It's a fun game, the graphics are beatifully handdrown and the music is nice, the gameplay is a little bit slow and repetitive. Also a sound effect here and there would've been nice
For some reason it took a really long time to load (I'm not one to talk mine did too, but it seemed disproportionately long for the amount of code that must've been running). Apart from that the game wasn't too bad, it suffered from some slow and repetitive gameplay. The shooting to either side seemed to be slower than shooting up or down for some reason. The music was pretty good, but the looping got pretty tiresome quickly. The art and animations were great though, the spitting animation was really solid.
I think the theme was incorporated pretty minimally, and a small upgrade system or even just some powerups would've helped the gameplay a lot. Obviously the enemies needed to be more eloquently programmed, but that can take a lot of time, especially without any knowledge of AI or more robust movement algorithms.
Overall it was a solid foundation for a game with a better than average art style, that could've benefited from more time or better knowledge of enemy code. Good work.
Simple but fun little game. The graphics are really nicely done! It could use some polish here and there but a solid entry overall. Well done :)
H
hildegain14 Dec 2016, 18:50
Quite surprised by the positive reception to my art work. Was my first time making anything for a game. My first time animating anything too :D
Yeah the horizontal and vertical shot speeds are different because the timing of the animation is off too. So I will be addming more frames and fixing that up later on but it is out of the question for the LD. We're considering making this into an actual game.
As for power ups and the like: Yeah we were super into the idea of making power-ups but had little time to make it into the gamejam. Pretty sad about that but it's okay! Because I also wanna make more hamster variants too. Gonna be sweet.
Nice animations! I included it in my compilation video series of the Ludum Dare 37 games, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/jkCKtsfy-DM
Nice entry! The hamster animation is pretty good, but there is quite an artistic disconnect between the hamster, the enemies, and the room itself. They all seem to be drawn with wildly varying styles.
I'm not a fan of the handwork style art in general. But still, yours is nicely done. The shooting mechanism felt a bit too slow for me, and the level were a bit too repetitive. Some sound effect would help, especially since it's ashooter: makes thing more engaging.
nicely drawn. but starting with the exact ammo, that you need, leaving you with no place for mistakes, is a bad idea. also, it could use some sort of visual indication that you've lost a life. otherwise, nice and fun game
Didn't load for me, and for the windows download I couldn't download the Data folder. Please put everything in a .zip file or something. It would be a real shame if I don't get to play your game.
Unable to download the Windows one as the folder and files are separate. You should zip them all up. I then tried the web version and after installing Firefox and the Unity plugin I got a white screen with no game. You should have used WebGL as that works in Safari and Chrome.
Well done! The only complaint i have is the animation when the mutant hamster is facing right or left, which is slightly slower than when he is facing up or down. But the animation itself is awesome!
Once I realised that those big things are spawners, and that you can shoot vertically much faster, it became much easier. I assume that the quicker vertical shooting speed was unintentional?
The music was a bit off-putting at first, as it didn't seem to match the visuals, but it shortly grew on me.
Awesome animation/drawing.
Above all, it kept me playing until the end, which not many LD games do.
Good job!
P.S. if you want a good game to check out for your vid, check out Managore's Walkie Talkie. Best game I've played yet for this LD!
zipped it all up into one package for those unable to download and added with the rest of the stuff. So if you can't download the folder and exe separately, just download "ALL IN ONE.zip".
The graphics and animations are pretty nice! The animation of the hamster could be just a little bit faster. Something you should have in mind is to give the player the proper feedback when interacting with things, and I say this because sometimes I didn't realize that I was being hit by the enemies. The way you approached the theme was interesting. Overall a fun game!
Nice. Music is a little bit annoying, and the gameplay is pretty repetative, just keep spamming projectiles until something disappears. Flying things were difficult, but their collisions with stuff were saving from them for a long time.
Nice, colorful game. I really like the animations of the hamster, spitting nuts and running looks good. Good thing that the bed can block for a moment the flying enemies, I used it to my advantage.
Nice little game. The concept is really cool and the aesthetics are pretty good and I also liked the music. However you might want a bit quicker gameplay (is a hamster after all), and more variety on enemies or projectiles. Good job!
I'll be honest, I think the best part of the game was the music, which I guess wasn't yours. :/ It is pretty, but it is missing the gameplay. If you were aiming for a twinstick shooter, then these are the issues that come to mind:
- there should be no delay between me pressing the key and the hamster actually shooting
- I'd personally make the shooting + cooldown much faster, make the enemies have a lot more hp, but allow the hamster to move while shooting
- the reloading adds nothing to the gameplay, and the ammo counter is super easy to miss
- shooting up and down is faster than left and right for some reason?
- the monsters should absolutely not spawn on top of the player (or at least let the player know it will happen, so they can move out of the way)
And then of course – more weapons, enemy types, sounds, etc. Still, congratulations on your first LD entry!
-The animation on the hamster, especially when he's firing from the side, is excellent
-Good pacing (it really picks up around level 4) and perfect/smart length of play time for a game jam when many people will be only getting the surface level of your game
-Intuitive easy controls
Cons:
-It could use more of a variety of firing patterns from the robot baddies-- maybe just change the color of the same sprite and make one that also fires at diagonal directions?
-It wasn't obvious until level 5 whether the spawners were actually responsible for the enemies spawning or whether they were simply something I had to destroy to beat the level
Suggestions:
Maybe have an autofire for the player or a mechanic where the longer you hold down the fire button the faster/slower your projectiles get created. The former, in conjunction with maybe adding regenerating health on the spawners could make things a bit more interesting.
Also an animation that cues the player in to which spawner is spawning which enemy type would be helpful.
Thanks for playing mine and it is a joy to play yours as well :)
I tried this three times. The graphics and animations are well-done and I enjoyed the lighthearted/silly mood.
To be honest, I didn't even realize that the game had multiple levels until I looked at the comments after my first two tries. I didn't realize that the machine thingy was responsible for spawning robots, so I kept killing the robots, and they respawned, and this repeated until I ran out of ammo. Some visual feedback on this would have been nice (e.g. a robot popping out of the machine and being thrown to its location in the room). Also, speaking of player feedback, I would have liked more sound effects to indicate when I hit a robot or got hit by the red circle things.
The second level seems really difficult, given that I only have 20 ammo and there are 2 spawners and 5 robots, so I'm not sure how to get past it (is there some way to restore ammo?). Also, moving and shooting in general just feel kind of sluggish; I think I would have found this more exciting if everything was sped up 2x or something like that.
Overall, I like the idea, and with some more mechanics this could be really fun. You said in the comments that you're considering making this into an actual game, and I'd highly encourage that!
Well, I just saw that you can press R to reload. Boy do I feel dumb! (but again, in terms of feedback, it would have been nice if an R key appeared above your head if you ran out of ammo)
I've seen several games with "cute" on their title because of the art style, but not one of them got me to think they were actually cute... until now. Amazing art, and the background music fit perfectly.
I'd suggest adding more sound effects. Also, the fact that your projectiles could collide and be destroyed by yourself was pretty counterintuitive and frankly frustrating. Was confused by this through the entirety of the game.
Loved the hamster! The music was a good fit as well. I think some ammo pick ups would be a nice touch. Also fine tuning the collision / movement / shooting mechanics would be good - they felt a little clunky. Overall nice job!
Cute graphics, I seemed to get stuck on corners of things a bit, so maybe the colliders need some tweaking, took me a while to figure out that those things were spawning the enemies and I needed/could to destroy them, also reloading with 'R' was not that obvious and seemed a bit uneccesary as its instant anyway. More variation in terms of enemy behaviour would also really help the gameplay. I also felt everything was a bit too big, that made avoiding the enemy bullets difficult.
I really liked the main character though. I also made a one room shooter style entry, please feel free to give it a try.
Great "one room" game. I didn't remember the reload button at first so thought it was super hard. I mean, the game gets harder, but you need more than 20 ammo to get by even the 2nd level :)
Cool idea with the spawners and the exploders! Pretty good controls, I found some corners where I could (as I hoped) hide and fire at the incoming enemy hordes :)
Comments39
I think the theme was incorporated pretty minimally, and a small upgrade system or even just some powerups would've helped the gameplay a lot. Obviously the enemies needed to be more eloquently programmed, but that can take a lot of time, especially without any knowledge of AI or more robust movement algorithms.
Overall it was a solid foundation for a game with a better than average art style, that could've benefited from more time or better knowledge of enemy code. Good work.
Yeah the horizontal and vertical shot speeds are different because the timing of the animation is off too. So I will be addming more frames and fixing that up later on but it is out of the question for the LD. We're considering making this into an actual game.
As for power ups and the like: Yeah we were super into the idea of making power-ups but had little time to make it into the gamejam. Pretty sad about that but it's okay! Because I also wanna make more hamster variants too. Gonna be sweet.
Bunch of really good criticisms here :)
The graphics are great and the animations are really smooth. The gameplay is very fun and pretty difficult.
So, sorry I was unable to play your game.
Once I realised that those big things are spawners, and that you can shoot vertically much faster, it became much easier. I assume that the quicker vertical shooting speed was unintentional?
The music was a bit off-putting at first, as it didn't seem to match the visuals, but it shortly grew on me.
Awesome animation/drawing.
Above all, it kept me playing until the end, which not many LD games do.
Good job!
P.S. if you want a good game to check out for your vid, check out Managore's Walkie Talkie. Best game I've played yet for this LD!
As some others said, adding some elements to make diversity in the gameplay experience could have helped a bit :)
Well played anyway!
- there should be no delay between me pressing the key and the hamster actually shooting
- I'd personally make the shooting + cooldown much faster, make the enemies have a lot more hp, but allow the hamster to move while shooting
- the reloading adds nothing to the gameplay, and the ammo counter is super easy to miss
- shooting up and down is faster than left and right for some reason?
- the monsters should absolutely not spawn on top of the player (or at least let the player know it will happen, so they can move out of the way)
And then of course – more weapons, enemy types, sounds, etc. Still, congratulations on your first LD entry!
-The animation on the hamster, especially when he's firing from the side, is excellent
-Good pacing (it really picks up around level 4) and perfect/smart length of play time for a game jam when many people will be only getting the surface level of your game
-Intuitive easy controls
Cons:
-It could use more of a variety of firing patterns from the robot baddies-- maybe just change the color of the same sprite and make one that also fires at diagonal directions?
-It wasn't obvious until level 5 whether the spawners were actually responsible for the enemies spawning or whether they were simply something I had to destroy to beat the level
Suggestions:
Maybe have an autofire for the player or a mechanic where the longer you hold down the fire button the faster/slower your projectiles get created. The former, in conjunction with maybe adding regenerating health on the spawners could make things a bit more interesting.
Also an animation that cues the player in to which spawner is spawning which enemy type would be helpful.
Thanks for playing mine and it is a joy to play yours as well :)
I'll try to download Firefox, but it would be nice if there was a web version that worked on all browsers.
To be honest, I didn't even realize that the game had multiple levels until I looked at the comments after my first two tries. I didn't realize that the machine thingy was responsible for spawning robots, so I kept killing the robots, and they respawned, and this repeated until I ran out of ammo. Some visual feedback on this would have been nice (e.g. a robot popping out of the machine and being thrown to its location in the room). Also, speaking of player feedback, I would have liked more sound effects to indicate when I hit a robot or got hit by the red circle things.
The second level seems really difficult, given that I only have 20 ammo and there are 2 spawners and 5 robots, so I'm not sure how to get past it (is there some way to restore ammo?). Also, moving and shooting in general just feel kind of sluggish; I think I would have found this more exciting if everything was sped up 2x or something like that.
Overall, I like the idea, and with some more mechanics this could be really fun. You said in the comments that you're considering making this into an actual game, and I'd highly encourage that!
I'd suggest adding more sound effects. Also, the fact that your projectiles could collide and be destroyed by yourself was pretty counterintuitive and frankly frustrating. Was confused by this through the entirety of the game.
But yeah... really cute.
Gameplay could be improved to be more snappy. Sound effects and hit feedback would do wonders for the game.
I really liked the main character though. I also made a one room shooter style entry, please feel free to give it a try.
Personally I really liked the music choice also.
Overall good job.
Cool idea with the spawners and the exploders! Pretty good controls, I found some corners where I could (as I hoped) hide and fire at the incoming enemy hordes :)
Good fun!