Living Tales by tinyworlds 2012-09-07T22:23:00
This would have been really nice if the objects didn't overlap so much. As it is, it was still fun to play, but all the actors got stuck and I couldn't tell what was going on.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → triliyn
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 24 | Evolution | Cannibal Slugmage of Eden | jam | 247 | 2.26 | 1.76 | 3.06 | 2.79 | 1.48 | 1.69 | 2.23 | 1.84 | 74 |
This would have been really nice if the objects didn't overlap so much. As it is, it was still fun to play, but all the actors got stuck and I couldn't tell what was going on.
That was certainly amusing. As a game it wasn't great, but I certainly don't regret having played it.
I had a problem where occasionally, if I was firing continuously, Darwin would get stuck and fall toward the back of the screen. Dawkins did not appear to suffer from this.
Nice game! I don't think I ever really figured out what the blue powerups do. It looks a bit like a temporary shield when you attack? But since the graphic doesn't show unless you get hit, it's hard to tell how long it lasts.
It also would have been nice if the doors had the powerup colors on them instead of just the shape. A few times I went through the spiky door wanting the red powerup.
djtjj: Uh oh! Unfortunately I only really had time to test it on one other computer. Are you sure it actually crashes? The executable I currently have spawns a cmd window and spits out a LOT of errors, but runs fine after that.
If it is actually crashing, I have no idea what might be causing it, but I'll do some more testing and get back to you!
Sorry, I don't know what might have made it freeze.
There's not really a goal right now, but you can interact with the slug ecology by killing the slugs you don't like.
Gidaio: I agree that it needs much more polish. I was SO disappointed that I didn't have time to add animations for spells, combat, and slug mating. :(
PickledBrain: Thank you! I am actually quite proud of the name. And yeah, I realize the presentation at this point is terrible. I was scrambling by the end and I was like an hour late for the Jam.
zx81: Sorry about the freeze. I really should have tested this on more computers, because its behavior doesn't seem consistent at all.
The graphics are intentionally minimalist, but I agree, a background would have been nice. I'm not sure how I feel about audio because I'm mainly in this for the programming, but maybe next time I'll try to have at least placeholder sounds.
infinitedog: Unfortunately, magic mode kinda sucks right now. The biggest issue is that you can't really cancel; you can only get out by casting a spell (which is impossible if you have no slugs in your inventory). What did you try while in magic mode? You're only supposed to be able to click slugs (to eat them), click spells (to select them; this only works if you have enough mana for that spell), and click the ground (only after you've selected a spell; this casts it).
If you can't do any of these things, that is genuinely a problem. I'm planning to upload a post-compo version in a bit, but I don't know how much I'll be able to fix.
AaronGordon: Thanks! Actually, I'm only one person, which explains why I was so rushed. I do plan to do a remake of Slugmage though (at this point I feel like that would be easier than to improve the mess I made of it at the end). I'm also about to release the source and a post-compo version with some minor improvements in a bit.
X-Out: Yeah, even I have a hard time keeping the fonts alive. It's slightly better in my soon-to-be-released post-compo version; slugs have a small chance under certain conditions to spontaneously become fonts, but due to the way they behave in the compo version it almost never happens.
Norgg: Exactly. I hope to fix that in the post-compo version by adding the weight limit and hopefully also implement the win condition itself. (Right now when you cast Dawn, it sets the game state to "win", but after every spell it sets the game state back to "end-turn".)
jarnik: currently you can only eat slugs from your inventory, so the last thing is not a bug (although I agree it would be nice if you could eat slugs directly if they're next to you).
The first two bugs are... interesting. Which version are you using? Did the multidrop thing only work with the green slugs from grabbing an empty space? Are both of these things replicable? I think I understand the drop thing given the grabbing bug, but I have no idea what could be causing the grabbing bug.
Marudziik, I will probably not be developing the original slugmage anymore, but I plan to do a sequel with a more manageable codebase. I haven't started development on the sequel yet, but today I finished the first version of the UI library that I will be using. (I also have one more version of Slugmage that I've been meaning to upload that should fix a crash or two, but I'm not sure when I'll get around to that.)
demonpants: unfortunately I don't have access to a Mac and I don't know any way to cross-compile lisp (although I'm working on getting a new lisp implementation running that can compile to C). I'll try to upload the source soon though. If anyone wants help compiling it, feel free to ask!
RawBits, in the post compo version you can press escape to end your turn in emergencies like that. My fault for being uninformative, sorry.
Very interesting idea! I liked that for the most part it was a game about FALLING. I felt like the rain.
It felt a little sluggish though, except when I went off the screen, in which case it felt too fast. It would be nice if there was some indication of your height when you're offscreen.
I was eager to try, but I also couldn't get it to run. The menu works fine, but moving to the "play" button crashes both the game's browser tab and the Ludum Dare tab from which I opened it. I am also on Chrome on Windows 7.
Testing again, I can see the credits perfectly well. It's just the Start button that's broken.
I tried again and it mysteriously works! The game is pretty cool (and crucially, the controls are smooth and not at all frustrating!). There were certain long intervals that didn't have any enemies though.
A minimap would have been nice on the first-person shooter level. The second time I died I ran out of patience and gave up.
The rest of it was really cool though! At each stage I was actually pretty excited to find out what level would be next, which is why I played the FPS level for so long.
The mechanics sounded very interesting, but both the scrolling and the round progression were too slow for me to get into it. I also ran into a weird bug in which the menu got inverted (i.e. it was visible when the game was unpaused and not visible when the game was paused).
Like many of your other commenters, I'd love to see you keep developing this.
I don't think I ever successfully floated and it wasn't clear how to collect the green things (but that might have just been the "it takes a few seconds to delete objects" thing you warned about). It was fun to watch though, and I love the name.
This was interesting and could have been very fun, but the controls were clumsy. I think it would be a lot better if the molecules didn't jitter as much without being interacted with. I'd like to see it with more polish though!
The cell faces were cute. Aiming the gun was a little difficult; I would have liked a separate button for that instead of having to click on a cell. It's also a bit non-intuitive that you target a point rather than a direction.
This sounds interesting, but I couldn't run it. When I double clicked the executable I got something like "Error: No OpenAL found" and a game window opened, but presented an error: "Zugriffsverletzung bei Adresse 0049601F in Modul 'CityLife.exe'. Lesen von Adresse 00000008."
Trying to close this error just pops it up again, so I had to kill it with Task Manager.
I found this unplayably hard, but I'm giving you high ratings anyway because I love the idea (and also everyone else seems to think it's playable). I'd like to see this polished (and with variable difficulty please!)
More of a sandbox than a game, but it was pretty fun to name one creature and watch its descendants blot out the gene pool. Speaking of which, if you let it run for a while it can get hard to see anything through the haze of names.
This looks like a really nice game! A couple issues, though:
1) the mouselook is REALLY FAST. I had trouble aiming at things.
2) It's a little hard to tell whether you're in melee range.
3) I really like the "storing three pieces of information as an rgb color" (and in fact I used this in my own game!), but in the beginning of the game your EVO crystal is too dark to make out anything.
Despite these, I had fun in my short playthrough (I didn't realize how low on health I was).
The cats-for-health thing seemed a little tacked on, but I do like that health is linked to your torch radius. The black ghost thingies were pleasingly creepy too. I couldn't get past the first dungeon level though, and I stopped trying because starting from the beginning takes so long and there's not much replay value.
This was really hard, and the controls were awkward, so I didn't find it very fun. I REALLY loved the graphics though. Her dress and hair flapping around were fun to watch even when I was too frustrated to continue.
This was fun! One complaint I have though is that cats very often seem to end up overlapping each other. It would be a lot easier if they could be spread out somehow so I could see them.
I couldn't download this. The link took me to a page that said "Your download is ready". Clicking what looked like the download link on that page opened up a copy of the same page in a new tab.
In my first try, I destroyed the data siphon in the linker and didn't understand why I couldn't get any resources. After restarting, it took me a while to figure out that something was actually going on when you hold-click on the resources -- the mining sound is a lot like a "failure" noise.
The first couple levels were really fun. I didn't really like the last... three, I think, because they broke the pattern of "You must die at least once in each level to succeed" (thereby losing you a theme point). Even so, I was interested enough to finish the game and disappointed that there was no more. Nice work!
The concept was nice, but it was too slow. It could have been very fun if movement, fighting, and evolution were all sped up a bit.
This was actually really fun. The "Excerpt from the Book of Prophecy" was both funny and cryptic enough that it made a puzzle while still offering adequate instructions (though I will note that I was pretty frustrated for the first 5 games when I hadn't realized what golds do).
I like the idea and the graphics were actually very pretty, but there's not really much to do. I might have liked the gliders to start from further up so that I could have more control over when they hit the ground (especially since for now it's just a sandbox).