ODISSEUS

You should definitely add a screenshot or two to your game page. Like you did in your "published" post.

I will check out your game after getting some sleep!

Thanks a lot. I will post screenshot ASAP ;-)

I get an error pop up when trying to run your game on my XP 32 bit Windows:

LD39_00.exe - Entry Point Not Found

The procedure entry point InitOnceExecuteOnce could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll.

Thank you for trying to test my game. When I am back I will see what I can do. And I will also test your game.
Thanks again.

Great game although I have one advice: Since you're using game maker studio, please create a stand-alone executable. Installers are a pain, no one likes installers.

Gameplay
Mechanics are simple but solid. I really liked landing sequences in which I made my best to move as little as possible and shot virtually nothing :p The short mini-game sequences to pick up the energy were also a very nice touch! Maybe one complaint is that I had to restart the game every time I lost, which is really the only thing that prevented me from trying more than 3 times :p

Ambiance
Great music! Great dialogues! That first choice to who wrote the Illiad was hilarious. This has potential to be a fully-fledged adventure game, keep it up!

Thanks Adrien for these very precious feedbacks and pieces of advice. I will test your game this week-end :smiley:

Great game, graphics look good, sound is nice and gameplay is very unique and interesting.

Interesting game. I like the multiple game styles. Graphics were cool, and the hybrid Greek classics/space opera was a really neat concept too. I eventually figured out how to go faster through the text dialogues, which was very good - I hated waiting for them to change. The asteroid/travel sequences seemed too long for what they were worth, and occasionally I would get shot by something invisible, which was frustrating. If you wrote the music in this short time, it's amazing - great jazz feel. Good job.

Thank you for these great feedbacks. Actually the asteroid sequence was designed to last 1 minute... and I turned it to a random 2 to 3 minutes. Maybe I should turn it back to 1 mn ?

Interesting game mechanics. It was fun to play and it has potential. Congrats!

Wow, a game themed after the Iliad and Oddyssey!

Likes:

- rich sawtooth sounds. :love:
- multiple games in one, that gives you an extra star!
- it's an okay vertical shmup
- sirens! sireeeeens! ouch. I got zapped so hard. so often.
- so many stars, I really appreciate these dense starfields
- funny opening and clising cutscenes. Well done!

Try differently:
- mix of mouse and keyboard controls...
- the difficulty is a bit steep, and the asteroids are often only visible through their HP numbers (which made me first think they are powerups... ouch)

Overall:
- homer would enjoy this game
- I spent way too much time playing it.
- DAMN SIIIIIREEEEENS!

If you want some inspiration about a few simple tricks to make a shooting game in GameMaker feel really awesome, here's an excellent talk on it. :) Youtube link

Oh thanks for these accurate feedbacks. Actually it is first attempt of schmup. And yeah I will try to solve that difficulty curve problem and lighten the star field background to make the game more readable ;-)

Nice cutscenes lol. The individual mini games were pretty good. I ended up being able to skip one of the planets on the path because I had just enough power :D Nice work!

I can't land on first planet - even thought I didn't collide with anything, I don't have enough power to last 2 minutes. I might be doing something wrong thought.

Hello. It is because every move and every shot costs you power. The core idea is to save your power. So move and shoot wisely;-)

This was an interesting game. You definitely have to think wisely about your actions. Something I found a little annoying was that the game stops itself whenever you run out of power. Perhaps just go back to the start menu? That'd be certainly a lot easier. Anyway nice game.

Thanks. I forgot to fix that. I will do it ASAP.

Interesting game! I really enjoyed the interactions with Homer! The space asteroids parts were a bit long, and it seemed shooting things was worse than conserving your movements and dodging at the last second. The quiz parts were a nice diversion, and the mining parts were fun!

This was a hard game! Had to think like an A* when playing it and couldn't clear it anyway... Moving through the asteroid field where perhaps a bit slow and uneventful and wouldn't have had to be so long. Apart from that the game was fun and intellectually challenging :)

I have a video of me failing multiple times if you want to see it :)

Thanks for explanation. It's a very nice game, the idea of many minigames is really great, but my favourite thing game are references to Antiquity.

Real nice take on the theme, and i really liked the idea of an adventure with multiple gameplay phases however it has a few flaws

Positive stuff :
- The multiple gameplays as i said, they really mixed things up in a good way
- The theme of the game, really clever mix of ancient mythology and sci fi which reminded me of an old childhood favorite of mine Ulysses 31 (i guess that was your inspiration ^^ so +1 )+ making homer an AI that writes the story when you're game over :p
- The very "space like" mood of the 1st music
- The humour was really nice as well XD

Negative stuff :
- The game window may be a bit too tall, i see what you did putting it this way to get the vertical shooter feel (which i liked) but i had it a bit cropped at the bottom, maybe have it so that you can resize it manually to fit the screen ?
- The planets hitboxes on the map, i had to click around a bit upon reaching a planet untill the game registered it and took me to the riddle phase
- Tiny detail but on the shooter phase i could see a cut in the starfield background and where it repeats

I think that's about it, really the negatives are not that much, so it's a neat experience, your mythology meets sci fi theme really took me back as i said :)

i'll give you a silly award as well : You get the 31st century award for classical heroes :p

Overall a great job man ^^

Oh my, you have managed to do such a long gameplay and an interesting story. Good job! But in the same time it was hard to make a click on the planet. Managed out how to do it thou. Anyway, I like this game. :upside_down:

This is very solidly crafted, and it's amazing how much content you actually managed to cram in there, especially considering that it's a Compo entry! Some minor usability gripes not withstanding, it's enjoyable to play. I think if you added a few more effects and did one more polishing pass on the graphics, you could put the game onto a store for money, otherwise pretty much as it is.

Nice bro! I lso mek game about space: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/scale-of-life

Crashes every time i play or hit skip

Surprising amount of content given the time frame, music was catchy but a little repetative, mechanics were simple but varied, over all good entry.

Pretty easy difficulty in this game. Unfortunately I felt like I had very little incentive to actually shoot anything while flying; I think I used less energy just moving and avoiding things. The graphics were a bit rough in the space sections. It was difficult for me to tell what some things were. Having turrets spawn randomly on the screen is very jarring and creates unpleasant situations sometimes where one suddenly appears right in front of you, and you ram into it.

The mining section was my favorite, and I enjoyed collecting all the things. Sometimes though I'd see a green gem really far away from everything else, so I would have to move five tiles to pick it up, then five tiles to get to the next gem, making it not just useless, but a waste. It would be nice if you could choose to leave the mining section early!

I took some fun risks, skipping planets and carefully rationing my energy that way. Was worth it.

Thank you for your interesting feedbacks. Indeed it seems it is pretty frustrating for some players to refrain from shooting;-). The core idea of the gameplay was the lesser evil choice. But in a post-jam version, I will add something rewarding to shooting. Probably some random loot (power supply). As for random turret pop-up I would also add some animation before turret pop up so as the player has the time to spot it and doggie the turret. Thanks a lot.

you should add different tile and @thygrrr 'S sent video is awesome you should check it too . If someone mix gold digging and asteroid game , It can't be better than yours :D I give 4/5

Thanks a lot. I have seen the video and will surely make another shooter following the 30 steps to make it 100% juicy.

This game is pretty nicely, Effort can be seen

I like shooting games and you suggested your game, so I didn't wait to play it!

Very comprehensive entry! Love the story sequences, it is written very well. SHMUP part controls very well, but the asteroids are hard to see, could use some more contrast or a white outline. I don't know why I lost the 2 times I played it. I had energy left, survived the SHMUP part, got the quiz answer right, but still I lost for some reason.

Very well done!

Must be because the drill machine used the power stock quicker than you harvested power. I took the opportunity of the web version to add a white glow around the asteroids. Thanks a lot for your feedback so ;)

Sorry, I didn't get through my list of games yesterday and had to go to work! I am finally home to finish reviewing your game! And thank you for the kind review on our game.

This is a pretty impressive entry with a lot of content. I haven't been able to beat it yet and will go back to it but feel like I can give you feedback from what I've played so far.

I liked the dialogue and story, it made me laugh a few times but the text went a bit too fast for me sometimes and I missed bits. I really liked that you had different gameplay types, even the little quizzes. The shoot em up bit controlled well but felt a little bit long but I loved the mining. At first I kept shooting across the screen trying to get as many in one go but came out of there with as much full as I went in with, haha. I was more methodical the second time. It was fun, a bit of a puzzle element to it. The graphics are alright, loved the portrait art and the explosions were nice. The music was pretty good too and the retro sound fx helped tie it all together. Nice work!

- Nice game i liked it
- music feels good while playing

Cute dialogues, interesting gameplay :) The music sounds really nice too

Great job! It's clear you put a lot of time and effort into this. I am particularly impressed by some of the space fight effects, for example when you get hit by the electric beam there is a screen distortion that looks very nice. And you also researched your history which is also awesome! My only complaint is that you have to switch between mouse controls sometimes and keyboard only controls (during fights) and I wish you could just stick to one control scheme and make that work for all gameplay types.

Impressive amount of content and mechanics for a compo. The game loop working through different mechanics kept me from getting bored. which is an achievement in and of itself for a compo game! Main criticisms have to do with repetitive qualities of the experience. Most notably was the music, some variation would have probably lessened the feeling of repetition even if mechanics repeated. Other than music, as much as I enjoyment the shifting mechanics they all did feel a bit flat. I think that is always a struggle in development, it is hard to explore a mechanic far enough to get depth out of it. Multiple mechanics leads to interesting new game play scenarios as well as narrative methods, but it seems to lead to flatter mechanics. Oh well, rambling a bit. Nice work!

Thanks PjchardtTheSecond! Your analysis of the issues I faced during the game development is right. Next time I will probably focus on a main game mechanic(loop?) and do my best to get it as deep and fun as possible;-)

Interesting game, I liked the graphics (not a fan of the speaking sounds though, it got a little tiring after dying multiple times). The mechanics work fine and I had an alright time. The characters were also pretty funny. Good job!

Thank you for testing my game. Speaking sound : I plan for a redux version to make one unique sound for each character to represent their own voice. Week-end is coming, I will be able to test games again.
Thanks a lot.

For a game that was so heavily reliant on dialogue to tell the story there were way too many spelling/grammar mistakes. I did really appreciate that knowing Odysseus' story and some history helped you throughout the game. The enemies in the space shooter portion were interesting but I felt like the game suffered from being made from so many separate components rather than focusing on one singular aspect.

Cute idea. Some fun to it and the music. I couldn't really figure the game out very well though.

I Recently played your game during a live stream at your request.

here .

I appreciated that you put two different types of games in one. The space shooter one was ok but I really enjoyed the jewel mining part. If you added a limited number of moves you would have a puzzler on how to collect all the jewels without running out of moves (power). Great work I also liked your dialog system.

if you haven't already please give my game a try Zombie Power Station HTML5 Thanks

I really liked your game! The idea to put Odysseus into space was fun ;-)
Graphics and UI could be improved but that's minor issues for an improved release ;-)
The mix between space travel, mining and quiz was also a nice idea although I got only 3 different riddles?
The travel through space should be dependent on the distance between planets - if two planets are 128 units away make the travel last 128 seconds...
The only thing that irritated me on the first go was the displayed route - on my second go I ignored that and clicked on the planet that was reachable and led me closer to home ;-)
Overall a very nice entry for a compo game! Well done!

I like the Homero reference. Great sound effects. Also, both different minigames are great. Good job.

Man a lot of things that I want to say has already been said.

A few I haven't notice anyone say, though I only read a few:

- Enemies during the space travel should appear out of nowhere. It would be nice too if it flies left and right too instead of disappearing at the bottom of the screen 1.5secs. Same with asteroids.

- The space travel time should be proportional to distance traveled. Feels random currently.

Overall a pretty good game.

Very nice game. I loved the simple graphics and music. Congrats. Great work.

There is way too much text, why not just do a voice over?

The "humor" is not there really. Your "jokes" are just aweful. Then of course this is my opinion and not an objective thing to say.

At first I was going to rage quit. The text is too small, there is no fullscreen option, I had to zoom in the web page. Then I have the ability to skip a text box by pressing a key, but once I am actually finished reading the box and about to hit a key, the box disappears all by itself, without any notification, then I hit the key because I already started the motion, so two boxes are skipped at the same time. This is not OK! You either give the user control over this or you don't. But this is just frustrating. Never do this in a game.

After my first rage though, the game was acutally fun. I love how you mixed mini games from different enres to create a kind of coherent whole :-)

The graphics were alright, I have seen better, I have seen worse.

The sound and music are OK but I think the vibe you get from the background music in the Asteroids game does not really fit the setting. The music is light and happy but the rest is not. The music could have been a little more spacey here.

I managed to beat the game in the third try. Once you actually figure out the mechanics it is not too hard. But you could have made the rules more clear in the beginning, e.g. by highlighting the power display in the top-left and making clear that this is the most important thing in the game. I lost the game the first time without even knowing why!

Overall a good entry, could use more polish here and there but then I know how much work it is to put together so many different mini games, each needs its own programming. Therefore many props, you really did a great job for only 48 hours. Also the art style is consistent over all games, that is really important. Nice entry, keep up the good work!

Great game, loved the art and audio, very good job, it impressive that it is a compo game !

At first the difficulty was rather high, but after some time I got used to the controls... I didn't manage to make it to the dinner though.

I liked the "Achilles and the tortoise"-style of drill movement. Finding the best strategy movement/collection was fun.

Ideas:
- The dialogs could be displayed for a bit longer.
- It was tempting to go to the farthest planet i could reach (and dying almost immediately).

Nice references. It is great you made all the mini-games in the Compo timeframe!

Neat game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 39 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr1O4LytQqQ