BIO-EX-DEUS by Joror 2018-08-23T14:26:51Z
Very interesting creation. I really liked seeing the different groups interact. Could be made more "gamey" by having scenarios with goals, but it's a nice toy as-is.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Radical Dog
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | Astronaut's Journey | compo | 33 | 4.05 | 4.09 | 3.32 | 3.44 | 4.05 | 4.00 | 3.67 | ||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Bad Trains | compo | 294 | 3.47 | 3.50 | 3.45 | 3.57 | 3.35 | 2.61 | 2.75 | ||
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Flappy Blocks | compo | 53 | 3.95 | 3.73 | 4.15 | 4.45 | 3.86 | 3.60 | 4.17 |
Very interesting creation. I really liked seeing the different groups interact. Could be made more "gamey" by having scenarios with goals, but it's a nice toy as-is.
I like the concept going into this a lot, and managed to sneak ahead of you in one of the high scores! That said, it feels really random whether you have enough things to fill your truck in level 2 and 3. The most interesting decisions for me were always when I was deciding what I had to leave behind, but there were only a few times when my truck was full enough for that. It feels almost like a board game!
I liked the exploration aspect - it worked well! Gravity mechanic was also nice, as was the homemade sounds. Needs an extra mechanic to really sing, but it's very solid for a weekend's work.
It's a nice idea, but also shows why twin stick shooters use twin sticks - so you can strafe! Holding the button to fire instead of clicking lots would also be a good improvement.
I'd have liked to know the objectives in each area, since I frequently was confused while beating a level. Graphics/mood is lovely however, great job on that!
The art in this is great. It might have been simpler to have collect/throw be the same button, and only store one at once. Also, mapping jump exclusively to "up" makes it difficult to use with a controller!
In that case, you must have set it to private!
I like the idea going into it, but it needs another twist to really work as a game. Perhaps a recipe book? It's like a proto-crafting game, and it needs to get some more crafting game elements!
Superb game. The ship is a touch on the twitchy side for my taste, but otherwise really excellent.
I love the idea of doing a WarioWare type game in a jam, and this is quite close! There's a few ways you could tweak the minigames, but the biggest one would be adding a metronome to the music one and giving a bar between hearing it and playing it.
Also, some parts display badly on a 16:10 aspect monitor - unfortunately including the art!
Nice little project. I'd quite like it if you could fall in the water too, but that might make it too difficult and reward standing still.
Functional, finished game that works well. I only wish the hitboxes were a bit tighter, and that the items came around in a curve rather than a straight line! Could also make the jetpack controls a bit more like "Copter", which would make sense given the gravity theme is right there.
Very nice art, good job.
I like this! Though a few things aren't clear, like I wasn't sure what was "pastry" or not. Still though, really original game.
Nice one! I like the concept, and the way you must store some cargo or else lose everything. I wish that you could see the colour of the teleporter quicker after dropping off a package, rather than having to move away to see.
My preference would be for the cargo deliveries to come in waves with breathing room between, and reduce the health to 3 - then when things start going wrong it's a lot faster.
I can imagine the concept working quite well as a mobile game, where you can just tap the next spot you want the crane to go!
This is super, really well done. I only wish I could use twin sticks, rather than the mouse to aim - it's hard to keep track of where exactly my mouse is!
Thanks all! Looking forward to expanding this post-jam.
@joror Looks like we were playing each others' games at the same time! Thanks!
Nice project! I would have liked a gradual difficulty curve though, as these "locals" are extremely fast and aggressive. Seems like the sort of game where I wouldn't mind it being easy and relaxing.
I like your sprite work! I think the game needs some "hit" actions, e.g. you flash when hurt, enemies flash when you hit them, that sort of thing.
Nice, I think Insane is the only way to play as this isn't a game that should really last more than a minute. Per the Jam rules, you should opt out of audio though as you didn't make the music. Cheers!
Fantastic work. From a gameplay sense I would have liked shorter levels with faster shrinking, but I really admire the use of theme and the concept.
I love how bizarre this game is!
Pretty cool game, very different. I do wish you'd make your projects a little smaller, 113mb is very big for a jam game!
I like the models and animations a lot for their simplicity!
What a brilliant game! The only problem I had was when the level generated 2 backwards-gusts in such a way that it was impossible (in my opinion) to pass. But really funny, and uses the theme 100%.
You've nailed the mood and sound, very nice. I also really like the smoke effect.
Am I right in thinking that the gameplay is basically that you need to find lots of Spades in the deck to grow your population? Nothing else seemed to be half as helpful!
Nothing about this game is funny, so the fact this came 2nd in "humour" shows that you have abused the system and taken trophies away from games that truly deserve it. Shame on you.
I like the idea behind it, and your wololo! I did find the sheep fertility rate was a bit aggressive, since I'd hope that killing 3 sheep would give a boost for more than a few seconds. I'd suggest rebalancing so that the player almost always dies because of eating all the food, but producing more sheep is easier, since having sheep to kill is the main game.
Excellent art and design! I would love it to be a bit harder, e.g. range from 1-10 and only give 5 seconds to make each choice or else. I found no reason to lose, and as you say, there is no winning.
I couldn't kill seals fast enough to make space for the drill, definitely should start off slower.
Tying motivational stuff is a really interesting idea, and I also think the food choice is clever (though maybe the long one could be a little less long!) I did notice some problems with key capture, where it would miss keypresses sometimes. Also, no idea how to increase motivation...
Good game!
Nice idea and design :) It did feel like a clicker at times - perhaps the ad campaigns need an expiry date! I also found one medium campaign set me for life, never needed the bigger ones.
@davidfox Yeah, one little tweak I'll add is a fade-in of some congratulations text once the lander touches down. Some nice music would also work, once LD's over. Thanks for the feedback!
@kromeboy Cheers! I do think the little lander at the end messes with the physics a bit, but the good news is you have fuel to land on stage 1 or 2 pretty easily.
@james-leib Thanks! You can actually follow people to get notified of their uploads for next time :D
Thanks so much everyone!
@amastryukov Good fair critiques, will definitely improve post-jam.
@carlpilot Yeah, it's tuned to give cash easily, on the basis that most LD raters wouldn't see the end if it took too long to beat - so it gives a minimum of $100 funding per flight until I have time to balance the campaign. Also, I'll definitely add more visual/audio feedback when the moon landing sequence takes over.
@elzach Ha! The moon is only 500 units away, so you'll be in float precision space for a long time yet.
Thanks a lot everyone for the feedback and kind words!
@capital-asterisk @dusho @rumor I think I know why the later stages are more difficult than intended, so that’s definitely something I’ll try to fix postjam!
@hystaf The idea came from how the real space program involved actual deaths and sacrifices in the name of progress. I’d intended the newspaper to tie in with whether a given rocket exploded to say whether or not the astronaut survived, but simply ran out of time to make the link.
Interesting game, reminds me a bit of old GTA!
Well done on making something :) I am confused what to do! I found a gold nugget, and clicked it many times to get negative pressure. Couldn't seem to speed up time even though it looks like it should be the + button.
But how do you sacrifice? Clicking on them didn't work, dragging them didn't work...
This came out awesome, well done! I love the console-like output, which makes total sense for the scenario - I might have to steal that idea for a later version of my game!
I only wish there was a more active sacrifice to do, e.g. shooting burns oxygen, but if you survive a level then you dock and it gets refilled.
Good on you for getting involved with a jam!
I think you should work on making the game rules clear, and obviously people have talked about the resolution stuff. Once I worked out what was going on, it was an interesting idea. Perhaps it could be improved if the player could see 5 seconds in advance what the consumption would be, so they could make sure their resources are in the right place?
I hope we see you again next time :)
Well done on making the fundamentals of a crafting/survival game. I felt like it needed one more element, perhaps ways to discover the recipes, or recipes that collect water that give you a reason to balance "building the escape" with "making the island survivable".
I like the art design too, at least on the overworld.
It was a bit scary having such a long black screen at the start! Good work on the voice acting. I feel like the dates should have been a bit more of a "mini-game" rather than just clicking and waiting, and also they would sometimes not appear for ages and ages - so it needs to have a min and max time between spawning dates.
It works well. Art is nice, but it's begging for a bit more animation and music!
Is there ever any reason not to just shoot out a handful of blocks in the middle? It's pretty, but I feel like it's missing something to be a full prototype.
Really great artwork and mood. You should try a 3DS game called "Attack of the Friday Monsters", which has a similar card-game sidequest, and play all your character's friends to become their boss!
Obviously up-front it's hard to explain a deckbuilder, but it's a really nice idea of how to use it.
However, there needs to be a lot of tweaking, and perhaps an "undo" button, to get the balance right. There aren't enough basic weapon cards in the shop IMO, for how quickly your weapons deteriorate - I certainly couldn't reliably put up 2 towers every 3 turns, which is what is needed. I'm not even sure the towers need to deteriorate at all; you could just have the waves get harder so that the old turrets aren't strong enough over time.
I hope you keep working on it!
That's fair. I'd definitely like to see a preparation phase between waves, especially given that you can't upgrade a tile with an enemy on it!
I really like this, as the car mechanics works well with the action style. A few things: when the car reverses, the steering should be inverted. Also, turning speed should scale with the speed a bit. Finally, I want to use space/arrows to start/change missions so I can keep my hands on the keyboard!
It's a nice idea, but begging for enemy "waves" rather than just a constant flow. Also, the towers should only target enemies they can reach, as my towers were useless when they couldn't reach the enemies they aimed at.
As interesting as it is, a clicker game definitely needs to be doing lots of autoclicking before the user has clicked 600 times!
The moving mechanics are nice. Didn't like how the character stayed in front of the text. Slightly bizarre choice of texts - if it was something funny you wrote, this could quickly be a very good game!
Your Itch link doesn't work!
Great game design, the levels taught the mechanics well. I would have liked to see the bullets zoom away once you win, and as others mentioned, the movement was a little stuttery.
I agree with others that it was scoped too big, however this is a worthy prototype. The idea of a logic game under a time pressure is good, but the UI needs to do everything it can to make it easy, especially at the start - perhaps lay out logic gates to be used in the first few levels, and graduate to having the user add 1+ logic gates in designated spots later.
I made a game with the same concept! It's interesting seeing how very different the games are, though, and we've approached a lot of the challenges with combining the two differently. Your art and music is really lovely.
Not really, I knew I wanted to make a small funny game and I had the idea quickly. Everyone has made so many weird combination games, it feels very different to other Ludum Dares with a more typical theme!
It's nice! The concept is good, the core gameplay work well, so I'd be interested to see this taken to the next level with some progression mechanics from the roguelike.
The movement system is very clever once explained, but I really don't know what my goal is!
This is a nicely done flappy game, and a fun idea! I believe your flap counter is way off, though.
Good parts so far, but doesn't feel finished yet. I'd love to see a progression, where it gets harder over time, or has 'levels'/waves of enemies!
If you die, the music doubles up.
Solid idea, basically a three-joke game but they're good jokes so it gets a pass. You could certainly squeeze some Undertale references etc in if you wanted!
Thanks so much everyone!
@oivin-f I totally get that top wall thing, I need to add a tweak to more forcefully centre the blocks. I've tried to make the start of each block a little forgiving, but it's hard to make too many changes without breaking the rhythm you need for the rest of the flight.
@SuperTibbles My girlfriend didn't know what Bejeweled was. I should have made it Candy Crush! (Also, free puns; "We're gonna get candy crushed!")
Thanks all for the feedback and encouragement.
@gonutz Very kind words! I'd like to do a V2 for Android, and default the shapes to be on their side. Should make the preview match, and also the game a touch easier for those first 2 clicks!
@SecretPocketCat Totally agree, definitely something to tweak for V2. Cheers!
@Synedraacus Yes, I'm throwing stones in a glass house! Thanks a lot.
@resivium Thanks for the specific feedback! I'm definitely wracking my brain for a way to do rotation while "sticking", because there's a lot of room for it to turn into a glitch-fest.
Thanks a lot again for all the feedback!
@BoltKey Absolutely, going to do some testing with a restart button/undo mechanics for a version 2, to see how to solve it when a level feels unwinnable.
@Noxbuds Great score! I've only managed 10 :)
So much great feedback, thank you all.
@Ashtrail @HacksawUnit I'll definitely have to work with someone more talented musically taking this forward. I claim no expertise!
Really interesting idea! I think this prototype shows this might be a touch too hard. I found it a lot easier once I grabbed both attractors together, so that I didn't have to work out how to avoid the other one. It might work better for a colour-matching game, where there's only 2-3 colours that you need to connect 4 in any shape.
I found it easiest to play by ignoring the distractions entirely and just driving the car underneath!
This game is seriously difficult! I think the next step would be to hand-pick some generated levels to give a linear experience. My first 'easy' level, the solution was to wait in one spot for about 15 turns before making a very specific dash for the finish - not so easy!
I like the visuals, though the controls are a little floaty.
You should definitely make a webGL build so it's easier for people to play!
This is an interesting prototype. I rather like the idea of having a city-ship under your control, though perhaps with slightly fewer buttons for thrust and more for managing the city life!
This is nice, though I really wish I could move left and right so I can catch my ball easier!
Congrats on the results! Very nice game, would have liked a slightly slower tempo, and perhaps a chance to listen to rhythms freely between levels rather than just get chucked in!
There's a lot to like here! Sound especially is done well. I would like to have seen the demons be different sprites for the sake of colour-blind people. A and Z are also odd choices of keys.
If anyone's virus scanner makes the game not work, Alt+F4 then run it again. Scan shouldn't run twice.
I like it! Though the gravity is too high for me, it makes the platforming harder than perhaps it was meant to be.