Kind of didn't understand how I fell down sometimes even when I have foothold available. Neat little idea though. Maybe it could be expanded with different weapons to pick up or different moving enemies?

Is reserves the tiles? I seem to be able to go into negative reserves without the game ending, my score just stops though. Is that right? I really like the sprites :smile_cat: 5903 is the highest I got to!

Yep! You start with 400 tiles. Every tile you break enters your reserves, which get placed as you move near pit spaces. However if you land direct hits on the Munchars, or get bitten by a Munchar, your total number of tiles go down. If there are more placed tiles in the world than you are allowed to have, you'll have to make up the difference by breaking some yourself.

If you detonate a blob too close to yourself, you might fall into a crumbling tile before your reserves can pick it up.

There is a good chance I'm gonna continue with this one to iron out the display a bit. Too late for this build perhaps to put up a more urgent display for the amount of tile debt, eh? Would be handy to know that on the fly. I've dashed into a lot of pits for not realizing how low on reserves I was.

Not bad. But i did not understand what happens when you are bitten. The enemy became green and disappear, but it seems to that this is not good for scores.

Yep, being bitten puts a 10 foothold debt on your reserves. The higher your reserves, the faster your score ticks up. It also means that there are 10 less potential footholds to stand on for the rest of that game. Blobbing a Munchar directly has a similar effect, but it only puts a 2 foothold debt on your reserves.

The scoring is a bit complicated for a quick game, haha. Essentially you want to sacrifice as much ground as possible without taking too many hits, or landing too many direct hits.

In Footfall 2.0 I'll be sure to add a few slide tutorials explaining it properly.

i think the enemies sometimes spawn to close to the player - happened to me a couple times that i was shooting somewhere and an enemy popped up in front of me, i hit him and fell down

otherwise a nice game - like the idea of the tiles rebuilding in front of you

@seed42 There is quite a lot of truth to that. When I take a second pass at the game, I'd like to try to allow for a little reaction time by tweaking the spawn distance or perhaps nudge the destroyed tile positions from close range shots to be a bit more forgiving.

I'd say an unlucky point blank shot is probably the leading cause of death in most of my playthroughs.

Thanks for the feedback!

it's cool game, innovation: 5

Maybe a little too harsh to take away 10 footholds and the enemies can sometimes spawn a bit too close even if you have lots of breathing room. But definitely a creative spin on the theme!

That was great! the bullets are very satisfying to shoot. Great job!

Very cool idea, but has a few game-breaking bugs:
You can have negative reserves.
You can fall when you have reserves.
Enemies spawn on top of you, even the very first one.

I like the idea though, interesting!

Pretty cool, a bit frustrating when the enemies spawn right on top of you though. I like that you get rewarded by having less tiles, makes for some good risk vs reward decisions.

I keep panicking when the enemies spawn next to me and shoot them and lose :D

@timeshapers Negative reserves are intentional. In an "early" (as early can exist in 48 hours) version of the game, they actually caused your score to drop, but I found that caused me to want to just throw myself off the edge to save my score. Quite a sacrifice, but perhaps a bit too much to be fun, haha. I figured there had to be some way to ensure that the player aggressively had incentive to break tiles. Else, one could run around a hole in the center and passively rack up score. Putting the player into tile debt, rather than starting at zero, ramped up the tension over time.

Falling when you have reserves due to movement isn't intentional. Blowing an enemy up within 4 tiles of you might make you fall if the tiles destoyed chain back toward you. Perhaps those should be covered by reserve tiles. Worth trying out.

@Quackqack As for the enemies spawning too close, I totally agree. In 2.0 I'm certainly gonna make the spawns more fair. Right now they actually serve a bit of a purpose in keeping the pressure up to break tiles, but it doesn't feel too fun or fair. I think perhaps this is better accomplished by having more fair spawns, and adding some more enemy variety in future iterations.

Thanks for the feedback!

Great game with such a good concept!
My only real issue with it is the fact that the text on the top left is not easy to read, but that's just a detail!
Awesome job!

@andrea Thanks! Totally agree with you. I think some kind of clear visual indicator would have been good to work in for when you're out of reserve tiles. I wasn't terribly in love with that display in the corner. Kind've draws the eye a bit too far from the action to be healthy.

Pretty fun little game :) I would add maybe a little time when you can stay on the breaking tile, I've had some times where a hole would just spawn under me with me having no way to escape! Other than that, great job ! :D

@takayamushi I think you might be right on that. The instant fall from shooting too near yourself is pretty harsh. Delaying the time between when a tile starts to crumble and when you can fall through it would probably feel a lot better. Any blob detonation with a chain of 4 or less tiles that leads back to you has a chance to cause that to happen. If an enemy unexpectedly spawns near you, it is uncomfortably easy to fall into an instant game over. Being able to walk on a few frames of a crumbling foothold would probably feel a bit better.

Thanks for the feedback!

I like it! It's cute and the mechanics work well. The only downside is when you're making platforms and you don't realize you're out of tiles until you're already falling, haha! Good job!

clever mechanics! maybe you could try starting out in a smaller area, make the enemies give you more reserves, and you have to build out more. i feel like it could be cool to have to build smartly so you don't get trapped

@kddressel That's a game mechanic that certainly deserves some exploration. Come to think of it the starting area is perhaps a bit too big. I was thinking about giving it a circular shape not too long ago. I can imagine that changing the starting tile arrangement would have a pretty drastic effect on the game flow. It's something I didn't really experiment with during those 48 hours, but I'm absolutely going to for 2.0.

Thanks!

I liked the reserves and the general floor dropping out mechanic. Sometimes the enemies spawned a bit close. I forgot I could dash for a little while and I liked using it once I remembered. Good work!

really cool concept!

I also liked that it was understandable enough for me to get the gist of the game without reading any of your tutorial text.

destroying platforms as a way of killing enemies, absolute genius! I liked cheesing it by destroying almost all the platforms and just making the enemies walk into pits XD

i could totally seeing this becoming a full fledged game

my high score:


really good game and a great idea, the graphics are simple but aesthetic. unfortunately gameplay gets a bit boring after a few approaches. but anyway good job :) i like this game :)

@querk Thanks! Having played it more than anyone, I agree it certainly could do with a bit more depth of play in the long game. I should think a few more enemy types/behaviors, tile starting configurations, and perhaps even score goals to advance to new stage configurations might work to help alleviate a bit of the repetitiveness from playing the same 400 tile square every game. I've found in testing that altering the initial shape of the map has a rather dramatic effect on the game flow. I'm looking into more destabilizing elements to shake up the gameplay. I'm also playing around with the idea of powerups which add new abilities at the cost of consuming a small number of reserve tiles.

I feel like with a little time and experimentation, 2.0 is going to shape up well!

Ahahaha the sound effects! I am satisfied playing this little game. There is a creative idea and proper graphics and audio. Nice job!

My suggestions... consider adding more complex mechanics?

Nice work! Here are my thoughts:
- This is a great take on the theme.
- I had fun with this one. With some polish, I could easily see myself coming back to this. I'll be looking forward to 2.0.
- I love that you can expand the map by walking off the edge. That was a pleasant surprise.
- I know you've already addressed these in the comments, but I'd like to echo the thoughts of others about enemies spawning too close and tiles crumbling right underneath the player. You mentioned fixing the latter by giving the player some time to walk off the tile before they fall. While that could work, I think a better solution for consistency's sake would be immediately repairing the tile after it crumbles. After all, that's what happens when the player walks onto a crumbling tile from a non-crumbling tile. I admit that players could abuse this system by constantly shooting underneath themselves for the points without actually giving up any footholds, but that problem could be fixed by making it so the point counter for a tile doesn't start until the tile has completely crumbled away.
- I thought I saw Munchars repairing tiles a couple of times. I assume that's a bug.
- My high score is 30987 (screenshot below)! I figured out a strategy: Move around the edges of the map in a circle, while quickly shooting as many blobs behind you as you can. This allows you to destroy footholds faster than you repair them, so your reserves are always kept up, even if you run into a Munchar here and there. That said, if it weren't for the instant-fall thing, I'm not sure what could've stopped me from going on forever with that strategy. Perhaps a restriction on fire rate is in order. I feel like that would make it more about the kind of strategic decisions you mention in the description.


@birdwards Hey, thanks for the kind words!

I've been playing with a few branch builds of the game. I first focused on producing a better enemy spawner, but that made it painfully obvious that I'd need something a bit more threatening to the player.

I tried the brief delay on dropping the player when the floor is crumbling as well, and while it helped, it didn't feel quite right. In general, I found never destroying the immediate tile on which you are standing feels a lot better. But that made it even more apparent that there needs to be more pressure on the player to keep it interesting.

There are certainly a few dominant strategies, like the one you found, that are too safe to be interesting with less aggressively positioned spawns and self destruction prevention. To that end, I've been messing around with alternative forms of destabilization.

Some things I've been playing with in branch builds:

- Ranged enemy units. Though I'm not quite sold on their spawning rules yet. They certainly do keep you on your toes.

- A faster enemy unit which will avoid walking into pits until they have gotten within a certain distance of the player, where they will start to power up into a short dash (even over small pits) periodically. Right now they wait if they are isolated from the player, but try to get as close as possible.

- A better warning system regarding your reserve tile count.

- Adding tiles to your reserve only after they have fully crumbled. Good suggestion there birdwards! It became especially exploitable after suppressing tile destruction immediately underneath the player.

- A toggle to cycle between building and shooting mode. This was a pretty drastic change to the game flow that I've been toying with. The idea being that you don't rebuild footholds unless you specifically go into a building state at the cost of being able to fire shots. Adding a delay on your ability to transition between the two has been pretty fun. Could still use some work, but it does give some relevance to all the sparse pits one tends to make all over the place. When the pits aren't dangerous to you as you rapid fire to fill your reserves, it just doesn't feel quite right. Swapping between building and shooting as a deliberate decision makes the game feel more engaging. I think I might have to limit the amount of time one spends in the building state, perhaps with some recharge time mechanics in there.

- Creating more varied start conditions to see how they affect the gameplay. The game feels very different under different starting conditions. To keep the gameplay from becoming stale, I would even consider using stage transitions after meeting certain milestones (time survived on the current stage, perhaps?). It would also give a bit of breathing room to introduce ramping difficulty, rather than setting up your favorite dominant position and staying alive as long as possible, would you hop into a portal to go up to a new stage with less total footholds, different enemy spawning rules, or a less convenient map shape for a point multiplier increase? This opens the door to a lot of possibilities. Stages could be persistent, where one can fall form higher stages with big point gains to lower stages.

- Pickups. Currently just point boosters, but I should think I can change them into whatever feels right given the state of the game as I iterate upon it.

Balancing a sense of progressive destabilization of the playing field while keeping it fair is a bit tricky. Often I find that the best way to chase the desired "feel" of a game is to identify what is preventing you from evoking that "feel", be it something that you've made that gets in the way or something that is missing entirely. Splat out a few prototypes that you think might get you closer to that "perfect" version of the game and see what rings the most true.

Speaking of which...

The feedback here has been great in channeling my focus toward areas of improvement, thanks folks! I'll throw out a 2.0 bonus link when I've got juicy new mechanics at play.

It's smart but it's confusing. I wasn't sure what reserve does, or even why I died sometimes. Also I'm still not sure I understand how the score system works. I think that for this to work well, you need to make sure every animations and every bit of UI helps understanding what's going on, which is really hard to do in such a small time. IMO simply "destroying enemies also destroy tiles" was enough for a ludum dare, then if you have some time left you can add polish to the game.

My point is, it's a good idea but imo too complicated to make it works well in 48h, and too complicated for players to understand in few minutes. This said, it's still fun and it plays fine, so good job overall.

@yorsh No disagreements here. I'd hoped to fit a few tutorial bits in there to explain the game in more detail, but just ran too short of time to make it happen. In the second version of the game, yet to be unleashed, I'm going to make sure to include a tutorial and improved user interface to make the scoring system more understandable. As some others have mentioned, the sudden deaths are likely the result of two game mechanics working in tandem to end games in a rather unfair manner. Namely, enemies which can spawn too close to the player, and the tile immediately underneath the player can be destroyed when a shot impacts an enemy near the player. When these two mechanics combine the player can lose quite suddenly. Both of these mechanics are seeing changes in 2.0.

Not sure why I didn't think to do it earlier, but I should probably add a bit of info about the scoring system in the description. Will do so now.

Thanks for the feedback!

Neat little concept. It was difficult to understand how many tiles were available to be replaced but once I figured it out, the game flowed nicely.

Nice fun little game. I liked how you had to avoid the holes that are created when you shoot the projectiles and you can try to get the enemies to fall into those holes. I felt like there was too much text to read on the title screen, and I still don't fully understand the scoring and reserve system. Getting hit by an enemy really didn't seem to do any damage.

@levidsmith I hear you! Explaining the way the game works as a wall of text wasn't my first choice. It's what I had time to throw in at the last moment of iterative development. On account of the game having a rather unconventional scoring system, a hands on tutorial would go a long way to making it clear how the system works. The HUD doesn't really do enough to show how the footholds, reserves, and scores relate to each other either. Improvements in both of those areas is assuredly going to go into the 2.0 version.

In general, the enemies don't "damage" you. The only way to lose is to fall off the stage. What they do is consume tiles out of your reserve tile pool. Your reserve tile pool multiplies your passive point generation over time for simply surviving, and is also used to replace walkable terrain. Having zero or a negative reserve pool means you won't be racking up any points. It forces you to shoot and sacrifice more tiles to transfer them into your reserve pool. When your reserves are positive it triggers point generation and the ability to passively rebuild tiles near you by spending reserves.

Over time, taking hits is going to reduce the overall number of tiles in the world, since you can't rebuild the world with tiles that the enemies eat out of your reserves. This makes it a lot trickier to avoid being hit. It also makes it a lot more likely that you will accidentally destroy a tile beneath you and end the round instantly, though that aspect is being changed in version 2.0 as it doesn't make for a particularly fun ending to a round. Tiles beneath the player will no longer be destroyed by player shots in version 2.0.

There is a certain balancing act to consider in Ludum Dare game building that I feel more clued into after this, my first, experience. While I think I got pretty close in this rapid prototype to achieving the feeling of the game that I wanted to make, it came at the cost of being too complicated to explain in a short period of time without a hands on tutorial. That's something I should probably take into consideration when the target audience is not going to be spending much more than a few minutes playing the game. A few 'first play' micropauses to highlight the results of actions like destroying tiles, hitting enemies directly, being hit by enemies, the ebb and flow of the reserve pool in relation to your score and so on will go a long way to making the game objective and obstacles more clearly understood. In many ways I think this game challenges years of conditioning that top down shooters have drilled into us. Recognizing that, I should try to make a more organic learning experience of how the game operates rather than shoving a wall of text on the title screen. This likely means rebuilding the HUD to work in tandem with a new in game tutorial.

Consider your point taken, haha! I'll be giving the game another proper pass sometime after the scoring period, though I've been messing with it ever since to improve upon it. I'm thinking that perhaps remaking it from the ground up, less hastily, will do it some justice.

Thanks for the feedback! I'll put it to good use in the next version!

I got a score of 686! Interesting trade off with the tiles and shooting the enemies. One thing in terms of player feedback is perhaps a spawning in animation so I know where an enemy is coming in. Otherwise I think the game was interesting to figure out (I didn't read all the text as there was a lot) just through gameplay. Keep up the good work!

@aeveis Not a bad idea at all, shouldn't be too hard at all to put a visual indicator on enemy spawn locations in advance of their going active. Will add that feature for sure in 2.0!