Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → sclark39
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | One Ninja | compo | 539 | 2.96 | 2.67 | 3.11 | 2.74 | 2.59 | 2.29 | 2.27 | 2.55 | 41 | |
| 2012 | 25 | You are the Villain | Fetch Quest | compo | 142 | 3.42 | 3.21 | 3.37 | 3.87 | 3.23 | 1.24 | 2.63 | 2.91 | 100 | |
| 2012 | 24 | Evolution | Ascension Garden | compo | 442 | 2.85 | 2.21 | 3.21 | 3.18 | 2.56 | 1.75 | 1.48 | 2.19 | 65 |
Died really quickly without knowing what was going on. On repeated playthroughs I had a better idea of what was going on, but there's no agency over what ability unlocks and I didn't really find there to be enough time to read the text with black triangles showing up under my feet and stuff all the time.
Great work achieving this in 48 hours.
Quaternions are the solution for gimbal lock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion
Haha this gets hard to control pretty fast. Nice work though. Pretty impressive for only 48 hours!
Hilarious sound. Great graphics. The gameplay is kind of boring but I liked the evolution integration. I'm assuming what I evolved in to was related to what I killed (and what then circled the rink).
Way too hard. Wasn't able to get far enough to see any evolution theme. :(
It was very hard to actually get to the smaller guys before the other ones of my size, and there didn't seem to be any conflict.
The game froze while I was playing when I stopped moving.
I love the effect of the changing level. Very interesting effect that you could basically get for free with the right architecture for the level (consider using tiles). :)
The gameplay was a bit repetitive and boring, but I never got tired of seeing stuff in the level move.
I like how you also with the Ascension (Spiritual Evolution) route, but unfortunately couldn't try it because there was no link to the game?
I like the idea, but in practice I found it too difficult to get my guys to the other species before they all died out. There also wasn't a very strong visual difference between them. This seemed more like a meta-style game (more sim-like) than a hands-on one. Could be a good pick-up-and-play type game for the ipad.
Really hard. At first I didn't understand where I was shooting from or what was going on. It would help if the initial enemies were able to be killed in one hit. It seemed impossible to aim for the head (or even kill them at all) before they started hitting the tower and stopped moving, but that is obviously not a sustainable tactic.
Cool little game. Very tight design. I was led astray by the familiarity and tried to jump on enemies heads before I found out I could shoot. The evolution portion was very minor in the gameplay, I felt. If you leveled up faster it would probably be more fun.
The majority of my time was spent walking, which is not as much fun to do as in DayZ.
Fun, hard to aim. The evolution theme seems pretty weak
Confused by the controls. Why are the main screen and in-game using different controls? There is also a crosshair in game which seems not to do anything. I didn't see the evolution theme anywhere in this.
Ah. Reread. I didn't realize the red circles were good. The coins looked obviously good but I was trying to avoid the red circles.
Cute.
I think a game like this requires much stronger level design. As it stands, I found myself just controlling each ball one by one to get them to the end, rather than trying to control them all harmoniously.
One easy way to ensure people can't do that would be to actually have walls blocking one ball also block the others (so if one ball is stuck, they are all stuck). But again, that requires good level design to ensure the challenge can actually be completed.
Nice texture work.
I wasn't able to get anywhere once I got the frog (couldn't make it up to the next platform), and I died at first as a mosquito because I went to try to eat the frog (as instructed), before discovering the ones with their tounges out are harmful.
Cool idea, good graphics/sound. Reminds me of E.V.O. a little. :)
I wish there was more relevance to the evolution elements, it seemed like it was pretty arbitrary (partly due to their being too many numbers to look at).
I love the dragon evolution animations and noises. It's an extremely polished effect for a 48h game. If I was taking this forward I would most certainly expand on that portion and build the game more around that.
Cute.
It's fun, but seems to just be a clone of Conway's.
Simple TD. "Evolving" without branching seems pretty typical of TD games. I only lasted to the second wave where a whole stream of guys got by while I had 0 gold and 4 blue towers.
I couldn't get past the second level. The "health is your ammo" mechanic is a neat one, but when the enemies move this fast (and have so much health) it can be pretty frustrating. I wasn't able to tell where the "evolution" theme was coming into play (maybe a later level?).
Wow, really fun. I love the initial water-bomb effect, i was sad when I upgraded to missles. It was a little confusing when I kept having my size down-grade, and also confusing when the final boss was the same color as me.
If I have any complaint, it was that it is too easy, but that's part of why I think it was so much fun.
Great work. Very impressive.
I've added skip links to get through my sleep in the the Timelapse. Thanks for all the comments guys. I know the sound is awful, I accidentally had my speakers on very low when I was making the SFX and didn't realize until it was too late. If you're getting stuck, read the wall of text and let me know if there is still any confusion.
Thanks again for checking this out!
Josh, I'd love to hear what you didn't like about the implementation. I'm thinking about continuing working on this so any info about where you think more attention was needed would be great.
Couldn't run :(
Didn't really see the theme. Background music was good. Feedback on getting hit was pretty weak (barely realized I was hit a bunch of times, other times more than one heart was taken off for the same thing). The popup messages were a little amusing. :)
Very hard to hit things with the tiny little bombs. If the enemies had an acceleration based seeking behavior instead of a velocity one it would be possible to shake them off a bit more and get a bit more maneuverability and time. The first playthrough I didn't see any evolution elements. I think I kept getting hit or placing mines consumes evolution powers... Pretty cool, but very hard to stay upgraded.
Great work! The AI was frustratingly dumb, but I love the ideas here. Reminds me of the Yoshi racing in Mario RPG. It would be great if you could have some influence during the race similar to that (in Mario RPG you could give cookies to speed up your racer, but you had a limited supply)
I like how evolving the better body prevents you from picking up some DNA. This game's a bit of a grind, but I think that means if you polished it up it would do quite well on Kong.
I just re-played it. First game in the LD48 I've actually wanted to replay. The evolution mechanic made me want to try again and take a different path. This time I escaped in 15 evolutions (the first time I didn't even know there was an escape). Great work, again. :)
Lots of fun, but i kept getting hurt by the evolved creatures for quite a while before realizing I could be. I love the usage of the theme. Very original, and very successful at doing it in a way that isn't really effecting gameplay but is still extremely prevalent (many entries attempted and failed at this in the compo)
Strange, but great graphics. Fits together well, great art, great sound. I died after the third screen I believe, wasn't able to kill the enemies fast enough to get to the shrooms.
Kongregate submission in 48 hours, nice.
I glitched into the water (through the kill trigger?) in the level with the water.
Overall a very cool little puzzle-light platformer. Good audio, effective graphics. When I picked up the first power up and started flashing red I knew exactly what was going on.
Not really sure what the point is.
Cool game. The movement of the amoeba was a bit hitchy (would have probably been a bit nicer with a more acceleration based seeking behavior), and I found the purple ability really confusing. When I was purple and hit someone I shrunk and turned blue, which I assumed was a bad thing the first time I played.
Can't run it :(
Crashed when I tried to launch it :(
I love the stealth aspect to being the villain. Interesting selection scheme.
I'd love to see a port
I've seen this idea a bunch during this LD, but this is probably the most unique implentation. I love that you can draw the path of hte bullets. It would be cool to have more options on how to draw (symmetry/reflection mode for example to fire more than one at a time). This idea definitely has potential, and did a good job of prototyping the concept. :)
Good work. Similar idea to my entry. Yours is more of a tower-defense approach, mine more of an RTS. I played until I had 3 skeletons in reserve behind each door. :)
Great work! I can tell that quite a bit of work went into this over the weekend. I wish I could slice the grass. I wasn't exactly sure why I was collecting the flowers, I kind of wanted to see the flowers and the killing being linked (like psychedelic flowers).
Thanks for rating my game as well, and I'm glad you liked it! :)
Too bad the pacman doesn't have a better AI, and you don't have any friends. The dynamic of alternatively chasing and running away is interesting. Would be even more so as a 4P game.
I got really far, but eventually needed to take a break. This is a freaking awesome game. You should really finish it and get it on Steam. Probably with some controls changes you could get it working really well on the iPad as well. I would buy this game. 5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5
Also, thanks for the awesome review on my 48hr entry. I left you a comment on there before coming here, check it out. Not sure if there's a way to send private messages through this site but if you're on Twitter, send me a message @sclark39. I don't want to miss out on any other games that you two create. :)
It was very hard to "connect" the mustache. Love the integration of the theme though.
I couldn't tell if my minions were shooting or not, and wasn't sure what advantage switching between them really gave me. Interesting game though, I'd love to see you add more.
I wish there were more spells to make!
I'm not a fan of text adventure games, it always feels like trial and error to me. Of the text-adventures in this LD48, I think yours is the best. Good writing, good voice, the readme is very helpful. I love how little you used to accomplish this. It really shows that anyone can make a game for Ludum Dare, even if all they've learned is std::cin and std::cout. :)
I'm also giving 5 for mood since when I opened it I wanted to keep exploring. Good work!
I remember playing this game on my calculator back in the day! I was never very good at it. Good work, plays well. Offers a nice challenge.
Not seeing much of the theme here. Sounds more like you're the heroic kid stealing the cookies from the oppressive parental unit that wants you to starve.
This is really hard, and the music reactions were very effective but I think would have worked better with me if I was less sleepy. :)
It is REALLY hard to hit those buttons. I sat at the "press big button to start" screen for way too long trying to press it. I wish it would just do whatever I'm closest to when I click rather than needing to be directly over it. Cool idea, great audio, effective graphics.
Was very easy to win. I'm curious why you chose Unity for this, seems like it could have slowed you down (I haven't used Unity much but it seems like overkill for a game like this).
Looking forward to seeing what you do when given more time (next LD maybe?) :)
I know there are some weird circumstances where the AI sometimes freezes up. Unfortunately the AI code was not organized enough due to the time limit and was way too complex to debug these issues out of prior to submission. If the game gets stuck, I recommend restarting. Hope you all like it. Please leave me comments, both good and bad! :)
Thanks for that, leafo. I updated it so my *.love can support luajit as well. I'm still trying to get a love-webplayer version, but it really doesn't like me.
You can heal your units by making them hold at the fortress. :)
@OrangeeZ Thanks! Sorry about the crash. I barely had enough time to finish this and so never actually was able to test dominating the hero so thoroughly. :)
@BrothersT Well done! Yeah, I had a feature planned to make the hero level up as he fights you so that you WILL eventually lose, but I thought it would be too risky given the amount of time I had to actually implement that. More fun to let people break the game by dominating it than to have it be too hard. Sorry about the frame rate, I definitely did some non-optimal code for the sake of time, if I continue this it wouldn't be difficult to keep the frame rate down. Lots of low-hanging fruit. I'm glad you liked it as much as you did. If you haven't tried my entry for LD24, you should! It was called "Ascension Garden"
Waited in the queue of your download site forever. I'd suggest using Dropbox or something next time.
Cool game. I think giving the "hero" 3 lives was unnecessary since his behavior doesn't seem to change (so the same strategy keeps working). Seemed the easiest strategy was to just make a ton of battleships, and then spawn fighters on the opposite side from him.
Would be cool to see this expanded.
Really hard, it would probably play better in a more turn based style, or if there was more of a controlled setup time.
I had to try each spell to figure out what they all were (the icons didn't help), and ended up running out of mana. Good start though, I rated you highly in graphics because I loved the way you did the lightning spell. Very programmer art-y. :)
Good music, fun & simple concept. I would have liked to see more feedback when punching them and picking up the jelly beans, I wasn't sure if it was working or not.
p.s. Thanks for checking out my game!
Game crashes on startup :(
Interesting. The knight seemed incredibly strong, and I didn't have a lot to do.
"Could not find main class: EpicEngine." :(
Interesting. Sound and graphics are engaging. Not exactly sure what the goal was (did the lines being drawn between guys matter?)
I misunderstood the game a little and thought I'd regain health when I brought someone back to the shredding machine. Otherwise, good work!
Didn't really get the point, but it was fun to make tons of spots spawn by holding Tab and then setting them all on fire with one click.
Simple, but fun!
Really easy to play. The gameplay didn't have much depth nor difficulty, I think it was actually harder trying to read the description of how to play than to just jump in and figure it out. Congrats on your achievements here. :)
It seems like it requires you to die and restart at the checkpoint in order to progress past the first room (otherwise you don't have enough power to make it through the vents). There is also very little feedback on if I am infecting someone or not, which was confusing.
I have no clue what to download in this folder, and I don't see a .zip or anything.
I must agree with Datw, very little feedback. I couldn't figure out if researching or infecting was actually doing anything, and it took me three different tries and looking at the help image to figure out how to infect in the first place.
Love the dodging mechanic.
Great work. Not a lot of gameplay, but all the different text makes it very interesting. Similar concept to my entry, actually! Give it a try. :)
A bit clunky, but a cool idea. I wish I could have set up more of the typical enemy arrangements (like a row of enemies to all come out at the same time) instead of just basically random placement.
Couldn't find the gatekeeper :(
Well done on your first game, quite the undertaking. I hope to see more from you in the future. :)
I don't have Python, so can't run.
Good graphics & audio, but I didn't have a clue what to do and the game screen was about 4x larger than my browser window.
Really fun. It's kind of like a twist on Bubble Bobble. The sounds and animations for scaring are very effective, and although I don't love the bouncing if you hold jump, I do think it was important for the gameplay. Good work, very well polished.
Regarding my game, Hero leveling up was planned but cut due to time constraints, and other features considered but also out of the scope of the 48hr window. Glad you liked the game, and thanks for playing&rating!
Dude get a webhost. It's just silly to have to download a web-based version of a game! If you don't have any other option, you could at least host the files in a folder in your Dropbox public folder. It should work.
Pretty fun. I was able to just stay in one place for a long time. I liked the asteroids, I kept trying to keep the bigger ones alive. Kept me playing for longer.
Double clicked, but it won't run :(
Long download. Next time maybe you could use a different file format for the sfx.
I wasn't able to tell which floor the guys wanted to go to. I liked the idea, but I wish I could have also given them a thrill by hitting a key to do a fast drop, or letting them out on the same floor, or opening the doors and closing again before they got in. Maybe I was meant to be an evil elevator.
Good sound fx, and interesting control scheme & attack. :)
Player feedback in this is awful. I had no idea when I was getting hit vs. when I was successfully attacking. Graphics are amusing but I feel are part of the problem (since if there was an animation associated with attacking / getting hit, it would provide some better communication to the player). The audio was great, and I think the problems I have with it wouldn't be too hard to fix (by just adding some particle fx, sfx, and maybe some movable arms on the bear).
Cool, the AI is tricked similarly to another game with an identical idea (shoot to one side, then one down the other). Without that trick though, the AI is pretty much impossible to beat! Good work, and thanks for rating my game as well. :)
Error when trying to run :(
Aw, I wish I could try this. No OS X for me.
Super crate box, but with princesses instead of guns! Neat idea. I liked that the different colored damsels gave different powers, but I wish they could have been combined or increased in power as you collected more. Also would have been cool to have a "bank" to drop them off at (tradeoff between not having a weapon v. cashing out)
"Could not find main class: EpicEngine." :(
Oh actually, I reported the wrong error. I just see a black screen for this one. A different game had the other error. :)
I like the idea. I especially like how it's much more interactive than a lot of the tower defense clones I've seen.
Check out my more RTS-esque approach!
Pretty polished. Nice work!
I like the story aspects, but the controls make it very very hard to do anything. I don't see any advantage to shooting with one enemy vs. another, and didn't see a way to dodge at all.
Difficult controls, but I liked being able to control the whole fleet instead of just one guy.
Ouch my shoulder. Kind of hard to move around with my clicky keyboard (need to tap the arrow keys a lot), but I love the look and feel of this game. I made it to what I think was the fake ending. I'll have to try this again some more later. Good work!
Can't run :(
Looks like someone was having fun with shaders. :)
I kept getting stuck on the edges of objects and couldn't find the bomb. I ran directly in to the sphere guy and didn't get seen / hurt / lose the game, so not sure what the point of him was. Very pretty.
I unfortunately couldn't play your game because SDL.dll was missing. I was able to find the executable, but like others said it would have been easier to find if it was in the root. Please leave a comment on my game if you add the required DLLs, I'd love to try it.
Glad you liked my game so much! And also that you didn't mind the lack of sound. My entry for LD24 really suffered due to bad sound, so I thought it better to leave it out than to deliver a sub-optimal soundscape. :)
Really difficult to aim, but great intro and pretty fun! :)
Pretty fun, but I couldn't figure out how to attack in the second level and didn't want to grind my way through the first again after I died. Also, "tractor beam". Love it.
Wow that player AI is really good. His only downfall is trying to defend cities that were already burned down. "Lowscores" is a pretty amusing idea as well.
I liked the idea, the feel of dropping cars was nice, but killing the frogs seemed way too easy. I also wish I could have achieved more of the Frogger feel of having lots of cars going at all times, so placing spawners maybe instead of just cars. Good work though, congrats on completing this!
Beautiful animations, and great concept! I'm not sure how to avoid getting spotted, the lady just keeps staying at the bed. Reminds me of some parts of Super Mario RPG.
Can't run it on my old phone.
Didn't want to run an installer
Really great graphics and effects. Intro screen was awesome. I liked the flashes to you being the villain, but it really threw me off while trying to defend the castle.
Failed to download. :(
I love the intro to this.
Super floaty controls. I wish there was more ground friction.
I get the same error as Rex
The parallax effect and the controls feel pretty good.
Very slow, and it seemed like I was just following the instructions from the pastebin, not actually playing a game.
Windows version works for me. I think some quick scoring mechanic would have been a great addition to this, as it is, there's not really any incentive to avoid overlapping. It would be great if you could change the size of your tetrinimo as well as its rotation for larger areas to patch, as well as maybe a subtraction mode as well as an addition to get rid of some of the overlap (scoring would need to include number of moves as well as number of overlapped cells)
Lots of content, not a whole lot of gameplay. Great work with all the animations / story / satire bits. :)
Just found out this game doesn't run so well on under-powered devices. It runs very slow while the ninja appears to run very fast. I think it would have been better if I had made the theme a bit more evident in my messaging as well. The use of the theme in this is really just that it is a one-button game==the rest of the ways I intended to integrate the theme I just didn't have time to complete. Thanks for your comments, all.
Yup, that was exactly my intent (designed for a tablet). There is also a bug whereby clicking to the left of your guy should always make you turn around, but something is getting stomped when the hook gets thrown so it doesn't work. :(
I got a local build running better on this laptop but it still doesn't feel quite right and I really don't understand why it's screwing up like this. Seems like a bug with love2d itself and mobile gpus.
I figured out what the problem is with crappy machines... If the driver/screen doesn't support vsync it effectively tries to run the game loop at 300 fps which makes some stuff move really fast (the ninja's feet), while the actual update loop which is capped to only run 60 times a second ends up getting starved out by the draws... so for crappy machines I need to add a FPS limiter. Fun stuff. I'll try to get a version up tomorrow to fix this issue.
I love all the options for stuff to do. I found it too difficult to live the life of a pirate, and very difficult to navigate, but a lot of fun none the less. I think it would have in some ways been better without any mouse input. There's a lot of potential to this one, good work.
Well done, great sounds. The sounds really add to the experience. I'd suggest peggle-ifying every single square break (and especially pattern match) to make the whole thing even more rewarding, even if you lose. I played first without sound on, but went back and played again. It is quite a bit better with the singing tiles. :)
I feel like trying to do a 3d game held you back here and prevented you from fully realizing the design. Moving through the crowd was really difficult with guys teleporting in front of me. It also looked like I was able to just buy as many vaccines as possible. Impressive none the less as I think the amount of work required to make a 3d game in a game jam is substantially more than a 2d game.
Great music and graphics. I probably would have enjoyed the gameplay if it was focused less on the pillar-jump platforming and more on avoiding the enemies while my human takes them down. I didn't understand the point of allowing the game to continue after you lose your human, as at that point it seems the optimal decision is to just kill yourself and restart.
I agree, this is very easy to understand and very difficult to play. It would be great if you could continue standing on a block through the color changes so you don't need to be midair on your way to a block you can't see when it changes. As is, it's more a game of memory. I also was able to get stuck (temporarily) within a platform. The music was nice. I'd also suggest making it more like a rhythm game so that the color swap can be anticipated a bit more easily (like the music beat levels in New Super Mario World).
Fun little mini-game. I'd be so pissed if I had to eat at this place. :)
This seems more like a screensaver than a game, given that the best option is just to sit and watch. In terms of watching, it's got great images and sounds. The music is very fitting -- did you actually make that during the compo? Assuming you did, it's very impressive. :)
Some more feedback to the player about when they're hitting NPCs at the right range or getting hit themselves would have helped me significantly. Nice graphics, and good work on succeeding at your first LD!
Great music, fun controls. I wish the bullets went faster because a more twitch-shot color changing would fit more naturally with the way the jumping and platforming feel. Lots of fun though. I was a little confused about why the colored guys can stand on the white platforms. I'd love to see you continue work on this.
Re: your comment on my game (posted here because otherwise you'd never see it... this site needs better reply-notify capabilities). No audio played? Do you normally get audio with Love2d based games? The filetype is ogg. What OS are you using? Also you hit on it exactly--I set up the mouse controls the way I did with the intention of making a game that would work well on a tablet. A mouse is a poor replacement for touching the screen, but it works decently for a prototype.
And as to your game...
I got a bug where when I died it used a ladder sprite instead of the normal sprite. It was a bit annoying to me that I couldn't stand on top of the ladders (and so I fell back down the ladder a bunch of times right when i reached the top), but for some reason the sound and movement really made me think of how the 2d portions worked in Link's Awakening. The bat enemies are really fun and the platforming has some nice action to it. I'm not sure how the theme integrates, but everything else is very solid. Well done.
I kept playing and I've got to post again to say I'm very impressed with your sense for good action-platforming. Really fun. Polish it up, and release it! If it was on Steam I'd buy it. :)
Cool game, I like the mechanics. The puzzles are interesting and the movement, while it could be improved, still feels very good. I didn't understand at first that all the robots shared the power bar. Some sort of animation to indicate the passing of the charge could help to convey this better through the gameplay.