Something Magical by wasd 2020-04-22T10:43:03Z
This experience really was something magical!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → santriptasharma
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Verbose | jam | 946 | 3.60 | 3.51 | 3.28 | 4.15 | 3.77 | 3.38 | 4.08 | 3.65 |
This experience really was something magical!
This is probably the best game I have played so far, great job!
I really really like the sound design, the art, and the atmosphere.
Damn, what a concept. The idea of the recalls is so ingenious. Great job!
the art is v v nice
I really like the simple graphics, the sounds. The puzzle design is very nice. The environment design along with the sound design really makes you feel like you're alone in the apocalypse.
The controls are a little janky though. Other than that, it's a great game.
Is this inspired by The Final Station?
Great job!
I love the art, the sound, the concept, the gameplay. The water especially is v nice. The UI is also v nice. There's some rendering artifacts between the tiles while moving though. Overall, great game!
dont starve vibes
This is so fun and polished, great job!
very nice! I really like the idea of the game!
Amazing.
quite possibly the best voice acting in the universe
WOW!
Amazing world design, movement feels amazing, the gunplay feels amazing. I really like how much feedback there is as to what's going on in the game. You always know what happened and when it happened. Great job!
Damn, the art is v v good. The music is too loud and high pitched, but otherwise it's a really solid entry. Great job!
The design as a whole is amazing! From visual design to game design, you nailed the mood you were trying to go for. More levels would be amazing!
There is one more thing tho, anything you could do to reduce the need to wait for a robot (or multiple robots to line up how you want them), a fast forward button or something, would go a long way towards the final game. It might not be a large issue in these 2 levels, but I think it might become one as more levels are added.
Great work!
@kwaku i just played the game through and realized that the difficulty curve is way different than from what i was expecting it to be. I didn't get time to test yesterday, so i just assigned some arbitrary values to the spawning logic, hoping to find the easy, but still challenging sweet spot.
What I got instead was ghostwriter spam
@ldf-productions thanks for the comment!
@shikamaru @webox @hamzeh thanks for the positive comments!
@shikamaru the idea behind the ghost writer was that it would be your payload. I noticed that it was extremely hard for the activists and journalists to break through, and hence the ghost writer was born. The idea was that if you planned well enough to be able to conserve enough battlepoints, you would be rewarded with a guaranteed hit.
How it was supposed to be countered was that if you were trying to spam it, you'd be pummelled by the opponents' activists and authors, but clearly, the enemies' rates of spawning weren't high enough for that.
@alpharock6 proactive game design saves lives yet again Thanks for playing the game!
@remus-rain oops thanks for the feedback!
@yigitserin @homunculusgames @tuesi thanks a lot for playing!
@marco-le-van that's the plan!
@janmatyoostudio Thank you for playing!
@tomas-selmeci yeah, it was surprising, since it should've been obvious that this game would require a lot of balancing, but I somehow missed it. I'll take it as a learning experience. Thanks for playing the game!
@nameless-ghoul thanks for the great feedback! I'm also glad that someone recognised the age of war influence. I used to play a lot of flash games and two games in particular had influence on this game: Age of War and Stick Wars.
About the AI, the bp system and state machine do exist, it's just that they're not well tuned due to lack of time. How it works is, each level has an AI behaviour data structure associated with it, containing BP/s, Tower health, a list of spawnables (a data structure containing unit type, stats and mean seconds per appearance), aggressiveness, max spawns per spawn opportunity, spawn spacing.
I won't get into the details of it, it's quite a messy bit of logic, but it works pretty well (if tuned properly).
I'm currently working on a post jam version. After playing through stick wars to understand why it feels balanced, I also thought about putting a queue system in place. I decided (out of laziness) to instead have the units spawn a few units behind the tower, causing the same outcome. I've also shrunk the no man's land to 1/4th it's size, since the long stretch made it very hard to penetrate to the tower with any unit other than the ghostwriter.
Sorry for the slight rant. Again, thanks for the great feedback!
@xmatos I agree! For a game named verbose, there's a glaring lack of words (besides the (not very) phenomenal wordplay by me). I'm working on a post jam version and am thinking about something like word specials.
For example, at some random point in the game, a word falls out of the sky letter by letter. If you are able to type the letters out as they fall and before they hit the ground, you get some buff or something. It would also make sense for these words to be thesaurus-ised (to make them verbose).
Maybe one of these could be the word acceleration, which when successfully typed gives your units a speed buff.
I don't know yet though, I haven't tried it out and don't know how it feels yet. It might be a bit tedious, but I wanna give it a try!
Thanks for the feedback!
@mhykah by stuck on a level do you mean the one with the barrage of ghostwriters? If so, that was supposed to be the end of the game, but we weren't ready with it, so I just used an impossible (technically possible, but you'd need to spend time leveling up your bp/s to at least 76 to pass it) level as an array overflow guard.
yes, I know, amazing design! (...)
About the animations, we were originally supposed to have a walk cycle, but my [artist](https://shubhro.in) (amazing artist), had never worked with pixel art before so he had trouble making them. I told him to leave it and introduced....... PROGRAMMER WALK CYCLES!
I agree with you on the point of making information available to the player. I think it's essential. One of my favourite games, [heat signature](, is all about having all the information available to you: How the AI will react to this, or how many guards there will be, or what weapons they will have. I would have loved to make this change, but in all honesty, I kinda forgot about it. oops.
As for the last point, a post jam version is coming soon! Thanks for playing and giving feedback!
general note: the ghost writer is a ghost rider pun
it seems like no one is getting it :(
@amazura Since I didn't have enough time left to make a proper ending, I instead opted for... A NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE LEVEL!
Thanks for playing and leaving feedback!
@zerohbeat I hate those guys.
@odeyalko @zerohbeat thanks for playing!
@simon-rahnasto the ghostwriter rush exists only because I wasn't quick enough to make an ending.
Thanks for playing!
@brendev I agree. I wanted to add particles, sounds, screenshake to make everything feel more impactful and to further the game feel but sadly, it didn't pan out due to time constraints.
As for the broken-ness, I am working on it with a post jam patch!
Thanks for playing and leaving feedback!
@scott-steffes thanks for the feedback! Would you mind clarifying what you mean by it being a lot to take in?
@scott-steffes Ah, I see what you mean. That's a good point. I suppose that stuff that is obvious to you as the creator isn't necessarily as obvious to everyone else. Thanks! I'll keep that in mind.
What a powerful experience. The world design is amazing and seeing the monotonous ruins around you really invokes a feeling of loneliness. The music takes this further.
Solid job.
v nice atmosphere. the main frustration I faced is that sometimes you can't tell the good shapes and bad shapes apart easily. It would be cool if more shapes would use their shape to do something specific, like the triangle. maybe the square could charge in the four cardinal directions. good game overall!
Great concept, great art, great sound, great atmosphere and great humour. V fun game!
All I've got to say is that when I lost, I didn't understand what caused the loss. Providing the player with more information about the state of the aliens may provide better gameplay. Just a suggestion though.