Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → zuf
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Category | Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | Blank Page | compo | Innovation | 4.65 | |
| 🥈 | 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | Blank Page | compo | Theme | 4.56 |
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Keep it alive | compo | 590 | 3.36 | 3.47 | 3.26 | 3.07 | 3.36 | 2.94 | |
| 2019 | 45 | Start with nothing | Blank Page | compo | 15 | 4.09 | 3.90 | 4.65 | 4.56 | 3.20 | 3.22 |
One of my favourite entries in the compo. I spent a long time completing the levels and then more time optimising the solutions.
I got Opus Magnum and Portal vibes (from the leaderboards/optimisation and the layered music).
Also, great work with the [analytics](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/somthinga-from-nothinga/statistics-about-chemistry).
Nice art.
Possible next steps: * Show how many inputs items there are in each producer (e.g. how wheat does the mill contain?) * Fix bug: Can jump repeatedly when carrying something * Fix bug: Can place another building if you jump. (Or is this a feature?) * Possible: Add way to delete buildings. (Only necessary if the game becomes long)
It could be an incremental growth game if the farmer didn't have to micromanage so much. A possible direction could be automation. e.g. hire workers to transport wheat to the mill.
I liked the art and music. And you made the bubbles work with the serious themes. Good job.
That second level was brutal. Couldn't even get close to 12. But the other levels were doable.
Pretty fractals and satisfying level-complete animation. And nice work on designing 20 levels for it.
But it devolved into guess and check for most of the levels. Swapping added more possibilities though.
Reminded me of [Blek](http://blekgame.com/).
I love the music, art and mood in this game. 5/5
Really nice! At first I played randomly and couldn't win, then I read the instructions and figured out a strategy. Great art and animations. The only issue is that the tile highlight covers the number.
I played this on Chrome. Very impressive. It seemed to run quite smoothly compared to the other 3D web games I played. I liked the smooth controls. Building the character randomly on respawn was a nice touch.
There wasn't much to do, but a post-compo version with more content would be great. This is an entry I'd want to tinker with.
Go, and you modularised your code too. Nice.
The manual was helpful.
Great interpretation of the theme and cute art. Nice dialogue. I'll have to try Ink some time.
And it's nice to see another lightweight game using just JavaScript and DOM elements.
Really enjoyed this. Fairly strategic and the randomness (risk and reward) adds replayability.
I agree with the issue others described about not being able to see how many days I took on the end screen. And some audio would be nice, but time is scarce the jam.
Edit: My lucky turn 10 win
turn-10-victory.jpg
The initial state of turn 10 was close enough that I could spend 8 actions to move everything into place.
I agree with the arrow thing. It tripped me up too at first.
The intuitive behaviour of pressing the up arrow would be for the three visible parts of the wheel to move up as well, but they actually move downwards. However, the arrow direction matches the intuitive move direction of the "All Slots" interface. So they're opposites.
A way to reconcile them could be by changing the appearance: instead of clicking an up arrow, you click the top item to reveal it.
Wow, nicely done.
It teaches some valuable life lessons: prioritise your goals, call her back every three months (especially if she's pregnant), and always play rock paper scissors.
Some ways to improve: Add more phone/park scenarios. They repeat a lot. Add more jobs, and I agree that it would be good to see other jobs before quitting yours. (Or maybe there aren't any. What a tough job market.)
I started the second generation: the child had much higher stats and was immediately inundated with job offers. I picked the highest paying one (6.5x the peak salary of his father). Barely one month into adulthood and he had already exceeded the wildest dreams of his predecessor. He even had extra dialog options.
loser-2-gen.jpg
But despite all this, he was not able to sire a child. Let this be a lesson to you all: do not spend your days at the club, for you will acquire a great many numbers. And the woman of your affection will remain out of reach, hidden in the masses that accost you in the park.
Felt pretty strange. The down button didn't work for me, so the trees were a bit annoying. The cats didn't seem very hostile, so I thought they were allies at first. (A possible direction for this game is to collect an army of cats)
It was much more frantic with the cat update, and I was able to jump down from the trees. Well done.
Great work on this. I liked all the custom responses.
I'd really like some keyboard shortcuts though. Being able to type the words would be much less tiring than moving my mouse and clicking so much. An idea: Allow typing the words and backspace to delete. Enter to submit and to advance dialog. Maybe also a shortcut to clear the input (e.g. Space?)
(Played post-compo only)
Great game. Like auto-chess with actual chess pieces. I played many rounds.
I found Human Wave the hardest. It's easy to lose early on if you're not careful, and in the late game it's common to start with a large group of pawns but then they get destroyed by the opposing queen and rooks.
In Double Nothing you can make it easier for yourself by getting into and advantageous position early on and then passing for the rest of the game to avoid placing any more black pieces.
Fun idea and nice sprites.
The bodybuilding mechanic worked strangely though. Some parts never seemed to attach to my torso no matter how many times I tried. And there was another time where I seemed to steal the entire body of an opponent instantly.
Some things could be done graphically to make things clearer. e.g. Body parts not attached to anything could be shaded differently.
Nice concept. The hints are helpful.
But for some reason the text is really small on my device. It's a tiny thing in the corner.
console-text.jpg
I was playing on a laptop (Chrome on Mac). Notably, if I zoom the page in or out the text stays the same size but everything else gets bigger/smaller as expected.
I liked the sprites, boss battle, ending and background music. The other levels had too much walking back to get upgrades though. They could be designed more compactly. Performing those 4-button combos was also a bit tricky.
Nice interpretation of the theme, and the coding aspect lets players explore different movement schemes (but the strategies are limited). I like how the incentive to press less buttons forces the user to optimise.
The line numbers need fixing. They shouldn't be part of the same text field as the code. Put them in another not-editable text field on the side and make sure they line up correctly (with appropriate line wrap). Maybe jumping to line numbers could be removed entirely because it's not done much in practice.
And the rotations seem flipped.
The script I ended up with: ``` #A# // Slide up. turnRight step turnLeft #B# // Slide down. turnLeft step turnRight // Step forward 1, 2, 3, 4. #C# step #B# step step #D# step step step #F# step step step step ```
Possible extensions: * _Must_ fix the line numbers * Highlight parsing errors (better UX) * Allow scrolling the editor * Consider removing the warped graphics around the editor for visibility * Add functions (better than goto line) * Add API with functions for detecting obstacles -- allows users to implement more advanced tactics * Consider more traditional coding syntax and keywords. (e.g. skipping letters in symbols like `st` and `jmp` doesn't help much with developer experience)
A power-user strategy would be to implement a script with pathfinding that plays everything for them, but we don't have the API for that.
@mosaic Not sure of the exact score, but it was over 300. The important things are to have an easy way to get out of the way to avoid obstacles (like the sliding) and to able to step forward multiple times (so your net score breaks even).
Would be nice to have signs showing that the area ahead was off limits. I had to do trial and error. I also didn't find a use for F.
Great work. I found it very challenging but managed to finish all 20 (or 21?) eventually. I think I got stuck on 15 for the longest.
Extremely well done. You implemented an impressive amount of content in such a short time. The great visuals, music and world design make it an immersive experience. A lot of spelling mistakes though.
Good interpretation of the theme, but needs polish.
The physics definitely needs to be improved. There's noticeable clipping when the minions are near walls and sometimes creatures can go through them. It might help to disable collisions between minions and other minions and the player. I even had a minion push me into the enemy it was targeting.
It's also strange how minions often seem to appear out of nowhere. Maybe they're overlapping, so you don't know if you're going to collect one minion or more.
Clicking on the enemies was a bit annoying. The brown one had a smaller hitbox, so it was harder to click. Maybe change it so that clicking somewhere orders one minion to walk towards that spot (for a duration long enough to get there) and then walk back. And each click iterates to the next minion in your ring. Any contact with an enemy makes them fight. (This would also prevent the brown ones from walking through)
Sometimes enemies spawn too close to the player.
Great work on 3D models, and I liked the exploration.
Nice game. I played it to the end.
The UI could be improved in some ways: * Need indicator of what resources you pick up. * Show the player's current stats (e.g. attack power) somewhere
I agree with the need for balancing. Need more wood and less string. Some items (bow, gun) don't seem to be worth crafting.
Also, once you get enough health it becomes viable to run into all the enemies.
A possible extension is to add more enemy variants. e.g. some with ranged attacks and some with different movement AI.
Nice hand-drawn aesthetic and choice of music. And I liked how you designed so many levels. Very fun.
Things to improve: * player sticking on sides of objects. Either get rid of it or make it into another game mechanic. (Maybe wall sliding?) * In level 16 you can even abuse it to push the moving platform in the opposite direction. * Consider adding overlays to the dragged items. e.g. sometimes I want to place something as close as possible to the bottom without it going back into the drawer. And sometimes I misclick because I'm not sure which part of the object is draggable.
I'd appreciate any feedback on the experience. Did you manage to win? Where did you get stuck? etc.
@xart2012 Yeah, I took a risk with the start of the game. I hope people at least try to click or mash the keyboard before giving up.
@alex-lutay Thanks for the kind words! Getting past 4 is a good effort.
I tried playing it on my iPhone, but the text was messed up. That's the danger of doing all the development and testing on one browser. Maybe I'll fix it in a post-compo version. Saving progress between sessions is another possibility.
@appoxgames try clicking on the blank page
It does get pretty hard. I had to draw a map for myself while designing levels 5 and 6, and I spent hours refining it. To pass those later levels you need to simulate the effects of sequences of actions in your mind, and you need to backtrack to figure out how to get the slider to each destination.
@congusbongus A shallower difficulty curve could help. I got stuck coming up with ideas for more powers and I wanted to continue my pattern of `x` beacons for each level `x` (apart from 0), so the jump from 4 to 5 is a bit big. I actually reduced the difficulty of my initial version of 5 after realising it was so tough -- I moved some of them to 6 and added easier 5s.
@jk5000 If you click on everything that's clickable, that should be enough to pass level 2. All the things you can interact with should be highlighted slightly blue.
@jakiteli Starting with no knowledge of the end goal or the rules of the game is part of its relation to the theme. You have to explore and discover what the end goal is. (I did implement a win condition.)
I designed it so that there should be no way of getting stuck and having to restart, but if anyone finds a way to get trapped, feel free to post a screenshot.
A challenge with building this sort of game is that I, as the designer and developer, know exactly what the rules are constraints are. But other people playing the game won't be able to form those same mental models with certainty. e.g. one of my rules is there must be no way to get trapped. But other players won't know for sure because there could be a counter-example down the road.
@jakiteli Thanks for the feedback.
I watched someone else play and they got the stuck dots issue. Then I tried just now and found the issue:
```if (gameMap[r][c - 1].char !== '.' || c - 1 < 0) {```
^ The conditions here appear in the incorrect order, so breaks if `c` is 0. 😞(This happens if you extend the dots all the way to the left side of the screen. So in this version of the game you lose if that happens.)
That's definitely a game-breaker. Are we allowed to make bug-fix changes now or is it too late? If it's too late I'll fix it in a post-compo version.
I've also heard others express annoyance with having to look carefully to line up the paths of the slider. One solution would be to add a faint grid. My editor has visible whitespace, which helps a bit. But it still requires close observation. Another idea is to show faint preview lines extending out from the slider so you know where it'll end up. The limitation of that is you can't see more than one move ahead, and for this game you (ideally) should be thinking multiple moves ahead. And a alternate grid strategy is to only show the a + grid when you click on a square. It removes the noise of a complete grid and also lets you preview the possible moves of the slider from anywhere on the map. This could work quite well, but users may find it confusing.
I looked at the [rules](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/rules):
> Certain Bug Fixes are allowed. You can’t add new features, but if something broke or didn’t work correctly as you were finishing up, you can fix this after the deadline. You are asked to highlight the changes you make in your submission (a short change log).
Here's my change: https://github.com/ZufengW/blank-page/commit/39af97322f28937c1b03538e1238a0c3b2c7cd6f
It only fixes the bug. And then I redeployed the app.
So it's entirely reasonable that the people who said they got stuck earlier really did get into an unwinnable state due to the bug.
@lex Thanks!
You're the first person so far who said they completed the game.
(You did everything and got the `100% Completion!` message, right?)
Approximately how long did it take?
Thank you all for the feedback. I really appreciate it. Seems like all those hours I put into designing the level were worth it.
@aurel Keyboard shortcuts are a possibility. I could add those to a post-compo version. Maybe number keys 2 and 3 for the abilities and WASD or arrow keys for power 4. Mouse click will still be the primary way to control things though.
In an early iteration of the game, dots could only be expanded by clicking the leftmost symbol, but that was really tedious so I changed it to allow clicking anywhere in the line.
A few people have suggested grid now, so I'll try that to see how it looks. I want to keep the completely blank look of the start of the game, but it could be a thing added in Power 1. A full grid would give away the size of the map, but another possibility is to show it only for the explored areas.
@erilhir See @pandan's screenshot for a hint for how to do 4.
@suchista I could make the grey question marks fainter.
(**Spoiler**) Here's the map I used to help with designing the levels:
map.png
(The meaning of the map is left as an exercise for the reader.)
This is a screenshot of the file open in my text editor. I have invisible characters set to visible, so here they act like a grid. It still requires counting to line things up though. I could try a similar appearance in the game. What do you think? Does it help?
@rezerd this compo game has no keyboard controls, so mashing it doesn't help.
How far did you get? Did you at least see the first sentence after that clicking? (If not, what device and browser did you use?)
And it might not be clear enough, but everything that can be clicked to trigger an action is shaded slightly blue. Clicking all the blue things is enough to pass the first level.
If you're still stuck, post a screenshot.
@rezerd
I'll give away the start of the game: You click anywhere on the page and it makes some text increase in opacity. The text should be visible unless you're using a really small window.
So you probably have an issue with getting the game to run.
The most questionable part about the screenshot you attached is the URI in the address bar. Yours shows the path to a [local file](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_URI_scheme) on your computer. The intended way to play the game is on this website: https://zufengw.github.io/blank-page/ or at least with a [web server](https://phaser.io/tutorials/getting-started-phaser3). (However, I just tried running it without a web server and it still seemed to work.)
I think you should start by trying the [intended website](https://zufengw.github.io/blank-page). (You also need JavaScript enabled and, preferably, a recent version of your web browser)
If you can, [open your browser console](https://support.monday.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002197259-How-to-Open-the-Developer-Console-in-your-Browser) and see what error messages appeared. When the compo game is running as intended there is this error message: `GET https://zufengw.github.io/blank-page/vendors.app.bundle.js net::ERR_ABORTED 404` and possibly another 404 error about `favicon.ico`.
If it still doesn't work, post the full URI (contents of address bar) and the contents of the [console](https://support.monday.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002197259-How-to-Open-the-Developer-Console-in-your-Browser).
Nice mechanic of possessing opponents to get to the top. I look forward to playing a more polished post-compo version.
Getting insta-killed was annoying. There were two main ways it happened that could be fixed: * When you finish possessing an enemy they can kill you immediately. I ended up dealing with this by always finishing above a hatch and going into the hatch immediately. A way to mitigate this issue could to be add a post-possess cooldown/sickness that briefly prevents the victim from doing anything. * When you jump up to a hatch from underneath you also pop up to the next floor. Maybe add something (debounce?) that prevents the player from going up again immediately.
The physics were a bit glitchy. It can do things like make the player pop through the floor when walking quickly over a hatch, or make your possessed character get stuck half way through a floor and never be able to get out again.
Could also add more telegraphing for enemy attacks. e.g. a brief ! reaction before they start chasing and attacking.
Make it clearer what each scientist is carrying.
Also, the "possess" text is flipped when the target is flipped.
I ended up winning by abusing the mercenary's ability to kill things at range and through floors.
Nice concept. The platforming physics could be improved though. It's possible to jump up walls and sometimes jump in the air if you spam jump.
Just completed the game. It took patience.
The command line part was pretty clunky. Having a few shortcuts (e.g. command autocomplete, up/down for history, etc.) might help streamline things, but would still be hard to pick up for players not used to command lines. At the very least, being able to scroll up to see more of the history would be nice. It's slightly annoying how the `help` command clears the console by taking up all the space. Also, you should reduce the space between lines so more lines can be seen.
The GUI upgrade was weird because I had to figure out the controls again. (Left click to toggle select. Right click to toggle target) After some time, I realised that the GUI strategy boils down to selecting all your orbs and targeting a non-owned orb. Repeat until done. The visuals here could be improved for clarity. The selecting/targeting highlights are not great because they obscure the ownership of the orb. It would also be clearer if each orb had its own population number instead of only having one number in the corner.
On the whole, a solid attempt at a game. Polish is needed.
Nice sand shader/texture, and I liked this interpretation of the theme.
The UI could be improved a bit though. The icons at the bottom could be made into more obviously-clickable buttons, and a placement preview along with an indicator of whether the spot is valid or not would help.
I like how you pushed the theme a bit more by also making the protagonist start without life. The combat was mostly just walking into the opponent and spamming attack. I found a way to defeat the final boss that seemed exploitative: using a sword, run into it and attack once, then immediately back off and wait until it stops flashing. Repeat.
I finished the game. After getting enough upgrades (move speed, attack speed, spray, T-shirt, backpack, even the 1-range downgrade) my strategy devolved into rushing against the enemies and spamming attack until they died. No more dodging or timing needed. Knockback is a good mechanic but it made this strategy overly effective.
Thanks for the comments!
@moomka @jeremyfa I agree that the controls make it tricky to fit in some gaps and avoid things. When I play it I often end up hugging to wall on one side to navigate around corners. The level design allows this most of the time, but it's not an obvious trick to pick up and I shouldn't rely on players doing this. I ran out of time when building this, but improving the controls is something I'd definitely do if I extended the game.
Regarding improving the controls, there are multiple directions this could be taken.
One idea is to make everything move strictly within the grid and in four directions only. This would prevent brushing the sides of arrows.
Or if I want to keep the fluid movement, I could add some assistance that makes the sprites align to the grid in certain situations. E.g. When you're moving left/up/right/down, your character automatically stays close the the middle of tiles.
@k4v0x I haven't played baba is you, but I've seen screenshots. The art style is inspired by that game.
Thanks for the feedback!
@teo-miklethun @kjscott
I realised afterwards that some levels had unintended shortcuts. As you noticed, level 6 lets you skip the second part of the level. And in level 3 you can walk under the third moving spike. I didn't have enough time left for level design so it was rushed.
Level 8 is an important one because it's a nice twist on the theme. Most interpretations of "keep it alive" are about keeping some allied creature/object alive, but in level 8 you keep the opposing creature alive.
This game can definitely be improved if I spend more time on the controls, level design and general polish. I plan to make a post-compo version that fixes all this.
I really like this interpretation of the theme. And I agree that getting to draw your own poster is great.
Nice puzzle mechanic
I suggest adding an alternative to the mouse wheel. Not everyone has one.