I Am A Ninja by Frozen Fractal 2011-12-19T18:07:00
Thanks! There is sound, only it doesn't work in all browsers. I'll see if I can get that fixed tonight.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Frozen Fractal
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 36 | Ancient Technology | Leonardo's Painting Machine | compo | ||||||||||||
| 2016 | 35 | Shapeshift | Morphing Maria | compo | 47 | 3.94 | 4.08 | 3.12 | 4.17 | 3.70 | 2.88 | 3.48 | 3.57 | 59 | ||
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | Glauron | compo | 58 | 3.86 | 3.80 | 3.34 | 3.89 | 4.06 | 2.82 | 2.37 | 3.62 | 50 | ||
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Discharge | compo | 368 | 3.37 | 2.92 | 3.57 | 3.46 | 3.95 | 2.64 | 2.11 | 3.74 | 69 | ||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Toytown | compo | 54 | 3.89 | 3.52 | 3.02 | 4.09 | 3.89 | 2.63 | 2.30 | 3.26 | 71 | ||
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Jack and the Alarm Clock | compo | 237 | 3.42 | 3.39 | 3.00 | 3.67 | 3.43 | 3.20 | 3.46 | 2.91 | 62 | ||
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | Aranami | jam | 75 | 3.67 | 3.12 | 3.90 | 3.71 | 4.10 | 3.37 | 1.67 | 3.57 | 69 | ||
| 2012 | 25 | You are the Villain | Park to Park | compo | 51 | 3.71 | 3.82 | 2.69 | 3.82 | 3.92 | 3.11 | 3.53 | 3.50 | 71 | ||
| 2012 | 24 | Evolution | Cytosine | compo | 31 | 3.83 | 3.83 | 3.39 | 3.86 | 3.61 | 3.48 | 2.66 | 3.41 | 80 | ||
| 2011 | 22 | Alone | I Am A Ninja | compo | 50 | 3.50 | 3.50 | 3.29 | 2.71 | 3.00 | 1.13 | 1.17 | 2.58 | 3.00 |
Thanks! There is sound, only it doesn't work in all browsers. I'll see if I can get that fixed tonight.
namrog84, thanks for your comments, and well spotted :) Initially I had a "push rope" just like in Worms, but I realized it was easy to make it more realistic, so I did. Drawing it properly was a breeze with canvas's quadraticCurveTo method.
I have completely disabled sounds for now because they were causing too much trouble -- Firefox not playing at all, Chrome completely ignoring the cache and re-downloading on every playback! HTML5 audio is a bitch. Impossible to use for games. Too late to add one of them Flash-wrapping libraries now...
Last update, I hope: now works on Safari too (workaround for missing requestAnimationFrame). Tested on MacBook Pro.
I tried to get it working in Opera but get DOMExceptions that I couldn't figure out. I tried to get it working in Konqueror just for kicks, and it almost worked, but the risk of breaking something else outweighs the required fixes.
Bottom line: use Chrome or Firefox!
Aaron, the slow walking was mostly intentional, because yes, you're meant to go Spidey right from the word go! I say "mostly intentional" because there's also the aspect of it not being walking at all, but just a force pushing against friction; to make him go faster I'd have to reduce friction and this sliding effect would become too obvious. (Or hack around it. No time for that!)
kato9, Aaron, you both mentioned difficulty with the controls. What could be improved in that area?
kato9: Maybe the ability to accurately gauge your momentum is part of the learning curve? But yeah, a projected trajectory would probably help here. It would be easy to code as well; the physics are frictionless, so it's just a parabola.
Doft, FrozenCow: The trouble with time attack was mainly that it would be fairly pointless without a proper highscore list, and that would require server-side programming that I had no time for. (I guess I could've used HTML5 client-side storage as well, so you could at least have a record of your own scores. Oh well.) If I continue development, I'll definitely add it! As to removing stars completely: they could be part of a time attack, as long as they're placed somewhere on the optimal path. That goes to show again that level design is not my forte...
FrozenCow: Please don't look too hard at the code, it's not exactly a shining example :) I think I could've made the browser do more of the SVG parsing, i.e. parse the path description as well, but once I'd gotten it to work there was no point. But yeah, I couldn't have done it without this technique; it saved me so much time in the end.
I actually like not being able to strafe. It makes it much more tense to not be able to walk around a corner safely. But then maybe you shouldn't die at the first touch either, or have (working) sounds to warn you of imminent danger. (I thought you couldn't strafe in Wolfenstein 3D either, but apparently I was mistaken.)
Controls are utterly confusing and there is not much of a gameplay to it, yet I loved playing this! The graphics are fantastic, in particular the textures, the animation of the character, and the ever-changing lighting. The wonky camera and strange point of view, and creepy sound effects all contribute to a really weird experience. Five out of five for graphics, audio and mood.
I don't see any creatures. Might be a bug...
This is fantastic. A very impressive piece of work for just two people, even for a jam entry. Not very innovative (apart from the procedural levels), but a great game overall.
I love this idea, and it's well executed. The little guys and gals look cute and have pretty distinct behaviour. I don't feel like I'm having much influence on their evolution though. Maybe that's because the most successful ones reach the exit before they get to reproduce :(
Great work! I love how all the moving bits fuse into the fixed ones. Too bad there isn't any checkpointing or even restarting (or is there?); if you make a mistake, you'll have to reload the entire game.
Great job on the physics, by the way. I know that even something as simple as a stable stack of boxes can be hard to achieve.
On my machine, it's slow but playable. Is the entire level one big graphic? Because that really might slow it down; drawing it from a small set of tiles is likely to be much faster, because of less memory access, and because it allows for the majority to be culled right away.
This is a brilliant concept, and five out of five for theme. It would be great to have some sounds, so you can keep track of what's happening while your eyes are fixed on the bars. Also five stars for graphics: simple but subtle, with the little ones going :O and the screen shaking and the bubble denting and all that.
I liked the music for the first ten seconds, but by then I'd heard all of it twice :) The controls are a bit laggy for me which makes it hard to play.
Looks great with the textures and all, but there are some gameplay issues. Virus B didn't make it through the first five seconds of the game. I started making all my creatures immune to C, which got me 90% of the way there, but then some remained that were infected with C but immune to A, so I couldn't do anything to get them. Also, I don't see what the point is of killing a creature that is carrying your virus around, and the effect of mutations was also never explained.
Love the name! Love the graphics even more! Hate the preacher!
I love this. The controls took a little getting used to, but the way the creatures move is very reminiscent of bacteria under a microscope, or maybe larger aquatic micro-organisms.
Very clever how the various body parts make for a large variety of different creatures, from tiny particles to menacing scorpion-like things.
Graphics look great, and it was wonderful to see my creature grow until I got overconfident and died at level 18.
One complaint would be that the game is maybe too easy. A carrion-eating strategy works quite well, but then, it's the same in nature!
At first I thought: button bashing and dodging the enemies, is that all? But I was mistaken. The way your group changes shape when you hit walls, and the effect movement has on the way you "evolve", make this an interesting tactical game, though like others said, pushing yourself into a corner makes it too easy. But the graphics look really good, and the sound is among the best I've heard so far.
Great puzzler concept! It shines through simplicity. However, maybe you have altogether too many operations at your disposal: once you start using horizontal to vertical swaps and such to their full extent, it's a pretty straight path to the finish line. Maybe you could add some limitations?
By the way, sound and music work in my Chrome (version 21.0.1180.79 on Ubuntu Precise). Some versions might not support Ogg Vorbis, so you'd have to provide MP3s or WAVs for those.
A great zippy little platformer! I love the graphics and the sound, though the music gets a bit annoying after you've played as long as I (with my sucky platformer skills) needed to finish. The difficulty is just right though, challenging but not impossible, and the level design is very very good. The link with the theme is a bit contrived though :)
There was no challenge until I got to the time-trial bit, which is where things got interesting. Then blarghghrghrh, then I died. Does that always happen?
Nice! I'm not sure if the mechanics are obvious to someone who hasn't played Osmos, so some instructions would be handy. Too bad you didn't have time to put in the ejection of your own mass to gain speed; that's one of the key things that make Osmos so tense at times.
Could you put this for download somewhere that does not require an account? Dropbox, for example?
Is this a GLaD OS? ;) Nice little platformer, though not much connection with the theme. I like the jump boost idea, though the controls are too fidgety for my taste.
Even after figuring out what I could do with my lollipop, I couldn't get through the four fat dudes on time. Maybe I am too stupid for this game :)
Brilliant concept, and very well executed. I love the game mechanics with autofire, the blue/orange rectangles and the overall aestethic.
The shell scripts in the Linux build don't seem to make sense:
$ sh EvolutionAssault_Linux64.sh
Unable to access jarfile /home/ld24/EvolutionAssault_Linux64.sh
Works on my Linux too. For a Flatland-inspired game, it's very... spatial ;) I love the minimalist but certainly interesting aestethic; screenshots really don't do it justice. One problem is that the food (edges?) tend to bunch up into clumps, especially to the sides of the screen.
Works in Linux too, you can run it straight from source with "python evolutiongame.py". A major problem is that the command parser is too literal and inconsistent: you have to type "stay in capsule", but neither "stay" nor "stay in the capsule" nor "Stay in the capsule of goop." works, but in the next question, it's not "take desert" or "take the desert" but simply "desert".
Nice puzzler with well-designed puzzles. Relation to the theme is very contrived, though. And when I finish, it just starts over?
Graphics are great, in particular the backdrop. I love how the explosion at the start and end ties it all together; maybe you could show some of it behind you occasionally?
The Linux build doesn't work for me; it says "no such file or directory". But after unzipping the source I can run it via "love .". The game still crashes every time I press Enter to retry.
Muhahaha DIE KITTENS DIE! Five stars for Theme on this one, for doing two themes at once :D
It's a bit hard to mix the colour channels in my head while KILLING KITTENS DIE KITTENS DIE DIE DIE but just spraying them with all I'd got worked pretty well.
However, I can see the cats, but I haven't seen a single seck. What does a seck look like anyway?
Love the style! Love the music! Love the concept, but it can be frustrating at times. It might be more fun if the robot's behaviour was completely predictable instead of somewhat random at times, so the puzzle would be to figure out how it behaves, and use that knowledge to trap it. Or is it predictable and am I just missing something?
Not much in terms of gameplay, but wonderfully silly and hilarious :D
Phew, that is hard! Not much relation to the theme though. The controls work great and overall gameplay feels really smooth. It really helps that you can go sqrt(2) times faster diagonally, but you might want to fix that :)
Server seems to be down at the moment? Would love to play this though -- I considered naming my entry Space Evolvers but thought it was too obvious :)
Ah, the Kongregate version still works. Great game! As we seem to have worked from similar ideas, I'm really curious about the details of your genetic algorithms and neural networks. See my posts for a write-up of mine.
199 seconds. Controls are nice and smooth, but the game gets a bit repetitive after a while. In particular when you go from e.g. magenta to red, you just fart out blue, but then you have to just sit and wait for the shark to come. Also, I'm not sure if RGB colour mixing makes sense to anyone but programmers... maybe you could add hints to the colour bars as to where they should be? Oh, and the sounds are great :D
I like the graphics, in particular the levels -- are they procedural? The gameplay could do with some tweaking; if you can reach the green it's straightforward, and otherwise you die quickly, and the blue "AI" doesn't seem to do very much. The concept is great though, and it would work really well on a touch screen too.
I would really like to know more about how you did all this. Maybe you'd like to write a blog post?
Fantastic! One of my favourites. Smooth gameplay, nice retro graphics and sound effects, and a very Duke Nukem style mood to it. Great job!
An old concept with a new twist. Great job! Love all the nice little touches such as the minotaur slightly moving, and the very idea of a minotaur in his underwear in the first place.
Glad I'm not the only one struggling on level 3. You should give the different items more distinct colours -- makes it much easier to spot large groups. The red ones are by far easiest to do :)
Charming :D
MortalWombat: You *could* post a link to the alien species you've produced; all is contained in the URL!
@ratboy2713: Weird. I've had all aliens disappear on occasion (NaNs creeping in, probably) but the entire screen blanking is new to me. Sorry about that. Maybe some graphics driver issue?
@mortehu, @renatopp: Yeah, the bases work two ways. But try to survive the first 10 seconds if you don't have bases to hide behind...
@Kurama_Youko: Glad you liked my game, and thank you for the detailed writeup!
It looks like your approach is more general, but also more low-level, because you didn't code explicitly for particular behaviours like dodging. In my game, dodging (and most other parameters) is done with exponential falloff, like F = a * e^(-(b + 1) * d), where F is the resulting repelling force, d is the distance to the bullet, and a and b come from the DNA (range -1..1).
Indeed my evolution has a tendency to converge, and I don't think it depends on player style very much. For what it's worth, for me they always end up narrow-faced and pale green, with evil-looking slanted eyes.
It would have been cool to change the rules a bit so that we would get different "species" with different strategies, but I don't know enough about genetics to see how to do that. It would also be nice to change the conditions from time to time, e.g. by giving the player different weapons, to force the aliens to keep evolving and adapting.
Haha, I'd say that is still pretty good for five hours. Love the headband :)
I have just now managed to pick myself up from the floor after a good five minutes of laughing various body parts off.
You deserve a medal.
Does not work with Love 0.7.2 on Ubuntu 12.04:
Error: [string "loadPeanut.lua"]:20: attempt to call field 'setNewFont' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
[string "loadPeanut.lua"]:20: in function 'loadPeanut'
[string "main.lua"]:9: in function 'load'
[string "boot.lua"]:310: in function <[string "boot.lua"]:308>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
The .love file from the Windows build gives me the same error.
Smooth! I like the feel of the controls, and the explosions are very satisfying. The sound effects are a bit annoying though. Also, I got away for quite a long time (22100 points) with just spinning and shooting. The closer the enemies get, the more effective the bouncing becomes.
This is beautiful. The artwork is fantastic, and the sound works very well together with it. At first I didn't realize that you don't have to push all blocks to their destinations, but I don't think I missed anything because of that. Rather the contrary. Amazing job!
Apparently my 16:10 screen isn't wide enough, because the instructions got clipped off. But very original puzzler, and pretty gory looking too!
It looks kind of nice and destroying things is always fun, but somehow there's not much of a game here yet. It would also be cool if you could look farther, but I suppose that would make it too slow at this point?
Great concept, and fantastic execution. This is way, way too good-looking for a game jam :) My main problem is that it's pretty hard, but I did notice some improvements if I tried different strategies, which means the idea of "hold longer for bigger ships" works quite well.
It's too slow... I'm just sitting around waiting for enemies to appear. I like the balance with diagonal fire, though it makes it a bit easy to hit enemies while avoiding their fire.
Most splendid, my dear fellow! Lovely, consistent style and solid gameplay. I particularly like the exclamations and the face changes :)
97 points on the first try (using the mouse). This is really fun and addictive! I think the balancing is quite good, and I particularly like how there seem to be "waves" so you get a bit of a breather in between, because it does get quite hectic. It looks cute too!
Nice! Got 1200 on the second try. I love the graphics and the animations, and the music, and just the general idea. It needs some more synonyms (e.g. "clothes" wouldn't work even though they clearly showed interest).
Creative use of the theme, but the gameplay needs some more work. It's so slow that it gets boring easily, and the paddles' behaviour is too predictable.
Nice! The controls are very smooth and I love the random remarks that the different characters shout out when you devour them. I keep dying on the second level though, when the three army dudes in a row appear. There seems to be little point to eating people, though?
Great puzzler concept. It seems to be nondeterministic where things will move, though, which makes it difficult to plan ahead. Also the walls are a bit hard to see at first, and the inability to rotate counterclockwise adds to the difficulty. But if you have some more time to address these things, there's quite a good game here.
It looks stunning and very atmospheric. Gameplay and controls are very smooth. I actually prefer the version without music, because I don't think the music fits in very well with the overall mood that the graphics are setting.
I'm not really sure how this relates to the theme, but the giant at the start does certainly look villainous.
What's happening with the double-jump though? At some point I seemed to have infinite-jump, which made it quite a lot easier.
Love the music!
Great job! Looks great and sounds even better. There are some UI quirks but nothing unbearable. It seems a decent strategy, at least in the beginning, is to hire a cook briefly, turn all your money into meth, then fire him while you take a few turns to push your stockpile to the streets.
After the point where making money is no longer a problem, I can't get the addiction bar beyond 33% or so. With technology and cooks maxed out at 10, I simply can't produce enough meth to keep all towns supplied.
It would also be nice if you could see a breakdown of how much was sold in each town, and what price it fetched.
I suck at this game and didn't get very far, but man, this is awesome. My heart was beating in my chest, it's just so tense. The music adds to the quiet stealth atmosphere. It reminds me of Metal Gear Solid. It took some time to get used to the controls, but I see why you did it this way; it gives you very precise control. Maybe to simplify it, dropping the strafing and moving forward with the left mouse button would be an idea? Anyway, impressive work!
Controls are pretty smooth. It's a bit too easy and too much of a clickfest. Why would I ever *not* want to spawn minions? I love the intro screen, by the way :)
No-one here right now, but I'll check back later.
Missing lwjgl natives on 64-bit Linux, it seems?
Wacko. Love the pseudo-3D sprite engine style.
Wee bit too hard I think.
Like the music! Too bad that's pretty much all there is...
Pretty tense! This is the kind of game that I suck goat's balls at, though, so I didn't make it past level 2. I think this could work well as a mobile game, too. Great job!
Hahaha, that's not just seemingly pointless, that's thoroughly and utterly pointless. And hilarious. I love the graphics. The gameplay could use some attention; it doesn't feel like there's much of a challenge to it. Is "Advanced Licker" any good?
Wow, great job! That's a very innovative concept, and the level design is excellent. I frequently found myself frustrated with my own bad memory, but never with the game, which is how it should be :) It's interesting how groping around in the dark can add so much tension to what is essentially a puzzle game.
Nice! Love the difficulty levels :)
It's just a lot of button-bashing, but I had a lot of fun doing it! Especially when the tiles started coming off. Too bad it doesn't have any sound (or it does not work on Linux). You get one extra star for making a download for Linux that actually works.
Funny! Is that the Mario theme playing backwards? :D I find it hard to vote on this since it isn't really a game though...
Great game! This is fun! It could do with a bit more of an objective and some balancing; for instance, the difference in value between the coins (1/10/50) is too extreme. But the mechanic works well and the controls are quite smooth. And did I mention that it looks and sounds gorgeous?
What a great idea to emulate one of those cheap LCD handhelds! This doesn't look like it should be a lot of fun, but somehow it is, and strangely addictive. I couldn't figure out why I shouldn't smash packages under Santa's eyes though; I don't get any points, but it doesn't seem to do any harm otherwise, so you can just keep playing indefinitely if you bash Shift in time to knock down the sleigh. It would also be cool if every next level was a bit faster than the one before.
As to the name: "ante" means "before", so although it's not what you intended, it's not entirely inappropriate ;)
Fantastic! The artwork is the best I've seen in this LD so far, and actually so is the music; they work very well together. I also lingered in the menu for a while just listening to the music. The game is fun, although some sort of progression in difficulty would be nice. I'm not sure it makes sense to lump hiscores for both modes together in one list.
Funny, smooth, wonderful! Definitely one of my favourites so far. The controls were difficult to get the hang of, but not so much to be unplayable; just the right amount of challenge I'd say. The buildings add a lot to what would otherwise be a fairly uninteresting game, particularly when you're trying to make chains (which is a brilliant concept in and of itself). I love the cute graphics and sound effects. There seems to be a bug that causes the music to play multiple times simultaneously, which gets a bit cacaphonic after a while.
I would love to know how the story unfolds, but I can't make it past the third level or so... It's too hard to hit enemies from a distance. Up close a kick works best, but by then you're already half dead.
A great take on the theme! The MS Paint graphics make it easy to miss that there is actually a rock-solid game here.
The platforming bit was a bit repetitive, but the boss battles were great and really had progressive difficulty (except Mozilla who was too easy). I would really have loved to see the ending but didn't have the patience to beat Chrome, who is just mean. I didn't really notice the music until I found my head bobbing in the rhythm. Oh, and did I mention it's hilarious? The intro, the safari hat and the opera mask cracked me up.
Five out of five on everything but innovation (because at heart it's still a platformer!).
Awww :( The poor dog knew too much! Creative use of the theme, and nice story, but the game could have been more challenging.
Beautifully dark and moody game. I got the first ending (by starting to walk at the time the instructions appeared...) and the one where the little girl thinks I'm a murderer. Too bad you need to play through the whole thing again to get the different endings, because it's just the same thing over again. Would love to talk to the cop at the end more... why is he letting me go?
Tried this both on Nexus One (2.3.6) and on Galaxy Nexus (4.2.1), but speech recognition doesn't do much. Often the agents don't respond at all, and if they do, they often just ask me to repeat what I just said. Once or twice they seemed to have interpreted my words as "what do you see" even though I said something quite different. I am not a native (UK) English speaker but I don't have much of an accent. Five stars for innovation though; this could be really cool when these problems have been worked out.
This is surprisingly fun for such a simple game. I love the use of fruits for... scores? levels? Either way, "plum" just sounds as disappointing as it is.
Level 3 took me a while, but mostly because I misunderstood the meaning of "don't leave anything". To future players: be sure to read that sentence carefully, lest you be stuck for minutes like I was.
Nice! Because of the extreme minimalism, it took me a while to figure out what all the enemies did and what my towers did, but that was part of the fun. The notion that enemies are trying to 'rescue' the little white guys makes gameplay more interesting. I really like the graphics style, too.
Pretty good for 4 hours! I got 88 treasure on the first play through, 95 on the second, 64 on the third. It may just have been my luck, but it seems a bit unbalanced: cannonballs are in too short supply, crewmen are just right, and everything else (grog, fear, anger) never became a problem for me. I like the MS Paint style graphics; they work quite well because of the limited palette.
Great puzzle game! Looks very smooth and feels very polished.
The only place with "too much text" (as several commenters have remarked) is at the start of the first level. Which I didn't get to read, somehow (bug?). The other bits of text are just very funny :)
Since you asked, I posted some details about how we did the sand in Aranami: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=7882
This is pretty great! Missile Command meets Osmos, and yet it's entirely unlike either of those. I really like how the growing core gives you an increasing level of difficulty that naturally adapts to how well the player is doing. The music is nice and relaxing, and my only point of criticism would be the sound effect of enemies dying, which gets a bit annoying after a while.
Heh, that looks familiar somehow :) Would be nice if you got more points the higher up the flagpole you catch the plumbers. And I suppose some challenge or a way of losing would be needed for it to be a proper game.
Beautiful! Just... beautiful. The only problem with the concept is maybe that there are only so many orientations that an object can have (24?) so there is a limit to how hard the puzzles can be; the length is perfect as is but I don't think it could be made any longer. A brutal timer would solve that problem but make it into a very different, much less relaxing game :)
Not bad for 3 hours!
A great concept, making you dependent on your enemies to advance. The controls are a bit hard; it might have been easier to use the mouse to point the mirror. Checkpoints would also have been welcome, but maybe that's just me being spoiled :) Sound and music are a bit annoying. I suck so I didn't get very far, but the levels look pretty well designed!
Could you rename the "Download" link to say "Windows" or similar? This would let people on other platforms (e.g. Linux, OS X) know that they don't need to bother downloading.
Works perfectly in Linux (with pygame installed). Just do:
$ python 'The Only Rocketeer.pyw'
I love the story here; it really hints at a depth and background that anchors the whole thing, so five stars for mood.
But there are some gameplay annoyances: the non-timed puzzles are too easy and don't really prepare you for the harder ones, which are timed to boot. And there's no way to start working on the next puzzle until the AI tells you to, which means you'll just have to sit around and wait for it to happen. Within the puzzles, it would be nice if you could click and drag, rather than click-click-click; and it could pick up the colour from the tile you're dragging from, rather than having to choose explicitly. The walking through the ship also seems a bit pointless, but maybe that becomes more interesting later on?
I'm not quite sure where the theme comes in.
The engine hum works quite well as a background track, and graphics look great in a semi-retro way.
Whew, this is hard! Especially when I get my arms reversed, it gets pretty tricky to control. The music does a great job of soothing my frustration though. And the name is brilliant... any reference to QWOP is totally appropriate :D
Impressive amount of content. As DesignerNap said, it really reminds of FTL.
Interesting concept, and there are some well-designed puzzles in there. Sadly the controls are too twitchy. It would be easier if E and space worked upon keydown, not keyup. The music is a bit annoying, especially when switching in and out of edit mode.
I like the idea of the player becoming less powerful over time, rather than the enemies becoming more powerful. The physics are a bit floaty and the camera is too laggy; I frequently had to stop and wait for it to catch up before I could see where I was going. Wall jumping is too hard for me to pull off... Oh, I like the sound effects! They remind me of Commander Keen, especially the slugs.
That's what I imagine Jesus must have felt like. If he were a square, that is :)
There is not much gameplay here yet, but the music is lovely!
Sadly, the Linux package does not work:
$ ~/Downloads/hru.bin
Found path: /home/thomas/Downloads/hru.bin
There is no data folder
Controls are smooth, but it's hard to aim because the goblins move towards your feet but the fireballs emerge from the top of your staff. It would also be nice if enemies stayed dead so you can safely flee back to the previous room. Graphics are nice, and sound is charming :)
Wow. This is by far the most scary, most tense, most creative and most amazing game I've played so far. The notion of only being able to locate yourself by also telling all the monsters where you are is pure genius. This game could only work with excellent sound effects, and you nailed it.
Nicely done. Like how some of the patterns were "unfair" in the sense that you couldn't really escape them, but this was counterbalanced by the presence of a shield.
Like many others have said, this would have been better with music and sfx, but within 48 hours, you can't do everything. :P
Haha, wonderful :D I love the hipster's monologues and the robot's snide remarks. Very well done.
Another one getting stuck on the "red" level. Too bad, because I was enjoying myself!
Would be better if the player weren't placed in a corner. It's really hard to avoid hitting the fish this way. Cute graphics, could do with some sound.
You seem to have a massive memory leak somewhere. After a few minutes the game starts stuttering, and a while later my machine starts swapping like crazy. I also had some bugs with the mouse cursor and hit detection, but that might have been due to my unusual window manager.
But it's a nice concept and the level progression (as far as I got before I had to kill it) seems pretty good. I also liked the music as long as I didn't pay too much attention to it.
This would work great on a touch screen. Maybe you could add some variety in colours as well as shapes?
The tutorial levels are well thought out and very effective. The music could have been a bit darker and moodier to fit the graphics better, but the overall effect still works. Gameplay is a bit frustrating.
Not much of a game here, but a great work nonetheless!
Very innovative, and I love the name!
@namuol: It *is* coming to mobile/tablets! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/05/06/aranami-is-going-mobile/
The sand is basically a bump map, done in software JavaScript (CoffeScript). A height map indicates the level of the sand at that point, 0-255 with 128 being the initial value. We can easily draw arbitrary things into the height map, because it's just a regular (albeit invisible) canvas element.
To show the rake's trail, we draw a series of "dent" sprites, which are small circles that are black in the centre (the trough), white around the outside (the little wall around the trough, where the sand was pushed out), and then fade out to transparency (so the wall slopes gently outwards). To prevent dents overwriting each other, each dent is actually a semicircle, rotated so the round side faces the direction of movement of the rake.
We then calculate the lightness of a pixel based on the dot product of the normal with the light vector, as in regular Phong shading.
To this we add some random noise based on the normal and the pixel's location, which means that every small change in the height map results in some noisy change to the colour. This gives the impression of grains of sand rolling around.
All this would have been much easier and faster in GLSL shaders, but as we started out with 2d canvas, it had to be all software rendering. Which, in spite of several optimizations, is why it's still a bit slow on Firefox.
Source code for the sand, among other things: https://github.com/ttencate/aranami/blob/master/100-model.coffee (warning, LD-quality code, horrible hacks, etc. etc.)
Blitzplatformer! Well done :D
Beautiful! Five stars for graphics and mood.
Instead of describing ("Ask her name") you could just put the actual text that you're going to say ("What's your name?"). It both cuts out an extra line of dialogue, and lets the player make more intelligent choices.
The storyline is amazing and very well designed, and I love how it gradually unfolds. I thought I'd won when I gave away my 10 seconds but then it turned out there was much more story to be experienced, which made me very happy :)
This is incredible. It's hard to believe that you made all of that in just 48 hours... the graphics alone are the best of all entries I've played so far, but then there is also a good mechanic, and great music, and a ton of levels, and so much polish that I almost thought I was in Poland. Very impressive.
This is great! After the simple warmup puzzles, things get real difficult real quick. I have to admit I got stuck on the level where you can switch characters and there are four trolls and two beholders and you have to kill them all...
One minor gripe, which can probably be resolved with one added line of help text or some animations, is in what order things happen. It seems like I have to step onto a monster to attack, yet they can hit me at 1 distance?
I like the music -- simple without being annoying. Overall, the game feels very complete.
Nice puzzler! Simple but effective.
I found level 2 harder than 3, but maybe that's just me. Too bad there aren't more levels. I wonder how far this concept can be pushed.
It would be nice if you could see how many minions you have, and if you didn't have to wait for the timer in case you just want to start, or similarly, when you want to give up because the guy is heading the wrong way.
It could also do with some more explanation; when there are multiple options, it seems the guy will always turn right?
Nice! I particularly like the particle effects.
The controls are quite good but jumping is a bit floaty.
It's a bit weird that you can die with a chicken but still have it when you respawn. Also, returning to a hole should reset your time.
Beautiful!
I'm not sure I get the thing about the glitches, without which the relation to the theme is entirely lost.
I do love the Game Boy aesthetic. It might have worked even better with double-size pixels; the original Game Boy was only 160x144.
The sounds are a bit of a mismatch with that, unfortunately. And does the voice at the end say "thank you" or "f*ck you"? I'll assume it's the former :)
Bringing lag in as an aspect of gameplay is genius. I found the first level doable, but the second was already too hard for me. But then, I suck at platformers of all kinds :)
I love the graphics and subtle sound effects. The really fast retry cycle is great, and that you don't have to walk back out to the eggs if you die on the way back.
Gorgeous, original, and a ton of fun! Too bad it hangs sometimes :(
First impression: the sprites are awesome, the tree in particular. It would be nice if there was a consistent pixel size, so objects in the distance wouldn't look more detailed just because they have smaller pixels.
The platform physics are glitchy, which makes this frustrating. Try adding some acceleration, to make a parabolic jump instead of a linear one. You might also want to add some code to make the player stick to the moving platforms, because they keep moving away from under you. Here is a very good article: http://higherorderfun.com/blog/2012/05/20/the-guide-to-implementing-2d-platformers/
... Whoa, reading the comments, it's multiplayer? That's impressive for a weekend game!
Great interpretation of the theme! The problem with this kind of gameplay is, though, that it's a bit of an all-or-nothing affair. Assuming the player has a roughly fixed cleanup rate, they will keep up until the incoming food rate gets higher than that, and then things go south very quickly. I got to 7800. This would be better on a touch screen!
Interesting concept! A bit like Angry Birds in reverse :) I found that just spamming a lot of blocks usually worked, except on the last level. Also the "Solve" button once gave me a solution that didn't work -- probably the pysics aren't 100% reproducible.
The physics are good, but the sounds are a bit harsh. Overall, with some more love, this could be a great game!
The music is charming! So are the graphics! The puzzle is quite good -- once I'd figured out how to do it, it still took some time to get all the timing right, but without being overly difficult.
There are some small bugs -- I once collected water from the flowers, it seems. It would also be nice if you could see the actions queue somehow: as a list, or even as a series of lines and icons in the field.
I don't get it... I can click the sadface and it moves to the left, I can click the circle squiggly and it vanishes, I can click the bell-shaped squiggly and it does nothing. Is there more to it, am I missing something?
Pretty moody, and I like the alarm sound :) But it's really annoying that you have to sit through the entire intro sequence and redo all levels every time you die. Or did I miss something?
Wow, this is hard. Especially when an enemy is coming from the direction you're moving in, it gives you very little time to react. Perhaps this is also because I'm right-handed but it doesn't let me use the arrow keys.
The sound effects are a bit harsh. Otherwise, good job!
An excellent dashing platformer! The controls feel great and there are no glitches as far as I can tell. The blue acceleration zones are an interesting invention.
I like how the sounds slow down along with the rest of the game. Is that a libgdx feature, or did you have to supply slowed versions of each sound effect?
In spite of the simple graphics, it looks and feels very polished.
Nice and moody, but the difficulty is probably too high for most people. I got stuck on "That's natural. It's nature doing her job. You have the only option to accept fate." and there's no way I could type even more than that in 10 seconds :)
An interesting idea, but it needs more tuning. I feel that I'm too much dependent on the random movement of the robot -- if it goes over an area where it's been before, I'm much more likely to make good money.
The UI design could be better. It's annoying to have to (slowly) walk around in a room just to get to fragments of menu. Sometimes I can't buy things without apparent reason -- armour seems to max out at 19 and Auto Heal and Heat Shield at 3, which means after a while the only investment is Health. At $10 per click, that takes a while if you've just cashed $1000...
For UI things, I often find it easier to use HTML instead of drawing everything on a canvas. You get click detection, styling and event handling for free.
It was pretty satisfying though to see my tiny robot grow into a mean mine-busting monster :)
Linux link is borken... https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/h7m1lb9as3vk90l/Solution%20Alpha.jar?token_hash=AAE9U_AWy44N6_2nbpnUIzfAZU49IS6FdL8q2TiKxyq6yQ&dl=1 gives me a 404 :(
Are you sure this is supposed to work on Linux? All that's in the RAR file is an exe and a dll, and Wine doesn't like the exe.
I love the sound effects and the stressful music. The physical ground doesn't seem to match the graphical ground though.
This is unplayable for me because of the extreme mouse sensitivity. If you could fix that (or make it configurable) I'll give it another try.
Wonderfully abstract and quite interesting. Understanding what is happening becomes part of the challenge, but even once you know, using that knowledge is still not trivial.
My strategy is basically: go down if the leftmost bit is black, to the right if it's white; then when all bits are sorted, swipe up all the way and win. Got me to around 6000 points. But your video shows that more sophisticated approaches are possible. I wonder what it would be like without the time pressure, when you really have to minimize the number of moves.
The difficulty is a bit random, depending on how sorted the bits are to begin with. Perhaps worth considering some measure of "sortedness", e.g. number of transitions between black and white, and keep that roughly proportional to the number of bits somehow.
I like the simplicity of the graphics and sound, and the bits really seem to have a life of their own. Perhaps the screen layout could have been better, especially on fullscreen.
It's pretty obvious what the right choices are, but I still had fun exploring them all :)
You've got an excellent little platformer going here! This is pretty much exactly the game I failed to make ;)
I like how you equated health with time, so the player can choose to trade one for the other. Makes for interesting snap decisions.
The randomized maps are decent enough, and make the game quite addictive. Overall, a very solid entry.
Haha, the sound and humour are great! I suck too hard to make it past level 2 though :(
This is pretty hard, mostly because 10 seconds is quite short. The slow fades are a bit frustrating too. I didn't manage to get very far, but I do get the feeling there's a lot more to explore.
The graphics are pretty good, and the fact that you can't really see what things are is essential to gameplay, because it forces you to get close enough to get a description.
I really love the concept; check out http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=5496 for something similar.
I'm going to run through it with the walkthrough now, because apart from the difficulty it's very good!
$ mono StillCharging.exe
Unhandled Exception: System.EntryPointNotFoundException: GetCursorPos
at (wrapper managed-to-native) Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Mouse:GetCursorPos (Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Mouse/POINT&)
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Mouse.GetState () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.OpenTKGamePlatform.OnIsMouseVisibleChanged () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamePlatform.set_IsMouseVisible (Boolean value) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.OpenTKGamePlatform..ctor (Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game game) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamePlatform.Create (Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game game) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game..ctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at XFORGE.StillCharging.SCGame..ctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at XFORGE.StillCharging.Program.Main () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
[ERROR] FATAL UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: System.EntryPointNotFoundException: GetCursorPos
at (wrapper managed-to-native) Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Mouse:GetCursorPos (Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Mouse/POINT&)
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Mouse.GetState () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.OpenTKGamePlatform.OnIsMouseVisibleChanged () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamePlatform.set_IsMouseVisible (Boolean value) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.OpenTKGamePlatform..ctor (Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game game) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamePlatform.Create (Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game game) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game..ctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at XFORGE.StillCharging.SCGame..ctor () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
at XFORGE.StillCharging.Program.Main () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
$ mono --version
Mono JIT compiler version 2.10.8.1 (Debian 2.10.8.1-1ubuntu2.2)
It might be a library thing too... I'll try this when I get into Windows.
Excellent work! Gameplay is good, story is good, and the graphics support it well. I expected the repeated teleportation to become annoying, but it never happened. The most difficult part was getting to Daisy on time, which was very close even when I did make it.
The sound effect for text appearing is a bit intrusive, but the music makes up for it.
Nice one! Simple but fun, solid mechanics, and the levels are quite good. Lacking in originality, but hey, we can't all not make platformers!
Looks cute! Too bad I can't play, both for lack of controllers and lack of friends :(
Wow, this is pretty hard! Maybe it's also because the text is so tiny and you don't have much time, but I kept dying of starvation because it's difficult to check on inflow and outflow of resources. But with some work on the interface, this could be a really nice game.
@timtipgames: Thanks! Both checkpointing and a chasing giant were on the wishlist, but they didn't make the 48h cut :(
@Dining Philosopher: Yeah, I realized too late that the balance was off, didn't want to redo all the levels. I could have changed the timer to 7 seconds, but y'know, theme and all that...
@AdventureIslands: I know I'm no great composer :) In the interest of improving my skills, what in particular don't you like about the music? Is it the chiptune instruments? The accompaniment that I invented? The lack of any dynamics? Or do you just not like Irish jigs in general? ;)
@tigerj: Thank you for the praise!
@gritfish: Funny, it's a bit smoother in FF for me. Which surprised me because I usually find Chrome faster.
Can't try this today for lack of other humans in the vicinity, but it sure looks cute!
Well, that's one way of interpreting the theme. It took me a bit longer than 10 seconds to win, but I did it!
What did you do to the poor space-time continuum? I needed that to keep my sanity!
Profoundly weird. And bonus points for including Carl Sagan, of course.
It is simple. It doesn't have impressive graphics. And yet... it is a great game. Smooth gameplay, quite tense and twitchy and addictive. And great ending, of course!
Great entry as always! Too hard for poor me, but I'm sure better gamers will have a blast with this. Nice music, but the sfx are a bit too... sfxr.
This is so hauntingly beautiful, I almost regretted that I was expected to do something, instead of just watching and listening.
I can tell this is going to be a great marriage. Congratulations!
I can't believe nobody asked yet, and I hope it's not because everyone knows: what's the music?
Great music! Great graphics! Badass mode rocks!
Brilliant! I loved the email subjects in particular, but the entire thing is spot-on hilarious. Also, those sound effects :D Minor point: I didn't quite understand how the stabilizer worked -- it just seemed to flip the amplitude of the sine wave around.
This is great, so meta, great use of the theme, and still an actual game. Graphics are very HD, sound didn't work for me though so leaving that unrated. Zombies made me LOL. But then it segfaulted at "Things I do want in my game" :(
Won't run on Ubuntu 14.04... :(
$ sudo apt-get install libsdl2-2.0-0
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libsdl2-2.0-0 is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 304 not upgraded.
$ MakeWarNotScience-linux32/MakeWarNotScience
MakeWarNotScience-linux32/MakeWarNotScience: error while loading shared libraries: libSDL2-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Would it be possible to just link everything statically? It vastly increases the odds of people being able to run your game.
Interesting idea. I think it simulates some mobile design considerations quite well, like fat-finger inaccuracy and view obstruction. Now go integrate it with the Android and iOS emulators ;)
Can't play right now for lack of friends, but looks interesting.
The link gives a 404 :(
I'm afraid I don't quite understand... What do the other letters (W etc.) mean? Can I interact with the other M's and F's? What's the objective? How can I "make an impact" at the end?
What a profoundly unusual game. Dreamlike. I didn't quite get the puzzles, but made my way through Chapter One by guessing, elimination, and dodging. Then the game hung, was there supposed to be more?
Impressive! Best compo game I've seen so far. Looks very polished, gameplay is interesting, and the music is great. One minor complaint would be that it's hard to perceive depth sometimes, but all the rest more than makes up for it.
¿ǝʌıʇɔǝɾqo uɐ ǝɹǝɥʇ sI
Yay orbital mechanics! Gravity seemed a bit harsh until I realized I can't actually crash into the Earth myself. I'm not sure the edge wrapping is a good idea, because it throws off your orbit -- then again, you can use it to your advantage. Smooth gameplay, nice and simple graphics, too bad you didn't have time to put in win/lose conditions and such.
Brilliant idea, well executed! On par with QWOP in terms of difficulty. With a different control scheme I could see this work quite well as a mobile game as well.
Really great work! Looks good, and it's fun to play. The ball sometimes seems to do random things, but I guess that's no different from real football. I particularly liked the colourful GOAL that swept across the screen :)
I can't figure out how to run it on Linux... the bin directory only contains a Windows executable.
Very cute little game. It really is just like a kid playing in the snow, and the lack of objectives or dangers makes it even more so :)
You might want to mention that Java 8 is required, by the way.
Great puzzle game! Well-designed puzzles, interesting mechanics, and just the right level of difficulty. I love the robot voice.
Smooth gameplay. I particularly liked the powerupdowns -- you never know what you're gonna get!
Looks nice, but some sound would really spice it up. My main concern is with gameplay: it takes minutes just to move your units into enemy territory, and there the main challenge is not getting blocked by dead bodies. At the end, one of the robots was still standing but I couldn't get to him, nor he to me. Also a couple bugs: pathfinding doesn't let you move around obstacles even if the target square is green; dead units are sometimes movable and become alive; and standing next to the enemy base did nothing for me.
I disagree, there was *too much* space for variations. Look at all the different games made -- many of them would not have been any different, had the theme been something else. I would also have preferred the snowman :)
Still, you made a game, that's what counts! And you get bonus points from me for making what might be the smallest game in all the compo, just 48 kB unzipped :)
Love link not found, gives 404, so can't play on Linux :(
Less of a game and more of a slightly interactive comic book. Interesting nonetheless, and beautifully drawn!
I had to fix some symlinks, but even then it wouldn't work because libdump.so isn't packaged, nor installed on my system. From the directory that contains run.sh:
$ ln -sf libSDL2-2.0.so.0.2.1 lib/libSDL2-2.0.so.0
$ ln -s libSDL2_image-2.0.so.0.0.0 lib/libSDL2_image-2.0.so.0
$ ./run.sh
Error loading libdumb.so: libdumb.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
INFO: OpenAL opened OpenAL Soft.
INFO: Used ALURE version 1.2.
INFO: compiled against SDL version 2.0.3.
INFO: Linked against SDL version 2.0.3.
INFO: SDL_image linked version 2.0.0
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
I like the detailed artwork and background soundtrack, but the foreground sound effects were a bit jarring. I could just avoid the bad guys and they'd all end up at the bottom. There was no reason to go there.
Can't get the JAR to work well on Linux. The window started too small and only small squares appeared and didn't move. Resizing resulted in NullPointerExceptions. Getting it full-size on another desktop got me through that and into the game, but when I tried to shoot, it froze and gave up with Audio Device Unavailable.
My setup is unusual, but from reading the other comments, I think there might be a few bugs here as well.
The mechanic is nice, but I think it's a bit too hard. Walking around chasing the moving hive is a bit pointless though.
Smooth gameplay, nice programmer's art. How does the enemy guy decide where to move? Sometimes it seemed random, sometimes scripted, sometimes he actually seemed to be trying to block me -- pretty effective!
Simple, but effective. Also, hard! But I think it's supposed to be :)
It would help discoverability if you renamed the download link to "Windows/Linux" or something like that, or just add an identical link titled "Love". Case sensitivity problem on Linux: you need to run "mv class/Formationgenerator.lua class/FormationGenerator.lua" before you start the game.
Hah, that's a new interpretation of the theme. I liked the tone, it sounded like the offspring of GlaDOS and Mr T. This game would be very hard for people without the right geek background -- then again, how many of those play text games? :)
I did cheat by looking at the code, because I wanted to see where it was going, and many of the tests are quite arbitrary and unforgiving.
Works perfectly on my Ubuntu system, for what it's worth. Just run "python main.py".
Very moody and tense with the limited vision, and the lawnmower always humming in the background. I would have liked to see actual arrow key controls, as I'm right-handed. There seems to be some bug, because I won before finding the key.
My Ubuntu doesn't come with libglew-1.8, but this looked so cool that I had to go and install it. Word of advice for next time: link statically.
Anyway, this game looks wonderfully retro, and has music to match. It took a while to understand the mechanics (and that the mouse can be used to rotate).
There might be some bug because the second play, the playing field ended up in a corner mostly offscreen :(
A highly original take on the theme, and I love the L button :D Good choice for music, but the game got a quite repetitive and didn't seem to get harder anymore.
Kudos for the detailed Linux instructions!
The Linux build doesn't seem to contain an executable. I tried to get the web player to work in Linux via https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/unity3d-web-player-in-linux-browsers-thanks-to-pipelight-.2996 but the plugin wouldn't show up in my browser.
Way to make a clickfest compelling! I'm so frustrated that I couldn't get to the end now... very moody and atmospheric, great job!
BTW, the "Linux" and "Mac" links seem to be reversed. I used the Mac link to download linux.zip and it worked on my Linux system :)
Nice take on Tetris, but even though I'm quite good at Tetris, I found this very hard. With the round 3D, it is difficult to see where your piece will land. I would suggest adding a "ghost piece" to help out. It also starts out way too fast to give me any time to consider where to drop the piece, and taking it all the way around to the other side is nearly impossible in the time provided.
Camera management with the mouse is hard because I'd like to use my right (dominant) hand for controlling the blocks. I also don't see how it would work in multiplayer -- does everyone get their own corner of the screen? What might work is a "flattened" top-down view, basically a ring with axial and radial segments, where the blocks fall inwards. Equivalent game, simpler presentation :)
The music is fun and adds to the atmosphere, but the sound effects seem to come from another game.
I'm home alone so I can't try multiplayer at the moment, which is too bad because the mechanic sounds great.
0:51 on the second try. Beautifully done! Have you tried it with mouse/touch controls? I think that might feel a bit more natural in a circle.
Well done on the texts, I love how the backstory unfolds through these phone calls. But the options you get to say are a bit weird sometimes, because they stick around after the conversation has moved on. There were a few more bugs (I think), because when I hung up on someone, I'd just get them back with a blank screen and no options to say anything. Transferring them didn't seem to help.
Great concept, and finally one that did something creative with the theme! Didn't like the sound effects, but the music is quite nice. I could see this work very well as a mobile game too.
What would work nicely as an addition: just have the thief remove the item and walk away, and you would not only have to sound the alarm, but also point out who did it. (Maybe you could accuse more than one, but your score would go down accordingly.) It would be nice if they didn't all look the same in that case :)
The pixel art is great, but what am I supposed to do? Just select a waiter, and buy new booze when we run out? Too bad about the lack of audio :(
Hope you get well soon!
1:15, is that bad? :) Love this game, very polished, and it's great how bits of the music disappear every time a light starts flashing. I also enjoyed the random encouragements popping up.
@schuranator: Thanks for the detailed feedback!
If their commute becomes too long, housing demand should get negative and people should leave. But I'll be the first to admit that that part of the simulation hasn't been tuned very well :)
Planting trees was something I wanted to do, but I didn't have time.
I also wanted to make things transparent in front of the cursor so you could see what you were doing, but again, no time.
Maxis already made it ;)
Oh dear! The click target on the Restart link was far too big... fixed that! Sorry!
Looks gorgeous, with all the subtle animations and transitions. Sounds OK, some sounds are a bit jarring, but overall it really does create the right atmosphere. The puzzles are quite good, although I didn't get very far. Great work!
Amazing work! Cute graphics, smooth controls, a catchy soundtrack, a brilliant innovative mechanic, well-designed levels... what's not to like? It'll be bedtime soon, but I'll play this some more tomorrow :)
Yay, I won! Maybe it was more luck than skill, who knows :) I didn't figure out what the chest contents did.
WARNING: COMMENT CONTAINS SPOILERS.
Great writing! But I'm afraid I really haven't a clue... the answer seems different every time, but everyone says the same things...
Then I looked at the source and, well, these are very very subtle! I would sure hope that IRL they don't arrest people for being a bit nervous when faced by a possible accusation :)
Great work! Very interesting mechanics, both with the smiling/frowning and with the blower things. Love the hand-drawn art style. On the fourth (?) level I managed to get up on the ledge to the left, because I thought I was supposed to... walked off the far end, and fell into a void.
Won, I guess? Not so much an interactive story as it is a kind of RPG. After the first time you've read them, the blurbs of text just get in the way, especially the ~10 clicks you need to jack in and get to work. But it does have a weird kind of charm :)
Well, where to begin... 5/5 almost everywhere, and I don't grant those lightly. It looks fastastic, it has a sense of humour, great attention to detail, the planets morphing into faces is great, and the music...! Are you sure this isn't a Jam game? ;)
Great work! Played it on my Android tablet. Well-balanced gameplay, and I really dig the embroidened art style. The music gets a bit annoying though, and there is one little bug, as I lasted for 03:193:27.
Multiple great musics! Could have done with better sound effects though. The controls are a bit buggy at times, you randomly stop walking or don't jump; and the framerate was low and steadily dropping. But the styles of the different levels are very entertaining :)
This also runs fine on Linux, you might want to update your download link.
5/5 for audio. Much rather this than harsh sfxr sounds :D
Looks beautiful! Very moody and atmospheric, although the cheerful chiptune runs contrary to that. There is definitely a learning curve, but it's a fair one. Is it just my computer, or is the mouse control super sensitive?
Killed 69 of the suckers. Great that we can use Go for games nowadays... maybe I'll do my next LD in Go then!
Haha, brilliant :D Looks very cute, plays smoothly. My only complaint would be the harsh sfxr/bfxr-like sounds.
Congrats on your entry, and good luck with the continuation! You've got a good foundation there. It feels a bit floaty right now, might want to look into the controls.
Great game! I lost miserably the first time, made it to 91% the second time. Not easy, but full of interesting decisions, and very well balanced. Great job!
Interesting concept, but it's a bit too random. You just sit around waiting, either because you've spent all your lures or because they're on the wrong side, and whether they all gather under your one bookcase is pure luck.
Charming little game, my dear chap! Quaint, but rather charming indeed. The animations are outright fabulous. I shall gladly play this some more at four o'clock.
This is awesome! It starts out almost like Tetris, but becomes more of a hectic dropfest in the later levels.
Looks good, plays smoothly. I just don't see where the theme comes in, but maybe that's because I failed to reach the ending? Linux version works great for me by the way!
Nice one! It's pretty fast indeed, but plays smoothly. Great job!
Since there are no gravity wells to eat your delta-V, I think you could do it with a single ship and a lot of patience. But it was fun to play and try to keep the rocket under control... or not :) SAS would help a lot to make it more controllable, i.e. gradually cancelling angular velocity.
Very nice! Once you hit the resonance frequency of the swing, it becomes fun to keep it spinning while dodging the bullets. Would be even better with more particles and other juice!
Best looking entry I've seen so far! Great soundtrack too! I reached "All is love" and stopped bombing, but somehow I reached a tipping point and the love kept spreading and killed a bunch of people.
The music is great, and the blowtorch thing sounds great too. Could have done with better AI, so they won't all come at you in a straight line. The zombies look a bit like R2-D2 :)
Unfortunately the Linux version doesn't work for me. I think it's because the JAR file doesn't include lwjgl.
Can't I rate sound? The music was good :) Other bits were good too. Smooth controls, great graphics.
Works fine in Wine. Smooth gameplay, a bit too hard for my poor skills but I'm sure many people will enjoy it. The music is great, but the sound is a bit too loud in comparison.
Looks nice, but the guesswork does get frustrating.
The controls are so floaty that I couldn't even make it to the ball :(
Great stuff! Your postmortem link isn't working. I think you want http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/04/20/not-nice-knight-postmortem/.
Full marks for Innovation. This is brilliant! The art style initially made me think that the game wouldn't be any good, but I was proven wrong! Good puzzles, great gameplay. It gave me new appreciation what you can do with pen, paper and random objects lying around on your desk :D More levels would make it even better!
Wow, great take on the "where to invest your clicks" genre! It's got some interesting strategic decisions, like which ones to bribe (usually the healthy ones) and which to have killed, and the balancing and progression curve is good. I didn't manage to kill/bribe the boss, and my wall ended at -9843 health, but it seems I won anyway, so yay! Some sound effects or music would have been nice, but I think you made the right tradeoff by focusing on other things.
It seems to only work if you have a really wide window or monitor, otherwise the buttons fall off the screen. Easy to fix by running windowed and resizing appropriately.
This is a great concept. I particularly like how the multiplier depends on your turret count, which encourages you to try and keep as many of them alive as possible. There may actually be a lot of strategy to where you try to hit the enemies, so that you don't end up spawning turrets in your line of fire. Unfortunately it goes a bit too fast for strategy -- maybe something similar would work well as a turn-based game?
Very unusual, very innovative! I love how you actually can use the amp to jump higher and farther, once you got the hang of it. Good music, too ;)
You may need to enable public sharing on the Source download. Right now it tells me to ask permission using my Google account.
Nice! Made it to 82 points, but I can't reproduce it anmyore. I like how you can combine multiple zeppelins into a single punch, but it's a bit hard to see sometimes whether that will work. Perhaps a 2D top-down view would work better? I like the music, really adds to the frantic atmosphere.
Nice. I like the feedback loop of getting more energy out of followers, then getting more followers out of energy. But I had already converted everyone when the red thing was only at 30 or so out of the 100 I needed. From then on all there was to do was chase villagers to call them back to my Tree of Evil and pray.
For those who are having problems with libsdl not being found, try this:
$ ln -s /usr/lib/libSDL2-2.0.so.* libSDL2-2.0.so.1
$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./gbgames-ld33-bin
(The game is looking for libSDL2-2.0.so.1 but even my bleeding edge Arch system only has libSDL2-2.0.so.0 installed.)
Gorgeous, just gorgeous. Smooth controls too, and I love the music (although the sound effects are a bit jarring in comparison). The mutual hopping gets a bit frustrating at times, and I'm not good enough to get very far, but I really want to know whether there's a happy ending...
On Linux, so neither the web nor the Windows version works :(
I love everything about this game. Even the sfxr sound effects aren't quite horrible :) The zombie mechanic is brilliant: you have to get close enough to the enemy for your minions to spot them, but far enough away not to suffer any damage yourself. Amazing job!
The sound effects are funny, though a bit harsh at times. I kept running out of ammo before having killed all enemies, and it took me a while to realize I could just stomp on them.
Any chance you could make a Linux build? I can hear the music, but get no window. Since it looks like Java and lwjgl, it shouldn't be too hard.
The Linux version goes really really fast for me. That is, after the first stanza, I hit the right arrow, and the troll zipped through two or three screens until I encountered an enemy. Then I mashed some random buttons and more things zipped past. Pity, because this looks really interesting...
Wow, that was really weird and special, in a very good way. I wish you'd had more time.
Nice little game. The controls are a bit too twitchy for my tastes, and the camera is quite annoying at times since you can't see what's coming. I like the sprites and the animations!
Beautiful! Though (as you note) there is not much gameplay.
Funny how the gradually appearing centered text is not at all annoying, and actually makes it pretty easy to read. Reminds me of that speedreading thing that would flash one word at a time.
Regarding cross-browser audio: I strongly recommend Howler.js -- assuming you can talk to JavaScript from Haxe. Been using it for all my past LD entries, works flawlessly on any browser I or anyone else threw it at.
I like the visualization. I also like the music, although I'm not sure it's fitting :) Is it me, or do the same choices always lead to the same outcomes? There might also be a death spiral, because I got a chain of bad luck and harmful events, and basically watched myself go from 6 health down to Game Over with nothing I could do :)
I laughed out loud when I "lost" for the first time. But after a few plays, I figured out what the symbols meant and had a rough idea how to influence them, and I got the happy ending :)
The sound is appropriately creepy. But I found that my victims would often not stop running, and all fall like lemmings down a hole.
Great little platformer! Pretty easy though, unless the goal is to collect all the coins, in which case I don't know how to get back out of the pit on the second (?) level. Love the music, which works well despite being simple. Also, finally some controls that agree with me :)
Smooth controls, and it looks like there's a lot of gameplay here. Unfortunately I suck too hard to make it past the first wave :(
Interesting mechanic with the turning into a monster at will. The near-sighted guys are easy to catch even when you remain a monster, but the far-sighted ones really need sneaking up on while human (and even then I often failed). I would like a way to detonate each bomb individually, so I can be a bit more strategic about triggering them when there are victims around. Oh, and I love the eating animation to bits :D
Great stuff! Wonderfully smooth gameplay, although maybe slightly too fast for really tactical play. In some ways very similar to my game, in some very different. No vote option for audio? It gets a 5/5 too :)
I have no idea what CHONMg is, but I had a good time collecting it. Also because I'm a sucker for Newtonian and orbital mechanics :) Too bad the game is short, but well done for getting an ending in anyway :D
For HTML5 audio, I strongly recommend Howler.js. Works flawlessly on all browsers/platforms I've thrown at it.
Psychedelic! I'm a bit dizzy now... but the concept of Madness is very well represented :) Thanks for adding the minimap, it is invaluable. I would have liked to see some more visual representation of the different "resources", e.g. a progress bar of how far you have to charge them to awaken.
Wow, creepy. Love the art style.
Is it a raytracer in emscripten? Neat! Not much of a game though...
OK, this seems sufficiently weird that I want to try it, but no Windows here :(
This is hard :) I like the sprites and animations, although they don't fit well together. The sound is also a bit jarring. But I'm sure that better players than I are going to have a blast with it :)
Wow, there's a lot of content here! The drawback is that it seems a bit disconnected at times, and it's not really clear how my being believed or disbelieved led to the next situation. I'm not sure whether I like the randomness, but it does make each playthrough different. However, I seem to always end up getting killed :(
Roar! Lots of mayhem, I like it! I also like the voice sound effects, but the bfxr ones are a bit harsh. As to gameplay, it's a bit hard to see what's going on around you, so there's not much room for tactical manoeuvering and dodging. A camera standpoint farther up and back might help here, but would of course mean less immersion :(
@GBGames:
The white arrows are immune to fire, so they're a lot harder to defend against.
Yes, there should be audio. What's your browser and platform? Do the demos at http://goldfirestudios.com/blog/104/howler.js-Modern-Web-Audio-Javascript-Library work for you?
@warlorddreadful: Great idea about the terrain. If I develop this further (which is likely) I'll definitely include that.
@Literal Games: There are keyboard controls (space, up arrow) and mouse controls (left click, right click). I wasn't anticipating anyone trying to use both at the same time, sorry :)
Hooray, a creative take on the theme! Smooth, looks minimalistic yet polished. Gameplay is a bit confusing sometimes; it would help to draw some borders that you cannot go beyond, and indicate that the centre tile is "special", being the pivot. Maybe also add some horizontal lines around the row you're shifting, to make it clear to novice players that the horizontal direction is different from the vertical. But all that is icing on the cake; I think the core is quite solid here, 5/5 for Innovation and Fun :)
Excellent concept! Great puzzles! Googly eyes! Amazing stuff! The art style feels a bit inconsistent somehow, with a lot of good ideas (especially the eyes) that don't really go well together, but the actual gameplay and controls are incredibly solid. The puzzles are hard, sometimes frustratingly so, but fair. Do consider making this into a mobile game!
Nice! Love how your explosion blows away all enemies and bullets. But having to shapeshift with the number keys is awkward, because I can't use WASD at the same time. How about mapping the mouse wheel as well? Apart from that, the controls are pretty tight. Audio is a bit minimalist, but works fine and doesn't get annoying.
Nice, an upside-down version of the classic submarine game, with a totally sensible theme :D
Love the graphics concept. Might have been even better wit hand-drawn and scanned scribbles, but this works. Too bad you didn't manage to fit in the theme. Sadly, I suck too hard to make it past the first few enemies.
Yay, a libGDX game :) And awesome work, to boot! The graphics remind me of The Incredible Machine; I'm guessing this may have been on purpose. The zooming transition between levels is a great touch. Great sfx and music top it off.
Great stuff! Made it to the top. The leftmost sheep thing got a bit annoying, until I realised that I could just make a cage, instead of a staircase that he wouldn't climb. A bit more performance would be nice, but it's fun as is, and definitely has potential.
Nice! Become a bear to push crates, where have I seen that before? GMTA ;)
Wow, great artwork, good soundtrack, both really supportive of the story.
Minor gripe: the text appearing from the center is only readable once it settles, because it moves too quickly before that. And click targets are a bit small.
This seemed really obscure at first, but once I figured out the rules (with help from your description above), it really made sense. Great concept! I particularly enjoyed the last puzzle.
Minor annoyance: the controls could have been more intuitive. Perhaps drag with left mouse button to rotate, right mouse button to move? The distinction between "selectable" sparkles and "selected" sparkles wasn't entirely clear either.
Ohhh, that's clever. Unfortunately, it's possible to get stuck on an island without a way off (except down). For a game without sound or fancy special effects, this is surprisingly tense :)
Simple concept, but well executed. Love the contrast between the soothing music and frantic gameplay. I bet this game is WAY easier on a touch screen though.
What you could consider is to make the shape you're looking for flash up larger in the middle of the screen, so you don't need to take your eyes off the board every second or so.
Great polish, very "juicy". Love how the murdershifter turns into you and wobbles around after he killed you.
It's a bit confusing. How do I kill bosses? Why do 1/2/3 not work? Also, the Tab screen covers up my resource meters so I can't see what I have available to spend. Maybe I didn't get far enough, but there doesn't seem to be much of a challenge.
Your game keeps highlighting me in IRC since my name is Thomas. And indeed I pressed space to restart. Nice :)
I'm a beaver! Hurray! ... Ehm, okay :) Anyway, I guess this game could do with a bit more challenge. It's just a matter of waiting and clicking the right buttons. The UI could be a bit more streamlined, e.g. a single larger button to toggle between map and brewing, or put both on one screen; and selecting a minion to give a potion shouldn't require another "Validate!" click. Stuff like that :) Oh, I like the music, simple but effective!
Hilarious :D Love the sound effects and the music. Gameplay-wise, I got hit by the PRNG pretty hard, losing some $300 while waiting for customers to enter. And when there were two and I shaved one, the other one had disappeared.
Curious: how are you doing the comparison? Just pixel by pixel, or is there more to it?
Nice! Shapeshifting is a bit tricky at times though.
Very moody, even despite the bfxr sound effects. The lighting and flashing meteors (?) really convey a sense of being marooned on a lonely, remote, alien planet. The subtle background hum also helps.
I'm no good at this kind of game, but I think the controls could have been better. Even if you have a qwerty layout (I had to switch), doing both movement and weapon switching with the left hand is awkward. The physics all feel rather floaty and not very responsive. I do like the fact that the character is fully animated (even though his legs move weirdly). Would like to see more of that in LD.
Wow, never seen a game like that before :D It's hard, but fair, and I'm sure practice would help a lot. I love the morph animations on the character, especially when you start mashing buttons in a panicked frenzy :D Really well polished too, apart maybe from the HUD/font stuff which is a bit bland in comparison. Oh, and props for non-annoying sound effects!
Mouse control seems to be inverted? I kept randomly dying even though I was car-shaped well before I hit the ground, and I didn't hit it very hard.
Wow, really neat puzzle game. It's pretty hard -- I didn't make it all the way through, got stuck on the level in your last screenshot (although tbh I didn't try very hard). Great puzzle design. The music gets a bit annoying after a while though.
I think I found a bug: I could "un-eat" tiles even when I was already at length 1, so I could pave over the entire area. Is that intended?
Love the music and the artwork. Some sprite animation would have been great.
At night, the butterfly zips across the screen really quickly. I can't position it anywhere, it just zooms to the other side no matter how briefly I press the button. Is that a bug?
Had to laugh at the third leg being attached to the side like that. 5/5 for humour!
Wow, so much feedback! Thank you all! Let me answer to some people specifically...
@rockybdubs, @Malvern: You are basically saying opposite things about movement speed :) Perhaps level 7 got tedious because, frankly, it is. I meant for something more interesting to be placed halfway, but couldn't fit it in (neither into the time, nor into the map).
@fin_nolimit: Just your comment by itself made this LD worthwhile. Thank you, and enjoy the rest of the levels!
@Cosmologicon: I didn't want to go to deep into hardcore Sokoban type puzzles, where you have to get 100 steps in the right order or you have to start over. I'd rather have something more forgiving, where you can never get stuck. I tried to find a reasonable balance there.
@wboqm: Yes, the snake might be under-used. The problem is that once you're a snake, the only limiting factor is crates. I think I'd have to add another snake-blocking tile to get more good puzzles out of it.
@danbolt: Level 8 is my personal favourite, which has a similar structure.
@Cowa: Sorry about the sounds. Eleventh hour, almost literally. Totally true that they could have been better.
@Pestel Crew: If this is highly enough rated in LD, I'll definitely consider a mobile port :)
@Freank: Please feel free to include my game in your video if you like!
@urfbound: Thanks for the detailed feedback!
Undo would have been great, but wasn't possible in the time available. I'd have to either clone the entire game state, or have some "reverse" operation, but because of hacky code (zero separation between game logic and display) neither was easy.
I'm not so sure about dynamic elements. I prefer pure logic puzzles over logic plus skill. I hated many of the moving mine puzzles in Talos, for instance. YMMV.
Not sure what the blurry text is all about. It should look crisp and pixelated, and does on every platform I tested. Not sure if this is a HaxeFlixel bug or I'm just holding it wrong.
The keys don't actually disappear, it's just that they're rendered on top of each other. I was aware of this but didn't bother to fix it, because as soon as you pick them up again it becomes clear.
Very cute, very random :) Love the SUGAR EXPLOSION.
There's something ironic about downloading 51 MB for 4096 mostly monochrome pixels :)
In line with the holy trinity of themes "upgrade", "upgrading" and "upgrades"? ;) Fun game, hard in the beginning, but I improved. I found the soundtrack pretty annoying, but the sprites are very very nice :)
Reminds me of our entry for the previous LD, http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=18490 :) It would be nice if the attached blocks had some other advantage beyond improving your score. Minor: it's a bit annoying to have to reach for the mouse to click the buttons, when the rest of the controls are keyboard only.
Quite original again :D I couldn't make it past the Eiffel tower, where my incredibly pretty rock kept getting 0% accuracy. How is this computed?
There seem to be some issues with the sound, which loops, and the music, which doesn't -- that seems the wrong way round.
Great little quiz! I can see why you added the spinning, though I can also see why people don't like it. The best bit are the descriptions and silly puns at the end :)
Also, thank you for pointing out the existence of Piskel. It's exactly the tool I've been looking for for several LDs, and was considering writing myself.
Nice and relaxing music!
The game seems a bit buggy: I somehow got both my catapults connected to the cutter, and I got fireballs even though I didn't have a torch yet. And I was unable to reposition any of my stuff (using Chromium 52.0.2743.116 (64-bit) on Arch Linux).
The interface also takes some getting used to. For instance, how can I tell which of two identical catapults are connected to my cutter? It would be nice to do this on the objects themselves instead of in a dialog, for instance by dragging a line from the cutter to a catapult.
Mocha and Chai? You mean, you *unit test* your LD games?! Wow :)
Spent a couple minutes with this one. As others are saying, typically each option should be better than the previous one. Suppose I have $500 to spend. I can buy a sweatshop ($1/s), 5 factories ($1.25/s), 20 double robots ($6.66/s), or 50 robots ($10/s). Clicking 20 times for those double robots is definitely not that onerous, so the sweatshop is just very underpowered at this point.
It would also be nice if there were powerups for stuff you already have. Give that fleet of old single robots something more to do.
Also, the next unavailable thing should be hinted at (showing at least its price) so the player has something to shoot for. When nothing new appeared even after 10x my currently most expensive item, I just gave up.
I also wasn't sure what "bank >= $1000" means. I just get the two bucks...
Wow, I had no idea such things could be done in LÖVE (shaders and such). I thought it was just for drawing 2D sprites with alpha blending at best :) I need to check it out some more before the next LD.
Great little game that I badly suck at. But the retro feel is definitely there, being as difficult as it is, and the "just one more try" effect is there too. Could work well on mobile, perhaps?
Reminds me of Dwarf Fortress. Equally unfathomable, unfortunately :) Lots going on and looks very cute, but it's hard to find out how to control anything that's happening.
But once I figured out the arrows that appear when nothing is selected, I got a little bit of progress by extending my fort.
Then I told them to make the stairwell deeper, but it took the lazy bastards a long time to get started. I would have liked to assign more people to the task, or set priorities.
It's also not clear what all the things are for. When/why do I need Store Rooms, Food Halls, Builders?
Made it! Almost dying of dehydration, so I hope somebody came to STONECONF to present a soft drinks vending machine.
Great entry. Reminds me of Oregon Trail :)
It requires several playthroughs (three, in my case) until you get the hang of the right balancing and what the right responses are. That's fine though.
On a subsequent playthrough, I also managed to get to STONECONF without packing any supplies in advance, with 3 days to spare. When I started to run low, I just explored a bit. Maybe I got lucky?
The encounters are funny, but it would be nice if they were a bit better randomised: don't repeat an encounter until you've exhausted all the others.
Also, lesson learned: do not fight bears. ;)
@smerino: Interesting solution, I hadn't thought about that approach!
@NoTrueSpaceman: Made a post-compo fix for the scrollbar, thanks. I had noticed, just didn't think anyone else would ;)
@studdert249: Yeah, sorry about the lack of a clear button. The thought occurred to me, but I prioritised other features. You can drag across with the right mouse button (or with left, when starting on a hole) to erase somewhat quickly.
@bigalphillips: Yes, I should have made the wording context-dependent (depending on whether jump is available yet or not).
@tenpn: Thank, fixed the right-click thing.
@David Cookie: No time for any of that, I'm afraid!
Finally got a chance to play your game Wan :)
Rewinding time was always possible in games like this, so kudos for the idea of making it an official feature!
Good writing. I loved both endings, the "evil" one in particular though :)
Great stuff! I wonder if it would be possible to remove the platformer controls, and control the entire game just by typing letters. Snakes to push the player forwards, conveyor belt snakes, trampoline snakes, shield snakes, the possibilities are endless!