One small step (ladder) for mankind, one giant leap for Astro the Astronaut! Traverse micro sized planetary puzzles with the help of Astro's trusty ladder.
Controls
1. Use ◀️ and ▶️ to walk around planet
2. 🅰️ button to pickup Ladder. Press 🅰️ again to drop it
3. While holding, you can use 🔼 and 🔽 to adjust grip point height. Press ❎ and 🇾 to shift your grip point along the ladder.
4. Place the ladder on 2 Planets, then press 🅱️ to begin climbing the ladder! Press 🅱️ again to try and get off, though you'll need to be close enough to a planet.
5. Reach the Red flag in each level to progress. There are 6 levels.
6. If you get stuck, restart the game with Control+R. The game saves you're level progress so it should send you back into the correct level.
Have fun!
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Here’s the button mapping if you’re using a keyboard
- Arrow keys for movement - “Z” on keyboard to pickup/drop ladder - “X” on keyboard get on/off ladder to climb
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Here's the cartridge if you'd like to play offline, or explore the source!
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Made in TIC-80 , written in the Janet Language, for Ludum Dare 54
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Post Submission Patch 1: fixed gamesave not loading correct level correctly on restart.
Made to the end and I had to "cheese" it a little bit by rapidly pressing buttons when I felt stuck. This is a great game, really cool effects in a TIC game!
Didn't make it to the end, as I softlocked myself on "Put your hands up" by climbing onto the ladder accidentally in space, where I couldn't climb back down. Clever mechanics, once you figure them out! Shifting the ladder along its length took some figuring out, partially due to the strange keybindings, but this is a great little puzzle game with some tough challenges. Well done! 🎉
Awesome take on the theme! At first, it made me think of that one boss fight from Yoshi's Island, but it's very much its own thing. The music is nice and serene - which is very much appreciated, given that the controls are a bit tricky - and the sound effects are really endearing, especially the bloops when the player character is climbing the ladder. I had a _lot_ of slowdown, which is understandable, given how much maths must be involved in all this. I'm not familiar with TIC-80 as much as I am with PICO-8, but this makes me want to give it a look!
A very interesting game concept. I really find it interesting (and rather difficult) to be able to think in this 2D space by taking the ladder so it works out. The graphics are really cool, and fit the game mechanics very well. I also think it matches the game theme really nicely. Net, a very robust entry, congratulations!
@john-gabriel thank you for the comment and report on slowdown! I also got some slowdown, but only on certain computers. I wonder if it could be browser dependent. The game is definitely NOT optimized, so that definitely is a factor.
In any case, I'll add some native builds for people to download which should run faster then the browser build.
I love this one. I love the art style, I love the gameplay, the character animation is very satisfying to watch. It fits the theme extremely well. This kind of traversal is very interesting, I'd love to see a more fleshed out prototype one day. Excellent work! 😁👍
I haven't run into TIC-80 before now, I guess it's similar in concept to PICO-8. I'm going to dig in and learn more later on today, I love this kind of thing.
Just a quick bug report though, probably more for TIC than you @alec but I can't get it to start at all in firefox. I get the white play button in front of the dark blue background, and nothing happens no matter I do. I was able to play it in Chrome however.
Really cool art style and satisfying controls! This has a nice Mario Galaxy vibe to it and the ladder system is really intuitive and smoothly animated. You can instantly tell how much polish and thought went into this one. Great work!
good: - very interesting and unique gameplay - great graphics and music; especially clear style for the art and it's all really polished, especially for a game jam
bad: - possible to get stuck on ladders you've hoisted up - physics/controls feel a bit janky/unintuitive (but I guess that's part of learning the game, and sort of fun, so maybe this isn't a real criticism)
This game has some really interesting ideas, and the visuals and music are absolutely stunning. Although there are a few minor issues, like occasionally getting stuck after climbing up a ladder and not being able to come back down even when in the same position. Overall it's a fantastic game.
I had major performance issues in Firefox, but Chrome showed some miracles and I was able to play the game with an adequate FPS.
I'm not sure I totally understood the rules behind moving the ladder when it's in the hands, but I managed to complete the game somehow. 😅 The ladder refuses to move sometimes and this can get frustrating. I had to restart the game once due to a softlock-like situation.
This game is quite clever in many ways. The sound design is one of my most favorite thing here. The puzzles themselves are somewhat simple in a sense that they usually can be completed by a trial and error without any real planning; but that's a very common issue with puzzle-like games that were made in a very limited time window. This game does show its main mechanic and that mechanic is quite impressive.
Great game! The mechanics were very well executed and the levels were very interesting. Got a bit stuck on the last one, and trying to reposition the ladder while holding it was a bit rough, but I made it all the way through and had a great time. Well done!
this is insanely cool! absolutely love the core mechanic, and the chip-tune is perfectly off-kilter to give it that out of space vibe. some really tricky puzzles in here, and recently, ive been loving anything to do with platformer puzzlers. fantastic entry!
This is my favourite game so far, great take on the theme IMO, graphics and sound effects are really nice (especially climbing the ladder) and gameplay is really enjoyable.
Sometimes the ladder wanted to do it's own thing but I was hitting it off everything 😅
This was a really cool little puzzle game! The asthetics and music/sound were great and really fitted the intruiging puzzley gameplat. Realy well done!
Maybe it was because I played on keyboard, but I had a bit of trouble moving the ladders where I wanted them. I especially did not know how I could move them up and down. The character seemed to just do that on their own sometimes. Pressing the up and down arrows sometimes helped, but sometimes did not. Anyway, I really liked the puzzle design, where you had to figure out how to get the ladder to the right place to get to the flag. I had a lot of fun :D
I found the movement and shifting of the ladder hard at first, but got there.
Great submission