The Drowning Man by stoo 2014-04-28T03:11:00
The holes might be a bit too far apart? I never managed to rest in more than one of them in a round. The fish monsters are cute, though!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → snapman-gt
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | Watcher's Steps | compo | 3.07 | 2.64 | 2.85 | 3.42 | 3.42 | 3.42 | 2.78 | 3.28 | |||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | SatMap | compo | |||||||||||
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | KADOOMERANG | compo | 187 | 3.62 | 3.59 | 3.95 | 3.38 | 3.41 | 3.45 | 2.47 | 3.20 | 36 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Blind Spotted | compo | 59 | 3.87 | 3.32 | 4.42 | 4.45 | 3.52 | 3.14 | 2.72 | 3.30 | 51 | |
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | NOT THE ELEPHANT | compo | 26 | 4.08 | 3.95 | 4.09 | 4.15 | 3.79 | 3.37 | 4.08 | 3.60 | 47 |
The holes might be a bit too far apart? I never managed to rest in more than one of them in a round. The fish monsters are cute, though!
Most current-events games don't try to make you sympathize with the trials of giant corporations. Interesting choice of theme! The swinging mechanic was novel, thought I was kind of expecting vertical movement to have more of an influence on it.
I couldn't figure out how to survive the first wave. I'm guessing I'm supposed to collect the resources to build more soldiers? But the button to build more never appeared, and the lone soldier I had couldn't fend off all the hooded figures that show up. Instructions are important!
The aliens seemed to cover ground much faster than the rate of fire on the gun, and the level doesn't work too well for running backwards. That, and the standard Unity FPS mouselook sensitivity is too high in a browser. The idea and atmosphere are quite nice, though.
Mixing the spritework with untextured 3D models was an interesting choice. I don't think I've seen a low-rez sprite animated to be "breathing" like that before.
It plays like puzzle bobble without combos? Or maybe reversed combos? I tried to rebound a shot, and it flew off the screen and I was stuck. I guess that's worth some humor points. ;-)
Couple of funny bugs, like passing the killer on the stairs with a friendly hello, and one of the guys got stuck in a crouch pose when he entered the final attic room. It was a little unclear that the locked-off area of the attic wasn't the part you see at first, since the text made it sound like I couldn't go up there, so I didn't know where to find the bear trap for a while, but I'm nit picking. Pretty fun and interesting puzzle game. Cheers.
It seems to always zoom in on the same part of the picture, which doesn't really matter since the whole image is kinda samey anyway. Maybe you could have made the image a little more texturally varied, and given some more relative hue-based hints? Interesting idea though.
A reasonable clone of SCB, but the infinite ammo and central choke point is game-breaking. Nice lighting effects, and the music is pleasant.
It's an interesting idea, but there needs to be some additional channel of information to interpret for what stocks might do next (like news stories or rumors, etc)
I changed sides of the cube twice and I couldn't leave. Just a pile of rocks and nothing to interact with, and endless spawning beetles. Also, it's hard to tell if your shots are connecting with the enemy, since they go right through them without stopping.
The rotation mechanic does show promise. Something to consider: the game was just as playable with only the up arrow key, and this was a little more fun even, since it forces you to commit to a move since the option of going back is out.
Are the cuts pre-made? If they are dynamic and you could have synced them to mouse movements, it would have been more satisfying.
Apparently the dog cannot open a door? That makes it a very short adventure. Your art is cheerful and weird, so I hope puggles someday gets past that door. Good luck!
I like the rain effect. Seems more like a sheep shearing game than a sheep herding game? Very pleasant minimalist graphic design.
I took a walk in the comfort zone, but I didn't know what to make of leaving it.
Virtual pet with long delays in any action? My HOB died after going through several transformations. I guess that's sad.
A fun "escape the broken game" idea. The sticking point is always to try and come up with the kind of story that goes well with a boundary breaking theme.
Kind of a cross between pacman and the original GTA? Pretty cool.
Intense little defense game. Clearly conveys what each character can do, and good strategies appear from the mix of abilities. Neat.
Interesting idea, but some of the tension is lost by the ability to see the zombies in the dark without shooting or using the flashlight? If you slowed the pace way down it might work without that crutch.
The game seemed to lock up on my first and second try, but then the third time I loaded the game, a solid white pigeon showed up almost immediately, and won all the dominant pigment genes. The rules as to what makes certain spots show up in the offspring or not show up is really unclear. Might be random? Hard to tell.
Standard arena shooter with some pickups, but the standout element is that music track. That's really your composition? If so, bravo. Best tune I've heard so far this jam.
The movement was too slippery to play. Might have been a clock timing issue?
Seems a little unfinished. If you came up with a mechanic that would make use of the zooming effect you could have an interesting game on your hands.
Solid shooter. I like how the mutual powerups slowly change the game from a western scrolling shooter into an eastern bullet hell.
Fun/weird mechanic. Switching on a grid was a little easy to forget which rooms you had marked which way, even with the minimap. Kept feeling like there should be a keyboard-based way to pick safe/neutral/dangerous. Cool music speed effects, though.
Nice concept, though it's a little difficult to judge perspective only by scale. I'd recommend adding a projection shadow to the balls. That would make it easier to see how far back into space the ball is and it would make it easier to read its overall velocity/direction.
Your instructions are a little unclear that you have to chain together collisions with fuel containers, and that you'll fall back without them. The mechanic is interesting and surprisingly difficult, but it doesn't really fit the theme of a ship in space? Not unless there's a black hole behind you or something.
That sound starts to grate after a while. Are the disc arcs right? I kept seeing them fly way over the mountain and continue going up. I guess they had to return to their home planet. Their people needed them.
The curved throwing was interesting, but it didn't seem put to any good use. I thought maybe it was a way to attack multiple enemies at the same time, but it didn't seem to do anything to guys in the way of the curve. Speaking of other guys, I ended up with a crowd of them following me, since there didn't seem to be enough cards to kill everyone, and the AI never gives up once it's got your scent. Really interesting idea, but it needs some more thought to give a purpose to the curving idea.
Very nice puzzle mechanic, but the huge amount of life I had to make mistakes with kinda meant I ended up blundering my way through your nice puzzles. Perhaps a directing control not based on slow rotations would allow for the kind of precise control that would make the generous life system less necessary? Overall a nice and charming actionpuzzler game.
This was all a little confusing, and the wilhelm scream at the beginning with loud guitars seemed like it was going to be the unconventional weapon.... I kid, I kid. I managed to rip of the correct android head on my third try, after dying in the void of space twice. Having to refresh the page to start over is a bit of a techincal bugbear, and you might want to fix that for any future projects. The story was not the best, but I hope you keep working on your storytelling. Good luck!
I really do like the speed lines effect. Very curious how it chooses what color to sample and draw with. I hope you finish it someday! :-)
Yeah, no WASD keys working in Chrome on PC. Seemed like a pretty standard arena shooter with the gun lagging around a bit more than usual? I was hoping the disk drive idea would have more of an influence on the mechanics of the shooting instead of just the visual theme. The drive still went in the direction of the mouse, as if possessed, instead of being a physics driven thing like I was expecting.
Not sure if stating that the shooting weapon is something other than a gun really makes a shooting weapon unconventional.... The art, music, and perspective effects are all amazing! But it's not that much fun to play, really. The waves are all over the place and you're constantly dying and respawning in the middle of waves, invulnerable for a moment, and then taking damage pretty quick. Jumping is weird, since you can't shoot in the air, even though some enemies are tall enough that you'd still hit them. Eh, lots of incredible programming pulling this off in the time alloted, but I wish the result had been a little more snappy-feeling?
Managed to hop out of the island map and sail off the edge of the world. Also, just ramming things with a boat could have been an unconventional weapon.
There's not much need to distract enemies when they're just coming at you in a straight line from the left and right. There's also very little reason to move left or right, either. If you built out a level (or just a couple platforms like super crate box?) there'd be more utilization of both movement mechanics and distraction mechanics.
Is this one of those meta-meta games, like trytohack? Did I lose by getting a 404 and stopping there?
I like the cat animation, but I'm a little sad I don't get to see the whole thing since it plays so slowly and the encounters are so close together. I laughed the first time I opened a can and bricked the game. "what they say about what curiosity did to the cat" ;-)
Hey, it's a start. And everybody has to start somewhere! :) Be sure to come back for LD33, and see if you can get farther next time!
An okay game. Seemed odd that wolves avoided a poo after I laid it down? Though I guess that would have made things too easy? There's so many wolves to begin wit that you don't really have a chance to build up an apple/poo stock to fight them. And having to stop moving to poo just makes that disadvantage that much worse.
It's a little confusing which way the rang is going to go when you release it. Seems to be always clockwise, but I've been looking left and suddenly it flies off behind me! The hold-for-strength mechanic (so familiar! ;-P ) is nice, but ends up getting it stuck in the wall a lot. And since the rang never stops, it could be pointless in multi if it just sits there in a loop forever (but maybe you can push them into it? Haven't had anybody around to try it with).
Couldn't play the web link. It wanted me to log in to a google account? Why do I need to do that?
The first screen was blue, but the second two weren't? Managed to win after I started checking every single screen. Interesting idea, reminds me a lot of Quadrilateral Cowboy.
A pretty conventional game, and honestly, a pretty conventional weapon. Seemed easy to just fire watermelons way ahead, and everybody would be dead by the time you got to them.
I like the mechanic. Though, by slowly increasing the number of dots, you do kind of have a reverse difficulty curve. More dots makes it easier, not harder.
The automatic radius adjustment idea was very clever.
Having such sluggish movement in a shooter like this is interesting, since it puts a heavier focus on shooting and aiming. The buttons are hard to hit when they're in a corner, because they are only triggered by some velocity threshold, and you lose all your speed when you hit the wall near it. Having walls that disappear when they match the background color is fun, having enemies that don't disappear when they match the background is a little less fun. I tried shooting randomly while searching for a switch to change the color, which was cool and worked a little, but there wasn't enough visual feedback to indicate the technique was working. The scrolling was too close to the edge of the screen, and it was very easy to run into enemies that were right in front of me. And due to the sluggish movement, I couldn't change directions to avoid them, either.
An interesting idea, though! Just needs more visual feedback for killing enemies, some smarter scrolling tech, and some better button interactions. Cheers!
You just gotta look where you're going. You only trip over stuff you can't see. In Watcher's Steps, you gotta... watch yer steps. (If you look at the floor you won't fall over, but it's more realistic than just that. It simulates tripping over your own legs from changing direction too fast, slipping from stopping too quickly, tripping over stuff you can't see behind you, losing your footing from falling too far to catch yourself, and even dizziness).
@bobismijnnaam The tripping is not random. You trip from changing you speed too quickly (high velocity delta). You can do that by turning too fast, pressing an opposite direction too fast, or moving up or down too fast (stepping on stones, falling). You can negate the effect by looking down, but you don't have to look straight down. All this is countered by some things you can't block (falling a very long distance, or tripping while walking backwards). My hope was that these rules would be discoverable, but apparently they were not.
@bobismijnnaam Well, it is inspired by Getting Over It, so frustration was definitely a goal. This whole "incompatible genres" thing really made this LD weird, you know? (Also, regarding speed, you move faster when you're looking up)
This was a little disturbing? But I guess most dating sims are anyway. I'm not sure if the stealth element was doing anything? It was hard to tell if I was doing well or poorly.
Very pretty game, but I had to quit at the forced stealth section. The guys kept getting alerted through walls, which was a bit unfair. Gotta give it points for theme though, hockey stealth is very incompatible.
Feels a lot like the classic dungeon crawlers with grid movement, but a little more analog with mouselook. I cheater it a bit by ending my turn early so I could get a larger turn when rounding corners. It was definitely creepy when I noticed that the bunnies continue to make eye contact with you after you've dispatched them!
Interesting game, but the survival aspect seemed a little off. If I'm picking up wood and stone, I would expect to build something with them instead of just chucking them away? Some small crafting mechanic would have been better, like making a stone axe. Still a fun little idea!