Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → NATHAN WASH
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | Wicked Wanderings | jam | 684 | 3.33 | 3.06 | 3.08 | 3.27 | 3.45 | 3.27 | 2.79 | 3.31 |
Great idea, literally "start with nothing". The art is unique and fits the overall tone along with the music. Some balancing stuff, megahit enemies tend to just 1-hit you. Personally I like the way the AI works in response to your movements.
I concur with the performance issues, but the overall concept was super cool! I still had fun with it even though it was at barely playable framerate.
It took me two tries but I beat him. I think you could do more enemy spawns, or have multiple levels that increase in difficulty and have different layouts and such.
We used Godot for our submission too and I'd be interested in trying to figure out why the performance is suffering so much. I might take a look if I get some time!
As a side note, the music was super catchy, and the voicing was hilarious.
@phobos001 So, I did some digging out of my own curiosity. I checked pretty much every physics/process loop watching for them to take longer than normal but had no luck with that. I found through the Godot Profiler that you don't spend very much time per frame on actual physics/process calculations, but there's a lot of "idle time" which is apparently caused by loading in textures and stuff.
I don't know enough to actually solve your problem, but that'd be a good place to start looking. It's a really weird problem, it doesn't seem like anything you did with your programming because the Menu screen has pretty much nothing going on and it still is just pegged at ~13 FPS.
I noticed the physics are set to run at 144 FPS, is that default for Godot or did you mess with the Project settings a bunch?
I was just curious, I would be interested to know what was wrong if you ever figure it out.
@phobos001 Glad you figured it out! If the fix wasn't too involved I'd say it wouldn't hurt to upload the new version. It's not a change in core game mechanics and makes the game playable so I can't imagine that would be frowned on. My understanding is that minor fixes are okay, you just can't update core design/mechanics or add features during the rating period.
edit: Just noticed you did update it, about to give it another play!
edit2: I think you may have forgotten to upload the updated version to your itch.
I was chuckling through the whole thing. The ending hit a little too close to home about LD sequels though. The game is well thought out and actually takes some thought to get through the battles. I was also admiring the artwork through the whole thing, very cool. The credit music is a downright slapsterpiece.
One minute criticism: The defend ability should have an animation that plays for all the characters on the team like the heal ability so the player gets a visual clarification that it's a party effect. At first I thought the defend ability only affected the one character.
Absolutely great work, I love when LD games are so good I feel like I have to finish them.
Style is great! I love the aesthetics and the creepy music and art. I had the same issue where when I died I would remain the battle screen and not be able to do anything. Oddly enough, you can still kill the enemy that kills you after you're dead. Is there something special that happens if you make it through every encounter? Would be really challenging in its current state but I'm curious! I think the non-recoverable health through encounters is a nifty mechanic.
This is like a fever dream. Absolutely hilarious. When the Level 2 text popped up I busted out laughing, it's just so absurd. The juxtaposition of so much jesus imagery and then just random angry birds and clip art is great.
I thought the gameplay was actually pretty good, I don't like bullet hells generally but this was pretty fun.
I loved the DOOM style health indicator where your halo gets smaller with each hit, classic. Music was pretty lit too.
One criticism: the heartbeat sound when you get down to one life is really loud, took me a moment to figure out what the noise was.
Also very cool you wrote the engine from scratch, don't see that very much!
I have no idea what you're supposed to do on the bloody pipes puzzle. I could've sworn I had a valid solution but kept turning them and eventually got it. Pretty fun, cool idea with the "minigames". Not sure if it was supposed to be sad or funny or disturbing but I found it all three.
Almost forgot about the xylophone puzzle: I think it doesn't matter how fast you click them, just that they're in the right order, but it's really hard to tell where the "start" of the sequence is. Maybe that's the point.
Super fun! This is really similar to a game called Little Alchemy where you drag ingredients around to make new things. When we made our little witch game we were thinking in the same vein! It would be cool to have more rooms, or to be a Witch Interior Designer and fill other people's homes with equally creepy friends.
@fre Thanks for the feedback! I was the one that built the crafting system. I noticed how tedious it was opening the menu and putting things in hand, but I ended up focusing on getting the recipe panel implemented so people weren't completely lost. Would definitely be better if selecting an item from the menu while standing near the cauldron just auto-placed the item in the cauldron and left the menu open.
@arzi the double click makes it a little better, I agree though, context sensitive menus would streamline the crafting system a lot. Thanks for the feedback!
@thecritterscove Thanks for the extensive feedback! It means a lot when someone takes the time to write at such length to let us know what we can improve on.
Controls: The controls could definitely be streamlined, some other commentors mentioned this too. I'm thinking a context-sensitive menu would make crafting a lot less tedious. I.e. you select an item while standing next to the cauldron and it just auto-places it in the cauldron for you and leaves the menu open.
Ingredient Gathering: This is feedback I haven't seen on here yet, but was mentioned by a few of my friends that played it. The original idea was to have a heavily dialog driven game where you have to talk to the other NPC's to learn about ingredients and recipes, which would then spawn in the world or allow you to craft them. We just simply ran out of time to implement so much dialog after getting the crafting system running.
Art: The inconsistency is due to some of the sprites being "dev art", like the "Leaf" sprite was meant to be replaced and we just didn't find time for it. The good-looking art was actually done by the artists :)
Thanks again for the valuable criticism.
@catie-jo Woah! Thanks for taking the time to write so much feedback, much appreciated!
- Interesting, what browser are you using? On Chrome the font appears correctly (at least for me). - I agree, if we continue work on this then Petunia will end up somewhere else or turn into multiple NPCs that you sell different potions to. - At one point Petunia would give you a "Thanks!" bubble after selling something to her. Her dialog interaction is actually written differently from other NPCs since she doubles as an "interactable" like the cauldron and she ended up getting her dialog broken a few hours before deadline. I fixed it for the most part but forgot about the feedback bubble for selling something. She needs a bit of TLC to fix her dialog bubbles not showing up correctly if you're already standing in her area and put something in your hand to sell too. - I agree the music tracks loop pretty quick. If we keep working on it we'd probably add some length to them and make more tracks that swap in when you go to different areas so it doesn't get so repetitive. - Sound effects are a great idea! - Ya the cauldron was also my work before I totally understood the UI system in Godot Engine. That ingredient box definitely needs to be cleaned up. I think it ought to have the same cool scroll texture as the dialog boxes too. - Hahaha ya I mentioned dialogs getting broken, the guy had dialog at one point and we totally blanked on fixing it before the deadline. - A lot of other players mentioned in their feedback that the crafting system was pretty tedious too. I posted some thoughts on how to fix that in other comments, but basically having the menu be context sensitive to whatever you're standing next to would solve a lot of the clunkiness.
And since you took so much time to write all that feedback I'll write some more on our original ideas. - We wanted to have a lot more NPCs that would unlock different ingredients on the map or give you potion recipes but time constraint just didn't allow for it. Would have added a lot more depth to the game overall. - It's actually possible (or at least should be) to drink the potions, but they all just flash the screen, we ran out of time to actually add effects to them or give other NPCs interactions with them. One idea we had; we thought it would be funny if after drinking a Potion of Toadspeak, you go back to the toad you speak to in English at the beginning and he just says "Ribbit!" - The potion progression definitely needs a balance. To get to the final potion it requires a lot more elderberries and mushrooms than any other raw ingredient because I used the Potion of Minor Stomach Aches as an ingredient in too many recipes. Some players have reported that they can't actually reach the last potion because they run out of elderberries. I think there might be a difference in the random gen between desktop and web builds
Thanks again for all the valuable feedback! We really appreciate the time you took to play and review our game.
edit: I just realized you're the FairyTiles dev, I LOVED it!
@negator2vc thanks for the feedback! That's a common criticism, we wanted to add more in regards to gathering ingredients but just didn't find the time.
I love the art and music too, our artists/musician did an amazing job!
This was my (personally) first jam and first real project in Godot, it was a lot of fun figuring it out. It seems like a pretty powerful engine and we'll definitely be making more projects in it.
@shubart thanks for the feedback! The controls have definitely gotten the most criticism out of anything else. Our idea to fix it is to have the menu be context-sensitive, so if you're standing next to the cauldron and select an item, it just automatically enters the cauldron and leaves the menu open instead of closing the menu and making you hit E to place it.
@catie-jo Haha I'm glad you liked the potion names, wasn't sure if they'd be too goofy for a laugh.
As far as the browser bug, that's super weird. I tried resizing my browser to a ton of sizes and refreshing the page but the most I was able to get it to do is give me a blank box and play the title music. The game itself doesn't run at a very high resolution so most things shouldn't have an issue. Could be specific to OS X Chrome maybe?
A Ludum Dare: Reboot where you take previous submissions and try to improve them would be super cool!
@justcamh Thanks for the feedback! Funnily enough, there was actually supposed to be description texts if you hovered over stuff in the inventory and the description text for Psychotic Episode in a Bottle was "I'm not sure why Petunia would even want this..."
@dxk2294 Thanks for taking the time to play and leave feedback!
I actually wrote a blogpost [found here](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/wicked-wanderings/wicked-wanders-implementing-feedback) about how we're working on fixing the controls and menu experience.
I had a lot of fun coming up with all the potions and recipes, glad you enjoyed it! :)
@mao This is actually something I looked into the other day. It turns out the random generation runs differently on the browser version than the desktop version. We don't actually change the seed for the random gen, so it's the same every time and the web version just got unlucky with Elderberry spawns.
In the future we will probably change the way items work completely so they don't just appear all over the ground. Most likely the player will need to talk to an NPC who will tell the player where they can find an ingredient, and then the ingredient will spawn and replenish on certain trees/bushes/etc.
Thanks for taking the time to play and leave feedback!
@terribly-awesome-games put it better than I could. A truly outstanding project. I've never been into poetry of any kind, but this left me wanting so much more. I'm going to have to go back through to try to find the extra stuff. I knew I could click on words but not that I could move them around.
Aside from being a bit confused on what to do at first, I didn't really find much to criticize. It felt super polished. The word placement was such a nice touch, it gave me mega Shel Silverstein vibes.
The controls are pretty strange but once I figured it out it was pretty cool! Could have a lot of potential with the interesting mechanics. I found that jumping on the bugs for a horizontal obstacle is pretty hard, you kinda have to just go up enough that you can fall sideways far enough to pass the obstacle. I think more could be done with the swapping between worlds, it's a pretty cool mechanic.
I also found if you just hold jump you can ride the bugs sideways across the ceiling if you go slow enough.
Pretty cool game. Missing translations made it a bit hard to follow, but that's forgivable considering there are translations at all. The art style is creepy (which I love), and so is the whole tone of the game from what I gathered. I got stuck not very far into it trying to give the shopkeeper the red bottle. I couldn't figure out how to interact with anything. Are there controls I might be missing?
This is pretty fun! Physics based games are always extremely tough to fine tune so I think you did a great job with the amount of time available. I agree with other posters the controls could use some work, or rather just how the controls affect the movement, the controls themselves are fine. More acceleration at the start of a move would help it not feel so much like an ice rink maybe.
Aside from controls/movement - My character had a tendency to just walk diagonally on 2 wheels which made movement impossible without resetting position. I also found that turning under high speed sometimes just puts you into a spin, this happens a lot trying to avoid the police.
Great concept and execution, had fun playing it!
I'm stuck on the second level, not sure if that's my own fault or not. Seems unfinished (or I'm just bad?) so I'll just comment on what I did see - The intro sequence was pretty cool! I wasn't expecting that. I like the art and the music was a nice touch. Is there a way to kill the hopping slime on the second level and take his jump ability? I was mashing all my keys trying to figure out if I was missing a control.
Wow this was outstanding. Felt very polished and the graphics are one-of-a-kind, I really dig 'em. Was a little confused at first until I figured out that the Oracle Pine will show you when you get something correct.
Only bug I found was that when you're holding something, it collides with other stuff in the scene (namely the altar) which is kinda weird, but definitely not gamebreaking or anything.
I really liked needing to both rotate and change an object's state to complete the puzzles. I want more!
Cool game with a nice aesthetic. The art and music mesh very well together and gives the whole game a suspenseful mood.
I got stuck after lighting the candles around the pentagram, I tried dropping some deer meat around the ritual circle but couldn't get anything to happen when pressing Q to offer my gifts.
Very cool and impressive everything came from 1 dev!
Cool game! I was going to comment on the weird flickery (although cool) lighting effects, but I see you mentioned that's because of WebGL - classic.
I really liked how dark and moody the map was. I agree the level design could be improved, my first try I never found the scythe.
The hitboxes or attack collision could use some work, I found it was easier to stand more to the side of the enemies than in front of them.
The enemies also didn't seem to be very dangerous, probably the same issue as attacking where they're just not triggering what they're supposed to.
Overall very cool, I liked the physics based approach. Some more weapons, spikes, and some "dungeons" could make it super fun!
Hell yeah! This is super cool and I really want to try out local coop as soon as I've got someone else around. The weapon upgrade system is pretty cool, but I think it could be diversified. Like instead of just upgrading damage on everything (what it seems like it does if I'm not mistaken) it could make the shotgun shoot more pellets, give guns more starting ammo, increase fire rate on pistol, etc. Extra sound effects would be nice too, like one for breaking the weapon crates. Overall it felt like it had a nice balance, I almost got myself killed trying to use the RPG. Somehow the upgrade menu will let you go negative on money but I haven't really figured out why. I think they subtract more than they say and only check what the displayed cost is or something but I didn't mess with it too much. The graphics were pretty killer, I loved the lighting effects from the flashlight.
Interesting game. Looks like a sort of bullet hell that could be pretty fun if it was fleshed out. I was expecting to beat all the enemies on the first platform and fall to a new one with different enemies but I think they just keep respawning. Some more enemies, a health system, and some more weapons and stuff would make this pretty fun.
Absolutely amazing. Great artstyle, unique idea, and combat is super fun. I love wandering around trying to find the different items to unlock areas.
One bug I found is that moving from the first area to the second makes the camera spaz out when you move.
Super creepy, I love the art and sounds. The story could use some work, but for a jam obviously there's only so much you can fit in.
I think the dream world could be creepier, imo it doesn't really fit the rest of the mood quite as well, but I think it would be as simple as switching out the enemies so something creepier. The enemies having your painting as a face was a nice touch though.
Nice job!
Cool game! I was totally ready to move onto the next area and get some harder enemies, bigger guns, ship upgrades etc. I think it's got a lot of potential for a 3d space bullet hell.
Some criticisms: - You've gotta fly around quite a bit just finding enemies, would be cool to have the enemy density increase towards the edge of the area. - Adding purchasable upgrades like a shotgun spread or having multiple tiers of upgrades would be cool. Like if you could purchase the fire rate upgrade multiple times and it gets more expensive each time.
I love that you took the time to do some voice acting. It always helps to get experience with that kind of thing and I feel like it takes some courage to throw your own voice onto projects. Super cool, had fun with it.
Played the Windows build. Overall great game, the movement is pretty buggy which detracts a lot from a platformer. I think you shouldn't be able to die, but there should be a larger penalty for getting hit. As it is, if you have any amount of money you can pretty much run through the enemies because 2% isn't much of a hit. Artwork is super good. It's cool that the platformer mechanics change in each area.