Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → nk_x_x
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Starship to Lethe | compo | 124 | 3.89 | 3.65 | 3.82 | 4.01 | 4.37 | 3.96 | 4.17 | ||
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | 👥 | The Unseen | jam | 3.85 | 3.28 | 3.50 | 3.42 | 4.00 | 3.16 | 2.33 | 4.33 | |
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | 👥 | congamoeba: the amoebic friendship simulator | jam | 13 | 4.26 | 4.21 | 4.20 | 4.05 | 4.34 | 4.47 | 4.16 | 4.29 |
Really liked the concept and the humour! A little bit sad that the code interface is so hard to use - I'd love to see a cleaned up version after the jam! Plus hey, you totally lampshaded that in the final dialogue so whatever.
Some solid sprite work + I like the concept you were going for. It's a little detail, but I really enjoyed the way you handled going into buildings as well! I'd probably echo the concerns other people have about the text speed, though I'd also say it's a bit eye-straining to have it on that blue background, a darker text box would've been nice.
Fun concept, and a cool set of physicsy puzzles. The water section I had a little trouble with - I ended up just spamming lots of cans, not sure if that was the intended solution? Had a great little 'OH!' moment with the roller door puzzle :D
It's pretty impressive to see such an ambitious idea attempted for a solo jam game! The enemies I felt moved too fast, and some kind of lock on mechanic would definitely have helped make the game more playable. It would've been nice for the game to start off easier and have the difficulty ramp up over time, too. Still, the free camera and movement felt pretty solid for the time allowed!
Hi, D-Studios! Thanks for the feedback - we used the last day of the jam to iterate on a first time experience that helped folks understand what to do without requiring explicit instructions, and it seems to be more hit than miss now, but it's still super valuable to hear from people who don't get it.
Missing arrow key support is sadly a minor bug (the UI actually responds to the arrow keys, but not the character!).
Thanks folks! We might look into posting some more technical details later on. It's mostly pretty simple tricks, but spreading the knowledge is always cool!
I really love the art style, and there's a lot of potential for a cool platformer here! I found it very frustrating to have to start over every time, especially as the jumping is (appropriately!) floaty and there's a few jumps where you can't see the spikes underneath before you try them. I'd suggest only resetting the player back to the last safe spot, and probably aim the camera in front of the player (there's seldom any need to see behind!).
Nice job overall!
really impressed by how much y'all got done - it's pretty polished and there's loads to it! The music and sound design especially struck me as cool.
I died a whole bunch of time by relying on my real world knowledge with one of the early puzzles instead of what the game told me, if that's not too spoilerific. I wonder if other folks had the same problem.
Ya, definitely something cool lurking in this game. Personally, I was a little overwhelmed by the speed at which the stats of each environment change compared to how slow it is to use the satellite to check on them. There seems to be quite a lot of game mechanics affecting each biome, but it was hard to learn them because the information is so hidden away.
I feel like there's a few different directions you could take this, if you wanna develop it further. It could work well as a slower-paced tactical game, or keeping it at this speed but giving players info a little more readily.
A brilliant idea executed perfectly. I swear cruel vengeance upon you for the suffering I have endured at your hands.
Came for the excellent title. Stayed for SICK TUNES, amazing art style (their little faces!) and on-point humour. Best game-over screen of 2020.
I basically couldn't see any of the notes against the background half the time and I don't even care because it's wonderful.
NICE. SMASHED IT.
@freya-c thanks! Yes, I didn't really playtest without a pad and it shows.
I'm planning to upload a non-compo build with some changes, including checkpoints (maybe along with a reduction in health from 3 to 2), and WASD + Mouse controls instead of WASD + Arrows. I hope that addresses things without changing it up from the gamepad experience as much.
@overmolo haha thanks! I got super lucky to stumble upon a level design format that let me spin up content really really fast honestly. even then, about half the time I spent on the game was adding content and playtesting over and over.
@tyler-bay thanks so much! the letters I actually just put in as debug progress text to help with debugging levels on day 2 but I left them and dressed them up with greek letters 'cos I thought they looked cool tbqh, no secret mystery I'm afraid
@maumau thanks! I think that's a great shout - I will add that to my list of things to try out when the compo is over.
I don't know if it's of interest to anyone, but as someone who doesn't actually own any art tools, I thought it'd be fun to write up a postmort of the visuals.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/starship-to-lethe/its-coder-art-oclock-a-visual-postmort-of-my-jam-game
@despdair thanks for the feedback! Yeah, keyboard controls definitely suck. I've got a version of the game that uses the mouse instead, which I'm going to finish and upload as a second download at some point, if you want to try it out post-jam.
I'd really appreciate it if you had more details on the bullet going through shield bug, but no worries. The only reliable bug I know how to reproduce (and fix) is that bullets seem to go through if you don't touch the controls at the start of the game.
@despdair my plan atm with mouse control is to keep WASD for one shield and mouse for the other. The game only expects you to pull off non-45 degree angles with one paddle at a time. I've beaten the game that way myself already and definitely thought it was a bit easier.
Thanks for all the feedback so far, everyone!
@shakedimus some amount of travel-time on the movement is intentional for game balance purposes, but it is indeed much worse than it's meant to be on keyboard. That may just be the default Unity input smoothing, which I should be able to disable, if you'd like to try it again once I've had chance to do that.
OK so first things first, the name pun is basically perfect.
It took me a while to figure out how to use the shears (I intuitively tried to spam left click which did not go well for me or my little friend) but once I did the extreme splatter violence was a hilarious surprise.
Lovely art, and the polishedness of having cutscenes etc was really impressive with the time limit!
Were there more mechanics than just hitting the buttons? I couldn't tell if each level made me mash faster or if it was the sam every time. It would've been cool to have more of a skill-requiring element, like if it needed specific timing or something. Still, really polished little game!
I must've played this for 25 minutes and not finished level 02 oh my god
The high physics sensitivity is super fun and led to a bunch of honestly hilarious deaths, and I loved the crazy bounce you get off enemies. It often turns a victorious moment into "oh crap" in a really silly and enjoyable way. Also love how the water reacts when you drop in it, also neat!
My only real beef is the stickiness of walls even when you've barely started your jump, which doesn't really act as a challenge so much as a frustration that makes certain sections unexpectedly hard. Kept trying to jump too close to a wall and not leaving the ground. I wonder if maybe you could just turn off wall jump for like, 0.2 seconds after pressing the jump button?
I played on controller, which felt really good. As a little note for future jams, maybe, it felt kinda annoying to have to switch to the mouse to restart. Maybe it could just auto-restart after a couple seconds?
Anyway, it was a super fun time with a silly, absurdly difficult little game.
The words just stop after being connected for me, and I don't lose any lives or gain any points. Which is a shame because I think the idea seems really cool!
It doesn't seem super fair to rate it for most of the categories, but you have points from me for innovation because it's a clever concept and I'm sure I'd enjoy it a lot. :)
I was connected to the internet, yes!
Neat little idea!
I did struggle to react fast enough often - several times I died not because I failed to click well enough to a fair degree but seemingly because the now-poisoned food was basically already touching me before I had chance to read what it was. A hint of what food is going to be poisoned next (like in Tetris!) and maybe a visible timer bar showing how long you've got left until it changes would make the game feel much more fair imo.
Concept was super cool, and I like the feel of dodging enemies whilst staying locked on to them. I'm not sure if there is a max distance on the cables but it felt like it and playing like that made it much more interesting in how I dodged them. The slow pace I enjoyed as well. Gave it a sense of slow, steady impending doom which was a nice change of pace for this type of game!
That said, I found it very frustrating actually hooking onto the generators. I can only assume the left/right offset is relative to movement, because what it *felt* like was that they were cleverly heat-seaking the exact opposite of what I wanted, haha :p I found myself pretty constantly healing enemies by mistake so I eventually started just herding every enemy to one side of the screen to get them out of the way, which seems to work ok.
It would've been cool if there'd been a mechanic to force me to change strategies every now and then - but hey, it's a jam and there's not much time!
Presentation is all really good, especially the sound design! The use of the scrolling level to provide instructions was a really slick little detail that I appreciated a lot.
Really love the graphics, especially the blooming flower! It's so pretty!
I was quite confused by the movement controls, and maybe the player's ability to *mlem* is a bit overpowered - being able to sit in the middle and omni-directionally *mlem* like a boss did make finishing the game pretty trivial. Maybe it could've been stronger if there was a limit on where you could aim?
Nice entry, all the same!
Really love the aesthetic & feel! Great work and fun idea.
The addition of a timer was brilliant! Felt super frantic and exciting, which took me by surprise and I enjoyed it a lot.
My only complaints is the puzzle difficulty felt a little unfair - usually it felt like I only lost 'cos I got a sudden crazy hard level after a string of easier ones. I saw the star spawn inside a wall once, too, which I think made it impossible?
Oh my gosh, the little bounce when you start moving pulled at my heartstrings. +1 for being able to speed up text scroll, always love that feature (especially for replaying!)
I like the core loop, it was super smart finding different ways to make use of the same environment, both for making a jam game, and also it's pretty fun as a player to navigate it in different ways each time and remember where things are.
Made it 1159! Pretty cool little game with lovely art - mechanically, we kinda made similar games. I do really like games that require mouse dexterity, so this was my kind of thing.
I did find a lot of the difficulty came from the nails being hard to see against the background. I'm not sure if that was deliberate (or just my eyesight heh) but a slight little glow around them maybe would have helped me a lot.
The armour pickups felt a little unnecessary, when I got them? I wonder if it'd be a cool feature if they popped up right when you're about to get hit by a bunch of nails at once as a twitch-reaction way to escape death.
Such a nice little story, told in a super lovely way! The simple addition of putting the phone down and picking it back up does so much to ground the conversation and make it feel real, what an awesome idea.
Like the dual meaning of the theme in this one, too.
I don't feel like I can judge this 100% fairly playing it solo but honestly even on my own it's pretty fun. The nervous wobbling energy of the little dot people, how they get snagged on corners in the maze level etc, really adds to the frantic feeling and ridiculousness - awesome stuff. The visuals are super charming too!
Whoa, never seen these bits of tech put together in this way before. Very cool! Cool look, too.
My brain got really focused-in on the 3d screen and I could've maybe been helped with an unsubtle visual (or audio) cue to let me know me when the line of dialogue changes - I felt like I missed a fair chunk of it, even after playing through twice.
Like other folks above I also was confused by the doors, especially as there seems to be an unopenable door that doesn't look different to the others. I really liked the effect of the door opening once I worked it out, though! Proper spooky space vibes.
Oh man, @infinite ! I really am blown away by how such a similar concept can be super different in execution but still totally awesome. Love how polished this is, slick presentation, frontend with difficulty select, really nice UI features like the warnings of where the boulders will come from. Great sound design, too.
If I'd nitpick one thing, it's that I found it often a little confusing where my shield would go relative to my cursor position. I felt like I had to move my mouse further to the sides than was intuitive.
Still, though, super impressed.
Super spooky! The core mechanic is a super interesting twist on the Limbo spider scene - I really, really like the idea of a stealth game about controlling sound to get around giant monsters. That said, I did feel like I ended up just cheesing the spider, as I escaped it by abusing the respawn mechanic to spawn on the opposite side of it.
If there's a specific puzzle you had in mind with that, perhaps it'd come across better by resetting the spider too when you respawn?
Good job on the spider procedural movement, btw. I have tried that problem myself in the past and I'm really impressed you took that on in a game jam.
Neat. I especially liked the little touch of the compass that appears only when you need it, solid game design idea.
It might've been good to have an angle for the gameplay to be a bit more of a challenge, or alternatively if there wasn't the threat of a timer. It'd be nice to know what order things get burned in too, as someone above said maybe an inventory of some kind. Once I felt like I'd explored most stuff, I did eventually let it run down to see what happened and it took ages :P
The sound design and music was great, and honestly really loved the little character's walk animation, was totally charming. The mushrooms were a fun addition too.