Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → VDZ
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Cm | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 34 | Two Button Controls / Growing | SnakeRPG | compo | 144 | 3.72 | 3.74 | 4.32 | 4.17 | 2.50 | 2.38 | 40 | ||||
| 2015 | 33 | You are the Monster | The Slime's Journey | compo | 39 | 3.95 | 4.05 | 3.05 | 3.86 | 3.53 | 3.57 | 41 | ||||
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Cellular Warfare | compo | 462 | 3.27 | 2.95 | 3.45 | 3.38 | 2.43 | 3.45 | 2.40 | 2.79 | 41 | ||
| 2014 | 31 | Entire Game on One Screen | Quiet Life | compo | 546 | 3.20 | 3.00 | 2.88 | 3.44 | 2.56 | 2.22 | 2.17 | 2.96 | 41 | ||
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Coin Diver | compo | 328 | 3.42 | 3.67 | 3.08 | 3.63 | 2.42 | 3.70 | 3.10 | 41 | |||
| 2013 | 27 | 10 Seconds | Talking Is A Free Action | compo | 202 | 3.46 | 3.29 | 3.17 | 3.67 | 2.50 | 3.08 | 3.26 | 3.09 | 41 | ||
| 2013 | 26 | Minimalism | World of Minimalism | compo | 135 | 3.70 | 3.44 | 3.85 | 3.93 | 3.35 | 2.94 | 45 | ||||
| 2012 | 25 | You are the Villain | Conquering Oneself | compo | 22 | 3.94 | 4.06 | 4.28 | 4.39 | 2.72 | 3.56 | 2.33 | 3.41 | 37 | ||
| 2012 | 24 | Evolution | DIGIEVO | compo | 246 | 3.20 | 3.07 | 3.43 | 4.00 | 2.93 | 3.21 | 30 | ||||
| 2012 | 23 | Tiny World | TinyIsland | compo | 155 | 3.47 | 2.71 | 3.76 | 3.47 | 3.06 | 3.47 | 2.50 | 3.07 | 28 | ||
| 2011 | 22 | Alone | Hikikomori Manager 2012 | compo | 304 | 2.78 | 2.17 | 3.00 | 4.06 | 2.06 | 2.38 | 3.00 | 3.31 | 1.67 | 14 |
Interesting idea, but in the end all you do is walk forward and point at ghosts (who don't seem to actually do anything). No challenge or interesting events, and the game isn't atmospheric enough to make up for it.
How do you get past the gate in the fifth screen? I'm stuck.
The Windows link leads to the source code, not an executable.
Interesting game, but too short for the minimalistic story to have any impact (I was more interested in what was going on than in actually getting to Lisa). The ending can be reached well before reading the other notes and reads like a standard game over, not an ending, which makes it rather anticlimactic when you play the rest of the game and discover that was the ending. The game did do a good job of making me interested in a place consisting of only white circles.
Very nice. The game is simple and it doesn't really do anything new, but it's a very solid game. Simply very nice.
Gameplay is very basic, but it mostly just works. (I say mostly because the collision detection sometimes messes up and won't allow you to stomp a building.) It's fun to play and try to improve your time. Unfortunately, your time isn't saved (or even shown - after you've jumped, your time and score become invisible and you have no way to tell how well you just did), but keeping it manually isn't too much of a hassle. This is the kind of simple game I'd like to see online high scores for, so I can challenge others to beat my time.
The graphics are neat and fun. None of it is mind-blowing, but it's all just very solid. Buildings look like buildings, monsters look like monsters, humans look like humans, and it all just looks nice. I loved the simple helpless animations of the humans, it really makes you feel like eating them.
Audio-wise, it was very, very solid. Catchy tune in the background, sounds for everything that needs a sound, and none of it is ever bothersome. Perfectly done.
Theme-wise, well, it was one of the two really obvious interpretation (either you are tiny in a large world, or you are large and the world is tiny), so there's nothing spectacular there. Large monsters stomping buildings and eating humans is nothing new, but hey, it's still fun.
A fun game to play. I'd have kept playing for longer if I had a direct goal to compete against, such as time posted by others, but it doesn't look like anyone else is posting times. If anyone wants to try to beat my record, my fastest completion was in 110 seconds.
The link does not work. It gives a 'file not found' error.
The game does not run for me. I get http://i.imgur.com/SkIFM.png twice, then http://i.imgur.com/ompmc.png, then the game just closes. Using Win7 64-bit, dual core 2.8 ghz, 4 GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M.
(Note: The following text will make me sound like an ass, but I just prefer to be brutally honest when giving feedback.)
Shallow, basic gameplay, consisting only of pushing right to walk over a completely flat surface with some holes and jumping. Gameplay was very repetitive; if there was anything like increasing difficulty, I didn't notice it. The goal of the game (to run away) and the controls were clear (assuming there's no buttons I missed other than walking and jumping), but the rest of the game was not. What are those hearts and other thingies for? You also barely see them at all; I'd attributed the random stops to software bugs until I re-read your description and figured I had likely run into almost invisible poison.
The crude style of the background art is somewhat charming, but the background itself is very minimal and repetitive. The foreground art and character art are just crude and ugly.
The sound was minimal and did not add anything to the atmosphere; though I was running from the sandstorm, there was no excitement and the wind sound left me completely unconcerned.
I was unable to see any connection between the game and this LD's theme.
Interesting idea, poor execution.
A major design flaw lets you push Tiny into a corner of the screen while Big shoots all blocks in that corner, making dodging unnecessary. This remains a valid strategy until the difficulty suddenly ramps up to a point where it's simply not humanly possible to dodge and shoot at the same time, as shooting by itself already becomes near impossible. At this point, it's just a matter choosing between shooting (when Big's health is low) and dodging (when Tiny's health is low). Due to this sudden jump from too easy to too difficult, you always lose at the same point once you get the hang of it.
The scoring system only rewards shooting, not survival. Not only does this make Tiny's role mostly irrelevant, it also makes scoring mostly a matter of button bashing; as you always die at the same point, the only way to get a high score is by clicking as much as possible in that time span.
The lack of fair challenge and the flawed score system make this game unfun after the first three or so times you play it.
Graphics are simple, but effective. Music is okay, but the repetitive shooting sound is grating.
Inclusion of the tutorial was very useful; after reading the tutorial, how to play the game came naturally to me.
And if anyone wants to exchange scores, my high score was 21780.
Holy shit. This game is brilliant.
Did you seriously have no test players around? The game is almost perfectly balanced to have you slowly progress while struggling to remain alive and keep the planet at a good size. I had no problems with the learning curve (other than being stupid enough to plant a uranium fire on a small planet in my first playthrough, but that serves me right for not reading the build menu), though that might be because I read the instruction menu before playing (AFAIK most players generally skip optional instructions). The difficulty is good for the first minute or so of the game, but after that (assuming you don't make really stupid mistakes), there is no sense of impending death (other than the occasional moment where you realize your warmth is running low and you're pretty far from your uranium fire, but that's only occasionally and only if you're playing with uranium fires instead of wooden ones). Still, the game keeps challenging you as it's harder than it looks to keep the planet growing; this is an especially challenging aspect when you go for a speed run.
From what I can see after 1 failed and 2 full playthroughs (so I might be wrong on some things), there seem to be a couple of elements that are superfluous, adding very little to the game. I never had any problems with enemies, as they could easily be dodged or avoided altogether (you can generally also find the resources you need on different planets). This also makes the two weapons rather useless, unless it's possible for the random generator to create a situation where enemies are unavoidable. The rake sounded good at first, but you quickly realize that growing time doesn't actually matter if you keep planting until plant/tree #1 has fully grown. Even if you don't have enough seeds to keep planting that long, the time it costs to use the rake doesn't seem worth it. The good news is, none of these elements are harmful to the game, only useless.
The balance of the food bar, warmth bar, campfires vs uranium fires, planting vs harvesting are all practically perfect. You really have to work to progress, but making the right choices and thinking quickly allow you to get further in the game more quickly.
The game's also very innovative; although growing/shrinking is an increasingly common element in games, it's rarely used like this, allowing you to shrink or grow areas to travel between them. The idea of making tiny worlds grow big also fits the theme perfectly.
Graphics are simple but functional. They're nice, but nothing to get blown away by. Sound consists entirely of a short music loop; although the music isn't bad at all and it can be looped pretty often until it gets boring, it does get rather boring if it's the only loop in a game of this length (first full playthrough took me 560 seconds). Although the lack of sound isn't jarring (to the point where I was unsure whether it actually had sound when I closed the game after playing for ~20 minutes), sound effects could add a lot. A little sound when you plant, harvest, or do some other thing just gives that little extra push that makes it feel rewarding.
Overall, brilliant game, by far the best I've played so far. I really should get back to this game at some point to improve my score. (In case anyone else wants to beat it, my second full playthrough took 363 seconds.) Do you have any plans to continue developing the game beyond its current state? If so, you should definitely add sound. Seeded generation (perhaps giving the player the option between a list of pre-seeded galaxies or a completely random galaxy) would also allow fair competition between players (as it is right now, you could just spawn in an easy galaxy and nobody could beat your score until they got lucky too); if you want to take it even further you could have players compete with an online high score list. You could also greatly boost the replay value by giving the player a list of pre-seeded galaxies, ordering them by difficulty and challenging the player to complete all of them. It's an amazing game, and it has the potential to be even more amazing. If you decide to develop it further than this, I'd be very interested.
I don't have or want Chrome on my PC, and I feel I wouldn't be able to fully enjoy it without audio, let alone rate it...is there no other way to play it with audio?
Wonderful game, you should definitely finish it. Still, it gets -1 overall on my score for not being finished, despite the amount of polish.
The gameplay was pretty simple, but it was very well made and provided an actual challenge - I died multiple times, yet none of the deaths felt unfair. The controls worked perfectly, and the amount of polish is amazing for an LD game.
Theme-wise, this game was brilliant. It's an innovative way to use the subject, and it's completely central to the game. I couldn't ask for better.
The graphics were clean and charming, and functionally they were perfect; despite the abstract style it was clear who was an enemy and who wasn't, you could instantly see where you could walk and where you couldn't walk, and the simple effect on the transforming enemies clearly conveyed that you were fucked if you were too close. My only complaint is that it might have been too abstract - if hadn't been for the text, you wouldn't know you were in a raindrop. For that matter, I never really know what exactly my allies and enemies were, other than 'those star-shaped things' and 'those round things'.
Sound-wise, the game simply does its job. There's no background music, but the storm sounds do a great job of setting the atmosphere. Everything that needs a sound has a sound, and the entire thing just feels right. It wasn't revolutionary in any way, but what it did, it did perfectly.
The story was interesting and fairly innovative. I wanted to continue through the game to find out what happens next, which is always a good sign.
The game lagged significantly, which might have been caused by Flash. Still, the game was playable, even if most of it was in slow-motion.
It's a damn shame the game isn't finished, otherwise this would be an easy 5/5.
A simple get-from-point-A-to-point-B, which however has several major flaws that make it no fun to play.
The biggest detrimental point is the buggy physics system (or implementation of it - either way it doesn't work). You constantly get stuck in walls or floors, making jumping (the main gameplay) very frustrating. The collisions are also handled either improperly or incomprehensibly, with snacks simply being bumped away when you touch them half of the time and cats walking on top of you, making it impossible for you to jump properly.
The AI of the other cats is the second biggest flaw. You said 'annoying kitties', but I haven't seen AI this unfair since Mortal Kombat. They will chase you as stubbornly as they can and have no qualms about ganging up on you. With the broken physics system (see above) and frustrating controls (see below), it's often impossible to get away without receiving any damage regardless of how well you play.
The controls of the game are the third pressing issue. Although the 'don't jump until the button is released' system is often a nice change of pace, it simply does not work in a game where you have to jump quickly to avoid enemies. Adding to the frustration is the fact that you have no indication of how high you'll jump other than gut feeling - there is no visual aid to show how much you've 'charged' the jump. Due to the broken physics, however, even gut feeling won't get you anywhere as your jump is usually interrupted by either a wall you get stuck on or another cat. It's also impossible to see where you're going - I've often jumped off the level simply because I had no indication there were no more blocks where I was heading.
Graphically, the game is very minimalistic. I like the abstract style, though, and the background does look kind of nice. However, it's still very minimalistic, and everything looks the same.
The audio consisted of a generic jump sound and a grating tune. The jump sound was okay, but the tune was grating. It was completely lacking any other clear kind of auditory feedback, such as a sound you'd expect to hear when hit by another cat. (There might have been some kind of sound, but it still was never clear when exactly I was hit and when I wasn't.)
The implementation of the theme could be described as 'novel' or 'lazy'. I'll go with the latter; slapping the word 'tiny' on a game does not automatically make it fit the theme.
This is definitely a difficult one to rate. I wouldn't call it a game myself. It's more like an interactive...something.
The gameplay is simple, but it mostly just works. Controlling the whatever-you-are feels just right. The requirements for the endings are unclear, but can easily be found by exploring.
The graphics are very nice. The world looks interesting enough that exploring it is worth it by itself. There isn't much to say other than that I just like it.
The story is completely random. It's vague enough that the messages you see throughout the game are kind of ominous, but the nonsensical endings kind of ruin any potential it has story-wise.
Considering the incomprehensible/random/nonsensical nature of the game, I'm unable to give it a theme rating as I simply don't 'understand' the game and its world.
The music is kind of generic, but it adds to the atmosphere, enough that it bothered me when it didn't loop; something which took away a lot of the atmosphere.
Overall, I found it worth playing, especially considering its very short length. One suggestion, though: For games like this, you should consider using Flash or some other no-download-necessary platform; people are more likely to play a three-minute game if downloading it doesn't cost two minutes.
The low overall score is because I rate LD games as 48-hour games; if it had been a 5-hour game contest, the rating would be much higher.
An interesting platformer.
It takes very obvious inspiration from Megaman, and the metroidvania elements are pretty standard, but it's fun nonetheless. Beating enemies felt like a chore, though; they're not harmful enough to actually harm you, but they're still in the way and it takes too much time to kill them considering how trivial they are. The bosses were a bit too easy; once you figure out how to beat them, it's just a matter of hammering the Z button until you win.
The graphics were amazing. Although the tiles themselves look pretty generic and bland, the characters, the animations, the background and the opening cutscene all look awesome. The face in the background was pretty creepy, and was a very nice touch. It was lacking death animations for the enemies, though.
Theme implementation was one of the two blatantly obvious ways (tiny character in relatively huge world or huge character in relatively tiny world), but the terrarium theme was a nice spin on it.
The game contained almost no audio, and what audio there was, was pretty annoying. I was missing a lot of auditory feedback on many things; you don't hear when you get hurt, you don't hear when you hit an enemy (as opposed to swinging and missing), et cetera. Don't underestimate the importance of sound, it takes away a lot from the game.
Overall, a nice game, but it's pretty clear it's rather unfinished. Practically no sound, enemies just suddenly disappearing when killed, the nonsensical ending, lack of spawn points - many minor flaws that subtly harm the game experience. I'd say scale back a bit and add more polish next time; it's what turns a good game into a great game.
MinerCraftGuy; it IS multiplayer. In fact, to play single-player you have to change a setting in the config file. It's just that nobody sticks around long enough for there to be two players online at the same time. I really should focus on more content to keep people playing for longer than a couple minutes next time.
Interesting but fairly bland game.
The game is a rather standard twin stick shooter, which is pretty fun, but it does very little to make it stand out among the other twin stick shooters. The size gimmick is an interesting idea, but in practice you tend to get surrounded, pushed into a corner and then fully drained to death in one or two seconds, making HP and the gimmick that relies on it fairly meaningless. The stores in-between the levels also seem meaningless, as the pickup effects are nullified when you enter the next wave and HP is fairly useless. The variety of enemies was nice, though.
Graphics-wise, the levels are ugly (just the exact same tiles repeating over and over, no other decorations) and the items are very unclear (still not sure what they represent). The enemies looked pretty okay.
Audio-wise it was decent but unremarkable. There's okay background music and fairly default sounds for the things you need audio feedback for.
The theme seems to only be present in the story, and neither gameplay nor graphics indicate any connection to evolution or devolution.
Overall, decent but fairly standard game.
P.S.: For Windows users, it might be better to have some .exe or similar runnable file to immediately start the game, as many people will probably just run love.exe, see only the piggy, and just assume it doesn't work. Also, there's a bug where points are carried on in subsequent playthroughs if playing multiple games in one session.
First of all, it's quite impressive how much you've managed to do in just 48 hours. There is a lot of content in the game, and the number of different gameplay elements is also surprising for a Ludum Dare entry. (And it has FIVE freaking bosses.)
However...there's a very good reason why Ludum Dare entries are never as big in scale as this game. The 'finishing touches' are more than just nice extras. The problems with this game are all minor, but all those minor problems (utter lack of sound, control issues, occasional dull moments, wildly varying difficulty) combine for a frustrating play experience.
Gameplay-wise, it's a strange mix of sheer fun, utter boredom and pure frustration. Though there are very interesting parts in the game (notably the bosses, the first times you use the reflect ability and the butterfly backtracking), they are surrounded by dull platforming/backtracking parts with either no challenge or only the kind of 'challenge' that feels lame (fireballs appearing out of nowhere as you land, stray bullets requiring you to stop every second or have a small chance of suddenly dying), worsened by unresponsive controls (like the time gap after landing when you can't jump or dash for a moment).
A very significant source of frustration (to the point where it felt like a chore to continue playing and I strongly considered quitting (if I were only a random player and not judging the game for LD I'd have quit at that point)) was the unresponsive dash ability during the laser boss. While the boss is awesome the first couple of times, it quickly grows beyond frustrating as you die over and over again due to your character not dashing despite having clearly double-tapped the arrow key - which instantly kills you at the boss's later stages. This single element causes all the enjoyment being had to come screeching to a halt.
Another issue is the varying difficulty: it happens multiple times that a challenge later in the game is easier than challenges all the way at the start of the game, making the "challenges" more "chore" than "challenge". This is accentuated by the utterly underwhelming final boss fight, which I managed to complete on my first try with more ease than any of the other bosses.
Graphics-wise, this game is amazing. Everything looks all polished and shiny, all the animations are ridiculously smooth even compared to non-LD games, and the level art gives off a nice atmosphere (which really, really should have been accompanied by background music to truly make it atmospheric).
I am not entirely sure what this game has to do with the theme at all, though. If you manage to give a convincing explanation I might be able to give some more points, but right now the proper score seems to be 'utterly and completely unrelated to the theme'.
As a developer, I love this game. You really did some amazing things for a 48-hour contest, and there's tons of potential in there. But as a gamer, I don't care about potential that's not realized. This game feels unfinished and has major flaws, making it simply not very fun to play.
Now, on a lighter note, you need someone for audio? Sound effects aren't really my specialty (i.e. I'm not better than the average Joe at that) but if you need music, I could try to see if I can make something interesting. What kind of music were you imagining for the game?
(If you're interested, you can hear examples of my music at http://tindeck.com/users/VDZ.)
@ChevyRay: It's good to be ambitious. Try to discover where your limits are, and try to push your abilities as close to the limit as possible.
Last LD I also made an impressive but unfun game (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7284, it was a persistent world online multiplayer building game). It really helped me discover my limits, and this LD I made something that I'm actually satisfied with (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7284) (though I did go slightly over my limits, leading to some last-minute additions, a lack of interesting TRAITs (I had much more interesting ones planned) and no direct multiplayer).
That's one of the things that makes LD so awesome. If you're ambitious, you learn things you wouldn't otherwise learn, and that allows you to make something significantly more awesome next time.
I don't get people's issues with backtracking in general. It's a metroidvania, aren't those all about returning to areas you've visited before to find out you can now do stuff you couldn't do before there? I think backtracking can greatly add to the experience as long as it's about discovering new stuff and not about walking back the linear road you just came from.
(This game has both 'good' and 'bad' backtracking; there are very obvious parts where you already know exactly where you have to go, what you have to do and how you get there (such as at the beginning where you go in one direction, go back all the way in the other direction, then go back to the original direction again, all linear), but the butterfly collecting makes you explore, trying to find places you weren't able to access before.)
Hmm...I'm not sure how to comment on this. As a gimmick, this is top notch, giving pure fun for a short while. As a game, however, it kind of falls short, because after that short while you grow bored of it.
While the animals are fun for a while, their survival (or lack thereof) seems rather random and not directly related to the choices you make (unless you do something specifically to kill them). I strongly get the feeling that the game will always have 6 species max because they just keep killing themselves or dying randomly and there's nothing you can do about it. As such, there's no genuine challenge in the game, and just watching the animals do stuff gets boring after a while.
The wacky music is very fitting and adds a lot to the wacky atmosphere. The sounds also add a lot and makes the animals feel alive. When there a lot of animals, though, the sounds they make can become repetitive and very grating.
Graphics-wise, it's simple yet charming. The simple graphics have a lot of variety which makes the spectacle fun to watch, but the evolutionary traits are very unclear, and in every case I had to see them functioning before I realized what they were supposed to represent.
All in all, a fairly unique "game" that would work out better as a Flash gimmick than as actual game.
Bizarre, just bizarre. I love it. It's like I'm playing pictures for sad children in video game form.
The gameplay is simplistic but everything just works perfectly. There's always things to do and things to see, and you never get bored while playing. The graphics look like shit - but they look the consistent, fitting kind of shit that makes the bizarreness all the more obvious. And the audio is simply amazing. It's all just weird noises and vague background noise, but it perfectly completes the bizarre atmosphere.
Hats off. This game is simply art.
To everyone who can't run this: Install Java JRE 7. You likely have Java 6, in which case the game refuses to run without even so much as an error message.
This game presents some interesting ideas, but is very flawed.
The degree of customizability in this game is very interesting, giving you a motivation to gather points and a way to specialize in a specific playing style. However, the rules to this customization are very unclear (sometimes I could upgrade and other times I couldn't - I have no idea why).
But most of all, customization is pointless as there is no challenge in this game. Even in the earliest stages, you have to specifically try to get yourself killed in order to lose. As you upgrade further, it only gets easier, and soon enough you get to a point where anything that gets close enough to damage you is pretty much instantly obliterated before it can touch you (if you have enough curve and spread, you don't even have to aim for it). If something does happen to you, healing is very cheap. As much as I like the customization and the pixels representing your health, all of it is pointless when there is no need to customize and nothing to really deplete your health.
The graphics are basic and mostly not problematic, but the interface does have its quirks (no 'button pressed' feedback, numbers with 10 decimals, text running through other interface elements). The audio is interesting for the first couple seconds, but quickly becomes very grating.
Very nice twist on the twin stick shooter genre, but above all, a very well-executed one.
The gameplay is simply fun. Everything just feels right (down to minor details like being able to heal by not being hit for long enough), and the randomly changing enemies add a lot of variety to the game (it strongly reminds of Warning Forever, which also has interesting changing gameplay like this).
The graphics look very nice, with the clearly 2D elements fitting perfectly with the 3D elements. The whole thing looks very polished.
The audio design was also well thought out, with a sound for everything I'd want a sound for. The shooting noises are a little harsh and become slightly repetitive, though.
This game is simply fun to play and replay. One thing I feel that could be added is saved high scores, possibly even online high scores - it would be great if I could compare my score to my highest score, or even to other player's scores. I can now post in the comments that I hit Virus Strength 35 (with best strain 0x02E1, 16 mutations, 10 splits and 120 dead), but experience has taught me few (if any) other players will also post their scores.
By the way, there's no way to restart the game from the score screen with the keyboard, other than just reloading the page.
Is there anywhere we can get an MP3 of the background music or something? I love it.
What a twist. I thought it was a basic Snake clone, but then it started transforming and became something else entirely. (Though I can't agree with the 'one level without interruptions' - the maze part felt like a clearly separate part, and until I died I didn't even realize the score was counting on from the Snake part.)
The transforming level in the Snake part was a nice twist, especially visually. Then the game transformed into a completely different game, which pleasantly caught me by surprise. The invisible maze was quite interesting and challenging, with a proper increasing difficulty to kill me before I started thinking foolish thoughts like the game being too easy. A major point of criticism here, though, is that at the start of the game the difficulty increases too slowly. I'd like to play the maze game again, but I don't want to trudge through the easy Snake part again. A faster transformation of the level/gameplay or some other way to speed up things for advanced players would have been very nice.
The game starts with very simple graphics (looking like a very typical basic Snake clone), then starts to look increasingly nicer, eventually getting to the maze part, which just looks neat. It would've been ever better, though, if even in the maze part the visuals would change (even if only in color), as that would provide some kind of incentive to continue scoring more and more points.
The audio is lacking. Although in the Snake part the audio is sufficient, the maze is completely quiet making for a very boring auditory landscape. More importantly, there is no audio feedback to important parts of the game; mainly, there is no clear indication of when you collect the dot (a simple sound would've sufficed). Sound to indicate the blinking of the dot and sound to indicate your time was running out would also have been nice.
A very nice game with some flaws.
Although I like the idea of running for survival while defending yourself against incoming enemies, I feel the execution here falls short, making the game overall not a very fun experience.
The controls are very unfit for this kind of game. You'd want tight, responsive controls to run for your life, but instead this game provides a low-acceleration, slippery, hard to steer control system that makes you slide for your life and comically bump into the walls. Or at least it would be comical, if bumping into walls and a lack of acceleration didn't kill you, which it does in this game.
The stars coming up to you and slowing you down if you didn't kill them in time were a neat idea. Shooting the stars feels very fake, though; you don't 'fire in a direction', you click the star to make it disappear. I'm guessing this was done through an OnClick() event rather than spawning a moving projectile with collision detection?
The gaps in the floor are sudden and sometimes simply impossible to see. This makes progress more or less a lottery where if you happen to encounter an 'invisible' gap your run ends there. The jump feature is also slightly buggy, with the character sometimes refusing to jump fully, which can also lead you to fall into such a hole.
The graphics don't feel very consistent. Although the background and the stars look pretty nice, the different elements (background, stars, road, walls, character) simply don't blend well together. Even if hamburgers, spaghetti and ice cream are all delicious, if you throw them all together and try to eat them as one dish it wouldn't taste very nice. Make sure the different graphical elements fit well with each other, otherwise any individual merit they might have becomes moot.
There is very little audio in the game, and what little audio there is sounds rather repetitive and annoying.
The concept is nice, but the game is bogged down by many flaws which ultimately make the game hardly enjoyable.
Game updated, you can now battle other players (with both players picking their attacks rather than attacks being randomly picked). Use the link at the top of the description to download it; please do note that LD entries should be judged by their original version, not any post-LD updated version.
Fun game. Neither the interpretation of the theme nor the game itself are very innovative, but it's fun and that's what matters most. Reminds me of old Commodore 64 games.
Awesome game! Killing heroes is always fun, and the monster and trap systems are great.
Though the system is easily broken with a good strategy (such as just killing all heroes on the surface with cannons, taking their loot and digging out the treasure yourself), coming up with such a strategy is a lot of fun, and you can always keep challenging yourself by choosing not to use your previous cheesy strategy.
Unfortunately there's no audio, and victory is pretty underwhelming, but the game is fun enough to make up for it.
I agree with jsmars that this game would probably be a lot of fun in multiplayer.
By the way, your source code is not included, nor any link to it on this page or with the download.
>6. Source code MUST be included.
(from the competition rules)
Personally, I'm kind of interested in how this was made.
For a Jam entry, my only remark is that it doesn't really fit the theme very well (the protagonist is more gray area and acts like the 'good guy'). Other than that, top marks for everything. I did not expect to see something like this as an LD entry.
Due to its quality, I'll critique it as a normal visual novel instead of a jam game.
The writing is really, really good. Seriously, I don't think I've ever read such good writing in an OELVN before. It was really interesting to read and had a lot of charm. The style and atmosphere were also fantastic, using limited resources to great effect.
However, while the plot starts off promising, it ends up being incredibly shallow and disappointing. The detective work is limited to reading each person's profile, having a single conversation with each person and getting a couple of lines of information from Archie. While in a mystery you'd expect some hints, foreshadowing, red herrings and the like to keep you guessing for a bit until the answer is revealed, The Cards Never Lie presents all information so clearly you make an immediate correct guess as to who the culprit is, and the story never adds anything to it - in the end, you have to 'solve' the mystery with the vague guess you get as soon as you have the relevant information. There are no suspicious people and there are no misunderstandings - there's some information implicating someone (the kind that usually is either a misunderstanding or a part of a larger whole), and all of that information turns out 100% accurate and can be taken at face value.
For that matter, none of the other suspects matter to the story, only serving as a distraction. Nothing of what they say or do has anything to do with the case, their backstories not only never become relevant but are never really revealed (why waste the reader's time with something that both isn't relevant and will never become interesting?), and they don't even serve as convincing suspects. With the little character interaction you have with each character, most feel very shallow as well - their personalities are limited to the things that happened in their backstories, and they don't really feel like more than walking plot devices.
Still, I again have to commend your writing skills - with a better plot and characters (probably more likely when you aren't on a strict time limit) you'd probably be capable of making a masterpiece. I'll definitely have to check out your other works. (Though it may be a while until I do, since the next translation patch for Rewrite is just around the corner and that will probably eat up a LOT of my time.)
The game's idea is interesting (though not very innovative - it does little to differentiate itself from DOS-era puzzle platformers), but I did have some issues with the game.
As others have mentioned, the controls are very slippery, which makes precise platforming difficult.
The effects of the switches are not always clear, and this mainly presents a problem in this level: http://i.xomf.com/zfnpk.png. You keep pushing the button, but the blocks seem to move almost randomly in response (there is a pattern, but it took a long time to find it - it was especially confusing due to all other buttons toggling between two states instead of six or so).
The level after that was what made me gave up on the game, though: http://i.xomf.com/xrbzs.png. Clearly there is a puzzle there, but as you're thinking about the puzzle you are hit by errors leaving you absolutely no time to think (as death means you have to start all over from the beginning). There's no clear way to dodge the errors (looking at the readme you could apparently duck, but I had no idea at the time, and many other players will likely face the same problem), and if you try to move forward to seek shelter from the errors you screw up the puzzle - and get hit by even more errors.
The sound also felt very repetitive and became grating after a while.
On the other hand, I did like the graphics, and the idea to start by bashing your keyboard was nice.
The concept of this game is interesting, but the way it's executed is unfortunately not much fun.
The two biggest issues I had with this game are the lack of strategy and the slowness of the game. The idea is that you attack the hero with the most fitting enemies/traps for that situation, but since all three recharge separately and the enemies are barely different, it becomes just a matter of spamming everything you have.
It becomes even more of a problem in the battles, as your only options are 'attack' and 'dodge', with 'attack' just dealing a set amount of damage (unless you're low on HP and the hero has priority), and 'dodge' randomly either dealing or not dealing twice that much damage, and only if the hero strikes that character - in practice, dodge is completely useless except for that single situation described above where attack is not useful. This lack of strategy makes battles a matter of just mashing the attack button until it's over.
But what really makes the first problem stand out is the second problem, the slowness of it all. When you're about to fight the hero you can pretty much calculate the entire result in advance - the hero will lose between X and Y health and you lose the battle, regardless of what you do in-battle. But every time you attack the hero, you have to play a complete battle, having to watch the same slow animations over and over again. I just stopped using monsters at some point because of how slow and repetitive it all was.
Adding just a bit more strategy to the battles would've gone a long way, but as it is now, I'm afraid the game just isn't very fun.
Interesting game. The only thing I have to add that hasn't been said before: The interface and stream of information to the player needs some work. You can't drag dungeon windows out of the way, you can't have multiple dungeon windows open, it's easy to misclick when trying to add a monster to a dungeon, getting no feedback whether placement was success or failure (a sound and a simple visual sign would do), you can't see from the map whether a dungeon has monsters or not, you get no notification when all enemies in a dungeon are defeated, etc. Improving that would make the game a lot more fun to play.
I don't want to be an asshole, but I'm afraid I just can't really say anything positive about this game.
The game starts without any explanation whatsoever, leaving you confused about what to do. The gameplay is extremely simplistic. There is no difficulty; you can just hold Z after starting and win automatically. The graphics are ugly and unclear - you don't know who you are, you don't know what that thing on the side of the screen is, you don't know what those things flying past you are, you have no idea how much life you have left (I assume the bar at the top is for that, but it's too small and hidden to read during gameplay). There's no music or sound (not even a simple pew-pew-pew shooting sound), which is often essential feedback on sidescrolling shooters and would be very useful in this game. The victory screen is sudden, ugly, underwhelming and doesn't really give the player a victorious feeling.
The story started out interesting, and I was really curious who the protagonist was and what he was doing, but the conclusion to the story was just disappointing. What little answers the story did provide were generic and uninteresting, while major questions (who is the protagonist? Why is he looking for that artifact, what does he plan to do with it?) remained unanswered. In a story that seems simply made to make the reader curious to those questions, it's very disappointing that they are barely answered.
Not my cup of tea.
Normally I post a wall of text here pointing out flaws and suggesting improvements, but in this case I just don't like the game for what it is. It's the kind of 'LULZ SO RANDOM XD'-ness you frequently see on forums, except in game form, with no story to speak of, no humor other than the 'inherently funny' randomness and a couple of references, and there is no gameplay to speak of to make up for its lack of story, writing quality and humor.
I guess it's kinda harsh, but that's how I see it.
Interesting combination of Turn Based Strategy games and Worms, making it really different from either. I liked how taking cover and general unit placement was strategically important.
However, like others I was confused at first (turn order and worms-like fire-and-retreat were never explained, for example), and I was disappointed with how easy the game was. Except for the last level you are always starting with an advantage against a dumb-as-bricks AI (does not retreat and unstrategically blows up blocks), so most of the game had no challenge and I completed the game without losing even once.
One thing I'm wondering though: why is there no simple Worms-like multiplayer? From your game setup it doesn't look hard to do, and it would've added a lot to the game.
(By the way, I think I found a bug (not 100% sure). In the final round, I once moved my tank in the last second of retreat time. Retreat time ended before I finished moving, so I think it got stuck halfway between tiles (it's hard to see where a tile starts and ends). AI shots seemed to deal no damage to it and I was unable to move back to the tile after moving the tank.)
In case anyone's interested, here's a link to the battle theme: http://tindeck.com/listen/hzph
@Tobias Wehrum
The "strange spell" makes you forget the attack you used the most that battle. This is specifically to disrupt such "dominant strategies", as removal of your most used attacks forces you to use other attacks.
Fullscreen does not change the aspect ratio - your computer's graphics settings are just set to stretch fullscreen applications (any game, not just this one). If you find the correct setting (varies per video card, I think) and change it, you'll get the normal 4:3 ratio with black bars on the sides. (It does that on my PC. If you're interested in the technical side, I hate it when games set a high resolution and then upscale all graphics, so my game just goes to 800x600 fullscreen without any scaling. This way, if you for example take a screenshot, the result is normal 800x600 instead of some ridiculous resolution.)
The music was made in FL Studio 9.1, using Miroslav Philharmonik Orchestra, soundfonts from DSK HQ Instruments and ezdrummer. If you're interested in the FLP files, you can download them here: http://www.stack.nl/~vdz/misc/COFLP.zip
@Tobias Wehrum
For some reason, a lot of my Nvidia Control Panel options disappeared (seems to be a common bug) including that one, but it's supposed to be there for Nvidia cards. (The setting is called 'image scaling' or something.)
The reason I hate upscaling + pillarboxing is cases like this: http://i.xomf.com/qhrvw.png
That's a 1680x1050 image (the resolution I was using at the time) of an 800x600 screen. Not only is the filesize hugely inflated (it can get twice as big; my current resolution of 1920x1080 makes it even worse), there are two black bars in the image and the picture as a whole is less sharp due to the scaling. Often the lower quality due to scaling is even visible while playing the game.
@Tobias Wehrum
I just uploaded an updated version (fourth link at the top), which has a feature to change your aspect ratio to 16:9 or 16:10 (1280x720 and 1280x800; pillarboxing is possible but not mandatory). If you run into any issues with it (like things being drawn in the wrong places), please let me know.
To everyone who's downloaded and played it so far: Please redownload the game. I fixed a minor bug that had some major implications on the game balance. (The Demon Lord's max MP was always at 100, regardless of your max MP.)
@awppy
You can see all of the Demon Lord's attack pattern. Just press PageUp/PageDown when viewing his pattern in the main menu.
@awppy
Either of them. The LD version was updated to v1a, v2 was updated to v2a. Both fix the bug, v2a also has extra features the LD version doesn't have (but were already included in v2).
@soupy
You're always playing from the perspective of the hero, out to slay the Demon Lord not knowing he is you from the future. If you were playing the Demon Lord after traveling back, you'd just be able to kill the hero and call it a day since the Orb of Time is safe, the only hero that rose to the task is dead, and there will be no other time-traveling Demon Lord to take your place. (The Demon Lord is also stronger than the player due to having had years more of experience.)
Not much of a game. Minimalistic, sure, but there's nothing to see or do.
A single session of the game takes too long. It takes a LOT of hits for you to die, and the amount of damage you take does not increase noticeably as you get to higher levels. Because of this, it gets boring rather fast.
On a technical note, in C#, if you create multiple new Randoms in a very short span of time, they will be IDENTICAL, and give exactly the same numbers. (Really, try executing
for(int i = 0; i < 20; i++) { Console.WriteLine(new Random().Next(1, 7)); }
and you'll see what I mean.) In your game, this causes most or all mystery boxes in a level to contain the exact same effect. Pass an existing Random to the constructor or use a static Random to fix this bug.
As for the crashes, they are clearly NAudio's fault (I couldn't get music running here either). I used NAudio for audio output once and I ran into the same game-breaking bugs; I've never used it since.
Great atmosphere and graphics, but it feels very unfinished and barely related to the theme. Gameplay is the usual adventure stuff, but point and click adventures aren't really a place to look for gameplay innovation.
Interesting, but only as a prototype, not as a game.
Very nice game. I felt the fame limit to be too easy to reach, though; if you just keep building plenty of parks (without bothering with the higher-level buildings) you can reach it very quickly. This also caps your city growth; I played the sandbox expecting to be able to make an uber-town, only to win (and be unable to continue) because I had too much fame. Kind of defeats the purpose of a sandbox.
Very interesting game. However, the difficulty is very high and the learning curve is very steep - it took me ages to figure out how everything worked, and even after I understood how it worked it was still extremely difficult.
By the way, the game freezes for me when I don't have my gamepad plugged in but I do have bluetooth input devices configured. Apparently it's checking for gamepad input even if there's no gamepad (analog stick is probably also a requirement), as long as there's some other input device. (I occasionally connect my Wii Remote to my PC via Bluetooth; it's an input device, but not a gamepad.)
Screenshot of error: http://i.xomf.com/bkwsz.png
Very immersive, though around the 100 feet mark it starts to lose its dramatic atmosphere somewhat. Around 50 feet I was thinking, 'oh man, I'll never make it', but after 100 there wasn't really much tension anymore; some 'oh shit I'm not going to make it' lines between the distractions would've really helped there. It isn't until you get near the top that it gets dramatic again.
There is one thing that bothers me, though. WHAT THE HELL IS AT THE TOP OF THE WALL?! I climbed 208 feet up the wall, completely destroyed my hands in the process, lost all of my loot, caught malaria and pissed myself, and I don't even get to see the reason I put in all of that effort! What is it that's up there that made it worth the effort to climb 208 freaking feet riskily using vines that are barely strong enough to hold me with a heavy backpack?! I'm fine with anticlimactic endings (such as not making it, not finding what you expected, etc), but cutting it off at that point was just mean.
Ah, looks like I completely misread that sentence; I thought he was saying his helicopter is somewhat far away on the other side of the wall because he couldn't land close to the tomb.
Hm, I guess I'll explain how I initially interpreted various things and why I experienced things the way I did. This is going to be embarrassing and stupid, but I hope it helps.
Let's start off with the choices. I originally felt the clickable text were actions you could do, and that they may affect how the story progresses; a link not clicked meaning an action not taken. For this reason, I usually ignored the sidetracking actions to focus on climbing unless they were relevant for climbing or very interesting, lest I do something stupid and fall and/or wear myself out before I reach the top. It took a very long time for me to realize that these actions would be done regardless of whether I clicked them or not - clicking was only for expanding the text. Because I was avoiding 'unnecessary actions', I also missed how you could change the action you were about to take by clicking the word at times (these moments were indistinguishable from text expansion moments until you click the text); only near the end of the game did I understand how that worked.
The story: I didn't know the opening lines were meant to be taken literally, as they have a lot of implied context I didn't know about beforehand (the game has no description, so I had no idea what the game was about until I tried it). As such, I interpreted it as a cryptic intro text (which is quite common in many stories; my interpretation could be blamed on the fact that I'm currently reading Shikkoku no Sharnoth, which is absolutely full of this kind of stuff) which would make sense later.
As the climb began, I had the impression (partially based on the title) that the protagonist was climbing the wall of a ruin he [as I interpreted the protagonist at the time] was about to loot stuff from (and therefore I was wondering why I hadn't left my backpack behind before starting the climb). As the story progressed, at first I was thinking 'it sucks that there's no choice to go back, this isn't going to end well', which gradually shifted towards 'the treasure at the top better be worth it'.
Regarding the protagonist, considering the context (treasure hunter climbing the wall of a [probably ancient] ruin), I was reminded of characters like Indiana Jones and various old video game characters from such contexts (most inspired by Indiana Jones). All of these characters are male, and as it was from a first-person perspective, I am male myself, and there was no clear indication otherwise, I thought the protagonist was a male treasure hunter in his late 20s-early 30s, as that fit the clichés/conventions. Re-playing the game, I found that the only non-optional hints towards her gender were:
"You envision piles of Sephora cosmetics. White tiles. Glass case. 20 percent off fine jewelry.
Career Woman Khaki package with Ocean Mist Underarm Dab for midday refresh.
You can smell the fabric. See the tags strewn across the dressing room floor."
As I am not American, I had no idea what 'JC Penny' was; I thought the protagonist was distracting 'himself' from the pain by thinking random thoughts as some psychological trick.
As you can see, I misinterpreted various things in the story. It always happens with stories; anything not told clearly is filled in by whatever preconceptions the reader has. If it was your intention to make certain parts clearer to readers, I hope this helps to understand where it can go wrong in readers' minds.
I'm a tad disappointed after The Cards Never Lie.
While the expanding text gimmick sounds interesting, in practice it's only a bother to read the same text repeatedly with some alterations - most of which are just filler text which don't really add anything to the experience, in my opinion. Perhaps it would be more interesting if all hidden text actually added something and could not be displayed when you first read the text - for example, requiring you to have read certain other parts to 'unlock' the hidden text. As it is now, I eventually ended up just expanding everything to max size every time after a certain point, so I wouldn't have to reread the same thing thrice every time.
The plot feels very disjointed, chaotic and random. While to some extent this is justified by the subject matter, it feels like the story is distorted beyond what the protagonist's perspective would provide - like if the world was a dream and simply had no logic. Even with the protagonist's mental state it would make sense for it to feel like one continuous story, but rather it seems like a collection of separate snippets, as if you are skipping three pages for every page you read in a book.
Absolutely amazing. I think this is the first time I've rated an LD game 5/5 in every applicable category. Perfectly executed in every way, it's a shame so many people don't get it.
--SPOILER WARNING--
To the people who don't get it: Each door has a minimalistic symbol above it that indicates where it leads to. Using these symbols and hints you find on the walls (notably the ones to search for the red cube and that 'nature is below your feet') you are supposed to find your way to nature. (The eventual solution is to find the room with the red cube (! symbol) and jump off the path leading to it; nature is below that room.)
High score!
Fun game. Only complaint I have is that at the start of the new level, objects keep spawning while you are vulnerable - not bumping into a magenta object is as much a matter of luck as it is of skill at the start of a level.
No effort put in, horrible writing, comedy no more than 'LULZ SO RANDOM', terrible graphics and very grating music.
I understand you're "being ironic" but unless you manage to do so in an amusing and not-completely-obvious way, I will rate it for what it is.
Absolutely amazing game. Amazing gameplay, amazing minimalism, amazing music, amazing everything. This game deserves to win LD 26.
My high scores are 73/65/43. Anyone managed to get higher scores?
Sorry about the frequent bugs (they can be fixed with restarts, but restarting every minute is very annoying). I'll see if I can get a v2 up later.
Bugs squashed. Play v2 if you don't want to have to restart the game every other minute.
I've updated the post-LD version to v4.
CHANGELOG:
-ADDED: You can now copy the tile at your cursor by pressing C.
-ADDED: You can now paste at your cursor by pressing V.
-ADDED: You can now change the color of the tile at your cursor by pressing B.
Simply put, copying/pasting is now tons faster.
@SuperlevelSebastian
Do you have .NET Framework 4 and XNA 4 installed? The installers for them are included in the first link. Otherwise, it might be a case of your computer not meeting the minimum requirements for XNA (it just crashing instead of notifying the player when that happens is my fault), as XNA just refuses to run on machines without the proper specs (it's especially picky about video cards; an XP32 laptop's built-in video card is likely not good enough for XNA).
Short, simple and impactful. Great graphics and audio, too.
Great game, reminds me of classic C64 games. Impressed 6 ladies on my first try, 9 ladies on my second try.
It's slightly humorous, but there's not much to it beyond that. You click the right words a couple times, and then you either win or lose. As a game, it's not very exciting. Even adding some kind of score system (such as a numerical rating of how much the boss likes it) would improve the game as it gives you some target to aim for beyond just winning (which is hardly a challenge at all).
Wow. When I opened this page, I got a very bad impression from the, to be honest, ugly graphics. So I definitely did not expect there to be a great game underneath that I'd keep playing over and over again!
It's a very simple game, with mechanics that have been done to death. But it all just works so well it's a lot of fun despite that. This game really has the 'one more try!' factor.
Besides the graphics, I only have two minor criticisms about the game. Though I really like the rest of the audio, the announcer's voice at the start of every try gets very repetitive after a couple of plays. Secondly, and that's only a problem because I really like the game, the randomness is unbalanced and makes scoring unfair. For example, in the ring toss game, any run with a lot of white rings and a front row full of white bottles will have a higher score than other runs. It's even possible to get rings/balls/darts of colors that don't exist on the board! It adds a bit too much luck to a skill game, in my opinion.
Also, something I noticed, not sure if it's a bug or intentional: The high score is registered immediately, not at end of round. If your score decreases at some point (for example, a ring that was barely on falls off), the higher mid-round score counts towards your high score instead of your end-of-round score. This is very noticeable in the ring toss game when you get above 50 points.
Anyways, a game like this calls for score sharing. To all other commenters: What are your high scores? Mine are 80/50/71.
I guess I'm the only one who doesn't like the graphics and audio. I understand you were going for a 'so bad it's good' style, but it just didn't do much for me. Perhaps it's the fact that there's too little variation in the graphics and everything looks pretty much the same, or perhaps I'm just weird (I didn't like Space Funeral either).
As some others have said, the gameplay gets rather repetitive. You'll just be moving towards the exit without having to think much about it, dying due to being slightly too slow, then going through the exact same motions again except changing your route by a couple of tiles. It's not so much that you have to try hard to do it right as that you have to be careful not to do it wrong; the second time you'll almost always get past your obstacle without any trouble, so it doesn't really feel like you've accomplished much.
Most of the levels feel like they're pretty much the same as the previous level (only rarely do you get an interesting new element to think/strategize about), so it feels like you're just going through the same motions over and over again. Though it must be noted that there are a couple of instances of new elements/patterns in the game, such as the part where you walk through the spiral with rapid-fire enemies shooting at you from all sides. Contrary to the usual 'walk past it fast enough not to get hit' gameplay, you actually had to walk in a small area with enemy fire all around you, which felt significantly different. Parts like that make levels interesting and memorable.
From a gameplay perspective, the execution of the theme felt rather bland. 'Beat a level in 10 seconds and occasionally recharge your time'. Better than not using the theme at all as some people do, but it's not exactly the most original use of the theme.
Lastly, a comment that doesn't affect my judging of the game, but bit of a disappointment for a Porpentine game: You wrote down some interesting lore, but the game feels like it has nothing to do with it. The environmental description is reflected in the art of the game, but other than that there's only the arbitrary time extension item in the game, which feels like it's hardly related to the lore (I can't imagine them surviving disasters with only a handful of single-use crystals granting only 10 seconds valid for only a single person). The ending of the game also amounts to nothing more than a simple 'yay a handful of us have survived'. Feels like it makes the lore a bit redundant, in my opinion.
This game is far too hardcore for me to finish in a single sitting. Could you make a post-LD version with a level select/save/password system so people don't have to repeat all of the previous levels if they want to play a specific level?
As for the game itself, well, other people have said it all already. This marks the second time I've ever rated an LD game 5/5 in all applicable categories (first time being your LD26 entry)...I really need to check out your other games sometime.
From a technical viewpoint, this game is quite good. It's well thought out, everything works, and so on.
But for some reason, it just doesn't feel fun to me. Maybe it just isn't my kind of game, but the auto-generated walls of text aren't that interesting to read, and solving the puzzle doesn't really feel rewarding to me.
I had a lot of fun with excessive upgrades, being able to freely navigate in all directions using recoil and such. http://i.xomf.com/snjhs.png
The rules of the game are extremely unclear, and I'm not sure if the 'rules' matter at all. Regardless of what I put in the potion, it just gives 10 XP. It doesn't look like there's any purpose to not using the potion at all. In fact, there's not even any clear point to leveling up - what, if anything, changes when you do? The shop upgrades are also completely lacking in description; even if they do something, I have no idea what, and I didn't notice any change.
But most of all, the game feels pointless. You throw random stuff in the cauldron, the arbitrary numbers behind XP and MNY go up, then you press spacebar and do it again. There's no challenge, no sense of discovery, no real progression, nothing besides just repeating the same motions over and over.
If I am somehow grossly misunderstanding this game, please explain how the game works, and I'll re-rate it.
Awesome game. Beat it with 250 deaths (score -158). The '+ LVL' was a real nightmare. The timer countdown was far too loud, though; I had to turn down the great music to prevent that sound from being too loud.
Simple, but it works. Entertaining for a short while.
High scores by the same person are listed multiple times. You generally want to re-submit your score when you get a higher score.
I'll give my honest thoughts: The game is a buggy mess with no challenge, ugly graphics, and barely any content (there's only one level and it's really short), and it has nothing to do with the theme.
But everybody starts out making shitty games. Keep making games and you'll improve over time.
Thanks for pointing that out, there seems to have been some data corruption in uploading. I've re-uploaded both versions and they should both work now.
Every level can be completed. However, the impossible level requires a very unorthodox solution, and the final boss requires a combination of thinking and quick action.
In the unlikely event that anybody still cares, I've updated the game to finally squash the physics issues. Version 3 has better collision physics than previous versions and should therefore play much more smoothly.
Nice little game. Dooleus has already said everything I have to say about this game.
This game has a lot of potential, but unfortunately it really gets bogged down by its flaws.
The most problematic aspect is that, at some point, the game just starts to feel tedious. I know being able to die is a necessary element for the excitement, but having to recollect every item again simply doesn't feel fun. That's partially because the item collecting itself is too slow and aimless - eventually you're just walking through the school three or four times to find out what room you forgot to check this time, to get that last item you need. Then when you finally learn the ritual and place the correct items, and wait for Emily (who is now rather fast) to arrive, you suddenly get a wonderful surprise: nobody told you, but you actually have to keep up the ritual for 4 seconds. Hope you placed your items right. Needless to say, after I got inevitably killed during the ritual, I just no longer felt like doing all of it AGAIN. This problem might be lessened by NOT randomly changing the item locations whenever you play.
While some parts of the school have a unique, recognizable look, a lot of parts look too similar. This makes it take longer to get familiar with the school layout (essential to complete the game) and even once you're familiar, you'll still find yourself occasionally wondering where you are because everything looks the same.
The game makes a very good attempt at a creepy atmosphere, but it's missing one vital element: MUSIC (or ambient sound). Music can make the difference between a boring walk through some school and a scary exploration of a creepy dark building. At some point, I decided to play some music from another game (Corpse Party) in the background, and sure enough, the game felt a lot more exciting.
I want to say I love this game, but I can't really say that when I don't even feel like starting the game one more time to complete it. A few changes and I could love this game.
Oh, I saw a '4' pop up when she walked over the center, disappear again when she left the center tile, pop up again when she walked over the center, etc, so I assumed it was a countdown for the ritual. I read the book plus the two torn out pages; I had (in link for spoilers) http://pastebin.com/Vr8FzHbd. What did I do wrong? The fact that the game responded in some way convinced me I performed it right but I just had to keep it up longer.
Tried a different setup: http://pastebin.com/EbD9Gbkm
Now it says '2'. I followed all of the instructions, so what am I doing wrong?
Ah, I had no idea you needed the book for the ritual. It doesn't feel logical when you already memorized all information in it.
Executed the ritual. The game really doesn't have enough replayability to justify what follows :/
Is it even possible to make it within the time limit?
Enemies get stuck. Enemies walk through the clock hand without dying. You die even when you're not touching anything. There's no score or timer or any real measure of how well you did.
The game has some potential, but it just doesn't realize that potential.
Great concept, although I feel the game is far too easy once you get how it works. I feel the upgrades may actually detract from the game in this case; once you've upgraded a bit, you practically never run the risk of losing. I didn't understand how depth penetration worked at first, but since I figured that out I'm pretty sure it breaks the game as it allows you to skip any tile that could cause any risk (monster and earthquake tiles).
Very interesting strategy game. The interface (as a whole, graphics, audio, text) was a bit lacking, though; it was hard to differentiate between moving the king and spawning a soldier (you need to pay attention to the king otherwise you don't notice at all), there's no special attention to a player being wiped out (it sounds like a normal defeat, then you check the board to see a color missing), there's no quick way to check the number of coins/number of soldiers/number of areas of each player, there's no way to scroll across the map (only rotate the camera), it's not always clear which areas are linked to which areas...all kinds of minor issues that drag an otherwise great game down.
The game is great, though, and I'd imagine it would be quite interesting (and a lot more diplomatic) if it were to be played against other players.
Can't say I'm too impressed by this game. It's a very basic 'click before timer reaches 0' mechanic that does nothing to set itself apart from other games using such mechanics, and there's nothing to the game besides that. The random background noise does not really add to the experience in my opinion. Though the theme was used for the visual presentation of the game, it has no effect on the gameplay (and the 'possessed by the devil' flavor doesn't really have anything to do with the gameplay itself).
As you said, it's not very good. You press space to make two numbers go up, and that's it. It says 'press space to jump', but there is no jumping whatsoever going on. There's not even an increasing difficulty; you always have the same amount of time to pres space. This game is lacking in any kind or form of fun.
Great game as always.
It might be helpful to some players if there was an alternate jump key, such as Z. I had to use numpad 8 to jump as I couldn't properly short hop using the up arrow key while simultaneously moving my character; it was a bit awkward to play that way.
Also, I managed to reach a place that shouldn't be reached and ran into an invisible wall: http://i.xomf.com/wsrrk.png
@Solifuge
You're missing a significant part of the concept by playing only the start of the game. For example, after some point you lose your shadow and become able to move through the mirror (going beneath the surface). The final part of the game also takes place in some kind of underworld.
@Gazok
That's because there is no double jump until you become a vampire.
I tend to really like TCGs and deckbuilding games, but that's mainly because the cards that tend to be so different in effect. Unfortunately, that isn't the case here, with all cards adhering to the same pattern and giving no surprises. And surprises is what I feel the game lacks; it felt like I was just grinding through the enemies and that there was no point to it all. You encounter treasure chests between battles, but I never felt excited by the treasure. I feel that adding some kind of progression, be it finding more interesting/unique cards, battling other monsters, arriving in different locations, and so on would make this game much more interesting. Then again, grinding games have been really popular on smartphones lately - maybe you're doing things exactly right and this just isn't my kind of game.
As others have said, graphics are great, it should really have music and sound, and I couldn't see any relation to the theme.
Let's get this out of the way first: The whip SUCKS. It never fires in the direction you want it to go, you're never quite sure if it's still going forward or already retracting, it clings to stuff you don't want it to cling to, and it pulls your character around like a puppet in unexpected ways and makes you feel like you're not in control of your character anymore. It's very awkward to use and IMO it detracts from the game.
That said, everything else about the game is fucking awesome. It's awesome to run around and wreck stuff, it feels awesome to divekick the shit out of everything, it feels awesome to run past a dozen lasers and escape unharmed. Everything looks awesome, sounds awesome and feels awesome. The final boss fight in particular has you clearly kicking ass in a challenging way. The 'no whip' mode was even better, combining significant difficulty (but never to the point of frustration due to well-placed spawns) with kicking ass.
Some suggestions:
- There's a bug in the final boss fight in the third and second stage of the fight; touching the separated treads occasionally leads to a state where your jumps no longer function correctly (they become really short) and you can no longer divekick. Touching the treads again generally fixes the issue.
- It's possible to die in the transition between the second stage of the boss and the third stage; if you are slowly falling towards the boss or are already hurt and fall towards the boss, you can receive lethal damage before you even get the chance to do something. (The boss's body doesn't hurt until the transformation, so suddenly receiving damage from something that dealt no damage until you hit it is a very lame way to die.)
- It wasn't clear to me when I activated a spawn point. Maybe a change of spawn point color and/or a sound effect might make this more clear.
- Similarly, it was frequently unclear to me whether I properly hit (and dealt damage to) an enemy or not. Making the enemy flash red or similar and/or playing a sound effect indicating a hit would help make this more clear. It might also have been a collision issue; particularly in the case of the big circles firing lasers and the second stage of the final boss fight, it felt like dive-kicks that should've dealt damage did nothing. If this was intended and I just attacked incorrectly, a sound effect or other form of feedback could tell me so, otherwise it feels like it's just bugged.
It took me a while to truly understand the game (things like not being able to pass through the box, your character having to move towards the cursor, etc). Like Tifu mentioned, it was too difficult to distinguish between the cleared shapes and the shapes that will kill you; eventually you end up with a screen with lines all over it, and you have no idea whether a specific line is safe or not. I also didn't really see an relation to the theme; maybe it was just too abstract.
By the way, I forgot to mention it, but my highest score was 1050.
Hmm...this is going to be somewhat useless feedback, because although overall I think it's a nice game, I didn't have enough fun to go for a third try but I can't quite put my finger on what exactly is missing.
The balancing act gameplay is well-executed; you're constantly running between your machines to make sure none of your problems escalate. The different forms of input make every activity feel different, and each activity has its own meaning and consequences on the gameplay. The graphics and sound are decent and functional.
Some suggestions and things that bothered me while playing:
- When firing at blobfish, you have to use your mouse to operate three buttons in a row. The fact that you have to use a mouse combined with the layout of the buttons (if the fire button were above the two others, for example, it would be less of an issue), you frequently click the wrong button. Although this makes the game more challenging, I feel it adds more frustration than it does challenge.
- Similarly, misclicking the fuel rod feels frustrating. Widening the fuel rod's hitbox would make this happen less often, and giving audio feedback (like a metallic *clunk*) when you misclick might help you understand when you've misclicked (otherwise it's easily to subconsciously blame the game; you're sure you clicked right but it just didn't recognize the click or something, that's how it feels).
- Audio feedback (and perhaps visual feedback) can also help the player to recognize when an activity is futile. For example, if your fuel is at 99%, dragging a fuel rod to the tank could make a 'tank now full!' sound or visual effect play. I found myself occasionally dragging fuel rods into the tank when it was already at 100% because I didn't see it was full already.
- Different alarm sounds for different severities might also be useful. As it is now, you'll always hear an alarm sound later in the game because there's always a blobfish bothering you. There's however no way to distinguish the sound of a blobfish that just appeared and a blobfish about to end your game. You lose the game due to your not noticing a situation, rather than your inability to respond to it well enough.
By the way, I made it to 3259m in 238 seconds. (First game was 886m in 217 seconds.)
The art is great. I'm a bit on the fence regarding the gameplay. As others have said, having to click a post-it to find out what it does doesn't really add anything to the game, and in fact only frustrates you when you want the arrow but instead accidentally grab the wall post-it because you can't see what they are. It's also trying to combine puzzling with quick placement, but I feel the latter drags the former down. If you'd given the player a pause button, you could create much more interesting puzzles without them feeling unfair. The fact that the physics were a bit wonky didn't really help with this - frequently Daisy gets stuck because she's unable to climb one pixel up onto the floor beyond the gap, stuff like that. (Not that I have any right to complain about wonky physics, as my game also clearly sucks in this aspect.)
Also, the music got rather repetitive, and the game is a bit on the short side. I was ready for more complicated puzzles, but then it ended already.
Very interesting concept, it makes for some nice puzzles. I managed to get through a bunch of them through sheer trial and error, though.
Great game, far better than I'd expect for someone's first LD. Though there are some technical issues, design-wise it's mostly flawless.
The 'two worlds' mechanic was an obvious pick for the theme, but it was very well executed in this game; the environment-changing bubble is not unique, but it's definitely a fitting choice for overlapping worlds, and the way it was executed was really good; you really had to be careful about when and when not to activate the bubble. The level design was great and forced me to think about how to progress multiple times. The areas look a bit too similar, though; minor visual differences (paintings on the wall, sets of armor, other decorations) would make it easier to recognize where you are (and with that, whether or not you have visited that room before). The combat unfortunately sucked donkey balls, mostly because of the extreme slipperiness of the castle (seriously, what was it built out of?!). The death penalty is also rather severe; with no way to heal, your third time of accidentally running into a skeleton comes soon enough, and suddenly you have to walk back to where you were again - a lot less fun once you've finished solving the puzzles. In fact, I feel the combat didn't really add anything to the game, and it might've been better off without it.
I also feel that sound would very much improve the game. When you flip a switch or press a button, you might not even notice that you did so, let alone know what happened from pressing the button/flipping the switch. A simple *click* sound would help recognize when you press a button/flip a switch, and things like sounds of doors opening (for multiple-use switches) or a you-solved-the-puzzle jingle (for single-use switches) would help hint towards what just happened because of the switch. Music would add a lot too; once I started playing 'Fearless Challenger / Guidance Gate' (from La-Mulana) in the background, the game got several times more awesome.
Overall, great game, looking forward to seeing what you make after this LD.
@Impmaster
To clarify what xerohuang says: There is a 'front layer' and a 'back layer'. The front layer is visible outside of the circle and around you when you have your power disabled, when when you enable your power you see only the 'back layer' of the level in the circle around you. Enemies will hit you when you bump into them regardless of whether or not you can see them; switch to the proper layer to kill them.
At the very start, you have a 'closed room' with only an enemy. Kill the enemy and activate your power to notice the back layer has a hole in the wall that you can walk through. The rest of the game is just like that; there's platforms that are or aren't there depending on the layer, etc. You'll probably find yourself wondering where to go next and thinking maybe the game ends here because of time constraints, but there's always a way to continue until you get a clear 'you win' message. I urge you to give this game another chance, it's quite good apart from the combat.
Extremely simplistic catcher game that adds a small extra mechanic to the usual formula (having to press a button to catch), but it's unfortunately not enough to make it interesting, especially with the lack of the increasing difficulty that makes catcher games at least somewhat interesting. The background music wasn't very good, but it was better than nothing. I failed to see any relation to the theme.
Everything about the game is great, except it lacks replayability. Once you figure out the winning strategy, it's kinda pointless to play again. Then again, figuring out the winning strategy took longer than most LD games keep you entertained.
Good atmosphere, but other than that I didn't like the game very much.
Though you'll inevitably screw up the first couple times, once you understand what to do there is no real challenge to the gameplay. Fetch food, alternate between hugging and feeding. At first I turned the light on and off, but eventually I noticed that it takes less steps if you just keep the light off. Once you get into the pattern that allows you not to get caught, it's just a matter of repeating it again and again and again without any variation. The people searching for you also keep doing the exact same things, which makes no sense and only adds to the repetitiveness. I finished the game, but only out of sheer coincidence - by the end I was so bored I just turned on the light again and decided if I didn't get the good ending before I'm found I'd just stop playing.
I didn't like how you didn't get any context to the situation at any point in the game. I know imagination is the strongest context and blah blah blah, but you could also just give people a blank screen and tell them to imagine something exciting happening. I understand I'm in hiding, but why am I in hiding? And how does the husband returning solve any of it? (Wouldn't he just be executed/deported/whatever terrible fate awaits us as well?) Why would I meekly wait in a basement if people are trying to find me and I have no reason to believe this situation will end even if the husband returns? I at least wanted to reach the ending in hopes that it would explain at least *something* about the situation, but no such thing.
The sound eventually felt very grating as well; there's no variation in the sound and the sounds aren't pleasant to listen to for long stretches of time.
@Aske
If it weren't, you'd be dead by now.
I've updated the game to fix the collision issues (sticking to walls). The original version remains up for judging, but if you just want to play, you can download version 2 by clicking the 'Post-LD version' link.
In other news, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck: http://i.xomf.com/cybdj.png
@phi
The score is only doubled in the end if you reach the surface. If you drown, your score still counts, but it'll be only half of the score you'd have gotten from reaching the surface with that score. (It is also a viable strategy to abandon the idea of resurfacing altogether to spend more time deeper in the ocean, where you can collect more points.)
The atmosphere is great. Everything (circle as viewport, fog, audio, etc) works together to create an exciting atmosphere.
Unfortunately, the gameplay keeps breaking the immersion so nicely built up by the graphics and sound. Enemies remain completely static until you attract their attention, and it is only after you attracted their attention that they decide to swim away - wtf? Why would you remain on guard until there's an intruder, then decide 'nah, everything's okay here' AFTER you spot your target? Rather than stealthily trying to avoid the enemies, the game forces you to attract the attention of enemies, but not too much or you'll die. This unintuitive style of play is not very fun (the 'wait' part of 'attract their attention and wait' isn't too exciting) but more than anything it does not at all fit the 'avoid the danger that is lurking everywhere!' atmosphere the visuals and audio build up. The fact that one mistake is instant death adds insult to injury; although it makes sure you want to be very careful, dying after getting pretty far doesn't really motivate you to do it all over again. In my last attempt I died right in front of the treasure, and although I'd really like to complete the game to better judge it, I just can't bring myself to go through all that again.
Solid, simple game. Not much to say about it.
The only thing that negatively stood out to me was the audio; the music gets very repetitive, and the sounds are kind of grating. Less harsh and/or more varied sound effects would have made it more pleasant.
By the way, my best score was 8.
@KudukuForgiveUs
Strongly disagree with the X/spacebar remark. Maybe spacebar in addition to X, but if spacebar were the only jump button I'd seriously complain.
axe OP plz nerf axe
Very nice game. Simple and fun to play. Combat is fun and challenging, and the mechanics are well thought out. Music set the mood well and the sounds were great. The graphics have a consistent style, are clear and work well.
I found the difficulty ramps up a bit too quickly. With both damage being kept AND a challenger being added every round, it becomes impossible to survive round IV for a player of my skill level, and I'm sure that people better than me won't be able to survive round V. A more gradual difficulty increase would motivate players more to get further; as it stands now, I'm sure I won't get past round IV and even if I would somehow beat that, round V would be absolutely impossible for me no matter how much I practice.
Shield mechanics seem inconsistent at times. Enemies can trigger your 'blocked attack stun' while you're not even attacking, and it's possible to get 'blocked attack stun' even though your attack is not blocked. (It probably hit the shield through the enemy.) Worse, when being attacked, you are occasionally damaged through the shield somehow, making shielding unreliable (and with the persistent damage, useless for anything but stunning the enemy).
The enemy has no hitstun, which is hardly fair when you do have hitstun and they outnumber you. I can understand being punished for missing an attack or having an attack blocked, but being punished for hitting the enemy and not retreating IMMEDIATELY takes away a bit from the whole 'beating the shit out of your enemy' thing.
The weapons are severely unbalanced. The axe is clearly superior in every way, while the trident's limited attack angle (and damage? Feels like it did less damage but that might just be me) make it very difficult to safely attack, especially in the absence of enemy hitstun.
However, all of the above are minor issues that are only harmful to the experience in the long run. For the length of time LD games are usually played for, it was great fun.
Tuba, are you planning to make a post-compo version? I think it'd be much more replayable with some adjustments.
Random guessing: the game, pretty much.
A puzzle generally starts out by giving you a framework of rules to reason from: In the case of a jigsaw puzzle you know that the pieces have to fit and every piece is part of the picture, in a rebus you know that each picture represents a word or sound and the whole makes a sentence or phrase, and in the game of Set (look into it for a good reference for your game) there are four strict rules which make a pattern which allow you to reason and find the pattern without needing any confirmation.
In this game, however, the only rules are
1) If you hit a block that fits in the pattern at the specific spot you're at, you hear a sound and the block is lit;
2) If you hit a wrong block, you hear a sound and the blocks will all be unlit (including previously lit blocks); and
3) If you get the correct pattern, you hear a sound. all blocks will be unlit, and a new pattern is chosen.
In the case of a jigsaw puzzle, you can reason that 'this piece doesn't fit that other piece' or 'this piece is open on three sides, so it's placed at an edge'. In this game, however, no such reasoning is possible; you can find the first block in the pattern through trial and error, but it doesn't tell you anything about the second block in the pattern. Even when you hit the second block, you still have no idea what the third block could be. It's like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle where all pieces are perfectly square and the picture is so abstract you can't tell what pieces belong next to each other (and there's no reference image). I managed to get through the game because I could guess the patterns through sheer predictability (they're not the most original patterns), but even then it was mostly just trial and error with very little reasoning. There's also very little feedback when completing the pattern (such as further highlighting the pattern for a bit, or showing a simple phrase to describe it ("COMPLETED: Looping around")), which often leaves the player unsure what precisely the pattern was even after solving it. The emotional reward for puzzle games is the feeling of accomplishment you get when you manage to solve the puzzle through reasoning (you clever person you), but this is absent when solving a puzzle through guessing. Or to put it more simply: It's no fun to solve a puzzle through sheer guesswork.
The primary reason the game turns out like this is because there are too few possible solutions excluded. If, for example, you limited the possibilities to color/shape combinations (making the position of the blocks irrelevant), the player would be able to solve the puzzle through reasoning: I have a black circle with red background and a black triangle with red background; what do they have in common and how do they differ? I see they both have red backgrounds, so maybe the pattern is everything with a red background? Having too many possible solutions ruins this aspect, as the information I have (the comparison between the tiles) can be entirely irrelevant and it may instead just be a line between the top left and bottom right, or maybe it zigzags, or maybe I just need each different shape once, or who knows what else could be the pattern? There's no way to tell except to guess. Again, I strongly recommend you look into the card game Set to see how having clear rules makes pattern detection puzzles fun.
As others have noted, the sound is very harsh. It's good to have auditory feedback, but the sound itself is annoying to listen to.
(I beat the game in 186.089 seconds.)
Though it seems wildly innovative at first, digging a bit beyond the surface reveals that the innovation mainly consists of gimmicks that actually detract from the experience.
We'll start with a positive point: having movement consist entirely of jumps is indeed innovative and it gives a nice twist to what would otherwise be an unremarkable platformer.
However, having gravity run sideways adds nothing to the gameplay. You could just rotate your screen and have exactly the same game except without the 'sideways' gimmick. The 'zooming out' gimmick likewise adds nothing of note (beyond making your game fit the theme), and in fact detracts from the experience as things would look a lot nicer and clearer if it were visible from up close.
And that's a shame, because the graphics are very nice. Though the gameplay wasn't very interesting, it was still interesting to go through the game to see what the levels look like.
The game is far too easy for its short length. With how easily you can get past what little dangers there are, you'll beat the game in significantly less time than it takes me to type up this feedback.
The sound was a tad repetitive and annoying, but it was okay enough to not detract much from the experience. Functionally it was fine.
Five stars for theme, that should be pretty obvious.
The gameplay I'm less enthusiastic about, unfortunately. While it's hard not to do so when the level is a television program, hitboxes come out of nowhere constantly, dealing damage to you and making you inevitably lose unless you replay the game over and over again until you've learned where the hitboxes will be at which point. Making it worse is the fact that the art is not clear about which things will damage you and which won't; the only way to find out is trial and error. Then there's also several hitboxes which are plain unfair, like still being hit by the blowfish even when you're all the way in the top right of the screen. I think that, with the way your game is, you could've dialed the difficulty back a whole lot, perhaps even to the point where it's hardly any challenge at all; after all, the fun in your game doesn't come from its challenge, but rather by the fact that being in the TV levels if fun by itself. Compare to the Kirby games, which are ridiculously easy but still tons of fun because you can mess around with the abilities and because the levels are interesting.
Most of the humor didn't really click with me, though there were some parts I did find funny. However, since this is Ludum Dare, the game does stand out for its humor compared to other games (which rarely try to be funny and when they do, they usually fail).
I feel the audio was fitting and added a lot to the experience. The voice acting was bad which may have messed up the delivery for a lot of the jokes, but it fits well enough with the 'so bad it's good' graphical style that it works. The audio does get repetitive, though, especially on repeat plays, which reduces the replay factor of the game.
Overall, it's a good game, it's just a shame the gameplay sucks so much fun out of the experience.
I think the inclusion of single-player likely has a detrimental effect on your ratings, as the singleplayer isn't very interesting while this seems like the kind of game that could be a lot of fun in multiplayer...but not having anyone to play it with nor Xbox controllers, I'm rating it having only played the singleplayer, and I expect many others will do the same.
For singleplayer, I thought Onslaught wasn't very fun, being just dodging balls with the option to slap them away with the somewhat awkward slapping controls (you have to actually slap to get them away instead of just pushing them, which is fun in theory but just awkward in practice). (It must be noted that I'm also not very fond of twin stick shooters, so maybe it just isn't my kind of game.)
Battle mode is something that would appeal to me a lot more...except the enemy literally doesn't do anything in singleplayer. I'm very sure I'd have a lot more fun with this game in multiplayer.
I'm afraid I can't say anything positive about this game. It's just bad. The entire game exists solely of arbitrary tasks that make little sense and don't give any emotional reward to the player.
The main problem is that this game is an adventure game that A) doesn't make any sense; and B) does not give the player any reason to care about solving the puzzles. In a good adventure game, you don't just want to 'get to the next task', you want to help the protagonist escape from his situation, or discover what's beyond that one mysterious door, or something similar.
Here, you're just dropped into a nonsensical world and there's no reason to want to solve puzzles. You could at least give the player a bare minimum of interest in solving puzzles by, for example, leaving a part of the world locked away, so the player will want to solve puzzles to see what else there is to see in this world. Or you could add some kind of story; why is the player in the world, and why does he want to see the screen? Maybe the protagonist suddenly woke up in this strange world, and the whatever-it-is tells him the screen will reveal the reason he's in this world; it would make the reader slightly curious as to what's on the screen and give him a reason to go through all the steps to see it.
The nonsensicality of the puzzles is what kills whatever fun may be left in a puzzle game without any reason to solve the puzzles. In a typical adventure game, you find an item that you can pick up, say for example a screwdriver. If the puzzles are logical, this makes the player assume 'hey, there must be something for me to do with the screwdriver', and he'll start looking for things that might contain screws. If he then attempts to use the item on something that looks screwdriverable and something happens, this gives the player a sense of accomplishment; he figured out that the screwdriver works on the other item and the game rewards him for being smart enough to figure that out.
This game completely lacks such logic, however. If you find the teddy bear first, there's no reason whatsoever to assume the tall man needs it. If you find the tall man first, he immediately gives away the answer to the puzzle ('he needs a teddy bear'), leaving only the tedious part (finding the item, and it's not hidden in a way that makes the player feel smart for finding it). Had instead the tall man been a lonely-looking fellow that just said "I'm so lonely...", remedying his loneliness by giving him the teddy bear would greatly increase the player's satisfaction upon completing the puzzle, especially if he had to manually give the teddy bear rather than automatically clearing the puzzle when approaching the lonely fellow.
In addition to not having any puzzles solvable by logic, there are also useless elements further denying players any challenge of figuring things out. What are the houses for? What's with the giant teddy bear? What do I do with the potion of strength? The complete lack of answers to these questions leaves the player further discouraged from attempting to solve anything. Furthermore, in this specific game it works against the experience further by causing disappointment; I had to double-check with you on IRC whether the game really was over because I'd expected to do something with the potion of strength and all the other unnecessary elements in the game. You know how sometimes a story ends and leaves major plot points unanswered? It's exactly like that, except almost EVERYTHING remains unanswered in this story.
All that leaves is a game in which you can walk around the world and look at stuff. The complete lack of music (aside from the radio) and sound really hurts the atmosphere which usually makes exploration interesting. As others have pointed out, the movement sucks and camera has issues (as well as the terrain hiding things in such a way you think it's not there; I didn't notice the radio until after I finished and replayed the game for the sidequest), rendering exploration not only not fun, but actively unpleasant. When exploring in this tiring way, the only things to see are a couple random objects that seem to be rather roughly modeled, mostly untextured and lacking in any consistent style. The text is the only somewhat interesting thing to see.
Two minor further remarks: The radio puzzle requiring music is inconsistent with the rest of the game having no audio. Hearing no audio after playing the game for a minute makes players conclude there's no audio at all, and they may turn off their sound altogether or turn on music of their own, leaving them unable to hear the music when it does arrive. The other remark is also about that same sidequest; as with the main game, there is no reward (emotional or otherwise) or any specific reason for the player to do it. It is literally a waste of time. You should've implemented it in the main quest so it could piggyback on the emotional payoff of solving the main quest (had there been any) or given some kind of reward to the player for solving it.
Though I occasionally see people I've given 1-star ratings in the past go on to make 4- or 5-star-worthy entries, it's rare to see the opposite happening. Normally I'd offer some constructive criticism in this comment, but I'm pretty sure you already have a good idea of what's wrong with this game.
I haven't played your other games, but your LD27 entry '10 Squared' got a solid 5 from me. I was looking through my previous votes to see if there's any creators whose new games I should check out, so yeah, I was a bit disappointed here. This game got a 1 due to simply not being any fun in any way.
It's unusual for me to say this, but this game is just way too hard. I always finish games before rating them, but for this one I just have to make an exception - it's just impossible to finish without having the entire solution spoiled to me (and nobody in the comments is spoiling it).
The big problem with this game is that almost the entire game is contained in one single puzzle that isn't divided into sub-puzzles. In practice this means that no matter how much you get right, you never get any confirmation you're on the right track - you just have to take the leap and reason it out using lots of assumptions and then pray you were on the right track. But you weren't, so you go back to the drawing board and have to try all over again. It would be far more doable if the game let you know when you're on the right track via sub-puzzles or clearer hints, like some kind of puzzle featuring only the relation between the watch and the clock (assuming there is some relation), and using whatever comes out of that puzzle instead of the currently unverifiable information from the clock/watch puzzle itself.
I really wanted to love this game - it's highly polished, graphics are amazing, mood is great, I love the music and it does everything right for sound design. But this is a puzzle that can't reasonably be figured out except through tons of trial and error. The more steps you have to take before you get confirmation you're doing things right, the higher the chance that you're using the wrong approach to solving the puzzle, and in this case it just kills the game in my opinion.
The atmosphere in this game is amazing. Lighting effects combine with audio, consistent graphics and natural-feeling level design to make it really feel like you're exploring part of an abandoned hospital. Definite 5/5 for the experience, the comments below are just nitpicking.
The gameplay itself doesn't really stand out much, but it doesn't really need to as it's not really the point of the game. Going too far with gameplay might drag the narrative experience down, and I did in fact feel that this was just slightly the case for this game. While it's common in games, finding key A to enter room B to find key C to enter room D to find key E to enter room F makes little narrative sense, and if done too much breaks immersion; why the hell am I finding the Chief Physician's key in a random office? It also distracts from the narrative when there's too much of this in sequence without anything happening that adds to the narrative.
The storytelling in general is very good in this game. However, I dislike how little of it all is explained at the end of the story. It's obvious that the protagonist and his wife died (perhaps a bit too obvious; a news story about kids being left behind after their parents' deaths directly followed by 'gee, I wonder how my kids are doing' could've been more subtle), but even so a more direct confirmation from the story would be nice; the mystery is built up by the hints given, then just...ignored. Even if Linda had just made a single remark about the afterlife at the end it would feel like a proper end to this mystery. What bothers me more, however, are all the details that are left unexplained:
- Why is there nobody at the hospital/is the protagonist incapable of perceiving them?
- What's up with that ghost in the storage room? I really liked that part (and it made me wary enough to avoid passing by the storage room until the end of the game), but it makes no narrative sense from what I can see.
- Why are all of these doors locked (other than 'because it's a video game')?
- Why did the protagonist not pass on to the afterlife/not realize he was dead? (Doesn't necessarily have to be answered, but it would add greatly to the story.)
- What is the protagonist's relation to the hospital, if any, or otherwise, who are these people the protagonist refers to when examining random parts? Referring to them by name makes them seem relevant enough to at least deserve acknowledgement of who they are.
As a story, it feels a bit incomplete even though it starts of really well. But as a game telling a story, it accomplishes its job almost perfectly.
It's possible to get stuck in a certain level if you get there at exactly the wrong position: http://i.xomf.com/sfcdz.png
Detailed feedback (and rating) later once I replayed the game.
Very nice game. Very challenging (though this may be a false impression, see below) and everything works as it should.
The twist of switching levels on death is very interesting and completely changes the gameplay. It's also a very good take on the theme. I never figured out how the levels are connected though - is it just random, or does where you die have anything to do with what level you end up in? I feel the death counter at the end is counterintuitive given this twist; you can switch levels by killing yourself instead of completing a level, why 'punish' it by giving the number of 'retries' (including non-accidental deaths)?
Unlike what others have said, I feel the controls are very tight. However, they're also very unforgiving, which probably led to others' criticism of it. Myself, I think of it as a good thing - if you screw up, you die, it's your own fault. Even though it's both in the description and the readme file, I forgot you were able to to double jump the moment I started the game. This made the game a lot more difficult but by no means impossible. (However, one of the levels did become frustrating: the one with the moving platforms leading to a single platform with the 'elevators of death' with spike walls on the left, where getting onto a moving platform with a single jump is extremely difficult.) Once I started replaying it after getting stuck, having read the comments and noticing the double jump, I had little trouble clearing it in a short time.
Like others have said, the gun knockback adds little to the gameplay and 'chain deaths' caused by warping into spikes or enemies are confusing.
The graphics have a clear style and look nice. They fulfill their functions well too and, other than the spike at the bottom of the leftmost bar in the 'elevators of death' level (which isn't a clear threat and took me two deaths to notice), there was no confusion about what things were (destructible/indestructible blocks, enemies, effects, etc).
The sound was simple but functional and it sounded good enough to not be annoying despite playing for some time.
A typical game of executing simple tasks on a time limit. Not very original, but it works.
The game desperately needs some instructions. I was able to figure it out after some time, but people playing games for fun only rather than to rate them will give up really quickly as the controls are not easy to figure out. The game concept of cooking food to serve on plates with the fitting icons did feel intuitive, though. (For people unwilling to waste time figuring it out: You grab a plate, grab food to put on the plate, then put it on the stove, then pick it up again; all this is done by moving to the top edge and clicking just above you. The rest is obvious.)
Once you get the hang of it, the game becomes too easy. There's no gradual difficulty increase, meaning that if you play well enough you'll consistently gain more money than you lose over time. There is also no score or other goal to work towards, so it feels like there's not much point to it once you get used to it.
The graphics are functional, but not very pretty. The game fits the theme but does nothing impressive or innovative with it.
The game suffers from some technical issues. If you try to configure the options, the game crashes. It's also possible to get stuck in the top edge of the level, no longer allowing you to move down (only left and right). The controls feel very counterintuitive (why can't we just click the drawers/stoves to interact with them?) and the necessity of quick mouse input in a windowed game results in occasionally clicking outside the screen, which can be annoying.
Overall, the game just isn't very fun. With some modifications (some goal to work towards and some difficulty or other game ender) it could be somewhat fun, though it's too similar to other games to stand out even if it were to be fixed.
My computer doesn't support pressing '1', '2' and '3' at the same time so I am unable to play your game.
This game is very unfinished. It starts with a super-long unskippable intro, crashes if you type commands wrong, if you lose it simply quits after a short cutscene (forcing you to sit through the super-long intro again), and perhaps worst of all, it is literally impossible to beat as the robot just doesn't move fast enough to get to the exit in time even if you do everything exactly right.
Although not completely unique, the concept of control via code is still quite rare and it's good to see a game featuring it. The link between 'one screen' and 'terminal' is obvious but fitting; however, the actual gameplay is still multi-screen and the 'terminal' only exists for story reasons (it might as well have been a text box at the bottom of the screen instead).
Unfortunately, the novel control scheme goes to waste because of utterly boring level design. Except for the literally unreachable last part of the level, you can clear the entire thing by just repeating 'r1. turn(); r1.move(20); terminal.transmit();' (without the 'turn' for the first set of commands, of course) throughout the entire game. Though likely intended as a puzzler, you hardly have to think about what to enter here. There are also only three commands, none of which takes advantage of code control's special benefit of being able to accept anything as input (such as entering the name of an object to interact with that object, and having puzzles around that); unfortunately the game offers no gameplay that couldn't be done with a more traditional control scheme.
Graphics are functional but unremarkable.
@monkeedude1212
That's the 'crashes if you type commands wrong' part I mentioned in my comment. If you don't type the () after a command, it crashes.
Playing the game didn't feel very rewarding. You're running away from and shooting dinosaurs, but I never felt the excitement of running away from something threatening or the kick-ass feeling of defeating dinosaurs. Reasons for this likely include the constant stream of incoming enemies (you don't feel the accomplishment of 'surviving a wave' or anything like that, I didn't even realize there were waves until I looked around the interface elements), unsatisfying manner of enemy deaths (they just bounce off-screen), lack of visible score during gameplay (the score counter is tiny and hidden away from where the player is looking, which removed the potential satisfaction of seeing it go up with every kill), and the lack of any indication of progress (again, enemy waves are unclear; no new enemies, level changes, bossfights or other content to reach by killing enough enemies). Because of the lack of emotional reward, dodging and killing the dinosaurs just felt like a chore.
I feel the 2.5D gimmick does not anything to the gameplay and in fact actually distracts from it. The lack of any same-level areas of significant size other than the bottom level at the front means you'll mainly be fighting at the front and/or that you'll mainly be shooting enemies from close up. Which would be great if I had a melee weapon, but with a gun I'd really want to be able to pick off enemies at some distance.
The enemies felt far too similar, and during gameplay I didn't notice any difference between the different types of enemies I killed. They're all rushing at me mindlessly and get killed by shooting at them for a bit. The fact that they all share the same color-swapped sprite definitely didn't help matters; maybe I would've noticed the yellow enemy's higher health better if he'd been larger than the others, for example.
Graphics were unclear and lacked any kind of atmosphere. The 'dinosaurs' didn't look anything like dinosaurs (not helped by them moving nothing like dinosaurs), the level's graphical design seems completely arbitrary (it's...grass hills in a mud field with random barrels stacked on each other for some reason?). The character's sci-fi/diver look didn't have anything to do with dinosaurs or mud-grass-and-barrel fields either. Some consistency in what situation is supposed to be represented here could've made fighting dinosaurs actually exciting.
As others have mentioned, it's hard to distinguish player, enemy and level, and it's impossible to tell visually whether the player or an enemy is standing on the ground at a certain level or jumping at a location more towards the screen. I also feel the powerups didn't really give me any idea of what they're for with their graphics (nor with their pickup sound or any kind of effect or message upon picking them up). Yes, you've listed that in the description, but I won't be remembering the specifics once I start playing. (Furthermore, having to read up on game mechanics shouldn't be a requirement for casual playing of a twin stick shooter.)
The interface elements were too far away from where you're looking during gameplay, and the action keeps you too occupied to check things like your health or ammo (and, considering the kind of game it is, it punishes you for looking away if you do check your status). I was unaware of my current health for most of the game, and I was never sure when I was running low on ammo. Though not a replacement for proper health/ammo visibility, a sound effect or other form of feedback to let you know when your health/ammo is low would really help as well.
The difficulty curve makes no sense. For most of the game, you're just shooting dinosaurs, rarely getting hit, and collecting more than enough health to fully heal when you do get hit. Then suddenly, within the span of a single minute, it suddenly becomes difficult enough to be a challenge, and within that same minute increases to the point where you keep dying every couple seconds because there's enemies everywhere and there's simply no escape. I'm not sure if it's because of ridiculous spawn rate increases or because death/not shooting for a couple seconds causes dinosaur numbers to increase beyond manageable levels, but either way I felt cheated. I was never offered any genuine challenge except for less than half a minute, and then the game got so unreasonably difficult I kept dying without even being able to kill anything. It really killed my motivation to replay the game. A proper difficulty curve increasingly challenges the player and makes him lose when it becomes too much for him to handle and lets him get a bit further every time as he gets more skilled, but a difficulty curve that goes straight from "snoozefest" to "the developer decided you lose the game right here" is extremely discouraging.
I subtracted a point from both Overall and Fun because you have updated the game beyond bugfixes (especially rebalancing the game) after the jam without leaving the original version up to judge, which is against the rules. Part of the difficulty in game jams is having enough of your game finished in time that you can do some polishing; otherwise, everybody could just submit their game in an unfinished state and do all polishing post-compo/jam. While improving your game post-jam is a good thing, the version of the game we are supposed to judge is the one you made during the jam.
Bugfixes are fixes for bugs. Bugs are software problems where the program does not behave as was intended when programmed. Revising the game balance is game design, changing the UI (beyond fixing it not working for technical reasons) is interface design.
The rules have recently been relaxed a bit (even for bugs, you used to only be allowed to fix critical ones), but I will remain strict about post-compo edits as long as they are not excused by the rules. The spirit of the rule is that you don't improve your game post-compo (and having people judge that improved version) to get a higher rating, which I feel you clearly violated in this case. (Getting people to play more of your game automatically leads to higher ratings. I'd be getting tons higher ratings if more people played my game beyond making the most basic items and starving to death before the first winter.)
But, well, if you're in it only for the feedback and not for the ratings, then there's no problem. My lowered ratings are just to prevent a case like this getting undeservedly high ratings.
The game's concept is really nice and the zombie/civilian behavior is very interesting. Unfortunately, some gameplay flaws keep the game from being much fun.
The game starts with a lot of civilians, and with the limited range of your character and the slow speed of civilians, it's impossible to prevent a very rapid zombie outbreak. Normally this would be no problem, but this leads to a situation where, under the current score system, there is no reason to protect the remaining civilians. You get a point per second regardless of how many civilians are alive, so why keep all 30 civilians alive when you can more efficiently run away with one or two? When there's a hundred zombies running around, it doesn't really matter if 30 more zombies are added, and an increase in zombie numbers is the only penalty for losing civilians. In the end, you'll be losing all except a few civilians within the first minute, then surviving for the rest of the game by hiding the handful of civilians (or sometimes even single civilian), waiting for zombies to approach and trying to run past them (which depends on luck more than anything else).
Eventually this means that skill and strategy don't really matter past a bare minimum of not getting yourself killed immediately, and it makes the late-game rather boring. A way to block zombie paths or some time-limited kind of invulnerability or some other meaningful interaction would allow for skill to play a much larger part. The strategy part could be enhanced by making survival of civilians actually matter, such as by having your score being dependent both on time survived and civilians being alive (such as just getting points equal to the number of civilians every second, or counting the number of civilians every X seconds and awarding a bonus for them, etc). It needs at least something to keep the end-game more interesting than 'wait for the zombie to arrive then run and pray'.
The zombies/civilians look nice, and the mechanics really add to the atmosphere (it really feels like a civilian is zombified whenever he's touched by a zombie, goes gray for a moment, then becomes red as well). Unfortunately, the white blocks are too abstract and don't remind me of a city which really hinders the 'zombies in a city' atmosphere. Music would've also helped lots to make it feel more dramatic. It's rare to see mechanics fitting the atmosphere so well, but it's a shame the rest of the game does little to capitalize on this.
Best score is 139 seconds, by the way.
For those interested, here's a chart with all items you can gather and craft in the game: http://i.xomf.com/zjjqn.png
BtheDestroyer; the game is actually playable with arrow keys or WASD, as pointed out in the description. Numpad is just the recommended controls because diagonal movement is more intuitive with numpad.
@Soron
Fully agreed on all points, that's why in the post-LD version (as of version 3) they're all fixed (balancing makes sure you keep struggling to survive, complete sound overhaul, sheep eat grass and die if they can't eat).
@Tifu
That is indeed a bug, though one I was aware of and didn't bother fixing as it doesn't really matter much balance-wise (with the explosive sheep growth you could also just eat sheep all winter, that'll also delay the inevitable sheep apocalypse). Death by sheep is indeed inevitable in the compo version; such are the limits of compo playtesting.
In the post-compo version, sheep will starve if there are too many in a certain area, while completed crops will wither if you don't harvest them in winter (and non-completed crops just won't grow until summer). On the other hand, the post-compo version does allow you to permanently store cooked food and tomatoes.
Mouse controls prevent this game from being as good as it could be. You're struggling too much with the controls itself (moving the mouse pointer from point A to point B) that it eclipses the real challenge (noticing things need attention and responding to that). A more direct control scheme like keyboard controls could ease this somewhat. The other big control issue is that as everything's controlled by mouse clicks, manipulating sliders and other variable state controls takes unreasonably long; it would feel more logical if you could twist knobs and drag sliders instead of clicking often enough to get them all the way to the right position (often first going in the opposite direction).
I think this game would be amazing to play with touch controls, for example on a tablet. It would make all controls feel much more natural and remove the artificial delay caused by having to move the cursor from point A to point B.
Otherwise, very nice game. I would definitely play more if moving the mouse around all the time wasn't so tedious.
(High score: 1:53)
Finally finished the game. That was hard indeed. Overall, good game. The bosses were all different enough that it was fun to defeat them all, and most of them had that learning curve thing where at first they seem impossible yet if you play enough you'll learn to defeat them without taking any damage. Precisely as boss fights should be. The fact that they appear in random order makes gives good variety and makes retrying more fun. The game was good enough that it kept me playing until I finished it.
However, I did feel the game had many flaws:
- The game gives insufficient feedback to the player. It's not always clear when you're hit, and more importantly, when you're NOT hit; the effect when you're hit is so subtle (and hidden by objects being in front of the player), you don't notice when things like colliding with a boss does NOT hurt you (which can be vital, like in the battle with Whatshername, the one spamming beams on two platforms at a time). Additional feedback would be very useful for this, be it effect particles, your sprite flickering, knockback, etc.
-- Also lacking is feedback of when you've successfully hit an enemy. You'd expect the enemy to flash or something when you perform an attack that deals damage; that would make bosses with more tricky vulnerable spots (like Red Eyes Pink Dragon and Narcisia Bele) far more intuitive.
-- Likewise, you want some kind of feedback for when an attack is NOT successful, such as attacking Narcisia Bele's visible form, so players figure out it's useless and stop trying it.
- Related to this, AUDIO is sorely missing. Even if it's really shitty audio, having some simple sounds does wonders for player feedback. Beyond the absolute necessity of feedback sounds, I feel having music would really enhance the mood of the boss battles.
- The controls aren't as tight as you'd expect for a game of this kind, and some expected control features are missing. The character's movement is kind of slippery, making you fall into a hole when you expected to be able to just land and jump again. It also takes time to move between platforms due to movement starting slow; you really want to be able to do this kind of stuff IMMEDIATELY.
-- As for the missing features, your jump height is always the exact same regardless of how long you press the button. This causes you to jump onto platforms when you just want to dodge a projectile or shoot a bit higher. The other big missing feature is the ability to drop through platforms, which is especially unfortunate when combined with the fixed jump height. As it stands, several attacks are very hard to dodge when on a platform because your only options are jumping and moving towards the center.
-- Then there's the dash. Yeah, I'm not sure how to say this in a friendly matter, but why is it even here? It's hard to predict (likely due to the lack of animation; made worse by the presence of bottomless pits), short, and worst of all, unusable when you're in a pinch due to the stamina requirement. Furthermore, it's completely unnecessary; though I've tried it in some of my other runs, I didn't use it once in my winning run and never felt like there was a situation where it would be useful.
- Finally, some boss-specific feedback:
-- GOD OF THE BATTLE CRY: No issues with this one, actually. It's a really good boss, and fun to fight.
-- Hand Maiden: In general a good boss, but it can be a bit tedious waiting for the eye hand to appear on your side; moments where it repeatedly appears on the other side are frustrating. Also, due to lack of feedback, it is initially unclear whether you need to hit the eye itself or if any part of the hand will do. This boss is made more difficult by the lack of short hop and platform fall.
-- Narcisia Bele: It was really unclear at first what to do against this boss or how she worked. This is partially due to lack of feedback, but even with feedback I'm sure I'd be confused. It might be a good idea to have the invisible form visible as a shadow or something until she gets hit for the first time, then make it fade away, hinting the player at the way to damage her. I understand the intro animation is supposed to hint at this, but it doesn't succeed at it, likely because it's not visible when you're wondering how to hit her.
-- Pink Eyes Red Dragon: This boss is a tad boring; it poses little threat, but you have to wait for it to land and charge its laser to damage it. This makes the battle tedious on repeat attempts.
-- Runner Up: This boss is a lot of fun to fight, but a bit too easy.
-- Sorrow Phantom: This battle is made FAR more difficult by the lack of platform fall. It's quite manageable if you stay around the center, though, but it involves a lot of movement and highlights the slipperiness of the controls.
-- Unspeakable Starfish: This one is extremely difficult the first couple times you fight it. The lack of platform drop means you're entirely screwed if it charges at you from the center while you're on the platform; you'll take damage and there's no escape. Once you get more used to the Starfish and stop getting on platforms, the 'spreading out' attack still seems impossible to dodge. Either I'm missing something here, or this is a source of guaranteed damage in a game where all damage is persistent (aka 'wtf bullshit').
-- Whatshername: Speaking of bullshit, that's precisely what it feels like when you first die to her. It's not obvious that you can just stand where she is without taking damage (see: lack of feedback, sprite being hidden. In addition to this, with her being a big scary boss it does not feel intuitive that you can just collide with her without consequences). Once you understand that you can, however, this becomes underwhelmingly easy, even easier than Runner Up.
-- God of Nightmare: I'm conflicted on this one. On the one hand, he's underwhelming for a final boss. On the other hand, I don't want to be cheesed to death after 8 battles by a boss I can't practice against without surviving 8 straight battles.
Despite the wall of text above with what I perceive to be flaws, I enjoyed the game enough to keep trying and retrying until I beat it. It says a lot when a game is enjoyable even if it has many flaws.
@dalbinblue
I shared your frustrations at how impossible the starfish was to dodge too, until I realized I made a far more fundamental mistake: You're not supposed to fight the Starfish from the platforms (unlike most bosses). Your neutral position should be on the center platform, moving from it only when necessary. That way, it's possible to dodge every single attack except perhaps for the 'spreading out' attack. When your neutral position is on the platforms, one of its attacks is indeed impossible to dodge...because you simply shouldn't be there in the first place.
@ShellfishGames
>as there's no way to escape the boss in quite a few situations (as far as I'm concerned)
I can personally confirm that every attack by every boss, with only the possible exception of the Starfish's 'spreading out', can be dodged (and I did clear almost every boss without taking a single hit on my winning run).
This game is way too hardcore for Ludum Dare audiences. If you want proper feedback you might want to post in some Touhou/danmaku community. Myself, I could only capture 'Under the Muffin Tree' and had to use continues to clear the stage.
Excellent (if highly derivative) danmaku game. Outside of the unfinished state of this game, I can't really tell the difference between this and a Touhou game - it has everything a danmaku game needs and it's all done right (as far as I can tell - I'm no danmaku expert). The difficulty is absolutely brutal, though (significantly harder than Touhou in Lunatic Mode, assuming this represents the early game). I don't think I've used the Pizza Sauce Mode even once, considering I was way too busy not dying repeatedly to check if I can use it yet.
The bullets look nice, but the placeholder enemies and solid gray background make the game look pretty awful. The lack of audio takes away a lot from the experience, and even harms the gameplay on some occasions - not hearing the bullets being generated makes the patterns harder to predict, and the lack of sound when you die makes it far, far harder to bomb in time.
I didn't really see any significant link to the theme.
Amazing game as always.
Only the music wasn't as good as I usually expect from one of your games. Link to the theme also seemed nonexistent.
Minor nitpicks:
- The hitbox of the alien's spotlight (or whatever the blue thing is) is larger than it looks, causing frustrating unexpected deaths.
- Killing other enemies while controlling an enemy is too easy and therefore somewhat boring. It might be more interesting if enemies start attacking the traitor once you start attacking enemies.
Like others, I felt that it remains easy for too long, and without the difficulty the game gets repetitive and boring, leading to poor replay value that could probably be fixed by changing the difficulty scaling. Once it gets going it's pretty interesting, though, but not interesting enough to sit through the boring early game again.
Highest score: 321
Is it just me, or does Sheep's Anti-Bacon Beacon spam completely kill the game? It doesn't look like Team Bear can get destroy the beacons or get past it in any way, so there's not really much to do on Team Bear.
So when are people usually online?
A very interesting concept, but unfortunately the execution doesn't do the concept justice.
Although the game is asynchronous, the gameplay entirely does not work unless other players are on - whenever you're the only one on (as tends to be the case with asynchronous games), you can just march straight towards the enemy base and steal a point. Worse still, when you finish doing that, the arena is reset meaning no results of your actions remain to influence the gameplay for other players. Although you could afterwards set some traps for enemy players, they can just blow up the traps in a leisurely way when they log on and then proceed to steal your points, so doing that feels futile - your time is better spent stealing points from the enemy. These issues combined completely ruin the whole 'asynchronous' concept.
The game does get more fun if more players are on (only managed to play a 1v1 once), but fighting indirectly through placed traps without any option of directly engaging the enemy makes it feel less fun than just directly fighting the enemy. This is further hindered through poor feedback; you don't even know an enemy is on until you notice traps suddenly appearing, you don't get any feedback warning you that enemies are taking action (something like 'VDZ spawned a Pork Roaster!'), and worst of all enemy team progress is practically invisible (you'd expect messages like 'Team Boar has infiltrated Team Bear's base!'), making victory come out of nowhere, which is pretty much the least fun way to lose ever. The unavailability of in-game chat in favor of Guardian messages works well in asynchronous play, but I feel it makes simultaneous play less fun by restricting the timing of your messages; you can't respond to a victory by saying 'wtf that was fast', for example.
I really wanted to like this game, but unfortunately all I can see is a lot of unused potential and a game that isn't that much fun in practice.
Graphics and audio were great as always. I didn't really see a strong relation to the theme - Guardians aren't that conventional, but they're pretty much just traps which are definitely conventional.
Amazing game. Contains surprising amounts of depth once you start playing it; though easy to start playing, this will definitely take a long time to master - even in my fourth playthrough I was discovering new things and making countless mistakes.
The level design of the first level is brilliant. (Only got to the second level once and died shortly after, so I can't say much about that one yet.) The flamethrowers are both useful as a weapon against enemies and at the same time lock you in the corners at unfortunate moments. The corners themselves play very well with the teleportation mechanic; you can use them to fight an enemy without others bothering you, you can use them to isolate enemies, and the way enemies get stuck there is extremely helpful for position management. Enemy designs likewise play well with the teleportation mechanic; their attacks are both dangerous and abusable.
Graphics were nice and clear but not spectacular. Sound was functional and gave good feedback, but sfxr beeps never sound nice. Music would've been a great addition.
Minor things that bothered me: After you die, you don't get to see your score. It really would be great if after every game I could see whether I beat my previous score or not. Also, death is very sudden; there's no death animation or sound, it just cuts to a black screen all of a sudden. Slowly showing your death would cause it to have more impact and leaves the player a moment to go 'nooooooooooo', while also letting you figure out what exactly killed you.
But those are minor nitpicks. This game is amazing and I'll definitely have to play it some more.
Will you be making an updated version of this?
Completely amazing. If this game doesn't reach #1 I question the community's tastes. I have no criticism to offer here because everything was just perfect.
Is the music available for download anywhere?
I felt this was a rather uninspired defense game with little strategic depth. The only thing you do is reverse/stop enemies to get them close to each other and use the area damage spell to kill them, while taking care of any solo enemies using the default kill spell. This makes the game very repetitive, and the low difficulty ensures you'll be playing for a while unless you quit out of boredom. Most of your time is also spent waiting for spells to recharge, which isn't very interesting.
I gave a 1 for Audio - would give a 0 if possible - as it blatantly violates compo rules. You cannot use Freesound samples in a compo, not even modified; submit to jam if you must use third-party assets.
@Eigen
I've thought about it, but I couldn't really find any way to significantly improve it without abandoning the core gameplay. I guess position control just isn't an interesting enough mechanic to build a game around, or at the very least it's not my kind of game. (Minor improvements would be stuff like giving bonuses for blowing up many enemies at the same time to reward good performance or placing mines and other delayed attacks to allow better planning, but that still wouldn't fix the main issues.) All I can do is try and put into words why I didn't feel the game was very fun and hope the feedback is useful to you as developer.
Overall a great game, but some minor flaws harm its replayability.
The gameplay of running into a battle is fun, and seeing what weapons come next (and which set of restrictions comes next) is an interesting motivator. It's all very well executed, too.
However, the scoring system and lack of early-game difficulty discouraged me from playing more than four games. Due to the way scoring scales, doing anything early-game is a waste of time and effort; the points you get are negligible compared to later on, and there's no danger to make it even slightly interesting. This means you're pretty much stuck waiting for the guns to arrive, at which point scoring starts to become useful (though still not all that relevant compared to later on) and you actually have to do something to not die. Still, at that point your primary goal is to survive so you can rack up the real points later on. Having to play the futile early-game every time discourages me from playing to improve my score (as less than 50% of my playtime is actually spent improving my score).
The game mechanics also discourage taking risks; there is no penalty for not doing your job, and simply surviving is enough to increase the amount of points gained per seized weapon. I'd have loved to see some kind of reward for jumping into the battle, like a combo system (increasing points for successive weapons seized if you don't take too long between weapons). Other rewards (recovering health? Score multiplier?) could also make early-game weapon seizing more useful.
Still, I enjoyed the couple games I played. The graphics look nice and, more importantly, are very clear (everything was recognizable without a problem), and the audio wasn't very interesting but fulfilled its purpose (though having a BGM beyond the first seconds would've added a lot). Though the interpretation of the theme was one of the more obvious choices, it was executed well.
High score: 841 (226 seconds)
P.S.: Is there any other set of restrictions beyond 'ban plasma rifles, allow bazookas'?
Excellent, solid platformer. The controls are tight, the level is designed well and the checkpoints are properly placed. The return trip felt awesome and provided an interesting contrast to the more careful gameplay of the first half, helped by the background music and the sirens you'll inevitably trigger. I also felt the commentary added a lot to the experience, motivating you to move forward to see new commentary (and providing excellent game-over messages).
The only gameplay issue I ran into is the camera; often you can't see what's behind you unless you wait for several seconds, which can be deadly in a game like this. I also wasn't able to see below me beyond the default camera setting, which is something that really would've helped out (is there ground below here or lava?).
The first half music wasn't very interesting, but aside from that the audio was solid. Graphics were likewise solid and clear.
I felt the relation to the theme was rather weak, and the game isn't really doing anything that hasn't been done plenty of times before, but otherwise it's an excellent game.
Gamers these days are pussies. Pussies I say!
This game has SEVERE issues.
First of all, there really need to be how to play instructions and the player needs to get more feedback to understand what's going on. At first I didn't even know how to get out of the blacksmith's house, then I didn't know how to get letters, it was not obvious that you just had to string random letters together (the game tells you to make words), but most of all, there is no instruction or feedback whatsoever about the fact that some letters are more powerful than others. There's really tons of missing feedback to cause this confusion - damage dealt is unclear, enemy HP is unclear, which enemies drop which letters is unclear, and even at the blacksmith you can't see how powerful each letter is. All of this combined make it really hard to discover that letters vary in power, which is an essential part of the gameplay.
The gameplay is interesting in concept, but it's very poorly executed. You constantly have to make return trips to the blacksmith (or kill yourself) to upgrade your word, and if you die you lose your word, generally causing a huge setback in game progress. Furthermore, the game doesn't work right. The most pressing issue is that the greek letters and nuclear symbol do not have any power; this makes fighting snakes near impossible and the dragon completely impossible. This issue is made worse by the horrible spawning mechanics; the game keeps spawning enemies with no regard to the amount of enemies on the screen or the player's position (you can be fighting an entire swarm of snakes and have one suddenly spawn on top of you). With the late-game letters not functioning properly, the enemies spawn faster than you can kill them.
The controls feel inconvenient. This is an action game where my input is directly converted to actions, not a strategy game in which I can queue commands - why do I need to click the destination position to move, and why can't I hold a button to keep moving or something like that? The unrestricted 'one shot per click' makes hammering the mouse the optimal way to play the game, but button mashing rarely makes a game more fun.
The interpretation of the theme is obvious and overdone, and in this game it isn't executed very well. With how you're just stringing letters together, it could thematically have used just about anything else than letters and 'words'.
However, I did really like the graphics and I loved the music.
This game is seriously lacking in challenge. The concept of shining light on things to kill or distract them while navigating a maze is nice, and combat does feel fun, but it feels entirely pointless when the enemies pose no threat to you whatsoever - you can just run past them easily and they don't stand a chance of catching you. This is made worse by the level design; the coin is always in the same place, and with the openness of the level you can just either head straight towards it diagonally or safely move along the edges, whichever you prefer. You spend so little time in a level that even if you do mess up, your health and energy bars are irrelevant (you won't get them to 0 before reaching the end unless you're messing up on purpose). Distracting the cats with weapon #2 is never necessary, nor is protecting yourself or doing AoE damage using weapon #3. This game has potential to be fun, but it needs some serious work.
The graphics are pretty bad. Most stuff is placeholder graphics and/or untextured. I had to run into a cone to even figure out it was a ghost. The single-color floor and walls that are all the same make the level boring to look at, and the random-seeming placement of the walls doesn't make for a visually interesting level design either. The minimap does look nice, though.
I liked the music. The sounds were unremarkable but functional. The implementation of the theme was...not really bad, but light is hardly an unconventional weapon against ghosts.
Cleared on second play with no hits taken. (20 wolves pooped, 20 apples eaten, 19 poops, 0 times attacked)
Not my kind of humor, at all.
The game is surprisingly strategic and challenging with the wolves actively avoiding poop and eating and pooping taking time and requiring you to stand still - providing a contrast with the running away you're inclined to do while being chased by enemies.
However, I do feel the game is lacking in feedback on critical elements. You cannot see your pooping progress, eating progress or poop cooldown, which adds to the difficulty in only a frustrating (rather than challenging way) - it's annoying to see a 'not ready yet' message while having no way whatsoever to tell when I AM ready to poop. You also can't see how much HP you have left, which makes the game over come unexpectedly (and might cause frustration/discourage the player from trying again).
The graphics are unremarkable. The map looks the same everywhere and sprites lack animation when you'd expect them to have some kind of animation. At least the gameplay elements (pig, wolf, apple, poop) are recognizable.
Music felt boring and went out of sync. Sounds gave proper feedback, but were too subtle with the exception of the eating sound which felt grating (the contrast in noticeablity with the other sounds may have made this feel worse).
The theme was properly implemented, but not in any (in my opinion) interesting way; 'poop' as a weapon is just random and its use to scare off (kill? Not sure what it does exactly) wolves is nonsensical.
Interesting and unusual game. I didn't truly get a feel for the controls until the final level where you have no choice but learn how to play the game properly. It's not the physics that are wonky, it's the player's interpretation of what he's doing. Definitely an interesting experience to slowly shift to a different perspective of what you're actually doing like that. The game is very short, however.
I like the minimalistic graphics. The music was nice, but it got repetitive after some time. Other audio was obviously lacking (especially a death sound would be welcome, as would a congratulatory sound for finishing a level).
As for the theme...I understand you tried to use the room as the weapon, but while you're definitely using the room, you're not using it as a weapon (or even remotely like one). So yeah, it doesn't really work out with the theme.
Cool idea, and ye olde English is really amusing, but gameplay-wise it's not executed nearly as well as it could've been. Using drag & drop rather than clicking or pressing buttons make your mouse movements the deciding factor in winning or losing rather than any mental challenge. But more disappointingly, there doesn't seem to be any progress whatsoever in the game. You don't get a score and the game doesn't get any more difficult - you're just doing the same thing over and over again without there being any point to it, and when you're capable of doing it right almost every time it gets rather boring.
I loved the audio, though, and the graphics were nice. Interpretation of the theme was too obvious in my opinion.
@Ryusui; oh man, don't remind me. ON THE BONE MEAT? ON THE MEAT BONE? MEAT ON THE BONE? THE MEAT ON BONE? I absolutely love Danganronpa 1/2, but MTB/PTA has always been the part I liked the least. But yes, other than that, Danganronpa is truly 'battle with words' done right. As well as many other things done right, actually.
Fun and challenging gameplay. I loved how the three different shot types all had their own strategic purpose and you constantly have to consider which shot is best to use at any given moment.
However, I do feel that a single playthrough takes far too long, discouraging me from replaying it (because it doesn't really get challenging until quite some time in). I feel that faster difficulty ramping, higher initial difficulty or making early mistakes more significant (for example, losing a toast permanently instead of temporarily) could help replay value.
Graphics and audio were excellent. I felt the link to the theme was rather weak (existing only in the graphics; the toasters might as well have been turrets as is the default for these kinds of games).
Also, my score was 831.
The post-compo version is a significant improvement. Going to try if I can get this game working on my arcade machine.
High score (so far): 374
Personally, I'm not as enthusiastic about this game as most other people seem to be. It was frankly rather boring to play, with a message that's been done to death, obvious from pretty much the start and not conveyed in an especially impactful way.
For the gameplay/interactive experience, the method of progression didn't make much sense to me. You absolutely had to talk to specific people to clear each level, but you had no indication of who you should talk to (even worse when you also have to go back to talk to people again) nor any choice in the matter (making it feel less like you're doing it naturally; rather than being the victim for natural behavior, you specifically have to seek it out. You have to make the conscious choice to get hurt (despite having no incentive to other than because the day magically doesn't end otherwise) and people never approach you to hurt you (which AFAIK is a defining aspect of bullying). I feel this both undermines the game's message and makes the game feel boring.
I can't agree with ProjectX593 and careless that this is a remotely accurate portrayal of bullying; all that happens in this game is that people are mean to you a couple of times (when you're the one initiating contact, no less). Having been bullied for years myself, you get used to the words themselves pretty quickly; it's the whole social exclusion thing (and being punished for just about any social behavior, them actively coming to you) that makes it so depressing. It goes far, far beyond people just saying a couple mean things.
The atmosphere was great, though. Interestingly enough, I don't find the graphics or audio very interesting when taken alone, but they do make for an excellent atmosphere. The interpretation of the theme was a very obvious one - tons of entries are using 'words are powerful weapons' - and it's used in a rather straightforward manner, but it was well-implemented as central element of the game.
Fun little game.
Hole 7 felt like bullshit because you can only win by abusing the fact that the hitbox is bigger than the sprite (you can't actually hit the sprite itself), so it took me a lot of tries to figure out how to clear it.
The game's replayability suffers from the lack of variation between playthroughs; once you memorize how much power each shot takes it becomes kind of boring.
(Best score: -22. Did really well until I got a Triple Bogey on hole 9.)
This game is amazing. A relatively simple concept that provides immense strategic depth. Gameplay-wise, you've executed everything perfectly. It's really difficult so I couldn't get past the level with the dogs, but I really need to get back to this game later and see how far I can really get.
The graphics don't look amazing, but they do a good job at depicting what they are supposed to depict. Only the exact status of your head and body parts is sometimes not entirely clear. Audio is simple sfxr sounds but they fit well and add a lot to the experience.
Though it's not mindblowing, I like your take on the theme of you becoming the monsters (or perhaps, the monsters becoming you).
The only big flaw of this game is the lack of instructions, making it take a while to figure out; from what I gather from the comments, not everyone had the patience to figure out how the game really works.
And now one for the players who can't figure out what makes this game special.
=====================
HOW TO PLAY SNAKELIKE
=====================
Your objectives:
1. Grow stronger.
2. Don't die.
3. Reach more difficult levels.
1. How to grow stronger:
---
Whenever you defeat an enemy, it leaves behind a corpse. Move onto food (like corpses) to ingest it. Every time you move, the food moves further down your body until it reaches the end of your body, at which point it becomes an extra segment (unless it was generic meat). Which type of segment it becomes depends on the enemy ingested; swallowing a rat nets you a gray rat-like segment, while swallowing a fox gives you a brown fox segment. STRONGER MONSTERS GIVE STRONGER SEGMENTS. Stronger segments deal more damage (and probably have more HP, but I'm not sure about that). While a corpse is moving through your body, you can press S to digest the food; the segment the corpse was in will be changed to the corpse's type. You can use this to upgrade your segments (or downgrade if you have a weaker enemy!); it's particularly recommended to upgrade the segments closer to you head as they are more vital.
2. How not to die:
---
There are two ways to die: Fatal head damage and fatal damage to the segment closest to your head. The reason for the latter is that once a segment dies, all segments behind it also die. (The dead segments will all leave generic meat, which allows you to heal but not regrow segments.) For this reason, try not to tank too many hits with your head or first segment. Your head and segments can be healed using food in two manners:
1. As food moves through the segments, your segments are healed slightly.
2. Digesting food strongly heals the segment it's in (or your head if it's still there). If the food is a corpse, it also changes the segment type (unless it's your head digesting it); generic meat does not change segments and is thus always safe for consumption. (As generic meat adds no segment to your body, it's often useful to digest it rather than having it move through your entire body.) Digesting food takes one turn. (You can also press the digest button with no food in your body to skip a turn.)
3. How to reach more difficult levels:
---
This part is easy. On every level, there's a portal leading to the next level. You just have to find it and move onto it. Every new level contains an enemy type stronger than the strongest enemy of the previous level. This is both advantageous (better upgrades for your body) and disadvantageous (they kill you harder). As such, it's recommended that you make sure your body is sufficiently upgraded before moving on to the next level.
The story was interesting (the writing style appealed to me despite the large amount of typos and other errors), but it was blatantly unfinished. As is, you can barely call it a story because we pretty much only get the protagonist introduction and then it ends already.
I liked the art. The protagonist's speech sound was too high-pitched and sharp and was unpleasant to listen to; the rest of the sound was okay. The take on the theme is rather straightforward, but at least a proper straightforward interpretation is better than a failed twist on the theme.
Although this game has a lot of potential, it has several major issues which detract so much from the experience that in the end, it's more frustrating than fun.
Visually, I love the art style. Everything looks pretty. However, from a functional perspective, it may be the biggest weakness and the greatest source of frustration. Due to the art style, elements don't stand out as well as they should (most notably the spikes which I sometimes didn't even notice until I was on them, but also things like walls) while other elements that don't affect gameplay stand out too much (such as the rocks on the ground).
A bigger issue is the fact that hitboxes are extremely unclear - due to how vague the art is, you never know for sure where spikes start and where they end. The same goes for all other objects, especially walls and trees. When those elements damage you and there's no way to heal, you really should be able to tell what exactly their hitboxes are.
Because you see only a small area on a screen, and because areas don't look very visually distinct, it's hard to tell where you are. I have been going in circles for a while in level 3 and it took some time to even tell I was going in circles.
The fists feel horribly cheap and unfair. There is no way to tell where they're going to strike - or even the very fact they're present somewhere near you - until they've struck for the first time, and in many case, that first strike deals damage to you. Dying this way feels incredibly cheap and seriously detracts from the fun.
While I liked the sleep to heal mechanic conceptually, I feel it didn't add anything to the game. (Note: I only made it to level 3, where I kept getting lost trying to find the exit; maybe the later levels make better use of it.) As all dangers are static, there is no risk to sleeping (other than the risk of being hit by a fist, but you also have that risk when moving or standing still). This means that the only thing it does is waste your time (having to wait after moving every couple of steps) and limit how fast/much you can move at once (which can be implemented in a less obnoxious manner).
Due to unclear hitboxes and the floaty movement physics, as well as how short the jump is, jumping feels very frustrating. It's hard to reliably jump over something, and there's a good chance that after you finish your jump you'll crash into something and lose health anyways. This one could be chalked up to the game just being difficult, but particularly with how unclear the hitboxes are it felt more frustrating than challenging.
The game has fun elements, but with all of the issues above I don't really feel like giving level 3 another try.
Excellent game. Really enjoyed it and hope you make more levels and/or add sound/music.
I don't really have anything to say other than what has been said plenty of times before, other than two tiny remarks about the Android version:
- The app name is 'LD33'. Might want to fix that. It also uses the default Unity icon.
- On slower devices (like my phone), the blue tiles take a long time to disappear (talking about sometimes like 20 seconds here) due to them moving instead of just disappearing. This strongly affects gameplay on slower devices.
@rogual
@ChosenCharacter
Although I doubt the creator has played it (with how obscure it is), there is actually a (non-jam) game out there that features very similar mechanics (auto-walk + walljump to turn around) called Little Walker. The main differences between this game and Little Walker (other than that Walker is much, much longer) are that Little Walker has long levels, HP and checkpoint while Lil' Drake has one-screen levels with instant death when hit, and that Little Walker has platformer controls (other than the auto-walk) rather than Flappy Bird-like controls (though I guess Walker's underwater levels are somewhat similar).
itch.io page: http://flipswitchx.itch.io/littlewalker
Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eAeGArGGFI
It's a very cool game, but it's clearly unfinished. This was clearly too big a project for a 72 hour jam. I know the appeal of overambitious concepts better than anyone, but it clearly didn't work out here. Perhaps next time it's better to cut features as you approach the deadline (the merchant doesn't add a lot to the gameplay, the game would function almost identically without the fear mechanic [though it does admittedly add a lot to the atmosphere], guard interaction could be simplified (like just have the raiders fight guards instead of having it as spy action), and so on) and reserve more time for playtesting.
Things that stood out to me in particular:
- Game balance is horrible. The only challenge in winning the game is finding out how to get the Lions to the dungeons (didn't understand the exact summoning mechanics at first); they're super-cheap and money is way too easy to come by.
- The game needs a lot more explanation/some kind of tutorial. I read the whole description, yet it took me quite some time to figure out most elements. This mainly includes minor elements like having descriptions for all the spy options in the menu where you're able to select them.
- It needs more/clearer info on the current game state and potential consequences of your actions. Mainly, I had no idea what my units where doing exactly - where they're heading, what they're doing there and when they'll arrive/return. When they report back, they also don't even name the village they returned from. (There's also a bug in the spy menu where ETA and Risk don't update as you check/uncheck boxes until you've closed and re-opened the window.)
The game was a lot of fun during the short time I played it, but its unfinishedness completely kills all replayability.
There's not really much I can say other than that it's an excellent story game. I would have preferred clicking to advance the text instead of auto-advancing text, but that's a matter of personal preference.
This game just felt like nonsense to me. While I like surreal stuff, surrealism is when what is depicted defies our expectations of reality or logic; none of the things in this game defy my expectations in an interesting way, they're just sorta random. The same can be said about the audio; though it doesn't fit conventional standards of music, it's not strange in an unsettling way, just random and incomprehensible (with the exception of some elements, most notably the vague voices/whispers, which were genuinely unsettling).
The gameplay has no challenge and due to the random yet uninteresting nature of the events it also doesn't feel rewarding in an exploratory way.
I didn't really see the link with the theme here; all of the characters are monsters but it's not even confirmed that the protagonist is a monster, let alone that the protagonist's being a monster would affect anything. The text 'you are a monster' pops up at every bad end, but I have no idea why. Maybe I just don't 'get it'.
Others have pretty much already said what I want to say other than one thing: Minesweeper tells you HOW MANY mines are around a tile, which is a crucial element in deducing where the mines are. Unfortunately, your game doesn't distinguish between one adjacent pit and two adjacent pits, meaning you simply can't navigate from a room adjacent to a pit to a room that hasn't been confirmed safe yet. As a result, you just end up wandering through the level to discover all safe tiles until you smash the hero.
It is kind of fun, but only for a short while.
I will have to disagree with the players who liked the movement. It feels very chaotic and hard to control. Although the sense of speed is great, I can't say I ever felt really felt in control; I can tell it roughly where to head towards, but actually moving the way you want seems impossible.
The dogfighting aspect feels unimpressive and unbalanced. It plays way too fast; by the time you see where to aim the fight is already over. The fact that the moments you're actually close enough to really fight are so short (and you simply can't see your enemy outside of those moments) and the lack of sound effects (pew pew pew, the sound of your ship flying and the sound of the incoming enemy ship would be great to hear*) don't do it any favors either. Firing is effective only at close range, and the specific range depends on your movement, giving a huge edge to ships moving backwards (as you're firing long-range against a ship that can only fire short-range).
I did like the graphical style. In contrast, the music got repetitive rather quickly.
* (I realize there is no sound in space, but surely your ship's instruments would at least give sounds to indicate these things? For example, in World of Warships you obviously can't hear the torpedoes moving towards your ship, but the sonar ping still gives an unrivaled sense of impending dread.)
>I'll probably make a postjam version and change it back (or maybe even just change the original as I believe the rules allow for that kind of thing).
Balance changes aren't allowed, only bug fixes and other accidental stuff. (Basically: It's not something that broke unexpectedly, it's a decision you'd make differently now that you have playtest information.) Many games would be better if only the creator had more time to playtest, but such are the limits of 48 hour games.
A solid (though short) platformer. Not very original, and the link with the theme is rather weak, but it does what it tries to do exactly right.
Is it even possible to get a different good ending than the romance ending? I tried several times but couldn't get any other good ending.
Anyways, I liked the game enough to try multiple times before giving up on finding different endings. It's fun trying the different options and seeing what results they bring.
The art is obviously the strongest point of the game. It's very charming and works very well in the game. The only minor flaw I could find was that Nadine's death sprite didn't really have much of an impact.
I disagree with most commenters on the audio. While the background tune is nice, it gets repetitive over time. More importantly, there are countless missed opportunities where the game could be enhanced with sound. Most notably, Nadine's death is soundless with the cutesy tune still playing in the background. Even just muting the sound would have made it much more dramatic, but ideally you'd want a short dramatic BGM and sound effect. Sound could also provide tons of feedback (for example to indicate Nadine's mood changes) or help immersion (eating sounds while eating, etc). The audio's not terrible, but it could have been so much better.
A note to other users:
ThomeTheMagician's comment above is slander written as revenge for the creator posting the same comment on his entry (which does genuinely use copyrighted materials). Don't pay any attention to this troll, this game is legit.
I quite like the idea, but with the current implementation unfortunately it doesn't make for a very fun game. Your movement is very limited, which is understandable considering you're a Goomba, but it leads to complete dependence on initial positioning. If you don't get Mario immediately, it's an instant game over as the game gives you no chance to recover. The allowed margin for error feels way too small for how long the game takes to play (you can be playing for a minute [most of which is spent waiting for Mario to arrive] and then lose the entire game due to being half a second late), a situation which is worsened by the fact there is no way to reliably predict where Mario will land other than guesswork.
Still, the idea was amusing, and the music was great. My best run was 6 points, but the game isn't replayable enough for me to improve that score.
I always find it difficult to judge interactive stories like this. As a game, it's very interesting; the branching is well thought out, and it's interesting to see all the possible outcomes. I have based my ratings on how the game works as a game.
As a story, I see more flaws. The characters feel generic and boring, and the narrative never made me truly care about them. The writing is sometimes a little too stiff and formulaic, especially in how it describes conversations (see also http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SaidBookism). There's also a bunch of typos, spelling mistakes and similar minor errors that screw up the immersion. Still, the plot was interesting enough to follow all possible paths (I think - it's impossible to get a perfect score on the advanced test, isn't it?), so it's not bad - it just could be better in a lot of ways.
A nice little platformer. It doesn't really do anything special, but it's fun for a while. The controls feel a little floaty, though, which IMO doesn't really fit platformers in which you're mostly dodging things. I consider the comparison to Super Meat Boy to be preposterous as this game is rather easy.
I liked the graphical style and the audio was simply excellent. I felt the link to the theme was extremely weak, present only in a tacked-on story and being hard to justify even there (they hate me -> therefore I am a monster? That's quite the leap of logic there).
@Acerio
I did read the description (I always read the description before playing to judge). My point was that the game wasn't based on the theme and even the way the story implements the theme feels awkward (he is a monster because...why exactly? What did he do to deserve being considered a 'monster', despite apparently feeling immensely guilty about whatever it was?).
@Acerio
I understand what you were trying to do. If the game was about Adolph Hitler having a nightmare about being in a concentration camp, a dictator being chased by his army, or a loan shark being attacked by his money and the poor people he got into debt, I would have liked the interpretation of the theme.
The big issue here is that we are only directly told it's supposed to fit the theme. ("He later realizes it's because of his actions in real life that made him seem like a "monster", and he was giving revenge on himself as punishment in a dream.") However, it has little relation to the game's actual events; he could just be having a random nightmare for no reason, or he could be punishing himself for overeating. How do you get self-punishment from avoiding meatballs in a dream world? Why assume he's a monster when there's nothing in the game remotely hinting you towards that (other than a direct statement 'oh yeah, he's a monster').
For higher theme scores, I also expect the gameplay to be related to the theme. Why did you go with a platformer focusing on avoiding projectiles to represent a monster punishing himself? For an obvious example of gameplay inspired by the theme, in Last Chance for Bernie (http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=49432) the game mechanics were chosen specifically to reflect the options and objectives enemies in the Mario series have. Your mechanics, on the other hand, seem like they're chosen just because you wanted to make a platformer or because you're best at making platformers. As a result, you could almost always make it 'fit the theme' by just replacing a couple story lines; for LD32 you could argue the meatballs are unconventional weapons, for LD30 you could argue he entered a parallel dimension, for LD29 you could argue he found a magical area underground (or that it takes place in his subconscious), and so on. The game has so little to do with the theme that they can be cleanly separated.
I will be back as a Harbinger of Death and Fire! (High score: 3189 souls devoured)
Excellent game. Everything about this game is done well; the gameplay provides an excellent high score challenge with plenty of variety, and the graphics and audio work together to truly make you feel like a dragon bringing about death and destruction.
Because this game is good enough to replay over and over again, two balance flaws stood out to me, though:
- Balloons are too difficult to destroy. They dominate the airspace, and with how hard they are to destroy it is better strategically to remain close to the ground. It would add a lot of depth if coming up to destroy them would be a viable (hell, required for a good score) tactic.
- Wizards aren't effective enough. You can just fly through their barrier, and immediately start breathing fire again once you're out of the barrier. Your breath regenerates fast enough that by breathing in short bursts, you can still deal more than enough damage consistently even if your breath is reset to 0. It might be better if wizards stop or slow your breath regeneration in addition to slowing it (or if breathing in short bursts is nerfed entirely).
Due to these two issues, staying close to the ground and breathing in short bursts (using continuous breath against towers) seems to be easily the dominant strategy for getting high scores, which doesn't feel like the right way to play a dragon.
But that's nitpicking. For an LD game, this is beyond excellent.
@derr
Any part of the entry details, including its links, can be changed by clicking 'edit' on the front page or 'edit entry' on the games listing. After LD33 voting ends, those buttons will be unavailable, but you can still edit your entry through http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=edit . (Replace the number for any of your earlier LD entries; I can even still edit my LD22 entry (from December 2011) if I want.)
@pirate_shell
@NickMakesGames
I strongly disagree with the idea of regaining health. Games like these work only because your health only ever goes down, never up; if it can go up and you're good enough, the game would become endless.
You can't avoid all damage. (Again, this is good; if I could keep avoiding damage it would takes ages for the game to end.) However, you can minimize the amount of damage you take by killing enemies quickly enough and maneuvering well. It makes a huge difference, so the amount of damage you take really is affected strongly by skill.
@derr
Regenerative armor could work, it works very well in Tyrian for example. In Tyrian, you have your 'Shield' (regenerative armor) and your 'Armor' (health); your Shield automatically regenerates quickly (assuming you have enough power - on power-intensive ships you need to stop firing for a bit to have enough power to regenerate your shield), but Armor damage is permanent (well, until you get a repair block).
However, for this game personally I'm a bit concerned about such a mechanic leading to endless games. For high score challenge games, you need to kill fast and die fast. It gets really boring in games like this if runs take 15+ minutes once you're skilled enough.
I felt that the game lacked originality and that its implementation of well-known elements was rather mediocre.
The game consists almost entirely of avoid-the-guards (in this case monsters) stealth gameplay with no innovations. Common improvements such as showing the line of sight of the enemies, or giving you clear indicators where the checkpoints are, were not present in this game, and being caught felt very underwhelming. The movement of the enemies themselves was also really straightforward, making the stealth sequences rather boring.
The other major gameplay element is Sokoban puzzles, all of which followed simple predictable Sokoban patterns and were easy to solve if you've ever played a version of (or a game inspired by) Sokoban before. The non-tile-based movement of the boxes actually allowed for alternate solutions making the puzzles even easier. (This element could have been used a new twist on Sokoban, but the game did not utilize this design space.)
Between the stealth and Sokoban sequences there was a lot of walking, which felt boring as most of the world looked the same, with no interesting landmarks, patterns or variations to be seen.
The music felt fitting and added to the atmosphere. The monster sounds added a lot from a functional perspective, but didn't feel fitting from an artistic perspective (I wasn't even sure the sound came from the monsters at first). I would have liked to see more audio feedback, for enhanced gameplay or increased impact of certain events, notably for being caught, shoving boxes and picking up flowers/medicine.
The graphical style felt inconsistent and rough. While the individual graphics look nice in isolation, they just don't fit together. Most notably, the walls look very much like artificial barriers and out of place in an otherwise natural-looking environment, and the boxes look like small crates that were scaled up rather than genuine large crates - this may be due to them being entirely in top-down (or side view) perspective while most of the graphics look like they've viewed from an isometric perspective.
The message/implementation of the theme felt predictable and forced. Why are monsters that make weird sounds and wander around mindlessly suddenly Jews? If their graphics had been the Jew image from the start I'd have felt it offensive; they sound like monsters and behave like monsters, and they stick in locations where it would make no sense for a human to stick around. (Hitler considered the Jews to not be human, but I hope you can agree with me that having them behaving in a more human-like manner would really help the delivery of the message.)
Despite all of my criticism, I haven't rated the game a 1 in any category. It's not truly bad in any sense, just very mediocre. You clearly know how to make a game work; now comes the true challenge, which is making games actually fun.
Interesting game, I had fun trying to figure out the perfect set of choices. Towards the end (after repeated playthroughs to figure everything out) it did start to get boring, though, as certain choices lock you out of winning the game entirely and you have to do everything all over again to be able to pick the right choices. After that, I was disappointed not to see a special 'you win' screen for getting 0 kills.
@TooMuchPete
Yes, the 'lag' is entirely intentional. I messed around with several aspects of displaying the text (including timing of the messages, color usage and so on) to make it play better, and I found it makes a world of difference.
Game updated to version 2.
Great game, my favorite this LD so far. Running around, dodging enemies, eating plants and evolving was fun.
As others have said, balance issues drag the game down after a while. Wonky AI movement behavior causes them to combine into an impenetrable wall of death if you're unlucky, locking you out of the starting area where the plants are. They never attack each other or give up chasing you, and once you get in combat with them it's often impossible to escape - right after running, you get into combat again the very next turn. You're forced to just muscle your way through, which seems to be entirely luck-based. It's also slightly frustrating that combat is purely detrimental; you get no reward for victory other than your continued survival, so strategically it's best to avoid combat at all times. It would be nice if the player was rewarded for strategic combat choices, like attacking weaker animals, if only through something like improved combat capacity in the next evolution.
The music was great and the sounds were fitting and added a lot to the experience. However, I would've loved to see different sounds per dinosaur for attacking and being hit; as it is right now, you repeatedly have the exact sample playing twice in a row every turn, which just sounds weird in addition to not making it clear whether it's the 'attacking' or 'being hit' sound.
Graphics were great but a bit too repetitive. I like the minimalist look, but you can't easily deduce an enemy's (or hell, your own) characteristics by their look, and many different enemies look the exact same (not even color differences).
I'm with the others; the gameplay is a bit unclear and feels rather random. For that matter, I never felt like I was building a city; I was making random choices while a city appeared in front of me. There was no goal for me to work towards - not even a personal goal, as I had no idea what I was doing - and no challenge to struggle against.
The graphics are great, the sound effects are very fitting, and I like your interpretation of the theme.
Unfortunately, I'm rating this as a game, not a tech demo, and as a game it just seems entirely lacking in fun. The first minute or two was interesting to see the city grow, but the time I played after that kind of felt like I was just wasting my time, and I can't really say I had fun playing it.
It's a great game, however it's a bit too hectic and there seem to be some weird balance issues. (Don't worry, the rating is high, these details are just nitpicking and explaining why I'm unlikely to replay the game much.)
There is too much going on at the same time. You are trying not to get crushed, avoiding spikes, dodging enemies and killing enemies. At the same time, you are collecting clouds and torches, picking up healing items, touching weapon upgrade things and grabbing score pickups. This all is done while repeatedly switching between two characters with significantly different gameplay, which can both independently switch between weapons. Interface-wise, you have to keep track of the sun gauge and the rain gauge and your health while you're doing all this. It's just way too much to handle in a fast-paced game like this with no breaks between the action sequences.
Feedback also seems slightly lacking; though I generally grasped what was going on, it wasn't entirely clear to me when I was hit (there are too many things going on at the same time - was that the enemy being crushed just now or did I get hit by the enemy?), and I could never get a grasp on how much health I had left (it's only subtly visible all the way at the top of the screen; I am not reminded of it when I am hit and there are no audio cues telling me I'm about to die). Similarly, I never really knew where the sun/rain gauges were at unless the platform was stopped and I had both the time (not much going on) and incentive (something's wrong, must be the gauges) to check it out. Audio cues might have helped here.
The weapons seem extremely inconsistent. Some weapons completely obliterate everything, while others seem to hardly do anything even if you spam them in the enemy's face. Combined with the 'one weapon at a time' replacement mechanic, this leads to situations where one moment you're destroying everything and the next moment you're suddenly utterly helpless. You're screwed in particular when both of your characters have a weak weapon.
Although for the most part the level generation was great, never feeling dull, there were some weird designs, notably parts where you apparently can't grab a weapon without being crushed? There was also this weird inconsistency where on some designs you could move up by jumping, while in other designs your high jump just wouldn't reach. It also seemed a bit strange how much superior the Rain Shaman's jump was to the Sun Shaman's; even a perfectly executed Sun Shaman jump doesn't reach as high or far as a Rain Shaman jump. Jumping as the Rain Shaman always seems preferable.
The distance goal seems ridiculous. Rather than not being able to survive to that point, I don't think I can play for that long in a single session without getting bored; it seems like it would take way too long to get there. Particularly with the non-stop action without any breaks, I don't think I would want to play for that long in a single session. The difficulty also seems too unforgiving in an inconsistent way; I can get hit by enemies many times, but a single positioning mistake getting me crushed ends the game immediately. If the game is intended to be that long, that's just way too harsh. Instant death becomes exponentially harsher as more progress is lost by it.
Still, all of this is just nitpicking, issues that keep this from becoming an 'amazing game' rather than just a 'great game'. The graphics and audio were great as always, and it was fun to play.
I felt this game was fun, but it does little to make it stand out among other Asteroids variants/dodging games.
I liked how bumping into asteroids costs you fuel, making risky maneuvers viable in certain circumstances (like when a fuel block is touching an asteroid). I also like how turning costs you much more fuel than going straight forward; this has a noticeable effect on my playstyle. However, these innovations are relatively minor and the game is otherwise a relatively unremarkable 'dodge objects to grab other object' game.
I felt that the difficulty takes too long to ramp up. To get a higher score, I first have to play through the much safer early game before the real challenge begins. In this sense, I also felt the merging of asteroids to be counterproductive difficulty-wise; it is far easier to dodge one large asteroid than it is to dodge two smaller asteroids, particularly when you need to move to a specific point (which could be between two asteroids).
The graphics are, simply put, ugly. The spaceship and fuel are in a similar style, looking like the original Asteroids did but in color, but the Asteroids are just gray...somethings. They look ugly and look like they don't belong with the spaceship and fuel. As they also all look the same, this makes the game rather boring to look at. I do like the effect on spaceship movement, and the fact that you can tell where each game element is and what its role is at a glance.
Audio was functional, but boring. The sound of the spaceship felt fitting but hearing it constantly made it feel boring. There was no music and the only other audio was collecting fuel and crashing into something, the latter not occurring much if you're doing it right.
My high score is 30. I could get higher, but the game doesn't feel interesting enough to work my way up to a decent score again.
There's a tiny bug in the game; if you pick up a fuel thing (due to inertia) after running out of fuel (game over), the game suddenly resumes again.
It's a fun if simple and short platformer. I feel you made good use of the movement gimmick, though it was all a bit by-the-book; the level design was solid, but never surprising.
The graphical style and the effects were great, as were the graphics that are in the game. However, the visuals did feel a bit lacking; every part of the level looked pretty much the same and the background was mostly just a solid color, which was a bit boring. As others have mentioned, lack of graphical feedback isn't too much of an issue but is a bit disappointing. Audio was pretty good.
I also agree the link to the theme is a bit weak (I'll respond to your post after this), though it is clearly there. I also agree having a different button for dropping would probably play better, it feels far too counter-intuitive as it is now.
All in all, it's a solid game, it just never really goes beyond just being a solid game.
@Alex Rose
The problem here is that you adapted what you were making to the theme, rather than having the theme dictate what you will be making.
Rude Bear Recreation is a platformer in which you can only move by jumping and airdashing forward. What you do in the game is moving forward while avoiding obstacles. This gameplay is not in any way related to growth or two-button controls by itself.
Through a narrative about a growth and marijuana you have linked it to the 'growth' theme, and by changing the controls from the usual 'jump button, air dash button/combo, drop button' to a single button for all you have turned it into a one-button game. If the theme had been 'one button controls' this would have been a boring but adequate interpretation, but it could hardly be called a great interpretation unless it actually changed something about the gameplay. You called the non-gameplay-related 'R' button the second button, but you can't really call that the second control button. (In my game, the two buttons are left arrow and right arrow. You can also press Space, F and Escape to pause the game, go into fullscreen or quit the game, but those are just convenience functions that don't affect the gameplay. I could remove them for 'not fitting the theme' but I doubt anyone would be happier if I did.) As such, I would say this game doesn't even qualify for 'Two Button Controls'; I based my Theme rating for this game solely on the interpretation of 'Growth'.
For me to give a game a higher Theme rating than 3, the theme needs to strongly affect either the gameplay or the experience. An example of the former would be LD32's 'TeleMage' (http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=19774). Having teleportation as your only weapon radically changes the gameplay from what it would otherwise be (shooting fireballs to kill enemies or engaging them in melee); every aspect of your playstyle has to change to account for this change. An example of the latter is LD33's 'I am Death and Fire' (http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=55643). The general atmosphere, flying around in the night sky and burning panicking civilians to a crisp, makes you truly feel like you are the monster. (Side note: I rated Rude Bear Realms a 5 in Theme for this reason as well; sending out minions to raid towns made me feel like a typical evil villain.)
Although Rude Bear Recreation clearly abides by the theme on a superficial level, it does not feel like either the gameplay nor the experience is notably affected by it. As such, I gave it a theme score of 3; 'theme clearly present, but not affecting much'. (For reference, I give 1 if theme is not present, 2 if the interpretation is too obvious and it doesn't affect gameplay or experience, 3 if present in a non-boring way but it does not affect gameplay or experience; OR it does affect gameplay or experience but in a too obvious way, 4 if it does affect gameplay or experience in an interesting way, and 5 if it truly feels fitting. I don't give too many 5s; last LD I gave it to 3/18 games, LD32 1/17 games, LD31 2/17 games.)
This feels more like a tech demo than a game, though even as a tech demo it feels rather boring and unfinished. There is no challenge in the game; once you have a single gathering/production combo up your money will only go up, never down. There is no challenge (not even something simple like a timer, 'earn as much as you can before time runs out') or goal. The game feels extremely unfinished as half the resources are not present on the map anywhere and there is no way to create many of the items. Not that there is much point to crafting different items - they're all practically the same, simple money generators without any other effect on gameplay.
A game needs something to challenge the player or to keep them interested somehow. I never felt like I was being challenged or that I was achieving anything in the game, and watching numbers tick up by themselves is not interesting enough on its own.
I felt this game was exceedingly dull. As there is no way to lose the game (you will defeat every enemy by just holding right from the start of the game until you get tired of it), nor even any more optimal to progress in the game let alone beat the game, there is no challenge. Your actions in the game are meaningless, not affecting the game other than having the game not progress if you're not holding right.
There are rare cases where games can be good despite a lack of meaningful interaction, particularly in narrative and art games. However, this game does not present a sufficiently interesting experience (it's a typical RPG scenario without any twists) and is too repetitive (you're fighting the exact same enemies over and over again, without even a change of scenery) to be interesting as a barely-interactive game.
The pixel art is really nice, but unfortunately the gameplay doesn't do it justice.
As phi6 pointed out, the window was inconveniently small. I had to lower my resolution to 800x600 (from the 1920x1080 I usually use) to be able to play the game properly, and even then it looked small. Also, the button to start the game was very counter-intuitive; at first I thought the game didn't work on my machine and was about to report this "bug". A starting command more in line with the controls (say, starting by pressing right) or some explanatory text ("Press right to start"/"Click button to start") would help players understand how to start the game.
I'm not really sure what to say here. Everything is very well-made and polished...but it just isn't fun. It's the most basic form of 'push button to win game' with nothing at all to spice it up except for a whole lot of style. The only challenge is how fast I can push buttons, and that got tedious even back in the C64 era when it was combined with timing challenges (long jump games and the like).
The only real criticism I can offer is that the audio seems a bit lacking. There's only a single piece of music, which gets rather repetitive, but more importantly there's no audio feedback in the gameplay. I can't hear myself cycle, I can't hear how fast I'm going, I can't hear the start sign, and I can't hear myself cross the finish line. It would add a lot to the experience if you heard sounds produced by in-game events.
How did this not get a Mood score? What's wrong with people?
Great graphics and really fitting audio.
The gameplay, however, felt slow-paced, too easy and especially lacking in variety. It was just positioning yourself right and repeatedly pressing the attack button until everything is dead, with only a slight difficult ramp as you progress through the game. It just didn't feel very interesting.
I agree that the terminal was extremely well-executed. The plot (or, pretty much, the twist, as there's not much to the plot beyond that), however, was extremely predictable (I saw it coming when I first saw the boot-up failures at game start); the twist is too obvious and overdone, as well as lacking in any impact (even if I didn't see it coming, I'd have probably just thought 'oh, so that's what I've been doing'). This is not helped by the disconnect between the mech vs slimes gameplay and the 'real' situation; the enemies behave nothing like they should (plot-wise), you die if you do not kill them, and you are a mech (read: murder machine).
An interesting game, despite its technical shortcomings. Though the 'no brakes' idea has been done before, combining it with a Trackmania-like stunt track feels surprisingly fresh.
That said, having to manually restart whenever you flip over in a lightweight car on a track apparently designed to flip you over is more frustrating than fun. The game would've been much more fun if you could just respawn with a time penalty or something like that. The tendency for the car to flip over in midair after a ramp as well as the bumps in the road nearly guaranteed to flip you over felt rather unfair. The challenge to get the boxes despite your lack of control was fun though, when it worked properly.
Although it took some time getting used to, Snake with 360 degrees rotation ends up causing rather interesting gameplay. (It's not really Snake due to the tail not being gameplay-relevant, but it's close enough.)
However, the game has significant technical issues that really drag it down. Corpses don't disappear after death. Rendering too much (for example, several of your previous corpses) causes a massive reduction in frame rate. The collectable circles bug out after you die. Collision detection is wonky, and sometimes you don't collect a circle you're definitely touching. And are there only two levels (plus the intro level), or is there some bug causing the freeze upon completing level 2?
Design-wise, feedback is sorely missing. You don't get any sound or graphical effect indicating you just lost HP, and some auditory feedback on collecting a coin would also be nice. There is also no quick way to check if you've finished collecting them all or if there are still some left. I also found some of the level design parts were too harsh. Most notably, the bottom right circle in level 1 is nigh-impossible to get and return without touching a side. A slightly more gradual difficulty buildup would've helped here.
Great game. Using shooting mechanics for movement works well with the gameplay of avoiding enemies, and the precise movement (and motion reset!) caused by the katana works very well to balance out the imprecise control of the gun recoil movement. Having them work in opposite directions also creates an interesting contrast. The game has quite a learning curve due to the unorthodox controls, but it gets more fun as you get better at it.
Minor nitpicks: The laser enemy seems to be too powerful, as it completely dominates the game once it starts appearing; it often comes from off-screen, is hard to dodge, and the movements required to dodge it frequently cause you to run into enemies/bullets. It deals several times more damage to me than all other enemies combined. Also, feedback on being hit seems to be too subtle; sometimes I don't even notice when I'm hit, and when I'm hit I'm not always sure what dealt the damage.
The graphics look nice, though I'm left wondering what's with the pirate theme when you're floating in the air propelled by some machine gun-like weapon, being attacked by flying enemies (including some that shoot lasers). The audio is nice and functional.
I can't say I'm very impressed with the implementation of the theme. Sure, you have two buttons, but the most important part of the controls is the mouse movement. You could call pretty much every single PC strategy game ever a two-button game like that.
Regarding controls, I think the game could be further improved using twin stick controls. Mouse movement is slow when you try to move large distances, particularly when you need to reach the exact opposite location (when trying to katana in the direction you're already moving, for example); something like dual analog sticks could make this much more convenient. It would also help with the awkwardness of mouse controls near the edge of the screen.
Also, my high score was 94.
This game has some potential, but ends way too soon (just when I expected the game to really start) and has a lot of technical/design issues that make the current content not very fun.
The amount of non-tutorial content is way too small for how much tutorial there is; if I have to sit through a tutorial, I expect the rest of the game to make it worth my time. There's tons of design space left unused; the tutorials are made to be near-impossible to fail, so all that's left is two short platform challenges (the climb and the drop/bounce) and a "puzzle" (finding the exit). Even disregarding the tutorials, that just isn't enough content to make a fun game.
Collisions/hitboxes were very weird. It was never clear to me what ways of touching enemies were lethal to me and which ones allowed me to bounce; particularly the climb had me moving into enemies sideways a lot, which just felt plain weird. If you fall on top of the box in the drop/bounce challenge you go right through it (and get killed by an enemy while you're standing still in confusion). The invisible block before the exit is apparently intentional, but is very poor design as it feels like a glitch; there is no indication it is not a glitch until you've "solved the puzzle". Likewise, the "puzzle" itself is a matter of trial-and-error; the only way to find the solution is by giving up and trying to kill yourself, which generally happens before you even realize it's supposed to be a puzzle. This could be remedied somewhat by having the hidden block become visible when you approach it, but even then 'find the off-screen object' rarely makes for a fun puzzle.
The graphics were okay and worked for the game, but were not particularly memorable in any way. I didn't like the humor and felt that it tried too hard to be funny, but humor is very subjective. The awkward timing of the text also didn't help; frequently I was busy doing gameplay things while text appeared in the background (I didn't even see the 'you can jump on enemies' until I'd already jumped past the platform), and I didn't read it until after the fact. Timing is crucial for humor.
While I liked the idea, the execution just doesn't seem to work out.
You're supposed to be making strategic choices at the right times to get your people to prosper, but with the simplistic cards (never any reason not to play a card immediately), high degree of randomness (you keep drawing Sacrifices when you're at full mana and your people are prospering), very restrictive hand size combined with no card draws when at the limit (you can't discard cards to make place for more useful cards) and wonky game balance (the civilization grows too easily, then becomes entirely unmanageable as you don't get enough food/water cards to sustain them and have no reliable way of culling them), there isn't really anything to do except for play whatever cards you draw. Again, you don't even get the option to keep them - you need to keep playing cards to get new ones. The game gives you no chance to make strategic decisions, which means you're pretty much left watching a civilization build up and destroy itself.
The UI could also use some serious work; elements moving on mouse-over is very annoying when you're trying to click something, the text rewriting itself as it zooms in makes it hard to read until it's fully zoomed in, and as it's impossible to see the effect of area effect cards you can't be sure what area you're affecting.
I fully agree with what silkworm_sweatshop said. I am a boring person, and I immediately noticed that just mashing the buttons is a far superior strategy to playing the game as intended; it takes much less time to hit both buttons once than it takes to determine which button to press next and pressing that button. I dislike it when a game doesn't properly enforce its rules, because where do you draw the line between playing seriously and cheating? I could focus more on speed and less on accuracy, but would that be cheating? It could be a valid strategy if you were punished for inaccuracy, depending on how harsh the punishment is.
Trying to play as intended (avoiding pressing the wrong buttons) reveals some design flaws which make the experience rather unfun. The arrows look too much alike, making it hard to distinguish between left arrows and right arrows. (DDR has each arrow in its own lane to distinguish them, for example. It also has different outline and fill colors on the arrows to make them easier to distinguish.) The initial game speed feels too high for just starting the game. But worst of all, a single miss means instant game over. This is okay in button-mashing mode since it's the result of slowly losing ground, but when playing carefully a single moment of carelessness makes you lose the entire session. Not fun at all.
The style, however, is awesome. The graphics give it a lot of style, and the audio fits perfectly.
While I like the idea, and conceptually the game is very solid, the fact that it's hard to know what's going on around your base and the fast pace of the game combine to make a disappointing game.
The UI is rather clunky and lacking in information. I can't just zoom out and immediately get to the room I want to view/edit. Vital information on room productivity (how many spiamonds/sec does this generate? How much damage does this shield absorb?) is lacking from the interface, while other information is only visible on mouse-over, or sometimes has to be deduced after mouse-over (what level is this room's productivity at? How much does it cost to upgrade?). The menu for building rooms is slow, and the lack of any confirmation when upgrading means you need to do it slowly or risk upgrading too much or too little.
But the most frustrating is how little you know about your base at any given time. You don't even get audio cues to signal you're being attacked and the attack penetrated your defenses somewhere. There really need to be warning signals indicating when things require your immediate attention. There is no way to view your entire base to get a good idea of where you should focus your efforts, it's not possible to view shield/weapon ranges unless you have that specific room selected, room damage is too subtle, it's hard to see where there are spots for building rooms with an energy connection, and the rooms look too much alike to immediately glance how much firepower/defense/repair/etc you have in a given area. All in all, you don't know enough about what's going on until it's too late and the enemy's approach is already unstoppable.
In a turn-based game, this all would be fine. But as this game is real-time, and the effect of falling behind is self-reinforcing (losing rooms makes it harder to defend your base, which makes you lose more rooms), these issues entirely ruin the interaction with the enemies. Either you build your base right quickly enough that the enemies pose no problem at all (also a frustrating process considering the interface issues), or you get completely devastated by the enemy without any hope of rebuilding. If you have to respond to the enemy, it's already too late.
These issues are made worse by the way things get more expensive as time goes on. Building defenses in time is no longer possible when they're made so expensive by your earlier defenses, especially not when they've just blown up your mining room. The cost of repairing rooms is extremely prohibitive, yet at the same time not repairing rooms leaves you far too vulnerable.
Overall, the gameplay has a lot of potential, but it just doesn't work the way it is now. It's a speedrun building game where you lose if you haven't built your base in time, rather than a base management game where you defend your base from enemies.
The graphics look very nice, but unfortunately they're not sufficient on a functional level (see 'hard to see what's going on' stuff above). The audio is very atmospheric, but is utterly lacking functionally (you don't even hear your rooms blowing up when you see it happen!).
-1 to Overall and Fun for making balance changes to the version being judged. Please upload a post-LD version if you want to have players play a better game; the version to be judged should be what you made in the 48 hours, complete with balance flaws. Balancing is hard and takes time, and many games would be better if only the creator had more time. Getting that right is part of the challenge too. (And yeah, I failed that part pretty hard on mine this time.)
@Mantlair
When does it crash? If it crashes all the way at startup before you see anything, it's your video card. I always forget to implement error handling for that situation, but XNA games crash at startup if your video card doesn't meet the minimum requirements. If you're on a laptop with dual video card, try if you can run the game using the more powerful video card.
If it crashes at any other point, could you provide more information? When does it crash, and what information does it give you when it crashes? Is it the typical Windows crash message?
@mockthebear
I used XNA, the (now deprecated) Microsoft framework that MonoGame is based on (MonoGame is open-source XNA, pretty much). I should move on to MonoGame at some point, but my graphics library isn't fully compatible and so I'd need to fix it under MonoGame, something I still haven't done yet.