Nicely done. The background looks beautiful but the foreground is a little too static. The character is cute and well animated (it looks like he's tapping his foot in time with the music on the start screen). Definitely still some bugs to work out but a great effort for the jam!
There was one point where I thought I had to build a bridge of boxes to get a box onto a button. I actually started building a bridge before I noticed it was a one-press button. I think having to build the bridge out of boxes would have made it a little more challenging.
An excellent example of "keeping it simple" and ending up with a great game that's a tad addicting. If this is what you can make in 48 hours, it would be amazing to see what you could have created with the full 240.
Fun/challenging game, cool concept. I like the "two dimensions" aspect to the story, along with the variety of comments made when you lose. Well done with the time allotted!
Thanks for taking the time to play & review! I just went through it and found a few other places Quidl can squeeze through and closed them up! Hopefully that's a bit better now.
Loved the katamari feel to the game. Wish I could have gotten enough points to start collecting lampposts and buildings! The secret passage to the diamond was cool.
Since you're running around collecting gifts you always don't get to see the funny names you provided for them. On the end screen it'd be nice if you could roll over the gifts (or cursor through them with the arrow keys) and see the large version + the name (and maybe their point value).
Loved the katamari feel to the game. Wish I could have gotten enough points to start collecting lampposts and buildings! The secret passage to the diamond was cool.
Since you're running around collecting gifts you always don't get to see the funny names you provided for them. On the end screen it'd be nice if you could roll over the gifts (or cursor through them with the arrow keys) and see the large version + the name (and maybe their point value).
This was a fun game and the low-res graphics were great (reminds me of the graphics back when I learned to program on the Apple II series). Amazing job!
Thank you so much! I wrote a wordy blog about my experiences leading me to write this game here, but here's the short (yet somehow more detailed 🤔) version of the networking methodology:
Doing realtime messaging is quite easy with node.js and socket.io. Since all the game logic is client side there's nothing else for the server to do but exchange messages.
Since it's a two-player game, I opted for a simple "lobby" where the first person who connects gets a random game number from the server and waits until a second person enters the lobby. The second person gets the game number of the first. Instead of setting up a channel (as one normally does in websocket communications), I just assign each to an "opponent" property on their opponent's socket. If a socket has a value for its opponent property, it's in a game.
The game number is used to seed a client-side random number generator so that the asteroid field is created identically on both players' screens regardless of device. Each asteroid is given an incremental id number which ends up being identical on both devices too.
Players report their movements and collisions to the server who simply rely it to the other client who updates the display. When a player hits an asteroid they pass that id number which will tell their opponent which asteroid to remove from their screen.
When the game ends, the server nulls out the opponent property on both sockets so they're no longer considered in a game.
Now this isn't at all how big games do it, and somebody with GreaseMonkey (or a similar plugin) could come up with a script to simply report planet collisions and defeat their opponent immediately. Heck, you could probably do it with the developer tools window now that I think about it. But the point was to have something functional after two days and that lack of security/integrity was the trade-off.
I hope that answered your question. I'd be more than happy to answer any others you may have.
This was such a clever idea and done so well. Please make a full version of this game for me to buy and play (you might need to pay those iStockPhoto licenses first though) ;)
