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It's Hard To Shipstart!'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Presentation | #623 | 2.810 | 2.810 |
| Creativity | #674 | 2.667 | 2.667 |
| Overall | #703 | 2.540 | 2.540 |
| Fun | #763 | 2.143 | 2.143 |
Ranked from 21 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Preferred Name
Team Wave of Blue
Me:
Lampe2020, nickname "Lampe" (yes, the German word for "lamp")
My teammate:
Maltana_J, nickname "Maltana"
Newbie?
Newbie
Yes - I'm new to game jams!
How does your game fit the theme?
You need to get the motor of your ship started, and you were just getting started with your journey.
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Comments
Pretty neat jumping mechanic - i like how its not super simple to gather all the coins since you can only carry one at a time! XD
They weren’t meant as coins, but I was due to the time constraint forced to simplify a lot and thus couldn’t make them little broken-off pieces of the motor sprite that you then have to place in the actual spot where they are missing from. As you can see, I couldn’t make a good background either.
I spent ~50% of all the jam time on the intro animation XD
Ive read all the previous replies for this game and Im aware that you didnt have enough time to design the level. However, id like to add on additional pointers for this game at least the art side of things. I think adding an background that fits the theme might be cool might be a nice way to make backtracking less dull, in this context, maybe have some pipes going all around the ship (bonus points if you give them parallax effect), also potentially helps with giving land mark and providing the player where theyre at. Doesnt have to be really detailed, your artstyle is nice and charming as it is! That aside, really great that you decide to commit the last few days and being able to submit your game in time. That takes pure dedication! Great job and all the best in your future projects!
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll try to add a background, your suggestion of pipes and parallax sounds nice. Could you please raise an issue on the issue tracker (link on game page) about it, so I don’t forget?
[EDIT]: Also, thanks for reading all the other comments and not making me repeat my answer :)
It seems a lot of my thoughts would mostly be echoed by prior comments. A cute intro and outro cutscene! Though the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. But hey as a first submission it's a pretty good benchmark moment!The intro was cute, but the rest of the visuals left a lot to be desired. The jump was also particularly janky to handle, and having to backtrack for each part in a ship where every section felt relatively the same.
Congrats on completing the jam though! Best of luck with whatever you strive to make next!
After the judging phase ends and I’ll be able to edit the game itself again I’ll check the issue tracker and implement improvements suggested here if possible, because I myself am not really satisfied with the actual gameplay. The platforms are resizable though, I can add some documentation about the edit mode to the repo at some point, so you can try it too. It supports different-sized platforms already (as you can tell from the platform under the motor), but I hadn’t had time to design a level with that so just spammed the standard size randomly around.
I definitely want to fix that though.
Great submission for your first gamejam, congratulations on finishing!
I had no issues playing, so great job having a complete experience.
If i had the chance to tweak a thing, it would be either to have something like a little arrow indicator (like a compass or so) to give you a rough idea of the next direction. It's hard to memorize the locations/orientation since the platforms all have relative similar dimensions, maybe thats another way to improve there to make some smaller and som thicker platforms to recognize patterns as you move along the level.
Adored the little captains move-animation and the fact, that the outer borders of the game is equal to the color of your theme page, sneaky ;).
I had fun - thanks for the submission.
I could in a later version add a little floating glowing dot at the screen edge, at the point where a straight line from the sailor to the nearest motor part crosses the edge. I had that idea myself too, but didn’t add it due to the time constraints. If you want to see me implement that, please open a ticket on the issue tracker of the game (linked in the “Bugs” section of the game’s description) and suggest the feature there; at least during the judging period and maybe a week or so after that I’ll continue supporting the game there because I may otherwise forget it.
The intro sequence is so cool, but the actual gameplay was unfortunately not. I have the same thing to say as others. A little more engaging level would makeup for the backtracking.
Nice attempt nonetheless. Congrats on finishing your first jam!
Yeah, the actual game itself accidentally ended up being more of an after thought, I spent prob half my time just makign the animation XD
Fun: I like the idea of fixing the engine, though the movement was a bit slippery and the camera movement was laggy.
Presentation: I like the art style, especially the ship and water at the start, it seems like 2 songs was playing at the same time, though, it was a bit annoying
Creativity: starting the engine is a good idea and fits the theme well
Were you playing on any Chromium-based browser or inside the Itch desktop app? If so, please try it again in Firefox, as it can handle the way I implemented the camera (which is just the whole world rendered bigger than the screen and scrolled smoothly to center the player 20x per second, which seems to overwhelm Chromium but Firefox can handle it just fine).
sadly I played on a browser, I should try downloading it, I would love for you to try my game and rate it, I'm sure you're gonna like it 😁
Wether you run it from your own server or from Itch’s server isn’t a big difference - what browser you use is what counts. If you’re using Firefox or a Firefox-based browser it should work, if you’re using Chromium, Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc., it brobably doesn’t work.
Simplistic, but well done for a first jam entry. The highlight was the intro scene, I liked how each layer of the theater had a dropshadow, that's a nice detail.
The intro cutscene was what I spent most of my time on, glad it showed XD
All the animation in this game is really good, but the actually game play was a little barebones. Going back and forth to the motor was a little tedious, but I think if you added some kind of obstacles or something it might boost the entertainment value a bit.
If you read my reply to RickZinho you know why the game itself is so barebones while the animations are good XD
Congratulations on finishing your first game jam! Your concept is excellent, and the musics fits a lot with it! But I need to say the gameplay needs some improvements, like camera and player movement, also I don't know why you need to press shift together with jump to make it higher... if you want a tip, try searching up about platformer movement on YouTube, there's a ton of tricks to make it smooth!
Other than that, congrats! You did a nice work :)
Thanks!
Yeah, I spent so much time on finetuning the intro cutscene that I basically realized “Oh frick, I need to make the game part of the game!” two and a half days before the deadline. And then I spent probably around 48h (with only one 3h sleeping break) on programming the game (over ten hours were wasted on banging my fist on my desk and angrily shouting at my monitor because the camera simply refused to move, period) and had no time to fine-tune that or iron out any non-gamebreaking bugs. That’s also why the platforms are all randomly placed and the level isn’t really “designed”, I literally threw together an edit mode in a few minutes, zoomed out, then spammed platforms everywhere and dumped them, then copied the dump into the game’s code XD
cool concept + the music is really cool, though the gameplay is a bit lacking atm. i had a bit of problems with lag and also idk if someone already mentioned it but at times it feels like the game doesnt register input, but im not really sure on why would that be
I don’t know of the game not registering inputs (you can press [F3] to toggle debug info, showing you what keys it thinks you press and what movements are in the queue, plus some positions and distances), but I know it has a bug of sometimes not fully registering that you landed on a platform, making you glide and unable to jump (which can feel like a missed input). To mitigate that, you can zoom in a little or reduce the size of the game window, or try in a different browser and/or on a different screen or device if you have multiple.
I also know about the lag, that’s because I made the decision to render the game in the browser DOM, meaning the browser applies all of its logic to each and every visual element in the game as well.
oooh ok the missing input was exactly that - for the lag i am not smart nor knowledgable enough to know what the things you said mean but if you know the issue you are halfway to fixing it :)
Great intro to the game! It was a annoying to return to the motor everytime I found a piece, but I can understand it being soooo heavy you cannot carry more than one haha. Also like Varii said, player felt a little too floaty so hard to control. Great work!
PS : Lampe is also french for "lamp" ;)
I hope you read my wall-of-text reply to Varii? The second paragraph explains the floatiness.
Opening cutscene is a great hook, but comes out far too slowly. The textbox speed frustrated me and unfortunately you lost al the goodwill an opening like that shouldve built.
Character controller is really floaty, and the level design feels like a set of randomly placed platforms. "go back to the start every 2 pickups" just means a lot of backtracking. Its not great.
sorry but i really didnt enjoy this.
I tried to make the text go faster, but because I chose the DOM to render the game (i.e. every visual element can be inspected in the web console as a separate element) and am playing audio with
<audio>elements (which are a huge mess if you want to play many in quick succession, like for the talking sound effect), I could try to play it faster but it would simply eat more CPU without going faster. I set it to 10 characters per second, but it only goes maybe 6 characters per second. It annoyed me too, but you can skip the text box animation (press space or click the text box) and after the skip get 2s to read it, which is doable if you’re fast.I unfortunately didn’t have much time to make a better character controller, because the version in the submitted game was created only a handful of hours before the jam ended. But I think I know why it feels floaty, because you have momentum even horizontally on the ground, meaning coming to a dead stop in a precise spot is a bit difficult, the terminal velocity vertically is just double that of the running speed, and if I’m not mistaken it has a 1-tick input delay (1/20 of a second).
And yes, the platforms are just me randomly spam-clicking the scene in edit mode, then dumping their positions and inserting them into the code. I didn’t have time to properly design a level, as you see by all platforms except the one under the motor having the same size, even though they all would support different sizes.
Thanks for the feedback though!
Nice! I love the cute art, and the music loops really well and fits perfectly!
Cool!