Just worked out what it was...
Deeperbeige
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A member registered Aug 31, 2018 · View creator page →
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Perform an evacuation drill in the alien nursery. Careful though, aliens clump together.
Puzzle
Attempt to build bridges without stopping traffic. Out of control doesn't begin to capture it!
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Interesting concept, but such twitchy movement makes it hard to play. I got frustrated failing the jump just after you get the gun. Up until that point I found it easiest to just avoid the 'enemies' and play as a pacafist. I would have expected dashing into enemies to kill them or at least dodge through them, rather than taking damage.
Love the presentation, sound and concept, even though I didn't get far enough to see the role reversal. Good job making a finished game, especially one as complete and complicated as this!
Likes:
- Concept
- Art
- Juice
- Sound
Dislikes:
- Controls. Why can't I drive diagonally? Why can't I drive in any direction with a game controller? Why does the cursor get lost in all the visual noise?
- Fire hurts me! But I'm supposed to be setting the fires. It's far to easy to paint yourself into a corner. I didn't even realise that was why I was failing at first. Then I did a specific test and discovered that yes, indeed sitting in a fire hurts. I think it'd be instantly improved with that removed.
- Police occasionally spawn right next to you, and hit you before you've had time to react.
- It's really hard. I tried the tutorial about 10 times, and never passed it! I did pass the first level, but nothing other than that.
Well done still. You've created a working game that looks incredible in just 48 hours. No easy task, I know.
That was really good! I enjoyed my time with that a whole lot. I got to the end too, and felt it had about the right number of levels, and they were about the right difficulty. Even the onboarding puzzles were well paced - very hard to do in a games jam setting where you don't get to see much feedback from playtests etc.
Before it introduced the B key to return to the bot, I struggled to move the box in level 2. I was starting to think it would continue to be a frustrating experience, but on the very next level it showed me that was a deliberate trap, and how to solve it. I'm guessing if I went back to that level B would have still worked, and made it a whole lot less trouble. That was a wonderful lesson!
I think I solved a lot of them in unintended ways, but I liked having the freedom to solve things the way that worked in my head. Stacks of buttons holding each other down were a particular favourite technique for me. Sometimes there were boxes that I never touched at the end of levels, but that's a joy in a world where most puzzle designers would block off unintended solutions.
I thought the music was OK, but a little bit short to loop continuously like it does. Not a lot of variation too, so it kinda grates a little bit. I'd have appreciated an option to turn it off, but I totally understand games jams force you to prioritise things that really matter, and appreciate just how many other features were competing for your limited resources.
The controls weren't exactly to my taste. I found it hard using A/D to move, but not W to jump. Then there's E to swap (that's fine) and B to return? That's a bit of a stretch, and occasionally I found myself automatically pressing R and resetting the level, when I meant to press E or Space or B. I wonder if keeping to one button to swap souls would have helped - you could maybe hold it for a half second or so to return to the robot.
Anyway, great concept, great fit to the theme (I was genuinely surprised when I discovered I could move buttons and lifters), great presentation. Great!
Took me a while to get the main mechanic, and it's a bit frustrating until you do. Even when you 'get' it, you have to look the exact opposite way to where you're aiming. Not sure how to judge my aim when I'm not looking at it. Third person might have worked better for this, perhaps?
I eventually got to the "slide" bit, and fell on my first attempt. I couldn't be bothered to find the ball, make the first tricky jump at the top of the stairs and try again, so my play ended there.
I'd have played for longer if there were an invert-mouse option. I'm really old, and the first FPS games I played had 'inverted' controls and that's just what I'm used to. In games like this, I typically end up looking at the sky/ground, rather than where I'm going. For me, not having the option to change this makes the game practically unplayable.
Still, you've done really well to get a working game concept finished in 48 hours. You should be proud of that, it's not easy!
I enjoyed that quite a lot! At first I was a bit like "isn't this just Commandos but with a monster". Then it dawned on me that while in Commandos getting seen is probably a game over, this game differs in that you're not actively hunting the NPCs, you're hearding them to safety. That's a proper mechanical difference.
I was never quite sure how the lights worked. I think they behave like this: If an NPC steps into the light's illuminated area, it attracts them to huddle by it. Thing is, I'd have expected them to trigger if any illuminated area is within the vision cone of an NPC.
The random motion of the NPC makes it hard to dodge past them in level 5. If they were a little more predictable it might be a little better. The levels are very short though, so failure isn't as painful as it could be. I didn't figure that one out. I think you're meant to scare the two NPCs into the hall and steal the box, but on the occasions I managed to do that and get back to safety with it I ended up getting caught trying to figure out how it was useful. I noticed that it blocks the light, but didn't see how that was helpful.
Beautiful presentation. My only real nit to pick is that the fullscreen button doesn't actually make the game bigger. It sits in the same sized window, just at the top of a black screen. It's more like a "remove distractions" button. On my main 32 inch monitor, it's a bit too small for my old-man eyes to see clearly.
Well done, incredible to get this done in just 48 hours!
Conceptually, I've seen very similar games before. Mechanically, it's a bit unforgiving for me. I stopped playing after level three when it introduced both mechanics at once. I gave it my best, but after failing 4 or 5 times in a row, I lost interest.
I was immediately put off by getting quite a long way into the first level, then failing and it sending me right back to the start. I know none of the levels are especially long, but when you have over 6000 other games competing for your players' attention, you have to be very careful with people's time.
I would have been more encouraged to battle on if I had some kind of indication of how much further I had to survive to finish the level. Level one felt really long. Level 2 seemed about half the size, which was a bit weird. I personally like to leave the early levels until later in the development when I know much more about what the game will actually be. Once I know that, I can carefully tune the onboarding levels more appropriately. I fully acknowledge that's not easy to apply in a games jam's tightly limited resources environment.
Getting the difficulty right is always going to be a knife-edge challenge in games like this. My old-man reflexes can't cope, but other people might find it trivial. There's never going to be a way to keep everyone playing without some new features like (say) dynamically adjusting the difficulty. I'm not really sure how that would work here anyway!
It's beautifully presented, both graphically and the audio. And it fits the theme pretty well too. Congrats on getting a finished game out in 48 hours!
Interesting puzzle game, but it's quite hard to read what things actually do. The good hole and the bad hole look very similar. Sometimes the ball travells over the hole as if it's flying, but there's no indication of it's height. It looks like the game is on a fixed grid, but not much seems to line up.
The presentation is functional, but the stripes hurt to look at after a while!
I didn't like the way it resets everything you've placed each time you reset the level. It even resets the zoom!
Quite a few flaws, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed playing it. Well done!
Interesting puzzle game, but it's quite hard to read what things actually do. The good hole and the bad hole look very similar. Sometimes the ball travells over the hole as if it's flying, but there's no indication of it's height. It looks like the game is on a fixed grid, but not much seems to line up.
The presentation is functional, but the stripes hurt to look at after a while!
I didn't like the way it resets everything you've placed each time you reset the level. It even resets the zoom!
Quite a few flaws, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed playing it. Well done!
It's Asteroids, but you fling the asteroids at the ship jam comments · Posted in It's Asteroids, but you fling the asteroids at the ship jam comments
Interesting idea, but I'm really bad at it! I played about 4-5 times, and the ship is just so good at escaping. I never got close to it at all. So I tried pumping out more asteroids, hoping to make a collision with the ship before another asteroid, but the odds of that are not in the player's favour. I also tried firing them directly at the front of the ship, but it was always able to shoot the asteroids before they got close. I tried firing lots of them in the same direction too, to minimise the chances of them colliding with each other.
I might have missed an essential feature, but I couldn't see any way to make the asteroids faster, and couldn't see what affected their size. If these are related to the length of the line or the amount of time you wind up for, that wasn't communicated to me. Without feeling like I had agency I lost interest pretty quickly.
The presentation is lovely. The sounds are functional. The story is pretty fun too. But for me, the gameplay wasn't quite up to scratch I'm afraid.
Still, great job for 48 hours!
Not sure I fully understand what I'm meant to be doing. I got through the first level fine, but then on the second I seemed to fail for no adequately explained reason. I thought the objective was to avoid the incoming shots with both ships at once? But it failed me several times without my ships taking any hits.
I'm thoroughly confused!
Thanks for the detailed feedback, and I agree with it all! One criticisim I've heard over and again is about the shot timer in the last level. I really should have added a time-speed slider for that. Slo-mo would help in some of the earlier levels too.
Have you played the turn based Peggle yet? That's the most interesting one from my perspective!
The cannons not being synchronised is deliberate in a couple of the levels. But not in others. That's a subtle bug that could take days to track down. It's definitely my fault, but I knew I wouldn't have the chance to chase it down. It behaves differently on different computers, and between the editor and a build.
Don't worry about picking those nits. Even if I'm aware of them, they're really constructive. I welcome feedback!
I like this idea, but can't explore it as I don't have anyone here to play it with.
Would be a great candidate for a random multiplayer matchup game. I know it would be tricky in the strict time limits of a jam, but a single player AI opponent would also work well.
As it is, I can only play it 'against' myself. It feels a little bit like the old game Nim, where you have to try to avoid taking the last sheep (or peg or whatever). But I'm not sure because I haven't really 'played' it.
Minor bug: I clicked very near the edge of one square, and it registered the click in the square below it. Maybe the colliders aren't quite aligned properly?
Looks like an interesting idea, but without a tutorial and controls I didn't really understand how to play. Maybe you ran out of time, but in it's current state I can't say I enjoyed playing.
Still, good effort! You made something that kinda works and released it. Not an easy feat by any stretch of the imagination.
I solved traffic!
It's a little glitchy sometimes, pretty sure some of my solutions were not the intended ones! I got stuck a lot too, and sometimes the other cars in the puzzles would refuse to move, even if I wasn't blocking them with the race car. But niggles aside, it's a very enjoyable twist on a classic puzzle game. I haven't seen anyone attempt to add new mechanics to this sort of sliding-block logic game before.
I found I had to Austin Powers 48 point turn quite a lot. That could possibly have been solved by letting the car continue to turn while blocked by a wall. Similar to the way it can slide along a wall at an angle. I don't know how many puzzles that would break, mind.
I'm also not convinced it fits the theme perfectly. It's not exactly a role reversal - more a role extention and genre mashup. That's not to say I don't like it. I thorougly enjoyed my time solving all 14 of the levels! If the other cars say, moved when they could, rather than it being your choice to drag them around, that might have been more on-theme.
Congratulations on creating a lovely working finished game in 48 hours. No easy feat!
You had the same idea as one of mine at the start of the jam. Although the mecanics you've come up with are very different to what I was planning. I always find it interesting that different people come up with such different interpretations of the same ideas, even when the idea is pretty specific (in this case "Golf, but you play as the hole").
I love the way the game develops over time. You get the idea, then homing balls, then the giant balls... No idea if it goes any farther than that, I only lasted just over a minute on my best attempt.
I also love the humour and personality the voice-over gives the game. Touches like that make such a difference to how a game feels, it can cover up a lot of sins!
How is this any different mechanically to a bullet-hell dodge-em-up? I get that thematically it's a reversal of roles, but when you're playing, what is the unique perspective?
Exploit: Tap space constantly to move faster! Seems the boost isn't limited by a cooldown or anything.
Bug: Restarting doesn't fully reset the state. I still had homing balls and the large ones flying around at the start of a new game.
Graphics seem a bit inconsistent. You have high-res balls and shadows. Mid res hole. And super-low-res golfers as if they're from an Atari 2600 game at the sides!
Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game rather a lot! Well done.
Thanks for you kind words! The fantastic Shapes plugin does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to clean crisp vector graphics. I use it on so many projects these days. You still need to have design skills, but it makes creating graphics in the Unity Editor a bit like it was back in the Flash days - playful and enjoyable.
I'm not generally a fan of games where you have to manage several things at once under extreme pressure, but I found a neat exploit to let me handle this one...
I collected all of my invaders onto the same grid space, near the top of the playspace. I could shuffle them to the side by executing a simple sequence on my Xbox controller three times: Change alien, move alien. That kept them all safe pretty much indefinitely.
Then I realised you were meant to try to collect the small circle, so would leave the two at the top, and chase the circle with the 'spare' alien. Doesn't really matter which, as they're all the same as far as I could see. Once that was collected, retreat to join the others and regain my composure!
This meant rather than having to focus on three things at once, I could decide between just one thing, or if feeling brave two. And because the bullets move pretty slowly I'd have plenty of time to move the two invaders on the top row. The ship seems to move around mostly at random, so the edges are pretty safe.
Interesting amount of strategy for such a tiny game. Props to you sir!
I found it quite difficult that everything moves on the grid, but nothing moves together. All the bullets move out of sync, which makes it almost impossible to cross the stream of shots unless the ship happens to leave a column gap in between two shots. That's pretty rare, and after dying a frustrating number of times trying to cross a steady stream of bullets, I gave up.
Potential improvements? I kinda like it the way it is! But you could experiment with having a less random and more AI-like thing where the ship picks an invader and chases it for a while. You could also experiment by having lots more invaders, and allowing a set number of them to die. Maybe even all of them - like the arcade versions. So it starts out as a slaughter, but ends up as a one-on-one tense battle. You could also have pickups that are meaningful. Maybe the ability to fire back, or bring back the bases at the bottom that can be destroyed by any shots?
In the original arcade game, the invaders movements were linked together, and staggered slightly (I think that was a limitation of the hardware). The player could only shoot one smoothly firing bullet at a time. Maybe you could experiment by following those features more accurately too?
I loved having game controller controls too. I think keys would have just been too confusing for my old-man reactions to handle.
Really thought provoking game! Well done for making it with the tight games jam deadline.
Interesting concept, and one I've been thinking of prototyping for years myself! Glad you've done it so I don't have to...
Well presented, love all the details like the animated menus etc. It's not super clear what's happening and what you can do. Needs a couple of hints to onboard you a little better. I only figured out I could spawn new units by clicking in the edge after I'd already lost twice!
I'd have also appreciated indicators showing what the different units did, how much HP they each had, how upgraded the each were etc. Likewise with the single hero - how much health does he have? How much damage does he do? Explaning these things to the player in a clear and concise way would go a huge way to making your game feel better.
As it was, I played about 5 times, and in the end could hold the hero off indefinitely. I never new if it was possible to defeat him though. I could see my "money" clicking up at a decent rate, and spawned in a few of the red guys. They died quickly just like the cannon fodder yellow guys. I had expected them to behave differently, like maybe have a longer ranged attack or something.
Still, well done for getting a totally working game done in 48 hours. Not an easy feat at all!
Any of the non-trivial puzzles were quite hard for me. Especially as any minor mistakes would usually lead to restarting the level. The puzzles are small enough that I don't mind losing the progress. I think my issue was more about the brain-load I had to carry due to the game not keeping me informed about who I was controlling and what their assigned roles were, while keeping the solution in mind too...
I've built games a bit like this in the past. One you may have heard of is Home Sheep Home, which became super popular. You'd be in control of three of Aardman's famous sheep characters, all with different sizes and characteristics/abilities. They were fixed though, and the puzzles were one screen with no scrolling. They could all do roughly the same things so the controls were common between them all. I set three ways to select which sheep you controlled at any time - you could press 1, 2, 3 to switch directly to individual characteristics, or you could press another key to cycle through them, or you could click on them with the mouse. There was a small arrow over the one that was selected, and they'd make a bhaaa noise and play a little "I'm alert" animation when they became active. All that stuff was aimed at reducing brain load, to free up players' mental resources to solve puzzles. It must have worked, because the stats I saw last said half a billion people had played it!
You make a really good point about knowing your game well because you were the one creating it. This is why playtesting with other people is so important (and really hard to do in a 48 hour jam). Watching other people play your game is a unique and often humbling experience! You find yourself thinking "why can't they see that obvious thing that you put in there to help them pass this specific point in the level?" etc. The answer is that things that are obvious to you the designer, aren't obvious to others who aren't as close to the project as you. When you release a game, you are the best player in the world at that game! You know intimately what everything is for, all the nuances of the levels, all the clever little touches you added etc. New players take time to build up that knowledge, and it's a steep hill to keep people interested in playing long enough to get there.
It took me a few tries, but I beat your kill-screen level! I was wondering if there was any hidden content behind that, but alas no...
You probably already know this, but it's really hard to tell where you are and what you're meant to be avoiding. The camera lags a bit too far behind your movements. It even flips around to face the other way when you reverse gravity.
The graphics and sound are functional, but not exactly pretty. The gameplay concept would be fine if I hadn't played VVVVVVVV before, but I have. So it didn't really seem all that original to me.
But it's not all negative! You managed to get a fully functioning game with several finishable levels submitted within the strict time limits. It fits the theme pretty well too. None of that should be sniffed at.
I made that mistake two years ago, with a game that I could have easily had in a browser. I was determined not to repeat that last year, so I tested a quick build at the start. Then went and used a multiplayer plugin that had no online build compatibility. Didn't find that out until the end! Live and learn...
Interesting concept, although a little confusing at first. I didn't realise the ball ran away from the mouse cursor at first. It's not very consistent, so it's hard to tell what it's doing!
I like the idea of modifying the maze itself, although in practice I just found myself doing a quick visual solve in my head, then walling off the ball so it couldn't move backwards away from the goal. Then you just have to chase it to the exit!
Congrats on submitting a working game! Not an easy task at all.