Unlock Everything by DDRKirbyISQ 2019-10-15T18:13:02Z
Got to the end! Great game, really impressive for 48 hour solo effort, well done!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Space Wumpus
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | Shadowy Monster Land | jam | 887 | 3.08 | 2.79 | 3.13 | 3.13 | 3.38 | 2.86 | 3.51 |
Got to the end! Great game, really impressive for 48 hour solo effort, well done!
As others have said, reminiscent of 'choose your own path adventures', particularly with the sudden unpredictable deaths. But that's the fun of it! Fun game.
How very odd.
Itch.io link doesn't work...
The itch.io link is now valid - but 'The developer has not uploaded a game yet'
Didn't manage to get past the last defences with the evil green lasers, but this was really good fun. One issue - you can't zoom out very far and the zoom centre is low down, not the centre of the screen. This means that once you've reached a certain size you have no chance to see what is coming before you hit it when you move down. An indicator pointing towards the planet might be helpful too, as sometimes you don't really know where you are and have to just head in a random direction. Anyway, great job!
Poor dog. Nice art style, and very nice opening level. The main level was very repetitive though.
Good relaxing space disaster fun! I see that a lot of others are saying you should be able to rotate parts before attaching, but I think it is better how it is where you end up with things not quite how you want them! It would be too easy if you had more control. It's too easy to play indefinitely though, I rescued 25 crew and could easily have kept going. Basically once you've got a thruster of each colour spaced approx. 120 degrees apart, the ship is flyable.
Unique and fun, great effort!
I'm impressed! I saw some of your in-progress screenshots during the jam, and the nano-pixel style got me intrigued. I haven't had time to play very far through it yet, but have have great fun so far, and will definitely play it through to the end. A few comments - as mentioned by others, the controls are too cramped. Also, although E, F, and R are mentioned in the tutorial, they aren't listed on your main page where the other controls are. First time I skipped the tutorial, and couldn't understand how to deal with guards or get through doors. It reminded me a little of 'Saboteur' on the ZX Spectrum. On the tutorial - at the beginning there is a low passage you have to duck to get through. One time, the black area above acted like an elevator and lifted me out of into total blackness. I wandered left, and fell off the nothing into bottomless nothing. :-)
Just noticed that your 'source code' link appears to link to another copy of the exe...
Movement/control unresponsiveness definitely weakens the game - otherwise it is excellent. Nice graphics style. I got stuck early because I couldn't figure our what the anvile was supposed to do.
Surprisingly fun for such a simple idea! I like the scale progression through the levels, and the end screen!
There seemed to be only one exit from each room, so no exploring needed. More variety would have helped a lot - the rooms all felt the same. Health indicator didn't seem to work - it always read 5.
Negatives: Rotation bug*, Inverted Y axis, no sound, no aiming crosshair. Positives: Nice atmosphere, models, and concept. *You can only rotate though a certain angle, then it won't let you move any more. I guess that the invisible mouse is being clipped to the edge of the screen, and so limits your rotation.
Fuel efficiency upgrades are broken, whey make it worse. It takes far too long to dive deep. After a long game, I'd totally maxed out all the upgrades by doing lots of high speed shallow dives, then attempted to dive to the bottom. I got to about 9.5k before dying because either you go slow enough to avoid the baddies, in which case it takes absolutely forever, or you go faster but keep getting hits along the way which eventually wears away your strength to nothing. General concept is good, graphics are fine, and sound is atmospheric, but it does need balancing.
I like the variation in the bosses - though I found the first one by far the hardest!
P.S. Love the Quadropus!
It does suck when you lose your face. Hopefully your game will increase awareness of this serious issue. :-) Surprisingly hard to win!
Played through to the end (well, I think it was the end - it just stopped). That double jump right across the screen on the first level was way too hard for first level - I almost gave up. The commentary was great. Good fun!
I found the same with my game - had no time for subtleties like difficulty balancing and playtests!
Had to give you a 5 for fun on this. I've been playing it for ages (currently second on the leaderboard - but I know that won't last). Nothing to do with the theme, but a fun game with nice progression with mechanics that seem to work well together. The only thing that annoyed me a little is when things spawned too close for you to have any chance to react. Also, quite often I killed a bunch of baddies by dropping a block on them, intending to immediately then jump into the block - only for more baddies to instantly spawn on top of it. This meant that it was no longer safe to jump onto it, and if another block were dropped on them you've immediately made a wall to high to jump onto. Also, I found a bug - guess how I got this: bugShotCropped.png
@shredmer I'm fairly sure I triggered the bug by dropping lots of blocks as fast as possible (safe to do whilst you are in 'spirit' form!). I think the problem happens when a second row of blocks is cleared before the update for clearing the first row has finished.
This game desperately needed the instructions that you gave in the comments to have been on the main page. Also, because the game starts with a white screen (starting from nothing?) it looks like the game has failed to load. Once I had some idea what was happening is was quite fun, but it does seem mostly random what happens and you don't have a lot of influence. e.g. the people kept eating the animals before they turned grey, so I had the idea of fencing of a region of the map with trees, with the animals inside to protect them. But then the people just collected the trees as fast as I could make them so this wasn't possible. An interesting idea, but needs to feel less random, and really needs instructions.
Visuals are really nice, well done! Felt bad about killing the small spiders - they were just bouncing around having fun! It is very short though.
Is there a way to skip to intro sequence? It was fine the first time, but it's too long to sit through again and again. I only played a few times because of that. Turrets didn't seem to fire. You seem to be able to place blocks anywhere - I assumed they would have to be connected.
@kipkat Oops, yes. It even says say in your controls section, which I somehow totally failed to notice...
I declare victory! beat.png
I also found sensitivity to be very high. Camera felt too high up. You seem to have to aim very precisely to be able to pick barrels up. Whenever I brought a barrel into the end car, I seemed to get stuck in the wall. I then ignored the barrels and went looking for the bad guy, who then ran away!
Yes, the blocks shouldn't shadow each other, but I ran out of time to fix it.
@douglass Thanks. That was just me making 'monstery noises'. :-) No post-processing. Each monster emits a random noise (from about ten) when it is first activated, and each time it becomes illuminated. This did work quite well, and I was pretty pleased with how it sounded.
@kekkodude. Yeah, keeping stuff between levels would make sense. Soundtracks are really short - I just did a live recording of some hastily improvised stuff (DeepMind12 synth), and they are only about 30 seconds each.
The game very nearly had no sound at all, until I unexpectedly had a few more hours available on Monday!
@raffe Yes, the help section had rather too much in it. I spent too long adding lots of mechanics, which needed explaining, and then I ran out of time to made proper levels to actually use them. The music loops are very short, because I had almost no time left to make it and get it in the game!
@pablotitan. Thank you, glad you liked it! I am quite tempted to continue working on it. But not just yet - I need a rest. :-)
@doey Glad you liked it! I worked hard on the lighting - annoyed that I couldn't get the lighting on the walls working properly (the tiles shadow each other, which they shouldn't).
Yes, in retrospect, the help page had far too much on it. Would have been much better to have quick popups whenever you encountered anything new - I have these for the torch and batteries, but nothing else.
For my first game jam, I'm pretty pleased with it. Wish I'd given myself a lot more time for designing levels though - spent too much time adding mechanics which were then barely used due to the lack of levels!
I might well continue working on this after the jam - once I've had a rest!
@paulsams Thanks. I am quite tempted to work more on this. But not right now. :-)
@cg-fred Yes, I agree. In retrospect, the player does move much too slowly. The levels got thrown together in very little time, so yeah, they aren't in any way balanced.
@coatline Totally home-made audio! I did at first have separate controls for beam direction, but at the time felt that was too more complexity in the controls. I think this was actually a mistake, and having direct control of the beam direction would have made for a better game.
I may well continue working on this, and will speed up the player, and will add back in direct beam direction control. Thanks for the feedback!
Oops - I'd forgotten that I'd even put in a restart level button. I agree - it's very unfortunately placed. Sorry about that. Glad you liked the audio - making monster noises was fun!
@terryg Yes, in retrospect, walking speed is too slow.
@rubixnoob13 Thanks - the monster sounds seem popular! BTW, this was a Jam entry not Compo - though I realise that there's a message in the game help saying written in 48 hours... This is sort-of the case, and was what I intended when I put the message in as I didn't expect to have any time to do anything other than package and submit on Monday due to work being busy - but I unexpectedly managed to get half a day. Good job too as without that it would have had no sound, and even fewer levels! Anyway, total WORK time was less than 48 hours, and this was submitted to Jam not Compo. (It had to be anyway as I used third-party sprite graphics, which is why I've opted out of graphics rating). I spent a total of 39 waking hours actively working on it, though elapsed time was 3 days.
@p-r and @oilen Sorry about the difficulty balance - this was my first jam and I spent too long coding mechanics and left myself with nowhere near enough time for level creation or any balancing. A lesson for the future!
I do plan to update/improve the game, so if you are at all interested then please follow it on itch.io to get notified of new versions.
@karanveer Yes, sorry - I had very little time for making levels so they aren't at all well thought out...
@guckstift Agreed on all counts! The lighting on the wall tiles was the thing that annoyed me the most, but a fix would have taken far longer than I could have afforded!
Hi, your download link is dead - did you remember to set it to public on itch.io?
Great job, very atmospheric. Loved the style of the whole thing. The only thing I found slightly annoying is that you take damage just from going close to something and it can be hard to judge where the boundary is. Mostly this just means need need to avoid going too close, but in one section there is little room to move and it wasn't that easy to tell whether some regions were passable or not. But that's a minor criticism. Overall I really like this one.
Enemies(?) take too much killing, and it seems random how much damage you cause. In particular, I assumed that flinging them into things would cause them a lot of damage, but it seems to cause none. Attack buttons seem pretty unresponsive. Otherwise, quite fun!