Little Mouse Planet by Frodewin

You are a small mouse on a small planet trying to survive! Luckily, seeds are just falling from space onto your planet. But sometimes, also other things come for a visit...
Control with arrow keys and space bar.
Sounds have been generated with bfxr during the Compo, others been recorded and modified with Audacity. Music has been initially generated with Autotracker and processed with mplayer. Graphics were drawn with the built-in editor of Scratch and occasionally further edited with Corel Photo Paint.
Packaging was done with Junebeetles .sb2 to swf converter and the swfzip tool.
The game, including all its assets are provided as open source under CC-BY-SA-3.0 This game was made with Scratch, a versatile graphical programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. See http://scratch.mit.edu.
Links
- Game (plays in browser): https://frodewin.itch.io/little-mouse-planet
- Source Code download at https://frodewin.itch.io/little-mouse-planet
- Source Code opening in Scratch online editor: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/156772967/#editor
Ratings
| Overall | 345th | 3.143⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 291th | 3.114⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 221th | 3.257⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 71th | 3.971⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 356th | 2.972⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 236th | 3.03⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 96th | 3.333⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 175th | 3.364⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 51🗳️ | 58🗨️ |
Nice concept, and I liked the fact that you could hide behind the bush to avoid the giant purple alien cat thing.
Good job! :D I kept starving due to starvation. I wasn't sure how to turn the seeds into eatable food.
ps. @jupiter-hadley add this game to your video https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/bitverse ;)
Also I think that the cheese/fruits takes too long to grow because I died because of the hunger several times. Except this, I think it's a good game done in 48h, good graphics, good idea. Maybe that the mouse (and the cat too) could run faster, it could have been more enjoyable.
I like the overall feel though, and the sound design! Nice work in Scratch!
I managed to survive for 36 days, but the difficulty plateaued pretty early on in the game, and this made it more of an endless game of patience, which means dying of boredom to see how many days you survive. :P
Some issues:
- Pressing the C key twice results in this screen popping up:

- If you press the C key again at that screen, it cycles through a bunch of numbers in the centre of the screen (with the Game Over text gone), from 0 to 9, before sending you back to the titlescreen.
- Like I mentioned above, once I understood how everything worked, the game didn't really offer much difficulty. I think there are several ways to approach this (and if you wanted to continue working on the game more after this, the progression of difficulty in an endless game like this would be the best thing to focus on imo). For instance, sleeping in the house lowered my tired metre, but also restored my health. This was probably the thing that made the game too easy. Maybe over time, the speed of the cat could increase and more bushes could be added, etc. These are just things you could consider, but you definitely don't have to do exactly that.
The game, aside from those issues above, is solid. The titlescreen music, by the way, sounds like it was made in ORG Maker. I was surprised, when I looked at your game page, that this was not the case.
Graphically the game has an interesting aesthetic. I liked the cute characters, although the animation was slightly jagged sometimes. UI was good but seriously, the controls were very weird and probably needed UI explanations of some sort.
The sound effects weren't great but I appreciate they were there. I LOVED the voices! Really nice touch though I would have liked if the cat's voice was set apart more somehow. The music in the title screen was ok. Probably could have used some gentle in-game music too.
The gameplay suited the small world theme well. It wasn't super-innovative but it did the genre justice and was really fun for a time, which is all I can really ask for. The water > food > survival mechanic was simple and it worked. It could have increased in complexity as the game progressed, to avoid repetition of the same challenge.
Overall I enjoyed the entry and congratulate you on an awesome job.
The controls could be a bit clearer. I never figured out that I had to use the down key to eat the fruits. I only found out by reading your comments here :P
Great job, I cannot imagine the degree of difficulty it was undertaking this.
The sounds do the job.
Maybe more of a story / objective is needed
Cute, fun game.
Nice job!
In regards to the gameplay, it appears that it's basically impossible to survive if you don't immediately start watering the first cheese. This seems a bit unfair, especially for players just starting out. Past that, the main problem is that the game is very repetitive - the only way to win is to water plants, sleep, hide from cat, repeat. I'm not entirely sure what new variety could be introduced, but that's definitely the main point to improve on.
Also, kudos for making successful rotary controls. Several other games have confusing controls because the player moves, not the world, but this game doesn't have that problem.
Congrats with your game. :D
That ended just as one would expect. :laughing:
Mouse not smart enough to put food in mouth. Mouse starves in front of a pile of cheese. RIP mouse.
As for feedback, like others I also kept trying to eat the cheese seeds until I found out they weren't immediately edible and you had to take care of them. Some other actions weren't clear enough (for example, I managed to fill the watering can by accident, after I'd been trying to interact with the well unsuccessfully), so I ended up starving on my first playthrough.
Good job! It is interesting to find games developed in Scratch :)
My cat was disturb when she was hearing the meow.