Earworm Jam

This game cured my tinnitus.

Dropped by your twitch streams a few times throughout this jam. Love how it turned out with the ear instead of the original frog-man!

This was really fun. Great cute/weird/funny graphics and I liked running to the beat of the song telling me I am going to die, which I did

Great experience. It's really different from anything I've seen here, and as a musician, I loved the rhythmic thing. Worth noting it was well implemented as well.
Very nice game overall, congrats!

Loved the rythim game and those lyrics are really sticky hahahahah
we are gonna die
like everyone else

A masterpiece!

Ran nearly a mile before a toothed sausage ate my ear. The soundtrack is great and makes me smile. The run buttons could be duplicated on the left and right mouse buttons. Overall great job!

Very nice rythm game with good humor! Unfortunately i miss an important mechanic - i am getting eaten up by the very short after he appeared. I have done the tutorial and run to use some stamina, but didn't make it to the first powerup.

@marin0104 It is definitely a game designed to make you try a few times before you can get good results! It took me awhile before I could get very far at all.

I love the music !! It's a pretty dope anthem bro. Fun game overall nice concept.

Wow that was interesting. The soundtrack was hilarious and the art was weird in a good way. Running faster didn't feel very intuitive after running to the rhythm but maybe that's just me.

Very good and funny music! It's a music that stick in your head.

An ear as character! Why not :smile:

This is perfect and hilarious at the same time xD Very fun game, great work! That music is everything

The song was absolutely amazing. 10/10. Would listen to again.

Haha this was adorable, and I love that you made an actual earworm for the earworm game - its damn catchy! The song kinda reminded me of the Lava / volcanoes song that Pixar did a while ago. Super cute and nice!

Once I understood the mechanic was more than *just* getting perfect beats, I got much further. Got around 1600 on my best run, then the jump was too slow to avoid obstacles in a row haha. Really good submission, super impressed!

What...the...
I want Google to replace the "no internet" dinosaur running game with this! Really weird and well done!

Loved the sound design overall, the song made me snort when it first started. The look and feel of the game was great too but the sound was on point. Great job!

This is very fun and every time I lose, I blame the chaotic energy of the song

Best game of 2022 confirmed! Step aside Elden Ring

Ill probably be fired after singing this to my self for 8 hours straight at work tomorrow.

Easy 5 stars on audio btw :D Ive been sitting in the death screen just listening to this for minutes!

GOTY 2022 - 2023 and 2024 confirmed

This is the best thing i've played all year, after stopping i can just feel an emptiness in my ears.
When is this track dropping on spotify, i need it in my life

LOL this game is hilarious. Love the graphics and the music. Very innovative making a rythm-based "endless" runner. Really enjoyed this game!

Two words: the song

really funny! great game, wish the input of left right, matched the left right feet, rn it feels very unrelated to the actual characters movement. but thats my only note!

Super weird, super fun. Great job!

Do I win

First I thought that the music theme will be annoying, but it's really good:D Nice lyrics as well!
Gameplay idea is great, but little confusing. But overhaul - amazing experience, thank you!

Very weird game, but the music is a masterpiece.
P.S. often freezes for a while

@nardandas That is as close to winning as I've seen for sure!
That being said, you may have lost cause that song is going to be stuck in your head for awhile if you're at all like the rest of us mortals!

How did you come for this idea? Ahahahah
Music is gorgeous
Lyrics - thematical
"Like an everyone eeeeelse
You gonna diiiiiiie!"
I know what I will sing tomorrow:D

@gandelianna Trying to think of what was inevitable, not depressing, and not something we would be upset about stopping.
Ear worms, they're the worst without actually being *that* bad.

The rest was the genius of the others and I did not follow their majestic leaps to this piece of art so I cannot speak for them.

Thank you though! :D

Found the juice slider! Love this- but I can't beat 41, even with the juice turned up. I'll try ooooone more time. Fabulous song. Thanks for the game!

I couldn't figure out the last mechanic, my highest was 542.

Great entry overall, adding the annoying voices to throw off your rhythm was truly genius.

I'm...in love with this game

Oh my gosh so many comments! Thanks all for the feedback! I'm glad the ear worm is infecting so many people :grin:

Second guessing my choice to not be more explicit on telling people one of the core game mechanics or being a lot more obvious with it. There's hints from the combo text as you get more combos, but it takes time to unlock and most people in jams aren't going to run into it.

@bhughes We thought about that at first, but the issue is that we want to encourage people to spam the left/right quickly as well and there's no way to get that to look good animation wise without spending the whole jam on animation tech, so we settled on making the left/right increase/decrease your overall run speed.

@anoma1y Sorry about the random freezes, that's an issue with loading in audio for the first time in HTML5 that I couldn't find any solutions for. It should be smooth after things have played though, although mileage will vary based on your PC of course.

@nardandas You do indeed win as far as I've seen! My personal record is 2500 and you blew right past that, well done!

For those not figuring out the mechanic, I wrote a post with some more information about that here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/earworm-jam/on-making-mechanics-obvious

But, I do want people to have a chance of figuring it out on there own so do give it a try :)

So creative and original. I love the music and the mood. Well done!

Bizarre :D

1811 is my high score. It's so relaxing to play. It's really the perfect concept. A giant ear listening to the distant drumming of desert music to channel its energy forward despite knowing its eardrum will rupture. God I wish I could sing like that!

Wow, what a bizzare experience. *I love it.*

The graphics and audio are well-produced, and both fit together well in how absurd they are. The gameplay is fun in terms of seeing just how far I could get (the answer is not very-about 600 points was my highest). I did notice what you spoke about in your 'making mechanics obvious' with perfects causing more harm than good (so much so that the previously mentioned high score came from purposefully button-mashing and getting a ton of offbeats). Other than that quirk in the game design, I had a lot of fun being confused at the absurdity of this one. Good entry!

This game is a real treat. The hardest thing to do is get back on beat after getting ahead of the worm. I can't get much further than 550. :( I'll keep playing and hopefully I won't be humming this when I got to sleep tonight. :D

Welp, it sure was evitable, I mean, all the signs were there. The worm, the ear, the music, I should've known, but here we are, stuck with this catchy song in my head just before going to sleep. I can't imagine what kind of dream I'll have. Anyway, congrats on your game! The core mechanic was indeed hard to get, but the AAAH moment was worth it.

I always admire anyone crazed enough to make a rhythm game for a game jam. The entire game is so absurd and I loved every second of it - definitely one of my favorite games I've seen from this jam. Only gripe is the juice boxes were hard to see against the sandy background, but it's a pretty miniscule issue. Great work!

Thank you everyone for your kind words! I'm so happy that so many of y'all have enjoyed playing our weird little game! However, I am very disappointed at the lack of Dune fans in the audience ;)

What a wonderfully weird game. Very difficult, but I loved the absurd character and the animations were really well done. Great job on this game!

Constructive feedback: adding gameplay depth via a hidden mechanic when gamejam play sessions are so short is a pretty big risk.

Wow, the moment where the camera turns to bring the earworm into view really got me xD
Hard to play but a very nice entry.

Awesome game! Like others have said, I think the song will be stuck in my head all day lol. Top notch humor and gameplay. Well done!

Is the title a reference to Earthworm Jim ? Damn I'm gonna have nightmares about that ear chasing me... So wacky and fun, love it, great job !

@forgin-bits that it is! Glad you enjoyed the nightmare fuel that we made lol

lol, this game is hilarious! Amazing concept! Great music! Great graphics! Great references to a classic Sega game. Really cool distraction worms playing off-beat tunes.

Excellent game. The sincronicity with the music as a mechanic is a wonderfull idea. Nothing to improve, congratulations!

That was a blast! Fun game, simple catchy song!

@not-tomo oh dang, I think we have a new high score! Thanks for playing :)

Rather fun game! I don't think I've gone as far as others here, but I had fun nonetheless. Certainly a 5 in audio! That tune will be burned into my brain for a while.

dune part 2

Why is this d*ckhead chasing me? As a result, it is really fun to play and it is much more enjoyable if you choose a different pattern instead of a stable rhythm. Don't say you heard it from me but WE ALL GONNA DIEEE!

Had a lot of fun playing this and it's a really cool and inventive concept that fits the theme perfectly. I did have some pretty major audio issues (in Chrome) and even reloading didn't solve them. Oddly having it open in another tab that I wasn't looking at caused the audio to play perfectly. Not sure if that helps you track it down, but hopefully it's helpful! Great job and congrats on finishing!

Super hilarious and at the same time disturbing! xD I really suffered for my ears jajaja! The music is undoubtedly the best, the 3d art is very good, perhaps it does not run very well in the web version. Excellent work!

This was amazing! Love the graphics and music! I never felt so happy about knowing I was going to die :D Great work!

A 1300 on my first run, was a fun experience!

The jumping felt a little bit janky, but the rhythm bits worked very well!

@nsadie I'll take the blame for the janky jumping. I'm still very much a rookie at character animation, especially with timing. The entire animation, including the verticality of the jump, was done by keyframe animation in Blender instead of having the vertical movement handled by code. I don't know why we did it this way, you'd have to ask @ursagames
Also if it's any consolation, I hate the jump too.

Is it just me?

@spooderdooder don't be too hard on yourself! I don't think it spoils the game, but look into using a tweening library and do the jump in code as it is easier to tweak!

This game is hilarious. Who made up these lyrics lol max distance 1023.4

FYI:

Playing on Windows 7, Chrome browser and it took 5 reloads to get the game to start. It freezes from time to time as you hit the rhythm causing you to lose the rhythm but I will keep trying it to see if it is because I haven't loaded the sound effect before.

In other words, fantastic job making this earworm that will stay with me for days. I mist share this with my team lol It's inevitable~~~

Glad so many people are enjoying it so far! Thanks everyone for your comments!

@asukanami Not sure why that would show up, but the game does require WebGL and will run awfully without hardware acceleration on. I only have tested it on chrome personally, but I had reports of it working fine on edge and firefox as well.

@vixenmink Game does require hardware acceleration to run decently with webGL, also it should run better if you don't reload the browser but just play another round it should be more consistent. There's an issue with audio loading in Godot with multiple scenes on HTML5 export and having hiccups when loading the audio for the first time.

@shadow64 That's really odd! From what I've found there's some issues with audio loading in on HTML5 export in godot with multiple scenes, but once it's been loaded once it's in memory and should be smooth after that.

@gamesplusjames Glad you enjoyed it! I had a blast making it :)

I'll try and get a windows version exported for people to play as well, the current issue is there's some bug in export that changed the lighting so we tweaked the game to look decent on web sacrificing how it looks on a standalone build.

@ursagames I think the hardware acceleration being turned off is what did it for me. I ran it in Chrome Canary with H.Accel turned on and that actually made it run great with the sound and everything. So I imagine that's what was causing my issues. Might be worth putting that on the itch page since I think a few people might have theirs turned off. Thanks for the info so I could come back and replay! :smile:

@shadow64 Good idea, I went ahead and added that to the itch page! Thanks for trying it again :)

@ursagames No problem! Happy to help and well worth it! :)

fun experience loved the song - I was bad at the game though!

I was also terrible at this game! My high score was 300 I think. Trying to jump and walk both in time was surprisingly difficult for me :)

Love the song, and how happy the worm is when they catch you.

🎵You're goooonnaaa diiiiieeee🎵

very innovative take on the rythm games i think you guys created a veery interesting mechanic here thanks for sharing also since it gave me inspiration for my game too! well done on everything :smile: very polished too

Hilarious game and great concept, can't really fault this game so good job. Great submission.

Aside from jumping this was a marvel. Had alot of fun playing it, and obviously loved the vocals and audio references. Really didn't feel like the jump worked with the rhythm no matter what I did though.

Loved this lol. I only wish there was more of an indicator for the actual distance between you and the worm. Still, alternating between sprinting and normal running and jumping is great. And the music ( oh gawd the music ) is damn good lol. I honestly couldn't help laughing at all the absurdity in this game lol. Especially the worms who were singing what I thought was the final countdown lol. Awesome entry all around

what

i don't know what i just played

Great game tho

I need a link to that track haha! I just watched Dune so this really had me giggling.

Really cool game!! The idea is super original, the song is so good it's, well, a earworm, the gameplay is really engaging and the humor+mood+graphics are priceless (so many little things going on in the desert

Jeez, this looks really good. Not just "game jam" good, but just good, period. I'm a sucker for rhythm games so the gameplay loop really appealed to me as well. Maybe I just have no rhythm though, but I felt like the timing window of the key presses was too narrow. Maybe that part could be tweaked a bit to not be as strict.

Btw, that song is brilliant.

For some reason I keep dying in the start, even if my rhythm has no errors. Game feels as high quality joke. And it's good one.

Spoilery Stuff for gameplay mechanics ahead!

@morricore Yeah, we definitely didn't make that aspect of the game obvious enough that this is actually an anti-rhythm game. Another huge joke as a Dune reference that's in there by just by hidden mechanics... well and one of the worms does reference Fatboy slim - Weapon of Choice when you walk by. The hint that the pink text combo messages are the big worm isn't very obvious especially since people tend to not pay much attention them.

@shrillwhip It's possible the delay is different based on your audio / video devices could make it desynced, but the window is actually probably more generous than it should be for the fact that it's an anti-rhythm game.

ok this was definitely weird and fun haha!

I liked the art, the sound, the overall mood here. The concept was a bit too cryptic for me and that was a bit unpleasant at first, even if losing was still fun because of those awesome animations and great music!

Great job on this it's quite something 🪱

I liked the graphics and the music was funny, you did well with the humor.

I'm really not sure about deliberately misleading the player on how to play the game, it didn't lead me to an AHA moment as you mentioned in your blog post, it just annoyed me.

From a technical standpoint, it was a well put together entry. It's nice to see options and a tutorial in a game jam game.