the title screen finally came up.
Anyway, the game's ok, but you've pretty much seen it all within the first minute. Nothing new ever happens past the first time you have to surface for air. It's nice that there's different kinds of fish and that, but there's no real feel of progression there.
Was a bit odd that you have to use WASD to control the whale, and can't use the arrow keys. Movement is a bit stiff i think, some slight easing in and out of full speed (just a little bit) would help with that.
Oh also, if the game's controlled with a keyboard, it's nice if the the menu can be used with a keyboard, too, so you don't have to switch back and forth.
Simple gfx, but the whale's cute. I like that you put a chewing animation in there =). I'm really not a fan of the gradient in the background though.. Doesn't fit with the rest of the graphics (gradients rarely do..), and the flashing is just unnecessary.
The options menu said there was music, but i didn't hear any. The only sound was crunching when the whale ate stuff. (Terminal output said something about midi being unavailable, so i tried setting up some midi emulation, but couldn't get it to work.)
Would've been nice with some sort of indication when the whale is out of air.. it's easy to miss all your hearts draining away if you're not paying attention =]
Beneath the... hey, look, shiny things! by Yaru 2014-04-30T20:47:00
Managed to find all the gems somehow, just when i was about to quit. That last one took me a long time though. Total playtime was around 18-19 minutes, and more than half of that was just the last gem. When i found it, i was mostly just glad it was over.
I think one of the most important things about exploration games is that there's something to discover, apart from collectibles like gems. Your map doesn't really have much to offer there, though -- it just feels... random, like it's partially randomly generated. There's really only two landmarks: The skull, and the LD room. Those were nice to discover, but everywhere else is mostly just the same. You start to recognize some of the formations after a while, but it's still just piles of dirt in the darkness. Not very engaging on their own.
Landmarks are interesting, but they're also clues that help the player remember things. Have they been here before, or is it someplace new? They give purpose. "Let's try *this* path now, i didn't go up there last time. I wonder if there's anything there?". They don't have to be big, impressive things, just something different. Give a place an identity.
Keep making games =)
Water Golf by Jaenis 2014-04-29T18:24:00
This is a really neat idea, but it's very... minimal. I guess you ran out of time.. I'd really like to play a more complete version of this though! There could be fish, waterfalls, whirlpools, currents, various mechanisms, other things making waves... tons of possibilities here =). Would probably need designed levels though
Bugs: Sometimes large-ish waves pass straight through the ball without affecting it much. Also, it generated a level where the flag and ball were in different pools, disconnected from each other.
Theres's a Twist by Lucio 2014-04-29T16:06:00
I stopped playing after only two moves. If only there'd been like a twist or something!
Nah, it's neat =). I like how the twist forces you to think ahead. Some of the levels felt a bit like they were just there, but the more puzzle-y ones were nice.
I wish the crab moved slightly faster and that i had more control of it in the air though, or at least that there was some momentum leaping off an edge, so you could float across small gaps if there's enough vertical space. Just dropping like a rock like it does feels a bit unnatural.
Oh also, it felt a bit like i was exploiting a bug when i discovered that i could dig while falling (mostly because of the lack of control while falling otherwise, i think) - i guess you're supposed to be able to do that though? Had to do it to get past at least one level, anyway.. but it definitely felt like i was breaking another one when i just went outside the edge of the screen and dug in =P
Also, you can dig two blocks at once if you stand between them just right. It only counts as one for the twist counter when you do that.
Graphics wise, it's inconsistent between flat pixelly (crab, +) and higher res shaded (apple, block), but i guess that's just a case of stub graphics never getting updated. Common LD problem =)
You're Pulleying My Leg by Draknek 2014-04-29T15:04:00
This was a lot of fun! I really like how you go back and reconfigure things as new parts of the level are unlocked, and yet all that going back and forth never gets tedious. The checkpoints help a lot with that, leaving you free to try things without fear of screwing up. Awesome! =)
(Maybe mention the checkpoints in your description though? They're a lot better than undoing and i could see how someone might never dare pressing R)
The Transgression by increpare 2014-04-29T14:15:00
You know, it's interesting how people's interpretation of subtext is different.. Take "Don't worry about it" - you (or your game) interprets that as deliberately withholding forgiveness, but for me that could just as well mean that the "forgiver" really *wouldn't* hold the transgression against the other, or even that there was nothing to forgive in the first place, from their point of view. So then you can get awkward situations where one person believes it's been dealt with and everything is fine and the other thinks they've not only done something wrong, but been denied forgiveness! Highlights the importance of clear communication, i think =]
Of course, a ton of this depends on context and facial expressions and the previous relationship between the people involved and all those other things, none of which are in this game! ([smug] I forgive you.)
Beneath The Surface In The Sky by tomhunt 2014-04-29T04:10:00
Sorry, but this is unplayable (Linux version). No matter if i play windowed or in fullscreen, the mouse cursor is visible and not locked in place, and the camera stops turning when the cursor hits the edge of the screen. I also tried playing with a gamepad and with the keyboard, but that seems to rotate around the wrong axis/center or something. Couldn't get anywhere.
I'll skip rating this for now.
The Moon Has Monsters! by KunoNoOni 2014-04-29T03:46:00
The game itself isn't too interesting (i mean, all the levels are basically the same even if the monsters look different), but i really liked all the text! Sets the mood nicely =)
The background/foreground tiles are a bit busy and very obviously tiled. A few alternate tiles to break up the monotony can do wonders =)
Ground control to major Tomashevsky by drnick 2014-04-29T03:16:00
The game started pretty suddenly after the intro, i thought. I was just watching Neptune come closer waiting for the intro to end, and then before i knew it i'd crashed into the ground and died. I didn't press D there because i thought it'd skip all the rest of the text of the intro, not just that one box. Also, when the lander appeared on screen, it wasn't really clear that the intro had ended and the game wanted me to control it.
There's not a lot of contrast to the text most of the time. It's all readable, but too similar colors makes it harder to read than necessary.
Mouse only menus and keyboard only ingame controls makes the menus and game feel like they're from different games. Failing is more disruptive and punishing than it could be too, when you have to keep switching back and forth between inputs. (It's usually best to use the same control method for both menus and ingame, though you have to be careful to avoid accidental menu activation if it pops up when the player presses jump or something when you do that.)
At one place I was jumping while going down a slope (where it says "to further investigate..") and died from the fall. Restoring from the last checkpoint restored me to a point in the air, still falling to my death. Had to restart the game and not do that again to continue..
The light doesn't really illuminate things, and if you have both the light and can use the jackhammer, the action button toggles both at once. Would be better with a dedicated key for each, i think.
Controls overall felt a bit floaty.
The ending was also a bit sudden. I mean, there's the cube and all the knowledge pouring in (nice scene btw), but i kinda expected to get to play as supercosmonaut for a bit, or maybe explore somewhere completely different for a bit. Instead there's just a screen telling you what happened, and that's it. Show, don't tell! (I guess you ran out of time?)
Sorry if this sounds overly negative! Don't take it too hard though, i think you just need a little practice. Keep making games =)
I liked the speech effects.
SolidGround by hi-scor.es 2014-04-29T00:59:00
I, uh.. i kinda covered the entire surface of my planet with a slowly thickening layer of pipes (..since, you know, price increases with *depth*..). I don't think that's how you're supposed to do things? ;)
But yeah, it felt a bit odd that pipe construction is completely unrestricted like that. I guess it'd be better to be more selective in what to mine despite increased costs, but "my" way seemed effective enough really
Anyway, tried it again playing a bit more "properly" this time, and that felt a bit less pointless =)
Deus ex Submarine by Jod 2014-04-29T00:10:00
I'm glad i tried again after the first attempt. That took an unexpected direction =). It did get a bit tedious going through everything for every retry though -- maybe you could've simplified repeated sections a bit on replay, since you already detect that anyway? Stuff like not having to check the list of what's wrong again and such.
Also, i got ending 5 twice, in two very different situations. Second time i'd actually managed to save the sub and some of the people in it =), but the first time was when i just went for a swim straight away, leaving everyone to die. I don't think that's right?
Would've been nice with some ambient sounds.