1. Ensure food will fit in mouth. 1a. Ensure mouth does not obstruct food. 2. In case of bodily expansion, ensure there is sufficient room for expanded body. 3. Prolonged durations without eating may result in death. 4. Food that has been eaten once may not be eaten again.
How to play:
WASD / arrows move. P pauses.
Eat:
Move over green box to eat a bite off them. You can only bite into sides that will fit inside the black box. Eating fills the black box's lower/yellow bar. When that bar is full, the black box will expand.
Death:
If body expands into adjacent green rect, you pop. If top/red bar empties, you starve.
Notes:
Evidently I built before saving a last-minute change I'd made to the "last" level, which fixes the borders to make the level passable. Unsure how this relates to the LD rules, I've left the "fixed" webplayer version at: http://www.selenoscope.com//LudumDare/LD23/oops
Made in Unity in C#, without any Unity extensions or my own previous code. Sound effects made with CFXR. Menu graphics (such as they are) made with Adobe Illustrator. Code written in Unity's included MonoDevelop as well as Sublime Text 2, despite their tendency to stab each other.
It's funny how the zooming somehow 'wowed' me. This game has very interesting mechanics, it took me a while for me to figure them out, but once I got it, it was a big 'aah, tiny world!'-moment for me ;)
A good demonstration of how a few simple rules can come together to make something fun. I like the fact that you only use food when you move, so you can plan your moves a little better. The zooming out is a nice touch too, and having the growth marks stay on the screen gives a good sense of scale. Simple, but fun!
Neat idea, and I liked the puzzle aspect, but I found it difficult to anticipate when I would enlarge except through trial and error. In puzzle games, I usually don't make a move until I've solved the puzzle, but wasn't able to with this one. Of course, since this wasn't entirely a puzzle game, that might not matter.
I really like the concept. The puzzles are a lot more challenging than I expected. I wish when you die you could restart on the current puzzle and not from the beginning. I'll never be able to win cause of the trial and error restart time =).
Very cool game - it was a little frustrating at first, but I couldn't help but try and get past that 2nd stage. Quit after making it to stage 3 and then failing again.
Suggestions: * checkpoints at each stage - why make player go back to the very beginning? * Maybe ditch the time limit - give people time to strategize! * The style of the blocks is kinda cool, but the character is pretty arbitrary. would be cool if he made some kinda sense.
Would love to play this on an iPad and slide the little guy around the screen, perhaps with smooth movement/transitions between the stages.
My son loved playing this! He was really having a tough time trying to figure out what to eat first and not over expand but he started getting the hang of it. Also, great tutorial!!
It's a very cool puzzle idea. As said, Respawning at the very beginning kills it, though, and I'm not convinced the time limit adds anything either. Time limit should be longer or nonexistent and there should be a button to restart if you get stuck - at the current level :).
Also, it needs to be more obvious when the player is going to get bigger and just how much bigger he will get. If the "poop" consistently filled the size you were about to be, one bite before you reached the new size, it would be less frustrating.
The sound gets old in a hurry. Good entry overall.
Loved the zoom out effect as well, the squares seemed to really fit the idea of the game. I'd add the reason of death to the "you died" screen, cause i sometimes didnt understand why i died =S Loved the myopic humor xD
Great concept, this is really quite fun. Nice use of the theme and great to see a new mechanic. Levels were balanced and took a lot of thinking to beat.
I only got to "level 3"; I wish I could start at the last level I finished, since it was tedious to play the first level so many times before getting to try the second. It was lots of fun figuring out how to beat the second level however I didn't want to have to replay everything to get to the third.
Anyways, great game! I'd love to see it made into a full-game.
I love the puzzle mechanic and the idea of the zooming out for the next level. I liked that the first level was real simple and taught the main mechanic, even big game companies don't do this as well as you did. I didn't quite understand what the three bars meant, but I got that one of them was how much til you expand and one was how long time you die.
I love the mechanic! It's what a good mechanic should be: Perfectly clear and self-explanatory when you consider the theme (rules of eating lol); unique compared to other game mechanics, and has lots of level potential. And satisfying. You should really try and make this into a full game!
Suggestions:
>Less quick to starve; many people hate solving puzzles under pressure >Cool graphics >A vengeance back-story for eating all those squares
Interesting concept, but I couldn't get past the second level because I always got smashed upon growing. I'm probably missing something obvious, but reading other people's comments makes me think that a more gradual difficulty curve would get more people to play for longer. The concept is definitely there though, it just needs some tweaking, so great work for 48 hours.
Interesting idea, but like KevinWorkman, I did not manage to get past the 2nd level. It lacks in game explanation, without what is said in this page, you have no idea why the game is behaving like this
I must have played this at least 20 times. The core mechanic is really fun. I made it past the first 2 levels and half way through the third. This game has a lot of potential and I could see it being successful on mobile devices or web portals.
At first it took a bit to figure out how the the mouth worked. I thought the yellow bar indicated how large the mouth was. Since the green squares are on a grid, the corners of the mouth are the same size. Drawing a distinctive mouth on all sides of the cube would make it much easier to understand.
I'm still not clear on how the orange bar works, the semi-transparent rectangles you leave behind, and what direction the cube expands. Although I think the last two are related.
It feels like this is a mechanic that can be explored even further. I hope you expand on it.
Comments36
Great concept, enjoyed this one.
Suggestions:
* checkpoints at each stage - why make player go back to the very beginning?
* Maybe ditch the time limit - give people time to strategize!
* The style of the blocks is kinda cool, but the character is pretty arbitrary. would be cool if he made some kinda sense.
Would love to play this on an iPad and slide the little guy around the screen, perhaps with smooth movement/transitions between the stages.
Simple but fun game mechanics.
Also, it needs to be more obvious when the player is going to get bigger and just how much bigger he will get. If the "poop" consistently filled the size you were about to be, one bite before you reached the new size, it would be less frustrating.
The sound gets old in a hurry. Good entry overall.
I only got to "level 3"; I wish I could start at the last level I finished, since it was tedious to play the first level so many times before getting to try the second. It was lots of fun figuring out how to beat the second level however I didn't want to have to replay everything to get to the third.
Anyways, great game! I'd love to see it made into a full-game.
Suggestions:
>Less quick to starve; many people hate solving puzzles under pressure
>Cool graphics
>A vengeance back-story for eating all those squares
Keep up the good work! :)
Very fun game.
At first it took a bit to figure out how the the mouth worked. I thought the yellow bar indicated how large the mouth was. Since the green squares are on a grid, the corners of the mouth are the same size. Drawing a distinctive mouth on all sides of the cube would make it much easier to understand.
I'm still not clear on how the orange bar works, the semi-transparent rectangles you leave behind, and what direction the cube expands. Although I think the last two are related.
It feels like this is a mechanic that can be explored even further. I hope you expand on it.
http://puu.sh/u3co
In that screenshot the square I'm touching was eaten once on the left.