Herding Humans by MWB
Get all the stupid humans to the saferoom before the doors shut! Make sure you don't get locked out either, because they can't do anything without you. Objects will get in your way, you will get stuck in doorways and humans will run back into danger.
Sacrifices will be made, lives will be lost.
I broke the theme down into two core concepts:
1) Available space being taken away from you.
2) Filling a space with more and more objects until it gets chaotic.
Combined they became the idea of grabbing as much as you possibly could from a shrinking spaceship and stashing it in a small space before time ran out. As this was my first Ludum Dare entry I did a terrible job of documenting my workflow as I was too busy just making things work in time.
Solo project. Made with Unity3D/Blender/Photoshop/Reaper/Audacity from scratch. 2x8 hours slept.


(I spent a non-insignificant amount of time swearing and laughing at the seemingly suicidal humans)
---Added Web Port---
| Source code | https://github.com/JustAnotherFool/LudumDare_42/ |
| Windows | https://www.dropbox.com/s/ikp53hqo4bo0yia/HH.zip?dl=1 |
| HTML5 (web) | https://mwb.itch.io/herding-humans |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/herding-humans |
Ratings
| Overall | 521th | 3.121⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 639th | 2.603⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 470th | 2.985⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 357th | 3.574⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 194th | 3.667⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 284th | 3.076⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 117th | 3.2⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 147th | 3.435⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 39🗳️ | 4🗨️ |
Several times I was carrying a human, and I tried to go through a doorway only for Mr Roboto to suddenly steer to the side and stop himself on the wall inside the doorway. After that, I tried to reverse out, but instead of backing up out of the doorway he just turned to face the wall, so that there was a wall both directly in front of me, and directly behind me. Leaving me with no option but to try and execute a 3 point turn to try and straighten myself out so that I can escape the sticky clutches of the doorways of doom.
I see that there is probably a very fun (and funny!) game here, but I was too distracted by wrestling the controls and trying not to get stuck that I couldn't find the fun in it.
Grabbing the humans could also be a bit of a chore if they ran toward boxes.
Art and lighting are good, music loop is short but gets the job done.
I wish there was a way to end the level early, it seems like I had to wait for the last room to close despite it being empty.
Overall nice work for a compo entry!
Controls were ok, but yes when colliding into stuff my tank wasn't very tanky, more ballony :D Maybe increase angular drag.
Try our game too, maybe you'll like it)
Also there are "humans" unreachable from the beginning (random generation?)
Excepted those small points, nice idea and realisation, the use of the theme is simple but works fine and nice arts also ^^
Here is a list of improvement :
- I think the main issue of your game is the collisions of the tank.
Every time i was hitting a wall and i couldn't pass doors correctly. I think you should increase the size of the doors because it's very difficult to pass throught them.
- You should decrease a bit the alarm sound because it's to loud in my opinion
- Wait like 15/30 seconds before the first alarm because overwise it's impossible to save the first human
- Make a first room to let the player handle the controls, make him move in a room and put block in front of the exit to make the player grab and release objects for the example
- Add some feedback when we put a human in the safe zone could have been great too because i didn't even knew if it worked or not and if the human was saved
- Light a bit more the scene since it is difficult to see why i was colliding and all :)
Update me if you have a new version of your game ! ;)
I absolutely agree that the game is a "smidge" too frustrating to play. Had there been more time for polish/reflection I would have made changes that would have made the controls less frustrating. Specifically I would have altered the robots collider and reduced wall friction so you don't get "caught" and rotated as often as well as other minor changes.
>Rules:
>Certain Bug Fixes are allowed. You can’t add new features, but if something broke or didn’t work correctly as you were finishing up, you can fix this after the deadline
Unfortunately I feel that it would be unfair to fix these things as part of a bug-fix because everything is working as intended when I originally posted the game. At least while the ratings are on-going. It's not the end of the world :]
If you're interested in more details I wrote a short post-mortem/bts of the game here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/herding-humans/herding-humans-compo-entry-post-mortembehind-the-scenes
- Simple to understand
- A little touch of humor on humans
- Hard challenge
Cons:
- Frustrating moving mechanic (Maybe physics is messing everything)
- Repetitive music loop
:Anyway, for a compo game that is a nice work.
:point_right: It's been said before, but it's quite upsetting that this game could have been so much more fun to play if the character didn't get stuck in LITERALLY EVERY DOORWAY, AHHHH!!! ^_^ Sorry about that... throw out realism (let the arms clip into the walls), and use a capsule collider, we will all thank you.
:bulb: The robot gave me a bit of a Rumu vibe, of course the narrative is completely different. ^_^
:star: Overall great job. Thank you for making this!
:thumbsup: The theme use is amazing, and the graphics are superb! The ideas in this are great.
:confused: However, again - I didn't like the controls, I constantly got stuck on the doors. If it didn't get caught it would make for a more entertaining game.
:fist: Well done with what you during the competition! Nice one...