I played this in the morning and thought about it at all day at work. Some things I thought of... an obvious parallel is the infinite growth model of capitalism, consuming all in its path until the world is ruin. Or that of a doom-scroller late at night, scrolling through content and never satisfied. I also dig the green tint. We're seeing through the eyes of a classic green slime after all. I enjoyed it. Well done!
I definitely went with a more generative ambient musical style as opposed to something with strong harmonic progression. One thing is I didn't totally exploit my custom adaptive system, one of the things I didn't have time to do was create more than one set of pitch and rhythm patterns for each of the musical entities in the scene, so as you observed, the music in each area is pretty static despite the tempo and scale changes.
As for what you missed, it's a little obtuse, but there is an ending sequence if you jump off the edge into the chasm.
The audio is great. Love how it gets layered up by having all the different enemy types. Very cool.
Gameplay is pretty decent, tower defense does seem like a big feature set to try and pull off in only 8 days. Sorry to hear circumstances were not the best.
But it turned out playable in the end and I think your idea for the adaptive music implementation is pretty sound. (get it?)
The music sounds really good when it's playing. Like what was mentioned previously, the sudden starts an stops are jarring. Definitely having a next note preview would help, there's no way my awful reaction time can get this to sound right heh. I hope you continue to improve this and get it to flow nicely, it's definitely a great start.
Oh and that art is just fantastic. Really great job!
I like this type of stealth game. The rules are really clear, and there is enough room for error to learn and get better without a lot of frustrating restarts. Well done!
The adaptive music portion is well implemented too.
I had one issue at the end of level 2, although I had the data and exit the level, the "Next Level" button was not working and a guard eventually pathed over and caught me, restarting the level. admittedly I rage quit here, but might come back and give it another try later.
I enjoyed playing this quite a bit. It's just the kind of comfy mix of grind and leveling that ends up making me forget the time. The one complaint I have is that the rage system seems to be tied to the music loop. Unless I'm missing something it seems that when I trigger rage, the game waits for the music to hit the loop point and then switches on rage mode? Was this to keep the transition between tracks smooth? I had a few sticky situations where I wanted to rage out but sadly the delay between when i hit the button and when rage actually activated was the run killer.
As for the adaptive music part, was it limited to the track switching for rage/not rage?
Anyways really cool work on this, I enjoyed what you made!
I really enjoyed the over look and feel of this word, surreal and different, just how I like it.
The gameplay idea is creative, however I found it more challenging than I like. It felt like the souls were getting eaten almost at random because it was just too hard for me to keep track of all three things. By the time I figured out where one type of cube was, the soul had fluttered off somewhere or the other type of cube had eaten it. Additionally I think I might have been experiencing a bug, all the positional audio seemed only to be coming out of the right side channel, making locating the soul by sound not possible.
The music tracks are interesting by themselves, however I didn't really get the sense that there was an adaptive element to it based on the game state or player action other than the crossfade between each dimensions bgm loop.
Other than that I think this is an interesting game that tries somethings I haven't seen before. nice work!
The gameplay controls are pretty nice, though it felt a little wonky when the character would suddenly switch direction to target an enemy nearby. Adding a dash cancel maybe or a way to deflect projectiles back, that would be cool.
As for adaptive music portion, didn't seem like there was any? The bgm track is definitely nice but didn't seem like it was adapting to the game or player actions.
The world is very pretty and the music is relaxing!
I liked the mix of realistic nature terrain textures with the surreal sky and reflective surfaces.
I didn't find that the music adapted however, other than switching which loop was playing based on the quadrant I was currently in. Maybe I was missing a secret.
Really nice level of polish on the presentation! Gameplay is fun, my only complaint was that I was having some issues with my input not registering sometimes, making it a sort of dicey situation when it came to making tight turns.
Audio is great. the tune is a good 'un. Loved how the lasers and bombs are telegraphed with the music, it works really well!
It took me a fair number of attempts to finally get through and memorize the layout, I'm glad the ship was not much bigger than it was otherwise my pea sized memory would not be able to deal with it.
But wow this had really great pacing in the layering and buildup of the music. The ending was very fantastic and chilling!
The final winning run was like a well scored movie scene, with rising tension right up to the end. The transitions between parts were very smooth! Great work!
I liked the visual style, very pretty. Was cool seeing that whale out there. And the ending scene was very nice.
Other than triggering the different musical cues on the props, I didn't get a sense that the main background music was adapting or changing throughout the playthrough, maybe I missed something.
Oh, and you got me with that screen effect. First thought was "How did my monitors get so dirty already?!"
This is a pretty nice little music generator! I really liked how I could modify one specific digit in the seed using the controls.
I think if you found a way to transition between the variations it could be even more useful for adaptive music. Then you could tie portions of the seed to a value in the game, like the player score or health or whatever and have them smoothly transition. Could be cool!
The sight of all those trucks piling up and just happily trucking into each other made me giggle. Nice memetastic gameover audio too!
As far as the adaptive music part i noticed the layering as the game progressed to higher stages.
One thing that was almost there was the tones being played when I picked up an orb. I could only ever get 5 at a time before the game would do a weird position reset and not let me finish the tune that was beginning.
Really neat take on the adaptive music idea. It's a nice implementation and cleanly presented.
I found myself wanting more time with the patterns though, the objects scrolled off the screen before I could hear them for more than one or two cycles.
Love the liveliness of the music and overall goofy mood. Sorry to hear that your first attempt wasn't working out, but its great to see that you managed to bring something together still! And for a last minute attempt the adaptive music part works pretty well!
I liked how the music changed as I hovered over the choices, and that the changes were carried over into the following sections. It's an interesting implementation!
The intro sequence was well done, though I didn't notice any musical change between the scenes until the sudden change at the keypad entry part.
Shrimp level was probably a bit too brutal, those lasers! I'm not sure what I did to beat it, maybe just lucky in avoiding the lasers. I didn't feel like there was a noticeable use of adaptive music on this stage.
I liked the vertical cloud level and this is where the adaptive music really comes in, with the layering of the parts as I ascended. It was a nice progression. I think fading in the parts would work to smooth it out a bit as I noticed some rough edges but overall very nice!
Also I really dig the hand drawn art style, it lends a lot of great character!
This is a really entertaining short story with a neat perspective. I learned about some foods I didn't know about along the way too. Nice work to all involved!
I love his happy thumbs up portrait! It's neat that the enemies will start to gang up on you. But, I think I need an easy mode or a way to grind levels. Or maybe I should git gud :D. I like the energy the music lends to the game, and the handrawn art is great and nostalgic. Nice work.
This is a very nice game to look at! Wow that seems like a lot of assets to build in a short time, but they all look great. The exploration is very nice, with the rolling world effect being both pleasant to look at but also adding a nice depth by limiting the view distance. One small criticism is that I would have liked the battle animations to be quicker and snappier. Overall very good job!
The combat system is nice, I enjoyed the battle camera movements, the variety of spells and the random AP mechanic. I think the environments are nice, though maybe something is missing in the dungeon crawler aspect when there aren't walls. I think I didn't have a feeling that I could get lost. Maybe that's what you wanted though, and in that case good! Overall the game is very well put together with an impressive level of polish.
I like how simple and effective the graphics are. It was very nice that enemies which were found but that I had escaped were still marked on the map, so I knew I could come back to them when I felt more ready. The card battle was also a nice choice, being more interesting than just a dice roll. I'm curious if there's an internal deck or are the cards chosen purely at random?
i really like that the same resource you have to spend to defend yourself is also the one you need in order to win. it took a couple deaths but i figured it out eventually. nice!
I enjoyed exploring the area that I was able to get to easily. The game has a visual style that evokes N64 with its low rez stretched textures. But running in a modern high rez screen lends a uniquely bizarre quality to it. I really liked it exploring because of this.
Due to my being on a Windows, as mentioned in other comments here the framerate felt sluggish. The platforming itself was too hard for me to do, possibly linked to the performance, but also in part due to the awkward control scheme.
That said I was content to explore the world and soak in its strange ambience for a time.
I'm enjoying the storyline so far. At 46%, will finish over the next couple days.
One very interesting plus is that the game through gameplay actually does explore the idea of what it feels like to have power versus not having any power. This is a concept that I feel is not explored enough in games.
