Purple Thing!

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.50
Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.86
Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.75
Theme★★★★★★★★★★4.03
Graphics★★★★★★★★★★2.62
Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.52
A short platformer about tossing and catching a purple creature that goes splat if it hits anything. If possible, I encourage you to play to the end of the level; it's fairly short.

game_screenshot.png
The art is all mine (you can tell because it's terrible). Also, sorry about the lack of audio. In case it wasn't obvious, this is my first attempt at Ludum Dare (and I don't have any "real" game dev experience) and I didn't quite get as much done as I had hoped.

screenshot

Comments28

melomel21 Apr 2020, 02:57
Laughed out loud on this one, great job!
beanslasher21 Apr 2020, 03:05
That is the greatest thing I have ever seen! The map creation is unreal :P My man!
Scharma21 Apr 2020, 03:07
And here I was complaining about unity's level design tools.

Nice job!
jyrkface21 Apr 2020, 03:09
really great entry. Goddamn good gamn tbh, with a little fine tuning. Probably the best direct take on the theme I've seen, and really feature complete for a jam game. Checkpoints were such a relief!
Scott Steffes
Scott Steffes21 Apr 2020, 03:10
Hah! I love that, the level design bit made the whole game hit different.
pvp
pvp21 Apr 2020, 03:12
Wow that was difficult but fun :D.
Lateralis21 Apr 2020, 03:15
yo deadass this game hella fuckin good my dude. honestly tho i picked it up and couldnt stop.
Batswinger21 Apr 2020, 15:05
I really like the idea, unfortunatly i could't make it past the first two obstacles. when i jumped i had a hard time making it to the other side and catch the purple thing. Maybe its just me, but i really love the idea though.
DrewG8
DrewG821 Apr 2020, 16:02
I really liked the mechanic here, it seems like there are a lot of cool possibilities to expand it should you want to. I felt extremely dejected each time my purple friend died in a burst of goo, and I think that the time between that and the restart kind of reflected that, but also, for a game with so many deaths, it kind of felt slow to wait for the restart. Great job!
Franklin Lei21 Apr 2020, 16:53
I found a cool super jump mechanic while holding down throw and jump at the same time. Sad to say, I've killed countless purple friends. Neat little funny game :smile:
3LSTMsInATrenchcoatauthor21 Apr 2020, 19:39
@batswinger the first few obstacles are easier if you don't jump before throwing.

@drewg8 Thanks for the feedback. I tried to find the correct balance between showing the player the consequences of their actions & respawning in good time, but I guess I got good enough at the game while testing that I didn't have many deaths by the time I got around to implementing the respawn system, so I didn't really notice a problem.

@franklin-lei I think this is a bug that I fixed but re-introduced in an attempt to fix a different bug. The "Arcade" physics in Phaser is very frustrating to work with.
oceanm
oceanm21 Apr 2020, 21:14
Really cool concept and very challenging! Sadly the purple guy died a lot due to my platforming skills.
RodPraet
RodPraet21 Apr 2020, 22:21
OMG! This game is awesome! I really liked the idea to carry the purple thing. It is easy to understand, but so challenging to play until the end. Great job!
fishbrain
fishbrain22 Apr 2020, 05:52
Nice idea - found it quite hard!
Javad-tab
Javad-tab22 Apr 2020, 10:18
It was very enjoyable! But I got stuck in the second stage! I think it would be better if the throwing button was something other than down_key! Thanks for this challenging experience!
Khud0
Khud022 Apr 2020, 13:17
I failed a lot so I'd like the restart to be faster, otherwise very cool idea! :)
junior2341922 Apr 2020, 13:29
I can't pass the third jump. The game is really funny btw XD
mudlee
mudlee22 Apr 2020, 14:26
What it makes really hard is that you have to use the down arrow for dropping instead of space, enter or other things. I really miss some audio :)
3LSTMsInATrenchcoatauthor22 Apr 2020, 19:03
@javad-tab @mudlee Thanks for the suggestion. If I end up developing this further (starting to think that I should) I'll add more options for the "throw" button.

Also, to everyone, thanks for the feedback!
3ago_23 Apr 2020, 01:42
nice concept! this mechanic has a lot of possibilities
EdZ123
EdZ12323 Apr 2020, 03:29
Super cool and simple mechanic. Pretty hard, though. I probably wouldn't have been able to beat it if I hadn't discovered a jumping bug that let me go over most obstacles, and go right over the castle. (You hold down the jump button and then hold down the throw button right after, giving you infinite height).
Edit: never mind, you already know about it, judging by the other comments
3LSTMsInATrenchcoatauthor23 Apr 2020, 03:49
@edz123 Yes, I know about this bug. If I go on to develop this further, I'm planning to switch to a new physics engine which hopefully will resolve this problem.

Apparently, using this bug the game can be speedrun in 45 seconds (although it can also be done in 49 seconds without exploiting the bug).
Chronos_Dev23 Apr 2020, 04:01
Great Idea. I found a lot of possibilities. The graphics are very cool and the gameplay, smooth and a bit hard.
Very good job !
matthewi
matthewi23 Apr 2020, 04:02
Super fun but super challenging. I love how your level design teaches the player what to do. I really like this one!
Dextreon
Dextreon24 Apr 2020, 10:23
Super challenging game as my entry, I loved this kind of games, so I must tell you I really liked it! I miss a bit of audio, but the concept is super cool! Congrats!
WanS2426 Apr 2020, 10:04
This game is very fun and I laughed for some reason which I cannot explain. Good take on the theme, pretty smart level design and it's actually interesing that your game is very similar to https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/dino-spin
Which I consider nice, because Dino Spin is my favourite game of the jam for now.
I have a few suggestions. Maybe make hitbox of purple thing! a few pixels smaller than the actual sprite for invisible comfort improvement and feelings like "NOOOOO...okay it's fine, I caught it". Also some coyote time for better jumping. You can make some dynamic action levels where you need to run without stops. Overall, enjoyed the game a lot. Included this in my list https://wans24.itch.io/he-needs-healing/devlog/140983/what-ludum-dare-46-did-to-me
relixes
relixes26 Apr 2020, 21:54
I loled pretty hard at the ending, what a plot twist hahaha.

The mechanic is great and it's indeed very similar to our entry so it was pretty cool to see an similar idea implemented in a diferent way.

The graphics are programmer art level, not much to coment here, they're simple but they get the job done.
The level design is very great but some throws are pretty hard to pull out and this may be frustrating at times.
Also it seemed that there were cases were the player didn't respond to the jump command when near a edge, wich led me to dying

Overall a very solid entry, made me wish there were more levels to play. Good job!

edit ---

Little heads up here. Was playing for a second time and I managed to get the purple thing stuck into a button leading to a soft lock.

Other games by @3lstmsinatrenchcoat

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