Cool Hat Mr. Hat by bitslap 2017-12-04T10:32:54Z
I had some very funny moments when my stack of hats got stuck under the coin box; as a payoff for playing, that was pretty cool. Good pixel art, too
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → William Bundy
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 40 | The more you have, the worse it is | Haven | compo | 337 | 3.38 | 3.00 | 3.24 | 3.41 | 2.86 | 2.65 | 2.97 |
I had some very funny moments when my stack of hats got stuck under the coin box; as a payoff for playing, that was pretty cool. Good pixel art, too
Other than dying under suspicious circumstances a few times, it's really fun. Watching the ghouls burn for a moment before they disappear is really satisfying, and mashing fireballs is just fun in general. The game looks and plays very well, great work!
Hey, sorry about it being hard to read, but yes, the overall speed of the events coming in is by design.
As for music, in the end I didn't have time to add audio playing capabilities + compose music by the T-6 hour mark; I didn't feel like sound effects would add too much, either.
As for guidance... I don't know what to say? Make sure you have some people gathering food and try to click on as many events as possible? I don't really know if I should spoil the overarching strategy to the game in the description, but it behaves kinda like a clicker game/dwarf fortress hybrid, I guess?
My gui system is immediate-mode, yes, but I didn't use ocornut's dear imgui (or vurtun's nuklear either). I can't deny some Rimworld inspirations; I've dumped several hundred hours into that game. I had to consciously refrain from calling the people "colonists" in the code :P
I'd like at some point to work on a full spacial town sim kinda thing like Rimworld or DF eventually.
Rather nice little adventure platformer; definitely captures the theme with the diseases, though after a while you end up in a death spiral. Nice pixel graphics, and I appreciate that it has background music and sound effects (though it seemed like key pickup and button presses didn't?). The controls are a little rough, I think they'd feel better with some momentum and slightly lower gravity.
BFXR is your friend if you don't know how to make sound effects; they really help with spacial awareness in 3d. Still, I had fun playing it though. It was kinda difficult to figure out how far your water gun was going, but the effect looked cool. Also, I wish I could jump
Too much like real life! Very well done though, easy to understand but with plenty of depth (I managed to last only 7 days my first time)
My only complaint is the apparent lack of a windowed mode? It decided to fire up at full screen at some non-native resolution, which made the text a little hard to read.
It's definitely difficult to know when your shots will hit a shuttle, but other than that, it's pretty good! Seems like the goal is to shoot the ships as fast as possible to create the fewest trubbles?
Definitely a cool shmup game, but I found it pretty difficult? Maybe a HP bar and some iframes for the casual crowd?
The tongue-hook mechanic is really fun! It's good and kinetic, which makes the "more you have" element stand out, too. It'd be nice if you could drop ladders to some places though; I ended up getting stuck a few times, and it seemed like moving the mouse after throwing your hook kinda broke the game?
Ocean BONUS! Seemed like the only way to win was to drop about half your money immediately? And venting air didn't seem to do much, but seeing that I got 999,701,888 points, I can't really complain.
It's a great compo entry for your first time! The graphics, sound, and design are good, but you don't explain what the point of the game is or how to win. I personally find the font quite hard to read, but I'm just as guilty of inflicting bad bitmap fonts on people.
The classic game design solution for teaching some of this stuff would be to force the player to perform a basic action before introducing it to them fully; maybe the first thing you'd do is place your castle, then create a king with it so the player knows how to do that for the other buildings later.
That looks like a very tasty burger for $5
Definitely a fun mini-platformer, but it seems like the best strategy is to try and keep the board clear rather than go for combos; I can imagine with more time there'd more than just a high score to chase, though. I'd love to play this game (more-or-less as-is) on my phone, too.
I liked it up until
It's good! Shooting the enemies is fun (even if I didn't find the rocket launcher until later) and the "things get worse" effect doesn't disturb the gameplay too much. It seemed like I was running into invisible obstacles sometimes, though, and I couldn't see an ammo count? I wasn't playing at 1920x1080, and it seemed like some text is offscreen
Great job for finishing the compo!
I agree that needing three hands is kinda rough--maybe move shooting to the mouse too (right-click?) to make it more playable. However, the game implements the theme well: as you get more skeletons, it is much harder to click on what you want.
While the music is... hard on the ears, it's good at setting the tone and mood! Maybe the background graphics should have been grey/cryptlike to reinforce the necromancy/undead theme
I had fun; but it seemed like the game ended right after your paycheck? It was still satisfying to complete people's soup, so good job!
I had fun with this one; shooting the bad guys was fun, but I didn't feel particularly attached to my cows. Other than collision detection being a little weird, and towards the end of day 12 my controls stopped working, the game worked perfectly--great job!
Nice job! Apart from a few game feel things, it's pretty good!
I think the green aliens could have done with some kind of secondary motion (like a sine wave?) so that they're more interesting to fight, and I'd really have appreciated if my attack went slightly above and below my character, so that dropping down wasn't a death trap.
Other than those, it looks good and I was a little excited to explore the underground (even if there isn't that much)
It's very pretty, and I especially like how you knock leaves off the trees. Walking back and forth so many times got boring, though; maybe you could warp? Also, the water physics is frustratingly slow. Great work though
It's a lot of fun! The pixel art is really sharp, and I didn't run into any bugs with the gameplay. The music is good too, but there could have been a few more sound effects (and maybe some visual effects for enemies when they take damage).
The mechanic is actually really interesting; the rebounding shots not only make danger for shooting, but also give you a way to damage hard-to-reach enemies. The regenerating health was a little puzzling; it seems like incomplete hearts don't count as hp? I think tying health regen to killing monsters would create more of an incentive to kill them and keep moving, rather than just wait around for regen.
Overall, it's a great entry; good job!
Overall: a great start to a game; I can see how it's trying to be a metroidvania, but those are difficult to build on a time limit. The music is fine, but a lot of the sound effects are grating rather than effective. The menu art is great, and the sprites are good too, but I think a lot of the environment art is a little too noisy and distracting. Too, the viewport is much larger than it needs to be for most places; some more zoom would probably make it easier to play (I played it in the default window it opened up with). Also, the camera hit the edges in a few places, so I'd consider padding those out so the player is always close to the middle of the screen. I'd definitely spend some time with a dynamic camera if I was polishing it up for release. While the font is flavorful, I'd have appreciate something more readable for the smaller and informational text. This is all polish stuff that you'd address if you had more time, I imagine.
I think the biggest problem is that the linear nature of the levels and the progressive accumulation of curses makes the game less interesting over time. "Look at these cool abilities! Look at the cool things you can do! Now they're gone." I think the most interesting way to do this is by having the abilities lost change the way the player looks at existing challenges, which really ties into the metroidvania theme. I think, even in the scope of the jam, you could have probably made a dungeon about the size of two levels that explores backtracking with reduced abilities. Traversal puzzles that get more difficult over time are always really cool (the recent Prey is a good example of a world opening up, yours could be a world that gets smaller), and this is a good setting to do it in. Of course, to really capture all this would take far, far longer than what you have time for in the jam.
Story and theme-wise, you've definitely got some missed opportunities. There could be a little more story than the opening text (my mind immediately jumps to "summoning/freeing some big bad"), and even a few lines of dialogue in-game could set the tone, and you've got the system you used for the tutorial to display it. I mentioned in the discord that hitting the bells should give you the curses, which I think would be a really cool way to tie them into the game.
Anyway, hopefully this rambling mess gives you some ideas. Great job and good luck with the game in the future!
Kinda funny that dropping explosions on people yields a calmer neighborhood.
Ah, the one-coin-at-a-time thing was confusing, but good job for finishing! It's really difficult to make anything for a game jam, especially a short one like LD
I ended up not being able to swipe properly; not sure why, but still a cool concept. Good job!
Is there any way you could package the game without an installer?
Good job getting an entry in! It seems like the game stops paying money after a while, though? Still, it's a good start, but a way to upgrade your clicking ability would have made it go smoother.
Other than the collision detection bugs and difficult controls, it's pretty fun! I appreciated that I could shoot in four directions.
Pretty fun! It's a good galaga-like shooter, but eventually it got to the point where I could sit in the center and hold space.
@scott-r-howell Yeah, it seems like hard problem to solve with the design; I think you have to change the basic format in order to really address it. If you had time I could see some kind of miniboss that can only stand on medals (or something) to force the player to move around a little more
Good job overall. It would have been good to have some way out; rather than just collect forever, you could end the night (and give up your combo or something) and restart with zero weight.
I was going to make a comment about the (P)s being hard to see against the enemies.... then I got a little further. Great job, I laughed out loud when the game started slowing to a crawl.