Dinosaur Survival Bash!! by Orni 2012-08-27T09:05:00
Wow, very cool graphics! The game was fun to play, but I seemed to get owned by dinosaurs spawning right next to me and shooting fireballs. Overall the game felt very complete. Great job!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → phren
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Po | Cm | Te | Jo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 24 | Evolution | A Matter of L and D | compo | 504 | 2.73 | 2.08 | 3.12 | 4.00 | 2.77 | 2.43 | 2.90 | 2.29 | 51 | |||||
| 2009 | 15 | Caverns | Cavern Pong | compo | 136 | 2.00 | 1.88 | 1.88 | 1.82 | 2.22 | 1.71 | 2.00 | 2.08 | 24 | |||||
| 2008 | 11 | Minimalist | The Pushers | compo | 27 | 3.30 | 3.17 | 3.73 | 3.96 | 3.30 | 2.62 | 1.86 | 3.83 | 3.10 | 2.40 |
Wow, very cool graphics! The game was fun to play, but I seemed to get owned by dinosaurs spawning right next to me and shooting fireballs. Overall the game felt very complete. Great job!
Awesome music! The game was very fun and exciting to play, kept me playing for quite a bit. The game mechanics were nothing new I guess, but overall I felt like the game was pretty well balanced. I didn't realize you had to pick up "corpses" to get exp until some time had passed. Perhaps the graphics could've made that fact a bit clearer.
The tune was very catchy. :) It felt a bit annoying that you couldn't shoot diagonally, I found myself missing the feature quite a lot. It was quite hard to keep track of the evolution/mutation/gene process, were the alpha specimens for each round chosen by random? All in all, the game was fun to play, but could've been even more fun with for example mouse aim.
Holy scheitmonster! Installing this game was an adventure in itself!
The theme felt kinda tacked on. Overall the playability was ok, albeit nothing new. I wish the character graphics were finished. :P I had trouble understanding what some of the icons meant, perhaps you could've just written the descriptions next to them (especially so I shouldn't go back to your post to see which weapon does what). I was really missing WASD, which is really a must for right-handed people while using the mouse.
The game was quite fun to play, even though I didn't really manage to figure out any winning strategy except just clicking like crazy. :P I like your explanation on the theme - your interpretation was refreshing.
Quite a complete game, was fun to play while it lasted. Perhaps pacing-wise you could've inserted some less intense moments into the level flow. The theme felt kinda tacked on. I also feel like the music could've looped. :P Overall your game was really great though. The graphical style worked and the physics style mechanics were a nice new thing.
Your idea of evolution is nice and with a bit more work this could be a good game. The music made the game a lot more interesting to play; even though it was so simple, it set the mood.
Overall the game was pretty basic. Fun to play but there are a lot of things that could be more polished. I didn't really understand what dying actually meant, since you could just grow anyways. Seemed like the spawning code was a bit buggy, since after a couple of seconds of a steady stream of ghosts and squares I got hit with a gazillion things at once. I liked the music you had made, it gave the game a bit of a better mood. :)
You could possibly try setting the import settings for your sprite textures to be GUI, or at least higher resolution, so they're not as scaled and blurry.
Pretty nice little game. At some stage I noticed I was really trying to rescue my little spheres. Perhaps with some more charismatic graphics the emotional aspect could've been of even more use. There wasn't really that much new here, and I don't know how evolution came into play.
Looks like you have the simulation part in place, but I think the user interface needs quite a bit of work. It was very hard to follow what was going on - sometimes you could definitely see the creature (or whatever) going for some item you dropped there, other times it just died without making the move. All of this was made quite a bit harder and more annoying by the fact that all my clicks didn't register for some reason. There could perhaps be more clarity in the whole graphical design and maybe you could have some of the rules/guidelines visible during gameplay, since most of the stuff was hard to remember once the game got started.
The game started off very slowly, and it didn't really progress at all (very, very little). The evolution mechanism you have in place results in players having to play the same "level" twice, with the second time being even easier because of the upgrades. This coupled with effectively no difficulty level resulted in a bit of a grind, in which you didn't really know what you're aiming at or when the end is going to be.
Your animations were great in my opinion, and the "tadpole" player character was charismatic. :P There were a couple of stray pixels left on the animation sprites, which were a bit unfortunate, since they're such an easy thing to erase.
I figure the game was supposed to have sound since there are some audio dlls, but I didn't hear anything except a high-pitched whine.
Overall with a bit of progression this game could've been a lot better, but I enjoyed playing it for a while (went to 140k just to see if there's some kind of finish :P). Not a bad effort if this was your first LD game!
It was very hard to track what difference my choices made. I didn't really understand the evolution system, or the left and right arrows. Did they move the world around? Props for actually having a nice background music!
The idea you had for this game is actually quite interesting and fun. It works at times, but on the other hand sometimes you just feel lost. I couldn't understand what the hell the text was in the game with the blue dude. :D Perhaps each minigame would've needed a bit more polish and clarity, and maybe a border around each screen to make the screen more segmented.
Hahaa! Loved the starting music! A shame it didn't loop better.
I had a hard time listening to the sound effects. Using the sword I didn't really figure out a tactic to defeating the enemies without getting hit myself. I wish there was an autosave feature, since I accidentally pressed esc in the menu. :P
This isn't actually that far away from a great game. The game itself is very hard (which is ok) but I feel like the transformations should be faster, so you can actually react instead of getting killed the first time. The music was quite nice, especially the start, where the mood became ominous. With better graphics and shorter transformation times this could be a really nice game for mobiles, for example.
The game felt quite nice to play. Had a hard time getting forwards since I pumped all my upgrades into damage in the beginning. :P The sounds were pretty standard sfxr stuff, I guess they were better than nothing.
A game design issue was the regeneration - it was best to just go hide behind a crate with shields on to wait for your health to regenerate. This made the tempo quite a bit slower than it should've been.
The graphics were pretty good, especially the scientists.
Also: For next time, please zip it instead of rar. :)
This time I didn't even have the energy to update the blog at all! Phew, 110% effort went to the game...
Perhaps there has been some confusion regarding the goal of the game. There isn't really any score or end result you should strive for. It's more of a sandbox "do whatever you want" type of game. As a very goal-oriented gamer I can understand your issues. :)
At work instead of playing solitaire you can give a creature a stupid name and go watch him sex up and eat its children. :P
Oh, that's why it didn't work for some people! Thanks for the tip!
A big thanks to all that have played my game up until now. I appreciate it. :)
Why did you ignore the theme? :(
This game has kinda "been seen before", the gravity mechanic added some extra to it, but not that much. I liked the "Awwww" sound. Sometimes the framerate would experience small hiccups, which were really fatal considering how smooth the mouse movements have to be in order for you to hit the ball.
The game was very hard! Couldn't pass a single level. Would've been nice to see your genetic algorithm working, but I'm assuming it would've been good. :P Perhaps the borders of the game area should've been just walls instead of having you lose a life by going outside of them. Props for having sounds, even though the gun sound got pretty annoying. :)
Which Java version am I supposed to run this with? Couldn't start it on my Win7-64bit/Java 1.6.0_25
Managed to get it working. :)
I thought the game was nice, even though the basic gameplay was pretty standard. Picking only some items was an interesting twist and it's sad that you didn't have time to make more levels that use this idea, since it made the game a lot more fun to play. I would've liked to see some kind of indication how strong the castle is, so you'd know whether you stand a chance or not. The highlight you have for selections is nice and helps a lot while playing.
Good story about evolving from Game Maker to Java. ;)
The main gameplay system is quite well in place and the main concerns in the game are on the UI side. The texts weren't that clear and the click + button combinations were a bit weird. You've created a game that's quite different in idea to the ones I've played earlier, points for that!
Felt like a pretty nice little game. Would've been nice if there was a way to track better what your combinations actually did and upgrading bit by bit, instead of saving up for a big bang. Getting stuck into dead ends made me sad, and I don't know why they were even included in the game. :( Your idea and execution were nice, but the gameplay still needs a bit of refinement.
Perhaps the how-to-play guide could've been integrated somehow into the game.
A very good effort, can't believe you've actually been able to put this kind of a system in place during one weekend. The sharing of evolution codes is a great idea, a shame there weren't more codes to take advantage of. Overall this package was very complete, with nice music, a consistent graphical style and fun gameplay.
Since this entry was so complete, I'm just gonna go ahead and list the stuff I would've liked done differently. :P
-The selection style in battles: there should be an option to have the cursor stay on the previously selected ability.
-More variety in local battles in order to make playing the game more varied when there aren't any players to play against (battles against dummies and disablers get kinda old :P)
-A way to evolve your creatures without the codes of other players
-Some explanations on the mechanics of the game while playing (what does power rating do? why don't my stats get higher the higher my power rating is? is there any way to get better other than to copy traits and moves from other people?)
-The selection color should be of bigger contrast compared to other menu items, sometimes it was hard picking out what item you actually have selected
-Esc should go back in menus
-Menus should scroll while holding a key down
There is obviously a lot of potential in this kind of a system, I'm a bit worried though since in the beginning the experiences are a lot more limited than what the raters will have in the future. I wouldn't have listed all this negative stuff if I didn't think your game was awesome though. :D
PS: NORMAL DIGITAL TERA COMBAT
I think the buttons didn't always work, had a hard time getting the mutate button to activate. It's very hard to follow what's actually happening, especially since I think sometimes the biods get stuck into a huge clump and you can't really select anything. Our approach on this theme was kinda similar and it's nice to see how you've implemented it. There definitely seems to be a simulation in place but it's just too hard to get an idea of what difference your mutations made.
Great storytelling and a nice adventure that kept me playing through the whole story. I don't really know how much this had to do with the theme, but what the heck, I enjoyed it. :P The interface felt a bit clunky at times. Overall the dialog was funny and the puzzle design was just the right challenge level for me.