No improvising allowed XD
I love this kind of graphics. It brings back nice memories.
How did you made the music?

Nice idea, and nice mashup of genres. If you have the time to flesh it out a little more for a post-compo game, I think this could really work!

Hey thanks for the feedback! The music is made with Logic X. I actually checked in the project file as part of the source code, though I'm also using SoundToys plugins for FX. Besides those, though, it's all Logic's built-in sounds, just with a ton of processing.

Nice game! The billboarded enemy sprites in the 3d environment looked really nice. I also enjoyed the sound effects.
The gameplay was great, each enemy was different and required a different strategy to beat. With some more polish, this has the potential to be really great!

Good job, i liked it a lot. :)

Really like the take on the theme! Cool combination of cooking and shooting! Took me a little bit to figure out how to properly pick up monsters (about 3 trials, haha) but there is a good basis for this game to become very fun. Big fan of the big green pool that demands specific ingredients. :)

Fun and nice. A little wonky controls though

I really like this! While I'm not usually a fan of 3d games for jams, I think this one really worked; it was pretty polished and played great! I loved the cooking/fps combination, and the game stayed consistently fun throughout my playthrough. My only major criticisms were a few bugs. First of all, enemies could track you and shoot through walls, which felt unfair at times. Secondly, collision with a held monster often pushed you away. It would have been better if it held it in a set position in front of you for all monsters, rather than keeping them where they were when you picked it up. Otherwise, I really enjoyed my time! Nice work!

Thanks for the comments, everyone! Sorry about the wall collision bug (or rather, lack of wall collisions) - that and the wonky push physics were both things that I noticed but decided not to fix so I could do all the other stuff. It's a first time for me for a lot of these things, so I decided to call those "good enough" and then focus on the sound, music, gameplay - the stuff I've got more experience with. The picking up code is functional but could be better, definitely. That and the fact that you end up with your view blocked by whatever you're picking up - whoops.

Pretty decent. Gets a bit boring, but fairly well made

Hey everyone on the thread, I just updated Monster Stew to version 1.1. Check out the game description for details on what changed. Spoiler alert: Not much!

Well made! Looks like old school shooter.

Nice game! Nice mood, the controls were really good, the cooking part was a bit annoying and it feels like it is just in there to for the theme.. But it's fun to shoot enemies. And it's cool, that you gave the bullet the colors of Ludum Dare :)

Fun idea, great sounds and enemy names. The whole thing is pretty dark and strained my eyes to play very long.

@dwemthy I'm sorry that the game was too dark for you :( I wanted it to be feel moody and otherworldly but perhaps I took it too far? Do you have any recommendations? Did you play it with the lights on or off?

@BytingGames Sorry you didn't like the cooking part :( What about it could I have improved without doing a major overhaul of the game? I did try to design everything around that idea, so that's why the level is separated into sections that force you to go get monsters after you kill them and walk them back. It didn't occur to me that the bullets were LD colored but...sure, yeah, I did that on purpose, right?

@Kutase thanks for your feedback! Easy tip - all textures are set to use Point sampling (no smoothing) and that's an easy way to make everything look like software-rendered Quake.

@Aaron-Nemoyten Had lights on when I played, might have been some glare. A little more contrast between the walkway and the void below would have made a huge difference. The atmosphere created by the darkness was good in general though.

...
Maybe being able to collect multiple cooking parts, so that you don't have to walk all the way back for each monster. Or making the whole ground your cooking pot, so you can throw enemies inside the abyss anywhere to cook. But then it would be more like a quest game, killing x amount of y... Hmm maybe explore the cooking part more, for example that you have to come up with an own recipe to fill the needs of the customers and the enemies have different flavours. I think it's not that easy to make a fun cooking game espacially if you mix it with a shooter in three days.. So yeah you did pretty good :)
Oh the colors weren't on purpose xD

Good job! I don't really like the 2D billboard style for the enemies though. It looks rather ugly. Also, the enemy detection didn't really work that well, and the fact that the cooking pot is so small in one place is rather annoying (not to mention the fact that you die if you walk into it)

Good job, and good luck!

@notpresident35 What do you mean that the enemy detection didn't work very well? Each enemy type has a different "awake" radius - some will wake up only when you're really close, and some will wake pretty far away. And they always wake up if you shoot them.

I'm sorry you didn't like the billboarded sprites... the art is intentionally very basic and childish, and the fact that Bullion Cube is a sketched cube on a 2D plane is an intentional style/visual gag.

@BytingGames Thanks for the extra feedback and ideas. I did want the cooking mechanic to be deliberately very challenging; the original idea was to push enemies into the stew, which would have been even more difficult because you would have to avoid pushing them off the level by accident. It's also intentional that you can't really shoot while carrying a dead monster around; you always have to make the tradeoff of carrying versus shooting, like in a capture the flag game where you can't defend yourself while you have the flag.

That being said, I have thought about how this could be improved to make it a slightly larger game. Enclosed levels with set (instead of randomized) enemy layout could be fun if done properly. I don't want to just turn it into a fetch-quest game though. I love the idea of a protagonist hauling around these giant weird monster corpses that are all puns.

I liked this! The art and soundscape created a gritty alien place, and this played very well with the strange task set in front of me. The difficulty ramped well, with dog-O's letting me learn the ropes, but by the time I got to bullions I was getting snuck up on and surprised, then I had to whirl around in panic and not fall in my own stew! A nice moment.

I fell in the soup early, so I had a feeling that this was a full-restart game. Buckling down and being careful, I got to the artichokes with a few close calls that were enjoyable. But when I died at the artichokes and went back to the start of the game, I called it a day. I was enjoying myself but for these LD entries it's a little too much to ask me to repeat THAT much of the game to experience the next bit. Yet the threat of full restart certainly added tension, so it's a tradeoff.

The controls were mostly spot-on and worked well. I liked the travel time of projectiles, the movement speed, and the jumps. I noticed that if I keep looking down I flip around which was weird, but didn't really present a problem. I did have a few issues with the shooty-shoots blocking my view when I carried them, for example https://imgur.com/a/TXjqqnb But again not a serious problem by any means.

The punny names were a nice touch, add a kind of odd contrast to the gruesome task performed in this hellscape.

Overall a memorable and interesting entry, well done!

@pkenney wow, thanks for the detailed feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed the game so much. Sorry about the view blockage, it's just not something I got around to fixing before the deadline.

Curious - did you hear the Bullions' awake sound? Did you know what it was?

No, I guess I didn't... In fact I even remember thinking, "That guy could use a sound." My impression was I looked, nothing was there, I turned around and was reading the recipe and then I was being attacked. I'm trying to recall sound effects of his that I noticed. He definitely had a death sound, and I think there was another one I experienced mid-combat, too. But I don't recall hearing one before he attacked. Maybe I was just being inattentive though.

It sounds like a good idea (although I'm not really sure grabbing the enemies and throwing them in the pot really counts as a cooking game, it just seems like grabbing an objective item and taking it somewhere is something I've done in plenty of FPS's.

That I didn't mind so much, my main problem was the enemy spawns, yes, the game says they're random, but I played for about five minutes and only saw Dog-Os and whatever the green W things are (at first I thought they might be shooty-shoots, cause they shoot at me, but one of them was called for in the recipe and it wasn't that), so after that long without seeing anything else, I gave up (sorry!).

A couple of other minor problems: I managed to pick up a corpse in such way that I couldn't see it in front of me, and it seemed to be constantly pushing me backwards (I turned my view and I kept going backwards relative to my view), I didn't even think I was holding anything because I couldn't see it but I pressed F (at the "try everything" stage of problem solving) and I dropped it. Also, I pressed escape (assuming it was pause) and while it seemed to lock me in position and rotate my view slowly, the enemies still came at me.

But it's still a good start of a game (last time I tried to make an FPS for Ludum Dare I didn't make anywhere near as far as you did and ended up not submitting) and I think it could be great if you had a bit more time to work on it... which is what I say about a lot of the games I see because it's so often true!

Hey! Actually it was a pretty cool experience. The mechanics works well. Love the monsters design (more especially the bouillon cube). I didn't notice there was a recipe to follow at first (and i miserably died XD). Perhaps some little icons instead of text can help for that. Good job! :)

@pkenney Okay, thanks. The Bullion Cube does have an awake sound, but it's a whistle and it's probably too quiet. It was supposed to be kind of a joke that in hindsight doesn't make as much sense as I thought it did on very little sleep.

@Slashee the Cow I'm surprised you didn't see a wider variety of enemy spawns. Thing is, the other enemies won't start spawning until you need them. It is theoretically possible that you just took so long to fulfill the first few orders that all the spawn points got filled up with Dog-O's and Shooty Shoots, so when it came time for other stuff to appear there just wasn't room for it! If that is what happened, I hope you can give the game another shot and try to just get the first few recipes out of the way faster.

Escape was supposed to be a mouse lock/unlock thing so I wouldn't get stuck in the editor; it's not really supposed to do anything useful in-game... though I have experienced some weirdness when alt-tabbing in and out of the app that Escape seemed to fix.... sort of.

@arche-san Glad you enjoyed it! I decided to punt on doing any fancy UI to focus on other stuff, so that's obviously got mixed results if you didn't notice the recipe at all in the beginning :)

Like the game a lot! Everything fits in place and great execution. Loved the way you did monsters! Great job :)

@machrom thanks!!!