Save the litle Planet! by igalencar
You are a smal player on the quest to get all coins from 28 small planets.
Jum trought the gravity rifts to travel from one planet to the other.
And beware of the space bats.
https://itch.io/embed-upload/454718?color=333333
Ratings
| Overall | 72th | 3.971⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 137th | 3.676⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 268th | 3.353⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 160th | 3.829⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 108th | 4.314⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 63th | 3.971⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 261th | 2.967⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 156th | 3.727⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 2🗳️ | 0🗨️ |
(here is ours for you or anyone to game on! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/moped-mayhem)
A small nitpick from me is that I didn't know you could attack/roll until I died and returned to the menu. A simple fix is to make the text explaining the controls in the menu stand out more or place some in the game itself such as at the bottom of the screen.
I'm curious what you used to make it. It was a little choppy at times in my browser, but otherwise it ran pretty well. I liked how jumping from planet to planet stayed exciting because of the "portals" between them started changing shape and size. It felt pretty impressive to make those huge jumps between planets. The roll was a good addition and made for some pretty epic moments when you'd roll under a bat that almost got you!
The game reminds me a lot of Aether (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/459147). One thing I enjoyed there was how you could go inside of planets as well, since the gravity mechanic was one of the things that make this fun, emphasizing that even more would really push your game to its potential.
The graphics are beautiful, music is great, sound is good. Could definitely be great! As a fellow maker of spinning around the planet games, I noticed that on occasion your interface things such as hearts and damage, as well as the direction of your attack would rotate around the outside of the map! But that can be solved with layers, and you still did so good for how little time you had!
What did you make this in? Did you use an engine?
The planets were interesting and varied and quite pleasing to look at.
In a game that needs jumping so much, it would be nice if the jumping felt better. I felt like I was fighting the character to get him to go where I wanted him to more often than not, at least when jumping. Also, the rolling only occasionally seemed to work, but I never felt like I needed it anyway. Maybe try and add areas that require rolling (once it works better) or replace the roll button with a jump button not tied to the arrow keys.
I don't know if it was just my imagination, but some of the bigger planets felt like they just kept going around. Like I could have sworn I had gone all the way round, but there was just more planet with more bats and coins to get. That's not a bad thing, it make the game feel very big, but it was a little odd feeling.
All and all, clean up the jumping and this could be a very fun game to play.
Then I wasn't sure what I did wrong, but when I tried to play a second time, the main character just fell into the abyss. :(
This was a VERY solid entry and I'm curious if you have that song separated for download.
The portal/jump spots themselves were cool, but rather frustrating; sometimes, I'd stand there and jump over and over again, and on the ten or twelfth try, I'd finally hit it just right and go. Other times, I would jump, start to flip, and then inexplicably flip back. Finally, sometimes I'd hit the portal, but miss a coin on the way, only to find out it wasn't actually possible to go through the portal the other direction, so I had to take a _long_ detour (with no map) to get back to where I was (and do it again, each time I failed to get that coin). None of these are huge problems, and that last one may even be intentional (though if so, I disagree it's a good idea).
Now, I'm going to level a criticism I don't think I've ever given to an LD entry before: This game... is simply... far, _far_ too long. I kept playing, thinking I was nearly at the end as I approached 50k points. Nope. I kept thinking, "Surely I'm nearly done, now. I'll give it a chance, I'd like to see the whole thing, see if there's an ending." When I finally stopped, I had more than one-hundred thousand points, and for all I know I'm still only halfway done (Of course, I could have counted planets, but I didn't realize when I started that it would be necessary). That far into the game, when you make a jump through a portal, discover that it has deposited you on one of the very first planets, turn around to go back the other way and discover you can't reach it, so you're going to have to find your way back the long way around? Let's just say it wasn't my favorite part of the game.
Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly approve of games with a lot of content, if you can pull them off. But unfortunately, there just wasn't enough going on to last as long as the game does. It needs to have different kinds of enemies, power-ups, sub-goals, it needs differences in kind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlBR1z-ue-I
Obviously in a game jam there's not always time to add all that. And that's ok! But if that's what happened, it might have been a good idea to reduce the number of planets once you realized you couldn't enough content to sustain an hour-plus-long experience.
Ok, so, now that I've got that off my chest, I do still want to reiterate: What you do have, though it has some problems, is a really good start. I would _love_ to see you build on this for a post-jam version. But unlike most post-jam games, I wouldn't focus at all on making the game bigger, just put more to do inside the game you already have.
EDIT: Also, what on earth did the Z key do? It seems to do _something_, makes an arrow appear on screen, but I couldn't figure out what it was for, didn't seem to point at anything specific).
My game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/survival-game
Here's our game:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/star-keeper
I identify myself with your story. I am 47 and this is my first LD, I joined a team with great talented guys and we made this one: NUKEBALL - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/nukeball .
If you have the opportunity, take a look at that. Most important lesson for me was that working in a team enables you go further than alone. Team work demands effort from all but it is worth it, and game jam was the perfect opportunity to try it.
Here's ours: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/polyorbis
My only gripes in the core of the game was there wasn't a ton to do. Just murder some bats and enjoy the art. I feel like this could make a very good story based game. Where you have to travel the stars freeing kingdoms or species from the clutches of some galactic tyrant. That or some type of procedural dungeon crawling experience, but rather in space as opposed to inside of a literal dungeon. But overall rather nice. I found I rather enjoyed the graphics and music quite a bit. Though I felt it could have used more pixel art. Rather than just using it for the bats and the character.
All that feedback said. On several occasions when loading up the game I had a load of strange physics bugs. Like the little vortex that pulls you from planet to planet was constantly trying to steal me into space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWSToLZwTAE