Exo-Aquatic by deathray 2014-05-02T03:52:00
Good game! Good looking art. Love the concept. Good work!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → wheelsx (StickyKittyGames)
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | Co | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | 👥 | Super Mecha Diggin Dodge Idle | jam | 263 | 3.76 | 3.80 | 3.18 | 3.93 | 3.27 | 3.43 | 3.69 | ||
| 2024 | 56 | Tiny Creatures | 👥 | Kwakerz | jam | 247 | 3.86 | 4.11 | 3.31 | 3.82 | 3.58 | 4.12 | 3.60 | ||
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | 👥 | Raging Hell | jam | 785 | 3.40 | 3.47 | 3.15 | 3.85 | 3.28 | 2.30 | 3.25 | ||
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | 👥 | Conveyor Chaos | jam | 747 | 3.38 | 3.46 | 3.77 | 3.13 | 3.32 | 2.41 | 3.03 | ||
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | 👥 | UPDEX | jam | 1072 | 3.01 | 2.75 | 2.76 | 3.44 | 3.23 | 2.81 | 2.92 | ||
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | 👥 | Fields of Fury | jam | 692 | 3.01 | 2.82 | 2.41 | 2.75 | 3.45 | 2.73 | 3.13 | ||
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | 👥 | Egg Salad | jam | 1161 | 2.77 | 2.58 | 3.03 | 3.54 | 2.91 | 3.16 | 2.58 | ||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | 👥 | The Urban Legend of Nightmare Forest | jam | 2256 | 2.94 | 2.85 | 2.35 | 3.15 | 2.27 | 3.02 | |||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | Buggert | jam | 990 | 2.90 | 2.57 | 3.12 | 2.93 | 3.26 | 2.80 | 3.12 | ||
| 2014 | 30 | Connected Worlds | eMERGEncy | jam | 504 | 3.03 | 2.90 | 2.73 | 3.28 | 3.17 | 3.32 | 2.60 | 2.80 | 51 | |
| 2014 | 29 | Beneath the Surface | Diggin' Dodge | jam | 316 | 3.30 | 3.13 | 2.96 | 3.55 | 3.15 | 3.02 | 2.38 | 2.85 | 87 |
Good game! Good looking art. Love the concept. Good work!
Totally reminiscent of Tetris. Fun and addicting, yet maybe a little too easy. I had to commit suicide at level 50 so I could stop playing and rate it :P Great concept, would like to see it polished!
If this came out as an atari game back in the day, it would have been revolutionary. It's quite fun, I'm a sucker for true retro games.
Great game, music is a bit redundant, but the AI seems to be pretty good.
You made my day!
This is a pretty awesome game. The line art is awesome, and the sound is good. The story seems pretty decent (given the short amount of time to write it). However there are a few flaws, the biggest being the controls being a little clunky and non responsive. Running should be default, and holding to right click is a bit pointless.
The sound effects were a bit too loud and drowned out the music, but the music decided to stop anyway. Otherwise, the sound and music are pretty good.
The graphics are decent, but they are a little incongruent. I love the way the buildings look, and the ground looks reminiscent of the ground tiles of old, but they don't exactly compliment each other or the gun towers.
This game is a pretty fun Missile Command clone with a few differences, however, it completely misses the theme.
I get an error and can't play, unexpected end of archive. I was looking forward to playing it though.
We originally had plans to help defend yourself, but we ran out of time, and we didn't think it was as important as what made it into the game. As a few of you pointed out, it's obvious that I was influenced by playing SMB2 in my childhood (aah, the 90's had good games). We plan on finishing it and releasing a new version, but we will keep this version here, and on our brand new (currently otherwise blank) website.
If you hit escape or p, you can adjust the volume of the sound effects and music. Also, installing Wordpress managed to break the link, I'm trying to fix it now.
Seems to work now.
Thank You Jupiter! We have been enjoying watching your video series, and look forward to more!
Love the concept, solid entry!
Great concept.
I want to thank everyone for all the feedback. I already knew about most of the problems mentioned, but didn't realize how much they actually affected gameplay. I was trying to capture a little of that classic action-platformer difficulty, but it looks like I over did it. I was dissappointed that I wasn't able to do some things faster to free up some time to do basic things like visual feedback when you hit an enemy, finding a workaround for the possibility of getting hit when switching worlds, and improving the level design. I feel like if I had another 12 hours this game could have been a lot better.
I really enjoyed playing this game! Like how you tied it to the theme, and I love the social / economic message. This is my favorite entry (so far). Can't wait to play your next LD!
I love it. The music is awesome, and the purring when you take a healing cat nap is a great touch. It's very well polished for a jam game. The parts where you have to get over gaps is a bit annoying, especially because the controls were a bit sticky for me. At times, the cat would keep moving after letting go of the button.
The graphics and audio are awesome, but it seems to freeze if I stand next to a tree. It says press E to harvest, but nothing happens.
This game is a blast! It's a great concept.
It starts to get super frustrating after just a few levels. There's already a lot of challenge in working with the physics, the timing sliders need many more steps to be able to fine tune better.
I uploaded a new version to the itch.io page. This version fixed the enemies not moving. Everything worked fine in the editor, but I didn't find out until the next day that the enemies were broken in the build. Apparently, Unity decided to not find the rigidbody on the enemy by using GetComponent
These are the only things fixed. Because it was after the deadline, I left the html version alone, and the original downloadable version is still available. I spent a good deal of time working on the combat, and would like it to at least be possible to experience the game the way I did playing in the editor. I was in such a hurry to play everyone else's great games that I didn't realize it was broken until the next evening.
A little hard at first, but once you get used to it, it's great
@kevin-meissner There is an end. It is time based, you just have to survive for a certain amount of time. I don't remember how long off the top of my head though.
I really like that when you use up your bullets, there's no reloading, you just have to wait. I wish I had the option to invert the mouse though.
I had the same issue occasionally. It seemed to happen more often when I went into a shipping container. I had it mess up with going forward when I wanted to go backward too.
Thank you everyone for the feedback. The original idea was for the minigames to have an impact, at least a way to beat the minigame and leave it early. If you beat the ducks or invaders, it does kick you back to the main game, but I didn't have any time to implement any kind of visual feedback, so players probably won't realize it.
We were going to have a hunger meter that fills up over time, and you pass out if it fills up completely, it's game over. Losing a minigame was going to add a notch to the hunger too, making it imperative to beat most of the minigames. We were finishing up the 3rd minigame going into the last hour, there would have been no time for testing and adjusting difficulty, and I wanted to make sure I had ample time for building, as Unity always seems to give me a hard time on that part. And it did this time too, I'm glad I took the extra time for building.
@ryusui @jaaskeh Yeah, the instructions were a bit thorough, I wanted to make sure people were able to get through a good portion of the game without feeling like they were lost. I did taper it down once you get to the step where you make toast. I knew where everything was and didn't want to underestimate the difficulty of finding stuff in an unfamiliar kitchen, especially if you're getting distracted every 10 seconds, so I leaned towards making it easier to know what your next step was.
Amazing work on the visuals, and the gameplay is fun and addictive too!
I feel like the gun not shooting right kinda breaks the game
This kind of reminds me of Life and Death on MS Dos, if anyone remembers that. It is too easy to accidentally cut organs under connective tissue.
@bowen We had plans for more enemies and more weapons, but you know how it goes...
@wouter52 * I just converted the MIDI files to MP3 with the lame encoder and VirtualMIDISynth, so it's the same music. Then I got rid of all the MIDI player stuff and converted it to use AudioSource and AudioClip. The issue is that the MIDI player I had needed to have the MIDI files in the StreamingAssets folder, but WebGL doesn't allow you to use StreamingAssets. Of course I didn't know that until I built it and most of the ScriptableObjects failed and music was missing (I was using ScriptableObjects to store playlists, among other things). * They're set to trigger at a predefined distance. We intended to have a variety of enemies with a variety of behaviors, but ran out of time. * Only had time to do a random key spawn, I reused a method I had for the enemy spawn to prevent enemies from spawning too close to the player, but that's the only positioning I did. Ideally, the key would have been a drop, or maybe only sometimes a drop and a pickup in the level other times. * Unity 2022.2.0f1. WebGL builds take forever on that version, I read it's an issue with the version of Emscripten that Unity 2022.1+ uses, but I didn't look any further than that. Edit to add info: We used Aseprite for the textures and sprites. The enemies are billboarded by rotating them, I couldn't get shader billboarding working on them without them appearing through walls. I used shader billboarding on the corn stalks though. It was my first real attempt at using the shader graph, so with more time to learn it I'd probably be able to do more with it.
@quadtree It is set up to attack continuously by holding the button, but sometimes it just goes haywire for absolutely no logical reason. It would sometimes attack nonstop, completely ignoring controls. Sometimes it would do exactly as you describe, one attack per click. It probably has something to do with the way I ensure it plays the full animation, but I went through that code several times and didn't find the error. I gave up and moved on to the next task, it wasn't worth spending too much time on.
This is super addictive. It is frustrating though when the RNG gods won't let you roll a 7 until turn number 41.
Great style, great gameplay. The minigames are fantastic, multiplayer would make this a great party game
I kept clicking things on my other screen. After clicking the play button, you should set Cursor.lockState = CursorLockMode.Locked. Don't forget to set it back to CursorLockMode.None when appropriate.
@thegameoverguy You pretty much hit the nail on the head with what I was going for on controls. I was going for Mario 64 controls, but I think Tiny Tank had basically the same control scheme. I actually forgot Tiny Tank existed until you said old school tank game.
The recording of the voices were good, very clear and high quality
@coda-highland @headzerg The rhythm idea isn't bad, but it probably wouldn't work with some of the other ideas we have for improving the game. We wanted powerups, which might change the fire rate of the turrets, and potentially other turrets that would have different patterns. Locking everything to fit the beat of the music might be too limiting, but it's definitely an idea worth playing around with.
@hyper-ion Adding visuals for regular enemies is something we wanted to explore. The health bars were added so close to the deadline, we only thought to add it to the player and boss.
@ackbad It's a great idea to add a visual indicator to let you know if an enemy can hit you, especially as part of a tutorial. We didn't really want to spend time on a tutorial, we knew we wanted to focus everything we had on the main gameplay. I'm thinking maybe something that does this the first time you encounter that type of enemy, what are your thoughts on that?
@crotonyl-alcohol You were so close to reaching the boss. We only did 4 waves plus the boss. We didn't have much time to playtest and get the pacing dialed in, but we think powerups and more enemy types would help, along with a complete rewrite of the enemy wave spawn system. It's mostly based on time for the waves within each round, and the wave data is currently stored in a manner that's really hard to work with. We also have ideas for more progression for the player to interact with, giving the player more agency, and it might also help with the pacing.
@wander-dev We wanted to have a healing powerup, amongst others. We just didn't have time to implement the powerup system.
The driving feels great! It has a great look too.
no icon.jpg no icon 2.png
The pause, restart, and exit icons aren't showing up for me. I was able to sort of brute force my way until the exit icon section.
I love the concept, I wish I was able to finish the game.
@crotonyl-alcohol I figured it out now, thanks. I didn't realize I had to get the character to touch ***those*** buttons to interact with them in a new way. It's pretty cool, it was just confusing without help.
The fuel mechanic is really holding this game back. There's already a lot happening, but when you factor in the quick fuel burn, the difficulty is just too high to really get into it.
The game is pretty fun, I played it for quite a while. The escape menu doesn't work, it pops up and blurs the background, but you can't interact with it. The loot chests seem to not do anything when you click the collect button. The progression is a little slow, both getting upgrades each game and collecting gold to unlock more ships. Fixing the loot chests might help the upgrade speed a bit though. I'm playing the 0.9 version from itch.io if that helps find the bugs.
This is a solid start to something pretty cool.
(itch.io embedded version) This game has a lot of potential, but has a lot holding it back. When the upgrades come up, other than the extra heart, none of the icons convey what it is that you're upgrading.
Do I get the upgrade that does something with the projectile? Or do I hold on to my money until next round so I can get the other upgrade that does something with the projectile? Is it worth it to get the face upgrade? Is my face really that bad? *(reads a few comments)* There's tooltips?
The enemy speed is too close to the player speed, I have to spend almost all of my time dying from being in the dark too long, at least when I'm not busy getting hit by the enemies or their fiery corpse area. Projectile speed being the same as the character speed makes it hard to create a safe area for the character to go.
If you make the upgrades more obvious and change the balance a little (possibly just adjust the speeds), this would be something solid.
Sidenote: either sound wasn't working, or you should have opted out of Audio. I'm assuming it was broken, so I'm giving a 1 in Audio.
@247gamestudio I had no sound at all. I tried it again, and it is working now, so I revised the rating on Audio. I played the itch.io version both times.
It could have something to do with the asset loading issue every Godot game here seems to have, the first time I do a thing, the engine has a stroke while it loads a texture or sound asset. Maybe it didn't load the sounds the first time because it just couldn't recover from said stroke? I usually don't like to discuss engine choice, everyone should use what they think is the best fit for them and their project. But the multi second stutter while loading a single asset the first time the game needs it thing is why I will not consider trying Godot. I mean, I have a Ryzen 5 2600x, 32 GB ram, RTX 3080, SSD, and that's not enough to give Godot a smooth experience on these little game jam games? Of all the games I've played this jam, with all the different engines they used, only the Godot ones seem to have this issue.
With the tooltips, what @quasilyte describes what I did, I was hovering the buy button. It wasn't immediately obvious what I was supposed to interact with, so when the upgrade window popped up, I tried clicking the icons and nothing happened. So I swept my mouse across different elements of the upgrade window, looking for something to change, and noticed the buttons with the price were what I was supposed to interact with. If there was no tooltip delay, I would have found them immediately, I didn't realize you had to hover on them for so long for anything to happen.
Great visuals and music, the limited number of steps makes it very difficult.
Ambitious for the time limit, a good start though. You missed the opportunity to make it mouse only, it was a little weird to hit the Esc key after every battle.
It is fun, reminiscent of the Extreme G series. It can be a little disorienting though, the ground texture frequently looks like it's moving backwards, especially when you hit the booster.
@manabreak I wish I was that good at music! The music comes from a set of assets I got a while back on Humble Bundle, which is why we opted out of the sound category. Sound effects were from freesound. None of the sound assets we used required attribution, so we didn't take the time to make a credits screen.
@misoukun I got the same thing on the embedded version, but the itch.io link worked for me
A very good experience overall. The game is very straight forward, and it has a straight-shooting narrator that doesn't hold back.
Everything about this is great. You can get really unlucky and get wiped early, but you can also get super lucky and get the Goblin Cage at the beginning.
Really enjoyed the combination of RTS and bullet hell. It is pretty challenging to get started, but once I understood how it worked, it was very enjoyable.
That music was great. I kept expecting a big boss battle behind the closed emergency exit, but the change in pace in the last level sort of made up for it. I noticed the pushback the flamethrower causes, great attention to detail. For what it's worth, I played fullscreen in Firefox and didn't have any performance issues.
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I like customizing the creature once I figured it out, but it is a little difficult to do. Changing the color and attributes is very tedious. Once I selected fins, on one segment, couldn't remove them.
Played for well over an hour. It's addictive.
@broheartttv We also used their music in LD 55, so far they seem to always have something that really fits for the mood we're going for. I think all the source files for sound effects except for the duck quack came from Ovani's Audio Arcade pack they had on Humble Bundle a while back. I mixed a few of the sounds and added effects in fmod to craft the sound I wanted. It was the first time I used fmod, so I didn't use Ovani's Unity plugin, I just manually set the loop region for the music and it came out great.
@wouter52 I did enjoy yours. I realize I forgot to leave a comment, so I went and did that real quick. Yours was the second game I played and I was just elated that I got my web build working after 2 hours of extra work and forgot to comment.
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to mention The Duck Song... I wondered if people even remembered it.
Racing as a swarm is such a great idea, but think some improvements can be made. Being able to see further down the track would help, every turn is a surprise. The zigzaggy corners really mess with the swarm's idea of staying away from the walls automatically. It tends to feel a lot like you're watching the swarm, not controlling it.
I really enjoyed the movement mechanic once I got used to it, overall it was good fun. I don't keep up with pop internet culture at all, but all the creatures from the memes you reference are pervasive enough that even I knew of them.
@wouter52 I also forgot to mention I loved that your character is the finger cursor with the flat bottom, much like the one from windows 95, and not the boring round-bottomed one we have today.
Lots of fun, very polished given the time limit. The name entry screen has a minor bug, if you have an s in your username, the text box loses focus.
I really wish it had sound. The messages showing you the controls are great
Great mysterious music, really sets the mood
Gets pretty hectic (in a good way)
I was really getting into it, wish it was longer. Balancing the different effects your control has on the different creatures is very engaging.
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The single point attack is where it's at, the others aren't as useful until late game. A lot of fun, and great music.
I like the idea, and the style is great. I played on itch.io, performance wasn't the best, and the music stopped.
The sound is great. The concept is interesting, but I find it a bit difficult. I lost track of the goal and wandered around aimlessly for a while, I think I'm just not patient enough.
The swinging mechanic was good. The slower pace made it feel more mysterious.
I was really annoyed when it was over, I just wanted it to keep going. I love physics games like this, and to combine it with a programming game is just over the top.
@milano23 That must be an issue with the web build, it's a slightly different screen ratio than the Windows version. I didn't fully test the web version, that's my bad.
"Jump King-like platforming game" means nothing to me. Some basic instructions or a gif would have gone a long way. Once I figured out jumping was the only way to move, through random chance I had to figure out how to jump higher.
Once I got going, it's brutal. I went in the first portal a few times, missed the second one, went into the third one. Once I went into the third one and was teleported to the beginning again, I decided it was too difficult for me. It would be more fun if it offered more varied difficulties. This type of jumping game is not one that I've practiced before.
@sariiger I played the web version in fullscreen, esc takes it out of fullscreen. I didn't realize if I press it a second time I get a menu. It changes how a feel about it a little bit, but it's still just too difficult for me.
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I played to the point of the camera shake making me a little motion sick. Clearly gnomebody was meant to play this far.
There are people who want to push forward to go up and pull back to go down? I had to change a setting to make it how planes work? That's so weird. Everything used to be "inverted" except we called it normal back then. What everyone calls "normal" now didn't even exist most of the time.
Once the max speed increase happens, it's more fun, but the difficulty ramps way up. I found it impossible to get past level 6 or so, the turns were just too tight to take at the speed necessary to get away. But maybe I was trying too hard to get all the rings even when I knew I didn't need them.
And for anyone interested, if you turn around to look at the evil, it's a red light effect that shines on the walls. You didn't stop me from turning around, so I had to do it.
Those seahorses are quick
The pixelated view and music really make it feel very un-serious, and really sets the mood for a game where you jump down a hole and try to ragdoll to the end. The controls are underpowered, just a hair more influence would have done well
This is a lot of fun. I really like the weapon choices.
The graphics and music are great. It was a little hard to figure out play, but once I got it, it was fun. The minigames were difficult, an easier start would have helped me figure it out sooner..
The auto-restart is the most underrated feature of this game. You don't get kicked back to the main menu and have to navigate again, the action just starts again on its own. The visuals are great while playing, the stills don't do it justice.
That music is top-notch. The idea is great, and the controls are different in a good way. It felt tedious as soon as I figured it out, but the constraints of a game jam are a formidable obstacle to creating deep gameplay
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I managed to go past the bottom. If you do it just right, you can jump over the mountains.
The oxygen doesn't seem to fill on the web version. It has good fast paced action, and I like the ability to choose weapons.
Either I got super lucky, or this game is telling me to follow my dreams...