Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → tuism
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | Blobbies | jam | 132 | 4.02 | 4.05 | 3.59 | 3.45 | 3.92 | 3.08 | ||||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | CRAMMM: Totally Accurate Studying Simulator | compo | 73 | 3.89 | 3.76 | 4.07 | 4.36 | 4.18 | 3.63 | 3.82 | 3.63 | ||
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | Orbits | compo | 21 | 4.16 | 4.11 | 4.31 | 4.44 | 4.07 | 3.64 | 3.32 | 3.87 | ||
| 2017 | 39 | Running out of Power | Assault//Battery | compo | 45 | 3.98 | 4.29 | 4.21 | 3.57 | 3.26 | 2.98 | 3.51 | 3.10 | ||
| 2016 | 37 | One room | 2D Cat Wants Out | compo | 115 | 3.69 | 3.55 | 3.79 | 3.59 | 3.41 | 3.21 | 3.04 | 3.23 | 53 | |
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | BOOST | compo | 72 | 3.91 | 3.81 | 3.42 | 4.10 | 4.16 | 3.92 | 2.27 | 3.54 | 80 | |
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | PokEscape: Magicrap's Stealthy Journey for Survival & Gyrodeuce | compo | 104 | 3.75 | 3.63 | 3.65 | 3.44 | 3.83 | 3.12 | 3.38 | 3.17 | 82 | |
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Mecha Cop 2875 | jam | 447 | 3.31 | 3.48 | 2.77 | 2.48 | 3.41 | 3.06 | 2.53 | 3.15 | 76 | |
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | No More Boxes | compo | 73 | 3.82 | 3.85 | 3.56 | 4.06 | 3.84 | 3.26 | 3.14 | 100 | ||
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | SUPER LANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK! | compo | 388 | 3.34 | 3.70 | 3.43 | 3.16 | 3.02 | 1.71 | 3.79 | 2.89 | 78 |
Wow the graphics are simply mad. I can't tell if the Goblin is 3D or 2D, probably 2D, but the animation of him coming in is just superb. Details!
However the game... I completely completely don't get it. Well I do, but it looks incomprehensibly hard. Idid better when I guessed everything XD It's like one of those old adventure games where I needed to click on everything... But with a TIMER :P
It could be super cool with a better learning curve :)
So pretty! So much of polish! So much of juice! It's so much juicy madness!
I wish there were:
1. AI player
2. More sweet moves ;) (what's the difference bewteen the up slash and down slash?)
3. More characters
4. More stuff!
Not sure cos I haven't played against a 2nd player yet but the fact that the player that died always spawn from the same spot (that they died) may disadvantage them. Maybe :)
Good stuff!
Whooooa! Awesome game! Great style, great juice, great great great! I'm definitely coming back to this one, so many nice touches, even from the get-go with boy/girl selection. COOOL! :D
Dies too easily though. Gotta learn to not just run n gun :P
Ah! I saw the sortie en mer thing earlier and thought that this was a lot like that. Well done, the game was very nicely put together, and has one of the best mood despite it being stickman. Very cool stuff!
Great music! Fits amazingly!
I drowned :/ So you *can* get rescued huh? Lemme do that again :P
Great game! I especially liked that there's really a lot of hidden depth with multiple vectors of interaction even with just one button, which makes it simple but very skill-oriented. Very well done on that design.
Lots of little touches make it play very well - the "internal dialogue" and the juice. But ultimately a little more variety in gameplay or progression would have been awesome - and still can be :)
So many entries inspired by that le mer... Something ad. We know who reads Kotaku now, then :P
Why no web build if you're on Unity! Not having web build is one of the biggest barriers to people playing your game, these days :)
Needs more game, I like the idea, but I guess Minecraft didn't have "more game" unlil much later either :)
Keep going! :)
I really, really, really, love the idea, and the QWOP level madness one can have with it. But the execution is just short of decent...
1. People don't like to read. There's SO much reading. And most of it shifted off before I could finish reading them. Which led to...
2. I couldn't remember where any of the keys were so I had to resort to trying everything. Eventually I was like typing random characters...
3. The sound was very loud and obstrusive.
4. So anyway since I didn't know how to play... Yeah it didn't keep me in the game.
I think if you WANT TO rely on keys you need to put them on the screen somehow. Either onto the scene or under the game screen in the web interface.
And then expecting people to remember a whole sequence of events isn't going to work - sure yes you're trying to simulate a show's director and that's what they do for a living... But it's no fun!
Anyway I'd love to see this concept done in an intuitive way, could be tons of fun!
The finish was great. It's nice to see something well polished :)
Thumping track! Very interesting idea! The jitteryness of things makes it feel a bit odd, that's the aesthetic! I really enjoy it except for the controls. Could really be taken further! Good stuff!
Pretty well polished! Would fit well on an NES :D Some design issues but great for 48 hours :D
I honestly couldn't figure out anything at all, even read the instructions a few times over XD
The valve thing didn't make any sense, everything is always blue... How does a heart "beat"? I connected everything up, nothing was loose... Anyway I gave up XD
It does show some promise... It just need to be communicate better, I guess...
I like it all except for my finger getting really tired. I think if the character moved without pressing multiple times it would make for a more user-friendly game, though then of course the panic-ness wouldn't be there.
So I guess mechanically I'd have liked something less painful to be the game :P
But good job, well polished!
Interesting concept! I feel like it could have been communicated better or worked a bit differently. For one, I'm used to four beat so a three beat really really confused the crap out of me. Then, the flashing green thing is too fast - as with all music games, I think instead of flashing, a trail of some kind that you can look anticipate would work best. Then the controls - instead of having to hold down the button until that moment, I think if it just took the last input and applied it as held down it would be better. It would also give it the ability to score differently according to accuracy in pressing, like other music games :)
Interesting but needs some more care in design! :) Great music!
Mechanically interesting, I really like the idea, but a few implementation problems leave it difficult and unfun to play.
1. The fact that you can shoot the food to diminish disincentivises you to shoot the red guys (or the blue guys)
2. The tinyness of the targets (food and creatures) makes it REALLY hard to get a hit or to roll them around.
3. I ended up just letting the blue guys through and killing the red guys, which got really boring after a while.
4. Needs more feedback on behaviours you want to encourage - like getting food to roll into a big one should make you feel WOOO! By providing visual feedback (juice). Maybe some kind of combo indicator.
Overall great idea that can use some polish :)
Cool! Wow that's so much work! I really enjoyed the concept, many rough bits could be worked out, but damn it's already so far along!
The damage you do is too low! That made me feel really weak :P
The mechanics gel together well. The pacing is good except for the low damage. It's almost like it was trying to be AAA. Goodness :D
Awesome! Fantastic! :D I just can't believe you left it... like that! :P
Good damn job, looking forward to more? Though gameplay wise... Not sure what more there could be :)
Typing of the dead was epic though, damn :)
Great one, love the graphics, ok sound, good controls, very polished. The juice was great. Just wished there were a bit more variety in there :)
739 :)
Very well designed in all respects - the Metroidvania principles are all there, it's awesome to see sound design principles play out :) You maximised the limited enemy types and movements you had as a toolbox, and that was awesome :D
The only real gripe would be the core mechanic is a bit bland, I was hoping for something besides the drill, so having the strength go up but essentially doing the same thing over and over got a bit much.
Has real potential if that was just expanded on! Well done!
I'm going to be honest because honesty is how you'll get better! We're always learning!
So, how long did it take to place all those cubes? I don't know, I like the LOOK of them, but the rest of the game needed a lot more attention. The cubes weren't worth the load time for the most part.
Is there even a reason to switch the torch off? If so, why make it an option?
There's zero feedback on if you hit the worm or not. That's a tough one to contend with. Also eventually I just ignored them. They don't do much damage anyway.
So bumping up the damage alone probably won't solve the problem cos it'll just either be too hard. The enemies need to do something a little bit more, either in movement, or in attacks (which are almost unavoidable, which takes away from the players' decisions space).
So that's my crit, it's not a bad start, really, but I do hope you learn and grow! :D
I like it! It's well polished and rounded off, a good challenge, and intense in small doses :) I really like the way the game starts and the way it moves!
Could be nice if you make the mine explosions hit enemy subs - more interactivity is cool :D
Fantastic! Awesome! :D I really loved yours, screw the interface you don't need one, the weights and the spinning wheel are all you need really :)
This would work so much better on touch device, so I think you got yourself a little winner of a gem here :)
The style is GORGEOUS! Really love it!
The one biggest gripe I have is due to the design, you're always staring at the least pretty part of the island - the bit that's rising out of the sea. Soooo I would try and change that :)
VERY GOOD!
Ok damn I haven't played it yet, but I will :D It sounds like a Dixit on twitter, which is pretty damn awesome :D Love it! :D
Oooooh. I think I like this. But it's a bit loose (see what I did there):
There's very little indication that the character was directional - I spent several tries trying to move him up down left right like regular directions, when I was supposed to drive like a car.
The zoom and rotate seems superfluous - like something the game should be smart enough to do for you.
Not sure what the light beam does.
Otherwise the gfx are PRETTY and the sound gorgeous. Just need to iron out some niggles and probably put in some more variety in what happens/what the player can do/etc.
GJ!
Pretty good one, nicely rounded with lots and lots of features, though overall it felt unfocused and not quite interesting enough to keep my attention.
Hmmmm. That's a great engine for something, though not sure what. It's a nice groundwork for a game - but isn't a game yet :) Good job putting it together, juicy :)
Very nice one! The controls work well, the polish is there, the mechanics had surprising depth - the risk/reward aspect of the mines are a really nice touch. Not sure if new mechanics after the mines?
Great job! :)
Hahaha! Is this a Mass Effect planetary mining parody? :P Cool idea, I do like it, but it's not super fun... But then ME's mining was crap too and they probably spent a million bucks on it :P
An interesting collection of ideas, I think overall the game is just a bit unbalanced - the jump is powerful but I can't see where I'm going, the attacks don't feel meaty enough, lack of feedback on getting hit/hitting... But I really like the health system, the climbing... Yeah there's a lot of systems in there, they just aren't fine tuned enough.
Oh the key mapping is tough to play with. I've never understood how games are mapped there so popularly XD
I'm sorry, I don't get the point of the game :/ the graphics and the premise showed promise, but there was no variance on the way down, there's no point to drill anywhere but down, then I couldn't even get through the granite/white rocks bit at all.
The P button didn't "skip", it just showed you something you can't get to otherwise :/
A nice little game! I like that there are many little touches like the sounds and the animations on everything. The deviation of this from the regular formulas prevent it from it being just another one yet is familiar enough to be immediate. Good one for the scope! :)
Some of the stuff could do with a bit more design but such is a 48 hour jam :)
Nooooo! Sorry you didn't make the jam cos of pure fluke! I was up for 46 hours straight so I definitely feel your pain!
Anyway great game! So well polished! Great music, the visuals are awesome, I love the little touch of seeing air bubbles where fish are and the radar mechanic. So well designed!
Dunno why but there seems to be a plethora of fishing games (not just talking about this LD) lately in indie circles, I guess Ridiculous Fishing awakened the fishing soul in us all :P
So beautiful :D
So hard :/ So so hard. If the second and third skeletons act according to slightly different AI routines then you sir are FIENDISH. I think if they are harder they should actually look different, even if subtly so. As it is now it just feels unfairly wrong.
I guess there's more content later in terms of variety, but damn it's so hard. And hard without room to manouever in - Super Meatboy for example has many options - when the player has very few options AND it's so hard it feels like luck getting through things.
But really, it's a goodie :) Pretty good (see what I did there), or is that pretty hard? :P
Wow! I love many things about this, great graphics, a twisty tale (I like the simplicity and the strength of it but obviously a little tenuous), interesting concept... It's all SUPER impressive for a 48 hour game!
The only thing that bugged me was the constant knocking. Is it supposed to be footsteps, or someone (you?) banging your head? I thought another window was open with another sound going, but it wasn't. What is it??
Awesome! Super original, great use of the theme, idea, fun, brough a smile to my face. So good! :D
It's a minimal Terraria with buggy movements and unclear interactions... Well done for implementing all the stuff, but some of the choices in implementation makes the game feel quite boring...
Quite lovely, I enjoyed the idea but the controls were slippery and too fast to master. The graphics and level design was cool :)
Eventually I got stuck under the leftmost chest and that was embarrassing XD so that was a game deadend :P
But good job the game could just do with polishing, solid idea :)
Really nice art and style and music and polish overall, but one fundamental issue plagued it - you die with no warning, and it feels more like a crash than anything else! The "spikes" needed to be much more communicative of spikeyness, and you need to tell the player what happened to them, one way or another.
Anyhoo other than that, great adventure :)
Man. So cool. Great graphics, great juice, great concept, great execution... But it was so boring. And pointless. And the controls really doesn't feel like I was in control. It's QWOP without the falling down :/
Would love to see where this one goes!
Lovely! THE JUICIEST GAME :) I love it! The speed up mechanics make death really awwww inducing! I love the juice! But the juice is a bit mismatched initially - when I picked something up I thought I'd got hit and died :/ But I learned the right stuff eventually.
Multiplayer? :) Perfect for mobile :) A bit like orbit1 I guess :P
Really nicely juiced game, well designed levels, there's not much to it but what's there's quality :)
Great game!!! :D Starts out a bit slow, but I really love the concept and mechanic! The controls could be improved a bit more mouse play, dragging the bits are a chore, but it fits great for touch devices. The tutorials were well done and clear. Very very overall package especially for a jam. Well done I think this has tons of potential to go far :)
Very good! I love the mechanic of triangulation, really adds a cool level of deduction to the game. I'm not sure there are any new things beyond the basics, but if there were new toys, now source of wealth, new... Whatever, stuff, I'd really love to see it go multiplayer too :)
Yes the driving is too clunky and I often get stuck by the platform... Which is a huge pain to get on to and then an even bigger pain to reach the stuff to buy.
Other than that - congrats on your first LD! It was my first one too XD
Wow!!! So good! At first I thought it was really meaningful how the usual roles were reversed, then when *twist*... It was really powerful. I wish I hadn't read the description to the game before heading in now. Very well designed, the forward and the return trip really tells the story well.
NIIICE :D
Only gameplay gripe is the inelegance of puzzles that could be broken necessitating the reset button.
I like the theme that you've incorporated into the mechanic, very interesting :) I'm almost certain I've seen that mechanic before somewhere but it's not anything serious - everything's a remix of something else anyway :)
The art style is great :D
Though I had some problem with the way he climbs up some ladders and you have no idea which way he's going to go, and then he moves super fast when he gets off so you basically have no skill choice other than to start again :P
Otherwise well designed :)
Man! I liked it lots! The moodiest piece I've seen so far in this LD! But... I met "that thing", threw "that thing" at it, and couldn't progress any further. I dunno what I was supposed to do but I went back the way I came and nothing happened. So... Didn't see very much!
Good job though guys! Atmospheric!
In my mission to rate all the shark related games in this LD (my game is SUPER LANDSHARK MISSILE ATTACK, see? :P), this is the best one so far :P
Cool collection of juice, and I love the surprise in the one-shot-on-screen mechanic in that I could spam shots if I control my ship just right, though that was risk/reward in itself :) Whether that was intended or not doesn't matter cos it's cool emergent gameplay! :D
Good stuff :)
Quady14 I like ALL your ideas there and will credit accordingly when I get it made. Eventually :P
Thanks all you guys! I really do wanna make MORE LANDSHARK :D Dubstep first of all. Or Mozart :P
And YES it was supposed to be multiplayer but of course that was overambitious in scope :P
Hi wdebowicz, I tested the web player myself and had no problems with it - in fact I was SO SURPRISED that it didn't just crash XD (it certainly lagged my Unity editor out MASSIVELY). So... If you can give it a try on another system and see? I wonder what the problem is...
Thanks guys!! :D
Yeah the text placement was a bit off... In fact the whole interface/menu was slapped together in the last few hours so it leaves MUCH to be desired... Hell the lack of sound made me quite sad (which I *kind of* remedied with this :P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUzqlAde6Co&list=UUYNbqngS3SOYGp42I7EWIIw
And yes there are refinements I definitely should have made to the controls, especially after looking at other people play, but TIME :P
Thanks again guys :)
Thanks thanks guys! I'd love to see some high score screenshots! :P Wanna design a level with me? :)
It was ironic cos I spent THE MOST TIME on the wall swim mechanics, but the end game didn't have a lot of it. I REALLY WANT TO add more to the game to make use of it more :D
Thanks!! I totally agree... The premise needs a ton of polish to get it up to a decent, as it is, I look at it as a screensaver game, well you can't watch it go, but watching someone play is super fun... Heck playing myself is super fun, not fun in an extensive way, but in an almost relaxing way :P
The thing with the missiles are that they're homing (on the guy that you're clicking on at the time the missile launches) but not precisely homing - they're a bit drunk, which makes them, IMO, look more impressive and interesting. I definitely need to give more feedback to communicate that to players, and also I need to tune the missile's targeting systems a bit more :)
I was utterly surprised too at how smoothly it ran, the laptop I made it on was a piece of ancient poo, so my decision to keep everything as low-poly as possible paid off :D If you think the web player runs well you should see it as the downloaded windows version :D
Thanks everyone for your rating and comments! Especially comments! I've been working on a post-compo version, it's not ready yet cos I've torn it apart and it's buggy, but here's what I've been working on:
Working on these for post compo:
>> Proper win/lose condition
>> Fixing bullet time stutter (done!)
>> Better interface for easier pick up n play
>> Targeting through the shark (done!)
>> Aerial dodge by double clicking
>> Better use of swimming up walls
>> Better, more stable camera (half done!)
>> Boss battles
>> Different weapons
>> MUSIC and SOUND EFFECTS
Thannnks!
@wschorn I'll definitely look into controller support! And multiplayer along with that. Always wanted multiplayer in this :)
Thanks everyone! Next up few more enemy types and different weapons :D
Also, I haven't noticed anyone complain about lag yet - so that's not an issue at all?
I like it! The mechanics are fresh and new and has a lot of room for exploration! The strong visual/mechanic design tie is a great bonus too :) The way the enemies shoot so you'll go look for them is great design.
There are many things that can still be explored so I hope you carry on with this :) Like for example there's no reason to NOT be attacking. So give the player a reason not to hold down the button forever!
Theme! I would like to see a cooler theme, something like an armada of spaceships surrounding the sphere/enemy ship/planet/whatever. Cos right now you're a big sphere... Surrounding a smaller sphere... What?
Anyway good job!! :D
Unexpected entry is unexpected. High novelty, low on... Anything really :P But innovative, I'll give you that. I like the built-in level-skip "feature" :P
First impressions: WOW! Gorgeous! Then I saw how much was going on in the game and I was even more impressed. Then as I went on I found the controls a bit fiddly, I noticed that because the player character wasn't centred in the point of view, it was kinda hard to get stuff as my expectations and his movements weren't lining up. Got used to it after a while.
The music is fantastic, the visuals amazing.
But it's lacking some fundamental things from the gameplay: Challenge, and motivation! I have no idea what I'm doing there, the description in fact sounds like you want Charly to wake up. Which is to lose the game. Huh?
The ghostless pacman mechanic meant I could basically hold down the forward button mostly and never die. Forever. There are walls yes, but they're not really important to the gameplay.
I did find a thing for "Catherine", but I didn't know what/if it meant something.
Great art, like fantastic.
Really good for a first LD!
Instructions were needed, though because I've played games like this before I figured it out quickly enough. Some comments:
1. The lose condition is a bit fuzzy - sometimes I do get hit on the head but doesn't die. I'm guessing it's just positioning of the hit box that's the issue here.
2. The only bit of animation are his two tiny single pixel feet! If you're gonna animate, let people see that you've done it! :)
3. Single hit death is a bit harsh :P
4. I think the rocks should hang around more. I'm pretty sure it shouldn't lag the game out if you let them all hang around and not auto-destroy after a while.
Keep up the good work, this was a great learning exercise!
Look for "the incident" and "the blocks cometh" to see how they took this mechanic to a finished game :)
Hey it's a cool little game, I like the variance it had from traditional sub attack games in that there's PHYSICS involved under the sea! The missiles from enemies can quickly and easily out of hand, not sure if that's a + or a - :)
Good job!
Wow. I really like the concept! It's basically dexter lite :P I must say when the cops take you out it's really quite harrowing. The way you start again from the beginning is a bit annoying but I guess the level is short enough that it's not a completely bad thing.
The mood is very good for something so... Light looking. The little easter eggs of references here and there are very cool too. Love it :)
OK, A for effort, and very different, very polished, and I do like it, but there are a few things that felt like really core mistakes to me:
1. The whole spinning thing, while novel, makes no sense. I have no idea why I'm spinning - the trigger to the spin and the spin doesn't make sense. How I stop the spinning also makes no sense. as "cool" as the spinning is, it felt shoehorned. It does nothing but hamper my memory of where the heck I was going.
2. Navigation. I have no idea where I'm going - if there was any way of navigation I missed it. Add the spinning to that and you felt like you're perpetually - exactly - going in circles.
3. Agency - the two previous points make me feel like I have no control over the game and my actions. I don't know where I'm going, I don't know how to "get better" besides going slower. Which just produces a really slow and frustrating maze.
So if you can address the above concerns, the core mechanics can actually work. I feel like the player needs to be given more to work with (some kind of direction to go), and I feel there needs to be more reason for the spinning or something about the spinning that makes sense, or is controllable.
Sorry if the above sounds harsh, but I really liked your game and I'd love to see it improve :)
Cheers!
Wow! Was this game maker? Glad you got the web build going cos I ALWAYS struggle with game maker's web build :/
And it was an awesome game, great puzzles and great juice and ambience and very thought provoking.
One gripe would be the sheer repetitiveness of the mechanic makes it unfun to play. Yeah I get that that it's social commentary though, so... Art!
Well done!
Really cool idea, but I broke the game by riding rocks like a magic carpet :P Looks like everyone did :P
Wow! This is amazing! I saw it as it grew to this point, and I NEVER thought it would have been so different from what I saw while it was being built! The theme added was pretty damn classy! Well polished, great sounds, nice stuff guys!
NOT easy at all. I almost failed maths so... Not one for me to master :P
Moody as all hell, I love that you conveyed a massive range of oppression with such a few things. Comparable to Papers Please. And such a mystery too! Well done :)
Fantastic piece guys! Wow this is superb even for a team effort! Well done! :D Investigate EVERYTHING! :D
Well, you know how I feel about dice in games :P So personally I don't like an utterly random mechanic, but I can definitely see the appeal! There was a game called Slot Quest or something to that effect and it was super popular, something I think your game also has :)
Does it have an end of the fight, currently?
Anyhow, good work, sorry you didn't make the 48 cos of some stupid bug!!
Amazing for 3 hours :D I guess could do with a bit more depth, but what more can I ask from three hours? Not much :)
Very cool! I love the graphics and the gameplay, some real tension in those turns! Well done! Every little bit of communication was really good. TENSE! Good one!
It plays like one of those clickers, like Candyland or something, but I can see the depth in it... A bit more options would be better, strategic options, tactical options.
I really want to like it but it feels like accounting :/
Oh and the interface - it needs just a bit of tweaking to be intuitive, it's already pretty good, but the intuitiveness is *just* short of good.
Not bad at all! Great juice, despite the sound making my ears bleed. Had to turn that down. Very stylish. I could hardly ever get any weapons because the hordes were just too much - I'm guessing you don't have the spawns keyed to number of players? You should do that :)
Buggy though, I ended up playing the game on the title screen while pressing play and then died before anything spawned :)
Fun oldie. Does the multiplayer controls use controllers?
Great game! Love the mechanics, it does feel like tightroping, except... yeah, it doesn't fit the theme! And the music is a bit grating - It's GOOD, just not for a long long time :)
But still damn solid! And so much stuff! WD!
Oh mannnn, I really liked this, the humour is brilliant and the interaction is actually pretty good, but the controls are one huge problem. For me when playing a game, the difficulty should come in the game, not in how to get to that key quickly enough. So I've got my two hands straddled over the keyboard switching 123 with space AND enter and... Well, it doesn't feel intuitive.
GREAT writing though, I loved it :)
So gorgeous! I really like the way the movement worked - it really looks like a dance! But it could be a little more sensitive to my input, it took a lot of getting used to the way it behaved, and often I still couldn't tell whether I was in control or not.
I also can't tell when the gam ended - did I hit something, or was it timed? Need more feedback on that.
Also the scoring, too.
Is the jumping good for anything besides looking pretty? If it is I couldn't tell.
Mechanically requires a bit more :) But so gorgeous!
Am I the only one who had to deal with that giant bloody banner? WHY EVEN IS THAT THERE?!
Looking past that, it's a very well put together production. Really good animations.
The random disabilities... I get that they're funny, and they add a layer of frustration... But I'm not sure that's good frustration, because it's not something I can include into my plan, and take away agency. If you're going to penalise the player, make it avoidable, or else it doesn't add to the game - it makes it less fun.
It's pretty decent, really. Just wanted something a bit more in the ideas department!
Not sure if I saw everything, but if I did... Well, it's not a bad game, it's just there's not much to it? I'm not sure if I was taking damage, and the game is just two screens?
The sound and music was awesome :)
Was a great little thing, just wished there were more choices!
So ambitious :) Really good animations, goes without saying :)
Also +1 for Scott Pilgrim vibes ;)
So, here comes constructive criticism!
> Of course... Sliding on the floor is not ideal. Walk animation needed.
> No gameplay... You should have added in some life, that would have been the minimum requirement for a game to have any sense of direction and need to do something other than standing around.
> You shouldn't be able to move while attacking
> Try and keep the button count lower and closer together - you didn't need to use 1 and 2 for the other attacks, that made them unwieldy. You had so many keys around the ones you already use. Heck you should actually have...
> ... used combinations. Like down + punch = that burrowing thing. Or holding the punch button for 0.5 sec to activate the snowball.
> The snowball attack didn't suit this kind of game - stopping in the middle of attacks to pull and charge feels a bit off.
Yeah I think that's it. Just gotta be more game-y. I can see you're a good artist learning game dev, keep it up, the best learning comes from doing :) I started learning game maker for the first time 2 years ago :) Last Sunday during Ludlum Dare I released my first (smallish) game. It's been unreal :)
I can't launch the game... The loading bar gets stuck at the last bit... And no more. OS X, Safari.
Really cool, interesting mechanic there, I like the way you actually made sure each part was necessary during the journey with different situations.
Was it fun? Not sure, but it was certainly memorable :)
The writing was also a great touch :)
Pretty cool atmosphere! The music surprisingly does fit this game :P I also used a Robert del Naja but it didn't really fit all that well XD
Is it all randomly generated terrain? Seemed so, which resulted in a few situations that were distraction from the "fun factor":
1. It looks like there's a gap but I can't get through
2. Dead end... With the bear right behind me
An indication of how many candies there are left to pick up would be great as one could easily end up wondering around looking for something that's not there and that sucks.
Luring the bear into a corner it can't get out of is a cool mechanic though I would have liked a smarter nemesis if possible :)
A) Yay finally web version :)
B) Whew, you weren't kidding with better frame rates for Windows version... The web version lagged so much, though I don't see why, as it looks really fairly simple in what the game needed to do.
Ultimately, I feel there's a missed opportunity with exaggerating the size of the sumo ball - that's your biggest (ha pun intended) hook with that theme, and I didn't feel like it was much of a factor - have you played Sushi Cat? Yeah like that.
And then beyond that... Any pinball lives and dies by their table design, IMO. So with a really sparse table the interaction potential is minimal... And so fun factor suffers.
Great concept, cool execution. Levels that solved itself without all the pieces seemed... Broken.
What's it got to do with the theme though? Or the name with anything else other than not fading to black at the end of each level?
Thematically an incoherent mess, which might not be a bad thing if people like it. I didn't like it.
But a great achievement nonetheless :)
I REALLY want to like this, I love experimental narrative experiences. IF they're done right. Right now there are some logical issues:
> The flow of leave room > look at a map to see where to next > get there do something > go back to "your room" > teleport > go back "there" to find a number to punch into the next keypad > go to "your room" > teleport > leave room again... It's very strange to me. It doesn't make sense, and not in a mysterious way, it just doesn't make sense :/
Otherwise I got to the med wing thing and lost interest. Could really be interesting :)
Bugs:
> Suggest you find a new shader for the texts to they don't show up through walls - google "unity 3d text shader".
> Suggest you lock the mouse pointer so you can use clicking instead of E - creative solve for not knowing how to lock mouse pointer though :)
Also... This has what to do with the theme? :P
Yep, the controls are a bit of a problem to get people playing, but hey it looks stunning and the mechanics seem sound!
Speaking of mechanics, why can't you move forward with the ball? (I know why mechanically but it just doesn't make sense in the theme) And is the only way to get a ball flying by mouthing it first? Couldn't you ever hit it with the axe without biting first? (seems so)
I think you could increase the interactivity by letting more things happen more of the time instead of it being a strict sequence of bite > hit. I do see you can hit them backwards though :) Fun :)
Rad work guys :)
Awesome creative with theme use, very cool mechanics. Pretty good graphics. Really awesome :)
Gripe: the way the mechanics makes the game play is a bit cautious slowy, it doesn't feel super exciting. But is fun.
Then the way you die without knowing you die really irritated me. Also I felt like I didn't have to shoot the cat at all, it was gonna do what it was gonna do whether I shot or not.
I never did finish the game because after the cat swiped me off for the 3rd time I've had enough. Strict pattern memorising attacks I dislike. It's not skill based, just gotta remember stuff.
Falling off the screen during the cat fight felt ridiculous. Also I found that I often couldn't jump, specifically more so on the edge of the screen. What gives? It felt broken.
Ha, interesting :) Took me a while to understand about the snowballs and the size and the road crossing aspect of it. I tried to dodge everything and that got very... meh.
Once I realised I didn't need to dodge everything it was a lot better.
The online score keeping is a great touch :)
The sound, that sounded like a steaming iron :P
The theme application however sucked :P
Hmmmmm so it was made *for* touch? Keyboard works much better though the touch potential is there.
I was very excited when I thought the levels were procedurally generated. But when I realised they were not I got less excited :P
But a cool effort :) Pretty :)
WOW I REALLY WANNA PLAY THIS. DON'T REALLY KNOW HOW.
Whether you intended or not, you've basically just made what almost every freemium bloody mobile game is these days :)
And on a fraction of the budget too! Well done! :)
Man. It's gorgeous. Everything is gorgeous and well animated. The premise is great.
BUT.
The controls are impossible. No mid-air movements means I couldn't even stand next to a platform and jump on it.
The first enemy alone frustrated the crap out of me, I almost ragequit. There's no indication if you're actually doing damage and the blobs keep flinging you down to the ground level UNPREVENTABLY <-- that's the key, it doesn't feel like I have a choice or say in the matter.
Then I jumped a platform and got stuck and the thought of having to go through the first enemy again just terrified me.
There are some fundamental platforming control issues that are far more important than pretty graphics, though they are really pretty. I took a lot of tim in my LD48 just making sure the platforming was natural and feels decent. It wasn't perfect but it wasn't an obstacle.
Good luck on this :)
Very cool and well polished, interesting and original mechanics, good sound, good graphics, I love watching the action move on the map AND on camera. But:
>> There's a lot of stuff that's not really obvious, and even after trying is hard to understand at all - the cameras for example, I still don't understand why there are camera buttons, and why there are more cameras on the map than 4. The numbers at the bottom left too.
>> There's a lot of sitting around doing nothing. I feel quite powerless most of the time.
>> Very little indication of how things work - how do I know when a door's going to break? Or even that it would? How do I know when the guns shoot? Its range? What even is it doing? Washing machines... Don't know when they're gonna blow. Or if.
>> Overall it was just very confusing having all that on screen at the same time, too.
But dang you got a lot in here :) well done :)
Mmmmmmmm
The effort that has gone into this is plain to see. Cut scenes and art and things are pretty good.
BUT.
Maybe I'm jaded, but what I see is a Super Meatboy clone? The story is pretty much Meatboy, the gameplay is Meatboy, and it feels like Meatboy...
And then you've made the cardinal sin of employing the WORST WAY to deal with wall jumping, in my humble opinion. Requiring the player to push towards the wall, then quickly away from the wall after you press jump so that you don't fall back towards the wall... It's just torturous and unnecessary. You can test player skill in a variety of other ways, I feel that making the controls hard is the wrong way to do it. There are many other ways of employing wall jump.
AND THEN you threw a timed stage in just as you learned how to do the wall jump. RAGEQUIT :P (also, it doesn't make sense that you die if you hit the bag of a vacuum cleaner :P)
Kudos for good effort where it's due. but the rest of it needs some design love.
Well, honestly, I've seen this game many times before, so I think it's thin on originality. Now, you might never have seen the ones before too so I'll give you that.
I think that the mechanic has potential to be great, but there are some really frustrating bits:
1. The hoop tends to get in the way more than be a scoring opportunity. The collision feels too heavy-handed. Possibly provide it as a bonus than a hinderance and let it ignore the ball going up (like platformer platforms.
2. There's simply not enough upward force - it feels like you're reversing the down force up to get a bounce, right? That's good in theory, but when the ball never goes higher than it does previously (by hitting the bottom side of the hoop) it becomes all too easy to just lose all your height and peg in a lot of disappointment.
3. JUICE! For something so simple you need a lot of juice to make it feel satisfying. A great example of this is Tap The Coin - find it on iOS app store if you can.
4. The absolute randomness of the stars meant I could get stars without knowing I got one. That then feels cheap. Make me work for them. Place them away from the ball.
Good luck with the game :)
Well, it's not really working, but I can see what there's supposed to be, so... Good effort.
1) The shots are probably too fast - it's like invisible
2) The enemies were also invisible?
3) The hero is cute
4) The jumping works I guess
5) Enemies weren't getting hit...
I think for next time, try using coloured blocks for placeholder - so you can at least see them, and still take no time to produce :)
Good luck with it! :)
Hahahaha fun :)
Simple but pretty good with changing up the constraints by simply changing graphics :) Now pump some IAPs and go mobile :P
Wow what a well polished set! Love the gameplay, the juice is amazing, the sounds and graphics, everything. It's basically a done deal :)
It plays a little unsophisticated though, despite all the options you have, it comes a lot down to who gets to face the opponent more often than the other, and that becomes a game of if you win the first exchange, you'll lose the next one, etc, etc.
Getting in a "lucky hit" with the grenade becomes pivotal, but it basically drifts in one direction + bounce, if you stay away from the other players' grenade zone you're likely fine...
Not sure if you can select weapons or what.
Oh and jump on the keyboard, imo, should be up (w), not space. Up is more intuitive on the keyboard.
Charming game :) I really like how honestly retro it feels, it's like one of those properly old games that maximised what it had to play with :)
At first I didn't know there were 3 dwarves. So you should make it clearer.
Then the dwarf selection is kinda awkward, clicking a tiny target like that. I think a numeric selection a la Syndicate original would have been nice.
then the dwarves are a little dumb? But that's ok if they don't have pathfinding, it's a jam :P
The gold... that's supposed to increase abilities... Did that get implemented? I can't tell.
I feel like I'd like more of an indication of when acid will advance/break through. That's a big vague thing so I never know if a dwarf is about to die or not. The same with rocks, I guess.
Awesome! I really like it, the combination of a bunch of things make this a really cool little gem.
Loved:
> Hearing yourself die in the background as boss walks past, (even if that doesn't make sense)
> The clicking to return to work - very cool incidental meshing of control/theme
> So minimal :)
Crit:
> I would have liked a single unambiguous metric of success - right now you could get bored and quit or fired after X time... It feels disparate.
> The jump is a bit off - getting stuck on walls and sometimes being able to wall jump doesn't feel quite right.
Rad stuff :)
Hahahaha!
The music is great, I like it :) The movement is a bit random, I suppose you can say it's "hard to master", but a little less slippery would be good (the controls not the floor).
The way you fall apart is great.
The "wall jump" is a bit odd, maybe put something there to look like you're actually wall jumping.
Aren't the voices from Worms? :)
Wait, why can't i rate this at all??
Interesting! It's purely a choice based narrative, and seems to really have a lot of options, so well done on the writing :)
Feels like I want there to be more of a mechanic... Personally. But well (lol) it's ok :)
Dude! Fantastic concept, well executed, immaculately polished, the only real problem is that it doesn't really have much game in it - as in if you just screen hop all the time you're basically invincible. No challenge... But that can be easily fixed, right? RIGHT?? *whips out staple gun*
86580!! Really well made! The sound is a really really nice touch, well done! I especially like the obstacles of the tombstones and the two player avatars, really adds tension when they get split up. Interesting mechanics!
VERY smartly designed, very deceptively simple, but intricately locking design decisions really add up to a great, albeit small, game.
A successful theft was the biggest surprise for me. I was weighing things up by efficiency and decided to just let it happen, but DAMN NO GAHDAMN NO.
Do you play any euro boardgames like Agricola? The combination of efficiency management and coloured cubes made me think of them :P
As a bonus it even seemed like you have a message about farm murders.
GREAT JOB
Conceptually strong, but mechanically weak, unfortunately. It would have been good to have more intrigue in choices - I understand that desperation and choicelessness is part of the art of the concept, but even a beggar has choices - do you pester the same people 10 times? Would you get socked if you do? Who should you beg? Based on their looks?
So I really applaud the idea but the execution is lacking. Hope to see more Papers Please type stuff! :)
Really great idea and execution! Was there any intelligence built into the thing to make sure there're impossible situations?
Would be quite difficult to convert to touch, the directional precision controls are hard to get right without haptic. But it's still a fantastic idea :)
154 XD
159! Pretty fun, there's been a lot of different games on this take but yours is brutally true to life AND funny :) Great voice overs :) I can imagine this *is* a real life dilemma faced by mane BBQ dads!!!
Pretty good! I love the interpretation of the theme, even though I feel like it was being a bit liberal and cheaty with it :) But that's ok it's resulted in a good fun game :)
The puzzles are well thought out and well designed, I like that :)
Gripes:
1. Why does the player have to "dash back" when going through rooms? I don't get the necessity of it. He should really just "teleport" there.
The way the rooms don't connect correctly seems arbitrary when everything else seems systematic. That's weird in a world of systems.
So... Is this some kind of metaphor for life and meeting people and making different friends?
I couldn't discern any kind of mechanics at play, it all may be absolutely random and I wouldn't know...
Now that's kind of a sound point to make, too, though...
PERFECT!! I love this so much even if I juggle as well virtually as I do in real life :) That is, I can't :)
Incredible amount of stuff packed into this one - the experience is magnificent, tutorial and all. WELL DONE :D
Hmmmmm I like it! Nice and original, has all the nuances of baseball without none of the bogged down crap most sports games have.
THAT SAID.
Would be nice to see an expansion of this idea with *some* of the bogged down crap sports games have, but made more fun and fast too :)
A few problems - things feel utterly random (whether you got caught or not), and that kinda sucks. Some kind of visual interpretation of fielders would be best.
The batting power interface is really confusing. REALLY.
Otherwise good stuff :)
GREAT :D
The sidestep could work better. But that's what top down FPS controls are. Broken.
Amazing atmosphere. I must change my shorts now.
Soooooo beautiful :D Audio is great, animation is great, aw just so good :)
I can only ever seem to use the spike power - mouse wheel doesn't change powers, nor does E. Is it something you acquire later?
The spike creatures - would have been nice from a design perspective to see a bit more wind-up so I can learn to dodge their spikes.
REALLY GOOD.
So good! Great design, tight as hell, but damn so frustrating. Super frustrating. But I guess that's the point, despite my GRRRRRRRRR about it. Can't finish it. Too hard for me.
This should be curriculum work for ANY game designer wannabes. You've basically designed what's effectively a condensed re-tellign metrovania minus any fluff. Everything worked amazingly, there's no wasted elements.
It's incredible. AMAZING.
So well designed.
SO WELL DESIGNEEEEDDDDDD :D
It's very interesting, really polished, but I feel like the controls let the concept down entirely. Maybe it needs to use a move controller or a analogue stick - playing with the mouse is just painful.
I assume it does support the controller :)
Without reading explanations I thought the arrow things are stuff to be dodged - it's BLACK which looks bad and pointy which looks damaging. So I think the visual communication aspect could be refined a bit.
Otherwise good job :)
Awesome game! Seriously well designed and put together, great take on the ol' dual stick genre, the tension of physics bouncing around and the arena is just great. Just random enough without it being absolutely silly, great progression, great great :)
One gripe is the lack of feedback on some things - for example when an enemy is "invincible" you should be able to tell - shots go through them without me knowing why. I'd like to know their "grace period"
And an online leaderboard too! Instant classic :)
Good for a first try :) I like that it's not just a straight up shoot-at-the-cursor top down shooter but at least has the four directions thing. Though you could then have used the keyboard entirely to control the game instead of the mouse :)
Good production value, very nostalgic, I'll give you kudos for those :) I like the way the platforms floated around to provide different terrain, true to the spirit of the theme :)
But there are several design flaws that result in poor gameplay... Basically your *only* option is to stay at the bottom by your chest to get much far at all. Because:
1. The ghosts don't disappear when they start punching your chest, so they accumulate, so you HAVE TO go get them
2. Your short range gives you no option to use the rest of the space to stop them.
3. The ghosts being pretty much deterministic in their movements - they WILL get to the chest and they WILL get there very quickly.
Unless there're some attacks that I missed or other things that would mitigate that. I don't know how anyone could get through to even level 10... Never mind 70!!!
Heyyyyy thanks everyone! :D I really wish everyone can get to some 4 player testing!! I'll try to get that going too to see how it actually plays :)
@okkolobr thanks for the bug report! It has happened to me too but argh it's hard to fix, I'll have to think on that. Sometimes non-players also all out, but doesn't happen often.
Thanks again! :)
@Tipyx what do you mean by IA? You mean IAP In App Purchase? XD
Yeah to be honest the Music was from the free jam assets from Robert del Naja of Massive Attack. All his tracks were dark and aggressive, but I really liked them so I just... picked the one that seemed to fit the most. But I agree it was a poor fit. I basically opted out of the audio criteria, that was all very last minute :P
@Phoenix849 cool ideas :) I would perhaps add a single player mode or AI if I took this further! Funny you should mention tetris, because a long time ago I made a game called Bear Chuck which was basically blocks, platforms and match-em-up. It was too difficult to play so I learned my lesson from that and made this really straight forward!
Arena brawlers are awesome fun! Samurai Gunn, Towerfall, that Duck game, they're so much fun! I'm learning to make them so this was a good learning game :)
Yeah there're some bugs, I'll iron them out in post-jam version!
THANKS!!!! :D
@klianc09, I agree, the sounds are sub-par... They're just me foleying in the last hour or two and I'm no sound artist... That's why I opted out of the sound category XD
Which controllers are you using? The game is set up to work with xBox360 controllers because they seemed to be the most popular ones, and I'm not really sure how to set up for multiple controller sets with the web version :/ The standalone should be able to be configurable, but even then I hadn't tested that yet.
Thanks for giving it a shot! :)
@Trite Games thanks! :D Great of you to notice the jump! It took a lot of tuning, I'm mostly still using Unity physics despite everyone and their dogs recommending otherwise. But because I'm using physics as an arena I can't really roll my own platforming. But it still needs a lot of refinement!
@Gins thanks for your tenacity going as far as to dual-wield! :D
@Lynx yeah the sounds aren't superb :P I do need to make new ones. In the future! The stuck in the box bug should have been fixed, but I'm sure I didn't get every use case. Will look into it - do you mean stuck in the grey box as in your starting area? Or the top right extreme corner?
Thanks everyone! :D
Hey everyone!! Thanks so much for playing, and the bug reports! I am aware of some of them, though some not! So thanks again! :D It's kinda hard to figure out halfway physics, but I'll make it happen! :)
I'm not sure if I can fix the combo version... Will put up a post jam version soon to smooth out some of the issues!
Thanks all! :D
@RHY3756547 Multiplayer as a trend is still tough overall - if it's not easy to get people playing it'll be harder to get your game moving, but I personally LOVE multiplayer, my company's even called Twoplus after that fact :P
Gamepad support is a tricky one, each gamepad has their own button mappings, the only one that's consistent is left and right :/ The gamepad that the game is preconfigured for is the Xbox 360 one, and even then - I realised later that on OS X and Windows they're different yet -_-
Soon the moral of the story - gotta write a in-game controller definer thing to stick into your games in future.
Thanks for playing!!! Awesome! :D
Over the weekend I played an updated version of the game with some other people at parties, it went down quite well, there were these kids of like 7 or something. They were SO HAPPY about it. But then I realised maybe the pixel blood was a bit much :P
Thanks @Larzan! What do you mean by the second player? The 2nd character from the left, Stompy? Or did you mean it was quite difficult to kill an opponent at all?
I just put up a post-compo version, maybe that addresses the problem (I did a little bit of balancing with Stompy)
http://www.twoplusgames.com/nomoreboxes/postcompo
Ooooh oooh ooh yes, a win con is exactly the first thing I added after the 48 was done, I didn't think it would be so quick to add... So that's lesson learnt, and will be the FIRST think I'll add to future jam games!
It's in the post-compo version here, if you'd like a look:
http://www.twoplusgames.com/nomoreboxes/postcompo/madness
Thanks :D
Thanks for your input @SuperDisk! The post-compo version should have most of those ironed out -
http://www.twoplusgames.com/nomoreboxes/postcompo
- I've run into the one side stuck bug before, I think I gotten that out though. Will look more into it!
- The download version allows you to set your own controls, I'm not sure how the defaults may be messed up :/
- Punch sound fixed! :)
- I hadn't had problems with joystick controls, did you mean that the mapping was bad? They're set to xBox 360 defaults, it's not really anything that can be fixed without lots of code to implement in-game control setting.
Thanks for playing and noticing the small things!! You're awesome! :D
@Rodaja which controllers did you play with? The controls are set up unfortunately for 2 keyboard and 2 controllers, and mapped to xbox 360 controls... on mac. I have no idea how to easily set up flexible controller support in Unity, so it's damn particular. The desktop build would have let you set up controls yourself.
Thanks for giving it a look!
@Kuupu great suggestions! More effects for jumping and box collisions etc is a great idea :D
I... think I like this!! Well, the concept. Honestly it's all very charming, but I think I stepped on two pixels on the carrot thing and instantly died? What's the point of "life" if it all goes away in one hit?
But I love the idea and the presentation is actually not bad. Needs more love on the design parts :)
Sorry, I couldn't start the game... Clicked, pressed buttons... Not sure what I was supposed to do? Tried everything...
Not a bad effort, the fun is kinda there just very dry. The controls are.. weird. I got used to it, but it's per keystroke rather than holding it down, right? I kinda like that but it doesn't seem to be exploited or intentional in the game? Good to explore that - that's something new :)
I like it! The idea of a pirate ship simulation is awesome, the way the cannons are set up is awesome (side cannons x 4 each side, the rear cannons being at an angle so you can chase people, good design).
But the game is confusing, all I can do is stay in the box? I can't actually chase anyone outside of it?
The cannonballs floating... That makes no sense :P
Oh the control to cancel shot is super unwieldy.
Would be great if some of those things are resolved :)
Dig the concept, dig the graphics, dig the effects, dig the sounds, dig the storytelling, it was all really cool... BUT.
Everything, taken individually is cool, but some fatal bugs (haha) or slight lack of feedback made the game unenjoyable for me:
There's a general sense of not knowing what you're doing - the web doesn't seem to go where you want it to, the attacks don't seem to connect when it looks like it's connected. I don't feel like I'm in control.
I think a lot of it comes in the fact that I'm controlling 2D but seeing 3D - I'm not actually aware that the bugs are ABOVE the ground level plane? Well I suspect that they are but I have no way of telling.
I think shadows beneath the bugs and the spider may solve this. Amazed by the amount of stuff you put into this LD as well as the previous! :)
I don't understand why you didn't include keyboard support... You basically wiped out half the possible player base.
Then I brought mine out... And tried it... Control panel indicates it's working, works for my LD48 game No Mo Boxes,
But doesn't work on yours. Tried closing the game, plug in controller, made sure it worked, still doesn't work...
Sorry guy :/
Admittedly I only watched the video because I'm on OS X right now, but damn I really like it :) I'm a sucker for rhythm games, am making my own one called Beat Attack, so this is special :)
Now, I feel like some things could make it more true to what it should be doing:
1. Make the player action mean something to the music - so the sample plays when the player lands on a colour? Or samples NOT playing when the player doesn't land on it? Right now it's just music playing, and doesn't feel right as a rhythm game... Right now you can take out the music and the game plays the same.
2. Or in reverse, make the music a cue that is a clue for what the player must do. Beat Trip does this very well :)
SO COOL! :D
It's a shame that there's not enough content there, but what little there was I was absolutely blown away. I didn't look at anything before starting the game, and thought "oh look command prompt"
When the 3D view came up OMFG I SHANT MYSELF :D
Awesome :D
VERY inspirational. Always wanted a hacking game that was worth a shit :)
I mean ever since Uplink got way too impossibly hard because of hidden elements I've been itching at something worth playing. This might be it :)
Kudos kudos kudos! :D
I like the idea, but it may be a bit too tedious for my personal taste!
I'm in two minds about saying A) the sounds were great, they conveyed enough feedback for me to understand (for example) I fell into fire or B) the sounds alone were not enough and some visual feedback should have been implemented. I'm thinking B.
I think a lot of people wouldn't get it if they played without sound (entirely possible) or didn't get the connection after the first 2 minutes.
A good game is based on interesting choices... After picking a class (i chose mage I think), there was literally no choice to make. Hit 1 and everything dies. And then the character went off screen... So... Am I missing something?
Great, moody piece, but it ultimately felt like battling a directionless set of UI to do something really trivial.
1. I somehow "copied" the hammer a million times. Then the tool rack won't take it.
2. There are only really 2 things to do yet it takes forever to do it.
The music is really really really good though. Definitely gets the tension thing, but other than that the game gets in its own way more than let you enjoy it... Take care of that and you might have something really interesting :)
Oh and a big thing is the sense of goallessness is not awesome - everything in the house looks exactly the same, and it degenerates into a click-everything game like one of those old pixel hunting adventure games, except you're going everywhere.
Which doesn't make sense seeing as it's your house? Or maybe it's not... In which case why do you have the full blueprint? Anyway...
It's pretty, has cool juice, pretty decent sounds, controls are responsive, if a bit slippery. The drifty make up of the character is pretty cool.
But ultimately it has one gimmick which is kinda pointless? Why switch levels with 1-0? It doesn't actually affect the gameplay in any discernible way, at least, for me. I couldn't tell why it wouldn't be less hassle with the same result to just advance to the next level at the end of each "stage".
There are also no varieties between levels really. No new enemies. Maybe there are higher numbers but ultimately it's nothing new.
Really interesting, is it a Metroid tribute? Feels like it with the gameplay style and the fact he turns into a ball, though I see what you did there - it saved having to make walk animation :)
I like it but it's too damn hard! I didn't know where to go at all, and after dying a million times to get somewhere to find out you can't pick the thing up there I rage quit XD
It's like a sideways Space Invaders :)
It's a pretty good start to something cool, however there are a few buggy things that prevented it from being more enjoyable:
1. The controls are inconsistent... I'm not sure how or why or when, but sometimes the movement gets stuck... Sometimes the firing gets stuck. I died once because I couldn't move. In a game that is real-time dodging, that's super frustrating.
2. I'm not sure what the restrictions on the shots fired are. It's good to have a restriction or a player could just spam fire, but I feel like sometimes I'm restricted sometimes I'm not. So it's again frustrating.
3. Game sounds are a bit loud and jarring.
LOVE THIS! :D
Never have I seen so much game squeezed into two buttons and one screen :) Ship it! :)
It can also be called Backtrack: The Game :P
The interactions are so smart and well designed. I really have no words. I can only get 8 stars though, can't work out the rest.
Also I think I cheated by squeezing the tennis ball into tunnels :P
Also I think this is what Snoopy will play like as a game :)
SO hard, very interesting, simple. Not much else to say about it :) I got 3 :)
I'm really not sure what just happened :)
I'm not entirely sure why computers turn rooms, or why you forget about everything if you don't use a computer, or why the exit is at the top...
But that's just me, I like themes to make sense :P
Pretty good job if you disregard the things not making sense :)
Well polished, though for me it was a bit flat as it was basically a sokoban clone and those are just... EVERYWHERE.
There's a slight problem with identifying a block and its intended destination or what they do - in the beginning when there's only a block and the goal, you can understand it, but later it becomes very confusing - if the visual link between objects, their destinations, and what they did (i kind of see that happening with the ice slide block that's supposed to look like ice).
Also animation between a push and the end of the move would help communication too - again - the ice block just teleports to the end of the row, which is confusing.
Really pretty! Gorgeous particles!
But I really don't know what I doing half the time, or why I get "chromasick"... Or not.
The mouse controls are completely unintuitive, I couldn't do anything with them, much better with keyboard.
I feel like some effort at making it understandable will make it excellent!
It's a very interesting one on design, I like the design of having everything on and off on one screen to create different puzzles to solve :)
I got to the bit where you press numbers to switch - i assume layers - and couldn't figure it out. I think the visual language there could be stronger for that.
Interesting :)
Incredible atmosphere.
Amazing graphics for a jam.
Music, everything.
Animations.
Controls were intuitive.
Great interpretation.
So good.
Man. I REALLY want to love this game, but it's just so damn inaccessible. After walking around forever toggling stuff, I simply have no clue where I'm going or if I'm doing something right/wrong.
I *get* that it's supposed to be pitch dark and frustrating, but ultimately if I'm not having fun - or accomplishing anything, then I'm not interested.
It's not a "difficulty" problem - it's a design problem. You gotta give the player a direction. An indication of progress. A funnel... Something. Often I don't even know if I'm walking forward at all, and that's a big problem.
I was really confused. Too much reading, first of all... But as soon as it started I could see it was a mobs-like. But... It didn't hold my interest. And crashed as I got to the middle bit.
Sorry, I love boardgames-like things but this one was really tough to get into.
Erm, I really wanted to like this, it LOOKS well polished, and it has a cool premise, but it doesn't "play" very well... It's like clicking a few things together without a clue of how they work, send them off without a clue of how they work, and then get a wall of (well written and sometimes humorous) text back without knowing how they work.
There's no learning or meaningful decisions... I hope that you guys can figure out a way for a player to understand and learn from the experience to see how to improve future expeditions. Then it'll be a game!
Again, great premise and amazing graphics. But needs improvement as a game!
Game did not run from me from Newgrounds, Running OSX.
Holy cow this is amazing. Immaculately executed platoformer with amazing concept. Dig it to pieces.
I'm trying to think of some criticism.
And that might be the click-everywhere-syndrome of adventure games - not knowing where to go sometimes, and just bumping every corner of every wall until something happens. So that comes down to providing more of a goal. Just a bit more, because yes the sense of wonder is great. Just not when I've circled the place 5 times :P
Stupendous work! :D
The concept is sound, I like it quite a lot, and there's already a lot in there, but a few things compound to it being difficult to enjoy:
1. The controls - moving around corners for a blob should be natural, but as it is now I'd try and move around a corner and basically end up in a jump and die in some other way
2. Random is nice, but random with zero prediction is terrible if I'm supposed to be surviving. The rockets come out of nowhere and it could be right next to you, and you have no hope of surviving it in that case.
3. There's no indicator of a goal. There's no timer to beat your best time, there's no levels as far as I can tell. You're just... There. Always give your players a goal. IF there are more levels, I can't tell, so I quit before I could even consider "going for" the next level.
Moody, interesting concept, but there's very little in the way of actual feedback as to what's happening to you. If I don't know what's going on then I can't avoid it, if I can't avoid it and I die and not know how I died it won't hold my interest.
The boulder was the clearest obstacle and I loved the boulder. I think it's a boulder.
Does the level shift? That's at the same time cool and frustrating. Can't really learn anything if the level keeps shifting and you don't know what you're running into/towards!
Cool concept and decent execution otherwise!
Haha!! This is the first time I burst out laughing not because comedy in this #LD48! Well done sir! TAKE IT FAR!
Ace! So simple yet so nuanced! I love the little creatures, the swarm is PERFECT. I think I got to wave 4 and then when I got close to the edge they just all CAME AT ME BRO and we all went off the edge. Fantastic entry!
Errrrrr.
I really liked it except I don't understand what was happening with the movement, I basically had no control over the "me" box of presents, half the time I was stuck under the table, and then after that I just few out the door to the right and never came back :/
Other than that I really liked the day/night thing and how that tied into Christmas as a countdown :) The game is fun, it's just... I couldn't do anything with it really. Would have loved to see more mechanics in terms of the shooting instead of just shoot and shoot. Ammo? Different shots?
Still, good job :)
It's not bad as a concept, I think there are a few things that you could have done for more fun factor :)
1. Feedback - I don't know if my shots have any effect. I thought the larger blocks were indestructible. You should visually reduce their number per hit. That would make it feel better.
2. Sounds! Any kind of sounds would work :) Don't just leave it out :) There are a lot of free sound resources around the internet :)
3. The movement is VERY sluggish. Yes I get that makes dodging harder, and you want hard, but this is almost unfair most of the time. Giving speed + momentum makes people feel better about being in control. It's a concept called agency :) It's good for players to feel in control :)
First LD? Pretty good man! You have the same problem as me, I also opted out of audio, and I also put in a Robert Del Naja track that didn't quite fit :P
I think it was pretty smart! At first I was like BLEH run into a corner and shoot across the stage - that got me typically like 50000+, but then I changed tact and moved to the middle and shot left and right...
So my biggest complaint would be design-wise, there are no incentives to move around. The best thing you can do is to stand next to the box and shoot left and right and occasionally up at some dude jumping.
I really like that there seems to be AI and they'd dodge bullets by air jumping. That's a really nice touch.
Oh and the fact that the multiplier is show way up there in the corner means having to take your eye off the action, which sucks. Incorporate it into the game so you don't have to move your eye too much. And it's tiny.
Good one :)
Get one screen in one screen to its screen on your screen :) Hahahaha :)
At least you put in two lives, or else it was (and is) dastardly hard :)
Hmmmmmmm
I get the idea is that you might fall off, and that's part of the gameplay, but I don't find that satisfying.... Unless there's actual one-screen multiplayer, being completely invisible is more frustrating than fun...!
Hmmmmmm, the premise really drew me, but it wasn't very "fun". I think it can be attributed to it being too hard and there not being enough emergence in the play - none of the systems affected each other. So if you're building you have to stop and go stop a meteor, if you're jumping you can't shield. Nothing felt particularly smart and a lot of the decisions are kinda made for you.
Not being able to see meteors half the time is discouraging.
The premise is great though, I believe there's something great in there :)
It's not bad really, but unforgiving and slightly lacking in variety. Needs at least some kind of second-step to keep it interesting.
I do like the movement of the character, it moves well.
I loled so hard :) Great narrative driven little piece, amazing amount of detail paid to everything, would LOVE to see this grow into a bigger, more procedural story :) Like Papers Please but happy instead of sad :)
Also... Has noone noticed that it's called Bionic Bliss... And "Blitz" on the logo? XD I almost couldn't find the game cos of this :P
Not my cup of tea... Great graphics, but as soon as wall of text comes up I just throw my hands up. Never did like turn based tactical combat...
Kudos for an interface that was recognisable though. Sliders, buttons... But they weren't logically flowing, it felt. Go to the right, then back up then go down again... Not super intuitive.
It might look subpar, but the idea is really good. I don't know what to do after the key, I'm assuming get to the big guy or something.
I think I would like there to be more of a "system", a way to tell that I'm going to fall or not fall besides trying everything. It's a really good smart idea, just needs a bit more design and polish :)
Really interesting, I liked the concept, but the execution leaves me wondering what I'm doing and whether my actions have consequence. If that was the point... Yeah it came across, but then it's not a "game"...
It gets you thinking. Beyond that I'm not sure.
Have you heard of that game coming up called "Riot"?
Argh. I'm sorry, but I'm already using Safari as a secondary because Chrome, my first choice, doesn't like unity web player... Not about to download a third browser. Sorry man.
So... A pretty standard platformer.
The contrast of the platforms are so bad that I thought I was supposed to figure out some invisible platforms in for the first minute.
Instant death with those fast bullets seemed unfun more than challenging.
The 2nd screen where you could only stand around while those shots whizzed was just not fun.
No air controls compounded the problem.
I'd suggest trying other successful platforms and seeing how they approach their gameplay - that's fundamental and really important. I also learned platformers this LD.
Really good!
I love the effects, the bullet time is very cool, but inconsistent. I wanted to rely on them but I couldn't, sometimes they'd trigger sometimes they won't, so I ended up running away instead of engaging in cool manoeuvres.
It was very twitchy and got a proper rise out of me, so emotionally engaging, that's good.
There's a limit to how much of this one can take though. It feels utterly random and uncontrollable at some stage. Think it's too fast for any meaningful decisions. Which would be alleviated by the bullet time if it were consistent.
The file doesn't do anything, running OS X, if I run the .app file Terminal opens... then nothing.
I liked the way the ghosts were animated - that was a nice touch of using a 3d plane.
But sorry, gotta be harsh here - there's not much game here - I can't turn my character, so my attacks were always going the same direction. Nor could I see my attacking - so I had to basically guess how I attacked.
Then because everything followed a predictable pattern, and there was an unlimited and unrestricted attack, I just had to stand just below the second torch on the right, and hit space forever. I didn't even have to look at the game. Eventually I got bored at 1030 and quit.
Excellent start as a learning game, I'm sure - now take what you've learned and think about a game's design! Good luck! :)
Great:
> Juiciness
> Animation
> Sounds
> Juiciness!
> The zombies moving through the forest seems to add a level of anticipation because you can't hit them there, which is cool, though if the carrots hit the forest itself and not went through it would have made more sense.
But:
> The carrot attack was way too loud and repetitive. Got irritating fast.
> You're throwing a million carrots to save one carrot :) It's big, sure, but doesn't make sense :p
> The first zombie arrow indicator seems superfluous, especially when there's already the zombie head in the forest one.
> Too easy? Too easy.
> Lack of variety in attacks and situations.
I'm on OS X and I have downloaded the game twice, but twice OS X tells me the file is damaged... So I can't run it!
Love the graphics, it's very well done :) Cool concept...
BUT:
The lack of informed choice is a problem in this, all you can do is replay the game a few times and see how much risk (dungeon upgrade) you can take in relation to the damage/health/hooves upgrade.
I like the concept of a quick dungeon, but this feels like repeating a puzzle to solve it rather than having an acutally intelligently solved puzzle.
Really interesting concepts, I enjoy the coop elements, except there was almost no need to coop - It might be better if the coop was forced neither of the pair could do what the other could. So split tasks.
The shooting was only marginally useful to start with, then once I realised you could toss blocks it became dead easy as I could very quickly build the house without moving much.
So the problems with shooting were: It was almost impossible to kill the fire things, so that felt useless, and the collision with the fire things was really difficult as they got smaller, doubling their futileness.
I only managed to put my "buddy" back together once, his head refused to go back on many many times. It got frustrating.
Really good :) Unbelievable amount of polish in everything. Like really.
The only criticism I might have of the design is your one fall into the water means you're back right at the start. That's REALLY HARSH, which is probably a conscious design decision, but that makes me basically ignore a huge part of the game design - jumping, because I don't wanna risk it. I see the movement accuracy upgrade... I would perhaps have changed it to "air speed" or something so you don't fly too fast while in the air.
Really good, well done :)
The only reason I might not run into a wall in shame is that this is a jam and not a compo entry :P Ok kidding :P
Loooooove the idea! The execution is, well, good enough, but I feel like I want a little bit more from the gag :)
But a good one nonetheless on creative :)
Fun stuff! This is however exactly what should go on touch but not so much for a mouse :)
I love the charm it has, it's like a step back from SpaceTeam, but still great fun. The indicators are great, I just wished there were maybe one more level of imminence so you're not so clueless as to why you lost. Does it have "hit on the beat" detection? That would be a great thing to have, to make it feel more musical :)
Pretty solid! I was surprised by the Google involvement :) It's like one of those old educational games - I played Eagle Eye Mysteries (and In EEM London), aw really loved them :)
Didn't find much in terms of design fault, other than the fact I don't know for how long you could keep a modern person for with this kind of mechanic :)
But that's for a longer term game of course! No problem now! :)
This was lovely! I can't honestly say the game is "fun" but it was definitely a great experience. I can't believe the graphics, they're so great.
A few things, though:
Why is the planet or something always visible? The S shape to the right seemed to say I'm flying that path?
The game crashed just a little while into cruising, not sure why... The graphics stopped updating but the game still went because I could hear alarms go off when I left it for too long, and then I pressed up or down and it would go away again. Was weird.
It's barely a game, but I guess I say that in the best way I could mean it. The writing's pretty good, the graphics are decent, but as a "game" it was hold right, push enter a few times, jump a few really terrible platforms really slowly, and listen to some more MS Word robot reading.
The moving platform is glitchy when moving down. It's almost impossible to jump while they're moving down.
The "time control" weapon is interesting, but right now it's basically a "back home" button - which means you entirely rely on knowing where their single start position is. Which doesn't make thematic sense.
Otherwise, it's tightly designed with some really good tight bits.
Oh, and the E - why do you even need a button to pick up? It doesn't really make sense. Touching should do it. Monaco has taught us that you don't even need buttons at all most of the time :)
Great camera work, too!
Well well, it's fun and well polished with a solid core mechanic, lots of juice, chaining is fun (if utterly mysterious, you need to expose that mechanic a bit more)... Just... Lacks any feel of progression I guess :)
MAN. I really want to like this, the graphics, the audio, the presentation is top notch. There's even a bit of lead-up story? So good.
BUT. Sorry, gotta do this:
1. Derivative. It's basically Snow Bros and Bubble Bobble.... but...
2. With worse mechanics! The action queue of icing -> dashing -> picking up -> throwing into gate is super frustrating because it doesn't make intrinsic sense, and on top of that...
3. Confusing as hell controls. Why z+x to throw? Why dash to pick up? The flow is unintuitive and thus difficult to pick-up-and-play. I don't think the dash is necessary. The throw isn't even necessary when you can just carry them into the portal. Neither of those ADD to the gameplay at all.
4. The platforming is a bit off. Player character moves too fast, especially over gaps, so it's HARD to go down a level. Compounded with the inability to jump down, makes navigation really hard.
5. The z+x is really hard to press, there's not enough looseness in having to press them at exactly the same time, resulting in my attempts at throwing into the gate making me jump up a level... And getting down a level is hard, so... Endless cycle of frustration.
6. The level timing is a great touch, and offers some push to finish a level, but it's too fast, especially given the frustrating controls, and unexplained/untelegraphed to the player.
Really want this to be a good game, see if issues can be addressed :)
Excellent writing. I love the writing, it's all wit, but the mechanics themselves required a bit more attention to make the experience more fun. Maybe if there are only three answers and all are on screen at a time, and the list gets longer against stronger opponents... A timer.. (I hate timers in general but it fits in a boxing sense).
Did you listen to the Frog Fractions soundtrack? The bit about the History of Boxing? It fits this *perfectly* :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIlTJIJS8p0
Fantastic! I can really appreciate a modular approach to the game in which everything is everything :) Being able to pick up dead enemies is a nice touch :)
There are only a few things I think would improve the experience:
1. Holding down the mouse button to throw could have been displayed a bit more obviously.
2. The need to point your mouse at the thing you're picking up seems unnecessary, it feels like if you're by the object, or walking into it with directional controls, it should be clear enough that you want to pick it up.
3. Being able to see some kind of trajectory to your throw would have been nice. Especially when the enemy is behind the fence.
4. A bit more intelligence/variety to the enemies would have been great. The single-minded Crimsonland zombies get old fast.
Fantastic! :D
Oh and really appreciated the depth of field effect you had there. Nice touch :)
Very very excellent. The concept is well conceived and the puzzles well designed. The polish is great, I *just* can't give everything five stars, but it's a really well rounded game.
The physics on the character is surprisingly good - wrangling unity physics into a good platformer is no mean feat! I like how the rotating block is a good "trick" to getting corner climbing to work :)
Great stuff!
I'd love a non-windows version... Looks interesting.
Man, so want to try this. Watched the walkthrough instead. It's really fantastic, and among the most polished jam games I've ever seen. Kudos super kudos.
I don't understand how sometimes some of the peeps get into a brawl and sometimes they push each other away, it feels inconsistent.
Then the "give hat to push" mechanic doesn't make sense... Even in the already-ridiculous context that this was set up in.
But damn, stupendous work :) Well done! When's it getting a proper release? ;)
Damnit now I really wish you hadn't lost half a day of work on this. Superbly done, channeling Sos in a big way :)
Is this about Quantitative Easing policies in Europe or something?
It's more a toy, but the juice is OFF THE CHARTS. Really good :)
REALLY want to rate the music :)
Mmmmmmm
Great audio visuals, great presentation, but the fact that it's not only a copy, but a very uninteresting one makes it all the worse for me...
The movement is so slow. The point of Hotline Miami was the twitch play. So that's gone out the window.
The "weapon" in the game is some kind of... heart ray? If you're going to call it Hugline, make it ACTUAL HUGS! The fact that you took a melee-centric game, slowed it down and removed melee confuses me a heck of a lot.
Technically impressive. Design is flawed.
I was drawn in by the cool voxel graphics and the mysterious theme. It seemed interesting... I was expecting something calm and mental.
Then it's a shooter that's basically way too easy. Hold down space, alternate left/right every half second or so. Once you're halfway with your upgrades you don't even need to left/right anymore.
The music is pretty rad and the asymmetry, or what looked like asymmetry, is a great idea, but the gameplay as it is lacks big time, unfortunately.
Interesting idea, but falls flat due to a lack of... Game design? Everything you know must be read in the documentation, the game should really try to give you an idea of how things work in the game itself. Attraction/repulsion is utterly random, and shapes/movement are too abstract to communicate anything. In short: you need some juice that communicates. Your beacon placement's cooldown, for example. How long they last, for example.
The problem isn't in cubes and primitives, it's in the way they behave and communicate.
I don't think mapping up to top right and left to top left etc was a good idea. Isometric movement is really confusing if people have to react using cardinal directions. There would have been nothing wrong with up being up, etc.
Really interesting concept, but overall it felt like it wasn't a fun game in the end because of a few design choices:
There's not really a reason to having three different colours, they all do the same thing, the "different cooldown" thing doesn't make a jot of real difference, and, while it made cool colour combos, the colours where mechanically pointless. If the paints had different mechanics associated, then sure, three colours. As it is now, it's much better to assign each player a different colour so that the game communicates what's going on better.
The fact that there's no sound for footsteps after a player isn't coloured anymore is weird. Doesn't make sense and takes away from the idea that you're walking.
Too much aimlessness... If both players didn't want to give away their position, you'd end up with... a lot of nothing going on at all.
Overall you need more "tell" as to what's going on. Giving players a goal to shoot at is fundamental to gameplay.
Multiplayer is hard to test anyway! So kudos for giving it a try :)
Colour theory wise... Mixing different colours of paint will never get you to white :) So just no. Make it a muddy brown :P If your "metaphor" is paint then stick to paint :)
Guys, seriously, too gorgeous. Hands down the prettiest game I've seen so far.
But.
WHY NO DEPTH!? All this game is... Is seeing who bashes the button more???!!! I was expecting some kind of lance-tweaking mechanics and such.
But seriously, so much beautiful animation and juice in here, it's great.
Amazing work!
I really enjoyed how it's very conventional, while there's a twist there that's not instinctive, but makes sense once you play for a while. It enables learning and understanding, and that's great.
At first I thought you were an alien there to suck blood..... Well you looked exactly like a Grey. So that looks anti-human and aggressive.
The way the colour and concept tied together in everything is brilliant! having the blood drained out of you provided a very strong visualisation of the concept, and picking up the chunks to fill you back up, everything, was great. Same with the civilians.
The graphics are just phenomenal. The balance is pretty amazing, that there's even sound is just stupid good.
Please please tell me there's a way for me to learn that aberration effect? :D
Gorgeous, designed look, great track, but that's to be expected from the Cadence creator :)
I really like the idea of gravity manipulation, it's just not very intuitive, maybe the juice in the bubble could be a bit more obvious, or maybe it's just a tutorialing thing that noone should have to worry about in jams :P
The platforming controller was *the worst*. I'm guessing it's the standard unity FPS controller or something. There's so much slipping that made dumb jumps practically impossible half the time. I would perhaps had designed the levels that were more forgiving on the jumps.
The mouse cursor wasn't locked on my standalone build... So my pointer kept going into my second screen, and that really made it super irritating too.
Overall a great FPS puzzle proof of concept :)
The simplicity is a plus, the simplicity is a minus. I like the amalgamation of ideas that you've thrown into so much simplicity, too, though added together a few problems emerge:
The first attack is great if you spam it, and because you can spam it it becomes a "how fast can you click" game on a mouse... as this was meant to be a touch game (I presume), there is no way someone could tap their screen as fast as they could click the mouse (I'm really really fast at clicking. No jokes), and that creates a balance problem.
Level 2 attack is a good go-to too when you're tired from clicking. Three and four are situational. But then I find that the best thing to do is to cycle 3 and 4 until you get a heal when you can, and then keep using 2 until you need to heal, hopefully you remember in time and you heal and go back to spamming 1 or 2, depending on how tired you are of speed-clicking.
If you don't have heals when you need one, you're screwed. If your finger gets tired you're screwed.
It's a fun little idea and the juice is super good, but I think it needs more balance in this simplicity :)
Really cool concept! The initial moment of *wtf* can be reduced a bit, but as soon as I remembered the title, things made sense. I think the interface doesn't help that matter - it would be good to remove/recede some of the clutter, and placing them in a more logical manner around the screen.
For example, what's the significance of even having a load button? There's never a reason not to press it, so you might as well make it automatic.
I love that here's a blocks game that has nothing to do with "matching" :) Good stuff! :)
Aw MAN!!!
I LOVE THIS TO PIECES!!
I've always wanted to make a game that really captures the essence of speed. WipeOut just isn't quite right, but close. Swooping over fields, etc. Flower and Journey, wierdly enough, got close to what I was looking for...
But dodging - what you added - is essential to what I was looking for. Bullet time dodging, too.
My first LD game previous was going for that kind of feeling sans speed - bullet time dodging stuff (video: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=35114), it wasn't great at hitting the mark, but yours. MAGNIFICENT :D
Race The Sun had a bit of that but not quite. Not enough movement options.
The music/environmental mix is brilliant, do you just key off events to time along the soundtrack?
The biggest problem is that the keyboard struggles when I try to go right + E + space + forward. So I can't really feel the speed. Any chance of an Xbox controller build?
Mmmmmmmmm...
The premise is good, the direction/design of the narrative is good, I love how the camera angles work to show you the boss in the beginning then work your way to it in the end, that's great :)
But the game itself lacks any real agency/challenge... The awkward angle makes moving left into the screen deadly if there's an enemy, then the attack doesn't communicate super well. I don't know how many "hits" it takes to kill something.
When you first got the mug I thought it was to prevent coffee from dripping on your head - it seemed to make the most sense given that the first enemy dripped coffee from overhead. So I tried that and promptly died. I remembered getting hit earlier and not dying, so I wasn't sure how many hits it takes to kill myself because there's no life indicator.
Was interesting overall, just lacked nuance.
It's really charming! Something it the comedic factor that really hit the spot. The subversion of expectations is really good, I think you may have stumbled upon something good given much more polish :)
It's so good!
Top notch animation, idea, execution, sound, everything. Has a very Mario 3 feel about it with some of the backgrounds but that's not a bad thing at all.
Gorgeous, challenging. The many things don't entirely make sense (collect skulls?? why crayons?), but it's too cute and pretty to mark it down for that.
It lags a fair bit from time to time and I have no idea why. Dunno if it's me or you.
So good!
I really want to like this, but I think I'm too dumb to understand how Ad Hominem beats Genetic Fallacy.... Or something.
Basically comes down to learning what each of the Pokemon moves do, and doing the most damaging ones and then doing the ones that heal you when you're down too far? Something like that?
Do different attacks have different "elementals" so that one is more/less effective than another against specific moves?
I really can't tell. It just all seems too random. Needs a pokemon-like system to really figure it out.
Great idea, just difficult to engage with.
Off the charts! You built a metroidvania in two days. Seriously? Seriously :)
The controls were the main point of contention in this. They were great most of the time, but can be a bit unwieldy. The way the time controls versus the bullet speed works means I'm often pre-emptively slowing time to wait for a shot to come, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Maybe an indication of some sort on the gun itself to say whether it's going to fire or not is useful, often I'm just staring at it in slow mo while I think I'm just out of its raycast or something.
Could maybe do with a camera that looked ahead to where your mouse is closer to, maybe. Maybe just subtly. I think I overdid that in my game XD
Superb polish. Seriously good! Absolutely should continue with this!
A pretty good atmosphere... But I really don't know what the point is and I couldn't find where to go and what to do. For a game to be explorative there needs to be intrigue and interest to be found. I got as far as the body of water with the scuba gear... And I had no idea what to do after that. The thought of backtracking to find more stuff was too painful as the game wasn't giving me anything interesting to engage with and the movement was super slow, so I left it.
Duuuude, are you kidding me?!? I can't believe you guys pulled THIS off in the short amount of time!!
The concept is amazing, it's just really difficult to control and understand, and the real time nature of it makes it really hard to get into it from the get go. I feel like I'm just spamming buttons as quickly as I can. I guess eventually I'll understand some of it but right now it's just spam spam spam.
I feel like keyboard shortcuts are needed. OR put this on a touch device, though touch feels like it doesn't suit it as the buttons will have to be tiny tiny tiny.
Superbly polished, well done (if you didn't start the game before 72 hours :P) I think it could become something cool if you just slowed it down a bit and made it easier to understand.
It really looked great, and I can see that it's quite tightly focused around the core, which is a good thing.
Really good art :) The sounds are a bit weird, that death/teleport errgaa sound is really weird.
The central mechanic seems interesting, but it felt like there's little meat on the bone, I think it's more of a presentation problem than in the mechanics:
- Death and transitions are abrupt and confusing - losing looks the same as passing the level, and in fact also looks the same as using your weapon (ok yes there's the laser bolt and the sound, but it's quite easy to miss). The distinction needs to be stronger.
- The aiming is super tough because the aiming orb thing is quite difficult to manipulate. Give the nature of the weapon I think another solution could work better - like a mouse cursor with a line-of-sight line drawn from the player to the point, that cuts off if it hits an obstacle.
- The walk cycle's a bit off, she looks like she's walking with both legs forward at the same time?
- Half the levels amount to... click spamming. Maybe there needs a bullet time or something that lets the player feel like they're intentionally aiming and choosing rather than spamming shoot.
- I can appreciate the self-referencial humour in the text presentation :)
- The exit signs look more like "move left" signs and confused me for a while.
Good job, original, though needs a bit more work to feel better!
What do you do with Steam Workshop/Tabletop Simulator? I love boardgames, but it's nearly impossible to test a boardgames in the LD environment. Man, good luck to you on this :)
Did you chuck it on BGG? You might get more plays/feedback there :)
Rats, you can get into the siege off the bat? That's supposed to be mission 3 exclusive XD Will need to update that. Or not. Hmmmm not sure.
Thanks guys :)
Each of the three mechs are mission-specific, the siege one has one special property that suits the third mission, but yes, it's otherwise pretty hulking useless. Would have needed much more time to fine-tune the balance between the mechs, which I didn't have because I threw them down the toilet building oh-my-God-so-many-interlocking-systems. SO incredibly overscoped.
YES THANK YOU for noticing the fuel gauge on the arms :P I totally redesigned the flight type so that it could be understood without tutorialising. Turned out to be the best idea ever :D
The siege type has a very specific role and wasn't ever meant to go to the right side for mission one :P In fact that it was accessible from the start is a bug I should fix. But I'm glad I had the stairs that prevented it from "breaking" the game :P
LINUX BUILD COMING RIGHT UP!!! Sorry about that was frustrated with the Chrome-hate :P
@Park thanks for your suggestion!! You're right on the money. Unsophisticated AI is easy to exploit :p Honestly because of the many systems I had to build in the time, tweaks like mutually exclusive hitboxes were simply going to add one more system which would have to change things across quite a few others, which there simply wasn't time for.
The one lesson I took out of this was really keeping the number of systems in a jam game down to a minimum.
It's really pretty... And that's about the best I can say about this. It's obviously super derivative, but that goes without saying.
The controls are hideously unresponsive, and the first person controls slip and slide so that I never feel like it's going where I want to go (ie where the camera is pointing). There seems to be an excessive force that I'm always "drifting" in my initial direction even after I've turned. It's really annoying.
Then the clicking to grab weapons and whatever seems like a complete crap shoot... I don't know when I can click and how far I can click, so I basically mash buttons hoping something happens.
I see what you're trying, but I don't see it being successful. And being a clone I feel like it's doubly meh. Especially seeing how it really doesn't fit the theme I guess you had prepared beforehand. Triple meh.
The visuals are really pretty though.
Ok, thanks for tweeting me :) I'll come and say over here what I said over on Twitter.
Fact is it looks like a game that had some preparation beforehand because it looks derivative and is well polished. I've seen many people prepare beforehand.
But hey if you didn't you didn't, and that's all good, in that case, well done for getting so much done in so little time :) woo :)
Oh and I fully agree that my game didn't fit the theme too well. The last LD I stuck really close to the theme and this time I decided to give that approach a skip because I wanted to experiment with mechs and such. Not sure it was the best decision in hindsight :/
The mood was pretty good, atmospheric, dark. The gameplay however is flawed...
The platforming is slidey and difficult to manage. That's what happens when you use the built-in physics for platforming without a lot of experience tweaking it.
The drag and jump attack is very hard to aim - I know it's hard to do a prediction line in native physics but that's what we need for something like this.
The inability to run up and down walls seem weird when you're a facehugger :P
The countdown till the human exploded seems weird. If you're a facehugger that's what you want to happen - you procreate, but in this case it's a lose condition. That's weird, why didn't you just pop off instead of die?
The restart time between deaths is too long when you're playing a one-hit kill thing like this. It gets irritating quick.
The music and graphics are really good, the rest of it are just niggly bits that unfortunately are more important.
Are there only 4 levels? I picked up 4/4 green cubes on the 4th and the game didn't go anywhere.
The game idea is there - using a portable door sounds like fun.
But it suffers from some basic flow issues: going from level to level I had no idea what was happening - getting "caught" and moving into the next level looked exactly the same.
The picking up control feels superfluous - every time you walk past a door you want to pick it up, and every time you try you misclick... Either make it easier (and for there to be a reason to leave a door behind) or take away the need to manually pick it up. The dexterity barrier to dropping/picking up the door shouldn't be the game - the game should be working out the route to take.
In fact with the mechanics as they are you should walk up to a wall, the door should be there, walk through, door picked up. It's like you have the power to walk through walls, that's it.
If you had multiple doors, that would make the pickup/drop make sense.
Good start! :) I can see it was a lot of work :)
Sorry to be harsh, but I really don't know how to rate this, I played on OS X and Safari, and could move forward until I saw "Oh no! The dragon!" and then literally couldn't do anything else. Pressed space... Didn't work.
Good: The indication of progress lets me know what I want to do.
Good luck!
I know you're going for funny but it's not particularly funny as stereotypes or satire goes :/
That aside - the money being thrown is so tiny that it's hardly visible, so... It's really hard to get anywhere, I found.
Then, the wind up animation when you throw your bombs make it almost impossible to throw and turnaround - you always end up throwing the wrong way. Sooooo.
It's a cool concept but it needs some attention to make it play worthy :)
Very competent, feels complete :) Everything works and is reasonably polished.
The concept works well, thought it feels like a theme-swap to replace goals/waypoints with guys with bad hair. The double jump also seems to just be there just because? I guess what I'm saying there's not a tight enough integration between the mechanics and the theme to my mind.
Well designed levels lead the player around clearly enough.
I would have like to know when my blowdryer was going to run out when I'm flying in the air.
Good stuff :)
A charming game, just seeing the GIFs and screenshots alone pull you in.
I really enjoy the concept, the graphics and juice is OFF THE WALL. You had the frame-pause, sound, and the little blocks flying everywhere - everything just feels really good.
I'm in two minds about the extreme difficulty, though. One-hit death to your car feels harsh, and coupled with he handling (which is pretty good, but doesn't offer much options) means that it's super difficult to get up to speed and get the sense of wrecking-everything excitement that I want from the game I saw in the gif.
I understand that balancing that against having nothing to worry about and the game becoming too easy is a difficult thing, too though. I struggling getting that difficulty curve at all in my jam games.
Overall, feels great!
Great graphics, cool idea, I like the companionship things, that was interesting, though I found the game both too simple (your lightsabre pretty much destroys anything you could see before hand) and too frustrating (I was often getting hit without any clue why).
The lack of variety between each procedurally generated room was a big let down, as you basically just ended up doing the same thing over and over again.
It's pretty complete, but I felt that it didn't really realise the concept's potential. It feels like the first bit was not punchy enough - the mechanics of missiles tracking myself could have been fleshed out during the normal section - I mean I flew into the missiles myself and they didn't track me - which counters what the scenario set it up to be.
A more ambiguous rather than absolutely binary system would have been nice - it might track you if you got too close or if you generated enough heat through moving continuously, or something.
Has potential :)
There is something really cool here, the ghost control mechanic is fun, but it's marred by many problems in details:
The camera - when I was supposed to go down to a platform, I kept jumping the impossible jump and dying because I couldn't see the platform that's out of the screen.
Indication of death - dying and sending me back to the beginning and going into a door looks exactly the same. That's kinda broken.
Restarting isn't restarting because the enemies (i.e. your resources) remain gone - that's jarring and weird.
I can possess enemies... Except the skeleton. Why? No indication of why + the impossible to tell death means I tried it many times and was confused as hell.
Lack of direction - I almost completely missed the fact that when you're small you can go through the tiny gap to the right. That's frustrating, you needed to teach players that first.
Really interesting, but too many problems to be enjoyable. Hope you polish this up!
Man! That was good. And I hate dice. The presentation is slick, the music is awesome, the graphics are really pretty good.
BUT :) (There's always but :P)
1. It's a game about chance, and because it's about chance, the more times you throw, the more chances you have. So... Nothing is stopping me from just spamming down and space on the 8 sider. Nothing at all. So the game pretty much became meaningless. Needs an incentive to throw accurately or a disincentive to throw recklessly.
2. RNG means if your number doesn't come up, it doesn't come up. Dice sucks :P
3. The sound effects are completely terrible compared to the music. Guess that's why the volume's low.
4. Love the doof doof screen shake to the music. Nice touch.
5. That wasn't a but. Ooops.
Great entry :) Lacking in a few areas but great.
Oh and: Needs a bit more easing into the action - it was very confusing to see the giant number etc. It really took a bit of panic before understanding what the game is about.
And this roll has nothing to do with actually rolling initiative, so bogus name :P
Great graphics, decent concept (a bit derivative of Kirby but hey what's really original?), but I don't know whether it's the Unity player build that's terrible or something else.
There's a constant stutter which I tried to ignore.
Then the main mechanic of "eating" an enemy is confusing - I'm not sure when I ate something, and not sure when I haven't. When I throw something out, sometimes it appears behind me... or in front of me, whatever. Is it respawning? Surely it needs to do that when it's off screen?
Level design wise, the first backtrack from the purple wall is terrible.
It's a really pretty game, but I suspect you have suffered the same problem I did - too many "necessary" systems in concept leading to none of them being properly tweaked and finished and tested, which is a shame.
Oh and shouldn't it be "Glutto" instead of "Glatto"?
Man, I know it's supposed to be hard, but I feel like the difficulty hides what the game could be. The way that you lose all your stuff - keys AND ammo, combined with the common deaths, make it feel really unfair. You could end up in a situation where you need ammo and you got none. Or keys, and you got none. I understand then that the game is designed around not needing ammo or keys to complete, right? But then those things... End up being superfluous.
So, a great entry, a great game, fucking hard, but I feel some design choices could have made to make it a BETTER GAME, not necessarily easier, but more fun and nuanced, and not waste the mechanics you've put in because noone could use them.
Good job :)
There's an idea there, but several flaws put together make the game quite tough to play:
1. Poor platforming controller - the character often stuck to walls, slid around, and couldn't go where I wanted him to go. A good platform control is *hard* and should never be underestimated. Especially with native physics - it's almost impossible.
2. The fun in the laser-eyes is the fact that it bounces around - but being just about completely unpredictable means I often blew myself and the base thing up, which means I'd much rather NOT bounce the ray, which negates the fun in the core mechanic. Some kind of predictor (like in old snooker games) may alleviate this.
3. Things weren't obvious - the level end thing looks like something you collect. But I couldn't get to it and was about to get frustrated. If you're supposed to shoot at it, make it communicate as such.
4. The fiction of the game doesn't make sense - soldiers walking on the wall could make sense, but then why can't you? Consistency is the keyword here.
5. The juice/feedback doesn't match the action quickly enough, when I blew my own base up I didn't know that my laser struck it as it was so delayed. The sound/shaking/visuals don't match and that gets confusing.
It's all a huge learning experience! Good luck man! :D
Lasted 26 days :D
MAN that's cool. Harkens back to the Uplink days. I really really really wanted to play a decent hacker game ever since realising how flawed Uplink was. And now I play Netrunner.
This feels pretty awesome, I enjoyed the streamlining of the process so it's not a huge chore (I'm sure real hacking is). I enjoyed the seemingly super variety in things to do. I enjoyed the way it presents both obfuscation and simplicity (the credit system is a long string but you only really look at the first number before the decimal, and the percentages during attacks is all you need to know, though the "flavour" to the side is great.
there are a few problems though:
I don't feel like I have enough agency - that is, I don't feel in control. All I'm doing is saying yes and no to things without context.
Too little knowledge/info on things - for example I have no idea what Zeroday is when I bought it, and have no idea what it would do when I use it.
The "hack" is just watching a meter go up and down - again, no agency.
Losing the game here felt just like losing the game in Uplink. I have no idea what went wrong.
But it's such a polished and complete experience, rad :)
Oh btw the controls are a little off - the keystrokes probably should not repeat, holding the key a split second too long made me lose my orientation in the UI.
After pressing target, for example, the cursor should auto-move to one of the targets? Especially since during the screen refresh you no longer see your cursor. It's a bit confusing.
Erm...
Nowhere in the game does it say anything about how to use the camera. It could and should have been automated. Right clicking is not something people usually use for camera movement in a "puzzle" game.
It's pretty. That's definitely a plus.
The gameplay is really quite lacking, though. "Operation" style drag and avoid isn't interesting, maybe with touch, but not with a mouse. Click on enemies to do damage? The mechanics are very desperate and doesn't make sense together. The way you call things doesn't make sense either. "artefacts" and "sockets"... none of them look like that and doesn't need to be called weird names to make it even more difficult to understand.
Is it a puzzle game? Action game? Avoid-em-up? I don't know, I can't tell.
Love the concept! It actually works pretty well, the gravity seems to react well to player input, which is good. It's just a shame that the rest of the game is a bit lifeless - more juice would have made it really good!
A bit more variety in the arena... And maybe not so much of a hard edge to the sides of the arena could be good. Wrapping perhaps?
There's been a lot of flail-style games lately, this is a nice take on it :)
Excellent game. The comedic value is amazing, and that's on top of being a well refined and tuned mechanic!
There are just two things:
1. Mouse is a crap replacement for touch, so I'm gonna look forward to seeing this on the app store :)
2. The game needs a lot more variety in the end because the novelty of the great core mechanics wear pretty thin pretty quickly. My biggest question while playing was "when does this end?" or "what's next?"
Over all REALLY good. One of the best so far :)
The second game I played based on Monkey Island's insult mechanic - while this is better as a "mechanical" exercise, the other one was much better written and more fun, though more limited.
There's literally no way to beat the game until it randomly throws up something its used against you before. It's a slow grind to get retorts and pretty meaningless on top of that.
I like that it tries something new but it's ultimately really, really boring and pointless and doesn't make the player feel like they've achieved anything.
Sorry :/
Music is way epic :) Where is it from?
The gameplay seems violently random - like I have no choice but to mash the button I have and hope for the best. The ability to have a plan and be disrupted by your opponent reacting to it is in my opinion the essence of multiplayer games... This doesn't seem to be able to deliver that - especially since the platforming controller is so slippery (because physics yay)
I appreciate the alternativeness of the weapon, the pretty decently varied environments you got going, but overall the game is just too easy. Once you pre-heat the wok before going into the next room there's really nothing to stop you.
Music is hella grating after the 3rd time it repeats, which is just past the title screen :P
Are there any point to bacon? The game needs some other vector of play to do something with.
I was just wondering the other day what to do with that new Unity free screen effects like the twisty thing :) Really rad, great presentation, nice concept, but it all seems pretty arbitrary - what I mean is that I don't know what I'm doing, despite there being a tutorial.
The pills go through the orderly when you throw it at them - I guess the collision is only with the ground, which seems like a bug.
Then a pill making you go through doors would do what to someone else? Surely the same thing? It doesn't make sense mechanically that way.
Sometimes the mouse seemed to lock up without any reason I could tell.
Generally good, but I'd like to see more mechanical consistency for this to be fun.
OK I see the effort, and A for originality in terms of the theme, but the mechanic boils down to hitting things with arrows, and the outcome works a bit like old school click everything adventure games in that it seems absolutely arbitrary.
The lack of information about how you lose also sucks a little, though you quickly learn to just never walk forward. In fact, why even have the player walk at all? I completed the game without walking.
The premise though, I really didn't like it. Make people hate each other... It's just unsavoury. But that's more personal, so no knocks against the game itself.
A pretty game. Music is great but not yours so can't really mark you on that. Other than that:
There's not much visual clue as to what you can and can't hit. So... try everything. Which makes me feel stupid, not clever. A game in which you must try everything is just a slideshow.
The pixels exploding shouldn't have collision with the player, too many times colliding with them just make the controls awkward.
After throwing three pixels in the "watch your back" part you can't throw a fourth and so the game can't continue. Stuck.
It's pretty. But yeah... Pretty pointless. Not enjoyable.
Superb! Love the presentation, the blob enemies look amazing, the environment effects and stuff are pretty great. The controls are pretty good, I can't think of a better system than what you have for the colours :)
Sometimes it gets a bit too dark to see, I think you could have brightened things a lot more. Maybe it's got to do with the filters you slapped on. (Aberration is awesome in free unity I agree :P)
The way the blobs moved slowly then charged super fast when it moved into a hole was weird.
ARRGH WHY IS THE MOUSE NOT LOCKED TO THE GAME
How do the blobs actually move towards colours? It seems like there's a weighted system of it finding an average spot between all walls of the colour it's attracted to? It's not very intuitive, and caused them to just plain get stuck, while you have to go paint them and some other wall another colour to get them moving - which I understand is part of the puzzle, but seems lanky and inelegant, as you'll end up spamming all the walls. And then they eventually all turn black, and that sucks.
The "not moving to explode missiles" is ambiguous. I was wondering if you needed to decelerate or if there's a timer. I don't know how that actually works, so I don't know how to play the game effectively :/
I really like the idea, but it's really not clear what I need to do. There are words above and below the line, but I don't know if I should do those or not do those... And then it just become a case of whack-a-mole rather than finesse and conversation.
Really interesting idea, if it could be implemented with an Eliza-like (or Siri-like, if you're under 25 :P) conversation engine it could be interesting.
Oh I could walk all the way past like 10 rooms before it actually kicked me back to the beginning.
Fantastic work, great art, music, audio and polish, even with primitives. The pile of cats somehow not breaking everything was a joy to "lead", which was an achievement in and of itself!
Some suggestions - the "damage" your cats are doing are kinda invisible, a better indicator than "stars" of them actually doing something may be better.
The cats got stuck in the hole in the first stage and I have no idea how to get them out, or even if I should/could. Was frustrating.
Good stuff!
I really really like it! :D One of my favourite games in the past was THE TYPING OF THE DEAD, and this is as frantic as that.
The only thing is that you have to still walk yourself... That seems unnecessary and counterintuitive. I stood for a good while before trying arrow keys.
The restriction of using each word once is ingenious!
I hope you continue with this somehow. It's really charming!
The mechanics work in a non-obvious way, for example it took me forever to understand the blue dots = score. Using the laser to mine hazards for fuel, then using the other laser to attract blue things but grow hazards seem... Arbitrary. I understand it from a design point of view, but it doesn't make a lot of sense thematically, and so it's hard to intuit.
Feels like it could do with a little bit more juice, to indicate what's happening. A lot of the time I'm just roaming aimlessly. A sense of objective would be great.
Really interesting idea that ultimately relies on TONS OF DEVELOPMENT TIME to be anywhere near viable. You'd need it to work almost naturally or else it just falls flat. Eliza and Siri wasn't made in 48 hours :P
Following the instructions word for word is really boring, and making stuff up doesn't work, making it a difficult sell for me.
Great concept.
"Woods fires" didn't even work. Frustrating!
Cute graphics, funny that I got to this from you asking for an artist to come onboard...
The game is really flat. I basically just backed up until just before the treasure and fired fireballs in a straight line that seemed to cross the paths of adventurers the most.
Aiming is almost pointless because everything moves so fast.
Zero feedback on your getting hit or enemies getting hit means I don't know when/if I'm going to die or when/if the enemy is going to die.
When they die they drop money. But when they reach your lair they... teleport money out?
I feel like maybe I'm missing something. This has great presentation but it doesn't make me feel like I'm in control of the outcome.
OK, an update, as I realised now you can build traps. But that just means I start the level by running around hitting E... And that's it. Where's the choice :/
Hello fellow Poke-inspired game :P
The graphics are cool, though I think it was a bit heavy on my system... I keep getting bad lag spikes. But it didn't crash.
The concept works, though it feels like it was a bit rudimentary, would have liked a bit more interesting things to work out. The fact that keys were in everything was a bit weird. (Keys in buckets! Keys in barrels! Keys everywhere! Except where you might expect them, by guards and indoors :P)
I saw a clump of guys to the left on the bridge. It looked like some kind of red laser party freezeframe :P
Rad that you guys are using the minecraft stuff every jam :)
So much polish in the character! It looks and moves amazingly, the triple jump from mario 64 is pretty cool, but without variable camera angles it becomes really hard to control.
Omg scratch that, I just found mouse lookaround controls. It's a bit sluggish though.
Good stuff, gorgeous, I guess a return to the classic stuff is great :)
Looks and feels incredible. The shader work is amazing - are they standard unity shaders (the cool new free ones are great!) or did you write them yourselves? They were super well curated - the face mosaic effect was an excellent touch.
Had to run the game in 640 x 480 or it would lag. Well done :P
However there's not much of any game there, I couldn't find anything that I could do other than fall into the water and die. And I clipped through everything, the big shiny door - clipped through, the down arrow - clipped through.
The long tedious walk was also a bit of a downer, especially since there was... Not much at the end of it...
Again, looks amazing :) Wish there were more game!
I played a web build the dev built just for me, kudos for that, but I don't know if it's because of that, the game is insanely slow. I can't imagine how to play the game through in this speed. I left the game running so I might come back to it.
Other than that, a very technically competent piece - the art and the animations and style and level design are all pretty good, but the initial learning curve is a bit off... Interactable objects should highlight telling you so, I was stuck staring at the destructable wall thinking I can open it, for example. The dead body was interactable? I had no idea.
Love the art and style, and I can guess what the ending is :P This makes me wanna play doom, where everything is like sprint speed :)
A good try, the structures and things are all in place, it's now time to tweak things :)
1. The falling was weird - I get that you're doing variable height jump, but it felt very unnatural.
2. No checkpoints. Frustrating.
3. One hit kill + no checkpoints = frustrating.
4. The way you basically wait for an enemy to turn away from you before attacking isn't fun. In this case, patience is... anti-fun.
Good luck learning game dev! :D
Has a really nice feel to it, the chopping mechanic is core and works great, but:
- There's a delay between keypress and the cursor stopping, that's super irritating, it makes the misses all the more frustrating.
- The rhythm change seems arbitrary, which doesn't feel good when it happens all the time - there should be a rhythm to it.
- there didn't seem to be much point walking through the forest... Yeah I get that the big trees are harder, but you could also just easily swipe through trees. Platform walking was superfluous.
- If the shop isn't working, remove the button :) And only having to use the mouse for one thing is irritating, it should be changed to keyboard controls entirely.
Looking great, keep pushing it :)
So meta, great writing! :)
There are a few great tidbits of info in there, and I liked the way your choices seemed to matter, which is a great thing for a text adventure. Sounds were great, and the emoticons were excellent too.
Seems to be quite a deep branch! Gotta check it out again :)
The best thing about this game was the juice - everything feels really good, the particle effects, animations, little details were everywhere, and I really loved that.
The game itself felt a bit staid. There's not much in the way of variety - the challenge didn't make me feel particularly attached to this or that outcome, I zoned out a lot, felt like a chore, I think it could have done with some more rhythm - sometimes hard, sometimes easy, sometimes fast, sometimes slow.
A real shame considering the way the enemies moved and everything really made it feel alive in a really good way :)
So, what I really wanted to play, was as the jets. And the wobbly buildings are rad. But the monster didn't feel particularly fun. Those jets though!
Very polished, has a bunch of awesome things - procedural generation was great, graphics and animation was great...
But as a whole the game isn't very fun. There's not really all that much to do and be challenged with. If you don't fancy a certain situation, just stay away from it.
The enemy/collectible relationship is also not 100% clear. I eventually knew what each were, but a stronger visual language differentiation between them would have been better.
For example the triangles were pointy, and so were the chaser enemies. The spinny things were dangerous, but round. Etc.
Such Production, so value! The prettiest and greatest sounding game in this jam. It really looks and moves and sounds amazing :D
Wishlist:
1. Wish there was a "game" in here, or at least something I could understand. I struggled understanding what was going on, and honestly I think I still don't understand what does what.
2. The controls... I'm not a natural inverted player. So that really didn't work for me. Plus I felt like I had no fine motor control - aiming at a specific thing seemed impossible due to the way you can't see what's directly ahead of you. I feel disoriented and unoriented.
3. There are apparently two different colour "pips"... I couldn't really tell. Oh I think you meant the ones inside the peaches, I think they might have been different, but can't tell. I think you need to show players them next to each other for comparison, otherwise it's difficult to understand.
Rad rad :D
Nailed it :)
Great, simplistic set of mechanics that's intuitive and is fun. The sounds are great, the game plays well. Things all react as expected, which is a great thing.
The only gripe I really would have is that moving around corners is almost impossible when it should be easy, but that's a physics engine thing.
Great stuff! :)
Great stuff! It's an educational game that doesn't feel terrible! That's rad! :D
Great graphics, sound, animations, juice, effects :)
I played the web version which stretched to full screen, that's an obvious advantage over the mobile format. That probably needs to be addressed, especially since the guy above says you can get damage from those unseen enemies.
Good stuff :)
Sooooo much of mood. The graphics, the writing, etc, all convey an epic sense of scale.
But the game... I tried to follow the clues, and couldn't find a diner, or maybe I found it, but can't get through zombies, or whatever, I can't tell. There needs to be a better system of making the player aware of what needs to be done. And the movement speed makes for a terribly tedious time.
At least you don't lose your progress when you die.
Interesting idea, but the execution is lacking. The mechanics are too rudimentary for much of a strategy, projectile dodging doesn't really factor into it, and you just basically hover your mouse on the opponent.
The idea's there, but there's not enough challenge mechanically!
I really enjoyed the flying mechanic, it feels pretty good to master the flying and swooping, though something about it is a bit under-tuned... But that's okay, it's great for 48 hours!
The music fit the eagle thing well too :)
It was just a bit strange that you can pick up a car easier than people :P
Good work :)
Looks and sounds great. But doesn't feel particularly interesting because it seems pretty inevitable that you'll eat everything with or without too much thinking.
Did you know there's already a game called Interloper? It featured in the previous IGF awards.
If the ending was just the title... Yeah there's really not much to do/not do.
It's really gorgeous :)
Ommmmg great stuff :D Simple mechanics, dark humour, a nice tension between ease of access and difficulty in not killing your own children :) Favourite so far :D
The switch is a novel idea, no doubt, but it doesn't make the game better at the moment. You need a clearer goal for the player, what is the measure of success?
Saying "you decide yourself" isn't really what game design is about. That attitude works if it's, say, minecraft, where there's interesting things to see and do.
The dragon falling asleep animation's cool :)
Well-polished, great feel, the movement of the block being "configurable" is pretty cool :)
Add in a bit of variety and boom you've got a good thing ready to go :)
Gorgeous pixel art work/animation, gorgeous effects, really looks great.
The game didn't feel really interesting, wasn't satisfying marching up to gun-toting dudes to eat them, most of the time you're basically forced to eat a few shots, and if you don't, you're just spending a ton of time wandering left and right and... it just wasn't satisfying. If it were insta-kill there'd be some interest to die and come back quickly and see how many you can eat before dying, but because of the life-bar it just felt long and drawn out, and I'd lost interest super quickly.
Controls are awkward, but I could use the arrow keys, and that was fine.
Oh yes the door sometimes didn't register, had to wiggle around a lot.
Man, this one felt soooo good :) I really enjoyed the animation and the feel and the juice. Heck when I saw the gif I was like OOOOOH :)
- That name is FANTASTIC.
But!
It was almost impossible to dodge meaningfully, projectiles are almost impossible to distinguish, meaning you kinda just hope you wouldn't get hit. And you do.
Wishlist:
- More "reactive" water - when the water wobbled it felt great, if that surface interacted with the ships it'd be amazing.
- More tentacles - you're a Kraken. Using just one tentacle seemed silly as hell.
- More subtlety, more options.
Good job :)
Great concept, it works really well mechanically, even if narratively it makes no sense... It's dying for some writing around it :P
The music is grating! But other than that it's pretty polished, it feels like it could use a bit more... fine tuning (movements, animations and such) but it's great for a jam product :)
Well done! :)
Good stuff! A lovely mix of juiciness, easy to understand and simple mechanics, and some subtlety :D I love the stuff you eventually learn about the action and how to go further and longer :) I wonder if the middle guy does anything, I guess I didn't make it far enough to see :)
18200!
Holy crap, best of jam. BEST OF JAM.
The only thing that felt a bit off was not knowing when you get "verbal warning" - sometimes you get hit and that happens, but sometimes you get hit and you blink a bit.
BUT OMG SO GOOD. The juice and animation and the music and everything is top notch. SHIP IT.
There's... nothing to see, nothing to do, nothing to change things with. Following the tutorial messages you lay down some stuff. Then there's ENDLESS waiting until the next things happen, in the meantime, I can't do anything but put it on maximum speed... And then?
The game doesn't tell you how fast its running (no highlights), what the guests want (if anything), what they're doing (they disappear into rooms and... and?), what future guests might want... Anything at all?
As a player I felt totally helpless.
The zoom/scroll happening all the time is very distracting, even when I'm operating the menu bar at the bottom. I can never be looking/doing stuff down there and be looking at stuff I wanted to be looking at.
There's an arbitrary time/condition that made me unable to build stuff when I had the money to. It looked broken.
I'm not sure what the game is because you haven't shown enough of it!
Great writing, it's a rote game, but humorous games tend to be :)
Fantastic art, great music. The concept of "you're the monster" is way too subtle, but perfectly there :)
Nice one! Bow chika bow wow! :)
NOOOOOO WHY WINDOWS ONLY
I had this idea too, didn't go through with it :)
Has a great feel! Great camera, well animated, responsive - I especially like that you can orient yourself differently by starting a move in different states of the rotation... Wordy, but that's what it is to me :P
A bit more variety would have made it a lot more interesting, but you have yourself a good base! :)
Shares the same DNA as your previous LD game :) Again, very polished looking, great presentation, but I feel that all came at a cost to the gameplay - the game is pretty straightforward, not much in terms of challenge or decision...
The way the story unfolds is pretty cool, though not unexpected thanks to the theme being an already known thing.
Yes, the elevators of snails that also robbed you of freedom of movement was very irritating. Plus I accidentally fired one off. Contextually sensitive button is cool, but there are cases where you really want separate controls. Maybe up/down would have been better (especially since the player can't do anything while the elevator was going)
I am sad that this is windows only, really wanted to try it :(
Really good stuff, though I don't agree with every decision you made with it.
With the difficulty being cranked up to 10000 - the speed of everything essentially made it a game of rote trial and error as opposed to master and learn. Sure, there are things to learn, but I pretty much guarantee noone ended up beating a level without dying a pile of times and learning the timing and sequence of button presses of each segment.
That's cool, it's great how tight you've made this, but at the same time not as fun as mastery by reaction and learning how bits work, for me anyway. Especially in a game as tight as this.
The controls are pretty decent but it really feels out of the norm, and so I feel more like a retard than a killer most of the time.
But damn, it's a well put together piece, really. One for those addicted to punishment. And a gamepad, too, I guess.
Thanks! Yes indeed it's "you're (poke) monster!" - it's the first line of the description! :D
You're right you can just speedrun it, but the real challenge is to get the three coins while doing that. I was wondering if I should lock the exit in some other way, but didn't get that far. Level design is hard!
Thanks for playing! :D
I was on the fence about the button selection for busting out - wriggling left/right was the first choice, but then you'd run out of cover. Same key as eating makes it interesting, but I'm not sure if it's better, but I also don't want it to be yet another button...
The idea here is pretty bare-bones, the original thought was that you get to evolve and play with different abilities like dashing, and/or different types of food that grant you boosts, and different trainers, some will go into long grass, some with wider view, some with better balls, etc.
But of course, overscoped :P
Thanks for playing! :D
Linux version fixed! Sorry about that!
Thanks everyone for your awesome input! :D
Comic Sans was a conscious decision :P I thought - if I'm gonna make a joke game, I might as well go all-in with the jokes :P
The difficulty is a really tough one to balance, I know I didn't want to trap the player in a level if they can't get past something, but at the same time, I didn't want it to be easy. So I eventually settled on this - where it's easy to get through, unless you want that extra challenge (I do!).
I can tell you this - This was nowhere near as well designed as it can/should be. The compo is REALLY hard to do some really good level design in... Heck ALL level design is damn hard, and is definitely something I need to practice and learn in massive quantities.
@Ellian you're right! I actually wanted to make the game turn-based to start with, and make it an almost roguelikey sort of super thinky stealth game, but I quickly realised... That would be so damn hard to build, balance, and everything, so I settled on this quite quickly.
The next version? Who knows? :)
Yeah the music was pretty much something I could find from a generator. I initially wanted a nice relaxing pokemon-esque track, tried to write one myself, first with Bosca Ceoil, than with Garage Band, then I just realised I ain't gonna be able to make it on my nub of musical talent :P So I went procedural hunting. I also wanted the music to pick up into pokemon combat music when you get spotted........ But alas.
The feeling of being a monster was the feeling of being a (Poke)monster, as far as my interpretation goes :P
Thanks for the input :D
Spot on on the simplistic graphics - They started out as being placeholders, then I totally remembered my previous experiences, and made sure I made "good enough" placeholders just in case, and sure enough :P They really really helped though!
I made the pokeboxes... boxes, because I didn't want to tread on trademarks :P
Bookmarked: Indiegames.com had PokEscape in their roundup of LD33 games :D
http://indiegames.com/2015/08/ludum_dare_33_voting_open_with.html
Haha, the choice of Magicrap was really just that its the most uselessly floundering pokemon of the bunch, and I wanted to convey the feeling of helpless pokemon more than anything else :) So yeah, my take on this wasn't the usual rawr-eat-everything-scary monster, but just the word monster in pokemon :)
I really do want to develop this in a roguelike, turn-based direction, though it would really be something else, due to the projectile dodging that's happening now.
Thanks for your kind words everyone :D
Thank you! :D
I tried to go for something very pokemon-ish, started composing in Garage Band, then realised I still have no musical talent to speak of, just like last time I checked... So I found some procedurally generation and went with that. It was... Better than nothing :P
The balance between the two polarising goals of the game could definitely have been handled better - I wanted to not present an impossible task for people who give up quickly, nor did I want it to be a cakewalk. The optional challenges I thought was awesome and would give people something if they wanted it - which is what many did, and that's awesome :D
I should have made perhaps one coin mandatory before moving on, or something more interesting than just "get to point B". Further development will tell, possibly :)
Omg guy, did you get all the coins?? :D Yeah I absolutely ran out of time to actually put in different endings, or even hook in the coin counter properly... :/ really wanted to though!!!
Hahahaaha! Love the idea! :D
I would have loved if the numpad keys would work :)
Great sound and graphics, good juice, this is a great little distraction :) Are the levels procedural? If so, are they pre-solved? Or utterly random?
So interesting :) Touch controls, ship it!
The production value is phenomenal, I especially loved the depth of field - I've always wanted to employ it in a game, and this one did it pretty nicely. It was so cool that I was reluctant to fix it :(
The flying controls are frustrating - yes air break is important, but then you kind of just drifted from one stationary point to the next, felt like... snooker. And the camera auto-centering back to default gravity down makes it hard to control - I get that it orients the player, but it's frustrating trying to manoeuvre while it's turning your head all the time.
Then some direction for what you want to do would be nice... I repaired everything, then was left with repair 10% hull which I tried forever and then gave up. There was no other indication of what to do as far as I could till. I wondered around a bit and just was done with it :P
Great tech :)
A great collection of good, sound mechanics! The car handling is tuned very well, the drifting and the killing is satisfying. Would have liked a bit more feedback on damage - I realised later that there's smoke coming from the car, but it's not very apparent. And I hope there's some way to avoid damage, or else it's quite linear (I realise the elephants attack you, but that's not really enough) - like sideswiping animals wouldn't give you as much damage as a frontal hit, or something - if it's already doing that, then it should be communicated.
Would have been nice if a hit didn't instantly result in a splatter regardless of your speed. But then we're into the realms of physics simulations :P
Goals yes, would have been nice :)
Really rad! I want Agar.io to look like this! :)
There's not much of a game there, I actually hadn't realised that the purple blobs made you smaller, eventually you just get to a size that makes dodging impossible, then... what's the point after that? :)
Definitely find more game with this thing, it looks and moves amazingly :)
I get it, it's meta. But It's too meta for my taste personally :P
And the dialogue engine... I often accidentally clicked past some dialogue without meaning to. So if there was an option to, text should appear *much* faster than it does right now - the delayed appearing doesn't really help for small chunks of text.
There was that pringles flash banner ad... That was like this.
http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/pringles-banner-ad-worth-few-dozen-clicks-13979
Check it out, it was great back in its day :)
The creepiness reigns supreme in this one! I could actually feel the anxiety and tension right from off the bat, well done on the shader work!
But after getting into the game a bit, one realises that there's not much to be afraid of, and the tension drops off significantly. Wish the game mechanics actually fed into the tension.
Some odd choices that you've made:
Why do you have to get close AND click ON the victim? It feels unnecessary and unwieldy. Your victim is already highlighted. Use that highlight, press a key/button. Done.
The lack of visual or any feedback about when you'll be spotted or not is irritating. No vision cones, sphere of influence, noise circles, whatever. An ambiguous stealth game is a sucky one as the player feels randomly done in.
Great little gem! Presentation, gameplay, all pretty good. Rage mode really saved it from being repetitive. Nice one :)
Well put together :D Great graphics and animation, great great juice. Well paced. Good meaty combat. Could do with more variation, but hey, 48 hours :)
Very interesting ideas, but ultimately don't contribute meaningfully towards the core experience.
Can't see anything in side camera view. Buildings blocking the view isn't fun.
So we switch to FPS, which is interesting, except you can't shoot.
So toggling between the two is super meh.
But the idea is interesting, just not as it comes together now.
Great, moody piece, music and the visuals work well together, the sound effects work well.
But the game... There's no indication of where to go, so you're left wandering aimlessly in quite a huge space, and your speed is terrible so you can only really hope to have a machete (which are super rare) or that they just happen to have their backs to you when you see them. If not, well then keep walking.
There's potential in the subject matter, but the execution right now is lacking as a piece of interaction.
The fact that you have to watch a gameplay video to understand a two-button game is some indication of something being pretty wrong :/
Top-notch production values. TOP NOTCH. Great effects and music. REALLY COOL.
But your game communication is terrible, sorry. The goal isn't to "complete notes", it's just to line up the red rectangle with the circle. That's all. Everything else is visual and gameplay clutter. So you should have visually linked the thing that is the red rectangle and the things that are the the circles at the end of each of the lines. That is all, really.
The theme is also utterly unrelated :/
The fact that you can be in a state where your red rectangle has become impossible to hit the circle because it's gone past it is frustrating. The game is over but you have to wait to die. The wait's not long, but you KNOW it's happening and it really should just end it there. Or you change the mechanic to prevent that.
Four stars just for that opening pixel art piece :)
The idea is sound, but there're quite a handful of things that make it not awesome:
1. The sloshing arrow is way too fast. You've made it developer hard, and that's frustrating and unfun. It can go faster later, but from level one that'll turn a lot of people away.
2. The game description said to hit red first. The game killed me for hitting red first. Eventually I hit a green first.
3. As above, you need an indicator for what you want to hit next.
4. Omg that music. My ears.
5. When I hit two things in a row, in the correct order, it killed the first and then I was hurt by the second. That really shouldn't be - lining up an epic multi shot should be part of the fun.
Holy batman, you're 14? 14?!?!
This is so confusing, I feel like it's a joke that wasn't intended, or an accidental art piece, but it is wha it is, and it a different thing to whoever interacts with it I guess :)
No aiming to the attack, so you just spam it?
No point to the score?
No real point to the story?
Yeah, just like american tv romance, really :)
Good job :)
The mood is great, the concept is pretty cool, but it feels let down by the controls. It seems like the bullet is following some kind of invisible mouse cursor on the screen? The lack of visible or tangible feedback makes it incredibly frustrating, as you don't know what your mouse movement is going to actually do, and when you're steering a bullet through the air, you really need a good degree of understanding about what you're doing.
I'm torn. To pieces. (hahaha), ok no I'm torn - I like the idea, but the mechanics doesn't really reflect the idea. I thought it was interesting when you were just a head/ball. As you got more bits it got less interesting. The health of various limbs doesn't do much, and the way you moved with one leg made no sense.
But the controls... The controls are just too slippery for the kind of platforms you stuck in. I didn't feel like I was beating a challenge, but rather beating a flaw. It's not "challenging", it felt "wrong" or "broken". Controls need a tightness to reflect the player's intentions!
It doesn't really feel like my choices were making a difference... There's zero feedback when you "attack a city", you don't know if your high attack is hitting harder or if your high defence is making you last longer or whatever.
Just getting to the point of attacking was pretty difficult and weren't intuitive. The "flow" of moving from control to control seemed illogical and inconsistent.
Customising the kaiju was a nice touch but would have been nice if it meant anything at all - if they integrated with the stats system that'd be nice.
The scrolling text is cute and a nice touch, but again, does nothing with the game.
Feels like overall a game made with love, with lots of detail, but very little thought in the actual game feedback loop.
Fun little thing, it's really rudimentary but it has a certain charm to it.
Here are some frustrating choices you made though, that made the experience irritating:
1. For some reason I automatically think W is down and S is up - I don't play inverse usually, but I instinctively reacted that way. I think it has to do with clockwise/anticlockwise. So I had to play with my keyboard flipped. Wonder if anyone else is like that.
2. Having to click a button after you die THEN press space is... unoptimised. Two space taps. Or two mouse clicks. Why both??!
Congrats and welcome to LD! It's only my... 4th one, so I'm not that much more senior than you :)
It's an interesting toy, but yeah - think about game design! That's what we're making here! Games! Take this mechanic and see what you can do with it. Maybe let he player rotate the formation so that there's more option to what/who can be thrown off (right now it's always a single row). Maybe restrictions in movement. Maybe you want to be left with certain combinations. Who knows? Try stuff :)
Gorgeous! Absolutely gorgeous and amazing looking. Fantastic production.
The gameplay itself feels... Just a little short of great, I guess. The mechanics make sense, the pacing is good, but there's just not enough oomph to it, I think it might be a lack of emergent situations - being able to only pound the left or the right fist separately didn't make sense from anything but a balance perspective, and was a bit irritating.
Overall fantastic :)
Great set of stuff happening here, lots of work :) I like the big set of actions and things you can do, it's very satisfying cracking those buildings and everything, lots of debri, juice, etc.
The music gets REALLY bad after a while. Grating. But not a major problem.
The controls were not the best - they felt unresponsive - not entirely broken, but it was hard to get it to do what I want it to do. Not because the monster was slow/sluggish, but the input to output feel wasn't all there.
Dunno about it being called Eye in the Sky, I get that you're a monster with a big eye, and you're in the sky, but that seems very superfluous, especially when tied to a term with pre-established meaning :)
RAMMMPAGGGGE :D
The soundtrack is great!
The game... Is rudimentary. Graphics are pretty good.
The dichotomy of trying to fit a social message into the game while the game doesn't reflect that message (your character is having fun, and you're "scoring" for property damage and killing girls (which is somehow called "harassing"))
I get it, but it doesn't work yet.
Technically:
There's no restart button?
I feel the movement speed is way too fast for such a small space of movement.
NOOOOO NOT WINDOWS ONLY
Well done on your first game!
It's weird that you can only shoot in the cardinal directions and nothing in between - especially when the enemies can.
I'm not sure you needed a button to eat - is there any reason to conserving people/cats? Do they keep spawning? I didn't feel like I ran out of them at all. So needing a button to pickup seems superfluous.
Great execution, great idea, great presentation, sleek controls. All round great...
EXCEPT! (Mid-review turnaround!)
It's been said somewhere before, a stealth game that relies too heavily on being randomly discovered is bad, because you can have the best laid plans being foiled by a random dice roll... Which feels really crap. Which is what a lot of this feels like.
I haven't really actually figured out what "charm" does, but I assume it means you make people follow you, or something. And if you fail, you instantly lose, that's the impression I had.
So... you've essentially got a stealth game, with no enemy movement patterns to discern (seems completely random to me), and with a random chance to die when you use your one ability that you have to influence anything other than stand in their way so they can pick one fewer random direction to walk to.
I felt like a Rumba trying to murder people by inconveniently standing in their way.
So if you give them some pattern to follow and or the player to figure out and work around, and eliminate randomness from the mechanics, you've got something solid!
It feels pretty good, has good juice, mood for the most part, but the game is a bit short on choices:
1. Don't see why I wouldn't just spam space all the time to move faster all the time
2. Don't see any way of meaningfully stalking down people, you just go forward until you find people, or don't.
3. Don't see any strategy.
The featureless walls makes it hard to tell you're moving sometimes.
Congrats nonetheless, it feels good :)
A nice, interesting set of assets, good art and concept.
A few things:
- The controls feels a bit floaty.
- Would be nice to have more feedback on the attack - I never could tell if my attacks were doing any damage on the bigger guys.
- Need a bit more handholding, the "end of the level" felt more broken than a thing you're supposed to jump down.
Surprisingly enjoyable, for what it is :P The reading was tough to crunch through... Perhaps it's the layout, perhaps it's the sheer length. I think it would be prudent to break the long bits into smaller bits over screens, but that would have probably been difficult.
The art is super fun :)
The dog at the end is super fun too, I see you must've had fun writing his dialogue :)
I'm not sure if the game has a system - the Succubus required "two souls" - that I remembered - and I noticed the half soul thing, so you could get half from all 4 characters, or 1 whole one and two halves, or whatever... But I'm not sure if it would have made a difference to the ending. But I think it would be nice if you knew from the outset that you'd meet four dudes to harvest two souls from. Or some kind of hint (maybe I missed it).
And sometimes a selection wasn't crystal clear... I had told the library girl that I was going to take half, but the final selection assumed if I was gonna cackle I definitely would take the whole soul. Who knew cackling equated to murder :P
It's a pretty good tech demo. Very pretty. But not much game in here at all.
Ok, kudos for creating it :)
So... where are the prisoners coming from? The incinerator?
Mechanically, there's no incentive for the player not to just spam click, as there's no accuracy bonus or ammo limit.
Cute sounds :)
Dunno about the theme fit, though yes you can explain it away :)
Good job team!
Great on all counts, concept, art, music, voiceover, juice, even tech stuff (screenshot into photo was a great touch!)
Now you can add some variations to this and SHIP IT ALREADY :D
Fantastic stuff!
It's interesting, works as a boardgame, but ultimately the ruleset seems too easy to handle - the queen seems to always have an advantage. Hmmmm, a really well polished game otherwise!
Amazing idea, though I wasn't always sure what exactly it did. It parses in tweets with a particular hashtag?
And then? How would one "level design" within those tweet characters? Do something affect the way the tweets are arranged in space? Or are they always descending to the right?
If so, what's the point? Just move to the right and read tweets?
There's potential here, but requires a lot of figuring out. As it is now it's a nifty twitter API hookup.
So good! You guys have this :D
The only thing I want for this is to exist on a touch device, playing with mouse is just meh.
When the two heads came out... Ah! So cool! Great variations!
Holy crap this is awesome, is the music all yours??? That's amazing. Sir you are seriously talented.
The juice and the sounds are all fantastic, I really enjoyed it all.
The knight as a different attack pattern is really awesome. LOVE IT.
Fishing for constructive criticism, I think maybe the timing of the hits are a bit off? Not sure. I tend to pride myself on rhythm games, but this one feels off on the beats. Really not sure.
Hey! Did you rename a gif into a jpg and that tricked it into animating on the screenshots??? Gotta try that :D
Very charming and cute, cool idea, I'm a colour matching fan... which brings me to...
1. What's the point of the game? All the buildings seem to have equal health, so it's just a matter of finding the route of the least buildings to destroy to move on? There should be a point to the colour of buildings.
2. An attack button seems really pointless. You should attack a building just by moving into it. A lot of time is wasted because you're standing still attacking nothing. That's frustrating, and not in a "challenging" way.
3. Controls again - why ask people to click to start the game when you never use the mouse again? :/
4. Dunno if you have a special available, was never explained or indicated.
Has potential. Needs more interestingness. Good luck!
I really like it. The graphics are exceptional, the little juicy touches are amazing, the music, the humour is spot on, it's all pretty great.
BUT.
The game's doesn't draw me in - it could be solved by tutorialising, or chunking down the game into more manageable bits to start, maybe. As it stands, what's there is an overwhelming pile of stuff to figure out and understand.
Why Papers Please was a great game was because (well besides that it's not a jam game, of course) it was TIMED, which limited the amount of stuff the player could focus on (by design), which means there isn't a ton of stuff. Your game gets around that by removing the time constraint, but then I just feel like it's a huge chore.
I look forward to seeing this evolve, it's really interesting :)
Rad! Love the writing and mechanics :) everything pretty much works instinctively, which is a huge plus :)
The killing people in specific order is a nice touch.
Until I realised you can get in through the window I was really kinda just waiting and waiting and waiting.
The way that kids walk all over fallen friends' pile of blood and heads as if nothing happened is a bit off.
On OSX... Downloaded, unRARd into two files, both of them doesn't run :/
Off the charts! So pretty! The effects are great! The mechanics are spot on! There's even humour! You've got everything!
I really wanna know if you ever can get to the nut. Because I really feel like I can. Until I realise it was an endless runner.
Sometimes the setup feels really too difficult for the imprecise controls. Sometimes the thorns just end up giving you a small ass gap which basically felt impossible.
The one thing I would really want to see is a bit of button memory, or "forgiveness" on pressing too early. Say I want to jump again right when I land, I have to hit the button EXACTLY THERE or else you'll slide a bit, and if you're jumping right behind a thorn bit, then you're screwed. Many games have this thing where if you press again mid-jump, it'll remember you did that and jump as soon as you land. Fighting games have that especially.
So yeah. SHIP IT! I TOTALLY WANT IT :D
Off the charts! So pretty! The effects are great! The mechanics are spot on! There's even humour! You've got everything!
I really wanna know if you ever can get to the nut. Because I really feel like I can. Until I realise it was an endless runner.
Sometimes the setup feels really too difficult for the imprecise controls. Sometimes the thorns just end up giving you a small ass gap which basically felt impossible.
The one thing I would really want to see is a bit of button memory, or "forgiveness" on pressing too early. Say I want to jump again right when I land, I have to hit the button EXACTLY THERE or else you'll slide a bit, and if you're jumping right behind a thorn bit, then you're screwed. Many games have this thing where if you press again mid-jump, it'll remember you did that and jump as soon as you land. Fighting games have that especially.
So yeah. SHIP IT! I TOTALLY WANT IT :D
Dude! Ship it! Fantastic concept and execution, the little subtle bits of juice are fantastic. Really really cool!
Are the levels procedural or hand-made?
Fantastic fantastic. The extra mechanics are great. Love it :)
Everything is pretty cool, but I have no idea what I'm doing and I can't focus on two bars at once. Too hard for me :/ Is it supposed to be a two-player game???
Fantastic polish, fantastic presentation. Feels like a complete product. The tanks move beautifully and all the juice and bits of detail are just fantastic. Lovely minimap and all that jazz.
Except...
The gameplay is really uninteresting. There's not really any choice other than to move to the nearest hotspot, and there's no challenge other than to not dilly dally.
And despite everything that's in there, I really REALLY felt the absence of sound effects, heck, especially with the soundtrack playing. Sound effects are easier to make than music thanks to the likes of BFXR, so I would prioritise that first!
Great great polish and presentation. Great concept and just all round great juice and everything. Even the pace is top-notch.
The difficulty seems to fall off a cliff at the stage with two lasers down a shaft. And it got VERY frustrating so I just gave up.
A gripe was that mouse controls seems to be the only thing that would work for this game, and yet it feels like it requires touch precision to work well enough. If you can figure out another control scheme that's intuitive I believe you have something special.
But it's already pretty good as it is :) Rad :)
I feel like there're bugs in here, sometimes the 1 or the 0 wouldn't get picked up.
A cool little set of interesting bits, well executed, but no real metric for challenge? It's not a "real game" :P
The presentation is fantastic, great graphics, great subtle bits all over the place. That's quality.
But.
The game... well, I get that darkness is the theme, but I can't see what's coming up, and progress is mostly trial and error, and I don't know what errors I'm committing. It's not clear for example that the door I keep dying at needed a number on the top left to be 6 to get through, and that I must go backwards from my checkpoint point to collect stuff to get that to 6. And it's not clear that I have to go backwards once I pass that, to jump on to the left into blind darkness to progress. And then die immediately, and then have to do that all over again.
So, I feel like the game should be pretty cool, but I don't feel like I can see enough of what's going on to actually play it well.
Also the nature of the two controls you've chosen means that sometimes I see a thing, hit a button instinctively, then want to turn around, which turns into a dash, then I die.
So a lot of it feels like a memory rather than a reaction exercise :/
Okay! Got the Mac version and it looks much better, I can see where I'm going.
Some concerns remain the same though:
- How do I know that gate kills how many of my guys? Some obstacles kill one of them, some kill more than one, I have no indication of which ones are what. I know I should just avoid them all, but the feeling of "argh I hit something", expecting to lose, then the game continuing, makes me panic because I was ready to restart but I can't now, and possibly end up dead because I was not paying attention anymore.
- I never felt comfortable with the controls, I had to think about a sequence of actions before I did them, which made me feel quite silly. I think the combination of dash and turn around in one button made it really hard to get to grips intuitively.
So a great game, great execution, but the flow of it felt unintuitive to me.
Whoa! Fantastic entry! :D
I really enjoyed the aesthetic and the feel of the plant, it really feels alive, that is really fantastic stuff just there.
The time-lapse effect is SO GOOD! It fits the theme and the feel SO well. LOVE IT.
I kinda wish I knew more about what the plant is doing. When I started I kinda just bunched into a ball trying to get somewhere and not knowing how. I think some kind of cursor indicating where you are (the head, if you will) might be nice, if at least for the beginning bit.
Lovely stuff :)
A real shame I can't try this baby :) Has nothing to do with the theme, but hey so what, right? Well done :)
Fantastic! :D Really liked your control scheme, has a nice degree of granularity in it while being pretty clear once you understand it. My own LD game was kinda in this direction but utterly different :P If you know what I mean :P And my game was also a bit downwell-influenced, haha :)
There's a little problem in the mechanics being understood, collecting stuff explodes, which feels like damage, I was really confused by that for a while. I also didn't register the bar at the top was to be kept filled by collecting/hitting those things initially.
Rad stuff otherwise :)
Really wanted to check this out but... No move controller :( Can't you make a mouse replacement?
I enjoyed the setup :) Kittens and such :)
One big gripe was that I felt the controls were not only inverted, that you put them so far apart means I had to do it with two hands. If they were closer together I could choose two hands or one.
I had to flip my keyboard upside down to feel like I knew what I was doing.
My game this time BOOST was also based around this kind of mechanic, I think I got my controls quite intuitive, if you'd like to check it out. http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=35114
Would have liked a little bit of grace in difficulty by giving the ship a little bounce when it touches a wall, instead of just taking all my life because I'm touching it constantly in half a second!
Good solid entry :)
Wow, pretty rad for a compo, it's almost basically complete. So kudos just on that alone :)
The gun to the crate thing wasn't immediately obvious. Also why can't you just throw the crate to smash it open?
The screen size is TINY leading to it being difficult to see and control. Especially since you have to click precisely on the item. I feel like the pickup shouldn't have to be precise control, you should be able to hit a pickup button to pickup the nearest thing (perhaps highlight the nearest interactable thing at all time)
Okay this isn't for the compo, but post compo you'll need more variety, but I don't think that'd be hard.
Can't believe you made Nuclear Throne Harvest Moon for LD :)
Solid little experiment :) I'm ambivalent about the fact that it felt like I didn't know what to do other than the video game convention of go right. Also that the buildings didn't look like they were actually over your head to block missiles. One the one hand it's cool to not be spoonfed but on the other hand it didn't feel intuitive.
The feeling of panic +1
The feeling of getting stuck in a crowd +1
But not sure if it's "fun".
Good effort. VERY short.
Text text text.
Then the game itself didn't give you much visual cue to get anywhere. Initially I just spun in place without knowing what to do or where to go. Then after I figured out the controls (which were very strange, why map them to buttons so far apart?) (And they were definitely the wrong way around. Asking people to flip their keyboards... Why didn't you just make a second set of keys that was inverted? Wouldn't be hard).
Everything was so slow, I think things needed to be faster.
The inertia was too strong - it was basically super hard to get the ball to go where you want it to go. And when you get there, you overshoot and realise you have to try and stop on it for a while.
I didn't get to eat anything, I tried a few times, then got really frustrated and left it.
So esoteric! I liked that you're trying something very different, but I feel like it missed the target on being a game... Unless I missed something completely :/
- Where's the gameplay? Progress amounts to matching exactly what's given with what seemed like an overly complex set of controls. Simon says, without any real-time challenge aspect.
- The travelling between bits seemed very unnecessary and uninteresting. The same gripe I had with Shadow of the Colossus and Titan Souls.
- I couldn't work out what to do with empty blocks and gave up. Leaving them empty resulted in the crack of a wrong option. Couldn't see any other control options.
Otherwise:
- Amazing graphics, Sword & Sworcery esque, of course :)
- Pleasant sounds, though a bit sparse.
- The bird metaphor was cool, but there was a bit of a disparity between having a shadow indicating where the bird "was" vs where your click lands. It's weird.
- Great juice and details.
Cool experiment, perhaps needs a bit more thought on the mechanics to make it work-outable rather than rote copying what's there. Of course, I may have missed something completely :/
Mmm, too tough to get going, completely multiplayer. Sorry.
The jumping! THE JUMPING. The delay was too long, and I thought it was buggy when I was on the ground and couldn't jump again.
Besides that, it's pretty, but it also pretty much does nothing. So er, nice parody?
The theme usage is pretty cool, interesting ideas combined. However over all it feels like it needs a bit more design care:
- The controls don't feel "tight", I don't feel like I am in control of my character. The initial startup speed is slow for too long and the top speed is mad, and turning around isn't even an option really once you get going.
- The jump is unreliable - It seems you have to release both buttons at *exactly* the same time - the exact same frame, which is unrealistic for anyone to consistently do, which means frustration. I suggest a solve by flagging when both buttons are down, then flagging when both buttons are released, to trigger the jump.
And even then multiplayer games are tough for LD! It's hard to get a feel for it for players!
You should separate the different platforms' files. I think a few people would be turned away by the fact I have to download files I don't need.
Now to the game :)
Ah, puppy love. A well written and cutely illustrated story. Reminds me of many many stories that I've read in my youth, mostly in manga :P
The choices were esoteric, like how you treated the plant would directly influence how you were in real life. That was weird but I guess you could sell it. But then it affected how other people treated you. That didn't make sense at all.
But still, a nice story. And stories are what makes us human.
A good try :) A basic runner with basic mechanics. Like the implementation of the theme - goat goes flying, that's fun. Would be good if you spent more time on mechanics - more interesting movement, lay of the level, progression and such.
Still a decent simple entry.
Y U WINDOWS ONLY :( sadness :(
Er, wow, so bizarre, so weird. I like weird and bizarre, but I would prefer if it also came with some kind of sound game design.
The controls were serviceable. Slippery like a Zamboni, but it works.
The graphics, well the claymation, were super cool. The physical media use is amazing. Love that. The levels were just as low-tech but in a different way I guess. Felt alive, at least.
The gameplay... There's very little sense. The two words you give players present basically no clue to what the right choice is, so it's basically random. And so it forces players to either get lucky in one shot or play through twice. That's not fun.
And I feel like there's a specific order you have to meet the people in? That's not fun, because there's again no real clue as to where to and why.
And the "error messages" are nonsensical.
So... There's not much game here, but a big experiment, and that's cool, it's just not much of a game.
Beautiful presentation, the model moves really nicely, and what's there feels really good, you must have put a lot of time into getting that central hit to feel right, which is fantastic.
The Hotline Miami style one hit pace tells the story of the ronin very well.
But it's a one-trick pony with a couple of flaws:
1. The camera angle is terrible. I have to constantly remind myself what pressing up means, and that completely kills the intuitiveness of combat, especially considering it's supposed to be simple one-button.
2. Similarly, having to remind myself that I cut to the left of my character on top of remembering that up is not up... argh.
So I can't even imagine how to play the game intuitively (which was what's needed) with those things bogging it down.
Also, has what to do with the theme?
Mmmmmm.
This is a highly polished take on a game concept I've probably seen replicated 100 times. I'm pretty sure there are people out there who can solve these things as fast as those other people who can solve rubik cubes.
So, sorry, low on innovation but MASSIVE polish, which isn't really the point of LD, imho!
Well done still, it's REALLY beautiful. Credit where it's due.
The idea is there, and I get that using the mouse adds difficulty, but I'm not a fan of games that make controls difficult for the sake of padding the challenge. The challenge, to me, should be about mastering the controls to overcome the game, not to make sure it's hard to control for the game to be a challenge.
The presentation is top notch. You even managed a tutorial which is rare in jam games. Kudos for that.
So... a meditation JRPG?
The music is very good, calm and soothing. The gameplay part is part confusing part relaxing... It's hard to tell at all when I'm allowed to press the button, and in the beginning the assumption was to press on all dots. Then, how do I know what the "hit area" is that would pick up the dots? Without those information the player kinda just hit randomly to hope to catch as much as possible.
You could argue that meditation is not a precise activity, but this is a game :)
Hmmmmmm.
The mechanics feel completely arbitrary, and sometimes doesn't quite follow its internal set of logic. Sometimes I would walk along flat stuff and become a ledge grab.
It feels like a sokoban game, which is a good thing, but I feel like the internal logic needs to be stronger for it to become a puzzle to solve rather than a thing to try everything to see what works. The saving grace was that "everything" was two buttons and things happened really quickly so it was easy to try everything quickly.
Man, great work as always, even though the game just wasn't very good, that you took on the eccentric challenge was commendable :)
The core mechanics are a bit shaky, using the bouncy beard as an extension of yourself, while sounding novel, is a bit frustrating in practice for anything other than really simplistic actions. I think maybe if you got more mechanics and variations in, like sticky beard or something, it might be interesting.
Who knows! But the platforming is solid as always. And gorgeous. So gorgeous :)
Kudos for going the boardgame route :) I doubt you'll get any plays but kudos nonetheless.
And... Has nothing to do with the theme?
Going through the rules and the cards it seems to be utterly unstrategic and completely luck reliant. So if I wanted to spend two hours seeing how lucky I am I would play something like... Actually I don't :/
If you would like to get further feedback on this from a more appropriate audience, I suggest posting this to Boardgamegeek.com's forums, there's a game design forum there and the people are awesome :)
Some really good ideas, many of them in fact, but the overall mash of them doesn't feel exciting. If this were a landscape, it'd be pretty flat. I think a good game needs to have some rhythm, highs and lows. This one feels like a straight line.
- The player movement could do with some organicness. Like have the rotation accelerate a bit, so that the player can adjust in smaller increments while not letting them being stuck rotating too slowly.
- The upgrade system is cool, but ultimately the impact of each small thing feels too small for me to care a lot about each click.
- Progress = death? Where's my risk and reward? Do I progress forever no matter how well/badly I play?
- Didn't realise the plane wrapped. I think in that case the shots should wrap too and have a range that disappears after its range. It doesn't make sense to have the ship wrap but not the shots. Do the enemies wrap? Think they should too.
Oooooooh. This one's tough. I like it, but it's too close to a few other games like this without adding much new for me to really push it to 4 stars.
By the way the web build doesn't work in Safari, just thought you should know that.
The graphics are fantastic, the way the trees grow and sway is extra cool detail. The colours are fun and everything just looks great :)
Sometimes the combo thing seems to miss, I have no idea why - I would press right and I *know* there's an enemy there, and I would miss. That was hugely frustrating.
Some variety would be cool, enemies that require a different pattern of input. Have you played these games?
- Kung Fury (has a range thing so you won't always hit and you can "look ahead" to plan a little.
- Melody Muncher (from the previous LD, 33)
- One finger something something death something.
Ok, yes I see that it's for range - I understood it as a result of the attack that you did - a bolt of lightning doesn't tell me "it's in range", it tells me "I'm hitting it", maybe something more like a light that changes colour or something would be more appropriate as an indicator?
It's still a solid and really polished entry :)
I haven't got tabletop sim so that's a problem, but I do have a bunch of dice, so I'd be keen to try this physically sometime :)
I see the print and play, I guess I'll have to see how I can duplicate that onto my physical dice (cos no way I'm hand-building 10x number of players dice by hand).
Kudos :)
While the concept is interesting, the execution leaves very little room for interest...
There's no risk/reward. The best way to play the game is to tap left and right to the timing of your shooting. The super fast guy will either be taken out by a shot you previously shot or superhuman reflex. But with 200 lives there's not all that much sense of urgency.
Making it harder makes it impossible - there's no skill that you can employ to tackle difficulty, you're not shooting faster or more accurately, you're just shooting.
So... There's no room for skill. The values need to be balanced more, as well as the moment-to-moment gameplay loop - what feels good? Can you miss? If you can miss then there's skill. If you can perform poorly there's skill.
A good exploration! :)
Thanks @sydan! I really wanted to hit a balance where twitchy movements are possible to avoid things, and drifty movements also give the player a sense of drifting... Like a car sideways, but still in control :)
I think I'm not *quite* there yet but it's a start! :)
If you didn't run out of fuel, all you had to do was boost when a thing was coming down in front of you, kill that and keep moving up, there's no reason to go sideways at all.
The balance wasn't quite right in the compo build, I'm working on a post-compo, so that might make it better. Might :P
Hey SaintHeiser, I would agree that the early levels are too easy if you just boost through them. The nature of the game is such that the difficulty is a balance between how fast the inferno rises and how fast you get away. And of course the enemies. The first levels are there to let people understand the controls, most people only figure out the boost after a while, so the first few levels would be murderous if it were any harder, with more enemies or something. Once you understood boost, yes you just cruise through the first levels.
I don't think I solved it perfectly, though :/
Can you elaborate on the issues you have with the controls? Did you want to go left but keep going right? Was it too slippery and you couldn't go where you wanted to go? Could you not react in time to what's coming from top? I'd like to know the kind of trouble you have so I can iterate on it :)
And I agree the game definitely needed more polish!
So the controls were too drifty for me to feel like I was in control.
Then, I don't think I got to the point of the game because the enemies were basically too strong - or I wasn't equipped to kill them. It would have been nice to be able to turn around!!! I was stuck facing right. Which sucked. Then when I landed ON a bunch of zombies, they killed me and I couldn't do anything about it because I can't shoot down or fall through or anything. And I couldn't kill them earlier because I couldn't turn around.
Frustrating. Not sure what "gun seeds" were for :/
Okay, the game isn't really my cup of tea, reminds me of those Facebook wait-for-energy-to-progress games, but of course without the energy thing. Working out cryptic clues against ingredients didn't seem interesting to me...
Though the presentation and graphics are really awesome. Lots of details for a jam game. Well done.
Weird, couldn't run it, came up with an error "MissingKeyMissing Key-Pair-Id query parameter or cookie value"
Wow, superbly stunning, I was really excited at first, but then the game mechanics themselves don't live up to the hype of the visuals :(
The hold to charge and release to shoot thing means you have very little accuracy control. And since you have to fly straight at the worm to shoot it, coupled with the hills, meant that it was VERY VERY VERY hard to land a hit. At all.
Then the worm almost alway spawns right under me and kills me instantly. Unavoidable deaths aren't fun.
I would want to see more nuance in the controls, right now it feels quite dead, and not like a real spaceship (X-Wing if you wanna go there).
Otherwise the presentation is mad good. The sound effects got very repetitive, so not perfect.
Well done :)
Interesting take on a pure timing game, super abstract, but works well enough. Not too much depth to it though.
Another take on the eat and grow and can't eat smaller things theme - the problem here is that it's REALLY difficult to tell what counts as smaller and what counts as bigger. That's very important information.
The camera doesn't always work and often I'm stuck pretty much going blind with no idea what's going on. And lag.
Solid game and looks great, the terrain generation is ace :)
Oooooh, this is an interesting one.
My first reaction was that I didn't like that it was colour coded - it's the same problem as playstation games with quick time events where they expect me to remember up is triangle and down is X and right is circle in the heat of the moment.
But then since there was only two, it was forgivable. When the colour palette changed I was pretty fucked for a bit. So again, don't like the colour correlation.
Then I realised the core was growing with the number of successes, making the dots hit quicker. Game getting more difficult as you earn an advantage is cool!
Then realised it was synced to the music somehow, and that's also really cool.
You've hit both themes well with this! So that's really rad :)
I just want some kind of system that makes it not have to be colour coded. And longer, better music. And I guess more patterns.
Rad :)
Coo mechanics! I at first didn't realise you could shoot, so it would have been nice to have some kind of in-game indication of that.
The gun shooting and hitting are super meaty and thumps and feels great.
The movement of the ship could perhaps be a bit more nuanced, so I can move small increments and not be definitely doomed because I can't move into a smaller gap because I have no finer controls.
Interesting concept, that much's there. Besides that though the game itself doesn't do much... Follow a bunch of prompts and proceed. The platforming controls are competent but feels flat, unalive.
The fact that the game needed to tell me "hint" shows a lack of design... You really should guide the players in other ways. Distinguishing between what's supposed to be a platform to stand on vs not was impossible there were those faint blue lines in the end, but that's again, taking an immersion-breaking shortcut.
Sorry, though the writing isn't bad, there's just not very interesting decisions to be made, especially for something as grand as becoming the president of the USA.
Whoa! So good! Really enjoyed that you hit both themes so well with this, despite meh graphics that actually works pretty well. I started the jam with a somewhat similar idea (build a town through Y/N decisions), but I realised I didn't know how to implement big interesting systems quickly. Yours works out great!
I really enjoyed the narration that made it super clear what was going on all the time.
Sometimes things seem to appear before the narration, which was a bit weird (like a chest would lie there for a long time before the chest thing said anything).
Love love love :)
Oh one more thing, waiting for a long time with nothing happening was a bit of a bummer, because you literally had nothing to do and sometimes watching your people mill around just isn't interesting anymore.
You made this in Unity but didn't make a OSX build and didn't specify that you only have a windows build. Thanks for making me download the files for nothing :(
Interesting take on a clicker game, I felt the lack of information made it quite tedious. I didn't know how my investments were affecting the game, so all I could do is just mash randomly. Should have been able to see a definitive view of rate of growth, for example.
The presentation is super quirky and interesting. 800 seconds for me too to get to random surgery. Guess that's about the same for everyone.
Puberty Simulator?
The idea is good, the execution pretty great, but the actual outcome wasn't... fun. It's very tedious. I think this is one of those to file under cool idea but ultimately not the best thing to do with two buttons.
If you ever played King of Thieves, this has that kind of feel to it, except I can time KOT with one touch, and this is a sequence of button hits... When I fail I feel like I'm unlucky rather than unskillful.
Cool exercise though :)
Solid :) A nice take on the old two button yes/no game - the simple yes no thing is different because of timing, and trying to remember that stuff gets hard when the queue gets longer than 3 parcels.
Good stuff :)
So here is a JRPG type of fetch quest game. But JRPGs have a sense of progression between the DHL-style delivery of stuff, and those kinda form the meat of the game, while the "go here do that" form the bone of the game.
You have bones without meat, so I feel like I was just very slowly walking around and walking and walking.
The camera was a bit irritating, I don't see the point of it zooming into a level where I literally can't see anything around me. It might make sense if the game needed a tighter view of your surroundings to find stuff, or something.
The lack of direction made it REALLY tedious. I don't know where I'm going, and that really sucks. Imagine a click-everywhere adventure game but instead of a mouse cursor, you have a slowly moving cursor controlled by arrow keys. This is that. I want to at least know where I should be looking, which direction/area, etc.
Then the solve mechanism is very unclear, and seems broken sometimes. For example the guy who wants fire, I should have found fire, the game tells me I have fire, then I use the fire to get to him. Instead I meet a guy who says he has fire, then I lead him back to the village, no message of success, I don't know what's going on, then I go to the guy who wants fire, and all of a sudden I am making fire. The causality here doesn't make sense. The same with the coin guy.
The last person who's "tied down"... I couldn't be bothered to search the entire map for something I have no clue about so I left.
Good exercise in game design, I hope you learned something out of it :)
Played on itch.io. no sound?
I like the pretty style, that's really interesting, but I feel like it can barely be called a "game"... I could just leave it running. The branches and the poem are pretty, but ultimately not interesting to me. Maybe it's just me. I didn't like Monument Valley too and it won like a million awards...
I feel like I couldn't make round shapes like the rest of the branches were - my lines were zig zaggy and that felt out of place.
Would have liked to see a zoomed out view of my creation - I feel like that that would add a lot more to the creative aspect of this. To be creative and be recorded as such.
Pretty thing :)
This has what to do with the theme?
A lot of work went into this, which has a fairly cool amount of content. But the game itself is pretty 1994... Duke Nukem... Which can be understood as retro, but in this case is very, very slow.
The weapon system is cool, but feels unpolished. It's really hard to pick up an object (by E or by walking over pickups), so hitboxes could have been extended. Why couldn't I pick up trashcans or flower vases, etc? The game could have been balanced around that :)
Wasn't ever actually sure what the boss was doing. He went through the fence without breaking it, which was odd.
Wished the game was faster. The enemies were kinda dumb especially because they weren't zombies, but had zombie behaviour.
Good attempt :) Needs more design though, I think.
You're right, it's a mind bender. Though I think unnecessarily so. Games like Super Hexagon works because it's simple enough to go into autopilot and rely on your intuition. When you have to start over logic-ing and its super fast 's it becomes not fun.
It doesn't feel consistent as to how to lose. Sometimes I miss blobs and it's game over immediately, sometimes I miss and nothing happens. Can't tell what's going on.
The trails are confusing too. The colours in the back are too, it feels like they means something but I can't tell what.
There's just too much going on to be simple enough for a good reflex game.
+1 for hitting both themes :)
So I don't quite understand what you're going for - high score or height? Why have two measures? If you added the height to the score at the end it might make it clearer what you're going for.
Because of the ambiguity, the water feels like just something I should avoid to not go faster, because going faster is bad because it makes you more likely to hit planes. But it's presented as a positive thing because it does feel good to go faster. So there's a design opposition between "feels good" and "is a better idea to do". If anything right now growing faster alleviates boredom, as there's really not much to the game if you don't go faster.
So I think there are some design things to think about in this game :)
Solid! I like it despite it looking a bit aged. The game has much more depth than at first blush, it's interesting that it seems your goblins' numbers are limited and the money you make goes right back into maintaining your horde.
I often feel quite ineffective though. The arrows are so bloody fast that covering enough ground to block one is mostly impossible most of the time. It sucks watching a fast arrow track across the whole screen to hit the guys you've protected the whole time. And then seeing that happening over and over. Maybe that should be a bit more balanced, I made VERY LITTLE progress.
On progress, it would be nice if there were more upgrade-y things than just goblins. Ogres are interesting but ultimately they're super random dice throws, you can't do anything to protect them in a game with protecting stuff as the central mechanic.
The character movement could be a bit more natural, and the dash I think could have been more useful. Right now when the soldier comes I go into button bash mode to try and kill it in time. Indicating a hit there would be great, and life bar for them, too.
Overall an interesting concept that needs a bit more tightening up to keep attention :)
I see the potential and the polish, but sorry you didn't finish :(
I'm not sure that the chicken following the mouse was great. For the longest time after I booted up the game I thought it was a broken endless runner and I would dive off the edge of a broken stage.
Stopping the chicken when you shoot is a decent counter to the running towards the cursor thing, but it's not quite enough. I guess you should just revert to traditional left/right controls. There's not really a a reason why the current scheme would be better than traditional controls for fun or mechanical or thematic reasons.
Initially didn't really understand the whole meter thing. It wasn't clear that it was growing. I think more increments instead of 4 discreet steps would have made it easier to understand.
Then when I understood it the game was just way too easy. Wait till the bar fills, bash, when cool down comes up, stop. Repeat.
Would have done with a bit more nuance :)
hahaha :) Very cathartic and much more enjoyable than it should be :)
The to freedom thing reminds me of that game 1000000 (by the guy who made You Must Build A Boat).
I think the Whale is an allegory to Moby Dick isn't it? Can't get it. FFFFF.
What I would have liked to see
- some way to say grab now (perhaps both buttons together or double tapping down)
- better "handles" so that I could grab things by protruding bits more reliably.
Funny, but not really fun. The random changing of the directions mean that I end up really doing nothing but bashing a button until my guy turns in the way I want him to. *maybe* I can use the second one to "store" a direction I want, but that's so difficult that it's not worth doing against the time pressure.
Top notch presentation. Unless that's all boilerplate copy pasted from before, I would have much rather seen you guys spend the time on working out a more interesting game design.
But really top notch presentation. The announcer is hilarious :)
A competent runner, the spawning RNG can be cruel. Feels a bit under-varied. And what's the escalation? Does the game go faster the longer you go? There's not really any indication of that.
Ooooh, I like this one :)
It's very rough around the edges, could do with a lot more love in the details, but I dig the concept.
- the trick with bumping the left to straighten out the stack seems cheap
- the mice should be less slidey
- the mice could be more alive and do different things
- more variety in general
- the way the mice disappeared if they don't stack seemed like a waste, like they could be doing something else.
Like the concept! :)
Off the charts! The lack of sound is a downer, but the rest of it is just fantastic :D If Badlands were a platformer, this is what it would be :)
The visual juice is fantastic, the overall platforming is responsive and interesting. I liked how the slopes affected the characters.
The chaos of the play is both cool and frustrating, you can really only watch out for so many of your characters at a time, so it's a bit button mashy. But satisfyingly so.
Missing sound feels pronounced with the arcady feel. A shame because I believe it could have been decently audible in an hour with BFXR.
Good stuff :)
Great graphics, I enjoyed the tweens on the soldiers.
But the gameplay is completely lacking, you basically hold the button down and spam, and the aim's so random that you basically can't care much until they get close to you.
The big laser cannon? You don't even know when it's ready. But it probably doesn't matter too much, you just hold down and spam. Spam spam spam. The game really needs more variation to give skill a chance.
Just misses the boat on being great.
+ presentation
+ graphics & animation
+ easy to understand
+ fun
- repetitive, could have done with some variation (besides the minigames, some of them were great but some were just kinda pointless)
- not enough information (what does +STR do? +AGI do?)
- a bit of a pause between activities would have prevented me from pressing the button to choose without meaning to.
The graphics are great. The music is nice but I'm guessing not your own. The presentation is fantastic, movement is nice, the juice is nice, everything is great!
Except... No gameplay. Push buttons and that's it. The monsters don't present any threat after you understand you can punch more than once.
I really want to like this but it's just so... Just pretty! Just so pretty!
Mmmmmmmm I'm really in two minds about this! Presentation is top notch, the sounds are good, great graphics and animation, but:
- Gameplay feels stunted... Feels like there's just not quite enough to keep me engaged beyond pressing block when I see stuff coming. Some attacks are hard to read, but overall there's not much in reading the enemy, which should be the case since it's a game about watching incoming attacks.
- I feel the singular use of the charge bar was a missed opportunity - maybe releasing at different lengths of it does a different attack, and maybe a heal, or something more tactical, to give me choice.
- The pickups and equipments are a nice touch, but I never know if they do anything (I'm guessing no) and thus it's just a case of pressing the button more.
Lots of great detail, but I wish all of it conspired towards a better game rather than more pixels to push!
Really cool idea, dunno what you want to do with it, but it could probably extend into something more :)
Playing it not on a touch device is silly :P
Literally two buttons (on screen) and literally growing :)
Mmmmm, the interactions that you describe is awesome, but what's on screen isn't very interesting. The pace has something to do with it - I don't feel like I'm actually making any difference to the game.
Is it always supposed to be a tall thing on the left and a short one on the right the does nothing?
The scrolling is VERY slow and makes it really hard to see anything beyond the first screen - and the tree will just grow out on the left side too.
The two buttons are confusing... There is a problem with the toggle as in they don't display what's actually happening - so if I see "fruit" i'm actually doing branches, and vice versa.
It could be an interesting screen saver thing, but... Dunno if anyone cares for screen savers anymore. Personally I feel a game needs some kind of interaction beyond looking at a thing growing, and if it's a thing growing, I want to be able to affect it A LOT to express myself creatively.
Perhaps it just needs a lot more going on before it gets interesting enough for me.
Perfection. Congrats on getting my first and probably only 5 stars all round. Everything is fantastic, from the way the little fruit guys move around, the way they clump into colour groups when you wanna pick them up, to the way that all the guys together create beautiful chaos. The fruit behaviour during combat is amazing. Not attacking till you throw them, but chills and follows you and still attacks when things get close enough. It's so good.
The visuals are amazing, the animations are amazing. Only gripe may be that everything is too black and the green lines could have been thicker at least to give the visuals a bit more punch. But the colours are expertly used and serves prettiness as well as intuitive guide.
SO GOOD SO GOOD!
And that ending! More good!
Great music!
GREAT EVERYTHING :DDD
Really pretty, really cool little narrative thingy, but there's just about no "game" here...
A really nice art piece.
I can see what you're going for, like a Binding of Isaac sort of vibe, with procedural bits. But there are a couple of fundamental flaws:
1. Controls were sticky, not sure why. It didn't always go where I pressed the key to go. Sometimes I'd get stuck.
2. I didn't know the attack and ammo relationship. It wasn't shown.
3. You'd often spawn right next to an enemy and take damage just because. In a game as brutal as this that seems completely wrong.
4. The pattern of attack and how you could work around that was pretty limited, that's a combination of your attack range and enemy attack patterns being limited.
5. Cool music, cool graphics, though the two really don't suit each other...
Poetic expression. That's cool.
I couldn't find sense in it, but that's how expression works, it's so personal to you that that's what it is, and without dialogue and engagement there's only vacuous guessing.
I'm guessing it's about a girl/boy. Or a bunch of them. I would be right 80% of the time, but it doesn't matter, because what you want from this was your expression, not my understanding. If you wanted my understanding, you would have done something that made me understand.
So, cool expression.
It's great that you've got this far :) I think it could do with a few minor adjustments for improvement:
> Some feedback on hitting something would be cool, I feel like I'm blasting and nothing is happening, dunno if I hit or missed.
> More varied movement patterns
> Some kind of risk, like a thing to protect or something, so that it would direct your attention here or there.
Moody and interesting, though completely incomprehensible...
Why keyboard look controls when mouse would have done?
Why use a switch to change look directions?
Why pick up flowers?
Why the cool but epilepsy-inducing effect?
What's the point of the second room/screen?
What's the point of it all? XD
It's REALLY pretty! Kitty and environment are all really well rendered. Really cool on that end.
But the game itself... It's hard to actually work out what you CAN do - hitting the cat is hard, and it appears quite sporadically and unobviously. And I can't tell whether my hits or not hits are doing anything to my progress. The cat appears right in front of you slowly and you seem to lose anyway. Can't tell why when the seeds hit from afar the cat reacts but not when the cat is close. Sooo...
It's an interesting idea but needs more game design!
Pretty cool, great presentation, music, but ultimately I don't feel invested in anything I click, I don't see the clicks influencing something, anything. For example the upgrades is a whole panel that covers up the room, so when you click it to upgrade, instead of SEEING the upgrade, you close the window and still have no idea what you did.
So it just feels like I'm literally just clicking for no reason. I think you need some reason for the players to care about the thing they're doing. Candyland and Dark Room did very well there.
I don't have a friend on hand to play with, and multiplayer games are always tough to evaluate :)
But damn son, I must say I'm impressed! Good graphics, mechanically super sound, cool interaction. Can I ask for the source? I've struggled to make good platforming code and yours is amazing, it even works on slopes AND with physics. Please?
My twitter is @tuism too, please please please let me know?
The controls were a bit awkwardly arranged though. Would be better probably to map jump to up and use just one action button.
An unusual mechanic, the game works out pretty well. I enjoyed the limitations (teleport meter) that pose a challenge but there's still always a get of jail free card in your infinite shooting.
Though the play gets a bit dry after the initial understanding sets in.
The bullet bounce vector was also a bit weird, I can intellectually understand how it works, but when they come from near-perpendicular angles they should deflect and not bounce in seemingly weird directions :) But at least it's predictable :)
Cute concept, the enjoyment is really marred by some technical bits - my keyboard for example jams with W,D and space. So yes you couldn't test all the permutations of hardware so that's unfortunate. The lack of a consistent shadow under the character makes distance judging difficult, and in general isometric starts being difficult to judge by eye when platforming comes into play.
Really love the premise and the art :)
Really cool idea, there are bits where it felt a bit off, like where there are two layers of walls, but that's not too bad. The initial understanding of the concept wasn't easy though, took a while to realise you were "tagging" things to become solid/not solid after pushing the button thing. But it works. kudos :)
Mmmmmm, the premise is cool, the feedback is adequate, but I don't feel like I'm "in control" despite playing the fantasy of being god :) I think there's a lack of feeling like I'm building something, with the whole "progress" represented by just 4 numbers.
Perhaps there was too much reading. For me.
Cool idea and great polish in the presentation though :)
I see what you did there about taking Fun out of the voting criterias :P
To whoever is reading this, SPOILER ALERT AHEAD PLEASE DON'T READ MORE IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED THE GAME YET!!!!
SPOILER!!!
Okay so that was interesting, the "game" portion seemed really really pointless, I didn't really see any cause and effect, and the only point of feedback was a number - your gold, and a little face changing colour. I couldn't tell what achieved what, so I literally ended up clicking everything. All the time.
Then the rest of the game was an interesting "twist", though I don't have any solid idea of what it means - though that's kinda cool. I enjoyed that, laughing like an idiot at the end.
Smart, really doesn't pull through together. A for effort, and pretty graphics :)
I would have liked diagonal movement to follow the orthagonal movement direction, it felt a bit off the way it was now, broke the illusion for me.
Love the super polished presentation, and I really like the premise, but a few things prevent me from getting into it:
1. The real-time feels too fast. Or perhaps the lack of visual feedback/progress makes it feel like I don't have any handle on what's needed/wanted.
2. It's hard to connect objectives and actions - I don't know what I need, and i don't know what I can do to fill those needs. The three bars on top aren't easily and instinctively connected to what you can put into a room, for example.
3. The people, who are objectives, don't clearly "state" what they want out of a room or whatever. I pretty much just randomly dump them in.
4. The buying of a new room is very out of the way and hidden given the rest of the interface.
5. Effects of various things you can do isn't immediately obvious. Cleaning and such.
The presentation is fantastic, and maybe there's a learning/tutorialising problem, but I think it could be improved drastically with giving feedback to the player.
@dlweatherhead Thanks! Yeah the controls are a bit wonky, platforming controllers is non-trivial!
oops, yes I uploaded the library sans the bulk of the size because I wanted to get to bed quickly, was really running fumes then. I'll put up the more complete source tonight when I sleep and don't need to use the internet, it's a biggish file.
@spacedoubt are you referring to some kind of Schroedinger's cat thing? The cat is required to exit, that is all :P
@p1x3lruckus could you tell me what your specs are? Operating system and such? I'm curious if/how my game is too processor-heavy :/
@Drtizzle thanks for your input! I think I have an idea where the superjump comes from, I'd have to go and dig into it a bit, it's actually not to do with the update/fixedupdate thing, but that I've made the jump on GetKeyDown instead of GetKey so it reads multiple times. I'll give it a tiny delay between activations.
Thanks!!!
@Bensonance that one way platform one yeah was way too advanced for where it is. I needed to do another element or two before that. But that's where my puzzle design failed :P
I've fixed the jump bug and I dunno about the other one yet :)
A moody little environment, which is done quite well. Perhaps a little genric, I would have enjoyed a bit of a unique signature aesthetic, some kind of shader perhaps.
Of what's there it's fine. Would have liked to see the content move forward.
I think the meters emptying would have communicated what they were supposed to better :)
Pretty good implementation, the animation and movement was good. Was it unity 2D physics? Own character controller? Platforming is non-trivial to implement so kudos on your seemingly pretty smooth implementation :)
Design wise, it doesn't quite get more interesting as you dash and get more bits and carry on and such. The levels have awkward jumps that are irritating to do rather than feel like they're skillful to do.
It's a pretty interesting little turn based puzzle, but needs some more prompting in the game to get people into the gameplay. There's too much stuff hidden -
> The "workflow" for selecting a skill then clicking on destination wasn't clear. I thought they were AOE spells or something.
> It's hard if not impossible to strategise without information of what the enemies are going to do, and simple let's die first to see what happens is frustrating.
>The "cost" and the "command" being so separated makes the concept of cost difficult to understand. And time wasn't very clear too.
But in all an interesting start :)
This is one moody and atmospheric piece, I really love that feel that struck me as the game kicked in. It absolutely communicates the desolation and isolation. That's cool.
BUT
The "fantasy" of desolation is not interesting at all if literally nothing happens at all. I click somewhere, and wait for my little dude to get there. I go and make coffee. I think I picked something up, I'm not sure because I'm busy making coffee or doing something else. I was hoping that the footsteps would stop when you reach the destination to "notify" me that I'm there. But no, apparently I'm moonwalking in place the whole time.
You can have a slow-paced game and still have stuff going on. You can depict desolation without it being absolutely devoid of interest. Respect the player's time investment, give them a point. Some goal. Interactions along the way. Something. There's no way to know where to find anything - so it's literally guess a direction and find out 10 minutes later whether you guessed right. It's like Pokemon Go without the payout at the end of catching something cool.
The UI, the interactive bits are all great. But I need a design intent to keep me engaged.
A pretty competent piece! Seems really technically advanced. I assume that there's always a way to solve each level, and it's procedurally generated? It does seem like once you understand the system, you can work out the path through the dungeon before you even take one step, if it is always solvable. That aspect makes the game a bit tedious in "play".
I would have liked to have access to keyboard controls.
Felt like a bunch of cool ideas that weren't taped together really well enough.
> The bike itself handled well and was fun to drive and drift.
> The Juice was super good, well done on that!
> But as soon as you grapple something it no longer feels like you're in control. I felt more like I was hoping the enemy would drive into the boxes rather than me swinging them into the enemy.
> The grapple distance was limited but not communicated. It felt like a bug half the time it failed to attach.
> Did the gun reload? I couldn't tell. Felt like a superfluous mechanic
> It maybe shouldn't be a desk with legs... If you can't go under the desk :P
Really interesting concept, and pretty slickly put together, but there are some nagging bits that prevent this from being fun:
> The symbols are too hard to decypher at the size they are. I think colour would be a good add here. Or simpler icons.
> The "grab stuff and put down" mechanic feels really fiddly. You have to face the right way and press and hold and that's just not intuitive or easy. I think the core loop of arranging the blocks correctly could be more satisfying with an alternate control scheme that focuses on the blocks, like Money Idol Exchanger or sokoban kind of games.
> The massive floor space on the left feels empty and pointless. And if you do end up using it then that means you're traversing huge distances by tapping (annoying) and again, isn't fun. It's a symptom of the control scheme problem.
Errrrrr
I love the premise and the concept, really brings a smile :) BUT!! Isn't that the elevator you're operating?
Great presentation, and the game eases you into its systems well. If there's a gripe for me it would be some of the room icons/symbols were quite same-y which makes it bit hard to make a quick call.
Great entry :) Got really hard on 3, might wanna ease the curve a little.
Really neat little package that fares well enough on execution but not enough on game design.
> The camera follow is too slow. Sometimes you'd fall off the screen AND can't see the ground coming up and that's pretty bad in a game about anticipating what's ahead.
> Thematically speaking... Mouse traps would be pretty much a dead stop. When I didn't stop I pretty much assumed it was a bug. Maybe find something else to stop you with.
> Related to the above, obstacles didn't look like obstacles. I was never sure what I was going to hit and what I wasn't going to. More visual language and clarity would be good.
> Had no idea that the cat was going to hit me, and that took away a lot of the game's feeling. Not knowing your "progress" made it less interesting. Less tension.
An excellent entry that despite its length, works really really hard. The puzzle is really obtuse and makes no sense, but I guess that's true for most point and click puzzle games. It even manages to have a proper ending, which is pretty damn amazing given the jam restrictions! Kudos!
I loled at the idea, but it's not very fun, just like the game IRL I guess, so there's an artistic side to this :)
The miss sound is a bit annoying, especially considering how often it happens. There should be a counter that shows progress. The distance of your "reach" seems a bit short, it feels annoying rather than challenging. Speaking of challenging, it would be nice to have some kind of non-rote form of challenge during the activity. Perhaps you pick the cards up and throw them, or something.
A for effort :)
Pretty cool idea and slick presentation! I had a problem where I couldn't see the leftmost row so I didn't clear any horizontal lines at all, then halfway through the game I cleared a vertical row and I was like OH IT DOES WORK.
What does the chest thing do
What do big white blocks do
I think you need more in-game help/tutorial/assistance
Maybe have a proper border so the player can be sure where things end. I couldn't know.
I didn't know I wanted heroes to win. If I am building a dungeon it's a pretty good assumption to make that I'm on the side of the monsters.
Great idea and cool implementation :)
I don't see why I wouldn't click all the buttons, not having some of the stuff doesn't seem to add anything, which kinda goes against the end bit which was the only indication of what you clicked on having any kind of real impact. I liked that idea, it could be expanded more, perhaps.
Looks pretty and music ain't bad. Just didn't know what to actually do with it! :)
It feels like ye olde backpedal-in-the-face-of-hoarde game Crimsonland, but with caveats:
1. The longest range weapon, spear, seem to dominate, as there's really no variety of ways to handle the enemies.
2. If the weapons do different damage, maybe it would help to make that visible.
3. The weapons all attack with the same speed and damage, so they all feel the same except for the very minimal range difference.
4. I feel like having two weapons could have been interesting if there was a point/variance to having the second weapon instead of just switching.
5. There were bugs, I think? I could pick up all the starting weapons, and the elevator would drop, and the weapons would still be there. Not that it mattered much to the gameplay.
@antti-haavikko thanks so much! High praises indeed! Yeah sorry I found one bug I could fix without changing anything substantial so I re-uploaded :) I really would have liked a bigger variety and complexity in enemies, these guys are really rudimentary :P
I haven't even gotten to 1k myself! Challenge accepted! :D
@hitchh1k3r hey thanks! I totally agree, I couldn't get the arms to target more precisely, mostly because the whole system is a big mess of joints - what is there now is already tweaked after many different iterations... The first one was worse :P Right now it's applying a constant force over some time whereas originally it just shot out with one burst of force. Which you would *think* would have done it but we're not all engineers :P
The downward I've found to be the easiest though, the tanks by my feet are easy pickings :P But sometimes I do miss and eat a shot to the nuts which ups the challenge factor :P
Originally the game was conceived as a touch game, so tablets and such. That it's playable with a mouse is hilarious :P I never thought about gamepad, though yeah it probably would work too! Just add a modifier for the jetpack :)
Thanks for playing! :D
@agecaf thanks muchly! :D And thanks for the info about Wine :)
Regarding the slow-mo UI, if you let go while the line is inside the circle, it won't punch. Only when the line turns red would a punch be launched, so you can return to normal time without punching if you want :)
The robot is a complete hack, it's not actually technically standing up on its legs :P It's so hacky! Thanks! Really appreciated! :D
@peaupote I do agree on the robot slowing down thing - the physics kinda just worked out that way, I should have manually gone in and tweaked it to just stop if it were ever not going slow. But there wasn't time!
Thanks for playing! :D
@pavelsovushkin Yeah the distance there isn't ideal, I should have placed it in another corner. Mainly I just didn't want the UI to be too "loud" so I put them all together. Maybe I'll do a minor update :)
I definitely wanted to add more types of enemies, and waves and such. truth be told I only stopped tweaking the robot's physics and started on making it into a game in the last couple of hours, so that was pretty rushed :P
The mechanic on this is fantastic fun :) The only gripe I have is with the left and right click being difficult to work out in my head intuitively, and because each move costs charge, I inevitably end up wasting a lot of power when I really shouldn't if the controls were more intuitive. I think maybe a click and drag to go to the orientation you want (still costing same power) would be better. So you click, drag to show the orientation you want, and let go to apply and deduct cost.
And the lose level menu is broken :) the "next level" button does nothing so it should be removed.
Good stuff!
The concept is there, but the elements of the gameplay don't quite balance out to form a cohesive experience. Things happen seemingly too fast, robots are dead before you have a chance to get to them, which is compounded by the initial confusion of being completely uncertain of what to do, which is compounded by the control scheme - I think you didn't need a Q for drawing power, why not use the same action key? I don't see there being ever a case where both actions are possible and you have to be clear about which one you want to do? And holding the key down seems less interesting, doing them in increments might be good, like pressing the key twice instead of holding it down and you're not quite sure if you've overdone it or not enough or whatever.
The floaty movement is fine I guess for a system like this but yes a better movement would feel like a real character. With minor acceleration and deceleration, some animation (even if just bobbing up and down) to make it feel like it's moving while it is... well, moving.
Not sure what 1 2 and 3 did, I made things but not sure how they compare to each other or what they were meant to do, that might have been better implemented as part of some on-screen GUI.
Very ambitious :) Art is great :)
That was interesting, I was going to immediately launch into how the lack of instructions or labeling was bad, but then I quickly got to playing with the relevant bits, i'm not going to spoil it here :)
I kinda wished there was more to it, though that's pretty much what everyone is beholden to at jams :) The big question is - could you fail? Don't tell me here, don't spoil it for other people :)
The intro was cool :)
The game itself... it's a fairly standard feeling FPS, which really wasn't fun to play because of various reasons: - The walking speed is just too slow, or things were spread out too far. You're chasing from one end to the next constantly and not much actually happens while you're peddling slowly. Trying to shoot tiny targets with your gun is not fun. - The lack of indication of whether you hit the enemy or not is an issue, especially since half the time you're far far away from them. - Chasing down far, far away ammo is not fun. - Needs more feedback when you lose health too.
The art and style was pretty great, I appreciate the work in presentation. But the gameplay itself I think was a miss for me.
Your self-awareness is refreshing :) Yes it's unfortunately not fun to play, the "best strategy" involves jogging up and down between the machine and the middle turret... That's about it. But really well polished, great graphics, wished there were more variety in movement and feel.
You're definitely right about the need to scope down! I've had the same problems too, and now I build a toy until the last 6 hours and I turn that into... Something. With scores :)
Great art style, it's a shame it didn't permeate through more of the game, like the environment and such.
The game itself is a pretty good implementation of the idea I've seen in several other entries. Brief but well thought out.
The character movement could have been more interesting and juicy given the simple nature of the game.
But cool work nonetheless :)
What really caught my eye are the animations, the good ones are really great.
The game mechanics are okay, I thought the attacks would drain energy or something, but it looks like the only thing that drains is basically a timer?
The bombs were weird, perhaps they linger too long. After the explosion I walked towards it and died.
The jetpack hella unresponsive. It feels like it's on some kind of delay, and that makes controlling it really difficult, I think a more responsive jetpack could make it challenging still while not feeling like it's intentionally broken.
Dude! Superb game! The mechanics are deceptively simple but incredibly difficult to master, it looks really simple from video playthroughs, but when you're in the thick of it it's very hard to actually track everything. But the actions are so simple that the challenge is never from confusion.
Only bits of improvement I can think of: * The on/off states are less obvious than I'd prefer them, yes the wires are there but I guess you've intentionally made them less than perfectly clear. * I'd love some kind of mapping to keyboard to move the little guy to turrets, clicking is less speedy than I'd like it to be. It fits touch perfectly, I guess! * There wasn't really indication of those pickups being pickups - that would have been nice to know off the bat.
That's it really. GREAT JOB :D
Beautifully presented, but not that much substance to it. It's basically solo Spaceteam :) The UI could be done better I think, having to rely on an exploit to beat the game makes it less fun. And the reaching wasn't really explained, for a piece of critical info.
Really really pretty though :)
The idea is cute, could make a meta clicker game out of this, I guess.
On presentation: The simple instructions you have really should be *in* the game. Right there on the screen. Just put letters next to items and people could work it out easily.
There's very little visual feedback of what's happening too. The bars are there but the correlation to action, for example the W to work - I thought you kept pressing it, eventually realised you just press it once.
The biggest problem here is that it's hard for anyone but yourself to play the game. The game could be great.
Hope this helped!
Looks cool, but... Windows only :( I run a mac :(
Well produced, great graphics and the music is great (though sound effects a bit lacking in contrast). But: * The platforming controls are really unresponsive, the best thing to do in the game seemed to be to just stand and not move. If you fall off, there's very little chance of getting back onto an RV. In fact I'd rather you instantly died if you fall off, as trying to get back on and the struggle is just terribly not fun. * Don't think you did anything with the theme at all? * Character upgrade? Died like 3 times and didn't see anything to that effect?
Without reading the textual instructions at the top here, there's really no indication that you're not supposed to build things until the first colonist arrives, which is weird since the game starts with A LOT OF TEXT, which most will skip. I read it all and still didn't get that.
The concept of the game is cool, a numbers balancing game. I feel like the entire map thing doesn't add to the game itself - the important things are how the numbers change when you build this thing and that, and those consequences are completely left out of the UI, leaving the player to guess at the outcomes, which doesn't work well. I think if the whole game worked without the map like one of those clicker incremental games, it would communicate and work much more easily to a player.
The concept of "stable power" also was very vague and needed to be clearer from the beginning.
Has potential but lacking in the ability for the player to understand what's going on.
The procedural generation is a nice touch, it can't have been easy to implement. I would have liked to see more elements of the levels to make better use of the procedural generation but I understand time is always the constraint.
I liked that you didn't go overboard with the power mechanic - so many games just made the power aspect basically a timer and then it just became a mad thoughtless dash to do the next thing, which genuinely felt worse for their games than better.
I found that you could edge away from a lot of enemies without being hurt, but there were still times where you *would* get hurt. That was a nice balance. Though overall it was probably too easy.
Would have wanted a bit more than absolutely random wandering around to find the goal, some kind of clue or pointer but not dead obvious would have been great. Or perhaps just pick one default ending point but leading to that point would be procedural - like how Spelunky does it - you always go down, but how you get down would be varied.
Good, considered, if not really all that mind-blowing :) Good back-to-the-basics.
This is such a polarising entry!!!!
I really want to like it but I really can't say that I do - the design choices really conspire to make the really cool mechanics sort of just flop around. - The game is SUPER JUICY. The shots and effects and the glowy lights stuff are really really fun, looks great. - Movement is great. Responsive, great speed.
BUT:
- Finding the "black holes" and completing the level felt like a matter of rote memory, die, and come back and remember where you died. In the dark. Repeat three times. The whole "light dims when you get closer" thing was not obvious to me, if I didn't read that comment I wouldn't have known. And at no point in the game did I feel like I was armed with the knowledge that the thing I was going after was what was killing me over and over. It FEELS like I just got shot out of nowhere and died without knowing why. It didn't feel like I was running into a static thing that killed me because it was the same colour as everything else. L feel like the goals should be a different colour. I know you've made it like this intentionally, but it just simply wasn't fun. - Getting a good angle to get a shot at the squids also felt really painful to do, it wasn't "challenging" because of a skill, it felt challenging because of controls that felt wrong. The game felt like a twinstick shooter, so I felt I should have been able to strafe and shoot (walk up and shoot right, for example), but the lack of that degree of control freedom made me feel crippled, even though I understand that this is not a twinstick shooter.
I really really wanted to like this!
For some reason there was maaaaassive lag at the beginning and I thought the whole thing had crashed.
The game is pretty confusing - it's not clear what the goal is (not sure if there are, if you could win or not). It's not clear in the game. Yes you've written some stuff here but that's still not clear. There are instructions in the game but sometimes instructions are contextual and only comes up in the right moment, sometimes they just are there and do nothing when you follow the instructions. Some consistency would help.
I'm guessing there's some kind of health system that the donut is tied to, I noticed that he became slow, but by the time I noticed that it was way too late and I couldn't get out of the situation.
I do like the visual styling, background, etc. Could be improved but fun.
The visual style is quite cool, I liked the bold textures and glows. But the game itself is lacking from several angles: The bugs have been mentioned already - they're all pretty obvious and glaring, so I won't go over them again.
The core mechanic is interesting but as soon as you know that you can just walk around with the lights off and you know where the trap is, that's it. There needs to be a counterbalance to that so that the dark is actually frightening and you want to keep your lights on.
As with many of these games, I feel like the *feeling* of the character movement can really be improved, and that would add a lot to it. A linear straight-line movement is very... unappealing. A little animation, bobbing up and down, would have made a huge difference, for example.
Yes g-o made a great point - this looks like iti was overscoped for the time and skill level. it's great to challenge oneself, but finishing is also a worthy challenge to tackle :) Good luck :)
Man, I really want to like this, I love the concept, I love all the little touches - the indicator for a turn, the little map that only works when you're stopped, driving on the correct side of the road, all really cool little attention to detail bits that I enjoyed.
BUT
The game doesn't give you much context when you start out, and the interface, while neat, is confusing. I had no idea what W stands for (still don't), I just assumed that it's wood. Which is a fair assumption because, well, it's telling me about wood deliveries. There are also other coloured blocks. Also have no idea what they are.
Needing to press the map button to bring it up is annoying. Either bind it to a key or have it automatically come up, and disappear immediately if you drive off by pressing direction buttons - there's no need to close it with another mouse press. All these add up to a clunky interface for something that shouldn't require so much action from the player.
Punishing a "wrong delivery" by completely ending the game seems unnecessary and confusing too. The player has already been punished for spending all that time and energy for nothing.
Then, the problem with trying to tie the game in thematically in is that you have some theme in there that completely doesn't make any sense either: Why can you only stop at a stop street to look at your phone but you can't pull over whenever? Why don't you have a car charger? :)
Then the more I play it the more I feel like, am I supposed to beat this with rote memory? Never open the map up and just do it all once? In which case why wouldn't I take a screenshot? There have been several games that I've seen in this jam that has a similar thing - use power to see stuff, or use your memory. I think memory is one of the worst mechanics in games, it's just not fun. If you could recharge your battery power by achieving things, so that the "best play" isn't to take a screenshot, then that would make the map thing more interesting.
It might sound all these criticism means I dislike the game - I really don't, I liked it, but I hope these issues can get addressed and it becomes even better :) Good luck!
A well rounded little game overall! The loop is challenging with a handful of elements. Most things work as expected. Nice.
I feel like I want more points of references that are closer to the ship so you can deduce your current momentum and speed, you can very easily feel like you're not moving. So like particles or stars around the ship would really help.
Cool :)
Ah, ye olde LDJAM pixel platformer :P An olde staple :P Very well presented, great polish, really pretty with great sounds, good stuff. The wall jump is great and the general versatility of the character was good.
though:
- Why even use enter to start? Why not use a key already being used? Moving my hand away from controls to restart and coming back was annoying. - The last level was confusing (SPOILER AHEAD), some walls could be crossed, some couldn't. It was unclear by just looking. Also there was a bit where you could run and run... into nothing. Why even have a path there if it only led to nothing? (Top right). In fact the entire level was completely unnecessary once I just kinda ran towards the exit out of sheer frustration. - The controls were generally very tight and very good, but at the last level the super tight spacing of the enemies there shows that there is a weakness to the controls at tight quarters, either tighten the controls to allow finer degrees of control more easily or don't have such tight situations. - The overall mechanics weren't really all that interesting to support the great feel of the game. Running out of energy over and over didn't create interesting decisions. It was purely a timer that ran out. The coins may have added a cool challenge to hit precision platforming acrobatics but that wasn't really implemented as such. - That bit of floating city in the last level LOOKED LIKE a thing to interact with. But it didn't do anything and felt like it was broken.
Overall, great job :)
PS I just realised that I completely missed the presence of this "turbo" thing. In-game teaching is always better than expecting people to read ahead of time :P PPS Lol then I realised that your screenshot above is old as there's no turbo in-game, you might wanna fix that :)
That was surprisingly cool :) The idea behind it is sound, there's just some executional issues.
Predictability is a big thing - as it goes on it becomes less predictable, and that just becomes less interesting. Randomly getting struck by a randomly directed shot is no fun when the whole game seems to be about working out patterns.
Also feel like the current control scheme isn't a good fit for the gameplay - what if you controlled the player by clicking somewhere and he'll walk towards it? That makes the movement more predictable and more complex dodging can happen. The current movement can work but it just is too fast to control with much finesse.
The narration is a cute touch :)
If this is a commentary on the subject matter, and that it's a drag, then I guess it fits? But as a game, piece of entertainment: - It's confusing as heck, I have no idea what to do, where to go. Apparently I picked up a cigarette, it's now in my hand, and I expect that it's a weapon, but have no idea what to do with it. I have a yellow blob, and people on the street are yellow blobs. I thought it was a jelly zombie apocalypse. - If this was "going to the shops", wouldn't you know where the shops were? I have no clue, there are no directions. That, coupled with the super slow speed (yes you can shift to run but that basically is pointless because I don't know where I'm going and therefore will run out of energy before I get there and be forced to start over again. - The "yellow people" have completely unpredictable movement or non-movement, and move faster than you, and that's not fun.
A very basic implementation of a dodge runner, I think it had potential to be much more, but the problems are quite irritating, which become quite glaringly obvious when the core loop is literally a couple seconds: - The need to use the mouse to start and space to jump is weird. Why even use the mouse at all? - The super precise jump that is needed to completely clear the obstacle is not fun. Way too unforgiving. - It's weird that both landing on red bit and running into the red bit both result in the same "running into a wall" outcome.
"ZOMBIE RUSH MAC CAN'T BE OPENED" <-- Can't play, sorry.
Not sure what the problem is, the controls keep becoming completely disabled for me. Keys stop working. I restarted the game several times. Sometimes it happens early, sometimes late (late as in after I picked up the first fragment).
Besides that:
The plug head dude is cute, but... the main character is a female plug (as in, holes, not prongs), and is drawing power from... Other holes? Would have liked it to make sense, to play a plug that draws power from outlets :)
Controls were fine, camera was fine. Would have liked to see more "liveliness" in the character, I feel that's central to a platformer's feel.
There is one problem I find with the design, when you're running low on power there's literally nothing you can do about it, leading to what's known as "deadman's walk" problem, where the player must continue while knowing what they're doing is pretty much pointless. The R to restart helps, but doesn't solve the fundamental design issue.
Cool! Hope the feedback's been helpful :)
It's really pretty and has great style and music and everything is ace on presentation - but:
* I can't tell where the "too late" point is. That means it's essentially a blind game of chicken. * I don't know if you actually built this to the theme. There's not even a vague connection.
But hot dang it's pretty. So very juicy.
I had... Other things in mind when I saw the production value on this baby, but I certainly wasn't expecting a linear quiz that I couldn't be arsed to work out all the answers for :) It's like a twist that was less fun than what it was gonna be :P
Oh man, I'm in two minds about this one. What makes so different is also what makes it so terrible. At its basis, it's a sokoban-style puzzle game. All good there. Count the steps, achieve some goals. Except that the resource of time is now also an incentive to use memory. I think all games that *require* memory is bad - trying to remembering things is not a fun challenge, nor an exciting skill, or choice.
But! I really like the way this was put together, the darkness mechanic has some charm to it. You could actually do the entire thing without picking up batteries if you just remember it all. Is that good? Logically, I don't think so, but it's intriguing.
Also the control scheme, why do you require a mouse click on a thing when you're REQUIRED to stand next to it? Moving into it should be just as much a valid action. Just like in roguelike games, moving into enemies = attacking. Makes perfect sense. But the clicking also feels like it mimics digging in the dark. So the thematic link is interestingly novel, if hugely frustrating.
Allowing clicks to do nothing is also really frustrating.
Man, overall, I don't know. It's as "badly designed" as it is interesting because of those designs.
Went to the folder called "PC_MAC_LINUX" and I only saw the exe version? No Mac?
This game is incredibly well produced. Everything is well polished......... Except the gameplay? I get the "metaness" of it as a commentary on society and blah, but seriously it's not a fun game. Like, I did it twice to see if there's anything else to it, but it seems like a no and well, it's not fun... Sorry, everything else is great. I guess it's "ART".
Half of what you wrote went completely over my head, and I think 80% of people won't read 50% of it. That's not to say don't write stuff that's interesting about your project, but try not to bury the TL:DR so that people who don't want to have a choice of skimming/skipping and not be completely confused. For example, first you have to read 3 paragraphs before finding out about the pause menu at the last sentence of its paragraph, when it's your most important piece of info for people to start playing your game. Then in the pause menu there's a whole whack of text before getting to the basic controls. All those things should come first.
From what I understand, you're trying to make an engine for bullet hell games? Sounds rad, hope you get to something easy to use for the average joe :)
The game itself: There's almost no feedback on gameplay - It's hard to tell when the ship's been hit, and that's really important to know. The three hearts in the corner of the screen isn't enough.
The whole interface to the right doesn't make sense, there's a list of names, you can click them to... turn them off? Then they have batterie things next to them, you click them to... use it? But then you have to still press keys? Not sure how it all works. It needs to be much, much clearer, and probably simpler, like click to deploy power. I'm not a fan of mixing control schemas (obviously the common FPS is the exception), but it seems like it might work here.
Hahahahahaha! I love it! Genuinely made me chuckle :) though of course we should not buy so much into sexist stereotypes :)
There are some control choices that I think could be improved, for example the running forward - should I even need to press a key for that? I feel like automatically running would be a good thing.
Then the getting up from the chair requiring W is not awesome. Pressing S again should work, and much better than right now.
Wasn't sure how to "get bags". And also feel like it should have something to do with reaching your partner :)
Interesting concept, I usually don't like this kind of puzzle where you basically want to brute-force all possible options to get to the "most efficient". The inclusion of a time limit kind of alleviates that, but it doesn't *really* reward you for going faster.
So on the design of the game - Are there any actual logic to the placement of the numbers, or is it completely random? Is there an "expected cost" that one could work to go under per level? I ask because if it's completely random, then players' scores aren't comparable - someone could get really lucky and just get low-cost, direct paths all the time. Or vice versa. If there were some sort of "standard" per level, either a highscore per setup for all the players who played (around the world or whatever), or some kind of worked-out "par" for the course, then there would be a goal to work towards. Right now, it's just... Random, right?
Frantic fun game :) The music was pretty spot on too :)
I didn't like the fact that you had to type THAT HIGHLIGHTED WORD and you didn't have any other choice. So when you know you can't make THAT word in time, and can't start on another, well, that's super annoying.
Have you played the Typing of the Dead? That was great :) The Trumping of the Dead will make a good sequel :)
It's really interesting, but the lack of player feedback means taking blind shots aiming at nothing hoping to hit the target, and then dying, then trying to remember how far you tilted up and repeating that again and again. For example, if there were a distinct skybox, you could use landmarks in that texture to facilitate with aiming, perhaps.
Right now it's just repeating and repeating, and the repeating takes forever too because of the falling effect.
I see the potential for a "sporty" game where one builds up skill of it, like golf, but what's there now doesn't feel like it gives you enough to do that with.
Thanks, somehow I missed that right click instruction, I heard it this time around. Yes it does make the game a lot more engaging, and it's good that you had it tied to energy use so at least it's not a matter of just having it on - that said, the energy drain is pretty negligible. What I might add would be a target on the surface it lands on, because often at distance you can't see where it is touching.
I do like that you've changed up the level design later to really hide the thing, and often it feels like I would go out, teleport a bunch and expect to die and come back again - making those "scouting" runs rather than actually working out a puzzle of some sort. It's kind of too easy now. So.... I dunno, it's like advanced hide and seek :)
130MB later the osx file simply tells me that it cannot be opened. Tried it several times. You wanna separate the two downloads please. No point for anyone to download both.
This looks hella slick, but the interface is really really difficult to get into. It's a given that noone reads - I tried the thing and went back to this page to read the thing twice before getting a clue about what's going on.
The mechanics are really interesting, but the interface is annoying as hell. Separating the base from the panels to set their destinations is annoying. Needing to click each timeslot to set each of them is annoying (clicking and dragging should work).
The "menu" looks so much like it's part of the gameplay that I quit the game thinking I was playing it.
Ultimately though it's an interesting engine to optimise - I found that it feels like given that you can't affect the number of bits you output, there's not much to do other than to drop your "defences" in some parts and to make sure that you're not "wasting" capacity by over-protecting some parts, and direct all of that to try and attain a mainframe to get more firepower.
That's pretty interesting :) I do wonder about the game beyond grasping that initial concept of not wasting resources, then it becomes a matter of watching incoming focussed attacks to counter and then redirecting everything to offence.
Once you take down another mainframe you pretty much push right through everything else - it's a matter of going to your outermost nodes and clicking all the enemy nodes :P
I just wished the interface wasn't so annoying...
So torn! I really like this as a collection, and there are a couple really cool games in here, but overall, like you're trying to prove that your games are getting worse as you make more? Lol in a way that worked :)
The effort is amazing and I appreciate the amount of work and thought :)
Technically though, I can't believe a game this tiny lags THIS much. So, so much lag. I played the chrome web build, I'm on a mac. And I would say sacrifice particle effects to get the game to play well enough.
Also I feel like some of the games simply dragged on. Cardinal, racing car, etc. By you not booting the player out quickly (or the game being hard enough to boot them out quickly enough) you leave the opportunity for the player to actually get bored. So I think the warioware approach to this is prudent - end each of the mini games sooner than later, one way or the other.
Then, a minor but I think important thing, putting virtuaman first means that a lot of people would not read (a lot of people do not read and it's noone's fault, it's just how it goes) and would go straight in and think your game's broken because the game does nothing, even after reading "oh these are the controls". At least make virtuaman react in some way to key inputs and say "hey man I'm just chilling" "quit to play a real game" or something.
Cool stuff :)
@theloneplant I totally totally hear you on that, I struggled really hard on whether or not to keep the collision between planets on or not - if they didn't collide into one another it made it much easier to form orbits, but then it also made the whole thing less interesting and emergent. In the end I settled on keeping collisions on, but tried to offer some relief with two things: 1. time slows down if collisions happen within your circle - this gives you time to react, and 2. Giving you a bit of invincibility after you get hit so you can swat some planets out of the immediate area for the time being.
If you have any ideas other than turning collisions off, let me know? :P
@snipera I thought about that but there's very little control over planets smashing into each other - I tried that for a while and it just felt like there's not much to gain from that, it annoyed me that I kept losing planets without being able to affect it. And getting new ones isn't as interesting as you could always get new ones...
@theloneplant Don't you see the flashing when you're hurt? There's a little delay before the sun started its invincibility flashing but the flashing should be there. I'll make the flashing start earlier. (I actually never thought about her being the sun, but it MAKES PERFECT SENSE LOL)
As for more tracks, that would have to come with tweaking the physics - I wanted to zoom out more but decided that that's much more complicated in tweaking how the physics worked and will leave that for another day :)
@fiaKaiera I love nothing more than to hear "this stays on my drive". Really appreciate it, much <3! :D
- Really good point about the music, I've been kinda torn about it - truth is I made it in like under an hour with an iPad app (Figure by Propellerheads)... I'm no musician but I love making stuff! When I made it I hadn't gave the planet a face yet and I had Interstellar vibes in my head. But then I realised I wanted a life indicator and the face felt perfect so WHAM the music became a bit out of place :P But I still like that it's a bit ominous and fits the pacing of the game, if not the cutesy face :)
- The physics took a LOT of tweaking, and no, it's not realistic - I tried realistic physics and that was actually terrible to play. I initially wanted a system where every body exerted a force on every other body - which is a cool concept, but can get REAL heavy on the processing. I still want to explore that but of course ran out of time.
- I really do want to do massive big orbits as well as smaller ones, but how to visualise big things while maintaining legibility and being able to control the small scale is a problem I needed to solve and that was out of the scope of right now.
- The slowdown can get a bit annoying, but I found that it was needed when crazy bounces happened near you, our reaction times aren't good enough to handle those and getting whacked by effectively random shit feels bad. That said, the slowdown system could be improved a lot to not trigger when it's not needed - so that's a system I'll look to improve later too.
- And yeah those are cool ideas! :D I'd love to explore this more! :D
- I don't know anything about orbeez... Just googled it and OMG I WANT SOME OF THAT IN MY LIFE :D
@theloneplant that's an interesting idea, I'll give it a think :) The thing with a moon would be like, it would have to either follow its parent body explicitly, or do some kind of trick where if it falls behind it'll catch up, if it's ahead it has to stay ahead. It'll be tricky :) Let's see :)
GOOD NEWS EVERYONE! :D
A post-compo version has gone up with several improvements:
- **Removed collisions between planets** - after much testing and thought, the game is hard enough without random factors ending your run. It's a better call. - **P to pause**, and also zooms out so you can see all your lovely orbits - Better controls - silky smooth :) - **Mouse sensitivity controls** via up/down arrow
Original jam version still up, post-compo version is at the bottom.
https://twoplusgames.itch.io/orbits
GifCapture-201712070937122644.gif
@gamepopper I'll definitely look into getting to the folder easier, if that's possible!
And I was really torn about the collisions... The pros of it I found was that for someone who knows the game relatively well, it serves as an interesting unexpected element in the early game, the cons of it was that it feels like an impossible frustration later (it was nigh impossible to get past 12 planets) which really limited the high score potential. And also for someone just learning the game I see they would often fail because of it. So it wasn't good for beginners AND experienced players.
I have another system in mind for collisions that'll take a little longer to implement where planets combine, so let's see how that works.
Thanks for your input! π
@cppchriscpp OMG that's amazing! β€οΈ
The orbit detection is really really dumb, so it's easy to truck it given the buggy vibration that happens during the fast forward π
Thanks for breaking the game! (Genuinely, not being sarcastic β€οΈ)
I really gotta work on an incentive to play further. It feels like a common thread that players say they like it but don't care to play much further than 4 planets. It's a pattern!
@almost Thanks for your input! π You'll be glad to know that in the post-compo version there's now a pause feature that zooms the view out so you can see everything :D
The swirling them around in the same direction thing is a good strategy that I discovered too! Nice one! π
Also I'm gonna be overhauling the scoring system, which includes the collision system.
Thanks again! β€οΈ
@sir-magic Thank you for your input! The prediction trail is definitely an interesting new idea I hadn't thought of yet! I'm currently of the mind to get rid of bouncy collisions and go for another method of dealing with collisions. In the most current post-compo version (also on [itch.io](https://twoplusgames.itch.io/orbits)) it's currently without collisions.
I'm also going to be tweaking the scoring system too, though I'm not sure why you would want to remove the ability to add planets manually? One could follow the normal progression and get new planets as per progression, or add new ones manually - it's your choice, both works!
@serpentworks-games Thank you! :D What exactly do you mean with the planets thing? You get more planets coming at you as you go, even if you don't add them manually. Do you mean you'd like explicit "levels" where it might throw you 3 at once, or something like that?
And that gravitational mass thing is something I've been thinking about too - after grabbing a certain number of planets in orbit you might become bigger, absorbing all the ones you've spun up. Still have to figure out where that idea goes :)
@racso Thanks! The collisions have been the biggest source of head-scratching, will have to see how it works out or not, I have another system in mind to replace the bouncy collisions though. Working on it!
Completely agreed on the mouse movement, I really should have added mouse sensitivity controls in the original version, but that's also in the post-compo version now.
@fdr scope for progression is definitely the thing I'm working on now! Thanks muchly! As you say, the feeling of narrowly missing getting struck feels AMAZING, and the dodging recalls the sort of feeling I get from playing hectic bullet hell games, so for me it'll be about cultivating that kind of a feeling out of this! :D
@sir-magic yeah you can inflate the number of planets but they don't count towards your score unless you can survive them :) That's the whole risk/reward thing - take bigger risk, score more points :) Sorry if that wasn't clear enough - I'm working on making the game's communication much clearer :)
@nyri0 Thanks :D That's interesting, initially I had the new planet as space key, but then I thought it would be easier to not have to use two hands, funny how different people think differently! I guess eventually I might have to add in an option to disable mouse click to add planets...
@ithildin Thank you! Yeah I have no idea how to up the timescale and still have the physics behave in the same way as normal timescale. I think unity's engine might simply be incapable of doing that. I have messed with timescale so many times before, and usually it's come out just fine, but the way this works makes it abundantly clear that the two timescales don't produce the same outcome. I would love to be able to fix that.
You'll be happy to know that planet collisions are out in the post-compo version, though that doesn't make it *that* much easier... Just less crazy-random :)
Thanks again!
Thanks to everyone who rated my game! The results are much better than I anticipated! Thank you for your kind words and ratings!
I'm actually really working on a better and awesomer Android build, with multiple levels of progression, a health-pickup system, and re-tuned gameplay system that doesn't use the confusing concept of "stable orbits" anymore.
As soon as I'm done with a high score system I'll be ready to send it into the wild to be tested. Hope you'll come join me in feeding back on that version! :D
@mshopf Thanks! :) I'm actually working on the game further and it actually has gone a long way away from what there is here... For better or worse :P
And no need to check, they're definitely not "accurate", I wrote them according to my own hacky guesstimates, and is only single-body. Simulation - The bodies don't affect each other, only the player's body does. I tried a multi-body simulation but it ended up being not fun, not to mention lag the game out at higher counts of stuff flying about.
The idea is interesting. It's like a simplification of how Diablo and other power-up loop with stronger enemies work, I guess.
The "upgrades" doesn't feel more powerful, there's very little indication of how much power you or the enemy has - the "health", if that's it, being a number on a fast-moving enemy doesn't really tell you much. I don't know how much "power" I have through upgrades.
I think improving the feedback could improve the game a lot.
And the controls are really difficult to use, the keys felt like they were all over the place.
So... I like the idea, but I don't know how it works. I get into the game, wait for my turn, try help, try all the commands, and it just says I can't use items and there's no way to attack. I don't know, it's a cool idea, but I think it needs to be simplified.
Also I don't like the way the bot responds to the help command - instead of separate messages, it should all be in one big message that breaks down individually. Right now help is really confusing to use.
Hope to see an evolution of this! I love experimental stuff! :)
Awesome! Really fantastic game, great concept, it kiiiinda fits the theme, but I'm not entirely sure about that :)
Great graphics, nice animation touches and flourishes everywhere. The clouds are gorgeous though slightly annoying when over where you're looking at.
The mechanics are reminiscent of Minesweeper, but obviously not the same, and in that it's like an instant classic. SHIP ITTTT! :D
But dangit it gets really hard :)
Some issues: I can't seem to get out of a game once it starts? That seems to be an oversight. Escape doesn't work, no button to press on screen that I could see. And the "next level" vs "change difficulty" doesn't quite make sense, does next level increase difficulty?
Fantastic presentation, art and audio is GREAT, the comps people drop are just off the charts, humourous, stylish!
BUT... The gameplay itself is very lacking, there doesn't seem to be much more to the game than to shoot everything in sight - hitting obstacles isn't very interesting either. Eventually I realised that since shooting is free (as in, no downside to shooting), why not just keep shooting forever... And that means I randomly hit half the targets, and the other half isn't hard to hit. And it could go on for like EVER, and that was no fun.
The game doesn't seem to get harder then, at that point. I would have liked to see something that made the big head affect the game so the gameplay feel changes over time.
Where's the bit where everyone's running behind you? Didn't see anything that looked like that in the game.
Congrats on your 10 years of LD! :D
Great little package, great presentation and details in this pico8 gem :) The controls felt a bit too slippery, and sometimes the walljump didn't fire when I expected it to (I appreciate being able to hold it down to just continuously jump, but if you keep doing wall jumps they fire earlier than if you jump at a wall and held it down - it would touch but not fire like if you repeated the jump. It felt like a mistake).
As much as the coins as an inversion was cool, it didn't do much mechanically besides being another form of damage, given the health thing. So was the goal to get a high score, or to finish the game? If it were both, I think the feedback loop needs to be much shorter (shorter levels, so you can "bank" your score or whatever) rather than having such a long game then realising "shit I can't get through this next bit because I collected too much gold". If it's just purely about getting through the game then the gold has no interesting tension rather than just being something to avoid like lasers that were pretty much unavoidable.
In all, interesting and well presented! Beautiful work as usual!
It's very pretty - the new post-processing stack is a godsend, everyone's stuff looks next-level now :)
But the controls handles very badly and really let the whole experience down - I was never sure whether I needed to look down at the ball to pick them up (and it would be better if I didn't have to, or maybe it'd be fine if the controls were tighter). The control scheme wasn't bad - it was kinda intuitive, so kudos on that point.
The design of the game is also a bit off - it's really easy to not be hit by the AI's attacks, and once all their balls end up on your end, well, you can take your time tossing at the opponent. But the deflector's charge time is really a non-issue considering it's virtually impossible to toss balls at any decent rate. Even if this were two players with perfect controls, I think the game design itself needs a more work.
Oh the music. A bit more variation would have been very welcome!
So... It looks good, the concept is sound. The whole game is basically a series of UI, and it feels like the UI hinders more than it helps your mission. For example, the planets on the left doesn't map in any meaningful way to the planets shown to the right (if it is I couldn't see the relationship) and that makes finding planets a pain. Then the interface has three focuses - the centre, the left and the right, and doing anything requires you to move from the left to the right and back again, etc. The drop downs don't meaningfully map to the planets at all - if I want to send ships to a close by planet - see the planet that's close, find its name, check on the left how much resource there is, go to the right, hit the drop down and look for the name... It's all very cumbersome.
If the UI can be more refined to present relevant information where the player needs them most, and issue commands easier (e.g. hover over a planet to see commands, click send and drag, or click send x times then click destination... It might not be perfect and there might be other problems but I just spitballed that), then playing the game wouldn't feel like that much a problem.
The UI problems are especially pronounced because it's a race against time game, and knowing what I want to do and it taking so long to parse and execute feels like an artificial barrier. It's like giving someone a rubics cube, and telling them they could only solve it with one hand. It's much harder, but the difficulty isn't the mental or skill challenge but the execution.
It feels like a clicker with really complicated controls. It has potential, but the UI needs much improvement!
It's really gorgeous, and the music is above-par, but really the gameplay doesn't really hold up. Just... Do a lot of attacks. There's really not much strategy or skill, smash the attacks, smash the charge attacks when they're full, smash some more.
I was hoping that the combat had some sort of musical jazz improvisation to it, it really didn't feel like it.
Kudos on a really swish and polished presentation.
I don't quite understand how this works...
You want to shoot the shuttles to get the balls off, but the balls will sink you. What's the optimal play? There's no optimal place to shoot them off (like if you shoot them off over the water they won't land on your ship for example).
Plus it's really hard to tell when the shuttle can or can't be shot, that's confusing.
The aiming of the thing doesn't really work all that well, which means the best move is to just leave it on one place and shoot. Which works because the shuttles always take the sameish path so there's no need to aim anywhere.
It's a black fly... In your chardonnay, it's a game that crashed... When its theme is glitching :) Screen Shot 2017-12-05 at 22.50.06.png
It's a really solid game, very challenging, simple, clean core loop. It might be a biiiiit too simple, though. The graphic style and juice is amazing, spot on, and the controls are pretty good for the most part. The jump height that varies between getting up to the next platform and not is a really great touch. But I found the movement too fast, and left very little room for small manoeuvres, like dropping off the side of the platform and turning around immediately. So that was a annoying. Also the shooting was a bit annoying - I know I want to shoot as fast as possible, but the best way to do that is annoyingly tap the button quickly. That's both tiring and creates a physical barrier to playing the game well - if the shooting speed were capped, you could balance the game to that cap. But now it just means some people will be worse at the game through no fault of their decision making or actual skills (I don't count rapid firing a button a real skill).
I kind of also wish there were more patterns to the glitch to discern. But I guess it's fine as it is, a great big goo of a boss character.
Other than that, really polished, good stuff :)
I really like the thought of the game, but it really wasn't "fun" or "interesting". I would have liked to feel more agency - there were all these moments that could introduce agency and give player actual choices that could make differences in the game, but alas it wasn't meant to be. I ran through a second time without picking anything up and nothing was different... A missed opportunity.
The controls felt sticky? It would be nice if the movement weren't against a keyboard repeat where there was a delay before moving, and the fastest way was to tap faster...
I really liked the little touches that were in the presentation - like the rainbow texts, wobbly texts, etc.
I love physics animations! Any possibility of a mac build?
Interesting to be sure! I enjoyed the idea of the game, though I think the mechanic feels a bit too "uncertain" - I understand that's how physics games are supposed to be, but it does feel like often I would do something (press/hold) a key and nothing much would change. And that's counting in key jams, so I'm talking about one key at a time. Often losing doesn't feel like "my fault", and it would be good to address that with more clarity in feedback to the player (and tightening of physics)
Yes, and key jams ruin this game big time, and isn't something you can control, but should, I think, be something you take into consideration when designing the game. I would have liked to see the game be more responsive so you don't have to/want to hold down that many keys at a time.
Good job :)
Super impressive, given the time constraints and the engine choice - but I guess the engine choice is part of what made it possible :) Beyond great visuals and audio, let's give some hopefully useful feedback:
- The mechanics are really opaque, I'm still not sure how the dash works, sometimes it works, sometimes not. Seems only to work if you collect something, but then... Why should you have to press a button if you can only press that button when collecting that thing? Could you store it up? I couldn't tell. - The visuals are helluva confusing. Yes, the three colours thing is a nice gimmick, but I daresay an unnecessary gimmick that didn't work in favour of the player. There's a ton of trial and error that would have been unnecessary if it weren't for the confusion. - The controls are tight, but it does feel too fast, there's a lot of super tightly timed things that need to happen. One could dismiss this as "noobs stay away" but I don't feel like that's a good thing. It limits accessibility. - Totally agree with @drazil100 on the intuitiveness thing - there are many many many games that I encounter that nail that, and many many many that ignore it and slap players with wall of texts and then blame the player for not reading. And that severely limits the game's potential in terms of DESIGN.
Omg PERFECT. PERFECT PERFECT.
The game perfectly encapsulates the terror of being on a first date. The ballooning expectation that comes with each exchange, the fear of not answering with the right things, and scouring your brain for the right things to say but coming up blank, and all the while time/energy/brainpower runs out slowly. It's a terrifying tightrope, and damnnnnnnnnnnn this gets it so right.
Love that the more you played the more the emergent properties of the game reflecting real life comes through. SO GOOOOOOD
Without that tutorial the concept wasn't so clear, but the tutorial was perfect.
SHIP SHIP SHIP!!! I mean sure yes it could use more variation down the line but the the mechanics are so THEMATIC! I kinda wish you could play this two player, but I'll leave you to figure that out. And with a physical game version :)
The problem with this is that the core combat isn't fun. Dodging and attacking is really bland, so that's really hard to give the core idea of the game any test. The mouse aiming doesn't really work very well.
The inventory system seems superfluous? Couldn't you just drop your loot without having the entire system? Are there even things other than gold that could go in there? I might have missed something?
With that last point - I meant if the entire loot system was just a number, 1, 5, 10, whatever, the game would work exactly the same as now, I think? One button to drop loot. Would have been simpler to execute fit the player and for you to code.
But you said you had other intentions for the system so that's okay.
Oooooh, I like this, a lot :D The idea of collateral damage with forced upgrades and friendly fire that hits things you want to protect is really interesting. It does make the game a bit awkward - like you want to go balls to the wall blow everything up, but you're forced to squeeze out a shot here and there for accuracy's sake. It's a great idea and sentiment.
And all that despite some not-awesome things: The music... It's there, but it's a bit annoying and jarring against the atmosphere of the game. The controls are tight and good but feels so wrong - it's a spaceship-looking-thing that behaves like a top-down rambo. That feels so weird. I'm sure you could get controls that felt good while behaving more like a spaceship.
But again, despite all that, I really like the idea and it plays quite well :)
It looks gorgeous, dunno about the sound since I played on web (am on a mac). Really love the art style.
But the game........... The gameplay feels really lacking. At the base of it, stopping the wheel at a good place is purely a timing thing, and the spots on the wheel basically only do the basic stuff - so basically all you want to do is hit the enemy, that's it, not much strategy to it. Heal when you're low on health. If there were some more strategic choices it might be more interesting, but right now it's just that.
And because it's so straight forward, the wait between spins are excruciating - you know exactly what you want to do, but you have to wait SO LONG to do it. And if you miss the spot you wait some more. A lot of waiting. Gets really boring really quickly.
The mechanic might have some promise if you designed more interest and nuance into it, but right now it's just not a fun game. Really gorgeous though.
So gorgeous and the sounds work perfectly. The little running dude is just too cute. This really showcases what pico8 can do, and has me looking into it over and above my noob unity knowledge :)
The only gripe is that there's not that much more to the game besides running and avoiding enemies, but the sheer amount and quality of juice almost makes up for it entirely :P
It feels just like this one time I had with mushrooms :)
High polish but annoyingly hard. I would love to enjoy it but it doesn't feel reasonable. But excellent polish on all fronts.
I really enjoy the idea of a city builder that is SIMPLE. I've been working on a city builder idea of my own for ages, but have never really gotten it anywhere nearly good enough to show. The balance between simplicity and feeling like you have agency in your choices is a tough line to walk in game design, and just building enough of a system to feel like a complex enough city to govern over is also hard.
Your game looks great, but I have so much trouble trying to figure out what does what - maybe the system works well, maybe the system doesn't - I can't really tell because I can't follow the causality of what's going on on the screen - your text explanation is fine, but noone reads, and the moment-to-moment gameplay relies on feedback to the players.
And then there's the matter of the random builds - do the locations of stations and hospitals etc matter? If they do then I should be able to direct where they go. If not then maybe the graphic you have there doesn't make sense - or it needs to be made clearer that it doesn't matter, that you can see the station putting out fires from any distance, for example.
The icons on the screen aren't really clear - I can understand the fire icon but I can't tell whether my efforts in spending has made any difference. I can't tell if I overspent or underspent on the fire department - I spent, and the fires hasn't gone out.
Then the putting money into things thing - I can't tell what the money has gone to/is going to. I can't tell if I've overspent or underspent - again, feedback to the player on this is needed.
Feels like the dials about spendings should be locked in where they were, having to hit + every turn feel wrong.
Are there goals? Like growing the population? Or keeping bad things down? I can't really tell.
The concept is great, injecting humour in this with parents' call is interesting :)
Though:
I wished it were more engaging - the overall package gave me very little to "care" for. I think it's due to many little details, like: - The overall design is very bland, almost everything is monochrome, and that makes it hard to know what to focus on, and makes it hard to parse easily, makes it tiring to engage with. - The font is not reading-friendly, and that's bad for something that's effectively a text adventure. - The choices could do with some design - have the action bigger, or different colours, etc. That makes skimming choices easier. - The chances of things could be presented easier to understand/read/parse at a glance. - The shipping multiplier could be clearer to indicate that your goods get more valuable after each successive run.
So yeah overall it's an information design/ui problem that keeps this from being more interesting, I think.
Really interesting idea, I think the progression could use some work, and there's a lot of waiting around so you might want to reduce the time it takes to respawn a letter.
The controls could be better - half the time I'm trying to get something to where I want it to be rather than figuring out where something should be.
The pegs that appear and disappear are really frustrating, and not in a good way. I can't tell if it's based on timing or some other mechanic, and that just made me close the game. Some indication of what's supposed to happen would be great.
Also... What does this have to do with the theme?
In summary, I do like the game, but it needs more polish to make it really good.
Interesting puzzle mechanics but I can't help but wonder how much more there is to the mechanic besides "avoid all the first ones, pick up the later ones then backtrack". Would have been nice to see some more interesting puzzles than that. The last level was beginning to feel like that, but again, wonder how much there is in it :) Try working out more stuff!
Cool pixel art, decent presentation.
The idea is really cool, but I really wish the game engages more with it. They basically all die of their own accord and there was literally no reason to think about the mechanic at all. It would be more of a challenge to get at least some of them to the end, which was basically impossible.
The character is also really slidey, so that makes the precision platforms really difficult to do, and that's not a fun difficulty.
Holy heck the production value on this is insane, I can hardly believe this was made by one person in 72 hours.
Polished all the way through, love the graphics, presentation, but uhhhh, not quite optimised enough... I went to the lowest resolution, lowest detail and it still lagged enough to be really annoying. I might not have the best machine but one shouldn't need one to play a game like this.
The controls feel a bit too sensitive? Or just not tight enough. Turns are too tight and there's not enough fine control to manoeuvre satisfactorily.
The health system is a mystery - sometimes I crash once and game over. Sometimes I crash a couple times and nothing. Sometimes I head-on crash and nothing. The health meter is hard to read. The difficult controls combined with this unforgiving and mysterious health system means it's quite difficult to build up speed and feel awesome.
The vehicle doesn't handle with enough nuance to feel really interesting. I think that's a big issue. Drifting and driving over stuff and trying things knowing the controls allowed you to was a big part of crazy taxi!
Omg amazing, really really awesome! :D Fantastic design with the speed + coin pickups, the puzzles are great and mostly show off the mechanic very well. There was an initial moment of confusion but it was overcome quite quickly. Maybe a clearer correlation between the speed and movement would be great if you're going to take it further.
The presentation is top-notch with the NES heritage - the colour cycling and such bring back such nostalgia :D
The *only* annoyance is that I find it impossible to tell which direction enemies will head into, especially those grey blocks. I don't know if that's intentional, but it feels like it should be clearly shown given the nature of the game.
Really love it! :D
There are some really great ideas and mechanics in there, and the sense of progression with different enemy types is pretty rad.
Unfortunately the ideas are let down by the execution. The basic movement, shooting and combat is unsatisfying, there's very little in the way of juice and feedback to make hitting the enemy feel good. The enemy movements are also bare and doesn't feel good.
Controls wise the clicking to shoot is problematic - In this case, being able to hold down the button to shoot at the maximum interval speed would have been much better. Also the reloading doesn't make sense - the best way to play would be to just click both mouse buttons continuously. Reloading should be its own interesting choice.
The way the corpses are dealt with means it's basically a game of entropy - you WILL lose ground to irritating corpses, and the rate at which it happens is too slow for meaningful challenge to set in - the escalation is too slow and that makes the experience a bit boring. You want to speed the challenge up so that it feels exciting, so the player can lose and come back to play again, rather than feeling like you're just waiting for the next thing.
Also feel like there's not much choice/challenge in the corpse piling up - if there were ways to make them sit on each other or something, one could conceivably harness the skill of piling corpses on top of one another to avoid having the field saturated so quickly. This would require tweaks to the rest of the game - player movement speed, enemy movement speed, etc, too, of course.
Flawless victory :D
I usually give detailed feedback and I pretty much have none :)
The graphics are fantastic, the bounce on the character is gorgeous, the sounds are spot on, the controls are tight and perfect, it's amazing, it's done :)
Perhaps the only thing I can offer is that it doesn't *quite* fit the theme so well, but heck it wasn't *the worst* theme fit I've ever seen <3
I really really like the idea, but I have no idea how it works - the centre of mass indicator is a good call, but it doesn't mean very much as I've had many times where the center of mass is low but it still topples.
But what are you *supposed* to do? I see wheels but the tank doesn't drive. I see a number top left with an enemy next to it but it doesn't go down when I seem to have hit an enemy.
The idea is really cool but I really want to have a game to play, a challenge I can overcome, a system I can balance :)
Very cool :) I love interesting typing games, this one's pretty cool, everything works, though I feel like there could be a lot done to make the game feel more natural, for example a lot of typing comes with anticipating the next word, and typing in sentences, which this lacks. Also there's definitely a deadly game end problem as in having 3 lives was almost not useful given that unless you were really good, missing one word quickly cascaded into losing 3 lives consecutively because you're stuck typing the previous one. An automatic clear or something when you miss a word would go a long way towards making players feel more comfortable.
So you basically made a mini Scott Pilgrim game? :) The production value is stellar, the graphics are amazing, the juice is incredible, hit-pause, everything is rad to behold :D
But the game itself is really lacking... There's no depth of combat, you just can run as quickly as possible to the next clump of enemies and bash the attack button and remember to use your charge blast thing. Which looks awesome! But that's just that.
And this has what to do with the theme? I almost feel like you may have thought to build this game without having seen the theme.
A really polished game, well put together, well oiled.
The game however is really hard to wrap your head around - I play a lot of tabletop games, and I like the mechanics and ideas in here, but it's difficult to understand. The "aoe" cards require "activation", but it's not clear how activation works. Like, only "blow up" works with activation? Or does stealing do that? Killing? I'm not quite sure. I think I got it but it's hard to parse.
Don't really like that the two sides can have different cards, sometimes the setup makes for a bad game, but sometimes with the same cards it gets boring. I'm not sure how to mitigate the luck thing without pre-designed setups.
I feel like the last turn has a massive advantage. Not sure how to mitigate that.
Overall great game! I'd love to see it physically, but I guess it gets too fiddly :)
Mac build please... :)
Really interesting! The graphics are gorgeous and the use of that fluid simulation as a mechanic is genius :D
The short term goals were fun to work out - slightly frustrating in the beginning without much of an immediate feedback, but once you get over that hump it made sense. The drawing being a very different style to the actual goblin threw me a bit, and also I expected the bottom right goblin to match up to the potion I was dumping in the pot. I think it would be better to have the next goblin come in later because it's a obvious focal point and can be misleading.
Would love some longer term goals :)
Nice work!
Yeah, the procedural generation needs a bit of care in games like this or else giving players an impossible jump makes them really sad. Otherwise, cool concept, just very bland on execution.
I wish the music didn't repeat that same bar over and over? I noticed that you do have a longer loop, but that main bar kept going again and again. A little variety there would have gone a very long way.
I downloaded the OSX version and opened it - the music came on, and the game seems to be there, but it ran at like a frame every 5 seconds or something. Impossible to play, not sure why. Tried lowest detail settings too.
Mac build? Can't play :)
Lol, it's cute, it's funny, great presentation and graphics, but the gameplay is lacking a bit, I wished there were more interesting decisions or skills than to hammer keys as quickly as possible, but otherwise fun effort :)
I really can't say that I didn't like that, but there's something about the expectations of agency that makes me feel really robbed when I understand that this experience offers no agency... Excellent writing, great visualisation, I just wish it actually mattered at all what I "did" or chose.
I kinda understand that the lack of agency is a kind of the point, but that doesn't make it "better", at least for me.
This would be amazing if there were some agency :P
Did I mention agency? :P
Like, having my decisions and actions mean something in the game, knowing that I'm not just flipping pages in a linear book. There are so many decisions in the game, and all of them made me feel like they could have had consequence. But once I realise it all didn't matter I just didn't care anymore what I chose.
Yes you could say that artistically that's what the game was supposed to convey, but I disagree with that kind of art :P
I like the concept - the design intent is sound. But the execution was not up to the same par: - Can't see ahead enough to make meaningful choices when you make a jump - No indication of how a jump is going to look, again, makes the jump pretty much blind luck
Those are the main points, otherwise just general feedback polish is needed to know that you're being damaged - to be more responsive to what's happening.
Okay, I get it, it's Tetris. The fact that your old board is someone else's starting board is interesting, but doesn't have any actual impact on the gameplay in the end. Clearing the board has been seen in previous Tetris before. Time limitation has been seen in previous Tetris before.
I *love* that you're experimenting with "leave some info for someone else to play with", but this game doesn't really use that effectively! Which is really unfortunate!
Additionally, mac version - after every drop of a tetromino, there's effectively a small lag which is really REALLY annoying given the timed nature of the game. I'm guessing that you're communicating with the server at every drop? If so that seems to be overdoing it. And it really shouldn't hang the game, however briefly.
Soooo, what they say about Ludum Dare and platformers is true :P
It looks good, it feels good. The simple monochromatic style is great. The movement feels solid, the attacks too.
But the mechanic... It took some figuring out, but once you do, I feel that it's really flawed. I've seen a bunch of people use the "more of X = slower movement" trope in this jam, and I think that not every game can be Dark Souls. It's too easy to slide into a bad outcome where the optimal play is to just dump excess and run in - in a system where the excess means something, it works, but when the excess doesn't really mean anything, it just encourages you to reload, shoot blanks into the air, and jump up and unload one shot. Duck down, rinse, repeat.
There's no incentive to not play like that, which just means the best play is also the most boring one. There's a lack of risk/reward.
Oh and the movement is a bit slidey, it's impossible to turn around a bit on the edge of a platform without falling down. And turning around is important here because that's your shooting direction.
Other than that, everything is super solid, the only thing I couldn't find was player health or boss health.
I just noticed that this should be "Dense Revolver" <--- the last R was missing :P
The graphics are gorgeous, the presentation is great :) Played the web version if that matters.
I really like complex system games that are easy to control. I thought this was it, but I tried several times to follow and understand it and gave up eventually. The "clicking on a rabbit" thing seems really really hard to do, what are their hitboxes? I couldn't tell. Sometimes something would happen that wasn't carrot-dropping, but usually a carrot drops and more bunnies come and I just kept bleeding money.
Also, I thought you were supposed to be able to click the checklist thing? I couldn't, and lost a bunch more carrots trying to click on that.
I wish the game would do what I want it to do!
Yeah, mac download doesn't work :(
Yay this one worked! :)
You have a great game on your hands! Six very simple things individually but together is hard as nuts, and that's great :D There's only one gripe - nothing stops you from just focusing on one or two things and let everything else go, and that makes it really easy. I didn't get to an "end" because it got boring after I've seen all the modules.
There should be an incentive to have as many of them active at a time as possible. That'll make the risk more rewarding.
Oh and uh, this isn't something you can fix easily, but keyboard jam is real - sometimes multiple key presses doesn't register all at once. I don't know if there are key combinations that might dodge this issue.
Oh man, what a lovely little game, the sentiment is fantastic and the presentation is pretty good, decently polished. The music suits well, though the sound effects were a little off. Just a little.
My main gripe is that the main "interesting thing" is actually bad for the game - the best way to use the mouse control is to leave it off to the side of the screen and moonwalk everywhere, trying to use the mouse results in flips of the sprite that completely sends the ice-cream flying. That might have been fixed by centering the cone and rather moving the character around the cone, but anyway it is what it is now.
And because of that the game is just catching things and moving on. And the lack of failure means there's little challenge.
I'm not sure how the ice cream physics works, but they don't seem to really "stick", despite being not bouncy. That a perfectly placed ball would just roll off seems weird to me. So if the ice-cream physics were modelled better and more to "expectation" of how ice-cream behaves, that would probably make the game feel even better.
Overall, charming :)
Of course, jams are a learning experience and that's the most important thing :) One thing I can suggest regarding the ice cream mouse thing is not to tie the ice cream to a mouse *location*, but to take the delta of the mouse's movements and apply them to the cone/hand/whatever. So you could move the mouse to the left forever and it counts as input left, like an analogue stick. That's how I implemented the movement in my LD game this time around and it works wonders :)
Hmmmmm, okay firstly, it's a nice solid entry, it works, and works well enough. There's nothing that feels really broken about any of it. Which is a big plus for jam games.
BUT
The game mechanics feel disjointed, as if they were all made for different games. The trail of gnomes doesn't really work with the bomb mechanic, the cross bomb really didn't make much of any difference, the enemies and the gnomes didn't interact in a satisfying way (often you run away from an enemy but they'd still get your gnomes). The bombs themselves feel like they weren't a fun weapon in this scenario.
So... I dunno, it's okay, but it doesn't really stick out in any way.
The presentation is top notch, the music is pretty decent...
But after all the chrome of the great graphics and music, there's not really that much gameplay. - The enemies just swarm up and shoot occasionally, there are no patterns to predict and nothing to engage with. - The enemy bullets are almost camouflaged. For a game about dodging things, this means any lapse of concentration and you'll eat a shot easily. - The player movement is a bit too slippery and deters the player from making daring manoeuvres.
I basically just sat clearing one side of the screen, occasionally dodging shots, and stray off the other half to shoot a few things if there seem to be a gap in the bulletstorm. And a lot of the game is like that - a single rhythm. No rise or fall.
I see that there are more enemies that appear later, but I was bored by that time. And mostly the same applies - except now with the enemy that dashes towards you, you have no way of telling whether your shots would kill it so you don't know whether to dodge or not dodge. And dodging something that fast is again not fun in the sea of bullets and with slippery controls.
Whoa, if that was the core mechanic of the game, it wasn't something that registered with me at all, and I pretty much bet noone else would have got it! If that was the intention, I think the game needs to be more "about" that, and explore what would require the player to interact to cause more enemies to appear, b and let them know that they're causing it to happen, so there's an interesting choice from the player's part.
No.... mac build? :)
Great presentation, lots of pretty graphics and polished visuals.
The game itself - the movement was fine, but felt unsolid. The characters slid around and didn't really feel good to control. Felt too fast as well, which takes away from the skill component of the game. I think slowing everything down could make the game feel a lot less random and chaotic and thus not skillful.
The game mechanic itself was okay, basically a reverse health concept. I feel like there could be a lot more indication of what's desirable and what's not, as getting hit by food and picking up food looks identical and at the speed this runs it feels difficult to tell.
The aiming and tossing didn't feel really good - it needs to be more solid and purposeful, again, it just feels random and chaotic and not skillful.
Great idea, though could be tightened up!
Really interesting, I love the concept and the writing is really fun.
The problem though is the feedback - it's really hard to tell when you've hit stuff accidentally, and the way the game is designed it's very hard to avoid hitting things - being careful is one thing, having to line up weird angles like straight into the ground and such is not much fun, and distracts from the "narrative" - the player is now gaming a system rather than feeling like a crime-fighting overpowered superhero.
There should also be some incentive to hit enemies rather than "just because", like, are *they* causing destruction?
Oh and how you "get more power" seems arbitrary to me? That bit's really weird. You just get it out of the blue.
Love the look of it!
The concept is really appealing, the game design feels like it could be really good, but a couple things let it down: - I don't feel like I can see far enough to make any meaningful moves, especially given the controls: - The controls, using keyboard repeat as a limiter of speed doesn't suit the game. One could "cheat" the speed barrier by tapping really quickly, but that's not fun and very exhausting. It should be a continuous move speed. Maybe it's a limitation of pico8, I dunno. - The drop loot key is wrong :)
Well, seeing more caves and also then being able to access or dodge them (given control changes and making it slower) would probably accomplish the same. But zooming out would make the game feel different, which one is better I dunno without trying.
I would love to check this out........ If there were a Mac version! >_<
Pretty much @fiakaiera said it all - the concepts are solid, the game works, but many little details add up to the game feeling like it doesn't play very well, and those are details that you'll learn over time. Tiny little things like the way the player character moves - having a tiny bit of acceleration as you start to move it, and a tiny bit of slide at the end - but absolutely controllable. The speed of the jump and movement right now feels quite drifty. The "feel" for movement is something you can learn to convey even with a completely unanimated square sprite.
The same goes for the enemies too. They move slowly and sort of monotonously, they would feel much more alive if there were more variation how they move, either moment to moment or diversity between different types.
Cool for a first LD! You'll get better! :)
Hmmmmm, I think this is a case of a cool idea but inevitably it's not a fun idea. At least, not for me. You could call it an allegory for constraining options for players, I guess.
The controls confuse me, there's no point to the tank driving controls when a simple left is left, up is up etc would work much much better.
The download said it has a mac version but the dropbox says it's only the windows build.
Oooooh, honestly, at first glance it wasn't all that interesting, but it's actually pretty exciting. The speeds are balanced just on the edge of being able to get away, so that's quite tense. However the very linear speed everything moves at does make the game feel a lot less alive and exciting - there's a lack of rhythm, rise and fall. It's almost always the same pressure, and you're just hoping the helper cells (white blood cells I assume?) appear soon enough. There's a bit of a lack of agency here.
Also would have liked maybe a bit more straightforward player feedback about your "health" concept.
I think a better and more organic movement scheme with perhaps a skill to boost speed occasionally or something might make this really cool :)
The game's not working for me, on chrome, the game loads but the controls do nothing. Music works. On firefox, it's just blank and doesn't even load. On a Mac if that makes any difference.
@eldogg, good call, I pulled the tab into its own window and it worked, but that's weird.
Anyhoo: Full of personality and charm, despite the mechanics being not very interesting. The web version lagged when you spam too much tofu but that's a tech hurdle that a standalone build will have no problem with.
It's... quirky :)
Interesting game! It was very different from other games of this nature where there's a good growth to keep you going, this feels like every moment was balanced on knife edge, everything is expensive, everything sells for nothing. If I can be bothered to crunch the numbers on feed vs age vs production, it could probably be worked out, but I don't like maths :P Once you realise that you just need enough money to keep everyone alive first (have some savings), then things got easier.
I think the controls could use a little tweak - like for example two clicks to do something could be simplified to click, drag, release. Or hover, options, click. Don't get rid of what there is already, the drag and release would be a more advanced option that saves some time. Or heck, keyboard keys replacing the three options so you can just hover and press keys? The reason is that clicking so much gets tedious and tiring.
I also think maybe a bit more visualisation of the mechanics might be good, I'm not sure how the timer works on bunnies - sometimes I feel like I don't feel like feeding a bunny because it's not going to be useful, but is it possible to wait for it to breed first before killing it? I dunno, I can't tell. Should I be able to tell? Maybe, maybe not, but I feel like I don't know, and that makes me feel like I'm being taken for a random ride, when this feels like a simulation game which I should be able to see aspects of the simulation.
The dark humour here is quite good too :)
The concept is interesting, but the execution effectively means it's a reverse health system. Beyond the joke value of it, there's not enough there for it to be an interesting mechanic in this design. If there were aspects like buying upgrades with the money you carry? Or something else that makes it more than just a health system?
Also when you play with theme like this it begs the question of why can't you just drop all your money? Are you a kleptomaniac? If so how does that feel when you play? Shouldn't you be physically drawn to the treasures?
The enemies attacks are well done, the bullet hell sort of feeling is good. The movement speed is lacking. The player's attack doesn't feel fun. Training your mouse on an enemy while moving isn't interesting and gets tedious.
Slowing the movement speed is in theory a punishment, but in gameplay it's not fun. It's like losing a turn in boardgames - it's not interesting.
Would love to see more design on this concept!
The game itself is weirdly hanging on the fact that its most interesting thing is the thing you don't want to happen. After hitting a few drinks it becomes impossible to play - not "difficult", but impossible. So... Good effort, interesting, would be good to see more design around the drunkness rather than just it being impossible to actually have meaningful interaction.
I like the idea but I have no idea what's actually going on, the initial goal of getting rid of gophers was easy because it was the only thing to do, then everything else feels like I'm bashing those buttons at random and seeing what comes out... Like for example, at what point does it not allow you to progress when you have all cats? I noticed that you can just click on the stuff on the board to clear them. Was that intentional or not? If so then why not just clear cats, drop cats, clear cats, etc?
I really like the theme and I wished it all played out in a way that's much more understandable, and making goals clearer would really help.
What is "threshold"? Is that visible anywhere in the game? My point was that the game needs to give you feedback on what a player would need to know to play the game with purpose :) I understand it's a jam game and some stuff might not make the cut :) Hope you get to work further on this if you want to take the concept further :)
I always appreciate edgy and interesting design, and willingness to break with norms is good.
That said, the graphic nature of the game seems completely arbitrary andI didn't see any reason for it to be lewd.
So... The gameplay is basically meeting dogs, slashing once and attacking 3 times, repeat until dead, go back to the office and come back with more health, and repeating until... What?
Repeated the same thing until 100 energy to see what happened. Then 130. Found a gate that didn't do anything. Then got bored and left.
The game needs to give me a lot more direction so I know what to look for and what to expect. And the core gameplay is completely predictable and not challenging.
Great art, cool idea. But the execution is really not very interesting.
I have no option to loot or not loot? Just hit things or be hit. I guess the skill here is to start your attack further away from the enemy as your bag grows larger. That's not really all that interesting.
The pillars blocking the view is completely bad. The camera does nothing to compensate.
I played on the web version and the death screen is broken - I can barely see the top sliver of the button.
Gah. No Mac build?
No... Mac build or web build?
Really great idea, I appreciate the sentiment and the mechanic design very much! The graphics are also pretty great (yay post-processing stack, it's definitely trending this LD).
But the game itself is simply not fun for several reasons, unfortunately:
The controls - the need to both be close enough to highlight someone and then also to click on them makes it really hard to actually do what you want to do. The hitbox probably could tweaked for that. The way the collisions work between characters make moving through the space and crowd really difficult too. And it's not a challenge that one can overcome through clever moves, so it just feels like you know what you want to do but you can't do it.
The way people turn on you is completely random and there's not enough time to remedy it once you see it. Which means the best way to play is to tell someone, and then just walk with them. I don't know if they would randomly turn, or if they are "born" with being good or bad. Either way, it's all completely random so it feels like there's no skill component. One could argue that it's "realistic" in that way but that doesn't really help the game be enjoyable.
I had to zoom out on my browser window to be able to see everything in your game. And there wasn't a full screen button?
Seems like on principle, you have a sound set of game design that's basically how games like zelda and such works. Predictable enemy movements, attacks, progression via unlocking, etc. It's all there.
But the general "feel" of the game isn't there - when you're hit, you don't bounce back, when you hit the enemy, they don't react. There's long stretches of walking. The dodge doesn't really work because you need to press in a direction first for it to mean anything and the enemies and their attacks move much faster than is useful to even think about using dodge.
So I think that you scoped this game up waaaaay too much for a first game - instead of trying to make all of zelda, maybe try to make something smaller first - the first room, with one enemy. See how you can get one room to feel good rather than so many rooms that doesn't.
Edit: Oooookay, I read someone else's comment and figured out you want your fatigue low. The way the mechanic works you basically wanna spam your attack even when there's nothing to hit. I don't see any reason not to be doing that, and thus this "design" isn't really that interesting - there's no risk in just spamming attacks and dashes.
Cool moving it to desktop worked :) That's weird.
Really cute little game, has great polish, the sense of urgency ramping up is really cool with a concert of effects like the music's pitch shift. The game works well and the predictable paths of people make for a great mechanic.
I would have liked to see people "enter" through doors or something, it feels like that would have a bit of narrative value. Like an introvert at a party or something. Having them pop into existence feels odd, but then this isn't a realistic game, of course.
There's just not that much variation I guess, would be interesting to see how it expands, if it does.
Lol annoying I found an edge case bug, and without a restart or menu button the delivery guy rots away on the surface of the moon for eternity:
Screen Shot 2017-12-07 at 09.50.26.png
(I only discovered the down to restart after reloading the game, perhaps that bit should be on the screen, even if subtley.)
Lovely polish on a simple game, somehow the controls are a bit unintuitive... I've tried playing in different ways, crossing my arms, etc, but it just isn't quite "intuitive". Also I kept thinking I was supposed to pick up the miners or something and kept trying to land with them and nothing happens.
I think the way the game controls need to be more intuitive - like the controls shouldn't be "fire this thruster" but "if I want to go this way I'll press this", if you know what I mean. It can be tweaked to be more enjoyable to play rather than like learning an alien instinct.
Mac build? Looks amazing :)
That's weird, I just checked and all links opened up the right page!
Ahhhh sorry guys indeed it was set to private, I've changed it to public now, THANK YOU SO MUUUUCHHHH
@mruniverse thanks for that input! The point of the game was to evaluate the words and not just "pick out the wrong stuff easily", you know? If you can tell if a word is wrong without reading and evaluating it it defeats the point? There is a way to tell - though it wasn't "intentional" - if you pull a word out of the head and put it back in, the "learned" number would change if it's a correct word.
I do realise that the difficulty balancing still has a ways to go though, and I still am wondering how else I could implement this core mechanic to make the game feel better than it does now...!
Also, I've implemented ESC to quit. It's a minor usability update so I pushed it. Thanks all for mentioning it :)
@ravenflame Thanks! That's a great point, if I work on it further, I'll put in mechanics so that people can avoid topics that they don't feel confident in, or progression that doesn't rely on knowing about every topic!
@m8rix you're right that's a frustrating bit! Though half the game was supposed to be about carefully getting the wrong stuff out with physics. Though that's hard! The game mechanics could be re-balanced to allow for that to be more interesting. Maybe.
@agecaf thank you so much! Love your feedback!
So there *is* currently a way to figure out if something is right or wrong but it is time consuming and dumb :P (if you drag a word out of the head, if it's a right word, the LEARNED number will drop, if it doesn't it's a wrong word) I like the focus mechanic, it sounds like a good idea to make the game less punishing and perhaps even a bit more educational :p
Interestingly, there currently *is* audio feedback that compliments the overheat - the music changes to a more beat heavy version, though I guess it's too subtle :P I'll work on that too!
And yes that sort of various sets is one of the ideas I want to explore for making this game more accessible and go beyond a jam prototype! I also wonder about if I can change the scoring style to make the game less chaotic and mad. Or just better than what it is now, which is a bit too random for my taste. But that's something to think about further :)
Thanks so much! :D
@agecaf so the way it's tuned right now is that when the face goes 1/4 red, the music kicks in, and it's crossfaded in so I'm not sure if it's too late by the time it becomes audible. I didn't want it to be too jarring. And indeed it is later than the visual feedback, I wonder if I could tune it to work better.
The way to "fix" the overflow situation is usually to throw out a bunch of things rather than one thing at a time - it checks if stuff is over the top line of the head. So one at a time means probably more are coming than you could deal with if you do one at a time.
Thank you muchly for the feedback still! :)
@chaotikza you FINISHED the game without trying!?!? Man that random, I really need to tune it properly. That last biology level is insane, I could never get through it myself. So I'm super surprised that you did. But yes the random is too random and I definitely need to tune it. That, and/or come up with a different way of scoring that makes it less dependent on the randomness of everything. I just tried it again and got through, damn I really need to tune this damn thing :P
@keppu Thank you so much for your kind words and great and honest feedback! I'd like to ask which version you tried? I do know about some of those issues, and I thought I had worked those out already (the clicking issue especially, I rewrote the raycasting and I thought it was working correctly now)
@jerripo the art was done in Illustrator, pretty much the default vector art program :) Thanks for the props :) And you're absolutely right, I could have (should have) made some of the stuff less ambiguous!
@keppu thanks for testing, I have no idea why it would do that, I guess this one's for the programming murder mystery books :P
@tasty-jose thank you! A grading system sounds like a great idea! I'll look into that as a system. Somehow :) And I also feel like a system of finding if a word is right or wrong during gameplay would be a good idea, have been thinking about that!
@avavt thanks for the critical input π I do think about the way words may be interpreted directly by different people, it can be indeed subjective so I do want to work on that further if this goes to further production.
There's an idea of holding for a little while on a word to see if it's on topic or not. Exchanging time for clue, which may even be educational in the long run π
The reading and processing is pretty crucial to the core game, as, if the game was changed so that the elements to keep or toss were represented by another criteria of recognition (say, color, or another aspect to perceive about some graphic things), then the challenge changes fundamentally. Whether that makes it better is going to be subjective.
Definitely for non-US people the topic of Trump is not going to be as recognisable. If the game gets further produced, the levels wouldn't be linear and people would be able to choose the topics they challenge. But also my writing is pretty terrible right now, and hopefully I would improve that if it gets built out more.
The fact that the random generation is too random is a thing that I noticed but didn't have time to fix, so yes unfortunately sometimes one could win without doing a thing, or never win. This is something I already know how to fix (I think).
Thanks for your input! π
@gil4 thank you! The tiny word panels were the results of a zero-alteration port from the desktop setup... I was running out of time and didn't tweak the mobile build. Will definitely improve that for subsequent builds! β₯οΈ
@joemag I had been experimenting with different ways of dropping the words, and initially I thought maybe dropping them all from above would make it too easy. But then I realised the physics made them bouncy, and moving from falling makes it even harder to read, so appearing in the bowl is actually easier. If I take this further maybe I'll try to do the appearing right on top so there's minimal bounce and always in a predictable place. I thought being too predictable would be too easy but it seems like the difficulty inherent in the physics is hard enough.
Knowing whether a word belonged was basically the core and the writing can definitely be improved still. I do wonder and am figuring out if there's a good system of auto-correcting for a better collection of words, either through user-generation or through ongoing curation. Maybe.
@somuch omg party play sounds great, but only thing is it's a touch-centric game... I'll have to think about this :)
@rjhelms I've gotten feedback that the html5 version is erratic, sometimes not registering clicks, and so I turned it off. I have no idea why as I didn't run into that in just the web build myself... So I'd rather people have a good experience than a potentially buggy one!
@prajwal Thanks for your kind words! May I ask what kind of problem you had on desktop?
@dleanjeans thank you! I don't really think I learned it from anywhere, I just threw stuff together quickly in Illustrator! :)
@freelivesgames thanks for the valuable input!
I've frankly been frustrated by this concept - it seems quite divisive, some people get it easily, some people completely don't. I personally am on the fence about the mash-up of physics "mastery" being in very polar opposition to the word association "mastery" - the two very disparate skills needed to master the game feels like it pulls in two opposite directions.
The scoring - it was the best I could come up with in the time we had, and while it seemed to work for most people, there were also a significant number of people who straight up didn't understand the scoring. That's problematic and I wondered if it were more a UI visibility/understandability/juice problem or a fundamental mechanics problem.
I also have been trying to make the game feel more thoughtful and slower - first of all I should have made the procedural generation more stable, winning/losing by sheer randomness is boring and I would fix that, it's not difficult. But it's the sheer randomness of the physics movements that's difficult to contend with. I've tried to "settle" the physics more but pulling stuff from below inevitably made stuff fly all over the place. And sometimes it's even desired. So I've tried to redefine the rules of this game's physics, for example, picking up an item would "lift" it out of interacting with the rest of the physics objects, but that created yet more problems, either making it too easy (seemingly) or too illogical.
I haven't thought of different word rules, that sounds interesting though I feel like I have another hurdle before jumping that one - ambiguity of words is a thing a lot of people struggled with, and that's probably down to needing better writing on my part.
I've thought of changing the physics part of the game design to change the game into more perhaps tetrisy, block-driven design with the same word association core, but haven't found anything satisfactory yet.
I think a slower, less chaotic design is definitely the better way to go, I've been exploring that direction too in my head, I just haven't quite found the design that seems to make sense for it. I don't think a frantic, mad dash random audience is the right audience for this. But I might also be wrong :/
Thanks again!
Love it! Great, simple, to the point graphics, the sounds design makes me feel every manipulation of the objects' crunchiness, cool music, great, great mechanics. The teaching of the puzzles ramps up excellently.
One gripe is that the obstructed backpack spaces are kinda hard to tell apart at first, I didn't understand that for a while.
The only gripe I have is that the puzzles have a very try-everything feel to it rather than a-ha! Type of puzzling. I personally don't like that as much but it's still really good!! GREAT WORK! :D
So here's a gameplay question, what's the reason for anyone wanting to actually drop the car quicker than just letting it drop naturally? The countdown goes only so fast, and dropping it will only speed up your demise. The only exception is to "rush" them through open booms. You also have no idea when the booms will come down so it's a bit of a random toss up whether your sending them down there will lose you the game or not?
So if the optimal play in the game is to not do anything... That's a design problem?
Also placing a higher number behind a lower number is instant lose, yet the player must play on unless they manually reset the game themselves?
It's not a bad premise but there feels like there are a bunch of design problems that would make the game feel better if solved.
I don't quite understand: Committing a car doesn't make the next one come faster, but you can start controlling the next one (which did not appear faster because you committed). So again, what's the advantage? Committing doesn't make this car you're controlling count down faster, it just means that all other cars didn't count out more seconds while this next one arrived earlier than it would have?
I would recommend trying to changing the core mechanics to resolve the issue rather than adding more stuff you're expecting the users to have to deal with.
Pretty good! The sprite design has a nice 16-bit nostalgic feel to them, and everything pretty much worked as expected, making it feel quite smooth. It feels like you have quite a few cool systems weaved together for a jam game too, so that's rad :)
The fire's spread speed seems pretty good, feels menacing as well as being slow and methodical.
A few things though: 1. A bit of fire's "end state" feels impossible to know - the very tiny sprite nearing a fire's 0% is unsatisfying to tackle, and when you stop thinking you've killed but you haven't because it's like 1 pixel large, it's annoying and a problem. Rather give the 0% state a bit more visual substance, or give fires some kind of obvious visual cue (black smoke, for example) that makes it obvious you've put a fire out. 2. The fire takes a lot of water to kill, and it makes the game feel slower and less exciting than it could have been. Though the tension of the pace is present in that speed, it also makes killing fires less fun.
The mechanic feels good and sound cool music. The visuals are juicy and work well, though: - I can't tell when the thrusters max out - The way you can move out of the edges of the screen is not fun at all - The limited thrust use makes the game way too hard and much less interesting than it could have been. Conserving thrust to pickup more thrust becomes just about the entire point, and if you miss one you're basically boned. - The charge-up-then-go sort of thrust doesn't feel like a fit with the real-time approaching nature of the danger. The charge-up feels much more like it would fit a turn-based game better. Getting immediate thrust feels better for a game of this real-time nature.
AWESOME! Really charming concept and execution, and the single-player didn't even bother me - though a two-player mode would be a great addition. The exploratory way of finding what scores high is both cool and a little frustrating - cool from narrative point of view, frustrating from trying to get high scores point of view.
The initial confusion of the game is not much of a big deal compared to the payout. Good stuff! :D
Cool style, feels great, music is great.
Gameplay wasn't immediately obvious. I first tried to match the number to the next number, and nothing happened. Then I tried to alternate between left or and right, changing directions whenever I heard a click randomly. After a while it stopped working and I was still confused. Eventually I realised you just gotta hold left or right depending on the topmost displayed L or R.
Not the strongest gameplay but feels good enough that some people might just sit and spin that all day long.
It's a pretty cool spatial puzzle! Everything works as expected, the game design is pretty cool in that you disregarded traditional tetris rules. And didn't have to cut people into bits :P Though it feels like the game doesn't quite fulfil its potential because spatial thinking like that doesn't come as easily as tetris's easy-to-parse spatial feel.
Why was the match-making not checking every drop, and what indicates when it's going to check or not? That was a point of unclarity and that felt unnecessary, and if it were part of the intended design, it wasn't clear why.
It was smart to limit the playing field to a smaller size rather than have it as big as "regular" match 3 fields.
Art and presentation is great. Love the characters.
HOLY SHIT THIS IS THE REAL DEAL
The only problem was with mouse controls not being perfect, this is however a perfect fit for mobile. I LOVE IT!!!
The humour is on point, the graphics are great all round, the music/sound/voice work is fantastic, everything is GREAT. LOVE IT LOVE IT. 5/5 on all counts. GREAT STUFFFFFFFF <3
If any feedback can be squeezed out of this solid game: - The baby selecting and moving is a little less than ideal - drag and release should work, and an indicator for which baby's selected would have been nice. - Is the pattern for the cannon shot random? I would have liked an indication of what the pattern would be coming up? Not a huge issue though. - THIS IS SO GOOD
My middle mouse button is broken so..... :/
A pretty visualisation... But there's not much "game" to it. The scene transitions were top notch.
I feel like I've seen these same mechanics before, the blocks dropping off behind you especially.... Hmm.....
But regardless of that, this implementation feels pretty good, the thing with the two control buttons used, it never feels natural - intuitively the left and right click feels more like stuff to do with left and right, but now left/right are both assigned left, and jump is... It's just quite brain-twisty, and a reaction game that doesn't map easily heuristically is like a rhythm game that forces the player to flip left and right. Or like a QTE game where you have to see a triangle on screen, think about which of the 4 buttons on the controller it corresponds to, then press it.
The turning also feels like there's a bit of imprecision to it, a bit of slipperiness when you turn, which sometimes make it feel like you've turned in time but you end up falling off anyway. That little nuance in turning is theoretically interesting but practically it actually makes the play feel more frustrating - I think the little slip doesn't gel well with the precision nature of these mechanics.
Besides those, this is a nice, well polished package. Name entry is a nice touch, though I'm not sure if it ever gets shown back to me?
The purple in the background is a tiny close to the dreaded broken texture default colour of unity :P
Sorry that there's not an OSX/Web version :(
Interestingly I didn't know that there were going to be a score at the end of the day, I think if you were being scored it would be good for that feedback to be more immediate.
Mechanically, it wasn't super interesting in and of itself. I guess it's a good commentary on the soul-crushing menial task of the check-out clerks under the weight of capitalism. I do think though, that there are interesting things that could be done with the base game play in a Papers Please type of way, where you're forced to make decisions about your own job vs the pleas of a customer who can't pay, or someone who wants to be discreet, etc. I liked that I could scan an item multiple times to rack up the bill, or skip the scanner entirely. There are many scenarios that could play out with this. Could be interesting to explore.
Really solid entry! At first I was a bit confused by all the text everywhere, but figured it out quickly enough. A minor gripe is that I'd have liked to been able to use WASD for controls :)
The amount of variations on the core mechanics is fantastic, the tetris stuff is a great fun implementation. I didn't get to the end but hey I appreciate that it's there for those who want to perfect the challenge.
The platforming controller feels a little drifty and not as solid as established platformer games, but that's a minor nitpick for a jam game.
Solid solid solid. It's difficult to say whether this particular formula is a genre now or not, but despite it being a common trope, this is well executed and still feels varied enough to stand on its own. The size of the arena holds an interesting tension for me - it both feels like it's too big of a decision/interaction space for a puzzle as well as being a pretty good way to allow exploration of the genre in different ways. Anyway, solid solid :)
You do not need a mac to compile to mac with Unity. Just as you don't need Windows to compile to Windows. I use unity, I have a Mac, I compile to windows, no problem. I've seen plenty of other people compile to mac without a problem too.
Is there anything for mac users? Web? Mac build?
Gorgeous and gorgeous and gorgeous. The art was simple but masterfully done, the sounds and music was great, though I think I missed sound effects? But it wasn't a big gaping hole, just a little nagging feeling.
The atmosphere is amazing. Those billowing clouds are just sublime. The models are simple but with enough variation in them to make them look great with static light source. Really good. They don't look like they had baked lighting? Why not? :)
Never found the last secret :)
The sentiments are surreal and good, though the "gameplay" was a little lacking, but that's just the nature of something like this. It's not really engaging in a mechanical sense.
It's good, well presented, everything is pretty. But the controls are very frustrating and I'm not even actually sure if perfect solutions are possible for all but the first two tutorial levels. Can you move an object up/down? There seem to be enough space for stuff but it's impossible to move it up so I can only wait for the timer to run out? What?
Edit: Why wasn't the mouse wheel controls documented anywhere? So it feels flipped, scrolling up should go up. But the height of the object should be automatic anyway. The rotational controls weren't intuitive enough to make the game feel satisfying, it always feels like I'm more battling the controls than the game logic.
But well done for a well presented, pretty game, and fun if you can get the controls to stick in your head.
The fact that you're locking it to isometric means that drag to rotate feels impossible, so if you locked it to not strictly 45 degrees - like crossy road for instance, it may feel more natural to drag and rotate. Give that a try?
And yeah how likely is it for people to not read text? Especially a lot of smallish text. Very. Important stuff need to be big and always present.
Great bunch of ideas here: - Good graphics and presentation - The music didn't feel like it fit very well but that's okay. The popping sound of shooting was also a bit out of place. - There feels like there's too many things to wrangle at once - the ammo crates don't supply enough ammo at a time to make you ever feel like you've got much agency, the need to pick up enemies after you defeat them and walk over there to press E again, and health constantly getting chowed while you're worrying about ammo, etc... The systems feel unfocused. Perhaps give players more ammo per pickup so they have longer time to do stuff that need doing. Perhaps do away with ammo system altogether, or make ammo a byproduct of getting rid of waste. Make more intertwined systems rather than independent systems. - It took a while to realise the E to pickup waste thing. It would be very easy to put that on the screen during play. Don't assume people read the manual outside the game (I often don't and I'm sure many people don't, I prefer it that way because a game can be a self-contained unit the better it is anyway) - Why do we even need a E button for pickup? If the player is close enough to something pick upable, pick it up, if they're close to the hole while holding something, drop it. It seems like a better solution. Pressing that button is not an interesting challenge/decision. - Not being able to see enemy health doesn't fit with limited ammo. - Not sure where the dinosaur player character fits in with everything
The debris side of things feel a bit too haphazard - that mechanic could really have made the game if it were easy to engage with. In addition to them being too small to click on, that there is so many little bits floating around and you're not really sure whether some of them are in the way of things or not make it difficult to interact with the system.
The dark side of earth is perhaps too dark, or if the satellites were easier to see it would be better. Half the trail/circle/orbit was not visible at all so it was harder to plan around it.
The globular nature of the game is both really cool to look at and makes a cool differentiator, but it also makes it harder to parse. It's like the Homeworld problem - lots of people (myself included) bounced off it because it was too difficult to grasp 3D spatial relations quickly. It's not necessarily wrong to have a harder to engage aspect of the game, but I'm just mentioning it as a limiting factor. OR the visualisation of the game can try to help alleviate that problem of perception. The trails already do a decent job of it but it feels like it could have been more clear.
It's difficult to tell when "income" arrives, and how it's worked out. Perhaps it's something that could be visualised.
Also a session is perhaps too long to feel a sense of urgency. Or perhaps the variety of stuff one can do is too low for that length of time. It feels aimless for a while.
Also I can't think of a better way to arrange the satellites other than in a single file around a single route in as packed a way as possible, given the current rules. Any other routes seem to be destined to crash as circles intersecting at the wrong time. The cascading failure scenario is actually pretty fun to see play out - the design could be pushed more to be about dealing with that disasterous outcome, kinda like Pandemic, attempting to contain a huge, cascading mess can be quite fun.
Game is gorgeous and the mechanics cool and intuitive. Just a little bit short of being amazing :)
Mac user here, downloaded mac build tried to run it but it's just a black square, nothing is going on. Tried several times. Pressed all the keys. Nothing.
Solid solid stuff!
Really enjoyed the art, and the way the audio is integrated feels really on-point. The animation is fantastic and so well detailed. This is pixel art on overdrive :D
The only real gripe is the gameplay, it's decent but not great, there's not that much to figure out, more just knowing what does what. Some timing bits are timing bits and other than that it's an elaborate pacman minus the ghosts.
The levels might be too sprawling for the game of a puzzling nature but... Yeah it's kinda stuck between being a puzzler or an action game. Kinda reaches neither ends.
But I still had fun doing the romp and it's a pretty good game for what it is, the game design could have been much worse given the chosen design space, but it isn't :)
Kudos!
It looks cool and feels good, but I have NO idea what's going on... "if no enemy touches us" means? To build the bar all the way to the top by avoiding enemy fire for x time? But when I die and come back via continue that bar is full... And still nothing happens? I don't know. I see sometimes my shots become epic but I don't know why. I see the green things are pickups but I don't know what they do.
The player movement feels slow and cumbersome. The "you're always moving down" thing feels... unnecessary? I don't know. Distracting. The player hitbox is probably too big, it feels impossible to dodge things - classic arcade shmup games like 1942 and Jamestown tend to have a tiny player hitbox so that it feels good to dodge hordes of shots.
The player aiming feels like a distraction more than a feature. I basically left the cursor on the enemy for most of the game, sometimes I'd move it but I feel like that should all be taken care of by the game automatically because it's not really that interesting. And again, distracting. I want to focus on the fun bits of the game, which is in this case dodging, mostly.
Again, gorgeous. But I don't understand the game and it feels slow and frustrating.
Interesting in terms of the message. The music and mood was good, and the way the game "plays out" feels interesting, though unfortunately the mechanics themselves aren't engaging at all. Those zoom moments are great :)
I have a mac so the performance was pretty bad on webGL, a mac build would have helped.
The levels and the character look pretty good. Animation and all that are solid. Not sure if the levels needed that level of detail (cobblestones and all feels like it really drained performance unnecessarily).
Game design wise, I was trying to figure out some kind of rhyme or reason for the things that were "correct", but seems like there weren't any, so trial and error and memory seems to be the mechanic, and that is to me not an interesting mechanic (disclaimer, I didn't read the text before playing the game, I think playing once without that priming is a better way to discover what a game should and shouldn't have. Control instructions, in fact, should be present in the game).
A small thing was that when I initially died and was pushed to the beginning of the room, I was really confused. The ceiling coming down was slow and not very noticeable and it happened a few times before I understood what was happening. The causality of "I stepped on the wrong tile" and "I died and returned to the end" was far removed from one another and that caused additional confusion, in addition to the ceiling coming down not being very obvious, even at the moment of "crush".
Cool effort :)
It's an endless runner :)
There are some design issues to the game that could have made it work better: - There isn't enough view in front of the player so that they can plan ahead and anticipate stuff coming, resulting in a very twitchy, panicky playstyle. - The foreground/background differentiation isn't strong enough, which adds to the frustration of obstacles being difficult to read quickly. The big red cup for example looks just as much like an obstacle as the red pins. Basically, try to differentiate foreground/background stuff so they can be differentiated quickly at a glance. - The jump feels floaty
I HAVE FOUND THE ONE THIS IS THE ONE THIS IS THE BEST OF THIS LD 5/5 EVERYTHING IS AWESOME
I love the little build-up animation of each of the things, love the simple feedback of smiley/sad face, love the checklist system that makes things so clear. LOVE LOVE LOVE
Minor feedback: - Drag to place multiple things, but it's really not a big issue because the levels are generally small. - Want a clear all button
7/5 would play forever
Very cute :)
The premise is good, the graphics are superb, the music worked well, top notch presentation overall.
The writing deserves a special mention for being A-class B-grade stuff.
The gameplay though didn't really live up to the premise :( I really would have liked to see more interesting interplay in the way the terrain worked, if the players had to run around on them, for example. And I wasn't really sure if there was much interplay besides forests turning into fire tiles after use. Which seems pretty arbitrary, especially since there wasn't much else I saw in that vein.
There needs to be that full screen button for the web build, I had trouble fitting everything into my screen.
But a solid display of your powers :) Well done :)
Really pretty, nice graphics, cool music.
Gameplay wise: - Is there any reason to not push the "brush size" up to the max? If there's no point why not set that as default? Is there any challenge to pushing the mouse wheel up a bit? - Is there any challenge other than clicking quickly and finding everything and destroying them as quick as possible?
Ahhhhhhhh I love this idea because I've had it since YEARS ago and hadn't been able to make a decent enough implementation of it yet, this looks sweet but I can't play it - OSX/Web version???
Hmmmm downloaded the Mac version, extracted it and when it ran it said it was damaged and can't be opened :/
I don't think it's the unknown sources thing, I know how that works, right click and open. Every other game I downloaded worked like that so it's not really that I don't think.
I followed the instructions on that page and I already have the most relaxed security, so it's not that.
Hey no worries, thanks for trying, what engine was this in?
OOOOOOOOH
This is really quality work, fantastic the amount of game design squeezed in there. The mechanics are a little annoying, clicking to place things, though it wasn't that bad as there were not time pressure.
The link to the theme feels tenuous at best though, that's the one major gripe.
The music gets a bit annoying but it wasn't really a huge issue.
Though I'm really in awe of the game design. Mmmmm delicious. But it *was* perhaps a bit hard to solve, and perhaps a tad tedious, but that's forgiveable for such a short game.
Minor gripes with the controls - the character was more slidey than I thought necessary, and it was a bit annoying that each tap of the jump key didn't necessarily gain you enough height to clear one block - which seemed completely unintuitive as that's the minimum height anyone would want to jump. It made jumping stairs more annoying than it needed to be.
EXCELLENT WORK SIR!
Oh man I really want to like this!!!
The graphics are awesome! I love the little dudes wandering around, I want more of THAT! The sounds are minimal and spot-on, and there's only one thing that wasn't clear immediately, which is a mostly a win in a jam situation (it wasn't clear that after a move you always get one attack, I was under the impression that wherever you moved was the one move you had)
Crit: - The game feels bifurcated. The two systems of fighting (tactical grid vs little soldiers running around) - I'm not sure if they mesh as well as they could. - Lack of AI :( This is a big one unfortunately. Even a dumb AI would have been great. - The theme... This feels like a shoehorned theme. Incidentally just like another game Cartoon Tactics. - Not sure how well the simulated battles fare, it feels almost random sometimes. - The differentiation between the two teams on the sprites (on the squared map) needs to be a bit better.
I do like the idea! Hope you work on it more.
Did 16 people really make this one game? :O That's gotta be a statistical NIGHTMARE.
Any way Mac users can try it at all?
Not a bad game, great for 5 hours, but has problems:
- Collision - sometimes you can be stuck not being able to jump with nothing above you - That jump is really floaty which makes the game feel less solid.
That's it I guess. Music is competent but short looped which gets repetitive, game doesn't have too much more to it than just this core.
Great graphics and presentation. The theme fit was fine, but not mechanically good. The biggest question is why do you require the player to switch weapons to use a hammer when literally allowing the other button to BE the hammer button is much easier? It feels like an artificial barrier to make the game more difficult than it is. It's a frustration rather than a challenge. Also, the hammer can't damage enemies? Or at least that's how it felt? That feels counter intuitive if it's the case.
Anyway good execution, not sure about the core mechanics.
I really like the premise. Bullets that don't disappear sounds like a fun thing to play with. But the execution of the concept feels like a missed opportunity:
The bullets are stuck completely where they are left, that means often the way forward is blocked off and you have to reset the level, which is really annoying for an action game of this nature. Then the way enemies take so many hits to kill means that you're inclined to spray, which leaves a bunch of bullets lying around, which blocks the way, which makes you have to reset the game...
The bullets, after they're "dead" should have been able to be pushed around via physics, and/or interact with enemies like block their path or something. That would open up a whole new avenue of interesting interaction and perhaps not necessitate restarting a level every time you missed a bunch.
Enemies' shots also becoming obstacles is also very frustrating.
And it would be good to be able to see the enemies' health so you know how many times it still needs to be hit to kill it, especially with excess bullets becoming a nuisance.
As it is now the game encourages the player to stay as far away as possible at those heads and shoot them before they move at you, which is not very interesting or satisfying!
Love the concept! Needs more design development!
The easy mode just feels like a chore. Taking away the time pressure, you're just trying to place things perfectly without much of any challenge.
Hard mode feels a bit arbitrary, I don't know when a line would clear or wouldn't clear, so I find it hard to feel like my actions have much tactical significance. Sometimes lines form and lines form and form and I have no idea why. I feel like there needs to be an indicator to show how lines are checked or if a line is about to form or something. Otherwise it feels random.
Pretty solid entry!
The theme feels well-used, the graphics and juice are good, the controls are good and works as expected.
Minor gripes: - The gameplay does start to feel repetitive pretty quickly, clicking the mouse repeatedly is not fun. An auto-fire with a capped maximum fire rate would have been good. - Would have liked to see a health bar or something on enemies to see how many shots they still will take before dying. - The music is a bit too loud and repetitive and doesn't feel like it suits the atmosphere of the game. - Why are you shooting a bubble gun? I dunno, it doesn't feel intuitive, but this is very minor :)
Great art! Though the animation could have really been upgraded to match. Initial impressions are good as the feedback is juicy and shaky, and I like the enemy bits that litter everywhere (though they don't do much besides being stood on - it could have been cool if they did more than that). Though after that first blush some issues show up:
- The movement and jump feels drifty - Screenshake on every shot... Is probably excessive. Or it might be just the individual shakes are too hard/too long. - Sometimes the enemies come at you from impossible angles, either from the air or because you're standing on a big pile of stuff and you can't get on their level to shoot them. While that's an opportunity to present a challenge, right now it's mostly just run away and hope you can run far enough that they get down low enough to turn around and shoot them. If an enemy come from the other side in the same way you're borked and can't do anything about it. Dead-end situations are not interesting. - The shot sounds gets on your nerve. - There's no reason to ever not shoot, unless you're annoyed by the sound. There's no risk/reward regarding not shooting. So you might as well just shoot all the time. - Mouse controls feel unnecessary since you can't aim. Why not use a key?
The art is the best part here! Hope you work on more stuff to make that art really kick gameplay ass :)
I like the idea and I love the little touches that are abound in the game - the variety of stuff that you can miss and wreak havoc with is charming. Watching the inferno from way above is satisfying, if in ways counter to the success of the game :)
There is very little sense of urgency or direction - it shouldn't take me a long long time of pressing the spacebar mindlessly while trying to lose, to lose. Losing the game should go a lot faster, and winning, or persisting in the game should feel like it takes skill. The player has too much "health", or tolerance, I don't know why it's called that, or why it's not displayed more obviously. It should be.
The way the choppers approach the tower, it's a crapshoot to see whether the rope is swinging in the right direction, so it feels like it's half luck until you wait for long enough, which is a really boring "strategy" if you're trying to play to score. I would suggest some kind of camera change that allow the player to feel like they're getting information that is useful. Similarly, the mechanics of the swing could do with some more feeling that the player knows what's going on, or has influence over what's going on.
I second everything @ian-kettlewell said above too :) I really like the idea, hope it goes further :)
Moody, great art style. Good presentation.
The gameplay itself is okay. There are moments of tension, but as soon as you understand that there are no real threat from anything, the tension dissolves and you're just kinda trying to get through menial activities to get to the next bit of animation.
Really cool art, kudos for that.
Lovely entry! A solid romp through and through. I really enjoyed the ambient sounds and the way there's always something to do, just like being a real life party host :) There's a minor quibble about the "flatness" of missioning, like it's consistent to the point of predictable, which is something that could be tweaked if you're developing this further. The way the guests don't move about is a bit annoying as it both feels lifeless (despite the lovely ambient sounds) and clogs up the space.
I kinda wish the hand icon thing meant something. It feels a bit arbitrary. If developing further I'm sure you have more ideas. Like a glass of wine that you pour on someone to make them leave :P Or something :P
And I guess it eventually needs more depth in how you walk through people and move people around.
Good entry! :D
Mac build doesn't seem to run... Sorry.
Rate some games to get more visibility, that's how Ludum Dare works. I see right now you've given 0 ratings and you're gonna struggle getting ratings if you don't give some. 20 is the good amount to get decent visibility.
The link goes to a 404 on itch hey...
Well done on completing something with a large scope :) Now prove you can take the mechanics and make it sing :) By that, I meant that the game works and everything works well enough, but the game lacks interesting decisions, and the shrinking arena doesn't really feel like it interacts much with the rest of the game, it's probably added just for the theme.
Definitely impressive amount of work that went into this, looks great, but needs more game design love!
Mmmmmmm
There's lots to like, the reference to Hitchhiker's Guide, the humour inherent in the planets' quibbles, the chaos of everything everywhere... But it's not really hitting the spot.
I've been into orbital mechanics since my last LD, with my game literally called "Orbits". While I really appreciate the idea that you got here, I just can't get to grips with it. I think there are a bunch of small details that might improve the overall experience:
- The initial learning curve is deadly, the game doesn't tell you much at all, and everything looks the same. I couldn't tell which planet *I* was supposed to be - differentiating the player would be a good thing. The same thing with the player planet's trajectory line. - The asteroid flinging mechanic is sound in theory but the fact that it spawns where you release instead of where you click is really confusing. Click, drag, aim, release. It should work like that. - The trajectory lines seem to update in weird ways? Dunno, they seem to flicker rather than change smoothly. Also again the fact that the player's line's not differentiated makes it difficult to understand. - Where's the theme? I don't get the relevance to the theme...
You have a bunch of things in place and that's good that you got content down, but the core mechanics are missing a whole bunch of things. This feedback hopefully might help you understand what improvements you might have made or what you should have focused on rather than building out more content - the core design and feel is so much more important.
- Foreground (platforms) are the same texture as the backgrounds. Often it looks like you're just floating in the air. Can't really tell where you can stand and where not. Even the torch didn't help that that much. - There are no ammo pick ups are there? That's a problem, of course. - Reloading automatically should happen when you try to fire without bullets. - The movement is super fast and that makes it difficult to feel like you're in control. Enemies appear into view too fast. Well, if you can see them: - The enemies are too dark. In fact everything seems to be too dark. I know the torch is a mechanic but it seems superfluous. And waiting for it to charge back up literally means to stand around and do nothing, which is not interesting. - The glowing light things... I presume they were meant to do something in the first place? In any case they don't do anything now and that feels weird. - I only read after playing that it's now a "survival arena". But then the text that comes up that makes the game feel like there's a goal shouldn't be there anymore. Either change the text (shouldn't take long) or remove the system altogether... It's confusing.
Good luck to further game making endeavours! I hope you focus whatever you make next more on exploring and refining core mechanics!
I really did enjoy the puzzles, though the puzzle mechanics felt weird. Feels like a lot of weird spacial trial-and-error rather than the feeling of "ah I got it" which is what I feel like puzzle games should promote. But it's definitely well done.
Though I have no idea where the theme fits. I'm suspecting it wasn't made to theme.
Great polish, good sounds and graphics! I love the popups, the writing on some of them are great.
Though the gameplay: - There's not much urgency. The enemy moves slowly and all enemies feel pretty much the same, the encounter feels monotonous. It takes forever for you lose the game even if you sit back and do nothing, which is not interesting for an action game. - The controls - it should allow for maximum rate of fire if you just hold the mouse down. Needing to click the close buttons is bad enough, clicking rapidly to shoot is a huge (boring) chore. - The popups, while novel and cool, are largely a hinderance that's not creative or interesting to overcome. That leads to the ideal gameplay being to ignore them completely. Which gets boring.
Man, I really wish this was all I wanted it to be... GREAT presentation. It looks good, and it sounds good. SimCity 2000 esque in the best way. But...
1. The placement - The mouse pointer should dictate exactly where to put a building. Right now not being able to place where I want to place a building is a huge frustration. The pointer should only interact with the base square of a building space. 2. Controls - I went back to the page to read about camera controls - those things should be on-screen, because why not? Also the camera shouldn't be able to look up/down? I don't see much benefit in that other than being frustrating. 3. Not knowing what next piece I'm going to get is... unfair? In a game where planning is being promoted? And I'm not just talking about the building, but the next ground/level piece. 4. The lining up of pieces - After level 1, I couldn't tell how the building I'm supposed to place lines up with buildings under them. 5. There seem to be too many spaces I want to put into/onto but can't. There doens't seem to be rhyme or reason as to where they can/can't go down? 6. Combo system? Can't tell how that works.
Really like the idea, I love city builders, and hope to see this evolve :P
It looks incredible. Great work on all the visuals.
But the gameplay... - There's very little control over the robot, and even just walking a couple of steps could cause it to fall over. - With the jetpack on you can move really fast but with almost no real control. - The train zooms away super quickly and catching up involves turning as little as possible while flying forward. Not fun. - Any bump while you're zooming and you'd go flying off and probably never see the train again due to the bad controls. - The scoring is a mystery. There needs to be some visualisation of when score is added, how much, etc. - Just really the controls man, it's the whole game. And so important. - There's no display of how much life you have? Getting shot doesn't even tell you? - Also... Theme?
Hmmmmm
The game is pretty straighforward, do a thing as quickly as possible, avoid some things.
The controls are responsive and breaking the blocks work well.
The game is a long game of attrition though, it takes a long time to lose if you're doing a half-decent job of running from spot to spot, and there's not much challenge or variety in doing that. Getting a block dumped on you by mistake is probably how most sessions would end.
The lack of a timer running during gameplay takes away the sense of urgency or "about to beat my old score" feeling that there might have been.
Oh one more thing, feels like blocks going pink under other blocks are effectively invisible and not quite fair. Losing to that is really frustrating. The moving blocks shouldn't be stealth.
SCV simulator 2000 :laughing:
It looks cool and has promise, but there are a bunch of issues that make it less than ideal: - The rotation controls are bad. A single button to rotate or a keyboard key to rotate is what you need. Individual rotation buttons per building is silly and cumbersome. - The help > nope button... But why? - I assume that the shots turning in mid-flight is a bug. - If you build stuff, you're pretty much set to not die for a while. There's little sense of urgency in progression. The balance is off but I guess that's a long term problem. - I couldn't really tell much about the two resources the game seems to have. Resource generation is not visualised.
LOVE the art. Cleaning up the core gameplay and it could have great potential.
The game feels super juicy, the animation and feedback is fantastic. The art is great and the sounds fit awesome. I wondered if the sushis were animating to the rhythm - if so that'd be a really nice detail.
- The gameplay feels fine though I would have liked some things to change up the game a bit over time. - As it is now, looking at the scoreboard it looks like what you "want" to do to maximise score is to just catch the stuff that's the most efficient in terms of space to score ratio. I couldn't really be arsed to work that out. - There's no urgency - for what looks like an action game, the lack of time limit means I should just wait to get the best catch, and waiting isn't fun. - I found it a bit weird that the sushi "changes" between the pickup and the drop. Surely it wouldn't have been difficult to make the two pretty consistent AND still match the criteria for fitting into spaces well? It felt like an unnecessary thing to add which doesn't really add to the gameplay or presentation. - The catching mechanic is timing, the packing mechanic is spacial arrangement, the two mechanics don't interact in an interesting way. The whole timing part could be taken out and just let players drop sushi and it would have been pretty much the same game but faster. What I'm saying, I guess, is that I'd like to see mechanics that interact wit each other more meaningfully.
First impression: I really liked the way the player was animated. It felt good and responsive.
Hellishly hard in a way that feels like there's no way around it. Player movement speed vs enemy bullet speed vs enemy from all directions makes it feel like it's literally impossible not to get hit. In "difficult" games like Dark Souls and Hyperlight Drifter, for example, you want to give the players a way to not get hit if they know what they're doing, despite it being super hard. This feels more helpless.
That first issue is multiplied to other aspects of the game - looting feels impossible, collecting things feels impossible, etc, because you're just hammered from all sides.
Then visibility - enemies are really dark, so are the "loot" spots, without stumbling on a spot accidentally, I didn't know that was a thing that could be done.
Then the shooting - forcing the player to click as fast as possible to shoot is obnoxious. It might be "more challenging", but it's challenging in the wrong way. I don't want to be challenged by how fast I can click my mouse. I want to be able to decide whether to shoot or not, or to test my accuracy. Giving the player a rapid fire to the maximum fire rate you want to balance the game around.
The premise is sound and presentation not bad, but the mechanics need to be tweaked for the experience to be enjoyable.
Mmmmmmmm
I really like the feel and presentation, hitting the junk is juicy and the screenshakes are good. Things pop and bop and that all feels good, but the gameplay problems bring it down: 1. The player's movement is FAST. TOO fast. That, combined with the movement being tied to the same direction as shooting, means if the player moves a lot they'll definitely crash a lot and die quickly. That encourages the kind of play that is to stand still somewhere and just shoot. 2. Standing still and shooting is not interesting. 3. For games like this the player's movement being decoupled from the movement direction of the player is important to make the game more dynamic. 4. Yes a forewarning system for when stuff might appear right on top of you to do massive damage would be important.
Looks and sounds good. The effects and the explosions are particularly well done.
The gameplay is a bit conflicted - the combination of the 1 hit death with the slippery controls that pushes the player towards being very very careful means that a lot of the game ends up being little bits of thrust and drifting towards targets hoping not to get hit. Much tighter controls might make the game feel more active and encourage players to go after goals with some kind of bravado. But the one hit death really takes that away.
Oh and I didn't even notice that the ship scale was changing on its own. Does the ship's scale actually mean the scale of all the rocks around? If so, then there's something to note - if the "world" scales, the the position of stuff would also change - not just the scale of all the rocks. So if the rocks are scaling only to communicate a scale change, it reads wrongly.
The icons are weird. The two arrows pointing outwards meaning "scale down" is completely the opposite of what is expected from that visual.
Mac/Web?
Solid! Gorgeous effects, great sounds (a little bit underwhelming but it's not a big issue), great set of mechanics to explore and provide choice with. Generally great!
Thanks for the mac version :)
Minor thing: I think the hitbox on your attacks are not very clear, or not big enough, or not wide enough. Often it really looks like you'd hit but you just don't. It gets quite frustrating. I don't actually like the mouse aiming like this - I would prefer either a second stick type of control where it's not about where you aim the cursor but about the direction of the movement, or just remove the aiming altogether and let the attack happen where you're facing. That would mean the directional movement need to be more responsive, but that's actually a good thing.
Good stuff, congrats :)
It's an interesting idea and the execution and presentation is really good - great graphics, animations, movements. But the game itself feels like a huge chore, with the core mechanic being... Either memorisation, or really menial storage management, neither of which are fun or engaging. Perhaps if the inventory management were more intuitive and less clunky (maybe with mouse and keyboard, drag to delete), it might be more interesting, but as it is now it's more a matter of frustration than challenge.
Good first impression, decent core idea. Some constructive crit though:
- Where's the theme? It feels like it was made completely independent of the theme? - The player's hit box is too big, often it feels like you're hit without seeing how. - There's little anticipation for the enemy's shots, and combined with their speed, dodging them feels unsatisfactory. If the enemy looks like they're about to shoot before shooting it makes dodging more interesting. - There's little visual association between the scrap number and the costs for upgrading - forcing the player to look to the left then right then work out if they have enough for an upgrade is unsatisfying. Giving them the "not enough scraps" feedback also takes them away from the action where they should be focusing. There should be a big light that lights up to say "ready for upgrade" on either of the upgrade types that make it easy to see at a very quick glance what's possible right now. - The icons for the weapons feel unnecessary? There's no communication value or gameplay in what the icon looks like. I wouldn't even know if it actually changed... I don't know if it actually changed.
Wowee, I have such mixed feelings. On the one hand, it's stupidly impressive that you got all of that content into the game. Menus, dialogues, multiple levels, EVEN CUTSCENES WAT. It feels like a complete game. And the core idea and mechanics feel pretty good, the juice is pretty good...
BUT.
But the core game loop itself feels lacklustre, are you trying to stomp on the opponent? When you land "on" the opponent, it feels ambiguous, you automatically jump up and to the left? That feels weird. Feels like I'm not in control. Are you trying to stomp out blocks from under the opponent? Basically it feels like I'm just waiting for the other player to make a mistake.
Initially I actually thought there was a Smash Bros mechanic of health going on where the more you get hit the more you go flying when you do get hit, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
And animations - everything feels so good but there's no walk cycle?!?!??! It feels so weird drifting around the way they do now.
I really want to love this!!
I had one more thought - given the exact same mechanics as now, it would feel so much more urgent and the running out of space theme would be much more meaningful if the arena were a LOT smaller like 10 blocks small. Just tiny. Give it a shot maybe.
Not a bad game, it's got all the right bits in, I think a few things could improve the experience: - A game session is too long, there's not much sense of impending trouble - the blocks that fill up the screen seems to be the primary mechanic for that, in that case it should fill up faster - though I also feel like those blocks are a bit weak in terms of gameplay challenge, they don't present any risk/reward to the player, which is what you want in a game like this. - The speed of progress should perhaps accelerate over time or just be faster, again, the current setup feels like it's too slow and it's easy to stay ahead of the movement on the top of the screen. It doesn't feel urgent. - More variety in level setup - there are only so many platform variations, leading to a lot of the same kind of movement patterns. The jump-from-platform-exactly-below got annoying for me. - Variation! I see you had powerups in the "shop", but a) It takes too long to get stuff enough to upgrade, b) I could not figure out where the shop was for the life of me, the message popped up telling me to go buy stuff but doesn't say how. There are no prompts on screen and even reading stuff elsewhere didn't help. Help your players. Be straightforward. Treat them like idiots (in terms of instructions)
The humour in the writing is good, though I feel like a bit too drawn out. Also the font there is quite difficult to read, the kerning is too small.
Then from the dialogue/monologue to the start of the game there should be some kind of indication, I went from clicking the mouse to the next second everyone dashing off and I was like "huh". Keeping the controls all-keyboard would have been cool.
The game itself... I basically just held up most of the time. The AI wasn't challenging but the course itself didn't offer much challenge either. Some of the later obstacles did "get me" a little but overall it was pretty easy. The balancing between the player speed and the speed of the obstacles and the size of the entire course could be balanced more in such a way that the player could look ahead and anticipate more stuff, while there might still be tension in being able to dodge or not dodge an obstacle, as well as opponents gaining on you. Right now it all feels quite "lonely" throughout the race.
As I said over twitter, I have a soft spot for this idea as it was an idea I had SO MANY YEARS AGO and I haven't been able to build the right game with it yet. It's super impressive the amount of work you've put into this little guy, and it's already on the Play store already, lol :)
It's super gorgeous, and the jiggle as you walk is a great little detail.
Some feedback on the gameplay though: - The physics of the pickup and such is a bit off, I'm often throwing stuff out without meaning to. - The "peek ahead" thing takes too long and while that's happening it's difficult to do anything else. It really should be a quick thing, and probably not a whole camera transition. Quick zoom out and back in while a button is held down, probably. - There's no feedback about how much weight you have - or if there is I didn't find it. Which makes the overemcumbered ending come suddenly and without warning, and is unsatisfying. - The core problem though is that there's not much decision making or skill in the core game loop - popping almost anything in the weapon rack is pretty much all there is to do, and deciding whether to fulfil a quest or sell some loot feels... Not like a real decision if you want to score.
Still a really good effort, I love the concept and execution :)
All round great game! Fantastic theme and interaction. I can't really fault it much on any aspect. GREAT GREAT GREAT STUFF!
Pretty good concept and execution with a few bits that feel like it could really make the game better, design wise: - The mouse aiming feels unnecessary. I'd much rather have had a pure keyboard control scheme where if I walk left, I face left, etc, and the attacks would face where the player faced. - There's no way to deal with fire, and that means if you get trapped behind some fire you literally can't do anything. I get that the fire should feel entrapping, but it would be good to achieve that and still give the player a way to feel like there's nothing to do but to quit the game. OR some kind of suicide button/mechanic. - The music is a bit repetitive and jarring.
The overall presentation is pretty good. I don't know what the glowing enemies did later in the game but it's good that there seem to be some kind of ramping up besides just the space being consumed by the fires :)
So I guess that's it?
It's a nice sentimental piece. Great art and music.
I can't argue that it's not a game :)
Oooooh, yes this one's interesting :id: - Everything felt intuitive at first glance but it wasn't really completely intuitive - I tried to play without reading instructions and found I couldn't figure out where to put the arrows or some of the stuff - turns out what was actually unintuitive was that I wasn't sure whether I was dropping the items correctly onto the heroes - some visual feedback that your item is in the right place and letting go will confirm the drop would be good. - Given that it's currently a desktop game and not a mobile game, I feel like this game could benefit from click then click rather than dragging. It feels like it works better. You can keep the original control scheme in but allowing for click then click would be good. - The frantic pace is good, though the pace should probably be dropped a little for desktop, would probably be perfect for mobile. - Minor gripe - the pixel art are at different scales - some pixels are larger than others.
I was at the itch.io page and saw no macOS version? I downloaded the one file and it only had .exe stuff in it.
Love the idea, the graphics and sounds are all great, but the controls take away from the immediacy of the idea: - The hitboxes of the dogs should probably be extended (for the small dogs especially) - clicking in the tiny gap between their feet should count as a click, it's not obvious that it wouldn't be. - A highlight would probably help. - A more visually obvious display of their temperature would also help. Right now it's quite a mystery when they're about to freeze. - Here's the biggest thing - it FEELS like a game that's constrained by blocks, it would work better if it were, but it isn't. The free axis placement makes the game difficult to contend with, and you're left wanting to min/max available space by careful tweaking. You also cannot visually and quickly gauge whether a dog will fit in a space or not, instead being forced to twist and turn and hope it fits. This would work if it were a turn-based slow game, but it isn't. So the nature of the game and the time limitations don't line up and cause frustrations in the wrong direction. Either design towards turn-based, or design towards time pressure. Either direction places different demands on the game design.
I really like it! But these elements make it difficult to enjoy fully!
Mac/web possible?
So there's no way for a mac user to play this?
If you download the Mac build option, a windows machine can build a mac build. I am on a mac and I build to windows without a problem. It works both ways.
Presentation is good, certainly drew me in. But the game itself is lacking, the player movement doesn't feel good at all, which is a problem considering it's the core of this game. It moves too slow, the jump doesn't feel right/good, if you hit jump while in air the sound plays but nothing happens.
I thought the enemies did nothing for the longest time. There needs to be some kind of front and centre feedback regarding getting hit.
The "collapsing level" is more going up and down? I couldn't really figure it out.
The file size is mad. I don't know what's in there, but this game should *not* be that size.
Music is great, and probably the best part of this game.
@jumpander well done for your first game :) I don't say any of it as a downer, I hope you can use it to refine what you think about when you make your games :) All the best! :)
Cool theme, but I didn't really understand anything about how the game works other than holding down the left key.
Conventionally, the main player is usually on the left, so that was a source of confusion too. Not saying that balking convention is a bad thing, but it feels like just randomly, and without any indication, changing things that people might expect to hold true might not be a good idea by default.
The music/soundtrack/ambience is interesting, I thought it was pretty well put together, though it also did feel broken at times, which is a punky aesthetic and that's cool. But not sure if it was entirely correct.
If you rate other people's games it'll make it easier for others to see your game.
Awesommmmme work! Great art, the platforming feel is solid, the voxel work is awesome. The only gripe I have is wishing the earth particles were more interactive, perhaps fluid, and reacted to more of the game. It just feels like it was begging for it.
The enemy variation was good and the telegraphing of patterns was well done. Really great, simple and effective design there too.
Audio is also all round great. Just everything is nice and tiny and great! GOOD WORK! :D
Mmmmmmmm
Really, the concept is something interesting, but playing it for even five minutes and one sees that it's basically just tetris but harder. The added mechanics make no difference to the gameplay other than demanding that you make more than one lines at a time. It. Is. Tetris.
In addition, the pieces drop way fast and that makes it much harder to get to the extreme left and right, especially if you made "mistakes" in making a line.
I really don't see how the addition makes any real difference. It's like playing Mario without mushrooms. It's just harder.
No Mac build?
Really pretty game, enjoyed many little bits of detail - the sound of things clearing into the distance? Not really sure if it fits but it works well, and the procedural dungeon generation is pretty awesome.
It's too bad that there's not much to do in this dungeon... Chasing down 40 coins and finding the exit is it. The "gas" mechanic... I'm not really sure what it does, as I've run out of that bar around me once and the game didn't end. And sometimes the gas put you in impossible positions of having to go through it to get to the exit.
Another detail worth noting is that the pixel art of the dungeon and the player are at different pixel scales and that makes the game's look less coherent. It's like the assets come from different games.
I wanted to make a procedural roguelike game too and didn't in the end because of the theme... I can definitely sympathise with how much work it takes!
Need a mac build. So I guess I can only review on the web build:
- Really pretty. The art is great. Animations, everything feel great to look at. - The web build is laggy so that's a problem, but I do try and look at the game minus the lag... But the controls don't feel tight enough to make a game like this fun. Why a ball? It feels like the exact wrong character for a game like this, though that could be both superficial or mechanical. - The player feels like they move way too fast for the fine motor controls it feels would be needed to navigate these platforms. - I really can't imagine this not having performance issues, with literally the whole level wobbling around on physics. Though you managed to get the system solid enough to not all topple immediately, which is good. - The lack of an indication of where the character is in a 3D platformer is a bit of a deal breaker. - Lack of a clear goal - There's a countdown, but where am I trying to get to? There's no direction or indication. If it's just survival surely it should count up and score you when you lose?
I could potentially enjoy this but I can't really play it properly :/
Kudos for making a mobile game, though I'm not sure why you felt it was necessary to publish only the mobile build, since the game does not need mobile controls nor benefit from mobile controls.
The music isn't bad. A little jarring but not bad.
The gameplay feels completely random - if the player were just a ball, you could perhaps predict its trajectory. Or if it could "hold" a direction or something, but as it is now, it is an angled object that bounces around completely arbitrarily, and its forward force makes it all the more complicated. There's basically no way to predict which way it's going to go. So... It might as well be a dice throw slot machine?
Not sure why there are "bad zones" that expand and "target" that shrinks. Doesn't really make sense design or narrative wise.
The map loading and the jiggly effects look great, some nice juice there. The procedurally generated is competent.
Core gameplay wise: - The fact that pressing diagonals doesn't result in a movement that lines up with the diagonals in the game is annoying - you should be able to walk straight along an axis if you press that diagonal, but that doesn't work and results in a lot of keyboard tapping which is more frustrating than challenging. - Doesn't seem like a new coin appears as soon as the old one is collected, if not, why not? - The player movement is also quite flat. A game that focuses entirely on the movement could benefit with the movement being more fun an dynamic. - Did not even think/know there's a jump. Besides the animation not being an animation, which it should be, perhaps stick a prompt in the game. Again, why not?
It's REALLY pretty! The combat feels solid and good, movement, punching, comboing, all that looks good. - But there's a really small range of things that you can do. Which is a problem for a game of this nature. (I understand of course that it's a jam game and has jam time constraints) - It was not clear from the outset what you're supposed to do. I thought you were supposed to push the files into the folders. I did that for a while. - There's a distinct lack of feedback from the files getting to the folders. They kinda just stand there doing nothing. I wasn't sure what they were doing. If there's a timer till when they "assimilate" or whatever that should be apparent. - Because of that there's little urgency in the gameplay, it kinda just dragged out a lot.
Quality everything, graphics, sounds, presentation, great effects, juicy, nothing short of what I'd expect from the Broforce peeps. The amount of work and content in this is astonishing for a jam game.
That said, the game feels a bit like an uninspired top-down Broforce. The action feels a bit tepid and uninteresting, getting in range of anyone with a gun pretty much means death by default (that air drop), and the explosive barrels are quite similar, but without as much interaction. The run-and-gun mechanics work, though not super interesting.
I don't know (can't remember) if a lot of the mechanics that made Broforce interesting were in the original Broforce LD prototype, but comparing this to what I imagine was aimed to be a top-down Broforce-like, it's not quite at that level of mechanical interestingness yet. But it's top notch in terms of quality!
The atmosphere is pretty good, presentation decent for a bunch of text, but the game itself is lacking in several respects:
1. The maze is actually completely random - at easier levels it's all just a matter of time, while at harder levels knowing that you couldn't win due to no mistake of your own is not very satisfying. 2. Without a repeating function on movement, tapping the direction endlessly is just not very pleasant. 3. Not sure what anything does - spinning block? I wouldn't dare testing it out by walking near it so... There are variations which doesn't mean very much. 4. Without any signs towards the exit (doesn't even have to super obvious, just have to be able to be worked out), how many moves you make to get to the end is completely arbitrary luck.
Despite the limited scope of the game, it's really quite well polished in terms of visual effects.
Sorry to be harsh but I hope that it helps you with future game designs!
Competently executed, though design wise felt a bit flat - there's not much of rise and fall in the rhythm of the gameplay, there's no much variety in what you do - which is to run in circles. The feeling of claustrophobia is certainly there but not very interesting.
Controls and graphics are fine, the bits all are decent. But the gameplay doesn't feel challenging in a way that I could overcome by thinking about it, or reacting better/doing it better.
OSX/Web version requested :)
Very slippery platformer controls make the game really annoying to actually play. There's an argument to be made for difficult and speedy physics but if you played a game like super meat boy you can see that you can achieve that and still give the player the feeling that they're in control - which this game doesn't feel like yet.
The concept is interesting though only purely cosmetic. I don't really get how the making everything bigger powerup is relevant to running out of space. Making the screen completely impossible to see eventually... I just don't see the appeal, or challenge. Is the challenge to not get achievements as you progress? Is that even possible? Maybe? But it's not clear as you don't know what gives you the achievements so you don't know what to avoid. Getting to know them through repeat plays might work but that's not really satisfying as it is right now.
Interesting ideas, maybe they could go further, hope you get to further the core mechanics!
Great game! I love match 3 genre mashes, and this is one of the great ones! The game works great and everything is made very competently, though there are a few gripes: - The different bits of art feel like they come from different games, which is a hazard with working in a team. Would be good if the art direction were tighter. - The music feels really in opposition to what the game is? Music feels pastoral and relaxed, but the game feels frantic. - The movement systems feel wrong - the player moves aren't governed by blocks but the blocks clearly are, and the gargoyles too. It creates a weird mismatch, even though it still works. - Similarly, the shots feel more analogue than digital, a "beam of light" doesn't feel like the right shots in a game like this, I think it would feel better as strict bullets and shots that you can see. A laser could maybe be an upgrade but it just doesn't feel like it gels. - The upgrade system is great, though the clear all blocks one is clearly the most needed one. - The analogue movement of the enemies and player also makes collision between them and you quite ambiguous, sometimes you feel like you not going to get hit and you do. Having a more defined movement would make that not feel so difficult to be certain of. - The grey gargoyles are not signalled properly. I bet most players wouldn't draw the connection between "I pushed some blocks off a minute ago" and "I'm getting grey blocks now". That's a problem. - A bug - when I get 5 in a row (2 and 2 and push one between them) only 3 disappeared, that's VERY VERY disappointing for a match-3 game :P
Good stuff! :D
I really like the idea! There are some details that I think would elevate the game to a whole new level but as it is it's a well polished little jam game! - The core idea of surrounding an enemy to kill them is really cool! I like the idea of pushing for many kills at once - risk and reward. But there doesn't seem to be any incentive to do a combo kill right now, which is a shame, and I feel like should be a core design consideration. - I'm not sure how the spikey ones work, it's not really clear what their "thing" is. - Some variation in player powers and such would go a long long way. - This feels like it has the bones of a roguelite something or other with powerups and stats etc. - The controls are not fine enough, at least on keyboard. Being able to move slower, accelerating up to a speed over a longer time might help. Or just controller support I guess. - The circle around the whole arena is a nice touch, gliding along the edge feels great. - On THAT note, I would like to see some kind of warning before an enemy appears right on edge, as right now you can die without warning if you use the edge, and I just like the edge too much to feel like I shouldn't be able to use it. without adding more UI, you could have an invisible round wall which you can glide along, and beyond that you can see enemies appearing. - The music is a bit annoying :p
Just super solid, gives Animal Well vibes, which is NUTS considering this is a compo entry! Doesn't quite excel on individual aspects, but as a whole it's very difficult to not like it.
- The "was hit" state was very confusing the first few times I encountered it. Pressing buttons didn't seem to do anything, so I stopped pressing buttons when I got into that state again, but then it DOES take button presses to recover? The sudden stop and then nothing was very unexpected. I guess at least a flash to indicate a hit? Or a clearer "fall down" look? - Lack of distinct landmarks made it so sometimes I see a path that looks like a new place, go/fall through and realise I had already been there and have backtracked a bunch. The inability to look ahead downwards or another direction also contributes to that, but it's a minor gripe considering. - The quips being bottom left didn't feel right. Having to look so far away from the action to read tiny text... Maybe centre upper screen? Also no biggie. - I had to play cross-armed because I'm used to left hand on wasd and right hand on action keys... Z and space is incompatible with wasd, which actually does work. Also not a major thing for a jam.
@jezzamon you could map it to multiple keys and just let people use whatever they feel like. I like WASD + IJKL as the mains but I might be alone in that.
It's Flappy Jellyfish with energy management :D - Overall the game plays well and handles well. Made it through the first level having picked up everything. - There's a fundamental tension between two parts of the game - the energy management encourages you to be careful about moving, yet it's a game about exploring unknown spaces. Unless you go in first and then die to low energy and try to remember the layout, which isn't a fun thing to do. - Feels like a game like this would benefit from more visibility - as in, blindly moving expending energy, not knowing whether the direction you're heading in would have a payout, doesn't feel great. If say, the whole level were smaller (but you and enemies also moved slower, e.g. scale everything down), it could be played more like a puzzle and less like a "maybe there's something there, or not, Idk". Especially when players could forget about having been somewhere before or not, since it would take very clear landmarks in the level design to make it obvious where the player has visited or not. Memory games is not a fun game most of the time. - Not sure if the holding one direction button to glide is intended, as it feels like it's quite at odds with the rest of the energy mechanic. And it's also feels anti-fun to feel like I should hold a direction to "grind against" a wall so I can move horizontally after I reach the bottom of this wall. Hmmm. - 2nd level somewhere there was a corner going down and all of a sudden... Gravity stopped working? So I just died because I couldn't head downward. It's weird.
@aurailus thank you! Many things went wrong and I didn't actually manage to reach the mechanics I wanted in the end, but I did manage to cut my losses and "round off" the game, so that I'm pretty proud of :P Unfortunately no I didn't make the music! I ran out of time and found some freebie music, and as I was submitting I completely forgot about the compo requirements of "everything made by me", so instead of axing the music I instead submitted for jam. Making music quickly will be something I try to learn for my next jam lol :p
@milq Yeah I'd LOVE to add more to the game, the original plan was to throw more crazy stuff in the game - connect 4 makes a block, blocks attach to each other to make tetrominos, and blocks are cleared like tetris - making lines lol, but I never got that far! Thanks for playing!
@jaco-van-hemert thanks for playing! You're absolutely right - the mechanic kinda comes down to frantically sorting the colours in the end, which if I'm honest I didn't really want. I had a more contemplative design in mind, but due to various reasons I just couldn't implement/figure out in time. I did have the idea of dragging groups of blobs together, it might be interesting, but I didn't have time to implement that. Also I think it probably doesn't change the frenzy of the core mechanic. One idea was to make it kind of "turn-based" - I've been working on the idea of turn-based matchmaking games, but haven't really cracked it yet, it's a fine balance between too much time think out a move being not that fun, vs being frantically throwing things everywhere in real-time.
Yes you can chuck the blobs out of the play area, I wanted to prevent that but didn't have time to. But if you toss them out you automatically lose - in the instructions: "You spill you lose!" - it's the lose condition.
@francoisvn yeah as I decided on the iteration of core mechanics I realised that this is a fit for a mobile device more than for a mouse, which is what I'm working on making (should be easy. Should. Who knows lol). Moreover, I wanted to make a more contemplative version of the loop so it's not so much of a mad dash arranging everything - the freeform moving of blobs that this engine allows makes it quite different from other matching games, so it doesn't really translate directly from other matching games.
@namnam yes! I really like chain reactions and I wanted a game that was more focused on that. As it is it's often too frantic to sit back and watch things unfold - I have ideas for a different version of the game that will hopefully incentivise players to work towards combos more :)
@kyllua could you elaborate on what you mean by unbalanced? You can in fact keep dragging one blob around and shift things around, but in this iteration of the core loop, that doesn't really benefit you much from what I can see? I want to make another version of the game that actually leans a lot more on the dragging one blob around.
@bumble believe you me I know most modern match games turn out to be more of the same, I'm a huge match fan and like my favourite are still releases from 1995 and 2017 - been chasing that high of yesteryore forever now lol.
There's still definitely have a ways to go before this design would ever be ready for something that I would pay for, but it's a nice start for a jam :)
@ategon yeah no I just ran out of time for more stuff and put in all the sort of progression stuff right at the end, and didn't put much thought into an ending. If I were to work on this further I'd definitely make that more differentiated. Among many other things!
@yogurtthehorse YES you're ABSOLUTELY RIGHT! The dragging was pretty much hacked together for jamming purposes and I tried to get inertia going but didn't succeed within limited time. I'd love that too! Except of course you shouldn't be throwing them anywhere or you'd instantly lose lol
@mechazawa thank you for saying so! Honestly, I didn't manage to hit the vibes I wanted with this game, which was more thinky and less panicky drag the same colours together. I was actually looking to be able to plan for combos and such, but didn't really have enough time to get to the design I wanted, so I'm working on post-jam changes!
@andreia yes it's definitely a big priority for me to end up with a design that allowed more contemplative play rather than a mad dash, I just didn't manage to crack it during the jam! I can't believe I'm saying this but I think I'll have to take inspiration from Candy Crush :P
@loveschach well if you could just drag blobbies outside of the playing area and just toss them out without consequence, you can just do that and extend the game forever... Since I couldn't stop the dragging the blobbies outside easily, how it works now is... Intended π
@ausstein thanks for playing! Hm yeah heck wow that is indeed the highest score so far! πͺ So yeah I didn't really manage to balance the levels very well, level 9 was really a "okay fuck it I don't have anymore content" curveball that I don't expect anyone to be able to beat π even myself lol
When I take the game forward I'm gonna to be changing the mechanics up a bit to allow for a slower, more considerate pace, and that'll hopefully open up more variety of challenges to progress the game with!
@brusi I'm sure you've realised if you tried to drop a blob out of the play area and release, you'll lose the game due to spillage :p I would have liked to limit the drag to within the area but that was additional physics shenanigans that I didn't manage to fit in!
@jeffez thank you for playing when it definitely looks like it's not colorblind friendly! π I had planned to make the different colours shape identifiable too, but that ended up being out of scope for the time I had π
What did you mean by a more defined environment? Not really sure how I could define it more than the classic puzzle game drop rectangle? I am working on a post jam update that'll be more considered and less chaotic, so it'll be less about reaction and more about planning, at least I hope so!
@nopogo I know that it's quite the usual thing that players don't read, but I couldn't make the text any bigger than they are now :sweat_smile: keeping the game going was just a little touch for people who like to mess about without any limits. The score stops updating after the game over message appears!
The game made a great impression with its graphics, I used to make all kinds of levels in all kind of games (back in modding days) that was basically players running around shrunken in my room! So nostalgic :) - The attack... Is a block? It doesn't really make sense, but more than that, the way to use the attack seems to be attack an enemy, turn around so you don't get hit, and turn around and attack the enemy again? Because there's no knockback on your attack on an enemy, they just keep coming at you anyway, so the best way to deal with enemies is to just run away from them, which isn't so satisfying. You want to strike a difference between being able to push the enemy back and continue attacking, and not being able to do that trivially for all enemies in all situations all the time. - The world is HUGE for your pitiful run speed. There shouldn't even be a run button - there's never a reason not to run. - The little blobs are super cute for such a minimum modeling job, which is rad. I just wished they had more personality or mechanical significance, like they are your attacks, or they moved in a livelier way when they follow you (a bit of randomisation would go a long way in this case, and making them collide with one another) - There were what sounded like a lot of low, crackling sounds, I wasn't sure if the audio effects were blown out or if they were just really odd bumps that were meant to be footsteps. In any case they sound like something was wrong.
Very interesting puzzle, I'm undecided about a few aspects of it, but it's not something seen before and that's rad :) - Not being able to tell which units are coming up feels bad. Though I understand that if you could predict next unit it would be too easy. Maybe something in between like knowing what remains "in the bag", like this were a bag builder and you know what's in your bag so that you know there are still pikemen left but no archers left, for example. - And bagbuilding I guess would be how meta progression could be handled? Though the design would have to be much more fleshed out to become like a deckbuilder with the levels offering different challenges to bagbuild around. Which sounds cool :) - No longer knowing what units already placed does is annoying, like I still don't know what 3 pikemen end up doing lol, so I think a mouse over to see what they do is needed. - Went back to see what pikemen does and "attack next 3 cells" doesn't make sense to me. Does that mean to the right? - Don't understand what a yellow outline of a space means? - Preview of results of placement would be nice - Music is perfect for this :) - Art is beautiful :)
Yeah I'm sure a lot of my complaints would be because you ran out of time. This is a crazy good amount of work for a jam!
*This* is what's under the dictionary entry for "don't judge a game by its meme pfp". A short but well-reasoned deduction game wrapped in memes and terrible collection of gifs from whherever, I thoroughly enjoyed its brief brain-scratch, even though mostly it's just following prompts around in circles. The "real time" pressure was administered just right, the slow-mo a nice bonus. Really fun!
The presentation is *top notch*, the colour palette, movement of the blobs, all the bits of art, are *really great* in the minimalism. However... - Was there any choices to be made? I get that it's a clicker, but I feel like even clickers need some kind of choices to be engaging. The game basically became whack-a-mole with clicking followers, not much more than that, unless I missed something? - A click on a follower correctly triggered should have a clearer feedback to confirm that you hit it. And/or they should have bigger hitboxes. - It was also not clear that they were meant to be clicked on - that is, once you clicked on them, they didn't react seemingly as if you were meant to. For a while I thought I chased them away and that was a bad thing. But I guess ultimately it was all non-destructive. Would have been good to feel like clicking on them was a good thing more immediately. - There weren't much in the sense of development and scope, which I feel was what you were going for. The land didn't expand, the culture didn't grow, whether explicit or implicit. I think that would have been something that gave the no-choice progression some feeling of impetus and outcome. - The mood is GREAT. Music + art worked well together. The low boops, weren't sure if they were followers' footsteps or something else. Proabably needed to be a little less bassy and distorted.
So a rhythm type game, it works in theory, but there are a few things that would probably improve the experience: - There's not enough feedback on player action - at first I could see that you would "collect" a note even if you hit it way outside of the scoring zone, and then later I realised my score was dropping when I did that? Clear negative feedback should be given when a note is collected negatively, as should a positive feedback for hitting the timing right. The changing number alone isn't enough, as most people aren't focusing on that tiny number off the the side when playing. - The alignment of the notes on-screen are vertical, but the keys assigned to them are horizontal. That means an additional mental gymnastics hop between reading the notes to executing. One could turn my keyboard around, but I have a laptop and that's not really easy to do. You want to make the control mapping to screen as intuitive and immediate as possible. - The rhythm mapping is a bit straightforward AND dense. But that's difficult to get right anyway, designing maps for Guitar Hero and co is a super hardcore discipline that few can do well. - Would like more visual aids to "line things up" between the different colours, sometimes it got so dense things just looked like continuous lines. A lot of rhythm games space the notes out a lot more and moves faster - which SEEMS to make it harder but when there are a lot of notes together, it actually makes it easier for the more experienced rhythm players.
Hole-eee-cow, that is a REALLY GOOD GAME for a jam! The idea of building your own level to play on is done really well here, with a somewhat original mechanic (I remember Gals Panic and from back in the days) - The spinning part is REALLY hard and I probably wouldn't put it in level one, it's very soulslike lol. Also it can seem to have an ambiguous hitbox. Or it just reaches too far lol - The controls are easy but also not so much at the same time. The space to dash mechanic has gotten me jammed up a few times. I guess git gud. - It's a fun time exploring, I wish it weren't so hard! So some kind of progression that's not that punishing would be good, but that's out of scope for a jam!
I haven't played Hey That's My Fish, so I can't speak directly to a comparison, but I do know it is a well loved game among many people. The game looks pretty cool, and yeah the AI is dumb as a brick, but a ruthless AI is also not that fun to play against.
- The music is definitely more Fate Stay Night than Cute Frog Boardgame lol - The game design is interesting, I guess the boardgame doesn't have a setup that's like *this*, with (what looks like) randomly connected nodes? - I can't really figure out the rules of where you are or aren't allowed to jump, like you can't "turn"? But also there aren't really straight lines? It's like half clear. - This kind of game design annoys me in one way - counting up the amount of potential score between choices. Like these tiles are worth X and those are worth Y, is it worth me cutting those off for these, etc, which leads to a lot of counting. Not really an issue with the game design since it's basically what Hey That's My Fish is too. Just a gripe I have with these kinds of completely open game.
Man, what a fun little toy :) The magnifying glass that does double duty is a great touch. However... - Would have liked to see more... Of anything? The interaction is one-button shoot a flame to kill things. There's only really one thing you want to kill, and that's it. - When I realised what the magnifying glass does, I went "oh no" :p I would very much like an alternative wat of dealing with or interacting with things. - Feels like there's such potential for an ecosystem that has multiple points of interaction. For example, you got a little skull that's left behind - dead bugs fertilise plants, that's a whole thing, and could easily be represented in your ecosystem. - The fire apearing and the damage on the bug feels a little delayed, maybe the damage effect can also be a bit more obvious, like flashing the sprite white for example. - On the same line of thought as the more interaction thing - the fire really should have more interaction with other things, like with plants, with skulls, other stuff. Or at least give the player more interactions.
It's really a pretty well polished entry with what looks like a pretty novel mechanic, but that's let down by how uninteresting that one mechanic is. - The problem with this mechanic is that there's really no challenge to achieving it, other than tweaking it over and over so many times because you have no feedback on how and which bits are off. It's all very loose and imprecise. - The graphics are pretty great, well polished and presented. - The music doesn't quite fit but it's not terrible. - The searchlight on the spaceship doesn't follow your cursor when you hold it down and see through the trees. It feels like it should, since the area is revealed? It focuses for a moment and goes wandering off again. - - The one "twist" level was actually pretty cool, but there's no indication of it beforehand, nor is that same mechanic ever used again, which makes it a forced annoyance rather than a well considered puzzle design. But cool nonetheless!
Oh wow you're an exceptional person! 8 hours! Opted out of ratings! Whoa! Yeah there's not much to this as a "game", but it feels excellent, is adorable, the split resetting sizes is fun, and... Well yeah these are cool things. If only there were more!
I *love* the idea of the game, controlling a bunch of little entities in a simple way is very compelling. - However I never really feel like I am in much control of the little fleas, obviously controlling so many entities is never going to be exact, but I feel I should feel like I have enough say over their actions such that I *am* in control - this is especially true of platform games. - Without that feeling of exact control, most of the game devolved into just smashing space over and over. Most of the game is me going left to gather up a pile of them and trying to control the blob of fleas with some kind of hope lol - The art is adorable :) - I think perhaps the little fleas stacking up too neatly ruins a bit of the feel of them being a chaotic pile of little things. I think maybe they're on square colliders? Maybe if they were on circle colliders they would appear more chaotic.
Very cute, I wonder if the shrimps grow bigger or anything like that? Since that's what the food implies? But there lacks feedback on whether that's the case and waiting for a long time since the game requires focus... Doesn't work for me :P Cool for a practice toy! :)
Very strong entry! Great name and title that translated into a great idea (translated as in for a player coming into your game). Incredibly well polished! - The Doombas oscillated between a pretty decent challenge to being an absolute nightmare consistently. The design of the space with dividing paths that lets you dodge them is cool, but half the time they just appear around the corner and you couldn't dodge them at all and that sucks. And also half the game is just waiting for them to leave you randomly so you can proceed with the dash back. They are definitely necessary to the game or there's no tension, but they don't feel great yet. - The need to hold down right mouse feels.... Pointless? Like yes the left hand holding a ball of tiny kittens is cute and all, but is completely superflous I got tired of holding right mouse down. - I think the choice to incorporate the vertical axis in the scanning was unintuitive and annoying. Made the game harder but I think for a lot of players they'll never realise that up/down mattered and it just feels bugged and broken. - Eventually though, hitting Doombas and dropping your kittens and having to go and locate randomly placed goals while randomly-routed enemies may or may not be around one of several corners on your way back that you can't do much about repeatedly got tedious. But the novelty was great and the art + sound was puuuurfect <3
The game is really charming in its presentation, pretty good art and music, sfx, but the core platforming mechanics are a bit of a mess. - Stick to walls to charge a jump? Well there's no indication of how much you've charged, sometimes I shoot right down off a wall, sometimes not. Not really sure how that works. The most consistent way I've found to jump higher is to stand in place and hold up and you'll jump higher and higher? Seems so? - The bug is always animating in the same spin regardless of going left or right, that should be a fairly easy sprite change, little details like this make platformers feel alive and responsive.
This game LOOKS great, as in, the art is great. The idea is probably there, but it really doesn't come through. This is a case of overscoping of the highest order :p - There seem to be a lot going on, and there is, but without the juice and design to support all those mechanics, the game just isn't very interesting to play. I hope you'll consider this and learn to scope down, finish core bits, and polish those core bits up, before even thinking of expanding more stuff. - The player character should at least flip left/right depending on walking direction. Small details matter, especially when they're easy to do. - The attacks are just sounds and there's no indication of what's hitting what, of hitpoints, of anything. So it's all a bit of a toss up. - No indication that you're actually busy collecting something, when it takes a while to do. Which leads players to just wandering around moving and not picking anything up because they wouldn't know to stop. - Presumably building things cost resources - the costs of the things should be visible. - After clicking build there's no indication that you're building something with the next click. Well, after squinting, there's a very tiny square, but that might as well be invisible. - No idea what "boom" does, never got enough to build "big boom". Root seems to give you more blobs that follow you? Buildings don't seem to do anything interesting. As the mechanics stand, you could really just build units and that might be interesting. - Nobody wants to read that much outside-of-the-game stuff and remember it and go into the game. You need to put that information in the game. It doesn't even have to be all that complex like a tutorial or whatever, just text on screen helps a pile. - It's so pretty. Such a shame that it's so unpolished.
Great game! Well polished and plays well, everything is on a technically great level :D - The dedication to the bit with ant puns is very good lol, though like, is there a quit button on it just for the pun? It's a webGL game, why is there a quit button :p - Love that there are different abilities for the different ants, though it's hard to really see the differences, I guess it must really be there, but would like it to be more visible. Maybe abilities triggers could be shown explicitly in some way, like damage number in brackets, or growth number with (-10) for whatever their penalties incur. Not super important, but it allows the player to feel the individuality of each factions. - One gripe is that the button to send ants and the button for selecting a destination are distinct. I feel like it should be okay to click on the general area to start selection and on the general area to confirm destination. Or with a drag gesture. It's a minor gripe :p - The AI is quite good, or maybe I'm quite dumb, either way, there's enough challenge without it feeling too easy or too hard. Victory is hard earned and that's great. - I guess if I had to really think about it, the game doesn't really innovate much since it's a mechanic that's been used many times before. I think the abilities are an innovation? - The ability to change the speed of the simulation is great.
I didn't see this during the ratings period, but saw it after results, and had to give it a go because hello fellow blobs! :)
- The presentation is TOP NOTCH. Music, graphics, UI, everything is slick and super well done, congrats for that. - The "awakening" mechanic is fun and cool :) - However the gameplay is an exercise in frustration - there doesn't feel like there's much in my control as a player, playing the game feels like I'm waddling through molasses - and I think that can be attributed entirely to one thing - the mechanic of holding the click to slowly increase the strength of a shot. This makes the game a race to haul as many blobs out of the hole as possible, while not really having any control over the finesse of the throws. If the throw strength were more immediately finessed with click and drag, distance = strength, it wouldn't be a matter of "I can't click and hold fast enough because the strength builds so slow". It would be a matter of working out good angles and good shots. Obviously if you swapped it out directly like I described it would make the game too easy right now, but retweaking the level to allow for shots to be more interesting would be a plus too. - I'm sure there are more mechanics in later levels but I really just didn't enjoy the "haul imprecise things with slow and jerky controls" mechanic. But the game really feels good other than that aspect. Good job!
A well polished VN. Thank you for telling a difficult story to tell. I'm sure there are many people who will connect with it and help them with their own difficulties.
Very pretty game, as is expected from an Unreal production. The ideas are kinda there, but I feel like it's hidden under a LOT of what feels like very buggy (lol pun) execution: - There are "two interacts" and it doesn't say at all what the differences are, or if the second one is even needed at all. The game needs to be much more explicit about this. - The way the interaction works needs to be much, much clearer. I have to click twice to "activate command mode"? Or something? Why twice? Why not once? And why does it only work *some* of the time? - I can only really tell one bug working, and that's after a lot of weird trial and error. Solving getting the 2nd key was interesting but A) The key was too well hidden/not visible and B) I honestly can't tell if I glitched it. - I guess the raycast was meant to be a lot more robust, sometimes it works and sometimes not. Again, can't tell if I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing or if I'm just following buggy interactions. On the same surface, sometimes I see the raycast dot and sometimes not. - Poking around in the dark with buggy UI isn't great. - Feels like there's some puzzle potential, but it needs to be a lot more robust.
Wow! This was a very undersold GOOD GAME! The graphics, while simple, really works, but the unique and simple mechanics really makes a great experience! - The one-click mechanic hides so much depth, the where is important, the how much is important. It's great! - I would have liked some more feedback on some details of the gamestates, like it looks like each blob can take some damage before perishing, but that's not visible. Not a major thing though. - WTF is that bomber plane? It doesn't look like I could do anything against it? Certainly gave me a "random event about to fuck my shit up and I can't do anything about it" sensation. - The way the visuals worked for the click was very well done, there being a delay after mouse release before it goes away is *chef's kiss* - The way the blobs always head to their destination makes sense mechanically, but them just waltzing past enemies looks weird, if it were made so they were like lobbed at the destination that would make more sense. Minor. - Would have liked a R to restart option - Would have liked a score of some kind - like if it kept the highest blob number you got to or something. - It's so hard! - Given some polish this would be just AWESOME!
Right click! You needed to have controls more clearly somewhere :p Is there a requirement for the right click weapon other than 3 blobs? I was on more than 10 and right clicked and nothing came out. Not sure why.
It *is* charming, but the mechanics are... Just quite torturous to play. You know exactly what needs to happen, but actioning it is another thing. I wonder if the same mechanics would be more fun if you controlled the hand with the mouse cursor? Other than that, the writing is fun, the characters are fun :)
Cool concept! - The writing on the notifications is top notch, love it! - Is there a fail state? I couldn't really see/figure one out. Seems to need a fail state, and what the fail state is would apply different kinds of pressure to the gameplay. I left the game running and saw the fail state, but I can't really tell how - AH I SEE - the eyeballs. So it moves so subtly that it's hard to tell that it was moving at all, it does a jump when you score, but that's still hard to tell unless you're already looking at it. One way of making a "meter"'s change state more obvious to the player is to make it in increments - so instead of 1 pixel every second, make it like a visible increment of 10 pixels every 10 seconds. The outcome is the same but it will look more obvious. - The notifications touching each other being removed - I guess I understand mechanically why, but it doesn't make sense :p - One of my notifications turned into a red spinning fireball and I have no idea why? - I think the game could use some speeding up - that is, faster critter movement, and/or faster progression, or an additional movement/traversal mechanic to break up the slow march towards the goal. - Maybe penalise the player for losing a critter, though it doesn't make sense to subtract from attention directly.
The music is great, I guess I should lean more into beatboxing acapella in my own musical endeavours too! The game... If you actually think about any of it none of it makes sense lol, why are you guessing species in a support group? Are you blind? But why hangman style? What is this world??? :P - I played this like wordle - start with vowels. Figure out the shape of the word, go from there. - The clues may or may not help, very red herring-y lol - Could benefit from a layout like wordle, where you change the colours of letters alreaedy picked, rather than having to interpret a list. A keyboard layout would also be nice (like wordle) - Number of letters could be easier to read, underscores just become one long stick and hard to count. - I guess the numbers are supposed to be completely forgiving? I can't see losing unless you're guessing everything. My guess is you just wanted people to be able to get through the whole game, which I guess is fine for a jam, but really sucks all the tension out. - A cute text adventure!
A lot of things packed into a tiny tiny space, but it doesn't feel like a lot of what would make it a unique work... works? This is why "scope down" is often repeated as the number one lesson in jams :up: - Yeah you already know this, the entire starting experience is impossible to understand. Some of the menu selections straight up crash the game. You could have disabled them? - The window is tiny and I didn't see any way of making it full screen or enlarging it or anything, that's no good. - The shooter part of the game works alright, nothing very interesting. No bombs, no movement mechanics. No powerups during a level. I understand that the metagame was meant to be the main hook, but like, the main game just feels flat. - The resources being outlined in white is a nice design detail. - There's nothing to tell you about the length of a level, and there's so much repetition that it feels like... Something's wrong, am I supposed to trigger the end of a level somehow? Players should have some way to easily tell how long till the end of a level. - Logic wise - you're flying, but you'll hit ground beetles walking. Other shooters have resolved this kind of thing in various ways (can't remember shooter names, but there are several well known ones that "throw bombs" to hit ground targets and you can fly over ground targets. If you wanted to have slow moving enemies that collide with the player you can quite easily just retheme the enemy sprite and change nothing else) - The boss was also completely flat and uninteresting, one single attack, repeated forever. - Everything is technically very competently executed. Music, graphics, animation, etc. But the game itself just isn't very interesting. Again I say - scope down, focus on getting the player to the interesting hook of your game AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE!
I audibly went what the f when the game started in earnest and I understood the entire premise of the game :laughing: - The game is too straightforward despite its many thematic twists... There weren't really that many interesting things you can actually do besides fire at enemies and grown heirs, and move away from anything that deals damage. That's it. - That first bit pushing the push button seems completely superflous lol - The voice acting is top notch meme work lol - I wish there were more depth to this mechanically, it's fucking hilarious :laughing:
Wow! This is..... So much *fun*! I certainly didn't even know that you could do this with Unity? What?? That is super cool! Not much in the way of a game, but certainly a great toy! <3 - The dithering transparency is rad, is that for performance or a limitation of using the desktop as background? - Reminds me of the Gnorp Apologue, which is good :) - I guess my laptop is burning to a crisp as I write this, I should turn it off... 200,000 friends and I can barely see anything anymore lol
Well done for innovating on something nobody ever thought to innovate! - Just overall very polished on all fronts - audio, visual, design. Very cool! - The people's representation is top notch, no fucking around with individual physics objects, just a series of lights like one of those Game & Watch relics, great design work with this :) - Can't believe you got this control scheme to work with just kb/m. It feels relatively good and still janky enough for it to be challenging to do. - I never got two mice to work - I *actually* have two mice on my computer all the time, so imagine my surprise when I run into a situation where it's suppose to be actually supported! Is there anything specific I have to do to enable support for two mice? - Hope you get to expand on this with more mechanics and interesting things. It could be almost Papers Please like with different characters and stories depending on who lives and who dies. Working in different buildings with different stories.
@alxje I am running the windows build, and I'm at the main menu, both mouse can move the single cursor, and I've clicked both left, both right, and every combination of buttons on both mice, and the 2 Mouse option doesn't become available! Wonder what's wrong, hmmm.
@alxje I only have one wired and one wireless hooked up, so maybe that's why? Though that's weird that that would make a difference!
A pretty good game that would work directly translated as a physical boardgame :) - The premise is good, though a bit clunky. I think it could do with some iteration to make it more streamlined. - You can discard cards but not not place blobs, so you could really extend the game almost indefinitely by skipping all lower scoring cards. Seems the game should have some kind of way to push you towards an end state rather than letting you delay it indefinitely. - A bigger variety of cards/conditions to fulfil would be more interesting. - The cards would be much easier to read with graphical representation of the conditions.
Hey! I also wanted to make a Conway's Game of Life game, in fact have been for a long long time, but just haven't really found the right mechanic for it. Your game makes sense with the game of life so kudos for that design! - My biggest gripe is the music. It's absolutely drilling in my head and I can't really play with it going. - On the game design, a big thing about the game of life is that it's difficult to internalise the rules, and as a videogame, our design has a duty to make the challenge for the player as much about the challenge itself as possible. The challenge is to work out the puzzle and remove the bits that will maximise your losses, so our UI should assist with that - the player memorising the rules of the game of life isn't a good challenge, for example. So the rules should be on the screen as you play for easy reference, there's enough space for that. - Similarly, it would be good for the UI to show the player which units will expand and which will die before the next round - that visualisation will help immensely with understanding the challenge. It's like treating the player like the CEO of a company, and providing them with reports that enable them to make a good call - so if they fuck up, it's not because of the lack of information that they had to memorise or work out, it's because they fucked up, plain and simple. - The background grid doesn't quite line up with the grid on which the game happens, it should.
Looks pretty good and moves pretty well. A technically competent jam game :) - The fundamental design space is interesting - eating smaller things and running from big things is cool. But it felt unexplored, your own size didn't seem to change through eating other things, so your relationship to the food/enemies didn't seem to change through the game? So all the smaller things could have been replaced with mushrooms or anything and the big things with whatever enemy sprite and it would have worked the same? - The movement controls worked pretty well. - Getting caught by an enemy seems like a one hit death as I couldn't really figure out any way to get away, the animation of your getting smaller over time is a nice touch, but only would matter if you could actually get away? - Resetting to the start of the whole game losing all progress is a huge turn-off, some sort of checkpoint system would have kept me playing. - Space button to eat seems completely unnecessary, does it make a difference whether you touched them to collect vs pressing space to collect?
There's a lot in the game but they don't add up to a lot - I think there's so much diffused effort on various parts that there wasn't enough time to make any single thing truly shine, which is a shame. - Rudimentary character controls doesn't feel very good. Jumping is floaty and doesn't feel like a jump. Attacking doesn't have much nuance and just leads to the player repeatedly smashing the shoot button/mouse click. - The boss's hitpoints/energy is not shown to us, which really makes it difficult/impossible to judge how long it's still going to take. At least your attacks are visibly registering as hits. - The boss having different attacks is good. But they're so slow and predictable that it just doesn't feel enough of a challenge. - The bits of dialogue at the start sets the tone story-wise, which is cool, but it didn't feel like an entire JRPG dialogue section was worth spending time on as much.
I have no idea what it is I can do or am supposed to do here... It seems like you're switching between 3 celestial bodies, and waiting for bubbles to appear, and drag and release them to put them on the celestial body that it was found around in the first place? Like, what are your choices?
I tried to "throw" items from the sun to earth/mars and I wasn't sure if it worked - like the object would float a few seconds then "ignite" or something, burning very bright. Don't know what that means. Some of them landed at the other celestial bodies when I've aimed well enough through "my hands".
I think this game could do with some player information and feedback. Like what the effects are of what you're doing - and indeed, which are the things you should be doing. Guiding players towards them is good.
I think you should be able to click on a planet in the distance and zoom right over, instead of having to click those carousel buttons at the top. They're cumbersome for what they do.
Scroll wheel scrolls too slowly.
The 3D style is quite cool. It's like the little people from that Introversion game... Darwinia.
I appreciate a good experimental weird game, and what a weird experimental game this was :) - The idea is really interesting. Not directly being able to control anything, relying on breeding to get to what you need, I guess like pokemon (but you bypassed their patent so kudos lol), is rad :) - The gameplay though suffered from a couple of issues: - Half the fish in the new fish tank were like uncatchable because the claw couldn't get to them on the edges. - The way you basically need to go back and forth between home tank and catch tank to refresh for new fish felt like there should just be a button on the catch tank to give you new fish to catch. - The traits were pretty cryptic - "Swim in direction" really doesn't mean much? I assume there's a hidden direction that the trait picks? Seemed like there was never a trait that had to do with attacking, only with swimming away/towards. Is towards the equivalent of attacking? I think these need to be clearer since it's hard enough to try and get what you do want via breeding (which I assume results in a mix of random traits picked from parents), it shouldn't be hard to understand what they are in the first place. - The fish move very well, they have a nice character to them. Definitely enough for a jam title. - Selecting a fish to move on to the fighting stage was not very clear, I think a better, clearer instruction is needed, perhaps not something that can be removed from the UI. - The post-it note instructions were fun and cute, but not having access to them after you removed them is less great. People tend not to remember things and they should be able to access instructions during the game. - During a fight, is there literally nothing you can do? My fish eventually jumped out by themselves and just died, I assume that's some kind of timer that says hey if you don't win by whenever you just lose. That felt quite unsatisfying, perhaps a more explicit fight timer or something. But yeah if the fish don't attack each other there's nothing the player can do and that kinda sucks.
What in the fever dreams is this?? :D It's got all the bits in place, so many bits, but it feels like none of the very well done bits talk to one another? - A whole ass exploration thing with maps but there's really nothing to explore - A whole ass inventory of tinymons that... Do nothing? Well the first one gates the exit to the house, but certainly was not needed to actually do the gate. - I guess my biggest gripe is that if you had cut the exploring map top down bit and focused on the rhythm game, it could have come out with so much more in terms of feel and mechanics :p - I can't help but feel like the rhythm section's scoring was a bit rudimentary, but it does the job. No biggie. - Would have been nice for the dance bit to involve some kind of visuals other than the bars. But not a big deal. - The rhythm mapping + songs were surprisingly good considering this is was a jam. Do you have past experience mapping rhythm games?
@dropmania I suppose you play rhythm games a fair bit at least then? The mapping is good! Good job!
The premise is really cool, and the controls I feel are pretty innovative, but there are some improvements that could really elevate the design. - Controlling 3 characters by guiding them with a single mouse pointer, and toggling them on/off is a really cool idea. - The toggles 1/2/3 doesn't heuristically map to the characters so it was super hard to know which one I'm start/stopping. I think Red = 1, Green = 2 Blue = 3 is the closest to something intuitive since RGB is an established acronym. - The interaction between the screen moving to follow the group and using the mouse to control movement makes for a very difficult to account for oscillation sometimes when precision is needed, and that's a pretty big problem. I think for the sake of gameplay, the mechanic would work better with a static camera - that is, each view of a level is static and the player characters move around in a level that doesn't pan around. This would make pointing the mouse exactly where you want much easier rather than having to account for the whole screen panning around. - Other than that, the platforming character controllers could do with a lot of tightening up so that they feel more predictable and responsive. - The art is okay, though the animation was very charming. The various elements could do with some unified design direction though, they feel disjointed when compared to one another.