Really like it. I actually played it until no more enemys would spawnXD.
Play Hippo Flight Test
Can Hippos Achieve Outer Space?'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun | #67 | 3.864 | 3.864 |
| Game Design | #81 | 3.827 | 3.827 |
| Overall | #154 | 3.576 | 3.576 |
| Innovation | #193 | 3.531 | 3.531 |
| Audio | #210 | 3.444 | 3.444 |
| Graphics | #426 | 3.519 | 3.519 |
| Theme | #475 | 3.272 | 3.272 |
Ranked from 81 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
In what way does your game fit the theme?
I made up an acronym for CHAOS:
Can Hippos Achieve Outer Space??
Did you write all the code yourself and made all the assets from scratch?
everything on my own except for the music track (credits in page description)
Comments
Looks like I overflowed your coin counter before I was able to beat the game! If that's not proof I had fun while playing, I don't know what is.
I love upgrade-based games like these! At a certain point, being capped to just being able to collect three rain/sparks per run made things a little slow, but still fun to play overall. Also, having the hippo face reacting to stuff was a nice touch, but it seemed to get in the way of my maneuvering sometimes. Lastly, the font made things hard to read. I kept reading "soales" instead of scales, and some of the upgrade descriptions were hard to understand.
Nice entry :)
Thanks for playing!
Yep, I tried to rely too much on the text for explaining the upgrades and pickups system. But the clarity of sleep and relaxation has helped me understand where that system falls a bit short. Thanks for the feedback!
I thought it'd be fun to reuse some of the obstacle art at the start of the level and by making it smaller, hopefully convey it's way in the background. However, that seems to have backfired for too many people, making them misinterpret real obstacles.
More info on the resource pickups - The system was intended to turn enemies and obstacles into collectible objects. However, you have a max carry limit per run shown by the greyed out sprites on the lower right. These pickups neutralize one obstacles in exchange for a resource of that type: dragons give a scale, their fire gives one dragon fire, the brainclouds give a brainjuice, and the brain lightning gives the sparks. It ends up playing as pseudo-health during the run where I want the player to have to decide if they want to collect early to guarantee resource collection or collect later for the extra safety but at the risk of not maximizing a run's economic value. The inspiration for this came from incremental games where upgrades and unlocks frequently make previous content obsolete. But since I only had two enemies, I didn't want to make them completely obsolete, thus the collection limit. I don't expect you to change or update your rating, I just wanted to share my thought process and see if I could squeeze any further feedback from you :P
Oh, and the skip/skid - yes, that's a bug. When you start getting enough speed, my poorly implemented background transition method misfires and shows the wrong scene because it's trying to process it a couple times in the same frame. Thus, the actual final background is impossible to see (but the game is still winnable).
Thanks for playing and the kind words <3
Hippos are actually hyper violent, right? I'm sure these guys would have no problems with lasers if they could get their big ol hooves around the trigger. I, however, have strict moral obligations about creating games that ask the player to solve problems with violence. So I try not to make games where the player achieves their goal by shooting, fighting, or killing other things. That's why the dragon scale catcher says it's humane. Mostly. ;)
2 years ago(+1)
Thanks for playing and for the feedback! Glad you enjoyed the resource mechanic. I was excited to try that out.
Thanks for the kind words! And I appreciate any and all nitpicks. I'd rather you find something minor to suggest improvements than tell me nothing. That way I can work to improve and learn :)
If you've got the time, could you give me some more detail about what you mean in your comment? Are there specific elements on the game whose color felt mismatched to you? And could you give me an example of the visual cues that you missed or would have liked to see to help you understand better?
I've added your game to my play list!
2 years ago(+1)
<3 <3 <3
Those are some incredibly kind words from an internet stranger. Thank you kindly. I hope I can live up to these expectations ;)
2 years ago(+1)
Hey, thanks for checking it out! Glad you had fun :)
I took a lot of inspiration from those old games, for sure. Oh, and my take on the theme was to make CHAOS into the titular acronym: Can Hippos Achieve Outer Space? I like to think of themes as guides or inspirations, but I'm always willing to sacrifice the rating on that metric in favor of doing something more interesting for me and less bound by the theme.
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