Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Vulture_42
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | Mindlapse | jam | 401 | 3.56 | 3.22 | 3.31 | 3.71 | 4.02 | 3.58 | 3.44 |
This was so fun! I managed to play through once without realising I could just bomb the chickens, then I decided to do that, round up any survivors and fire them out the sides. I'm not quite sure how I ended up with chickens back on the poop deck, as there weren't any eggs up there after I cleared it out, but oh well :grin:
Great work getting this down in the time available!
This is such a great jam entry — it's really fun to play and pretty intuitive to pick up. Points to note, as far as I saw, are:
- Music/sound stopped playing after about a minute of play. - Seawalls aren't intuitive at first — I thought I had to place the walls individually, like roads, rather than allocating an entire area. - The little bits of wall that appear when you create a sea wall never go away and can't be destroyed. Is that intentional? They never appear that close to the water's edge, so it seems odd. - When I got to about 70 population, the framerate began to drop rapidly until the game was on pause, so sadly I had to give up before completing the objective.
All in all, though, great work! The art looked lovely and it definitely seems more than a weekend's work.
(Edit: Forgot to mention that it would be *amazing* to have a way to rotate buildings. I could have fit in so many more food storage buildings if that were the case.)
I like the idea of this game, but I found the collision mechanics a bit too picky, to be honest. I hit cars when I wasn't visibly touching them and it wasn't entirely clear which side the driver's side was meant to be. Can you ever park the cars in the spaces *and* get out of them afterwards, or do you always have to stagger them or leave more space either side? I feel like the default spaces should at least be wide enough to get out in. Then again, no one else seems to have had a problem with it, so I could just be terrible at it :grin:
Great artwork and sound effects, though, and the tutorial was a welcome aspect.
I managed to last for around twelve minutes before running out of space — it definitely fits the theme, although I think maybe there could have been a little more to it. If you moved a little faster or maybe the gameplay was expanded to include matching dogs to owners (since the dogs have descriptions), that would have made it more interesting to play for that length of time, for me. It certainly felt like it needed something to break the routine I fell into.
I liked that the artwork wasn't too cluttered. The music was fine for me but the voices got a little bit repetitive, as there were only three phrases to hear! Great work, though!
I loved this game and played all the way through to the end — great work! I'm very happy that there wasn't a time constraint with this, as I quite liked just playing around with all the different layouts with no particular rush. The sound effects and music suited really well, too, so thanks!
People are saying they can't get past the last level — I can't get past the first. This is a shame, because it looks amazing and I love the concept. I can only speak for the first level, but I feel like maybe some more differentiation between ships on the front of the sphere and ships on the reverse would have made things clearer for me. In any case, it's proof to it being fun that I reopened the game about four times whilst writing this to see if I could do any better! Question: if I should the glowing spawn-y thing enough, does it stop spawning ships? Or is there a set number of enemy ships to beat?
Edit: agree about the camera. It's not terrible, but it doesn't help.
This game looks great and I like the idea, but when I played it in two-player mode I got a bit confused. It wasn't very obvious which cauldron I was meant to be putting stuff in. I assumed it was the one I was standing next to, but then one of them flashed when I was near it and I got confused. I've since realised the outline colour of the cauldron matches the highlights on the characters, but it was subtle enough that I didn't notice when focussing elsewhere. It's a lot easier in singleplayer! I liked the fact that heavy objects are slower to move, by the way.
I managed to fulfil all my orders, although it took a while to figure out I had to drag the planets to the order (even though the instructions were right in front of my face). I didn't really end up using the sliders for orbit/axial tilt, as I completely forgot they were there, but I did pretty well nonetheless.
It would be nice to have more orders come in after the first lot, as after they're gone you don't really have anything to do. It would also be nice to have some way to split a planet up if it's grown too big (although that may not realistically be an option). Does the population of Earth have any effect on anything else, by the way?
This is a beautiful game and it was a tug to work out which memories to keep when it got to the later stages. The only comment I have is that I was a bit confused who 'Her' referred to in the last memory. (I liked how the memories got shorter but more bold and 'essential' [I guess] as time went on).
@kiirohanabi Ah, yes, that's a good point. Thank you!
This world's too good for me — I only lasted three minutes :wink:
I love the concept of your game; I think it's great! I agree with the others that health bars on top of people's heads would have been useful, but it's totally understandable that you forgot. In terms of other areas to improve, then given more time I think making people's weakness 'visible' would serve as a good prompt (frowny faces on angry people, gluttons with food... something like that), but it's good as it is.
Great work!(Loved the random Homer, too!)
I think this is a great game and it definitely suits the theme. I did have some issues getting to grips with the boat, though. Not its speed/manoeuvrability — I think that's fine — but the fact that the reversing controls felt like they should have been inverted. Real-life boats move on an arc based around the rudder's direction (now that I think of it, so do cars, so I probably sound like an idiot right now), and I'm pretty sure most games I've played where you can sail use inverted backwards controls. Because this didn't have that, I couldn't get used to it at all. (Perhaps a setting in an options menu, given more time.)
Otherwise, great graphics and the sound effects worked well. I was grateful for the flashing platforms and the little health bars, although sometimes it took me a while to work out where the raft was! I agree with someone above that being able to let people out/pick up from the side of the boat would have been great.
@antoined73 So it's not great, but [this is the best diagram I could find](http://www.boatus.com/Assets/www.boatus.com/magazines/boatus/2018/june/img/backing-into-a-slip-illustration.jpg). Basically if you're sat on a boat going forwards, for example, and you push the tiller to the right of the boat, the rudder angles to the left and the front of the boat goes left. You could picture the movement as a curve.
If you then began to reverse with the tiller and rudder in the same direction, you'd move back along the same curve. So in terms of mechanics, if pressing 'right' whilst moving forwards turns right, then moving backwards with 'right' still held down will turn the rear of the boat left, meaning you end up in the same position you started in. The same as for cars: if the wheels are at an angle, you'll follow the curve forwards and backwards.
I hope that makes sense (and I wasn't too long-winded)!
This was amazing! I eventually managed to get the Notes password with a little help from the comments section. This is so well executed for 72 hours' work. The voices were great to the point that I genuinely want to fight the podcast guy (not whoever did the voice, obviously — well done to them :grin:). The only thing I will say is that I found it a bit odd that I couldn't uninstall the duck game to free up more space.
It took me a while to notice where the monetary cost of buildings showed up on the screen (I assumed it was the amount of money I lost per... something, at first :grin: — maybe a tooltip would have been more obvious?), but this is a really solid game. It's pretty fun, although obviously doesn't last for too long! A good entry, thanks!
This is such a cute game. It looks great, it plays great and the puzzles prove a fun challenge(those crocodiles can be surprisingly difficult to place). I liked the addition of dinosaurs! If you work on it a bit more after this, it would be nice to see the animals blink, I think — it would add a bit more life to them :smile:
I got scared, then my husband got scared that I got scared, then I took off my headphones, then I still got scared, then the game ended. Considering that, I'd say you did very well with the mood and atmosphere!
I was expecting there to be a bit more to it than just walking, good sound effects and jump scares, though. I feel like I was missing some background for the situation, or that there could have been some details that revealed themselves as I went along — definitely something to interact with, as people have said. All that happened was I wandered round for a while and found a lift to take me to a smaller room, did that a couple of times, then died(?).
Still, I couldn't come close to making something like that in 72 hours and it looks amazing, so great job!
A good game and congratulations on getting it finished, although it was quite difficult (for me, at least). The hitboxes on objects seemed a bit unintuitive and I struggled to pick up the items I wanted quite often. I didn't really like the fact that you can't pick up shelves once they're knocked over, but otherwise, everything worked reasonably well (after reading the instructions, of course — I like the crafting element). As far as audio goes, I feel like there could have been a sound for items falling on the floor and barrels exploding, but the rest of the sound was good. I think maybe if those areas had been covered, I could have played this for quite a while longer.
This was fun to play! It took a while to get used to where exactly to aim when shoving red penguins off the platform (how are those penguins different to the others, mechanically speaking? I wasn't sure), but I got a score of 151. The sound effects are a little annoying for people in the same room (or, well, maybe just my husband) but fine for people playing it!
Short and sweet — I really liked playing this. I think the fact that it was simple was fine, considering its length, but I was expecting some sort of cutscene at the end where he realises he's been hallucinating or something!
Really well polished, though, so great work! It didn't get dull to me, but I agree about the need for more clarification on where exactly you'll die (but hey, you die once, you know to avoid it again).
Well, this was definitely unique! I mean, I was terrible at it and couldn't finish the boss fight, but I certainly want to try again later.
The feedback I have is that the first password is discoverable in uppercase, but it only works when entered in lowercase. I don't know if this is intentional, but it caught me out. As for the boss fight, I feel like the files are perhaps a bit close together (but as I've said, I'm terrible at it, so that could just be me) and I thought I'd be able to shoot them as well as the boss, at first. I also found the flashing background made it very hard to focus on the items, but I imagine this was very intentional.
Great game, anyway, even if it gave me virus flashbacks! :stuck_out_tongue:
This is a lovely concept and I think the changes between each level played out well. In terms of feedback, I'm not sure I can say anything you haven't already heard, but I definitely would have appreciated the option to speed up text somehow, and I found the running animation a bit jerky (or not matching the movement speed). Other than that, great job getting this done in the time limit!
I like the concept of the game and I think the style is great. I think maybe making the character/file tuck its legs in while it falls down in the first level would have been a good thing to do, as the most annoying failures in that level were when I just caught my legs on the corner of a piece of data.
I'm not much a fan of using the up arrow to jump rather than space, but I got used to it — it did, however, not always worked when I thought it would during the boss fight on level three. I couldn't jump when I was on top of its head, so I couldn't get clear in time to avoid being kicked across the screen. I also wasn't entirely sure if the things I dropped on it did any damage.
I thought the introduction was pretty good, though (a few typos, but nothing unintelligible)!
Thank you for the feedback so far, people! I'm glad you're enjoying it.
@hailburns I'm especially glad you thought the sound effects were cute — I'd never made any before this weekend :grin:
@unbonjusdefruits It's interesting to be compared to *The Dream Machine*! I only played the first level at an event once, but I loved it. I'm glad you thought the mood all fit together. And who knows? Maybe we might polish it up a bit more once voting is over.
Thank you everyone for your continued feedback!
@saering I know what you mean with the game feeling a little slow. I can personally get quite into it for a while, but as someone said above, there's no real urgency or end-game unless you start running out of resources or time a repair badly. We had plans for more mechanics, but sadly not enough time to implement them (we thought we'd stick to the core mechanics). Thank you for the feedback!
@anthony-dunlap and @uncannyvalley Apologies for the loud spell-casting sound — I hadn't used Unity in years and didn't know how to adjust the volume in the editor (I probably should have readjusted them in Audacity)! (Definitely something I'll look up if I ever end up making sound effects again!)
@wrenpirate Standing in a collapsing room does kill you, but only if you haven't begun repairing it. I probably could have made that a little bit clearer with some more explicit dialogue the first time it happened.
@demn Thank you! I'm glad you liked the little dialogue bubbles :grin: There were a few ideas for more mechanics and/or a win condition floating around, but yes, we did run out of time to implement them — or really to hone those 'extra' ideas much.
@team-infernus I think you're referring to the sound effect that plays when you get hit, which is basically me saying 'Ow' into the microphone and adjusting it in Audacity afterwards. I'll admit I wasn't too satisfied with that one, but I wasn't sure what else would fit the situation!
@swordfish — @0xff0000 made everything by hand — the bricks, character, monster, walls, floor etc. I think he has some 'making of' posts he might be able to share.
Thank you all for the feedback!
@local-minimum Thank you! I think the visual feedback on the rooms about to collapse (when the floor turns completely red) might have been made a bit more confusing by the fact that the room can't collapse if you're repairing it at the same time. The floor does flash a little while, then it goes completely red — when it does that, you don't want to be standing in it. We had intended to add animations where the room would crack a few times, then disintegrate, but we didn't get round to it.
@carlos-giraldo The clay art is really cool — @0xff0000 did a great job :smile: . To repair a room you need to be standing in it. The notice to repair a room might be a little vague because you have to be quite close to it and the text appears off to the side. Which did you think could have done with a clearer range? (I think maybe we could have highlighted the notice or something when you get close enough and that might have worked.)
@tigerj Thank you for featuring us in your stream! I noticed the comment about the reticule — it was quite large because it indicated the explosion radius. Anything within the reticule takes damage, including yourself, which is why you kept taking damage (you only got hit by the monsters a couple of times, I think). Great feedback about binding the reticule to the mouse cursor, by the way!
I enjoy the concept of this game and I think you've pulled it off well — it definitely fits with the theme.
I think as far as constructive feedback goes, it could do with a little streamlining. Considering there's a time limit to deal with as well as a space limit, people seem to take a little too long to move along in the queue. Some hotkeys could have helped with this (L/M/S), or the ability to drag people onto their seats. The UI on the main screen could do with a bit more clarity, as well. Since you choose seat types when arranging seats, I don't think needing to choose the number of each first was necessary (I sometimes forgot to update the numbers).
But otherwise, good work!
This is a fun game and I love the creepy laughing guy in the background. I was confused at first about the folders and thought I was meant to tidy the files into them, but I realised what was going on eventually. The only other comment I have is that the sound didn't quite match up when it looped, but as you've opted out of audio, I imagine that was already like it :smiley:.