Ludum Dare #43compo
Tezcacoatl's Dance Dance Paradise
Bust a funky move to appease the fickle Volcano God!
Bust moves along to the beats your trusty drummer lays down for you using your arrow keys. Complete a sequence to sacrifice a subject to the Volcano God, staying its destructive might. Perform moves in perfect time to appease the God even more.
Miss too many patterns or perform them sloppily, and the Volcano God will become enraged, bathing the land in wrathful magma!
As you play, the beats will get faster and more complicated -- see if you can sacrifice 50 dudes!
Comments63
My only complaint is that on my Macbook keyboard diagonals are super tough to hit. I basically instant lost the game at that point.
The diagonals seemed near impossible though :/
If I were you, I'd change it to mobile controls and put it on android play store. It can be a fun pastime game.
Sometimes, it was a bit too unforgiving in my opinion. But that is probably because I suck at rhythm games :smile: . Got about 32 on second try.
Did you record/create all the audio yourself? Like the birds, volcano explosion and all that?
The diagonals are pretty hard to strike, tho!
Great work!
What I liked the most:
- Diagonals! I've seen tons of games over the last years use this type of gameplay, but they hardly ever use diagonals.
- Game feels and plays great! Its charming and funny!
What I disliked the most:
- Diagonals! LOL, I see why that's not such a common thing. It's hard to get it right and it usually feels like the timing is off (as a player)
- It got repetitive real quick.
You did a great job, congrats again ;)
Cheers!
I have a few minor nitpicks that might help the experience a bit - I noticed that if you did not release a button by the time it scrolls past the window to hit it, you'd be penalized as though you pressed the next button incorrectly. It took me awhile to figure out why I kept failing right after entering an input correctly, before I realized what was going on. Rather than checking if the button is being held down, you might want to check if the button was pressed down on a specific frame.
It also took me until the end of the game to realize that the volcano had a face that was telling you how close to erupting it was. If you make a future revision, you might want to give the face a little bit more contrast, so that it draws the attention of the player better.
(P.S. : best volcano I've ever seen 🤣)
What i don't like is, that sometimes, even the arrow is about half of it's size in the circle, the game does not accept my button press. I was quite often too early, misguided by the arrow. Perhaps you could tweak that a litte.
Overall a very solid and fun to play game!
- The graphics and audio are delightful. I love how the game conveys its humor entirely through those, instead of explicitly writing jokes.
- You chose your scope well, and it shows. The amount of polish put into each detail is impressive.
- I love the subtle rumbling of the volcano telling you how close you are to losing.
- Like everyone else, I struggled with diagonals, especially hitting them in rapid sequence. When diagonals are introduced, it seems like each arrow is equally likely to be diagonal or orthogonal. I think you should tweak the probability so that diagonals are far less likely than orthogonals when they are first introduced (maybe a 25/75 split), but get more probable as the game progresses, up to a 50/50 split. Otherwise, the ramp-up in difficulty feels very sudden.
- I had the same input problem as @ild-games-llc. My guess is that you're using Input.GetButton or Input.GetKey to detect key presses when you should be using Input.GetButtonDown or Input.GetKeyDown.
- It can be difficult to replicate a rhythm that contains a long rest. Likewise, when there's a long gap between the end of the drum sequence and the beginning of the dance sequence, it can be difficult to time the first arrow. I think there should be a backing track to compare the drum rhythm against- maybe a shaker softly playing 8th notes with an emphasis on beats 2 and 4.
- The gap between the beginning of the drum sequence and the beginning of the dance sequence appears to be about one measure of 4/4 time. This can pose a problem when the drum sequences become longer than one measure. Dancing one measure behind the drums while the drums are still playing can be very disorienting/distracting. I'd recommend a gap of two measures, so you can generate longer patterns without disrupting the call-and response flow of the game.