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Ludum Dare topic for other games
TaoPhoenix:
Interesting. I'm not really a Platformer guy myself, but on my wanderings I did see lots of people doing them. How did this make your list as a 5? What finesses about platformers are super important to you?
And how tight do you like your difficulty levels? In the comments I keep seeing notes between the commenters and devs that the devs misjudge the difficulty quite often, maybe because they intuitively have a feel for how they are involved with the controls and the content, and can make all those tight hops. (But then I never mastered the asdw/arrow controls for games either.)
In my surveys here I tend to enjoy relaxing with a game that others might call too easy, but it means I can at least get solidly into the game before maybe some spot just makes me call it a day and move on.
Corollary, I like watching speedruns! : )
Edit: I just needed a nap!
TaoPhoenix:
For a perfect mix of silliness "Rated PG for ... figure it out." :P
Princess Fart!
LD Page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=20841
The LD main web copy:
http://jacklehamster.itch.io/princess-fart
For completeness and to see some sterner reviews, here is a Newgrounds copy:
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/638437
And because I am cruising and this is a "concept game" I'm glad there's a walkthrough.
https://sites.google.com/site/dobukiwalkthrough/princess-fart
And I'm on the verge of making my own rough difficulty ratings! A key aspect is it's really "tough" to die! (There's a pit though, watch for that!) So because of that you just have to work through the puzzles. It's like the yin vs the yang of a walkthrough. (For ex if a game is super hard the walkthrough is only 20% help because it doesn't matter if you die every thirty seconds! But some folks out there really do like tough games.) So combined I'd officially call this "easy".
To climb the ladders sometimes it helps to wiggle left and right on the controls.
And the voices are hysterical! Dev says he (she?) abused Google Translate (somehow.) (Not sure where the voice side comes from.)
Deozaan:
Interesting. I'm not really a Platformer guy myself, but on my wanderings I did see lots of people doing them. How did this make your list as a 5? What finesses about platformers are super important to you?
And how tight do you like your difficulty levels? In the comments I keep seeing notes between the commenters and devs that the devs misjudge the difficulty quite often, maybe because they intuitively have a feel for how they are involved with the controls and the content, and can make all those tight hops. (But then I never mastered the asdw/arrow controls for games either.)
In my surveys here I tend to enjoy relaxing with a game that others might call too easy, but it means I can at least get solidly into the game before maybe some spot just makes me call it a day and move on.
Corollary, I like watching speedruns! : )
Edit: I just needed a nap!-TaoPhoenix (May 07, 2014, 03:22 PM)
--- End quote ---
It's definitely a hard game. In fact, I didn't beat it.
But I rated it as a 5 in all categories because...
Somebody created it from scratch in 48 hours.
The art was pretty good. It all fit a style/theme and worked well together. It looked good.
The game itself was pretty well developed. Text above the player's head, the police chasing the escapee, the helicoptor, the platformer controls were pretty good (though I feel there was a problem with knowing where the player's feet were, which made it easy to fall off the edge just as you press the jump button.
The sounds and audio were well done.
It made a good use of the theme "Beneath the Surface"
It wasn't a worm game or underwater game (good innovation).
Etc.
I think most people, when reviewing games, give a rating based on how much they enjoy playing the game, or seeing the pretty visuals, or hearing the nice audio. I think the LD ratings are (or should be) different. I think the rating should be based on the understanding that time was limited, and developing all aspects of a game is difficult with such limitations on time. In other words, I'm rating not just how enjoyable I feel the game is, but also based on how well developed it is.
Senilescape might not be that impressive of a game compared to something like Super Meat Boy (which I believe also had its origins in a LD competition), but the difference between Super Meat Boy and Senilescape is that Senilescape was made in 48 hours by one person while Super Meat Boy was made over the course of several months by (mainly) two or three people and (IIRC) with grant money and other support from Microsoft.
Senilescape is one of the few games that both impressed me from a technical/completeness perspective and from a fun/gameplay perspective. Really, the only complaint I have about it is that the jumping was a tiny bit off, resulting in falling onto spikes when I felt the jump button should have worked. My guess for this problem is that the physics engine probably sees the character as a thinner rectangle than the sprite would indicate.
That is, if the physics sees the character as the size outlined in pink then the sprite gives the player the impression he has some extra width (underlined in green) that is still standing on the ledge before he has to jump. This means that if the pink area is no longer on the ground, but the green area still is, the player will be unable to jump and will fall.
TaoPhoenix:
And here we come to another of the "simple" strategy games that are right down my alley!
A few people were well aware that everyone would be making digging/platformers/underground/underwater games, so some of them went for "emotions beneath the surface". A "Sleeper hit" might be "Undermined" where you have to make trapped miners feel better.
The LD page:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=29805
It's a download only - no web version (yet?)
Ludum Dare topic for other games
Some great aspects:
- Really crisp layout where all the info is mostly there at most a click away, vs traveling all over the terrain all the time.
- Exactly 12 rounds so while some of it does depend on "dice rolls" at worst if you totally botch it I think you can hit enter like 30 times (including the confirmation screens) and blow up the game and start over aka you don't lose five hours of work slowly building a bigger sim.
- Really conducive to making a chart of which miner wants which support action, (vs the ultra hard method of doing it all from memory but I tend not to like memory stuff - I prefer notes.)
- Round based, with no timer. So you can just relax and try to work it out (even vs say a bad dice roll), get a snack, a phone call comes, and again you don't lose your game play effort because all your people died while you were doing something.
TaoPhoenix:
Great answer Deozaan, and I sorta agree I really get the time limits, so I am only rating games "vs each other". And of course with 2500 games, everyone has different skills so I've really liked reading the tons of post mortems. Some time later I'll go back (again) and check more on the "Alone" theme from a couple of LD challenges ago just to see what the ratio of "underground/water/dig/platformers" is there. I vaguely recall that theme helped inspire a slight bit more creative designs where this one really led a lot of people to compete with each other on finessing the standards.
So yeah if they almost perfectly nailed the gameplay, to me that's huge vs some of the other teams got a little over ambitious then ran themselves out of time to bugtest.
That's one reason I like some of these "simple" strategy games, because often without complex physics going on, the dev can keep it under wraps and do more raw core polishing.
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