Shift the Shapes by Larzan 2016-04-19T01:58:00
The puzzles here get hard very fast. I couldn't figure out level 4, not for lack of trying :)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → nickavv
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Keeper of the Flame | jam | 187 | 4.02 | 3.92 | 3.56 | 4.22 | 4.16 | 3.87 | 3.92 | |||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Spacious and Newly Renovated | jam | |||||||||||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | 👥 | Corgo-a-gogo | jam | 715 | 2.65 | 2.40 | 2.04 | 3.45 | 3.10 | 2.47 | 3.05 | 2.88 | |
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Selkie | jam | 938 | 2.80 | 2.82 | 2.74 | 3.32 | 3.20 | 3.15 | 2.80 | 3.00 | 69 |
The puzzles here get hard very fast. I couldn't figure out level 4, not for lack of trying :)
Very freaky. Nice poem, not sure I understand it, but nice. Lovely graphics and sound design too
This is one of the most visually astounding things I've seen, not just in this game jam but period. I could stare at it all day. Pretty frustrating gameplay when you lose the form and have to start over, but worth it for those graphics
Doesn't really have anything to do with the theme, and it's not really a game with no objectives, but I like it anyway haha. The music is good and the physics are fun
Great! The music and graphics are awesome, the controls feel very good. Well done
I love the mechanics of stretching and squishing your vehicle, and messing with the wheels. I would have loved some AIs to race against, of course, so hopefully you manage to work that in after the competition at some point. Good work
I like it! The character sprites are very cool, even if the level art is a bit bland. The 3rd level gets pretty hard! Good job
I was pretty confused but re-reading the controls /after/ playing it it makes more sense. Very tough
I love the art, and the weird angles the world contains
This is a cute little game, I really dig it. My biggest complaint is that the first level can be beaten by just jumping over the barrier, so I missed the mechanic of moving boxes. Then I was unable to figure out the third(?) level, "Climb". I restarted the game feeling like I had missed something, and I had, and after that it was all good. Great use of different mechanics for the shapeshifting theme, they were all straightforward and not overwhelming to remember.
This is very cool. The graphics are awesome. Controls are very unique and interesting. 2 gripes: It's easy to get disoriented. Some kind of attitude gauge would be useful for telling if you're pointing up or down or whatever. Second, I managed to clip through the ground and was flying under the stage when going for a low hanging ring :) Good job overall though
@all: thanks for all the feedback, I'll definitely sink more of my effort into.. you know.. playability next time around :)
@Nolocality: I'm really curious how you got him to go onto the water, I did model the fish after swedish fish, I did undercount how many fish there were but then 42 is a nice number so I decided to leave it, and it is quite a bit of modeling and I probably should have spent more of my time elsewhere haha
The backdrop art and the music are both fantastic! Gameplay is interesting too, good job
I love the graphics, and while the sound clips got a little annoying when you'd hear the same clip over and over, they were cute and funny. I love the play on words too. My only complaint is the combat mechanics being kind of confusing and rough. The Ultra Taiga killed me, but that's OK. Good job overall!
This is pretty cool. Was a little lost until I did the tutorial, but then it was all good. The detection mechanic on the eyes is really awesome, with the ring. Great work
As others have said, needs some polish. The camera was a little too close, it was hard to get a bearing on where to go in the level, and the controls were rough. Eventually, after getting the dashing form I glitched through the level and was unable to continue playing. I like the graphics and the music a lot though
A lot of mechanics get thrown at you all at once here which makes it pretty overwhelming jumping in. But once I got my head around them it's a pretty awesome gameplay concept! The camera is way too close to the player in my opinion, which makes it difficult to get your bearings, especially with the plain black background. But good stuff overall
It took me a few tries to understand the mechanics, but then I got it. Pretty fun!
This is awesome, and pretty tough. I made it to level 10. I also found an easter egg which gave me a nice hat, which is great and I appreciate that :)
I love the art/music, the concept, and the funny dialog from the player/guards. It's seriously hard though, I can't go very long without getting shot to ribbons. Nice work
Interesting story/message, great graphics and sound too. The music did get a little bit repetitive, and a map would have been very useful too, but good job overall
This is good, kind of loose on the shapeshifting theme. Ends up just kind of being a race to do the level perfectly so you don't get trapped. Still, I liked it and was sad when it ended after 5 levels. Good job
I LOVE the graphics. The shapeshifting world effect is very cool, and makes for some tricky platforming segments. I would have loved some music and sound effects but time constraints will be time constraints. Great job
Simple and fun. Basic gameplay, but still tough to get a high score. As XAND noted below, I managed to crash the Windows version several times by pressing keys on the title screen. Clicking the shape to start the game seemed to work more reliably.
Nice stuff. Taking the theme and making a statement haha. I like the Zelda II "game over return of ganon" esque trump on the interim slides.
This is really cool, kind of zen to play
Gah this is hard! I love the graphics and the music. Great entry
Very nice! simple, fun, great graphics and audio.
Nice mechanics! I also got caught in the environment, but it's pretty good and with some polish it could be an awesome game
Short and sweet, but absolutely beautiful graphics and nice music. Fun gameplay, good job
This is really great, captures the imagination and wonder of childhood really well. Good stuff
Really really funny, and the graphics were great. It was a little hard to figure out what to do sometimes, but I'm glad I stuck with it til the end. Great job
I liked the graphics and the music a lot. It was pretty easy to get lost, and my cursor didn't lock so it would run up to the edges of my screen and stop me from turning any further. Good entry though
The graphics are lovely, movement is a little too slow, and I couldn't see the bar at the top when playing in the embedded player, so I was poofing a lot and not understanding why. Good job overall though
The art is really awesome. Gameplay is rough, jumping doesn't seem to always work well, and attacking I had to be in a very specific spot to pull it off. Good ideas though, good work
I like the minimalist but polished graphics, the music is pretty good too. It's hard to switch to the right shape in time, and hard to see in front of you to avoid black hearts, but it's good overall
Great entry. I love the graphics, they've got a kind of DOS game charm to them. There's not really any interesting mechanics, but it feels good and the levels are well designed.
I liked it and think it has a lot of potential. The character graphics are nice, but the animations are pretty crude, and the level artwork definitely doesn't match the quality of the animals. Gameplay is basically good, floor detection for jumping felt a little off sometimes. Nice work overall
Cool concept! Liked finding out how the enemies moved and using that against them. Graphics are nice, and the music is not bad either
This was great. Once I got the hang of the mechanics each puzzle was very well constructed. My time at the end was 34.30. The sound was great but the music was a little bit grating. Wish it was longer too. But good work overall!
I really liked the visuals and the music. The gameplay was awesome and reminded me (in a very good way) of an old black and white point-and-click game I played as a kid called Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel. Unfortunately while that game was (or at least seemed) infinitely large, this one ended far too soon. But it was short and sweet. Good work!
Thanks for the comments :) @coleslaughter and @glimaleite regarding the tank controls, I totally agree and we were originally writing it with strafing and mouse-based camera control, but combined with the spherical world it was just introducing a whole host of problems so I dropped them in favor of the simpler control scheme. But I'm glad you were able to play and enjoy!
This is one of my favorite games I've played for this LD so far. I'm a huge sucker for metroid-style gameplay where you find upgrades that allow you to backtrack to previous areas and do something new. This is a perfectly self-contained little game that uses that concept very well, the wraparound world makes sure that you're never totally lost and the upgrades like the drill are creative. The art is basic but looks nice. The sound would be my biggest complaint as it invokes an Atari 2600's bleeps and bloops more than anything to me, but it wasn't bad enough to really detract from the whole. Great work
This is so awesome. The graphics are beautiful, and the gameplay feels so fluid. I love the segments where you can build up speed and power through multiple obstacles without ever stopping. Great work
This is a very good concept, and very ambitious, and I love that unlike most "fly-around-space" games this one does actually let you land on the planets. At the end of the day there isn't that much to do or see to keep a player around, but it's definitely a good base to build on. Good work!
I really love this entry. The levels are like sliding puzzles taken to the extreme with lots of fun twists to keep them challenging. The little touches like the sound effects, the different poses to visually distinguish between happy and sad aliens, the way you have to physically execute the warp drive. It's all really satisfying! Great work!
The graphics and music are phenomenal. Not to spoil anything for anyone but it started very cutesy but got very dark and interesting by the end. 100% recommend playing all the way through. It had a bit of the usual point-n-click adventure logical stretches about which items are supposed to be combined, but the small size of the world actually worked in your favor here by making there not be too many possibilities to try. Great work overall
I thought this was awesome. Great twist on a classic. The first time I went through a tunnel made me say "woah" out loud. It was a little disorienting but nothing I couldn't adjust to. I think the main difficulty for me was in how reactive the snake felt to your inputs. It seemed like there was a bit of delay before turning and that often got the better of me. Great work though!
This was very cute, loved the presentation and the humor. Would be nice if there was more interactivity to it but good work.
I absolutely LOVE the graphics. Phenomenal presentation. Gameplay was pretty cool, I love the bullet-hell concept done this way, with lots of varying enemy types that shoot in unique but predictable ways. my main complaint would be that the camera angle makes determining where bullets are relative to you very difficult. But it was still a great entry, good work
This is really awesome, the humor is great and very meta, and the level design was challenging but in a fun way. Great job
This is a fun twist on the fish-pond/katamari/big-eats-little game. I like that your size is drained or gained just by proximity. I would say you probably would like to add some kind of particles to indicate movement, as with the nearly-static background it was sometimes difficult to tell. And maybe a bit more forgiveness on strong gravity wells and making it easier to escape. On the whole, good entry, nice work!
Interesting little resource management game. Could definitely be expanded upon in all sorts of ways.
This game is really cool, I didn't finish it because my tower got very difficult to climb up, but here's a list of things I loved:
- the spherical world physics which feel totally great and natural - the vertigo-inducing fisheye camera when you're high in the air - the way the music fades out and the wind sounds come in when you're high up
Here's what my stack looked like in the end Capture.PNG
Great work!
The graphics and sound especially are really awesome. I had a hard time understanding what to do or how to drive my cell around, so a little better teaching would probably be my biggest area for improvement. Good work though!
The concept of this is very cool and could be a very deep game. To me the ship felt very fast, and the camera too close so I didn't feel comfortable going fast without running into things. My biggest critique would be in a game with this many systems to introduce them naturally through gameplay rather than on a screen that appears before the game that is only viewable once. Also the music was very cool but the lack of sound effects (although scientifically accurate I suppose) made it feel a little empty. Good stuff overall, very nice work
This is an excellent entry! The graphics are great, the sound design is really good, it fits the theme perfectly. The guests sometimes putting on Nickelback against your will is very funny. Great work
This is really cool and clever! It's always a balancing act between protecting your fire and replenishing it, in the end the elements won. The sound design is very relaxing, just having the natural noises. The animation of the waves on the coastline was a little hard on the eyes but that's about my only criticism. Great entry!
Thank you all for your kind comments! I'm sorry about the frustration over the fans or collider size in general, I agree that a little visual indicator that the fans were spinning up would make them feel more fair. Things to think about for next time around! Cheers
@mika-la-grand @miracl Thanks for your constructive criticism guys, I've definitely understood at this point that I made some parts a bit unfair. I will likely publish an update to the game after the jam ends to ease up some of these things, I think it's most fair to leave it as-is for the time being so people can fairly judge what I was able to do in the time limit! Thanks for playing though and I'm glad you were able to enjoy it despite the challenge!
@cvetk0 thanks so much for your kind words, glad you enjoyed it! Sorry the controls weren't great for you, in my main game Song of Asirra I've got a very elaborate system with fully remappable controls but obviously no time to implement something like that here! Just wanted to say that I care a lot about accessibility and in any full title I release it's always on my mind!
@ellian Thanks a lot, glad you enjoyed it! @kiln honored to be compared to Zelda, and sorry about the controls, that's the kind of thing just a little play-testing would have helped me with but jams ya know? Glad you enjoyed though! @joe40001 thanks a lot for the kind words, glad you liked the art/music that much :) I'm no professional so it makes me happy to hear I can impress people haha
I'm pretty impressed, never played a VR game for a jam before! I couldn't actually hear the music at all unfortunately, and I was never able to find the 5th record, but it was pretty cool. Tip-toeing to see onto the high shelves and getting on my knees to look under the bed gave me a real sense of immersion, so kudos for that!
I thought it was very fun and cute! The graphics are very nice, the sound is good but a little repetitive. One small problem I had is that the main character's dialog box would cover up an NPC's if they were both talking at the same time, so it was a little distracting. But funny and cute, good job
I thought this was a super interesting idea. The controls were pretty weird/confusing, but they worked. I think it was a little frustrating figuring out what would and wouldn't kill the dog without some checkpoints. Starting the whole thing over once you're a little ways in becomes not so fun. But overall an interesting idea decently executed. Good job
I love the art in this, and the gameplay makes for a sort of 3D flappy bird (although a lot less punishing which is a good thing). It was kind of hard to reliably tell when I was about to hit an obstacle, but that was my only complaint. Great work!
I like the concept a lot, very creative! Like others I was able to just completely avoid all the enemies so there wasn't really any challenge, and also at some point the music just stopped playing and didn't loop.. but it's still a fun concept and good take on the theme! Good work
It was a classic tower defense game, and in your defense a lot more playable and easy to understand than some other tower defenses I played this jam! I like the music, and the neon glowing environment is eye-catching. I never really felt like there was much of a challenge, but it wasn't totally mindlessly easy either. It's a good effort, nicely done!
I played through all the levels and had a good time! I like that you make jumping on the enemies part of the platforming challenge. The controls feel pretty good, nice work!
Very cool idea for a game, I like the puzzle-exploration element mixed in with the obligatory "keeping it alive" aspect. It makes you want to explore and figure out the connections, but with a bit of an added specter of the water running out, it also makes you have to choose sometimes between water or food which is an interesting dynamic to play out. You did good!
Well that was delightfully silly! It reminds me a bit of the biking game Guts and Glory just for the devilish obstacle-course style of the levels and the wacky physics-y ways to die. I think your game could really benefit from some checkpoints, as my one point of criticism, but I thought it was really funny, fun, and cute. Great work!
Like others said it's a pretty simple concept, and yet I spent more time with it than with a lot of other games in this jam! I got 125, the controls are very fluid and once the speed gets high it's all about keeping an eagle-eye on where the next smily face is. Not a lot to look at but I had fun, great entry!
Wow, so this is incredibly challenging. I really love the humor, reading the game description made me laugh out loud, actually playing the game I was not so good at. But I love the creativity, good work
Pretty fun! I like the sort of active tower defense where they can be coming from any direction so you have to really have a good setup on all sides. I didn't really get a lot of shells until I was down many turtles, but once I started really building a lot that last bit of the game lasted a while. The music and sound are a little repetitive but overall good entry!
This was really surprisingly deep! I'm very impressed, played it through to the end. I loved the characters and the jokes, the dancing minigame, the twist ending. Really just very impressed. Great work!
I like the concept, and you came up with a pretty interesting gameplay loop! The music is really cool as well. My biggest complaint is that the UI was very small on my screen so i had a hard time seeing what resources I had. I found your game because our entries both have the same name! Anyway good job on this!
I like the idea of it as sort of a "distracted driving" simulator haha. There were definitely some parts where it was confusing what to do, and with no way to tell how close you are to the destination, it sort of drags on a little too long. But very creative, good entry
I like the concept, I wish that you could retry directly from getting a game over, and only being able to jump while moving was counterintuitive. I thought the screen getting darker and narrower as you took damage was visually appealing, and the graphics and sound in general were pretty good. Good work, keep it up
The art is fantastic! I thought the music was pretty nice, and I like the concept a lot. It was pretty challenging and a little stressful at times. Great entry overall!
This game has really charming graphics and design, I like the level of polish. Sometimes my weapon "upgrades" ended up being much harder to kill enemies with and I feel like I was punished for wanting to try different things, so I'd recommend being able to switch between the various weapons you've unlocked? But overall it's a very solid game, great work
Like others, I wasn't able to figure out exactly what I was controlling, or how to do anything. The art is nice, and the concept seems like it could be good, you should probably teach the players how to play the game a little more clearly! Good entry though, keep it up
I got everything except for Xenon, couldn't figure out what to do for the life of me, but I really loved everything I played up to that point! The art is great, the sound design is lovely (I got a kick out of the "dude" saying "thank you so much"). Playing on a laptop, using the arrow keys with my right hand and the trackpad with my left threw me off a bit, but it's OK, since there's no time-critical things to do it wasn't much of an issue. Great entry!
I really like the art and the music! It's a classic arcade type of challenge that fits the theme very nicely, and I don't think I've played an arcade game quite like it before. I can imagine this having been a hit at arcades in the 80s. Great work
I thought your game was very cute and fun. The boss fight music was great. I thought the fact that your long message shaped body could get hung on the edge of platforms was funny, and it saved me from the pit a few times. Movement was very slippery and the camera was a little too close for comfort in my opinion, but it was a great entry overall, good job!
Hey, so it's a really fun concept for a game, very creative. I just for the life of me could not play it... no matter what angle I ran into the sleepwalker, he seemed to go in a random direction. I couldn't get him past the candelabras in the second level, I tried many times. I think the music was really good too, and the concept is great, just needs more work on the controls. Good entry though!