Zombies In The Hall by recursor 2023-10-05T15:30:54Z
I didn't even know about the lyrics button until I've read the comments. :D
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → quasilyte
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | Out of Signal RTS | compo | 15 | 4.15 | 3.85 | 3.81 | 4.15 | 4.37 | 4.12 | 4.25 | ||
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | RunicForce | compo | 23 | 3.95 | 3.93 | 4.00 | 4.17 | 3.15 | ||||
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Hireblades | compo | 99 | 3.62 | 3.58 | 3.50 | 3.31 | 2.89 | ||||
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | NebuLeet Troopers | compo | 51 | 3.98 | 3.84 | 3.80 | 4.02 | 3.68 | ||||
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Astro Heart | compo | 133 | 3.63 | 3.35 | 3.63 | 3.61 | 3.31 | ||||
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | CaveBots | compo | 52 | 4.01 | 3.86 | 3.73 | 3.49 | 3.86 | 3.53 | 2.57 | 3.60 |
I didn't even know about the lyrics button until I've read the comments. :D
Oh, this game is pretty fun!
I wish it wouldn't start from the beginning after every death, but I guess that what it's like to be roguelike (it's about suffering). :D
The sound design is good. Everything feels well-put together.
The graphics are simple, but the shader makes up for it. The UI could use some improvements (visually), but you probably well aware about that. :D I don't mind the keyboard-based drag and drop btw. Since this game is controlled via the keyboard, it's nice to do everything without grabbing your mouse.
I have some minor criticism about the game: * The big and growing enemy collision shape looks odd; it feels like a circle or a square, but the enemy clearly has a triangular shape. This makes you get hit when it doesn't look like you will. * The & sign in the font looks weird, like a Euro currency sign or something; "and" could be used instead of "&" to circumvent that * It looks like the best strategy is to constantly spam the attack. There is no penalty for doing so. Therefore, I wish the vessel would shoot on its own without the need for me to mash the button for it. Or it should be a decision to make (ammo/energy/whatever), so spamming is not as good as it is right now.
Overall, I like the fact that this game has some variety of content for the player.
Nicely done. Extra points for making it work in the browser.
Also, thank you for playing my game. :3
I wish they were creating a new room brick by brick. :)
The art direction of this game is cool. :)
Please provide some instructions in the description here on on the itch io page. :sweat_smile: I'm literally that dog from the meme "I have no idea what I'm doing" when playing this game.
I mean, I can put some stuff on the board. Sometimes they explode (?) But I have no idea whether it's good or bad. Or what is my goal in this game (just to get more score and there is no win/lose state?)
This lack of direction makes it frustrating to play it for a longer period of time. Extending the description is something you can do without modifying the game, so please use this opportunity.
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Also, keep in mind that you need to play other's game to get people play (and rate) yours. Good luck.
I can see the movement being the core mechanic here that sets it apart from the vampire survivors and alike. Although the camera could use some tweaks. It stutters when you're trying to navigate.
As @godsboss pointed out, enemy spawning could be improved too; I think I noticed enemies appear right in front of me.
The good ol tactic to circle around the enemies still works here. I would add some randomness to the enemy movement, because right now they end up in a single big chunk of vessels.
Also, when I died, I flew outside of the safe area and the countdown started. It didn't go away after I saw the menu; the menu was bugged too, I couldn't start the game again until I refreshed the page.
The game loop is good. That Moby took a good chunk of my base the first time around though!
I like the fact that whales move in dashes instead of having a constant speed. Makes shooting them more interesting.
Some issues I got with this game while playing it:
* It would be convenient to have a way to undo a purchase in the "level cleared" menu. I ended up buying many farms while trying to cancel it; I had to restart the game due to this. * The FPS dropped considerably when Moby appeared. It never went back up, every next level felt slow with ~10 fps. * The water tiles look like a grid, but it seems like they're not aligned or have a different size. This feels a bit off.
Hey! Congrats with finishing a game.
Please consider adding a short video of a gameplay of your game to this page. Or at least some screenshots.
Since this game can't be played in browser, the threshold to make a decision to play this game is higher. Cool screenshots and/or a video can push the player towards the decision to download and play your game.
Cheers.
A relaxing mini game. One part of me wishes it to be endless, but another part of me says: you can't fit any more of the sheeps in there, you have to let go.
The sheep's bleating became a big jarring near the end. The graphics are cute and fitting; the dog is so adorable.
My best score was 85.
It's hard to play because an enemy can drop right on top of your head and end your run. :D I don't know if there is a way to know beforehand where will they spawn or not. My reaction is not fast enough to jump away when I see them after the spawn.
As for the game, it has good music, simple but stylish graphics, fluid controls for a platforming game. Is double jump a bug or a feature?
What is your highscore in this game? I see 135 in the screenshots.
Behind the silly appearances, a there is a deep gameplay. So deep, you probably would never forget about getting there...
It's weird that this game gives you this guilty pleasure satisfaction. Gameplay-wise, it's quite cryptic, but after a couple of runs you just "get it" (if you don't drop the game at this point, that is).
I played it with my friend and we laughed our asses off. Well done. xD We found a cool strat that carried us through ~8 years & 3 months.
The plague mechanics is unclear though. We couldn't figure out whether it correlates with anything or not.
But anyway, this game gave us some good time. Thank you. :3
This is one of those games where I know what to do with the Mood rating, it's 5/5. It's so immersive.
The way the game looks, sounds and plays is so amazing not only for a compo game tbh. If it would have more content to make it more interesting for a longer play session, this would be a solid game even outside of the LD context.
I have my fun playing this game. Very well-made.
I wish there was a web export though. It's so much easier to play the game this way when we're talking about the jam.
The cowboy died first. Then everyone except the seamstress joined the RIP party. It was the day 3... the seamstress was the sole survivor. And then, a miracle happened: they lasted for 20 days!
But seriously, it was hard to understand what was going on. xD The event log idea suggested by @don-shinski could help a lot here for sure. Even if the game simulates some complicated things, we players have little chances of appreciating it. :D
I loved the idea though.
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I love the aesthetics of this game. The music as well as the art style create a good vibe.
I completed the level and was surprised that it was the only level. :'( This looks like an interesting mechanic, but it requires more "meat" to be tested out I think. For example: how far can it go? Can there be non-combat related puzzles that would require colors? Can colors also have some side-effects apart from allowing you to defeat a specific enemy? Can colors be combined, somehow? Etc.
I'll rate the game by extrapolating this experience. It's a nice little level after all.
Last but not least, thank you for playing my game.
This game is quite good. I jumped a bit after the first 7-point move (because of the bell). :D
Since you've done it in such limited time while being solo, it could be a solid compo entry!
Nicely done.
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The sounds effects are probably the best part of this game for me. :D When the game becomes faster, the movement sound turns into a music. :)
/eating sound/
I don't think that I can lose in this game, but my finger got tired of holding the left mouse button. :D I was doing rather badly before I realized that it's more of an action game than a puzzle. Holding the attack button turns the bear into a berserk that goes through everything like it's nothing. :D
It looks like the game speed stopped to change after a couple of times. A couple of more challenge increases and maybe I would lose, eventually. :)
There is something captivating about this simple game that kept me playing for quite a while (I mean, reaching 40k points requires some time!)
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Nice little game. It ended a little bit fast, but it was a good ride.
The strongest game points in my opinion are graphics and physics. Physics is everywhere: boxes can be pushed, rats are active too and interact with the environment. I wish the game used these physics a little bit more; it feels like there is only one place where it was really required.
Also: it doesn't matter whether you save your little friends or not. Looks like a missed opportunity. :) The end scene always has all slonokots in the picture. It would be neat to have a single slonokot in there if you didn't save anyone.
Sound design is good too. I like the menu music the most.
Overall, it's quite polished, but short game. Good work.
lol xD The moment I read "how you use it", I realized the full title. :D
The gameplay is a blast. The sounds is fitting too. I'm planning to finish this game and maybe record me playing it till the end! I'll post another comment if I end up publishing the video.
I have a feeling that this game can enter the top-10. :D
The graphics are amazing for a solo game. You really showed your skills in all the areas: from sound to graphics. The game gives enough visual and sound cues to help the player. The level design is good as well. I think I saw 2 more platformers with comparable mechanics this jam, but here you have to draw the zone yourself and this sets it apart.
I don't usually enjoy puzzles, but Soffie's Tiny Garden grabbed my attention until the end.
Every puzzle had some trick you have to come up with in order to complete it. I like the way these mechanics are stacked. Especially the fact that the character can block the growth and it is required to complete some levels.
The in-game level editor is a rare thing to find in a compo game too. It's not that easy to use, but it's there. :D
The theme interpretation also fits well. You don't even have to spell the "SPACE IS LIMITED" in your game to make it obvious.
Extra points to make the web export of the game.
Some background music could make the overall feeling even better.
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This game is pretty interesting. I managed to get to the outer rim, but had not enough fuel to reach the settlement. I didn't know about this requirement. :D I wish the game would give you a reminder like "you bought this for X credits" instead of making the player memorize the number, but I guess it's a compo game so it's understandable.
The space traveling remind me of Star Control 2 hyper space a bit. Even the music sounds like some sort of remix. :)
Overall, I didn't expect this game to be as entertaining. I learned the prices and made some good deals. I wish there was more upgrades and vessel management.
This cover image gives me mild trypophobia triggers. :'(
Can I play it in the browser? The HTML5 (web) link leads to a page that contains only windows/mac/linux desktop builds download. Thank you in advance.
Whoa, I did not see that coming.
There are many little details I like about this game:
* The voiced tutorial * The fact that labels are random every time (their color) * The objects are also randomized in their graphics * The later levels require you to think; I stuck for a couple of minutes more than one time * The music is cool; I wouldn't even dream about creating a track like that during the LD
This is a very well made game.
One addition I thought about is that glass-like objects we have could be fragile, so you would have to place them above heavy stuff. Some objects can be considered to be light (can be placed on top of the fragile item) while other items are heavy (can't be placed above the fragile object).
I had major performance issues in Firefox, but Chrome showed some miracles and I was able to play the game with an adequate FPS.
I'm not sure I totally understood the rules behind moving the ladder when it's in the hands, but I managed to complete the game somehow. đ The ladder refuses to move sometimes and this can get frustrating. I had to restart the game once due to a softlock-like situation.
This game is quite clever in many ways. The sound design is one of my most favorite thing here. The puzzles themselves are somewhat simple in a sense that they usually can be completed by a trial and error without any real planning; but that's a very common issue with puzzle-like games that were made in a very limited time window. This game does show its main mechanic and that mechanic is quite impressive.
This is quite literally a mind boggling game (in a good sense). :D Sometimes I found myself stuck on a level while trying to see the solution. More often than not I found it by some trial and error. I'm bad at puzzles in general, so this game is probably one of those I can't really "crack". I should probably play more puzzle games to get better. :sweat_smile:
This game is quite complete for a jam entry, but the lack of music is noticeable.
It wound be more convenient to undo the compression operation. As some other people mentioned, a quicker unfolding can improve the UX.
The in-game tutorial is fantastic. It doesn't feel out-of-place and it does do a good job at explaining things.
The guiding arrows are another nice game design touch.
The music fits the game too. It's one of those games that switch the music depending on the situation. It's always a good touch when executed properly. The only thing that kinda annoyed me is that it gets too loud when you lose. I get the idea, but it hurts my ears. My sound levels are usually quite high to fit the average sound level of the game. When some sound is x2-3 times louder than any other sound in the game, it creates this unpleasant feeling of "this is too loud".
The sound effects are good as well. It's a good touch that defeating the monsters inside your zone of comfort makes this pleasant sound.
The platforming + danger area combination works well together. Sometimes it feels like a puzzle because you have to consider the time it will take for your comfort zone to catch up with you.
I really like the feel of jumping in this game, the controls are responsive enough. The movement in general is a bit different though: it's too fast. I can do a jump well, and then run off the platform after landing on it.
The game stutters a bit in the beginning when playing a web build. Maybe a little loading screen could help there?
The graphics are simple, but they do their job and fit the gameplay.
Regarding the comfort zone: I failed to understand what affect its speed. Sometimes it gets back to me almost instantly. The other time it's so slow. Some other time it just stucks somewhere until I "drag" it by entering it again. It feels inconsistent.
It's unclear what's the purpose of HP. It looks like the monsters are instant-kill, no matter how much health you have (you usually have ~20 due to the danger zone).
Difficulty-wise, it's quite hard. :D It's not a casual jumping puzzle platformer. I tried 3 times and found my demise pretty fast. The tutorial was the most straightforward part for me. :D A game this hard could benefit from either occasional checkpoints or smaller levels.
I think I'll come back to play this game some more on the record; I added it to my list.
Overall, great job. It's quite polished for a jam game to be honest. Extra points for making a web build of a game. It's much-much easier to test the game this way.
If you like this review-like comment, please consider doing the same for my game. :)
I can see how this game is working, mechanically, but as a player, I want to do more meaningful choices and see the consequences of these actions.
In this game I can see the consequences, but the intro dialogues look like a generic filler in terms of the information. You can learn some of the facts about the person, sometimes. But it doesn't mean that you can make any assumptions with the consequences. For example, there is a k-pop fan that is probably easily distracted and your first instinct is that they're probably not the best candidate for the crew as this whole internet culture may not even exist outside of the Earth (space wi-fi?). But I took them anyway and they turned out to be OK and became a singer.
Since this is a LD game, I can only suggest a simple solution to that: add some kind of a bio page for every person. Some profile page that would give you a couple of hints what may happen if you take them. For example, a person X may dislike food A, another person Y likes to cook and their favorite dish is A. If you take both of them, there is a potential for a situation where Y is going to be a cook and their dish of choice is something that the other person dislikes. It's a simple example, but that would make some drama at least a little bit predictable. It doesn't have to spell of the important facts and connection, just enough to make the choices feel meaningful.
It would be also nice if you could pick less than 6 people. Although this would mean that you have to write more "endings". Why would it be a good thing to have? Because I enjoy the gamey part of the games more than their narrative. For me, having an option to choose less people means there are more choices and combinations. In narrative-heavy games it's hard to find a way to incorporate an actual gameplay and not turn it into something else. In this particular game, adding more freedom to the selection part would add this extra bit of gameplay that could make it a better game in my point of view.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against this kind of games. But I think they can be better and simple mechanical things can add some depth to their gameplay.
I played this game 2 times and got somewhat different results. I may try a couple more runs to see how varying the endings can be. :)
@f1krazy I didn't know about the pico-8 cartridge space limits. :D Fascinating.
There is something special about the single button games that manage to maintain some sort of depth in them. Spaced out is such a game.
I think I played about 15 runs and it was a good time. The player loses often, but it doesn't feel unfair.
After pressing the space button to restart the game the game does a shot. It seems weird because in this game you don't want to waste a single space. :)
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I like this game! Even more so since it has a casual mode. :D
I couldn't understand the point of a push during the first run, but then I read the game description and then it clicked together. Perhaps a very short in-game tutorial would make the onboarding smoother.
The music and sound effects are so good for this kind of game. The same goes for the graphics. It's one of the better looking game on the jam.
I would say that the game would hold my attention for longer if there were more things to do. Like completing the levels with some new mechanics to overcome (things to escape/enemies, things like traps, some new food combos, specific food score targets like "only green things are scored, everything else will just slow you down").
I made my friend play this.
Here is their feedback:
> It would be better to give some extra time for a good play in the non-casual mode. It's either a constant +time for every digested thing or make the player rewarded for matching the specific patterns (the same food for a combo or 1 of each for a different kind of combo). This would make the player more engaged and the highscores will be more diverse.
"I can see a helicopter"
I like the storytelling. The visual clothing reflection is neat as well. The rain & snow effects add a lot to this game. I also giggled at the intro.
This might sound out of place, but it reminds me of old Wacraft3 RPG maps where you had all kinds of biomes all over the place. A single map would contain a desert, a jungle, a cursed ruins, etc.
The game is quite harsh at the snowy stage. I wonder if it's possible to beat it without dying and reverting to a save location? It feels like cheesing when you only able to defeat 3-4 enemies and then you have to continue after dying. :D Thanks to the non-respawning enemies, I was able to find a flare gun and finish the game. Perhaps I missed some enemy patterns. If they stop shooting after a while, then it makes sense to run away from them for a while and then get closer.
I lost my mouse pointer at a darker rainy place. The tiny black cursor can't be noticeable enough on that background. Maybe a light outline would help.
I managed to respawn with 9/10 hitpoints once. I think one of the projectiles damaged me after I respawned. This is weird. :sweat_smile:
I think this game could be a bit better with a focus on something different from a combat. It has a look and feel of a story-heavy game, but then it quickly becomes an action game with a simplistic combat. Perhaps a couple of simple puzzles and 50% number of enemies reduction could work? I dunno.
Good luck with Godot!
A friendly hint: if it's possible consider making a web export of the game. It would make it much-much easier for people to play it, so you get more ratings and feedback. It looks like the game is decent, so it would be a pity if not enough people end up playing it.
I see that you made it with Unity. Unity has a good enough web builds that can run simple 3D games with a stable frame rate.
Also, it might be easier to upload it to itch io and add a link to it here. ldjam site is tricky when it comes to embed-games as there are many limitations that may stop your game from launching. I've seen some of the Unity games being runnable here on ldjam though, so it should be at the very least possible.
@caeonosphere ping me again when this build is out. I'm looking forward to it.
Thank you for making a web build!
You know, I read this in the notification and thought: "hmm, I'll check it out later". And then I realized I can't find a notification history, so I can't jump back to this game! Luckily, I managed to find it in my browser history. Whew, that was a close one.
I really tried, but couldn't solve the 3-box puzzle. :D
I tried stacking them, moving them, throwing them at different places, throwing them at each other, phasing them through the textures out of existence. Nothing makes this fellow behind the glass impressed!
Here is a short demonstration of what I had to go through (box glitching included):
( In case if video embed below doesn't work `https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CbfxrQnby0` )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CbfxrQnby0
Please give me some direction so I can continue playing it. :) I want to finish the game before rating it.
I managed to leave the room, but there is a catch ( `https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DIpSoUcjkw` ):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DIpSoUcjkw
Hmm, I tried doing that, but I guess they were not standing still for too long.
I still like my rocketjump solution of getting out of the room better. I tried to think out of the box.
The eye-guy comment proves that they were not see this coming.
The QTE-style mini game to evade the attack is such an unexpected gem for a jam game. I rarely see people combine the mechanics in the jam prototype. It's usually very focused in one direction. For example, if it's a maze hide-and-seek, there will be movement, some monsters and maybe movement/vision related mechanics. But here, instead of just dying from the monster, you can save yourself. I was pretty bad at that mini game though: I can pass the simplest monsters, but those ghost-like creatures get me 80% of time. Overall, I really like it.
To improve the game further, I would suggest having different movement patterns for the monsters. Starting from the way they're advancing (in a straight line, zig-zag, etc.) and the movement speed they could have. Since this is a turn-based game, the movement speed can be implemented in two ways:
1. A monster can make a step once per N turns (speed=1 is the fastest, speed=2 makes them move once per two turns, something like speed=1.5 may make them toggle between 1 and 2 turns per step which could be also fun). 2. Instead of just jumping to the destination cell, they may stuck in the transition. With speed=2 they would traverse half of the distance towards the next cell.
If you like this kind of a review, please rate my game too. The feedback is important for all of us. :)
I would agree with @cheesepencil. Please consider to upload this game to itch io.
A quick glance at the errors make me think that you're using some external libraries that can't be downloaded. ldjam encloses the embed games into the sandboxes that have tons of limitations. itch io, however is much easier to play with.
My guess is that you can take your web zip, upload it to itch io and you're golden. There should be no extra steps required as itch io allows external libraries to be downloaded from the web game.
Otherwise, if you want to be hosted on ldjam, include the dependencies into the zip file, so they can be found "locally".
This looks like a genre that I never played before. I'm gonna need a proper /computer/ mouse to play it again, lol.
Or perhaps I need to use the pause feature more often. The only issue is that it's not as easy to "click" on the same spot with a touch pad as it would be with a mouse.
But I digress. The game is pretty cool. My only complaint is the sound design. The explosion (death?) sound is too loud. I had to set the system's volume to ~20% to make it bearable (or should I say mousable?) :)
Surprisingly odd and satisfying. The music is nice too.
I wish the game wouldn't restart the level for unpredictable reasons. Is it a time limit?
Sometimes I feel like I'm getting so close to the solution, but the game decides to restart the level. :'(
I'll probably record some playthrough of the game. Stay tuned. :D
I can't see my comment here for whatever reason, but the rating is still there. OK, let me try to write it again. :D
I like the aesthetics of the game: from its visuals to the way it sounds. The graphics are simple, but special effects make it juicy enough. These "combo" texts add to a retro feel.
The fact that I can configure the sound levels is also nice.
I hope I did get the mechanics right. Looks and feels like a 4-way tetris.
One issue I had is the game freezing after pressing the start button. Refreshing the page and starting the game anew fixes that.
Extra points for making it run in the browser. :)
All in all, this game is quite polished for a compo entry!
Also, thank you for playing my game. :3
This game is pretty cool.
I was a slow learner and it took me ~14 minutes to complete the game. Visually, this game is fantastic. It takes a while to understand how to navigate efficiently.
The tutorial gives you the basics, but it was hard for me to completely understand the "getting tired" mechanic. I get why it exists, but sometimes I can't predict whether something will get tired or not; I can only see when it's already tired.
The levels lack some navigation hints. Sometimes it looks like the world has several paths, but you as a player has no idea where to go. I like that some of the places required advanced worko-parkour, but these places were quite rare.
I missed (misread?) the intro images (I thought they were buttons), so I missed the plot. I didn't know that we were a small work-like thing that fell down. This is why it wasn't clear to me that we're trying to get back to the surface.
Am I right that our little wormy dies in the end? :'( Is there a better ending?
This game felt quite peaceful. I like the fact that there were no enemies.
I haven't found any bugs or issues during the playthrough, good job on that front.
Overall, the game feels quite polished.
Oh no, my poor wormo. :'( R.I.P. my friend.
Wow, this foldable UI is a gem for a game like this. I usually struggle to place all the necessary things on the screen, but hiding the unused windows away solves it. It might sound obvious, but it's not something I saw implemented in a jam games.
The music, combined with an art style, create a cool retro-style game atmosphere. It looks like you really tried to create a great sound for your game; the music is like 10 times better than what I managed to create for my game. That's really an area I want to improve on in the future.
I haven't completed the game, but I spent ~10 minutes in it and it was a good experience.
You get extra points from me for making this game runnable in the browser. :D It took a while to load, but hey, I have time. :D
Also, this is one of the few games that get a Mood rating from me. :) I think you captured the vibe pretty good with this one. I like the moon depression atmosphere. :D
This game is quite unique.
It would be even better with different levels with target numbers of parked vessels. Starting from a simpler one and then going crazy hard.
Once I realized that you can dock the ship from any side, the game became easier. :D The port should probably give a game over if you try to dock the ship from the wall side of the dock (it has only 1 directional entrance).
Oh nice, it looks I've found two RTS at the same time. I'll check @corporation game next. :D
One thing I've noticed in this game is the fact that text may appear below other buildings, making it impossible to read. The text labels should probably be on a layer above other sprites.
The music is very fitting. Extra points for making it possible to play it in the browser.
This is a very good game. I like that the area expansion mechanics stays relevant. I also enjoyed the music and the overall aesthetics. Sometimes I thought that the collision shapes are a bit too large and unforgiving, but I guess I should have used the dash more. It's just hard to tell whether something will damage you or not.
This game is a mixed bag to be honest.
The good parts:
* The robot greets us by flailing its robo hands; I'll cherish this moment (until I kill that robot to get 30$) * Killing and recycling your robot is funny; and profitable * This game has a sandbox potential * It does have some Factorio vibes * The music is nice * The missions guide you quite well; it's a good idea to mix a tutorial with this goal-based system * The theme interpretation is a win too
The problem is... I don't like Factorio. xD
For some reason, I thought that aqua blocks are the blue ones. xD This made me waste some time making the wrong things. The "color block" sources are somewhat hard to notice. The game could be more gentle when introducing them.
The graphics are OK. One problem is that it's sometimes hard to read. I thought that these "boxes" were rocks. xD
Regarding the tutorial: it needs an earlier mission that would involve the conveyors. Because otherwise you need to do a lot of manual work without having a clue that it can be automated. If the player has Factorio experience, maybe they have some chances of figuring it out, but otherwise, it feels like a chore... in a bad way. Maybe the tutorial level could be isolated on a smaller zone, because dozens of boxes are really hard to clear.
The controls are quite hard and not very intuitive. I think the "space" key is not even mentioned in the game description, so it took me some time to figure things out.
One minor bug: you can put things between the grid cells. Sometimes that can break the conveyor pipelines and this is somewhat annoying.
Oh shoot. I was hoping I could play this game without a need to download anything. I guess I can run this game on Linux using Wine, but it's so much more efforts than just pressing "play".
Oh dayem, I you used your own engine for this. You have my respect.
This game has so much potential, but the controls are somewhat annoying. :'( My biggest issue is vessel rotation. It's spinning like crazy. xD
During my first run I though it's because I placed the engine in a wrong way. But it doesn't seem to help if I align them properly.
Another thing is a very short looped music track. 10-30 more seconds with some variety of patterns would make it loop less seemingly. But this exact short part is good; it's just easy to notice that it loops a lot.
Other than that, this idea is brilliant. I player 3 runs and I would play some more if not this rotation thing. xD This is not the first game to interpret the limited space as a "limited space inside your space vessel", but this is the first time I had to manually put stuff on the ship.
The tutorial section is good. It gives you some time to get comfortable with controls (which you won't due to the rotation lol) and only after that it sends some enemies.
It's pretty cool that you added a way to rebind the controls. It's such a rare treat for a compo game. :D The menus are good too. But I think those are the default Godot skins. :D
The gameplay feels OK, but it got quite repetitive for me; although the game is short enough to not overstay its welcome anyway.
Sometimes it was a bit frustrating to wait an enemy to attack, because we can't do anything to them unless they create an opening for themselves. So in a sense, we can't attack them, we can only retaliate. This decreases the dynamics of the combat and reduces the amount of actions the player can have. That could be an intended route for this game, I dunno. :) Just sharing my view on that.
The music does a little stutter every now and then when playing in browser (I tested it in Firefox and Chrome).
It's great that you managed to add a music during the compo. The sound settings is also always welcome. A web export is another extra point; it's much-much easier to play it than a desktop build that you have to download and fight your antivirus to run it.
The amount of screens this game has is impressive, but I wish they were a bit more consistent. The buttons placement looks a bit sporadic.
Now to some less positive things.
In addition to what @ellaris said, I would add that the barricades close in so fast you don't even have a chance to decelerate in time (if it would have any sense). So instead of paying attention to the screen the D spam is the true strats.
Also, I don't feel the distance while traveling between the stations. If I choose the further away station, it still takes a few seconds to get there.
Another thing that made me confused is: I took some boxes and people from one station, went to another and I can't seem to find the things I've taken from that other station.
I wonder if anyone can actually outclass this game in this jam. I bet it will enter to top-100 at the very minimum. :)
A very polished entry. There is not even much to say here. I usually list some issues with the game or how it could be improved, but I have nothing to say here. Well, maybe tweak a game balance a bit, because it's somewhat hard to beat the last wave. It took me 3 runs to do it, but maybe that's an intended difficulty for it?
One of my favorite things about the graphics of this game is its color palette. This is one of my weaknesses: adding the right colors to the sprite. Your artists made a good job.
I encountered no bugs and the game maintains good FPS. :)
Also, have my **epic Indikator greeting of Destruction with sockets (2)**.
The driving mechanics are nice. It's hard to implement those correctly, so I'm impressed you can do it during the compo. This game is surprisingly relaxing.
This game is pretty simple, but it was quite enjoyable due to the combination of the sound and visuals.
At some point it becomes really hard to navigate the graveyard and I think this is where your theme interpretation is **burrowed** (giggles).
After I realized that I can dig things from a side, things became a bit easier (this was my 2nd run, score attacked). I made a few mistakes, but I think I wouldn't score more than ~45 anyway.
It's good to see more PICO games as they tend to work quite well in the browser. :D The also have this retro feel that I like.
end.png
It's also quite fascinating that you provided so many desktop builds (windows, linux, macos) in addition to the web export. :D
@extar Aha, fascinating! I heard about Pico-8 before this jam of course, but never learned any details about it apart from it being "something retro". I learned something new today. :)
The screen ratio made me decrease the browser zoom to see the whole screen. Even if I run it in a full-screen mode, it's not scaled properly. Is it a web-export issue?
I agree with @peremily - the background should reflect the movement. Otherwise, it feels dizzy and it's hard to sense the directions. The lack of sound adds to this weird feeling. :)
The art style is above the average for a jam game, but it's somewhat inconsistent. I personally don't enjoy the different pixel sizes. Some sprites have 1-to-1 pixels and detailed graphics while others look like a scaled thing with bigger pixels (they look chunky). Sometimes this combination of styles work, but it's safer to avoid it in my opinion. Stick to either a detailed x1 pixels or a chunky pixel-art graphics. The consistency is usually important for the aesthetics.
As a side note, some of the sprites look amazing.
It also looks like this game has a lot of mechanics like upgrades and base building (?), but I got lost in one big area with creeps without any clue where to go. I ended up getting lost somewhere in the middle (?) of the screen. :D
Overall, it is impressive that you managed to put so many things into the game. But it looks like it could damage the overall feeling of a game due to a lack of polish. That's just my opinion though.
Don't give up on making games and have my congratulations on actually submitting the game; it takes not only efforts, but also courage.
@scott-cooper you're welcome! This is what makes this event that great.
I managed to beat the game after 3 attempts. :)
The 3D graphics are impressive for a compo entry. Also, the web version of the game maintained a good frame rate. The controls are slightly awkward due to the lack of a building grid, but that could be just my preference.
The only complaint I have is a jarring toilet flush sound that happens every time the water comes closer. xD
@pe7e sorry if I went to harsh on the comparison, but that sound got me. :D I usually use sfxr/bfxr to create sfx, but it's limited in what it can do.
It only works well for retro-style 16-bit audio feel. It also mostly limited to beeps and bops that are OK for futuristic games, but ain't good for pretty much anything else.
This one of the few games that will get a Mood score from me. :D Because the music and the art are quire atmospheric here. (But really, I just have no idea what to do with this rating category.)
I tried my best, but I couldn't complete the last level without casualties after my 3 tries. The third level was the first one to make me lose a passenger (1 casualty during the first playthrough).
I like the way this vessel controls and feels.
I watched Kuvi play this game and asked you to share the link, so here I am!
This game looks and feels amazing! The art style is great. The music is going into my top-3 list I heard on this jam so far.
The plot also looks good and fits the theme.
I like this puzzle + platforming combo.
Your team did a good job on all the fronts!
It was quite hard to understand what I'm supposed to do. :'( I like the amount of details you put into the game and the description here. I may come back to this game later, when I'm done with some smaller and easier games first. :D This one requires concentration and ... reading. xD
Also, how can I get this "eh?" style buttons in the menu? Which language should I choose? :D
You probably want to hide the "exit" button in the web build since it looks like the game just hangs if you press it.
The text is quite hard to read when playing in a fullscreen mode on itchio (I think it's because of the messed up size rations):
tmp.png
@cyber-puffin sounds pretty cool eh?
Godot rocks. :]
The tie is found. The day is saved. result.png
Earthlings, I have good news. I manage to defeat the invaders. The final boss wasn't as tough as a pain we had during the ship placement. Sometimes we caught ourselves thinking: why can't we re-arrange the vessels that are already on the field? Or why can't we choose which side is getting bigger after an update? These questions will always haunt us, even after this glorious victory.
P.S. - I wish there were more levels. Consider turning this into a more full-fledged game. I think it has some potential. I would like to battle against some random fleets, etc. The endless mode would be great.
And hey, thank you for playing my game. :3
A nice little game.
The sound effects are cool. They're doing their magic in combination with some fancy vfx. The game feels juicy enough even with its minimalistic graphics approach.
I wanted to praise that this game doesn't become faster after some point and you can maintain the same pace, but then it went faster... and I lost. :D
Extra points for making it work in the browser.
Well, I tried my best:
highscore.png
14699
This is less than @cyt score. :D I may try a couple of more times to give a good competition here. :P
@senso I'm glad to hear that you're happy with your game. So am I to be honest.
Thank you for listing the tools you used to create your game. Maybe I need to include such a list too; I learned about a couple of things from the others this jam. For instance, I always used sfxr, but apparently there is also a bfxr which has more features.
Now, regarding the game. Even the itch io page is fancy. I personally don't like that pixel-style font as it's not very readable, but I guess it fits the overall style. :)
The music is... great. It's so much better than something I can make it's somewhat embarrassing. I need to get better on this front. :D Have you used Chiptone to create it? I may give it a try. How much time did it take to make it? I would also like to watch a video how you created that music track. The good music adds so much to the experience so I'm really interested how to create a good music in such limited time.
The voices in the game be like: "double kil... ouch ouch ouch" xD Tons of fun.
This game is hard to play with a touchpad (at least for me). I guess that's to be expected from a game like that. I had to take my lil old mouse to do it properly. :D
The online leaderboard... I can't even believe it's real. :D Lemme try submitting some score... And holy cow, it works. I managed to get somewhere around the rank=25. :D How did you manage to make a server for a compo game, that IS impressive.
When the field became so small I was so excited when it grown back for a while. This is a cool touch.
I think this is one of the best compo games I played this far.
Also, thank you for playing my game. :3
Wait, it also works for the mobile devices?
N-nani?! ... Masaka!
@senso I haven't tried it on mobile myself, but my friend said it's working. :D He was just amazed by the game just like I was. (Yes, I shared the game in a couple of chats as an example of a very polished compo game :D)
That's a neat game.
The music is great (the best one I heard on this jam so far?)
I like the fact that you give some direction to the player by saying "get as far as you can". Without it, I would have less motivation to play it. :)
I wish the collision warning was a bit slower; I couldn't take a look that fast. It could be an icon instead of a text, since there is no time to read.
I'm bad at these kinds of game, I got ~7000 highscore after ~15 attempts and gave up. :D
I noticed that the levels are randomized to some extent. This is pretty impressive for a compo jam game. You didn't have to do it, since the average play time is probably so low the players have low chances of noticing it. But you did it and you earned some extra respect points. :D
Plus you made it runnable in the browser. Thank you for that.
Last, but not least, thank you fro playing my game. :3
I like the controls. The precision jumping feels good in this one. I wish it had mid-level checkpoints. I failed the second level somewhere near the end due to the crazy bouncing enemy. I couldn't efficiently kill it, so it camped below me and waited until I'll go down to progress.
The graphics are good, this is probably the second best part about the game, after the sweet controls.
The game plays, looks and sounds nice. The attack feels a bit weird as I can't seem to be able to hit while on the move, but that's the only nitpick I have for this game.
I enjoyed the concept and the flavor text. :D Although there is no convenient pause to read the entire text, so I ended up losing the game. When I see a text, I want to read all of it. xD How else would I get to know a Naruto-Sasake guy (which is definitely not a dated name btw)??!
I would like to have a casual difficulty where the timer is higher, like 3->5 seconds maybe? It would make the game much more enjoyable for me, as I like the concept of reading random stuff and selecting something that I feel like fitting the next event, etc. This mechanic alone is enough for me, but the hard time limits give me pressure and tension overburst. :)
Another downside of this: it would be almost impossible to stream this game. The streamer would not be able to read aloud everything, while the viewers wouldn't make it in time either. So it will be a chaotic experience where no interactions are possible. Take the "monster loves you!" game. The game gives the player time to choose an option, so the viewers can vote for stuff. A casual mode with a space-key pause (that would not obstruct the view) could make it possible.
Perhaps I'm just not the right player for this game. I'm really bad at timing stuff and making fast decisions. :'(
Maybe instead of clicking a small "close" popup we could delete a memory with a right click (or a short left click). Less actions for that would reduce the chore feeling. But maybe it's just me.
Now, to the things I adored: * The writing! One of the best entries on this jam in this regard * I'll include the humor as a separate thing (you can't stop me) :D * The artstyle is so cute omg, you even have a small pic with a development team! * The in-game UIs are stylish, the colors are great * The music & overall sound design is good too * The game gives you some direction: the schedule is a cool idea
Also, I'm not even sure how to categorize this. It reminds me a bit about the games like Telling Lies and Her Story (these are my associations lol). In My Memory, you read the text and try to interpret it. Because you need to understand the effects it might have if you "save" it. It's understandable that for a jam the mechanics are quite limited, but I can see this game getting finished into something bigger, where intricate connections between the memories can take place. I have no idea how this game would play out though. :D
All in all, it's a solid jam entry. Well done!
Last but not the least, thank you @morgie for playing my game. :3
I'll be honest, this was quite stressful. This kind of an open space freaks me out. It's so easy to fly away and have no opportunity to go back. I don't feel like I have enough control to avoid that, therefore it gave me some extra anxiety.
I did manage to beat the speedrun mode after a few attempts. It was too hard for a touchpad, so I took my mouse for this. :)
I do like the idea of upgrades, but I couldn't figure out what the thing near the planet does and costs 5$. The backpack is very useful though.
Sometimes I grab something and it just spins around for infinity. This is kinda frustrating, adds to the whole feeling of being helpless. The same can happen when you're trying to grab the planet. I was flaying away from the planet due to momentum even though I was holding to the planet. I had to re-grab an asteroid to stop myself from flying out of bounds.
The music was nice. I do admire that you managed to make more than one cool track during the compo.
The art style as well as the sprites themselves is glorious. :) Things fit together and do not feel like a bunch of sprites that don't share the same style.
You probably never intended to make this game actually scary, but you got me. xD
P.S. - I won't let my tension meter affect the ratings. The game is good; it's just not my cup of tea I guess. I get this void space fear helplessness feeling pretty easily.
highscore.png
The idea is interesting, but the I'm not sure how to play it properly. I tried running it 3 times but every time I get a red letter and couldn't continue the game.
The xbox word appears to be my nemesis. :) I'm almost sure I didn't make any mistakes while spelling it...
P.S. - I played the web export version of the game.
QWERTY layout. I didn't know about the backspace. I'll try it out.
The gameplay is something I would expect it to be. :D I usually suck at flappy bird like games and this one is no exception.
Jokes aside, the collision shapes look weird. Sometimes I feel like the game is being too harsh on me. :)
It's OK for a 4 hour game, but it's a pity you couldn't spend some more time to polish it. Maybe add a couple of unique mechanics and all.
Anyway, I think my best run was around the score of 8. xD That's pretty pathetic, I know.
This game is insanely good!
I like this immersive UI and handwritten labels everywhere. It feels intuitive enough.
I had a slow start because I hesitated to eat the first Shawarma. :D The game told me that I can take objects and eat stuff, but why would I eat my only shawarma? :D I thought maybe I can use it to create other things. :sweat_smile:
The game started to drop a lot of FPS after about 7-8 ships. Maybe there are too many particles in the game for the web export? I dunno.
The game worked in the browser for me. I played it on itchio.
One issue I had with the game is a green text over the green objects. :D I also couldn't figure out what upgrades (?) do, so I skipped them, lol
Congrats with finishing a game during a compo!
You made a right call about the art direction. It was probably quick to make, but it looks stylish. And style is almost always more important than the amount of details. The filament looks extra cool (thanks to the flow animation).
It's admirable that you managed to make the mobile controls working during the compo.
The amount of different levels and extra mechanics, not to mention the different difficulties says a lot about your productivity. I think the most common thing to have is like 2 or 3 levels in the jam/compo game. You managed to create much more. I haven't played all of them, but I tried one level from each difficulty. They do feel different enough.
Now some of the less positive thoughts about the game and its implementation (I'm keeping in mind that this is a compo).
Some simple music would make the game a little bit more lively in my opinion. Some simple tools allow you to create a track in 10-20 minutes. It won't be a good music, but it's something. People can turn it off if they hate it, but for a 10-15 minutes session (most of the jam games don't get more than that I believe) it would make the experience much more gamey-like.
The docking feels awkward, but that is to be expected I guess. I got used to it after a couple of runs. It does change the pace from going at full speed to a turtle speed though. Not sure if this can be addressed in any way.
The friction/proximity interface/terminology is overly complicated in my opinion. :sweat_smile: As far as I understand, the proximity means the countdown until you get destroyed. There could be a more intuitive way to represent it, like calling it DANGER or something. Friction is probably related to the extra speed boost, but again, I'm not sure it adds anything to the speed counter. Players don't need to be explained about what "danger" would do - if it's full, something bad will happen. A full "proximity" doesn't convey a clear message to me.
It wasn't convenient to play the game in the browser from my desktop as full-screen mode is not supported (?) and some vertical part of the screen gets out of bounds. I was only able to see 80% of the screen due to that. It's not a biggest issue, but it would make some of the interface invisible to me, depending on which half of the screen I'm going to focus on. Making 2 layouts would be too much for a compo game, but I have a feeling that most people here would rather try to run your game in the desktop browser if there is such opportunity. I don't have any statistics that would support this theory, so I might be wrong here. :D In my opinion: browser game > mobile browser game > desktop build > mobile build
Running a browser game is basically ~zero efforts. Running a game on a phone might require an extra step, because while you're playing games on LD, you usually don't expect them to be a mobile game. Therefore, there is a higher chance of a player sitting in front of their PC/laptop. Desktop builds are a pain to download and run (anti-virus may go crazy and for a good reason). Mobile builds are like desktop builds, but also could be more dangerous and they still require a device switch.
I hope this is helpful at least in some way. :D
Ah. The danger meter could probably go near the vessel, so it's easier to notice for the player. But since you have a nice sound cue for it, maybe the visual representation is not that important.
Whew, I managed to beat in 2 tries. At first, I thought that I don't have to manually activate items, but then I was the labels on the screen and understood everything. :D
The spike traps are my favorite because you can traverse them without damage more easily. :D I can dash through the blades, but it's more risky and there is a chance of mistiming it.
This game is quite good overall.
result.png
It's hard to play this game with my touchpad, so I had to grab my mouse. :)
The music is surprisingly good for a compo game.
I managed to "win" (?) the first level before I could read the tutorial because the figures moved outside of the screen. This made me confused so I had to restart the game.
After I got used to it though, along with my mouse connected, I was able to get some fun.
I'm still in the process of playing the game, but here is a little bug report.
I played in Firefox, on the itch io site.
Steps: * Only click "play" with a fox * Say "I left the food in there" during the first dialogue option
Result: trace.png
I'll try to play the game again to have a chance of rating it properly.
Upd: I managed to reproduce it again, following the steps above. I'll try a different set of options now.
Upd2: I'm not sure that anything training-related is important. It looks like I just can't choose a "forgotten food" option.
Going for an all-play playthrough leads to another crash.
The fox jumper out of the window, so I consider it to be one of the endings. :)
trace2.png
OK, all-train playstyle crashes as well at the pillow scene. :)
@berin oh, let me try it again then. :)
I think I managed to get all the endings. Or at least it feels like it. :) I guess we can't make the fox stay with us forever? :) Or maybe I just got to the game overs, because every one of these had a sad music with "you will never see it again".
This one is pretty addictive!
It has a solid game loop and mechanics.
I'm being so unlucky, 3/3 times I tried to grab "just another one" it was a bust. I guess I should have memorized my deck better. :D
I was 1 point away from surviving the third wave, but I just couldn't make it; 1 extra draw got me a bust.
This game needs more attention and ratings for sure.
I find this combination funny:
funny.png
It could be useful in combination with "arrows", but still. :D
Also, sometimes arrows pointing down are on the 3rd row, so it looks like they wouldn't do anything? The same goes for the arrow pointing up in the 1st row.
And some extra points from me for making it work in the browser.
Last but not the least, thank you for playing my game.
@airwaffle oh yeah, I wasn't sure about the way arrows work too. Whether they affect a single row or not.
I had massive performance issues on both Firefox and Chrome (feels like ~5fps). The music stutters, the controls are lagging (I need to click 3-4 times for the game to register it).
It looks like this game needs to be played using a native build. Are there any recommendations on how to run this game in this case?
I liked the premise, but I can't rate the game until I play it properly. If nothing helps, I could rate it based on the gameplay video, but it doesn't feel right. :)
This is probably the most unexpected game I played during this jam so far. :D
I tried to open many files, but the game won't let me see them. :[ How can I start doing a real gamedev if it doesn't let me procrastinate?
> (Crushing of) Hopes and dreams
The game delivered.
The art style is good. The content of every New Document (1), (2) and (3) is great. I recommend everyone to check them out.
What I like:
* The graphics are neat, the weather particles make it much better * The way drone bounces when it's damaged is funny (and perhaps realistic?)
What I didn't like:
* The first level is already quite tight * The lack of some ambient sound (or a music) makes this game feel more empty (some arctic ambient would be nice, but I get that it's hard to create a track like this for a compo game)
I'm not a good platrofmer player, so I couldn't fly all the way to the left. I read some comments that there is something in there (a next level?), but I tried ~20 times to no avail. :'(
I managed to beat it thanks to the meta-progression. :D
This tri-shot weapon is my favorite one when you have enough damage to one-shot anything. :)
The game started to drop FPS close to the end due to the number of particles on the screen. I played it in the browser, Firefox to be more specific.
Regarding the tooltips: I couldn't see them during my gameplay. I read some other players had this issue too and I found out what was the culprit. I was hovering over the "buy" (price) button, not the actual icons. The icons don't look interactable, therefore my attention shifter towards the shiny button. Maybe it would be safer to copy the tooltip to the button as well.
I tried to press both of these buttons, but nothing happens. I guess I can't have some more. :'(
This game is quite enjoyable.
hiscore.png
In the games like this I wish I wouldn't need to repeatedly press the fire button. Since there is no penalty for shooting without stopping, the player will be spamming the button anyway. An auto-fire would also be OK: you could concentrate on moving instead of having to spam the button that doesn't serve a lot of purpose. At least that's my take on the gameplay. If there would be some mechanics around that, it would be a different story, but there is no reload time or energy cost, so the faster key presser wins.
Also, I can swear the music was changing its speed during the game.
Other than that, I was able to beat your score. Albeit just barely. :D
asteroids.png
I'll be honest, the premise didn't sound like a game I would like. But after playing for some levels and getting to the part where you have to capture multiple objects by finding the right angle was rewarding.
I like the difficulty progression of the game. It's easy to get used to the controls and mechanics.
I do feel the lack of sound. Some simple music in the background could fix that. A simple sfx for taking a picture would give some action feedback to the player.
Good work on the theme front too.
Extra points for making the web export of the game.
I noticed that the game title is different. :D Heavy Weaponary vs Heavy Machinery.
I think the lasers turned out to be my favorite weapon. I wish there was a bit more customization involved, but it was a good little experience for a compo game.
The controls feel so jarring in the beginning. I got used to them after a couple of runs, but I still find them weird. It's neither a free-control where you could turn freely and it's not a 4-directional movement either: it's a mix of those two. If you want to keep this movement system, some polish may be required to make it feel less janky.
I have a feeling that I had a higher high score after the 3rd run, but I don't remember it because the game just quits to the main menu. Does the highscore in the main menu properly update if you managed to beat your previous score?
hiscore.png
I was running the game on itch io. It took several minutes to load, but it was worth it. :D
The music is cozy, the graphics are fitting. I'm impressed that most things are animated. The sound effects are funny and sound like you've made them yourself (instead of using some generator like sfxr).
During my first run, I managed to serve exactly 0 drinks lol. My mistake was related to the fact that I didn't get the placement requirements for some reason. When I started a second run, it all became clear to me. I still didn't manage to serve every single order even on the first level. It looks like this game requires some fast fingers and/or a good mouse; I played it with my touchpad and it wasn't easy. :D
One thing I wish was implemented is an auto-open for the crusher. It feels like an unnecessary chore to open it up after every use. I get the crushing part, but not the "open after use" part. (i.e. I want to do a down move, but not up-down action).
Overall, it's a polished game with neat mechanics. It's my understanding that you're using a small field and placement requirements as a theme interpretation.
Extra points for making this game playable from the browser.
Also, thank you for playing my game. :3
I'm not sure I can find a web export on the referenced itchio page. Can this game be played in the browser?
@jiri-one thank you for checking it out. I can't figure out how to properly "respond" to a comment on this site, but oh well.
I'll play your game later, when LD enables the ratings. Because apparently, we can't rate games yet. Or maybe it's just for people like me (new users).
https://www.reddit.com/r/ludumdare/comments/16xgv1k/i_dont_understand_how_to_rate_other_games/
@crylica those are pretty legit suggestions. The bots are so similar due to the fact that I'm not that good at drawing, so I created a couple of unique sprites and then modified them to create more variety. :D The same goes for the enemies, they're a variations of a single sprite. I spent ~1 hour drawing this damn jeep thing just because I wanted mutants to have some vehicles, but it wasn't the best time investment. :D
I'll make sure to check out your game too!
@scott-cooper patrol bots go like: heeey, look at me, I'm adorable. :D
The game UI needs to be revamped completely after the jam. :) Those textbox-style windows were very tempting due to the fact it was super fast to implement them. :)
Thank you for playing my game in return! :3
@bloodyaugust yeah that slot-specific building selection was probably a bad game design decision on my part. Having the restricted building slots would be enough. Initially, this decision was made to fit the buildings selection into a pretty small text window so it doesn't get overwhelming. I broke this rule with factories later, giving the player to choose among 4 options. The buildings would require 5 items in that list, which is even more. The UI needs to be completely revamped after the jam.
I plan to re-create this entire game without a rush later. But for now, I guess that's how I managed to do this in time: like all of us, I had to sacrifice some of the things in order to finish the core gameplay loop.
Thank you for your feedback. :3
> And now, to go play some of the other base building and RTS games on your itch pageâŚ
I think Roboden is the one you may want to try (it's out on Steam).
@thaprofesional my inspiration mainly comes from a game called No Heroes Allowed also known as "What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord?" series. :D
The Dungeon Keeper is of course is another one that can be considered to be a somewhat similar game in genre.
As for the old school RTS: I'm a big fan of those. :)
@kasmilus there are two end conditions:
1. You lose if your Core is destroyed. 2. You win if you destroy the enemy base.
It's possible to destroy the enemy base in the late game, when enemy sends out more units than they can produce. This is an opening. Build several Titans and they'll attack the enemy base. You can assist titans with your Core if it has some Vanguards to cover it. There are other strategies, but this tactic is the most safe one: defend the base until the enemy is exhausted.
You can win without Titan units: make dozens of Vanguards instead. You don't want too many of these before you're planning to do an attack since their energy upkeep is high.
@peco every tile has a randomized buildings bound to it. In the retrospect, it was a bad game design decision.
In part it's due to the limited UI I used in the game: having 5 options in the list would be quite overwhelming, so I decided to go with a 2-item lists that are randomized.
The bad part is that it doesn't really make the game better. It just allows me to fit the options in without making a more complex UI system.
Note that a unit selection in the factory is already 4 items and it's quite inconvenient to use. It wasn't even meant to be a 4-item list, but then I came up with a Titan unit idea, so I had to add "just another one" to the list.
> Also the titan would never get built even when i had enough resources.
This is weird. I wonder how can I reproduce this. The game usually gives you an error sound as well as a notification (a flying message around the factory) when it can't build something.
@milq this is my first subjectively successful RTS for a short jam. Usually, I fail to implement all the necessary mechanics for the core game loop. But this time, the game is fundamentally simple: you can only control one unit directly, the enemies are just attacking in waves, etc. So I had some time to actually get things done.
@mickey-sanchez try beating the game even on normal. :] Perhaps you're a seasoned RTS player and easy difficulty is not enough to match your skills.
The end-goal is to destroy the enemy base. The difficulty is "easy" by default, to make it more accessible. You can attack by sending out Titan units (use factories to build them) and/or by sending out your core with an army of Vanguards (they follow the core outside).
The normal difficulty is what I can beat quite consistently.
The hard difficulty is almost impossible to win, but it can be treated as a survival mode. If you can survive for ~25 minutes up there, you're a champ. I can only win on this one if I cheese a bit and destroy the enemy camp before they get crazy strong.
@neowedge I didn't have enough time to add some essential contextual hints. :D I tried to use the tooltips as much as possible to make the onboarding a bit better, but I think I overdid it a bit (with these "dig complete" messages that have ~zero meaning). I could spend 30 mins more to add more important messages like "hey, you still haven't build a generator! you can build it here >points to the cell<".
You lose if your Core unit is destroyed. You win if you destroy the opposing base. The Titans are indeed a way to siege the opponent, but it's not as easy as sending a couple of these.
The game also has a progressing difficulty. Unless you're winning in a 15-20 minutes span, it will be much harder to win afterwards (requires a lot of efforts and maybe a little bit of cheese).
@nilan I do have a lot of plans on this game after this compo. :) I'll have to rewrite the entire game from scratch though, because the code is a mess right now. :D
I really don't regret getting my hands dirty with this game, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to finish in time. I wish I could make the onboarding better and polish the balance a bit better, but oh well.
@yngvarr ah, I can see that some of the mechanics were not that obvious due to the lack of a proper tutorial.
You can build factories on some "hard terrain tiles" and produce units there. This is the main iron resource sink in the game.
Thank you for recording a video. These things usually show me the way people interact with a game and where their intuitive flow breaks.
@caeonosphere Vanguards are quite sloppy, that's correct. :D It takes them 4-10 seconds to gather around you, usually. So if you want to gather them for an attack, you would need to stay outside for a while, then they'll come.
The reason behind this behavior is that they only check what to do every once in a while, so they don't end up chaotically running in circles. There are much better ways to achieve that, but I was not spending a lot of time on the individual bot's AI (every one of them has a dedicated behavior). :D I'll definitely revisit this weird mechanic after the jam.
P.S. - I hope you enjoyed my rocket jump strats for your Sampler game. :D
@2thegamechanger it would be a different game if you could build at any spot. It would create a single best strategy: just make the entrance heavily guarded and that's all. Just like in any other defense game.
I probably wouldn't keep the randomized slot buildings, but I like the limited building spots idea. You can just extend the entrance by digging deeper and when you find the right combo of blocks, you build a main base around that. This means you need to adapt to the environment and what the game gives you.
At least that's my view on things. I really don't want to see ~every base setup to be the same.
@2thegamechanger yup, the randomized per-slot selection was probably a bad idea. :D
I thought it was cool, but nah. It just makes things more annoying. Maybe if ,you could spot the "kind" of a building spot that would be better. Like some spots can have only utility buildings (like generator and smelter) while the other one can have military buildings (factory, turret).
I'll get rid of it after the jam, when I'll work on a proper game based on this.
@f1krazy I'm sorry that the tutorial isn't good enough in the game. You can build generators on these hard terrain blocks. There is ~50% chance that some tile will have a Generator building available. Also, you can dig some tiles for free even without the energy; read the tooltips to find them.
Every action in the game require a tile to be focused. So hover over a hard terrain tile to get a context menu. It will list the options as well as the hotkeys.
As a last resort, you can watch the gameplay video attached to the itch io page. It should explain some of the things.
This game is so polished wtf. xD Great job!
I like the physics and car driving mechanics. I tried to make a top-down racing game before and I know that it's not trivial to make one. ;D
Me upon launching the game: /starts MAYHEM/
I wish there were some car damage shaders. :D I have a GTA1 feeling, where things just can't be left untouched.
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This game is SO good. I was restarting the first level a couple of times until I realized that you can consume more than one blob in a turn! I completed a couple of levels and I'm willing to do some more later, until I finish the entire game. I may even record my playthrough of it later.
Note: even the first two levels made me so surprised. I see that there is more to this game than I could discover in this short period of time, so I'm excited to continue.
I don't think that I ever saw a game like that. :D
Extra points for making a web export of a game.
Nicely done!
Holy cow this game needs more ratings and attention. :]
It took me a couple attempts to realize how exactly this mechanic works, but after that it was quite interesting.
This game is impressive!
I like the stacking mechanics: conveyors + movable characters + body swap make it interesting.
I have to agree with other commenters about the movement though. It's so slippery. xD Feels like we're walking on ice and/or our feets are covered in some liquid that makes us slide constantly. xD
Slipping aside, the controls are simple and easy to learn. The in-game hint helps too.
The music is fantastic as well. I think this is either #1 or #2 my favorite track on this jam so far. The other cool track being in a Super Cube game by @senso
The theme is interpreted as in "you can't go far away from a physical body", if I get it right. It's quite a good angle on that.
The graphics are stellar. 5/5 here without any hesitation. If I put 5 anywhere, it should be here.
Music and graphics are probably the strongest parts in this one.
The beat is quite impressive for a game jam game and it's suitable for a rhythm game (not every track is).
I found a minor issue with the gameplay: there is no penalty for mistakes. I can mash HJKL nonstop and hit every note. The game tracks the "misses" and decreases the bar, but it doesn't account for this mindless button mashing. For a rhythm game, maybe there could be some "beep" sound if you're hitting the wrong key (or hitting the correct key at the wrong time).
The game is quite short so I baked two cakes and recorded it on a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn9DKeRQ04Y
Hey, I actually went for a canon ending where demon pooped themself. :D
I found it funny that the time is displayed like it's not 5 mins but rather 5 hours. Or maybe the demon's time resolution is just that great, every microsecond counts.
I recorded a video just in case (the first 5 mins is my fav part):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKle6GrgxlY
It's funny that during these jams you get all kinds of feedback. Some people can't beat the game while others may say that it's too easy.
I'm for one didn't feel any challenge while playing. :D
This game feels very polished otherwise. A difficulty setting is probably the only thing I would like to have to make the game last for more than ~4 minutes.
Btw, I used the controller and it worked. It didn't work in Firefox, so I had to switch to Chrome.
Here is my playthrough of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqJw0AmZ6Kc
It's funny that the game's URL is Replicate-Me, but the title says Replicate-You. :D
I "trained" two replicas: 1. A good-playing replica that played by the book 2. A bad-playing replica that only cared about catching blue enemy things
And it kinda worked. I was wondering if it would replicate that behavior or not. This is probably a game where player needs to treat a computer playing as their baby. :D "I have nothing more to teach you"
At first, I thought you're mining crypto on my computer, because "summoning" the replica makes everything stutter. :) Also, the site hosting the game is not HTTPS and it felt very unsafe.
I recorded a video if anyone is curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDZgDlrXJ7c
We almost managed to beat this game with my friend, but it we were 1-2 spores short in the end of the second stage.
The level design (from a puzzle perspective) and graphics are probably the strongest parts of this entry. Although the first level felt better for me as second level lost the feeling of novelty at that point (no new mechanics or challenges). Or maybe we got more used to the gameplay at that point.
The one thing that made the game hard to play is its way of connecting the bridges. Sometimes the mushroom will spawn, but no grass will show up. Or the branches will grow, but you still wouldn't get the ability to navigate. These multiple states make it not so obvious for the player whether they missed and should fire there again or if it's a mistake and they should try finding another way. Sometimes we managed to create a bridge by repeatedly firing 2-4 shots at the same place just to make the game register it. It could be the lack of understanding of the mechanics, but from a player's perspective we don't see enough consistency I guess (you don't fail all the time, neither you succeed all the time, "it depends" and you may want to repeat the action just in case).
Other than that, it's pretty impressive for a jam game. I was somewhat surprised to see an UE game instead of Game Maker game from Serge. :D
You can find the playthrough here: https://www.youtube.com/live/XE5Pg5Olp-0
I tried to play this game from my laptop and wheel-scrolling controls were backfiring. Sometimes I ended up summoning the wrong summon (over-scrolled), the other time I was trying to make the game recognize my "scroll" gesture on the touchpad.
I think I would have different experience with a dedicated mouse. Although hotkeys like 1, 2, 3, and 4 for summons could make things easier for me without the need to open/scroll the selection wheel.
I couldn't figure out whether there is any progression (level ups, etc) or not. I would think that collecting souls would give something, but maybe I was dying too early in the game. My second guess was that I need to make sacrifices to get extra power, but it looks like they're there just to get healing.
I recorded myself playing the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr-vmYHZBO4
I thought that battles would be turn based. :D It took me a while before I realized I should be doing something.
My only real nitpick is the font selection. Or maybe it's a problem of ALL CAPS. It was hard to read the text most of the time due to the lack of spacing between the words.
The game is pretty short, but at least it means one can beat it. :D
This game is very good for such a small team of two.
* The core battle mechanic is addictive * The leveling system that utilizes the battle mechanic is nice too * It feels good to level up, extra dices do make a difference * This system has the potential to be really good after the final polishing
With that being said... Since there is no gameplay variety apart from this combat mini-game, I got a bit tired of being concentrated after ~30 minutes. You can consider adding some distractions from combat to a bigger game to mix the experience (some city activities could help here, maybe).
All things considered, it's a solid game for a game jam.
I couldn't go pass the last (?) level, but I was interested enough to play for about 30 minutes.
Some observations: * The music sounds weird, like there is a glitch * I would like to have a fast-forward button because when there is a 1-on-1 hammer battle, it can drag for ~30s while they float around randomly * I would make hp bars distinguishable because otherwise it's a mess with 10+ units on the screen, I can't tell whether we're winning or not
Other than that, it's a very good jam game.
I recorded myself playing the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRwQ_FYDUF0
Whew, that's a lot of drama in here. Do let it break your spirit though. The ratings will be polarizing, but you're getting experience and some people are trying your game in a fair way.
I played your game till the end (it's quite short, ahah). I noticed that web version music sounds weird, both Firefox and Chrome can't handle it: it stutters badly. I wonder if it's Godot issue or if it's related to the music you used somehow.
I would maybe decrease the max range of the weapons and enemy aggro, so you could see who is firing at you and vice versa. Because as it is, the best combat strategy is to shoot randomly out of the camera bounds to kill anyone out there.
I also skipped a dialogue once by accident. I was mashing the fire button during the last fight and then the dialogue window appears. I did not manage to stop firing at that very moment, which lead to a skipped line or two. A delay after the enemy is killed could have helped here a bit.
Here is a video of me completing the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFiShdJPazk
Hey, this is probably the highest rate for a game from me so far. :D I like it from every angle (in terms of the ratings).
My best friend loves puzzles, so I'm gonna recommend this game to him. :)
I tried to make something puzzle-like myself too, but I think this is as puzzle-y as it gets while my game is mostly about movement frustration (which is puzzling, lol). :D
Your game has good design (simple things, then more mechanics), humor, good enough art style for a compo game, a good selection of levels and even some ambient sounds. I would assume that the "engine" you made is simplistic and doesn't evaluate the expressions themselves, you probably just checking for the right solution right? This could be a problem if some levels have multiple solutions (but the ones I've seen so far probably have only one).
The theme interpretation is also quite good. I like summoning sticks in a puzzle game more than summoning monsters/units in terms of theme interpretation (there is nothing wrong with a classic approach, I'm just curious about new interpretations). I honestly failed at adding anything theme-related to my game, therefore I opted-out of this rating. You, on the other hand, did a good job.
I'm not sure this game is innovative in general, but it was innovative for me, because I wasn't expecting much from a game that makes me do math. :D
This is a second time you impress me with your LDJam game (the first time being your Auto Pilot game).
I recorded my playthrough of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhIshruf4a8
@stmate03 to be honest, I'm not planning to get this anywhere.
I needed to play with a visual programming part for my other game. So in a sense, this jam was useful for me. But as for this exact game, it's as good as it gets. :D
The system I ended up with for coding behavior could be better if I had more time. But at least I found a couple of things I like. For example, I like the idea of linear branches instead of a full-fledged trees for the logic. It's more limiting, but this pattern matching approach can make reading larger programs easier for non-programmers (because you just read them one by one, not as a whole tree). Or maybe I'm wrong and it won't scale. We'll see.
The argument/param stack was probably a dire mistake. It makes things harder without much benefits. I mean, it's a way to pass extra data to the instruction and it borrows from the languages like Forth or stack virtual machines (e.g. JVM), but there are better ways to do that. But I thought it could work pretty well in the beginning (I was wrong).
So all in all, I'm mostly interested in the visual programming part of the game than the auto-battler part.
@binroot my idea is to make this a foundation for allied and hostile units programming. The player could configure the behavior if they want to, but otherwise this system can be used to create tons of units with varying behavior using the in-game terms. The visual programming part would become more of a mini game for a bigger scale game.
Although I can see a space battle game that rivals Carnage Heart, I'm not sure I want to make a game where coding is the central part (it should be an optional mini-game that is connected to the bigger game directly). This prototype is just my way of experimenting with the idea. :) It was a productive weekend in terms of testing out the visual programming aspect of my next project.
See my other comment above for some more context.
@stmate03 I'm also having fun by playing games we made during the jam. :) It's probably the most social activity (albeit online) I did in a while. I hope you have fun too.
@woona the "Test" button was intended to simplify the testing process, but sandbox idea is even better. A live coding of sorts would be pretty cool.
You know what. An on-the-fly program reload in that sandbox could be used for something other than combat. Imagine a "play sound" instruction that would trigger on some conditions. And maybe something to render on-screen notifications. That would allow a creation of programs that would do something interesting coupled with the game mechanics (movement, energy management, and other things that can control the branching). This kind of sandbox would be fun to have. I'm gonna write this idea down.
@woona there are two main things that make movement bad: 1. A bug with "rotate to point" that may take a longer route 2. A very floaty physics with high inertia
While (2) is fun, it makes movement highly unpredictable. I think it should be either reduced significantly or there should be some ways to counter it, programming-wise (like turn extra engine that would compensate for the current inertia).
@woona inertia was coded by design, but it turned out to be a bad design choice in combination with a zero instrument selection the game provides to handle it.
Btw, I remember your Auto Pilot game. We definitely "met" before on the internet. :D Long time no see.
@frogman I created a basic main menu layout from the start and disabled the buttons that were "yet to be implemented". I didn't had any time/energy to implement them in the end. :D
The movement is kinda broken, that's true. I wish I would spend 30 more mins to make it more predictable and enjoyable.
My friend managed to beat level 6, but it's not a fair level. It's there to add some real challenge to the game after you learned the basics. :)
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@sharploaded this rotation bug was in there for quite a long time in my math library. :D I never had enough motivation to fix it, but I actually did after this jam due to the amount of pain it inflicted. :)
@rubixnoob13 well, due to the rotation bug you would probably suffer anyway. :) I kinda feel rough to put people through this.
But the bright side is, I managed to come up with some partial solution for my visual programming task. Post-jam brainstorm with the "lessons learned" lead to the value stack concept elimination as it's both hard to use and understand (but it was easy to implement during the jam).
I wanted to check out your game but it seems that I already completed it. :D I remember it being many-things-in-one experience. :D
Hmm, this is a tough spot to be in. On one hand, I wanted to play this game more. But the frame rate drops to unbearable levels after a few minutes. I assume it has something to do with the amount of enemies crawling the map.
I really wanted to get further into the game, but I can't play with ~5 fps. Also, the difficulty seem to be too high, I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.
On the bright side, this /is/ an interesting game that got me excited for a while (until the huge fps drop kicked in). It also looks good: I appreciate little things like unit death animation.
I recorded a video so you could see how one may struggle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdERL9hsErA
Overall, it's a cool game which I would play more if not the performance issue. With that being said, there are some other things that bothered me (but not to an extreme):
* The pathfinding looks quite bad, my units sometimes fail to cross the terrain and fall behind * If you engage the enemy on top of a hill, units will lock-on forever (?) and try to attack it from the bottom; it kinda works (a bug?), but it's somewhat annoying (because you can't disengage). * The camera movement felt too slow; or maybe it's a browser-only issue? You can see the camera movement speed in the featured video
I would like to see a video of how it's supposed to be played. Maybe I missed some obvious mechanic that would make the game easier?
Not gonna lie, this is pretty impressive for the first game (itch io game description says so).
Make animals poop and let the player clean this mess up and you get a Cult of the Lamb lol.
I think the game difficulty is more of less static, this is why I felt overpowered after a few upgrade levels. The main danger is your own army because in the end I was surrounded to submission.
I recorded myself playing the game if you're into that weird kind of stuff (such as watching other people play your games): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3SVna1wLuM
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Ah, I forgot to say that chicken are quite OP. It took me a while to notice the way sheep are attacking. Overall, it was good to know that every unit has its own mechanics. I haven't read the game description but I was able to get this info while playing the game itself.
I had some performance issues when running this game in Firefox. Chromium handles it a bit better. I got something like ~20 fps which was good enough. The only thing is that the music kept stuttering and I had to mute it (it's good that there is an option to do that).
@ooboob I have these performance issues with ~all 3D games in the browser. So it's either my video card issue (it's integrated) or perhaps web builds in most game engines do not perform that well. I know it's the case with my game engine, its web exports use wasm for execution and its way worse than running a native build (when compiling Go to wasm it becomes single-thread only, which is a bad thing 'cause the game engine itself can't use any form of parallelism).
Btw, which browsers have you tried?
I didn't know that bonuses other than agility affect the workers before beating the game. :D I guess I should have read the description first, but sometimes it contains spoliers. :)
As @yogurtthehorse mentioned, the pathing system is interesting. It also allows you to skip the pathfinding programming in a creative way. :D
Also, as @kiberptah said, adding "click to continue" to the "Victory" text would make the level transition a bit better. But since I've read as far as "this game has 3 levels" I was expecting more. Also, "press tab if many factories" kinda gives away that you might get to that point, eventually.
At first, I thought different slots affected different body parts, but it seems that it's more about stats. E.g. having more agility leads to more legs, etc.? It's probably a quite creative way of handling it. Although it would make combinations like A-A-P and P-A-A look identical (and maybe they should, as their stats are identical anyway).
A somewhat simple addition that I would have is ranged weapons, even if they're pathetic. Because it would make tanky frontliners more worthwhile, since you can only have 3-4 effective melee attackers anyway (there is usually no space for more). If you could have a composition of 3-4 frontliners with HP+HP+HP, covered by ~4 ranged units and a couple of "pushers" (all into power and maybe 1 agility) to destroy the enemy base fast, it sounds like a more balanced group than 10 average buts (e.g. a bunch of power and health upgrades).
I tried making some agility-heavy combat units to flank the enemy base after their initial attack, but it failed. :D
But either way, it's always nice to see an RTS-like game on a jam.
https://youtu.be/vI-I_CPE4Gs
The game has an interesting mechanic (sticking to an apple with your body).
When I saw a purple worm, I thought that some new game elements are about to be introduced, but you probably ran out of time so we couldn't get more. I think there are some things that could be added to the game, if we ignore the compo constraints.
Another good part is that this game has a working flow. You can restart the game and actually finish it. It's something that some of the compo games can miss. :D
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@nazariglez is it an evolution though? The original game is real-time, this is why it's easy to make a mistake, esp in the late game. This game is more of a puzzle. Therefore, I would put it in a different category.
After the new carma changes, I see so many comments that feel like carma farming. :D (I might very well be wrong, but it's just a feeling)
@johnbrynte it's fine by me as well. :D I'm not here to break any fun, but the words "evolution" caught my attention when used in this context. xD
I unlocked both endings and even saw a shocking rat showing pussy content!
I got like 1/4 of the steps left during a winning run, so it was a very close call.
Damn it Maria, how many times I have to repeat the same phrase to you?
Like some of your other jam games, this one has distinguishable humor component to it.
I couldn't provide any good feedback as this game feels like a finished mini story. It even has the markers telling you which rats were mentioned in the previous dialogue. I don't see how this can be turned into a full-fledged game (unlike your King game), but perhaps it can be a part of another game (a mini-game)? Or maybe rats can be varied more (or even randomized), so every run is like a "Slay The Princess" kind of adventure, where some choices lead to an unexpected branching.
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> Also I intentionally did not make rats randomized because this is just a jam entry, and a player should lose onse and have an easy win after that, 5 minute adventure.
Yeah, I totally get that. It's the right choice here. The randomization part was about expanding the game if you would ever think about it. :D But as you said you don't want that, then this game is just perfect for the jam format. :)
I managed to get all the ducks on the road. Well, most of them. I got the most important ones anyway. Sometimes the duck mom will go berserk and lead her kids to swim, I guess not every duck is treated the same way in this family.
But jokes aside, I almost felt that the game became repetitive, but at that moment, the game ended, so I guess it's not a big issue. I noticed that there were golden bag that could be picked up, but there was no score in the end, so I'm not sure if I'm missing something.
Maybe a single new mechanic in the middle of the game would make it feel less repetitive? Like having two duck mothers of different color, each willing to take only her kids for a walk. And maybe they would need to go to different directions and use different road lanes? E.g. the family 1 goes to the right using the lane 2 (this is how it works right now) and family 2 goes to the left and uses lane 1.
I'm not sure how hard would it be to code that behavior inside the LD time constraints, maybe the code is not ready for this change as it's usually quite messy during the game jams. :D
As it is right now, it feels like maybe you had some more ideas, but you ran out of time. I remember your previous game btw, the one with a virtual device; it was really good (especially on the visual part).
Don't get me wrong, I'm trying to think hard what could make this game a tad better without adding too much stuff as it's probably why some of us are here, to share their thoughts.
P.S. - I tried wine to run the game on my Linux, but it didn't go well. Steam's Proton did the job though! So it's possible to run this Windows game on Linux, if anyone is interested.
@designernap now I'm interested to try the duck food mechanic.
I managed to finish the game. :)
At first, I was a bit bored as there was not much things to do in the game. I could only click for a bit, build a new candle, click some more. It was not until the ~10th candle when I realized that I can send the followers to find some extra essence. I can't say that the game became much more exciting at that point, but at least I had something more meaningful to do.
The visuals are probably the strongest part of the game.
I'm not an expert on clickers, so I couldn't really suggest anything. This game looked good, it just lacked some extra mechanics to be more interesting. The game as it is right now can win itself at the moment I build a couple of candles and go AFK (it'll just take a lot of time).
But anyway, congrats on finishing the game for the jam.
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Wait a minute. A see a "bowl" building on the screenshot, but it wasn't available for me, ever. Also, I don't remember that piece of dialogue. Is it a final build of a game or there is more of a content I missed?
As mentioned above, the fixed zip also gave me an error during the extraction, but the game launched anyway.
@blacksheepza could you at least describe the magnificent bowl and that extra dialogue here? I'm intrigued. xD
@blacksheepza gotcha, thank you for sharing. I love these little game jam "making of" stories. :D
My fairies were quite lazy. xD By the end I think only 25% of them were doing something while everyone else were too busy pretending they're not in an idle state.
One of the fairies struggled with this so-called "unhealthy attactchement syndrome". I miss the lime. It never reached the cake, what a terrible way to go.
The cakes (the foundation of it?) were the bottleneck of my production line. Is there a way to boost its production?
The good part about this game is attention to details. Like cakes actually getting into the oven, the workers being lazy, those kinds of things.
I wouldn't call this game hard or having a bad UX, it's alright. But the player must read some text during the start. My game also relies on the player reading some text to understand what they're expected to do, but ~25% of people struggled anyway. :D I can clearly see the effort to make the early game less frustrating to the player: you start with less fairies (may I call them units, please? ok, I won't :D). It's a good step, although they started to appear while I haven't finished reading the text. xD One of the fixes for that could be trigger, e.g. when the player does something explained in a tutorial (they create a complete cake), we start the fairy spawner; otherwise it can be turned off during the starting sequence. This way, even a slow reader can have more time to kick in.
I liked the notifications system which tells you what you're missing! It's useful and it's a level of polish you rarely get in the jam games.
I was frustrated a couple of times when I couldn't get out of the bowl. :D It just wants me to commit and doesn't let me go without making a cake. I think I wanted to re-check which kinds of cake foundations do I have/cook right now.
I don't know whether any of the cake parts affect the prices or not. But at any rate, I have a feeling this game is more about looking at different cakes than doing actual economy (because look at these cakes, they're cool). Although my headcanon is that if you sell the same cake multiple times, the demand goes down and you get less $ for that exact cake for a while. Perhaps something like this was already implemented, but it was hard to test without repeated cake design production. I would do that, but my fairies seem to have stucked and the cake foundation speed production dropped so much I had to cease the operattion.
I recorded a video of myself playing the game, perhaps it could be useful to see how a random player would interact with the game.
Also, I wish you more ratings. I came here from the post you created, but you don't have to play my game in return. You can spend this time playing the games you find more interesting for you personally; besides, I already got my 20 ratings while some other games may need these ratings more.
Upd. - why can't I rate graphics? :D It's one of the better looking games so far. xD Alright, I'm including this score into the "mood" zone (nobody knows what it's for anyway).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-B-9_4c7FE
I like the idea, but the implementation is currently very bare bones.
A single thing that should be quite easy to implement is a more gradual enemy. Make the player face a single enemy so they need to do a small scale 1-on-1 battle. Also, I would like to either see damage numbers or health bars just to know how good or bad some units is doing. This is not the only way to do it of course, but these methods are the simplest ones for the game jam format. This way, the player can recognize facts like "our 1 melee unit worth 1.5 enemy melee units", etc.
Maybe lock most of the units for summoning before a trigger happens (a group of enemies are defeated). Then it will be easier for the player to learn every monster type in a more controller environment.
With a slightly improved game flow described above, this game would be a very solid game jam entry (all games are flawed here in their own way).
So far, this game excels in graphics and artistic choices (sound design is included in this definition).
I'm going to look forward to your post-jam versions of the game. The comments below are my opinion how could a ~60 minutes (theoretically) could have been spent to make a single subjectively most important change.
I think it's extra hard to play this game on a laptop without the top-notch touchpad. If the hit area would be bigger (as someone already mentioned above), it would be easier.
I enjoyed the gameplay during the first speed stage, but I believe it gets increased afterwards. I'm always kinda bad at time attack games when time is basically against you. :D I don't have enough time to plan for the hits and combos, and eventually you will lose anyway. Even without increased speed, I think this game could spawn more enemies and the player will lose eventually all the same, but the feel of controlling the situation will be prolonged.
To give a comparison, the first speed level plays like a billiard of sorts, but the balls are moving. The next levels turn it into a shooter, when you can't really do much planning. :D Imagine if we could even slow time for a short while to plan for a great strike, and if bounce from the target would be displayed as well, doing longer combos would be easier. Perhaps it would be a completely different game, but it's something that crossed my mind after playing yours.
All in all, it's quite a polished experience for a compo game.
Screenshot_2024-10-08_11-58-33.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8q73TLLQJQ
The only issues I had is diggers trying to dig the same block, no matter how many digging facilities I build. Sometimes they would dig a couple of blocks from one side of the map, leave a couple of blocks undigged and move to another side to do the same; since there is no urgency in the game, it never was critical, I just had to wait for them to do their thing a little more. :D
I really like that this game, although quite complex for a compo jam standards, can be easily played and figured out without a tutorial. I don't remember game telling me what to do, but it was straightforward to figure out. Note that I'm not a city builder player.
I noticed the similarities with Gnorp game even before reading your game description. :D The wave destruction part was the thing that caught my eye here.
Overall, this is a very strong compo entry. I played it for a good 40-45 minutes, which is a very good score for a jam game.
One thing I would like to have is an ability to have some control over the number of workers (diggers) doing something. E.g. I wanted to send 1 digger into the deep depths, but what ended up happening is all of them falling in there; so I had to cancel this mad operation shortly after (it wasn't the late game, so I needed my diggers elsewhere). I'm not sure how to achieve that without giving a direct control over units (which is against the indirect control nature of the game I guess)... But perhaps you have some ideas for it?
The game had some mechanics that I discovered only later. Like the ability to build on the artificially created blocks. But the one thing I giggled about was the ability to build something, then remove the ground below the building and build somethting else directly beneath it (it saves 1 vertical tile space which can be good for the base density). Here is an example: Screenshot_2024-10-08_02-38-28.png
I'm so impressed this game runs so smoothly in the browser, well done. I usually expect some frame drops from a 3D Unity game when exported to a browser.
At first, I was thinking: "Hmm, why do I even need to split?" and the game quickly answered that question. I like the fact that the game also rewards some exploration (although I died in the process and lost all of the bonuses, lol).
It leaves me wondering how to make such a cool game in a compo. :D Do you have any advice? Your game has it all: graphics, clever mechanics, music (!), level designs. It's way above the average polishing one can hope to do in a couple of days. I want to get that good too. :D
Also, the game page is cool, I borrowed the GIF idea a bit.
I saw this game on a stream (They got the game's link from the Twitter) I was really amazed by the game, and maybe a little bit saddened by how short it is. It looks like there is some potential in there. Since I already know all the solutions, it makes no sense for me to play the game, but I need to rate this gem.
We couldn't find the LD link as itch io makes its job at hiding it (you wouldn't find it, unless you already know where it is), but @deniskazantsev kindly provided the link in Twitter. :D
Anyway, it's a good compo entry, I'm glad that I learned about it.
As a random comment, it was very hilarious when little guys dropped to their death right after being spawned at level 2. xD
@deniskazantsev sure thing! It was https://www.twitch.tv/mrrubel Your game was near the end of the stream, the very last one IIRC.
I'll share your updated version with my puzzle-loving friend. :D It looks like something that they might like. Of course, it depends on whether you can get this idea and figure out more clever ways to utilize the mechanics. But so far, it's probably the best promise of a game with multiple creatures walking around as a group.
Your team delivers a good game once again. I remember being stunned by the wiggley-wormy game before, but this game is probably on par with it.
The fact that the music kicks in after the first mission is completed is a nice touch.
The units ack's are so cute. It makes ordering them to run around much more pleasant.
At first, I couldn't understand what's the challenge after you decipher what the game expects you to do. But then I failed the timings and it became apparent. :D Although I must say, the time bar works in a weird way, like the less time you have, the slower it runs out.
Is there a "good ending" when you were doing really well or it's an infinite game until you quit or lose? Since I'm not sure I made it to the proper ending, I'll share some thoughts that may be invalidated in the parts of the game I couldn't (?) reach.
I would like to see some extra dimension in the puzzles at some point. Like some glyphs requiring not just any worker, but the one of the right color. These tasks could provide some extra time as they're harder.
Another layer could be synonyms. If we would expand the game into something that has its own alphabet, then it could be logical that there are multiple terms for the same thing. If we could introduce "words" or other combinations, then the player would have an extra phase of decoding the task (e.g. it says "foo", but in reality you need to use "bar", because those are the buttons available to you). Basically, it means that this game may have some potential to become a full-fledged game if you really want to.
Please tell me the game says that I was doing great: Screenshot_2024-10-08_16-59-06.png
Upd - it seems like there is even a leaderboard. I'll come back to this game a bit later.
@kiberptah that means I just need to get better. I had a feeling that these missions are randomly generated, so it felt like an infinite game.
Yeah, I see the depth now.
Screenshot_2024-10-08_18-17-12.png
Such a good game! Especially the visual part, so stunning. I'm really stunned for ~2 seconds.
Nicely done! Puzzle games are one of my fav genre of all times!
God job on finishing your game! It's a challenge of its own.
The only thing that somewhat decreased the level of fun for me is the lack of attack cooldown. The moment I realized I can just stand and spam clicks I stopped trying to avoid enemy attacks as they would not have a chance anyway. I have a feeling this game is not that centered about the combat as it looks more like a performance than a mechanical game, but nonetheless, the combat is one of the most used mechanic here. A simple 0.5s or so cooldown would make the player motivated to run away from the mob or even roll/dodge (especially since you already implemented it, it's well animated!)
I was feeling like a man from a meme "too small, can't read" xD
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One thing I would like to have is a restart level button, because sometimes you want to experiment with a level more before commiting. :)
The voice lines (and the sound effects in general) are very cure. :D I'll also check out Strudel as I failed to create any music for my game using my own methods (e.g. MilkyTracker).
Btw, I also used Ebitengine for my game. :D
Everything looks like it was handcrafted by you and the quality and cohesion is there. I wonder why it's not a compo entry?
I've seen you commented on my game, so I thought I can rate your game in return, but I can't. :D So the least I can do is to describe my experience in a comment.
I would like to rate this game for audio, graphics, and mood really high. The atmosphere reminds me of Inscryption a bit, although maybe I'm just lacking a better "leshy" vibe games in my vocabulary.
You're also using a very hard style of 1-bit graphics. I tried to make my game 2-bit (4 colors), but I kinda failed and resorted to more colors.
The combat was a bit confusing at first as it's neither full real-time nor turn-based. I think it's close to earlier final fantasy approach of action turn based combat (with timings), but I wasn't expecting that. :D I found out that this game has random encounters and the first wolf nearly killed me. :D
The only real issue I can report is an overflowing text for some dialogue lines. It's not a big deal, but it affects one of the main parts of the game.
This is probably what comes to mind when people say "a crazy Japanese TV show". :D I'm not sure how accurate it is, but I've definitely seen some shit. :D
It wasn't very intuitive what exactly I need to do to "win". I guess it's about balancing the efficiency and the drama so the audience likes it more?
"Turns out, you only need your trusty mines to survive in a post-apoc world" "You know, I'm something of a miner myself"
Man, you did it again. You'll make me remember yet another one of your LD games! :D
I enjoyed the variety of units and it looks like most of them have a good use case. I'm not a big fan of Sheriff units as they seem to be just an inferior version of a cat that attacks with penetration; although the attack speed might be good against 1 target, it's very rare to focus on a single target. The sword guy was too risky for me as I tend to lose crew members while trying to utilize them. I guess they're sort of a last defense line, not an offensive option? I would prefer them to get hit first then, like they're actually protecting the crowd. :D
Everyone else seem to be cool (to me). I especially like the big circle AoE monsters. They would be even more usable with an indication of how charged they are. Something as visual as mine "cooking" process, lol.
The mine layers are very good, so effective. A top unit for a running chicken tactic (tm) for sure (and I like that tactic). The mine design is good too, very biotechnological.
The bomb and magnet items were so small and not very well highlighted, so I ended up almost ignoring them during my first run. They're OP. xD
Here is something for you to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdrTdPlm10k
Holy crapola, this is so funny. :D
One aspect of a game that I especially enjoy is that you can either help the little guy by throwing your stuff into the door or to slow them down (although I'm not sure how effective it is in the long run) by taking the stuff back.
These little distractions make the core gameplay less repetitive. Otherwise, it would be a quite boring experience. But as a whole, it works alright. I think your gameplay video was intentionally more funny than many playthroughs would be, but it shows that this game can be enjoyed in some other ways (if you try to create a funny scene out of it).
The graphics are cool, but UE is such a heavy artillery for a jam, it really puts my laptop under a pressure.
Creating a first game for a Ludum Dare compo is quite a challenge.
This is a place where both experienced and beginners submit their games, which can be quite discouraging for some people. I don't remember ever making it pass top 10% of the games or so, I usually suck here. :D If you can take the pride hit while not getting the best scores, it's cool. Otherwise, don't let it ruin your interest in the game development.
I noticed that the game doesn't have any sounds. Check out sfxr and its clones - it's really a good find for jam games. It allows you to generate dozens of sounds in a matter of 10 minutes. A few pew-pews here and there improve the overall feel of the game. There are web versions for sjxr too (jsfxr or something like that). :)
I thought it would be a straightforward text questions, but you made it a bit more interesting by adding some actual gameplay elements.
The visual parts of the game are good too, considering it was created by you. My game doesn't even have any music to begin with, so it's another plus points for managing to add some tunes to your game.
I think more "test" should be like this. Put the person into situations and consider their actions instead of just taking their responses as a source of truth.
In the very end, it looks like there is no subtitles for the final speech. All other parts of the game had the subtitles so I was caught off-guard. :D
Upd. I've read the comments and it's insane that those insects were humans. Makes me kinda sad. We've done nothing wrong. :'(
Screenshot_2024-10-09_02-18-42.png
Playing this game feels like you're breaking it, cheesing it. :D I finished most of the levels in this zerg storm kind of way: Screenshot_2024-10-08_16-36-26.png Screenshot_2024-10-08_16-40-21.png
Which makes me curious what the intended solutions are. After beating the level, revealing the optimal/planned solution would be a good touch in my opinion. This way, the player can learn even if they managed to beat the level (on accident).
P.S. - looking at the GIF in the description, I can clearly see that my solution is incorrect, but it did manage to complete the level. It didn't ruin the fun for me (in fact, I may enjoy that in a puzzle-ish game), but it might now be what you intended the game to be.
I like that there is no punishment for doing bad moves. It's probably the reason why I had a chance to figure how to play it. :D
The game wouldn't run on Firefox, but it was running well on Chrome. If someone else has issues running it on Firefox, try other browser (e.g. Chrome).
@zombiewalrus thank you for the fix. :D I can confirm that your fix is working.
Firefox is my default browser, but I do have a Chromium ready for action just in case as some web apps defy the existence of any other browsers except Chrome. :D
Thank you for playing the game.
The cards/tactics mechanic was hard to present as I couldn't make it straightforward enough with a single iteration.
A phase is basically a turn that lasts for ~5 real time seconds in combat. Every card is applied automatically during the beginning of a phase it's assigned to. This is why order matters.
@johnbrynte check out https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/maginot, it's even more complex. xD
I would use colors instead of category labels for cards, but the game was initially intended to be 2-bit colored. Then I used a few extra colors in the end to make the graphics a bit easier to read for the player and forgot that colors would be much better than category names. :)
Thinking about it in the retrospective, choosing a 2-bit style just for the sake of it was such a bad decision. :)
@jack-d-taylor this whole "extra verbosity" would also make it more easy to understand as it would provide a flow chart of the tactics. Right now it can be hard for a player to figure out the phase-by-phase nature of the cards.
@prunus-padis thank you for the extended feedback!
> I think showing the map/enemies or atleast vaguelly before selecting the troops would have been better. I realized that best start is to just first skip buying any and then going to back to after seeing what enemy composition is.
The game initially didn't have unit shop available at all time, so you had to live with your mistakes, potentially soft-locking yourself unless you restart the game. Since it was too punishing, I added a shop revisit for the current level. I couldn't make a good flow like "see the enemy -> buy troops -> set tactics" from the first try, so it ended up being this weird.
The cards have categories that can have up to 2-3 different cards, so your first pick can be at least partially educated. E.g. you generally don't want to pick a Bonus first as it could be a First Aid that is useless during the start of the battle (because it will heal 0 hp). But you might still want to do it depending on the adjacent cards (because you want to reveal more).
> Small quality of life could have been having reset deployment button when deploying units.
Ah crap. I could have added that, it's like 10 minutes of coding. I had about 1-2 hours left by the end, but I didn't know what to add, so I ended up just playtesting the game, adjusting the balance a bit.
> Sorry for my nitpicking and rambling but it comes from the love of seeing cool and highquality game in jam.
Thank you for doing it. It's something that I needed from a jam. It's the reason I show the game here instead of just keeping it to myself - to get feedback and some random ideas about the game.
I'll make sure to play your game next.
> Also I understand that this is like card game. Difference is in the input/output randomness. Here I click card and itâs locked, instead of first drawing cards and playing them where player can control order.
I tried to make it a bit more involved than drawing the cards. You can make an educated guess for the first pick based on categories. Then you "dig" into the direction with better options (both in terms of a direct card and cards that will be revealed after you pick it). I need to think about the final concept though as the current solution might not be the best one. E.g. maybe the player could form a deck for the cards so there are no cards that you don't ever need (like a tank rush for a player without tanks in the army).
@designernap the first level really expects the player to follow the hint literally. :D It's like a tutorial to learn the basic mechanics, like you can't win without using the environment, but if you do use it, winning is possible even with inferior troops. :D There is exactly one winning deployment in level 1, just to make things simpler (I guess?), it's the row with the most amount of trees, so your troops are in cover for the most duration of the battle. The forest tiles grant ~75% defense bonus for infantry, which is a lot. :)
But fear not, this is probably the biggest blocker in the game right now (it's not just you), I failed the delivery, I guess.
@designernap I'll make sure to play your game too (in fact, it's what I'm going to do right now). Thank you for the potential second chance. :)
@kanity it's so heartwarming to see comments like this, thank you. I enjoyed your game too. :)
@woona, we've met again! I remember myself remembering you during the previous LD because of your autopilot game. xD I guess it's a tradition now! I wonder how long this chain can last?
(And just in case, your salmoning game was also a great one; I need to check your LD56 game right now!)
> Getting First Aid as the first reveal doesnât feel that great though.
Ahah, right. I usually try to avoid opening the bonus card first, so at least I can get the very much needed heal mid-combat.
Thank you for playing my game. :) I hope to see you some other LD again!
@co5monaut
> I figured things out pretty quickly
This is quite a skill of yours, because I failed at pacing/delivery/onboarding or whatever part. :D
> but I couldnât survive the enemy machine gunners rush
This is a tricky one! Enemies will play 2 ion storm cards, each of those disables laser troops (infantry and hunters) for 2 phases, so up to 4 phases without lasers. The best bet here of course is to not rely on laser troops heavily, but there are some other tricks that can help there depending on what you have.
A single tank on the lane 3 (I think) can do a rush action once and they will run over ~5 rifle infantries, which is a good win. This forward tank may also attract some fire.
You can use a take cover card to make your non-rifle infantries to enter the lane2 forest tile, which grants them 75% defense. This can be enough to wait these 4 phases and retaliate.
Missiles/tanks rock in this one, as enemies tend to be grouped a lot, and these two unit types can damage multiple target at once (due to an AoE).
And of course it should be possible to just buy ~10 rifle guys to counter the enemy directly, there should be enough money. These rifle troopers are usually a good bet anyway to have something cheap to attract enemy fire away from your more expensive units like missile launchers.
(Sorry, I got excited, ahah)
I'm gonna try out your game too! Upd. Ah wait, I already did! I found it from the vas3k club. :D Your game was hilarious, almost like taking a part on a show.
It took me a while to understand the mechanics.
One thing I can suggest (if you could go back in time, etc.) is to add a simpler first track. The one with only 1 opponent and your single driver (only one, not a whole team of 4). And make it in a way that winning would require some reconfiguration. This way, the player will learn some of the mechanics in a less hectic way, in a more controllable environment. In fact, this first "easy" level would be a great sandbox material where you can focus on just your single car (sans the single opponent, but it should be easy to distinguish your driver vs that AI-controlled one). With this single change, the game would be much easier to grasp in my opinion.
Other than that, it was an interesting experience. The icons used for the items are so hot, I like this artstyle.
I guess it was already mentioned before, but the race can stuck until the final countdown even if all moving cars finished the final lap if some random car broke along the way a long time ago. So I had to use the speedup x3 and wait for the timer to run out. It's not as annoying as it could be, but it feels janky.
The strongest parts of this game are graphics and audio (you even have some good music). The impact feeling could be even stronger if some camera shaking would be involved upon impact.
I would like the little people to be a bit slower, they're so annoying to catch. xD
Some special ability like shooting a forward laser with ~10s cooldown could add to the gameplay too. Something that could help the player to sweep the small fellas.
I think the game replaced my highscore of 3300 with 3150 for whatever reason.
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@andrewkennedy your score is good indeed. I only got up to 3300.
It's sad to see this ratings given to ratings received ratio. I would assume the game's size have something to do with it. HTML/web games usually get the best ratio, then it's small native games (<40mb?), and larger ones require much more efforts (unless you're an influencer that can force their game through the media).
So let me try to fix it. This is the least I could do for you in return as you played my own game.
First off, I would also recomment using zip format instead of 7z, as it's far more cross-platform; but at least it's not rar. xD I had to use wine as there is only Windows executable available for the download (this is another benefit of web version - no struggles for Mac/Linux users). My first attempt:
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(it hang for a minute, no progress, so I killed the process)
This could be the case that I have a potato computer.
Steam Proton Experimental also couldn't handle this game. I played a couple of Unreal Engine games this jam, many Windows executables made with Unity, some Godot games bundled for Windows, but this game doesn't want to run.
This is probably where I give up. If you'll upload a Linux binary, I may try running it again. There is also another way: upload a full walkthrough of your game so people can rate it based on the footage if they don't have an ability to run the game (as it's big and may not run on the target PC).
Please consider everything above as a friendly piece of advice.
I tried the SPEEED car. It wasn't lying when saying it has no handling stat. :D I guess it needs a controller so you can have a press sensitivity instead of just having 100% speed all the time?
The graphics are cool, the sound design also complements it. I imagined someone making the engine's sound with their mouth, lol. :D
I couldn't go back to the menu after the race, or maybe I was missing some keys (I tried enter, escape, random buttons and clicks). The normal car is my favorite so far, at least on a keyboard. :D
The physics feel good for a jam game, I'm not sure why do you call them weird. :D The only weird part about them is when you hit the wall hard, but that's because the wall is 100% solid, it would fell weird either way. If the walls would deform/destroy, then even with the current physics I think it would be better, but making breakable walls is an unpopular choice in racing games. :)
Have you done these graphics on an actual paper? If yes, maybe you could add these photos of the work-in-progress to the game description?
A couple of random ideas came to me while playing:
* if inetria would be x10 times stronger, then you would have an opportunity to return to the base even when low on fuel if you know the general direction. This would include a fuel conservation mechanic: the less you rotate/correct your path, the less fuel you use (as inertia can get you pretty far without efforts). This economic would make teleportation back to the base unnecessary (although it could still be an extra life mechanic). The only downside is stopping after getting too much momentum, as if it would require a dedicated way to decrease the speed. I don't know how to address that at this moment
* the asteroids (?) could be more fragile. I'm not sure hitting them 3 times adds to the gameplay. It looks like this game is mostly about managing your movement and fuel. Destroying them in 1 shot would make the gameplay a bit better paced in my opinion. One problem with firing more than 1 time is that you can't fire at where you want, so it can interfere with the movement. Another option could be to make them auto-collected as soon as you reach them.
The graphics are simple, but the space background is surprisingly good. It might be a basic spray tool, but the colors and the overall composition make it work. The fact that you can move your vessel sideways is an interesting addition that I haven't seen in games with tank controls in this jam so far.
I don't agree with a point that this game needs animations. The little shake effect is enough to be appealing enough for a compo game. Heck, it could even work with a released indie game. What is missing though are impact effects to make hits/kills more satisfying. A simple dissolve shader would make enemy deaths x2 cooler without much time investments.
For whatever reason, I was confused by not getting levelup after collecting ~18 coins during my first run. I read the game description, but it still wasn't apparent. Only a comment about "upgrading after death" made sense into it. It's a good idea, but I could drop the game before that point if I don't know that dying is a part of a game loop (not every game has meta progression, etc. and we have expectations from vampire survivors game - you get upgrades as you go).
I also tried pressing the entire upgrade icon instead of a green button below it. Perhaps turning the entire "slot" into a button could be an upgrade to UX, but maybe that's unnecessary.
Overall, a good game with a proper game loop.
After seeing your progression system, I though about upgrades like "add health pickups to the loot table" -- so some pickups are not dropped until you bought an upgrade for it. It would complement the strength of this system where you configure the run before starting it. It's not something that you could add during compo of course, but something that one might consider when making a final game or another iteration of it.
> Yes it pains me I did not get music in. Will sure start doing a more finished game out of this any day now. The feedback is of great help. Thanks!
Meh, music is overrated imo. I turn off most of the compo music after a couple of minutes as it's usually a weird 10-20 second loop. A good music can turn a game into a banger, but it can take hours to make. May not be a good recipe for everyone. If you can make a bad music in 1 hour, I'm still not convinced it makes the game better if the player ends up muting the entire game (or you may need to add another overlay button to mute the music separately at any point - even more extra work). Ambient-style music works better, it could be a 2-3 minutes long loop of birds chirping, etc. If it's not into your face, it can be alright, but it also doesn't improve the game by a large margin as a really cool track would.
In my opinion, it's not worth it considering all "add this" comments, especially when they're coming from mostly-jam people (no offense intended, it's just very different) that may use premade music or have a dedicated sound designer. I'm assuming you used 100% of your time, so all suggestions above are like "if you already have a dissolve shader, which you are permitted to reuse as it's like a library source code, then you could add it to get something extra without spending more time".
If you **are** talented in making music, it's a complete different question of course. :D
@scoobysnacks how is you map identical to mine? Cheater! I watched the game on the stream btw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCbuh9WZHdA
The game looks, plays and feels quite polished. I wonder if it's the little details, like click sounds, that make it whole.
It's a bit hard to start playing as there are many building options and the map seems big, but easy difficulty was somewhat forgiving.
I really like that the tiles look 3d-ish, with a shade. This is probably what I would like to have in my game too, but I wonder if it would fit the environment (probably if being careful?). It makes the tiles much more clickable, like they're waiting for you to click. As a result, even a game cover with tiles is much sexier.
I may need to play this game again to cover its content as 10 minutes were not enough, which is somewhat unusual for a ludum dare game :D
That fly was like a party member, traveling with me from level to level. It was not helping me though. We're not buddies with that fly anymore.
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The game plays well after you memorize the controls. I thinks I used WASD + Q/E + space the most, plus the crate colector of course.
I like space games with controls like these. This game is about movement and its optimization.
To begin with, I skipped the whole story section of the description. :D
I'm not sure what is a meta for movement, although Q/E using 4 fuel like the main movement was a bit disappointing. you're using a less traditional movement scheme to optimize, but for the player it's hard to estimate the benefits. What I'm saying it would be nice to have a way to explore how good or bad some movement patters are: how much fuel I spend if I just rotate+thrust as opposed to using Q/E. Is it 25% more efficient, etc. I don't know how, but knowing what is beneficial would be the clue to motivate the player to use more controls as opposed to sticking to WASD. The consumption per second works for a very short span planning and is good to let the player know that releasing W is a good idea when you maxed the velocity. Maybe a per/5 or per/10 seconds consumption could help for the longer term planning, I dunno. :D It almost feels like in order to fulfill this desire of mine a dedicated mode is required, where you start from A to B and try to get there using the least amount of fuel possible. That would make me experiment with alternatives and comparisons would be easier in a smaller scope run.
One another idea is making the grabber far less costly to upkeep (maybe 0.5/s?), but a bit more expensive to turn on. This would create a situation where it's better to turn it on, fly through the crates without losing too much speed, collecting all of them in a line and then turning the grabber off, resulting in a net positive. Right now 4/s consumption means that is crazy expensive to keep on, I would rather do an instant enabling->grab->disable combo. I'm not even sure it's efficient to grab 2 crates around you with keeping it on as you would need some time to move the mouse cursor. The clicking part is another one I'm not quite sure about - maybe an automatic grab (with physics moving them towards you) would be better, but it needs testing.
Assigning the grabber to `[1]` is a weird choice tbh. This is the sole controls command I had to look up. The is a label on it, but `1` reads more like a count or a level ("grabber level 1"), therefore a key like `x` or anything else that is not digit could help a bit here. Maybe you were planning more than one tool, hence it being `1` and another tool would be `2`.
I tried using `ctrl`, but it seem to do nothing. Is it implemented?
I posted an upgrade screen because one of the background stars confused me with a "next screen" arrow. :D When a star ends up below the radar, it also confused me as a point of interest, but it wasn't :D I would prefer an opaque background for the radar for this reason, or maybe a different color/style for start (which may not fit the 2-bit style of the game, but maybe you'll move away from it if you ever wish to continue working on this game).
I managed to beat the game. I would probably be OK with it going for another round or two, as movement was quite enjoying, but that could be a good trick from you - it's better to keep the player interested and unsaturated than making them bored from the gameplay.
I wonder why it's a JAM instead of compo if you made everything yourself during the jam. Did you ran out of time and needed an extra day? I'm just curious.
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> At first I was considering making it so youâd have to return to the station yourself before the fuel runs out or youâd lose, but in the end I figured that would make it too punishing for the player.
It definitely would be too punishing for an LD game I believe. :D
> Maybe for the next time I need to make a simple sprite resembling a keyboard key to make it more obvious
A simple convention of adding `[]` around the label could help here. But a button-like outline would be even better of course, but sounds like too much efforts.
Even after reading the description you provided, I have no idea how to use that ctrl thing. :D
Overall, makes sense. Thank you for the detailed response (and for an elaborated feedback for my game, I always love that and it's one of the main reasons to participate in LD; "good gaem" does not hit the string for me anymore)
> Hah, thatâs what I get for trying to use Itch.ioâs theme system! Maybe I should add a disclaimer to best play fullscreen then. :D As for the radar I think youâre right, either making it opaque or only going transparent when there are objects below would be better.
I'm always too lazy to do that, but there is an option to add a border between the background and the playable area. Either by adding a border to the game itself or by adjusting the background for itch io. There might be other ways.
I can recommend this template, in particular: https://jannikboysen.itch.io/easy-releasy But hey, I wouldn't go that far myself for a compo game. It might be worthwhile to do **after** the deadline, when you can still edit the page and cool-looking page can improve its performance (e.g. more browser plays)
- pressing down repeatedly seem to reset the attack, which is probably redundant - if enemy is too close, damage is not dealt, it will screw the players closer to the mid game - projectiles can hit through the wall; most of the time the hits through the cover seem unfair - I would decrease the player's hitbox just to make it a bit more forgiving, right now it's hard to dodge the projectile - jumping on the floor kills you, but if you land a hit on an enemy - you won't die, is that intended? Looks like a good speedrun strat :D I've seen a couple of places where it could save you a good amount of time - health pick ups would make the game easier to beat for the most of us :D - the normal attack feels inferior to the jump+down combo as it needs 2 hits and has a weird hitbox (can't hit an enemy next to you) - it was unexpected that I can bounce on the enemy head forever :D - I would decrease the gunner rate of fire by ~0.5s just to make timing attacks against them easier; right now it's very tight; or make the bullets a bit slower (so jumping is more reliable, perhaps even combined with a smaller projectile/player collision area) - unlike me, you actually followed the theme /well/ :D - congrats on your first 2D; what is your opinion on 2D vs 3D for compo?
Overall, it plays well. It does frustrate me when I get hit by a wall-crossing projectile, but the movement is fluid enough for a compo game. The combat system could be improved, at least in a way that makes already demanding up+down combo more reliable (so that double press on down doesn't reset the attack).
I forgot to check "receive notifications" for the message above. This is my chance to fix that. :D
Hi! I found your game via an itch link my friend shared in the chat. As of now, it requires a manual search on ldjam to rate your game if you found it through itch. Please consider adding a link to the description of the game (turn "LD 57 game" into a link). You might also want to configure a ldjam link in the settings, it might help too.
As for the game, the only issue I had is 20 seconds of trying to figure out what to do. Highlighting the inventory spaces when you "hold" in item would solve this issue for me. Other than that, it's quite polished, if short. The graphics and sounds are very good, the gameplay is probably not my cup of tea, but it is much more unusual than many games on this jam :D
Note: the sounds may be too loud! I jumped out of the surprise when I started.
I enjoyed this game a lot. It took me 3 attempts to beat it, although I must admit -- I won due to a bug (see the notes below).
The best parts: * As mentioned by others, the art style is good and quite consistent. I especially like the cover and the final encounter character * The flavor text for items and interactions is well-written (at least for my taste) * The UI is stylish, while being simple. I would probably borrow this trick * Inventory management is fun enough to contribute to the experience, I do miss item swap function, but it's understandable * It's cool that I understood what I'm supposed to do by the end, even though nobody told me directly (there are a couple of indirect hints in the game!) * I LOVE the unusual interactions: feeding an enemy, killing an enemy with an onion, etc; also, attacking a puzzle/quiz box was funny * Trading is fun - it's a mini game of its own (it also allows the player to re-arrange the inventory while at it) * It apparently has more than 1 ending?
Other stuff: * The game doesn't tell you there are no bullets and you miss a turn. I got a pistol, but no ammo. It makes it a very disappointing item. Even if it's by design, it only serves to frustrate the player. Give it at least 1 shot, so it's not a complete waste of gold bags :D * It wasn't too intuitive how to use weapons in the game as it only gives you prompts to escape; I did figure it out though * If have <20 hunger, boulder doesn't do damage * Could be related to above, after that bug I stopped taking hunger damage, so I was at a constant 0 without any problems (except the slow speed) * I catched 0 turtles out of 7 with 35% chance... It's mathematically possible, but also annoying. A fixed 100% chance after 2-3 misses could be nice. I just want to know what it has xD I guess it's a mushroom?
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My friend managed to beat this game in ~4 tries. They had a feedback that the boulder appears too often, so every time they managed to get some food, all of it was taken by the boulder. :D It's also hard to have a pickaxe at hand, and it might be too large of an item to keep (you want an armor and other useful stuff inside your backpack). He also noticed that it's up to the random whether the game is beatable or not - if you're not lucky, there is no way you're going to fix that.
Maybe a better rng distribution could help here, and there are different techniques for like, but it's not that useful for a jam game that has hard time constraints. But if you're going to make it into a bigger game, these changes might be worthwhile.
I want to play the game, but it has weird resolution in my browser window. It looks like it expects a full 16:9 ratio, but browser and the task/control bars will eat some space. Could you add an itch "full screen" button to the game (edit the game on itch) or adjust the canvas size so it fits the page? Attaching the screenshot to demonstrate the problem. I have 1920x1080 resolution, if that helps. issue.png
@jhax I can confirm that it's playable now! I'll check it out later as I have to go for now. Thank you for a quick fix
What did I do to deserve this, my lord?
Hi Woona, here we meet again! I was wondering whether you would participate or not. I got a notification and here I am.
A pause during the tutorial screen would be a good addition as I tend to be a slow reader. :D I started taking damage while reading the hints => had to restart the game to get a fair start.
Holding to fire non-stop is a good thing. :D I would hate to click so many times in a game. It's usually the opposite: the player still needs to repeatedly click even if there are no real penalties to fire as fast as you can click (e.g. the ammo is unlimited).
The crab scared me. xD It turned out that sharks and other critters are more dangerous as they attack from different angles and some of them are very fast.
For a small game, there is some enemy variety that changes with the depth level. I like the artstyle, it's quite consistent. The options screen blur is weird though. :) Also, adding so many settings (lang, window mode, audio) for a jam game is a rare stuff. I ran out of time (and juice), so my settings button basically does nothing. Sharks are PROBABLY too fast, a 20% speed reduction wouldn't hurt the game, but since I managed to beat the game on the first try, it could be irrelevant. Still, they're on annoying side of things. Their damage is relatively low, this is their saving grace. :D
From a gameplay perspective, it was hard to tell the area of mine explosion, they also trigger each other in an instance. A delayed chain reaction would be easier to work with from the player's perspective, but it would require more coding time of course. If the explosion hitbox would grow as the animation progresses, it would solve my hitbox issues as well (right now it damages you without an apparent hit).
The end-game gameplay is a bit hectic. I'm bad at bullet-hell like games and this game was close to my reaction limits. :D
I tried to cheese the game a bit by moving in a narrow zig-zag pattern, firing downwards. It wasn't as effective as enemies attack from all sides. :D
The game runs OK in firefox, but I think it was around 20-25 FPS. Maybe there are too many particles/sprites for the engine thruster effect (bubbles)?
The music is fitting. Makes me jealous a bit as I spent ~40 minutes trying to make a single soundtrack to no avail. What did you use to create your music?
The UI is simple, but clean. However, I would mention that it's hard for me to tell which button is being focused right now.
I also see Linux native build, which I appreciate. I would restrain from using it, as there is a web version; and I'm also afraid of installing all crypto miners in the world.
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@woona are there any bugs to explore? :D Now I'm curious. I found none
The game feels polished for a compo entry. I found out that there is a winning strategy there - just stick to the narrow tunnels, then enemies can /never/ surround you, so you can always fight back a single creep.
I've made it to the last level and defeated the dragon (or something like that happened).
The sfx and music are amazing. This is where the money went. :D
Now to some feedback. Don't take it personally, I'm trying to understand what went right here (I might be wrong)
I would personally make every biome last for 2 levels (3 at most), so it has 10 levels instead of 30. It's the same content per levels anyway, so the player doesn't lose anything. For the purposes of the jam, I have a feeling that dragging content is usually not a good idea - it wouldn't be dragging if the player would have a progression between the levels, but there is none (only a new biome can be called a progression, but it's once per 5 same-y levels). So in my opinion, 10-15 levels instead of 30 would make the game better, not worse. :D A real boss fight in the end could be a reward, but 30 levels is a lot in any case.
Since the game doesn't reward the player for kills, at some point you start to avoid monsters and run for the next floor, which kinda defeats the purpose of the game, unless it was designed to be a monster cheesing game. The later monsters are too fast to outrun though, so there is that. :D The simplest way to fix it would be adding a score amount for every kill, making encounters at least a bit more meaningful (you can aim at a higher score). This is a cheap way, but it can work; although 30 levels is still a lot for it to work properly (the player may stop caring unless there is another progression).
The crates could be replaced by hearts directly without losing too much of their functionality, if they would not be picked up at full health, that is. I think one of the benefit of a container is an element of uncertainty ("what's in the box?"), but it disappears if 100% drop is a heart. Even a 80% chance to get a heart would make it more exciting, if you insist on having boxes. :D An upgrade or something else would make it even better.
Since it's a compo game, I would not suggest any alternative attacks or bonuses for progression as it would take extra time. You invested that time into the music and it pays off in its own way. But I did mention some other stuff that would take 5-10 minutes to do, but the overall experience would be better, at least in my opinion.
You might be annoyed by the idea of stripping down the 30 levels, but if more than 1 person tell you that the game is too long for its gameplay, you might want to give it a second thought. :D And to be honest, I fell for this trap myself - I added more content instead of giving more polish to already existing one. I tried to counter-balance this extra content by adding more variety, so it could be rewarding for the player to play more; it was still better to focus on a smaller core with more polish and bells-and-whistles, and maybe even music.
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I've read the comments above. It looks like this game has random generation. I had an advice from someone before that random generation for LD rarely pays off. "People will not play the game for the second time" If we would make this game have only 10 floors, it would be possible to make these floors by hand. Given that they're quite simple in nature (small amount of varying objects), it could take less time than making a generator, but I'm not sure how easy it is for your engine to load a map (you would probably need to make a scene initialized from a serialized map, etc.). I made a small randomizer for my game as well, but it doesn't create actual mazes - just random tiles and random enemy placement; this was very fast (20 mins of coding). Making a maze/dungeon generator is much harder.
I forgot to mention something. I really liked the fact that enemy projectiles are quite slow. :D Usually, people tend to make them too fast and it makes the game unplayable (or very annoying to play). This game does it right (at least if the player has no way to counter it, the projectiles should be this slow).
As a crab, I find this game highly disturbing...
Jokes aside, it was dying so many times. xD
@barnabewild perhaps the low resolution is partially to blame here. Do you have any suggestions on how to improve it?
@mr-mesmer the cavalry technically gets 3 actions per turn, but every unit can only move once during their share of the turn. Cavalry move 3 times, unless they lose their action points (-1 melee attack, drops to 0 if stun-attacked, penalties per tiles can increase the movement cost, etc.)
The turn ends when all units used their action points for this turn.
> How is this game connected to the theme? I could not make a connection, maybe âstrategic depthâ?
@lllarso nah... there is no real connection. I gave up on trying because making it "every next battle is a descent into a dungeon" felt too weak of a connection that would not have any mechanical impact (making tiles/levels work differently would take more time than I could invest, or maybe I was too busy adding units and items). I opted out of theme for this reason - there is no connection and I fully admit it. :)
It's a very rare occasion for me to come up with a good and interesting theme-based game as it mostly ends up a worse game than a better game. :(
This time, I spent extra 2-3 hours testing and polishing the balance. It was probably a mistake to include 3 playable races instead of 1 or 2, but I felt lucky. I'm pretty confident with Humans (mercenaries) balance, undead were tested only 1/2 of that time, and horde being mostly untested. :) This is probably a lesson here for me - 3 races don't make the game better for LD, but it can make it worse.
@wyzal it is inspired by several old strategies, that's on-point! I did, however, make a unique turn order where you can't use all action points at once, but rather 1 of them at a time, meaning a cavalry moves 3 tiles per turn, but not right away in a single move, but after 3 "rounds". Units with N action points get N rounds spread across the turn. In a sense, it makes interruptions possible - you can stop the cavalry from running past your units by attacking them (and causing -1 AP in the process).
The Lays with crab taste are on their way btw (I'll play your game, that is)
@ssiannas I can assure you, these menu buttons didn't work for anyone. :D I usually add these buttons at the start of the jam and it's a rare occasion when I have some free time and mood to implement them. :D
Thanks for the feedback btw.
@whateverdat the troll has Regeneration trait, which is probably too surprising in the game and there is no feedback that it heals. Basically, it recovers 100% hp at the beginning of each turn. The only way to deal with it is to focus attack on it. Usually, 3-4 volleys of arrows is enough, or 2-3 attacks from adequately experienced melee troops. It's like killing ~6 orcs in a single round. With that, it's quite an easy opponent, but it can be hard to align your units properly for an attack (especially since there are tons of goblins to distract and block you on this level).
And by the way, making it till the troll is a good result. This game is not intended to be fully completed. It's about how far can you get until the game overwhelms you, which can depend on luck (random items, units for hire, enemies).
@milestone-games I tried making a drum march-like part, but 1 hour near the deadline was not enough. All I managed to do is a ~30 sec drum loop that would drive the players mad
@lcstark the spread deployment level is quite far into the game. Further than many players would go for the purposes of ludum dare game testing. :D
There are probably two difficulty spikes: mission 3 with orcs (requires the use of flanking and/or attacking from behind and/or luck with ranged troops), and mission with a troll (which needs to be killed in a single turn, otherwise it would regenerate to its full health). Many players found it confusing to figure out how to flank/backstab, so I failed at highlighting that mechanic in the game (the floating text doesn't help).
That level was a test of this concept for a less optimal scenario and it shows a flaw of this system - since you can't choose who is going next, the camera may be annoying. I found a solution to this, but it's not implemented in the game. As you mentioned, showing the attacks would be he part of that solution.
It was the goal to make a game that can be played like Fantasy General, which does provide missions with multiple area deployments (e.g. attacking from 2 sides, etc.) That would require fixing this issue, but the camera toggle between the units was the best thing I came up with during the jam.
> How does the turn on our work though? I sometimes got to move twice with the same unit but didnât understand why.
Imagine a single turn as 100% of time.
Now let's consider some examples: * 1 AP (e.g. zombie) would move once per turn * 2 AP (e.g. most units) would move twice per turn * 3 AP (e.g. cavalry) would move 3 times per turn
The "action" phase for a unit can happen at arbitrary time in turn, but there are rules: * 1 AP can take action from t=0 to t=1.0 * 2 AP will have first phase in t=`[0,0.5]` interval, and then at t=`(0.5,1.0]` * 3 AP means 3 phases following the same logic
Now we mix-in all units to get a full action queue. Units can lose their action point mid-turn, like when they do an action like attack (consumes all AP) or when they get attacked (-1) or even stunned (sets 0 AP). A double turn usually happens when other units that could move in-between lost their AP (or died).
Take this action order: ``` [phase1] [phase2] [phase3] -- cavalry [phase1 ][phase2 ] -- infantry ``` If infantry unit is killed or loses its phase2, the cavalry will have 2 actions in a row (given that there are no more units in the queue).
Generally speaking, it's enough to pay attention to the "dots" above the unit that represents the AP counter. If it's empty, the unit will not act during this **turn** (you can see the turn counter to the right).
Ah damn, I clicked "anonymous" instead of "receive notifications". The comment above is mine
This is a game about small guys (170cm/67 inches tall) diving into a tube to collect something. The usual thing
The dialogues are the best part of this game for me xD "I will kill you, but first, I will teach you how to fight" -- that is very considerate of you, thank you
I have also experienced a game freeze at flip 35.
I like the game overall. It could be even better if a symmetrical base design would not be almost universally good strategy here. I don't know the exact way to improve that part of the game, but if the placement of the blocks would mean more in a grand scheme of things, this game would get much deeper.
If you can figure out how to improve the decision making, this game would be worth making a post-jam full version as it has a potential.
The web version is still weird: I can't click on anything in Firefox or Chromium. Any chances of fixing it? Unity games usually have above average performance in web, so maybe there is a ways to fix the build and reupload it as a bug fix? You'll get more ratings and feedback this way.
@xackii holy cow, I think I got it! I have a small 1920x1080 screen, but the game seem to run in a much larger canvas. I can only see ~60% of the screen if I don't enter the full screen mode (the bottom right button), but if I do, the clicks stop working as the game can't properly read the click location. It should be possible to reduce the resolution of the game for the web port, I think. It could even make the game run smoother as less pixels would mean less load on the browser. If I run the game in full screen, I would still screw the graphics anyway (if they were supposed to run in an ultrahd or whatever). For a pixel art game, ultrahd should not be a requirement. :D
So anyway, I tried playing it and fps is very low right now. Could you try using a much smaller canvas for the game in web build? It would solve the click issue + can help with fps. If not, at least I provided some new info. :D It could be useful for your next LD game as web builds are very handy for getting more feedback.
@xackii it works! I'll play & rate it in a moment.
It's one of the game that I would like to play a bit more, a 4 more minutes of gameplay would be welcome. :D On the other hand, the game doesn't overstay it's welcome I guess, but it does have more than 1 gameplay element, so it looks like it could drag the time some more (mining+movement and turret shooter). At least 3 turret segments sound fair :D I would assume you ran out of time after implementing these, so you couldn't add more playtime.
- I like that UI is mostly intuitive with a few exceptions. Highlighting valid options is a very welcome thing. This feature allowed me to overcome stuff like "ODD" challenge when it actually expects an even number.
- The little details, like extra animations (e.g. cards folding) make the game look visually polished. I also see a good shader usage. Visually, this is probably the prettier game of this game jam
- The music becomes repetitive after 5 minutes, although it does create the atmosphere at the start. You probably wouldn't use a single track for the complete game, so for a jam it would be ok just to turn it off after 1 minute at the beginning of every run
- I have a feeling that the starting dialogue is being cut-off, I can only use 1 phrase, get a response and then there is only one option is to skip. Is there anything else to it? The skip button can change to "DONE" if user has seen all the dialogue, just to avoid confusion.
- The tutorial (6 pages) tries to be atmospheric (which is good), but unfortunately, it has tons of text (which is bad in general). Almost nobody will read through it. It's hard to make the good tutorial for a jam game, so I can only state that this approach is not the best one. It does have pics, which is good. If you could get away with 2 or 3 pages instead of 6-7, it would be good enough. A simple idea would be to show more tutorial pages after some levels were completed. Introduce new mechanics and their tutorial as the game progresses.
- I've tried to read the tutorial, but I still failed to memorize what different kinds of map tiles do (a rabbit challenge, test of luck, etc.). It would be cool to have a simple description somewhere on the screen when player hovers over the tile. E.g. "this is a shop tile", etc.
- The intro dialogue seem to be a bit off to me. I get the idea, but maybe it should show up after the player loses for the first time? There are two benefits to it: it reduces the amount of text the new player needs to read, and it also shows the second dimension at a more appropriate moment. It's still OK to show some intro text I think, but don't give it all away from the start
- The "space" button icon is very small on a "Pass" button. I would make it bigger, and maybe even would allow a mouse click for it. Also note that it requires continued press, which may confuse players as they would press space, get no result and think that they need to press something else. The progress bar for a hold state could be more noticeable
- It is easy to use a joker (green one?) on accident. I tried to read the description and play around, but it was used on accident
- Some text is hard to read due to the shader use. It's a stylistic choice, but it can hurt the readability. A larger text could help here, I think
- Gameplay-wise, it's a good game, but some of the matches felt weird. For example, you could fill 5/6 slots, but miss a required card. You can either fail now (because a six card is out of the deck), or you will win at the last pick since there is ~1 card that you need. This means pressing "pass" for multiple rounds without a gameplay. I don't know how to fix that. I think Jokers can help here, but I had a green joker for the main challenge, not for the side challenge.
- Taro is very hard to notice. I instantly forgot about it after reading the turorial. I would ask how many players (%) actually used it, maybe there is an issue with that. For the LD, this mechanic could be excessive, but I'm not 100% sure as I wasn't using it lol. What I mean by excessive is that the game is good as it is, even without Taro. The challenges are varied, there are Jokers, something related to the deck, etc. For a 10-min game (an avg. LD playtime) the Taro sounds like a ng+ content which is not for the start of the game (it's like in Inscription you don't use all mechanics from the start).
tl;dr: you guys went too far. It's understandable that you reacted like that, but if it's not a race to win (as you said), why getting involved with someone's **first** jam? The don't know the vibes/atmosphere precisely because of that - it's their first time. I guess you showed the atmosphere - you either 100% right or get out of here. Not to mention they did publish their sources after some backs and fourths.
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It looks like bullying and guilt tripping. As much as you might care about the rules, I do think they matter the most if we're talking about the top3 games after the rating. If this game would be, say, `#20`, would it even matter?
LD compo gets less and less participants every time, I'm not even kidding here, just look up the stats. The elitism attitude does not make it better. People have varying senses of rules, etc.
In 4-5 LD, you'll be among the 50-100 people that are still here. Congrats. I hope all of them are up to the bar of your standards, otherwise you'll need to draw your sword again.
And if the rules wanted to be super precise about the "sources", they would just say "everything to build and run your game", instead of saying "source code" putting an emphasis on the code side of things.
It's like "making from scratch" is a topic for some debates, how far can you go with using libraries and frameworks, etc.
I'll personally hit something around `#300`-`#200`, I really don't care if there is a game at `#20` that wasn't 100% fair in some aspect of the compo. :) I'm here for feedback, experience, and networking.
@busisen I'm not 100% sure that you can't use whatever you want for the cover/description of the game. People tend to work on the game's page even after a deadline. I thought it's permitted tbh, but I don't care enough to re-check it. People do that, that's about it.
> Game doesnât really fit the jam theme?
Neither does my game fit it. I'm sure it's not a single game's fault. I'm not proud of it, but I would like to avoid such group attack, it doesn't worth it.
To be clear, I don't paint the author as a full victim here. It's a complex situation, I just don't like the outcome and the way communication was performed. I'm more open to mistakes and people saying they're sorry (esp. when they submitted the sources after all, even more so if it's the first timer).
As a person, I can imagine being in the same shoes. Doing something wrong (from any kind of perspective), and then reacting too emotionally, being unable to properly react to a crisis-like situation. If someone is telling others to be better, they can show how to be better.
I do think that losing a member that was probably willing to change and acknowledge their mistakes is a loss. I hope that they come again next compo and we never talk about this exact situation ever again, with lessons learned and all.
I think the main issue with difficulty is hitboxes. I would make them more forgiving, so even there is a visual collision, the player can still go pass it. E.g. make it a smaller circle around the player, so the hands are collision-free. :D
Since I was dying in the first 5-10 seconds, the music restart was a bit annoying. The game should either be easier, or the song should not start over, otherwise it's a death loop xD
For a meow game, it was unexpectedly brutal, and not that kawaii (I got beated by the trees)...
Here is some feedback.
* the sounds should not stack with each other, otherwise the game is too loud when there are many same enemies on the screen. I experienced ~6 enemies firing at the same time and it was quite loud. :D Usually, you either don't want to stack them at all, or multiply the volume of every next repeating sound by some ratio, so 6 sounds are x2 louder than 1, not x6 times.
* there is a gray area in the right and bottom part of the web build. It doesn't break the game, but makes it look less polished. Should be quite easy to fix by adjusting the project settings (depends on the engine you're using). Note that you can also adjust the area size in itch settings.
* please add a game description, otherwise it's hard to tell what pick-ups do. This game doesn't require a tutorial, as it's quite simple and intuitive, but the pick-ups are a different beast. Another (better) way of solving it is to add a floating text after you pick up something. Like "+1 life" (1UP), or "extra damage", "+score", etc. This would feel much better and help the player understand the meaning of those.
* I would also suggest adding screenshots of your game both here and on itch io
* The game is probably too easy. These kinds of games typically have a 1-hitpoint mechanic with lives, but since it was a thing of its time, 3 hp is probably better (or a shield that recovers over time that acts like a saving hitpoint on top of a single hp). It's not a deal breaker, but this kind of game can mostly entertain by its high risk gameplay (1 hit and you're dead).
* I can't tell what bonuses do, but maybe they do provide some upgrades? In that case, it's good. But they would only improve the experience if (A) the results are so good that they're apparent to the player (B) they're explained by the game (a floating text is the best way to explain those)
* One enemy uses a very long sound sfx for a single-projectile attack. I would either make it fire a lot of projectiles repeatedly or use a different sfx.
On the bright side, it does play relatively well and I gave it 5 minutes. The difficulty does increase, although 20 hp is a lot at the beginning. The sounds balance makes later gameplay too loud for my taste as the sounds stack.
I do like the extra efforts for death animations and damage effects. It would be also cool to have flipped sprite versions for turns (e.g. 3 states - left, normal, right). You can easily achieve that by adding a half-sprite shade for the turning direction side.
I liked the spaceship physics. Sometimes there are weird things like vessels flying at x10 speed which I assume is a physics issue after collision, but I might be wrong. Maybe there is no max speed limit and anyone can accelerate that much if wanted to.
It's almost impossible to lose in this game, I think the melee vessels should do much more damage, or get at least 2 hp at some point. Otherwise, the player is too strong for these enemies.
As others notes, the wave delay could be too long, but I understand that it's there to allow the player to collect scraps. Even with that in mind, this game is quite easy and player does not really need 100% of the scraps, they barely need any :D A couple of upgrades in everything and you're good to go for infinity, and this can be farmed without a long wave pause.
I noticed the web build of the game freezing for several seconds when a wave of 50+ enemies is about to be spawned. The more you progress, the more noticeable this freeze is (up to 6-7 seconds, but I haven't measured it).
I recorded a video of me playing the game. https://shadowveilsociety.itch.io/claw-of-the-mantis
This is one of the games that is not very convenient to play from a laptop without dedicated mouse. :D
"Oh no, they can't live without đ!"
The King is having fun again. But this time, we're not playing the king...
I tried the first level for 5 times but can't seem to beat it :D Are there more than 1? The level introduction title implies so. I managed to use the "stolen" (collected) enemy projectiles, but it didn't help that much :D Avoiding the projectiles with a head collision box proved to be harder than it sounds. I always tried to avoid with my whole sprite. :( I like the vibes this game gives me, but it happened to be also just as difficult as these older games were :D This is a hard to rate entry as I would have to play it for much more time to have a chance to even see what else it has to offer
The balance is weird. Upgraded souls seem to be somewhat lackluster, but maybe that's the whole point. It's more of a shooter than a vampire survivors game because of that. I had ~5 fps after ~300 seconds and it made the game almost unplayable.
But the idea is quite fresh. I like this soul management. The ring-based soul collecting gets outdated too soon though. Or maybe I did something wrong.
I like how I felt "this level is going to be easy at first" and then spending 3 minutes on it, making all the wrong moves. Figuring out the correct layout BEFORE moving stuff around is a good strats. "Which arrangement can actually provide these production goals?" instead of just trying to keep things closer.
I like the new resource introduction. The mission difficulty felt right. I wonder how would you expand the game? 4x4 field can be too small for the upcoming levels I believe. :D
Ah, so you had some ideas on how to extend it. Good I think that's what matters.
Compound resources do sound like a solid step up in the difficulty
Adding 10-15 hp to the boss seem to be a safe bet here. Although maybe 10 minutes to beat is good as it is. I stayed for a bit longer, but without a goal I lose motivation pretty fast (keeping in mind that I was called a winner after defeating the boss). I like the visual style. It's simple, but it also matches the style of your previous game :D I was a bit confused by 100hp enemies at first, but I guess they're just an obstacle. One thing that bothers me is that we can't remove/mark them out. I noticed the game is made in Godot: is it gdscript or C#?
I see the late game potential of a 3-slot guy, but with that small amount of money you have to know what you're doing xD With a rich guy I can cosplay "random bullshit go!" meme and still be find (have to buy all dizzying items though!) It looks like the balance is pretty decent, but I am not sure about the mixed-damage items as they're mostly around 2/3 of efficiency for the full price.
It was a bit hard to manage the items as I tend to forget how many vomity and scary-scary stuff I have in my inventory, etc.
Some sticky items tend to be outclassed later, so it's another newbie trap :D Unless you're playing with a 3-slot guy. He can probably utilize both sticky 2+3 items.
How about a hacky cheap and dirty way? Add a counter near the damage type of the item inside the tooltip. Like:
â ď¸â ď¸ (have 2)
10 minutes of coding :D Very ldjam-style
Btw, my game has the same issue. But I haven't thought of it in time.
I made a burger with something that should never be in the burger... and I am not feeling bad. I watch too much anime to be surprised at this point! :D
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This game is pretty cool: I like the fact that a goblin can split into chunks and those are legit ingredients apparently? :D I am not sure how much depth to the brewing there is, as I only seem to have simple tasks like changing colors adding/removing some body parts. The graphics are neat and matching the game's tone.
I do feel a bit lost while seeing too many "unknown ingredient" stuff as it leaves me clueless. "How do I make it known?"
@melomaner this game would be even harder if you wouldn't have homm 3 prior experience... At least I hope I avoided the difficulty spikes that were so common in my previous games.
@hnkxobka I wonder which pawn are you referring to :D
@hijomo my friend says they're saying "kodateiru" instead of "commander" :D
@kiv I am so tired of sci-fi stuff :[ I always wanted to do fantasy games, but it was way easier for me to draw some robots/spaceships. I am starting to learn how to express fantasy units now!
Watched this game on BluePinStudio stream. I like the visual story telling! The progression is also there as we start without wings :D
The game is pretty easy, but that could be a ludum dare thing - it's safer to make an easier game so everyone can finish it. At the same time, I thought I could not lose if I don't screw up too much. The art style of this game is cool.
Hmm, this one plays good enough, I played 4 runs actually.
1 run - couldn't figure out that E only works on top of the station
2 run - managed to play for a few minuts, but then "signal lost" (I was unsure what was the reason - my hp? base hp?)
3 run - only noticed the beacons thing, but I wasn't sure what it does, so I spent too much time flying around it and lost due to the inefficient play
4 run - I tried my best and it was alright, but then I died again - not sure what was it again, as base HP looked like it's near full
My best score was around 6 or 7 minutes (I didn't have time to pay close attention as my every death was very sudden)
I enjoyed the idea that you can upgrade the base and it's probably more powerful due to the easier multi-shot access. The beacons... I am still not sure what they do. I thought they would damage the enemies on their own, but they seem to allow the station to attack further targets? That's useful, but does it help if your base is already surrounded? It would help if there were directional waves, but I think the enemies go at you at random, so I was not feeling the decision making while activating the beacons. I did it just because I was passing by anyway, so "maybe it could help", but honestly that probably led to my demise as you can only do this much stuff at the same time - my vessel was probably destroyed in the process.
I re-launched the game and noticed that the bottom-left corner mentions the beacons. I am still not sure what "beacon draining time means". Also, I don't know what's the ace repair drone :D
Maybe making the player less vulnerable and moving the focus to the base survival could be the key here. Managing 2 HP bars is a bit overwhelming without a clear UI. For instance, I would like some HP around the vessel, so I can always see it without staring down. Or even better - around the pointer as it's where we're usually looking at in this game.
I might do a couple more runs as this game is otherwise well made. It's fascinating that survivors and its interpretations are one of the good recipes to make a good game loop in the limited time! And I don't think I saw this exact interpretation before (I mean the base + player as upgradable units).
Also, neat cover art. That's one of the reasons I clicked and came here :D
Fuuuuuuuuu, I accidentally refreshed the page and my entire comment draft is gone. Hafta do this again :'(
I think you made this game with your brother again, right? Very good job, I was a fan of Absolve.
This game deserves more feedback. It has not 1 signal-related mini game, but several :D I only played 2 so far and I believe there are 3 in total? I haven't realized that I can do other stuff until solving several wave alignment rounds with pathetic rewards xD I bought the auto-solver, but it gave like some $ per 30s I think? :D I think I was scammed there :D
The outside art is cool. I wish we could interact with it a bit more - it's a pity we have so much cool looking stage areas and they're not very utilized (at least that's my impression - I tried touching the grass to no avail, but that's kinda realistic; it never worked in real like too: every time I go outside there is nothing of interest).
Ah, and also - the cover art is fantastic
That's a very unusual RTS take :D
The traps were my least favorite mechanic xD Especially when they are combined with a time-based doors at level 3 :D I tried to solve them in a correct way, but even at level 1 I haven't found a better solution than moving 1 tile and going through all channels, comparing the volume of those - but this is very slow, maybe there is a better way. Also, I think it does detect the mines even through the walls? Are mine placements randomized? I noticed the codes are randomized indeed, but mines seem to be static. The game is intuitive enough I guess, but those traps are making me go urrrrhghh (although the "damage taken" grunting is funny).
I think I got all the combinations, and web build worked good enough for me. The only issue I had is a jump-scare x2 speed dreams flying at me... they don't know I tried to get a specific sequence and couldn't afford a random piece connecting to me. I don't know if it's a desired effect, but I felt like in a fever dream :D
I think the game is fine, but the fact that you lose HP/population during the pause (before the mission?) is a bit frustrating. Even in vampire survivors like games you have a pause during upgrades selection. Other than that, it's good: the upgrades are strong, music is fitting, the artstyle is interesting (but it could use a bit more consistency I think).
Also, the ultra high numbers are hard to interpret :D I gave up to understand the meaning of drains and population as only the red part matters.
@reimi every once in 3-4 game jams I try to make an RTS-ish game. And it's usually not a good idea as there is not enough time to balance it and they end up either too hard or too easy. It's still better than not making one as there is 0 chance of me trying to make a commercial RTS any time soon.
@woona I think the easiest and quickest fix would be to only spawn the "out of the map" enemies outside of the radar range. That would make it less annoying and more fair. Defending would also be easier. But oh well.
I didn't get that simple idea during the jam. And now it's too late
@alex-mulkerrin the cyborg factory is the only factory you can stop completely as it does not produce units when conntected to itself - so the cyborgs are a way to dump gold into the furnace to build up your raw power, but it will hurt the expansion as most buildings cost gold. :D But the game is still far from being balanced, I got very limited time to test it. I think I played the game around 2 hours in total during those 2 days and it wasn't enough to check things out enough.
It reminds me of shapez io a bit, in a good way. It feels like a sandbox and really it mostly lacks the discoverability of its features. The Esc for upgrades was a bit confusing, but onboarding is the curse of many LD games (especially for compo). The good part is that it can be played for more than 10 minutes without exhausting its potential, which is somewhat rare for compo games. :) The graphics are serviceable. The sounds are a weak spot, but it's good that it can be turned off :D
I am not reading the other comments to avoid the spoilers. I want to find the cheese myself
I ended up liking the controls even though I initially thought "it's not like in the old strike games!" The only thing I struggled with is cargo pickup. Maybe making the hook stay for a couple more seconds would be a simple fix here. Or perhaps keeping it down while space is being pressed?