Takomakase by Zambini
🐙 たこ 任せ Tako Makase 🍣
Ludum Dare 40 Compo Entry

Ludum Dare Page- Zambini845 - GitHub - itch.io
Theme
The more you have, the worse it is
Objective
Serve as much sushi as you can, you're the best chef in the land. You're also an octopus.
Gameplay
Sushi will come by on three conveyor belts. You must prep, cut, and plate sushi as it comes by. Don't let the sushi get to the end. Press the key above the Sushi to start working on it. Each one requires three steps to complete.

As you get bigger combos, you'll get into the rhythm of things and start getting to use more arms. In the beginning you can only use two arms, but each time you level up you get to use two more arms. Once you hit level 3, you'll be able to use all 8 of your arms! But don't get too comfortable, if you mess up you will have to go back down to using only a couple arms.
Controls
You'll need all your tentacles for this one, but don't worry it starts out easy.
Q W E R- Top Left AreaA S D F- Middle Left AreaZ X C V- Bottom Left AreaU I O P- Top Right AreaJ K L ;- Middle Right AreaN M , .- Bottom Right Area[- Volume down]- Volume up
Tools
- Phaser.io Engine
- BoscaCeoil Audio
- Pyxel Editor Sprites
| Source code | https://github.com/randonia/ld40 |
| HTML5 (web) | https://zambini.itch.io/takomakase |
| HTML5 (web) | http://randonia.com/ld40 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/takomakase |
Ratings
| Overall | 552th | 2.944⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 581th | 2.722⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 220th | 3.417⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 425th | 3.263⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 518th | 2.816⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 422th | 2.639⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 490th | 2.735⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 10🗨️ |
(if you want to be super sneaky, you can edit dist/js/keys.js and dist/js/zone.js to re-map to AZERTY ;) It's "mostly" data-driven, so if those two align it *should* work™.....)
The concept of the game, however, was pretty solid. I liked the octopus idea and the wrapping belts was a neat idea for potentially making things more hectic, but again, things needed to escalate to that point to get that to happen.
Also, the music is a good start, but I think it should be longer and more varied. You don't have to go crazy, but try having it go through more of a chord progression. Even just having a second half that's one step higher in key would go a long way towards making it less repetitive.
After I got a hang of having four tentacles, the game became a bit too easy - so it would have been nice to ramp it up after you have completed x meals. Items that need multiple prepares, or only on certain areas, or have a toggle for having a different utensil somewhere.
But a nice start to a parallel processing stress game! :)
There should be a different way to fail than just pressing the wrong key. I found it really easy to immediately level down as soon as you get extra tentacles because they just appear and there's no pause or anything to indicate that to you. It was also really easy to try to press a key during a time when you can press two keys for one sushi, or right when one goes off the screen, but press it just barely too late and it penalizes you. The conveyer belt shouldn't go off the screen until the actual end (at least in my opinion).
Maybe if you had to track which sushi you already fully prepared, it could work as the gameplay challenge. Like, you would have to prep+cut+plate one, and then let it go off the end. But if you left it underprepared or you tried to press the key for it again when it was complete, you would lose a life. Or if you pressed an incorrect key, one of your tentacles would be unable to do anything for a second instead of just losing the extra ones. Or both.
It took me a while to realize that the belts actually form one big belt: I was testing how playable it still was if I just mashed the top row (it works that way, but it's a bit less fun than playing it properly).
'One mistake and you're back to 2 arms' felt a little punishing to me. I mean, sure, you don't even loose health, but gaining arms is the actual fun part of the game. Maybe you could add the arms one-by-one instead of in powers of two? Then you could just remove a single one in case the player messes up.
I don't think anyone mentioned, so perhaps it's just me, but I don't think the music loops? Sound effects would've also helped a lot!
Keep up the good work!