Super Charged by Manumeq
Super Charged is an arcade game about a tiny little electron trying not to lose it's negative charge. How long will it last? How far can it get? It's all up to you! Make your way to the top, earn some highscores, upgrade your character with different power-ups and beat your records!!!!
Made by: https://twitter.com/Manum000 https://twitter.com/FranDekhey
(also, there's this weird legend about some secret key that makes you rich...)
/game/img?e=LD39&gid=36137&u=/DEVELOPER UPDATE\\
Hi there guys! It's Manumeq, from the Super Charged development team. First of all we would like to heartfully thank you all for your comments and feedback!. This is our first LD Jam, and we are overwhelmed to see just how supportive and positive everyone has been. We are very happy to hear that a lot of you folks enjoyed our little game, however, as some of you guys pointed out, the gameplay definetly needed some tweeking. We were full aware of this since the very release of the game, so we have been working in an update patch to fix this problems. Of course, the game in it's current state has been uploaded to a different link, so everyone can see and rate the game for how it was when the Jam timer hit 0 (overwritting the same link wouldn't be fair for the rest of the developers). Also, there's now and Android port of the game, so You will also find a link for the apk file. I will now leave you with the patch notes and changes, hope you keep enjoying Super Charged and thank you all again for your great support. Cheers! -Manu
//PATCH NOTES\
-Improved Difficulty: Positive energy decreases your jump force making you loose more charge and points.
-Auto Save: Coins and bought power ups are now autosaved between executions of the game.
-Optimization: The menu is much faster and no longer takes time to load between screens.
Ratings
| Overall | 543th | 3.167⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 405th | 3.167⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 575th | 2.806⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 361th | 3.583⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 601th | 3.028⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 358th | 3.121⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 516th | 2.1⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 730th | 2.515⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 65🗳️ | 41🗨️ |

However, the gameplay is definitely lacking. The penalties from the positive energy obstacles was small enough that I could just ignore them and be fine. After about a minute I started using an autoclicker which seemed to work just fine as I was getting enough energy pickups to offset the losses. Might've benefited from the ability to move side to side as well to engage the player some more, especially if the score pickups were placed to make the player move.
Amazing game. The graphics stand out and have their own character. Nice sound effects too!
Won't say anything about the gameplay because it was perfect.
Outstanding game. One of my favourites till now. Good luck and congratulations! :D
But the soft edged graphics really distracted. I wasn't sure how close I could cut it, so it felt like my timing was off when I made it or didnt.
The Obstacles felt randomly placed, not stacked at the same height I could jump so there were plenty of times I got stuck and had to power through a bunch of things instead of waiting for them.
The rotating fans were placed left or right of centre, so some of them you couldnt even time right, you just had to take the hit.
The overall mechanics though were great, this is a really cool concept.
I love that you start running out of power, and will eventually just fizzle out.
It's a great game idea, and nicely built.
5/5 for theme :D
Pity the save data didnt persist after closing it.
Avast freaked out and flagged it as malware, so I had to disable it temporarily.
I think with a bit of balancing and some kind of penalty for spamming would make it a solid game.
The idea itself is not half bad. I've seen these *upgrade-centric* types before (back in the days on the internet, mostly on mobile now-a-days) and as long as the core interactivity is enjoyable enough and the upgrades are frequent and poignant it can work. That's not quite the case here.
There are few choices to be made because it is all about timing and as pointed out by pretty much everyone and their dog, spamming works! Lastly the progress you've made isn't saved if the program is closed...
Good effort, unfortunately the end result doesn't live up to the potential of the genre.
Anyway thank you all for your supportive feedback, we have made an update to fix most of the problems you guys pointed out, so in case you come back to check the game's progress, feel free to comment again please, we'd love to hear your opinion.
Cheers!
It is good fun while trying to play properly though, so great job :grinning:
Let's start here: The gameplay, which was probably the best part of this game, is EXTREMELY similar to an app on the app store that Starbucks gave away for free like 6 months ago or something. I get that it's a simple idea and convergent designs exist, but this one was a little close for my liking. There is one where you are a ball and you just go up when you tap and if you hit an obstacle you lose, and then there is another where you are this little guy in a rocket I think, and when you hold down your rocket flies. The gameplay is basically this game except in it you died right away when you hit an obstacle and that you could hold instead of tap. Now, most of the people rating this have probably never played that game so they think this was entirely your idea and are rating it accordingly.
As far as art goes, the art would have been pretty good on its own, but it wasn't nearly as good as the game this is a clone of, so it kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth... (Also, how much of it is even yours?)
And I guess that leaves us with music and sound effects. Nowhere in your description, developer update, or patch notes (which almost no one reads anyway) are there any disclaimers about art, music, or anything else. Now, I do realize that this is a jam entry, and as such the rules are a little bit less rigid, but like, come on guys. If you didn't make the music, then just opt out of the audio category! And if you aren't going to do that, at least say somewhere what you made and what you didn't! At least 3 quarters of the people who rated you for audio did so under the impression that all of the sounds were made by you during the jam. I don't know about the background music that played during the main part, but I know for sure that your background music during the main menu/shop scene is something you just downloaded from the internet. (I know because I used the exact same music in a 30 second commercial I made for a [non-LD] game over 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=25&v=KTfANUbgR1E)
After this, it makes me wonder what part of this game you actually did make. The particles that are created when you die is just a Unity particle system with minor changes. Nearly all of the art in the game is a recolored version of the same steel texture--a texture which, if you didn't flat out copy like your first soundtrack, is one that you probably generated with a few clicks in Gimp of Photoshop directly following a YouTube tutorial. The fire (or whatever it was suppose to be in the steel-textured triangles) looked suspiciously good for someone who only has time to draw one real texture (if that) during the entire 3-day jam. At this rate, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it were a built-in Unity particle system.
Anyway, you get the point. When you submit a game, people think it is yours. If it isn't, you have to tell them that it isn't, otherwise you are screwing over all of the people that did actually make a game. Preferably, tell them by opting out of the categories that you didn't participate in, but at the very least but a disclaimer when you publish your game saying what music/art you did and did not create yourself.
-I like the concept of one colour being good and the other being bad, representing + and -.
-It was hard to tell when the triangle enemies were going to change colour, so they hit me a few times.
-The fuzzy border around the electron also made it difficult to know which objects it would collide with.
-I liked the simple gameplay idea. Having only one button was a great idea, although my only criticism of it is that it wore my hand out clicking so fast.
A pretty solid jam entry.
Our game is freely inspired by a very popular smartphone game called "Color Switch". Is a pretty known title where you are a small white ball that changes colours and have to go through multi-coloured obstacles, being only able to go through the ones that are the same color as your ball. It was one of the first games to use this kind of gameplay formula and a lot of games were inspired by it. We never heard about that game you mentioned, and We came up with the idea of Super Charged after seeing some Color Switch gameplay and tried to make something different with the same formula at the same time.
Secondly, the art is self made, except for the metal texture which was found using the google tools for Creative Commons 0. Aside from that single texture, all the art was made in roughly 6 hours using photoshop, or the unity particle systems. As an example, the "fire" you mention is a total of 6 particle systems heavily modified by ourselves within the editor with a custom material we created to make it look like some kind of ray. You probably guessed it by now, but none of us are artists, we are just rookies in that matter and did our best although the results are not as good as we would like. We are both programmers.
And finally, the music is nowhere to be mentioned in the description or the developer update because it is inside the game. If you enter the "Credits" section in the main menu, you will find that the music used is taken from bensound.com, always with the attribution Creative Commons License.
Hope this clarifies your doubts about the making process of the game. It is true that is not a fully original gameplay formula and definetly there are a lot of games extremely similar gameplay-wise, but we want to make ourselves very clear here:
We have not and We will not skip ethics by stealing another person's work; not in this game, and not in the games to come.
Cheers and thank you very much for taking your time and warn us about the rules, and how important is to keep people informed about the development process and assets work.
The concept behind the game is good too and I really did have some fun playing it! I'd insert a more "progressive" difficulty, though, making the player learn a bit how to read the patterns (if there's any when entities spawn).
But great job there! ;)