KeyPuppers

Interesting idea! Though Idon't see the point of the shift key, since there's no reason why you should not have it pressed all the time you might as well not have it there (unless it's to limit you to only having one hand avaliable).

The sounds are music are really cute, they fit the puppies well!

Music and sound were great. Wish you could have been able to hold more than one key though (maybe two)?

i like how the game takes place on a keyboard and that your keyboard irl controls the game. i can see the potential in that. the pups and the music were cool too. would like to see some more mechanics, but trust me i totally understand its ludum dare, you dont have timeeeeee.

@venny Thanks for the comment! That's a good point, I wanted the player to repair the keys actively which is why that mechanic exists, and the potential is there for other abilities to be used on the selected keys, but in this version I guess the shift thing is kind of redundant :)

@jejoll Thank you! Originally I had planned to have a function where you could hold two keys and build a bridge between them by pressing another function key, but had to simplify the idea :)

@xxdoombox yeah I really wanted to put more mechanics in but just ran out of time lol, glad you liked it though, thanks for playing!

I like the game but it is harder with an AZERTY keyboard :sweat_smile:

@fouralex OMG I didn't even consider different keyboard layouts...if you managed to play it I congratulate you haha!

This gave me a hard time, but it was fun

As has been mentioned, holding down the shift key doesn't add much to the game, and in my case it made the experience just that bit more frustrating, since hitting the right side of my keyboard was made more difficult.

The main thing I'd have liked is to be able to repair 2 or more keys at once. I do like the time management aspect of not being able to fully repair a key instantaneously (though I've seen effective uses of that mechanic, too, in other games). But because of the health bars being very obvious, and the repairs taking as long as they did, I felt like a lot of my time was spent watching progress bars fill up, which is never a fun experience. Granted, this is highly subjective and a massive nitpick, but it's a gripe that stood out in my playthrough. In the spirit of constructive criticism, here's an alternative I might consider to avoid that problem: press the key once to start repairing, a second time to stop. make fewer keys be damaged at any one point, but make repairs take longer. allow 2 or 3 keys to be repaired at once, so the player's always hunting for new targets even while keys are repairing.

Still, besides the nitpick I can't fault the game on any front. The sound effects are fine, the graphics are nice and polished, the design's very nice for a LD game. Very nice work.

@king-kujito Thanks for playing, I'm glad you enjoyed it despite the difficulty :)

@amras0000 Thanks very much for your critique. You're not alone in wanting to repair multiple keys at once it seems. I will try it out and see how it plays :)

As for the shift key, it was kinda obsolete in this version but I'm planning to add more abilities triggered by other keys, so it will make more sense in future versions (hopefully).

Thanks for playing, and for your suggestions, I'm glad you liked the game overall! :)

I FREAKING LOVED THIS GAME. The game is super cute and promotes learning your keyboard better! I would love to see an alternate version where the keyboard damage is not predictable (like if the puppers jumped to random keys and such and also included more keys besides letter keys) A game like this would make a fantastic game to learn your keyboard better especially if the pattern wasn't them walking from one side to the other at an even pace.

Only bug I encountered is if you freeze a pupper over a broken key it can eat your lives away cause they cant despawn. That aside this is a great game and I would like to make a game like this sometime myself!

@drazil100 Late reply here but thanks very much for your feedback, I'm glad you liked the game and it was fun watching you play it!

Very nice game! Unique concept, cute graphics, well-designed menus and controls. Only complaint is once keys start falling out you lose almost instantly (simple fix could just be repair rate being higher? although this is just my opinion).

Really well done!

Very cute game! Absolutely love the pup models. Haven't played any type of keyboard or typing games in so long, fun stuff!

Awwwww. My PC's Chrome can't handle WebGL for some weird reason. Will try if you upload a Windows build!

Funny idea! Smart game and the art was very nice... it's hard to keep up with :laughing:

Gotta love puppers

Nice game. I was trying to repair every key, but because I have a QWERTZ keyboard it got a bit hard, so I ended up just rolling over every button all the time. When the keys break, where do they go? Some just go under the keyboad. Maybe you can make them invisible.

What a laugh. Good job mate!

My game: Google Drive Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B13g3FsdXQ4MUGp5anQzb20zams?usp=sharing

Oh noooo! I'm not very good at this, RIP puppers... :P

Great concept and excellent execution!

I played a few rounds but couldn't figure out what pressing the keys did. Only the up arrow key to freeze the pups seemed to do anything. Otherwise, the graphics are nice and the background music was charming if a little repetitive. I like the keyboard premise.

@danman9914 Did you read the tutorial? You have to hold a key and press shift at the same time to repair the key! :)

@xavier-indie-gamedev You're totally right, the balance for being able to repair keys is not really there. It's hard to get back on track once they start falling. If I had more time I would focus on getting the balance right but I had to upload what I had lol. Still I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Just rated your game! Good luck!

I had to come back and read what the shift-key did to actually play this game. I think the game would have been better off without the shift key.

I like that the game brings stress and flow at the same time. Much like a typing version of audio surf or something.

I almost made a similar game about a tiny world inside a keyboard, cool to see someone pull it off.

I think the key should repair by just pressing it, otherwise very well done!

Absolutely beautiful! You made all the right choices. Love everything of it!

I love the graphics and the fact that the map corresponds with my actual keyboard! Good Luck!

PUPPERS that's such an adorable name!

From the looks of the screenshot, I thought this was going to be a typing game, but the way this game works makes it seem a lot less of a typing game than it actually is. Sure you have to hold the corresponding keys to repair them, but each pupper always seems to move the same direction: left to right (Q to P, A to L and Z to M). Since you can only repair one key at a time, it's nearly impossible to quickly repair a whole row of keys, what with the constant wave of puppers walking through constantly and only getting a minimal amount of time to "fix" each key.

Personally I think this would have worked much better as a typing game. You could have puppers jump from key to key, at different distances between the keys, and at different paces. With these variations, it would seem a lot more like a typing game. But that's just my personal suggestion.

Here's some other thoughts:

- Freezing the puppers should not cause other waves of puppers to come onto the screen while said puppers are still frozen. Without this, it barely serves as a cooldown time for the player to repair keys while still being reasonable.

- Holding the shift key and then said targeted key does appear to be superfluous. Consider letting the player hold down just the letter key to repair.

Those things aside, I think you've got some fine ideas here. The graphics are really cute (I mean who can say no to colourful puppies anyway? :P), plus the music is upbeat and fun, and I do find it suitable to the graphics and overall tone of the game. The only thing that I don't like about the sound is the "hover" fx for buttons; it just sounds really scratchy and unpleasant against the pleasant sounding soundtrack. Something that's more "bwoop"y or maybe more lighter, gentler and shorter than the effect you currently have is an sfx I could see working as a suitable alternative.

But yeah, congrats on your first game jam you did a fine job (final score was 260 for me...hehehe).

@random-storykeeper Thanks very much for your in-depth feedback. I think everything you said is true. More variety in the movement of the puppers would take the game to a higher level. And making the freeze power also halt the spawning was something I also considered but didn't get round to implementing. I didn't have in mind to make this a typing game (I hadn't even heard the term before to be honest) I just went with an idea I knew I could program (I'm still a novice in programming). Having said that I could definitely change the mechanic to something other than just puppers moving across the board in a wave, it would be a totally different game though I imagine. As for the shift key, I did plan to add other abilities in addition to the repair function which would be applied with other keys, which is why that mechanic exists. I could have taken it out for this version but by the time I realised, I was too afraid of breaking everything lol. Anyway thanks for playing!

I'm not a dog person at all, but you managed to convince me with your cute puppers, haha. Very nice game that quickly gets very challenging! And yeah, as someone else already pointed out, it's a cool idea to have the keyboard be both the input method and the playing field, kind of reminds me of some experimental games with unusual controllers. Well done!

My final score was 400!

That is a really neat idea! The dogs (and their barks) are cute, the music is good and the graphics are pretty nice. The freeze works pretty well, but it took me a little bit to realize you hold a key and then hit shift to repair keys, so I sandbagged myself a little I guess. (I did read the instructions, but I guess I missed it somewhere.)

I don't think I've seen an idea quite like that before. You did a great job with the time you had.

Keep up the great work!

Great idea ! I can see a future to this project as a typing learning game (it this kind of game still have a audience ?)

While the fact to keep pressing shif to reapir the key was disturbing and kinda forced, I see that you wanted to put more ideas and mechanics to make use of it differently... So I will classify this as a "jam hazard".

But the idea is there, I cas see gamemods where you don't have labels on the keys, or mixed around to mess with you ! It has potential !

While the sounds effects and music a cute, after hearing it loop for too long, I couldn't stand it anymore ^^'

Overall, great idea, nice execution but too repetitive music and sound design

Original interpretation of the theme! ^^

It's really cute to play, like with the puppers, the sound they make and with the music, the whole lot fit nicely together.

At first I had a look at the tutorial, and I felt a bit overwhelmed by it, like there was a lot to do, but once I started the game it went nicely.

As some others already pointed it out, holding down the shift key could be avoided because in the end you're holding it most part of the time, or if you want the player to hold it, there should be a reason of not holding it too.

Another point I noticed, is that I never quite get the kind of bonus the puppies were giving me once they reached the other side, like I was too focus on saving the other ones from falling.

And also it was kinda hard to notice when the keys on the left part of the keyboard were broken, because they were dissapearing behind the ones of the middle of the keyboard.

But overall it was pretty fun to try it out!

Congrats on your first entry :)

Super cute game. Music was a bit repetitive. I learned I'm really bad at keyboard games lol. Great job. If you get a chance check out our game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/down-the-rabbit-hole

Really liked this, great idea and really well implemented. The characters were cute and gameplay interesting, good job :)

The game mechanic was quite innovative (at least to me) and challenging, the music was very fitting, and the visuals in general were really polished and cute.

Congrats! Great entry.

It's a cute game! Could definitely see it expanded with some additional mechanics. As you have agreed with already the shift key is a little redundant right now but once other functions can be applied to the blocks it will make sense. I can imagine different powerups such as being able to build a spring on a block that catapults them over a few blocks.

I hope you do expand on the game good job and good luck!

Fun and actually challenging game!

I think it would be good to have some random movement in it and not let all the Puppers only run from left to right.

Graphics and sounds are fitting and the freeze action brings an extra strategic component. I like it :)

I really like the game, just like everyone else said before, there's not point on not holding shift.

The models were really cute and I loved the setting. I also appreciated the mute button, since I usually

listen to other songs while playing games :)

Some opinions about future features, maybe the puppers could have different movement patterns?

I also thought about letting the user press two different keys (for some ambidex action) but I think that would be too overpowered haha

Really original idea, with a really cute style. I really love games that break the fourth wall in this way. Unfortunately, I found the game pretty hard to play (maybe it's something to do with having an ergonomic keyboard layout). The best tactic seemed to be to simply spam all of the keys, focusing on the areas of the keyboard closest to death. I'm sure that the gameplay could be tweaked to add more of a challenge though.

Thanks for checking our our game, E.(a)T.. Much appreciated :slight_smile:.

So very cute and playable and challenging! The left shift could work as well, it'd be possible to type by both hands. I love it, also the time-lapse, great work!

This test my fast typing and I failed! xD

Really cute, fun game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 38 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :)

Nice idea. May be it could be better to replace SHIFT with space, because pressing SHIFT key too much throws the setting window on some OS key settings. The graphics is really cute! =)