Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Spooner
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Cm | Co | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 18 | Enemies as Weapons | Alpha Channel | compo | 95 | 2.74 | 2.79 | 2.85 | 3.35 | 2.25 | 1.85 | 1.50 | 3.75 | 35 |
Spooner leaves an average of 10.6 feedback comments each event.
I found it a bit difficult, without a cross-hair, to see what I was pointing at. I know it highlighted, but when I was pointing at a large object, I lost track of where I was looking exactly. Otherwise, a very novel idea!
Very, very nice! Wish I'd entered myself now, so I could rate it as high as LD would let me (except sound, of course :P).
@Wixmef: Although those graphics were used in Great Dungeon in the Sky, they are from the lo-fi sprite pack by Oryx (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=8970.0) and have been widely used in other indie games.
The top-right action key doesn't work on my keyboard (UK) :(
Otherwise, filled with joy!
The link above is wrong. Appears to be at http://hempuli.com/DR/doooors.html now.
As people have said, restarting if you fail is not so in-keeping with what is a puzzle, rather than arcade, game.
Got to the spring room but it kept glitching (using page-up to return). Tried half a dozen times, but I just couldn't get through and gave up (I still had to watch the intro and talk to the computer before page-up worked for me and I felt it could have been a dozen more tries before I randomly got past that level). Was really disappointed, because I wanted _so much_ to serve the computer!
Was a bit confused by the sound. On my first play-through music started at what seemed to be a random point; silence before. Then I read in your journal that you had a human-acted voice-over in the intro, but no, I never heard that (maybe you didn't get around to putting that in?).
Making all the other games look shabby :(
Plenty of levels, considering the time limit, but keep to the turn-based (you can't move/fire while the game is resolving effects) rather than real-time puzzles.
Liked the Tron style a lot and the use of size-for-health (and the way that integrated with the navigation though smaller places; unlike the other reviewer, I felt this could have been more used). Not sure the theme was used as well as it might have, but I greatly enjoyed exploring the neon caves.
Runs fine for me on win7x64, but I have newish card & driver.
Found tracking the enemy with the mouse a little fiddly, but I think that could be improved without making it too easy. The lasso and blue-meanie twirling was very nicely done, though I had trouble aiming them at other meanies (felt easier just to throw them off the edge).
Why were tribes of cats living on the asteroids? They made a horribly heart-twanging sound as they were thrown off their homes into space (Simple graphics + fine sound effects + too much imagination).
As someone said, there wasn't an actual challenge, but it was fun to swing and fire asteroids around. Not sure if you got a huge bonus for sling-shotting, but there should have been (I could only hit things while swinging). Some flying saucers with lasers might have improved the experience and given more incentive to grab an asteroid.
I would have preferred a larger window with pixellated graphics, but it was surprisingly playable in spite of that.
Nice that there is an intro; bad that it goes on (and on). Thankfully I could skip it.
I barely had time to work out what the two concurrent games were before I died. I can't imagine anyone could come to those games completely blind and succeed, even if they only had to play one at once! Remember that with games like this, other players don't have the deep understanding of how they work on first glance, that you, as the game developer, have. Maybe I'm just getting old...
I'd be curious whether a pat-your-head-while-rubbing-your-belly game like this could be made to work. The mini-games could actually be even more simple (trivial even), I think, and it would still work as a test of multi-tasking and coordination.
Nice music. Game was an original idea, but needed work.
Thought the game was too hard until I realised that you had to constantly kick little guys just to stay out of the jaws :) Poor little guys!
I liked that "bouncing" enemies also affected the environment (such as turning the platforms over so you could stand on them, which was a step ahead of some games I've seen that followed the same formula).
Glitchiness didn't help; it might have been nice to have been able to see more of this game. Even without improving the sprites, it would have been nice to show direction of facing, since the attacks were directional.
Nice pretty game; decent puzzling action. If only you'd used Tom Baker as the player, you'd have had 5* in everything :$
Nice to have added a bit of dialogue to make the game less flat than most of the other entries. The magnetic effects were nice, and I am sure could be expanded upon to be central to the game-play, but actually throwing robot heads around was a little cumbersome.
Seemed to be lots of spikes directly under drops that you couldn't see until you'd fallen onto them. Seemed a bit unavoidable unless you were psychic.
Couldn't find the theme in there, which was a shame.
Pipe-hacking lifted straight from Alien Swarm (and others) and Mastermind, but at least put together in a nice package. My primitive ape brain couldn't hack fast enough to finish the game, but at least that means it had a decent scaling difficulty.
Wherefor art thou, Theme?
Shame you used dodgy music; I was really impressed when I thought it was original! Lovely game and style; screen area could have been a bit bigger.
Original mechanics, with potential. As people have said, being the hand of god is a a bit confusing and makes it too easy to just run around in the walls. If they didn't get attracted to you if you were inside the walls, it might make sense.
Really liked the graphics, but bad that I couldn't see the grass "wall" when end-on. Has potential though and although the music is creepy, that is all for the good!
Nice mechanics! As others have said, a bit more polish and variety would make the game even more playable.
Huge numbers of enemies homing in directly from all directions made avoiding them too hard, especially since they bypassed the platforms. The fact you could just continually dash in all directions made the bat (and the platforms) a bit irrelevant.
Still, some un and has some potential, but I'm not sure what exactly would make it work better.
Needed a bit more to do; would have been nice to have less asteroids and maybe some aliens shooting at you that you needed to crush with the rocks?
Otherwise interesting mechanically and has potential, perhaps.
Like others, I found that the only way I could get anywhere without dying very quickly was expanding out and rotating.
Very original concept and with a bit of tweaking of the controls and making it obvious which way you were facing, could be a fun game.
I didn't the way the rooms reset when I left them. I walked off one screen with three spiders on it to a dead end, then when I went back, I got killed at the edge of the screen before I could do anything. I think the game would have benefited from continuous scrolling, since the "levels" were so tiny in real terms.
Still, nice art style and some interesting ideas.
Since you can rotate fast, and the bullets are slow, it doesn't seem to matter which way you are facing when you fire as long as you rotate with the bullet in the air. Not knowing when you will actually fire doesn't help either.
Still, interesting concept and brownie points for making it with only dynamic HTML :)
Nice to see someone playing with building an engine rather than just using off-the-peg stuff, even if other parts of the game suffered. Game would have gained immensely just from having a stick-figure for the player, rather than a box.
Sadly, the game kept crashing before there were more than one zombie, so I couldn't actually use "enemies as weapons" :( (Windows binary on Win7x64). Did manage to play zombie bowling in the end though :)
Journal good though.
Audio when the enemies fire would make it a lot easier (in a good way), I think. Otherwise, nice simple idea that is nevertheless fun to play!
Liked the idea that carrying a spider limited where you could go, but I didn't feel it really limited me, because I had stones to throw anyway. Maybe I just didn't get far enough (collision handling issues made progress slow; gave up on level 2).
I wouldn't force the player to kill all the spiders in order to advance. If you want to jump over them or, in the first level, not bother to go and get the extra life, I don't see a reason not to let the player past (you'd get less points that way, but I'm not sure that hoovering up all the monsters is fun).
I enjoyed working out the puzzles in the game and think that it could be be great with some more levels designed after the competition.
Creating the insults was a bit cumbersome, especially when I had to persuade about 8 guys to leap into a pit. Otherwise, it was intuitive enough. Shame that there wasn't really a difference between pants and balls though :P
Would have been very nice to have a standalone that didn't need me to install .NET.
Didn't think the theme was covered in a very interesting way, though it was within the interpretation. Random levels, however is a boon, though didn't slog through a lot of them to see how different they actually were.
The moving background was painful, but otherwise pretty.
The problem with the knock-enemies-into-other-enemies system is that you kill enemies by touching them anyway, so there isn't much reason for it. Perhaps if you had to bounce on the enemies and that made them shoot out and kill other enemies, it would make more sense.
Really interesting little game, that looked like it had a lot of content (if only I was better at jumping :)). Intro and general style helped greatly.
Not sure that a snake-whip really counted as good use of "enemies as weapons" though.
Loved the game, but "Enemies as weapons"? It was a lot harder to knock asteroids into other asteroids than it actually was to knock them yourself (and it was more often that I pushed an asteroid into earth than pushed it away, when I tried to do this).
Brought back happy memories of playing the Nuclear War card game. Only 30 millions dead? Ha, I shrug it off!
Neat little puzzler, especially since you included an editor.
I had to use XP/SP3 compatibility mode (Win7x64) but then it seemed fine.
Liked that picking up your weapon was in 3 parts, so you could mix and match a better weapon (clip, feed & barrel). Well, you could, but mainly you were taking pot luck (which was fine).
I would have preferred less robots that were more of a threat rather than a horde of drones, but that is more personal preference than saying something is wrong with the game.
I had fun!
Really enjoyed this puzzley game, but some simple sound effects would have made it. Would like to see the sort of levels you could make using the mechanic with a bit more time.
Liked seeing the concept art in your journal.
Yeah, runs stupidly fast here too. Since I can eat enemies by flying over them and they were unaffected by my dotted lin, I wasn't sure what I was supposed to shoot with the ammo I allegedly got from eating the As. Either that or I completely missed the point.
Hehe! First game I've seen that has a similar game-play to my own entry, so that has to be good. Hmm, but on the other hand, it isn't exactly the same as mine, so perhaps I should mark it down? :P
Good use of the theme, but the game-play was very limited. Could have done with obstacles, perhaps, to make the map a bit less open. As people have said, catching multiple bombers in the explosions would have helped a lot.
The lighting effect, though simple, did add something to the game. I felt I was being chased by villagers with pitchforks and burning brands!
Did like the concept a great deal, though I found it too hard to exactly place my fires so they blocked the onslaught (I felt that once I had worked out where to place them, it shouldn't be a work of extreme precision to actually block off an area).
Nice original use of the theme and pretty too.
I liked this more than I expected to. I was thinking it would be a bog-standard platformer, when it was really more of a puzzle game. The puzzles were pretty good as far as I got, though I did struggle a bit with timing jumps while switching and using abilities, but I'm sure that could be made easier.
As others said, the text could have been larger (even just a simple key list in the entry description would have helped a lot); I had to read the comments to work out what to do!
I really liked the style of the game, especially the little chat bubble in the title scene and spat out by panicked managers. Slick!
The difficulty does rack up very fast, but the lack of variety in game-play wouldn't support a longer game.
A long time since I saw digitised people in a game; sort of missing that style now. Animations, although not using a lot of frames, were very effective and obviously modelled with great enthusiasm. Ultimately, I had endless fun beating up deps, then throwing deps at deps :)
I was immediately reminded of the classic claymation side-ways scrolling shooter Platypus when I saw this. Definitely very impressed that you managed to hand-craft in the time-scale!
Really liked the way the spore-guns stuck to you too, though I was less sure of the way that you scanned the mushrooms.
LD22 — Alone (1)
Lonesome Cowboy by jlnr 2011-12-19T00:48:00
Apart from sometimes being adjacent to coyotes I couldn't avoid, the level generation wasn't too bad really, but I wasn't sure they were always completable. Missed having some sound effects, but otherwise was a really fun little game that required a bit of planning! Presumably inspired by DROD, but mixing it up a bit.