World Fighter by LeviDSmith 2017-05-13T18:52:15Z
Fun game, Only complaint was there was very little hit feedback when the player got hit, and that I didn't realize which one was my health until a ways into the game.
Beyond that nice job!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Snowdrama
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | 👥 | Signal's Shift | jam | 570 | 3.36 | 3.08 | 3.01 | 3.75 | 3.64 | 3.20 | 2.32 | 3.53 |
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | The Hollow Library | jam | 380 | 3.52 | 3.10 | 2.89 | 3.52 | 3.42 | 2.47 | 3.76 | ||
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | 👥 | Deckfall | jam | 632 | 3.27 | 3.07 | 3.22 | 3.02 | 3.02 | 3.07 | ||
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | 👥 | Bunny’s Dusty Odyssey | jam | 546 | 3.55 | 3.32 | 3.63 | 3.73 | 4.09 | 3.88 | 3.02 | 3.78 |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | 👥 | Neon Citadel: Guardians of the Stars | jam | 440 | 3.70 | 3.78 | 3.48 | 3.96 | 3.80 | 3.26 | 2.75 | 3.21 |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | 👥 | Hellevator | jam | 551 | 3.58 | 3.56 | 3.02 | 3.31 | 3.72 | 3.61 | 2.75 | 3.41 |
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | 👥 | Crazy Pizza Galaxy! | jam | 2.87 | 3.12 | 2.87 | 4.00 | 3.00 | 3.37 | 3.33 | 3.25 | |
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | 👥 | Lovecraftian Famring | jam | 646 | 3.11 | 2.61 | 3.06 | 3.79 | 3.56 | 2.92 | 3.04 | |
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | 👥 | Sweetheart Speedrun | jam | 844 | 3.25 | 2.86 | 3.11 | 3.80 | 3.36 | 3.77 | 3.61 | 3.22 |
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | 👥 | Lucifloor | jam | 798 | 3.45 | 3.16 | 3.35 | 3.90 | 3.88 | 3.83 | 3.10 | 3.50 |
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | 👥 | Nausi-tical | jam | 3.12 | 2.60 | 3.50 | 4.09 | 2.80 | 3.60 | 3.00 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | 👥 | Depths of Slumber | jam | 1698 | 2.92 | 2.76 | 2.94 | 3.55 | 3.34 | 3.21 | 1.90 | 3.89 |
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | 👥 | Dog Go Bark | jam | 773 | 3.52 | 3.43 | 2.87 | 3.19 | 3.52 | 3.63 | 3.47 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | Firestarter | jam | 1204 | 3.50 | 3.44 | 3.26 | 3.10 | 4.00 | 2.70 | 3.28 | 3.32 |
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | Zambies! | jam | 733 | 3.26 | 3.36 | 2.67 | 3.36 | 2.78 | 2.27 | 3.30 | |
| 2019 | 44 | Your life is currency | 👥 | The Dieland | jam | 2.66 | 2.56 | 2.00 | 2.06 | 3.25 | 2.77 | 1.85 | 2.77 | |
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | 👥 | A Sworded Tale | jam | 902 | 2.91 | 2.73 | 2.72 | 3.52 | 2.86 | 3.19 | 2.57 | 3.17 |
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | All The Things! | jam | 885 | 3.11 | 2.91 | 3.07 | 3.63 | 3.08 | 2.39 | 2.01 | 2.64 |
| 2018 | 41 | Combine 2 Incompatible Genres | 👥 | Help Wanted | jam | 751 | 3.31 | 3.04 | 3.52 | 3.78 | 3.04 | 3.17 | 3.33 | |
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | 👥 | Loot Drop | jam | 506 | 3.51 | 3.37 | 3.52 | 4.10 | 3.56 | 3.32 | 3.06 | 3.21 |
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Elemental Harmony | jam | 3.11 | 2.77 | 3.00 | 3.11 | 3.33 | 3.33 | 2.00 | 3.22 | ||
| 2017 | 38 | A Small World | Planet Hoppers | jam | 520 | 3.13 | 3.09 | 2.82 | 3.73 | 2.69 | 3.04 | 2.35 | 2.90 |
Fun game, Only complaint was there was very little hit feedback when the player got hit, and that I didn't realize which one was my health until a ways into the game.
Beyond that nice job!
Sweet Idea! It's like centipede meets a tower defense or something!
Loved this game! It had so much content! The jumping controls were really solid and overall the game played well, I got lost a few times, but it was only ever temporary.
Might be worth putting an easy mode in, that shows like cracks or some marking on walls that can be walked through or shot. I had no issues with it, but I could see some people having a hard time if they don't know to check for it.
Can't get it to run unfortunatel. With VK=false I get:
``` Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalStateException: There is no OpenGL context current in the current thread. at org.lwjgl.opengl.GL.createCapabilities(GL.java:350) at org.lwjgl.opengl.GL.createCapabilities(GL.java:302) at code.engine.graphics.gl.GLRenderer.createWindowandContext(GLRenderer.java:40) at code.game.Main.main(Main.java:150) AL lib: (EE) alc_cleanup: 1 device not closed```
And with VK=true I get
``` Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at code.engine.graphics.vk.VLK.createContext(VLK.java:87) at code.engine.graphics.vk.VLKRenderer.createWindowandContext(VLKRenderer.java:26) at code.game.Main.main(Main.java:150) AL lib: (EE) alc_cleanup: 1 device not closed ```
Sweeeet game! I loved it, SO MANY CUSTOMIZATION OPTIONS THOUGH!! I spent too long customizing the best battle ever XD
Love it can't wait to see where it goes from here!
Took me a second to figure out how to actually play, and I didn't realize you could shoot the asteroids and have them fall and kill you until almost 4 games in. I kept seemingly dying for no reason. Other than that fun game!
Dang! I'm getting a "This site can’t be reached" error! I'll try again soon, maybe the site is just busy.
I accidently soft locked myself from progressing, didn't have enough wood for ANYTHING and i couldn't get too far, restarted knowing that, and made it through fine. Interesting concept, agreed with others that being able to hold the button and farm would have been much better.
Love this game, all I think it needs is work on the level design and collision to make some of the puzzle solutions easier(The Box jumping puzzle in the snowy area was challenging to get right)
Beyond that more levels!
Funniest game I've played all LD. Controls are great, picking up and using stuff can be a bit off at times, but it works, short sweet to the point, definitely fun, will definitely have to check out Rude Bear Resurrection.
Interesting gameplay mechanic, frustrating at times, great at others. Overall a unique game!
This was a really good concept, I only wish you could carry more than one nugget and that killing an NPC would drop all their nuggets but yeah great game!
@Matt Fabius, Thanks! Yeah I wanted to do a tutorial or something last minute but I was cooked on time for the last day.
@MrTroy Yeah the random generation sometimes makes levels really easy and sometimes really hard. I would need more time to refine that so that it doesn't happen as much. A Locator would definitely help but might make the game too easy. One of the challenges in the game IS finding the gems, with a radar or by showing them on the mini map you essentially get rid of any challenge. The fact you don't know where the gems are and need to explore each world to find them is the main challenge. If I were to update it, and rework this I would have a map that automatically marks planets you've already been to therefore making finding planets you haven't been to easier. I wouldn't want to take away the need to explore and find them naturally because that's the core of the challenge.
@jasperarmstrong Yeah I rebalanced things really late in the development(a few hours before submission) so the random other gems do nothing. They were supposed to unlock the gates as you mentioned, but there were permutations of the random generation that would basically be a soft lose because no planets you could get too would have a type of gem needed to continue so I scrapped it.
@sachos345 Thanks for playing! Yeah the mini-map was mostly for spatial awareness, so you could mentally check off planets you've already been to. Similar to what I mentioned in the comment to MrTroy, the challenge comes from finding the gems, and the randomness makes it harder or easier sometimes. I wouldn't want to get rid of the challenge by showing the Warp Gems or the Ship on the map, but as I mentioned If I were to update it, I would have a map that automatically marks planets you've already been to, so you don't end up searching planets you know the gem isn't on.
As for the warp gems ending up in the black hole, that can happen, I realized this near the end but didn't have time to make a lose state for the ship or the gems falling into the black hole. for now it's a soft-lose state which given like 4 more hours would have been fixed. The random generation algorithm prefers planets be created in a tree pattern to the right fanning out 60 degrees from the planet before it, on one of the final nodes in the tree pattern is where it likes to place the ship, however there's a bug that causes it to sometimes be on the first planet when one of the tree branches ends on the first planet.
Finally That last thing I TOTALLY understand, I wanted to add a toggle for it, and ran out of time, I had put it in originally, then took it out and people in the chat complained because they liked it, so I put it back in, but didn't have time to edit in a "Press button to disable rotation" feature. That was like the next thing to be added.
@OccultOne Weird I gotta check to make sure that's not a bug because that's the first time It's done that. Huh... What were you using for a controller? Arrow keys+Z+X? Also what hardware are you running? It seems the physics simulation is going weird, probably because of a low framerate or something.
The other gems were supposed be currency to use the warp gates, but they got cut last minute(within an hour of submission) The Black Hole was slowed down to make the game easier because it was too fast and the people on my stream who played it said it was too fast. Unfortunately none of them ran into the slow controller bug.
UPDATE: Okay version 0.0.8 WebGL is up and should hopefully fix those issues.
* Added ability to toggle off camera rotation(For those with motion sickness R on keyboard Y on Xbox Controller) * Fixed a few physics bugs that would cause the running and jumping to be weird on different machines. * Fixed a bug where the game would not end if the player climbed in the ship. * Fixed a bug where the camera would tweak out * Fixed a bug where the Ship would end up on the planet closest to the black hole.
@OccultOne Weird that should be fine, I'm on an i7 with a 1050 and I haven't had any issues. I do know one bug that might have an impact, if you have very high OBS settings, then the CPU on OBS will slow the game down just enough to cause issues... Which has an issue because of an oversight on my part where I don't timestep the physics. So if the game is running slower than full speed it throws off the physics. I'm working on a bug fix for it and will update when it's fixed.
@the-jahn Thanks! We actually thought about that, there was mixed feelings about the camera rotation overall. Did you know that you can disable camera rotation with the R key on the keyboard or the Y button(or equivalent) on a gamepad? If you could, try playing the game with the rotation disabled, and see if you like it better!
Anyway yeah I love the music as well, I super appreciate @DanielJMus for hammering those out during my stream. They work super well.
@feips Thanks! I'll let @DanielJMus know you liked it!
@secret-tunnel Yeahhhhhh Originally there was going to be platforming challenges on each planet hence the jumping but it got scrapped for time, and to keep the world sizes as small as they were.
@multiplexor There actually is a fixed camera(assuming you played it recently) the R key or the Y button on a controller toggles on and off the camera rotation, I left the default as on because the game released with the rotation on but I totally play it with the rotation off.
@sparrow, Thanks! I also felt the camera was kind of disorienting, as a last minute change we added a toggle for the camera rotation due to possible motion sickness.
@puppetmaster Yeah I wanted to make the blackhole to become more menacing but that was something we didn't have much time for. The music is great another shout out to @DanielJMus for the music.
Gonna be a long one so I gotta make 2 posts!
@diknows "Everything functioned which is a big plus for every ludum dare game" true, I axed a LOT of features to make sure the ones that got in worked correctly, in fact since you mentioned the music, the music was actually intended to have a completely different purpose then how we used it, it was the theme for an axed Merchant character which is what the non Warp-Gems were for. Last minute we didn't have any overworld music so we went with it.
@simonreiser The colored gems were for an unused system, originally the gates were going to cost colored gems to use, it would consume the colored gems to unlock the warp pad, but I axed it last minute because it could make the game unable to be completed under certain circumstances.
I do want to continue working on the game, but the final game will look very different than this, as I'm probably taking the game in a significantly different direction. I was hoping to make something closer to a platformer combined with a point and click adventure game, so a lot of the arcade-y elements I shoved in for time, will actually be removed, for some more involved but slower paced gameplay, with a heavier focus on exploration.
Finally the jumping was originally going to be necessary but a lack of art assets, a lack of design direction and a lack of time, meant in the end all the platforming elements we had planned had to get canned in favor of completion. Originally the gems would be stacked on buildings and floating platforms and jumping would be required. The jumping is slower due to the way the planet gravity works, due to having to rework the controls so many times, I didn't have too much time to clean it up so when you jump the gravity pulls on you a bit more than it should and basically causes drag.
2/2 @stevie-bushman Yeah controls were hard because I actually had to rework them 3 times over the course of the whole thing due to lack of planning, I didn't know what the goal of the game was until day 3. For example the character at one point had a jetpack and could just fly around in space freely, and that was axed for the ship idea, which was axed again for the bunny character design.
@tuteupaituamae I try to understand games hahaha, if I didn't it would be hard to make games! I'll definitely check it out!
@narve I totally agree, the problem we had was that the gravity system wasn't well built as I've mentioned in some of the above comments, I had to rework the controls 3 times during the course of the jam. Due to the weak gravity on the planets, if the player was to run much faster than he did, he would actually lift off the ground and start to orbit until he left the atmosphere, which would have been a soft lock since once you left the atmosphere, you would be unable to move(the controls for movement only work inside the atmosphere due to one of the 3 control reworks)
The Minimap was also added late, the map is simply another camera that's farther away that also points at the character just like the main camera. The minimap was rushed, and only placed there because of the camera rotation, people who play with camera rotation off don't seem to use the mini map because with rotation off, you don't loose sense of direction. I planned no having a map, but not so much a mini map, one where you could set waypoints and mark planets as explored. Originally I was trying to make it more of a platformer crossed with an open world exploration point and click game. so instead of a mini map, it would be more like a compass, pointing at a waypoint you would set on the next planet you want to go to(This aligns nicely with whats next)
The warp pads were also introduced late, they were hacked in to make the game playable, as the idea wasn't to warp between planets but your character would actually be jumping between planets(hence the bunny shape to the main character) The problem was that in early tests of the jumping system, trajectory problems became SUPER apparent really fast as you would be off by 1 degree and miss the planet entirely and fly off into space.
In the final game, I was thinking about adding some kind of a tether or something so if you fail to touch down on a planet and reach some max length, it would pull you back in. Warps weren't supposed to be links between planets but more along the lines of markers that said: "Jump here and you might not miss the nearest planet" I want to highlight the main character's comical super jump that's so strong he can launch himself from planet to planet, so in a post jam version, I wouldn't even have the warp pads any more.
Definitely could use some targeting system but overall a fun game! I had SUCH a pain hitting the last ship when it came down to it.
Had a lot of issues with the jumping and clipping into walls. Good concept but needs a lot of work on the collision.
Fun game, Locks up randomly when I activate things. It says X to continue but then does nothing. Usually when activating the bread machine.
I had a lot of fun with this game, the game had just enough challenge to keep me going without being brutally difficult. I've played a few games like this during this LD and this one is one of the more fun iterations on the ship lander concept.
Fun game, just a classic shooter, reminded me a bit of missile command. Wasn't sure if the graphics were super blurry for a reason, but after a while I figured it was intentional.
Pretty fun, It took me a bit to figure out what to do, but I got there!
@Surovyi I updated the game, there was a bug with the mouse raycast in certain spots of the map! Try it again please!
@feathergunner, the dice rolls determine the movement speed of the elementals for that turn. As an example, if you roll a d8 and get a 6 the fire elemental can move 6 spaces. The air Elemental has the d12 which makes it the fastest, the earth gets the d6 and that makes it the slowest. I deffinitely think the game needs more information, The game had actually started out as a kind of RTS/Tower defense but then became tactics game as we got through day 2. The main gameplay mechanic(Charging the towers) wasn't even thought of until monday morning haha, so I only really had 1 day to get all the gameplay in.
@kleinzach Yeah I definitely get giving more info, I had planned to have damage numbers and stuff pop up when getting hit, there was also supposed to be a whole turn list shown to see who's turn it was and what the turn order looked like. There was also supposed to be numbers next to the health bars and such. The actual AI/movement system was pretty hacked together as originally the game was not supposed to be a grid based game, but an RTS. There's some bugs for example if there's a enemy at 4 tiles away and you roll a 5 you can actually click the fifth space and you'll move and extra 3 spaces to go around the enemy and the AI won't retread over old spaces so sometimes they choose the same space multiple times if they get stuck. All of this was because the AI was all programmed in the last day after a change in game direction. Skipping was planned again but there was not time. I was going to make the animation speed faster but I didn't have time for that either. Long story short that's the whole thing, most of the gameplay happened in the last day so only essentials got programmed in, none of the "Nice to have"s like skipping turns, phases, and animations, or showing damage numbers and more HUD than necessary to function.
@fledgeling93 Yeah I didn't get time to hook up the sounds for attacks turn ending and other things, a lot of the game came in the last day when the gameplay changed from a tower defense to a turn based tactics game. So yeah a lot of the audio/visual feedback didn't get in.
@3mpty Yeah there's a lot of waiting, the game was supposed to be a tower defense but due to time constraints became a turn based game because it was quick and dirty. We tried the dice bouncing off stuff but the problem is that sometimes it wouldn't end up landing on a face, which would glitch and roll a 0 instead of choosing a face. I would have loved to have put in more HUD stuff and whatnot but yeah just ran out of time.
@apple-dash Yeah it was a very ambitious project, you did get it right though originally it was supposed to be a tower defense, but I didn't have enough time to implement the features I wanted so in the last 24 hours as a quick and dirty option, I converted over to a tactics game. The audio sounds were in but I didn't have time to hook them up, There's also a lot of hud elements missing, including a list of turns health numbers, and damage numbers. Skipping was also added but the HUD element was not working correctly to skip the move phase, and finally yes there is not a lot of actual tactics involved, due to a lack of time the AI and stuff are super basic and there was supposed to be more variety to attacks. So yes I can see why you found it boring, there is a lot of content missing from the game due to the turn in the last 24 hours to a tactics game in order to finish the game to any degree. The freezing after killing an enemy bug has been resolved since you posted, but understandable if you don't want to try it again, thanks for the feedback though!
@tuomo
Thanks! I worked hard to get it where it is. Strange that you encountered that bug. I fixed it in the current live version of the game... Hmm if you do see this let me know if you were using BugFix_2 or not.
I know that the attacks are hard to notice I was going to add more particles and make the attacks stand out more. As you mention at the end, I also have sounds in the game files for this stuff, but they were added in the last hour with the HUD elements and I didn't get a chance to actually add them in.
The font and buttons were another thing I wanted to change, but I didn't have time since ALL the HUD elements got added in 1 hour before submission. I didn't even get a chance to play through the game fully before submitting(Hence the enemy death lockup bug)
Turn based snake, with tile based movement programming. I like it! Good job!
@blizary ME TOO! I got a hand with all forwards and "Turn Left, Turn Right" tiles so I inched my way straight into death XD
It's a Fun game! Sorry I raged at it on stream yesterday! I was very tired <3
It's pretty fun, I played a few levels in and died, when I hit restart it took me all the way to level 1 instead of restarting the level which was very frustrating.
@cubeeo Thanks for the heads up btw
@Deathray thanks! I'll let @pRoFiT know, he did the stone textures and the bump mapping!
@gus-the-shark The only thing I wish I had more time for is to polish the controls. Glad you liked the puzzles though, those were my favorite thing to design. The camera we debated a bit, but I think the camera angle we went with works best, and the post processing shader we had really pulled it all together!
@polychromial I believe I've fixed the issue at this point(all versions were having that issue), but if you still have an issue please hit up the Discord: https://discord.gg/uYKDyty I don't have a mac so I can't test it.
@videojames Thanks! We wanted to try and avoid a game that just increased in challenge like "More enemies" or "enemies do more damage"
@algebru WHAT?! Now I want to know how! XD
@elitegoliath - Yeah most of those we knew when submitting people would have issues with. I considered last minute making the loot not have rigidbodies just because the puzzles involved picking up loot in specific places. So going in, that was kind of a known issue but I didn't have enough time to fix it before the jam ended. The thing about needing more UI also came up, like a "0/50kg to go" and a Ui thing for what keys you had in your inventory. The main reason we had you drop the bag was we were designing the puzzles around the idea that you would fill the bag to a certain weight and then drop it in one of those pulleys(see the last level) but it was mid way in and there was a bug with the bag rigidbody that caused pulleys to stop working so we axed it and I added the wooden cubes. We are working on a change to the loot anyway to make them kinematic so this won't happen. I'll be posting any updates here/twitter @SnowdramaGames once we have an update.
@unlikelynomad - OMG I forgot that I had left the test key in for the ladder climb animation hahaha! Yeah the physics bugs were the big issue for most people. Sorry about that! Let me know on twitter(@SnowdramaGames) if you would like a post-jam version. We're planning on removing the item physics mostly because we designed puzzles around the item's placement so if you accidently kick an item you can get stuck pretty easy. With the item physics removed, the only way to get stuck will be jumping down a ledge you can't jump back up, and grabbing the wrong loot(See level 2 with the fools gold chest that makes you stuck if you grab it!)
@victorsimoes - That's the first I've heard of getting stuck on the ladder collider! I'll make sure the ladder doesn't have a collider in the post jam version
@fangzhangmnm - The time that was chosen was supposed to be pretty lenient, taking into account that people would have to restart, but I can see it being rough if you're trying to explore everything, and the physics bugs are really killer, something we're working on fixing(by making the loot not move anymore) As for the character controller, I tried to fix that by allowing it to slide by having no friction on the player collider but I think that the pointy edges of all the platforms made that still an issue, Something I'm discussing is to round all the pointy corners in the same bug fix version that has the update to the item rigidbody physics.
@hiyek - Glad you were able to finish the game! I actually discovered that the button we had mapped to start is actually clicking the right stick, I misread what button number is start. For the physics items falling through the floor we're removing the rigidbody, we did clever loot placement where picking up loot is strategic, and there have been lots of "I kicked it off the platform" and "it fell through the floor!" so we're making them static in an update soon. DANG IT I THOUGHT WE FIXED THAT WALL! hahaha anyway no worries! We knew the entry wasn't perfect when submitting but we agree it could be great with some work!
@kraftkar - Appreciated, we had originally been going for a Crash Bandicoot kinda soundtrack, a upbeat kinda jungle-y sounding thing. The controls can definitely be finicky I think I know how to fix it but yeah definitely can be messy. We plan on rounding the mesh corners to mitigate getting stuck on platforms, it only happens because the mesh corners are pointy. That falling off the tower happened to me as well, it was introduced in a bug fix that fixed jumping so we've got something in for that. We were also talking about adding in UI for the weight needed and the key inventory. We discussed dropping loot but we decided that part of the puzzle was deciding when to pick up loot and when to not(we tried to introduce that in the second level we dubbed "fools gold") As well as when and where to drop the bag in certain instances.
@algebru - AHHH yeah I forgot to pull the ceiling down in that level so you couldn't go over the door(probably fixing in the next build)
@mcovert yeah I was thinking of ways to fix the cube issue, the first thought was to light it on fire and after say 10 seconds it would burn up and then respawn or something, that would at least prevent you from needing to restart but would still waste some time
@alchemic yeah the key UI is definitely a thing we also want haha! We can't put new features in until post jam, right now it's all bug fixes. Speaking of, were you using the most recent version 1.1? and do you remember what level you skipped?(what was the core puzzle, I can iron it out from that)
Hey Everyone! We added some serious bug fixes and usability tweaks to the most recent version. I think this is all we'll fix until the jam is over, other complaints would require adding new code or new assets(New UI elements) And that'd be breaking the rules!
- Ported to WebGL, works great in FF Quantum, not so much in chrome. - Objects are now kinematic so they do not move(No more kicking them out of the level!) - Monkey statue is 25% smaller to make jumping over it easier(Get out of the way!) - Platforms have less friction now, getting stuck on corners is eliminated(mostly) Introduces new ~~bug~~ "feature": Slopes now let the player slide down them(Wheeee!) - Camera in ending scene is now using the post processing effect(Shiny) - Ceilings have been brought down in various levels to prevent(You cheaters!) - Input for pause on controllers is now the correct button(Start in case you're wondering!) - Scenes that shouldn't have pause menus no longer open the pause menu.(Yo dawg I heard you like menus) - Made snapping to the circle more reliable at lower framerate or during frame dips. No more falling off the level!(Hopefully) - Added an extra axis so that the D-Pad works the same as the analog stick(For those anti-analog fans out there!) - Changed the highlight color so it's easier to see what you are highlighting with a controller(Yes you can navigate menus with a controller!) - Changed the Drop key from Left Alt to Left Shift(Now WebGL users can drop the bag without also opening a menu and pausing the game!) - Tweaked some physics settings which are minor but will subtly make the controls better. - Reduced grass particles on the terrain in level 1 to try to get better framerate from Chrome WebGL(Firefox Quantum still has a higher framerate)
@jasperarmstrong - Unfortunately I don't have a Mac to test on, so I assumed it would hopefully work on Mac just like it did on windows. It's likely due to the shader not functioning properly or something, but without the ability to test on Mac I can't be sure. Good to know about the esc key, I totally spaced that, I already moved the Alt key for similar reasons, I'll make an update to add P as pause as well. Also in the green level you are 100% on point there, the correct way to beat it was to use the pulley to raise the other platform to get the key. The level had planed to have more of that kind of thing, but when adding a second one, the number of ways to get yourself soft locked tripled so I left it to the one, in hind sight it probably should have been an earlier level leaving the last one as the one with a bunch of keys.
Nice one! Loved the implementation of the theme
This game was super challenging but super fun! I played it again today while waiting for some files from a co-worker. Definitely a solid game.
The visuals were pretty good, the controls could use some work, also it felt like you were pivoting from a weird spot, not the center of the triangle. Also the losing coins thing was kind of annoying cause I got 0 points my first time, cause I always managed to brush the wall by the end of a lap Some feedback on losing coins and only losing some of your coins instead of all would be ideal. Maybe a mechanic like Sonic where you drop them and can collect them.
Chalenging but super fun, the FX make it look really good.
Amazing game! That said a map that expands as you explore as well as some enemy variety would go a long way to making it even better! I hope to see the project expand and grow!
Would have definitely have added a "no energy" mode so you can just run around and see the level It looked really nice but I couldn't get more than a minute in before I would die, I just wanted to see more of the level but cant do that because I die if I'm not INSTANTLY seeking out more energy.
A fun minigame, although I don't think you can hold down A or D which would be nice.
Interesting idea, only issue I have is that the monster has no attack telegraphing so I don't know when to start blocking. Also since the timing on the enemy attacks seem random, I can't avoid getting hurt because sometimes It attacks, then immediately attacks again without waiting, assuming I could attack after the enemy attacks I release block and he instantly hits me. Giving a delay after an attack to give an attack window, and a small animation to telegraph before an attack would go a long way to making this better. Take a look at something like Dark Souls, or even Megaman every enemy has a wind up animation or a predictable attack pattern of some degree that tells you "Hey if you don't dodge, I will hit you" giving the player the information needed to decide to dodge or block that way when they get hit, it's on the player for not paying attention to the wind up animation, and not on RNG.
@mrserp Thanks! Yeah I thought it was a pretty cool idea.
@sharky3188 Yeah the browser one is broken because I use a custom shader and it doesn't work in WebGL. I meant to take it down when I found out it was broken. I definitely understand what you mean about being an interior designer, the game was originally about a guy who hoards stuff in his house. That being said the HDD theme was kinda last minute due to art assets/textures, I didn't have time to make detailed wall/floor meshes, and @rot_god unfortunately didn't have time to do unwrapping for textures so I couldn't even use generic wood textures. I had to make one thing that would overhaul the theme which was why I went with the wireframe look. The models that @rot_god had made were already furniture pieces so either I used them, made new models, or I would have just had plain cubes which may or may not have been more appropriate, we'll never know hahaha! The controls are definitely a point of contention, I really liked the idea of a virtual cursor a lot since it would allow the game to support gamepads and I love when games have gamepad support. In reality, just using the mouse would have been better for PC players. Anyway Thanks for playing!
@lexyvil Thanks for playing! I'm still playing with balance on my end, the RNG for the rooms can be brutal because of the 90 second wait time between room spawns. Get 2 or 3 1x1 rooms in the first like 5 pieces and your basically screwed. My thoughts are to have wait time for the next piece be dependent on how big the piece is. So for example a 1x1 may be a 30 second wait, but a 2x2 might be 90 seconds. Room objects start spawning at 5 seconds apart but that shaves off a tenth of a second every piece until it's every 2 seconds. Which is the fastest the pieces will spawn. We want the difficulty to be challenging but not brutally so. We'll get it eventually and I'll do a post jam version with all the feedback
@pyjamaboy Yeah the controls are a bit complicated for sure. Tetris is kinda what we were going for, tetris if you could expand the playing field and you were inside of it. Like a Tetris labyrinth.
@huskitch Thanks It was a last minute addition so I'm glad people have liked it.
@chris-coe HAHAHAHA I figured that would happen for a few people, it's the one thing that initially throws people off, it's basically a twin stick shooter where instead of aiming the stick at an angle, there's a radius bounded cursor. Glad you were able to figure it out and actually give it a go.
@poio complex shapes were definitely something we thought of, but by the time we had the code implemented to allow for complex shapes and we were sure we could do them, it was after all the models were done for the original concept.
@ernest-mccracken Yeah they aren't immediately intuitive, the best way I've explained it to those having issues is that the game is basically a twin stick shooter. WASD/Left Stick to move, Arrow Keys/Right Stick to aim. Glad you liked the graphics
@drtizzle That sucks, I'll take the mac one down in a bit. Looks like the same issue that WebGL is having due to the shader I used. I am working on a fix so that it runs on platforms that don't support the shader, I'm just not sure what it is that's causing the issue.
@player-2 The main character is 100% the default cylinder with the same wireframe shader that everything else has. The graphics were planned to be fully textured, and the player was going to have a model, but @rot-god had only a few hours over the weekend, this meant we got the object meshes done but it prevented us from getting the objects textured or have time to make a main character. The lack of variety came down to a similar problem as the rest of the objects we also didn't originally have tech built to allow for T or L shapes(Objects were exclusively width * height) so I didn't originally count on us fixing it in time, therefore when asking for meshes I made sure the meshes fit a rectangle. We eventually got it working but it wasn't until the end of day 2 and we weren't able to go back and add meshes. As for music @danieljmus, who I normally work with for jams, was busy and so there was no music for this jam. Lastly thank you, I actually really liked the controls, this idea of a radius , they are something I was experimenting with for a much different game so it's good to finally get some feedback on them haha.
@nuriko55 Thanks! I thought it was pretty funny too, I'd love to do a second pass to really lean on what the game ended up being, originally it was about a guy hoarding stuff in a house and we switched it last minute due to lack of textures, no character model, and having furniture models. As for the controls, originally we only allowed the player to place things directly in front of them, basically removing the need for the second axis, but in practice it made it next to impossible to play just due to the nature of the precision needed to fix pieces next to each other. Some parts were not able to be placed based on their orientation, for example the 1x3 couch, when the player was facing down, could only be placed horizontally as when aligned vertically, the upper section of the couch collided with the player, not allowing them to place it. The virtual cursor ended up being the best solution to this issue. Besides having the cursor snap to a grid, I don't know how else we could simplify the controls and still make the game playable.
@drtizzle I have uploaded a new version for mac and WebGL where I've overhauled the graphics to use textures instead of the custom shader if you are interested in playing the game still.
@drtizzle Thanks! The controls seem to be tripping more than a few people up a bit, but I didn't expect it to work for everyone. The keyboard controls are super un-ideal and if I hadn't been targeting gamepad players so much I probably would have used the mouse, but I used this opportunity to design a control scheme that I felt was appropriate for if the game had been say a PS4/Xbox One/Switch game, with PC kind of falling on the wayside a bit(although maybe I could just map the mouse to the virtual cursor... hmmm didn't think of that at the time) Yeah we realized that the room RNG can really screw you over, I was thinking about how to balance that but ran out of time to actually implement it before the jam. Right now you wait 90 seconds for a new piece but I figured that time could be dependent on the size of the room you get. Say 15 seconds per grid space. that way if you get a 2x2 you wait 60 seconds for the next piece, where getting a 1x1 doesn't kill you as you only wait 20 seconds for the next piece(These numbers I worked out from average piece taking up 2 blocks, the room having 25 spaces, and each piece being added to your inventory every 2 seconds at it's fastest. if every piece is a 1x3, it would take just 8 pieces before you couldn't place one. with the 8th piece spawning at 16 seconds, a 15 second room time would mean that if you ONLY got big pieces you could survive long enough to get the next room, RNG be damned, with my only worry that the game might be too easy if RNG gives you only 1x1 pieces) Game balance still needs lots of work for sure hahaha. That's pretty good, I think that's better than I've gotten(I totally forgot to save my highest score whoops)
@tymus Thanks! Yeah the controls make more sense in context of a PS4/Xbox One/Switch controller. It was a weird concept for sure, I've mentioned in other comments that the game was originally about a guy hoarding stuff in his house which is why the objects are all couches, chairs, vases and tables. The pivot to a Tron-esque theme was only when we didn't have enough time to make textures for all the objects/rooms/player etc. It allowed us to quickly apply the wireframe and switch up the theme.
@anubhav-kashyap Yeah the controls are a bit rough, they were designed with a gamepad in mind(I used a wireless Xbox One controller), using both analog sticks, the left and right shoulder buttons and all 4 face buttons. The Keyboard controls are messy because it's hard to have the rotate/switch piece/switch mode where they were accessible at all times on a keyboard. I'm considering making some changes and adding mouse support instead of the arrow keys, to make the game more accessible.
@unitedfailures Yeah I wish I had time for some kind of idk tutorial? Or at least more detailed instructions. Most people get the hang of it after their first play, so I think that's all it would have had to really do is give a bit more control context.
@tymus Thank you!
@carlos-giraldo Yeah the controls are hit or miss, the challenge of positioning and being able to place objects was the point however. The idea for the gameplay literally was "You have to place walls to your own labrynth" but we know that the lack of balance between creating new rooms and needing to place objects make the game grow too difficult too quickly.
@steffo Nice! 2000 seems to be a sweet spot for points due to the RNG from what I've experienced. There were other objects planned, but there were issues with other sized ones, there were 1x2s almost ready but there was an issue with getting them placed correctly. objects always center at the middle, so only odd numbered width/height objects worked. so 1x1 1x3 and 3x3(or shapes that fit inside that shape like a + or large L shape) would work but any strange shapes wouldn't work. I didn't think of it when initially making it, and so it prevented any other types of shapes from working. I would have had to rebuild how placing objects worked to get it working and I didn't catch the limitation until Monday morning.
@mrtroy Hahaha yeah it's pretty heavy and has lots of info. Glad to hear you enjoyed it!
Actually challenging puzzles that made me think a bunch. Basically a complete game already although more levels would help, more easy levels might help players get into the mechanics better, the difficulty curve is good for the number of levels, but adding more easier ones would make the curve a bit more smooth.
Besides the physics and the cart being a huge mess, It was fun. Akin to things like Goat simulator, and Surgeon Simulator where the fighting the controls and physics is kind of expected.
Useability changes are what I'd love more than anything, Raycasts that actually pick up what I'm looking at instead of the object near my feet would be a HUGE improvement(But I already mentioned that on stream)
Leaving comments now(even though I played it on Monday, it's been a busy week) Overall a fun game, good graphics, funny idea. Perspective is kinda frustrating, because it's hard to see where the dogs will end up, the shadows help but its not perfect. The dogs also have strange hit boxes, where the tails and legs will prevent you from placing them, but then are also really hard to lay smaller dogs on top of. So leg space basically is wasted cause you can only place smaller dogs on the bodies of the larger ones. Overall it's feels like more of an exercise in patience more than strategy. Yes strategy is a part of it, taking the dogs off each other and then re-stacking them is a strategy, but get some bad RNG and it's basically over for you, due to this and the lack of precision placement(say like if it was on a grid) it feels less like Tetris, or a Towers of Hanoi puzzle and more like a physics sandbox.
Granted nothing I've said are things that haven't been said hahaha.
It was fun my high score is 608 Roomy's Room_2018-08-16_12-15-56.png
To extend the game's life, you could add maybe another button that adds a dash that's on cooldown where you ignore collision temporarily and just dash in a direction for a short distance. That would help you keep playing the game. Maybe have an energy meter that only fills when nobody is bumping into you(To keep it in line with the introvert theme), and dashing uses some of that energy.
I also found myself bumping into things that I didn't expect to. Is the collision at the feet? Where the shadow is? or is it the whole sprite? I feel like colision should only happen where my shadow is since that's the only way to tell where I am in the room due to the player hopping. If it's the sprite, then it makes sense I was getting hit because the player, even though I am fine at my shadow, would hop up and collide with someone above me even though we're on different a Z axis. I could have been mistaken, but just something to keep in mind.
Similarly I agree with @twinghosts It might be cool if the enemies bounce off of you as well, more realistic, since right now they are unstoppable forces hahaha
You saw me play it so :P Commenting here to get that sweet LD Karma haha. Good job! Super interesting core mechanic.
@egordorichev Yeah, karma affects the "Balance" factor, people who vote on games, give feedback and get likes on posts all gain karma, which helps promote your game on https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/games
Not sure exactly how it factors in but I know there's a benefit to leaving feedback on other people's games
@guilhermesouza Thanks! Ahh yeah I have it zoom out based on how far it is from the player. you can use D and C to zoom the camera in and out.
@dizzy Thank you!
@niborious Thanks! The plan was to have a 3D battle scene, but it was cut for time. I wanted to do camera pans and such as well and unfortunately that just never ended up happening.
@bendev-games Thank you! Yeah that was something I considered fixing It was originally SUPER fast so fast that you were almost twice as fast as enemies, If I speed the enemies up a bit, I think I can also make the player move a bit faster(I might sneak this into a 0.6 build in a few hours. Small buff to speed counts as fixing a bug to make the game playable right? Haha)
@heyycap 0.6 has some speed buffs coming. Sadly I don't honestly recommend it until we get a post jam version up *Spoilers* There's nothing really there. Since we don't have any items in the game, there's nothing hidden in the forest or dungeon to find, and since we don't currently have exp in the game, fighting the monsters is just a distraction.
@miltonsilva Google translate did a pretty bad job with this one :/
@wheatleyscience Thanks! Yeah the project was super ambitious, so we didn't realize we wouldn't have enough time for all the content and such. There was so much more planned but it got cut to make sure we'd finish.
@gebowunjo Thanks! Yeah we didn't know how huge it was until we
@popdaddygames Yeah we learned a ton! I only recently learned the tricks I used for the cutscene system. And this was my first time implementing them so there were some pitfalls I learned there.
@joramwolters Yeah haha super ambitious, thanks for playing!
@okuar Yeah I took the night after to sleep haha, I streamed for 13 hours that day so when I passed out at 5 am tuesday morning I was done for a bit haha
@johara-dutton that's an issue we definitely struggeled with, It was a challenge as we had a new artist on the team, and I did the 3D models this time(usually I only dabble in 2D and UI stuff) So there was lots of issues. I also struggled with texturing otherwise I could have had the models done and we could have gotten the battle scenes done in 3D which would have definitely helped with that. The enemies and characters were also done by different people so there's an even bigger disconnect. So I totally agree. Thanks for playing!
@tacohej Yeah same I wish there was more variation in enemies. I also wish there was more to the combat like experience or unlock-able skills but we definitely ran out of time for any of that.
I don't think I'd have done anything different per-se but I would put more focus on content and less on the environment, as good as the environment is, the hours I spent working on all the non essential models in the game could have been time working on scripting more dialogue, more NPCs, there was even supposed to be a second town between the dungeon and forest.
@jlv Thanks! We tried to give a psuedo-retro-modern hybrid feel, for example the music was inspired by Final Fantasy and Golden Sun. As for the controls I think personally I struggled finding one that works well. I mapped it to the default GBA emulator controls(at least VBA) ZX being the GBA AB buttons, and AS being the GBA left and right triggers. But yeah controller is definitely better haha. I also agree the text is super slow, I appreciate you pointing it out. I'll add that to the next patch to increase it a bunch.
@eddie-li Thanks! Yeah sorry the keyboard controls were kinda tough to figure out since we needed essentially 6 buttons and a d-pad. Apprecate the feedback though. We'll see if we can make it more bearable.
@aortega Yeah it was super ambitious, I couldn't settle on a good control scheme so I used the default-ish GBA Emulator VBA default controls(ZX for AB, AS for LR etc). The combat I can definitely understand being confusing, cause the vague hint at the beginning doesn't really help too much, I didn't want to outright explain it because I wanted some of that "Aha! I figured it out!" going on but yeah. I think pacing could have been helped as well but with a lack of content, there's not much we could do there. Thanks for playing!
@ninnec Thank you! Yeah I totally get where people are coming from with it being kinda boring, the open world is cool and all but there's nothing there, so it becomes hard to want to explore anything. Hahaha I'm glad someone got a laugh from it!
@coleslaughter Thanks! We had a lot of stuff going on with the graphics there. For sure, the original plan was to hide skill stones, items and other things that gave the sprawling levels more purpose, unfortunately that ambition came with a cost, there just wasn't enough time for more content. I gave the enemies a speed buff in 0.6 because it was possible previously to just walk past everything skipping all combat entirely you walked twice as fast as the enemies so it was a cakewalk to avoid everything. We also buffed the healing on 0.6 and fixed a bug where you weren't actually healing but apparently that wasn't enough to make the combat easy enough. I also realized we didn't explain the health recovery well especially due to the tutorial being vague. I appreciate the feedback and thanks for playing!
@fzillo Thanks! I wish I had more time to create more NPCs and flesh out the world a bunch more. It was a struggle for sure, that ambition came at the cost of content sadly haha. Thanks for playing!
@mirsakka Yeah the keyboard controls definitely were a bit of a challenge because of the camera and such, Honestly, I totally understand why so many RPGs have fixed cameras or cameras that you can't directly influence. We worked super hard on the graphics and music so thank you!
@aim Thanks! We tried hard to do a modern retro feel, the top percentage rattata thing is actually a whole story in itself involving the cutscene system.
@arron-fowler Where were you standing? The Camera system has some whisker raycasts that go from the camera to slightly left and right of the player that cause the camera to turn to prevent the player from being obstructed by buildings, trees etc. If you were standing in a corner somewhere that at no angle these raycasts weren't hit, it will spin until it finds a location where the raycasts aren't hit. Also did you have a controller hooked up. Some controllers cause issues as their analog mapping is different than the configured axis. It's possible that due to another input that isn't the keyboard, the other input method was constantly pressing the camera turn axis.
@arron-fowler appreciated, I just am trying to figure out how to replicate it.
@arron-fowler appreciated, I am trying to figure out how to replicate it.
Great game, love the idea, I would like to bring up one thing I thought of after playing it on stream yesterday(also want to get that LD Karma haha) I'd like to see it more twin sticky I don't mind the stop to shoot like gauntlet, but just being able to shoot at non 45 degree increments.
Clever use of the theme! Lots of fun!
Loved the game, nice use of the theme. Totally my kind of game.
Decent if not simple game, the good: Art looks pretty good, the music is nice, gameplay is okay. The bad: Gameplay is JUST okay. Needs a hold to shoot option. Camera needs to zoom out a bit, I know you wanted to show off the character art but do something like have the book take up the right 2 thirds of the screen, and then zoom in when opening the book. Book also needs a close button not just the E hotkey.
Definitely interesting, the random levels were cool although I sometimes completed levels without doing anything hahaha! There was some good ideas here I just think hand crafted puzzles and removing the destroy wall mechanic would make it more interesting. Hand crafted puzzles would guarantee a solution and removing the wall destruction would make the game more about puzzling than finding the least number of walls to smash.
Interesting idea, needs checkpoints, I didn't understand the 4th puzzle with the colored flooe and because of that It made me play through the whole game again. If it just started you back at the beginning of the level it would be much better. My only other gripe is that I can't press something to skip dialogue boxes, especially when I see them 4 times over the course of replaying the game. Otherwise interesting concept
One of the more innovative games I've seen! Clever use of the multiple windows to have unique mechanics. Loved it!
Lots of glitchyness with movement and stuff but overall an interesting platformer. Liked that the powers reset each level so you start each level with nothing. Definitely needs some level design love but I think it has potential
@adamcyounis Thanks! Sorry about that crash hahaha Yeah unfortunately I ran out of time for too much balance for the zombies. The idea that's half implemented is that zombies spawn faster during the day(This part's in) and move faster(this part's not in) We did this to go against traditional zombie paradigms and as a way to counter the fact that it's easier to scavenge during the day since you don't have to use the flashlight at all. This way, although harder, it's better to scavenge at night, and then during the day defend against the zombies! We also planed to tune the stick's damage back, give it knockback, and boost gun damage but again ran out of time to really balance. I'd rather the game be too easy for a jam than too hard and have nobody beat the game though.
@nachtwitch Thanks! Im really happy with the way the controls felt. Glad you liked it!
@zimennik Yeah we over balanced a bit too easy right at the end in the last few hours because the game was nearly impossible to beat before that but we didn't have enough time to go back and make it harder again. The version coming after the jam ends is going to have significantly more challenge.
@gaming-night yeah normally I'd do a pause, the problem was that on the second day we had to cut the inventory code I was working on that was tied to the pause. So it wasn't till too late(4 hours to go) that we'd have to write in new pause state code, and other things that needed completion were just more important that pausing.
@skyridge Yeah originally all weapons killed with one hit, so we balanced the guns and then forgot the stick.
@pedromgdo Hahaha that's awesome! Thanks!
@wr4thon Sounds like a mouse issue, it's probably registering as multiple ticks I might be able to fix it on the software side in the future but I've already made some post jam changes so I can't make a new build. Thanks for letting me know I'll make sure I look into what the cause is.
@koukwst I think you might be the first person to have found the item. That's super lucky too, because it can be in multiple places on the map. Thanks!
@lereveur Yeah it's definitely too easy, the changes we've made to the post jam version make it significantly harder. The secret weapon is pretty out of the way and randomly chooses a spot on the map every time you start. we didn't want it to be easily found, and finding it just makes the game even easier than it already is.
@tcicerodev I'd have to see it, not sure what you mean curved weirdly if you can get a screenshot share the link and I'll look into it
@sorlok Thanks! There are only 4 in the game so that makes sense you got them all. The flashlight was done using Unity's experimental 2D lighting which does not currently support shadows so there was no way to do that, and the days were definitely too long for the scale of the map. The time was broken into 90 second stages, Morning and evening did the light transition and night and day stayed the same brightness. So each day was 6 minutes long. I think 4 minute days would have been a little better
Managed to get down to 1 enemy left and can't find him :( sounds like I won't be beating it, Could definitely use a radar or at least an arrow pointing to nearby enemies or something with the camera unable to zoom there's really no way to find the last one. Otherwise I enjoyed the game, the arm mechanic is really interesting, and though it started out tough, I managed to understand. The energy bar is a bit too small initially though I ran out of power a couple of times before I could get a hold of the game. Either way good work!
Easily one of the more innovative entries, I didn't personally have much fun with it(There are not many choices right now) BUT the point is that it gets more fun over time. I'm going to come back after judging and rating is over and see what the game ends up like.
@cyriaque Not saying it's a bad game either! Just that I think more people need to play it to get more responses and paths in. I posted it in my discord to get some of them to play.
Already gave feedback on stream but but interesting concept. Need more incentive to not just click around and guess on one panel. Overall a fun take on the "Spot the difference" type of game!
Sometimes blocks just randomly teleport to spots and I got stuck with a vertical tower that I couldn't get over. I couldn't really control where the blocks went, it would be nice to have a visual indicator of where the blocks will be placed so I have control over where they go. Otherwise really interesting concept!
Don't know how much I can add to these comments haha so I'll try and add something I didn't see.
The hitbox shifts slightly when turning around so in the green section with the series of short lasers to jump over I would jump over but be really close to the laser but I'd be okay but then I would turn around to adjust my position and I'd die because the hitbox shifts into the laser and then since knockback only hits you backwards compared to the player's facing direction and not away from the source of the hit, I would get stun locked and die.
After I got the prompt to return the things I'm not sure if it's intended but I was able to return the gloves 3rd and then was unable to complete the game because I could no longer wall jump up to return the other items.
Good atmosphere, movement is WAY to slow, needs to be faster especially if you expect people to play more than once. I can't seem to find the 4th ending, only guess is it's something to do with the axe but I can't grab it.
@bitingcold - Yeah I'm working on fixing that hahaha It's some leftover code that was supposed to handle the controller for menus.
@alpharock6 "No digital people were harmed in the making of this video game, the programmers on the other hand, their livers didn't like what happened later"
@chrissimas Sorry! I had no way to determine how loud the sounds might be on other peoples computers! I'm going to push a change soon that halves the volume.
@listonos clearly nothing wrong with their methods haha. Sorry about the sound(see above) the cops were really hard to tune, and I think there's a bug where they always wander, after something, I'm looking into it haha.
@myles-mccoy You and me both, Burn it all down.
@connie-liu Ahh that stinks, I added the dialogue to try and explain what the population bar was, but I can imagine it's not always intuitive what the goal is.
@drewg8 I should point out now, that there are actually alternate palettes if you open the menu! Also a pixelization filter for the retro enthusiasts.
FirestarterSS2.png FirestarterSS3.png
@chromaphase yeah there's a lot of balance things I could think of. Originally it was supposed to ramp up in difficulty, buildings would spawn faster, cops would be even more aggressive. The cop's navigation AI is really bad too, and I would have liked to improve that. The walking animation was an oversight because I had intended for the game to always have the pixelation on, when on I hardly noticed it wasn't moving, but when we defaulted it to be off, that's when I noticed and at that point it was too late to really spend time on it.
@verbvirus Thanks! I think we spend maybe TOO long on the visuals, and I personally over complicated it by wanting to use a custom palette shader, If I had been smarter I could have done it much faster. As for the theme, late into development I almost switched it to be a firefighting game, because I was concerned that the dark nature of it would turn people away but I didn't have enough time to convert everything and we would have had to throw out the idea of police or other NPCs on the map entirely. Maybe in the future I'll convert it over to a firefighting game. We'll have to see haha!
@besto Yeah there's a bug with the police, not sure what it is, it has something to do with something added in the last few hours involving the police wandering around but I think they congregate in a single place and it overrides a lot of the chase logic.
@ponypen The idea was kind of a "The anti-hero that nobody appreciates because they don't see the problem" idea. You're attempting to save the city from becoming an overcrowded slum by preventing people from moving in. The character's goal isn't to burn down the city, but to save the city by keeping the city from becoming overcrowded in an unconventional manner. I tried to come up with a more interesting scenario then a generic superhero "Save the city" thing, but without more time to make the nuance of the situation more obvious, It doesn't get conveyed well.
@kjscott The bar on the right is a meter of the population, and the population increases every 5 seconds. When the bar fills, it's game over from population growth, when it empties it's game over from burning too much. Could you not see the bar? If so that's a bug I'll have to look into(Unless you played on the GB green palette, it's a known issue that the background and foreground colors are the same therefore the bar doesn't look different, it's an easter egg but not intended to be played on seriously)
@hwaet No there is no win condition, the goal is to survive as long as possible without the population going to high or too low(very easy right now as there's no increasing difficulty)
Really fun game, would have liked a bit of a larger screen hahaha I scaled it up in the browser but yeah overall had a lot of fun, worst thing I ran into was sometimes I'd click and accidentally move outside the window and it would get stuck held, and that was mostly on me.
Ran into a bug where the keyboard no longer worked after tabbing out so I had to restart and It didn't save in local storage or something sadly, but I did beat it! great game! One of my favorites!
@roolow yeah the curfew was supposed to matter a bit more, but would have required adding more items. What was supposed to happen was that the day reset would remove all your upgrades(but not bones) so the idea would be that some bones would rely on pretty tight timing of knowing EXACTLY what upgrades you need for any one bone. As an example, imagine the temple had a leash item that lets you pull some blocks,the south river was also going to have a cave that was blocked by pullable blocks. You'd have to coffee -> ball -> leash all in one day cycle to be able to get the bone in the cave. The reason we changed this was because we found that it would be really annoying if you weren't making the right connections between upgrades and puzzles so each rotation you just slam your head against the wall trying to essentially route a speedrun for each bone.
@neowhoru @thestoff Thanks! Yeah for sure, I didn't have time to go record sounds though, so I prioritized making features and having content than having sound.
@tomatolamp Thanks! I love the gameboy/color era(if you check firestarter my last LD game, it also does the 4 color palette thing) and this time I wanted to try to do a Zelda-like, so I tried to make the gameplay similar to my favorite Zelda game, Oracle of Ages/Season
Yeah there's definitely plans to add audio, and I want to re-visit the mechanics a bit. I agree the curfew is kinda forced though I think it works, the design was supposed to be a slightly modified version of Minit(Definitely check it out if you like this kind of game) where this kind of thing works very well. In Minit you only get 60 seconds and then you respawn back at your house. So that's where the respawn/curfew mechanic came from. It's funny because I felt the same way in Minit, it weirdly was fine until I spent 20+ respawns going "IDK where to go..." So yeah I can understand how the respawn can kinda hinder the experience if you're stuck.
I think I know where you got stuck as well, I believe there's an NPC in the town that hints at the solution(I won't spoil it if you want to go back after I add audio)
@sevenlevelgames Thanks! I tried to make sure for this game that I gave myself around a full day just to add content, something I had not done in the past.
@gabriel-dias-oliveira-de-almeida Thanks! glad you enjoyed it!
@lereveur Yeah, I did think of that actually, there was the idea that if you made it home before curfew, you could bury an item in your inventory so you can grab it the next day, but we ran short on time before I could flesh that out and decided to cut it as well. At that point we just changed it to be a short cutscene showing you going home. Definitely could have done a lot of things just needed more time haha.
@lebrra Yeah I wanted to get to animations but ran out of time. Sounds I thought about adding like some CC0 ones I found online, but didn't get a chance to build the tools to play the sounds either. Spent too much time trying to come up with the few mechanics it had sadly. Thanks for playing!
Nice game, A bit on the easy side, and the game breaks down if you play it for long enouh(get like 200-300+ turrets) Otherwise good game!
Was pretty fun, getting the paper in the last level was really hard(even if it wasn't necessary) I ran into some weird glitches where I would go in the correct door and end up back in level 1-1. For example I'd go from 1-1 to 1-2 through the upper door, and then go into the right door like the note says, but I'd end up in 1-1 again. Are the doors randomized or something? Anyway nice job
Definitely needs an inverted look option. Doing this in a time limit is very hard when the controls are inverted. An options menu on the title screen would be helpful.
I found the layout to be confusing, I wasn't sure what was changing so I just kept running forward till a door didn't open then turned. So found a lot of empty rooms. IDK where anything was really.
Thanks for linking this to me! Easily my favorite game I've played so far, It's hilarios, It's fun, It's silly, it's great nuff said.
Nice chill casual game, Only advice really would probably be to choose a different audio track, the music felt a bit too hype for something so relaxing. Something more chill would really make it zen. Overall great game.
Great game, took some time to understand what was happening after the first couple puzzles but after that it was smooth sailing. Loved the use of multi step puzzles that didn't just boil down to "Stand here with the first bot, stand here with the second bot = Win" there was actually some puzzles that required multiple steps that required thought.
Small Bug: Instagram and Site links are broken on the main menu in WebGL
Fun game, the camera as mentioned could use work(honestly just nest the camera under the player it doesn't seem like unlocked camera is needed)
I think that the buildings(if you're going to make them vanish) should wait until the player has picked up the gold. I don't think I got higher than a 25 score because often the buildings would vanish with my gold. If anything leave a gold pile behind? But personally I don't think the buildings need to vanish.
The first time the npcs were like "I WISH TO PURCHASE!" I laughed, loved the voice sounds.
Overall good job!
Once I turned down the sound, It was pretty good, wish there was more levels with more unique track designs but definitely a start!
I wasn't sure if I reached the end, since I could still move and there was no indicator that I had finished but overall amazing idea, loved the end, I'd like to see an expanded version, maybe a redemption arc? Maybe you actually break the loop?
Great game, art and music were great, definitely a bit of a massive difficulty spike towards the end timing the jumps between the bullets were either too close together or too difficult without any audio cues. Of my total play time I spent 75% of that time just beating this room alone(15 minutes on the bullet room vs 5 minutes on everything else). Biggest complaints is it's possible in some puzzles to die then have to do the whole puzzle set up again by dying in 3 other spots first then fully resetting. Definitely need a reset button, because it can be challenging to find other spots to die where they aren't in the way. Nice game.
Really interesting idea, like a rail shooter, but on a loop. Would have been easier to aim if the reticle was easier to understand. I think a different aiming scheme could have made it easier to understand like an on screen reticle like you'd see in a light gun game. Not being able to just turn 360 and shoot in any direction was pretty annoying as well. I'd like to have had full rotation vs having to press a button to do a 180. Finally I'd add some kind of on screen indicator of the whats in front even if looking away. Maybe do some kind of picture in picture that always shows forward.
Super fun, it was nice that the ball had a bit of weight to it, made controlling it have a bit of a learning curve to it.
@profit Yeah It's 9pm and I've been working since 3am. I'm getting some sleep before I rate any games hahaha! But I saw that you submitted! I'll check it out when I get up!
@twigg Yeah the camera was supposed to be able to rotate, but I didn't get around to adding that.
@drew-abegg huh I didn't run into that, thanks for mentioning, I'll look into it and get a bug fix out for it.
@neowhoru Thanks! This was the first time I've done music for the jam that wasn't made by someone else. I don't really make music so I spent maybe too much time on it hahaha.
@eldogg Thanks, yeah I can understand that, I could see it being more of an issue if the game demanded more precision.
@lannden Thanks! Yeah if I added harder rooms and such then I think it'd need to be less floaty.
@roolow It was not being generated, it was a 6 or so minute song and it crossfades in a spot where it's not so obvious when it loops. Yeah I had plans for more rooms like rooms with pistons, stuff like danger pools(lava?), maybe other nightmares(not the ones chasing you) and potentially simple puzzles. Also yeah the downside to the randomly generated rooms is that we could set limits, but in the end, some levels could get very large, one level I spawned, went one way, and spent like 3 minutes going down a winding path only for it to be a dead end, the exit was like 3 spaces away in a different direction.
@tomatolamp Yeah I definitely wanted more obstacle variety, I mentioned above that I wanted things like Lava, pistons with spikes, other nightmares other than the ones chasing you, and possibly some things like simple puzzles. The random generation though would have made more complex obstacles more annoying beucase there could be some really long dead ends, and making everything more tedious.
@fupi Thanks for playing! It is not infinite it only goes 6 levels deep. It does have music, not sure why you couldn't hear it, it plays automatically at the start. But yes it is pretty shallow, I did want more variety of stuff, puzzles in rooms, rooms with lava and pistons with spikes, other enemies, but we only worked for 2 days, and I did everything but the maze generation, so I didn't have enough time for more content.
@lereveur Yeah I did intend for the camera to be able to be rotated which I definitely think would have helped, I felt it too cause going towards the screen was annoying because you couldn't see where you were going.
Found the edge of the level, might want like a permanant wall to prevent falling out of the world. Otherwise good job, simple concept but it's a nice game. I'd add sounds for hitting, and a toggle for inverting vertical mouse look(Yes I am one of those players)
Another thing to consider is adding a script that disables the "Quit" button on the menu if it's WebGL this causes the game to crash if you try and do Application.Quit(); I use something like this:
```cs public class HideInWebGL : MonoBehaviour { public void Start(){ #if UNITY_WEBGL //this will only be called on WebGL, so put this on your quit button. this.gameObject.SetActive(false); #endif } } ```
I'd also make sure to look into some kind of anti soft lock mechanic. I can Imagine a situation where you break the pick, then buy an upgrade only to then not be able to buy the pick repair and being stuck with an upgrade but no pick and being unable to progress. A simple one would be to make the repair free, requiring you just to go back to the table to repair, so it'd be impossible to soft lock that way.
Looks like the Windows and Linux versions are not visible. I only see the Mac version on itch.io
I think for me was a challenge more in perspective than controls(I played both Keyboard and mouse) There's some weirdness with rotations and my expectation of gravity that doesn't line up quite right. I'm not sure if that's some element of how the gravity is working but if I rotate the planet so that I'm falling straight down then center of a shaft and turn the planet, I expect my momentum to continue going "down" relative to the screen until either I hit the bottom, or rotate enough that the shaft hits the side. Instead there's this odd air control that causes me to like move sideways instead of still falling. For me the problem is less the controls and more how the character's position and momentum work, they line up in a way that doesn't match my mental expectations about how the visuals tell me the game should be working. This dissonance makes it frustrating to play because I can't intuitively feel how a rotation will affect the player, making it feel like it's near impossible to control, regardless of keyboard or mouse controls.
Cool idea though I like the characters and graphics and music and such! Nice work!
I guess the question is that does the rotation rotate the existing momentum or position? Imagine you removed the colliders, what happens when the planet is turned? I would presume it should behave like dropping a marble in front of a spinning wheel. It would just fall straight down and nothing would interact with the marble. However in the game it seems to change the player's position relative to the rotation like the player is parented to it and the initial downward force becomes a left/right force because the direction of the existing momentum changes, though I may be mistaken on the momentum part.
As with others It took me a bit to actually understand what was happening in game BUT once I figured it out it's definitely an interesting game. It's very simple in concept which is nice and It looks visually interesting very alien in nature, once you decipher what the arrows actually represent it's a very cool idea.
@wyl-team Thanks for playing! Thought it was a pretty funny idea when we were brainstorming ideas haha!
@colbymakesgames You can invert the look in the menu! Yeah I figured that might trip people up, if you're looking towards the front of the boat port is the left side, and starboard is the right! Starboard is the side where the steering oar is on old boats, and port is the opposite of that because that's the side you load cargo on and off the ship when docked at a port! That said the boat model we used it is hard to tell which side is which because it's hard to tell which way is forward T_T The bow/front is the raised area and the stern is the lower side.
@neowhoru thanks for playing! Yeah I really put the game together in like one day of work total hahaha. As for the negative score, it's because you lose points when you vomit on the boat and cargo becomes worth less if you vomit on it! Vomiting over the side of the boat doesn't make a mess so you don't lose points! So to get a high score you need to manage vomiting over the side of the boat and moving the boxes around!
@dedjo0 The controls can be reversed in the menu! Thanks for playing!
Really good looking game, plays well, I'm glad keeping the cargo on the boat isn't actually that important. Got to around 6k points before I just got tired and crashed intentionally haha
@thestoff It was a challenge but we got there! hahaha Thanks!
@roolow Yeah, because of the lack of team this time around I made sure to keep the mechanics minimalistic so I could focus on animations, sound and polish. Because of that I didn't actually really test "playing" the game beyond "Okay this doesn't break, cool" so I didn't really consider what the gameplay experience would actually look like in sustained play.
@tomatolamp Thanks! The reset button was a post jam feature that didn't get any real testing, but it was enough of a roadblock that I added it in, having to fully refresh the browser tab to restart wasn't great, I'll have a fix for it pushed soon. Otherwise yeah as I mentioned to roolow, I didn't really test gameplay besides to check if it was functioning or not, the focus was to implement the most simple mechanic possible and then the rest of the jam was animation, sound, and polish.
@dmtroy yeah the pace at the start is slow so that you have time to see the tutorials and learn the controls and mechanics. I agree with some of the later comments though and it should ramp up further right now it caps at one line destroyed per 5 seconds.
@andreish The colored blocks are just colors, they are all identical except one thing: combos. the game is supposed to be a hybrid of a "match 3" style game and a platformer, you combo blocks of the same color together by making 2x2 grids or larger and that nets you bonus blocks in your inventory of that color to offset permanently destroyed blocks at the bottom in the lava. For example a 2x2 when dug up, will return 6 blocks instead of the 4 used to create the 2x2.
@leom @kack3y Yeah, this jam I had a high focus on polish vs complex mechanics, my goal was to focus on making a single mechanic and then polishing everything about it. So I did animation, music, sound, particles etc. but that left like no time for actually programming more complex mechanics. I had plans that involved more complex patterns rather than just the simple combos, but those slowly got replaced by spending several hours animating the Demon in the background, having actual character animation etc. Something like a high score makes sense as well, though there was not enough time to actually add that, I'd need to have done it after the deadline and I'll probably add a post-jam version with a score, but this was it at the end of the jam. I made sure my post-deadline bugfix/edits didn't affect the state of the game(sound/music toggle, restart button)
@agent-peterson Thanks! Yeah I liked the idea of having to destroy blocks to progress, but then blocks are also needed to not lose so there's a trade off. The music was great, that's @rot-god he spent the jam working on that.
@matthewrobo Yeah for sure, I had planned other things like combos that require multiple colors or specific patterns, ways to make you need to spend more time making complex shapes rather than just making big shapes to make lots of blocks. I leaned away from a Faster game pace initially because the PLAN was that only squares would work so only 2x2/3x3/4x4 etc. but the way the blocks are detected is more like a flood fill that looks for any 2x2 space. That would have made it harder because then 20x2 wouldn't combo, and so you'd need to spend more time placing the blocks in that block shape, I playtested under the assumption that would be the case, and that speed made sense because it was making a 5x5 was nearly impossible at the fastest possible speed 4x4 was risky and only 2x2 and 3x3 were reliable. When I found my combo code made odd shaped groups vs square groups, it made the towering strategy the best option because getting up high and making a 20x2 was faster than having to manually make multiple 4x4s.
High score of 57, I also found movement confusing at first(I expected left right to rotate around the building not choose the direction) once I got past that overall good game!
Biggest complaint is that the audio balance is off, the background sounds are way too quiet, and the sound effects are way too loud. The background city ambient noise doesn't get in the way of the game since there's no audio cues, so it can be much louder without getting in the way. I turned up the volume assuming the game was just overall very quiet and had my eardrums blown out by the whistle sound.
Fun game, I got the powerup and there were so many enemies that I couldn't change direction and I just jumped on enemies across the stage right off the side of the screen lol. Good job
"Welcome to the shop" lol Had a lot of fun, funny idea for sure, overall good game!
Loved this, it was great, too bad I couldn't play with a light gun but still lots of fun! Some of the hits I took were kinda cheap IMO like as an example I'd shoot the icicle in the middle with the single shot and the tip would be floating in the middle of the air and still hurt me. Beyond that overall good stuff, had fun!
@thestoff Yeah, I realized after I uploaded that the build version scales the renderer down a bunch, so they become illegible, especially if you play in the window and don't full screen.
The music came out amazing, originally I was just going to use it for like menus and outside normal gameplay like it would pull back when paused, but when I realized it would work perfect to tell with an audio clue when the timer was paused and not paused, it just worked great.
Anyway Thanks for playing!
@yirsi Thanks! I had intended to make the map have like store names on them so that you could see roughly where items might be so if they asked for a hat, you could see a store named like "Caps-R-Us" or something.
@jhoffis The map was basically a canceled feature, Originally the partner character would wander the mall and go to various stores and you'd have to use the phone to find out where they were to deliver the items rather than them standing in the coffee shop the whole time. So yeah the map is basically pointless due to cutting that feature, and then like I mentioned in the above comment, it would have had like store names and such on it so you'd have a better idea of what stores have what items in them like "Coffee Donuts" and "Pursetopia"
It makes sense to have added like dialog where it's like "I didn't ask for a hat" when you turn items in, especially when the items text isn't readable like the Quadcopter in the upper right, but I didn't do that for speed reasons, if I were to do that there'd be a line per item that you brought, and the timer doesn't wait if you bring an incorrect item so for brevity, I made it a single line that covers all items. This could eventually be mitigated too by just having the item names be readable so you know what you shouldn't pick up.
Maybe if there was a more complex system, you would be allowed to trash items out of the inventory so you don't deliver the wrong item but there'd need to be some kind of penalty for doing that, so maybe you needs to spend points/money to buy items? There's some stuff that could be done but in the end this is what we ended up with.
Overall though the game is intended to be difficult and so it's not expected for you to get high scores on your first play. I didn't really playtest much until after the jam beyond making that the game was playable. My first few game I ended up getting like 5400 points likely because I had remembered where some of the items had been. It's expected that it would take 3-4 plays to memorize all the item locations, at which point I started getting over 10k points. My goals this time were to make the game have a steep learning curve in that you need to memorize where all 23 items are and memorize the layout of the mall and have ramping difficulty in that the partner asks for increasing numbers of items over time.
Some tips for another playthrough would be, use the time in the tutorial to go look at each item the timer doesn't start until you bring the coffee, and that you should keep in mind that you can bring partial orders, if they ask for a purse and an ice cream, you can bring the purse, without the ice cream for partial points and patience up, and then grab the ice cream after.
@jhoffis Yeah it would likely instead have a list of like store names or something similar rather than DIRECTLY listing what items are where, while some would be obvious like "Pizza Planet" some would be like "Lakestone" which would be where you can buy expensive massagers and drones, or "The Orange Store" which would be like an Apple Store knock off where you buy Tablets and Phones. The goal being that you still need to learn to associate the store name with the item that it contains and not a 1 to 1 comparison.
The reason I put the coffee in the main room with you and forced it to be the first item was as a tutorial on like how to pick up items, but nothing stops you from wandering around. It's not really hinted at that you could ignore the tutorial to wander around casually, that's just something that I know is possible.
@lereveur It does happen, I also don't do well with remembering things so I can understand that. Bigger labels for sure since the icons were clearly not enough to be able to know what the item was. The UI for items you were asked for was something I considered and omitted it intentionally, it was going to be one of the pages on the phone UI, but I opted to not have it specifically because it would make the game significantly easier.
@dragonayzer Interestingly enough it's already set up for wandering around, there's a nav mesh agent so I could have them wander around the mall. This is why the phone has a page for showing where they are on the map though it doesn't work currently due to scaling issues with the mini maps. Also due to needing to do the tileset last minute due to a team change mid jam, I had to scrap that in order to finish the tiles. There was also some plans at some point to actually have the score be the player's money but the goal was still positive money. This would have been the main penalty for buying incorrect items, since you want a high score, but your score is decreased by buying items. There would then be ways to acquire money, and you could make more money than the game would have asked you to spend, so it would often be a net positive unless you were spending it on the wrong items. Finally going back to the tileset, originally there was going to be items in the front windows of shops so you'd be able to tell what was inside based on the signage out front and the items visible in the windows, but similar to the tileset issues, all the custom signage was scrapped. Anyway thanks for playing!
Loved the idea, music was great, I definitely agree with some comments I've seen about having more UI, like having a keycard count for the level. It would have been interesting to see some kind of unique play on the teleporting mechanic like being able to teleport into locked rooms or past lasers or something so that there was more reasons to use the teleport mechanic. I also found you could just teleport outside the level bounds and walk around the level, TP back in when you spotted a key grab it and then TP back out which was hilarious. But yeah overall good stuff!
Nice! Good stuff, the game gets really hard really fast haha, once it added in punching in the code it was really challenging!
Victory! Fun game once I got what was going on, would love to see more stuff but definitely understand it's a game jam haha
46.8 seconds survived, interesting idea for sure, biggest issue I had is that where the ball went when I clicked felt extremely unpredictable. At one point it was just going vertical REALLY fast and no amount of clicking while it was in the little light area would make it change direction, I was facing it just made it move even faster in the direction it was already going. I think an actual paddle would make it more intuitive, a small wall you rotate in the direction you want to face and the ball bounces off that. If you wanted to make it more air-hockey like just make the paddle circular instead of a flat wall just make it actually solid and bounce the ball off it. Overall a pretty fun game.
Only real complaint is that sleeping in the bed is timed and not "Click the bed to get in, click again to get out". I failed several times by clicking like half a second too early and the character just hopping out of bed slightly too early, or by clicking around for items and then clicking the bed at like 3 seconds left by accident and then getting up just as it hits one second. Beyond that one minor issue, great stuff, looks really good, the music matched the concept perfectly, and it was a very unique use of the theme and gameplay elements!
Fun game for sure! Didn't get it the first time, getting between the dimensions felt a bit jank, like I wasn't supposed to do it, but it works I do wish there was a way to increase your ship energy and extend the length of the game, maybe as a score penalty? That way you can like spend points to try and risk potentially getting more points during that extended duration. Anyway fun stuff once I got what was going on!
Late game is crazy haha, I get so many seeds I can't fit them all on screen, I buffed one really strong and it shredded enemies. Fun game overall, really liked the seed mixing mechanics and such. Would be interesting to have like a nursery or something where you can raise plants without equipping them or something and then you can swap without harvesting which seemed to waste a lot of the effects or I was just misreading the discriptions which was probably my only real feedback would be to make the UI more understandable, I'm not sure but I feel that some times when I planted something it would take the thing next to it or before it and not the thing I was highlighting so I'd have to harvest it, and then plant the thing I wanted to by switching to something else and then planting it again but overall fun stuff!
@schlock it's one of the issues I definitely struggled with, like how to explain the mechanics and such and how to make the traps discoverable within the game without giving you a book/note with the recipe or something like that. There is a goal but it's hinted at very subtly and becomes more obvious as you progress, which is that you need to build the last trap in the list.
@neowhoru Yeah music was totally coming, but the guy doing the music came in just a few hours late to get it in the final build for the game. UGHHHHHH That was a real disappointment but a post jam version coming after the voting closes will have it and I'll be sure to tag you! I noticed the issues with the LD site player, I just couldn't fix due to working so I'll probably fix it early tomorrow The health was SUPPOSED to decrease because the enemies were supposed to attack you but basically all of the combat got cut in favor of the main crafting and trap mechanics.
@arron-fowler yeah for sure, some way to like discover the recipe's in the game was planned, it was supposed to be like a mysterious stranger would leave notes for you at night or something and that would add recipes to like a crafting book. But that got cut for time along with a ton of other things. Sadly the overscope was real this time which I plan to talk about in a post mortem soon, but yeah normally I have a relatively large team of 3-5 people helping but this time we got jump scared by the LD, only finding out about it 3 days before it started, and most people could only help like 1 day at most so it was scoped for like a ton more features.
@hayricakir interesting, I'm not sure why that would be, I'll have to look into it. Were you on the itch.io version or the LDJam site version and what browser were you using? But thank you for playing!
@almost Yeah there was going to be a lot more to do, if you press M you can see that there was a market planned where you can sell the parts for gold, and there was going to be a quest system where you'd also be able to fulfil requests to get specific parts for various cultists. On top of that there was going to be more involved like permanent versions of traps so you wouldn't need to rebuild them ever 3 days but they'd be made out of more late game parts and such. Of course scope and time got in the way of all that hahaha.
@hayricakir Ahh might be an Opera GX thing I'll have to try it there. Worked fine in Edge/Chrome/Firefox for me
@immanentdeath yeah for sure, I had a lot more ambitious ideas but obviously scoping for time a bunch of ideas had to be dropped to finish haha
@pope-paf yeah 100% too much, I usually have a lot more help but this time that help was mostly advice or like really basic like discord calls about how they'd have done something, but they didn't have time to actually help so I worked mostly alone on this one. Music was on the way but my teammate working on the music didn't get anything to me until after the jam ended, so I was waiting till the jam was over to update it, the update will have music but only after voting closes for fairness.
@froissant Yes! Very excited to have this done soon haha, Will check out yours as well!
@oadt yeah seems many people struggle with that one, it's the rat eyes/rat tail/rat eyes, someone else mentioned this because it's the one time where I don't use the base sprite, just one of the bubbles of the 4 pink rat eyes.
Yeah I was going with "Key = meaning" so C = Crafting and I = Inventory. In fact the "M" for Market is actually still there though the money isn't used for anything and I don't hint at it at all because It's not valuable to know about lol.
Sounds and music were coming but we got them in slightly too late and for Jam fairness I have not pushed the version with any updates like sound or controls yet.
@artofluba not sure what you mean the task screen? You can close any screen by pressing the key again or pressing Escape.
Yeah sounds and music came in too late to add to the Jam release.
The signs should give you most of the information, but I see how some additional context clues could help with explaining like how to place traps, but I wanted to avoid an explicit tutorial, so 95% the information needed to beat the game is in the game except for the final recipe which I ran out of time to add an event for that would teach the recipe. The silhouette of the traps are in the inventory and use the sprites from the items you pick up.
@procrasteroid Thanks! @rubiks did the player sprite and I added the animation afterward, there were more animations but they got cut when I cut the part where some things would be hostile.
Music is coming in like... 20 minutes once ratings close haha, it was JUST barely too late to add haha
I appreciate the comments on the signs, I try not to give explicit tutorials because it's something I really hate in games, I expect a level of awareness on the player's part to piece things together though I think I could have done better since I have done so in previous jams, but I overscoped due to normally having more team help but we all got surprised with the re-addition of the January jam.
Overall interesting idea, nothing to add, most of the other comments hit on my feedback as well looks like haha.
One thing I could add is if you do end up doing something like this where there's a big barrier to entry like this game had, consider uploading a gameplay video of you playing the game. This way those who can't install it can experience what playing the game would look like even if they can't manage to install it. It'll always be better to have it playable but it's a back up plan.
Loved the game, very good aesthetic and mood.
Only real complaint was the auto scroller, the swinging platforms weren't coming on screen fast enough and so I messed up there 3 different times not knowing there was another swinging platform after. So I'd wait on the swinging platform and then because the platform doesn't swing back enough, I'd end up not making the jump.
It'd be nice if the swinging platforms swung were more consistent, or if there was some way to like press a button and kick the platform to make it swing more while on it, which in itself could be a feature used in other ways like using it to press buttons in maybe a full version with more complex puzzles.
I think removing the "auto" part of the auto scroller would have been ideal, show the threat of the vines coming, but then unlock the camera so that it follows the player, that way the player can progress as fast as they want, You could probably even rubber band the speed of the vines to keep up with the player so they can't get too far ahead, just don't punish the player for mastering the mechanics and going too fast by preventing them from seeing the next platform.
I'm nitpicking though so don't take it too hard, it was a good game, just my thoughts.
Nice game! I found all of them! Very cool, I liked the timed events like the frog in the pond in the rain and the fox that was in the way until later.
Really fun game, I like the idea of like drifting around and trying to get points by having the harvester run over things. I do wish there was an even bigger one after The Big Boy haha like the Big Boy but wider, It also seemed like the big boy was taking damage when I ran stuff over vs the other harvesters where I'd only take damage when the main tractor got hit. I wonder if the dead zombies still applied damage after dying or something. But yeah overall great game!
@thestoff yeah a lot of this came from feedback from previous LD games where I would clamp the difficulty to something more reasonable, and the feedback was that the game eventually became boring as you would just continue to play forever with the game never getting hard enough to cause you to lose. With this instead I just ended up making a kind of "high score" style game where I continue to ramp the difficulty up until it basically becomes impossible to continue. Unfortunately, I don't think that comes across well leading to a difference in expectation. The game is supposed to essentially be "how high of a score can you get in 10 minutes" because the difficulty will always ramp up to the point where it should be basically impossible to continue playing. But because this happens relatively fast, It just very quickly starts to feel unfair rather than feeling like, out of control, ramping difficulty.
@tomatolamp Thanks! It was definitely an interesting project, yeah difficulty is hard. If it doesn't ramp up fast enough people don't really notice the change in difficulty. It's a hard thing to balance for sure.
@neowhoru Thanks! Yeah I went back to work and just stopped having the motivation to play more games than I did which has become a huge problem for me the last few Ludum Dares.
@maksimj Thanks! Yeah the actual balance was something I struggled with the boss was supposed to feel harder for sure but I didn't want the Level 1 boss to be too hard, a lot of any kind of balance was done in the last 8 hours or so before the jam ended. The idea was yeah was that the reload was faster, I considered making the bullets do double damage but I ran out of time to implement that. We plan on adding a real thumbnail, but we focused on adding the bat enemy over doing the thumbnail before the jam ended.
@joesturge Thanks! I love the music too @aaldrik did a great job for sure! and the story was @rot-god's idea.
@ampo Thank you! Appreciated!
@bobbie Thanks! Yeah I really do wish I had more time to balance better.
@hagamosvideojuegos Thanks! Appreciate the candy! :candy:
@eli-heinrichs thank you! I was glad I took the time to implement the reload mini game for sure, and yeah I do wish we had more time for enemies, unfortunately new enemy variants didn't make it into the game until the last 4ish hours before the jam ended haha, 5 hours before it ended it only had 1 enemy type!
@olddog Yeah I also wish there was more content. Upgrades and stuff were planned but cut for time since other more pressing features took longer than expected like the level art, reloading, and the wave stuff.
@neowhoru Thanks! And thanks again for the shout-out!
@lastuck I'll make sure @aaldrik and @rot-god know you liked the music and art!
@fahim-faysal yeah balance was something I didn't have a lot of time for. The heart containers could be just on hit but pickup is still needed because you can only carry 2 guns at once so once you get 3 guns you have to use it to choose which gun you want to keep. I do think that introducing the other enemy sooner(there were only 2 completed) would have just moved the difficulty spike sooner, the main reason for level 1 being so long was to introduce the revolver and reload mechanics, then give the assault rifle and give you just a bit more time with that before increasing the difficulty. On replays it definitely feels pretty long due to it being so easy in comparison. I think the addition of the bat should have been when the wave still only allowed 2 enemies to spawn, but introducing the bat the same wave we increase it to 3 enemies at once was overkill for sure. Good feedback though appreciated!
@shess Appreciated! We have another game currently in development with similar controls and stuff but we may come back to this based on the interest and performance from feedback and stuff. There was so much we still wanted to add more enemies more guns, more animations and stuff.
@contro1990 The hitboxes are pretty generous already, all the hitboxes are like 80% of the sprites size, the smallest hitbox is the player it's a small circle, but it's just around the feet not the body or head. If we touch this after the jam what I'd like to do is make the character like a more square-ish shape instead of a tall rectangle.
@keely-brown Thanks! Yeah I really wanted to get more content in and have like epic bosses and stuff not just scaled up normal enemies haha. Reloading was going to have a bonus originally of like doing more damage, and failing to hit the window would slow the reload down to half speed for the remainder. I wanted the high risk reward of going for the reload but time constraints T_T
@gamebuilder Yeah this is why the game starts off fairly easy, in order to allow you to get a feel for things before making the game harder. Reloading was something I debated from the beginning because I knew right out the gate it would make the game a degree harder, but seems that it's not as massive of a hurdle as I may have initially thought, I just wish we had more time to fully flesh out the risk/reward stuff for the reload timing and balanced a lot better.
@kazuma Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!
@constance Yeah for sure, the interaction stuff is not perfect, I didn't do it for the hearts since I didn't want them picked up if the player had full hearts e.g. Zelda games. The highlight was something I was working on but it was cut for time. The reload had a bunch more features I've mentioned in other posts so I won't go into detail, but yeah the being able to reload when full was supposed to be so you could reload a normal clip into an improved one. The balance of the game was definitely not there, simply because enemies weren't actually added to the game until the last 4 hours of the jam. We had planned for 4 enemy types and 4 unique bosses, but there was several reasons for them not being finished including not having the art throughput volume to make more enemy sprites, and some oddness with the wave mechanic system. The main reason for the low karma is that due to IRL stuff, most jams often don't have time to play games due to things like needing to go back to work right after hence being in 'danger' and past jams not even getting enough votes. So often I'll play the games during short breaks at work, but don't have the luxury to spend the time leaving feedback, and even worse, not being able to play games with no web versions, and not having speakers on the work computer so can't rate audio.
lmao plagued by the disappearing finger with 1 piece and 10 seconds left! Curses! overall good stuff though! The instructions were a bit confusing, I thought clicking would do the opposite, it would stay straight unless you clicked and dragged but yeah otherwise once I ironed it out it was good!
Overall a solid game, would have liked accessibility features over like additional game modes, for example turning off head bobbing and changing the footstep volume.
@pov probably worth checking out who rated this with suspiciously high scores as well, it's likely it was a group effort.
@unchain Thank you! I appreciate it! We tried really hard it was a lot of work but hearing people are having fun definitely makes it worth it!
@stanov Thank you! Yeah the color combos can be tough but they do actually have a pattern! It's tough but I memorize them like this:
If you look at the general hue, there's 2 orange, and 2 blue and then a green, the Fireball Mage is `Light-Dark-Green-Dark-Light` and `Blue-Blue-Green-Orange-Orange`combined. Try looking for patterns like that in the others! Maybe that helps!
Also I still have my Kazoo with me on stream, though I don't bring it out as often as I should haha!
@deerofblue Yeah I'd like to improve on the units to make them maybe more dynamic vs just going straight for the closest, thing they can find. Right now the pathfinding agent is fairly straightforward, enemies just go after the closest thing, in the future I'd like them to even be able to "talk" to each other so they explicitly take different paths to try and juke the player's units. Depending on how well the game does in the jam I may consider expiditing this over my current full time game if there's interest.
@samallo94 Thank you! It was a big goal of mine to be able to have a handful of units, unfortunately some of the features had to be cut, specifically things like flying units that can only be hit by ranged attack or armored units, that need attacks with armor piercing. For example right now even though it says only the Runeslinger can hit flying enemies, anything can hit the flying units as there's no system in place to be able to tell if a unit is flying or not. In a full release there would be a TON more of this kind of interactions as I love that part of strategy games.
@westeaststudio yeah it's definitely not easy there's a trick I wonder If people are missing that you can open the book without closing the summon wheel. So you can dial it in check the book and then dial in the next one without closing it lol. But yes memorizing it is intended. Either by the position in the wheel or by the colors (there's an pattern to the colors that's supposed to help but seems like it's not as obvious as I expected) but yeah thanks for playing!
@jordantanner yeah it's mostly because we were using a palette so I didn't want to use colors not on the palette for the runes. There was also some intentional similarities that are used for repetition to create "patterns", for example `blue-blue-green-orange-orange` or `green-orange-blue-orange-blue` combine that with light and dark hues and you'll see reflection patterns like `light-dark-middle-dark-light`
As for the units melee will chase until they're out of some range but ranged units stay still mostly unless pushed. It's very basic though I'd like to make them smarter in the future! Appreciate the feedback!
@ry-kil yeah I wanted to lean even more into that but time limits got in the way. Originally the Enemies were supposed to choose different paths but right now they chose whatever they think is closest to them.
As for the spamming there was originally supposed to be like immunities and such for example some enemies would be immune to magic, and flying enemies would only be hit by the Runeslinger but unfortunately that didn't make it into the final game. There was also going to be a summon limit. So only X could be summoned at once and you could unsummon them to free up space as you needed to counter specific event types.
Anyway glad you enjoyed it! Thank you!
@aucguy yeah memorizing the spells can be difficult I attempted to leave several patterns in the choices of colors to help but it seems it's not as obvious as I had expected. The air is very short sighted it can only see about 10 units away, and will always focus the nearest enemies. That's something I would like to fix and make the Units more intelligent. And yeah balance was an issue for sure. Therev was a few things I couldn't get to so I removed the cap, originally there was going to be a limit of maybe 5-8 units and units would all have an enemy type that directly countered them like being immune to magic, so you'd need to unsummon units to change strategies on the fly, unfortunately that never made it in, so I removed the cap to prevent you from getting stuck with like 5 mages, in turn allowing late game spamming.
@easilydistracted yeah I had tricks to make the spells easier to memorize but it seems like it's not helping so that would make Sense to have the spell book open at the same time, I could Even make it interactive interesting idea. In a full release I'd definitely like a tutorial or a few. Also thought about unlocking spells over time through a campaign so It would be less to memorize all at once. Glad you liked it!
@neowhoru Thanks! Yeah seems that the spell recipes pose a challenge for more people than I thought, but I get what you mean haha. Glad you like the visuals and gameplay feel!
@gabrimer Yeah the spellcasting is tough initially but they eventually become second nature, I couldn't memorize them when I initially built it, and I even considered changing it to just a selection rather than the spell wheel since even I couldn't memorize them initially. But over time I learned the spells so I figured I'd leave it as an exercise to the player to learn and kind of master over time.
And yeah the recipe book is definitely supposed to be able to be opened at the same time. I have ideas of how I'd do this in the full release with more spells, where the book is a list with smaller icons and as you select runes it auto filters out the spells showing only the ones available from there(think like the way the Minecraft recipe book is on the side)
Glad you liked it!
@monika Yeah so there was a ton that didn't get added that would have made the cheesing it less possible, but time is always the challenge TL;DR: I was going to add a unit limit so you had to be more deliberate with your unit choice, but because I was building features up until the last hour, I was literally at the limit of what I could add already.
One of the things I wanted to do was to have much more of a focus on type advantages, but I didn't get systems in for that. For example flying enemies could ONLY be shot by the Runeslinger, so you'd need one for that. Additionally there was supposed to be an Unsummon feature, that would let you remove something and gain the mana back, without having any passive regen, this would mean early picking up shards dropped from enemies would be how you gain mana to summon things(until harmonic mages are unlocked and then they'd drop 1 shard per wave or something) And finally there was supposed to be a Unit limit that would increase over time/level/etc. with a starting limit of 3 or 4 units.
Obviously none of that happened because time, not having the type advantages meant fireball mages were effectively way too strong as they shoot faster and therefore more DPS than the Runeslingers who's main "advantage" was that only they could shoot flying enemies, without that they are effectively useless. Brutes due to a bug have the lowest health in the game, making them terrible at the job they're SUPPOSED to do which is be a wall and absorb damage(though they have REALLY high damage) No unsummon meant you needed passive mana regen because you couldn't get the mana back from an unsummon. And Harmonic mages code was the last thing added which was hacked in to solve the "enemies don't drop enough mana, and passive regen has to be slow to prevent early spamming" but it's programmed as a "weapon" that didn't need a target, so it's functionally a "Every 5 seconds spawn a shard" and so it isn't tied to like a "spawn at the end of a round" because there's no way to get that inside the weapon class. So yeah there's a ton of things haha.
And yes someone pointed out that it doesn't reset for some reason and I'm not sure why, that's something I haven't solved yet, I haven't touched it since the jam ended really.
Anyway thank you for playing! Appreciated!
@mathead It's mostly expected there's a learning curve initially as you figure stuff out but yeah seems like everyone gets the rhythm eventually haha, if you read other comments you'll see there was some method to the maddness in the patterns of the colors. But thank you, glad you liked the graphics!
@ale Yeah the other thing people don't pick up on which is totally my bad but you can open both the wheel and book at the same time, so you can "enter 1, check book, enter 2, check book, enter 3..." only when you close the wheel or complete a spell does the spell reset.
I'd be maybe worried that with more spells it'd be to hard to remember, the 5 spells maybe up to 10 max I think is the limit of "memorization" since the patterns aren't inherently intuitive. I've made a few comparisons to Minecraft but the crafting recipe's are 'intuitive' there, for example 3 wood planks in a line makes wood slabs, items in the shape of an axe makes an axe, once you learn it it's hard not to remember. These don't have that kind of intuitive pattern so having like a "spell autocomplete" like I've mentioned in other comments might be a solution to the spell memorization.
Making sure everything had particles and stuff was a big focus for me this time as my last game lacked them, so it lacked juice so I made sure to prioritize that. But yeah definitely didn't have time to balance, with the actual damage resistances and stuff there might be less cheese as I mentioned, but it happens, it tends to be a weakness of game jam games. Balance is always hard in the short time frame since there's limited time for playtesting.
Thanks for playing!
@kjscott Yeah someone mentioned that it didn't get cleared correctly I looked into it and I'm still not sure how to fix that, I completely switch scenes and I don't use any "DontDestroyOnLoad" code so it should but not sure. I'd have to investigate more closely.
As for the Summons they do have patterns but they are primarily in the colors, I've mentioned a few times in other comments but as an example the fireball mage is `Light-Dark-Green-Dark-Light` and `Blue-Blue-Green-Orage-Orange` While the Harmonic mage is the same spell but with dark/light reversed.
I assume by menu you mean like the start screen to the controls screen, and yeah the transition(minus loading time) takes one second and can't be interrupted so yeah if you click before it's faded in completely, the scene manager ignores it to prevent breaking the transition manager which breaks if you send it a new scene before the full transition finishes due to callbacks.
@verti Yeah it's a bit of a learning curve but once you get it, it's fairly easy. I added the spells themselves on the third day and by the end of the jam I had memorized them so it's not impossible but I can see where the challenge lies for some people. Interesting, I'd have to look into that, if they arrived on the same frame then they'd do the damage on the same frame so it might be that they travel the same speed and launched at the same time leading to them hitting the same frame(very common especially if the units see the enemies on the same frame as well since they'd be fully in sync). Adding like a random offset to shooting might help here just so they don't arrive at exactly the same time, but would mean that some units are less responsive to something entering their vision sphere. Something to consider for sure
@leorean Yeah the expectation is you'd need to use a few of the fireball mages before you get access to other spells, that's why you start with only 4 mana. But yeah definitely the memorization has a learning curve.
@ohfiddlediddle Yeah I feel like a lot of people struggled there, I did try with more colors initially but the problem with more colors is you actually lose a lot of the ability to do "patterns" since patterns rely on thew similarities between the colors, I think maybe adding more deliberate shapes like "blues are also always roundish, while reds are lines, and greens are polygonal" would have helped but, from my initial testing, not inherently more colors.
The choice to only use 3 colors and 2 shades was deliberate as the colors were at one point "Red, Magenta, Blue, Green, Yellow" but I found it actually a lot harder since there's no obvious groupings here, no good similarities, they felt more random. I had one that was a "light to dark" sorting order or a "cool colors and warm colors" grouping but then hit stuff like "Will people consider #FF00FF a cool or a warm color? it's literally 50/50 cool/warm Blue/Red"
But yeah the art style was something that we established early, we went with voxels just because I knew that we'd be needing to make a fair number of models, and it would have been a lot more time/work if we had decided to do them as low poly models instead. I was trying to focus on variety, as past jam games that has been something that has been lacking, enemy variety, player variety, item variety etc.
And yeah, I've found adding a quick visual instruction screen tends to be super useful to help people jump in without reading the description and such, I just wish I had more time to add in the options menu and stuff where you could look at the controls after starting the game.
Anyway thanks for playing!
Overall really fun entry, the platforming for me got really challenging later which I personally am not a fan of, I'd rather the game be more puzzle focused where the solution is getting the puzzle right and not, landing perfectly on the one block wide skull you placed in the middle of spikes(the collision on spikes didn't feel right I felt like I was hitting spikes when I shouldn't) but overall good stuff.
You saw me play the gme yesterday but came to leave a comment anyway!
Loved the whole shape drawing mechanic!
As an aside you should do a writeup or something on how you got the shape detection working, fun fact, my game was supposed to have this kind of shape drawing mechanic but couldn't figure out how to do it on the first day so axed it for a circular menu and then drawing lines between connections because it'd be easier XD
Anyway! Love the game!
Great game! The final puzzle was really interesting it took me a bit to make the final logical leap needed to solve it but I got there! My only notes are that the dialog occasionally felt rigid or just uncharacteristically empty, like you summon them and they're like "okay" and that's their whole reaction, while others feel like characters and their dialog feels more involved, but I imagine that's a time issue more than anything. Anyway good stuff!
@goodwincek The design idea was specifically based on a cross between like Alice in Wonderland and an episode of one of my favorite anime that I believe was also inspired by Alice in Wonderland in which they have a magically induced acid trip and turn into rabbits. I think a low poly aesthetic would have been better than the voxels it would be more obvious that the walls are piles of dust and that the objects sticking out of it are things like coins, donuts, rings and lollipops.
The dash was added last second just because backtracking for the vent took a long time due to the original level size being VERY large at 16x16 rooms and it was supposed to be removed before release. The levels are only 6x6 now? So the vent is much more likely to be closer to the player
Yeah the levels on the music are not normalized. I'll work with @mrtroy on this, I assume it's supposed to be normalized.
@facundo-santos Thanks! Having multiple tracks was something I definitely hoped for, my past jam games usually only have 1 if any at all.
@v1ru6 Glad you enjoyed it!
@rodorodo Yeah for sure, the paint stuff took a long time to implement so in the end as cool as it works I'm not sure it was worth it over doing a tile grid like we had initially planned but I wanted to focus on visuals this time around.
@darefus Hahahaha that'd be interesting for sure add a "pet the dust mites" button hahaha
@skleembof Thanks for giving it a shot, unfortunately we didn't have time for new elements, the level generation took most of day 1, the paint stuff took most of day 2 and then day 3 was just getting it doing multiple levels, implementing music, menus etc. so unfortunately that was it. But Thanks for playing! OHH and on that last note, It should also say C my bad, it says X because it's X when using an Xbox controller it's C on PC yeah I'll patch in a change to the text that adds C so future people know.
@david-huculak Thanks! We definitely focused on presentation and stuff more this time around more than the actual mechanics, the goal was to go more simple as usually I inflate the mechanics side and then everything else takes a hit, polish/graphics/audio etc.
Yeah I knew the framerate was going to be an issue on lower spec PCs and WebGL performance makes the performance even worse but it was well known going in just because we were going for a style that was going to have a high poly count(problems with Voxel style games)
As for the control thing, yeah it is relative tot he camera rotation so as the camera rotates, it always moves directly left/right relative to the screen. I considered a locked camera due to it, but I left it as a tradeoff for better visibility of the maze.
@davidsheadgames yeah the game was initially supposed to have an ending, after like 5 or so levels. It was supposed to grow from a 4x4 maze to a 16x16 maze and then end but unfortunately, due to issues with Unity taking upwards of 3 minutes to load on every change, the last 6-ish hours I really could only get like 2 hours of work done, so the ending was cut with an hour left to finish. The maze generation took a whole day by itself, and then the painting stuff took most of day 2, so day 3 I had that last 2ish hours to implement sounds/music, menus, UI, and level progression, which is why it ended up being just an infinite loop. Anyway thanks, appreciate the feedback!
@neowhoru Yeah it was partially inspired by Splatoon for sure! Were you defeating the mites by kicking them? Defeating the mites will prevent them from taking back the area from you. If you did that and it still never went over 52% then it might be a bug with the percent calculation I haven't seen before but not sure.
@bstabuu Yeah sprint was not a planned feature it was more for testing to speed up covering the ground, and early versions had you backtracking way more because the levels were larger. But due to time it just got left in instead of removing it I just added the control on the controls screen, but I regret not disabling it, the main walk speed is the intended movement speed.
@weirdbitgames Thanks! We almost didn't go with it just due to how expensive testing the coverage of the area was performance wise and instead almost went with a fairly large grid of tiles but I'm glad it worked out this way.
@hubol Could you not hear the sound effects? There was sounds for attacking, hitting the dust mites, and getting hit, but it may be bugged if there's no sound effects.
@chuchugeralt Yeah sounds are something that it could have improved a bunch, there's supposed to be a hit sound, but sounds like some people couldn't hear them and I'm not sure why it's not playing them, I also think adding powerups like health drops would have made it more obvious.
Fantastic game! Love the concept a lot! As others had said, adding a fill bucket would have been nice but that's nitpicking haha
I hope someone got my map and had a super easy time with it lol, I put a lot of effort in!
This was pretty fun! I could see orientation being a bit of an issue, so maybe a small white dot for a reticle might help with orientation, you could also maybe have it automatically click the ground every so often with a small click to just show just what the player is standing on in a very small radius, so if they look down they see a small ripple. But those are small changes that might be useful.
Otherwise overall a good game! I had fun! Raindrops.png
Awesome game! Loved that there was even some backtracking to search places that had locked doors before, very well fleshed out!
@chupachup Thank you! I do wish I had more time for more stuff, like more attack cards, more enemies, and more diverse dungeon layouts. The the whole deck management and card visuals were a bit of a struggle and so I spent most of the first 2 days on that, and didn't really have time for content. I will definitely loot at releasing more in the future!
@soul-grinder Thanks! Yeah the big issue for me was Unity doesn't have any kind of Spline or Curve that's configured for UI, so to get the cards to move to the right spots at different screen aspects and resolutions I had to build my own UI Curve class that worked in UI Space. The music ended up working well, I know @rot-god didn't have much time to work on it since they had to do IRL job as well but I think it came out good.
@clymm Yeah I considered a bigger hand but I went with 4 because the game can also technically be played with gamepad, and so the cards are selected with ABXY, if I axe the ABXY selection maybe in favor for using the shoulder buttons to select cards? The main reason I don't mention gamepad support this time around for the game is that card management at the end of the dungeon and loot selections are not supported by gamepad due to running out of time, so only normal gameplay is playable with gamepad
@tokto Thanks! I plan to at the very least release a post jam version with more cards/items such as improved attacks, different elemental spells, and cards that provide defensive shields, while adding new enemies, that have different attacks. The enemies funny enough use the same cards as the player, I just made a special "scratch" card for the initial enemies, but in early testing I had rats that shot the same fireball attack haha
@penguinmunch Did you play the Windows version? I haven't updated the Windows version but I released a patch earlier today for the WebGL (based on the time of your post it was released very close to when you commented) version that fixes the deck management screen issue, as well as an attempt to fix the spawning in wall problem lol. I'll be updating the Windows version soon I was just very tired after a 13 hour stream haha
Edit: The windows version has been fixed, @penguinmunch can you double check you're not running into the deck manager issue anymore?
@jamesgames1000 Thanks! I have done quite a few games with this kind of top down 2D controller so I have kinda figured out what works and what doesn't over time. I think the player is a bit fast but beyond that, I agree haha. I grew up playing some very unique card games in the late 90s early 2000s that unfortunately flopped pretty hard but I was inspired to revive some of those mechanics.
@mdsalomon The QERF controls came from mimicking the ability keys from Risk of Rain 2, I personally struggle with using 1234 in games with WASD controls(for example I only use scroll wheel to select things from the bar in Minecraft, and don't like the game Smite for this reason even though I like most other MOBAs) eventually though It's why I implemented the scroll wheel to select cards as an alternative to the keybinds, they keybinds are there as a vestige of when I had ABXY for gamepad input(which is still in the game, but I don't mention it because card management currently can't be done with the gamepad)
The game initially wasn't going to have any shuffles, and you'd game over if you ran out of cards. At the end of each floor the deck would get reshuffled so you essentially had a fixed number of abilities per floor.
The shuffle was eventually added to make running out of cards less punishing but the idea was that when you shuffled, it would take some fixed amount of your deck size and remove it(so if you had 20 cards in the discard, you'd have some amount, say 18, of them randomly shuffled back, then 16, 14, 12 etc.) I removed the decreasing reshuffle because it wasn't obvious what was happening and why your deck was shrinking without some kind of animation which I didn't have time to implement.
There was also the idea that you could when adding or managing your deck you could intentionally move cards to your "Side Deck" and then when you ran out of cards you could use those as a backup life, or lose and use the Side Deck as your starter deck in your next run, turning it into a risk reward, where you risk not using powerful cards and stuff cards into the side deck so that your next run power is really high! Also turning into a slight form of meta progression.
I'd like to go back and try a version where you don't reshuffle at all, and maybe letting the player start with more cards to compensate, or as mentioned make it a resource rather than the diminishing reshuffle but we'll see what happens haha, I'm hoping the game scores well, if it does I'll consider pausing my main project and at least adding more content and polishing up the sounds and music and putting it on Steam
Edit: Dang I didn't realize I wrote a novel until re-reading it haha!
@mr-field Yeah there was also going to be a mana system, hence the colored bubbles at the top of the cards. Unfortunately that also got cut for time. The you'd have 5-10 mana or something of each type Fire/Air/Earth/Water and it would regen over time, this would prevent the ability to just spam to get a card which was why I had added the ability to discard cards(which is useless in the jam version.)
Discarding would let you risk losing a card in order to get a more ideal spell without paying the mana cost. Since discarding was fairly common(due to spread of heal to attack cards) it necessitated reshuffling, since you'd go through cards faster due to discarding.
I have some ideas of how to make the no-reshuffle work but I'll need to do a lot of implementing and playtesting to see if I'm happy with them but not enough time during the jam for sure.
@axodo The orbs were initially for a Mana system which I'm adding in a post jam update, each spell required mana to cast, Mana would regen slowly over time, and you were going to be able to find upgrades to max mana and regen speed.
That was scrapped for time though so the mana dots mean nothing in the jam version.
DeckfallManaSS.png
I also planned to add doors and keys, where you'd need to clear a room with enemies to get a key, but I did not have a good way to prevent the keys from being inaccessible to the player, for example making sure there was always at least one room that dropped a key before the player would need it to open a door. The dungeon generator just made rooms and connected them, so I'd need to have done some extra logic traversing the level and placing keys which I didn't have time for.
Likely what you're seeing with the increase in cards in the deck management takes your discard and shuffles it back into your deck, so you're not gaining cards, you're seeing the deck count update as the deck manager takes all the cards from the discard and deck and then takes them out and sticks them in your deck, so if you had 10 cards in the discard and 11 in the deck, and 4 in the hand, a total of 25 cards, removing a card would remove all cards from the discard and deck and then put them back in your deck, so you'd now see it go from 11 to 24 cards. There is a bug in the deck managing screen related to it not putting the cards in your hand back in the deck leading to it duplicating the hand cards, so there's that too.
And as for the getting stuck in the wall I have been trying to figure out why that happens every so often. I teleport the player to the start stairs when they load but it seems that it doesn't actually move the player if they're already stuck in the wall.
@geckoo1337 I haven't played Gauntlet in a long time but yeah I have played it! I later played the port for the Genesis along side Fatal Labyrinth are both some of my earliest dungeon crawling games.
I wish I had more time for animations, it's one of my biggest issues in jams. In past jams that I did the art for like [Hellevator](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/lucifloor) I spent a _LOT_ of time on animations but I'm not really an artist, so they took a really long time, the background took me most of a whole day, and the character slightly less time, but because of that the gameplay suffered for it... In this case I decided not to focus on the art, and instead focus more on gameplay and mechanics.
I think overall for the jam it was the right choice. Depending on how well the game scores I may bump it up the list in terms of games that I focus on finishing and releasing, and for that I'll definitely be adding animations.
I'm glad you liked it! Your game was a lot of fun, I definitely wanted more levels to play haha
@woona Yeah I definitely know what you mean, I mentioned in another post I think the player is crazy fast so that's already something I've toned down in the post-jam version. I plan to re-balance a bunch of things to kinda slow down the game. We'll see how that goes but yeah I get what you mean by too fast for sure.
I've got quite a few ideas for things for the future, right now I'm adding in the mana system which will help push for more attack variety once there's more cards the goal is that you're better off casting different spells than the same spell multiple times, after that I'm going to be setting the cards to have types, like fireball having a fire element(red background card) and then doing enemy type weaknesses/resistances, weak to fire/water etc. I had initially set aside some sprites for at least 4 magic projectiles, 4 swords, 4 axes, 4 maces, each would have a different attack animation/range/shape. Axes spin around the player on cast, making them a bit harder to use for single targets but better for multiple targets, and also per hit do more damage than the sword which would be much faster easier to aim, and cost less mana for example.
And yeah the enemies were supposed to trigger doors that would lock, or spawn keys to open other doors, in the vein of Zelda games, but I didn't have time to design the code that would graph out the dungeon and place the objects and doors properly such that the player wouldn't get soft-locked. So many things I couldn't finish. I think enemies will drop Mana shards as well that will refill mana, since mana will regen slowly, it may be beneficial to kill 1 enemy with an earth spell that's less effective, to get a mana shard that refills all mana types by 25% or something in order to get enough mana to cast a bigger fire spell against a harder enemy that has a weakness to fire. That sorts of things. Enemies will also eventually drop gold, and gold will let you buy cards or something... It's a WIP as mentioned XD
@bloodbane Yeah the getting stuck in a wall issue has been something I've been trying to solve for a bit and not sure exactly why it's happening since I teleport the player to the stairs, but the player sometimes seems to not move, and so fixing it has been eluding me since the jam ended. There were definitely more things planned, ultimately but ran out of time, the actual card deck/hand/discard mechanics and animations took like an entire day, and then dungeon generation took another day, I still only had one floor and fireball with like 4 hours left in the jam. There was a lot more missing too but ultimately as the jam came to a close I had to go down the list in order of things needed to get the game built and uploaded first, which is why there wasn't many cards or enemies in the end.
@binaryprinciple Thanks! I wanted to have negative cards in there the tradeoff was going to be like. A random negative card in your deck for some number of positive cards, or bigger better cards. Burning negative cards would permanantly remove them from your deck but have some negative effect for some duration. So they were like little spikey things you'd have to deal with. The issue I found was that my initial ideas for negative cards had to do with your mana, and the jam version had the mana cut. Some examples would be like:
* -1 fire Mana for the rest of this floor * Water mana recharges 10% slower for 10 minutes
That's a good idea for sure! Unfortunately like everything else, the whole card/deck animation stuff took SO LONG that so many other things got cut, the sound effects that made it into the game were added in basically the last hour, in fact it was so close that the code for the sounds that made it into the game has options for that same kind of pitch variation code in it, but adding it would have meant working after the clock ended haha. That's how close some of these features were cutting it haha
Good stuff! I think I cheesed the last section by accidentally clipping a corner I wasn't supposed to and getting up to the ending section a bit early, but I'm not complaining XD
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Overall good game! Didn't really struggle with the platforming but only died once due to the spikes or the player having quite large hit boxes but overall wasn't a huge issue. Enjoyed the small puzzle platforming challenges.
LETS GOOOOOOO! Big Hype!!! TheDrop.png
Love the graphics, Nice short and sweet!
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Beat the game, definitely could use some balance but I know how hard that is hahaha, I get the oxygen going down at a faster rate when you go deeper but it made the oxygen tanks basically useless after a while since they'd deplete faster than I remembered to use them haha. Displaying the rate of depletion would be a good idea, that way the player knows how fast they're running out of oxygen.
It was also weird that it consumed multiple oxygen tanks per key press, it would have made sense to me that 1 oxygen tank = 100% oxygen, but it seems it was like a certain percentage per tank(10% per tank?) which is never shown, and could just be added to the tooltip in the crafting menu. Finally it would have been nice if it auto-filled using the tank if you hit 0% instead of activating with a key press especially since it drained so fast.
Also was odd batteries went down faster as you went deeper, similarly it eventually became useless because it would disappear almost instantly.
It would be nice to see more upgrades like improved oxygen tank which doesn't leak so fast as you go deeper, that would bring the value of oxygen tanks back up, as well as improved battery vs battery charges, if a battery is 100% light, then making it go down 5% per second and then 2% per second, going down to like 1% per 5 seconds as you upgrade etc. would make the light much nicer.
Overall a good game!
Pretty fun! I know implementing the surface dot stuff like scanner sombre is kinda hard so nice to see something with it! As others mentioned I don't think the density of the monster's output is high enough to be useful for knowing where it is how far it is, having the red dot emission of the creature be higher might make sense would need some play testing to figure out, another thing is it could have a color gradient based on how far the creature is from the dot that was placed. This way if you said like pink is farthest and red is closest, then you'd know if you were going towards or away from the monster by how pink or red the dots are haha
Some ideas to consider but overall good stuff!
Good stuff! Very Sonic 2 special stages haha. Final high score I got was 104950, given more time I could maybe do better but for now that's where I'm leaving it haha.
Great game overall! Didn't realize that the levels looped with no changes, I was thinking that there was some twist the second time around haha. But yeah very interesting idea for sure, I'm actually pretty curious how the actual wave itself worked, I can't actually think of a good solution that wouldn't be expensive or massively over-complicated lol.
Anyway yeah I had a lot of fun I like these kinds of puzzle-esk games so it was a good one.
@6knowledge Yeah for sure, there was originally going to be 4 different ghost AI, only the first one would run when you shined a light on it, and yeah I had thought about making it search more away from the player. So it wouldn't run at you when fleeing. But didn't have time to figure that out, so it just picks a random spot.
After I built the one AI that ran from you, and had a plan for the 4 ghosts, I started on the art/animations/atmosphere. By the time I finished the art assets it was half way through Sunday and I spent the rest of the jam doing the scene transitions, the actual like level unlocking mechanics, the dialog thing, and such. I was working on the game loop right up to the end basically.
Thanks for giving it a shot!
@raysplaceinspace I did try really hard on the atmosphere, so I'm glad that it worked out! Thanks for trying it!
@neowhoru Yep this time it was just me, the only thing not me was music/sound which is why I opted out of that, but I had to have sound to get that atmosphere so I bit the bullet on that one. I also really liked where the mood ended up, my main wish is that the mechanics were deeper but I'm just glad I finished lol
@lereveur Congrats! I don't know how many people beat the game, but I only know of 2 people XD I'm glad you managed it the last level layout is definitely challenging. I do wish I had more time for the ghost AI to make things mildly easier and more interesting but definitely ran out of time!
@macron Yeah the last one is tough since the layout is twice the size as the other levels. Funny enough the final ghost was supposed to have an AI similar to what you describe, each was supposed to have a different behavior but I ran out of time. The final ghost was supposed to stalk the player and when they got near a soul they'd sprint to it and try to cut off the player and defending.
To help with the missing souls issue, there was also going to be an in game map system to help you find where you haven't been. Appreciate you playing!
@chuchugeralt Thanks for playing! Yeah there was supposed to be a mapping system that would assist with helping you find the souls, but it got cut due to time constraints(90% of the gameplay was made in 6 hours, the rest of my time was art and atmosphere lol)
The audio was added last minute, as I initially didn't have sound at all, but instead of having no sound, I used some CC0 audio so I didn't make it myself(Hence opting out of Music) thus the mixing wasn't adjusted at all and I didn't notice it but I noticed it later.
@darianifakina Thank you! I spent a lot of time on the atmosphere! Thanks for playing!
@patuwu Thank you! I spent a lot of time on the graphics (more than I'd like to admit lol) Thanks for playing!
@neowhoru Yeah I plan to make another post soon I've been playing and rating games as well trying to help get the danger ones up to 20 haha
@wormkingboo Thanks! I spent a long time on the visuals to try and get that part down.
@rol Yeah the issue is that while you shine the light they don't stop coming at you, so it's mildly finicky. The area to hit them is also a sphere located at towards the feet(which is the collider) not the whole body, combined with the fact the flashlight collider is a cone shape, could be part of why it feels inconsistent.
@alex-mcgrath Thanks! I had planned to do a unique ghost AI for each room but I ran out of time haha! I can dig into it after the jam for sure! Might be worth doing an update
@ciphereo Thanks! I spent a lot of time on the character designs and I think they came out actually fairly good! Thanks for playing!
@bacontree Thanks! I wanted to try to add more "character" this time, usually there's not time for lore or characters in my past jams so this time I figured I'd add some personality.
Yeah the AI isn't very smart, it kinda just walks towards the player, so it can follow you down dead ends which I can imagine is frustrating. The flashlight delay is also kinda broken, if it goes off the collider for even a second, it resets to 0, which is something I want to fix in a post jam release by having the charge goes down slowly when not pointed at the ghost.
The other issue I know of is hitbox for the light is a small circle at their feet, I found during post jam play-testing people were pointing it at the ghost's face, which works when it's far away but you end up with situations where the cone shape of the flashlight, would miss the circle due to angle, which would break the connection, so it compounds the whole full reset if it even loses contact for a second.
I may be updating it at some point but yeah all good feedback thank you for playing!
Good game overall! I had a good time, I got bad RNG but I'll try again when I have time after the voting ends haha!
Fun game for sure! I only wish the arrows matched with the music, maybe it's a bug but for me they didn't line up at all so I kinda had to ignore the music to be able to actually get the note timing correct.
The graphics are amazing, genuinely crazy to see in a jam game. Overall the puzzles were very straightforward, it personally would have been nice to see there be some like item selection, and then have the player actually think at least a little about how the items work together and stuff. But yeah overall was a nice fun short and sweet experience so I definitely had fun!
@okacat @DraughtVader Yeah The Chairs are bases for the turrets to be placed Making an update to add more context.
@ostoru I have to do some balance fixes, the first round is kinda hard, try a Number 911 to slow them and 3 Sub Machine Guns, that seems to work for me. Also make sure to have one tower near the counter to make sure if any get through you can kill them while they stand there. Finally The Meatballer blocks paths, consider building them and blocking the far left and right areas, look for places that have chairs near narrow walkways.
@mintarcade Yeah the balance definitely needs work, you're not the only one who has had an issue with the difficulty, especially the first wave!
@fernando-labarta Thanks, it was a challenge because we had to get all the towers in before we could even really balance the game. There was some balancing that happened after. From feedback I got on my stream that night and the first few comments, the first round was messed with to be more managable. It was originally pretty difficult for those playing the first time.
@sanjeev Yeah I definitely agree, I'd still have some catch up waves, but like every 2 waves is a bit much, if there was more time, and more waves, I'd say like auto start every wave except like every 5, having the untimed waves was to help with planning so instead of cooking in a panic, you could strategize but yeah I agree, going "OMG I ONLY HAVE 20 SECONDS AND I NEED 4 more towers!!!" is much more exciting then casually cooking towers and starting when you want. Maybe even have all of them timed but some be like 1 minute vs 20 seconds.
As @arc1llusion mentioned, we had planed to make enemies get stronger over each wave, and there was also talk about having the turrets have some kind of ammo so you'd have to re-fill or replace them over time which I think would have been cool.
Thanks for the feedback both of you!
@Flatterp Hmmmm I did a second pass of the UI so I might have messed up the scale or something for lower resolutions. I'll have to look into it. What scale were you playing at?
Also Which version were you playing? Most versions(Though I think I clarified more in later versions) had a Instructions screen that mentions that you place the turrets on the chairs in the controls:
Instructions.png
It's possible that this also had a scaling issue making the text difficult to read. I agree something with more details would be useful but a lot of this was added in with under an hour to go.
@Flatterp Thanks! Yeah I haven't quite had time to fix it but I will asap! Thanks for checking!
@Flaterectomy Yeah we definitely noted that the tension of cooking with a countdown timer to the next wave was way better than getting unlimited time. I considered turret placement like on hover effects but I couldn't figure out the outline shader in time. I also had no real time to do much on the design side and the models were rushed, with the focus on making sure we had animations and stuff over spending time on character and object design. There's lots with like color I'd do better in the future.
@Alans Antics I definitely wish I had some way of showing a map or like some kind of pathing for the enemies but I spent a lot of time learning how to do pathfinding in the first place so I didn't have much time to clean it up. Making the enemies go to the different sides was partially intentional, in order to make the Meatballer have a purpose, but it would have been better for sure if you could see that on this wave they plan to do something different than the first round. With the cooking mechanic we weren't sure how involved we wanted it to be. We considered things like adding drops or rare ingredients that could be added, ot having shops nearby so you had to go to nearby shops and get those to cook something more powerful/unique. For example a Mexican restaurant so you could make taco turrets, that would do damage over time. The only concern was that if we made the tower cooking to complicated that it would be a huge information dump, even more than it currently is hahaha.
@dwemthy Everyone failed the first time. Hell I failled the first time hahaha! The scaling issue has been noted and I'll update as soon as I have time to get to it, I've been very busy at work due to taking some days off for this haha.
@rebecca-kremer Hahaha Love that it reminded you of that, @arc1llusion and I have both worked at a sub shop so it was partially based on our experience there. The meatball was the best one(though I wish I had time to make a model for it, it's so smooth... it's weird haha) It was a late edition so I didn't have much time to change the level layout to balance for it. If you made like 3 or 4 of them they'd follow one path and then you just load that with damage turrets and a couple slowing ones, easy win. The character models were based on an old comic I did about working in food right out of high school. I'm not an artist, so I passed these over to @rot-god and he re worked them into the models we had. If we had more time I would have liked to do a Cell Shaded filter kind of thing, and really brought out the cartoon-y look for the game.
I could not for the life of me play without a controller, WASD really messes with me because I don't think of W as W but as "Up". With a controller it was fine though.
Not a bad game, Besides the obvious like sounds/music I'd definitely have more of a clear objective. I didn't even know about the upgrades until I read about it in the comments, so it might be worth having a screen between the Title and the game explaining the objective. It would be nice to have a pointer that always points back to the nest so you can find it
Beyond that, I think this game would greatly benefit from zooming the camera out based on player speed. Like Sonic The Hedgehog, a major complaint was that because you were going so fast, you couldn't see what was ahead of you and would hit obstacles. This was helped in later games(Sonic Mania) by moving the camera so it was easier to spot obstacles coming, In this same kind of effort, it would help if as I got faster I could see more of the level so have a better Idea of where I was going. Either with a manual camera zoom or an automatic one like this:
``` //Here's an example of how I'd do a camera zoom based on speed float defaultOrthoSize = 5; float orthoMaxIncrease = 10;//defaultOrthoSize + orthoMaxIncrease is the max zoom float forwardVelocity = 0;//This is the current velocity float maxForwardVelocity = 10;//This is the max velocity float targetOrthoSize = 0;//this is added to the defaultOrthoSize, should be a range from 0 to orthoMaxIncrease
//This is used to scale the speed at which the camera zooms //don't make this too high or crashing into a wall will make the camera zoom in super fast. //Basically at a speed of 1, when crashing into a wall and going from max Velocity to 0 //The camera will take 1 second to zoom back to defaultOrthoSize //Making this 2 would make it take 0.5 seconds //And making this 0.5f would make it take 2 seconds. float zoomSpeed = 1; void Update(){ // Some logic that updates the forwardVelocity would go here //how close to max speed are they going? //Clamped so that we don't over zoom float percentageOfMaxSpeed = Mathf.Clamp((forwardVelocity/maxForwardVelocity),0,1); //Determine how much over defaultOrthoSize we're zooming out based on the percentOfMaxSpeed targetOrthoSize = defaultOrthoSize + (percentageOfMaxSpeed*orthoMaxIncrease);
//Smoothly scale the zoom to match the target scale. Camera.main.orthographicSize = Mathf.MoveTowards(Camera.main.orthographicSize, targetOrthoSize, zoomSpeed * Time.deltaTime);
} //In theory this works but try it out and see how it feels. ```
Hopefully this helps!
Fun game! The red/green cycles feel so long, might be better with shorter cycle times(5 seconds?) more chaotic more frequent stops. Final level was rough trying to find that last button but we made it! Love the character art and the music. The walkers are really cool too.
@head-priestess-ari fair lol originally I didn't have the reference ones on the bottom and it WAS hard. It also didn't snap the dials to discrete values and in testing I randomized the targets and it sometimes took me like 20+ minutes just to get out of the room. So if could have been even harder! I love the idea though so I'm going to keep messing with it after the jam tl see if I can find a balance of challenging to satisfying
Finally awake after a long sleep, so just getting back to people
@carterjbx Yeah every time I saw Signal come up the last few LDs I was thinking about something like this so I was excited when it came up. it's expected that people would need some time to figure it out the first time.
@hammerfrenzy That's okay I appreciate you trying! If I had more time for a full tutorial, I would have made more simple versions and stepped up difficulty but didn't have time.
@tbk-david I get what you mean, originally there was an intention to use the mouse to rotate the dials but that got scrapped as I had to simplify controls, so I went with mouse wheel instead to simulate rotating the dial.
@nathmate Ahh yes we love Unity tilemap floating point error BS. I'll do a hotfix when I can to fix that by baking a texture atlas for it. That's the core bit it's supposed to generate that when it builds but it did not.
@sam-gorman Thanks! I think that's most of the feedback I'm seeing with those struggling with the puzzles, having a base knowledge of how waveforms work is basically kind of key to understanding what it means. The reason the lower 2 windows also have the yellow reference wave is to make it easier. Originally those were hidden and it made it MUCH harder, so I simplified it because I expected some struggling.
As for the platforming part yeah I intended to add more puzzle elements like timing elements, where doors would only stay open for a few seconds, before closing etc, as well as more complex multi switch/door puzzles, these first sections were designed to teach the mechanics, not to be challenging, setting you up to take on more complex puzzles later.
@goodwayman Apprecitated @clymm did a good job with the art and sound stuff. I have wanted to do something with waveforms for a while cause I thought it'd be cool for sure. Yeahhhhhh moving platforms are hard, I plan on spending some time building tooling around moving platforms so next time I do a platformer they're already set haha. But Yeah I also wish it had more, I mentioned in another comment that this was SUPPPOSED to be just the tutorial to get you familiar with the controls, but it ended up being all I had time to make.
@magus77 Thank you! I spent a fair bit of time on the controls and I'm pretty happy with how they came out. I may expand on the character later but this was one of my most complex character controllers because I spent so much extra time making the jumping and movement feel good.
@val-ociraptor Appreciated! There was a lot of ideas surrounding the mechanic initially, I just thought this made the most sense for a game jam. Glad you liked it!
@neowhoru Yeah once you get how the wave adjustment works it goes a lot smoother, I mentioned in another post I had intended to start the game off with even MORE simple wave stuff to like start you off just adjusting just 1 wave's frequency, with no amplitude and then graduating to both frequency and amplitude, before introducing the second waveform which would have probably helped people understand, but that's something for a post jam update maybe.
The graphics are awesome I think they came out great @clymm did a great job for sure!
@borisfrommurmansk that's fair enough, it's a game jam so these kinds of things are expected. I've mentioned in other comments that this set of areas was intended to be a tutorial for all the base mechanics, and supposed to be much easier. The puzzles were planned for much later, and the signal mechanic was supposed to become much harder over time, for example not showing the yellow tutorial reference waves in the signal inputs, adding more interactions like timers and gates, adding in mechanics where the signal affects objects like having platforms follow the signal path or opening a door when the signal is high etc. but again, game jam so you can't get to everything so I focused on the basics of just matching the wave and doing a toggle.
As for the art and sounds, the amount of time they had for working on this was VERY limited, only a couple hours overall, due to their schedule so it was whatever we could get in the time that we had for that.
@whoisethan Thanks for giving it a try! I 100% get what you mean, I unfortunately built it for gamepad first and then adapted those to Keyboard/Mouse like... in the last hour or so, so I didn't have much time to actually do something else with it so I have definitely seen and agreed with the feedback surrounding the inputs for it for sure haha I know it would have been more intuitive to just point the mouse at a dial and then mouse wheel but I didn't have time, so this is what it had to be.
To try and un-stick you, The bottom 2 screens are the input waves, and the top is the output wave. The dials to the left of the bottom 2 screens adjust the waves on the right of the dials. The blue wave represents the things you can change, and the yellow wave is the solution. The "Amp" dial changes the Amplitude which is how tall the blue wave is, and the "Freq" dial changes the frequency, or 'how often' the wave goes up and down. High frequency means the wave gets more compact and goes up and down more frequently.
So look at the bottom screen and use the bottom Amp/Freq dials to adjust the bottom screen until the blue wave matches the yellow wave. So from your screenshot, in the bottom screen the amplitude is too high(the blue waves are taller than the yellow wave) and then the frequency is too low(The blue wave only pulses up and down 2 times vs the yellow wave pulses like 7 times)
When you adjust the bottom 2 screens to match, the top screen is what happens when you add these 2 waves together, in this case you don't need to actually look at the top screen at all and instead just focus on matching up the bottom 2 screens to solve the puzzle!
@amirrajan Yeah for sure, this was just supposed to be the tutorial, the train was supposed to take you somewhere else where the puzzles got harder, but that never panned out.
And yeah for sure I 100% get the weirdness with the input stuff, once the jam is over I've already got an update ready to go to ship a fix that makes it so you just hover over the dial and rotate with the mouse.
Thanks for playing it!
@ismael-rodriguez Yeah exactly, as I mentioned in other comments the mechanics were going to become more complicated over time, where the integration was more involved but I started with stuff surrounding the waves and how to actually match them together, which took most of saturday, and then sunday I built the one way platform and the doors and the platforming controller, and then by the time I got to actually integrating the wave into the mechanic, it was already day 3, and basically everything got cut so I could create a level with what I had which was the basic doors and the basic moving platform. Yeah I hope to make the input part better in the future with a post jam thing for sure, the mouse integration also came on day 3, so I basically just mapped the existing gamepad controls which is why mouse pointer does nothing, there's no raycasting or anything because the Gamepad controlls didn't need a cursor integration like that. And yeah the visuals were also fairly limited time, not by me but @clymm wasn't available the whole weekend to work on stuff, leading to focusing on the minimum needed. But yeah thanks for playing!
@xiao-duye Interesting It's supposed to display a tutorial there not sure why it's not showing. To fall through one way platforms it's down + jump.
@n-o-x Thanks! I'd been thinking about this for a few jams where Signal came up and thought it would be cool.
@euler-moises hahaha you aren't the only one who didn't notice. Later in the game it was going to actually get harder, the hints at the bottom were eventually going to go away hahaha so you were playing more how eventually I intended for it to be.
Moving platforms are hard XD it's because the velocity is applied to the player based on the change position of the platform. It's
The music was supposed to have layers too, but yeah I agree, unfortunately this is all we had time for beacuse @clymm had IRL stuff and so had limited time to work on the jam stuff and they did both the art and the sound stuff, on top of that I had already made a music manager that would loop a single looped track, and didn't have time to add the logic to keep multiple layered tracks in sync so that was axed.
@railnof Yeah lol I realized it after publishing that it was a trap hahahah! I always made the jump from the second platform and left it because I was like "Oh that's fun you can make it from here if you do it just right" like it was a skill thing XD and not testing that you can jump from the top one. A friend who played it after the jam ended just to search for bugs mentioned it and I'm like NOOOOOoooooo!
@aruseus Thanks! Yeah I _wanted_ to do more but RIP Time. The camera definitely could be improved, It's just like out of the box settings so it has issues for sure. I've mentioned in other comments but yeah this area was supposed to be easier because it was a tutorial area, so it was intended to get harder later, but yeah. And funny you mention narrative focused game because @clymm made face sprites for doing dialog and stuff and I ran out of time to implement any story stuff so yeah IDK how much I'll update the game, it'll really be dependent on the outcome/score/interest in a more fleshed out version of the game. I'm always looking for the next "Main" project that I can flesh out and ship, and if there's enough interest I can go and actually add the challenging sections and more complex puzzles.
@trexxak hahaha truee, the plan was to eventually try and teach how to break down a wave into it's components and stuff to help use the big one haha, the hint waves at the bottom were gonna go away later in the game but never got to it lol Thanks for playing!
@slay-a-stone Thanks! Yeah the text... >.> wasn't important it was like loading screen 'tips' but it was just silly quotes like "The archer class really is full of archers" I updated my template to move it to the bottom right corner to make it more obvious it's silly loading screen text and in a full game I'd probably stick actually good tips in it but... yeah It's just placeholder text lol. And I mentioned in another comment but from the beginning I was doing the jump from that platform and only after launching someone told me it was basically impossible to make from the other platform because the ceiling was like 2 blocks too low lol. I have a system for defining jumps and my jump code says that the jump should be possible... but only if you can reach the peak of the jump. The jump is exactly 5 units tall, and should be able to cross a 7 block gap, but again the ceiling is too close.
@wormkingboo Thanks! I want to expand on the signal mechanics at some point in a post jam update to make them integrate into the game more! @clymm did a great job with the art and atmosphere I'm glad you enjoyed it!
@johnnysix Thanks! Yeah lots of stuff was just getting caught with no time and needing to finish.
I wanted to make it so the mouse would just point at the dial and you'd rotate the wheel that you're pointed at, but ran out of time to make them different so the the KBM and Gamepad controls are the same system.
@kaze-todoroki Thanks! I thought of the basic idea last LD when I saw Signal come up but didn't think much deeper until now. Eventually I'd like to expand cause I think it's cool.
@lllarso Yeah it's a bite size game for a jam, don't need games to overstay their welcome too much but I agree adding some more content and a bit harder stuff at the end would be nice for sure haha. And yeah the platforms could definitely use an upgrade, one consideration I had was to make them have buttons so you pressed the button once you were on. Thanks!
@indiepanda Thanks! Appreciate you playing it!
@hagamosvideojuegos Thanks! I'd love to get time to add more content post jam for sure! I think with more integration into the mechanics It's a really solid idea for sure! Thanks for playing!
@lereveur I tried to ensure it wasn't going to bog down the experience too much for sure. Eventually I'd like the platforming and the signal stuff to integrate more closely and make it into a more unique experience, but this was really the beginning of the idea. I'd have liked it to be longer as well haha I wanted at least a bit more but time crunch haha
I crashed the game part way T_T RIP due to pressing escape which caused "TypeError: can't access property "deleteFramebuffer", GLctx is null" I think it's an Application.Quit(); call when you press escape.
If this is caused by that issue you can this, it will protect from this issue by disabling the quit command when building for web ```cs #if UNITY_WEBGL Application.Quit(); #endif ``` I think I beat had basically finished it but uhh >.> whoops!
Good game, My one ask would be adding a sprint with shift toggle to the speed up upgrades mid way because by max I was CRUISING around and it made it kind of hard to get on the marks to dig haha I missed quite a few times just because I was moving too fast and overshot where I meant to go lol.
Was fun! Took me a bit to figure it out but once you get int the groove it's a good time!