Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Rob Cigna
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | King of Bjorp | jam | 132 | 3.87 | 3.60 | 3.11 | 3.88 | 3.95 | 3.63 | 3.21 | 3.55 |
Nice job! I feel the same as most other commenters: movement would be better on a discrete grid, aesthetics are terrific, progression through the levels is very good. The thing that would most improve the game is more content!
You made an actual NES game for LD? Fantastic! I've been thinking about trying to make a NES game myself, and in fact it was your post on nesdev that lead me here rather than the ldjam website. I'll have to take a look at your starter kit sometime.
As for the game itself, it was enjoyable. The dialogue enhances the mood, and just having it puts the game a cut above many others, in my opinion. Like others have said, it's easy to get caught on other characters. I'd like it more if Barney's and enemies' collision boxes were actually a little smaller than their sprites, to make fitting through narrow corridors (and slipping past enemies) easier. But there are a lot of jam entries that don't bother to knock back or give the player temporary invincibility, so I really appreciate that in this game.
There are also a couple of places where it is possible to walk off the edge of the screen, but once scrolled onto the next screen there is no more ground (or lilypads, as the case may be) to walk on, so Barney is stuck until the darkness reaches him.
Nice job! That was very fun to play. Could you put a link back to this page on your itch download page? I clicked through from your front page post, but had to go back and search through your user profile to get here and rate it.
Impressive! There's a bit of a difficulty spike at the last level, but I can't count it against you because that last level is genuinely well designed and finely tuned to be exhilarating!
The thing I most wish the game had is a short visible countdown after failing the level and retrying before the input is allowed and the wall starts moving. I felt a little cheated when I discovered I could move the character before the fade-in had even finished, and therefore until that moment I had been wasting all that time at every restart.
Wow... Impressive atmosphere! That little bit of text and dialogue really makes me feel the character's worrying even before I have to start dodging bullets. The time slow between the first boss' phases is an excellent touch. Gives just enough time to realize it's about to get harder and steel yourself. I feel bad about fighting the last boss by just hiding behind the very first rock, though (I got demolished when I tried to stand anywhere else.) Regardless, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time!
The only thing I wish for from this game would be to be able to use a gamepad. I'm terrible at watching both where the character is and where my mouse cursor is and wish I could just push a joystick to fire in that direction.
Cool interpretation of the theme! I can see how enjoyable this game would be with a bit more work. You seem to have anticipated my most urgent criticism: it's hard to enjoy the 3D parts with the current camera controls.
It seems like the camera tries to guide your view forward for yaw rotations, but not pitch. And it does this even when I am actively trying to control the camera. Perhaps if you gave it a simple cooldown after any mouse movement, so it wouldn't try to do that within, say, 2 seconds of the player moving the mouse? And, of course, add something similar for the plane's pitch rotations. Also, since the plane can go completely upside-down, it might be better to use the plane's own up instead of the world up vector for your look rotations, if you aren't already.
Beyond that it sounds like you already have a solid idea of what would make it better.
Going to echo @bartosz, a blob shadow would do wonders for landing high jumps!
Great job! I had fun playing it. Like others, I think the pacing could be sped up; more enemies could appear early on. But I'll admit that I would feel different if I didn't have a ton of other jam games to play and rate.
Second to that, more visual and audio feedback for everything happening in game would enhance it the most. Sounds for enemies dying (I think the sound I hear is them spawning?) Little red arrows indicating you took damage and from which direction would be great (camera shake too!) And I had some trouble judging the range of the shove, but I'm not sure what you could add to best convey that. Maybe a short, little shock wave on the ground?