Don't let the bubbles hit the edge of the screen by dragging them away from it. The more you drag a bubble the more it inflates until it eventually explodes into two smaller ones. Survive for as long as you can!
My high score: 21.1. The instructions say "drag", but it seems dragging makes them grow and split, so I found that just clicking/flicking them was much more effective (usually got to 15 seconds before they split the first time, then things go poorly!).
Nice, fresh mechanic. I like the clean visuals. Audio seemed intermittent - exactly one game it said "10 seconds to new high score" "5 seconds to new high score", but I didn't hear it beyond that.
Do you think you could offer a download on a site other than mediafire? Itch or dropbox maybe. Mediafire is such a bad experience - I went to download your game but five browsers popped open with sketchy junk, including one of those fake warnings trying to scam me into calling so they can rip me off: https://imgur.com/a/p7ZMT
(Do not call that number, anyone!)
That window refused to close and I had to task kill my browser.
Want to try your game, but now I'm worried what that site has tried to install on my computer. Sorry. :(
I honestly had no idea Mediafire did that, thanks for the info. I'm using adblocker and they used to be pretty reliable a while back. I'll drop a google docs link when I'm home.
@mattcane I'm actually considering writing it from the ground up and as a tablet game, I tried it on Android, a phone screen feels a bit too small, but I have another project I want to get done first.
For some reason watching the YouTube video of the game, I thought it would be very relaxing, but the bubbles moved so quickly it was actually rather stressful.
Still, the audio and graphics came together to create a polished product. Well done! I enjoyed the British lady telling me when I was about to break my record, though she didn't do it every game. I'm not sure why.
@Carraka With hindsight I regret going for such a difficulty curve. I had 2 days to play the crap out of it, but when I gave it to a friend it took them 10 minutes to start doing well.
I knew nobody will play it for this long in LD, but rebalancing rhe whole thing after the deadline feels like too big a change for a gamejam game so I left it as is and posted the video for other enthusiasts like me who just feel like when they download a game they have to beat the dev's highscore.
@alexv Haha, yeah. For every Ludum Dare game I've made, I have a balance problem where the game I thought was easy turned out only to be easy because I had just spend 18 hours playing it, while most people play the finished product for 5 minutes before moving on. Some day I will create a game with difficulty modes. But the modes will probably be Hard, Insane, and Send Help.
Came back to try this with the dropbox link, so thanks for offering another option and for posting about it so it hit my feed.
This is really good! It's a simple concept but it unfolds into some complex strategic considerations. At first I was playing with trying to minimize the bubble count by keeping them traveling long diagonal paths to the edge of the screen, but eventually I got a better score by just trying to click them all back to the middle as fast as possible and not caring about the count. Of course, I only got to 20.8 seconds that way. I see that another commenter got 32 second, wow!!
Slick visual style and smooth soundtrack coupled with a thought-provoking puzzle and instant retry loop kept me trying "one more time" a while.
I love this simple but smart mechanics, really good, the art is awesome, very modern and just fit the main idea of the game, pretty good game overal, congratulations !
Nice, fresh mechanic. I like the clean visuals. Audio seemed intermittent - exactly one game it said "10 seconds to new high score" "5 seconds to new high score", but I didn't hear it beyond that.