The explorer by Stepan Shabalin
It's a small roguelike game; you play as a ball who got into a whole new world of cubes. It's controlled only with a mouse; it's pretty tough!!
I made it by cutting features; "the more you have, the worse it is", a wise man said.
Please leave comments!
P.S
Don't play the HTML5 version; it got damaged.
| HTML5 (web) | https://neverik.itch.io/explorer |
| Windows | https://neverik.itch.io/explorer |
| macOS | https://neverik.itch.io/explorer |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-explorer |
Ratings
| Overall | 580th | 2.894⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 497th | 2.941⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 352th | 3.147⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 671th | 2.074⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 567th | 2.632⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 483th | 2.147⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 515th | 1.963⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 558th | 2.516⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 50🗳️ | 5🗨️ |
The level generation was nice. The first time I ran into a circle I was wondering how I was supposed to get over that without rolling off. That's also where it clicked that the player sticks to surfaces.
If you ever decide to iterate on this I highly recommend you do something to keep the player moving fast.
I will release a Jam entry with fixed music.
I like the minimalist graphics, but having a small animation or something else would have make the game more living. I liked the music, simple and a little bit short but well-fitting the game.
Good job !
One improvement you could make - the further the mouse is from the player when you click, the more powerful the jump (and vice versa). That's something that most of these sort of games do.
I had my mom play it, she didn't do very well, the first enemy is too quick for her :P
Also, the behavior was sometimes quite unpredictable. I never managed to get over those circles with the red spikes on top, because I couldn't adjust my brain to the weird sticky-gravity-effect. I also sometimes managed to jump while in the air (don't know if that's intended...), and I was trapped under the platforms a couple of times, still being able to jump, but unable to get back on the platforms:

Visually the game is appealing, just the right level of detail for it not to be boring to look at, and not too cluttered. I think your minimalistic interpretation of the theme is valid and well implemented. Nicely done!
You've spotted the only bug I can find. I just couldn't fix it before the deadline!
**Cons:** Sometimes controls are weird - feels like too much friction. Music fits the beginning when you have to escape but gets repetitive quickly.
Overall a neat game, not too much to complain about. The controls are easy to pick up and hard to master, but are not that fun to play with. Game is too difficult right away, and there are no checkpoints, which made me quit after about 10 tries.
Save points would have been cool, since I am not that good at these kind of games :D
The minimalistic graphics also worked well. Red=bad, Grey=ok
Once I got stuck

Also love that the level is sometimes different beyond a certain point, that helps ease the pain of failing and having to start from the beginning over and over.
Planning to make it fully 3D and make a stickman the main character.
This LD was totally awesome!!!!!!
Edit : Oh, my bad, just saw you were a fellow Compo-er. Well it's a even much nicer game if it was made in 48 h ! Good job, really ! Will boost the score even more then
Come check out my game if you like!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/virus-detected
(if you used unity to make this game, you could recompile the web version till it works. That worked for my broken web build at least)