Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → wcwedin
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 32 | An Unconventional Weapon | Elsie and the Allergic Robots | compo | 770 | 2.93 | 2.75 | 3.36 | 3.64 | 3.14 | 2.77 | 2.95 | 2.91 | 53 |
Fun, but I would have preferred mouse controls for shooting so that I could aim in any direction. Still, it reminded me of Realm of the Mad God in a very good way! The hitboxes are screwy on just about everything, but it only took a few hard lessons to work out just where they are.
Goofy and delightful! I'm going to see if I can trick my wife into playing with me when she gets back from the gym. It looks like true love and the shotgun are both basically joke weapons, but it was still a little disappointing how badly broken the true love/exploding ducks matchup is. Maybe the imbalance could converted from a joke into a feature with a Smash Brothers—style system where the weapons fall from the sky as power-ups!
I really like the way the yo-yo keeps a fixed position in space! Sure, that's not how yo-yos actually work, but it somehow felt good anyway.
Climbing stairs seems like a fated death in a lot of situations, depending on whether there's a goblin that you can't see facing the exit point. Am I doing something wrong?
Pretty fun; cool idea. The ability to wall-jump off the same wall repeatedly is way overpowered. I used it to do a full pacifist run my second time through, though, which was pretty easy until level 6.
The controls are a little wonky, and the hit boxes seem a little strange, too, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the game. I could *not* figure how to beat my mirror self, though. It seems like even if mirror-me dies, I still get Game Over?
Thanks for the feedback, all! I did spend a lot of time getting the controls right, since I knew I wanted to try making a platformer but I had no idea what my weapon would be until the second day. It was only after wasting hours watching Mario 64 speed runs that I realized that movement should be my weapon, so I added in the dust and went back to refine the controls for the tenth time. I think the end result is that the game is more "tight" than "developed", and I really regret not having time to add more levels and enemies. I wanted to play with different room shapes, and I really wanted some robots to shoot lasers!
It is (generally) possible to kill the robots, but the game's on a bit of a reverse difficulty curve. Unfortunately, there's no indication of how much damage they've taken. You'll know when you get one, though, because they explode in a dense puff of dust that you can use to kill the remaining robots. There does seem to be a bug that occasionally makes a bot invincible, but it's rare, and I've only even seen it affect a single bot at a time. I don't think it would be in the spirit of the competition for me to fix it now, since you can still beat the game most of the time by resetting, and there's no victory screen or anything anyway. Playing with the dust without pressure is sort of a reward, though!
A few tips: The more concentrated the dust, the more effective it is (the damage function is super-linear, specifically quartic), so you may find it much more effective to skid or hop around an area for a few seconds to set up a "trap" if you can. You should only have to drag a given bot through a fairly thick cloud maybe five or six times to do it in. The bots run on simple timed, randomized state machines, and one of their states is to fly straight up, so be careful jumping over the same bot too many times in a row. (I wanted to implement Pac-Man style differences in chase behaviors but didn't have time; that may be for the best, since they still manage to ambush you often enough purely by chance, I think.) You might also find it useful to know that a ground spin lets you get through single-block-high gaps and occasionally sneak under a descending bot.
You really do have to get ahead early! My first go I got overwhelmed and ended up facing the wall and pummeling myself as the monsters ran into my back, which it turns out is not an effective strategy. Anyway, congrats on your first LD!
Simple, but really charming! I think the biggest problem is that your Gaston look-alike has more character than the sidekick you're playing as. Also, sometimes the bounding areas on the objects seem a little off (or maybe it's a stacking problem?) even with a mouse. With a little building out, this could be a fun game to kill time on the train. Nice job!