Ludum Dare #47compo

Terror of the Lazy River

by birdwards

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.83

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.98

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.70

Theme★★★★★★★★★★4.17

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.84

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.92

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.89

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.79

It's a wonderful day at the water park, and you are a horrible kid.

You're relaxing on the lazy river ride, pocket knife in hand, when you get an idea: if you poke a hole in everyone else's inner tube, you can have the whole lazy river to yourself! As you begin your reign of terror on the lazy river, you notice the park employees handing something to every rider except you. Are those... darts?

Instructions:

- Use the arrow keys or WASD to swim. The river current is pushing you along, too- don't expect to get anywhere if you're swimming against the current.
- Click in any direction to slash your pocket knife in that direction.
- Slash everyone else's inner tubes to win!
- Don't get hit by the darts being thrown at you- you can dodge them, or you can slash them out of the air!

All art, audio, and code made by Birdwards within 48 hours for Ludum Dare 47. The font used is an aliased version of Jellee by Hanken Design Co.

If you experience performance issues on the web, try a downloadable desktop version.

Tags: #2d, #8-bit, #pixel art, #top-down

Genres: action

Comments27

rhoff955 Oct 2020, 00:33

Fantastic game! cool use of theme, and nice complete experience. Would be nice if collisions & missiles spawning was a little more forgiving somehow.

Warrrkus5 Oct 2020, 18:40

Really cool and polished entry. I especially like the art and the music. It reminds me of every underwater level in NES games :D Also good idea that you added multiple difficulties because the normal difficulty was a bit too hard for me. Good job :)

Nobleboy6 Oct 2020, 00:21

The pixellized graphics make my eyes hurt bad as stuff animates, and the mouse cursor gets lost in the light-colored graphics easily, could've been fixed with a crosshair.

Otherwise a nice and polished fun entry!

RNGames7 Oct 2020, 22:47

✔️ I quite like the simple pixel graphical style.

✔️ The gameplay is intuitive and a creative take on the theme.

✔️ The music in the game is very nice.

➖ I feel a few more mechanics could have been implemented, maybe attacking could also push you in the opposite direction?

Gabriel Dias Oliveira de Almeida10 Oct 2020, 22:33

I basically put 5 stars in everything because I really loved the game. I would play this game more if had more levels! If you wanted to make this game with more things, let me know because I would love to work in something like this!

Reef10 Oct 2020, 23:49

Put together well and a funny concept. At first I had some trouble where the attack would just stop working, but I think that may have been an issue with my laptop trackpad. It was harder than I expected! I had to play on Easy. You could add things like obstacles in the water or something similar vary the gameplay a little, but I guess I had enough trouble just dodging those darts!

elysiagriffin11 Oct 2020, 02:56

Great game! Took me a second to realize that I needed to take out the other riders and that I needed to click to use a pocket knife. The movement was very smooth and satisfying. Finished normal mode in around a minute, took awhile to find the last rider lol

eskooh11 Oct 2020, 03:28

Good game, got foiled by having 2 screens and my mouse going wildly of the screen. Got a good score on normal of 1:54:78. Great game and awesome job!

Whom11 Oct 2020, 03:29

I played Normal 1:28.19. Was fun to play. Collisions worked fine did not feel like losing was my fault

JavaSaurus11 Oct 2020, 21:28

Hey there ! I really like this game, for the first time in my life I got to be a pool-bully ! Simple mechanics and honest gameplay, whenever I screwed up it always felt like I could have prevented it. That's a nice feeling. The audio is giving me chill swimming pool vibes, exactly what you went for I assume ! Well done !

Hakro11 Oct 2020, 21:37

Really fun little game. Well made, the graphics are cute, and the sound are to the point.
Enjoyed it.
Great job.

fabula_rasa11 Oct 2020, 21:50

The setup is adorably ridiculous. Controls work perfectly and the game is simple but polished.

And you are doubly stuck in a loop - in a tube on a looping river. 10/5 for theme :wink:

Trexxak12 Oct 2020, 03:27

First up, THANK YOU for including an easy difficulty level

Artyom Volkov12 Oct 2020, 18:28

Fun little game with vibes of classic games and lazy summer days.

Trypants12 Oct 2020, 20:04

Really fun game!

Honestly I don't have anything to say! 5/5

ChickenChaser17 Oct 2020, 23:12

Fun and polished game!
I liked the relaxing atmosphere the music created.

ColeSlaughter18 Oct 2020, 23:12

Looks like the VOD turned out okay! :smile: Super sorry I wasn't able to get this working perfectly on stream!

I'll be honest, I think it's criminal that this game doesn't have more ratings. It's simple, charming, and rewarding to play, through and through. Never really encountered any bugs, and even though I only played it for a little bit, I could feel myself improving with each round.

Very awesome job here, I hope you get more attention!

LeviDSmith19 Oct 2020, 02:31

Nice game that fits the theme well.

Doot19 Oct 2020, 10:47

Awesome compo game!

The idea is very cool, the movement feels right and original, the audio and visuals makes for some nice feedbacks.

The only issue I could see is that the more you defeat enemies, well the less they are and the less it's interesting.

Awesome game anyway, great job on making this 💕

Duke22 Oct 2020, 22:58

That was... nice :) Short but poignant. The art, sound and general game play worked really well. A coherent experience from start to finish. Especially the soothing soundtrack kept me engaged. There wasn't much challenge since swatting away projectiles and sinking those pesky tourists was rather easy (even on hard mode, I haven't really found out where the hard difficulty comes into play, honestly), so a little more variation and/or challenge would've been nice :) The theme was tackled in a obvious way without trying to twist established game play principles or innovate on them in a meaningful way, which isn't a problem per se, especially considering this a is a compo entry! I enjoyed the absurd comedy approach a lot, that helped leave a positive impression.

All in all, a nice little compo entry with a bit of a lack of game play variations! Keep it up!

rodobodolfo22 Oct 2020, 23:45

That music!!! this was really fun and challenging! good job!!

TheBookSnail23 Oct 2020, 00:03

First I played Normal a few times and sunk each times so I thought it was a overly difficult game. Changed to Easy and breezed through in 43.86. Back to Normal and beat it first try that time in 51.77. I jumped on Hard excited for a challenge and got one. Finally beat it with the score in the screenshot. Great controls, difficulty, theme, graphics, and music!

aevek23 Oct 2020, 00:52

This is a really fun game! The music fit really well. I occasionally lost my mouse on the high-frequency light colors, but I worked through it and was eventually able to finish the game on normal. I would also like a faster reset option, something like the ability to just press 'R' on the lose screen would have reduced my frustration when needing to restart. The core loop was fun enough that I didn't mind these inconveniences much though. Fun game, and incredibly well done for a compo entry.

Peace Of Cake Games23 Oct 2020, 05:53

What with the simple controls, the graphics, and the music, if you had made this a few dozen years ago this would have been a hit on the Super Nintendo!

Keibii23 Oct 2020, 17:36

What a hilarious game! I had a lot of fun lol!

Matoux4224 Oct 2020, 13:02

What a game ! Really funny idea, I really like the topic and the gameplay. It's like a "chill bullet-hell" or something :smile:

JoaoG27 Oct 2020, 16:21

I really enjoyed that. The game looks well balanced, great audio and the graphics are very good, I loved the idea! It's a fun game, Great job!

By the way, thank you so much for playing my game in your stream! You play very well :v::grin:

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