A Game About Bacteria by phi 2016-01-02T02:33:00
Loved it! Simple, enjoyable mechanics, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. It's the perfect length for what gameplay is there.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → synthetic-entropy
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 37 | One room | Pinch | jam | ||||||||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Reflow | jam | ||||||||
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | Tailwind | jam | 292 | 3.55 | 3.21 | 3.12 | 3.64 | 3.36 | 64 |
Loved it! Simple, enjoyable mechanics, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. It's the perfect length for what gameplay is there.
Also can't run the game at all. The 64bit launches a window that closes immediately, the 32bit does nothing. This is on Windows 10.
Short, sweet, to the point. At least, most of my ties were too short. Great idea, would love to see it fleshed out a bit.
Was entirely unable to run it; clicking on the .jar file does nothing.
Why is there a time limit? Just when I had figured out the controls, I lost randomly, and I realized the time limit was to blame. There's not nearly enough time in the recommended level to figure out what's going on, or play with what seems like a plethora of systems.
Nice first entry, looking forward to seeing improvements next compo. :)
Great fun! I wanted to keep playing it some more, which is the best praise I can think of for a game.
A fun idea! The jumping was a bit tricky, but it was a lot of fun. There were a few areas where bits of the puzzles could be skipped entirely; this includes most of the last level. I think a bit of continuity (a very brief animation or some directional lines) would help you keep track of what's going on when a rotation is triggered, but it wasn't detrimental to gameplay.
Good idea, mechanics were all there and seemed to be working. Balance is really harsh, and it's far too easy to die right away. I feel like the suns in particular were often simply impossible to grab, and the early game was too unforgiving as a result.
Good job though, nailed the theme, and great to see a fellow lovecraftian. <3
LOTS of railroading, which made this feel like a guided story more than an actual game. Interesting concept, but we got stuck in the second phase; once we read clues the second time, we were unable to escape the east room and continue. (Help listed "back" as a command, but it wouldn't recognize the command.)
This is cool for being made on a smartphone, but feels unfinished.
Rowing mechanic was really frustrating. Concept was pretty great though. I saved humanity from the aliens! (My fish died.)
Fantastically well done, would gladly pay for a polished version. Only suggestion would be to color squares where enemies are standing, or otherwise indicate where they are; I had trouble discerning which direction I needed to swing to strike the bats in particular.
Loved it! Quirky and strange. Audio was *really* jarring though, only thing I would change would be the volume of the spawning noise.
I got trapped in the zoo. 10/10, would visit that zoo again. (and again. (Not that I had much choice, really.))
Best game I've played so far! The graphics were really nice, the feel was good, and the game flowed quickly, even on the event of failure.
Levels were really hard; level 1 felt harder than level 2, and the off colored corners on the last level made it practically impossible. I would absolutely love to see more of this.
Cool concept, much polish is needed. I feel like starting the player right next to the red slime on level one led to frustrating restarts during the level where they're figuring out how to move. I could see this being pretty interesting though.
This is a neat idea, but it feels like it's way too difficult to follow. Even when I could keep track of when I needed to press a button, I often had blue and orange mixed up. It feels difficult in a frustrating way, not in a good way. Still, points for a unique idea, and the gameplay is solid, if confusing.
Excellent. I was terrified, amused, and somewhat disturbed. The only light quibble we ran into was just just after a summon, it was too easy to advance and miss the summoning animation; a brief period of no input would solve this nicely.
Great entry!
Came expecting a basic snake clone. Was pleasantly surprised at every turn; very well done. Third level's a *bit* unforgiving, but with a bit more polish, I'd play this for hours.
I laughed, I cried... I got eaten by a beard. Good times.
That is a very slow arrow. As a very slow crab, I appreciate the slowness of the arrow.
In all seriousness, good concept, checkpoints made things not painful. Turning should be MUCH faster. Crabs may turn slowly in real life, but this does not equate to a fun game. :)
Great idea! I was able to beat the game with a little persistence and some lucky dodging of those yellow teeth things. Those are brutal.
It starts off really easy and really slow, and quickly devolves into overwhelming right about the time the player receives the fire rate increase, which greatly punishes missed shots against enemies that are really good at dodging.
Good execution though, mechanics were solid if difficult.
I think having a "horizontal" and a "vertical" button would have achieved much the same effect as what you were going for. Still, I work in retail, and every VO I heard had me giggling. Well done all around.
Wow! This is one of my favorite entries. Cute graphics, excellent implementation, and just enough gameplay to make the tower building mechanic fun without overstaying its welcome.
Great job. I feel like this is everything a ludum dare should be. :)
Great idea! Spawn points were really predictable, and we found that you could camp one side of the map, let the robots build up on the other side (unmoving) then fire at them every once in a while for massive free health boosts. :)
Very, very difficult. Tried 4 times and could not clear the second wave. Overall aesthetics are great, the experience is quite polished and good, but the difficulty kills it.
Noticed one bug: attempting to play the game a second time spawned no enemies; we had to relaunch for each playthrough.
Grobby is a free orc.
Thanks for the feedback everyone! This is cromo. I'd like to address the comments so far:
- art: thank you for all the kind words. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I'm not especially artistic and I had no idea what style to go with when I started. It just kinda popped into existence and I went with it. You can even tell which pieces were done earlier on because they have sharp corners - I moved to rounded corners on everything once I got a feel for it.
- drifting: I'm really happy with how this came out. The physics of the game went through roughly three iterations over the course of the jam, with the last one feeling the best.
- theme: I feel the mixed themes made this game what it is. And yes, the idea behind growing plants on the track was to encourage players to take a slightly different route each time and plan ahead.
- map length: I agree, the maps are on the short side. I restricted the maps to 2048 pixel squares because we load the whole map into a single texture, because we don't know what sizes other people's computers can handle. Love guarantees at least 1024 (though our computers support 16384). On our to do list was to implement stitching multiple textures together to allow for larger levels, but we focused out efforts on polishing the maps we had already done.
- phone version: this is definitely something we want to do! In fact, it was discussed shortly after deciding on the concept, but we had already selected love for familiarity, which doesn't have phone support, and the ports of it that exist are incomplete.
- performance issues: that's rather unfortunate. We never ran into issues on our systems, which are pretty beefy. We didn't do any optimization whatsoever. In particular, all plants are drawn every frame.
- multiplayer: absolutely! This was on our feature wish list, but unfortunately some early design decisions prevented us from being able to add it in the limited time. I want to add this in the future. In lieu of multiplayer, we also considered AI racers and time trial ghosts.
- bad respawns: this is really the worst part of the game as it is now, in my opinion. We had a slightly more sophisticated system in place, but it would occasionally put you out of bounds, getting the player stuck in an infinite respawn loop. Adjusting the rotation some depending on the direction the player was going would be a simple solution. Sadly, because I was cramming the map within our size limit, some of the borders - especially around the edges - are way too small.
Final score: 81,925.
This game is FUN. Needs audio and fleshing out, but boy what a blast to play.
Colors are painful... so painful. Gameplay's solid, collision's a bit wonky but serviceable. AI could use some work, but I like the concept, and what you have works well enough.
Would love to see this in multiplayer, has a sort of agar.io vibe going. Great work!
Wow. This is pretty awesome and well done. You had me grinning from the title screen. Not overly complex, and overflowing with polish and charm.