TrackSurfer by fysx 2013-05-01T13:33:00
Very well done, I like it a lot, although I had to play it with a touchpad. Those short feedback messages the game throws at you are actually quite encouraging and a nice little touch.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → ShellfishGames
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Brute Force Art Defence | compo | 56 | 3.95 | 3.88 | 3.83 | 3.95 | 3.63 | 3.08 | 2.78 | 3.44 | ||
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Room 41 | compo | 387 | 3.13 | 2.73 | 3.75 | 22 | ||||||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | No One Can Hear You Honk in Space | compo | 263 | 3.52 | 3.62 | 2.67 | 3.19 | 3.14 | 2.81 | 3.90 | 3.39 | 40 | |
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | Monster Standoff | compo | 313 | 3.31 | 3.44 | 3.50 | 2.44 | 2.20 | 26 | ||||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Frostbite | compo | 254 | 3.52 | 3.36 | 3.66 | 3.70 | 3.00 | 2.94 | 3.67 | 3.31 | 100 | |
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | Frankie Goes to Heaven | compo | 363 | 3.40 | 3.33 | 2.46 | 2.96 | 2.88 | 3.17 | 4.04 | 3.25 | 41 | |
| 2013 | 28 | You Only Get One | Desperado | compo | 366 | 3.17 | 3.33 | 3.27 | 2.73 | 3.20 | 2.88 | 3.11 | 2.95 | 95 | |
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Forever Alone | compo | 52 | 3.85 | 3.48 | 3.69 | 3.50 | 3.08 | 3.08 | 3.70 | 3.90 | 100 | |
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | 360 | compo | 361 | 3.37 | 3.43 | 3.04 | 3.50 | 2.56 | 2.11 | 1.60 | 2.56 | 88 |
Very well done, I like it a lot, although I had to play it with a touchpad. Those short feedback messages the game throws at you are actually quite encouraging and a nice little touch.
I didn't make it past the second level, seemingly I needed 3 fishes to satisfy the bear's needs but always lost before a third one appeared.
Anyway, I like the game and especially the way you made minimalism part of the concept instead of just relying on minimalistic gameplay or art style.
Very fun game. The ship's progression is quite motivating and the gameplay is a little repetitive but engaging nontheless. Well done and thanks for sharing this nice piece of work!
Didn't make it through Level 3, but until then it was quite fun to play. Nice mechanics and puzzles. Overall one of the best games I've played so far in this year's compo.
And although that's hardly important for LD-games, the menu transitions are very nice to look at.
Minimalism indeed. And quite a nice title. :D
Well done. Feels a little too slow in the beginning, but overall it's pretty nice. I've got to say that I quite like the visual presentation, minimalistic yet somewhat appealing.
I have to agree that the music is by far the weakest point though. :D
I like it. It might lack a little polishing here and there (especially the fighting), but all in all it's a nice minimalist take on "save the princess"-style adventure games.
Not particularly fun, but other than that a great entry. Beautiful presentation and mood and it's pretty funny.
This was great, I really like the atmosphere. What you did with the shake-effect (felt like it all took place on a ship), the lighting and the ambient sound is really exceptional and totally pays off.
The only complaint I got is that it's really quite repetitive and a little too long (John seems to be of the same opinion). Other than that it is one of the best LD26 games I've played yet.
I spent like 20 minutes trying to find that key... almost gave up but then I found it and finished the game. Overall a great experience, with a little room for improvement on the picking up and subtitle-duration parts. Love the music and atmosphere. :)
Nice one, kind of taking minimalism to the next level. I couldn't get past the level with dozens of lazers though.
Better than I expected. Got a score of 5 and was satisfied with my performance, so I stopped there. :D
The slowmo/upgrade-mechanics work really well, also the fact that you have to collect upgrades to score makes it far more challenging than the usual "dodge"-game. Instead of simply avoiding stuff you have to be more active/progressive as a player, which is a good thing. Imho this is a great example of how much you can achieve with such a minimalistic approach. Well done!
Love the style. :)
Impressive!
Nice atmosphere and accoustics. But I just couldn't find out whether my actions had the slightest effect on the world. What are the crates for? I opened them, threw around the colored balls and nothing happened. I watched two trees for a while, they created more colored balls and still I had no idea what to do other than throw them around aimlessly.
I'd really like to see something actually grow, or even affect the world around me in some way, but have no idea how to achieve that. =/
As LrdKzrth said, the respawning is rather irritating and I was a bit confused about the timer, which seemed to display something like "half seconds" instead of actual seconds. Making sure that it runs equally on every system is kind of essential for this kind of game.
But I have to admit, despite being overly simplistic the game worked for me. I wanted those potatoes and I got them. 36 to be exact. I'm full now. Thank you. ;)
It works here, but I have no idea what I'm doing. .___.
Nice to see a game with rather complex gameplay. It seems to be pretty well done overall. The lack of sound and some kind of tutorial (e.g. a few text messages introducing you to the basic mechanics or anything) are a little sad but not too dramatic, since most people know how to play TDs anyway.
However, one thing that did bother me was the ~balancing. Firstly there's the problem that the better you play, the easier it gets (the game is actually harder for less skilled players - additionally to their lack of skill, that is). I worked on a TD game once and solved this by making sure that for each enemy reaching your base, you get money as well, and even more than if you had killed him. This way, as soon as your towers are too weak for the enemies, you get a little extra support. Secondly I really wish there were some pauses between the stages to calm down and rebuild your towers if necessary.
Still, seeing a complete and well-working TD game, even with appealing graphics in this game jam was a nice surprise. :)
I didn't even get past those guards. Tried to use the three objects on everything possible, but I didn't get anywhere with it. Which is sad because I'm really curious how the story continues.
But I guess this first impression was good enough to justify a pretty positive rating nontheless.
Audio and atmosphere are obviously very good, but I wasn't able to use the grapple in any helpful let alone satisfying way. =/ I'm probably doing something wrong here, but I tried everything that occured to me to use it properly. It's just so slow and static, I have no idea how flinging, as Tom7 called it, would even work. I'd *really* like to see a video of that.
Also the basic running and jumping is a bit counter-intuitive. You need quite some time to accelerate to maximum running speed, but as soon as you let go of the key the player immediately stops mid-air. Also the fact that side-movement is sometimes ignored (when standing next to a small block and trying to jump over it for instance) makes the whole thing a little frustrating.
I think this is a good basis to a potentially great and really fun game, but it would need a little more polishing and possibly more in depth explanations of the hook mechanics.
Brilliant. :) The fact that you can decide whether to dodge the obstacles or simply deal with them using your tools makes the concept fresh and dynamic. The whole presentation is wonderful.
I downloaded the exe but it doesn't run on Windows Vista which I'm currently using. Immediately after running the exe it crashes with the typical kind of windows error. Do I need to download more than the exe? In that case you might consider putting all required files into a zip/rar to make the download a lot more comfortable.
The screenshots look really amazing by the way.
Ha. Funny. :P
I understood how the destroying/building works eventually, but it's highly unintuitive and irresponsive and I had to keep thinking about which button to press all the time. Which is a little sad, considering that apart from this issue the game makes a good impression and would certainly be quite fun otherwise.
Crashes when I select a level. =/
Good atmosphere and somewhat original, but as most people here I don't quite get what my job as a player is. Still a pretty ~immersive experience.
Nice concept. It is confusing that you can't use the last action though (when there's a 1 in the edge you die as soon as you execute another action, which resultet in my unexpected death after playing for a while, when this final action would have moved me to the next pickup). But it certainly is minimalistic and original.
Interesting to see such extensive use of water in a platformer. I think that using gravity-based physics (acceleration instead of constant up/down movement) would benefit the game, and those sound effects are really painful to listen to. :D Nontheless it's a good start.
Not bad, but a few more levels would have been nice.
Cool game, although it really is rather frustrating. I only got to Level 5, but from what I can tell so far the concept is great, and its execution as well, for the most part. The only weak point seem to be the difficult controls.
The graphical style is convincing as well. Clean and simple, yet nice and unique.
Very nice. The controls felt a bit weird and sadly I wasn't able to solve the puzzle (how about a hint? Neither brute force button-pushing nor making all buttons white nor making all buttons colored nor anything else I tried succeeded, I guess I'm just too stupid and/or tired to see the solution..?), but that being said, everything worked really well. It actually felt like a complete game and was quite immersive.
Download link doesn't work here as well, the site doesn't respond. Maybe you should upload it somewhere else.
A few good ideas for sure, and I quite liked the atmosphere. I thought it would have been a good idea to keep it 2D, but that might just be my personal preference.
It really lacks some kind of purpose.. :D
Nice little game. I didn't get past the Agility-Level, but up until then I had a fun time with it.
Very cool game, love the visuals and the gameplay. Sadly the web version seems to have big performance issues, it was highly unsteady and pretty hard to play.
I uploaded a video playthrough to Youtube - you can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISZbNJoNFKI&hd=1
@SamPotasz, what DLL is missing exactly?
@all of you - thanks for playing, I'm glad that you like it.
infernet89, that problem can probably be solved by using another screen resolution, which can be changed in the settings.txt file (first two lines represent display width and height, default is 1280x800). Sorry for the inconvenience!
And again, thank you for all the positive feedback and helpful criticism.
@JimmyLord - indeed, the code for dynamic zooming was even there, actually I wanted to let the player define the zoom factor but simply forgot to implement that feature in time. =/
Fun little game. Nice animation, sound and music. The procedurally generated levels (I guess?) are cool although they certainly reduce the comparability of highscores and I'm pretty sure I encountered a spot in the level that was impossible to overcome, but who knows. Good work!
Interesting idea and well executed. Slightly frustrating at times but since it's quite an original approach, that's a risk you had to take I guess. Overall a pretty positive surprise.
Fantastic!
Oddly enough the raytracing-effect could either be some kind of lighting (if it depends on the player position) or a 3D effect for walls that are pretty high (if it depends on the camera position). Since the camera is bound to the player however, it's impossible to know which of the two things it is. If you know what I mean. Just thought that was an interesting find.. :D
Very minimalistic indeed, and the game is quite fun for a while which is probably due to the good atmosphere. I got to day 13, but after maybe 5-10 days the game got a little too repetitive to keep me motivated.
Good concept, I like the basic idea a lot. Sadly the game is hardly fun anymore once you've beat it. But still it is a nice experiment.
Great game. The rules seem a little unintuitive at first, but once you get the hang of it it begins to be quite fun and challenging. The visuals are nice as well.
Excellent. From the 75 entries I rated before not a single one comes close to this. Absolutely amazing!
33 soldiers btw.
Well done, but kind of frustrating. I died ~30 times in the first level, mostly due to the oversensitive spike collision detection, and several times on the last zombie (I guess).
Also, I have no idea what's going on in the second level. I have to fall upwards out of the screen to be able to jump and I have no idea what those green triangles are there for.
However, the basic gameplay feels good to me, visuals and audio are pretty far above average which makes it a quite decent game overall.
Very good game and great art style. Certainly challenging and at times slightly frustrating (having to wait for the moving spiky things after each respawn for instance), but still fun and rewarding.
Played for a little more than 10 minutes but wasn't patient enough since there didn't seem to be an end in sight. the pixel armies pretty much neutralized each other and the game got slower and slower. Nontheless very nice, you seem to have captured the essence of such games very well. The music is nice too.
Finally played it - even better than I thought after watching the video. The sound gets a little annoying and the gameplay seems quite repetitive, but other than that it is great. Nice graphics, well thought out game logics, entertaining AI (which to me is a good thing) and good atmosphere. I really like the fact that the game world is not entirely fictional but based on earth.
Oh, and as belickim already said: Seeing your swarm grow is indeed very rewarding. Well done!
Needed 3:57 and it was a rather satisfying experience. Nice mechanics, good level design. The sound is a little annoying but other than that I can't complain. Well done and thanks for sharing.
Not bad. While I didn't like the time-pressure parts that much, the rest was great although probably too easy. The whole presentation is exceptional as well - e.g. the quotation on minimalism, the marvelous menu, the game's visuals and the credits. The game may be short, but it feels much more complete than most games I've played so far.
Well done, I like the music and presentation. I thought it would have been more interesting if there was no time pressure but you had enough time to plan and aim for a minimized move count instead. This way I kind of "panicked" and clicked every group of blocks of the same color as quickly as possible which seemed to work pretty well, but wasn't that satisfying because it doesn't seem like I really achieved something with my random clicking.
599. For some reason there was no sound at all here (speakers are on, sound works, but the game was completely silent - console said something about OpenAL Null pointer exception) and the menu was running at 2 FPS. The game itself played rather well though, simple and fun.
Not bad. The gameplay (despite the lack of diagonal movement, which I think would make it even better) is nice and fluent. Dodging those bullets is quite rewarding.
Cool idea and very nice graphics.
Nice, clean look and I like the soundtrack. :)
Hooray, I won!
It's cool how you basically inverted the usual premise of avoiding all the enemies. Also the balancing seemed pretty fair - despite the bugs (I once spawned in a wall and the enemy bahaviour was partly a little strange) and randomness of it all. After a few tries I kept collecting them all just in time. Well done!
Great art and soundtrack. The gameplay and especially the ruleset remained a mystery to me for quite some time. Some boxes could be moved, but only in certain directions, and only once.. a little strange, but anyway. Quite a cool game. Sadly it got stuck after leaving the 4th or 5th room, so I couldn't finish it. :/
I've got the same problem as Choupom. Can't get past the intro screen. :/
Nice game. Needed 27 lifetimes to reach the sun. :) Wasn't too easy figuring out a strategy to actually reach it. But I did, Bam! And enjoyed it despite the obvious repitition involved. Also, I like your TL;DR text. :P
Very nice and funny. Great visual style. One of the best I've played so far. :)
That intro-sequence with the girl was amazing, and I love the way those people scream. :D
Nicely done. I struggled with the fact that your shots are so slow, on my first attempt I barely hit anything. It really needs some time to get used to it (for me anyway), but once I did, it was quite rewarding. Unlocking new weapons is a nice addition and provides enough motivation for playing it several times, which is always nice.
One thing that you definitely should have added imho is a sound effect when an enemy reaches the base. Often I just wasn't sure whether I killed them or not. And suddenly I had no lifes left. :D
Great game, very fun and engaging. The controls were a bit suboptimal though, since I'm using a german keyboard, so the Z is where you got the Y, which made everything a lot more difficult. :D And so I wasn't really able to use all three abilities.
Nicely done. For 8 hours this is pretty solid. I liked the different block behaviours, especially the white ones.
There is some obvious room for improvement, such as sound effects or some other kind of feedback when you hit a block. Also I just realize that I never used the teleport thing... kind of forgot about it. Anyway, got to Level 22 or so and it was quite enjoyable.
Amazing! Great mechanics, very good presentation. Probably the best game I've played so far.
Sadly I didn't get very far though, since it completely overstrained my laptop. :D But I'll try to play it trough once I'm back at my PC.
I like the backgrounds. The game is obviously very simple, but still nice. Kind of satisfying. :)
Kept me playing till level 7, but it got quite repetitive by the time. I like the controls (although the guy should indeed walk faster, but I guess you already know that :D), the wall jumping was a nice touch and quite intuitive. Made it quite easy to traverse the level.
...that's not very nice. Everytime I lose (which happens really easily since 10 seconds is not a lot for those partly rather complex pipe things) I have to start over and watch the complete intro again?
I guess I didn't get far enough to be able to rate the game. So all I can say is that it is indeed quite intriguing, and that those isometric screenshots looks very nice and I'd like to get there. :P
Great entry! The idea of stretching time more and more by collecting upgrades is quite funny. Also the graphical style is very cool and the controls are fluid. Great job for a 48h game. :)
Got to level 7, but lost motivation then because the levels seemed a little too long, especially since I had to play each of them like 3-5 times until I finally made it to the end. :D
Fun game nontheless, I really like the character and his way of looking at you and panicking when the time goes down (which was very rarely the case by the way). Also, the small intro demonstrating the basic time-mechanic was great. The "show, don't tell" paradigm in action. Good work. :)
I do like the concept and presentation (especially the blood effect - may sound creepy but I think it's kind of cute), but the gameplay was extremely laggy, just as the music, which often resulted in death situations I couldn't possibly avoid (game freezes, a second later it continues and I'm dead no matter what keys I press). Which is sad, because it certainly has some potential and I see how it would be very fun if it ran a little better.
I quite like the idea and the visual aesthetics. Reminds me of Escape From the Underworld. Also, the concept of using your weapon to enhance your movement is nice. There seems to be a lot of substance here - complex levels (with nice layout), checkpoint mechanics, enemy behaviour etc.
However, I found it a little frustrating for several reasons. Firstly, since it runs in window mode, I always kept clicking outside of the window by accident which is highly distracting. Secondly, the collision detection is very unforgiving. And finally - the checkpoint (i.e. water) placement seemed to be pretty fair most of the time, but I got to a point in the second level, where you have to execute this very long jump to the left side, where it was a bit off. I needed around 20 attempts for the jump alone, only to find myself in a situation even harder, so after trying a few more times I gave up eventually.
Anyway, very nice concept and, for the most part, execution. :)
I needed a bit to really get the hang of it, but when I did it was really fun. Well done, and although it's a little hard at times (had some problems with level 2), I was able to finish it. Cool concept and surprisingly versatile. :)
Nice entry. Admittedly not my kind of game, but I see how some (or a lot of?) people would enjoy the mechanics. :) Also nice tutorial.
Nice, solid little platformer. Player was moving a little slow, but other than that the controls felt surprisingly good. Graphics are nice as well. I'm not a fan of the Game Over mechanic though... playing through all the levels again each time makes it quite daunting, especially since, as I said, the player moves quite slow. However, if everything was sped up a little, and maybe with some fast engaging music, this might actually be very addictive.
Stunning. :) Expected a bit more from the ending, but apart from that it was totally worth my time (and I needed quite a while to find all the objects, I even considered making a plan of that building).
Awesome. :) Not much more to say - I don't think there's much room for improvement, everything is pretty well executed and the concept is nice as well. Visuals are good, the sound is funny (so is the tutorial), so.. overall, high ratings for you, Sir!
"Click to retire", hehehe. :D Funny concept, seems a little easy though.
Doesn't run on my system. :( The screenshots look very nice though.
Nice one, very cool drawings. :)
Great presentation and atmosphere. Quite daunting. Regarding the gameplay however - for some reason I could not deactivate invisibility again, so once I was invisible I basically had 10 seconds to finish the level. Is it meant to be this way?
Also, I'm not a very patient person. Having to wait for this almost 10 second long fade-out-and-in-again sequence after dying is like torture to me. Sometimes I died after the first or second jump in a level, it's really frustrating to have to wait for 10 seconds each time until you can try again. But, even though this had a major impact on my mood when playing, it doesn't make the game any worse. As I said: great concept, presentation and atmosphere. Well done!
Cool game, I liked the comics and the different modes of gameplay. Didn't really understand the last scene though to be honest. :D
Very cool and quite captivating. I like how you included the "quests" in form of simple dialog lines. And I have to admit it's quite funny at times. "There's not a lot of fish in this swamp", ha. :D
Not a bad idea at all! And quite a lot of content and gameplay elements.
Pretty good, especially sound and music. And thumbs up for the options menu! :D
Sadly, it neither works on my WinXP PC nor on my Vista Laptop. =/
I really like it, and I don't think it's too hard. At least the first few levels (not sure how many there are - I couldn't get past the falling-through-the-ground one since there was no "coin" and in the end I was set back to an earlier level every time). I'm quite impressed by the graphical style, it looks very nice and fleshed-out and there's much more detail than I'd expect by such a game.
Fascinating stuff. Very energetic.
Oh god, this is amazing. :D Giving you a hypothetical amount of 7 humor stars.
Still laughing..
Very nice, this is much more complex than I expected! Also the controls are very smooth which makes it quite a fun experience. It was indeed worth installing.
Very well done. I like the variety of the different tasks. And the graphics, obviously.
Nice concept and aesthetics! The jumping could have been a bit higher, it is kind of hard to tell if the character was jumping at all and if he was going to hid the weird red things.
By the way: The soundtrack was created using the amazing procedural music generator at http://www.abundant-music.com/
Thanks tiffi. :)
You can in fact save her by reaching the "safe zone" at the top (which is not possible in the very beginning, this event will be unlocked after ~2 women died already). I guess I will upload a playthrough video soon.
Thanks for all the positive feedback, I really appreciate it!
@Jimanzium: Sorry for that. Possible that it runs once you download that dll, but who knows.
I'm just about to upload a video of the game to youtube for those who can't run it themselves. But thanks for trying. :)
Thanks guys, I really appreciate your feedback. :)
@ZeppelinCaptain - I spent almost no time on the music, it was procedurally generated and I simply tried a few seeds until something with an appropriate mood came out. Furthermore I spent maybe about 4 hours total on all the textures and sprites, the rest was writing and coding (and sleeping and eating and wasting time on the internet). I came up with the dialogs pretty quickly and there wasn't really anything complicated programming-wise (although I spent over an hour on the movement of that car alone... and I can't even say I'm satisfied with the result). Also, although DBPro lacks a lot of features you'd expect from a decent programming language, it's great for prototyping etc. since you can get results very quickly. So that certainly helped.
Thank you very much for your comment, I'm honestly honored. :)
Cool concept, but I guess I'm just too slow for it. :(
Interesting concept, I was quite surprised by the gravity shifting/rotation thing. :)
The time pickups work for me. Overall a nice game, I like the layout of the track.
Would have been a nice touch to rotate the car according to the movement. And I missed music, or at least a sound effect for the car's engine. But still, well done. :)
I started playing, but after the initial monologue scenes it just made firefox crash. :/ The atmosphere so far was very nice though. Kind of relaxing, yet dramatic.
Thanks for your feedback on my game Lokarunith! I tried yours once more, this time in Chrome and Opera. In Chrome simply nothing happened after the post-monologue-fade out, in Opera after a while the actual game started but ran with ~1 frame per second (also, the dialog lines in the beginning didn't work well - often when I press space 1-2 new lines appear and immediately disappear before I'm able to read them). I then tried the Windows version which, sadly, didn't even start. But it still looks good.. :D
It's funny how the enemies stack up after a while of following you, making them look like a giant spider. :D
I didn't even notice the music at first since I had my volume turned down a bit, but was still able to hear the sound effects without any problems. But it is indeed nice.
Score of 1011. Congratulations, your game made me feel proud of myself. :P
It really is kind of cool for what it is. In the beginning I was slightly underwhelmed (the title made me expect something different than a simple dodge game I guess), but I like how it just went completely insane on the effects side after a while. It was so disorienting that after a while I was almost sure everything was rotating. Still a little dizzy.. :D
Very cool game. :) Doesn't seem to fit the theme that well, but other than that I really like it. Simple yet challenging gameplay, it actually feels quite good and is very rewarding.
Made it. :) Actually (Spoiler ahead) I wanted to jump, but accidentally pressed Space and watched the world burn instead... well, unfortunate, but it happens..
Very cool game, awesome concept and pretty innovative. I'm seriously impressed. :)
Congratulations on the good ratings. Would have deserved even more in my opinion.
The description of the king was just amazing. :P As for the rest, I did enjoy it, even if just for the humor.
Same here, sadly, but WinXP. I'd really like to play it. =/
OK, it did indeed work this time. I encountered two bugs though - during the first few matches the camera was extremely slow and needed at least 5 seconds to move to the player. After I changed my class, the camera was as fast as it was probably intended. Also, when I use the secondary ability of the ninja, the game isn't drawn anymore and I have to leave it via the pause screen.
But I do like the concept, and as lame as it sounds.. the moon. :D
There seems to be quite a lot of substance there, but I die way too fast to experience any of it. :D Even without the time limit it would be hopeless for me. But it seems very fun and quite complex for a game that was made on a single weekend.
Tried it two times and didn't get anywhere. :/ I reached that terminal (I guess? the only block that looked different than the rest) and nothing happened anymore, pressing space brought me back to the main menu and I had to start over. I did read the tutorial text, but it didn't really help. :|
From what I can tell it seems quite promising and well thought out though.
Awesome game, really enjoyed it. The concept is very cool and funny, controls and presentation are good. You seem to have made some interesting experiences with girls.. and also with girls disguised as ninjas, apparently.
Look how speedy it is. o___o Seriously, that sloth is too fast for me. Couldn't even get to the third level. :(
Nice to see an FPS on here. :)
Interesting, to say the least.
Very difficult, and at times a little unresponsive (ignored mouseclicks every once and then, possibly due to GameMaker, who knows). I almost finished the second stage but didn't make it in the end, sadly.
Well done, and also very well presented.
Very good entry, high ratings in all categories. Needed a while to figure out what to do, but I guess it was worth it. :P
Awww man. Played to the last level surely 10 times until I finally made it to the treasure room. And then [Spoiler Alert, kind of], since I expected to be rewarded somehow (e.g. by not having to play any further :D), I lost motivation when it still wasn't over.
Very cool idea and execution.
Lovely graphics. The concept is cool as well. It could certainly need a bit more variety gameplay-wise, but other than that it's pretty solid. ;-)
I like it a lot! Considering there's no sound, it is actually quite atmospheric. As many have already mentioned the lighting effect is pretty cool. It is surprisingly relieving to reach a fire and suddenly be able to see your surroundings again. :)
512 - hell yeah, power of 2. B-)
It IS quite addicting, and I was happy to see a level selection screen, and you even save the progress which is nice! And I like the soundtrack.
If you ask me, you should have used another background color though. Like a dark blue maybe, or even a parallax scrolling texture of some kind.. this gray just makes it look more boring that it actually is.
I agree on what most people above said. Not being able to see more than 3 meters in front of you made it quite frustrating, apart from that it's very enjoyable. And I like the graphics.
Not bad. I like games with narrative and the gameplay is actually quite fun. For some reason I really like the spinning thing.
Quite a funny idea actually. Very original. The execution could be a little better though, it lacked a little feedback - despite reading the readme file, I never really knew what I did and who got a point and why exactly. Still, nice entry. :)
Nice entry. I really like the presentation. Don't really know how to win the game, though. :D
Very cool game, quite versatile. Found the controls a little difficult though. :)
Windows Download doesn't work here... I'd really like to try it though.
Nice one, and cool graphics. :)
I like the atmosphere, graphics and music. Gameplay is a little simplistic but it works. :)
The controls feel very smooth and the introduction was great. Good work, especially since it's your first game and you had such little time!
Interesting concept and quite well presented actually. I don't quite understand the scoring, though - would probably make the game more fun if the relation was clearer. :)
Well, obviously graphics, sound and mood are excellent. And that's about it. Still a nice experience. :) From the 100 games I've tested so far, this is definitely one I'm going to remember.
"A post-apocalyptic room", hehe. :D Good job!
Download link doesn't work. :(
I like how it got more difficult really quickly. In other games of that kind you often play for 10 minutes until it finally gets challenging. Also, hitting enemies is strangely satisfying. Might be the sound effect. :D
Seems very difficult. I couldn't kill a single person and was dying most of the time due to the very short reaction time of all the enemies. I barely made it to what I think was that keycard but could not get any further.
From what I can tell however, it's a nice game. Clean and slick presentation and interesting use of the theme.
Nice game. Visually, it could be a bit brighter though. :) Having a shop with upgrades is great, makes the game much more motivating.
I reallly like it. Very positive mood. "Love fuel" hehe. The particles effect are great and the controls are smooth (enough). And as many already mentioned, the level design leaves nothing to be desired. Good work! :)
Oh wow. I really, desperately, wholeheartedly wanted to click that button but did not succeed. Shame on me! :O
Very nice. Reminds me of the board game Ricochet Robot. I completed the game, it's quite challenging but not too hard. I like what you did with the additional elements, and that everything was mostly self-explanatory. Good job. :)
Well, I've got mixed feelings about this. Generally speaking, this game is so cool. I love the art style (especially those shadows next to the walls, neat stuff) and the premise. The fact that you can re-use those Abort-switches makes it quite fair, I rarely had to start over a complete level since I could always backtrace a few steps if something went wrong. Also, the level design is fantastic and the How To-screen is nice.
However - the controls are (at least on my PC, maybe that's a factor?) an absolute pain. There's nothing more frustrating in such a game than when it simply ignores your keypresses, and it does that *constantly* which really drives me mad.
All in all it gets reasonably high ratings from me, especially on theme, graphics and mood. If it wasn't for the controls, it would probably be in my Top 5 so far, but this way it's only "good". ;)
Doesn't work on my PC. :( (WinXP 32Bit)
After gamepoppers comment I really wanted to see that intro...
I simply get an error message that sais the exe is not a valid windows executable. :/ I already downloaded and installed the VC++ thing you mentioned, but to no effect.
I just tried it on my laptop (vista) and it finally worked. And what can I say - very well done! Great atmosphere, unsettling yet kind of funny lines, a few surprises here and there. Not a lot of actual gameplay but a cool experience nevertheless. :)
Honestly, games like these are the reason I like LD so much. There are tons of generic platformers and such (I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, I made one too in April), but this one is among my favorites so far. Very short, not a lot of content or gameplay, but it's cool as hell.
Nice graphics (although a background would be nice) and, well, it works. :D The controls seem a little unresponsive at times, but other than that there's really nothing wrong with it. It may be generic and the ending is indeed a little lame, but it's still a nice game. I've seen a lot worse.
Love it! Sadly there's nobody here to play with me, but this must be incredibly fun. But even when playing alone - which is completely stupid - I was really enjoying it. Nice music as well.
"Loosing his arms in a wrestle accident didn't stop him from what he loved!" - Oh god. :D
Very well done. Quite a complete game for 48 man-hours of work. The music is really catchy. :)
My only criticism: The orb gameplay isn't really all that fun. Still a cool experience, after all.
Absolutely love it! Audio/Atmosphere are amazing, the gameplay is simple but engaging. And the text messages were very nice as well. Great job. :)
Some music and sound effects would really help the feel of the game. Also, I didn't quite understand the spells. They didn't seem to affect anything in the game, at least I didn't notice any changes after using them. And I always died from hunger, since I didn't find enough to eat. :(
Otherwise quite a cool game, I especially like the art style. And the level generation seems to be solid to say the least.
Funny idea. And what an ending. Poor guys.
Woohoo, 10:2 for me. Funny game. Was it a deliberate choice to make the player faster than the enemy when running diagonally?
I really like the "one match" idea, and the lighting effects are pretty cool. The game would DEFINITELY profit from some ambient music though. And yes, the collision is a little annoying.. :)
Very tense.. probably the best use of sound I've encountered so far. Great work!
So, you created that perfect copy of the wilhelm scream within your 48 hours? :P
Fun game, sadly I wasn't able to finish it. Got stuck in, I don't know, Level 5 or something (didn't count them). Really unforgiving enemies, but that makes finishing a level even more rewarding. However, I had to turn off the sound after dying approximately 50 times in a row. :D
Oh wow. My eyes... funny idea though, and it made me laugh quite a bit (even though I'm not too sure if that's intentional). :D
Doesn't run on my system unfortunately (Windows 7, it just tells me the exe file could not be executed correctly instantly after trying to start it), but judging from the video it looks very good. Great effects, the gameplay seems solid to say the least and the level design is just right.
After adding msvcr120.DLL to the game directory, I get the same error again I got before. =/ So neither 32bit nor 64bit version work for me. I'll test it on my 32bit vista laptop later.
Wow, just... wow.
:D
Ha, great, well done. Satirical indeed. :D
As the others said - fun game, and I like the lighting as well. Sound/music would be a nice addition, but other than that the game got everything it needs.
Cool game, somewhat similar to the one I made.. but different. :D Nice art style and atmosphere, and the voice acting really made it rather special. I didn't make it to the dragon though, unfortunately. Always died in round ~5 or so, and lost motivation to replay the first few rounds each time after a while. :/
Nice visuals and mood. The gameplay is a little too minimalistic if you ask me, but it works well and seems very polished.
What a nice game! So simple yet so fun. Really well done. :) A snow falling effect would have been nice, but other than that there's nothing I'd change. I just spent at least 20 minutes with it and had a lot of fun, great work!
Nice graphics and audio and the parrot surely is a nice touch. Unfortunately the game seems way too difficult for me.. :(
Now that was fun. Loved the "zombies on ice" level and the way the cars pushed away those enemies, and the controls felt very good as well. The boomerang mechanics are kind of funny, but a at times a little easy to exploit (sort of letting the boomerang fly in a small circle while hiding behind it). Having an upgrade menu was a great idea to increase motivation, and it seemed to make sense and was easy to understand. Overall, great work. :)
That's just amazing. What a cool idea, seriously! I didn't get very far, but I'll surely come back sooner or later to finish the job. :D
Ha, very nice. :) Cool idea, and I really like the programmer art. :D
Well, yes, kinda cute. :D
I believe without the bugs, and a bit more work on the level generation (the levels *look* pretty good and not too generic, but they don't go too well with the gameplay), this could be a really cool game. Graphics and music are already very nice.
Got a combo of 913. Fun little game, and indeed quite addicting. It's cool how the gameplay shifts once the screen fills with more dots and everything around you starts to explode by itself. Visual style and music are cool as well. A very enjoyable experience overall. :)
Yay, penguins! Nice visuals and the game is pretty fun. The only thing bothering me a little were the controls - I didn't quite get why you could move your character in the first place since it didn't really made a difference, and the way the mouse holding affects the way the arrow is shot is really hard to control.
The flying penguins were a positive surprise though. Good work!
Haha, nice one. I quite like the idea, and it was fun to play. As background_nose said, kind of frustrating in a good way.
Pew, those controls... I surely died 50 times in the second to last room before finally reaching the end.
But other than that - pretty good. Especially the music and overall mood you set up with those signs. And a good interpretation of the theme. Kind of tragical.
The style and smoothness really seem to be the strong points of the game. Considering all the games with really bad collision handling around here (not meaning to offend anybody.. :P) this was a real pleasure.
I encountered low FPS rates (~20) in some rooms as well, you should work on that if you want to use the same framework for later projects, but other than that it makes a great first impression.
Nice one. As lucars83 put it, not particularly fun, but certainly interesting and well executed. Feels quite polished and the visual style is excellent.
Thanks for the feedback guys. You're right - I just played to level 158 until I lost.
I changed a few things relatively late that had some impact on the balancing, so I wasn't really aware of the problem. I'll make sure to solve that for the Post-Compo version (and add a few new weapons - suggestions are welcome!).
For some reason editing the entry has no effect, so I'll put it here: A gameplay video of Desperado containing more or less everything there is to the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_oFxoXIwkk
Doesn't replace playing though! :P
@Alex - it is indeed the incredibly elaborate latter method. ;)
But Actually it's relatively simple. World To Screen Transformation for bad guys/player/grenades and stuff (x,y,z) -> (x,0.5*y-z) (z being the height and x,y the ground coordinates). And all the ground decals, shadows, "HUD" and the cursor are rendered to a texture from a completely top down perspective, and this texture is then drawn to the screen with some kind of displacement mapping to achieve the 3D effect.
Have a look at the contents of the media folder if you like. "texture.png" is the top down ground texture, and "coords.png" a texture that implies a mapping from the screen coordinates to the ground texture.
Thanks for your interest, and thanks everybody here for the kind words. I'm glad most of you enjoy the game! :)
I'm actually working on the post-compo version right now, with more weapons, unlockable stuff and local Multiplayer. http://imageshack.com/a/img89/9775/6bgr.png
Very well done, definitely one of the better "duel games" I've played. Seems very polished and I love the style.
I could only test it alone so far, but will make sure to play it with a friend tomorrow (hopefully). As of yet I can only imagine how fun it must be. ;)
A decent start, but it could really use some sound effects, and slightly more interesting graphcis to make it more engaging. And as Zenkerdus said, everything should be faster.
Very well done, I liked the relative depth to the gameplay and the level design. Sadly I wasn't able to finish it - the third/Thomas level was too hard for me. :)
Really creepy. Had a few problems with the controls, but graphics and atmosphere were great nonetheless.
I really like the visual diversity of the game (although I didn't get further than level 2 :/), and the music is quite cool. But as many people here I found the physics a little frustrating unfortunately. FPS was around 20 for me, so not ideal but still playable.
Very atmospheric, and good interpretation of the theme. Visuals are simple but appealing, same goes for the sound.
Unfortunately there seemed to be game over kind of thing after dying a few times, so I wasn't able to finish it. But judging from the first few levels (until the one with a lot of open space and three rats - don't know how much is yet to come afterwards), the level design is pretty neat as well. Simple and always focused on a few main obstacles - just what you need for such a game. Well done. :)
Link works now, but the game doesn't run on my Windows 7 system. At first I needed to download MSVCP120.dll, but now it just throws a "application could not be started" kind of error when trying to run the exe. :/
The "you can only move in one direction" premise sounds interesting though, I'd really like to see where you went with it. So I'll try to run it on another machine later.
Thanks for solving all the problems, works fine on my computer now. :)
I like how you handled that "one key only" situation. Having to plan your moves and execute them accurately really is something different than the usual runner games relying mostly on reflexes. The learning curve seemed pretty good as well, but I couldn't get through Level 7.
Nice game, very fun to play. The AI seems fine, and I like that there are so many different kinds of bullets with unique effects. If it wasn't for the "rough" art design (although the lighting thing is a nice touch), this would surely be one of my favorites so far. This way it's just good. ;)
Congrats on your first entry!
Probably the best game I've played so far. Very fun and well polished. The wall climbing felt smooth and the art style is really cool. 5/5, Thanks for sharing!
Awww man... a mixture of being proud of myself for having won the game, and being ashamed of myself for having spent so much time clicking on virtual chicken. :D
Something different, finally, and an interesting read.
Regarding the "Basically you could say that I took on a challenge I could not muster" thing - I think that's just part of the deal. Sometimes those 48h projects work out great, but often we realize at some point that it doesn't quite work out the way we imagined. Despite the final product not being exactly what you hoped it to be, most people here, myself included, seem to enjoy it nonetheless. :)
Unfortunately, running the exe doesn't do anything on my computer. Windows (7) seems to be loading something for a few seconds, but no window or process opens.
It worked now (my bad, I forgot to install XNA 4), and it's as fun as it looks. Fair yet challenging. I liked the FOV mechanic/visualization. Well done! :)
Man, that music... :D
And yes, I took the hat too, of course. And I had the same problem as ocarina, and only could avoid dying at that point on my second attempt using the extra life instead of the beautiful hat (what a shame). Is there an actual ending? I just found two secrets.
The ceiling climbing thing was an interesting idea btw - and would almost assume it was originally a bug but you decided to make a feature out of it. Right?! :P
Ha, nice one. Very creative. :)
Very well done. Needed some time to finish it (obviously), but it was rather interesting to say the least. Also very nice graphics you got there, and I liked the humor a lot.
Very nice concept! Actually I worked on something somewhat similar for Asylum Jam a few months ago. However, it didn't quite have such a unique style. The small pieces of texts appearing in the level especially are a very nice touch.
Get rid of those bugs, work a little on the balancing, build some actual levels and you'll have a wonderful (and addictive) little game. I had some fun with this - despite the bugs kind of destroying the experience. It already has this "just one more level" thing and it's fun to plan your strategy.
If you ask me, you should definitely put some more work into it, the potential is surely there!
Some music would have been nice, and I think the controls could be improved a little, e.g. that pressing a number key "selects" a weapon and shows the hint (instead of pressing Shift) and there's an extra action key to use the selected weapon. At least I personally would probably prefer that scheme.
However, the game works really well nonetheless, the level design is pretty good and I was surprised by the variety of tools you get. I'm currently stuck in level ~6 or so, the first one with a lot of spikes, where you get the crate for the first time. I assume I'm relatively close to the solution, but couln't make it back from the jewel. :/
Unfortunately, I don't really get it (unless that's kind of the point?). What I can say though is that I do like the art style, sound and atmosphere. Unique and somewhat mesmerizing.
Woah.. too much for my brain. I kept confusing WASD and the arrow keys and ended up falling from the platform without any actual danger.
Nice entry overall, quite innovative gameplay and I like what you did with the three different levels. The menu was kind of cool as well.
A good start. With a bit more polishing, a little faster gameplay (although that's probably a matter of taste) and better sound and visuals it could become a really cool and addictive game. Having the upgrade menu in there certainly was a good idea. :)
Very cool idea. I didn't think it was frustrating at all, actually very fun to play, even if a little slow paced. Maybe it would be cool to have a third staff of some kind, just for variety.
Interesting style and concept. It just lacked a little feedback, I never knew if I hit somebody, and if not, why. Because I always died without defeating any of the bandits. =/
Solid shooter. Controls and shooting feel quite good and the main menu is rather pretty. :)
Definitely not bad for your first game, far from it. It actually plays quite well - especially regarding physics, collision and controls, I've seen a lot worse around here. Wise choice of yours to stick with a relatively simple concept which is suitable for a 48h compo. Keep it up, participate in more game jams in the future and within a year you'll be creating great experiences. :)
(As a sidenote, you may want to visit compohub.net for an overview of game jams around the world)
I reallly like the idea and had a bit of fun with it. However, the impossible equation was truly evil.. I spent at least 10 minutes trying to figure it out. :(
And a few answers don't make much sense (to me), such as the 1111811 thing and the (5+5)*1010 = 90 equation. But other than that, well done!
Very original approach and interesting interpretation of the theme. It worked better than I expected, and the puzzles were nice.
The visuals really stand out. Good job with all the effects and textures. However, the controls are not that great - it feels as if not the gameplay itself, but rather the controls are the main challenge here, i.e. rotating the view and picking the right tool.
I think it would be more intuitive and allow for more fluent gameplay if the mouse was hidden and mouse movements would always lead to a changed view (not only when you click), and you could select tools using the number keys.
Also I think the stages could have been a bit shorter, since it got relatively repetitive. Other than that, good job though. It's nice to see the planet evolve over time.
Oh no, the thing got me! I thought there was no actual danger and it was all just for the atmosphere. :D Anyway, very well done. I particularly liked the level design and how there were certain "landmarks", such as the pool of blood and the different barricades. Made the exploration relatively worthwhile.
Nice idea and good selection of gameplay elements. However, I think you overdid it a bit with the bullets.. :)
Funny idea and good execution. The gameplay is very satisfying, even though you're just watching 90% of the time. You should possibly have considered using some kind of grass texture instead of that aggressive light green though.. :)
That music is just amazing. Great job guys. :D
Even after reading the tutorial and the description above I have no idea how to kill a zombie... :/ Restarted the game about 20 times and tried several things, but nothing seemed to work. Also, I needed to struggle with the windows task manager for quite a while to end the game, since there was no option for that and neither ALT-F4 nor telling the OS to close the window had any effect.
However, it's pretty clear that the visuals and audio are just amazing, and the gameplay indeed seems very well thought out and innovative.
I might just be too stupid.. but after ~10 tries I still couldn't beat a single level, even after discovering that you could block attacks. =/
What I can say though is that the visuals are very sweet. Absolutely lovely characters.
Cool game, kind of addictive. Does the Kürbisroboter actually do anything? Can you give him commands or something? I didn't quite figure out what he's there for.
And I needed to select the lowest difficulty setting to win the game, because I just never got enough pumpkins due to the rare occurence of seeds. Maybe I did something wrong, I guess. Also, what are the potatoes for? And can you spend the money on anything other than new plantations?
More questions than feedback, sorry about that. :>
Very nice graphics.
Fun and original. A good start to something bigger, I'd say. ;)
A lot of potential here, but rather frustrating since it's in window mode and the mouse isn't locked, hence I accidentally leave the window every few seconds. Also, next time without installer please. :P
But other than that it's really fantastic. Seems like a game with a few weeks of work put into. Nice art style and gameplay for sure!
Funny game, is the car driving meant to be that difficult? :D It's as if you're completely drunk, or driving on ice or something.
Anyway, really well done, I like the visual style a lot, especially those collapsing buildings.
Very interesting concept, but it would have been nice if the game explained how to kill a monster. And I never saw a hut either. =/
But I got to say, I quite like the visual style of the game.
Made it to the end using double jump. Very cool concept and well executed. I found it a little bit too frustrating at times, but that can easily happen in a 48 hour project and is not that big of a deal. Viuals and Audio are relatively basic bust seem just right for the game - maybe a dark/subtle background of some kind would have improved the game's appeal though.
I like the original way of approaching the theme and feel that this is definitely one of the better games of this LD. The tutorial level was very nice as well, and it's cool that is uses a different tileset than the actual game. Great work overall!
Oh right, and the level design was excellent, considering you had to make sure it works for all the abilities. I didn't try out any of the other ones yet, but using double jump I found a suitable path relatively quickly, and the challenges/"puzzles" seemed quite solvable for the most part.
Wow, I'm rather impressed by the visuals. Must have been quite some work to create those sprites.
The gameplay is nice as well, although it was a bit unintuitive that you can jump over the spikey ground things, while the enemies die instantly.
Brilliant! And I thought the difficulty was just right. Really beautiful game (in general, not visually - the characters are nice, but the rest could be a little more detailled/varied). Challenging and highly motivating gameplay. I basically ignored the guns most of the time and tried to backstab everybody. One of the very few games that get 5 fun stars from me. :)
Definitely a cool idea. The last level was a little difficult though, and I basically skipped the 3rd one by falling down and doing an "air jump" - not sure if that was intended, but it's good that it's possible since succeeding by kind of breaking the rules is always satisfying. :P
I see, I have to be an integer to pass, huh? That's what I call discrimination of floating point numbers!
But seriously, very cool concept and pretty well done for 24 hours. Assuming you'd have had another 24 to add better visuals and more levels, this would surely be among the top games from this LD. This way it's a very rough but promising prototype with quite some potential. :)
(But seriously, you really could have picked other colors... black, green, pink and light blue?! :D)
Well done, challenging and yet sort of relaxing. :)
Nice idea, I could imagine such a game to be very fun indeed. Unfortunately it doesn't work that well as the controls seem very unresponsive. Often the character just doesn't build blocks, although I collected wood. And once the crate was bombed into the ground and I couldn't pick it up anymore.
However, certainly a nice concept.
About the graphics: You don't even need to spend much time and effort, but I believe the visuals could be improved greatly within just 30 or so minutes. Things such as a color transition on the background, a simple layer of clouds, even slightly more interesting textures. You know, that stupid 80/20 rule - 20% of the effort suffice to get 80% of the desired effect. Not always true, but in this case certainly! :)
Nice visuals and good, fluid gameplay. The game would certainly benefit from one or two additional gameplay elements, but other than that it's already pretty cool.
I kind of like the way the music changes in the menu. :>
One of the best I've played so far (not too many, but still). Very nice presentation and those slingshots work surprisingly well. Looks like it would be the perfect smartphone App.
That's nice! As was said before, great pixel art. Also, funny dialogues. That bored guy in blue made me laugh. And while I couldn't really help all of them (the first guy's still in the water, I'm afraid), at least the one on the roof has a fish now.
That was surprisingly fun. And despite the whole mechanics seeming somewhat unintuitive, I finished most of the levels on the first try, so I guess it's not that unintuitive at all.
Got to Level 19 and tried it until I was out of ideas... basically tried every possible combination that occured to me, but it didn't work out.. :)
Great work overall. Very nice main menu and soundtrack, and the gameplay, albeit simple, is refreshingly original.
"I need to increase difficulty over time and add some variation to the obstacles" Yep, pretty much!
It surely is a solid start, and the visual style is very appealing, the music works very well and it's kind of cool how the game transitions in and out of the "menu screen" fluently. It is, however, fun for only about a minute.. :)
Sorry about that yodamaster, one of the downsides of using Dark Basic. :/
For those who can play it: Note that it's possible that some of the dialogues don't quite work as expected. Considering this is how I created them: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13847228/frankie_dialogue.png (and there are about 10 of similar complexity). However, I went through the game multiple times without problems, so I hope it works out for you as well.. :)
@Donar you have been warned! :P
@hungyg How did you do that? Where? Didn't even know that was possible.. :D Sorry about the Alt thing, didn't know that could be a problem. Guess I'll upload a post-comp version at some point with X as grapple button.
Thanks for all the feedback!
Yeah, sorry about the controls. I didn't think that far and it didn't cause any problems here. :|
For those of you who either can't play the game or weren't able to finish it, here's a complete walkthrough video of the game: http://youtu.be/zVFOd9icIp8 (at 6:00 I leave hell, at 12:00 I get the hook)
I'd still recommend playing it - if you can - as the dialogue options can indeed make a bit of a difference (you don't necessarily have to turn the lake into wine, for instance, you can also convince the guy otherwise to just give you the hook). On the other hand, it's less focused on gameplay than the whole "journey" which you can watch as spectactor just as well. So I guess that's up to you. :)
The enhanced version is now online. Controls are fixed, so is the problem of getting stuck at dead ends (you can respawn at the last checkpoint now manually, which hopefully solves this issue). Furthermore the game saves your progress, so no need to play through in a single session.
This actually looks quite fun, but unfortunately I don't have a second player available. And on my own, I couldn't even pass two obstacles in a row. :D I can easily imagine, however, that it's rather addicting once a second player joins.
Very cool. Nice idea and wonderful visuals. Requires a bit of brain usage without being too difficult. And the story is quite engaging as well. Well done!
Very nice visuals and well executed platforming. I didn't quite get what was going on though. Some of those DNA shaped barriers are red and some are green, but neither let me pass. There's nothing I can do in the first world, so I wonder why it's there to begin with (maybe gets relevant later on?)
I found one additional skill, but the shooting doesn't seem to be very useful as each enemy can take about five bullets, and there are just way too many to shoot them all. I visited all the places on the map I was able to reach, didn't find the third skill though and couldn't find more than 2 or 3 hearts.
That all being said, the visual style is really remarkable and there's a surprising variety in enemies.
PS: The very first word the game displays has a typo in it. :P
Would be nice if the jump height depended on how long you press space. Unless it's intended this way, because it's quite easy to die just because jumping automatically kills you when there are a few enemies at the top. You know, where you can't even shoot them. Also, sound would be nice! :D
So.. basically you're supposed to run this in the background and have a look every now and then? And I guess the blue bar in the top left corner depicts the level of faith of my people?
So if I close the game now and open it again in two hours, there might be more villagers?
Very nice. But I think I didn't get very far. Got stuck after the timed button dual door thing.. and have to "experiment" with the pink block, but don't really know what to do.
From what I can tell though, a very decent game. Rather engaging story, and I quite like the "mystery" about it - hence would love to see how it ends, so feel free to tell me how I get past the pink block situation..? :D
The only minor issue I see is the top character's controls. I'd either use the relative approach - A to run to the character's relative left (hence right on screen), D for the opposite direction and W to jump. Or, as you did, the absolute approach with A running left on screen, but in that case use S to jump instead of W. This way it's just very confusing. Well, to me that is.
Awesome! Really, really cool concept. Although a little tough to controls with the momentum and stuff.
I beat the last level by creating a single, combined map with all the walls relative to the players on paper, making it easier to figure out the possible paths and in which order to proceed. Took me quite a while, but I made it eventually. :D
Wow, this is much more difficult than it looks. :D Amazing visuals though.
Neat little game. Could use a soundtrack and a little more variety gameplay-wise, but other than that it's pretty cool. And those robbers are cute. I don't really want to kill them. :>
Simple but fun! A few explanations on what school and hospital do exactly would've been nice (since I avoided the spoiler thingy before playing, so I just built and upgraded both of them without really knowing why), and the slow steps of increasing the storage were a little irritating - I "accidentally" won the game before even unlocking most of the tech stuff. But other than that it was cool. Funny how those little tanks pushed each other off the map. :)
Amazing work once again. Only flaw I see is that it wasn't really clear you had to "explain" who the murderer is. After a few days it seemed pretty certain who it was, so I called in the meeting, but apparently I hadn't collected enough information yet which seemed a little random. Anyway, great experience in all regards, audio and visuals are top notch, the atmosphere is great, the gameplay is fresh yet familiar. Really enjoyed playing this. :)
I don't quite get the telekinetic thing. On what should I use it? And why? It worked one time, but I didn't quite see the advantage.
Other than that, really good looking obviously, nice atmosphere, all in all very enjoyable even when just walking around the terrain. :D
Got 465, then accidentally fell off the island. .__.
Man I wish all LD games were like this - good but simple concept, but working really well and being that enjoyable. Very well done pirate rob!
Got that error, installed latest JRE and still get the error. A shame! Judging from the video, it looks damn impressive. Not only did you implement those 5 games pretty much spot on, there's also a decent amount of polishing, screen transitions and all that going on. Also, Pacman and Lunar Lander seem rather complex, amazing how you managed to finish all that. :)
All in all probably one of the best games I've seen so far, Jam included.
Cool characters and animations. The "lets just run to the player's x coordinate" kind of AI makes it all look very static though, sort of like a round based game, I don't know.
Also X and Z keys for controls don't work very well with QWERTZ keyboard layout. Not a big deal, but maybe keep that in mind for future projects. :)
MSVCP110D.dll apparently is missing (a file without D is part of the archive, but I guess that isn't enough .__.). Not sure if that has anything to do with the openGL thing you mentioned, but anyway.. let me just say from the screenshots and your description it sounds very interesting. Also you're called Doctor Broccoli, so high five for that!
Wow, that was surprisingly engaging. The only thing I didn't quite get was the cost of units.. I never knew how much I had to spend and where that money/resources came from, so everythign that happened and the units I could order kind of seemed like magic.
Also kind of impressive that you pulled off to write a complete working AI for such a deep strategy game!
Cool game, especially liked the visuals. :) Those scenes and camera angles.. I don't know, it just looks really cool and appealing with the textures and the color scheme and that little ~noise effect.
Pure perfection. :D That stealth mode is a brilliant idea, well done man.
Pew. Beautiful art indeed, and a few nice details, like the moving "rope"/plant reacting to the player, and the level being basically body parts of the boss.
The controls however... they're playing in their own league. Let's just put it that way. :D
So yeah, I've basically got mixed feelings. Concept and art style seem really good, but the unresponsive controls and constantly getting stuck make it difficult to enjoy.
Hey that's cool, really fresh idea and fascinating to "play" through and see all these scenes unfold in front of you.
This is cool! Very nice and coherent art style and atmosphere. A shame this isn't complete, guess an hour or so of additional work would make this even better.
Cool idea! But is it even possible to beat the game (on easy)? There were so few enemies I could hardly gather enough energy to even have 3 of the teleporters up and running at a time, let alone 5.
Anyway, the concept is quite nice and innovative and I was pleasently surprised to find a snowman dimension. ;)
This is good! Needed tip #1 to proceed, but figured it out afterwards. Very funny animations you got there, well done.
Hehe, funny idea. Super Jump Fellow controls could need a bit of polishing and some sort of small animation when losing the game would be nice, but other than that it's a nice original concept and well executed. Surprisingly high tension as well, kept me on the edge of my seat as you have to act pretty quickly when the boss arrives. :)
Thanks for your comments, I'll make sure to try your games eventually. :)
@Wakka sorry about that - are you sure it's msvcr>T<71 though? I only know msvcr71, which is often an issue (didn't think it would be for this game, but apparently it is).
You could try putting the DLLs from this archive:
http://shellfishgames.com/dl/msvc_dlls.zip
Into the game's directory. Usually that does the job already.
Also, I'll fix the Shift problem later today as soon as I've got a bit more time. I actually tapped into the same trap before with other games but forgot about it. .__.
Thank you Zayron, the fixed version is uploaded now. :)
@Gaspard, what shortcut do you mean? There certainly is one due to somewhat buggy behaviour of the catapult things when approaching them from an unintended gravitational situation so to speak, but you still have to get to the ceiling right?
And indeed, I'm not too satisfied with the bridge building thing. But then again, I kind of like the idea of the 3D snowman (the one you play from 1st person perspective) living in that perfect 3D "game world" but still enjoying such a lame 2D platformer. :)
@danielilett, thanks man! Quite a bit of feedback there. You're certainly right about a lot - maybe too much - stuff being in the game. The gravity puzzle is indeed confusing, but that's also sort of the point - except sometimes the camera rotates in weird ways when changing gravity, but to be honest I was highly relieved to even get it as smooth as it is now in the first place.
I guess the snowball mechanics are generally not the best. Guess I should have spend a bit more time on the platformer's concept beforehand.
I don't know what this was, but it was cool! Quite a neat effect when the screen suddenly fell apart. And is it true that there is no actual lose state? I didn't do very well but didn't seem like I could die. Which is nice! :D
The shrinking mechanic is a nice twist. Also, I like the 3(?)
frame running animiation a lot. Managed to finish the game, but without getting a single star in the last level, otherwise I would always die shortly before the goal. Is there a trick I haven't figured out?
Very good game indeed, but the controls.. maaan. Eventually I got used to the jumping to some degree, but still often needed like 10 attempts to reach a spot that didn't really seem like a challenge when looking at it.. :)
However, the visual style is pretty unique (and great!), I quite like the music and the overall concept is pretty cool.
Man, would be neat to actually solve the mystery. Has this interesting Twin Peaks-ish feel to it. Well done, next time you create a plot driven adventure please finish it! :P
Well done! Could be a little faster, the movement feels very slow, but other than that this is a really enjoyable game. Also, funny way of working with the theme.
While I do have a gamepad, the game didn't react to it in any way unfortunately. Looks fun, but next time you should consider making your game a bit more accessible... :)
This must be the best snowball juggling game I've played this year!
But seriously, this is very well made. Love how the snowman leans to the side and has facial expressions and everything. Great work!
Beautiful graphics! Also quite innovative game, and relatively fun - I just thought it was very difficult. I barely managed to dodge anything, still got to 78% somehow. Guess that's due to the game being very forgiving and lets you rebuild your snowball occasionally, which is cool. And I liked those boards in the beginning explaining how the game works, which really is much better than relying solely on the explanation here on the LD page as most people do. :)
Seems very solid overall. Nice visuals, simple but catchy music plus a clear relation to the theme. Only complaint I'd have is that it all feels quite slow which might reduce how fun the game is - however, I couldn't play with anybody, so I can't really tell (or rate all categories). Anyway, I did enjoy looking at and listening to it. :P
Nice! I was a bit confused initially, didn't know what to do with what turned out to be a drill(?), but after a few minutes of aimlessly running left and right I realized one of the ground tiles was looking suspicously different and felt a little stupid.. :)
Anyway, it is very enjoyable. I'm still not sure about the screen locking thing, it's strange because it basically means teleporting to the exact same spot and I don't see how it has any effect on anything really, except the somewhat random fact that blue chests vanish when they get out of view/change sides.
Anyway, it all added up nicely and turned out to be one of the better games so far, so good work!
Wellll. I do like the message, and the game itself is solid. Your way of getting the message across however might be a little brute force style. :D Not necessarily bad, but as somebody said before a more subtle approach might have worked better. Anyway it's always cool to see some sociopolitical commentary in LD games!
Love the visuals! The lights, the particles and the kind of cute zombies.
fueelin is right though, the shadows do look a bit like small horses. :D Considering the only visible light sources are on top, the shadows should really go to the bottom. But other than that it's looking really nice.
I'd argue though that the prices in the shop are a little high. It takes so long to get enough money to buy something, which makes the gameplay rather monotonous.
Somewhat innovative concept, good way to deal with the theme and overall quite interesting to play. I wasn't really sure how the screens react to clicks, if the new direction is a random one or predictable in some way, but I still managed to get 10 points and had some fun while doing so. Good work.
Reminds me of Bastion and Transistor. Graphics are obviously amazing, but the game was laggy as hell when I played it, which made it pretty unplayable. :/ Couldn't really control it, sometimes my key presses were recognized several seconds too late and sometimes not at all, I couldn't properly fight the enemys and on top of that the two hp/energy bars at the bottom kept going crazy in all directions. Might be just my browser though as nobody else here mentioned such problems. Which is a little strange considering all games so far worked pretty much flawlessly on my machine. But well, I can definitely see it would be pretty awesome without the lagging.. :)
I'm amazed! Really good game. Nailed it in pretty much every category. Perfect usage of the theme, quite a bit of humour, beautiful graphics, nice audio, fun to play - what else could you possibly ask for in a LD game? :)
What an amazing idea! That really surprised me. A really well working game mechanic. Not sure if I finished the game though, there was an area to the bottom right I couldn't enter. Even pressed the power button!
Funny idea and it did turn out rather hilarious. That snowman sprite, ha! And man, those snowballs coming closer until they hit you are actually kind of frightening.
One question though - why on earth would you pick "bright yellow" as your preferred color for the sky? :D And just one idea for improvement, let the snowmen appear gradually instead of just being there all of a sudden. Like let them rise from the ground, or fade in, just to give the player a visual cue of how much time he has before they attack.
Could you possibly upload a gameplay video for those of us who're not able to play it but want to see the action? :>
Explosions didn't work unfortunately, but I just kept building houses and won eventually. Despite the extreme simplicity it's still surprisingly engaging.
"What you see on screen is what exists. Once it's no longer visible, it gets deleted." - sounds really good, I think you should've focused more on that and used it as a central game mechanic. This way it doesn't really matter all that much, and everything seems quite generic. Wouldn't even have noticed that feature if I hadn't read it beforehand.
Otherwise a pretty solid game, the chests were a nice touch. It just was a bit monotonous.. :)
582160 in the third level. Not sure how good that is, but 6 digits sounds OK to me. :D
Very well done, especially the visuals. So many fancy shader effects in such a small game, and while the whole experience made me pretty dizzy, it still looks impressive. Music is good as well, only complaint I have is there were a few cases where a red rock spawned directly in front of me so there was no way to avoid it, or at least it appeared that way. Still kind of amazing how you managed to get such an impressive game out of such a simple concept.
Good idea, makes the whole pong concept much more interesting. I'd like if the powerups were moving though, maybe just vertically to make the whole game a little more dynamic. Also the visuals could be improved obviously, a more interesting background or slightly better sprites - but then again, the game is fun and that's what counts right? :)
Cool game, only drawbacks seem to be the slow speed in the beginning and the clouds/trees constantly blocking your vision (which led to my death after succeeding for a few rounds :( ), otherwise it's good fun and a very nice art style.
That's just stunning. Beautiful art, the soundtrack reminds me of Clint Mansell's work to some extent.
Well, art and sound-wise it really is pretty amazing. The general concept is cool as well, the level design is good - a shame it's not really playable due to the buggy interface. Even just dropping items or doing anything with them whatsoever wasn't possible for me, even restarted the game numerous times, nothing. :( I can imagine it being very cool when it works though. And the music is just amazing.
Hail to the snowman! I like what he (or she!) does with his arms.
I liked the atmosphere. Interesting music (reminded me of Twin Peaks actually) and the text was rather fascinating. Also interesting and kind of "meta" take on the theme.
Not really an actual game, but seems like you achieved what you had in mind rather well.
Good effort, only the combat is a little unresponsive - as mentioned before, visual hit feedback would be nice in addition to the sound effect (like particles, or the zombie stumbling back for a moment). Visuals are cool though, I like the animations. :)
I really dig the visual style. Gameplay works well until the jetpack... which is really hard, as there is no way to practice it. A checkpoint there would have really helped.
The audio, well, turns out I spent the last few hours messing around with FL Studio so it all sounds quite similar :D but it still adds something to the game. I guess if there were checkpoints, the game would be almost flawless - definitely among the better ones.
Really good graphics and quite innovative gameplay, but man, the controls and camera make it quite hard to enjoy. In case of a post LD version, why not 1. rotate the camera smoothly instead of jumping around in 90° steps instantly and 2. that angle on the scene.. it's rather unintuitive and you never know in which direction exactly the keys take you (or you have to actively think about it for each move, well at least I had to) - I know it's helpful as it allows the player to see 3 sides at once, and you already picked a "biased" angle hinting at which side is in front instead of neutral 45°, but still, it kept confusing the hell out of me. But that could just be me I guess.
Overall pretty high ratings from me nonetheless, and there's surely some potential there for a really cool game.
Nice! Love those little pre fight animations where the two characters are presented. Also the animations are quite cool and I'm sure it would be pretty fun if there was somebody available to play against me. Only thing I didn't quite get were the special moves, didn't really seem to do a lot, at least for the british guy. There was a british flag but nothing happened, opponent's hp stayed the same and everything.
Anyway, really cool overall, and probably one of the most beautiful cases of bad graphics I've encountered - I mean, it all looks like MS Paint, but it's really nice to look at nonetheless. :D
Pretty cool. Would make a great screensaver. :) Gameplay-wise, well, it seems really easy and not too engaging, but it's still very nice and moody.
Good job on the graphics and the general concept. The mouse controls ruin it to some extent.. I'm pretty sure there's a bug involved. Moving the mouse only in y direction affects the horizontal movement of the camera which surely is not intended.
Apart from that minor problem however, you had a simple but good idea for a game and executed it quite well including a nice intro screen, explosions and everything. So well done, and tell Mr Almeida to insist on fixing the controls next time he playtests a game for you. :P
Pretty much what everybody else said - visually very well made and the mechanics seem to work well (except the bugs), bug wayy too hard. Wasn't able to build a turret, even when I managed to destroy a few enemies it was a challenge to even collect the coins without randomly hitting an enemy and dying.
I imagine this is due to the 48h time limit though. As the developer and basically only playtester available you often get very good at your own game without really noticing, so that might be such a case. Kind of hard to avoid in these game jams, but maybe you'll make sure to keep your games somewhat easier in the future. :)
Ah, good old programmer art! :)
Pickups are cool and I like the idea of those elemental forces fighting each other.
Haha, that "out of time" line. :D Beautiful lighting, very atmospheric game despite the lack of ambient sound or music. And a pretty innovative approach as well. Controls were a bit weird and I was really looking forward to those spiders, but you achieved a pretty good result nonetheless!
Would really like to play it, but only got one controller, so doesn't seem possible. :/
Awesome visuals and a funny idea. Works very well, it just doesn't quite feel like an actual game to be honest - more like participating in a study on weird car controls. :P
This is really random and weird but funny. Well done, really good job for your first game.
The whole game ran really slow here, not sure if that was intended. But I still found it rather difficult, and at times unresponsive or the controls just didn't work properly.
Other than that, a very nice idea, a lovely protagonist and the snow effect adds quite a bit to the atmosphere. :)
Ha, brilliant. Didn't expect that much from an 48h TD game, but you really nailed it. Differently behaving tower types, reasonable upgrades, a good GUI, hotkeys, decent balancing, a boss wave in the end and even a free mode that seems to include pathfinding? (Never made it past wave 2 there, so can't really tell)
Very good effort, and you're only 15?! :)
Very innovative indeed. Seems very difficult though, as many have already stated, starting all over from the start is kind of evil.. and will most certainly prevent many people from getting through the game and seeing all the content. The design was great though, nice aesthetics and a pretty fresh idea.
Not a particularly "fun" game, but very innovative and one of the best interpretations of the theme for sure. Very good work, and I don't think there's anything wrong with the artistic style whatsoever. It's nice to see something different once in a while. :)
This is cool! Completely forgot about the powerups the first time and was a little underwhelmed as I remembered seeing a video (or gif) of it somewhere a few days ago and wondered why people weren't running around. But yeah, the comments reminded me you could press CTRL and the game suddenly became a pretty hilarious experience. :)
With there was no time limit though, I think it's difficult enough even without one.
This is good! And funny!
Ooh, why did you have to make it so difficult. :| Tried for about 10 minutes to reach one of the buttons and when I finally did, nothing happened. Couldn't figure out what to do, then tried to dash down but apparently didn't succeed as I just died as was respawned pretty far away.
I think this has a lot of potential to be very fun (and I assume when playing with a friend it might actually be, as both would fail equally bad and continue getting themselves killed over and over), but those slippery controls make it infuriating. :D
Could only play alone, but it's rather obvious this would be quite fun with 2-4 people. Quite cool!
Looks neat. A bit of music wouldn't hurt though, even just something auto generated. And maybe a few more screens to play through instead of just the one. :P
Good start though, and nice rain.
Oh, a neat parallax scrolling effect! And funny game overall, well done. Just two things: 1. the contrast was a little slow, was difficult at times to see the snowballs against the partially white background and 2. the water didn't quite match the graphical style of the rest of the game. Anyway, other than that quite cool, great music, day night shift and everything, and Aliens?! Got to about 200 kills I think, hope I didn't miss out on anything coming after that.
This is good! Innovative and funny and all that. Wish there was more of a learning curve though, like different stages, starting with just the bugs and successively adding the other elements after 20ish seconds, allowing you to get used to everything before having to deal with all the dangers of space. Still really cool, I like the look and the overly minimalistic background melody. :)
Quite a few cool mechanics in here and quite a unique art style. The controls are indeed quite tough and I skipped 4 of the levels as it was getting a little frustrating dying over and over or not making it in time due to the character bouncing off some wall, so I'm glad that skipping feature was even in there. :P
Still a pretty cool game and some fairly decent level design.
Yeah.. well.. I guess you're excused, but this isn't really working well. Great concept, pretty innovative and it does sound like a great idea. And I guess you're not even that far away from a fun, playable game. Maybe a little tutorial, a bit of code to make sure the generated paths are traversable to begin with (like every third try it spawned a block I couldn't jump over before I could really do anything), a bit of music and less obtrusive game over messages and you've got a really cool game. Assuming you had the full 48/72 hours instead of 20, it surely would have turned out way better.
Anyway, congrats on your first LD game, it's a decent start and now you know what to focus on next time. :)
Very nice graphics and pretty cool that you managed to finish a relatively well working TD game in such a short time.
Only bad thing about this may be the controls, at least in the web version, as rightclick opens a context menu, so deselecting towers doesn't work all that well, and I ended up accidentally placing a tower beneath one of the buttons.
All things considered, great work!
Very nice, kept me busy for a while. Oddly enough the game seemed to get easier over time.. not sure if that was just me getting better at the game or the game actually getting easier, but I feel the window and door mechanics were quite helpful to find a good solution. Either way, it's was nice to see new elements be introduced every few floors. Also the art style is spot on, those blue prints look really nice. :)
Kind of sad. But the visual style is pretty cool.
Great visuals, good sound (except the lack of music, would really add a lot I think) and, well, a really nice font.
It just seemed the pistol was the best weapon to be honest, after two rounds of running arount frantically to always get the shotgun, I just stood around, shooting guys with the pistol, which was much easier. :P
Also, it would have been nice if each enemy left a small blood decal on the ground, letting you see your "progress".
Yes man, you did well. You'll get better with every single game, so keep doing those game jams. :)
Seriously, I wish I had started doing that at 14. Didn't start until two years ago though - but signed up for about 10 since, I believe 5 Ludum Dares and a few of the countless others. Always fun, and it's really cool to see your progression retrospective.
Web version seems to be offline? At least the site doesn't load for me.
Worked now, it is indeed rather difficult but made it through about half the map, so I feel like I've accomplished something today. Thanks man. :D
Not too bad for your first LD, good thing you settled for a relatively simple concept, it seems you managed to finish it instead of being overly ambitious and not getting there in the end. :)
Interesting idea, haven't really seen that kind of thing before. But it really is quite confusing, had to read the text above two times and experiment with the game for a while to find out what I might be supposed to do - still not perfectly sure but I did collect 3 things, so yeah, I think I did something right. :D
Ha, I made it! 31 seconds or so. Nice game, glad it's not too hard. The wall jumping could need a bit of polishing, but that's really the only complaint I have. Very nice graphics, I really like all the movement in the level. Good work!
Needed some time to figure out I was supposed to kill the soldiers instead of sneaking past them (my bad), but then it all made sense. Fun gameplay, I just wish the AI was a tad more complex instead of those simple and often weird walk patterns. Otherwise pretty cool, and nice visuals.
Now that's a beautiful title screen! And man, I've never seen such smoothly animated snowmen. I'm not a great fan of the forced manual reloading, but still great work. :)
Really lacks some audio, but I guess you're excused.. :) The movement felt surprisingly good.
Gameplay could be a little more varied after all, but it's a good start and holds some potential for a really fun game, you know, the super crate box kind.
Very challenging game - solid concept and well executed. There surely is a bit of room for improvement here and there, e.g. you could've made the weapons a bit more satisfying to use (more powerful sound, particles, pushing back the snowmen..) or added just a bit of variation to the mix.
Pretty cool the way it is though, congrats on your first (jam) game!
ваша игра тоже хорошо
..right? Anyway, it's really cool from an artistic standpoint. Controls a bit fiddly, would certainly prefer the mouse instead of WASD. Very well done. :)
So much hilarity! Man those characters, couldn't stop laughing about Carl and Olaf and Steve waiting for his desk. :D
Very nice visuals and music and overall a pretty fun (albeit somewhat frustrating) experience. It has a very unique feel and conveys that sense of speed rather well.
The controls are quite.. special? :D Works well in the first level, but not in the second one (for me at least). And after I finally made it past that small single platform of hell after 20ish tries, there was a broken checkpoint or something so the game kept respawning me at a place where I couldn't reach any platform and just fell down immediately.
Also, a minor thing I just realized, the game plays a sound when *pressing the jump button* instead of when actually jumping. This is somewhat irritating as it implies the feedback of "successfully jumped", but then I fall down because I pressed the button a little too late.
However, I don't want to focus too much on the few negative things, the game remains pretty amazing all things considered. Visually it actually reminds me of Rupture by ASD (demoscene stuff, it's on Youtube) and, you know, that's good. :D
This is perfect! Amazing graphics and mood. Truly fantastic job. +1 for letting us kill the snowman. :P
Great example of how a 48h game can benefit from a really slim concept. Beautiful art and music. The gameplay is reasonably simple, basically Super Crate Box minus the weapons, but the slippery controls make it challenging and fun. All the stars for you, Sir! Well, almost. :)
That was cool. A shame the ball didn't behave properly when hitting the sides.. can't you just let it bounce back? Like two lines of code. :( However, it's still very fun, I liked holding the ball and just take it to the other goal instead of shooting immediately, which was my intuitive strategy at first.
Also quite nice visuals and the music was.. and interesting choice. :D
Well done, such a minimalistic yet kind of deep survival game surely is a cool concept. I know this is hardly possible within 48 hours, but generally some directions for the player, i.e. a small tutorial-ish introduction of what things to combine to get the basic tools, would be great. Also using the arrow keys for controls would be much more comfortable for the player (well, for me at least) - you could simply add a small delay of 50-100ms when a key is pressed and then check the other keys as well to allow for diagonal movement without having the player need to press two keys at the exact same moment. The current controls resulted in me playing with arrowkeys anyway, despite making it harder, as this is just the way I'm used to control game characters and using the numpad just felt weird.
I think the game's strongest point is the general idea behind the mechanics and how motivating it is/can be. Finding out all the tools and figure out ways to survive really is quite appealing and rewarding.
Well, it's rather obvious that the visuals could need some work - simple item icons are OK, but gras/sand/water make it almost painful to look at for longer periods of time (but then again, my game has a similar, if not worse problem :D). Even just replacing the black background of each tile with an appropriate color makes quite a difference.
Either way, I even went as far as downloading and playing the post-LD version and am rather proud of growing and eating my first tomato, so there's that!
Amazing! Definitely among the best games I've played, pretty much perfect. Graphics could need a bit of work, it looks rather bland with the plain gray background, but other than that there really is nothing I could complain about in any way. Beautiful soundtrack, very well working gameplay, good level of difficulty, great level design and just a very fun experience. Thanks man!
Super cool art style! Quite a lot of content here, rather impressive. I barely defeated more than one boss in a row, but saw a few of them. Hard to figure out what to do exactly at times, and even if I know the strategy it's often hard to execute as there's no way to escape the boss in quite a few situations (as far as I'm concerned). Great effort though!
Would love to see a full playthrough of all the bosses in a video, as I'll hardly be able to get that done myself. :D
@VDZ That makes sense - and I was kind of referring to the starfish as that was one of the bosses I was fighting. The lack of going down the higher platforms directly made it a lot harder.
@Tifu - Just read your comment on my game, it was indeed made with Dark Basic (just like all my previous LD entries), works really well for those 48h projects. :)
That's some pretty neat terrain you got there! Controls aren't great which makes it a little frustrating, I never really took up speed as I always got stuck in some wall and was hardly able to move around efficiently.. apart from that however, it seems very solid and could surely be fun if I had somebody to play it with.
Had to play Firefox vs Chrome (i.e. against myself), since unfortunately nobody joined for 10 minutes and I don't have that much time to spare. :P
First things first: Very nice, clean art style, even the menu looks really cool and tidy. The game itself might be a little underwhelming though - it's sure cool you managed to create a fully working multiplayer game in such a short time, so you certainly achieved your goal, but the mechanics are pretty simple and make the whole experience a little bland. Possibly a good start to something more exciting - with a few more weapons and vfx, as in more focus on action, I'd certainly have fun playing it again.
Difficult indeed. :D Needed quite a few tries to even stay in screen for once.. and a few more to make it back to the nest. So much wind!
The owl physics are spot on though. Watched a documentary on the topic once and they explained it pretty much as it is in the game. Also the title screen is lovely. :)
Really, really cool. Great idea, fun gameplay. I wish there was a bit of creepy music playing, and maybe a bit more variety than just "sawblades everywhere", but other than that it's very well done. And while the latter levels were difficult, it never felt unfair and I would beat them eventually. Also very coherent level design. Only thing that bothered me was the corpses making it difficult to see the actual level at times. :D
Slashee, I already got one with local multiplayer using keyboard + gamepad. Online multiplayer is rather tough with Dark Basic, the language I used for this. But yeah, I'll make sure to support multiple gamepads (as of now it's just one) and upload it eventually.
Thanks for your feedback. :)
This is good! Great interpretation of the theme for sure and very well executed. I just feel that this would be a case of "less is more", and a single day would certainly be enough instead of playing a whole week.
Really fun idea, and I actually like how short it is. I don't want to spend 20 minutes on each game.. if I can get the idea and ideally play through the game within 5 minutes, that's perfect (although I admit I've made longer LD games in the past, sorry :>).
The gameplay could need some tweaking - maybe a bit more space between the cookies to make it easier - but other than that it's cool. And funny.
Nice start, I'd recommend adding sound effects and music next time - really doesn't take much time if you use sfxr for sound effects and maybe some simple random music generator, just for that extra bit of atmosphere. Good work though, very solid controls, I've really played worse Ludum Dare platformers. :)
Well done, quite an engaging little game. And nice to see there are no "wrong" decisions and it all seems to be a matter of subjective interpretation.
Really cool visuals, and the story line would certainly be quite intriguing if the game felt like an actual game, i.e. after some polishing.
Still a very good start, if you ask me you should take the time to finish it.
Very coool. Got stuck on that island as well and there doesn't seem to be a way to respawn manually? Great game nonetheless, I really dig the level design.
Really cool. Didn't expect the switches.. quite a puzzle game actually. Certainly very difficult, but I somehow made it to the last level. Great concept and well executed, and it seems we had a somewhat similar idea regarding the useless dedicated horn button.. :)
1177. Good idea and concept, lovely minimalistic art style, and a game that is basically a cellular automaton, which is cool. Controls were a little meh, quite hard to tell in which direction you're going even with that indicator, and not all that responsive. Also the promised tutorial was nowhere to be found!
Funny idea though, and great mood. :)
Really cool! Love what you did with the theme, and it's not just an interesting idea but also fun and engaging, even if somewhat punishing. Great entry though, I really dig these little "jump in and enjoy" gems. :)
Really cool! Love the smooth movement of armies, I could just watch them run around for an hour. :D
Not bad, not bad. I guess we need more games centered around beards.
Great use of the theme, lead to some quite complex and engaging gameplay. Others have made good suggestions already, so there's not much to add from my side except 'good work'!
3 runs too, best score also 73. Got to say, it's rather cool how you put some effort into a seamless presentation, with that menu screen animation and everything. A little tricky to control - I guess a somewhat bigger garden or a smaller turn radius would have opened up more options for the player. Fun and surprisingly immersive nonetheless.
Not bad, especially for 9 hours. Basically a growing based puzzle game. Would surely be interesting to see a more polished version of this.. could definitely become a very entertaining little game. :)
Also sorry for only providing a 64bit version of my game and your struggle to get it to run. I've added a 32bit download now and will upload a video later, so feel free to check back at some point. Cheers!
Great entry, very well done. Survived for 6 minutes and then stopped because it seemed nothing new was happening and I was always barely good enough to not lose the game until that point. I really like how you managed to make the game pretty self explaining - no reading required whatsoever, just jump in and play. I wish more Ludum Dare games were like this. :)
This is good! Really cool ideas and mechanics, for the short time I was able to progress in the game there were quite a few surprises. Nice level design as well. Having played no less than 3 games already, this surely is the most original one. :D
Very nice! Some kind of ambient soundtrack, even if just random noises slowed down by 800% or something, would have added quite a lot I presume. But the content that's there, both the narrative and the pictures, is really good.
..you decided to make less levels in order to focus on making it more difficult? Aww man. You really nailed the jumping controls from hell. :P
But well, I enjoyed giving that little squarey prince the food he deserved. By, apparently, pushing it over the floor until it hit him. Why not!
Oh you....
That razor! And a beardmeter! And a head looking like a cookie after a while. Nice!
Graphics and Audio, yes! Very nice. Gameplay-wise I'm not so sure if I just didn't really get it or it was a bit meh. At some point it was game over for no apparent reason too, I dodged all the bullets as far as I can tell and consistently hit the Godzilla thing, but hard to tell if that really did anything.
Intro was somewhat hard to follow, but good job on the voice acting for sure. :D
Absolutely loved this. Great and fun and funny and I had to laugh quite a bit at the ending. Britlliantly done. :)
Thanks for the feedback guys, glad (some of) you enjoyed it.
@TitoMakaniJr I actually thought of that webcam episode from the latest season a few times. Can't say Black Mirror didn't influence me in some way. :D
@Mouch no coincidence, you can actually pick the weapon in the end. Although there really are just three actual endings. They will react to more stuff though, e.g. when you try not to kill the person at all.
I actually wrote a relatively complex system of how the bots react to what you say, but lacked the time to actually use that system to a better degree. There's one bot who'll reply to you if you mention him (@<hisname> in the chat), also there's one in the beginning trying to talk to you who will, to some degree, react to your replies. Also the bots react to each other dynamically. I guess about half of all messages are scripted, the rest is spontaneous nonsensical banter by the generic bots inhabiting the room. :)
Maybe I would have gotten more done, had I not spent over 3 hours on that nickname generator.
Haha, "one room", i.e. all levels are pratcically the same huh. :P That really is kind of funny. Having a single simple mechanic and distributing it over 5 almost identical levels. But then again that's probably due to running out of time. Still funny. :D
The artwork is considerably basic but still kind of nice. And it's always good to hear good old abundant-music soundtracks!
Hey, that's certainly a cool concept and the sound is pretty neat. The way the boxes turn when you click them is oddly satisfying. Plus it's kind of funny you yourself don't really know how to beat the game realiably. :D
Ha, nice one! Great way to handle the theme I must say. Some simple sfxr punch sound effect, and maybe a little screen shake, would have helped a lot with making it more satisfying I think, but for 48 hours this is definitely something.
This is super fun. Took me a minute to understand how it works, but after that it was really enjoyable. I believe it's actually a quite deep game, and you could surely spend hours planning your perfect moves. I ultimately died (i.e. returned to day 2 :P) because I didn't manage to cover the right most lane with a tower two days in a row. Do the resources play any row other than buying you additional lives? It kind of felt like there might be more to the game which I just didn't know of.
Anyway, very well done, I loved the hungry zombie, and the music actually reminded me of plants vs zombies, which obviously is a good thing. Great job!
Very well done, a cool game we got here. With day-night-cycle and everything. I actually found the music alright, repetitive yes, but it didn't really bother me. The tutorial was helpful, and the mechanics are very well put together. More enemy types would be nice, but honestly, for a weekend projects the 4 existing ones with different animations and behaviours are already very impressive.
The project was obviously very ambitious with all its content and mechanics and even interactive inventory and tutorial. Yet you managed to deliver a playable and enjoyable game that doesn't feel unfinished in any way. Great work, and I hope to see more of your games in the future!
(by the way, you might think about adding a screenshot to the description above)
Surprisingly cool! Got to admit after three tries I never even reached 200 points, but I really dig the concept. Just once I used this yellow, I don't know, glue? On spikes, and while I lost the card, nothing happened and the character seemed to die on the (emtpy) tile behind the spikes. Which was weird. But other than that everything worked fine. The jumping "animation" was a nice touch. And I agree with @matsoj15, great music!
It definitely was nice to play through, quite atmospheric for something without sound actually.
I did it! yay!
Cool concept which is very true to the theme, and generally very well done. A few notes:
- missed attempts are kind of cluttery, might not be necessary to keep them around for so long - aiming for further away holes is really difficult, it might be an idea to smooth the rotation somewhat (i.e. it moves very slowly initially, but holding an arrow key accelerates the arrow) - this might make the game too easy, but having an actual visual indicator where your tower will end up would be helpful - at first I really had no idea what I was doing - after the first failed attempt at level 1 I realized what was going on and what I was supposed to do; after the second failed attempt I started having an idea of how to use the towers properly and hence how to actually beat the game, and eventually did that. Quite a nice learning curve, plus the game has just the right length for an LD entry.
I think that's about it. Nicely done, cheers!
Surely not bad for a first attempt at GameMaker, and as others have mentioned, the concept is cool. Just a bit difficult with the glitchy collision. Is the double jumping intended, or a bug? If you hit Jump multiple times when on the ground, you can practically fly to infinity. Also is it intentional that our little insect protagonist keeps moving to the right? Because in the end I he was so far right on the screen, I simply wasn't able to see the letters before they hit me. And now I feel bad for the armless little guy. :(
This was very innovative and cool. Very fitting concept and actually fun to play, despite its simplicity. Got to level 11 and enjoyed it. Well done!
I basically agree with what others have said already. Controls are smooth as hell (almost too smooth one could say) and the player blocking the text is not ideal, but just a minor issue. I really like the (albeit very simple) visuals, especially the character animation, and the choice of background colors for the different areas. It's also always nice to have all the required explanations directly within the game instead of having to read a wall of text as preparation.
Only downside for me was that the puzzle mechanics felt more like work than fun - there was no real thinking or puzzling involved for the most part, just scanning text basically.
Got to 15 points with 5 minutes in the bank. Quite fun actually, maybe it would have been nice to have the hole be not quite as near to the border, so there's a little more room for movement without the danger of losing the ball alltogether. Shooting the balls into space was also quite fun.
As pointed out by others, the camera movement could need some more work. Regarding the hole collider being too small: Why not just apply a little "gravitational" force towards the hole once the balls are within a certain distance? Haven't really used Unity, but I'd be surprised if something like that wasn't possible to implement relatively quickly.
Good work though, fun original little game, basically all I'm asking for when playtesting LD games.
Unconventional indeed, and quite an idea to use a game format to teach command line interactions. Unfortunately it didn't quite seem to work - neither ls nor touch worked for me (the game was happy, but I also got system error messages that it didn't know what to do with them). At the point where I should delete the folder I stopped, as I wasn't sure if these misunderstandings between game and system could ultimately do harm to my system in any way (i.e. accidentally removing the wrong directory or whatever). I'm on Windows 7. Isn't ls and touch linux based, and Windows uses dir to output directory content, and some copy variant for creating files?
I agree with @ian1337, the cooking time frames could have been a bit more forgiving. Also I didn't realize until the third customer they had specific wishes coming with their order, and kind of assumed the list on the top left was just feedback regarding the previous burger (which is pretty much my fault). Once I figured that out however I created the ultimate burger, only be be about half a second to late, was already dragging the burger towards the customer through my window when the game decided that was enough. :D
Very nice entry, it's a bit rough around the edges but still very charming.
Impressive! Beautiful visuals and it all seems very smooth and polished. I just wish I could actually shoot some paint balls every now and then, which was practically impossible 90% of the time as most players had 0, and refilling wasn't really possible as the game automatically assigned me another character every time I tried to go to the refill area.
Very nice AI you got there, and I'm glad my goalkeeper had superhuman reflexes. Managed to secure a point after a lucky 0:0 draw!
Unfortunately there were two problems that made it rather difficult to properly play the game, both occurring at pretty much the same time every time I tried it (twice, to be exact):
- after 30 seconds or so, the narrator would get extremely quiet and I couldn't understand a thing
- shortly after, the game got stuck for a few seconds, after which I think I was beneath the floor, and could only kill myself
It does seem like a fun idea though, and the art style is nice. The general tone of the game too is quite nifty. I think I'd like to see a full playthrough video.
I get an error message trying to open the .rar file with 7zip unfortunately.
Presentationwise it's among the best I've seen, very nice! Great visuals, sound and atmosphere, and even a proper boss. The gameplay would certainly profit from a few improvements and a little more variation, and I would've liked you to go a little deeper with the whole music thing. And a minor thing, the texts were visible very shortly, I sometimes had trouble following. Waiting for the user to press a key might be a good idea here. Anyway, great entry overall, these kinds of games are what makes me come back to Ludum Dare. :)
Some great ideas in here, and while I don't necessarily think these genres are in any way incompatible, they surely aren't very common together (but then again, this is the case with most games, mine included.. true incompatibility would probably not yield great results :D). I was a bit confused at first, as I didn't know player and ball could (and had to) be on the same tile to kick, and expected standing right next to it to be enough. The randomness in kicking is probably a good idea, yet I was really confused when kicking from a close distance at the empty goal didn't work out, and thought there was some rule preventing me from scoring a goal in that situation.
If you keep working on it, an AI (even if just a very simple one) would be great. :)
Very nice, albeit a little too hard in my opinion. Engaging gameplay, and I quite liked the funny little texts. I'm the best climber. hehe. :)
Original concept (good title as well) and nice pixel art. I'd say yes, it qualifies as a combination of incompatible genres.
I had some problems with the game repeatedly not noticing characters, so with every second word or so I ran into typo problems, which was a bit frustrating as I had to force myself to type slowly to avoid this. As nobody else seems to be mentioning this it might be related to I don't know what, my system or browser maybe (Windows 7, Firefox 59 currently).
That little car is really hard to control, and I don't understand why I kept dying without any obvious reason. The idea however is certainly cool (and so is the music), and it's quite a nice touch you leave this trail behind you. I can only imagine what went into the level generation, and there seems to be quite a variety of obstacles and enemies from what I can tell so far. Great effort, and props for using C++. :)
The idea of combining learning and horror already made me laugh. The game itself did as well. Very well done! Great atmosphere, visuals and sound. Physics are a bit weird, but I can't really complain about that as it barely affected the gameplay. Also, good luck with your game design careers.
Not bad, not bad. The enemies pretty much crushed me as I had little to no idea what I was doing at first, and once I figured it out (half my units were already dead when I realized I could move diagonally) I was already at a great disadvantage. I probably should have used the hook more. In the end I tried to group my 3 healers together in the back and let them keep everybody alive, which worked out for a little while, but the army of robots was unstoppable.
The fact that I'm even able to tell this story of my experience with the game already kind of shows how cool it is. Quite a complex system that seems to work quite well. And I like the music.
A few things that could need some improvement:
- Skip maybe should be on a different key. Several times I accidentally skipped a turn when I wanted to actually move down (as I'm used to the arrow key layout)
- while the sprites are charming, the color palette could be refined to look a bit more friendly
- I belive the left player has a disadvantage, due to the order in which units have their turns. The right player can move a whole lane to the left within a single turn, the left player however can only the first unit of a lane (i.e. the one in the front). This asymmetry isn't great as the left player initially has to skip many moves.
Anyway, great game, well done!
Great idea to work with the theme indeed, and well executed as well. I really would have liked more variation in the dialogue as it relatively quickly started to get repetitive. I'm just wondering though.. am I a robot too?
You work for the mouse industry don't you?! So much clicking. :D (and often enough outside the game window, minimizing it, which is a little frustrating). Also I would have liked to see my final score. I believe it was somewhere above 3000 which I'm rather proud of. Good idea to stick with a game you're able to finish instead of getting too ambitious. Still there would have been ways to use the theme surely. Decent first game nonetheless, keep participating and the games will only get better and better.
Ooooh I love this. Hilarious concept, the dialogue started well and only got better. Hairy guy is such a weirdo. Also it's always nice to have a complete game which you can play through in such little time and yet experience so much. Finally a developer who understands the great struggle that is testing ALL the games! Also, the gameplay itself was surprisingly smooth, quite unlike the majority of ludum dare platformers.
Why are these games so addictive? I just with the Automation was a bit more effective. But then again, with all these generous kibble donations coming in, I didn't have much work with my 3 cats. Oh now it's two, I didn't pay attention while writing this comment and one ran away. Bad cat! And fun game I must say.
Beautiful. When the game's concept already makes you laugh, the developer has done something right. Really funny, and this actually feels like a proper little Tennis game. I honestly think though the game would be better without the moustache adjusting - it's a funny twist, but gets in the way of the gameplay a bit too much. Other than that however it's pretty great, one of the best entries I've seen so far, great work!
The surroundings with their fancy shader effects are very nice! Gameplay-wise there's some room for improvement - pretty much what @pebkac and @designernap said already. Nice work nonetheless.
Thank you for your feedback everyone!
@Ovidios I too felt the game turned out relatively easy, but thought it was probably OK this way. Often its the other way round, and when as the developer you believe the game is just right, it actually is too diificult for other players who are not as used to all the mechanics. There's definitely luck involved though with the cards. The upgrading mechanic was my attempt to stop players from too easily putting *all* their upgrades on one single tower as this would ruin the balancing (upgrades improve towers in a pretty much exponential way). Making it frustrating definitely wasn't inteded though, so sorry for that.. :)
@Nash Can you go into more detail of what kind of deck manipulation you were thinking about?
@Nash Ah, this makes perfect sense, thanks for clearing it up. Indeed the way it is right now it's just a plain randomization of what the player can do, and adding more control and planning to the mix would certainly add a lot. As I'll be putting some more effort into the game in the future, I might as well do just that after getting some of the easier stuff out of the way.
@EkkoEkko Sorry about the background music, it surely could be a bit less in your face. :) Regarding the text, you're right, this actually never occurred to me, but simply putting it in two lines instead of one would have prevented this weird situation where you have to move the camera simply to read it.
@TheMonsterFromTheDeep Thank you very much, very insightful review! I'm not sure if voluntarily losing lives in order to gain more cards is actually a better strategy than to just try to play well from the start, but it's certainly worth considering. Providing some insight regarding the upcoming wave is pretty high on my list of future changes, and I'd also like to change the final round - that single (and immune to everything) enemy is kind of anticlimactic and doesn't work so well with everything the game has built up to till this point.
Very nice! Lovely art style, I liked the soundtrack(s), and obviously the premise is rather funny.
I agree with @MaxKlimenok regarding possible improvements, and would add to maybe remove the collision - it's a bit weird to get blocked by the date zone when you just want to run to the other side to beat up some minions. And is there actually a way to win the game? Maybe you should start with the "interest-meter" in the middle, and filling it up concludes the date.
All in all very well done, certainly one of the better entries, and very much in line with the theme.