When the theme came out as 'Keep It Alive' my immediate instinct was to make a bootleg Touhou game. Lacking in both time and expertise, I figured the next best thing was to try and create a survival-style platformer.
You are a Droplet named Meringue, and for whatever reason you're being haunted by the crude Phantom. The goal is simple: stay alive. Your health ticks down over time and the Phantom has spikes and bullets to make sure the clock moves a little faster, so to speak. You're not without help as every once in a while a peach will appear to give you some health back (which happens to be a favorite food of the Droplets). How long can you keep the Droplet alive?
- v1.1.1 4/25/2020 - Updated Webgl version to respect viewport aspect and not stretch the textures beyond recognition - v1.1 4/25/2020 - Tweaked movement to be more precise - Re-imported textures with the correct options to remove blurriness - Changed submission title from "Droplet Dodge - LDJ46" to just "Droplet Dodge" to look less... odd - Fixed typos in submission description - Added mention of the Quit button (even though it only works on the windows version) - v1.0 4/20/2020 - The base version with slippery movement and features to be added later
Nicely done game. Character is difficult to control, but I suspect it's part of this particular genre. I was getting good figuring out safe places to jump from. Music really helped set the mood.
Very fair critique on the movement though. I wanted to try for a sort of floaty feel, but ended up with something that's a bit... slippery, but indeed tough to control.
Echoing the control issues. Ultimately while the slippery feel is kind of annoying, the big issue for me is that movement continues after releasing the movement key. This removes almost all precision from the platforming.
One of the things on my todo list was to make the gravity affect the falling movement a bit more so it'd be a more Mario-esque jump, but by the time I got to that point where I could make some quality tweaks I was already out of time. Same but not really with the slipperiness of the movement; I had it written down to turn up the deceleration in the x-direction, but in that case i just forgot to do so.
I think I'll do a post-jam rework once the results come out with the feedback you've all left. There's other stuff I'd like to personally tackle like making the Phantom a little more than just a drone with some extra attacks, implementing a way to possibly fight the Phantom and having a win/scoring mechanism, fixing some of the sprite blurriness, making the level bigger (and better), etc.
I also found the horizontal movement tough to control. But also one thing I would've liked to have was a score system maybe in the form of a timer, so I had an idea of how well I was doing in each playthrough. I think adjusting the movement and adding some high score system can really go a long way for your game.
Ahhh pixel art! I love how simple your game is! It is frustratingly fun! The music fits well! The peach kept me alive most of the time because I would lose my easily with the spikes! :laughing:
Considering the movement has been the chief issue I think it's probably time I treated it like a bug and fixed it... not really sure how many changes I can make before I start breaking into the "new feature" territory though :laughing:
@prackli I added some light gravity scaling, only at the falling part of the jump though.
@fireslash@legavroche @EveryoneBasically I went ahead and tweaked the movement to be more precise. The little droplet is still quick, but he's not walking on butter anymore.
If I'd have had more time I'd have loved to get at least a little timer put in or some form of scoring, but alas... Some sort of progression is a great idea though. Like "you've survived long enough here, moving to next area" or "build up a meter and attack!" kind of thing. Appreciate the good ideas.
@dingotime Glad it was fun for at least a few minutes! I tweaked the movement a little so it's still a little fast but you have better control over it if you wanted to try again.
Good job with the game. I liked the concept and it was fun to play around with. It would be cool to see some more variations in the attacks and an increase in difficulty as time goes on.
Nice sound effects and music. Graphics were simple but effective, possibly more effective BECAUSE they were simple, but a tad more color could help (maybe the spikes could be purple too?) It was way too easy to cheese the enemy by simply staying in a corner where he couldn't reach me, and only moving to grab the fruit. Maybe add something to force the player into moving around? Also, the play area was tiny, any way you could get it to expand to full screen?
@shaolin-dave I thought about making the spikes their own color, but in the end it just looked too tacky for me; this is where I shot myself in the foot with being too simple with the graphics (granted the speckled look doesn't look much better, but that's where I settled). I do have the health bar ticking down slowly to try and keep the player moving, but ultimately I do also need to give a little extra motivation from more attacks (ones that can hit through walls) or falling hazards, etc. Originally I did have it fullscreen, but due to bad import options on the textures everything looked blurry; but when I corrected those options the stretch on the viewport heavily distorted everything. I might play around more with it, but ultimately I'd need to make time to redo the scaling on the nodes and rebuild the level.
@garygreen There was not. I want to add one in, but I think that falls under a new feature rather than a bugfix.
Fun game, jumped around for quite a while enjoying myself with this game. I would like a higher phase and/or some progression if you continue the development after the jam. Anyways, great job!
Took me a bit to find the jump key (went straight into the game) - a quick ingame instruction showing the controls or alternatively also allowing space/up for jumping would be great.
I liked the music! The game felt a bit easy to me, as you could simply jump over all spikes at once most of the time and even when you messed up multiple times in a row, it was easy to quickly get back up to full health.
I think it would be fun to have the boss randomly switch between different attacks to make him a bit less predictable.
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Very fair critique on the movement though. I wanted to try for a sort of floaty feel, but ended up with something that's a bit... slippery, but indeed tough to control.
One of the things on my todo list was to make the gravity affect the falling movement a bit more so it'd be a more Mario-esque jump, but by the time I got to that point where I could make some quality tweaks I was already out of time. Same but not really with the slipperiness of the movement; I had it written down to turn up the deceleration in the x-direction, but in that case i just forgot to do so.
I think I'll do a post-jam rework once the results come out with the feedback you've all left. There's other stuff I'd like to personally tackle like making the Phantom a little more than just a drone with some extra attacks, implementing a way to possibly fight the Phantom and having a win/scoring mechanism, fixing some of the sprite blurriness, making the level bigger (and better), etc.
Greato Jobu! :smile:
@prackli I added some light gravity scaling, only at the falling part of the jump though.
@fireslash @legavroche @EveryoneBasically I went ahead and tweaked the movement to be more precise. The little droplet is still quick, but he's not walking on butter anymore.
If I'd have had more time I'd have loved to get at least a little timer put in or some form of scoring, but alas... Some sort of progression is a great idea though. Like "you've survived long enough here, moving to next area" or "build up a meter and attack!" kind of thing. Appreciate the good ideas.
@dingotime Glad it was fun for at least a few minutes! I tweaked the movement a little so it's still a little fast but you have better control over it if you wanted to try again.
@god-colo ありがてぇ！:smile:
I chose 'Z' because I've had Cave Story on my mind lately and it felt better to have both hands doing something.
It was way too easy to cheese the enemy by simply staying in a corner where he couldn't reach me, and only moving to grab the fruit. Maybe add something to force the player into moving around?
Also, the play area was tiny, any way you could get it to expand to full screen?
@shaolin-dave I thought about making the spikes their own color, but in the end it just looked too tacky for me; this is where I shot myself in the foot with being too simple with the graphics (granted the speckled look doesn't look much better, but that's where I settled). I do have the health bar ticking down slowly to try and keep the player moving, but ultimately I do also need to give a little extra motivation from more attacks (ones that can hit through walls) or falling hazards, etc. Originally I did have it fullscreen, but due to bad import options on the textures everything looked blurry; but when I corrected those options the stretch on the viewport heavily distorted everything. I might play around more with it, but ultimately I'd need to make time to redo the scaling on the nodes and rebuild the level.
@garygreen There was not. I want to add one in, but I think that falls under a new feature rather than a bugfix.
I liked the music! The game felt a bit easy to me, as you could simply jump over all spikes at once most of the time and even when you messed up multiple times in a row, it was easy to quickly get back up to full health.
I think it would be fun to have the boss randomly switch between different attacks to make him a bit less predictable.