ToastBiome by tinyworlds 2012-04-23T04:50:00
Not really sure what to make of this game. I couldn't really figure out what the goal was. There was also a bit of response lag when night changed to day.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Spiridios
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Snap Encounters | jam | 478 | 2.68 | 2.59 | 2.79 | 2.68 | 2.39 | 2.58 | 3.39 | 2.50 | 58 | ||
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | Conversion | compo | 352 | 3.38 | 2.82 | 4.25 | 4.25 | 2.19 | 4.00 | 2.32 | 3.86 | 100 | ||
| 2012 | 23 | Tiny World | T-Pod | compo | 541 | 2.79 | 2.67 | 2.00 | 3.03 | 2.61 | 2.94 | 2.10 | 2.36 | 57 | ||
| 2010 | 17 | Islands | Evil Lair Command | compo | 152 | 2.46 | 2.18 | 2.19 | 3.21 | 2.64 | 2.44 | 2.28 | 16 |
Not really sure what to make of this game. I couldn't really figure out what the goal was. There was also a bit of response lag when night changed to day.
I'd mark this as unplayable under Windows. Aside from the flicker, none of the UI (as seen in the screenshots) show up except for a split second when entering a screen. Couldn't play, so didn't rate.
Controls are a bit choppy, I couldn't find any way to restart except to close and re-run, and the black blobs would eventually just ignore my "sword" and kill me. Based on your journal, I'd be interested to see what you were planning. Perhaps a post-mortem post is in order?
Pretty decent. Could've used sound of some sort. There didn't appear to be any score, and the ending was kind of abrupt.... But there was game play, water physics, and the setting was great!
Fun little game with a dash of humor. Enemies had way too many hitpoints or bullets did too little damage. Hitboxes seemed a bit large as boss bullets that should have sailed past hit me, but I still managed to win it eventually.
If you're trying to say our personal universe is full of confusion, then you succeeded. But it's way slow to find anything, and even once you build up your strength a bit, there's still no feedback. I finally just push a direction then clicked out of the browser to get some auto exploring done. I found an item up against the outside wall, so that wasn't retrievable. I like the base mechanic though, just needs some balancing.
Unlike the others, I didn't think it was too hard. I really like the game play, but it WAS hard to tell what the target color was. It didn't help that my first target color was a shade of grey, so I didn't realize the test-tube was my target color. =p I also think this makes a better natural selection game than a color theory game, but what do I know.
Hmm, where have I seen this game before. =p Oh yeah, I wrote one too (I wouldn't normally mention that but @wibblymat mentioned it first!) Nice take on the arcade space shooter. I didn't immediately realize that big red bar was a health bar or that the aliens shot when they got close, I like that mechanic. Loved the sound effects. Could've used faster or more aliens, or a limit on the bullets.
Yeah, thanks to Kvisle for the port!
As for the game, I like the base mechanics. Death seemed a little harsh, so maybe some health would be good or a short breather of some kind. Also I'd occasionally get in a state where I couldn't shoot - maybe because I just died? Not sure. Throw in some sound, music, and a little tuning and I think you've got a fun side-scrolling shooter.
The first time the devourer appears, you're pretty much dead since you weren't expecting it....Not sure if that's good or bad. =p
Eating orbs to go faster was a nice touch. I managed to keep ahead of the devourer until I reached the edge of the world. I kept swimming, but with no more orbs I was easily turned into a tasty treat. Is there a way to win?
One complaint is the use of "space" to both swim and to start a new game. You're madly swimming along for your very life but sadly you get eaten, then the title screen flashes on screen for a single frame and boom, you're in a new game. Using some other key, like enter, to start the game, would prevent this from happening.
@robcozzens - If I had a Mac I would have built a binary. It's all cross-platform Python with PyGame, shouldn't take long for someone with a Mac...
@j_peeba - Yeah, the colors weren't supposed to be permanent. In fact the particles were intended to fade over time, I just ran out of time.
@arkazon - come on, the only skill this game uses is how fast you can press the fire button! =p I like how my two very simple Alien behaviors, layered at random, can become "fairly interesting paths."
Liked it. I don't think the orb needs to move faster necessarily, but it does seem like it's response is slow. Try moving one direction, then immediately moving the opposite. It seems like it takes a fraction of a second before it switches directions. Maybe your framerate is too low? I'd almost think adding a slight bit of inertia to the orb might make it more interesting and mask the slugishness problem. When in doubt, make the bug a feature!
Oh, and sound. This game needs sound! Lots of it.
This seems like it would be a very fun game, but a couple of things caused me to stop playing. Trying to select near the edge of the window causes the selection to get stuck if your mouse strays over the edge. Probably a good idea to capture the mouse or something similar. Also, using such similar shades for your shapes makes it darn near impossible to tell where the little shapes are supposed to go. I think just a couple of tweaks would make this game great.
Interesting concept. I played locally against serilyn. Won 2 out of 3. Seemed like I kicked halfway around the planet once, which was weird. I definitely would concentrate on sfx and fight mechanic next time and save the AI for the last minute panic. =p
Great fun game! Definitely one of my favorites of the compo.
Some of the sounds were either identical or only off by a tiny bit. I like the idea of a speech bubble as an alternative for sound, each has a symbol or something.
The controls weren't intuitive. At first I kept click click click clicking, dragging the fish in little spurts, until I realized I could click and hold, and the fish would just follow.
Fun game, though using your finger means it's hard to see the color the planet wants (at least on my phone). High score of 659.
Great concept. You should do a post-compo version since you ran short on time.
Loved the game! Great music! I think the jumping mechanic needs tweaking, storing up jumping energy and jumping on button release is hard to get used to. Also, it would be nice to have some momentum in the jump, so you can run and jump onto one of the walls, instead of having to use the spinning thing as an intermediary step.
Would have been interesting to see your concept of rotating the level with respect to the spider.
I have AYIMs but I have yet to play it. Based on these comments and this game, I guess I probably should. This was a very fun puzzle game. The only bad part is that in my mind the rotation buttons should have been reversed. This should be configurable or at the very least "z" and "c" should rotate the same direction, and players can just pick using z&x or x&c depending on which rotation they feel more comfortable with.
Fun puzzler. Definitely need some feedback on where your current construction is going to be placed, especially on the larger pieces. Music was slightly repetitive, but was overall a good addition.
Not sure what to say that hasn't been said yet, great interpretation of the theme into a unique mechanic!
You might consider changing the death/new level screens so they only advance when the player pushes a GUI button or so they have to be displayed for a minimum of .5 seconds before you can continue. This prevents those of us over here click spamming to save our globe from just flying past the intermission screens and wondering "what was that strange screen flicker?" =p
Very interesting. Would love to see this fleshed out more - see what kind of mechanic you were going for. Destroy buildings, save buildings, both, neither.
Fun puzzler. I hit the M key for music and my spotify, which was paused, started playing. Otherwise music didn't work. =p
Not to be redundant, but I couldn't tell... Maybe make the bad cell more obvious? I had one game that the only cells that were dying were the ones I killed trying to find the bad cells, so I'm guessing there were no bad cells?
Overall, and enjoyable platformer.
When running the desktop version, a non-scaled resize would be nice. The zooming when I got near large things was a bit distracting. I hate invisible walls that are only there to keep you from wandering off. Maybe just let the player jump to their death or put a visible wall there.
At first I thought the death penalty was pretty weak, but as the levels advanced and got harder, it seemed more balanced, though possibly still on the weak side. The restart checkpoints need a better indicator that you've hit them - at first I didn't know what they were.
Fairly hard to last very long, and I couldn't make the walls do much. But I'm quite impressed that you managed to do all this from within Android!
I ran into a weird glitch where the mouse kept "escaping" the plugin window when I clicked to fire. I mainly mention this because the first time I shot someone the browser window disappeared and was replaced with another app I had running in the background. I was left sitting there for a moment wondering if that was the intended effect: you shoot someone and everything is gone. Of course it was just a glitch with the Unity plugin but, technical limitations aside, that seemed an interesting way to end the game....
Very simple, fun game. Would've like a keyboard control option in addition to the mouse as the mouse seemed a bit hard to register which trap you were intending to click on.
Pretty good game. Reminds me a bit of Potty Pigeon on the C64. =p
I created a Windows exe build at https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19107686/identithief.zip Program_IX, feel free to add the link to your entry, or copy it to your own host if you wish.
You're welcome Program_ix! I had py2exe and pygame2exe installed and setup from a previous LD so it was pretty quick to do.
The Windows exe exits just fine on both mine and Serilyn's Windows 7 x64 boxes, so I'm not sure what problem Dark Acre Jack had. Hitting esc to exit from playing the game and then having to right click to exit the main menu is slightly confusing, maybe that was the problem?
I realized I forgot to include the script that creates the exe - it's included in the zip linked above now if you want to use it in the future. It needs py2exe installed and it's a modification of this script: http://www.pygame.org/wiki/Pygame2exe
Great little platformer marred by a couple issues that kinda tanked the fun factor. The run-jump response seemed off, like if you weren't pixel-perfect in your timing, you were dead. The lack of save points made this excessively hard in that you lost all progress for one slip-up. However, the music was great, the level design felt good, and other than the annoyances above, the controls were good too.
Fun little chase. I think mouse control would work better. I kept finding the exit with exactly 5 gold.
The controls felt a bit floaty, like it was easy to slide off or over correct. Otherwise, nice mechanic. I think adding some urgency would be neat in order to try and force the player to blindly jump rather than just waiting for the next lightning flash.
Nice graphics and audio. Wonderful puzzle mechanic. I stopped playing at level 6 mainly because I've been rating puzzle games all night. :P Yours is the best I've played tonight though.
Hmm, no music for me. I thought you just didn't implement audio until I saw everyone talking about the great music. =( Controls were too touchy, and the collision response seemed to have more energy than I put into the crash. The graphics, however, looked great and the overall gameplay concept was good.
@badlydrawnrod I'm planning on trying a monogame port which opens up the possibility of an Android port. Though I can just imagine people falling down stairs trying to play it in the dark though. :P
@Cosine - what is the exact error message and which OS are you trying this on? Is the XNA 4 runtime installed? (second link above). Hopefully either I or the JSIL developer will make some headway on getting panning support in JSIL so I can have an HTML5 version up.
@everyone who asked about the ending, I've added a hint to the entry description that mentions that there are two endings. Thanks everyone for the great comments!
Thanks for the comments! I took it for granted that the controls were obvious. :P Movement is FPS-style. I added two more hints to the entry description to help with this.
@_Ziemowit - which build did you try (Web or Windows?) If web, which browser and version so I can test it. The Audio API code that the web build is using for panning is bleeding edge, so it might have some issues. It's only known to work in Chrome 26 or better and it's known NOT to work in Firefox.
@davidwparker I'm not quite sure what you mean by "didn't see", but you could try it in Safari - it's supposed to have the Web Audio API that's being used for sound. I don't have access to a Mac to try it in.
Thanks everyone who voted me up to #10 in innovation!
Doesn't appear to work with my AMD Radeon HD 6800 nothing but white no matter how many times I click, move the mouse, or push WASD. You also seem to have an issue with mouse capture as the mouse escapes and starts clicking on other windows requiring that I exit the game.
Very interesting game play. I like that you get brief pulses of vision. Not sure how I felt about persisting the vision for nearby walls. I almost think it would be neat to simplify the mazes and ONLY rely on pulses... But that would require some play testing to see if it works. Great job on innovation!
Great concept. I think the mirror controls could improve a bit, especially since the pivot point changes based on... Randomness? Definitely needs audio, but overall I like it.
It's way to easy to bypass the tutorial screen in play. Fast and hard and I still wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to be doing. Some of the colors were hard to see on my monitor. I think you could have a decent game here with just some slight polish.
BTW, appreciate the JSIL build.
Love it! A sound based game! Could use some more depth, but the variety of sounds and humor were great.
I could not fully rate due to not having the requisite hardware/adapter to connect our Kinect to a PC, but I did rate in some categories (eg theme) that I could tell from the video. From watching it and playing similar Kinect games, isn't it a bit odd watching the balls move away from you instead of watching them move toward you?
I beat level 12 and got weird static and a very thin green triangle that spanned the bottom of the screen. Loved the gameplay and I think the controls were reasonable enough considering what needed to be done. The legend helped. Maybe you could place the legend on the mouse pointer itself, so you don't have to move your eyes (like color the pointer half and half, or put little dots next to it).
Not sure how I should score you on innovation. On the one hand, staring contest must be the oldest game ever. On the other than, *it's on the internet*, and that was good enough to be called innovative in the 90's.
Made it! Very interesting game. The moving dots were confusing, because at first I thought they indicated my actual movement, not just the direction I'm trying to go. I think adding some positional feedback would help, so rather than just volume make use of stereo. Also, to orient the player, the first level could have the maze visible so you get a mental connection between the sounds and movements. THEN take away the visuals. It gave me some ideas for my sound-based game.
Wow, where to start. This is probably one of the games in LD that impressed me the most. The integrated tutorial is awesome. Not just for an LD game, you did a wonderful job leading the player through each of the core mechanics before throwing them into their first puzzle. The little cries from the little orange critter when you reset were great. It makes you actually feel a bit bad for giving up without actually punishing the player. The little blue critter and it's whine give you mystery you want to track down. The fractured graphics help with that. I gave up a few levels in, because I'm not really up to a puzzler right now, so I'm not really sure of those mysteries are answered. As has been said, some better cues on where/what buttons are doing would help. And continuing the tutorial by having a better ramp up on puzzle difficulty would help too. This is definitely a game to continue developing. Great job!
I came back to play again. :p So here's some more feeback. This one's very very minor: because the .zip doesn't have the game name in it, it was hard to find in my LD26 folder of games.
Since this is an XNA game, you might consider trying JSIL. It may or may not work, but if it does you'll have a web version of your game.
Having come back, a way to skip levels you've already completed would be nice.
There's one place in one level (second to last I believe) where you CAN walk on empty space. That seemed like a bug, except I couldn't find any way to continue the level without using that.... Except, now that I solved the level, I think it may be possible to solve without using that glitch. This also may be why it took me so long to solve the level because I hadn't discovered the other path and kind of dismissed that area as being "done"....
I like that standing in the way of walls doesn't punish you in any way.
Loved it. Great take on the theme, interesting controls. A bit frustrating at times, but good job.
Since you die if you touch a wall, I think the controls would be better if you were confined to the four cardinal directions. I didn't realize they weren't until I activated the cheat mode. Like the game idea though.
The goal sound is pretty harsh - as my wife can attest while I was playing. Placement was a bit touchy, definitely need to constrain the pieces or warn the player that they're about to place it in an invalid location rather than having the piece snap back. However, it was quite a fun physics/puzzle game, good job!
Loved it. Hard, crazy, didn't quite know what I was doing half the time.
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Interesting interactive story. The voice acting seemed a little devoid of emotion considering the subject matter. I can see conveying numbness in spots, but other spots it seemed out of place.
Need more ammo! Ok, maybe not, but that's what I kept saying while playing it. :P Fun little shooter, just hard enough to be challenging.
Saw this and thought "not another Mondrian game!" But the puzzle mechanic is great! Would like to see some bonuses for clearing more than the minimum required, not using all your clicks, etc, but overall nice balanced, interesting puzzle.
Very interesting. I wish time actually flowed like that. I could sit down and ponder my LD game idea then stand up to find the theme has only just been announced!
Oddly enough, even the "with sound" version has no sound in Firefox. Also, Firefox tries to scroll the page when I hit space (may be my config). Voted N/A on audio due to rules violation.
Zip is corrupt. I tried running the .love file in love 0.8.0, but all I get are randomly blinking white squares and nothing seems to do anything (could be operator error, I've never used love before).
Very minimal gameplay. A difficulty ramp would be nice.
Sound didn't work in Firefox 20. I liked the limited vision aspect, but the game needed more depth.
Giving you high scores for innovation, but I wasn't really having fun. I think you need to work on balance a bit and provide some way to lead the player from point a to point b. It seemed a bit random as to where you were supposed to go and how to get there.
I like the combination of blindness and light.
Controls were a bit off.
The web version takes quite a while to load. Controls are toast on some non-gaming keyboards. This particular keyboard can't read up, left, and space simultaneously, so I was stuck just past the first checkpoint. Will rate later when I can do this on a gaming keyboard.
OK, now that I'm on a gaming keyboard, the controls do need work. You have a great, fun game here marred in controls that you're constantly having to fight. And there were a couple Nintendo Hard parts where you just have to blindly jump and hope you make it. Still, high scores for a fun jam game.
@prelucid yeah, it's common for non-gaming keyboards to have issues like this. The cheaper the more likely. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_%28key%29 I don't blame your game, I blame the cheap keyboard I was on at the time.
Very fun game with a great interpretation of the theme. Needs a bit of polish still. Would have liked a way to restart the game, but I know that can be problematic at times (my own game can't restart due to an audio bug I didn't have time to fix).
Audio doesn't work in Firefox, which is too bad because your audio adds a lot.
This really needs more feedback than just a flash. Audio would help. Also, I looked at the map to orient myself so I could figure out what the different flashes meant (yeah, cheater, sorry). If heal-spots can just be spammed for health, why don't they just heal you up fully to start? Even looking at the map, I thought it wasn't winnable until I realized that.
Loved the mechanic and the tone set by the narrator. BTW, Wolfram Tones isn't free to use (read their terms of use, they claim ownership of all content produced through the site and require you to get a license from them to use it).
Wow, neat idea for a rhythm game. Had fun playing it.
Very neat idea, and level layouts looked good and challenging, but the scrolling mechanic and faulty collision detection ruined it. Either do smooth scrolling, or scroll the robot WITH the screen. Having the screen suddenly jump and now the robot is in lava isn't fun, especially when it's very hard to tell WHEN it's going to jump.
Also, not everyone reads text at the same speed you do. Especially if you wrote the text, you WILL read it faster than anyone else. Either wait for the player to press a key to skip, or if you still want a timeout, put a long timeout on it and also allow the player to skip by pressing a key.
Definitely think you have a fun little game here if those problems are cleared up.
Reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_%28video_game%29 Liked the graphics and sound, not really liking the controls, but I'm not sure how you can avoid that on compo deadlines and still make it four player.
Wow, you said you wanted a relaxing game, and this is it. There's a bit of strategy to get a high score, but it doesn't break the mood any. Great job.
Been wanting to play this since I saw the preview posts during the compo, but only just now got to it. It was both a bit slow and a bit short. The slowness was mainly due to the randomness of how things went together. The shortness, I suspect, is exactly why my game is short (darn time constraints). BTW, in Firefox, if the browser window is too small and you scroll a bit too see, the mouse detection is off. Fun point&click overall though.
I like the concept. There needs to be a break between the last note of the previous phrase and the first note of the next one. Like "press any key for the next phrase". I was having issues tracking which note was which key too, but I'm not sure I like the suggestion to map them to their letters.
Fairly well polished, but not much game other than guessing which is the right thing to erase. Loved the art style, but the autotracker music didn't feel quite right (I hate to say that, since autotracker is a life saver for compos). Would love to see this developed more as the erase stuff mechanic is fun. Perhaps concentrate on levels where the erasing is strategic rather than random (eg, more first level or kitten level, less cloud level or space level). High marks for innovation, theme, and graphics!
For those complaining about lag, it's most likely your browser. Same computer, ran it in Firefox and it was painfully slow. Ran in Chrome, was smooth as it should be. This mimics my experience with other Javascript games (both in compo and my own). Javascript/HTML5 just isn't very consistent yet...
Very interesting take on the theme :P Not much for replayability, but it was interesting and nostalgic.
I liked the subtle clues about where to go next (you could just barely see some edges, etc). The last level I made it to (5 I think, wasn't paying too close attention) tried to trick you into doubling back but I could see the other light by looking at an angle. I like how you first think it's going to be a real lame minimal game (oh, find the cube that's RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU!) and then it turns out to have some depth.
Very deceptively simple gameplay. Some levels were a lot about just randomly clicking until you found the magic spot, which felt more like playing the slots. Great music.
Controls need work. Trying to do everything one handed sucks for these kinds of games. Considering how many people implement "up" to jump, maybe I'm the only one that thinks this? Falling rate for the character could be tweaked a little to help with pushing falling blocks. Difficulty for level 12 was off the charts, considering that when pushed from below, things slide off. I did eventually make it, which means you had enough of something to keep my interest in seeing what was past level 12.
For some reason, when I played from Firefox there was no audio. Chrome worked.... Which is odd, since it's the unity player not the browser doing the work. :/ Liked the interpretation. The game was a bit short and could possibly use a bit more depth, but I liked that you get to hear the combination at the end.
Could you perhaps put up a link that is not an installer? It gets messy having to remember to uninstall hundreds of LD games.
Very unclear what is going on. Not sure to do or what not to do. I guess if you're going for the art-concept, then that's what life is like.
I like the concept, but the controls are way too touchy.
LOL I thought the caret was a banana!
It wasn't really clear if the game was crashing or I was dying until I ran from a command line and saw the debugging output.
After you kill a monster it can still hurt you. I've died several time due to that. I've also been killed while standing back at the farm with no enemies in sight.
I think just a tad more polish and this could be a fun little explore and bash monsters game.
Really liked the theme here and that you can totally botch the intro if you don't answer questions "correctly". In fact, it feels like there's two games here and it's kinda neat. If you expand on it, you can alternate between the two using the Captain Pike yes/no for dialog and the super flying wheelchair man for the superhero part. I do feel there was some guidance missing from the flying stage. I'd pick someone up and other than the girl and her kitty, it was random and non-obvious as to where I had to take them.
Loved this game! One of my favorites in the compo. The scoring mechanic was great. It felt a bit like a rhythm game the way the sounds worked and I think you should build that in. Like getting higher bonuses for shooting on the beat. Great job!
This was interesting....
Interesting dodge game. Definitely needs sound (I know not a trivial concept in HTML5 at this point). Given that the instructions are so short, including them in-game might help those of us that like to try before reading. I at first thought I found a bug when I learned of the grow aspect by accident. Then I read and found out that was a major point of the game. =p
Some of the explanation screens skipped automatically, so I wasn't quite sure who I was or what my setting was. The secondary power didn't seem to ever do anything, except when it was the potato (or whatever that potato-shaped thing was supposed to be). And most primary weapons sucked in comparison to the mighty fishbowl, which isn't a bad thing, it's just fun to say. I played through several different rolls and enjoyed it.
As has been said, some movement indicator would be helpful. Maybe make movement a bit faster or slow down the enemy gun rotation? It seemed impossible to out maneuver the enemy's gun, so I either tried to outrun them or just soaked all the hits and hoped I hit faster. Interesting idea to make the gun recoil also your propulsion method. Using "click anywhere to continue" was a bit confusing when I was crazy clicking instead of holding the mouse button down. I'd get one frame of game over then I'd be back in the game.... I didn't even realize I had died several times until I realized I should hold the mouse button down. That's when I saw how bad I was at it. =p
Awesome mood and the audio reenforced it so well.
Great execution and interpretation of theme.
Liked the concept. Could use some audio. The NPCs need to do something other than just waiting to die. Had fun overall though.
Very fun little game. The first puzzle was a bit confusing, as nothing had prepared me for the mechanic, but it was an interesting mechanic.
As others have said, the controls seem a bit floaty. Also, I couldn't figure out how to attack. But there seems to be a good game behind that annoyance.
Interesting puzzle mechanic. I agree with the other comments that there needs to be better differentiation between things. And since I like to dive in before reading directions, I had no clue why I was losing some squares, nor did I have a clue what my goal was.... But I did eventually win, so it's not like it's unplayable for stubborn people like me. =p
Interesting. Not sure why sometimes blocks disappeared and sometimes not, or why sometimes my balls would bounce off or sometimes plow right through. And I wasn't 100% sure what made the goal appear. But enjoyed it none-the-less. Great audio, interesting controls.
Controls are a bit odd, but I liked them. Loved that making choices changed what equipment you had to fight the dragon. I worked out a pattern to fight the dragon and when I tried challenge mode found out my pattern no longer applied (since I didn't have a shield)! Nice touch.
Really liked the idea and execution here. You come to a level, you think you know how to solve it, you try and die and try and die again only to find the solution is a outside-the-box gimmick that's really easy to pull off. And you managed to not reuse the puzzle solutions. I think it's a bit of a stretch to call it minimalism, but I've seen worse ;)
Oh, you might want to label the link "Web (Flash)", you might get more players that way.
Wow, great concept. The "pure white" blended with the grey on my second monitor, making it hard to see what I could and could not move. Moving to my primary monitor helped some, but better grey differentiation would help. Given that this is a mouse+keyboard game, WASD/ZQSD is probably a better key binding for movement. A reset would be nice in case you get yourself into a hard-to-back-out-of place. Also an in-game tutorial. I know that sounds like I didn't like it, but I actually did - just some minor polish and you've got a great puzzle game.
Why are all the links to a post-compo version? It's not legal to rate post compo versions.
Seems there are some bugs when it comes to teleporting from room to room. I frequently end up materializing in open space then fall fall fall.
That said, the concept looks great. I hope you continue working on it!
Didn't make it past the first puzzles. I spent several minutes in the conveyerbelt room, then tried the trampoline room, but by then I was too frustrated to really want to try.
For everyone with download problems, the "sources" link contains a playable copy of the game.
I'm not sure what to make of it. I discovered a few things, but some things seem arbitrary.
Would have preferred two-handed controls, as moving and attacking simultaneously was awkward. Steve's animation reminded me of Little Computer People on the C64.
Game crashes on launch. I hear a short sound, the console enumerates a bunch of sound devices, and then I get the wonderful Windows dialog "TemporaryBabel2D.exe has stopped working"
Would like to see a mechanic come from the morphing. Like involving the physics engine so circles can roll, but triangles are more stable, etc.
Nice variation on a simple game!
@Cybearg It felt a little overly punishing, but then a lot of Atari games were like that. I played it again to give a better answer to your question.... And I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking for a different mechanic (the problem with checking back 13 days after leaving a comment). Perhaps some kind of score modifier/subtractor for hitting walls (though pinging already does this).
Unplayably broken - W to move north just keeps throwing an error.
I like the concept. I sat there holding my left mouse button for quite a while before I got bored and committed suicide to get a high score. Other than the button mechanic, I liked the mouse control.
Some progression, like the occasional goal or level boundary would be nice. Also, some of those coins are damn hard to get to, make them worth more points so that the reward feels worth the risk.
The hunt for seeds got a bit monotonous, but the game's atmosphere was great. I'm not sure what actually ended the game. The share feature is a nice touch.
First, for the windows build you might want to mention that you need the x86 build of the VC2012 redistributable: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679
I needed to rate this game since you and I had similar takes on the theme.
Talk about Nintendo hard! I like that you had different sound effects to tell you where you were in relation to the things around you. A key or description would have been helpful, or even just hinting that the different sounds have meaning. I needed to open up the map to reverse engineer what the sounds meant. Even with the map open it was a bit of a challenge to find the end.
Overall great concept. You might consider polishing it up a bit and submitting it here: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?id=7201
Nice concept, though buggy (dialog clearly meant for one character was drawn as if coming from another. Also, at one point, there was a dialog line but no text, and then the defense responded like there was dialog). The entire game without sound, only to have a sudden, loud, creak, was a bit unnerving. Other than that, excellent game!
#15, on my monitor, the color that came up might as well have been white. I inspected the pixel's color. It was fffffb.
Interesting experience. Not sure I can call it a game, since your choices don't really matter, you have to make the pre-canned choices or you just run in circles..... Wait, that sounds like MOST video games. Well done!
Very nice simon-like game. Since the cube has no visual indicators, even if you know sound X is on face Y, finding face Y is a problem. If you accidentally spin the cube, then finding face Y is impossible. Put some kind of minimal graphic that is always visible, and that lights up when the sound is played (similar to how you show something now). That way a player can associate a sound with an image. An alternative, if you want to preserve the "don't associate sound with an image" aspect, one face needs to be marked with an orientation image, so a player at least has a hope of finding face Y. I liked the basic mechanic though, and you generally pulled it off well.
Video looks interesting. I'm puzzled as to why you didn't submit the game itself though (not that I have an iDevice to play it on).
The non-debug build ran fine. You and I had similar ideas here. I was assuming the controls were first-person style like my game and it took me a while to realize I needed to repeatedly push the key for the direction I wanted to go. I like it, you managed to get a bit more in than I did.
Can't rate - mingw build just gives me a blank command window and I can't find the MSVC build mentioned in the description.
You took a text adventure, already considered minimal by some, and minimalized it further! Bravo! Though it would have been slightly more minimal if it wasn't bilingual on every page (but I can imagine maintaining two localized versions might be harder than one)
Controls were a bit sloppy - why does the car game use keyboard but the other two use mouse? The mouse didn't work half the time on the matchstick game. Concept is sound though, just needs some work.
As you already know the controls need some work. It would be nice if the game detected that the ball hit the floor or stopped moving so you didn't have to manually hit "R", but that might be personal preference (maybe someone wants to use the floor as part of their setup). I liked the music, even if it was a bit repetitive. Some sound effects for the ball striking things would be nice. I certainly like the base concept though, so keep working on it.
For the negative, it could have used some audio (sfxr/bsfxr can turn out something useful quickly, and XNA can play sounds very easily)
For the positive, I loved it! It's a great concept to teach math and/or logic. I can see this being made into a great educational game!
Wow, fun game. The controls were a bit tough, and collision detection was claiming I was hitting things that didn't look like I was hitting.
Oh, forgot to mention that this game reminds me a bit of Master of the Lamps.
Love the art style - more the CRT effect than the actual graphics. I like your interpretation of the theme.
IT was easy to cheese my way through the game - it seems enemies don't do anything until you get within certain range. It doesn't matter if you're shooting them or not. Also, having explosions hurt the enemies would be fun.
Overall good shooter for a compo entry.
Talk about difficulty ramp-up! The tutorial has small maps with lots of walls and suddenly not only can you not see the edges, there are hardly any walls to rest on. Interesting concept, though. I could definitely see an interesting game here if it was balanced a little better.
Hmm. The web link doesn't work and neither of the windows bat files worked. I ended up just running the jar directly. Would have liked to have been able to spend my gold and XP. Loved everything else about it though.
No audio on Firefox or Chrome. Bullets don't fire where the mouse is. But, fun shooter game, just need to work out the bugs and maybe add some powerups to add some variation.
Very fun game, it kept me playing despite being a bit frustrated with the healing mechanic. It's a little weird that when you upgrade damage it upgrades your weapon, so if you plan on changing weapons those are wasted points.
Fun one-button game! Definitely would be better with sound. There were a couple of graphics oddities - the game over text appears behind the missiles, and the tank bullets don't fly a the same angle as the tank barrels. Also, I got hit by a tank bullet while just touching the tank barrel from behind, which seemed odd. Maybe I died from heat dissipation from cannon fire? =p
Played the non-rift version. Really curious what the rift version looks like. I think I kinda got what was going on, though there were a couple sound cues I didn't quite understand. I still managed to find my way to the goal and avoid getting twanged too many time.
It sounds and looks great. It was killer hard to avoid getting hit, since there wasn't much indication of where a projectile would come out and they were pretty fast. Seemed like there wasn't much downside to getting hit either.
I'll add it to the description, but the in-game text says "Use the left or right arrow keys to make your choice" There is no mouse support, clicking does nothing.
@solifuge it's a sample that came with LMMS, specifically harpsichord01
@SnoringFrog The HTML5 port was done using JSIL - a cross compiler of sorts. It takes the C# output and recompiles it to Javascript. It's by no means complete, but does a reasonable job once you get past its quirks. They've been adding support for Monogame recently, but I don't know how far along it is.
As for comparing the code, well, it is possible, but there's a lot of supporting code JSIL provides that doesn't exactly make it look like typical Javascript.
Neat puzzle game, played to the end. Needs to have a way to reset completely so I can start fresh when that dolt I'm playing with screws up. Or if it already has that, the dolt I've been playing with didn't tell me. :P
Great music and I gave you highish audio despite not having sound effects because of it. The art is great and the mechanic has promise. I don't see any way to lose though, I got to a point where I stopped clicking on dolphins because there really was no point to having more firepower, things died as soon as they spawned. Would love to play a balanced version of this.
Hmm. Tried the game on a different computer and I'm seeing the same bug Serilyn is - no guns spawn. With just the cannons and bombs spawning it's a pretty darn hard game. On this computer I see the bug in Firefox but not in Chrome. On the other computer I don't see the bug in Firefox and never tried Chrome. The buggy computer has flash 11,8,800,94. Symptoms are that sometimes when you click on a dolphin, nothing spawns and for as long as you play you'll only get cannons and bombs, no guns (presumably what would have dropped from the dolphins that drop nothing).
Love the idea of making a game around the elevator pitch. 10 seconds is a bit short to both size up the investor AND to track all the buzzwords spinning around. Maybe give a short 2 second count down before starting so you can size up your investor? BTW, when can I expect my funds? ;)
Nice concept, would be neat to see it developed more. Needs audio and possibly a health bar or a hit animation (wasn't sure why sometimes I died and didn't at first). I could see some interesting puzzles where you have to use previous clones to clear the way for later clones.
Reminds me a bit of the Hairy Chestival.
The Javelin is backwards - 1st place was closer than 3rd place. For everyone who's complaining about the controls, I take it you've never played any of the old Epyx classics. ;) This reminded me exactly of Epyx Summer Games. Controls were spot on for a bit of nostalgia, just wish I had my old Slik Stik for this. :P
I kept getting just one move away. Love the puzzler. Could see this being a great phone game.
Pretty decent gravity platformer. Some puzzles that took the timing of the switch into account would be neat. As it is, I could mostly just get through a level before the timer ran out, and on the few that needed a gravity switch, I just ran to the point I needed to be and waited out the timer. Some tweaking of the run speed/jumping physics might be nice to make it feel smoother. I'd definitely play it as-is with more levels though, so you're not very far off.
Certainly needs some polish, but great concept and great mood. I got everyone talking but it seemed like I lost, like I took too long maybe. Might try again later.
I think this is a great first game. Some places to improve: If you need a particular resolution, you might want to call that out or limit the selection to resolutions you support. I had to try several windowed modes before I found one that fit inside my older monitor and had the aspect ratio you need. Also, since there was more than enough light in play mode, the lit preview didn't make much sense. I think if you continued work on it, it could make a great puzzle platformer where the lit preview is essential to completing the playthrough.
Fun game! Not sure if this is a bug: you can make your arrangement, hit "play song" realize it's wrong, change the order, and if you do it before it's done playing the song, it'll count as a win. I like the mechanic to spend points to get hints. I didn't use it until I realized I should in order to judge the game, because even on the songs I didn't recognize, there's still enough musical and sound cues to get it right.
Odd concept. Marks for integrating social networking, though having options other than twitter would be nice.
It needs a way to place the picture early instead of requiring that I hold the mouse still until the time is up. The built-in browser you're using is kinda bad. Might be better to just open the URL for twitpic and let the player's regular browser handle that aspect.
Thanks to everyone who actually posted to twitter so that even those who don't use twitter can see that side of the game.
The up/down movement is too slow relative to the asteroids. If you're saying the ship is slow due to time dilation, then those asteroids must be traveling at the speed of light! Love the concept of having to prolong the inevitable while you wait for a jump to hyperspace. If you could just make the controls so you actually have a chance to skill your way out instead of hoping the random number generator is kind to you, it could be quite a fun game.
The Android app's GUI is unplayable on a Galaxy S4 - all the controls are grouped together on the side of the screen not allowing me to interact with any of them.
MUCH more fun on a touch screen than with a mouse (thanks to other commenters for the idea). My phone screen is a bit small for it, so I have to waste precious seconds scrolling, but I got a much higher score there.
Wow, great concept. When I solved the red room puzzle I was like "this can't possibly be how you solve it", and yet, that's what worked.
I can't seem to start a fresh game to prove it, but the blue room puzzle didn't seem to work until I tried in on my main monitor instead of my secondary monitor.