Eine Kleine Insektmusik by davidthelazar
This is only my second Ludum Dare, and the first Ludum Dare for the rest of my team! Eine Kleine Insektmusik is a music-based game where you play as a bug stuck in a piano. As the hammers strike the strings to play the song, you have to dodge out of the way to avoid getting squished.
The game is written in Monkey-X. Art made in Aseprite.
--David Lazar (@davidthelazar) wrote all the code.
--Brylee Treadway (@Brylee) made all the art. It was her first time using aseprite and her first time making video game art!
--Lucas Bishop (@lukatroopa) made the music for the main game mode and some additional sounds. It was also his first time with all this stuff!
In audio, we're only asking to be judged based on the music in the main Play mode; the bonus songs are just for fun. The Play mode piece starts as a play on Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
I'm super proud of our team for making our first game together in only 3 days!
We just wrapped up work on the game right as time ran out for the jam, so the game is pretty content-light. I look at it as mostly a proof-of-concept we hope to expand on later (more songs! a difficulty ramp! collectibles!).
Look at this little dude!
Links:
Game (HTML5): http://davidthelazar.com/ludumdare38/MonkeyGame.html
Twitter: http://twitter.com/davidthelazar
In-game, use the left and right arrows (or WASD) to hop left and right to avoid the hammers striking down with the music.
Post-Jam Version (HTML5): http://davidthelazar.com/einekleine/MonkeyGame.html
The post-jam version fixes a screen flicker bug, adds randomly-spawning collectibles, and significantly reduces the visual warning time before hammers drop.
Ratings
| Overall | 493th | 3.177⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 438th | 3.048⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 141th | 3.677⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 554th | 3.066⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 655th | 2.629⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 126th | 3.717⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 129th | 3.475⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 522th | 2.983⭐ | 62🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 51🗳️ | 88🗨️ |
Great idea. I feel like I'm back in an old Looney Tunes (or was it Tom and Jerry) cartoon. This would definitely be a fun concept to expand on.
It's cool that you included "For River", I really like this piece.
I imagine that it would be hard to predict which ones were going to move far enough ahead of time when many of them are moving. I found, however, that for some of the songs I only had to move once or twice to stay alive for the whole song. So, you either need songs that will force the player to move often or some incentive, like extra points, to move.
One other idea we had was to introduce some sort of enemy that followed you that you had to try to trick into getting squished. That would encourage you to put yourself into harm's way and take chances you wouldn't otherwise take.
Thanks for playing and for giving feedback!
But overall it's very well executed and it feels good to play.
Sure, I feel the game could've benefited with some things that you need to do while the songs are playing, to force you to move around a bit. When I played "For River" bonus song - you can simply just remain on the spawn point and wait until the song is over... that key is never used.
Simple, but cool little game, though.
In any case, good job.
As a side note, thanks for including For River as a bonus song. It's such a strong piece, damn.
@davidthelazar
I have a question , are you reading information directly from the song and making the piano keys move accordingly? Or is it hardcoded?
In any case, great piece of work! Contratulations!
Keep up the hard work! :)
Well done :)
My only request would be a sound effect for dying. You could just crash your hands on the piano.
PS: my second Ludum Dare to! :smile: this event is so fun, I hope to work with friends in the next one, with a group of friends it should be much more fun
Would it make sense to make surviving give you points like before, then collectibles give you bonus points? It actually felt much less satisfying seeing a score of 1 after grabbing a note, but that might be due to my expecting a score of 20 or so by the time I got to it.
I tend to really like rhythm games and you don't see them often during contests like this, so that was a nice treat. Well done!
However it was pretty easy, on the 2nd bonus track you can win the game without moving at all. It might be more interesting to only have hammers for notes that are used for each song, rather than all of them all the time. That would be much more challenging.
Well done.
Good job overall !
I would have liked to see a bit more content, but this is a solid entry nonetheless!
Cool entry!
And that clueless, happy bug is surprisingly funny, especially with as sudden death as you implemented. Happy, happy, jump, jump, happy, *SQUISH*.
As a jam game it's spot on. If you plan on developing it further - maybe advertise to musicians, and represent the hammers 1:1 with the real piano? I play a bit and from what I see it's simplified, I'd actually enjoy a game where the knowledge of the real piece would be a factor in how well you'll do in a level.
And making that bug survive Chopin with all his passages, ha - that would be something!
This idea really deserves to be taken further.
Well done, cheers!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns3gNNBiLxk