F-STOP by phantomopenboxing 2018-08-13T17:06:29Z
Didn't really get what I was supposed to do? Also the screen gets almost entirely covered in black, with just a tiny circle of view in the centre? Was that a bug, or intended?
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → wheybags
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 51 | Every 10 seconds | Frantic Belt | jam | 694 | 3.41 | 3.55 | 3.55 | 3.55 | 3.08 | 2.91 | |||
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | Drilbert II Diggeredoo | jam | 276 | 3.88 | 3.92 | 3.73 | 3.48 | 3.61 | 3.08 | 3.34 | ||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | 👥 | Drilbert | jam | 152 | 4.06 | 3.75 | 3.97 | 3.86 | 3.81 | 3.58 | ||
| 2020 | 47 | Stuck in a loop | 👥 | LichLoop | jam | 664 | 3.59 | 3.60 | 3.73 | 3.46 | 3.54 | 2.52 | 3.16 | |
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | A Bzon Warehouse | jam | 453 | 3.83 | 3.76 | 3.86 | 3.20 | 3.97 | 3.37 | |||
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | 👥 | Geary Grinder | jam | 260 | 3.76 | 3.66 | 3.81 | 2.71 | 3.59 | 3.54 | 2.22 | 3.40 |
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | 👥 | Bloodbags | unfinished | |||||||||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | 👥 | Antromeda | unfinished |
Didn't really get what I was supposed to do? Also the screen gets almost entirely covered in black, with just a tiny circle of view in the centre? Was that a bug, or intended?
Same here
I didn't get any audio? Also, you could maybe explain how to play, it took me a while to figure that out.
I'm not sure I get the gameplay? I can't seem to survive past the second slime. Is there a way to use the potions to heal? Because the slime just keeps hitting me and by the time I've thrown enough weapons at it to kill the first slime, I'm almost dead so the second one one shots me.
The idea is a quite nice. It took me quite a while to figure out how the game actually worked though. I was just clicking randomly and dying without understanding for about 5 minutes. :( Maybe some more explanation of how the game works would be good? In particular, the start was confusing because I was just placing red blocks, and then I died. Maybe if the game started at the point where I can already see some symbols on screen, it would be easier to understand. Another possibility would be a tutorial level with no bombs, so you can get used to the flipping mechanic without dying all the time. Minimal aesthetics are quite nice too. Overall, a nice puzzle game!
Nice art, both ingame and the cover image! Pity you didn't have time to get sound in, that would have helped a lot.
For feedback on mechanics: - Once you get the purple speary orb, you probably don't ever want to pick up a rock or jar again. I found that I sometimes misclicked on one, and ended up dropping my orb. - Would be nice to have a display of what wave I'm on. - The enemies stacking was a bit confusing, as it made it difficult to tell if a hit connected until they unstacked.
@aevek > the 4th level felt like a strange place to end
Yup, we wanted to add more levels, but ran out of time :(
> the up/down controls felt pretty clunky
Yes, we wanted to have the camera zoom up when you finished a level, but forcing you to do it makes sure you understand you can move back down again. You could actually move with the arrow keys too. A good addition would have been scroll wheel to move, perhaps
@archimagus The game was definitely not supposed to just close :( From what I can tell, it's an internal engine crash that happens every now and again inside love2d, if it was our code crashing it should show an error.
@joeshanahan >It would also be nice to see how fast gears are spinning maybe when hovering over?
Did you try doing that? Because it already does :p
> Highlighting pieces that prevent the placement of new pieces could make this more clear.
@markus That's a really good idea!
Really nice game! I loved the music and minimal art style. Details like the starting sequence of pressing keys, and the end screen shifting around when you pressed arrows were really nice, makes it feel super slick. I normally don't like platformers, but this was short and sweet enough that I saw it through.
The idea was interesting. Reminds me of daggerfall :D Best part: sprites were good, and the whole 3d world with sprite characters thing has a cool retro feel. Worst part: I spent way too much time glitching around the level geometry.
When I spawn I am immediately killed but an orange blob with the first few seconds. If I keep respawning, his spawn position seems to change, and eventually he will spawn outside the map and I can play for a while.
I've seen games where you build a combat vehicle out of blocks before, but never seen one where you do it while you're actually driving it. Really nice idea!
Game looks interesting, but the movement gave me motion sickness so I couldn't finish it :( An option for windowed with a small window would help a lot for this.
Art is really nice, music is good too, generally the g/sfx are super slick. I like the wiggly mouse mechanic too, in theory. I haven't gotten very far though. I haven't managed to craft the pickaxe. The night comes very quickly, and I gather resources very slowly. I find it hard to get more than one wall block up before night, and the amount of enemies has me dead on the second night. I'm not sure if I'm just doing something wrong, but I feel like I need _a lot_ more day before the first night.
Is the sheep at the start supposed to vibrate like crazy? Also I can't stand beside theshop because my revolving sword pushes me away from it.
Pro strat: battery farming: https://i.imgur.com/9qQ49m5.png :D One annoyance I would note is that clicking the buttons at the top takes "focus" away from the game, so I have to click on the game world again before I can use the arrow keys to move, which is kind of unnecessary and annoying.
Got stuck on the sword, kadric gave me the bellows and I took the kid's money but the blacksmith won't give the sword to me :(
Space does nothing for me, can't jump! Will retry if you upload a fixed build. Art style looks cool
Interesting game. Definitely 5 stars for mood! I had some trouble with teleport mechanic, when I get to the safe "sewer" area I didn't really know what impact the direction I chose had. I wasn't sure if I was teleporting to a new level after that or back to the same one. Also, some of the drugs were unselectable.
Pros: - Progression worked well - UI had some nice animations + polish - Progression worked well - I liked the flavour text :D
Cons: - My villagers kept getting frozen doing nothing. I noticed you mentioned a bug with them getting hungry, so I checked, and it was definitely happening sometimes when they were not hungry at all. They would sometimes just stand in front of a resource patch they were told to collect, and do nothing until I poked them.
- It would be nice if the status bars for each villager were onscreen at all times. Alternatively, if they would consistently sleep when they're tired, and eat when they're hungry, this wouldn't be needed.
For people having trouble with the game running too fast: Switching my desktop resolution from 4k to 1080p seems to make it run properly. I tried this since I wanted to record the game running too fast using OBS, but recording with OBS in 4k slows the game down to a proper level as well :p
As for rating: Fun concept, artwork/visual style looks super polished, and the orbital controls work really well. I know it can be super easy to get bogged down in maths doing that sort of thing, and end up not finishing a gamejam, so good job on that.
Collision on the rocks/trees and enemies would add a lot IMO.
Nice game, one of the few that kept us playing for more than a few minutes, trying to beat each others scores. Pretty hard though, neither of us could win (we got to the second last segment). Spoilers perhaps, but is there an optimal strategy? I tried 5 long lines of trees each with a cactus connected, but it didn't seem to be enough.
I couldn't manage to possess anything? I right clicked and it fired something at them, but the only effect seemed to be that I lost health. I also couldn't find any items so I could fulfill the " certain items before you can possess different entities" requirements
I keep getting stuck to the ceiling and having my eyes bug out like this: https://i.imgur.com/x53vy9Z.png When that happens, it seems I can't detach.
Nice game, the level was good fun to play. Easy way to lengthen it up would be to add an infinite mode. IMO this game would suit some kind of infinite challenge mode perfectly.
I really like the aesthetic. I feel that the block creation could have been better incorporated into the gameplay. In the end, I didn't actually use the block to finish the game at all, I just jumped (mostly because my jump height was absolutely massive, about 3 or 4 times higher than the highest objects in the level).
Very cute game. A nice twist on match-3, and the sfx and graphics are really good. It can be a bit hard to tell what each type of beetle will do. Perhaps some kind of tooltip would help there. Also, I would maybe simplify the mechanics a bit. It's confusing that I gather resources both in battle and match-3 phases, and there are quite a lot of beetle types. Also, the music at the start of battles is really nice! I get that you didn't have time to make different music for different parts, but would have nice to just play that track you did have all the time.
I can't really figure out how to do an attack. I click the enemies and some symbols appear? Then i drag over the symbols and some sounds happen? But nothing that looks like an attack. And then they kill me
Really nice game idea, the art style was great too, reminded me of hidden folks. A couple of comments: - It wasn't obvious to me at the start that I was supposed to leave. I thought I had to infect everyone at the same time, and the exit was for the normal people to escape the infected area. - The music was off by default, was that intentional?
Really slick and polished entry in terms of audio and visuals. The gameplay idea is prettytight too, but like some other commenters mentioned, I felt it suffered when it got to the zigzaggy stages. I found it hard to get past the zigzag stages which were fully lit, and I stopped playing at the second not-fully-lit diagonal stage (with the curves) after about 10 or 15 tries, I just couldn't do it.
I also tried getting out a gamepad, but that led to an odd bug where the player wouldn't stop moving (slightly). Maybe you need a bigger dead zone?
I'm not sure if it was intended to be so hard, but a possible solution that came to mind would be to use a grid system instead of free movement. That way you feel less like you're walking a tightrope made of ice, so you can focus more on following the light. Alternatively, focusing on more of a puzzle aspect could be good too (IE, you need to figure out *how* to get across, but once you do, it's easy to actually do it).
Anyway, despite my criticisms, it was interesting enough for me to want to write that wall of text :D Nice submission overall!
Nice idea, and I really liked the flavour text in the emails. It was a bit hard though, it was pretty difficult to tell what was actually causing things to go wrong. I kept getting to the point where I needed to install apache and qmail, and then I would not have enough space to install all the services I needed. It told me I needed more disk space, but I couldn't afford it. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to make more money before that point?
The animations were really slick all-round. It was a bit unclear to me at first whether there was a link between the shifts, but I did notice the orders getting bigger + faster eventually. Nice game overall :)
Nice and polished little collection of minigames. One thing I would note is that it's a little confusing how some games are played with the mouse, and some with the keyboard. It's not super obvious which is which at first.
So, I'm not normally someone who plays rhythym games, I normally don't really enjoy them. This was really, really good though. The music, graphics and gameplay were all spot on, well done!
What is there is really nice, quite polished visually and the interactions work well. Is there some way to save the trees though? I tried a few times and no matter what I did the bulldozers just came and destroyed them.
Wikipedia page on bsod eh? :p
- Atmosphere 10/10 - I absolutely love the slavic glados :D - Wasn't clear I should use right click to pick up the wheel. I left click-jiggled it around for a while before I got it. - It took me waaaay too long to figure out where to go when I got trapped in the greenhouse. The quick camera pan to it didn't tip me off. - Movement speed is a bit low. I would use the sprint speed as normal, and just not include a sprint mechanic.
Overall, one of the best games I've tied so far. Well done!
@billehbawb Yeah, I tried a lazy version of easing you in where I just made the first request last for a long time, but it probably should have had the whole first day be slower, or something more aggressive. Thanks for the feedback!
Audio was pretty creepy :D Is there an ending? I played a few rounds but never really lasted all that long.
Super stylish, the art style was great. In particular, the enemy meshes were horrendously creepy. It would be nice if there was an easier way to orient their heads so you can see the eyes. Maybe auto-rotate on pickup? Also, am I one of them? :D
Really nice hamster ball model :D
It was a little hard to keep track of which heals were single target, and which were party-wide, which made it a little confusing, especially combined with the harsh difficulty. The chat was spot-on though, reminds me of the goat simulator mmo update :D
Retro feel is good, it has that geocities look down :D It would have been nice to add a few more levels.
Voxel art was really great, so was the sound. Gameplay was a little simplistic, and not well explained at first. Overall a nice little game :)
So, I don't pay much attention to social media (don't have an FB or twitter account), but we have just recently started making sourdough bred at home, so this was an... oddly specific surprise :D Nice little clicker game. I made it to 80s.
You should change the category of your download link, it's set to source code so a lot of people will probably ignore this game because they'll think there's no binary to play. Anyone else reading this: it is a binary!
The intro you added is really nice, actual 3d cutscenes are pretty slick. I like the radio announcer, and I was starting to get into the gameplay, but I think I ran into a bug? My hunger seems to be permanently maxed, but I can just go to bed repeatedly to advance the days. I can't do anything else because my hunger is maxed, and I can't eat because I have no food.
When I did still have some food the problem was that I could harvest a turnip, but that made me hungry. It made me more hungry than eating it refilled me :p
Let me know if I'm justb doing it wrong or if it's a bug. If it's a bug and you post a fixed version I'd try again.
I found that the RNG seemed to have a lot of effect on how far I'd get, as sometimes I'd have a lot of dogs spawn at the start, and sometimes they'd come at me pretty slow. Some specifically chose times + spawn zones could make it more balanced that way. Overall, creepy atmosphere + nice dog models.
Ok, I dunno if I'm just an idiot or if there's a bug, but I cannot play this game. I get to the first actual level, where the knight walks into the lava, and it tells me to press space. So I do, and it make s a purple thing appear, and time slow down. I can move the purple thing to the goblin with arrow keys, but it doesn't seem to actually effect the knight or the goblin at all? he just goes for the goblin and hits the lava every time, regardless of what I do. Is there another control I need to use to affect the creature I'm possessing? I tried mouse and wasd.
Oh man, I was pressing arrow keys only while I had space held down...
derp
Nice game, pity I have no rhythym :p I think I got close to the end, but I'm not sure. The dancing metal guy is a really nice touch.
dat twist tho. nice
@maindric I noticed a problem where my last two aliens got stuck on turrets so they nhever blew up (until i realised and intentionally aggroed them)
I liked the dog model. Such derp :D
Music + sounds were nice, I missed a checkpoint system though. Replaying from level one whenever you die is a bit annoying.
I really liked the visuals, but I found the interaction quite awkward unfortunately. Even the tutorial level took me about 10 runs before I made it though, and the first real level was a no-go. A big annoyance was that I would try to jump up stairs and miss, only to get "stuck" to the side of the stair in front of me.
Looks really nice, I agree with @codeforjoycaro about the "inside" vibes. Not sure if I'm just missing something, but eating berries didn't seem to do anything for me. It should make the attacks stronger? The dogs still seemed to take two hits whether I'd eaten a berry or not. Also I suck so I didn't get very far, even after 6 or 7 runs :v
I felt like keeping the plant a live was a bit too easy, there were a lot of health, water and sun powerups available. Also the random weapon switching was odd, was that intentional. Core gameplay worked well though.
Really nice game! Art and sfx were great. One small issue with DPI scaling, the game started in a really small window, and windows 200% dpi scaling didn't affect it. Normally programs that aren't DPI-aware will be naively scaled by the os, so I guess gamemaker is saying telling the os it's dpi-aware but not actually scaling? Anyway, it's a small issue. Well done!
> see who’s dragons are the most dragon.
Yessss
So, I really like dragons, ever since I was a kid playing spyro, so this one caught my eye. Overall, I wish I could like it more than I do. The core is good, I liked the pokemon battling system, the multitude of dragon sprites, and the goofy plot / dialogue, but I think the core problem with the game was the way information was presented.
For example, each dragon has two attacks, and the attacks have certain attributes, but I can only see this information before the battle. This leaves me effectively random button mashing during the fight since I can't remember the stats from before.
The same goes for catching new dragons, I can't compare the new dragon's stats to my old ones side by side. Also during the battles it is hard to know which when issuing attacks, as there is no highlight or animation to indicate it.
It's a shame because I think these issues kept me from really enjoying the game as fully as I could. If you ever post an updated build please ping me, I'd love to try it :)
I really liked the original gameboy style graphics. As for the gameplay, it was a bit too easy, as you could just grab a guy and move him away from the enemies. Some ways that I can think of that this could be improved: - You can't move the people, only the wood - The enemies could target the healthy people, instead of wandering randomly
Diverging a bit further from the current implementation, maybe some kind of building mechanic instead of moving around the wall while the game is actually live?
Anyway, nice little game :)
From the linked itch.io page:
> Enclosed is the Executable, written in the C programming language, for an interactive novel, written within the last **two weeks** of NaNoRenoMMXX.
> Files uploaded 6 days ago.
I think you made a mistake when you submitted to this jam, it's supposed to be only from games written over the weekend of the 24th-25th April 2020 *only*.
The low-poly models looked really nice! It would be nice if the tutorial screen you posted here was in-game. Also some way to know where the interactable items are would be good. The difficulty is a bit high, I played for about 10 minutes trying repeatedly and I couldn't figure out how to make things last past day 4. I found: stove, ac, computer, tap and sprinkler. Was there some essential item I missed or was I just not using the ones I had correctly?
Nice game, sounds + music were good, gameplay was fun + the graphics were nice too. I love the dither around the the edge :)
Hello, I'm the test line! :D
Nice game. The music and art were pretty good, and worked well together. The repetition was a cool idea, but I didn't manage to fully figure it out in the end. I bought the dress so Hope's dad would fix the thing, but I didn't really know what to do with it, I just went there instead of the park on the final day and made it ping a few times, but in the end she got eaten anyway. :(
The controls could use some tweaking IMO. Holding down a direction to keep moving would help a lot, and also adding key binds for the few things you need your mouse for, so you can just play one handed. Minor issue though.
@aimainiac Yes, I think there's an issue where if one thrall is about to move off a tile, you can't move into that tile on the same turn because it's not empty yet. It should be that the thralls are processed in order, but I'm not sure if that's working right. Visualising each turn for each thrall could make that easier to understand.
At first I didn't get the combat system, but once I realised that the different block colours corresponded to different action points it was really nice. Some explanation of that system would be good (even if it's just in the text on this page). It would be nice to have a heal action as well. Also, the overworld was confusing to me. Sometimes when I move, there is no combat, and sometimes there is? And I can flee? I'm not sure where I'm supposed to go. I expected that there would be a non-skippable combat encounter at each location, and the locations would lead me towards some kind of boss room where I fight a final battle and the game is over. Instead it seemed to be just random nodes with random encounters leading nowhere?
I'm sure I'm just missing something, but regardless, the combat system was awesome. Nice game!
EDIT: Also, there was no audio for me, so presuming that wasn't a bug, you guys should remove the audio category here so you don't get rated on it.
Mouse sensitivity was way too high, I wasn't able to play. The settings menu didn't work to adjust it unfortunately, I was able to change the sensitivity, but the back button doesn't work so I'm just stuck in the menu. Didn't leave a rating since I couldn't play, but if you upload a fixed build I will try again!
Mechanics were really nice, the puzzles were good. Sound and graphics were really nice too. I liked the loop to level 1 :D
I would add an ability to move your placements without starting from scratch (click and drag?). I would also allow the player to "try a simulation" without forming a full loop, so they can test timing, and not clear the solution after a test. That would speed up the iteration process, which can be a little tedious sometimes when you just want to adjust one thing at the end of the cycle, and you have to re-enter the whole thing again.
Interesting idea, reminds me of an idea for a warcraft 3 mod I had years ago: your army autobattles, and you move around non attacking units with different buff effects, and that's your only input.
Sad to hear that you were so rushed, I think this could have been really fun, but it seems a little too buggy for me to play through atm. I tried twice, and both times all my units ended up becoming noncombative, and would just stand there while the enemies shot me :(
Music and SFX are great, of course. I've played a bunch of breakout clones before but I've never seen one where the ball can spin :D
The main problem to me was that sometimes the ball loses its momentum and then it will move very slowly. There's two ways I can see that this could be solved:
1: Don't use a physics engine. Just use collisions, and do your own movement code that just pushes the item in a direction at a constant speed.
2: Keep using physics, but detect when the brain's velocity is under some threshold, and give it a boost.
Download worked fine for me? Game was really nice, concept was somewhat similar to my team's game, but honestly yours was better executed. I'm pretty terrible at platformers so I had a hard time with the last level, but I pushed through in the end. Pixel art was great too :)
The one thing I'd change is to ship a portable build, instead of an installer. Most people just want to run LD games from their downloads folder, not install them forever.
Did one of your team members recently lose a hamster? :(
Really nice little experience. It might be short, but it did the the best thing that a game can do - surprise me!
Really liked the ending. The idea and execution was uniquely weird. My one criticism is that the hit detection is a bit odd, so initially I thought you couldn't attack the sweets. I was running through like an obstacle course :D
Nice short and sweet pixel art experience as usual! :D
There were some small graphical bugs, I think the game is rendering outside the intended frame, at least for me.
Eg: Screenshot (10).png
Nice game! I particularly liked that you guys made all the assets yourselves, including music. Well done!
Wow, not even a small thanks for all the fish. Selfish.
@wiredsound https://youtu.be/N_dUmDBfp6k?t=27 <3
I really like the tube map graphical style. I didn't get the gameplay so much, but I couldn't experiment for very long unfortunately as the rapid zoomed in movement in full screen was starting to give me motion sickness pretty quickly :(
PS: there was no audio for me? Presuming that wasn't a bug, you can remove the audio category in the submission settings, so people won't rate you on that.
Really nice! I agree with @melektaus though, that the reset after failure is very annoying. I got to levcel 10, but I gave up after doing the same thing that almost worked many times. I know I only need to adjust a few pixels to make it work but it's very hard to get right when I can't compare from last time.
I didn't really get this one I'm afraid. The mechanics didn't make any sense to me. I didn't manage to beat the second level :s. The laser was very difficult to control precisely, and the laser resetting every time I touched the path made the results feel pretty random. Didn't understand why the ball's size needs to change either, but maybe that comes in in later levels. Definitely high on innovation though :D I've never seen anything like it before.
Nice idea, and the spoof popups were pretty funny :D Unfortunately, I couldn't finish, as the last two windows didn't respond to clicking?
Screenshot:
Untitled.png
I clicked both their minimise and close buttons, but it doesn't do anything :(
Web version doesn't load for me, downloaded version is fine.
"They are rusted, which makes no sense, because there is not much water and oxygen in space."
Unfortunately, that's as far as I got. The website was very slow to respond to my inputs, and it's now stopped responding altogether, even after I reload :( I won't leave a rating for now, but I figured I should let you know, since maybe you could self host it instead or something.
Also felt it was too hard. The enemies seemed to shoot streams of bullets so dense you literally couldn't pass through them, so you have to defeat every one? I might just be bad at dodging though :p
Art style was nice! I felt a bit confused as to where to go. Also the popups become a bit too much when you're not doing well, every tile you get a fullscreen window telling you someone has a cough or has mutinied :p it's a bit too much when you're just trying to move arounf and explore.
So, I had a number of problems with input, that made it a bit unplayable for me unfortunately :( Mouse look was moving waay too fast, even when I turned down my mouse dpi so it moves stupidly slowly, didn't seem to effect the game. Also, when I had the game in not-fullscreen, it keeps pulling the view down. The super fast movement in fullscreen kinda gave me motion sickness so I couldn't really continue.
It looks really cool though. The PS1 style warpy textures are very nice :D
4k double monitors, yep
EDIT: also, on firefox on windows 10
Nice game, overall pretty well done. I got to the level with the shark, and couldn't get past it. Is there some special strategy? I stuck quite a few bubbles to him at one point, ans he just kept coming.
As promised, here's a video of my playthrough: https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/41b434d83b8345bfb11c/
Also had the problem mentionedby @andrewkennedy of small UI on 4k. Overall, nice game, and I got the mechanics in the end. My main ask would be for more feedback on player action. It sometimes wasn't clear to me why something had happened.
The combination of subject matter and the graphics, I felt genuine dread in my stomach. Very nice. And with my godawful tying skills, wow, the protagonist was right to be worried :D
@akiored love2d is so great for gamejams. It's super fast to get everything going, and lua is great for quick experimental projects like this. IMO the main downside of using a dynamic scripting langauge like Lua is that it gets hairy as the project grows, but in a gamejam it just... doesn't :D Ok I'll stop gushing now :p
Thanks @threeli! When making a puzzle game, it's always hard for me to judge how much players should figure out for themselves. I did a bunch of last minute tweaks to try to get across the oxygen mechanic properly, after a few playtests made it clear I needed to explain it better. Where did you feel the difficulty spiked? In learning the mechanics at the start, or later on? Also *spoilers* but, if you didn't find something that was obviously a secret, there might be a few more levels for you to play :p
@pennycook Thanks for the detailed feedback! Changing the wording is a great point. It would also be nice to have a different sprite for the level exit. I'd like to have just a hole in the ground, but with the dark background I have already I think that might be hard.
@mykola Yeah, undo would definitely have been nice. If I'd had some extra time I would have added it.
@jrevel That's a fair point about the turning around all the time. Could maybe add a macro key for "dig, move, turn, place, turn". Not sure if that would interfere with learning the mechanics though.
@pancelor thanks for playing! Really nice to get a surprise stream video (I've been trying to solicit video playthroughs here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/drilbert/video-rating-games with not much success so far). Agree about the movement, I think in a full version of the game I would introduce some sort of macro key for combined inputs, but only make it available after the player has demonstrated they understand the mechanics. EDIT: just looked at your upcoming game on your profile, it looks really cool! If you need a playtester, let me know (email is wheybags@wheybags.com)
@aditya-dave Thanks :) I actually had a similar thought. If I were to make an extended version I might add in powerup-style air bubbles as an item, that would refill your oxygen when you walk over them, but probably only the first time you do so.
@ty It actually is turn-based! :sweat_smile: Just wasn't explained well enough, but that's what I'm hoping to get out of this jam, learning better how to convey information to the player. Thanks for playing!
Video playthrough, as promised: https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/74ef8f0640b14180aac9/ Nice game overall! I liked the derpy dangly boi mechanic. I definitely expected the sharks and such to hurt me, that confused me at first.
Super punchy, great visuals + music. Not gonna lie, I'm not a rhythym game guy, so it might just be me, but I felt like the shooting in sync with the music was a bit broken. When I tried to click with the beat, it just didn't. I could get off the odd shot by spam-clicking though, but it didn't feel like it was aligned with the beat to me when I did.
Really nice ambience. Art + sound were great. Gameplay was just a little off for me. It would be nice if the harpoons were a bit more "punchy" somehow. They felt a bit underpowered tbh. Reequipping was slow enough that I felt more inclined to just blowtorch everything instead. Played until I got to a seemingly unbreakable lump? Screenshot: Capture.PNG
Nice sprites, and very nice chiptune soundtrack!
Nice game! Got out with 3:05 left too @eric-smith :D
Video playthrough as promised: https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/c5b6d0578ec5491b8d96/
Really liked the art style. Music + art together made a great ambience.
It wasn't super clear to me how far the shoot distance was. It might have been nice to allow me to shoot from anywhere. How far the "tendrils" of my attack extend would then teach me what my range is. It would also be nice if the enemy "totems" would die in one hit. When I first tried attacking, I just pressed X once, and didn't realise it was an attack, as it didn't have much of an effect.
It also took me a long time to figure out that I could jump to any teleporter in the level. I though they were linked in pairs. I think the use of arrow keys primed me for that. If it was 1,2,3,4 keys then I don't think it would have happened.
Overall, very nice entry!
Really nice art, and the mechanics were surprisingly deep. The one-way-only movement is a super nice touch. I played until a bbit after the golden shovel, at which point I got stuck. I think I know where I have to go, but I'm not very good at platformers so I can't make the jump.
Here is where I got stuck: Capture.PNG
Trying to jump to the coins. I couldn't see anywhere else to go.
Hey, finally got around to playing more LD games. Here's a video of my playthrough, since you said you'd like to see one: https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/3652f17b97ca4250ac72/
I really liked the unusual interaction mechanic. Sprites were nice too, and the whole experience was pretty polished for a jam game. My main issue was just figuring out that the matches existed. Their sprite looks a little like a plant to me, so I didn't realise they were a tool. It could have been nice to have some more intermediate goals, like maybe one of the tools is gated (eg: axe is hidden behind water or something) to space things out a bit, as is it felt like a lot of front-loaded learning, followed by a lot of execution. The ocelots were a nice touch also, would have been nice to interact with them a bit more.
The derpy faces are great :D Also liked the ending a lot.
Oh my god, that squid is some of the most beautiful pixel art I've ever seen 1000/10! What did you use to make it?
I got stuck at this section: Capture.PNG
Really realy nice art! Especially liked the parallax background on the second level. I normally wouldn't mention it, but since the pixel art is so nice, I have to say that I think the art did suffer a bit by not being rendered pixel-perfect. I haven't used unity much, but I know it makes that unreasonably difficult. I did get a decent result before using the [unity pixel perfect 2d camera package](https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.2d.pixel-perfect@3.0/manual/index.html). My LD47 entry used it, and it worked quite well (you can find it on my profile, if you want an example)
Video playthrough, as promised: https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/05e24652373f4d8a9714/
Nice art! I gather there is some secret, but only because I saw a little of it on someone's stream and you were implying there was in chat. Unfortunately I didn't manage to find it.
Very nice legit c64 look!
Hey, video playthrough as promised :) https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/a222b8237b8641b186eb/
Short and to the point little game. Music was nice! For your first game well done. I think my first game ever was just snake :D. I tried the downloadable windows version first, it seems you forgot to upload some accompanying files, it didn't launch for me. I also had some small trouble with the hitbox on one of the interactable items, but I got it in the end.
You have some awesome pixel art, you should add some screenshots here and show it off!
Suggestion to make the movement flow a bit better - if I'm moving over a certain speed and I hit some dirt, just turn me into drill mode.
I really liked the super low-res pixel art, looked great IMO. I'm generally not someone who goes in for super hard games, so you may want to take this with a grain of salt, but I felt that the lighting mechanic detracted from the exploration element of the game. For me, the main draw was to explore and see what's out there. You're not going to win on your first run, but that's ok because you gathered information. But if you're on super low light level, you probably won't manage to see much of the current area before you succumb to the cold.
Also, a minor complaint, but it was a little annoying when enemies were right beside a screen edge (like the snakes immediately north of spawn) because you couldn't tell if you were about to step in on top of one.
So, as promised here's my video playthrough: https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/34d35d8c94f04847bb79/
Really nice ambience + visual style. The interactions felt very polished too, lots of attention to detail. Overall really nice entry. After reading through comments here I think I get what you were going with for the puzzles a bit better, but in the moment I was just clicking stuff and it wasn't very clear to me what that represented.
Putting the bear in bed for example, I figured the next thing I should do was go to bed, as that's what the dialogue said, but that didn't work. Then when looking around I accidentally activated the other two items in that room through the mother mesh, so it was a surprise when things moved.
Wow, really original idea. Absolutely loved the monochrome pixel art too!
Capture.PNG
Not sure if bug or mimic chest? :p Poor Josh, he was so young.
Video playthrough as promised: https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/ca52f76bdda947ccad95/
Nicely polished little game! Art + music were quite nice, and the ending was great :D
Very unusual mechanics! Nice sounds + music too. Blending the background blobs into a solid mass was a nice trick.
Nice art! The interactions felt quite polished also. Difficulty was a bit much for me though unfortunately. Also, would appreciate a free-standing exe, instead of having to install.
3650 pounds in one shopping trip, fookin' 'ell that must be some supermarket :D
I also had some trouble with clicks not registering, but I guess less than others (I know I'm not just faster, I'm using a rollerball :p)
Enemies seem to spawn on top of me? Most of the time I was dead before I noticed they spawned. The guns look nice though, the laser effect is cool :D
Polish was amazing! Art and sound were great, and I do love me some block-based puzzles so it was right up my alley :) The game was great, so my criticism will be a little nitpicky: - It would be nice to have some juice at the end of the game, just a "you win" screen would be enough - The controls were pretty good, but they felt (and looked) kind of optimised for mobile. I imagine the arrow keys could be replaced by directional swipes. In particular, having to use my mouse for level switching was a bit weird, would be nice to just press space or something.
Really nice job! Never would have expected a grand strategy jam game, nice work getting it done on time!
I recognise that rocket :D As others mentioned, some smooth lerping of player / camera from one tile to the next would add a lot, but overall was a solid game. I died a couple of times, then eventually made it through. I also loved how you turn into a sailboat when you're on a water tile, nice touch :p
I think the puzzle concept here was quite good, but the complexity ended up getting in the way. IMO, there are too many controls - move, rotate, shoot, push/pull buddy, rotate buddy. That's 5 things, and a lot of buttons, which end up making things a bit difficult. There are also a lot of bars - I would try to bring things down to just one. Like, maybe a single bar which goes up when your buddy is near and down when you move. If it goes over you melt, if it hits zero you can't move (also dead). The discrete bits of the game get in the way of puzzling also, maybe it would work better if the bars where in discrete chunks that only changed when you made a move (so, turn-based, basically). Still though, I really like the idea, and I think if it were boiled down just a bit it could be really great.
Really nice mechanic! Visual style was great also, I loved the penguin :D And so many levels! One technical issue was that the window was quite small, and maximising it broke the rendering: https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/4145b47303564a6db6d7/
Absolutely fantastic game! Art, gameplay, music all excellent! My only small nitpick I could mention was a small bug I ran into where the head of my caravan moved on top of one of the other wagons, and the game crashed shortly after.
Make a full version, I would buy it immediately!
Pixel art is awesome! I really like the one-resource-bar thing too, I've been wanting to make a game based around that for ages. The one thing I think was a bit unclear was the pillars - you have to fill/drain them to two squares, but I forgot what the text said immediately + also didn't really notice the squares fill / empty at first. A big halo around them when balanced, or something like that would help a lot.
Artwork was amazing! Ran into game breaking bugs a few times so I never finished, but really nice all the same!
@codeforjoycaro when you dig under things, they become "unstable" and fall on top of you :p
@bakuchi thanks for playing! 2x is all I'm afraid :D For the undo functionality: the game is written in lua, and the state of the whole map is just one big table of tile ids. Instead of actually modifying that table when you make a move, I just push your move into a list of moves, and then whenever I need the "current" version of the world, I call an "evaluate" function that copies the world table and applies the moves to it, but I never store this evaluated version. Then when I want to undo a move, it's as easy as just removing the last entry from the moves list.
^The above is the basic theory of it, and I have used this implementation straight before, but this time I ran into an extra problem. To make the blocks fall, I had to run an algorithm to segment the map into tile zones, and that needed to run several times each move. As your move list got bigger and bigger, that meant the game got slower and slower because it was doing more segmentations each frame. So in the end, I added a simple hack where I turned the "evaluate" function into a recursive function instead of a normal loop. When I had it set up that way, it was easy to add a cache to memoise the evaluation. Since the state of the world depends only on the move list and level index, I can have a cache keyed by move list. Each time the level changes I just clear the cache completely. It does mean that if you just go back and forth forever your memory usage will grow forever, but in reality the size of a full game state copy is tiny, and also it's a jam game so it's fiiiiine :p
You can see the implementation [here](https://github.com/wheybags/ld49/blob/734833d8e51f64e267b5360361f3ecdef1668e0e/game_state.lua#L130), it's a bit messy because, well, jam game, but maybe it will be helpful anyway :p
@huntthewumpus Thanks for playing! Nope, that's the end, for real :p
@pancelor Thanks for playing! I didn't see it last time, but I will check out keke in the caves of peril, it looks like my kind of jam game :D
Screenshot 2021-10-06 174814.png
Woop!
Nice game :) One thing I will say is you should change your instructions. LPM and PPM mean nothing to most of us, although based on a [search result from reddit](https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3d761m/what_do_ppm_and_lpm_mean/) I guess it's left and right mouse in Polish? :p
Nice game :D It is a bit slow, maybe it would work well as an idle game? So it would "compute" the change over time even when I was offline.
Nice! Good way to make a sound-focused jam entry :D
A valued team member! <3 Nice one. The last few levels had me stumped for a decent while, overall balance was good, and it ended before I got into half-hour-of stumped territory, which is what I like to aim for when making a puzzle game.
Capture4.jpg
I love the planetarium plot explanation :D
FWIW I had no issue with rotating "right" and "left", and find that easier to understand than clockwise/anticlockwise, but I'm probably in the minority there :p
Nice! I was kinda bad, and didn't have great scores, but it seemed to let me move on to the next level anyway? Maybe it should be more punishing :v Also, it seemed I got score when I moved into a stable state, didn't keep getting score when I kept it stable? Or maybe I just didn't manage to keep it stable long enough :sweat_smile:
Amazing! When it switched to cooking papa I literally laughed out loud alone in my apartment, that doesn't happen so often :D
Really nice game! Mood and aesthetic was great. If I had to nitpick I'd say that the camera could be adjusted a bit. Either by reducing the amount it can wander off the player, or just don't reset it when coming to a standstill. At the moment if you stop and start walking, it will wave around a lot.
One bar for attack and defend is a great idea <3
It would be nice to skip the opening cutscene when you die!
I really like the monochrome art. It would be nice to be able to set up before the wave starts spawning also, maybe have a button to click that starts the wave.
So, I am admittedly terrible at 2D platformers, but I couldn't beat the tutorial ;_; Pixel art looked nice though, I liked how you put the control scheme in the world as graffiti.
Hey, as discussed on discord, here's a video playthrough: https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/66eb637d0683445c9d0b/
Really nice game, plenty of juice in it. Music, graphics and the way they worked together was fantastic. The one issue I ran into was sometimes I couldn't get the parts of the beard that ran off the bottom of the screen. Apart from that, I think adding in some small bit of filler tying the scenarios together would go a long way towards making the game feel more "complete". Just some text screens about the activities of the day + a clock showing the time passing, then an end screen at closing time, or something along those lines.
So, I'm conflicted on this one. There were a lot of thing I really liked, but also a lot that frustrated me. It was especially frustrating because I felt like the issues were getting in the way of a fundamentally good experience.
What I liked: - I like block puzzles - The pixel art + music were both great - I liked the linked blocks mechanic - I really liked the "parallell rooms" mechanic
Where I feel the experience suffered is by sticking too, much to the theme, I think this would be a much better game with no time limits. If I could just press space to cycle through the levels I would be able to stop and think, which is the headspace I want to be in when I'm playing a puzzle game. As-is, whenever I got a bit stuck I ended up having to spend half my time replaying the parts I already figured out instead of looking at the screen I was actually stick on, then rushing my experimentation to fit in the 10 second window. The other minor issue I had is that while I really like the pixel art (and so many tilesets!), sometimes it was not easy to tell at first glance what was a "button" and what was a "door". Using a more consistent style for these key pieces across levels would help a lot with that.
Just BTW, the game isn't endless @fax, if you play for 5 minutes it ends and submits your score to a leaderboard.
@digitaldude555 The inputs spawn every 10 seconds :p The antivirus thing is... unfortunate :s I didn't think that could be a problem.
@codeforjoycaro the only answer is to uninstall norton :p
Really nice art!
I really liked this! Especially the "Comfort" sound :p
I think I found an exploit though :D https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/ebadb37858834f10b24a/
Screenshot 2022-10-13 123139.png
Fun game! Took me a while to realise that I needed to avoid "movements" as much as possible.
I didn't really understand the UI at the top of the screen. The battery bar going down makes sense, but there's two battery icons beside it too? And I have no idea what the percentage bar means.
Art + sound were cool though. And I liked zipping about with the dash.
~~It would be nice if there was some indicator that you are running out of air.~~
Just checked the web build, and it seems there is actually an indicator! I played initially with the windows build, and the air indicator does not show for me.
Screenshot 2022-10-04 231812.png