Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → theloneplant
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | SHROOOMS | compo | 159 | 3.69 | 3.78 | 3.42 | 3.91 | 3.81 | 3.64 | 3.82 | 3.59 |
Awesome job on this, great art style and implementation of orbits. Fits the theme really well, though I had cases where to get planets to have a good orbit they would bunch up and start colliding and slowing the game down. That's a nitpick, doesn't detract much at all from the game
@snipera I think the issue there is that it would make the game much more difficult, I was thinking the same thing or even have them combine to form a larger planet but I think you would need another system to compensate for the difficulty.
@tuism You could just have the camera zoom out with more orbits and give the player more room to work with. I think this keeps the spirit and difficulty in check, and if it gets too easy add in the collision destruction/combine. One other thing is it would be cool to see flashing or an effect around The Sun when you’re invincible, I didn’t realize that’s how it worked lol
@tuism Something you also might want to consider regarding the collision pain point is to implement moons. You would need a system to help the player control it or have it done fairly automatically where planets with similar orbits and varying size would have the small one nudged gently around the other. This is a stretch, but another spitballing idea that might be cool to see
great game, theme, and execution! I wasn't completely sure what my goal was at first so I just tried to find a parking space and waited there like "where's the next level?" xD that reminds me I still need to get gifts for the holiday
cute, fun game and it fits the theme really well! it took me a bit to figure out how the controls worked but after 15 sec of fumbling I got the hang of it and beat the AI :)
I thought trubbles were a joke about tribbles lol, great game! I like the animation for ships flying over you, very well done!
I think the player choice will always be gas in this case, since you don't provide a real punishment for players who only pick up gas since the AI is way too slow. I think having the option to slow down the car prevents players from needing to improve since they can just slow down and aim exactly where they wanted to go without much problem, and adding a boost option to catch up where it would eat up extra gas would also be a good addition imo. I also feel like the sideways acceleration on the car is a bit weird, though that might just take some getting used to. I think you made all the tools for a good game but it needed much more balancing.
is this the new battlefront game everyone's talking about?
This is a good idea executed very well! Instead of just having a damage variable change you went and implemented completely different weapons, and the move by shooting is just icing on the cake! Very cool game and very well done, lots of choices to make and a good amount of skill required to master it too :)
While it doesn't adhere super closely to the theme or have nice graphics/sounds, it feels quite good to actually play, and that's really all that matters in the end. Nintendo's design philosophy is to design gameplay first, and they start with gameplay prototypes not unlike this. The game doesn't get models, music, etc. until the gameplay can stand by itself. I think you've made a great prototype, and with practice you'll be able to prototype faster and faster, which will give you more time on the little things. Great work, keep it up!
I knew what I had to do right away, controls were straightforward and I hadn't even looked at the game page yet (I play the games first to see how intuitive they are). Gameplay got a bit repetitive, but was very charming and fit the theme well. I think a couple more mechanics to make it a bit more in depth would be cool, maybe have the player able to throw the presents and have parts be a bit like basketball, or you could have conveyor belts and robots to configure that turn it into a little puzzler. The core mechanic is get A into B, C into D, etc. Pretty much anything could happen in between :)
Very well done! Love the music, art, and gameplay. I have one gripe which is that it's hard to tell when the hunters actually notice you. I thought the cone around them was their vision, or an indicator at their direction at least, but they seem to notice you more if people are panicking and if you get close to them. Aside from that it was very enjoyable to go around sucking everyone's blood, and they kept on partying!
I love the atmosphere in this game! It might not use the theme to its fullest but it's an interesting story and very well done! I had some issues with the menus taking too long, so a way to skip or move during the menus would be helpful :)
Good job, I like the movement a lot, though as others have said the aiming is quite difficult. Cool spin on the theme, and the bullets are quite fun to shoot. Also more audio would've been nice to see. I usually just generate my sounds using bfxr and if you're familiar with the tool you can get all your sounds done in <30 min.
I liked the balancing act and the effects that happen when you go too low/high in a resource. The graphics were great, sound was good but I think there could be more sfx for the enemies and when you hit something. Loved the dance and UNLIMITED POWER! Very fun ideas! Here are some suggestions I think might improve the game:
The balancing mechanic seemed to reward me for standing still in a small crowd and spamming fire. Since there is no noticeable cooldown on your fire spell and since you're rewarded for getting hit, you're also rewarded for playing in a somewhat boring style. I'd suggest having a way to widen and narrow that bar so that players don't get directly rewarded for getting hit/making mistakes. Have a max resource amount for the bar and every time the player gets hit, shrink that max amount. To recover that resource pool you could use drops potions/glowy things that spawn around the level that give it back. This way when I get hit I can only attack 4 times instead of 8, but my health is still low so I need to be careful.
Then I think you should have two basic skills instead of one for the balancing act, and since this involves a lot of health/mana sacrifice I think a necromancer/dark magic type character fits really well too. The first spell might be a life drain beam that siphons health and drains mana. Then the other could sacrifice health, restore mana, and shoot your blood at the enemy that creates an aoe. I think this keeps the spirit of the mechanic in place but also allows for deeper gameplay. Also you could make each resource give a buff, maybe speed for health and attack for mana. That way the player can choose the one that they want at the time. Then they'll need to balance their resources even more accurately!
Mostly spitballing, but hopefully you get some nice ideas from it :)
Nice job! I think a mechanic to urge players to cook more hot dogs would help a lot here, since if you want to, you could just spend all day making 4 hot dogs at a time which can be boring. Something like customer orders would add a lot since you could get more orders the longer you play and if you miss orders your score would go down.
Nice job, the music sounded a bit odd but I liked the rest of it! Cool effect for the intro and the flips and "hup" sound from the pirate is very entertaining :)
Very cool concept of a multiplayer game, and the frame that you're working a job and you're left with someone else's problem is a perfect fit for the theme. Also the animation with the history of the entire board is a great visualization of each player. I screwed up my game big time, sorry whoever was after me :)
The slowdown seemed very all or nothing to me, since when you reload you basically can't do anything and when you unload a few bullets you suddenly move too fast to avoid bullets and end up running into everything and off the platforms. The only comfortable amount I was able to manage was 2 bullets I think, but I don't think you want players turtling to get the right number of bullets before doing anything. That is something easily fixed, but just requires tuning which nobody had time for really. Great game aside from that, could use some music but not much harm done since all the sound effects were good.
Man I love tower defenses, I played them all the time when I was a kid. Great job and spin on the genre! It was interesting to plan an escape route. Some more hover and UI effects would benefit this game a lot. It was hard to tell when the waves would happen
so good, too bad about the audio :( reminds me of the stanley parable a lot, no complaints, lack of gameplay isn't really a problem since it's a narrative. cool to see development happen as you go through the levels
Simple game, but very effective I think. It would benefit a lot from a visual cue for when you have a coin. I was getting confused as to why pickups weren't working but I had to return to the chest before I could pick up another. Aside from that, the concept adds weight to otherwise meaningless pickups which is a big plus in my book :)
Great game, though the camera makes some areas a bit annoying to play through since it's too slow to keep up with player movement, even when you aim forward with the mouse. Very good concept and surprisingly polished for two days of work!
It took me some time to figure out what the mechanics were since I didn't know what attacking was. When I moved into an enemy trying to attack it just made the bumping noise and I got confused. Finally got the hang of it after reading the controls a few times trying to wrap my head around the wording. Past that it was a blast! I recommend having Level 0/1 have a pug directly next to you to teach the player how attacking works, then they'll know something's up when they move towards another pug and can't kill them :)
So cool, I loooove the art in this game, and the gameplay reminds me a lot of luftrausers. Seriously this is the best looking game I've seen so far. My only complaint is I can't really tell when I've hit an enemy, so a particle effect would benefit a lot.
The controls threw me off at first but I picked them up for the most part. I had trouble figuring out strafing left and right since it was all local translations and sometimes they would invert since the ship would be upside down. Also one minor thing is I'm playing on an ultrawide monitor so I saw a bit of the skybox behind the background, that's a nit pick but good to know in the future, since you should make the bg much larger than you think it should be, and also set the default background color just in case! Very cool little game and very calming
I like the gameplay, very polished and the aesthetic is fantastic! I liked the risk/reward for unloading bullets to gain a longer dash and found it to be a very well done take on that concept! We've seen a lot of "more power makes you slower" mechanics but this mixes them very well. It feels great to dash through enemies, but the gun doesn't feel quite powerful enough to me considering it takes a lot of sacrifice to use, both speed and health wise. I feel like this is a minor balancing tweak and perhaps add a more satisfying particle effect when you hit stuff :)
Cool art, nice game! My main complaint is when your bag gets weighed down there's little choice in what to do since goblins basically just turn and kill you. If there was more space to move you could keep the strafing thing going, and using los to stop the ai is a cool strategy too
One small bit about the codebase, I'm using standard assets but I actually modified the motion blur effect so that it saves more frames and skips several in between so it gives you the trailing image effect.
@aplite There's the visual cue right now which is the mushroom growing, but it can be kind of subtle if you're intoxicated. Things being harder to see when eating mushrooms was the point of the theme, along with exponential increase of mushrooms, but I do agree there should be a particle effect and/or a color effect when mushrooms get closer and closer to changing state.
@belowparallel-ian I think you're on keyboard, which I didn't really design it for unfortunately. It's much better on a controller since you have the left joystick alone and the right side is either shooting or eating. Next time I'll focus more on kb/mouse implementation, it seems more people are using that
@handle Yes a controller really is a must lol, it was an experimental idea that I had and it just doesn't work well with kb. If I had more time I would've tried doing something where you pull back with the mouse, but hey that's what game jam's are for. Thanks for the awesome feedback!
Thanks! I was trying out an idea for controllers where you would pull back a shot and release it to shoot. I wasn't paying much attention to keyboard users which was a big mistake since most people are using that it seems, but I highly recommend using a controller for this! I was also wrestling with performance and added a cap on the number of mushrooms but I didn't have enough time to really investigate it. There are a lot of things that cause the lag to be a problem and 2 days isn't enough for everything :/ I also wanted to add a feature where the mushroom would leap towards you and also add obstacles, but I overslept this morning so I didn't have any time lol
@cklidify Yeah there is the death screen but I think the problem is it's mapped to any key and when you're mashing buttons to eat mushrooms it causes it to change instantly. I'll probably push a hotfix for this and a few other minor issues like performance.
@byron-bowen Thanks for playing! Yes eating does get obsolete, I was missing a mechanic that made the game harder as the crowd of mushrooms grew instead of just running towards you. What I originally wanted was for attacks to cause a chain reaction that blows up an entire crowds of mushrooms but for performance reasons that wasn't feasible in two days. This would've fixed the problem for the most part, but I think having obstacles and having the mushrooms do a leap forward occasionally would also help make things more interesting. That being said, I'm also thinking of making this into a dungeon crawler roguelike with some hidden doors, puzzles, enemy weak points, etc. that are only visible when you're intoxicated.
@spacemonkey Thanks for playing :) Yeah I wish I could've added 1 or 2 mechanics for the endgame since it's basically just kiting and killing, or at least a good mechanism to make the game harder. In 1.1 I made the screen get narrower when you eat mushrooms which fixes a graphics bug and makes it harder late game since you move faster and can't see as much. This was about as good as I could do with a simple patch.
@wuceng That's a result of me using an input buffer for attacking. I store (5?) frames of input so quickly flicking the joystick still works but there's probably a small bug in there somewhere for that first frame. I updated the downloadable for 1.1, I just forgot to zip everything :)
@forrest Yup that was a big pain point for me as well. I wanted to keep the updates minimal so I probably won’t be changing the arrow keys and just leaving the flaw in but I was thinking the very same thing myself after I finished. I didn’t realize how many people were using kb/mouse for the compo so lesson learned lol
I've updated the game to v1.2! Now there's support for web and I've made a tweak to the scoring system that hopefully addresses many of these comments about late game. There are a few other minor changes in the changelog too. Let me know what you think!
@steven-pinto Yes that was intentional and I've mentioned it a couple times in previous comments. I didn't have time to implement mouse drag and I had kind of neglected kb/mouse for the LD so it feels weird for that. It was originally a concept of "pull back and release to shoot" which worked pretty well on controllers but needed a mouse to work well on kb/mouse. So yeah it was intentional but on kb it was more of an afterthought unfortunately.
I've made two small tweaks in another update. The feedback has been overwhelmingly in favor of reversing the aim controls so I've made that change, along with making the intoxication levels easier to get to and easier to sober up. This should make it more common to get and lose intoxication, which I thought would be well used as a choice between keeping mushroom numbers low vs keeping intoxication low (better visibility). Hope you like the changes!
Unfortunately I don't have time to investigate the low pass issue on the web version since there isn't a lot of info on it. If anyone has experience with this please let me know :)
Love this game! Graphics could be a bit more refined but that's a nit pick. The overall aesthetic suits the game very well, and you utilize the mechanics introduced as well! Adding more light beams increases difficulty and pairs well with the "more shapes is bad" idea. Also the music is lovely. Great job!
I like the balancing act of having a bunch of bandits! I think there's a lot to explore here, and I think some improvements could be made like adding a medium/slow projectile to the driver's shot since that would give an opportunity to dodge and keep more bandits around. Another thing is there should be a loss state like having all of them die, and maybe allow the player to summon extra bandits by spending money. This way they can make a long term investment if they're good enough at balancing. Another minor tweak I would recommend is to slightly randomize the bounce of the bandits so that they aren't always in sync, since this way players could control them individually if they're good enough. Very charming game and the core gameplay is solid so it gets a thumbs up from me :)