Crustacean Cannon by Hellfang 2010-09-01T08:12:00
As people have said, restarting if you fail is not so in-keeping with what is a puzzle, rather than arcade, game.
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 |
As people have said, restarting if you fail is not so in-keeping with what is a puzzle, rather than arcade, game.
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.
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.
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 :)
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!
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!
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.
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?).
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 :$
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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!
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.
Neat little puzzler, especially since you included an editor.
I had to use XP/SP3 compatibility mode (Win7x64) but then it seemed fine.
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!
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.
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 :)
@ThibG: I've not heard reports of this from anyone else and I've had about 5 people playing it a fair bit (some people have actually played it for fun; not just because I bullied them :)). If you can email me the contents of the "logs" directory (bil dot bagpuss {at} gmail dot com), I'll make every effort to sort out the problem. Details of what OS you are running it on and where you installed it would also be useful!
Thanks for taking a look at my game!
Oops, that was my fault with the Linux problem reported by ThibG. I will attempt to push a working Linux source/OS X binary version (1.1) tonight (or at the latest, tomorrow). The current Windows (1.0) binary version works fine.
Yes, the sound is indeed played by _each pixel_ in contact with an "enemy", so it soon racks up the volume. Sloppy, I know, but one of the many corners I cut during development (and I have my PC speaker volume low, so it never got to the level I realise would be on other people's machines, though a tester did comment on the volume at one point and I did lower it _slightly_). The sound _is_ intended to be a little grating (I like that it sounds like a power tool), but I'm sorry if the volume was annoyingly loud.
I don't think I'm allowed to fix the sound in the competition entry version (only porting and crash fixes allowed, I believe). Currently I'm working on fixing the Linux/OS X ports, which I'll submit as soon as I can, as part of the competition (v1.1), then I can make some non-competition tweaks, like fixing the volume, before I consider the game in a properly usable state.
@everyone: Thanks for all of the positive comments (and quite reasonable criticisms)!
Avast Anti-virus and Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware says it is fine (checking both the .zip and the .exe inside it, that I re-downloaded from my link). I strongly suspect that this is a false positive on your checker.
The application I used to make the exe is Ocra (for Ruby). It packages up the complete Ruby installer, the .rbw file (so it can start up the rest of my scripts) and whatever other dependencies are needed in a .exe. Mmm, I've just found several posts saying that the regular Ruby interpreter installer had tested positive for TR/Dropper.Gen and that being dismissed as a false-positive. I suspect, therefore that this is a similar situation, since my exe has most of the Ruby interpreter inside it.
Not sure if this would help you, but if you downloaded one of the copies of the Ruby Installer (not intending to _use_ it) and it came up as infected when you tested it, then you might be assured that you were safe using my exe (The installer is a very widely used application, unlike my game, that would not be left with a trojan in it for very long!). Ultimately, up to you, of course, but if you still have doubts you could run from my source version (you need to install from the aforementioned Ruby Installer, then run "gem install ocra chingu" and then run "rubyw lib/spooner_ld_18.rbw").
@stqn: Chingu and Gosu are in fact Ruby packages (aka Ruby Gems), the former pure Ruby (so universal), the latter you will have to compile and link to some dependencies (This done via a simple "sudo gem install chingu gosu", as noted in my readme). The problem, possibly, could be getting the necessary requirements for Gosu sorted out. Unfortunately, I only have access to Ubuntu, so the instructions I give in the readme only apply to Debian-based distributions (beyond that you are on your own with http://code.google.com/p/gosu/wiki/GettingStartedOnLinux).
Sorry I can't be more helpful than that (I can't imagine you'll have a problem installing Ruby 1.8.7, or later, on your system, so I needn't mention that)!
@eli: I have actually already considered the colour-blindness problem. The most common colour-blindness is red-green (can't tell the difference between red and green colours), but that doesn't matter since my Red moves and Green doesn't and they are both to be avoided anyway. As long as the player can tell the Blue from the other two, that isn't too much of a problem (until someone tells me there is a form of colour-blindness that can't differentiate that from the others and then I am screwed!). If I was doing it properly, I suppose I should have a "colour-blind mode" that superimposes a marker on top of the player's block to make it stand out?
Not sure what you mean by "floating" enemies. There is, however, a bug with my rather naff manual collision handling that means that occasionally a block will jump to another position rather than collide correctly. I fixed this after the competition by hooking up to the Chipmunk physics engine and there are no longer any glitches like that, though that doesn't fix the version you are playing.
@eli: "The enemies kind of float in from the middle of the screen sometimes - an alpha problem perhaps? Or on purpose?" - Just realised what you meant. They intentionally spawn anywhere, except just next to the player.
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.
Couldn't find the theme in there, which was a shame.
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.
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).
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
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.
The link above is wrong. Appears to be at http://hempuli.com/DR/doooors.html now.
Oops, that seems to be the post-jam version I posted, since it has several levels (sorry!). Still, the link for the Jam version, above, isn't working for me. Did enjoy the extended version though :)
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
The top-right action key doesn't work on my keyboard (UK) :(
Otherwise, filled with joy!
@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.
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).
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.