Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → PatateNouille
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | 👥 | Isekai Summoner | jam | 586 | 3.56 | 3.52 | 3.08 | 3.20 | 3.84 | 3.79 | 4.02 | 3.68 |
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Final Delivery | jam | 290 | 3.84 | 3.65 | 3.56 | 4.11 | 3.52 | 3.45 | 3.82 | 3.69 | |
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | 👥 | Alchemysterious | jam | 666 | 3.57 | 3.26 | 3.39 | 3.26 | 3.64 | 3.55 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Space Train | compo | 460 | 3.44 | 3.28 | 3.94 | 2.81 | 4.26 | 3.89 | 2.76 | 3.52 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Monstrous Affection | compo | 436 | 3.52 | 3.02 | 3.36 | 3.11 | 3.69 | 2.42 |
A fun little game, the cooldown on the attack probably is too slow, the collisions with the environment can be a bit complicated to avoid, but it's a nice work, especially with such short time to make it.
Good job ;)
I think that's the first game ever to have a shotgun useful only for long-range combat and a machine-gun way better in close-range combat xD
Anyway, for some proper feedback, the difficulty is very high, i don't know if the difficulty scale isn't proportinal to the number of player but in solo i couldn't get under 1:40 remaining in normal, and it has to do with mainly two things i think :
First one being at some point there is so much enemies i'm not sure you could kill them all even if you fire constantly, especially since the shotgun is very efficient but if the enemies get too close it's not efficient at all, as all bulelts hit only enemy. This kinda leads to a vicious cycle, where if you let some enemy get too close, it's harder to kill them and have the nice "AoE" of the shotgun, which lets even more enemies get close, and closer. Whereas what you would usually want is to have the game becoming easier the more you are in danger, and harder the better you're at it, to create a natural balance so to speak.
The other one would be that the repair parts only spawns in the right side of the screen, this isn't a problem while you're clearing enemies efficiently, but, if you are good enough to clear those enemies this early, then they probably didn't even hit you, while when they reach the left side, it's usually because you are getting overflown with enemies, and you can't simply let them be while you clean up the right side to get some health, as it's usually not worth it : getting to the wrenches get you close to the monsters too, plus by the time you get some health you most likely lose, this issue is made worse by the first one, because while there aren't too many enemies health pickups are useless, but once there are many, clearing the necessary plus enough to get to a wrench is just too much.
I still had a lot of fun, i really like this kind of game and the never ending stream of monsters has this creepy effect, would love to see more kinds of monsters and maybe more mechanics for the player.
But still, great job ! ;)
The mood is there, even if it's only a sound and low lighting, feel like you didn't got the time for msot of what you planned, generally speaking trying something new during a jam is a really ballsy choice, as you'll spend most of the jam trying to learn how to do it, i'd recommend trying a few things before to get familar with the engine ;)
I loved it ! Awesome feeling, especially when you start to know the keys, very cool game, very well done ! :D
Awesome game ! Really cute ambiance, i like how the music is changed by how much flame you have left, the graphics are very good (although the kind of motion blur on the very bright part is really weird and it's difficult to see when you have the flaming tail in front of the camera.
Nice puzzles and environment, really nice audio, the character controller is really nice, although moving the tail when holding shift could be easier.
Again, awesome work ! :D I reached a room (the first one where you have to use the Q+E) with three flamable leaves going up, and i can't find how to get past it, i try burning them all at the same time, tried reaching the leaves behind the kind of "tower" the leaves are in, is it the end or is there more beyond ?
Good job ;)
Nice fun game, my only complaint would be about the asteroids you have to avoid since it's the only event that don't rely so much on the player's skills, you can sometimes get into a situation where you can't avoid being hit.
The first time i played i died in about 20 seconds, a tutorial or a gradually increasing difficulty at the start would really be nice, although the second time i managed to survive for 10 minutes (no end screen sadly D:), the variety of the events is very cool, and i like how some gets more difficult by asking for three keys instead of two, sometime spaced. For some reason i only had pirates in the two first minutes, after that no pirates until the end, not sure if it is intentional.
Anyway, really cool work :ok_hand:
@shadow30 i played the first one, i know there's a more recent one but as i was going to rate the game i thought trying onthe version that was posted during the jam made more sense. Also i hadn't read the whole page and saw that in the updated version there was an end screen and a better difficulty curve for the beginning.
About the asteroids, shooting could destroy them, or maybe just push them ?
Those bugs didn't changed much to the note i gave, it wasn't supposed to be here anyway so rating it as a part of the game is a bit extreme :thinking: Also as a sidenote i actually found the game only hard at the beginning, probably because i had to learn how it worked, but actually found it easier between 3 and 8 minutes in, on the end i had a lot more events which made it harder though. Overall i think you could increase the difficulty, or maybe add an option to do so
Nice mechanic, went through all levels, finding the last energy ball can be difficult one certain levels, i feel like the rotation of the balerine could have affected the player too
Not sure if the difficulty curve is balanced, but it is a bit extreme at some point, i went from 2 mushrooms needed, to 11, the 46 vegetables and 12 mushrooms, then 158 vegetables, while i only add 25 in storage capacity, so i couldn't complete any card, which mean i couldn't get any money and i could just press next day until i lost.
Also, blight plants are OP, i had 3 and in only a couple days two upgraded and they spread a bit, i had just enough money to buy one stone but after that by the time i would have had enough resources to complete a card they went level max and covered about a quarter of the map :o
**However**, the game feels really nice and i loved the idea and its realization, designing this type of game for a jam is super hard, so very good job here :D
I had a lot of fun and would likely play a more evolved version ;)
Fortunately i didn't encountered any difficulties to do that, i simply set every frame the rotation to have the same forward but to use the position for the up, apply a custom gravity force toward the planet center and the physics do the rest ;)
Thanks a bunch everyone !
The character controller is indeed very slippery, didn't had time to get back on it as the rest took so much time, but i am improving it
@ytaha long feedback ! nice ! :D 44h of work to be precise, i barely slept and ate but it was worth it apparently :D I really appreciate the comparison, although Astroneer has much more content than my game ^^
I wondered if it was going to be confusing to let the numbers on the icons and it was, it is indeed a lsit of all accepted items, it should be clearer.
I guess miscrafting is part of the learning curve of the game, not sure how i could improve it
For some reasons i thought that adding a cooldown to the hit on the object that was being hit rather than on the player was a good idea, resulted in a super weird feeling, plus as there is no feedback on what's happening when mining it's even more confusing. I changed it to make the player unable to interact with anything after hitting a rock or else, which works a lot better, i also rebalanced the number of hit points the deposits have, and reduced the hit cooldown, mining is faster and less confusing now
I finished about 10 minutes before the deadline, transition between planets wasn't a thing up until an hour and a half before that, it was a tight schedule at least xD
Uh, i had some issues with the scene managing but i thought i solved the issues, it happens the first time you take the rocket, when you're still in the menu (where there are info bubbles everywhere) ? D:
I'll definitely make a post-compo version, i don't have that much time as i'm working on another game for school meanwhile but i really want to continue making it, i'll probably post the post-compo version on itch
@bmacintosh you have to drop the correct ingredients on the top of the factories, there's a yellow text saying "Drop Here", you can see what are the ingredients needed by looking above the factory, there's a bubble with icons, and a text to describe what you need, for example when launching the game the factory needs 2 rocks to produce 1 ingot, just to your left there are some rocks lying around, pick them up and drop them onto the factory (PS: you have a jetpack, just hold space, in case that's what you missed ?) (PPS: there are two drop zones on a factory, one is for the fuel, the other for the ingredients, the highest and largest one is for the ingredients)
@henrycgs thanks ! There is an info bubble on the starting planet though, but there is a ton of them, didn't had the time to make a tutorial script to make them appear and disappear when needed unfortunately.
c.PNG
I checked and noticed one of the recipes shows the wrong items indeed, it doesn't use 4 gaz tanks but 6 ingots to make, it's due to an issue of how i create the icons, sorry about that ^^" Yeah there's no respawn of objects, so if you run out of fuel on the planet its game over basically, but this is by design though, but not having a monster is really weird :thinking:
@mirck782 thanks mate ! i should write it on the page, same issue as above, didn't catch the bug before i had to send the game. I'm still working on it so a post compo version should arrive at some point :P
@bmacintosh Glad you enjoyed :D Beam of lights is actually a very good idea ! I think i'll add that to the game ! ;) And also for the rocket part, well, indeed placing the uranium artefact (it's supposed to be some kind of uranium even though its name is never shown) will update the icons, but it's effect is to give infinite fuel to a factory, the recipe always was 6 ingots i just had an issue in my function to change the icon contents :/
@ownedstuff thank you ! I'm still working on the game, controls and interaction were the first thing to get reworked ^^ and technically there's an infinite amount of level since except the first one the planet's props are procedurally generated, plus once you finished the tutorial you don't have to redo it to play the game ;)
It seems i had an issue with inventory management, them monster could eat an item forever if it's inventory had 0 of it, just because a slot for that item was registered, and vegetables are stored before the meat in the invenotry so once you give it some vegetables it basically becomes vegetarian xDD
@ytaha @henrycgs @mirck782 I've created an itch.io page and uploaded the first updated version ! I also created a Trello to track the state of the game. There's not much that changed for now, mainly bugfix and some QoL, but i'll post devlogs and newer version every now and then on itch :
https://patatenouille.itch.io/monstrous-affection https://trello.com/b/YhDxMuLY/monstrous-affection
Cool graphics, the controls are a bit fiddly, for example attacking a cow when you're surrounded by steaks is quite hard as you grab them from very far. Some more difficulty and maybe a more complex behaviour for the beast would make a really fun game :)
Really nice idea even though i can see you ran out of time, would love to see more of it ;)
Nice idea ! Overall nice work too !
I feel like the skulls shouldn't be able to spawn that close to the companions, as there's no chance you can kill them in a few frames.
Also found an exploit : the companions can pass through the exterior walls, so if you just turn your back to it they will be unreachable, especially if the wall is above or to the right of the player, it's cheat but it could be an interesting mechanic too, you can't move otherwise they'll get out of the wall, so you only are invicible while standing still, combine that with the hardest difficulty and the gameplay turns into a rush to a safe spot, clear out the skulls, wait for an opportunity to move and repeat, which I quite liked :P
Another thing : seems like you can't shoot 1 bullet per frame, so with a spam click macro you could turn the gun into a machine gun, which could also be turned into a mechanic, say an ability for some time or with limited ammo to have a minigun
I like the mechanic of throwing your health at the nemies to kill them, it palce the player in a dangerous position but it also is the only way to kill enemis to reduce the threat, making every shoot almost a strategic choice. Even more if you consider that monsters don't attack you if you don't have It Alive in your hands, so making sure to kill enough enemies while having land in a safe spot to then crawl on the monsters to reach it.
I think the thing i can the most criticise is the controls, which are quite hard to use precisely, it would probably make more sense to be able to throw in the direction you point rather in the opposite, could be funnier to throw the box around if it was simple to aim. The other only thing that bothered me was the enemies stepping on me, making me stuck and unable to do anything, being able to push them a bit and jump on them would be really nice ;)
Otherwise you made a pretty good job, would love more levels and to see what this mechanic could turn into :P
Oh wow ! awesome game !
The combination of very tiny characters, a lot of elements in front of them and the attacks of the enemy that takes forever to strike can make the combat quite hard, especially during the last room.
It took me around 20 tries before completing it, despite getting very close on some attempts I would always end up dying by some enemy that started attacking when I passed it a few seconds ago, with some bad luck this enemy would be behind an element of the scenery and well, it feels like it could be improved.
The aiming with the ranger is very hard to pull off in combat : you have to dodge both the arrows and the melee enemies, but while aiming you can't move and it can take a few seconds for the cursor to get back where you want it, and you have to be very precise to hit your target. So unless you can make the perfect shot when the cursor first come up or when it just starts to come down you will most likely have to miss, kill a bunch of enemies before getting another chance at taking the shot, by which time more enemies have spawned, etc...
I think this could be just a question of timing, maybe sometime the respawn delay could be longer so that you have time to take aim. Or maybe have a discrete auto aim lock, if you shoot close enough to a trajectory that would hit someone, it modify the shot a bit so that it does hit.
On the other hand, the warrior is kinda OP, you just have to run back and forth while spamming Ctrl, since there's not really a cooldown on you attack ability it destroys everything on its way. Might be worth to have a cooldown every 3 attacks, so it doesn't become too difficult but still involves a bit of thinking.
One more minor thing was when switching character, the change of velocity feels weird, especially when you are in mid air, or when you just landed but the other characters are still in the air. Instead of teleporting the character you were controlling and taking the place of the next, it could feel better (and prevent the player from infinitely teleporting back in the air if they mash the shift key) if you teleported the new character and override its velocity with the one you previously had, and let the previous character move toward its place in the queue.
Now onto the pros, the mood is incredibly cool, I love the scale of the environment, the feeling of greatness and mystery with the music is very present. It does remind me of the mines of Erebor. ;)
The lighting is really nice, it's not too difficult to see but it still gives the sensation of not seeing much, the fact you can temporarly increase the radius of the light helps mitigating this issue.
Being able to see the particles when you kill an enemy through the scenery is really nice, don't have to wait in a visible area to see if an enemy will come out at some point.
Having the different sounds for each character helps a lot when you're not sure which one you had and how many switch does it take to get to the one you want.
Looking forward to seeing the next part of King Lamborg's mines (got that right ?) !
Nailed the visual style and sound design that's for sure ! The gameplay wasn't very clear though, it took me some time to realize what the coins did, what were the purple things that I picked up, and I'm still very confused about several things.
For example both the column 0 and the row 0 are very difficult to reach, sometimes portal would take you from 1 to 5, or from 1 to 0, same the other way around (5 to 1 or 5 to 0), having the rotated grid is already difficult to map out where you are going to end up, adding to that the inconsistent wrapping made it really seem like a maze. For the room preview I don't know if I misunderstood how they worked but oftenly I'd see a key preview, walked towards it, but would never reach it even after a couple room. Also is there a reward for exploration ? My lives and scrolls would randomly go up, sometimes by a lot, I had like 5 lives and 0 scrolls, the next room I had 9 lives and 4 scrolls without picking up anything.
The limited scrolls idea is interesting, but since you don't know where the monster is going to go, unless you're really far you pretty much have to use a scroll every room, or at least every couple room, especially considering the map is pretty small. And when you run out you're just blindly moving hoping to not land on the monster.
@thebmxeur I'm doing exactly that, and I would agree, didn't had much time to test other controls. Do you think if I reset the offset once you teleport it could be better ? Originally I thought the player wouldn't spend a lot of time off the tracks hence why I had him hold the click, but in the end you're just holding a lot the button.
@chensu Thank you ! I'm not very familiar with unreal yet, thanks for the tip !
It's not really made obvious but the fuel consumes 3 times faster while not on the tracks, but if you have enough power capsules in front there's indeed not really a need to go back, i wanted to add more wall of asteroids and some of them would've forced you to get back on the tracks, or maybe it could've increased the score while flying wouldn't. Originally the timing for teleporting was much quicker and I regret making much slower just to match the SFX length, but I didn't have enough time to change it afterwise unfortunately, I'll try to make a more complete version over the next few days.
the sexy booby url did not work in my more recent browser, disappointed
I really like the concept behind the game, and had quite some fun playing it!
However the building of turret is way too slow to be able to react to your defenses being broken, having to right click > click the turret button, mash Q/E to rotate a bunch, then click again for *every* tower is too much, especially when enemies are coming from the bottom of the screen. Several ways to speed this up would be to : - be able to place multiple towers without having to reselect and re rotate every time - save the last rotation used and use it for the next tower - have shortcuts to select the towers (1,2,3,4 for example) - change the rotation system : you could click to place a tower, then while holding the click move in a direction, and orient the tower towards the cursor
Despite being quite simple the game works quite well, gj !
ok, the beginning was a bit difficult, took me some time to figure out what had to be done, but the screenshots on this page got me on track, I only noticed the shecmatic was explaining what to do after completing my second bomb just to get the 100% completion. First time around I *accidentaly* yeeted the hammer too hard, and it glithed into the wall, near the ceiling before eventually falling on the other side... at least the hammer got out of this room, it might be enjoying a nice drink on the beach by now, who knows ? Apart from that the controls were a bit tedious to use to get he near perfect match in rotation needed for a few of the pieces, and well, the physic was... quite unstable to say the least, but I guess this fits the theme :p
PS: the potato is very hard to find, a bit too much imo, at least there was the clue on the whiteboard, even if I was looking for sugar instead, and thought that was what I found when I found the potato, before the subtitles told me otherwise
This is a game that spends way too much time being awesome, and not enough being awesome even more !! I WANT MORE !!! No butt seriously, great game !
That was fun! I originally missed the "you can jump on platforms" and thought I was stuck once I stopped on one, glad I tried clicking otherwise I would've missed a lot, the game area is much bigger than I thought and it was fun exploring it, trying to get a high score and to the end, although until I got to it I did not think there was an end. Also great music choice, brought memories back, been so long since I last heard it! I would've liked to see a bit more juice added tho, and the score made a bit more central, with maybe "+200" popping up on the screen as you win points, things like that. I also mistook the timer for the score at first and was wondering why the hell I was gaining point automatically rather than by hitting things, until I finally looked at the bottom left xD
I liked the concept, but playing was a bit difficult.
Firstly, I noticed the terrain could not be changed from the comments and while playing, which is a shame because this is imo a more important mechanic than the guardians being able to move or attack, since it's the one mechanic that ties to the theme and is pretty unique compared to other games of the same genre.
Secondly, as others stated, the camera was a bit cumbersome from time to time, when the target is close, it works decent enough, but when they are far away it's difficult to control the camera to frame them correctly
Finally, the selection of entities and validation of actions were super sensitive, as in most of the time clicking would not do anything, I would have to click ~20 times for an attack to finally trigger, despite the target cell not being red. I eventually noticed clicking directly on the enemies' sprites worked better for attacking them, but even then it was very finicky.
The game looks awesome, and the concept is interesting enough that despite all those issues I would still like to try an improved version with all the mechanics in and better controls.
@dante2001 Hi ! Thanks for playing ! We originally planned to just fix up the few missing things, but we got carried away and are redoing the whole level, clues, recipes and machines. For ratings it would be better indeed to release just a hotfix version with the few missing parts fixed, but at this point we're really just doing it for the fun of doing it rather than the jam itself...
For the axe, you actually don't have to pick it up anywhere, it shows up when you interact with a mineral deposit (the things that looks like piles of rocks and say "Hold to mine" when looking at them). This is a rather good example of how unclear the game is xD
The walls actually have a collider, but we used Rigibody.MovePosition, which despite sort of having collisions seems to have issues with small colliders (probably not doing sweep test, even though it's set to continuous detection), using the velocity instead works perfectly.
You're right about itch.io ! We choose mega because it was faster to upload there, and we finished uploading ~30 seconds before the end of the submission hour... But we could and definitely should do it now that there's time.
As for rating other people's game, we're waiting for a proper version of our game (which we want to get out by the end of the week) before rating, so that as few people as possible try the game in this messy version.
@dante2001 Hi, we're on the final strecth, expect a build uploaded today ! We did not had much time during the week-end so it was a bit delayed, but we reached a quality we're proud of. We're finishing the last details, doing some more playtesting to ensure we don't forget crucial elements this time.
If we go on a rating spree we should be able to get some ratings before the end of the jam !
@dante2001 Ok, the new version is up ! We encountered some issues with the lighting and a font that weren't fixed in time, but we added temporary solutions and at least this time the game is doable ! Hope you'll enjoy !
In the meantime we'll get some well deserved sleep and go rate as many games as we can before the end of the jam.
@gamebucha @lilkrit @nekopi @lychee thanks to you all for playing and commenting !
@lychee yeah for the three days we had it was a bit overscoped, tho we did waste the entire first day looking for assets, coded all the necessary things during the next two, but only started actually making the game level in the last 4-5 hours... It was quite frustrating to have made everything, but simply did not had the time to use it and properly design the level.
Also I am curious how far each of you made it into the game ? Were the hints sufficient to understand what to do ? or did you get stuck at some point ?
@fabula-rasa Hi, yeah the jam build is very buggy unfortunately, it can't be completed as its missing several crucial items and even a hint to make the final step
@xsangyhix thanks ! Yeah, I recommend checking out the V2 if you want to see a fixed up version. We actually did a lot of playtesting while making the game, the game started working at half the jam, but we sticked to dev test scenes without making an actual level, which we only started making at the end of the jam...
Woa ! Amazing game ! The story and the ambience were really nice, I played a bit recklessy on my first attempt, skipped the encounter under the large sign by going through the mountain, runned into the fire tornados, tried to horde some zombies at the end before getting to the ship with only 17 stability left... I redid the game and skipped everything but the first dialog, hiking some more outside the designed area, just to see the good ending. :P A simple game overall but really effective at that, it reminded me of soma a lot, with less content obviously but still, an impressive deed !
192 seconds here ! The randomness of the spawning rate got me in my first game, for some reason no enemy spawned in like 15 seconds giving me enough time to reach max temp, but in my second I lost because the whole level was littered with cooling canisters and I could no longer flee all the enemies without collecting a lot of them, and ending up sloing my shooting rate too much. I eventually got trapped between too many enemies and got exploded. In the end, I guess heaters gonna heat ! Cool game !
Quite enjoyable, I listened to my own music while playing, I guess that's the advantage of not having one in game haha and had fun scamming towns by selling them their own goods at a much higher price they fixed themselves, the buffoons !
It's a bit RNG dependent though whether you can progress or not, as sometimes you get towns with cheap cannons straight away, and sometimes the first 10 towns have none, and then every enemy ship becomes a tank.
I unfortunately could not finish the game, despite getting many attempts that were going well, it consistently throws an error when I reach about halfway through the world, which forces me to refresh the page.
I liked that the winds are very strong and push you around, it made the battles less repetitive.
The boat spawn rate felt weird, some games I had no enemy boats, some game I would have them constantly spawning and have a good 4 boats around at all times, it feels dependent on the region too, whatever it is I could benefit from being a little more tame early game, once you get a few cannons it's not as problematic as you can destroy them all.
I couldn't get past level 3, even with the SMG you still have to move and up and hit all your shots which makes it fairly hard, not to mention the recoil.
Up until half of level 3 I found the best strategy was to keep the pistol and buy a new one instead of reloading. That allowed me to shoot indefinitely which made it a lot more manageable.
That was really cool !
The controls felt nice and the levels played quite well, the sound effects are good too.
Most of the text was way too fast for me to read it in time though, apart from the final where the text was then really slow haha.
Also, that was indeed a nice delivery box hehe.
Got to $5685 on my playthrough.
That was so great ! Really impressive to get this much for a jam game. Reminded me of Super Metroid.
Dope music, great visuals, good sound design overall.
Shooting bullets in the conducts in the beginning was my only problem, as they are kinda big and for some reason on my first playthrough they wouldn't stay alive for more than a few frames, so I basically had to stuck the gun in the slug's mouth to deal damage haha.
I found the cat pictures immediately, but had to restart as without the jetpack getting back to the level wasn't possible heh, I did go back later to discover the last two pictures.
The boss was simple but it worked, learned the rhythm and managed to beat it without taking any damage.
It was fairly short but I enjoyed it quite a lot. Amazing game !
Great game ! It was pretty fun to try and match the color of the truck to the package, just for an extra challenge haha. And also to make pretty rainbow trucknados :truck:
My only issue was with barriers that sometimes would allow trucks through, sometimes not, and I could not figure out why. It seems like the trucks that can pass through are the ones drawn after the one that presses the button maybe ?
That was a satisfying little game nonetheless. Good job !
Fun little game !
The graphics are simple, but at least they don't make it hard to understand what's going on.
The control scheme did feel a bit too slow, especially because the truck doesn't slide against buildings much when at an angle or other situations where you need to reverse, it lost a lot of time for not much.
Turns out I preferred driving backwards, the way it behaves is similar but I found it made it feel better when taking corners, it might just be me, but I crashed a lot less this way.
I also wished I had an hand brake to quickly stop or turn around more easily.
The minimap was very helpful, though the icons could've been smaller as they hid the roads surrounding the parcels/drop off points.
I feel like the game in this state is a bit of a blank slate, as in the gameplay base is there, but it's waiting for something more to make it pop off.
Overall had fun still, my highscore was 19 packages delivered !
Really cool game ! The difficulty felt high but I managed to beat it on my second try.
I liked the different attacks - my favorite was the sniper one, as you can risk more or less and try to find a route through the bushes to not need to stop, there was some skill in learning how much you could risk. - the mortar field felt inconsequential, even without armor running through was mostly ok - the mines felt worst as the reveal range was fairly short, it meant you had to stop a lot and made it the slowest one
It felt both long and relentless, as I had to keep delivering and making painstakingly slow progress, even with the maxed mining speed.
The rhythm at which stations went down was in my opinion too high, very often I would go refill a station only for it be downed 2 seconds after I left.
That caused me to be unable to upgrade for the last 3-4 minutes of the game as the research station was downed immediately every single time.
The upgrades also felt a bit weak, despite being able to carry way more and having upgraded the station defense and package quality, I could barely maintain a single of the station needs to the max.
I liked that each station served a different purpose though, it gave a sense of choice on to what to prioritize when multiple of them are downed.
I would often be a bit too hasty and leave while giving the items, which made the station not give any research point. Though I had more than enough to fully upgrade (except for the last level as the research station kept dying haha)
The npc dialogs were funny, they made each trip a little less repetitive, at least until you've seen every line. And I liked they revealed how to approach each attack, although I did not end up needing the tips, I think it's a cool way to add a tutorial.
Overall I think it only misses a bit of polish on the balancing/difficulty but it's a very solid game ! Congrats !
@leorid oh, yeah it took me a good 15-20 min I think, the additional time probably came from looking in the upgrade menu or selecting what to carry.
On my first attempt I did not go for the loan upgrade and eventually got way behind, everything was 100% empty. So on my second attempt (the winning one) I bee lined this upgrade, only bought carry capacity before it haha.
It makes sense the enemy are scaling yeah, I think it could be interesting to have them scale on a delay compared to the player, so when you get an upgrade you're more powerful for a short while, and then they have a sudden spike of level up and become hard again until you get another upgrade. This said it didn't specifically bother me while playing.
Yeah it felt like the constant "everything is falling" could've happen later, but on the other hand, without constantly having something that needs you, the pace could've suffered until it started being hectic. In the end it might not be an issue apart from lacking a tutorial/introduction moment while you're still learning what to do and launching you straight into it.
I did notice the stations were safe zones actually, but still sometimes couldn't resist the urge to leave immediately haha. Maybe could make them into an underground bunker, so when the player gets there it visually changes the environment, maybe tones down the SFX of the battlefield, it could then give a feeling of rest. Though it's not the like 6 points I missed that would've changed anything, I was stockpiling on those by the end anyway.
Not sure if it's related but not getting the points only happened on the defense station. Maybe it's just because it's vertical, so it was less obvious where the invisible line to get into it was.
Surprisingly simple yet still difficult from your own impatience and inevitably touching another item causing a chain reaction and everything getting out of control in a matter of seconds.
Eventually found a good order to put the items in, stopped them at the appropriate rotation and slowly slotted them in.
A satisfying short experience ! Great job !
Fun game, I like that characters are introduced with different habits and progressively becomes less obvious. I would even like to see an extended version with even more obscure recipients, maybe as a bonus objective ?
I liked that there was an underlying story in which you could participate, without being explicitly told you can have an impact. I picked up on JP colluding with the organization, but didn't realize all it took was for me to route the letters to someone else until the last letter evidently revealing their involvement.
The visuals were really nice too, really fitting for the kind of vibe the game is going for, and although I would've liked just a few sounds or a soothing ambient track it came out as a really well polished experience.
Reading from the comments that wrongly sent letters would come back, I did not appear to have made a mistake in the sorting process. I feel as if I'm an expert postman, yay ! :joy:
Anyway, props on making a great game, had a good time playing it !
Hm I like the idea, but just the fact that the items incoming are random makes it hard to play. I spent most of the timer waiting for the right item to come by, failing delivery after delivery. I would sometime get one of the two required items, but not the other one.
It might have been better to remove some items to make it at least possible to complete most orders, or give multiple orders at the same time so there's a higher likelihood there is something to do.
I also got the bug with the claw getting an item and being unable to drop it or grab anything else on the second ever item I grabbed, which made me super confused as how you were supposed to play until I tried restarting the game haha.
Well I can definitely sense that your previous game served as a base, although it's good to see the controls were improved. :P
I'm still not too much a fan of collectathons so after falling in the water near the end of a level on multiple occasion I couldn't be bothered to redo everything and collect every single meat piece again.
I managed to softlock myself too which forced a restart of the game : turns out doors can be interacted with when you stand right on top of it : a text saying "Can't unlock" appears and pressing F closes the door, permanently closing it.
Jumping on the enemies wasn't great, kinda finicky to perfectly land on them and the bouncing off being physics based meant it could be hard to predict and occasionally threw me into a deadly situation.
I think I would've preferred less levels and higher polish, small stuff like : - some checkpoints, - a small tutorial bit, - an objective indicator showing where to go these could've eased the experience a lot for me and make me willing to try harder to complete the game.
The art is really cool, I liked the animations and the general vibe. Sound wise it's lacking a bit, the music is nice but barely or no sound effects on a lot of actions make them feel a bit underwhelming, especially when you're doing them again and again across the retries.
For the gameplay, I would've liked a bit more interactions possible with the egg, it feels like the game would've barely changed without it. The only two notable consequences were the few puzzles requiring to throw the egg at a target and enemies running away with it, though that only happened once in my playthrough.
What if instead of damaging the enemies by jumping on them, you do it by throwing the egg on them ? Turns throwing from something to avoid to a double edged one : You need to throw it to kill enemies But it would give them a chance to grab it
Could be interesting to then design everything around the egg : - Different throw moves (directly in front, upward, just placing it down, etc) having different uses, adding depth to it - Enemies that are designed with the level design in mind, so you don't ignore 95% of them until they somewhat bother you enough to take the time to kill them but are an integral part of the gameplay
Imagine placing the egg down to attract an enemy, rolling the egg like a bowling ball and damaging everything in its path, but losing a health point upon impact with a wall etc
Well anyway this is long enough as it is. Hopefully this was helpful and did not come across as bossy, it wasn't the intention.
@pavel-tararin For sure yeah, it probably would be over-scoped to do everything I mentioned.
My point was more than instead of having several long levels I would rather have a shorter but more in depth and polished experience.
Though that's just my opinion, and like I said this isn't particularily my type of game so it might be irrelevant.
This said, the game was fairly polished, just difficult without checkpoints.
The first few attempts were difficult to get into, forgot to pickup the boxes, took my time to turn around and look for doors until I was stuck between robots, basically that a few times.
But then... I started mastering the rocket jump and it started to be pretty fun !
Zipping around the level, finding alternate doors and better/easier routes, timing the jumps perfectly to get to each door directly, etc.
Although the enemies were only a danger if I stopped in the same place for a while at that point, as I was able to move to anywhere very quickly. And that only became easier as the number of enemies increased throughout the waves, which turns out makes the pathfinding much slower, so by wave 10-15 the enemies found their paths after I had already left, it also felt like they took more time to attack me when I was nearby.
It also made a dent in the framerate, although it wasn't too bad it was still harder to nail the tight timing jumps, like from the ground to the overpass highway or the building top green door. I was going for those for style points but started going for the ground alternatives then.
Reached wave 30, by that point the lag was quite bad though, I had a lot of pizza boxes lying around, as wave 23 repeats and you can't pickup the boxes anymore, but they still spawn for every wave.
Lastly, I'm not sure if the regen health option in the shop is broken or has special condition, but I could not buy it.
To close it off I climbed to the top of the gigantic building by rocket boosting on the side multiple times and was thinking "hey there must be an easter egg up there !", there wasn't, thought I at least had a cool screenshot to share, but saw someone posted nearly the exact same above, oh well :joy: except mine is from wave 30 with a mess of boxes on the ground so still posting it haha Capture.PNG
It was difficult to keep up with doing both at the same time, I would often just focus on playing tetris after building up a lot of tetrominos in advance, but then forgot to put them on the belt so I still lost despite everything going fine haha. Fun concept though, having a second player could definitely make it entertaining
This might be my highest rating yet !
The windows were a bit fiddly to select, sometimes they wouldn't want to pass in front of the others, but apart from that I really had a lot of fun.
I do have a soft spot for command based games, so there's that, but even then I think it was really clean.
The small screen space means you have to juggle between windows and adds to the chaos, but there is still some space to put the map, terminal and orders all at once and still see most of it.
the commands and map worked really well, it felt intuitive to use and it wasn't punishing, ie dropping the items in the wrong location wouldn't destroy the item, you could just pick it back up and bring to the right place.
The music tracks were really fitting.
The 300 seconds for the big order was fairly generous, but still fairly tight, I made a few mistakes and finished with just about 10s remaining, phew, thankfully heron is a fast boi.
I could have used autocomplete or a command history, but I'm already grateful that I was able to move the caret and change text in the middle of a command.
I did wished there was a scroll bar for the messages in Sluck!, as I sometimes barely had time to read a message while new ones where incoming, I did not miss any in the end though.
Especially with the timer, it really reminded me of Hacknet, which is among my favorite games.
Overall really loved it all around. Amazing job !
Fun idea, that makes me want to make this kind of "check the details" game.
Though that teleporter man... I'm going to have to bring it back and play the warranty card ! It's : - too small, all the big boxes have to glitch through the top to get to it - kinda buggy, very often I would have boxes sitting in the teleporter for up to several minutes on end without teleporting, during this time I'd have a huge pile up of boxes I could not send anywhere. - too slow, even when it doesn't pout I constantly have a queue of packages to send waiting for it.
Physics based packages on its own is already challenging, as you accumulate delays it gets increasingly difficult to manipulate them, but with that whimsical teleporter it's frustrating.
Stamps would not always show when placed, which could make it confusing to know if a box was done correctly.
There also seemed to be next to no consequence of doing your job super poorly, the only thing I noticed was a special sound playing when throwing a non cursed item in the pit. I'm guessing you didn't have time to implement a bigger consequence but once you realize it as a player it takes the charm away.
I have no idea what the number at the top right corner is, if it's meant to be a score then it just kept increasing whatever I was doing.
There didn't seem to be an end, neither losing or winning, so I eventually just closed the game, at that point the top right number read 49700, or close to that.
Overall I think using physics could be ok, but the boxes felt too big in general, even with no queue or buggy teleporters it was difficult to make the box go where you wanted them to, I feel like this might be intended but it makes it disappointing when you correctly label everything and still can't do it right because the boxes just won't fit or block each other across the different conveyors.
It looks like the stamps were made using decals, I think in this case, where packages are basic cubes, it would make sense to have a textured quad placed instead, it would be more performant, wouldn't display through/on other boxes. Though you would have to clamp the stamp to be fully inside a face, otherwise it will poke out in the air haha.
I think the stamps that don't show up are based on the sides of the boxes they are placed on, maybe the sides pointing in the box's local negative axes ? If that helps.
Anyway, making this kind of games during a jam is quite a challenge as they work best when they have a good amount of content, so I feel like you did a pretty good job in spite of the issues.
@jeff-kerman thanks ! I'm thinking of adding a progress meter to help determine when there's nothing left to do !
@obe-dot thank you !
@mathead Haha, glad you enjoyed it !
@darchankaen Thanks ! I would've liked to add more interactions and maybe choices gameplay-wise, as it is it's a kind of interactive story more than a game. Glad you liked the Terminator references haha !
@tom-oak Thanks !
Ah I did not try it on speaker, I hesitated to add a couple other sliders to control the music/voices individually but didn't do it in the end. A lesson learned here.
Haha the story definitely isn't a fine piece of writing, I'm happy it was still interesting despite the absurdity.
Thank you all for the kind words !
@surweaver Yeah I was aware of the slider doing that, but still every time I'm like "why is the volume lowering, is my dialog audio system broken somehow o.O"
@freshbone When the main objective is completed the quit button appears (albeit not working, but it says it's okay to quit at least "^^), but it lets you continue as there is an optional side story to complete. I originally intended to have a couple more and have new dialog once the box is delivered, but I spent the time on polish instead.
@stephanschue Yeah, I'm going to publish a patch during the week-end fixing the audio slider and a few other issues. Glad you had fun !
@its-capp Thank you a lot ! I'm hoping to make a post-jam version with a few levels, more stories, more interaction types, your comment makes me want to do it faster haha :blush:
@gordienkogames Hey, there are a few context clues when talking with the various npcs, a hint : the dog is related to the second floor. If you get stuck, you probably have to talk more, some npcs have interactions that are only possible once you've talked with others. Also they have more than one dialog line in case you did not interact multiple times with the same door.
@piano-forte Thanks ! Very glad you liked the terminator style haha, spent an entire day just on the interface an cinematics. The next patch is adding a slider to control the music separately and I made it quieter while npcs are talking by default, hopefully that should fix the issue for future players.
@fedora Thanks a lot for the review ! I just added subtitles in a patched version, if you feel like you missed too much and are willing to give it a try again. Beware they are decently fast, as they are synced with the voice lines.
@jk5000 Thank you ! Several people had trouble with the voices, but this should be no more, there is no a slider for changing the music volume on its own, and the volume during dialog is lower by default too.
@kreshi Same as above for the slider. I'm glad you found the hint system intuitive, as without it it probably is quite hard to figure out the whole thing.
@sneakyfox If I may, how was the ending disappointing ? As in the plot doesn't lead to something interesting maybe ?
Also, have you seen the Terminator movies ? as the beginning and ending are big references to those.
Thank you very much though. And you're right, I'm beginning to think that there was supposed to be a Psychatric Hospital sign, but somehow got misplaced... haha
@sneakyfox Ah yes, I see, somehow that thought hadn't even crossed my mind haha :joy: I could remedy to that in a post jam version, we'll see how it goes.
@binroot thanks !
@lcstark I'm glad you liked it :blush:
C02 was originally not supposed to be the one that helped fix internet but during writing I gave the dialog to them and it turned out for the better as they turned into this ironic situation where they wanted something so desperately they gave away something that mattered even more. I feel like their trouble with internet coming from posting a jam game is great interpretation of it ! haha
The chalkboard clues were inspired by Tunic (great puzzle game if you haven't played it btw, I recommend it), it has a similar premise with picking up pages of an old game and using those to help you in your journey. This version is my interpretation of it as a mean to help keep track of the stories and distract from the Terminator side.
I do have a story in mind concerning the few tenants that don't have much of an arc, and it does involve the cooking lady along with making the D02 kid happy...
The Knock Knock guy was supposed to be just a dumb joke character, but maybe I'll try making him part of a story too, I feel like at this point I might make everyone important in some way, maybe with the cheese guy, that girl in B01 or A01 too as their stories is only a couple lines long.
Anyway, that motivates me even more to continue this game and make a more furnished post-jam version, no promise just yet but I feel like it has great potential to expand the narrative and mechanics.
The controls felt really terrible for me, I spent most of my time stuck against trash cans or houses, and when I finally got back on the road I would bounce all over the place and end up stuck again.
The camera doesn't help either.
Shooting packages was also way too powerful : even the shortest click I could do I had to be about 5 truck length away, barely could see the target. Most of the time the package went flying through the ground, houses and most props to end up at the opposite side of the map :/
I did manage to get a few ones and got up to about 350 bucks before running out of gas.
I think I would have liked a more controllable truck, the challenge could've been there even with good maneuverability. A minimap would've been really helpful too.
The voicelines did make me laugh though haha !
That was a pretty fun game, I kinda wish there was a couple different maps that would emphasize different driving styles (like full speed or jumps), so I think that goes to say I enjoyed my time.
The keyboard controls were really difficult as it would constantly drift and spin you around but after plugging in the gamepad it felt much better.
Though it still was still rather difficult to not do a 180 at every turn I at least had some control over it and managed do some pretty sick drifts and jumps.
The timing on the deliveries felt doable, but I couldn't get a perfect score as I would always end up bouncing around or upside down and losing a good 20s.
I feel like having some air control would've help landing more correctly or getting back on the wheels, as once you don't have momentum, even with the jump mechanic, it sometimes was difficult to flip back around.
The boost meter was kinda hard to fill up, I assume you had to drift with a high enough velocity, but in most situations, even I drifted I ended up not gaining boost so I did not use it much.
It also had a tendency to boost you out of your way and since precise maneuvering is in general more valuable than going fast I think the boost might not even really fit in the design.
My best attempt scored 2895 with only 2 pickup failed !
Had fun playing ! Good job !
I gotta admit, the controls felt really good ! Loved the animations ! The gameplay felt a bit repetitive, there being only two actions made obstacles feel a bit samey. I actually think simply speeding up as the game goes one would've helped because you would need to react faster and sooner so you can't just get in a rhythm.
Have to have a 42 somewhere in there haha! The ending screen was a bit confusing, whether I died or reached the end it always said I gather everything. I assume it's not relative to the total amount of symbols but rather the one that passed ? But since most obstacles have only one way of being passed it seemed a bit weird to me.
Another small thing that could help with long levels is a distance/progress score. Numbers going up are satisfying :P
I'm not sure if the level dubbed "Try this..." has an end or if it's endless, I got to 24 words and 235 symbols and eventually made a mistake, as I wasn't paying too much attention anymore.
Seeing the sliding animation kept me going haha
Oh also quick side note : the itch.io page doesn't link back to the submission, you did add the ludum-dare-53 tag but if you look in the "Edit game" page that will have added a field for you to put the link to this page ! ;)
So it looked great, but the gameplay felt quite shallow.
The battery is barely enough to keep 3 plants up to max, above that you are bound to lose and the question is just how to best delay losing. I don't think this feels particularly great as it really is obviously impossible to tend to all plants in time. It might just be a personal preference but I think it's usually better to fail because of making a mistake rather than playing perfectly and still losing. It just removes a big part of the "interactive" side, since no matter what you do the result is the same.
The best strategy I found seemed to be just give about 25% of the battery to the plants in red and try to go back and forth to the generator. I reached 9 plants and lasted 5min36s.
A few fairly simple ideas that could improve the experience, at least for me : - Having the battery capacity increase as you get more plants, so you at least have a chance of surviving. - Instead of losing with the first plant that dies you could have some currency, gained by keeping plants alive and lost when letting a plant die. - Slower plant decay along with a faster move speed, then give multiple batteries, so you could charge one while refilling plants, then bring an unloaded one back with you, swap it with the one at the generator and go recharge the plants, same interactions, but a slightly more playful main loop. - Batteries charging nearby plants instead of one at a time, so you could throw a battery in between a bunch of plants, charging a whole group but still being able to do other things in the meantime, if you have a few other batteries then there's strategy about where to place them, in which order to charge them, etc
Overall I feel like the game design was left out, despite a lot of polish otherwise.
One tiny thing too, I wish there was a sound or visual effect when the battery is fully charged, as I probably was waiting too long every time. The charge bar on the side isn't super precise on its own.
I gotta agree, the control are very hard to use. I got the hang of it, but still every time I would go into a wall I would usually collide multiple times because it was so difficult to recover, you have to just spin enough to avoid the wall and people around you, but not too much that you spin and stun yourself.
It took me a good bit to understand I had to pick up packages at the start areas, but once I figured that out it only made it harder, as I now had to pay attention to : - the particles to know where I'm going, - every single person passing by to try and match them with the ones at the top, - if they match, I have to make sure the top package is the right color, - and then I have to throw it accurately while dodging cars and people and lamp posts, still taking the turns and weaving in between traffic ?!
I like the idea, but it's just too much at once. Since you die so fast and the people change every time it's extra hard to keep track of what you need to do.
I think the game could've worked just fine by removing just one of : the traffic, the package colors, the near exact match but not quite.
The atmosphere is indeed great ! I loved the ambient track.
I wish there was a bit more variation as the obstacles and environment felt rather repetitive. Maybe making levels by hand could help give it a more interesting side.
This said it was very relaxing to not have to try hard and just casually play.
The controls were a bit too fast though, it made being precise very hard, in several cases where it was possible to go between object I couldn't line it up because even the shortest tap made me move a lot.
I also thought the score felt way too random, I think having some input from the player or some consequence to delivering stuff could improve that.
A few ideas : - say you're delivering some food but you have a limited quantity so you have to stop by warehouses to restock - maybe stores have power ups or a varying amount of money they give you in exchange and you can choose not to deliver, so there's a choice to deliver now or wait for a potential better deal down the road.
I guess it depends on how relaxing you want to keep it.
What a calming game, great job !
The city planner here is really out of his mind !
The animal hitboxes were my least favorite part, it was fairly hard to tell when you would overlap them, even they visually pass beside you they would still cost you a couple beers, especially on level 4 with those going perpendicular to the path.
The jump obstacles on the other hand felt quite generous.
I won a couple levels with all beers but was disappointed to see there wasn't a perfect score reward haha.
Well like multiple comments pointed it out, having to do stuff in a very specific order doesn't feel too great.
The walking pace is really slow, it adds some dramatic vibe but as you have to go back and forth in the same small area you eventually know the place and the dramatic aspect fades to leave just a very slow pace.
You could avoid getting out of the experience while walking by reading the notes, but they disappear so fast I had to retry four times just to read one.
The timer (I assume it's an oxygen meter) is depleting wayy too quickly, I could get up to 3 parts in my best attempt but got caught by the sort of xenomorph inspired alien.
However despite reaching 3 parts again I did not see the alien again in other attempts. The fact you're so slow even when being chased, and the alien being just as slow makes it kinda funny instead of oppressing as you can take a good look to the enemy and have all the time to get used to it.
Some of the farthest equipment parts are so far just getting to it and back to the rocket was too long and I ran out of time. I'm really confused on whether it's possible to escape or not.
The mood with the fog, ambient sounds and music was pretty good though.
Wow, I love the visual style and the concept a lot.
However my experience playing wasn't the best, I did not encounter any bugs, but the balancing is just way too hard, I retried multiple times but could barely do anything, full gun turret, full rocket turrets, a mix of them, with or without armor, but it seems like nothing worked, I would always encounter a group with two big monster, a range one and a bunch of small units, and they would obliterate me.
I don't even get halfway through the health of the first big dude that they already destroyed the rig and lost me the game.
This feels especially bad because I have zero control over the rig, it just runs into monsters, gets stuck, and dies. I guess jumping out could slow it down, but that wouldn't do much either as the monsters would still come in contact and munch at the rig all the same.
Even the smallest enemies slow you down so much when colliding with them, I would expect such a huge machine to just roll over, maybe feel a bit of a bump, but no it just can't push through even one of them. I'm not even sure colliding deals damage.
That combined with automatic navigation makes for a very harsh punishment for something you can't avoid.
It seems like the blue cargo is the most valuable, the first delivery gives 200 coins, but the other cargo types are so not worth it, made a trip with yellow and I got 120 coins only !
You have to do multiple trips to get to a station that lets you load the stuff you want, then multiple trips to sell it, and you can't even afford a turret after the necessary repair, or you can get a turret but instead die to a couple small units that the turrets couldn't kill fast enough.
If I am to make a suggestion, I would make the turrets more powerful, let the beginning be on the easy side, just the player can get their bearings, setup the rig how they want, and reach their preferred station without already being half dead and completely broke.
Then I would remove the player's ability to shoot, playing as a turret helps a little bit DPS wise, but it's not much fun in my opinion. Instead I would see a gameplay similar to that of Guns Of Icarus, the idea is to have to tend to the vehicle while it's operating : - perform quick repairs on damaged stuff - move fuel about - change the power distribution - whatever else
I think it would be interesting if these actions allow you to have some indirect control on what the rig is doing. Maybe you diver all power to one side, making the it much more powerful at the cost of being defenseless on the other. Maybe being able to somewhat steer (not fully control the direction just slightly strafe around the predetermined route) so you could try to avoid running into the enemies face on.
It saddens me as I really like the idea and direction of the game, it reminds of Helldivers and Alien Swarm which I loved.
Well hopefully I wasn't too mean, I just really do wish I could enjoy the game more. Great job still, as you truly were close to getting it right.
Fun concept that could be really interesting to develop further, with instead of a simple meter judging if you did good or bad having consequences on choosing pro or against certain action types.
Could affect the kind of guests you receive or maybe has an effect on the stock market and you're secretly influencing the world to become richer.
I agree that the news could be even wilder, and that giving the inappropriate answers is quite funny too.
I'm reminded of this card game with incomplete sentences and players picking the dumbest parts to shove in it. I think a similar concept of having pieces of news to put together to complete the newscast script could be interesting, maybe even without knowing the script while you're picking the order the parts appear in, so you get to discover what horrors you said once it's revealed.
I had fun playing, good game !
That was a strange experience. I feel like the delivery side really isn't present in the game, I'm guessing you ran out of time to make a win/lose condition involving deliveries.
The map boundaries are a bit hard to avoid at first as when the "losing signal" effect appears you don't have time to stop and go back the other way if you already had a good amount of speed.
I laughed when I saw the street going off in the distant village that's just a triangle as I used a similar perspective trick in my own game too haha :joy:
I think the drones are quite hard to see, though it only took me a couple minutes to find all 5.
For an improved version, I think it could be interesting to have the drones actually going somewhere instead of aimlessly flying around, so you actually have to stop them. Maybe add a way to highlight drones so you're not pixel hunting. And maybe have both good and bad drones, so you'd have to maybe get close and scan to determine if they are transporting legal goods and take the appropriate action.
As a drone enthusiast myself, I think the vertical controls could be a bit more responsive, could be interesting to be able to completely cut the motors and fall rapidly, or boost upward. Usually the throttle is linked to how much the drone leans when moving, the higher it is, the more you can lean and still go horizontal, maybe that could make for an interesting movement scheme ? As in when strafing increasing the throttle would make you go faster, but when stationary the throttle makes you go up/down.
It's lacking a goal, better feedback (like a vfx when shooting) and some polish, but overall I liked the concept. Cool game.
Was wondering what were the deliveries the description mentioned until I noticed the arrow in the top right corner ! Overall fun game.
My remarks would be :
- Make the objective arrow more obvious, and also make the consequence of not following more obvious.
At first I was just randomly going from room to room and randomly found delivery spots, I'm not even sure following the arrow is necessary or not.
- I think there's too much stuff spawning, be it pickups or enemies, I'm constantly picking up/colliding with stuff whether I want it or not, which made each element less impactful.
Bullets would get lost in the pickups, I always have all the pickup types around me so no reason to flee and find another room with what I need, you don't really notice how much you're picking up because it's so constant too.
- It felt way too easy to get knocked off the side of the screen and go to a different room, and since even if you come back the room is regenerated it really diminishes the motivation to clear a room.
You don't gain anything by doing it, it's kinda tedious to have to get some speed before shooting to avoid changing room, and combined with the amount of stuff spawned in such a small space you're bound to run into stuff.
So I ended up just passing by enemies, as that also doesn't have a consequence, and staying at the edge of a screen allows to swap room every time you're in danger of being hit.
- Less important but the volume was extremely high for me, I would appreciate a lower default volume, or a slider/button for it.
Despite that the audio is pretty cool, I liked the music and the retro vibe of the SFX.
Got some issues with the controls as well, the mouse movement being quite snappy, boxes randomly shooting as soon as you grabbed them or just dropping while aiming.
I'll excuse those by saying those boxes were possessed.
Despite that I did have fun though, the concept is interesting, the visuals and quirky music gives it a fun vibe.
Having to find your food under the pile of hay dud boxes is fun as it gets messier and messier.
I wish I had seen there was a download version as the web one doesn't lock the cursor in the window when in fullscreen, or at least I couldn't get it to do it, so I had to manage both the snappy turning with not being able to bring the cursor near the edge or it would on my other screens (as I have 3, it was extra difficult, it meant no touching either the left or right side of the screen haha)
I feel like a tutorial would've been great, thankfully I realized A+D was for going straight so exploring the map wasn't an issue, in fact when going at high speeds it felt pretty good.
Though I unfortunately completely missed the fact they were a gate for heaven as well, I only saw the hell one and sent everyone here, not knowing I had to choose.
I also got severely confused by the plant traps, I tried again and again for like 5 minutes straight to get the soul, not understanding how I was still missing it, until I went a bit further after starting to think it might be fake and realizing there were plenty more plants.
Unfortunately before I saw those, that made me think I could not pick up a second passenger, which I still don't know if it's possible, would've saved me several trips back and forth and awkward getting stuck moments trying to shortcut or go faster.
I would've liked the length of the dialog to correlate to the distance to the gates, so characters with long dialogs would be far and keep you entertained for the long trip back, and character with short dialogs would be near and not keep you waiting and doing donut drifts or spinning in place in front of the gates.
The later example actually got me to accidentally cutoff a dialog midway because I hit the trigger for the gate unwillingly. Same for the first soul, I had no idea how the game worked by that point and didn't even understand what the gates where so I just got to read the first two lines before the dialog skipped to the end which made no sense out of context.
The map was half helpful half not, as it's missing a big island in the top left area which made me not trust the map, turned out the rest was fairly faithful though. The low water passage blocked by land near the guy in the large skeleton wasn't an issue however, I think that added to the experience to have to find another way.
So yeah, overall I feel like there's some good ideas but the execution doesn't quit hit the mark for me. It's easy to overlook tutorials in jam games, as there's so little time to do what we want, but I think they shouldn't be left out, you even added some texts for the controls and a couple slides for the introduction, but I think you could've gone a bit further and clearly explain what to do, even if it breaks the 4th wall, better this way than the hard way when you realize you got the game wrong after finishing most of it.
Fun game, I also wish it lasted a bit longer as I probably didn't see that many items. I would've liked being able to use multiple paper sheets per item, if there is a way I couldn't find it.
I'm not sure why you couldn't put tape on the inside side so a few packages ended up being poorly secured as the last fold covered the entire item with the wrong side haha.
Good game overall !
It was fun !
My only criticism would be that the interaction to get on top of boxes is very frustrating simply because you have to aim at the box, nearly all the attempts I failed were because I could not line it up and eventually got caught. Although it took a good ~50 tries, I still managed to beat the game :)
Other than that it is quite solid, good art and fitting music, decent levels, pretty good feedback. Great job !
Really cool game !
Though I had some issues with it, probably because I never played Papers, Please! myself.
First off, it took me a while to understand how to turn pages. You should probably add a short message to explain it somewhere as playing without being able to open the books is impossible.
After figuring that out, I had a good experience, I was doing perfects or just 1 mistake, most often I forgot to check the weight. But it was going smoothly.
Until day 6, with the return addresses. I retried the game like 6 times, I was doing everything right and every single time on day 6 I got the return addresses wrong.
I first assumed the return address was the last line, because by that point I had tried flipping the letter the same way I turned pages on note stacks or books, but it did nothing despite trying lots of times, so I was convinced you couldn't.
I thought it might be wrong initials ? but no, those were correct on many letters.
Maybe it's the format of the whole line ? nope, they are all [2 letters] [2 digits] [1 letter + 1 digit] and still some wrong some right
One of them had the recipient be "Mx EDWARDS" and it turned out the return address was wrong, so I thought maybe that name isn't the recipient but the sender, and Mx is incorrect ? wrong too, as another letter had "Dr TAYLOR" or "Rev SMITH" but it said return address was bad.
I seriously was confused. I thought day 6 was not supposed to be beatable and that it was some sort of cheap way to make a forced ending.
Turns out you can flip them by clicking in the bottom right corner. Up until that point I assumed the entire left and right sides were the triggers, and had I not recorded to try and check what was wrong in post, reviewed it and noticed I hadn't tried spam clicking everywhere on the letter, I would have left a significantly lower note.
It also really doesn't help that clicking in that corner while the letter isn't selected doesn't flip it, so when you're on the town almanac you have to click the letter twice to flip it for example.
Thankfully though I gave it another try and confirmed it was in fact on the backside, where I was expecting it to be.
Anyway, TLDR is it's not lacking much in terms of tutorial, but the turning page and flipping letter interaction really weren't obvious to me and nearly made me very frustrated with this otherwise really good game.
My only other critique is much more tame : I wish the font had a bit more pixels, as it was a bit hard to read, I got used to it after trying again and again but still.
All that to say that it's crazy how a simple small thing can make such a huge difference.
I think a couple solutions to solve this would be : - Have a tutorial step ensuring the players knows how to open the book, you have the call button blink, you could have a rectangle blinking on the handbook to show where to click. - Change the cursor when hovering over an area where flipping is possible - Could also have a different interaction to flip, maybe double click or MMB or a keyboard key that would work no matter where it's done (though that could still lead to problems if you try normal clicking on the side and don't try this method)
I did beat day 6 in the end, at least it was the last day so had I not found the flipping interaction I at least wouldn't have missed any content, apart from seeing "promoted" at the end I guess haha.
Well anyway, great game still, I had fun and liked it enough to give it many more tries than the average jam game !
there's a good chance you (as in the author) did not check "Public" at the bottom of the itch page, meaning only you have access to it
The embedded game on the page works though. Thankfully the text is selectable, so I could use a translator to understand what was said.
I liked the story, the narration was well written and it's interesting to hear about this world through the lens of a delivery drone, forced to be a cog in the machine.
I would highly recommend adding the artwork you added on the page as a cover for the game, it really does help incentivize players to try it out.
Though a long russian text is probably not what most players expect nor are looking for haha.
Took me a couple levels to understand the target was a special building, I was just randomly bumping into everything until it randomly worked.
The levels probably would've benefited from being hand made (at least I assume they are generated), as they feel a bit repetitive once you know how to find the target.
Got 18s as my best score !
Nice game ! The music was really cool :sunglasses:
After reading the rules, I was expecting the gameplay to be more involved, but I really didn't understand the part about the offerings, first playthrough I practically ignored it and got a score of 2210, tried again but paying attention to them for each demon with valid credentials, and a handful had more items than they asked for but that was it, end score was 2400 something.
There didn't seem to be anything interactive with it, and judging from the above comment I'm guessing there's a random chance the offerings aren't enough and it simply didn't proc.
Maybe a better system than pure random to determine if the demon is a fraud could help to ensure a more consistent experience. Something like you pick a number of fraud in some range as the shift starts, and then you roll the odds but weighted so that it guarantees this number of fraud appears (something like ``isFraud = rand(0,1) > (1 - (nbFraudLeft / nbDemonLeft))`` for example, or if you want a more uniform distribution you can split the demons into N groups and make one fraud per group).
Of course the number of frauds wouldn't be revealed to the player.
As for the difficulty you can do something similar but for the number of discrepancies and how obvious they are, something like only 1 number got picked wrong in the ID would be a lot more difficult than if the ID, expiration date, name, and offerings are all wrong.
Anyhow, even though the game is simple, it feels decently polished and is pleasant to play, you did a great job !
PS: I wouldn't mind an auto skip of the rest of the shift when you finish processing the demons in advance, had to wait a couple minutes the first time hehe)
@sstyles93 Thank you ! Yeah we had some plans for heroes that would summon things during combat but even then theme would still be mostly for the story.
Tip : the warrior only attacks in orthogonal directions, and deals less damage when stopped by a wall
@yoyoj Lol, the transition from the cool hand drawn art to the rushed pixel art is rough indeed haha x)
@thomasvenner Completely agree, during testing I would disable the cinematics and it didn't come to mind that I would need a skip button until less than an hour before the final build, at which point other things needed to be fixed.
Fortunately for you there is only one fight, there is a cinematic mid-fight and for the good ending but I understand watching the intro multiple times isn't fun.
The move option was supposed to be selected by default but it caused an issue with the preview not being visible until you swapped to another and back, and this was the simplest fix.
@sstyles93 @yoyoj @thomasvenner @xazens
Hey, out of the blue ping but I posted an update that makes the cutscenes skippable !
It also fixes the move action not being selected by default at the beginning of the turn among other small things. I'd be delighted if you had the heart to give the game a second try if you couldn't beat the warrior during the fight, you gotta save those shrimps after all !
@cameron-dunlap Thanks a lot for trying it out and the kind words !
I recommend using the 0.1.1 version as it adds a way to skip the cutscene.
@kevvy Hahaha, glad you enjoyed it ! xD
Thank you for playing :D
Well this is nice, the music is great and I'd like to beat it at least once to the end, but unfortunately my keyboard is ancient, kinda cheap, and only supports pressing 2 arrow keys at the same time, making the sections with rows of 3-4 notes super hard to hit, and they are frequent enough that it's nigh impossible to tank even if I arrive to these sections with full health.
I can go up to 3 with WASD but it's still not great and I only realized that was an option after 30+ attempts with the arrows so wasn't too keen on switching hands/position.
I tried mostly the normal difficulty mode and got these during my best attempts (reached about 3 dragon ball) : High1.PNG High2.PNG
Went to easy mode but again lost when the section of rows of 4 arrives. I can hit one pair then the other two but yeah it's just adding a lot of difficulty when I'm already terrible at this kind of game lol.
I also keep getting confused with the key layout, for some reason it's really not intuitive for me, just to make it a little extra harder hah.
But, there are combinations of keys that allow 4 to be pressed simultaneously on my keyboard, and I bet most keyboards have some layout that could work.
**So, my suggestion is to allow changing the keybinds.** I think the point of this kind of game is nailing the patterns and timing more than using a specific mapping on the keyboard anyway.
If you end up making an updated version that allows that, mention me in a comment, I might give a second try.
Otherwise you could add options to change the damage for missing or pressing with a bad timing, and/or the regen for playing well. Right now it doesn't forgive even a few mistakes and it takes a while to recover. Having an easier setting would help.
Or maybe even consider checkpoints. I'd really like being able to just restart at the last dragon ball or maybe the last calm section. Maybe this could have a significant cost on the score-side so it still incentivizes getting better. I might be able to finish if I practice enough, but having to re do the first 1-2 minutes with minimal mistakes again and again only to lose in 5 seconds when the complicated section arrives is tough.
I feel like especially for jam games, it's usually preferable to make a game too easy than too hard, although having a challenge is nice it's frustrating when there isn't a way around it. Well I'm saying this as if balancing was easy but well as the dev it's always very hard to gauge how difficult the game is, especially when handing it to players who don't have the same kind of gaming experience.
@xazens I have an AZERTY keyboard, and from some quick testing it seems mine supports those groups at least keyboard.png
Combining the left and right areas I can even go up to 6 keys, maybe more when using special keys like space and return !! x)
Also I discovered that if I press two arrows then the other two before releasing the first two, only the first two are active, but if I press 3 or more at the same time, none are active ! :joy: The firmware is probably confused what keys to use so it just nopes out of the question and does nothing lol.
I can change the language to qwerty so you can use that for reference instead azerty, preferably I'd use QWER, ASDF, UIOP or JKLM I think.
However this is likely to be completely different for each keyboard model, or at least the different constructors. So a layout that would work for me might not work for others.
Using unity it shouldn't be too hard to make a runtime rebind system though : instead of using the legacy input axis manager which can't be modified at runtime, you can use ``Input.GetKey(KeyCode)``, passing a variable in parameter. Then, you need a way to change this variable, you could have a dropdown that just contains all the enum values which should be easy to populate in code, though not the best in terms of UX it can do its job.
The easy difficulty is definitely easier and I could probably finish it with enough tries but I got frustrated with the rows and stuff so I stopped after just one or two attempt haha.
Man, the ambience here is real ! Getting strong Jumanji vibes but with a satanic twist which is great. The cinematics, music, audio and visuals go super well together and really contribute to making a strong mood.
TLDR: I enjoyed the experience, the audio and visuals alone are worth it, though I think the strategic aspect doesn't come out too well because all the stuff mentioned below.
I liked the game's state happening both on the board and in the room, that and the unsettling tone reminds me of Inscryption, also very fitting.
Though while it looks really cool, I felt quite confused. I had to return to the game's page multiple times to try and make sense of what I was supposed to be doing. After several turns I got that the left gauge is the "winning meter" and the sanity one is the "losing-meter", but how each are affected remains a bit unclear. It also took me a minute to understand the mystic dies aren't just "auxilium" dies but feature all 3 symbols, maybe they could rotate in place to show that.
The board's layout with high values being in smaller regions surrounded by smaller values hints you're supposed to aim for bigger numbers, but even after beating the game 2 times I feel like almost no matter what roll you get it deals more "damage" than you need to win in a handful of turns.
Then the winning state, it says I win, but drinking or pouring seems to just restart the game. I got super confused at first and thought I picked the wrong option or that I actually had lost haha.
I played a third time to try to lose, and I really had to only pick one die or specifically combinations that didn't figure in the top right list, and even aim for the fire zones to destroy them. Most turns I wouldn't lose sanity, sometimes I'd lose a huge amount. By the end I was roughly 3/4 of the way to winning despite trying hard not to make progress.
Only during this 3rd try did I understand that you had to roll the symbol face up for it to count in the combination list. I was wondering why it seemed to randomly trigger the combinations. But well even without triggering them a single time it'd be easy to win just by always throwing 3 dies into fairly high value areas.
The losing cinematic was worth it though, really nice :ok_hand:.
Overall I'm getting the feeling that the unclearness is intentional and part of the mysticism for the ambience, but I'm wondering if it's maybe a bit too unclear what's happening or why. This said I quite like obfuscated puzzle games which often do that, so I guess it's a matter of what genre you want to be in haha.
The balancing of how often the sanity debuff happens and how easy it is to get points don't help the confusion, it being easier to win that to lose despite all the rules felt like I didn't understand it correctly and that I was playing wrong.
I played on version Bug_Fix_2, I only encountered two bugs : - sometimes when picking multiple dies to throw again, one disappears when starting to aim. - sometimes the UI isn't super responsive, when clicking on a dialog choice or on the face entity button, it occasionally doesn't do anything and I have to click a few times, 2-3 times max.
@pabloabraham that could be cool! I feel like there could be a great progression around understanding what the sinister entity you're trying to capture does and how to prevent it.
For some reason I'm picturing something like the We Were Here game series, not on the coop side but for the kind of puzzle design where you start confused but progressively find elements to help build towards the solution as you get familiar with each part of the mystery and understand how they tie into each other. Kinda like an escape room if you will.
Haha, I'm reminded of Patapon, awesome usage of the theme ! Initially thought I had to move by exclusively using the summons and chaining/combining them, but then I tried WASD and realized it wasn't as complex as I was making it out to be :joy:
Very nice !
The levels get quite hard though, I had to place stuff at just the right timing to bypass certain restrictions, like placing a search engine platform on the line the character is about to jump to so that he can go "through" the platform.
I'm pretty sure that's not the intended way but I couldn't figure out any other solution.
Eventually reached the third quarter puzzle piece but got stuck on the second level I believe (the one with 2 folders, 1 search engine and 1 return, 1 cat and 1 roasted chicken). It felt like I needed 2 platforms/bridges or a couple more folders to do anything.
I'm not sure if the puzzle got some mishap and isn't possible or if it's just a matter of the difficulty rising way too fast, expecting the player to know special tricks when they didn't get introduced in a tutorial level. Given how many puzzles there are it's still very impressive.
I wish I could've seen it through to the end, I wonder what happens once the four quarters are completed.
That was a load of fun ! Cute music and very funny "goop" sound effect, I laughed every time I gooped stones around xD
A fairly standard puzzle platformer as far as the scope goes, but very well executed. The puzzle design was on point, between the spikes coming out with steps and the timed one it offered a good variety of "I see how this goes" but then surprise there are hidden spikes and you need to adjust your solution or pay attention to where the gaps are.
Confidently going to a resting platform only to pleasantly get stabbed by some spikes behind grass :ok_hand:
The difficulty was good too, with the timing requirements and hidden spikes adding some challenge, but not demanding extreme precision and not relying on random/uncontrollable elements makes for a good progression as you're closer to mastering the level with each failure until you complete it.
I'm not sure if there are multiple endings, but I made sure to crush wizard before reaching the artefact, though he was still able to send me back to the broken tea set. Dabblin' in some necromancy ay ?
Anyhow, I had a great time playing ! Great entry !
Really cool ! Great looking and sounding !
> You don't need to know what will happen if you don't [serve the customers properly]
Well, you were wrong, I had to try again after winning to see what'd happen hehehe :P
In terms of gameplay it's quite simple and trivial. I was surprised you couldn't send the order if all the required ingredients weren't present, or that there doesn't seem to be a time limit, so you really have to try to lose in order not to win which is a little odd.
Usually this kind of game gets some challenge from either a time limit, relying on player skills to improve to use the interface/controls faster, or using some random/uncontrollable elements, things like physics making the stacked order fall or some other disturbance that has to be dealt with, or by using confusion with the interface mixing up some information, playing tricks or requiring the player to remember things properly.
Although I'm guessing with this game you went for the chill and casual vibe (which you nailed btw), I still think a little bit of challenge would make for an even better experience. It doesn't have to be hard but I think it's when your efforts allow you to avoid failure that they become meaningful.
Overall this is a very solid entry, casual but effective, my highest rated yet ! Congrats !