November Hail - LD39 by alexJ
November Hail is our first Ludum Dare and is the first game that I (alexJ) have properly finished. Although it is still incomplete, we're very proud of what we've accomplished and hope that you enjoy roaming our small, buggy and randomly generated levels.
November Hail is a game about a guy who helps restore a town's energy by killing scary, robot crabs. You can sell the scraps of these crabs for more energy. This can be put to waste by killing more crabs with your energy consuming laser gun. If you ever happen to fully run out of energy, you can borrow a loan from the banker, but you will need to pay it back or you'll be sitting around for a very, VERY long time.
Anyway, we hope you enjoy the game as much as we enjoyed making it. Next time I'll definitely try to better my workflow to get more basic tasks done sooner, as the first few days were not too productive. Thanks!

Ratings
| Overall | 700th | 2.926⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 765th | 2.519⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 814th | 2.2⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 779th | 2.654⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 490th | 3.333⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 543th | 2.28⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 731th | 2.5⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
Shooting works fine, although the bullet never seems to actually hit something but keeps going until no longer on screen. The enemies should have some kind of hit point display to see how much damage was actually dealt. In the beginning it took three shots to kill them, but at some point I couldn't hit them at all (?) or did the just have more hp?
The music got a little repetitive, the melody fit the town nicely, just try to play with it some more, extend the loop to at least a minute and it should be fine.
But I played for some good minutes, I only stopped cuz I needed to rate it and play more games =)
Nice job guys!
@somethinboutgames basically said my other problems with the game right now.
With some more work put into it and more content, I think it will make a great platformer.
The graphics are good, but remind me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o16EmvSyNg.
Overall good game!
Shortly after the game starts, the background turns red and there's strange collider thing.
Looking forward to play the game still!
Some suggestions to improve quality for future game jams:
- Character sticking on walls: the usual reason for this issue is there's too much friction. I don't know how you setup physics properties in your case, but generally you want to set 0 friction and 0 bouncing for characters collision to be able to slide along walls easily.
- Character sliding too much: the best way to avoid frustration when your game involves some platforming is to start with a lot of linear drag on your character controller (the velocity should be 0 when there's no player input). This way you make sure you can deliver with the best possible accuracy, and then you can change it back to just a little bit of inertia later if you have some time left to polish and you want to make it look smoother.
- Game pad support: it seems it would be easy to add in your case because I can already move with the game pad stick. But the buttons don't work, and that would be a nice easy addition you can re-use through different game projects.
@c0nst4ntin I do remember watching that video quite a while back, Mort is the person a learnt to pixel art from in the first place! When I was making the textures I guess it was the first thing I thought of :grin:
The graphic and the sounds is good ;)