B-Bump?
I'd love an answer to this as well...
Gunnar Clovis
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A member registered Apr 29, 2017 · View creator page →
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As always, great art style. This kind of gameplay is not so much for me, but the art is just so nice I can't help but like it of course.
The menu is frickin' slick. I love that askew re-ordering stack of menu cards. Really great. You should definitely use UI like that more, where the graphics of the UI itself fits with your creepy, off-beat, bizarro art style.
As for this game itself, it's still nice to see you do 3D games. I like seeing such a different style and how your art style and direction is applied to 3D as it can be. This game does a nice job being what it is with its creepy atmosphere and off-settling nature, but it's not an inherently super compelling. The movement is claustrophobic and serves the mood, but it's also really slow and confining in a not fun way, and if this was expanded upon then my patience for waiting for the movement would wear thin. My favorite part strangely was turning: the slow, incremental turn, getting to see the nice wall textures up close, just this suspense and unease. It similarly would get very tiring if the game was longer and turning was needed, but for some reason I really liked it.
The colored diamond puzzle was too much thinking for me (at least right now at this hour...) so my solution felt more random brute force after like a dozen or two clicks than an intelligent puzzle solution I could feel proud of.
All and all, interesting to see you make different stuff like this. I like the diversity.
Oh! In playing through your games I've yet to remark how awesome it is that all your games are playable in-browser! That's just awesome. I wish all my games could be the same but it doesn't seem to want to end up that way; I'm going to try to focus on HTML-focused builds first. I always build my games for Windows initially when testing, and then when I make the engine port to HTML/JavaScript for in-browser play more often than not it gonks up severely and refuses to work. Your successful, consistent commitment to in-browser itch.io games is an inspiration to us all.
Also, when your browser games started being able to maximize too, that was awesome. I super appreciate that.
Having sound options too is neat, but unfortunately since they're always in a start menu that I can't access mid-game (as far as I'm aware for all the games of yours I've played like that), they can't be too useful. I don't know what the sound mixing will be like or if I'll get annoyed by the music after too many repeats and when I'll want to mute it until I play the game, and I don't want to quit the game just to rebalance the audio in the start menu settings. Maybe there were Escape pause menus with the sound options mid-game that I missed and my point is invalid, but that's been my experience thusfar. Still though, again, having sound options is still way cooler than those that don't do that.
Very bizarre; I love all your games that really steer into this weird off-kilter humor. Very easy and not super rewarding, but the fun is of course just reading the weird dialogue which is good enough on its own. This is not robust enough in its current form to be expanded into a full game, but I think there are definitely some great ideas and of course the art style/humor that could (and should!) be brought to some nice big published projects.
Music also served well with the off-beat mood. Just funny and great.
Very interesting! I love the party popper sound effect of the enemies exploding, and the conflicting art styles with the 1-bit enemies, lofi pixel art player ship, and low-poly 3D space rocks really worked for me. Also very juicy with how the health erupts out and magnetically gets sucked up by the player, I love that.
Very interesting... but sadly too hard for me to finish. I finished every quest except the Giants, Unknown, and the God Berry. I walked around forever looking for a way to climb up the giants, following the directions of the stick to see if it would point me to where I had to climb. I tried brute-forcing it every which way to no avail.
But very odd, creepy, mysterious, and unsettling, as I believe was the intent.
I wish there was a sprint button, because for a game about wandering around a foggy weird place where you can't see ten feet in front of you, retreading the same ground as you explore was super frustrating. But still, I really love the weirdness and personality.
Oof! This one took a really long time to beat... Maybe six or seven tries, I think.
I love the intro and the art style as always. Really funny and charming. The gameplay concept itself is very simple but pretty solid. The controls were really wonky and hard-to-control for me, which I feel is part of its great charm and personality, but after several tries it did become incrementally less fun. I think the mouse controls just aren't the best, but I think this concept has greater potential: as a mobile game. I think changing the control scheme to be pinching and two-finger pinch-zoom (like when you zoom in or out on something on a touchscreen) to control the two environments closing in on each other, and using the accelerometer of a phone to control the world rotation would make the game not only easier to play, more intuitive, but much more fun as well, fitting well with the theme. I genuinely think this could be expanded into a great mobile game, where the game world is always static within the phone relatively as you rotate it, but gravity is always oriented to face downward in the real-world, creating very fun, intuitive, and fittingly silly gameplay.
Nice work!
I like it! I loved the art style as I am always seeming to for your games, though this one was a lot more muted than some of your other games I played. Which isn't a problem, it's just a different style.
There are some issues with the difficulty curve for sure, and I didn't feel like the game really picked up until the real-time projectiles were introduced, which were great, but for a game jam game this is definitely a good game :)
Flying Bird Flyer Lazer Shoot and other stuff The Game comments · Posted in Flying Bird Flyer Lazer Shoot and other stuff The Game comments
This is absolutely fantastic! I love the style, the personality, the music! And it's a very nice, simple, elegant gameplay loop! Nice design, though it's a bit hard to understand initially, and the controls for the different characters feel odd, but I can't help but love this game! Really excellent.
Howdy! My name is Gunnar.
I'm looking for any teams that I can contribute music to! If anyone needs music (or more music) added to their game, please contact me! I'm happy to help!
My main day job is as a game designer/developer, but in this case I just want to help out as a composer! I'll produce music for you, a fair bit of it if you'd like, for FREE! What can beat the price of f~r~e~e amirite?
In terms of music I can provide, a good example is my most recent game jam game, made for the GMTK game jam: https://gunnar-clovis.itch.io/flip-stride
There I made a five-minute long music track, and created four different versions of it using different instrumentation. I swapped between two of those versions as the side-flipping gameplay went on, creating a nice dynamic audio effect with the player's interactions. That music is pretty intense EDM music, as that's an action runner game, but I can make a wide variety of genres, from the soothing to the tense, from chill lofi hip hop to dramatic acoustic. Just let me know what you're looking for!
You can message me here on itch.io, or DM me on Discord at Gunnar Clovis#2913
I hope I can help!
Thank you for your comment, DragonHeart!
Thank you! Yes, an endless mode with procedural generation was always originally intended, but I didn't have a ton of time to work on this (and then failing to get an HTML build to work ate up most of my limited time), so I unfortunately had to settle for a static level design for proof-of-concept. I'll update with an endless mode build in a hopefully a week or so!
That's a really great problem to shoutout, not knowing what's coming next. That's something I naturally would have gotten acclimated to in development, but that's excellent feedback, thank you! That has to do with the speed of the player and the size of the player (relative to the level geometry), which is something I definitely struggled coming to a decision on. I like having the player be quick and the expressiveness you get from this current size, but I'll try some variations, mostly likely shrinking the player down so you can see ahead of you better and have more time to respond. Thank you for the feedback!
In terms of flipping sides while in-air, that's an interesting idea though my gut feeling is that that would clash with a lot of the other inherent game design, and could have problems with the player spamming back and forth across sides while in-air, so I would need to be a timer restriction or something, but then it wouldn't feel as good with arbitrary restrictions. And if you could flip in-air, you lose the slam (fall faster) ability, unless I add more buttons which makes it less intuitive, and I think the current control scheme is fairly intuitive, jumping, slamming, and flipping based on your position and side. I'll take that into consideration and see if I can generate a solution to the problem you're feeling.
And yes, absolutely, this game in its current form is not a great epitome of the jam theme, you're absolutely right. There were earlier versions that were only one button, but I felt like having the two button controls made more sense and accomplished more while being very intuitive, and I wanted to prioritize the game design itself over the adherence to theme.
Thank you so much for taking the time to play and share your thoughts! I appreciate it! ❤️
Damn this game is really good! Color me very impressed!
This is a really simple, elegant, intuitive set of mechanics, and it just works great! Obviously the program itself is rough and unpolished (like all of ours for a game jam), but this is just excellent, really! This is by far my favorite game jam game I've played thus far. Really well done, I mean it.
Thank you, Skache! I appreciate your time.
Yes, this is a very unfinished prototype. I had some design ideas for expanding upon this into a full game, but it wasn't something I was overly passionate about. The core mechanic I wanted to drive home was the key. In this prototype it just kind of follows you around, but I wanted the big physical key to be the driving game mechanic, with the player holding it in their hand, and having all sorts of uses:
- Unlocks Doors
- Unlocks Chests
- Used as Weapon to Stab-a-Stab
- Used on Telephone Wires as an Impromptu-Zipline
- Used as a Counterweight on Buttons and Physics-Puzzles
- Used as a Platform Maybe, IDK, I forget everything I wrote down in that original GDD;
While also having negatives, like:
- Weighing the player down so that they can't double-jump, and
- Taking up their hands so that they can't ledge-grab or hold any other items;
I really wanted to experiment with going as far as I could with one item. Maybe I'l return to it someday!
I also wanted to note about the game's SFX, particularly the gun, being kinda limp and muted, making the whole experience less fun and engaging, but I hesitated to say that as I didn't want to come across as mean, and I didn't want to do a whole write-up explaining game feel in SFX, how it impacts the game, and how to change it, however I do think you'd really benefit from this classic 5 minute video that can explain it for me:
Right now the gunplay sounds and feels like that of Random Heroes, but with just a bit of tuning it could be so much more. This is all meant from a place of positive critical feedback, though I'm mildly autistic and I tend to come off as kind of a jerk over-text. I'm sorry about that if that's the case now.Very nice visuals and music.
The gameplay was kinda frustrating though. The hitboxes on the spikes and enemies feel really unforgiving, and the level design was also very unforgiving. Felt like the game didn't want me to play or explore it. I'd really like to see what comes later, see the map, see if any mechanics change. The planet text with gravity implies to me that there are other planets with different gravities or other different properties, but the gameplay is too frustrating and not super engaging, so I can't really bring myself to progress. Sorry :/
I'm sure with playtesting and tweaking you could make something very special out of this, and again the art + music is really quite excellent, but I can't get through this one. Not my cup of tea unfortunately.